Hermione sat between Ginny and George at the long table at Christmas dinner. Dinner had been exhaustingly long, and all she wanted was to go home and curl up in her bed. Severus was seated down at the other end of the table, and he'd been watching her the entire time, his eyes sparkling with something she didn't understand.
When Molly had cleared away the last of the pie, and had settled back down next to her husband, there was a lull in the conversation, and Severus cleared his throat and stood. She looked down at her plate, pushing the remnants of pumpkin around with her fork, avoiding his thick gaze.
He cleared his throat.
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
She looked up, confused, much like everyone else at the table, who were all trying to figure out why Snape had begun to recite a sonnet while watching Hermione carefully with a strangely affectionate-looking smirk on his face.
"Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee."
She was still staring at him, biting her lip, tears running freely down her cheeks.
"Well?" he asked, voice rough, cheeks pinkening.
"I don't understand," she said softly.
"It turns out that, contrary to what I thought, it wasn't meaningless. And so you win our wager."
"Is this another game, Severus?"
He shook his head. "However, I've thoroughly embarrassed myself and would like to hide my face. Possibly forever. Ideally, I will never see these people again," he finished, turning and striding from the room.
She grinned suddenly and stood up from the table, running to the doorway he'd disappeared through with a half-hearted wave goodbye to the others.
Lavender, always the wisest of the lot when it came to matters of love, began to sniffle and clap loudly, resting her head on her Won-Won's shoulder.
Everyone else just looked bewildered.