Author's Note - Sorry it took so long to post this chapter, guys, but Fanfic, for some reason or another, was not letting me load a document. Many, many, many (!) thanks to my wonderful new Beta Reader Marston Chicklet(Kandice). We now present to you the continuation!
WARNING - Small slice of lemon at the end of this chap.! ;)
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"Maybe Dumbledore will let you go and visit them after Christmas."
The Ball was one month away, and Christmas two weeks after that. One month had already passed from the night Hermione spent with her professor, their bodies entangled on the worn fabric of the sofa as the morning brushed light across their skin and gave them an awkward awakening. Hermione watched the tired man fumble his apologies—they both had a very awkward laugh and parted ways. She had not been to visit him since, yet it was not out of embarrassment or fear of what he might say to her. It was simply that Hermione had been too busy being Hermione—her nights were spent in the confines of the library, books propped against one another to form a bed or pillow. Her research had gotten her nowhere and the prospect of an evening with Professor Snape grew steadily more tolerable, if only to cure the itch in her curious brain.
"I hope so, Harry," she replied, rubbing her tired eyes as they walked the corridor together. The nights in the library were catching up to her, it seemed. Hardly a day passed, now, that she didn't feel utterly depleted.
"But he says they're doing all right, right?"
"He told me yesterday that they were starting to move their fingers and toes in their sleep. That's a good sign, Harry. Dumbledore has the best mediwitcheslooking after them." That brightened her a bit and allowed her slight lips to manage a smile.
Harry gave her a sideways glance. "I hate to break your mood, Hermione, but did you notice the moon last night?"
They both paused. Damn. Full moon. Remus would be recovering today. Which meant that Defense Against the Dark Arts would be taught by—
"Are you two quite incapable of moving or shall I have to levitate you into the classroom like luggage?"
The billow of black robes slipped past them, a sneer evident on the plaster-white face. Harry clenched his jaw together as he walked past the dark man and began to make his way into the room, Hermione following behind him.
"One moment, Miss Granger," Snape said, almost at the tone of a whisper, his hand on her shoulder to prevent her from entering the classroom.
Harry looked back to her, defiance in his boyish face. "You were not invited, Potter," the professor snapped, giving Hermione a slight shove away from the threshold.
She looked back to Harry with a nod and the boy turned reluctantly and ventured into the classroom. In the shadow of the door, shielded from view, Snape regarded the girl coolly.
"The Headmaster has informed me of your...little trinkets which I am to examine." The slits of his eyes narrowed as he studied her. "You will present them to me this evening at seven. Must I elaborate on the importance of punctuality?"
Hermione shook her head dumbly. "No, Professor."
He sneered nastily down at her. "I shall be taking my own time away from certain other projects for this little endeavor. I do hope you are quite aware of this and will not make yourself too much of a nuisance. It was certainly not my idea to pursue this."
It was not my idea either, Professor. She wondered about the probability of acquiring the spell with which to splash your opponent with a nasty coating of venom. "Professor, it is not necessary to—"
"I should think that the Head Girl would not wish to defy the orders of her Headmaster. No matter. It is no longer an issue at your discretion, Miss Granger. Now, return to my classroom before I dock fifty points from Gryffindor for tardiness and general stupidity. And close your mouth you stupid gaping girl!"
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"Can you believe that enormous git?" Ron stabbed his fish with the flat end of the knife, red pooling across his dotted cheeks. "Two classes with Snape—it's inhuman."
"It's mental," added Neville, still pale and shaking from their previous Defense Against the Dark Arts class.
"I don't care what Dumbledore says," Harry added. He looked ready to maul the trout fillet with his fists. "I don't trust Snape."
Hermione sat quietly, passing the bits of fish around her plate with a fork. She had constructed a valley with her peas and the carrots passed for various objects with which to disassemble the green peaks. Disassemble and reconstruct.
"Haven't you got anything to complain about?" Ron asked grumpily of the young witch.
Hermione gave him a sharp glance. Loads, Ron, she mused sullenly. "Honestly, Ron," her tireless mantra began, "he's a professor and as such he deserves our respect."
"Got a little crush, Granger?" Draco Malfoy stalked behind her, his arms crossed into his robes, white teeth gleaming dangerously. "Thought you Mudbloods went for the older type. I just didn't expect you to have good taste—Head of Slytherin." "Watch your mouth, Malfoy," Ron snapped, his boyish fists curling into tight balls.
Draco sneered triumphantly. "You might want to put a leash on your friend, Potter. It's not good to let animals loose."
Ron moved to stand, reaching inside his robes with his wand hand. "Sit down!" Hermione snapped at him, exhausted with boys' antics. "I don't want to have to deduct points from Gryffindor."
"He started it!" Ron snapped indignantly, his pinkish lip quivering in the wake of her reproach.
"I don't want to deduct points from Slytherin, either," she remarked, giving Draco a quiet glare. Don't raise suspicion, her eyes pleaded with pointed glances towards the silent Harry, his dark hair bent over the dinner plate.
Draco sniffed, his dashing chin protruding from him like so many busts of Roman Gods and ancient demigods. He was arrogant with a sort of fullness that his father could never imitate-a tangible fullness that no longer left one cringing but aching to complete his hero worship. After all, Draco had his pure red blood as a mark on Death Eater corpses.
"Granger," was the stiff remarked left hanging after his leave to the Slytherin table.
Ron fumed over the supper, his cheeks burning a defiant light into the Great Hall. "Didn't see you doing anything about it, Harry," he grumbled.
Hermione glared at him. "Ron, for once in your life, shut it!"
He looked at her, wounded. She responded with a cold sneer before turning back to her plate. Harry said nothing.
It was in the summer that Hermione had discovered their little secret—discovered their bodies knotted in one another beneath the sheets of a Weasley bed. Harry and Hermione had been staying with the family after the war, resting and rediscovering life in the warm burrow. Draco, too, had come, then disowned by his father—it was Dumbledore's doing, of course.
"I don't understand it, really," Harry had later told her. "It felt right to kill Voldemort and it feels right, now, to be with Draco."
"I'm not judging you," she replied, embracing him tightly. "I only want you to be happy."
In his own strange way, Hermione knew that Draco made him happy, and in turn, she felt the odd contentment around Draco. She could only describe it as such: it was considered puppy-love for a young boy to tease a girl.People recognized that as an early form of flirtation. Draco and Harry's hazing, perhaps, was their earliest form of flirtation. They could not express their love for one another, and so expressed the hate they felt from their own confusion. After the war, however, the line between their own boundaries and what they allowed themselves to have become distorted by the idea of loss. Death became all-too-real an option and love the lesser fear. Hermione had only admiration for their affair. One day, she hoped to see the side of Draco that only Harry could—the good in the dark shadows of his arrogance.
An idea flickered-something unthought-of before, she suspected, by any Gryffindor mind. Perhaps Draco was not the only one whose mask she had yet uncovered—true selves pitted in arrogance and pride. Perhaps men who wore their darkness on their faces had fires in their stomachs—burning brightly in the shield of their bodies.
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Severus Snape paced the length of his office, robes licking at desks and chair legs. He was exhausted. Outraged. Overjoyed. Terrified. Subdued. Reborn. Beaten to death and suckled from head to toe. Horny. Always horny—he was a man.
The idea of the pucker-lipped little Gryffindor bending her slender neck over one of his cauldrons, the caress of smoke breathing across her white face, beads of concentration streaming down her body beneath the soft robes, and he the only one to witness it! Hell. He nearly decided to start the potion tonight.
Miss Granger would rather saw off a limb than spend the night with you, you wretched old bastard, he thought, pausing slightly to breathe. Recently, he seemed to need to make a conscious effort to breathe.
Severus did not remember how he came to love her. All he recalled were pieces of the path, not the direction of the undertaking itself or, really, how he had come to walk there. Flashes of pictures rose in his mind—Hermione cooking supper at the Black House, Hermione striking out at Draco Malfoy, Hermione sitting at her vanity staring into the depths of the mirror, Hermione blushing as she read a rather obscene romance novel at the back of a library thought to be deserted—he had bought the novel days after and found himself ready to toss it, sneeringly, into the fireplace with one hand and masturbate to the thought of Hermione as the heroine with the other. He remembered the way her hair flattened and her body curved and the sweet smile at her lips growing to understand the way a woman should smile. Memories of reality and fiction began to intertwine—Hermione smiling. Hermione smiling beneath him. Hermione's body white and bare beneath his own as he took her to the sounds of her own wonderful screams.
If nothing else, Severus knew that he was obsessed and obsession, he reasoned, might as well be random. Perhaps love was random, too. The only truth that mattered now was that Severus lived and breathed the scent of her skin. Her eyes fed him hunger. Her body maddened him and killed him daily.
He wanted to kiss her. Scream at her. Hold her. Debate the properties of potions until he was driven so mad with her incessant speaking that he fucked her small body until she buckled from exhaustion. That was his truth—the derivatives never mattered.
"P-professor?"
The sound made him pause. Quickly, he slid back into himself and brought out the old character of the dreadful potion's master. "Enter," he said.
The door came quietly open a crack, just enough to let the girl through, and closed behind her. She stopped and looked down, then up to him, then down—an endless process. "I've... I've brought the artifacts."
Snape snorted. "I should hope that you would at least find that task manageable," he replied tartly, then walked towards her with a quick and purposeful stride.
He saw her flinch and wanted to recoil, but struck her with his presence and took her satchel unceremoniously.
Damn you for being disgusted, he thought. Damn me for making you so.
He pulled the box from the bag and laid it aside-the slippers he found wrapped neatly in a cotton throw, which thrilled him immensely. The objects were well cared-for. It pleased him.
Unthinking, he dumped her bag to the side. "How did you come by these treasures?" he asked silkily.
He turned, enjoying the sight of her fierce blush. It reminded him of that night in the library as she read the romantic book by candlelight. A passage from the novel came to his mind-he had read it over and over relevantly.
He kissed her sleeping lips and touched the golden nectar of her hair. She was a Princess of a thousand kingdoms in his heart, and yet lay in the garb of peasantry. He was her knight, her savior, born of the kings of...
Severus Snape was nobody's savior, but perhaps Hermione would be his princess nonetheless.
"I...uh...well...they were gifts." She bit her lip-he knew that habit.
"Who gave them to you?" Severus asked as he walked behind the desk, crossing his arms over his black robes.
Her cheeks darkened delightfully. He became very aware of how he desired to make her blush over other matters. "It's...it's a personal matter," she said, diplomatically. Her eyes met his own, eventually, trying desperately to convey her own confidence.
He sneered at her-it complimented his black grandeur. "I see," he remarked pointedly. "I was not aware that insufferable little know-it-alls had such suitors."
"That is my own business, Professor Snape," she retorted, giving him an incredulous look. It reminded him of a southern American woman in the picturesque Muggle films on their great plantations—they had always seemed to Severus a saucy kind of woman. The kind that would slap a man's cheek and cry, How dare he? at the faintest remark on their character. He wondered what she would look like in one of their hoop dresses. And then nothing at all. "I only want to study the properties of these objects."
"The Headmaster has made it rather impossible for me to object," he said. A flicker of exhaustion passed across his face before he once again became impassive. It was going to take so long to claim her—woo her, perhaps, was a better word. Severus was a possessive man. "I should think you would rather like to study with your...friend, Lupin." The word passed his lips and wounded him.
She, too, gave him the look of an injured creature. And then anger. "Professor Lupin has kindly been helping me to research, but we have hit an impasse with books. The Headmaster suggested that I ask you for help." A pause. She hesitated with her next words, it seemed, but went on with Gryffindor tactlessness. "He had informed me that you worked with the Lost Artifacts in a Defense Against the Dark Arts project. Frankly, Professor, I just had a lack of options, otherwise I would not have bothered you."
But you would kindly bother Lupin unto all hours of the night, would you not? He was sure of the fact that their evening together had been relatively harmless—the night he spent seeing only the inside of her satchel through the mirror had alerted him, at first, but his tact for subtle Occlumency only confirmed the fact that there was nothing, yet, between the two. Still, he would have given up much more than Lupin to hold that insufferable girl to his chest all night.
He swallowed and stilled his temper. "Leave the objects here," he instructed, knowing the enchantment he had placed on the box was useless now without the mirror-damn his anger. He had so loved to see her as she slept through the portal the box provided to the hand-mirror. "I will concoct the beginnings of a potion that will take a month to complete. You will return in a week to help me. Seven o'clock. Do not be late or I shall throw the potion out. Good evening, Miss Granger."
He watched her coldly as she stood-a little shock playing on her face. She bit her lip and picked up her rather empty satchel. "Good evening, Professor," she said and turned from him, her body swaying beautifully as she retreated to the door.
Once alone, Severus wasted little time. He replaced the ward on the door and leaned back in the chair, closing his eyes as his hands worked deftly to relieve him of the few buttons of his trousers. His mind pictured her, skin smelling like the fresh scent of vanilla and cedar still hanging in the dungeon, in a pool of black sheets, bare and perfect. He held himself and started. He could taste her neck as he peaked.