18 November 1998.

Her mood had deteriorated as much as her sobriety had returned; with it, angry melancholy. She stood abruptly and flung open the door. The deep brown of her eyes seethed, not unlike the ocean, and she stalked through the halls of Grimmauld Place.

Her step was fluid, more like a dancer than the warrior she had been only hours before. The grace she exuded would have been so beneficial on the battlefield – but she wasn't thinking about war or blood or beauty or grace. She was thinking about panting and heated skin in her desperation to stop the slide of her world and restore her center of gravity.

She found it in a man named Summers when she crossed into the kitchen. She spent five minutes in front of the refrigerator staring blankly at curdled milk, raw eggs, Stilton cheese and yesterday's curry before she blinked the haze from her eyes and chose a block of cheddar. She cubed the cheese with a dull knife she found in a drawer and ignored the man in the kitchen. Summers had light hair and skin bronzed by someone else's sun, and she wished he was the season. She sat across the table from him, and watched through narrowed eyes. She used her teeth against a small square of cheese and closed her lips in a way that could have been innocent had her eyes not been boring into his. She was unpracticed but he found it erotic. When she rose, he did too, and he followed her as she stepped into the hall.

It was Wednesday and she was feeling reckless. Her own bedroom was a permanent fixture within Grimmauld Place, but bodies rotated in and out of the house, and a series of rooms were made available to those needing temporary lodging. She chose a vacant room at random and once inside, instead of closing it, she left the door ajar. Her curiosity flared and she ran her fingers along the wall and brushed the lamp on the nightstand by the bed. She heard the hinges of the door in their soft protest and she whirled with fierce eyes and a drawn wand.

Summers met her eyes in challenge, but he raised his hands in the universal gesture of surrender. His body smoldered when he cautiously shut the door, and slowly, slowly, he took her hands and backed her against the wall. Her body melded with his like it was meant to be. She was soft and pale, and he didn't notice that her waist was wider than it could have been or that her stomach wasn't hard. In this moment she wasn't shy and he was busy inhaling her careless abandon because it was sexy and he was lost in her bravado.

She pushed on one shoulder and too easily she reversed their position so that his shoulder blades were the ones that ground into the ragged wallpaper. She felt his fingers tighten around her arms but she growled. He relented and she knew she had won. She pulled him from the wall and pulled his lips to hers, walking in to him even as she kissed him with an intensity that should have scared him.

He let her backed him from the wall to someone else's bed, and he whimpered softly when her lips touched his neck. He moaned when her teeth closed on his shoulder, and he groaned when her nails cut into his scalp.

"Stay," she growled again when she took steps back and pulled her shirt over her head. She didn't blink when she undid the button that held up her pants.

"Off," she commanded when she cocked her chin and set her hands upon her hips. She was expectant, impatient, and he hurried to comply. Not soon enough (too soon!) he was naked before her, and he wasn't what she wanted, but it was what she needed, and in arousal (frustration) she growled at him again and pinned him beneath her in the bed. She knew what to expect this time and she took him in her hand. He was hard and the skin felt like velvet against her fingers. The hurricane in her head abated just a bit, and she put him where she wanted him and moved slowly. Skin against skin, friction at its best. There wasn't much of a rhythm and it took too long, but finally she arched and screamed in such a way that the window rattled, but she came.

She sucked in her first breath, but she spent her second with one word.

"Go," and he did. He scrambled to put on his underpants, and though he left his shirt and his shoes, he all but ran from the room.

She thought his intimidation was odd, because she'd smiled when she spoke. It would have taken her a mirror to understand, to see that her eyes were dull in a dead sort of way, that even in the dark, her skin held an unhealthy sheen of pale.

She gave him ten minutes before she slipped from the sheets, waiting for her heartbeat to slow and her breath to quiet to normal. Dressing was more difficult than she had anticipated. She was shaky, and in retrospect, sex had not been a good decision - she was supposed to be recovering, physically and magically, because she sure as hell wouldn't recover emotionally any time soon. She rolled her shoulders methodically and considered it a success, though. She hadn't thought about Voldemort or Alicia or Ron's drinking or Kenneth fucking Towler, who had the audacity to die in front of her for… approximately thirty-nine minutes and seventeen seconds. A blank mind was an understated bliss, something new for her to cherish.

She changed the sheets the Muggle way and lit a candle to diffuse the scent of sex from the room. Curling her lip, she picked up his shirt and shoes and shut the door as she left. They would go to the community stash of emergency clothes, and they would serve someone else well.

Summers is mentioned as being an already-graduated Hufflepuff. I took the liberty of making him interact with the Order. I'm not sure what he does, precisely – he might push papers, he might be a consultant, he might… remove Nargle infestations, I don't know. He's mentioned somewhere in the books (verified by the HP Lexicon), and I decided to reinforce his existence because Hermione needed an outlet.

Thank you so much for such faithful reviews. A few concerns were mentioned that I'd like to address, because I learned a long time ago that even if only one person voices a question, more than that one person have the same question.

-Sentence structure, run on sentences, an overabundance of commas and ands: I am fully capable of writing 'correctly', however the last thing that I wrote was my thesis. After such a rigid, structured, best-worst-experience-of-my-life, I'm rebelling just because I can. With the extent of the rebellion brought to my attention, I will be going back and revising most of the incorrectness. What I don't fix, I'm leaving intentionally because it pertains to the mood or the flow of a scene that I'm trying to bring past my mind, and into yours.

-Gryffindors/Slytherins, Good/Evil: I need to present a very obvious black and white so that the transition to grey is as significant to the reader as it is to Hermione. It is a lesson that I feel is imperative to the evolution of her relationship with Snape from professor to, ultimately, her other half.

-There's more, but I have to go to work in not enough hours, and will address more in the next chapter :D

Please and thank you for your reviews - ESPECIALLY the ones that tell me where I'm off, when things don't make sense, or if I get lost in the words and accidentally blend people together. My e-mail should be visible on my author profile, but I am xxthrenody at g mail. I love conversation and questions. SocksForDobby, you are PHENOMENAL. Thank you again for taking so much time on your reviews. Please don't stop :)

-Now I'm worried my responses to your reviews aren't getting out :X I've sent somewhere to a few sentences, to a few paragraphs, to everyone. Are they being received?-

Yours,
Threnody