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In true Hermione fashion, she arrived ten minutes early for her first Potions Mastery lecture. She had planned out her schedule meticulously, ensuring a timely arrival, naturally practicing the route from Grimmauld Place to the doors to Knoxford’s Potions Lab a grand total of five times, as was necessary to calculate the best average and account for any common sources of delays. 

Some might call it obsessive, Hermione called it due diligence.

Knoxford, the secret sister to England’s most elite muggle University, was nestled into a wizarding village of the same name, west of London—a hop, skip and an Apparition away from the centre of London, where she currently took up residence in Harry’s inherited townhouse, Grimmauld Place.

Emphasis on the ‘grim’.

Hermione had spent the last week exploring the many halls of the magical college. She was delighted by the auditoriums filled with fierce debate, the vast library stacks that put the Hogwarts restricted section to shame, and the architectural magnificence of the stone work. And was especially awed by the giant busts of celebrated wizard scholars of the past. 

The whole university village was a clear confirmation that something could be both old and decadent. It needn’t be decrepit. And the more time she spent exploring the grounds, the more she regretted not registering  for a room on campus. 

The decision had been simple at the time, after all, she had a place to stay after Hogwarts. Harry had insisted that he wanted her there, and that there was more than enough room for her to make a corner of the residence her own. But he and Ron had left out one very crucial detail, one that she was still trying to come to terms with.

Nevertheless, Knoxford was the next stage of education for graduating students of not only Hogwarts, but schools all across the globe. And it was by far the most prestigious. 

Hermione was still pinching herself, thinking that she had managed to secure a place. 

She had been concerned, at first, that her post-war ‘Golden Girl’ status might have unfairly boosted her chances at admittance, but she had crunched the numbers. 

Hermione had cross-checked the student listings, transformed their global academic results into a common scholastic grade, and, with great relief, confirmed that she had, in fact, earned her place fair and square. 

Plus, she was rather proud of her entrance essay documenting the successful brewing of a polyjuice potion at the age of thirteen (carefully omitting the fact that she had transformed into a cat-human hybrid and coughed up hairballs for a week.)

The University board did not need to be informed of that part. 

And, for anyone who dared question the validity of her placement, she kept a thorough report of her findings on hand in the dragonhide satchel she received as a twentieth birthday gift from Ginny.

The sun was trickling through the frosted green glass of the tall pointed windows, bathing the wooden walls in an ethereal murky glow—reminiscent of the depths of the Black Lake. The air was rich, and swirled with the fumes of pre-brewed potions.

The lecture room was filled with fifteen singular potions desks, all facing a slightly raised dais where the main potions table stood—most likely the table a professor would demonstrate throughout the lecture portions of the study. 

Curved pews cocooned the main table, in three rows, and Hermione took a hearty inhale as she chose a seat in the first row. 

She checked her watch: twelve minutes to nine.

No, it wouldn’t have done to be late on her first day, especially when she had no idea of the sensibilities or teaching style of her new professor. The school had, frustratingly, been rather ‘hush hush’ about the new appointment.

She generally had a good rapport with most professors; there had only been a handful over the years whose respect she had struggled to earn. One was an absolute fraud, whose class she had stormed out of, and the other was a sullen bully. The latter had not returned to teaching after his miraculous resurrection the morning after the Battle of Hogwarts, sixteen months ago.

Still such a mystery. 

Hermione had had enough of mysteries, she lied to herself, as the irresistible quest for the truth tickled at the itch in her mind.

The oak door swung open and a soiree of laughter chimed, interrupting her moment of quiet reflection like an unanticipated alarm clock. A trio of students sauntered in, appearing to already know one another, quipping back and forth in French, eyeing the lecture room with its standing potions booths, shiny brass cauldron pots and glass cabinets filled to the brim with ingredients with a scrutinising air.

These would be the Beauxbatons students, then. 

A girl with tan skin, overplucked eyebrows and a tight bun took one look at her, then sniffed and gestured with a snooty nod towards Hermione. Her two friends, a short boy with spiked hair—the tips highlighted bright green—and a full-figured pale girl with springy honey-blonde curls, both turned to Hermione with similarly sour expressions.

So this is how it’s going to be…

She recognised them from the admittance listings: Audrey Ferrier, Henri Dubois and Celeste Montague. All old money, all French aristocracy. 

Behind them, two Ilvermorny boys entered, frattish energy radiating off of them as they fought boisterously for their preferred bench at the back of the class. 

She turned her gaze back to the door, where a familiar boy with mousy brown hair bustled in.

“Colin! I thought I saw your name on the list,” said Hermione, warmly gesturing for him to join her.

“Thanks, Hermione,” he beamed, all crowded teeth and endearing charm. 

As he settled into the pew by her side, his overstuffed bag landed with a thud, a corner tearing at the seams. A rogue inkpot tumbled out, nicking its cork against the stone floor,  oxblood-red ink spilling out in rhythmic glugs. 

Colin muttered a frenetic apology as he picked up the now mostly empty pot. Hermione cast a Scourify and he hastily repaired his bag, looking around with the skittish eyes of a meerkat, hoping there hadn’t been too many observers to his blunder.

 “I’m nervous, are you?” He offered with an earnest little shoulder shrug. “I was hoping they were going to share some pre-course reading—but I just had to wing it in the University library.”

Colin had been through hell during their last year at Hogwarts, still grieving the loss of his younger brother Dennis at the battle. It had taken him until the end of the Christmas break to return to his bright and bubbly self. 

Whatever—or whoever—he had discovered during that time had done him a world of good, as though purpose had been brought back into his life. Hermione was proud of the young man for persevering through the grief, and even more proud that he’d managed to earn one of the highest grades possible in potions—only one point below her own.

His eyebrows creased together as he peered around the steadily filling hall. “Did you see Romilda Vane got a place?” 

Hermione pursed her lips. 

“Yes,” she said primly. She still had not forgiven the busty and brazen witch for her completely utterly ludicrous and entirely illegal use of love potion chocolates in their sixth year.

She had nearly killed Ron, who had eaten the entire box, needed an antidote from Slughorn, and was simultaneously poisoned from the pick-me-up tipple afterwards.

Coming down from a love potion was apparently a new layer of hell, and she didn’t begrudge Slughorn for offering Ron the hard liquor in his moment of need.

However, considering it wasn’t Romilda who had poisoned Ron, the offence had gone unpunished, other than a mere slap on the wrist. Hermione thought that had much more to do with the crocodile tears she put on the morning after.

What a performance.

The offending party, with her curves and raven curls, arrived to class with ten seconds to spare, right after the younger and fairer Greengrass sister, Astoria, and her androgynous Slytherin peer, Eliander Harper. 

Fifteen students to ten cauldrons… 

Odd.

As the bells of the University clock tower rang out, heralding the top of the hour, a shudder of anticipation vibrated through her. It travelled restlessly from her hands and feet all the way to her chest—as if the blood cells were being pulled from her extremities to fuel her thumping heart.

It was almost time to meet their professor, the person who would shepherd their learning for the next two years, whose hands her education, growth and success would lay with.

As the bells rang their final chime and her finger tips began to prickle bloodlessly, a concealed door at the head of the hall swung open.

Hermione almost slid from her bench, as all the blood that had pooled in her chest, plummeted to her stomach.

No.

No! 

NO!

“There will be no foolish wand-waving or silly incantations in this lecture,” drawled the man as he swaggered from the dark recess to lean on the front of his potions booth. 

Hermione took in every inch of him in mere milliseconds. Cataloguing. Assessing. 

Something about him was different. 

Severus Snape. Former Death Eater. Cheater of death itself. 

… So much about him was different.

The way he held himself, shoulders back.

He looked like he’d taken some sun: the sallow, vampiric complexion warming to a faint beige. 

Where had he been this last year? And what terrors had he brought back with him?

His midnight hair was tied up in a bun, showcasing a shaved nape and a neck tattoo that started behind his ear and continued below his buttoned-up black collar. His black button-down shirt was crisp and tucked into black muggle skinny jeans. Hermione’s breath stuttered as her eyes snagged on the wicked bulge pressing against the tight fabric.

Her eyes shot up, a fierce blush blooming across her cheeks. His own eyes, oubliettes of darkness, were trained on her. 

It was as if the whole world ran away screaming that very moment, and she was left alone with only his inscrutable gaze and her academic curiosity for company. 

He is not a puzzle to be solved, Hermione, she chastised. But from the darkness itself, the questions called out to her for answers: How had he secured such a prestigious position, especially with his less-than-favourable reputation with wizarding society?

What had possessed him to transform into this… evolved version of himself? The version of him that could get a centre page spread in a Rolling Stone magazine?

And why, oh, why, was the mere presence of him making her throat dry?

The screeching of wood on stone drew both pairs of their eyes to her left.

“C’est impossible ! Je ne peux pas et ne veux pas être enseigné dans ces conditions.” The french girl, Audrey, rose with impassioned fury, stomped a single heeled shoe and spat on the floor at Snape’s shiny black brogues. 

He did not flinch, almost as though he had prepared himself for this reaction. He merely looked down at the splatter of spittle on his shoe and slowly raised his long nose to point at the young woman. 

“Henri, Céleste ? Suivez-moi, on ne tolérera pas ça,” she continued, flinging her rucksack over one shoulder and storming out of the class, her posse at her heels. 

A beat of silence followed, where the room seemed to hold its breath, and Hermione watched as Snape’s eyes fell closed for a long second, before he opened them once more, crossed his arms and leaned back on his desk.

He panned the room, eyes tracking each of his remaining students. Like a bird of prey, he was beautiful in a terribly dangerous way that made her squirm uncomfortably in her seat. The sneer of hatred was palpable, and she could feel the ice leaching off of him like a thawing corpse. 

“Anyone else?” he said tightly, peering down his nose at them all. “Should you not wish to be taught by a former Death Eater, no matter what role he played in the war efforts,” his tongue clicked, seemingly involuntarily, and his nostrils flared. “The Dean is prepared to grant a transfer to a comparative study abroad—with immediate effect. But if you choose to put aside your prejudices and stay, then your fate is sealed. Should you attempt to exempt yourself at a later date, the same offer will not be granted. You will fail the course and your admission will be revoked permanently.”

Colin looked to Hermione, as though half expecting her to storm out of the room with a similar fervour as the French students. 

Yet she found herself transfixed. Rooted to the spot. 

When she didn’t budge, Colin’s shoulders slumped slightly and he sighed, facing forward and nodding thoughtfully to himself.

But it wasn’t Colin who Hermione was watching, it was Snape—who seemed to be making a concerted effort not to meet her eyes.

“Choose wisely,” he said, and she felt his dare like a dagger pressed to her sternum.

Behind her, several students shuffled in their spots, some rising, some fixed as firmly in place as she.

Knoxford was still the most prestigious and elite magical mastery university in the world. And Hermione wouldn’t let anyone take that achievement away from her. 

Maybe it mattered less to others who had grown up within wizarding society, had their roots firmly secured in the world, and had plenty of opportunities to open to them through their pureblood circles.

But despite being a fucking war heroine, muggle-born Hermione Granger still had tons to prove—and she would rather die before letting Severus Snape steal this from her.

When the door closed on the takers of his offer, Hermione finally looked around.

The Americans had stayed, as had—less surprisingly—the Slytherins: Greengrass and Harper, with herself, Colin, two Uagadou alumni and the Japanese Mahoutokoro student, Arima Hiro, remaining seated. Plus, much to Hermione’s chagrin, Romilda Vane.

The expression on her face was one of performative rage, and Hermione willed the girl to just leave if she was going to wear all her emotions like that. Hermione could only suffer her false fury for so long.

Fifteen students were now down to ten.

Exactly the amount of cauldron spots available.

Snape pushed off the desk, and all eyes snapped to him. With an air of indifference that Hermione didn’t believe for a second, he rounded his booth and began tipping potions ingredients into his cauldron. 

The room watched him in silent anticipation. 

He sprinkled a dash of pixie dust, pink sparkles crackling above the vat. An ingredient most used for transfiguration-level potions, she pondered. Followed by what looked like grains of sand—a tiny pinch—to constrain the time of the potion to a limited period.

“I don't expect many of you to appreciate the subtle science and exact art that is potion-making,” he began, a billow of green smoke clouding around him as he dropped a handful of fur tufts into the concoction. 

“However, for those select few who possess the predisposition…” Snape’s face became clear through the mist, and Hermione’s stomach knotted. 

This man had been the bane of hers and her classmates' existence for six solid years at Hogwarts. Despite the honourable choices he made during the war—working as a double agent at the height of Voldemort’s power and aiding the Order—he still terrorised his students at any given opportunity, removed house points for no reason other than to exert some sick sense of control and repeatedly bullied those who he deemed beneath him.

Which, Hermione had to admit, was almost everyone bar Dumbledore.

Hermione hadn’t realised how intently she had been watching him, but when her eyes re-focussed she found his irises, tunneling into her like black holes. Her chest tightened.

Is he always going to be this intense?

She had faced the putrid maw of Fenrir Greyback, had buried countless friends, had lost her parents to an overly effective obligation—Severus Snape didn’t scare her anymore.

He couldn’t.

So why did she feel so fucking nervous in his presence.

He began to ladle the potion into a vial, and addressed the class at large once more, but Hermione’s mind was twitching, itching, clawing at her. “I can teach you how to bewitch the mind and ensnare the senses.”

She’d heard this all before; did the man not have any original material to work from? Was this his rehearsed orientation monologue—enacted even after all these years? Moreover, from the lack of reaction from her Hogwarts cohort, was she the only one who had logged it in her memory bank?

 He had made an iconic entrance, after all… even if he had used the moment to demean an eleven-year-old boy merely for existing.

“I can tell you how to bottle fame, brew glory, and even put a stopper in death.” On the word ‘stopper’, he corked the vial with a small squeak, and held the liquid up to the dim light creeping through the window.  

The audacity of the man bubbled over her decorum, and she let out a puff of air that was far more audible than she had intended. He made a beeline towards Hermione, stopping short to loom above her.

She rose to match his height, falling short by a good foot. No one made a sound, but Colin visibly tensed beside her. 

“Miss Granger,” he sneered through pinched lips, tilting his head to the side. “Our new celebrity.”

“I could say the same for you, Professor.” She met his cold eyes with fire.

The effect was like scorching coals in a vast furnace. 

He brought the newly made concoction to eye-level.

“Drink it.”

Panic froze her resolve. 

“I said, drink it.”

You could have heard the footsteps of a demiguise in the silence. 

“Sir—” Interrupted Colin with a light quiver in his tone. But Snape entirely ignored him and pressed on.

“Come on, Miss Granger,” his tone moved from mocking to a dangerous tease. A dare. “Do you seriously believe I would put the ‘Golden Girl’ in harm’s way on her first day in my class? Especially when my own reputation hangs in the balance?”

Hermione’s mind whirled as she flicked her attention from the vial to the dimple she had never seen before revealing itself on his left cheek. Her heart pattered fiercely.

“Regardless, you are far too much of a swotty, know-it-all to have not already worked out what this potion does.”

Was that praise she detected? Lower levels of her body certainly thought so. 

She wasn’t afraid, and Hermione reminded herself that she was in control. She knew exactly what this potion would do; the balance of the ingredients seemingly haphazardly strewn into his cauldron were perfectly in harmony to create a singular result. 

Hermione took the glass vial from his lithe fingers, skin meeting skin for just a second, and she could have sworn both of their breaths hitched at the touch—before she downed the bottle in one gulp.

Benches creaked, and Romilda let out a theatrical gasp.

The room grew around her, and her skin began to prickle as her body took on its new form.

The components of the concoction had all the hallmarks of Polyjuice, with a few sneaky additions that would speed up the brewing process whilst also reducing the time the potion would take effect.

Her khaki linen blouse dissolved and was replaced with silky black fur that covered her entire body. She felt her nose elongate slightly and tipped ears protrude from the top of her head. 

Hermione sank low to the ground and tried to speak, but all that came out was a croaky “Meowwwww.”

With a whoosh, she was lifted high and dangled in mid-air, as Professor Snape held her up, his hands snuggled at her ribs. She felt a chill at her navel, and hissed into Snape’s smug face, feeling entirely exposed. Whiskers sprouted from her nozzle and she could sense every tremor in the room, including the rapid beating of her professor’s treacherous pulse. 

“What a pretty pussy you make, Miss Granger. Almost as if you’d experienced this form before,” he sneered sardonically.

Too many muscles in her body clenched at his words. Muscles she could not admit to, even in the solace of her own mind. That said, she was impressed. This was a feat hitherto unheard of. Scholars and Alchemists would be chomping at the bit to learn of his formula—one that could evoke trans-species transmutations, and be brewed in a fraction of the time.

Why wouldn’t Snape share this discovery with the wizarding world?

He may have been passed on for an Order of Merlin for his role in the war, but a discovery like this? Even just the reduction in brewing time could earn him similar recognition and praise.

Snape flipped her into a fetal position in his arms, like a baby and studied her. 

No, not her, the effects. 

He wet his lips and scratched delicately behind her ears. Hermione couldn’t breathe. Her body betrayed her as her feline instincts took hold and an unmistakable purrrr vibrated through the lecture room.

An array of nervous laughter and smug chuckles littered the room, breaking the strange tension of the scene, and Snape placed her down on the cold floor.

Hermione let out a gust of air as the black hair began to shed away into the ether, her clothes reappeared and her stature returned. 

Fully back to herself, she brushed down her jeans and clumsily sat back at her pew. 

Colin watched her with concern, his face glowing red in her honour. 

Professor Snape cleared his throat, and everyone but Hermione and Colin looked at him—enraptured. “Your first assignment of this course will be to devise your own bespoke potion, complete with ingredients list, recipe and formula—including a five thousand word report on its practical uses and beneficial applications to wizarding society.” 

She could feel his eyes boring into her. “You have the month. Class is dismissed.”

“What is this?” Dean Shafiq said imperiously, without raising his bloodshot eyes from The Daily Prophet. Severus was already walking away from the resignation letter he’d just slammed on the elder Wizard’s leather-topped desk. 

“You know perfectly well what it is, Saddiq,” he deadpanned, turning at the closed door to the office. “You conveniently omitted Miss Hermione Granger’s name from my attendance list.” 

The man didn’t stir. Dark skin tags mapped out a constellation of freckles under his eye bags, while his burnt orange robes highlighted the warm undertones of his deep skin. His coarse black hair, styled back with Sleekeazy, had a wiry, unkempt cut, while his jowls seemed locked in a fierce competition to see which could droop the fastest toward the floor.

Saddiq Shafiq hailed from one of Wizarding Britain’s Sacred Twenty-Eight—a self-important register of pure-blood families who prided themselves on their unbroken magical lineage. But the Shafiqs’ story began much earlier, and far from Britain. Originating in the 1500s, from the region now known as north-west India—then the powerful Gujarat Sultanate—they were a noble house of magical scholars and alchemists. For generations, they travelled the world, sharing their knowledge of enchanted ingredients, spices, and potioncraft, before ultimately settling in Britain in the early 1600s.

The family had stayed out of the war, which at the time had not made them particularly popular with either side. Yet, it was precisely their family’s penchant for remaining ambivalent to the shifting tides of the world that allowed Saddiq to maintain his position at the University, keep his name out of the press, and—most importantly—his family out of Azkaban.

Severus couldn’t suppress the envy that simmered just beneath the surface of his thoughts. He had sacrificed so much, put himself forward at great personal cost, and come perilously close to losing his life—if not for...

“Miss Granger did not submit herself for exchange to another college,” Shafiq countered, “so I fail to see what the problem is. A war hero wishes to be taught by you—”

“THE PROBLEM?” Severus’s voice rose to a venomous volume. “The problem is I have no desire to teach her. Do you honestly think I want a constant reminder of my failures sitting at the front of every class?”

Shafiq sighed, his reading time thoroughly interrupted, and set down the paper.

“Tell me, Severus—what exactly do you believe you have failed at? Because, unless my sources are mistaken, your only real sins are a disposition darker than a Dementor’s cloak and what we might politely call your ‘punitive flair’. The former, I’ve grown quite accustomed to over our years of correspondence. As for the latter... well, we’ve already had words about that, haven’t we?” The Dean narrowed his eyes at him. 

At least double Severus’s senior, his tired orbs held a myriad of expressions and sentiments born from years of scrutinising people, which he never failed to use in his favour for moments such as these.

Severus clucked his tongue and huffed. He had to admit, his demeaning treatment of students over the years, particularly those close to Harry Potter, had not done him many favours with the press.

“Tell that to the Prophet,” he muttered, feeling the weight of Shafiq’s gaze on him. Severus was not looking forward to tomorrow’s headlines, which were sure to be rife with disparaging rhetoric, as articles concerning him always tended to be. 

“Are you going to deny yourself the opportunity to prove them otherwise?” asked Shafiq, leaning forward on his elbows.

Severus’s shoulders slumped, and he closed his eyes slowly, cowering from the confession crawling out of his lips. “No one wants me here, Saddiq. Fuck, I don’t even want to be here.”

Much to his surprise, the Dean smiled, his crow’s feet crinkling. “See out your probation. It’s only three months, and we’ll talk after that. I will have a suitable replacement lined up should you wish to vacate the role.” 

He began to shake his head, a low growl escaping, but Saddiq cleared his throat and cut in, his tone leaving no room for argument. “Do you think you’re the first infamous hire at this university, Severus? You are not even my most controversial hire this decade. Surely you've heard of our goblin curse breaker, Barlock?”

“So you have a track record of hiring disaster cases?” he scoffed. “Didn’t the goblin go missing under suspicious circumstances?”

“Psshhh,” Shafiq sounded, with a dismissing waft of his hand, “he merely took an extended vacation and forgot to mention it.”

“I hold very little confidence in your flippancy, Dean,” he said sourly, but his mood had lightened. 

Just three months. He could get through three months.   

He hoped.

Saddiq chuckled. “Besides, you truly would not want to miss out on tutoring the ‘Brightest-Witch-Of-Our-Age’ now, would you? Imagine the new potions she could devise under your newly rehabilitated tutelage. How did she fair in your introductory lecture?”

His breathing quickened, but he pursed his lips.

“She is even more insufferable now that she knows her own worth. Her obstinance knows no bounds,” he gritted.

Saddiq’s thick brows seemed in danger of disappearing into the deep crevice of his forehead, and there was far too much knowing in the wily intensity of his gaze. After a pause, he made a casual gesture toward the door, which swung open wandlessly. Without missing a beat, he lifted his newspaper again.

“Your resignation is denied.”

“I granted as much,” Severus muttered sullenly, stomping out of the office.

The tiny gold bell clanged above the door to The Leaky Cauldron, as Hermione hurried into the warmth of the pub and scanned for Harry and Ron. 

She was late to meet them, as usual, but they were easily found—canoodling, as they always were these days, in the back room by the roaring fireplace. 

After the war, Hermione had returned to Hogwarts to complete her studies the thorough way, where Harry and Ron had chosen a different route—straight to the Auror Training Programme. She tried not to begrudge them their decision, but the growing distance between them felt like a slow, invisible wedge being driven deeper, and she couldn’t ignore it. 

It was strange. After Ron’s kiss, things had turned awkward for a while, neither of them eager to repeat the gesture which had felt far more like kissing one’s sibling than either had expected. 

The shift in their dynamic had caught her off guard—especially the fact that, without Hermione in the picture… and the daily threat of death, his and Harry’s relationship had evolved into something entirely different. 

Hermione was not to know any of this, though. While she redid her final year, Ron and Harry had connected in a way she would never have foreseen.

On her first night at Grimmauld Place, with her school years officially behind her, she was forced to confront just how entwined the pair had become. It had involved a rather traumatic bathroom encounter—one she would’ve gladly Obliviated from memory, if she hadn’t already exhausted her lifetime’s quota of memory charms.

She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when the tide had turned between the young men. She hadn’t wanted to pry—or come off as coldly clinical about the ins and outs of their budding courtship—so she simply kept her questions to herself. After sitting through their well-meaning, overly earnest apologies for not telling her sooner, she nodded, smiled, and carried on as if nothing had changed.

Still, it was a bittersweet sting. Hermione was genuinely happy for them, happy that they had found each other, but it had come at a cost. They were a unit, the two of them, and she often found herself on the outside looking in, watching them share quiet moments that once belonged to all three of them. 

It meant she spent less time with them, less of those spontaneous adventures and in-jokes that had once been the glue of their friendship. And, while she knew things had changed for the better between them, it didn’t stop her from feeling the ache of being left behind.

Plus, it made living at Grimmauld Place mightily awkward at times, especially with the pair on a mission to christen every single room of the Great and Most Noble House of Black. It was a bold “fuck you” against all the stuffy, bigoted ancestors who had once roamed its halls—if a little mentally scarring on occasion.

Hermione ordered herself two Firewhiskeys, knocking back the first one at the bar and hissing at the invigorating burn down her gullet. With a flick of her wand, she summoned the boys’ Butterbeers, levitating the three glasses above the bustling after-work crowd of wizards. Steeling herself for the inevitable awkwardness, she took a deep breath and plastered on her most supportive smile.

“All I’m saying is—” teased Ron as Hermione lowered the drinks onto the table and took a seat on a rickety wooden stool, “the uniforms can be distracting”.

Harry shook his head, lifting his beer to his lips, and glanced up through his dark lashes at his freckled friend. “The fact that you can’t focus on anything but my crotch doesn’t exactly qualify for a department-wide mandate for looser clothing,” he said, taking a long gulp before setting the glass down with a satisfying thud.

Hermione offered an awkward smile, taking a careful sip of her drink as Ron responded with his usual gusto. “I’m not suggesting anything like that! Just sayin’...”

“Just sayin’ you’ve got zero self-control and need your boyfriend to cover up—otherwise you’ll end up dragging him into another broom cupboard mid–Death Eater raid and nearly botch the whole thing?” Harry teased, his grin stretching wider.

“You promised you’d keep that between us!” Ron gasped and whacked at Harry, who swerved back nimbly.

“It is between us! And Hermione…” Harry shrugged with his hands up, and tilted his head in her direction.

Both men turned her way then. Ron at least had the nerve to look sheepish, having not noticed her arrival. 

“Hey ‘Mione,” he said breathily. 

“Hey,” she offered with a small smile, lacing her tone with as much cheer as she could to match their vibe. It wouldn’t do to drag down the energy—despite her sour mood. “You were both given new assignments today, right?”

“Yup,” said Harry, wiping the froth of Butterbeer from his mouth.

“Anything of interest?” 

The two men shared a look, as if discussing telepathically whether they could bring her into their secret circle of trust. The one she used to hold a permanent residence in. 

As one second stretched into two, Ron broke first. “There’s been a string of deaths. Most seem completely accidental, but…” 

Hermione scrunched her nose in thought. “I haven’t seen anything in The Prophet.”

“Thing is…” Harry began under his breath, leaning into the center of the table. “The Ministry is trying to keep it quiet. Kind of goes against the whole directive of ‘healing from the past.”

What an odd strategy , Hermione thought. 

“Surely serial deaths would do the opposite?” Hermione argued, her tone tight. “They’d unite people. The public deserves to know if they’re in danger—they’d want to protect themselves.” That long-buried resentment toward the Ministry’s chronic lack of transparency had crept back into her voice. “Is there a pattern?”

“Maybe. We’re not sure yet,” Harry said, punctuating his words with a line in the sand. Inviting no further remarks. “So, how was your first day?”

“Eventful,” she said with a sigh, and knocked back the remainder of her second glass before she embarked on recounting the horrors of the day.

The weeks of September slipped by, each one a blur of pressure and potions fumes. Hermione spent her days like an ant under a microscope, constantly under the unforgiving scrutiny of Professor Snape. His glares could have boiled Glycerin, and she found herself ducking them like curses, pouring every ounce of her energy into her assignment. 

It didn’t help that the man was unfairly fit. When he rolled up his sleeves to demonstrate a brewing technique—slowly, methodically, as if he knew exactly what he was doing—Hermione couldn’t stop her eyes from drifting. His forearms were lean, corded with lithe muscle, veins wrapping like ivy up his skin. Controlled strength. Precise. Unbothered.

But what truly stole her attention was the ink.

Fresh, dark, and sprawling across his entire left arm, the tattoos were a mesmerising blend of fine-line illustrations and arcane symbols—winding scripts, celestial markings, a small flower nestled between a tangle of runes. The kind of art that meant something. Hermione, naturally, burned with curiosity.

She’d tried—really tried—to steal a longer glance, to catalogue the details, maybe decode them later. But when her gaze had lingered too long, she’d looked up…

And he’d already been watching her.

Watching her watching him.

The moment their eyes locked, heat rushed to her face like a rogue explosion of Pepper-Up Potion. Mortified, she’d snapped her gaze back to her notes, willing herself to disappear behind her parchment and never—ever—attempt to deconstruct his tattoos again.

Of course, that didn’t stop her from thinking about them. Repeatedly. Obsessively. Especially when he leaned across her cauldron with that infuriatingly subtle smirk playing on his lips, like he knew exactly which part of her mind he’d invaded.

“ Not like that, you ridiculous girl. Are you trying to curdle the base? ” Snape had drawled on only their second day of class, looming over her cauldron with that ever-present sneer carved into his features.

“ This is a mastery course, Miss Granger—not remedial potions. You’re capable of far better, ” he murmured one late afternoon, voice low and dark behind her ear. The words wrapped around her like smoke, and they did absolutely nothing to cool the heat coiling low in her belly.

She’d been carving into a particularly stubborn root when he appeared at her side like a shadow. The moment he spoke again— “Much more delicately,” a soft whisper right in the shell of her ear—her soul very nearly left her body. Her core clenched so tightly she had to grip the table for stability.

Then his hand, cool and precise, settled atop hers. He guided her in a slow, fluid slicing motion, and the root surrendered in perfect, papery curls beneath their shared touch.

Even Colin, who caught his fair share of Snape’s scorn, had begun to notice the tension crackling between them. He'd invited her for drinks after class more than once—probably out of pity, maybe curiosity—but she'd always declined, citing the need to dedicate every spare second to their assignment.

Her nights were no better. Grimmauld Place, when Ron and Harry weren’t bouncing from the walls, echoed with a kind of quiet that pressed in on her ribs.

She’d owled Ginny a handful of times, but the replies were brief and few. Ginny’s world was spinning fast now—training constantly, consumed by the whirlwind that came with earning a coveted spot on the Holyhead Harpies. Hermione was proud of her—of course she was—but that didn’t soften the pang of isolation every time a one-line note arrived days late.

Everyone seemed to be moving on, falling into new rhythms and roles. And Hermione? Hermione was still here, alone—measuring dragon bile, avoiding eye contact, and counting the days.

On the final Sunday of the month, Hermione had her Eureka moment.

The moon hung low, peering through the grime-streaked window of the spare room she’d claimed on the fourth floor—her makeshift potions lab, cluttered with scribbled notes, half-used ingredients, and the lingering scent of valerian root, doused Jobberknoll feathers and borage. Her hands trembled with a mix of exhaustion and exhilaration as she poured the shimmering concoction into a glass vial, biting down on her protruding tongue in concentration.

The liquid glowed faintly, a silvery sheen that danced in sync with the passing clouds outside, as if even the moon itself was watching. For a heartbeat, everything was still—the bubbling cauldron, the creaking pipes, the whispering portraits in the hall beyond—and all she could hear was the rush of her pulse, loud and proud in her ears.

She had done it.

At least, she hoped she had. She had already written the damn report on the potion—to get ahead of the timing while it brewed—so she hoped it would work as intended.

 

Elixir of Lucidity: “For when the mind is clouded, and the path unclear—let the dreamlight guide you.”

To be taken just before rest, with a single, focused question held close to the heart.

This draught delves into the deepest folds of the subconscious, unlocking doors long sealed and silencing the noise of doubt. As the drinker slips into slumber, the potion weaves through the dreaming mind, distilling clarity from confusion and offering a vision of the most appropriate—and achievable—course of action.

The dream may arrive in symbols or in startling lucidity, but its truth will ring clear to the seeker upon waking.

 

Snuggled beneath her bedsheets, the silence pressing down on her like a weighted blanket, Hermione lay alone in the vast, creaking house. Ron and Harry were miles away, chasing renegade Death Eaters in some windswept corner of the country. 

The potion slipped down her throat and settled warmly in her stomach, a quiet bloom of magic unfurling inside her. As the edges of her awareness blurred and sleep pulled her under, one question pulsed gently at the forefront of her mind, echoing in the hush between heartbeats:

What would it take to feel less alone in the world?

When morning broke, so did Hermione.

She jolted awake with the sheets tangled around her, her skin slick with sweat and her heart thundering in her chest like she’d run full-tilt through the Forbidden Forest. Her thighs clenched of their own accord. Her lips were parted, dry and kiss-bruised, and the lingering traces of her dream clung to her like the scent of smoke after a fire.

Flashes scattered through her mind, wicked and uninvited—Snape’s mouth on her neck, his voice a low, rasping command against her skin. His hands, deft and demanding, holding her hips in place. Her own pleas, desperate and half-formed, tumbling from her lips as she arched into him.

“Oh no,” she croaked aloud, pressing the back of her hand to her forehead. “ No no no no no. That won’t do. That won’t do at all.”

She sat up sharply, heart still pounding and the memory of phantom touch refusing to fade. The potion vial lay empty on her bedside table, glinting innocently in the morning light.

She must have mismeasured something— surely. Perhaps the stardust had been contaminated, or the ginseng had steeped too long. Or maybe the moonstone had interacted strangely with the valerian root. 

Yes. That had to be it.  

A misfire. A magical anomaly. A fluke.

Because there was simply no way that the solution her subconscious had offered to her soul’s aching loneliness was that man.

And yet—

Chapter Text

Hermione had not gotten the formula wrong.
The formula was, in fact, perfect—as her fifth attempt at the brew had confirmed. But the deadline was fast approaching, and after five sweaty, steamy, unrelentingly salacious dreams, she finally caved to the admission.

Maybe she should take Creevey up on his offer for drinks. She probably just needed to get laid.
Not that she believed Colin had it in him to scratch this particular itch. It wasn’t that he wasn’t attractive—he was. But he was also nineteen. A boy.
No, what she craved was a filthy mouth, a sharp tongue, and a volucrine nose peppering her clit with kisses like a woodpecker on a mission. There was only one man who fit that description. 

A pang of errant need stalled her as she flitted down the stairs and she exhaled slowly through the rhythmic echoes clenching her core.

Okay, so maybe she’d touched herself once or twice at the thought—but purely to take the edge off. To temper the gnawing, impossible craving for a man she had absolutely no right to be fantasising about.

Still, with The Prophet and Witch Weekly going after Severus Snape the way they had been this past month, she wouldn’t be surprised if Knoxford had a new Potions Master by the end of term.

OUT OF HIDING, BUT STILL COWERING IN THE SHADOWS: Severus Snape’s mysterious revival continues to baffle the public

KNOXFORD STUDENTS WALK OUT: Faculty speak out on the new Death Eater hire

I SLEPT WITH SEVERUS SNAPE AND LIVED TO TELL THE TALE! – An anonymous, unverified reader reveals all

 

The media had been relentless. And so, she wagered she just had to hold out a little longer. Hermione couldn’t imagine that it would be long before he would be asked to step down from his post. That’s what she told herself, at least, as she wandered into the kitchen to grab a coffee-to-go before class.

The moment she crossed the threshold, her eyes were assaulted by an overwhelming display of bare flesh—freckled, wrinkled, and rhythmically smacking against Harry’s chin as Ron’s member was buried deep between the Chosen One’s lips.

“Ugh, fuck!” Ron barked, startled, as he bucked forward, his ginger-flecked arse twitching with release. Hermione’s face ignited and she spun on her heel, eyes lifting helplessly to the crown mouldings above.

“Sorry ‘Mi—” Harry choked, and Hermione’s blush burned furiously as she heard clothing being adorned and zipped up in haste.

“It’s fine, boys, seriously—” she squeaked. 

The kitchen smelled of burnt toast and sex as she massaged the bridge of her nose, “but maybe if you could try to either keep it to one of the bedrooms or at least wait until I’ve left for the day?” 

There was an awkward beat of silence.

“Is it safe to turn around now?” she asked and Ron affirmed with a mild stutter.

When she decided to brave the sight, she found Harry with a flushed and puzzled expression, checking his watch.

“Christ, is that the time?!” He exclaimed, shucking up loose combat pants over his boxers. “C’mon, we’re gonna miss the morning stand-up meeting. ”

With that, Ron chomped into a cold slice of toast, crumbs tumbling down his shirt as he and Harry breezed past her toward the front door, tossing half-formed goodbyes over their shoulders.

The ghosts of even a lukewarm “good luck” —on her first potion presentation of the year—lingered in the hallway long after they’d gone.

Severus considered himself a fair man. Ruthless, perhaps. Uncompromising, certainly. But never unfair. His standards were high—unapologetically so—but only because excellence demanded it. His delivery, he’d been told more than once, left much to be desired. 

He considered that a compliment. Precision mattered. Efficiency mattered. Sentimentality did not.

So when the door to his office slammed open hard enough to make the floorboards groan and his shelves tremble, he did not flinch. But his jaw did tighten—just so. He would not be made a fool of. Not by anyone. Least of all by her .

“You haven’t even read my report!” Hermione Granger’s voice lashed through the room like lightning. Her eyes sparkled, not with innocence, but with fury—molten and fierce. Her braid, usually militant in its binding, was failing its duty. Stray strands whipped free, wild as Medusa’s snakes rallying to her defence.

He leaned back in his chair, giving the illusion of calm, though something low in his belly shifted.

“I did not need to,” he said smoothly, lacing his fingers together. “Your potion was clearly flawed. It failed to produce the intended result. Theoretical brilliance is irrelevant when practical execution fails.”

Her nostrils flared, like a dragon prepared to decimate all in her path. “How convenient , Professor,” she fumed. “Tell me, what’s your empirical basis for judging the success of a potion meant to divine one’s true path forward? Do you have one? Or are you just too terrified of where your own mind led you to acknowledge that it worked?”

It was her first time accosting him in his private office and Miss Granger’s eyes darted to his desk—to the stack of well-worn first editions. Hemingway. Austen. Brontë. She blinked, visibly recalibrating. Then her furious gaze snapped back to his.

“A Troll,” she hissed. “A T for fucking Troll . What about my submission said Troll to you?”

The curse on her tongue hit him like a note struck perfectly off-key. Wrong, yet deeply and deliciously right. There was something so profane about it coming from her mouth—as though inspiring such a prissy, good little girl to reach the point of an expletive was a personal achievement he’d like to repeat.

Something pulsed in him. 

A perverse thrill crept down his spine. She was trembling with indignation. He watched her pace, the way fire danced in her cheeks, in her voice, in the way she refused to shrink. Most students wilted under his scrutiny. Miss Granger sparked .

His cock swelled in his jeans, and he felt incredibly grateful for the cage that their tightness provided. Skinny jeans were all the rage in muggle London of late and there was something about their rigidity and body forming structure that gave him a sense of security.

In his free time—when he wasn’t at the tattoo parlour, he liked to walk the city streets.

No one knew him there. No dark looks of revulsion, no nosy witches whispering to their journalist friends, no wide-eyed children pointing before their mothers yanked them away with anxious frowns.
There were no haunted glances. No war stories clinging to his boots. Just... space. And anonymity.

And the more time he spent among the muggles—trying out their fashion, letting his hair fall differently, slipping into styles that felt more like costume at first, and choice later—the more he caught favourable glances, even if they were just from muggles who had no idea who he truly was. Curious ones. Sometimes even intrigued.

He’d never once considered his appearance might be tied to his likeability. That how he wore himself could shape how others received him.

But now...

Severus shifted slightly, adjusting in the chair, as if to relieve an ache in his back. In truth, the ache was far lower—and far less appropriate.

He had spent the better part of the previous night tormented. Her summary—read twice, annotated, then read again. A work of brilliance. But the potion… the potion had delivered something far more intimate than any mere theoretical result. It had cracked open a door in his mind that should have stayed sealed shut.

Her body. His hands. Her breathless gasps. Her wild hair spilling out like a halo on a pillow, her sweet, glistening cunt opening to him like a flower in bloom, his cock piercing that wet, succulent core for the first time—His name falling from Hermione Granger’s lips like a prayer, filthy and reverent all at once.

And now here she was, breathing hard, fists clenched, chest rising and falling with the same tempo he remembered from that dream.

Her eyes locked onto his, studying his shift in body language in a way that made him unsteady. He raised a brow. 

“Is there something else you’d like to accuse me of, Miss Granger?” 

“I am a grown-arse woman, Professor, not some little Hogwarts first year you can pick on to feel a sense of grandeur.” Her gaze burned a trail of fire toward him.

“Do you truly believe I marked you low to stroke my own ego?” he said, his voice had a dangerous edge. He stepped around the desk. “That I would stoop to such petty retribution to assert dominance? My ego, Miss Granger, is not so fragile. Your work does not meet the requirements of a Mastery level pass.”

He stopped just short of her—closer than was proper. Closer than was safe .

“Recollections of said fragility may vary,” she scorned. 

The tension between them was like a charged trip-wire. “Miss Granger, you should be lucky to receive even the grade you have. I could as easily have had you wiped from my attendance list. Would you rather I reward you for slipping me a mind-altering compound? For allowing me to live, for several hours, in a world where I—” His breath caught and he gritted the next confession through clenched teeth. “Where I did things to you I have no right to speak aloud?”

He could almost hear her mind, wishing he could just dive in with a quick Legilimens and see the truth in her madness. What had she been thinking? What was the purpose in affecting him in such a manner? The girl was brilliant, she knew that, everyone bloody-well knew that, she didn’t need to soften her Potions Master to elevate her grades.

So why?

Those rich, wide eyes fell to his mouth, and his Adam’s apple bobbed.

A heartbeat passed.

Two.

Her fingers twitched at her sides. His hands locked behind his back. 

Manacled. As if it were the only way to ensure he kept his hands to himself.

They stood like that, locked in some invisible current, a breath away from an unforgivable act. Her scent—earth and ink and the faintest hint of wild fig—wrapped around him like the fumes of Amortentia .

He wanted her. Fuck. He wanted her. She had done this to him. And he would make sure she paid for it.

And then—

Pffffft. A soft puff of ash scattered in the corner of the room, followed by a faint warbling, an infantile chirp.

Hermione flinched, the spell broken, like a potion bubbling over. Her gaze tore away from his lips, where they had fallen, to the small brass perch beside the fireplace. There, nestled among the charred remains of his own detritus, a small, smouldering phoenix chick blinked up at them with luminous eyes.

Fawkes.

Severus had not expected visitors. He rarely received anyone unannounced in his campus office, save the occasional screeching Howler from his ever-persistent hate club . And this... this was a moment he’d been waiting for.

The chick stirred.

Fawkes’s revival had been slow—agonisingly so. A phoenix rises only once every ten years, and true to his dramatic nature, Fawkes had taken his time, lingering in the ashes like a promise unfulfilled. He had gone up in flames the day before Severus’s appointment had begun at the university, as if marking some final end to the past.

And now, finally, a chirp. 

Severus hadn’t wanted to miss it—the first note of life reborn from soot and silence. And yet, quite unexpectedly, he wasn’t alone in witnessing it. He was sharing the moment with Miss Granger . The familiarity to this occasion gave him unrest. 

Fawkes had been his only companion these past two years. The only magical presence that didn’t recoil from him, that didn’t ask for any more than he could give. After Dumbledore’s death, after the shattering finality of it, Fawkes had lingered. Not with Hogwarts. But with him .

Comforting. Watchful. Loyal.

Fawkes had become his confidant during the endless stretch of hollow days and cold nights. The sole witness to where his heart truly lay. The only creature alive who had seen the trembling fury in Severus’s hands the night Albus asked —no, commanded —him to take his life. The only being who had heard the crack of Severus’s voice, pleading no again and again, not out of cowardice, but out of love.

And then he’d done it anyway.

Because that was who Severus Snape was. Bound to duty and haunted by it.

His gaze softened, drawn to the fragile, half-formed creature nestled in the embers. Dusty, keratin-rich feather stems jutted from translucent skin—delicate and unearthly. Its eyes, dark as obsidian—dark as his —glistened with an ancient knowing. Even from where he and Hermione stood, heads tilted together, he could feel it: the weight of inherited wisdom staring back at him through those black, endless orbs.

The room, charged with the chemical reaction between him and Hermione, now felt somehow still. They had reached an equilibrium.

Hermione blinked at the sight of the scrawny chick, her eyes watery—though whether from awe or the overwhelming tension of the moment, Severus couldn’t tell.

She turned back to him as her mouth opened to say something. To question? To interrogate? But her voice cracked.

He stepped back, because someone had to, and he gestured stiffly to the door.

“Rework the potion, Miss Granger. If you can provide a new and working draught by the morning, I will reconsider your final grade and we can forget about this little mix-up.”

Hermione’s mind raced, overwhelmed by the sheer flood of revelations the proximity to Snape’s personal world had unleashed. It was as if being near his belongings peeled back the layers of a man she’d never truly seen.

Not only had she discovered that her Potions Master had somehow earned the favour—and companionship—of a phoenix, Fawkes , no less if she were not mistaken, but she’d also noted the neat stack of classic literature resting beside his desk. 

And then, as if that weren’t enough to tilt her axis further, her gaze had caught the unmistakable spines of vinyl records—Beethoven, Debussy—lined up with meticulous care on a side table, as if placed for private ritual.

The man was a walking contradiction. Brutal in the classroom. And yet... surrounded by softness, romance even.

Those facts did nothing to quell the ache in her lower abdomen. Neither did the fact that she had not been alone in her nightly visions. Severus Snape had had dreams about her too. She wondered just how illicit they had been. Just how hot and hard and sweaty dream Hermione had made him. 

She would never have thought she could get off over such a notion. But this version of Snape… this tattooed, mysterious contradiction of a man with a penchant for classical muggle literature and music? 

Well… she didn’t know quite what to make of him. Still, her chest burned furiously. She was incensed. 

The potion worked as intended! How am I supposed to brew it in a way that doesn’t trigger his very real need? 

The true implication hit her as sudden as a Knockback Jinx. 

He needs me.

Whatever the man was struggling with, whatever question or unfulfilled goal he had in life, led him into bed with her. Or at least, that was the impression he had alluded to.

She should be appalled at the very notion. But Hermione was not one to talk. Not when her own elixir-infused dreams featured the almost-forty-year-old, acrimonious Potions Master so deliciously. 

When had she started to look at him like this? 

As a girl, she’d been captivated by his exacting nature—often slipping into a quiet trance of academic curiosity as she observed his brewing methods. Even then, beneath the surliness and questionable grooming habits, there had been a pull. A subtle, persistent attraction.

But like a scientist tracking the nocturnal habits of a rare, irritable creature, she had chalked it up to a longing for the praise he so rarely—no, never—offered.

Hermione was working late in the university lab, wanting to be as close to Snape’s desk as possible for when she had reworked the draught for the umteenth time. Her lips were sore from sucking on them in concentration and her back ached from hours of ingredient preparation and stirring.

The night sky outside was thick with fog, obscuring any glow from the moon hoping to shed light on her dilemma. The sputter of the magical lamp flaring under her cauldron was the only noise accompanying her busy thoughts.

If she could maybe brew a version of the draught that excluded those particularly salacious solutions, then perhaps she could still walk away with a pass?

She just had no idea where to start with that. The Lucidity Draught worked to open the mind, to increase the connection between neural pathways and present new ways of thinking, of achieving one's goals, needs and ambitions.

The more she exhausted her brain thinking about it, the more clear it became that Hermione couldn’t simply change the ingredients to bar certain pathways from forming. That would be entirely counterproductive for the end goal, and could remove some very reasonable and viable methods for self-improvement of the consumer—therefore making her entire report null and void.

No. Hermione would NOT be changing the potion. But she would also NOT be accepting a fail.

She needed more time to come to a solution, or a more efficient use of the time she had. 

Hours later, the silvery surface of the cauldron pot bubbled and sparked, announcing its completion. The belltower heralded the early hour of a new dawn as Hermione brought a vial to her lips. 

All she needed was a quick nap—and a way to make Snape see .

The question gnawed at her, replaying again and again: how could she prove the brew’s validity to a man who couldn’t see past his own bitter spite to believe her?

When Severus woke the next morning, he was accompanied by a heavy, aching emptiness. The dream of the night before—so vividly coaxed into being by Miss Granger’s meddling—had not returned. That absence alone felt like a wound.

As though the mere suggestion of her body wrapped around his had hollowed out a place within him—an echoing cavern carved into his soul. One that now bore her shape. One that would never again be empty without her haunting it.

And it was all her fault.

How the hell was he meant to rid himself of her now?

He’d spent five weeks carefully dismantling the fascination she had evoked on their first day of class. She was right, Hermione Granger was no longer a little girl. She was a bright, methodical, astute young woman—with all the makings of a Master Potioneer. 

Though still as insufferable. 

And oh, how he suffered.

She had crept up on him like a demiguise in the dark, leaving ghostly footprints across his consciousness. And then a new dawn would come, and there she'd be: unavoidable, unmistakable, utterly entrenched in his thoughts.

But he had managed it. Just barely.

If he lingered by her workstation a touch longer than necessary… if his voice softened slightly when correcting her… if he found himself cataloguing the movements of her hands as she stirred, as she scribbled, as she pushed that infernal braid back off her shoulder—it was all still within the bounds of propriety. Still defensible. Still controllable.

Until she shattered it all.

Barged through his carefully built barriers like a battering ram. Threw herself into his bed— the bed of his dreams —a creature of heat and chaos, begging to be touched, taken.

And now?

Fawkes’s cage in one hand, potions case in the other, the sun only just cresting the edge of Knoxford Commons, Severus arrived to find the word Death Eater emblazoned across the bricks outside his lab—spray-painted in a sickly, venomous green.

A not-so-subtle reminder of who he truly was. Of who he would always be.

His chest constricted, and for a moment he gagged—like he was choking on a bezoar lodged in his throat—before forcing the rogue emotion back down where it belonged.
He stared at the wall for a beat too long, jaw clenched, eyes dry but burning. Then he sniffed sharply, dragging himself back to the present. The graffiti would have to go— after he got Fawkes settled in his office, and before the students started pouring in two hours from now. With a flick of will, the classroom door creaked open.

To his great surprise and immense ire—

Can I not even have his morning to myself without her interruption?

He found Miss Granger slumped over her booth, her cheek pressed to a pile of notes. Two potion vials sat beside her—one sealed, the other conspicuously empty.

Had she worked through the night? Testing her draught out here in the open?

Severus had assumed she’d gone home hours ago. And not for the first time, he found himself begrudgingly impressed by the witch’s dedication. In all his years of teaching, no student had ever come close to matching his rigor or devotion to the craft—until now.
Hermione Granger was threatening to meet his standard.

He set Fawkes’s cage gently atop the demonstration booth and placed his potions case beside it. Then, almost without thinking, he moved toward her. His steps were not deliberately quiet, nor were they overly loud—simply… unobtrusive. Careful.

She didn’t stir.

Her face, usually pinched in concentration or knitted with frustration, was softened in sleep. The faintest blush stained her cheeks, blooming down into her neck. Her lips, parted slightly, looked swollen—almost bruised with colour. Her breathing was shallow and rapid, the telltale rhythm of someone caught in the throes of a dream.

His eyes fell over her form, studying, watching, wondering what dreams held the girl captive this early morning.

There he stood like a wax-work figure, alone in the classroom but for the sleeping young woman. Was he to be her sage or her belladonna? Her protector or her poison? 

Hermione’s thighs twitched faintly beneath her navy jeans. A soft whimper left her lips and, just as he was about to scold his body for pumping blood to forbidden regions, she murmured— “Professor…”

His eyes blew wide and blood raced, unforgivingly. Intrigued, he perveyed her notes where a small pool of drool had blotched the ink.

No changes to be made to final batch—requires retest with new question.

Severus’s brows drew together, and he ran a hand over his hair, curiosity warring with his restraint. She hadn’t amended her potions project. Did that mean that her initial submission had worked as intended? That the visions he was presented with as he slumbered perpetuated the validity of her hypothesis? And that the answers to his own plight lay in the devoted devouring of his star student’s body?

Discourteous urges flickered low in his abdomen, as fear seared right through his chest to the heart of him like a firebrand. He was her disgraced professor, and she is the golden girl—war hero. While she is indisposed in such a manner, she is under his care—his ward.

Thunder rattled through his blood, and she whispered again, this time more breathless. “Please… touch me…”

His heart stuttered and he found himself transfixed. Her breathless whisper was not a plea for help. No. No, this felt like something else. 

The right thing to do, the honourable thing, would be to leave her to sleep, to act as though he’d never heard her honey-sweet cloud-soft cries—

But where had honour got him so far? 

A social pariah, ostracised, despised.

If he could perhaps learn of her dreams, of what solution her mind had presented her, maybe he could find a way for her to cease plaguing his own.

Perhaps she wasn’t dreaming of him at all. She could be fantasising about any number of her former professors. Lupin, for instance, with his soft-spoken charm—when he wasn’t busy turning a blind eye to the torment orchestrated by his sainted, dead friends. Even… Lockhart, though Severus could scarcely comprehend the appeal of a man with the intellect of a concussed flobberworm. Or maybe—just maybe—the girl before him had a penchant for those of the feminine persuasion?

Still… the way she tensed beneath his gaze, the delicate eruption of goosebumps along her arm as he spoke low and deliberate… Was it all in his imagination?

Or did she, too, find herself caught in the same treacherous fascination?

There was something undeniably wicked in the dynamic that had begun to stir between them—something sharp and simmering, like a volatile potion poised on the precipice of masterful brilliance… and catastrophic ruin.

There was nothing else for it. He needed to know. With his curiosity sated, perhaps he could regain a semblance of decorum for the day’s lectures. 

Severus scanned the room, then flicked his wand with a swift Collorportus . The classroom door was sealed before logic had a chance to protest and reached for her. Not with his hand, though the urge to trace the blush on her cheek, to tuck that unruly curl behind her ear, nearly undid him—but with his mind.

“ Legilimens ,” he encanted beneath his ragged breath and he slid, effortlessly, into the heart centre of her mind—where dreams may live.

It was like bathing in fire. Basking in the summer sun. Drenched in the golden hue of her dreams. 

Blearily, he squinted through the haze of colour. His dreams had always been muted things—shades of grey and sepia, monochromatic, like pensieve memories left to wash away in the rain. He hadn’t known it was even possible to see the world like this. How had she done it? How had a girl who had seen so much death, so much fear, so much loss , still managed to carry sunlight in her heart?

Severus had never been particularly close to anyone—save for Lily Evans and Dumbledore, both of whom had died by his own hand. Both of whom he had failed.

And yet… Granger had lost so much more. Mentors, peers, even her parents. He remembered reading about the Obliviation—executed with surgical precision, more effective than any adult might have managed. In one of those post-war biographies on The Golden Trio , it was noted with a mixture of awe and pity. She had no family left. No partner, if his sources were to be believed.

What, then, had she clung to? What stubborn ember of hope had she nursed in the dark to keep herself from flickering out?

As her mindspace materialised, illuminating soft sheets, sunrays spilling in through wide open windows, birds chirping merrily in the distance, guilt clouded his awe. 

He should not be here. This was a violation. Wrong on so many levels. He knew it—every rational fibre in his being screamed as much. But she had called out to him. And Gods help him—he was utterly unequipped to resist. 

Ill-prepared and practically unwilling in actuality. 

Every defence he’d constructed crumbled at the sound of his name on her precious lips.

Hermione Granger had been the bane of his existence for the past month—and yet, the beautifully infuriating creature had also become the reason he dragged himself to work each day, heart smouldering with reluctant anticipation.

Without her? Without her relentless, burning thirst for knowledge—an inferno he could only feed, like kerosene poured on smouldering wood—he would’ve long since abandoned his post. To hell with Shafiq’s probationary period. Severus Snape would never have endured the indignity—

But she was different. He could teach any dim-witted troll how to brew a potion. But Miss Hermione Granger? She strived to surpass him.

And that— that —was fuel enough to weather the Howlers and the besmirching smear campaigns dragging his name through the mud.

So, when the girl who appeared to have so much to prove had summoned him, there wasn’t a chance in all the nine hells that he could have denied her. Something in him wondered just how far she was willing to go—if she was anywhere near as dedicated as he was, and he suspected she came dangerously close, then he was in trouble.

Because obsession, he could manage. Competition, he could relish. But hope ? Hope was treacherous. And Hermione Granger, with her fire and her maddening brilliance, was starting to make him hope for things he had long since buried.

Severus focused his mind, searching for the elusive young woman—but every bone in his body locked, all of them, when a pair of dark nipples, centred on soft, heaving curves, shimmered into view before him.

He was positioned to her right, seated, enraptured—as Hermione Granger splayed out like Titan’s Venus of Urbino. She was glorious. 

Writhing, mewling, panting. Her fingers tucked between her slick folds of dark curls. If Severus had ever doubted his own mortality… he was reminded now. He was but a man—helpless, hopeless, utterly at her mercy.

He could almost see it—the aura that shimmered around her like heatwaves on a summer’s road. Sensual, spectral, iridescent. Ripples of pearl and smoke, curling toward him, beckoning him closer. Daring him to take hold of something he knew he could never keep.

In the blink of an eye, as if his surrender to weakness had summoned the devil’s due—a tithe worth enough to drag him to the gates of hell—he was lying atop her. 

Her thighs were wrapped around his hips, her voice was hoarse from moaning his name, desperate to be filled by him, and her eyes— Merlin , her eyes—were locked onto his like he was the only truth she’d ever believed in. Hermione's fingers clutched his biceps, her mouth parted in rapture, and her breath was releasing in short, sweet gasps that made him want to taste her lips.

His clothing dissolved into the golden glow of the dreamspace. 

“I’ve never seen you shirtless before,” she confessed, chewing her bottom lip, as her gaze tracked from his dark chest hairs all the way down to where the hair grew darker, ending in a defined line from his navel to his throbbing erection.

Her hands mapped the full length of his arms, soft caresses that shot tingles down his spine, before she clutched hold of his waist—fingers digging into his skin. Being in this space, sharing her potion-fuelled dream, Severus felt her want like it was his own. Her hunger. Her heat. Every inch of her was arching into him, greedy and needy and desperate.

His cock was poised, seated right between her plump lower lips. He could feel it hard and aching as if it were truly his own. Ready to fill her to the brim. 

He hungered to thrust forward into her. Ravenous. Starved.

Her warm eyes were wide with trepidation mingled with a heady exhilaration. 

“Gods, Sir—” she murmured, and Severus felt like he could crumble apart at her beautiful cry.

She was like none other had been this close to. Brilliant, in an infuriatingly obvious way—devoted, driven and fuck , he was just as desperate to have her.

He realised that now, and the thought terrified him.

“I want you so badly,” she mewled beneath him, scraping her nails down his back and bucking against the tip of his cock. “Please—” 

He still hadn’t spoken. Hadn’t moved. As if by staying perfectly still, he might somehow escape this moment with his soul—and his morals—intact.

His stomach muscles quivered from the strain of holding himself back, and his cock pulsed angrily, as he continued to fight against becoming the version of himself she dreamed of.

He should not be here. He was violating a boundary he knew she would place if she had the ability to consent. But Gods… the way she clung to him. The pinkness of her flesh, the softness of body arching into his, the way her mouth opened on a gasp of Severus, please, I need you —

As Hermione bucked into him, guiding her core to align perfectly , and he felt the first slick, intoxicating sensation of her walls enveloping him, Severus tore himself from the dream with such force that he staggered backwards into the waking world, colliding with a potions desk. 

His chest heaved. 

His skin was clammy. 

He sent a silent prayer to all the wizards of old that she hadn’t stirred—and mercifully, she hadn’t. Hermione simply shifted, a soft hum escaping her lips as dream-Snape presumably carried on where he had left off.

Severus exhaled, sharp and shaken. Fuck. What have I done?

His cock was still hard— painfully so—and guilt coiled around his chest like a noose, tightening with every breath. He pressed the heel of his hand to his temple, desperate to erase the image of her beneath him: flushed, desperate, needing him like he was air.

But he already knew the truth.

He would never banish her now.

Hermione startled awake to the bell tower striking eight. 

Merlin’s beard. 

She jerked upright, nearly tumbling off the stool she’d curled herself upon. The classroom was empty—sunlight dappling across the booths as dust particles danced in the air as verdant orbs.

She straightened her blouse, closing up an undone buttonhole. Hermione’s heart was still trying to break free from its rib cage. The phantom memory of glistening skin and hot breath and the low growl of her name spoken into her throat flooded her senses. 

Godric, that was… so hot . Another dream that had carried her to the edge of madness and back, all with Severus Snape’s hands on her hips and his mouth— Oh Gods, his mouth.

But this time—this time something had been different. The sensations had been almost too real. The ache between her thighs lingered like an echo, her skin still buzzing from his touch. The way he had looked at her, not only full of lust and need—but a heartbreaking longing and perilous hesitation that was so fucking sexy.

Had she brewed the potion too long? Altered the stirring cadence? Had her practice brewing the potion somehow made it stronger ? Or, had her question been answered so clearly that this truly was the only path open to her? If that were the case, then she was already a lost cause.

The real Severus Snape wouldn’t touch her the way she needed . The man could barely look at her without sneering. He was a bitter, sour ex-Death Eater who’d failed to win over the public, and frankly, didn’t seem to care about anything beyond his own self-absorbed surliness.

He’d sooner hex the sky to rain harder than lift an umbrella over the head of the bloody Golden Girl .

Hermione groaned, dragging both hands down her face as mortification settled over her like volcanic ash—stifling, weighty, and inescapable. She’d fallen asleep. In his classroom. Dreaming of riding him into oblivion and—her breathing stopped.

The concealed door to his office stood slightly ajar, soft lamplight flickering through the gap.

He’s already in his office.

The thought slammed into her like a Stinging Jinx, and her nerves fired up. He must have walked past her while she’d been moaning in her sleep. She prayed to Circe she had uttered nothing too incriminating and groaned into her hands. 

“Kill me now,” she muttered. But there was no time to die of shame. She had a new batch to deliver, and only an hour before students would begin arriving for class. Hopefully, this time, her professor could just ask a different question… yes… that is what she would request of him. Just rephrase the damn question.

That was all the defence she had. 

Grabbing the fresh vial and her parchment of notes, she squared her shoulders and made her way to his office. Her knock was firm, but her heart was in her throat.

“Enter,” came his familiar, low voice.

She stepped in, steeling herself. “Here. A new batch, as promised.”

Snape was seated on an armchair to the left, a hanging lamp beside him illuminating the leather-bound pages in his hand. Fawkes sat in a warming nest of cotton and rags, nuzzling sleepily, some feathers already breaking free of their casings and colouring him in a fluffy pale orange. 

Hermione, tearing her inquisitive eyes from the small creature, endeavoured to learn more about how the bird ended up in his possession. 

A single strand of black hair fell beside Snape’s eye. One leg was crossed widely over his other, the fabric between his thighs seeming even more prominent this morning. His sleeves were rolled to display fresh ink crawling up his right arm. Hermione wondered where he’d had his tattoos done. The inkwork was impressive—more indiscernible flora paired with Latin scripture. 

She forced her eyes away. Hermione didn’t want to give him the impression of her inappropriate curiosity. 

He didn’t look up from his book as she held the vial out. “That won’t be necessary, Miss Granger,” he said, but his tone was soft, unnervingly so. “Had you gone home at a reasonable hour—instead of dozing off amidst the hazardous remains of an untidied potions booth—you might have checked your spelled grade card this morning, and seen your mark has since been revised to an ‘O’.”

Hermione was stupefied. “But,” she stammered. “I worked all night on a new batch.”

“After some reflection, your previous attempt was deemed fit for purpose,” he said, closing the book and setting it down on the mosaic-topped side table beside a potted Mimbulus mimbletonia —its cactus-like spikes looking like the perfect weapon for her to jab him with.

The first edition cover of Pride and Prejudice did not escape her notice—and it did nothing to temper the boil of her indignation. This absurd man was sat there reading one of her favourite stories of all time, teaching at the finest mastery school in the world, and yet he continued to berate and mock her . Why!?

“Oh, so now it’s ‘ fit for purpose’ , is it?” Her voice pitched higher, tight with disbelief, as loose strands of hair rebelled from yesterday’s braid. “I had the distinct impression, Professor, that you believed I’d drugged you into some less-than-decent liminal stupor—and that my entire mastery hung in the balance lest I correct it!”

Even from where he sat, Snape managed to look down his hooked nose at her. That same nose she had just been shamelessly grinding against in her dreams. Her cheeks burned with the same fervour as her indignation.

“Miss Granger,” he said, with maddening calm, “are you now making the argument for failing your first assignment? Must you always be engaged in a duel of wits to feel alive? One wonders if you’ll ever be content without a riddle to unravel, or an adversary to best.” He smirked. 

Professor Severus Snape actually smirked at her. And it wasn’t a malevolent, irksome, vexation of a smirk—no. It was actually rather charming, devilish, enticing even.

Hermione’s lips pursed as her ego tried to shy away into the dark. There was something in his eyes. A sparkle. A flicker of dark amusement dancing like candlelight on ink. 

Her eye twitched. 

“Are you purposefully trying to antagonise me?” she snapped. “Is this what you want? To get a rise out of the ‘Goody two-shoes Granger’? Does it get you off ?” She stomped one foot forward, voice rising again, practically standing at his feet now. His eyes raked over her. Not with so much disdain as… what was it… admiration? 

No. It couldn’t be.

“I am Hermione fucking Granger. I will not be toyed with. And I will certainly not be used as some pathetic punching bag for you to unload all your misery onto.”

There was a beat of silence, heavy and crackling, during which Hermione genuinely questioned why she was so riled up. He was passing her assignment. He was acknowledging the potion had worked. He was admitting —however obliquely—that the dreams he’d had about her… were his own.

Not induced. Not manipulated. His .

The fury simmering in her belly sank lower, curling hot into her needy core.

What did this mean—for her? For him ?

Snape leaned back, one thick brow raised in mock consideration.

“No, Miss Granger,” he said hoarsely, then rose to tower over her like a monument to an old God. As she fell into his shadow, so did the remainder of her bravado. Yet rather than feeling small or pathetic, she found a strange and precious comfort in the shelter of his presence, as though some secret part of her had always longed to be cloaked in him. “What gets me off is your smart mouth and wicked brain.” He tilted his head. “Or is it your wicked mouth and smart brain? I truly can’t decide.”

Hermione’s brain short-circuited. “I—I don’t understand.”

He blinked at her. Slowly. Like a cat. A cat who had decided not to pounce, but to let the mouse come closer of her own accord. Her skin flushed from collarbone to hairline.

She hated how much she liked the way he looked at her when he was amused. She hated even more that some part of her was already cataloguing every syllable of what he’d just said, folding it up like a note to reread in the quiet of her bedroom.

What the hell was happening to her?

The tip of his tongue peeked out, tracing a slow line across his lips. Hermione watched the motion like she were wearing Omnioculars—replaying it in slow motion, committing every detail to memory. As if she could watch it again. And again. And again.

Her own teeth grazed her bottom lip and sucked.

Blood rushed downwards, drawn into a blackhole of desire.

His eyes, when she found them watching her, were molten. “I think you understand perfectly well. You. Are. Brilliant. Your potion is… for lack of a better word… wondrous . And now, we both have a problem that needs a solution. Your brew provided its consumers with… apt resolutions to their particular dilemmas.”

Hermione's throat felt dry, and she swallowed hard. Was that… a compliment ? From her sullen, impossibly aloof Professor? And why— Merlin , why—did it do unspeakable things to her?

At just the faintest whiff of his praise, her body betrayed her completely—heat blooming low in her belly, her knickers dampening with arousal like some desperate schoolgirl. 

Though if Hermione were being honest with herself, she still identified a little too closely with that part of her—the girl who needed to be seen. Maybe she always would.

She craved recognition, to be noticed , to be praised not just for her cleverness, but cherished for the qualities that made her her . Too many people had taken those for granted over the years. Even her two best friends—once her everything—were now so wrapped up in each other that she’d become little more than a passing thought. An afterglance. Convenient. Familiar. Forgotten. Almost like furniture—just expected to still be there when they finally deigned to check.

You are brilliant.

Those words had actually left his lips.

And now we both have a problem in need of a solution.

Hermione’s mind roiled like a stormfront of questions, logic battling hope in a dizzying spiral.

—apt resolutions to their particular dilemmas.

Was he saying what she thought he was saying? That they follow through on what the potion had suggested—that they act on it, physically, intimately —

“Wait,” she blurted, shaking off the rogue current of her thoughts and stepping back from his looming presence. “How could you possibly know what I was dreaming about?”

“Ahhh—” was all Snape uttered, his gaze falling to the floor like an admission of guilt, just as a flash of crimson swooped through the doorway.
The letter tore itself open mid-air—a forked tongue slithering out of the seam—and began to howl.

Chapter Text

The sound that spewed from the ripped, red maw of the Howler was nothing like the familiar hiss of maternal frustration, nor the exasperated scolding of a weary grandmother—both of which Hermione had overheard during her school years.

No, this was something else entirely. This was raw, unfiltered choler. Not a reprimand, but a malicious reckoning. A voice that didn’t want to correct, or air grievances but eviscerate.

It scraped through the air and clawed at her eardrums.

“The Ministry may have washed your sins clean,” the letter seethed in a magically distorted low tone. “Knoxford might be desperate enough to welcome filth like you… but not all of us forget. Not all of us forgive.

You think redemption is yours to claim? Think again.

We hope you don’t choke in your sleep, Snape—because we want the satisfaction of watching the light drain from those traitorous eyes ourselves. Watch your back. Every shadow you step into, every door you dare open—know this: your days are numbered. 

We see you, murderer. We know what you are. And we’re coming.”

The letter tore itself into tiny burning pieces of pure rage and they both watched on like frozen unicorn fowls in Lumoslight. 

Professor Snape did not stir. He merely blinked.

Once. 

Twice.

A third time. Throat bobbing on the final blink, he squared his shoulders and looked down at her dully. The colour that she had come to appreciate in his cheeks paled. His black eyes had a filmy sheen about them and the fine laughter lines framing them had become flat and inanimate. In this moment, he more closely resembled the Professor she had once known. 

Lamentable. Loathsome. But mostly, just lonely . 

A sad, empty husk of a person.

His shift in demeanour unsettled her—like biting into a glistening apple from a harvest she’d come to trust, only to find it mealy, flavourless… hollow at the core. And in peering into that vacant crevice—the space where his secret smile usually lingered, the one he reserved only for their sparring—Hermione caught a glimpse of something else entirely.

The shape of his heart.

Taciturn, yes. Mercurial. Guarded. But it was there—she’d seen its glimmer, not just in dreams but in the silent choreography they’d been dancing since her first day on the course. It was a fragile thing, clenched and suspicious, but not unreachable.

And now, this vile missive had driven it into hiding. It retreated somewhere deep within the cold corridors of his soul and longing flooded the emptiness his withdrawal left behind. 

Not his longing. Hers .

She wanted to be the one to draw it back out—to coax that rare, crooked smirk from its fortress. The one he only ever offered her.

What would it take to see it again? To secure its existence instead of always expecting it to skitter away.

 He had put a deal on the table, but perhaps Hermione had a clause of her own.

Cautiously, she ventured forth. “Sir… that wasn’t just some disgruntled objection,” Hermione said, her voice edged with concern. “That was a full-on death threat.”

With feigned indifference he moved to the little fledgling’s nest who was chirping urgently for a feed. “I have ears too, Miss Granger,” he said coldly, offering a wiggling mealworm to Fawkes’s open beak. 

“Do you receive many like those?” 

“A few,” he said curtly, avoiding her gaze.

“Define ‘a few,’” she pressed.

“An increasingly frequent few,” he admitted with a sigh. “But it’s nothing you need trouble yourself over. I am perfectly accustomed to the ire of the public,” he said, righting himself and striding to his desk before leaning back on it.

Hermione could not help raking her gaze up his long form—the tattoos like twisting vines climbing up his forearms, concealed under his shirt, before announcing themselves once more at his neck. The bundle of nerves in her knickers pulsed with a curious need to see more—still, she bit back. “Right, because death threats are simply part of the décor now.” 

He ignored her, eyelids lowering, smirk flashing once more.  “Now, back to my offer—”

“You don’t get to sweep a threat like that under the rug like that.” Her volume rose with incredulity. “You think I’m just going to let that go?”

It was as though she had suddenly pulled back the curtain, expecting to reveal the masterpiece beneath. Yet all it was, was sketched lines awaiting paint. Unfinished, a work-in-process, under-development.

Professor Snape may have risen above the wrath of the public, keeping his sharp chin high, but the constant barrage of hate was still draining him, still leaching the life out of him. It wasn’t right. 

He had been cleared of all charges. If Dumbledore had lived to answer for his choices, Hermione had little doubt he would have been lauded for his war-efforts, no matter how questionable his methods. Snape, though, was a walking reminder to everyone of said methods—and they wouldn’t let him live it down. 

She wished she could help him somehow. 

“I do not need your pity,” he spat, as if he had been reading her thoughts. 

“Good because you don’t have it.” 

“What I do need,” he began, punctuating his words with a flicker of heat that made her throat dry, “is an answer to my suggestion.” He stayed leaning back on his desk—unmoving and watchful. Her stomach wound itself into knots, tightening down to her core..

“I would prefer we speak plainly, given the subject matter. Please outline your proposal,” she said statically, working to reduce the flush in her cheeks as she crossed her arms.

Snape lifted a hand to scratch thoughtfully at his chin. His index finger traced a line across his lips that Hermione followed like prey assessing the moves of a predator. How magnetised she felt in that moment, as she waited for his scheme to be spoken into existence. If a surgeon opened both of their chests in that moment, would they find that their hearts were beating in tandem with one another? It certainly felt like it.

His eyes darkened. “I propose a mutually beneficial, consensual single session of physical intimacy, whereby both parties reach peak level of satisfaction at least once.” There was something about the precision of his words that riled up a devil within her. Why did removing all the flirtation and seduction actually make her feel even hotter—as though they were diving directly to the scalding core of the matter.

A throbbing sensation in her sex brought her thighs together in a tight squeeze. There was no way he didn’t notice the effect he was having on her because his delicious smirk had re-emerged. Hermione’s cheeks burned. 

“Fine, but—considering the balance of power, I would like it in writing that this will not affect my mastery in any way. There will be no retaliation should the relationship become contentious. This will be merely an exercise in proving the true validity of the Draught. One and done and then we can move on.”

“Naturally, I wouldn’t want to sully your academic experience nor invade your personal crusades more than is required for this venture.”

The devil within her grew fiercer. 

“And I would like to secure myself two orgasms,” she blurted.

“Three.”

“Th-Three?” Hermione stammered. She had barely received a single orgasm from a sexual partner, nevermind multiple. Unless she was counting the shy one that had absconded in the summer of 1998, when Viktor, in an ill-advised burst of enthusiasm, had switched up his pace just as she was about to come. Mind you, he had hammered into her with such brutal ferocity it was like he’d partially transfigured himself into a jackhammer.

Hermione had almost blacked out from the bruising pounds against her cervix. Suffice it to say, her screams were not those of pleasure. Not that Viktor had realised. And not that she had informed him either.

She had still enjoyed herself… just not to her full capacity. What was the harm in a little white lie, if it spared his ego a bruising? 

Hermione had no desire to confess that not only had it been her first time, but it had also been spectacularly awful . Nothing like the books had promised. Frankly, she had enough post-coital bruises for the both of them—any more and she’d be within her rights to file a complaint with the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes.

The books had said her first time could be painful and bloody, but she had practiced on herself plenty of times to avoid such an occurrence. 

Later that year, there had been Seamus. An encounter that, while not disastrous, had proved just as fruitless. They had fumbled together in the drunken hubbub of a Quidditch afterparty—an exchange so hurried and enthusiastic on Seamus’s part that it was over before Hermione had even caught her breath, let alone had a chance to chase an orgasm.

At least he’d had the decency to look thoroughly ashen the next morning, and, mercifully, they never spoke about it again. 

After that, she stopped bothering to put herself out there. Hermione surrendered to the realisation that sex just wasn’t the grand, earth-shattering experience the stories, poems, and songs made it out to be. If anything, it all seemed vastly oversold—more awkward than transcendent, more disappointing than divine.

“Or four, five... even six,” Snape offered in that low, devastating growl of his—the kind that sent sharp, treacherous jolts straight to her core, beckoning her closer, luring her to her own ruin. “My intention is to provide you with as many climaxes as your body can endure—without necessitating my Apparition services to escort you home.”

Hermione’s eyebrows raised as her heart whooped with a thrill-seeking anxiety. The idea of her much-older, infamous Potions Professor delivering a sexually sated and spent Hermione onto the doorstep of Grimmauld Place was almost laughable in its mortification.

A sardonic smile. “Though, perhaps it's wiser to consider such feats as stretch goals , rather than binding clauses. One would hate to… over-promise and under-deliver.”

Shockwaves triggered spikes of hormones to race across her nerves at the utter filth of his words. 

“When?” asked Hermione, her voice a mere gust of breathlessness through her lips.

“No use dragging this on,” he said, with more hunger in his tone than she was sure he intended. “Tonight. A location of your choosing.”

“Here.”

“Here?” He blinked.

“Yes.” She nodded once, sharply, lifting her chin to his desk. “Right there.” 

The fire did not leave his gaze as he turned to assess her suggestion. His desk. In the centre of his private study. Adjoining their potions lab. That evening, while the moon crested the sky. 

It was perfect.

“Very well, Miss Granger. Very well.”

The morning’s lecture passed without much note. Except, of course, for the telltale flush that refused to leave the cheeks of his star pupil. It was relentless, that heat. He felt it like a connected force direct to the ever-growing devil in his trousers.

Whatever was he going to do with her?

Oh, he had plenty of ideas. And she had all but sealed them in place with her agreement earlier that day. He would draw up her contract, swear her to secrecy and then ruin her for all other men.

So consumed was he by the plans blooming into fruition in his mind—the taste of her, the sound she’d make when he teased her just right—that he barely managed a signature sneer when Romilda Vane’s attempt at the Wolfsbane Potion overheated, releasing a hiss of steam and fusing her eyebrows into a singular, furry slug across her forehead.

Normally, he might have barked a scathing remark. 

Instead, his cock twitched as he discovered the guilty smile tugging at Miss Granger’s lips. The fantasy replayed again in his mind: her on his desk, her breath catching in her throat, her body bowing to meet his mouth as though she were made for it.

If the dream version of her was even remotely accurate, she might just be the most astonishing partner he’d ever had.

And that wasn’t a high bar.

Throughout his formative years, Severus Snape had not been anyone’s first choice. He wasn’t the kind of boy girls pined for—he was the one they used. A tool to provoke jealous boyfriends, a curiosity for one reckless night of rebellion.

Still, he’d applied himself. Read all the right books. Practised every technique he could learn, determined that, if nothing else, he’d be unforgettable.

It didn’t hurt that he was relatively well-endowed, if Quidditch locker room averages were anything to go by.

And truthfully? They never quite looked at him the same after. Something in their eyes shifted—like he’d cracked open a window in their tidy little minds and let the wild in. The filthy, the rogue, the untamed. A glimpse of the Universe beyond the familiar orbit of their shallow worlds.

Yet they always went back. Back to their boyfriends. Back to safety.

Apparently, that was all he was good for: a detour. A lesson. A cosmic footnote in their otherwise ordinary lives.

But Hermione… she had never been ordinary. And if tonight went as he imagined, maybe she’d be the one who never looked back.

That’s a very dangerous thought , Severus . It would do no good to have her occupy a permanent space in his consciousness or life. She was his brilliant swotty, self-assured know-it-all, fierce-hearted self-righteous Mastery student. 

No. He would see that her needs were met, and then they would both move on with their respective lives. However solitary they may be. 

It was a highly distracting headspace he’d found himself in—one riddled with far too many thoughts of flushed cheeks and parted lips, of whispered agreements and what he might do with her once the sun dipped below the horizon. 

So consuming, in fact, that he failed to notice the snickers shared between the two American students—Brad and Chad, he had named them. ‘Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum’ was probably more appropriate. He missed the side-eyes from his former Slytherin students. Even Hiro’s mounting disquiet went unnoticed—and she was arguably the least offensive student he’d ever had the slim pleasure of teaching. Deliberate and unobtrusive, and what she lacked in imagination, she more than compensated for with methodology.

It was only when the students began pouring out of the classroom in a rising buzz of noise akin to the mating season of cicadas, that the churn of something wrong turned his stomach. A crowd was forming just outside the door, murmurs spreading like mould in the hallway.

The blood drained from his face.

The graffiti.

“Out of my way,” he snapped, voice slicing through the din like a lash. He shoved past the dainty Creevey boy—nearly knocking over his ink-stained satchel—and emerged into the hall.

At the centre of the knot of students, who had spilled in from various classrooms along the corridor, stood Hermione, already waving her wand in flourishing arcs. The slur was halfway gone, its hateful scrawl dissolving into green smoke. But it was too late. They’d all seen it now.

DEATH EATER.

The corridor fell into an uneasy hush.

“Nothing to see here,” Hermione said with a self-importance he couldn’t help but appreciate at that moment. She had all the gravitas of the young woman who had won the war for them. “Move along.”

Some obeyed, scattering away like flies on shit. Others lingered, casting furtive glances his way. Snape didn’t speak. He couldn’t. Still, he would not be surprised to find steam exuding from his flared nostrils.

“Severus?” Dean Shaffiq had just turned the corner to witness the commotion. “Come,” he said authoritatively. “Walk with me. I think we could both use a cup of coffee... and perhaps a bit of air.” Saddiq smiled at Hermione, tipping his head in her direction. “I see you have this handled, Miss Granger. Very good.”

Hermione was giving Severus a wary look, not of pity, but of a growing determination that made him fear what was brewing behind those impossibly clever eyes of hers. Surprisingly, spite did not rear its ugly head at her concern. Oh no, he had plans for her, and whatever scheme was simmering beneath, he’d just have to fuck it right out of her later that evening.

He didn’t need anyone’s help, least of all hers. 

Like a drill sergeant, he turned on his heel and marched down the corridor,Dean Shaffiq  keeping pace by his side. 

Through a set of double doors, across the lawn, and out to the quieter edges of the grounds, the October air was crisp, and his favourite coffee bar stood on the sidelines of the green. Saddiq conjured a pair of large ceramic coffee mugs with an elegant flick of his laurel wood wand, handing them with the ease of a man who had long ago decided life was too short for bad conversation—or small doses of caffeine. He winked jovially at the server.

“So,” Saddiq said, tone light but probing, while the barista filled their mugs with steaming black coffee, “shall we talk about the elephant-shaped artwork in the hallway?”

“I forgot to dispel it,” Severus said monotonically.

A pause stretched between them, filled only with the sound of shoes over gravel and the faint rustle of trees shedding their autumn leaves.

“I’ve been distracted,” Severus admitted finally, staring out at the treeline as though it might offer some kind of reprieve. He used to do that at Hogwarts: sit in his window seat, reading and occasionally peering out through the gloom, to the Forbidden Forest. Wondering if the secret to life really was becoming comfortable with your own solitude.

“Mmm. You don’t say.” Saddiq sipped his coffee. “Wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain bushy-haired, bolshy war-hero would it?”

“Whatever would give you that impression?” 

“You forgot to erase the graffiti because your mind was elsewhere,” Saddiq continued, his smile so warm it threatened to thaw the glaciers warding Severus’s ribcage. “Perhaps on something—or someone—that reminds you of the man you could be. Not the one they fear you were.”

He didn’t answer. Saddiq Shaffiq was far too perceptive a man for Severus to risk handing over the truth so freely. It felt like, if he offered freedom to even one secret, the rest would come crashing out in a deluge—like a dam burst wide open, unleashing a flood of fears, longings, and griefs that would drown them both right there on the lawn.

“May I speak plainly?” Saddiq asked, wearing a troubled smile as he began a slow stroll along the edge of the green.

Severus fell into step beside him without question. There was something oddly calming about the gesture, almost Regency-esque in its decorum, that helped settle the nerves prickling at the back of his neck. A gentleman’s turn about the lawn, complete with veiled truths and measured words. How quaint.

He gave a dry snort, barely looking up from his mug. “I don’t know why you bother asking. When it has always been your modus operandi to speak your mind, regardless of permission. This conversation already case-in-point.”

His Dean nodded sagely, “Fair enough, my friend.” He sighed, “Look, you’ve been carrying the weight of your past alone for too long. You shut people out, punish yourself more thoroughly than any of your critics could ever manage. But you are not the same man who once bore that mark with pride.” Saddiq pointed to the faded dark mark hidden beneath inked vines of ingredients and herbs. “Is it not time to let someone else in? To show, if not a certain student of yours, then others the man you truly are?”

Severus’s eyebrows flickered upwards slightly. “I find it bizarre that you would be encouraging a student/teacher relationship. Does that not go against the University code of ethics of some-sort?”

“Psssh!” he sounded, waving a free hand to bat away Severus’s rebuttal. “We’re all adults here. So long as you don’t abuse your position of power—and I feel you have learned from the mistakes of your past in that regard…”

He glanced at Severus mischievously over the rim of his cup. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

Severus’s lips thinned. He didn’t respond.

“Then,” Saddiq smiled gently, and Severus once again had the distinct and unsettling feeling of being fully perceived by another person. It was the queasy sense of free-falling on a broomstick and not knowing if you would make the landing. “Let your penance be candor. Speak and live your truth. Not in silence. Not in solitude—I fear you’ve done far too much of that in life. Though… it does appear frequenting the Muggle city has had a good influence on you.”

He rolled his eyes as Saddiqs bloodshot eyes gleamed. “It’s time to create a better future for yourself.” 

They walked for a while longer in thoughtful quietude, birds flocking above against a clear sky, distant chatter of students milling about on their lunch break, the soft breeze tickling his neck, and the tightness in Snape’s chest began to ease.

Though he would never speak it aloud, in the calm belief of his new mentor and confidant, the gaping void Albus Dumbledore had left behind was beginning to feel a little less echoey. A little less cavernous. Slowly, like the steady rise of the sun, the space was being filled—not replaced, no one could do that—but existing as something more equal, reliable, trusting… something akin to friendship.

He didn’t deserve it. But he appreciated it all the same.

“Level Two, Department of Magical Law Enforcement,” trilled the tannoy as the metal grates of the lift groaned open. Hermione stepped out with purpose, her boots clicking sharply against the polished floor of the DMLE. 

She weaved through a cluster of Aurors arguing over wand permits and ducked a flying memo shaped like a winged boomerang as Ron called out from a cubicle.

“‘Mione!” Half a sugar doughnut stuffed in his mouth, frosting coated the corners of his lips, and a constellation of crumbs littered the front of his work uniform. “What you doing here?”

“I don’t have much time before afternoon class,” she said briskly, dodging a floating cabinet, “but I need to file a report with your office. It’s urgent.”

Harry, mid-bite of an absurdly large footlong sandwich in a neighbouring cubicle, paused and set it down on a paper plate, brushing his hands on a napkin. His expression shifted immediately from casual to attentive. That was the thing about Harry—he could switch into crisis mode faster than a portkey—yet still exuding calm. Hermione had always admired that.

Without a word, he motioned toward a free conference room. Inside, the walls were a sepia palette of moving photographs—crime scenes, suspects, victims—connected by a spider web of crimson magical threads. 

As Ron wiped his powdered fingers on his trousers—leaving behind ghostly white handprints—as Harry gestured to the chair opposite him. “Alright, what’s going on?”

Hermione launched into it without taking a seat. The vitriolic press. The graffitied ‘DEATH EATER’ on Snape’s classroom door. And the howler—its voice still echoing in the back of her skull. She paced as she spoke, gesturing and pulling the pieces together aloud.

Midway through her tirade, she clocked the boys exchanging looks. Ron’s expression was merged somewhere between befuddlement and concern, as though she had just sprouted wings and started squawking like a Hippogriff in heat, while Harry’s was unreadable. 

When she finally stopped to catch her breath, Harry leaned back in his chair, folding his arms.

“Hermione,” he said carefully—too carefully, trying not to agitate the wild beast. It made her want to scream. “Look, I’m sure Snape can handle himself. He’s a grown man. And… let’s be honest, he’s not exactly a stranger to people hating him.”

“That wasn’t just hate, Harry,” she said, stopping short and yesterday’s braid really becoming unruly now. “It was a death threat. A magical one. You of all people should take that seriously.”

“If he feels threatened, he can file a report himself,” grumbled Ron. “We can’t just launch an investigation on a bit of paint and a strongly worded letter. You know that.”

Hermione blinked at them both. “Did you even hear me?”

“We’re just saying—” Harry started, then faltered. “I dunno, Hermione. Maybe someone’s trying to scare him, yeah, but… there’s no sign of real danger. Not yet.”

“No real sign?” she barked a humourless laugh, crossing her arms and turning to face the wall to collect herself. Why was this riling her up so much? Severus Snape had been cruel not only to her but also to her friends throughout the years—he had earned the suspicion and ire of the public. But surely there was a limit? 

She had heard Harry’s testimony. Snape had been a triple agent. His true affiliations even tricked the darkest wizard of all time. The man should have walked away with an Order of Merlin at the very least. 

Instead, he was a social outcast and the constant  subject of gossip rags. 

Indignation surged within her. 

As her eyes found new focus, the faces on the crimeboard caught her attention. Cold dread crystallised her blood.

“Harry,” she whispered, pointing at the red-threaded images. “These victims—look. Bulstrode. Edgecombe. McNair. The deaths are related.”

Harry and Ron exchanged a side-eyed glance.

“Milicent Bulstrode’s parents funded the Muggle-born commission, but stayed on the sidelines. Edgecombe. She encouraged her daughter to spy on Dumbledore’s Army. And McNair, he acted as executioner without questioning due process.”

She stepped back, breath coming quicker now. “You knew…” Hermione’s heart ached. “You knew it was former sympathists being targeted. People who chose the wrong side, but were cleared by the Wizengamot.”

More silence. More surreptitious glances shared between her two best friends who chose not to invite her into their new world. “You don’t think that’s significant?”

“I didn’t say that,” Harry muttered. “But there’s no threat to the public. No one who’s... innocent has been targeted.”

The insinuation hit her like a slap, and she raised her voice. “So former affiliation makes someone disposable? Is that it?”

“We’re not saying that either!” Ron said, throwing up his hands. “It’s just—look, ‘Mione. We’ve got nothing concrete.”

“In that vein, you do realise that Percy could easily be considered a target. He only officially switched sides at the Battle. Did you even think about that?”

“He’s safe. Me and George already sent him and Penelope on a world cruise,” mumbled Ron, abashedly.

Air blew out of her nose as if she were a dragon. The audacity of Ron to protect his own family and interests but not hear her out?

“Fine.” Her voice was shrill now. “Then here.” She drew her wand to her temple and extracted a silvery strand of memory, placing it carefully in a spare vial from her satchel. “There’s your evidence. Add it to your dataset.”

She slapped it into Harry’s hand and stormed past them both. “I’ll handle this myself.”

Ron watched her, a flicker of guilt passing over his features. “Why do you even care so much?”

Hermione turned to the door, pausing only to glance back over her shoulder at the two ghostly pale men. She had never felt as distant from them than at that moment. 

Hermione wasn’t one to ask for help, and this was why. Fear that her ask would be too great, that their friendship was so fragile that asking for one thing—one small thing—would tip the balance and cause them to abandon her.

“Just promise me you’ll look into it. Please.”

She didn’t wait for their answer. If she was right, and she was right more often than not, then Severus Snape was in very real danger. And if she couldn’t count on her so-called ‘best friends’ to help, she’d find someone who would.

As Hermione swept through the Ministry’s corridors, heading for the Owlery, her mind ran through her planned missive. There were still favours she could call in—but there was one remarkably sincere and wholesome witch at The Quibbler who she knew would always hear her out.

Hermione would hurry home after class, a list of preparations repeating in her mind like malfunctioning teleprompter:

• Shower
• Shave EVERYTHING
• Moisturise 
• Drink a Contraception Potion
• Freak out
• Freak out some more
• Head back to Knoxford to get utterly railed by Severus Snape

That had been the plan.

However, having spent much of the afternoon lecture stewing in a murky vat of frustration at how utterly useless Harry and Ron had been, and at her own inability to do anything truly helpful in dealing with Professor Snape’s threat to his life, Hermione had made a complete pig’s ear of her Wolfsbane Potion.  

It wasn’t as though she hadn’t been paying attention, one had to remain incredibly focused during the initial brewing phase of the Werewolf remedy. There was a delicate art to the stirring motion, almost like not over mixing a meringue—needing to preserve the air within the mixture. 

Alas, between the emotional tumult of the day, the ravenous, anxious anticipation for the evening’s encounter, and the sheer, searing heat of Snape’s presence—hungry and heady as Fiendfyre—her concentration had splintered entirely. What remained in her cauldron was no potion at all, but a putrid, tar-like glob clinging stubbornly to the end of her ladle like it, too, had given up on life.

A disappointed cluck of the tongue hit her like the sweet sting of a whip. The fun kind that she had only ever imagined being used on her. And she stood up straight.

Hermione didn’t need to look up to know it was him.

Before she could string together an excuse for her dismal work, his mouth was a dagger at her neck, and all her tiny hairs stood on end. She was like a Cheval de frise, and he was the enemy at her gates.

“Sloppy.” Velvet murmured in her ear. “Distracted, Miss Granger?” His breath grazed the soft shell of her ear, then drifted to the delicate morsel of flesh below, just where her pulse betrayed her with a frantic thrum.

He had never been this close to her before, and certainly not with an audience. She felt both fully in her body and totally out of it at the same time, as if she’s just been transported to a universe where only she and her professor existed… except actually they were entirely exposed. Colin flicked his gaze over, looking troubled, before continuing to slice his horklumps. 

Hermione’s cheeks bloomed red. To anyone else it would probably look like he was berating her under his breath, spewing vitriol and nasty remarks. 

Instead, his voice was a purr in her ear. A tease. A taunt. 

From Snape’s unbuttoned collar rose the scent of rosemary and wild honey, with the sour, wine-dark tang of crushed blackberries. It wrapped around her like a spell. Earthy, sweet, and thoroughly intoxicating. Her clit responded in kind with a spattering of pulses, and she could feel her sex becoming slicker by his mere proximity.

“Abysmal,” he continued, darkly. Leering over the globulous contents of her pot. “I expect far better from you.”

She wanted to snap back, defend herself, her work, her pride. But another emotion crept in, uninvited. Hermione faltered and the realisation hit her like a rogue Bludger to the chest: she wanted to please him.

He was toying with her, playing her like a cat does a mouse. But instead of fear, she felt a dark thrill bubbling beneath her skin. She was the mouse… and she liked it.

Severus Snape could swat at her, bend her, unravel her entirely, and she, Circe help her, would look up at him with wide eyes and say, Oh, sir… please, may I have some more.

She didn’t know whether to be more ashamed… or more intrigued by the turn her mind had taken.

Snape straightened behind her, and Hermione could almost feel the tip of his bulge press against her backside, her walls contracted exuberantly. 

He reached forward, across her body and—for a second longer than was necessary—his hand brushed hers as he adjusted the angle of her stirring rod. Precise fingers, lithe fingers, fingers she wanted to have swirling the wetness in her knickers, gliding against her needy bundle of nerves, held the palm of her hand.

Relinquishing her from his grasp, he stepped back. Breaking the seering connection. Her palm tingled in the exact spot he had touched her. As if he’d left behind a tiny Stinging Jinx on her skin. If she looked, she wouldn’t be surprised to find glowing red finger marks emblazoned on the dermis—like a brand.

She realised she wouldn’t feel too badly being branded by him.

Hermione dared a glance up, only to find him already striding back to the front of the room, leaving her with nothing but the echo of his voice, the burn of his nearness, and the overwhelming need to get her potion, and her thoughts, back under control.

Steadying her heart, she vanished the entire contents with a quick Evanesco, then began taking stock of where she could have possibly gone so wrong, heaving out a deep sigh.

“Why is it,” A voice called out, brash tones silencing the clinks of cauldrons and the scratch of quills. Hermione’s head shot up. “That you’re always so focused on Hermione? Leave her alone. Can’t you tell you’re making her uncomfortable?”

Romilda’s slug-curtained eyes were fixed on Snape with a righteous glint. She straightened her stance, her mouth already halfway to forming a secondary accusation.

Hermione’s ladle paused mid-stir. Snape stopped dead, like someone had Petrificus’d him. Astoria’s lips pursed. Eliander crooned their head over a plume of steam, keen for the spectacle. Arima, meanwhile, looked like she wanted to escape to anywhere else in the world and kept her eyes fixed on her notes.

“I don’t need anyone to fight my battles for me, Romilda,” she snapped, rounding her desk and meeting the girl head-to-head. “I can manage that perfectly well on my own. I did, after all, help win a war and earn an Order of Merlin just last year. So forgive me if I don’t feel compelled to call upon you in my hour of need.”

Romilda’s mouth opened, then shut again. Her eyes flitted to the floor, retreating beneath the shadow of her newly-formed monobrow. Her fleeting moment of bravery crumpled like discarded parchment.

Hermione turned, braid swishing, just in time to catch the smallest twitch of Snape’s lip.

She’d gotten better at reading him—honed over the course of countless dreams where he ground against her, filled her, lavished her in obsession. In those fantasies, and in her waking hours, she’d studied him with scholarly devotion.

There were nuances to his sneers, slight variations that revealed more than he probably realised—if you knew where to look. And she had plenty of practice.

That one. Right there.

That particular curl of his lip—the one he used when he didn’t want to look impressed. A carefully constructed mask of disdain, designed to hide the glint of intrigue sparking behind his eyes. A single, deliberate twitch of the mouth that whispered, You’ve surprised me. And I hate that you have.

Class resumed and the next twenty minutes passed in a brittle hush, broken only by the bubbling of potions and the occasional snort from the Americans. When the bell tolled and the students began to pack up, Colin popped up beside Hermione. 

“Drinks tonight? I’ve got some friends who’d really love to meet you, plus there’s a jazz band playing at The Hopping Pot and I heard the Butterbeer’s half price.”

Hermione started to convey her regret at not being able to join, for what must be the fifth time this month, but then paused. 

On the flap of Romilda’s satchel, as she flung it over her back. Right there. A splotch of green paint. The exact same garish, almost neon hue used in the graffiti outside Snape’s door that morning. 

Hermione filed that away, a shard of suspicion slotted beside the others in her mental cabinet, and declined Colin’s invitation with a half-smile and a “I’m sorry Colin, I really want to fix this Wolfsbane. Next time, I promise.” He hung his head low, but gave her an understanding nod before shuffling out of class behind Romilda. 

Vane really didn’t seem the type to be graffiting slurs on University corridor walls, but then again she had just stuck up for Hermione against Snape. Maybe she was part of a bigger organisation of people against their professor?

Hermione would have to keep an eye on her.

By the time the last students had trickled out, Snape had already vanished among them, leaving Hermione alone with nothing but the ticking of her own internal countdown. Her desire was strung tight as a bowstring, a flaming arrow ready to fly—aching to surrender, to give in to the fantasy that had haunted her since the first sip from that poisoned chalice called ‘Lucidity’.

She shuddered under the sweep of a head-to-toe Scourgify—the best she could manage by way of preparation. Then, ignoring the chime of the clocktower marking each agonising minute until Snape’s return, she threw herself into busywork.

The clouds travelled lazily over the waning sun, birds falling silent to the call of the night. Just as her potion shifted into the perfect shade of violet—exactly as the textbook described—the door to the lab creaked open. Almost like he’d timed it. Almost like he knew .

Snape strode past her, his gaze fixed ahead, not so much as flickering in her direction. But she noticed the slight looseness in his jaw, the barely-there softness at the corners of his mouth.

There was amusement tucked deep in the lines by his eyes, a secret folded into his expression—and it mirrored the fizz of giddiness frothing within her. As if they were in on the same joke. As if he was the punchline, and she was entirely delighted to be the setup.

Flutters in her stomach as she packed her bag and placed it tidily beneath her booth.

Saliva pooling in her mouth, which she swallowed down, and followed after him.

Throbbing in her core as she took in a deep breath and pushed open the door.

The room was veiled in the soft ethereal glow of the moon, Fawkes was snoozing happily in the corner, and Professor Snape stood rigidly to the right. Hands behind his back. Black hole eyes ready to swallow her in their depths.

Was this all a massive error in judgement?

What the hell was she thinking?

If she did this, she could never take this back. How would she explain this?  

‘Oh well I drank a potion of my own design and it told me I needed to have sex with my ex-Death Eater professor.’ 

Yeah, she wasn’t sure that would pass sanity checks at Saint Mungo’s.

Just as Hermione was about to morph into the voice of reason, Snape offered out an arm—a scroll of parchment held in his grip. 

“I believe this will cover any of your concerns,” said Snape with a genuine smile that even reached his eyes. And oh, what a smile it was, when it wasn’t trying to be concealed behind insecurity and distrust. Hermione felt like her body was already on fire… could she really subject it to more stimulation when any minute now she would erupt into a firework of suppressed need and pent-up desire?

She took the scroll from him, careful not to touch his skin for fear she would ignite before she was ready. Before she had truly understood what she was getting herself into.

 

AGREEMENT OF MUTUAL PLEASURE

Parties Involved:
This Contract is hereby entered into willingly and without coercion by:

Professor Severus Tobias Snape , hereby known as Mr. Snape.
Potions Master, Knoxford University, residing at Spinner’s End, London

Miss Hermione Jean Granger , hereby known as Miss Granger.
Potion Masters Student, Knoxford University, residing at Grimmauld place, London

Clause I – Purpose & Scope:
This Contract binds both parties to the following terms for one (1) mutually agreed upon sexual encounter, to take place in a location selected by Miss Granger. The aim of said encounter shall be:

• Acquire at least three (3) climaxes for Miss Granger (though more are permitted and encouraged).
• To ascertain the validity of the draught known currently as the ‘Elixir of Lucidity’ as it pertains to the experience being a source of relief of each participant's personal plights.
• The experience to be free of shame, judgement, or degradation unless mutually desired.

Clause II – Consent & Communication:

• The parties consent to the use of a contraceptive potion or charm, the choice of method to be decided by Miss Granger
• Consent is to be active, enthusiastic, and ongoing.
• Use of Safe Words (selected herein as: ‘Heathcliff’ for pause, and ‘Catherine’ for immediate stop) shall be honoured without hesitation.
• Any discomfort, emotional or physical, shall be addressed without mockery or evasion.

Clause III – Confidentiality (NDA):

• No details of the encounter—explicit, implicit, whispered, or overheard—may be shared outside the bounds of this agreement by Mr. Snape
• Breach shall result in immediate curse of the tongue, which will be subject to a shrinking curse for the duration of a week and he shall submit his resignation for the post of Potions Master at Knoxford University.
• Miss Granger may speak freely to whomever she so trusts regarding said arrangement, without repercussion or retaliation.
• Pensieve copies are strictly forbidden unless reviewed and sealed by both parties.

Clause IV – Post-Coital Protection:

• Miss Granger shall suffer no academic, social, or reputational backlash as a result of the arrangement.
• Should unwanted rumours arise, a joint cover story will be enacted and reinforced with subtle Memory Charms if deemed necessary.
• Emotional fallout (residual tensions, increased desires, mutual pining) will be mitigated through mature communication, tea, and perhaps a second contract.

Clause V – Termination & Re-negotiation:

• This contract may be terminated at any moment, prior to and even during enaction by either party with no ill will.
• Should the encounter yield surprising results a follow-up agreement may be proposed and reviewed at a later date.

Signed,

 S.T. Snape

 

---

Hermione hadn’t realised how big her smile was until she stopped reading and found her cheeks were not only burning but also aching. She loosened her facial muscles and looked up to find Snape’s eyes trained on her. 

A curious glint, a nervous crook of the eyebrow.

“Very thorough,” Hermione remarked.

“May I take that as your agreement then?” he said horsley, as though he had caged all the breath in his lungs until he had his answer.

“It says nothing here about your climaxes.”

“No.”

The syllable landed like a heavy stone in her chest. 

A rush of doubt spiralled up from her gut. “I understand the necessity for this experience and the contract,” she began carefully, fumbling. Had she misread this? Misjudged the signals? “However… I would hate to force you into a situation that is not mutually desired.”

Snape’s brow creased. Confusion. Irritation. Her spiralling words tangled between them like choking Tentacular .

“Am I so undesirable,” she continued, unable to stop the flood now, “that you do not believe you could reach that level with me? That I wouldn’t be able to make you—”

In a blur of black and intention, he closed the gap between them. Not touching. Not yet. But close enough that you could feel the magic crackle between them. Close enough that, as her chest rose, her breasts would graze against his shirt. Her nipples hardened with heat.

His voice, when it came, was barely a whisper. “Far from it.” 

The words rooted in her skin.

“I fear I may have to try my hardest not to come the moment my hands touch you for the first time,” he rasped. “I will need every ounce of my control to ensure that you acquire the three orgasms you so brazenly requested.”

Hermione inhaled sharply. Her eyes snapped to his, then dropped helplessly to his mouth.

She wondered what they tasted like. What he tasted like.

With a flick of her wand, the contract hovered beside them. Another flick, and her signature unfurled in red beside his. The ink gleamed wetly for a moment, like blood or wine, and then sank into the parchment.

“It appears,” she murmured, voice shaking with something more potent than nerves, “we have a deal.”

Snape exhaled. A subtle release. But it was enough—his shoulders dropped just slightly, the tension in his spine softened like a taut bow being laid to rest. Even that tiny glimpse of vulnerability in him made her stomach somersault.

With a casual flick of his wand, the parchment contract coiled itself into a tight scroll, zipped through the air like a well-trained owl, and tucked itself neatly into the top drawer. The drawer snapped shut with a definitive click , a silver rune glowing momentarily on the lock before fading from view.

“Be a good girl and sit on the desk,” he rasped.

Hermione gulped. Her heart stuttered. Her knickers were undeniably wet.

This was happening .

She moved slowly. Teasingly. Like she wanted him to ache for it. Like she wanted to own the moment as much as he did. Past him she slid, her hips swaying just enough to catch his eye. Her lashes fluttered as she turned and lifted herself gracefully onto the desk, never once breaking their gaze.

He sauntered toward her and Hermione sucked hungrily on her bottom lip. Notching her knees open, sparks rochocheted around her body, while he nestled his frame in the gap of her legs.

As he lifted his hand to play with her braid she watched his fingers move deftly. Snape rolled the hair bobble off her wiry ends, methodically, and Hermione got a closer look at his forearm tattoos. 

Sage, for wisdom. 

White Poppy, for peace.

Sassafras, for foundations and considered choices.

Her soul ached in kinship for the man. The fresh markings curling up his arms, on to areas of his body she was yet to explore, weren’t merely aesthethic. There was a ritual about them, a runic plea. 

Hermione endeavoured to learn more about him, his tattoos, the meaning behind them and the reasoning for his newfound style, should they both survive this encounter.

With slow, deliberate fingers, he unpicked her braid, loosening the last knot like a secret. Both his hands rose, combing through her thick mane until her curls tumbled free.

She didn’t know where to focus. His ink? His muscular forearms sculpted fromyears of potion’s preparation? His dark brows, sharp nose, wicked mouth? All as delicious, all as distracting. 

Hermione could sense him holding back, almost too exacting for how wild and untamed the beast inside her was becoming. Inside she was a snarling, ferocious creature.

Then she was fumbling. Hands reaching, eager, tugging at his waistband. His hands manacled her wrists, firm but gentle and he tutted. Shame and indignation blared within her. But all he did was smile at the expression on her face.

“I’d like to keep these on… for first course.”

Hermione had to force her jaw to remain closed. 

​​“You’re surprised,” he said, his smile utterly devastating and devillish. “You thought we’d go straight to… penetration?”

“Well, I—I just assumed…”

The moon licked his face, its glow reflected in Snape’s dark eyes like tunnels to another world. A new world just for them. Slowly, deliberately, tantalisingly, he traced his palms over the tops of her thighs—creating trails of fire in their wake—and unzipped her jeans. 

Hermione lifted up slightly, nerves ablaze, a songbird flapping erratically in her ribcage, and allowed him to tug her jeans and boots off. There was something so effortless in the way he moved. It was so practiced, so intentional. 

Not at all like Viktor or Seamus.

As he peeled the left leg of her jeans down and off, a sudden brush of cool air kissed her swollen clit, making her hips jerk in response. Snape knelt—lowering himself between her legs—and the heat of his presence so close to her cunt had Hermione spiralling. She was trembling with anticipation, breath shallow, utterly undone by how completely she had surrendered control.

A flicker of panic crossed her face. This was new territory. She didn’t know the rules here. Didn’t know how to handle this much focus? Attention? Care?

As if plucking the thought from her mind—and of course he had—he pulled back just slightly. Not in rejection but with mercy. His brow creased with concern.

“Please tell me this is not your first time.” He sounded pained. Like he was praying to some divine, debauched pantheon for the answer he wanted.

Hermione stiffened, blinking up at him. “No, no. I’ve had sex before.” 

“Then why…” He frowned. “Why would your mind suggest otherwise?”

She hesitated. “I’ve never… No one has ever gone down on me before.”

The silence stretched. Snape’s jaw ticked.

“I see,” he said at last.

“I just—I don’t know if I feel comfortable with you doing that. It’s not necessary. Not what we agreed.” She bit her bottom lip. “I didn’t expect it. I didn’t have time to shave…” she blurted, before she could stop herself.

He looked at her, half amused, half bewildered.

“I find myself lucky,” he said simply. “I’m glad your clumsiness in class today stole that time from you.”

She blinked. Perplexed.

“Don’t… Don’t men want it bare?”

“ Boys might,” he said. “But I’m a man. And you are a woman. And I prefer you to look, and feel, that way. Especially with my tongue between your thighs.”

The moan she suppressed nearly choked her.

Sensing her discomfort in the vulnerability that just passed between them, he cautiously continued. “My apologies,” he said. “It was not my intention to pry.”

His hand came to her cheek—soft and grounding—then his thumb swept the curve of her skin. She felt entirely disarmed. “It can happen wandlessly, when I’m… relinquishing my control. I only caught surface thoughts, I promise. I’ll do my best to keep it in check, if it troubles you.”

Still close. Still fire between them. His other hand travelled down her neck, clavicle, curve of breast to toy with the hard nipple pebbling through her blouse. Hermione rolled her head back in pleasure, sighing as her clit throbbed.

“It’s okay,” she breathed. “It’s just very intimate.”

“Devouring your cunt or your thoughts?”

Hermione snorted, the motion tensing her stomach and pumping even more blood to her core. “Both.”

“Hermione,” he murmured. Her name coming out of his mouth felt like a thunderclap. “May I call you Hermione?”

“While you’ve got your hands on my breasts, I feel that might be a reasonable request.”

Colour dusted his cheeks—not crimson, but soft pink. He made to pull away.

“No.” She caught his hands, guiding them back. “Please keep them there.”

Their eyes locked. Her heart galloped.

“Hermione—” he began, voice like smoked whiskey. He exhaled slowly, visibly straining against something internal. “I fear I cannot uphold our deal.” 

Her heart plunged. Panic rose. “But, the potion—”

“I agree that your potion outlined a solution to each of our problems.” He took her hands in his. “But knowing now how neglected you’ve been…” His gaze held hers, and something deep and dangerous flickered there. “There is another way I’d suggest to approach this solution. A way that ensures you truly fulfill the requirements of your needs. Which I believe to be great.”

Hermione was dumbfounded. Spellshocked. 

“If you would do me the honour,” he continued, voice rough as gravel, “I would like to submit myself to servicing you. This very moment. And after this—this session, where you are worshipped and devoured as you deserve—” his thumb traced the back of her hand, “we meet again. Somewhere else. Not here, not on a desk, not as a quick remedy, to be hurried and check-boxxed.”

“But as…?” she breathed.

“Still as two people, meeting each other’s needs. But more as equals.”

Equals. That sounded good. That actually sounded perfect. Hermione nodded, staring into his eyes. Lit like gas lamps. Burning. Finally, as he began to lower himself once more, she spoke the request on her lips. 

“Severus?”

He smiled, brightly this time, the sound of his first name so strange on her lips but also so right for the moment.

“Yes, Hermione?” 

“Can I ask something of you first?”

“You may.”

“Kiss me?”

He flushed. That same soft pink but richer now. The colour of winter’s dawn. The colour of Amortentia.

He gripped the edge of the desk, rose to her height, and slowly leaned in. 

The first press of a kiss to her lips was a gentle caress, more a teaste than a promise. He practically moaned into her mouth as their lips brushed, and Hermione melted—completely undone, a puddle in his hands.

The second came with a possessive hand tangled in her hair, guiding her into him like he was claiming her. She felt it—liquid heat rushing through her, bubbling like a jet pool set to boil.

By the third, she matched him with growing boldness, one hand gripping the shaved nape of his neck to keep him close, the other drifting down to press her thumb against the thick, straining bulge beneath his jeans. His breath hitched, then he growled—a deep, primal sound—right onto the parting of her lips. Hermione's restraint snapped like a broken wand. There was no more holding back.

She slipped her tongue between his lips, coaxing his into a dance—fluid, certain, like they’d rehearsed it a hundred times in secret dreams. Which, perhaps they both had. There was no fumbling. No hesitation. Just heat and synchronicity, as if their bodies had always known what to do.

Desire surged between them, undeniable now. Too palpable, too precise to ever be mistaken again. He wanted her. Gods , maybe even more than she wanted him. The realisation bloomed hot in her belly, a fierce kind of assurance she hadn’t known she’d been starving for.

He broke off and a small high-pitched sound of disappointment left her throat, but Severus only glinted his eyes at her before beginning to kiss further down. 

Shirt unbuttoning. A kiss to the top of her breasts, still cradled by her bra. Tongue snaking down past her navel. Hermione shucked off her blouse and leaned back, chest rising rapidly, clutching the edge of the desk behind her. 

Teeth met the inside of her thigh, a sharp little nibble, then a kiss in its place. He sighed and stared up at her in wonder, “Forgive me, but if you taste anywhere near as good as you smell, I fear you are going to utterly ruin me.”

Hermione peered down at him through her lashes, a small, shy smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. In an easy motion, she slipped her knickers down and off—now entirely bare before him. Her pubic curls, neatly tamed enough to meet her own standards, made her exhale with a quiet wave of gratitude. Thank Circe.

Snape inhaled slowly, his eyes drinking her in like something sacred. He lowered himself further, breath hot against the tender skin of her inner thigh.

“May I?” he whispered.

Her brain was a scream. Yes. Yes. Yes. A symphony of yeses bouncing off the walls of her skull. But still he waited. One eyebrow arched with deliberate patience, that playful glint flickering in his eyes.

“Yes,” she breathed, her voice wrecked and trembling. “Yes. You may.”

Severus Snape dove into her like a man hunting treasure in deep waters—like a diver chasing pearls—and fuck, did he find it fast.

Hermione gasped, head falling back as his nose ground against her clit, sharp and purposeful, while his fingers gripped her arse with a possessive fervour that made her knees weak.

“Oh my Gods,” she mewled, eyes squeezing shut as she surrendered completely to his ruthless ministrations. His tongue—fuck, his beautiful fucking tongue—devoured her, lapping up the slick heat he’d conjured from her with nothing but presence and promise, all while breathing hot, silken air across her most sensitive skin.

The result was devastatingly divine.

“It’s a good thing I didn’t realise you tasted this good before now,” Snape chuckled darkly. “I’d have had to resign—leave Hogwarts entirely—just to stop myself from defiling you long before this moment.”

Hermione let out a high, breathless laugh, dizzy from pleasure, giddy from the unreality of it all. He nudged his nose against her clit again and she whimpered, grinning, “And it’s a good thing you only recently discovered a sense of personal style… otherwise I’d be known as the ‘Dumbest-Witch-of-Her-Age.’ You’d have had me distracted from day one.”

His tongue answered with a punishing lick, trailing kisses and nibbles that made her toes curl. Every motion was perfectly calibrated chaos—reckless and skilled.

“We should count ourselves lucky, then,” he murmured into her folds.

Hermione’s fingers found his black locks, grabbing hold of his man-bun like a dial to crank the intensity. She twisted, and he understood instantly.

“Or,” she gasped, “unlucky—fuck Professor—”

“Such a wicked mouth, Miss Granger,” he whispered, his voice dark silk. “You don’t know what it does to me… being the one to bring this out in you.”

He released one hand from her arse and brought it down between her thighs, two fingers sliding into her heat with soaked ease. Hermione sighed with delight, her walls clenching reflexively around him.

“So fucking beautiful,” he rasped, and it made something burst inside her—like sunlight cracking through stone. She felt like treasure, like myth, like something ancient being worshipped.

Then his fingers began to move. Curling just so, stroking perfectly. The rhythm of his mouth never faltered, his nose rubbing insistently at her clit while his tongue and fingers pushed her to the edge.

“Ugh—fuck—right there—please don’t stop—”

“You’re making me so hard, Miss Granger,” he growled against her, voice thick with hunger. “I may come just from the taste of you. Show me—show me what you sound like when you come.”

Hermione let out a strangled sound and curled her fingers tighter in his hair, pressing herself shamelessly against his mouth, grounding herself in the rhythm of their connection.

The vibrations from his moans thrummed through her body—down to her bones, her core, her soul.

And then it hit.

A rush of wet heat surged as her orgasm took her, violent and searing, like lightning licking through her veins. She cried out once, then again, again—time fracturing into moments and fragments and waves of pleasure, as his fingers continued their relentless work and his mouth refused to relent.

He devoured the sight of her like a man starved.

And in that moment, soaked is sweat, shattered from top-to-toe, shaking with the echo of her climax—Hermione felt utterly his .

As if to draw her back from the depths, Severus’s mouth crashed into hers—a kiss of possession, of lust, of raw, aching need. Hermione moaned into it, tasting herself on his lips, the eroticism of it sending a shiver through her as she locked her legs around his waist. Her fingers raked through the short, shorn hair at his nape, pulling him even closer.

His hands were everywhere. Her waist. Her breasts. Her face. He was mapping her like she was the only landscape he wanted to memorise. The chemistry between them crackled. This wasn’t just lust—it was an unstoppable force, a soul branding desire.

Then his hand found her again—cupping her heat with a familiarity that was nothing short of blasphemous. The moment his palm pressed to her clit, moving in slow, deliberate circles, Hermione felt the fire reignite inside her like dry kindling catching under a single, perfect spark.

She was already halfway there.

The flat pressure of his palm wound her tight, tighter still, spiralling her into a crescendo that sucked the breath from her lungs and sent her tumbling into another fierce and sudden orgasm Even greater than the last. She whimpered, then squealed into his mouth, her sounds swallowed by his lips. 

When she opened her eyes, dazed and panting, the smug little dimple on his cheek told her he’d felt every trembling second of it.

With his mouth still on hers and her hands dragging over the muscle of his upper back—shirt, damn shirt , still annoyingly in place—Hermione felt something shift. This wasn’t just chemistry. This was equality. She wasn’t beneath him. She was beside him. And this? This was how she wanted him: head to head. Mutual attraction. Mutual destruction.

Her hand slid between them, fingers trailing down to the zipper of his jeans. She tugged it down with deft insistence, using both her hands and feet to push the dark denim off his hips.

“Hermione—” he hissed, voice cracking as his head dropped to her shoulder in a plea.

“Don’t you dare stop me,” she growled. “I need you in my mouth. Now. Get on the floor.”

He huffed a laugh. “Bossy little madam, aren’t we?”

“Oh, you’ve got no idea.” Her eyes flashed. “I can be very… domineering when I know what I want.”

“Brat,” he muttered playfully.

“I prefer Good Girl ,” she purred, dragging her nails down his side. “Now get on the floor.”

He obeyed her command without hesitation, lowering himself onto the thick carpet. Reclining on his back, arms relaxed but muscles taut beneath the surface, he watched her like a wolf awaiting its mate’s next move. Hermione stood over him, bare except for her bra, and she couldn’t help the flicker of nerves that danced across her mind. Gods, she hoped she knew what she was doing. But his cock twitched visibly beneath his boxers at the sight of her, and confidence surged like warm honey through her veins.

“Take off your shirt,” she said, voice calm, steady—even as heat flushed across her skin.

He complied instantly, pulling it over his head and tossing it aside without breaking eye contact. The sharp ridges of his stomach flexed, and Hermione’s mouth went dry.

“What else, Miss Granger?” he asked.

Hermione dropped to her knees beside him, her pulse a gallop in her throat. She leaned forward, hands brushing over the elastic of his waistband as she met his gaze.

“Now your boxers,” she whispered, ravenously. 

He smirked, the corner of his mouth twitching with wicked amusement. “I feel I should warn you… it can be quite the shock.”

Hermione rolled her eyes, and blew out a laugh “Oh, I hope so,” she purred. 

Snape peeled his boxers down, revealing himself fully to her—and sweet Circe , he hadn’t exaggerated.

His cock sprung free, as monstrous as her need to have it pounding inside her pussy—but unfortunately she had made an agreement and her mouth would have to suffice for now.

Hermione’s breath caught in her throat. His length was thick, flushed dark with arousal, and already dripping at the tip. She stared for a beat, mesmerised by the sheer beauty of him. It was a moment she’d only imagined in her stolen dreams, but nothing had prepared her for the real thing. 

Without waiting, she swung a leg over him, straddling his face with a boldness she didn’t quite realise she possessed. Her cunt hovered over his mouth as her hands gripped the base of his cock, and Snape groaned, the sound vibrating up into her core.

“Merlin,” he rasped. “You’re divine.”

“And you’re filthy,” she breathed with a grin, before lowering her mouth over him in one long, slow glide.

His cock pulsed against her tongue, and his hips jerked up slightly beneath her, but she held firm, teasing him with a swirl, a suck, before drawing back and repeating the motion. She relished the weight of him on her tongue, the deep, low grunts he made as she took him deeper with each pass.

Then he began devouring her again—tongue fucking her in rhythmic plunges, nose grinding against her clit, hands clenching at her hips to anchor her in place as if he couldn’t bear to let her float an inch away.

Hermione whimpered around him, struggling to keep her rhythm as his tongue drove her mad. She swirled her tongue around his head, then sucked hard enough to draw a hiss from his lips. He retaliated by dragging two fingers through her folds, pushing them into her dripping heat while his mouth stayed locked on her clit.

She yelped against his cock.

Their movements became a tangled, exquisite mess of pleasure. Wet heat. Flicks and sucks and plunges. Every time she moaned around him, he groaned into her. Every time she hollowed her cheeks, his hips bucked. Every time he curled his fingers just right, she’d lose her place and ride his face harder.

It was obscene. It was perfect.

His voice was strangled, thick with lust. “You’re going to make me come, Hermione—fuck—you feel so perfect.”

She released him with a pop and gasped, “Come for me, Professor. Severus, please. Let me taste you.”

He chuckled darkly, nipped her inner thigh, then redoubled his efforts—his mouth a machine of destruction. Tongue relentless. Fingers punishing. Hermione came like a shot to the spine—head thrown back, sex grinding down onto his face, a cry clawing up her throat as she shattered.

Her vision went white.

But she didn’t let go of him.

Still trembling, still gasping, she bent over his cock again and took him. Deeper this time. Faster. With vigour.

Snape’s hands flew to her thighs, squeezing so hard she’d bruise, his breath catching ragged in his chest. “Hermione—fuck— fuck , I’m—”

He pulsed against her tongue, his arse shaking as he jutted into her, and she held him through every delicious spurt, swallowing him down, humming softly as he groaned her name like an incantation.

Seconds passed.

Minutes. 

When the heat of their sweat began to cool in the still air of his office, and the delicious stickiness between shifted into something closer to discomfort, Hermione finally rolled off him. She collapsed beside his heaving form, hair spread wild around her, chest rising and falling like she’d just sprinted through a thunderstorm.

They lay there, skin damp, lips swollen, limbs tangled. Utterly spent.

Hermione turned to him, unsure if she should place a hand on his steadily rising chest, or if the moment for their physical touch was now over  “That was—”

“Ruination.” Snape let out a wrecked, satisfied laugh. He turned to view her, eyelids heavy, and cupped her heart-shaped face in his hands before planting the sweetest and deepest of kisses on her lips. “You’ve ruined me, Miss Granger.”

She grinned, still panting. “Good. I intend to keep doing it.”

"Three. I'm losing my touch," Snape tutted to the ceiling.

"We only agreed upon three, you met expectations," Hermione sighed softly.

"Oh, but I, like you always intend to 'Exceed Expectations', or otherwise achieve the most coveted 'Outstanding'."

Hermione hummed, a tease on her lips, "Hmmm, I think... I'd rate this session as 'Acceptable'."

Severus seethed through his teeth and shook his head. "Acceptable? You little brat, I would have given you an Outstanding for that Gryffindor boldness, but now you can have a 'Troll'."

Hermione laughed, a full bodied laugh that brought a small tear to her eye, and Severus joined her with a breathy chuckle. 

"Acceptable." He clucked his tongue again and smiled. "You have no idea what's coming for you then next time, My Girl."

My.

Girl.

Those two words struck an elegant chord in her heart, while her mind reeled at his earlier words.

'Next Time'. How many times? Hermione was sure she could never live with just one more. 

For a single suspended breath, time stilled. A raw, unguarded moment passed between them. A flash of something far deeper than lust. She saw each him, felt him, beyond skin and sweat and climax. But then the world tilted back onto its axis. Cold reality crashed over her in the same breath—a jolt of “what now” rattling through her bones.

As if he had the same thought as her, they both shot upright like students caught sneaking out after curfew, scrambling for their discarded garments and Scourgifying away the evidence of their tryst. 

Hermione's heart pounded—not just from exertion, but from something murkier: the aftershock of intensity, of need, of how exposed she now felt in more ways than one.

The air was heady with the smell of sex. Her eyes met his briefly—his expression unreadable, mouth set, hair wild, and lips still a little swollen from her. He looked like a man who had just committed something irreversible. She wasn’t sure whether that thrilled or terrified her.

Then, like the chime of a bell saving them from figuring out just how to traverse into normal conversation again, came a serene, singsong voice from beyond the office door.

“Are you both quite done in there? It sounded like a rather spirited conversation.”

Hermione let out an involuntary laugh—a high, startled sound that quickly devolved into a wheeze. She pressed a hand to Severus’s shoulder, steadying him more than herself as he let out a long-suffering groan and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.

Luna Lovegood. The one person in Hermione’s friend group who wouldn’t blink twice if she’d emerged with a dragon hatchling under her arm and a declaration of matrimony to the Black Lake squid.

Hermione glanced at Snape again. Trying to work out what was going on in his mind. He was still fastening his buttons, slower now. A wall settling between them again, perhaps. 

The moment had passed. But the shift in them lingered.

What now?

She didn’t know. Not yet. But one thing she did know: it was time to bottle some fame—for her enigmatic, notorious professor who had just eaten her out like a dying man granted one final sin.

Chapter Text

My Girl?

My Girl??

MY GIRL?!

The words rocketed around the cavern inside him. They bounded and cackled and ran rampant like Peeves, hellbent on destroying whatever precariously perched thoughts Severus’s mind had organised. She could never truly be ‘his’ girl. The prospect was entirely unfathomable. 

Unacceptable.

Unreasonable.

He’d never been allowed beautiful things without bleeding for them first. Without giving his entire life force and it had still never been enough to keep their hearts beating.

No. Miss Granger would never fall prey to that fate. He wouldn’t allow it. Not this bright, brilliant, utterly belligerent brat that had worked her way into his psyche. She was too savvy, too good to be taken in by the vampire he truly was. She would not allow herself to be leached of life as so many others had succumbed to from his doing.

For one thing, she despised him, and with good reason. For most of his thirty-nine years, Severus had been deplorable at best, despicable at worst. He had let his self-loathing curdle into cruelty, allowed his loneliness to metastasise into something darker—a monstrous, untameable dementor that fed on the scorn of his peers, the slow erasure of hope, and the creeping certainty that one day, there would be no one left willing to defend even a sliver of his soul.

No matter how perfectly his cock sat in her wicked mouth, or how she practically transplanted all the blood from his heart to feed said hungry cock. Nor how the sound of her coming was more beautiful, more poetic, more devastatingly soul devouring than any piece of classical music he had ever listened to… He couldn’t keep her. 

And even if she wanted to stay, to continue whatever strange kinship had grown between them, even if she gave herself to him to worship, to praise, to appreciate, to adore. He would never, ever deserve her. There wasn’t a penance he could pay to be worthy.

“Ahem,” coughed Lovegood, in such a brilliant impression of Professor Umbridge it sucked Severus out of the oubliette he had been wallowing in.

“My deepest apologies,” he snided, blinking slowly. “I still do not quite understand what I have done to provoke a personal meeting with the new editor of The Quibbler.” Severus shot a less-than-impressed look at Hermione who sat on a pew of the potions lab—a prim leg crossed over her other, hair back styled into a tidy braid, trepidation warring with determination on her features.

“I asked for Luna to meet with us at her earliest convenience, I just didn’t expect how early that might be,” Hermione said with a trace of guilt, a flush still on her cheeks from their session. 

He could still taste her on his lips. He hoped that taste would never go away, hoped it would embed itself into his flesh forevermore, that with every sip of wine, every bite of the finest steak—there she would be. Juice of the fruit of temptation.

Now, there might be a penance for all his years of bitterness: to have tasted her once and left with the ghost of her on his tongue—only to tease and toy with for the rest of his days. But he had promised her more… and so this still wasn’t over, he was able to cling hold of her a little longer.

“And why, for Salazar’s sake, would you do such a thing?” he seethed.

“Your public image needs a rework,” Hermione shrugged, not in the non-committal way of a person holding no blame, but as if shucking off an accusation she knew perfectly well she was guilty of.

“Hermione tells me you’ve been receiving death threats?” asked Miss Lovegood with her melodiously high lilt, a notebook in her lap as she pulled a clear liquid vial from her crocheted bag. The tassels tickled the glass as Severus’s mouth turned to a deep frown. 

“And just what do you propose to do with that ,” he said, eying the potion. “Veritaserum is under strict Ministry control last time I checked.”

“I have secured a contract with the Department for the Regulation of Magical Substances on behalf of The Quibbler . It is important to our readership that all our sources are properly tested for falsity—especially in the wake of the propaganda shared during the war.”

“Too bad that the readers of The Daily Prophet and Witch Weekly do not seem to require such stringent levels of journalistic integrity,” he said sulkily.

“We believe that to be one of the reasons The Quibbler has, for the last six months, outsold both of those publications weekly.”

Now that was interesting. 

Severus narrowed his eyes. “By how much?”

Lovegood smiled at him puckishly. “Enough to have full UK market saturation, the majority of wizarding homes in Germany, France, Spain, Italy with monthly subscriptions and a newly signed contract with publishers in South America, North America and Australia—with the hope to reach Asian markets in the Millenium,” she chirped. “Though for that to be achieved we’d need to open a whole new office in Singapore, and of course the content would need to cater to the wizards and witches of the region… I’m not sure they would find the migration habits of Cornish pixies all that interesting, nor the reputational makeovers of ex-Hogwarts’ professors,” Lovegood finished thoughtfully. 

“My my, you have been busy.” He punctuated the comment with another disapproving look at Hermione, who had the audacity to look spellbound at the unexpected business acumen of the wispy blonde. 

Luna Lovegood had already been an odd student to teach. She had a great sense of natural ability, producing expertly brewed potions eighty-percent of the time, the remaining twenty-percent, utterly diabolical mixtures only suitable for the Dangerous Substance Division of the DRMS. Her methods had been unorthodox and she could rarely recount the class theory, nor recall her formula when luck would have her producing a perfect potion.

Intuitive, but prone to catastrophic errors. 

“I’ll take that praise. Thank you, Professor. I spent my final year of Hogwarts working on the global roll-out plan following our readership boom during the war. Alas, I fear it may have affected some of my grades, but you know what they say—you have to stir while the cauldron is hot.”

“Quite,” he looked suspiciously between the pair of young women in his lab. “What is it exactly that you propose?”

“The reason you feature so heavily in the media is due to the mystery that surrounds you. In the absence of truth, untruths are shared to sell papers.” 

Severus made a nose that was part growl, part hum. Lovegood pushed the vial in his direction with two slender fingers.

“I would like you to drink up, and then I can ask you some questions regarding your role in the war, the death of Dumbledore, and your intriguing resurrection after being pronounced dead by no less than five witnesses.”

He ground his teeth together, jaw tensing. 

“It’s time to put this to bed, Severus.” His name on Hermione’s lips, uttered so informally out in the open, both made him want to coil into a den of snakes and also wrap himself around her in a constricting embrace. 

It felt as if she was laying claim to a part of him in public. But that couldn’t be right. Surely she would be ashamed of their activity? 

He’d written it into the contract specifically that of course she could discuss their arrangement with anyone she so wished, but he never expected that she would want to.

He didn’t know how to feel about that.

After a pregnant pause, filled with the expectations of two very opposite, yet equally as hard-headed young women, he conceded, and lifted the vial to his lips. 

What was the worst that could happen? 

If things were to continue his way, with escalating threats and campus vandalism, Severus would likely be out of a job by the end of the first term, the wizarding world already thought the worst of him and he had no friends to speak of who could be hurt or implicated in any way—unless he counted Saddiq who would likely be glad to be rid of him by that point. 

Of course, there was still Fawkes to think of, but if he didn’t want to answer a question, he could simply employ his Occlumency to counteract potions effects. He’d tested such a strategy before.

With the potion trickling down his gullet, a freeing sense of ease curled around him, loosening his tongue from where it had lodged itself high on the roof of his mouth, his shoulders dropped an inch and the tightness in his chest relaxed. 

“Ready to begin, Professor?” asked Luna, quill poised against her notebook.

“As I’ll ever be,” he drawled. He just hoped he wouldn’t live to regret this.

“Wonderful! Now, can you please tell our readers why you killed Albus Dumbledore.”

Cutting. But, of all the questions she could ask him, this was possibly the easiest to answer.

“As I explained to the Wizengamot at my trial, Dumbledore knew he had little time left. After being cursed by the Gaunt Family Ring, nee Horcrux, he wished to control the marionette strings of his own death. He knew that Draco Malfoy had been tasked with his assassination—but did not think him capable of committing the final blow. Dumbledore sought to protect him and control who became the new owner of The Elder Wand, by appointing me, as double agent working aside the—Voldemort, with the… honour.” 

He stumbled over the appropriate moniker for his once master, while the last word sat sickly in his throat.

Lovegood studied him with the surgical nature of one analysing a mummified corpse. “What were the circumstances by which you joined the Death Eaters in the first war and how did you come to be an informant for Albus Dumbledore?”

“Again, all these details can be found in court transcripts, I fail to see how this will help reform my public image. If anything, isn’t it just digging up old ground? I prefer to leave the skeletons to rest.”

Hermione leaned in and placed a hand on the edge of his stool, not quite touching him, but close enough for him to stiffen at the odd comfort the gesture evoked. “The point is that we need to remind people of how Albus Dumbledore pulled the strings of almost every aspect of your life for the past twenty years. Tell us what you told the Wizengamot, but try to apply the feelings you had at the time, the motivations, the heart of it.” She nodded encouragingly. 

Something deeply unsettling soaked into his porous bones and he found himself, not for the first time, trusting in Hermione’s will. “You truly believe this will be useful? There is an awful lot of ground to cover.”

“I have all night, what about you Hermione?” Luna added.

“Yes, as long as it takes.”

Tension twinged within him, followed by a hollow guilt. He owed his life to Dumbledore, he would have done anything for him. Had done everything for him. And yet, there was a gnawing sense of anger in his heart for the man who left him behind to pick up the pieces of his broken life. Broken promises. Broken trusts.

He let out a breath, chewed the corner of his lip and looked down at the stone floor before speaking, the Veritaserum helping the words form more easily on his tongue. “I was in love with a girl called Lily Evans,” his gaze flicked to Hermione, but she did not seem surprised by this detail. “I had loved her since the first moment I saw her when I was ten years old. She was like summer. Golden. She lit up everything she touched. Even me, who had lived in the shadow of my father’s erratic temper and my mother’s depression for as long as I could remember.”

The soft cluck of Hermione’s tongue signalled her displeasure. Only Lily and Dumbledore had known how abusive his childhood home had been, but he didn’t wish to explore that further at this moment.

“In any case, after many years of friendship, it became quite apparent that my affections for her were not shared—at least not in the way I would have hoped,” he swallowed back the sour emotion in his throat. “What transpired after was ridicule and bullying from the man who would become her husband and his rabble. Trust that I gave as good as I got. But I was still one against four. I was a lonely child, and that loneliness only grew into a resentful young adult who craved desperately to belong to somebody.”

As he spoke he sensed Hermione’s indignation flaring on his behalf. But this was only the beginning of his story, everything else that followed was his own doing, his own cross to bear. 

“Abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and rejected by the one girl who had become my only source of light, I fell into the clutches of some of the older students. Namely Malfoy, Rosier, Mulciber, Avery, Nott and Lestrange; they called themselves the ‘Knights of Walpurgis’ and they were to be the burgeoning beginnings of what we now know as the ‘Death Eaters’. I confess, the allure of belonging to something greater than myself overtook a lot of my intellectual sensibility on the conduct of cults and the subtle art of indoctrination.” 

Luna’s quill scratched furiously against the notebook parchment, which he now noted was coloured a soft pastel purple. “Before I knew it, I was spewing the same hatred they did for muggle-borns, permanently severing my friendship with Lily, and soon after had a mark on my arm to seal my fate.”

“It was just a tattoo back then, it didn’t hold the symbolism and weight it does today. At eighteen years old, I just saw it as another way to belong… then the attacks began. What followed was two years of me wondering what, in all Hell, I had gotten myself into. Too brainwashed to leave, too astute to fully believe that what I was a part of was truly for the greater good.”

He kneaded the pads of his fingertips one by one as he recounted the facts, allowing the truth to pour out unbidden.

“Needless to say, eventually I came to my senses enough to seek out Dumbledore’s aid—his confidence, his mercy. He had always been watchful of me as a child, would visit me in the hospital wing when I came in bloodied and bruised from spats with the Gryffindor four, impart his wisdom upon me—like some divine messenger of Veritas—until I became too lost for even him to reach.”

“During the war, I passed him scraps of information at first: minor tactics, vague timelines. Then riskier intelligence—names, locations, targets. After I failed to stop the murders of my classmates, McKinnon and Meadowes, I begged him. I begged him to get me out. To end it. But he refused. He, in all his wisdom, said I’d be of far more use to the Order if it appeared I still bore loyalty to the Dark Lord.”

He could sense Hermione’s breaths were shallow and salted with contempt for her former Headmaster. Bitterness coated his own tongue, and he found more words trying to escape, too truthful, too honest, and without him employing Occlumency they still flowed freely. 

He decided he wanted to be honest, no matter how cowardly and weak it made him look. He was tired of hiding.

“It was possibly the darkest time of my life. And, as I stated previously, was not one unaccustomed to darkness. But this was a new low of the abyss. I had my ‘Last Will and Testament’ prepared, everything set in order—and on the very night I intended to end my life, I had one last drink at the Hogs Head, under a cloaked disguise. A simple drink at an old haunt—that was all it was meant to be.” 

His voice cracked and he took in a long, aching breath, the kind that lay solid as molasses in his chest, then released it. 

“Unbeknownst to me, Albus Dumbledore had selected that location—Merlin only knows why, as it's quite literally a Skrewt-hole—for an interview with the prospective Divination professor, Sybil Trelawney.” Lovegood’s gaze flicked upward at the name. “Instead, I overheard a prophecy that would alter the course of wizarding history forever.”

“Sensing my distress through the Dark Mark, offshoots of erratic emotions from my intended final day on this earth, I was forcibly summoned to Voldemort’s side. My mind was raw and open. It was before I mastered the art of Occlumency. Before I had the strength to keep him out.”

He couldn’t bring himself to look at Hermione now. Would her gaze hold the impossible forgiveness he knew he didn’t deserve—or would it reflect the very self-loathing he’d spent a lifetime trying, and failing, to bury?

“From the alcoves of my mind he plucked the freshly catalogued information he found useful, and discarded the rest—all my meetings with Dumbledore still kept hidden. There had been a prophecy. A prophecy that would mark a boy ‘born as the seventh month dies’ as his equal. He would have powers the Dark Lord knows not and would bring about his end.”

Severus finally braved a glance at Hermione, whose eyes were rheumy and glistening—her mouth set with some unknown emotion. 

“As soon as it was safe, I found Dumbledore. I told him everything—the prophecy, Voldemort’s obsession with it, how he was certain the child it spoke of was Harry Potter… Lily’s son. I begged him to do everything in his power to protect them.” The emotions tore through him as he spoke, aching like a caged bird finally freed—only to realise its wings had atrophied from years behind bars. 

“He was perhaps more cruel in that moment than I had ever seen him before—and, in truth, more than I ever saw him again. Disgusted that I hadn’t shielded my mind well enough… that I didn’t, couldn’t keep Voldemort out. But he agreed. He said they would be protected. He promised me.” A bitter laugh escaped him. He closed his eyes for a moment, as though bracing against the truth of what came next.

“And so… July 28th marked the end of summer, forevermore. Voldemort was vanquished. But so was Lily, along with my soul.” His voice frayed at the edges. Hermione wiped a stray tear falling down her freckled cheek. “I should’ve seen it then. That Dumbledore wasn’t divine, he was just a man. As fallible as I. But I was too tethered to the idea of his approval… too desperate to belong to something, anything, that I convinced myself I owed him my life.”

Lovegood shook her head slightly as she scribbled. He let her quill catch up with his confession, still adding pressure to the ends of his fingers to count away the seconds of pause. 

The interrogation interview continued in much the same fashion for the next half an hour. Lovegood asked poignant questions about Severus’s past, the kind he assumed most people had already formed their own conclusions about. Recounting his sins in grim detail, he avoided Hermione’s sympathetic gaze as if it might scorch him into oblivion. The entire ordeal felt like being slowly garrotted on a lamplit stage, each confession pulling the rope tighter, with no curtain call, no exit, and nowhere left to hide.

Still, Severus felt the looming threat of her next question before it came. They had covered all the familiar ground and now it was time for the hard hitters.

“How did you survive Nagini’s attack? Three witnesses pronounced you dead at the scene, and another two corroborated no signs of life when they relocated your body to The Great Hall. Yet, reports say you rose as if you’d only been sleeping, and then fled from the scene without even a word.” Luna crooked her neck, studying him once more in an unsettlingly morbid manner.

This was it, time to explain himself, but he also needed to mind his words. In that moment he employed every mental ward he could muster to let only the approved words fly free.

“I had been trialling a potential antidote to Nagini’s venom. I suspected I may end up in an altercation with the snake when it came to fulfilling Dumbledore’s instruction to kill her. She was the supposed last Horcrux. In order for it to take effect, I suspected that the body must remain in stasis, firstly to stop the venom spreading, secondly to prevent the victim from bleeding out. Thus it was paired with a Draught of Living Death potion. When that wore off, I was free from the venom and could tend to my wounds accordingly.” 

There was a single heartbeat of silence, then: “If this is the case, why keep it a secret?” Hermione frowned. “Why not just say this from the start? That potion, just like your animal polyjuice potion could benefit so many people.”

“I have no desire for my potions to end up at Weasley Wizard Wheezes gimmicks,” he sliced back at her. 

Hermione rolled her eyes. “Okay fine, but an antidote to a Maledictus bite—”

“It was an experimental potion that has no future practical uses and cannot be trialled.”

“But if it could save the life of one person, however far in the future that may be, surely it’s worth it.”

“Hermione,” Luna chided gently, “if I may? I have a very specific rhythm to these interviews, and you’re throwing off the harmonies.”

Admonished, Hermione sank back into her seat with her arms crossed. Severus, for his part, had no idea what melodies Lovegood believed she was composing with her bizarre line of questioning, nor what any of it had to do with harmonies—but he’d long since learned that attempting to decipher Luna Lovegood’s logic was a shortcut to madness.

She lifted her quill once more, the nib poised against the parchment. Then, without so much as glancing up, as if she were asking the most mundane question in the world, like ‘ What’s your favourite Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Bean?’ (coffee) or ‘ What was your first pet? ’ (a bloody phoenix)—she said:

“And when did you realise you were falling in love with Hermione Granger?”

Hermione choked beside him, half-gasp, half-laugh, while Severus tried—futilely—to vanish into the floorboards like he’d been cast back into the oubliette. The question had caught him bare. His guard had slipped somewhere during the sparring match with Hermione, and he hadn’t the sense to raise it again. A fatal mistake. 

The words launched from his mouth, completely without struggle, wild and free, wings spread wide and soaring. A golden phoenix crossing a clear Scottish sky.

“Approximately forty-five minutes ago.”

Hermione had to pause the scene in her mind and replay it another few times to confirm she had heard it right. Had Severus Snape just admitted to be falling in love with her?!

No. That couldn’t be possible. His mind must have misconstrued the question Luna had posed. Hermione Granger wasn’t someone he could fall for. She was his student. She has been the target of his ire frequently throughout her school years. She was nothing but an insufferable know-it-all with a hero complex. 

He had told her so on many occasions, recently even.

Still, he had had dreams about her, about her body, about the things he could do with her… and just now, in his office, he had given her three of the most unbelievable orgasms of her life. That kind of worshipping could not come without feelings.

And Hermione certainly wasn’t bereft of affection herself, however scared she was of admitting to it.

Luna’s beam was as wide as a Cheshire cat, and equally as mad, as she tucked her notebook in her bag and made to stand, satisfied with the mental Bombarda she had just cast on the two of them.  

Severus had not stirred an inch, his focus instead appeared to be on a tiny piece of lint floating through the air reflecting off the moonlight. Hermione wondered if he was trying to pretend the last few seconds had never existed, like a cat caught in an act of destruction, freezing and backing away slowly hoping no one would accuse them of the crime.

“You know, you could just ask her out,” said Luna while throwing her multi-coloured crafted bag over her back. “It wouldn’t be terrible for your reputation to be seen in public together. She is the Golden Girl after all,” she winked. 

“What so I can drag her down to hell with me?” Severus snapped, his head tracking Luna as she made to exit, practically skipping down the aisles of potion booths.

As the door shut behind Luna, Severus moved like a bat out of hell towards his study. Hermione, still reeling from everything he just shared, ran after him. He tore around the room, waving his wand and summoning his satchel, notes and Fawkes’ cage to hand, then whipped past her to stride down the potions lab. 

Mind finally caught up with her frantic heart, Hermione Apparated in an instant flurry and a pop of air to bar his exit.. 

“Aren’t we going to talk about—” 

“No,” he replied, side stepping her to grab the door handle, but Hermione blocked that movement too. 

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.” 

He took a second side step in the other direction, which Hermione matched in a comical dance of wills. Like two fencing masters finding themselves equally as determined to advance.

“No! No to it all, Miss Granger,” he scowled, attempting the door handle once more but Hermione parried by tightening her fist over cool metal. Snape’s hand clashed with hers and for a short moment it was like they were holding hands. Fireworks shot through the marrow of her radius and ulna, setting off explosions of sensation up into her humerus and across to her chest.

Snape stepped back like he’d been shocked with the same informality. The same echoes of desire.

“No. No. No. No, No,” he repeated, shaking his head at the ceiling.

Hermione studied him, his chest rising and falling in tandem with hers. Was he scared of what truths the potion had brought up? Was he as surprised by them as she was? If she was a fair witch, which she liked to think she was, she should offer him the time to sit with his revelation. He probably needed time to analyse the candor behind them. She didn’t want to force out of him what wasn’t ready to be shared. 

The thought of his heart housing deeper feelings for her, both terrified and thrilled her, and Hermione knew that if it were her who had just blurted such ideas out, he would grant her the time to come to terms with her own emotions. Hermione needed to give him that. But that didn’t mean he was totally off the hook.

“Your potion needs to be shared with the public, or at least with Saint Mungos, think of the lives that could be saved?”

“It cannot be replicated,” he snapped, just as Fawkes let out an indignant squawk at being roused. Snape set the birdcage down on a nearby booth, his movements jerky and flustered. He turned back to Hermione, who stood planted in the doorway, gripping the handle as if she could actually keep him from leaving—never mind the fact he could Apparate out at any moment.

“What do you mean? Of course it can,” she countered.

“No. It cannot,” he growled resolutely. “The original brew accounts for only half the equation. The maledictus poison, along with its toxin, thins the blood, causing the wounds to stay open and the victim to bleed out. I did not account for this property. The potion I produced did nothing to coagulate the blood cells. Nor did it replenish what had already been lost. By all logic and medical reasoning—” he paused, grimacing through the words “I should not have survived that attack. My injuries were too great.”

There was a dark and indecipherable flicker in his eyes as he looked at her. Longing? Regret? Hope? As if there were some further meaning behind his words that she couldn’t translate. 

“But you did survive,” she pressed. “Have you at least tried to recreate and test it?”

Whatever that emotion was, whatever glimpse of vulnerability had cracked through, vanished as quickly as it came. His exhale was tinged with exhaustion and exasperation.

“And how, exactly, would you suppose I try?”

The two weeks of October dragged like the first mile of the Hogwarts Express pulling out of King’s Cross—arduous, and fuelled by anticipation. Its only momentum came from evenings one-on-one in the lab with Snape, helping him—or, more appropriately, supervising him to ensure he was actually trying—to recreate the potion that had saved his life, and the echoing pulse of what they’d shared still thrumming beneath her skin like the engine of a steam train. 

Choo-fucking-choo. 

He was humouring her. Hermione could see that. Severus Snape was more than capable of brewing the potion on his own, but if him allowing her to help meant they could spend more time together while he sorted through his feelings, and she figured out her own, then Hermione was more than happy to be humoured.

They hadn’t talked about their last ‘meeting’, nor about the way his feelings for her had bled through in glances, in touches, in things unsaid. But Hermione suspected his hesitation had less to do with doubt, and more to do with the looming storm cloud of his upcoming tell-all interview, set to be published that Monday, and his desire to protect her from the inevitable fallout.

She could grant him a week or so of reprieve, and… when she got desperate for his touch, his cock, his mouth, Hermione had a few Lucidity Draughts on hand to meet him in dreamland. Now she’d had a glimpse of the real thing, her dreams were even more visceral.

The taste of him, the length of him, the feel of his taught stomach muscles as he rolled into her. Hermione was lost in him. 

It was a bit of a problem. But, as far as problems went, obsessively fantasising about your brooding, sharp-tongued Potions professor—who, however inconveniently to him, might just want you back—wasn’t exactly the worst affliction a girl could suffer.

Apparently, Luna had bumped an article on the magical properties of garden gnomes to fit it into the issue, which she’d explained with her usual offhand, otherworldly calm. Hermione hadn’t yet told Snape what she knew: that pardoned Death Eaters and known associates of Voldemort were being quietly targeted and that danger was circling. For one thing, she hoped the article might sway public opinion, maybe even loosen the grip of the “ex-Death Eater” label. But more than that… she wasn’t technically supposed to know about the classified DMLE operation. And she certainly didn’t want to risk Harry or Ron getting into trouble.

Still, after hearing Snape recount his life—how starved of love it had been and how isolated—she couldn’t help but wonder what her own path might’ve looked like without Harry and Ron. Without the troll in the girls’ bathroom in first year. Would she have wound up struggling just as much with belonging?

She’d never fully connected with the other Gryffindor girls. They’d wanted to talk about boys and drama while she buried herself in books. And attempts to make friends outside her house had mostly earned her suspicion… or fascination with her muggle upbringing. Which was just as lonely.

Maybe she would’ve still become close with Ginny? Though truthfully, they shared so few interests. Ginny was a sports-girl through and through, and much preferred practical studies to theory.

That train of thought was enough to send her gently spiralling for the entire fortnight leading up to the next issue of The Quibbler . Which is why Hermione decided—quite rationally, she thought—that she would simply not let Severus have any spare time in which to feel threatened. If she could fill his hours with joint activities, research, projects… perhaps even another potion or two… he’d be too busy to be in danger. Right?

Weekends were proving… problematic. By midday on the first Saturday without her regular fix of his exacting stare, that delicious sneer, and the gravelled heat of his laugh, Hermione found herself combing through her memory for any mention of his address. Spinner’s End. It had been listed on their contract, she was sure of it.

So, entirely by coincidence (obviously), she decided that particular district would be the perfect place to spend the afternoon reading. 

Just her, a book and a rickety, half rotten bench in a drab and dark street in Cokeworth. 

Not totally conspicuous. To keep things subtle, she’d thoughtfully come prepared with a vial of Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes Invisibility Drops. Hermione dosed herself every hour on the hour until she was thoroughly satisfied that he was, in fact, staying home for the night.

No danger. No suspicious visitors. No reason to panic.

And for the record, she wasn’t a stalker. She just needed to employ stalker-adjacent tactics in order to ensure his continued survival. All perfectly rational behaviour. Totally fine. Absolutely normal.

That afternoon, Snape had stepped out onto the grimy street and Disapparated before Hermione even had the chance to track the magical signature. She sat dumbfounded, book still spread in her lap, then trudged home muttering about her abysmal sleuthing skills and disgraceful reaction time. But the following weekend? She would not be so lax.

On the second Sunday of October, Hermione rose early and crept down the groaning staircase of Grimmauld Place, wincing at every traitorous creak beneath her toes. She’d long since perfected the art of tiptoeing like a seasoned cat burglar, all in the desperate hope of avoiding the wrath of Walburga Black’s portrait. There were only so many times one could be shrieked at for “defiling the ancestral home” before seriously considering storming off to Diagon Alley and demanding a lease on a single-bed flat with central heating, one fewer bigoted house-elf, and precisely zero blood-purist wall hangings.

To be fair, Kreacher had grown significantly less insufferable since the old days of the Order. The boys had somehow given the grouchy occupant a renewed sense of purpose in serving at least one pure-blood wizard, “even if he was a Weasley,” as Kreacher liked to mutter. But he mostly kept to himself now, as did she. In fact, lately, Hermione had been spending most of her free time on Knoxford grounds or trailing Snape, and thus was rarely home.

A buzzing noise floated from the living room, followed by a low static mumble and Hermione went to investigate. Yet as she curled around the doorframe she actually needed to take a step back, blinking at the incongruous sight. A great big television had been set in the corner of the room by the bay window, Tom Cruise in his aviator glasses taking up the whole of the screen.

“Oh Hey Mi,” Harry said groggily, his arm over Ron’s shoulder. “Look, new TV!”

“I see that,” she said slowly, inching further into the room. “It’s very early, have you been up all night?”

Ron nodded, humming an affirmation as he peeked his eyes open. “I’ve never seen muggle television before, and Harry didn’t get to watch much with the Dursleys, so we started a movie marathon last night.” He sat up straighter on the couch and leaned forward grab a handful of popcorn from a glass bowl on the coffee table, stuffing t into his mouth as he continued, “We did knock on your bedroom door, but whatever dreams you were having had you fully knocked out,” he mumbled between chews. 

“Where are you off to?” Harry asked, one brow raised, clocking her long sleeve turtleneck, potions satchel and cargo pants with light suspicion.

“Ummm, just some project for Snape…”

Ron eyed her warily. “Spending an awful lot of time with him. Hope he’s not creating extra work for you.” 

“Want to join us instead?” asked Harry, making room beside him on the couch, “We’re watching Titanic next. I picked up a stack of VHS tapes from Blockbuster. Don’t have to give them back till Tuesday.”

A tight ball of longing clogged up her lungs, like overly expanded cotton spheres, laden with missed hang-outs, inside jokes and lost connections. 

“Ahh, sorry can’t,” her voice trailed off. 

Both boys visibly deflated, Ron’s shoulders sagged as Harry made space for him again in the crook of his arm. 

“You work too hard, ‘Mione. Sack Snape off,” Ron said with sincerity.  “It’s the weekend. We hardly ever see you these days. When’s the last time you joined us for a drink at The Leaky?”

He was right, whatever distance Hermione had felt at the start of her summer living with them, she had increased tenfold since starting at Knoxford.

“How about tonight? I could try to get back early—” neither of them stirred. Hermione had broken one too many dates with them of late. “—with takeaway?”

At this, Ron perked up. “Chinese?” 

Hermione smiled. “From Chin Chin?”

“Nah, their prawn crackers are always stale,” Ron grimaced.

“The Fortune Cookie, that’s our favourite place now,” offered Harry, “just off Main Street.” 

“Okay, sure. It’s a date!” Hermione asserted and Harry gave her one of his award winning smiles. The kind that had been so hard-won at school while he had a target on his back, and thus she cherished all the same. Her gaze flicked down to the stack of movies on offer.

Harry followed her line of thought. “We saved The Truman Show for you. Sounded like your kind of thing.”

“Thanks Harry.” 

Just as she was about to leave the pair to whatever fate became of Jack and Rose, something clanged in her memory. “Oh, did anything show up on Romilda?”

“Nope.” Ron shook his head. “As clean as a whistle, and she was spotted swimming at the University gym the morning of the graffiti incident. Then she met up with some friends for a morning coffee.”

Hermione’s brow tensed as she chewed the corner of her lip, offering a quiet nod of thanks—grateful, at least, that they were looking into it. But as she stepped away, a fresh swarm of questions clattered through her mind, none with answers she liked. She could only hope Snape’s biopic might draw enough public sympathy to keep the worst of the heat off him, maybe even make the murderer think twice about marking him for death. At least until the DMLE caught up to them.

Back on the dingy streets of Snape’s neighbourhood, Merlin knows why he still lived there, Hermione chose the cleanest stretch of curb she could find directly opposite his front door. She performed a small Scourgify on the broken paving stones. and sat. If he went anywhere, she’d be ready to follow this time, wand already nestled discreetly in her sleeve. 

She was just about to unstopper her Invisibility Drops, when—

“Miss Granger.”

Hermione leapt so violently, she was fairly certain her soul remained seated on the bench for a full second before scrambling to catch up. As she whirled around, her boot slipped in the slick edge of the pavement, and before she could even process the fact that she was now face-to-face with Snape, gravity claimed her.

Her world crashed down, quite literally, as her backside landed in a shallow, squelching puddle.

“Oooof!”

Shame, embarrassment and self-admonition struck her from within. All she saw, as she peered up from the mucky cobbles, was the half scowl, half smirk of Severus Snape. His nostrils were not flared, which was honestly a blessing considering their grandeur, and the small lines framing his eyes were crinkling with thinly veiled amusement. 

“I do not know whether to be flattered by the level of attention you’ve bestowed upon me of late, or concerned. Have I wandlessly made you a thrall to my needs by the will of my tongue alone?”

“I—” Hermione stammered, glancing around at the undignified mess she’d gotten herself into, her trousers soaked through from the sodden ground.

Taking pity on her, Snape extended a hand.

She placed her fingers gently into his and he lifted her effortlessly to her feet. Then, with a kind of Austenesque chivalry Hermione had only ever read about but never experienced, he cast a drying charm over her, shrugged off his black leather jacket to reveal a short-sleeved V-neck T-shirt that left her throat Imperviously dry, and draped it around her shoulders.

As if that weren’t enough, he slung her satchel over his own shoulder and wet his lips, casting her a sidelong glance, one brow arched with amused exasperation.

“That was a rhetorical question, Miss Granger,” he said, the cold peaks of his voice thawing like melting ice caps. “I was planning a morning walk. You’re welcome to join me… unless you’d prefer to spend the day loitering on my curb?”

They walked together, side by side, crossing through an iron gate at the end of the row of terraced houses. Severus strolled languidly, casting small glances her way as Hermione fumbled around her mind for a way to excuse her behaviour. She had never planned on actually getting caught, and would have taken the Invisibility Drops at home had it not been for her distraction with the boys, and the friend-guilt that had subsequently swamped her brain.

The grey clouds performed a monodrama across the sky, veiling the stage so the sun never stood a chance of stealing the spotlight. Yet rather than feeling oppressive, the overcast hush wrapped around Hermione like a well-worn blanket. Comforting and cocoon-like. Or perhaps that sense of safety came from the man beside her and his jacket draped over her shoulders.

It smelled of him, sharp rosemary and wild berries just on the cusp of ripening. The fabric was weighty and grounding, as though it alone could tether her to the moment—to the quiet, sacred stillness of walking beside him, tucked half into his world.

Evergreens stood tall and resolute as they crunched along a winding path through a park. Children squealed nearby on squeaky climbing frames and see-saws and the melody of the Sunday ice cream van chugged along an adjoining street. 

“—So—” “—I must apologise—” They both began after a stretch of silence. Snape laughed through his nose, while Hermione focussed on dimming the glow of her cheeks. 

He extended his hand with an elegant wave, palm up, inviting her explanation.

“I appreciate how bizarre my behaviour must seem today,” Hermione began tentatively.

“Today?” he echoed, with a knowing tilt of his head and a ghost of a dimple twitching at the corner of his mouth. “Don’t insult my intelligence by pretending you haven’t been loitering on my street every weekend for the past fortnight.” He paused, as if relishing in her unveiling. “Did I not say that the Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes products were gimmicks. Even a modified pair of Omnioculars can see right through such rudimentary magic.” 

Hermione’s eyes dropped instantly to her shoelaces, which had apparently become the most enthralling objects in the entire universe. Anywhere but him. Anywhere but those entrancing, all-seeing eyes.

Caught, she nodded and swallowed her pride like a bezoar curing her poisoned throat. 

He stalled as they approached another gate, holding it open for her. “Do you think I’m incapable of protecting myself?” he asked with low curiosity.

“No, I just—” she began, stepping past him toward the gate, but realised too late how little space he’d actually given her.

They were chest to chest, breath to breath. She looked up at him through lowered lashes, only to forget what she’d meant to say as she brushed against him. Her thigh met the unmistakable press of him, a hardened ridge at the apex of his core, and his gaze refined to obsidian.

She froze. So did he. Neither moved. And Circe help her, she could swear he hardened further against her. They stood in a quiet, trembling stalemate.

“You think I survived as Voldemort’s right hand,” he said darkly, “as the man who walked the wand’s tip of treason for nearly two decades… by not keeping my guard up at all times?”

Her mouth parted, but no sound came. “Is there something you wish to confess, Miss Granger? Some hidden motive behind your newfound hobby of shadowing me?”

He leaned in slightly, and she was a slave to the curve of his lips. “An insatiable appetite, perhaps?” His eyes narrowed. “A craving for… further pleasures of the flesh for which you are still owed?”

Her breath shuddered, and that, it seemed, was all the encouragement he needed. “Or,” he added, coolly now, “might it have more to do with the string of murders currently occupying the DMLE’s attention?” He studied her with a precision that bordered on invasive, and her skin prickled. “You wouldn’t happen to know something about that… would you?”

Hermione’s blood was lava, boiling her insides and her secrets along with them, vapourising and evanescing into the very little air between them. Her attention flicked agan to his mouth, and she desperately wanted to kiss that smug, sagacious expression from his lips. 

“How long have you known?” she said instead. 

Severus straightened, affording her enough room to scoot past him without further pressure against his caged shaft. She took in a long needed breath of the London city street air.

“I had my suspicions since McNair, which were confirmed with Edgecombe’s untimely passing,” he replied, closing the gate behind him. “All mundane deaths, non-magical… highly unorthodox.” He held out his right arm, and Hermione tracked how the tattoos perfectly coiled around his muscles, as she assessed the gesture with scrutiny. Snape blinked slowly at her and smiled, “Take my arm, Miss Granger.”

Hermione looked at his offering, and without letting her trepidation outweigh the thrill of him, she looped her arm under his like it was the most natural thing to do in the world.

“Good Girl,” he teased, and flames erupted down her body.

Hermione Granger and Severus Snape, walked arm-in-arm, along the muggle streets of London. No one batted an eye. No one hissed or hooted or scowled. They were practically invisible to the bustling city folks. Just a braided brunette in a leather jacket, and a slender, tattooed bloke out for a stroll on a Sunday morning.

“I hope the article tomorrow will reduce the chances of you making their list, or at least provide a layer of protection while Harry and Ron work on finding who is responsible.”

Severus stalled momentarily, before continuing to circle around the edge of the park and back to Spinner’s End. “Wonderful. Potter and Weasley to the rescue.”

Hermione frowned. “Not really. They and the Ministry appear to be scratching their heads at the moment. They don’t seem to think you’re in as much danger as you are in.”

“Perhaps it is not in the Ministry’s interests to protect a disgraced ex-Death Eater.”

“Well, it is in my interest,” she said, her tone leaving little room for argument. 

He smiled at that and they continued in thoughtful silence until they returned back to the grey street his home occupied. As they reached his doorstep, Hermione found she did not want to let go of his arm. In fact, if she tried she felt that it would be impossible, as though the heat between them had fused them together into a single fortified unit. 

“Would you like to come in?”

She looked up at him, her brows knitting in faint disbelief. “Into your home ?”

A single brow lifted. “No. In my shirt.” His mouth twisted with dry amusement. “Of course, my home.”

A pulse of laughter threatened at her lips, but it didn’t quite make it out—caught somewhere between the suggestion and what it might mean . Her arm fell loose from his, but she held onto a piece of him, her fingers hooking in the crook of his elbow. She traced the lines of his tattoos as she coyly purred back. “You don’t think that’s… crossing a boundary?”

He stepped closer. The air between them crackled as if filled with a warring magic.

“I fear we’ve already crossed too many to count,” he said, gaze unwavering, “This would be one added to a very long list of improper meetings between us.” His tone wasn’t flippant, it was bruisingly honest.

Hermione’s throat tightened, but she nodded once. “I suppose you’re right.”

The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. It was loaded . Brimming with possibilities: the long looks, the small touches, the ache that had been growing since he’d first promised her more.

He shifted onto his other foot, the short sleeves of his shirt clinging to his biceps. And then his eyes, black and burning, dragged slowly down the length of her wrapped in his own jacket.

“Plus,” he said, voice dipping so low it vibrated in her core and slickened her panties, “and forgive me for my forwardness—”

Hermione’s breath rattled in her lungs as her cunt squeezed around nothing.

“—but seeing you wrapped in my jacket, after weeks of you tailing me like a preternaturally attractive poltergeist with control issues…” His lip quirked, just slightly. “I find myself gripped by the rather uncivilised desire to tear it off you.”

Desire was a devastating tsunami within her. Fuck , she wanted him. Wanted him with every fibre of her being. 

“To spread you out across my sofa cushions,” he went on, the words almost too cleanly spoken to match their filth, “and make love to you. Repeatedly. Until you’re screaming out every last anxious thought you’ve tried to drown in self-righteous tenacity.”

Her thighs pressed together.

He was looking at her like she was both a mystery and the answer to every one of his questions. And he was hers. The missing piece to her loneliness. He was her salvation. She couldn’t think. Not clearly. Her hands had gone cold from the autumnal chill but her blood was molten.

No witty retort arrived, no clever deflection formed. And for once in her life, Hermione Granger didn’t want to be clever. She just wanted him .

Chapter Text

This was perhaps the greatest idea Severus Snape had had all week.

The little witch had been plaguing his every waking thought, and the majority of his resting ones, ever since he’d had his first taste of her. And if he was honest with himself, before then too. Even in the silence of his private quarters, the echo of her laugh, the flicker of her sharp tongue, and the memory of her pliant, gasping body haunted the space between his breaths.

Yet Miss Granger had motives of her own for remaining aloof, and he was glad he’d finally had the opportunity to catch her in the act—staking out his home like some modern-day Miss Marple.

She walked slowly down the dimly lit hallway. The noise of her boots was softened by a long burgundy runner that stretched the full length of the corridor, guiding her past the lounge and study until it met the soft glow of light spilling from the kitchen. Light that kissed her feet and made him want to drop to his knees. 

His home was silent save for her and the grandfather cock, and that silence brought ghosts. This had been his mother’s refuge, the house she had claimed as her own after fleeing the torment of Tobias Snape. Both her sanctuary and tomb. He could still hear the soft cries behind her bedroom door, the musical laughter in the kitchen, baking up a storm of muffins. Eileen Prince had tried to carve a quiet life from tragedy, and he had not been enough to save her.

So he protected the house instead. He preserved its memory.

Though now, as the object of his affection hovered in his home like a lost seraph, eyeing the various pieces of artwork, the meticulously tidy side tables and running her hand along the dust-free wainscoting, Severus couldn’t deny his trepidation. 

Perhaps this was actually his most terrible idea. Who was he kidding? Of course it was a Gods-awful idea inviting her into his home. Hermione bit her lip in thought, and his cock jolted with such violent interest he nearly groaned aloud.

“Here, may I?” he asked, stepping behind her. His hands found her shoulders, thumbs kneading gently, and she eased beneath his touch, her body relaxing into him as though her bones had been searching for his warmth. Merlin , she was so responsive . Her soul trembled under his hands and, Gods help him, he was starving for her.

He slipped the coat from her shoulders and hooked it on the rack with care.

As they moved into the lounge, verbal silence was replaced by internal chaos . He could practically hear her thoughts whirring, sparking against each other like flint. If only he could climb inside her mind, if only he dared. But no, that path was closed. 

She had a right to express herself in her own time. He had already crossed the line of her dreams—though, that transgression he couldn’t seem to make himself regret. Not when it had brought him her.

Hermione Granger, ‘Brightest-Witch-of-her-Age’, pursuing him, caring about him, wanting him. Still, he could scarcely believe it. And yet, here she was. Perusing the bookshelves of his living room as if they held all his secrets. Secrets she seemed desperate to uncover. 

He wondered, idly, if there could be a way of extending the contract. Would she be amenable to an additional clause? More exploration of the bounds of their connection? Or would he truly satisfy her curiosity and need with a single session?

He would need to leave her wanting more. Craving more. As she did to him after every class. 

Once could never be enough. 

She was strolling along the well-organised bookshelves that dominated two walls of his room, framing a grated fireplace. “Fawkes is looking so fluffy,” Hermione said sweetly, looking over to the bird perched in the corner, before finding Severus watching her from the doorway. 

“His regeneration is progressing well,” he replied, pushing off the doorframe and approaching her with slow, predatory grace.

“I hadn’t expected you to be such a collector of Muggle works,” she said, lifting a first edition Thomas Hardy from the shelf. She flipped through it as if it were a familiar friend. Severus wet his lips, drinking in her form like a glass of mulled wine—spiced and warming.

She read from an open page. “It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in.”  

A ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’ quote, if he wasn’t mistaken.

Severus ghosted behind her, embracing her in his shadow. Speaking low, he recited one of the quotes that had hit him most poignantly upon his last read. “You overrate my capacity of love. I don't possess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.”

From behind he could sense the twitch of her mouth, the half disagreeing, half amused smile. “Sometimes,” Hermione started smartly, then her own voice curled into a soft, small thing. “I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.”

Severus raised his palms to meet hers which were holding the book open. He whispered in the shell of her ear, “I know women are taught by other women that they must never admit the full truth to a man. But the highest form of affection is based on full sincerity on both sides.” 

Hermione huffed a shaky laugh. “Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…” she teased, but he watched her body betray her as his very breath set goosebumps on to erupt down her forearms. 

The press of his erection, constrained beneath his jeans, felt sinful. 

“...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes,” he hushed into her neck. Severus' lips kissed lightly at the supple flesh where her shoulder met her throat, and she tilted her head, with the release of a laden breath—a low moan escaping her as she felt his tongue graze her skin.

He held her waist and met her, head on. Shadowing over her like a moon, blocking the sun and blanketing her in his cloak of darkness, and instead of feeling unease, she revelled in the refuge. Hermione whimpered as he kissed the hinge of her jaw. “I—” her nose scrunched . “I… feel like I shouldn’t want this as much as I do. You hold all the power to utterly destroy me and it terrifies and excites me in a way I’m not used to.”

“You think I hold the power?” he whispered. “Miss Granger, Hermione, it is I who is powerless to you. In a single word you could have me on my knees. I am merely holding up the pretence of control at this point, to satiate the hunger you have for submission—but make no mistake. I am yours to ruin.”

She whimpered as he kissed the corner of her mouth. 

“You are mine to ruin?” she mulled over the confession breathlessly.

“Yours,” he repeated reverently, pulling her onto the couch. Straddling him, her hair loosening from its braided constraints, she captured his lips with hers. Severus’s mind went dizzy as all blood travelled to his groin with a speed and ferocity he should feel shameful of.

Somehow, being with her here—his arms cradling her back, her thighs wrapped around him—he felt a safety and surety in his adoration that he had thus far never experienced. 

“Say you want this as much as I. Say you’re mine.”

Her voice cracked. “I’m yours.”

Their kiss deepened and she clutched at his shirt, pulled him down with her. The room became heat and breath and need, and he was just about to lift her—relieve her of her vestiges, lay her down beneath him, into a moment they’d both ached for—

CRASH.

THUD.

POUNDING BOOTS ON CRACKED STONES.

The front window shattered with a violent spray, glass raining onto the carpet as a brick thudded against the floor.

Hermione tumbled off him, lifted her wand with an immediacy of someone still fresh from war. He moved as quickly, wand raised, body shielding hers. 

On the brick, a paper was crudely wrapped around the middle.

“Quit your role and disappear—or you’ll be next.”

His blood iced.

“They’re after you now,” Hermione whispered.

Having urgently checked outside and finding that the assailant had already made their great escape, ensuring none of the neighbours had heard the din over his anti-muggle wards, he wandlessly cast a Reparo of his front window, the glass rising, re-forming and de-shattering in a matter of seconds, then rejoined Hermione in the lounge.

“Can I use this?” she asked, already crouched in the centre of the room on his black woven rug, studying the object that had just been hurled into his home.

Severus raised an eyebrow. “The brick?” She looked up at him, determinedly. “For what exactly?”

“For evidence,” she replied primly, with a single shoulder shrug, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.

He folded his arms, “Muggle methods of crime require muggle methods of inquiry?”

A wicked smile. “Something like that.”

He didn’t press further. 

After a good few minutes watching her think and study the object, he accepted his fate and fetched a pot of coffee, setting a mug beside her with a sidelong glance. 

There was something deeply satisfying in watching her work—cross-legged on the floor, brow furrowed, hair haphazardly braided back, notebook already open and pen at the ready.  

“You know, most people at least secure the perimeter when someone hurls masonry through their window. You get to work studying. Some may call that ‘Insufferable-know-it-all’ behaviour.”

Her face scrunched, the freckles moving like twinkling stars on her nose and she gave a distracted smile, already levitating the brick to eye level, examining the jagged edges and embedded grit with forensic focus. 

“I wouldn’t be able to get prints, not unless they were perfect. But if they left behind a hair… or even skin cells…”

She trailed off, eyes gleaming, and Severus felt the tickle of awe in his chest.

“Far be it for you to leave it to the experts at the ministry—” he drawled. 

“Oh, those same experts you spoke so fondly of earlier?” She side-eyed him and he exhaled a short ‘Hmph’.

She traced her wand carefully over the brick, spelling away the superficial debris, murmuring something about ‘getting a clean sample’. Severus sat in his arm chair with a book at first, doing anything but reading the text, and doing very little but admiring her diligent spellwork. 

Severus watched her work as the hours unfolded around them. After the flush of their flirtation had been conquered by her fluster over the self-appointed project, she cast—what appeared to his eyes as—a modified Revelio charm. A slow, sweeping motion of her wand that glowed green only once, then flickered and died.

“No, no that's not at all right,” she blustered, putting her wand between her teeth, the thick vine-wood wand nestled between plump lips. Severus’s pulse climbed a fraction, and he stood, clearing his throat and ordering his blood to continue moving around his body and not lay idle in inopportune places.

Fawkes had hopped down from his top perch by this point, his fresh talons wrapped on the edge of his bronze tray in keen interest, small chirps of intrigue tuning the room with mystical musicality. Severus gave the bird a soft pet before the grandfather clock made declaration of the afternoon.

Deciding that, for such hyperfocus, the little witch would need sustenance, he left momentarily for the kitchen, returning with toast and eggs—un-touched—then with grilled brie and chutney. Not even the temptation of small chocolates roused her from her hyperfocus, though once or twice she did reach blindly for a nibble of the assortment he’d set beside her, chewing while murmuring to herself, “If I could just isolate the DNA stand, then corporealise it…”

“Are you narrating this for my benefit or your own?” he asked, now lounged sideways in his chair with the book he hadn’t turned a page of in twenty minutes.

She grinned up at him. “Both.”

“Care to illuminate me on that which you are attempting? I have been known to craft spells in my time. No doubt Potter shared this font of knowledge with you.”

“Curses don’t count,” she bayoneted him with her eyes, but her smirk was evident. 

“On the contrary, they do too.”

Conceding, she explained. In order to discover the identity of the perpetrator, she was hoping to reveal the identifying appearance markers that muggles had discovered were hidden in the strands of DNA. 

Severus listened to her, one long finger pressed to her chin. He had read about the phenomenon and had used similar methods of study in his potions making, ascertaining which compounds could be paired together for more efficient or potent results.

“Its no use though,” she huffed. “I lack the practical experience in this kind of spellwork. It’s way above Hogwarts level… and for some reason I decided a career in Potions making was my calling.” Her mouth quirked in his direction.

“That is the problem with you Gryffindors” he sneered. “Atrocious at delegating. Always think you have to solve the problems yourself to get the praise.” He slid off the chair and leant an elbow on a propped up knee. “Now, we Slytherins… we know how to use others' strengths to our advantage… and still take all the praise.” 

Hermione traced his movements like a hungry child watching the drip of a melting ice cream. 

“May I?” he said, prowling around her to cup her wand hand in his. 

There was a slight tremor of nervousness, maybe even exhilaration at his touch. He lifted her knuckles to his mouth and kissed them lightly to steady her. She melted into him at that, then settled.

Carefully, methodically, intentionally, together they traced her wand through the air and swirling ribbons of green mist lifted from the brick, coiling upward, flickering. For a moment, it wavered, like it might vanish… and then it began to reshape. 

A phantom outline of a tall male figure emerged in the air, face still hidden in the weave of magic—broad of shoulder, thick tufts of straw blonde hair.

Hermione raised on her knees, dusting errant crumbs onto his carpet. He would complain, but the look on her face—so accomplished and proud—he couldn’t and wouldn't take from her. “Blonde. Tall. Male. Broad…” Her voice faltered. “… that’s him.”

He frowned. It wasn’t anyone he recognised, which was a feat in itself considering how many young men he had taught in the last fifteen years of his life. Perhaps homeschooled? Or even non-British? 

The revelation had done little to soothe his disquiet.

The mist dissolved, while Severus stood and exhaled slowly. “Impressive.”

“Speak for yourself,” Hermione glowed, then sat back on her heels, flushed with triumph. Radiant.

“No sugar?” she asked, sipping the coffee he’d set down hours ago, now stone cold.

“I prefer my coffee like I like my women,” he said, eyes never leaving her, “Powerful and persistent.”

She smiled knowingly as she took another sip, her gaze casting out to the lamplit street, then began choking out a wet splutter. “Oh bugger! The takeaway!”

She scrambled upright, landed a punishing kiss on his unsuspecting lips and reached for her wand with a panicked flail, vanishing in a loud crack.

Severus blinked. The sudden silence, the sudden dearth of her presence was almost comical—in a tragic comedy sort of way.

He looked at the empty space she had occupied, then down at the barely-touched picnic selection on the floor, her coffee still rippling faintly.

Dragging a hand through his hair, his lips twitched.

“Insufferable woman,” he muttered.

But he was grinning.

The boys had forgiven her lateness, especially after she conjured a third bag of prawn crackers, seemingly by magic. She’d known all too well that one bag wouldn’t survive more than a few minutes in Ron’s grasp, and had wisely ensured a steady supply of reinforcements.

Whether shaped by childhood neglect or childhood indulgence, the path to their hearts remained the same: through their stomachs. The evening had been a cosy reprieve from the quiet distance that had crept between them of late. Though Hermione was beginning to suspect, reluctantly, she’d had more of a hand in that strain than she’d previously cared to admit.

After the film—which, to Harry’s sassy delight, she’d actually enjoyed—Hermione filled them in on everything she’d uncovered that day. She neatly sidestepped their questions about what, exactly , she’d been doing in Snape’s living room at the time of the incident, but even so, their intrigue regarding the fate of their disgraced professor was clearly piqued. 

For the first time, they at least had the good sense to seem concerned.

Handing over the brick, sealed in a plastic ziplock, she regaled them with what the modified Revelio spell had revealed about their suspect.

“You’ll ‘av to teach us that spell at the DMLE, 'Mione,” Ron had said, awestruck, as he chomped his way, solo, through a sharing bag of Maltesers.

Harry, however, had gone still and pensive, unseen cogs whirring behind his eyes.

Hermione had finally lit a lightbulb within.

The following morning was as clear and crisp as Hermione’s resolve, as she found herself pacing the hallway at 9AM awaiting that week’s Quibbler Article. 

Would it be enough? Despite yesterday’s attack, could it move the wand tip away from Snape? Perhaps Luna had been right and she should have been seen out with Severus more. Not just strolling the streets of muggle London, where no one knew them… but really out in Wizarding public. 

Would that help? Surely Hermione had built up enough goodwill with the public for some of it to transfer to her surly professor? Or perhaps not… What if the mystery he was shrouded in, the decisions he had made for self preservation and his blind obedience of Dumbledore meant his reputation could never recover? What if, like she, the public pressured him to release the potion that had saved his life?

Worse still. What if he actually couldn’t replicate it. What if he denied them? Could they end up in an even worse position? Had she sealed a much darker fate for him?

Just as her reason blackened to dread, a single, stately hoot rang out from the kitchen, echoing off the decaying walls. Someone had left a window open.

Hermione spun on the spot, her socks skidding slightly on the wood floor as she raced towards the sound. A glossy barn owl was perched on the countertop beside the fruit bowl, feathers puffed with importance. She tossed three Galleons and a generous sprinkle of bird seed beside it, untying the twine with shaking fingers.

The owl gave a satisfied clack of its beak, and Hermione barely acknowledged it as she tore into the thin brown parcel. 

The Quibbler front page was a spectacle of peachy ink and verdant drama—a bold headline in shimmering, black script:

“The Man, The Myth, The War’s Most Misunderstood Hero?”
Inside the Mystery of Severus Snape.”

On the page, an artist’s silhouette of Snape dominated the cover, not sneering in a corner like the Prophet usually portrayed him, but standing tall in profile. Bold. Brave. A Fighter.

Hermione’s heart leapt.

She flipped through the fluttering pages, pushing past ads for self-stirring cauldrons and flameproof socks, until she found it—the article, pages of it, gorgeously laid out with large, clear pull quotes and softly faded watercolour sketches: Snape in the classroom; bleeding after the battle; testifying (reluctantly) at his tribunal; at Knoxford, with Her—Hermione Granger—his gaze on her with the kind of heady expression she’d only…truly… thought she’d imagined.

As Hermione read, her shoulders slowly unknotted. The tangle in her stomach loosened, and her heart began to rise, like a bird long-caged and trembling to take flight.

Luna had done her proud. The balance was perfect. Not a plea for pity, but a testament of truth. A humanisation. A story about obligation, its cost and his redemption.

Hermione exhaled deeply, her breath catching on something like laughter, and nodded to herself. A small, steady smile lifted at the corners of her mouth, her eyes half moon crescents. 

This…

This just might work.

Halloween. Growing up, Hermione had always thought it an absurd holiday. Children in her neighbourhood would dress up as witches and goblins and ghosts, swinging their plastic pumpkin buckets, ready to be filled with sweets. They’d ring her doorbell with wide grins and outstretched hands, as if they hadn’t spent the rest of the year pretending she didn’t exist.

She’d been an odd child, even before the magic. Always buried in a book, far too clever for her age, and with no siblings to temper her eccentricities, she was miles ahead of the other children in her year—academically, at least. Socially? Not so much.

Her classmates hadn’t appreciated her precociousness. And it didn’t help that strange things seemed to happen to the children who weren’t kind to her. Crayons snapped mysteriously inside their boxes, frogs turned up in school desks and homework suddenly became garbled nonsense—complete gibberish, even though it had been perfectly legible moments before.

At the time, Hermione hadn’t realised that their unease around her was justified. That their suspicions that she was not quite normal were entirely correct.

After joining Hogwarts, however, and coming into her magic proper, she’d found a new appreciation for the holiday—especially after a thorough research of its history and connection with actual witchcraft and wizardry. 

By that time, it had already become a day additionally celebrated among the wizarding population as the day Voldemort was vanquished by The Boy Who Lived, after Harry—only an infant—survived the Avada Kedavra curse.

This, though, had given Hermione an idea. What better time to launch Severus before the public, than on All Hallows Eve? A day still celebrated—despite Voldemort's return thirteen years later—as the day good triumphed over evil. 

Thus it was, after a fair amount of cajoling and coaxing on her part, that Hermione Granger and Severus Snape found themselves sitting on a central table in the Knoxford student haunt of The Hopping Pot. 

She would like to say that all the decorations—floating skulls, violet lanterns, illusionary cobwebs—made it unrecognisable… but given that she hadn’t stepped a foot in the establishment herself since the start of term, that wouldn’t be possible.

It was the last Friday evening of October, and the bar was packed. Drinks foamed in levitating goblets, and students clutched laughingly at their costume hats while a tribute student band played covers of The Weird Sisters.

Severus had, naturally, refused to dress for the occasion, which she hardly could blame him for… it's not as though she could have requested he dress like an angel—people would see right through that—and a devil was out of the question. 

No, it was much better that he showed up as his true self. Hair tied back, skinny jeans, fitted black shirt—shirt sleeves rolled—with an extra button undone this time too. Hermione vowed before she was done with him she’d see that third button unclasped just enough to see a peak of his tattoos.

For now she would just have to ogle over the inkwork of his forearm.

Hermione on the other hand wore velvet cat ears, had bought a costume make-up kit from Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes to magically paint her face to that of a feline and donned a clip on cat tail to her black pencil skirt. 

He had, at one point, thought she’d made a ‘pretty pussy’. 

She thought she’d show him just how true to form she could be.

It had had the desired effect when he’d met her outside the bar. She’d watched him devour her with his eyes, adjusted his collar as if the covetous heat of the October evening was stifling his breath, and had whispered into her ear while planting a chaste kiss to her cheek: “I’m of half the mind to apparate you straight home to my bed.”

“Where’s the other half of your mind?” she purred back. 

“Having my wicked way with you in the public restroom.” 

Hermione laughed and patted him on the chest. “We don’t need to be here for long. Just enough for you to be seen by the right people and then you can take me wherever and however you wish,” she waggled her eyebrows at him coquettishly.

“Promises, promises,” he said, and held the door open for her. 

Five minutes later, a stack of letters and two glasses of the house red—Hermione couldn’t help but giggle at Snape’s reaction to—were set on the sticky wooden tabletop. 

Apparently, The Quibbler had struck a chord.

“I still can’t believe this one,” Hermione murmured, holding up a bright purple card charmed to rain glitter. The sender had called him “our hidden hero” and thanked him for “protecting Harry and the others when no one else dared.”

Severus rolled his eyes, plucking the letter from her hand and scanning it with thinly veiled amusement. “Do I now qualify for a chocolate frog card, do you think?”

Hermione smiled, elbow resting on the table as she watched him flick through another envelope. His shoulders were looser than usual, his brow a little less furrowed, though the shadows in his eyes remained. It suited him, somehow—the ease. However mistrusted to stick around. He was like a man re-learning how to be seen in the light without flinching.

“Well, you're getting fan mail, Severus. Actual fan mail . That’s practically a wizarding knighthood.”

His smile was dimpled and playful. “I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone asks for a lock of hair or a signed photograph.”

“I think people are more curious about your potion than your autograph.”

At that, his gaze darkened.

Hermione leaned forward. “You’ve been avoiding the topic.”

“I haven’t,” he replied smoothly, opening another letter that had a children’s drawing inside. From this angle, upside down, it just looked like a large black blob. But when Hermione twisted her head she could see it actually depicted him hanging upside down like a bat. The words ‘Our Bat Man’ scrawled in big colourful writing on the side. 

She watched the sadness in his expression, the vulnerability and fear; as though he couldn’t trust the win for what it was. People were listening. Sure, not all the mail had been so positive. There were still a good percentage who, no matter what facts were presented to them, still needed someone to blame, and still needed Snape to pay for all they had lost.

It wasn’t the first time she’d asked about the life saving potion though. And every time he deflected.

Did he think, if he was honest with her, that she’d abandon him? Was that also why he’d delayed them sleeping together? Perhaps, he thought that once the contract was completed he would lose her. 

Even if she thought, believed, knew that not to be the case, it wasn’t something she wanted to promise. Snape had been hurt enough, used enough for other people's gains throughout his life. 

If and when Hermione said she wasn’t going anywhere. She wanted to make sure she meant it.

He deserved that.

“I feel that I know you well enough to know that you’re purposely holding something back,” she said, voice hidden below the band in the background. His dark eyes magnetised to hers.

“Well, isn’t this charming,” came a drawl as sticky-sweet as treacle and twice as artificial.

She didn’t need to turn around. Rita Skeeter.

Hermione might’ve let one or two gossips know they'd be at The Hopping Pot tonight. A harmless whisper here and there—enough breadcrumbs to draw the vultures, if they were paying attention.

And naturally, Rita had swooped in dressed for the opera.

She approached their table in acid-green robes that shimmered unpleasantly under the bar’s violet lights. Her crocodile-skin notebook was clutched in one hand like it might bite, and her lacquered nails—blood red and filed to perfect points—drummed a slow rhythm along the spine. Tiny gold crystals glittered in her towering hair, which looked like it had been styled by a glam rock band on a budget.

“Rita,” said Hermione, her smile slow and feline. “What a surprise. I wouldn’t have pegged this place as your local.”

Beside her, Severus’s mouth twitched in amusement. They had, at least, discussed the possibility of Rita making an appearance, though she'd rather hoped the woman might choke on her quill before then.

“A little birdie told me I might catch everyone’s favourite bad boy here tonight,” Rita purred, angling her chin as she gave Snape a once-over that bordered on inappropriate. “And lo and behold… my sources did not fail me.”

Her focus lingered on Severus like he was a particularly juicy beetle pinned under glass. With a theatrical flourish, she produced a lurid pink business card and laid it atop the stack of unopened letters between them. 

“Do give me a call sometime,” she trilled. “I was thinking… a tell-all biography. Snape Uncovered, perhaps?” a sharp brow raised.

Hermione didn’t miss a beat. She plucked the card from the pile, held it up between two fingers, and gave a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

“I’ll be handling Professor Snape’s interview requests, thank you. Though, since the Quibbler article, he’s rather booked up for the foreseeable future.”

Rita’s smile curdled like spoiled milk. “My, my. Quite the unstoppable duo we have here.” She swished her head toward Severus and added in a stage whisper, “Careful, darling. You don’t want to get on this one’s bad side. You might end up bottling it.”

With a wink, and a deeply self-satisfied smirk, she turned on her heel and swept off, her robes flowing dramatically behind her like a cursed cape.

Hermione watched her go, resisting the urge to hex said cape into a puddle of beetles.

Severus smirked into his glass. “Well handled.”

Hermione shrugged, trying not to look too pleased with herself, though the familiar flicker of righteous fire glowed steadily in her chest. “I’ve had practice.”

“What was that ‘bottling it’ remark about?”

Hermione blinked. “Ummmm…”

“Oh no,” he said, voice silkily dangerous. “Now I really must know. Especially considering the way you’re blushing, I’d say your black cat costume is halfway to becoming that of a red fox.”

“Alright, alright!” She rubbed a hand across her cheek, grinning sheepishly. “I may have kept her in a glass jar for a week. In fourth year. After the Triwizard Tournament.”

He paused mid-sip of his wine. “You jarred her?”

“In Animagus form!” Hermione defended. “She kept sneaking around the castle and writing horrid things about mine and Harry’s non-existent love life and his sanity. I just… detained her. Temporarily.”

Severus snorted. “Merlin. I should have recruited you during the war.”

“I’m surprisingly efficient when mildly unhinged,” she replied, sipping her drink with a smug little smirk.

Before the moment could settle, another voice called out, light and filled with surprise.

“Hermione?”

She turned and smiled, this time far more genuinely.

“Colin!” she said, standing up to wrap her friend in a hug. Yet she faltered, taken aback for a moment at the person on his arm. The man beside him was older, calm-eyed and quiet in contrast. There was a familiarity to his features, something that tugged gently at her memory.

The pair were dressed as American ranchers, with hat and cowboy boots to match. She forced herself not to glance around to see whether the ass-less chaps had made it out tonight too. 

Sooooo, Colin had never been a contender for a quickie. Nor had he seemingly been inviting her for drinks to spark a romance between them. Hermione felt well and truly mortified. 

“Aaand, who’s your friend?” she squeaked.

“This is Shaun. Shaun Bones,” Colin said, cheeks pinking just slightly. “We met last Christmas, when I was back at Hogwarts helping out during the break. Shaun, this is Hermione Granger—in the flesh! I told you we were friends!”

Hermione and Shaun shared a small chuckle.

She looked to Colin. “ That explains a lot. I did wonder why you’d suddenly perked up in the new year.”

Colin laughed, nudging Shaun fondly. “Yeah, It’s all his fault. I’ve been wanting you too to meet for ages. But I could never seem to pull you away from the lab.”

A quick, nervous flit behind her with his gaze was the only indication he’d given thus far that he’d noticed their Professor sat at her table.

Shaun reached a thick arm out and shook her hand, "It's nice to meet you finally.” He was a heavy set man that carried it well. A rugby build, triangular and strong. In the light his hair was tingled with purple and he had kindness in his eyes.

“You too,” she said warmly. “And Shaun… Bones, did you say?”

He nodded. “Older brother to Susan. A squib, as you call them, so I never made it to Hogwarts.”

Hermione's smile faltered just a touch, her heart dropping low in her chest. “How is Susan these days?”

Shaun’s voice dropped slightly. “She’s… not quite ready to come back into the world yet. She’s at Saint Mungo’s. Spellshock still from the battle. The Mind Healers think she’ll recover, in time, but it’s slow going.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Hermione said, sincere. “She was always so brave.”

“She still is,” Shaun said softly.

The moment stretched. Then Colin, always merciful with tension, piped up, “Anyway! We just came by to grab a drink before the costume contest starts, but I saw you and had to say hello.”

“Glad you did,” Hermione said.

They left with a wave, drifting back into the throng of dancing students and flashing lights.

Hermione sat back down to Severus, whose eyes were narrowed to barely let any light in.

She hadn’t noticed it at first, but now… Now that she thought about it, Shaun Bones looked remarkably familiar.

Chapter Text

Their bodies scrambled together mid-apparition, an amalgamation of flirtation, temptation and dogged persistence brewing a concoction of intrigue that spiralled through London’s Islington Borough.

Hermione landed with a small stumble on the stoop of Grimmauld Place, Severus acting as her skeleton and frame, steadying her.

To be fair to her, she hadn’t really partaken in University drinking culture enough to know that the measures they served at The Hopping Pot were well above her normal limits. 

What the heck did they put in those cocktails?! 

Besides the odd shot or two of firewhiskey at the Leaky after a tough day, she really wasn’t that much of a drinker. She enjoyed a glass of good wine, sure. But the moment she’d stood from the table—they both knew she was well past her apparition limit. 

They’d actually, genuinely been having a good time together. Sat there, out in the open among their community of witches and wizards. The drinks kept flowing, along with scintillating discussions on the history of UK potions imports, the role Dean Shaffiq’s family had played in the development of most modern potion discoveries, and how his family had been instrumental in the export of the base ingredients from North-West India in the 1600s.

Then, along with another round of drinks, more delicate topics. 

He told her of his mother, real longing and hurt brimming in his eyes; love for the woman who had been dealt such a poor card in life—and whose depression stole her from this world at the height of the Second Wizarding War. How much he blamed himself, and how it had been another deciding factor in him turning spy for Dumbledore.

She placed a hand on his, resting there quietly on his lap. Severus entwined his fingers with hers. One light squeeze in recognition of her offering. 

She told him of her parents, of the mind healer’s conclusions that their memories were beyond recovery. The guilt. The shame. That ultimately, the thing that she’d worked so far for all these years—to be just as accomplished as her magically raised peers—had been what had orphaned her at only nineteen years old.  

“My only solace,” she said, as a tear trickled down her face. “Is that at least they are happy now. Happy and safe. Even if that means they will never know me.”

A slender finger brushed up the tear from her cheek, and he looked into her soul. “Believe me when I say that you protected them from a much more devastating fate.”

She hadn’t needed to question further. Hermione knew all too well what could become of those who defied the regime. You only needed to look at Neville Longbottom’s parents, still living like shells of themselves in Saint Mungo’s, two decades later. Or Susan Bones, struggling to regain herself from the trauma of the battle and the curses inflicted upon her.

Two hours and several nuclear-strength cocktails later, Hermione had just risen to visit the restroom when the floor seemed to vanish beneath her. Only then did she realise just how potent those deceptively fruity drinks had been. 

Her mild inebriation did not go unnoticed, and after waiting patiently while she gathered her composure in the loo, he insisted, in his far more seasoned and steady state, on apparating her home.

Who was she to deny such a gentlemanly offer? 

The autumnal twilight air crisply nipped at her bare shoulders as she stumbled on the slippery stoop. Rain pattered down around them, like tiny kisses against her skin.

“Whoop,” she sang through her slip, grasping onto Snape’s leather jacket. 

“Carefulll,” Severus chortled, his voice a rasp on the wind that itched at a scratch in her lower abdomen. 

“Do you want to come inside?” Hermione purred, thinking tipsily how marvelous it would be to sneak around Grimmauld Place just like Harry and Ron had attempted so poorly. The boys would be at work in any case, if her memory served her rightly. 

Hermione decided she could definitely trust her senses at this moment to make an informed decision. Absolutely. Of course.

He gave her a small smile. “I’m not into necrophilia, Miss Granger. And I fear the minute your head hits your pillow you’ll be dead to the world. Plus, I’m not sure it’s entirely advisable given who this abode belongs to. I do not believe I would be invited back warmly within its halls.”

Hermione stuck her bottom lip out at him dramatically and rolled her eyes. 

“Fine. Fiinnnneeeee.” 

He chuckled, and it lit the alcohol in her alight, blazing bright and flickering. Licking her insides in a tantalising frisson. 

“Come here you silly little witch.” He pulled her towards him, and the firewhiskey kissed her lips. The structure of his form was so stabilising, his touch so conquering, his taste so inviting. 

Light flooded over them like a tsunami as the door to Grimmauld Place swung open; nausea roiled within her. Ron stood framed in the doorway, Harry just behind him. 

Hermione Granger and Severus Snape caught and captured in an obscene tableau, frozen mid-kiss. 

Hermione felt all the spirits flee her body like some mass exodus, sobering her up in an instant. 

The skies opened wider, droplets smacking down hard and breaking into her reality. 

Snape’s hand hovered near her waist, then dropped to his side as he took a big step back and crooked his head in a rigid nod, like the mechanical hand of a clock, ticking from one moment to the next. From safety, to the doomsday clock striking midnight.

“What the fuck.” Ron’s expression was pure, horrified blankness. Disgust, anger, betrayal hidden beneath the surface of shock. He was stupefied, as though his brain refused to process what his eyes were showing him.

“‘Mione…” Harry’s cracked voice was caught by the wind and evaporated into opaque mist. She could see his mind working a mile a minute, while her own stalled like under an Immobulus charm. “Snape?”

Ron stomped forward. “You’re seeing him?”

“I’m—” Dread soaked her heart. She hadn’t been prepared to explain this, any of this, yet. She hadn’t devised the plan, practiced the lines, rehearsed and revised them until she was sure they could land softly. 

No, instead she’d just launched herself into hot water, drowning while she boiled.

“Fucking Snape?!” Ron choked out.

“No, we’re…” she trailed off beneath a gasp, salt water coating her lips. 

Not yet, really—kind of—well not true at all, maybe? 

The dance they’d been performing around each other the last two months was certainly a foreplay—dancing across a knife’s edge. And he’s already given her enough orgasms both in her dreams and in their singular, earth-shattering session together that should warrant calling it… fucking… yes.

Her mind was spiralling, spinning, flailing. 

Snape exhaled sharply and straightened his jacket. “I should depart. It appears, quite as expected, that my presence is unwelcome here.”

“Seeing as you were never welcome to begin with, I’d say so, yeah!” 

“Ronald!” Hermione barked back, finally finding her voice. 

Severus eyed her earnestly, the crease of his forehead deepening. “I fear you have much to unpack here and my presence will only make conversations more fractious.”

Hermione pressed a hand to his chest. “No, please. Stay.” 

His smile was an empty promise, the lines on his face saying far more than he felt he could in the moment.

“You won’t speak to him like that.” She whipped back around, finger outstretched at the two of them, standing there in their matching woolen pajamas. “We’ve been getting to know each other, yes. It’s nothing serious, it's just to let off some steam. Just a bit of fun. But he’s been there for me these past months, much more than I can say for you two.” She masticated on the bitterness of the words. 

Harry huffed, brows joining in frustration. “Because you shut us out!” 

“You’ve been closed off for months , Hermione!” Hearing her full name croaking out of Ron’s mouth gave her pause. His manic eyes were wide and glassy. “We don’t even know where you are half the time!”

“Do you even care to ask?!” Hermione screeched back like an owl calling out to the night.

Their shouts clanged off the cobblestones, as did the sound of boots stepping away.

“Yeah, that’s right. Fuck off,” Ron spat past Hermione.

“That’s enough!” Hermione’s pointed finger, aimed at Ron’s venomous face, could as easily have been a flobberworm for the dearth of threat it proposed. 

Blowing out a steamy gust Ron marched back into the dark foyer of Grimmauld Place.

Hermione stormed after him and past Harry, still holding the door open dumbfounded. Hermione saw no sign of Severus in the night as the door slammed shut behind her.

Maybe it was the October chill seeping into the tiled hallway, but the Black family townhouse had never felt as cold as it did then. Harry let out a weighty, resigned sigh. Almost as though he was expecting this row—likely sans the Snape part—for some time. 

“Hermione… What are you thinking?” he shook his head, addressing the tiles. “He’s your professor too, you know. I thought your Mastery was important to you. And you’re just going to throw it all away getting tangled up in Snape? What could you possibly see in him? He was an absolute twat at Hogwarts and he’s a Death Eater—”

“Ex-Death Eater, Harry.” She threw her satchel down by the coatstand, and dragged a hand over her forehead with a sigh. 

Harry crossed his arms over his chest. “Is this why you’ve been so hellbent on getting the DMLE to watch over him? And I bet that Skeeter article was your idea too, right? Bloody Hell Hermione, how long has this been going on? Did this all start at Hogwarts?”

Hermione exhaled sharply in outrage and clucked her tongue. “Funnily enough, No Harry. I wasn’t fucking my professor while I was still a teenager. Thanks for your vote of confidence though.”

He gave a small eye roll that set her indignation on edge. “It’s not like your letters were very detailed last year—” 

“And yours were ?!” Her hands were on her hips now, and the small thought crossed her mind how ridiculous it was to be having this argument dressed like a Godsdamn cat. “Look,” she breathed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realise you’d be home—”

“What, in my own house?” His eyebrows raised with sarcasm. 

“Right, yes, of course. YOUR HOUSE.” Her volume escalated without prior approval from her senses. At the top of the first staircase, the moth-eaten curtain of Walburga Black’s portrait whipped open to unveil the screeching banshee. 

“Despicable filth! Besmirching the name of Black! Begone Muggle!”

Hermione shut the witch out as best she could and forged ahead. “It’s not as if you said this would be MY HOME too when you practically begged me to move in with you after Hogwarts! Then made it very apparent that I was still just a guest. A guest in the life of Harry Potter and Ron Weasley. A guest in a home full of ghosts!”

“The only ghost here is you, Hermione.” Ron’s vacant voice led ahead of him, as he entered from the living room. His eyes were red with the sting of unshed tears, his chest blotchy and mottled.

“Why did you bring him here?” Harry’s shoulders slumped, defeated. 

Hermione’s lungs ached with trapped air desperate to escape, while her skin prickled with anxiety. “I really don’t expect you to understand. It was stupid letting him apparate me home—” 

“Was it to get back at Ron? At me?” Harry said sadly, as Ron joined his side. 

“Vile girl, leave the house of my great ancestors!” 

“THAT’S WHAT YOU THINK?!” Hermione had to yell over the choral demons Walburga was surely summoning. “Gods, you two really are unbelievable.” 

This was it. The moment she’d been most afraid of. The moment where their ties would fray forever and there would be no coming back. Ron placed a hand on Harry’s back. The action seemed to soothe him, meanwhile an unsettling feeling carried Hermione to very distant shores.

If Hermione had even spared a moment to assess what the boys were trying to say, maybe she’d have seen through their accusation to acknowledge the devastation in their eyes. Maybe, instead of storming away and up the stairs, she could have held space for their feelings and the distance she had created between them. Perhaps instead of hastily packing a bag of clothes, toiletries and university notes—spiralling over her own indignation, loneliness and self-righteous fury—she might have been able to explain herself rationally. Bridge the divide, cross the seas that she had flooded herself with her own narrative of being cast aside.

Perhaps. Maybe. But this was not the moment that Hermione Granger became the bigger person. Tonight, she was going to be small and bitter. She found no other emotional route open to her. All other states of reason, of understanding, of humility blackened to a crisp layer of scorched earth as she tore out of Grimmauld place and into the salt soaked night.

Severus hurt everywhere.

His shoulders felt like they bore the weight of a collapsing sky, dragging him down with an oppressive gravitational pull. His back throbbed from slumping too long on the couch, head buried in his hands. Even his skin seemed to revolt, stinging and prickling ever since Hermione Granger had let those words fall so carelessly from her lips.

It’s nothing serious.
Just to let off some steam.
Just a bit of fun.

But none of that compared to the pain beneath his ribs, the ragged pound of flesh that had dared to hope. 

Fool. Salazar , what a fool he had been to imagine they were building something real. No, Severus Snape was merely a curiosity to her, an experiment. Something to dabble in before she moved on to greener, more wholesome pastures.

A soft weight shifted beside him. Fawkes hopped down from his perch, talons gouging yet another mark into the arm of his mother’s sofa—reparable, sure, but for now Severus didn’t care to. The phoenix’s feathers had regained their brilliance over these last weeks, fiery red and molten gold like living embers. Severus had taken comfort in that transformation, in this steadfast companion who had outlasted all others since Dumbledore’s death.

The bird pressed its curved beak into his palm, eyes beady and wise. Blinking slowly, as if to say: You are not alone.

But he was. He always would be. Everyone he loved left him in the end. No matter how much blood he spilled, no matter how deeply he carved himself hollow to make room for them, he would never be enough for anyone to stay.

Rain lashed at the cobbles outside, a steady drumming against the earth. Beneath it came another sound, three metallic taps against the door knocker.

Fawkes gave a low coo, wings fanning wide as he fluttered to the window and tapped the glass.

Jaw tight, Severus rose, brandishing his wand as he approached the door. Who in Merlin’s name would seek him out at this hour? He peered through the keyhole and his gut tightened.

Hermione Granger.

Flushed cheeks, drenched curls clinging to her temples, a rucksack dragging her shoulder down.

He opened the door, and she looked up at him with the wide eyes of need.
“I didn’t know where else to go…” she murmured, voice breaking like fragile glass. There it was—that treacherous ache again. That desperate urge to gather her in, to keep her safe, to never let go.

Instead, he stepped aside without a word. She slipped past him, dripping rain onto the hall flooring. He walked to the kitchen, waving his wand to set the kettle boiling, because it was easier to orchestrate tea than conversation. His tongue tasted of bitterness; better to say nothing than let the wrong words spill.

When he finally turned, she was watching him, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. He poured two mugs of peppermint tea, the steam curling upward like spectres. She lifted one, sipped nervously.

He catalogued every detail—her trembling hands, the hurt in her eyes, the exhaustion creasing her forehead. Clearly, Potter and Weasley were the cause. Yet how was he meant to comfort her? He was just a bit of fun . Nothing serious.

What role was he to play in this farce?

“What am I to you, Miss Granger?” The question fell sharp and sudden, imploding the laden air between them. Even the steam seemed to recoil, curling backward.

She blinked at him, startled. Searching his face for… what? Meaning? Mercy? She wouldn’t find it now.

“Am I a case study?” His voice was glacial. “A project to dissect, document, and discard once the novelty fades? Something to tick off your little list before you return to safer pursuits?”

“Severus…” Her frown deepened, eyes pleading. “That’s not what this is.”

“Isn’t it?” he hissed. “You said it yourself. Just a bit of fun. Nothing serious. Should I expect any different? We began whatever this was through mutual scientific curiosity, a contracted experience that I had been foolish to entertain and even more foolhardy to think to extend it just to spend more godsdamned time with you.” His voice cracked. Emotion was a whirlwind inside him, threatening to seize him and fling his useless body somewhere no one would bother looking for him.

He cleared his throat and then spoke under his breath, as if the vulnerability of the words could not be heard aloud. “And yet… You told me you were mine.” Tears fell down her freckled nose. “—and like a damned fool, I believed you.”

She took a step toward him. “That was nothing—what I said to the boys—” but he turned sharply, shoulders stiff. 

Midnight pressed against the windowpane, the garden beyond drowned in shadow. The pale kiss of moonlight traced the tips of the conifers. An oubliette—that was what it felt like. His soul, staring into its own pit.

“Nothing,” he echoed. “Precisely what I should have expected.”

“Please don’t shut me out too.” Her voice was fractured, breaking, each word soaked like the tears on the window panes before him. “Please.”

Arms slid around his waist and his muscles went taught. He couldn’t yield. He wouldn’t dare. To sink into her warmth would be to fall. And the fall from here, these great heights she had raised him to, would destroy him.

“You promised me,” she said, desperation laced in her tone. “We—” She faltered. “We still have the contract.”

And just like that, the last of him broke. He began to tumble. The remnants of hope balled themselves up, crumpled, and tumbled down the mountainous drop. He turned, slow and lethal, a sneer twisting his face. A flick of his wand summoned the contract from its liminal space. The air crackled as magic unbound and unfurled.

“Incendio.” The syllables burned like Fiendfyre on his tongue. Flames devoured the pages in an instant, curling them inward until they collapsed into ash. “Consider it null and void.”

Her face fell. He had shattered her. Severus looked away before it could unmake him entirely.

“You may sleep in the guest room,” he said, voice stripped of everything but the vibrations alone. “I will not disturb you again.”

And as he walked away, leaving her every bit as alone as he had always been, one thought lodged itself like a blade between his ribs pressed to his bleeding heart: It was time to seek another post. Shaffiq’s probationary period be damned.

Chapter Text

A few short seconds of blissful ignorance greeted Hermione as her eyes squinted in defense of the rising sun. In those sweet seconds she felt the weight of the heavy duvet blanketing her like a warm hug, fresh air wafting in from a window left ajar and birds chirping as if it were their life’s work to bring joy to the world.

But when the breeze brushed her face—landing sharply like the cold thwack of a riding crop, the golden sun burning her corneas and the twittering pecking at her throbbing temples—the cruel memories of the night prior rushed back in full force. 

Hermione cleared her throat, dry and raw from crying herself to sleep, and rubbed at her swollen undereyes with the cuffs of black shirt she’d pulled from the wardrobe to sleep in. His scent was all over them, the slightly tangy wild berry softened with earthy rosemary.

What a fucking mess she had made of everything. From the argument with Harry and Ron, one which surely had been brewing for some time—but had still been their worst fight to date, especially between her and Harry—to her absolutely horrendous choice of words (words she didn’t even mean!) while Severus was in earshot, and, worse still, him shutting her out because of them…

Had she broken the trust they had been building between them? Was this salvageable? 

In truth, Hermione hadn’t acknowledged the depth of Snape’s feelings towards her. It had almost been like they were enacting a play, a choreographed performance. One that, once concluded, the curtain would fall upon the stage they had built just for the two of them, and that would be the end of it. Of them.

She rolled over to grab her wand from the nightstand, cast a Tempus charm, and shot out of bed at the time on the glowing clock hands. Class started in just fifteen minutes.

The upper hallway was still as a mausoleum as she hurried to the bathroom, cast a few charms to tame her hair into a braid—the tighter the more control over her crumbling romantic and social life she could pretend she had—splashed some water on her face and tucked Severus’s shirt into her pencil skirt. 

This would have to do. Even if she had the time, she couldn’t go back to Grimmauld. Not yet. She couldn’t risk bumping into either boy before she had sorted through her thoughts. Did they truly think she was sleeping with Snape to get back at them? For leaving her behind? For moving on with life without her? For being… in love?

It couldn’t be further from the truth. She had been giving them space, hadn’t she? Wasn’t it obvious that was what they wanted? She hadn’t wanted to intrude. Didn’t know where she fit in now with their new dynamic. 

Or had that been an excuse? Perhaps she was responsible for the divide that had festered between them? An unhealed wound, left untreated, had infected everything about their friendship. Her ability to connect. Ron’s desire to include her. Harry’s trust in her.

Downstairs in the kitchen she found a small scrawled note, paired with a warming charmed coffee and toasted sandwich.

‘Please eat. I will not be responsible for any alchemical mishaps caused by you passing out from starvation.’

Caterpillar cocoons broke open in her belly, tiny butterflies fluttering out. A not unpleasant but not entirely pleasant feeling. But she couldn’t dwell. If there was one thing in her life she couldn’t and wouldn’t fuck up—it was her education. Transfiguring the coffee mug into a flask, Hermione took two obligatory bites of the breakfast toastie and apparated away.

There was a small parcel on Severus’s desk, wrapped in silver and green ribbon, which he largely ignored when he arrived at Knoxford in the early morning with Fawkes. The brazen bird flew independently of his cage and had to swerve an entire 180 degrees to fit his wingspan through the doorway to Severus’s private office at the back of the lab. 

No doubt the parcel was more fanmail from Lovegood’s article, perhaps a trinket if he was lucky or a pair of some great-grandmother’s panties if he were less so. Following that thread of thought, he wouldn’t mind a pair of Miss Granger’s knickers in his desk drawer, for safe keeping. 

His mood soured the moment she barraged across his mind. Like an indulgent spectre, she could be conjured by even the most tenuous connection. He couldn’t escape her. She had coloured his world with her snark, her wit, her curiosity and brattish indignation and he would never be rid of her. Not now, not ever.

As students milled in, the mechanism of his jaw wound tighter. Hiro dutifully set up her table, the Yanks passed equally eligible notes back and forth, Vane touched her makeup—for whom she was attempting to lure, Severus was only mildly interested, more so to warn-off the poor fool—and still there was no Hermione. 

Severus couldn’t recall any lecture Hermione hadn’t been the first seated for, never mind arriving late. Creevy peaked around the doorway in his direction, before he was jostled in by a congregation of late comers, including Harper and Greengrass. 

By the time all but Miss Granger were in attendance, and the first ring of the 9AM bell chimed, his molars were in danger of cracking under the grind. 

Ding.

What if his actions had caused her, the brightest-witch-of-their-age, to drop out of the most prestigious university in the world? 

Ding

What if he was responsible for her great fall into mundanity? 

Ding DIng DINg

What if his selfish need and intellectual curiosity over the fierce young man who had stolen his interest, then his heart, then his soul, had resulted in the entire breakdown of the core of who she was?

DING DING DING

The swotty, know-it-all, insufferably brilliant and most exceptional witch he had ever met.

As the last DING of the bell pierced his soul, a frazzle of loose braid, warm freckles huffed through the doorway in the pencil skirt from last night and one of his black shirts.

The door banged shut behind her.

Oh, but of course. Hermione Jean Granger was never so weak willed as to let anyone get in the way of a project of hers. And he had made himself, however foolishly, her main project. 

Even if he was just to be a passing curiosity, as many geniuses have, what if he could come to accept that? 

To be a simple footnote on her life… perhaps he could admit himself the pleasure of that small existence. To be enjoyed, enraptured, haunted, possessed by her, even for only a moment of her life.

Maybe, Severus admitted, maybe that would all still be worth the pain of losing her.

He let out a small gust of derision relief through his nose and then looked anywhere but at her. Severus knew that if he dared even one flickering glance at her he would be sucked in once more and would be completely Stupified before the entire class. 

“How kind of you to finally grace us with your presence,” he sneered. 

She bit down hard on her lip, her browline tight, chest still heaving from her rush here. Would anyone notice the similarities in their shirt? Could any of the cretins in this room read between the lines and see the icy white fire blazing between them?

He couldn’t look at her. Wouldn't. But he’d mastered the art of looking through and beyond insolent students in his time. He would employ that skill again, get through the morning lecture and then hand in his notice with Shaffiq.

Severus survived the remaining one hour, fifty-nine minutes and fifty seconds subsisting on pure self-loathing alone. Which, he supposed, was as close to his old self as he had come since the first time her smile had captured his heart.

Hermione dragged a hand through her braid, which was all undone now anyway from the stress of the lecture. 

Her brain was not braining and her heart wouldn’t cease hurting. 

In her fluster to leave Grimmauld, she’d grabbed an already filled notebook from her desk at home. Trying to keep up with Snape’s instructions with no ability to write notes had resulted in her becoming even more frazzled than she could cope with being that day.

As for Severus, the man who has turned her entire world upside down, who had opened up her mind and body to a level of connection, understanding and challenge that she had only ever dreamed of from a romantic partner, barely looked at her all lesson. It was honestly worse, receiving this treatment, as opposed to his laser focus scolding her. 

She would take that heat over his glacial indifference any day. 

There was still so much she wanted to say to him, to explain, to apologise for. But now that the Contract was null and void, eradicated, decimated… would he even entertain her?

Well, he would just have to, she decided. He wanted to just exit from her life? Out of fear, scorn, worry over being hurt? Well she wouldn’t let him. And when Hermione Jean Granger set her mind to something, when she wanted something, nothing would get in her way.

And she wanted Severus Tobias Snape.

Everyone began bustling out at the end of class, but the storeroom with extra supplies was only across the hall. She would grab a notebook now and then corner Severus until he admitted he absolutely and unequivocally could not end their contract and must at least see it through to the end—agreed under duress or no. 

During which time she would find a way to make him want her, need her, crave her—as much as she did him. She was his. And if she was his, then she wasn’t leaving this classroom, until he was hers again. 

Severus tired at his desk, shoulders falling forward as he toyed with a small present left at his desk. As she made her way out quickly at the end of class, Colin’s frenetic tone scurried up her spine. 

“Hi. Hi. Hi! You owe me lunch drinks? Right?” his voice was the quiver of an arrow about to launch.

“I can’t,” she whined, wiping sleep from her flushed face. “I’m just going to grab a spare notepad. I left everything at home, and then I have to speak with Sev—Professor Snape about—”

He grabbed her arm, slight fingers digging in a little too forcefully. Hermione looked down to where his boney tips were punctuating red pressure points in her forearm. Colin, releasing his mistake, released her and blew out a quick sigh. “You’ve been in the lab too much. Just one drink. Please.”

His eyes were worried. Even more wide and frantic than usual. Off. They flicked back to the classroom door, closing behind them.

“Colin…” her voice wavered as she frowned. A niggle in her mind grew, fuelled by the unnerving expression taking over her friend's normally genial features.

Her mind flashed to her squirrely and feverish friend bumping into Romilda Vane, spilling the contents of his bag everywhere—a flash of green paint on her bag, Colin being so distraught at Hogwarts after the battle, after losing Dennis, until he’d found a new focus over Christmas break, him finding strength to stand up for her against Snape—of all people—and… last night…before her shouting match with the boys, before she had ruined the rapport and trust between her and Severus for good, the man on Colin’s arm at the pub. Shaun Bones. Grieving for his sister who was still with us, a squib raised half in the muggle and half in the magical world, a man, who looked oh so familiar.  “Oh.  My. Gods. What have you done?”

His breath shuddered in. Hermione didn’t wait for an answer. She ran.

Severus was JUST lifting the lid of the box, tucked snuggly on the surprisingly heavy package, as a whirl of worry and shrill panic burst back into the lab.

“Severus, don’t—” The hysteria in Hermione’s voice chilled him to the bone. He hadn’t heard that tone on her since the Battle of Hogwarts. He felt all blood drain from their bodies in an instant, as though it had escaped down through the grates of the lab’s stone floor.

The lid was mostly off when he heard the click.

“Accio package!” He heard her scream from the other end of the classroom.

The box flew out of his hand, landing in hers with a thud that would have knocked the wind out of her.

And exploded.