Icing Roses

HermioneWeasley1972 gave me the prompt: It's Snape's birthday. Someone jumps out of a cake and does a striptease for him.

I don't own the characters or the setting, but I will claim the plot.

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It is a dark and snowy night.

The students of Hogwarts are nestled snug in their beds, curtains pulled tight to ward off the cold and the boogeyman.

Severus Snape is stalking the halls, his bat-cape swirling and whirling behind him. None dare disturb the Potions master’s nighttime stalk, and the Potions master never takes a night off. Even on… his birthday.

Snape doesn’t expect anyone to remember his birthday, except for the Headmistress. Having received his yearly allotment of Glenfidditch and Ginger Newts at breakfast this morning, Snape knows there will be no surprises. The rest of the staff hardly notices him, and nobody else would know his birthday.

He rounds the corner near the entrance to the kitchens and tickles the pear in the painting to gain entry. A nice cup of tea will be just the thing before he heads back down to his cold, lonely, dungeons, maybe with some of those chocolate biscuits the elves so excel at making. But instead of a reassuringly floral-patterned china teapot and cup, there is a cake on his usual table. A very large, very obnoxious, very rose-covered cake, suspiciously bearing his name atop it.

Before he can begin to call them, several of the kitchen elves scurry over with his tea tray. One snaps her fingers, and a second table is conjured, along with a very comfortable armchair. He opens his mouth to speak, but is immediately shushed. As he pours himself a cup of the fragrant tea, he thinks he hears a feminine giggle emanating from the region of the cake.

Before he can raise the cup of tea to his lips, the top of the cake explodes and a woman comes popping up. Severus has no words for the sight before him – Professor Granger, with frosting in her hair. And dear lord – are those Royal icing roses over her nipples? And nothing else? He’s sure he’s fallen somewhere in the corridors and hit his head very badly on a lurking gargoyle, because deliciously plump, curvy, and naked Arithmancy professors do not jump out of cakes on his birthday. It’s a rule, written somewhere before the beginning of time: “Severus Snape shall never have naked ladies in a birthday cake” – he’s sure of it.

He watches, transfixed, as she shimmies her way out of the cake, wearing nothing on her bottom half but an abbreviated pair of French silk knickers and a pair of thigh-high stiletto boots. He’s not so naïve as to not know what boots like that say. She offers her hand to him, nods to the bystanding house elf, and they find themselves in his sitting room with a snap of Mippy’s fingers.

The next morning, they have leftover birthday cake for breakfast. And the students who take advantage of Snape’s office hours from that day on wonder why there are two lurid pink icing roses under a preservation charm on his desk – but none of them dare ask.