Talking In Your Sleep

It’s three o’clock in the morning and it looks like it’s going to be another sleepless night ...

(Lyrics borrowed from Talking In Your Sleep – Crystal Gayle)

The deep, dark, empty silence of the castle was disturbed for the fifth consecutive night, its peace shattered into tiny, unwelcome, intrusive shards of noise. And, for the fifth night in a row, Hermione listened in concerned apprehension from outside the thick, heavy wooden door, her breath catching in her throat, heart pounding.

She stood, transfixed, with her left ear pressed firmly and uncomfortably up against the cool, well-worn, musky-smelling aged wood. It was her most sincere hope that the noise would soon stop.

I really shouldn’t be here, she thought belatedly. But something kept her invisibly glued in her position. She simply felt compelled to stay there, desperate for the din to subside.

Again, the sounds coming from the other side of the door could be heard clearly: Intense, heavy rumbling – sending ricocheting deeper notes into the unforgiving night, which, in turn, echoed and bounced off the ancient stone walls. It really was a terrifying sound.

The cold night air wrapped itself around Hermione’s slim body, penetrating the thin layers of her night clothes easily, seeping into her very bones, and making her shiver uncontrollably. She pulled her dressing gown tighter, and told herself to get a grip. She was a Gryffindor, wasn’t she? Not a coward. She’d faced much, much worse than this ...

Taking hold of the cold, solid, doorknob firmly, she turned it clockwise, and listened to its reassuring, familiar click as she opened the door to her bedroom.

‘For better, for worse’, her wedding vows had stated, and she knew that she needed to remind herself of those words frequently. After all, she had known full well from the beginning that marrying Severus Snape was never going to be plain sailing. And she really shouldn’t let his snoring get to her like this. The fact that he had the unwelcome addition of a cold right now simply magnified the already troublesome problem, she reasoned.

Perhaps she could persuade him to move up to a warmer level of the castle, after all? Insisting on keeping his old bedroom, in the depths of the dungeons, after they’d married, really hadn’t seemed like the best of ideas to Hermione. It didn’t even have an en-suite, for goodness sake, which meant a disruptive, and decidedly chilly, trip across the corridor to the bathroom ensued every time the call of nature hit home in the middle of the night! Just what was a girl supposed to do?!

He was quieter now, having turned onto his side, and, smiling amusedly to herself, Hermione slipped gracefully back under the bedcovers to lie beside him.

She gently wrapped her arms around his warm, comforting torso, spooning around his beloved body from behind (knowing that her hands must be icy cold and intrusive to him, yet confident that he wouldn’t mind.) Her contented smile extended further when he snorted and grunted in his sleep, muttering something incomprehensible, half-heartedly, under his breath.

Severus turned again at that moment, and, in his half-slumbering, half-awake state, wrapped his arms possessively around Hermione, enveloping her with his heady, welcome heat and burying his nose softly in her neck.

Hermione giggled and smirked down at him, thinking that, if this was the downside to having a husband with an overly-large nose, there was a decided plus-side too ...

The saying about men with large noses having other corresponding (more intimate and interesting) parts of a matching large size was definitely so in Severus’ case. (Size 13 shoes proved her point!) And, as she was the lucky recipient of all he could do with everything he was blessed with, she wasn’t about to complain!

As far as she was concerned, he could snore all he liked, as often as that overly-dramatic nose of his required ...