Chapter Two

Disclaimer: The characters and settings belong to J K Rowling. I'm just borrowing them for a bit of fun.

Chapter Two

Professor Hermione Granger dismissed her last Charms class of the day with a sigh of relief. Surely, she and her peers had never been as incompetent in first year. Remembering Ron's inability to pronounce Latin and Seamus setting fire to his feather in their first lesson, she chuckled. Maybe they had.

She gathered her teaching notes and checked around the classroom to ensure all was in order. After summoning a few stray feathers to her desk, she left to spend an hour in her room contemplating the conversation with Minerva at breakfast.

Spotting Severus striding down the corridor beyond her classroom, she hung back, reluctant to alert him of her presence. The day before, she would have quickened her steps to catch up with him, enjoying a few moments of exchanging insults and perhaps a good argument before the tedium of dinner.

It had taken the first six months of her teaching career at Hogwarts before he had so much as spoken to her beyond an occasional terse request to pass the salt and another three before he had engaged her in conversation, if insulting her teaching methods, deportment, and hair could be considered conversation. He had appeared somewhat taken aback when she had countered his insults with her own observations. After all, his hair was hardly an advertisement for L'Oreal, and his teaching methods appeared to be taken from the Victorian era.

Eventually, he had appeared to concede defeat, and somewhere around the end-of-year exams he'd almost begun treating her as an equal.

The day he'd caught her sunbathing topless had been a revelation. Having heard him open the door to the roof of the Astronomy Tower, she had expected sharp words of reproof, not silence punctuated by distinctly heavy breathing. Turning over onto her back without giving any sign of noticing his presence had been interesting, especially the way he'd nearly stumbled getting back through the door.

Still at a loss as to why her body had suddenly taken a great interest in his inability to walk easily, Hermione had spent days in introspective reflection, finally coming up with the only explanation.

She fancied Severus Snape.

Cursing her lousy taste in men, which obviously ran to greasy hair, sallow skin, and big noses, not to mention razor sharp tongues and a total lack of social skills, she had since attempted valiantly to maintain circumspect behaviour at all times around her fellow professor. Their friendship, if that what it was, was too delicate a flower to risk crushing with inopportune displays of lust. Not that she had any idea how to go about said inopportune displays in any case. She'd never had occasion to do so before.

As far as men went, Hermione had thrown in the towel after first Ron, then Ernie McMillan, and even dear Neville had lost interest somewhere between her career aspirations and her research. She had briefly considered whether she fancied women instead, but a hot but somewhat icky kiss with Ginny after a night of too much wine and Muggle X-rated movies had relieved her of that hypothesis.

By the time she'd finished ruminating on her sex-life, or lack of it, Hermione realised she was almost late for dinner. Acutely aware of her flushed face and slightly sweaty neck, she tugged her robes straighter and ran the back of her hand over her forehead as she pushed open the staff door behind the high table.

The only empty seat was right beside Severus.

"Oh, bugger." It slipped out, but luckily everyone was too intent on their roast beef to notice.

Slipping into the chair, Hermione pasted a smile on her face as Severus looked up.

"Good evening, Granger."

Hermione nodded, unable to manage a greeting as the memory of the evening before crowded her thoughts. Did he know? Had he seen it? Surely he hadn't given permission.

She shook her head. The man was oblivious. Scanning the room, Hermione noted female eyes of all ages, from the headmistress's stately seventy to the youngest first year, watching the Potions professor with poorly hidden fascination. She made a mental note to find out just who had shown eleven-year-old Matilda Merryweather that magazine and give her a severe talking-to.

Finding it rather difficult not to stare herself, Hermione reined in her need to know whether all she had read was true and concentrated on her plate.

"Have you read..." He was interrupted by the clatter of her fork onto the plate.

"No!"

"How do you know what I was referring to?" Snape frowned. Surely Granger hadn't lost her wits as well? That would be the last straw.

"I... I... What were you referring to?"

"The latest Potions in Practice, of course. What else?" He threw the journal down between them.

"Er. Nothing. No, I haven't read it yet. Anything interesting?"

"Not unless you consider Benedict Falloon's ridiculous treatise on mushrooms in any way related to reality."

Hermione smiled. This she could cope with. "Falloon? Has he done it again?"

"Read it and weep. It sounds more like a Women's Institute cookbook than the sensible report on the properties and uses of fungi it purports to be."

"Oh, good, I could do with some new recipes."

"Very amusing, Granger. Next thing I know, you'll be submitting an article on a hundred and one ways to brew a pot of tea. It's a pity the one method you know produces such appalling results."

"Good grief, Snape, I've told you more than once it was Earl Grey tea. It's supposed to taste like that. Not every cup of tea has to be so full of tar you can stand your spoon upright in the cup."

He shrugged and drained his cup of tar. "At least it's far superior to something that smells like someone has washed the teacup in toilet soap and forgotten to rinse. Nothing wrong with a well-brewed pot of tea."

"Well-stewed, you mean. And it can't be good for your stomach lining. It's probably why you always have such a sour look on your face."

Severus's chuckle surprised her. What on earth could he find so funny in tea?

"What's so funny? Do I have a piece of broccoli between my teeth?" A surreptitious swipe of her tongue revealed no embarrassing deposits.

"Nothing so mundane. I'm simply relieved to find you've not been afflicted with the disease which has rendered most of the female population of this castle witless."

Hermione, thankful she had just swallowed her mouthful of tea, managed a puzzled frown. "Poppy hasn't said anything about any illnesses circulating the castle."

"Must you take everything so literally, woman? Have you not noticed the bizarre behaviour of your colleagues and students?"

She shook her head. Lying to his face was impossible.

Suspicion was not an attractive look on Severus Snape. "You're in on it too, aren't you, Granger? It's a school-wide female conspiracy, designed to unsettle me. Do you women not have enough to do with your time that you have to make sport of me?"

"Oh, for goodness sake, Snape. Your paranoia is showing. Next you'll be ducking under desks and shouting, "Constant Vigilance!" while hexing anyone who looks at you sideways." Attack was the best form of defence, after all. He'd taught her that in sixth-year.

"Paranoid I may be, but I'm neither blind nor deaf. Something is going on, and I'm going to get to the bottom of it." Standing in a huff, he stalked off, not noticing the sighs following him out the door.

"Shit, shit, shit, shit. He doesn't know, and someone will have to tell him." Hermione muttered to herself as she watched her cackling female colleagues. "And it looks like I've just been volunteered. I was just starting to enjoy life, too."

It took two hours of pacing her room, a soothing bath, and several nervous trips to the toilet before Hermione was ready to enlighten Severus. Waiting until after curfew when the corridors were empty, she sneaked into the private common room the female staff used for their weekly get-togethers and uplifted the incriminating magazine.

"I'm dead. I'm so dead. He's never learned not to shoot the messenger. Oh, hell, I need to pee again." Talking to herself was necessary at times. After all, no-one else was there to chide her down the stairs to the dungeons.

All too soon, Hermione stood in front of the door to Severus's private quarters, having only recently earned the privilege of knowing their whereabouts. She knocked.

She knocked again.

As she raised her hand the third time, the door flew open to reveal an irate Potions master clad only in a hastily slung on robe.

"What!"

Holding out the publication clutched in her hand as a peace offering, Hermione said, "I think you need to read this."

Then she fled.

A/N: This was written for the SSHG Exchange in 2012. Many thanks to karelia for her beta skills.