Part Second: The Hart Rampant: Chapter 23, Part 1

Chapter 23, Part 1:

Emily led Professor Snape along the wall of ivy and then through the maze of industrial alleyways leading back toward Diagon Alley. To him, it must have been almost pitch dark, but her night vision was up to the task of navigating by starlight and wide-spaced streetlamps. Now she had to get him back to Hogwarts and his bed. She could have put her arms around him and tried to Apparate them both, but in his current frame of mind, who knew if he would cooperate with it. If he decided to resist going along at the last second, it was entirely possible that they could both end up splinched.

So, she did what any sensible Second World witch would have done – she borrowed Snape's wand for a moment ("I'll give it right back, darling, not to worry. Yes, I know the gargoyles up there look dodgy, but I'll keep it ever so safe from them, I promise"), put out her wand hand, and hailed the Knight Bus.

The triple-decker purple bus instantly came roaring out of the night at breakneck speed, and a very young, pimply-faced conductor came down the steps to help them aboard. "Stan Shunpike, at yer service, miss. Help you with your bags?"

"No baggage, thank you," Emily told him. "Just two passengers, to go to Hogsmeade, Scotland."

"All right then. Twelve Sickles apiece, and you get hot chocolate for fifteen."

"Ah, no hot chocolate, thank you," Emily replied, then opened her bag and counted out the fares. She made a mental note to get to Gringotts and make a withdrawal sometime soon – between the unexpected bus fare and the bar tab, she'd spent a bit more than she had planned that night.

She turned to Professor Snape to help him aboard. He had his head craned backward, staring intently at the sky. "Tell me, Professor – when exactly did the stars start changing colour?" he asked her, very seriously. "And why was I not previously informed of it?"

"I'm sorry, I forgot to mention that – they've only just started doing that tonight as sort of a trial thing. I really should have told you," Emily said apologetically, holding her hand out to him. "Please, dear, let me take you home."

Snape gave her a moment's suspicious look, but then took her hand, and allowed himself to be led onto the bus.

"Hey, there, feller. How's he doing, there, miss?" Shunpike the conductor said, glancing at Professor Snape.

"He's not feeling well," Emily said quickly.

"I feel fine, Professor. I'm actually wondering when the bloody walls will learn some consideration for others and stop breathing so loudly," Snape said tartly.

"Well, then," Shunpike said.

"Oh, darling, you're so funny." Emily twinkled at Snape as though he had just said something very cute indeed, then turned to the conductor. "Such a wit, this one. I'll just take him upstairs to lie down."

"Go right ahead, miss," the conductor said.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

As the bus closed its doors and sped away, an ordinary-looking man in a grey tweed overcoat watched it go with a look of cold fury and disappointment on his face.

He paused long enough to light another cigarette and then walked away in the opposite direction.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

The Knight Bus was nearly deserted that night. Emily got Snape up the stairs, occasionally bracing against the railings when the bus took a particularly violent jump, and onto a second level where several neatly made beds were ranged against the wall. A curtain had been lowered in front of one of the beds – soft, regular snores were coming from behind it.

She eased him down onto the bed nearest the doorway. "Why don't you try to go back to sleep, it's very late. I'll let you know when we've gotten to Hogsmeade, all right?" He nodded, one hand over his eyes and massaging his temples.

Emily paused for a long moment, sitting beside him on the bed, just gazing down at the black, etched silhouette of him against the white pillow.

If someone had told her previously that she would finish out a night at the Mushroom Circle like this, with him, she would not have previously believed it for a second. But now... her lips felt slightly bruised, and she could still smell his scent all over her own skin.

Bloody hell.

There was no denying that she found him damned difficult, if not impossible, to get along with most of the time, but she had long since accepted that some part of his distrust had been earned. But there were other times when she remembered what had happened between them last September, and (admit it) lusted after him like nobody's business. There had never been any sense of parting, of an end, to whatever had begun that evening – it had just stopped. Seeing him every day at school did nothing to make her sense of having lost him because of her own foolishness feel any less fresh, even though she knew she had no reason to believe he had ever truly been hers in the first place.

But he couldn't just consistently play the vindictive bastard, either, and let her feel prudent and smug about not getting involved with him. He had to keep coming out with moments of great intelligence and insight, and very occasionally proved capable of dark humour, even compassion. He had surprised her into absolute speechlessness when he consented to help Liria, and to give proper credit, he had done more to help Liria, and Catherine, than she had ever imagined he would. When she had suddenly been obligated to repay the obligation she now owed to him, in barest truth, it had been a furtive pleasure to have a reason, ironclad in moral decency, to seek him out and desire his attention. During her visits to his office in the weeks before, the thought had come to her unbidden, once or twice – What if he put his arms around me and whispered, "Yes, I can think of something I'd like very much. Would you sleep with me tonight?"

There was no denying – had never been any denying, damn it – that she dearly wished for him to talk to her the way he had that first night and longed for a repeat of what happened on that icy callbox ledge. If she only knew somehow that he wouldn't ridicule her again... if only she had ever seen any indication that he still wanted her. Now, it seemed, he did... but who knew if that was anything other than three glasses of absinthe and her proximity.

She couldn't say she understood him, not for a second; he was a riddle wrapped in a mystery, an enigma kept Obscured beneath an Invisibility Cloak – but at least he looked like he was comfortable. She would just let him sleep until they arrived at Hogsmeade, then help him up to his own quarters. Emily turned and started to get up, intending to lie down on the bed next to him – but then he sat up behind her and slid an arm around her waist.

"Where are you going?" he whispered, and put a velvety little kiss on the back of her neck.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Oh, blast and damnation.

There went her knees turning to jelly and her stomach quivering again. Not only that, but this time she had acquired a little flutter as well, like a goldfish wriggling between her shoulder blades. His arm tightened around her waist; she leaned back into him as another soft kiss brushed the nape of her neck.

This was crazy barking mad. He was a creature made of thorns and prickles, he had told her in no uncertain terms that he thought her to be nothing more than an amoral rake, he was her colleague, he was three sheets to the wind on Seventh Kingdom absinthe, and he was Severus Snape for pity's sake. Kissing him had never gotten her anything but the cold shoulder at best or bawled out within an inch of her life at worst. She was going to get up, get up now, and not get drawn back into contemplating the glory of those brooding black eyes, because that way madness lay. He had said, Don't let me keep you, and she had never questioned from that moment on that she had been unequivocally dismissed.

She sank a hand into that thick curtain of black hair and kissed him right back. Now he tasted not of jasmine tea but of exotic liqueurs, and his scent was again unashamedly drenched in lust. As before, the first kiss tantalised – and all those that followed were absolutely ravenous. Then she was clinging tightly to him, and he was clutching her back just as intensely, his fist clenched in her hair.

Emily never expected to respond to him the way she did – not on the first night she met him, nor this evening. Lucius Malfoy might have plied her with jewels, indulged her every whim, used every charm, wile, and deceit in this world to engage her attentions, but one artless kiss from Severus Snape and she couldn't fall into his arms fast enough. There was just something about this man that left her palms damp and her knees watery – perhaps it was his eyes, or his scent, or the sight of all that chilly composure giving way to all that unbelievable intensity. Perhaps now it was the fact that the bastard had challenged her to her very wits' end, and she had won him nonetheless. Whatever the source of his allure, it had a mind-bendingly erotic effect on her. To now be holding him again, after all that freezing scorn and stubborn refusal to forgive, was more thrilling than even the anonymity of the callbox.

Somehow her head was now on the pillow and he was lying over her, and his idea of a kiss was still as arrogant as it was endlessly tantalising. Somewhere along the line her outer robe had gotten unfastened and come off, and now she was pushing his frock coat off his shoulders. Thank the Mother she didn't have to contend with all those bloody buttons this time. As before, this very buttoned-up academic was quite the earthy sensualist when no one was looking, and tonight, he wasn't in a prohibitive mood. The sense of agonising hunger in his body was contagious; as before, a moment or two of embracing him made the space between her thighs felt very warm, and very empty. Now he was devouring her neck, the swell of her breasts – ye gods but he was an absolute fiend for necks – and her back arched off the mattress with pressing herself against him.

The situation was suddenly more exciting and illicit than any hotel room tryst – alone with him again, late at night, with the clean scent of a freshly made bed beneath them, their only company being that bloke snoring behind the curtain, probably dead tired, poor chap. Hours until they reached Hogsmeade. The snogging in the club had been almost innocent – they had been far from the only couple enjoying a dark, private corner – but this was an unmistakable invitation to something else, and she was accepting it. S. S. was back, and the Mother knew she had missed him.

His hand was on the warm slice of thigh just above her stocking top, was continuing to slide up her thigh, fingers curving delicately around the soft swell of arseflesh just under the lace of her knickers. She buried her lips in the cusp between his jaw and throat, indulged herself with a long greedy breath of the incense smoke scent of his skin – then unfastened the top buttons of his shirt, ran her lips over his neck. Not long after she had his shirt completely unbuttoned, her hands all over the naked flesh of his back, buried her lips in the taut skin over his collarbone.

She was rewarded with the softest baritone sigh of Do that harder – and sank her teeth into his flesh with renewed gusto, felt his back contract under her hands as she did, his nipple hardening under the pad of her thumb. Lucius had been so vain of his milk-white skin and self-conscious about taking home any telltale marks to Narcissa – but she didn't want to think of Malfoy ever again, certainly not now. By the Mother, he felt even better than he had looked with his shirt off.

She was trembling horribly – dear Mother, he had to be able to feel it – and could hardly breathe. Then she noticed, with a rush of aching tenderness, that he was trembling just as horribly as she was, and felt unable to hold him close enough.

Just clothes between them, just a few layers of wool and silk and lace... rip that irritation away and she could feel his warmth and weight covering her with the same surety he had the first night, here in the luxury of a comfortable bed, with plenty of time. One utterance of her True Name would Obscure them, to where they could have gone through every position in the Kama Sutra without being noticed, provided they managed to do it quietly. Emily could already feel all of it: his slim, naked body melded to hers, taking a long, luxurious time to make love this time, another of those convulsive, yowling orgasms with him deep inside her. She thought of all the ways they had not yet had each other, all that still could be done. She could vividly remember the cathartic release orgasm had been for him, and now she wanted him to have more of that, all he could stand. Yes... she wanted to see him really satisfied, indulged to weariness, not momentarily satiated as he had been before.

Then he was lying over her, between her recklessly spread thighs, his teeth gently biting into the flesh of her shoulder, one long deft hand clasping the tender cusp of her knee. There was an extremely fine erection pressing against the inside of her thigh, beneath his trousers. She remembered that moment of unfastening his fly and caressing him so very intimately in that damned callbox... the ragged gasp when she touched him, that silky, tumescent flesh straining into her hand. Her hand slid onto his belt, then paused.

At this rate, in about two more minutes, she would have another set of ripped knickers – and there would be a repeat of the raw, fumbling, but unutterably intense encounter that had happened on the first night they met, so long ago in September.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Then Emily pulled away from him, hard, with a desperate effort. "No, not now. I can't," she gasped.

"Why not?" He sounded like a small boy who had just been told Christmas had been cancelled.

"Because I do not take advantage of men in the arms of the Blue Faerie. That wouldn't be fair to you," she said, still panting.

"I'm not in the arms of any Blue Faerie," he protested. "Everyone keeps insisting that I've shagged this Blue Faerie person, and I don't even know the bloody slut."

Emily laughed despite herself. "You're probably still seeing trailing lights and hallucinating harp music."

"Yes, and once you've gotten used to trailing lights and the occasional hallucination, it's not altogether that bad," he quite sensibly replied. "The heightened tactile sense is even rather pleasant. I'd imagine it's fairly common to have some absinthe before making love in Arcadia, is it not?"

"Yes, people do that sometimes, especially at Beltane and Midsummer. It is rather nice."

He bent close over her again, his lips brushing hers as he whispered And tonight is Midsummer, yes? So very nearly persuasively enough. He wasn't going to make this easy, was he.

"I can't, Professor. I want to, but I can't – not while you're impaired like this. Not unless I know you'll feel all right about it tomorrow, sir," she said softly. She knew that he was in this state because he had no idea what the absinthe would do to him, and that this man, who had such tight control over himself at almost every given moment, would probably have never drunk it if he had known. Plus she had already made him feel profoundly ill-used once before.

He gave a long, frustrated sigh, then raised himself on one elbow. "Emily? At the very least, then, would you please indulge me by using my given name for once? You know what it is."

"All right... Severus." She whispered it into his ear, caressing each syllable with her tongue.

"Yes, that's about how I've imagined it." He ran his lips over her cheek, which felt just as shiveringly good as she remembered.

"You've imagined me whispering your name in your ear before?"

"Oh yes. In the dream, it was while I was making you come fit to collapse the bed."

At this point, just hearing him say such a thing left her trembling almost fit to collapse the bed. "Sounds like a rather vivid dream."

"It was." His voice was a tender growl in her ear.

"Then... then you can ask me to sleep with you tomorrow, when you're sober. I'll only do this if you properly consent to it, and I know you'll remember it the next day."

"Would you?" Even in that dimness, his eyes seemed bright, and his voice was softer than darkness. "Tomorrow night, if I was to say, 'Emily, come to my quarters and spend the night with me'... you would do that?"

Oh bloody hell. Secretive national character be damned.

"Yes," she said. "Please. Gladly. I would love to. I would have that first night at Hogwarts, if you'd asked."

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

He stared at her. Then put his head down onto her shoulder, let out a harsh breath of laughter. "You cannot be serious. The very next night?"

"After what happened in that callbox? Absolutely," she replied. "You have to be joking if you don't think I'd want that again. Come on, you were there – how often does something like that happen to you? I certainly thought it was memorable."

She felt, rather than saw, how much he blushed when he heard that. "I... I had been trying to do my best imitation of... reasonably gracious behaviour that night," he said, with the most endearing touch of uncharacteristic flusteredness. "I honestly did think you had enjoyed yourself. I didn't think I'd offended you in any way."

"No, you didn't do anything wrong at all," she whispered, caressing his cheek. "You were lovely. Just... witty and clever and damned fine company. And then later... you were incredible. Afterward, I remember thinking how much I wanted to take you back to my London place and keep you there for about a month, without all those blasted millions-of-buttons clothes on."

"Then... why did you leave?" he asked, in the most melancholy voice imaginable.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

The words came in an impassioned rush, her arms tightening around his shoulders.

"I didn't mean to I hurt you when I left. I know I did, but please believe I didn't mean to," she said. "Ask yourself this – what else could I have done? How could I have hoped to ever see you again? I didn't have a contact number I could give you, or an address where you could have sent me a postcard or something – all I could have said was, yes, I'd love to meet up with you again, but I won't have any contact information for the coming year, so there's really no way you can reach me. Plus, I had to get to school and start my new job as fast as I could. The teaching job isn't something I applied for and interviewed for, like everyone else – I'm here because the King gave me an order. It wasn't my time to do with as I liked anymore.

"And then there was... "

"There was what?" He was listening – just listening, not scowling, not cutting her off with sarcastic remarks. Still lying over her, his forehead touching hers.

"There was... the fact of what I am. I'm not human, I'm not from here. I thought you were a Muggle – how could I have told you the truth about myself? Even if I had known you were a wizard, how would it have gone over if I'd told you, over our tea, 'What do I do for a living? Oh yes, I'm a Faery knight commander in the service of a kingdom on another dimensional plane. Not only that – I have a whole other body I can switch to when I feel like it. With hooves, even. Yourself?' Would have brought that conversation to a big fat screeching halt, wouldn't it?"

"All right, I can see how it might have," he said. Or actually, he chuckled, truth be told.

"So, as it were, I simply couldn't think of anything else to do but just... get out of there," she finished, in what she thought was a very lame voice indeed. "It was... it was just that I didn't know you then, and I got horribly nervous, and I swear it was no more complicated than that."

"So, in not so many words – you panicked, and the 'Obscure yourself and vanish' bit was what first occurred to you to do."

"Exactly. And then when Dumbledore introduced us and I realised you were a wizard... I was stunned for about one second, and then my first thought was something like, well, hello my dear, isn't this just bloody convenient, what are you doing tonight? And then I thought you were looking a bit cranky – and then the next second you had sort of let me have it. Which was... oh all right, I don't deny I deserved it, you were right to feel unceremoniously abandoned, every damn bit of that scolding you gave me at Malfeasant was completely justified, but afterward... afterward I was so damned ashamed of myself I could barely face you again. And then I could tell in November that you were still hurt from it, but I've absolutely no way to tell you that I regret it and that I'm sorry and that I'd love to try to make it up to you, because you don't want anything more to do with me."

He was still just listening. No scowls, no sarcasm. She was now trembling so badly that she wondered how she would ever be able to compose her hands enough to handle a sword again. "And you're right, the prank with your bag was pretty fecking silly. Like something a teenage wood pixie would think was funny. I should be able to do better than that, at my age."

"Oh, bother the prank. If you had only not instantly run off afterward, that would have just been one of those absurd stories people tell about their first dates later," he whispered reproachfully.

"It was just because I wanted you to talk to me. Really, that was all of it."

"Emily – if you had gotten up and said, 'Hello, do let's stop this ridiculous business of you staring at me and me staring at you and get acquainted over some tea,' it really would have had the same effect."

She laughed, buried her head in his shoulder, now feeling unbelievably silly indeed. "You were leaving."

"I would have stopped to listen – how bloody often do you think women I don't know ask me out to tea?"

Oh, such men deserve to be hugged, and she did, at length. "You poor, dear, lovely, long-suffering, frightfully ill-used man. I want you to have such fun letting me make this up to you." She punctuated that with a very long and impassioned kiss, as if demonstrating her determination to begin the making it up to him right now.

"Yes, you're damned right I was frightfully ill-used," he growled, but kissed her back fervently. "And then, you insufferably brazen creature, you had the nerve to turn up at my very place of work and shamelessly cozen up to all my colleagues – and you were so calm and collected about the introduction. I thought you had already put the entire episode behind you."

"Calm and collected?" She laughed. "Oh no, you were the one who was calm and collected, my dear – I blushed so much I thought the fire dimmed by comparison."

"You blushed? Come off it, the very idea is ridiculous. I have never seen you blush a day in your life."

Emily looked at him as though he was missing something very obvious. "Oh no, I blush. Around you, I blush frequently."

"Please, no matter what happens, no matter how scanty your clothing, you remain as cool, pale, and composed as an untrodden snowbank."

"Well, you know why that is, don't you?"

His brow creased. "Er, no. Why is that?"

"I can't turn red when I blush – my blood isn't red. When I'm embarrassed, I get paler."

He thought about that for a long moment. "Oh," he said finally. "I suppose that does make sense, doesn't it."

"Oh, and here's another thing I've been wanting to say to you all year – I can't do anything about looking fetching when I apologise. We're called the Fair Folk, dear, not the Presentable-Enough Folk, not the They-Look-All-Right-When-They're-Dressed-Up Folk – that's not my fault. There were lots of more fetching women than me at that club tonight, you saw them. You should see my mother sometime, if a nice face is an absolute bar to being able to apologise properly, then she's the insincerest woman you've ever seen – "

"All right, all right," he said, with a little snort of laughter into her shoulder. "I forgive you for looking fetching when you apologise. Now do be quiet and kiss me again, would you?"

She sighed. "It took you long enough to ask."

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Emily thought she'd forgotten how mindbogglingly good this man was at kissing, but no, she hadn't.

The agreement had been reached, the date had been made, and now they both knew that all that had begun and been left unresolved in September would finally receive its due attention the next evening. It was a longish drive from London to Hogsmeade, and both of them had by mutual telepathy decided that the best way to spend that time was by lying in each other's arms engaged in a lengthy session of their earlier sort of behind-the-greenhouse kissing. The knowledge that this mutual desire was soon to be satisfied lent the most delicious languor to the current proceedings. His kisses were as deft as his hands; the way his tongue feelingly caressed hers made her shiver, left her more intoxicated than any wine she had consumed that night. She felt dizzy, feverish, nearly exhausted with lust.

But there was one condition left to be considered – and Emily was no stranger to the joys of Seventh Kingdom absinthe herself. "Severus, I have to warn you, Faery absinthe does strange things to people's memories. It leaves you incredibly suggestible, and it tends to amplify your moods. Put it this way, in the morning, I could probably tell you we played backgammon with cigar-smoking pink flamingos all the way back, and you'd remember in great detail how many hard-fought games you won. Oh please, please promise me you'll remember all this tomorrow. I simply can't go back to ripping each other's heads off at the slightest thing after this."

He laughed very softly and sighed – a sound of delicious gloating. "Not bloody likely, after tonight. My ice-maidenly colleague just promised me her favours for tomorrow night, and not only that, I've received the most moving apology of my life. I don't see how I could possibly forget this."

Emily laughed with him. "Don't get too sure of yourself, my dear – I think I'll insist on being taken to dinner first, just so you don't get it into your head that I'm easy. Even if you know damned well that I am, where you're concerned."

"Professor... Emily... yes, I would be happy to take you to dinner, and I would... thoroughly enjoy having you in my bed tomorrow night. If anything could make the Third Task tolerable on Thursday, believe me, that would be it. But now I have to warn you – in the morning I'm going to want you still there for breakfast. And after breakfast I want at least the possibility of having you there again the next night if we haven't come to hate each other in the interval in between. I'm thirty-five fecking years old and I know damned well that no one will ever call me the most charming, handsome, or wealthy bloke on Earth or any other plane of existence, but I want more from a woman I'm involved with than a nice cup of tea and some three-minute swive in a bloody callbox. I don't think that's an unreasonable request to make."

"It isn't," she whispered.

"And... " He averted his eyes for a moment, as though gathering his courage. "And I don't ever want to see you with Lucius again. I don't know what's gone on with the two of you, and I don't care to know. I only want him gone."

"Don't worry," she said, with certainty. "There's nothing between me and Lucius." Which was true, now – and she saw no reason to burden him with what had happened previously. As far as she was concerned, the truth about her wretched affair with Lucius could go to her grave with her. She was a bit surprised as to why he would even bring Lucius up at a time like this – quite frankly, with S. S., Professor Snape, no, Severus lying quite contentedly in bed with her, she was more than happy to forget about Malfoy forever.

Then it occurred to her... oh no, had he perhaps noticed the attentions Lucius used to pay to her at balls and such and been made to feel a bit insecure by them? Certainly he hadn't seen her with him in months – and it was Menzentius who proposed to her, not Lucius. Ah well – Emily figured that after they had spent some time together, and he had not seen Lucius anywhere near her, or heard any mention of him, that little insecurity would be laid to rest.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Apparently they both fell asleep at some point, wrapped in each other's arms, because Stan Shunpike came barging up the stairs to the second floor of the bus calling "Sir, Missus, we've arrived – " He then took one look at the dishevelled dark man lying fast asleep with his shirt half off one shoulder and a rather skimpily clad fair-haired woman dozing on the other, and made a swift pivot back to the stairs, calling, Er, stopping at Hogsmeade behind him.

"Thanks!" Emily called back, then nudged Snape. "Wake up, love, we're here." She reached for her velvet robe and Snape's coat, and helped him back into it, and then had rather a time of it helping him button his shirt up again.

He was exhausted, really almost asleep on his feet as she led him back up to the castle after Obscuring them both against inquisitive eyes. Emily got him past the Slytherin security paintings with a bit of judicious Deceivre, and then back to his quarters, and eased him down onto his bed. Seeing him lying there made her want nothing more than to curl up next to him, put her head back on his shoulder, and go back to sleep – but instead she picked up his cloak and coat and hung them up in the wardrobe. He roused long enough to grasp her hand again when she came back to help him off with his boots.

"Remember, you're to see me tomorrow... tonight," he said. "You promised. You will come, won't you?"

"Of course I will, dear heart," she replied, bending down to tenderly kiss him again. "I'm very much looking forward to it."

With those reassurances, he looked, just for a moment, so uncomplicatedly happy. There went her stomach quivering again. By the sweet Mother, what a dear, lonesome, sensitive, complicated man he was. She was going to have to treat him gently, and that you could be certain of.

The last thing she did before leaving him to his rest was to prop the tiny envelope of Catherine's hangover-cure powder on a book on his night table where he would be sure to see it in the morning. After enough time spent at wine-soaked Fae parties, Catherine had developed a phenomenally potent hangover remedy that had become extremely popular with the clubgoing set at the Mushroom Circle. Catherine and Roderick had arrived at the club while the Professor was out cold asleep on her shoulder, and when she had told them that Snape was in such a state because he had drunk too much absinthe, Catherine had given her a bit of the hangover cure for him. She had written Put in tea – marvellous for hangover on the tiny envelope so there would be no question of what it was.

That done, she doused the lights, kissed his forehead, and left him sleeping safe and sound in his bed.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

The morning after the Midsummer's Revel, Severus Snape woke from an unrestful sleep full of feverish, disconcerting dreams, of dark labyrinthine caves lit with dancing purple fire, vaguely threatening antlered men and winged women, people turning into snakes, forests full of watchful, sentient trees and hostile, uncanny eyes watching him from around every corner.

He also awoke with the single most excruciating hangover he had ever experienced in all of his thirty-five years.

His head felt three feet across and full of sharp wet concrete – it took him five minutes of concerted effort before he could get it off of his pillow. Even blinking and swallowing hurt, and his mouth felt like the bottom of the Owlery.

Snape glanced blearily at the clock on his night table – oh bloody hell, it was already eleven minutes into breakfast. He was going to have to hurry just to make it to his first class. The Professor was very much a creature of punctual routine and habit and despised having circumstances interrupt his usual sort of day. To say that this unexpected lateness, coupled with an agonising headache, did nothing to sweeten his never-admirable temper is an understatement along the lines of perhaps Judas Iscariot wasn't a very good mate to have. Many a British sailor would have been impressed with the level of profanity muttered by the famously dignified Professor as he made his way into the bathroom.

The light of the candles that ignited in the bathroom's wall sconces sent a red-hot needle of pain through his eye sockets. Snape opened his medicine cabinet, took out his bottle of willow bark tincture headache potion, tried to read the dosage instructions on the back, but ended by simply uncapping the bottle and drinking the remainder of it down. Then he closed the mirrored cabinet door and had a look at himself.

The Professor didn't think he was the handsomest bloke on Earth on his best days, but what faced him in the mirror that morning seemed like the wreck of the Hesperus. His face was puffy and his eyes were incredibly bloodshot, and his hair was a perfect nest. And – he stared at his reflection in astonishment – he was still nearly fully dressed, in his shirt, trousers, belt, watch and fob, and socks. The oddest part was, while his cuffs were still neatly buttoned, his shirttails were entirely untucked, and – wotthebloodyhell – the front of his shirt was misbuttoned all the way down. Somehow his second button had gotten into the third buttonhole, and that had apparently led to his third button into his fourth buttonhole, and so that merry state of askew-ness continued all the way down his front.

What disturbed him even more than the odd state of sleeping in his clothes was the idea that in order to get misbuttoned, he must have had his shirt unbuttoned at some point in time. Would someone please mind telling him what that was all about?

The agonising headache abated slightly in the shower, between the headache potion and a great deal of hot water pouring down on his head, and the Professor tried to collect his thoughts. The previous night, he had gone to meet Catherine Orson with Professor Swain... but then Catherine had turned into a tiny grey-haired man in front of a library. No, he had gone to the bar for a whiskey, and a Blue Faerie with white sweet pea flowers in her cleavage had told him he was no man, if with his tongue he could not win a woman. Some highly obnoxious French bloke had taunted him in verse, he had met a seductive winged redhead with an extreme passion for frock coats, and he had lain in Professor Swain's arms and been kissed all evening.

No. Snape thumped his palm against his forehead. No, that couldn't be right.

He pressed his cheek against the warm shower tiles and tried to reconstruct the events of the previous evening with as much clarity as he could.

All right – he had gone into Diagon Alley after supper the previous night to look for some gillyweed. He had Anti-Drowning Potion on his fourth-year syllabus and had pushed it back to the day before finals due to the year-long lack of gillyweed, and Snape hated to leave a syllabus incomplete. The search had turned up no actual gillyweed, so he had gone into the Leaky Cauldron to drown his annoyance in a decent Scotch before heading back to school. Professor Swain had been sitting at the bar reading the Daily Prophet. He asked her how Liria was, just taking a professional interest in how well his medicinal potion had worked, and she had said she was going to ask Dr. Orson that very night. Rather than trust such an unreliable source as his esteemed colleague, he had suggested that he speak to Catherine himself. Professor Swain had disagreed vehemently at first, but finally she had agreed to bring him along to the meeting with all the good grace of a mountain troll at the ballet.

Then she led him through a labyrinth of alleys, they had encountered a gigantic fellow with horns who mistook him for some Muggle musician whom a Faery King had knighted, and he had followed Professor Swain down a rabbit hole of hallways and staircases until they emerged into that nigh on orgiastic party the Faeries were throwing for their Midsummer festival. He'd felt like a freak from the first, and no one there had seemed very friendly either. Professor Swain left him alone to talk to her friends, all of whom spoke foreign languages except for that annoying versifying blond wanker. The bartender had been a saucy redheaded thing in a blue lace dress with flowers in her bosom, and she made someone else a blue drink and he ended up ordering one as well. And then Professor Swain came up to him and made a speech about how dryads plant their children, and from there...

From there it was a hopeless jumble, part high fantasy, part Carrollian nightmare. He was trapped in a roomful of hostile, ever-changing creatures. Men with antlers and boys with horns and randy women with wings, girls morphing into trees and strange half-human, half-snakes. All of them talked in riddles or foreign tongues, and none of them would tell him where he was. Supposedly he had been there to speak to Dr. Orson, but of course she had never appeared; more than likely she hadn't ever been expected in the first place. He couldn't imagine an intelligent person like her in a zoo like that.

Snape's eyes focused on something he had not noticed before, a circular black ink stamp on the back of his hand, which read:

The Mushroom Circle

Well, so that's what they called the place. How picturesque.

The headache had abated somewhat when he got out of the shower, wrapped a towel around his waist and shrugged into his bathrobe, then moved over to the sink for a quick shave. His hands felt numb and somewhat stiff as he lathered his cheeks and reached for the straight razor on the countertop. He was just about finished when he noticed a spot of discoloration, a reddish mark on his chest just below his left collarbone. Setting down the razor, he pulled down the neck of his robe for a better look. It wasn't a bruise, wasn't a slash, it was...

To his utter, jaw-dropping surprise, Snape realised that someone or some bloody thing had bitten him, not hard enough to break the skin, but enough to leave a rosy little mark. Snape had been a teenager once, he wasn't a sodding virgin, he knew what it looked like when someone had been taking a nibble of someone else. It wasn't that he objected to the idea of being bitten – under the proper circumstances and state of arousal, he actually quite liked it – but now, all he could think of was how the flaming hell did it get there, and who was it that had had her teeth on him?

Then, as he crossed his bedroom to the wardrobe to get dressed, he noticed the crowning indignity – there was a tiny envelope on his night table, propped up against the spine of his volume of De Medicina, on which was written:

Put in tea – marvellous for hangover

Oh, that was rich – so she had expected him to be in a state when he got back, obviously; she had known what was going to happen. How considerate of her. She hadn't wanted to bring him with her, so no doubt she had thought it would serve him right to have a bit of sport with the foolish mortal. Hallucinations, love bites, misbuttoned shirts, and now patronising little hangover remedies. She had told the bartender to "take care of him" – and that little vixen of a Redqueen had inferred her real meaning and taken care of him indeed, hadn't she. Now she thought she could give him a bit of something for the after-effects, and that would be that. Tee hee, no harm done.

Of course, that – that (here the Professor had to force himself not to use some of the fouler invective of his vocabulary, a gentleman couldn't abuse a lady, no matter how much she deserved it) – that woman was going to get a piece of his mind later, and that was certain.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

The morning after the Midsummer's Revel, Emily Swain awoke feeling like a giddy teenage girl who now knows that her secret crush has long since been admiring her from afar as well. Despite her meagre night's sleep, she felt light and exhilarated.

She sang in the shower, hummed while drying off and combing her hair. Then she took a bit of time choosing the most becoming of her frocks and professorial robes, and hooking up the buttons of her favourite pair of Victorian boots. She usually didn't wear any sort of maquillage for class, but perhaps some powder and mascara was in order today. And perhaps a bit of rose petal lipstain. And maybe a drop of her favourite violet oil behind her ears. She threw her windows open to the morning with an elated smile – it was an absolutely beautiful day in June, and she couldn't wait to see him.

But Severus didn't show up to breakfast, much to Emily's disappointment. She had her own meal of wheat cakes and tea, chatting with Professor Sprout about the exams they would both be administering that day, all the while watching the left-hand entrance to the Great Hall for his arrival – but he never came. Ah well, he hadn't been absolutely coherent once she got him home, perhaps he was having a bit of a lie-in to give the hangover powder some time to kick in. She wasn't worried that he would miss his classes, as it was probably more likely that the enchanted ceiling of the Great Hall would fall in before Severus Snape would fail to show up seven minutes early for class.

Professor Moody, however, did arrive shortly after Emily did. Although he nodded to her as pleasantly as he ever did to anyone as he passed, something in his scent, the set of his shoulders, and the steely glint in his eyes when he saw her made Emily run down a mental list of all the hand-to-hand methods she knew of incapacitating an opponent as he came toward her. She was unwilling to turn her back on him even after he took a seat at the far end of the table and poured himself a cup of coffee with what she thought was an elaborately casual attitude.

Emily quickly finished her tea, wished her colleagues a good day, and headed off to her first class session.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Professor Snape found administering practical final exams to be somewhat exhausting even when he felt especially healthy and well-rested and wasn't at all hungry. On a day when he had slept badly, missed breakfast, and had the kind of splitting headache that made loud noises and bright lights absolutely agonising, a day of administering practical exams seemed like a torture the Dark Lord might have devised in a particularly grumpy mood. Nonetheless, he made it to his first class in his usual impeccable black robes on the dot of 8:53 that morning.

If his sarcasm and bad temper were not already the stuff of Hogwarts legend, they certainly would have been after that day – he hadn't taken this many points off since Sirius Black eluded the Dementors. Even his first two classes, sixth and seventh-year N.E.W.T. preps, which were usually his easiest and most pleasant, were an ordeal. He reduced one absolutely inoffensive flaxen-haired Ravenclaw sixth-year, who had perfectly concocted her exam potions, nearly to tears with sarcasm simply because of a slight and hitherto unnoticed resemblance to Professor Swain, and nearly frightened the eyelashes off of a Hufflepuff boy in his seventh-year session for glancing over his elective Defence Against the Dark Arts paper for a moment just before class was dismissed for lunch.

After his class had left, Snape sat silently in his classroom long after they had gone, before deciding the hell with it and heading down to his own quarters. It wasn't that he didn't want to see that woman at lunch, he just bloody well didn't feel like enduring the noise and bustle of the Great Hall with this headache. Once in his rooms, he Flooed a note down to the kitchen for some lunch and a pot of tea to be sent up.

As he was finishing the pot of tea, his gaze fell again on that tiny envelope propped on his night table. Well, he had tea in front of him, conveniently enough, and it certainly couldn't make matters any worse, now, could it. He picked up the packet and poured its contents into the cup of Earl Grey in front of him. The pale green powder seemed to dissolve the second it hit the hot liquid. There was only the faintest herbal, medicinal tang to the mixture as he drank it.

It was really only the prospect of several more hours of pain ahead of him that day that made him resort to such desperate measures as actually taking the headache powder she had left for him – he trusted that little packet about as much as any sensible person would have trusted a bottle labelled Drink Me or cakes marked Eat Me left in a corridor at the bottom of a rabbit hole. At this point, he would have to be dying of thirst before he would ever again accept so much as a drink of water from a Faerie.

He was so preoccupied with this line of thinking that he was surprised to notice some minutes later that his headache had entirely evaporated, as unobtrusively as dew off a leaf. One moment his head was aching, and then he looked up and realised that it wasn't. Well, that was... interesting. Now he was just bone tired, instead of bone tired and headachy.

Snape stood up and stretched, refusing to allow himself to nod at the table. He gathered some compositions that still needed grading, and headed for the teachers' lounge, intending to finish his work while everyone else was at lunch.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Severus didn't show up to lunch, either, and by now Emily was starting to get a bit worried. It wasn't at all like him to not appear at meals on weekdays. Hopefully the hangover hadn't been so bad that he couldn't get himself out of bed the next morning. She'd never heard of anyone having a bad reaction to Catherine's hangover powder, but there was a first time for anything.

Well, it wouldn't hurt to drop by his classroom for a bit, she thought. It was the first day of finals, after all, and more than likely he just had a lot to do that day, but perhaps she could just pop by and say hello – but unfortunately, the Potions classroom and Snape's office were entirely deserted when she arrived there.

He could have taken the lunch break to go back to his apartments for an hour's nap, she reasoned to herself, he really hadn't gotten much sleep the night before. Or he could be in the teacher's lounge, or the library...

Her heart lifted when she opened the door to the teacher's lounge and saw a familiar dark, etched silhouette bent over some composition scrolls at one of the tables, his back to her, his quill furiously scratching away. There he was, at last. Hello, darling.

"There you are," she said. "I hope you're feeling all right?" Such was her exuberance at finally seeing him again that she even dared put her arm around his shoulders and put the lightest little kiss on his temple – why not, there was no one else around.

Then he turned and looked at her – and her affectionate smile faded. She withdrew that infinitely offensive hand from his shoulder and backed away from him, lest she be singed by the depth of cold fury she saw radiating from his eyes.

She got out of that room and well down the hall, cloaked in blissfully restful Obscurity, now wondering why she had ever been such an idiot as to expect him to have been sincere the night before.

Whatever she should have expected, she had not previously thought it was possible to feel as crushed as she did, at that moment.