Some Day One Day

Author's Note: My gratitude goes out to Angel Mischa, without whose input this story would be illegible. The tunes Hermione plays for Snape actually exist and are accurately described herein. Anyone who wishes to make a guess about them is free to do so. Lassi requiescamus is a reference to Ovid, Amores I.5.25.

Some Day One Day

Over the next few weeks, Snape was dismayed to discover Miranda attending the Duelling Club regularly. He assumed that, in her newly found friendship with Hermione, she was coming to give the younger woman moral support, though he believed privately that this behaviour was likely to cause Hermione more unease than comfort. It certainly caused him unease, at least initially, to know that she was sitting in the back of the Great Hall watching and, probably, critiquing his abilities. Her presence also pricked his ego, though he was loath to admit it to himself. Miranda seemed just as fascinated by Hermione as by him. He couldn't decide whether it was the implication that she considered someone twenty years his junior impressive, or the fact that her attention was not centred solely on him, that bothered him more. In the end, he decided that he must not enjoy sharing the spotlight; Hermione was rather good at duelling and he admired her proficiency himself. In the night, when he was tired and sore and his mind hovered on the edge of sleep, he could be honest with himself: he coveted Miranda's admiration. She was beautiful and clever, and it gave him a little thrill to think that she might hold a favourable opinion of him.

Eventually, he was prompted to invite Draco to attend the Duelling Club as well to provide some kind of mitigation of Miranda's presence. It made Snape uncomfortable to think of her sitting alone in the back of the room, making him nervous and intimidating the students. He refused to let her duel, at least for the time being – he had a vague presentiment of disaster should she be allowed to practise what were surely her unsavoury Spanish duelling techniques – but it was getting progressively more difficult to resist the students' demands to see her in action.

Snape was also becoming curious about whether Hermione was enjoying the music he had selected for her. As far as he knew, she had not asked to borrow any of Draco's parents' records. One Saturday evening in November, he took himself to her quarters near the Transfiguration classroom and asked if she would care to play for him anything she had especially liked.

Though the hour was not particularly late, Hermione had undressed for the night and wore a long, fuzzy dressing gown. Her hair, freed from its weekend ponytail, hung messily around her shoulders, and her face was fresh, as if it had just been scrubbed. She looked incredibly warm and cosy as, barefoot, she led Snape into her sitting room.

'I hope I haven't interrupted you,' he said awkwardly, perching on the arm of a chair.

'Not at all,' she replied breezily. 'I was just going to stay in with a book. Can I get you anything to drink?'

'I've brought some,' Snape answered, pulling a bottle of red wine out of his robes. 'Draco told me you have a taste for this particular vintage.'

She leaned down to inspect the label and grinned. 'He's right. Shall I get some goblets, then?'

While she rummaged in a cabinet, Snape set the wine on the coffee table and walked over to inspect her phonograph. She had made it absurdly old-fashioned: the casing was blue enamel, and the fluted horn rose two feet into the air.

'Do you like it?' she asked from behind him.

'Yes, very much. Although it's much more elaborate than anything I'd have come up with.'

She uncorked the wine and poured in into two glasses, then curled up on the corner of the sofa. 'Well, I am the Transfiguration professor. It wouldn't do to let standards slip.'

Snape sat next to her on the sofa – surely that wasn't too presumptuous? – and leaned forward to take his wine.

'No,' she said, putting her hand on his arm. 'You have to let it breathe first.'

Amused, he drew back and waited silently for a few minutes until she decided the wine had aerated enough.

'Now,' she said, picking up her wine, 'a toast.'

'A toast to what?'

'To music.' She clinked her glass against his and took a long sip, rolling the wine over her tongue for a few seconds before swallowing.

He found her mouth absurdly erotic and drank hastily, hoping to cover his discomfiture.

'So,' she said, 'you wanted to know if there were any songs I liked from amongst the albums you lent me.'

He nodded.

'I've got three favourites at the moment,' she informed him. 'Shall I play them for you?'

'Please.'

She got up and selected three albums from a shelf near the window – he noticed with approval that she had not stacked them one on top of another, but kept them stored upright instead – and put one on the turntable, waving her wand to start the turntable revolving and carefully placing the needle onto the vinyl.

The first song was a melodic, simple mixture of guitars and piano. The words and the timbre of the electric guitar put Snape in mind of summer and sunlight. Peculiarly for that particular band, the tune contained no flute; idly, he wondered if Hermione preferred that.

The second, by a different group this time, was also very melodic, with otherworldly harmonics and distorted guitars; its lyrics gave a haunting account of a traveller returned home to find that, in his absence, decades have passed, while he himself has aged only by one year. This was rather the opposite of his own situation, Snape reflected ruefully: after the war, and after regaining his health, he seemed to have aged tremendously – on the inside, if not so much on the outside – while everyone else, in their relief and exultation, had shed years.

The third, and final, tune that Hermione played for him was one that Snape had always loved: a dark and powerful piece of blues worked in chiming guitars, thundering drums, and wailing vocals. The grinding, driving rhythm had always lowered his inhibitions; listening to it, he could imagine how he might behave were his passions permitted to reign. This song, he knew, like so many others by the same band, was a song of the id, and he had always taken care that listening to it should remain an infrequent pleasure.

An affinity for this song seemed so out of character for Hermione, as Snape had come to know her, that, when she returned to her place on the sofa after situating the needle, he looked at her searchingly, wondering what aspects of her personality she had yet to reveal to him. She shrugged, answering his unspoken question, and said, 'It makes me feel... different. Bolder.'

Hermione's slight movement had shifted the neck of her dressing gown, revealing an expanse of smooth skin that Snape tried in vain to drag his eyes away from. She must see him staring, he thought; surely, she would tell him to stop looking at her this way! But she did nothing of the sort, and some restraint inside him broke, almost imperceptibly. Driven forward by the music, and the dimness of the sitting room, and her air of mellow contentment, he reached out and pushed the fabric of the dressing gown further aside with one graceful hand, leaning in to kiss the exposed swell of her breast.

She arched her back and sighed softly; simultaneously relieved and aroused, he sucked at her skin gently for a moment, then raised his head, knowing instinctively what he would see: her half-closed eyes, pupils dilated, her lips parted from her sigh. She allowed him a moment to appreciate her enjoyment of what he was doing before she touched her lips to his in a long, sensuous kiss that seemed to him to mimic the rhythm of the song on the turntable.

He closed his eyes, luxuriating in the pleasure of her mouth, and allowed her to lead. Pushing him against the back of the sofa, she climbed slowly into his lap and straddled his thighs, never breaking the kiss. Her hands moved from his shoulders to the back of his head; her fingers caressed his scalp in slow circles as her tongue twined around his. Burning with a desire to touch her, he pulled her hips closer against him and slid his hands up to her ribcage. His thumbs stroked beneath her breasts through the cloth of the dressing gown, and she sighed again, her breath warm in his mouth.

Snape felt himself sink into thoughtlessness when she moved, pressing her chest to him and grinding her hips in one long, torturous revolution against his. The movements of her mouth were growing more heated and urgent. Unable and unwilling to resist her unspoken demands, he hooked his fingers around either side of her gown and pulled it open slowly, exposing her breasts. He moved his hands further up her ribs and ran the pads of his thumbs in light circles around her nipples before brushing over them gently.

Breathing raggedly, Hermione reached between them and untied the belt of the dressing gown, letting the garment fall completely open across the front of her body. He couldn't help himself – he wanted to look at her: breaking the kiss, he let his eyes roam over her face, flushed with desire; her full breasts; her pale belly; her soft thighs that met beneath a scrap of black satin. She arched her back again, and he bent his head to kiss her breasts, loving the feel of the silky skin beneath his lips. When he ran his tongue lightly over one of her breasts, her head fell back, and she groaned quietly. Supporting the curve of her back with his hands, he leaned forward and closed his mouth around her nipple, sucking gently at first, then harder, until he could feel her moans vibrating in her chest. He did the same to her other breast, and then her hands were closing around his jaw, forcing his head up into another kiss, hot, passionate, and demanding.

The insistent fire pulsing throughout his body gradually made Snape aware that if he permitted this activity to progress any further, he would quickly reach a point at which self-restraint would no longer be even remotely possible. Regretfully, he gentled the kiss and closed Hermione's dressing gown over her breasts.

'Severus,' she whispered, 'we don't have to stop.'

'I know,' he said quietly, planting light kisses along her jaw and over her cheeks.

She melted against his body sweetly and asked simply, 'Why?'

He held her, embracing her, and said softly, 'I won't deny that I want you very much. But if we do this, Hermione, it shouldn't be hasty or impulsive.'

She nodded. 'I understand.'

The music had stopped some time ago; the only sound in the room now came from the crackling of the logs in the fire. Snape stretched out on the sofa, drawing Hermione against him, and entwined his legs with hers. 'I would, however, like to keep kissing you,' he said.

'By all means,' she replied, smiling, and offered her mouth to him. Finding a strange pleasure in tormenting himself, in resisting his body's needs, Snape remained there with her until long after midnight, enjoying the simplicity of her slow, delicious kisses and the feel of her languid body, warm in its fluffy dressing gown, relaxing against him.

***

Snape strode into the Great Hall for the following week's meeting of the Duelling Club already in a foul mood, due to a number of different factors. First, and most frustrating, was the fact that Hermione had not had any free time since their evening spent snogging on her sofa. As a consequence, he had seen very little of her, even during the day. The last conversation they had shared had taken place this morning in the staff room, when she had informed him that she would be leaving the castle directly after the Duelling Club to spend the weekend in London. He had gone to his lessons wondering if she had decided that kissing him had been a mistake.

But he had not been given the leisure to dwell on that speculation because not twenty minutes later he ended up in the infirmary assisting Madam Pomfrey with some very stupid students of his who had hexed each other's noses off. Unbeknownst to Snape, who was demonstrating a spell on the other side of the classroom at the time, they had been attempting a poorly modified version of the Bat-Bogey Hex. Upon hearing the gasps and screams, he had whirled around, stopping short in horrified fascination at the sight of the two noses wriggling half-heartedly on the wooden floor. Some time had passed before he was able to force enough Calming Draught down the perpetrators' throats to convince them to walk to the hospital wing; not even threats of dire punishment proved to be enough to compel them to collect their noses, a task which had been left to their thoroughly fed-up professor.

Finally, having missed most of his morning lessons, he sat down gratefully at lunch, only to be accosted by Miranda, who demanded bluntly to be allowed to duel that night. Hoping that the grinding of his teeth was audible only to himself, he had acquiesced, provided that she sharpened her skills only on Draco Malfoy, the sole member of the club, other than Snape himself, who had enough sense to be prepared for the sort of spells she might throw at him.

Wrenching his concentration back to the matter at hand, Snape let his gaze sweep menacingly over the students assembled warily before him. Some of them had already suffered the lash of his temper today and looked as if they would dearly prefer to be anywhere but at the Duelling Club; even Hermione and Draco seemed subdued. Only Miranda, to Snape's irritation, appeared unaffected by his mood: she bounced on the balls of her feet impatiently, grinning in anticipation.

'This evening,' Snape growled, 'Professor Silva and Professor Malfoy have volunteered to demonstrate their duelling expertise for the club. Although this is a contest of skill, rather than a fight...' here he eyed Miranda meaningfully '...you are advised to stand well back from the high table and be prepared to shield yourselves, should the need arise. I will not tolerate any misbehaviour tonight.'

The students backed away from the high table hastily, some drawing their wands protectively, as Miranda and Draco leapt lightly onto the tabletop and executed the opening formalities of the duel.

Draco was good, Snape thought, but not good enough: the duel was a complete rout. The students were bedazzled by Miranda's showmanship, but what really impressed Snape was the ruthless way in which she bombarded Draco with curses. He was able to fire off only one spell for every ten or twelve of hers, and it was clear to Snape that the effort of shielding himself was draining Draco's energy alarmingly. It would not be long before he faltered, Snape reasoned, and then Draco would be risking serious injury.

Snape nudged Hermione, who approached the high table as closely as she dared and shouted, 'Finite incantatem!'

In the resulting silence, Draco's aggrieved panting was audible. 'What was that for?' he demanded, turning a fierce glare on Hermione. 'I had everything under control!'

'I...' she began, turning helplessly toward Snape.

He stepped forward, noticing as he did so that Miranda was perfectly composed and scarcely even winded. 'You were getting tired,' he said shortly to Draco. 'Tired wizards make sloppy duellers.'

Draco snorted, flipping his hair out of his eyes, and Snape, painfully conscious of his own fatigue, narrowed his eyes at Draco's unspoken taunt. 'You have something to say?' he asked silkily.

'Yes. You come up here and take my place, and let's see how tired you get.' Draco jumped to the floor and gestured for Snape to take his place.

Snape scowled at Draco and clambered onto the table. 'By all means,' he drawled.

Draco huffed again and stomped out of the hall, leaving the students to stare wide-eyed at the two professors standing on the table. Hermione's wand was still out, Snape saw, and that too annoyed him, as it suggested she might intervene if she felt he was flagging.

Then he turned to face Miranda and bowed; noting the eagerness in her face and the anticipatory tension in her limbs, he allowed a smirk to turn up the corners of his lips. At last he had discovered a good reason to permit Miranda to duel: so that she could be the target for his temper.

He quickly revised this opinion once the duel began. He could use her as a target, but only if she paused in her relentless casting for long enough to let him fire off some really terrible hexes. Her turn of speed was truly astonishing; it also irked him that she cast silently, leaving the students with no idea of the kind of magic he was facing. They might not look so unimpressed, he thought bitterly, if they could hear her. Though she never once breached duelling etiquette – non-verbal spells did tend to be the norm in professional duels – he considered that her strategy counted as fighting dirty, at least for the purposes of a student club, and pursed his lips firmly together, determined not to make another sound.

His sudden silence put her off her stride, and he was finally able to cast, a powerful 'Sectumsempra!' that screamed through his brain and streaked down the table. Hermione, recognizing the spell, gasped out loud in horror, and Miranda, registering the danger, narrowly dodged the bolt of light.

Black hair whipping around her face, she fixed him with a look of pure fury and advanced, flinging curse after silent curse at him, all of which he deflected or evaded nimbly, elated by the fact that he had finally gotten under her guard. Chunks of stone broke off the wall behind him and tumbled to the floor; ducking for cover, the students scattered, and Hermione rushed forward again, flicking a Blocking Charm toward the wall and screaming at the older students, 'The safe-word, damn it!'

Two or three of the seventh-year Gryffindors brandished their wands at Snape and Miranda; the air cleared at once, and Snape, chest heaving, dropped his wand deliberately on the table. He turned to face Hermione, about to apologise – and a jolt hit him in the back, right between his shoulder blades, a perfectly aimed final curse fired off silently by Miranda in flagrant defiance of all the rules of duelling. Flames seared through his chest. He stumbled, momentarily unable to control his muscles, but managed to catch himself before toppling to the floor. He recognised this spell, recognised the sudden, painful, arousal in his body, the deafening pounding of his heart, the sense of desperate need growing in his mind that was quickly crowding out rational thought, and felt a tide of anger build up inside of him.

Instead of the apology he had been about to make, he shouted hoarsely, 'This meeting is over! Everyone is dismissed!'

With a monumental effort of will, he ignored the curse raging through him until Hermione had ushered all of the students out of the Great Hall; no one, including Hermione herself, seemed to have noticed Miranda's out-of-bounds parting shot, and they all glanced at him in puzzlement as they left the room.

When he judged that the club members had at last passed out of earshot, Snape snatched up his wand and pointed it viciously at the doors of the hall, which slammed shut with a violent bang. He rounded on Miranda, who had climbed down from the table, and stalked toward her, hoping his greater height proved intimidating.

'You stupid woman!' he exploded, his hands beginning to tremble from the effort of resisting the spell. 'There's a reason the Lassi requiescamus is a curse! Do you know what you've done?'

'Of course I do!' she shouted back; far from being intimidated, her thin face was bright with laughter, some of which she was unable to suppress. Miranda backed toward the wall, never taking her eyes of his face, as he approached and leapt from the table; he finally saw the telltale tremors in her limbs that showed him her resistance was weakening as well. Her breath was coming in short gasps, and the blue of her huge eyes was beginning to glaze over. He knew the same thing was happening to him: the spell had been denied for too long; soon, it would take over.

'Severus...' Miranda whispered desperately.

Abruptly, his mind shut down. Shoving her against the wall, he pulled up her robes and forced her leg around his waist. She clung to his shoulders, kissing him violently, biting his lips and thrusting her tongue into his mouth. He groaned and ground his hips between her legs, sliding his hand along the back of her thigh until it reached her centre; heat enveloped his fingers as he explored her. She moaned into his mouth and tilted her hips, driving his fingers deeper into her.

His body shrieked its need at him; fumbling at his trousers with his other hand, he finally managed to release his erection, which was now excruciatingly hard. Lifting her other leg and pinning her in place with his weight, he pushed aside her knickers and plunged into her as far as he could. She met him thrust for thrust, crying out inarticulately as he took her, roughly, slamming her against the wall over and over.

Her orgasm, when it happened, was so intense that he felt as if his body was being squeezed in half. Her scream of completion filled the Great Hall and set off a cascade of fireworks in his groin; with one last push, he came deep inside her, a powerful release that left his entire body shaking with relief.

Weakly, he lowered her legs to the ground and backed away, leaning for support against the high table. He felt the spell wane and fade away; they had satisfied its demands. He lifted his head, nearly exhausted by the effort it took, and saw that Miranda had sunk to the floor and was rubbing the back of her head. 'I'm going to have a bruise,' she said and laughed softly.

'Why?' he asked her quietly, physically incapable of raising his voice now. 'Why that spell, when you know the only way to lift it is for the caster and the victim to reach climax together?'

Wincing, she got to her feet. Taking a brief moment to cast a cleansing spell on both of them, she offered Snape her hand and said, 'Come with me.'

Ignoring her hand, he forced himself fully upright and followed her into the dungeons. She lit the fire in her sitting room and poured him a drink, a generous measure of whisky that warmed him and revived him.

'What on earth possessed you to do that?' he asked again when she had settled herself on the hearthrug with a drink of her own.

Miranda gazed into the fire for a long time without answering, her face pale and thoughtful. He felt as wrung out as a dishrag and marvelled that she could appear so calm and composed. She sat in a pose of extreme relaxation, leaning back on her arms, her long legs stretched out before her. Her glossy, black hair, hanging down her back, wasn't even disarranged, he noted with a twinge of envy.

Finally, she said simply, 'I wanted you. I was tired of waiting.'

Snape heaved a weary sigh and rubbed his hands across his face. 'You might've tried the conventional way before resorting to a curse to seduce me,' he pointed out.

She shrugged gracefully. 'I didn't think that would work.'

'You were right,' he said bitterly. 'I wasn't interested in you.'

'Wasn't,' she repeated, still not looking at him.

He leaned back and let his head drop against the back of the chair, staring at the stone ceiling. He knew he was not to blame for what had happened in the Great Hall, yet guilt washed through his mind. This was the end of his hopes for Hermione, he thought sadly; she wouldn't want him now, and he couldn't fault her for that. He felt as if he had betrayed her, even though, for all he knew, she had never really wanted him in the first place. Certainly, she had given him no indication since their evening together that she was ready to become involved with him. But he was not so petty that he resented this; he knew she had been genuinely busy. If he were prepared to be so generous with Hermione, he thought, he should really extend the same courtesy to Miranda: she had not known about him and Hermione, and she was not really a stupid woman, as he had called her. Just a selfish, inconsiderate, and reckless one.

He sighed again and raised his head. 'So what do we do now?' he asked resignedly.

Miranda finally turned away from the fire and looked at him, and he was struck by the tender patience in her expression. 'Come here,' she commanded softly and held her hand out to him again.

This time he grasped it and joined her on the rug. She took his drink from him and placed it on the hearthstones next to hers, then stroked his cheek gently with the pads of her fingers. To his surprise, he found that he did not mind her touching him now, that the combination of wariness and admiration he had always felt in her presence was making his blood sing again with arousal. He took her hand away from his cheek and kissed her fingertips, half questioning what he thought he was doing, and saw the answering flare of desire in her eyes. She pulled him closer to her and began to unfasten his robes.

Their lovemaking was calmer this time, but no less intense. She made every effort to please him, perhaps in apology for forcing herself upon him earlier, and he reciprocated enthusiastically, excited by her responsiveness. It was not until much later, as he lay half-asleep in his own bed, alone, that it occurred to him that she had not spoken a single word during their moments of intimacy, either in the Great Hall or in her rooms. She had not called out his name as she had climaxed. It wasn't as if she had made no sound at all, he admitted, remembering her moans of satisfaction; all the same, the lack of words seemed strange to him, a reflection of a kind of detachment he found glaringly out of place considering what they had been doing. But then, he wondered, how could a person be passionate and detached at the same time? Perhaps he simply didn't know enough about passion. Or perhaps, he thought, intensity and passion were not the same thing.

***

Snape was playing chess with Draco in the parlour of Malfoy Manor on Sunday night. After considering the board carefully, he moved his bishop into position to take Draco's queen.

Draco tapped his fingers against his thigh thoughtfully. Still deciding on his move, he asked conversationally, 'How did your duel with Miranda go?'

'Why didn't you stay to watch?' Snape asked irritably.

Draco moved his queen out of danger. 'I wasn't feeling so well,' he admitted. 'She blasted me with some kind of nausea spell.'

'I see.' Snape focussed on one of his few remaining pawns.

'Well?' Draco said. 'What happened?'

Reluctantly, Snape told him about the Lassi requiescamus.

Draco stared at him, aghast. 'Is that what you've been doing all weekend?'

'Yes.'

Ignoring the chessboard now, Draco said evenly, 'You hid that well.' He regarded Snape solemnly. 'Does Hermione know?'

'What?' Snape asked, surprised. 'No,' he said, feeling a sick sensation of shame. 'Why do you ask?'

'I won't tell her,' Draco said, and his expression changed to one of pity. 'Just don't lead her on.'

Insulted, Snape snapped, 'I have no intention of leading anyone on. My relationship with Hermione is strictly one of friendship.'

Draco raised his eyebrows. 'If you say so.'

'It's true,' Snape insisted quietly, knowing that this piece of literal truth was very, very close to being a lie.

Draco shrugged, as if to suggest that Snape could delude himself as much as he liked, and looked down at the chessboard again. 'It's your move,' he said.