Three ficlets
Hey all! *waves* lillian_cho rather graciously invited me over here to post these fics.
Title: Blue
Author: Arsenic
Rating: G
Pairing(s) or Character(s) (for Genfic): Severus Snape
The work is based on: Cinderella (evil stepmom)
Fandom: Harry Potter
It's not in the way she speaks or carries herself or even the way she is forever offhandedly mentioning his faults to his father. A vapid, "Really, Severus could stand to bear himself a bit more like you, dear," when they deigned to take their thrice cursed responsibility out in public, or a giggly, "Dear lord, Severus," (such a Muggle, utterly Muggle curse) when he would say something she didn't understand. As if to suggest intelligence were something to be frowned upon.
His mother had been smart.
No, it was in her smile, the way the corners of her eyes crinkled up but the actual blue of her eyes was always a bit. . .glacial. Severus had never seen the icebergs of the Arctic but the books he had read on northern breeds of magic had contained pictures of that blue sheen. It reflected back on the sun beautifully and glossed over the magnificently quiet danger of the icebergs themselves.
She was always smiling.
Severus had never loved his father, not the dark man who he so very much resembled, the one who had driven his mother and the reassuring, familiar touch of her magic to such madness that in the end she could not remember Severus, let alone the stories she would tell him, the spells she would whisper with their long, exotic sounding words from a world that once was and would always be.
His stepmother came after, once his father had safely packed away his quiet, unassuming, witch (the word always sounded like a slap in Severus's head) of a wife. The new wife had appeared then. She of the iceberg blue eyes and ready smile and wit that was sharp in ways that didn't cause people to yell at her.
People yelled at Severus.
She who didn't smile the day they got the letter. Instead she said, "Are you sure of that, Tobias?" to his father's emphatic exclamation that Severus would never attend his mother's alma mater. "After all," she purred, still not smiling, "the term is nearly year round."
When Severus hauled his things up onto the Hogwarts Express all by himself, he found an empty compartment, and closed the door to hide his smile where nobody would see it.
Title: Shiny Hair
Author: Arsenic
Rating: PG
Pairing(s) or Character(s) (for Genfic): SS/HG
The work is based on: Ugly Duckling
Fandom: Harry Potter
Hermione figured out very early on that being smart didn't mean knowing everything. Hogwarts students called her a know-it-all--behind her back and to her face--and Hermione felt perfectly justified in living up to the title, as it was better than some of the things the kids from home had called her.
At least at Hogwarts being a know-it-all meant you might live longer.
Though she probably should have been, she wasn't surprised when Ron didn't recognize her at the Yule Ball. She'd wanted him to, of course. What fourteen year old girl didn't want a boy a foot taller than her with good potential and a smile that always wiped away her homesickness to see that shiny hair wasn't the only thing that mattered in a relationship?
(Or perfect teeth. The kind only wizards had. Hermione's parents just couldn't understand the appeal of perfection. Most days she understood, after all, they'd raised her, but occasionally. . . She almost hadn't noticed how far she'd let Madam Pomfrey go. Almost.)
She wanted him to say something like, "Wow, you're beautiful," even though this was Ron and it would have been stuttered and he'd have looked at his toes, but it would have meant, "you're beautiful, you are," not, "oh, hey, you look good in a dress."
To her surprise, she wasn't surprised ten years later when somebody did tell her, "You're beautiful."
He didn't look at his shoes as he said it, which was nice, as she wasn't fourteen anymore, and was not entirely certain he ever had been. Her hair was a mess, she'd pushed it back countless times in distraction. The problem she was working at wouldn't conform to any known arithmantical boundaries, and Hermione would have preferred not to create new ones. She hadn't been sleeping enough as it was. She was sure there were circles around her eyes.
He did stutter a bit, but that might have been because he yawned in the middle of the casual declaration. He didn't apologize or excuse himself. Even were he the type, they were a little beyond that.
She laughed when it happened, even though she'd waited so long for someone to say it, someone to notice. She said, "You're tired."
He repeated, "You're beautiful."
So she shoved the compliment away like she always did the things she most wanted, as afraid of them as she was of the things she least wanted. "Since when?"
"Since I looked long enough to see you."
And she should have been surprised, but Severus Snape had always seen more than he was supposed to.
Title: Password
Author: Arsenic
Rating: G
Pairing(s) or Character(s) (for Genfic): Bill Weasley
The work is based on: Rumpelstiltskin
Fandom: Harry Potter
The problem with curses, Bill Weasley had come to realize, was that they never looked quite the same. Nor, despite their similarities, were the effects ever identical.
The problem with goblins was that they didn't care in what sort of condition their curse-breakers emerged from a dig, so long as they got their gold.
Which was how Bill found himself entrapped in a curse, fighting the fear that always came with nearly certain death almost as much as the adrenaline, which rushed so hard at these times it was hard to think.
Thinking was necessary, though. Bill hadn't gone down to one of these yet, and he didn't plan on tonight being the night. The Curse pulsed against him, golden strands of light that seemed to crush in on him holding him where he stood.
He wasn't sure if the Curse was sentient in some way, or if the magic was just incredibly complicated but the strands had spoken to him, or at least, that was what it had felt like.
As Bill understood it, the strands fed off his magic and would do so for roughly eight hours until he was drained entirely. Then they would leave him for dead, and go back to happily guarding their hoards of gold.
Bill would have despaired except that it was a known fact in every curse-breaker's existence that everything could be broken, most things with a password. So he began to talk to the Curse. It felt crazy at first. Bill often spoke aloud to himself when trying to break one, or brought in other breakers, something like that. He'd never had much practice at speaking to the curse itself.
He tried an experimental, "So. . .where do you call home?"
"Magic," it said.
"Right," Bill said. "Why do you guard the treasure?"
The Curse seemed a little confused at that. Finally it said, "Magic."
Which seemed to be its answer no matter what Bill asked. So Bill dug up the word "magic" in every language he could think of: Latin, French, Spanish, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic and onward. When nothing seemed to work he closed his eyes and thought of the way magic worked, the way it felt, the way curses came together and could be broken.
It was personal, magic was so very personal, but there were certain things that were true for every practitioner of the art, everyone from Egypt to America, from the Middle Ages to the postmodern.
Magic was something a person had to know as deeply as he knew himself, his home, anything of immense value and enormous familiarity.
With that, Bill took a breath and let the Egyptian word for "knowledge" curl off his tongue.
He thought he felt a spark of something sharp against him--as if the Curse had always known this would happen--before its golden threads slipped down from him and faded away, remnants of the sun disappearing in the depths of the night.
Title: Rescue
Author: Arsenic
Rating: PG
Pairing(s) or Character(s) (for Genfic): HG/SS
The work is based on: Beauty and the Beast
Fandom: Harry Potter
"They sent you?" Snape looked so enraged that it was almost hard to feel insulted.
Hermione managed. "Hm, let me see." She ticked off a finger, "I'm the best Curse Breaker within four countries, and the nearest two were both taking care of bigger problems than you, if you can imagine," another finger, "you're the one who bloody walked into a Compulsion Curse, a Love Compulsion Curse no less," and another finger, the last, "for whatever reason, Minerva values you and can't stand to see you whither away from need of Love." She threw her hands down at her side. "So unless you know of someone who can fulfill the dictates of the Curse, you're stuck with me and the brilliance you find such pleasure in maligning."
The last was said with a sort of cold cruelty that she knew was unworthy of her.
And despite the fact that his only response was a deliberately cutting, "It's a good thing Minerva has learned to take disappointment well," and he was older than her, Hermione still felt like a fifth-form bully picking on an infant.
To distract herself she said, "Describe the curse to me, everything, even details you think don't matter."
It only made her feel worse when he did a better job than anyone with whom she'd ever worked.
*
"How did you get caught in the Curse?"
"It's not a well, Miss Granger, it's not something I fell down and couldn't climb my way out of."
But Compulsion Curses were large, they had to be. Compulsion was hard to weave at the best of times, doubly hard when the weave had to stick until someone, well, walked into it. "How did the Curse come into contact with your being?"
"I was not paying attention."
"When I was thirteen I watched you look in four directions all at once."
"I'm slipping in my old age."
Without thinking, Hermione said, "You aren't that old."
He muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, ". . .feel it."
"Snape. Can you not understand that I have to know? You didn't see it, you can't tell me what it looked like, its size, its shape, its color, anything. I have to know how it enveloped you."
"What's the first thing a Curse-Breaker learns about Compulsion Curses, Miss Granger?"
Hermione said, "They're. . .compelling." Specifically, they tended to attract those victims who were already weakened in the specific area of the spell's compulsion to begin with. She frowned. "You want to die?"
"That's easier to believe of me, isn't it?"
*
Often, if Hermione could get the person not to want what the Curse compelled him to need, it could break the compulsion. It was backward logic, and often their apathy toward the object had to be so strong it bordered on the dangerous, as apathy of that sort could easily spread into other foci.
Hermione didn't know how to convince a nearly fifty year old man that he didn't want love. Most people wanted love, it was an essentially human trait. People who had experienced very little of it craved it more than others.
The Curse was eating at Snape particularly fast given his yearning. Despite his denial, Hermione thought he wouldn't mind dying if he couldn't get what he wanted.
Hermione wasn't ready to have that sort of blight on her relatively spotless Curse-Breaking record.
The thing to do, she decided, was to trick the Curse. There actually were people who loved Snape. Minerva, for one. And Draco, although getting him to admit to loving anything other than himself was like trying to aim an Imperius through a house elf dwelling's keyhole. Given the new information recently presented to her about Snape, she was relatively certain he loved them back.
All she had to do was. . .twist the Compulsion.
She explained the idea to Snape, who, after an interminably long silence said, "Kind of cheating, is it not?"
Hermione handed him a book (that was at least twice his weight) on the flexibility of compulsion and said, "I'm revoking your privileges as Slytherin until you can do better than that."
*
When he was reading, Snape would curl up at first, as though hoarding the words. After a bit though--perhaps realizing she had no intention of stealing them from him--he would stretch out. This was a slow process, starting with his fingers, (longer than she had ever realized,) crawling through his arms and neck and back, and ending in his legs and feet and toes.
It was unpracticed and elegant, and for whatever reason, Hermione found herself having to force her attention to her own text. She had never once thought anything half so interesting as the delicate weave of a Curse, malevolent in its bittersweet intricacy.
At some point she summoned herself some tea from habit, summoning a second cup out of ingrained politeness. He took it with a murmured, "thanks," and she choked on her own tea.
He had the (shocking) grace not to say anything.
*
Hermione asked, "The weave, did it feel at all porous?"
Snape tapped thoughtfully on the surface of his book. "It felt. . .Muggles have this material, I remember, my father bought me a ball made out of it once. It bounced."
"Rubber?"
"Yes, like rubber."
"It stretched?"
"And snapped back."
Hermione reached across the table and began flipping frantically through the book she'd given Snape to read. She hoisted herself so that she was leaning over the length of the table, reading upside down. "Sorry," she muttered absent-mindedly, aware that her hair had probably occluded his face entirely.
She felt long fingers tuck a strand firmly behind her ear. It wasn't gentle.
It felt that way.
She said, "I think I know how to do this."
*
The spell to mutate the Curse took a lot of energy. It was wordy, unnecessarily so, really. Hermione had learned that Curse-Breakers evidently liked to hear themselves talk. She'd created all of her breakings as acronyms. Short and slightly humorous. She was entirely sure those who followed and needed the spells would miss the point entirely.
Snape had laughed when she had explained that to him, a tangent on a tangent on a tangent as she had prepared herself. She had been amazed at how he had let her talk, and not just let her talk, had listened. It wasn't easy to tell, he didn't provide soft sounds of encouragement like other people, or even nod his head. He just. . .watched her. Stayed where he was. Laughed a soft breath of comprehension.
When she had finished the spell, all flowing Latin phrases and dramatic waves of her wand, he stood behind her, not touching her and asked, "Well?"
In trying not to fall backward, she swayed forward. He caught her with his hands on her waist. She said, "It probably worked."
"This is my life we're discussing, Miss Granger." His hands didn't waver.
"I need Minerva or Draco to test the theory," she said, panting slightly.
His hands moved without moving, and his quiet, "Ah," felt like a bruise.
*
Two weeks later Hermione let her eleven o'clock appointment into her office only to find herself face to face with Severus Snape. He was carrying a book with a twine ribbon wrapped around it. He sat down very stiffly and said, "I owe you a Life Debt."
"Yes, well, I'm best friends with Harry Potter so you can pretty much figure I'm going to go the noble and stupid way so far as that's concerned."
"It's rumored that every few years the entire House of Gryffindor petitions to be exempt from receiving Life Debts."
Hermione laughed. Her eyes still crinkled, she said, "If you came only to tell me that, you've underestimated my intelligence even more than the usual amount."
Snape slid the book across the table. "I somewhat figured you wouldn't accept the other offering."
Hermione turned the book to look at its side. It was Muggle. The Science and Mechanics of Rubber Production. "That's either the most thoughtful gift I've ever been given, or the most reductive."
Snape smirked, and his expression was like a curse, not in that it was evil, but that in Hermione could read it without even opening her eyes, could feel her way through it without putting out a hand. He stood and she said, "Severus."
He raised an eyebrow but didn't refute the address. "Hermione?"
"If I had tried to break the Compulsion in the more traditional way, would you have. . .let me?"
At his side, his hands shook for less than a second. "The more traditional way?"
Hermione moved without premeditation, sliding so that her knees came up onto her desk. It was entirely undignified but Snape didn't falter back from it and she was able to hook one hand around the back of his head, her palm resting over his ear, and settle her lips against his. It wasn't exactly soft, she didn't think he had waited this long for something like that, at least not at this moment. She certainly hadn't spent two weeks thinking about sweetness.
He tasted like coffee with not enough cream and too much sugar. Sweet and somehow clean.
She pulled back after a bit--he wasn't moving--and asked, "Would you have let me?"
He ran his tongue over his lower lip in answer. She asked, "Why couldn't you just ask?"
He brought his hand up to twist a curl in his finger. "Until this moment, I hadn't the type of imagination to allow for reading of fairy tales, let alone living them."
For a flash, a second, Hermione imagined herself a princess, and her desk a tower. She leaned in for another kiss from her Prince Charming.
The second stretched on.
Title: Blue
Author: Arsenic
Rating: G
Pairing(s) or Character(s) (for Genfic): Severus Snape
The work is based on: Cinderella (evil stepmom)
Fandom: Harry Potter
It's not in the way she speaks or carries herself or even the way she is forever offhandedly mentioning his faults to his father. A vapid, "Really, Severus could stand to bear himself a bit more like you, dear," when they deigned to take their thrice cursed responsibility out in public, or a giggly, "Dear lord, Severus," (such a Muggle, utterly Muggle curse) when he would say something she didn't understand. As if to suggest intelligence were something to be frowned upon.
His mother had been smart.
No, it was in her smile, the way the corners of her eyes crinkled up but the actual blue of her eyes was always a bit. . .glacial. Severus had never seen the icebergs of the Arctic but the books he had read on northern breeds of magic had contained pictures of that blue sheen. It reflected back on the sun beautifully and glossed over the magnificently quiet danger of the icebergs themselves.
She was always smiling.
Severus had never loved his father, not the dark man who he so very much resembled, the one who had driven his mother and the reassuring, familiar touch of her magic to such madness that in the end she could not remember Severus, let alone the stories she would tell him, the spells she would whisper with their long, exotic sounding words from a world that once was and would always be.
His stepmother came after, once his father had safely packed away his quiet, unassuming, witch (the word always sounded like a slap in Severus's head) of a wife. The new wife had appeared then. She of the iceberg blue eyes and ready smile and wit that was sharp in ways that didn't cause people to yell at her.
People yelled at Severus.
She who didn't smile the day they got the letter. Instead she said, "Are you sure of that, Tobias?" to his father's emphatic exclamation that Severus would never attend his mother's alma mater. "After all," she purred, still not smiling, "the term is nearly year round."
When Severus hauled his things up onto the Hogwarts Express all by himself, he found an empty compartment, and closed the door to hide his smile where nobody would see it.
Title: Shiny Hair
Author: Arsenic
Rating: PG
Pairing(s) or Character(s) (for Genfic): SS/HG
The work is based on: Ugly Duckling
Fandom: Harry Potter
Hermione figured out very early on that being smart didn't mean knowing everything. Hogwarts students called her a know-it-all--behind her back and to her face--and Hermione felt perfectly justified in living up to the title, as it was better than some of the things the kids from home had called her.
At least at Hogwarts being a know-it-all meant you might live longer.
Though she probably should have been, she wasn't surprised when Ron didn't recognize her at the Yule Ball. She'd wanted him to, of course. What fourteen year old girl didn't want a boy a foot taller than her with good potential and a smile that always wiped away her homesickness to see that shiny hair wasn't the only thing that mattered in a relationship?
(Or perfect teeth. The kind only wizards had. Hermione's parents just couldn't understand the appeal of perfection. Most days she understood, after all, they'd raised her, but occasionally. . . She almost hadn't noticed how far she'd let Madam Pomfrey go. Almost.)
She wanted him to say something like, "Wow, you're beautiful," even though this was Ron and it would have been stuttered and he'd have looked at his toes, but it would have meant, "you're beautiful, you are," not, "oh, hey, you look good in a dress."
To her surprise, she wasn't surprised ten years later when somebody did tell her, "You're beautiful."
He didn't look at his shoes as he said it, which was nice, as she wasn't fourteen anymore, and was not entirely certain he ever had been. Her hair was a mess, she'd pushed it back countless times in distraction. The problem she was working at wouldn't conform to any known arithmantical boundaries, and Hermione would have preferred not to create new ones. She hadn't been sleeping enough as it was. She was sure there were circles around her eyes.
He did stutter a bit, but that might have been because he yawned in the middle of the casual declaration. He didn't apologize or excuse himself. Even were he the type, they were a little beyond that.
She laughed when it happened, even though she'd waited so long for someone to say it, someone to notice. She said, "You're tired."
He repeated, "You're beautiful."
So she shoved the compliment away like she always did the things she most wanted, as afraid of them as she was of the things she least wanted. "Since when?"
"Since I looked long enough to see you."
And she should have been surprised, but Severus Snape had always seen more than he was supposed to.
Title: Password
Author: Arsenic
Rating: G
Pairing(s) or Character(s) (for Genfic): Bill Weasley
The work is based on: Rumpelstiltskin
Fandom: Harry Potter
The problem with curses, Bill Weasley had come to realize, was that they never looked quite the same. Nor, despite their similarities, were the effects ever identical.
The problem with goblins was that they didn't care in what sort of condition their curse-breakers emerged from a dig, so long as they got their gold.
Which was how Bill found himself entrapped in a curse, fighting the fear that always came with nearly certain death almost as much as the adrenaline, which rushed so hard at these times it was hard to think.
Thinking was necessary, though. Bill hadn't gone down to one of these yet, and he didn't plan on tonight being the night. The Curse pulsed against him, golden strands of light that seemed to crush in on him holding him where he stood.
He wasn't sure if the Curse was sentient in some way, or if the magic was just incredibly complicated but the strands had spoken to him, or at least, that was what it had felt like.
As Bill understood it, the strands fed off his magic and would do so for roughly eight hours until he was drained entirely. Then they would leave him for dead, and go back to happily guarding their hoards of gold.
Bill would have despaired except that it was a known fact in every curse-breaker's existence that everything could be broken, most things with a password. So he began to talk to the Curse. It felt crazy at first. Bill often spoke aloud to himself when trying to break one, or brought in other breakers, something like that. He'd never had much practice at speaking to the curse itself.
He tried an experimental, "So. . .where do you call home?"
"Magic," it said.
"Right," Bill said. "Why do you guard the treasure?"
The Curse seemed a little confused at that. Finally it said, "Magic."
Which seemed to be its answer no matter what Bill asked. So Bill dug up the word "magic" in every language he could think of: Latin, French, Spanish, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic and onward. When nothing seemed to work he closed his eyes and thought of the way magic worked, the way it felt, the way curses came together and could be broken.
It was personal, magic was so very personal, but there were certain things that were true for every practitioner of the art, everyone from Egypt to America, from the Middle Ages to the postmodern.
Magic was something a person had to know as deeply as he knew himself, his home, anything of immense value and enormous familiarity.
With that, Bill took a breath and let the Egyptian word for "knowledge" curl off his tongue.
He thought he felt a spark of something sharp against him--as if the Curse had always known this would happen--before its golden threads slipped down from him and faded away, remnants of the sun disappearing in the depths of the night.
Title: Rescue
Author: Arsenic
Rating: PG
Pairing(s) or Character(s) (for Genfic): HG/SS
The work is based on: Beauty and the Beast
Fandom: Harry Potter
"They sent you?" Snape looked so enraged that it was almost hard to feel insulted.
Hermione managed. "Hm, let me see." She ticked off a finger, "I'm the best Curse Breaker within four countries, and the nearest two were both taking care of bigger problems than you, if you can imagine," another finger, "you're the one who bloody walked into a Compulsion Curse, a Love Compulsion Curse no less," and another finger, the last, "for whatever reason, Minerva values you and can't stand to see you whither away from need of Love." She threw her hands down at her side. "So unless you know of someone who can fulfill the dictates of the Curse, you're stuck with me and the brilliance you find such pleasure in maligning."
The last was said with a sort of cold cruelty that she knew was unworthy of her.
And despite the fact that his only response was a deliberately cutting, "It's a good thing Minerva has learned to take disappointment well," and he was older than her, Hermione still felt like a fifth-form bully picking on an infant.
To distract herself she said, "Describe the curse to me, everything, even details you think don't matter."
It only made her feel worse when he did a better job than anyone with whom she'd ever worked.
*
"How did you get caught in the Curse?"
"It's not a well, Miss Granger, it's not something I fell down and couldn't climb my way out of."
But Compulsion Curses were large, they had to be. Compulsion was hard to weave at the best of times, doubly hard when the weave had to stick until someone, well, walked into it. "How did the Curse come into contact with your being?"
"I was not paying attention."
"When I was thirteen I watched you look in four directions all at once."
"I'm slipping in my old age."
Without thinking, Hermione said, "You aren't that old."
He muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, ". . .feel it."
"Snape. Can you not understand that I have to know? You didn't see it, you can't tell me what it looked like, its size, its shape, its color, anything. I have to know how it enveloped you."
"What's the first thing a Curse-Breaker learns about Compulsion Curses, Miss Granger?"
Hermione said, "They're. . .compelling." Specifically, they tended to attract those victims who were already weakened in the specific area of the spell's compulsion to begin with. She frowned. "You want to die?"
"That's easier to believe of me, isn't it?"
*
Often, if Hermione could get the person not to want what the Curse compelled him to need, it could break the compulsion. It was backward logic, and often their apathy toward the object had to be so strong it bordered on the dangerous, as apathy of that sort could easily spread into other foci.
Hermione didn't know how to convince a nearly fifty year old man that he didn't want love. Most people wanted love, it was an essentially human trait. People who had experienced very little of it craved it more than others.
The Curse was eating at Snape particularly fast given his yearning. Despite his denial, Hermione thought he wouldn't mind dying if he couldn't get what he wanted.
Hermione wasn't ready to have that sort of blight on her relatively spotless Curse-Breaking record.
The thing to do, she decided, was to trick the Curse. There actually were people who loved Snape. Minerva, for one. And Draco, although getting him to admit to loving anything other than himself was like trying to aim an Imperius through a house elf dwelling's keyhole. Given the new information recently presented to her about Snape, she was relatively certain he loved them back.
All she had to do was. . .twist the Compulsion.
She explained the idea to Snape, who, after an interminably long silence said, "Kind of cheating, is it not?"
Hermione handed him a book (that was at least twice his weight) on the flexibility of compulsion and said, "I'm revoking your privileges as Slytherin until you can do better than that."
*
When he was reading, Snape would curl up at first, as though hoarding the words. After a bit though--perhaps realizing she had no intention of stealing them from him--he would stretch out. This was a slow process, starting with his fingers, (longer than she had ever realized,) crawling through his arms and neck and back, and ending in his legs and feet and toes.
It was unpracticed and elegant, and for whatever reason, Hermione found herself having to force her attention to her own text. She had never once thought anything half so interesting as the delicate weave of a Curse, malevolent in its bittersweet intricacy.
At some point she summoned herself some tea from habit, summoning a second cup out of ingrained politeness. He took it with a murmured, "thanks," and she choked on her own tea.
He had the (shocking) grace not to say anything.
*
Hermione asked, "The weave, did it feel at all porous?"
Snape tapped thoughtfully on the surface of his book. "It felt. . .Muggles have this material, I remember, my father bought me a ball made out of it once. It bounced."
"Rubber?"
"Yes, like rubber."
"It stretched?"
"And snapped back."
Hermione reached across the table and began flipping frantically through the book she'd given Snape to read. She hoisted herself so that she was leaning over the length of the table, reading upside down. "Sorry," she muttered absent-mindedly, aware that her hair had probably occluded his face entirely.
She felt long fingers tuck a strand firmly behind her ear. It wasn't gentle.
It felt that way.
She said, "I think I know how to do this."
*
The spell to mutate the Curse took a lot of energy. It was wordy, unnecessarily so, really. Hermione had learned that Curse-Breakers evidently liked to hear themselves talk. She'd created all of her breakings as acronyms. Short and slightly humorous. She was entirely sure those who followed and needed the spells would miss the point entirely.
Snape had laughed when she had explained that to him, a tangent on a tangent on a tangent as she had prepared herself. She had been amazed at how he had let her talk, and not just let her talk, had listened. It wasn't easy to tell, he didn't provide soft sounds of encouragement like other people, or even nod his head. He just. . .watched her. Stayed where he was. Laughed a soft breath of comprehension.
When she had finished the spell, all flowing Latin phrases and dramatic waves of her wand, he stood behind her, not touching her and asked, "Well?"
In trying not to fall backward, she swayed forward. He caught her with his hands on her waist. She said, "It probably worked."
"This is my life we're discussing, Miss Granger." His hands didn't waver.
"I need Minerva or Draco to test the theory," she said, panting slightly.
His hands moved without moving, and his quiet, "Ah," felt like a bruise.
*
Two weeks later Hermione let her eleven o'clock appointment into her office only to find herself face to face with Severus Snape. He was carrying a book with a twine ribbon wrapped around it. He sat down very stiffly and said, "I owe you a Life Debt."
"Yes, well, I'm best friends with Harry Potter so you can pretty much figure I'm going to go the noble and stupid way so far as that's concerned."
"It's rumored that every few years the entire House of Gryffindor petitions to be exempt from receiving Life Debts."
Hermione laughed. Her eyes still crinkled, she said, "If you came only to tell me that, you've underestimated my intelligence even more than the usual amount."
Snape slid the book across the table. "I somewhat figured you wouldn't accept the other offering."
Hermione turned the book to look at its side. It was Muggle. The Science and Mechanics of Rubber Production. "That's either the most thoughtful gift I've ever been given, or the most reductive."
Snape smirked, and his expression was like a curse, not in that it was evil, but that in Hermione could read it without even opening her eyes, could feel her way through it without putting out a hand. He stood and she said, "Severus."
He raised an eyebrow but didn't refute the address. "Hermione?"
"If I had tried to break the Compulsion in the more traditional way, would you have. . .let me?"
At his side, his hands shook for less than a second. "The more traditional way?"
Hermione moved without premeditation, sliding so that her knees came up onto her desk. It was entirely undignified but Snape didn't falter back from it and she was able to hook one hand around the back of his head, her palm resting over his ear, and settle her lips against his. It wasn't exactly soft, she didn't think he had waited this long for something like that, at least not at this moment. She certainly hadn't spent two weeks thinking about sweetness.
He tasted like coffee with not enough cream and too much sugar. Sweet and somehow clean.
She pulled back after a bit--he wasn't moving--and asked, "Would you have let me?"
He ran his tongue over his lower lip in answer. She asked, "Why couldn't you just ask?"
He brought his hand up to twist a curl in his finger. "Until this moment, I hadn't the type of imagination to allow for reading of fairy tales, let alone living them."
For a flash, a second, Hermione imagined herself a princess, and her desk a tower. She leaned in for another kiss from her Prince Charming.
The second stretched on.