In Dreams
Dreams play a major role in lots of SSHG stories in many different ways. Our SSHG authors are quite creative when it comes to weaving dreams. Come join Severus and Hermione in their dreams!
Want to give Hermione a run for her money in the know-it-all field? Simply play the quiz by commenting on this post with your answers at any time over the weekend. All comments with answers will be screened until the answer sheet is posted on Monday morning EDT. On Monday, all quizzlings with the correct answers will receive a pretty banner to prove their quiz prowess. Ready? Set? Play!
Match the quotes to the story titles without picking the red herring titles:
Love, Carefully Folded by dressagegrrrl
Forget Me Not by surreal_angela
The Bone Knife by kizzy7
Bewitching Her Mind by notsosaintly
In Dreams by Machshefa aka shefa
The Squandered Heart by moonrevel
Old Spice Snape by pokeystar
The End of Reckoning by StormySkize
In Your Dreams by duj
Circus Caper by astopperindeath
If the Shoe Fits by ginny_weasley31
The Succubus by southernwitch69
1. The dream always started the same.
Hermione was walking down the hall to the dungeon for detention with Professor Snape. He had caught her stealing Boomslang skin from his private stores and given her a week’s worth of detention.
How strange. That happened years ago and NOW he gives me detention, she thought miserably as she wrapped her robes tighter against the chill of the dungeon.
The door to the classroom was slightly ajar, so she pushed it open and walked in. The professor was nowhere to be seen, leaving her to hope momentarily that perhaps he had forgotten.
“Please close the door behind you, Miss Granger.” Professor Snape’s disembodied voice came from the direction of his office. Her hopes dashed, she did as she was told and peered around the office door. He sat behind the desk, chin resting upon his steepled fingers, and stared at her appraisingly. It reminded her of the way her mother scrutinized the prime cut of beef she bought every year for Boxing Day. She was beginning to wonder how she measured up when he spoke.
“Miss Granger,” he said suddenly, standing up and startling her, “whatever should I do with you? You must think yourself such a clever little witch. Stealing from my personal supplies; thinking that perhaps I would be too stupid to notice?”
2. Sullivan Shaw woke, the sweat-dampened sheets tangled around him. He threw off the covers and swung his legs over to sit on the edge of the bed. He glanced at the bedside clock and groaned when he realised that he’d only been sleeping two hours. He knew from experience that once he had the dream, he would not be able to go back to sleep, at least not right away.
He rubbed a weary hand over his face. He’d been having the dream for years, but in recent weeks, it had come more frequently. Tonight marked the third time in two weeks that he’d had it.
It was always the same: he was standing on a tall tower, and he was pointing a stick at an old man who was slumped against the parapet. In his dream, he spoke words he didn’t recognise in a language he didn’t understand. As he spoke, a flash of green light burst from the end of the stick. It struck the old man and lifted him into the air, throwing him backwards over the parapet and …
… and that was when he woke up with his heart pounding, with sweat dripping from every pore, and with fear choking him and urging him to run, to flee, to hide from an enemy he didn’t know.
3. She likens this place to an endless nighttime sky, and sometimes, she can feel cool, wet grass beneath her or the rustle of a gentle breeze against her face. “Tell me what you think about,” she says. “What you think about when I am gone and you are here alone.”
He paces around her, restless this night. “I think about how much I hated life. And now I am here, and I hate this more.”
Bitter tonight. He is so unpredictable; she never knows which Severus will greet her after she drifts asleep. “But you have me.”
“I have nothing,” he states flatly.
Hermione stands and begins to walk in endless circles with him. “I don’t love Ron. Not anymore.”
Severus laughs short, harsh barks. “Do you think I care about that, Hermione? Who you love? You can’t love me. This,” he motions with a wide sweeping of his arms, “is just your half-life. You get to leave.”
She places a hand on his forearm. The fabric of his robes feels sheer, gossamer. “I wish…”
He shoves her away. “Nothing you can say matters to me.”
Fat tears trail down her cheeks, gather in the dimple of her chin. For the first time, she can’t wait to awaken.
4. “Oh my -” she breathed. “You knew? You knew and you tried to stop me saying.”
Still he said nothing.
“Do you - do you want to die?” Her cheeks were wet. This wasn’t right. Snape was hard and invulnerable as rock. He got angry; he didn’t go quiet.
Dumbledore flinched. After a moment, Snape shrugged, hiding his thoughts behind half-closed lids. His voice was soft.
“Not particularly.”
“Then why didn’t you say something?” she shrilled.
The thin shoulders straightened and he was towering over her in an instant, eyes glittering.
“Your concern is unnecessary, Miss Granger. This is the risk I took. Be patient. The dreams will die when I do. Meanwhile, you’re quite safe to use Dreamless Sleep Potion every night; you won’t need it long enough to become addicted.”
Her eyes prickled and her throat burned with sudden unexpected anger. She wanted to shake some sense of self-preservation into him.
“How dare you pretend the only thing that matters is whether I can sleep? You’re going to die!” Her voice was almost too thick to squeeze out of her throat. Judging by the battered state of his dream-corpse, it wouldn’t be an easy death.
“I could hardly fail to be aware of that, after twenty-one nights of you snivelling over my grave. Don’t let it bother you.”
5. The dream began as it always did, with screams in the darkness and an urgency, to run, to be in the right place at the right time. So, as I always did, I ran. Across a field to a massive gnarled tree, then under the tree through a tunnel to a ramshackle shack. As I ran through the tunnel, I became aware of my two companions - both young men, one with scruffy dark hair and glasses and the other with red hair, both running with the same sense of urgency and purpose as I was.
Up the narrow stairs, along a short hallway that creaked as the three of us slowed from a sprint, creeping to avoid the monster we knew was hiding around the next corner. But there was no monster; only a man, too pale and gasping a gurgling breath around the bloody wound that had torn across his throat.
My eyes locked with his across the room. From the corner of my eyes, I could see my companions pull wands from their pockets, summoning bandages and what looked like some sort of ointment. But the man's dark eyes held my gaze as I rushed to him, kneeling by his side to staunch the bleeding with my hands.
His hand caught mine weakly. "Look at me", he rasped, and I looked up from his neck, tears blurring my vision. So it took me a moment to see the movement in his eyes, a serpent, moving intently towards me and lunging...
6. Sleep overtook her. She dreamt that she was in the Great Hall, but there was no one else around. The ceiling reflected a stormy night. She could hear hard rain splattering around her, hear the thunder crackling, and see the lighting flashing brutally. “Hello?” she called out. Her only reply was a faint echo. The doors to the hall slammed open a moment later, and someone walked in slowly. It was a wizard; she could see that much. He was walking straight towards her.
“Hermione...” he whispered once he drew nearer. Fear tore at her heart. Who was this man? How did he know her name? She couldn’t see his face. He was in the shadows, and his cloak’s hood was covering most of his face.
“Who are you?” she asked, her voice etched in fear. Something didn’t feel right. Where was Harry? Where was Ron?
“I’ve come for you, Hermione.” His voice was deep, scary, mesmerizing, and yet, familiar. She scooted back as he came closer. He finally stopped when he was nearly five feet from her. With his head bent forward, he slowly pulled back his hood. This man had dark, silky, shoulder-length hair that hung about his face. His head tilted to the side, and the hair littered his face so much that she could only see one of his black piercing eyes. “You’re mine,” he rasped. She screamed as he lunged forward.
7. She dreamed of him again. The early morning light, filtered by the last fog of midwinter’s dawn, lay like a shroud on her bed. Hermione shook her head as if trying to dislodge the mist from her thoughts and tried to catch hold of the last tendrils of her dream.
A flash of white skin and dark eyes. And a voice, there was something that the voice was saying that she should remember. Why couldn’t she remember? Above all, it was the sense that there was something important that she had forgotten when she woke that she found most disturbing. And with that, it occurred to her that she woke each morning with the tendrils of this dream, no, not this dream, but one like it, surely, haunting her thoughts and leaving her gasping for breath.
She shook her head again and rolled her eyes. What was she thinking, imagining that she was having dreams that meant something, dreams of a man telling her something that she should remember? She was letting her imagination run away with her. Again. Or at least that’s what her friends would say, were she to tell them that she thought that her nighttime wanderings meant anything at all. She could hardly help it, really, this longing to follow that voice, and her dreams, against all reason. Her friends wouldn’t really understand. They would remind her that she was supposed to be logical, sensible - the one they could turn to for clear vision. She sighed sadly, shaking her head again. So why, then, was the image of dark eyes still imprinted on her mind’s eye, despite her efforts to banish it?
8. “You must’ve been done in after your shift. You never have a lie-in,” Heidi remarked, now sitting down on the end of Hermione’s bed. This was not an uncommon occurrence. They often went into the other’s room and talked, although it was usually when Heidi wanted something. Hermione wondered idly what it was this time.
“Well, I think it was a combination of the shift and then my going to the Ministry ball last night.”
“There wasn’t a ball last night.”
And here Hermione smiled. “Yes, there was. It was hosted by the Ministry and it was very nice.”
Heidi looked back at her, puzzled. “Hermione, there hasn’t been a Ministry-hosted ball in nearly ten years, and that one was to celebrate the fall of You-Know-Who. Although I did hear a rumor about something for New Year’s Eve, but….”
“No,” Hermione insisted. “I know about the one for New Year’s Eve, but this was last night. I went for just a few hours. I was back here a bit after midnight.”
“No you weren’t.”
“No I wasn’t-what?”
“You weren’t out until midnight.”
“Yes, I was. I came home, did a quick spell to change into my pyjamas, and I went to bed. It was just after midnight when my head hit the pillow.”
“Hermione, I was home just barely after ten last night and you were here… asleep.”
“What?”
“I came home a little after ten, and you were here, in this bed, asleep.”
9. She had fallen asleep with a text on Legilimency open in her hands. All summer, in addition to tireless N.E.W.T. revision, she had been learning about any and every weapon they would need in battle. She was mainly hoping to master a more obscure branch of Legilimency, Silent Speech (which older texts referred to as Pseudo Legilimency Minor), which would allow her to talk to her companions in the event of a struggle. Now that Harry’s scar was burning so persistently, however, she hoped to use the information in the books to persuade him to let her help him with Occlumency.
Once again, she was standing before Snape and Dumbledore when the Killing Curse was fired, only this time she could see Harry standing motionless, regarding the scene. Though he was perfectly still, his eyes burned with hatred and rage, the same rage with which they had been filled all summer when he would explain, at great length, what he would do to Snape if he found him.
Hermione strode towards the lifeless body of the former Headmaster and looked down at him, trembling as she surveyed him.
Abruptly, his twinkling eyes opened. “It’s all in his head, Miss Granger. It’s all in his head,” he insisted quietly as he motioned with his gaze towards Harry.
“What do you mean, Headmaster?” she muttered into the darkness of her room. She sighed deeply. She was far too tired to skip sleeping again, but she had no idea what to make of what Dumbledore had said. Hermione laughed at herself. What did she think, that he was actually speaking to her in her dreams? Nonsense. Dreams are just a manifestation of things already in our thoughts, so what would the statement possibly mean to her? What was in Harry’s head?
10. They stared, each holding a portion of the blankets over their important bits.
"Um," she said, feeling heat rise in her cheeks.
"Granger," Snape snapped, his lips thin white lines. "What the fuck are you doing here?"
"I have no idea." She shifted the coverlet, trying to minimize the contact between the bare skin of her breasts and taxidermied animal parts. She cast her gaze about the room in discomfort and noticed a single white flower resting gracelessly in an earthenware pitcher. Its head drooped a bit and the edges were wilted, making it appear even more out of place in the tacky room. Looking back to him, she asked, "What are you doing here?"
He scowled and opened his mouth.
As if hit with a Stinging Hex, Hermione sucked in a great gasp of air and sat up in her own bedroom. She was alone and wearing flannel pajamas.
That was the first time she dreamt of being naked with Severus Snape.
Want to give Hermione a run for her money in the know-it-all field? Simply play the quiz by commenting on this post with your answers at any time over the weekend. All comments with answers will be screened until the answer sheet is posted on Monday morning EDT. On Monday, all quizzlings with the correct answers will receive a pretty banner to prove their quiz prowess. Ready? Set? Play!
Match the quotes to the story titles without picking the red herring titles:
Love, Carefully Folded by dressagegrrrl
Forget Me Not by surreal_angela
The Bone Knife by kizzy7
Bewitching Her Mind by notsosaintly
In Dreams by Machshefa aka shefa
The Squandered Heart by moonrevel
Old Spice Snape by pokeystar
The End of Reckoning by StormySkize
In Your Dreams by duj
Circus Caper by astopperindeath
If the Shoe Fits by ginny_weasley31
The Succubus by southernwitch69
1. The dream always started the same.
Hermione was walking down the hall to the dungeon for detention with Professor Snape. He had caught her stealing Boomslang skin from his private stores and given her a week’s worth of detention.
How strange. That happened years ago and NOW he gives me detention, she thought miserably as she wrapped her robes tighter against the chill of the dungeon.
The door to the classroom was slightly ajar, so she pushed it open and walked in. The professor was nowhere to be seen, leaving her to hope momentarily that perhaps he had forgotten.
“Please close the door behind you, Miss Granger.” Professor Snape’s disembodied voice came from the direction of his office. Her hopes dashed, she did as she was told and peered around the office door. He sat behind the desk, chin resting upon his steepled fingers, and stared at her appraisingly. It reminded her of the way her mother scrutinized the prime cut of beef she bought every year for Boxing Day. She was beginning to wonder how she measured up when he spoke.
“Miss Granger,” he said suddenly, standing up and startling her, “whatever should I do with you? You must think yourself such a clever little witch. Stealing from my personal supplies; thinking that perhaps I would be too stupid to notice?”
2. Sullivan Shaw woke, the sweat-dampened sheets tangled around him. He threw off the covers and swung his legs over to sit on the edge of the bed. He glanced at the bedside clock and groaned when he realised that he’d only been sleeping two hours. He knew from experience that once he had the dream, he would not be able to go back to sleep, at least not right away.
He rubbed a weary hand over his face. He’d been having the dream for years, but in recent weeks, it had come more frequently. Tonight marked the third time in two weeks that he’d had it.
It was always the same: he was standing on a tall tower, and he was pointing a stick at an old man who was slumped against the parapet. In his dream, he spoke words he didn’t recognise in a language he didn’t understand. As he spoke, a flash of green light burst from the end of the stick. It struck the old man and lifted him into the air, throwing him backwards over the parapet and …
… and that was when he woke up with his heart pounding, with sweat dripping from every pore, and with fear choking him and urging him to run, to flee, to hide from an enemy he didn’t know.
3. She likens this place to an endless nighttime sky, and sometimes, she can feel cool, wet grass beneath her or the rustle of a gentle breeze against her face. “Tell me what you think about,” she says. “What you think about when I am gone and you are here alone.”
He paces around her, restless this night. “I think about how much I hated life. And now I am here, and I hate this more.”
Bitter tonight. He is so unpredictable; she never knows which Severus will greet her after she drifts asleep. “But you have me.”
“I have nothing,” he states flatly.
Hermione stands and begins to walk in endless circles with him. “I don’t love Ron. Not anymore.”
Severus laughs short, harsh barks. “Do you think I care about that, Hermione? Who you love? You can’t love me. This,” he motions with a wide sweeping of his arms, “is just your half-life. You get to leave.”
She places a hand on his forearm. The fabric of his robes feels sheer, gossamer. “I wish…”
He shoves her away. “Nothing you can say matters to me.”
Fat tears trail down her cheeks, gather in the dimple of her chin. For the first time, she can’t wait to awaken.
4. “Oh my -” she breathed. “You knew? You knew and you tried to stop me saying.”
Still he said nothing.
“Do you - do you want to die?” Her cheeks were wet. This wasn’t right. Snape was hard and invulnerable as rock. He got angry; he didn’t go quiet.
Dumbledore flinched. After a moment, Snape shrugged, hiding his thoughts behind half-closed lids. His voice was soft.
“Not particularly.”
“Then why didn’t you say something?” she shrilled.
The thin shoulders straightened and he was towering over her in an instant, eyes glittering.
“Your concern is unnecessary, Miss Granger. This is the risk I took. Be patient. The dreams will die when I do. Meanwhile, you’re quite safe to use Dreamless Sleep Potion every night; you won’t need it long enough to become addicted.”
Her eyes prickled and her throat burned with sudden unexpected anger. She wanted to shake some sense of self-preservation into him.
“How dare you pretend the only thing that matters is whether I can sleep? You’re going to die!” Her voice was almost too thick to squeeze out of her throat. Judging by the battered state of his dream-corpse, it wouldn’t be an easy death.
“I could hardly fail to be aware of that, after twenty-one nights of you snivelling over my grave. Don’t let it bother you.”
5. The dream began as it always did, with screams in the darkness and an urgency, to run, to be in the right place at the right time. So, as I always did, I ran. Across a field to a massive gnarled tree, then under the tree through a tunnel to a ramshackle shack. As I ran through the tunnel, I became aware of my two companions - both young men, one with scruffy dark hair and glasses and the other with red hair, both running with the same sense of urgency and purpose as I was.
Up the narrow stairs, along a short hallway that creaked as the three of us slowed from a sprint, creeping to avoid the monster we knew was hiding around the next corner. But there was no monster; only a man, too pale and gasping a gurgling breath around the bloody wound that had torn across his throat.
My eyes locked with his across the room. From the corner of my eyes, I could see my companions pull wands from their pockets, summoning bandages and what looked like some sort of ointment. But the man's dark eyes held my gaze as I rushed to him, kneeling by his side to staunch the bleeding with my hands.
His hand caught mine weakly. "Look at me", he rasped, and I looked up from his neck, tears blurring my vision. So it took me a moment to see the movement in his eyes, a serpent, moving intently towards me and lunging...
6. Sleep overtook her. She dreamt that she was in the Great Hall, but there was no one else around. The ceiling reflected a stormy night. She could hear hard rain splattering around her, hear the thunder crackling, and see the lighting flashing brutally. “Hello?” she called out. Her only reply was a faint echo. The doors to the hall slammed open a moment later, and someone walked in slowly. It was a wizard; she could see that much. He was walking straight towards her.
“Hermione...” he whispered once he drew nearer. Fear tore at her heart. Who was this man? How did he know her name? She couldn’t see his face. He was in the shadows, and his cloak’s hood was covering most of his face.
“Who are you?” she asked, her voice etched in fear. Something didn’t feel right. Where was Harry? Where was Ron?
“I’ve come for you, Hermione.” His voice was deep, scary, mesmerizing, and yet, familiar. She scooted back as he came closer. He finally stopped when he was nearly five feet from her. With his head bent forward, he slowly pulled back his hood. This man had dark, silky, shoulder-length hair that hung about his face. His head tilted to the side, and the hair littered his face so much that she could only see one of his black piercing eyes. “You’re mine,” he rasped. She screamed as he lunged forward.
7. She dreamed of him again. The early morning light, filtered by the last fog of midwinter’s dawn, lay like a shroud on her bed. Hermione shook her head as if trying to dislodge the mist from her thoughts and tried to catch hold of the last tendrils of her dream.
A flash of white skin and dark eyes. And a voice, there was something that the voice was saying that she should remember. Why couldn’t she remember? Above all, it was the sense that there was something important that she had forgotten when she woke that she found most disturbing. And with that, it occurred to her that she woke each morning with the tendrils of this dream, no, not this dream, but one like it, surely, haunting her thoughts and leaving her gasping for breath.
She shook her head again and rolled her eyes. What was she thinking, imagining that she was having dreams that meant something, dreams of a man telling her something that she should remember? She was letting her imagination run away with her. Again. Or at least that’s what her friends would say, were she to tell them that she thought that her nighttime wanderings meant anything at all. She could hardly help it, really, this longing to follow that voice, and her dreams, against all reason. Her friends wouldn’t really understand. They would remind her that she was supposed to be logical, sensible - the one they could turn to for clear vision. She sighed sadly, shaking her head again. So why, then, was the image of dark eyes still imprinted on her mind’s eye, despite her efforts to banish it?
8. “You must’ve been done in after your shift. You never have a lie-in,” Heidi remarked, now sitting down on the end of Hermione’s bed. This was not an uncommon occurrence. They often went into the other’s room and talked, although it was usually when Heidi wanted something. Hermione wondered idly what it was this time.
“Well, I think it was a combination of the shift and then my going to the Ministry ball last night.”
“There wasn’t a ball last night.”
And here Hermione smiled. “Yes, there was. It was hosted by the Ministry and it was very nice.”
Heidi looked back at her, puzzled. “Hermione, there hasn’t been a Ministry-hosted ball in nearly ten years, and that one was to celebrate the fall of You-Know-Who. Although I did hear a rumor about something for New Year’s Eve, but….”
“No,” Hermione insisted. “I know about the one for New Year’s Eve, but this was last night. I went for just a few hours. I was back here a bit after midnight.”
“No you weren’t.”
“No I wasn’t-what?”
“You weren’t out until midnight.”
“Yes, I was. I came home, did a quick spell to change into my pyjamas, and I went to bed. It was just after midnight when my head hit the pillow.”
“Hermione, I was home just barely after ten last night and you were here… asleep.”
“What?”
“I came home a little after ten, and you were here, in this bed, asleep.”
9. She had fallen asleep with a text on Legilimency open in her hands. All summer, in addition to tireless N.E.W.T. revision, she had been learning about any and every weapon they would need in battle. She was mainly hoping to master a more obscure branch of Legilimency, Silent Speech (which older texts referred to as Pseudo Legilimency Minor), which would allow her to talk to her companions in the event of a struggle. Now that Harry’s scar was burning so persistently, however, she hoped to use the information in the books to persuade him to let her help him with Occlumency.
Once again, she was standing before Snape and Dumbledore when the Killing Curse was fired, only this time she could see Harry standing motionless, regarding the scene. Though he was perfectly still, his eyes burned with hatred and rage, the same rage with which they had been filled all summer when he would explain, at great length, what he would do to Snape if he found him.
Hermione strode towards the lifeless body of the former Headmaster and looked down at him, trembling as she surveyed him.
Abruptly, his twinkling eyes opened. “It’s all in his head, Miss Granger. It’s all in his head,” he insisted quietly as he motioned with his gaze towards Harry.
“What do you mean, Headmaster?” she muttered into the darkness of her room. She sighed deeply. She was far too tired to skip sleeping again, but she had no idea what to make of what Dumbledore had said. Hermione laughed at herself. What did she think, that he was actually speaking to her in her dreams? Nonsense. Dreams are just a manifestation of things already in our thoughts, so what would the statement possibly mean to her? What was in Harry’s head?
10. They stared, each holding a portion of the blankets over their important bits.
"Um," she said, feeling heat rise in her cheeks.
"Granger," Snape snapped, his lips thin white lines. "What the fuck are you doing here?"
"I have no idea." She shifted the coverlet, trying to minimize the contact between the bare skin of her breasts and taxidermied animal parts. She cast her gaze about the room in discomfort and noticed a single white flower resting gracelessly in an earthenware pitcher. Its head drooped a bit and the edges were wilted, making it appear even more out of place in the tacky room. Looking back to him, she asked, "What are you doing here?"
He scowled and opened his mouth.
As if hit with a Stinging Hex, Hermione sucked in a great gasp of air and sat up in her own bedroom. She was alone and wearing flannel pajamas.
That was the first time she dreamt of being naked with Severus Snape.