Chapter Text
There is a wait so long;
You’ll never wait so long.
For the last three days, Hermione had been trying to find the error in the code on the screen in front of her. She had run every search at her disposal. She was reduced to dragging her finger across the monitor to examine every line of letters.
Magic made these sorts of errors rare—certainly rarer than the ones she had tackled in university when she was doing her graduate study in molecular biology. Even with the computer, some human was always entering a letter incorrectly. A flick of the wand had obviously zagged here, too. She would find it eventually.
She was researching the genetics of Nonmagical Presentation, of squibdom, to use the outdated term. Squib was an awful word, and she advocated language that upheld the dignity of all creatures, human or not.
There were two types of Nonmagical Presentation, or NP, as it was usually called. About a quarter of cases were the results of physical or psychological trauma. The rest had a genetic component, and those were the cases that made up her research. And now she had been side-lined for three days because someone in the research office had made an error while transcribing the DNA code.
She put her glasses on top of her head and rubbed her temples for a moment. She could use a cup of tea, but it would only make her have to use the loo and waste another few minutes. She glanced over at her lab-mate. He wasn’t brewing today but was conducting a trial in at least twenty small cauldrons. He was squinting in each one and then scratching out notes on endless parchment.
She had inherited him with the space. It was the best lab, and with her last promotion to head of research, she had the right to it. Its previous occupant, an ancient wizard called Dewey Fletcher, had retired, and at the party in his honour, he had pulled Hermione aside.
“It is within your rights to chuck him. I took him on because everyone was putting up a strop. The potions can be…well, not exactly pleasant,” he tapped the side of his nose with one finger and raised his eyebrows. “But he is quiet and fastidious, and better than most I’ve shared with, I must say. They WILL replace him, so perhaps the Death Eater you know…” He delivered the last part in a sing-song cadence.
“He is NOT a death eater! He was acquitted of all…”
“See, my dear, I think you are the perfect colleague to share with old Snape.”
Dewey Fletcher was at least a hundred and twenty, so calling the late forty-something former professor old was a bit rich.
Hermione had never regretted her choice to allow Severus Snape to share the lab with her. His potions were not offensively smelly; in fact, they made her nostalgic for her school days. Snape was working on cures for magical maladies, same as her, although their projects had never overlapped. She was technically his superior, but he never reported directly to her. The eighteen months of their work cohabitation had been without conflict.
They hardly spoke. She greeted him each morning and said goodbye when one of them left; he would nod in response or sometimes ignore her if he was engrossed in work. They took their lunches and tea breaks at different times to allow for more solitude in the lab. She didn’t always associate him with the professor of her adolescence. He had worn his hair short since the end of the war and the recovery from his injuries. He wore dark colours and a black robe, but it wasn’t the dungeon bat special anymore. He had black framed glasses that perched on that nose. He looked like any professional of a certain age, on the handsome side, really. A change of occupation and decreased stress had done wonders for him.
When he first discovered that she would be his new lab-mate, his face had reflected horror and repressed fury; she hadn’t seen him look like that in years. She suspected he was pleasantly surprised as they began to work in the same space. She didn’t speak unless it was necessary, and her work was quiet. She was usually at her computer—their lab was one of the few spaces in the Ministry with electricity and wifi—or conducting her own tests that typically took up much less space than his did.
He was scratching away on the parchment, unaware that she was looking at him. Under his robe that day he was wearing black wool trousers with a light charcoal jumper over a white oxford cloth shirt. His shoes were shined as was typical of his meticulous grooming. His salt and pepper hair was cut close on the sides and longer on top, never greasy or even slightly unkempt.
She smiled and put her glasses back on her nose. She wound her curls on the back of her head and secured them with a stirring rod before giving her attention to the screen before her once again. She grasped a ruler this time, and held it flush to the screen so she could focus intently on each line.
If I don’t find it on this page, I am fetching tea. A trip to the loo would be a pleasant diversion at this point.
She dragged the ruler down slowly, line after line. And then it popped out at her. One tiny, errant, lower-case t in a field of capital letters. “Fuck me!” she said under her breath as she fixed the mistake.
She was preparing to run the program again—she had just pushed the enter key—when he said it.
“Gladly.”
Her head jerked up and over to his side of the lab. He was writing with his quill on the parchment, head down, exactly as he had during the whole process.
Had she imagined it? She must have. But…she had heard it. It hadn’t been loud, but it was clearly his voice, deep and melodious and carrying, as it always had been no matter what the volume.
Gladly.
And then she had to turn back to the monitor. The program was running; whirring gleefully, spitting out bad results, and cataloguing the hits. She couldn’t isolate the gene with these strands, but she could eliminate almost half the possibilities. It was fantastically productive, even with the three-day lag finding the error.
She started to fill in the reports with two columns. All thoughts of tea or anything else were gone as she focused on her project. She was aware when he left, she glanced up and noticed all his cauldrons had been cleaned and returned to his supply shelves.
“Good night, Snape,” she said as she heard him near the door. She didn’t turn to see his response. She stayed until after eight and then shut the computer down for the night, feeling highly satisfied with that day’s work. Her little flat was not connected to the floo network. She apparated up the street from her building, just inside a quiet wizarding neighborhood, just outside the Muggle streets she loved. She dropped her wards and entered, greeted by Crookshanks, who then turned and walked to the kitchen.
Oh, it’s only you.
She prepared his dinner and then made half a chicken sandwich for herself, using leftovers from Sunday dinner at the Burrow. She wasn’t hungry; she never was after a day like that at work, but she knew if she didn’t eat something, she would wake up starving. She ate it standing in the kitchen and washed it down with a half glass of Bordeaux.
She took a quick shower, pulled on a sleep shirt and knickers, and settled in bed with her book, well-written smut and the last of the series, sadly. She would have to go through the bother of finding a new author soon, but at least she was only four chapters in this one. The plucky doctor had gone to the farm-stand to buy tomatoes and had asked the wise beyond his years but still youthful farmer about his use of pesticides. He had left the stand in the care of his younger brother and had taken the plucky doctor back to the green house where, somewhere in the course of showing her different varieties of fertilizer, he had hoisted her on the sturdy table, divested her of her knickers, and was eating her pussy like an absolute champ.
Hermione considered a wank, but she was having a hard time keeping her eyes open. “Nox,” she whispered and snuggled into her quilt.
She is at work in the staff room, waiting for a brew. Snape is there, too, and he’s smiling at her, quite uncharacteristically, but she doesn’t care. It makes her feel lovely, and she smiles back at him. He reaches out and plucks the stirring rod from her hair, and her curls tumble down. He moves them aside with one hand and kisses her on the neck.
They are running through the streets urgently, holding hands. She can feel his tight grasp. He is protecting her; she can feel his intention as they run. They are not scared; they are just trying to be somewhere else quickly.
They are in bed, in an unfamiliar flat, naked. The walls are bare, there is only this bed covered in white linens. He reaches for her and pulls her on top of him, so she is straddling him. She eases down on his hard cock, and she feels completely full. He still has on his glasses, and she removes them and places them on a table beside the bed she is certain was not there before. He laughs because she still has hers on. He plucks them from her face and they join his on the table, and she realizes the styles are quite similar, except hers are taupe and his are jet black.
His cock is still making her feel full and warm and fantastic. She starts riding him, and he reverently addresses her breasts as if they are his absolute honour to be touching…and kissing…and sucking. She feels a pull in her groin as he takes one of her nipples into his mouth, and she is so close…she rubs her clit against him every time she descends.
She is off him and has moved to the bottom of the bed and has his cock in her mouth. She can taste herself as she licks the underside of it. He moans and repeats her name over and over in his voice. She’s never heard her given name from his mouth, and she takes him fully into the back of her throat and reaches down to touch herself, and she is so close.
They are in the lab, and he has his clothes on but they are more casual than she has ever seen him in. She is sitting on the lab table with her legs spread and her knickers off, and it smells like fertilizer, and his tongue is on her, and his strong hands are keeping her thighs apart, and his tongue is all over her, and she needs a little bit more, so she grounds her quim into his face and that is all it takes. Severus! she calls out and he keeps his face right there and she is coming and coming…and she is in her own bed and her knickers are sodden and she is still shaking.
“Oh my.” She was breathing heavily. She put one bent arm above her head and stretched her legs luxuriously. She checked her wand. It was ten minutes before she needed to get up, but a shower was probably now in order. She stretched and smiled like an idiot before she walked with a bounce to the bath.
What a pleasant way to wake up.
She’d had the occasional Snape fantasy over the years although it wasn’t exactly a standby. She let the spray hit her and she smelled the lovely clean scent of the bar of soap before she started rubbing it on herself.
Wait…that’s a possibility.
She had never considered him a potential candidate, but maybe so. Gladly, he had said.
We shall see, Snape. We shall see.