The Fire and the Rose Part 18

Disclaimer: Anyone and anything you recognise belongs to J K Rowling; the story, however, is ours

This fic is also to be found at the DarkSarcasm Yahoo group - if you want e mail notification of updates, this is the best way to get them. The group can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/darksarcasm. New episodes of this fic will be posted late every Saturday night UK time (and there will be 40 episodes in total, so look out for episodes each week from now until mid-December!). Please do not ask for more frequent updates. The authors have lives and other fics to write :)

MetroVampire & Rhosymedre

Part 18 - A Medley Of Extemporanea

November wore on; the weather was foul, and not even the interesting variety of foul - a blizzard would have been a welcome variation on the grey skies and sheeting rain that kept the entire school cooped up indoors. Tempers and mischief rose inside as the rain sluiced down outside.

Snape was curled in the armchair by the fire in his room; he had found a stack of startlingly interesting magazines under Hermione's bed earlier and, frankly, they were about the only thing keeping him sane right now. He had been hunting for Crookshanks - again - to make sure that the cat was not about to ambush him from some hiding place or another. Whilst everyone else was clearly oblivious to the switch between himself and Hermione, the cat was not; he was clearly suspicious that Snape had usurped his mistress' body for nefarious purposes and, from time to time, decided to launch a series of attacks on the interloper in his domain. Snape had wished, not for the first time, that there was some easy way to get Hermione up to his room - well, to her room, in fact - without running the risk of discovery. It would ... challenging ... to come up with an explanation as to why the Potions Master was visiting the Head Girl's rooms.

The magazines had been filed neatly under the bed, tucked behind the valance in a small stack. Snape had assumed them to be Witch Weekly or some similarly tedious thing and was about to let the valance drop back when some words on the cover of the uppermost magazine caught his eye.

Mindblowing sex - how to make him come for hours!

It was the exclamation mark that did it; of course it was. That and, naturally, curiosity about Muggles. There was no other possible reason for him to have taken the magazine from the stack; this was clearly a Muggle magazine, and he had been interested in Muggle society all his life - one way and another. This was reason, nothing more.

Snape wondered whether he was remotely convincing. He suspected not. Nonetheless, he read the magazine that evening from cover to cover in a bemused fascination - the magazine declared itself to be "Cosmopolitan", but Snape rather thought that it re-defined the concept of cosmopolitan. Or perhaps Muggles meant something different by their use of the word - something relating to sex, diets and fashion.

The fashion was peculiar - Snape wondered why there was so much fuss about witches and wizards having to don Muggle clothing when they went out into that world; it looked as though you could wear pretty much any odd mixture of clothing and be declared 'cutting edge'. In fact, he was relatively certain some of the designers had to be witches - and influenced by wizarding clothing. One issue of the magazine featured a designer called Zandra Rhodes; he was positive he had seen her in Diagon Alley, at Madam Malkin's, last summer. The pink hair was unmissable.

Witch-influenced or not, the clothing was just odd. Snape had stared at his - borrowed - figure in the mirror for a while, wondering why anyone would dress that way. All told, Hermione had a surprisingly intriguing body - that was a thought he'd scuttled away from as fast as possible - but he couldn't see that it would be enhanced by most of the clothes in the picture. The short skirts were a possibility though ... no, better not think about that either.

A man's mind in a woman's body produced the most bizarrely conflicting hormone responses.

The diets were similarly odd - Muggles apparently knew nothing of the potions that would re-align the insulin response that caused most of their weight problems, and they ate the most appalling rubbish, which seemed to cause the rest of those weight problems. It was no particular wonder that they needed diets. Snape wondered whether anyone ever succeeded in following these; reading the restrictions alone sent him straight to Hermione's cache of chocolate. He made a mental note to replace it the next time he went into Hogsmeade; it was becoming clear, from their continuing failure to fathom out what was in Longbottom's Liquid Leap, that they would have to wait for the mandrakes to mature before they returned to normal but, all the same, Snape thought he had better restock the chocolate sooner rather than later.

Apart from anything else, last week's repeat of 'the joys of being a woman' had convinced him - if he had needed convincing - of the medicinal properties of chocolate. He loathed being at the mercy of his hormones; well, not even his hormones, they were Hermione's. And she could have them back, thank you very much.

But, then again, when those hormones weren't running rampant, they produced some wonderful entertainment. Which brought him back to the magazine again; it was ... highly instructive. Rather more so than he would have expected just a couple of months ago - because now he could appreciate the commentary and suggestions from both points of view.

A man's mind in a woman's body really did produce the most bizarrely conflicting hormone responses.

Snape shut the magazine; he would read it again later, and the rest in the pile. There was no point in fooling himself otherwise. It was, though, more than prurient curiosity; his thoughts wandered back to Hermione. His first reaction had been surprise that she would read such trash - the magazine was hardly a model of good literature - but that thought had been chased rapidly away by a new realisation that it was not perhaps out of character. Two months had provided, apart from novel private physical entertainment, a growing awareness of the mind that currently inhabited his body.

It was hard to continue to treat her as a student, as a child. To look up at her, into a face he knew all too well, and to be aware of the way she would be treated by everyone else ensured that he could not treat her that way. He had tried to treat her as a student - and it was not in his nature to appear to treat her very differently, after all, he treated everyone apart from the Headmaster as a student - but if he did not make a conscious effort, he would treat her as an equal. She was, all told, the closest thing now that he had to an equal.

Snape shied away from the insistent thought that, when all this was over and done with, they would be equals. There was little hope that Hermione would escape the more extreme elements of his life; he was grateful - and terrified - that she had not yet been summoned. Grateful because it had given her more time to perfect her act, although he would never tell her just how good it was, and terrified because the longer Voldemort allowed between summons, the more painful the summons inevitably was.

Which would mean that the one person who truly understood him, who knew the layers of his life, would be an eighteen-year-old know-it-all. Fate was a ridiculous thing.

In all this musing, it didn't occur to Snape that he would - in the same way - be the one person who understood Hermione Granger and the oddities and complexities of her life.

A loud rap on the door heralded the arrival of two of those particular oddities. No-one could call them particularly complex, but Harry Potter and Ron Weasley could generally be counted upon to be odd. Snape was almost certainly that last week's menstrual cycle had been brought on early by the stress resulting from listening to them hype themselves up for the Gryffindor-Slytherin match.

He tucked the magazine under the chair - he was fairly certain that Hermione would not want the pair knowing about it, and he was definitely not prepared to have to listen to them chortle over it with childish sniggers at something of which they undoubtedly had no direct knowledge. Snape thought it extremely unlikely that either had lost their virginity; then was almost nauseated by the realisation that he was thinking about the boys' sex lives.

Snape almost ran for the door, trying to escape the thought.

"It's late, why aren't you in your dormitory?" he asked, sighing. He couldn't immediately see what the time was - he had taken off his watch - but dinner had been rather a long time ago, and he had even managed to spend some time in the dungeons checking on the progress of the experiments (and starting the next batch of skin care potion orders) before he had returned to his room and the magazine. Hermione had been immersed in one of his books and hadn't been particularly communicative.

"We've got an idea," said Ron in a rush. Snape suppressed a groan. A Weasley idea was a dangerous thing. Harry had the grace to look rather uncomfortable, which suggested that he thought the same thing.

"I don't want to know, Ron. I'm Head Girl and, if you tell me, I'm pretty sure I'll have to do something about it. Are you sure you want to take the consequences?"

"Oh, who cares?" came Ron's reply. "Snape took enough points of us this morning, the greasy git, that no-one would notice anyway."

Snape winced slightly at Ron's casual dismissal of him and almost ground his teeth in frustration that he couldn't tell Ron exactly who it was that he was speaking to. Knowing what the students thought of him was one thing; having it confirmed to his face was another.

"Come on Hermione," urged Harry, "you know we'll get into trouble if you don't come along with us." Emotional blackmail - and it worked every time, on Hermione and now on Snape. Besides, he was certain Hermione would give in; the two boys were rarely found without her when they were breaking rules, so it would be rather out of character for him to flatly refuse to go with them.

He gave in. "What are we doing?" he sighed. Ron grinned.

"It's the Map - Harry's managed to get it to show another passageway, it looks like it goes from the Arithmancy Tower, and we thought we'd see if it led anywhere interesting."

Shaking his head, Snape followed the two boys as they turned and left the room. Ron looked over his shoulder to check whether Snape was coming. He was, unwillingly. He knew exactly which passageway Ron was talking about, and it led nowhere interesting at all - simply surfaced in the Herbology glasshouses. He had no idea why there was a passage from the Arithmancy Towers to the glasshouses but Hermione would undoubtedly not know that there even was a passageway - so he had to keep quiet and follow, rather than tell them that they were wasting their time.

It was late - the common room was empty, and the silence suggested that the younger students were all asleep and most of the older students similarly so. Which meant, of course, that they were breaking curfew by sneaking out of the Gryffindor Tower. Somehow, Snape was pretty sure that there was no point in checking whether the boys realised. Potter and Weasley paid as much attention to curfew as they did to anything else - apart from Quidditch.

The Fat Lady opened to let them out with nothing more than a 'tut' of disapproval - she was clearly used to the boys' nocturnal comings and goings - and they crept along the corridors, hidden under Harry's invisibility cloak. The school at night was very faintly sinister, full of dark shadows and unexplained noises. Snape had spent enough time prowling the same corridors on his duty nights, trying to stop students from doing precisely what they were doing now, to be comfortable and familiar with the shadows and noise but, somehow, seeing it from a different perspective - a foot lower than normal, hidden behind the shimmer of an invisibility cloak and with the rather disturbing heavy breathing of two half-grown men on his neck - made it all subtly unfamiliar.

The trip to the Tower was relatively uneventful - they were caught on a staircase, and had to detour through some second-floor corridors, but there was no sign of any of the teachers.

Until they reached the Tower.

Unable to cast a spell under the cloak, Harry had dropped it to aim his wand at the lock; Snape heard him draw breath to unlock the door when a cold voice echoed softly in the corridor behind them.

"And just what do you three think you're doing here, at this time of night?"