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Severus Snape liked learning new things.
Most of the time, anyway.
It was part and parcel of his life as a researcher and instructor, after all—learning. In addition to reading voraciously in his field and keeping up with international affairs in Muggle newspapers, Snape reconciled himself to the idea that shepherding the snot-nosed miscreants of Hogwarts through puberty also served to instruct him about people. And life, and all that rot.
Minerva said that teaching kept her young.
She must have been on something, because teaching just pushed him closer and closer to the day when he would inevitably lose it and strangle a twelve-year-old with an audience watching.
And Snape sure as hell didn't want to go back to Azkaban.
On the first day that Hermione Sodding Granger began her professorial career at Hogwarts, Snape learned Little Miss Bossy Britches hadn't encountered enough intellectual challenges to knock her down a peg or two… or ten… from her days as a student.
She had the gall—the unmitigated gall—to drone on about the history of Shrinking Solutions in a conversation she'd instigated with him over lunch one day. As if he hadn't known every damned fact she rattled off when he was twenty years old. When she spoke, it was as though she hadn't had access to an adult with a working vocabulary in years and was simply taking full advantage of the opportunity. Snape knew that spending time with Potter and the Dim Weasley would take its toll on anyone, but this was just sad.
And he told her so.
He told her that if he'd wanted a remedial Potions review, he could have asked one of his Third Years.
Said that he'd be happy to find a pimply teenager or a castle wall for her to talk to the next time she felt chatty.
And he made sure that she knew how tickled he was that she'd honored him with her dubious attentions.
She erupted in anger, prodding him with her wand as she told him to perform unspeakable acts upon his own person, and Severus Snape learned something terrible and wonderful and glorious all at once—
When she exploded in righteous indignation, her hair crackling with an unseen energy and her cheeks flushing a becoming pink, Hermione Granger was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.
Determined to see Granger spark again, Severus decided that the wisest course of action was to figure out how to piss her off.
He insulted her subject at breakfast the next morning, telling her that Arithmancy was on par with Divination and that determining the future from the mating habits of blast-ended skrewts was more reliable than any of her carefully worked calculations.
That same blush flooded her lovely features, and he could swear that her nostrils flared in frustration, but she merely held her tongue and turned her head, ignoring him for the remainder of the meal.
When he called her "Sybil" and "Madame Trelawney" in jest, she whipped out her wand and hexed him in front of the whole student body. The spell left him smiling like a loon for the rest of his morning classes. Since he'd trained the students like Pavlovian dogs to respect him or else, he didn't have to fear any of them saying anything in class. The magically induced grin merely kept Hermione from seeing the true happiness that he felt upon seeing her in all her furious majesty.
Because it was just that—happiness. A feeling Severus had told himself he'd never have and never deserve to have. Hermione never needed to know how enthralled he was by her passion, how he loved watching her nostrils flare as she allowed her magic to ripple off her body in palpable waves.
Most men would pursue the woman they wanted, but Severus didn't have any illusions about his own appeal. He wasn't an idiot; he'd seen the young men she'd dated in the past, all conventionally handsome: Krum and Longbottom and Weasley and whoever else she'd dated. The most he could hope for was to light her fuse, run a short distance away, and watch her fireworks.
A few days later, another opportunity presented itself when the front page of the Daily Prophet featured photographs of her bosom friends after a successful Auror raid. Severus complained loudly about preferential treatment and the sycophancy of the media, trying to see if she'd rise to the defense of Harry and Ron.
Much to his chagrin, she didn't.
He needed to up the ante.
So he insulted her hair. A rats' nest, he called it. A tapestry of forest undergrowth, all rotting plants and twigs and animal carcasses. Then he compared it to Dumbledore's beard.
The look Hermione gave him could have stripped paint off a table.
And her neck and upper chest turned that delightful rosy pink.
But what he found most disconcerting was the look he got from Minerva. She eyed him throughout the meal, so he kept his head down and his yap shut. When he stood up to leave, the older woman took him aside, whispering advice into his ear about catching more flies with honey than vinegar.
Severus rolled his eyes and fled the room. When he reached the corridor outside the Great Hall, he collapsed against the wall, trying to steady his breathing.
Fuck all.
Minerva knew how he felt. He'd been obvious. If Hermione had sussed it out, too, she could use his feelings against him. She would react in disgust, horrified by his affections.
Severus needed to ignore her, to stop himself before she suspected anything.
He could do that.
He could.
Now that Minerva was onto him, he had to lay low.
Severus spent the better part of October pretending that Professor Granger simply didn't exist.
If it weren't for the fact that he ate three meals a day with the woman and sat through endless hours of staff meetings with her, he might have been able to pull it off.
He took a different seat at the High Table. Next to Trelawney, of all people, but it was the only one free. It was an act of pure masochism, and he knew that, but still, it was less torturous to fight off the amorous advances of the Divination Bat than it was to sit close enough to Granger to catch her scent.
When he smelled her shampoo, he imagined her in the shower, and that was dangerous territory for him.
At least Minerva had stopped giving him sidelong glances.
But Hogwarts seemed colorless and barren without Granger's indomitable spirit on display.
When he simply couldn't take it anymore, Severus decided to tickle the dragon once more. Obviously, he couldn't do it himself, or he would arouse the suspicions of his colleagues as to just why he was paying Granger so much attention. He tricked an accomplice into doing the dirty work for him instead.
Peeves was only too happy to disturb the peace, especially after Severus went out of his way to thank the poltergeist for his kinder, gentler attitude towards the new teaching staff. Why, he never knew what a bleeding heart Peeves had become, and he so appreciated the change in attitude and knew that Professor Granger appreciated it as well.
That did the trick.
Severus had expected the routine pranks: the snakes let loose under her chair at lunch time, flying through her blackboards during classes. He was treated to Granger in full strop one morning when Peeves dropped a load of itching powder down her shirt.
She didn't disappoint, pulling her wand out of her bun and attacking Peeves mid-flight. When he fought back, she shrugged out of her teaching robes, leaving them on the floor as she ran after him, shrieking all the way.
Severus was in love.
Which was pointless, really. No Snape—or Prince, for that matter—was ever lucky in love, at least none that he knew of, so Severus shoved those feelings down into the toes of his boots, prepared to bury them where no sane person would ever look more closely.
What Severus hadn't expected was for Peeves to nail the woman in the corridor outside the Potions classroom.
It was a rainy autumn day with no other notable goings on.
There Snape stood, just minding his own business, grading his fifth years' essays on common antidotes. Some of the little darlings had trouble stringing words together, so he'd already gone through a hefty amount of red ink.
Severus heard a commotion and some screaming, all followed by Peeves zipping in through the main door and flying out through one of the storage rooms. A shimmer flickered where the poltergeist had been just as Granger burst in.
"PEEVES!" she shrieked. "I WILL CASTRA—"
The words stopped cold as she looked around for the culprit.
Snape looked up to see a bedraggled Hermione, dripping in water, her white Oxford shirt clinging to her frame as she left a puddle beneath her feet.
She was a vision, her eyes wide as she stared at the man she hadn't expected.
"Boo," he said.
Severus kicked himself then. "Boo"? What the hell had prompted him to say something so juvenile and asinine? That was officially the nail in the coffin. Gods, he could just—
But she laughed.
Laughed!
And she wasn't laughing at him. She was just… laughing, all warm and whole-hearted as the sound rang out against the stone walls.
He glanced around then, just to make sure he hadn't missed out on a crucial piece of information, like that his desk had just been swarmed by a promenade of pygmy puffs or that Peeves hadn't charmed his coat a lurid teal at his exit.
Nope and nope.
"Oh, Severus," she said, fighting to catch her breath. "I would never have imagined that word from you!"
That made two of them, he thought. He set his quill down atop the pile of completed essays and leaned back in his chair. "I am not a ghost, Granger."
"No," she said, her voice almost a whisper. After a moment, she took a few steps closer. "No, you're not."
After crossing the room, she took the seat beside his, scooting a few inches nearer.
"I think it's high time we had a chat, don't you?" she asked, her eyes gentle. "I've been able to catch up with everyone else on staff, but I feel like you're avoiding me."
He shrugged noncommittally. "The sun does not rise and set on you, Professor Granger."
"You don't scare me, Severus." She raised her wand to cast a series of drying charms on her chest and her arms, rendering the shirt opaque once more.
Ah, well, he thought. All good things…
"Have a drink with me," she said. Her skin dry, she next turned her wand on her hair. It may have been dry now, but it was wildly out of control. "The Three Broomsticks, if you like. Or…"
Her voice trailed off, and her gaze shift downwards ever so slightly.
"Or?" he asked, intrigued.
"It's getting late," she said, her eyes on his stacks of student papers. She shook her head as though she were second guessing herself.
"I'm not handing these back for another two days," he said. He was quite curious as to her intentions. If she was going to be bold, the least he could do was clear the way for her. He was a gentleman, after all.
"I have a small collection of dry reds in my quarters, if you care for wine," she said. "And I need someone who actually keeps up with the Muggle news so I can complain about the London mayor for a tick. Did you know that Minerva had never ever heard the name Boris Johnson before I mentioned it?"
"No," he whispered conspiratorially. "I am aghast. I expected better from her."
She smiled. "You'll have to put up with a good deal of ranting and raving about that albino toady, but I'll provide the Malbec. Or the Pinot noir."
"Ranting and raving, Miss Granger?" he asked.
"It's Hermione," she insisted, standing. "You'll just have to learn to be more familiar with me, won't you?"
He could do that.
Severus liked learning new things.