Bonds of Duty

Chapter 2: The Morning After the Night Before


Hermione didn\'t want to wake up. That was her first conscious thought. Unfortunately, it seemed that she *was* awake. She peered out through almost closed lids and found that daylight was creeping into the room. There was no hope of going back to sleep, then.

Her next conscious thought was that she didn\'t want to get up. Shwnedwned, and closed her eyes tight. She could pretend it was Saturday at least until her alarm went off, even though there were, no doubt, lots of things she was supposed to be doing today. She was so tired she didn\'t want to move an inch, and the bed was so very comfortable. Surely nothing would suffer too badly if she stayed here that little bit longer? She snuggled more deeply into her pillow and curled her legs against the soft linen sheet.

Something moved against her back.

Hermione\'s eyes flew open. She rolled onto her back and looked across the pillow at-

Oh, yes. That was right.

He was lying on his side. She could see an ear peeking out from beneath familiar black hair; a shoulder and the beginning of a long, pale back were also visible where the covers had slipped down.

As Hermione watched, Snape twitched slightly in his asleep. He must be getting cold; she could see the gooseflesh appearing on his upper arm. Presumably, the rest of him was just as naked as his upper body. Hermione looked down: just as naked as she was herself.

Hermione pulled the sheet up tight so that everything below her shoulders was properly covered. It didn\'t really change the fact that she was quite naked, but it made her feettertter. She\'d never done this before, woken up naked in bed in the morning. Not by herself; not with anyone, but most especially not naked in bed with Snape. Her lack of clothing hat bot bothered her the night before, but then lots of other things which should have bothered her hadn\'t bothered her the night before either. She groaned softly, remembering the way she\'d pulled off her nightdress and flung it aside. What could have possessed her?

Well, she knew the answer to that. Professor Dumbledore had warned them of just this sort of development, of the possibility of the spell working on their subconscious minds, pushing them towards what it wanted, eroding their self-control. They\'d been doing so well until last night that perhaps they\'d got slightly complacent. Perhaps they\'d become a little too sure of their own abilities to keep the power of the spell tightly leashed. She and Snape hadn\'t been nearly so… uninhibited the previous two times they\'d had sex, exactly a week apart, as planned. It had been serious and solemn, both times. At least, that was how it had started. Hermione had reminded herself ovnd ond over again of just why she\'d agreed to do this. Duty had been paramount in her mind and even if both times she\'d reached the point where the blood had been rushing in her ears as she gasped for breath and pleasure pounded through her, then at least they\'d both still been wearing nightclothes at the end and could therefore claim that a certain amount of personal dignity remained.

Neither of them enjoyed the invasion of privacy inherent in the situation. Hermione thought that Snape resisted all trappings of intimacy even more than she did. It was impossible not to intrude on each other\'s private lives given that in addition to the weekly sharing of bodies they were also having to share the same living quarters, and, of course, the same bed every night. However, they\'d had a tacit understanding that there were certain boundaries they would not cross.

So what had happened to that last night? How had they both succumbed so easily?

Hermione considered the matter. She\'d wanted to feel skin against skin. That\'s where it had started. She closed her eyes, feeling oddly embarrassed to be looking at Snape\'s naked back. Skin against skin. With Snape. She\'d never expected anything like that, or to find herself wanting anything like that, when she\'d agreed to take part in this desperate undertaking. She hadn\'t really been able to properly imagine it beforehand, but she\'d thought that it would be businesslike, more than anything – as businesslike as such a necessarily intimate act could ever be, anyway.

She groaned again, and Snape shifted beside her. She bit her lip; the last thing she wanted to do was wake him up prematurely. If she thought that looking at his back was embarrassing even with the rest of him safely covered up, then an awake, less covered, vocal Snape was definitely something that didn\'t bear thinking about. He would most likely blame her for the loss of control, and Hermione was honest enough to admit to herself that she\'d wanted it and that she\'d been the one who\'d made the first move. But he hadn\'t put up any sort of objection. In fact, he\'d thrown off his nightshirt with considerable alacrity. Besides, he knew as well as she did that they\'d had to do it last night. They needed to do it to reinforce the strength of the spell.

Beside her, Snape moved again and made a low, sleepy sound. Steeling herself to open her eyes, Hermione discovered that he\'d rolled over and was lying sprawled on his stomach with his head still turned away from her on the pillow. His left arm was close to her now. The room was dimly lit, but the presence of the faint mark on his lower arm was unmistakeable.

The last remnants of Hermione\'s earlier resolve to pretend that it was Saturday and stay in bed for as long as possible fell away. She decided that right now would be a really good time to get out of bed. It was a shame, really, since now that she was a bit more awake she remembered that it *was* Saturday. It would have been a shame, anyway. She swallowed, and made herself look away from Snape\'s bare arm.

Her eyes fell on the small clock on her beside table. She blinked. Ten o\'clock? It looked as though she – they – had managed to sleep in after all. How on earth had that happened? She didn\'t feel as though she\'d had all that extra sleep. She felt bone weary, and more than ready to stay in bed for quite some time to come. Well, she would have done, except for the little matter of… She looked back at the man lying beside her, her eyes drawn almost irresistibly to the one thing in the room that she most didn\'t want to see.

As though aware of her scrutiny, Snape made another of those sleepy, wordless noises deep in his throat. Hermione let out a sigh. She wouldn\'t be surprised if he woke soon, and she\'d much rather not be present when he did. There was really nothing else for it but to get up. Resolutely, she pulled back the covers and slipped out of bed.

She yawned her way across the thick bedroom carpet to the bathroom, hardly able to see where she was going through the curtain of hair in front of her eyes. Suddenly, she bit back a less than ladylike word or three when her foot got caught in something and she very nearly tripped and fell. She pushed her hair out of her face and scowled down at her discarded nightdress. So that was where it had ended up. She dispatched it into the corner of the room with a satisfying kick and continued on. It was with no little relief that she made it to the sanctuary of the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

She hoped the noise had woken him up.

As she stepped away from the door, Hermione winced and turned her face away from the bright sunlight coming in from the two large windows on the far side of the room. She hadn\'t yet become accustomed to the glare which greeted her each morning in Snape\'s bathroom. The bathroom was the only room in Snape\'s chambers which possessed anything like good-sized windows, but they more than made up for the lack elsewhere. They weren\'t much short of magnificent, stretching from the floor to the high ceiling in two perfect, elegant white arches, which framed the view out across the lake and beyond.

While she had gasped in pleased surprise the first time she\'d seen the bathroom windows, Hermione soon found that she didn\'t like living with them day in and day out quite so much. The windows were bare of curtains and drapes of any kind, and the light streamed in relentlessly at most times of day. Whenever Hermione used the bathroom, she couldn\'t quite shake the feeling that she was on display, even though she knew quite well that there was nothing anywhere near the castle high enough to provide a vantage point from which anyone could look in.

That still didn\'t rule out passing brooksticks, of course. Hermione was itching to put up a deflecting charm, or a reflecting charm or an obscuring charm or something similar. There were scores of spells which would do an effective job of allowing those inside to see out while preventing any stray Quidditch player from seeing in. Even a set of unenchanted curtains would be an improvement on nothing at all.

Of course, Hermione could have easily applied any of the spells that sprang to mind, or even put up a set of curtains by less magical means if she\'d decided to. But she hadn\'t. Snape definitely hadn\'t said that she couldn’t *add* things to his quarters, but since he\'d greeted her upon her arrival two weeks ago with the very blighting instruction not to touch a thing without his leave, Hermione had been left in little doubt as to what his feelings would be with regard to any changes to the bathroom décor. At first, she had been determined to disrupt Snape\'s living quarters as little as possible. Of his own free will, he was giving up the privacy he set such store by, even if he didn\'t bother to hide his resentment of the circumstances that required it. Of course, neither of them had expected the situation to continue for nearly as long as it had already, much less with no end in sight.

And yet here they were. Here she was, stuck in this impossible situation. Stuck with an impossible wizard. Stuck with impossible windows for that matter, she thought as she spared them one last irritable glance.

For how much longer?

She rubbed her eyes wearily and wished she was back in bed. She wished she was back in bed by herself.

There was no choice but to get ready to face the day.

She used the toilet first, keeping her eyes firmly averted from the offending windows the whole time. The shower, with its private, obscuring screen beckoned next. That was a more inviting prospect. Hermione could already feel the cleansing blast of hot water against her skin. It was just what she needed – to clean herself properly in body, anyway.

She got to her feet; a bit too fast, she promptly discovered as the room swam before her eyes and tilted alarmingly. She grabbedd ofd of the brass towel rail affixed to the wall beside her and remained there, clinging desperately for a few stomach-churning seconds until the room settled and she could see properly again.

Hermione drew in a shaky breath and made herself let go of the rail. Obviously, she needed to make sure that she ate proper meals more regularly than she had been of late. She would start with today\'s breakfast, straight after she\'d washed and dressed. She looked over at the shower stall again and then reluctantly moved on to the bath. She could lie down in the bath. Perhaps that would be best this morning, even allowing for the problem of the bathtub\'s close proximity to the windows.

She perched on the edge of the bath and watched the water flow from a set of old-fashioned taps very similar to those she was familiar with from the student bathrooms. The bath itself was even more old-fashioned than the taps, a deep, claw-footed piece of work in plain white porcelain which matched the large tiles lining the wall behind it. She thought it odd that the teachers\' quarters didn\'t run to more luxurious fixtures, like the ones in the prefects\' bathroom. Then again, this relative austerity might simply be one of Snape\'s particular quirks. The white bath, tiles and windowframes, plus the dazzling light which bounced off the shining tiles was oddly un-Snape-like. Hermione couldn\'t imagine that he had chosen any of those things. It was strange that he had, apparently, elected not to change any of the features of the room even after all his years of living here. If not for the fact that she knew it would be a wasted effort, Hermione would have loved to ask Snape why.

She shut off the flow of water with a wave of her wand and settled into the bath, leaning back and closing her eyes against the bright sunlight.

It took her somewhat less than thirty seconds to decide that she wasn\'t going to put up with those uncovered windows any longer. Snape obviously never took a bath during the day; it wouldn\'t surprise Hermione to find out that he never took a bath at all. It wouldn\'t hurt him to accommodate her preferred bathing habits. He\'d given up his privacy, true, but so had she. She was the one who\'d moved out of her home and into semi-hostile territory for the duration. She was the one who\'d made all the major concessions up until now. Viewed from that perspective, it seemed more than fair that he should put up with a few minor alterations to his environment while she was forced to share it.

She made a few wain tin the bath as she leaned over the side of the bath to retrieve her wand from the floor. She squinted up at the window as she took aim: with a bit of luck, she\'d soon make a few waves of quite a different sort.

\"*Velumio*,\" she said, stressing the second syllable.

Instantly, the room darkened. Hermione looked up through the sudden gloom, trying to make out what exactly was blocking the light from the windows. That was the one little uncertain variable with that spell: you could never be quite sure what sort of curtains you would end up with. Hermione was fairly sure that the trick to perfecting it lay in the exact intonation used when casting the spell. Last time she\'d tried it, she\'d ended up with a set of elaborately lacy curtains which wouldn\'t have looked out of place in any of the bedrooms in her mother\'s house. As she recalled, Ron hadn\'t been too thrilled to see them adorning the main window of the bedsit he referred to as his \"pad\". Well, she hadn\'t produced lace curtains this time, that was for sure. These ones were much more solid, so solid that they blocked out the light to the extent that she had trouble making out the pattern on them.

\"*Lumos*,\" she added as an afterthought.

Hermioine laughed out loud at her first clear sight of the curtains. Chintz! They were like something out of her grandmother\'s house. She hoped Snape was struck speechless at the sight of them.

She put out the light and then stifled another laugh as she let herself sink down into the bathwater until all of her face was submerged except for her nose. There was something private and wonderfully isolated about being down in the water like that, particularly when surrounded by the soft gloom currently enveloping the bathroom. It was so calm and relaxing that it almost made up for having to get out of bed before she was ready. Actually, it was more relaxing than being in bed with Snape. Much more. Well, except for when they were both really relaxed, of course.

If Hermione\'s face hadn\'t been underwater, she probably would have laughed again, a bit self-consciously this time. Sleeping with Snape. *Sex* with Snape. She never would have predicted that. When she was a student, she\'d had some vague idea that a relationship mightn\'t be a bad thing at some point in her future, so long as it didn\'t interfere with more important considerations, like her studies, her career, and helping Harry and Dumbledore and all the rest of them in the fight against Voldemort. And now here she was, in something that had all the more intimate trappings of a serious relationship without actually being one, while researching into the whole thing as part of her role in the war effort, and all the time aware that her researches couldn\'t hurt in furthering her own ambitions, either.

Hermione knew quite a lot about sex. It could be looked up in books and researched like any other subject, after all. When she was a student, she\'d quickly made her way through the fairly slim pickings on the subject available in the Hogwarts library. At the time, Hermione had wondered about the sparsity of reading material on sex and sex magic to be found even in the Restricted Section. She wondered about it even more now. It was something to ask about some time soon. Now, at least, she had a legitimate reason for researching the subject.

Back then, it had been simple curiosity that had driven her. She\'d supplemented her readings with books from her parents\' local library during the holidays. She\'d even perused a few articles on sex when flipping through old magazines in her mother\'s waiting room while waiting for her to finish with her final patient of the day. Thanks to all her reading, Hermione knew a lot about sex and the modern woman. She knew about the importance of foreplay; she knew about the Power of the Clitoris, and about Being Responsible for your Own Orgasm; she knew about the supposed difference between clitoral and vaginal orgasms; she knew about the Ten Surefire Ways of Keeping Your Man Coming Back for More; she knew about the significance of The Right Wand for The Right Witch.

She\'d even had sex a few times.

None of it had prepared her for the situation with Snape. Not at all. She didn\'t like having to deal with anything without appropriate and thorough preparation, but this time, she had no choice.

Well, she was coping so far. *They* were coping so far. Just. So long as the situation didn\'t continue much longer, which was, of course, where her researches came in. She needed to get back to work on that today. It was just as well she\'d brought that book back with her the night before.

Hermione surfaced, and reached behind her for the bottle of *Lotsa\' Lather for Extra-Abundant Tresses* shampoo she\'d left on the shelf at the end of the bath.

Her hand grasped at empty air. With a sense of foreboding, Hermione twisted around in the bath: the shelf was quite bare. The remains of her calm evaporated.

\"Oh, I don\'t believe it,\" she muttered. \"He\'s done it again.\"

Damn Snape. Damn him to hell. She could put up with a lot. She could be put up with living as an unwelcome guest in Snape\'s quarters, *and* sleeping with him, *and* having sex with him, *and* putting up with his moods and habits. However, she refused to put up with having her personal possessions relocated without her permission or even her knowledge. It just wasn\'t on. There was nothing wrong with leaving her bath things out on the shelf, within a convenient arm\'s reach of the bath. It wasn\'t as if she left the caps off, or the bottles scattered haphazardly about the room. Snape didn\'t put anything of his own on the shelf, so why should he begrudge her the use of it?

Hermione knew exactly where she\'d find her things. Still muttering under her breath, she hoisted herself up out of the bath.

She wasn\'t ready for the room to start tilting again. It was sheer luck that her flailing hand found the shelf and hung on. She sank down on trembling knees, only sure that that way *was* down because the bathwater was there.

She remained there for a while, eyes closed and hand clamped like a vice around the shelf, until the muscles in her arm started protesting under the strain. She opened her eyes cautiously. The dizzy spell seemed to be past. She\'d definitely have to hunt out some breakfast as soon as possible.

Hermione pulled herself up, slowly and carefully this time, taking a moment to rest on the edge of the bath before dripping her way across the floor. Her missing bath potions were in the cupboard beneath the sink, as expected. She stared at them, feeling too weak to summon up the righteous anger and resentment she\'d been anticipating only a little while before. Now she felt so… drained – yes, drained was the word – that she really did want to sleep the day away in bed.

She got back into the bath, and washed and conditioned her hair almost mechanically. She half-dozed in the tub for a while after that, not even having the energy to reach down for her wand to keep the water at her preferred high temperature. Eventually, the water cooled sufficiy thy that she could no longer ignore it. She got out of the bath very carefully, towelled herself dry, and sat down again on the side of the bath to apply the quick-dry charm she always used after washing her hair.

She leaned her head against the wall briefly, feeling more drained than ever, and only then paused to wonder about whether Snape would still be in the bedroom when she emerged.

All of her clothes were in the bedroom.

It wasn\'t something she\'d had to worry about before. Every other morning she\'d been here, Snape had risen early, got through his ablutions quickly, dressed in the bathroom and departed before she\'d even made it out of bed.

She\'d been less than alert when she\'d retreated to the bathroom this morning, not even thinking to grab her dressing-gown from its hanger on the way. All of her clothes were out there, and of course, so was he. There was nothing else for it: she\'d have to wrap herself up in her towel and brazen it out.

Once she\'d arranged the towel around her so that it covered everything that needed to be covered, she turned to the mirror and took a good look at the picture she presented. The mirror didn\'t offer an opinion; it was a mirror of few wordst dot doubt the result of living too many years with Snape. Hermione frowned. She\'d never worn this particular towel before and it was definitely on the skimpy side. It would just have to do. She wished she\'d had the foresight to use a bathsheet.

Then she laughed. Perhaps the sight of her would stun Snape into silence. She could always hope. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door and walked out into the bedroom.

Snape was indeed still in the bedroom, though no longer asleep or in bed. Or naked. He was wearing his long, navy dressing-gown and was, in fact, standing so close to the bathroom door that Hermione nearly walked right into him.

\"I trust you have quite finished in my bathroom?\" he asked in a tight voice, emphasising the possessive.

\"Oh yes, I\'m all done,\" said Hermione.

She expected him to come back with some sort of withering retort. He shot her a fierce look at that, as though searching for some double meaning in her words, but said nothing more than, \"See that you don\'t keep me waiting so long in future.\" Then he disappeared into the bathroom, leaving her standing in the middle of the floor.

She was pretty sure that he hadn\'t even noticed the towel, or anything else that she wasn\'t wearing. In an odd way, she was disappointed about that. Wasn\'t he the least bit curious about the body he\'d touched so intimately only the night before? She supposed that he wasn\'t.

She heard the toilet flush beyond the door, and then the rush of water as the shower was turned on. That was definitely her cue to get dressed and out the door before he made a reappearance.

Letting the towel drop to the floor, Hermione set about getting ready for the day ahead.