The Training of Hermione

DREAMS


DISCLAIMER:

This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

Reviews are welcome.

~

It has been such a long time since he last was here. He remembers the dim fields around the castle, the huge griffin and wyvern that sit guard and greet him at the entry, the endless – literally – corridors. Yet most of all, he remembers the library.

The unthinkable library, holding every book which has been written, will ever be written, will never be written. Corridor after corridor, stack after stack, railing a rai railing trailing off into infinity in the half-lit gloom peopled only by the dust motes floating in the thick air. And by Lucien, of course.

“It’s been a long time, Professor” says thin Lucien from behind his moony eyeglasses, putting a heavy tome down to greet the still disconcerted Snape.

“Certainly, Lucien. Ever since I had to consult that lost book by Paracelsus – when was it? Twelve years ago?”

“Thirteen, if my memory doesn’t fail me.” And how could it? wonders Snape. After all, this is the librarian par excellence, the guardian of all possible – and impossible – knowledge. No wonder he exists only in dreams. “It is a pleasure to see you again.”

“Thank you,” says Snape as they both walk down the long, long passage with the impossibly high walls which leads to the main hall. “Do you know why I have been summoned?”

A huge raven swoops down from nowhere to alight on the librarian’s shoulder. “Nobody knows why he’s been summoned,” he croaks.

“Everybody is summoned at least once in his life, as you surely know,” murmurs Lucien.

“Yet I doubt even he knows why he has called you,” finishes the raven, and cackles unpleasantly.

Lucien ignores him. “He seems to be in a… more melancholy mood than usual, these days. You have met him before. I hope you know what to expect.”

Snape nods, and they finally arrive at a tall door at one bend in the corridor. Lucien opens it and lets Snape in.

The hall, as Snape remembers, is huge, and empty, and dark. The only light in it comes from the lightning that flashes through tall bay windows across from the door, and from the fire leaping in a stone chimney place by the throne.

Where the Dream Lord sits, waiting.

Snape approaches, slightly unnerved by the fall of his own footsteps in the emptiness, and takes a short bow. “My lord Morpheus.”

“Wizard. Such a long time.”

“Indeed, my lord.”

Dream of the Endless looks like a pale, gangling young man. Like Snape, he is extremely pale, wears full black, has a mop of black hair and eyes of the darkest black. Unlike Snape, however, he is strikingly handsome. And infinitely lonely.

“So. How is the story going?”

“What story, my lord?”

“Your story. The story you’ve been written into, by the Rowling woman and by countless others. Although they, too, have been written into their own stories, as all of us are…” He smiles sadly he bhe blank look on Snape’s face. “But never mind these metaphysics. I hear you have taken a new lover, wizard. Is it true?”

Snape hesitates. “Yes, my lord. A witch.”

“Do you love her?”

“Yes.” Without hesitation.

A wistful look crosses the Dream Lord’s features, which suddenly turns into pain. “I have had my own share of lovers, wizard. Some I even loved.” He looks away. “It is a terrible thing, love.”

He looks so awfully young when he says it that Snape is surprised to find himself pitying this ancient of ancients.

Which the Dream Lord seems to perceive, for he turns around to look at him and snaps: “Wizard, I was old when this universe was created. I will be here long after you and all your descendants have turned to dust. I am Dream of the Endless. Yet, as you surely know, Endless too are Desire, and Delirium, and Destruction. And Despair.”

His siblings. Dream, Despair, Delirium, Destruction, Desire, Destiny, and Death recounts Snape to himself. The Endless. You really are dealing with some mighty stuff here, Severus.

“Well. However. Your lover is suffering from very bad dreams.” He isn’t asking, but stating, of course.

“She has been having some truly hideous nightmares, yes.”

He must have said it with certain reproach in his voice, because Dream gently points out: “I only send in dreams what is already in the dreamer, wizard.”

Snape looks at his feet and w. It. It is hard to keep a conversation with these elementary beings, who only respond to the most ancient, most primal magic. Certainly not what we teach at Hogwarts. And then Dream speaks again:

“I myself am in a sorry mood these days, as Lucien has no doubt told you. I would like to do something for you, if only to see someone else happy. You once did me a great service, wizard, and today I wish to reward you for it.” He gets up, steps down from the throne, and walks towards the farther wall, followed by a wary Snape.

There is a door on the wall which hadn’t been there before.

“Your lover is asleep now. I am giving you the chance to enter her dreams, and do whatever you deem fit. It is a chance afforded to very few men. But beware –,” he adds on seeing Snape’s eagerness to accept, “the Dreaming is a dangerous land, and you may find greater perils in it than in what you call real life. You will come across parts of your own self which you’d rather not face, ever.” He stares down at Snape. “Do still you wish to enter?”

There is no question at all, to Snape’s mind. “Yes, my lord. I do.”

“Well, then. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He pushes the door open, and Snape walks into a darkness thick as velvet. Behind him, he hears the Dream Lord’s voice as the door slams shut.

“Good luck, wizard. You will need it.”


~~~~~


He stumbles in the darkness until he finally starts to see a dim clarity, like a halo, coming from somewhere ahead. He moves on.

And steps out onto a hall. The main hall at Snape Watering, to be precise. Empty.

Only, it is not exactly his own ancestral home as he knows it: the wall seems to bend and give when he touches it, the furniture shifts constantly, the air flickers and twitches with currents of – something. Poltergeists? Revenants? He is very definitely not sure. About anything at all.

And then come the screams.

He runs into a corridor which definitely is not to be found at Snape Watering, and enters a room like a bedroom, with a huge fire roaring in the chimney place, and what he recognises as his own books lining the walls. Only, where the bed should be, stands a rack.

Hermione lies tied down on the rack, covered in something which looks like a mixture of her own blood and faeces. And he is standing over Hermione, holding something very pointed and very sharp in his hand. Which he is driving into the softest parts of Hermione’s flesh. Together with his penis.

Snape stands frozen, horrified. And then the other Snape, his dream-self, turns around and notices his presence. “Well, well, well… Look who’s come, Mione.” He pronounces her detested nickname with mocking delectation. “Prince Charming himself.”

Dream-Snape whips himself out of Hermione’s prone body and takes a couple of steps towards him, the piercing instrument still in his hand. He is much taller than Snape – a looming, forbidding figure. His face is like Snape’s, only he seems to exude a raw sexual energy which endows a magnetic glamour on his features. He is incredibly attractive. This is how she sees me? thinks Snape incredulously.

Dream-Hermione groans in agony on her rack, and he moves to take a better look at her. And is astonished to find a teenager – she can be no older that fifteen – lying there, and a rather chubby and plain one at that, beneath the fluids covering her face. And this is how she sees herself. Oh, Hermione…

“Thinking you can save her from me, Snivellus?” hisses Dream-Snape. “You’d better save yourself first, then.” He raises the poker-like instrument above his head, and tries to strike Snape on the head. Snape dodges, and kicks his dream-self hard in the shins. Only to realise, in astonishment, that the kick hurts him too.

“Struggling with yourself, Severus?” comes another voice from behind him. A v he he knows all too well. “That’s the problem with having a conscience. Interferes with one’s coherence. Me, I’m all coherent. As you can see”.

He turns, and sees Voldemort standing by the chimney, surrounded by his Death Eaters. All of them grinning insanely at the plump young girl who is now kneeling in front of Lucius Malfoy. Sucking his dick as if her life depended on it.

“Little cocksucker,” says Voldemort, almost affectionately, and puts a hand out to pat her. Then grasps her rudely by hai hair and pulls her back towards him, letting a spurt of semen escape from Lucius’s penis and fly across the air, to land on Snape’s face.

“Snake seed,” hisses Voldemort, staring at him with his red, feral eyes. And, to Snape’s horror, the string of semen turns into a viper which he hurriedly flings to the ground and stomps on. “Slytherin seed,” says Voldemort, and Snapes sees that suddenly Hermione has become swollen, so swollen in the belly that she seems about to burst.

“Won’t Draco be delighted with a little sister?” smirks Lucius, looking straight into Snape’s eyes. And answers him own question: “Not really, no… But well, at least he’ll get his own little mudblood fucktoy to play with.”

Snape is so appalled, so horrified, so overwhelmed he can hardly breathe. “You… sick…” he manages to wheeze out. But this is the Dreaming, as the Dream Lord warned him, and it isn’t even his own dream, and all his limbs feel stiff and inert. He is impotent.

Voldemort smiles, a sinister, twisted smile. “Sick? Why, Severus, we are only here because of you. We are only doing to this muggle bitch what you yourself would like to do.”

And then he understands. Turning around to face his dream-self – which is still standing behind him – he takes the sharp instrument from his hand.

He looks at Dream-Hermione, who is staring at him in expectation and fright. “This is me, Hermione,” he whispers. “I love you. And I won’t let them hurt you anymore.” And then, very slowly, slits his own throat.


~~~~~


He wakes up to the wetness of his own blood, a sticky coat on his throat. Only when he raises his hand to staunch the flow, it isn’t blood, but – saliva?

He opens his eyes. Hermione is looking at him, her eyes full of mirthful glee. She kisses him some more around the neck. “It was you, wasn’t it? In the Dream?”
is is so out of breath still, even tha that he is back in reality – whatever that may be, he thinks –, that he can do nothing but nod rather sheepishly.

“You… killed yourself in the Dream so that I could be rid of it,” she whispers in awe.

“Whatever it takes to make you happy, my dear.”

She stares at him for a moment, then ducks under the cover of the bed. “However did you do it?” comes her muffled voice from inside. “That wasn’t standard magic.”

Ever the cur one one, he smiles to himself. “Let’s say that I have some influential…” he begins, and is cut short by something very, very delightful going on in his nether parts.

“Welcome back,” murmurs Hermione, and kisses him again.


~~~~~


AUTHOR’S NOTE

With apologies to Neil Gaiman. Dream, Lucien, and Matthew the raven are all characters in his gorgeous graphic novel, Sandman. If you haven’t read Gaiman (he also has regular novels), then by all means do. Really.