The Harder They Fall

Hermione sniffed and brushed the back of her hand over her face. She didn’t say anything, but she stepped back from the door. Severus Snape walked into the examination room. The door closed behind him.

The demon Ahrimanes shrugged. “Well, that went pretty well.”

Madame Hooch cleared her throat. “Er, I think I’m going to go ride a couple of laps, enjoy them while I can…” Blushing, she beat a hasty retreat, Silver Arrow clutched firmly in one sweaty palm.

“Mr. Weasley, you might want to, ah, find a bed for the night.” The headmistress couldn’t believe she was suggesting this, but she felt sorry for him.

“I’ll take care of it,” Ahrimanes insisted. With an offhand gesture, the demon banished Ron Weasley from the infirmary.

“Where did you send him?” Minerva asked.

The demon smirked. “Cute Hufflepuff sixth year he was canoodling with earlier? She’s been waiting in the Room of Requirement since you dragged him away.” He fluttered his fingers at the other two couples in the room. They disappeared as well. “If they’re going to sleep, they deserve a more comfortable bed. And if they’re not going to sleep, they deserve a little peace and privacy, don’t you think?” He looked at his wrist, bare of a wristwatch. “Because any minute now…”

The yelling started. Hermione’s screams were punctuated by dull thumps.

The demon and Minerva both cringed. “Yep,” Ahrimanes confirmed, “Right on schedule.”

The headmistress glared at the infernal being. “What’s right on schedule?”

“Oh, didn’t I mention that part?” He unrolled the contract casually. “The bit in bold lettering.”

Minerva settled her glasses more firmly and peered at the text. “Too long apart and the love between two people starts turning to hate? That wasn’t there before!” Indignation made her bristle like a cat. “You just put that there. You’re changing the contract to suit your whims!”

Ahrimanes shrugged, guiltily. “That was Fudge’s idea, too. He wanted to give me carte blanche, just in case you figured things out too quickly.”

“So, as soon as we figure things out, you have the power to change the contract?”

The demon laughed. “I can change the contract anytime I like. It’s just more sporting to give you a chance to figure out my methods first.”

Minerva frowned. “So, why are you telling me all this now?”

Ahrimanes transfigured a hospital cot into a plush red velvet upholstered love seat. He sat, lounging casually against the arm, his hands behind his head. “Well…” He smiled at Minerva winningly, patted the cushion next to him. “To begin with, you’re much better looking than Minister Fudge.”

***

“Miss Granger, sorry, Hermione, stop for a moment and think. You’re blowing this all out of proportion.” Snape ducked the pot of geraniums the irate woman had summoned to chuck at his head. She’d been quiet, far too quiet, when she let him into the room. He hadn’t done anything or said anything to provoke her, but she exploded like the geranium pot that had just shattered against the wall behind him. Potting soil and geranium petals showered the room. “You didn’t hear what I had to say.” He ducked the cricket bat. It thunked against the wall with a hollow cracking noise. “If you had only let me finish my sentence…”

“Finish this!” Hermione summoned a bottle of fizzy lemonade and hurled it at the Potions Master’s head. Snape ducked. The glass shattered against the wall, fizzy lemonade splattered around the room.

“Enough!” Snape roared and charged across the tiny space. He grabbed Hermione’s wand hand, restraining her firmly. “You will listen to me, or I will begin to believe you truly are the stupid brat I have always accused you of being.”

“Let go of me!” She was sobbing, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Hermione, you are young. You have your whole life ahead of you. I don’t know what you think you are playing at. I would save you this experience if I could…”

“What do you mean, save me? You’d rather serve a sentence in Azkaban than…”

“…than make you unhappy. I know I’m not what women want in a relationship…”

“What?” Flustered, confused, Hermione finally met his eyes. “Aren’t I a woman?”

Severus squinted at her. “Of course you are a woman. Who said you weren’t?”

“You said that you weren’t what women wanted in a relationship. But I want you. Therefore, I must not be a woman.” One side of Hermione’s mouth quirked gently. “Or you might be wrong.”

Snape brought his face close to hers, their noses almost touching. “Have you factored in the effect this curse might be having on us?”

Hermione sobered. “Yes. I know you don’t feel the same way as I do. So, please, why are you here?”

“The demon told us how to break the curse. Three couples must consummate their relationship. We’ve already had two…”

“So, for the sake of Hogwarts…” Hermione gulped. “This is going to be pity sex, isn’t it?”

Severus shook his head gently, his prodigious nose brushing against Hermione’s less substantial nasal protrusion. “This will not be pity sex, unless you pity me for being a bitter old man taking advantage of one of the loveliest witches I’ve ever had the privilege of working with.”

“You think I’m lovely?”

“Ravishing.” He couldn’t look away.

“Right now, anyway.” She was resigned. Hermione pulled out of his unresisting grasp. Snape wanted to protest, but with a swish and flick she transformed the examination table into a large four-poster bed. She tucked her wand away safely. “At least I’ll have this memory.” She sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at him expectantly.

That was when Severus realized that she was accepting his ungracious proposition. “Oh, Hermione, this is all wrong!”

“What? What did I do?” She looked panicked.

Severus quickly knelt on the floor in front of her, embracing her knees, hiding his face in her lap. “You deserve so much better.”

His voice was slightly muffled, but she could still understand him. Hermione combed his hair with her fingers, brushing the inky tendrils away from his ear. “Shhh…”

“You deserve a man who loves you with a whole heart. You deserve a man who could say, Hermione, I have been waiting my whole life for you. I love you. Every beat of my heart whispers your name and I am incomplete without your love. The stars sing of your beauty to me and the world is new every morning when I see you. Hermione! You deserve so much better than this poor broken hearted wreck of a man, and I cannot possibly deserve you.”

She hushed him gently once more.

He crawled up onto the bed beside her. “Let me pretend, Hermione, just for tonight, let me pretend that I am good enough for you. Let me pretend that I can love you like you deserve. Let me believe, just for a few precious moments. Tell me you love me and let me believe it.”

Hermione was crying again, but silently, the tears dripping down her face. Severus kissed her cheek, tasting the salty wetness. He kissed all the droplets he could see, his lips caressing her chin, the side of her nose, the corner of her mouth. He almost didn’t hear her plaintive whisper. “But I do love you, Severus.”

The answering words stuck halfway up his throat. He wasn’t going to say it. How could she believe him under these circumstances?

“Let me…” he began.

“Shut up. Just kiss me already.” Hermione didn’t wait for him. She pushed him onto his back and kissed him first. His arms came around her, answering her actions without thought. It was like the first kiss, except it didn’t stop. Their mouths met and merged, sending shock waves throughout their bodies.

She surged over him, rubbing herself against him as they kissed and touched. Severus thought he was going to lose his mind. It was good, so good, too good. Sex wasn’t supposed to feel this good. It was always awkward and fraught with complications. But here, now, in conceivably the worst possible set of circumstances for any kind of truth between them, Severus Snape was making love to Hermione Granger and it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

“Too many clothes,” Hermione muttered, tugging her skirt up while maintaining her slow gyrations over his groin. Severus started undoing the buttons of his shirt, realized it was taking too long and ripped the offending garment, popping buttons around the room.

He tried to help her remove her shoes, but Hermione was impatiently undoing his trouser flies and shoving his underclothes down around his knees. His arousal sprang up, startling her slightly. She laughed deliciously. He gave up on her shoes and fumbled her panties to one side, probing the moist heat beneath with two long fingers.

“Oh! Oh!” Hermione temporarily forgot all the words she’d ever known. He teased her clit briefly before plunging deep within her, finding a spot she’d read about but never before understood. She went cross-eyed from pleasure. Searching for an anchor on reality, she instead grasped Severus’ surprisingly thick arousal and squeezed it gently. It twitched. Hermione laughed again, pleased and excited by the response.

Severus couldn’t bear it any longer. He flipped her onto her back and wasted precious moments easing her panties off over her shoes. “Open for me. I can’t wait.” He growled, caressing her thighs as he positioned himself above her.

Hermione lifted her legs and wrapped them around his waist, trying not to hurt him with her shoes. “Come to me. In me. Now.”

Driving home, Severus tried not to crush the girl beneath him, but she clung to him, kissing his face, his neck, scraping his back gently with her nails. He tried to prolong the experience but Hermione was having none of it.

“Harder! Faster! Damn you! Harder!” He complied and was rewarded by Hermione’s shuddering, quaking orgasm. She screamed her pleasure and bit his shoulder, hard. The pain distracted him momentarily, but her shuddering muscles worked around him, pulling his own release from him with a loud groan.

***

“Well, that’s three.” Minerva McGonagall sighed, hearing the groans and cries coming from the examination room. It sounded like they were very happy indeed, by a certain crass physical measure. Minerva crossed her legs, feeling like a jealous old cow.

Ahrimanes snapped his fingers and the contract disappeared. Then he yawned theatrically, stretched and placed an arm on the couch behind Minerva. The headmistress frowned at the demon who took this as an invitation to cuddle closer. He winked. “Wanna make it four?”

“What’s in it for me?” Minerva asked warily.

“Earth shattering pleasure?” The demon smiled confidently.

“I want Fudge.” Ahrimanes proffered a plate of chocolaty sweets. Minerva waved it away. “No, I want Minister Fudge. Cornelius. The substandard excuse for a villain who set this farce in motion.” Her eyes sparkled with a fury that made the proverbial woman scorned appear as harmless as a kitten. “I want him to pay for this. I want justice done. I want some of my own back.”

“They say the best revenge is living well.” Ahrimanes transformed the love seat into a large circular bed. He reclined lazily against the plush red velvet bedspread and heart shaped pillows.

Minerva perched prudishly on the edge of the bed. “We’ve had three happy couples, so you’ve removed all aspects of the pumpkin juice curse, right?”

“Right.” Ahrimanes held his arms out to the headmistress, waggling his eyebrows encouragingly.

“This is just between you and me. Everything else is back the way it was?”

“It sounds like you don’t entirely trust me, Minerva.” The demon pouted. “I’m hurt.”

“I just want you to promise me that when Minister Fudge arrives in the morning…”

“With his nephew.” Ahrimanes inserted.

“With his nephew?”

“Fudge has this nephew he thinks would make a dandy headmaster for Hogwarts.”

“He does, does he?” Minerva’s eyes blazed again. “When Minister Fudge and his nephew arrive in the morning to give his usual parting speech before the students get back on the train, I want him to be able to find no fault whatsoever with me, my tenure at Hogwarts, the students under my care, the faculty… am I leaving anything out?”

“All this and more, Minerva.” Ahrimanes’ voice was full of promise. “Give me tonight and I’ll give you the world.”

“I don’t want the world. I just want Hogwarts.” Minerva moved closer to the demon on the bed. “And maybe a little bit of you.” Abandoning herself to the fantasies she’d been doing her best to ignore, Minerva McGonagall slid her hands along the dark demon’s smooth chest. “Have you ever wanted to be a teacher’s pet?”

***

“Hermione? Are you…? Did I hurt you?” Severus was still inside her, his trousers binding his legs uncomfortably.

Hermione smiled a lazy womanly smile of utter smugness. “Not at all. That was magnificent.” She stretched under him. “How do you feel?”

“You weren’t…?”

“A virgin? Heavens, no! What do you think summer vacations are for?” Hermione smiled. “My parents are fairly liberal. They figured as long as I used all the available protection, wild sex was a lot better for blowing off steam than strange drugs. And given the war…”

“How, er… modern.” The thought of Hermione having sex with anyone but him made Snape unexpectedly angry. He hadn’t even seen her breasts. He rolled off her.

“Oh.” Hermione noticed the tooth marks on his shoulder. “Sorry about that. I got a little carried away.” Softly, she kissed the dark blemishes on his pale skin. To her surprise, his body began to respond again.

Severus noticed her watching his arousal growing again. “I guess it didn’t work.”

“Maybe we just have to try again, but a little bit more loudly?”

Secretly, he wasn’t sure they hadn’t heard her screaming in America, but he was willing to play along. “Fine, but this time I want to see your breasts.”

“And we should both take off our shoes.”

***

A/N: Not done yet. I’ve still got more lemons and a little revenge coming. Yes, you can also blame Joss Whedon for the singing demon, but in my head, manemanes looks more like Bollywood actor Shahrukh Khan than the smooth zoot suited demon from OMWF. Your mileage may vary. *grin*