sshg_smut | Fic: For Safekeeping (Part 2 of 4) (Reply)

Title: For Safekeeping (2/4)
Author: (anonymous for now)
Summary: Hermione forgoes undergarments to protest avoidant behaviour. Severus benefits.
Prompt: Severus has voyeuristic tendencies. Hermione likes to be watched. Hermione pretends she doesn't know she's being watched. Severus understands the game and abides by the rules, until he decides to break them.
Prompter:

bonsaibetz
Warnings: Voyeurism
Notes: There's a plot here somewhere, I could have sworn I packed one in my bag before leaving the house...

Part II

Dinner had not ended quickly enough for his tastes, though it rarely ever did.

He had glared up and down the high table with impatience, his mind whirring too loudly to remind him that he might be hungry; he had left behind a plate that was still a third uneaten, his gravy-coated mash in particular having been forked and flattened to a pitiful degree. At one point he had noticed Filius giving him a curious look, but he had squashed the Charms professor's potential concern with a forced smile that a lifetime of experience had taught him would look more like a grimace. While his spying days may have been over, he would likely never lose his talent for managing the attention of others: Filius turned away with an uninspired, barely-there smile of his own.

Severus had left the head table at the first opportunity, slinking through the side door, his cloak whipping behind him. Over the next hour and a half, as the Great Hall had emptied of students, he had roamed the corridors, his cloak quietly brushing past the heels of stragglers and causing all sorts of amusing yelps, jumps, and flinches as he strode away. He caught one pair of industrious Hufflepuffs with their hands past waistbands (before sundown—the dunderheads), and another pair of students (sixth years) who had surely been groping one another before he had turned the corner. To the Hufflepuffs, he took away points, gave detention, and hinted at Pomona perhaps hearing of the incident. To the other pair (a Slytherin and a Ravenclaw, if that had any relevance), he merely deducted house points for lack of visible decorum.

As the torches in brackets along the walls became the only sources of light, however, the daylight well and truly spent, Severus began to lose what little patience he had managed to squirrel away after his morning class. His thoughts kept drifting to Hermione Granger. To goading her at her out of bounds reading spot—to her seeming ignorance at the intimate view she had presented him with only hours earlier. His attention rested somewhere between the two memories, worrying at a spot that should have bridged the unexpected gap in behaviour. No epiphanies resulted. He could conclude only one thing with certainty: he wanted to catch her again.

The night wore on with precious little to occupy him. He had snuck up behind a group of three students and addressed them, making them all jump and cry out in alarm (they hadn't been breaking any rules—it had been for his own enjoyment). He had insinuated, to a still-impressionable first year, that tracking mud into the entrance hall would cause permanent damage to the castle's stone floors and thus would result in a horrible punishment (Minerva would have words with him about the misinformation before the week was out, he was certain). He had confiscated an erotic pamphlet from a fifth-year, and enjoyed the look of horror on her face and that of her friend's when he had flicked it open and raised his eyebrow at the two of them (a banishing charm had followed his dry, unimpressed expression).

After an hour of no one else encountered in the halls (save Aurora heading down to the kitchens for a late snack), Severus should have called it a night. Clearly, all of the little monsters that had intended to break rules already had done and were now well on their way to sleeping (unlikely, but as he had no current evidence to the contrary...). The corridors were dead, and yet Severus continued to walk them. He had become somewhat unhinged after the war ended—he told himself this, but acknowledged, very far back in his mind, that he had undoubtedly been unhinged before, during and after. He paced, and strode, and stopped, and started. Not searching for rulebreakers, anymore, on this late hour (though he fed himself this likely story), but hoping to stumble upon Hermione Granger in some new, compromising position.

A page turned.

It should not have, considering the section of the castle that Severus had decided to walk through, but in the thick silence of disused classrooms, crumbling walls, and empty living quarters, the sound was clear and unmistakeable.

He stopped, his wand out at his side, listening, breathing evenly, his heart jumping once before steadying. He didn’t want to be noticed this time, regardless of whether it was her. Though he was quite certain it was; he had a feeling. Circe—a feeling. The end of the war truly had unhinged him, if he was beginning to have feelings again. If he studied the feeling from a certain angle, it even had a certain hopeful shape to it, a stale waft of optimism.

Severus cast a wordless disillusionment charm over himself and then something to muffle any sounds his clothing might make as he walked. His nostrils flexed along with the sneer that briefly alighted his features and he resisted the urge to snort in disgust. Hope. His boots went untouched: the dragon hide they were made of had been tanned over the fumes of a silencing solution set to simmer for longer than the recipe usually called for. As a result, the solution became inert and the leather (already somewhat attuned to magic to begin with) was imbued with the magic from the potion. His boots, incidentally, did not give off any sort of magical trace, but muted his footsteps just enough to ease his efforts at disappearing. They wouldn’t prevent a kicked stone from making noise when it cracked against a wall, of course, but as long as Severus stepped carefully, his approach generally went unnoticed.

Severus had always been a careful man.

The temperature lowered drastically when he inched past the doorway he had been making preparations in front of. Well. Doorway. That was one way to put it. It was more of a hole. It had been a doorway, once. Now it was a warded exit—beyond which the castle was a ruin, its ancient magics flayed and leaving the even more ancient stones exposed to the weather. Several vicious duels had been fought among the corridors, classrooms, and living quarters that once stood there. The stones that had made up the former Charms classroom burned with cold to the touch—Filius still hadn't been able to come up with a counter-curse. The walls and floor were scorched in places and full of blast holes. The ceiling had caved in. The tower suite that Rolanda had occupied since becoming a professor, several floors above, had buckled and crashed to the grounds after a nasty skirmish in the corridors outside the former Muggle Studies classroom. Innumerable shortcuts and secret passages had been cut off. Paintings had been utterly destroyed—priceless works of art, irretrievable memories of people who had once lived.

Severus remembered walking through the wreckage the first time and coming upon a famous suit of armour that had been twisted to scrap. Then schoolbooks that had become wavy and bloated after one too many summer rains—still dotted with blood that wouldn't wash out. It was a little pocket of war, much like his classroom. He liked it there, not least because so few people cared to walk through it. It was cold, it smelled burnt and a little sour with the force of the curses that had been thrown around the area—and it was mostly unprotected. The board had voted to postpone the restoration of that badly-hit section to expedite the school reopening; but more than that, the section felt vile. Even the most annoying of the student miscreants tended to avoid passing through it.

Wind pushed through the cracks in the outer walls (what was left), barrelled along the craters in the floor, whistling as it scraped through to the other side. Severus massaged a wordless warming charm into his bony fingers.

Another page turned.

He began to see blueish light shifting along the ceiling, deeper at the junction of the hall towards the old Muggle Studies classroom and a small store cupboard whose door looked as though it had been hacked at with a giant axe. There was a large splotch on it, with four thick tails, dark brown. Small mystery what had caused that.

The hall that had once led to the classroom was now a dead end. The tower stairs up to Rolanda's front door, so to speak, had crashed down, cracking open upon impact and fitting the corridor (and the other rooms it had bisected) with a completely useless string of odd teeth. One could climb up and along the now-useless stairs to reach the grounds proper, where Rolanda's old sitting room had been coughed out in the crash. She had salvaged a lot of the furniture, but what was left gave her once-home the air of a haunted museum.

Severus walked along the stairs now, following the light, careful not to dislodge rubble as he stepped. The blue light grew more intense at the mouth of a storeroom partly caved in, and he could hear crackling, as though the light were being fed by wood. It wasn't. It was a little fireball on the armrest like the last time, of a couch, rather than an armchair, and Hermione Granger, its architect, slouched there and studied an old piece of parchment. He stayed where he was, still disillusioned, and merely watched as she observed it a moment more—before folding and tucking it back into her bag with a soft snort of... well, he wasn't certain what. She then picked up a book that had been sitting beside her (he recognized it as the one she had been reading the night before) and settled back onto the couch—partly. She sat back up almost immediately in clear annoyance when the blue flame had come in contact with her head—Severus watched with (grudging) amusement as Hermione palmed the flame and tossed it towards the other end of the couch, near her toes. As a Muggle might toss a remote control.

She sighed and settled back, apparently content with the change in configuration. Several pages were turned and Severus continued to watch, not entirely certain why but unwilling to look away. She turned to her side and read awkwardly for a page or two, then lay again on her back, bending her knees up so that Severus could barely see her forehead, her halo of frizz. She contorted, reaching down to scratch her ankle, and then let her bent knee flop down over the edge of the couch, the hem of her nightgown, which had been tightly fitted over her knees, slinging back towards her belly. Severus nearly grunted in shock but instead did something nearly as foolish: he gripped the wall beside him and caused a small amount of rubble to fall.

Hermione's eyes snapped to where he stood, disillusioned, and her legs shut with a soft slap, her book thumping closed against her chest as hands shot out to wrap around her shins.

Merlin. She hadn't been wearing knickers. Again.

He watched her flinty eyes start to relax, breath stalled in his chest, and felt himself becoming aroused. She settled back again and picked up her book, giving it a small tsk of annoyance (a page had probably dared to bend or crumple in the fall). She fidgeted several times, the pages turning steadily, before letting her knee flop down again. The blue light left nothing to the imagination and Severus felt twenty years younger, intrigued and annoyed with himself, both.

Hemione made a huff of disbelief and turned the page, reaching down absently to scratch her thigh. She stretched her still-bent leg out over the arm of the couch and then retracted it again, yawning audibly. Then Severus watched the hand that she had scratched her thigh with slide down further to her vulva, watched her crook her index finger, rub several small circles over her clitoris. His mouth went dry.

Since when had—

What was—

Should he be—

Severus made no sound, nor any attempt at extricating himself from the view.

Her dry sigh of contentment, the clearing of her throat, were almost uncomfortably intimate. He watched her slide two of her fingers around the opening of her vagina, noticing how wet it already was, transfixed at the moisture being spread around, higher. She rubbed her clitoris again, lazy, still mostly focused on her reading.

He swallowed, very aware of how erect he was and of how much he wanted to touch himself.

Hermione slowly slid a finger into her vagina and breathed in deeply; he could hear how slick her finger was, even more clearly when she added a second with a small sound of contentment. She pulled her fingers out to rub at her clitoris again, shifting on the couch so that she could hold her book and pleasure herself more comfortably.

Severus reached down—as quietly as he could manage—placed his hand onto the lump in his trousers and bit back a groan of pleasure at the immeasurably small action.

Wind howled, barrelling against the outer walls and shattered mortar hard enough that the air shifted in the store room—Hermione shifted too, glancing up from her book at the ceiling. She wore a small frown. Bracing her open book against her thigh and the couch, she blindly reached down into her bag and got out her wand to mutter a spell. Some variety of warming charm; two fingers on her other hand had slipped back into her vagina, as if for safekeeping. She poked the wand back in its place and picked up where she had left off in her reading. The book had slid down a little with her receding nightdress hem, down towards her chin, so that Severus could see something of her expression now. He watched her eyes follow the lines on the pages, the relaxed skin of her brow—knew that she was truly reading and not attempting to be coy. Though her fingers still stroked, and rolled, and rubbed at the glistening skin of her vulva. Just par for the course on a Thursday evening, apparently.

His fingertips slid along the fabric of his trousers, feeling out the head of his penis, the warmth of his arousal.

Severus listened to the soft sucking sound of Hermione's fingers stroking the inside of her walls; her deep satisfied sigh was a prod that made the muscles in his stomach contract reflexively, his teeth grind together.

"Ha!" She murmured at one point, with derisive amusement, "Imebecile!"

And Severus' body went hot and then cold with shock. But it was just the book. Whatever she was reading—she put it down. And made herself more comfortable, spreading her legs wider, settling further into the couch, her other hand reaching down to spread her labia wide.

She had begun making small noises then—almost too soft to hear, just loud enough to fuel her own pleasure. Severus watched her and mirrored her with tiny, halting movements, the way she rubbed and massaged her clitoris, her eyes completely closed in enjoyment, though she looked almost as though she were in pain, offended. She kept licking her lips. She convulsed slightly, the pages of her book pinned, nearly ripping, under her elbows. Severus squeezed and stroked at his trapped erection with less caution when he figured she wouldn't be opening her eyes.

A whimper of a moan, and she was coming with a shudder, her body folding inwards, nearly rocking with the force of the orgasm. Severus gritted his teeth, watching, one hand balled in a painful fist at his side. He very badly wanted to fuck her.

Or to fuck someone, at least.

But probably her.

Hermione turned heavily onto her side, still trying to catch her breath, and closed her thighs over her hands, fingers still in and around her vagina. Calm and relaxed, she lay that way for several minutes, staring at the wall opposite, at the grin in the split-apart tower, at him—and not at him. Then began to sit up. Wiped her wet fingers on her thighs. Put away her things, threw on her heavy outer robe, palmed that strange, mesmerizing blue flame of hers. Severus continued to grit his teeth and command himself not to move, to give himself away. Hermione banished the couch and picked up her bag to leave, holding up the flame to see her way out.

She passed so close, he could smell her still-humid fingers.

He listened to her footsteps receding, being muffled and then cancelled out by the raging wind just beyond the walls. Finally, when he was certain she was gone, he lurched back to life, almost stumbling into the storeroom he had just watched her exit, off-balance with the strength of his arousal. He strode over to a partially-concealed corner, undoing the buttons of his trousers as he went, and pulling his erect length out. His disillusionment charm failed.

His hands were shaking with anticipation and he almost laughed at himself, almost, but the moment his fist closed around his penis, skin to skin, any amusement slid off of his features, was pushed to the back of his mind. He jerked himself off, felt the pressure build immediately, effortlessly, yanking on him like an undertow, his whole body moving with it. He was grunting audibly and he didn't give a damn if anyone heard him slamming and grinding his pelvic bone against his own wrist while what he had watched replayed in his head.

And then went further, into imagination.

Severus ground his teeth and grimaced with pleasure as he came, painting the gritty stones before him with semen. The whole section was a cursed ruin anyway, why shouldn't he add to the mess? He kept his eyes closed, panting through the last convulsions in his balls, his hand still wrapped loosely around his penis while he continued to imagine he was still buried deep inside her.

The last time his heart had rattled his chest to such an extent, he had been about to die of a good, spiteful laugh.

Severus opened his eyes and looked down at his palm, clammy now with half-dried, half-congealing sperm, and chuckled at the sight. He shook his head. He still felt aroused—not hard, he was calming down—but aroused. Mind and groin both. He muttered a scourgify under his breath to clean up his hand and then after some consideration another at the wall before him. He did tend to lose his sense a little bit when under the pull of an orgasm. No benefit in giving Minerva more ammunition against him (though he would have enjoyed the scandalized tirade). He fixed his pants and trousers and turned around, still feeling warm and blissful, to see an old folded piece of parchment where the conjured couch had been earlier. He could have kicked himself for his lack of attention.

Severus cast several diagnostic spells in quick succession, more out of habit than actual worry, and then approached the intriguing slip of parchment, picking it up with one smooth movement.

It was him. A dot in the centre of the page, neatly labelled and wavering. He took an experimental step forward. The dot followed. He looked around, scanning the room, and then back at the parchment, now recognizing the crude lines and shapes as rooms. A hastily-drawn map. The image suddenly disappeared and was replaced with the phrase glad you came.

It was Hermione Granger's damned handwriting.

Severus barked out a laugh.