I was on sugar

                by Natalie 

I didn’t think he had the balls.

Or rather - I knew he had the balls, but I didn’t think he had the class.  Bad me, wrong again.  Guess I had him miscast all along.  Me and a lot of other people.

I mean, WHOA?  What’s up with that?  OK.  After Voldie was permanently Ix-Nayed by Otter-Hay, Umbledore-Day and Aaack-Blay, we all changed a little.  OK, maybe more than a little.  I quit working at Gringotts and joined a Muggle rock band, Professor McGonagall married – UGH – Alastor Moody and my sister Ginny started dating chicks, but hey – we’d grown up like lab rats, under the big light – you couldn’t expect us to behave in the wild exactly the way we’d been under ‘controlled conditions’.

I guess we all kinda broke out.  Even him.

Rumour has it, the day after Voldemort and the League of Darkness got it in the gonads, Snape picked up a telephone, called Hermione and asked her on a date!  Which is, if you think of it, so weird, so beyond weird, that it actually seems normal.  Know what I mean?

Well, we probably woulda never heard about it at all, except that … get this … wait for it … don’t peek … she accepted!!!!  And not for a joke, either.  She actually voluntarily went out on a date with Severus Snape, Hogwarts Potions Professor and All-Around Arsehole Extraordinaire.

Like I said, we all kinda broke out after Voldemort was gone.

And, like I said, he has balls.  It took a big pair o’coconuts to do that, no question about it.  You gotta admire him for that one thing, even if you hate him for every other thing (WARNING:  Incoming File Transfer from Sirius Black).  Na, don’t get me wrong.  I liked him OK in school.  But he is a bit of an arsehole, no matter which side of the cauldron you’re on.

Phew.  I kinda break out in a sweat every time I think about it.  Not because I was hot for Hermione (the queue was long enough without me), but because ... things were a little … hot under the collar … for all of us for a while.  When the two of them became an item, that is.

Ya ya, of course everyone said ‘it won’t last, it won’t last’.  Everyone except them.  They knew.  I say it again, they knew.  It was in their eyes.  You don’t work as a curse-breaker for the biggest, most powerful wizarding bank in the world without getting good at reading people, and I say it again, it was in their eyes.  They knew it was for real, and they knew it was for good.

And I admire that.  In both of them.  They didn’t try to shrug it off.  They both went head-on into it, into their relationship, and they didn’t look back.  Which is good, because if looks could kill…a lot of the people they left in their wake would be doin’ hard time.  Including three members of my family, heh heh.  Yup, like I said, my sister digs girls now.

So, there was a big stink.  Howlers were sent, envoys were sent, tears were shed through closed doors (and this was just at my house), and for a while it looked like they were going to usurp Voldemort as the big news item of the year.

But… there’s always a fresher cow-pat to step in, and after a while Snape and Hermione – why do we always say that?  Never Severus and Granger – got sifted down through the compost pile, and were out of rotation for a while.

So when I saw them at the club, it was just a bit of a surprise.  Not only because it’s a Muggle club – Au Contraire, in Islington – but because a) I remembered belatedly that it was Hermione’s birthday (D’OH!  Actually hit myself on the forehead.  Onstage.  Yes, the guitar pick hurt.  Yes, I’m OK.  No, the scar isn’t shaped like a lightning bolt –  it’s more like a U with a little squiggle) and b) because Snape was dressed as a Matador.

Ya, I couldn’t believe my eyes either.  I thought it was a joke, actually.  Like they were look-alikes, or on Polyjuice, and he was going to do some song with a Spanish guitar while she stripped.  I know, it sounds completely and utterly stupid now, but at the time … it seemed as logical as what turned out to be the truth!

It was Open Mic night, and at that particular club you could really do anything: ventriloquism, stupid pet tricks, angsty poetry, anything.  So whaddaya think happened next?  You have three guesses, no, one guess.

Yup, he went to the Emcee and signed himself up for a spot.  He didn’t look over the moon about it, but he did it.  And when our set was over (we’re Yorick Acid, we do rock versions of Elizabethan folksongs), I went over to the little table where they were sitting, and said ‘Hi’.

Hermione was looking about as happy as a girl can, which got me thinking, let me tell you.  A girl doesn’t get happy like that overnight, if you know what I mean.  It takes a bunch of nights.

And the weird thing was, Snape was looking happy too.  I don’t mean that he just didn’t look scowly and growly, he actually looked happy.  In a Snapey way, of course.  He was just watching Hermione, and not paying attention to the rest of the world, and just looking … glad to be alive.  Which is like, a WOW.  I was WOWed.

Turns out, this was Hermione’s birthday present.  She found out that Snape knew Spanish dancing, and she wanted to see it.  And so he took her to this club, and signed himself up to dance at an Open Mic.  In front of everyone.  Because she asked him to. 

Like I said, I knew he had balls, but I never knew he had class.

FIN

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By SilentG, gnat67@telus.net