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The Fantasy Book	By : CryingCinderella Category: Harry Potter > Het - Male/Female > Snape/Hermione Views: 44517 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 6
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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A/N: CelestBlack and Addictive Writer, I hope this tickles your fancy. ;-)

Hermione was cautiously perched at the foot of the bed, eyes watching him sleep. She had mostly convinced herself that he was still lost inside his coma, though perhaps not as deep. He had smiled of that she was certain and perhaps it meant that on some level of conscious thought she was reaching him and perhaps he would soon awaken. Hope dashed from her mind as soon as she realized that her fantasies would return to being nothing more than fantasies once he returned to the land of the living. Though they were hardly more than that at present she somehow felt them to be deeper sitting in bed with his physicality resting on her figure.

            It was a difficult decision, but her task had been to save the man, no matter how tempting it was to selfishly keep him. With a heavy sigh she shook her shoulders slightly as if trying to loosen the tension from them before climbing down from the bed. She stalked over to the door of his private chambers and muttered a few charms. “I’ll be back,” she said and then disappeared through the door.

            Sometime later she returned to his private room in the medical wing. Severus Snape was sleeping soundly in his bed as if she’d never left. Finding his private quarters in the dungeons had been more difficult than she had anticipated, but after some careful sleuthing and crafty de-warding she had managed to break in. She returned with an armful of things. A green washcloth, a bottle of herbed shampoo, and a long black terrycloth robe, faded and worn with good use making that much softer to touch.

            The bathtub in the adjoining bathroom had been filled with hot water, just hot enough to be relaxing without searing the flesh. Hermione had taken great care to levitate him into the water, charming it to stay heated. She’d been gentle as she washed him, caring for him with tender strokes of her hand, cloaked in the green washcloth, over his arms and legs and down his back. Her knees ached as she knelt on them beside the tub, working the herbed shampoo into his tresses. A gentle sigh escaped her lips as she leaned close to inhale his scent, thick sage and sandalwood, a delicious smell that tickled her nostrils and reminded her of the man that had terrorized her potions class so long ago.

            Hermione was trembling when she climbed into the tub, as naked as he was, and sank back against the deep tub wall, lowering his back against her chest. She wrapped her arms around him and cradled his head against her shoulder. The water was comfortably hot and she smiled. With a wave of her hand the book of her fantasies flew through the air and clattered against the rim of the tub before falling to the floor. One long lazy arm reached over the edge and grabbed it. She settled back and closed her eyes for a moment. “Let’s go a little deeper…” she muttered and opened the book.

~*~

            Fog obscured his vision but he had sworn he’d seen it. The black sails spattered with crimson pitched against the night sky. He’d been at sea for days or hours he couldn’t tell. He’d lost all sense of direction when he’d been thrown from the high mast of his ship. No light had entered the sky, only rain and lightening. And when the storms had finally stopped and the waves ebbed from their violent crests he was certain he had drowned and wound up in the locker. But the sea was eerily still, too quiet to be the sea. And that was when he had seen it. The black says with the crimson spray across them, painting their way across the night sky; slipping in and out of his vision as he clung with the last bit of his strength to a waterlogged plank of wood.

            The crow’s nest was hardly the place the first mate but with the storm winds on their tail, the rest of the crew would need rest to prepare for the gale. Her brown eyes were peeled to what she knew would become the horizon, red hair whipping about in the wind, her bandana doing little to hold it back from her face. There was a break in the fog and that was when she spotted him. She mistook him for driftwood at first, but as he bobbed helplessly up and down in the briny foam of a wave head, she was scrambling down the mast, leaping the last nine rungs, landing with a heavy thump against the deck.

            Her black leather boots clunked across the wooden plank as she ran to the starboard side and hefted over the long roped loop. Aimed with perfection the sea-worn knot work landed around the piece of his plank, catching his arm as she yanked on it, dragging him up along the hull of the ship. It was then that he blacked out.

            The galley was dim but he knew he was in the galley; the scent of salted meat and pickled fish assailed his nostrils, rousing him from his state of unconsciousness. A haggard old woman sat on a barrel over a long wooden table, peeling potatoes. The ship swayed back and forth and had he not been at sea most of his life he would have lost his bearings and tumbled from the sack of dry tack upon which he’d been resting. The woman paid him no mind, flipping her peeler, tossing half a rotten potato over her shoulder and into a heap of foul looking rubbish.

            “Lucky they let you recoup down ‘ere, ‘fore sendin’ you ta her…” the woman spoke. Her hair was a faded red, what would have once been bright had been dulled by salt and sun, wiry and pulled back beneath a tattered bandana. A crooked scar ran the length of her face, across her nose and disappeared beneath the patch that covered her right eye. When she opened her mouth to speak again, he was greeted with bits of jagged yellow teeth and it was almost enough to turn his stomach.

            Growling for attention his stomach rumbled and the sailor placed his hand against it in an attempt to stave off the sounds of hunger. He couldn’t recall how long he’d been adrift. He had no idea how long he’d remained passed out on the ship of which he was now a passenger. The last thing that he could recall was the sound of the ship run aground, though that had been impossible. They’d been too far out at sea to have run aground. It had to have been worse. And with the maelstrom raging he was blessed to have been thrown by the winds from the riggings; he tried not to think what fate his shipmates met.

            “Don’t jus stand there, ya lub, ‘ere,” she muttered and tossed him half a potato. “You’ll be needin’ your strength ‘fore ya see the cap’n.” And without another word she returned to peeling the skins and rotten bits from her dwindling pile of starchy roots.

            Severus Snape, starving and weary, devoured the morsel of potato without a second thought. The galley was tiny but if the legends were true, the crew it fed was insatiable. He turned his eyes once more to the ship’s cook. His lips were almost a quiver with the question that he dared not ask, but knew for his own sanity that he had to know. “What ship have I boarded?” he asked.

            Her fingers stilled and she set the potato against the table. She waited a moment before tilting her head up to meet his gaze. She narrowed her eye at him, leaning over the table. “If ya have ta ask…ya don’ belong ‘ere…” she almost smirked and then coughed roughly.

            Her response did little to settle his nerves. “Have you a name, cook?”

            “Molly O’Weasley…” she spat into her hand and extended it to shake his. Severus was hesitant but extended his own hand and grasped her firmly. The woman’s hands were calloused and rough; her fingers gnarled and twisted and she was missing the pinky finger on her left hand. “And I be the cook here aboard The Crimson Wraith…”

            He withdrew his hand at once and staggered backward. It were as if her words had sent a jolt of cold metal shooting through his body. He’d only heard tale of the ship in his seafaring days; it was a myth, an old salt’s tale at best; the frightening phantom ship that would appear in the midst of a storm, crewed by the souls of seven women damned to the locker for their wild and wicked ways, each woman on board more fearsome than the last, the captain the worst pirate in all of nautical mythology. Severus closed his eyes, praying somehow he had drowned and this was a horrid if living nightmare and at any moment he would awaken, finding himself jailed or dead.

            Heavy boots echoed their fall on the corridor just outside the galley and the man shook visibly. Molly O’Weasley chuckled and turned her eye once more back to her pile of peelings. The door to the galley swung open and a fierce redheaded girl appeared in the doorway. Her face was careworn from the sun, freckles standing out like dark spots of dirt against her Irish milk skin. She was donned in dark leather boots, black buccaneers stirrup leggings and a shirt that when it started could have been white but at current bore the stains of the life of a pirate, blood, sweat and muck. Her red hair, a more vibrant shade than that of the cook’s, was tied back in a bandana, making her look much older than she was.

            “The Cap’n will be seeing you now,” she hissed, her voice rough like gravel. But it wasn’t her voice that frightened him, but the sharp jagged hook that protruded from the stub of her left arm where a hand once was. The pirate girl pointed her hook once more at Severus and he side-stepped her, edging toward the galley door. “Best not to keep Cap’n Granger waitin’…” she sneered. “I did that once and ended up like this…” with a hearty chuckle she held her hook close to his nose. “Lucky I was the first mate of her ship or I’d ‘ave ended up much worse…”

A/N: Please don't kill me! I just haven't worked out all the kinks, so to speak. ;-) But please leave a review!
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The Fantasy Book