Belonging

Horrible Hiccups -Severus Snape-

-Severus Snape-

Thursday Morning

Thursday already, and Severus knew that he was halfway through the hell of these symptoms and yet the most insidious one had yet to rear its ugly head. Hiccups were simply not an option when one taught dunderheaded teenagers. They would chortle at each and every one. Severus did not wish to reach that stage, and yet the only way out was through. He had gotten so used to the discomforts of the ears and the stomach he kept forgetting this would all be over sooner than he thought.

His future mate arrived at his rooms as if he had summoned her by thinking too hard about her. He tried to focus on how helpful it was of her to stop by for them to get their symptoms under control before the day began. How it saved him from running around to find her, but his mind kept churning in the background with altogether different wonderings about Madelyn Watson. He wondered with increasing frequency what it would be like to love her. To be loved by her. To belong to each other. He couldn't quite grasp at the idea with a full sense of reality.

Last night, he had mislaid his hand onto a very bare thigh and ever since, he could not stop thinking about how this soft, young creature was somehow his wife, somehow his future love, and somehow it was still not obvious to him why it was her. He longed to remove the feeling of her skin from his memory to stop himself from replaying the embarrassing moment. But if he was being honest, truly honest with himself, what scared him most was the coil of longing the small brush of warm flesh has stirred. It had been quite a while since he had last been intimate with someone. Now the looming prospect of sex was staring him in the face and he was trying very very hard not to think about the subject of it as she was his student. She would remain his student in his brain until she was... his everything. He shoved it down, he could think about her like that after the bond snapped and not a second before.

"Are those flowers for me?" Severus asked when he made his way into his sitting room to find her with a small hand tied bouquet.

"No, they were given to me. A group of Slytherin girls stopped me on my way down." Madelyn said, she read the tag out loud. "To our future House Mother, may the week bring you many blessings." She laughed. "What. Is. this!?"

"They are welcoming you, Watson. One of us, now."

"I'm fairly sure this tie is gold and black still. Can I leave them here? Do you have a vase?" She asked.

"I do. You may." He pulled the amber glass vessel from the shelf and handed it to her.

"Second time you said 'I do' to me this week." She quipped, but her eyes were betraying something false about her happiness.

"Har... har," he rolled his eyes and pretended he didn't already know her well enough to notice something off under the joke.

"Alright! Touch me! I'm starving!" She said before hearing the words out loud and cringing. He was going to approach but was cautious given last night's misplaced hand.

"Sorry about last night. I think we should make better plans for evenings going forward." Severus said.

"I promise to wear more clothes to bed just in case," she blurted.

"Don't bring it up."

"Sorry. I won't mention it. To anyone." Her breathing was elevated.

"Watson, are you okay? You look a little sweaty."

"Yup. This is just the casual face I have when my teacher husband accidentally touches my upper thigh. No big deal. Now, do you wanna shake hands or what to get rid of this hunger problem? I don't want to eat six helpings again or else they will have to roll me up the stairs to history of magic."