Title: Altered
Author: songquake
Characters/Pairings: Severus/Hermione
Rating: NC-17
Kinks/Themes Chosen: Everything Old Is New Again: sensory deprivation (including silence), altered-state orgasms.
Other Warnings: Het! LOL
Word Count: 2523
Summary/Description: Hermione's always been curious about what hallucinogens would be like...
Author's Notes: ♥ Established relationship, AU in that Snape is alive. There is no canon about Harry and Ron's drug use, but man, can I see the potential for stoner!Ron.
♥ Sensory deprivation and its effects in this scene are based on the Muggle concept of the isolation (flotation) tank.
♥ Also, I promise, it does get smutty. It just takes a really long time getting there.
♥ Finally, thanks so much to the mods for letting me post late when I missed my deadline of 27th January! You guys rock my world.

Altered

The problem with being a goody-two shoes (escapades in world-saving aside, of course), is that one tended to decline the offers of Muggle marijuana and Magical Mind-Altering Potions when one's shitfaced best friends made them.

True, Hermione had saved herself the embarrassment of having to explain to Healers (and the Prophet, her parents, and Molly Weasley) why she'd been raving and puking the way Harry and Ron had done those few times. But she'd never really experimented, and the curiosity was killing her.

Not so much that she'd try dropping lysergic acid diethylamide, either. But she was still envious of her friends' trips into altered consciousness. Purely on an academic level.

"You, my dear, are full of shit," Severus said to her when she came home one night pouting about how her ethics and desire to remain in control of her body were interfering with her social life. "You no more want to smoke cannabis than you want to experience a hangover."

"I've been hung over," Hermione retorted.

"You've experienced one hangover, I do believe." Severus' eyes were narrowed, but there was amusement in his voice.

"Well, that was more than enough to satisfy my curiosity! And the drinking wasn't all it was cracked up to be, either."

Severus regarded her for a long moment. "Wasn't it? It wasn't fun at all to feel so free from anxiety?"

"I notice you don't go around silly-drunk, either."

He sniffed. "I can hold my liquor, silly girl." With a small hum from Hermione his only response, he continued, "I also have had enough of being out-of-control, and have learnt that my own best time happens when I talk myself through my inhibitions. But you, it seems, have merely determined the risks to be much greater than the rewards when it comes to lowered inhibitions or altered states."

Hermione slid down a bit in the chaise. Her head hit the back of it, and she stared at the ceiling. There was a stain in the corner; she'd need to check whether the shower was leaking.

"You're right," she finally said. "I am not willing to take the risk of not being able to take care of an emergency should one arise, even with a sober adult around."

"Even if it were me, Hermione?" His voice was soft, a sign he felt wounded.

Hermione sighed. "Severus, if I were to let go of myself in anyone's company, it would be yours. Of course it would. But I sincerely doubt you want to chaperone me whilst I got pissed or, Merlin, high with Harry and Ron."

Severus snorted, then laughed outright. "Heaven forefend. As if I'd enjoy watching the two of them add dunder to their heads." He leant forward, taking one of Hermione's hands in his. "Still, there are ways to effect an altered state that do not require trusting in substances, and I am more than willing to observe whilst you engage in such activities."

"You make it sound...just a little dirty, Severus," Hermione said, and chuckled a bit.

Though Severus's eyes were dark with desire, they were also wide in his earnestness. "It needn't be," he said. "Some report certain...openings, they call them. Altered states of perception and consciousness, openness to new ideas, greater creativity, even greater suggestibility after meditation or other such activities."

Hermione wrinkled her nose. "I've always been pants at meditation, Severus." It was true. The times she had attempted meditation, or even yoga, she had struggled so much to do things right that she hadn't been able to relax.

"Indeed," Severus said from deep in his chest. "But I was going to suggest that I put you in a state of sensory deprivation."

"Like blindfolds and earmuffs?"

Hermione did like it when Severus would tie her up and blindfold her so she couldn't predict what was going to happen next; while he might find his best time happened when he was in control, she found pleasure in feeling a little helpless before him. Still, she would hardly call those games meditative.

"No," Severus fairly purred as he moved to sit beside her. Pulling her hair behind her neck and holding it there, he whispered into her ear. "I propose something more akin to what Muggles call an isolation tank."

He wrapped an arm around her shoulder and pulled her against his chest. She snuggled into him, humming in contentment as she felt his fingers trace up and down her spine. "And if you like, I'll even give you what they call a 'happy ending'."


******


The first spell Severus cast was Silencio, depriving Hermione of the experience of sounds in the room—of any knowledge of other spells he cast. She stood, naked, in the centre of their bedroom, the drapes tightly closed and the furniture temporarily Vanished.

The heat in the room had been adjusted to precisely the temperature of Hermione's skin. She wondered whether she would begin to sweat during all this. She suspected that Muggles who did this by floating in tanks of hot water did not worry about where their perspiration would go.

Hermione took a deep breath, steadying her nerves, and lay on the carpet.

She didn't hear anything as she felt her body being levitated, but felt the slight parting of the air as she rose through it. She smelt the trace of ozone that accompanied magic, but it was the only scent in the room. She couldn't even smell Severus; they had bathed one another in fragrance-free soap in preparation.

He had thought of everything.

Hermione tilted her head side-to-side, feeling the joints cracking as she did so. Her hips settled into a position far more comfortable than her bed had ever been; her spine aligned in a way that had her sighing in surprised relief.

She had never in her life felt this comfortable in her body. She was sure she would remember it if she had.

With the room empty of light, Hermione realised there was no reason to continue keeping her eyes open, so she closed them, completing her physical relaxation. She breathed.

She breathed again, deeper. The warm air filled her lungs, then flowed out again. Her neck relaxed and let her head fall back, but it did not fall so far as to overextend. Her body was perfectly secure, held gently by Severus's magic and cradled.

But she could feel nothing against her skin.

Hermione panicked. She tried to fight the hold of the magic, fought against the rational voice in her head that told her that of course she was safe, of course Severus wouldn't drop her. Indeed, her rational mind knew that struggling against her flotation risked her more than relaxing into it would. She could distract Severus with her thrashing.

But she didn't. And though she knew Severus could not practice mind magic on her while concentrating on the spells that maintained her state of sensory deprivation, she thought she heard his voice whispering in her ear to calm herself, to let herself just be.

Hermione Granger had never in her entire twenty-six years allowed herself just to be. She took a long, shuddering breath and attempted to do so now.

She inhaled and exhaled. She began to count her breaths, and then thought that this might be too much thinking. She began to breathe again, and let her thoughts come and go the way Severus had suggested she do.

Really, the man was a miracle. She knew she had asked for him to watch over her whilst she 'experimented' with 'altered consciousness'; he had gone further and helped her find a way to do so without triggering her anxieties of being totally out of control, even though with no sensory cues she felt utterly out of her element.

That idea caused her to tense momentarily, but her body refused to succumb to her anxiety. She felt warm and comfortable, as though she were being held in her most perfect form, as though she were suspended in her mother's womb once more. She breathed.

Her mind travelled back to Severus. While explaining the process to her, Severus had told her of his own experiments, with Muggle drugs, with meditation, with flotation tanks, and with potions and mind magic. He'd used terms like 'theta waves' which she'd had to look up in Muggle texts in order to comprehend.

She breathed. If she could think about the theta waves, she was surely not experiencing them!

Instead, she let her consciousness wander, let the memory of Severus's voice float through her mind and the memory of his caresses float over her skin. Her breathing quickened a bit, but then slowed once more as she concentrated on her skin once more and realised that no, he wasn't touching it after all.

And then her skin erupted as though Flobberworms had squirmed across it and allowed their trails to dry.

Hermione reached to her breast to scrape some of the slime off, but encountered nothing but her own warm skin. She stopped herself before she tore through it with her fingernails.

She'd been warned about the itching, though others had described it as the feeling of bugs crawling over them. Hermione didn't quite feel bugs.

But perhaps she just had a larger vocabulary of sensations and words.

And with that thought, the itching subsided.

Hermione breathed again. And again. She became her breath. The air was all that existed for her, and it became her, and she became it. She felt her awareness expand, even though she could sense no light, no touch, no sound. Her mouth and eyes opened; she willed her very pores to open to the Universe which was welcoming her to join with it.

She breathed.

She breathed.

She felt indescribable joy, and breathed some more. There were lights, like fairies or angels, playing before her face, and she welcomed them into her universe, loving them as completely as she loved Severus, Harry, Ron, her parents.

She lay back and breathed some more, the feeling of oxygen singing in her veins as surely as wine might do.

And when suction, hot and wet, surrounded a nipple, she gasped and loved it as well.

Warm, strong arms wrapped around her, but the darkness didn't abate, nor did the silence in the room. Those arms guided her to the floor, the carpeting abrasive against her bare feet after the luxury of nothingness for the past minutes, hours. She scrunched her toes into the piling, and loved it.

She felt light-headed and giddy.

She clenched and opened her fingers again, and breathed in. The air before her was just slightly more humid, which was all the warning she got before her lips were pressed by Severus's, her mouth invaded by his tongue. She welcomed it, welcomed him, still elated by her sense that she was one with the Universe. For some long moments she hadn't known where her body's boundaries were, and she wanted to feel that again, feel it more.

She felt the word "Please" explode through her lips, the end of it hissing past her tongue, felt her moan move up from her cunt through her diaphragm and into her throat. She raised her hand and felt hot skin against her palm, stubble popping through it. She pushed her own tongue into Severus's mouth, pressed her breasts into his torso, and delighted in the rumble she felt coursing through it.

And suddenly, Hermione could hear again, hear Severus rasping her name, hear the brush of skin on skin, hear the movement of wet tongues and lips pressing and twisting.

She could hear her moans as they escaped her.

She wanted to hear everything. And so she opened her ears, listening for the very heartbeat she could feel underneath her fingers as she reached down to stroke Severus's hot, thick cock.

She pushed the foreskin back, just a little, and the smell of Severus's arousal overwhelmed her. It was rich, and bitter, and oddly mushroom-like, more so than she remembered it smelling or tasting before.

But everything she smelled and felt and heard was more.

Her own voice was louder and higher than she'd ever understood it to be; she felt it in her sinuses when he opened her labia and dragged a slow, soft finger around the hood of her clit.

Her high moan spoke for her—she'd lost her words, left them in that place where expectations, analysis, and explanations mattered.

They did not matter here. All that mattered was welcoming. The universe welcomed and loved her, and she loved and welcomed Severus. She shifted her weight, parting her legs to give him better access. She smelled her own desire hanging in the air.

Hermione had absorbed the universe through her pores. Surely she could merge with Severus Snape.

She grabbed his face, stared into his eyes through the darkness. At this closeness, with such a long time in the dark, she could almost make out the shape of his face. But she knew, as she knew it was his fingers in her cunt, that his pupils were blown and their minds could connect, were linking. Their very souls were joined in this moment.

Her mind begged him to fuck her, to make it so there was no place that was one of them individually. With her ears she heard him gasp her name, heard the slurp of his fingers coming out of her cunt and into his mouth.

His skin was just slightly cooler than hers; the sweat between them eased the slide of her thighs around his hips as he lifted her. When he pressed her against the wall, it seemed impossibly, blasphemously cool. Nothing in the world should be so utterly different from the two of them.

She pulled his hips against his, pulled his cock into her. She locked her eyes on his, trying to pull him into her.

"Hermione!" Severus gasped again, and thrust up.

One one one, her mind chanted, hearing the singing of those lights from her time of sensory deprivation in her ears, in her veins, in the mind of the man who was fucking her. She saw the green and blue spots dancing in his eyes, and knew they had tapped into that great connection to Everything.

She did not undulate. She did not writhe. She just pressed. She opened. She would become Severus. She would make Severus become her.

His fingers, an extension of her desire and her own body, played against her clit, squeezing it, rubbing hard against it.

Her body convulsed, hot hot hot, and she wrapped her arms so tightly around Severus's neck that he gasped for air. She felt as though her head had no top, no lid, and as though there were no difference between herself and her Severus.

"Breathe," she whispered, "breathe us together, breathe in the world."

She felt Severus's lungs expand against her breasts and felt his cock pulsate and spurt something even hotter than their skin into her pussy.

"Breathe," she whispered again.

"Breathe," Severus murmured back.

Sinking to the floor, still cradled into one another, they breathed.