by Verity
[NOTE: This fic is rated R for sexual content, language, and the author's judicious screwing of the characters' minds. You've been warned.]
:01
In his innermost thoughts he allows himself fantasy; and in that fantasy she comes to him, chestnut hair a river of silk over welcoming arms curving out from her. Pale alabaster skin. Her eyes meet his - wide-open pools of liquid cinnamon, frankincense, and myrrh. Her mouth is like pliant silk beneath his when she reaches him.
Her hands are feverishly seeking him out beneath the layers of his robes as she kisses him – there is nothing passive or submissive about her, she is Gryffindor's fire protected by a heart of ice.
It is his turn to bow down as her fingers scatter over him, awakening from the dust ghosts he thought long buried and forgotten in their graves. She has the gift of urgency in her touch – urgency, and need, and it amuses him to think he could ever be needed or wanted or desired that way. But only for a moment; and then he loses himself in her touch. It's so easy to give up control, so much easier for someone to take his place for once, for her to be the one to move first.
Kneel.
He heeds the unconscious appeal of her voice and her body. Her lovely lush scent floods his senses. The taste of her is ripe to match the flavor of her lips and the fragrance of her; he drowns himself in it. This is not love or peace but something closer to them than primal gratification, which is all he has ever known.
She makes sweet little cries of pleasure until he is finished, when she sighs finally in satisfaction. They give each other sly, sated smiles; they are in on the joke.
When she brings her lips to his again she rolls atop him, pinning him to the floor, and he submits to her less-than-gentle ministrations. They doze later, arms entwined around each other.
Of course, this is only fantasy; in reality she is the brown-haired girl who sits at attention each day in class, her eyes trained upon him when she is not making notes in spidery script. Her eyes ask of him his secrets, his story; he wishes she would give up. Better for some lion-hearted boy to disillusion her with flowers and candy than for he to shatter her with the truth.
:02
She's fucking sick and tired of being a good girl.
She's had it with sharing a room with a bunch of twits whose idea of a good time is getting groped by some handsome Gryffindor boy who equates a relationship with scoring Quidditch goals. If she hears one more time about Sibyll Trelawney's latest death omen, she's not sure she can contain herself. She wants out. Today was the final straw – walking into her dorm to find that Lavender Brown had spilled Eau De Nocturne all over her Arithmancy textbook – again.
Potions class is first on Mondays – double Potions. Not the best class to be in a fit of rage in, by far. Somehow she manages to focus her anger into a glare that keeps anyone with half a brain from approaching her while she neatly dices her shrivelfig into twenty-three equal parts – perhaps pressing just a little too firmly with her knife.
Whilst the Draught of Dreams is boiling merrily, she lifts her eyes from her cauldron to her Professor as he walks from table to table. As always, she wonders what he's thinking about – he's always so imposing and dangerous in his black robes that waft around him as he moves with serpentine grace. Fuck Gryffindor boys. Fuck Harry and Ron and their well-meant offers to three Yule Balls that she's always refused. She'd like to see what her Professor would do in her place. Would he go mad as well?
She's never though he's bad looking. No, he's actually quite dashing in an unattainable way. Briefly, the idea flits through her mind – what would he be like in bed? She'd like to make him kiss her lips. Lick her feet. She'd like to make him touch everything in between. Watch him kneel, entirely at her disposal. Kiss him or kill him?
Lolita and Belinda and that Hufflepuff girl who'd been warming Gilderoy Lockhart's bed five years ago –
Yes, she craves the control, the attention. She's been lost in a wood she didn't know the way out of, and there's a lantern light shining beyond that hill. It's been years since she's given into impulse.
She's fucking sick and tired of being a good girl.
Deliberately, she slides her hand along the table, her eyes suddenly meeting her Professor's black ones. He knows what she's doing.
The vial of vanilla extract shatters on the floor, the sickeningly sweet smell making it hard for her to catch her breath.
"Detention, Miss Granger."
"Yes, Professor Snape," she breathes.
:03
He never thought this would happen.
Her coyness, her fragility – how can she do this to him? His fantasies became nightmares with the look in her eyes – sharp, brown, and feral. On his territory.
His reactions have been honed over the years – to a point where being threatened in such a way means that he has to take back the control, upright the shifting universe. His fantasies are nightmares, dissolved to dust under the harsh light of reality, shoved into storage in the part of his mind that houses the dying vestiges of his humanity.
This is what made him the perfect Death Eater. He remembers vividly the wild ecstasy of pain that he felt as his Lord burned the Dark Mark into his arm. He no longer serves Voldemort, but his destiny is the same – fear and terror and a few terrible, dark moments of pleasure that he never earned the right to.
She comes into the classroom then. It's midnight on a Friday and the rest of the castle should be abed. Except for Dumbledore, who will confront him with his sins later. He never tells the wizened old man about the release he finds in self-flagellation.
"What am I to do for detention?" There's a slight tremor in her voice that lets him know that she's just a little bit out of her depth. The door instinctively locks behind her. It knows his moods well.
"What was the meaning, Miss Granger, of breaking that vial of vanilla extract this morning?" he asks, letting the velvet in his voice relax to a cruel purr as he steps out from behind the desk to stand in front of her.
"I – I – it was an accident," she stammers, her hands clasped behind her back, looking up at him. The evidence of her fear arouses him.
"No, it wasn't." She doesn't contradict him. "Why did you break that vial?"
She looks at her feet. "I… was having a bad day."
"Which culminated in your desire to have detention with the most loathsome teacher in the school?"
"You're not loathsome."
"I think I can be the judge of that. Now really, Miss Granger," he reaches out one long, elegant white finger to jerk her face up to his, "why?"
"A number of reasons," she says, defiance creeping out from behind the fear.
He kisses her then. She's inexperienced but, oh, yes, she can learn. "Was that one of them, Miss Granger?" Any sense of ethics that he had is completely, utterly eradicated by this point. Later he will attempt to justify it to himself by pointing out that she's a legal, consenting adult.
"You're not – loathsome," she gasps.
He'll take it as a yes.
:04
Sometime, many years later, she will think that was the way things had to be, but now she is deluged, tired, torn apart in infinitely many directions. She feels like a paper towel through which the water of emotion has been poured and poured, but somehow remains in tenuous existence.
Everything she ever thought was true was wrong, wrong, wrong.
As she lies on the floor of the Potions classroom, half-asleep, listening to her Professor's footsteps as he moves around, tidying things that don't need to be tidied, she feels everything and nothing. The world has ceased to exist, beyond this, her bed of school robes stained with sweat and the remnants of her virginity. The apocalypse has come and gone. She is a planet thrown out of orbit.
Every time she tries to close her eyes she is assaulted by memory, him in her, pleasure the greatest pain. A knife to her heart. She has betrayed herself by her own desires.
Eventually she is able to get up and dress, wrapping herself carefully in the remnants of her childhood. She is cold and shivering. Professor Snape is watching her as she leaves. The silence is a gift she is thankful for.
Before she goes to Gryffindor Tower, she makes a detour to the Prefect's bathroom, where the mermaid in the painting watches her sadly as she bathes herself in scalding-hot water. It only makes her feel dirtier.
Once back in her dorm, she casts a silencing charm on her bed and sobs her heart out until she is empty of everything, and silence cradles her in its gentle arms, letting her nurture the feeling that is flowering in that barren emptiness. Anger is freedom.
She feels a little more herself then.
:05
He watches her, surreptitiously, all through the rest of December, before she leaves for the winter holidays. At first, she seems a little distracted, a little not-quite-there, but soon she is even more focused than usual. Her papers are critical, not a word wasted, and crafted with the utmost precision. He knows her weapon of choice. Fury has helped him in his quest more than once.
Though she's much better at using it than he was.
Guilt floods him whenever he looks at her. He has always known that whatever he touches he destroys. She was such a happy girl, in love with schoolwork, and now she's a deadly spider, waiting to catch someone making the wrong move in her web. She weaves of dreams, knowledge, magic, and other poisonous things. He still desires her. And this horrifies him.
She'll get her own, he knows.
He really doesn't want to be there when it happens.
Reviews/con. crit are welcomed. Flames, while not encouraged, may be emailed to me here. ;)
Verity