Needfire

Chapter 15 – Capitulation.


\"You\'re too young or you\'re too old or you\'re simply not inclined
You\'re asleep or you\'re withholding be that my cue to crave you.\"

--Bent for You. Alanis Morissette.


She woke up once during the night, when the warm weight beside her shifted and moved out of the bed. Blinking in the almost complete darkness of the dungeons, she looked for Snape\'s figure drawn out in the dim candle light, relieved to find him watching her from behind the velvet drapes.

\"Wha\' is it with you…?\" Hermione mumbled. \"Come back to bed… it\'s really cold \'ere in the dungeons…\"

She thought she might have seen him smiling at her, but it was impossible to tell in such darkness. His hand, however, reached for a moment, to curl in her tousled tresses. \"Go back to sleep,\" he told her. \"I\'ll join you in a while.\"

And so she did, allowing her heavy eyelids to shut out the dreamy, darkened room. The soft mattress welcomed Hermione as she sank deeper; fragrant loops of warmth – still carrying his scent – wrapping around her body until she was entrapped with him.

There was no telling how long she slept, only that by the time she woke up, there was light in the parlor, and Snape was sitting on a leather covered armchair in front of the mantel, reading a book.

This time, when she told him to come back to bed, he put the book aside and joined her.

\"When is it you plan to return to Gryffindor tower?\" he asked after a while.

While Ron used to lie on his back with his hands crossed behind his head, his face wearing a silly expression, Snape – she noted – would withdraw into himself. His eyes would be scanning the canopy; long, beautiful fingers curled around a nonexistent object – like a babe\'s hand might fist in its sleep.

\"Do you need me to leave?\" she asked, raising a little and leaning on her elbow, in order to have a better view of his face.

He frowned. \"I just might.\"

\"Aren’t we rude?\"

\"I\'m not accustomed to sharing my bed with another person. Nor my living quarters, since we\'re talking about sharing.\"

She lay beside him for a moment, not sure why she should feel so thoroughly lacerated. There had been rejections in the past, not of this sort – and Hermione did not suspect Snape of not wanting her. She was reminded of mental and emotional fencing, until one of the participants surrendered. Battlefields she entered with the intention of losing, longing for the sweet sensation of knowing her intellect had finally yielded: that she had capitulated and taken, and could now be assured that she rests in good arms.

But then, those boys she had been playing mind games with… one Ravenclaw boy, early in her sixth year, then a Slytherin, a while before the end of the year exams… it was the challenge they sought – not the pliant, soft, delicate devotion she wanted to give them once she had been defeated. Perhaps, had she dared to go further, cheated on Ron… perhaps there would have been more: the challenge would have lasted, into a physical interaction, before it vanished. But she chickened out of taking it any further. And them- it was the challenge of yielding her bright spirit, her exceptional intellect to their bidding. Nothing more. Nothing more. Hermione wondered, then, flayed open, with Snape at her side, whether he wanted anything more. There is always Daddy, of course. We have our… disagreements, she thought for a moment, with tears in her eyes. But Daddy is safe, Daddy is always safe.

\"Hermione-\" Snape was leaning over her, a look of concern floating in his dark, glowing eyes. \"What is it?\"

\"You said you wanted me to leave, so I shall leave,\" she proclaimed, defeated. \"Just give me a minute to scrape my pride off the floor.\"

His eyes narrowed suspiciously. \"What is it?\"

\"I didn\'t trust you then, and I don\'t trust you now.\"

Snape growled. \"I thought we were past that.\"

\"You really don\'t get it Snape,\" she drawled at him. \"I\'m a teenage girl, and a totally messed-up one at that. We\'re never going be past that. Though seeing you\'re driving me away from your living quarters, there\'s no \'we\', so I guess it should not bother you.\"

\"You think I\'m… what\'s that childish phrase… dumping you?\"

She rolled her eyes. \"What else am I supposed to think? You had it your way, under your rules. You seduced me. End of game.\"

\"Antisocial, ridiculous, silly, foolish….\" Snape drew in a breath. \"Is that how you treat your lovers? Is that how Weasley treated you?\"

Something inside her clenched and fisted, air leaking out in a whispery whoosh at the dangerous gleam in Snape\'s eyes. \"No, no, you idiot. Ron would have never done this to me!\"

\"Who, then?\"

She opened and closed her mouth, biting her lower lips. \"There were two boys, last year. Nothing worth talking about, okay?\"

\"Why you are afraid, then?\"

\"They both were… God, you wouldn\'t understand!\" Crying out, she turned her back to him, burying her face in the pillow.

After a moment, she felt Snape\'s hand touching her left shoulder blade, caressing her gently, almost tentatively. \"Try me, I know teenaged boys. I was one, once.\"

She frowned, searching for the right words. \"They… well. We wanted different things, I suppose.\"

\"Did they push you, Hermione?\" There was suppressed anger in his voice that warmed her and frightened her at the same time. \"Did they take something you weren\'t willing to give? Is that why you can\'t be cornered?\"

\"No, no!\" she protested, a bit impatient. \"Men and sex! Is there anything else you are capable of thinking? I have no doubt they wanted sex, too. But that was not the thing. We\'d battle intellectually. Emotionally. Fight for dominance. They won, in the end. Whether because… they bested me, or I\'d let them win. I guess I wanted them to. Wanted to have someone better than I, whom I can… yield to. Then they got tired of me, and stalked off. I was left capitulating and pliant and craving and they… just- evaporated. I was no longer challenging, you see. Quite like the morning-after concept, I suppose… so tell me, Snape…\" She was suddenly in a hurry to change the subject. \"Did you ever break a girl\'s heart once she gave you what you wanted?\"

\"You\'re straying from the subject,\" he said, reaching to turn her over, so she would face him. There was no expression in that elfin, ugly face of his, but the eyes were dark and intense.

\"I know. But I\'ve entrusted you with one of my secrets now. You should give me one of yours in return. Ron would go nuts if he\'d known I… contemplated other boys while I dated him.\"

\"Dated?\" Snape seemed… surprised? Relieved? Angry. \"I didn\'t know you two ever stopped dating.\"

\"So who is straying off the subject now?\" she retorted, then sobered. \"We broke up, several days ago.\"

\"Which is probably the reason you looked so sated and well shagged Tuesday morning in the Great Hall?\"

Hermione lifted a brow. \"I didn\'t know you were watching me.\"

\"I wasn\'t.\"

\"Yes, right, whatever you say, Professor. Anyhow, I broke up with Ron on Monday night.\"

\"So it is a habit of yours to sleep with your former lovers?\"

\"Jealous, Snape? No,\" she put off the notion hastily, before he could object. \"Of course you wouldn\'t. You wouldn\'t be staring at me, well shagged and all, in the mornings in the Great Hall, or be turned on, watching me snogging with another in the hallway- Snape, Severus,\" she felt her mouth dry, her tongue turning into clay inside her mouth. \"I don\'t think I can stand it when you look at me like that. I think… I think…\" she stuttered, her pulse racing, \"I think that my heart might be breaking, or I\'d be tempted to cut myself because it\'s too bloody much… no, hell, I won\'t do it, but you frighten me, you freak me out, do you hear me, Snape, you bastard!\"

At that, he dropped on the mattress beside her; his eyes, once again, trailing on the velvet canopy. \"I want one thing clear between us,\" he said quietly, his voice so deadly calm she couldn\'t believe the calmness to be true. \"While we are together, there will be no other lovers, of either sex. If you think you can stand that, you may come back here. If it\'s too difficult for you, go and don\'t come back.\"

She felt the anger building inside her, into a small eruption. \"Do you take me for a cheat?\"

\"You just admitted contemplating cheating on your boyfriend.\"

Hermione nodded. \"True enough. You didn\'t tell me, though. Did you ever break a girl\'s heart, after taking what you wanted from her?\"

Snape seemed to be amused. \"No,\" he said at last. \"Who would fall in love with the greasy git?\"

\"Well,\" Hermione began as she slid from the bed, slowly moving to pick up her clothes. \"You\'d be surprised.\"

* * *

\"Ron and I missed you at the Halloween feast,\" Harry told her once she sat on her bed in her Head Girl\'s room, Le Monde in one hand and a saucer supporting a tea cup in the other. The messy haired boy had knocked on Hermione\'s door only a few minutes after she got out of the shower.

\"I had… more pressing matters,\" she replied.

\"Like being thoroughly shagged?\"

She glared at him.

\"You have love bites. On your neck. And on your collar bone. And there\'s another one, just below your ear. And some scrapes, too. And of course, there\'s the sex look,\" Harry explained, sinking on the bed beside her. \"Better start practicing concealment charms.\"

Crookshanks, who had been pushed aside from his favourite hollow at the edge of the bed, attempted to bite Harry\'s ankle, then resettled himself between Harry and Hermione.

Her glare deepened. \"Oh! Just look who\'s talking! The Boy Who Lived To Be Miss Anonymous\' Marked Property! There\'s that love bite on your neck all over again! Why don\'t you conceal it?\"

Harry\'s lips tightened and his hand reached to stroke the reddened skin. \"I happen to like it to show,\" he replied. \"You, on the other hand, would not like Ron to know you\'re shagging someone else so shortly after breaking up with him.\"

Hermione breathed deeply. \"Who is she Harry, and why are you letting her do it to you?\"

\"Who is it you slept with and why are you finally awake at 11AM instead of 6AM?\" Harry retorted. \"I never knew Ron to keep you in bed so late. I never knew him to put that look in your eyes, actually. Not even in your first days together.\"

\"What look?\" she asked angrily.

\"Like you\'re…like you were made love to for the first time.\" Obviously disgusted with the sentiment, he screwed up his face.

\"Perhaps I was.\" Hermione fell silent the moment the words hit the warmed air of the room.

\"Hermione,\" Harry told her, \"we are completely and totally fucked up.\"

\"You already said so.\"

\"The fact you won\'t tell me who you\'re seeing only makes me right.\"

\"Evidently so.\" She fell silent for a while, refusing to consider the consequences of her former words. \"You love her, do you?\"

Harry let his head drop backward. \"It\'s not important.\"

\"But you do.\"

\"Yes.\"

\"Why don\'t you tell her?\"

\"Who says I didn\'t?\"

\"So you did?\"

\"No.\" He shrugged his shoulders. \"Drop it, Hermione. It would never work.\"

She only stared at the wall.

\"Thank you,\" Harry said after a while.

\"Whatever for?\"

\"For not saying that if I wanted it hard enough, I could make it work.\"

She snorted. \"Those who\'d say so are no more than idiots,\" she spoke bitterly, realizing all at once how vehemently she felt about the notion. \"Some relationships, some situations, cannot be worked out. Some people can\'t be loved into loving you back… can\'t be loved out of their wounds or out of their prejudices…\" She could not shag Snape out of being her teacher; out of being a spy … whatever she did feel toward him could never be enough to level their position, to make the world see them as equals. Could never be enough to make it more than mind numbing, sense-shattering sex. \"And yet, it still doesn\'t mean you should let it hurt you, Harry.\"

\"But what can I do?? Wish it all never happened?\" He shook his head. \"I can\'t! And I don\'t want too. Being with him… being with him…\" Harry buried his face in his hands. \"Do you remember what I told you about the cupboard, Hermione?\"

She nodded, forcing herself to ignore the sudden revelation, made in a moment of anguish, that Harry\'s \'she\' was, in fact, a \'he\'. She supposed it made things clearer, but not all that much. \"I do,\" she said.

\"Well, with him,\" Harry continued, \"there is no cupboard: I can still remember it, of course, which is important, because I know that with him I\'m free of it. That I don\'t need to go back inside, there\'s no more hiding from myself.\"

Slowly, tentatively, like Snape did for her before, Hermione put her book aside, and with the utmost carefulness, reached to touch Harry\'s back. She was not sure how to touch him, never being one to demonstrate her affection in a physical manner, but when Harry crawled toward her, burying his face in the hollow of her shoulder, it all became easier. Understandable.

Crook, pushed aside once again, decided to abandon the bed. She followed the part-Kneazle from the periphery of her vision, while allowing Harry to settle more comfortably against her body.

\"When I\'m with him,\" he said in a muffled voice, his tears soaking the fabric of her shirt, \"I know I am alive. I can\'t give him up. Don\'t ask me to give him up.\"

\"I\'m not asking you to give him up,\" she whispered, not daring to reach her hand and stroke Harry\'s hair. She thought it might be the right thing to do, but then she thought of herself being stroked, with the hands reaching for different, intimate places, and the gesture seemed almost obscene. She could not trust herself to stop in time.

\"You don\'t mind it… being a boy, right?\"

Hermione uttered a short laugh. \"Why exactly should I mind? Pure blooded families\' actually merged bloodlines by male marriages for ages, allowing an inferior female relative to carry the descendant, while the homo-lesbian revolution took place in the Muggle world about two decades ago. Why should I mind in the least, then?\"

\"Is that true?\" Harry rose up slowly.

\"Is what, true?\"

\"That piece, about the pure blood families?\"

\"Don\'t you ever listen in History of Magic?\"

Harry, his face still streaked with tears, watched her with a tinge of amusement. \"No one ever does- except for you. It\'s the best lesson for catching up on sleeping hours, after Divination.\"

\"Really.\"

She was scrutinizing him now, unsure of his intention. Harry\'s lovely, delicate face was too pale; touched by weariness and sadness. He was working himself too hard, they were both working themselves too hard; not for thinking it might help them catch up with some overload, but because for both of them, straining beyond exhaustion was the only way of facing their problems: the only route to oblivion. This, and whatever snowy land that was waiting for them at the other side of the cupboard – she with her Snow Queen Snape, never needing lamplight to be illuminating, and Harry and his mystery lover, basking in the merciful lantern\'s glow. And isn\'t it dangerous, she wondered, to have one\'s sense of aliveness dependant on other person? Snape would be freaked out to learn I\'m at risk of becoming addicted to him. Or else he\'d say something cruel and Snape-like, as if he wanted to mark me from within as well as from without with internal injuries, and I\'d ask myself why the hell do I find him so funny while being torn into pieces.

\"Harry…\" she said, carefully considering her words. \"If you ever wanted out, there might be a way…\"

\"Out?\" Harry was obviously amused. \"And who will do my job, Dumbledore?\"

\"Dumbledore is damn capable of… at least trying to do your job. Don\'t you tell me you believe in that bloody prophecy!\"

\"I don\'t know, Hermione,\" Harry answered. \"I really, honestly, don’t know. All I know is that in all of the great, magnificent Wizarding World, I\'m the only one willing to do this job. Probably not the one with the best training and preparation… not the most powerful, though quite powerful… but the one willing. And if I\'m gone, who would defeat Voldemort? If I\'m gone, we\'re doomed… They\'d say I\'m a coward, \'cause I know nobody is powerful enough to beat him – then there\'s really no one ready to face Voldemort. I can\'t seek escape, and I won\'t seek escape. Just the way you won\'t, either.\"

She sighed loudly. \"You\'re the only one you should be thinking of, you and your boyfriend- you could go away-\"

\"Why are you suddenly romantic?\" Harry retorted with a note of annoyance in his voice. \"You should be the one to go away, Hermione. If anyone has the right to, it\'s you. You weren\'t born into this world; you have no reason to fight its wars.\"

\"Perhaps…\" she began, \"perhaps I have no world to return to.\"

\"What bullshit! You have two loving parents waiting for you at home, swimming in money; it\'s true the Death Eaters might be after you because you\'re my friend, but you could conceal yourselves-\"

\"-Harry,\" she cut across him, \"you don\'t know everything, all right?\"

\"You\'re not telling me, so how would I know?\"

\"You\'re not telling me everything either, and I need my privacy just as much as you do.\"

\"Okay, okay. Hermione-\" Harry\'s lips moved undecidedly against her collar bone, shaping unsaid words through the cloth of her tricot shirt. \"Is it… is it like we don\'t trust each other?\"

She shook her head with determination. \"I don\'t think so. You have your childhood and this impossible responsibility that should have never been placed upon your shoulders always hovering in the background, and I have my issues… giving away our secrets is like… giving away your cupboard. Imagine if you had no place to retreat to. Perhaps you can give away your secrets and your cupboard with him, but I don\'t expect you to do it with me. I can\'t do it with… well, with the person I\'m seeing at the moment. Not yet, at least.\"

\"Do you think you\'d ever be able to share it with him in the future?\"

\"Maybe,\" she said. \"Maybe not.\"

\"Does he want to know?\"

She gave a small, bitter laughter. \"That he surely wants. The real question is why he wants to know.\"

\"Why do people usually want to know things about you…\" Harry mumbled.

\"So they can use it against you.\"

He snorted. \"Strange. I always thought it was a way to get to know each other better. You know, like learning your lover\'s sore spots: not only where to tread, that how you study your enemies – but where not to touch, and what points to push until you cry, and you cry enough that you feel clean…\"

* * *

Because needing something meant she was losing her self-control, Hermione counted two, three, five days before attacking Snape once Wednesday\'s Advanced Potions was over. Tearing away his clothes, she shagged him on the classroom floor to their mutual satisfaction. This time, it was Snape who decided he preferred a warmer and softer location, and hauled her to his bed. This didn\'t mean, however, that her Druid training went amiss. They\'d kept meeting each other, according to his strange schedule, in whatever odd hours he wanted them to meet, and never once, while he was her mentor and she, his apprentice, did he touch her. Nor did he ever approach her for anything but her training, out of his own free will. It was she who set the pace, she who decided where and when, although often enough, Snape would be the one to determine how.

The fact he would never initiate a sexual encounter maddened her. She tried to deny him from herself, to see how long he would last before he\'d approach her, but nothing ever happened. And while she seemed to experience an everlasting deprivation on those days she managed not to leap on him, Snape seemed as cool and untouched as ever. Nevertheless, when she finally came to him, he would devour her with a fervency that left her heady and giddy- and frighteningly alive, as if her mind was stretched to trap a notion that was just complex enough to stimulate her into total awakening. Her heart kept beating with that racing pulse of their lovemaking, even long hours after they had parted.

Sometimes there would be conversations, buried deep inside his quilt, her face hidden in the hollows and concaves of his body – where they wouldn\'t have to look at each other and their voices would be dimmed either by the darkness or by the other\'s warm skin. She told him about Donna: about living in her mother\'s exhibition hall, a Barbie doll to be played with and showed off. She told him about Ernie, and betraying him, of forgetting about him when she left for Hogwarts, so drowned in her excitement at the new revelations. She told him about the summer between her fourth and fifth year; of not understanding Harry; being stressed and straining to understand him; unable to offer comfort, unable to be anything to anybody; wilting, wilting, until the razor seemed like the best option.

She was sure most people would have found him a bad listener; withdrawn and introverted, sarcastic when he shouldn\'t say a thing, but he could have been clung to. And he did not want her to capitulate. He held her pliant and molten sugar in his arms and let her hold to him – and did not want her to capitulate.

He would talk, too. Even more rarely than she did. He told her about his own mentor, Angharad; sometimes he would talk about Professor McGonagall – he had called her Minerva – so very odd. Once he spoke a little about his parents, not that much- an abusive father, a delicate mother, who wouldn\'t or couldn\'t protect him. All too stoic. She wondered whether age would have done that to him, or whether it was simply his choice not to pay it any more attention, knowing it would gain him nothing. Are you angry, she thought sometimes. Are you sore and bitter and raging underneath your crystal calmness, as I am?

He would still be poignant and annoying, still taunt her and make cruel remarks- and she would answer with equal malice. She remembered gasping, once, as she impaled herself on his cock, a stuttered admission – in the grip of pleasure – saying that she had never felt that way before.

\"That, Hermione, is because you were sleeping with a boy,\" he told her, smug and cynical as ever.

\"Oh, is it?\" she retorted, her eyes glowing. \"Ron was twice the man you are, since you really beg to know. He was bigger and stronger, and when he held me in his arms, I felt like a fragile porcelain doll. But you… you…\" Hermione moaned. \"You fuck me to my very soul… I can feel you in my marrow and my blood sings. Damn, I\'m getting poetic. Can you get it? Can you possibly get it?\"

From time to time, he would look at her hands- subtly, or more obviously. Usually his eyes drifted sidewise to look at them, as if he didn\'t want to stress her. There would be no more talking about her visiting St Mungo\'s, though she knew the threat was always there, on the edge of his lips, the moment he felt her condition worsened. Always, when they celebrated a ritual at the Stones, he would wash her hands for her. At first she had to initiate the act, then he followed her example, and it became part of their private ritual. He kept demanding to know why, and she kept being unable to explain it to him. The drool, she thought; the touch- wrong touch that lingers, the things that made you dirty and stuck like dried bubblegum to the inner cervix of your soul – how could one ever explain that?

Sometimes she would forget he was her teacher and she was his student. Then next Monday would crash in, and reality would roar in her ears, cruel and vicious and disinterested in what either of them might have wished for. Did he actually wish for something to be different? She didn\'t know. She couldn\'t tell. In the classroom, he kept treating her with the same deliberate coldness.

\"It hurts, did you know that?\" she told him after the class was over. Staying behind was risky, and she was doing it too many times, but he had been cruel, and although she knew he had to keep up the façade, there was part of her protesting at the indecency of this- that she should offer him her body and mind, and he would treat her so, if only because his position allowed him to; if only because his reputation demanded he must.

Snape glowered at her, pointing his wand at the door and warding it, then adding a silencing charm. \"Are you aware of the fact that by staying behind, you are risking us both?\"

\"Forget that!\" she called. \"You are being cruel and you know it!\"

\"Would you rather have me treat you as my lover? Perhaps you just wish me to go and present the Headmaster with my resignation letter and ask for you to be transferred,\" he raged. \"Is that what you want, Hermione?\"

\"Do you think I\'m an idiot?\" she replied with similar fury. \"All I want from you is to tone down your comments. Saying you don\'t see a need for my opinions in your classroom, ever, was uncalled for.\"

\"Touchy.\"

\"You fuck.\"

\"Three points from Gryffindor.\"

\"Zillion points from Slytherin,\" she answered, enraged. \"Ever thought about what you\'ll do when I\'m no longer your student?\" she asked him while moving to sit on his desk. A formidable piece of furniture – it must have had been smeared with semen and bartholin, where the devil\'s hand worked it into the wood. She liked to think it have been wafting the fragrance of their own mixed essences, after having fucked so many times on its stable surface.

Quickly rolling up her skirt and disposing of her knickers, she gave Snape a cocky look. \"What are you waiting for?\"

She watched him freeing himself of his trousers and briefs, never bothering to withhold her cry of pleasure as he plunged into her, ramming her against the table.

His eyelashes fluttered for a moment, his face unmasking with the strangest and yet most alluring expression, then he lowered his gaze to watch her. Hermione moistened her lips, entranced, but unsure why he should look stricken.

\"I have no idea,\" Snape said after a while, setting a quick, sharp rhythm. \"I guess I\'ll just have to cope.\"