Needfire

Disclaimer: we own nothing you recognize. All credit goes to JKR.



no man,if men aregods;but if gods must
be men,the sometimes only man is this
(most common,for each anguish is his grief;
and,for his joy is more than joy,most rare)

a fiend,if fiends speak truth;if angels burn

by their own generous completely light,
an angel;or(as various worlds he\'ll spurn
rather than fail immeasurable fate)
coward,clown,traitor,idiot,dreamer,beast --

such was a poet and shall be and is

--who\'ll solve the depths of horror to defend
a sunbeam\'s architecture with his life:
and carve immortal jungles of despair
to hold a mountain\'s heartbeat in his hand

-- e.e.cummings


Chapter 18 - All Too Familiar


Snape looked up from his essays when Hermione entered his classroom that evening after dinner. He hadn\'t expected to see her, but she would be a welcome distraction. He wanted to talk with her about the letter he and Minerva had written to her parents. She should be made aware. He watched as she warded the door, and then realized she was casting a particularly strong silencing charm. His eyebrow rose. That might bode well for further adventures in the dungeon...

Hermione came to his desk, gently pushed aside a pile of essays, and slid herself onto the surface, close to him. He set down his quill and met her brown gaze. The pupils were large. He felt his body begin to stir; her eyes looked that way when she desired him. She spoke.

\"Bastard.\"

In an instant all desire evaporated. Somewhere, somehow, she\'d found out about the letter. He should have told her sooner. This would not be good. Snape sighed, already tired before the discussion had even begun. \"We had an agreement,\" he said at last.

\"An agreement that you\'d approach Professor McGonagall, so she would grant me her permission to leave Hogwarts during the school year, in order to visit St. Mungo\'s,\" she reminded him. Her tone was as cold as he had ever heard it. \"An agreement, may I remind you, which had nothing to do with approaching my parents.\"

\"Professor McGonagall and I felt it would be best for you.\"

Hermione\'s legs swung in and out of the cubbyhole of his desk, she was so close to him. She spoke again. \"You thought it would be best for me, now did you? Didn\'t it even once occur to you I might differ with you?\"

\"As I told you once, you may have to trust my judgment.\" To demonstrate that he was the one in control, he turned away briefly, organizing the stack of essays and popping his quill into the inkwell for storage.

She nodded. \"You also told me that at any time I can stand up and walk away. You didn\'t give me that choice, though.\"

Now she was becoming tiresome. She needed to let go of this topic. It was unproductive. \"I had your welfare in mind, Hermione.\"

When she replied, her tone was soft and gentle. He thought he detected an undercurrent of malice, however, and watched her closely. \"If you had my welfare in mind, you would not approached my parents,\" she said gently. \"If you had your own welfare in mind, you would not have approached my parents.\" Her eyes were not on him as she spoke; they roamed the desk top, seeking something, or else she just didn\'t want to appear to be looking too closely at his reaction to her threat to expose their relationship, and ruin him.

Snape leaned back in his chair, his eyes gleaming. He was torn somewhere between aggravation and amusement at her overreaction to the situation. He tried to control his tone when he replied, striving for sweetness, which, he knew, would put her on alert. \"What is this game you\'re playing?\"

\"I\'m not playing. You warned me not to play games with you,\" she said. \"And I, unlike yourself, bear such requests in mind.\"

\"Fine. A threat, then.\" Now his tone was darker. He did not care for her attitude. His apprentice needed taking down a peg or two for her insolence. Snape folded his arms.

Hermione shook her head. \"I don\'t make idle threats.\"

\"Really?\" She was boring him, a small Gryffindor lioness spitting uselessly. She would not carry through on this threat; it would mean she could be expelled, at best transferred to somewhere like Beauxbatons, or what would be worse, forced to take her NEWTs at the Ministry with the home-schooled squibs, witches and wizards without talent or money enough to attend Hogwarts. He felt himself relaxing inside. This was, indeed, an idle threat. \"Foolish girl. Go back to the sandbox where you belong.\"

She looked down at him and rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hands. Snape wondered if she would cry. He understood why she hadn\'t wanted her professors to contact her parents about the problem with her hands, but for a child not to want to go home at Christmas...this he didn\'t understand at all. Himself, yes; there had been so much anger and devastation at home over the holidays when he was at school, but for Hermione to dread them was simply foolish. He supposed she was thinking of staying at Hogwarts, where the two of them could spend inordinate amounts of time together, doing...well, what they should not be doing. Still, that idea appealed to him. The two of them, closed into the small dark world of his dungeon quarters, day after day, Hermione always within reach of his long, sensitive fingers. Hmm. He would have to give this idea more thought. And yet -- if she stayed, and spent so much time with him, her absence among so few students would be noticed. Fuck. No way to have this cake and eat it, too. Home for Christmas it must be. With, perhaps, a small visit from her professor, to let her show him the sights of her town...and the sensations...and...

When she spoke, her tone was tired; defeated; and he knew he had won. \"Yes,\" she replied. \"Soon enough I\'ll return to the sandbox. That is where you sent me and that is where I shall go. However, seeing that you betrayed my trust, I\'ll make sure you suffer the consequences.\"

Wait. Now she had hit the ball back into his court, with some topspin on it. He arched an eyebrow at her and sat forward. \"Explain yourself.\"

Her eyes narrowed at him, and once again he saw himself in her face. More habits she had picked up from him. \"Ah, Professor Snape. Darling Professor Snape. Notorious Head of Slytherin House, suddenly interested in the mentally ill Gryffindor Head Girl. Dear child,\" she mocked him prissily. \"Just look at her hands! Those sore, red hands!\"

Snape put his palms flat on the desk surface and pushed himself to a standing position. He knew exactly where she was going with this little act, and what was worse -- it would work, without question. His face tightened as he glared at her. He shoved his face closer to hers menacingly, but remained silent. The little bitch is standing her ground! He didn\'t know why he was so surprised by her spine; she\'d been standing up to him more and more lately during the druid training, debating, disputing, and proving her theories.

She kept talking, her gaze lifting with his as he rose. \"Poor Miss Granger, she must be really disturbed to hurt herself this way, the little darling, such a bright girl she is… And this vile Potions Master, an ex Death Eater, you surely know, taking advantage of someone of her --\"

It was suddenly too much, her bringing his past into this argument. His horrid, ruinous past. \"Enough! Enough!\" Snape roared. \"You ungrateful, little bitch --\" and had to rock back when she slapped him across the face. His cheek stung. She\'d put everything she had behind that blow. He felt rage boiling inside him. He struggled to master the urge to slap her back or at least grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she sobbed. He gritted his teeth, staring, white-hot.

\"You watch your mouth when speaking to me,\" she said hotly.

\"Well,\" he said at last. It was all he could manage, with so many emotions struggling for supremacy within him. Anger, fear, aggravation, fury, sadness, regret, rage. And still she stands her ground, still she holds my gaze. Another student would be sobbing by now. How fierce she is. There...is...something more...here. Something else is giving her this strength. He thought hard for a moment. Unwilling to go home for Christmas. Desperate. Anything is better, even baiting the Potions Master into a fury. What is at home, Hermione? What lurks there?

Angharad: \"Take yourself off, Severus, and don\'t come back. Leave my book here. I am tired of this nonsense of yours. I am not your pawn, nor will I permit this religion to become your weapon against others.\"

He had brought one of Angharad\'s scrying mirrors into the Circle, and had enchanted it to allow him to see his parents with it, to spy on his abusive father. After a glimpse at the latest savagery, Severus had begun spelling a long-distance cursing via the mirror. He had not done it meaning to pervert Angharad\'s Circle or subjugate it to his will; it was just that the Circle was so peaceful, and helped him to focus. He had not considered what Angharad would think of his actions. And now, with her showing him his sin, he was horrified at himself. To think he had tainted her with his deadly hatred. And worse, it was not himself who had stopped him: it had been Angharad. He hadn\'t recognized his own evil.

\"What? No! We haven\'t finished studying.\" He put his palms flat on the top of the ancient book, caressing the leather. He could not let it go, it mustn\'t leave his hands. Everything he needed was inside it, except for Lily Evans.

\"I will not be baited.\"

\"I do not bait you.\"

\"I will not argue, either. What you are doing, by bringing that Dark magic into my Circle, is the same as blasphemy.\" Her face was pale; he had never seen her look that way. Strangely, her control over her fury was more frightening than his father\'s violence had ever been, because there was no way to combat it. He did not understand her fury, because it did not hold the heat of hatred.

Severus\' brows drew together. In attempting to explain himself, he had tried to tell her that his father, in his wickedness and brutality, deserved whatever evil could be visited upon him. But in his heavy-handed way Severus had denigrated her beliefs and hurt her. And now she was hurting him back, taking away the one thing that promised a surcease from pain, a way back to humanity: the peace of the rituals, the power of the Stones, the structure and study of druidic life.

He knelt at Angharad\'s feet, next to the old table, scarred with scorch marks from how many meals, and nicked from how many generations of children, banging spoons? The scrying mirror lay shattered on the floor across the room, where she had thrown it before wandlessly exploding it into glittering needles of glass. He crawled to her, laying his face in her lap, holding hard to her womanly hips, feeling the cloth of her robe smooth against his cheek. \"I\'m sorry,\" he whispered. Lily, I loved you so. I couldn\'t tell you. I am my father\'s son. \"I beg of you. Please forgive me.\"

It took many minutes, but finally her hands rested on his head and stroked his hair. \"My apprentice,\" she whispered to him. \"It\'s you and your victim who must forgive you, not me. Come now, to your chair. You have a lesson to learn, and prayers to say before dawn. You have placed a stain on someone\'s soul, a mark as dark as the Mark on your arm. I need to know that you understand this. And then you must lift that stain.\"

Severus wept, knowing himself vile. It was a long time before he could rise from the floor. He did not deserve her forgiveness, yet she gave it anyway.

He could not have said why the memory of Angharad\'s fury at finding him in her Circle with the scrying mirror surfaced now. It fled through his mind with the swiftness of a bird\'s wing. Something about it pulled at him, taunted him. He thought he could see Hermione in his youthful self -- had he, secretly, wanted Angharad to condemn him, to punish him, to validate his own terrible opinion of himself? What would it have accomplished, except to drive Angharad away from him? And here was Hermione, threatening something equally final in ruining his reputation. Yes. She wants to take this irrevocable step; to cause an upheaval that would take weeks to resolve, and require her presence at Hogwarts. At this realization, calmness poured over Snape. He kept watching Hermione. He was able to speak, now that he saw she was pulling him into her problem in order to save herself from going home at Christmas. She would even go so far as to cost him his job, the respect he had worked so hard to earn, and her own chance at graduating with her Housemates. What he still could not understand, however, was why.

\"Well. I\'m removing myself from your chessboard,\" he said at last. He wondered what she would do now that he had handed her his life, his work, and the respect of his peers. \"Go and implement your little scheme, you\'re free to go. I won\'t contradict you. However, I won\'t be your substitute for a razor. If you wish to hurt yourself, go do it somewhere else. You won\'t have me as a willing participant, Hermione.\"

She stared at him. \"It\'s not like that.\"

He sighed. \"I don\'t believe you. Now, the door is that way. Please see yourself out.\" He sat down again, reaching for his papers and quill. This nonsense was over. Snape tried to focus on the essays, but was stopped by her tearful cry.

\"I told you, it\'s not like that!\"

Snape tilted his head to look at her again, leaning forward, lacing his fingers. \"Isn\'t it? Then tell me, Hermione, how is it, exactly?\" A sob escaped her and she looked away from him. He heard her taking calming breaths that were still ragged.

Hermione looked at him again, finally, more fiercely, the sobs under control. \"Even if it was like that, it is none of your God damn business,\" she said through gritted teeth.

\"The hell it isn\'t,\" Snape retorted. \"It became my bloody business the moment you made me a part of it.\"

\"I never forced myself on you.\"

There was a long moment of silence. Snape\'s gaze trapped her. When he spoke, he was careful to enunciate clearly. There must be no mistaking who was at fault here, and it was not he. \"You never let me help you either.\"

She closed her eyes, and in that moment he knew he had reached her, but he had wounded her, too. She stammered her reply. \"You c…can not…Y-you can… n-not help me.\"

Merlin. What is so wrong? What? Snape almost whispered, he was so confused. \"Why won\'t you let me try?\"

\"Because you fucking sent me back to him!\" Her shrieking harpy\'s voice startled him beyond belief. \"How can you possibly help me?\" she went on, screaming and sobbing at the same time. \"I should kill you, I should wring your bloody neck, I should gut you and serve your heart in the Great Hall, damn it!\"

Snape flinched back in the face of that volume, that ferocity, that raggedness.

She leaned forward, scrabbling madly in the upper drawers of his desk. Tears sprang from her eyes and streamed over her cheeks, more tears than he had ever seen someone shed. Her red hand suddenly pounced on something in the upper right hand drawer.

\"Yes, I knew it would be here --\" Her words were harsh after she had torn her throat with her screaming, but her tone was triumphant and he stared in horror at the glittering silver blade of a scalpel in her claws. He was almost too late to stop her as she tried to plunge the blade into the skin of her left wrist. Snape\'s hand shot out and captured her own in a death grip. You will not do this, you will not do this to yourself!

Hermione gave a sharp cry of pain. \"No!\" she shrieked. \"Release me! It hurts, it hurts, you idiot, it fucking hurts…!\"

\"You give me that knife this instant, you bloody fool.\" He wrenched her wrist backwards, prying desperately at her fingers, trying not to get cut himself. In this state, she might turn the blade on him, as well.

\"All right!\" Screaming, she released the scalpel. \"I\'m giving it to you, here it is, here, take it, just please let go of me, let go of me, and don\'t touch me…!\" He snatched at its handle and flung it at the wall. Dimly he heard it tinkling on the stone floor, but all his attention was now focused on controlling this wild animal in his office

Something in her voice, the anguished plea, made him release her. Never had he heard her speak so. She collapsed onto his desk, sending papers flying, and curled into a fetal position, sobbing shrilly. \"I told her that he touched me and that I didn\'t like it -- I asked her… I asked, if she would please please tell him to stop, and she said, she said, why,\" fresh, new wrenching sobs tore from her throat. \"She said: whatever is the matter with you, Hermione, can\'t you see that he loves you?\"

I\'m not hearing this. This horror doesn\'t touch her world. Not her Muggle dentist world, the perfect family, no, no, no... He rose, an all too familiar coldness welling into his belly, his bowels, his testicles. Mother -- why does Father hold you down -- why are you bleeding --why does he hit you -- I cannot help you --

She screamed. \"Don\'t touch me!\" Her hands flew to cover her face, her elbows over her breasts.

He shifted to crouch in front of her, searching for her eyes, seeking to see into her torture. \"Hermione, who are you talking about?\" His voice hoarsened and he added, barely controlled now, \"Who touched you? Who wouldn\'t stop him from touching you?\" Tell me who did it, and I will kill them for you. I will kill them for me. I will kill them for Mother.

When she looked at him, her eyes were red and full of tears, still splashing. \"My…my parents.\"

Fuck. Stupid, Snape, stupid of you. How unobservant. All the signs were there, you just didn\'t read them. All you could see was a woman-child who desired you, a woman-child who could make your Stones come to life. \"I should have known.\"

Her tongue flicked out nervously to moisten her lips. \"Please, please don\'t make me go home for Christmas.\"

\"It\'s not up to me, but I\'ll make sure you are allowed to stay at Hogwarts for Christmas.\"

She was still trying to read his eyes. Her voice trembled when she spoke. \"Do you still want me out of your life?\"

He read such devastation in her eyes, heard it in her voice. He could not lie to her. \"I never wanted you out of my life.\"

\"Will you want me in your life after I\'m graduated?\"

Snape couldn\'t speak. How often had he asked himself that question over the last few days? Except it had been reversed: would Hermione want him in her life?

\"Would you?\" She pressed.

\"If you still want me.\"

\"I thought… well, I thought you might take me as your apprentice for the summer – your Potions apprentice, so that I can still stay here at the castle. I\'ll be going to University in November, but there is nothing to prevent us from seeing each other --\"

He closed his eyes a moment. Then he reached out with his index finger and stopped the flow of her words. \"Let\'s see how the year ends,\" he said quietly, exhausted now that the worst of the storm seemed to be over and there was only the aftermath. We both know Voldemort is coming for us all. And soon. Let\'s not make plans. \"First you all graduate, then we can see about this apprenticeship.\"

\"So…you don\'t… mind, me… us?\"

Oh, Hermione, I am so very tired. How do you cope with this inside you? He sighed heavily. \"I -- I mind having slept with a student. I mind being used to assist self-mutilation. You are complex and obnoxious, and I don\'t have the time or the tools to deal with your complexity. And yet I am compelled; bewitched. \" He looked at her gently. \"I know that if I tap right here,\" slowly, so as to not to scare her, he reached to touch two fingers to her forehead, \"and if I touched you just this way…\" his two fingers touched the pulse point under her ear, and then a spot just over her heart. \"I know that you would click open, and there would be a land of milk and honey.\" And such riches will never be mine.

She stared at him blankly for the longest time. It was as if she hadn\'t heard him. Her voice broke as she spoke. \"I think…I think I\'d like you to hold me.\"

This...oh, this...I can do. Snape lifted her into his arms, dragging her from the desk, one arm beneath her knees, the other around her shoulders, tucking her head beneath his chin. \"You can put your arms around my neck,\" Snape murmured to her now. \"You might find relief just in holding onto me.\"

Hermione stiffened in his hold and he feared he would drop her. \"If sex is what you want right now --\"

Merlin! What did her father do to her? \"It isn\'t,\" he said softly. \"Just like sex doesn\'t necessarily mean a cock; touch doesn\'t necessarily mean sex.\" When she relaxed into his hold at his words, he left the classroom and carried her to his quarters, where he sank into an armchair in front of the fire. Holding her -- just...holding her, was all he could do for her now.


Snape awakened with a start, a heavy weight pressing upon him, holding him down, trapping him. That dream again... his mother, her length stretched on the parlor floor, turning on her side and drawing up her knees to her chest, trying to protect herself from a well-aimed boot toe to her belly, and instead the blow struck a kidney. It never got any better, it never changed. Small Severus ran forward to help, and a clubbed fist swung him out of the way to land heavily, head first, against a trunk where a heavy vase tottered and fell, shattering like a bomb.

It took only moments to place himself: in his quarters, in the large leather-covered armchair, before his fireplace. It took longer for his racing pulse to quiet. Hermione nestled on his lap, sleeping the sleep of the exhausted, the broken. Judging from the lack of light from the small, high windows, it was still night. How long had they been here like this?

It all flooded back. The meeting with Minerva. Writing a letter to Hermione\'s parents. Hermione herself, raging in his office, trying to hurt herself, desperate to stop pain, in any way possible. Himself bending back her wrist, wrenching away that scalpel, flinging it at the wall. And finally, the truth coming out of her. A terrible truth, one that still burned into his brain like a white-hot dagger. Like nothing he had ever thought possible for her perfect life, her perfect family.

Who touched her? Her father. Who wouldn\'t stop him from touching her? Her mother. Never, never would Snape allow her to go home again. Not alone, at any rate. He would be with her, he decided. No more conjugal visits with daddy, he thought. Not for his student, his apprentice, his bedmate, his.

Her arms were around his neck, limp and heavy in her sleep. She had finally released his hand, after the curious biting and sucking, that somehow didn\'t seem destructive but instead gave her comfort. His fingers were slightly abraded, but more or less whole. She seemed to prefer that tender web of flesh between thumb and forefinger, on the back of his partially closed hand. Snape, in his confusion and desperation to control the pain, the fear, the overwhelming sense of betrayal she must have felt, had allowed her to suckle at his hand like a babe. Just before she slept, she released his hand and shifted to press her hot face into the curve of his neck, snuffling there, smelling his scent. He couldn\'t quite hear what it was she was whispering, but shortly she became a rag doll in his arms, and he knew she was soothed into sleep.

Gods. He was stiff from sitting so long. The muscles in his legs tingled, half asleep. He shook her gently. \"Hermione.\" She did not stir. He shook her again. \"Hermione.\"

She mumbled, but that was all. Snape groaned and struggled to slide to the front of the armchair, with her still in his arms. He got his feet under his hips and rose. She stirred at that, with a shrill cry of anguished fright.

\"It\'s Snape,\" he said to her. \"You know me, Hermione. I\'m putting you to bed.\"

Hermione stiffened in his arms and he nearly dropped her. \"Be still, you foolish girl!\" he snapped. His sarcastic tone seemed to reach through her frozen demeanor and started her breathing more normally. \"I\'m only taking you to bed. To sleep,\" he added hastily, in case the demon within her was still lurking close to the surface.

Snape set her on the bed and debated about undressing her. He decided against it, except for her shoes, which he removed with a charm and banished beneath the bed, next to his slippers. She\'d been sleeping in her clothes and school robes; let her stay that way. He pulled a spare blanket over her, thought a moment, then stripped to his boxers, and cuddled behind her, spoon-fashion.

Though Hermione was soon asleep again in that peculiar depressive state, Snape was not. He found himself pondering the similarities and differences of their separate childhoods. Hermione, touched by her father in ways she should not have been. Severus, a captive audience of one, lurker in dark corners and under beds, watching his father strike his mother for unclear reasons. Hermione, helpless to fight against the years of paternal authority ingrained in her brain. Severus, fighting, always. Struck for it, always. Hermione, left to the tender mercies (and Snape had no doubt they were tender, if unnatural; Hermione was a delectable morsel, sweet, sharp, passionate) of her father, by a mother who appeared not to notice something was wrong. Severus, whose mother knew what was wrong, yet could not struggle against it, even for her child, much less for herself.

Hermione, who coped by hurting herself. Severus, who coped by hurting others. Both driven to brilliance and excellence in their magical studies, sensing freedom might lie in knowledge and power. Hermione with her yoga and fitness training, seeking to control her physical self. And Druid Snape, seeking solace in religion, and control through ritual.

It was too much to think about now. He buried his face in her hair, inhaling her scent deeply into his lungs, his brain. She smelled slightly acrid, no doubt a residue of her distress, but mostly she smelled warm and faintly green, like something growing in the Forbidden Forest. Like a tender shoot from one of those black roses, not a bloom, but a stem, with a thorn.

Snape slept again, one arm across her belly, the other pillowing his head.

He was wakened by the sensation of soft, warm lips, trailing down his body. Slowly stirring, he gazed down his body. He could see Hermione\'s eyes glinting in the twilight before dawn like those of a cat\'s. The terrified, desperate child from the night before was gone, replaced by the lush-lipped Lolita he remembered well from prior encounters. Suddenly flooded by a sharp sensation of wrongness, he reached his hand to stop her.

\"Hermione, don\'t --\"

\"You don\'t mean that,\" she said to him, continuing her slow kissing down towards his navel and beyond. \"I can tell.\" Her hand slid softly over the fly of his boxers. Snape jumped at her touch.

\"Stop, I said.\" Damnation, it can\'t be this way. Not yet.

\"Why?\" Knowing smile. \"You want me, I can feel it. Here. This wants me, if you don\'t...\" She bent her head and Snape thrust his hand into her hair to stop her, pull her face back up.

\"No, Hermione.\"

\"Oh, God, oh...\" Her face fell at once, and again, there was the lonely, helpless girl who lay curled into a ball on his desk. \"I knew it.\"

\"Knew what? Lumos.\" He released her.

She rolled her eyes in his bluish wandlight, as if talking to an extremely retarded child. \"Just… Just drop it.\" Sliding off the bed, she began groping for her own wand. He watched conflicting emotions flit across her features, until at last the emotion that settled, devastation, seemed to fill her eyes. She tried to speak.

\"What is it?\" he muttered. This was nonsense. Snape understood her distress about her home situation, but last night he had agreed she could stay at Hogwarts over Christmas. It should have eased her mind. He sat up and swung his legs off the bed. She crossed her arms, as if daring him to step nearer.

\"You know, now.\"

He didn\'t pretend to misunderstand her; that would have been deliberately cruel to her while she was in this state. \"Yes. He touched you, and she wouldn\'t stop him.\"

\"Evidently so.\"

He was stunned by her calmness. She seemed to sense that.

\"What should I do, Snape? Do you want me to scream? Cry? Yell? Wasn\'t yesterday enough for you? Or did you want an encore?\"

He shook his head. \"As I already said, Hermione, I won\'t play this game with you. If you\'re looking for someone to hurt you, find some other masochist.\"

\"Prick,\" she hissed. \"You do want me to cry now, now don\'t you?\"

\"I want you to express some emotion, yes.\"

\"I cried my heart out last night,\" she said at last, with a sadness that almost overwhelmed him. \"It didn\'t change history.\"

\"I want to ask you to come back to bed,\" he said, \"It\'s cold here. Come and talk to me.\"

\"No.\"

\"Why not?\" He stood up, turned back the blankets, then folded the spare blanket and put it on the trunk at the foot of the bed. \"It will be no different than it was last night, just warmer.\"

\"You\'ll never want to touch me again, now that you know.\" She stayed where she was.

\"Utter rot,\" he said.

\"Well, you certainly didn\'t sound like you want me, a moment or two ago.\"

\"Hermione, you\'re offering yourself to me for all the wrong reasons. It would have been wrong -- even cruel -- to accept your offer. Sex doesn\'t solve problems, it causes problems. And Merlin, I know it. I can\'t say something as stupid as \'Hermione, you just need a hug\' because you need so much more than that to make your world right.\" His hands clenched. He wanted to go to her, take her in his arms, bring her back to bed, soothe her with the sex she thought she needed. It would be easy. But it wouldn\'t be right, and it wouldn\'t help for long, just the way the ritual washing never helped for long. Sex was a palliative, and not a cure.

She cried in despair. \"But don\'t you see I n-need you?\" she stuttered, holding out her arms to him, her poor, red arms. \"Please. I need you to make me right. I need you to make me --\"

As Snape watched, her face crumpled and she brought her hands up to cover it. He went to her after all, unable to watch her torn open this way without touching her. His hands floated just to the sides of her shoulders, and finally settled like two dragonflies, lightly, yet gripping. At the touch, she cried out, anguished, but then she pushed forward and rammed her face into his bare chest.

Snape spoke. \"If you tell me one more time that you\'re not clean, Hermione...I\'ll...\" he trailed off. His hands slid down her arms and moved to her back, warm on the fabric of her shirt.

\"You\'ll...what?\" She didn\'t look at him until he touched her chin and raised her face. Her agony devastated him.

\"Come to bed. Let me hold you.\"

She stumbled along with him, to where it was warm. \"Where are my shoes?\" she mumbled.

\"The unbelievably stupid things that worry you,\" he muttered, arranging the pillows so he could lean back against the headboard for support. Sitting up seemed a less sexually charged position, though he would not have made love to her now if she\'d begged on her hands and knees. There was still too much to talk about. Snape settled himself, and held out his arms. With a moan, she curled against him and pulled one of his arms around her. She was trembling.

\"What if we\'re late for breakfast?\" she said now. \"We\'ll be missed, we\'ll be caught...\"

\"Two more stupid topics. I want to talk to you, seriously.\"

That made her tense in his arms. For a moment he thought she would break away again. \"I will not talk about my father.\"

\"You will talk about your father.\"

She moved away from him at once. \"This conversation is over, Snape. I\'ll thank you for telling me where you hid my shoes --\"

\"Hermione, this is important.\"

\"Why, because you say it is?\"

\"No, because it is important, and if you weren\'t so busy hiding away from yourself, you would realize it too. Now come here this instant.\" Once again he held out his arms.

Surprisingly pliant, she sank on the bed, limp as a rag doll, looking at him with large, pleading eyes, as if begging him please not to hurt her.

\"About your father --\"

\"I love my father. I won\'t sit here and listen to you condemn him!\"

\"Well then, what would you accept from me in regards to your father, if not my condemnation? I condemn him for what he\'s done to you. Why don\'t you?\"

When she finally answered, it was slowly. \"It\'s...it\'s much more...complicated than that.\" It was clear that this conversation was making her uncomfortable. Moments ago she had been limp and compliant; now the lurking demon was peeping out from her eyes.

This, Snape simply could not comprehend. He hated his own father for what had been done to young Severus and his mother. \"You must hate what he did, at least.\"

Hermione colored as he looked down at her.

\"...don\'t you?\" Snape asked, his brows drawing together. His arms were still out. At all costs, she must know she was welcomed into them.

Her lips tightened. She looked like she was about to take wing from the bed, poised to fly her way back to Gryffindor tower. \"I am not going to talk about it.\" Rapid shakes of her head, confusion reigning on her face, and then, \"Oh, God...\" and a moment later she buried her face against his chest, hiding in her tumbled hair. At last he could close his arms around her.

\"How will we ever get past this, otherwise?\" he asked her now, softly. \"I can\'t wash your hands at every moon ritual. I can\'t fuck you into oblivion, Hermione! I can\'t and won\'t make you forget.\" A dawning realization stunned him and his voice grew even softer. \"And I can\'t save you.\" Oh, but I could Obliviate you, Hermione, I could help you that way, I could take it all away, I could make a Pensieve for you...make you not you. UnHermione. And then you would walk away from me. It was almost too much for him to bear. His heart was racing. \"You asked me last night if I will want you in my life after your graduation. My answer is yes, but the other side of that question must be true as well, Hermione. Will you still want me? And to know the answer to that question, we must talk this out. I may be as old as your father --\"

\"Stop talking about him, I said -- stop!\" She tried to sit up again and pull away, but this time he would not let her. He prayed she would not feel trapped, and drew a hand soothingly down her back. She stayed, but she was very tense, all her muscles thrumming like violin strings.

\"As I said, I am so much older than you. As old as he is, perhaps. But have no illusions, Hermione -- I am not your father and have no intention of behaving as such. I will not parent you. But above all I will not have you thinking I want to touch you in the way he touched you.\" He took a deep breath. The next was too hard to say, just now: And if that\'s what you want from me, Hermione, if you want a new daddy, then go home now. Home to daddy. Unwholesome though I am, I want Hermione the woman, not Hermione the child. I am under no illusions here.

\"Oh, God.\"

\"God is not in this. Only you, and I, and your parents.\" He took her hand and placed it over his heart. \"Feel this. That beat, that pounding, is for you.\" Lily, how much you taught me, and never knew you were teaching me.

\"I will still want you,\" she whispered. \"But I won\'t talk about my father.\" She pressed her ear where he had pressed her hand. Snape closed his eyes, and put one hand on her head, threading into her curls.

\"Do you think you ever could?\" he asked, as gently as he knew how, which was not very gently. He needed this information in order to solve this problem for both of them.

\"I don\'t know.\" Her mouth turned against his chest in a warm, moist kiss that somehow held everything, and nothing, of desire, at one and the same time. \"But you still want me,\" she whispered.

\"God yes.\" He could only groan his answer, and clench his hand in her hair.

She had one last thing to say. \"I\'m glad.\"

They were silent for a long time. Snape still wanted to press her for answers, but clenched his teeth hard enough to give himself a migraine instead. He sank into thought, closing his eyes. How to get the answers he needed. Perhaps a visit to the Granger\'s home, with Minerva in tow, so he would not explode and throttle the father.

Hermione stirred him later, prodding him with two sharp fingers in a tender spot near his floating ribs.

\"Stop that,\" he muttered, opening his eyes as he reached to still her fingers.

\"You need to get up,\" she told him. \"Breakfast. Classes.\"

\"You\'re always thinking of food.\"

\"You don\'t think about food enough. Look how gaunt you are. You need more protein. You will eat bacon this morning. Or kippers.\" She pulled her hand free and ran her fingers over his ribs as though she were pulling a mallet along a xylophone.

He narrowed his eyes at her. \"You seem a little better.\"

\"Perhaps,\" she said. \"I would say thank you, but you wouldn\'t like that.\"

\"Whyever not?\"

\"You don\'t like people to be grateful to you. Just...worshipful. In awe. Fearful.\"

Lily. \"You loved to be feared.\" How alike they were, his two Gryffindor loves, and yet, how different. He must stop this nonsense of entangling himself with his most polar of opposites. They knew him too well, saw too deeply into him. Their angles were not his angles, but they fit closely, nonetheless.

\"So instead you would prefer I think you ungrateful.\"

\"You don\'t think that at all.\" She lifted his hand, the one she had bitten, and examined it closely. \"Did I hurt you, last night?\"

\"Not my hand,\" he said.

\"But I hurt you?\"

\"You bring back bad memories.\"

Hermione\'s brows drew together. \"In what way?\"

\"It\'s not important. Let\'s just say I had parental issues, too.\"

Her eyes gleamed at him. She settled herself closer, where she could look right into his face, deep into his eyes. She searched there for a long moment. \"I want you to tell me.\" Looking back, he could still see a faint shadow lurking in her brown eyes, and dark circles beneath them.

\"Not today.\"

\"Now is a good time, I could bypass breakfast just this once.\"

\"Perhaps someday soon we will trade our tragedies. I will give you my parents, and you will give me yours.\" His hands lifted, almost tentatively, to touch her, close gently on her hips. She didn\'t flinch. He shook her, just a little. \"You need a bath, Hermione.\"

\"Do I smell?\" Hermione was almost smiling. \"Because you do,\" she said. She dropped her nose to his chest, and her breath huffed over his skin. He was reminded abruptly of a horse he\'d once been introduced to, at Lucius\' estate. The same tender skin, the same alertness, the rush of breath and flaring nostrils, the wariness, watching for any sudden movement, ready to bolt. \"You smell of bitter herbs, and charcoal, and lab cleaner. And me.\" She lifted her head, blinking. \"Come and have a bath with me, Snape.\"

\"Hermione.\" He closed his eyes, shaking his head. Don\'t do this, don\'t tempt me so. It\'s too soon for you, too fresh a scar. \"I will not make love to you this morning. I will not do it. And not because we might miss breakfast, wench that you are.\"

She understood his hesitation. She pulled him up from the bed with her and twined close, her pointed chin pressing painfully at his sternum. \"I know. What I meant to say was, come and bathe me, Snape. That\'s all.\"

He sighed. He bent his head and kissed that warmly upturned mouth. Kissed it deeply, wanting her so much. \"That I can do. Go and draw your tub.\"

She looked over her shoulder at him as she wandered away, shedding her clothes and leaving them like Hansel and Gretel\'s breadcrumbs behind her from bed to bath. \"A hot one, with bubbles for your sudden modesty, Snape. But after Double Potions class, you\'d better have wards ready.\"

Merlin, yes -- and new ones, since Draco can break the old ones. He walked to the bath after her, picking up her clothes and burying his face in them. Smelling that acrid smell, that desperation, to remind him that sex in his enormous bath was out of the question, at least this morning.