Just One Kiss

Title: Just One Kiss (2/?)

Author: Moirasfate

Story: HG/SS: Chapter Two, in which Severus ponders his fate after the Battle, accepts his losses, and dreams of a certain Know-It-All.

Rating: NC-17/MA

Warnings: Solo, Oral, Dom/sub, Hurt/Comfort, M/F.

Disclaimer: The Harry Potter books and their characters are the property of JK Rowling and Scholastic Books. This is a work of fanfiction. No infringement is intended, and no money is being made from this story. The title of this fic and the lyrics are by The Cure.

A/N: For some reason AFF.net decided to eat this chapter. So here it is...again. Thanks for all the reviews in July! I had almost lost hope on continuing this fic, but here is the second chapter. This will not be a long fic, and I know there is a slow build, but you lemon heads out there will get what you have come for...eventually. Also, a beta is still wanted to help clean up a bit of the grammar and flow...so email me if interested: moirasfate@yahoo.com.


Chapter Two

Remember the time the islands sank…
But nobody opened their eyes…


* * *

The art of potions making was a delicate art, almost as delicate as making a fine drink, in Severus Snape's opinion. The flame of his match reflected in his black eyes as he laid it near the alcohol soaked cube of white sugar. His palate desired the bitter taste of liquor, and there was nothing better than absinthe on a day like this…
He watched with bated breath as the caramelized sugar dripped through the openings in the silver spoon, collecting at the bottom of his glass. Finally as the alcohol burned away, he removed the spoon and poured a small amount of water into the glass. The milky green that swirled in his glass was hypnotizing, but Severus knew better than to watch for long…the Green Fairy would only come after three glasses. Sitting down on the worn divan in his room, he considered the color of the absinthe in the firelight before him. Slytherin green? No, but a muted green that reminded him of ocean waters in the Mediterranean, not exactly blue, but not a true shade of green either… He took three full mouthfuls and let the anise taste of the liquor slide down his throat.
There was a difference in the type of intoxication that absinthe brought to the mind and body, not the haze of whiskey or the numbness of vodka, but a type of intoxication that made the mind predisposed to waking dreams and vivid fantasies… He wanted a dream tonight, a beautiful dream for once. He had been having nightmares ever since he promised to no longer take sleeping draughts, an oath forced out of him by his mentor and employer. Severus had suffered a type of addiction to liquid oblivion when it came to sleeping, and logically he knew he was addicted but begrudgingly gave up taking his night phial of sleeping draught when the Headmaster noticed that his addiction was interfering with Severus' waking hours… Old meddling fool…
He rose again from the divan, limping to the sideboard holding his collection of liquor…his fire whiskey, brandy, vodka and absinthe… He knew he had been drinking far too much to make up for his dependence on the sleeping draught, but he also knew he could take a potion to nip his hangovers in a moment when he woke in the morning… Severus had never been a heavy drinker, but old age, pain, and surviving the atrocities of war made his mind wish he had been an alcoholic long ago.
He could abide the pain…he had trained and honed his body to resist pain for many years, but it was a different kind of pain that afflicted him so deeply… He was not and would never be the same man he had been only months before, before the end…
Severus stumbled back to the divan, nearly upsetting the drink in his hand. It was not that he was feeling the affects of the absinthe yet; it was his leg that refused to cooperate while either drunk or sober. It was the price he paid for his involvement, and compared to some, it was a small price. He had survived the war basically intact; except for his lame left leg…the result of too many Cruciatus curses as well a placed cutting curse. He had feeling in his leg, but little control…he was reduced to using a cane and walking about with gangling limp. Severus knew he was unattractive, but this limp made him into something akin to a monster…
Downing the third glass, Severus leaned back into the divan, pulling his wasted leg up onto the cushions with his good leg. It was late, it was Sunday, and he dreaded the thought of NEWT level potions with the seventh years the next morning. Potter would be there…and his girl companion… Granted, Severus was grateful that Harry Potter had defeated the Dread Lord; it meant that he could retire from spying, and the mark, which still remained on his arm, would never again pain him. Yes, the Dark Mark was dead, nearly faded away, but still there when Severus ran his fingers over the flesh of his forearm…the skin still felt dead and cold, but it no longer hummed with summoning. But not everything was so perfect now that the Dark Lord was gone. There were the casualties, the dead, the missing, the maimed and those who had to live with the knowledge that a part of their life was either destroyed or at least, disrupted.
Severus was one of the maimed living, like many of those who resided in the walls of Hogwarts castle…like Potter's girl companion…Hermione Granger.
Why he had saved her life was not an act of kindness on Severus' part, not in the least. It was perhaps pity, or hatred in seeing a bright young mind being drained of life just as the blood spewed from the gash in her neck… It was sacrilege to destroy something that could be so useful in the future, a waste, a travesty… Perhaps that was why he had saved her, healed her throat and forced a blood-replenishing potion down her gaping throat… He was sure that she did not know he was the one who had saved her, and Severus thought that it was just as well. In his mind he could imagine the Head Girl trying to thank him, her lips moving soundlessly, her Gryffindor code of conduct still strong even though she had been dealt a blow so befitting to devastate her very nature…to be an insufferable Know-It-All… To never speak again, a part of Severus delighted in this, the darkest part of Severus…
The glass slipped from his fingers and rolled along the carpeted floor toward the grate of fire to his left. His eyes had glazed and his thoughts swirled in upon themselves…thoughts of Hermione Granger…
She had been watching him; he had not let that escape his notice. But he knew she was unaware of his part in her survival… But she had been watching him, or more specifically, watching his hands. His years of subterfuge were useful in such situations, he could only wish at that moment his years had been a bit kinder. The question remained, why was the Head Girl staring at him and his hands? What sort of new silly infatuation would he have to deal with now?
Through the years there was always one girl, typically in seventh year that fancied themselves in love with him. There were a few embarrassing situations, but Severus Snape had never taken advantage a student…of course it was not as if he had not imagined it before. But Granger? He could only hope his fine tuned instincts were wrong.
Then again…Granger had become quite a figure in his existence for the past seven years. She had grown into a woman rather easily, but the war had made her gaunt, fragile and now broken to a certain extent. Severus had admit that he did not particularly dislike Hermione Granger, he was annoyed by her, intimidated to a certain degree by her sharp wit, but he never wished her harm or what befell her on that day almost six weeks before.
It was just a shame...all of it, his life, his jobs, his fate. And as the numbing calm of sleep nipped at the edges of his consciousness he rose from the divan, staggering from the affects of the absinthe and the heaviness of his leg. To bed he knew he must go, and with a quiet mutter he was unclothed, slipping under the blankets of his bed and dreams overtaking him as his dark head hit the pillows. And in his dreams Hermione Granger did not have a scar on her throat and she laughed quite delightfully.

* * *

When dawn came, stretching its rosy fingers across the horizon of a new day, Severus had already dressed, taken his potions to clear the fuzziness from his mind and his potions to lessen the stiffness in his leg. In the quiet of his dungeon chamber he waited to hear the shallow echo of footfalls overhead. And slowly as dawn revealed her face, those footfalls were a welcome sound, reaffirming that Severus had made it through another night alive.
At the time Severus had always appointed to himself, he made his way slowly out of the darkness of his abode, his cane tapping the flagstones of the ancient school, and up to the Great Hall for breakfast. Even then, many months after the start of that year's term, it was startling to see how few children there were sitting at the house tables. Granted, Severus did not care much for ‘children,' but it seemed as if the life blood of Hogwarts were in need of a replenishing potion.
Once ensconced in his usual seat, Severus waited for his traditional breakfast to appear on his plate. Soon a breakfast consisting of three strips of bacon, a piece of toast, two slices of ripe tomato, slice of white cheese and sprig of white grapes appeared on his plate as his goblet of that morning's pumpkin juice automatically filled itself. The other professors were tucking in, and slowly the morning conversation began after quick taps of a napkin against many mouths.
"It looks like your leg is feeling better," a voice said softly from his left, the voice now subdued more so than it had even been from a much more subdued Rolanda Hooch.
"The potions are helping, and I have also began implementing a different regimen of stretches to do every morning," Severus answered cooly and concisely, searching for Madam Hooch's strange eyes but failing to meet them. Madam Hooch had taken the death of Minerva McGonagall quite badly, but she tried to maintain her overall companionable attitude despite losing one of her greatest companions in life and friendship.
"Good, Severus, I was hoping to tempt you onto a broom before long. With so many..." and Rolanda Hooch faltered, her face crumpling slightly, "With so many students gone from the Quidditch teams I was hoping you would help me form an inter-house team for those students who would like to play until the end of term."
Severus suddenly found Madam Hooch's eyes, and suddenly wishing he had not. The despair was more evident in the flying instructor's eyes more than anywhere else in her stocky body.
"I will consider it, Rolanda, perhaps in the early spring?" he answered, trying to keep his voice as low and unemotional as possible.
Madam Hooch nodded and began finishing her breakfast in silence. Severus slowly began finishing his own breakfast, taking the last bit of his toast when he felt familiar eyes watching him from the Griffyndor table. Wiping his mouth and fingers with his napkin he reached forward to grasp the stem of his goblet. Slowly his eyes traveled up and outward, settling resolutely upon one Hermione Granger. But her eyes did not meet his and he blinked as he began to wonder if he had been wrong... No, she was looking at him, but not at his face, he had been correct in thinking that she had been watching his hands and apparently had been watching the movements of his hands even during his brief conversation with Rolanda Hooch. He began to realize that she had been watching him eat, drink, and move his hands from his napkin to his plate and back again. Severus turned his gaze away again, she had not noticed...that he had noticed.
Slow he rose from his seat, taking his cane in hand, and made his way to begin a Monday morning in the Potions lab.
But all the way, the sharp tap of his cane and the subtle scrap of his left boot against the flagstones, Severus thought of nothing more than Hermione Granger's amber eyes never noticing his own black eyes all of that morning's breakfast. The girl needed to be confronted, if not to save herself from a future indiscretion like most female students committed when convinced of their love for him...or for himself to be saved from her molten gaze and his growing sympathetic affections for her...

* * *


Hermione was always the first student to arrive to the Potions Lab and mostly had always been the first in all of her seven years at Hogwarts. While Harry and Ron had complained and waited until the last minute to make their way down to the dungeon classroom, Hermione had always been the first to be set up for another day of challenging potion making. She had always been torn, however, to say or think that Potions was her favorite subject, for Transfiguration rivaled Potions quite equally when it came to the level of work, amount of interest and overall enjoyment for Hermione. But with her Head of House gone and some underqualified Ministry Official teaching Transfiguration, Potions won out as her favorite subject at that point in time.
So when Hermione entered the Potion's Lab she was not surprised to find herself quite alone, setting up her workstation for the anticipation of making a lesser version of Veritaserum for future applications toward the N.E.W.T. exam at the end of the term. It was a difficult potion, but Hermione was anxious to begin trying her hand with the truth serum. With still twenty minutes before the official start of class, and her workstation ready, Hermione sat on her work stool, waiting.
She began thinking of how she would have to pay close attention to her potion and not look at the Potion Master's hands this session... She began thinking that Neville had come a long way since the years before... She began thinking that she felt better that morning than she had most mornings in the past few weeks... She began thinking...
CRASH!
The sudden sound of shattering glass, and the falling of what sounded like many phials startled Hermione from her reverie and to her feet. Unconsciously she had drawn her wand as her eyes moved to the source of the crash, the supply closet behind Professor Snape's podium and desk. Her feet moved her around her work table and around the podium before she had stopped to realize what or who could have created such a loud disturbance.
"Sodding...hell...ugh..." came a muffled voice from behind the supply closet door.
Hermione took a breath, realizing that she had been holding her breathe all the while since the crash. Wand out in her right hand, her left hand fell to the door handle and opened it quickly, the air blowing back strands of wavy hair from her eyes.
The scene before was confusing at first, and slowly she held back a smile and an attempted laugh. The closet was small, but in the floor, in the middle sat a quite ruffled Potion's Master, surrounded my millions of shards of broken glass and black robes stained in various colors.
"Bloody piece of..." he began again, searching around for something that Hermione could not discern. Apparently he had not noticed her, or was ignoring her, but as he sat on the cold stone floor, turning this way and that, Hermione began to notice that indeed the Potion's Master was injured. As he turned to his left, away from Hermione's slowly widening eyes, she noticed that his right palm was bloodied, apparently from the fall, or from the broken glass around him.
Reaching for his cane, Severus tried his best to rise to his feet, wary of the glass and myriad of spilled potions around him. How had he been so clumsy? Of course some phials could not have an ‘unbreakable' charm lest the potion loose potency...
Careful not to use his right hand, he placed his cane upright before him and tried to stand. After two failed attempts to rise without using his right hand, he was startled as a warm body moved against his side, slipping under his right arm to help him to his feet. A startled curse died on his lips as his eyes met a familiar set of amber orbs. Regaining his footing, grasping his cane tightly, he opened his mouth to speak, perhaps scold or admonish, but Hermione Granger had left his side as quickly as she had appeared, but was now standing before him, holding his right hand palm up, the crunching of glass under shoed feet an afterthought.
"Silly girl, mind the glass!" he snapped suddenly, pulling his hand out of the girl's small hands and warm grasp.
Hermione visibly jumped at her Professor's words and began backing for the door. Severus sighed softly as he noticed the panicked expression on Hermione's face.
"There are several potions of the floor as well, I cannot tell what has been spilled or what the reaction will be if they come in contact with each other, so go into the lab and wait," he said quickly, minding the tone of his voice so that the girl would not be traumatized any more than she already was.
Hermione nodded and took several steps backward, her wand still out, standing just outside the open door to the closet.
Severus sighed again, apparently he had been spared once again, for none of the potions spilled on his person or on the floor seemed to be reacting violently. He set his cane against the shelves and drew his wand from his robes with his uninjured hand. After a few spells and a few grimaces, the supply closet and his teaching robes were clean, but not without a noticeable loss in inventory. Severus knew he would have to spend his free evening finding out what potions he would have to re-brew, a task that he looked forward to as much as he looked forward to seeing the Dread Lord in Hades.
Hermione waited just outside the door, worrying her lower lip, thinking of the sight of blood in her Professor's hand. She had only wanted to help, she had only wanted to heal the blemish on his near perfect hand. GAH! Hermione shook her head violently, her thoughts...her obsession was getting out of hand...hands...GAH!
"If you do not mind, Miss Granger, I would like to leave the supply closest at some point, and do stop shaking your head like that, you might damage something important," Severus said softly adding a bit of his trademark snark to his voice.
Hermione jumped out of the way, her eyes automatically moving to her Potion Master's right hand as he held it before him, unable to cradle it in his other hand since he was gripping his cane so tightly.
"Pro..." Hermione gasped and promptly grabbed her scarf swathed neck in pain. Tiny tears prickled at the corners of her eyes, but she managed to keep herself from crying as she noticed Professor Snape gazing at her with a mixture of surprise and slight concern.
"Class begins in fifteen minutes, Miss Granger, if you feel up to it, you can accompany me to the Hospital Wing," he said softly, letting his expression return to his usual sneer. But underneath the mask of annoyance, he was still surprised. The only syllable Hermione Granger has uttered in his presence was nothing more that the first syllable of a title that Severus was slowly beginning to abhor...if only he were younger...if only she were younger. Her act of silent kindness to help him to his feet was defiantly not lost on the snarky, foul tempered Potion's Master.