A Rock and a Hard Place

Trudy stood quivering at the back of the dungeon classroom, eyes blazing. The Professor’s little warm-up before class had only sharpened her appetite, and now was not the time. She shifted from one spike-heeled foot to the other. Her hair was already starting to come down from its topknot, and she feared she was starting to look—hungry—again.

So far, the Professor hadn’t lived down to his classroom reputation. True, his tone was bored and contemptuous. And true, his lectures were pitched toward adults interested in his topic, not bored adolescents. But other than that, you couldn’t fault him, Trudy thought. The man had an encyclopedic memory.

He swept up and down the aisles between the wooden desks, cloak billowing, as he lectured. At one point, he strode up to her, leaned down, and said low in her ear, “In my potions closet. The hellebore. Third shelf down on the far wall. A root in a jar.”

Trudy felt a rush of wetness at having him so close to her, whispering so intimately in her ear. She left the room rather too quickly, gabbling the ingredient’s name in her head so she wouldn’t forget it in a rush of desire. As she scrabbled through the jars in the potions closet, she heard the Professor’s voice from without:

“Ah. The dream team.”

Trudy had never heard him sound like that before: gloating, almost sadistically happy.

“Well, we’ll just put Miss Know-It-All Granger...here.” Sounds of wooden benches scraping on stone floor. “And Mr. Weasley of the third-hand robes here.” A stifled groan and a hissed insult. “So that will leave Mr. Potter with...Mr. Longbottom. A pair of winners, surely.”

Trudy clenched her hands so hard the nails dug into her palms. He sounded hateful! Her desire continued to be high, but now it was a physical throb only. Her heart felt cold and shriveled. The jars and jars of potion ingredients seemed to spill out under her gaze. She groped among them, reading the Professor’s careful back-sloping handwriting. Belladonna, fluxweed, ginger ...where the hell was hellebore? At last she found it, tucked deep among the jars. She grabbed it, double checked the name, and stalked back out into the classroom.

Potter was patiently trying to explain some complex potion-mixing methodology to a chubby kid with a sweaty, flushed face and a doomed expression. Trudy longed to go to their table and help them, but she bit her lip.

“Ms. Mills!” The voice was low but sharp, and Trudy’s head snapped up to meet the Professor’s furious face. How had he sneaked up on her like that? She met his gaze levelly and didn’t bother blinking or looking away. “Have you forgotten our little agreement?” he said between gritted teeth.

He must mean not showing that she disagreed with anything he did or said. Trudy handed him the jar. He took it without looking away from her. Reluctantly, she cast her gaze toward the stone floor. “No, sir,” she murmured. She purposely made her mind blank.

“See that it doesn’t happen again!” he hissed.

On his way back up the aisle, he managed to jog Potter’s beaker, which crashed to the floor, spilling a foul liquid and making everyone in the class gasp and plug their noses.

“Oh, dear,” the Professor purred. “A zero for today, Potter. Pity. It will be hard to make up these many missing points.”

Trudy willed herself to keep both her mind and her expression blank. The Potter kid only stared at the Professor with ill-disguised loathing.

“Evanesco!” the Professor drawled. The mess on the floor disappeared, which Trudy thought she would never get used to.

The rest of the lesson passed in nightmarish slow motion. Trudy thought it couldn’t end soon enough. The Professor asked her for nothing more, and she stood quietly at the back of the room, as far from the north corner as she could get. Her need for physical release from the Professor was fraying her nerves, but equally strong was her yearning to get as far away from him as possible

Snape took each table’s beaker, except Potter’s of course, and chanced a quick look at Trudy. He had never seen anyone, witch, wizard, or Muggle, look as she did now. Her hair looked like it was on fire, her face was a white disc, and her eyes blazed blowtorch blue. Cold fury flared in his own heart.

“Dismissed,” he said coldly to the class, and they filed sullenly out the door.

Now he had a few moments alone with her, and how they would ever satisfy what must have been terrible need on her part, he did not know. He wanted to break things and scream at her.

“What’s the matter with you?” he snapped. “I thought our agreement was plain.”

“Yes. Plain.”

He looked at her again. This time he chanced a probe of Legilimency. Her gaze didn’t waver from his face, and he was greatly surprised to find himself coming up with nothing from her mind—no images, no thoughts, memories, nothing. Just that shimmering blue stare.

“You are defiant. That was not part of our agreement.”

“You didn’t mention that you would be bullying a 15-year-old.”

“Didn’t I?” His tone was baiting, and Trudy breathed in slowly, willing her anger down. “I know best how to handle my class. You know nothing!” He was losing control—only weak people cannot handle their emotions—

“You bullied that kid and acted like you enjoyed it!” Her accent was becoming stronger, hard r’s, flat a’s, an almost complete lack of inflection. It was the only indication of her fury.

“I did enjoy it. I do enjoy it. Some students need correction.”

“For what? The kid did nothing!”

“He exists! That’s enough!” Some strong emotion shimmered through Snape’s chest, and it took him a moment to register pain. He knew those words, Sirius Black’s words, about him, Snape, so many years ago. He closed his eyes briefly.

The Muggle was still standing in front of him, panting. At last she said softly, “You disgust me.”

Those words, too, went through Snape like a knife, an echo from Dumbledore so long ago.

She turned to leave. “Wait!” he said.

She turned, a look of contempt on her face.

“You can’t leave.”

Her jaw tightened. She started for the door again.

Snape hardly knew what he was doing. He beat her to the door and stood in front of it. At this proximity, he could see her trembling. She said nothing, only stared at him, bolder than anyone who hadn’t known him as a child. She folded her arms across her chest.

Snape reached out and took her arm gently. “You can’t leave,” he said again. “You’ll die.”

She looked away. “I don’t want you to worry any more about my…situation.” She swallowed. “I don’t want you to touch me any more. The way you treated that kid...”

“You don’t know him.”

“No one deserves that! I hear that the wizard-who-can’t-be-named killed his parents, and that his aunt and uncle hate him. Why do you need to pile onto his misery?”

“He—" Snape could not believe he was going to tell her this—“looks like his father.”

Trudy’s eyebrows went up. “Oh,” she said inadequately, groping around with this piece of information. “It’s his eyes, right?” Snape’s grip on her arm tightened slightly. “They’re a weird color. I noticed it right off the bat.”

“No,” he said slowly. “His eyes are his mother’s.”

“Oh,” she said again helplessly. “And she was...someone you didn’t like?”

Snape set his teeth. This was excruciating. “No.”

“Someone you did like, then? A friend?” His expression was unreadable. “A...lover?”

Snape had a sense of being caught in an electric current, unable to release his grip, unable to go back, unable to go forward, almost unable to speak.

“A lover,” she ventured. “But married to someone else. Having a baby with someone else. This kid.”

He couldn’t answer.

“What do you have against the father?”

“Nothing,” he snapped.

“Doesn’t sound like nothing.”

How could this be happening to him? With a Muggle?

“His father and I didn’t get on,” he spit out. She raised her eyebrows slightly. Long-buried bitterness bubbled to the surface. Snape was surprised at the strength of his hate, even after all this time, even with its object long dead. He thrust his face close to hers. “You want the truth? I hated him. And he hated me as soon as he saw me. He was an arrogant git, and he liked to pick on anyone he thought might be weaker. But he miscalculated with me—"

“How?” she said breathlessly.

“I—" What was he doing, telling her all this? She had no Occlumency, no magic, nothing at all.

His expression was calculating and narrow, but somehow, Trudy felt her heart opening to him. She reached out and laid her palm against his cheek.

The small gesture unraveled him. “I protected them,” he bit out. “Even James, and even their baby. But the child is just like the father, arrogant, attention-seeking...” He began to sputter.

“But you just told me the father was a bully. Doesn’t seem like the son is.”

Her words flowed over him, calm and rational, washing away the sting of past hurts.

“...mediocre talent...”

“Does he have to be a magical genius for you not to humiliate and mock him? Those Slytherin kids aren’t exactly the wizards of the century, and you seem to like them fine.”

“They have to endure the Gryffindors. I know what that is like.”

“But wasn’t that Lily a Gryffindor? Isn’t Dumbledore a Gryffindor?”

He scowled. She was starting to confuse him, to bend the lens through which he had seen the world for so long. “They’re not all bad, obviously,” he said sourly.

“OK. But it’s all right to make this kid pay for all the bad things that other Gryffindors have done to you? How long does he have to keep paying?”

Snape gave her what he hoped was a withering look. “You haven’t seen the way he shows off on the Quidditch field, the way he eats up the attention whenever he gets the chance. He loves to play to the crowd. He loves to play the hero.”

“So it’ll be helpful to rub this kid’s face in the dirt, this kid with no parents, no caring family, no special magical ability, nothing but surviving You-Know-Who and being able to play football.”

“Quidditch.”

“Whatever. And that seems fair to you?”

“Life isn’t fair.”

“You’re determined to make it fair for you, at his expense.”

Snape glanced down at her in irritation, then frowned. She was quivering. He took her arm. “Potions closet. Now.”

For a moment, she wouldn’t budge. But finally, under his tightened pressure on her arm, she moved forward.

Once they were inside and the door closed, she clutched his arm. “Promise me,” she rasped in his ear, “...promise me you’ll be...kinder?”

“I can’t promise that,” he said flatly. He pulled her up on a table and reached under her robes, delighting to find her half-naked thighs. He opened them and put his body between them. They only had short moments before students would start filing back into the classroom beyond.

“Promise--?” The word ended with a gasp as Snape slid his length along her slick flesh and pushed inside her.

He hung over her, never losing contact with her most sensitive, tumescent parts. “I am being kind—for me,” he said. “Isn’t that enough?”

She bucked under him, clutching the front of his robes, and he slid his hands under her buttocks, pinning her in place. He saw her blue eyes open wide, and then gasp after gasp tore from her throat as her hips rocked beneath him. He pulled out of her, harder than ever, and with difficulty, tucked everything back into his trousers. He could hear the next class arriving.

“Take the belladonna and bring it out with me. And...” She looked at him in helpless disarray. He reached out and stroked a tendril of red hair behind her ear. “...do something with your hair again. It’s come undone.”