A/N
This is a one-shot that I wrote one day while musing over the possible lemony uses of Polyjuice potion.
Warnings: 1. This fic is quite dark. It's not my usual fare, and may take you somewhere you don't want to go. 2. Very serious lemons--this fic has mature content. Stop reading now if you don't want to go there!
If you enjoy this fic, please do take the time to review—reviews are fanfic authors' bread and butter!
You also may be interested in two longer chaptered fics that I have, both of which include Snape as a major figure: Sorocheand The Wayward Wand.
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The watch in his shaking hand read half past eight.
He was unaccustomed to this level of anxiety.
To the shame, yes. Shame had been his faithful traveling companion for most of his life, a leaden shadow so omnipresent he was scarcely even aware of it anymore. But for him—who had faced with equanimity the vengeful rage of the Dark Lord himself—to tremble now before the imminent arrival of a woman he himself had hired to do his bidding, well, that was irony if nothing else.
His preparations had been characteristically meticulous, and not without guile. He thought with contempt of the disheveled Ruthven in his shiny, threadbare suit, and imagined that man's gormless bewilderment upon returning to Snape's file weeks hence and finding nothing but blank sheets of parchment.
Mouthbreathing fool.
And when he was unable to resist sampling the brandy sent him as a token of Snape's gratitude, he would find his memory of their interview fading to nothingness as well.
Snape was not naive. He knew that establishments like Ruthven's made their money not only from feeding off the desperate yearnings of troubled souls, but from selling the secrets by which those unfortunates could later be blackmailed. He had no intention of offering his arm thus to be twisted.
The woman, of course, he would Obliviate before she left.
He had considered—for the briefest of moments, no more than an eyeblink, really—killing her once they were done. Such was his habituation to the Darkness that the impulse barely shocked him, caused only the tiniest spike in the current of his self-loathing.
Ruthven had even hinted delicately that this was an option that might be purchased—for a considerable additional sum.
But Snape had already discarded the idea almost as soon as it had surfaced in his consciousness. It was hardly a clean solution, since killing her would have given rise to as many problems as it resolved. Leaving aside the question of whether he could even bring himself to close his hands around that beloved throat (for Priori Incantatem was not to be risked) there was the ugly practicality that as soon as the life left her body, its form would change back, the illusion instantly and brutally shattered.
Better simply to wipe her memory clean and let her walk away.
After all, the illusion was already imperfect enough. The potion would faithfully reproduce the voice, but not the diction. If she spoke for very long, she could not help but reveal herself to be what she was: not the sought-after object of his own starved and depraved passion, but a common whore. In the painstaking hours he had invested in writing out instructions, he had stipulated that she was to speak as little as possible, and then only to say those words and phrases which he had specified beforehand.
He had thought exhaustively about what she might say, and in the end had written out almost verbatim the scripts for every fevered fantasy in which he regularly indulged himself, however hackneyed or degraded. The transcription of these scenarios had made him cringe even as it stirred the interest of his cock, shot through as they were with adolescent cliché and melodrama and the stark evidence of his own twisted desires. That another human being should know, even temporarily, his pathetic secrets filled him with a humiliation that made his entrails cramp, and he strengthened his resolve to obliterate all traces of the transaction. Ruthven himself he would kill if necessary, and without compunction.
He was also stuck with the problem of how to schedule the requisite opportunities for the girl to drink the potion, which she would need to do every hour to maintain its effect. He had given Ruthven three strands of the precious snippet of hair, retrieved from the little doeskin packet he wore always next to his skin: enough for three one-hour doses. Plus a fourth, so that they could have clothing made for her by a bespoke tailor. Which had added considerably to the cost, but in for a Sickle, in for a Galleon. Or, in this case, several thousand of them.
Since setting this process in motion, he had been vexed by a host of niggling questions, provoked by his intimate knowledge of the potion and its workings. It reproduced faithfully the physical state of the subject at the time that the sample was taken: he knew, for instance, that Narcissa Malfoy kept a supply of her own hair clippings and routinely took Polyjuice made from a ten-year-old sample before important social occasions. Nothing so far back as to strain credulity; just difference enough to make her look rested and more beautiful than usual.
So, he worried, what if the object of a person's desires were menstruating at the time one surreptitiously severed and Accio'd a little clipping of hair?
Or suffering from some private malady? Snape's knowledge of female physiology was restricted to his own very limited personal experience, and what he had gleaned from magazine articles and advertisements; he had the vague notion that women's parts were subject to a variety of mysterious and repellent ailments.
And then there was the issue of virginity. He assumed she had been a virgin at the time, although one never knew. What if she was one of those cases that schoolboys whispered about, with an impenetrable hymen, or one that had to be punched through like the seal on a new jar of dried hellebore?
He wiped his palms on his trousers and looked at the clock. Twenty more minutes.
His cock was hard already, he noted with dismay. He had waited for this hour, anticipated it, dreamed of it, for so long that apparently there was to be no stopping his body from straining at the bit, impatient to be off. For days he had been subject to these spontaneous erections, until he had begun to fear the humiliation of ejaculating in his trousers while she yet stood in the doorway.
Although, of course, there was no real reason he should care what she thought. It was not really her, and in any case she would remember nothing of the encounter.
Still, if the illusion was to serve, he must needs be immersed in it totally, and the thought that she would see him out of control, firing off like a teenaged boy the first time she spoke or touched him, was not to be borne.
With this in mind, he had indulged himself one last time during this morning's shower, leaning back against the tile wall and stroking himself savagely as the water streamed over him. He had imagined himself kneeling before her naked form, begging her forgiveness for the cruel things he had never been able to stop himself saying to her; imagined her voice telling him it was all right, that she had always loved him; felt her hands clutching his hair as his tongue explored the cleft between her thighs.
At this point the fantasy grew indistinct, as he had never actually licked a woman there; he could only imagine how she would taste, and how the secret infundibulum and the sensitive little button would feel under his tongue.
And that, he thought as he watched the sad clots of semen swirl down the shower drain, was the point of the whole business. After today, there would be no imagining; he would know.Not just how a woman, any woman, would taste, but how she would taste; how every little fold of flesh would look and taste and smell and feel.
He meant to commit it to memory, all of it. Every forbidden inch of skin he had never managed to see unclothed: her breasts, her belly, the curve of her arse, that triangle of hair always before hidden from him no matter how desperately he had tried to catch a surreptitious glimpse of it.
For this was the heart of the truth: in the beginning he had told himself that he was arranging this transaction in the hopes that it would fulfill his obsession once and for all, and in fulfilling end it, and free him from it at last.
Which was rubbish, of course. He knew perfectly well that one did not free oneself from an obsession by indulging it.
No, the purpose of this very expensive and certainly illegal little enterprise was that from now on, there would be no more fantasies to accompany his solitary activities in the shower, alone in bed at night, or anywhere else in the house (or the school, if he were being totally honest) that the urge overcame him.
Instead he would have memories.
Three hours' worth of them, played out one after the other in all their trite and erotic variety.
He would fuck her, and fuck her, and fuck her. He had no fears that his body would prove unequal to the task; not for nothing was he the Potions master. He planned to move seamlessly from one scenario to the next, with barely time for her to catch her breath enough to scream his name and beg him for more.
He would even read aloud the maudlin poetry he had written to her in moments of abject despair, and she would weep over it and swear undying love to him and open her legs and plead with him to prove his desire for her again, and again.
More, she would say. Oh Sev, more, harder, again, fuck me, please oh please fuck me.
And he would. At first gently and lovingly, and then forcefully and brutally. He would punish her for every second of his hopeless, humiliating fixation, for every time he had seen her laughing in the corridors with Potter and his cohorts or seen them head off to Hogsmeade together. He would bend her over the bed and plunder her, fore and aft, and she would weep with remorse and tell him that he was right to be angry, that she would always be his and only his if he would just forgive her now.
He would fuck her, and fuck her again, and she would open herself to him, receive him, bury his cock in her throat and suck him dry, and beg him to let her do it again.Please, Sev. Let me, I want to. Just once more, please. I love you so much.
A soft knock on the door startled him from his reverie, and a quick glance at the watch told him that the hour was upon him.
Taking a deep breath, he reached for the handle and opened the door.
And there she was.
Exactly as he remembered her: so young, and beautiful, and innocent, her eyes shyly downcast.
"Professor?"
He swallowed. "MissGranger," he said calmly. "Do come in."