A/N: an idea that came about with a conversation with snapekat about the possibility of Snape having a mild foot fetish. We decided to each write a chapter about it involving a deliberately unidentified OFC. Go take a look at her version: Stumbling Into Ecstasy, and witness her dirty mind in action!
The room waited: silent, patient, still.
The dull, almost metallic winter light barely had the strength to force its way through the slightly warped glass pane of the window. Or perhaps it just wasn't trying hard enough. The day had been bitterly cold in the way that English winter days were prone to being—the wind cutting cruelly through clothing, whipping the persistent rain around in frustrating whirls of splattering wetness that defied any protection against it; frosts that barely melted to an icy dew before the creeping evening froze the droplets once more into tiny, white pearls; a frigid air that stole the breath away in gasps of pale cloud.
A slight vibration ran through the room. It could have come from somewhere below the building where the Circle line ran or from a heavy-goods truck passing by. But the room knew that neither of these things were the cause, taking a slow breath in and scenting the approach through the worn and pitted panels, cobwebbed cornices and the threadbare pelt of carpet.
An angry voice floated through the cracks between the door and its frame a few seconds before the handle turned.
"—don't understand why you think that isn't important, and I really don't believe that we should be wasting time like this!"
The woman limped into the room, her face set resolutely in an expression of extreme annoyance that was a perfect match for the crabby tone of her voice. The flush of red in her cheeks had as much to do with her mood as with the cold outside. She took a cursory glance around the room and grunted.
"Cheery," she concluded sarcastically and hobbled over to the chair by the cold fireplace. Beads of water trickled off her chestnut overcoat and pattered onto the carpet, igniting a pale bloom of the fibres' former glory as the moisture soaked through the layers of dust trodden into them over the years.
Her companion drifted in after her and closed the door behind him, his face as pale as his clothes were dark, a lock of damp hair plastered to the side of his face that succeeded in accentuating the angularity of jaw and cheekbone. He seemed untouched by the woman's rancour, a line between his brows that could have indicated distraction. Or perhaps it was connected to no emotion in particular. Perhaps it was always there.
The room wondered how long they would stay. That they had not removed their coats boded ill, and the room's past experience led it to the conclusion that their presence would be only temporary. A ripple of disappointment rang along the joists. It had been some time since anyone had stayed long enough for the room to live anything more than a washed-out existence. How long had it been? Days had come and gone, but as to how many… The room didn't know.
The woman sat down heavily in the old chair, causing a cloud of dust to erupt up and into her face. She waved her hand to push the dandruff of disuse away from her nostrils and swung her leg up and over the arm of the chair.
"Bleurgh! Couldn't you have picked somewhere a bit less fusty?" she muttered under her breath and scowled at the darkened hollow of the fireplace where the logs sat like lumps of stone.
The man either didn't hear her comment or chose not to answer. He went and stood in front of the window, his back to her, and gazed outside.
The room wasn't certain—it was early days yet, of course—but he seemed anxious about something. If they stayed long enough, it was possible that that the room could discover why. The transient comings and goings of people meant that there was a small window of opportunity for any kind of empathy with those that paused between the walls, and the room had learned to absorb as much of what little there was as quickly as possible.
Right now, the spiky waves of discontent radiating from the glowering woman were like a flow of pain from a fresh wound: bitter and stark. She shifted so that she could balance the heel of her boot on the very end of the chair arm and glanced at the man's back.
"You haven't spoken all day," she stated, narrowing her eyes, her hands fussing around her raised ankle absently.
The man said nothing, but the room thought that his anxiety increased. Just a fraction. Sometimes when people stood by the window, the room could feel them more clearly, as if the barrier between object and being were thinner there, more permeable to the currents of emotion.
"I've left you at least five openings for sniping, and you haven't bitten once."
His head tilted slightly to one side, the sodden ends of his hair trailing across the dampened fabric of his coat, feigning interest in some detail that lay outside. The room realised that he was waiting for something. The plaster swelled in anticipation, and a gust of icy air exhaled from the fireplace, making the woman shudder.
"Are you in a snit about something?" she accused, her eyes still shuttered to slits. "You usually are, but you've never shied away from vocalising it."
His shoulders shrugged incrementally.
The woman pressed her lips together briefly. "It's making me nervous."
The room realised that she had been reluctant to admit that. Interesting.
And it seemed he thought so, too, turning his head so that his profile was silhouetted sharply against the colourless sky through the window, his eyes set so that he could see her peripherally, like a hawk on a branch that saw all that sought to hide from its gaze.
The room reached towards him gently, like a hand questing in the dark, and felt the pulsing thud in his chest. The floorboards quivered at the connection, thirsty and needy. The air inside warmed, the room's unseen fingers drawing out the heat from inside him eagerly. His heartbeat faltered slightly and then righted itself once more, the momentary uncertainty that came before a final decision.
With an audible sigh, he turned from the window and walked towards her, his thumb brushing the lock of hair that had been stuck to the side of his face back into and amongst the other midnight strands. Hooking his foot around the leg of a rickety wooden chair that sat beside the equally decrepit table, he swept it across the floor smoothly and sat down in front of her. One long-fingered hand reached part way towards her, palm facing the yellowed ceiling, allowing the room to see the faint crescent marks his fingernails had pressed into the lined flesh. He fixed his gaze on some point on the floor between them.
The woman stared at him in mild surprise, her pale green eyes widened, the colour of shallow waters under blue skies and spring leaves. The room thought them her best feature and wondered why he would not look at them. Into them.
Neither of them moved, though it seemed the crease between his brows deepened. Just as the woman's mouth opened, his middle finger curled and straightened repeatedly in a summoning gesture.
"Your foot," he stated quietly. "Give it to me."
At first, the room thought the last words were unnecessary, but he'd spoken them carefully and emphatically, as if the clarification held some particular significance buried in the grain of his voice. The mantelpiece flexed in response to the timbre—dark like polished wood, smooth as a bird's feather, deep as a forgotten hollow under a towering mountain. It flowed and spread through the room, into the spaces that had opened over the years as the structures had fallen slightly from each other in fatigue and disappointment and the ennui that had become all that the room could remember with any certainty, binding them together once more in an almost visceral convulsion.
The woman's breathing quickened. "My boots are dirty," she replied faintly.
He did look at her then, the combination of the gentle curve of his upper lip and the squint of one eye making it clear what he thought of her statement.
She huffed and glanced quickly to one side, the colour in her cheeks deepening, but she lifted her foot off the arm of the chair and down into his outstretched hand. Clasping his fingers around the heel, he drew her foot slowly toward him until it rested on his knee. His hand travelled up the back of her calf, pulling the cuff of her trousers up to expose the top of her boot.
Although her eyes were still turned away from him, she noticed the hesitation before he pulled the laces from their knot.
"Don't worry, my feet don't smell!" she bristled, closing off the brightness of her own anxiety in that shrewd narrowing that fanned out the lines at the corners of her eyes more noticeably. The room wondered, if she had seen the small smile on his face that her comment elicited, whether she would have had any idea what was coming.
The laces slithered through the eyelets, allowing the leather to relax away from her ankle. Her face tightened as her pain increased, the thrum of blood moving through her leg making the room flex inwards, pulled inexorably to that multi-channelled river that carried the myriad of things that sustained her in its circular, crimson journey.
The empty boot hit the floor, making her jump. Her nostrils flared wide as her sock slipped down her calf, the red and black stripes alternating as they emerged from behind the faded, rusty colour of her trousers like a banded serpent's markings.
He noticed her shivering before the room did, his head tilted just so to ask the question without speaking, the fingers of one hand wrapped around her bare ankle and the palm of the other cradling her calf, eyes half-closed so they appeared almost totally black.
"It's cold," she explained quickly, flicking a glance at him. "I'm cold."
Again, the small smile that was the only outward sign of the growing satisfaction in him at her tremulous agitation.
"Take off your coat."
"No!" She folded her arms tightly, trapping her hands under her armpits, holding the cold, damp fabric around her body defiantly.
The room sighed in an echo of the flush of triumph that rose in his body at her faint gasp as his fingers slipped smoothly over and around her ankle, trailing down and into her instep. She tried to draw her foot back, but he tightened his grip on her calf, his eyes widening and hardening in warning. She halted her retreat abruptly, frozen in that penetrating stare, her own eyes blinking uncertainly.
He waited until the muscles under his hands relaxed before letting go.
"Give me your other foot."
Her eyebrows floated up. "Why? I only turned one ankle, not both." Her brows lowered back down, shadowing her eyes. "That is, you turned my ankle!" she corrected quickly, her shoulders tightening in frustration.
"Is that so?" The room twisted in the radiated challenge as if it were a gentle eddy that caught the unwary in a firm but dangerous caress. "Give it to me."
The second boot hit the floor, making her jump even more noticeably this time, her shivering increasing until the water-tipped points of her hair vibrated.
With his head tilted forward, his long hair hid most of his face from her, but the room could see his eyes travel along and over the lines of her feet slowly, his hands drawing her ankles closer to each other, making the slight puffiness from her injury more apparent. The room could now see many things that had been hidden.
Soft words hissed from his mouth, birthing a fire where for years there had been none. The room was almost certain it was done to distract her from noticing where he placed her uninjured foot: between his thighs that were parted just enough to allow it to rest there, the wool fabric of his trousers touching its edges ever so slightly.
She yelped in surprise at the flames under the mantel, her head turned towards the light that seeped into the greys and tans of the room, lifting them to warmer shades that hinted at how the room had once been before slipping into disuse, a slow death that made the infrequent rally of recovery to be that much sweeter.
Fingers slid over her skin languidly, tightening briefly over the pulse points, the corners of his mouth turning up at the rapid fluttering that beat against his fingertips.
Her hands, now freed from their prison under her arms, clutched tightly at those of the chair, her eyes wide and round, locked on the only part of him that moved, that felt every square inch of skin laid bare between his palms.
Confusion, uncertainty, self-consciousness—the room could taste them all in her, but the cause was not as much the motion of his hands as the sensations they caused in her. She was fighting against them. And losing.
His long thumbs stroked along the sole of her foot, gradually building the pressure, making her toes curl in her final, valiant attempt to hold off that soft, liquid release that seeped into her, through her.
She watched in terrified fascination as one hand cupped her foot and raised it up and off his knee, oh so slowly, the ends of his hair slipping past her swollen ankle, her instep tickled by the warmth of his exhaled breath.
The room clenched in anticipation.
His mouth opened. The pause seemed to extend forever, both cruel and exhilarating. He knew to wait just that little bit longer, so finely tuned to her mood that it was almost torturous the way he held her at the very edge, on a knife's unforgiving blade. Her nostrils flared erratically with her breathing, nails digging into the fabric of the chair.
The cool tip of his nose brushed a line across her sole once. The second time, the trailing touch of his lower lip deepened that invisible line. The third time, he washed the line away with his tongue, making her toes flare and spread in shock.
"Whuh… what are you doing?" she asked, voice strangled, her face as scarlet as it could possibly go.
He tipped his head back up to look at her through half-lidded eyes, her foot still held a hair's breadth from his open mouth, breath sighing in and out silently against her skin.
The room knew. The room now knew it all. How long he had waited to do this to her and watch her unravel. How long he had thought of how to convince her to let his will be greater than hers, just for one moment. How many times he had dreamt of this exquisite point in time, freed from being unable to touch her for fear she might recoil from him in disgust. Or worse, derision.
The room felt. The room now felt it all. How much she had struggled against that insidious desire to watch him when she thought he was unaware of it. How she tried to deflect the confusion at the pull of his eyes whenever he looked at her. How she desperately wanted to experience what it was like to have him consume her in any way he saw fit, and not die of shame at the perverse thrill it ignited in her.
The room decided. It would not let them go until they reached the precipice of that elusive synchronicity of smothered, internalised hunger, until they fell willingly from the summit of lubricity down and into the depths of lustful completion. It bowed, focussed and reflected, channelling everything that swirled within them into an irresistible wave of demanding need that crashed repeatedly against them, wearing down their resolve until there was nothing left but truth.
Refusing to let her eyes slip away from his, he slid his tongue with agonising slowness from her instep, up and across her sole, working his way patiently up to her little toe, the skin of this most dextrous muscle hotter than fire, smoother than silk, stronger than desperation. He moved his head past her foot, leaving his tongue to trail up after before retreating back into his mouth. The expression on her face made him bare his teeth in the addictive thrall of utter control.
Eyes never leaving hers, he lowered his head until her toe vanished into the velvet embrace of his mouth, his grip on her raised calf loosening so that he could pull her other foot flush up against him, using his palm to trap her up against the strength of his urge to leave her in no doubt of what he had every intention of giving her. She broke.
"Oh… my… god!"
And those three words were his undoing. The control and restraint he'd been so proud of, that he'd gloated at her through, shattered so completely it left nothing but insubstantial dust. His hand clamped her foot up so tight against him that the buttons of his trousers dug into her skin. His mouth left her toe and latched onto her instep with the appetite of a starving man who had been given a ripe peach to eat, answering her involuntary moan with one of his own as his hips moved to grind himself against that blessedly willing appendage with a fierce, increasing determination.
Her back arched as his tongue wound itself around and between her toes, as he bit each pad of flesh firmly and possessively before sucking them so hard the blood rose to the surface, threatening to bruise her flesh with a sweet agony.
The sounds of their fevered breathing were threaded through with the rhythmic creaking of the chair he sat on as he crushed his length up and down her foot, his head falling back in sensory overload, her name curling out from his mouth in ragged, drawn out syllables uttered in time to the sweeping, upward thrusts of his hips, his fingers digging with near painful intensity into her flesh, the hem of his overcoat swaying across the thin carpet in a mirrored motion of the undulating curtain of his hair.
Freed from his possessive, trapping eyes, she watched her toes rub helplessly along his hardness that, although hidden from her view behind that ridiculously encapsulating attire he insisted on wearing, was no less intoxicating for being so. She saw the pulsing beat in his exposed throat that was echoed inside the thick desire under her foot, heard the increasing cadence of approaching orgasm wrapped in that voice that had plagued her, tortured her, liquefied her with a studied and deliberate domination. Even in his lascivious abandon his power over her was so complete that she willingly drowned in it.
The chiselled prow of his nose reared up and over as he lifted his head, impaling her with the intensity in his eyes one final time, sinking his teeth into the underside of the foot cradled in his upraised hand so hard that he broke the skin, a thin trickle of blood leaking down to her heel, the first drop falling to the floor just as he came with a wrenching force that threatened to splinter the bones trapped between his palm and his groin, sucking feverishly and greedily at that crimson rivulet, shuddering with the impact of that glorious finality, pulling her with him, both keening incoherently as she followed him over the edge.
He doubled over as he fell apart, his teeth still buried in her, unwilling to let her go as she convulsed repeatedly, squeezing her between his thighs and drawing his nails along her arch.
The room crowed and dissolved in their delight, alive once again after so very long, after so many cold and bitter days that had shrouded it in loneliness and desolation, shimmering in the aftermath that neither of them wanted to end.
But he lifted his mouth from her, licking that faint sheen of red away from his lip before sliding the bone of her ankle down and along his philtrum, his laboured breathing gradually lessening.
"How's your ankle?"
"Ah, er, still a bit sore, I'm afraid," she panted with eyes screwed shut tightly, her head resting on the back of the chair, cheeks flushed.
"Well, then," he surmised with a smile on his face, stroking the trembling foot between his thighs delicately. "I guess I need to give you something stronger, don't I?"
And so the room waited: silent, patient, still.
