Author's warning: some allusions to rape, some disturbing sexual play. Sensitive readers might not like the implications, but its not even close to NC17.







He focused his gaze intently on her eyes, observing the speckled irises interspersed with gentle colouring of browns and gold. They weren't eyes to get lost in, but certainly another path with which he could divert himself.


Something firmly locked about her face, a keyhole he couldn't discern. Her hand grasped his own, her damp fingers squeezing his much injured knuckles. She was breathing heavily, Severus could feel the rapid rise and fall of her chest against him. A breath caught in her throat and escaped in a furious sob that seemed to travel through both of them.


You don't know what you want.


He spoke decisively, eyes lowering to mere inches above her own. Her breath escaped her lips, the velvet of her mouth moving in wordless exclamation.


The grip on his hand suddenly loosed, and her body lost the exquisite tension it held only seconds earlier. She rolled her head back, exposing too much throat than was good for her, the vein of her neck pulsing in agitated sadness.


Severus closed his eyes and dipped his head into her throat, taking in her most feral scent. He pressed his lips against her vocal chords again, feeling the hum and buzz of her basest structure. The collar bones of the woman splayed before him pressed upon his forehead, and the roving spheres of his eyes behind locked lids encountered several nubs of flesh.


He raised his hands, hands wet and glistening from her own, the aroma of her sweat flooding him. He shuddered, a sudden sensation that he thought had died out was entering him. He swallowed back his tears, the bitterest liquid for which he was most suscept. His immunity and dampening of his feelings did nothing for him now.


He pressed her shoulders gently, kneading her flesh, noting dully how cold she was. As if the heart that was pelting against his own chest the night before, beating with such a bruising force that he may as well have been connected to her, was dead. Wizened and imprisoned in a woman damaged by her maker.


His fingers edged themselves into her shirt, pausing at length to allow her admission. She didn't respond to him, only shifting slightly so the circulation of his already frigid fingers would not be completely dammed.


Severus glanced at her face, her eyes were open now, staring at the headboard with a glassy but bitter expression. She was reliving something he had no wish to encounter, jousting with a memory atop the stallion of misremebered time.


He rubbed her shoulders, feeling, with an odd bolt of sentimentality, if she had wings.


Severus lifted her with the gentelest of embraces, holding in his hands the most precious of cheribums. He cradled her against him, his head slipping lower, past the softeness of her breast and the rigid peak of her nipple, searching for her heart.


And he pressed his mouth against her, just below her ribs that parted for him, Moses in the darkest of days, and screamed into her pliable skin.


She went rigid at this, the escaped sound of him. He cried into her belly, weeping, howling, lamenting. If he had been a Sophoclean dramatist, perhaps he would have set about tearing out his hair, enjoying the diminutive sting that each strand offered.


Why are you crying?.


She asked the question with such traceless derision and such childish bluntness that he stopped. He took a deep breath, trying to force his rather obdurate lungs to collapse themselves into a sembelance of order. The contact of her skin against his lips was unpleasantly intimate.


He raised himself, on his elbow, ignoring the lack of cushioning beneath them. She was still looking absently at the ceiling, her face of a passive angel. She raised her hand, and with the swift and economic movement of an obessesive soother, wiped the damp off his cheeks with the palms of her cool hands.


He inched slowly up her torso, himself a sallow snake. She sat up halfway, glaring at him almost resentfully. He took her hand and kissed it, then dropped it.


She reached out, very cautiously, and caressed the collar of his shirt, glancing inquiringly at the buttons. She slipped the pads of her fingers in each button hole, easing each button out with wary arousal.


He made no move to help her, he lay rather uselessly in the center of her. She pulled him, collar first, trying to make the situation easier. As she made her ambling way down to the fourth button, he stopped her. Severus knew his limits, and once women undid the fourth button, his body made a concious and primal decision to ignore his mind.


I can't let you do this. It's immoral, unconscionable. Remember your sister.


He rumbled the last part in a cloudy threat, staying her hand.


But what if I want to?.


There was the child again, poking its sunny head from around the corners of her face.


You don't. I've done things no normal man would even conceive of. I'm tortured, old, practically rheumatic. Leave. Go. Tup with someone your own age, a pretty boy of twenty five. A student. A doctor. A lawyer, a writer, an artist, a Parisian.


His mouth was senseleslly spooling off things which he had often heard uttered but had never paid mind to. But he still didn't want her to touch him.


I want to see your Mark.


She folded her arms across her chest, which was stiffening in the arousal of foreplay and need.


He shook his head.


I can't even look at it. It's nothing. A scar.


The break in his voice beytrayed this, the boulder in his throat was shifting. His face was tightened with his tears, and he found that frowning required considerably more effort.


She was lightning quick, deftly pulling his arm up to her, tearing at his sleeve in starved frenzy. He watched helplessly, almost yielding.


His whitened and bleached limb lay out in pornographic and starkly naked non-glory. His arm looked preverse, dismembered even. He glanced at it, forgetting it was attached to him, and was repulsed by the vision. The scar was always lighter than his skin, no matter how precariously he avoided the sun.


She gagged, eyes registering the nude hideousness of the advesary that she was trying to broach. The skull leered up at her, the carefully branded scar winking in the daylight. The snake was alive, with the beat of his dermis, winding itself sinuously around the eyesockets, tail protruding tellingly from the mouth, a forked tongue.


She pulled away from his arm, and ducked away from him, regarding him in loathing and curiosity . He felt shamed, violated, something akin to rape.


Didn't I tell you?.


The harshness was back in his voice, the rough and snappish edge that haunted his classrooms still was present. She didn't flinch. She was too horrified.

Get away.


The brown and wholly repentant pools were looking through him.

You wanted to look at it. You had no right.


He was spitting blanks now, his amunition depleted. He was a malignant sore to humanity, both of his kind and muggles, and she was aware of it as well.


You should never go trying to discover things to which you have no wish to learn the answer.


He was mocking her now, shamefully trying to curse her while her back was turned.


You don't think I had a right to learn about my sister?.


The calm in her voice was lethal, and her eyes narrowed into slits, her dusky lashes brushing down upon her lower lid before she raised her gaze once more.


Not through me.


Severus thrust his sleeve down over his arm, feeling the burn and friction of the rough material on his ironically softened skin. The sound was audibly grating on her ears, and she winced.


She rose up off the bed, making quite sure that contact of skin was nil. He watched her with an abrasively bored gaze.


So you think that your malnourished sense of reality would be able to handle the things your sister most likely endured?.


He taunted her again, stretching his gaunt form completely over the matress, his dark clothes spread like an inkstain over the white sheets. Her breathing was labored, and she placed her hands on her hips, finger gripping hard at the bone that emerged from the gap in her pants.


Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. Why are you so arrogant as to think I can't deal with suffering either?.


Her cheek bones were angling her face, cutting horizontal stripes in her youthful flush of rage.


Don't quote your bloody book to me. Your god is irrational and thoughtless, as are most things that exist in your primitive and pathetic culture. I know torture, little girl, and whatever you think you may have experienced, I can assure you that it comes not even a modicum close to the things I have been forced to bear.


He was spitting now, her ineffective, yet thoroughly rousing preaching drumming through his ears in a persistent and antagonstic battle cry.


And making it your pastime swearing allegiance to a man who couldn't even kill a baby, getting your jollies off by raping and killing, that's so much better, Professor? That's the noble work that your time on earth has accounted for?.


Her voice lowered, latent animosity wrenching itself free of her. Her fervor was physically palpable now, flinging itself in every direction. Severus was reminded of an angered basilisk, the way her venom was able to penetrate him.


He rose, slowly, massively and silently. She sputtered and stopped, a terror pooling in her eyes that give his belly a sick tug of gorged satisfaction.


He lowered his hands, dropping it to her waist, pulling her insistently and hastily towards him, her hips so pleasantly malleable between his hands. She shuddered beneath his touch, but there was undeniable hunger in her protesting eyes.


And what makes you so immune to promise of power and wealth beyond your torpid, little mind?.


He spat each word, the muscles in his throat stringing themselves together in a bitter torque of acid coated utterances. She shook her head, not denying his claim, but trying to slow the force of the words as they collided with her.


He reached up his hand, now warmed from prolonged exposure to her skin, and tilted her chin up. She didn't resist, only her eyes which tumbled about like loose hinges.


Severus knew that it should have ended, that this sadistic and lengthened torture and dismemberment of her was enough to sate any sadist. His mind was screaming for him to stop, the light battering his eyes. He was growing disgusted with himself, the saliva welling up in his tongue, bile creeping up his throat.


He wound his hand around her, tracing his finger around the waistband of her pants. He stopped, feeling the gentle indent of her navel convulse against his touch, her shorter breaths causing her to shudder entirely.


A warmth radiated from the area several inches below where he assured himself his hands would never wander to. She shut her eyes again, tears that were stopped up so valiantly overspilling onto her cheeks. She opened her mouth, trying to arrest his perverse and arousing broach of her body, but only croaked a protest.


Can't the little minx find the words for what she feels now?.


Severus had often found his most deceptive, and sucessful tone of voice was that of being completely indifferent, and utterly bored. He released her, watching her stumble away from him, hands rigidly at her sides, face set in determined dispassion.


Do whatever you like to me, you beast, but don't kill me like you did my sister.














A/N: Ok, ok, ok. *Puts hands up* Before you all clobber me, let me explain. I know that most will not like this uncovering of the very sadistic, very emotionally damaging Snape. Severus is extremely brutal in this chapter, both to Nadyae and to himself. So, let me go right ahead and tell you what was going through my mind, though I encourage everyone to draw their own inferences. First off, I understand people's uneasiness towards the fact that their ages differ so vastly, that his attraction might be considered lecherous. Well, I was writing it that she grew up too fast, and he still hasn't. Severus had always struck me as someone who was buried in the past, from his grudges to Sirius Black, to his unwilling pact with James Potter. I know that realistically, their relationship would be a bit testy in the eyes of critics, but, what can ya do? This story, as my faithful reviewers understand, is not fluffy. No fluff. Take this as the de-fluffer of every fluffy story. Their love is because they're emotionally unstable, and because he's as damaged as she. As for sex, I find it hard to write, and not so tasteful when it occurs within the first few chapters of the story. Severus never struck me as someone who would immediately go about bed hopping, so, my many apologies for those who were expecting some kind of horizontal action, but, myself rather being a closet sadist, I like to draw things out. *Spoiler* Her last statement is rather shocking, but Severus has to prove his innocence within her sister's death somewhere, right? Many personal and very gratified thanks to: Ami-the-writing-queen, Raven Xavier, Lady Jeanetta and Starlight. Good reviews are the best inspiration ever, and honestly, I would have stopped writing this a long time ago, had I not known people were enjoying it.