Inscribed in Air & Fire
~ An HP fanfic by Snape Ophelia ~
Chapter 9
"Nox."
It was barely a whisper, but the lamplight flickered and died.
Severus Snape sat motionless for an endless moment in the dark, listening to the breathing of the woman tied to his bed, breathing in the scent of her body. Annwyd.
Her voice still seemed to hang in the air, to hover in the soft darkness. Her voice, which had shaken and sobbed and finally faded to a hoarse whisper.
I want you
I've always wanted you
please
I need you to touch me
please
I need to feel you
please
Severus
He leaned over her till he could feel the release of her breath against his face, then pressed his mouth lightly, carefully to hers. He could feel her body trembling as he caressed her lips with his. Her mouth was hot and eager and wanted more of him, but he forced her to slowness, allowed the kiss to deepen only gradually, drew it out to savor the taste, the shiver and the ache of it.
When he reached for her sex, she opened to his hand and whimpered into his mouth. His fingertips stroked the slick, wet heat of her, and her whole body tightened like a bow string ready to snap. He knew that he had worked her to the brink again and again, knew he could bring her to climax in an instant, but now he coaxed her body to the rhythm that he wanted so that her pleasure came slow and long and deep. As she shuddered and twisted under his hand, he buried his face in her hair, freeing her lips to gasp and moan and whisper his name.
The feel of her, the sound of her, was fueling his own desire, heightening his arousal to the point of pain. But he had already taken her once in the fury and haste of urgency, and this time he would be patient, he would wait.
He kissed her neck and throat as his fingers drew the last shivering spasms from her body, and finally she went limp against the bed, panting and dazed. Working by feel in the dark, he freed her wrists from the restraints. For a moment, she didn't seem to realize she was free, still drifting in the aftermath of her climax. But after he had shrugged off his shirt and thrown it into the dark, she rose to meet him, arms circling around his waist.
Oh gods it was sweet to feel her wrapping around him, her face, moist with kisses and tears, warm and pressed to his chest, her arms clasping him tight, her hands kneading his back. He kissed her, wanted her again, now, ached to be inside her. And it was almost unbearably sweet to know that she would open to his desire, to know that she would welcome him with shivers and sighs of pleasure. No Imperius Curse, just her, warm and yielding in the dark.
He gently disentangled from her embrace to fumble one-handed with the button of his trousers, his nerves suddenly too eager for steadiness. She reached as if to help, but then withdrew her hand and waited. After a moment of hurried impatience, he pulled off the last of his clothing and reached for her.
During the moment since he had touched her, her skin had turned surprisingly cold. As he stroked her arm, her muscles felt unexpectedly tense. He touched her face and she gave a little quiver, but her body seemed to have suddenly gone rigid. Confused, he stopped and sat back from her.
"Annwyd?"
She made an odd little hiccoughing sound in her throat.
He laid his hand gently on her shoulder. "Annwyd, what—"
But she jolted upright under his hand, startling him.
"Don't!" she said in a shrill, strange voice, pushing back from him. "Oh gods, don't say my name."
Then she was moving with clumsy haste, struggling to disentangle herself, though he wasn't trying to hold her, and she half-leapt, half-fell from the bed. There was a thud that might have been a knee hitting the floor hard, immediately followed by a hiss of breath.
As she grabbed at the edge of the bed, gathering herself to her feet, her fingers brushed him, and she jumped away as if she had touched a poisonous snake. He sat there, utterly stunned, gaping at her silhouette in the dark. Then she turned and bolted out of the room.
For several seconds he couldn't collect his thoughts enough to follow her. Finally, taking a blanket to wrap around his body, he walked slowly and cautiously to the door.
She was there, in the front room, shoes in her hand, trying to pull on the ripped dress.
"Annwyd—"
She whirled and her eyes grew impossibly wide when she saw him. He stepped back, raised his palms, trying to show that he meant no harm. But her fingers were already frantically drawing a pattern in the air. She vanished. In the place where she had stood, there was a giant, hissing cat, eyes wide, fur raised, ears laid back. He stared, numb with shock, then he heard a small click. Looking sideways, he saw the open door, already closing. The cat hissed again and clawed the air menacingly. Was she there, disguised as the cat? Or already down the hallway?
"Annwyd, please—"
The cat gave a final hiss and dissolved.
He walked slowly, numbly, to the door. He opened it and looked down the corridor. But he had known even before he looked that the hallway would be deserted.
~*~
An hour later, Snape sat, fully dressed, hunched over the table, staring down at the map he had given Annwyd Gwir. It must have fallen from the pocket of her dress because he found it on the floor, along with a button. The map, the button, and the faint, lingering scent of her in the air proved that she had been here.
She had been here. It hadn't been a dream.
He wished to whatever merciful gods might listen that it had been. But merciful gods were few and hard of hearing.
The tiny red dot keyed to the location of the Glamour Caster was in the far end of the box that marked her quarters on the map. If he remembered the layout of the chambers correctly, that would indicate the bathroom. The dot had remained motionless there for most of the last hour. He supposed she was taking a bath. Scrubbing him off of her skin.
He had just made one of the biggest mistakes of his life.
And considering whose life it is, that's saying something.
Even after an hour, he couldn't assimilate it. The knowledge was there—his stomach was a solid knot and his chest was a lead weight—but his brain hadn't quite wrapped around it.
He tried to take it in small pieces.
I shouldn't have answered the door.
He had suspected who was there, and he had been in no fit state to see anyone, let alone her. If he had refused to answer for long enough, she would have gone away.
If I did answer the door, I shouldn't have let her in.
Actually, he didn't quite remember how she had ended up inside with the door closed behind her. He was sure he had not invited her in, but somehow she had been there.
I should have refused to talk to her. And good gods, I shouldn't have touched her. At all. In any way whatsoever.
He could have said he was occupied, sat down at the table and started writing, or at least pretending to write, and ignored her. She would have given up and left eventually.
I shouldn't have—
Shouldn't have what? He interrupted his own thoughts viciously, suddenly sickened by his own inability to come out with it. Shouldn't have thrown her down in the middle of the floor and raped her?
The knot in his stomach tightened even more as he tried to fight down a feeling of nausea.
It was not the moral self-revelation of a man who has just realized that he is capable of taking a woman against her will. No, that bridge had been crossed and burned years ago. The shock then of breaking a vow to himself, a vow he had kept for over thirteen years? Perhaps. After more than a decade of abstinence from this particular poison, he was far from happy to have tasted it again. But shocked? No, to be completely honest—and this was a moment for brutal honesty—he wasn't really shocked, not by that. If he devoted a great portion of his energy to the cultivation of will and self-control, it was because he knew, at bottom, how fragile both could be. He was disgusted by such failures, but not deeply surprised.
No, the mind-numbing shock of the thing was something else entirely. Something simple really.
He hadn't known.
He hadn't planned it or intended it, but when somehow he found himself kissing Annwyd—
"Don't say my name!"
He flinched, took a breath, forced himself to continue, to work it through.
When he found himself kissing…her…there had been, for a brief sane moment, a warning in his head and a chance to stop, to avert disaster. But at that moment, he had been certain—he had believed—
For gods' sake say it, if only to yourself.
I thought she wanted it.
Yes, gods help him, he'd thought she wanted it almost as much as he did. When he'd pulled her to the floor and—
He shook his head. He didn't want to picture it. He tried to keep the thoughts cold and abstract, devoid of imagery.
She'd screamed and clawed at his back and he'd thought it was pleasure. His stomach rolled over sickly.
It seemed ridiculous now. The stupidity of it—the self-serving blindness—sickened him as much as anything else.
There'd been no kindness in it, no words, no preliminaries. What reason was there to think that she would have enjoyed it?
I want you
I've always wanted you
please
He suddenly had an awful vision—a vision so horrendously distasteful it was almost comical—of himself sitting in Dumbledore's office attempting to account for himself to the headmaster.
"But she said—"
I need you to touch me
please
Severus
"And she said these things before or after you tied her to the bed?"
"She came to my rooms. She touched my face. She wanted—"
Yes, she had wanted something—some company, some comfort, and perhaps, yes, to be kissed and caressed. But not what had happened. She hadn't wanted that.
Even to himself, he could think of no explanation that didn't sound pathetic and grotesque.
"It's true, headmaster, that I did force myself on her—I did rip her clothes off and take her rather brutally on the floor, I did frighten her and tie her up and hurt her, yes—but she was the one who knocked on the door."
He saw her cheeks flushing and her mouth tensing with fear as he took off the dress and ravished her with his eyes, saw the tears on her cheeks when she lay helpless on his bed, his nails digging into her sensitive flesh, pulling the pain and submission into her eyes. And he had reacted in typical Death Eater fashion, savoring the feel of domination and possession. The fact that it could have been much worse, that he had done much worse in the past, would hardly made it better from her point of view.
And somehow, even during those moments of tension and tears, he had managed to believe that she liked it. The heat and momentum of the moment had carried his illusion through to the end.
Oh, he was certain that he had pleased her body finally—the human body was capable taking pleasure, or something like pleasure, even when heart and mind were cringing in revulsion. He was sadly well aware of that. But to think it was anything more than that—
Dear gods, the illusion had been so sweet.
With an effort, he steeled himself against the memory. He could afford no more illusions now, only facts.
Then why didn't she run earlier? asked a stubborn part of his mind. Why didn't she throw a glamour and make her escape?
He didn't know for certain, but he was willing to hazard a guess. No doubt she had been confused and frightened. Some people lost their heads entirely in a crisis. After he had released her from the binding spell, after the daze of unwanted pleasure had faded, she had finally been able to gather her wits and run. No doubt the prospect of enduring him a second time had provided sufficient motivation.
The small part of him that still wanted to deny the truth subsided.
The fact was that women who came willingly to one's bed—well, he had precious little experience of that, but he could certainly make a few safe assumptions. Women who came willingly to one's bed and enjoyed what happened there did not run off into the night, half-dressed, shoes in hand, eyes wide with fear. They did not leap back with horror when they accidentally touched your arm in the dark.
And he—idiot that he apparently was—had stared at her dumbfounded, unable for long moments to grasp the obvious. He closed his eyes and rested his head in his hands.
His life had had its moments—its hours, its days and nights on end—of bitterness and regret and self-loathing, but he seemed to have reached a new depth. He had done worse things, certainly, but at least he had known he was doing them. He had spat in the face of everything people considered good and right in the pursuit of his own pleasure and power, but he had done it with full knowledge, with defiance and exhilaration. And in that, even amidst whatever regrets had followed later, there was some kind of integrity to cling to.
I didn't know.
And far from making it better, that made it much, much worse.
It was certainly a mark of his essential selfishness, he thought, that however sorry he was for what he had done to Annwyd Gwir, he was sorrier for what he had done to himself. He had betrayed his fundamental sense of trust in his own mind. And beyond that—
He didn't want to think beyond that.
Think it through to the end first. Then you can stop.
Beyond that, he had discovered a hidden hope within himself that he would have sworn no longer existed. In spite of his previous thoughts to the contrary, he had hoped for what had happened—for what he thought had happened—and he had let that dream usurp all reality. Even now, he could feel the small space in his mind where the fragment of hope had buried itself, had lain dormant and invisible all this time. He probed it, drew it out like a rotted tooth, and there was a wave of raw pain and sickening humiliation that he hadn't felt in years.
He thought he had come to terms, long ago, with the fact that his life was not going to include most of the pleasures that people valued—the simple pleasures of human warmth and trust, of history shared with friends, or with a lover. He had counted up the losses and accepted them. If such losses were his fate, it did no good to rail against them. And to the extent that they were the products of his own abysmally bad choices, it was even more useless to feel self-pity because of them. The only sensible option—the only livable option—was resignation.
He thought of the nameless spy in the Ministry of Magic, the man who had been given the two potions. There was only one way that the man could have won. Snape had realized that later, and had taken the lesson to heart. If the informant had had the strength of will to live with the first potion and refuse the second, he could have slipped the trap. It would have been a joyless escape, yes, but it could have been done. If the man had been willing to accept his losses, grievous though they were, and set his will on a goal, without thought of reward or happiness, he could have walked away a free man. Miserable, perhaps, but not a slave.
Voldemort's informant had lacked such a goal. But he, Snape, did not. And, for the first time since Annwyd Gwir's departure, he felt just the tiniest bit better.
His current situation was bad from every angle, and it was clearly his own fault. But he would survive. He had always survived before. It was bad that he had harbored some secret hope that he could have her, could have whatever innocent physical pleasure it was that other people enjoyed—or, even more stupidly, that she would accept, would even enjoy, the permanently skewed direction of his own tastes, at least at the less extreme end of their spectrum. The folly of that hope was now abundantly clear. As was the only possible response. If any spark of that miserable hope still flickered inside him, he would crush it out the way he had crushed out other dreams before. And then he would do what needed to be done.
His goal was still there. Underneath the wretched morass of doubt and guilt and nausea, underneath the quicksand of despair that sought to smother him, his feet touched the bedrock of the goal. It had sustained him over the years, and it would do so once again. If he had sunk deep in the slime before finding it again, so be it. Indulgence in regret was part of the muck to be cut through. But underneath, the bedrock was still solid.
He was going to bring Voldemort down or die trying.
There would be no reward if he succeeded. He did not expect to win accolades. Even in the unlikely event that such were offered, he would know, if others did not, that honor and glory were undeserved. His motives were not noble. They never had been.
He did not expect happiness at the end, and certainly not anything so sadly trite as redemption. In fact, it was hard to imagine anything at the end. It didn't matter. He would do what must be done. His ability to focus on doing what must be done had long been the essence of his strength.
Snape allowed himself to look at the map again. The red dot had moved to the center of its box, the sitting room. He pictured Gwir curled in one of the armchairs. And the thought of her was more bearable now.
It was not without the exertion of considerable effort, but he managed to relax his muscles slightly. He forced a series of deep, calm breaths. His mind was not as clear as it needed to be, but it was better.
After a few more moments of trying unsuccessfully to rally his full powers of concentration, he rolled back the sleeve from his left arm. He gazed at the skull and serpent. They looked old and faded now, as they always did when Voldemort's attention was turned elsewhere. But they were still clear enough and ready to flare to black fire again at any time. He stared at the all-too-familiar shape and focused on the steady, cold ache of it.
The mark. And what you have to do. Nothing else but this.
The minutes passed and finally his mind grew cold and empty.
Mechanically, he listed the names of the players. Snape, Gwir, Voldemort, Dumbledore, Mulciber, Malfoy….
Then, just as mechanically, he mapped the possible actions, the possible outcomes. Outcomes for himself, for Voldemort, and for her.
He sat still for a long time, thinking. When he was ready, he took the map and his wand and left.
~*~
It was very late by now and the hallways were silent and empty. As Snape climbed the stairs and strode down the corridors, he kept the map in hand and glanced at it often. The red dot was bouncing from one side of its box to the other. She was pacing. If she decided to leave her rooms he would have to follow her.
But, when he arrived at her door, the dot was still inside.
Gwir used wand-cast spells, including protection wards, so infrequently that she probably didn't guess her current danger. Most witches or wizards would have known that, having cast the wards on her door himself, he was able to enter the room whenever he chose. If she had realized that, no doubt she would have gone elsewhere.
He paused outside for a few seconds to briefly review his strategy. He had rehearsed each step of the plan carefully. If he was quick and silent and lucky, she wouldn't have time to cast a glamour. If she did have time, he would have to improvise.
First he cast a simple silencing charm on the door. No betraying click would tell her it had opened. He studied the dot's movements on the map. She seemed to be tracing a path from the front office through the sitting room into the bedroom and then back through the sitting room to the office. He watched the dot complete the circuit twice, then raised his wand. The dot reached a point close to the other side of the door, then started moving away again. That meant she was close and her back was turned.
"Alohomora," he whispered. The door swung open without a sound.
He had not used the curse in over thirteen years—had hoped he would never have to use it again—but he said it clearly, without hesitation, wand pointed at Annwyd Gwir's back.
"Imperio."
She stopped, mid-stride, and stood motionless.
"Turn around."
Snape walked closer to inspect her face, to ensure that she had the blank, numb expression the curse should produce. She did.
Her hair was damp and she was wearing a loose sweater over a pair of rumpled trousers. He didn't want to look at her.
"Sit down and wait."
She pivoted and marched into the sitting room, seated herself in an armchair and remained there, eyes fixed on nothing in particular.
He quickly inventoried the rooms. There was no journal or parchment in evidence, no sign that she had started writing a letter.
He found the clothes she had worn earlier balled up near the bathroom door. He directed his wand at the wad of wrinkled fabric.
"Reparo."
The ripped fabric repaired itself. He put the shoes neatly next to the side of the bed, folded the clothing and laid it on top of the dresser. He left the map there also, next to the dress.
He made another circuit of the chamber. There didn't seem to be any further evidence. He returned to the sitting room where Gwir was seated, motionless, just as before.
"You will answer my questions honestly. Have you spoken to anyone or written anything since you left my quarters?"
Her gaze remained fixed, but she answered.
"No."
"Are you injured in any way?"
Her voice was without expression. "I bruised my knee."
"Which one?"
She pointed.
He touched the tip of the wand to her knee and did a healing charm.
"Listen to me carefully. You were not feeling well this afternoon. You spent the evening here in your quarters and went to bed early. Nothing happened that was out of the ordinary."
He raised the wand again. A memory spell would have increased potency when combined with the Imperius Curse, so he pushed it only lightly.
"Obliviate."
Her mouth opened and her eyes went unfocused.
The spell should be more than sufficient to wipe the last several hours from her mind.
There was only one more thing left to do.
The memory charm would prevent her from recalling the facts of the incident, but it would not completely erase its emotional resonance. That would have to be changed as well. He had only until the New Year to obtain the cooperation he must have from her.
"Stand up."
She got to her feet.
"Look at me."
She turned.
Moving closer, he put his hand under her chin and tipped her head so that her gaze was directed at his. Her eyes seemed to regain some of their focus.
His hand twitched slightly and he was aware, for an awful second, of his fingers wanting to feel her damp hair and stroke her face. He held himself perfectly still and the unsteadiness passed.
Imperio worked best when commands were simple, and he already knew, had planned exactly, what he was going to say. He knew the words would be bitter on his tongue. He was only too aware of their morbid irony. But nonetheless, he said them, his voice low but very firm, and he used all of his force of will to push them into her mind.
Severus Snape fixed his eyes on Annwyd Gwir's.
"Trust me."
To be continued…