Snape felt as though a bolt of lightning had torn its way out of a dark cloud inside his brain, down through his lungs and out his cock. He had never felt so completely overcome sexually by a dream in his life. He was actually panting. He tried to hold his breath, not wanting to wake Tziganne still slumbering beside him. He brought a forearm up over his eyes and thought about the images and the feelings in the dream. The sexuality of the encounter was tame in contrast to his usual indulgences, yet it had been overwhelmingly erotic. Her willingness to have him take her like that in that place in that way conveyed a complete trust in his person that singed the very marrow in his bones. But there had been something else at the end and with his eyes open he could not see it.

He nearly moaned aloud. Now that he was awake he was struggling immensely against an aching feeling of loss, if he could just return to that place. Not the sex, not the library, but the wild long grasses she had drawn him down into. They were alone there. In her arms he had felt something he had never felt before, he had felt complete. A completeness he had not desired but without which his lungs were scorched empty.

"Severus, get hold of yourself," he admonished himself internally. "It was a dream. That was not Hermione Granger. That was your anima, your muse, your Green Lady. Maybe it was even your mother!"

He had never dreamt of a sexual encounter with a student once in his entire teaching career. He groaned. The dream would not dissolve.

He turned heavily to Tziganne, she lay deeply asleep with her back towards him and he pushed himself up against her hard, the whole length of his body pressed into the curves of hers. He was erect again. He needed to thrust every moment of the dream out of his brain.

He looked down at his partner and closed his eyes tightly against the intrusion of the dream woman's face and body. He reached up with one hand and combed his fingers into Tziganne's impossibly black mane. Lowering his face into her hair, he breathed deeply, inhaling the scent of her, always the forest right before a summer rain. He pulled the tangled mass of hair away from the side of her face and looked down at her, she exhaled, rousing to consciousness slowly. He thought of her, the comfort she provided him. They had spent two decades walking a tightrope of love which stretched taut between the sheer cliffs that were their individual lives. They had broken one another's virginities twenty years ago and struggled through dark times and had not really known what to do in the sun-drenched years that followed. But they had wordlessly committed themselves to one another because they could be themselves having seen the worst of what they were. Now this woman lay sleeping beside him while his whole being ached for someone else.

Snape brought his mouth down hard on the side of her neck, pulled her skin between his teeth and sucked. Her head moved in groggy protest under this and he flipped her quickly onto her back and was over her. With a small grimace of guilt, he looked away from her surprised, sleepy face and with a quick, hard knee between her legs he opened her to him and drove himself deeply inside her. Her eyes fluttered wide and with both hands she reached up and brought his face down to hers. He rested his forehead against the bridge of her nose and she bent her head back in an effort to reach his lips, but he kept his mouth away, pounding into her body now. With one arm bent stiffly holding him above her, he snaked the other under the small of her back and his broadly opened hand pulled her hips up high against his own.  Then he rocked back completely onto his knees and both hands gripped the sides of her hips bringing her lower body up with his, her shoulders still on the mattress. He would not look into her eyes, but closed his own and threw his head back and dropped all conscious thought down into his lower belly.

He forced his mind to blackness and brought himself to his climax.

"What was that?" Tiziganne's voice hissed through the early grey morning.

"A morning salutation?" Snape answered, his voice echoing hollowly in the room.

"Well, good morning to you, too" she rolled away from him. Injured.

"Tziganne," he was contrite and lay back down, draped over her heavily, playful now that he had banished the dream. He looked into her eyes, his face inches from hers.

"No."

"Too late."

"You're not funny this early in the day. And I'm insulted."

He rolled off her, away from her, onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. "You should be."

He felt her stiffen. "What? What did you just say?"

"I said you should be. You should be insulted."

"Why do you say that?" her voice was chilled.

"Because I was insulting. And I regret it."

She rolled back over and leaned up on one elbow to look down into his face. He turned his face completely towards her and looked up into her searching eyes.

"What is it, Severus?" she whispered, her lower lip trembling.

"I cannot say, for certain." Her eyes widened and he reached up and stroked her lower lip with his thumb. "No need for that sort of worry, darling. It is nothing like that. I am brutally tired, I drank far too much yesterday, had to gorge myself on rice," he sneered, "spar with Bera, hope for Remus. And I hate this house. I can quite honestly say that my boundaries have been breached."

She sighed and he wondered at this. She closed her eyes and said, "It is more than that."

His brows furrowed deeply and his eyes grew dark beneath them, "What is more? What is more than that? That is what it is. There is no more."

She began to weep. Silently. Her eyes still shut, but with teardrops leaking out from under her long lashes. For one wild moment, Snape believed that she knew about the dream and that he had been caught in a lie. He sat up quickly, "Tziganne, what is wrong?"

She shook her head and the tears still dripped steadily down her face. He watched as they pooled for a brief second in the arch of her nostril and then spattered down onto the ridge of her lip and from there fell to the bed. She turned roughly onto her stomach and buried her face in a pillow. Snape felt a flame of fear ignite in his belly.

"Tziganne?"

"I didn't want to talk about this. Not now. Not here." The flame leapt high into his throat and his brain began to burn.

"Tziganne," he barked in his most intimidating voice and she just shook her head.

He stood and found his clothes scattered. He bent to them and began to dress, methodically, quickly.  He walked to the side of the bed where she lay and he sat there and reached for her shoulders. She did not move away from him and he began to rub at the tensed muscles that ran along the sides of neck and down beside her spine. Finally her skin warmed, her muscles went slack under his hands and he stroked her gently. She turned and brought her face onto his wool-covered knee. He stroked at her hair.

With a great tug of the covers, she sat up and wrapped herself in the down and looked at him. "I am leaving Durmstrang. I am returning to Hungary."

His hands clenched into fists in his lap, his voice was like steel, "Why?"

"Because I have to, I cannot stand it any more. I don't want this life any longer. My life is not this life and I have turned my back on who I am for too long. Sold myself to something else and," her voice became trapped inside her throat, "I don't even remember why or what it is, Severus. Yekka buliasa nashti beshes pe done grastende."

"With one body you cannot ride two horses."

"I will be drabarni. I will be the simple woman I really am, wear the clothes of my people, speak their language, birth the living and kiss the dying good-bye."

"This is not about you, this is about Zolton."

She looked at him with a flash of anger on her face, but it faded quickly, "Severus, I knew that would be your first thought and that is why I made my decision without talking to you about it. He has not forced my hand on this. Of course he wants me to come home. With Papa buried, Zolton has changed. He remembers the ties that bind. He is trying to do the right thing by our people. He has made peace with me, he knows I will not marry, he knows that he is the last. But he needs me and I see that clearly now.  I want to escape from the darkness here. I want to go where I am needed, where I am safe, where I know my purpose."

Her words cut into him like a hot knife, slicing down through his core, he bled out all his feelings of worthlessness and panicked as they pooled around him in a dark torrent of accusation. There were no words, there was no protest. He had failed her. He thought of her betrothed, Zolton. He remembered her father's funeral and how this dark prince had frightened him, truly frightened him. One moment leaping across a campfire with a rose clenched between his teeth and in the next breath the rose became a dagger and Snape could feel the man's hot breath in his face. He had not been welcome there, had not expected to be, he went for Tziganne, to help her to shoulder her grief and the weight of being an outcast from her kumpania, but he had left feeling like a thief.

"Severus." Her voice was firm now, resolved. "You and I have argued about these things for years now. Years. This is not my war, not my darkness. I do not understand why it pulled me the way it did. I believe I did have a purpose here, with you, against Voldemort. But no longer. When that boy was murdered, when Voldemort returned, I knew that this was not about me. And I feel like I am building weapons at Durmstrang." He looked at her sharply. "I only ever wanted to be a healer, my love. I possess a dangerous knowledge and I must take it from this place, from these children."

He was shaking his head and she put a finger over his lips to still him. "You have not done wrong by me. I will not ever concede that point. I chose the same things you chose. Something is calling me home and I am going to heed that call." She looked at him closely, "I think that something is calling you and it is not me. You are going to be needed in this war in some dark and terrible way. If I were to stay I would affect that."

"I will not listen to this gypsy prophesizing. Your words are pretty but they are empty. You are leaving. How can I answer to that? I would not keep you, even if I could, which I, obviously, cannot."

She began to cry again. He got up and left the room.


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