Switch

Ask

by Verity

“ASK ME - I WON'T SAY "NO" - HOW COULD I?” – Ask, The Smiths

[Sequel to Switch. NOTE: This fic is rated R for sexual content, language, and the author’s judicious screwing of the characters’ minds. You’ve been warned.]

:01

He hears in the staff room, Hermione Granger’s back from her holiday early, and the fear that clenches his stomach deafens him to the reason. Who’s the cat and who’s the mouse – now?

He doesn’t need to hear the reason, not really. He already knows.

It’s the next night, a solitary Friday eve, that she knocks on the door. He’s well aware of the irony, of the game they’ve begun to play. Measure for measure, shoving each other down into the shadows. Who made the first move? It doesn’t matter anymore.

“Serve the servants,” she tells him, leaning over his desk. She smells of lavender and musk. His eyes follow the curves of her breasts beneath her high-necked black silk gown, which is molded to her as though she has transfigured her flesh into the molten fabric. Not that she’d have to – he knows it’s infinitely softer.

“Miss Granger-” he begins, but falls silent, because he knows that no “Miss Granger”s can stand between them now; they were out of place the moment he kissed her a month ago, the moment he touched her. In nearly seven years of teaching he had never touched her.

How long ago it all seems, now.

She swings her long, ivory legs up onto the desk, and in one sinuous slither she’s slipped over it onto his lap, her legs straddling his hips. He’s trapped against the back of his chair, waist deep in a puddle of black silk and skin, and he cannot escape her flower petals of lips, soft and wet with dew against his.

It wouldn’t be quite so bad, he decides, if he weren’t enjoying it.

:02

Somehow, she hadn’t thought it would be quite so easy.

He makes no pretense of misunderstanding, just succumbs and, oh yes, reacts, just as she’d dreamed he would. Oh, and with a disquieting gentleness. Hands buried in her hair cradle her skull like it’s delicate porcelain. But he kisses back with passion.

It’s just to good to be true.

She shifts her weight forward – just enough, and the chair tips back, falling over and slamming into the stone floor with a force hard enough to jar her bones. He’s trapped beneath her. “Lock the door,” she hisses at him.

He swallows, closes his eyes for a moment, looking more resigned than afraid. “Valemora.”

And slowly, slowly does she begin her revenge, her revenge she’s been plotting ever since the day she discovered that Lucifer’s fall was not, perhaps, so bad after all. Better to dwell in darkness than dance in the illusion of light. She slowly undoes the fastenings on the back of her dress, until she is sitting naked in a little nest of black silk.

“Do you think me beautiful?” she asks him, and as she does, she feels her heart shattering, and remembers that perhaps is only perhaps. Lucifer was so beautiful, of course he was; but he was only an angel, and he had no heart.

“Yes,” her Professor says, and there is pain in his voice.

She takes hold of his wrists, to pin them over his head; she feels the smooth scars crossing them beneath her fingers. “No!” she cries, dropping them. Oh, she’s come so far. Why must her courage fail her now?

“It’s all right.” Does he mean for his words to soothe her? Or to let her know that there is no return from this place to where she is journeyed, where vengeance is the only answer?

But there’s no going back to the Hermione who used to comb the manes of Hagrid’s unicorns, the Hermione who could voyage to Hell and back unharmed. So she does what she has willed herself to – and there is a cruel pleasure in it she thinks she could get used to.

:03

She looks very lovely and innocent, her head propped up on her hands, and it’s such a picturesque tableau (even from beneath) that he has to ignore the fact that her elbows are digging into his ribs, and making it very hard for him to draw a proper breath. He has to wonder if she’s aware of how much she looks like an angel, and if she knows how rueful his thoughts about her are. Her brown eyes are distant; she’s lost in thought.

He shifts a little; it’s damned uncomfortable to be pressed into the slats of wood that form the back of the chair, especially by her elbows. She looks down at him then.

“Your wrists are beautiful,” she whispers, as if she’s sharing a secret.

A little, long-quieted part of him agrees. “No.” It’s his turn to disagree.

“We have to believe in beauty,” she insists, young, innocent, naïve, the opposite of the enthralling, destructive seductress who’s already had her fair share of the conversation. “The beauty of our own desires. Of our destruction.”

“I destroyed you.”

“I destroyed myself.” Here she smiles, a nasty sort of smile like Lucius Malfoy gives his wife as she submits to his humiliating whims, and the naïveté disappears.

“The road you walk is madness.” In her eyes he sees a reflection of himself, at sixteen, seventeen, so cold and self-assured.

She says nothing, merely covers his mouth with hers and seals away his protests.