Severus crashed backwards against the door, wrenching up his robes in desperate haste and fumbling with blind frenzy at the buttons of his trousers, shoved a violently shaking hand into them and gave a stuttering moan as his fist clenched around his tumid member; his eyes closed and his jaw sagged in relief as he buckled, and staggered on bent knees to the stiff chaise lounge onto which he crashed awkwardly, crushing one arm under his body weight, the other stuffed into his trousers, which he shifted down his thighs in a series of jerking movements.
Fucking Delilah Blackthorn, fucking little whore, ripping her top off every second… She was so fucking wanton that girl, had thought of nothing but fucking from the second he’d first found her rutting with that Terry Boot in the garden, that grubby boy pawing at her behind the shed, and even days later when he’d found her still stewing in her own juices, ripe with the scent of her own flesh, even then when he’d slammed her against the wall she’d been thinking of nothing but his hands on her tits, his hands on her thighs… Maybe it’s because she’s French, I bet in Beauxbatons all the girls are hitching their skirts up left right and centre. I bet at Beauxbatons you can’t open a door without finding a half-naked schoolgirl arching on a desk with her hands up her own skirt, waiting for someone to come and find her. I bet she waits until the girls in the dormitory are sweetly asleep and then spirits through to the boys’ rooms on her bare little feet, draped in some skimpy slip of lace, totally see-through with nothing underneath, practically naked for anyone she might meet, then clambers into the first bed she sees and sates the gasping cocks of those sweaty little boys, mounts one until he screams and comes all over her thighs, and she just takes his hand and presses it between her legs and grinds against him, shows him how it’s done, gets her end off one way or a-fucking-nother, fuck… Every fucking Ravenclaw lad out there’s probably had her, maybe she’s even had them all and started on the other houses, learned where the common rooms are and tiptoed up into their dorms too, or maybe she just sets up shop somewhere, in some deserted classroom after hours and puts the word out then opens her thighs and fucks whoever comes in, doesn’t even see their face or ask their name… Even when she was mortally injured all she could think of was my hands on her tits, her and her fucking tits, all she could think of was getting her top off as quickly as possible; even in Diagon Alley she made a beeline for the sex room in that shop, couldn’t even blunder into a second hand bookshop without coming out with a book about sex, it’s just sex-sex-sex with her, sex-sex-sex, fucking-fucking-fucking…
He bucked his head back with a moan.
It’s a miracle that it took until tonight for her to demand my hands on her, and even if I managed to resist touching her cunt I could practically feel the heat of it, could almost smell how hot and wet and open she was, could’ve yanked down her jeans and her little knickers and felt it for myself, shown her how it’s really done, so easy, could’ve stroked her clit in fast little circles until she was biting through her own lip to stop herself from screaming with a pleasure she’d never even dreamed of, lost the battle and let out a scream, fucking my fingertips, coming against my hands, helpless, and then my cock filling her up, finishing her off, shuddering through her and rattling her ribs, her young, naked breasts there in front of me for me to touch, to bite, naked, shaking as she convulses up and down with my jerking slams into her throbbing cunt, my rock-hard cock, her pulsing clit and swollen tits, fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-FUCK…
He rocked on the arched back of the chaise lounge with a spasmodic grunt, eyes pressed closed, his turgid muscles juddering with exertion.
His galloping pulse slowed, his excitement drained away, and the cold room hoved back into focus. His foul proboscis lay pale, deflating in sputtering fits on his wrist, and his lust was replaced with a creeping, sickening shame.
Delilah Blackthorn.
She’s a child.
She’s not a child.
But she’s a student.
She was far from the most attractive student he’d ever taught, far from the most talented… what was wrong with him? Far too skinny, far too angular, gauche, irritating… How could he have known, when he’d apparated into that garden, what he was getting himself into? He’d found himself face to face with the infant who had stared at him from the mouth of the tent, the infant for whose sake all their lives were about to be finished or hopelessly wracked, eyes like saucers, Lilah?, and he’d held a warning finger to his lips, shooing her so she backed away, terrified, turned tail and vanished into the marquee, and he’d seen a flash of blue streaking down the lawn, accompanied with a smothered silvery giggle, hand-in-hand with that boy like young love’s fucking dream, and he’d followed them in the safety of the darkness… How could he have known he’d find her gasping with pleasure, half-naked and grinding against him? That he’d have to sneak after them, sink into the blossoms that crawled the trellis and watch them from the shadows, watch him pulling her dress down, illuminated by the glow of the fairies overhead, watch him running his hands over her body, watch her gagging with excitement, and have to snatch her by the bare flesh just as the boy pushed her skirts up, have to cram his hands into her tits to restrain her; how could he have known that when he took her to Grimmauld Place she’d have the uncommon presence of mind, the blasted skill and savoir faire to turn her wand on him before she’d even covered herself up, shoot a curse at him so unexpectedly that she damn near hit him, her tits rippling and dancing in the light of the hallway…
Revoltingly, unbelievably, he felt a renewed twinge of excitement and, without sitting up, pulled his trousers up to his hips. He used the tip of his wand to blindly vanish the mess from the sleeves of his robes.
He hadn’t done anything wrong though, he hadn’t done anything really. He may be twice her age, but how could he be accused of despoiling a girl who was already so hopelessly depraved? It was barely days after her father died when he’d lost his temper at her, restrained her and looked into her mind, which was more out of habit than anything else, it was what he always did with recalcitrant adolescents; he’d only probed at the edges, barely an invasion at all, and the last thing he’d expected to find right at the surface, at a time like that, was her fantasising furiously about fucking that Terry Boot. How could he have known she was so preoccupied? And anyway, he hadn’t fucked her even though she’d practically thrown herself at him, he’d hardly even touched her, not until she’d asked him to; hadn’t she been the one who had ripped her top off this evening quite unprompted? Hadn’t she been the one who’d been so desperate for him to fuck her she’d even used that filthy Weasleys’ potion to play it out? And how was it his fault she’d gone and got herself attacked so he’d had to start this whole thing, make her strip off that first time, he was only fulfilling his responsibility…
Who do you think you’re kidding? “Very effective, but extremely dangerous if even a tiny bit of it should be accidentally swallowed…” Pathetic lies, just to see her tits again, a juvenile ploy, you shameful, disgusting old man, you degenerate, you criminal, running your hands over her even when she was unconscious on your sofa and her skin was ripped to ribbons, you crook, you reprobate, miscreant, pervert…
After a long time he wrenched himself into a standing position and poured himself a glass of port from the decanter on his bookshelf, which he drank in two gulps and refilled, sitting at his desk with the tiny goblet clutched in both hands, rigid and whirring as a battalion of thoughts charged through him, staring into the glass which he emptied and refilled again and again, Delilah Blackthorn, Delilah Blackthorn, Delilah Blackthorn…
The clock on his wall chimed. He had missed the Valentine’s feast but couldn’t miss the staff drinks party afterwards without raising questions, so he hauled himself to his feet and clattered through the green-lit corridors, remembering her sliding down the bannister after the Christmas feast, wondered if you fancied… her thigh nudging against his, her eyes hot and her hair speckled in the bracketed lantern-light like a nightjar feather, her cardigan slipping off one shoulder, a shadow dancing in her hollowed clavicle… He pushed against the waist-high tide in the emptying Great Hall. A bubble burst above his head, scattering rose petals all over his shoulders, and a heart-shaped puff of smoke dissipated over him as he stamped to the antechamber at the back, warm and festive with open fires and tables of drinks, ‘Severus! We missed you at dinner…’
‘Not feeling so well,’ he grunted by way of explanation, disorientated by the change in temperature, the atmosphere, and he snatched a goblet of Champagne from a tray being held aloft by a House Elf; ‘…feeling better now I hope?’ and he nodded non-committally and wheeled away from the questioner, the pest, and drifted through the room. He stood staccato in an existing group where he could appear interested in a story that was already mid-flow and have nothing demanded of him, hearing nothing except a loud, insistent siren that seemed to be screeching dully in his head, until a conversational thread behind him tugged at his ear and he turned his head in its direction, ‘Poor Delilah du Lac splinched herself as badly as I’ve ever seen, very ambitious that girl, pushed herself too hard…’ and he turned sharply away again as though he were incriminating himself just by overhearing her name, twisted through the tortuous crowds to the other side of the room and replaced his empty goblet with a full one; but then he overheard another conversation, ‘…but I did have to give her detention the other day for wandering the corridors out of bed, found her in a clinch with one of the Slytherin boys…’
‘Who?’ he demanded ferociously before he could stop himself, rounding on the speaker, ‘who’s this? Which student?’
‘I don’t remember his name,’ Professor Sinsitra said, amused, ‘don’t worry though Severus, I gave him detention too, I sent you a note…’
‘No, the girl, who was the girl?’
‘Mandy Brockelhurst,’ Sinistra replied slowly, peering at him strangely, and he knew he had given himself away and forced a casual nod, almost a shrug, as though in that way he could recover the situation, and wandered off as though he were suddenly bored, had inexplicably tired of the topic that had gripped him seconds earlier, cursing himself, circulating from group to group in an agony of distraction, and landed on a little cluster containing Professor Sprout and Madame Hooch among others, and Hooch was saying ‘…had to go into the boy’s changing rooms after Quidditch practice last week, that butterfingers Simons had slipped in the shower and broken his wrist, and my word, the smell of those lads in their sports togs – I’m sure the girls never smell half so bad…’
‘No,’ Professor Sprout said thoughtfully, ‘adolescent girls tend to smell like lilies.’
And that sentiment struck Severus like a club to his head, seemed so direct, so startlingly poignant, and it jarred through him so keenly that he actually lost his balance, took a step backward and almost dropped his goblet, spilling it all over the floor as he tried to right it, and they all stared at him suspiciously; he put his goblet clumsily back on a tray as he backed off, feeling horribly exposed, dozens of dark, hollow, accusative eyes on him, and he turned his back and stumbled away. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ he thought he heard someone whisper. ‘Cherchez la femme…’ but he was burning up, voices swirled around him and he could no longer tell what was real, so he fought his way back through the merry crowd, fielding shouted greetings and queries with inchoate murmurs – how many people were here? Fifty? A hundred? They seemed to be multiplying – and stumbled back into the Great Hall where he caught his balance against the dais.
‘…Severus?’
He took off at once and hurtled across the hall, away from them, away from them all… He had watched her from a second floor window a couple of weeks earlier, coming back across the grounds from the greenhouses in a bitterly icy gale, her classmates sprinting ahead of her, a clutch of girls clumping up the steps, their faces scrunched in ugly grimaces against the assailing wind, one of them clapping her satchel to her arse with one hand and flinging the other back and forth like she was wading knee-deep in rapid water; and there, following at a distance, with all the urgency of a Siamese cat, looking like a wisp that would be whipped away in the wind but, somehow, as composed and unperturbed as a thistle, her gaze at its customary 145-degree stare, lost to the elements, lost to the world, trapped in a seasonless shuck of her own, Delilah… and now he ran down the stairs from the Entrance Hall, wondered if you fancied… and he could have sworn he smelt her before he saw her, her absolutely singular scent of jasmine and sea salt, before he found her, as he knew he would, hovering anxiously outside his office, her pale face glowing in the shadows.
She opened her mouth as if to speak and he dimly registered that she was wearing an absurdly unseasonal button-down red dress covered in little floral sprigs as he grabbed her by the arm and bundled her through the door, dragged her into his chthonic chamber before she could speak a word, and he kicked the door shut behind them and grasped her in a crushing embrace, squeezing her like he would grind her into pomegranate seeds, backing her against the chaise lounge, already ripping inexpertly at the buttons at her chest. He grappled her dress off her shoulders to find a red lacy brassiere underneath, which he also wrestled off her, then tugged her skirt up, bunching it in one hand and gathering it by her hip to expose matching knickers. He flattened one hand over her breast and felt for the elastic of her knickers with the other, and she clutched at him so hard her fingernails dug in through his robes, giving dovelike little cries and then a long, ragged gasp when he pushed his fingers inside her knickers and plunged them into her hot, creamy petals, and when he felt how feverishly wet she was a pang of lust hit him so powerfully that his vision blacked out for a moment, and his fingers spasmed with desperation for more, cramming into her. He found her simultaneously wide open, gasping for him, and somehow closed like a locket, but the savage ache which had plagued him for so many weeks made him mad with passion, and he pulled his hand out of her knickers in order to wrench the slip of lace down and jerk her hips towards him, tilting them with both hands and pushing one of her legs away so that she was suspended on the edge of the chaise lounge’s raised armrest, leaning back on one wrist, her other hand on his shoulder, and he pushed his own waistband down so that his erection sprang free, and plunged it into her with a long, low groan.
She tolerated exactly three and a half thrusts before she gagged for breath like her throat had closed up, and catapulted her hips away from him. She rearranged her face with heartbreaking bravery into what was presumably supposed to be a sultry moue, then slipped off the chaise lounge with a little shimmy and bent over, looking over her shoulder like the heroine of some two-knut paperback bodice ripper, breathing ‘I prefer it from behind’; and of all the awful, all the shameful and odious things that Severus Snape had done, all the loathsome things that troubled his fitful nights, of all the things he would never forget and never absolve, in a way the worst of them was that night, for never, in the days that he had left to him, was he able to amend or erase from his memory the hopelessly horrible sight, reflected in the black, storm-spattered window, of Delilah Blackthorn’s face contorted in a silent sob of agony, her mouth twisted and her eyes squeezed shut as if she were trying to will herself unconscious, and his figure looming above her in a grotesque, goatish hunch, tossing her hips back and forth like you’d rattle a bag of dice, pummelling his foul rapier ruthlessly into and out of her tiny, fragile body with spasmodic grunts of monstrous ecstasy, grimacing his way through the unheeded realisation that he had got this dreadfully, unforgivably wrong.
