Chapter Text
Later, he would often take comfort in the fact that the first time had been entirely her fault.
He had returned to Grimmauld Place in the dead of night, and had he been a man with less self-discipline, he would have been stumbling. Actually, had he endured Cruciatus for even a moment longer that evening, even he would have been stumbling. Self-discipline only goes so far.
He'd returned, he'd made it into the kitchen, and he'd fallen with less grace than usual into a chair. He'd Accio'd a bottle of brandy from a cabinet and glanced wearily, reflexively at the level of the liquid to see if the Weasley twins had gotten into it again. They hadn't. This time.
He filled a tumbler with hands that barely shook. Knocked it back. Refilled it. Knocked it back. Refilled it.
There, that was enough to start to take the edge off.
Even profoundly exhausted, halfway to inebriated, and suffering from an extended bout of the Cruciatus, Snape heard her well before she appeared in the doorway. The house was old and the steps creaked, which was to Snape's liking. It meant that the brats presently in residence had even less of a chance of catching him unawares than usual.
The creak was slight. Too slight for a male or for Molly Weasley, and Minerva McGonagall never slept here, while Tonks would have just tumbled down the steps headfirst... which meant that either Hermione Granger or Ginny Weasley was about to interrupt his binge in order to get herself a cup of cocoa or some absurd thing.
He stirred vaguely. He ought to light a candle, so that the brat wouldn't be startled by finding him in the dark. He ought to transfigure the Death Eater robes that he wore into something more suitable. Really, the best option would be to exit by the back door and Apparate away from here, in order to avoid the interaction all together.
It was a bitter and uncharitable impulse that kept him from doing any of these things. He donned the thrice-damned robe and mask and went without hesitation before the darkest wizard in the world and suffered the Cruciatus and responded by begging forgiveness and the chance to continue to serve. He did it to protect the innocents of the wizarding world. And he was supposed to go out of his way to make sure that they weren't a little unsettled by being confronted by the evidence of what he did on their behalf?
Bugger that.
The Headmaster would have words for him later for allowing one of his precious Gryffindors to see her Potions Master in Death Eater garb, but tonight the thought gave Snape a sudden rush of nasty satisfaction. And so he did nothing but knock back the contents of his tumbler as the brat appeared in the doorway of the kitchen.
He couldn't see her face in the darkness, but even though his vision swam slightly he could make out the bushy hair that distinguished Granger from the youngest Weasley.
She stood in the doorway, and he realized that she was looking at him. So she'd known he was here, had she? So much for his brief and spiteful fantasy of the look of terror on her face when she found a Death Eater in the kitchen.
Strangely, given her tendency toward babbling, the swot wasn't saying anything. Snape semi-fuzzily considered what he could deduct house points for that would anger her the most.
That was when she crossed the kitchen and sank to her knees in front of him.
He knew later that being taken by surprise wasn't much of an excuse. It had taken her many seconds to open the front of his robes, unbutton his slacks, and free his prick from its confines, during which he did nothing but stare at the top of her head in shock. But at some point the half-formed thought intruded -- her mouth would be so wet and hot -- and it was because of that thought that he had to admit that he'd known what was coming and somehow should have summoned the initiative to stop her, but he hadn't.
Her mouth felt nearly scalding in its heat. He wanted to believe that he was flaccid when she first enveloped him, but the reality was that he was already half-erect at the astonishing moment that she wrapped her lips around the head of his cock. His head began to swim more dramatically as a heady rush of arousal magnified the muddying effects of alcohol and Cruciatus, though the wet soft pleasure of her tongue was distracting him significantly from the aches and pains throughout the rest of his body.
Her technique was far from expert, but she did manage to keep her teeth off of him and she was both eager and insistent, and it turned out that that was more than enough. The fingers of his right hand tightened around the now-empty tumbler on the table, and the fingers of his left gripped the side of the chair where he was sitting. At no point did he touch her... he didn't wrap his fingers in her frizzy curls, he didn't press on the back of her head to encourage her to take him deeper, he didn't grip her shoulders... his posture never really shifted from the moment that she appeared in the doorway to the moment when he tensed and stifled a groan and finally let his head tilt back minutely as he filled her hot mouth with his seed.
He still didn't move as she ran her tongue over his length one last time to leave him as clean as possible. She tugged on his trousers in such a way that they slid mostly back into place over his prick. Finally she pulled his blood-red robes closed in the front before she rose to her feet in front of him.
It was too dark to see her face, so maybe he imagined that she flashed a sad, half-rueful smile at him before she turned and left the kitchen and left him sitting in silent astonishment.
And for several long moments, Snape's stuttering brain tried to convince him that it was impossible that that had just happened.
So there could really be no debate that the first time was entirely her fault. Yes, absolutely, he should have stopped her. As her professor, he shouldered the lion's share of the responsibility for allowing the encounter to happen. But the point was, that no one could have seen that first time and thought that he coerced her into it.
He often clung to that notion later.
Snape had successfully avoided Grimmauld Place for nearly a week after his unexpected indiscretion. Once or twice he wondered if he had an irate confrontation with Dumbledore in his near future, but for some reason Snape felt strangely certain from the girl's behavior that she was not going to tell anyone what she had done to him in the kitchen in the stillness of that one night.
But Grimmauld Place was the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix, and Snape could not avoid it for long. The next time he'd gone for a meeting of the Order, he had glimpsed her in the library as he passed down the hallway and had braced himself for her to follow him, to speak to him, but she didn't. She'd merely looked up, caught his eye for the split-second it'd taken him to pass, and there had been no reaction at all. Snape had been unsettled by imagining all the wildly inappropriate reactions that she might have after their encounter, so why the hell was some strange part of him disappointed when there was just... none?
On his way out, after the meeting, he was not going to glance into the library. And yet he did.
She was gone. She clearly wasn't hanging around anywhere waiting for a glimpse of him.
The second time... he couldn't exactly say that the second time was entirely her fault. Because it had already happened once, and so clearly he should have returned to his chambers at Hogwarts or to his musty house at Spinner's End after his summons instead of going to Grimmauld Place and stationing himself in the darkened kitchen. Never mind that it had been Grimmauld Place where he'd gone a dozen times before, because at least it had the feeling of a place where other people lived and wasn't quite so suffocatingly isolated in the hours after he'd been before the Dark Lord. Those dozen other times had been before a student had come upon him in the night and given him a silent and unasked-for blowjob.
He refused to think about the fact that, instead of sitting at the table, he leaned against the counter as he repeatedly emptied his tumbler of bourbon. It was certainly not because he expected a repeat of the previous encounter; it was not because this time he wanted to loom over her in the darkness as she knelt before him. It wasn't for those reasons, obviously, because it wasn't going to happen again.
It wasn't until the third time that he found himself unable to resist the temptation to bury his hand in her frizzy hair and wrap his long fingers around the strands and press himself deeper into her silent mouth. It was also the third time that the moon had been bright and there'd been no clouds, and so he'd been unable to avoid actually meeting her eyes afterwards as she'd stood up. It was still dark enough that her face was indistinct, but the silvery light filtering through the grimy window had allowed their gazes to unmistakably connect for a moment.
Something clenched hard in his stomach when that happened; he experienced a moment of terror that she might not just turn and walk away this time. But she did.
The fourth time was the time that he slipped from his bed at Spinner's End in the middle of the night and Apparated to Grimmauld Place and thus found himself in the kitchen, with the Gryffindor prefect on her knees before him because he'd gone there exactly for that.
It was after that fourth strange encounter that he'd Apparated home in the night, and then back again in the early hours to eat breakfast at Grimmauld Place. His schedule and activities were such that he could show up at the Order's headquarters at any meal time and expect Molly Weasley to feed him without questions about why he was there right then, though he rarely took advantage of this and had not at all since the first time that Hermione Granger had happened upon him in the kitchen.
Indeed, Molly Weasley had been in the kitchen banging pots together when he arrived, and the aromas of breakfast were just starting to drift up the stairs. The redheaded matriarch greeted Snape with only a few words of surprise as she ushered him to the kitchen table, put strong black coffee in front of him, and handed him the Daily Prophet. They spoke intermittently and softly of various matters of importance to the Order before the first of the houseful of students made their way downstairs for their Mrs. Weasley's fortifying breakfast.
Fred Weasley was the first to arrive, and he paused in the doorway with a surprised "My my, it's Professor Snape!" before going on to help himself to a plateful of eggs and bacon. The youngest Weasley was next, wearing patterned pajamas with patches on the knees and with her hair hastily pulled into a ponytail, and she just half-heartedly smiled at him before looking away.
Remus Lupin joined them and Snape blatantly ignored him. Lupin just glanced at Snape before sitting down and beginning to talk to the students in detail about what exactly they had learned in their previous year's Defense Against the Dark Arts classes.
Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley entered the kitchen together. He could hear their voices all the way from the top of the steps, so he'd known she was coming. They were bickering about how much time he spent obsessing about Quidditch and how much time she spent obsessing about schoolwork, which had the sound of a much-practiced dialogue.
It was impossible that his pulse had elevated slightly over the prospect of seeing a 17-year-old student, even one whose mouth he had come in the night before. He didn't look up as the pair entered the kitchen. He noticed her pause slightly and there was a startled break in her nagging monologue at the boy. But then she picked it back up -- "... I tell you this EVERY year, Ron..." and it was clear that she had no intentions of doing anything to betray their late-night encounters to the rest of the household.
She did acknowledge his presence, though, with a polite "Professor Snape," as she lifted some toast onto her plate. And maybe her voice sounded just a little strange as she said it, but not much. It was no more or less than she would have said to him on a morning like this before... before the first time.
He nodded curtly, not looking up from his newspaper.
Conversation ebbed and flowed in a natural manner, with the company largely ignoring him as usual other than Molly's occasional attempts to foist some actual food onto him. He waited until Granger had recovered from the shock of his presence enough to actually become embroiled in a conversation with Ronald and Ginny Weasley before he took the chance to look up from under his brows and study her at all.
He noted with chagrin that she looked like nothing more than a typical Hogwarts student to him.
There was nothing obvious to distinguish her from any other seventh-year girl. She was not womanly where they were childish... she looked exactly like any girl on the verge of womanhood, prettier than some, less pretty than others. Her hair, like Ginny Weasley's, had been pulled back into a messy ponytail, though hers was at the nape of her neck instead of higher on the back of her head. She wore one of the plain, short-sleeved Muggle garments that the students referred to as a t-shirt, brown, faded, turned inside out for some reason, as well as oversized paisley shorts and fuzzy striped socks. Snape was disappointed that there was nothing that he could put his finger on in order to talk himself into believing that she was somehow different than the other girls whom he taught.
And then suddenly he found himself noticing her mouth. She was talking to Ginny, but her gaze flickered to him for the briefest of moments, which meant that she caught him studying her but also that he had a sudden, unexpectedly visceral memory of what exactly that mouth had felt like on his body only hours before.
He dropped his eyes quickly, and that was when he noticed that her knees were slightly bruised from the tile.
Snape stood up suddenly, putting his coffee cup on its saucer with more force than was really necessary. Molly Weasley and Remus Lupin glanced at him in surprise but said nothing as he swept quickly from the kitchen. He didn't look back to see if Granger's eyes were following him.
But he imagined that they were.