Chapter 2: Antivenin
You could lie. You could say it's a burn paste, or something for Mrs Penhallow's bunions. But he is the finest Potions Master of his generation and he is looking straight into your cauldron, and the colour alone will have told him everything.
"It's an antivenin," you say. "Topical. It's built on the one I brewed at St Mungo's. Dittany base, powdered bezoar, a reduction of Fwooper feather to carry it into the tissue, and then the part you're going to hate." You make yourself look up at him. "Diluted Acromantula venom. Treated. To make the body recognise what's still in it and push it out."
His face does nothing at all. His grip on your wrist does not loosen.
"For whom," he says.
You don't answer. You don't have to. His eyes go from the cauldron to your face, and you watch the moment he understands, because it is the only time since you met him that you have seen Severus Snape look as if somebody had struck him.
He lets go of your wrist. He steps back. In the blue light of the flame his face is all hollows.
"Get up," he says.
You get up. Your knees ache from the stone. You are nearly level with his chin, close enough to see the scar move when he swallows.
"Do you have any idea," he says, very quietly, "what you have done?"
"Yes."
"I don't believe you do. I believe you are a reckless, self-righteous woman who has learned nothing at all, who was given one last chance by a woman with no reason to give it, and who has thrown it on the fire for..." He stops. His mouth works. "For this. For me. For a two-year-old scar that I did not ask you to touch, that I told you did not hurt."
"You lied," you say.
"That is not the point."
"It's exactly the point. You stand at the hearth at three in the morning holding your own throat like you're trying to keep it on. I've heard you. I've heard you every night for six weeks. You can't turn your head fully left." You are shaking. You can't tell whether it's anger or cold or something else. "Every Healer in Britain looked at you after that war and decided you'd been lucky to live and left it there. I'm not going to leave it there. I'm not built to. You can write to the Council tonight. But I'm not going to apologise for it."
"Why," he says.
It isn't the voice he uses in the shop. It's lower, wrecked at the edges, dragged up from somewhere that hasn't been opened in a long time.
"Because you deserve not to hurt," you say. "Whatever you think you did. Whatever you think you owe. You've paid it."
He looks at you for a very long time. Then he looks down at the cauldron, at the salve going quietly translucent over the flame.
"Is it finished?" he asks.
"Nearly. It needs to cool."
"And you are certain of the venom ratio."
"I tested it on my own arm last night." You pull up your sleeve. There's a faint pink mark on the inside of your forearm where you scratched yourself with a needle dipped in the diluted venom, and above it a fainter green stain where the salve took it away. "Twenty minutes. No trace."
He takes your forearm in his hand, turning it toward the light. His thumb moves across the pink mark once, very lightly, as if to be sure it's real.
"You fool," he says, but there's nothing in it, nothing at all, and he doesn't let go.
He lets you do it on the stairs, because he refuses to lie down like an invalid. He sits on the third step from the bottom with his collar unbuttoned and his head turned away from you, toward the wall, and you stand on the step below him with the cooled salve in a dish and a clean cloth, so that for once your eyes are level.
"This might sting," you say.
"I have been bitten by the Dark Lord's snake," he says to the wall. "I believe I'll survive a sting."
The first touch of your fingers to his throat makes him flinch. Not from pain, you think. From being touched at all. You wait. You keep your hand there, two fingertips resting on the warm skin below the scar, until you feel the muscles in his neck unlock by degrees. Then you begin.
The salve sinks into the dark tissue almost at once, and you work it in with small circles, following the spread of the old venom under the skin. His breathing changes. You can feel his pulse under your fingers, fast and heavy, and you don't think it's the salve doing that either.
"Does it hurt?" you ask.
"No." It comes out of him hoarse. "It's cold. It's..." He swallows, and you feel the movement under your hand. "It doesn't burn. It always burns. It hasn't stopped burning in two years."
You keep going, and then you're not really working at all, just your fingers moving over his throat, along his jaw. He turns his head back from the wall, slowly, and looks at you.
You have seen him look at a perfect batch of Wolfsbane with something close to love. You have never seen him look at anything the way he is looking at you now, as if you were something he had been brewing for years and had given up on, and here you suddenly are on his stairs.
"You should stop," he says.
"Do you want me to?"
He doesn't answer. His hand comes up and closes over yours where it rests against his throat, and holds it there, pressed flat against the scar and the pulse beneath it.
"Tell me to stop," he says, barely above a whisper, "and I will. Tell me now."
"Don't you dare," you say, and kiss him.
For one awful second he doesn't move. Then he makes a sound low in his chest, rough and broken, and his other hand is in your hair, and he's kissing you back with a hunger that knocks the breath out of you. There's nothing careful in it. He kisses like a man who has gone a long time without anything he wanted, his mouth hot and demanding, and you grab the open front of his collar and pull him down off the step so suddenly you nearly both fall.
He catches you. He always catches things. He turns you in one movement so your back meets the cool stone of the cellar wall and stands over you breathing hard, his forehead against yours.
"This is a catastrophic mistake," he says into your mouth.
"Then make it properly."
You don't make it upstairs. You make it as far as the oak workbench at the back of the cellar, where he sweeps a row of empty phials aside and one shatters on the flagstones, and neither of you cares. He lifts you onto the edge of it. His hands, those long stained hands you've watched for six weeks measuring and pouring with infinite precision, are shaking as they push your cardigan off your shoulders.
"Your hands are trembling," you say, wondering.
"Be quiet," he says, and then, against your neck, much lower, "It has been a very long time."
You take his face in both your hands and make him look at you. "Then we go slow," you say. "And you tell me what you want. And I'll tell you what I want. That's the recipe."
Something in his face breaks open. "Insufferable," he breathes, and kisses you again, slower this time, deeper, and starts on the buttons of your blouse with the full and terrible focus he gives to a Draught of Living Death.
He undresses you as if every layer were an ingredient to be prepared correctly, and when you're bare to the waist on his workbench in the blue light he goes still and simply looks at you for long enough that you feel heat rise across your chest and throat. Then he bends his head and puts his mouth to your collarbone, your breastbone, the curve of your breast, and when his lips close around your nipple you grip the edge of the bench so hard the wood bites your palms.
"Severus." It's the first time you've said his name. It comes out unsteady.
He lifts his head. His eyes are black and wide. "Say it again."
"Severus."
He goes to his knees on the stone floor.
He does it the way he does everything: as if he were studying you, learning which pressure made you gasp and which made you swear and which made your thighs tremble around his shoulders, adjusting his angle by fractions in response to every sound. His hands hold your hips to the edge of the bench. His mouth is hot and patient and devastating. You can hear yourself saying his name again and again, and you don't care who hears it. When you come it's sudden and shattering, your back arching off the wood, a cry torn out of you that echoes off the cellar walls, and he holds you through it and doesn't stop until you're pushing weakly at his head and laughing breathlessly from sheer overload.
"Come here," you say, and pull at his robes until they go, and then his shirt, a dozen tiny black buttons that you get through with far less patience than he showed yours. He's lean and pale under it, the faded ruin of the Dark Mark ghosting the inside of his left arm. You see him tense, waiting for you to look at it. You do look. Then you lift his arm and press your mouth to it, once, and feel him shudder all the way through.
"You don't have to," he says.
"I know." You reach for his belt. "I want to. I want you. Is that clear enough, or do you need it in writing?"
He laughs. You didn't know he could. It's short and rusty and astonished, and it turns into a groan when you wrap your hand around him. He's hard and hot against your palm, and he drops his forehead to your shoulder and breathes through his teeth as you stroke him, slowly, the way he showed you the knife: angle it, so.
"Enough," he says roughly, after a while. "Enough, or this will be over before it has begun." He lifts his head. "Are you sure?"
"Yes." You pull him closer by the hips. "Yes. Now."
He pushes into you slowly, watching your face the whole time, and the stretch of it is so good you have to close your eyes. He stops when he's fully inside you. You feel his whole body trembling with the effort of holding still.
"Look at me," he says.
You open your eyes. He's right there, inches away, his hair falling around both your faces like a curtain, his breath ragged.
"Tell me," he says, and it's almost a plea.
"Move," you say. "Please."
He does. Slow at first, long deep strokes that drag a moan out of you every time, and then less slow as you wrap your legs around him and meet him, as the workbench creaks and the blue flame of your little cauldron gutters on the floor. He kisses your throat. You bite his shoulder. He says your name like a curse and then like something else, something prayed, and the sound of it in that rough ruined voice takes you apart a second time, tightening around him with a sob, and he follows a few strokes later with a hoarse broken sound pressed into your neck, holding you so hard you'll have marks tomorrow.
For a long while afterwards neither of you moves. You stroke his back and feel his heart slow against your breast.
"I didn't write to the Council," he says, eventually, muffled.
"I noticed."
"I'm not going to."
"I noticed that too." You turn your head and kiss his temple. His hair is damp. "How's the throat?"
He's quiet for a moment. Then he lifts his head and swallows, deliberately, testing. His face changes.
"It doesn't hurt," says Severus Snape, as if he can't quite believe it.
You fall asleep in his bed, upstairs, for the first time, curled against his side with his arm locked around you like he thinks you might be confiscated in the night.
In the morning, there's an owl.
It raps at the window over the shop counter like official business. You come down a minute after him, wrapped in his dressing gown, and find him standing at the counter with an unrolled parchment in his hands and the bird already gone.
He doesn't look up when you come in. The scar on his throat is paler this morning. The rest of his face has closed like a door.
"Severus?"
"The Healers' Council has scheduled your interim assessment," he says. His voice is perfectly level. "Friday. Healer Smethwyck will conduct it personally. He will observe your work for one full day, and interview your master." He sets the parchment down on the counter and smooths it flat with one finger, very precisely. "There is a clause I had overlooked. Article nine. 'Any impropriety between master and apprentice, of a personal or romantic character, shall render the apprenticeship void and the master's signature inadmissible.'"
He lifts his eyes to yours at last. They are perfectly empty.
"It seems," he says, "that I have just ended your career after all."