Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters and creations are not mine. I’m just playing around and am definitely not worth suing.

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A Revelatory Transgression


I do not think I would ever have found him if it weren’t for the ancient state of the castle itself, which bemoaned its age with the aid of creaks and groans throughout those drafty, wintry nights. I awoke to the sound of moaning bricks and the sight of silky darkness permeating my room. Nothing seemed amiss at that first glance, and I allowed the warmth of semi-consciousness to languidly convey me back to slumber.

With my eyes half lidded I couldn’t discern a thing in the room, but suddenly a peculiar sensation compelled me to open them. I refrained from shifting in the bed, and merely lay as I had been for hours: on my left side, curled in a quasi-fetal position with my legs only partially extended. Staring as I was in the direction of the fireplace, I could distinguish the eerily large shape of the mantelpiece. Crookshanks was mysteriously absent from the rug in front of the hearth.

Not with the greatest deception conceivable could I have convinced anyone that I didn’t enjoy having my own room. I had put in more than my fair share of hard work, bright ideas and old-fashioned exertion during my years at Hogwarts, and as my mother had succinctly put it months before, “[I’d] earned the reward.” I remained curled up in my bed and convinced myself that my surroundings were as innocuous as always, and the day’s events were simply toying with my emotions.

That is, until I noticed the figure standing beside my bed.

In the absolute darkness he or she could not possibly have known that my eyes were open. The person stood motionless, their entire body rigid as though wrought with nervousness; and though my heart thudded uncomfortably I couldn’t seem to muster the courage to move and defend myself.

It was perhaps the anti-climatic nature of the situation which lulled me into an inexplicable sense of security. Not ten hours earlier Harry Potter had vanquished the Dark Lord Voldemort, toppling the last edifice of a terrifying reign which would mark the history books for millennia. I had watched, standing amidst the horror of screaming voices and the bloody bodies of casualties, a scene reminiscent of an apocalyptic duel of good confronting evil. In one fatal movement Harry had withdrawn his wand from his cloak, divested himself of the disguise he wore -- the mask of the Death Eaters, of soulless evil and genocidal mania -- and cast the curse with deadly grace.

Lord Voldemort had never screamed. I imagined that in the future, elaborate exaggerations would be concocted to accentuate the heroism of the moment, including, but not limited to, Voldemort shrieking like a wounded animal as he haphazardly cast hexes in all directions. In reality it had been a simple matter. Harry had cast the curse which felled him the final time, and as he did so I stared, fixated, as Professor Snape had committed his putative master’s body to the soil he’d dared to defile.

It was the ultimate act of irony and vindication, and for that reason I had felt a swelling of admiration and respect for my Potions professor as he’d brought forth a sword of wicked length and methodically removed the head of the late Thomas Marvolo Riddle. Where he had concealed it I could not imagine, though I would never have put it past Dumbledore to arrange a convenient rendezvous between Fawkes and the professor; Harry’s tangle with the basilisk remained fresh in my mind.

The other Dark servants stared in appalled paralysis at the heinous act of one of their own ranks; and when, unleashing a cry the banshees would have envied and stumbling forward, Lucius Malfoy had torn off his own mask and made an attempt on the professor’s life, Snape had with equally calculating precision rid the world of the pestilent senior Malfoy.

Draco had fainted soon thereafter, and currently languished in Azkaban, a fact from which I derived no small amount of pleasure.

Though many of the Order were suspiciously absent, including Albus Dumbledore himself, other the high-profile participants -- Alastor Moody, Remus Lupin, Severus Snape, Neville Longbottom, the Weasley family, and, naturally, the Boy Who Conquered -- were scheduled to receive tribute and honorary medals -- Order of Merlin, First Class -- at a much-regaled public ceremony the following afternoon.

I had watched with grim satisfaction as these events unfolded, Professor McGonagall’s restraining hand firmly on my shoulder. Though moments before I’d been seething and trembling with rage because she had threatened to put me into a Body Bind if I tried to participate, I gradually acquiesced and grew to understand her point. Dumbledore had not bandied around euphemisms when he told me that I was far too intelligent and valuable to be thrown into the fray with the other fighters, comrades though we were. I was loath to stand on the side and gasp like the token female spectator, but Professor McGonagall had allayed my fears quite craftily.

“Someone has to be around to take on an apprenticeship with our victorious professor, my dear,” she’d murmured with an insidious smile in the direction of Professor Snape. Something in my abdomen had tightened strangely when I had followed the direction of her gaze with my own and watched him stand triumphantly above the body of Hades’ blackest minion, a bloodied blade hanging limply at his side and his own face streaked garishly with the evidence of his exuberant participation. His unflappable sangfroid and cold eyes were incongruous with the heaving breaths wracking his body as he bore witness to the demise of the greatest abomination of magical society.

“Professor Snape wouldn’t want me as an apprentice,” I had retorted almost absently. There had been no genuine vehemence in my words, for I was at the moment too consumed with watching the détente taking place before me. How, after years of anguish and struggle, had it ended with such a distressing lack of closure? Only the imprisonment of Lord Voldemort’s few surviving followers seemed even remotely victorious.

“He would be relieved to see you safe nonetheless, my dear.” Her words had sounded somehow portentous and cryptic to me then, as though forewarning through veiled sarcasm that Professor Snape would, in actuality, have disapproved of the Headmaster’s decision. I was angrily inclined to agree that I did belong on the field of war, as it was I war I’d fought during the years with as much conviction and integrity as the others; but McGonagall would hear none of it, and even cautioned me against involving myself in the process of removing our dead from the grounds.

“There are those who would prefer to do it themselves.”

I had watched, my curiosity continuously and increasingly aroused, as Severus Snape and Remus Lupin began to systematically inventory and transport bodies, conveying the lolling, grotesque figures with the aid of Mobilicorpus from their various temporary gravesites. Sickened, I had turned from the sight of the adult Order members setting things aright, and pleaded with Professor McGonagall with tearful eyes.

She had shaken her head firmly, the moisture evident in her own eyes, and pulled me into a shaky embrace. Though both our shoulders trembled neither she nor I really cried.

I’d left without a backward glance, my emotions in a roiling tumult and my eyes burning with the sight of magic-encrusted, eerily glowing corpses.

Now, a figure which I couldn’t identify stood alongside my bed -- perhaps two or three feet away, not yet within the proximity which spurred flailing terror -- and I found myself at a loss to feel truly threatened. I bit back a startled gasp when I recognized the faint outlines of slightly bedraggled, shoulder-length hair and a floor-length cloak with voluminous folds pooling about the feet in noiseless motion.

It couldn’t be, could it?

His hair was the same as always, though if my slightly blurred memory served me accurately, it had been slicked to wetness with blood and perspiration; but he would have had a chance to bathe decently since returning from the battlefield just outside of Hogsmeade. Shifting rays of weak moonlight revealed just enough of the cavernous eyes, expressive brows and the harshly patrician planes and angles of his face that I felt a growing surety within me as to the intruder’s identity.

Months of the more strenuous training Voldemort had devised for his adherents, including a weeks-long hiatus during and after the Christmas holidays which had left Hogwarts dubiously absent its resident Potions Master, had lent him strength and shape where previously a skeleton had been. Even in the faint illumination I could see, at this close distance, that the emaciated bat of my youth had surrendered the professor’s body to a far more capable creature. The slant of his shoulders and the musculature of his neck and chest underneath the repressive and confining clothing looked much less frail than I remembered; and indeed, before me stood a man with a length and breadth I had not yet seen and a countenance which both intimidated and thrilled me.

The primary question being, of course, why was Professor Snape standing in my bedroom?

Flashes of memory returned to me abruptly and I failed to sort through them with adequate haste. I was left with only the shadowy hints of certainty and an answer I craved with hitherto unprecedented and breathless need. McGonagall’s words were perhaps, when construed in accordance with this enlightening new context, the most conclusive evidence I had.

“He would be relieved to see you safe nonetheless, my dear.”

I began frantically to formulate and answer my own suspicions and doubts, praying all the while that he would not make a surreptitious exit while I unraveled the motivations underlying his visit. He hadn’t seen me (at least, I strongly doubted he had) before I’d left the battlefield earlier, and as I had retired immediately to my room upon returning to Hogwarts, the supposition that he might have been unaware of my safety was logical enough. I found myself somewhat shocked that, if he needed to verify no harm had befallen me, he would not have simply asked the Headmaster.

Unless, whispered the conniving female within the less pragmatic dirges of my psyche, he needed to see it for himself. Unless the Headmaster hadn’t been convincing insofar as the mere words of another’s offered honesty hadn’t sufficed; hadn’t quelled some need to know, a doubt viable and irrepressible despite the assurances of others. Unless he wanted to see me.

I toyed with the likelihood of this while waiting for him to make a move, as it were, and was rewarded when a hand draped in that theatrical cloak of his reached forth and hovered but inches from my shoulder. Fear and excitement flashed within me simultaneously and I willed myself to remain silent and motionless, watching interestedly as the fingers became visibly tremulous. The movement of his hand seemed somehow traitorous when contrasted with the uniform rigidity of his body and imperturbable stoicism of what few planes of his face I could distinguish. The fingers continued to hover above me with palpable hesitation. I endeavored in vain to locate some semblance of expression in the black void of his face -- the curvature of eyes, lips, and nose all obscured by the darkness.

I thought at first he was afraid to reach out and check for signs of life, but as I watched his hand I began to wonder with almost scientific fascination if it were really hesitation which reined him in, or if it were a need for restraint.

Why didn’t he touch me?

It rose unbidden in my mind, and instantly I felt perilously close to wincing at the crude connotations of my own thoughts. A heady flush suffused my face and internally I admonished myself, dreading that with all his attention focused on the nexus of our shared space, -- that reaching, grasping, shaking hand -- he would feel the heat radiating from my body.

Yet he displayed no indication that he had sensed any alteration in the physical state of the body before him, and I found my baser instincts were sufficiently suppressed so that I might think with better clarity. I was unsure why he didn’t touch me, but wondered, rather, why he seemed to want to touch me. If indeed it was verification he sought, incontrovertible, visible proof that I was alive, he’d undeniably found it. The advantages of his viewpoint included, I was certain, an adequately clear glimpse to discern that my right shoulder and rib cage rose and fell with the inhalations and exhalations of my breath, steady despite the erratic and absurdly excited beating of my heart.

The fingers moved slowly, inexorably forward, and I stilled my body but for my breathing. I focused on the very fiber of my muscles and schooled myself against any shifting of my limbs or features; and it was with this increased sensitivity that I had to contend when his fingers brushed with feathery contact along my right shoulder and upward along my throat, settling in an almost protective gesture as they curled around my jaw. One brushed my ear lobe and I suppressed a mighty shiver, feeling the tendrils of an unidentifiable stirring within me.

If I was not mistaken, he stiffened even more then, and I watched as he waited for me to wake. The room was strung with apprehension, his fear, and the knowledge that what he was doing was somehow forbidden. I’ve no doubt that he suspected I would awaken to his unexpected caresses and fly into a righteous fury, summoning the Headmaster to banish he who would threaten my security and sensibilities; but he grew emboldened with what he thought to be my continued lack of response. The hand returned to my shoulder and its warmth seeped through the pores of my skin, rushing immediately to my abdomen; his thumb brushed along my clavicle and the hand stilled momentarily.

I made my move swiftly, affording him no opportunity to withdraw the offending hand. I lifted my right arm, which had lain parallel to and atop my body with my hand resting on my right hip, and gently but unmistakably I trapped his hand beneath mine. He emitted no sound, but I could see that the muscles of his arms and chest seized in abrupt fear as he battled the compulsion to yank his hand out from beneath mine and flee.

He had to realize that my eyes were open now, and I made no secret of the matter, allowing the lids to lift fully as I stared blatantly at his face. Mercifully, the moonlight responded to my earnest entreaties: weak, scarcely visible rays shifted minutely to bathe his face in a soft luminescence. His eyes remained dark pools whose emotions and expressions I couldn’t distinguish, but the profile of his nose and cheekbones was as clear to me as sculpted marble against the dark silhouette of his lower body. Shadows clung at his throat and crept upward, emphasizing and contouring the clean angle of his jaw and threatening to encroach on the contour of his lips.

I berated myself prior to acting for what I knew I would do; but when the moment came and I knew I had to snatch it and every bit of opportunity it provided, I could not afford to hesitate. Running the thumb of my right hand along the length of his hand, still resting upon my shoulder, I allowed it to stop at his wrist. I imagined the frantic shifting of his eyes as he watched my movements and fantasized that for the first time in my life I had shocked and undone the affectedly superior composure of the untouchable Potions professor.

Latching onto his wrist with what I hoped to be an irremovable grip, I removed his hand from my shoulder. The next portion of the choreography had to be completed quickly and with the utmost caution, for I could see in the lines of his body that he already feared himself to be an incriminated and apprehended man. As fluidly as I could, I retained my grip on his hand while rising from the bed and moving to stand before him, slowing bringing our hands between us.

I bit my lip and stared up at him, transfixed by the sheer height and breadth of the man before me. He began to move his fingers, sensing that I had no intention of removing my hand from his wrist. Deftly he turned his wrist in my grip until his fingers were brushing the skin of the underside of my wrist; they were longer than I had anticipated, and I shivered uncontrollably as they trailed a distance along my forearm, almost teasing in the lightness of their contact against the skin. Determined that I would not be outdone in my assiduous seduction, I began to move even closer, praying that the arrhythmic, galloping rate of my heart did not foretell a sudden loss of nerves and a fit of fainting.

My cognitive processes were suffering as a result of my impaired ability to breathe. Wading through muddied thoughts, I endeavored to put words to the myriad emotions crossing his face in a fleeting display of fear, hope, and confusion, tempered by the visible tightening of his shoulders and a stormy intensity of the dark eyes through which he regarded me. They seemed to cloud and then sharpen. Instinct alone provided me with the comprehension that intellect could not as I dared to take the final step until I was directly beneath him, my eyes on par with the level of his collarbone. I could now feel his movements as his head bent lower to meet mine.