Chapter 2

Chapter 2

As Severus poured a too-large portion of firewhisky into a hastily-scourgified potions beaker, he was not unaware of the irony of the drink's provenance.

Minerva had given it to him one year for Christmas...a bottle of 27-year-old MacMuir. From a small wizarding-family distillery. Rare. Expensive. Far too generous a present for one colleague to give another, and not normally one that Severus would have been willing to accept. He didn't like gifts of any sort, viewing them as no more than prepaid expectations.

But he'd understood that Minerva's offering was not a gift: it was a part of a debt, one long owed him.

She'd paid the first instalment near the end of his second year of teaching, knocking on his dungeon door a few nights before the Leaving Feast. Severus had been startled to see her: although he never actively discouraged visitors, he made little attempt to socialise with his colleagues, and they, in turn, did little to seek him out. He couldn't remember the last time anyone but Slytherin students had come to his door...or if there had ever even been a "last time."

"Minerva," he had said, doing his best to act as if her appearance at his rooms was nothing out of the ordinary: he had an obscure sense that to show surprise would somehow give her the upper hand.

Unlike a few others, Minerva had not been overtly hostile to him when he'd joined the staff, but that could have meant only that she was better at concealing it. He certainly had no reason to trust her, not after the fraught relationship they'd had during his student days, and if she thought that showing up unexpectedly was going to wrong-foot him, he decided that she could think again.

"Severus. May I come in?"

He'd paused just long enough to let her know that this proposal was not entirely welcome, and then he stepped back to motion her inside with a gesture that she was free to interpret as ironic if she wished.

He did not invite her to sit, nor did she ask to...and it was this restraint on her part that let him know that whatever was going on here, the upper hand at the moment was his. The Minerva of the staff room, with her quick temper and dry, often cutting wit, would have made some biting remark about Slytherin concepts of manners and taken a seat on her own. But the Minerva standing on his rather worn carpet was almost diffident, and Severus was immediately wary.

With the typical Gryffindor air he hated...that of a martyr bravely about to mount the pyre...she'd got directly to her point.

"Severus, I've owed you an apology for many years, and it's high time I delivered it. You were done a terrible wrong when you were a student, and I should have done something about it, but I did not."

"Just one terrible wrong? And which have you decided it is?" For the first time, he realised, he was actually speaking to her as his equal, not as his former teacher, and it was a heady feeling. He was almost eager for her to speak again, so that he could meet her straight-on.

She'd ignored his tone and simply answered the question. "I'm speaking of the incident at the Whomping Willow involving Black and Potter and Remus Lupin."

Severus gave a bark of laughter, though he'd rarely felt less amused. "You mean the 'incident' where Black thought it would be funny to watch the werewolf rip me apart? That little 'incident'?"

Minerva had closed her eyes, and Severus had welcomed the chance to push her harder, though he let his voice go quiet. There was no need to shout facts as damning as these; the words themselves were loud enough. "They could have killed me, Minerva. You know they wanted to."

She'd made a small, abortive movement, as if she'd been about to touch him but then thought better of it. "Severus, I honestly did not know how serious the situation had been. I didn't find out the whole story until much later, after you'd all left Hogwarts."

Then she stopped and shook her head. "No. I will not make excuses. It is true that I didn't know what had happened. But I suspected that it was something fairly significant. I suspected, and instead of finding out the truth, I let myself be persuaded that someone else knew best, that the problem would be fixed and that I could stay out of it." She paused, looking Severus straight in the eye. "It was wrong, and it was weak, and I let you pay the price for my cowardice. I'm sorry."

Severus had hardly known how to respond. She'd seemed sincere, which to his mind was a sure indication that he ought to be suspicious. Yet part of him wanted to believe her, and still another part was lit with a rage he thought he'd long mastered. "You're sorry?" he snarled. "And that's enough? You can go comfortably back to your life now?"

This time she did touch him, resting her fingers lightly on his Marked arm, and he'd forced himself not to flinch. "Not comfortably, no."

As quickly as it had flared, the anger faded, and Severus was suddenly weary. "Why are you telling me this now?"

"Mostly for your sake. In case it may help you to know that the injustice is not unrecognised."

"'Mostly' for my sake?"

"And partly for my own," she said, with that characteristic honesty that Severus sometimes grudgingly admired and more often deplored. "One thinks about many things in the small hours of the morning."

Of course she did. That was another Gryffindor trait: self-flagellation as art form. Still, he'd had no immediate reason to doubt her, so Severus had found himself giving her a tight nod, accepting at least the impulse toward apology, if not yet the thing itself.

She'd taken her leave almost immediately afterward and never directly raised the subject with him again.

But a few years later, the firewhisky had been delivered to the foot of his bed by a house-elf on Christmas morning, the first and last present Minerva had ever given him. It had come with a card that read, "For the wakeful wee hours."

That's when he'd understood that he was receiving not a gift, but a payment, or rather, the symbol of it. The real payment was whatever thoughts kept vigil with Minerva in the night.

And so he had kept the bottle, not as a gesture of forgiveness...he honestly had never understood what that word meant...but as an indication that he was willing to let them be on an equal footing with each other. That he was willing to give up the advantage over her that he had gained from her failure in the matter of Potter and Black.

It wasn't a position he yielded lightly; he didn't have so many advantages that he could afford to lose one.

So perhaps it had been a sort of forgiveness after all.

~ / ~ / ~

Severus had had the MacMuir now for nearly ten years; he was as abstemious with alcohol as with sex. If he'd learnt nothing else since Lily's death, he'd learnt the dangers of giving up control. Yet sometimes, nothing but chemical oblivion would do.

Not that he intended to drink enough to pass out. But a little dulling-of-sensation wouldn't come amiss.

The trouble was, he wasn't sure exactly what sensation he was trying to blunt: the surreal strangeness of being whored out by Voldemort? Or the fact that he could now admit to himself that the thought of sex with Minerva had its appeal?

Things had been different between them after the night she'd offered her apology. Despite Severus's initial inclination to dismiss her words as too little, too late, he'd felt more comfortable with her as time went on: there was something about having seen your enemy's soft underside that made life a little less difficult.

Except that somewhere along the line, he had ceased to think of Minerva as an enemy. If he wouldn't have gone so far as to call her a friend, at least he saw her as a fellow inmate in the prison and no longer as one of the Dementor guards. They'd even taken the odd drink together over the years, although he'd never offered her the MacMuir: they'd already said enough to each other with that.

He certainly saw her as a worthy opponent, one he thoroughly enjoyed besting, in large part because she never made things easy for him. Severus had come to believe that her competitiveness was a mark of her respect.

And perhaps of something more. Something like attraction. He'd sometimes felt it himself, and there had been times that he'd been sure she felt it, too. Usually, though, he did his best to dismiss these ideas as absurd. Why would Minerva think of him as anything other than a former student...a surly, difficult one at that...and why would he want her to?

Yet mutual attraction did help explain the undercurrents he felt in their unending attempts to get a leg up on one another. So to speak.

She'd started the one-upsmanship; there was no question about that. He remembered the day it began in earnest. They'd been in the staffroom one afternoon during Severus's fourth year of teaching, and Madam Hooch had been congratulating a beaming Pomona Sprout on Hufflepuff's current lead in the term's Quidditch standings...

~ / ~ / ~

"Do you know," Sprout had bubbled in her exasperatingly irrepressible way, "I think this just might be the year that Hufflepuff actually wins the Quidditch Cup! Wouldn't that be a treat for the badger-kins? Poor things, they've had rather a drought these last few years when it comes to awards." Her gaze moved down the table to Severus, and although he'd averted his eyes, he hadn't been quick enough.

"A small wager, perhaps, Severus?" Pomona said, smiling at him teasingly. "Slytherin is not so far behind us, you know. A little incentive... "

Severus hadn't smiled back. "If your students need incentive, Pomona, then I suggest you spend your money finding ways to encourage your 'badger-kins' to surge ahead in the potions standings. Currently they are dead last."

"One hundred galleons says Slytherin finishes behind Hufflepuff on the potions exam, Severus." Minvera had risen from a chair near the fire, startling them all; they'd forgotten she was there.

"One hundred!" gasped Pomona, and even the ghost of Binns stirred himself to mutter, "Oh, I say..."

Minerva stared at Severus, her eyes alive with amusement and challenge ... and something that he'd later thought was a glint of sexual interest. "I know you'd never compromise the honour of Slytherin House by anything less than the most scrupulously fair marking, of course," she'd continued. "Are we agreed, then, Professor Snape? One hundred galleons?"

He'd stared back, knowing that more was at stake here than a mere bet, however exorbitant. Finally he nodded. "One hundred galleons, Professor McGonagall."

It was a sum he could ill afford to lose, at least not in terms of money. But in other terms, he felt, the cost of not wagering would have been far higher. Even then, with everything unspoken and unacknowledged, he hadn't been willing to close any doors.

As it happened, it was Minerva who lost the one hundred galleons. She'd refused his offer to let her proctor his examinations or to inspect the results, and he couldn't decide whether to feel vindicated or insulted that she thought she knew him well enough to be sure he wouldn't cheat.

She had come to his dungeons herself to deliver his prize. "Your winnings, Severus," she'd said, handing him a satisfyingly-heavy bag of coins. "Try to keep them safe. If you can, that is."

"You plan to burgle my rooms?" he'd enquired dryly.

"I plan to win them back."

~ / ~ / ~

She had, of course...had won and lost them several times over the ensuing years, and the rivalry between Professors McGonagall and Snape became an accepted part of the lore of Gryffindor and Slytherin.

And now the combination of firewhisky and Voldemort was forcing Severus to own up to the fact that he and Minerva had used the House rivalry to conceal their sexual spark. They'd carefully channeled it into competition and edgy banter, but it was there, and if truth were told, it had grown a bit with every contest, ignore it though they would. That Minerva had been content to leave the spark unfanned was obvious, but Severus thought it might not take much to bring it to flame.

He was starting to feel the fire himself. He took a few more swallows of whisky, yet he knew it wasn't just drink that was giving him visions of how Minerva's hair might look spread across his sheets, or better yet, twisted round his fist. Of how one of those still-nice tits might fit into in his hand, or how good it might feel to pin her beneath him. He could even feel her little cat paws patting his back, see her tail switching, hear her voice purring, "twenty points to Slytherin......"

A splash of wetness in his lap pulled him back to wakefulness; he'd nodded off and tipped his whisky onto his crotch.

Severus swore roundly before charming himself dry, but at least the shock had put paid to his burgeoning erection. Far better than having to deal with it himself.

Unlike his ever-horny dorm-mates, Severus had never liked wanking, not even as a teenager; the stickiness and indignity put him off. He took care of his needs when driven to it, and he'd mastered the cleansing charms quickly, but if he was going to have sex, he preferred it to be with actual person: it seemed cleaner, more the way things were supposed to be.

Which brought him back to Minerva, who was very definitely an actual person. And back to the Dark Lord's ludicrous plan for her. Madness. Even if Severus had wanted to bring her over to Voldemort's side, it was ridiculous to think that Minerva could be sexually and emotionally seduced into betraying a cause she'd worked for nearly all her adult life, a cause to which she had sacrificed friends and family. Far easier just to try to Imperius her.

But of course, Severus wasn't working for Voldemort, which made things easier in some ways. He could simply go to Minerva and explain what the Dark Lord wanted. It wouldn't be the world's easiest conversation, perhaps, but between the two of them, they could come up with ways to plant false sexual memories for Voldemort to read, or use the premise of romance as a ruse to funnel him misleading information.

It was a reasonable plan, but...god, what if Minerva, being the damned Gryffindor martyr that she was, insisted on sleeping with him as her contribution to the war effort? Severus could just imagine her stripping nobly off, her face aglow with the glory of being the Heroic Strumpet, or whatever-the-hell word she'd use, whoring herself for the Greater Good. She'd probably even get off on the idea.

The very thought of such a scenario made Severus's whisky-laden stomach roil. No. He was not going to tell Minerva a damned thing about the Dark Lord's orders. If she was going to come to his bed, she wasn't going to do it as part of some perverse grand sacrifice. She was going to do it because she wanted him. Wanted him: the Slytherin. The Greasy Git. The Death Eater.

He didn't even care if she also saw it as part of their unending competition.

What mattered was that in the end, she would do it because she wanted Severus Snape.