Chapter 15

A/N: Greetings, my dears. We're now past the half-way point in our tale. I eagerly await your thoughts and feelings about the story, and ask that if you read, you take a moment to say you've done so. It encourages me more than you can ever know.

The new banner for the story was created for me by TalesofSnape, an author whose talent turns also to the visual arts. Thank you, dear Tales!

Chapter 15

I hope someday we remember what was lost here

For if love no longer waits for the broken

Where do we go when it all goes away?

When It All Goes Away

7 July, 1998

Hermione made it into the quiet house without incident, but Arthur hailed Severus (who was several steps behind her, admiring her bum in her tight jeans) before he could escape. Hermione left him without a qualm, knowing that if anyone in the world could be counted on to take care of himself, it was Severus Snape. So she fled up the stairs to their room, aglow with delight at the promised adventure in the shower.

She stood before the old mirror on the dressing table, studying her reflection as she brushed out her hair. Thank Merlin she no longer had to study her body, wondering what was wrong with her and why he never approached her for sex. His invitation today was the clearest request to share their conjugal delights he had ever made to her...and in the shower. She shivered, a wild thrum of excitement beginning to pulse low in her belly. The dreams she'd had of sex with him in the shower were her favourite ones, because she was the aggressor...well, one of the aggressors...and because in the dream, he permitted her to take the lead.

Would real life work out as the dreams had done? Would he relinquish control for long enough that she might overwhelm him with pleasure? It was difficult for her to imagine her severely buttoned-up husband allowing her that sort of license with his person, but there was no harm in trying, was there?

Besides, the only reason she even felt she could do it was because she had dreamt it so many times in the last several weeks. She wasn't quite clear on how much confidence one could place in actions remembered from a dream...whether they would really work for her or not...but she was fully determined to try them and see how successful she would be.

She turned from the dressing table, pulling her tee-shirt off over her head, and she unfastened her jeans, shimmying out of them with expert speed, so that she was in her bra, knickers, and socks when the door opened to admit her husband.

The predatory gleam in his endless black eyes gave her momentary pause, and she took a step back from him, but he pounced on her all the same, clever fingers finding and working the clasp on her bra in mere seconds.

'Someone has been lollygagging,' he murmured, fanning his thumb across a nipple now hardening beneath his attentive gaze.

'You're not precisely naked,' she pointed out breathlessly, feeling the process of liquefying under his determined hands, lips, and hard, lean body already beginning, presaged by the unsteadiness of her knees.

He did not so much as look away from her as the fingers of his left hand performed a fluttering movement, and he was completely nude.

'How do you manage that without a wand?' she demanded, finding that she was reaching for him, desirous to feel his bare flesh in contact with her own with no delay.

'I could have sworn I had instructed you in the use of non-verbal magic,' he replied in a musing tone, somewhat diminished by the heat and focus of his gaze, driven and implacable.

'But you did that without a wand!' she gasped, becoming boneless as he inexorably drew her body against his, thumbs hooking in her knickers and beginning to pull them down her legs.

He stopped with the underpants halfway down, his face now on level with her sex, which he pretended to ignore as he looked up at her. 'We could skip the shower and have a go at practicing wandless magic,' he said, and then he bent towards her, the tip of his nose pressed to her navel and travelling inexorably downward towards regions begging for his attention.

She threaded her fingers through his blue-black hair. 'F-fuck wandless magic!' she insisted, anticipating his contact with the pleasure centre just below his lips.

'I feel quite certain I can fuck you without wandless magic,' he stated.

And her underpants were dragged ruthlessly from legs, her socks dispensed with, and she was being led adamantly to the door and urged through, into the same shower enclosure he conjured each morning on the landing...the one she had never seen before their stay here...the one with the peculiar bench seat built into the wall, which seemed so oddly familiar.

Severus found that the moment he saw Hermione, his tedious conversation with Arthur Weasley was wiped from his mind, and he was once again back in the moment with her. This vital young witch, his wife, had taken possession of his mind in a way he would have sneered to believe was possible, before he married her. She had fallen into his life, disrupting it and forever stealing his scant moments of peace of mind, leaving in their place a constant, pressing desire to be with her...within her. Yet until they had come to this place, he had not touched her as a man touches his wife since their wedding weekend together. Now she seemed insatiable...for him...and he found he could match her desire, kiss for kiss.

She turned to him beneath the warm water from the showerhead, and he found himself facing the Siren from his wedding night, a tempest in his arms, blowing through his guard to an agenda all her own.

She was enticing, the water saturating her hair and making it nearly black, the water droplets cascading down her smooth skin, dripping from her erect nipples in a way that held him speechless with the aching beauty of her.

Completely unaware of his stricken state, Hermione had fascinations of her own. She grasped his erection, her touch bringing him to full and throbbing readiness. Moving closer to study the organ wrapped in her fist, she brought her other hand to bear, groping him as thoroughly as if she meant to record her findings in a scientific journal. She seemed rapt in her study, as if she had been awaiting the opportunity to give him a proper examination in the light of day...was it possible that she had been thinking of his naked body as often as he thought of hers? The notion seemed ludicrous, but her actions seemed to confirm his hypothesis.

Her eager touch upon his cock reminded him of his reason for suggesting this midday shower. He'd always wondered about the feasibility of fucking in the shower and had meant to attempt it with her...but it seemed she had ideas of her own. Ignoring his attempts to distract her from the object of her fascination, she urged him towards the bench seat. He allowed her to impel him to a seated position, watching as she slipped down between his thighs, her questing mouth finding its way to a most welcoming protrusion. He closed his eyes in stupefied surrender with an eerie sense of echoing déjà vu.

10 January, 1998

Fresh from the shower, a bath towel hanging precariously from narrow hips, Severus stood at the basin, straight razor in hand, glaring at his reflection in the age spotted mirror. Behind him, seated on the closed toilet, Hermione combed her wet hair, the bath towel she wore about her hips in imitation of him leaving her breasts bare, which did nothing to improve his concentration. In spite of the late hour, the Pepper-Up hummed through him like some illicit drug, a buoyant feeling of well-being trailing in its wake. Was that a side effect of off-label use? Why had he never encountered mention of it in the literature?

He applied the lather to his face and stroked downward, leaving a swath of hairless, slightly pink skin through the foamy soap. Methodically, he rinsed the blade and continued the rather serious business of shaving. It was unquestionably important to pay attention when positioning a razor against one's throat, and he had never been the sort to skimp on safety precautions.

When he took up a hand towel to wipe the remaining white foam from his face, his eyes met Hermione's in the mirror, and he saw that she had been studying him as if taking notes for a Potions project.

'I like your face,' she said seriously, resuming the detangling of her long hair.

He cocked a brow at her, wondering what angle she was coming from. 'You are in luck, then, because it's part of the package.'

Seeming not to hear the heavy irony, overlain as it was by the cockiness of a man who's just been thoroughly shagged into submission, Hermione continued in a musing tone. 'You're not conventionally handsome ...'

That absurdity startled a bark of laughter from him, and he threw the hand towel aside as he turned to face her.

She appeared to be unfazed by his reaction. 'But you have beautiful dark eyes, good bone structure, and a rather lusciously shaped mouth. You're better than handsome, Severus...you're arresting. I wouldn't change a thing.'

He was human enough to be pleased by her words, however improbable they were. Even so, she had talked long enough. He moved to stand in front of her, and she watched him come, her attitude one of perfect trust and tranquillity. Whatever one might say about his little tempest, she was not afraid of him, and he found that fact puzzling, if pleasing.

'You're all over gooseflesh,' he said, hearing his gruff tone and wishing he sounded smoother...less like a parched man rushing headlong from a long desert trek into a sparkling, clear oasis pool.

Hermione glanced down at her naked torso, crowned by tightly pebbled pink nipples. 'I don't think it's from cold, you know,' she said, raising her eyes to his.

He pulled her to her feet, and the loosely tucked towel fell from her waist, leaving her naked.

'Come back to bed,' he said.

'But I don't want to sleep!'

He couldn't prevent his smirk. 'Who said anything about sleeping?'

Her gurgling laughter brought an answering smile to his lips, but it was the sight of her running naked to the bed, her best womanly bits bouncing like Circe's own gift to man, that created a recurrence of the cresting sensation behind his breastbone. He wondered vaguely if he were having some sort of heart seizure.

Warm beneath the blankets with Hermione, her softness was curled against the hard planes of his body as if it were comfortable for her to be there. They kissed languorously, time bowing to their wishes and stretching like taffy, making each minute longer than the last. She actively sought his caresses, arching and purring beneath his hands like the most pampered of familiars. His body had not fully recovered from his explosive experience in the shower, and yet feelings stirred in his chest, as if his little tempest were actually inside of him, creating divine havoc.

She pushed herself up, so that she gazed down at him, and the tenderness in her expression nearly unmanned him. Stroking still damp hair back from his face, she said, 'There's so much I don't know about you – so much I ought to know, and would, if we had pursued a more ... traditional courtship.'

He snorted, attempting a display of disdain for such a notion, all the while taking care not to dislodge her stroking, soothing touch upon his brow.

'What do you want to know?' he asked, feeling expansive. He could indulge her now...there was absolutely no risk attached to it. It would keep her busy whilst his body recovered the ability to fuck her again...and perhaps it would not be so bad, telling his tempest a bit about himself.

He could always lie, if necessary.

Her face brightened as the prospect of being allowed to ask questions. 'Do you have brothers or sisters?' she asked.

'None.'

She nodded. 'I'm an only child too. It can be lonely...and it is possible to receive too much attention from one's parents.'

He grunted noncommittally, busying himself with twining a bushy brown curl about his finger. He was not going to divulge any details about being the only child of Tobias and Eileen nor discuss the type of attention he had received from them.

'Are your parents alive?'

'They are not,' he replied.

'Oh,' she said, her manner changing. 'I'm sorry, Severus.'

Time to divert her ...

'Did you suspect you were a witch before McGonagall delivered your letter?' he asked, surprised to find that he was interested in the answer.

She chuckled. 'There were loads of times things would happen around me...oh, from about the age of three, I think...and Mum and Dad were very careful to cover for me. I thought I was ... freakish.' Her good humour faded a bit. 'Other kids didn't like me much...in addition to having odd little "accidents", I was the top of my class.'

'... as befits an insufferable know-it-all,' he murmured provocatively, pleased when the haunted look was chased from her face by mock outrage. She punched his arm, inflicting no damage, and he retaliated by toppling her onto her back, his hands imprisoning her wrists.

'Tempest,' he murmured, dipping his nose to her fragrant throat and inhaling the fresh, clean smell of her.

Hermione.

She struggled lightly, and when he released her hands, she stroked his shoulders, turning her head until her cheek rested against his. 'Did you have friends in primary school?' she asked.

'My mother was a witch,' he answered honestly. 'I received home schooling before I went to Hogwarts.'

'So there was no one for you to play with? No other magical children nearby?'

He answered automatically, his defences at full rest, his lungs full of her scent. 'Only one friend,' he said. 'A girl my age. We were friends at school, but we ... grew apart.'

He waited for her to ask the identity of his one friend, wondering if he would speak the name aloud into the sanctity of this sacred tryst.

But she surprised him, turning on her side until they were face to face upon her pillow, her modest, perfectly reasonable nose tip gently grazing his outsize one. 'It was harder to leave my toys behind than my schoolmates,' she confided.

He cupped her cheek with his palm, feeling the gentle curve of her jawbone. 'What was your favourite toy?'

She made a little moue of discomfort. 'Just a silly Muggle toy...popular when I was small.'

Intrigued by her embarrassment, he hazarded a guess. 'A doll?'

Her cheeks flushed pink. 'My Little Pony,' she said, her voice almost too soft to be heard.

He bit the inside of his cheek against the urge to snicker. 'I am ... unfamiliar,' he admitted, once the deadly impulse of laughter had passed him by. 'Perhaps you could acquaint me.'

'They were small plastic horse shapes, in pretty pastel colours, with long manes and tails you could brush or plait.'

'You had ... more than one?' His personal belongings at the time he left for Hogwarts had been negligible before his mother had taken him to Diagon Alley to procure his school things... second-hand, but entirely his. He had known that other children possessed more things than he, but it was still difficult for him to imagine such abundance.

'I collected them. My favourites were the unicorns.' She laughed, her breath puffing against his face. 'When I came here and found out that unicorns were real ... oh, it was as if some silly dream of mine had come true.'

Through the veneer of sophistication his child-bride had acquired over the last seven years, he could still clearly see the wide-eyed child she had been, and a confusion of emotion rattled through him, the only easily recognisable element of which was possession.

She was his now.

'We have no pastel coloured unicorns,' he murmured, simply for something to say. Why were smooth comments, long one of his chief weapons, deserting him now, when a bit of suavity would have served him quite well?

She rose over him, her hair hanging down, her luscious breasts sliding over his chest, stirring his cock again with her fiendish desirability.

'You have far more alluring qualities on offer, I promise you,' Hermione said, and before he could reply, she kissed him.

It was a novel experience, having a woman in the role of aggressor, and for a while he lay beneath her, touching and kissing those parts of her easily within reach...here an ear, there a nipple...until she dumbfounded him by scrambling astride, her bum grazing his more than adequate erection.

'This is ... possible, isn't it?' she asked, looking to him for confirmation even as one of her hands snaked between their bodies, seeking his cock.

'Yes,' he answered, finding he was a bit breathless, even though she was the one exerting energy. 'You ... guide the way, as it were.'

Her lower lip caught between her teeth in concentration, she grasped his shaft and wriggled down, attempting to place the head of his cock at the entrance to her vagina. It took more than one try, but Hermione was nothing if not a determined woman. She kept after it until she achieved her goal, and when he made an experimental thrust upward, his muffled groan of pleasure was overborn in his ears by her audible gasp.

'Oh, Severus! I ... feel you differently.'

She closed her eyes and rocked back, engulfing him in a passage made entirely new by the angle of her body atop him.

'Fuck,' Severus breathed, even as Hermione found her balance on her knees and straightened her spine, sitting neatly astride him, her vaginal muscles tightening and releasing as she accustomed herself to this new experience.

The oil lamps on either side of the bed cast a golden light upon her, limning her silhouette, the entrancing vision becoming the focus of his swiftly narrowing reality. She was splendid, her quickly drying hair wild about her head like a living organism; her breasts bouncing with every rise and fall of her body, the motion mesmerising him; her arrhythmic, less than graceful movements failing to dim his enjoyment of the amazing occurrence.

'I can't seem to get the knack of ... regular rhythm,' she said, placing her palms on his chest and leaning into him for a moment, trying that angle of penetration and mewling with the pleasure of it.

He stared at her dangling breasts, hanging like fruit ripe for the picking, and he palmed the inviting globes and gave a gentle squeeze.

'Do what pleases you,' he suggested, thinking he could remain in this position with this visual delight for hours without tiring of it.

She did not reply, but it seemed she must have heard him and taken his words to heart, for she made more experimental moves, finding one that pleased her at last, and she proceeded to pleasure herself, her expressive face mapping for him the progress of her journey. Her motions were too irregular to put him in danger of ejaculation, thus ending her fun. He contented himself with stroking her flanks, gently pinching her nipples, and storing this encounter in his memory, swearing never to forget an instant.

She was as lissom as any love nymph, arching her back, her breasts thrust upward towards the heavens, and she lifted her heavy hair from her neck, allowing it to fall again, her crown and glory. Her breath quickened, her hips maintaining a more heated tempo, and her lips parted as her eyelids drifted down, as if her vision were blurring. Severus coated his fingertips with saliva and touched the dark rose petals of her quim, applying pressure at the nerve centric apex.

Hermione gasped, her eyes flying open in comprehension, and her fingers replaced his, moving in firm, sure strokes, completing the circuit of heady pleasure she had pursued so doggedly from her perch atop his bollocks. She gave voice to her completion, her cries seeming to echo about the rafters of the small cottage, and Severus was spurred to new action. Feeling as if he would burst with the surge of blind passion sparked by his lover's abandoned performance, he grasped her hips in a vise-like grip and drove upwards into her spasming muscles, once, twice, thrice...and his ejaculation tore a hoarse shout from his throat.

His muscles were still clenched with the effort of it all when a sweaty Hermione slid from his body onto the mattress beside him, both of them hot and breathless.

In spite of the Pepper-Up, the exigencies of the day fell upon him all at once, an overwhelming, paralysing lethargy, part satiation and part well-earned exhaustion.

'I apologize in advance, little tempest,' he said, turning on his side towards her, hearing the thick slur of his words. 'I must ... leave you for a bit, to sleep.' He forced his eyes to remain open, gazing into her beautifully flushed face. 'You'll stay in the cottage? Close by?'

She kissed his cheek. 'I promise I will be here or in the sitting room,' she said. 'I can read or revise...I won't go outside.'

He was satisfied with that reassurance, and with one last look at his bride, he fell deeply into exhausted sleep.

The fire in the hearth had begun to die down, and the woman in the fluffy pink dressing gown tended to it, stoking the embers, adding wood, and encouraging it to burn brightly. She hummed as she worked, a dreamy, faraway look in her eyes, as if her thoughts were not confined to the cosy cottage on a quiet side street in Hogsmeade.

From the sitting room she found her way into the kitchen, where she prepared a plate of provisions from those left by the Hogwarts house-elves, who had arranged a honeymoon hideaway with commendable speed and thoroughness. Sitting at the little table scattered now with the petals of pink and white wedding roses, she Summoned her ubiquitous bag and delved inside, producing a sheaf of parchment and a Self-Inking Quill. As an afterthought she also brought out a new-looking book entitled Transcendent Quality of Remembrance by Professor Moneta Muninn.

The bushy haired witch seemed to daydream over her pre-dawn meal, sipping champagne, doodling amongst other things her new married name...and the name of her new husband...on her parchment, embellishing the names with carefully drawn, leaf-strewn rose vines. She added one fat, primary-school Valentine's heart with an arrow through, but quickly scratched it out, completely obliterating it with black ink scribbles.

She picked at the cold sliced chicken on her plate, staring at the wall, then extracted a pink rose from the bouquet adorning the table and plucked a petal from it, watching it fall onto her plate amongst the chicken bits. She plucked another, and another, and it became clear she was murmuring to herself as she denuded the rose stem of its pink adornment. When the last petal fluttered to the pile now obscuring the food on her plate, she smirked to herself and took another drink of champagne.

She abandoned the plate on the table, but carried the wine, the book, and her parchment and quill into the sitting room, where she curled up before the fire. Her fingertips passed over lips made puffy by repetitive, emphatic kissing, and she stroked the palm of her hand down her torso, as if remembering another touch. A rather silly smile touched those kiss-bruised lips, to be followed by slowly narrowing eyes and the tilt of her head: a classic ah-ha! moment.

She looked over her shoulder, up to the loft where her companion slept the sleep of the well-shagged. Seemingly satisfied, she took up her wand, tracing it over a small section of the parchment, until she held a scrap no larger than her pinkie finger, with one word written upon it. Next, she traced the wand tip along the inner hinge of Transcendent Quality of Remembrance, creating an opening where the endpaper was pasted to the front cover board. Into the opening, she carefully inserted the parchment scrap, pushing it in far enough that repairing the gap between the end paper and the front cover would not leave any parchment sticking out the opening. Another touch of her wand to the inner hinge of the book repaired the rent perfectly, as if it had never been there.

But still she seemed dissatisfied. She opened the hidden space again, this time mending the tear less perfectly; when she was finished, there was the tiniest rip of the endpaper. Not enough for anyone to notice ... anyone, that is, who was not a died-in-the-wool, perfectionist bibliophile.

Contented at last, she set aside all but the wine and sipped whilst staring into the fire, as if she had all the time in the world...as if time were not the enemy ticking away every last second of any chance she had for lasting happiness.

7 July, 1998

Comfortable beneath the sheets with Hermione draped across him as if he were her personal body pillow, Severus had the taste of her quim still upon his tongue...the residue of his ejaculate was dried upon her cheek, a flaky white spot he would kiss from her face before escorting her downstairs to dinner. Her performance in the shower had been a near perfect re-enactment of the one on their wedding night, but she had been oblivious to his amazement: to her, it was all brand new.

How could it be that she evidenced perfect recall of events he knew for a fact had been purged from her mind by a Dark potion he had brewed with his own hands? What could it mean? The old witches' tales that told of a remedy for the Lethe Elixir were naught but fantasy...such a thing would never happen.

She stirred in his arms, rolling away from him to the cooler side of the bed. He permitted her to go, studying the delicate curve of her impossibly soft-skinned back...and then he spooned behind her, burying his face in her damp, clean-smelling hair.

A/N:This week's song, with the heartwrenching lyrics I quoted at the beginning of this chapter, was on my playlist for almost all of the writing period of 14 months. It is David Hodges singing When It All Goes Away. Another delicious line is, "I will keep what we've started in my mind, love/ Yet I can not help but be brokenhearted and undone now." You may listen to it on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OU6qCbdaNM