Chapter Two - Binding

Thank you for all the lovely comments! I'm really glad you are enjoying the fic. I apologise for being so untimely in replying to responses. My email account was automatically sending all my TPP alerts to Spam, so I didn't know I was receiving any reviews. I was starting to think you didn't like the fic at all! :P

The usual disclaimer still applies. I still don't own these characters. Darn it... :)

A year after my official pardon and recovery, I screwed my courage to the sticking place, turned up in Minerva's office and, while pointedly ignoring Dumbledore's portrait, asked for my old Potions job back. Minerva, puzzled but relieved, was able to stop mentally hexing Slughorn for bailing on her, and happily offered me the position with a pay raise and a side order of remorse-ridden tenderness.

Contrary to what many think about my stubborn pride, I found her constant attempt to atone for her behaviour during the last year of the war to be a balm to my healing self-confidence. If she made said attempt by giving me more money and remembering to stock my favourite chocolate biscuits for our afternoon tea together, who was I to say nay? She had once been a friend; I was not going to bite the hand that esteemed me.

If Minerva was surprised that I had returned to Hogwarts, she was nearly poleaxed when Hermione Granger showed up nine months later begging me to take her on as an apprentice. For several years afterward, Minerva regularly dined out on the story; she'd already had the consolation/commiseration tea and biscuits ready for the surely-to-be disappointed Miss Granger when said young lady came skipping up the stairs, exclaiming, "He said yes! He said yes!"

I tried to start with the basics, based on my own apprenticeship, but to be perfectly honest, those days are lost in a wash of fear, anguish and retribution. To keep an eye on me after I cravenly begged him for my life and Lily's protection, Dumbledore had placed me on what was essentially a fast-track apprenticeship with him to become a Potions master. The school needed one, and he needed me close so he could keep an eye on me. I was adept enough, having concocted several rather unspeakable potions for Tom Riddle in his early days.

What little I do remember is filtered through a sandpaper haze of resentment and awkwardness, compounded by distaste for Albus and his less-than-subtle hints on extending my apprenticeship to another level of partnership entirely. To say I was repulsed is an understatement. Aside from being completely certain I was a heterosexual wizard, I was determined to make it the only control over my life he would never have. Broken-hearted or not, sex with Albus Dumbledore was the last thing I wanted, and I frequently told him so. It was the only 'No' he would take for an answer. I guess I should've been grateful for that, at least.

As far as most Masters are concerned, Albus included, an apprentice is basically an unpaid slave to boss around for the requisite number of years until receiving their own degree. I had been a glorious exception; I'd only apprenticed three and a bit years before becoming the youngest Potions master in the school's history. I confess I took great pleasure in telling Hermione this as she signed the next seven years of her life away. I thought it would give her confidence in my abilities to be a proper Master; it only served to make me look rather petty and smug.

There had been stipulations, of course. Hermione hadn't expected me, the Arch-Slytherin of all Slytherins, not to have my own agenda. Shortly before our binding ceremony as Master and apprentice, I sat her down and calmly stated The Rules. At that point, I was pretty much making them up as I went.

Looking across the desk at Hermione was more than a little surreal to me. I remembered so well the first time she'd sat in this very classroom. I had crashed through the door and proceeded to enthrall them with the speech I still make to all first years. Her eleven year-old self watched me with a thrill of fear and awe, and had tried so hard to earn, if not my liking, at least my respect.

It had taken her three years to get it through her skull that, no matter what she did, no matter how hard she worked or how much she tried to please me, my regard would never, could never be given. Knowing her as I do, it must have hurt to realise that, no matter what she did, I would never like her. She was insufferable then, that much is true. What the other teachers saw as budding genius, I saw as strutting arrogance. I was holding up my mirror to her, pretending not to notice that we were so much alike I was tarring her with my own brush.

Now, a woman faced me. Gone was her girlish, almost painful desire to be liked. One got the feeling that Hermione had emerged from the war as a take-me-or-leave-me kind of woman. I liked the sharp intelligence shining restlessly from her amber eyes.

She was thinner now; those aforementioned eyes looked a bit too large and haggard in her heart-shaped face. It was surrounded by a riotous mass of curling hair which had always looked like Devil's Snare in her youth. Time and cosmetics had marginally tamed it, but the hair of a powerfully magical being is ever capricious and ever more tempestuous than its owner. I can say without conceit that I am a supremely magical being, and one has to look only as far as my own unconscionable locks to attest to this. The phrase 'go where ye list' could well have been attributed to magical hair such as ours.

And so she appeared at my door, asking for an apprenticeship. She was seething with bitterness so familiar it sickened me. During the entire interview I could almost see resentment and anger bubbling under her skin. Lupin told me she'd had a ferocious falling out with Weasley and had even checked herself into St. Mungo's, in case her uncontrolled anger was somehow curse-related. I performed my own tests surreptitiously. I could not rule out the possibility that she'd been cursed during the battle, but I found nothing but her own restless distress. She practically vibrated with it.

I suspected that, when the anger beneath her skin roiled uncontrollably, she often lashed out, probably alone - like a safety valve preventing a complete explosion. I understood. I used to blast rose bushes when my own suppressed fury got the better of me. Poor Pomona! I spent many a summer holiday replanting her ornamental flora during my tenure as a professor here.

The latest reports, however, were worrisome. Oh, I'd heard that Hermione had gained a vicious temper since the war, but I was not terribly surprised. I remember all too well watching her boss and bully Potter and Weasley around Hogwarts when she was nothing more than one of Minerva's little cubs. Not even fourteen, but as tough and uncompromising as her house's mascot.

I don't deny feeling a rather resentful debt to her. I had only just gotten control over my own life; why would I want to take charge of another's, especially one so aggressive and unstable? But what if I didn't? What would she do without some sort of guidance? Could I truly make a difference – and more importantly, did I want to?

When Lupin originally encouraged me to apprentice her, of course I balked. I had never wanted an apprentice. To me, taking on an apprentice held all the attraction of a seven-year punishment for breaking a mirror one never particularly liked in the first place. Lupin hinted that he feared Hermione might start self-harming, and in his words, 'she'd been inflicted with enough scars.' I began to feel a sense of obligation I wasn't sure I wanted to accept, but I know myself enough to know that, first and foremost, I answer duty when it calls me. Both a strength and a weakness of my character, I feel. But where was she to go, now that she had pushed away everyone who had ever cared about her? I lay awake the night before our Master/apprentice bonding, and thought about my own alienation with the world, and shivered.

I won't say I changed overnight; that would be trite and unrealistic. But I did change. Watching the sure-footed witch, grown misshapen into this stunted, repressed, angry woman, broke something in me that I no longer saw necessary to repair. I knew I could not 'fix' her, as Lupin so charmingly suggested. But I could guide her. I could show her how to fix herself. I wanted to. I wanted her to want me to. And so I bonded to her, as Master and apprentice, for seven years. Gods, what had I gotten myself into?

She was not merely a woman; she was womanly now, and I found I appreciated her physically as well as intellectually. This should have sent alarm bells careening through my head, but I was still seeing her as a former student. It was only later that all these factors merged together, but by then, I was leading her from the consecrated circle of our bonding ceremony.

Minerva presided over the bonding ceremony, looking as proud of the soon-to-be Master and apprentice as if she'd hatched them from her own eggs. Hermione stood on the outside of the ceremonial circle, watching Snape as he started the purification ritual. It was a long ceremony that required two days of prior fasting. Hermione was exhausted before it even began. She'd not slept at all the night before, questioning herself over and over if she was truly doing the right thing. By the time the ritual started, she was trembling.

He stood before Professor McGonagall, tall, dignified and proud, in a long black cossack-style robe of fine, elf-spun silk. In the natural light it had a dull sheen to it that made it look deep grey in one play of the light, and stark black in the next. Floor-length panels of blackest velvet were set beneath the arms and the same velvet cuffed the long drop sleeves. A high nehru-style collar, also velvet trimmed, was the only outward concession to his vanity, as it hid the worst of the scarring from sight.

Velvet buttons marched down the front of the robe in precise three-inch intervals; buttons marched down each leg and down from elbow to wrist on the tunic beneath the robe. Silken tassels dropped from the back of the hooded cowl that sat loosely at the crown of his head, and smaller but matching tassels weighed down each end of the almost foot-wide sash belt that girded his slender waist.

His black hair spilled over his shoulders and glistened in the sunlight like a cormorant's wing, and his dragon-hide boots looked soft and quality-made. Contrasting all this darkness, his pale face and hands shone starkly from the confines of his robe. He looked like a figure out of time, at once foreboding and alluring. His expression was calm, almost zen-like, and Hermione knew that he was in a type of trance. It was a trance she would experience herself later in the bonding ritual.

After he had been anointed by purified water, Snape dried his hands on a pure white muslin, then turned and formally called to her in a voice so softly mesmeric she obeyed him before having any conscious thought to do so. He held out his hand; she took it and stepped into the consecrated circle. His eyes briefly flickered over her for the first time that day.

Hermione's robe was also new, a deep crimson silk garment with flared sleeves and a cowled hood encrusted with garnets. It was a heavy, beautiful robe she knew she would never wear again. But when her Master glanced at her from head to toe, he nodded, quietly approving. Perhaps for the first time, Hermione felt worthy, as if his acknowledgement was a validation of her abilities. If the look meant anything else, she wasn't sure she wanted to explore it.

At the correct moment, his hands spooned beneath her palms, and he raised them both to be magically entwined in the cords of bonding. While his hands were steady, Hermione could feel her arm trembling with the effort to keep them in place. At that point, Master Snape turned to her and said formally, "It is my task to lift you up, Apprentice. In this and all other matters, you will rely on my strength to hold you true."

The words were formal and stilted, but there was a depth to his hypnotic tones that made Hermione oddly emotional. She relaxed the muscles of her arms, and as if already keeping a promise, Master Snape held her arm so steadily no one noticed that she had actually let him take over.

Later, she knelt at his feet to show the ritualistic Subjugation to the Master's Will. When Snape symbolically helped her to her feet to show his Promise of Support, and led the apprentice from the circle into their new life together, Hermione clung to her new Master tightly.

At the end of the day, to her eternal regret, Hermione was left with only a dim recollection of the exact wording and meaning of most of the ceremony. Looking back, all she could truly remember was the dancing tassels on Snape's belt, and his dark eyes gazing calmly into hers as he recited the Pledge of the Master, and the feel of his strong arms holding hers steady and even. The rest of the ceremony seemed, if not strictly a waste of time, rather more than she could deal with at that point.

She was as beautiful as a goddess to me that day. Oh, she looked as tired as I felt, and had no doubt got as little sleep as I. But I can still see her in those crimson robes, her feet bare to represent her humility to her Master. When I raised my hands to bind hers to mine, I was afraid she would feel them shaking. Her hands, clasped over mine, were warm, and she gave me a tiny, weary smile as we were magically bound together. I could barely look at her for fear that I would collapse at her feet in fear. She looked powerful and regal, and I felt like a fraud in my spectacular robes.

When we knelt to take our vows, I looked into her amber eyes and promised to be the perfect Master, and she answered the promise to be the most attentive and humble apprentice. I meant my vow. I wanted to be perfect. As we walked from the circle, I felt as if I was the one leaning on her for support, but she never made mention of it.