Hurt

In deepest gratitude to JKR for not only creating all that you recognize here, but for allowing her world to be open to others to explore.

And as always, thanks to my beta, Leigh-Anne. I posted questions about writing fanfic (this is my first) and amongst the responses was her offer to beta. How much luckier could I get?

14. HURT

He saw the weak bolt of red but was so startled he didn't dodge it. He landed hard, flat on his back.

Damn the girl!

But he could still breathe, still move, still stagger to his feet.

He stood, gasping, clutching his sides.

He didn't delude himself. The only reason he wasn't laid out for the count was because she only wanted to slow him down. She was too strong a witch to have tossed such a halfhearted curse unintentionally.

She'd done what she intended. She'd bought herself time.

By now she was Merlin knew where.

He forced himself to think like a Gryffindor.

She would go somewhere nobody in their right mind would go, assuming nobody would think to go there to find her.

Her refuge would be dramatic and foolhardy.

He allowed himself a tight smile.

The weather that would keep even the most hormonal teenaged wizards and witches indoors was on his side.

Not even when he flung wide the door at the top of the Astronomy Tower and was hit with the full force of the wind and rain did he doubt his conclusion.

Not even when a stroke of lightning followed by a crash of thunder lit the parapets like daylight and revealed no bushy haired girl huddled against the wall.

He walked into the forces of nature and let the door blow closed behind him.

And found her standing behind it, her face twisted with rage. Somehow even the torrential rain hadn't sleeked her hair to her face. His own hair already clung to his face, his eyes, his mouth; hers blew around her as if it had its own life force.

"Can't you even allow me this? A place to lick my wounds in peace?" She yanked away from him as if he'd reached for her.

He hadn't.

Something kept him at bay, something undefined but primal in her defensive stance. Her wand hand was hidden in the folds of her cloak. If he didn't know better, he would think she was one twitch away from truly and thoroughly hexing him.

In fact, he didn't know better.

"It was meant to be a compliment."

"That my husband, who knows I came to his bed a virgin, thinks I routinely service boys by sucking their cocks?"

"That your husband, who is so staggered that someone else hadn't already deflowered you before you came to his bed, concluded tonight that you had developed some pretty impressive skills to satisfy teenaged boys...whom you yourself announced only live to rut...in order to protect yourself from their more unwelcome advances."

Her laughter was bitter, on the edge of hysteria. She slid down the wall until she was sitting.

He dropped to a crouch in front of her and felt not a whit of guilt (hadn't she chosen him because he fought dirty?) as he leaned close and pressed her shoulders against the stone wall so that their eyes were close, and waited for another stroke of lightning...

And when it lit her face in stark black and white, a delicate face dominated by fierce, wild eyes, it took not a split second for him to stare into those eyes...

"Legilimens."

And enter.

It took her too long to realize what was happening, because he was rapid and ruthless, and she had no chance to stop him, nor experience to repel him. And it didn't take long to find the memories, which he flashed through with razor-like precision.

Weasley and Potter, teasing her homework out of her, and her feelings of fondness...fondness!...as she let them get away with it.

Longbottom, so insipidly grateful that she corrected his potion.

Potter, asking her to take his books to the Gryffindor common room so he could chase off after Chang, the Ravenclaw.

Weasley, punching her in the arm and laughing then stopping mid-sentence to gawk at a seventh-year Hufflepuff witch whose endowments had caused more than one Slytherin boy to eye her lustfully, as well.

But none of this was what he sought...he dug deeper, feeling her tremble under his hands, knowing he had pushed far beyond the bounds of anything ethical.

And found Krum.

Krum, kissing her. Krum, grinding against her, kneading her, bringing her nothing but discomfort and confusion, as he whispered harsh words in her ear and pleaded for completion.

And finally...he could almost hate himself for it...he found a dark night memory of a narrow four-poster bed, of her own urgent attempts to feel something, anything, as she fondled her own breasts, and touched herself tentatively...

And then, when he was ready to pull out, a memory that he realized she'd tried to block off sliced into him.

The expression of dismay on his own features as he saw her nude body for the first time.

Fuck.

He closed his eyes and she slumped to the ground, trembling, her teeth chattering, staring blindly ahead, and not even blinking away the rain.

He was a fucking bastard.

He'd never claimed to be anything else, though.

She certainly couldn't have expected him to be anything else.

He bit back a torrent of obscenities and lifted her from the puddle of icy water and didn't realize until he was halfway to the dungeons that his body trembled as wildly as hers.

#

By some miracle, he managed to get them both back to his quarters without being seen. The wards released and then closed after him, and finally they were in the warmth of fire and warming spells.

"Can you stand?" he asked.

She nodded, and he stood her up and started to remove her sodden cloak, but she brushed his hands away and did it herself. He started to cast a drying charm, but she did it herself.

Somehow, he ended up being the one who was drenched and shivering, as she went matter-of-factly about preparing tea.

"Miss Granger..."

"It's all right," she said. "It's easier this way. At least you understand."

Oh, he understood, all right. He simply wasn't at all certain that they understood the same things.

He gave up on working buttons with his icy fingers and whipped the robe off over his head. "Don't make assumptions. Tell me what you think I understand."

She glared at him. "You're not stupid. You're not Ron!" And then realized what she'd said and covered her mouth.

He was rather proud of himself for letting that pass.

And again, he could almost hate himself for making her say it, but he had to know, he had to know what he was dealing with, and even having seen everything he'd seen, he didn't trust himself to draw the correct conclusions, no matter how obvious they might seem.

"Please," he said. "Tell me what you want me to understand."

And his "please" seemed to catch her by surprise, almost as much as it did him. But then her body tensed and the pinched lines appeared between her eyebrows as she avoided his gaze. "You are humiliating me."

"That is not my intention. I'd prefer not to leap to another wrong conclusion."

She looked him straight in the eye, defiant if foolhardy, and announced, "You are the only one I ever wanted to please."

Which was definitely not what he expected to hear.

He stared straight back at her, waiting for something to make sense. That made no sense at all.

She would have wanted to please Krum, certainly. Well, maybe not Weasley, that wasn't hard to accept. But Krum?

He realized she was still staring into his eyes, searching, frustrated. "Don't you understand? Remember me? The insufferable little know-it-all who has to learn everything from books? Those things I did...I learned from books!"

Her cheeks flamed with what could only be shame, and he felt a right bastard indeed, but before he could say a word or make a move to cross the room, she shattered him.

"I would do anything...anything at all. I would take Polyjuice Potion. I would take Heart's Desire. I would do anything, be anything to please you."

She stared at him with those huge, soft brown eyes. "No one would ever need to know."

He sunk heavily into his club chair and stared at her from beneath his hair. How did she do that, he thought resentfully. How the fuck did she do that?

He tugged his boots off, and before he could do it, she'd flicked her wand and dried the carpets and moved his boots near the fire.

He cast his own drying charm and sank back and just watched her, watched her move across the room as she prepared the tea tray, watched her nibble her lower lip, watched her fling her hair out of her face and tuck it behind her ears and keep fighting with it, and he bloody well expected to find a hank of hair in his teacup when she brought it to him.

Without pausing to think, he stood up and walked up behind her. "Hold on," he said and pulled her hair back and up and gave it a twist, then snatched her wand out of her wand pocket and plunged it through the ruddy mess at a diagonal.

It stayed.

She turned to him, her lips parted in surprise.

"I knew someone once who..."

She nodded, and went back to the tea, touching a loose tendril of hair on her neck tentatively, but leaving it up.

"I need to check on my House," he said, suddenly awkward.

Again, she nodded. "Tea will be ready in about seven minutes. But if you aren't back, I'll make you fresh."

He couldn't get out of there fast enough.

He burst into the Slytherin common room with more force than necessary, hoping to find a disaster of momentous proportions, something dangerous enough to demand his attention for hours, to justify not returning to his quarters...his own goddamned quarters...until dawn.

But there wasn't the slightest whiff of alcohol or any other illegal substance, for that matter. The only cigarette smoke wafted from the seventh-year salon, where it was allowed. The lower years were not in evidence, having already gone to bed. The never-ending poker game continued beneath Salazar Slytherin's crest, and a few sixth years lounged and chatted in desultory conversation.

He made his rounds but didn't find a single excuse to linger.

He reentered his quarters, seething. All he needed was an excuse, any excuse, to blow up, to let his guilt get subsumed by anger, and he could feel himself again.

He scowled at the tea that awaited him, pure heaven in a cup, and forced himself to drink it.

Her determination to please him, to excuse his inexcusable insult and even cater to him was so damned despicable he found himself looking for Slytherin-like ulterior motives.

But she had none.

He wanted to rail at her for teasing him, for taunting him with her femininity...but she didn't do those things. The shirt she'd charmed to fit herself didn't cling, nor did the throat dip low to reveal cleavage. But every time he closed his eyes, he saw her wearing it, felt it sliding over her skin as if he were the one sliding over her, and the effect it had on him was as heated as if she'd been wearing something obscene.

Why would she want something of his against her skin? She had an entire trunk to choose from now, but she kept wearing his shirt....

And then, her body.

Her body was tight and long and lean and her breasts small and firm, and he liked his women soft and full and voluptuous, yet he'd never seen or touched a body that had as much power to render him almost incoherent with need.

He could catalog her faults and her characteristics and come up with a list of everything he'd ever disdained, but now they combined to drive him mad with longing.

He had to believe it was simply her proximity.

The knowledge that this body that was his for the taking.

That was all it could be.

It was driving him insane.

He did not like this life.

He did not like this weakness.

He did not like the guilt that gnawed at him, guilt for not being what she needed and what she deserved...

Guilt for being the only thing she had.

This was a responsibility he had not asked for, and he refused to feel beholden to it.

Teaching was his profession, but these were the kinds of lessons his enemies would expect him to indulge in. He wasn't a dirty old git who preyed on innocence. He harbored no fantasies of introducing students to the pleasures of the flesh.

He had never in his fucking life fantasized about a student.

He did not want this.

It was not his place to teach her that she wasn't what those bloody blind Gryffindors had convinced her she was, simply by not seeing her!

If only Krum hadn't been a bloody hormonal teenager, too. If he had a Time-Turner, he'd go back in time and hand the fucking boy a sex manual.

He jerked to his feet and paced before the fireplace, ignoring her startled intake of breath, not allowing himself to even look in her direction at her fucking huge eyes.

He was doing everything he'd promised to do, blast it.

He was keeping her safe.

He was securing her opportunity for education.

He was protecting her.

That was enough.

It had to be, because he couldn't be other than who he was.

Especially when he was a man with a raging desire to please the stupid little know-it-all in turn, the way she had pleased him!

However....

If his self-recrimination took a sharp turn and transformed an act of pleasing an insufferable know-it-all into an act of self-pleasure... if this weren't about pleasing her at all...but about assuaging his own desires...

Well then, wasn't that a very Slytherin train of thought, after all?

"Miss Granger," he said silkily, and oh he did know how to turn his voice to silk.

"Come. Please me."

X

She couldn't breathe.

He was slouched in his chair, peering at her from beneath a heavy fall of hair, holding out one elegant hand, beckoning her.

She calmed herself.

Whatever he wanted, she could do this. She'd enjoyed what they'd done before up to the point where he'd...

No, she couldn't let herself think about that. She'd enjoyed giving him pleasure, and she had so much more to learn.

She dropped between his open legs, leaned against one knee and half-smiled up at him.

His fingers traced her cheek and she jerked away. "That tickles," she said, embarrassed.

He arched an eyebrow at her and suddenly took her upper arm and pulled her to her feet. "I think we'd be more comfortable over here, don't you?"

And he had her at the bed.

Her pulse pounded. She reached up to kiss him, but he turned his head away. She nibbled his throat instead...she liked that, nibbling...and he tensed and groaned.

Oh, yes, she could do this. She wanted to do this.

And then, his hand was inside her shirt, closing over her bare breast. Her breasts were quite inadequate, and having his hand there only made her more humiliatingly aware of that fact. Her hand flew up to cover his, to try and pull it away, but it only caused him to... to caress her.

She drew back, anguished. What was he...why was he doing this?

He released her, pushed her gently down on the bed.

"Relax," he said in that voice that curled through her body and took up residence somewhere in her core. "Don't think. Just let me touch you."

She froze.

He stroked the bare skin beneath her breast, and she jerked upright.

"Shhh..." he soothed. "It's all right."

But it wasn't. She thought he'd understood what he'd seen! "Professor, please. Let me..." She reached for the bulge between his legs.

He gasped, let her touch, rub... then seemed to come to his senses and wrenched himself away.

"Give me a little credit, Miss Granger. It will be better if we both get pleasure from the act."

She turned her head away from him. Her eyes burned as she stared blindly at a wall of books and tensed, determined to endure his efforts to arouse her until he realized the futility. Or maybe, maybe she could fake it? Women did that. She wondered if she could fake something she'd never felt....

He closed his hands around her hips and pulled her to the edge of the bed, where he knelt between her knees.

She tried to roll away, but he held her firmly.

With his free hand, he stroked her inner thigh.

She jumped, tried to clamp her legs together, but he held them open, stayed between them.

"I'm...I'm ticklish," she protested.

This time, he allowed his palm to slide up her thigh instead of his fingers. This time, it didn't tickle.... Perhaps she could have handled that if it had been just that, but he didn't stop there.

She flinched when he touched her.

Gasped when one finger gently stroked her.

Cried out when he applied a firmer pressure.

Endured the silence that followed, and then...

"Fucking bloody hell!"

"What?" she gasped. She rose up on her elbows, frantic, and saw his face. "What's wrong?"

He looked stunned, and filled with what ridiculously appeared to be self-loathing, as he winced and hung his head. "Why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you...pull on your robe. We're going to Madam Pomfrey."

"We most certainly are not!" She scrambled to get away from him, but he closed his hands over her ankles and held her.

"You need medical attention," he ground out.

"Don't be ridiculous," she snapped back. "I was a virgin. I'm a little tender. That's what happens."

"A little tender? Is that what you call this...this..." he fumbled for words, "...injury?"

"I'm not injured!" But, she began to feel uneasy. "Am I?"

"Miss Granger... " His words seemed choked from deep within him, and his eyes were as black and hollow as she'd ever seen them. "I...I brutalized you."

"Professor," she said soothingly, "you simply did what had to be done. And it's fine, I promise, it's much better and I don't even have to use cushioning spells to sit any more, and I'm hardly even aware of it, now..."

"It was a week ago! You shouldn't be tender, and you...you..." his eyes went back to the junction of her thighs. "I gave you a healing potion. Why the hell didn't you use it?"

"I used it all on you!"

"You should have told me! Why haven't you...it's been a week, Merlin's bollocks, girl, why haven't you said something, gone to Madam Pomfrey, done something?"

"Well, let me think back," she snapped. "Oh yes, a week. First four days, taking care of you." She looked ceilingward. "Then there was the Sorting, my parents, classes...and besides, this is normal for a virgin! I read it in a..."

"Fucking bloody book."

She clamped her mouth shut. But. He was scaring her.

"Miss Granger," he said, his voice low. "Please. Let me take you to Madam Pomfrey."

"No!" And without thinking, she yanked her wand from her hair and aimed it between her knees at his face. "You take care of it! I took care of you, damn you, and you are going to take care of me! I'm not spreading my legs open for all and sundry to stare at my genitalia!"

"It's not all and sundry! She's a medical professional!"

"You're the only one who has ever seen me down there, and the only one who ever will see me down there, and you are going to do the best you bloody well can...which I am sure is probably better than anything Madam Pomfrey can do, anyway."

"You're deluded," he snapped.

"I don't care. Do your best. I won't complain."

He hung his head and shook it, burying his face in his hands. "I'm the one who did this. How can you trust me at all? How can you want me, of all people, to... "

"Look at me."

He did.

"Nobody else is going to see this. I refuse to be the subject of false stories, to have people think you are cruel, that you..."

"You mean you are refusing medical treatment to protect me?" Dismay, disbelief and frustration clearly warred on his usually unreadable face.

"And why wouldn't I? You're protecting me."

"Miss Granger, I am cruel. Nothing you do can change a reputation I justly deserve."

"You aren't cruel to me," she said softly. "I won't have people thinking otherwise."

He pulled away from her as if to get up, to leave, his expression incredulous.

She lunged forward and dug her fingers into his hair and held him there, until their faces were close. "Do you think the Malfoys would have been more gentle?"

He jerked his face up to meet her glare. Then turned his head away.

"Do you think when I give birth it will be gentle?" she demanded even more fiercely.

He glanced down at the juncture of her thighs and paled, which she would not have thought possible, all things considered.

She allowed her voice to gentle. "Do you think I blame you because it was difficult? It was difficult for both of us. Do you think I don't know that?"

"You are far too forgiving," he snarled.

"Oh, piffle!" She threw herself back on the pillow.

She heard a strange noise.

She raised her head again and looked. He was grinding his teeth.

"I'm sure you know a potion that will take care of everything. Just do it."

He let out a frustrated snort and grabbed her hand to pull her to a sitting position. "I have to fetch some things; we will be brewing tonight, I fear. In the meantime, you're going into a hot bath to soak until I get back."

"You won't be long, will you?" She felt a sudden emptiness at the thought of him leaving.

"No."

"All right, then."

She followed him docilely into the bathroom.