by kai
March 2003
Lessons in love and trust.
Shortly before midnight, you set aside your quill with shaking hands, straighten the papers on your desk, then depart for your adjoining suite in Slytherin Tower.
Once there, you quickly shower, shave, and rub your skin with fragrant oil; your lesson will begin soon and Severus will be...most displeased if, upon his arrival, you are unprepared.
Fortunately, when the clock chimes twelve, your ablutions are complete. Midnight finds you kneeling at the foot of your bed, wand in hand, back to the door, naked beneath your winter robes. Your glasses lay folded on the bed table and your eyes are closed.
You would welcome a basilisk now, or perhaps a corps of Death Eaters, wands ablaze. A medusa, a hydra, an acre wide sinkhole to swallow Hogwarts whole, anything...but then the wards ripple their warning over your skin.
You flinch at the click of the lock.
The door swings wide; the breeze chills the sweat on the back of your neck.
Four steps into the room: the hex is on your lips and his hands are at your throat.
And so the lesson begins.
Had you slept in a proper bed, in a proper room for eleven years, things might be different. Had your parents lived, had Sirius been less distraught and more canny, had Petunia and Vernon been quicker to hug than to shout or hit, then perhaps. Maybe:
Your instincts wouldn't shriek themselves hoarse at your predicament.
Your lips wouldn't bleed when you bite back the hex, unspoken.
Your body wouldn't tremble its outraged negation when you place your wand in his hand, then allow him to buckle the collar round your throat.
If your gut, your bones, your skin knew the secret language that all infants are meant to learn from birth; if you were obliviously bilingual, like Hermione or Ron.
If.
You wouldn't cry out in despair when he knots the blindfold and whispers, "Occulto occulus."
Tears wouldn't soak through the scarf and wet your cheeks when he clips the leash to your collar; you wouldn't stumble on the journey down the hidden back stairs into the dungeons.
The tang of blood and leather wouldn't mingle in your mouth when you kneel and kiss the handle of the fire-whip.
If.
The declensions and conjugations of that ancient tongue had been written upon your skin in their proper order and time, then:
There would be no need for your lover to scribe its lexicon, its complex grammar of sensation, submission, and trust upon your nakedness in darkness, blood, and pain.
But.
Lily and James died. Sirius went to hell. You lived in a cupboard and slept on a cot, and though the Dursleys taught you to dodge and duck, the required lesson in trust and touch went awry.
And so, Severus must lash it into your ignorant skin, stripe after meticulous, bloody stripe. The simplest words first, then phrases, and finally entire dissertations of intricate, flame-wrought runes adorn your quivering skin-turned-parchment.
You, in turn, must kneel obediently at his feet and recite the lesson back, word perfect: you must find--teetering at the brink of the abyss--the courage to believe that he will catch you if you should fall.
###
Much later, after the floors have been spelled clean of your blood, when your pain has eased, while the runes smolder beneath your skin, you both lie abed in a sweaty tangle of limbs. There, Severus repeats the lesson in a quieter voice, this time with his hands, his lips, his tongue.
Your recitation is rendered in sighs.
No other of your lovers has matched his pedagogical virtuosity.
And in the depths of night--when your despair is most acute, when you jolt awake, heart pounding, reaching for your wand--you instead trace his lean limbs with a trembling fingertip:
You rediscover hope and courage in the patterns of his own long-ago lessons that lie beneath his skin.
Finis.
Warning: D/s themes