Chapter Text
For years, Severus has managed to treat Harriet Potter like any other student. Perhaps he is slightly more lenient when she makes mistakes. He doesn’t harshly criticize her, but neither does he treat her specially. She’s just any other young student, who looks more and more like his dead childhood best friend, the only woman he ever considered loving, with every passing year.
On the first class of Seventh Year, she takes his breath away.
She has—done something. Figured something out, perhaps with the help of some female friends. Her hair is glossy and falls with a pretty bounce, her skin clear of the teenage acne of yesteryear, a hint of lipgloss swiped across her lips. It is obvious her classmates are noticing as well. Boys orbit pathetically as she giggles with her friends. When she glances at him with a girlish flutter of her lashes, his chest fills with need so rich and hot he thinks he will snap. He wants to order the rest of them out, grab the curve of her waist, grind his cock into her hip; he wants to lower his nose into her hair and learn the scent of her shampoo, drink in the innocent confusion in her green eyes, the sunny emerald of a summer canopy on a cloudless day. Oh, he has no doubt there have been a few fumblings with incompetent boys who are desperate to touch as much of her as quickly she will allow, with no thought to her own pleasure. But she hasn’t been touched properly, not in any way that really matters. He is sure of this.
During one class, they light fires and heat their potions until the usually chilly dungeon is thick with steam. The students are rolling up their sleeves, loosening the ties of their robes, and then one of the young men opens his robe entirely and unbuttons several buttons of his shirt. He’s a fit young man and is peacocking for his classmates, who are giggling and glancing at Severus to see if he’ll reprimand the boy. Severus chooses to say nothing. Soon half the class is wearing their robes unbuttoned, some opening the collar of their uniforms to release heat from their necks.
Severus knows this is a dangerous allowance, not just because he has a reputation to uphold as the strictest professor in the school, but because of a warning he received over a decade ago from a retired male professor. Don’t go easier on the girls or the boys will accuse you of being a creep out of frustration, and the girls will attempt to flirt to gain your favor. And an embarrassed, rejected teenage girl will quickly accuse you of the exact impropriety you failed to carry out on her. Even if your job survives, you’ll never gain your reputation back. So Severus has always been proud of his ability to hand out gender-blind criticism, his refusal to coddle his female students or spare them his derision on account of their sex. And he has always, always been careful not to look at any of them in any way that could be interpreted as sexual. He takes points for dress code violations from First and Second Years liberally and unreasonably, so that by the time the girls reach Third and Fourth Year and start thinking to roll their skirts, they’re far too afraid of his discipline to attempt it in his presence. Thus, he has never had to field an accusation of impropriety, of examining a young woman’s legs too closely, or looking down her shirt. He is sure his students view him as an asexual creature, one of their oh-so-funny jokes: a giant flapping cape, a dungeon bat.
Out of the corner of his eye he sees Potter open the neck of her robe, and then unbutton the first button on her collar, hooking a slender finger into her shirt and loosening the sweat-dampened fabric. She wipes a palm on her robe, glances to her friend Ron Weasley’s cauldron, and mutters something in his direction. A grin cracks the corner of Weasley’s mouth, and his foot shoots out and kicks at her skinny ankle, peeking out from her robe. She jerks her foot away and then returns the kick.
Are they flirting? Severus’s throat is tight at the thought. She has been friends with Ron Weasley since the very first day she arrived, six-odd years ago. He had always thought they viewed each other as siblings, especially since she vaguely resembles his sister.
He sweeps forward, clearing his throat, and Potter and Weasley both duck their heads back toward their brews. He stands over both of their shoulders, taking in first Weasley’s charred attempt at an Eidetic Elixir.
“Abominable,” he drawls.
“I followed the instructions,” the boy says, his shoulders hunched defensively.
“You added the jellyfish before the cauldron had heated through,” Severus says. “Thus, you burned it.”
“It didn’t say-”
“You are in a NEWT level class. The instructions should not need to spell out obvious measures.” He vanishes Weasley’s potion before the boy can waste any more expensive ingredients. He looks down into Potter’s cauldron, only to find that she has produced a quite passable attempt at an Eidetic Elixir. It’s the correct shade of opaque banana yellow and smells vinegary, as it’s supposed to. “Lower the heat now or you’ll scald it,” he says.
Potter leans forward, reaching under her cauldron to reduce the flame. Her other hand rises to her chest, perhaps to cover her cleavage, in that modest way women sometimes do to keep their breasts from spilling out of low cut shirts. The deliberate femininity of the gesture sends a pulse of blood to his cock. Potter was always more of a rough-houser, a back-talker, a tomboy rushing into class with her hair still a mess from quidditch. Nothing like the mother she never knew. This pretty, feminine, obedient version of Potter is—distracting.
When she straightens up, two more buttons on her shirt have come undone.
Severus doesn’t intend to look. He doesn’t look on purpose. But nevertheless, he sees.
He sees straight over her shoulder and down her shirt; he sees the nude bra, the poor fit, the gap where her small breasts don’t quite fill out the cup; for a split second he sees the pink of a nipple. Then his feet—traitorous feet, savior feet—carry him to the front of the classroom. He announces to the class all the stupid mistakes they are making. Years of practice render the berating monologue second nature, even as the image of Potter’s nipple is seared into his brain.
“Only three potions in this room would receive even the lowest passing grade on the NEWTs,” he concludes. “Malfoy, Granger, and… Potter.”
Potter beams.
Severus doesn’t masturbate much. When he does, it’s out of routine maintenance, or the occasional sense that there is tension in his life that release might fix. Perpetual horniness is for teenagers and perverts. He thinks that this level of sexual repression isn’t quite normal for a man still in his thirties, but he has no one to compare experiences with, and it’s not the type of thing he’d ever stoop to researching in a book. If he had to guess, he would probably say that his pointed disinterest in masturbation is a result of an overreliance on occlusion.
He doesn’t like feeling out of control. He doesn’t like the fact that arousal can reach a point where he abandons higher thought and a primitive drive takes over, forcing him to seek completion regardless of circumstance or propriety. And, luckily, nothing really arouses him enough to entice him away from his carefully wrought control—except, perhaps-
He occludes it away in the evenings, when he’s most wary of his own mind. But the thoughts sneak in when he’s distracted, when Filius is trying to make conversation with him over breakfast and he’s staring out at the sea of students in the Great Hall and his eye snags on a flash of red hair and a gross adolescent taunt echoes in his mind, does the carpet match the drapes? He doesn’t remember who said it, only that James overheard and beat the boy to pulp in defense of Lily’s honor. Severus had exacted his own revenge later, a campaign of subtle hexes to ensure that the boy was constantly tripping, injured, and paranoid.
Does the carpet match the drapes? he thinks, and his imagination constructs an image of Potter, splayed guilelessly back against her bedspread, dressed in only her ill-fitting bra and a pair of panties, her glossy auburn hair curtained over her shoulders, shoving her bra up to play with a pink nipple, sliding her other hand into her panties, through curly pubic hair (the carpet would certainly match the drapes) and through the slick folds of her sex. Her back would arch in pleasure. She would bite her lip to keep her moans in, because surely she would be in her dorm, hiding her pleasure from her roommates-
The thought of her dorm is an ice-cold end to his fantasy. She may have reached sexual maturity, but she’s still a student, and represents all the requisite emotional immaturity and inexperience. She has no real practice at choosing anything for herself: not her clothing (she wears a uniform), not her food (she eats what the kitchen elves decide), not how she spends her evenings (she is obligated to divide her time between homework and quidditch). Even the progressive freedoms students are granted over the years—Hogsmeade trips, an extra hour of curfew, the ability to add elective classes in Third Year and drop core courses after the OWL year—are nothing. She’s basically still a child.
The fantasies next attack while he’s proctoring a surprise quiz in his Fourth Year class. He is taking the hour of silence (except for the scratching of quills) to do some grading. Potter’s essay on the history of nightshade shuffles to the top of the pile, and suddenly he can think of nothing but her slow, demure blink up at him as he orders her to—lower the heat on her potion—get on her knees, open her shirt, present her breasts, play with her pretty nipples. He knows she bruises easily, as she always seems to be covered in them, and he would keep her knees perpetually bruised from kneeling. He would have her to live between his legs, with her little mouth on his cock, gently sucking and peeking up at him through her lashes. He doesn’t imagine she’d be very good at it, not in the beginning, but there is something arousing in the idea of her inexperience, her innocent efforts. And he would teach her.
He doesn’t get a break for three more hours. Finally, then, he can take a few minutes to return to his private quarters, wrap his hand around his rapidly hardening cock, and pull himself to completion in six hard strokes.
Oh, Potter says, covering a giggle as she looks at the ejaculate that laces her breasts, sliding down onto her stomach. There’s so much.
There is a lot of semen. He hasn’t ejaculated in a while.
He banishes the spectral thought of the girl, and vanishes his cum as well. The release leaves him clear headed. Just in time for this week’s Seventh Year class.