Title: Welcome Frost
Author: pocketwitch
Pairing: SS/GW
Rating: R
Summary: These two live in my head. What happens when they come together? I shudder to think ...
Disclaimer: If J.K. Rowling ever wrote this pairing, I would gouge my eyes out.
Archive: The Restricted Section. My Website. That's all.
Thanks: To Amy for the incredible last-minute beta work, and to Beck for the title!

She didn't look as though she should have brown eyes. This irked him. The pale complexion, the flaming hair - those eyes should be green. By all rights, they should be green, emerald, glistening, like his eyes, like …

Damn.

Well, if he was going to have a pair of eyes relentlessly pursuing him everywhere he went, the powers that be could have at least had the good graces to make them green. But no, not a bit - they were brown. Unwaveringly brown. He doubted that even the best of lighting could put the slightest of green highlights into those muddy eyes that refused to let him go.

Why in the nine hells did she keep staring at him? While it was true that he regularly chastised his students harshly for not paying him proper attention, there was a difference between respectful concentration and obsessive damned staring.

She hadn't been this way before. True, she had never feared him as the others had, nor seemed to loathe him either. Whenever he berated her, she simply fixed those eyes on him, calm, and nodded slightly. As if she were humoring him. Humoring him. He would move on, flustered, to his next victim, and she would go back to whatever it was that she was doing without the slightest concern. Yet she had never stared at him.

Six years she'd sat in his classroom and given him nothing more than studious focus. One summer away and suddenly she seemed to think he was the secret of life. Either that or he'd spent the past eight weeks with something particularly nasty between his teeth, it was difficult to tell.

Fascinated? Absorbed? Revolted? Why would she not look away?

When the class let out, he didn't bother trying to explain away his relief. He'd come to dread having to deal with the seventh-year Gryffindors, and after about two weeks of those eyes, those hideously brown eyes, he had admitted to himself that she unsettled him. After the countless horrors in his past, he was shaken by a seventeen-year-old girl and her eyes. It was embarrassing, yes, but far less so than the process of continuously fabricating explanations. Lying to oneself was the epitome of cowardice.

He was glad when they were gone, and when the room filled with first-years he was able to comfort himself immensely by snatching points and loading them with more homework than they would possibly be able to complete.

By late evening, he'd been able to put her out of his mind. His quarters were quiet. His books were familiar. His world did not change with the coming and going of students, whether they be young men with entrancing green eyes or young women with piercing brown ones.

The knock surprised him. Visitors were far less than common, and he closed his eyes for a brief moment before rising, attempting to prepare himself for any one of the many horrors that might accompany a stranger at his door this time of the night.

He hadn't prepared for her.

Yet there she was, a ghost afire, pale bare feet and long nightgown, dark green, Slytherin green, the green that, in a less cruel world, would match her eyes.

"Why, exactly, would you possibly be coming to my quarters at all, let alone at such an hour?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

"Humor my idiocy."

"I'm here to see you."

"You can see me during class."

"Not enough of you."

"You have my class three times a week. Most consider that to be more than sufficient."

"That's not what I meant at all."

"No, I suppose it wasn't."

She slid past him then, into his chambers, and he whirled to face her.

"Why do you feel the need to pester me? Surely your young suitor wouldn't be pleased if he knew you were here." He grinned inwardly at that. He knew as well as everyone that her beau had broken up with her over the summer, though no one knew exactly why. There was probably some perfectly reasonable explanation - not that such would be any comfort to a teenage girl in love. He was as privy to the rumor mill as the rest of the school, isolated as they may think him, and he knew where to strike.

She grinned. He blanched. She wasn't supposed to do that.

"Wouldn't you like to know what I know?"

"What in the hell are you talking about?"

"Wouldn't you like to know how it feels to be with him?"

He drew himself up, his years of training and experience urging him to channel his terror, redirect it, and he was instantly haughty, indignant. "I assure you, I have absolutely no idea what you - "

"You wanted him. You watched him, I saw it, that flicker, that instant before you remembered to sneer. Wanted him. Perhaps even loved him, but certainly desired him."

She was stalking toward him now, and he drew his arms around himself, his dressing gown wrapping around him as though it could protect him somehow. Protect him from what, though? From a teenage girl?

From her truth. From her eyes.

"Is that why you persist in staring at me? To gloat?" He snarled slightly at the last words, and she stopped in her tracks.

"Maybe you were the one staring at me."

"Please. Why on earth would I stare at you?"

"Because you can't stare at him."

"And you're an adequate replacement?"

"No, I'm just the only one who understands."

"What exactly is it that you claim to understand about me?"

"What it is to have loved both the Dark Lord and the boy who defeated him."

Now it was he who stepped toward her, arms at his sides, eyes flickering fury. This girl, this insolent girl who knew one thing and thought that she knew everything. He set upon her, wanting her to stand down, and stand down she did.

"You know nothing of the Dark Lord. Nothing. Less than a year of written communication, cloaked in lies, insipid prattling, the systematic seduction of a child. Maybe you thought you loved him, maybe you think you still do. You have never met the Dark Lord. You met a boy, a boy with too much ambition and too little sense. Less than a year of scribblings. Nothing. Nothing." She wasn't cowering, quite, but she was stepping away, her confidence clearly waning.

"Twenty-five years. Twenty-five years bearing his mark and doing its will. Well over half my life, far longer than you've existed." He stopped then. She was backed against the door, the space between them thin.

"You know nothing."

She hadn't trembled. Backed down, yes. Shivered, no. She was still standing as tall as she could, and her eyes had never left his. He had shaken her, yes, but he had not driven her away as he had intended. She hadn't made a single move to open the door at her back, nor did she look as though she planned to.

Her hand, slimmer than his own and almost as pale, reached out, cool fingers pressed against his cheek.

"Then teach me something."

It was his turn to back down, one quick step, in reaction, motion hitting his feet at the instant her skin touched his.

"Teach you something? I think it's a bit late for you to play the blushing virgin, seeing as how you've already bragged about your carnal knowledge of that damned boy."

She slid forward, closing the distance once more. "I'm not claiming to be a virgin. I'm asking you to teach me something."

"What could you possibly wish to learn from me?"

Brown, yes, impossibly so. Warm brown, earthen brown. Passion. It was in her bloodline. Fire, earth, fervor.

"Indifference."

His eyes widened slightly, one eyebrow raised. "Why?"

"Because passion has done nothing but drain me. Ardor, nothing but sap me. Obsession, nothing but open the door to pain."

"You are not, I hope, suffering under the delusion that indifference eliminates pain. Or that it is impenetrable, even among those who have practiced it for decades."

"No. Of course it doesn't. How could it, when I can see the pain in your eyes? When it was practically tangible every time you looked at him?"

She was goading him again, and he knew it, but he no longer cared. He would give her what she asked for. Whether or not it turned out to be what she wanted was none of his concern.

He strode forward, and in an instant she was slammed back against the door. He did not kiss her. He would not kiss her. His mouth lingered near hers for a moment, and he breathed in once before gathering her nightgown in his fingers and pulling it up over her head, tossing it aside. She was wearing nothing else. Of course.

He wasted no time by examining her body. She was lovely, yes, coltish, slightly freckled. He'd seen plenty of healthy, young, female bodies, and this one held no particular interest.

He gripped her by the shoulders, then, and turned her around, pressed her front side against the door. He had no intention of allowing those eyes to distract him. She inhaled. He let his robe fall open, and stepped out of his pajama bottoms.

He took her with single-minded focus. He took her with his fingers digging into her hips, pulling her back toward him, holding her in place. He took her silently. He took her with unflinching coldness. He took her for what seemed like a very, very long time.

He did not attempt to hurt her. He did not refrain from hurting her. He did not bite her, or pinch her, or strike her. To do such would have been to show passion. To show passion would have been to lose the focus of the lesson.

By the time he came, she was trembling violently. By the time he came, she was whimpering. When he came, a deep exhalation the only telling sound, she reached for air in fierce, ragged gulps. When he stepped away from her, he let her go entirely, and began to reclothe himself.

To her credit, she did not crumple. To her credit, she did not cry. She leaned against the door for a brief moment, then let her weight onto her legs, wobbly, fawnish, and cast her eyes about until she found her nightgown, which she straightened and slid over her head.

When his own clothing was in place, and her hand was on the door, he spoke.

"If you return to my quarters again, I will make sure that Gryffindor loses enough points that you'd do well to break zero by the end of the term."

As she opened the door, she looked over her shoulder, and cast one final look at him. Her eyes glinted, steely.

"I really can't imagine caring less."

He inclined his head slightly, the corners of his mouth twitching as she slid into the corridor, closing the door behind her. He was positive that he'd imagined the flicker of green in her glance, but it gave him a moment of satisfaction nonetheless.

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