Penny Potter may be the twin of Harry Potter but she does not share his proclivity for a hatred of the Potions Master, Severus Snape. Likewise, Snape finds, despite his better efforts that Penny has become dangerously intertwined in his life. Given...
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The rain had kicked in full ferocity by the time Penny and Snape broke apart and returned to Spinner's end. Pausing just shy of the porch, Penny looked up and closed her eyes, allowing the water to run over her face. With each patter she sank a little further within herself. She was the cause for this, this growing storm that threatened to engulf them all. The sun would not return because misery and despair had been strengthened—by her.
It wasn't supposed to be this way, none of it. The chaotic nature of it all frustrated her, mostly because Penny could not pinpoint the moment she'd lost control. The moment her life had been turned upside down. She tried to remember who she'd been before it all. Who was that person who's only wish had been to see Sirius' name cleared, and dreamed of the day she and Harry could move in with him and finally be a real family? She couldn't remember what it felt like when the only thing she worried about were her grades and the only pain she endured was feeling that Snape unjustly ridiculed her.
Those simple days, free from the depths of her despair were as far from her as the stars the clouds hid from her now. What was she to hope for anymore? Survival for survival's sake, Penny realized, was a slow, agonizing way to die. If she could not find enough pieces of herself to put back together into something coherent, what was the point?
Amid her attempts to be swallowed by her dangerously wandering thoughts, something inordinately soft and smelling of roses brushed across her face. Opening her eyes, Penny learned it was a towel. Snape was before her, uselessly wiping the rain from her cheeks, standing there with his own towel draped carelessly across his shoulder, as though he had been in the middle of drying himself.
He'd foregone his shirt in the time she'd spent here, succumbing to her misery, so while he kept the barrage of rain from her face, she watched the many drops of rain travel their way down his sleek form, unable to stop herself from lingering on his chest and then the muscles that rippled across his abdomen. The smooth, milky skin was much too alluring, and Penny finally pinpointed why—he had none of that customary hair the teenage boys her age often liked to compare etched across it. Penny found she quite preferred Snape's smooth form to theirs and wondered idly if he waxed it off, or if he was just born with such perfection. It would not surprise her, after all, Snape already had cunning intelligence and those dark handsome features of his, of course he would possess the trifecta of allure.
Forcing her brain to focus on something other than how much his unclothed body pleased her eyes, especially after what just happened at the Malfoy Manor, she pondered why this neat freak of a man had opted to stand here in the rain with her and not selected his usual course of action, which was to berate her and drag her inside. Penny's eyes, very begrudgingly, found their way back to his face before he noticed her lingering gaze.
It was reflected back in his dark eyes that she realized she was crying, and that they were not raindrops he was wiping from her cheek.
"I should go," Penny said, taking a sudden step away from the man.
