Author's Notes: Takes place during OotP. Dedicated to – er – Ducky, because I really don’t dedicate enough things to her considering that I love her with every fiber of my being. Please please *please* let me know what you think! It hurts my pride so to beg, but it’s a sad day when I am reduced to cross-posting my work on *fanfiction.net* (shudder) because no one at this site bothers to give feedback.

There is nothing like an empty slate.

His eyes burn into mine: dark fire irises and pupils that refract the orange glow of candlelight. His finger is long and white and bony as it traces over his small, thin-lipped mouth.  It is darker, by a shade, then the rest of his skin, and closed firmly.

He isn't handsome. He isn't beautiful. He is nothing like a clean slate.

I want...

His eyes are the colour of slate as they bore into mine. 'Eye contact is often essential to Legilimency,' I remember him saying, and I wonder if he is reading me right now. I feel sliced, like something from one of the jars surrounding us. Vivisected.

There is a slate on Snape's desk covered in his small, neat writing: I turn it face down.

I want ...

He is lecturing me about something again. Stupid boy, he calls me, foolish boy. I am. I know that I am, now, and yet I need so desperately to believe that I am right and he is wrong: that there are such things as beautiful and ugly, black and white, friends and enemies. I need for him to stop touching his lips like that, so softly, not even thinking about it.

There is no empty slate. There cannot be such a thing in this world.

I want, sometimes...

I move my chair a bit closer, and his delicious voice wavers. There is something in the air: he can taste it as well as I can. His tongue darts out to wet his lips: nervous gestures like clenching his hands together and biting his bottom lip. Severus Snape is a nervous man, so calm and imposing that he frightens himself sometimes.

I know that he is not beautiful. But he understands, and that is what matters.

I want sometimes to touch him ...

His face is half-shadowed, half demon orange, but his eyes never leave mine. When I lean forward to kiss him he does not move a centimeter. Such thin lips, so still and unrelentingly unresponsive. I tuck my hand behind his neck, bite his bottom lip for him. My fingertips feel the shiver go through him. He says my name against my mouth, pushes me back into my chair. His eyes are snapping with anger and frustration and want...

Foolish boy, I'm only a child to him. So much younger - he could have been my father, and yet I kiss him again. He forces me away, his hands are colder than ice: they look like they are made of glass and memories, so elegant and cautious.

I don't want him to be cautious with me. I want him to make a mistake on me, to stop calculating and weighing and just kiss me, just once more, because I need to feel what it is like to love something so ugly.

His eyes are dark fire and his voice is raw silk as he asks me a quiet why.

'I am no clean slate." I say, and he understands and catches my mouth with his, and in that instant that I am broken I become beautiful.

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