death row 4b (snape/potter)
title: Death Row (4b/5?)
pairing: Snape/Potter
warnings: WIP
rating: R-NC17
previously: One: Malfoy Manor; Two: Godric's Hollow; Three: The Burrow; Four (a): Hagrid's Hut
note: beta'd by buckle_berry and secrethappiness; this part with apologies to buckle_berry, who actually had to sit in person and listen to me read bits of it out. poor thing.
Chapter Four (b)
“Well that hasn’t happened for a while.” Potter is perched on the edge of the bed, elbows on his thighs, head down. Snape, who manhandled him there, is standing two feet away, hands clasped tidily behind his back, in a manner he assures himself is far from hovering.
“How long is a while?”
“Months, I reckon. I mean, I was stuck in that place with him for ages and nothing like this happened. Of course he never came to visit. Or asked me to hold his wand.” Potter looks up and smiles out of one side of his mouth. The pain has gone and he’s become garrulous in his relief. “Actually it hasn’t really hurt like that since I learnt to occlude properly. Oh. Um.” His shoulders tense and he looks down again, frowning.
“Potter, if you imagine I am hurt by your estimation of my teaching abilities, you are quite wrong. I am relieved you finally showed the sense to learn something. Drink the tea.”
Potter is bending to pick his cup up off the floor when Snape turns away. The potion has been cooling for three hours.
“So, d’you think it was just the wand?”
“It is possible.” Snape lifts the lid from the cauldron and lowers his face to it. The barest waft of vapour breathes onto his nose and cheekbones, where it cools damply. “That was the wand that killed your parents - the conduit of the Dark Lord’s soul, intentionally or not. You will not be required handle it again.” Snape straightens, levitates the cauldron an inch or two, and floats it back towards the fire. “If you had behaved with a little more circumspection, you needn’t have handled it in the first place.”
Behind him Potter sighs loudly. Twice.
“When’s this potion going to be ready anyway?”
“Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow the potion will be ready. Snape’s hands are cold and clumsy around the phial of crocodile tears. It takes two tries to pull out the stopper. Potter is silent for longer than Snape had expected.
“So what do you think will happen?”
Three teardrops, and the potion begins to seethe, welling and spilling in a low deep-green geyser in the centre of the cauldron.
“We’ve been through this before, Potter. What I think will happen is that we’ll attempt a spell tomorrow that has likely not been performed in several lifetimes.” Snape unhooks a long iron spoon from the rack next to the fire. “In the unlikely event that it is successful and we both survive, and then have the good fortune to survive the wards, the snares and the Death Eaters of Malfoy Manor, you will do your best to conjure a conflagration immense enough to destroy the Dark Lord. If the Ministry is feeling generous we will be rewarded. Posthumously.”
Snape pauses. The spoon is still poised above the gently heaving liquid when a small huff of a chuckle makes him look round.
“Well that’s something to look forward to.”
Harry Potter, lately snatched from the clutches of Voldemort, and repeatedly shielded from the untender mercies of his own friends, is leaning casually back on his hands, looking oddly happy. He has on a smile that reflects, on the one hand, his utter lack of foresight, and on the other his disarming physical courage. Snape unconsciously holds in a lungful of air.
“But what do you want to happen?”
Lowering the spoon into the cauldron, Snape pulls his gaze away from the boy, and breathes out slowly.
“If you must know, I should like to survive.”
~
Weasley turns up late in the afternoon to the predictable scenes of adolescent euphoria. They’ve barely exchanged pleasantries, involving some uncomfortably intimate details of the Weasley tribe’s ménage in Beaucaire and its various frictions, before Snape feels a pressing need for fresh air. At the door, he eyes the pair warily. Weasley is practically sprawled in the outsize chair, all knees and elbows, while Potter tilts on his own chair, one hand on the table, the other arm slung over the ladder back. In better times, Snape would not for a moment have considered leaving them unattended in the presence of a potion so delicately balanced. This is an era in which many scruples must be trodden underfoot in the interests of sanity.
“Don’t touch the cauldron.”
Weasley scowls, tediously familiar, while Potter grins. “Yes, yes, we know: detention, four million points from Gryffindor, a lifetime scrubbing the dungeon floors.”
He winks at Weasley, showing off. Snape closes the door behind himself with all necessary force and perhaps half the self-possession he pretends to feel. As he strides towards the forest in search of fresh mugwort and peace of mind, he dismisses the possibility that he is being discussed.
Potter is practising his wand-work when Snape returns. He appears to be alone, but then appearances are often deceptive.
“Is that Weasley?” Snape asks, as they both stare at a large shabby red armchair, which was decidedly not there when Snape left.
“No.” Potter laughs, and Snape’s belly prickles a little with pleasure, whether at Weasley’s absence or at the laugh he does not waste his time wondering. “It’s Hagrid’s second best coat. Just - you know - limbering up.” He rolls his shoulders, then spells the chair back into a coat which slumps in a moth-eaten heap on the floor. “Ron apparated back to France to fetch something for me.”
“How accomplished of him. I had assumed he travelled here by portkey.” Snape’s voice lacks its accustomed sarcastic bite. He busies himself retrieving the coat by hand and hanging it on the tree.
“You needn’t sound so surprised. Ron spent nearly a year and a half at the Ministry and in the field, you know.”
“I am already well aware of the parlous state of auror recruitment.” Snape is dusting down the sleeves of Hagrid’s coat, as if he intends to wear it himself. He feels suddenly detached from the ground and from his own body, watching his inexplicable actions with a sardonic eye. How awkward he is. He walks himself deliberately over to the fire and peers at his potion, untouched and simmering lazily. After a second or two Potter joins him, and they stand side by side, staring blankly down into the cauldron.
“They even took me on for a bit,” the boy says contemplatively. “But of course I always have had an impressive Patronus.”
Out of the corner of his eye Snape can see that Potter is grinning, his bottom lip pinned between teeth, and that the skin on his neck is a little pink.
“And yet I am unmoved.”
Potter’s blush deepens and spreads upwards, and Snape cannot help but wonder if he is becoming aroused, a thought both gratifying and wildly inappropriate. Potter shifts from foot to foot and looks away for a second or two before pointing at the potion.
“This is it then?”
“Nearly. Two more hours of simmering, a third boiling, a decoction of asphodel root, a number of gradated strainings and reductions, and then this is, as you say, it.”
There is a great sighing breath. “It looks sort of harmless.”
“How appallingly naïve, even for you, Potter.”
Still they stand there, looking down, subdued now - almost transfixed. Snape sees them both from his detached vantage point, dwarfed by the immense apprehension of what is coming, and when he feels the light brush of a knuckle against the back of his hand, he holds himself completely still, as if that, in itself, is a form of reassurance.
~
Weasley comes back with a pack of exploding snap cards and a small postcard-sized photograph. He and Potter sit next to each other on the bed, looking at it.
“It was the summer after they got married, Mum says. She didn’t have one of them just on their own - looked all through the shoebox. Then Ginny was shouting from upstairs. Bloody girls.” He pauses, shrugging, shifts on his buttocks, points at the photograph. “Somewhere in Norfolk apparently. Some Order thing.”
Potter doesn’t say anything, just stares intently, almost without blinking.
Snape sees the picture when it’s finally been abandoned. Two smiling couples in a field of lavender. The Evans girl is a young wife, already pregnant - it shows in her round belly and the pink of her cheeks. Snape does not touch so much as a corner of the picture. Potter and Weasley are playing snap on the bed; he glances to the side to make sure that they do not see him looking.
Weasley stays the night. He cannot be allowed to come and go fifty times in broad daylight, and so the two boys sleep together in the vast bed. Weasley faces out into the room, his eyes screwed shut, while Potter lies tight in the corner, enough space between them to fit three more boys of Potter’s size. He holds the covers to his chest with both hands, and stares fixedly at the ceiling.
Legilimens, Snape thinks, hesitating to put out his lumos, but his mind is barely prodding at the doors of Potter’s, before the boy’s gaze snaps round to him and something akin to a studded oak portcullis comes crashing down. Practice evidently makes perfect.
~
“Well, isn’t this cosy.”
Snape opens his eyes only to close them again in a hurry. Malfoy is standing in a painfully bright lumos at the foot of Snape’s bunk, his eyes on the vast bed in the corner and its two inhabitants.
“Potter and Weasel. I always knew how it was.”
Weasley yawns. “Put a sock in it, Malfoy.”
For a moment his mouth hangs open like a stunned fish. “Don’t even speak to me. Severus, you are operating a brothel.”
Snape spares him a look of disgust before setting the fire and transfiguring his bedcover back into a heavy wool cloak. Even wrapped from shoulder to ankle, he shivers. He lights the hurricane lamp on the table and sits beside it, pulling the cloak over his fingers.
“Weasley, get up. It’s time you were leaving anyway.”
“Yes, get up, Weasley. I’ll see you out.”
Weasley grunts and shoves a leg out from under the cover, sits and yawns again. There is a movement from the other side of the bed. “What time is it?” Potter props himself on one arm, squinting at no one in particular.
“So he’s talking now. Oh, perfect! Oh, break out the sodding firewhisky - we should celebrate.”
Malfoy sits opposite Snape with a thud and gives him a sulky look from under the eyebrows, which Snape ignores.
“Why are you here, Malfoy?”
“I have news.” He turns his head slightly back towards the bed, raising his voice. “If anyone wants to hear it, that is.”
In a bright flick of lamplight, Snape sees a mark across the left side of Malfoy’s face. A deep purple cloud of a bruise is beginning to surface, stretching from chin to cheekbone, and just above the collar of his outer robe a round sore, a burn mark, the size of a knut. Snape does not lower his gaze when Malfoy looks back, but neither does he venture a comment when Malfoy pulls his collar up a fraction, covering the bottom half of the burn. They eye each other with a frank understanding, as the Gryffindors crash around in the corner.
“So, what is your news?”
“Well.” Malfoy hesitates. “It’s over, I think. The Dark Lord has Longbottom and that demented auror Moody. Carrow and Nott found them at the Hollow and brought them back to the house.”
He pauses again and the hut is unnaturally silent; even Weasley and Potter are still now, listening. Snape has been waiting for this news, but that hasn’t made the sudden slide of his stomach any less startling. His skin prickles up in fearful goosebumps.
“Every Death Eater in the place has been taking turns crucio-ing Moody. Longbottom’s just been locked in the cellar. Apparently he’s completely doollally already.”
“What has Moody told them?”
“Nothing as far as I know. Not that they tell me. They know you’re not there, though. Father and Aunt Bella asked me about you again -” There’s a brief flicker of his eyelids - “if I knew where you’d taken Potter.”
“And you -”
“I said no, of course.”
Potter’s at Malfoy’s shoulder by now, wanting the details.
“Are they okay? Did you see Neville? Are they giving him enough food?”
Snape stands up suddenly, hands fisted, and for a second he feels that he could hex away that voice again for good, and it would be a relief not to hear it. He bites his back teeth hard together, pressing until the urge to act is gone.
“God, Potter, what do you care?” Malfoy’s looking at him, narrow-eyed. He crosses his arms, four-square, doesn’t answer the question.
There’s no time for this argument. Everyone must be got as far away from Potter as possible. Snape takes hold of Malfoy’s elbow and pulls him staggering to his feet. The panicked flurry in his belly would have him throw Malfoy and Weasley bodily out of the door. He settles for gripping Malfoy tight by the arm while the boy tries to jerk away, a remnant of the sulk.
“Draco, you have to return there now. Ensure that they have not missed you. Come back here tomorrow night with everything you need from the manor. Steer clear of the hostages; try not to talk to anyone if you can avoid it. Stay in the kitchen.” Snape feels he is gabbling and hardens his voice. “Go now, and take Mr Weasley back with you as far as the gates - it is time he was gone.”
Malfoy nods. His eyes are wide with the beginning of fear. Weasley, too, falls into line without argument. He is dressed and fully awake and, for once, looks at Snape only for instruction.
They don’t even jostle at the door as they leave, and once they are outside the hut, Snape does not watch them, convinced that this new imperative will not allow them to loiter. His fingers move stiffly around the kettle as he sets it to boil over the fire. It is a terrible gamble, on Malfoy’s life in particular, but Snape cannot protect them all. He doesn’t even glance at Potter, though his instinct is to take hold of him and floo out, anywhere.
“Why did you send him back?” Potter’s voice is perplexed, but there is also that unmistakable quaver of rage. “Don’t I get a say? They’re looking for me as well.”
“This is not a democracy, Potter. I sent him back because Lucius Malfoy has ways of finding his son. And we are not yet ready.”
There is a rustle and a creak from the corner of the room.
“What if he tells them where we are?”
Snape turns at that. Potter is sitting on the bed in his pyjamas. He looks small and fierce, his brows almost connecting with the frames of his glasses.
“He is not the coward you think him. I do not believe he will tell - not by choice. We must hope that he is allowed to retain that choice until tomorrow night.”
Potter is silent while Snape brews tea for one and sets it on the table.
“I have one or two things to attend to. You may go back to bed, Potter. There is still an hour or so before dawn.”
The boy climbs back under the covers, and lies there on his back for several minutes before removing his glasses and turning to the wall. Snape moves back and forth in the hut, shredding, straining, and adding the last ingredients: the aconite, the mantis hearts that must not stew. He watches Potter for the sigh, shift and stretch, the palm to cheek that says he is falling asleep, but it never comes.
~
It’s late morning when Snape and Potter levitate the cauldron into the forest, but it hardly seems like day at all. The sky through the trees is uniformly dull and grey and a misty drizzle is falling. Potter has hardly said a word since Snape woke him to make breakfast an hour after dawn. They trudge in silence over wet leaves and roots. Snape is inclined to hurry - if it begins to rain in earnest the potion may be spoiled - but Potter’s head is down and he treads with a deliberateness and an effort that should not perhaps be further forced.
It is a small patch of bare ground where they stop, barely even a clearing. The forest is closed over their heads, muffling sound and breeze. Snape stamps a little at the ground, then the cauldron is lowered. Potter stands with his arms hanging at his sides, awkward and expectant.
“Set a fire under it,” Snape says, nodding at the cauldron.
Potter fetches enough large twigs to build a small pile of kindling, breaking the larger sticks in half by hand, then toes them into place with his shoe.
“Incendio.”
The twigs are damp, and they snap and spit in the fire. Within five minutes, the tiny clearing has filled with wood smoke and the dark bitter smell of the Oblitteratus potion.
“Take your wand out, Potter.”
~
Voldemort’s wand burns and shakes with fierce charge in Snape’s hand. A crackling arc of magic connects it to Potter’s, gripped two-handed. Potter’s hair and robes are whipped around his face and body by a wind that Snape sees more clearly than he feels. Leaves and twigs whirl from ankle to shoulder height and the trees around them bend like grass, but Snape hears only the sharp rush of his own breath between his teeth and the accelerating drum roll of his heartbeat.
A piercing buzz reverberates back and forth in the air between himself and Potter. Potter’s face is furious with concentration - effort - anger. Voldemort’s wand shudders violently and for a frozen moment Snape expects to see Dumbledore materialise in front of him, then shade after shade begins to spill out - strange and familiar. Eustacia Goyle; Kingsley Shacklebolt; Fenrir Greyback; the Parkinson girl; a sleeping baby, a tiny bundle hanging limply in the air; a brown rat; an old man bent at the waist - an endless stream of victims floating in a smothering reel around the two of them: indifferent, or gloating, or shrieking with rage, muttering and chattering until Snape would give his life to drop the wand and run.
Snape stares at Potter, blinkering the mist of ghosts. The boy’s body is shaking, sweating; he stares back from under his brows, head lowered as if shielding himself from what hangs around them. Finally there is the Hufflepuff boy, silent and listless, dead for over four years, and then they come quickly. Suddenly Potter is shouting something incomprehensible and Snape’s pulse snaps to a stop. How can she still be so young?
Lily Evans. Or something in the shape and breath of her. Lily Potter. Snape’s arm drops to his side and the arc is broken. She stares, as if confused, doesn’t say a word, doesn’t shout as she is shackled in Snape’s wavering cinctus. The potion froths and spews as she is dragged lower, vapour scorching the ghost of her skin, then burning and shrivelling the shade to air, as if she had been hardly there at all, as fine as a hair.
The others fade unnoticed into the thick grey air, and the silence thumps at Snape’s eardrums. Potter breathes heavily, bent over, hand on knee, but Snape can still make out his face, white as salt.
“I don’t feel any different,” he says. His voice is petulant, tearful.
~
James Potter does not go silently, but begins howling for his wife as soon as Snape and the boy summon him up. By the time he too is incinerated, Potter is on all fours in the mulch by the edge of the trees, the barrel of his ribs heaving in and out.
“Is it over?”
“Yes. How does it feel now?”
The boy coughs and spits a little, then looks up. “I can still remember them.”
~
Potter moves around the hut slowly. He hasn’t taken off his outer robe. Without a murmur at Snape’s order, he has collected pumpkins for soup, and set the kettle over the fire, but now he sits on the bed, gaping at nothing until the water has boiled almost dry. The potion had been brewed with meticulous accuracy, yet Snape, too, is plagued by memories, chief among which is the tug of James Potter’s fist in his collar and the meat and urine smell of a confined dog. That wretched life-debt, never fully discharged, but dissolved now into less than nothing, or so they must hope. If the Dark Lord is killed and Snape survives - a constellation of miracles so unlikely that he cannot consider it without a cynical twist of the mouth - he will finally be able to shrug the boy off.
He looks at Potter, sitting limply on the bed and practises the words in his head. The job is done, Potter. As suicidally incompetent as you undoubtedly are, surely even you can manage without me now. He turns away from the boy, as if he’s said it, and concentrates on projecting all the scorn that was owed to the father through ribs and robe towards the son. His back feels warm with it, the muscles of his shoulders tense for an illusory fight.
He takes a knife from its stand by the fire, a vast hooked blade fixed to a broom handle riddled with woodworm, and applies it to the nearest pumpkin. The flesh gives with a satisfying hush of juice.
As they sit at the table later, two bowls of pumpkin soup, two spoons, two uncomfortable fools, Potter asks the question that’s been hanging over the hut all afternoon.
“Did it work?”
“Did what work, Potter?”
He frowns. “The potion, the thing this afternoon.”
“What did we do this afternoon?” Snape looks down, spooning the soup, and pretends not to watch the boy’s face.
Potter hesitates, mouth open. “We got rid of the horcrux, didn’t we? We destroyed - we destroyed - them.” His voice tails off in confusion.
“Who?”
He looks up then, and Potter’s expression is frightened, slightly frantic. Potter and Evans, he thinks, a little panicked himself. Your parents, your parents, your -
Snape can feel it slipping away. It’s a little like fighting to stay awake in the face of Dreamless Sleep. He’s trying to remember a woman. The name of a flower? Rose? Daisy? Snape’s not sure any more. But those were her eyes, weren’t they? - he looks at Potter over the table - or were they his? His? Snape lowers his spoon into the soup, and pushes a hand up his temple, grimacing. Potter isn’t eating any longer either, but looking at him uncertainly from opaque green eyes, and something Snape has always depended on, something he could have sworn was part of his own mechanism, seems to evaporate inside him. He holds his breath and waits for the vacancy to be filled.
~
Snape sighs and lays his book open on the table.
“Potter, you have been gawking at that photograph for at least an hour. Have you nothing else to do?”
The boy stands up from the bed and walks over, tossing the picture onto the table by Snape’s left hand. It is a picture of the Weasley parents in a lavender field, which, though moderately well composed, does not seem worth an entire hour’s contemplation. Potter stands, leaning on the table with one hand, one foot toeing at the other, hips canted casually.
“I don’t see why we have to wait. If we’re doomed, we may as well get it over with.”
“Oh, bravo, Potter. That’s the attitude.”
“It’s your attitude.” Potter kicks gently at a table leg. “Anyway, I’m not suddenly going to be better at unforgivables tomorrow morning.”
Thud, thud. Snape narrows his eyes at the foot. “Do not underestimate your shortcomings. There is ample room, if somewhat less capacity, for improvement. Where dedicated teaching has failed we may still perhaps hope that a good night’s sleep will prevail.”
THUD!
“Fine, I’ll go to bed. There’s no need to be such a prick about it.”
Snape watches out of the corner of his eye as Potter sits on the bed with his shoulders in a slump. He makes that last for about ten minutes, then looks up from under his eyebrows and peels off his jumper with a jerk, elbows jabbing in a temper. Snape’s posture gels rigid, and his scalp prickles with apprehension. He does not look up as Potter’s trousers are yanked down and kicked under the bed, but his eyes become fixed on a single word: transmute. Transmute transmute.
Eventually Potter is sitting naked and shivering on the bed, and still Snape does not look up. He surreptitiously presses the spine of his book into his lap and glares at the page: transmute.
When Potter gives up and walks over, it is with an awkward shuffle rather than the slink of a seducer. Nevertheless the boy must be an exhibitionist; his pink and white cock is already half full and bobbing at his hip at the point where that knobbly scar begins to meander up his torso, grazing one tight nipple and stretching for his neck. Arousal tickles through Snape’s balls; he clears his throat, already certain what will happen.
“You think this will make you happy?”
Potter shrugs.
“It doesn’t really matter either way, does it?”
“No.”
“Then you should take your clothes off, too.” Potter nods towards him.
Without a conscious impulse, Snape lifts his hand to his collar and slips the first button through its hole. Potter almost jumps - his eyes are huge, and in an instant he is leaning down, pressing his mouth against Snape’s and fumbling at the buttons himself, his knuckles knocking clumsily against Snape’s chest. He pulls at the fabric with short ineffectual tugs, and Snape shifts impatiently in his chair.
“Be a little quicker about it, Potter.”
He insinuates his way between Potter’s lips and sucks the boy’s tongue into his own mouth, pressing it up against his palate. Potter grunts, falls forward, bent half into Snape’s lap, one elbow digging painfully into Snape’s thigh. His fingers stop fumbling altogether. Snape reaches an encouraging hand down to wrap around Potter’s silk-hard erection, and is suddenly held in two pincer-like grips, one around a bicep, the other, oddly, around his left ear. Potter’s knee knocks and slides against his repeatedly, in what is apparently an attempt to mount him. Snape pushes back, resisting both Potter’s insistence, and his own desire to press all that butter-pale flesh against his chest and belly.
Potter’s eyelids are at half-mast. He thrusts a little into Snape’s hand, still jealously clasping his cock.
“Perhaps -” Potter swallows, “perhaps you should do it. The buttons.”
“Perhaps you should get on the bed.”
They edge together towards the corner of the room, an ungainly two-step, Potter’s hands on Snape’s arms, craning up, mouth pursed into kiss after badly aimed kiss. When they come to an abrupt halt, Potter has to grip hard to keep himself from collapsing onto his arse on the mattress. He tries to pull Snape around beside him, to push him onto his back.
He thinks he is going to top - he is not, but for now Snape feels generous enough to lie cautiously back on the bed and let Potter climb onto him, wetly mouthing at his neck, cock smearing on the chaste black worsted of his coat. Snape undoes the buttons, one-handed, the other hand clamped viciously tight on the boy’s smooth round arse.
Cumbered as he is, Snape removes his coat and shirt with a minimum of fuss and feels no small thrill when Potter’s bare chest presses against his. A warm palm splays against his grateful cock and Snape hisses, eliciting harder, quicker kisses against his jawline, a snag of teeth and a rough rubbing at his groin. Potter’s own cock is squashed against Snape’s hip and thrusting up against his trousers in desperate little jabs.
“Fuck. Se- Prof-.” A groan. Potter’s body is shuddering in a dangerously portentous way. Snape’s chest gives a sharp kick of excitement, unwelcome and quickly swallowed.
“If you come on my clothes, we will never be doing this again.”
A ridiculous threat. Snape is not so balls-led as to suppose that this, whatever this may turn out to be, is remotely repeatable; still, the boy has stopped moving, the line of his back rigid and his face buried, open mouthed and hotly panting in the crook of Snape’s neck.
“You may remove my trousers.”
The heel of Potter’s hand digs into Snape’s erection and Snape flinches, expecting a pain that doesn’t quite arrive. The boy levers himself up; there is a dazed smile on his face.
“Oh I may? Please may I, Professor?”
Heat pounds through Snape’s belly. He can feel the blood in his cheeks and cock, painfully hot, as if this is a game in which much is invested, and his bluff has just been called. Potter, however, goes about the business of taking off his trousers and underclothes with sincere zeal and a bottom lip bitten white. A sweat has formed on Potter’s forehead and he is making small sighing noises, his face bare inches above Snape’s groin. Snape’s cock flexes abruptly, reaching up, and Snape can do little more than stare at himself, chin to his chest, half amazed at his body’s brazen submission, half tempted to grab a scrag of that terrible hair and force the boy’s head into an even more pleasing proximity.
Potter swallows. “I’m, uh - can I? -”
In the end no forcing is necessary; Potter abandons his half-thought request and licks with the flat of his tongue from base to tip of Snape’s cock. A spike of arousal makes Snape’s buttocks clench tightly. When Potter’s lips close around him, and his cheeks and tongue press in with a gentle insistent suck, Snape’s body tenses, fingers spreading stiffly against the blanket. He almost says something foolish.
Potter grunts a little, breathing heavily through his nose, trying to set up a rhythm with hand and mouth and flicking tongue that is no less effective for its uncoordination. Snape begins to thrust up, and has barely gone half a minute when the sudden tightening itch in his balls cuts through the fog of bliss, and makes him push Potter’s head away. Potter strains back, trying to keep contact, but has to give in; Snape’s erection slides from his mouth and lands on his stomach with a wet slap.
Potter smiles slyly. His mouth is cranberry-red and wet with saliva.
“Any good?”
“Surprisingly adequate, Potter. Get on your back.”
The charm that Snape uses to slicken his own fingers and Potter’s arse sounds ridiculous to his own ears, better suited to some ten-knut Dovetown lothario. Now, however, is not the time for elaborate experiments with store-cupboard ingredients. He slides a finger in, then two, and watches Potter stiffen and twist. The blanket is beginning to ruck away from the edges of the bed, bunching and creasing around Potter’s back.
A few touches in the right place and Potter is gasping and beginning to arch upwards, eyes screwed shut, a high colour on his chest and neck and cheeks. Snape takes hold of Potter’s cock, on impulse presses it tight against his own belly and narrowly avoids being head-butted. The boy moans in a most spectacular way. Snape’s own erection jumps and jabs besottedly at Potter’s inner thigh. A hundred points to Gryffindor for making this fantastical performance worthwhile.
“Oh Christ. Fuck.” Potter thrusts against Snape with a will, all effort to hold himself back forgotten. “Oh, I think I’m-”
Tempting as the prospect is, with Potter tensing and panting underneath him, Snape pulls abruptly away. Potter, swearing, grabs for his shoulder, his side, and misses. Snape waits until Potter’s eyelids flicker open, then, with a smirk, presses the tip of his cock against Potter’s anus.
“This will slow you down.”
He breaches Potter slowly, painstakingly, one slim leg draped over his arm, and it’s just as exquisite as he imagined to see the boy’s head press back into the mattress, his neck and the line of his jaw, stubble-rough and flushed, rocking gently, breathing in great gulps. Snape forces himself still for endless seconds, while the blood ticks in his ears.
In the end it’s all over with a speed that might be embarrassing in other circumstances. Within a minute, Snape finds himself mouthing at Potter’s collarbone, hunching and thrusting under the pressure of a hand at his hip, while Potter has become incoherent, grunting with each thrust, pulling at his own cock in an erratic rhythm, his fist bumping awkwardly at Snape’s belly. Potter comes first, rigid as a plank and shouting something frantic and consonantless that makes Snape bite down on his shoulder hard enough to leave a mark, and shove into him desperately. There is hair in Snape’s mouth when he comes, seconds later, stuck to his cheeks with sweat - his own, Potter’s - and his hand grips at Potter’s thrust-up chin, thumb along his jaw, fingers in his hair, in his ear. His toes are snagged up in blanket. He feels none of it, only the blind pant and slide of the sweetest, roughest orgasm he’s had in years.
~
“Do you think Ron and Malfoy are doing it, too?”
If it were not pitch-dark, Snape would not be smiling, even to himself.
“I can’t imagine where they would find the opportunity.”
“Well, there was-”
“Nor do I wish to imagine it.” Fingertips brush against Snape’s jawbone. He frowns, and puts a little hardness into his voice. “Go to sleep, Potter. Tomorrow we will be leaving.”
Potter sighs into his neck, and slides an arm over Snape’s chest. Snape decides to tolerate it for a minute or two, after which he tells himself he will get up, dress and prepare himself for Malfoy’s arrival. He clenches his jaw to hold in a yawn.
It is perhaps a mercy that one’s last involuntary thoughts in the instants before one falls deeply asleep are rarely remembered. Snape’s are as tangled as his limbs and steeped in unbecoming sentiment.
~
A drop of freezing water lands on Snape’s brow, waking him with a start. Rain is coming through the roof. Through the warped glass of the hut window, the light is wet and pearly with mist. It is late. Draco has not come.
Snape’s pulse kicks painfully into high gear and he climbs out of the bed, naked, shaking heavily. The boy turns over, but does not open his eyes while Snape pulls on his trousers and shirt. He will wake him in a minute, when he has found the floo powder. It was on the shelf, next to the stove - next to the… no - in his box in the corner, wasn’t it? Snape rummages frantically. There it is. He fumbles and drops it with a clatter on the floor. Potter sleeps on. He will wake him in a minute; first he must make this call. He drops two new pine chunks on the hearth.
“Incendio.” The wood crackles and smokes. “Incendio!”
The handful of powder he throws on the fire is badly judged, too much, and half of it is blown straight back onto his shirt. He leans in.
“Le Terrier.”
A large tiled kitchen. Three people are sitting at a huge oak table.
“Weasley!” Snape shouts stupidly, and all three look round. The one he wants comes running over.
“What is it?”
“Weasley. I need you to come back.” Snape feels only the vaguest bite of regret over the fear in his voice.
“What, now?”
“Yes. Immediately. Malfoy has not returned. We may have been found out.”
“Who is it, Ron?” The Weasley girl is peering over his shoulder. “Oh god, him!” She makes a face.
“Ginny, piss off!”
Weasley is pushing her away when there is a crash. Snape glances round the kitchen, before realising that the noise has come from behind him. He leans back, cracking his head against the cauldron with a hollow metal clang, and turns in time to see Potter, standing naked, hunched over, in the middle of the room, squinting blindly towards him.
Around his neck is the hand of Bellatrix Lestrange.
Snape scrambles to his feet as she smiles at him, a strangely sweet smile, and raises her hand, showing him a silver signet ring that might glint prettily in a stronger light. She and Potter are there for another half second, and then Snape is crashing over an upturned chair, grabbing at nothing.
Chapter Five
pairing: Snape/Potter
warnings: WIP
rating: R-NC17
previously: One: Malfoy Manor; Two: Godric's Hollow; Three: The Burrow; Four (a): Hagrid's Hut
note: beta'd by buckle_berry and secrethappiness; this part with apologies to buckle_berry, who actually had to sit in person and listen to me read bits of it out. poor thing.
Chapter Four (b)
“Well that hasn’t happened for a while.” Potter is perched on the edge of the bed, elbows on his thighs, head down. Snape, who manhandled him there, is standing two feet away, hands clasped tidily behind his back, in a manner he assures himself is far from hovering.
“How long is a while?”
“Months, I reckon. I mean, I was stuck in that place with him for ages and nothing like this happened. Of course he never came to visit. Or asked me to hold his wand.” Potter looks up and smiles out of one side of his mouth. The pain has gone and he’s become garrulous in his relief. “Actually it hasn’t really hurt like that since I learnt to occlude properly. Oh. Um.” His shoulders tense and he looks down again, frowning.
“Potter, if you imagine I am hurt by your estimation of my teaching abilities, you are quite wrong. I am relieved you finally showed the sense to learn something. Drink the tea.”
Potter is bending to pick his cup up off the floor when Snape turns away. The potion has been cooling for three hours.
“So, d’you think it was just the wand?”
“It is possible.” Snape lifts the lid from the cauldron and lowers his face to it. The barest waft of vapour breathes onto his nose and cheekbones, where it cools damply. “That was the wand that killed your parents - the conduit of the Dark Lord’s soul, intentionally or not. You will not be required handle it again.” Snape straightens, levitates the cauldron an inch or two, and floats it back towards the fire. “If you had behaved with a little more circumspection, you needn’t have handled it in the first place.”
Behind him Potter sighs loudly. Twice.
“When’s this potion going to be ready anyway?”
“Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow the potion will be ready. Snape’s hands are cold and clumsy around the phial of crocodile tears. It takes two tries to pull out the stopper. Potter is silent for longer than Snape had expected.
“So what do you think will happen?”
Three teardrops, and the potion begins to seethe, welling and spilling in a low deep-green geyser in the centre of the cauldron.
“We’ve been through this before, Potter. What I think will happen is that we’ll attempt a spell tomorrow that has likely not been performed in several lifetimes.” Snape unhooks a long iron spoon from the rack next to the fire. “In the unlikely event that it is successful and we both survive, and then have the good fortune to survive the wards, the snares and the Death Eaters of Malfoy Manor, you will do your best to conjure a conflagration immense enough to destroy the Dark Lord. If the Ministry is feeling generous we will be rewarded. Posthumously.”
Snape pauses. The spoon is still poised above the gently heaving liquid when a small huff of a chuckle makes him look round.
“Well that’s something to look forward to.”
Harry Potter, lately snatched from the clutches of Voldemort, and repeatedly shielded from the untender mercies of his own friends, is leaning casually back on his hands, looking oddly happy. He has on a smile that reflects, on the one hand, his utter lack of foresight, and on the other his disarming physical courage. Snape unconsciously holds in a lungful of air.
“But what do you want to happen?”
Lowering the spoon into the cauldron, Snape pulls his gaze away from the boy, and breathes out slowly.
“If you must know, I should like to survive.”
~
Weasley turns up late in the afternoon to the predictable scenes of adolescent euphoria. They’ve barely exchanged pleasantries, involving some uncomfortably intimate details of the Weasley tribe’s ménage in Beaucaire and its various frictions, before Snape feels a pressing need for fresh air. At the door, he eyes the pair warily. Weasley is practically sprawled in the outsize chair, all knees and elbows, while Potter tilts on his own chair, one hand on the table, the other arm slung over the ladder back. In better times, Snape would not for a moment have considered leaving them unattended in the presence of a potion so delicately balanced. This is an era in which many scruples must be trodden underfoot in the interests of sanity.
“Don’t touch the cauldron.”
Weasley scowls, tediously familiar, while Potter grins. “Yes, yes, we know: detention, four million points from Gryffindor, a lifetime scrubbing the dungeon floors.”
He winks at Weasley, showing off. Snape closes the door behind himself with all necessary force and perhaps half the self-possession he pretends to feel. As he strides towards the forest in search of fresh mugwort and peace of mind, he dismisses the possibility that he is being discussed.
Potter is practising his wand-work when Snape returns. He appears to be alone, but then appearances are often deceptive.
“Is that Weasley?” Snape asks, as they both stare at a large shabby red armchair, which was decidedly not there when Snape left.
“No.” Potter laughs, and Snape’s belly prickles a little with pleasure, whether at Weasley’s absence or at the laugh he does not waste his time wondering. “It’s Hagrid’s second best coat. Just - you know - limbering up.” He rolls his shoulders, then spells the chair back into a coat which slumps in a moth-eaten heap on the floor. “Ron apparated back to France to fetch something for me.”
“How accomplished of him. I had assumed he travelled here by portkey.” Snape’s voice lacks its accustomed sarcastic bite. He busies himself retrieving the coat by hand and hanging it on the tree.
“You needn’t sound so surprised. Ron spent nearly a year and a half at the Ministry and in the field, you know.”
“I am already well aware of the parlous state of auror recruitment.” Snape is dusting down the sleeves of Hagrid’s coat, as if he intends to wear it himself. He feels suddenly detached from the ground and from his own body, watching his inexplicable actions with a sardonic eye. How awkward he is. He walks himself deliberately over to the fire and peers at his potion, untouched and simmering lazily. After a second or two Potter joins him, and they stand side by side, staring blankly down into the cauldron.
“They even took me on for a bit,” the boy says contemplatively. “But of course I always have had an impressive Patronus.”
Out of the corner of his eye Snape can see that Potter is grinning, his bottom lip pinned between teeth, and that the skin on his neck is a little pink.
“And yet I am unmoved.”
Potter’s blush deepens and spreads upwards, and Snape cannot help but wonder if he is becoming aroused, a thought both gratifying and wildly inappropriate. Potter shifts from foot to foot and looks away for a second or two before pointing at the potion.
“This is it then?”
“Nearly. Two more hours of simmering, a third boiling, a decoction of asphodel root, a number of gradated strainings and reductions, and then this is, as you say, it.”
There is a great sighing breath. “It looks sort of harmless.”
“How appallingly naïve, even for you, Potter.”
Still they stand there, looking down, subdued now - almost transfixed. Snape sees them both from his detached vantage point, dwarfed by the immense apprehension of what is coming, and when he feels the light brush of a knuckle against the back of his hand, he holds himself completely still, as if that, in itself, is a form of reassurance.
~
Weasley comes back with a pack of exploding snap cards and a small postcard-sized photograph. He and Potter sit next to each other on the bed, looking at it.
“It was the summer after they got married, Mum says. She didn’t have one of them just on their own - looked all through the shoebox. Then Ginny was shouting from upstairs. Bloody girls.” He pauses, shrugging, shifts on his buttocks, points at the photograph. “Somewhere in Norfolk apparently. Some Order thing.”
Potter doesn’t say anything, just stares intently, almost without blinking.
Snape sees the picture when it’s finally been abandoned. Two smiling couples in a field of lavender. The Evans girl is a young wife, already pregnant - it shows in her round belly and the pink of her cheeks. Snape does not touch so much as a corner of the picture. Potter and Weasley are playing snap on the bed; he glances to the side to make sure that they do not see him looking.
Weasley stays the night. He cannot be allowed to come and go fifty times in broad daylight, and so the two boys sleep together in the vast bed. Weasley faces out into the room, his eyes screwed shut, while Potter lies tight in the corner, enough space between them to fit three more boys of Potter’s size. He holds the covers to his chest with both hands, and stares fixedly at the ceiling.
Legilimens, Snape thinks, hesitating to put out his lumos, but his mind is barely prodding at the doors of Potter’s, before the boy’s gaze snaps round to him and something akin to a studded oak portcullis comes crashing down. Practice evidently makes perfect.
~
“Well, isn’t this cosy.”
Snape opens his eyes only to close them again in a hurry. Malfoy is standing in a painfully bright lumos at the foot of Snape’s bunk, his eyes on the vast bed in the corner and its two inhabitants.
“Potter and Weasel. I always knew how it was.”
Weasley yawns. “Put a sock in it, Malfoy.”
For a moment his mouth hangs open like a stunned fish. “Don’t even speak to me. Severus, you are operating a brothel.”
Snape spares him a look of disgust before setting the fire and transfiguring his bedcover back into a heavy wool cloak. Even wrapped from shoulder to ankle, he shivers. He lights the hurricane lamp on the table and sits beside it, pulling the cloak over his fingers.
“Weasley, get up. It’s time you were leaving anyway.”
“Yes, get up, Weasley. I’ll see you out.”
Weasley grunts and shoves a leg out from under the cover, sits and yawns again. There is a movement from the other side of the bed. “What time is it?” Potter props himself on one arm, squinting at no one in particular.
“So he’s talking now. Oh, perfect! Oh, break out the sodding firewhisky - we should celebrate.”
Malfoy sits opposite Snape with a thud and gives him a sulky look from under the eyebrows, which Snape ignores.
“Why are you here, Malfoy?”
“I have news.” He turns his head slightly back towards the bed, raising his voice. “If anyone wants to hear it, that is.”
In a bright flick of lamplight, Snape sees a mark across the left side of Malfoy’s face. A deep purple cloud of a bruise is beginning to surface, stretching from chin to cheekbone, and just above the collar of his outer robe a round sore, a burn mark, the size of a knut. Snape does not lower his gaze when Malfoy looks back, but neither does he venture a comment when Malfoy pulls his collar up a fraction, covering the bottom half of the burn. They eye each other with a frank understanding, as the Gryffindors crash around in the corner.
“So, what is your news?”
“Well.” Malfoy hesitates. “It’s over, I think. The Dark Lord has Longbottom and that demented auror Moody. Carrow and Nott found them at the Hollow and brought them back to the house.”
He pauses again and the hut is unnaturally silent; even Weasley and Potter are still now, listening. Snape has been waiting for this news, but that hasn’t made the sudden slide of his stomach any less startling. His skin prickles up in fearful goosebumps.
“Every Death Eater in the place has been taking turns crucio-ing Moody. Longbottom’s just been locked in the cellar. Apparently he’s completely doollally already.”
“What has Moody told them?”
“Nothing as far as I know. Not that they tell me. They know you’re not there, though. Father and Aunt Bella asked me about you again -” There’s a brief flicker of his eyelids - “if I knew where you’d taken Potter.”
“And you -”
“I said no, of course.”
Potter’s at Malfoy’s shoulder by now, wanting the details.
“Are they okay? Did you see Neville? Are they giving him enough food?”
Snape stands up suddenly, hands fisted, and for a second he feels that he could hex away that voice again for good, and it would be a relief not to hear it. He bites his back teeth hard together, pressing until the urge to act is gone.
“God, Potter, what do you care?” Malfoy’s looking at him, narrow-eyed. He crosses his arms, four-square, doesn’t answer the question.
There’s no time for this argument. Everyone must be got as far away from Potter as possible. Snape takes hold of Malfoy’s elbow and pulls him staggering to his feet. The panicked flurry in his belly would have him throw Malfoy and Weasley bodily out of the door. He settles for gripping Malfoy tight by the arm while the boy tries to jerk away, a remnant of the sulk.
“Draco, you have to return there now. Ensure that they have not missed you. Come back here tomorrow night with everything you need from the manor. Steer clear of the hostages; try not to talk to anyone if you can avoid it. Stay in the kitchen.” Snape feels he is gabbling and hardens his voice. “Go now, and take Mr Weasley back with you as far as the gates - it is time he was gone.”
Malfoy nods. His eyes are wide with the beginning of fear. Weasley, too, falls into line without argument. He is dressed and fully awake and, for once, looks at Snape only for instruction.
They don’t even jostle at the door as they leave, and once they are outside the hut, Snape does not watch them, convinced that this new imperative will not allow them to loiter. His fingers move stiffly around the kettle as he sets it to boil over the fire. It is a terrible gamble, on Malfoy’s life in particular, but Snape cannot protect them all. He doesn’t even glance at Potter, though his instinct is to take hold of him and floo out, anywhere.
“Why did you send him back?” Potter’s voice is perplexed, but there is also that unmistakable quaver of rage. “Don’t I get a say? They’re looking for me as well.”
“This is not a democracy, Potter. I sent him back because Lucius Malfoy has ways of finding his son. And we are not yet ready.”
There is a rustle and a creak from the corner of the room.
“What if he tells them where we are?”
Snape turns at that. Potter is sitting on the bed in his pyjamas. He looks small and fierce, his brows almost connecting with the frames of his glasses.
“He is not the coward you think him. I do not believe he will tell - not by choice. We must hope that he is allowed to retain that choice until tomorrow night.”
Potter is silent while Snape brews tea for one and sets it on the table.
“I have one or two things to attend to. You may go back to bed, Potter. There is still an hour or so before dawn.”
The boy climbs back under the covers, and lies there on his back for several minutes before removing his glasses and turning to the wall. Snape moves back and forth in the hut, shredding, straining, and adding the last ingredients: the aconite, the mantis hearts that must not stew. He watches Potter for the sigh, shift and stretch, the palm to cheek that says he is falling asleep, but it never comes.
~
It’s late morning when Snape and Potter levitate the cauldron into the forest, but it hardly seems like day at all. The sky through the trees is uniformly dull and grey and a misty drizzle is falling. Potter has hardly said a word since Snape woke him to make breakfast an hour after dawn. They trudge in silence over wet leaves and roots. Snape is inclined to hurry - if it begins to rain in earnest the potion may be spoiled - but Potter’s head is down and he treads with a deliberateness and an effort that should not perhaps be further forced.
It is a small patch of bare ground where they stop, barely even a clearing. The forest is closed over their heads, muffling sound and breeze. Snape stamps a little at the ground, then the cauldron is lowered. Potter stands with his arms hanging at his sides, awkward and expectant.
“Set a fire under it,” Snape says, nodding at the cauldron.
Potter fetches enough large twigs to build a small pile of kindling, breaking the larger sticks in half by hand, then toes them into place with his shoe.
“Incendio.”
The twigs are damp, and they snap and spit in the fire. Within five minutes, the tiny clearing has filled with wood smoke and the dark bitter smell of the Oblitteratus potion.
“Take your wand out, Potter.”
~
Voldemort’s wand burns and shakes with fierce charge in Snape’s hand. A crackling arc of magic connects it to Potter’s, gripped two-handed. Potter’s hair and robes are whipped around his face and body by a wind that Snape sees more clearly than he feels. Leaves and twigs whirl from ankle to shoulder height and the trees around them bend like grass, but Snape hears only the sharp rush of his own breath between his teeth and the accelerating drum roll of his heartbeat.
A piercing buzz reverberates back and forth in the air between himself and Potter. Potter’s face is furious with concentration - effort - anger. Voldemort’s wand shudders violently and for a frozen moment Snape expects to see Dumbledore materialise in front of him, then shade after shade begins to spill out - strange and familiar. Eustacia Goyle; Kingsley Shacklebolt; Fenrir Greyback; the Parkinson girl; a sleeping baby, a tiny bundle hanging limply in the air; a brown rat; an old man bent at the waist - an endless stream of victims floating in a smothering reel around the two of them: indifferent, or gloating, or shrieking with rage, muttering and chattering until Snape would give his life to drop the wand and run.
Snape stares at Potter, blinkering the mist of ghosts. The boy’s body is shaking, sweating; he stares back from under his brows, head lowered as if shielding himself from what hangs around them. Finally there is the Hufflepuff boy, silent and listless, dead for over four years, and then they come quickly. Suddenly Potter is shouting something incomprehensible and Snape’s pulse snaps to a stop. How can she still be so young?
Lily Evans. Or something in the shape and breath of her. Lily Potter. Snape’s arm drops to his side and the arc is broken. She stares, as if confused, doesn’t say a word, doesn’t shout as she is shackled in Snape’s wavering cinctus. The potion froths and spews as she is dragged lower, vapour scorching the ghost of her skin, then burning and shrivelling the shade to air, as if she had been hardly there at all, as fine as a hair.
The others fade unnoticed into the thick grey air, and the silence thumps at Snape’s eardrums. Potter breathes heavily, bent over, hand on knee, but Snape can still make out his face, white as salt.
“I don’t feel any different,” he says. His voice is petulant, tearful.
~
James Potter does not go silently, but begins howling for his wife as soon as Snape and the boy summon him up. By the time he too is incinerated, Potter is on all fours in the mulch by the edge of the trees, the barrel of his ribs heaving in and out.
“Is it over?”
“Yes. How does it feel now?”
The boy coughs and spits a little, then looks up. “I can still remember them.”
~
Potter moves around the hut slowly. He hasn’t taken off his outer robe. Without a murmur at Snape’s order, he has collected pumpkins for soup, and set the kettle over the fire, but now he sits on the bed, gaping at nothing until the water has boiled almost dry. The potion had been brewed with meticulous accuracy, yet Snape, too, is plagued by memories, chief among which is the tug of James Potter’s fist in his collar and the meat and urine smell of a confined dog. That wretched life-debt, never fully discharged, but dissolved now into less than nothing, or so they must hope. If the Dark Lord is killed and Snape survives - a constellation of miracles so unlikely that he cannot consider it without a cynical twist of the mouth - he will finally be able to shrug the boy off.
He looks at Potter, sitting limply on the bed and practises the words in his head. The job is done, Potter. As suicidally incompetent as you undoubtedly are, surely even you can manage without me now. He turns away from the boy, as if he’s said it, and concentrates on projecting all the scorn that was owed to the father through ribs and robe towards the son. His back feels warm with it, the muscles of his shoulders tense for an illusory fight.
He takes a knife from its stand by the fire, a vast hooked blade fixed to a broom handle riddled with woodworm, and applies it to the nearest pumpkin. The flesh gives with a satisfying hush of juice.
As they sit at the table later, two bowls of pumpkin soup, two spoons, two uncomfortable fools, Potter asks the question that’s been hanging over the hut all afternoon.
“Did it work?”
“Did what work, Potter?”
He frowns. “The potion, the thing this afternoon.”
“What did we do this afternoon?” Snape looks down, spooning the soup, and pretends not to watch the boy’s face.
Potter hesitates, mouth open. “We got rid of the horcrux, didn’t we? We destroyed - we destroyed - them.” His voice tails off in confusion.
“Who?”
He looks up then, and Potter’s expression is frightened, slightly frantic. Potter and Evans, he thinks, a little panicked himself. Your parents, your parents, your -
Snape can feel it slipping away. It’s a little like fighting to stay awake in the face of Dreamless Sleep. He’s trying to remember a woman. The name of a flower? Rose? Daisy? Snape’s not sure any more. But those were her eyes, weren’t they? - he looks at Potter over the table - or were they his? His? Snape lowers his spoon into the soup, and pushes a hand up his temple, grimacing. Potter isn’t eating any longer either, but looking at him uncertainly from opaque green eyes, and something Snape has always depended on, something he could have sworn was part of his own mechanism, seems to evaporate inside him. He holds his breath and waits for the vacancy to be filled.
~
Snape sighs and lays his book open on the table.
“Potter, you have been gawking at that photograph for at least an hour. Have you nothing else to do?”
The boy stands up from the bed and walks over, tossing the picture onto the table by Snape’s left hand. It is a picture of the Weasley parents in a lavender field, which, though moderately well composed, does not seem worth an entire hour’s contemplation. Potter stands, leaning on the table with one hand, one foot toeing at the other, hips canted casually.
“I don’t see why we have to wait. If we’re doomed, we may as well get it over with.”
“Oh, bravo, Potter. That’s the attitude.”
“It’s your attitude.” Potter kicks gently at a table leg. “Anyway, I’m not suddenly going to be better at unforgivables tomorrow morning.”
Thud, thud. Snape narrows his eyes at the foot. “Do not underestimate your shortcomings. There is ample room, if somewhat less capacity, for improvement. Where dedicated teaching has failed we may still perhaps hope that a good night’s sleep will prevail.”
THUD!
“Fine, I’ll go to bed. There’s no need to be such a prick about it.”
Snape watches out of the corner of his eye as Potter sits on the bed with his shoulders in a slump. He makes that last for about ten minutes, then looks up from under his eyebrows and peels off his jumper with a jerk, elbows jabbing in a temper. Snape’s posture gels rigid, and his scalp prickles with apprehension. He does not look up as Potter’s trousers are yanked down and kicked under the bed, but his eyes become fixed on a single word: transmute. Transmute transmute.
Eventually Potter is sitting naked and shivering on the bed, and still Snape does not look up. He surreptitiously presses the spine of his book into his lap and glares at the page: transmute.
When Potter gives up and walks over, it is with an awkward shuffle rather than the slink of a seducer. Nevertheless the boy must be an exhibitionist; his pink and white cock is already half full and bobbing at his hip at the point where that knobbly scar begins to meander up his torso, grazing one tight nipple and stretching for his neck. Arousal tickles through Snape’s balls; he clears his throat, already certain what will happen.
“You think this will make you happy?”
Potter shrugs.
“It doesn’t really matter either way, does it?”
“No.”
“Then you should take your clothes off, too.” Potter nods towards him.
Without a conscious impulse, Snape lifts his hand to his collar and slips the first button through its hole. Potter almost jumps - his eyes are huge, and in an instant he is leaning down, pressing his mouth against Snape’s and fumbling at the buttons himself, his knuckles knocking clumsily against Snape’s chest. He pulls at the fabric with short ineffectual tugs, and Snape shifts impatiently in his chair.
“Be a little quicker about it, Potter.”
He insinuates his way between Potter’s lips and sucks the boy’s tongue into his own mouth, pressing it up against his palate. Potter grunts, falls forward, bent half into Snape’s lap, one elbow digging painfully into Snape’s thigh. His fingers stop fumbling altogether. Snape reaches an encouraging hand down to wrap around Potter’s silk-hard erection, and is suddenly held in two pincer-like grips, one around a bicep, the other, oddly, around his left ear. Potter’s knee knocks and slides against his repeatedly, in what is apparently an attempt to mount him. Snape pushes back, resisting both Potter’s insistence, and his own desire to press all that butter-pale flesh against his chest and belly.
Potter’s eyelids are at half-mast. He thrusts a little into Snape’s hand, still jealously clasping his cock.
“Perhaps -” Potter swallows, “perhaps you should do it. The buttons.”
“Perhaps you should get on the bed.”
They edge together towards the corner of the room, an ungainly two-step, Potter’s hands on Snape’s arms, craning up, mouth pursed into kiss after badly aimed kiss. When they come to an abrupt halt, Potter has to grip hard to keep himself from collapsing onto his arse on the mattress. He tries to pull Snape around beside him, to push him onto his back.
He thinks he is going to top - he is not, but for now Snape feels generous enough to lie cautiously back on the bed and let Potter climb onto him, wetly mouthing at his neck, cock smearing on the chaste black worsted of his coat. Snape undoes the buttons, one-handed, the other hand clamped viciously tight on the boy’s smooth round arse.
Cumbered as he is, Snape removes his coat and shirt with a minimum of fuss and feels no small thrill when Potter’s bare chest presses against his. A warm palm splays against his grateful cock and Snape hisses, eliciting harder, quicker kisses against his jawline, a snag of teeth and a rough rubbing at his groin. Potter’s own cock is squashed against Snape’s hip and thrusting up against his trousers in desperate little jabs.
“Fuck. Se- Prof-.” A groan. Potter’s body is shuddering in a dangerously portentous way. Snape’s chest gives a sharp kick of excitement, unwelcome and quickly swallowed.
“If you come on my clothes, we will never be doing this again.”
A ridiculous threat. Snape is not so balls-led as to suppose that this, whatever this may turn out to be, is remotely repeatable; still, the boy has stopped moving, the line of his back rigid and his face buried, open mouthed and hotly panting in the crook of Snape’s neck.
“You may remove my trousers.”
The heel of Potter’s hand digs into Snape’s erection and Snape flinches, expecting a pain that doesn’t quite arrive. The boy levers himself up; there is a dazed smile on his face.
“Oh I may? Please may I, Professor?”
Heat pounds through Snape’s belly. He can feel the blood in his cheeks and cock, painfully hot, as if this is a game in which much is invested, and his bluff has just been called. Potter, however, goes about the business of taking off his trousers and underclothes with sincere zeal and a bottom lip bitten white. A sweat has formed on Potter’s forehead and he is making small sighing noises, his face bare inches above Snape’s groin. Snape’s cock flexes abruptly, reaching up, and Snape can do little more than stare at himself, chin to his chest, half amazed at his body’s brazen submission, half tempted to grab a scrag of that terrible hair and force the boy’s head into an even more pleasing proximity.
Potter swallows. “I’m, uh - can I? -”
In the end no forcing is necessary; Potter abandons his half-thought request and licks with the flat of his tongue from base to tip of Snape’s cock. A spike of arousal makes Snape’s buttocks clench tightly. When Potter’s lips close around him, and his cheeks and tongue press in with a gentle insistent suck, Snape’s body tenses, fingers spreading stiffly against the blanket. He almost says something foolish.
Potter grunts a little, breathing heavily through his nose, trying to set up a rhythm with hand and mouth and flicking tongue that is no less effective for its uncoordination. Snape begins to thrust up, and has barely gone half a minute when the sudden tightening itch in his balls cuts through the fog of bliss, and makes him push Potter’s head away. Potter strains back, trying to keep contact, but has to give in; Snape’s erection slides from his mouth and lands on his stomach with a wet slap.
Potter smiles slyly. His mouth is cranberry-red and wet with saliva.
“Any good?”
“Surprisingly adequate, Potter. Get on your back.”
The charm that Snape uses to slicken his own fingers and Potter’s arse sounds ridiculous to his own ears, better suited to some ten-knut Dovetown lothario. Now, however, is not the time for elaborate experiments with store-cupboard ingredients. He slides a finger in, then two, and watches Potter stiffen and twist. The blanket is beginning to ruck away from the edges of the bed, bunching and creasing around Potter’s back.
A few touches in the right place and Potter is gasping and beginning to arch upwards, eyes screwed shut, a high colour on his chest and neck and cheeks. Snape takes hold of Potter’s cock, on impulse presses it tight against his own belly and narrowly avoids being head-butted. The boy moans in a most spectacular way. Snape’s own erection jumps and jabs besottedly at Potter’s inner thigh. A hundred points to Gryffindor for making this fantastical performance worthwhile.
“Oh Christ. Fuck.” Potter thrusts against Snape with a will, all effort to hold himself back forgotten. “Oh, I think I’m-”
Tempting as the prospect is, with Potter tensing and panting underneath him, Snape pulls abruptly away. Potter, swearing, grabs for his shoulder, his side, and misses. Snape waits until Potter’s eyelids flicker open, then, with a smirk, presses the tip of his cock against Potter’s anus.
“This will slow you down.”
He breaches Potter slowly, painstakingly, one slim leg draped over his arm, and it’s just as exquisite as he imagined to see the boy’s head press back into the mattress, his neck and the line of his jaw, stubble-rough and flushed, rocking gently, breathing in great gulps. Snape forces himself still for endless seconds, while the blood ticks in his ears.
In the end it’s all over with a speed that might be embarrassing in other circumstances. Within a minute, Snape finds himself mouthing at Potter’s collarbone, hunching and thrusting under the pressure of a hand at his hip, while Potter has become incoherent, grunting with each thrust, pulling at his own cock in an erratic rhythm, his fist bumping awkwardly at Snape’s belly. Potter comes first, rigid as a plank and shouting something frantic and consonantless that makes Snape bite down on his shoulder hard enough to leave a mark, and shove into him desperately. There is hair in Snape’s mouth when he comes, seconds later, stuck to his cheeks with sweat - his own, Potter’s - and his hand grips at Potter’s thrust-up chin, thumb along his jaw, fingers in his hair, in his ear. His toes are snagged up in blanket. He feels none of it, only the blind pant and slide of the sweetest, roughest orgasm he’s had in years.
~
“Do you think Ron and Malfoy are doing it, too?”
If it were not pitch-dark, Snape would not be smiling, even to himself.
“I can’t imagine where they would find the opportunity.”
“Well, there was-”
“Nor do I wish to imagine it.” Fingertips brush against Snape’s jawbone. He frowns, and puts a little hardness into his voice. “Go to sleep, Potter. Tomorrow we will be leaving.”
Potter sighs into his neck, and slides an arm over Snape’s chest. Snape decides to tolerate it for a minute or two, after which he tells himself he will get up, dress and prepare himself for Malfoy’s arrival. He clenches his jaw to hold in a yawn.
It is perhaps a mercy that one’s last involuntary thoughts in the instants before one falls deeply asleep are rarely remembered. Snape’s are as tangled as his limbs and steeped in unbecoming sentiment.
~
A drop of freezing water lands on Snape’s brow, waking him with a start. Rain is coming through the roof. Through the warped glass of the hut window, the light is wet and pearly with mist. It is late. Draco has not come.
Snape’s pulse kicks painfully into high gear and he climbs out of the bed, naked, shaking heavily. The boy turns over, but does not open his eyes while Snape pulls on his trousers and shirt. He will wake him in a minute, when he has found the floo powder. It was on the shelf, next to the stove - next to the… no - in his box in the corner, wasn’t it? Snape rummages frantically. There it is. He fumbles and drops it with a clatter on the floor. Potter sleeps on. He will wake him in a minute; first he must make this call. He drops two new pine chunks on the hearth.
“Incendio.” The wood crackles and smokes. “Incendio!”
The handful of powder he throws on the fire is badly judged, too much, and half of it is blown straight back onto his shirt. He leans in.
“Le Terrier.”
A large tiled kitchen. Three people are sitting at a huge oak table.
“Weasley!” Snape shouts stupidly, and all three look round. The one he wants comes running over.
“What is it?”
“Weasley. I need you to come back.” Snape feels only the vaguest bite of regret over the fear in his voice.
“What, now?”
“Yes. Immediately. Malfoy has not returned. We may have been found out.”
“Who is it, Ron?” The Weasley girl is peering over his shoulder. “Oh god, him!” She makes a face.
“Ginny, piss off!”
Weasley is pushing her away when there is a crash. Snape glances round the kitchen, before realising that the noise has come from behind him. He leans back, cracking his head against the cauldron with a hollow metal clang, and turns in time to see Potter, standing naked, hunched over, in the middle of the room, squinting blindly towards him.
Around his neck is the hand of Bellatrix Lestrange.
Snape scrambles to his feet as she smiles at him, a strangely sweet smile, and raises her hand, showing him a silver signet ring that might glint prettily in a stronger light. She and Potter are there for another half second, and then Snape is crashing over an upturned chair, grabbing at nothing.
Chapter Five