So, I was going through a box of notes yesterday -- dignified, academic notes -- and I found this fic fragment I wrote a year and a half ago. The idea was to have Peeves blackmail Snape into getting the Baron off his back, but the idea didn't really work -- how could Peeves control himself long enough to blackmail anyone. But I thought it couldn't hurt to let this fragment see the light of day. Unbeta'd. 1300 words.
TITLE: Peeves Takes Charge
AUTHOR: Idlerat
PAIRING: SS/HP, but mainly Peeves
RATING: Explicit bawdy humor
FEEDBACK: Comments, howls of pain, cease and desist letters -- whatever. Here or idlerat at yahoo dot com
DISCLAIMER: Abject apologies to J.K. Rowling and P. G. Wodehouse
SUMMARY: A Peevish approach to blackmail. Wodehouse pastiche, sort of.
NOTES: This was started for the Severus Snape Fuh-Q Fest, 3rd wave; response to challenge 13, “Peeves Can’t Wait to Tell Snape What He Saw.” Never posted to the fest.
Peeves had feelings. People thought he didn’t. But he did.
It’s true he didn’t have many feelings - pleasure, frustration, and an instinct for self-preservation made up the whole complement - but they were real. And if his pleasures were a bit, well, infantile, who was in a position to judge him? Considering what a castle full of perverts he happened to know that he inhabited, Peeves felt a bit put out, from time to time, that no one seemed to respect his simple joys. To be fair, the entire sum of these joys consisted of causing discomfort to others. But being fair was not part of Peeves’ job description.
He had been a part of this school longer than almost anyone, and he had left his mark on three dozen generations. The Weasley twins had been his latest protégés, and everyone seemed to admire their work. Flitwick had gone so far as to dedicate a monument to them when they left the school. But did anyone bother to acknowledge the debt of influence they owed to Peeves? They did not. No plaque. No “Peeves” room. Not even a round of applause. On the contrary, everyone who had ever lived here could be relied on to thwart Peeves’ plans by any means at their disposal.
Thwarting was something Peeves knew a bit about. He was a thwarter himself. Thwart or be thwarted: that was the sole law in the Canon of Peeves. It was both his pleasure and his duty to attempt to thwart the residents of Hogwarts in all their undertakings, from great acts of heroism and villainy to the routines of daily life. It was his calling, and he never ceased to obey it. It was his creed. He interfered with everybody’s business any way he could, and everybody opposed him with all their might in return.
Nor, felt Peeves, were those who sought to thwart him quite so scrupulous about their methods as might have been expected, given their reputations. The likes of Albus Dumbledore (not that Peeves had ever met anyone who was really all that much like Albus Dumbledore) might not stoop to employ the Bloody Baron’s more vicious methods themselves, but that had never stopped them from enlisting the Baron to act on their behalf - not where Peeves was concerned. Fairness was the school rule for everyone but him.
In their crusade against Peevish bliss, the custodians of the school had never been above tricks, hexes, threats, or blackmail, but none had ever matched the pure amorality of Hogwarts’ original ghost, the Bloody Baron. The Baron had learned to frighten the local creatures while the Sorting Hat was still composing its first song (the covertly bawdy “Founders’ Lay”). His demesnes had been far away - somewhere they had barons, Peeves supposed, which had not been the medieval Scottish Highlands as he remembered them. But like the other ghosts, and the centaurs and the unicorns and the nargles and the nifflers, the Baron had returned to his alma mater to be with his own kind in an atmosphere of unadulterated magic.
The handicaps associated with being dead had cramped the Baron’s style to some degree, and as a Hogwarts Ghost he was bound to comply with the will of his Head of House, which had, under most regimes, meant no little or no deliberate terrorizing of children, unicorns, or the pure of heart. The one being against whom he was allowed free rein was Peeves the Poltergeist, and he had exercised it energetically, with the tacit approval of all living authorities at the school.
Peeves’ indignation, however, never lasted beyond the moment in which it was provoked. Justice and reputation did not, in the grand scheme of things, possess any power over his mind. Peeves lived in the present. He was a creature of the Now. Unlike some ghosts he could mention, he moved with the times. So when the times presented him with the possibility of leverage over his ancient nemesis, the most ruthless enemy the non-human inhabitants of this castle had ever known, he was not going to hesitate to make the most of it. When he saw the Baron’s current Head of House, that repressed, joyless freak of a potions master, sprawled naked on an enormous satin hassock in the Room of Requirement with his head back, his legs in the air, and Hogwarts’ most famous sixth-year on top of him, Peeves held his tongue and considered his options. For one one-hundredth of a second.
“Enjoying yourself, SNAPE?”
In an instant, Peeves was hovering directly overhead, looking down at them in an imitation of Snape’s glower before breaking up.
“SNAPE RAPE! SNAPE RAPE! HAHAHA!”
Snape swept his wand from the floor and used it to slam and seal the invisible door Peeves had somehow managed to find. He pushed the Boy Wonder off of him and rose from their bed of luxury, lunging at Peeves with his wand up and what was left of his erection, still a rather alarming shade of maroon, waving in the breeze. The breeze was created by Peeves as he orbited the staggering Snape like a deranged budgie.
“Naughty, naughty, you’ve been caughty! Fairy Potter and the Snot Monster of Doom! Wooohoo! DUMBLEDORE! DUMBLY WUMBLY!” Peeves made a rapid feint at the door, but allowed Snape to catch him before he reached it.
“Oooo sex with a student! Slimy Slytherin Boffs Boy Who Boinks! Poncey Potions Professor takes it from Hero Harry! Who’s Master of Potions now?”
Harry was still where he had landed after his ejection from the Tunnel of Love, plopped on his bum with his hands behind him. Copious amounts of the fragrant Love Lotion Snape had brewed for the occasion glistened on his cock and in the hair of his groin, and thick droplets of it wandered in lazy trickles from his navel to his knees. He could not have looked more dazed. He was obviously unable to comprehend how he had been thwarted so far into the proceedings. Peeves was over the moon.
"Snivellus Snape and Potty Snotter!
Who's abusing Harry Potter?
"Snivelarious! Ooo you think I don’t remember! Dogging dog-boy all over the school, turning his stomach. He’d do a werewolf before he’d touch a hair on your greasy pathetic head. Now he’s dead and you’re his boy’s bitch! Does he keep you on a chain? Does ickle Pottykins ever let you hunt? "
Harry struggled back into his "Kiss me I'm a wizard" t-shirt and rocked softly on his knees, still in a perfect agony of arousal. This was why all the children were taught Deflating Charms as soon as they hit puberty. Still, Peeves knew the charm did nothing to stop the aftereffects of an unfulfilled engorgement of this magnitude. Harry’s nuts were going to be killing him tomorrow, and he had to fly against Hufflepuff. This thought seemed to occur simultaneously to student and sprite.
“FUCK YOU PEEVES YOU FUCKING FUCKER!”
“HA, HA! Harry Boner and the Aching Bollocks! Broomstick hurting you, Harry?
"Go Hufflepuff!
Beat Gryffin-sore!
Beat him till he yells for more!”
Maybe it was Peeves' requirement to be rid of the Baronial yoke; maybe that's how he had got in. Besides, the castle didn't seem to like Snape as much as Snape liked the castle. It would be just like Hogwarts to play a punishing trick on him the moment he let himself go a bit. For the first time in six hundred years, Peeves and Hogwarts had a common cause.
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That's all I wrote.