Fic: As We Are Wont, 17
Lupin:
It is like you to accuse me of cannibalism for pushing my tongue into your wet, yielding mouth. Your saliva is a latent curse, activated by the moon. There have been studies, speculations, that one might preserve werewolf saliva and on the full moon, spread it over an open wound. It either inoculates or turns the subject into a werewolf himself, much like the smallpox vaccine.
I have been sucking the saliva out of your mouth and spreading your fluids on my fingers, perhaps liters upon liters. I am covered in immunity or latent curses. As potions master, my blood courses with trace poisons, antivenins, antidotes. I imagine my olfactory bulb to be covered now with a sheen of dust-- the dust of mites, wings, bats. My very blood is becoming a thick concoction that vampires would not touch. It tastes of foul things, vile things, aconite and silver. I may become a cannibal to keep my blood pure but you infect me every time you groan, shout, come into completion. Shall I call you a rat? Spreading plague. I know your curse. It's not the wolf, but death that your body harbors.
Tell me. When you're with her, how do you get it up? You so like being taken, not once have you asked to take. Does her hair change color like the hair on her head? What do you taste with your head between her legs? Imagine your saliva, latent with disease, so near her tissues, wet and mucus folds. How is it, Lupin, that in all your years of prostitution, you never contracted AIDS? Its effects are more devastating than most potions. Amazing what muggles contract.
No one has studied the mechanism by which muggle disease might spread to mages but I have always suspected that viruses have no blood preference. The Black Plague, Spanish influenza, their mage forms that were just as deadly. Sometimes I wonder if the hemophobia is nothing more than a pathophobia, the idea that one can prevent catching ill simply by living in quarantine. Cleansing. The Dark Lord's need for immortality, and clean air to breathe for the duration of eternity.
Sex between us is a disease. Love is a virus. It invades cells and reproduces, evolves and bursts out to conquer more cells until the entire organism is consumed. Thankfully, I have been drinking the antidote for years. My gallbladder produces it naturally.
I have no reverent words. Your eyes accuse me. You want from me what I will not give, you give to me what I would rather take. Lycanthropy has made you tenacious, Lupin. You adapt and spread like the disease itself, and refuse to be defeated.
Only fools love metabolically inert infectious agents. Perhaps I am a cannibal.
SS