fic Nostalgia HP/SS
Title: Nostalgia
Author: the_8th_square / the_pill_box
Pairing: Harry Potter / Snape, bits of James Potter / Severus Snape
Disclaimer: It wouldn't be worth it to sue me, you'd probably get $5.
Rating: Ehh, R-ish.
POV: Snape
Timeline: After HBP, so there are spoilers.
Summery: Short, musings of Snape while he visits Harry imprisoned in a Death Eater dungeon.
Bound together with a sane compelling discipline, master and student are expected to show respect. Our words never met the minimum of that requirement, ricocheting off each other until, in the blinding speed of sarcasm and defense, they collide as our bodies are swept under the endless, suffocating shades in the folds of my cloak. I imagine and I smile.
Nostalgia and déjà vu burn like fire, invading and weaving between the creases of my ribs and leave me sick, even as I feel like crawling to you. Longing to touch you. This is not a love of fairy tales and broken epic poems full of heroes and hideous beasts. I’m sure you’d love to pretend it was, boy, behind your iron cage, utterly spent, utterly lost, and utterly defeated.
It would make your story so much easier.
The motives are now too far hidden in the shadows of a willow with devious innocence. This is a love that is so finely entwined within the contrast of love and hate that neither feeling is able to conquer or walk away.
You fool. I can feel you wince as I unlock and enter. You cannot yet see which one of us it is. Fallen into my master’s spider web just as I always predicted. It was easier then, to choose what side to follow when the time came to kill Dumbledore.
Bathed in fame and brainless as the day you were born by that red-haired whore. Biting with her sympathy at my wounds, a voracious female piranha. Snip snap with long jaws of poisoned check bones that tilted in a scowl every time she looked at me, like a child playing with a nasty bug or a scorpion. I hated her because her pity and her intent to help me were such in earnest as to never be forgiven. That kind of person’s honesty leaves a lingering mark, a sting of remembrance at how vile you really are.
It’s when people look at me with a gleaming smile; it gives me false hope. The kind of hope that died long before she did. How dull she must have looked standing in front of you that night shielding, protecting, forcing herself onto a dagger held by someone else’s hand. She would have died anyway. Her actions were not courageous, but desperate and silly.
I lock the door and you look up at me with eyes cloaked in an automatic snap of disgust and mistrust, strapped to the wall in flimsy garments over two layers of bruises. You can smell me, somehow with primal sense and with a certain familiarity, it is your former professor. I wear the death mask still. It feels flimsy and I untie the leather strands that blend easily with my hair and fling the mask aside.
It is more than disgust. It is hatred. It is more than hatred. It’s raw, and bloody and makes your chest constrict and your eyes flash.
This is how your foul mother might have looked at me had she known the truth. Winter spirals from those green valleys deep and hidden behind your lofty black frames at hits me. It hits me like a wave, full force around the solar plexus. Liquid and bitter and sensual, like drinking an aphrodisiac tainted by poison. It digs with unmerciful ambition to just be unchained and allowed to strangle the life out of me. Your eyes scream it.
Tsk, tsk, tsk. How I could snap those glasses so easily…take away that little defense…to force death upon you and destroy your capability of each sense. Malice and a sick perversion pinch my lips and curl them into a smile dripping like acid upon to the scene unfolding. My lips moving like a worm, wriggling under a boot.
Your father always carried that look. I remember. Our common prejudices inflamed by the simple fact that we were on equal footing; with one exception. I never had allies. I never wanted them or felt I needed them. His pale face you inherited held the same components of a musical symphony splattered handsomely on parchment by a madman. Appealing as it may be to the common eye, a hard look at him might have seen he was a product of sick imagination or vivid brilliance. Balanced on his nose hung spectacles I had longed to smash with my foot, sending those brilliant lines of symmetry askew for one instant before the rage past.
It made him beautiful in the most disgusting way. One that few people saw. The evil within him, the monster that lay between his glass-veiled eyes remained hidden from all but his victims. Like a medusa, beauty turned into a snake-wigged monster with only myself capable of lifting the mirror to expose him to the rest who were too far entangled in his spell.
His cheekbones raised to pureblood stance and held all of it’s pride with none of the expression. A pureblood is truly a breed to observe because their body is a vessel for magic and talent retained by generations of carefully chiseled into the features of the subject with intense shape and measured calculation. Like a Renaissance work in modern color. Your father’s face was a potion with every ingredient for a perfect chemistry but at the last moment, he ruined it all with your similarly possessed talent for being hopeless at my class.
Your father was a creature of free will. He held no boundaries and observed no limits. I suppose I always envied him for that as well as his undeserved beauty just as I pictured him sprawling me out on the desks in between classes, harboring aborted lust for a man I hardly imagined looked at me ever without the intention to castrate me. It made me laugh and want him more. Hatred, love, or lust; it’s all a game of semantics at this point. I imagine his face twisted to merciful release and exoneration, my fingernails caught in his hair like bandages around wounds, with me holding the same expression of a toy sleeping with a child.
Only under the surface will I let the comfort the image fills me with explain that I have worn this same blank expression the many times I as a death eater have served my master. Love is the same kind of betrayal. But it was only a fiction, a fantasy that stopped short the day I gave incentive for my master to kill him.
A betrayal under which I justify with the natural inclination to serve as mysterious Slytherin boy with a curtain over my eyes, not much use to anyone for anything other than cheats and codes, serving a sophist balance of alliance until like the snake of the pureblood mentality make the timing right, and I became ultimately a revealed spy for the wrong team.
You used me that way. History really does repeat itself; a regret for which I harbor the distaste of a eighteen year old boy. It isn’t my fault, you know. That you hate me. You were supposed to be dead the very night I gave that fateful prophesy to what I now see as my own incompetent insurance policy as he lies dead in his chamber, sprawled upon his thrown, poisoned by my own fatally trusted hand.
Fate is an unlucky thing.
Evil is a brilliant method of hiding the embarrassing personal reasons.
As I watch you, you do not gracefully stand attent, but rather distracted by the throbbing pain you must be feeling and certainly trying not to pay attention; a method that made you an absolute twit at potions.
Out of my own whispers of self-contempt I have removed my mask. There is something in my own self-loathing that will not deny you the chance to glance upon me with your venomous green eyes. I am the man you hate most in this world and rightfully. I have earned it. I’m not sure your yet young and witless mind can sort out the layers of this passion.
”Are you here to kill me, sir?” You spit at me, sarcastic and bitter as I remember, now glancing bravely up, still crouched and chained.
This cannot continue much longer. I look down at you. I remove from my sleeve the keys and you stare stupidly. My cloak rushes forward as I move to release you. “What do you want?!” You whisper hoarsely. I remain quiet. You are so close. The near proximity of our bodies makes my pallid face flush a little.
The manacles fall limply and clang on the wall like tambourines in the night.
You wordlessly gape at me, lips parted in the shape of a lemon, and the bloodstains there would probably taste much the same. You are still sore from the Cruciatus curse. I could take you right here. I could throw you back against the wall. You would weigh no more than the pathetic stuffed animal I used to imagine myself as I was used.
My steps are measured, my glance lowered. You put you arms out to stop me. You move to punch me and I see it coming. I do not move. I let him empty his wrath on me. The punch is weak and awkward, the efforts of a small wounded and desperate animal.
I envelope him in an embrace he neither sees coming nor realizes is happening. Without thinking I lean down and kiss him on the cheek. He is cold but soft and slightly sticky from the blood. A simple Judas kiss to remind me of what I am. That’s all I want. I quickly step back as his shocked expression slowly spreads.
I turn and find in my pockets his wand. I give it to him. I have to manipulate his hand into holding the damned thing. He’s still blinking stupidly.
”They’re all dead. You are free to go.”
All the pain I have put into his life. His battered but innocent face rises to finally met my eyes. He raises his arm. He clutches the wand.
My indifference enrages him. I focus hard on him and see that he is shaking. I realize now I will take the blood innocence of a young man. He means to do it. This is the kill that will leave him complete. His revenge for what I did to his mother and his father and all the pain I have put into his life. Should I watch contentedly as he speaks the Unforgivable words that finally take the life from me?
And yet, if I don’t let him do it the love of my life with continue to hate me. I, for what seems like the first time in forever, choose the unselfish path and my hand reaches for my wand to defend myself and to save him. I can’t cause him any more pain. I could just flee after disabling him. He is safe now.
For a minute he means to do it.
But he doesn’t. He drops his wand. The wood clatters to the dungeon floor and echoes in my heart. “WHY?” He screams and falls to his knees.
His eyes well up. I breathe in. I admire his features once again and remain standing. After what seems like a long time, he picks up his wand and leaves the room on unsteady feet, leaving me standing. Once again, alone.