Fic: Where there was one marauder
Characters: Severus Snape, Remus Lupin, with various of their school friends.
Word count: 4200
Warnings: Angst and hurt/ comfort, but not much on the comfort side. Ambiguous ending.
Rating: PG?
Notes: this is a standalone fic but fits within the context of a longer story. The first fic in this series is " Quite the little dark arts expert". More notes at the end.
Disclaimer: this is a work of fan fiction. All recognisable characters belong to JK Rowling. I make no profit from this etc.
1.
Where there was one marauder, there were sure to be more. And so, at the sight of Sirius Black in the middle of the corridor, Snape stopped and waited in the shadows. Sure enough, as Black stood with hands on hips, Peter Pettigrew came running up and collided with him. Black slapped him on the side of the head and Pettigrew scuttled out of his way.
“Oi, you, lovebirds,” Sirius shouted. “Quit snogging and hurry up.”
James Potter appeared, with a laughing Lily Evans attached to his arm. It was a stab every time he saw her with him. He knew now that he’d never get her back, would never enjoy that warmth they had shared. But what hurt him the most was seeing how happy she was, and knowing he could never have brought her that kind of joy.
“Too bloody impatient, Padfoot, that’s your problem,” Potter said.
Snape stood, knowing what would come next, and powerless to do anything. His chest was tightening and he could feel his heart begin to race. He rubbed his sweating hands against his trousers. He wanted to turn and run, but somehow he couldn’t. It was as if he had forgotten how to use his feet. In anticipation of the what was coming, Severus’s mind began to run the image of those terrifying jaws over and over and over. And then Sirius waved his arm and shouted again.
“Moony, fuck’s sake, get on with it. Quit that stupid moping.”
The words cut straight through him and suddenly he remembered what his feet were for. Before he realised what he was doing, he was running away down the corridor, heading for the safety of the dungeons. When Evan Rosier returned from the transfiguration class that Snape had failed to attend, he found Snape curled on his bed with this arms wrapped around his knees and a blank look on his face.
2.
Remus Lupin was proving difficult to avoid. They had a number of lessons together and it was impossible to escape those classes completely. He was running out of excuses and it was not easy to slip away from the other Slytherins when they were making their way to class. He’d also been caught roaming the corridors when he should have been in class and had spent entirely too much time in Filch’s company, doing detention. Slughorn was complaining about the number of points docked from Slytherin as well.
Nonetheless, it was worth it. The nightmares were definitely less when he didn’t see Lupin during the day. He still had to use silencing spells to be sure his classmates didn’t notice his nightmares, but he did at least get some decent sleep. On the days he’d seen the werewolf, he barely slept. He would lie there in bed with the sight of that gentle face suddenly distorting, the mouth open in an agonised scream and growing those terrifying teeth, the eyes losing all human insight and filling with pure rage.
Tonight was going to be one of those nights. He’d attempted to slip away on the way to potions class but Rosier had stuck to him like flobberworm mucous. Seeing his friend exchange a glance with Slughorn, Snape suspected that Rosier had been told to ensure he’d get to class. Rosier was a good little Slytherin, and if Slughorn had asked him, he’d have done it. Snape and Rosier had been near the back of the class, where Snape couldn’t avoid seeing the hunched shoulders of Lupin as he was ignored by his potions partner for the day, a Ravenclaw called Livia Hinde who prefered to work alone as no other students met her exacting standards.
The class was a horrible as he’d feared. Black spent the time trying to slip things into the cauldrons of the other students. Pettigrew found Black’s antics utterly hilarious and giggled most of the way through. Potter and Lily ruined their potion by paying it insufficient attention. When Black managed to slip cocktrice feathers into Lupin and Hinde’s cauldron, causing it to boil over in spectacular fashion, Hinde completely lost her temper. She blamed Lupin and hexed him halfway across the classroom. His skin broke out in foul oozing boils and now Snape had another horrible image of Lupin to haunt his nightmares. Eventually Sluhorn instructed Pettigrew to take Lupin to Madame Pomphrey and Snape could finally relax.
That night, the images of Lupin transforming were even more revolting, starting with the boil-covered face and ending with teeth that dripped blood. But what haunted Snape the most were Lupin’s eyes. The Lupin in Snape’s nightmare had the same empty look in his eyes that Lupin had had as he’d lain on the floor of the classroom. Even his visions of the wolf had those same distant eyes.
3.
Snape finally realised that he needed to start attending classes again when Slughorn threatened to exclude him from the Slug Club. He wasn’t particularly attached to the club itself, but Slughorn had pointed to his rapidly declining marks and frequent detentions as an indication that he wasn’t really acting like Slug Club material. The next thing Slughorn would do, Snape knew, was write to his parents. And Snape didn’t want to face the consequences of that.
The fear of a letter to his parents was enough for Snape to hold his ground at the sight of Potter and Pettigrew in the corridor. They were deep in conversation and largely ignoring Black who was trying far too hard to get their attention. They obviously knew he was there - they could hardly have failed to notice when he hit them around their legs with his schoolbag - but were obviously not in the mood for his antics. Black then turned and yelled at a distant figure.
“Get a fucking move on, Moony.”
His words appeared to have no effect, as the distant figure did not appear to be moving any more quickly. The werewolf slouched along, tall frame hunched, looking at the ground, arms clutching his books defensively in front of him. At the sight of him, Snape felt his stomach clench, his heart speed up, his palms sweat. He wondered how the Marauders hadn’t noticed him yet, his breathing sounded so loud in his ears.
Still, Snape stood his ground. He needed to get to Charms and to do that he needed to walk past the werewolf. He took a step forward, then another, eyes fixed purposefully ahead as he approached Potter and Pettigrew.
“Oh, look, it’s little Snivellus on his way to class.”
“Ugh, I can smell him from here, must be that disgusting hair of his.”
“You’d think with a nose like that he’d notice how bad he smelled.”
Snape was past them now, and approaching Black, with the werewolf a couple of metres behind him. His pulse was racing, and as much as he tried to fix his eyes on the distant doorway of the Charms classroom, he was unable to take his eyes off the werewolf - the curve of his shoulders, the way his hair fell over his face, the tension in his hands as he clutched his books, the empty look in his eyes.
Then, just as he was nearly past Black and Lupin, he heard Black mutter something he didn’t quite hear, and found himself sprawling on the corridor floor. It was a tripping hex, he suspected, he’d experienced that one often enough before. The mocking laughter of the Marauders rang in his ears, Potter’s upper-class snort, Black’s coarse guffaw, Pettigrew’s hysterical giggling. From the werewolf there was silence, until Snape caught his quiet words.
“Haven’t you done enough? Why can’t you just leave him alone?”
And then Black’s response.
“Fuck you, Moony, you’re no fun anymore.”
There was a thud as Black shoved Lupin into the wall, hard. Pettigrew’s giggling intensified.
“Padfoot, that’s enough,” Potter snapped, and grabbed his Black’s arm.
Pettigrew helped Lupin to his feet, finally silencing his giggling. As he stood, the werewolf briefly met Snape’s eyes, then looked away in shame.
4.
Snape couldn’t quite remember when the racing pulse and sweating hands at the sight of Lupin had become something more than a sign of fear. It crept up on him and he barely noticed, except that somehow he wanted to see the werewolf, rather than avoid him. However he remembered the moment he realised that he’d developed a highly inconvenient attraction to Lupin. That moment came when he awoke from his most bizarre nightmare yet. It was another of those terrifying transformations, where Lupin’s mouth suddenly grew the wolf’s teeth. What was different was what Lupin’s mouth had been doing in the moments before he transformed.
He’d been having dreams about that ever since Mulciber, who was a couple of years ahead, had been telling them about what he’d done with Lucinda Talkalot. However Snape’s dreams hadn’t featured the Quidditch captain, or any other girl for that matter. Despite telling his mother, at the age of nine, that he planned to marry Lily Evans, he had worked out before too long that his interests lay elsewhere. He’d also worked out that such a revelation would not get a good response, and had kept it quiet.
While a number of his fellow students had featured in his fantasies, Lupin had not previously been one of them. But now he found himself unable to think of anyone else. Somehow, despite the fact that he was still terrified of Lupin, Snape was infatuated.
“Severus, what the hell-?”
He turned to see Rosier clutching at his hand, a rat firmly attached to his thumb by its teeth. They had been attempting to turn small wooden cubes into mice in transfiguration class. Rosier’s cube had grown a tail, fur and ears, which was better than half the class. Lupin, predictably, had quickly turned his cube into a small brown mouse, and had been holding it in his hands. Snape had been capitivated by the attention he gave it, the way the large hands cradled the tiny animal so gently, stroking it, caressing it. And while he had been imagining Lupin’s hands caressing him, Snape had somehow transfigured his cube into a rat.
“Ow! Get it off me!”
Rosier was attempting to shake off the rat, with little success.
“Ow! Help, Professor.”
As Rosier waved his hand - and the rat - Professor McGonagall pointed her wand and transfigured it back into a cube. Unfortunately, as it detached from Rosier’s waving hand it was flung across the room and into the window, which shattered.
“Who was responsible for the rat?”
Potter gave a snigger and McGonagall turned to him.
“Was that you, Potter?”
She sounded almost impressed.
“No, not me. It was Snivellus.”
McGonagall frowned slightly but didn’t correct him. She turned to Snape.
“Twenty points from Slytherin,” she snapped, and Snape’s housemates shot him filthy looks.
5.
Lupin sat on the floor of the corridor, his back to the wall and his arms around his knees. His head hung down and the look on his face was one of utter misery. Snape was no longer afraid of him, no longer scared to look at him or approach him. Quite the opposite. He couldn’t stop watching. After two months, his obsession with the werewolf had not diminished. Instead of nightmares about the wolf, he kept dreaming about the human form of Lupin, naked.
“On your own, Lupin? What, did your friends just abandon you? Decided they didn’t want to hang around with a werewolf?”
Lupin turned his face away, saying nothing. Snape felt somehow dissatisfied with himself, as if he was sorry he had wounded Lupin further.
“Are you ill, Lupin?”
The werewolf looked back at Snape, his expression indicating that he considered that to be a rather stupid question. Snape remembered that it had been the full moon the night before. And that it was a Hogsmeade weekend, which perhaps explained the absence of his friends.
“Shouldn’t you be in the infirmary?”
Lupin was silent for a little longer, before finally speaking.
“I… I thought I was feeling better. I thought I’d be okay.”
“But you’re not.”
Lupin hung his head and Snape had a sudden urge to wrap him in his arms. Instead, he crossed his arms over his chest.
“So, can you walk?” he asked.
Lupin looked at him in surprise.
“I… I don’t know. I thought… I thought I could, but….”
Snape found himself crouched beside the werewolf before he realised what he was doing.
“Here, put your arm around my shoulders. I’ll take you back to the infirmary.”
He grabbed Lupin’s arm, and before he could protest, had him lifted from the floor. Lupin could barely stand, and Snape was supporting his full weight. The tall werewolf had both arms around Snape, holding on with all the strength he could manage, inadvertently pressing his body against the black-haired boy in a way which made Snape realise he was in danger of humiliating himself. But he couldn’t very well now just drop Lupin back on the floor.
Snape turned himself to the side, hoping that his robe hid his entirely inappropriate erection, and began to walk Lupin towards the stairs that led to the infirmary.
“Remus, you silly boy, what were you doing out of bed?”
Madame Pomphrey rushed up when she saw the two boys coming through the door. Lupin hung his head and mumbled.
“Here, let me take him,” Madame Pomphrey said, holding out her wand and taking Lupin’s weight without touching him.
As she moved Lupin towards the bed, her eyes flicked briefly to Snape’s groin. He blushed at the knowing look which crossed her face.
“That will be all, thank you, Mr Snape.”
He turned and fled.
6.
When Snape saw the marauders the next day, they were one short. He suspected that meant that Lupin was still in the infirmary. He didn’t want Madame Pomphrey to catch him, so he waited until she was occupied after a rather ugly Quiddich incident between the Slytherins and Ravenclaws.
“Lupin?”
The werewolf’s eyes flicked open and a small smile appeared on his face.
“Hello, Sna… Severus.”
Snape nodded, not quite prepared to reciprocate the smile.
“Are you okay?” he asked instead.
“I’m fine, thank you.”
There was something rather blank in the way Lupin spoke. He was clearly not fine. Snape noticed that his arms were heavily bandaged, and his fingernails were all broken and torn. He had that same empty look in his eyes that Snape had seen too often before and his face was drawn and pale.
“Does it hurt?”
Lupin glanced up at him but said nothing.
“Being a werewolf. Does it hurt?”
Snape realised he’d never thought about that - that being a werewolf might be something rather traumatic for Lupin.
“I’ve noticed,” he went on, “that before the full moon you look… quite tense. Nervous. And after you always look sick.”
Lupin gave a sigh and shook his head slightly.
“It’s… it’s not… pleasant.”
“What happened to your arms?”
“I… when I… the werewolf… is alone… it… I… get upset. I… I can’t control it. It bites itself, claws at itself, at the shack, throws itself against the walls, tries to escape. It… I just can’t stand to be confined. I’m always sick afterwards anyway, but… the more upset the wolf gets… the more sick I am after.”
“And this month? It was a bad one?”
“About average,” Lupin sighed.
Snape was silent. There was something so hopeless in Lupin’s expression, in his quiet acceptance of suffering. That expression was painfully familiar. With a chill in his gut, he realised why. It reminded him of his parents. Trapped in lives they both hated, despising eachother, resenting him and bitter at the unfairness of the world but lacking the courage to change anything.
“I… I appreciate you coming to visit me, Severus. That was very kind of you. And for helping me yesterday. Thank you.”
Lupin gave another hesitant smile, and Snape was suddenly angry at the boy’s weakness.
“Well, perhaps I’m not the kind of person who can look the other way when someone is suffering or in need of help,” Snape said, before he entirely realised what he was saying.
He hadn’t meant to be so harsh, but when he saw the werewolf’s face, he knew he had been. Lupin let out a soft sigh.
“I suppose I deserved that,” he said, and then he looked away, his eyes empty.
Snape turned and walked away.
7.
“Severus, what’s up with you?”
Rosier had once again attached himself to Snape on the way to class.
“Nothing, what are you on about?”
“I heard you visited the infirmary yesterday. You were talking to Remus Lupin.”
Snape gave a shrug, although inside he was cursing. He’d managed to avoid getting seen by Madame Pomphrey, but half of the Slytherin quiddich team had been there and he had clearly been spotted.
“You don’t want to be seen talking to him.”
‘Who cares? It’s not anyone’s business who I talk to.”
“But Lupin’s… well, he’s… not right,” Rosier said. “There’s something about him. Something off. I’ve heard… I’ve heard that…”
Rosier was looking rather embarrassed, almost furtive. He dropped his voice.
“They say he’s… you know.”
Snape felt himself start to shiver. Merlin, did everyone know that Lupin was a werewolf?
“Actually, Evan, I don’t know,” he said, covering his discomfort with a sneer. “Do tell.”
“That he… takes it up the arse for Black and Potter. And possibly Pettigrew.”
Snape was shocked. He knew what it meant only because, once again, Mulciber had told them all about it. He really hadn’t expected to hear such a thing about Lupin. Unfortunately for Snape, his penis found the idea very interesting, and he slouched forward over his armful of school books so that his hanging robe hid anything Rosier might notice.
“That’s rubbish,” he snapped “There’s no way.”
“That’s what Wilkes says,” replied Rosier earnestly. Rosier had the unfortunate habit of believing anything that Wilkes and Mulciber told him. While some of it was probably true, a good deal of it was clearly utter tripe. Dumbledore having an affair with Gellert Grindelwald, for example, what utter nonsense.
“Since when is Wilkes a reliable source of information on the mating habits of Gryffindors? He’s just making stuff up again. Potter’s not remotely interested in anyone but Lily Evans, that’s blindingly obvious to anyone. We’ve been getting blow-by-blow accounts - literally - from Regulus about his brother’s activities and I think we’d have heard if there were any boys on that list. And Pettigrew’s sole claim to fame at this school is the time he managed to cast a transparency charm on the Gryffindor girls’ bathroom wall. He doesn’t strike me as remotely interested in sleeping with a bloody we…”
The word was so close to slipping out. Rosier was looking at him curiously.
“A… weirdo like Lupin,” Snape finished, covering his slip.
“Maybe. But that doesn’t say anything about Lupin.”
Rosier was looking intently at Snape. He lowered his voice further.
“Look, Snape. I’m not stupid. You managed a good diversion by convincing everyone you were pining after Lily Evans, but it’s worn thin now. Pretty soon I won’t be the only one noticing you’re…”
Rosier gave Snape another look, and Snape felt himself going scarlet.
“I don’t care, Severus. You’re my friend and I know you’re not a pervert or anything. But it’s not something you want getting out. My Dad said he’d take you with us when we go to the Malfoys. He’s a bit funny about you being a half-blood, but he knows your uncle, so he’s kind of getting over it. But if there’s any other rumours about you…”
Snape hung his head. He knew that Rosier was right. His association with people like the Rosiers and the Malfoys was his chance to avoid repeating the mistakes of his parents. He was not going to end up in a life he hated, surrounded by people he despised, trapped by his own bad decisions. He was going to be strong, powerful, in control.
He had a choice, but the answer was obvious. Rosier was actually a good friend to him, the only decent friend he’d had apart from Lily. He couldn’t call Wilkes, Mulciber, Avery or Regulus Black friends, but they did offer him a way out. With them, he would be included in a circle of powerful wizards, like the Malfoys and the Lestranges, like his uncle Walden. He didn’t like his uncle, in fact, the man terrified him even now, but there was no doubt that he was a powerful, wealthy man who got what he wanted.
Compared to that, what was Lupin? After a couple of months watching him, it had become clear to Snape that Lupin was quite as much the victim of Potter and Black’s bullying as he was himself. The boy was like a whipped puppy. He was quite clearly upset at the actions of his friends, but still he followed them blindly. He was incapable of changing anything. He lacked the imagination to see the possibility of a different life.
Severus, however, did not. What he felt for Lupin was nothing more than an inconvenient attraction, and he was not going to let it drag him back down.
8.
Lupin was more hurt than he wanted to admit by Snape’s words. While the hostility of his friends to Snape had kept them apart, that wasn’t how he had wanted it to be.
Something had drawn him to Snape the moment he first set eyes on him. On his arrival at Hogwarts, Lupin had swiftly identified two other students - one of them Severus Snape - as kindred spirits. Most of the first years were wide-eyed with awe, their faces open in wonder, with ready smiles and trusting eyes. But there were two who, like him, wore guarded expressions, their eyes looking first for threats, and their faces wary with the long experience of suffering and dark secrets.
He had considered himself lucky to be sorted into the same house as one of the boys. It hadn’t taken long before the two lost souls had found eachother. Before long Sirius Black’s charisma had drawn in two other, less troubled, boys and the marauders were formed.
Snape, however, had been sorted into another house, and he looked utterly miserable about it. He kept glancing at the Gryffindor table, at a pretty red-headed girl. She glanced back with an equal look of regret on her face.
As if being sorted into separate houses hadn’t made it hard enough to befriend the second boy, Sirius and James had taken against Snape with an irrational fervour. The only reason that Lupin could see was that Sirius hated all Slytherins, as that was his family’s traditional house. Exactly what James had against Snape wasn’t immediately clear, until James’s interest Lily Evans became more apparent.
Lupin had felt progressively more guilty about the way his friends treated Snape. When they’d been younger, there had been moments of truce through Lily being a mutual friend. But things had got worse as they’d got older, especially after the incident by the lake which had destroyed Snape’s friendship with Lily, and even more so after the Shrieking Shack. With so many years where they’d shared only indifference or downright hostility, Lupin had largely forgotten that he’d once wanted to be friends with Snape.
And then Snape had been kind to him.
It was so unexpected that Lupin didn’t know what to think. Here was Snape helping the boy who had looked the other way for so long. It reawakened Lupin’s curiosity about him. More than that, it made Lupin come to a startling realisation.
Snape was a better person than he was.
It wasn’t as if Lupin thought himself a particularly good person. He was under no illusions that there was anything particularly nice or likable about him. He was studious and did his best to be polite, but that was about all there was in his favour. He had, once, been a good, obedient boy, but he’d allowed himself to be led astray by his friends. Knowing right from wrong was pointless if you were too weak to follow your conscience. He knew he was only in Gryffindor because his father had been, and the other marauders were only his friends because he’d got to know Sirius first.
Lupin knew that he wasn’t up to much, but after much convincing from his friends, he did think that he was better than a dark-arts obsessed Slytherin who was clearly on the way to becoming a Death Eater. It was an uncomfortable revelation to find that, quite clearly, he wasn’t.
Lupin tried to thank Snape for his kindness. A few words of gratitude hardly seemed adequate, but it was better than not thanking him at all. He tried hard, he really did. He managed to evade his friends and find Snape alone more than once. But Snape clearly didn’t want his thanks. He wouldn’t speak to Lupin, he turned and walked away if Lupin spoke to him, he wouldn’t even acknowledge him if they passed in the corridor.
Snape might be able to purge that moment of kindness from his memory, but Lupin realised that he never would. And so Lupin watched, remembering the haunted eyes that had first drawn him to Severus Snape, wondering whether things could have ever been different and knowing that there was nothing he could now do.
Notes: this fic is inspired by the curious psychological fact that the body's signals for fear and sexual attraction are similar, and that this can sometimes confuse the mind into finding people more attractive in frightening situations. The longer story that this fits into comes from a prompt from Smirkingcat for the Shores of Angst Fest. I didn't have time to finish the story for the fest so I'm posting the bits here.
Prompter: smirkingcat
Type of Main-Relationship: slash
Suggested Characters/Pairings: Remus/Severus
Prompt: They always had a thing for each other- a deep want, need- but every time the tried, life interfered. Have they missed their final chance?
Word count: 4200
Warnings: Angst and hurt/ comfort, but not much on the comfort side. Ambiguous ending.
Rating: PG?
Notes: this is a standalone fic but fits within the context of a longer story. The first fic in this series is " Quite the little dark arts expert". More notes at the end.
Disclaimer: this is a work of fan fiction. All recognisable characters belong to JK Rowling. I make no profit from this etc.
1.
Where there was one marauder, there were sure to be more. And so, at the sight of Sirius Black in the middle of the corridor, Snape stopped and waited in the shadows. Sure enough, as Black stood with hands on hips, Peter Pettigrew came running up and collided with him. Black slapped him on the side of the head and Pettigrew scuttled out of his way.
“Oi, you, lovebirds,” Sirius shouted. “Quit snogging and hurry up.”
James Potter appeared, with a laughing Lily Evans attached to his arm. It was a stab every time he saw her with him. He knew now that he’d never get her back, would never enjoy that warmth they had shared. But what hurt him the most was seeing how happy she was, and knowing he could never have brought her that kind of joy.
“Too bloody impatient, Padfoot, that’s your problem,” Potter said.
Snape stood, knowing what would come next, and powerless to do anything. His chest was tightening and he could feel his heart begin to race. He rubbed his sweating hands against his trousers. He wanted to turn and run, but somehow he couldn’t. It was as if he had forgotten how to use his feet. In anticipation of the what was coming, Severus’s mind began to run the image of those terrifying jaws over and over and over. And then Sirius waved his arm and shouted again.
“Moony, fuck’s sake, get on with it. Quit that stupid moping.”
The words cut straight through him and suddenly he remembered what his feet were for. Before he realised what he was doing, he was running away down the corridor, heading for the safety of the dungeons. When Evan Rosier returned from the transfiguration class that Snape had failed to attend, he found Snape curled on his bed with this arms wrapped around his knees and a blank look on his face.
2.
Remus Lupin was proving difficult to avoid. They had a number of lessons together and it was impossible to escape those classes completely. He was running out of excuses and it was not easy to slip away from the other Slytherins when they were making their way to class. He’d also been caught roaming the corridors when he should have been in class and had spent entirely too much time in Filch’s company, doing detention. Slughorn was complaining about the number of points docked from Slytherin as well.
Nonetheless, it was worth it. The nightmares were definitely less when he didn’t see Lupin during the day. He still had to use silencing spells to be sure his classmates didn’t notice his nightmares, but he did at least get some decent sleep. On the days he’d seen the werewolf, he barely slept. He would lie there in bed with the sight of that gentle face suddenly distorting, the mouth open in an agonised scream and growing those terrifying teeth, the eyes losing all human insight and filling with pure rage.
Tonight was going to be one of those nights. He’d attempted to slip away on the way to potions class but Rosier had stuck to him like flobberworm mucous. Seeing his friend exchange a glance with Slughorn, Snape suspected that Rosier had been told to ensure he’d get to class. Rosier was a good little Slytherin, and if Slughorn had asked him, he’d have done it. Snape and Rosier had been near the back of the class, where Snape couldn’t avoid seeing the hunched shoulders of Lupin as he was ignored by his potions partner for the day, a Ravenclaw called Livia Hinde who prefered to work alone as no other students met her exacting standards.
The class was a horrible as he’d feared. Black spent the time trying to slip things into the cauldrons of the other students. Pettigrew found Black’s antics utterly hilarious and giggled most of the way through. Potter and Lily ruined their potion by paying it insufficient attention. When Black managed to slip cocktrice feathers into Lupin and Hinde’s cauldron, causing it to boil over in spectacular fashion, Hinde completely lost her temper. She blamed Lupin and hexed him halfway across the classroom. His skin broke out in foul oozing boils and now Snape had another horrible image of Lupin to haunt his nightmares. Eventually Sluhorn instructed Pettigrew to take Lupin to Madame Pomphrey and Snape could finally relax.
That night, the images of Lupin transforming were even more revolting, starting with the boil-covered face and ending with teeth that dripped blood. But what haunted Snape the most were Lupin’s eyes. The Lupin in Snape’s nightmare had the same empty look in his eyes that Lupin had had as he’d lain on the floor of the classroom. Even his visions of the wolf had those same distant eyes.
3.
Snape finally realised that he needed to start attending classes again when Slughorn threatened to exclude him from the Slug Club. He wasn’t particularly attached to the club itself, but Slughorn had pointed to his rapidly declining marks and frequent detentions as an indication that he wasn’t really acting like Slug Club material. The next thing Slughorn would do, Snape knew, was write to his parents. And Snape didn’t want to face the consequences of that.
The fear of a letter to his parents was enough for Snape to hold his ground at the sight of Potter and Pettigrew in the corridor. They were deep in conversation and largely ignoring Black who was trying far too hard to get their attention. They obviously knew he was there - they could hardly have failed to notice when he hit them around their legs with his schoolbag - but were obviously not in the mood for his antics. Black then turned and yelled at a distant figure.
“Get a fucking move on, Moony.”
His words appeared to have no effect, as the distant figure did not appear to be moving any more quickly. The werewolf slouched along, tall frame hunched, looking at the ground, arms clutching his books defensively in front of him. At the sight of him, Snape felt his stomach clench, his heart speed up, his palms sweat. He wondered how the Marauders hadn’t noticed him yet, his breathing sounded so loud in his ears.
Still, Snape stood his ground. He needed to get to Charms and to do that he needed to walk past the werewolf. He took a step forward, then another, eyes fixed purposefully ahead as he approached Potter and Pettigrew.
“Oh, look, it’s little Snivellus on his way to class.”
“Ugh, I can smell him from here, must be that disgusting hair of his.”
“You’d think with a nose like that he’d notice how bad he smelled.”
Snape was past them now, and approaching Black, with the werewolf a couple of metres behind him. His pulse was racing, and as much as he tried to fix his eyes on the distant doorway of the Charms classroom, he was unable to take his eyes off the werewolf - the curve of his shoulders, the way his hair fell over his face, the tension in his hands as he clutched his books, the empty look in his eyes.
Then, just as he was nearly past Black and Lupin, he heard Black mutter something he didn’t quite hear, and found himself sprawling on the corridor floor. It was a tripping hex, he suspected, he’d experienced that one often enough before. The mocking laughter of the Marauders rang in his ears, Potter’s upper-class snort, Black’s coarse guffaw, Pettigrew’s hysterical giggling. From the werewolf there was silence, until Snape caught his quiet words.
“Haven’t you done enough? Why can’t you just leave him alone?”
And then Black’s response.
“Fuck you, Moony, you’re no fun anymore.”
There was a thud as Black shoved Lupin into the wall, hard. Pettigrew’s giggling intensified.
“Padfoot, that’s enough,” Potter snapped, and grabbed his Black’s arm.
Pettigrew helped Lupin to his feet, finally silencing his giggling. As he stood, the werewolf briefly met Snape’s eyes, then looked away in shame.
4.
Snape couldn’t quite remember when the racing pulse and sweating hands at the sight of Lupin had become something more than a sign of fear. It crept up on him and he barely noticed, except that somehow he wanted to see the werewolf, rather than avoid him. However he remembered the moment he realised that he’d developed a highly inconvenient attraction to Lupin. That moment came when he awoke from his most bizarre nightmare yet. It was another of those terrifying transformations, where Lupin’s mouth suddenly grew the wolf’s teeth. What was different was what Lupin’s mouth had been doing in the moments before he transformed.
He’d been having dreams about that ever since Mulciber, who was a couple of years ahead, had been telling them about what he’d done with Lucinda Talkalot. However Snape’s dreams hadn’t featured the Quidditch captain, or any other girl for that matter. Despite telling his mother, at the age of nine, that he planned to marry Lily Evans, he had worked out before too long that his interests lay elsewhere. He’d also worked out that such a revelation would not get a good response, and had kept it quiet.
While a number of his fellow students had featured in his fantasies, Lupin had not previously been one of them. But now he found himself unable to think of anyone else. Somehow, despite the fact that he was still terrified of Lupin, Snape was infatuated.
“Severus, what the hell-?”
He turned to see Rosier clutching at his hand, a rat firmly attached to his thumb by its teeth. They had been attempting to turn small wooden cubes into mice in transfiguration class. Rosier’s cube had grown a tail, fur and ears, which was better than half the class. Lupin, predictably, had quickly turned his cube into a small brown mouse, and had been holding it in his hands. Snape had been capitivated by the attention he gave it, the way the large hands cradled the tiny animal so gently, stroking it, caressing it. And while he had been imagining Lupin’s hands caressing him, Snape had somehow transfigured his cube into a rat.
“Ow! Get it off me!”
Rosier was attempting to shake off the rat, with little success.
“Ow! Help, Professor.”
As Rosier waved his hand - and the rat - Professor McGonagall pointed her wand and transfigured it back into a cube. Unfortunately, as it detached from Rosier’s waving hand it was flung across the room and into the window, which shattered.
“Who was responsible for the rat?”
Potter gave a snigger and McGonagall turned to him.
“Was that you, Potter?”
She sounded almost impressed.
“No, not me. It was Snivellus.”
McGonagall frowned slightly but didn’t correct him. She turned to Snape.
“Twenty points from Slytherin,” she snapped, and Snape’s housemates shot him filthy looks.
5.
Lupin sat on the floor of the corridor, his back to the wall and his arms around his knees. His head hung down and the look on his face was one of utter misery. Snape was no longer afraid of him, no longer scared to look at him or approach him. Quite the opposite. He couldn’t stop watching. After two months, his obsession with the werewolf had not diminished. Instead of nightmares about the wolf, he kept dreaming about the human form of Lupin, naked.
“On your own, Lupin? What, did your friends just abandon you? Decided they didn’t want to hang around with a werewolf?”
Lupin turned his face away, saying nothing. Snape felt somehow dissatisfied with himself, as if he was sorry he had wounded Lupin further.
“Are you ill, Lupin?”
The werewolf looked back at Snape, his expression indicating that he considered that to be a rather stupid question. Snape remembered that it had been the full moon the night before. And that it was a Hogsmeade weekend, which perhaps explained the absence of his friends.
“Shouldn’t you be in the infirmary?”
Lupin was silent for a little longer, before finally speaking.
“I… I thought I was feeling better. I thought I’d be okay.”
“But you’re not.”
Lupin hung his head and Snape had a sudden urge to wrap him in his arms. Instead, he crossed his arms over his chest.
“So, can you walk?” he asked.
Lupin looked at him in surprise.
“I… I don’t know. I thought… I thought I could, but….”
Snape found himself crouched beside the werewolf before he realised what he was doing.
“Here, put your arm around my shoulders. I’ll take you back to the infirmary.”
He grabbed Lupin’s arm, and before he could protest, had him lifted from the floor. Lupin could barely stand, and Snape was supporting his full weight. The tall werewolf had both arms around Snape, holding on with all the strength he could manage, inadvertently pressing his body against the black-haired boy in a way which made Snape realise he was in danger of humiliating himself. But he couldn’t very well now just drop Lupin back on the floor.
Snape turned himself to the side, hoping that his robe hid his entirely inappropriate erection, and began to walk Lupin towards the stairs that led to the infirmary.
“Remus, you silly boy, what were you doing out of bed?”
Madame Pomphrey rushed up when she saw the two boys coming through the door. Lupin hung his head and mumbled.
“Here, let me take him,” Madame Pomphrey said, holding out her wand and taking Lupin’s weight without touching him.
As she moved Lupin towards the bed, her eyes flicked briefly to Snape’s groin. He blushed at the knowing look which crossed her face.
“That will be all, thank you, Mr Snape.”
He turned and fled.
6.
When Snape saw the marauders the next day, they were one short. He suspected that meant that Lupin was still in the infirmary. He didn’t want Madame Pomphrey to catch him, so he waited until she was occupied after a rather ugly Quiddich incident between the Slytherins and Ravenclaws.
“Lupin?”
The werewolf’s eyes flicked open and a small smile appeared on his face.
“Hello, Sna… Severus.”
Snape nodded, not quite prepared to reciprocate the smile.
“Are you okay?” he asked instead.
“I’m fine, thank you.”
There was something rather blank in the way Lupin spoke. He was clearly not fine. Snape noticed that his arms were heavily bandaged, and his fingernails were all broken and torn. He had that same empty look in his eyes that Snape had seen too often before and his face was drawn and pale.
“Does it hurt?”
Lupin glanced up at him but said nothing.
“Being a werewolf. Does it hurt?”
Snape realised he’d never thought about that - that being a werewolf might be something rather traumatic for Lupin.
“I’ve noticed,” he went on, “that before the full moon you look… quite tense. Nervous. And after you always look sick.”
Lupin gave a sigh and shook his head slightly.
“It’s… it’s not… pleasant.”
“What happened to your arms?”
“I… when I… the werewolf… is alone… it… I… get upset. I… I can’t control it. It bites itself, claws at itself, at the shack, throws itself against the walls, tries to escape. It… I just can’t stand to be confined. I’m always sick afterwards anyway, but… the more upset the wolf gets… the more sick I am after.”
“And this month? It was a bad one?”
“About average,” Lupin sighed.
Snape was silent. There was something so hopeless in Lupin’s expression, in his quiet acceptance of suffering. That expression was painfully familiar. With a chill in his gut, he realised why. It reminded him of his parents. Trapped in lives they both hated, despising eachother, resenting him and bitter at the unfairness of the world but lacking the courage to change anything.
“I… I appreciate you coming to visit me, Severus. That was very kind of you. And for helping me yesterday. Thank you.”
Lupin gave another hesitant smile, and Snape was suddenly angry at the boy’s weakness.
“Well, perhaps I’m not the kind of person who can look the other way when someone is suffering or in need of help,” Snape said, before he entirely realised what he was saying.
He hadn’t meant to be so harsh, but when he saw the werewolf’s face, he knew he had been. Lupin let out a soft sigh.
“I suppose I deserved that,” he said, and then he looked away, his eyes empty.
Snape turned and walked away.
7.
“Severus, what’s up with you?”
Rosier had once again attached himself to Snape on the way to class.
“Nothing, what are you on about?”
“I heard you visited the infirmary yesterday. You were talking to Remus Lupin.”
Snape gave a shrug, although inside he was cursing. He’d managed to avoid getting seen by Madame Pomphrey, but half of the Slytherin quiddich team had been there and he had clearly been spotted.
“You don’t want to be seen talking to him.”
‘Who cares? It’s not anyone’s business who I talk to.”
“But Lupin’s… well, he’s… not right,” Rosier said. “There’s something about him. Something off. I’ve heard… I’ve heard that…”
Rosier was looking rather embarrassed, almost furtive. He dropped his voice.
“They say he’s… you know.”
Snape felt himself start to shiver. Merlin, did everyone know that Lupin was a werewolf?
“Actually, Evan, I don’t know,” he said, covering his discomfort with a sneer. “Do tell.”
“That he… takes it up the arse for Black and Potter. And possibly Pettigrew.”
Snape was shocked. He knew what it meant only because, once again, Mulciber had told them all about it. He really hadn’t expected to hear such a thing about Lupin. Unfortunately for Snape, his penis found the idea very interesting, and he slouched forward over his armful of school books so that his hanging robe hid anything Rosier might notice.
“That’s rubbish,” he snapped “There’s no way.”
“That’s what Wilkes says,” replied Rosier earnestly. Rosier had the unfortunate habit of believing anything that Wilkes and Mulciber told him. While some of it was probably true, a good deal of it was clearly utter tripe. Dumbledore having an affair with Gellert Grindelwald, for example, what utter nonsense.
“Since when is Wilkes a reliable source of information on the mating habits of Gryffindors? He’s just making stuff up again. Potter’s not remotely interested in anyone but Lily Evans, that’s blindingly obvious to anyone. We’ve been getting blow-by-blow accounts - literally - from Regulus about his brother’s activities and I think we’d have heard if there were any boys on that list. And Pettigrew’s sole claim to fame at this school is the time he managed to cast a transparency charm on the Gryffindor girls’ bathroom wall. He doesn’t strike me as remotely interested in sleeping with a bloody we…”
The word was so close to slipping out. Rosier was looking at him curiously.
“A… weirdo like Lupin,” Snape finished, covering his slip.
“Maybe. But that doesn’t say anything about Lupin.”
Rosier was looking intently at Snape. He lowered his voice further.
“Look, Snape. I’m not stupid. You managed a good diversion by convincing everyone you were pining after Lily Evans, but it’s worn thin now. Pretty soon I won’t be the only one noticing you’re…”
Rosier gave Snape another look, and Snape felt himself going scarlet.
“I don’t care, Severus. You’re my friend and I know you’re not a pervert or anything. But it’s not something you want getting out. My Dad said he’d take you with us when we go to the Malfoys. He’s a bit funny about you being a half-blood, but he knows your uncle, so he’s kind of getting over it. But if there’s any other rumours about you…”
Snape hung his head. He knew that Rosier was right. His association with people like the Rosiers and the Malfoys was his chance to avoid repeating the mistakes of his parents. He was not going to end up in a life he hated, surrounded by people he despised, trapped by his own bad decisions. He was going to be strong, powerful, in control.
He had a choice, but the answer was obvious. Rosier was actually a good friend to him, the only decent friend he’d had apart from Lily. He couldn’t call Wilkes, Mulciber, Avery or Regulus Black friends, but they did offer him a way out. With them, he would be included in a circle of powerful wizards, like the Malfoys and the Lestranges, like his uncle Walden. He didn’t like his uncle, in fact, the man terrified him even now, but there was no doubt that he was a powerful, wealthy man who got what he wanted.
Compared to that, what was Lupin? After a couple of months watching him, it had become clear to Snape that Lupin was quite as much the victim of Potter and Black’s bullying as he was himself. The boy was like a whipped puppy. He was quite clearly upset at the actions of his friends, but still he followed them blindly. He was incapable of changing anything. He lacked the imagination to see the possibility of a different life.
Severus, however, did not. What he felt for Lupin was nothing more than an inconvenient attraction, and he was not going to let it drag him back down.
8.
Lupin was more hurt than he wanted to admit by Snape’s words. While the hostility of his friends to Snape had kept them apart, that wasn’t how he had wanted it to be.
Something had drawn him to Snape the moment he first set eyes on him. On his arrival at Hogwarts, Lupin had swiftly identified two other students - one of them Severus Snape - as kindred spirits. Most of the first years were wide-eyed with awe, their faces open in wonder, with ready smiles and trusting eyes. But there were two who, like him, wore guarded expressions, their eyes looking first for threats, and their faces wary with the long experience of suffering and dark secrets.
He had considered himself lucky to be sorted into the same house as one of the boys. It hadn’t taken long before the two lost souls had found eachother. Before long Sirius Black’s charisma had drawn in two other, less troubled, boys and the marauders were formed.
Snape, however, had been sorted into another house, and he looked utterly miserable about it. He kept glancing at the Gryffindor table, at a pretty red-headed girl. She glanced back with an equal look of regret on her face.
As if being sorted into separate houses hadn’t made it hard enough to befriend the second boy, Sirius and James had taken against Snape with an irrational fervour. The only reason that Lupin could see was that Sirius hated all Slytherins, as that was his family’s traditional house. Exactly what James had against Snape wasn’t immediately clear, until James’s interest Lily Evans became more apparent.
Lupin had felt progressively more guilty about the way his friends treated Snape. When they’d been younger, there had been moments of truce through Lily being a mutual friend. But things had got worse as they’d got older, especially after the incident by the lake which had destroyed Snape’s friendship with Lily, and even more so after the Shrieking Shack. With so many years where they’d shared only indifference or downright hostility, Lupin had largely forgotten that he’d once wanted to be friends with Snape.
And then Snape had been kind to him.
It was so unexpected that Lupin didn’t know what to think. Here was Snape helping the boy who had looked the other way for so long. It reawakened Lupin’s curiosity about him. More than that, it made Lupin come to a startling realisation.
Snape was a better person than he was.
It wasn’t as if Lupin thought himself a particularly good person. He was under no illusions that there was anything particularly nice or likable about him. He was studious and did his best to be polite, but that was about all there was in his favour. He had, once, been a good, obedient boy, but he’d allowed himself to be led astray by his friends. Knowing right from wrong was pointless if you were too weak to follow your conscience. He knew he was only in Gryffindor because his father had been, and the other marauders were only his friends because he’d got to know Sirius first.
Lupin knew that he wasn’t up to much, but after much convincing from his friends, he did think that he was better than a dark-arts obsessed Slytherin who was clearly on the way to becoming a Death Eater. It was an uncomfortable revelation to find that, quite clearly, he wasn’t.
Lupin tried to thank Snape for his kindness. A few words of gratitude hardly seemed adequate, but it was better than not thanking him at all. He tried hard, he really did. He managed to evade his friends and find Snape alone more than once. But Snape clearly didn’t want his thanks. He wouldn’t speak to Lupin, he turned and walked away if Lupin spoke to him, he wouldn’t even acknowledge him if they passed in the corridor.
Snape might be able to purge that moment of kindness from his memory, but Lupin realised that he never would. And so Lupin watched, remembering the haunted eyes that had first drawn him to Severus Snape, wondering whether things could have ever been different and knowing that there was nothing he could now do.
Notes: this fic is inspired by the curious psychological fact that the body's signals for fear and sexual attraction are similar, and that this can sometimes confuse the mind into finding people more attractive in frightening situations. The longer story that this fits into comes from a prompt from Smirkingcat for the Shores of Angst Fest. I didn't have time to finish the story for the fest so I'm posting the bits here.
Prompter: smirkingcat
Type of Main-Relationship: slash
Suggested Characters/Pairings: Remus/Severus
Prompt: They always had a thing for each other- a deep want, need- but every time the tried, life interfered. Have they missed their final chance?