nothing here resets the clocks (snape/lupin)
berry’s birthday snupin!
words: 6000ish
rating: R
warning: 1st person pov. also crammed to the gills with sirius black and possibly a bit on the grim side.
note 1: beta’d by lovely fitofpique. <3
note 2: last year i wrote buckle_berry the sweetest fluffiest creamcake of a snupin for her birthday, and for mine she wrote a brutal series of violent snupin sex vignettes. well fine. you win, b. this is because i love you. HAPPY BIRTHDAY (a fortnight ago).
Nothing Here Resets the Clocks
He’s packed to leave before the first owl arrives. I had wondered if he would visit me.
“You knew of the curse, Lupin. You should have been more careful.”
“Let’s not be disingenuous. This has nothing to do with a curse.”
“It has to do with the presence of a murderous - two murderous animals on the Hogwarts grounds. Do not think to flatter yourself that it is anything more personal than that.”
He sits in my office, in my chair, leaving me backed against the shelves of jars. I should turn him out of it and let him sprawl on the floor. “Severus -”
“You’re a fool, Lupin. He makes you look a fool.”
“You are the fool. This is just some ridiculous grudge. Sirius is innocent.”
I can’t even bear to hear that man’s name. I take hold of the cuffs of my robe to be sure that my hands are not shaking. “A madman,” I whisper. “And where is he now if he’s so innocent?” Lupin closes his eyes. I want to take his shoulders and shake him awake. “You think you’ve found him again - your friend?” I sneer, and I am actually moving forward to take hold of him. Fury is turning my stomach to acid. Perhaps I will be sick in his lap. “He is a dead man. You can’t bring him back with your sentimental schoolboy memories. You’ll always be alone. You and -” I have hold of his travelling cloak by the shoulder. “They’ll catch him. And when they do, no idiot would believe your story.”
He unhooks my hand, and I let him. My blood has turned to water. “You give people too little credit, Severus.”
For a split second he curves a palm round my elbow.
“Get out.”
He leaves slowly, as if he had meant to all along. I wait for the door to close, then sit in the chair. Fudge has promised me an Order of Merlin. When it comes, I tell myself, I’ll stoke up the fire and burn it to ash.
~
I’d forgotten how Cruciatus simmers through the bones for hours after the spell is cast; it sparks now at joints that haven’t felt fresh and well oiled in a very long time. Hard to believe in one’s thirty-seven years when the Cruciatus is buzzing in the ears, tightening the gait and rendering one’s thoughts little more than approximate.
I land in a cold fireplace and my leg bends like rubber, dropping me with a crack onto the floor. A wet nose and a snarl at my left ear, and I have an inkling of where I went wrong, just in time to pass out from regret.
I gasp awake in the dark, dry-mouthed, and hear the noisy breathing of an animal somewhere to my left. There’s someone else here, I can feel them looking at me; the pain has receded far enough for me to lever myself to my elbow.
“It’s dark.” If that’s all I can come out with, I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.
“I don’t really need the light these days.”
The animal comes close again. Its breath is wet and foul on my cheek.
“You are two of a kind,” I say, which is more like it.
I push at the dog’s head and it snarls again, padding, clip clip, away - out of the room as far as I can tell. I hope so.
“Lumos.”
I squint, and there he is at the table. “If you’d help me up, Lupin, I will return to the school and deliver my report to the headmaster.”
He doesn’t move. “I’m not sure you’d make it, are you?” Then he stands and walks to the stove.
I am as furious with myself as I am with him. How the fuck did I end up here in this kitchen? I am still on the floor when he returns to the table and puts a bowl of something steaming on the side nearest me. I cannot see into it. My head suddenly throbs and I let myself slide weakly back down, my cheek against chalky stone.
~
It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. Potter must be protected… Potter must be lured out… Not long after Michaelmas I am so sick of Potter I feel I could vomit into my Draught of Peace.
“It’s hard on him, all this partisan rubbish in the papers,” Lupin says in early December. We are in the kitchen at Grimmauld Place, he fussing with the kettle, I at the far end of the kitchen table. The other Order members are, it is becoming apparent, incapable of arriving promptly.
“No harder than the partisan rubbish he gets fed here, I’m sure.”
Lupin turns towards me, brows slanted in what I assume to be irony. “And I’m sure you do your bit to disabuse him of any untidy impulses towards valour.”
“He doubtless hopes to impress on the homefront, but I assure you, such behaviour does him no good at school.”
I have not the slightest interest in discussing Potter. The grey-green light in this kitchen is having a depressing enough effect on my spirits. I won’t even look at Lupin, whose fingers tap against a cupboard front; I feel them as if they are drumming at my ribcage.
Oh, and here is his dog.
“Snape,” it says as it comes through the door, ridiculously tricked out in velvet.
“Black,” I say. It’s a laughable pretence at politeness and it won’t last more than two minutes into the meeting. Lupin turns back to his kettle, and Black takes a stand beside him. Cups rattle. For my part, I prefer the sight of the coal dust coating the hearth and creeping out onto the floor tiles to that of Black’s hand at the small of Lupin’s back. How they simper at each other like girls. I would wish them both in Azkaban, if logic did not place me in an adjoining cell.
“Tea, Severus?”
“By all means.”
I smile to hear a cup land with considerably greater force on the worktop, then the scene of our petty drama is invaded by aurors, busy-bodies and makeweights, and the meeting begins.
~
The ceiling of this room is netted with dusty cobwebs. A series of concentric mouldings in the area above my feet, embellished with cracked plaster leaves, indicates where a muggle light fitting must once have hung. There were similar mouldings, though neither as large nor as ornate, in the home where I grew up.
I cannot feel my toes and yet I am not cold. A hot sparking numbness grips my right side in rhythmic pulses, and I wince, feebler than I would admit, but sure now that I will not need to make further use of the bucket that has been left by my side.
He was idiot enough to smile this time when I fell out of the fireplace, holding my stomach, supposing, no doubt, some sort of reasoned intent. And now that I have the leisure to stare at the ceiling and listen to the muffled bellows of Christmas dinner rumbling up through the floorboards, I’ll apply that to myself as well.
Idiot. Tomorrow I will ask Flitwick for a homing charm.
They are laughing downstairs. I fancy I can make out Black’s insane bark, and it gives me a thrill of pleasure to think that I am stowed up here, however helpless, without his knowledge or consent. I wonder if he will smell me on this slab of a pillow - if he will smell Lupin’s hands, arranging the blanket over me, the brief touch of his fingers on the sheet, tangled in my hair. They flickered at the edge of my vision, fuzzed and watery, but only for a moment. Lupin’s memory is longer than one might suppose, and Black is not the only one who bites.
I move my feet tentatively. Sensation is beginning to return, and with it paranoia. As my toenails catch on the nap of the blanket, I find myself eyeing my boots standing guard in the far corner of the room. Perhaps after all he means to keep me prisoner.
“I can’t imagine what for,” I whisper. My throat is dry and acid.
And yet he has not stolen my wand; it sits waiting under the blanket in my right palm. I stare at the ceiling rose, power beginning to thread the bones of my fingers back together. After five minutes there is a burst of noise from the hall, and the front door opens and shuts. I am certain he will come back, and as soon as I hear a tread on the stairs I apparate away, leaving him my boots.
~
“Severus, you must realise that I cannot.”
“Just as I cannot!” My fists are on the table. I will not sit in his furniture like a first year waiting to be reprimanded.
“You give yourself a great deal too little credit.”
“I know my own abilities, Headmaster. It is his I mistrust. Time and time again -”
“Harry is impatient, Severus, I know, but he has the potential to be -”
“He will not - learn. And I have had little enough success attempting to teach him.”
“Be that as it may, I require that you both try.” As quickly as that, the conversation is over. Astounding, really, that he humours me with the pretence of discussion even now, as if I were still the brittle penitent of fourteen years ago. More often than not I am happy merely for the opportunity to shout.
“And when do you require us to begin trying.”
“As soon as he returns to school.” Dumbledore gestures again at the chair behind me. “We cannot risk these visions continuing.”
I recognise his pragmatism as a mirror of my own; Merlin knows I am hardly the type to be moved by pity. The headmaster inspires such blind love in those who don’t know him, that they will all believe he acts out of some sort of paternal affection for Potter. It’s been many years since I’ve had the luxury of that belief, or that love, but naturally I’ll bend my neck for him once more. I sit finally, and take the cup, contents still magically warm if not quite palatable, and swallow down, for the millionth time, the reality of my choices.
~
Of course there are compensations.
Black sits at the kitchen table opposite me, his fingers on Dumbledore’s letter and his brows so low I can scarcely see those deranged eyes.
“You asked for it, didn’t you?”
I smile for the pure pleasure of seeing him bare his teeth. “Yes, Black. It is my sole wish to spend yet more remedial hours with your dimwit godson. You have found me out.”
Chair legs screech and Black stands in a rush, turning his back. “- infect our life here!” Such startling dramatics. I wonder if he has found my boots.
“Where is Lupin this evening?”
“I don’t really see what that has to do with you.”
“Conversation, Black. Preferable in some situations to sniffing at each others’ arseholes.”
He turns then. “Well you’d know all about that.” For a careless moment, my expression drops, a rush of adrenaline making the skin over my cheekbones prickle. I wonder if this is more than just some blunt jibe about the Dark Lord. “If I had my way, you wouldn’t come within a mile of Harry.”
“Then we are agreed.” Just looking at his face, so full of crude accusation, is beginning to make me angry.
“Exactly how long will it be before you’re reporting everything you see in Harry’s mind back to Voldemort? I’ve got a hundred galleons that says it’ll be under a week.”
“And I thought the Black fortunes were lost.” I rub a thumb on the tabletop, and lift it up, grey with dust and grime. I watch him look at it stupidly. “But perhaps you are just a very bad housewife.” My voice has slowed and I can feel my heart tripping in my chest, the tickle of pleasure in my gut at this turn of the conversation. I smirk at him. “Perhaps werewolves do not have the luxury of being choosy.”
He leans over the table, close enough to spit in my face. “You. Tell. Me.”
Something in me stretches to a thin burn, and for a second I think I will tell him. All about our sixth year at school - about two years ago, before he came back from the dead. I’ll embroider and embellish, gloss over the unbecoming details. He is jealous already, I can see it in the clench of his teeth. A drop of spittle glints on his lower lip.
Then the door opens, and Black sits quickly as the boy comes in. I stare at the window, painted with 200 years of pollution and decay, and summon again my dreary mood.
~
It is three days before the full moon. I make Lupin come to me.
He hasn’t set foot here for two years and I can feel his discomfort as he hesitates in the doorway of my office. I stand by my desk, so as not to give him an excuse to sit, and watch him stretch his neck, as if to ease the tendons. His adam’s apple projects and retreats. In his hand is a pair of boots.
“Good evening, Lupin. Already a little rough round the edges?”
He smiles - he wants this to seem natural, friendly. Immediately I am irked. “Have you rearranged your bookshelves, Severus? It seems a bit lighter in here.”
“I have not.”
He’s still loitering by the door. I entertain the fancy that, like a vampire, he is powerless without an invitation. Ridiculous to imagine that he has any power here, but it unsettles me. I stand, poker-stiff, saying nothing, and after half a minute he comes in anyway. He puts the boots on the desk.
“I’m sorry I missed you last week.”
I turn my back on him and climb the short stepladder to fetch a wooden box from the top shelf of my stock cabinet. I am struck with a nauseous sense of déjà vu. “I wasn’t there from a desire to see you, Lupin. And besides, Black no doubt gave you a full account of my visit, though I hardly dare to suppose it was accurate.”
“Actually he didn’t say anything.” Did he not. “Arthur told me they found you within a hair’s breadth of hexing each other.”
I won’t look up. My hands are like spiders on the corners of the box. “Then we play true to type, at least.”
“Sirius -”
I snap the box open. Lupin hesitates - out of the corner of my eye, I can see one hand grasping at his side. I don’t need to see his face to know that he is staring. I can smell the potion too. I take my time fetching the goblet and copper spoon, and he is forced into small talk.
He clears his throat. “How is Harry?”
“Why don’t you slink up to the dormitories and ask him yourself?”
“I wish I had time.”
I should be watching the goblet as I spoon in the aconite, but I allow myself to glance up. He’s barely frowning. In the candlelight, a fat scar glimmers from cheekbone to chin. I have a memory of carving out the groove of it with the tip of my tongue. A hot itch starts up in my belly and my fingertips.
“In a hurry, Lupin? Does the dog need feeding?” I hold out the goblet and he takes it, smiling. Too impatient. I should have made him wait longer. I sit and put a hand out to a scroll of parchment. I can’t think what I had intended to do with it.
“An Order meeting.”
He drains the potion in three gulps. It’s only on the second that I realise what he has said. I’m not accustomed to showing surprise, but I can feel my face heating.
Lupin’s head is cocked slightly to one side, smile gentle, eyes hard. He’s looking for a handhold on this conversation, and all I can think of are Black’s fingers at his waist. “It’s not practical or safe for any of us to know everything.”
Dumbledore’s philosophy. I’m certain he cultivates these little jealousies, all the paranoid fantasies that keep the Order fogged up and striking out blindly. It’s Voldemort’s philosophy too.
I will not be patronised. “Assuredly not. In fact I would go as far as to say that it is not practical or safe for some of us to know anything at all.” I can see by the shift of his jaw that he takes my meaning.
“We all have a role to play, Severus.”
The closer he steps, the more my chest tightens with anger - I cannot remain in my chair. The goblet clatters as I stand, knocking against the table, and we are face to face. I clasp at the side of my robe to stop myself making a grab for him.
“And what is yours, Lupin? Assisting known felons?”
“That was not -”
“Oh, I happen to know the Dark Lord has an entirely different career in mind for you and your kind.” I can barely wait for the insult to take effect. He holds himself stiffly, hunched a little, as if he thinks it possible to loom over me. Violence beams off him, sparking at my pulse, at my cock. “Be happy, Lupin - you may even get to work with children again.”
His hand is round my neck before I have time to flinch. I grip the table, push forwards towards him; his thumb digs, forcing my cheek against my back teeth. He’s breathing heavily, and when I grab at the hair behind his ear and pull his head back and to the side, his mouth lolls open.
I’m going to fuck him against this desk.
I’ve forgotten how it used to be - the unfussy shorthand we developed - and if he remembers it, he shows no sign. I have an instinct to pin him, and my hands grasp and drag at his biceps, while he struggles for purchase, tugging my collar tight against the back of my neck, scratching at my throat. We crane open-mouthed at each other, foolishly, with no desire to kiss.
There’s a low snap of thread as his fingers come away, and suddenly I’ve got him and he’s half-nelsoned, the other hand twisting in my robes to keep himself on his feet. We stagger into the side of the table, and I go for his throat. The jut of tendon, tender as a cuttlefish bone and sharply sweaty against my tongue, tempts me to bite. I do, and he grunts, arches a startling erection up against my hip.
“Take your clothes off.”
No. This is my show. His head is turned from me and I recognise another of those scars tapering under his collar towards his clavicle. I find I don’t want to see his white shoulders, the fragile map of injuries on his chest. With one hand flat in the middle of his ribcage, I push him back towards the desk, and force the knuckles of the other past his waistband. His legs part in a gangly sprawl.
“Take -”
A feeble grip, two fingers hooked around his cock, is all it takes to shut him up. His chest sucks in and out under my hand. I have to smile at how easy it is, then he puffs his cheeks, and a foot hits my shin. I sway for a second, long enough for him to get a hand round my neck again, thumb in the dip behind my chinbone. For a panicked second I imagine a kiss, an eye too close to focus, and struggle, pulling my hand back, but he holds me away. When I open my eyes again he is flicking apart his flies.
I gape at him. I’ve lost. He drags his trousers to his knees, then grabs my useless hand -
“Here -”
Here. Yes. My own cock nudges against the table edge.
The hand that does not have me at bay like a dog fans out behind his balls. “Lentescus.” I watch as his stomach undulates once, then two fingers disappear inside his arse, and my mouth dries to paper. I can’t undo my own trousers fast enough. My fucking idiot fingers.
Cock against arsehole. Teeth against lip. I push. I want desperately to see blood seep from his lips, but it doesn’t. They press white. His eyes squeeze into a hundred creases.
I push. I push. I push. His hair crunches between my teeth like sand. I am a million years old. I have hold of his collar and I want to twist it till his tongue drops from his mouth. He is panting at me: stop - or go - I don’t care. Something’s bursting up through my stomach, my chest. My fingers grip at his hair and I gasp my orgasm into his shirtfront. Fuck him. I’ve fucked him. Fuck him.
I keep myself still. For seconds I hold my breath to slow it; knuckles white and braced on the tabletop. The first inhale is a swimmer’s, taut and controlled - I can smell his semen. My face is tucked to the side of his, and the beads of sweat under his jaw puddle against my lower lip; his hand rests on the back of my head, thumb tapping gently.
I stand before I forget myself.
~
April is a wretched month. It rains like the apocalypse. Perhaps Dumbledore will build us a floating zoo, as in the Muggle fairytale, and pilot us all, two by two, to some fresh hell where Potter juggles forgotten prophecies and the Dark Lord hands round the sherbet lemons.
Potter’s occlumency lessons, such as they are, come to an abrupt end when I find him, arse in the air, headfirst in my memories. In retrospect I am surprised at how much surprise I feel; I have never supposed myself naïve before. Inevitably Black corners me in the hallway of Grimmauld Place, where I am, as usual, the first to arrive for the Order meeting. He looks like he wants to take my head off.
“Harry says you’ve stopped teaching him occlumency.”
“That’s a rather generous assessment. I would rather say that I have stopped demonstrating legilimency.”
“The way I hear it, you were as good as torturing him.”
“I believe it can be an uncomfortable experience when you have no aptitude for it.”
“His life is at risk!” I can see his shoulders shaking. “All our lives are! And you have made this happen, just because your role as sadist-in-chief has been jeopardised by a view of your fucking underpants?” My hand is trembling for my wand, crucio biting at my tongue, when I am distracted by the sight of bloody Lupin coming out of the kitchen, all diplomatic alarm. “Tell me, have you thought to tell Dumbledore?”
“The headmaster is all too aware of your godson’s failure.”
“Your failure, Snape. Yours.”
“Sirius -”
“Oh fuck off, Moony.”
For once I agree, though I am gratified out of all proportion to see the patient set of Lupin’s eyebrows lower into irritation. This is ours. I can kill him now - he’s practically asking me to.
We are nose to nose, wands aimed at each other’s chests, and not for the first time, when the door creaks open and our arena is invaded by aurors.
“The boys are at it again,” says the girl with the purple hair. His cousin. It won’t be a joke when I have blown him to pieces with a cool reducto. For now we are herded into the kitchen to debate Potter’s dubious sanity for the thousandth time.
Lupin takes the chair next to mine; I have the strangest notion that he wishes to defend me. A cloud of unspoken blame hangs in the air, and I welcome it. Outside, the rain has turned unseasonably to hail - Alastor Moody has to raise his voice to be heard above the clatter. I was barely listening anyway.
~
The house at Little Hangleton will not stand another storm. In a high wind it heaves like the Shrieking Shack, and the rain has crept past Mulciber’s leakproof charm and come in to find us. It drops haphazardly from the ceiling of the master bedroom, landing in a series of hollow splats on the floorboards, and the first drop to strike the Dark Lord on the forehead will surely mean a vicious hex for the nearest acolyte.
“Perhaps, Master, what we need is a decoy?”
“Perhaps you are right.”
Voldemort pads softly past without a glance, and Wormtail cowers, blissful and abject. It suddenly occurs to me that I cannot recall ever having seen Peter Pettigrew’s neck - always cringing for someone. Here it is the same old story: the Dark Lord begins with “my old friends”, and “I find myself once again in need of your help”, and ends with a bracing round of Cruciatus to keep us at each other’s throats.
Bellatrix already has an eye to the endgame. “Severus, surely you know the best way. One of his little friends?”
God, not this again. I have never had the Death Eater taste for children, despite my many years of teaching. “It’s possible. But if we wish to find his weakest point - the potential for greatest loss -” Yes, I am going to say it. “I would suggest we look no further than the boy’s godfather, Sirius Black.”
Raindrops tick against the floorboards; warmth fills my belly. I only have to wait.
~
In the end, even that cherished little pearl of vengeance does not save me, and I have to drag myself to the fireplace in the hall when I am finally dismissed, with a dead leg and a mild case of shock. I swear one day they will try to crucio me for not knowing the colour of Potter’s pyjamas.
At first, when I slump onto my backside at the other end, and focus with bleary inevitability on a room that is not my office, I assume that my homing charm has failed. Lupin’s head appears round the kitchen door. Loathsome to have to admit to myself that this was the place where my mind was fixed.
“Come upstairs,” he says, striding towards me.
The few remaining grains of floo powder clinging to the wool of my pocket slide under my fingernails. “I have a headache.”
He holds out a hand, and I don’t have the presence of mind to refuse. I stand with difficulty and fail to control my knees, which spindle out appallingly. We are standing, holding hands; I stretch my fingers out stiff, and a sudden scuttering outside the kitchen door makes him let go.
The dog trots in, barking. When it sees me, its tail goes down; it nudges a bony haunch against Lupin’s leg and bares its teeth at me. I snarl back, amused.
“You let him run around like that?”
“He finds it hard to go more than a day or two without spending some time in his animagus form. It’s a difficult habit to break.”
Lupin sounds like he’s apologising for a drunk relative. My laugh comes out weak, and more like a cough. The dog tries to nose between Lupin’s legs. Pathetic. When the time comes, the Dark Lord could probably lure him away with a dry bone.
I follow Lupin out of the kitchen, my feet dragging across the floorboards, and into a dusty little parlour off the hall. I’ve barely noticed this room before; its door is slanted into the wall under the stairs. It’s a tiny room, windowless; use has not polished up its grubby floorboards, and lumos only highlights the musty gloom. There’s a small round table on rickety legs and only one chair, an ottoman in the corner, stuffing spilling out of the far side, a crumpled tapestry bundled in a heap at its foot. An iron hook is bolted into the wall three inches off the floor, attached to a thick-linked chain, an unlocked shackle. It would hang loosely around a human neck, an object of tolerance, not compulsion. A sickening image fills my mind. I sit on the edge of the ottoman and think instead of the pain in my hip. Lupin takes hold of the dog by a handful of skin and fur at its neck, pulls it from the corner of the room where it is snuffling, tail down, haunches shifting, at the piss smell of another animal. It whines, nails skidding on the floorboards, shaking its head, as it is gently eased out.
“He’s not allowed in here.”
I really hope he doesn’t find it necessary to explain. “But I am?”
He smiles at me, as happy to martyr himself for me as for anyone else. I wait while he takes off his shirt, leaning forward in a shrug. His chest is smooth in a way that suggests age, as if the hair has been rubbed away, or faded to translucency; a scar rips straight through his right nipple.
There is a bark outside the door, followed a second or two later by another, then the sound of nails clicking jauntily away down the hall. A dog on borrowed time. When Lupin sits himself carefully astride my lap, nudging his cock against my knuckles, I smile at him, easily, as if his own grin were complicit. He takes off every stitch of my clothing and I let him. Finally I am in no hurry and I am keen to see what he will do.
We fuck on the ottoman. I keep one hand on his backside, the other round his wrist, so that he is forced to tug at his own cock. His thin thighs bulge, tight creases around his knees, as he lifts and lowers himself, shifting on his heels to find a comfortable position. I grumble at him, itching to come, my cock stinging and trembling like a wand primed for violence inside him. I close my eyes and lift my knees to take the pressure off my hip; the dry soles of my feet slip against the tapestry.
“Come on.”
He grunts. A palm slaps against my chest; I am startled when his mouth meets my shoulder. A shoulder white and thin enough to have gone its whole life without affection, he swears against it like a kiss. I think of him as a boy the month before I left the school, when his hair was brown and swept softly against my mouth. I press my tongue against the back of my teeth and leave go his wrist to pinch at his waist. Then he twists in my lap, solid and strong in middle age, and I thrust up, forgetting him completely, whining and panting into the top of his head.
He comes with a series of deepening sighs. I listen to him between my own heavy breaths, without a shred of remorse.
~
“He’s got Padfoot at the place where it’s hidden.”
Who would have guessed the boy would actually decide to trust me when there was no one left to trust; I smirk to think of him desperately trying to put the thought in my mind. The floos are blocked, but I apparate into London as light as a feather.
I find them laughing over dinner and I almost kill him myself. “Snivellus,” he calls me, but I have all the cards.
I tell them both of Potter’s message, and watch him drink wine out of his dull crystal.
“I’m touched by your concern, Snape, but as you can see,” he spreads his arms theatrically, then lets one settle around the back of Lupin’s chair. “Your friends will have to try harder.”
“Every inch the idiot, Black. By all means finish your dinner. I’m certain your godson is doing just that.” Lupin is on his feet, then Black’s chair, too, scrapes back from the table. He looks uncertain. “You are fortunate that your friends know him better than you do.” I raise my voice, determined to get the knife in as deep as I can. “But then they’ve had so much longer to get to know him.”
It transpires that Alastor Moody and his dancing girls are in Kent on some field mission that I knew nothing about. I should look discreetly away as Lupin’s patronus is dispatched, but I do not. Indeed it’s hard to ignore as it flies twice round my head, croaking with an enthusiasm that borders on inappropriate, then batters its way out of an open window in a flurry of feathers.
The floo powder is found; the heroes prepare to go off into battle. I’ll never be one of them, but then neither will Black, and all that matters is that it hurts him more.
“Sirius, don’t be a fool.”
“He’s my godson, Remus!”
Lupin has one foot in and one out of the hearth, and has to turn back to put a hand on Black’s shoulder. “And you would not want to deny him the pleasure of telling you all about it.”
Touching. And so predictable I could have scripted it myself.
“Lupin’s right. You and I will simply have to stay here and play ‘fetch’ while your friends save the day.” I sit at the table and make as if to finish Lupin’s dinner. I barely even notice when he leaves, I am so intent on Black, but he has gone and I lay the fork back down with a steady hand and fold my arms.
Black leans across the table towards me.
“You think I would stay here like you? You think there is anything about us that is the same?”
“I do not.”
He smacks a palm on the table and stands up straight. “Remus - he’s not a fool, you know. You ruined his life. He hates you just the same as I do. The same as James.”
And with that Parthian shaft, he is in the fireplace himself and gone. As if I care about his hatred, Potter’s hatred. They are feeble, half-formed, next to my own. My fingers touch at the steel of Lupin’s fork. It is five minutes before I remember to send for Dumbledore.
~
The sky outside the Charms classroom is thick and grey. It’s just after lunch, but it could be evening. I look at his untucked shirt; I’m so angry I won’t touch him again. This is his last chance.
“What future do you think you’ve got here? You’d better come with me. We can - it’ll be -”
“But things are better here than they ever were before -”
“You’re not like them!” I want to hit him across the face for being so stupid. “What job are you going to do? What is it? You think you’re going to stay best friends with Black? You want a little girlfriend like Potter?”
He looks - not sad like I thought, but irritated. “I want as much as I can get. I want to just see.”
“You won’t get anything. They’ll leave you - you fucking wait and see.” I’m infuriated by the sight of his canvas bookbag on the floor. He won’t come, I know it.
“You’re wrong.”
“You’re a fucking werewolf!”
I sit on a desk; my face feels heavy and sulky. We stare into space at right angles, and I think of our gazes crossing.
“I’m not going to beg.” I’m aware that even saying it is begging. I wish I would think before talking. He takes hold of my hand. I don’t pull away, but let my fingers sit loosely in his.
He takes a breath, playing with my fingers. I wonder if it’s a chance. “The Dark Lord has opportunities -” I whisper it, gripping at his knuckles; no one else deserves to hear. He cringes as if I’ve said something embarrassing.
“I don’t think -”
I shut him up by pulling my hand away and getting up from the desk. Rage hardens to a brick in my chest and I kick at his bag; books and quills spin away under chair legs.
By four o’clock, the gloom is so low I feel no more than a shadow, a smudge. I meant to leave early. I wanted to stride across the lawn leaving them all playing their silly snitch games, but they’ve already gone. They’ll be on the train by now, defacing their uniforms, fighting over cauldron cakes. I crowd out my annoyance with thoughts of Lupin alone, scrabbling after books, his robe trailing over his heels in the dust of the classroom floor.
words: 6000ish
rating: R
warning: 1st person pov. also crammed to the gills with sirius black and possibly a bit on the grim side.
note 1: beta’d by lovely fitofpique. <3
note 2: last year i wrote buckle_berry the sweetest fluffiest creamcake of a snupin for her birthday, and for mine she wrote a brutal series of violent snupin sex vignettes. well fine. you win, b. this is because i love you. HAPPY BIRTHDAY (a fortnight ago).
Nothing Here Resets the Clocks
He’s packed to leave before the first owl arrives. I had wondered if he would visit me.
“You knew of the curse, Lupin. You should have been more careful.”
“Let’s not be disingenuous. This has nothing to do with a curse.”
“It has to do with the presence of a murderous - two murderous animals on the Hogwarts grounds. Do not think to flatter yourself that it is anything more personal than that.”
He sits in my office, in my chair, leaving me backed against the shelves of jars. I should turn him out of it and let him sprawl on the floor. “Severus -”
“You’re a fool, Lupin. He makes you look a fool.”
“You are the fool. This is just some ridiculous grudge. Sirius is innocent.”
I can’t even bear to hear that man’s name. I take hold of the cuffs of my robe to be sure that my hands are not shaking. “A madman,” I whisper. “And where is he now if he’s so innocent?” Lupin closes his eyes. I want to take his shoulders and shake him awake. “You think you’ve found him again - your friend?” I sneer, and I am actually moving forward to take hold of him. Fury is turning my stomach to acid. Perhaps I will be sick in his lap. “He is a dead man. You can’t bring him back with your sentimental schoolboy memories. You’ll always be alone. You and -” I have hold of his travelling cloak by the shoulder. “They’ll catch him. And when they do, no idiot would believe your story.”
He unhooks my hand, and I let him. My blood has turned to water. “You give people too little credit, Severus.”
For a split second he curves a palm round my elbow.
“Get out.”
He leaves slowly, as if he had meant to all along. I wait for the door to close, then sit in the chair. Fudge has promised me an Order of Merlin. When it comes, I tell myself, I’ll stoke up the fire and burn it to ash.
~
I’d forgotten how Cruciatus simmers through the bones for hours after the spell is cast; it sparks now at joints that haven’t felt fresh and well oiled in a very long time. Hard to believe in one’s thirty-seven years when the Cruciatus is buzzing in the ears, tightening the gait and rendering one’s thoughts little more than approximate.
I land in a cold fireplace and my leg bends like rubber, dropping me with a crack onto the floor. A wet nose and a snarl at my left ear, and I have an inkling of where I went wrong, just in time to pass out from regret.
I gasp awake in the dark, dry-mouthed, and hear the noisy breathing of an animal somewhere to my left. There’s someone else here, I can feel them looking at me; the pain has receded far enough for me to lever myself to my elbow.
“It’s dark.” If that’s all I can come out with, I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.
“I don’t really need the light these days.”
The animal comes close again. Its breath is wet and foul on my cheek.
“You are two of a kind,” I say, which is more like it.
I push at the dog’s head and it snarls again, padding, clip clip, away - out of the room as far as I can tell. I hope so.
“Lumos.”
I squint, and there he is at the table. “If you’d help me up, Lupin, I will return to the school and deliver my report to the headmaster.”
He doesn’t move. “I’m not sure you’d make it, are you?” Then he stands and walks to the stove.
I am as furious with myself as I am with him. How the fuck did I end up here in this kitchen? I am still on the floor when he returns to the table and puts a bowl of something steaming on the side nearest me. I cannot see into it. My head suddenly throbs and I let myself slide weakly back down, my cheek against chalky stone.
~
It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. Potter must be protected… Potter must be lured out… Not long after Michaelmas I am so sick of Potter I feel I could vomit into my Draught of Peace.
“It’s hard on him, all this partisan rubbish in the papers,” Lupin says in early December. We are in the kitchen at Grimmauld Place, he fussing with the kettle, I at the far end of the kitchen table. The other Order members are, it is becoming apparent, incapable of arriving promptly.
“No harder than the partisan rubbish he gets fed here, I’m sure.”
Lupin turns towards me, brows slanted in what I assume to be irony. “And I’m sure you do your bit to disabuse him of any untidy impulses towards valour.”
“He doubtless hopes to impress on the homefront, but I assure you, such behaviour does him no good at school.”
I have not the slightest interest in discussing Potter. The grey-green light in this kitchen is having a depressing enough effect on my spirits. I won’t even look at Lupin, whose fingers tap against a cupboard front; I feel them as if they are drumming at my ribcage.
Oh, and here is his dog.
“Snape,” it says as it comes through the door, ridiculously tricked out in velvet.
“Black,” I say. It’s a laughable pretence at politeness and it won’t last more than two minutes into the meeting. Lupin turns back to his kettle, and Black takes a stand beside him. Cups rattle. For my part, I prefer the sight of the coal dust coating the hearth and creeping out onto the floor tiles to that of Black’s hand at the small of Lupin’s back. How they simper at each other like girls. I would wish them both in Azkaban, if logic did not place me in an adjoining cell.
“Tea, Severus?”
“By all means.”
I smile to hear a cup land with considerably greater force on the worktop, then the scene of our petty drama is invaded by aurors, busy-bodies and makeweights, and the meeting begins.
~
The ceiling of this room is netted with dusty cobwebs. A series of concentric mouldings in the area above my feet, embellished with cracked plaster leaves, indicates where a muggle light fitting must once have hung. There were similar mouldings, though neither as large nor as ornate, in the home where I grew up.
I cannot feel my toes and yet I am not cold. A hot sparking numbness grips my right side in rhythmic pulses, and I wince, feebler than I would admit, but sure now that I will not need to make further use of the bucket that has been left by my side.
He was idiot enough to smile this time when I fell out of the fireplace, holding my stomach, supposing, no doubt, some sort of reasoned intent. And now that I have the leisure to stare at the ceiling and listen to the muffled bellows of Christmas dinner rumbling up through the floorboards, I’ll apply that to myself as well.
Idiot. Tomorrow I will ask Flitwick for a homing charm.
They are laughing downstairs. I fancy I can make out Black’s insane bark, and it gives me a thrill of pleasure to think that I am stowed up here, however helpless, without his knowledge or consent. I wonder if he will smell me on this slab of a pillow - if he will smell Lupin’s hands, arranging the blanket over me, the brief touch of his fingers on the sheet, tangled in my hair. They flickered at the edge of my vision, fuzzed and watery, but only for a moment. Lupin’s memory is longer than one might suppose, and Black is not the only one who bites.
I move my feet tentatively. Sensation is beginning to return, and with it paranoia. As my toenails catch on the nap of the blanket, I find myself eyeing my boots standing guard in the far corner of the room. Perhaps after all he means to keep me prisoner.
“I can’t imagine what for,” I whisper. My throat is dry and acid.
And yet he has not stolen my wand; it sits waiting under the blanket in my right palm. I stare at the ceiling rose, power beginning to thread the bones of my fingers back together. After five minutes there is a burst of noise from the hall, and the front door opens and shuts. I am certain he will come back, and as soon as I hear a tread on the stairs I apparate away, leaving him my boots.
~
“Severus, you must realise that I cannot.”
“Just as I cannot!” My fists are on the table. I will not sit in his furniture like a first year waiting to be reprimanded.
“You give yourself a great deal too little credit.”
“I know my own abilities, Headmaster. It is his I mistrust. Time and time again -”
“Harry is impatient, Severus, I know, but he has the potential to be -”
“He will not - learn. And I have had little enough success attempting to teach him.”
“Be that as it may, I require that you both try.” As quickly as that, the conversation is over. Astounding, really, that he humours me with the pretence of discussion even now, as if I were still the brittle penitent of fourteen years ago. More often than not I am happy merely for the opportunity to shout.
“And when do you require us to begin trying.”
“As soon as he returns to school.” Dumbledore gestures again at the chair behind me. “We cannot risk these visions continuing.”
I recognise his pragmatism as a mirror of my own; Merlin knows I am hardly the type to be moved by pity. The headmaster inspires such blind love in those who don’t know him, that they will all believe he acts out of some sort of paternal affection for Potter. It’s been many years since I’ve had the luxury of that belief, or that love, but naturally I’ll bend my neck for him once more. I sit finally, and take the cup, contents still magically warm if not quite palatable, and swallow down, for the millionth time, the reality of my choices.
~
Of course there are compensations.
Black sits at the kitchen table opposite me, his fingers on Dumbledore’s letter and his brows so low I can scarcely see those deranged eyes.
“You asked for it, didn’t you?”
I smile for the pure pleasure of seeing him bare his teeth. “Yes, Black. It is my sole wish to spend yet more remedial hours with your dimwit godson. You have found me out.”
Chair legs screech and Black stands in a rush, turning his back. “- infect our life here!” Such startling dramatics. I wonder if he has found my boots.
“Where is Lupin this evening?”
“I don’t really see what that has to do with you.”
“Conversation, Black. Preferable in some situations to sniffing at each others’ arseholes.”
He turns then. “Well you’d know all about that.” For a careless moment, my expression drops, a rush of adrenaline making the skin over my cheekbones prickle. I wonder if this is more than just some blunt jibe about the Dark Lord. “If I had my way, you wouldn’t come within a mile of Harry.”
“Then we are agreed.” Just looking at his face, so full of crude accusation, is beginning to make me angry.
“Exactly how long will it be before you’re reporting everything you see in Harry’s mind back to Voldemort? I’ve got a hundred galleons that says it’ll be under a week.”
“And I thought the Black fortunes were lost.” I rub a thumb on the tabletop, and lift it up, grey with dust and grime. I watch him look at it stupidly. “But perhaps you are just a very bad housewife.” My voice has slowed and I can feel my heart tripping in my chest, the tickle of pleasure in my gut at this turn of the conversation. I smirk at him. “Perhaps werewolves do not have the luxury of being choosy.”
He leans over the table, close enough to spit in my face. “You. Tell. Me.”
Something in me stretches to a thin burn, and for a second I think I will tell him. All about our sixth year at school - about two years ago, before he came back from the dead. I’ll embroider and embellish, gloss over the unbecoming details. He is jealous already, I can see it in the clench of his teeth. A drop of spittle glints on his lower lip.
Then the door opens, and Black sits quickly as the boy comes in. I stare at the window, painted with 200 years of pollution and decay, and summon again my dreary mood.
~
It is three days before the full moon. I make Lupin come to me.
He hasn’t set foot here for two years and I can feel his discomfort as he hesitates in the doorway of my office. I stand by my desk, so as not to give him an excuse to sit, and watch him stretch his neck, as if to ease the tendons. His adam’s apple projects and retreats. In his hand is a pair of boots.
“Good evening, Lupin. Already a little rough round the edges?”
He smiles - he wants this to seem natural, friendly. Immediately I am irked. “Have you rearranged your bookshelves, Severus? It seems a bit lighter in here.”
“I have not.”
He’s still loitering by the door. I entertain the fancy that, like a vampire, he is powerless without an invitation. Ridiculous to imagine that he has any power here, but it unsettles me. I stand, poker-stiff, saying nothing, and after half a minute he comes in anyway. He puts the boots on the desk.
“I’m sorry I missed you last week.”
I turn my back on him and climb the short stepladder to fetch a wooden box from the top shelf of my stock cabinet. I am struck with a nauseous sense of déjà vu. “I wasn’t there from a desire to see you, Lupin. And besides, Black no doubt gave you a full account of my visit, though I hardly dare to suppose it was accurate.”
“Actually he didn’t say anything.” Did he not. “Arthur told me they found you within a hair’s breadth of hexing each other.”
I won’t look up. My hands are like spiders on the corners of the box. “Then we play true to type, at least.”
“Sirius -”
I snap the box open. Lupin hesitates - out of the corner of my eye, I can see one hand grasping at his side. I don’t need to see his face to know that he is staring. I can smell the potion too. I take my time fetching the goblet and copper spoon, and he is forced into small talk.
He clears his throat. “How is Harry?”
“Why don’t you slink up to the dormitories and ask him yourself?”
“I wish I had time.”
I should be watching the goblet as I spoon in the aconite, but I allow myself to glance up. He’s barely frowning. In the candlelight, a fat scar glimmers from cheekbone to chin. I have a memory of carving out the groove of it with the tip of my tongue. A hot itch starts up in my belly and my fingertips.
“In a hurry, Lupin? Does the dog need feeding?” I hold out the goblet and he takes it, smiling. Too impatient. I should have made him wait longer. I sit and put a hand out to a scroll of parchment. I can’t think what I had intended to do with it.
“An Order meeting.”
He drains the potion in three gulps. It’s only on the second that I realise what he has said. I’m not accustomed to showing surprise, but I can feel my face heating.
Lupin’s head is cocked slightly to one side, smile gentle, eyes hard. He’s looking for a handhold on this conversation, and all I can think of are Black’s fingers at his waist. “It’s not practical or safe for any of us to know everything.”
Dumbledore’s philosophy. I’m certain he cultivates these little jealousies, all the paranoid fantasies that keep the Order fogged up and striking out blindly. It’s Voldemort’s philosophy too.
I will not be patronised. “Assuredly not. In fact I would go as far as to say that it is not practical or safe for some of us to know anything at all.” I can see by the shift of his jaw that he takes my meaning.
“We all have a role to play, Severus.”
The closer he steps, the more my chest tightens with anger - I cannot remain in my chair. The goblet clatters as I stand, knocking against the table, and we are face to face. I clasp at the side of my robe to stop myself making a grab for him.
“And what is yours, Lupin? Assisting known felons?”
“That was not -”
“Oh, I happen to know the Dark Lord has an entirely different career in mind for you and your kind.” I can barely wait for the insult to take effect. He holds himself stiffly, hunched a little, as if he thinks it possible to loom over me. Violence beams off him, sparking at my pulse, at my cock. “Be happy, Lupin - you may even get to work with children again.”
His hand is round my neck before I have time to flinch. I grip the table, push forwards towards him; his thumb digs, forcing my cheek against my back teeth. He’s breathing heavily, and when I grab at the hair behind his ear and pull his head back and to the side, his mouth lolls open.
I’m going to fuck him against this desk.
I’ve forgotten how it used to be - the unfussy shorthand we developed - and if he remembers it, he shows no sign. I have an instinct to pin him, and my hands grasp and drag at his biceps, while he struggles for purchase, tugging my collar tight against the back of my neck, scratching at my throat. We crane open-mouthed at each other, foolishly, with no desire to kiss.
There’s a low snap of thread as his fingers come away, and suddenly I’ve got him and he’s half-nelsoned, the other hand twisting in my robes to keep himself on his feet. We stagger into the side of the table, and I go for his throat. The jut of tendon, tender as a cuttlefish bone and sharply sweaty against my tongue, tempts me to bite. I do, and he grunts, arches a startling erection up against my hip.
“Take your clothes off.”
No. This is my show. His head is turned from me and I recognise another of those scars tapering under his collar towards his clavicle. I find I don’t want to see his white shoulders, the fragile map of injuries on his chest. With one hand flat in the middle of his ribcage, I push him back towards the desk, and force the knuckles of the other past his waistband. His legs part in a gangly sprawl.
“Take -”
A feeble grip, two fingers hooked around his cock, is all it takes to shut him up. His chest sucks in and out under my hand. I have to smile at how easy it is, then he puffs his cheeks, and a foot hits my shin. I sway for a second, long enough for him to get a hand round my neck again, thumb in the dip behind my chinbone. For a panicked second I imagine a kiss, an eye too close to focus, and struggle, pulling my hand back, but he holds me away. When I open my eyes again he is flicking apart his flies.
I gape at him. I’ve lost. He drags his trousers to his knees, then grabs my useless hand -
“Here -”
Here. Yes. My own cock nudges against the table edge.
The hand that does not have me at bay like a dog fans out behind his balls. “Lentescus.” I watch as his stomach undulates once, then two fingers disappear inside his arse, and my mouth dries to paper. I can’t undo my own trousers fast enough. My fucking idiot fingers.
Cock against arsehole. Teeth against lip. I push. I want desperately to see blood seep from his lips, but it doesn’t. They press white. His eyes squeeze into a hundred creases.
I push. I push. I push. His hair crunches between my teeth like sand. I am a million years old. I have hold of his collar and I want to twist it till his tongue drops from his mouth. He is panting at me: stop - or go - I don’t care. Something’s bursting up through my stomach, my chest. My fingers grip at his hair and I gasp my orgasm into his shirtfront. Fuck him. I’ve fucked him. Fuck him.
I keep myself still. For seconds I hold my breath to slow it; knuckles white and braced on the tabletop. The first inhale is a swimmer’s, taut and controlled - I can smell his semen. My face is tucked to the side of his, and the beads of sweat under his jaw puddle against my lower lip; his hand rests on the back of my head, thumb tapping gently.
I stand before I forget myself.
~
April is a wretched month. It rains like the apocalypse. Perhaps Dumbledore will build us a floating zoo, as in the Muggle fairytale, and pilot us all, two by two, to some fresh hell where Potter juggles forgotten prophecies and the Dark Lord hands round the sherbet lemons.
Potter’s occlumency lessons, such as they are, come to an abrupt end when I find him, arse in the air, headfirst in my memories. In retrospect I am surprised at how much surprise I feel; I have never supposed myself naïve before. Inevitably Black corners me in the hallway of Grimmauld Place, where I am, as usual, the first to arrive for the Order meeting. He looks like he wants to take my head off.
“Harry says you’ve stopped teaching him occlumency.”
“That’s a rather generous assessment. I would rather say that I have stopped demonstrating legilimency.”
“The way I hear it, you were as good as torturing him.”
“I believe it can be an uncomfortable experience when you have no aptitude for it.”
“His life is at risk!” I can see his shoulders shaking. “All our lives are! And you have made this happen, just because your role as sadist-in-chief has been jeopardised by a view of your fucking underpants?” My hand is trembling for my wand, crucio biting at my tongue, when I am distracted by the sight of bloody Lupin coming out of the kitchen, all diplomatic alarm. “Tell me, have you thought to tell Dumbledore?”
“The headmaster is all too aware of your godson’s failure.”
“Your failure, Snape. Yours.”
“Sirius -”
“Oh fuck off, Moony.”
For once I agree, though I am gratified out of all proportion to see the patient set of Lupin’s eyebrows lower into irritation. This is ours. I can kill him now - he’s practically asking me to.
We are nose to nose, wands aimed at each other’s chests, and not for the first time, when the door creaks open and our arena is invaded by aurors.
“The boys are at it again,” says the girl with the purple hair. His cousin. It won’t be a joke when I have blown him to pieces with a cool reducto. For now we are herded into the kitchen to debate Potter’s dubious sanity for the thousandth time.
Lupin takes the chair next to mine; I have the strangest notion that he wishes to defend me. A cloud of unspoken blame hangs in the air, and I welcome it. Outside, the rain has turned unseasonably to hail - Alastor Moody has to raise his voice to be heard above the clatter. I was barely listening anyway.
~
The house at Little Hangleton will not stand another storm. In a high wind it heaves like the Shrieking Shack, and the rain has crept past Mulciber’s leakproof charm and come in to find us. It drops haphazardly from the ceiling of the master bedroom, landing in a series of hollow splats on the floorboards, and the first drop to strike the Dark Lord on the forehead will surely mean a vicious hex for the nearest acolyte.
“Perhaps, Master, what we need is a decoy?”
“Perhaps you are right.”
Voldemort pads softly past without a glance, and Wormtail cowers, blissful and abject. It suddenly occurs to me that I cannot recall ever having seen Peter Pettigrew’s neck - always cringing for someone. Here it is the same old story: the Dark Lord begins with “my old friends”, and “I find myself once again in need of your help”, and ends with a bracing round of Cruciatus to keep us at each other’s throats.
Bellatrix already has an eye to the endgame. “Severus, surely you know the best way. One of his little friends?”
God, not this again. I have never had the Death Eater taste for children, despite my many years of teaching. “It’s possible. But if we wish to find his weakest point - the potential for greatest loss -” Yes, I am going to say it. “I would suggest we look no further than the boy’s godfather, Sirius Black.”
Raindrops tick against the floorboards; warmth fills my belly. I only have to wait.
~
In the end, even that cherished little pearl of vengeance does not save me, and I have to drag myself to the fireplace in the hall when I am finally dismissed, with a dead leg and a mild case of shock. I swear one day they will try to crucio me for not knowing the colour of Potter’s pyjamas.
At first, when I slump onto my backside at the other end, and focus with bleary inevitability on a room that is not my office, I assume that my homing charm has failed. Lupin’s head appears round the kitchen door. Loathsome to have to admit to myself that this was the place where my mind was fixed.
“Come upstairs,” he says, striding towards me.
The few remaining grains of floo powder clinging to the wool of my pocket slide under my fingernails. “I have a headache.”
He holds out a hand, and I don’t have the presence of mind to refuse. I stand with difficulty and fail to control my knees, which spindle out appallingly. We are standing, holding hands; I stretch my fingers out stiff, and a sudden scuttering outside the kitchen door makes him let go.
The dog trots in, barking. When it sees me, its tail goes down; it nudges a bony haunch against Lupin’s leg and bares its teeth at me. I snarl back, amused.
“You let him run around like that?”
“He finds it hard to go more than a day or two without spending some time in his animagus form. It’s a difficult habit to break.”
Lupin sounds like he’s apologising for a drunk relative. My laugh comes out weak, and more like a cough. The dog tries to nose between Lupin’s legs. Pathetic. When the time comes, the Dark Lord could probably lure him away with a dry bone.
I follow Lupin out of the kitchen, my feet dragging across the floorboards, and into a dusty little parlour off the hall. I’ve barely noticed this room before; its door is slanted into the wall under the stairs. It’s a tiny room, windowless; use has not polished up its grubby floorboards, and lumos only highlights the musty gloom. There’s a small round table on rickety legs and only one chair, an ottoman in the corner, stuffing spilling out of the far side, a crumpled tapestry bundled in a heap at its foot. An iron hook is bolted into the wall three inches off the floor, attached to a thick-linked chain, an unlocked shackle. It would hang loosely around a human neck, an object of tolerance, not compulsion. A sickening image fills my mind. I sit on the edge of the ottoman and think instead of the pain in my hip. Lupin takes hold of the dog by a handful of skin and fur at its neck, pulls it from the corner of the room where it is snuffling, tail down, haunches shifting, at the piss smell of another animal. It whines, nails skidding on the floorboards, shaking its head, as it is gently eased out.
“He’s not allowed in here.”
I really hope he doesn’t find it necessary to explain. “But I am?”
He smiles at me, as happy to martyr himself for me as for anyone else. I wait while he takes off his shirt, leaning forward in a shrug. His chest is smooth in a way that suggests age, as if the hair has been rubbed away, or faded to translucency; a scar rips straight through his right nipple.
There is a bark outside the door, followed a second or two later by another, then the sound of nails clicking jauntily away down the hall. A dog on borrowed time. When Lupin sits himself carefully astride my lap, nudging his cock against my knuckles, I smile at him, easily, as if his own grin were complicit. He takes off every stitch of my clothing and I let him. Finally I am in no hurry and I am keen to see what he will do.
We fuck on the ottoman. I keep one hand on his backside, the other round his wrist, so that he is forced to tug at his own cock. His thin thighs bulge, tight creases around his knees, as he lifts and lowers himself, shifting on his heels to find a comfortable position. I grumble at him, itching to come, my cock stinging and trembling like a wand primed for violence inside him. I close my eyes and lift my knees to take the pressure off my hip; the dry soles of my feet slip against the tapestry.
“Come on.”
He grunts. A palm slaps against my chest; I am startled when his mouth meets my shoulder. A shoulder white and thin enough to have gone its whole life without affection, he swears against it like a kiss. I think of him as a boy the month before I left the school, when his hair was brown and swept softly against my mouth. I press my tongue against the back of my teeth and leave go his wrist to pinch at his waist. Then he twists in my lap, solid and strong in middle age, and I thrust up, forgetting him completely, whining and panting into the top of his head.
He comes with a series of deepening sighs. I listen to him between my own heavy breaths, without a shred of remorse.
~
“He’s got Padfoot at the place where it’s hidden.”
Who would have guessed the boy would actually decide to trust me when there was no one left to trust; I smirk to think of him desperately trying to put the thought in my mind. The floos are blocked, but I apparate into London as light as a feather.
I find them laughing over dinner and I almost kill him myself. “Snivellus,” he calls me, but I have all the cards.
I tell them both of Potter’s message, and watch him drink wine out of his dull crystal.
“I’m touched by your concern, Snape, but as you can see,” he spreads his arms theatrically, then lets one settle around the back of Lupin’s chair. “Your friends will have to try harder.”
“Every inch the idiot, Black. By all means finish your dinner. I’m certain your godson is doing just that.” Lupin is on his feet, then Black’s chair, too, scrapes back from the table. He looks uncertain. “You are fortunate that your friends know him better than you do.” I raise my voice, determined to get the knife in as deep as I can. “But then they’ve had so much longer to get to know him.”
It transpires that Alastor Moody and his dancing girls are in Kent on some field mission that I knew nothing about. I should look discreetly away as Lupin’s patronus is dispatched, but I do not. Indeed it’s hard to ignore as it flies twice round my head, croaking with an enthusiasm that borders on inappropriate, then batters its way out of an open window in a flurry of feathers.
The floo powder is found; the heroes prepare to go off into battle. I’ll never be one of them, but then neither will Black, and all that matters is that it hurts him more.
“Sirius, don’t be a fool.”
“He’s my godson, Remus!”
Lupin has one foot in and one out of the hearth, and has to turn back to put a hand on Black’s shoulder. “And you would not want to deny him the pleasure of telling you all about it.”
Touching. And so predictable I could have scripted it myself.
“Lupin’s right. You and I will simply have to stay here and play ‘fetch’ while your friends save the day.” I sit at the table and make as if to finish Lupin’s dinner. I barely even notice when he leaves, I am so intent on Black, but he has gone and I lay the fork back down with a steady hand and fold my arms.
Black leans across the table towards me.
“You think I would stay here like you? You think there is anything about us that is the same?”
“I do not.”
He smacks a palm on the table and stands up straight. “Remus - he’s not a fool, you know. You ruined his life. He hates you just the same as I do. The same as James.”
And with that Parthian shaft, he is in the fireplace himself and gone. As if I care about his hatred, Potter’s hatred. They are feeble, half-formed, next to my own. My fingers touch at the steel of Lupin’s fork. It is five minutes before I remember to send for Dumbledore.
~
The sky outside the Charms classroom is thick and grey. It’s just after lunch, but it could be evening. I look at his untucked shirt; I’m so angry I won’t touch him again. This is his last chance.
“What future do you think you’ve got here? You’d better come with me. We can - it’ll be -”
“But things are better here than they ever were before -”
“You’re not like them!” I want to hit him across the face for being so stupid. “What job are you going to do? What is it? You think you’re going to stay best friends with Black? You want a little girlfriend like Potter?”
He looks - not sad like I thought, but irritated. “I want as much as I can get. I want to just see.”
“You won’t get anything. They’ll leave you - you fucking wait and see.” I’m infuriated by the sight of his canvas bookbag on the floor. He won’t come, I know it.
“You’re wrong.”
“You’re a fucking werewolf!”
I sit on a desk; my face feels heavy and sulky. We stare into space at right angles, and I think of our gazes crossing.
“I’m not going to beg.” I’m aware that even saying it is begging. I wish I would think before talking. He takes hold of my hand. I don’t pull away, but let my fingers sit loosely in his.
He takes a breath, playing with my fingers. I wonder if it’s a chance. “The Dark Lord has opportunities -” I whisper it, gripping at his knuckles; no one else deserves to hear. He cringes as if I’ve said something embarrassing.
“I don’t think -”
I shut him up by pulling my hand away and getting up from the desk. Rage hardens to a brick in my chest and I kick at his bag; books and quills spin away under chair legs.
By four o’clock, the gloom is so low I feel no more than a shadow, a smudge. I meant to leave early. I wanted to stride across the lawn leaving them all playing their silly snitch games, but they’ve already gone. They’ll be on the train by now, defacing their uniforms, fighting over cauldron cakes. I crowd out my annoyance with thoughts of Lupin alone, scrabbling after books, his robe trailing over his heels in the dust of the classroom floor.