Greyback was careless, and the outhouse he slept in sometimes was always dirty. It could have been homey, Scabior thought, with a lick of paint here and an armchair there, but Greyback didn't care for any of that. There was a desolate sink that didn't work, and a single, lumpy mattress in one corner of the floor, swathed in blankets. That was as luxurious as Greyback got.
It was a dismal hovel, and seemed to exist in a state of perpetual disarray. The windows - the ones that were not boarded up - were mostly cracked, stained with the moss and slime that the damp bred. The cold was enough to make Scabior shiver each time he set foot in the place, and he swore he'd come away more than once with an illness because of it.
When it rained, it drummed down onto the steel roof like a horde of stampeding cattle, and the water dribbled through a hole in the corner, dripping steadily into a bucket that hovered there, ready to catch it. Scabior often wondered why Greyback didn't just put up some sort of shield against the weather, but he supposed that would have taken too much effort on his part. Greyback, after all, only came here to get away from the other werewolves.
He was devoted to them, he really was. Scabior knew, because he had told him, and one couldn't dedicate so much of their life to forming an empire and simply not care. The strain got too much for him to bear, sometimes, though. He wasn't a natural politician, or a businessman, but he was in charge, and he wanted to be in control. That meant a lot of hands-on work, and keeping everybody in check, and some days, he told Scabior, he just wanted to disappear completely. To curl up, forget the world – all but die. But that was weakness, wasn't it? And Greyback would not be seen as weak.
Scabior supposed he was privileged, in a way. As far as he knew, he was the only one Greyback had told about his den. The others never knew where he went. The drafts and the damp and the dirt made him wrinkle his nose, but it was alright, because they were the only ones there. And when Greyback was alone with him, there wasn't such a difference between werewolf and wizard. He talked to him normally when they were alone. He treated him differently, when they were alone.
Greyback said that it was just to relieve tension, and that he did not harbour feelings for Scabior and that it would be foolish pretend otherwise. And he claimed it was for warmth that he didn't push Scabior away as he huddled close to him in a tangle of tattered sheets and torn pillowcases - and Scabior thought that perhaps he didn't mind the cold after all.
Written for the OTP Boot Camp with the prompt 'torn'. Fluffy Greyback/Scabior? Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice.