Author's Note: It bears mentioning that authors do not condone everything they write.
Lies and Red Ink: Part I
Zigadenus
Sinistra is about the only other staff member he can stand anymore. McGonagall on a good day, but he doesn't have many of those. And he's gone off her; it's a guilty conscience perhaps, for all that his latest indulgence was unintentional when it started. He tells himself that he can't abide her gentle ribbing, that he detests her crowing and fawning over her pet students' accomplishments. But it's not that, or at least not wholly. He does a good job of lying to himself, for the most part, but still: he always checks to ensure she's not in the staffroom, whenever he comes across these particular essays, before surreptitiously tucking them to the back of the heap, to be assessed in the privacy of his own quarters.
Sinistra's alright, though. She's another breathing body, and sometimes that's enough. The isolation's been nibbling around at the edges of his brain of late. He doesn't sleep well, because it's too bloody quiet and all he can hear are his thoughts. They churn and swirl and swish with endless panic and recrimination, and he'd seriously consider developing an addiction to sleeping potions, if it weren't for their effects on occlumentic shielding. He's not particularly suicidal, not yet, and not like that. Just… tired.
But there's that last essay to look forward to.
It's Friday, and he's a bit surprised she's here; he usually has the staffroom to himself. He supposes that the rest of the staff is down at the Three Broomsticks; he's seen them there, and McGonagall used to invite him, occasionally, back when he started teaching. He'd been invisible and awkward, that time he'd gone. Better all 'round to spend the evening catching up on the marking. Because it never ends. Never.
The first few days of the week are pure purgatory. Back when he'd recovered from hangovers with more aplomb than his far-side-of-thirty liver was currently willing to permit, he'd approached the weekly marking with cheap gin and whiskey: a shot for every genuine moron, two if he caught a plagiarist. It had become apparent in very short order that this strategy would result in his untimely demise by alcohol poisoning, so he'd revised: a graduated cylinder from his lab, and two to six carefully measured drams for every paper that achieved a passing grade. There are few enough O's that his metabolism keeps pace for the most part. And in a stroke of unbrilliance, he'd decided, about two years in, to save the upper forms for his Friday nights. The quality was higher, and he could get nicely sloshed and spend Saturday recovering while he plotted what to inflict upon the little blighters over the following week. This, of course, left him with all the dross and tedium Monday through Thursdays.
But perhaps he is, at his core, the sort who goes in for delayed gratification. Perhaps Fridays have been all the sweeter for the promise of a quiet bender. And lately, well…
Here it is. Neat and precise and judging by the heft, a full five feet longer than it needed to be.
He glances up, around. Sinistra is tallying her papers. He carefully slips the essay to the back, and jerks his fingers away before they can linger. She's looked up at the sound; he ducks behind his hair and busies himself recharging his quill.
"You know, you could have a bit of a life, if you wouldn't assign so many papers."
Pity. He is going to have to cross her off his extremely short list of tolerable human beings. Maybe he could steal someone's cat for company? "Says the woman who is tallying her own."
"Ah, but I'm nearly done, and it's mostly just killing time; Gerard's working overtime, Mungo's is short-staffed again."
"Mmm." That was perfectly noncommittal, perhaps she'd take the hint.
"I'm serious, you're here every Friday night."
It appeared she could not. Perhaps his dead-eyed would you stop gaze would make an impression.
"Why don't you, I don't know, find a hobby. Find a book. Find… find a lover, someone would have you!"
He shuffles his papers up into a tidy sheaf, and pitches his tone to arctic temperatures, "That holds substantially less interest than this conversation."
"Oh, come on now, don't be like that!" She's wheedling. It's nauseating. "What's your type, then?"
"I do not have a type, madam." He is capping his ink, his decanter, and his graduated cylinder. He isn't halfway drunk enough to sit through any more of this.
"Nonsense, everyone's got a type. Let's start easy: Ladies? Gents?"
He glowers at her as he sweeps toward the door. Last word to Severus Snape: "Everyone does not have a type. I happen to be standing here, asserting that I for one, do not. Thus invalidating your naïve generalization. Good evening." He closes the door before she can emit any rejoinder.
He's irked, to have his marking follow him into his private quarters. He'd go to the classroom to finish them off, but he'd rather be someplace comfortable. It's Friday, after all. And he isn't about to allow Sinistra to ruin his Friday night plans. Nevertheless, the red ink his pen viciously hemorrhages across the papers is particularly verbose tonight. Here's a student who's an incompetent wastrel, a paper that's pure doggerel, and a waste of all efforts toward education, another that's a prime case of plagiarism save the spelling reveals it's been written by an orangutan. It takes more than an hour of this to put him back into a proper humour; his mood is mitigated only slightly by four A's (eight drams), an E (four drams) and Draco Malfoy's lonely O (he refuses to drink to blatant hypocrisy; his liver no doubt appreciates this honesty, even if no one else will ever know).
Besides, he's come to the last paper of the night.
He can't go so far as to say it was purely unintentional when it really began, but it was innocent enough. Saving them for the last – he doesn't remember when that started, so it must have been only half-conscious. He gives himself a moral pass, there. But not this present idiocy, stemming from that first time he'd scrawled an obscure citation at the bottom of the parchment, and those damning words you might be interested. There was nothing unconscious in that. He'd had to rise, and look up the volume and page numbers – plenty of time to have thought better of it.
He isn't certain what he'd intended it as: assistance or challenge. He probably ought to have interpreted the subsequent papers in some dark light – showing off, grubbing for extra credit, being obsessive. But he doesn't. Perhaps it's some basal kinship, because he recognizes that it's joy motivating the quest through dusty old volumes, the thorough analyses, the painstaking translations of international manuals. With one citation, it is clear he's created a monster.
Except that it hasn't been only one.
It's crept up on him, but he can't not. It's a dialogue, now. He tells himself he tried to stop it. Until early this year, these papers had a particular form: the assigned topic would be treated first, succinct and correct. But then the tangent, the real work. He'd started this year as he'd meant to continue: he'd written This is a waste of your time, and drawn a bright bold X across the offending section. Admittedly, this was probably the wrong strategy to have employed if he'd wanted to accomplish a cessation – he ought to have applied these remarks to the latter half of the paper.
Tonight's is a continuation in a series of refinements to polyjuice. He'd made an offhand remark about the energy potential in protein folding, and now there are sophisticated models of threshold potentials and theoretical equations that take his breath away. He notes, almost with detachment, that his hands have begun to sweat, as he grips his quill too tightly while he checks the derivation of these models on a piece of scrap parchment.
The funny thing is, he hasn't lied to Sinistra. He knows that people entertain particular obsessions, what she vulgarly refers to as having 'types'. Some find sexual stimulation in breasts, in buttocks, in the taste of secret places, in the lazy bedroom gleam of dusky eyes. All of these things have in common that they relate to another person's body, and this interests him not the slightest. Lust, he understands, applies to physical attributes. Love is more tender, a slowly-growing thing, and might encompass personality when it's pure – he thinks he probably loved Evans, although he certainly never lusted for any part of her.
He doesn't lust for any part of anyone's body, and certainly not for Miss Granger's. Nor does he imagine he loves her – he doesn't even know her. Both notions are abhorrent, not least owing to her identity as a student.
And yet he's aware of the insistent tightening in his groin, the hot flush beneath his eyes. It's so unwelcome, when he only wants to enjoy the clever hypothesis she's presenting here. It's been like this, lately, and it's deeply shameful. But it's secret, so he tells himself there's no real harm in it. And if he has perhaps – just once or twice – given in to stupefied fumbling under the cover of quilts and darkness, well, by Monday he's sorted himself out.
He casts his eye down the page, away from the compelling equations. He's out of luck; his attention is captured by the precis of her justifications, which segues into literature review. He approves of the slightly-manic obsession for tracking down errant sources that's clearly in evidence. Here's Kurzeil and Stappens, 1847 - that's a heavy, mouldering tome. When you open it, the glue at the spine crinkles and falls as tiny, opaque granules, and little flakes of decaying leather dust the smooth wood of the table. There's water damage on the pages she cites. He knows them intimately, and this sudden familiarity is an electric bridge between his mind and what he perceives as hers.
His erection is pressing painfully against the front of his trousers. He shifts, rearranges himself, all to no avail. There's a muscle trembling in his thigh.
He carefully avoids reckoning up the remaining whiskey in the cylinder – he has no desire to know that he's not drunk enough to blame this on the liquor.
He needs to stop this. But his hands are traitors, setting aside parchment and quill, delving past the buttons of his shirt. His fingers, tracing through the sparse hair of his chest, are cold; his nipples tighten and bud beneath them. He rolls one, hard, between thumb and index; the pain is a jolt of pure pleasure, arcing down his spine and pooling deep at the stem of his cock.
It's almost involuntary, the way he rises from the chair, and retreats to his bedroom. He strips out of his clothing mechanically. The sheets are cool; he lets his head fall back against the pillow. He can hear the blood coursing in his ears. With every breath, the sheet draped across his lap twitches ever-so-slightly over the sensitized head of his cock. He tries to gentle his breathing, to empty his head of thought.
It's no use.
Phrases, citations, those damnably clever equations - they drop back into his mind, disturbing the still surface of it like cast stones, pure desire rippling out and flushing his skin, the heat of it radiating down to where his treacherous fingers have begun to circle the base of his rampant cock.
He groans, a strained, hitching sound, moistened by the sharp barb of self-loathing that lances through him even as he eases back his foreskin, teasing the sensitive frenulum with the edge of a fingernail. He can feel his heightened pulse flickering through the thick artery running along his shaft. The coolness of the night air chills the pre-ejaculate now freely weeping from his tip.
He admits his defeat in a growl past clenched teeth.
But there won't be any of these softly hesitant touches; the likes of such are not for him, and he refuses to indulge himself further in this madness. Pain, instead. He grips his shaft too firmly, strokes quickly, methodically, with bruising cruelty. He pinches, tugs, at a nipple; the sensation is a counterpoint to the damage the base of his fist is inflicting upon his balls, and it's chilling nausea now that's quivering in his gut, displacing those futile threads of sensuality. A few more harsh passes and he's there, that hot tight ache loosening as semen spills across his clawed fingers. He releases his tortured cock immediately, wipes his hand in the bedsheets with clinical detachment.
He is empty now.
There is stillness inside, finally, and he is almost puzzled to note that there are tears cooling across the harsh planes of his face. It is absurd, he thinks.
It is as absurd as lusting after someone's brain. As absurd as the fact that tomorrow, he will carefully seat himself in the wingback chair, and spend the better part of the afternoon convincing himself that this has not occurred, that he can trust himself to act the part of beneficent mentor. As absurd as the eventuality of appending to her paper a suggestion for an expanded line of inquiry, in his customary red ink.
Author's Note: I always very much appreciate hearing from people who've chosen to read my work, and I'm thankful for any constructive criticism readers choose to give as well.