Warning: Rated an R, due to a slash pairing. Please avoid this fic if you
are not comfortable with the idea of a same sex romantic pairing.
Disclaimer: If the characters were mine they would be in a lot more pain. Alas, they're JKR's.
Mouth full of Ghosts.
Severus Snape was born and grew up in a Muggle neighborhood, before his parents managed to afford a house at the Diagon Alley. On the way home from school he used to walk by an old carousel. Six wooden horses, silent behind a fence, their paint blistered with the sun and the rain. They just stood there, forever frozen in a circle, going nowhere even when moving.
He remembers them now. Now, that no matter how hard he tries to walk away he seems to be forever coming back, his footsteps following that customary pattern, spiraling around the werewolf.
There is a certain foolishness in desire, Severus Snape has come to realize. In those dilated eyes and quickened breaths, in the way one accidental glance can become a vice that presses tighter and tighter around your body, until your ribs snap and your heart leaks out from the corners of your mouth and your fingertips.
The games he has taught himself to play. If he sees two Ravenclaws before he turns round the corner, Lupin will be in the classroom already. If three portraits talk to him today, Lupin will look up from his cauldron and smile. Four dragon teeth in the potion will make him cry, five cockroach eyes will make him beg. Those little tricks. Cheap magic and it almost never works, but it's the only kind of magic he has left.
Remus. The appropriate noun would be: tenderness
Remus bends over his cauldron, face creased in concentration. His hands are smooth with long elegant fingers that move delicately in the world, writing poetry without sounds and words. But when he rolls up his sleeves to protect his robes from the bubbling liquid, Snape can see that long pale line, that little cacophony, stretching from the wrist to the elbow. He was the one who gave Lupin that scar, with his little pocket knife.
Remus always asked for pain. He treasured it, he wore his suffering like jewels, the purple bruises suited his complexion perfectly. The wounds on his skin healed fast, water drained by a thirsty field, he pleaded for more and Snape obliged. It made them both feel alive. And Remus tasted of blood, his warm kisses were a fresh roadkill, teenage love was a mess of nails, fists and razors. There was more, of course. A whole library of moans, an omnibus of sighs, the stolen thrill of an 'I want you' soaking unguarded into a willing ear.
It's all in the past now. Black walks in the corridors with his arm looped around Remus' shoulders and neither of them ever look back to see him clench his fists in the shadows. Now he can only watch and play his little games.
So he has a plan. A well-thought out plan, that he has spent long months working on in absolute secrecy, a plan that involves extensive library research, notebooks full of diagrams, lists that cover every detail. A perfect plan. Naturally, it's all a disaster in the end.
Snape is asked to come to the Headmaster's office as soon as possible. When he walks in Dumbledore looks up with a half-startled expression, as though he has just been pulled away from something far more important. McGonagall has her arms crossed over her chest and is glaring at him over the golden rim of her glasses. There's Professor Binns too, who died last week, but is unfortunately still teaching at Hogwarts.
This will be a slow and exquisite public execution, planned to end with him crawling on the floor. Snape smiles. Remus taught him how. He has to stretch the corners of his mouth and then pull up his upper lip to reveal the front row of teeth.
'Sirius Black has brought me this.' Dumbledore says, scratching his long nose. A small crystal vial on his desk, filled with some bright green liquid. 'He claims you tried to pour it into Remus Lupin's cauldron while he wasn't paying attention.'
'Yes, Headmaster.'
'Black says he managed to stop you in the last moment. Apparently some sort of physical fight followed.'
'Yes, Headmaster.'
'You know that all the students, including Remus would have to taste the content of their cauldron by the end of the lesson, to test the effectiveness of their potion?'
'Yes, Headmaster.'
'Do you know what this vial contains?'
'Yes, Headmaster. A new potion I have created, based on the research of Arsenius Jigger and Phyllida Spore. It is called wolfsbane. It affects the process of lycanthropy, helping the werewolf retain his human consciousness during the transformation.'
'Why did you make this potion, Severus?'
'I wanted to save him, Headmaster.'
'This is not wolfsbane, Severus. This is poison.'
Dumbledore's eyes are boring holes into his forehead. McGonagall's face in a plaster mask. Binns struggles in vain to light his phantom pipe.
He could say 'No, no, no this can't be true. I didn't do it. I wanted to make the wolfsbane.' But he isn't that sure any more. What was he doing down at the dungeons for all these months? Who was he trying to save?
But it's too late to save anyone now. Remus or himself.
'You won't forget they tried to kill me, Headmaster?'
'No, Severus. I won't forget anything.'
Lucius is waiting for him outside, elegant vulture in velvet robes. 'Everything settled?' he asks. Snape nods. 'Smart boy.' Then a rough hand on the back of his neck, and a hot, moist breath on Snape's skin as Lucius sticks his tongue in his ear. 'The Forbidden forest. Tonight. Your initiation.'
Lucius. The appropriate adjective would be: wanton. It has the word want in it for a reason.
The trick, Snape thinks, is to realize that nothing of all these is happening. The night above his head is fake, the moon in a piece of polished bone hanging from a thread. The stars are chips of chalk pinned on black cardboard, the Milky Way is a vomit of sawdust. And if this night doesn't exist then nothing else does. So he isn't kneeling, stripped to the waist in the middle of a circle of fire, there is no mud soaking his trousers, no snake coiling around him, the green scales cold and slippery against his skin.
'Her name is Nagini' the hooded figure says. 'Raise your arm.'
But there is no hooded figure, not really, no fear strangling him, no red- hot iron scorching his skin, no smell of burning flesh, no, he isn't screaming, not really.
Pain. Remarkable, how alive it makes one feel. Somewhere in this impossible forest of paper and plastic, in a night that doesn't exist a wolf is howling at an improbable moon. Love, they say. Cheap magic and it almost never works, but it's the only kind of magic he has left.
Severus: The appropriate verb would be: to sink.
Back in the Slytherin dungeons, his bed is freezing cold, sheets like slabs of ice. Snape pulls the covers over his head and reaches under the pillow. He draws out his little pocket knife, and slides it carefully over his arm. The blade unzips the skin, slicing the Dark Mark in two, leaving a long crimson line behind, that stretches from the wrist to the elbow. After a week or two the red scar will fade to white. He brings his hand to his mouth and licks the blood off. It tastes like Remus.
A few minutes later he has fallen asleep, his sleeve a bit sticky with blood. In his dream he is sitting in the Potions classroom at his usual place, by the door. Remus stoops over and kisses him, with a mouth full of ghosts.
*
So many years are gone and now they are here again. All of them, frozen in a circle, going nowhere even when moving. Lupin is teaching DADA. Lucius stops by often, to ask about his son's progress in Potions. Even Black is around, looming somewhere in the Forbidden Forest, lunatic murdering godfather, with a dagger between his sweaty teeth. Snape has found the way back too, sleepwalking aimlessly through fields of winter. A thousand footsteps, a thousand days.
*
So why can no one ever leave? Why does one, for no reason, take the road that brings him back to the same place every time?
The end
Disclaimer: If the characters were mine they would be in a lot more pain. Alas, they're JKR's.
Mouth full of Ghosts.
Severus Snape was born and grew up in a Muggle neighborhood, before his parents managed to afford a house at the Diagon Alley. On the way home from school he used to walk by an old carousel. Six wooden horses, silent behind a fence, their paint blistered with the sun and the rain. They just stood there, forever frozen in a circle, going nowhere even when moving.
He remembers them now. Now, that no matter how hard he tries to walk away he seems to be forever coming back, his footsteps following that customary pattern, spiraling around the werewolf.
There is a certain foolishness in desire, Severus Snape has come to realize. In those dilated eyes and quickened breaths, in the way one accidental glance can become a vice that presses tighter and tighter around your body, until your ribs snap and your heart leaks out from the corners of your mouth and your fingertips.
The games he has taught himself to play. If he sees two Ravenclaws before he turns round the corner, Lupin will be in the classroom already. If three portraits talk to him today, Lupin will look up from his cauldron and smile. Four dragon teeth in the potion will make him cry, five cockroach eyes will make him beg. Those little tricks. Cheap magic and it almost never works, but it's the only kind of magic he has left.
Remus. The appropriate noun would be: tenderness
Remus bends over his cauldron, face creased in concentration. His hands are smooth with long elegant fingers that move delicately in the world, writing poetry without sounds and words. But when he rolls up his sleeves to protect his robes from the bubbling liquid, Snape can see that long pale line, that little cacophony, stretching from the wrist to the elbow. He was the one who gave Lupin that scar, with his little pocket knife.
Remus always asked for pain. He treasured it, he wore his suffering like jewels, the purple bruises suited his complexion perfectly. The wounds on his skin healed fast, water drained by a thirsty field, he pleaded for more and Snape obliged. It made them both feel alive. And Remus tasted of blood, his warm kisses were a fresh roadkill, teenage love was a mess of nails, fists and razors. There was more, of course. A whole library of moans, an omnibus of sighs, the stolen thrill of an 'I want you' soaking unguarded into a willing ear.
It's all in the past now. Black walks in the corridors with his arm looped around Remus' shoulders and neither of them ever look back to see him clench his fists in the shadows. Now he can only watch and play his little games.
So he has a plan. A well-thought out plan, that he has spent long months working on in absolute secrecy, a plan that involves extensive library research, notebooks full of diagrams, lists that cover every detail. A perfect plan. Naturally, it's all a disaster in the end.
Snape is asked to come to the Headmaster's office as soon as possible. When he walks in Dumbledore looks up with a half-startled expression, as though he has just been pulled away from something far more important. McGonagall has her arms crossed over her chest and is glaring at him over the golden rim of her glasses. There's Professor Binns too, who died last week, but is unfortunately still teaching at Hogwarts.
This will be a slow and exquisite public execution, planned to end with him crawling on the floor. Snape smiles. Remus taught him how. He has to stretch the corners of his mouth and then pull up his upper lip to reveal the front row of teeth.
'Sirius Black has brought me this.' Dumbledore says, scratching his long nose. A small crystal vial on his desk, filled with some bright green liquid. 'He claims you tried to pour it into Remus Lupin's cauldron while he wasn't paying attention.'
'Yes, Headmaster.'
'Black says he managed to stop you in the last moment. Apparently some sort of physical fight followed.'
'Yes, Headmaster.'
'You know that all the students, including Remus would have to taste the content of their cauldron by the end of the lesson, to test the effectiveness of their potion?'
'Yes, Headmaster.'
'Do you know what this vial contains?'
'Yes, Headmaster. A new potion I have created, based on the research of Arsenius Jigger and Phyllida Spore. It is called wolfsbane. It affects the process of lycanthropy, helping the werewolf retain his human consciousness during the transformation.'
'Why did you make this potion, Severus?'
'I wanted to save him, Headmaster.'
'This is not wolfsbane, Severus. This is poison.'
Dumbledore's eyes are boring holes into his forehead. McGonagall's face in a plaster mask. Binns struggles in vain to light his phantom pipe.
He could say 'No, no, no this can't be true. I didn't do it. I wanted to make the wolfsbane.' But he isn't that sure any more. What was he doing down at the dungeons for all these months? Who was he trying to save?
But it's too late to save anyone now. Remus or himself.
'You won't forget they tried to kill me, Headmaster?'
'No, Severus. I won't forget anything.'
Lucius is waiting for him outside, elegant vulture in velvet robes. 'Everything settled?' he asks. Snape nods. 'Smart boy.' Then a rough hand on the back of his neck, and a hot, moist breath on Snape's skin as Lucius sticks his tongue in his ear. 'The Forbidden forest. Tonight. Your initiation.'
Lucius. The appropriate adjective would be: wanton. It has the word want in it for a reason.
The trick, Snape thinks, is to realize that nothing of all these is happening. The night above his head is fake, the moon in a piece of polished bone hanging from a thread. The stars are chips of chalk pinned on black cardboard, the Milky Way is a vomit of sawdust. And if this night doesn't exist then nothing else does. So he isn't kneeling, stripped to the waist in the middle of a circle of fire, there is no mud soaking his trousers, no snake coiling around him, the green scales cold and slippery against his skin.
'Her name is Nagini' the hooded figure says. 'Raise your arm.'
But there is no hooded figure, not really, no fear strangling him, no red- hot iron scorching his skin, no smell of burning flesh, no, he isn't screaming, not really.
Pain. Remarkable, how alive it makes one feel. Somewhere in this impossible forest of paper and plastic, in a night that doesn't exist a wolf is howling at an improbable moon. Love, they say. Cheap magic and it almost never works, but it's the only kind of magic he has left.
Severus: The appropriate verb would be: to sink.
Back in the Slytherin dungeons, his bed is freezing cold, sheets like slabs of ice. Snape pulls the covers over his head and reaches under the pillow. He draws out his little pocket knife, and slides it carefully over his arm. The blade unzips the skin, slicing the Dark Mark in two, leaving a long crimson line behind, that stretches from the wrist to the elbow. After a week or two the red scar will fade to white. He brings his hand to his mouth and licks the blood off. It tastes like Remus.
A few minutes later he has fallen asleep, his sleeve a bit sticky with blood. In his dream he is sitting in the Potions classroom at his usual place, by the door. Remus stoops over and kisses him, with a mouth full of ghosts.
*
So many years are gone and now they are here again. All of them, frozen in a circle, going nowhere even when moving. Lupin is teaching DADA. Lucius stops by often, to ask about his son's progress in Potions. Even Black is around, looming somewhere in the Forbidden Forest, lunatic murdering godfather, with a dagger between his sweaty teeth. Snape has found the way back too, sleepwalking aimlessly through fields of winter. A thousand footsteps, a thousand days.
*
So why can no one ever leave? Why does one, for no reason, take the road that brings him back to the same place every time?
The end