Author's note: I have never written a complete fic, but I figured now is as good of a time as any. This will most likely be around eight to ten chapters. Poke me if I forget to update. And review! I need to know if I'm shite at this or what.
Warnings: Slash. Lots of it, later on.
Pairings: If you can't figure it out, I'm ashamed that you're reading it.
Disclaimer: I've never written something more than three chapters long, let alone a whole set of novels. Only the plot is mine; the characters and all that belong to J.K. Rowling, etc.
Chapter One
"It's not my fault, you know."
Severus Snape looked up from the small desk at which he was seated, his hand still moving in the slightly distracted manner of one who has nothing better to do than doodle. The young man standing in front of him, slouched up against a wall in Severus' tiny but private study, held an expectant look on his face, waiting for some response out of his former professor.
"What, exactly, Mr. Weasley, is not your fault?" Severus adopted his most sarcastic tone, and recommenced his doodling. "The fact that your botched attempt at a mission landed us diseased and in quarantine? The absence of any distraction to forestall impending annihilation by boredom?" He increased his volume and looked directly into the redhead's blue eyes. "Or, perhaps, the fact that I must put up with your ridiculous presence for yet another three months, when both of us should be outside of this infernal cubbyhole and aiding the war effort?"
Ron was beginning to look pale, Severus thought, but one could never be quite sure when another was covered so thickly with freckles. "Well? I would love to learn how this," the former professor paused to wave his hand around, indicating the cramped room with shabby, whitewashed walls, "Could possibly be the fault of anyone else."
Weasley looked slightly put out, and turned to leave. Ah, what satisfaction, to still inspire hatred and defeat in a twenty-year-old when one was still in his thirties. Or early forties; Snape never quibbled over details. The boy seemed to change his mind, however, and squared his shoulders. He turned towards the sneering potions master, staunchly pursuing eye contact.
"I just wanted to say…" Ron shifted on his feet and cast his eyes downward, seeming to gather his thoughts. If the entire situation weren't the young man's fault, Severus might almost have pitied him. The boy straightened, and once again forced himself to meet Severus' black eyes. "I wanted to tell you that I am sorry I landed us here, but that I didn't know I was infected, and I never imagined we would have to be cut off from contact with the outside world for four months."
Severus stared blankly at the youngest Weasley boy. He was a bit flummoxed by the man's honesty, and had reclined in his seat, fingers forming a steeple on his chest, during the small speech. Ron seemed to take his silence as a positive response, and let out in a rush, "And don't you think it's about time we played a chess game or something? I know you've read all the books they left us, and I'm going to be driven bloody insane if I have to count the floorboards in my room one more time."
"I would next suggest you the kitchen." Severus deadpanned. Ron looked slightly confused for a moment, then noticed the glint of humor in Snape's expression. It was faint-- a slight upturn to his lips, a deepening of the laugh lines around his eyes-- but it was there. Ron's face lit up in a grin, and he chuckled.
"Wouldn't it be nice to talk to someone other than yourself for the next three months?" No, Severus thought, but in the end he sent Weasley from the room, with the young man's grin still intact, and a promise to beat his arse to the curb during an after-dinner chess match. It was, after all, better than doodling a picture of Harry Potter beating Albus Dumbledore over the head with a bag of lemon drops.
Though Severus had intended to wound Weasley with his assertion that they should be on the battlefield, facing Lord Voldemort and not inside a remote cottage sealed from the world in Northern Ireland, he was relieved to not have to spend the coming three months suffering under the Cruciatus or playing the puppet to two masters. A cramped, four-room cottage was better than that.
Severus was annoyed only by four things during his hiatus: the first being the presence of a silent but clinging Ronald Weasley. Ron had, after all, grown up in a household of nine, and since had either occupied a crowded Grimmauld Place or Hogwarts Castle, filled to the brim with magic students. Having to constantly be alone with a taciturn professor-turned-spy must have been a shock.
The second rub was his inability to use magic; the disease they suffered from happened to be a rare form of wizarding influenza, and was highly contagious by touch alone. To use magic while suffering from the illness would result in death from depleting one's magic resources. And Severus, though more jaded than most men, would like to see how it all turns out.
The third item of Severus' short list, one that he repeated often in his head, was the lack of any unnecessary supplies. When the healers from St. Mungo's had given he and the young Weasley their apparition coordinates-- fully dressed in germ-proof clothing from head to toe and through a metal slit in their hospital room-- the idiots had promised there would be ample entertainment and food supplies, everything the heart desired for up to five months. Severus had finished reading all twenty of the cottage's books, which consisted of two muggle romances, three compilations of essays on magical theory, and seven mediocre works of wizard fiction. He could hardly imagine what Weasley could have been doing during those two weeks; probably chafing the skin off of various parts of his body in an attempt to relieve some of the boredom-- and tension.
Which is what led to Severus' final complaint. He was a dignified man of thirty-nine-- all right, forty-two-- but even he could not ignore the desire to have nice wank before bedtime to take the edge off of the excruciatingly dull day. Unfortunately, the two petite bedrooms in the cottage were separated by extremely thin walls, and Weasley was of the vocal variety. Severus, though admittedly more than a tad queer, did not consider himself a voyeur, and resented the man's inability to keep his voice down, and his lack of foresight to notice that his moans might cause his roommate some unwilling discomfort. Then again, Weasley probably did not realize his effect on his previous professor; Severus never made a sound when he was furiously pumping his hand to the sound of Ron's quiet moans. And if he did let out the occasional whimper, Ron's own noises surely blocked out his own.
And now he had agreed to be companions with the brat until the end of their four month sentence. It would begin with a chess game; but where would it end? Wary of his luck, Severus imagined with at least one of them dead, and the other barmy as Albus Dumbledore in Bermuda shorts on the Antarctic coastline. Ah, now there was an idea for a doodle.
To be continued, in which Ron will discover Severus is just a snarky as he had thought, but quite more human than he could have imagined.