The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 8: Exponents
There are several classes and another annoying Transfiguration tutorial to go to between now and the moment when I can continue my explorations, however. "Can't we just not and say we did?" I drawl at Professor Eccles, and she looks as though she wants to agree with me.
We try inanimate objects for a change and discover that I have some talent for changing myself into metal objects, but not wood, though I can't remain convincingly still. "There's nothing I'd rather do than be a proper teakettle for you, but how do you want me to stop breathing, Professor?" I say sarcastically.
"Your left hand still looks a little steely," she points out. "Now let's try fabric. Or would you rather be a liquid?" she asks brightly. I need to ask Lessmore if this woman has a China Cheer habit. No one is this perky.
Finally it is nighttime. Normally I feel very little for my fellow Slytherin, but I do feel a twinge about having given out the house password. If James decides to get back at me for some reason, I can be living with a houseful of enemies until graduation. As a loner, I know that there are some fates worse than being ignored as I am now.
Then why did I choose the fate where a confusing man-boy named James Potter may or may not be waiting for me in a disused storeroom, where he might kiss me or might re-break my nose?
No one pays any attention to me leaving my bed. I rarely spend a full night there, and they've stopped caring why.
This time I do leave long enough for the portraits to see me go out, but I come back having done a cloaking spell, so that they can see me but don't recognize me as Severus Snape. It's one of the few things I learned from my reading about magical identities, and probably wouldn't hold up in front of anyone who knows what to look for, but hopefully it can keep the portraits from blabbing.
It's very early still, so I pull the book out of my robe and read awhile to distract myself from what I'm about to do with this boy whose hot promise I can feel throbbing within the stones of the castle. "He's crazy," a voice in my head says about James. "But you knew that when he wanted you to begin with." "This is what happens when two boys get together," another voice sounding like my grandmother's says. "It's unnatural. Of course you fight." I've been staring at the same page, listening to the unpleasant voices repeating passages from Bigham's Book in my head for some time when the door opens. I sit up and the book falls to the floor.
There's no one there. The door closes and then it's James all over.
All over me.
"I can't believe I'm here in Slytherin," he says breathlessly while his hands fumble with my robes. "I can't believe I'm going to be there," he adds with a shy glance in my direction and his voice cracks a little.
I feel a stab of desire that might just be fear. "We don't have to—Maybe we need to talk."
"Talk?" he gets that incredulous look that comes right before the laugh. "Don't you want to—?" His hand is working fast. "Don't you want to—"
He whispers the impropriety. It's the first time he's used such a word and it embarrasses me for some reason while some deep ancestral pull unhinges something in my body. "Yeees," I say, about to spasm.
He stops and pushes me backward. I recognize a few charms rattled off in quick succession. He's warded the door, set up a sound shield, and, oh, something else happens that lets me know he's really planned out the mechanics of something I've scarcely imagined. He takes off our clothes while I sit there, transfixed, not sure if I really want to be doing this. Is it curiosity? Love?
Then James fixes his mouth on me and there are no more questions. My whole body writhes and now I'm muttering in some collection of languages. Por le Ancien et Mystique Ordre de la Rose-Croixs! He never did that before.
He switches the ecstasy to the other side and then says, "What is this?" There is a faint bluish mark trailing down my chest.
"I don't know," I say. "Please do it some more." And he does for a minute of perfect bliss before he moves his mouth and I can't complain.
"Do you want it?" he asks, eye level to my crotch, which is a difficult position to demand a considered answer from.
"Want what?" I have enough presence of mind to tease.
"Me in you," he says, and we both lurch forward at the bald statement. Everything up until now has been as natural as swimming, but this, it's like a knife has been unsheathed between us and there is danger. He doesn't give me a chance to say anything. I feel something begin to come undone deep inside me. I'm scared and start to say something but he puts his hand over my mouth and I feel a combination of arousal and terror that is irresistible. I lean back and watch the utterly intent expression on his face. He looks up at my eyes and his hand over my mouth and does something.
"Hermès!" I mouth into his hand. I pull it from my mouth. "What was that? What did you—"
He's staring straight into my eyes and he does it again, and again, until I'm begging for something, I don't know what, until he says another incantation and it's happening. He's got hold of my wrists and is pressing me apart. He's looking at me as if I'm everything he's ever desired. "Say it," he says. "Say how much you want it."
I realize I've been begging in other languages, so I switch back to English.
It only takes one particular word and that's all we need to pound together so violently that I hope he did a charm against people feeling the shaking of the bed. It is good. It is the best thing I have ever known. This beautiful boy becoming undone over me, and I'm doing this, I'm making him feel that, and all the while he's making me feel—. He stops.
"Don't stop," I cry in a voice I don't recognize. "This is wonderful."
He looks down at my chest, which is covered with blue. "I think it's coming from your skin," he says and traces with a finger. I'm terribly embarrassed and confused, but it feels too good to refuse. I feel some essence of me being dragged into his mouth and I would give up anything, including what we were just doing, for that feeling.
He's back inside me again and I change my mind when he kisses me. There is no me, there is no him, there is merely one ecstatic piece of flesh rolling over and over itself. One climax follows close upon the other.
We kiss and lay silently for a long time.
"Do you think anyone heard us?" I ask finally. "Or felt us? I feel like we could have shaken down the entire Slytherin tower."
"Don't think about them," James says. "Think about ways to do this more often." He runs his hands over my hips and looks at me for a long time. I am awed that someone would find me not only suitable, but very suitable for what we just did.
"Agreed," I say. He leaves under his Invisibility Cloak and I spend some time in the cupboard before I dare emerge. No one seems to be the wiser, but I've had time to remember that he and I were supposed to talk about something. Oh yes, he broke my nose! It seems so long ago. After what we just did, it hardly seems to matter. It seems like there is more to think about at this moment, but I feel far too good to care. Life is full of color and savor; I can smell each of the other boys' unique skin as I make my way to bed, but all I want is to lose myself in James.
In my dreams during those brief hours of sleep I dream that I'm in a hall of mirrors. A million different reflections stretch out before me, and I know what I don't want to see—Aunt Adele. I don't really know what I look like any more. There's scores of male faces before me, and I don't know which is really mine. But I want them. Each in his own way is infinitely desirable. I vaguely think James wouldn't like me thinking that way when I hear his voice. "Seen anything you fancy?" he asks, his nakedness dazzling me from a full-length mirror, and then I wake up.
I feel so splendid at the breakfast table I think I'm actually caught smiling.
The knot of misery that James has been loosing deep inside of me has freed up my mind as well. It's easier to simply focus on the moment, and I'm able to capture concepts from my instructors' lectures that I had never noticed before. In Sport I've jumped over the heads of my fellow students twice without thinking that normally I'd be standing there sulking. Transfiguration tutoring actually seems to be going better. I catch Eccles thinking that at last she'll be relieved of tutoring me.
I capture a piece of the nearly impossible-to-locate Animate Lichen that can sometimes be found in one of the towers and present it, along with the equally rare nest of a Winter Wasp to Lessmore, who is beside herself with what she'll do using these rare therapeutic ingredients.
There is so much to do now that I am not miserable that I scarcely give a thought to why I haven't heard from the lover whose body I taste like honey flowing across my tongue at the oddest moments. It's a tawny orange, this feeling I associate with this young man who Bigham himself would have been forced to recognize as beautiful.
When I don't hear from James for several days, I assume it's because he's still serving detention. A little gaggle of Slytherins collects around me sometimes when one of James' gang comes too close, but nothing can detract from my wonderful mood. I feel whole for the first time in my life. There are so many things I want to share with James—if I can keep him off me for a second! A sly smile at the power I have to attract him flits across my face.
I know I'm not good at talking about my feelings, but until now I've not had many to talk about. The next several days go by thinking pleasantly about a few things I'd like to say to this boy who's adopted me. If we were to actually talk maybe we could study together. It's prosaic, but it's one of the previously solitary activities where I've discovered some company might be nice.
The days go by with Severus Snape living in a rose-colored cloud like a schoolgirl, and if anyone notices, I certainly don't care. Madam Lessmore and I play cards and argue good-naturedly about the way she organizes her storeroom (alphabetically, instead of by magical property) and I volunteer to top up her supply of Dreamless Sleep if she can arrange for me to use the fully equipped staff laboratory. "Alone," I specify, thinking of that Cabinet woman hovering and mucking up my magic. Then I decide to sleep in my own bed that night. "Good night, Madam," I say and we share the solemn bow I used to give her when I was ten.
I walk down the corridors barely feeling my feet touching the stone. The castle feels literally alive to me tonight. I guess a healthy house is something you don't usually think about, because I've not really thought of Hogwarts as a living thing the way I know my parents' house was a sickly entity. But tonight I can almost feel the great stone beast shifting contentedly like a great cat that's been scratched in just the right place.
The blinding spell is on me before I've realized it, and I'm dragged into a closet before I can fight back.
"What- What is this?" I sputter. My wand is knocked out of my hands and I snort at the futile effort to disarm me. The spell is removed but it is pitch black. "Lumos," comes my incantation and in the light I see a Gryffindor I barely know glowering at me. "Sirius Black," I sneer. "If you wanted me to make you a Stamina Salve all you have to do is ask me coming in or out of meals like everyone else. It's nothing to be ashamed of."
"Shut up!" he says more angrily than I think necessary.
"If it's something truly embarrassing I'm surprised you would come to me," I pursue reflectively. "Although having Lessmore clucking over your nether bits wouldn't be pleasant."
"I want to know what you've done to him!" he demands fiercely. "Was it a potion? Are you extorting him until he pays for the antidote? What have you done with my best friend?"
Until that moment I didn't know Sirius was the best of the many friends James had, but it makes sense, I think. They're the most courageous among the courageous Gryffindors. And probably the two most attractive, though I didn't seek James out for that. I didn't seek him out at all, actually. I'm suddenly stifled in this tiny closet with this strange boy who has as much hair as I do and is a couple inches taller. "Potter? I didn't do anything to him. Didn't you hear? I let him break my nose without protest, I'm such a gentleman."
He raises his eyebrows and looks up from where he's been studying the ball of light I made. "That's not the word I'd use for you."
The abuse I'd been steeling myself against for months is here, and I don't want to think about how he knew.
"I don't know what this is about, but if I did have theoretical extracurricular interests, I would think the last place you would want to be was stuck in a tiny cupboard with me," I say, trying to keep things cryptic.
"James is not that way, he isn't! I've known him since before Hogwarts. We played together as children. I know him inside and out and there's just no way." He seems truly aggrieved, which makes it easy to gibe at him.
"And little Sirius is distressed that his best playmate developed some adult interests as he grew up?"
"Even if he were to do something—like that—with some bloke, he'd still be my best mate, but there's something abnormal about it. He twists himself in knots when you don't answer his letters. It's making him ill. If you like boys, like him, why don't you act like it?"
I am taken aback. "What letters? I answer every one immediately."
He laughs bitterly. "You mean to say that you haven't gotten off seeing his face when you trample on a note he's passed you, or when he makes some excuse to talk to you and you just turn away?"
My sarcastic demeanor is deserting me. "I don't know what you mean," I say. "James is the one that keeps me waiting for days until I find a Fragmented letter in my pocket or in my napkin at the table. I don't hold it against him because he has a wide social circle," I glare at Sirius, "and can't get away as easily as I can. I spend half my evenings playing Wizard Whist with Lessmore and the other half brewing potions. You can ask her."
I'm uncomfortably aware that being in these close quarters with another male is having an effect on me, but I'm afraid to just walk out and let Sirius use my tacit acknowledgement of a homosexual affair against me. I shift my position and brush up against his arm in the process of leaning against the wall and resolve to let Black say what he has to say. The glow of light is dimming without my attention so I infuse it with more magic.
"I'd never have thought," Sirius says.
"About me and James? Me neither, as a matter of fact," I say. "I truly didn't look for it, but he's—" I search for the words and while I'm at it, Sirius kisses me.
I struggle but physically he's very strong. I've wound up enough energy in my hands to repel him and then I realize maybe I don't want to. His hands are under my shirt before I can realize what's happening and then we're fighting again in a way that seems designed to bring us closer together. His curly hair is against my face and it feels so strange compared to James' short bristles. It is not unpleasant, but I still feel guilty about it.
My mind is bargaining with me, "If you don't take off your clothes it's not really cheating. You were dragged here under duress—whatever happens now is on Sirius. I wonder what he looks like in the altogether." And he's shoving his tongue down my throat unbelievably far. I melt into his arms. I like being the shorter one. I like the somewhat manic energy with which he's grinding against me.
Finally I use magic to push him away and keep him there. "We can't do this. I care for James. As it is I'm going to have to confess the last five minutes were not totally under duress."
He nods and settles his clothes, looking at me with wide eyes all the while. "What if it were me and James," he says casually.
This is something my 16-year-old mind cannot fathom. "That's impossible," I scoff, only afterwards realizing that I didn't say it was uninteresting.
"We're best mates," he continues. "Who would he rather share with than me?" and he pushes me out into the hallway first to wonder whether this was how he'd been planning my kidnapping to go, or if things had gone wrong in a way that had taken both of us by pleasurable surprise.
By the time I stumble into bed in Slytherin Tower it is late. I fall asleep feeling guilty but wake up in the morning very refreshed.
Classes go by so easily when I'm in a pleasant state of mind. People seem to be nicer to me in a vague way—like there's a warmth in the way they ignore me, if that makes any sense.
While I'm at another Sport Session that is strangely enjoyable a Fragmented letter gets slipped in my shoes, because when I go to put them on a piece of parchment crackles under my foot. I put it into my sleeve and go into the toilet to read it.
Find a way.
Since it's not James' usual scrawl, I can only assume the surprisingly clear if very slanted hand is Sirius'. Is this a trick? Is he doing this to show James I'm not good enough for him? I crumple the note and the dust runs through my fingers. This is a bad thing. I'm going to find James and talk to him.
It turns out to be very hard to talk with him. He must be angry at me and avoiding the person who spent five minutes snogging his best friend. I feel truly wretched. Would a girl have been so ready to betray him? We haven't talked of girls. I don't know if he likes them—or prefers them for that matter. We've scarcely talked about anything, really. He once told me he's an only child and yes, I guess he did say something about Sirius but he didn't say they were old playmates.
I know he's gifted at charms, because the Fragmentus spell is extremely complex, keyed to a personal signature and designed to assemble and then self-destruct the way it is. But as much as I want to know him, I just do know him. I can sense anywhere he's been, and there's this awareness labeled "James" that has been opened in the corner of my mind. I laugh at Gryffindor antics sometimes, because of him!
But he's either not looking my way or someone gets between us when I try to talk to him. My natural isolation is suddenly extremely annoying. The Fragmented notes I pen to him with all manner of awkward romantic declarations don't seem to get to him. With my James-sense I just feel a kind of steady anguish.
And there is something else thrumming at the edge of my mind, a hot green hammer as if Sirius is saying, "Let me in, let me in."
Maybe if the three of us talk this out we can clear the air. I begin looking for a room, but can't really picture the two of them coming into Slytherin House, Invisibility Cloak or not. I have no desire to expose myself on their territory, so we must find somewhere. The storeroom we used once seems to have been sealed off. The broom closet where Sirius accosted me has a broken door handle.
Feeling thoroughly frustrated, I start pacing the hallways the way I used to when I was afraid to dream. It's always calmed me, just me with stone all around. This isn't going well, my first love affair, and James is far, far better than I could have expected for an Incongruent like me. The way he kisses me washes away this lifetime's worth of sadness and then some. I think of losing him, the way I surely will at some point, and then of a long life of tawdry affairs with other men who, like me, are doomed to seek their pleasure from others who, like them, haven't the slightest idea of how to find more than just that.
I scrape my knuckles hard enough against the stone wall to draw blood, welcoming the pain as a way to steel myself against the inevitable blowup with James.
The wall opens.
I go in and the wall closes seamlessly behind me. Inside is a wonderful, inviting room with wall sconces and lots of cushions and tapestries.
And a bed. A bed fit for a giant.
And his mate.
As many mates as he likes.
I look around for the jokester. Surely this is a trap. "Let's get Snape in a big bed and watch him jerk off."
The sconces flicker cheerily at me as I sink into the very comfortable mattress.
Perhaps the castle is on my side, I dare to think. There is parchment on a desk and I put it to good use. When the spell is cast the pieces clump into a ball in my pocket. I walk through the castle and make my way into the empty Great Hall. The Gryffindors always sit in one place. The Fragmented letter should be able to find him from where it's stuck under the table unless the House Elves decide to do a thorough cleaning between now and then.
Sleep comes and with it dreams about sinking forever into a soft, soft bed rolling around with James. I never see his face but it must be him. No one else makes me feel like I'm all liquid, just this delicious potion that's being warmed exactly right so as to reveal some magic I had never suspected in myself.
At breakfast I give my usual close study to my toast, so I don't know if my letter reached its destination. By the middle of the day something is changing in my James-sense, so he must have read it, but I can't tell his reaction.
By dinner I have butterflies in my stomach and don't know if they're his or mine so I make a very careful inventory of the number of peas on my plate. I eat one and it tastes black. The peas are pushed around on my plate until it's safe to gracefully leave.
Out on the astronomy tower I take long breaths of bracing cold air. He's going to break it off with me. I know it. This is the one and only normal person who will get within ten feet of me and he'll be gone after this night.
The thought calms me in a way. I will get through this. Being alone is terrible in a wonderful way, most of the time. I think of Vin living out in the fields and consider that I'll just go to Romania and get my own flock. A flicker of real happiness licks up my chest. I look where I've been pacing while planning my escape to Romania.
My hand presses the door in to the hidden room without my thinking about it.
Two heads whip toward the door.
Hermès Trismégiste, they're both here!
They sit very still as I walk what seems like a mile on shaky legs towards the bed, where they sit fully clothed and with textbooks of all things.
"We're at a study session officially," Sirius says. I'm looking at James. He must be angry at me. But he's just looking at me the way he does when we're alone and he's making me feel wonderful.
I sit next to the boy who feels like a second heart fluttering in my chest. "I missed you," I say, trying to keep my resolve to tell him how I feel.
He makes a little noise in his throat and pulls me by my hair towards him until our mouths meet. I surrender to the kiss and give my best sardonic lilt to my eyebrow in Sirius' direction.
"Are you here for moral support?" I say finally to the curly-haired boy.
James sits back, suddenly passive. The outrageous thought comes to me that they have some sort of—relationship—as well, but that's impossible. Sirius' distaste for the idea of James and me was real enough. Though quickly dispelled….
While these thoughts are running through my head Sirius has been unbuttoning his shirt, apparently. Because the next thing I know a long, lean torso and very muscular arms are gleaming at me in the torchlight. Despite my best efforts to ignore the thought, I want him. My hand twitches forward and he leans closer. My hand clenches. I'm here to save my relationship with James! I look at James desperately. He reaches for my hand. He understands! I don't have to say it; he knows how I feel about him!
James places my hand on Sirius' chest.
I can't resist. The pull of that mile-long torso is too strong. I lick down to the navel and he coos. The new sounds and textures are fascinating. I want to share them with James. I look up. My first lover has been watching me. He meets my gaze the way he does when I know he's fighting off being ashamed.
Sirius is taking off his pants. He's all impatience. I put one hand on both of their shoulders and pull them close until the three of us are mixing our tongues together.
It's more pleasure than anyone has a right to, is the thought echoing in my otherwise blissfully empty head that night.
Our enjoyment was exponential.
But the best was when one of them held me down while the other had his way with me. The one watching was so focused that he acted like a mirror. I could feel everything I was doing with the other boy twice over again in the watcher's mind. It was ecstasy. Any thought that I was an ugly or Incongruent creature was swept away by seeing my body transforming a boy's hard hunger into something unendingly liquid and deep, watching my orgasm and Sirius' burst over James' face. And then It's me and James, softer, slower, flickering across Sirius' volatile features.
That night I saw that I am not my homely Aunt Adele with the misfortune of a homosexually oriented penis. Under Sirius' rough sun-browned hands I am a miracle of white smoothness. What my lips do to James, Sirus' mirror in sympathy. I feel James' admiration of the way my body flows like water around the larger young man, bucks but doesn't break. James whispers some terrible, profane observations in my ear. There is something about that wholesome mouth saying dirty things that is my undoing. I look up and he completes the circuit.
Between the three of us, it was too much magic. That must have been what we were making, because the sconces were leaping up towards the ceiling when we finally exploded together for the last time.
Two fireflies, one orange one greenI lie back against the pillows with one male curved protectively on either side of me. In one part of my mind I am thinking about ways for us to hide this type of relationship for the rest of our lives, wondering if it is legal anywhere in the world. I'll get elected somewhere and make it legal, my mind is saying, but the rest of my mind is happily silent. When I close my eyes I can see their orange and green magics circling around me like fireflies, and the light they give off warms me in a place I had thought would be cold forever.
Finally they stir. "I can sleep anywhere I like," I venture, "but you have both probably been missed already."
The two Gryffindors exchange a shrug. "We've been accused of being too close before," James said.
"But we never were!" Sirius exclaims at my horrified expression. "Don't worry, I think we all want things to stay just the way they are between the three of us."
Of course, the three of us never did get together again. Not without bloodshed, at any rate.
What the rest of the school is doing while I was having my sexual crisis and three-headed first romance, I have no idea. Students are mostly an undifferentiated mass to me. The adults are clearer to me because they had something I wanted—knowledge. Or in the Transfiguration professor's case, the ability to tell me a lesson was over. Madam Lessmore is the clearest to me, but mostly I just live in my head. Now that I have some pleasant things to think about, so much the better, but I've learned not to expect much real interest from people, so I show them little in return.
So when I go to breakfast and feel a little ripple of interest, I think it most peculiar.
Thinking it's because I look unnaturally relaxed, I affix a scowl on my forehead and pluck some toast from the tray. Chewing it, I make the mistake of letting my eyes wander. Some people meet my gaze! This almost never happens. And usually they look away immediately. As an ugly person, I count on it.
I grab a couple more pieces of toast and a hard-boiled egg, and go outside to finish breakfast on the grounds. It's Magical Animals first anyway, which is outside on a nice, if chilly, December day like today. Walking past the pond I crumble a piece of toast for the monstrous turtle that lives in the depths. It pokes its head up and I nod. "Good morning," I say in greeting. It nods back and eats a piece of bread. Some small fish come up to the surface and I make the bread break into bite-size pieces for them. We all smile at each other and then I'm on my way to meet the throng of students gathered at the edge of the forest.
Are they having sex as well? I wonder about my fellow students. For all I know, girls are warding themselves against pregnancy and lots of boys are meeting up in broom closets to do it. Or perhaps they're all as miserably repressed as I was a couple months ago, and likely to object to anyone getting off just out of spite.
When I have an unusually easy time coaxing a falcon out of the sky and getting it to sit on my shoulder, I expect the usual grumbles from the other students who will call me a show off and a know-it-all as usual when it licks my fingers.
They say nothing.
Professor Isle gives me her usual cheeky grin and I hand the bird off to the next student, who only holds it a moment before it squawks and tries to fly away.
"Any advice, Mr. Snape?" asks the teacher.
"Other than buttery fingers from breakfast, no Ma'am," I respond, and the class laughs. They laugh with me, not at me.
Is it possible that receiving so much affection from two perfectly gorgeous boys the night before is enough to thaw the indifference of my classmates? I wonder with flashes of just a few scenes from last night. I'll remember that on my deathbed, I think as class is dismissed and I wander—not too far from the others this time—back towards the school. It still feels almost painfully beautiful in my memory, what James, Sirius and I did the night before.
