The Prisoner
Disclaimer: It is, under no circumstances, mine.
Warnings: swearing, mention of previous character death, m-preg, hbp spoilers, poor taste in humour.
Rating: PG-13
A/N: I'm sorry, all readers still waiting for this chapter, that I have taken so long. I have had an absence of muse for the last 6 months. Complete absence. This is also getting rather long and serious, so if you joined on for some lighthearted humour, I'm going to advise you to stop reading.
--Last time on this story:--
Severus was fidgeting, and he gave off a feeling of agitation. He glanced quickly up at the young man before him, before blurting out, "you must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. I beg you, most fervently, to relieve my suffering, and consent to be mine."
Harry's face held only shock, that such a cold, apparently unfeeling man could hold such a passion for him. "I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly. I have every reason in the world to think ill of you. Do you think any consideration would tempt me to accept the man who's been the means of ruining the happiness of a most beloved friend? I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever marry!"
"Who said anything about marriage?" Severus smirked, stalking towards Harry, all nervousness gone. "I'm offering something much better."
"Wha-?" Harry blushed as he comprehended the implication. "Oh, sure, I'll fuck you."
--I wish...--
Severus' head felt like it was on fire. It was agony, the pain and the throbbing heat. It seemed to fill all of his awareness. He curled in on himself, hoping vainly that if he curled tight enough, the awful pain in his head would go away. He strained his memory to find why he was in such pain.
As he searched through his mind, faint images came to him. He remembered drinking. He remembered drinking a lot. He concentrated harder, ignoring the new pain it brought about. He remembered being thrown out of the bar, and he remembered running into Harry Potter. And he remembered...
Severus sat up abruptly, eyes wide open, despite the pain it caused. "Oh, bollocks!"
"I should've known that you'd say something like that as soon as you woke." The voice was clipped, cool and sarcastic. It was a tone that Severus was not used to hearing, yet the voice itself seemed familiar. Severus turned his head towards the voice, wincing slightly as yet more pain came in the form of a stiff neck, and came face to face with a rather amused Harry Potter. Typical. "How's the head?"
Severus glared at Harry, certain that Harry knew perfectly well how his head would be feeling, and certain also that it was the reason that Harry was speaking so damn loudly. His glare seemed to have no impact on Harry, who just smirked back with his, admittedly, perfect mouth. His green eyes glinting with untold mirth.
Severus sniped at Harry, "worse than usual, but definitely in better shape than yours has ever been." He dragged his hands through his hair, which he noticed was rather bedraggled.
"Touché." Harry stood from a chair that he had been sitting on, forcing Severus to look upwards. "I'm glad to see that you didn't lose your sense of humour, as well as your worth and dignity, when you murdered Dumbledore."
Severus snarled at the insult, but refrained from speaking when he noticed the magically warded chain connecting his left ankle to one of the posts of the bed he seemed to have been sleeping in. "So, am I a prisoner?" He questioned tacitly.
"Yes." The one word reply was followed by an angry crossing of the arms.
"Chaining me to a bed, Potter? I never knew you were so kinky." Snape glared at the boy riled by the one word answer.
"Well, I must be pretty kinky, seeing as sleeping with you's borderline bestiality." The snipe was accompanied by a smirk.
Severus marked the insult with a glare. "And I've been here for?" He could feel his head starting to pound more, probably from all the glaring.
"Two days." Harry walked away from Severus, towards a door Severus hadn't noticed in the corner of the small dark room.
"When you saw me, why didn't you kill me?" Severus enquired loudly, leaning forward, which caused the throbbing in his head to heighten yet again.
At Severus' question, Harry stopped, but he didn't turn around. Instead, he turned his head, so that all Severus could see was a profile of the beautiful face. "I don't bother with cowards." And with those words he paced from the room, his form straight and stiff.
"Don't call me coward," Severus whispered as Harry swept from the room.
Left alone in his quasi-prison, Severus felt that a pain relief potion was in short order. The problem; there was no possibility of it coming. He groaned and closed his eyes as he lay back down on the bed, feeling the coarseness of the sheets on his back. Then it struck him, and he reopened his eyes, looking downwards to see something he hadn't noticed in Harry's presence. He was naked. And rather willing it so turned out, which might explain why Harry had been so smugly amused by him.
It was a bit of a shock for Severus. He hadn't woken with one for years. Not since he was a pubescent teenager, in most likelihood. Which begged the question, why now?
Severus groaned as he once again closed his eyes. How embarrassing could his life get? It seemed that his sins so far had been to get blind drunk, confess undying love to a boy who wanted to kill him, and then show off his morning glory for Harry to see. Thinking about how bad his life was seemed to be rather unconstructive in the effort of pain relief, so Severus calmed himself, breathing in and out slowly, and let his mind wander.
In the room next door, Harry Potter listened as his prisoner's breathing went from slightly erratic to serene, and smiled. He was sure this would happen. Snape would get worked up, and then force himself to be calm. So in character. Severus always had to be in control.
After a few minutes of listening to the steady breathing of his former potions professor, he picked up the Daily Prophet, and sat on a chair against the wall, accidentally jostling the table beside it, and causing a small vial of murky brown liquid to roll once over and then stop, the contents splashing noiselessly.
He began to turn the pages of the prophet, searching for anything that would remove his attention from the greasy git in the other room. But it wasn't working. He kept on thinking of what had happened two days ago. Harry had been ready, poised to kill him, so why hadn't he gone through with it? Maybe Bellatrix had been right a year ago, on the night that Sirius had died, about him being too soft to kill.
He remembered bringing up his wand, pointing it at the traitorous bastard, and thinking those hateful thoughts. He had thought that he must be able to do it, with all those angry feelings inside him, but when he'd opened his mouth and spoken the words, all that had happened was that his wand had given off a bit of a green spark and he'd had a funny sensation up and down his arm.
That failure had made him realise something. Bellatrix Lestrange had said that, to use an unforgivable, you had to have the will to use it. And therein lay Harry's problem. Even with all his anger and hate, he still loved the bastard.
Harry's hands clenched as he followed his train of thought, scrunching the edges of the newspaper he was holding. He realised what he was doing, and growled in self annoyance, placing the paper down on the table to smooth the edges and bumping the vial in the process. This time, it rolled more than the one turn, slowing, but coming dangerously close to the edge of the table. It came almost to a stop a millimetre from the edge of the table, but then an agitated twitch of Harry's hands sent it flying over the edge to crash on the hard stone floor.
The crash of the smashing vial shocked Harry to his feet, and he stared in dismay at the mess of murky brown liquid and shattered glass on the floor. He sighed in frustration, and crossed the room to exit through a dark door that was almost invisible against the dark stone walls. He came back into the room carrying a cloth, and bent down to clean up the mess.
The crash had distracted Severus from his zen-like state. His eyes shot open, quickly adjusting to the semi-darkness of the room, and taking in the drab colour of the ceiling. He sat up quickly, searching his surroundings for the source of the noise, but found them to be sorely lacking. He slid forward until his legs were hanging off the bed, and noticed that the chain attached to his left leg seemed to have the ability to lengthen and shorten.
He scanned the room, searching for clothes, and damning his drinking habits as his headache returned from the turning of his head. He could see no wearable attire, so Severus wrapped the sheet barely covering his dignity around his body, tying it together like a toga. He walked stiffly towards the door that he had seen Harry leave through earlier, noticing another door next to it, and wondering where it led to. Instead of satisfying his curiosity, he wrenched open the original door to find Harry kneeling a few metres from it, picking up broken pieces of glass and placing them gingerly on a weathered wooden table.
Severus leaned on the doorframe, enjoying the feeling of superiority that being higher up gave him. "Considering I'm a prisoner, this isn't very high security. A never ending chain connected to a bed post. Not very secure at all."
Harry looked up as soon as he heard Severus speak. "Do you really think that is the only security measure I put in place?"
"Seems like it." Severus stepped forward, but found himself unable to move his left foot through the doorway, as if it was stuck in a hole in a fence. "Ah." Severus moved back to the doorway. "Clever."
"I know." Harry looked back down at the broken vial and picked up a large shard of glass. "I invented it." He placed the shard on the table. "It doesn't even require the chain, only the ring on you ankle, but you'd probably already guessed that." Harry looked up as he said it, a devilish smirk on his face. "I guess that's just my kinky nature."
"I'm sure." Severus watched Harry's smirk turned almost into a grin and looked down as Harry reached down towards the mess on the floor. Harry kept his eyes on Severus, picking up a shard absentmindedly. He let out a sharp breath as he cut his finger, and looked down as a tiny drop of blood seeped out of the cut. What he didn't see, was the residue of the potion that had been within the vial enter his bloodstream.
As soon as he saw Harry bleed, Severus stepped forward, concerned, but he was held back by the power of the doorway. "Harry, are you okay?"
"Yeah, fine." Harry stood, then placed the piece of glass on the table next to the other shards. "I think I'll go wash it in case." Severus watched in frustration as Harry walked towards the door at the other end of the room. And as Harry reached out a hand to open it, Severus watched in horror as he fell to the floor.
A/N: Ha ha I love cliffies. See you next time. Please review.
