In which Sirius is either insufficiently or far too persuasive. Depending on your POV.
Chapter warning: Language. Also, this is a higher (although not highly) rated chapter. If you've been able to squint and ignore the ship up to this point, that's, uh, not going to work for you here. Also, remember those warnings about tenseplay back from the beginning? Relevant.
Chapter Notes: I was going to title the chapter after a Warbeck song, but I just… just no.
Actual title is by Peter O'Toole.
Halfway out of town, Snape said, "He's going to think I have you under Imperius. You look like a zombie."
"Just waiting for the I-told-you-so," Sirius tossed off.
Snape's dark eyes went to Sirius's hip, where his hand was lying protectively over the hidden holster. They crinkled a little, although the rest of his face continued to look detached and indifferent. "I did tell you so, it's true," he allowed.
"Smartarse," Sirius growled, and shoved him playfully, smirking: he'd known Sniv wouldn't be able to resist saying it, given an opening.
But his ruminations have forgotten frailty. How could they remember what every line of the body they churn over denies too thoroughly even to sneer at?
Snape's brief swallowed noise is as much pained as surprised—and repeated, when he fails to stop his back bouncing against one of the trees that lined the roads. Sirius curses and grabs him without thinking, probably doing more harm than good. "Fuck, Sniv, I forgot," he says, since an apology is owed and that's the best he can bear to give this man.
"Clumsy, thoughtless oaf!" Snape hisses, choked-off, curled in on himself over Sirius's arm, bony fingers digging right through the thick overshirt. He's heavier than he looks, drawn in like that: dense where he seems brittle.
"Where does it hurt?" Sirius demands, resting a hand as lightly as he can over Snape's back, for warmth. Against shock. Yeah. But he finds himself rubbing soothing circles against the soft prickle of boiled wool, his hand pale against the vivid blue he'd charmed into richness himself. He could drop his head a few inches and bite into the prominent spinal column, between hair and collar, breathe warmth into it. The tight body—in his arms, Merlin save them all—really is shock-chilled, and the weather isn't helping. He's more than close enough to see that he was right, earlier; Snape's hair does have a blue-black sheen today instead of it's usual oil-slick gloss.
Close enough for the scent of him to wind through Sirius's body. The heather and fennel and oregano are strong now, a spicy spiral of enticement, without the more piercing smells of other herbs that must, by process of elimination, contribute to the oil-slick. Underneath them is something personal, intimate. Something he can't name, usually masked by the absent smells. It's ghost-familiar enough to make him want to clutch tighter no matter which of them it hurts.
"Get off me," Snape is snarling. He's cranky and with good cause, but the lines of his body are strange against Sirius. Stiff with hesitation, vibrating with restraint and pain and not with anger, he isn't, tellingly, trying to in any way burn, bite, or scratch Sirius's face off.
"No," he says softly, and curls a hand around that narrow waist the way he's been wanting to for what's felt like hours, feeling wool-covered flesh still into breathless marble. He runs it up, light as he can but cursing every layer of winterwear (of which there are at least five, knowing Sniv: peacoat, jumper, waistcoat, shirt, vest, maybe a wand holster, and who knows what else), until his hand is splayed over the safer area of bone under Snape's collarbones, helping him straighten and turning him around. "Can you breathe?" he demands, low.
"Get away," Snape repeats, making no fraction of a move that Sirius doesn't mold him unresisting into. His voice and mouth are furious, but his eyes are miserable. Even Padfoot's human muzzle knows longing when he's immersed in it.
"You need to warm up," Sirius tells him, moving neither the hand over his heart (too much cloth to feel it) nor the one supporting his back. "Do that wandless thing."
"Terrible idea. I can tell it's one of yours. Swallowed a whole apothecary yesterday, remember? And my palliative against your cousin's curse has been wearing off quickly enough without help."
"I remember…" he trails off. The truth is, he remembers this body, hurricane wildcat in fights, all sharp elbows and slashing fingers and spells, hard punches and harder knees and feet, head hardest of all, but he also, almost, remembers these arms.
"In my bedroom," he says quietly, what little distance there is between them diminishing, the heat from Snape's body rising against him in the winter air no matter how bad an idea he says it is, "the one I grew up in, in the boxes Remus packed for me. There was a photo album. There was a picture, where it fell open."
"I'd imagine there was, in an album," Snape drawls, snide. Sirius can feel his heartbeat now, or imagines he can, can see the jump at his throat, anyway, the quickening, very shallow breaths. The remains of reason tell him to attribute these marks to having just had healing ribs jostled, but he never listens to anything that boring.
"Well, I only looked at the one so far. I thought it was of you and Reg," he admits slowly, and, in the moment before Snape goes stiller than still, "but now I don't think it was."
"You—"
"I think that was me using you as a pillow," he says, still slowly, hand migrating up to Snape's sharp, rabbit-frozen face, up the pale throat. His hand closes gently over skin soft enough to mean the paranoid git uses a charm or potion for it, won't let a razor near his throat even when he holds it himself. Sirius hadn't been imagining that quickened pulse. "That was me reading a book for new teachers to you while you took notes. I should have known; Reg never let his hair curl, or get so long. That's not a smile I ever saw on him; he was more uptight than that. That was me, wasn't it."
Snape shudders against him, says quietly, "Let me go."
"It was me."
"We're on a public street."
"Tell me the truth."
"Say my name."
He pauses to regroup. Not an easy task; his arm has drawn Snape right flush against him, every long line of him. That arm is nestled, now, into the small of the spare back. As though it belongs there and always has. "What?"
"When you can say my name," Snape says, turning his face away, "I'll consider the possibility that you remember enough to hear the truth."
"Severus," he says, instantly. It feels strange in his mouth, wrong, as though this is the first time he's said it on its own ever. It is, as far as he remembers, but surely, if he's right, it can't be.
"Proves nothing."
"Seth?"
"You got that from Callum. You're not a muggle, to call me that. Remember it on your own. You'll have to: no one living can tell you but me, and I won't."
He hesitates. Reminds himself he was a Gryffindor once, before the grey shadows and the cold spiderwebs spun over his soul had shrouded him. Says, more quietly still, "It would be a stimulus if I kissed you, not you telling me anything."
At this distance he can see the blood rush to the thin mouth, see the slight darkening, although no one can tell when Snape's eyes have dilated. He can certainly see them pulling in to be moistened, those stiff lips, can just about feel the swallow. But Snape's voice is certain and determined, although nowhere near angry on the Sniv Scale. "I will not be your experiment."
"I'm not one of your tarts or trulls, Black," Sirius quotes him; he's sure he's quoting him. "I am not to be toyed with."
Endless black eyes stare at him out of a white, white face, startled, helpless. It may not be saying much these days, but it's the most compelling thing Sirius can ever remember. He pulls his arms tighter (carefully!), his hips closer. Their welcome is clear, anyway, even if his isn't. "Oh," Snape says faintly, his eyes drifting closed, apparently in exhaustion. "B—let go of me. Let me go, we're in public." But his hands are flat on Sirius's chest, molding to him.
"We both know how this works," Sirius tells him, his grip unrelenting. "There are moments you can't put on simmer. It's fall farther in, or pretend they never happened and enter a whole new world of unending humiliated awkward."
"There are people staring," Sniv protests unenthusiastically, eyes low, his hands falling slack to Sirius's forearms.
"Screw 'em. Obliviation's not illegal. SOP with muggles."
"Bloody awful thing to do to someone, though, you should know."
This from a Marked man. But Sirius has more sense than some people coffcoffremuscoff like to give him credit for, and just says, "They should have minded their own business."
Snape almost laughs. "Who does that on a public street with mane-brained melodramatic morons reenacting bodice-rippers with highly inappropriate partners?"
"Chalk it up to bad luck, then."
"You're not going to argue inappropriate?" he's asked, with the tilt of an amused eyebrow.
"Not worth the argument. Also, not untrue. What are you waiting for?"
He holds his breath a long moment, watching Snape fight with himself and waver, memorizing the feel of the sun on his skin, the crisp wood-and-earth flavor of the cold air, the press of them together, even the growing sense that there are eyes on them, sliding over them as walking people don't quite stop and don't quite stare but definitely take notice. One man jeeringly calls for cigarettes. The slang must have changed; someone smacks the bloke with an odd scraping thump, like hitting a tarp, even as Snape twitches like it's hit his oversized hex-first button.
Snape's struggle takes so long that Sirius breaks before it's done. He asks, very quietly, "Were we happy?"
This gets him a short bark of a laugh, and a, "You and me? Sunshine and roses? '81? Pull the other one."
"Were we good together?" he insists, his hand gently demanding on that hollow face, winter-cool skin soft but unpadded over sharp bones.
The moment teeters again, stretches, battles against itself. The surrender is hard hands clenched in his hair, a defeated, "Fuck you. No, really, I mean it," pressed bruisingly into his mouth, a wand-stab of obliviation at the crowd twisting oddly at his scalp when Snape refuses to let go of his hair to do it, and the spin and jolt of a portkey.
He does spare a second to make sure Snape hasn't brought them into, say, a circle of hooded psychopaths, just to pull an example wholly at random out of thin air (thick, stale, dusty air, actually) but not enough to let his stomach settle.
That vicious mouth is right there, after all, velvet as its voice under his, combative as its owner. What they say about muscle memory being more stubborn than the brain's must be true, because legs that he remembers have kicked and kneed him a thousand times have spread him, backed him up against an extremely dusty bookshelf. Hands that have punched him and clawed at his eyes are digging into his arms and the back of his jumper. All of that, and no room to back away, and Sirius doesn't appear to be nervous.
"Where are we?" He tries to ask without pulling away from the teeth on his lips.
And regrets it. "Safehouse," Snape mutters raggedly, upper half drawing back from him with a wince. "Just to use the floo. Off-network connection."
"Couch," Sirius mumbles, his arm around Snape's waist drawing tighter, trying to recapture the number-one source of venom in his diet.
Snape doesn't fight him—clings to him, fiercely, even, for a long moment, Sniv does, fights against the bandages to do it, Merlin, licks and bites his lips to send sharp, dizzy little darts all down his nerves, clenches fingers tightly in his hair.
He draws back far too soon, pulling completely away. "Floo," he says firmly, eyes unpleased but determined. "I told you: I have classes this afternoon, and things to do before then."
"Couch," Sirius repeats persuasively, reaching for him. "Bed. Could be quick."
Snape shudders, eyes falling half-closed, but he says decidedly, "No. Not your experiment, not your toy, you have no sense of fitness or occasion, you utter Neanderthal, and you don't know what you're getting into—shut it: you don't. I won't take the fallout when you realize it and balk. Find my name, then we'll talk if you still care to."
"Sure," Sirius says, with a smirk, bending over him for one last, long groping kiss that has the insufferable know-it-all shuddering against him, caught between clutching and shoving him away. "We can wait to talk till then."
"Hate you," Sniv snarls into his mouth, yearning desperately into him with stained fingers twisting in his collar, "hate you, hate you, arrogant, condescending, meaning-twisting true son of a deranged viper, no excuse for it, the hell is that floo powder…"
The illustration of the photo is in chapter 15 on AO3. Link in profile.
Next: itty bitty (kitty committee?) interlude in which Severus changes everything without doing anything differently.
