Author name: Lovecraft
Author email: starlightstrands@hotmail.com
Category: Slash: Severus/Harry
Keywords: Angst, Second-Kiss
Rating: Hard R.
Spoilers: None, really. Although it'd help to know the books, just for character reference. *rae*
Summary: A return to familiar places and a reversal of roles.
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters. If I did, they'd appear more in leather. Or nothing at all.
Series Title: Needs Unmet
~*~
Safe, Saved
~*~
It was a month and a half before I, at last, returned to the secluded rooms that had become my downfall. Shame kept me away as well as a healthy dose of embarrassment. A student had caught me in a private moment, in an incredibly compromising position several times over! I should have fallen like the wrath of harpies upon the boy. Instead, I ignored Potter as much as possible and for once in his academic career, Harry Potter cooperated.
In class, he was quiet, polite, studious, and actually followed directions. Potter gave me no reason to berate him, for which I was more relieved than I cared to admit. It meant that I wouldn't have to talk to him, have him answer back, or look directly into those ever-green eyes. Unfortunately, it was such a dramatic change from the boisterous boy that he'd been that his friend, the insufferable Mr. Weasley, took to watching him with not-so-covert worried looks. For a while, Ms. Granger seemed pleased, but when she too started casting those frightened "Are you okay?" glances, I knew something had to be off.
I learned at breakfast one morning that Potter's grades were slipping in every class save mine. Gossip was passed amongst the staff that he was losing weight and not sleeping. Popular theory was that he'd had his heart broken by some as yet unnamed girl. Something inside me came undone at the idea. By all accounts, he was haunting the hallways like a new Hogwarts ghost, and it was all my fault.
The idea enraged me further. Why should I feel guilt at what the little twit did? *He* spied on *me*. My conscience spoke out in a voice not unlike Dumbledore. 'He desired you as you desired him.'
And there was the crux of it. To keep the boy safe, I may have broken him. Unfortunately, he was quite possibly the only thing in this grief-stricken world that could have healed the desecrated man I had become.
So I tried to find him, to talk to him. Maybe if I made him angry, made him hate me enough to forget about whatever loss he considered me and move on with his life. The thought sickened me, but it had potential.
And that was how I found myself slipping shadow-like down the dark dungeon corridors to the hidden rooms of one Tesaine Tormet, a head of Slytherin dead more than two centuries. The rooms I'd become so comfortingly familiar with. The room had once meant sanctuary to me, before I found out a student had followed me.
I was simply told by the Bloody Baron that Potter had been sneaking through the dungeon. I don't know what I expected to find, but what I met upon opening the door wasn't it. A hitched, desperate cry rent the air and, gazing upon the bed, I saw only skin, sin, cream, and crystal.
I was standing beside him before I realized I had moved. He was sobbing on the bed, one arm strewn over his eyes in an ineffectual effort to hide his shiny tears. They glittered like glass down his *sharp*, *shadowed* cheeks. His free hand lay still, cupped around his spent organ, strangely (*beautifully*) innocent in the way it helped shade his virtue from my gaze.
I retrieved a handkerchief from the aged bedside table and gently, so gently, cleaned the white that spilled over his stomach. By the time I finished, the hitching sobs had slowed to deep, concentrated breaths, though the crystalline tears still flowed freely. I pulled out a second handkerchief, but before I could dry his face, his hand grasped mine. Fingers intertwined with mine and gripped, demanding to be held in return. The eyes I had avoided for so long finally found and locked on mine.
My body ceased to exist, save for the hand that steadily gripped his and the lungs that inhaled his stormbreak scent so greedily. His eyes glowed behind the sheen of tears that were slowly restrained from falling. They held pain. Loneliness. Loss. Hope.
It was the hope that scared me most. Hope was the one thing that would break him. His hope was the one thing that could save me.
In that instant, we understood each other. What it was like to be pushed by fate to do what no one else could do, to acknowledge the practicality of what had to be done, and what it cost to be a daily reminder to those around us, and more importantly to ourselves, of what the we alternately failed and succeeded at. Two generations of Voldemort's reign, one a follower-turned-spy and the other an unwilling, innocent pawn. Both killers for the cause. Both lost without the cause.
He had become my salvation, the last strand of reality in my slowly unweaving tapestry. I leaned down and pressed a light, chaste kiss to his lips. And when his lips parted beneath mine, I damned myself and sank into his mouth.
Let me not have damned him as well.
Author email: starlightstrands@hotmail.com
Category: Slash: Severus/Harry
Keywords: Angst, Second-Kiss
Rating: Hard R.
Spoilers: None, really. Although it'd help to know the books, just for character reference. *rae*
Summary: A return to familiar places and a reversal of roles.
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters. If I did, they'd appear more in leather. Or nothing at all.
Series Title: Needs Unmet
~*~
Safe, Saved
~*~
It was a month and a half before I, at last, returned to the secluded rooms that had become my downfall. Shame kept me away as well as a healthy dose of embarrassment. A student had caught me in a private moment, in an incredibly compromising position several times over! I should have fallen like the wrath of harpies upon the boy. Instead, I ignored Potter as much as possible and for once in his academic career, Harry Potter cooperated.
In class, he was quiet, polite, studious, and actually followed directions. Potter gave me no reason to berate him, for which I was more relieved than I cared to admit. It meant that I wouldn't have to talk to him, have him answer back, or look directly into those ever-green eyes. Unfortunately, it was such a dramatic change from the boisterous boy that he'd been that his friend, the insufferable Mr. Weasley, took to watching him with not-so-covert worried looks. For a while, Ms. Granger seemed pleased, but when she too started casting those frightened "Are you okay?" glances, I knew something had to be off.
I learned at breakfast one morning that Potter's grades were slipping in every class save mine. Gossip was passed amongst the staff that he was losing weight and not sleeping. Popular theory was that he'd had his heart broken by some as yet unnamed girl. Something inside me came undone at the idea. By all accounts, he was haunting the hallways like a new Hogwarts ghost, and it was all my fault.
The idea enraged me further. Why should I feel guilt at what the little twit did? *He* spied on *me*. My conscience spoke out in a voice not unlike Dumbledore. 'He desired you as you desired him.'
And there was the crux of it. To keep the boy safe, I may have broken him. Unfortunately, he was quite possibly the only thing in this grief-stricken world that could have healed the desecrated man I had become.
So I tried to find him, to talk to him. Maybe if I made him angry, made him hate me enough to forget about whatever loss he considered me and move on with his life. The thought sickened me, but it had potential.
And that was how I found myself slipping shadow-like down the dark dungeon corridors to the hidden rooms of one Tesaine Tormet, a head of Slytherin dead more than two centuries. The rooms I'd become so comfortingly familiar with. The room had once meant sanctuary to me, before I found out a student had followed me.
I was simply told by the Bloody Baron that Potter had been sneaking through the dungeon. I don't know what I expected to find, but what I met upon opening the door wasn't it. A hitched, desperate cry rent the air and, gazing upon the bed, I saw only skin, sin, cream, and crystal.
I was standing beside him before I realized I had moved. He was sobbing on the bed, one arm strewn over his eyes in an ineffectual effort to hide his shiny tears. They glittered like glass down his *sharp*, *shadowed* cheeks. His free hand lay still, cupped around his spent organ, strangely (*beautifully*) innocent in the way it helped shade his virtue from my gaze.
I retrieved a handkerchief from the aged bedside table and gently, so gently, cleaned the white that spilled over his stomach. By the time I finished, the hitching sobs had slowed to deep, concentrated breaths, though the crystalline tears still flowed freely. I pulled out a second handkerchief, but before I could dry his face, his hand grasped mine. Fingers intertwined with mine and gripped, demanding to be held in return. The eyes I had avoided for so long finally found and locked on mine.
My body ceased to exist, save for the hand that steadily gripped his and the lungs that inhaled his stormbreak scent so greedily. His eyes glowed behind the sheen of tears that were slowly restrained from falling. They held pain. Loneliness. Loss. Hope.
It was the hope that scared me most. Hope was the one thing that would break him. His hope was the one thing that could save me.
In that instant, we understood each other. What it was like to be pushed by fate to do what no one else could do, to acknowledge the practicality of what had to be done, and what it cost to be a daily reminder to those around us, and more importantly to ourselves, of what the we alternately failed and succeeded at. Two generations of Voldemort's reign, one a follower-turned-spy and the other an unwilling, innocent pawn. Both killers for the cause. Both lost without the cause.
He had become my salvation, the last strand of reality in my slowly unweaving tapestry. I leaned down and pressed a light, chaste kiss to his lips. And when his lips parted beneath mine, I damned myself and sank into his mouth.
Let me not have damned him as well.