She disappeared, almost on command, already anticipating his caving in. Her expression remained calm, steady and entirely void of inflections that might have beytrayed her turmoil.



Severus put his face in his hands, the tip of his nose gently poking through the gaps between his fingers. He applied light, but pointed pressure to his eyes, watching from beneath his lids, the flicker and squirm of brillaint, agitated blood vessels.



He felt screaming, murderous rage. He felt young, malleable and as though his own destiny was utterly out of his gifted and very precautionary hands.



She came back, slinking into the room, the only thing that alerted him of her presence was the sound of sharpened metal against soft skin. He looked up, eyes trying to bully her profuse and earnest petition back into the cavern of her head.



She held a small dagger on the dais of her hand, one palm cupping beneath the other, offering him the ornate and oddly familiar weapon. He took a deep breath, the sound of his angular lips creating a vacum against his teeth.



Green and silver stared unabashedly up at him, the immaculate face reflecting his own, one smooth place of metal missing from the center. A serpent, carved with such gladly precision, was wound around it, the sexless tail dipping into the metal, scales too miniscule to be probable.


His own house.


Where such things were banished from him.


What is this?.



He grabbed her, pulling her malaciously towards him, secretly half hoping that the dagger would somehow reverse itself and bury its lovely, untarnished head into the smooth, marbled breast that lay to temptingly close to it. She flinched, her hands enclosing around the thing, the tawny skin so indignantly striking against colourless metal.



He shook her, trying to force an answer to spill from her half-bitten lips. She was gnawing furiously, delicate skin mercilessly engorged by pearlescent teeth.



There were drops of scarlet, the thudding sound of heavy, viscuous liquid frantically packing itself within the threads of the fibre. She clutched the dagger, determined to get what she wished, yet not determined to let it go.


Where did you get it.


His voice had lowered, his question not really a question, but a veiled threat of excommunication.



It was my sister's. It's just a knife she left to me. She said to use it when I needed to protect myself.


Words came over words, hastily tumbling out, overspilling boundaries, omitting the homogenous confession into a fantastically reactive solution.



Do you always keep such dangerous magical implements scattered about your house?.



He asked this with cruel indifference, but also with a punctuated air of a scholar to whom everything is already known. He spoke down to her, himself being raised high above on some podium of seniority and stature.


Magic? This isn't magic....it's.....it's a knife.



She faltered, staring at the sanguinous potion coiled about her feet in randomnly radiated spherical drops. The bloodied tip of the knife glinted from beneath the mauve folds of her hands, winking at him in a blatantly mocking way.


I would recognise this anywhere.


He took her hands, calmly opening them with gentle, but steely force.


The markings and pattern of scales upon any serpent are individual, and, with regard to the mother nest, immediately recognisable. Severus felt similarly glancing down at the object, so ridiculously small, but at the same time, was about to wreak immense chaos on both of them.


What is it to you? .


She asked this not in the manner of some impudent street urchin, or erstwhile vagabond, but a curious and exuberantly bitter woman.


Something from my childhood.


She was not sated, but momentarily pacified. Severus found his heart beating, almost trying to spirtually escape the confines of his vessel, and go back to the only place that he wanted.


Will you still....


Her question trailed, not wanting to sound terse, but still pressing.


He raised his gaze, too magnetic not to look. Her eyes wavered, glimmering somewhere in boundless nostalgia, and trepidation. He rolled up his own sleeve, spidery fingers coiling themselves about the hem and pulling upwards, a brief flick. A sleight of hand.


You understand what would happen if this were to go awry?.


She nodded, the most infinite incline of her head. But it was contractual.


Against better judgment and the rather loosened reigns of sanity, Severus took the dagger from her, gripping with cautious and damply tenacious hands, the hot metal of the handle.


Give me your hand.
She outstretched her arm, splaying her palm, which was flushed and still slightly crimson from the runoff of her damaged skin.


He wrapped his own fingers gently around hers, a small gesture of reassurance. She shirked when he touched her, wincing and trying to shrink back. There was no sound, save for the heavy, and echoing breaths she took.


First, he caressed the palm of her hand with the knife, dragging the gleaming metal against yielding material. Without warning, he applied pressure, and was pleased to see that it parted before the knife immdediately, that there was no savage struggling , trying to bind two people with a blunt blade.


She stared at her blood in macabre and lewd fascination, the beautiful and velvet color spilling forth from her, emptying out the canals and rivers that ran beneath her skin.


Severus made his own incision, quick and precise. His blood was darker, the colour of freshly crushed mulberries. It had been long since he had seen his own, and the sharp, sweet tang of it quickly set off a sucession of memories he had believed were hidden behind mutiply barred rooms.


.


He said it, panic starting in his voice because once the wounds were sealed, it was nigh impossible to try and re-bond them.


Her hand clamped to his, a painful squelching of lubricated droplets.


He felt a pulsing in his palm, a very centered heart that conjoined for two seconds, beating in timed and implausible precision that was sealing them. His blood pushed against hers, the smoky corpuscles fighting and battling for oxegyn between their encircled fingers. She felt it too, the way her glassy eyes shifted cautiously from her hand to his face. The colour was slowly draining from her, and the warmth from her fingers was being lost.


Severus felt the slow, intoxicating sway of her death overtake him, the way her heart thrashed and thrashed, and the syruppy narcotic of her unconciousness.


One heart seperated, flowing freely on its own accord as she collapsed, a tangled, wiry rubble of her limbs. Her eyes flew open as she touched the carpet, the force of the contact ushering the last breath from her by painfully collapsing her lungs.


There, in the speckled egg's darkness of her irsises and pupils that lay accusingly affixed onto him, was truth. Somewhere in death, she had found her truth.


Severus slumped over himself, feeling drunken, but mutually dead.


They lay, head to head, staring into each other. He reached out and casually brushed his fingers over neck, caressing over the soft hairs that sprouted from the base of her scalp.


There was nothing.


A flatness underneath his fingers.



She was dead to him, her palm still open, a palette of such deadly vigor still masterfully mixed.


Severus closed his eyes, feeling an irrepresible and inappropriate shout of laughter suddenly build up in his diaphragm. He let it out, sounding like a wail of grief and insanity.


He laughed, screaming with laughter, rolling over on his side, feeling the dull push of the blade through his clothes. He cast an arm over her, the side of her body still warm.


And suddenly, he closed his eyes again, laughter gone. He closed his eyes, welcoming the flickering and ominious shapes behind his lids, bading them to come and take him with them. He closed his eyes, waiting to die.












A/N: Oh my gods! They're dead! Or are they?