"I miss you," he said, teeth clenched against the unfamiliar words.
Lucius lifted both carefully sculpted brows in a mockery of surprise. "Do you?" he asked, sly. "I think I have not heard you say such a thing since we were children, Severus."
"I have not."
Lucius held a hand aloft in the light streaming through the wind, in the echoes of firelight from behind them both. He inspected his nails casually, and twisted the rings on his fingers straight. "When you thought I might be killed by my father—do you remember? Some foolishness when they thought I should spend more time with . . . ah, pureblooded women. He was rather angry, wasn't he?"
"Yes," he replied shortly. He was rapidly becoming angry. Lucius was, in typical fashion, dancing around the issue rather than addressing it.
"And now you miss me. Well. Whose fault is that, Severus? Your loyalties seem to lie more with Dumbledore these days. I can hardly coax you away from that school to attend a meeting, let alone my bed."
"'That school' is my place of employ, Lucius," he said sharply. "I have—"
"Responsibilities, yes, I know—always the responsibilities. To your students, your precious headmaster, your fellow faculty—what of your lord? What of me—ostensibly your beloved?" Lucius glanced at him.
"Are you jealous?" Snape asked, his anger draining away into stunned silence.
"Would that surprise you?" There was no inflection whatsoever in Lucius' voice; they rang in the empty air like chisel blows.
"Clearly it would." Snape found the chair behind him with one groping hand and sat down heavily.
-
-
-
He woke with Lucius' name on his lips, expelled in a harsh sob of breath and awakening. He crawled from the bed gracelessly and stumbled to the bathroom where he proceeded to vomit dryly for a quarter of an hour.
The cat sat in the doorway and observed, tail curled around its paws.
-
-
-
"Lemon drop?" Dumbledore asked, regarding him genially over the rims of his spectacles.
Snape was incapable of restraining the grimace that twisted his mouth. "Must all meetings with you begin with, 'Lemon drop?'" It was too warm in the office, always too warm. Old bones, he supposed.
Dumbledore blinked, fishing a hand into the dish of sweets. "Chocolate?" he offered instead, surfacing with a fist's worth of silver foiled confections.
Snape felt his face settle into a frown. He accepted a small biscuit from the plate on the edge of the desk, took a mollifying nibble of the edge. "Sir, I would appreciate if you did not spend the entirety of this evening attempting to purchase and coddle me with candies."
Dumbledore set the chocolates into a spinning above the dish, their orbits crossing and weaving in a pattern that made Snape's head ache. "Does the mark burn, Severus?" he asked in the same tone that he might have used to offer tea.
Snape schooled his features to blankness, startled and unwilling to admit it. "Nearly all of the time," he said evenly.
"Do you think he suspects?"
That I am your pet spy, as well? "Lucius plays a complex game; I do not know what he has chosen to reveal, or what he believes merely on conjecture."
"He will betray you." It was not quite a question. Dumbledore's eyes lifted from his chocolates to pin his gaze and hold it.
A cold lump of dread settled in his stomach. "Likely so," he replied, maintaining his mien of indifference.
"Severus—"
"We are no longer children, headmaster. We will both pay for our sins." He rose to go, brushing crumbs from the lap of his robe. He had apparently consumed the entirety of the biscuit.
-
-
-
Of course, Potter had never grown out of the fascination with meeting in hidden or otherwise disused rooms. A motley assortment of Gryffindors (the usual suspects, he deemed them privately), a few Ravenclaws, a straggling Hufflepuff. No Slytherins; color me surprised. He strode through the doorway with typical affectation, robes swirling impressively. He wondered if he should thank his tailor.
"I think," Potter had been saying, "that we should make a statue, you know, in the courtyard of both of them together. Maybe we can get some of the professors to help." He gestured with his hands, outlining the general idea of his proposed statuary. He was entirely unaware of who stood behind him.
"Potter," Snape said warningly, scraping long-suffering indignation from his voice. Statues—the very idea was absurd.
The boy wheeled around, green eyes wild behind his glasses. "Don't you agree that there should be some sort of memorial, professor? I was thinking—"
"—of some sort of impressively large stone edifice for Hagrid's pet birds to excrete upon? Perhaps it should even be erected near his hut! That seems an entirely fitting manner with which to memorialize one's nearest and dearest friends, Potter." He sneered, reducing the idea to something to be ground beneath his feet.
Potter glared. Snape's eyebrows lifted a fraction. Impertinent brat. "As a bit of advice, Potter, that hat clashes rather unpleasantly with your eyes." It seemed to have been begun in red, and then, having run out of the appropriately colored yarn, the daft girl had swapped it for electric blue. It was also slightly too small for the boy's head. As a result, his untidy fringe was plastered to his forehead.
"She made it," Potter said, still clinging to the idea that a distillation of a soul can still be held trapped in something of its own creation. A bloody good thing inventiveness was not always so binding—half of his soul would be bottled on Pomfrey's shelves.
"Was she colorblind?" He dispersed the remaining children with a glare, sending them running to their common rooms. He had an excellent memory for faces; he would deduct points and assign punishments when he was through with the boy.
"She wanted them to be happy," the boy grated.
"Freedom is happiness?" A novel concept.
Potter seemed uncertain, now—perhaps he'd realized he'd just been shouting as his professor. "She thought so," he said uncomfortably. "Sir."
"Well." He tried for a shred of compassion. The glint in the boy's eyes was truly disturbing. "Now she is truly free, is she not?"
The boy clenched a fist.
"Potter."
"Sir."
He sighed. "At times, death is preferable to slavery. You are fortunate that Voldemort only saw her as an otherwise deplorable Mudblood and a friend of yours. Had he noticed properly any of her exceptional skills with magic, arithmancy, or potions, it may well have gone worse for her. She would have been 'useful,' likely put under Imperius and forced to serve." In more ways than the obvious. "Potter, listen to me. She died quickly; it was the killing curse for her." He was lying. The boy didn't know—would never know—the truth.
"Like my mother. Screaming." Potter's eyes were haunted, the glitter of madness fading into horror.
"Yes, like your mother."
Potter sat down heavily in one of the student chairs. "I couldn't save her." Snape began to feel like a confessor. It was not a sensation that he could say he enjoyed. "You could have!" Potter continued on, raving.
"No, Potter, I could not." He cut the boy off smoothly. "I assure you, however, that I would have done so if it had been within my knowledge or my power to do."
"You didn't like her!" Futile, childish protesting.
He surprised himself with honesty. "I'd intended to ask her if she would consider apprenticeship to me when her N.E.W.T.s were through."
Potter shut his mouth, having opened it to shout at Snape again. "Did you really?"
"She was very gifted."
He heard an odd snuffling sound emanating from the boy, followed by hiccoughing and wheezing. Potter was crying. Snape simply looked at him. Eventually, Potter pulled the hat from his head and mopped his face with it.
"She would not have appreciated a statue," Snape said when the teenage angst died down a bit. "Weasley may've. She would have found it ludicrous and embarrassing."
"Y-you're right, sir." Suddenly polite.
Snape was, appropriately, suddenly annoyed. He heaved himself away from the desk and took Potter's shoulders in his hands, leaning close to the boy's face. "Live, Potter," he demanded. "Stop dying simply because they've already gone." He released the boy, turning to shake his head and begin calculating points.
A sniffle, a shift of body behind him—Potter tidied himself up. "How do you do it?"
Snape paused, surprised at the question. "I died a long time ago, Potter. Fifty points from Gryffindor for organizing secret meetings, inciting students to wander the halls at night, and showing a complete disregard for authority."
-
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-
The cat twined around his ankles, wrapping itself around and around his feet until it became hopelessly tangled in his robes. There was a tin of expensive tea sitting on his desk, atop the essays he had meant to mark this evening. A fall of curling silver and white ribbon trailed down the side of it, brushing the top of a sealed note.
-
-
-
When he saw Lucius again, they spoke of none of it. Lucius' lips were chill and his mouth had a flavor of mint leaves and peaches. His hair submitted to Severus' impatient unbinding and fell around their faces when they embraced.
The strange hunger of it and the tang of betrayal took him by surprise. "Are you so ambitious?" he asked, wrapping his long fingers around Lucius' jaw, forcing Lucius to meet his eyes. "Would you sell me to further your own ends? Would you sell me?"
Lucius attempted ineffectively to break Severus' hold. "What have they been telling you?"
Severus frowned, knitting his brows in thought. "I see it in you, in your eyes. You hide and misdirect, and while you have been doing this since you learned to speak, you have not done it so often or so desperately within my presence.
"You would," he continued, covering Lucius mouth with his own to halt the protest. The kiss was tender, thorough.
"Will you—what will you do?"
It was nearly an answer. He considered Lucius: Lucius had beautiful bones—his faced lacked the dreadful pointed quality that his son's had. He transferred his kiss to Lucius' cheek. It occurred him that he would wait.
"Severus?"
It was possible, if one had sufficiently mastered the art, to unravel a potion from its finished product to the ingredients themselves, and further down, to the intent, to the signature of the brewer. An antidote required a cause. He would have to unravel Lucius.
-
-
-
He steepled his fingers carefully, regarding the girl who had finally slumped into the chair opposite his desk. Fuscienne Valerian was a second year Slytherin girl of average intelligence, rather plain in the face, and not particularly well-liked by her peers due to her unrepentant shyness. Her parents were killed over the weekend while she sat in a corner of the Three Broomsticks nursing the one treat she would spend her allowance on: a butterbeer. The rest was carefully saved into a pouch between her mattresses. He had no idea what the girl saved the coins toward. Truthfully, he did not care.
"Did they—was it the Death Eaters?" she said finally, staring into the cup of hot cocoa he had given her. "I told them—I told them they shouldn't . . ."
He waited.
"My mum didn't want to go, but . . . dad said it was the best thing to do, to ensure our future. Dad said—it was the only right thing to do, being that we are a pure-blooded family." The girl's voice had taken on a certain timbre that he assumed was an approximation of her late father. "He said . . . they wanted me, too, when I was old enough, but I didn't want to go, either. I was supposed to go home that weekend, but I said no, because it was a Hogsmeade weekend, and I really wanted to go to that . . ."
He continued to wait.
"Do you think they would have killed me, too?"
"Yes."
"Why did they kill my mum and dad if they were going to join?"
He had read the files on both of them. "They were not considered sufficiently useful. Contrary to popular belief, pure blood does not equate magical skill. Neither of your parents was particularly gifted."
The girl's eyes flared briefly in indignation, and then she sighed and settled back into the uncomfortable chair. "Mum even had a hard time lighting the fire when she was tired," she said. "She used to think old Ollivander had sold her a bad wand, but when she took it back, he just knit his brows at her and told her that the wand doesn't make the witch."
He resisted the impulse to drum his fingers on his desk. He refilled the mug of cocoa politely, waving at it with his own very functional wand. Pouring directly for a student was unthinkable.
The girl nattered on. She did not seem particularly bereaved.
"Would you like to attend the funeral? I can have your coursework owled to you."
"Nah," she said, heaving herself up out of the chair and setting the cup down with a clatter that made his teeth clench. "We never really got along."
On her way through the door, she paused and turned around. "The hat wanted to put me in Hufflepuff," she said offhandedly, as if she were commenting on the weather. "But it said I didn't love anything enough to be in a house that was that devotional; that I was too stupid for Ravenclaw and too cowardly for Gryffindor. I realized, at some point, that the only things the Slytherins love are themselves, and I love myself, Professor, much more than I ever loved my parents."
The damn hat was growing senile.
Lucius lifted both carefully sculpted brows in a mockery of surprise. "Do you?" he asked, sly. "I think I have not heard you say such a thing since we were children, Severus."
"I have not."
Lucius held a hand aloft in the light streaming through the wind, in the echoes of firelight from behind them both. He inspected his nails casually, and twisted the rings on his fingers straight. "When you thought I might be killed by my father—do you remember? Some foolishness when they thought I should spend more time with . . . ah, pureblooded women. He was rather angry, wasn't he?"
"Yes," he replied shortly. He was rapidly becoming angry. Lucius was, in typical fashion, dancing around the issue rather than addressing it.
"And now you miss me. Well. Whose fault is that, Severus? Your loyalties seem to lie more with Dumbledore these days. I can hardly coax you away from that school to attend a meeting, let alone my bed."
"'That school' is my place of employ, Lucius," he said sharply. "I have—"
"Responsibilities, yes, I know—always the responsibilities. To your students, your precious headmaster, your fellow faculty—what of your lord? What of me—ostensibly your beloved?" Lucius glanced at him.
"Are you jealous?" Snape asked, his anger draining away into stunned silence.
"Would that surprise you?" There was no inflection whatsoever in Lucius' voice; they rang in the empty air like chisel blows.
"Clearly it would." Snape found the chair behind him with one groping hand and sat down heavily.
-
-
-
He woke with Lucius' name on his lips, expelled in a harsh sob of breath and awakening. He crawled from the bed gracelessly and stumbled to the bathroom where he proceeded to vomit dryly for a quarter of an hour.
The cat sat in the doorway and observed, tail curled around its paws.
"I can't tell you what I'm planning, Severus. You are foolish to suggest such a thing," Lucius said."Why this, why now?" he asked the cat. "Do I dream, or do I wake into the nightmare?"
"There is a quality of fatalism to you these days that concerns me." His voice was steady, a professor's voice.
"Oh, it concerns you, does it? Concern—over my safety, the fruition of your own plans, those of Dumbledore's? I've rarely known you to be simply concerned, Severus."
"You are courting death."
Lucius laughed, then. "I am courting immortality!"
-
-
-
"Lemon drop?" Dumbledore asked, regarding him genially over the rims of his spectacles.
Snape was incapable of restraining the grimace that twisted his mouth. "Must all meetings with you begin with, 'Lemon drop?'" It was too warm in the office, always too warm. Old bones, he supposed.
Dumbledore blinked, fishing a hand into the dish of sweets. "Chocolate?" he offered instead, surfacing with a fist's worth of silver foiled confections.
Snape felt his face settle into a frown. He accepted a small biscuit from the plate on the edge of the desk, took a mollifying nibble of the edge. "Sir, I would appreciate if you did not spend the entirety of this evening attempting to purchase and coddle me with candies."
Dumbledore set the chocolates into a spinning above the dish, their orbits crossing and weaving in a pattern that made Snape's head ache. "Does the mark burn, Severus?" he asked in the same tone that he might have used to offer tea.
Snape schooled his features to blankness, startled and unwilling to admit it. "Nearly all of the time," he said evenly.
"Do you think he suspects?"
That I am your pet spy, as well? "Lucius plays a complex game; I do not know what he has chosen to reveal, or what he believes merely on conjecture."
"He will betray you." It was not quite a question. Dumbledore's eyes lifted from his chocolates to pin his gaze and hold it.
A cold lump of dread settled in his stomach. "Likely so," he replied, maintaining his mien of indifference.
"Severus—"
"We are no longer children, headmaster. We will both pay for our sins." He rose to go, brushing crumbs from the lap of his robe. He had apparently consumed the entirety of the biscuit.
-
-
-
Of course, Potter had never grown out of the fascination with meeting in hidden or otherwise disused rooms. A motley assortment of Gryffindors (the usual suspects, he deemed them privately), a few Ravenclaws, a straggling Hufflepuff. No Slytherins; color me surprised. He strode through the doorway with typical affectation, robes swirling impressively. He wondered if he should thank his tailor.
"I think," Potter had been saying, "that we should make a statue, you know, in the courtyard of both of them together. Maybe we can get some of the professors to help." He gestured with his hands, outlining the general idea of his proposed statuary. He was entirely unaware of who stood behind him.
"Potter," Snape said warningly, scraping long-suffering indignation from his voice. Statues—the very idea was absurd.
The boy wheeled around, green eyes wild behind his glasses. "Don't you agree that there should be some sort of memorial, professor? I was thinking—"
"—of some sort of impressively large stone edifice for Hagrid's pet birds to excrete upon? Perhaps it should even be erected near his hut! That seems an entirely fitting manner with which to memorialize one's nearest and dearest friends, Potter." He sneered, reducing the idea to something to be ground beneath his feet.
Potter glared. Snape's eyebrows lifted a fraction. Impertinent brat. "As a bit of advice, Potter, that hat clashes rather unpleasantly with your eyes." It seemed to have been begun in red, and then, having run out of the appropriately colored yarn, the daft girl had swapped it for electric blue. It was also slightly too small for the boy's head. As a result, his untidy fringe was plastered to his forehead.
"She made it," Potter said, still clinging to the idea that a distillation of a soul can still be held trapped in something of its own creation. A bloody good thing inventiveness was not always so binding—half of his soul would be bottled on Pomfrey's shelves.
"Was she colorblind?" He dispersed the remaining children with a glare, sending them running to their common rooms. He had an excellent memory for faces; he would deduct points and assign punishments when he was through with the boy.
"She wanted them to be happy," the boy grated.
"Freedom is happiness?" A novel concept.
Potter seemed uncertain, now—perhaps he'd realized he'd just been shouting as his professor. "She thought so," he said uncomfortably. "Sir."
"Well." He tried for a shred of compassion. The glint in the boy's eyes was truly disturbing. "Now she is truly free, is she not?"
The boy clenched a fist.
"Potter."
"Sir."
He sighed. "At times, death is preferable to slavery. You are fortunate that Voldemort only saw her as an otherwise deplorable Mudblood and a friend of yours. Had he noticed properly any of her exceptional skills with magic, arithmancy, or potions, it may well have gone worse for her. She would have been 'useful,' likely put under Imperius and forced to serve." In more ways than the obvious. "Potter, listen to me. She died quickly; it was the killing curse for her." He was lying. The boy didn't know—would never know—the truth.
"Like my mother. Screaming." Potter's eyes were haunted, the glitter of madness fading into horror.
"Yes, like your mother."
Potter sat down heavily in one of the student chairs. "I couldn't save her." Snape began to feel like a confessor. It was not a sensation that he could say he enjoyed. "You could have!" Potter continued on, raving.
"No, Potter, I could not." He cut the boy off smoothly. "I assure you, however, that I would have done so if it had been within my knowledge or my power to do."
"You didn't like her!" Futile, childish protesting.
He surprised himself with honesty. "I'd intended to ask her if she would consider apprenticeship to me when her N.E.W.T.s were through."
Potter shut his mouth, having opened it to shout at Snape again. "Did you really?"
"She was very gifted."
He heard an odd snuffling sound emanating from the boy, followed by hiccoughing and wheezing. Potter was crying. Snape simply looked at him. Eventually, Potter pulled the hat from his head and mopped his face with it.
"She would not have appreciated a statue," Snape said when the teenage angst died down a bit. "Weasley may've. She would have found it ludicrous and embarrassing."
"Y-you're right, sir." Suddenly polite.
Snape was, appropriately, suddenly annoyed. He heaved himself away from the desk and took Potter's shoulders in his hands, leaning close to the boy's face. "Live, Potter," he demanded. "Stop dying simply because they've already gone." He released the boy, turning to shake his head and begin calculating points.
A sniffle, a shift of body behind him—Potter tidied himself up. "How do you do it?"
Snape paused, surprised at the question. "I died a long time ago, Potter. Fifty points from Gryffindor for organizing secret meetings, inciting students to wander the halls at night, and showing a complete disregard for authority."
-
-
-
The cat twined around his ankles, wrapping itself around and around his feet until it became hopelessly tangled in his robes. There was a tin of expensive tea sitting on his desk, atop the essays he had meant to mark this evening. A fall of curling silver and white ribbon trailed down the side of it, brushing the top of a sealed note.
-
-
-
When he saw Lucius again, they spoke of none of it. Lucius' lips were chill and his mouth had a flavor of mint leaves and peaches. His hair submitted to Severus' impatient unbinding and fell around their faces when they embraced.
The strange hunger of it and the tang of betrayal took him by surprise. "Are you so ambitious?" he asked, wrapping his long fingers around Lucius' jaw, forcing Lucius to meet his eyes. "Would you sell me to further your own ends? Would you sell me?"
Lucius attempted ineffectively to break Severus' hold. "What have they been telling you?"
Severus frowned, knitting his brows in thought. "I see it in you, in your eyes. You hide and misdirect, and while you have been doing this since you learned to speak, you have not done it so often or so desperately within my presence.
"You would," he continued, covering Lucius mouth with his own to halt the protest. The kiss was tender, thorough.
"Will you—what will you do?"
It was nearly an answer. He considered Lucius: Lucius had beautiful bones—his faced lacked the dreadful pointed quality that his son's had. He transferred his kiss to Lucius' cheek. It occurred him that he would wait.
"Severus?"
It was possible, if one had sufficiently mastered the art, to unravel a potion from its finished product to the ingredients themselves, and further down, to the intent, to the signature of the brewer. An antidote required a cause. He would have to unravel Lucius.
-
-
-
He steepled his fingers carefully, regarding the girl who had finally slumped into the chair opposite his desk. Fuscienne Valerian was a second year Slytherin girl of average intelligence, rather plain in the face, and not particularly well-liked by her peers due to her unrepentant shyness. Her parents were killed over the weekend while she sat in a corner of the Three Broomsticks nursing the one treat she would spend her allowance on: a butterbeer. The rest was carefully saved into a pouch between her mattresses. He had no idea what the girl saved the coins toward. Truthfully, he did not care.
"Did they—was it the Death Eaters?" she said finally, staring into the cup of hot cocoa he had given her. "I told them—I told them they shouldn't . . ."
He waited.
"My mum didn't want to go, but . . . dad said it was the best thing to do, to ensure our future. Dad said—it was the only right thing to do, being that we are a pure-blooded family." The girl's voice had taken on a certain timbre that he assumed was an approximation of her late father. "He said . . . they wanted me, too, when I was old enough, but I didn't want to go, either. I was supposed to go home that weekend, but I said no, because it was a Hogsmeade weekend, and I really wanted to go to that . . ."
He continued to wait.
"Do you think they would have killed me, too?"
"Yes."
"Why did they kill my mum and dad if they were going to join?"
He had read the files on both of them. "They were not considered sufficiently useful. Contrary to popular belief, pure blood does not equate magical skill. Neither of your parents was particularly gifted."
The girl's eyes flared briefly in indignation, and then she sighed and settled back into the uncomfortable chair. "Mum even had a hard time lighting the fire when she was tired," she said. "She used to think old Ollivander had sold her a bad wand, but when she took it back, he just knit his brows at her and told her that the wand doesn't make the witch."
He resisted the impulse to drum his fingers on his desk. He refilled the mug of cocoa politely, waving at it with his own very functional wand. Pouring directly for a student was unthinkable.
The girl nattered on. She did not seem particularly bereaved.
"Would you like to attend the funeral? I can have your coursework owled to you."
"Nah," she said, heaving herself up out of the chair and setting the cup down with a clatter that made his teeth clench. "We never really got along."
On her way through the door, she paused and turned around. "The hat wanted to put me in Hufflepuff," she said offhandedly, as if she were commenting on the weather. "But it said I didn't love anything enough to be in a house that was that devotional; that I was too stupid for Ravenclaw and too cowardly for Gryffindor. I realized, at some point, that the only things the Slytherins love are themselves, and I love myself, Professor, much more than I ever loved my parents."
The damn hat was growing senile.