In You

Disclaimer: These characters are the property of Ms. J.K. Rowling.

Chapter Two

….

He sat up very suddenly, his heart an earthquake in his chest, his breath a hideous drag in the violent quiet of early morning. Dawn was streaking in through the windows in watercolor grays and through the pale light he could see his erection jutting plainly through the sheets.

He pushed his fingers into his eyes and felt the heat in his temples beginning to fade; the pulse in his groin, however, refused to subside. He threw back the sheets and pulling on a robe, he went silently into his office. He took a seat in his chair and pressed his hands against the cool surface of the desk, as if in the hope that it would freeze the tempest in his heart. He shifted his weight in the chair and his erection gave a nervous jump.

They were getting harder to deal with.

Every night a different plague erupted in his mind; a festering of emotions that rotted in his brain. Sick criminal fantasies consumed him night after unending night, wicked visions of lasciviousness burning into him like an iron; and always of the same dark-haired boy, the slender child with quivering knees and urgency in his crystal eyes. He never knew dreams could be so cutting, so raw, so wicked.

He felt the perverseness of a thousand shifting lechers, a sordidness that he carried deep within his breast and not simply because the dreams were so sick, but because he enjoyed them. In the early days, when he went for a week with an empty head, a shell of happiness formed around his heart. But deep within his twisting gut, he yearned for them; every second his head grew drained of pictures, he yearned for them.

It wasn't only the dreams anyway. Even the weeks his sleep was quiet there would be a desperate shuddering throughout him, a craving for the feelings that erupted when he thought of the little boy who lived. For even though the images faded the feelings burned feverish in his mind for days afterward, emotions so true to what he wished to feel that they rang like a burnished echo forever in his ears.

The one last night had been perhaps the most searing yet and if he shut his eyes he could still taste crushed peppermints and boyish cologne and see the stain of love-making burning roses into the boy's frosted cheeks.

With a hiss of frustration he shot up out of the chair and stood with a tautness to his shoulders, in the middle of the room. His erection throbbed against his leg and he felt a weakness growing in him, to deal with it, anything to make it go away. A sudden pulse of clamoring emotion broke open in his chest and he fell forward as his lower body twitched, fingers gripping like a vice to the edge of his marble desk.

Agony moved in him and all of a sudden his eye caught a flash of silver atop a stack of papers on his desk. It was the little, studded knife he'd confiscated from Draco Malfoy in class the previous week.

He'd forgotten to give it back after Mr. Malfoy had been foolishly flaunting it before his wide-eyed classmates. Severus had been quick to snatch it before Neville Longbottom lost a toe or a more grave disaster resulted and he'd meant to give it back but forgotten.

He went quietly around the other side of the desk and took the knife into his hand. The steel felt cold against his palm, seemed to numb his veins, splintering his blood to ice and shift his heart into a knot of iron. He turned it over in his hand and saw that one side was set entirely in emeralds.

A tide of anguish flared within him, like a knife set deep in his gut. There had been a time when he detested the color green, but somehow along the way things like that had dissolved, everything had changed and now there were only pictures.

With a quickening of breath, he set the knife against the inside of his arm and sunk the blade, with fervent pressure, against his flesh.

The skin split and it took a moment for the blood to rise in a ruby stripe along the silver in the blade.

He felt a little coil of tension loosen slightly in his stomach as he watched the blood run onto his marble desk. The same marble desk in fact that Harry's heated legs had stuck to only hours before, as he writhed in dampened sheets.

A violent suction of air into his lungs; he readjusted his sweat-slick fingers along the handle of the blade and drew it sideways across his wrist, sinking just a fraction deeper as he tried to dispel all memories of the dream. He watched the blood rise for a moment with a shuddering satisfaction.

His erection had begun to fade and the burning in his cheeks had cooled. But when he shut his eyes, images still burned coal against his lids. His fingers cramped into a fist, nails digging crescents into the flesh of his palm and he tilted the knife to a different angle and drew it parallel across a network of blue veins.

Seething satisfaction; he made another little slice and felt the drag in his breath catch. He needed to bleed away the sickness that pulsed beneath his skin, needed to cut away the disease that blackened so near his heart, he needed to- his breath faltered. He had always been a firm believer in punishment, the only real cure for sin and as he watched the blood pool on the marble, it was punishment for dreams and punishment for thinking and for feeling and for simply being what he was.

Through the fever of bleeding hatred he couldn't see, couldn't tell that what he felt wasn't purely lust, the power of it all had seared a hole straight through him and his eyes were shut off from the truth that it was something much, much more.

….

At almost the exact same moment on the other side of the castle Harry Potter jolted awake, heart hammering in his ears. The only noise in the dormitory was his racing breath, his gasping as he sat up and curled one leg beneath him, trying to stop the tremors in his limbs. It was another of those dreams. Harry dug his fists into his eyes and felt for a moment he might be sick, the blood still sticking black to the insides of his eyes.

He had them constantly now. They started out so beautifully always, him and… Harry licked his lips. He'd tried to deny it the first few times, there must be hundreds of thin, dark haired men who smelled like midnight shadows and who had such black, black eyes. But as he began to think of him during the day and during his class, and during lunch and really just so much of the time, he realized it was staring him dead on in the face.

The most unlikely person too. Harry'd tried to think on it, but making sense of the matter really hadn't helped him in the least. Maybe it was because he was the only person who really took Harry for what he was, not what he supposed to be. He didn't expect Harry to be the golden child, in fact he splattered him with mud whenever he got the chance. And he wasn't always overlooking Harry's faults. He didn't see Harry as The Boy Who Lived, he saw him as that irritating little dark haired thing that sat in the front row of his potions class. To him Harry was just a boy, nothing more. Then of course it still made no sense to develop an attachment for someone who seemed to loathe every breath Harry drew into his lungs, but Harry had always been the unconventional type.

He'd realized that when he'd gotten a furious crush on Dean Thomas in his third year and now it was easier because everybody knew Harry's… preference. Or at least his close friends anyway.

He'd started having the dreams several months ago, very, very explicit little things they were and Harry reveled in them, though he burned with shame whenever he recalled them during daylight hours. He knew it was half-sick yet there was something in him stronger that didn't care. It was just recently the dreams had started turning blacker.

They always ended now in violence; horrible, gut wrenching sickness. Once they'd been just finishing and the minister of magic had come out of the closet and shot Severus in the head. He lowered the pistol as the sheets spread scarlet and just stared at Harry, and stared and stared and Harry'd woken up screaming and Ron had run over and told Harry his eyes were on fire with something and Harry had laid back down on the sweat soaked sheets and not been able to sleep the whole night.

Then in another one Dumbeldore had walked in and taken Harry by the hair and dragged him to the potions room and stuck his face in a vat of bubbling green until his skin melted and Harry had screamed and screamed but in the dream, he wasn't himself, he was Severus and he'd watched his own face bubble like wax.

And in another one Ron had walked in and started yelling then he threw up all over the bed and he wouldn't stop and Harry had taken him by the shoulders and shouted at him to stop but he couldn't and it was everywhere and Harry could smell it and when he woke up he could still smell it and couldn't look at Ron.

There were dozens of them and every night they started out the same but always ended differently. The one last night had been the worst yet. Like all the others it started out the same but once they'd kissed Severus had ripped himself away and he'd taken a knife from the dresser and started to make slashes on his arms and on his chest and his face and the blood was everywhere and Harry had felt so sick but he couldn't make him stop no matter what he did. He finally took the knife but Severus just slid down the bed and bled all over and Harry had hunched over into the blood and cried for him to stop and he held the knife and woke up.

Harry blinked, his eyelashes stuck with saltwater. He hadn't even realized he'd been crying. He ran a hand across his nose and was glad because his legs had stopped shaking. He could hear Ron breathing as he slept, a soft noise that stirred the shadows beyond Harry's curtains and should have made him feel at ease but did not.

The moonlight spilled in from the window and made a puddle of silver on the floor. Harry shut his eyes. Like the blood.

He swung his legs over the bed. He couldn't do this anymore, couldn't do it. He had to stay awake. He pulled a sweater on over his pajamas and slid out the door and down the steps into the common room. The fire burned low in a fever of glowing embers and Harry paused to warm his hands but realized also that this was too conducive to sleep. If he sat by the fire his eyes would close in moments and his head would swell once more with sickness. He climbed silently through the portrait hole and went away down the hall.

He had no idea where he was going, but walking helped keep sleep from veiling his eyes. He kept going down staircase after staircase after staircase until he realized with a start that he'd wondered all the way down to the dungeons. Just down the hall, was the iron studded door that led to the potions room.

Harry's pulse began to serenade rather loudly in his ears. He swallowed, his throat dry. He walked several steps towards the door and stopped, staring. He brought his hand up along the door. "Oh, Sev…" he breathed and then a moment later his heart stopped as a hand came down upon his shoulder and fingers ground like iron into his skin.

He'd forgotten his invisibility cloak and oh fuck his world was over.

….

to be continued…