A/N: Hello there! I'm not going to activate PM because I'm not active enough on FFnet to bother so I'll just add a note here: thank you so much for your feedback She of many faces! I really wasn't sure that I would get any reactions after such a long break and I'm honored that you think what you said (and I'm not familiar with the Star Trek material you mentioned so I'll have to check it out once I'm done writing this). I do intend to finish this fic over the coming months. In the end, the thought that I myself would never find out exactly how the story ends if I didn't write it was enough for me to pick it up again and knowing that there is someone out there waiting to read it is wonderfully encouraging. So thanks, you made a big impact! :D

Chapter ten - "Branching out"

Once his stomach had settled, Severus felt everything else rush in. His first realisation was that he had been right to drug Lupin. However, so many questions remained open: why had they been so young? True, he had been only a little older in his dream about torture at the Malfoy Manor, but mostly he inhabited the body and mind of a version of himself in his mid-thirties. Secondly, it was the closest he had ever come to feeling that the dream was real and that his feelings and thoughts were as vivid as the ones he had during the day, though of a much more intense nature. He was shocked at how self-righteous and bitter his teenage alter-ego was. 'Though I suppose I might have been like that before the blackout' he thought to himself. A faint sense of self-disgust welled up in him and he thought he understood better where his emotional neutrality during the torture episode came from. At the time he had dismissed it as a fiction created by the drug, but now he wondered whether something hadn't broken in the teenage boy to turn him into such a numb young man. Thirdly, he now knew that the Lovex-reality was a shared one. It couldn't be memory, the older versions of himself made that plain. Unless he somehow had access to the future as well as the past. And what if it were a parallel world? How could he get there? And would there be two of him?

His flow of thought was interrupted by a hand on his arm.

"For the last time Snape, where is Narcissa?" Remus asked, calmer, yet still upset.

"She vanished." Severus said, blankly. "I wanted to try the octopus, that thing lying near your head, on her to measure brain waves. She was like a wax doll. I left the room, came back, and she was gone."

Remus sat up again. 'He must be joking'.

"How?"

Severus stared at him, slightly annoyed that the student seemed to be stuck on this question when it was the last of his worries. Unless...

"Maybe she wasn't real from the start." Severus said, more to himself than to Remus.

"Beg pardon?"

Severus couldn't help but emit a nervous cackle. Only Lupin, mild mannered and so middle-class would say something like that in this situation.

Remus stared stupidly at the scientist for a second and then answered his laugh, more because of how awkward it had sounded than because he was amused. He dropped himself back into the case.

"Bugger me, I'm neither here nor there." His stomach made a loud noise.

Severus grinned, or rather he thought it was a grin when in fact it was more of a grimace.

"I'll cook something." He said and headed off. He was aware that Lupin might take the opportunity to leave while he was preparing the meal - boar and truffle sauce over linguine - but he knew that he would eventually come back for answers of some sort. The experience they apparently couldn't talk about yet had been too strange and powerful for him to be able to avoid discussing it indefinitely.

When he came back twenty minutes later with two steaming plates Remus hadn't, to his surprise, even moved. In fact his eyes were staring at the ceiling so motionlessly that for a second the scientist feared that the alabaster case had some sort of "freezing-and-vanishing" effect. But as soon as the meaty pungence of the food reached his nostrils he twitched and sat up.

"Can you get up or would you like to eat here?" Severus asked matter-of-factly.

Not trusting his legs Remus beckoned for his plate and plunged his fork into the tangle of pasta. He nearly spat out the first bite.

"This tastes like..." he started, rather embarassed. Trust the scientist to serve him something with a flavour that strongly resembled the musk of physical closeness.

"Hold your tongue and eat." the food-snob answered, half-amused half-offended at his guest's reaction. He hadn't thought about the associations people had with truffle. Given their previous stay in this very same room he surmised that the flavour might cause discomfort. He, at any rate, was not going to waste his precious food and started wolfing it down. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Lupin reluctantly pick his fork up and eat, slowly at first, then with growing voracity. Something in Severus' mind sent the slightest shock of fear through him as he was reminded of Remus' lovex-alter's monstruous double-identity.

Remus, ashamed of his earlier rather prudish reaction savoured the warm food which was filling his mouth with the most sensous notes of pepper, meat and the characteristically rich musky-stale aroma of truffle, and his stomach with a sated sense of weel-being. He put the plate down, finishing before his host and shamefacedly asked whether there was any more.

"I only bought enough for myself. You should count yourself lucky that I shared this at all" was Severus' reply, accompanied with a small twinkle of approval at the implicit praise of his cooking. He got up and came back with two glasses of diluted absinthe, shining milkily white with the slightest opalescent hue of blue when the light shone through.

The walls, which mercifully had switched into default mode when the two had emerged from their trip were now glowing soft orange, the colour of an october sundown.

"And before you ask, no, real absinthe does not have to be green" Severus said, rather proud of this acquisition of this bottle, owing to how strict the restrictions on goods imported from the mainland were.

"Ehm, I wasn't going to" said Remus blankly. He had the distinct impression that the food and drink he was being presented with was meant to impress, possibly, to inebriate him. He found, as the first gulp of anisy-sweet and cold alcohol hit his stomach, that it was working. He felt something at the back of his neck unclench, the tension ebbing away. He drank more and found that his mood was lifted and that he felt more optimisic somehow. He motioned of another glass.

"One glass makes you euphoric, two make you sleepy and three make you aggressive they say" said Severus. Seeing as Lupin had stayed and having noticed how relaxed the man looked he was hoping to finally broach the subject of their joint waking. Being impatient with people by nature, he intently watched Lupin set the glass down, trace the edge and then look at him uneasily.

Remus felt the familiar warm clench in his gut. Not good. He was the one who had left on that night. He suddenly couldn't bear staying a minute longer in the room. Rushing to his feet he left the room in a hurry, intent on leaving altogether but stopped a few steps into the hall, his vision blurry and his head pounding. He fell to his knees. He looked up and found that Severus had followed him. Then, without making eye-contact the scientist extended a hand, which Remus, unsure, did end up taking. Severus pulled him up and the student, not expecting this and already starting to stand lurched forward, hitting the bottom of the other's jaw with his head. He brought his hand to his head and found Severus' hand hovering there for a fraction of a second, already in the process of being withdrawn. The fluttering and clenching in Remus' gut became unbearable. He pulled the retreating hand to his face and buried his in the relatively short hair at the nape of Severus' neck, wrenching him close. Their foreheads collided, softly though. They stayed that way for a few breaths, waiting, assessing whether this was acceptable.

Severus was wary. He didn't much fancy a repeat of that night a few months ago. He could tell that Lupin was not himself, but he could also, going by his breathing, tell that the same physical hunger was there. Not being the one to initiate much of anything when other people were involved, he would work with whatever was given him. And suddenly a chill ran down his spine. He remembered the feeling of being confronted with the werewolf, but this feeling was slowly fading away. And with it, the fear was fading as well. He considered for an instant, what it would be like to hold this body, this time with the knowledge that it had a potential for being something other than human. This, he found, like exotic food, sparked his curiosity. He breathed in Lupin's smell: the harsh overtones of chemicals and the pungent aromas of the truffles and absinth were covering a much warmer scent. It reminded him of dark thyme honey: slightly savoury, slighty sweet, vaguely aromatic and decidedly animal. It was intoxicating. He bent forward and inhaled, placing his nose behind one ear, right where the hairline started.

Remus' hand tightened its grip on the hair. Throwing his last shreds of reluctance to the wind he started to kiss the neck that was offered. He twitched when he felt the other's tongue briefly dart out and taste the side of his own neck. And then, once again, they were pressed hard against eachother, kissing fully, the walls around them settling on a fleshy red. They broke apart for a moment, just long enough to look eachother in the eye, to see the same expression reflected in the other's face. Severus glanced towards his bedroom, but Remus, pushing away the uncomfortable thoughts of past experience that threatened to stop them again pulled him down violently where they were.

Nothing was said, much was felt. At the end they were left exhausted, absorbed in their relief, for it was clear that below the awkwardness these past months there had been a suppressed sense of unfinished business there for both of them. And there was a finality in the aftermath mood that lay upon them. Remus felt comfortable with what he had done. It had been all kinds of things: reassurance that this version of him, the one that could make reckless decisions was indeed his true self, and not that boy, who was afraid of himself. It was also a way ridding himself, temporarily at least, of his worries, a distraction that postponed the time to make decisions. And it was also a discovery about himself, about the fact that he was capable of walking on the wild side, shaking things up a bit. At any rate it was a change from his girlfriends who had a habit of wanting to see him when there were places to be taken to, meals to be paid for, comfort-sex to be enjoyed, but who tended to end up with a better-looking friend of his after a month or two. This was altogether something else. And he was happy, actually. He put his arm around Severus, who tensed up and clamly pushed it away.

Severus' thoughts were crowding his mind, vying with eachother to be delt with first. He had enjoyed the experience, but wasn't given to sentimentality and didn't think that he would crave Remus the way Lucius seemed to become obsessed about his favourite tart. He genuinely hoped that Remus felt the same because this was not the time to become distracted from the parallel reality.

In retrospect, he realised that Riddle had practically confirmed that the lovex-world could be accessed by asking him whether he had unfinished business. Narcissa's dissapearance seemed to hint at the fact that once the "soul" was gone from the world, 'THIS world' he corrected himself', the concept sinking in, the body left behind was just an empty shell. What he had now proved was that they and the alter-egos had different feelings and thoughts, possibly slightly different personalities. It all made sense: with a different past, why should he be the same person as his long-haired professor counterpart? Furthermore, the loss of his memories before the age of nineteen had left only those predispositions that were the strongest, that were somehow innate, thereby allowing him to evolve differently. Remus, having no abnormality in this world, had turned out very average and somehow less attuned to other people's feelings than his teenage werewolf self. From his memories of having brewed and given the wizard Remus the werewolf potion he knew that what had just happened between them was not even remotely possible in the other world. He felt regret for his other self, because he was certain that he was too full of disdain and pride, mixed with other, darker emotions directed against himself to be open to an experience like the one he had just had.

He turned his head to Remus who was looking at him, a slightly hurt expression on his face at having his arm rejected. Severus smiled, just from one corner of his mouth. Mimicking the expression, Remus answered with a smile of his own. They ended up grinning, somewhat conspiratorially at eachother.

"We should sleep" Severus said. He got up and fetched covers from a storage unit behind a light pannel in the wall, now light green, and handed one to Remus.

"We can figure the rest out tomorrow."