A/N: Well, what I said would be just another few months turned into a year. A what a year! But this is the final installment! I hope you enjoy reading this story that I have never ceased to enjoy writing. - Isa
Chapter 11 - "Always crashing in the same car..."
Severus emerged from a dreamless sleep. Remus was still asleep next to him. Taking care not to wake the other man, Severus got up and fetched the sedative he had used to knock Remus out at the strip club. It had been experimental, something he had mixed together in the short period of time between going to the lab and then back to his flat and donning the government-regulated, all the while wondering how long the group of Remus' friends would be contented to stay in the bar before their money or interest ran out. Presently he located the vial, took off the stopper and waved it under Remus' nose. He felt a slight pang of regret at using chemicals on his- 'What? Lover? Nonsense...'- he paused. 'He is not my friend, either.' Severus felt slightly sad. 'It's better this way though... If my intuition is correct, it's better to not to feel...'. He stared down. His sense of smell was now more attuned to Remus' scent and it seemed to be coming at him from everywhere: from the man himself, from the covers, from his own skin. 'Right. Shower. Now.'
Stepping out of the bathroom, now clad in his lab apparel he programmed the door so as not to open from the inside without the appropriate password, hoping that Remus would stay unconscious long enough for a trip to the lab and back. He then left, walking briskly through the streets. When he got to his laboratory he paused. The crows had been fed by the cleaning staff of the building he worked in and looked suitably well. He went to crow-Lucius' cage and opened the door. The crow hopped out onto the waiting hand and eyed the scientist with a quizzical look.
"You know too, don't you?" Severus said to the bird.
Being a bird, it didn't asnwer, but Severus thought he perceived a knowing glint in the bird's eye. He set up the most recent version of the octopus prototype, now made up only of a few tiny electrodes, and connected it to the bird's head, checked that the split-srceen monitor was working and let the bird perch on the back of his chair. He went to a storage unit and pulled out several substances. All of them were poisonous. He then went to another unit containing artificial flavourings. Interestingly, he had discovered that it was partial to Gorgonzola when he left his plate of home-cooked pasta with Gorgonzola and cream sauce on a cabinet near the crow's cage one day. It had rattled against the bars and the scientist had been puzzled, knowing that it had been too long since his last experiment on the bird for this to be a side-effect. After a few moments talking to "Lucius" he had offered it a sauce-coated linguine, which it had eaten greedily.
Drawing on this piece of information, Severus went to the kitchenette of the third floor office in the building his laboratory was in. 'They won't notice' he told himself, knowing for a fact that two of the employees of the law-firm the kitchenette belonged to suffered from anorexia and the two others, interns, were so busy they hardly knew the time of day or even their own names when he bumped into them in the elevator. After a desperate search through the mostly empty cupboards, he ended up stealing a few pieces of stale toast. Back in his lab he prepared two pieces of the toast with a mix of flavourings which was reasonably close to Gorgonzola -'Smells rather like carrion, now I think of it'- and spiked one with a mix of toxins that would be sure to kill a bird the size of the crow. He added a little for good measure, seeing as he had dosed this particular animal with various substances in the past and there was no telling what surprising resistances it might have developed. Coming back over to the crow he presented both pieces of flavoured toast to it.
"This one will kill you. This other one won't." he told the bird.
"Lucius" looked intently from one piece of toast to the other. The bird paused, looked at Severus, and then began to peck at the poisoned piece of bread. Severus looked intently at the monitor. The side displaying the vital signals was, for the moment, unchanged and continued to track the crow's pulse and brain activity. The other side, which was set to display the "visions" using the same wave-lengths that had been active while the bird was on Lovex in the previous experiment, was blank. After half an hour, the bread was long gone, the bird having decided to eat the unpoisoned sample as well. It had then gone to sleep in its cage. Severus, baffled, was about to go back to his flat, unsure of how long his sedative would take effect on Remus, seeing as his poison had seemingly not done anything to the crow other than make it sleep, when suddenly, there was a flash on the vision-side of the monitor. Severus checked the side displaying the vital signs, and saw that it was unchanged. Yet the image on the other side was getting clearer: the crow was seemingly perched on the roof of a strange and shabby, almost medieval-looking house. Severus got very close to the monitor, willing the crow's dream persona to look at something other than the compost-heap, which probably contained something rotten it was interested in. The crow turned its head. There it was: three red-headed youths were straddling brooms in the garden of the house. And then, kicking the ground, they took flight.
Severus gave a muffled grunt of excitement. The crow's vitals appeared to be in order, but he remembered now that that wasn't necessarily worth much. Reaching in to the cage with trepidation, he touched the white crow gently. It was room-temperature. He started rubbing the feathers with his thumb energetically. They parted, and where he would have expected to see the bird's skin there was nothing. It was the strangest sight. It was a crow-shaped hollow. And suddendly the feathers, beak and all seemed to cave in on themselves and to spiral, like water down a drain until there was nothing left to indicate that the electrodes lying in the cage had ever been conected to anything. Severus went back to the monitor. The side with the vital signs was now blank, but the side with the dream vision showed a close up of worms being picked out of compost.
Remus woke and the room was moving.
"Wake up!" Severus was shouting as he shook the student.
"What's going on?" Remus was alert.
"We need to find something to kill." Severus said.
Remus' insides convulsed. The last thing he remembered was falling asleep with a wonderfully sated feeling. Now he remembered why he had had misgivings about getting involved with this man so many times since meeting him. He shook his head and felt a wave a nausea.
"Did you drug me again?!" he said with disbelief.
"Yes, but that's not important. Get up. Get dressed. We can get you something to eat while we walk to the zoo."
"Hang on. No. Stop!"
Remus felt his anger boil over. Something violent had stirred in him. He knew Severus well enough to connect "we need to find something to kill" with the probable reason they were going to the zoo. It wasn't right. The ethics student in him was shocked at the idea that the scientist would want to kill an animal that was under the protection of an instituion such as a zoo, and therefore probably endangered. But something darker in him felt a strangely personal sense of terror at the idea of taking a living being that could otherwise defend itself and killing it from the safety of the outside of its cage. It was only after a few seconds that he realised that he was gripping Severus around the neck. He let go immediately, appalled. Turning he said:
"I've had enough. I'm leaving." and proceeded to gather for his clothes from the floor. He glanced up at the scientists' face and stopped.
"Wait. Actually, we don't need to go to the zoo, I think." Severus said, an odd glint in his eye. He came closer to Remus. Taking his hands in his own and putting them over the slightly reddish marks already on his neck he said:
"This is much better."
Remus pulled his hands away, disgusted.
"You're mental! If you think that because of yesterday I'll go along with any and all of your strange games you... don't know me very well." he finished, feeling pathetic at not finding a better end to his outburst.
Severus looked at him, puzzled at first. Collecting his thoughts he said:
"I shall ignore what I think you understood just now and tell you what I mean."
Moving between the student, blocking his access to the hallway that led to the door, Severus motioned for Remus to sit in one of the armchairs and explained:
"Whil you were... out, shall we say, I went to my laboratory and did some research on a crow. It would be too complicated to explain it all in detail now, but the short version is: when I fed it poison, it ended up exactly like Narcissa: it sent signals to a machine showing normal vitals signs, but when I touched it, it... imploded. The point, Remus" he paused, surprised that the man's first name had slipped out instead of his surname "...is that I transcoded its brain waves into images after its' "implosion" and I saw that it was seeing things from the same place we go to when we take Lovex."
Remus stared at him. He had noted the use of his given name with a mixed twinge of pleasure and squeamishness that had slowed down his thought flow. Catching up he said:
"You mean... you mean, that by dying, the crow went to what... Lovex-heaven?" he said. He started to laugh realising that that must be exactly what the scientist meant. And then he thought back to his hands on the other man's neck. Horrified he said:
"No, Snape, I won't."
Severus moved closer. Tentatively reaching out, half withdrawing and then putting his hand on the other man's shoulder to prevent him rising, he bent down to look him in the eye, pulling the other armchair close, so they could sit facing eachother. The walls were a deep teal now, which made them both shudder at the thought of what was going to be said next.
"Yes, you will. I can't ask anyone else. You know, I've been wondering about the moniker Riddle's associates have in the Lovex-reality. Have you dreamt enough to know it?" Severus asked.
Remus was about the answer that he didn't know when suddenly a word came to the front of his mind.
"Deatheaters." he spoke it out loud.
"Precisely. Now, Lucius practically said that Riddle was testing us and he hinted that you might not be someone Riddle would want to test. Maybe, to be part of Riddle's...mafia... or chosen... or some such thing, we have to die in this reality. 'Deatheaters' would suggest that we would have to poison ourselves using... Bliss. My guess is that it also works not just if we die peacefully, but if we are killed or die violently." He stopped to see what effect this would have on Remus... who was staring at him with a weary reserved expression. The student sighed.
"Alright, let's suppose that that makes sense. What if you do just die? What if I have your blood on my hands for the rest of my life?" Remus said. And curiously, something in him gave a pleasurable stir. It was very small and it scared him. But something dark and wild in him liked the idea of killing Severus.
"Well, the way I see it, you could join me." Severus answered.
"No, out of the question. I am not going to commit suicide. And from what we can tell, we don't even like eachother in the Lovex-world. How would I find you? How would we know it worked?" Remus said.
"Well, technically it wouldn't be suicide. And we wouldn't have to go unprepared. No, first I think you should strangle me and reanimate me after one minute. It should be enough time for me to er... check where I've ended up. We can figure out the rest from there."
"Assuming for a moment that this could work, why would we want to go? Just because there is... seems to be another world, why would you want to be your other self? You're a scientist, you have your own laboratory. You have... I don't know what you have..." Remus lapsed into silence. For the smallest second he might have said 'you have me', but he did not want to say something aloud that might not be true yet. And then he thought about himself and felt a great shudder run down his spine.
Going along a similar line of thought, Severus realised why he had been mistaken in thinking that Remus would share his enthusiasm at a permanent move to the wizarding world. As a werewolf, he would be an outcast. No visits to strip clubs, no prospect of a job after studies. Pain. Having to live with the frightening thing that was a part of his very nature. And he probably would become instantly middle-aged. Of course he would not want to.
"I'm sorry." it sounded defiant from one unused to apologising. " I hadn't thought about your situation." Severus said, unable to meet the other's eyes. He jumped whe he felt a hand awkwardly fall on his knee. Looking up, he was surprised to find a look of determination on Remus' face.
"Actually, I don't have any reason to live here. I have no family, I'm bored with my life. The time I've spent with you has been disturbing, all of it" he said, nodding towards the covers still on the floor "even if it wasn't all unpleasant. And the truth is, I've felt more alive than ever. I have nothing to lose here."
Severus swallowed and felt his heart accelerate. He had trouble calming the excitement that had now returned.
"You changed your mind quickly." he said dryly, trying to seem composed. "In any case, you have time to think about it some more. I hadn't planned on being the proverbial guinea-pig when I left earlier and I have a few things to collect from work if this is to be done right. This time I trust that you will stay, if I ask you to?" What was meant to be a rhaetorical question came out laden with more doubt than he expected.
"I won't stay." Remus said. "But I will come back. If something goes wrong, I will have to be prepared to go into hiding. Have you any idea how to shut off the alert mechanism in your flat? I don't want to explain to the medics and possibly the militia why they were summoned on a flatline measure of your heart while I'm in here with your body."
Severus grinned. As a frequent drug user he had reprogrammed the alert not to be sent out to the authorities, but to Lucius, in the event that he might overdose. Riddles' associates had been clear from the start that any dead body left over from using their merchandise would be dealt with by them. At the time, Severus was impressed by such a high level of customer care from drug barons, but now, knowing that the bodies tended to "take care of themselves" by disappearing he felt a little like he had been conned. Having said that, Remus did have a good point. Maybe it would be better if Lucius weren't aware of their experiment. He went over to the control pannel near the automatic door and pried out the touch-screen, exposing the electrical set up behind it. Having tampered with it before he found the circuit responsible for the alert and pulled it out just enough to provoke a faulty connection but not enough to dispatch an automatic alert to the hardware company who supplied the appartment's "intelligent" equipment to send a repairman. He then put the screen back. Turning to Remus he said:
"Do what you must. And be back here before curfew."