Thanks to Dolores Crane for writing some of the quasi-fascist rhetoric. She’s worryingly good at that.
Many thanks to Dolores Crane, Neotoma, Ptyx, Titti, Blackletter and Julia Stamford (Not Her Fandom, again) for beta services that made this mighty brute much better than it would otherwise have been. Everyone caught the timeline problem—he should wait a couple of years before he returns as a teacher. Titti took on the thankless task of giving me ‘picky’ proofreading despite my insistence that I did not need it (and although I disagreed with some of her grammar points she did catch a ‘very’ for ‘every’ that the spellchecker missed and I should have caught...). Ptyx caught an unexpected touch of omniscient POV. Neotoma pulled me up on teen!Severus being Far Too Reasonable at one point, which is one of my besetting sins as I don’t like writing the spitting-maniac side of his nature.
Any remaining mistakes are, of course, mine.
—Predatrix
The house-elves nearly damaged themselves trying to carry the thing in.
Severus watched solemnly. It was a big mysterious glass case full of earth and rocks, and odd long little tunnels open to the glass, which rose to a hole at the top and went down to a huge circular bit in the middle. All empty, he decided after watching it for half-an-hour, but still quite interesting, and it would be even better if it had something in it.
He trotted up to his mother’s room, hearing voices before he got there, and clambering into the little alcove the house-elves used for storage, where he waited patiently, and listened because he’d forgotten to bring a book and had nothing else to do.
“Minty’s such a kind little thing. Well, we’ve been letting her do some voluntary work for the Wildlife Rescue place, helping the veterwizard with some splints and Potions.”
“Crispin’s practically been commandeering the local children into a Quidditch team, really a born leader. We dread to think what will happen when he gets into a wider society. Head Boy and then Minister for Magic, probably!”
“India’s never distinguished herself in any of those ways. You see, the child is really so appallingly pretty she’s going to be a success no-matter-what.”
“Oh, don’t you have a son, Helena? I don’t think we’ve ever seen him.”
And his mother’s voice, “Do forgive me, it’s a terrible thing to say about one’s own offspring, but he’s so ugly I swear he’d frighten cream into cheese. I couldn’t inflict him upon my friends...”
Severus smirked, imagining himself scowling at the elegant ladies, imagining them like a chain of paper butterflies rustling and fainting and falling away from the darkness of his face.
There was a silky scented chattering rush past him, for a few moments, and they were gone.
He padded in to ask his mother. “Did you do it?”
“What was that, dearest?” She ruffled his hair, and withdrew her hand with a faint moue of distaste. “You could try washing your hair occasionally.”
“Too busy. I mean, did you put that interesting thing in my room? A big glass case with earth and rocks and tunnels in?”
“A box with mud and rocks in? What an unpleasant idea. Nothing to do with me. Now you’re here, do you...”
Oh. Well, it wasn’t as if there were many human beings around the house. Since phrases beginning ‘do you’ usually went on to ‘...think you could possibly help with...’, Severus trotted away. It had never occurred to him that it was possible to say no to his mother’s requests, but as often as possible he intended not to be there when they were made.
His father was usually in the library. It was a good place to avoid his mother, and there were a lot of interesting books, particularly the trunks-full that hadn’t been unpacked since his grandfather died. If you were (temporarily) quite short because you were (nearly) eight and had forgotten to wear your (big tall) boots, they were actually easier to get to than the normal books on the high shelves.
He picked out a book on Unspeakable Curses for Deaf Dark Wizards, and began to read.
After an hour or two companionably reading in different chairs, his father looked up.
“Ah. Severus.” His father lowered his face back to the book.
“Well, what is it then?” Severus demanded impatiently.
“What?” asked his father, nearly smiling.
“That. In my room.”
“Birthday present. Half,” said his father. His father never wasted words, and barely used them when necessary as well.
On his eighth birthday, a week later, Severus removed a lot of brown paper, wood-shavings and other packaging materials from a large box. Inside was a small silver parcel, charmed to unwrap when he touched it. It was stamped from a rather exclusive mail-order Potions lab, and the Potion was labelled Myrmidosa and ‘do not take internally’.
“Father. What does it do?”
Silence.
“All right then, father, what do I do with it?”
“Glass case. At the top.”
Of course. That made sense. After opening his mother’s present (a robe or something similarly uninteresting) he went to his room and unsealed the vial. Opened the case. Poured the liquid very carefully into the hole, and watched it drip-and-trickle sluggishly down to the big circular bit in the middle, where it boiled and curled and turned into something. Quite a lot of somethings.
He watched it avidly all morning. His stomach seemed to do the occasional odd frightened twist as he noticed quite how many of them there were, and quite how fast they moved, but he merely added that to his inventory of reactions. It weighed rather less than the fascinated delight he felt at watching it.
He’d never watched anything so alive and complicated in that way. He’d tried watching the house-elves, but it gave them nightmares. As for his father and mother, they could barely stand to be in the same room.
He watched them go towards and away from each other, and sniff and taste and dance together. They all seemed to know exactly how and where to be. Tiny, but efficient. He wondered if cities looked like that. How did people in London know where to go and how to be? It was wonderful, because he could watch it for hours and it didn’t watch him back. It didn’t seem to get nightmares, although he didn’t really see how he’d be able to tell. But he thought his face was too big to mean anything to such small things, and they certainly didn’t turn in horror as if they’d just seen a giant.
His mother, of course, was furious. He could hear her shrill voice some way away, “How dare you buy the child an ant farm, Ambrosius!” and a lot of complaining about the paints and dresses she’d been told not to buy, and the ant farm being extravagant nonsense.
Severus was, of course, watching the ants when his mother caught up with him and put her arms round him.
“Do you want to help Mother work, dearest?”
He squirmed his way out of his mother’s grasp. He loved his mother, he supposed, but although beautiful and sweet-scented, she was a great deal of hard work.
He liked his mother’s paintings. The rest of the elegant ladies did watercolours, thin grey paintings that looked as if they’d been run under the tap to make them look specially washed-out. He’d seen them because the elegant ladies often gave them as presents, and his mother had to put them up for a while.
His mother painted on the walls, and her paintings were dry and witty and clever and real-looking. She had painted a lizard over the big crack opposite his bed. She said it was a pun, although he couldn’t see why. She called what she did ‘trick-the-eye’ painting.
Once she’d finished the lizard, she painted a cat intently watching it from the other wall. Using a pot of expensive paint mixed with Photograph Potion, she touched up the cat’s ears so that they pricked up, and its tail-tip so that it twitched irritably.
He was fascinated by that. “So it’s not really real, but it looks real?” he’d asked, after watching the picture for ages.
“Yes.” His mother sighed. “I could get better effects if I had more Photograph Potion, but it’s expensive, and I’ve never had the talent to make it.”
She was as fascinated by painting as he was by reading.
“Hold the paint-box for Mother, would you, dearest?” she said now, setting herself up for a new painting by the window.
He hated that. She made him stand painfully still for hours, and he wasn’t quite tall enough to hold it quite in the right place.
“Do you know what your father’s been doing now?”
He held the paint-box still. He couldn’t easily reach to where the brush-tip dipped and flew. His arms ached. His mother, painting, was quite as single-minded as he was when reading. An hour and a half later, he was still pushing up until his arms and legs ached, still bored, and still listening to his mother’s soft voice.
“I mean, it’s bad enough being entrapped in this perfectly ruinous ancestral pile, barely allowed to have friends...” Severus knew that wasn’t true. He always had to wait outside her room to make sure the elegant ladies weren’t visiting her before he went to talk to her.
“...but he’s enchanted my WizCard to shriek violently even when I go a tiny bit over my credit limit...”
Severus’ arms were just a little too short.
“...what’s life without shopping, really, it’s not as if he’s a stunning conversationalist or even gets invited to dinner parties...”
Severus kept pushing, until the paintbox was just resting on the tip of his fingers. They hurt, so he pushed up again. Now, the paintbox was just resting on the little crescent shape of the nail on his longest finger. It didn’t seem to need him at all. So he pushed up, again, and left it there.
“...and he won’t address a civil word to me, and...”
Stealthily, listening to the brush moving pauseless over the wall, Severus left the paintbox where it was, and went to read a book.
Two hours later, he had discovered that there existed a word—quite a long one—devoted to the way ants moved, ceaselessly and all together.
He looked up, and told it to his mother.
“Oh heavens!” she exclaimed, but she was looking at the paintbox.
“I’m sorry, Mother,” he said, and hurried back to resume his duties, rather guiltily. When his mother turned her full attention on him, he tended to feel as if he’d just slipped inside one of her paintings and had to step very carefully so as not to disturb the composition. He much preferred being left to himself.
The next morning, over breakfast, his father said, “What about Severus’s education? Hogwarts, I assume?”
His mother was noisily upset. “Of course he’s not leaving, Ambrosius! He’s the only prop and stay I have for my benighted existence in this mouldering ruin of a house.”
“Going to be quite a wizard. Wandless magic.”
“Well, of course most people start like that unless their parents are coaching them, Ambrosius. They try to do something, and it just happens.”
“My first magic was drying out a book that had fallen in the river. Yours?”
“My hat blew away, and I brought it back. Just as Severus lifted my paint-box. What point are you trying to make, Ambrosius?”
“Timing. Couple of hours. Not paying much attention. Better wizard than both of us, probably.”
Interesting, thought Severus. He liked to know things, and had picked up and looked into most of the books in the library, without paying that much attention to whether they were about magic or not. It hadn’t occurred to him to make things happen. Now that it had, he intended to do something about it.
“Maybe, but he’s not leaving,” said his mother.
“Asked him?” his father remarked.
“I don’t need to ask him. He’s my son.”
Severus’s father asked him anyway. “School. Learning. Big library. Versus staying with your mother.”
“That’s not a question.” If he could learn magic and have a big library to visit, he wouldn’t even miss the ants. He could learn how to mix the ant-creation Potion, and make himself a new ant farm. It was a pity he wasn’t going to go.
“Which?” asked his father.
He thought about it.
“I don’t want to want to leave,” he said carefully, certain that he wouldn’t leave and wishing he could.
“You see, Ambrosius, he’s not going,” put in his mother, firmly.
He nodded.
His father crouched down beside him. “You do have a choice.”
“I know. But I matter less. Mother’s more important than us. More beautiful. Makes more fuss. We just have to fit in.” After all, it was the way things were.
“Well, of course I would never dream of standing in the way of my son’s education,” said his mother, looking furious and walking out.
“Take you down to London, if you like,” said his father. “Need to get you a wand.”
“Does that mean I’m going?”
“Thinks she’s more important than you. Wouldn’t say so out loud. Rude.” His father smiled.
Severus smiled. Obviously this was some idiotic adult thing, like not taking the last piece of cake on the plate. But he did want to go, and it looked as if he might.
He couldn’t wait to get it home.
Severus’s pleased assumption that he was going to be a Great Wizard lasted all of twenty minutes. The wand seemed to work; he’d managed the traditional bunch of flowers for his mother, levitated the teddy-bear he’d ignored since he was four and discovered the library, and covered a cup and saucer with fur (because he’d seen it in one of his mother’s art books and liked the look of it).
Time to start on something just a little more challenging.
He cast an Orrery spell. Instantly, the hallway was full of little marbles, different sizes and colours, that slipped and rolled and rattled underfoot. About half a ton of them. The spell was only supposed to create nine shiny globes to hover smoothly in the air as an illustration of the solar system.
The house-elves were furious. Severus retreated.
His mother found it very funny. The next day, he heard her telling the elegant ladies that her ‘Sevvie’ (she’d never called him that in her life) was taking his first baby steps in magic.
He’d actually quite like to be a Great Scholar, he decided, and put his wand on the top shelf in the library. Time enough to try the wand again when he’d figured out what went wrong.
Ten minutes later, his father brought the wand back. “Don’t want it?”
“It works well. I don’t.”
“Didn’t think you were the type to sulk.”
Because it was his father, he took the implied question seriously and not as an insult.
“I don’t want to work with it. If I’ve got quite a bit of natural magic, but I can’t control it properly, I’d rather wait until I know a bit more before trying again.”
“Wand focuses your power,” said his father. “Doesn’t do a thing to make sure you’re aiming it in the right direction.”
“So what does?”
“Got an idea,” said his father, handing him a Potions book that was in his other hand.
Severus had already read it, and said so.
“Tried doing it?” asked his father.
“No. I don’t have the things.”
“Got an old cauldron somewhere,” said his father, and managed to provide a cauldron from the attic.
“That looks new,” said Severus.
“Forty years old. Hardly ever used,” explained his father.
“Thanks.” Since his father didn’t seem to be the sort to give hugs, Severus solemnly shook hands with him. He felt a bit silly, but he appreciated his father trying to help.
To his own surprise, Severus found this new style of magic worked. The book explained that the selection, mixing and precise use of ingredients was as important as the wizard’s own magical power. It said that although it was possible to use ingredients bought from a decent London alchemist’s, it was always necessary to bear in mind that this was a somewhat shoddy shortcut. There was always the possibility that the alchemist’s assistant had got something wrong, and dried ingredients might be less good anyway. Besides, it was good practice to get to know what you were working with.
With some relief, Severus began to develop an obsessive interest in ingredients. The necessity to get the ingredients right helped to mingle intent with purpose. All you needed was a very powerful wizard and exactly the right ingredients, and the Potion would work. A wand would focus power so that something would happen, but it might be very much the wrong thing.
The first Potion Severus created went wrong, so Severus traced it back through his notes and discovered that the honey and ants-eggs should have been added after the bistort roots, and that the colour showed this.
He was delighted. If only wandwork was this logical, he wouldn’t have needed to put it aside. He was absolutely hooked.
The tenth Potion Severus created was perfect in every way.
His mother started remarking on the difficulty of finding him now he was no longer in the library all the time. As far as Severus was concerned, this was an extra benefit to the situation. He was spending a lot of every day finding, chopping, dicing, distilling, mixing and stirring, taking his own notes, and then settling down with a book. Somewhere along the way, Severus began to develop a Nose. Not just the large organ that took up a lot of his face, but the ability to smell things out.
Platform nine-and-a-bit was easy to figure out. He just watched until you saw how people managed it. If there was one thing he knew how to do, it was watching.
The journey was quite enjoyable, although it was frustrating to move so fast. He kept thinking that if he’d been walking through the countryside he’d probably have seen any number of interesting ingredients, but everything flew past like... well, like magic. He much preferred magic when he could see what he was doing.
When the view palled a bit, he began to read his book. He was rereading Unspeakable Curses for Deaf Dark Wizards, and suspected that he’d have to be deaf to get a full grasp of wizardsign. The syntax was three-dimensional rather than by word-order, for example. Fascinating.
At this point, he was interrupted by a thin-faced boy with brown hair and a worried expression.
He looked up as the other boy put a worn set of luggage on the rack and sat down, panting exhaustedly, on the seat opposite.
“Er, hallo,” said the brown-haired boy.
Severus nodded, and settled down to watch him. This could, he decided, be far more interesting than ants.
Another boy came in, darker and more confident-looking. He came right up to Severus and grinned, sticking his hand out.
“H’lo, I’m Black. Have you got your wand yet?”
He stared. Why would this boy want to know whether he’d got his wand yet? He had not a clue that the appropriate response would have been to grin back, shake hands, and say, “Yes. Have you?” before launching into a blithe recitation of what he’d been doing and what he wanted to do.
A minute later, the blazing grin had been turned in another direction as Black faced the brown-haired boy. “D’you think he’s the local village idiot?”
The brown-haired boy said. “I—I don’t know. My name’s Remus. I haven’t actually been to a school before.”
“It’s not so bad,” said Black. “If you don’t get a rotten teacher, that is. Oh, and the books can be a bit boring.”
Severus was quietly scandalised. In his view, books could only be boring for children so stupid that they couldn’t read and tried to eat the books.
“I haven’t got any of the books yet,” said Remus shyly. “Mum and Dad don’t like us going out much. They said they’d make arrangements.”
“Oh, don’t worry. You can borrow mine. Here, you can have a read of this for a bit.”
Severus noticed that the book was called Elementary Transfigurations. It was a large, red book, very dog-eared, as if Black had been reading it frequently. But why would anybody not talk about liking reading, if they liked it?
He also noticed that Black touched Remus’s hand, passing the book over, and Remus almost jumped. Was that what shyness looked like? Was that how people got to be friends? People looked each other in the eyes more than he’d thought, but his mother and father probably weren’t the best basis for comparison.
The boys were much more interesting to watch than ants.
“Do I have to read all of this by the time I get there?” asked Remus nervously.
“No, just show willing, I should think. Nobody can fault you if you’ve only done your best.”
After ten minutes, Black turned to Severus. “I say, would you mind not watching us like that?”
Severus nodded peaceably and picked up his own book.
“Psst,” said Black to Remus in a loud whisper, “see what he’s reading? I don’t think he’s an idiot at all. I think he’s....” his voice dropped, “... evil.”
“M-maybe it’s not his fault. If he’s evil. Maybe he just can’t help it.” Remus had gone very pale.
“How hard can it be to do the right thing?” said Black.
“I think sometimes evil just happens to you,” said Remus.
There was a pause. “Oh,” said Black rather blankly. “I think there’s always a choice.”
Since there was no more conversation to listen to, Severus got on with reading his book. Books couldn’t make someone evil. That was stupid.
Severus spent all day brooding about those other boys on the train. How dare they decide he was ‘evil’? Well, he’d... he’d... he’d just show them, that was all.
In the evening, it looked as if there was some silly ceremony-thing involving a wizard’s hat. Since he knew he was a wizard with or without wands, broomsticks and clothes, he was determined to ignore it. He was still too busy internally spitting with rage about those other boys, and trying to work up a daydream. In the daydream, the boys had eaten some berries against his advice, and were stuck with an unsightly and painful rash, until (in desperation) they asked him to brew something to cure them.
Instantly, obedient to that unfortunate law of nature that meant people only showed an interest in you if you were busy, he was called up.
He was considerably surprised to be accosted by the hat. It had looked far too threadbare to be a strong magical item.
“Am I hearing things?” he asked it, ascertaining that nobody else could hear it.
“No. Interesting flavour...now who would you like to spend time with?” it asked him.
“With those boys I saw on the train.” Not much of a choice, since he’d hardly met anyone else, but at least they weren’t boring. After he’d thought up a good revenge on them for calling him ‘evil’, he could settle down to watching them.
“Interesting,” it said, “and why would that be?”
He felt the curious sensation of a hat rifling through his head.
“Stop that!” he said, as it found his daydream and ran it through mental fingers.
“Well,” it said, “at least I know where you’re going.”
“Where I’m going?” he demanded indignantly. “I’ve only just got here!”
It explained about the House system.
“Well, put me in the one with those boys,” he snapped impatiently.
“You want to be in Gryffindor!” He had a very strong impression of raised eyebrows, which was rather curious from something without eyes. “I can’t do that,” it went on sadly.
“Well, you choose, don’t you?”
“I sort,” it said rather huffily.
“Well?”
He had the feeling that it was crouching down beside him the way his father sometimes did.
“You see, if you were what they were, you’d want to be with them to make friends with them.”
How could he even know if he wanted friends or not? He was still finding out how people fitted together. He knew a good deal more about ants, for example.
“Can’t I just go there and watch them?”
He felt its regretful ‘no’.
“Put me with the ones that like books and learning.”
“You don’t just want to read, do you?” it asked. “You want to make something of yourself, let everyone see what you can do? You want to show those boys, don’t you?”
He squirmed uncomfortably. A lot of the time he was quite happy to keep to the books-and-reading side of things, but the hat had been plopped on his head at the precise moment he was wishing to show everyone what he could do.
“Does it mean I’m bad? I don’t think I’m bad. If I was bad I’d want to poison those boys dead or something,” Severus said thoughtfully.
“No. Not bad. Just a little ambitious. I’ll place you in...SLYTHERIN!” it roared. By the clapping, boos and hissing that followed, the others could hear the verdict quite well.
The pupils at one particular table gestured violently for him to join them.
Severus sat down beside a dark boy, who gave him a quick, assessing glance. “Wilkes. Son of James Robert and Imogen. Aspiring to be a Quidditch genius and the fifth-most-feared Dark wizard to ever walk the earth.”
“Snape. Son of Ambrosius and Helena. Certain to be a Potions expert and one of the world’s greatest scholars.”
“That might be useful. Can you make Eye-Watering Potion?”
Well, of course he could. It wasn’t as though that was difficult. Recollecting the thing about ‘ambition’, though, he said, “It depends. What’s it worth to you?”
Wilkes clapped him on the shoulder. “I think you’ll do.”
This, he decided, was going to be interesting. His fellow-inmates had pigeonholed him (and themselves) instantly, like the Gryffindor boys, but without either hypocrisy or moral indignation. The Hat might have been halfway-right after all. He’d have driven himself cross-eyed trying to make sense of all that good-versus-evil stuff when he could have been concentrating on more interesting things.
His first trip to the library was rapture. Some of the books were a little active, but he didn’t take it personally. The books at home were old friends, even his grandfather’s books, leading on incontrovertibly from the first page to the last. Here, he could open a book at random and see a twisted-looking woodcut of cavorting gnomes, or an unexpected recipe for Headache Curing Draught with half the ingredients and twice the efficacy, or feathers fluttering from between the pages of a heavy work on Diseases of the Owl.
This would take him months, he thought happily.
“Snape? You’ve missed breakfast,” said Avery, pulling a bread-roll and rather fluffy lump of cheese out of his pocket and dumping them on top of the book.
Severus cursed absently and picked up the food, prying the cheese apart to remove the owl-treat that had got mixed up with it, and prying the bread-roll apart to put the cheese in it. He took a bite, and the book he was reading began to scream, “Breadcrumbs! Breadcrumbs!”
“Come on with you,” said Avery. “You can eat that on the way, as long as you don’t eat it in the library.”
The first lesson was Transfiguration. A stern-looking tabby cat walked in and flowed upright into a stern-looking witch. Severus decided this would be fun. He’d read hints in books that some people could turn themselves into animals, but nobody ever seemed to explain it except to say that it wasn’t the same thing as transfiguration.
“I am Professor McGonagall,” said the witch, and proceeded to take everybody’s names. “Now, are you all prepared to work?”
“Yes, Professor McGonagall.”
There was an empty glass on each desk. Severus picked it up curiously and tapped it. Perfectly normal, as far as he could tell.
Sirius Black transformed his into a goldfish, and Professor McGonagall swept towards him crossly and turned it back before it could suffer a painful breath of air.
“Mr Black, we are not transfiguring living things this week, and we are certainly not transfiguring anything outside its element, is that clear?”
Severus smirked.
“Now, let me get an idea on where you are already,” she said briskly. “Anything relevant to Transfiguration, that is.”
Black said, “Black beetles into buttons, black beetles into black cherries, black beetles into brooches, black beetles into doorknobs, black beetles into...”
“That’s quite a lot of black beetles, Mr Black,” said the Professor.
Black looked down. “You work with what you’ve got,” he muttered.
Daly said, “I wanted a brooch to wear to a party, so I made one out of a nut. It looked right, but I couldn’t get it to stick on.”
Freston said, “When I was nine, my best friend had a stick insect and I couldn’t find one, so I sort of made one up. It was brilliant,” he said happily, “with millions of legs and big red eyes.”
“Unless all you’re going to do are party decorations,” said Professor McGonagall firmly, “you’ve got to think about basic plausibility.”
Her eyes fixed on Snape, who didn’t say anything because he’d done so little wand-work.
“Well, come on,” she said impatiently. “What do you know how to do?”
Snape paused for a moment, then reeled off a long list of spells, some of which seemed to upset his classmates.
“We seem to have a prodigy here,” Professor McGonagall said briskly. “Now shall we get on with a little practical work?” She tapped her wand on the desk.
“Today, we shall be transfiguring these glasses into wooden cups. It’s a relatively easy alteration because the use and purpose remains the same, and only the appearance changes.”
“Now, Miss Swanbrook,” she said kindly to the girl on Black’s left, “will you try?”
The girl raised her wand and pointed it. A ripple of woodenness flowed through the glass from bottom to top and then seemed to shake itself off.
“A good first attempt,” Professor McGonagall said kindly.
Without answering, the girl raised her wand and pointed again. This time, the spell resulted in six round wooden bubbles over the surface of the glass. These persisted.
“Can I keep it?” Swanbrook asked. “I think it would make a nice ornament.”
“If we kept all the mistakes we’d made as ornaments, we’d barely be able to move for clutter. Now, again,” said Professor McGonagall, briskly.
By the third time the girl tried, the wood stayed solid.
Meanwhile, Severus’s glass remained resolutely glassy and clear, while everyone else’s turned into a wooden cup. Not always easily, but usually the change seemed to ripple through it. His own glass remained obdurate.
He kept trying. “I can’t understand it,” he muttered. “I’m doing exactly what it says in the book.” He was. His wand moved sluggishly in his hand, and he could almost see the way to do it, could almost feel the magic flooding into the glass from his hand.
“Do you think he is an idiot? Maybe he’s an evil idiot!” said Sirius Black, in a loud whisper.
Oh put a bloody sock in it! thought Severus irritably, still struggling with vast theoretical knowledge combined with unsuspected practical deficits. He gritted his teeth and poured every bit of energy he could muster through his wand.
The glass exploded.
There was a lot of fuss. Severus was too old (and probably too shocked) to cry, but he felt ill for the five minutes it took Professor McGonagall to determine that no-one was seriously hurt and to drag him to the hospital wing.
“Oh,” said the mediwitch, sounding concerned, “what have we got here?”
“A first-year Slytherin who’s been stretching the truth a little about his abilities. I hope this’ll teach him to be a bit more modest.”
But I wasn’t lying! I wasn’t! he wailed silently to himself.
He was still a little shocky and scared, and knew he was going to be nervous next time he picked up his wand. Was every lesson going to be like this, with his wand ruining every attempt he made?
In fact, after the first three weeks, he happened to mention his continuing difficulties with wand-work in a letter to his father, and was immediately sent to Ollivander’s to have his wand looked at. Ollivander saw the problem immediately, said that the wand was ‘sulking’ after being ‘left on the shelf’ a bit too much, and readjusted it in a few seconds. “You’ll probably have a bit of ‘wand-stammer’,” Ollivander had said airily. “It’ll take you a little while to be able to cast without pausing to think, but if you work at it it’ll come.”
After lunch he’d have his first Potions lesson. He was looking forward to that. He didn’t have to worry about Potions, just measure, stir and pour.
Everyone except Severus looked rather...nervous. Idiots. It wasn’t as though this was going to be a massive challenge, and it wasn’t as though this was difficult, like turning things into things.
“God, this is going to be boring!” said Black.
Oh I see. Anything without a wand-lit firework-display of flashy stuff doesn’t catch your two-second attention-span, Severus thought.
“What’s the teacher like?” asked Lupin nervously.
“Catwood? Not so bad, at least he’s a Gryffindor. Things could be worse,” said Black darkly.
Who cares what House he was in? At last we’re going to learn something interesting!
Professor Catwood came in with a swirl of robes and a bang of the door.
Severus noticed that most of the other children looked rather nervous. He smirked. This cold, dank, dark place was his spiritual home. A place devoted to Potions brewing, with whole shelves (he could see the open cupboard at the back) devoted to ingredients you didn’t have to go out and pick. Wonderful.
“Today,” droned Professor Catwood, “we will be working on Transparency Potion.”
Severus went to the cupboard and picked out powdered mother-of-pearl, chameleon scales, the guts of a certain fish that was practically invisible in some lights, and the feathers of a starling, full of glint and shadows. Putting the right amount of each into his cauldron, he trotted back to his desk.
Everybody else was looking blank.
“Sir?” said Potter doubtfully, “I thought we were going to do Photograph Potions today.”
Black flipped through his textbook hurriedly. “I can’t find anything about Transparency Potions in here, sir.”
“Ah,” said Catwood. He shuffled through a pile of notes and said, “My notes for the third-year class were on top. My mistake. Five points to Gryffindor for observation.”
Severus trotted back to the cupboard with a sigh.
“And what do you think you’re doing, Mr...?”
“Snape, sir. Replacing the ingredients for the Transparency Potion if we’re not going to be doing that yet.” Deftly, he separated out the trickiest ingredients: lids off, back in with the mother-of-pearl and chameleon scales. Cool wet fish guts next, and finally the dry tickle of feathers against his palms. Not so much as a flake of anything out of place.
“Five points from Slytherin for contaminating ingredients.”
Severus gritted his teeth. He continued replacing until everything was in its place, as Professor Catwood watched.
“And five points from Slytherin for attempting to show up your classmates on a Potion not in the set curriculum.”
Severus returned to his desk.
“Now, none of you will have made any Potions yet—”
“Sir! Sir!” Severus was practically bouncing with indignation.
“—so I think a quick test would be in order just to see how far you’ve all got with your reading,” said Catwood. “Now, I realise this isn’t a popular subject, so I don’t expect you to have done an enormous amount of background reading, but I’ll just ask you a few casual questions. If you get any right at all you’ll have done very well indeed, all right?”
Severus prepared for the interesting bit of the lesson. Either making a public display of his own knowledge or learning something he hadn’t known. He couldn’t lose, really.
“Where would you find a bezoar, what is the difference between ‘monk’s hood’ and ‘wolfsbane’, what would I get if I added asphodel to wormwood... Enough for now. Do remember you don’t have to answer all of them, but can anyone answer any of these?”
Severus’s arm was actually beginning to feel tired by now.
“Nobody else?” said Professor Catwood rather sadly. “All right, Mr Snape, which one are...”
“Stomach of a goat, same plant, Draught of Living Death,” said Severus promptly.
“Five points from Slytherin for trying to show up your classmates. We don’t foster unhealthy competition in this classroom. All of you should be on the same journey to knowledge together.”
Severus muttered something about ‘if they weren’t such idiots I wouldn’t be able to show them up’.
Professor Catwood removed ten points from Slytherin for insolence, and the lesson went downhill from there.
Severus resolved to apply himself to his studies in private, because it wasn’t as if he’d learn much from Catwood. It was useful to have the ingredients all collected and to hand, but it wasn’t necessary.
Between bursts of being picked-on, he spent the rest of the lesson working up a very satisfying daydream in which he was the teacher. That would show them.
Severus was thirteen, and had his nose in a book, again.
While Rosier and Wilkes sniggered together about some asinine secret society (involving Dark magic, which was interesting, and naked ladies, which weren’t), Severus ignored them from behind a tottering rampart of books. Taking half a shelf-ful at a time, he read fiercely, eclectically and without practical purpose. He loved Potions when it came to actually making things work, because it didn’t rely on flashy flourishes and tricks. His other passion was knowing things.
He remembered the day after the ‘marbles’ incident. I’ll be so clever that no-one can ever laugh at me again. And before trying with the wand I’m going to learn everything, he had decided
Of course, that had been foolish. Some of the books contradicted each other, and some of the books had so much verbiage about What Should Not Be Known that they were remarkably light on actual information. Idiotic. He was presently finding out about a wasting spell that prevented a person from gaining energy from food. He could see where using it was bad, but there was nothing wrong with knowing about it. After all, you had to know about things to make them better.
At the moment, somebody was walking past the table. “I have it almost right,” the person said. “Exsanguinis. But it’s the wrong colour, and it’s inactive. I’ve tried it on rats.”
“Dragon’s blood,” Severus said quietly, without looking up. “Binds the fire element and the lethal energies.”
There was a silence. Severus remembered, too late, that he’d found that detail in what was left of his grandfather’s library. The standard sixth-form Advanced Potions text had an appendix about endangered species and no reference to the ingredient in question in the Potion in question. The version in the book at Hogwarts would make the recipient paler and weaker, but certainly wouldn’t bleed them dry from the inside.
It was something Severus would never actually do, but that didn’t change the plain fact that there was a right way and a wrong way to do it, even if it was horrible.
He heard his interlocutor muttering something about how would a little brat know that, and said, “It was in a book.”
Gradually, after a period of weeks and months, the people around him learned to trust his judgement.
He had a few surprising blind spots. They asked him about sex-magic at first, it being one of the sure-fire interests of adolescents, and he told them it was something he was going to find out about later in life – he’d already figured out that he was going to have to waste a lot of time thinking about girls when he grew up, and he’d rather concentrate on useful knowledge while his body wasn’t forcing him astray.
He was very weak on theory at first, as well. Starting out with an eclectic collection of odd facts, and adding an experimental style that came absolutely naturally to him, it took him years to see that theory could hold things together. Once he had seen it, general magical theory was added to his mental model.
He also didn’t answer questions about ethics. That was where responsibility came in, and it didn’t particularly interest him. Facts and theory were just true. He didn’t do experiments involving cruelty unless there was a reason to; he’d already seen some of his housemates being-cruel-for-the-sake-of-it, and that was where his own dividing line was drawn.
After a while, they nicknamed him The Oracle of Slytherin. He took some simple pride in that.
The year he was fourteen, something was different.
He first noticed it when one of the older boys was late for lunch. Hardly a revolutionary occurrence, of course. It was just...a momentary shaft of sunlight lighting up that great pale plume of hair, and the boy stood there, for a fraction of a second, smiling. Like a statue, only much more beautiful, with the soft richness of his skin and hair.
Severus caught his breath, wanting to stop time for a moment.
The boy walked forward, slow and easy. If his stance was poetry, his walk was song.
“Mr Malfoy,” said the Headmaster, “I trust there’s a good reason why you weren’t on time?”
The boy smiled again. “Of course, sir. I would not disturb school routine for anything but a good reason.” He inclined his head slightly to the Headmaster, as to an equal, and sat down at the Slytherin table.
“The Headmaster didn’t ask him what the reason was,” Severus murmured thoughtfully.
“Course not. Dumbledore knows how things are done, even if he doesn’t approve of all that. Malfoy’s got a fair bit of pull on his own account, and there’s always the Book. I bet Dumbledore knows he could be replaced if necessary.” Severus knew that Rosier didn’t mean an actual book. He’d been quite interested when his housemates had started talking about the Book, and wondered if they had developed an unprecedented interest in finding things out (or in Goyle’s case learning to read). The Book of the Renewing Serpent had turned out to be that inane secret society of theirs. Even worse, it had turned out to be a lot more to do with politics than magical knowledge. He’d asked them what they’d learnt after one or two meetings and they had not a spell to show for it, just a lot of rhetoric about the dangers of Muggles.
“Is Malfoy a reader of that particular Book?” Severus asked, as if not particularly interested.
“Keep your voice down!” hissed Wilkes.
Severus returned his attention to his own book, surprised to find this more difficult than usual.
Over the next week, he listened out for Malfoy’s name, and discovered that the older boy was in the seventh year, not a new boy at all. He was at a complete loss to discover why somebody’s mere physical presence was enough to stop him in his tracks (or at least raise his eyes from his books) when that person had been a normal part of the school environment for the last few years. All right, he was good-looking, with striking hair, but why hadn’t Severus noticed before, and why was he noticing to such a peculiar extent now? It wasn’t that long hair was particularly unusual: it was discouraged at school, yes, but given the propensity for haircuts not to ‘take’ if one had magic, several people (including Severus) kept their hair long. And other people were objectively good-looking.
Rosier said, “Why don’t you remember him, then? He’s in our House, and he even asks you things, just like everyone else.”
“Stupid question,” said Severus, who was used to looking up behind his wall of books, hearing a question and answering it. It didn’t seem to matter who came up with which question. Most of them were idiotic anyway.
People started noticing him watching.
It became an accepted part of school life: Malfoy would go past and Severus would be staring after him for the next five minutes.
For the first time ever, he wouldn’t invariably answer factual questions posed in his hearing. Five minutes later, he’d say, “What?” rather vaguely, and then come up with the answer.
Severus was rather dimly aware that it seemed to amuse people: once or twice he’d heard someone ask Wilkes, “What happened to the Oracle of Slytherin?” to be answered with, “Oh, his balls dropped.”
He didn’t make much sense of this, just accepted the annoying fallibility of his mind along with other things. Several people he’d read about had seemed to have tricks they could do (instant sums, wiggling their ears, smelling colours) which seemed to fade out when they grew up. Maybe your brain instantly turning to sludge was part of the normal growing-up process. He wouldn’t put it past things-in-general.
Over the last week or so, he’d been having momentary mindless eruptions of pleasure that ambushed his body at night. If those brought images with them, he’d forgotten them by the morning. The feelings seemed to be concentrated on that organ of his body which was probably going to want to have to do with girls. It had also taken to rising up at random times.
He stared at Malfoy with even more desperation: the ‘girl’ thing was going to happen to him eventually, and he would apparently want to look at girls rather than Malfoy. No sense in hastening that.
Severus saw Black and his friends plotting over dinner. He couldn’t actually hear what they were saying, but he could hear giggles and see significant looks. Definitely up to mischief.
He spent an evening following Black about for the usual pre-emptive self-defence. Last time, they had put small salamanders in his boots, translocated the Slytherins’ beds where their desks should be and desks where their beds should be at the dead of night, and caused a swarm of wasps to fly out of the stores cupboard. It wasn’t that he’d been incapable of hitting back. He’d put ectoplasm in Black’s boots (a nourishing and strengthening Potion with an extra ingredient from Peeves), given the Gryffindors’ pillows sharp-but-small teeth (Dentuosity Draught), and given each separate Gryffindor a swarm of wasps in their cauldron (Vesparosa). If he had to spend time and energy on vengeance, though, it was useful to be forewarned and forearmed.
He saw Black and Potter creeping up to a shuttered window and casting a Translucency charm so powerful he could feel it pull heat out of the air from where he was hiding in the bushes. He shivered.
“Don’t do it, Sirius,” said Potter, tugging at his friend’s sleeve. Maybe it’s something really powerful, thought Severus, rather interested.
“But it’s the girls’ changing-room,” said Black. “You know you want to.” Severus switched off his attention. He might be forced to like girls later in life, but he didn’t have to like liking them, and the less he thought about it the better.
“Paddy, you’re such a dog,” said Potter affectionately, ruffling Black’s hair. “It was Moony last week.” Severus discovered he was feeling sad for no reason at all. He wished he’d brought a book; it was much easier to ignore momentary emotional malfunctions if he had something to read.
“That was last week. Besides, if you like both you get more chances. Not that you’d know. What girl is it this week?”
Severus sighed and crawled away. He was glad he didn’t have to waste time looking at girls. Black and Potter had been quite bright, not that he’d have admitted it, before they grew up.
The next day, there was a special lecture for the older children, who crowded into the main hall. There was a lot of coughing and sneezing and feet-shuffling and whispering and bored-adolescent noises of various kinds.
Severus, having been prevented from bringing his book, sat down crossly and hoped he wouldn’t catch flu from the germ soup that was no doubt filling the hall. Pepper-Up would ameliorate the symptoms of a cold, but was no good at all against flu. He’d been trying to work on extra ingredients for it for years.
“Excuse me,” said Malfoy, in a voice smoother than cream, and clambered onto the bench in front of him, happening to brush him with the back of his hand in passing.
Severus’s skin prickled. His heart beat faster. He felt himself blush. He hoped it wasn’t the early symptoms of flu.
Dumbledore said, “I’m sorry that it has become time to touch on certain distasteful issues, but since a boy has been caught out in a certain misdemeanour involving the girls’ changing rooms—he knows who he is,” Dumbledore insisted over the rising chorus of indignant chirping from the girls, “it is probably time to let people know that we do not tolerate Misbehaviour at Hogwarts. And by Misbehaviour I most certainly mean spying on girls.”
“Yes,” murmured Severus, in an audible whisper. “It was Canis Major and its small-but-dense companion star.” In the course of his eclectic reading, he’d happened to find such a phrase used about the Dog Star, and the joke had been far too good not to share, even if he had had to explain it to most of his acquaintances.
The Headmaster wittered on about girls for a bit, all Gryffindor morals and ‘how would you feel if it was your sister?’. It was unbelievably dull.
When Severus returned his attention to the course of the lecture, after at least ten minutes wondering why Malfoy’s hands were so incredibly graceful, the Headmaster was still going on. “Looking at girls is Quite Natural, but ought to be discouraged until later in life. After all, when a young wizard gets married, he can do all of that he likes. Behind drawn bedcurtains and closed doors. In the dark. Now don’t you young men run away with the idea that I want you to be ashamed of your healthy, natural bodies. That is far from the case. All of you have... organs,” he dropped his voice, “and need to do your very best to keep them pure and clean ready for the occasion of your marriage. You wouldn’t want to give your wives something that was polluted, would you?”
Severus could make no sense of that whatsoever.
“Old coot’s forgotten we went co-ed years ago,” muttered Wilkes.
“You are not to take this reasonable caution to mean that you should avoid girls,” the Headmaster said sternly. “Remember the wizarding world has a population problem, and responsible sex is encouraged. At this point, it is my painful duty to mention unnatural friendships. Too close friendships between boys, for example, are very much to be discouraged.”
Severus sighed. Maybe the Headmaster was down on that because it led to boys using magic to spy on the girls’ changing-room? Or maybe he was on about Crabbe-and-Goyle’s joined-at-the-hip act. You never saw them apart. Not as though it had any relevance to him. He’d never had friends, not that he wanted to.
Half the audience was looking confused. It wasn’t just him. Good.
“Do you know,” said Lucius Malfoy, “the Headmaster’s little homilies imbue me with quite an irresistible desire to do otherwise.” He got to his feet unhurriedly, shadowed by Crabbe and Goyle.
“Crabbe, Goyle, go and practice with your reading books. Try to do at least four pages,” ordered Malfoy.
He smiled at Severus. “That should give us an hour or so, Severus.” He held out a hand.
Having that gorgeous voice pouring all over him made Severus feel faint. And Malfoy knew his name, which was fairly astonishing in itself. He followed Malfoy out of the hall. The Headmaster was still speaking, but he had no attention to spare for that.
“Can I sit on your bed and watch you read?” asked Severus.
“Dear me, how unambitious. Are you sure you’re in the right House?”
Severus had been teased before. He ignored it. “Well, can I? Or you could read your books to me. I like your voice.”
Never mind that he’d read every book on the curriculum at least once, skimming over only the parts that were a little light on information. Even one of those books explaining that There Are Mysteries That Wizard Should Not Wot Of might be a pleasure, even though he usually decided he should Wot Of whatever he damn-well liked.
Malfoy’s bed was far more beautiful than his own, which was how things should be. Larger as well. A room of green silk, and when the curtains were closed, silence and light called, it was a private little world floating through the darkness of the school like a bubble of warmth.
Malfoy looked utterly relaxed, lounging on the bed in a beautifully-cut school robe, long cream sweep of hair whispering behind him on the pillow as he turned, displaying a throat of an entirely different creamy colour. He blinked lazy silver eyes.
Now that Severus could look as much as he liked without interruption, he felt surprisingly dissatisfied. There had been no aim, no end, to what he’d been doing. Now that he could look, he felt itchy and restless.
“M-Malfoy?” he said hesitantly.
“You can call me by my name if you like, Severus.”
“Lucius,” Severus whispered, blushing.
“You are much too young,” said Lucius gently.
“For having me sit on your bed? Is that what Dumbledore was talking about—I wasn’t quite clear.”
“You are far, far too young,” said Lucius. “I should probably be flogged for what I’m thinking.”
“What did he mean about boys?”
“He meant that in his rather parochial moral and social system, sex should be restricted to married men and their wives. Boys are much more amusing for some of us.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” said Severus. “I’ve been dreading having to look at girls, and maybe I won’t have to.”
“I should definitely be horsewhipped,” said Lucius mournfully, and kissed him softly on the mouth.
“Why?” said Severus, “I like it. As long as boys can...do something.” He liked feeling this curious restless itch, but it would certainly drive him mad if he had to feel like this all the time. “I mean, we don’t have a...” He paused.
“Dear me, how prudish,” said Lucius.
“No,” said Severus, as a matter of fact. “I’ve seen a picture of it in a book, sort of, but it didn’t explain what people called it. I mean, a doctor would call it a vageener...”
“Vagina, dear boy.”
“...but the medical word for a prick was different again, so I still don’t know what people normally call it.” Severus blushed. “Anyway,” he said, drawing his legs up onto the bed, “what do boys do?”
“They don’t have that one thing, so they can’t get pregnant,” said Lucius. “That said, they can do anything else they like.”
“Why would you do it, if it’s to get pregnant?”
Lucius laughed. “Can you seriously suppose that Sirius Black was thinking, maybe if I see those naked girls I can convince one of them to become pregnant! I assure you that whatever our revered Headmaster might say, people are more likely to be thinking about pleasure than progeny. I mean, look at you.” He gestured gracefully at the front of Severus’s robe.
Severus became aware that his prick was standing straight up without having so much as asked his brain what was possible between two boys. He was mortified.
“I’m s-sorry,” he said, and swallowed. “I still want to know.” He was furious with himself for having assigned the ‘sex’ question to some vague future date. Why hadn’t he realised that finding out in advance was much better? He just...hadn’t wanted to waste even more time finding out about girls if his body was going to force him to do that anyway.
“Well, we might kiss. You know about that anyway, and it doesn’t vary by gender. Otherwise, one might use one’s mouth like this...” Lucius sucked at a couple of his own fingers.
Severus fell back on the bed, panting.
“Or one might touch here,” Lucius’s hand cupped Severus’s buttocks lingeringly, “or here,” slid round to a thigh, “or, obviously, here.”
Severus’s thighs clenched, pulling that beautiful hand down insistently. His face and crotch were hot with a prickling flood of embarrassment. He began to move.
“But you really are far too young.”
Severus wailed and shoved his arm over his face in an agony of horrified shame that did nothing to soothe the frantic movement of his hips, rubbing and rubbing.
The hand pressed down hard, and he thought Lucius was trying to make him stop, hold him still, and he was going to faint or go mad or break it or something, and—
—all the hot prickly sensation suddenly rushed at him, and he sort-of-wet-himself-only-not-quite and there was a roaring in his ears and all of him tingled at once.
He wondered if he had broken it, and then why he didn’t actually care. His face felt hot and rumpled where it pressed into the pillow. He felt...soothed: a heavy restless ache that had troubled his body for a long time had gone.
“Like that?” Lucius murmured softly.
Severus’s power of reasoning abruptly returned, and he suddenly realised that he had liked it. Very much.
“Yes,” he said, confused, and then, “why did I like it?”
Lucius evidently took pity on him. “Nature makes animals want sex, because animals are too dim to figure it out. They’re not going to mate for-the-good-of-the-family, or the-next-generation. They’re not going to decide that they want to eat a berry but they ought to copulate for the good of the bloodline. Therefore, nature makes it so that creatures feel pleasure. Sometimes they feel the pleasure when it won’t lead to reproduction, although the Headmaster is rather down on that.”
“Another of the Headmaster’s stupid ideas,” said Severus.
“Well, it is, really,” agreed Lucius. “I have no objection to doing my duty once for the good of the bloodline, or even twice if there is some unfortunate accident. The rest of my time is my own.”
Severus looked at him. He was so beautiful. Even now Lucius had made the ache of it go away, Severus still wanted to look.
Lucius looked back at him coolly. “You really are a disgustingly sticky child,” he said, wrinkling his nose and languidly waving his wand.
Severus hid his face in the pillow. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I wasn’t so revolting. I bet you don’t get sweaty and wobbly and panting,” he said sulkily.
“It isn’t compulsory, dear boy. It’s perfectly possible to manage these matters with elegance.”
“Show me!” demanded Severus eagerly, feeling his prick stiffen again at the thought.
Lucius’s fingers wandered absently to the front of his own robe, and a long finger slid into the gap between two buttons. “This,” he says, “feels pleasantly naughty if one has sensitive nipples.” His eyes closed. “If one doesn’t wear anything under the robe, and the robe’s decent-quality, one can feel the cloth and the fingertips at once.” He traced a hand over one nipple through the cloth, and Severus could see it stretch.
Severus panted. Sweat fell into his eyes, and he rubbed his sleeve furiously across them, because he didn’t want to miss a moment of this.
“I like taking my time,” said Lucius, undoing a couple of buttons and very evidently taking advantage of the easier access to his chest with three fingers. “Use anything you like, palm or fingertips.” He raised his hand to his lips and licked thoroughly at the palm, then undid a couple more of the buttons and slipped the hand in.
Severus watched the long lazy bulge of Lucius’s prick rise gracefully.
Lucius opened an eye. “Well, go on then. If you want to, follow my lead. See if you like touching your nipples and thinking of me.”
“Do you?” asked Severus, trying to distract himself, and having no intention of displaying himself at a disadvantage. Even if he ached.
Lucius laughed. “Of course I like touching my nipples and thinking of me. I mean, who wouldn’t? I’m beautiful, in case that has escaped your notice.”
Severus felt his balls began to tighten. He wriggled restlessly. “Show me!” he gasped again.
“You really want to watch me indulge myself, Severus?”
Severus groaned.
Lucius’s long fingers slid out and neatly undid each of the remaining buttons. Languidly he pushed at the robe until he was naked, gleaming in the dimness, framed in the green light and the dark shadow of his own robe. A hand tugged the fall of hair in front. “This also feels pleasant,” he added, letting the hair poke through his fingers like a brush-tip, and stroking it over his chest.
Severus had no reason to doubt that.
Severus wanted Lucius to pour all that hair over his naked body, and the only thing putting him off was that he would have to be, well, naked, and he knew he didn’t come up to standard in the nipple (and everything else) department. He had the right number of organs, but that was about the only thing he’d got right. He was sallow and dark and ugly where Lucius was creamy and pale and perfect.
“I think that’s enough of the preliminaries,” said Lucius, not even the slightest bit breathless, as he lowered a hand to his own erection.
Even Lucius’s prick was beautiful. A smooth, rosy, even colour all the way, rising steadily from a soft nest of blond hair, just as graceful as any other part of Lucius’s lovely body. Severus watched the hand stroke along in a blatant display of ownership.
He compared that organ with the distorted (well, it felt distorted) and leaking thing concealed beneath his own clothes. He’d never looked at it in this state (he’d been barely aware of it in this state), but at the moment it felt as if every drop of blood in his body had rushed into it. It was probably, he considered gloomily, purple. Like a bruise. A lumpy throbbing purple thing standing straight up from a thin white body.
Slipping a hand stealthily under his robe and into his pants, he rubbed it. His eyes closed. It probably looked awful, and he had no desire to wave it at Lucius, but it felt fantastic. His fingers squeezed and pulled and stroked.
He looked at Lucius’s face. Shameless, and very proud. And not blushing even a tiny bit. Of course.
Severus’s own face was blushing with every other drop of blood in his body, he realised. He sobbed and gasped and... let go, because he couldn’t bear to do it again and miss seeing it. He withdrew his hand from temptation, whining slightly.
He couldn’t stop watching; the delicious torture of watching Lucius’s hand stroking and stroking seemed to go on for hours. Lucius’s didn’t go and leak all over the place.
The light just caught a trace of moisture on the tip. Just enough to accentuate the grace and beauty of the shape, and not a drop more. Probably for the same reason that Lucius’s armpits weren’t gushing with sweat and his were: Lucius just got things right.
“Mm,” said Lucius. “Delightful as this is, I fear Crabbe and Goyle may be getting to the end of their chapter. I must bring myself to a swift conclusion.”
Even as he stroked faster, he made no more sound. Severus was rather impressed. Every time hand reached tip, Lucius squeezed tightly; his throat quivered and his eyelids fluttered. Yesterday, Severus had not known such an act was possible, and now it was being performed in front of him like a lewd work of art.
At last, Lucius said, “now.” His head fell back, liquid spurted from his prick with a moment’s glitter in the spell-light, and he made no sound but a long sigh.
Desperately trying to conceal his own lack of self-control, Severus stuffed both hands onto the billowing cloth between his legs and rubbed frantically. It didn’t feel as good as his hand on it, but pressure was all he needed, and little shuddering grunts were spilling out of his mouth, and he was...
“What on earth are you doing, Severus?” Lucius complained mildly. “Surely it would be more comfortable to do it the way I did. And you’re making the bed shake.”
“Ugly. Don’t look,” muttered Severus, with a small corner of his brain wondering why under stress he talked like his father.
“Nobody’s telling you to show yourself off if you’ve not much to show off, but hands just feel better on it,” said Lucius, dragging Severus’s wrists back. “Just undo a few buttons, here, I’ll do it, and just slip your hand in.”
Severus’s cock and hand found each other and clung together with absolutely no intervention from his brain, which was lucky. He didn’t need his brain. He just needed—didn’t have time to pull or stroke—just squeeze and—squeeze—and—oh, yes!—gushing so hard he’d probably drown in it—there’d be nothing left behind but a little pile of dry dust—
—and he cried with relief, clinging on to Lucius with the last of his strength.
“All right, don’t take on so,” murmured Lucius. “For goodness’ sake, it’s like having a bloody puppy making puddles in the bed,” he said, reaching for his wand.
“Wasn’t crying. Just...leaking a bit,” said Severus, with as much dignity as he could manage. It was true: he didn’t feel sad, just the endless relief of being able to let go. His body had done what it needed to do, all that tension had melted away, and he wanted to sleep. He was dimly aware that Lucius was drying him off.
Lucius must have either carried him back to bed or left him outside the door for the house-elves to do it.
Lucius stalked his dreams that night, priapic and elegant at once, but Severus woke up alone.
He knew something had changed because he woke up with both hands full of himself and no desire to reach for a book.
Instead of breakfast, he went to the library and researched his change in circumstances. Under ‘deviations’ he found ‘excessive self-abuse may cause insanity’. After a few minutes looking it up without success, he remembered Dumbledore’s obscure hints about ‘polluting’ one’s ‘organ’. What was ‘excessive’ anyway? Damn all books that didn’t specify properly! He started to count nervously: twice yesterday, with Lucius, and another two this morning just thinking about it. Well, he’d assume, provisionally, that his addiction wasn’t reaching dangerous levels.
Work was a satisfactory distraction, especially since it was Transfigurations, and he had to work obsessively at one of his worst subjects.
“Oh, come on, Mr Snape! Turning sheets into fishing-net is one of the simplest large-scale transfigurations anyone can do. Pull yourself together!”
He could manage it, in fact. However, he never quite learned what to do about the thick black ooze that coated his fishing-net.
Wandwork still didn’t come naturally to him; his wand was more reliable by now, but he always had to think, he could never rely on it working all the time. Ollivander had said that ‘wand-stammer’ almost always wore off with time and effort, and the pauses before fluency were getting shorter, but they were still perceptible.
Every time he put his wand down after a burst of furious activity, he remembered Lucius. He was a grown-up now—or he’d been “grown-up” by Lucius, he wasn’t sure which. His prick stiffened every time he thought of it, and that wasn’t the only thing that excited him.
Halfway through the lesson, he went to get a piece of rag from the cupboard to try to mop up the slime, and happened to walk behind Sirius Black, noticing that Black’s robe was falling loose from his smooth neck. He imagined putting his mouth on the warm skin. He thought my god, what if he’s naked under his robe and then none of us are wearing very much and then he wanted to strip every boy in the room and just look.
Think of Lucius! he commanded his drooling prick, because he shouldn’t be thinking that way about anyone else, and because he knew that wearing nothing-much under your robes was normal wizardly behaviour he shouldn’t be sparing a second thought for.
Nor should he be thinking about that strange, musky, just-a-bit-wild-animal smell that Remus Lupin got occasionally, or noticing that James Potter took his glasses off to rub his nose sometimes and had a gentle, goofy, endearingly-myopic look that made Severus just now wonder what he’d look like being kissed.
Obviously he’d gone a bit too near the ‘excessive’ side of things. Two was clearly too many. Good job he’d read that book, or he wouldn’t have known. He’d have to ration himself: maybe once a day in future.
How often did Lucius do it? He’d have to ask.
His prick tapped at his belly and wondered if it could have an advance on tomorrow’s one.
“Reverse transformations,” McGonagall commanded.
Lifting a shaky wand, he did.
“Mr Snape!”
He supposed he had ruined that rather impressively. For some reason, now he’d turned it back, the oozy substance had beslimed the sheet as well.
“That wasn’t in the book,” he muttered.
“I’ve no doubt it wasn’t, Mr Snape.”
She kept him behind. It took half-an-hour to reverse the oozy black stuff out of existence. He’d thought, furiously, Why can’t she leave it for Filch to clean up? but he knew exactly what she’d think of that.
By the time it was lunchtime, Severus was sweating and trembling and rock-hard. He just wanted ‘it’, whatever it was. ‘The Lucius feeling’, he called it to himself, because Lucius knew what it was, Lucius had made that strange, furtive feeling into an object of beauty when Severus watched it.
Knowing that he couldn’t do it, because he wanted to keep hold of his sanity, he couldn’t think of anything else. If he had another one, it might tip the balance. If he let himself feel the pleasure, the next stop might be madness, and he still had so much to read before he started—what—chewing books, dribbling and staring into space.
So he went to lunch. It was a pleasant lunch, but he barely knew what it was. He was too busy trying to keep his hands out of his lap.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, he was plagued by Gryffindors all afternoon. Quite apart from Professor McGonagall’s teaching style (firm but fair, as long as one was a Gryffindor), Black had enchanted his quill to leak ink every time Severus raised his hand to show he knew the answer to a question, which was an unwarrantable intrusion on his normal behaviour. His robe was covered with ink, and people were pointing at him and sniggering. It wasn’t as if he had wardrobes-full of clothes, either. That ruined History of Magic and Charms for him, and it was a bloody miracle he didn’t get detention.
Not that he got a peaceful evening. He tried three of the most powerful commercial domestic cleaners he’d managed to steal from Filch. Just in case any of them were too powerful, he stole Black’s Quidditch robe from the laundry and used it for testing. All of them could remove ink if he poured it on Black’s robe, but none of them could remove it if he enchanted it on.
He spent four hours collecting ingredients, testing and brewing, and ended up with a very powerful Potion for cleaning up magical spills.
Actually, it wasn’t a bad evening. Concentrated his mind and hands wonderfully, because it wasn’t the sort of thing you could brew with half your attention.
At midnight, he staggered into bed, devoutly thankful that he’d managed to sidestep his new addiction. Tomorrow was another day.
At half-past-midnight, he sat bolt upright, crying.
In the dream he’d just had, he’d been sitting about talking to Lucius about History of Magic homework (a three-foot-long penance that interested neither of them), and suddenly he’d realised that all of his Gryffindor enemies except Pettigrew were sitting on the grass with them, having a civilised and friendly conversation (which should have given him a clue that this was a dream right away, of course). Suddenly, all of them had had robes running with ink. “Curses,” Lucius had said mildly, and shrugged off his robe with graceful ease. So had Black, and then Potter, and finally Lupin. And then they looked at him. His naked, aroused, ugly body would certainly put paid to any friendly conversation, and he was sitting there covered in inky clothes and he couldn’t stand it. Then Lucius, Black, Potter and Lupin fell together in a graceful heap and started to touch each other. And he woke up.
He couldn’t sleep, not like this, and he didn’t dare even touch his prick, and he felt too shattered even to read.
Five minutes later, he padded up to Lucius’s room, crawled inside the green curtains (after applying a silencing spell so he wouldn’t be heard telling Lucius about it), and patted Lucius on the shoulder.
“Severus, what on earth is the matter?” complained Lucius sleepily. “Couldn’t it wait until the morning?”
“I’m going mad, and I’ll probably h-have gone mad by the morning,” said Severus, trying to keep a thin trace of irritation over the screaming hysteria he felt threatening.
Lucius sighed, called light, leaned out of the curtains and clapped his hands. Predictably, this brought Crabbe and Goyle, and he told them to go away and send him a house-elf.
Even the thought of meeting a house-elf, much less Crabbe and Goyle, when he felt like this, was a bit much. Severus darted into the bed and scrambled over Lucius. Shivering, he dived under the covers until the elf turned up.
He could hear Lucius ordering something, in a low voice, ending with, “...and get on with it or I’ll make you set fire to your feet.” Oh well, that was reassuringly normal. Lucius never did dreadful things to the house-elves himself. That was their job.
A few minutes later, the house-elf came in with a hot drink in a mug, and passed it to Lucius, who passed it to Severus.
It smelt nice, lemony. He sipped. “What is it?”
“Hot toddy. Lemon, whisky and honey.”
“I don’t need to be an alcoholic b-besides whatever else I am!”
“One drink won’t turn you into an alcoholic, Severus. Now be sensible and tell me what’s troubling you.”
“What we did. I looked it up. It’s going to make me go mad, and quite frankly I think it’s already working. I—I mean I think about it all the time, and even...even those Gryffindors. I mean, I know doing it more than twice a day might make me go mad...” He shivered, and took a big gulp of his drink, which almost made him sneeze but did make him feel a little better.
“Have you been reading that absurd sex book in the library?”
“H-how do you know it isn’t true?” Severus whispered, wanting to believe.
“Based on outdated information, and generally wrong. A hundred years ago, when the first edition of that book was written, people thought masturbation caused insanity, because there were an awful lot of people who masturbated in insane asylums. If it was true, every male your age or over at Hogwarts would be on the way to a loony bin by now.”
Severus looked at him.
“Every boy, and some girls, go a bit wild about it when they first discover it,” Lucius admitted. “I mean, when I was your age, I was probably doing it about eight times a day sometimes. Made it sore once. Absolutely no effect on my brain as far as I can tell.”
Severus gave a long sigh of relief and tossed back his drink at one gulp. Of course Lucius’s brain is perfect: he’s never put up with less than perfection in his life.
“Why did they think it made people go mad?”
“Because there are a lot of insane people that do it an awful lot. As far as I can tell, they’re not exactly surrounded with much to grab their attention, but that’s always in reach.”
Severus handed his glass to Lucius, who put it down. “A-and I’m thinking of lots of boys.”
“That’s also normal. I spent hours working out which boys at Hogwarts would meet my exacting standards. Leaving out hoi polloi, the Gryffindor moralists, lack of looks ranging from merely plain to unutterably hideous...”
Severus flinched minutely. Lucius appeared not to have noticed yet, and he was not going to mention it.
“...the poor, unwashed, illiterate, lacking in aesthetic taste, tediously sport-obsessed, over-talkative or half-mute. That narrowed down the list somewhat. Then there was one with an irritating laugh, and I couldn’t stand Winderley’s family, and Tatham wore socks with his sandals. But I considered everyone and made an informed choice.”
The thought crossed Severus’s mind that the only boy as perfect as Lucius was...Lucius.
“So you see you’re perfectly normal,” Lucius drawled. “If that was all, why not go back to bed.”
Severus sighed. “All right.” He felt as if he were an overfilled glass of butterbeer trying to make its way somewhere without frothing and spilling all over the floor, but if Lucius wanted him to go back to bed he’d go back to bed.
He rolled his way over Lucius, and suddenly his prick was rubbing against Lucius’s thin nightshirt and warm skin, very lightly, and he fell down, almost fainting against Lucius’s neck. He licked.
Lucius gave a long, exaggerated groan. “Does nobody at this school ever sleep?”
Severus was too busy to answer that. A long lock of blond hair got where he wanted his mouth to be, so he bunched the hair up and hauled it back, and set to work licking himself into a frenzy all over Lucius’s neck. He nearly wanted to bite, but he didn’t want to ruin all that flawless skin.
“Don’t slobber, Severus,” protested Lucius. His voice sounded slightly less clear than normal.
Opening his mouth as wide as he could, Severus grabbed a mouthful and sucked. Bliss. As near as he could get to breathing Lucius in. His mouth and prick were soaking. He tensed up, quivered—too much air and nothing where he needed something to rub—couldn’t quite...
Lucius sighed, almost complainingly, and lowered both elegant hands to Severus’s buttocks and gripped tightly, fingers pushing Severus down hard, clamping his thighs around Lucius’s leg. The hard fingers were no crueller than the feeling hammering its way out of Severus’s prick in a fierce and delicious flood. It felt so good it was nearly painful.
Squeezed me out like an orange... Severus thought, as the...the...whatever-it-was jolted through him and left him limp and exhausted.
I really must ask Lucius what one of those is called, he thought, just as he fell into a deep, contented sleep.
He was surprised to wake up in Lucius’s bed.
“Good morning.” Lucius looked at him with perfect calm.
“Can I have another one yet?” Severus asked.
Lucius’s beautiful face was a composed mask. “Another what, Severus?”
“You haven’t told me what to call it yet,” Severus pointed out logically.
“Doesn’t it say in the book?” Lucius raised an eyebrow.
“Well, there’s a lot of stuff about ‘the moment of union’, but I’m not sure whether that’s what it means.”
“The more formal term is ‘an orgasm’. And no, you can’t.”
“Why not?” demanded Severus indignantly. He had just decided to devote every bit of spare time he had, after potion-brewing and indiscriminate reading, to doing it with Lucius. His body had been having orgasms at him for about a week before Lucius had shown him what it was all about, but they’d been nothing to compare with the real thing (Lucius).
Lucius looked down his nose. He had less of one, relatively, to look down, but he’d been practicing it for longer. “You really are terribly young,” he said.
“Oh, not that again!” Severus snapped.
“You are too young,” said Lucius. “In any case, what would the world be like if everyone spent all their time in bed with unsuitable people?”
Stickier. Happier, Severus thought.
“Does that mean you have to go to bed with somebody suitable?” asked Severus, slightly worried.
“Not yet,” said Lucius. “The duty-to-the-bloodline bit can wait for the next few years. Everybody knows I’ll get round to it sooner or later. But all this incessant pouncing simply isn’t on, Severus. Suppose I were doing something important.”
“Like lessons?”
“No, not like lessons. More important than that.”
“Like waiting for the thirtieth minute I’ve been stirring something to add an ingredient, and at the twenty-ninth minute some twit comes in and asks me a question?”
“Like that.”
“What’s your thing you do, then?”
Lucius raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“Potions, or art, or reading? I haven’t noticed yet,” Severus explained.
“I suppose one might say politics,” Lucius mused.
“Well, you’re hardly going to have a meeting in here,” said Severus.
“Are we going to have this argument all the time?” said Lucius, as if enormously tired at the very idea.
“Not if you don’t like,” said Severus, remembering that Lucius had the power to give or withhold what he wanted.
“If that’s all, I should think breakfast is currently being served,” said Lucius.
“Can I have a kiss, then? A proper one?” Severus asked wistfully.
“I suppose so.... No, no, lie down, we are going to do this properly or not at all,” expostulated Lucius, as Severus jumped on him.
“What was wrong with that?” Severus muttered sulkily.
“All elbows, knees and nose. Lie down and let a master go to work,” said Lucius.
Severus lay down and waited, shutting his eyes. The first kiss brushed his lips so lightly he barely felt it. Then he was sure he felt lips on his, warm and delicate, parting to sigh into his mouth.
“All right,” said Lucius, extracting himself. “You can try tongue now, if you wish.”
Kissing with tongue wasn’t altogether easy, but he liked it, prodding and sucking recklessly at the smooth languor of Lucius’s tongue. Having something to go at, in however limited terms, made him tingle and throb and ache in that part of him that wasn’t going to get any attention.
“You don’t have to be so rough,” Lucius told him, the next time Severus stopped to pant.
“But I want...”
“Later.”
“Why not now?”
“There’s more to life than...”
Severus kissed him, stroking his tongue in and out in a way meant to ensure Lucius held still for it, but then shuddering in turn as every lick-and-quiver went down between his legs, and suddenly his tongue was the wet pulsing length of his prick, silky and rich and good as it left him soaked and gasping on the bed. This time, he realised, it had been easier to reach; since he was warm and relaxed from sleep, it had taken very little effort for the stolen pleasure to flow through him.
“Sorry, Lucius,” he admitted sleepily. “I didn’t mean to do it again.”
He heard Lucius whisper, “Such a messy child,” as he cleaned Severus up, and left.
His next few attempts to get in touch with Lucius were foiled by Crabbe and Goyle.
Since he was already getting a fairly clear idea that Lucius did exactly what he pleased, he didn’t push it.
At nights, he put up silencing charms and did it until he was sore, thinking of Lucius, but it wasn’t what he really wanted.
He was rewarded for his reticence by Lucius coming to collect him a few days later. Lucius led him back to the big green bed without a word.
He restrained his desire to jump on Lucius immediately.
“You’re learning,” said Lucius, with a small nod. “Maybe I should teach you a little about what sex is all about. Well, you’re hardly experienced,” Lucius murmured. “A little frottage and masturbation...” and had to pause to explain what those things were.
“What can we do apart from touch?” asked Severus.
“You really must pay better attention,” said Lucius. “The first time you were in bed with me, I suggested people can use their mouths.” He lay back on the bed. “I may regret suggesting this, but you may suck me if you wish.”
He did his best. Lucius’s prick was large and beautiful, a pleasure to look at, and where he would have begged and pleaded, Lucius merely awaited adoration as his due. Letting him look as much as he wanted to, which was quite a lot.
Gently, he lowered his mouth and kissed Lucius’s balls. If Lucius had done that to him, he’d have lost his self-control entirely. Then he took a long taste of the thing itself.
The taste was marvellous, salt and clean and strong. He took as long as he could just licking his way up the shaft, but at last he couldn’t resist any longer, and took it in at a huge gulp. A few seconds of greedy bliss, getting it as far down as he could, and he drew back to breathe (resenting the necessity) and crammed his mouth back on.
“Get off me, you peasant!” He recognised the most clipped and unwelcoming of Lucius’s tones before he could process the words, and loosened his mouth.
“W-what did I do?”
“Only bit me,” Lucius grumbled softly. “Not your fault, I suppose.”
“Can I try again?” Severus asked. “Gently?”
“No, thank you.” Polite, but definite.
Severus nodded and stood up, rather shakily.
Lucius sighed. “Oh, sit down. I’m just a little twitchy about teeth. You deserve something. I suppose you may fuck me if you choose.”
Severus looked blank.
“For goodness sake, Severus. Don’t you know anything?” Lucius pried his buttocks apart and arranged himself over a pillow.
Severus’s heart, and prick, leapt. He had learned enough to stay still, so he did.
“Oil your hands with the scented oil in the jar by the bed. Then you may approach me—slowly!—and slide one finger in to open me up. You have one chance,” specified Lucius unnecessarily. “If you hurt me, I won’t let you lay a finger on me ever again.”
“One chance,” agreed Severus. He warmed his hands, rubbing the oil in, then he inserted his finger into the shadows between all that paleness. He groaned with pleasure, and just kept going. Slowly and delicately and sweetly, caressing Lucius’s insides until he knew every bend, every tight silky inch, every slight imperfection—Lucius moaned. For a shocked instant, he wondered if it was pain, and then realised that Lucius was moving to get more of it.
“Another finger,” said Lucius. He obliged.
After some while, he withdrew his fingers.
“Prepare yourself with the oil,” said Lucius. Severus found the orders given by his aristocratic lover reassuring: Lucius wouldn’t let him do it wrong.
Severus prepared himself as best he could, and poised his prick ready to enter.
“Now,” said Lucius.
He did, trying for a smooth hard stroke. Lucius was hot and fierce all around him, and when he looked down he could see his prick disappearing into Lucius—his own ugliness disappearing into Lucius’s beauty, darkness into brightness. It felt wonderful, and he didn’t even have to worry about Lucius getting a brief and disconcerting glimpse of his unprepossessing masculinity. Maybe another time he could do it face-to-face, have Lucius’s beautiful face to look into as he came.
“Get your hair out of my face, Severus. You can only get away with hair that long if you wash it more regularly than once a year.” Severus, who had the sort of hair that looked lank and dirty however often or seldom he washed it, sighed, and twitched it away.
He reached for Lucius, disappointed to find that Lucius had taken himself well in hand. This time, there wasn’t just a sigh to indicate Lucius’s orgasm, but a strong smooth ripple of muscles that finished him off as well. He wanted to lie on, or in, Lucius for ever, or at least until he got his breath back enough to try it again.
“Thank you, Severus, that will be all for tonight,” said Lucius.
Severus eased himself off. Lucius rolled over.
Lucius even looked beautiful limp, wet and sticky. Rather unfair, thought Severus. He wanted to lie down beside Lucius, curl up, and go to sleep. Could he get away with appearing to be too tired to move?
“That will be all,” murmured Lucius.
Apparently he’d missed his chance on that. He sighed and reached for his robe. “Can we do it face to face next time? Can people do that?”
“Yes they can, no you can’t, that will be all,” said Lucius.
“I wish I knew more about sex,” muttered Severus, as he left, trying to console himself with the thought that at least he knew where he was with Lucius.
He hadn’t thought Lucius had heard his parting remark, but on the Thursday that week he found a parcel on his bed.
There was a note inside:
I went home and ransacked the shelves at the Manor. You need an education in these matters from somebody who is not mired in the Victorian Age. PS Don’t get the pages sticky. LM
Five books, all about sex. Terminology. Anatomy. Known practices, exotic and otherwise. He was vaguely surprised; it had always seemed to him that Lucius had practically invented the whole thing. Maybe the world out there wasn’t filled with people who agreed with Dumbledore about perversion.
Unfortunately, at Hogwarts Dumbledore was the one who counted. Outside, for all Severus knew, there could be libraries and libraries full of the sort of books Lucius had, with pictures. When Dumbledore had grown up, that potato-faced Muggle in a black dress had been on the throne of Britain. He’d seen a still picture of her, and she hadn’t looked as though she knew what sex was, although she must have had it, at least for reasons of succession.
Dumbledore was an autocrat. Everyone within these heavy, warded stone walls paid attention to his decrees. Wizard, witch, ghost or animal behaved as if he were unquestioned king of his domain.
For a wistful second, Severus considered stealing one of Lucius’s books and placing it in the library next to the sex-according-to-Dumbledore book. No: either he’d get into trouble or the other books (feeling territorial) might actually eat it.
Severus shrugged off the thought of Hogwarts and the wider world: there was nothing he could do about it now, but it was a great comfort to realise there was a wider world out there.
Returning his attention to the book, he paid particular attention to the chapter about fellatio. Maybe if he learned to keep his teeth out of the way, Lucius would let him do it again.
Between reading and school-work, Severus didn’t get the chance to ask Lucius the next day.
On Saturday, Severus washed his hair very carefully, rather disappointed that five minutes later it looked just as it always did. Of course, wizards’ hair tended to have a strong opinion about how it should be, but it seemed unfair that this should apply to greasiness as well as length and cut.
He found a deserted section of corridor, and practiced trying to walk like Lucius, with an arrogant sweep of robes covering a smooth glide. He doubted it would convince Lucius, but he’d be happy if he grew up to convince everyone else he had a sense of style. Not in clothes, he didn’t care about that, but in the sense of being Somebody. Being able to walk into a room and Be Somebody.
Then he went back to the library. He could barely remember how wonderfully fresh it had seemed to him at first, now that the books were old friends. He’d reread everything he was allowed to read about three times, and must really start working on how to reach the books he wasn’t allowed. He had a happy hour or two rereading, though.
He grabbed a sandwich, because he had plenty to do and didn’t want to have to listen to the usual inane chatter during lunch.
After three hours brewing his Potion du jour (Cessabalbutionis, because his own occasional stammer irritated him), he went in search of Lucius.
“I’ve come to return the books, Lucius. Thank you very much.” He tucked them, wrapped, under Lucius’s bed.
Lucius was lounging on the bed doing up his best robes. Damn. “Would you like to come to the meeting, Severus?”
“No. I hate politics,” Severus told him.
“You’re not telling me what I want to hear,” Lucius said.
“I still hate politics.”
Lucius sighed. “Sit down.”
Severus sat down on the bed, sulkily.
Lucius raised his voice. “Crabbe, Goyle, would you go on ahead please.”
Lucius’s tame anthropoids left the vicinity.
“What can I say to you to make you a fellow-reader of the Book?” Lucius asked.
“I don’t think there’s anything. Politics bores me silly. I’m too busy reading real books to want to listen to all those speeches and stuff.”
Lucius sighed. “Lie down.”
Severus lay down. Lucius unbuttoned Severus’s robe, using a spell.
Severus wished he was wearing better underpants. His had started off well, but were the veterans of a hundred visits to the laundry. They were large, grey and unappealing.
“Those are repulsive. Remove them immediately,” said Lucius.
He did.
Lucius regarded him dispassionately.
“Are you going to come to the meeting?” he asked again.
“Even if you’ve taken all my clothes off, no, Lucius,” said Severus, noticing his prick was beginning to swell at being naked in Lucius’s beautiful presence.
“Oh, I think you’re going to come to the meeting,” Lucius said, and wrapped his hand round Severus’s prick.
“No. I hate politics,” said Severus, panting.
“Are you going to come to the meeting?” Lucius asked again, beginning to move his hand firmly up and down.
“I...hate...politics,” Severus gasped.
Lucius removed his hand from its task, spat into the palm (he even spat elegantly), and replaced it.
Lucius seemed to have forgotten about the conversation, to Severus’s relief. He’d never had the luxury of Lucius’s bare hand on his bare prick before, because Lucius usually made him finish by rubbing against something and then complained about the mess. Stronger and statelier than his own; a hand that had never been denied anything it reached out for. Even his shame at his own ugly body (particularly that part of it) couldn’t stop Severus revelling in the feel of it. Lucius knew just how to grip to drive him demented.
“Harder!” gasped Severus.
Lucius did it harder, without speaking. Severus forgot all about meetings, about anything but how good his prick felt in a warm, firm hand. Lucius was giving it to him just short of pain, and it was bliss, he could feel the come burning its way up from his aching balls, and it felt perfect. He wanted to stay on this piercing edge of feeling for ever, luxuriating in Lucius wanking him, never wanting it to stop...
“Are you coming to the meeting?” snapped Lucius.
“Yes, yes, yes!” howled Severus, and boiled over like a cauldron left unattended.
“Messy brat,” Lucius murmured, although at least he had the grace to keep working his hand until Severus had finished.
“Want to sleep,” murmured Severus protestingly as Lucius clothed and cleaned him with two swift spells.
“No,” said Lucius firmly. “You said you were coming to the meeting, and that is just what you are going to do.”
Severus opened an eye. “Can we do that again sometimes, if I start coming to meetings?”
“I should certainly not become close to somebody that does not share my aims and ideals. I should think you deserve an occasional treat if you’re one of us.”
Severus decided it was probably worth feigning a mild interest in politics, just for the perks. Shrugging his robe on without bothering about the underwear, he started looking for his boots.
The meeting was small and crowded and rather furtive. Everybody else stared at the stage at the front. They’d left a small-but-distinct gap around him and Lucius.
“Do I smell of ingredients again?” whispered Severus.
“What—no,” said Lucius. “We’re a small, loyal, very discreet group. Only full members are completely trusted. You wouldn’t have got in here at all if it wasn’t for me.”
Severus nodded.
“Here’s his Lordship now,” said Lucius, as a middle-aged man made a decisive and visible entrance, sweeping up to the stage.
The meeting was extremely dull. For some reason, his Lordship was obsessed with the Muggle question, and it wasn’t as if that was a big part of Severus’s life. There were a lot of them out there, of course, and they probably ran most of the world in their Muggle-ish way, but if one was living in a wizarding community there was no real need to bother about them too much.
After about half-an-hour of unmitigated boredom, the tail-end of a phrase caught Severus’s ear. “...later, after the elimination of the non-magical community”.
He sat up. That couldn’t mean what it sounded like it meant. He was really going to have to ask Lucius some very serious—
At this point, Lucius leaned over and kissed him. Hard. Lucius’s tongue filled his mouth, and Lucius’s hand rubbed his crotch, and every single solitary thought he’d had for the last hour flew out of his head. Lucius just kept kissing (doesn’t he know if he keeps that up I’m going to...) and rubbing (...going to...) and unbuttoning his robe, and oh! for the second time in one day his prick was in Lucius’s hand. Lucius stopped kissing. Just for a fraction of a second Severus realised that Lucius wasn’t ashamed of him, Lucius was prepared to touch him in front of—a roomful of people were—his prick was spitting long juicy strings of come. As he panted, sighed, and finished with a long shudder, he realised everyone was looking at him, and he’d done it all over his robe, and the ground—and there was a splash on his boots, somehow.
He felt a little cold (did I let Lucius down?) before he realised that the meeting had ended. The man beside him shook his hand, and said, “I think his Lordship was well on form today”. The lady on the other side, in a big hat, said, “We need to safeguard the future for our children.”
Severus sighed, as Lucius patted him dry and tucked him away. Somehow he’d got away with it—or Lucius had got away with it. He’d believed before that Lucius could get away with anything, but he hadn’t quite realised how far it went.
But it might be worth coming to the next few meetings. Not that this would be likely to happen again, but he liked to watch Lucius.
At the next meeting, Lucius told him to pay attention.
His Lordship had a good deal of visible presence, which was almost stifling in the crowded room. Well, Severus had known it was a secret society when he joined it. He took the opportunity to press his thigh against Lucius’s, and waited for it to be over.
“Have you never wondered why we are happy to skulk in our one settlement, our one school, our three London alleyways, and grant the rest of our island to Muggles? We are asked to believe that we make all these concessions benevolently, to protect a people weaker than ourselves; that fool of a Minister puffs herself up and smiles all over her complacent face, flattering us that it is a proof of our strength that every day she hands over another piece of our sacred birthright to that pack of ignorant savages.”
Severus had in fact never wondered that. When he was a child, he’d known that thirty miles away from home there were a race of exotic magical cripples, with their rustling paper money and bizarre invisible lightning and strange Healers with knives. Thirty miles might as well have been five hundred. Why should he care? Lucius was smiling a secret smile beside him, and as long as Lucius smiled Severus might as well hang around.
His Lordship was still going on about it: “Those Muggles who spread and spread like a cancer, strangling half our sites of power in concrete and iron, pouring filth into our waters, filling the ether itself with the invisible rays that carry their moronic jabberings until not even the air is fit for a wizard to breathe—not content with this, they even contaminate our blood, throttling our power at its source, weakening us with their foul miscegenation until magic cannot even pass from one generation to the next.”
Severus was distinctly doubtful about this. As far as he knew the lightning-thing was only dangerous in Muggle homes, and they had to push a button to fire it off. There were quite a few charms that offered resistance to lightning that wizards could presumably use if a Muggle tried to use it on them, but would the wizard need to? He’d have probably have made the Muggles forget his very existence and just wandered away. Muggles filling the air with noises? Well, a young witch hundreds of years ago had enchanted the wind to speak the name of her betraying lover, and that had got everywhere. People would certainly have heard by now. Muggle words would be popping out of the air all over the place.
Lucius brushed the back of Severus’s hand with a fingertip, and Severus forgot what he was thinking about.
“And it is these people that ask to be protected from the very sight of wizards!” went on his Lordship, furiously. “Spreading through earth, water, air and blood until we have nothing and nowhere to call our own, besieging us from without and corrupting us from within, and they whine to Bagnold that we are too powerful, that they must be spared even having to acknowledge our existence! And we give them everything they ask! Even an animal will vomit up a poison or fight a disease, and we roll over tamely and give them our strength, our land, our life-blood, as soon as they ask for it!”
Severus looked at Lucius. He could not imagine Lucius, or his family, ever being in danger of giving things away. Oh, he didn’t precisely mean Lucius was ungenerous, but Lucius had always had a very clear idea of What Was Due To a Malfoy, and Severus couldn’t imagine him giving much of that to lesser beings.
He missed the next twenty minutes or so of the speech—who’d bother listening to politics when they could look at Lucius, after all? Even the way Lucius tilted his head back to listen, letting the soft shadows move gently under the pale shine of his hair—that would be worth the boredom all on its own, let alone the promise that maybe, just maybe, if Severus was good, he might touch.
The next month or so’s meetings were fairly similar. Lucius’s hair, and voice, and hand, and thigh, and even foot, were all quite capable of distracting Severus’s minimal interest in politics.
He asked Lucius about that, after a meeting, and Lucius said, “Oh, it’s all right. There is always too much distraction at a public meeting. What you need to do is speak to him in private, and then you’ll be able to see what he’s getting at.”
To his surprise, Lucius arranged a private meeting for him the following day. He even missed lessons. But of course Lucius could fix everything.
His Lordship was not there when he arrived, so of course he satisfied his curiosity by looking around the room the house-elf left him in.
It was full of beautiful and ugly and, above all, strange things. A cast-iron raven with a huge spike of a beak stabbed through a huge pile of papers, which he thought was a rather bizarre letter-rack until it raised its head and cawed. A pair of skeletons arranged with their arms round each other, posed for an endless dance; posed so well that Severus thought he could almost hear the clack of a bony foot against the floor as soon as he stopped looking. An exquisitely-carved wooden box, smelling of rotting meat, with a large keyhole from which issued a steady stream of buzzing flies—and a potted plant next to it, with jaws that kept biting at the flies.
He paused beside a miniature courtyard with an endlessly-renewing fountain of something wet and dark. He sniffed: not blood, although it looked rather like it, and it didn’t smell like anything he’d ever brewed—and where did it go, because it never stopped flowing, and it wasn’t building up on the floor of the sculpture...
After ten minutes, he noticed that the room was a library as well as a museum. The walls were lined with large, fat, blessedly unfamiliar books. Also, rather curiously, there was a glass-fronted cupboard that seemed to contain nothing but dust.
Severus had taken barely four months to read everything he was supposed to read in the Hogwarts library.
A moment later, he was comfortably ensconced in one of the chairs, deep in 101 Uses for Eyes, Teeth and Hair. None of them seemed to involve keeping to the original owner’s head, but it was very interesting, if not a little disturbing.
A throat-clearing noise. He raised his face guiltily, and saw a familiar tall, arrogant, well-dressed figure.
“Oh, I’m sorry...”
His Lordship waved his apology away. “Ah, Severus. Ambrosius and Helena’s boy, aren’t you?”
He nodded.
“Good blood,” said his Lordship.
Severus shrugged. He’d looked at Lucius’s copy of Who’s Wizarding Who once, and seen his own one-line entry (“Snape, Ambrosius m. Johnson, Helena 1958, 1 s, Severus, b. 1960.”) and Lucius’s three-page epic. He supposed he was pure-blooded, but it had never interested him. His eyes dropped back to his book.
“Of course,” said his Lordship, “you could borrow any volume in my library should you feel the need.”
Severus looked up.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Sir?” Severus thought ‘the man who’s in front at meetings’. He didn’t quite want to call the man ‘my Lord’ when he didn’t know who he was, but had the feeling it would be a very bad mistake to treat this man with, say, less respect than a teacher.
His Lordship smiled at him. “I am Lord Voldemort. I do understand that you’re less than interested in meetings, from what I saw of you and Lucius...” His rather roguish tone of voice gave no doubt that he was referring to the time Lucius pounced on Severus while he was giving a speech.
Severus blushed. “Did he get into trouble?”
“Of course not, Severus. Our Lucius is a bit of a law unto himself, isn’t he?”
Severus tingled. Nobody else could get away with some of the things Lucius did.
“I’m glad I have the chance to talk to you, Severus. You understand that a lot of the material I have to concentrate on in meetings is crowd-pleasing—most average wizards need to have the threat the Muggle world poses forced in front of their eyes before they see a reason to act.”
“What would you speak about if you could choose?” asked Severus, interested.
Lord Voldemort moved away from him slightly, and with a graceful flare of his robe assumed his public persona. “I would say to all of us that it is not just our own lives at stake, not just the future, but also the past. As the wizarding world makes more and more concessions to the sensibilities of the Muggles, more and more magic is classified as Dark, more and more of it is banned, more and more of it is lost! Five years at Hogwarts taught me nothing! Everything I learned, I had to find for myself. For years I have been travelling the world, trying to preserve the last fragments, the dying echoes of the voices of our forebears, the magics which, if they are Dark, are so only because they have been deliberately obscured, deliberately kept from us and from our children.”
For once, the rhetoric reached Severus. He’d rarely met any Muggles, and thought of them as poor cripples who could not counter the simplest of spells. His Lordship’s attempts to paint them as a threat had never convinced him. He had, however, met several wizards who thought that certain forms of knowledge should be destroyed.
Lord Voldemort went on. “The barbarians are at the gates of civilisation, Severus. Dumbledore’s lackeys will burn our books, will leave nothing but an otiose collection of conjurer’s tricks and rote-learning to replace centuries of knowledge. To balance that collection I will collect—the strength and glory of wizardry that will fall into ruin under the limitations of bureaucratic morality—you have not had the doubtful joy of dealing with the Ministry yet, I suppose?”
“No, sir.”
“My collections of curiosities and arcana are unparalleled, but...”
His Lordship gestured at the empty cupboard.
“...I would like a collection of vials of Potions in that cupboard. A collection of pure, lovely, lethal little jewels. I would like my collection to be the envy of the world, in this as so many other areas of endeavour. I think you should be the man to brew them for me, Severus.”
“I’m a schoolboy.”
Lord Voldemort was crouched down in front of him now, the way Severus’s father would for a civilised, grown-up conversation.
“I think you are capable of doing this job,” Lord Voldemort said intently. “Do you?”
This was, he thought, refreshing. Instead of ‘you shouldn’t even think about it’, he was being asked what he was capable of doing.
“With decent reference works and materials, probably.”
His Lordship went to the bookshelves and began tossing down books. “This, this and this. Don’t look at the later version, it’ll only confuse you at this point. Are you capable of ignoring the moralities you will have been given in place of an education?”
He nodded. This was going to take work.
He spent the next three months brewing Doloris, and its counterpart, Curationis.
Doloris contained distilled snake venom, spider jaws, lizard shadows, cat claws, a dog bite scraped off a used bone, malarial mosquitoes, the shriek of a disappointed salesman, a bruised peach, and an ingrown toenail. Since so many of the ingredients were notional, semi-visible or nebulous, it was a swine to harvest and a bitch to stir, remaining a sort of greyish fog until the last few minutes, when it suddenly turned into a clear red liquid.
Curationis contained sixteen different kinds of antivenin, spiderwebs, lizard tails, cat fur, the hair of the dog that bit you, ladybirds, the tears of a lawyer, a perfect peach, and a pair of comfortable shoes. It too was a swine to harvest and a bitch to stir, remaining a sort of greyish fog until the last few minutes, when it suddenly turned into a clear green liquid.
There. A perfect heal/harm pair. He’d like to see anyone else do that. Two gems for Lord Voldemort’s collection.
Lucius turned up just as he gave the two cauldrons the final stir. He narrowed his eyes. “Why did you want two Potions?” he asked. With a touch of modest pride, Severus explained about the paired Potions.
“Well done, Severus,” Lucius said. “If you wouldn’t mind making up a few extras, though. His Lordship’s servants are sometimes a little clumsy with breakable items, and one really can’t get the staff these days. I mean, if one hands delicate and precious objects over to somebody like Crabbe or Goyle, or to a house-elf, one would be lucky ever to see it again in one piece. So, just to save you the trouble of making extra for replacements, because I know how difficult it is...”
Severus sighed. What would a museum do with twenty separate vials of pain and another twenty of healing? He picked up a ladle and started to bottle the two Potions.
“Oh, and in future, Severus,” said Lucius, “in future he only wants the Dark stuff. Even Dumbledore wouldn’t forbid a healing Potion. We want to save endangered knowledge.”
Severus was a bit sorry about that. He liked the challenge of curing his own most devilish Potions.
Lucius snapped his fingers and acquired a house-elf to carry the results.
Severus shrugged. The interesting thing was the challenge: it would please him to see the result in his Lordship’s cupboard of venomous little jewels, but the challenge was the main thing.
Later that day, Severus almost put his foot through a mess of shards of glass and green liquid in the corridor outside his room. Maybe Lucius was right about breakable stuff.
“C’n you poss’bly make another set of Curationis, Sev’rus,” said Lucius, the next time he saw him. Lucius’s syllables were even more clipped-off than usual. He looked angry.
“But I—”
“I don’t want to hear it!” At his most autocratic. If Severus had been a house-elf, he’d be fearing for his ears just about now.
“Through your carelessness in bottling the last consignment,” said Lucius, “my servant found its fingers slipping on the wet surface of the bottle, and the contents were lost just outside your room. His Lordship was most displeased.”
“O-of course, Lucius.” Severus decided not to risk bargaining for Lucius’s sexual favours as usual. Something was telling him now would be a good time to back off.
With anybody else, he’d have got into an argument about his bottling skills. He prided himself on never spilling a drop.
“In future, make paired sets of Potions,” ordered Lucius. “Apparently I took too much upon myself in suggesting that he wishes for only the Dark-Arts variants. His Lordship will, in future, require complete sets.”
Severus nodded, already totting-up ingredients and timings and proportions in his brain.
Lucius left instantly, but it wasn’t as if Severus would ever object to a test of skill like making a tricky Potion. And a few suspicions he hadn’t let himself quite think about, that had been brewing at the back of his mind, had proved entirely unfounded.
He was whistling a cheerful tune as he set to work.
The first day of term after Lucius left school was not going to be pleasant. Lucius had arranged for Severus to be given permission to leave school on Saturdays, year-round, and had promised to spend Saturdays with him at Malfoy Manor. Severus knew that he would have to go to meetings, but if he was lucky... His prick jumped
Saturday seemed a very long way away.
On the train, he felt too upset even to stare at the Gryffindors the way he usually did. Scenting weakness, Black started to notice him. “Look, boys, Malfoy’s whore’s lost his purpose in life.”
Severus raised his head. He was too miserable to snap something back the way he would have done before Lucius.
“My god, look at it,” said James Potter. “Malfoy’s so pretty...”
“...even if he is evil,” Black went on.
“...I mean, Malfoy with that. He must really have been desperate for a hole to stick himself into,” Potter went on.
Severus burst into loud, noisy, messy tears, surprising himself and everybody else. He was crying too hard to talk, tears and snot were pouring down his face, and the misery and shame were unbearable. Malfoy had never been desperate. Severus had asked to be fucked several times, and Lucius had never permitted him.
“They got the name wrong,” said Potter. “Snivellus Snape.”
The Gryffindors laughed.
Severus went on crying, drawing his knees up on the seat to hide his face, and rocking himself a little in search of a comfort that would never come. He hadn’t cried very often before puberty and sex drove his reactions a little nearer the surface, and seemed to be catching up on every tear he’d never shed as a child.
“Look at us, Snivellus,” said Potter.
He ignored them.
“I don’t think you should be doing this,” said Remus Lupin, quietly. The others ignored him.
“I was sorted right in Gryffindor,” said Pettigrew tensely. “He’s more of a coward than I ever was. Just crumpled right up. I bet he’d wet himself if somebody hit him.”
Severus went on crying.
“I think you should stop,” said Remus Lupin.
“Well, we would if he was an ordinary boy, like us,” said Black seriously, “but since he’s evil that breaks the rules, so we don’t have to. We can tease him as long as we like.”
“Are you sure it’s teasing?” said Remus Lupin. He sounded worried.
“Course it is!” said Black bracingly. “We’re decent chaps, so it’s teasing. If we were him it would be bullying.”
Severus went on crying.
“Anyway,” said Black, “it’s a moral lesson about the Weakness of Evil. You don’t have to do that much, and it falls right apart.”
Severus went on crying. Lucius had drawn him out, effortlessly, from behind his wall of books, and now he was utterly defenceless.
“How long do you think you can make him go on for?” said Pettigrew, sounding interested.
There was a footstep. “What’s happening in here, boys?” said Ruffinson, the Hufflepuff prefect.
“Haven’t a clue,” said Potter in a voice that sounded sudd