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 suddenly much younger, innocent and schoolboyish. “We asked him about Malfoy—his friend—and he went like this. What do you think we should do, Ruffinson?”
“Well, stopping him crying might be a good start. Can’t be good for him,” said Ruffinson. “Do any of you know a spell for that?”
“I do,” said Lupin quietly. “Cessatio!”
Severus gulped, and hid behind his knees. Wonderful. Now he felt just as awful, but couldn’t cry about it.
Ruffinson went away, apparently reassured there was nothing bad going on.
“Can we do it again?” said Pettigrew. “We still haven’t found out how long we can make him cry for. My bet’s right up to the station.”
“A bet,” said Black. “Well, we never refuse one of those.”
“Look at it. I can’t imagine Malfoy wanting that,” said Potter. “How much did you have to pay him to let you suck him, Snivellus?”
Severus gave way to tears again, almost relieved.
It wasn’t, of course, the last of it.
Now they knew they could get to him, they did, and magic was the least of it. Sometimes they used spells, but Potter seemed just as happy to step on Severus’s hand as he reached for his wand, for example.
Because it had happened once, he knew it could happen again. He told himself ‘just stand up to them’, but they were a pack of animals and he couldn’t win by being civilised. He wasn’t afraid of them in lessons, or when he saw one of them on their own, but when Black’s eyes lit up with predatory joy and the other two came to flank him, Severus’s guts twisted with misery.
Because they knew they could, they liked to make him cry. Potter and Black developed a positive genius for saying whatever would reduce him to helpless wailing misery. Pettigrew never did anything, but liked to watch them make him cry. Lupin didn’t seem to want to make him cry, but since he didn’t seem to be able to make them stop, despite his prefect’s status, this wasn’t a lot of help.
After a while, Severus would have done anything sooner than cry. He spent hours dry-eyed and tearless. He always cried in the end.
Severus had never been afraid of his enemies before. He even stopped watching them: in his second week at school, he managed to creep up again and watch them while they weren’t looking, but since they were discussing how to make him cry again, it was more painful than interesting.
Being diplomatically absent in the library didn’t work. They sought him out. Even when he was brewing Potions they sought him out.
In the fourth week of term, he finished brewing a Chameleon Potion in the hope that he could blend in with the background and be left alone. When he hurried back to bottle it, after it had cooled, his four enemies were there.
After a brief scuffle, he was on the floor, with Sirius Black’s boot on his back.
“I really don’t think you should...” said Remus Lupin, as Sirius Black emptied a bottle of ink into the cauldron, and stirred, then tested the temperature with one finger before bending to seize Severus by the foot.
“Oh shut up, Remus,” said Black irritably. “James, you grab the other leg. Take a big breath, Snivellus. We’re going to see just how immersed you can get in your work.”
He almost hoped they would drown him, but ended up struggling desperately as they dipped him three times and then left him on the floor by his overturned cauldron.
“Is he crying yet?” asked Potter impatiently. “I’ve got practice tonight, so we can’t stay here all day.”
For the next week, Severus was a brilliant startling blue-black in colour. He waited for people to ask him how he got like that. And waited. Eventually he heard that the Gryffindors had put it down to a war of pranks and a misfired charm. Of course, they had been like that before. He’d given as good as he got before. It was only when they realised they could break him, and decided to see how far it would go, that he’d stopped hitting back. Or stopped hitting back effectively. He always tried, but he always ended up defeated.
He’d used Imperius once, but his wand-control was very poor under stress, and he’d ended up reducing Potter to a state of acute mental vacuity for four hours. He hadn’t actually intended to do that, just put a suggestion on Potter to leave him alone, but he’d got into more trouble than he ever had in his life before for using an Unforgivable on school premises.
The month’s detentions made him very happy. Unfortunately, every time he left the detention, they would be waiting for him.
Severus was too ashamed to approach the Slytherins in his year. Of course, they would be thoroughly on his side, but the thought of lowering himself from the Oracle of Slytherin to a weeping, confused child—no, he couldn’t do it.
He briefly considered going to an adult for help.
The Head of Slytherin was a chilly, remote lady who rarely paid attention to her charges. He’d heard her speaking to Professor McGonagall about how she’d washed her hands of them years ago.
As for the other teachers, he knew exactly how the four Gryffindors behaved in front of adults, and how innocent they looked the minute somebody else entered the room. He knew nobody would ever have believed him. If I’d been anyone else, I wouldn’t have believed me, he decided morosely.
So he went to Albus Dumbledore, last resort. Since Dumbledore was king of this particular little world, he felt he could petition him with less shame or fear than he would otherwise feel.
“Snape, isn’t it? Slytherin?” Not for the first or last time, Severus thought unkindly about a House system that became such a defining factor in one’s life.
“If a child has a problem with bullying, sir, what would you do?”
“I have heard a few things in passing from Potter and Black, and I’d have to say that if you put anybody under Imperius ever again you’ll probably be expelled. Let alone intimidating people by reference to Dark curses.”
“Sir, they’ve been bullying me!” If he’d been able to fight his own battles, he’d never have come to Dumbledore.
“I realise there are two sides to every issue,” said Dumbledore, folding his hands together and staring at Severus over them, “but I hope you know that if you weren’t lying, if you were bruised and hurt by anyone, you could come to me, and I would believe you. On the balance of evidence, of course. Slytherins have been known to spread malicious rumours, as I’m sure you know.”
Severus was silent. They had always been careful not to leave marks. They had always been careful not to make him cry in front of people who would have stopped them. Even the blue-black Chameleon Potion had looked as though it had a more innocent explanation.
“And I hope you also know,” said Dumbledore, “that there would be recourse for you if you wanted to tell me anything about Malfoy.”
“He hasn’t been bullying me, sir.” Ice dripped from every syllable.
“But has he been influencing you into doing things you know to be wrong?”
“Is this about politics, sir?” Because it’s none of Dumbledore’s bloody business.
“No, actually.” Dumbledore looked Severus straight in the eye. “If I ever learned one of my boys was seducing another, I would take the allegation very seriously indeed.” What, unlike bullying? Severus thought, as his blood went cold.
“It is a very bad thing for a boy to encourage perverted actions,” said Dumbledore sternly. “If I ever learn that Malfoy has been trying to force you into his bed, I will act to protect you.”
Severus shivered. Not only had he found no comfort for his real problem, he had another thing to worry about. If Dumbledore ever realised that Severus had been begging and cajoling and pleading to get a sometimes-unmoved Lucius into his bed, well, he’d probably be expelled.
He couldn’t do without his Saturdays. They were heaven by comparison.
Of course he didn’t tell Lucius. He wanted to forget about the cowardice and pain and shame that filled the rest of his whole life.
With Lucius, in a quiet corner of Malfoy Manor, he could imagine none of it had happened.
Lucius showed him the way to the Sunset Room, the first weekend, and said, “My parents never come in here. We shall be quite undisturbed.” Severus admired the big stained-glass window that threw golden light into the room, and the rose-pink velvet armchairs, and the big, cheerful fire. The first week of term was beginning to seem like a bad dream already.
“Tea and cakes?” asked Lucius, and Severus nodded.
When the house-elf was slow bringing them, Lucius ordered it to iron its ears and slam its head in the oven. This no longer seemed like an amusing foible of Lucius’s, for some reason. He sat down in the soft pink armchair and shook for ten minutes.
Lucius ordered the house-elves to stay away while he entertained Severus.
Severus never mentioned school. Lucius never asked.
Lucius finished eating his cake, and said, “I should think you’ve missed sex since I left. There are hardly many suitable prospects at that place.”
Severus sighed. It wasn’t that he didn’t want sex, but after the week he’d just had he’d rather have liked to spend an hour or two cuddling up to Lucius and forgetting the daily horrors of his life. Unfortunately, he’d never had that sort of relationship with Lucius.
“Well? Yes or no? We have a meeting to go to soon,” said Lucius.
Severus jumped on him and had him in the chair, rubbing desperately and ruining the state of both their clothes.
“That,” said Lucius with disfavour, “was quick.”
“Can I do it again?” Because for the three seconds just before I came, I felt like myself again.
“No, Severus.”
After the meeting, Severus asked his Lordship if he could borrow something.
“More books? Everything in my library is quite at your disposal.”
“No, actually. That box with the flies.”
“Oh, the Spontaneous Generation device. I suppose it would be useful for ingredients. I’ll have it sent up.”
That evening, Severus went back to his room. Setting the box beside his bed, he lay down and readied his wand to make something else hurt.
Half-an-hour later, the room was full of the smell of burnt flies. This did not, on balance, help.
He sent the fly box back.
Heaven with Lucius at the weekends, purgatory with the Gryffindors in the week: it set the pattern for the rest of his life at school.
It wasn’t too intolerable after a while: once he’d memorised the entire Gryffindor Quidditch timetable, that gave him a few more hours every week. After a while, he realised that there were two hours every evening when the four Gryffindors went off together and did something. He also noticed that every month or so Remus Lupin was ill, and the others apparently went to keep him company. This gave him another two days a month when he could rely on being undisturbed.
Once he knew he could count on at least two hours every evening to work on his Potions, and once he learned a really good ward from his Lordship so he could keep his work inviolate, it wasn’t so bad.
As for Saturdays, they were wonderful. When he came in, there would be tea and little tiny cakes waiting on a tray. Later on, if they felt hungry, Lucius would get the sort of food that didn’t need house-elves to prepare it: cheese sandwiches, fruit, and crumpets they toasted in front of the fire. While they ate, Lucius would read out political pamphlets, and Severus would listen to that clear, elegant voice, and not hear what it said, and watch Lucius’s silver eyes shine with passion.
In the afternoons, they would go and listen to his Lordship’s interminable speeches.
At some point over the course of the day, Lucius would permit Severus to have an orgasm. Severus could never rely on knowing when this was going to happen.
Sometimes Lucius would just stand there, reading out speeches, and undo his clothing, and gesture Severus to kneel down in front of him, and Severus would just suck, and suck, and come, while a tide of words flowed over him.
Sometimes, after the meeting, Lucius would sit down beside him, close in the chair, and rub a hand almost absently between Severus’s legs while talking about politics. If Severus could contain himself enough to sit there and talk about politics in what Lucius considered a civilised manner, the hand would eventually finish him off.
Once they’d been doing that for about twenty minutes, fully dressed, and he hadn’t wanted to wait, so he’d silently slipped his hand up his sleeve and under his robe, kept talking, and slid the hand into his pants (the best that could be said about which was that they were easy-access since the elastic was going). He’d asked Lucius a question about his Lordship that he knew would take a while to answer, and had a good, stealthy, satisfying wank. He’d been quiet, but of course once he’d taken his sticky hand out to wipe it, Lucius had smelt the truth.
Lucius hadn’t said a word about it, but the next week, he hadn’t allowed Severus to climax at all.
The week after that, Severus had been terrified he’d missed his chance with Lucius entirely. As he stepped into the Sunset Room, he noticed that there wasn’t a tray of tea on the table the way there usually was, and Lucius did not offer him a seat. Instead, Lucius narrowed his eyes and looked at him very coldly. He knew enough not to sit down un-asked. He stood there, in the middle of the floor, shivering.
“Open your robe,” Lucius commanded. “Over the crotch will do. Then drop your underwear.”
He nearly fainted with fright and confusion as he complied: Lucius hated even to look at the damn thing.
“Masturbate yourself.”
...and he knew how much trouble he’d got into, touching it before. He’d severely disappointed Lucius.
After five minutes, when he was gasping and panting and hanging onto the back of a chair with one hand just to stay upright, Lucius said, “Now stop.”
He stopped.
“Hands at your sides.”
He waited.
“I have a fancy for a new footstool,” said Lucius. “Down on all fours.”
No sort of sex Severus had ever heard of involved being footstools, but he complied. Maybe it was in another book Lucius hadn’t lent him yet.
Lucius was unfortunately wearing big high-heeled boots, and he could have done without that. After a while, in the silence, he could hear unbuttoning noises, and fleshy noises, and heavy breathing. He knew better than to say anything.
Lucius removed his feet from Severus’s back.
Severus knelt down, and faced him. To Severus’s disappointment, Lucius was concealing what he was doing inside a large hanky.
“Ah,” said Lucius breathlessly, “you wanted to watch.”
He nodded.
“Do you deserve to watch, you dirty, dirty boy?”
He shook his head.
Lucius flung his head back, closed his eyes, and had one of those graceful, subtle, sighing orgasms that Severus envied rather a lot.
“Over here,” said Lucius. “Sit in my lap.”
He did.
“What do you deserve, you messy, dirty brat?”
“Only what you say,” Severus whispered.
That must have passed muster, because Lucius nodded slightly, and said, “Permission granted.”
As he finished coming, hard and noisily, Lucius clasped his shoulder. “Dirty, dirty boy,” he murmured, but it sounded almost affectionate.
The only certainty Severus had was that Lucius was always right.
And however frightening Lucius was, school was worse.
The worst thing ever to happen at school was in his sixth year.
Sirius Black had stolen—or, as a Gryffindor would have put it, ‘borrowed’—Severus’s best ladle. It had taken him ages to put the perfect-pouring enchantment on it, and he’d rather not have to do that again.
Could he face up to Black? He considered the question seriously: if all of them were egging each other on, no. The horrified, tearful, powerless cowardice was something he only felt for all three of them. On their own, he’d rather leave them alone, but that was his best ladle. So: stick to the facts, try to be polite to give them no excuse to throw his property away, just get through it. He imagined he was Lucius: fearless and utterly entitled to anything he might happen to want.
So he walked up to Black, who was talking to Pettigrew, and said, “I would like my ladle back now, please. I need it to do my...”
“...evil...” whispered Black.
“...work. Did you steal it or not?” he asked crossly.
Black grinned at him. “Why, Snivellus, what a thing to say! We’re Gryffindors, we wouldn’t do a thing like that! Well, I did borrow it...”
He stuck his hand out.
“...but I lent it to James.”
“Fine. I’ll go and see Potter.” Crisp and clear. He even sounded a bit like Lucius, although in his case it did not come naturally.
“But I think Peter here borrowed it after that.”
Severus stuck his hand out again. All those sticky, detestable, Gryffindor fingers. He’d have to boil-wash it.
“Sorry, Sniv,” said Pettigrew insincerely. “I think Remus has it now.”
“Fine. I’ll go and see Lupin,” he snapped, glad that Black hadn’t got any other friends to borrow the thing.
“’Fraid it’s his time of the month, actually,” said Black. “But I know where he’ll be tonight.” Black launched into a long rigmarole about the Whomping Willow and a tunnel. “You could ask him.”
“Right.” Severus stalked off. As he left, he could hear Black ask Pettigrew, “What d’you think of your birthday present, then?”
Pettigrew sniggered. “I’m looking forward to seeing if he wets himself or cries for his mummy.”
Severus decided that they were probably going to try an illusion. They didn’t want to leave marks, after all. Black was reasonably good at illusion, and maybe they could make him that scared. Surely not if he was forewarned, though.
He considered not going, but only briefly. He’d never hear the end of it if he chickened out. He doubted Lupin would be there, but he wouldn’t put it past Black to leave the ladle on the other side of an illusory river of fire, for example. Or between the claws of a very convincing ‘dragon’.
The Whomping Willow trick worked, of course.
The monster was a werewolf. Points for originality. It wasn’t holding his ladle, but had a haunch of raw meat between its paws. There was blood on its mouth. It roared.
A wave of rank stench came from its direction; carrion and fur and just wolfness. Severus screamed. Black was a good student, yes, but the skill to carry an illusion beyond sight and into a convincing representation for all five senses took a level of magic that wouldn’t be found in a schoolboy. He had just made a fatal miscalculation.
The wolf raised its head.
An iron-hard grip clamped round Severus’s forearm, and Severus was pulled backwards—through the door—the door was shut—the beast thumped against it a second too late.
“You stink,” said Potter’s voice, low and vicious.
Severus realised he had wet himself. No doubt it had happened at the moment he’d been too busy confronting imminent death to notice.
“A wizard’s debt,” said Potter. “I saved your life.”
“You—you—“
Potter dragged him out, past the tree, and let him fall once they were out of range. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ladle, which he dropped on the ground beside Snape, spitting on it for good measure.
“I own you, Severus Snape,” said Potter. “Don’t you ever forget that.”
On moral grounds, a life-debt should be negated if it was engineered. However, Severus had a nasty feeling that it was one of those primitive and rather unpleasant forms of magic that had little to do with what one might term ‘daylight morality’. If so, the life-debt would stand, a matter of action and reaction that was entirely unaffected by motivation.
Just another stunning piece of bad luck to add to all the rest, in fact.
He went to Dumbledore the next day, and found Potter and Black already there. They fell silent as he came in.
“These boys t-tried to feed me to a w-werewolf, sir.”
Dumbledore looked at him. “I understand that James Potter actually saved your life last night.”
“Yes, but—”
Potter flicked a glance at him, too quickly for Dumbledore to notice. I own you, it said.
He fell silent.
“Sir, he was always creeping round after us. You know that,” said Black. “It was only a matter of time. We had to protect Remus, and the best way to do that was a good fright.”
“You do realise your actions might have had very serious consequences,” said Dumbledore. “Not least for Remus Lupin.”
Oh great, thought Severus, catching up: the only one of them who never threatened me has now tried to kill me.
“I know that now, sir,” said Black. “I was reckless and foolhardy, but us Gryffindors sometimes need the sense knocked into us by experience.” Every inch of him an adult’s idea of a thoughtless schoolboy, he was shuffling his feet and looking down.
But it was a calculated—! thought Severus.
“Mr Snape,” said Dumbledore, “I hope the unfortunate events of last night have also taught you something about spying on your fellow-pupils.”
“But I haven’t—not since fourth year!”
“He’s still doing it, sir,” said Potter. “He’s just being a lot more careful not to get caught.”
“I didn’t!” said Severus, and gasped loudly
“Mr Snape?” said Dumbledore.
“The fucking—“ said Severus.
“Mr Snape!” said Dumbledore sternly.
Severus gasped, then emitted a loud and very indistinct protest, in which self-justification, threats to kill somebody, and swear-words were so inextricably mingled that he wasn’t surprised that they were looking at him as if he’d thrown up on the desk.
Dumbledore wiped a speck of spit from his sleeve.
“Well, I’m sorry you feel that way, Mr Snape,” said Dumbledore. “Mr Black, I withdraw fifty points from Gryffindor House for recklessness.”
“Yes, sir,” said Black.
Well, that’s something, thought Severus grudgingly, chewing his lower lip in an attempt not to say anything or do anything. If he ever got out of this, he was going to learn to resist provocation if it killed him.
“Mr Snape, I withdraw twenty points from Slytherin House for spying.”
I deserve that for ‘admitting’ it, I suppose. I must admit that the fact they’re thirty down does soothe the sting just a little.
“Yes, sir.”
“On to happier matters,” said Dumbledore. “Mr Potter, I hereby award one hundred points to Gryffindor for bravery and unselfishness. I realise it can be difficult to do the right thing to help somebody you don’t actually like. Very well done!”
You bastard! thought Severus, feeling sick with fury.
“Thank you, sir,” said Potter.
That appeared to be it. As the door closed behind them, Severus looked at the Gryffindors.
“One hundred House points, plus Evans has decided to go out with me since I saved your life, plus I still own you. You lose, Snivellus. And we win.”
“So perish the forces of evil,” muttered Black.
That Saturday he went over to Lucius’s house even more eager than usual to have sex and forget about the many horrors of his life.
He sat there, aching with lust, while Lucius read out something about the awful things Muggles used to do to witches when they’d known about them. “Actually set fire to them, Severus. They weren’t to know it didn’t usually hurt us, so the only ones they actually hurt were their own. Savages. And the world is in their hands, remember?”
Severus wondered why that should horrify Lucius so much. He threatened to make house-elves set fire to various parts of their bodies an awful lot, for someone who wasn’t in favour of it. But it wasn’t what he wanted to talk about.
He wanted to talk about The Incident, and the horror of it, and the horror of knowing he’d probably have a life-debt hanging over him for the rest of his life.
No—he wanted to have sex, because then he wouldn’t need to talk about it, or think about it.
The meeting lasted about an hour longer than usual. Severus was hurting with the need for sex, aching every time Lucius moved beside him, and didn’t dare do anything. He knew that until Lucius gave him permission he could do nothing.
They got back from the meeting, and Lucius gave him tea and cakes.
“What an orator he is, don’t you think?” said Lucius, and Severus nodded, because if he did anything but nod he was going to burst.
Desultory chatter, mainly about all the politics stuff that his Lordship was obsessed with.
At last, Lucius put the tray down. Severus tensed.
“But I’m forgetting the time,” said Lucius. “Isn’t it about time you were on your way back to school?” He looked at Severus quite calmly.
Severus had looked back, knowing that Lucius could see the bulge and distinct damp patch at the front of his robe. He was even not wearing his underwear, knowing that Lucius hated it.
“Off you go then.”
“L-Lucius, p-please may I—” and couldn’t manage another word, because the humiliation felt like having those bloody Gryffindors on at him again and he hated himself.
Lucius looked at him.
He gulped. He couldn’t cry, couldn’t speak, and couldn’t beg. He was shuddering. He couldn’t tell Lucius what had been happening at school. He couldn’t ask.
There was a long pause. Then Lucius just opened his arms. “Here.”
“Poor little Severus, what I put you through,” Lucius crooned, mocking and tender, as he hitched up Severus’s robes and pulled him close. Lucius’s leg pressed gently between Severus’s thighs.
Lucius had very rarely actually held him, not the way he was doing now, both arms tenderly round him, making soothing noises.
Severus clenched his thighs around Lucius’s leg and rubbed frantically. If only he could stop. If only he could stop, because once he’d come he’d have to go, and he’d much rather enjoy Lucius holding him, which could go on for ages, rather than the few seconds of having an orgasm.
“It’s all right.” Lucius rocked him gently. “It’s all right.”
His legs clamped on, he got the pressure against his prick and balls, and the more he tried to stop the more he couldn’t stop and—oh— god!—it felt as though he’d never stop coming!
He did finish, of course, and Lucius just sat there, holding the sticky mess that he was, rocking him in his arms for a long time. Even though he was just a bit sensitive after all that, Severus did not dare move, because then Lucius would stop, and he’d have to go. Minutes and minutes, and he knew Lucius hated mess, but he couldn’t stop loving being held.
Lucius gave him a little push.
Severus got up. His legs were shaking, but he knew he’d have to go. To his surprise, Lucius cleaned up, gestured to a chair, and said, “Sit there. I’m going to get us some food. It’s about six o’clock.”
Lucius pushed a booklet into his hand, the short pamphlet On Purity of Blood, and left the room.
By the time Lucius came back, Severus had read On Purity of Blood once , and was reading through it the wrong way up in the faint hope that if he read it more slowly it would reveal more interest. It didn’t.
To his surprise, Lucius sat beside him in the huge soft chair, holding a tray with a big bowlful of stew and a couple of spoons.
All through dinner, Lucius permitted Severus’s body to lie right against his, without insisting on having a bit of space around him the way he usually did. It was wonderful. It was a pity he’d used his orgasm up, because just sitting by Lucius was erotic.
After dinner, Lucius wrote a note saying Severus was staying overnight, and would be back on Sunday morning, and owled that off.
Then Lucius invited him to the biggest bath Severus had ever seen, filled it with pink bubble bath, and, scarcely less marvellous, hot water, and permitted Severus to wash him all over. The plumbing at Hogwarts was rarely good, although he’d heard things about the Prefects’ Bathroom, and the plumbing at home was abysmal. Lucius, evidently, was accustomed to better things.
“I suppose I’d better make sure you’re clean,” said Lucius, soaping his hands. “Right. Stand in the bath.”
Hands clasped in front of his privates to keep Lucius from seeing his erection, he stepped into the bath. Lucius soaped his legs, belly, chest and arms. Pink bubbles pricked delicately at his legs.
Severus giggled slightly. “Tickles.”
“You’re such a child, Severus,” Lucius said loftily, pulling Severus’s hands away.
Severus shivered. “D-do you mind not looking at that?” He’d had his treat for the day, and it wasn’t as though it could be pleasant for Lucius to stare at it.
“Now, let me see,” said Lucius. “Did you get it dirty today or not?”
Severus blushed. “I suppose I ought to wash it.” He still spent as much time as possible ‘getting it dirty’ and was still waiting for the novelty to wear off.
To his amazement, Lucius wrapped a hand round it and began to soap it, vigorously and rhythmically. He did this for a few minutes, and Severus was just beginning to relax into getting a hand-job as opposed to mere washing, when Lucius stopped.
He sobbed for breath, but didn’t ask Lucius to go on. He knew he’d had his chance for the day.
Lucius leaned back in the bath and pulled Severus into his lap, Severus wriggled against Lucius’s limp cock and lovely thighs, wishing he had such self-control. Lucius clamped one arm against Severus’s belly, holding him still, and used his other hand to rinse him. This felt disturbingly good, particularly when the rinsing hand stopped sluicing his chest and thighs, and settled to take a firm grip of his prick.
Severus bit his lip, trying not to gasp. “What are you doing?”
Lucius chuckled. “Getting you clean, of course.”
Lucius did not stop.
“I think...”
Lucius squeezed.
“I think...” ...I’m finding it difficult to think.
Lucius kept squeezing. He had to know he wasn’t exactly rinsing.
Severus rested his head comfortably on Lucius’s shoulder, too happy to mind much that his long black hair was beginning to fall into the bath. It felt marvellous, but he’d have to stop short of coming, because Lucius never let him have more than one.
He had to moan, anyway.
Maybe he could stay here, just on the edge, for hours, or as long as it took his skin to go all pruney and wrinkly.
Lucius kissed him on the ear, and nibbled his earlobe. “Yes, you may,” he whispered, and Severus melted so ecstatically he was vaguely surprised the bubbles didn’t go white with the pleasure flooding out of him.
Once he’d finished, Lucius made sure he was clean, pulled him out, and rolled both of them in a very large towel.
Lucius had left him in the Sunset Room, dressed in one of Lucius’s own dressing-gowns, given him a book to read, and gone to find one of the house-elves to make hot chocolate with whipped cream and little flakes of chocolate and a brandy-snap stuck into the cream. Lucius had attacked his politely, with a spoon, but he’d let Severus drink his through the cream, only saying, “You have cream on your nose, Severus.”
After the hot chocolate, Lucius had gone to bed. “Come on, then.”
“Haven’t got my nightshirt,” he’d admitted.
“Oh, just this once,” said Lucius, and Severus had found himself tucked up in a huge bed, naked, next to a naked Lucius who wasn’t pulling away. He settled down to sleep, half-hard and very comfortable.
He put his hand on Lucius’s to stop him as Lucius began to rub between his legs. “I don’t need any more. Honestly.”
“You’ll need what I tell you to need, dear boy,” said Lucius, mildly enough, pulling off the bedclothes and lowering his head to suck. Severus was a little startled that Lucius knew how to do this, but of course Lucius knew everything about sex. He was a master of technique: the lick, the suck, the not-quite-nibble, the tongue-tease around the foreskin, and the hand that went tightly around the base while the mouth worked at the tip.
Quite soon, he had Severus crying out, “oh stop, it’s lovely, oh please stop!” in a desperate attempt not to dirty Lucius’s sweet, wet, strong mouth.
Lucius pulled off, looked up at him, said “No,” quite firmly, and started sucking him again, using his hand to play with Severus’s balls.
Severus didn’t try to stop again. He imagined Lucius getting as greedy for the feel and taste of it as he did the other way round, and he relaxed happily into it, gasping with pleasure as a slow, sweet come worked its way up from his expertly-played balls, slowly up the shaft, and into Lucius’s mouth.
“Mmm,” he said happily, as Lucius made a face and spat into a handkerchief.
“What a disgusting flavour, Severus,” Lucius remarked. “I do hope you won’t expect me to do that too often.”
“No, Lucius,” said Severus. To his surprise, Lucius flung an arm over him and settled down to sleep.
It was a very good night’s sleep. He must have slept right through Lucius ordering breakfast, because as he blinked sleepily and realised he’d woken up in Lucius’s bed, he saw Lucius just coming back in holding a tray with a couple of big cups of coffee and a croissant each. There was a small dab of soft butter in one saucer and a pool of jam in another.
Lucius put the tray down for a moment, then shrugged off his dressing gown. He joined Severus in the bed, where they alternated careful gulps of the coffee with feeding each other shreds of hot croissant dipped in the butter and jam.
When they’d finished, Lucius kissed Severus softly on the cheek—which Severus hoped wasn’t too sticky with jam—and said, “You do understand that this cannot happen too often, dear boy?”
“I don’t deserve it,” said Severus as a matter of fact. “It was a special treat, and I won’t expect it. Just treasure it.”
Lucius hugged him briefly, and said, “I’m in a good mood, as you may have noticed. I have obtained an excellent first job at the Ministry, and I have some quantity of paperwork to do this weekend. You can have a bit of a sleep if you like, then get on your way.
Severus snuggled down. He remembered something. “Lucius? You’ve done me three times, and you didn’t come once.” If he’d had the good luck to stimulate Lucius to orgasm that many times, he’d probably have come about eight times in the course of events.
“Oh, don’t worry. At my advanced age, I don’t need it quite so much as you seem to.” Lucius got up from the bed and started to dress.
Severus murmured, very quietly, “I wish you did.” Very quietly, because he knew he had no right to anything from Lucius, even desire, not looking the way he did.
Lucius sighed. Hitching up his robes, he stood before the bed in all his glory. “I suppose the morning is a good time to catch any man in the mood,” he said. “Now, I want it clearly understood that you don’t deserve me, and this does not give you the right to presume in future. That said, you may service me.”
If anyone else had been quite so arrogant, Severus thought, he might have minded quite a bit. But this was Lucius, so it didn’t matter. He just opened his mouth, worked some spit into place, and sucked where he was required to suck.
“Oh, very nice,” said Lucius. “You’d let me do anything with you, wouldn’t you?”
“Mmm!” agreed Severus, with his mouth full. For a taste of this, he’d agree to anything Lucius might ask.
Lucius slid slowly in and out. “I’m watching myself. As I use you. Yes. You’d do anything for this. It doesn’t even have to be my prick.” He slid out, and passed Severus his cane.
Severus sucked it enthusiastically, as far as he could work his mouth round the head. He didn’t particularly care for the taste, but the view he was getting was worth it. Something about the situation had Lucius harder than he’d ever been before, actually wet, looking the way he probably looked when he thought about Lucius. Less like a sculpture than usual, anyway.
With a little growl of satisfaction, Lucius removed the stick, flung it on the floor, and replaced himself.
Severus had stopped trying to talk around either the stick or Lucius. He was writhing against the bed.
“Don’t wriggle...when I’m humiliating you...you little slut!” Lucius gasped, and came down his throat just as Severus rubbed himself to a rather choked climax on the sheets.
Both of them needed a moment to breathe, after that.
Lucius brought his paperwork back to bed, and read while Severus dozed. It was a quiet morning. Quiet was good. Quiet was excellent.
At noon, he gave Severus a kiss, a sandwich, and his broom.
So a week that began with hell ended with heaven.
The next week, Lucius let him have his treat before the meeting, which meant he practically dozed through it in a sated heap, barely aware of the glow of Lucius’s beauty beside him. To his surprise, after the meeting, Lucius let him have his sweet cakes and tea without having to talk about politics.
Lucius sat down on the chair beside him.
“Is there nothing I could offer you to induce you to take that extra step?” Lucius murmured in his ear.
“If you mean that blasted tattoo, no.” How could Lucius fail to see it was such a tacky design, so unworthy of him? It made Severus’s skin crawl to see it marring the fair skin.
“Not even if I...” Lucius’s hands slipped under Severus to cup and curve around his bottom with slow attention.
More than the implied offering, Severus was dizzy with delight at being touched. Lucius had only sucked him once (and hadn’t swallowed), only masturbated his naked prick a couple of times. Most of the time, Severus paid adoring and fascinated attention to Lucius’s beautiful body; his own orgasms were frequent but rather incidental. Lucius would always tease him about making a mess of the sheets, or the carpet, or Lucius’s thigh, and Severus would feel mildly embarrassed. Very embarrassed, on the one occasion when, near-demented with lust, he’d come off in Lucius’s hair before he could touch anything more sensible.
Having Lucius inside him would be wonderfully fierce and undeniable. His prick twitched.
“Would you do that?”
“Do two things for me, my Severus. Pay scrupulous attention to your personal hygiene in that area, and take the Mark. If it helps, consider that you’re marking your personal fealty to me.”
“I’ll d-do it.”
“Then, two days after you’ve taken the Mark, I will take you.”
“Two days? I don’t need time to think about it, you know.”
Lucius smiled, very slightly. “The experience is...quite intense. You will wish to have time to recover before I reward you.”
Severus rather enjoyed being singled out for particular attention at the meeting.
“I believe young Severus,” said his Lordship with an indicating wand-wave that showed off the long fall of his sleeve, “...has decided to take that extra step to bring him fully into our community,” said his Lordship.
There was a sudden chattering of voices, although nobody would meet his eyes, or anyone else’s. It felt like the reverse of becoming part of a community. It felt as though everybody had some reason to feel quietly ashamed, and didn’t quite like to mention it.
“Follow me, Severus,” said his Lordship.
Severus thought he’d be led into a room full of tattooing instruments, and wasn’t all that happy about it. Instead, his Lordship led him to a room that reminded him rather of Lucius’s bed. It was a small, neat, octagonal shape, lined with green curtains and carpet. There was room for two comfortable armchairs on either side of a very small table, and that was it. His Lordship sat down and gestured Severus to a seat. “Pull your sleeve up.”
Severus complied.
The memory of his first time with Lucius filled his mind’s eye: the astonishment of finding his body could do something that he’d never even thought of, and the comfort of knowing Lucius could make it all right again.
His Lordship raised his wand, murmuring “not quite right yet.”
Severus remembered that awful moment when he’d woken up Lucius in the middle of the night, convinced he was going to go insane from over-frequent wanking. He blushed at the thought.
“That’s better,” said his Lordship, and drew the jawbone of the skull onto Severus’s forearm. The pain of embarrassed shame hurt like fire, and that feeling seemed to go into the skin. It was against all reason, but he was sure his Lordship was reading his mind. Oh well, he didn’t have all that many bad memories about sex.
He felt invaded somewhere different, then. His Lordship seemed to reach into his mind and find the stuff about school, which seemed to hurt a lot more than the stuff about sex. He saw the Gryffindors taunting him about how Lucius could have wanted to fuck such an ugly thing as he was, and his own horrified shock that they could condemn Lucius. He’d doubted if Lucius would ever fuck him, and that had hurt. And, all of a sudden, he’d realised that he’d have to get through the school week without the comfort of Lucius’s bed to retreat to. Without Lucius’s arm round him, casually, when Lucius had made him test him on his Potions. Without Lucius matter-of-factly offering him an orgasm if he really couldn’t sleep. He’d lost all the calm dispassion he’d had before puberty, and he was defenceless.
“Very nice,” murmured his Lordship, and drew the cold, dark empty orbit of the skull into place. Severus didn’t quite allow himself to shiver.
Then his mind filled with that appalling moment when James Potter had hung him upside-down in front of all his friends, displaying his unprepossessing underwear. He hadn’t even hexed anyone. He’d been reduced to helpless misery, so upset and angry and impotent he’d called that bloody Mudblood Evans a bloody Mudblood. And he’d never even cared about all that stuff, he could barely keep his eyes open through his Lordship’s speeches, and she’d been trying to defend him (which he’d hated as well), but it had been a weapon to hand. Not his finest moment.
The second orbit was drawn into place. Severus gritted his teeth and tried not to seethe. “Don’t hold back,” said his Lordship mildly. “You’re doing very well, Severus.”
Severus cleared his mind, with an effort, but then felt his Lordship draw another image to the surface.
“Now the serpent,” said his Lordship, and the memory rose however he might try to resist. The stink of wolf. The stink of urine. The horror of knowing he’d miscalculated, and they wanted him dead rather than frightened. The slower, deeper horror of knowing that it was a calculated move to give him a life-debt to somebody he hated.
It was agony to feel the tickling sweep of the serpent being drawn on his arm, weaving into the eye-sockets of the skull, every curve shouting werewolf and stupid and owned. Lucius owned him, but he could do without being owned by either Potter or his Lordship.
“Have you any more for me, Severus?” his Lordship murmured. It felt as though his Lordship was peering into his mind, drinking in every moment of shame or fear or embarrassment, filling him with the wordless assurance that only his Lordship could ever see these things without flinching, only his Lordship could ever accept the most hidden parts of his nature.
He felt...defiled. He could barely imagine what it would have felt like if he’d had more to hide.
He was glad Lucius had mentioned two days recovering from the experience before claiming his reward. He spent as much time as possible in the shower for those two days.
Lucius turned up while he was still in the shower.
“How did you get in?” he asked. He hadn’t seen Lucius at school since Lucius had left.
Lucius raised an eyebrow, conveying wordlessly that he couldn’t see anyone keeping him out of anywhere he’d taken a fancy to enter. Then he said, “I brought some of my study notes for Potions to lend you.”
“Oh, clever,” said Severus sarcastically.
Lucius shrugged that off. “Well then, are you eager?”
“Why didn’t you warn me?” He switched off the shower. The room was empty apart from Lucius, surprisingly.
“I said it was intense.” Lucius’s face was an elegant mask. It was impossible to tell what he thought.
“You didn’t say it was intensely bad,” said Severus, rather stiffly, drying himself off and trying to conceal his body from Lucius at the same time. He wasn’t sure whether he was most ashamed of the Mark or his unaesthetic sexual organ.
“There is no way of telling. Only we of the Book—” Lucius traced his own mark delicately with a finger on his sleeve, and Severus found that unpleasant “—have the courage to face our own darkness.”
“It didn’t feel as if that was what was going on,” Severus said, as a matter of fact. It had felt like an attempt, very personally, to weaken him. He did not care for the feeling that whatever darkness, shame or misery he might have inside needed his Lordship to prop it up.
“You have a lot to learn, my little Severus. Are you ready for your reward?” He transfigured a hard wooden bench into a luxurious bed.
“No.” Severus had wanted to talk to someone, and who was there apart from Lucius? He knew, from watching and listening to other people, that friends could have conversations including I’m bloody terrified and do you think it’s really true? and what will happen now I’ve done that? All he had was Lucius, who didn’t seem to do emotional conversation.
“Dry yourself off,” said Lucius. He removed his robe and was naked. Beautiful, if un-aroused.
“Prepare me.” Lucius handed Severus a small pot of oil.
Well, Severus would never turn down a chance to touch Lucius, even if he himself didn’t feel like sex for once. He warmed the oil in his hands, and caressed that part of Lucius he liked best. As he touched it, his own prick stiffened, and he thought no, no, I didn’t want because it was humiliating to touch Lucius’s limp prick and suddenly feel the urgent desire for sex replace the disturbed misery he felt at thinking of his Lordship.
Lucius’s prick began to rise unhurriedly and gracefully. Did Lucius trust him? Or did he just fail to conceive of anyone not doing what he wanted? But those weren’t questions he could ask Lucius, especially now he needed sex and Lucius’s prick was undeniably heavy and hard in his hand.
Severus considered masturbating Lucius to climax. Always a pleasure; he loved the way it would jerk in his hand as the white juice rolled hotly over him. He would probably come his brains out without so much as a touch to his own prick. He moaned voluptuously, “Do it in my hand, let me feel you, come for me...” and nearly did it himself just thinking of it.
“No,” said Lucius. “I promised you, and I pay my debts.”
With some difficulty, Severus managed to restrain himself. He lay down on the bed, on his belly, on a pillow, the way Lucius always did it.
As Lucius touched him, caressing the root of his cock, and his balls, and behind the balls, he came suddenly and helplessly.
“Mm, thanks, Lucius,” he murmured, “that was good.”
“That wasn’t anything at all!” Lucius snapped. “Must you ruin my every plan to do something properly!”
“Well, do it properly then,” suggested Severus. Lucius was ruining his afterglow, or betweenglow, or whatever it was. “I wouldn’t mind another one.”
“For you, etiquette is something that happens to other people,” Lucius muttered.
Lucius’s finger in him felt distinctly strange: he realised he should have practiced this with his own fingers, but it had never occurred to him that Lucius would want to do it. After a few moments, it stopped feeling odd and started feeling... good. Lucius, who made himself at home anywhere, made his fingers at home up Severus’s arse, and the fullness started sending messages to Severus’s cock. Lucius probed steadily. There seemed to be one spot up there that sent sparks scattering through what was left of his brain every time Lucius brushed it with a finger. Severus was very glad he’d already had one orgasm, or he’d never have lasted. The fingers kept going: strong and sure and without mercy. Then fingers slid out, and in slid Lucius.
“Oh fuck that hurts! Do it again!” Severus groaned. He was so full of Lucius he was rather impressed he could talk.
Lucius did it again. Even better.
It still hurt, having Lucius’s large prick in him, but he liked the thought he was going to remember it every time he sat down for the next week.
Lucius was sweating, pressed against his back, and thrusting again. Every stroke was touching him inside just where he liked it. His prick was going at the pillow again. His arse was on fire. He was stabbed, burning, transfixed. He forgot himself, there was nothing in the world but Lucius...
“Fuck me, my arse is coming!” yelled Severus, as the best orgasm he’d ever had clamped his shuddering guts on the hugeness of Lucius’s prick, and he kept moving kept yelling kept coming until he passed out.
He came round a moment or two later. Lucius was pulling a softened prick out of him.
“Would you care to repeat that last comment?” said Lucius. “I believe there’s a Hufflepuff in the Astronomy Tower who didn’t quite hear it.”
“Oh god. Did I really say...” Severus was slightly bemused.
“... ’My arse is coming’, yes, you did,” Lucius said dryly.
“I don’t think I care,” Severus decided, going to sleep. He was going to make Lucius make his arse come (even if it was a stupid phrase) as often as possible.
When he woke up, Lucius had gone, and he was sprawled across a wooden bench, sticky and shivering. A line of poetry he’d read once crossed his mind: “And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill’s side,” he murmured silently.
He fingered inside himself, wondering if he’d dreamed the whole thing, and found his arse dry but sore. Lucius had done it. Good. That meant Lucius could do it again, next time. It had been worth even this waking: used and empty and still at this hell-pit of a school.
He didn’t even wonder why nobody had disturbed them until he opened the door and found an elegantly-scrawled OUT OF ORDER notice. Lucius always thought of everything. Lucius never worried about inconveniencing others to suit his own convenience.
There was a large, and muttering, crowd of post-Quidditch-practice Gryffindors out there. Black kicked him in the shins as he passed.
It was surprisingly painful. Not so much the kick, as mixing up his sex life with his school life. Since the beginning of the year, Lucius had been his comfort and his delight, had offered him a refuge where none of the nightmare of his daily life had a place. He’d always had the journey back to prepare himself for pain.
Next Saturday, though, he was definitely going to get Lucius to do it again.
He could hear raised voices behind the open door of the Sunset Room the next time he dropped in on Lucius on a Saturday morning. He hadn’t heard his Lordship raise his voice in anger ever before, and didn’t care for it now either. His weekends weren’t a time for thinking about anything unpleasant, so he didn’t want to walk straight into the middle of that. Luckily, like his own home, Malfoy Manor had plentiful little alcoves for servants to wait in if the gentry didn’t want to be disturbed for any reason, so he tucked himself into a comfortable chair in a space behind the curtain.
“When have I ever failed you, my Lord?” Lucius said.
“For example,” snapped his Lordship, “when you wasted half of the Potions created for me because in your arrogance and carelessness you could not see what we would have to do with healing. Foolish, short-sighted child! Quite apart from the times when those on our own side might have need of healing, there are unparalleled opportunities for blackmail in having both pain and antidote to hand.”
Severus felt cold. He did not dare move.
“For example,” said his Lordship, “when you took it upon yourself to destroy all available containers of the Curationis Potion.”
Lucius had...but...
His Lordship was still speaking: “Even if you were correct that our side has more use for one thing than the other, did you never stop to think of the possibilities the substance might offer for blackmail? I have any number of mere brutes to call upon, should my situation call for regrettable excesses. But if I, and only I, hold pain in one hand and healing in the other, do you not think that any number of opponents might rethink their priorities?”
“And that’s another thing,” said Lucius, sounding cross. “How long do I have to continue this farce with your tame poisoner, my Lord? It becomes tedious.”
“Be grateful I have heretofore permitted you to postpone your marriage,” came his Lordship’s high, drawling voice. “I was under the impression that your tastes went more conveniently with such a connection.”
Lucius laughed. “You could at least have chosen me a gentleman.”
“Severus’ bloodline is excellent.”
“He’s extremely badly-brought-up,” said Lucius. “No manners. Blows his nose on his sleeve.”
No I don’t, thought Snape indignantly. Not unless I have the unfortunate conjunction of a sudden cold and no handkerchief.
“You gave me the impression, my Lord, that a little flattery would bring him nicely over.”
“Is this not the case, my Lucius?”
“He’s unreasonable. He wants to do it all the time. When he wants sex, his mouth gets wet and his throat twitches and his hands sweat. One can see a vein working in his face. I do my best to put up with it, but really.”
“A few kisses,” suggested his Lordship.
“No such luck. Unfortunately that part hidden from view isn’t particularly aesthetic either,” said Lucius coolly. “Large, but untidy, and a most repulsive colour. And he insists on rubbing it against me. Frequently. He has the most hideous expression when he reaches orgasm, and he ‘has a face only a mother could love’, as they say.”
Try ‘not even’, thought Snape, with a long horrified shiver. It hadn’t hurt nearly as much when his mother had told her friends how repugnant he looked. It was, after all, objectively true. The thought that his hot, frenzied, shaking need had been observed uncharitably was much worse.
“I actually had to sodomise the little beast last week,” said Lucius. “I was nearly sick.”
A single deep shudder ran through Severus.
“So you see, my Lord,” went on Lucius, “that my devotion to your cause is unquestionable. He could have been ten times uglier—though it’s difficult to see how—and I would have been obedient to your command.”
“I hardly think you could complete such an act if it repelled you so,” said his Lordship softly.
“I did not have to complete it. The little brute had the grace to faint after climaxing, and therefore I could extricate myself from an intolerable situation that I would never have entered but for my high regard for your Lordship’s aims.”
“I fear you must continue your masquerade just a little longer,” said his Lordship. “Severus still remains useful to me. If he becomes expendable, Lucius, I shall give him to you to dispose of as you please.”
“No. No, I don’t think so,” said Lucius. “Although it has irked me to have his attentions forced on me, he is a good and very useful servant. I dislike waste. Think of what he can do for us, and has already done for us.”
“Perhaps,” said his Lordship. “Do you feel he has earned a quiet retirement, like an ageing carriage-horse?” Severus heard the scrape of his Lordship pushing his chair back.
“Perhaps,” said Lucius in turn, breaking the word with a slight chuckle.
“I will accompany you to the door,” said Lucius, following his Lordship. “I fear my unwelcome catamite has developed some sort of phobia about house-elves, therefore I must permit them to do what is necessary before he arrives.”
The door shut.
Severus had plenty of time to think. He’d lost his refuge, his self-respect, and everything else but his work. Worse than that, he had to find a way out of the mess he was in. He was only a schoolboy! He hadn’t known it was...wrong!
He had known damn well that there was something wrong somewhere, but he hadn’t let himself think about it.
After an hour, he let himself out with the help of the house-elves (who intimated to him that they weren’t going to tell Master Lucius where he was, and it wasn’t as if Master Lucius ever asked them for their opinions), picked up his broom, walked out of sight, and flew back to school.
There he slipped into the Restricted Section of the library and picked up a thick, heavy, impenetrable work on Occlumancy. If Voldemort figured out by looking into his mind how much he knew, and what he thought about what he knew, he was going to be in some danger. He had a bit of time to work his defence up, because he wasn’t on his own with Voldemort all that much. Enchanting the book to imagine he had the right to borrow it, he stuck it under his arm and walked out.
That was easier to deal with than the other problem. Lucius would be expecting him, would be expecting him full of rampant enthusiasm, and he could not let Lucius realise the truth.
Luckily, his latest Potion for Voldemort had been unusually innocuous: a mere aphrodisiac. Later on, it would be time to worry about if there was a long-term way of getting out of his intolerable allegiance without creating more little vials of torture. At the moment, he needed to use himself as a test subject. He’d never considered he’d have any need of an aphrodisiac for the next few years, but he just couldn’t get an erection once he’d heard what Lucius really thought of him. He’d sometimes thought Lucius regarded him as a rather sweet, distinctly inconvenient, hopelessly randy puppy, but he’d had no idea of anything worse than that.
Using his best ladle, he decanted some neatly into the silver hip-flask Lucius had given him for Christmas. He was not going to take some before he went and entertain anyone with an unorthodox display of broom-riding, and he wasn’t sure he could concentrate on flying once he was in a state like that. He stared at the ladle: his best never-spill-a-drop enchanted ladle that Potter had returned to him. How on earth had he kept from wondering about that particular reason not to believe Lucius when he mentioned slippery bottles? He sighed: he hadn’t wanted to disbelieve Lucius, because Lucius was the one good and beautiful thing in his life. Well...beautiful, anyway.
As he stood outside the door of the Sunset Room, he reached for his fortifying drink. As the house-elf opened the door, he took a mouthful but did not swallow more than a very tiny trickle. Even that infinitesimal amount was enough to have an effect. Instantly, chilly misery transmuted into blazing heat, and he nearly stumbled as a sudden heavy weight seemed to fill his prick and balls.
“We’ve only got ten minutes before the—” said Lucius, before Severus kissed him breathless, pouring every reserved drop into Lucius’s mouth and working his tongue to conceal the delivery of the liquid, and then stepped back cautiously to see if his gamble had paid off. By now he was beginning to think there might be enough reptile in Lucius to offset the dose.
Lucius made a very un-Lucius-like noise, and grabbed his own crotch. In front of the house-elf. Lucius’s hand was moving frantically, fast, in a way Severus had never seen before, scrabbling at his own robes and releasing a huge, engorged prick. Severus had never before seen Lucius make any move that wasn’t mannered, or graceful, or calculated. Lucius began to pump himself furiously, making little gasping noises that eased into steady grunts and finally a long, ecstatic yell as his prick sprayed thick, copious come all over his clothes, and the desk, and the floor.
Lucius had made a mess.
Severus took a long, blissful breath. It wasn’t quite enough to offset the cumulative fuck-up that was the rest of his entire life, but it would do very nicely for now.
“Master Lucius is wanting a hankie?” asked the house-elf.
“Get out!” snapped Lucius, who was apparently rattled enough not to order the house-elf to suffer any torments.
It got out.
Lucius looked up. His prick was already stiffening again. He looked at Severus—not his face—and said, “Well? What are you waiting for?”
Severus had to admit that having Lucius looking at any part of him with admiration was decidedly pleasant.
“Have we got time before the meeting?” he asked, fondling himself through his robe.
Lucius panted irritably. “Give that here!” he snapped.
For a moment, Severus considered saying no. But he’d wanted the ripe fruit of Lucius’s desperate attention for far too long to deny it now, even since it had turned bitter with his poisonous knowledge.
He opened his robe, wriggled out of his underpants, and said, “Go ahead.”
To his surprise, Lucius tumbled him on the desk and simply rubbed against him. He could feel the edge of the desk digging painfully into his legs, Lucius’s robe sweeping over his skin, Lucius’s hot length practically wearing a hole in his hip, his own prick just grazing against Lucius’s robes and sliding away—
“Please!” A heap of paperwork crumpled noisily under him.
To his surprise, Lucius reached for his prick and grabbed it roughly.
He opened his eyes. For a moment, the glazed look cleared from Lucius’s eyes.
“What did you do to me?” he rapped furiously.
“I—I didn’t!” Severus stammered, but then the glazed look returned. He could tell Lucius was close to orgasm, by the jerky movements and little gasps and noises, and it was wonderfully exciting. After a moment, Lucius began to masturbate him fiercely, in rhythm with the prick rutting against his body. That did it, and he was coming himself silly, gasping and groaning and feeling Lucius finish with him for once.
That seemed to restore the power of reason to Lucius. He reached for his wand and cleaned up.
“If you didn’t...” said Lucius.
“You must have been overcome by sudden desire,” said Severus, as blithely as possible. “It’s been a few days; I was pretty desperate, and you might have been too.”
“Perhaps,” said Lucius icily. Severus watched him think of but I’m not attracted to you. In the slightest, and discard it as unsuitable. Lucius must be slipping a bit under the influence: he was usually far better at hiding his reactions than that.
“Meeting?” said Severus brightly, and led the way out.
After the meeting, of course, he had to think of a proper explanation, because Lucius said that he was never overcome by anything, desire or not.
He explained that he’d been working on an aphrodisiac for Voldemort, and wondered what it was like, “It’s not as though most of the stuff I brew him is something I’d like to try out”, and he must have tasted of it when he kissed Lucius.
Lucius, who had not remembered anything Severus had ever told him about dosage, seemed to find that a convincing explanation.
It hadn’t been a bad afternoon.
What was bad was the way back, and after that. After his first fuck, which was probably the only time anyone would ever do it in his life, he’d felt that Lucius coming to school had blurred his sexual refuge into the hell that was the rest of his life. Now, he had no refuge.
More than that, he had to get himself out of an intolerable situation without help. He never wanted to go to one of those bloody meetings ever again. He never wanted to corrupt his art to the wrong purpose ever again. He never wanted to see Voldemort ever again. He definitely never wanted to see Lucius ever again.
The first thing he had to do was get information.
He’d spent the last two years largely ignoring what Voldemort thought about Muggles—Mudbloods—enemies. ‘Mudblood’ was just a word to him, an insult he would use if it would sting and ignore if it wouldn’t. Muggles were Out There Somewhere, and he’d rarely even met any. ‘Enemies’, to Voldemort, were Dumbledore and his allies.
So he spent the day after his libido’s last hurrah deep in Voldemort’s library. He had a standing invitation to ransack the shelves, and luckily Voldemort knew that his reading tastes were eclectic, and usefully so. He’d had a couple of conversations with Voldemort after meetings about the odd things he’d found in books when he wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Voldemort wouldn’t raise an eyebrow whatever he read.
Using a Shrinking Potion, he prepared thirty books for transport. Muggles. Mudbloods. Purity of blood. Long-term objectives. Strategy. Governmental policy on reaching power. All the books from one corner he’d rather ignored.
For a week, he did almost nothing but read.
Every cold, ignored, frightening hint he’d pushed to the back of his mind was true, and more than true. Voldemort was ruthless in dealing with both enemies and traitors. He spoke with approval of “zealous readers of the Book” who went out for roistering nights of intimidation, rape and—it was hinted—murder. Now he was on the other side of the line, with Dumbledore, and the Mudbloods, and all those Muggles, he realised what a very small group remained on Voldemort’s side of the line. Small, and vicious. There was the odd veiled hint about repopulating the world once their side had won.
Severus remembered hearing that thing about ‘the elimination of the non-magical population’, just before Lucius had pounced on him, kissed him ruthlessly, and wanked him to orgasm right in front of a roomful of people. And all he’d done was think that his Lucius could get away with anything. He hadn’t even thought about that ominous phrase again.
His last few meals seemed to hang like a stone in his gut.
Before continuing with his reading, he mixed himself an emetic Potion so that he could be as sick as he felt, as sick as he deserved to be.
That night, he made a conscious decision not to masturbate ever again. He already knew that the odds against anybody else being able to stand touching him ever again were pretty high, but he didn’t deserve pleasure even from himself. The damn thing could happen while he was asleep if it had to, but he wasn’t going to encourage it.
The next thing to do was deal with the mockery they had made of his art.
He was very sure that he couldn’t go to them, frothing with moral indignation, and say, “I will never brew a drop for you, ever again.” If nothing else, there had been enough cryptic hints that those who were no longer of use to Voldemort might suffer death, and worse.
Now he knew the reason for Lucius’s ‘affection’, he knew he could not go to Lucius for the answer to his problems.
He went on brewing, creating the best Potions he could as a matter of pride, and adding a certain subtle marker to them so that he, and nobody else, could tell when they had been used. The marker wouldn’t show in the bottle Voldemort had, because it needed an extra ingredient. He doubted Voldemort would have the ability to realise what he’d done: Voldemort’s approach was to get the best in any given field to work for him.
Then he would pour a miniature vial of whatever-it-was for himself, add a certain ingredient to that, and leave it in his own cupboard.
When the Potion was used, the vial in his cupboard, with the extra ingredient, would glow. Feeling ill, Severus would take out a few drops of the glowing Potion in a spoon, and tip it gently onto a mirror. An image of what was happening with the used Potion in Voldemort’s hands would then appear, and Severus would document where and how and on whom it was being used, as far as he could tell. Everything was documented: the Potions, the antidotes, the way they were used.
He hated it, but he wrote it all down.
It would have to go somewhere: Voldemort would never break Severus’s wards because it would never occur to him that Severus’s feelings had changed, but Severus couldn’t do anything with his new knowledge. He couldn’t even apparate yet. All the connections he had were to Voldemort’s people.
It would have to be Dumbledore; there was nobody else with the strength to stand up to Voldemort.
He actually respected a few of Dumbledore’s ideas, if one left out the stuff about Slytherins, and knowledge, and sex. If one needed to choose between the two most powerful wizards currently towering over the world (and it appeared, unfortunately, that one did), Dumbledore was at least a) not barking mad (or not as barking mad), b) not intent on mass-murder and c) not going to kill him personally for his opinions.
“Sir? Could I have a word?”
“By all means, Mr Snape,” Dumbledore said cordially enough. “Have you any more to tell me about Mr Malfoy?”
“Is there anything that might make...aberration...less unacceptable to you, sir?” For no reason, he remembered Remus Lupin on the train in first year, saying: “Sometimes evil just happens.” He didn’t agree with most Gryffindors about ‘evil’, but sometimes things did just happen.
A look of faint distaste entered Dumbledore’s eyes. “If anyone should intimidate a younger boy into coming to his bed. If he should bargain. If he should say, ‘my family could do things for you, if you make me happy’. If the younger boy is afraid to cringe away from his vile caresses. If the younger boy feels some vague disturbance about the older boy touching him or kissing him in ways that cause him unease. All these things would be the seducer’s fault, not the fault of the boy he seduces. Have you any more you need to tell me, Severus?”
“No,” he said sadly. He was an insatiable pervert, and there was no way Dumbledore could understand that. Using either Veritaserum or a Pensieve, Dumbledore would find that damning, sordid truth: Severus Snape begging, pleading, crawling to be allowed the pleasure of orgasm. Which meant that he couldn’t talk about all the Dark-Lord-of-Ultimate-Evil business. He wouldn’t be able to mention how vastly uninterested he was in all of it without Dumbledore asking him well, why had he joined and never missed a meeting if he hated it. It wasn’t as if the Dark Mark was something one could stumble into. Which would lead back, like everything else, to Lucius.
“Even if the older boy bribed the younger one with affection,” said Dumbledore kindly, “if he made him feel that the only way he could achieve a loving embrace was if he allowed the older one to misuse his bottom.”
If Dumbledore found out that Severus had sold his soul to Evil for Lucius Malfoy’s cock up his arse...Severus would be in even more trouble than he was already. Even now he tried to wish Lucius painfully dead, he felt like weeping at the thought that nobody would ever ‘make his arse come’ ever again. The books Lucius had lent him had eased his mind that maybe not everybody in the world agreed with Dumbledore about perversion, but that didn’t mean that he could be less than guarded in talking to Dumbledore.
“If the younger boy had an abused childhood, so that abuse felt to him like a mark of love,” went on Dumbledore, “nobody could fault him for misinterpreting the loathsome touches of a seducer as affection.”
“But I wasn’t abused!” said Severus, horrified. He thought of his father’s intelligence, and whimsy, and understated kindness; and of his mother’s beauty, fecklessness and passion for art. He hadn’t been craving for affection—he’d barely known what it was. He’d traded Lucius’s casual and apparent affection for sex, not the other way round. The one time Lucius had been particularly kind, Severus had loved it, but he’d also had three orgasms over the course of the day.
Dumbledore’s eyes were kinder than Severus had ever seen them. “Many people have difficulty admitting to what has happened to them, Mr Snape.”
“So you’re telling me that if my mother hit me instead of making me hold her paintbox, it would make it understandable if I...went to Malfoy.”
“If you had a lonely childhood, Mr Snape, it would certainly make it more understandable for you to be vulnerable.”
Well, he hadn’t. What with his father, his mother, and the ants, and then the boys at school, he’d had plenty to watch. It had been later, with puberty, that he’d realised that he wanted to touch as well as watch.
“Well?” said Dumbledore. “Do you think you have any more to tell me?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I think I need to think about what you’ve said.”
The day after he sat his NEWTs, Lucius invited him over.
To his relief, Lucius did not ask him for sex. He looked slightly uncomfortable, and was holding a photograph restlessly in his hands.
“I’m afraid I have to tell you I am getting married next week, Severus.”
Severus had been dreading that for ages, and now all he could feel was relief.
Lucius held out the photograph. Himself, with a woman. Both blond and composed, like an elegant pair of matching bookends.
Severus swallowed. He had no real objection to wishing Lucius happy, apart from the fact that he’d prefer to see Lucius burn in hell, but Lucius would suspect something if he were unmoved.
Lucius said, “I find Narcissa, although politically useful, is not the type of a complaisant wife, so I suspect I shan’t have the opportunity to indulge you for a few months.”
Severus had nodded, bowed his head and turned away. That might or might not be true. He didn’t much care. With an effort, he thought back to overhearing Lucius, enough to make tears come to his eyes.
He let one tear spill over, turned back and said, “Goodbye, Lucius.”
He walked to the door and reached for the handle.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” murmured Lucius, quite calmly. “Dear boy, you’re crying, and I think I can stand you one last treat. Come here.”
Shaking with rage, Severus came and stood by him.
“Poor Severus, you’re trembling,” said Lucius, and raised a hand to stroke his face.
Severus’s skin crawled slightly.
“In my lap,” said Lucius. “You may kiss me.”
Severus kissed him, and thought about Dementors. He doubted they’d have any effect on Lucius Malfoy, because you needed to have a soul to lose it.
After a few minutes, Lucius pushed him gently back. “I can’t help noticing you’re a little less worked-up than usual, Severus.”
“I wonder why,” said Severus crossly. “I’ve just learned we can’t do it again for months. If ever. She might not want to let you go. I know I wouldn’t.”
“Jealous child,” murmured Lucius. “No, relax, I’ve got you.”
Here he was, pulled down to lie flat against Lucius, and he couldn’t even enjoy it.
Lucius unbuttoned the front of Severus’s robe, pushed down his underpants—“I thought I told you not to wear that garment!”—and reached in.
Warily, Severus expected an explosion of temper as Lucius stroked his limp prick without result.
“What is it, Severus?” Lucius asked him gently. “Is there anything the matter at school?”
Severus trembled with fury. Of course Lucius had never asked him when that was the matter. And how dare he act like a human being once Severus knew the truth! Which of course reminded him that Lucius must never know he knew the truth.
“S-sorry, Lucius. I’m just thinking, your wife is very beautiful, and—that part of me isn’t exactly pretty. How can you stand to touch me, after her?” He rolled over to face Lucius, trying to hide that part of himself.
Lucius was getting an erection. “Silly boy,” he murmured.
“All right, tell me something you fantasise. What did you think of the last time you masturbated? Her or me?”
He was half-expecting Lucius to throw him off and throw him out. Half-expecting, “None of your bloody business!”
He did not expect Lucius to murmur, “Yes, I like this game,” and reach for him, stroking him with something he couldn’t distinguish from tenderness. His traitorous prick filled; a few weeks since it had been properly taken care of, and Lucius’s hand was the best memory it had. Lucius’s erection stretched and filled gently against him.
“Last time I masturbated, I was lying in bed, thinking of making you crawl naked on your belly for ten minutes...” Lucius panted softly, and his erection got even harder, grinding carefully at Severus’s own crotch. His hand kept squeezing both of them.
“And your hard slimy prick rubbing on the floor in all the dust and dirt,” Lucius went on, having to pause a minute. The hand withdrew. There was a wet, sucking noise. Severus opened an eye and saw Lucius sucking his own fingers.
“When you’d gained a sense of your position,” Lucius went on, sighing, “I’d roll you on your back and look down at you, all streaked with sweat and dirt and juice, and you’d look up at me as if I were god.” Very, very gently, Lucius worked his damp fingers around Severus’s balls and inner thighs, stroking just a fingertip around and into his hole.
Severus sighed as Lucius managed, with a lot of painstakingly-gentle effort, to touch that spot inside him. Several times. Stroking in and out. Then two fingers, not going in especially far but just hitting that spot. Then he could hear Lucius fiddling with something, opening a jar.
Severus heard wet noises for a while, then the something else was pressed against him, cold and blunt.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, just something I thought you might like,” said Lucius, easing it in. He stopped talking, and just worked his fingers, then the—toy?—into Severus, slowly and carefully, getting him stretched and petted and cared-for until it was in him up to the base without pain. Then he began to fuck Severus with it, slow and steady, while continuing the conversation.
“You’d look so tempting, so ready to use,” said Lucius, gasping slightly, “and do you know what I’d like to do?”
Severus groaned, in a mixture of complaint, greed and enquiry.
“I’d like to kneel over you and come right in your face,” said Lucius, arching up a little as he came.
Severus’s arse had that full, stretched, ready-to-come feeling, and his brainless prick was happier than it had been in months—and he’d still rather be anywhere else in the world than this.
I hate you! he thought, as a long hot gush shot from his prick and his arse clamped down so violently he groaned, wriggling to get more, pulse after pulse of it flooding out until he was far too sated to move. Probably ever.
“There now, dear boy,” said Lucius. “Is that better now I’ve ‘made your arse come’ again?” He chuckled, and slipped the toy out, taking his time about it.
All right, now I really hate you. He had to admit, if only to himself, that the feeling had been almost worth it. His body, fool that it was, luxuriated in the afterglow, and the pleasure of being held.
“Mm,” he said, because that was probably what he’d have said before he was suspicious of Lucius.
Lucius kissed him on the top of the head, and cleaned them up with a quick spell. “If it helps,” he said, “I doubt my wife will be so wonderfully...compliant...concerning all my tastes and desires. I’m going to miss having a warm, eager little armful so desperate to satisfy my every whim.”
I still hate you, thought Severus, wriggling, because I’d have been quite satisfied by even as little as that, if it had been true. He was beginning to get hard again.
“When can I do it again?” he asked, because that was what he would have asked, if it had been true.
Lucius chuckled. “Now, if you like. Since it’s going to have to last you.”
Severus said, “I don’t really...”
“Come on then, let me get at you,” said Lucius.
“I don’t want to go on the floor. In the dirt,” said Severus stubbornly.
Lucius rolled him over, very gently, so that he was sitting in Lucius’s warm lap. “It’s a fantasy, you idiot. Can you imagine me putting up with a floor like that?”
Severus thought about it. “No,” he said.
“I think you’ve satisfied my more dominant urges for the present.” Lucius undressed him, using a spell, and put his wand aside.
“All I would like to do now is touch you, Severus,” said Lucius, pouring some of the remaining lubricant into his hand and rubbing his hands together for a few moments.
“No, I don’t want to,” said Severus.
“Really not?” murmured Lucius, stroking Severus’s inner thighs with merciless skill. “Show me how you like it. Pretend you’re having a good, slow session on your own, and you’re giving yourself all those naughty, brazen little teases you wouldn’t show me.”
Lucius seemed to be in a decidedly odd mood. Apart from the autocratic behaviour, of course; that was very normal.
Severus closed his eyes. Curling his hand gently around Lucius’s hand, he silently showed Lucius how he liked it, the way he’d never quite dared; the rhythm he liked, the fingertip playing with his foreskin in just the way that drove him insane with pleasure, the way he liked the palm of his hand to rub his balls. He ended up with Lucius’s fist pumping his shaft almost painfully, Lucius’s other hand playing with his balls, and his own fingers doing the precision work with the tip in the way that felt so subtly, exquisitely good. His toes curled as he tried desperately to hang on. Lucius squeezed his balls and his wet prick in rhythm, then took his hands away.
Severus moaned, but was too far gone to stop playing with himself until Lucius said, “Stop a moment. Take your hands off.”
He stopped.
Lucius pulled at his wrists.
“Now I have your attention,” whispered Lucius, “I would like to try this.”
Lucius’s left hand went between Severus’s legs, palm on his balls and a fingertip playing with his still-loose hole. His right hand wrapped the base of Severus’s prick and gripped firmly.
“Caress your thighs with your left hand,” drawled Lucius.
He did.
“Think about having three hands all over you, your thighs, arse, prick and balls all getting thoroughly stimulated...”
Severus whined through his clenched teeth.
“Now think about four hands, and use your right hand where you want it most. And—I think I should like you to scream, Severus.”
He thought about using his right hand on his other thigh, just to escape being so thoroughly choreographed, but it was really no contest. His hand brushed Lucius’s, settled on to the few inches Lucius wasn’t taking care of, and squeezed.
He didn’t scream. He didn’t have the breath. He managed a choked, shuddering gasp, and went rigid, jerking and twisting in a fury of pressure and pleasure and devastating relief.
“I take it you enjoyed that, dear boy,” said Lucius.
“Mm,” he replied, half-asleep, and vaguely aware that he was going to feel really bad about having done that as soon as he woke up.
A minute, or an hour, or some time later, he could hear Lucius whispering just above his hair. “You’ve no need to feel jealous, Severus. I don’t love her, and I love you quite as much as I love anyone.”
Severus almost believed it, despite everything, just for that moment. Lucius was dangerous, he reminded himself, because Lucius could make one believe anything was true.
He went back to his happy, satisfied doze.
There was a noise.
Lucius dumped Severus in the chair and got up, rubbing his eyes.
There was a very small house-elf at the door.
Lucius glared at it. “Didn’t I tell you not to come in until my guest had left? Stick your tongue in the vice in the workshop—two notches of pressure, I think—and wait for me,” he said crossly to the elf.
“Why are you looking at me that way, Severus?” he demanded, through a yawn.
“Isn’t that a little...cruel?”
“It’s a house-elf, Severus,” Lucius said a little blankly. “They like being treated that way. I’d never treat a wizard like that—well, as you know, a little discipline is character-forming, but I never hurt you, did I?”
Severus was silent.
The week after that, he got his NEWTs. He’d only bothered to do his two best subjects because he’d had so much to think about apart from school-work. He could have done reasonably on, say, Arithmancy, because he liked heavily-theoretical subjects, but he’d decided that it wasn’t worth cutting back on his real work.
Despite being distracted by hours-a-week brewing for Voldemort, and all the business with Lucius, he hadn’t done at all badly. There was a footnote from the Defence-Against-The-Dark-Arts examiner, saying that his Dark-Arts results had been docked twenty marks for ‘forgetting that this examination is in Defence Against the Dark Arts and showing an unhealthy interest in certain matters’. Even with that, he hadn’t done badly. His Potions result was, of course, ‘outstanding’.
He was quietly pleased, until he returned to school and heard Potter calling him ‘Thickie Two-Exam’. Potter had done four of the big, flashy subjects, including Transfigurations (which Severus had nearly failed at OWL-level). He had the best marks in the school, closely-followed by Sirius Black.
Of course, thought Severus acidly, bullying must take up a lot less of one’s time and effort than trying to avoid being bullied.
He went to see Dumbledore to ask what came next.
“What do I have to do next, sir?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, Mr Snape?” Dumbledore looked politely puzzled.
“I have my NEWT results. Is there anything I have to wait for or may I now leave this...school?”
“I believe some of the Gryffindors are going to have a very large, very drunken party,” said Dumbledore solemnly, “which of course, as Headmaster, I should know nothing about. But there is no necessity to stay here further.”
“Thank you, sir.” He breathed in. It felt like the first clear, deep, unrestricted breath he’d drawn since fifth-year.
He got lost in Hogsmeade, of course. Everybody else had been having lively, social, go-and-buy-sweets Saturdays for years. He had been alone in the library, at first, and then with Lucius. The sheer number of bustling wizards and witches of all ages who seemed to know where they were going was a little overwhelming, like the noise. Chattering, laughter, miaowing, croaks and owl-cries filled the air. The smells were even worse: it wasn’t that they were necessarily bad, so much as that he had an extremely sensitive nose and was used to isolating single items by smell. Stenches, odours, perfumes and just plain smells were running into each other all over the place—alcohol and vomit, horse-dung and flowers, hay and some rather sharp-smelling fixative used on cloth, poppy syrup and a whiff of Photograph Potion (he’d know it anywhere), sweat, mead, chickens, some appallingly-strong caustic that made him feel his precious nostrils were being scoured...
He retreated to the side-streets, and down one particular blessedly-calm and stone-smelling alleyway he saw a very small, muddy sign outside a door. On a whim, he rubbed it with a sleeve, and found: JACK ESTERY UNLICENSED MEMORIST. No wonder Jack Estery didn’t advertise.
Gasping sharply, he rubbed some more mud back over the sign, and hurried away as if someone had caught him committing a crime.
He went and found a room for himself, just for now, and arranged his shrunken-down and precious collection of bottles, books and documents in a matchbox he kept sewn into the hem of his cloak.
That night, he woke out of a deep, dreamless sleep with an idea fully-formed in his mind. Not a very admirable idea, but it would get him out of his mess.
It took him three days to find Estery’s hovel again, and that was with looking for it.
He knocked.
“Yeah?” The voice was rough, and rather hoarse.
Sticking his head round the door into the filthy, smoky room, Severus asked, “Mr Estery?”
“Yeah.” Most unhelpfully, Estery just continued to smoke. Severus could barely see him through the fog, but got the impression of bloodshot eyes, greying hair and untidy teeth. Good. He’d hate to owe anything to someone better-looking than him.
“Could you put that out, sir? It’s a little strong...” Severus said, as politely as he could, between coughs.
Estery stubbed it out in a large ashtray. Apart from a desk and a couple of chairs, the room was unfurnished. Except for a lot of shelves filled with clear glass bottles which were apparently dedicated to neither drink nor Potions. They seemed to contain thin, silvery, restlessly-shifting strands of something that Severus couldn’t quite identify; and then Severus noticed the huge Pensieve on the desk, and thought oh, of course.
“I don’t deal wiv underage,” said Estery, spitting tobacco-coloured phlegm into the ashtray. “If yer wants ter edit yer firs’ kiss ter be some’un prettier, piss off an’ grow up! An’ remember I can tell, because I’ll do a bit of rummagin’ around in yer head.” He sighed. “Uvver people’s misery’s abaht the only fun I’ve got left.”
Severus nodded.
“Do yer know how ter use a Pensieve?” asked Estery. He pushed the big bowl towards Severus. “Edited highlights only.”
Books. The paintbox. The Sorting. Potions. Lucius. Sex. Bullying. Everything but Voldemort. In they all went, and were handed over.
“Awright, awright,” groaned Estery, “I gets the point. Yer wants ter make that piss-arrogant toffee-nosed wanker suffer for ‘is sins.”
“What?— Lucius?—No, that’s not it,” Severus was surprised. With some effort, he isolated a certain conversation with Dumbledore, spooled it off, and passed it over.
“Are yer sure?” asked Estery, doubtfully, when he’d seen and heard that. “I mean, I could make it look like ‘e was even more of a shit. Like ‘e raped yer, or somethin’.”
“No,” said Severus, quite firmly. “There’s enough in my memory to incriminate me as a very active participant. From what the Headmaster says, if I had suffered some sort of abuse as a child he would then understand my vulnerability to Lucius Malfoy. If that happens, he might help me escape my situation.”
“So?” said Estery. “Tell me what yer wants or go away.” He coughed horribly.
“I want a new memory to fit in, suggesting my parents were cruel to me.”
Estery was silent, and looked as if he were having second thoughts about the whole matter, so Severus took out the bundle of Galleons in his pocket and counted out six.
“Awright then,” muttered Estery between coughs. “Yer does know that this is a risky, dodgy business an’ I shouldn’t be doin’ it?”
“Yes.” Well, of course. You don’t imagine I’d be here if there was any possibility of getting a reputable worker to agree to this?
Severus suspected Estery had been talking up the dangers-and-difficulties bit, because the actual work only took about five minutes.
Estery took out a strand from one of the bottles and handed it to Severus. It was, of course, unpleasant: that was its job. Estery had been clever enough to choose something that was neither violent nor long-lasting, but carried implied violence and fear. In the image, a tall, rough-looking man Severus didn’t recognise shouted at an obviously-scared woman for some minutes, then raised his fist, while a child cowered in the corner.
“Don’ recognise any o’them, do yer?”
“No.”
“Had ter ask. It’s a conflict-of-interest if it’s someone yer knows. Not tha’ this is any too legal, it’s jus’ what I’m good at.” Estery coughed hollowly.
Estery separated out a piece from Severus’s memories, pulled the new bit on top of it, and pressed at it gently but firmly with his thumbs, as if trying to blur the images together. The old strand kept wavering and buckling, as if trying to throw the new image off.
“Yer very strong-minded,” said Estery grudgingly. “Are yer sure yer wants ter do this?”
He nodded.
Five minutes later, Estery gave an exclamation of satisfaction, and handed the result to Severus.
It was unexpectedly painful to see Ambrosius Snape’s thoughtful face distorted into lines of violence, and to see his own equally hook-nosed face on the child in the corner. A look of terror on his mother’s face just looked wrong.
“Yer’ll have ter do a bit of upkeep,” said Estery, “or it won’t set. Dream it. Think it. Visualise it. Make it stick. Tell yerself that yer frightened of yer dad.”
“What, now?”
“No, on yer own. When yer just thinkin’ ter yerself. Or between awake and asleep. Tell yerself the facts don’t matter, and tell yerself it hurts, so it must be true. Think abaht when yer was scared at school, and then think what yer’d feel if yer dad was like that.”
Severus nodded silently.
It took about a week or two for the memory to settle, even with all that work. The problem wasn’t that the memory seemed unconvincing: after the first few days it looked huge, dazzling, hyper-visible and liable to overshadow everything else in his brain.
Severus had nightmares about his father, and after a while things his father definitely had not done, like hang him in the air upside-down, started to attach to the image of his father instead of those bloody Gryffindors.
He started to wonder if his father actually had been a violent man and he’d somehow forgotten, even though he knew the truth intellectually.
Only the knowledge that he’d be able to go back and repair the damage made it endurable.
Once the image had settled, Severus went straight to Dumbledore and showed it to him in a Pensieve, followed by an image of him crying on Lucius’s shoulder (he’d cut off the bit just before the tears when he was humping Lucius’s leg, in deference to Dumbledore’s sensibilities).
Dumbledore said, “I was afraid of this, Severus. Lucius Malfoy has cold-bloodedly taken advantage of your vulnerability.”
Once he had that admission, Severus managed to get the conversation onto the more pressing subject of Voldemort, and showed Dumbledore a completely un-edited strip of memory from his discovery of what Voldemort really stood for.
For once, he talked and Dumbledore listened, and when he got the documentation of his own crimes out of the matchbox, Dumbledore proved to be a good deal of help in finding out identities and how to deploy his antidotes.
Dumbledore asked if he could come back in a week’s time.
The next day he hurried back to Estery’s, light-ish of heart.
Estery lay in a drunken stupor with his hair falling in the Pensieve. When roused, he said, “Oh. It’s you.” Then he said, “Nobody ever comes back here.”
This was hardly encouraging.
“I’ve come to be put right.”
Estery looked at him.
“D-do your thing. I have the money.” His family weren’t rich, but his expenses weren’t huge, either. Considering that his only extravagance was normally books and ingredients, and Voldemort had been subsidising him for some while, his few Galleons were largely untouched.
Estery looked at him. “Oh, yer poor little fucker,” he said, after a while.
A very cold feeling began to creep down Severus’s spine. “You can do it. I know you can. People use Pensieves all the time. And Memory Charms.” The respectable end of the profession was better-regulated, but there were any number of things that could be done with the memory, anyone knew that. It wasn’t as if Memory Charms were difficult: people used them on Muggles all the time.
“Ain’t possible,” said Estery. “Magic needs ter be able ter separate stuff out. Memory an’ Healin’ an’ such always needs ter be fresh. Why do yer think everyone’s in such a bleedin’ hurry gettin’ ter Muggles when they’ve Seen somethin’ they shouldn’t? If it’s just lyin’ on the surface, blow on it an’ it’s gone.”
“But surely I can—think about it, dream about it, just reverse the process?” Severus insisted desperately. “You told me how to make it stick, then I can unstick it!”
“Naah. Ever tried not thinkin’ of a polar-bear? Once it’s in, it’s in. Yer might be able ter lose a bit of it over time, but don’t expect it to be easy. I worked it in wiv me fingers, it’s a knack that, not everyone can do it. Pushed past all the resistance your memory had ter acceptin’ it. Went right in. Then yer worked on it, dreamed it through—I bet yer had nightmares of every bad bleedin’ thing ever happened to yer, yer Dad had a starrin’ role—and once yer’ve convinced yer subconscious it ain’t goin’ ter come out easy.”
“You really can’t? Even if I pay?”
Estery shook his head. “I’m bloody sorry, lad, honest I am, but yer came in so confident I didn’t think ter check that.”
“It’s not your fault.” Severus sighed. “I think I might have asked anyway, even if I knew the worst.”
There wasn’t much to be said, after that.
Severus had been hoping to visit his parents soon, but changed his mind. He would send his parents presents and letters, but never go home again unless he could clean his mind out. It was his mess, they’d done nothing to deserve it—he doubted they’d even be able to understand it—but he was not going to flinch in front of his father as if his father were Potter.
At his next meeting with Dumbledore, the Headmaster asked, “What did you intend to do next, Severus?”
“I—I haven’t really thought.” He’d only got as far as the thought of exonerating himself as a vulnerable child.
Dumbledore stared at him over folded hands. “I have a suggestion. How would you feel about a teaching position in a couple of years?”
“Here, sir?” All right, that’s a silly question. But I wasn’t exactly prepared to come back here for longer than I needed to for Dumbledore’s help.
“You could make a very useful teacher, and an extremely useful spy, Severus.”
“No. Absolutely not. I hate children. I hated children when I was one!” Severus was indignant, then shivered as the factitious memory of the child-in-the-corner rose to the surface again. He wished he could get rid of that.
Dumbledore was doing that twinkling-eyes thing again.
“What?” he snapped, putting a fair bit of bite on the interjection.
“From my perspective, you’re still not terribly old, Severus.”
He shrugged. From his perspective, between Voldemort and Lucius and the bullying and the werewolf and the memory thing, he’d aged considerably in a few short months.
“Why in a couple of years?”
“From my point of view, Professor Catwood’s wife has been expressing her discontent at being stuck in the Scottish wilderness. He’s found a position elsewhere, but it isn’t immediately available. From your point of view, I understand students who return to teach at their own educational establishment directly after leaving have a difficult time of it.” Dumbledore paused. “Meanwhile, we could both benefit from restocking the Hogwarts Potions stores cupboard if you decided you wanted to go travelling. Funded by the school, of course. Professor Catwood is not an ambitious man, and has few private projects. Meanwhile, you can with perfect truth tell your acquaintances that you were offered the chance to travel as an incentive.”
He could have a last taste of freedom before having to teach, and he could get away from Voldemort’s and Lucius’s company, do his planning and read about Occlumency—and have the particularly tempting opportunity to choose his own fresh ingredients rather than what had been (badly) stored by an (inept) apothecary.
“Why would I want to become a teacher?” he asked.
“I think...freedom, Severus. The freedom to think and teach and talk as you see fit. As long as you don’t let any of the children, not even the stupid ones, get killed in your classes, I shall give you an extremely free hand to do as you think fit, even if I disagree with it. Freedom to set your own syllabus. Freedom to brew any Potion you might want, for study or use. Can you think of any other possible employer who can say as much?”
Severus shook his head.
“As well as that, there is the question of Voldemort. The chance to travel has bought you a bit of time: you will be able to prepare for being a double agent, and have time to think of precisely how to give him the impression that he is spying on me. You will be able to pass on misinformation that will be a significant help to our side. You might be able to cut back on brewing for him, and even if you can’t, I will be able to help you decide how to use your antidotes.”
“Are you prepared to admit a Slytherin to ‘our side’?”
Dumbledore un-twinkled himself. “To be quite honest, Severus, I’m beginning to wonder if I was...mistaken. There are a lot of Slytherins that I find it difficult to warm to, but the thought that we have to lose a quarter of our pupils every year to the Dark seems excessive. Now I trust you...”
Severus felt a tiny, grudging warm spot flicker into life in his heart.
“Now I trust you, I would like to appoint you Head of Slytherin. They need to have an advocate, and it can’t be me.”
“Now you’ve decided I was sufficiently troubled during my childhood to excuse me my sins,” Severus muttered.
“That isn’t true, Severus,” said Dumbledore sternly. “I have been trying to tell you all along that you are not culpable for whatever Lucius Malfoy did to you. He is older than you. He seduced a child.”
The world shattered and reformed behind Severus’s eyes. The sound of a heart breaking was as quiet as a grudging snap of ice from a small trodden puddle. Which was fitting. It wasn’t as if it was an important heart, and it wasn’t as if he couldn’t live without it.