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Chapter Text

Severus watched the raindrops slip down the glass window, his eyes trailing the individual drips before losing focus and taking in the wide garden beyond the glass pane. The green grass blurred into the sculpted rose bushes. The whites of the birch trees peeled back like split skin, smudging into the damp green of the grounds.  

It seemed impossible to Severus to be witnessing such a downpour and not be feeling the dampness on his skin from a leak springing from his bedroom ceiling. It was eerie to pick up the scent of petrichor from the slight gap in the open window, instead of the scent of pollution that typically simmered in the hot sun of the summer holidays.  

But he was not in Spinners End; and anything seemed possible at the Malfoy Manor.  

He had been staying at the Malfoy Manor since the second week of the summer holidays.  

It was a discomforting truth that Severus danced around in his mind, knowing that if he hadn’t been arrested by the muggle police in Cokeworth, if his arrest hadn’t been noticed by the magical law enforcement and picked up by Lucius Malfoy as he worked in the Ministry of Magic... he would still be festering in the misery and poverty of Spinners End.  

It had been... an embarrassment, to say the least, to be picked up by Lucius. The older man had looked so out of place in the muggle police station and, Severus had felt so, shamefully... in place.  

He had been arrested for stealing.  

He belonged in the police station, and he had burned in the blue eyes of his mentor when he had unexpectedly arrived to collect him.  

“I take it your poor excuse for a father did not leave you any money, nor any resources, to survive the summer holidays?”  

Severus had not needed to answer, that much had been obvious.  

“Well, we can’t have you stealing, can we? You’re coming with me. I should have offered from the start.”  

Lucius had done something to the police officer who had been questioning him, something Severus was sure came close to flouting a few magical laws but who was he to question a person who had came to offer him help... He had been stealing food, he had to take the help being handed to him with humility.  

He had walked out of the police station with Lucius, the hot summer sun beating on his face, his skin tinging red with shame as he stepped behind the smartly dressed, well groomed man. 

Lucius’ hair had shimmered in the sun; whereas his hair had glistened with dankness.  

His clothes were second hand when he had been handed them years ago by his mother; now they were second hand, ill fitting, and stitched as well as he could stitch with the thread that had been left in his dead mother’s haberdashery bag.  

The world he had stepped into as Lucius had apparated him away was as far from Spinners End as he could ever imagine.  

He had been invited to the Malfoy Manor before, for events held for Slytherin students, for awkward networking afternoons that Lucius offered him... He had never stayed longer than a few hours before.  

Now, this summer, the summer before his final year at Hogwarts, he had spent the last four weeks at the Manor. He had another two weeks to pass by in luxury and comfort, another two weeks to practice how to exist in this world so he had the slimmest chance of landing somewhere higher than Spinners End after he finally, thankfully, left Hogwarts behind for good.  

He didn’t even want to go back for this year.  

He never wanted to see that place again.  

He had nightmares about the school, nightmares that he woke from in a heart pounding sweat in the middle of the night.  

They were memories.  

Flashbacks that ran through his mind- images he had no control over, memories that dunked him under, his hands transformed into powerless stumps in his psyche.  

Each night this happened, Severus would climb out of his too-soft bed, quietly wander towards the library inside the Manor.  

He had been introduced to this peaceful place by Lucius’ father as he had mumbled his way through a tour he had deemed necessary to put Severus through when he had arrived. He wondered how Lucius had managed to convince his father to let a disgusting person like him stay over in his household for the summer. The older Malfoy had a similar air of superiority that Lucius carried, but he seemed to lack the warmth that Lucius appeared to bestow upon him- for reasons Severus could not comprehend, Lucius was kind to him. Severus preferred to stay away from Abraxas Malfoy as much as he could.  

Luckily, the library was a silent space at three in the morning, when he was ripped from his sleep with terror.  

He tiptoed across the hallways until he found the library, browsing the books with an enthusiasm that worked hard to eradicate the terror he felt inside: these were not books that could be found at the Hogwarts library, after all. He had certainly indulged in the literature, the knowledge, soaking up the old printed words with an awareness that when he did finally leave this place to go to school his education would feel lacking in comparison.  He was absolutely certain that even the Restricted sections within the Hogwarts libraries had nothing on the gruesome topics of blood oaths, horcruxes, or sacrificial hexes...

He had taken a few books back with him to his bedroom.  

Snuck them under the bed shirt that Lucius had gifted him when he realised that he had nothing to wear at night.  

He snuck them out of habit, hid them as if he was stealing them.  

He clearly hadn’t learned his lesson from when he had been arrested weeks ago.  

His eyes lifted from the window and landed on the desk where he sat, landing on the book he had taken from the library the night before. The book a reminder of the strangeness of that night. 

The night before had been different.  

Because every other night he had ventured to the library in an attempt to calm himself down from his terror, he had been alone.  

He had grown accustomed to the silence, the freedom of browsing with no one else to see him. This had been part of the relaxation for him. He had been alone up until he reached the corner of the library, the oldest part, the smell of dust and time heavy in this part of the library.  

He had stepped into an aisle and found himself face to face with a man he had a vague familiarity with.  

“Mr Snape, I presume?” 

He had nodded through his alarm, squinting into the dark as he frantically tried to identify who he was facing. Feeling a sharp prickle of tension on the back of his neck, his mouth had turned too dry to speak. The man was tall, sharp featured, sharp eyed. His hair line was regressing significantly, a gauntness in his cheekbones that radiated power rather than weakness.  

“It’s so good to see such an eagerness for knowledge from our youth.”  

Severus had stood, waiting for a question. He watched the man step closer to him, his face obscured by shadows. In the dark, Severus knew that he had seen this man before, the distinctiveness of his features were striking. He had seen him at the Manor. Both Lucius and Abraxas had coveted his company, seeking to please him in ways that Severus recognised- in ways that Severus had tried to please the Malfoys, to try to revert the terrible impression he must have given them both.  

Severus had the sense to know that this man in the library at three in the morning was a man he needed to... if not impress, then not embarrass himself in front of. But he was at a loss for words, the floor beneath his feet seemed to fracture and fray beneath his bare feet- he had felt so foolish to be caught barefoot at that moment in time, but... he had not expected to meet anyone at that moment.  

“Here. Take this book, perhaps it will interest you?”  

His voice had left little room for argument: it was as if Severus had to be interested in this book. Severus forced his body to respond, to lift his hand out and take the book that was being offered to him at that moment. He could hardly read the title, his nerves so shot.  

“Get some rest, Mr Snape.”  

And he had been left alone in the library once again. But the peace was broken, the respite was gone. He huddled the book beneath his bed shirt and made his way back to the bedroom Lucius had offered him to use for the summer.  

Only when he had returned to the sanctuary of this gifted room was he able to read the title of this gifted book: War of the Minds: Mastering the Dark Arts of Mind Magic 

Looking at this book now, hours later, placed on the desk, his ears filled with the drum of rain that pelted against the window.  

He remembered devouring the book in the early morning, his eyes shoving words into his head like a starving man shoving food down his throat. He had not been able to savour the flavour of the text at that manic moment, too wrapped up in the bizarreness of the encounter, the leap from traumatic terror to exciting terror too much of a jump for his mind to take at that time. He had fallen back asleep at six in the morning, Lucius somehow knowing he needed to sleep-in that morning instead of waking him at eight to get him to accompany him on his rounds of the Manor.  

Other things that day had dragged him away from making sense of the book he had been given. He had a full day of activities that aimed to shape him into a fine example of pure blood privilege, the things that Hogwarts would not teach him but Slytherin House certainly would: elocution lessons to dull his uncouth West Midlands accent; lessons in etiquette; lessons in how to dress and groom himself. The lessons had been a stark flush of humiliation to begin with but he ... understood why Lucius was doing this for him, he could not deny that he needed this help in how to behave. He was uncouth. He was disgusting. He hated himself enough to accept the lessons with grace and humility as he needed so desperately to change and improve.  

He didn’t want to be Severus Snape, half-blood with no money, greasy disgusting hideous individual who hated himself as much as everyone else hated him.

He didn’t want to be Severus Snape, freak of a man, who sliced his skin to shreds when his head got too thick of feelings, too full of failure. 

He wanted to be someone else.  

He needed to be someone else.  

So he took these summer lessons every day.  

He accepted the discomfort of change and criticism that came with shedding his old self away, because it was worth it.  

The rest of his day was spent in leisure.

For the first summer since he was a child he was not working in a muggle shop to earn money to exchange at Gringotts at the end of summer to scrimp together to purchase his school equipment and books. For the first time in his entire life, he didn’t need to think ahead financially because his needs where actually being met. It was a difficult adjustment to make, he kept expecting the rug to be pulled out from beneath his feet, for the security to be ripped from him... He didn’t even need to do housework, because the Malfoys had a series of House Elves to do this work for them. 

He opened the book, landing on the contents page. Taking in the theme of the book, the dominant topics, the supporting topics... 

He got the impression that the man in the library had wanted him to be interested in Legilimency- that was the topic that dominated the book. Why else would this man hand this book to him?  

But he was ... not drawn to the chapters that explored the act of invading other people’s minds.  

He was drawn entirely to the footnote topic of... Occlumency.  

Because he had so much he needed to erase. 

He had so many uncontrollable, monstrous feelings inside him that he could not handle.  

He had too much grief, too much anger, too much ... it all made him weak.  

As he read through the chapters on Occlumency he realised that this was his key to stability, his key to a future he could handle, a way to live and not explode. Because right now he was a lit fire, a burning plinth of terrible experiences that threatened to extinguish him. He saw the bleakness of his future if he did not get control. All he had at that moment was anger and tears that he lashed out upon his own body for failing, for his weakness.  

Scars welted his inner arms and thighs, the anger having lashed out in a self-immolation break.  

He didn’t speak of this. He didn’t let anyone else speak of this. Speaking of it would make it real, would ruin the life he was trying to build. 

Besides, he didn’t need to speak of it- the self-injury would be fixed by Occlumency.  

Speaking of this embarrassing, punitive, habit  would serve no purpose.  

He would work hard for it as much as he worked hard in the lessons Lucius arranged for him.  

He saw it as a way to make these lessons work, the time and effort that his mentor was putting into him- he wanted to make it worth it. To make it work. He needed to repay this kindness, this opportunity, he had been given. 

He flicked through the first chapter on Occlumency at his desk, absorbing the old printed words like a potion he had gone his entire life without. His ears drowned in the sound of rain as he studied, the rest of the world blocked out. 

. . .  

Now that the rain had passed, the outdoor would was more inviting. Severus placed his secret book in a small satchel bag he had been gifted in anticipation for his return to school. When he had been handed the bag, a clean dark grey material, a fabric that was charmed to repel water, he had assumed that this was a bag from Lucius’ time at Hogwarts and had felt a small tug of honour at being given what he deemed to be a personal item. However, this tug of intimacy was quickly dismissed when he was informed that Lucius’ fiancé, Narcissa Black, had purchased the bag for him whilst she was out shopping in Diagon Alley the previous day. 

Black. The family name was inescapable in these upper echelons of pure blood society. To everyone else in this part of the world, the name Black signalled purity and richness, an untouchable, unattainable, status that was worn in the bodies of this beautiful and haughty family. It was all these things to Severus, too, but so much more darker and so much more violent and so much more destructive. When Severus heard the name Black he did not hear ‘Narcissa’, or ‘Bellatrix’(although she was now a Lestrange).  

He heard Sirius Black and his chest tightened with a fear and anger and hatred that orbited a part of himself that he knew existed but did not want to face. The beauty of the Black family did not make itself known to Severus by the women of this family, but the men. Man. When he heard this family name, his head flooded with sneering insults about his own appearance from the mouth of the man he had such unwanted attraction to; when he heard this family name, his chest tightened not just in an unsupressable flutter but in anticipation of attack.  

When he heard the name Black he was reminded what a disgusting and self-sabotaging mess he was and how he needed to do better, be better. This was the sort of failing that needed to be erased; his punitive self-injury had not exorcised this sickness from him.  

He wished the satchel bag he had been gifted had belonged to Lucius, but it didn’t. It was gifted by a Black and he had no choice but to use it. He hoped the secret book he had placed in the bag would help with ironing out these tangles in his chest and the knots in his mind. He couldn’t see a future where he would live like this forever.  

He stepped into the fresh, petrichor laden air of the garden grounds. The shrill twitter of the Malfoy peacocks speckled the air like chimes; house elves could be seen tending to the flower beds, their ragged bodies gaunt and exposed to the damp air and the scorching sun.  

 Severus wondered if he saw the man in the library again, whether he should bring up the topic of having been handed War of the Minds by him. He was unused to being gifted things, unused to the social etiquette involved in acknowledging gifts, the performance and pantomime of social interactions felt exhausting to him.  

If he was confronted with the man again, and he was in the company of Lucius or Abraxas, he would also be confronted with the improper use of the Malfoy library. He assumed it was an improper use, so accustomed to the restrictions placed on study at Hogwarts that the act of being in the library at three in the morning and taking books out without permission felt improper to him. He didn’t want the Malfoy’s to know he was taking the books, afraid that the act would be seen as stealing and yet another example of his awful behaviour- afraid that Abraxas would put his foot down and have Severus removed from the Manor and he would have to go back to the shit hole of Spinners End again for the remaining two weeks of the summer holidays. Worst still: he would then have no time left to work and save money for his school materials...  

He decided there and then that he would just avoid the topic, keep it secret at the risk of appearing rude. Better still, he would do his very best to avoid their shared company- 

“Ah, Severus, so good to see you finally out in the fresh air.” 

As Severus stepped out into the circle of birch trees within the grounds, hoping to burrow away into the privacy-affording circular huts carved from oak, he found his typical hide away occupied by several robed individuals. Lucius peered up at him from his seated position, his blue eyes offering a shielded warmth.  

“Do join us, why don’t you?” Lucius patted the seat beside him, on the edge of the rectangular table in the hut.  

Severus had not wanted company, had wanted to dive into the book he had been studying since that morning, had wanted to absorb the knowledge in peace... But here he found himself instead enclosed within a gathering that included Abraxas, Narcissa, Bellatrix, her husband Rodolphus Lestrange, and the man he had unexpectedly met in the library the night before.  

As friendly and welcoming as Lucius was towards him, as Severus sat down in the too-cosy hut he had the sensation he assumed a person would have if they were sitting down in a lions den. The social minefield he found himself stumbling into made his mouth dry, his chest tighten. He looked up from the table and accidently met eyes with Bellatrix, her family name change doing nothing to dispel the familiar sharpness of her eyes that appeared to be a family trait. Same with the sneering smirk that appeared at the creases of her lips.  

“So, this is the little project you have adopted, Lucius?” she aired dismissively, “how very modern of you to pluck a no-name stray from the fringes of our society, dress him up in robes, and see if he can pass for one of us at the end.”  

Severus narrowed his eyes, a furious glare building between his brows as he sneered back at her.  

“Now, now, Bella, I think you will find that mentoring Severus has been a complete delight, a rewarding investment for the legacy of Slytherin House.” Lucius spoke before Severus could undo all the praise he had bestowed upon him with an uncouth spillage of curses from his mouth, “yes, Severus comes from humble origins, but he is one of us.” 

Bellatrix rose an eyebrow at her brother in law, but kept her mouth as the man sat beside her began to speak. In fact, Severus noticed with confusion, she seemed to hang off every word he said, even if it they were contrary to her own opinions.  

“I concur, it is admirable that Lucius has taken upon himself to mentor and guide the young of our House,” the man praised, turning to face Severus so directly that he had to hold himself still to not buckle beneath the invasive eyes of his unexpected defender, “if Headmaster Dumbledore is going to leave our children to the wild, unguided, then it is up to us to ensure they do not turn feral.” 

Severus felt his breathing relax as the man’s eyes turned away from him to look upon Bellatrix sat beside him, her eyes fixed upon his face with a barely restrained hunger and an admiration that Severus saw as open as an uncovered wound.  

“Perhaps, Bellatrix, you will be more open to the guidance of our youth, when you yourself have given us a child.”   

If Severus had seen her expression of admiration to be as open as an uncovered wound, her expression flashed to transform into this wound exactly. He was unsure why the man’s words would land so devastatingly on her face, or why his words seemed to matter so very much to her- to all the people sat together in the cosy hut, Severus noticed.  

But he found himself... satisfied by her private insult, as she had insulted him so publically.  

He found himself all the more intrigued by the man whose name he had not known until this moment.  

“Allow me to make introductions,” Abraxas announced, as head of the Manor, he deemed it appropriate to re-direct the conversation away from such intimate matters, “Lord Voldemort, this is my son’s mentee, Severus Snape. Severus, this is Lord Voldemort, leader of the fight to place magical might where it belongs in our world.” 

Severus was sure his heart froze at the name Lord Voldemort. Having full awareness of the acts this man had committed in recent years, of the way his name permeated the common room of Slytherin House. He remembered the enthralled discussions of his cohort, always on the edge of these discussions as he was always on the edge of any social world. But here he was, in the company of the man himself. He knew that his dorm mates would not believe him if he had told them that he had been given a book by the legendary dark wizard, but this interaction- this gathering, had witnesses to back his tale up.  

He knew enough about pure blood society by now to know that they were a matrix of gossip and news, a closed community of intrigue where social gatherings and what amounted from these gatherings were the topic of dissecting conversation. It was an uncomfortable sensation for Severus to know that his name would be dropped into these conversations.  

It was difficult for him to process a scenario where his name was not dropped for terrible, humiliating reasons.  

“We have already met, of course.” Lord Voldemort re-directed his stare to Severus, and once again Severus’ chest tightened and his heart palpitated in terror, his pale face flushing slightly with a humiliation that did not match the tone of the man’s speech.  

“You have already made acquaintance with the Dark Lord, Severus?” Lucius narrowed his eyes, as if trying to work out how underprepared Severus was for such a high profile meeting.  

“Yes, we both found ourselves unable to drop off to sleep last night and both sought to cure our insomnia with knowledge in your impressive library.” Lord Voldemort explained, his eyes never leaving Severus’ and witnessing the squirming humiliation that he tried to hold down inside him, “your mentee is well read.” 

But all Severus could think of was this is what the pure bloods would be saying when the tale of the gathering dropped his name into the story. This part: where he was exposed for the book thief he was, the part where his absence of social graces left him behaving inappropriately in other people’s houses. He was waiting for the anger on Abraxas Malfoy’s face, the disappointment on Lucius’ shoulders, the embarrassed side-glance from Narcissa. He waited for the dismissal from the Manor, his exile from a world that offered so much security and promise- 

“How wonderful to have such a studious project, Lucius.” Abraxas praised his son, before going on what Severus could only consider a heart-felt rant, “I have tried on several occasions now to introduce the tomes we own to Hogwarts library- for select readership, of course- but Headmaster Dumbledore’s aversion to what he considers to be dark literature has left him foolishly anti-intellectual and he has rudely refused my offer each time.” 

Abraxas turned towards Severus and for the first time looked him in the eye. It was as if this gathering in the rain soaked garden had served a vetting process for the older man; it was not enough for his son to praise Severus and invest his time and effort into mentoring him, but to have his character lifted by the Dark Lord made him now a person worth engaging with.  

Severus was not sure what to do with this apparent approval.  

It was not just the elder Malfoy who was looking at him with appreciation. It was his son and his soon-to-be daughter-in-law. It was Lord Voldemort himself. The only person who seemed disjointed by his praise was Bellatrix Lestrange- her husband looked at him in ways that made Severus avoid his eyes. Rodolphus looked at him with the same hunger that had been obvious on his wife’s face towards the Dark Lord.  

Severus did not have a social blueprint for how to respond to the ... uncustomary example of a marriage.  

At least he was not going to be sent back to Spinners’ End, he sighed in relief as the conversation carried on around him. 

He needed time to absorb this encounter, the too-close seating area that had put him under a microscope. He shivered at the exposure he had felt, as one pair of eyes after the next had landed upon him, the wide range of expressions and reactions towards him made him dizzy. He preferred to be alone so he would not need to process these sorts of sensations, finding it manageable to be in one-on-one company rather than such a large group. How was he supposed to juggle the range of demands from Narcissa looking at him as if she wanted to pet him like a puppy to Rodolphus looking at him like he wanted Severus to crawl beneath the table to suck his cock in front of his wife who evidently did not want to satisfy this desire? 

Severus forced himself to look at the older man, seeing that his age was not exactly as advanced as he had initially assumed. When he looked at the man independently from his wife, his dislike of Bellatrix no longer brushed up against the man’s appearance as Severus looked at him. He had a sharpness to his blue eyes that were duller than the grey eyes that haunted his dreams; he had light brown straight hair where he wanted to see wild dark hair.  

As he returned the stare back at the older man, he found Rodolphus turning away as if he had second thoughts about the looks he had been sending him. Severus held the bag on his lap tightly with his hands. The book he had wanted to read, the lessons he had needed to learn about Occlumency so close but so out of reach. The sharp sting of rejection, the dull ache of his total conviction of his own ugliness left a dust cloud on what he thought should have been a memorable moment, a defining moment. He wasn’t even invested in Rodolphus in any capacity, he just saw this retraction as another way he was on the edge of this world he was enamoured with.  

Whilst he knew that the story of the gathering would be repeated in pure blood circles, Severus himself had no desire to repeat it now.  

. . .  

The last two weeks of the summer passed by in a structure of etiquette and life lessons from Lucius who continued to tutor him when he was not making an appearance at the Ministry. He found himself passing through these lessons as diligently as he could, whilst his mind was elsewhere: the book that the Dark Lord has given him- a book that did not belong to the Malfoy Manor library, Severus soon discovered as he noticed the absence of the family crest on the inner cover of the book. This book consumed him. It had changed his life.   

For the first time ever, he had... some control over his emotions. When he woke up from another night terror, where Black and Potter and Evans’ faces haunted his sleep, he would practice the Techniques of Diminishment that the book had revealed to him and his terror would become transparent inside him. Invisible.  

Over the two week period he grew... bolder with his lessons and raked through the humiliation, grief and terror that resided inside his mind, touching it like a tongue probing a rotten tooth. Where once upon a time agony had festered he had a thin border of tranquillity around him. Where once upon a time his control over his own emotions had been so weak he had turned to unleash physical pain upon his body as the one and only way to subdue the chaos within him, now he had more sophisticated tools than cutting spells during term time and sharp knives when he had not been able to use magic outside of school.  

His time at the Malfoy Manor had so far become as transformative to him as a caterpillar that found itself within a cocoon. For the first time since his first day of school, he... did not feel as afraid to return to Hogwarts after the summer break. Potter and Black’s torment seemed further away. And Lily’s loss seemed duller to him in the company of those who had now welcomed him and invited him to gatherings as if he belonged at these gatherings. His own past mistakes that he had at the time believed to be soul destroying aberrations, the insult he had thrown at Lily when he was being assaulted, then seemed insignificant.  

He wasn’t sure what exactly was cultivating within the cocoon he found himself in, he wasn’t sure what would emerge, but he felt its resilience, its ability to face a future without someone he had relied on for too long.  

Because he had to.  

But more than that: Because he could.  

This fragile self confidence he was finally beginning to build in the company of people who offered him support and guidance came in useful when confronting individuals that remained less pleasant to his presence in gatherings that were held at the Malfoy Manor. Bellatrix Lestrange continued to belittle and scratch at his esteem whenever the opportunity arose. He felt her words slice down his skin, never breaking the surface, never striking at the angles her cousin seemed to land masterfully upon him. Her vitriol bubbled over as Lord Voldemort continued to grant him access to his attention, his focus, his conversation. They discussed books, studies, safe topics. But to Bellatrix, the Dark Lord might as well have had his tongue down Severus’ throat, ripping his clothes off in such passion, her jealousy was catatonic.  

Her husband continued to stand in her shadow at these events, his eyes lingering on him and then turning away as if having been commanded to not look at Severus.  

When Severus turned to get some fresh air away from the heat and the crowd in the hall, Bellatrix followed him. Severus found himself with a wand held to his throat, a rage heaving within Bellatrix’ chest. Her dark eyes drilled into his own dark eyes, her glare hot whilst he forced to keep his icy cold.  

“What has brought this on, Mrs Lestrange.” Severus spoke with detachment, as if happy to allow Bellatrix to make a fool of her self in a hot blooded rage. 

He was also finding petty amusement in using her married name, as if to remind Bellatrix of the specifications of the world she lived in. As if to make her aware that he saw her lust for the Dark Lord when she was married to Lestrange. 

“I know what you are, you half-blood changeling,” she hissed, the wand pressing deeper against Severus’ throat, “you usurper- you thief. I am telling you, once and only once, Snape, do not touch what does not belong to you.” 

“And what might you be referring to?” Severus sought to get her to admit.  

His time spent in the upper echelons of this society had revealed to him both just how strong the belief in marriage and family as an institution of magical protection and how hypocritical these people were in this world about upholding these rules beneath the surface. Marriages were contractual, marriages were for reproduction. But he had been privy to one or too gatherings were cheating and extra marital affairs were gossiped about like open secrets. Bellatrix acted as if she was above this behaviour, had publically insulted those who behaved with impropriety.  

But Severus knew that, given the chance, she would do the same. For the Dark Lord she would do the same.  

“You are an uppity little bitch, Snape. Remember your place if you want to continue coveting the Dark Lord’s attention.” Bellatrix spoke with a snarl, hearing steps behind her that alerted to someone else stepping out for air.  

She pulled her wand aside and walked away, returning to the gathering through another door so not to be seen in Severus’ company.    

Whilst Severus was outwardly unfazed by her unrestrained hatred, he carried a tightness in his chest in the immediate aftermath of her departure. He felt the blunt stab of her wand against his throat, rubbing the ache with his palm. He noticed his hand was tremoring and fought to steady his nerves, not let the woman get to him- 

“You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”  

Severus turned and saw Rodolphus stood too close to him, too close considering the vastness of the space they both occupied on the veranda of the Manor, facing the garden. The older man lit the end of a cigarette with his wand and inhaled the smoke deeply. Severus knew he should just walk back inside the gathering, re-join the discussions that were being held, but he was bitter about Bellatrix and was in no rush to return to a space she occupied as well. He leaned against the column that held the roof of the veranda, the coldness of the stone seeping through his shirt causing him to shiver.  

“My wife is not a fan of yours, Snape.” Rodolphus summarised, with a smirk to his lips.  

Severus rolled his eyes, feeling like a petulant child as he did. He felt more like a child in the company of this older man, and this regression brought an embarrassed hue to his cheeks that Rodolphus mistook for apprehension of having Bellatrix for an enemy. Suddenly, a fingertip pried his own hand from the ache that lingered on his throat where Bellatrix’ wand had pressed against him.  

Severus froze at the invasiveness of the man’s hand against his throat, the firmness of his touch giving way to a gentleness that Severus could see did not come naturally to him. When he did not push the man’s hand away, when he seemingly accepted Rodolphus’ touch, Severus faced a second shock as the man leaned down to kiss the space that his wife had attacked.  

Whilst Severus had developed self control with regards to the turmoil and terror that festered within his thoughts, that ripped him from his sleep each night, he was still a teenager. He was still a seventeen year old who both sought and recoiled from touch, desiring the distractions that sex brought to the chaos in his head.  

It was yet another reliance on the physical, much like hurting himself allowed him to channel through his misery, sex met the same need. He felt his cock instinctively harden beneath his clothes as Rodolphus ran the surface of his tongue against the injury his wife had left behind. 

Wordlessly, both men quickly made their way to a more private location, returning to the circular wooden hut where they had met two weeks prior. Severus heard the panting, breathless, gasps that emitted from the man as he shoved his tongue into his mouth, kissing him with a pent-up aggression that only made Severus smirk inside. His younger hands traversed the older man’s torso, descending slowly as his palm finally landed on the bulge that tented the other’s trousers. He was enthralled by the reaction he harnessed from the man with one simple touch. He watched, as if not part of his own body at that moment, observing the man with a detachment that bordered on academic- watching his eyes roll back as he wordlessly pleased for Severus to touch him, to stroke him, to let him do the things his wife never permitted...  

He thought this man was pathetic. He listened to the man muttering, his hips in a jitter as Severus’ hand slowed with disinterest, he watched the furrow deepen between Rodolphus’ brow as he became dissatisfied with the aloofness of Severus’ stroking. Severus was about to put a stop to the whole thing, regret and embarrassment a familiar nightcap, when Rodolphus pushed him with such sharp force he stumbled onto his back onto the oak table.  

About to snap at Rodolphus for this turn in behaviour, he felt his words fall from him as the man aimed his wand and muttered a spell in his direction, seemingly incapable of wordless magic- another thing that made the man so uncompelling to Severus at that moment. But the spell that had landed upon Severus caused him to freeze, not because his body was restricted, but because his body had been taken over.  

He felt a slickness inside him, dripping down from his hole and dampening his clothes. He looked up at the man with shock at the unexpectedness of the spell that had prepared his body. Rodolphus used his wand to remove his clothes from his lower half, Severus protesting when he aimed again to remove his shirt- he did not want the man to see his arms, he did not want anyone to see his arms. Rodolphus smirked and chose to take his insistence to stay half dressed as impatience to be fucked and decided to just unbuckle his own trousers and plunged into the younger man’s tight body.  

Looking up at the ceiling of the wooden hut, he wondered if anyone was questioning his whereabouts, or Rodolphus’ whereabouts at that moment.  

He wondered if someone would come looking for him and find him in this compromising position, find him fucking Bellatrix’ husband- he could not imagine a scenario where he would be permitted to stay at the Manor if caught like this.  

His thoughts were so focused on the outer world, preferring to focus on these inane things rather than return to the situation he found himself thrust upon.  

He didn’t want to listen to the grunts of the man above him, he didn’t want to feel the sloppy fullness like a rod shoved inside him, he didn’t want to smell the perspiration, the musk of genitalia, he didn’t want to hear the slap of Rodolphus’ disgusting testicles smacking into his buttocks. He just wanted this unpleasant situation to pass, his own cock lay half-soft on his own stomach, Rodolphus having no interest in anything beyond his own unfulfilled pleasure finally being satiated to even attempt to give Severus something to enjoy about this encounter. 

The man’s grunting turned to tightly wrapped pleads for Severus to not tell his wife, repeated over and over as he finally released inside him with a rush of euphoria that drained the life from his eyes. Severus felt the man’s cock pull from his body, the slickness of Rodolphus’ overenthusiastic use of the preparation charm and his orgasm dripping from him onto the wooden table.  

“You won’t tell my wife, will you. Keep it between us.” Rodolphus repeated manically.  

“You’ve already said this.” Severus snapped, the man’s repetition leaving him as frustrated as this entire encounter had.  

“I will lose everything. It’s... well, you’ll know when you’re older,” the man spoke with such patronisation that Severus retorted with an insult to his sexual performance.  

“No wonder your wife wont fuck you if that’s how you fuck.”  

“We both know why Bellatrix won’t fuck me, Snape.” Rodolphus smirked, unfazed by the insult.  

He buckled his belt and looked at Severus as he forced his stiff body to lift from the wooden table, his eyes searching for his trousers and underwear in the darkness of the hut. Rodolphus kicked his clothes towards him, making his way to leave the cramped hut before turning back to Severus.  

“You know a cleaning spell...  don’t you?” he asked.  

“How young do you think I am?” Severus balked, disgust rising in his chest like bile.  

“Just checking. Also, don’t come back into the hall through the door on the left. And give it ten minutes. Say you remembered you needed to finish some homework before school starts again to explain your absence.” Rodolphus spoke, and Severus got the impression he was used to such a performance, “people will ask.”  

Without further instruction, Rodolphus left the small wooden hut, leaving a silence behind him that Severus preferred to the man’s pattering voice.  

Severus stepped back into his clothes with frustration, with a humiliation he strove to suppress with the tools that Occlumency was teaching him.  

He had been attracted to the idea of fucking Bellatrix’ husband, finding the idea all the more amusing after Bellatrix had warned him off the things that did not belong to him.  

He had liked the idea of fucking Rodolphus as a way of asserting his own attractiveness in this society that privileged prestige and purity, the idea that he was worth fucking was -admittedly- a confidence booster to his poor self image and self worth.  

But Rodolphus was so unattractive, so unappealing, to Severus that he couldn’t even take petty delight in taking something that belonged to Bellatrix. He took small recompense that the act would obviously enrage Bellatrix, if she were to actually discover it having taken place, regardless of whether he found her husband attractive or the sex palatable.  

Having cleaned and dressed himself, he followed the instructions Rodolphus had set and returned to the gathering, a dull ache expelling from his lower back with each step towards the Manor hall.  

. . . 

The night he was due to leave the Manor to finally face Kings Cross Station and the Hogwarts Express, Severus felt ill. It was a sickness that only reminded him how foolish and how pathetic he was. A sickness that drenched him in sweat and kept him on an edge as thin as a needle. He never wanted to go back to Hogwarts. Never wanted to see those people again.  

They had done so much to him. Brought him so much shame and humiliation. They had exposed his body so publically and threatened to expose him further.  

But Black had stamped the final nail into the coffin of his self worth. 

“No one wants to see that James, don’t be disgusting.”  

And Lily had found this assault so amusing- he had seen her smirk, had seen her disdain at having to help him. He saw that she hadn’t wanted to help him- that had hurt him incredibly, that this friend he loved would not help him the same way he would help her. The humiliation of finally seeing how little he mattered, what a millstone he was to her, what an embarrassment he was to her. He had felt so terrible for shouting at her, for calling her a disgusting word, a word that was thrown around so freely amongst his peers that he didn’t consider the full weight of its definition until he lunged it towards her like a bomb made to hurt, built to break. 

But it only broke him.  

She had walked away.  

She had refused his apology.  

He felt a fool for even trying to apologise, as important as it had felt at the time. He had been so focused on apologising to Lily that he did not feel the humiliation of apologising outside the Gryffindor common room, the danger he had placed himself in by being where his attackers lived.  

He did not want to go back there but he needed the qualifications, needed the things that would demonstrate his skill, his knowledge, his power. In absence of a magical lineage, a pure blood name, these were the things that would offer him the chance of a future. Lucius had confirmed this to him in their final etiquette lesson, stipulating that all prestigious wizards had NEWTs and he needed to match this to have a chance of being welcomed into the Dark Lord’s inner circle officially.  

He needed one last year in hell if he was to come out of it with a future.  

The threat of having to return to Spinners End hung heavy around his throat, enough to convince him of the need to go back to Hogwarts as much as he hated the place.  

He paced his bedroom, packing the suitcase that Lucius had purchased for him, filled with the books and equipment he needed for his lessons- plus a few extra potions books that he had been gifted by Abraxas for his own budding collection.  He packed away the clothes he had worn over the summer and the robes he was to wear at school. All these things were new and he wanted to pretend this newness meant a new start, but he was long past believing in any hope when it came to his time at Hogwarts.  

War of the Minds was sat on his bed- he wasn’t ready to put this book away in his suitcase as he felt he needed it now more than ever. He sat down on the edge of the bed, about to flick through the chapters on Occlumency once again when there was a knock at the bedroom door. With a narrowing of his eyebrows he made his way to the door, unlocking it to see Lucius stood in his robes, still dressed as if it wasn’t late at night. In his hand he held a white envelope, on his face he held a heavy expression.  

“May I come in Severus?” Lucius asked, his politeness transcending the ownership he had over the room.  

Severus nodded, his already fracturing nerves splitting further and further at the disturbance to his nightly routine, to the worry on his mentor’s face. He watched the man step into the room, making his way towards the work desk that Severus had conducted his own private studies and his homework at over the summer. He saw that there was just the one chair and transfigured a second with his wand that was embedded within his cane.  

“Please do sit down.” 

“You are... alarming me, Lucius.” Severus admitted, sitting down nonetheless.  

“Apologies, Severus, I have come here today after much deliberation. I have heard some news on the grapevine and I had the intuition to see that this news may bring you harm if you were to learn of it outside the safety and security I have tried to create for you in this household. I want you to know that I am telling you this news now as a friend, but more so as family.” 

Severus sat in silence, waiting for the guillotine to fall.  

“I am aware of your bad history with the Gryffindor’s who are in your cohort at Hogwarts. I am aware of the violence and the abuse you have suffered and I will be doing all I can from my position to provide you with safety and to advocate for your education in a setting as free from harm as I possibly can.” Lucius began with honesty, “I am also aware of your... friendship with a certain muggle born. Whilst I know you have, rightfully, cut off this friendship, I can anticipate that there may be some difficulties with the news that I am about to share with you.” 

“Spit it out, Lucius.” Severus insisted, unable to take the stress much longer.  

“I have heard from a meeting with the House of Black recently that the pure blood Potter heir has entered into a relationship with the muggle born Lily Evans.” Lucius confirmed, seeing Severus’ face turn pale, “as I said... whilst you have ended your friendship with this individual, I can only imagine the betrayal that must exist inside you to know that someone who you considered to be a friend has chosen to court the boy who made your life hell for so many years.” 

Severus felt as if ice had dropped down his spine. The sickness that swirled within him moments before came to a nauseating stop as his body shut down. He could hear his pulse in his ears, feel the prickle at the corners of his eyes that signalled an emotional flooding was on the horizon.  

“Thank you for letting me know, for giving me the space to process this news.” Severus finally spoke.  

“You are a sensitive man, Severus, I say that not as an insult- it is natural to have these sensitivities in youth. And you have grown up without the necessary guidance to avoid the pitfalls of making friendships with mudbloods.”  

Severus heard the hurtful word that had ended his friendship with Lily once and for all and felt too broken to push back against the slur. He had kept that boundary with Lucius and the others, now it felt so meaningless. He wanted to be comfortable with hurting Lily, he wanted to not feel so betrayed by her choice to court Potter after everything that had happened. He didn’t feel he had the right to defend her, as their friendship had meant nothing. He felt a fool to defend her against a word he had used in shame.  

“You will build friendships with more deserving and higher quality people, Severus.” Lucius promised, “you have not focused on building these friendships with your own house at the expense of your friendship with this girl. Invest your time more appropriately.”  

Severus nodded slowly, softly. As if his body was still putting itself back together from the shock of the news he had received. Still trying to thaw itself from the stasis it had been in since that day by the lake where he thought he had destroyed his friendship with Lily. 

It was... hard to know that she had evidently wanted to destroy their friendship as much as he had accidentally.  

“Chin up, Severus. I promise you, as low as you may feel right now things will get better.” Lucius offered.  

“You’re a good mentor, Lucius.” Severus sniffed.  

“Good friend, good family.” Lucius corrected, patting his shoulder and protectively noticing the bones too close to the surface of this young man’s skin.  

He held the letter in his hand and presented it to Severus.  

“What’s this?” Severus asked, trying to steady his voice.  

“I’m not sure, it’s a letter from Lord Voldemort.” Lucius informed, smiling at the way Severus’ features picked up slightly at the honour of receiving a letter from someone so important, “open it.” 

Severus carefully tore open the envelope, plying the parchment from the inside and unfolding it.  

Dear Mr Severus Snape 

I write to you with intrigue, and I do not often write from this offset.  
I have become aware of your position within Slytherin and the standing you possess within the dark arts and potioneering. I am impressed by what I have heard. It is rare to see such self-taught genius at such a young age- I can believe that you are self taught as your knowledge far outstretches the limited and ignorant curriculum of what was once a prestigious institution.  
 

I was once a young a man in your position, unsure what to do after leaving the repetition and security of Hogwarts. I am writing to release you from this burden of choice, this fear of failure: I am writing to offer you a place in my inner circle. Do not let this relief untether you from what is undoubtedly a competitive and ambitious pursuit of knowledge and power- you will need to step into my inner circle with these qualities.  

I hope you are enjoying the book I gifted you with- Legilimency is a tool that all Slytherins should learn, although not all can. It certainly gives us a strategic edge, it certainly removes the element of surprise. 

That is why I am certain you will be joining my inner sanctum as a Death Eater and why I will not be disappointed.  

Sincerely, 

Lord Voldemort  

Severus did not know what to say when Lucius asked him what the letter contained, so he merely handed the parchment to his mentor as if asking him to confirm or deny this. He watched the silver haired young man read the letter, his face lighting up with excitement he would normally think was gauche.  

“My word, Severus, this is ... fantastic news.” Lucius assured, handing him his letter back, “it is wonderful that someone so high profile has seen the qualities that I have seen since day one in you.” 

Severus could hardly stand the schism in emotion he had been through in the last few moments, Lucius bringing both despair and elation to his bedroom door. He found it hard to process the emotions individually and so they mangled up together in a mess, a headache brewing at his brow.  

“Just one more year, Severus,” Lucius repeated, “and the hard work will pay off in spades. The rest of your life is right in front of you.”  

Severus folded the letter, tucking it back up in the envelope, packing it away in his suitcase.  

“A word of advice to you, Severus, as your mentor, as your friend, as your family.” Lucius began, “it would be best if you kept this letter private between you and the Dark Lord. There are a lot of... ambitious people in Slytherin House. This is to be applauded. But it comes with it’s pitfalls. Some Slytherin’s are incapable of celebrating other people’s successes- I would hate for some jealous housemate to try to take this from you.”  

Severus did not need to be told twice, he understood the face of Slytherin intimately. He understood the back-stabbing qualities that existed at the bottom of the totem pole, those too lacking in talent or resources to build their own successes were more than happy to knock down someone else’s. Those at the top of the totem pole saw a no-name Half-Blood like himself to be a threat to their own standing. Until he had power, he would need to act as if he didn’t.  

He just felt proud that he had been recognised, he felt special for being selected this way. The fears he had for his future felt lighter, now that he had a path laid out for him. He had spent so long trying to narrow down what it was he wanted to do, facing doors slam in his face when he reached a decision- having no support from school... and here, in the Malfoy Manor, here, in the Dark Lord’s inner circle, he finally had security, safety, belonging.  

He needed nothing else.  

. . .  

The sunlight beamed across the second floor bedroom of the house in London that was only visible to the magical population of Britain.

The self-imposed segregation from the major populace gave the magical community the impression that Grimmauld Place was an island of pure blood history in an ocean of muggle innovation and capitalist development. The old brickwork had turned a decrepit hue, red dust billowing on a breeze that blew too strong. If the muggles could see the house, they would debate between knocking it down or giving it protected status.  

Sirius Black hated this house. He hated the fact that he was born in it, a birth story that his mother had regaled for years and years at gatherings, going into grim and realistic detail. He hated how his mother had tied her identity to his birthing, whatever followed next being a further extension of her own ego. He had listened to her proud retelling of his own birth in public for too many years, until his rebellion against his family became public and it was no longer a positive to link her identity of pure blooded motherhood to his existence- saving her detailed labour stories exclusively for Regulus instead.  

Sirius didn’t care about this loss, didn’t even register it as a loss.  

He sat up in his bed and stretched, enjoying the sensation of his muscles popping with the release of pressure in his bones. He had been home for the last few weeks and he was sick of it. Every summer was the same thing: stuck at home, as if the six weeks between one term at Hogwarts and the next was enough to inoculate him  from things like muggle borns, half-bloods, and the poor... 

Anyone that was not a Black.  

It was terrible for Sirius that he hated everyone that was a Black: because that was all he saw during the summer.  

“As long as you live under my roof you will do as you are told!”  

Each year his mother’s voice got shriller and shriller, condemning him to whatever place was reserved for people like him in life and death. People who both disappointed their mothers and did not care for the social superiority of their blood status.  

His maudlin thoughts were distracted by the pecking of an owl at his bedroom window.

With a grin or recognition, Sirius launched himself out of his double bed, his feet fighting free from the duvet, as he made his way to the owl. It was James’ owl- a great white thing with specks of golden brown on its wings. He unwound the padded envelope that was attached to the owls foot, greedily grabbing hold of it and handing the owl a treat from a lidden pot he kept by the window.  

Flopping back onto his bed, he ripped open the envelope, a cascade of folded posters and pictures of half-naked women landing on his mattress where he sat.

He smirked at the unexpected delivery of nudity, of women presenting themselves to the appeal of adolescent boys and grown men.

He saw tits and thighs and exposed buttocks. The unmoving nature of the photos were extra entertaining to him- these were muggle women.  

He grabbed his wand and began to stick the posters to his bedroom wall, beside his bed. He lined each naked women up according to how attractive he deemed them. Chubby blonds lined the periphery of this porn wall; a lithe, black-haired woman smouldered in his direction, her small tits hidden beneath the sleek black waterfall of hair, her legs crossed and lifted, obscuring her privates and sneaking a peak of her buttocks.  

She had dark eyes.  

Sirius liked her the most.  

He charmed the posters to the bedroom wall, sticking them permanently to the House of Black.  

The rational part of himself, the part of him that aimed to give him some foresight for survival, knew that he would be in major trouble if and when his parents saw what he had done to his wall but he dug his heels in on the muggle pornography, as if this was rebellion rather than objectification.  

He remembered that these posters came with a letter.  

Hi Pads 

Hope you are surviving life with the parents. Only four more weeks!  

Do you think you can convince your mother to let you our of your kennel for a day so we can go school supply shopping at Diagon Alley? You can pretend that you want to knuckle down and get serious (!) about your last year at school, how the NEWTs are so important...  

As I’m sure you have noticed, this envelope is stuffed full of naked women. I am sending these to you for two reasons: 

1. You need all the distractions you can get  

1. I don’t need them any more- fantastic news: Lily and I are dating!!!!!!!!!  

She saw one of the posters during one visit and I saw from her reaction that she didn’t appreciate the decor. Seeing as I want to keep her in my bedroom, I had to get rid of these goodies.  

Sorry I’ve not been writing as diligently as I should have been- but you understand, right.  

Let me know about the plan for Diagon Alley. 

Prongs  

Sirius folded the letter and smirked to himself.  

So, Jamie had finally managed it.  

All those years of yearning had finally landed results...

He heard wedding bells in his head, he saw the two becoming a ‘couple’, becoming ‘domesticated.’

But then he also saw him and James being idiots back at school together and he calmed himself down, things couldn’t change that much, right?  

He lay back down on his bed, his eyes landing on the black-haired, black-eyed, pale beauty on the wall beside him.  

There wasn’t much to do in the summer, seeing as he was cooped up indoors.  

He pulled his cock out from his boxers, stroking himself as he imagined the dark-haired individual climb on top of him.

Glaring down at him as he bucked into her, his hips rising and falling in time with his imaginary companion. He closed his eyes, his grip tightening around his shaft, his thumb brushing the screaming sensitive tip of his cock, causing his body to tighten, to tense, to tremble.

His hand hurried, his skin lit up with sweat and heat that radiated from him like an energy source.  

His breath turned to gasps as he looked up at this imaginary woman- 

Finding an imaginary man upon him. 

Black eyes lidded and focused on him, too tense to close, to lose himself too totally.  

Black hair brushed across his face as the imaginary man leaned in, lips ghostly, nose bumping with a clumsiness that made Sirius’ chest tighten.  

Sirius’ eyes widened with shock, with horror, with self-disgust that wrecked through him as he realised that the man on top of him was too familiar, too disgustingly familiar. He pushed the imaginary figure off his body, his cum spluttering in disturbed streams as he released over the imaginary figure’s thighs.  

Snivellus’ thighs. 

He felt his mind scream as if in betrayal at his body for reacting like this, for responding like this – he heard a knock at his bedroom door and instinctually reached for his quilt to cover himself up, knowing he had exactly five seconds before his fucking mother walked into the door, with or without permission. 

“Sirius, you cannot spend the summer holidays rotting away in your bedroom, get up!” His mother’s voice ranted at him.  

He shimmied his boxers back up his thighs, making himself as decent as possible beneath the quilt, as if he could pretend he had been sleeping this whole time.

He used a wordless spell to erase the cum from his hand, his stomach, his quilt...

The act of erasing the evidence of his broken brain, his post orgasmic insanity, making him feel saner in that moment.  

“Mother, there is very little to do locked up in this household, I can’t even do chores since you insist on Kreacher doing everything.” Sirius retorted, “if you would just agree to unlock the Floo I could go out and get out of your hair...” 

“I am not having you galavanting around with those blood traitors you call companions,” his mother snapped at him, her nerves frazzled since Sirius had returned to living at Grimmauld Place over the summer holidays.  

“Then you leave me little options, I rot in my bedroom or I rot in the living room or I rot in-”  

“What is this on the wall?” his mother’s voice had turned icier than Sirius had ever known it to go.

This was a shrillness that told Sirius that whatever she was looking at had struck what little untapped rage she had locked up inside her shrivelled-up heart, the vitriol springing like an oil leak from eons ago.  

She stood in front of the posters of half naked women and tried to rip the posters from the wall, her nails merely glancing the charmed surface, the posters remaining unpeeled, untorn.  

“Remove this filth immediately!” she screamed, her face flushed with disgust at her son.  

“This is my room and I will keep it as I see fit.” Sirius retorted, adrenaline rushing through his blood stream.  

Even as he said this he was unsure why this was the hill he was going to dig his heels into and die on.  

If he had even the slightest capability for self-reflection he might have argued that he dug his heels and tempered his mother’s rage because it provided the perfect, all encompassing, distraction from the disgust he felt towards himself, the shock, the confusion.

He felt as if he didn’t know who he was any more- who he thought he was would not be masturbating over Snivellus, for Merlin’s sake.  

Perhaps he needed his mother to define him, to tell him who he was, now he was lost.  

“You filthy degenerate,” his mother hissed at him, attempting to remove the posters still with her wand, scorching the wall behind the posters, nothing landing on the posters themselves. “this is repulsive.” 

“Say how you really feel, mother.” Sirius sneered, stepping out of his bed and shoving his body into his clothes, the clothes that had been left on the floor from the day before, “it will always amuse me how distraught you get about anything related to muggles, even posters send you in to a fit-” 

“I am in a fit because my degenerate son has plastered women’s bodies on the wall- the fact that my pure blood son thinks muggle women are appealing makes me sick. No pure blood man should look at muggleborns this way- let alone muggle women!” his mother shrieked.  

“Well, you’re going to hate the Potter’s even more I suppose, when you learn that James is dating a muggle born and they have no problem with it- because they are normal, they are kind and can see that muggles deserve rights-” 

“What? The right for you to masturbate to their naked women?” his mother’s sneering voice dripped in disgust, “yes, Sirius, I can smell your sickness in the air of this room. You can't hide a thing from me. You really do think you’re such a rebel, don’t you, my son?” 

Sirius felt his blood boil over, the anger and horror at his mother knowing what he was doing- to some extent- he wondered how mad she would be if she knew he was masturbating over a Slytherin boy who he hated?

He couldn’t look his mother in the eye, not then, not ever.

Not ever again.  

“Look, you hate me. I hate you.” Sirius summed up, not even wanting to touch the invasiveness of her words moments ago.

Summoning his backpack- packed already in anticipation of escape, he turned his wand to the rest of his room, a whirl of spells hurricaning around the room to set his Gryffindor scarves and quidditch trophies to their place forever. In the turmoil of the whirling spells, he gave in to the urge to take the poster of the black haired woman from the wall, shoving it into his backpack like a treasure map he could not leave behind.  

“I won’t be back.” Sirius announced, barging his way past his mother’s imposing form, marching down with defiance down the stairs.  

His father poked his head out from the kitchen to see what the fuss was about, his younger brother following his mother like a shadow down the staircase.  

“Don’t forget to scorch me off the family tree.” Sirius smirked, not even bothering to say goodbye, forcing his tremoring hand to unlock the front door.  

Slamming the old door behind him as he walked away from his family forever.  

For good.  

His rage and his shock and his repressed sickness gave him the strength to march throughout London, hardly knowing what way he was going as he rarely explored his local area.

Had rarely been allowed to mingle in the muggle city; he felt like a dog unleashed.  

Left to fend for himself.  

A stray.  

The reality of his situation struck him like a slap to the face.  

His rage fuelled marching soon came to a stop and he was faced with the towering buildings, old pubs, the rush of pedestrians and cars passing him by.

This was not the pace of Diagon Alley, or Hogsmede, or Hogwarts- it was like none of the wizarding communities his family had circulated.

He couldn’t believe how lost he felt- it embarrassed him to be so lost when he had walked out... He felt like a child lost in a crowd.  

He didn’t want to feel like a child- he was a fucking grown man.

He stopped to think about what his next steps were to be, seeing as he hadn’t given thought to this when he had left.  

All he could think of was James, James would help him. He remembered the address on the letter, the one time he had managed to sneak his way out of Grimmauld Place before his mother locked everything down on him- except the door. He couldn’t believe the front door... it had always been open, he just didn’t have the fire to leave for good until then. He realised he hadn't thought to leave through the front door before, because... well, he was a wizard. Doors didn't mean much in terms of security when charms existed. 

But this was it, for good.  

He stepped into an alleyway, away from the eyes of muggles on their way to work, and he focused on his recently learned apparation skills....  

Landing on his feet by the long, tree-lined pathway up to James Potter’s family home. 

. . . 

Sirius found himself sat at a dining table, located in a kitchen that smelled like cinnamon, positioned shoulder to shoulder with James and his mother.

He had been welcomed into the house like it was the natural order of things to welcome people- even if he had rarely met James’ parents before, they welcomed him like they knew him his whole life...

This would never happen at Grimmauld Place.

Visits were scheduled, planned in advance, a repetitive merry-go-round of pure blood men and women and their vapid, sneering, children.

No one turned up, unexpected.  

He had expected to be turned away when the elderly woman had opened the door.  

He had been rejected by one mother, it made sense to be dismissed by another.  

But the old woman had opened the door, still in a silk dressing gown over her night dress, as if she had only recently woken and began her day. She held open the front door, a beaming smile on her lined face as she recognised the young man at her doorstep.  

“Sirius ? Is that really you?” she had smiled, “I haven’t seen you since that day Jamie snuck you in. No need to sneak in now, or ever, come in, come in. I like what you've done with your facial hair, very dashing. I bet you're popular with the girls at school.”  

He had been led to the dining table, sat down on a cushioned seat as James’ mum made him a cup of tea and offered him a cinnamon roll when they finally came out of the oven. The commotion of his entrance into the house caused a fluster of feet to come rushing down the stairs. Sirius looked up and smiled weakly at his best friend stepping into the kitchen in his pyjama trousers and slippers, followed by his father – an older version of James.  

They caught up, James allowing him to pretend that his turning up was routine, normal, waiting for him to reveal the real reason for his arrival.

And when he finally explained that he had nowhere else to go, that he had left his family home, he expected the Potter parents to sigh with annoyance, to march him back to London, to tell him this was just a silly little fight that he needed to go back home... 

But they offered him their spare room, offered it to him until they helped him sort out something more permanent.

They told him he was an adult at seventeen, that he deserved to live in a place where he felt safe and free.

That they knew what his parents were like, they knew how controlling and condemning they could be.  

How brainwashed they had become over the years.  

How the war was bringing out the worst of a lot of people. 

“Whilst it is your decision, entirely, just know that we are here to support you, you are safe here.”  

He drank his hot drink, ate his cinnamon roll, and felt his soul melt like sugar spooned into tea in the company of a family existence he had only imagined until then.

The soft, loving, embrace of a mother and father had been a fantasy he had played with as a child, pushing it back and forth from his chest as a teenager- embarrassed by his foolish wants, the sadness of his fantasies. But this was like a dream come true- as close as he had come to feeling wanted, feeling loved. But the gap between the dream and the reality was like a scratch he kept picking at; the molecular distance between this moment with the Potters and his dreams was still too vast.  

He felt as if he needed to keep his imagination under control, the real and the imagined merging and mingling until he was finding it hard to grasp what was real.  

This loving household was real. James’ mother patting him on the shoulder and getting up to get the spare bedroom made up for him was real. James dragging him up from the dining table to show him his room and to chat about his most recent date with Lily was real.  

Snivellus riding his cock was not. 

But, in that ditch between reality and fantasy that he seemed to have burrowed within; that was all he could think about.  

. . .  

This was the best summer Sirius had ever known.

It made him sick inside to know that he had gone his entire childhood never knowing the freedom that a caring parent offered; it made him nauseous to know that he had missed out on the closeness his best friend had in spades.

He tried to imagine the sort of man he would be, had he not been so curtailed and restrained and controlled- if he had not spent his adolescence screaming back at his mother and trying to get a reaction from his father.

If the people were supposed to raise and guide him had just... seen him as he was and accepted him for who he was.  

Perhaps he would have been calmer, perhaps he would have been softer.  

But that was another fantasy- not what was real.  

And in the company of James’ parents and James himself he felt darker and sharper than the rest of the household. It was peculiar to see James as he was with his parents, he was much more childlike, much more dependent on their soft acts of service that he lived without at Hogwarts. It was as if the summer was a regression for his friend, a way to curl up like a child against his mother and father- Sirius realised he must have been spending too much time with James because he was growing sick of his dependence on his parents.  

And he knew it was because he had never behaved like this with his own parents- never had the chance, had never known a familial bond like this was genuinely real until then.  

He both wanted it and was repelled by it.  

He just couldn’t wait to be back at Hogwarts, for one last year, where James behaved like the James he knew and loved. Where he had Remus and Peter to balance them out. But then he realised that this was the first year in their schooling where James finally got Lily after so many, many, years of chasing her and chasing off everything he considered to be competition to her attention. He wasn’t sure what he was going to be dorming with, if James’ excessive focus had transformed from getting Lily to having her.  

Living with him over the summer had proved to be somewhat tedious and it took him an embarrassingly long time to realise why this James was driving him mental compared to the old James who chased off the boys who orbited Lily.  

Because Snivellus had been a boy who orbited Lily.  

Until that day they went too far by the lake.  

Now that James had Lily he guessed they would have no... real reason to badger Snivellus like they had in the past. They would have no reason to fight him and Sirius didn’t understand why this left him feeling bereft.  

The question kept him up at night.  

Each night he had been kept awake by these questions, long after he and James had separated to fall asleep, not even the drink they had borrowed from the family bar cart had dulled the questions.  

Or the images.  

The fantasies that took a darker, twisted, turn once the lights went out.  

Once he was alone in the spare room. 

The poster of the black-haired woman for company.  

The poster he had drunkenly charmed- changed the image in ways that made him confused but satisfied.

He charmed the woman’s small breasts away to a smooth, flat surface. He hooked the woman’s nose, her dark eyes turned dark brown to black...  

He had to muffle his mouth with his pillow as he came so violently into his palm that night.  

He woke up with a hangover so heavy he thought the pillow suffocated him.  

. . . 

A series of communications flew in across the summer holiday for Sirius. For five weeks, at least one letter was sent a week from his mother insisting he return home, forcing demands and threats into each letter, each word dripping with malice and rage at his disobedience. Each week that passed proved to Sirius that he truly was not returning, that he had cut his family off with such a violent ending he might as well have murdered them: they might as well have murdered him.  

He read the letters each week until finally the letters stopped.  

And then a new correspondence began: one from the solicitor of his long dead and ostracised uncle.  

It seemed his uncle had been waiting for him to leave his family- as if he had expected it to happen eventually.

He had waited until Sirius had left his family before he presented him with his will and inheritance.  

And suddenly Sirius realised that he had not ... been concerned about what he was going to do for money after Hogwarts. Now that he had this sorted, he realised that he hadn’t even been worried. His needs had been met by the Potters so well that concerns and stresses had not permeated his surface.  

It was nice to know he had a fortune to fall back on, Sirius shrugged.  

It was nice to know his uncle had always believed in him.  

Because his independence and his decision to break away from his family was being recognised as a good thing by both the Potters and his dead uncle... He had the strength to know he truly had made the right choice. He had the strength to move forward into uncertainties because these uncertainties did not exist- opportunities existed. He didn’t have to worry about where he was going to live- he just had to find a place he liked the look of, his inheritance was more than enough to bankroll these choices. He didn’t have to rush into finding a job at the end of his studies- his inheritance gave him space to have a break before finally stepping into a career suitable for a man like him- even if he had shrugged off the burdens and constraints of the Black family name.   

 Holy, Merlin, did he see a bright horizon after the end of this one final year of school.  

He couldn’t wait to invite the Potters to his house warming party, as a way to say thank you for their help this summer.  

. . .  

The last few days before the return to Hogwarts was spent sorting out Sirius’ starter home in Diagon Alley: a stylish flat that overlooked the magical side of the city and had a sneak peak at the muggle side too. Sirius had let James’ dad look over the contract for the flat he was purchasing outright, the old man reading through it and combing through for hidden clauses and stumbling blocks that would come back to bite him later on. Having determined that flat was a good deal, a good investment, a fantastic starter home... He signed the contract and decorated the place.  

He had stood in the flat with James and Lily, standing with the security of knowing his housing situation was established and safe- he might even go home for the holidays this final year if this was the home he was coming back to. A peaceful, stress-free space to rest his head...  

The last night of the holidays, he spent with the Potters, with James. He had enjoyed a family dinner made by both James’s mum and dad and it tasted much better than anything Kreacher put together with his decrepit, wrinkly fists. James’ dad proposed a toast to their final year at school, to their education, to their futures.  

He went to his room, feeling full, feeling buzzed from the Elf Wine that was shared at the table. He still needed to pack his suitcase- a suitcase that James’ dad had let him borrow instead of letting him go out and buy a new one. As he packed his school books away, James strolled into the room and flopped himself down onto the bed.  

“How’s the packing going, Pads?” James asked, taking his glasses off his face to wipe the lenses clean with the edge of his t-shirt.  

“Slowly, I shouldn’t have left it to the last night, huh?” Sirius tutted.  

“Hey, a little last minute pressure always did us well with essays.” James smirked.  

“Right, do you think we might actually have to knuckle down a bit and focus this year?” Sirius asked with an arrogant tilt to his lips, “it is the NEWTs after all.”  

“Well, Lily will be studying like mad, even though she doesn’t need to. I guess we could keep her company...” James blushed.  

“What? You mean you’re not going to be leading her astray with your nonsense?” Sirius laughed, looking for the Transfiguration book he had been flicking through that morning.  

He realised he might have left it in his bed.  

“Prongs, look under my pillow and see if the Transfig book is there, will you?” Sirius asked, making space in his suitcase for the book.  

James sighed and ran his hand around beneath the pillow, throwing the case up and finding himself face to face with something that left him with more questions than answers.  

“Uh, Pads, what’s this poster?” James squinted as he picked up the A4 piece of paper, he stared at the flat chested androgynous figure on the paper, his eyes landing on the hooked nose, the black eyes and he laughed.  

“Holy Merlin’s balls, this girl looks like Snivy!” James balked, “I got a new idea for a prank- we’re going to copy this poster and decorate the school with this pin up babe, maybe add a few Slytherin insignias-” 

“What? What are you talking about?” Sirius interrupted, shock rushing through him, denial bricking up a wall around him that served to protect him from the crushing confrontation of his sick poster and his friend’s reaction.  

“Are you fucking kidding me? This gal is a carbon copy of Snivellus!” James laughed, “poor girl. Jeez. Imagine being a double of that ugly, grease ball. Who even took this photo... Wait, is this... this isn’t one of the muggle posters I gave you... but where did you get muggle pin up posters...?”  

“Look, I don’t know what you are seeing, James, and I don’t know why you are seeing Snivellus when you look at that girl with her tits out and her arse out, and- and, if I were you,” Sirius gulped with the sheer force of his projection at that moment, “if I were you I would just keep that insanity to yourself, I mean, what would people think if they heard you right now?” 

“What are you trying to say-?” James narrowed his eyes at him, sitting up on the edge of the bed defensively.  

“It just sounds a bit... queer, don’t you think?” Sirius looked away, “what would Lily think if she heard you just now? If she knew that you had posters of half naked women that you gave for me to hold on to-” 

“I gave it to you as a joke!” James retorted, turning red.  

“Yeah, well, maybe we should tone down the jokes a bit this year.” Sirius pushed, desperate to get this conversation to end, “I mean, that was just... are you sure you’re not bent?” 

“If I was I certainly could do better than Snivellus!” James joked, “can we change the subject, Merlin’s fucking balls this is a disgusting topic. I feel bad for this girl- what a freak show she is. Burn this poster, Pads, I’m not sure why you had it underneath your pillow...” 

Instead of continuing this conversation further, instead of defending his desire to keep hold of the poster, Sirius forced himself to take hold of the poster.  

He gave it one last look, as quick as he could, taking in the sharpness of the androgynous figure’s eyes, thinking he hadn’t edited the brows to be heavy enough, that he could have made the legs hairy- he knew Sniv had dark hair on his pale stick thin legs from the incident at the lake, after all... 

He remembered those legs, those thighs, the bare vulnerable exposure- 

He used his wand to burn the poster, the corners of the paper lighting up first, a glow or orange that devoured the picture whole.  

He watched the fire consume the girl in the poster and tried not to think of skinny legs, or bony hips, or black eyes crying as he finally made that frigid, stoic boy break. 

“All packed now,” Sirius stated flatly as the poster turned to ash in his hand, “let’s go have a drink to celebrate the last day of freedom.” 

James lifted himself from the bed, hearing the insistence in his friends’ tone and wondered what the fuck was going on with him.  

. . .  

Chapter Text

Life after Hogwarts was a liberation to Severus.   

He no longer had to suffer through the stifling education, the limitations that Dumbledore had placed on knowledge. 

He no longer had to face the hurt of his once-upon-a-time best friend dating and falling in love with the man who had abused him for six years prior- and continued to abuse him for the last and final year. 

He no longer had to live with the turmoil of this once-upon-a-time best friend condoning the bullying against him, no doubt even laughing about it with Potter when he told her about it.   

He no longer had to live with the shame of his attraction to one of his tormentors. 

He no longer had to look at those grey eyes and wish that things were different, that he was someone worth respect rather than torment. 

Severus left the school and never looked back because all that remained in his memories of this place was hurt and rejection.   

Even growing closer to his Slytherin cohort had done little to dull the pain he felt at this school. 

His link with Mulciber had continued on the sexual path that had sprouted in their fifth year, using each others bodies as means of blowing off steam and decompressing after the stress of lessons and homework and tests... Mulcibers’s cock did not lift him from the misery of his final year at Hogwarts, but it brought him a respite from the self-hatred that had returned to the surface full force when he had returned to Hogwarts after that summer. 

He had tried to hold on to the confidence he had gained whilst he had stayed at the Malfoy Manor.   

Once a month, he had been visited by Lucius at Hogsmede. The man continued his mentoring and steered him onto the path to be ready to be accepted into the Dark Lord’s inner circle after he finally finished with Hogwarts. The lessons had done a lot to prepare him, Severus accepted, as seeing the stress and toil on Lucius’ face grow, week after week, had given him a preview of the weight that war could have even on those not on the front lines.   

The year was 1978, when Severus left Hogwarts for good.  

This was the year that the Dark Lord stepped up his campaigns against the Ministry.   

Against those who failed to accept and acknowledge the logic that their magic made them superior to non-magical society and that staying in the shadows within secrecy was holding magic back. Their world was stagnating.   

Severus had left Hogwarts believing that his education would fail to take him places, because the lessons he had been taught were so wrapped up in squashing innovation, in repression of their own skills and abilities for the sentiments of muggle protection. Severus knew more than most that muggles did not need protecting- they were violent and crafty enough to fight back. The statute of secrecy, the laws against underage magic, these were the things that had left him vulnerable to attack by his father growing up.

These were the things that needed to go so no other child unlucky enough to be born in a Half-Blood family was left unable to defend themselves without the weight of magical law against them.   

Men like Dumbledore did not understand this, did not care for this, did not care for people like Severus who had suffered because Severus’ suffering was an inconvenience to his politics. That’s what Lucius had told him anyway, when Severus had vented against the man in a whisper at Hogsmede one afternoon.   

He had felt lucky to have people like the Malfoy’s guiding him, to have the word of the Dark Lord as a promise to land upon once he stepped out of Hogwarts.  

Lucius and Narcissa had been the ones to greet him when he stepped off platform 9 and 3/4s for the last and final time, stepping out into Kings Cross Station. 

He had been met by the newly married pair and taken to the accommodation that the Dark Lord had tasked them with arranging for him in Diagon Alley. 

Lucius had told Severus of the job that the Dark Lord had placed him to start as soon as possible. It was in an apothecary, linked to the Death Eaters and therefore contributed to the funding and potioneering of the Dark Lord's efforts. Whilst the manager dealt with the needs of the public, he had been tasked with brewing potions for the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters to serve the war effort.   

After such long school years of suffering, Severus had felt the breath of relief feel his lungs as he finally leaned back on the sofa in his new home and had slept easy knowing he had a job to turn to when he woke up.   

He had gone to sleep that night believing that the suffering he had lived through had finally come to an end.  

. . .  

Severus established a new routine over the first year after leaving Hogwarts.   

He drank a mug of tea for breakfast and watched the summer sun shift into the heatless light of Autumn.

He witnessed the sun sleep-in longer and longer each morning, his short walk through Diagon Alley from his flat to the apothecary growing darker each day.   

Some mornings he passed boarded-up shops, their windows smashed and the contents of the shop floor burned. He was aware of the intimidation tactics other elements of the Dark Lord’s circle participated in against enemies but he saw this as juvenile and delinquent. He remembered the muggles he had grown up around in Spinners’ End, their lack of life opportunities and resources caused them to lash out and smash up the cars and houses of people they were having arguments with that week. As much as he knew his education at Hogwarts had been empty, he knew more so that if he were to burn the shops of enemies in Diagon Alley he would be no better than those muggles he had grown up with, making his time at Hogwarts all the more pointless...  

He stepped into the apothecary where he had been allocated to work by the Dark Lord. The appointed manager had insisted on naming the place after himself, Karkaroff’s Cauldron, much to Severus' annoyance.

He was the first one in, as always, his sleep schedule made it logical for him to be the one to begin the pre-opening tasks that kept the apothecary going.   

He performed the morning stock check and noted the ingredients that needed to be refilled and re-ordered.

He made his way to the backroom as the sound of a horse and cart clip-clopped across cobbles, knowing that this was the day’s delivery arriving with both ingredients and instructions from a higher Death Eater informing Severus what potions to prioritise brewing that day.

He accepted the order, standing at the open backdoor whilst the post worker sorted the boxes to hand to him. 

Severus kept his eye on the horse as the man slowly identified the boxes for this shop. He hated the smell that lingered from the horse.   

After he had put away the stock he had received and acknowledged the focus for his work that week, he tided up his work space so he began his brewing with a clean and sanitized table, a clean and fresh cauldron.   

By the time he was chopping and slicing ingredients on his work table, the appointed manager of the shop, Igor Karkaroff would stroll in and delay opening the apothecary. 

He would linger by the doorframe to the backroom where Severus worked, watching him wordlessly.

Karkaroff would delay opening the shop for as long as possible, Severus smirking to himself knowing that each time he delayed this start to the shop’s opening hours was due to the routine he had established in asking Severus to deal with his morning arousal.   

Severus was unsure if it was professional to have sex with someone who was the manager of the place he worked at- he would never refer to Karkaroff as his boss simply because it was patently obvious that Karkaroff lacked the knowledge Severus had about potions. As Karkaroff was not his boss, he reasoned it was acceptable to have sex with him.   

He stopped slicing the ingredients he was to use to brew the Dark Lord’s potions order, knowing the potions themselves were easy enough to brew and would not take too long. 

He walked towards the sink and washed his hands, his chest fluttering with adrenaline as this action signalled to Karkaroff that he was open to sex at that moment. 

As he rinsed the suds from his hands he felt a warm pair of hands land and wrap around his waist above the shirt he wore.  

Karkaroff knew that Severus did not remove his shirt so he no longer tried to unbutton the delicate white buttons that lined the younger man’s torso. Instead he simply lowered his hand to cup the erection through the material of his trousers, amused by the quickness of Severus’ response to his presence, their routine, their dalliance in the workplace. 

Karkaroff would unbuckle Severus’ belt, unbutton his trousers and dip his hand beneath the waist band of his underwear. 

They never had much time, Karkaroff did not want to catch unwanted attention from the Dark Lord concerning any excess lateness in opening the shop...   

Severus would turn around, his own hands shaking as he unbuckled the tall man’s belt and lowered his trousers. He conjured a slick lubricant into the pit of his palm, the heat of the man’s cock burning through his skin as he began to stroke him off. Karkaroff would exhale deeply as if Severus’ touch gave him relief from the first brush, his dark brown eyes would roll back as Severus pressed his cock against his, their hands stroking in tandem, the slickness of the lubricant on Severus’ hand spreading to cover both cocks and causing his own body to shudder with arousal.   

Karkaroff pushed Severus against the back of the sink, pressing his body against the slighter man, crushing him as he groaned and grunted against the wall, his hand gripping hold of the towel rail above the sink for leverage as his worker stroked him faster and faster. Severus’ face was pressed against the man’s shoulder when he did this and usually he was confronted with the smell of cologne spritzed over sweat if Karkaroff had not showered that morning, the musky scent of man and sex that Severus craved and sought release within. 

But that morning there was the lingering smell of fire imprinted into the man’s skin, a scorching to a small lock of hair, the ends that sizzled hours before. 

His nose crinkled as he pushed through the acrid scent of burning, focusing on the man’s hand, his own hand, his own cock, the other cock, just focusing entirely on the rush of bliss that spread out through his body. He felt a familiar tingle in his toes as his cock hardened impossibly, his mouth releasing breathless gasps and groans as he released in a hot surge. Karkaroff continued to stroke him relentlessly as he chased his own orgasm, the slickness of cum adding to the slippery grip. Severus tried to pull away from his grip, his cock oversensitive and overdrawn, the man not letting go, continuing to pump, seemingly tipped over by Severus’ overstimulation and discomfort as he finally came in a flush into his palm. He rubbed his cum around Severus’ cock as if attempting to wipe his hand clean of the majority of this aftermess.   

They would wash their hands in the sink, clean themselves up before Karkaroff would rush to the front of the shop and open the door hoping no one had noticed the delay.   

. . .  

That winter was proving to be an abomination of snow and wind. 

Severus felt the exposed parts of his face crack beneath the whips of wind that whirled around him as he walked up through the familiar garden grounds of the Malfoy Manor. 

Even in this bleak, arctic weather, House Elves tended to the plant life, using permitted charms to keep the flowers warm and living. 

Severus smothered the pity he felt for the wretched creatures, that they were tasked by their master to warm the flowers but their own bare bodies would be forced to shiver with the exposure of their unclothed flesh.   

Narcissa welcomed him at the door and took his coat and scarf and hat to store away for the visit. Severus thanked her and handed her a gift parcel of potions he had brewed to help her along the way with her pregnancy. Her eyes lit up with appreciation as she took the wrapped parcel, treating it with the same adoration one would a much desired Christmas present. She was three months pregnant and had been truly suffering with morning sickness and exhaustion until Severus had decided to brew the support potions in between his increasing potion orders from the Dark Lord.   

“What would we do without you, Severus?”   

“I’m sure you could get your potions elsewhere,” Severus tutted, as reluctant as ever to accept a compliment.   

“Nothing like the brews of your making,” she had insisted sincerely, walking alongside him to the dining room that was used as a gathering space for the Dark Lord.   

It was rare that Severus was included in meetings at the Malfoy Manor. 

The expectations that the Dark Lord had depicted in the letter Severus had received before his final year at school had remained slightly  underwhelmed and unmet- in terms of a welcoming into the Dark Lord’s inner sanctum.   

It had been over a year since he left Hogwarts and so far the work he had been doing for the Dark Lord did not seem to step beyond potion brewing. 

As much as he enjoyed potion brewing- he could not help but feel side-lined, his talents underutilised, within the Dark Lord’s plans. He hoped to project himself forward through this gathering, unsure when or if there would ever be another opportunity to do so.   

The future he was promised seem to fall further and further out of reach the longer he remained, stagnant, in his job with seemingly no progression; living in a flat he could never afford without his connections to the Dark Lord. If he was to be deemed superfluous to the Dark Lord’s war effort he would lose everything. As much as he felt... admittedly quite stifled, he knew from his childhood in Spinners’ End that life could be so much worse than a little stifled.   

He sat down at the dining table, in the last seat available, regretting how he was appearing to arrive late when he had arrived on time.   

“How good of you to join us, Severus.” Lord Voldemort chuckled.  

A wave of replica chuckles followed from the others at the long table.   

Lucius gave him a tight look from across the table, as if Severus was letting him down.   

Bellatrix smirked, her eyes leaving the Dark Lord just long enough for Severus to receive confirmation that this smirk was undoubtedly aimed towards him.   

Severus felt his eyes burn with the familiar weight of belittlement thrown at him like stones; he thought these thrown stones were behind him. A familiar panic striking through him like a thunderous snake, wrapping tightly across his chest and making it hard to breathe. He remembered the training he had put himself through to learn Occlumency, soaring his own innate abilities into the tools he needed to function and survive humiliating moments like this.   

The meeting went on, the sound of Lord Voldemort’s voice commanding his loyalists to provide updates about their leading efforts in the war. Bellatrix gave her announcement, standing up as she spoke. Dolohov, sat beside Karkaroff, provided his update through broken English. Lucius stood with his formality, his self-assuredness that covered up the weariness of war that Severus saw on his face. The final update came from a person that Severus had not anticipated to be invited to the Dark Lord’s meetings, let alone to be leading a faction: Fenrir Greyback. How was a werewolf permitted the Dark Lord’s attention? Severus knew he needed to take strides to fix his standing, if a beast like Greyback was ranked higher than he was.   

Discussions were opened across the table concerning next steps for campaigns and Severus found himself in an aggravating discussion with Karkaroff, Dolohov and MacNair concerning the targeted burning of houses of enemies and the ambushing of muggles out alone. Severus rolled his eyes dismissing actions like this as mere hooliganism, his distaste a little too loud, a little too sharp.   

“Wars are won on intelligence and strategy,” he sneered, “not in delinquency and vandalism.”   

“How cute of you to speak up, Snape.” Dolohov bit back, “it’s too bad you bring neither intelligence or vandalism to this table, but thank you for the healing potions.”   

“Come now, Antonin,” Karkoroff chided, and Severus hated that the man was attempting to defend him somewhat at that moment.   

It made their actions before work seem dirtier.   

“He’s young, we should not dismiss his contributions. And, he is not Marked, yet.”   

The two men began arguing in their own language, a short and brief exchange that was shut down finally by the Dark Lord who took control of the table once more to declare Christmas lunch to be served.   

Severus excused himself from the table and left the Manor, his anger and his humiliation squashing any interest he could have forced in dining at the gathering in the pretence of networking.      

. . .  

Landing back inside his flat, Severus seethed with an unpalatable outrage that ripped through his chest, tore through his throat. He kicked the coffee table over, a ceramic mug smashing with the impact of landing on the wooden floor. The sound of the mug smashing into pieces rung through the otherwise quiet flat. The empty flat. The lonely flat.   

It was one thing to be ... without a birth family at Christmas time, Severus knew from years of experience. It was quite another thing to be belittled and iced out of the inner circle he had been invited in to. He had been invited to this Christmas dinner and he felt like he had been served up as entertainment rather than a guest.   

He sunk down on the sofa and tried not to go down memory lane, tried not to depress himself more than he already was at that moment. He had not felt this alone for a while, he recognised, which made the ache hurt more as he thought he was past all this. He didn’t want to think of his mother, dead just before his thirteenth birthday. He didn’t want to think of his father- a man who just stepped out and left him, no letter, no message, no goodbye. He had been there during his fifth summer and when he returned the next year for his sixth summer he was alone. Physically alone, of course, he had been emotionally abandoned long before that year.   

Christmas at Hogwarts was a different and uncomfortable experience. He disliked the whole atmosphere of gratitude and inclusion when he was doomed to a life of alienation. Lily had tried to get him into the spirit of things when she stayed for Christmas, rolling her eyes when her efforts did not result in what she wanted from him.   

He didn’t want to think about all the people who left him- he summoned the bottle of Fire Whisky that Lucius had gifted him, cracking open the screw lid and downing a burning gulp. He gagged at the taste, not being used to spirits. But a warm rush of relaxation washed through him as the alcohol hit his stomach and he took another sip to join the first.   

He didn’t realise he had fallen asleep on the sofa until a knocking at his front door stirred him with a jolt. 

Movement made him feel disorientated. He sat up and his eyes landed on the bottle of Fire Whisky that had been placed on the floor, the coffee table still knocked over, the mug still broken. 

The knocking at the door was joined by a chorus of voices, laughter. 

Severus used his wand to tidy the living room up, making his way towards the door to deal with the noise outside.   

The moment he unlocked the door, he was pushed back by the force of three men stumbling into the flat. 

Severus bumped into the wall, rolling his eyes when he realised who had turned up: Dolohov, Karkaroff and Rodolphus Lestrange. A combination of people he did not care to have in his flat.   

“Why are you here?” Severus snapped, watching the three men stroll around the living room, helping themselves to more whisky, touching the meagre possessions Severus owned. 

“It’s Christmas!” Karkaroff sung, his voice an annoyance to Severus’ ears, the obnoxiousness of his nonsensical answer.   

“I’m aware of the day.” Severus retorted, "you can leave now-" 

“You wouldn’t think it though, stood in this dismal little place.” Rodolphus criticised, “you would think Lucius would give you more of a stipend to decorate if he’s so invested in your progress with us.”   

“Severus doesn’t know how to have fun,” Dolohov chuckled, necking another sip of the whisky, taking the bottle from Karkaroff’s hand.   

“That’s not true, not at all,” Karkaroff giggled, the whisky and whatever it was he had drunk at the Christmas party at the Manor making him stupid, “Severus is very fun at work.”   

“He was very fun when he was younger too.” Rodolphus smirked at Karkaroff, a smirk that communicated that the two men had a shared history of fun with Severus.   

Dolohov caught the smirk and a smirk of his own stretched through his shark like face.   

“Which is why we turned up, Severus. We are after a bit of fun.” Dolohov explained.   

The three men suddenly felt too close to Severus, his head spinning from the whisky that still ran through his system. The whisky seemed to dull his responses, dull his awareness of what was actually happening around him until it was too late. 

He looked up, finding Karkaroff’s face in his, a whisky soaked mouth invading his. 

"What are you doing-?" Severus began to protest but a pair of hands grabbed him by the jaw, dragging his face away from Karkaroff. 

Dolohov’s tongue brushing his lips and causing him to shudder. 

More hands touched him, more hands began to undress him.   

Why wasn’t he saying stop?  

Why wasn’t he telling them to go away?  

As his confused thoughts stumbled over the conflicting sensations inside him, he felt hands begin to unbutton his shirt and he jolted in shock, his body waking up.   

“No, no, he doesn’t like his shirt off,” Rodolphus remembered, “just leave it on, it doesn’t matter.”   

Severus began to try to pull his trousers back up, to tell them all to leave, but Dolohov used his wand to bare his legs, exposing him like prey to three hungry dogs. 

He felt wanted and he liked it 

He was led to the floor onto his knees, hands rough, hands demanding.   

Why am I doing this?   

Why am I still here?   

Severus closed his eyes as he felt hard cocks brushing against his face, fighting for the first dip inside his mouth. He felt his own cock harden between his thighs, his own erection so obvious and exposed, so undeniable.   

I don’t want to be alone.  

It’s Christmas and I don’t want to be alone.   

The sadness of this realisation was something he wanted to burry, something he wanted to suppress. He opened his mouth and took the first cock, not even bothering to look upwards to see whose it was.   

“I told you he was fun,” Rodolphus laughed.   

Severus closed his eyes and when he opened them, he was in his bedroom, his body having been carried by one of the three men, his mind fractured and soaked by whisky that was placed to his lips as if he needed more encouragement. He found himself facedown on his bed, his arse propped up by pillows as someone fingered him. He felt the probing and prodding of this blunt finger and tried to imagine that this was an appealing touch but the man with his finger inside him treated the act as if it was an excuse to smack him.   

His eyes lazily dragged across the room and saw Dolohov shuffle towards him, his hard, thick cock swaying as he moved. His hand gripped the back of his head and he tapped his face with his erection, brushing his lips and seeking entrance.   

“Open wide.” Dolohov commanded, the excitement making his eyes light up.   

Whoever was behind him had pulled his finger out of him to swap this occupation with their cock, pressing inside his numb body and slamming him to the hilt.

His mouth opened  in a gasp, his body shocked and stupid by the sensation of being so full, the nerve endings that made up his sphincter lit up by the friction despite the slickness that had been charmed into him.

Dolohov pushed his cock into his mouth, taking the opportunity that Severus’ gasp provided.   

He wanted this   

He repeated this over and over as if trying to convince a part of himself that was separate from his arousal, his own erection, his own neediness.

He repeated this over and over again as each man took turns fucking him, using his holes and downing more whisky into his mouth like it was its own lubricant.   

Groggily, he found himself being lifted once more, placed upon someone’s torso as if he was receiving a hug.

He grunted into the man’s hot, sweaty, chest, feeling his legs being pried open and around the man’s hips.

He opened his eyes, the world spinning, and saw he was laying on Karkaroff, the man’s hand snaking beneath Severus’ body to position his cock against Severus’ slick and pounded hole, sliding his way back inside him and thrusting hurriedly, hard and fast. Karkaroff wrapped his arms tightly around Severus' waist to keep him steady and all Severus could think of was this was as close to a hug as he had in years.   

As searing coils of pleasure surpassed his capacity to think straight, Severus felt something placed onto his head.

The paper hat slipped down and covered one of his eyes and he looked up and identified what this paper hat was, a red-faced humiliation kicking in deeper when he realised that Rodolphus had placed a hat from a Christmas cracker on his head. A hat that he had evidentially taken with him from the Malfoy Manor Christmas gathering.

The three men found it amusing that he could not get the hat off his head, their laughter stinging his insides.  

As he tried to shake the hat off his head he felt a second body press behind him and he froze in confusion, his head turning backwards as much as his neck would allow, as much as his vision could see through the paper hat and the whisky that made the world spin.   

He watched as Dolohov stroked his own cock and met his eye as he shuffled himself as close as possible, between Karkaroff’s legs, between his legs held open and unable to close.   

“Merry Christmas, Snape.” Dolohov sneered as he pressed the head of his cock against the already occupied hole, pushing and forcing his way through, stretching Severus beyond comfort, beyond anything he could take.   

Severus protested, his body bucking and struggled, too many hands holding him down, holding him in place.   

“Let's stuff you with some Christmas cheer.” Dolohov continued to mock, his hand gripping tightly onto the collar of Severus’ shirt, pulling and forcing his back to arch as he shoved his cock through the tightness, causing Severus to cry out louder than ever.   

“Merlin, this is hot.” Rodolphus groaned, stroking himself as he watched Severus take the two cocks at once, seeing the struggle on his face and mistaking this for pleasure, “he likes it, too.”   

“Of course he does,” Dolohov groaned, taking his free hand to slap his buttocks as he thrust.   

The three men laughed at the action, the slap of skin on skin reverberating through the room, causing angry bitter tears to prickle at the corners of Severus’ eyes. Tears he forced his body to retract, to bury.   

He wanted this he wanted this he wanted this  

The pain eventually transferred to pleasure, slowly but surely the transformation was as unstoppable and uncontrollable as this whole encounter was to Severus. 

He felt his body salivating at the competing cocks inside him, his tight jaw that had so far gritted through the hurt began to coax open, to slacken as he panted and groaned through the quick and desperate pounding against his prostate, pushing and pushing him to the very edge of a bleak black cliff inside himself.

He stood at the precipice of this cliff, looking down until he found himself falling forward.  

He opened his mouth and invited Rodolphus inside him, his body fuller than it had ever been. 

He felt his cock leak against Karkaroff’s stomach, his ears occupied the grunts of three men using him at that moment.

His nose was suffocated by the scent of musk that lingered in the man’s pubic hair.

It felt as if every hole he owned was now occupied and airtight, his entire body seemed to be asphyxiating with the combined pleasure of three men and his own.    

In the haze of the whisky he found his position in the room had been moved yet again.

He wondered how long it had been since he had been placed face down again on the bed, his arse propped up by the stack of pillows as each man took their turn finishing inside him. 

He only noticed he was face down on the bed when he was flipped over onto his back, his legs held up and open by Dolohov and Rodolphus as Karkaroff began to fuck into him.   

“Do you want me to stroke you off?” Karkaroff asked, his face sweaty with the effort of this encounter.   

Severus heard himself say yes, heard his body begging for release, heard the mocking sniggering from the men that held his legs so open.

He felt revulsion and anger and shame but none of that mattered as soon as Karkaroff’s slick hand wrapped around his oversensitive cock, his thumb teasing the head, stroking him with such deliberate slowness that Severus began to wish he had said no to the offer.   

“Don’t tease him, Igor, he’s been a lot of fun.” Rodolphus spoke as his own hand joined Karkaroff’s hand around his cock.  

Severus felt sick at the talking around him, the distracting words that made it difficult to just fucking cum.

He felt Karkaroff lean deeper into him, pounding him deeper and harder, Severus’ thighs straining with the stretch of accommodating more of this man’s weight as his legs were held open.

He felt the competing hands speed up, stroking so hard and so fast that Severus tried to escape their touch, their hands too rough, too quick.

He felt his cock harden so impossibly, his body tortured by the thin tightrope of pain and pleasure, of agony and bliss, he seemed to teeter and rock between both worlds until he finally cried out as his orgasm was wrenched from him with the same tenor as a tooth extraction.  

He felt Karkaroff rip himself out from inside him, stroking his cock with his hand until he grunted and came over Severus’ spent form, his stomach and shirt sticky with his own ejaculate mixing with this new addition. The world continued to spin and swirl around him, his eyes closed and the world inside his head became a whirlpool he could not evade. His heartbeat fast, his breathing steadying slowly as the unknown began to fill him, his empty body, unoccupied by the three men, left him wondering what was going to happen next. 

Severus felt the bed  tip and sink and eventually settle as the three men climbed off the bed, the three voices relaying the interaction as if Severus was no longer there, no longer a participant on the same level that they were now that they were done with him.

"I suppose he does bring more to the table than healing potions." 

Theses voices too grew quiet, the three departing the flat together.

And then the door slammed shut.  

Severus rolled over onto his side and passed out asleep.  

. . .  

For the first time in his entire life, Severus took leave from work.   

He spent what was left of the time between Christmas and new year in silence.   

He ignored the correspondences that began to stack up by the post box by his kitchen window, owl after owl leaving behind a weather proofed envelope before swooping away.  

 The birds knew better by now to not bother lingering as Severus did not replenish the box of treats for them in thanks for delivering his ignored post. Severus had nothing to give the birds so they flew on.   

He sat in silence, frozen and stiff on the sofa as if locked inside his body.   

An unknown voice inside him began to speak, began to scream at him to get up to go out to get out of this world to hide and never come back. 

This wasn't the world he had been promised after Hogwarts.

But he was too far gone, he was too wrapped up in the Dark Lord to turn away- even people as useless as he was were not permitted to leave once they were part of meetings.

What if he was to leave and he told the enemy things about the Dark Lord? Things about the war? As if he had anything useful to give to the enemy.   

He silenced this fearful part of him, this illogical, foolish weakness inside him that preferred to flee than to face his reality and try too find a way to make it work, make it work for him. Leaving was not an option- he needed to fix where he stood, and that felt like much harder work.  

Eventually, someone knocked on the door to his flat once his letters went ignored for too long. 

Severus did not answer, did not want to risk a second go at what had happened at Christmas.

He jumped as he heard the door unlock, Lucius stepping into his flat. 

Severus was unaware that the man had a key to his flat.

The intrusion to his privacy swept aside when he told himself it was obvious that the man had a key, that he had every right to step inside this flat even if Severus was the one living inside it: Lucius was the one who had purchased it. The white-haired man took off his scarf and hat and hung them on the hooks by the front door, making his way towards Severus who sat on the sofa, not even standing to greet him.   

“I must say Severus, I know that some people find the time after the holidays to be a bit grim but you are doing yourself no favours rotting away like this.” Lucius tutted, concern on his face.   

He went to make a cup of tea for both of them, standing by the kettle as it boiled and hissed on the hob.

Lucius had heard things about Severus from other Death Eaters and it seemed that there was some truth to the stories, Lucius realised, as he saw Severus moping around inside his flat. He had hoped that they were untrue, these unsavoury whispers, but he would not cast the young man aside for this. He had invested too much in Severus to stop now.   

Bringing both mugs of tea to the sofa, Lucius took a long look at the young man and saw how manufactured his stoicism was. He sighed.   

“Severus, what is going on?” Lucius gave him an opportunity to speak for himself.   

“Nothing.” Severus forced himself to speak.   

The first word he had spoken in days, his vow of silence finally coming to a close.   

“You rushed off after the meeting, missed the Christmas dinner and then you ignore all my letters- and other letters too, by the state of your post box,” Lucius commented, “we are at war, Severus, you cannot ignore correspondences as they may be in direct connection to the war effort-”  

“Let’s not pretend that my involvement in this war extends beyond the potions I brew.” Severus interrupted with a childlike petulance to his tone, “potions that anyone with half a brain can brew.”  

“Is that what this is about, Severus?” Lucius spoke softly, and sighed, taking a sip of his tea, “look, we can’t all be leaders and commanders in a war. However, if you wish to progress within the Dark Lord’s circle, if you wish to receive the Dark Mark, for example, you need to bring something more to the table than what you are ordered to bring. Wishing is not quite enough.”  

Severus knew that this was true but wasn’t in the mood to hear it at that moment.  

“And, you might wish to ... rethink a few of your recent dalliances.” Lucius finally dropped, seeing Severus’ dark eyes turn towards him in confusion.   

“What do you mean?” Severus felt his throat tighten.  

“Severus, let’s not be coy. I do not wish to pry into your personal life, but when your personal life is having an impact on your professional life and your security within the Dark Lord’s side of this war... I must intervene, as your mentor, as your friend, as your family.” Lucius began, “there are... whispers, rumours. It seems that you have developed a bit of a reputation and it is this sort of reputation that does you no favours.”  

“What are you referring to?” Severus narrowed his eyes in fury.  

“You have been ... sleeping with Igor, have you not?” Lucius grew red at the face, “and, if these rumours are to be true, then this has gone a bit sour after an incident with another man. I do not know the details and I will not ask for the details. Severus, I will not judge you for your... tastes. But it is these tastes that hold people back, we need to practice proper relations, promote pure blood families-”  

“Are you having this conversation with these other men, Lucius?-” Severus snapped, an anger within him at the humiliation, the injustice, of this focus. It mattered nothing to him that the rumours were only half true. “-because they are hardly acting in the good of their wives and families by fucking me-”  

“You need to stop, or at the very least, you need to be discrete.” Lucius stamped down the law to Severus, “I didn’t think I needed to be so explicit with you, but it is very important for your future that you understand this. Your public face must be inscrutable; rumours should not be permitted to stick to you or you will sink.”   

Severus did not have the will to fight his mentor, not if he wanted his mentor to stay his friend and family.

He didn’t have the energy to complain about the hypocrisy of this culture, knowing it would come far too close to criticism, far too close to questioning the very ideals and way of life they wished to fight for.  

He simply nodded and Lucius stood up from the sofa.   

“... Will it help if we move Igor to another shop?” Lucius offered before he left, “we can put someone else in the front of house, and change the name of the apothecary of course. I was never a fan of allowing Igor to put his name on the door for a shop he was merely playing manager.”   

Severus agreed that this would help.   

“Take some time to think about what I said. It will take us a few days to find someone suitable to take over the front of house for you, so use this time to sort yourself out.” Lucius suggested, redressing himself in his hat and scarf to face the snow covered world outside.   

The quiet snap of the door locking left Severus feeling as if  he was trapped somehow.   

. . .   

Returning to work after the first week of the new year left Severus with an anxiety he needed to suppress.   

He knew that he was not going to face Igor again at work, that the unpleasant episode would be buried away, but having to work in the same space as a brand new person was a challenge to his preference for routine and familiarity. Even if that routine was harmful to him.   

It turned out that he didn’t need to worry about who he was going to be sharing the apothecary space with.  

Lucius had found an elderly woman of the pure blood Selwyn family to sit at the front of the till, take orders and payments, make the apothecary appear legitimate... 

Her previous role at Selwyn Solutions had been similar but her shop had been attacked at some point between the Christmas and the New Year and the old woman did not feel safe there any longer. 

She welcomed the protection that working at a Death Eater apothecary provided.    

She didn’t mind when Severus went out, after the potions he needed to brew for the Dark Lord had been completed; the orders for the shop patrons could wait.   

Severus had thought over what Lucius had told him and had taken his advice on board.   

He never wanted to be involved, sexually, with the people he interacted with within the Dark Lord’s circle ever again. 

In fact, after the incident over Christmas, he found it hard to envision a time when he might want to have sex ever again. The physical aftermath had healed, once he finally stepped out of his frozen state on the sofa and got round to taking the necessary potions and balms to no longer hurt when he sat down or walked.   

He had transformed into something dirty and shameful in the company of those three men and he did not want to face that part of himself again. 

A part of him wondered if his protest into celibacy was a bit over dramatic, but he sensed he needed the discipline of abstinence.   

He was also directing his energy onto collecting intelligence for the Dark Lord. 

He had been humiliated in front of the last gathering because he had highlighted intelligence as a superior means of winning this war once and for all, rather than continuing the senseless violence that brutish men like Dolohov and Karkaroff enjoyed. He had been mocked for this, accused of bringing nothing to the table either way.  And then....  

Counting the spare change in his coat pocket, he made his way to the newsagent on the corner of the street where the apothecary was located. He bought newspapers and journals, bringing them back to his work desk at the apothecary in a paper bag, double-packed due to the weight of the purchase. Severus walked passed Mrs Selwyn and heaved the bag onto this work desk, spreading out the papers so he could see all the headlines:  

Albus Dumbledore in talks with the Ministry concerning Death Eater violence  

Dumbledore keeping Minister Minchum in the Dark about Dark Eaters   

Dumbledore: Right man for the job?   

Everything focused on Dumbledore.   

Wherever the enemy of the Dark Lord was referred to in the news, Dumbledore’s face peered through his half-moon glasses at him through the newspaper.   

Severus’ preferred to avoid the man’s face, rather than feel the hatred he felt towards the headmaster who had left him to suffer for seven years.

The man who instructed him to shut up and never speak of the prank that had almost resulted in his own murder.   

He hated Potter, he hated Lupin, he hated Pettigrew, and of course he hated Black despite the sickness that existed within him for finding him attractive.

But he hated Dumbledore for letting the hurt go on.

For not stepping in to end it with the power he had.

With the authority he had he could have stopped the abuse years ago, but he had saw what was going on and looked away. Allowed it.  

He would get intelligence from Dumbledore.   

The anger and the ambition within him emboldened him to take such a drastic step out of his comfort zone.

He would get information about the war, from the other side, and bring it to the Dark Lord.

He would carve a name for himself, a new reputation, prestige for once in his life, without having to smash up a shop window like the likes of Karkaroff and Dolohov.   

He would bring more to the table than healing potions, more than sex.

Mrs Selwyn made her way into the back room where he worked, putting the kettle on for the mug of tea she had each day at three o’clock. She peered over Severus’ shoulder to look at the newspapers and articles on the surface of the desk.   

“I cannot wait until the time comes when this sanctimonious muggle-lover is no longer courted for his opinion by the press.” She snorted.   

Severus didn’t want to get into a conversation with her, she was known to go on for a very long time rambling and not listening to the person she was actually rambling at.   

The kettle boiled over and distracted her for a moment as she shuffled over to the counter to make her tea. The sound of hot water pouring into a ceramic mug filled the otherwise quiet room, followed by the clink of a spoon accidentally colliding with the side of the mug as Mrs Selwyn stirred the milk and sugar in her tea until it reached the strength and taste she had sipped for decades.   

She made her slow gait back to the front of the shop, turning to look at Severus as she reached the doorframe.   

"Will you let me take one of those papers home with me, after you’ve finished reading them of course. Newspapers make good cat litter tray liners.”   

Severus smirked to himself, finding it... a comfort to be in the same space with someone who shared his dislike of Dumbledore. He realised as frustrating as the hypocrisy was that ran through the Dark Lord’s army, this hypocrisy was preferable to the rage inducing betrayal he had faced from Dumbledore at school.   

. . .  

He had decided to go to Hogsmede each day, after work.   

Apparating from London to the Scottish Highlands, he only made the mistake of not bringing an extra layer of clothing for Scotland once. Every time then onwards he ensured he was dressed into an extra jumper and wore a hat and gloves alongside his scarf before he apparated to the higher, sub-zero climate that was common at this time of year.   

It was so dark by the time he landed in Hogsmede.   

The wind whipped through the darkness around him, the snow dulling the sound of any noise that may have existed at each moment he landed.   

The snow made it seem that Hogsmede was abandoned, was deathly empty in its silence.   

But this was never true, never the case.   

Even with the violence that erupted sporadically, Hogsmede a major target for Death Eater hooliganism. Severus knew he had no reason to worry about these Death Eater pogroms; he did, however, need to consider the other side of the war and whether they would think he was on their side or the Dark Lords.   

He knew Dumbledore would patron the more respectable taverns in Hogsmede. He had dreaded the idea that he would need to hide out in the Three Broomsticks and nurse a sickeningly sweet Butterbeer that he could never afford to try when he visited Hogsmede as a student. He had pretended that he just didn’t like the drink, rather than admit to his poverty to anyone but Lily.    

But instead of the Three Broomsticks, he found himself trailing the man to the Hogs Head Inn.   

The snow billowed around him and stuck to his eyelashes. Severus kept a distance from the tall, old man wrapped up in a navy blue robe. The snow blustered so thick and fast around them, that Severus became concerned that he would lose his target in the blizzard.   

He followed the headmaster inside the tavern, keeping his hat and scarf still wrapped around him to cover his appearance. Through the dirty window, he peered in and watched the headmaster speak to the bar keeper, a second old man with a similar appearance to Dumbledore. He watched Dumbledore sit down at one the few tables inside, not ordering a drink as if his business at this pub was not because of a penchant for cheap booze.   

Severus decided it would look suspicious if he didn’t order something. So he made his way to the bar and ordered an Elf Beer he knew was low alcohol, taking the bottle to the very back so he could keep watch on his target. He found himself sat at a table beside a gathering of drunks and used his skills in Occlumency to press away the memories of his own drunken parents. He heard a cackling laugh and his grip around the bottle tightened.   

The door to the pub opened again not long after he sat down. A woman entered the tavern looking so out of place that everyone turned to look. She wore glasses as thick as goggles, her hair wild, frizzy and adorned with beads, her body stacked with mystic jewellery and Severus rolled his eyes at these clues that suggested that this woman might be one of those witches who truly thought they could tell the future: a so called seer. He knocked back a sip of his unpleasant beer and watched the woman approach the bar keeper-  

Suddenly Dumbledore rose to his feet and met the woman at the bar.   

The two talked for a moment, the brief introductions of people who did not know each other well. The woman seemed to want to court his attention, to sway him over, convince him of something that Severus could not work out. He watched the bar keeper point the two to the staircase, saying that they could have the room upstairs.   

Severus began to grow concerned that his... intelligence on Dumbledore would amount to little more than a random sexual encounter in a dirty old pub. This was hardly the stuff that won wars...   

He needed to find out for certain, needed to take the opportunity of gaining something from Dumbledore in this rare moment he faced on the viewable periphery of his company without a hoard of people protecting the wizard. He watched the pair walk upstairs, Dumbledore acting the gentleman by letting her walk up first.   

How was he going to get onto the same floor? Severus balked at the screeching drunks around him and decided he could use this annoyance as a resource- a distraction. He walked past one table and took one of the drunks’ drinks and placing it on the nearest table, causing the man without his drink to think that someone at the second table had stolen his drink- it was an easily solved problem for people who were not drunk. However, neither table was sober, and this act caused a fight to break out, the bar keeper rushing over to separate the warring tables.   

Severus took his moment, tip-toeing upstairs and coming face to face with the floor where Dumbledore and his lady friend had been directed to.   

One room was a storage room, one room was a toilet. He saw a third room and, from the sound of voices behind this door, he determined that this was the room Dumbledore had entered with the woman.   

... Was he really fucking this woman? Here?   

With caution he placed the side of his head to the door to try to listen in to the room, relief coursing through him that the sounds he heard signified that both individuals had their clothes on still.   

“... The role requires that someone be competent in managing classrooms of students, in what ways do you believe you can direct and guide a cohort of adolescent pupils and teach your subject?” Dumbledore’s deep voice asked.   

“Well, of course, children thrive when they have established boundaries to work within, from the start of the course I would endeavour to involve these students in the establishment of setting these boundaries- if they are part of the contract, then they will be invested in upholding..."  

Merlin, this was worse than listening to two old people fucking. This was listening in to someone’s job interview.   

Severus was about to turn away and go when he became aware of a disturbance occurring within the room.   

He heard a chair fall backwards, a crash, Dumbledore rushing over to the woman who fell on her back, sitting he up.   

His polite and concerned questions to her health were interrupted by a distorted version of the woman’s voice.  

“The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies-”  

“Just what the fuck are you doing up here?!”   

Severus flinched and pushed himself away from the door, baring his wand to the bar keeper defensively.   

“Well?!” the bar keeper yelled, blood on his shirt from separating the fight downstairs, “this space is off limits- if you want the toilet- go downstairs!”  

The noise caused the door handle to the room Dumbledore and the bizarre woman were behind to turn and Severus forced his way passed the bar keeper to avoid being seen and identified by his old headmaster.   

He rushed out the subdued pub, rushed out back into the snow, the blizzard blinding him as he continued to run through Hogsmede as the adrenaline rushed through his blood.   

He had something.   

He actually had something to bring to the Dark Lord  

He caught his breath, the icy air causing his lungs to shriek.   

He stopped running and disapparated back to his flat in Diagon Alley to write down what he had heard so he wouldn’t forget a single word.  

. . .   

As he sat opposite the Dark Lord in a private room at the Malfoy Manor, Severus began to have regrets about requesting this meeting.

He had pushed for it, riding on the high of his own achievement.

But as he got what he wanted, doubt began to creep in.   

He was bringing a prophecy to the Dark Lord.   

Severus did not believe in prophecies, did not give Divination the time of day as it was an illogical and foolish practice.   

He had rushed through the words he had heard, decided it at least demonstrated that Dumbledore was losing the plot by courting seers- that had to amount to something too? It had to demonstrate his ... skills as a spy, perhaps?  

He just felt foolish.   

The Dark Lord instructed him to relay the information he had learned, word for word, asking him to repeat the prophecy over and over...   

“The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies.”  

The prophecy seemed to suggest a figure was out there, out in the world, unaware of the power they weld to somehow ‘vanquish’ a man like Lord Voldemort. Severus tried to think who this man could be, who this woman could be. He tried to recall all the backstory and gossip he had heard from pure blood gatherings, anything that might recollect a a man and a woman that had at some point in the past thrice defied the Dark Lord.

He wondered how old the Dark Lord was, what age bracket it put this so-called vanquisher.   

He expected the Dark Lord to chuckle at the prophecy, smirk at the realisation of how bleak the mood was on the other side of this war that fake prophecies were being called. 

He expected the Dark Lord to take amusement in the desperation of his enemy...   

But instead the Dark Lord’s face turned serious, turned introspective.   

For a moment, Severus wondered if the Dark Lord was going to unleash a rage upon him, for wasting his time, for bringing something as foolish and worthless as this to his attention.   

He was about to speak, to apologise, when the Dark Lord spoke first.   

“You have brought me vital intelligence, Severus.” He spoke, voice heavy with something akin to gratitude, “you have displayed loyalty to me, you have demonstrated your cunning and your commitment to me and our cause. Your cause. You are one with me, Severus Snape. And I will Mark you as one with me for all to see.”  

Severus felt his heart stop beating at the implications of those words he heard.   

And I will Mark you as one with me for all to see  

“Present to me your inner left arm.”   

Severus froze, unsure how to proceed.   

This was a moment he had been waiting for, for years, to finally, unquestionably, belong to something far greater than his own existence.   

To be part of a family, beyond words and platitudes, as much as he thought Lucius might have meant it when he called himself friend and family to him- this would make it as permanent as if they were blood.   

Severus and Lucius would be equals in the eyes of the Dark Lord.   

Severus would be equal to those who doubted his belonging, questioned Lucius’ decision to mentor him and put him forward into this circle.  

All these questions and doubts would... end.   

But being asked to reveal his inner arm was a problem for Severus.   

His history of uncontrollable emotions, his self-destructive behaviour that resulted in his own self-injury throughout his childhood and adolescence, all of this lined his skin- his inner arms the most accessible and concentrated space where his anger and hurt and fear and humiliation landed with each slice of his blade, each cut from his wand.  

In his greatest moment, he would appear weak and undeserving, unqualified, of what he was being offered by the Dark Lord.   

“Severus. Your arm.” The Dark Lord repeated, a part of him shocked that someone would delay this command.   

Severus unbuttoned the cuff of his sleeve, slowly unwrapping his shirt from his arm, pushing the soft cotton up passed his elbow.

He waited for the derision from the Dark Lord, he waited for the disgust.

He had never shown anyone these old scars before.

Not even Lily.   

Instead of disgust and rejection he felt firm fingertips grip around his wrist with a consideration he had not anticipated. He watched the Dark Lord stretch his arm out, witnessing the amassment of white and pink lines that littered his skin in a chaotic onslaught.   

“You’re road to me has been a dark one, Severus.” The Dark Lord summed up, “my Mark will write over this history, make these wounds irrelevant. My Mark will push away those who have sought to destroy you- and you will be remade in my army.”   

The Dark Lord brushed the surface of Severus’ inner arm as if smoothing the bumpy, bony surface like a work space.

He lifted his hand, the tip of his wand pointing into Severus’ skin. Severus felt his pulse quicken, unsure what was going to happen, unsure what to expect.   

A crushing heat pressed down against his inner arm, a heat that scorched him to the bone.

He bit down on his lip as the pain stabbed through him, black ink scrambling for territory on his flesh in a green glow of light.   

He shook as the pain built and built, afraid that he would pass out into unconsciousness...   

And then it was done.   

It was over.  

Through the aura of agony that disorientated him, he heard the Dark Lord call for Lucius and Abraxas, instructing the men to carry him away to rest off the Marking. 

Through the fuzzy light of his fading consciousness, he saw the beaming smile of pride on Lucius’ face as he was guided back to the room he had been given during the summer holidays before the final year of Hogwarts.   

Lucius supported him, throwing his limp arm around his shoulder and placed him on the bed to rest.   

The exhaustion quick to take him.  

. . .   

Sirius took a sip of beer as he waited for Remus, Peter and James to turn up at the pub.

He had asked the barmaid for the use of one of the side rooms in the pub for a bit of privacy, seeing as more often than not their conversations went from brief catch-ups to war talk. And he didn’t think it would help their situation if their conversations were eavesdropped.  

They were suffering enough without giving intelligence to the Death Eaters.   

He lifted his eyes from the golden liquid in his glass mug to peer out the frosted window in the side room. The snow was heaving down across the window so heavily that on a brief glance it seemed that the window was sheeted by a white lace curtain on the outside. He watched the snow go by, getting lost in the blinding white.   

Sirius had never been a man for self-reflection, he had passable self-awareness (or what he thought) but he never dared to put this proto self-awareness side by side with this embryonic self-reflection. His limited self-awareness told him this was a dangerous thing to do, a dark and dismal step into his psyche that he dared not trek.   

And anyway, psychoanalysis was for peace time.

War raged around him and his allies fell like dominoes to death or surrender or lethargy everywhere he looked.   

“You got the drinks in, I see.” Remus’ voice announced as he stepped in to the side room with Peter, closing the door behind him.   

Sirius had wanted to see Remus and Peter, but he had wanted to see James more.   

If he was to put money on the next domino people in his life, Peter and Remus would be the easy bet. And he felt ashamed to admit this to himself, sat opposite the two men as they helped themselves to one of the mug of beers he had got in.   

“How’s it getting on with that girl you were seeing?” Peter asked Sirius, eager to hear the dirty stories Sirius would regale in his youth.   

But that felt like a lifetime ago.   

“Haven’t seen her since.” Sirius sipped his beer, “I must be losing my touch.”   

Remus threw a dark look at Peter as if trying to subtly remind him to stop mentioning Sirius’ love life, as each time the topic had come up in recent weeks Sirius had ended up overdoing it with the beer and the despair...   

“Oh. Sorry.” Peter stammered, growing pink in the cheeks.   

Sirius didn’t bother asking Peter about his love life, as the man was perpetually sniffing around women and getting nowhere.   

“Sorry, I’m late.” James’ voice sighed as he stepped into the side room, closing the door behind him, “Lily’s not been feeling well lately, I went to get her some potions. Guess what- you’ll never guess who I briefly saw around one of the dodgy apothecaries in Diagon Alley?! Snivellus!”  

Sirius’ ears pricked up when he heard that name.   

It had been a while since that name had come up. 

It was part of his old life, evidently where his charm and spark had been left behind too. 

His eyes lit up with an eagerness he had not felt since he had left Hogwarts.   

“Is it any surprise that he’s working in one of those apothecaries?” Remus tutted, “he’s dark, but he’s good at potions. It’s a perfect mix, putting him in a front for He Who Shall Not Be Named’s war.”  

These shops were popping up with such regularity on the streets of Diagon Alley that it was becoming harder to find shops not affiliated with Voldemort. Whether this meant they were ardent supporters, or merely surrendering for survival, the Death Eaters’ were bank rolling this war and the Order’s defeat.   

“Hey, if they’re burning shops perhaps we should be doing the same thing?” James winked at Sirius, conveying their historical jaunts where Snivellus was concerned.   

Sirius felt a thrum of life throb within his body, his veins swelling with the spark of exuberance that came from hearing Snivellus’ name and the suggestion that they revive their pranks against him... For a greater cause.   

He remembered the man’s lank, greasy black hair, his too thin body, his dark glaring eyes.  

But if he was being honest, he remembered the poster he had shaped to look like Snivellus, charmed to mimic his flat chest and hooked nose.   

Peter asked him how his love life was- if he knew he was haunted by this pin up he had carved out in the image of Snivellus of all people, Peter would have him locked up at St Mungos for a psychiatric intervention.  

He wouldn’t fault the man for it either- it would seem a bit sudden to him only because Sirius had kept this secret obsession strictly secret.   

But he had to admit how tempted he was to find the man, knowing now he worked in a dodgy apothecary in Diagon Alley. 

Sirius was living in Diagon Alley...   

“No, Dumbledore would not have that.” Remus tutted.   

And the dream was dead before it took off.   

If he couldn’t use the pretence of a prank or an attack to face the man, then...

It was never going to happen. It couldn’t. What reason would he have? What reason could he contrive to justify seeking Snivellus out?   

“If I ever see him in a fight, on the Death Eater’s side, I want to be the one to cut him down.” James announced, as if stating this gave him dibs.   

“Have we really got to the point in this war where we are actually courting death?” Remus spoke darkly.   

The conversations weren’t supposed to go this way, Sirius knew. They needed to start ‘light’ and end ‘dark’, where they could blame the beer on the direness of the talk. And then the war would come up...   

As their meet up came to a end, James stumbled to his feet and pushed back the flop of dark hair from his face and readjusted his glasses.   

“Listen, me and Lils are hosting Christmas dinner this year- you’re all coming yeah?” James slurred, “her sister refuses to step foot in our place and her parents are too sick to travel.”  

“Why don’t you go to there’s then?” Remus asked, his questioned ignored by James.   

“We’ll be there.” Sirius confirmed.   

They were chosen family, after all.   

Ever since he had walked out of his family home in Grimmauld Place two years ago.   

Ever since James’ mum and dad passed away after they had left Hogwarts.   

They were chosen family- him and James. And Lily.   

But he knew, deep down, that James’ idea of family would change once he and Lily got married. It was in the stars, Sirius rolled his eyes, the man had been obsessed by that girl for years.   

He wondered if he would ever be as obsessed about someone as much as James was about Lily.   

The closest he got to obsession about someone was towards Snivellus.  

And that wasn’t the same thing.   

It couldn’t be.  

. .  .  

The days running up to Christmas were spent in Order meetings, Dumbledore appearing when he could, Alastor Moody chairing the meetings when he could not. 

Sirius could see the effect the war against Dark Magic was having on both men, Moody losing more and more of himself physically after each deadly battle he fought and survived. Dumbledore’s face was growing heavier and heavier, his shoulder stooping as if weighed down by his age for once.   

They had been so full of hope and morale at the start of this war.   

Now, looking around the meeting table was enough to make the strongest fall apart. 

So many were dead and gone around them. Sirius felt terrible for calculating who was next when he had sat with his school friends at the pub the other night. How sick was he to think like this?   

He had to admit to himself, the meetings always felt a bit brighter when Moody was chairing simply because that man was putting away Dark Wizards, left right and centre. He was trained for this, Sirius knew, but the voracity of his commitment to the task was a fire of motivation to others who were not trained to be Aurors.   

Sirius had never known what he wanted to do after he had left Hogwarts. 

Depressingly, he had known that war was breaking out and he knew that he and James would fight on Dumbledore’s side. 

But that was not ... a future. That was a stop gap. 

This was a ‘fight for the future he had never thought about’ or die and never have to give it a second thought. 

He hadn’t had to think before- he was a Black, for Merlin’s sake. A job would be a hobby to him, even if he was cut off from his parent’s funding- the inheritance from his uncle was something he could live on for many lives.   

He just wished he knew what to do with the one he had so far.   

Fighting the war was so all encompassing, if he dared think about the happily ever after he would combust. He would grow mad. He would scratch at the walls of his psyche demanding to have the good now, had he not suffered enough? 

The milieu of war was so... empty.   

He looked over the table where James sat beside Lily, noticing her sick appearance and wondered what was wrong with her. 

He hoped it wasn’t catching, the last thing he needed was a bloody cold.   

. . .  

Walking through the streets of Diagon Alley used to be a fun thing for a man with endless amounts of money to do. 

But some shops were boarded up and flamed out. The others were Death Eater affiliated. Only a few were standing in defiance, employed by people with just as much skill in defence as they had in courage. He looked through the shops he knew to be safe, looking for Christmas presents for his chosen family.   

In the end he found bottles of Elf Wine with labels that pertained to their nicknames at school. A bottle with a wolf for Moony; a bottle with a rat for Wormtail; a bottle with a stag for Prongs. Finding something for Lily was tricky, seeing as she was not... as close to Sirius as the others. He got her a nice looking bottle of Elf Wine with a flower on it, hoping that would do.   

He wished he had a better idea on what to gift Lily. Seeing as she was the love of her best friend’s life. But he found it hard to click with her, hard to relate. A part of him questioned the path that both Lily and James took to getting together, why she had found it agreeable to date James in the final year. It wasn’t as if he was a different person to the ‘toe-rag’ she had deemed him for years before. It wasn’t as if they had stopped attacking Snivellus. Although James had made sure to attack him when Lily was not around.   

Sirius knew it was hypocritical of him to think this, he knew he had no right to judge, but he found it a character flaw that Lily would be Snivellus’ best friend for years, obviously know how James and his friends would play pranks on him that left him upset to say the least. And yet she went and dated the person who did all this to her friend.

Sirius would not be interested in a person who had done to James what they had done to Snape...   

And James was different when she was around. 

Sirius saw how differently he behaved and he wondered if that was just... natural.

If that was what happened when people started dating, that it was natural to hold up masks in front of their own faces so they would be more palatable to the person they were dating. Sirius couldn’t live like that. Living in a pure blood household for so long as a child had necessitated the need for wearing masks and he just could not stand the pretence, the hypocrisy.   

Maybe that was why he was single, he smirked to himself, carrying the gifts back to his flat in Diagon Alley.   

The snow began to fall heavier around him and he sped up his pace to get home faster.   

He squinted his eyes through the blizzard and tried not to bump into other people passing by, braving the snow storm or trying to take shelter. 

He passed by people wrapped in cloaks and hats and scarves, indistinguishable from the next person who passed by.  

Until he saw someone he would recognise in a crowd of a thousand faces.   

He saw the man in a dark cloak, his bony body buttoned up against the chill. 

He saw dark hair poking out of a dark hat, dark eyes squinting through the snow. 

He saw a nose that was obviously hooked but the bump of bone cartilage did not seem so devastatingly prominent as Sirius had professed when they had been at school together. 

He found himself slipping on a patch of ice on the pavement, skidding across the floor and dropping his shopping bag. He noticed the bottles were covered in the white wine that had cracked from the bottle he had purchased for Lily and sighed, annoyed that he had to go back and purchase the gift again before the shops closed for Christmas.   

Picking up his bag he turned around sharply, trying to find the man in the snow, trying to seek out his darkly dressed form in the white blizzard that surrounded them. 

Sirius remembered that Snape worked here- James had said he saw him in one of the dodgy apothecaries, the type linked to the Death Eaters.   

He tried to find what way he walked, but the snow fell down even heavier around him. Sirius followed the trail of overlapping footprints left behind in the snow from passer-by after passer-by, trying so hard to identify the shape of Snape’s boots in the snow. 

He was about to transform into Padfoot, to sniff the man out when he felt a sharp stab of revulsion inside him at the desperation he carried to find this man.  

What was he going to do when he found him?  

No doubt Snivellus was a Death Eater- did he plan to fight him?

Kill him?

Hurt him for the dark choices he had made since he left school?

Blame him for all the loss and death that happened all around him because of this war?

As if Snivellus was the front and head of this dark war- in Sirius’ mind he was a... reminder of the proximity that existed between himself and those who joined Voldemort.   

He had stood so close to him, Sirius recalled.

He had hit him and punched him and held him down when their pranks had turned violent, when the laughter had transformed to spite.

He had to stand close to the man to take his belongings and throw them into the lake, destroying his property, his homework, his things.   

He had to be standing close to him, when he whispered the secret way to access the Shack.

The darkest thing that he had done  

And he had to be standing close to him when James levitated him upside down by the lake after the OWLs, he had to be close enough to see his bare legs, his concave stomach, the bulge where his genitalia hung obscured by underwear that Lily had mocked for their dirtiness when even Sirius could see that they were grey from age.   

He had tried to wash his own clothes once, sick and tired of having Kreacher touch his things- throwing out whatever his mother deemed too ‘old’. He had tried to wash his own clothes and saw how white clothes never stayed white, even if they were washed.   

He had to be standing close to him when James had threatened to take those pants off him.

When his friend had said those words, it was as if the rest of the world had disappeared and it was just him and Snape. He had wanted to see beneath those pants, had wanted to see him so terribly that it made him sick.   

The whole situation had made him sick and he ended it by lying and telling James that no one wanted to see that.   

He had come too close to getting what he wanted and it frightened him

He was not standing close to Snape when James dropped him with a bump to the ground.   

He was not standing close to him when he did not get up; James had led them away before they even saw him move. He didn’t want to think about how getting up at that moment must have felt so impossible.  

He didn’t want to think this way about Snivellus- it was hard enough fighting Death Eaters, humanising them and obsessing over one of them made it even harder.   

He peered his eyes through the white maze around him, waiting for the man to stumble into view, waiting to see him again. The coldness in his foot reminded him of each minute that passed by and he eventually gave up looking for the man that might have been Snape.   

He walked home, trying not to get lost in the blizzard.   

. . .   

James had sold up his family home when his mother and father had died, finding it too hard to move in and take over the place. 

Sirius had helped him with the sorting of heirlooms, the photo albums and the keepsakes. He had brought bottles of wine to drink to go down memory lane with James, share their stories of the pair that had loved each other enough to die within hours of the other from Dragon Pox. James had felt their loss immensely; he had wept in his arms. Until Lily had turned up and then he had wept in her lap.   

He sold the house once it was gutted of its heritage and memories.  

Sirius had assumed that James would come and stay with him in his flat in Diagon Alley for a bit, whilst he sorted out more permanent living arrangements. He had... wanted to have a bit of company, company with a bit more depth than the merry-go-round of women that spent the night only to leave the next morning. He had wanted to have James over to reminisce, to feel as if they were dorming together like the good old days at Hogwarts.   

But James and Lily moved in to Godric’s Hollow together.   

At their Housewarming Party, Lily had played the perfect hostess as she welcomed James’ friends over. Sirius noticed that no one who turned up was there exclusively for her, it was as if she had shed any vestiges of individuality once she had got into a relationship with James. Sirius guessed that the girl dormitory did not have the same sense of ‘sisterhood’ that the boys had as a ‘brotherhood.’

Or, at the very least, Lily had not been considered a ‘sister’ by the other girls in Gryffindor.   

It was yet another thing that made Sirius on edge about Lily.   

He wondered if Lily.... could tell. 

He wondered if Lily saw the distance that existed between her, as James’ girlfriend, and him, as James’ best friend. 

She appeared polite enough with him, but friendships weren’t built on politeness. 

Sirius was sick of polite masks, he hated double speak where words could say one thing and mean another.   

As Sirius apparated to Godric’s Hollow, he took a deep breath to steady himself for the demands of a Christmas dinner with his chosen family. He didn’t know what the matter was with him- a lovely little get together wound have sounded a great way to spend Christmas a year ago. But this year he was weighed down, he was deflated.   

He assigned this depression he carried inside him as another effect of the war that seemed to drag on into what he had considered to be his future.   

Anyone else would have felt depressed about this.  

Perhaps he wasn’t so different.   

He knocked on the door and was greeted by a rosy faced James, festive drinks in hand as a welcome to his guests.   

“Get in, Pads, it’s a cold one this year.”   

He stepped inside the warm, cosy, domestic cottage and took off his scarf and coat, hanging it up on the hook in the hallway. The cottage was warm, lit fire place warm. Sirius saw that James was dressed in dress robes and Lily was dressed in similar fashion. He looked down at his own faded jeans and shirt and felt as if he had missed a memo about a dress code.   

Peter and Remus were already there, sitting on one of the sofas by the fire place with a drink in hand. The full moon was due to come in the next week and Remus looked worn down in apprehension of his transformation. Sirius sat next to him and offered to join him this month, to keep him company in the isolated woods he used as his running grounds. Peter quickly announced he was busy that week so would not be able to join them.   

Lily walked in, looking a bit peaky but dressed in her best dress. She told them that Christmas dinner was ready in the dining room. Sirius noticed how sober she was in comparison to James, how flushed in the face from cooking she was compared to James’ red glow of whisky and wine.   

As they sat at the table as one happy family, Sirius felt a tension at the table, an unspoken hum that he could not narrow down. James continued to drink, much more than he normally did. Remus commented on his Christmas cheer.   

“I’m celebrating, my good Moony,” James slurred, standing up and holding his wine glass up in toast, “everyone, everyone, we have some news!”  

“James- not now.” Lily hissed, a flush of embarrassment adding to her exhausted glow.   

“We have fantastic news, smashing news.” James continued, not listening to her protests, “Lily and I are having a baby- due to be born in July!”  

The table transformed into a shocked silence at this news.

Sirius felt his mouth drop open at the words James spoke, the suddenness of this... child, this baby, this new life.   

They were in the middle of a war- they weren’t supposed to be doing things like this.

It was foolish to do things like fall in love, or plan families, and here was James and Lily doing just that. 

Sirius had a sudden realisation that he had... been left behind in time, as if he had missed the boat, as young as he knew he still was, he felt that he was never going to find a woman to settle down with.   

He was never going to have with James and Lily had, he was never going to-  

Lily stood up from the table, her chair backing up behind her with the squeak of the chair leg on the wooden floor.

She stormed out of the dining room.   

The table turned even more dire, even more awkwardly quiet.   

“Woops. I’m a little... enthusiastic.” James slurred, standing up to go follow Lily.   

Remus stood and suggested he have a sip of water first. The sensitive man taking action in the midst of the complexities that surrounded them all. He summoned a glass of water and handed it to James. He stacked a pile of food onto a plate and asked Peter to go hand it to Lily in case she wasn’t ready to come out for a while.   

Sirius shuffled his chair closer to James and saw the man was drunker than he had ever been in his life. Even compared to when his parents had passed away, even when they had sorted through the memories and heirlooms.  

“I just.... this was an accident, Pads.” James slurred, “are we fools, Pads? Are we fools to... want this? To do this? Is this ... is this...”  

A fucking disaster?   

A mistake?   

A risk?   

“Lily wanted to wait a .... a few more weeks before we told people. It’s still early days.” James continued, “but- we were all here, today. What if we aren’t all here together again like this? What if... you know what if, Pads.”   

He did know.   

“I always wanted to be a daddy, Pads,” James hiccupped before slumping forward in his chair, “my parents had me so late, they were so old. I wanted to be a dad early, to see my kid grow up. Not know the loss.... the loss so early on like I have. You understand don’t you, Pads?”  

And he did.

He understood James better than anyone and he saw why he made the announcement there and then.

He didn’t really understand why Lily couldn’t just... give him this.

Why she wouldn’t want the same thing.

Why she wasn’t on the same page.   

The rest of the afternoon went by with just Remus for company, seeing as James was unconsciously drink, Lily was in a strop in the bedroom, and Peter was keeping her company.

Sirius and Remus ate their dinner in cosy company, Sirius seemingly doing what he could to catch up with James’ drunkenness.   

“You wont be able to apparate home at this rate,” Remus tutted.   

“Shut up, Moony, it’s Christmas. Lighten up.” Sirius spoke sharply.   

Soon enough he was on the same plane as James.

The same disorientated headspace between wants and needs – only his weren’t being met and it drove him mad; only James’ were being met and it drove him mad too.   

He couldn’t remember leaving Godrics Hollow.   

He couldn’t remember leaving the warm, fire place glow of the cottage.  

But somehow he stood in the ice cold world of Diagon Alley in the early hours of Boxing Day, stumbling around searching for the right dirty, filthy front of an apothecary that Snivellus was working in these days.   

He found himself face to face with a place called Selwyn’s Solutions and decided this was to be it.   

He found himself holding his wand and aiming it at the glass windows, a shower of spells raining down on the old shop, glass raining and decorating the snow on the floor with diamond cut shards.   

He found himself shouting into the void.

His voice so dampened and deafened by the falling snow that he couldn’t even tell what he was shouting for.   

. . .   

Chapter Text

Sirius never thought he would be attending a wedding at the age of twenty.  

The idea of getting married so young seemed... childish, for such a supposedly massive milestone.  

Getting married in a hurry was the kind of concept he had left behind when he walked out on his pure blood family years ago. He wondered if he had been naive to think that people should marry just for love- for wondering if love was even a big enough reason for such commitment.  

In running away from the contractual and honorary marriages of pure blood society, it seemed that Sirius had disbanded the idea of being tied down to a woman for the entirety of his life all together. He could not imagine loving any one woman for that long. 

But James was not the same man as Sirius.  

James had grown up on the good side of pure blood society.  

Where Sirius’ parents had spent time plotting his eventual marriage to a woman distant enough on the family tree for their union to not cause birth defects, James’ parents gave him free reign to follow his heart. But, within this freedom, there was still the pious concept of what a family should be like. James could not be considered a good father or partner to Lily, in the eyes of his dead parents, if he did not marry her now that she was pregnant with his child.  

It was the honourable thing to do.  

And he loved her, of course, so why not get hitched?  

James had taken an interest in turning the wedding into an event to cheer up the Order, to cheer up their friends, to get together and celebrate. James had fixated on making sure there was enough food and drink for the party. He had concerned himself on getting a good band to play at the party.  

He had eventually got round to purchasing a wedding robe and had spent his stag night drunkenly attempting to put his vows together at the last minute, stumbling over his own whistling as a stripper undressed herself at a pub that the group had led James to for his so-called last night of freedom.  

Today was the big day.  

Sirius handed James a strong black coffee to steady his hangover as he got dressed into his wedding robes.  

“Cheers, Pads, you’re the bestest Best Man a man could have.”  

“Don’t mention it.” Sirius smirked, watching him down the coffee.  

James wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his robes and put the mug down on the table in Sirius’ spacious flat. He looked around the living room they stood in, the two men getting ready for the biggest day of his life – so far – and James wondered what his life would have been like if... if he lived as his brother Sirius lived. If he was living as hedonistically as him. He loved Lily very much, he assured himself, steady the nerves inside him that threatened to bolt out, but he couldn’t help but think. It was okay to think. 

Sirius watched his friend style his hair and he remembered all the times the man would fuss and primp at his unruly hair in the dorms back at Hogwarts. It seemed that in the time between leaving school and his wedding day, he had finally figured out a way to tame his locks into a style that he liked.  

“Were none of the girls you have on rotation available to be a plus one today, then?” James joked as his eyes met Sirius’ in the mirror.  

“Ha. No. They had better things to do.” Sirius smirked, the laughter not quite reaching his eyes.  

Truth be told, he could not think of anyone he would consider bringing as a plus one to a wedding. Bringing someone as a plus one to a wedding was akin to announcing to the rest of the attendees that they would be attending their wedding next. 

Still, it would have been nice to dance with someone.  

He found himself wondering if Lily’s muggle sister was open to dancing with the Best Man at her sister’s wedding. He hadn’t met her before. Lily didn’t mention her much. 

“Right. Where’s my vows... where did I put that sheet of paper....” James began searching through his rucksack, the bag that he had put all his wedding paraphernalia as he had stayed over at Sirius’ for the night before the big day.  

“Shit. Pads, I can’t find the vows.” James’ face froze as he began to panic, “I must have left them back home in my drawer.” 

“Okay, just go home and get them then.” Sirius offered calmly, not seeing the big deal.  

“I can’t go back- it’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding.” James sighed, “will you go for me? It’s the sort of thing you need to do as my Best Man.” 

“Ugh, fine. Bedroom drawer, right?” Sirius sighed, preparing to apparate away to Godric’s Hollow.  

“The top drawer.” James nodded, sitting down on the sofa, the stress of the missing vows lifting from him now that the problem was Sirius’ to solve.  

Sirius left his own flat and stepped out into the living room of the cottage in Godric’s Hollow, expecting to see a flurry of gowns and flowers as Lily’s bridal party got ready for the big day. But instead, the house was quiet, and the only sound seemed to come from above, in the room where Sirius needed to access to get the vows. He hoped this request wasn’t going to turn into a bigger hassle than it already was.  

He made his way upstairs and heard the unmistakable sniff of someone crying behind the closed door to the bedroom.  

He paused, not wanting to intrude, but too concerned about the unexpected crying to leave and not find out what the matter was.  

“Lily, dear, I don’t see why you are getting so worked up about this.” 

“You know why she’s being like this, mum,” a sour voice retorted, “Lily heard you complimenting me on my dress and, god forbid I get a single kind word offered to me, she finds a way to put all the attention back on herself once again. As if she’s not going to be getting enough attention today at her own wedding.”  

“Don’t start, Petunia.” An exasperated sigh collapsed from a hacking, coughing lung.  

“I’m upset because... so many people are missing.” Lily sniffed, “and James has made this wedding too big and too much, I just wanted a quiet celebration but he’s turned this into a party... I’m too tired for partying. I can hardly party in my condition.”  

“Well, you insisted on getting married right before the baby was born.” Petunia sighed, “you couldn’t even let me have that one could you? I do the right thing and get married before planning a baby and you find a way to upstage me by getting pregnant at nineteen and having an impromptu wedding at the same time.” 

Oh, wonderful, Sirius rolled his eyes, Lily’s sister was also pregnant. And married.  

“Mum, tell her to shut up!” Lily practically shouted, “she is always like this- why are you even here?”  

“Well, if I wasn’t here then your side of the guest list would be non-existent. Where are all your freak friends? Where is that awful boy you were friends with?” 

“There’s a war going on, Petunia, you have no idea what you’re talking about.” Lily spoke, “people are dying. People are fighting.”  

“Pfft. A war? Yeah, right. And the ones who are living can't make it to your wedding, I guess. Better things to do.” Petunia snapped back.  

“Girls, please, if your father were here to hear you both right now...”  

“See that, even dad couldn’t make it to your wedding-” 

“Go sort out the flowers, Petunia.” The mother struggled to speak through her coughing, but desperate to get the warring sisters away from the other.  

Suddenly, the door to the bedroom opened and Sirius was face to face with a girl who looked a bit like Lily, made more similar by the pregnant bump of belly dressed up in a pale rose gown.  

The woman stared at him in shock and promptly began to scream in alarm.  

Sirius didn’t know what to do, he looked towards Lily to sort this.  

But the woman kept on screaming as if Sirius was a stranger about to rob and murder them, even when Lily told her he was the Best Man. The shock clearly had an effect on Petunia as she finally quietened down, her hand clutching her bump with concern.  

“Something’s wrong.” Petunia gasped, “I think I’m having contractions-” 

“Don’t be stupid, Petunia, you have months to go still.” Lily sighed.  

“Don’t call me stupid you, stupid little freak, this is my child!” Petunia screamed, “something is wrong- that bastard over there, loitering outside your bedroom like a disgusting pervert, gave me such a shock it’s done something to the baby. Mum- mum I need to go to hospital for a check-up.” 

“You cannot be serious!” Lily sunk back down on the bed, looking so uncomfortable in her dress that was too tight around the stomach.  

“Lily, Petunia is a mother too, she knows her body, and she needs to put her baby first.” Lily’s mum sighed, standing up from the armchair she had been sat on this whole time, “we should be back for the after party, if nothing is wrong of course.”  

Lily sat and watched her mum and sister walk out the bedroom, Petunia cradling her bump the entire way and saying they needed to find a way to call her husband- criticising Lily’s cottage for not having modern amenities like a telephone installed.  

She sat and watched the only two guests on her side leave with no intention of returning in time for the ceremony.  

“I’m... sorry, Lily.” Sirius began, standing awkwardly by the door still. 

“Why are you here, Sirius?” Lily spoke, her voice empty.  

“Uh, James forgot his vows... I’m just here to collect them for him.” 

Lily’s scoffed in such bitterness at that moment that Sirius wasn’t sure if he had made things all the worse by speaking.  

“James remembers the drink, the food, the band, he remembers the stag night... but he doesn’t remember the vows.” Lily sighed.  

“It’s an honest mistake, Lily.” Sirius defended.  

Lily shook her head, turning away to look out the window away from Sirius. Sirius made his way to the drawer that James had told him to collect the vows from, putting the paper into his pocket. He was about to go and leave her in peace when she turned and asked him a question that Sirius wasn’t sure how to answer.  

“Tell me, honestly, Sirius. Did James... did James love me more before we started dating? Did he care more before we got together about how things would be? Does he even care now?”  

Sirius felt frozen by the question, the pressure to answer correctly or risk ruining the big day even further that he already had- ruining it for James as well as Lily. He tried to think of a way to smooth out this last-minute issue, this bump in the road.  

He thought backwards, back to the very first time they met. 

Sirius followed the boy that he knew was going to be his best friend forever into a carriage on the Hogwarts Express. He saw James’ eyes light up at the red headed girl sat down, sat next to a boy with eyes as dark as coal. He remembered the way his own eyes had fixed on that boy, unable to look away.  

“James has been crazy about you since the day he met you on the train to Hogwarts.” Sirius began.  

He saw the boy, slightly older now, backed up against the wall in the corridor between one of the Transfiguration classrooms. He saw the glare he threw at him, in response to Sirius’ taunting, his mock disgust at flicking his long black hair over his face, pretending it was greasier than it actually was. He remembered the scent of eucalyptus coming from him, mixed in with the scent of anxious perspiration and whatever potion ingredients he had spilled on his robe sleeve. He never rolled up his sleeves even when the work was messy.  

“He has dreamed of you for years. I remember him telling me all the things he learned about you each time he managed to get a conversation in with you before being booted away for being an arse.” Sirius joked, “he told me how your hair smelled like strawberries and when we eventually learned about Amortentia he- he remembered...” 

Sirius stirred the annoying pearly potion he tried not to ignore the smell of eucalyptus that lifted from the cauldron. It wasn’t supposed to smell like that. James had swaggered over towards him and told him how his potion smelled like strawberries.  

“He remembered what?” Lily asked, an almost pleading to her tone for something that proved to her that her fiancé did love her.  

“He remembered the strawberries.” Sirius choked, seeing Lily’s face light up like he’d told her the greatest truth.  

It seemed enough for Lily, to hear that James’ Amortentia had smelled like her hair.  

It was enough to help her believe that James loved her.  

It was enough to make her feel that she was just being a bit hormonal and was disappointed that she was alone on her wedding day.  

It was enough to help her realise she wasn’t alone, she had her soon-to-be-husband to meet her at the alter.  

She didn’t even like her sister- maybe it was time to stop pretending she could have any kind of relationship with Petunia?  

And her mother had made her choice.  

Lily saw the shaken look on Sirius’ face and thought he was so distraught, so overwhelmed, by the emotion of the big day that he was getting teary eyed.  

She walked over to the man and hugged him like a sister would hug a brother- because that’s what Sirius was to James, a brother. So now she was his sister.  

“There’s always someone who cries at weddings,” Lily smiled, flattered by what she presumed to be his investment in the big day, “I just... didn’t think it would be you, Sirius.”  

. . .  

The snow was beginning to thaw in London and left the roads a slush flooded river.  

Diagon Alley was a place of misery for the majority of its populace.  

Sirius saw the fear in people’s eyes, when they dared walk out of their homes. A lot of the flats were becoming deserted, people moving to the countryside to have a better chance to hide and outlast the war.  

Sirius travelled from Diagon Alley to Godric’s Hollow on a regular basis. He brought supplies for the parents-to-be, he purchased little gifts for the baby that was to be born in the next couple of months.  

Lily was now as big as a house and James was doing everything he could to make the uncomfortable pregnancy bearable for her.  

Sirius liked watching this routine. The wholesome nesting he witnessed was softer and warmer compared to the obsession he indulged in when he was alone in Diagon Alley.  

Ever since the wedding he had been searching for the scent of eucalyptus on the air. 

Ever since that day he saw a flicker of a familiar sight of the dark-haired man...  

He was driven to seeing him again by a force he could not name, a force that had him gripped so tightly it was hard to breathe at times when this force squeezed him.  

He felt as if he was going mad and the longer he went without ... confronting this madness, the stronger and more potent it grew.  

He just knew, that if he could just see Snape, his obsession would shrivel up and die and he would be free from the insanity that burrowed within his mind.  

He would realise what a fucking fool he was being, how his brain had been so broken this entire time. Because if obsessing about a hooked nose greasy oddball like Snape wasn’t a sign of a broken brain, he wasn’t sure what was. 

But he had a fear within him that if he was to stand, face to face, with this man once again he would only be feeding his insanity, throwing bones to the dog that howled in his chest and sought the eucalyptus scented toy to play with.  

He had thought that he was... a bit more mature now, at this age, compared to the teenager he used to be at Hogwarts.  

He thought he had outgrown this.  

But it was as if the mere thought of Snape drove him back into an insanity he hadn’t understood before.  

It was as if he was growing into this madness, the parameters becoming a much snugger fit compared to the space within him that had existed in his youth.  

It was suffocating him 

He needed to see Snape to kill this madness within him because soon it would be more than he could handle.  

It was bigger than himself and it needed slaying if he had any chance of a normal life, a normal future. 

When he was sat with James and Lily and Remus and Peter at Godric’s Hollow, he felt like an alien in a cosy, soft world. The familiar world of his found family offering him the connections he blood family never could. He fiddled with the yarns of this love and this care, but he could not seem to figure out how to knit it together in the same way that James had done with Lily. 

This cosy world was sweet, he knew, it was something that most people strove for in life.  

But it felt mute to him, numb and dull.  

It wasn’t what he wanted and realising this made him sad: he had walked out of his suffocating family home because their control was not what he wanted, and now he had the open and accepting love of his chosen family it wasn’t quite right for him either.  

He wondered if anything would ever feel right or if he was destined to be a square peg in a world of circular holes.  

. . . 

Severus received his new potion orders and noticed the slow but steady increase in private orders pile up. Orders from outside the Dark Lord’s requests.  

Orders that were meant to be a secret between himself and the recipients: orders for Euphoria, orders for Peace, orders for things that would take people out of their heads for a small amount of time so they could get some sleep or dull the humanity within themselves to do the worst things asked of by the Dark Lord.  

Most of these orders would be picked up by House Elves, as if it was too shameful for the real recipient to collect them themselves.  

It was hardly worth bothering with the attempt at secrecy by using House Elves- Severus recognised each House Elf and knew which house they served. Severus wondered if this attention to detail was missed by the pure bloods around him- as if they truly thought each and every Elf was absent of unique features that made them distinguishable from the other.  

Severus knew that Crabbe was asking for the Draught of Peace and he knew that either Bellatrix or Rodolphus was asking for the Potion of Desensity. Since Bellatrix was known for merciless brutality without the aid of magic, he assumed that Rodolphus was attempting to catch up with his wife’s violence by desensitising himself. 

The Dark Lord’s requests had transformed from healing potions to individual plots that seemed intended for mixing together with other plots.  

The vials in Severus’ hand were a ghostly green but all served different ends: unending thirst, psychoactive destabilisation, physical assault... The quantity of these individual vials was small, a sample size of misery. Severus could not work out what the Dark Lord intended to do with these vials but he was not tasked with questioning- he was tasked with brewing.  

He continued to turn up early, even though Mrs Selwyn turned up as early as he did most days and they didn’t need two people to do the checks and accept the deliveries. Severus had his routine and preferred to work early and leave late. His Mark stung and burned at times and he needed to depart to attend meetings with the Dark Lord, so he preferred to start work early so he would not fall behind too far with his jobs if a meeting was called.  

Living with this Mark on his arm was a strange thing to adapt to. The Death Eaters gave him respect now- even Bellatrix kept her bitterness and dislike towards him to herself. Dolohov, Karkaroff and Rodolphus pretended the encounter at Christmas had not happened, keeping the incident hidden within themselves. Severus certainly wasn’t going to  bring it up- he wanted to forget the entire thing.  

Those who were not Marked treated him with deference, with respect, with authority. He had no idea that the action of receiving the Dark Mark would change his standing in the inner circle so drastically. However, this change seemed relegated to social appearances as Severus still worked in the apothecary. The only change was now in the tenor of potions he brew: less healing potions and more... personal potions, more drastic and dire and secretive potions. 

Perhaps the Mark had made him more trustworthy in the eyes of not just the Dark Lord but his Death Eater family too? He only wished he knew why the Dark Lord wanted him to brew individual components of potions that did not add up in any way he knew to calculate. He was frustrated by his inability to add together what seemed a distressing but incompatible series of potion samples. He felt crippled by the curtailed education he had received at Hogwarts, belittled that there was work out there that he had not covered even with his own extensive private reading.  

The Mark on his arm gave him the courage to speak directly with the Dark Lord about this, his approach academic.  

He remembered the book that the Dark Lord had gifted him, a book he had read back to front and devoured every night when he was in his last year at Hogwarts. A book he still turned to now that he was an adult. He remembered the praise he had received from not only the Dark Lord but Abraxas too, concerning the pursuit of knowledge Severus was on.  

The curiosity continued to build inside until one day he finally asked Lord Voldemort and discovered that being Marked seemed to make it so the once cosy intellectual discussion of his youth with the Dark Lord were a thing of the past.   

“My Lord, if you would tell me what these pieces were to add up to, perhaps I could further assist with your plans?” Severus had asked him in private, after a meeting had ended.  

The cold glare he received from the Dark Lord was almost as painful as the reprimand he received, the reminder of his place and the command that questions were a one-way street: the Dark Lord asked the questions and Severus had to answer- never the other way round. 

 Severus left the Manor hurriedly, not even staying to say goodbye to Lucius and Narcissa, the woman on bed rest as she continued to approach the due date of her baby. 

He wondered when... the shift had happened.  

He wondered when he had gone from being praised for his intellectual curiosity to being punished for it.  

He thought the Mark would open all the doors to the Dark Lord but it seemed to close the one door that Severus thought was most important to him.  

. . .  

The sun shone through the lounge of the Malfoy Manor, within the private wings where Lucius and Narcissa lived.  

Pink and blue ribbons were adorned along the walls, flowers and stars decorated the open space where white pillowed sofas surrounded Narcissa Malfoy.  

The woman was dressed in a soft white gown with a delicate shimmer within the stitches that made her maternal body glow in the sunlight that poured in through the window. All other guests at the baby shower thought Narcissa looked radiant- Severus wondered if Narcissa was aware that she seemed to have accidentally based her appearance that day on a muggle disco ball.  

Severus was most uncomfortable at being made to attend this baby shower.  

He had agonised over what gift to bring to the event- what on earth do you give to a baby who has not been born?  

What do you gift a child that is going to have every single need, want and intrigue met by parents who could afford the world if the kid wanted it?  

In the end, he gifted a baby alphabet book that had a potions theme to give the child a head start with the subject. He had looked through the book before wrapping it, checking it for errors but how wrong could a book as simple as ‘A is for Asphodel... B is for Bezoar...’ be?  

He had made sure to give Narcissa a gift hamper of potions that were listed under the healing plans for birthing women in most healers textbooks.  

The guest list for this baby shower made Severus feel out of place, although he had the intuition to know that his place at this event was a demonstration of how close Narcissa and Lucius considered him to be part of the family. The room was otherwise populated by Malfoys, Blacks and Lestranges.  

For the first time ever, he was face to face with the mother of the boy who had made his life hell at school. 

Stood in the same space as Walburga Black, he actually found himself coming as close to commiseration with Sirius Black as possible, discovering what a ... monster the woman was. 

The woman criticised everything.  

Walburga hated the tea and the cakes.  

Walburga hated the bunting.  

But most of all, she hated the fact that he was present at the event; sniffing him as if his half-blood status could be smelled on his body.  

Her lack of self-awareness about her actions was made all the more insulting to Severus, because the woman absolutely stank of sweat and piss that made his nose pinch.  

Sensing Severus’ discomfort with her vitriolic attention on him, Abraxas Malfoy shuffled over to her and led her away to have a cup of tea before quietly informing Severus that she had late stage Cerebrasurri. A condition that would eventually leave her incapable of a single straight line of thought in weeks to come. Incapable of bodily control until she lost the ability to even breathe.  

Severus sardonically wondered if this condition was hereditary and if Sirius Black had been demonstrating an early onset throughout his time at Hogwarts.  

He knew that Abraxas Malfoy had informed him of Walburga Black’s condition as a means of keeping him quiet, of getting him to shut up and tolerate the abuse. He looked at the way the other attendees were putting up with her abuse, how she made her way past Narcissa calling her a bloated whale before finally reaching the sofa where a mug of tea had been left waiting for her.  

He saw a dull toleration to their expressions, an acceptance that they had to take this abuse without retribution.  

Not because she was sick and they pitied her- but because she was a Black.  

Severus knew that they would be tolerating her bitchiness even if she was in top health.  

Severus was unsure if he would ever... fully acclimatize to all the ways of pure blood society. The two-faced hypocrisy was becoming suffocating.  

As everyone made the effort to ignore the mad woman on the sofa, anchored down by a plate of sandwiches and a mug of tea, the Baby Shower carried on as normal as Severus assumed a Baby Shower was supposed to carry on. He had never been to one and he hoped never to be dragged back to another in future...  

He stood beside Lucius, politely enquiring about the approaching changes that came to his life in the form of fatherhood when he saw Bellatrix approach her pregnant sister on the sofa. She placed her hand upon her disco ball bump with a respect that Severus had never seen on her cruel face before. She held her palm to her sister’s bump, her eyes growing ... damp.  

“She probably hopes the pregnancy will be catching,” Lucius whispered to him.  

His words were a strange blend of pity and mockery, a sting that Severus had not expected to hear from Lucius at that moment.  

“What do you mean?” Severus rose an eyebrow, speaking into his glass of elf wine.  

“She’s been married to Rodolphus now for eleven years.” Lucius explained, his lips hardly moving, as if speaking about this subject was more than just impolite- it was as if the topic was forbidden, “and she has never conceived in the entire marriage.”  

“Perhaps her husband is to blame for that.” Severus spoke bitterly, unsure whether he hated Bellatrix or Rodolphus more.  

“Ah. Well.” Lucius took a sip of his own elf wine, his eyes glittering with salacious gossip on the tip of his tongue, “the fault does not appear to be on Rodolphus’ side, if the rumours of his bastard children are to be believed...” 

“Does she know?” Severus asked.  

“I’m sure she’s aware. But what does it matter? The tots aren’t claimed by Rodolphus- they don’t carry his name.” Lucius sniffed, disapprovingly.  

Severus rolled his eyes at yet another example of the sexual hypocrisy that ran rampant within pure blood society.  

He lifted his eyes from the image of Bellatrix stroking Narcissa’s pregnant bump, giving her the privacy of the moment.  

As much as he hated her, he felt pity for her in that moment, but for more than the reasons Lucius seemed to pity her. She had been married to Rodolphus for eleven years- meaning she married the man when she was seventeen- at the exact ageshe was considered an adult in wizarding society, and not a moment later.  

He had been seventeen years old when he first had sex with Rodolphus, and Severus had the self-awareness to know how... immature he had been at that age. How easy he had been.  

How easy he still was, he criticised himself, remembering how quick he had been to capitulate to the arousal of three men last Christmas.  

“You disapprove, Severus.” Lucius commented, noting Severus’ knotted brows, knowing the man was deep in thought.  

“It is hardly the pro-family stance you espoused to me previously.” Severus tutted, without thinking.  

“You’re not wrong, but it’s not for us to critique.” Lucius sighed, “one day you will learn.”  

You won’t criticise this, but you will criticise me for what I do.  

Severus rolled his eyes, knowing by now that Lucius was not interested in debating him.  

And besides- this Baby Shower was hardly the time or the place for it.  

. . . 

Of all the guests that turned up at the Baby Shower, Severus was surprised to see the Dark Lord make an appearance.  

The bald, gaunt faced man looked out of place at an event the was focused on the celebration of life, Severus could not picture this man stepping into the room even as he watched him approach the mother-to-be. He saw him whisper to Narcissa, she seemed flattered by what was being spoken to her. Bellatrix’s head bowed lowly, in the Dark Lord’s company. She seemed ashamed in that moment and Severus once again looked away, her public display of humility in the face of her pregnant sister was too uncomfortable for him to watch any longer.  

He could only imagine what criticism the Dark Lord was throwing at her. 

Lucius suddenly took a shallow bow and stepped away and Severus unexpectedly found himself face to face with the Dark Lord.  

It was the first time he had been in his company since he had been reprimanded for his questioning of the potions he was tasked with brewing.  

His instinctual reaction was to hold the reprimand close to the surface of his mind, unable to let go- holding it up as if anticipating more of the same. A shield of expectations and anticipation that made future attacks less sharp.  

But the Dark Lord did not dwell on their last encounter- not on the surface, not from what Severus could see. He acted as if it never happened and asked Severus to follow him to his private chambers for an update concerning the prophecy Severus had delivered to him.  

Severus rose his eyebrow at the request, at the idea that the Dark Lord had spent a moment more than was necessary dwelling on something so.... fruitless.  

So empty.  

So irrational.  

But he complied- anything to get out of this Baby Shower.  

Even if it was another disciplining.  

Stepping out of the lounge, Severus found he took a deep breath, as if he had been holding it for the entire time he had been enduring the gathering.  

“You are not a fan of crowds, are you, Severus?” the Dark Lord commented as they walked together towards a spare room, the office chambers that the Dark Lord kept when he visited the Manor.  

Severus was not sure how to answer.  

“I am not a fan of crowds, although my role as leader prescribes the necessity for crowds.” The Dark Lord mused, “you will grow used to crowds, I see you excelling in ranks where you too will be necessitated to endure the company of others.” 

Severus felt as if he had been handed a gift with this prediction.  

He felt the grudge of the previous encounter melt away into irrelevance and he wondered how this man pulled forgiveness from within him where others had no luck.  

Not his mother, not his father, not Lily...  

He reasoned that he was able to forgive the Dark Lord for previous hurts because Severus believed that the Dark Lord actually took steps to rectify these mistakes- even if the Dark Lord didn’t see it that way, Severus felt as if he was being offered something akin to an attempt to rebalancing wrongs.  

His mother had abandoned him with her own suicide- there was no grounds for rebalancing this wrong.  

His father had simply abandoned him- he could never forgive him for leaving him to fend for himself as a teenager.  

Lily, his best friend, had abandoned him and salted the earth in the wake of their friendship.  

But the Dark Lord had a way of manipulating even the most impossible of situations.  

He followed the Dark Lord inside the spare room he had commandeered and sat down on the offered armchair where the Dark Lord continued to stand.  

“I have spent the last few weeks considering the prophecy you brought to me, Severus.” He began, “I will save you the details of how I have identified the one who supposedly has the power to vanquish me.”  

Severus felt the pause, the deep breath before the plunge.  

“The one who supposedly poses the power to vanquish me, born to those who have thrice defied me, born as the seventh month dies...” the Dark Lord repeated with a smirk, “it is the unborn offspring of the blood traitor Potters. James and Lily Potter’s offspring.” 

 The words did not make sense as they fell from the Dark Lord’s thin lips.  

Each letter dropped slowly, like stones falling from a mountain before a landslide slipped and crashed around him.  

He sat still, incapable of dodging the crash.  

Unable to sway free from the crushing weight of disaster that buried him.  

“... A Potter child.” Severus repeated quietly. 

He had avoided all news of Lily since he left school.  

He had made a conscious effort to avoid all sound of her and the people who made his life hell for seven years, and, as he was not on the frontline of the war, as he was not a foot soldier... He had managed to avoid the obvious clash with these men he assumed would be on Dumbledore’s side in this war.  

He had never been eager to fight that side of things- the ways the sorts of Bellatrix, Dolohov and Greyback revelled in.  

Not simply because it was not his style- but he just did not want to risk a confrontation with his past.  

But here it was: amongst the landslide of shock that landed around him, were the bodies of these targets at his feet.  

The only body he could put a face to, the only body he could not erase, was Lily’s.  

James Potters’ he could not care less for; the unborn child he simply could not picture because it was a blend of the friend he had lost and the man who had ruined him.  

“A child.” Severus repeated, the incredulousness of the situation sinking into his blood like antifreeze.  

What on earth was Lily doing, having a child in a war?  

Having a child so young?  

Getting married so young?  

Both of them had come from families where their parents had kids too soon. Lily’s mum had her life choices taken up by motherhood; his own mother didn’t have that excuse. Severus’ family life had cemented the belief early on that he would never, ever want to have a family himself. Lily had always said she wanted to live a bit before having a baby, before he would be uncle to her baby- 

He felt sick.  

The Dark Lord... had chosen – Severus could not pretend any further that the Dark Lord had thoroughly investigated, with logic and rationality, who his vanquishing enemy could be.  

Not if he had chosen a fucking unborn child to fight to demonstrate his superiority. 

He lifted his face and looked into the eyes of the Dark Lord sat opposite him, as if for the first time. 

“A child.” Severus held back the searing fury within him. 

The man he had... believed was so powerful, was to lead magical society into a future where magic was might.  

He was a charlatan. 

A false prophet.  

A pretender.  

As powerful and dark as Lord Voldemort was... in Severus’ eyes, all his accomplishments, all his prestige and power... he could no longer see this at the forefront of his impression of this man, his definition of him- he was just a man who chose to duel a baby. 

“Do not let me think you are growing sentimental, Severus. This child would grow into the one with the power to vanquish me.” The Dark Lord smirked, "I have no time to wait for a dignified little battle, for this child to grow into an adult.” 

It was as if a spell had broken. 

It was as if Severus had full scope of his eyes, had full vision, could see the world around him for what this was- this army led by a man (and he was a man, as godlike as he depicted himself to be) who chose his defining battle to be fought against a life that could not even hold its wand up yet.  

This was wrong.  

“You are ... targeting the Potter’s unborn baby.” Severus repeated, as if the last vestiges of his commitment to the Death Eaters desperately reached out for security and protection it had given him since the age of seventeen.  

“I will no doubt need to slay the parents too.” Voldemort chuckled, “less the blood traitor and the mudblood decided to breed again and produced yet another so-called vanquisher.”  

The death sentence on his old, childhood friend’s life... felt like a death sentence stuck upon him too.  

He had been so angry at Lily before, so disappointed in her choices that brought him pain.  

So angry at himself for hurting her.  

For the one good part of his life falling away from him- before Lucius rescued him that was.  

But... this rescue that Lucius had provided him now had a bitter taste to it.  

Was Lucius part of this... sham?  

Lucius Malfoy, the man who had given him so much- was he ... aware of what a false prophet the so-called Dark Lord was?  

“Don’t...” Severus began, his words dissipating within his mouth at the dark look that landed upon him from Voldemort.  

A testing look, a test: as if Severus was... demonstrating a breaking of loyalty- which he was.  

He was demonstrating this.  

But if Voldemort suspected he was now a non-believer he would die right there and then- and then Lily would die, her whole family would die, because he was the only one in the whole world who knew that she was a target.  

Who knew she was in danger.  

“My Lord,” Severus began, the title tasting sick on his tongue, “if I may be so... bold. If I may ask one thing, as your loyal soldier.”  

“Please.” Voldemort permitted, surprisingly.  

“The woman- the mother. She... we grew up together.” Severus began, “you- you know some of my history....” 

Severus had never spoken aloud about this- referring to the scars that Voldemort had witnessed on his inner arm when he had been Marked.  

“But she made my life easier.” Severus struggled to toe a line between making the request appear casual- to not raise suspicion that he would do all he could to save her, if he made it through this request alive of course, “she is a skilled witch. She...” 

Voldemort gave him such a look that Severus was sure he was going to die. 

But instead, the man’s face seemed to turn icier and he shocked Severus instead. 

“I will do this for you, Severus.” Voldemort spoke, as if biting on a sour lemon, “Lucius made me aware of your... connection to this mudblood, years ago. I suspected you may find this news to be a difficult pill to swallow. Sentimentality is a weakness you will no doubt outgrow.”  

Severus sat frozen stiff. 

“You brought me this prophecy. You gave me the information to win this war. I will grant you this favour. It is no bother to me if the mudblood survives this encounter, as long as her offspring dies. No doubt this so-called power my vanquisher has, derives from the pure-blood father. He will die.” 

Severus forced himself to nod, to show the sociopath the deference he was accustomed to, to pretend, to play the part he had ... he had behaved and believed up until now.  

He stood to leave, forcing a shallow bow.  

“And, Severus?” Voldemort announced, his voice sharp as a knife, “we do not speak to this to anyone. If there is a leak- I will know where it comes from. I am ... admittedly, surprised that you asked. But what do I know about sentiment?”  

Severus met his eyes, holding his intensity and not breaking from it.  

The skills he had built up with occlumency... it was proving itself to be a saviour in ways he had never anticipated.  

In ways Voldemort evidently had not anticipated, when he had gifted him the book all those years ago, in the Malfoy library. 

. . .  

Leaving the side room was like being reborn in hellfire.  

Severus felt as if his blood had become gasoline and he was waiting to light a wooden matchstick.  

The familiar sense of impending self-immolation stood on the horizon of his mind as he walked down the hallway, knowing he was in no fit state to return to the Baby Shower.  

Not like this. 

He was on fire.  

He was burning.  

He was reborn seeing the world around him with new eyes that bubbled and pop with the heat inside him.  

The eyes of the portraits on the wall watched him pass, painted eyes that saw him as he did.  

They saw his guilt without knowing the details; they saw his shame without needing proof.  

Air seemed to rush through him, leaving nothing left to breathe as if he was a balloon with a pinprick he could not find. He could not patch up. He could not breathe. He leaned against the wall of the hallway, the sound of laughter from the Baby Shower brushing up around him like a wave. He thought the sound of laughter was akin to a crime right then, he was sure he would never laugh again after the meeting he had with Voldemort. 

He’s going to kill her, he’s going to kill her- he said he won’t but he will you know he will. She had a baby with that monster and they are all going to die. She had a baby with that monster. Stop caring about her, stop caring, she made her bed- 

“Ah, Severus, how ... convenient to bump into you here. Alone.”  

Severus flinched at the sound that interrupted his maddening thoughts, his spiralling crisis.  

Rodolphus stood before him, blocking his path out of the Manor. Leering down at him with his knowing smirk, no doubt memories of Christmas flashing by like pornography behind his dirty eyes.  

“I think you have the right idea, Severus,” he purred, leaning in and pressing him into the wall, “baby showers are ... dull.”  

She made her bed he made his bed she made her bed he made his bed- 

“No.” Severus whispered, freezing.  

Flashbacks ran through his own mind.  

Drunken memories.  

Degradation he had tricked himself into thinking had been arousal.  

Pain he had gritted through and pretended it had been pleasure.  

Pleasure he wanted to forget.  

“Don’t be shy, Severus.” Rodolphus chuckled, leaning into him, his body pressing him, crushing him, “that’s not like you...”  

He made his bed he made his bed he made his bed 

Severus did not want to be here a second longer. 

He was done.  

A rage shot through him, the matchstick lit, his blood igniting.  

He shoved the man off him, eyes wild and frantic as he saw the shock on Rodolphus’ face, the realisation that the man was going to retaliate- his rejection was an insult to him. Severus got in first, striking him in the face with his fist. Kicking his erection and watching the man drop to the floor in agony. The fire burned within him, an inferno of anger, hatred, shame- the mix toxic and brutal.  

He didn’t feel his own boot cracking against Rodolphus’ stomach, crushing and crunching him as he hissed in a rage he had not felt since his youth.  

It seemed fitting that the rage and shame that had brought him to this time and place would be the same calibre that led him loose.  

“You will never touch me, ever again.” Severus’ voice was a deep thunderous rage that left no room for debate or negotiation on the matter.  

He left Rodolphus wheezing on the floor and stormed through the hallway until he finally reached the door to the grounds, disapparating away from the Manor on the inferno that burned within him, like a phoenix dying in flames.  

. . . 

Why had he landed in Cokeworth?  

Why had his cursed mind led him to this cursed place, the graveyard of his memories and hopes he had shared with Lily in the grassy fields beneath the trees. The smell of the stagnant lake made him breakdown and sink to the grass.  

He had no right to be here. 

He had no right to remember- he who had convinced himself to hate her, convinced himself to be the slighted party, to build a life in the shit he had thrown at her that day by the lake 

Dirty Mudblood 

He had called her something he didn’t even believe in- he had just felt so ashamed and exposed and attacked and had seen her laughing at his assault. 

He had wanted to hurt her as much as she had hurt him.  

Well, he succeeded, it seemed: the insignificant prophecy he had brought to Voldemort, the small piece of intelligence he had grabbed and taken to the Manor in hopes to demonstrate his use to the so-called Dark Lord- this had led to Lily and now he was going to kill her. 

He gagged, a hacking coughing gag that had him on all fours on the damp grass.  

Nothing came up but the Elf Wine he had sipped at the Baby Shower.  

He needed to drink more- put out this inferno within him that threatened to break him apart.  

He knew how this ended.  

He knew how this ended and it served him just well.  

He was sick of himself, sick of the shame and the anger and the guilt. 

He pushed his legs to work, forcing one foot in front of the other as he made his way out of the park by the river that he and Lily had spent years playing together within, building futures that neither of them would quite see.  

He made his way down the streets, not even in his despair did he consider taking the familiar route back home.  

Never. He kept away from that hell hole, away.  

He found himself purchasing a bottle of vodka from the off-licence on the corner that divided his side of Cokeworth from Lily’s side.  

Spinner’s End from the River Leen.  

He unscrewed the clicking red lid on the bottle of vodka, knocking it back on the street and ignoring the scrutiny of the muggles around him- the people who he grew up with and almost recognised him in the corner of their eye: that Snape boy.  

That awful boy.  

That dirty son of a witch and a drunk.  

He could practically see these ghosts of his youth looking at him and seeing that he had followed in his family footsteps by drinking himself into oblivion out in the open.  

He downed more of the drink, the smell sickening to him but he pushed through.  

The streetlights came on and the sky grew blacker. 

He stumbled through the streets of his childhood, the anger burning through him, unextinguished by the vodka.  

How did he end up here?  

The Evan’s had lived in a semi-detached house on the better side of Cokeworth, beyond the River Leen, the river that Severus had crossed every opportunity he could find, just to play with Lily.  

She had grown up in a four bedroom house- more bedrooms than people. She had an indoor toilet and a bath that wasn’t a tin that was carried from the cold basement to the living room by the smoky fireplace. She had a fridge. She had an oven. She had walls that did not need to be papered over each winter with newspaper, just to cover up the black mould that stained and tarnished every surface in the house. She didn’t have a mother who spoke to herself, who drank and drank and cried. She didn’t have a father who drank and beat her, didn’t beat her mother. She didn’t live in hunger and didn’t need to steal food. She never felt the cold like he felt the cold.  

No one on her street died in winter from unheated homes.  

She never really understood the hunger he felt- laughing at him when she brought him food, feeding him like a stray cat. She never understood the cold he felt, telling him to ‘just put the heating on.’ As if their home had heating to begin with. She never understood what it was like to be thought less of because of his family- 

He knew- and he had thrown it back in Lily’s face: Dirty Mudblood 

He found himself stood before the house Lily had grown up in.  

He had the sense to see that Lily did not live here anymore. None of the Evans’ did. 

No she lived with James Fucking Potter 

He found himself stood in front of Lily’s childhood home, drunkenly shouting at the door 

How could you do this? 

Until a stranger opened the old door, threatening to call the police on him.  

Severus threw the empty vodka bottle at the wall, the glass smashing into a hundred pieces on the old bricks. 

He pushed through the fog of vodka, the haze of alcohol that made him stupid.  

Made him a fucking mess.  

And stumbled onward...  

. . . 

When did he land in Diagon Alley?  

He recognised this part of the magical community- a part that he was not supposed to be within.  

This was near the pubs and bars that Voldemort had ruled to be out of bounds: the Order affiliated pubs, the bars that were uncaring of blood status and sexual relations, or uncaring about the promotion of pure blood marriages.  

If Severus was the extroverted type, he might have been put out by the fact that these bars and pubs that were blacklisted by the Death Eaters were more than just affiliated with the Order, but also contained gay friendly places.  

This was a part of him that would never fit in with the ideals of pure blood society, less so than his half-blood status, it seemed.  

The hypocrisy was suffocating, even now when he was drunk out of his mind.  

He stumbled through the streets, seeking his way back to his flat. 

When he saw something that stuck out even through the haze of drunkenness.  

He saw something that proved to him how meaningless this had all been, how foolish he had truly been to fall for this lie the Dark Lord pushed.  

He had been a fool to... think that everyone played by the rules he pushed. 

He must have missed the lesson on hypocrisy, that time he had spent over the summer at Malfoy Manor, the last summer before his last year at Hogwarts.  

He must have missed a class on behaviour because the lesson he had learned from Lucius, before the man had learned he was gay, was to respect and worship your wife.  

Because there Lucius was, kissing a young woman who was not Narcissa by the door of a bar.  

He saw his mentor, his friend, his family, enraptured by an unknown brunette in a short dress, clearly under the impression he would never be seen by a person within the Death Eater circles as they either should not be in this part of Diagon Alley or they were already aware of the two-faced rules within the Death Eaters circles. 

Severus walked by, too ... disappointed to stop, too disappointed to confront the man.  

But Lucius spotted him as he walked by, his eyes bulging in horror at being seen like this.  

He tried to catch him up but Severus lost him in the crowd.  

Severus kept walking, his feet hurting from the unending paces he had taken that day.  

Paces back in time at Cokeworth and pacing into more mess in his present day.  

Lily’s peril and his shame tripped him up, witnessing Lucius’ infidelity distracted him even more and he ended up colliding into someone.  

He felt the world spin around him, feeling rough bricks against the side of his face as he tipped and leaned against the wall of a pub he never frequented.  

Because he had followed the rules- more fool him.   

According to the so-called-Dark-fucking-Lord.  

Why did he tell them all what pubs to go to?  

Why did he control everything they did?  

And why did they all... let him? 

He just wanted to go home 

To the flat owned by Lucius- a Death Eater home- all of them, hypocrites, all of them. 

He just wanted to get home and break into as many pieces as the glass bottle he smashed back at Cokeworth. 

He just wanted to be in privacy rather than have his breakdown on show - 

“Snape?”  

A voice passed through his ears, a voice on the cusp of memory, a voice that stirred parts of him he had fought too hard to bury. Too hard.  

He had worked so hard to forget this voice and it all came flooding back.  

He was once again pushed against a wall, this time in an alleyway beside the pub he just passed. Through the haze of vodka that blurred his vision, he saw those grey eyes those stunning handsome eyes he had forced himself to hate. Those locks of wavy dark hair. Those broad shoulders. That muscular chest. A wand pressed against his chest. 

“So, it is you.”  

Why was Sirius Black cornering him in an alleyway?  

If this was any other man, Severus would assume the man had seen easy prey for a blowjob. But this was Sirius Black. The man who all girls swooned over - 

And him too 

The man who hated him as much as Severus hated himself.  

“.. Snape?” Sirius asked, confusion in his voice at the floppy man he had grabbed, “What are you doing here? Snaking around no doubt.”   

In his youth, Severus had desperately wanted Sirius Black to kiss him.  

But even in his daydreams these kisses came with pain: a mocking laughter at the thought of Black kissing a disgusting boy like him bellowing from the handsome boy’s chest.  

Severus stood on his tip toes and leaned in, attacking the man’s lips with his mouth.  

His hands gripped onto Black by the shoulders, fulfilling his adolescent fantasies with the act.  
He felt the shock in his lips and felt powerful, for once in the man’s presence, he felt powerful-  

He felt powerful at taking charge and he felt powerful, as his hand slipped downwards, cupping the unmistakable erection beneath Sirius’ trousers.  

He felt powerful because he had this unmistakable effect on Sirius. 

Sirius shoved him off him, shock and embarrassment coursing through him. Sirius pinned him against the wall as if unsure what to do with him.  

“You’re hard.” Severus spoke, a slurred whisper that failed to convey the utter shock he felt inside that Sirius Black was hard for him. 

“You’re drunk.” Sirius answered, “you’re - you’re imagining things.”  

“I’m ... easy.” Severus confessed, the vodka removing all vestiges of decency from his demeanour.  

If he was going to feel shame and guilt and disgust he might as well give himself something massive to focus on.  

He ran his lips against the exposed parts of Sirius Black’s neck, his jaw, kissing and cupping his hand on that hardness he wanted inside him.  

He wanted to suck him, he wanted to feel something better than what he felt already.  

He wanted to hurt more on the outside than he did on the inside.  

He wanted Sirius to hit him like he had done at school.  

Punch him, strike him.  

As long... as long as he kissed him afterwards.  

As long as he fucked him afterwards- 

Sirius Black had history of hurting him- this should be easy. 

Because he was making it so easy for him  

He was hard. Rock hard.   

There was no denying it. 

“Hit me.” Severus slurred, enjoying the shock on Sirius’ skin, “hit me, you disgusting pervert. Fucking fag-” 

“Funny that, calling me a fag when you’re groping my cock.”  

“I am trying ... to manipulate you into hitting me, you idiot.” Severus slurred, “as if you need convincing to hurt me. Just fucking do it. Finish the job. I deserve it.” 

“I’m not going to fucking hit you- what is this?” Sirius Black’s voice seemed shrill, seemed at a loss for what was going on, “my oh my, is this who you are now since we left school? A drunk who grabs cocks in alleyways-?” 

“You grabbed me.” Severus reminded, beginning to play with Sirius’ shirt buttons, “now, you can either fuck me or hit me, make your mind up.” 

“I- I’m not going to- do either!” Sirius protested, as if embarrassed by the awareness that Severus had of his erection.  

But more than that, it was the reminder of who he had been in his youth when he sought to hurt Severus.  

The part of himself that he was not proud of.  

The part of himself that he could not find in the bleak alleyway, facing the distraught man as he was now.  

He would have loved this. 

Once upon a time, he would have just beaten the man up. Hurt him. The choice shouldn’t have been so difficult- so impossible, because he couldn’t really fuck Snape: that was just fantasy. 

This was just a fantasy- it had to be.  

“You’re a fucking mess, can you even stand up right now without me holding you up?”  

“You’re ... you’re not going to hit me...? You’re not going to...” Severus repeated.  

“No-!” 

“Well, what fucking use are you to me then?!” Severus seethed, a humiliation burned within him, the power wiped away from him, the man’s erection in his company meaningless without the follow through. 

He had offered himself on a plate to the man- offered him sex or sadism and – and he was good for neither. 

“Get off me.” Severus vexed, shoving Sirius’ hands off him, stumbling with the effort of rebalancing himself without Sirius’ arms acting like scaffolding to his drunken form.  

“Snape- wait! Wait a moment!” Sirius pleaded in the alleyway. 

Severus looked at the man, seeing the confusion on his face, mistaking this confusion for amusement and hating himself so much.  

Hating him.  

What was he doing?  

What had he done? 

His humiliation an escape valve, Severus finally focused enough to apparate away.  

. . .  

He landed in a heap inside his own flat.  

The place cold, deserted, silent.  

He landed in a heap and howled in a drunken, sobbing mess on the carpeted floor in the living room.  

The superficial emotional wounds he had unleashed upon himself by humiliating his soul before Sirius Black had ... provided a minor distraction to his mess of a situation but it had not obliterated it as he had hoped.  

He was still weighed down by the disaster of the prophecy he had brought to Voldemort.  

He forced himself to his feet and lurched through to the kitchen, grabbing a bottle of Elf Wine from the counter where the most recently washed up plates had been left to dry.  

He wasn’t drunk enough, he could still remember the Dark Lord’ eyes 

Stop calling him that 

He could still see those eyes blaring at him as he told him who the target was. 

Lily. 

How could he put her in this situation- as if he had not hurt her enough? 

He sipped the bottle of Elf Wine and tried to place it back on the countertop in the kitchen but he missed and the bottle fell and smashed onto the floor.  

The smell of cheap wine permeating the lino flooring.  

He knelt down, attempting to clean the mess up with his bare hands and flinched at the sharp tug of glass shards on his fingertips. 

Red blots of blood seeped through the sliced skin on his fingertips.  

All he was left with was the familiar compulsion he had thought he had buried in his adolescence. 

There was no alternative, no other way, to ending these terrible feelings inside himself.  

The shame, the guilt, the unbearable humiliation- how could Black not want to hit him?- how could Lucius betray Narcissa like this? How could he send a death sentence on his childhood friend- the burning inferno within him that needed to be obliterated or he would die.  

He would surely die if he did not find a way to vent this – 

Occlumency could not touch this. 

He was left with his old tools, old weapons.  

With shameful tears in his eyes, he unbuttoned his shirt sleeve cuffs and rolled his sleeve up to the elbow. He saw the old white lines that marred his skin and hated that he was back here again. 

He picked up a broken shard of glass from the floor and, with deliberation, with focus he did not think possible, he dragged the sharp end of this glass over the inner skin of his arm. 

The Dark Mark lay like a bleak reminder of his biggest mistakes. 

The glass shard began to quicken in pace, slicing at the surface of the skin on his inner arm. 

Slicing deeper.  

His flesh became a jagged picture through his heavy, drunk, eyes. 

The Dark Mark grew bloody, the snake sliced to bits, the skull smashed in with the hacking brutality he inflicted upon himself.  

He could hardly feel it- he was so unbelievably drunk- he could hardly feel it but he saw the blood rise from his skin like giant red balloons, floating and pouring from his skin, leaking like wet red ribbons from his flesh onto the floor.  

This helped this helped this helped 

He forced himself to his feet and sat at the coffee table in the living room, his eyes landing on the stack of newspapers that had been delivered to the apothecary the day before.  

Dumbledore’s eyes looked through him, through the paper, through the ink, through the drunken haze...  

As if he was the one who was unreal.  

He hated that man, the so-called saviour of the world who did not think he was worth saving at school.  

He hated that man  

But he was the only way forward. 

He would save Lily, wouldn’t he? He would save her child.  

Because he could. 

It was lucky that Severus had immediately dislocated his soul from the Death Eaters at the mention of Lily’s life being in danger, because if he had still been a Death Eater the thought of reaching out to Dumbledore for help... would have been a death sentence. 

Now he was untangled from the Death Eaters he needed to get the fuck out of this mess. 

But not without making sure Lily was okay.  

He knew that no one got out of the Dark Lord’s inner circle alive- no one had tried to, but they all said it was a decision steeped in death to try.  

He didn’t care.  

He could not live that way any longer.  

The hypocrisy, the sexual violence, the pious pretence that family was all that mattered- the money he was forced to give each month through his wages to the Dark Lord; the lack of freedom he had in choosing where to live- it all swam around him in a suffocating whirlpool: he had been trapped this whole time and had not even realised it.  

What a fool he had been, he sniffed, as he grabbed a parchment and pen.  

He scribbled a plea for a meeting, a conversation.  

Anything.  

Just to be heard.  

As he held the parchment down on the surface of the coffee table, the blood from his wrist stained the edges of this parchment and Severus wondered if he should re-write the message on a fresh piece of paper.   

His concern fizzled out, he stuck the parchment into an envelope and forced his way out from the flat that the Death Eaters purchased for him- that Lucius purchased for him.  

Knowing he was.... betraying them.  

Betraying their kindness.  

Betraying the benefits that Lucius had guided him into.  

He was betraying the only people who had ever cared enough to help him. 

But they asked too much from him- for a cause he did not believe in 

He was betraying them all for a girl who was no longer his friend, for a girl who never saw his suffering, for a girl who thought a bad word was worse than him being assaulted, for a girl who thought he was a weirdo, who thought he was from the bad side of town, who thought he was bad- pure bad, the longer she was immersed in Gryffindor Tower, her peers whispering into her ears, speaking against their friendship that had existed before school.  

Severus reasoned that this was just another way to harm himself: put Lily first instead of his own self-interest, his own self-protection.  

The power of this self-sabotage within him... it was brutal, it was bleak, it was all consuming.  

At some point, in the bleak early hours of the morning, he found himself somehow cognizant, barefoot, outside in the cold, stood at the all nighter post office. 

He was attaching his pleading blood-soaked letter to Dumbledore around an owl’s leg.  

He watched the owl fly off into the air and knew, even through the blurs of drunkenness, his life was forfeit from that point on.  

Chapter Text

Sirius stood frozen in the alleyway for so long, he heard bell chimes singing across the Alleyway signalling that midnight had passed.  

It took him far too long to realise that he was in shock at the unanticipated clash he had moments ago with Snape.  

How did life work out this way- that it gave him the exact thing he wanted and yet he needed to push it all away?  

It felt like more than a coincidence that he had left the pub at the moment that the dark-haired man had stumbled by.  

If Snape had been sober- he might have suspected that this collision had been intentional.  

Sirius remembered how his hands had reached out for Snape instinctively, like a dog’s jaw snatching a rabbit in a field.  

He had snatched Snape from the street, dragging him into the alleyway like a dog grabbing prey.  

But the capture had made him feel so impotent when he could take it nowhere 

Because he hadn’t known what he would say or do when he finally saw Snape for the first time since school.  

If he had been at school, if James had been by his side, he would have attacked Snape again just like all the old times.  

All those other times where touching him had been permittable because he was playing a prank on him, or beating him up.  

But this had been different.  

They were older now.  

He had the awareness that he had been... seeking Snape out ever since James had mentioned seeing him at Diagon Alley at Christmas. Seeking him out under the pretence that he would have roughed him up, would have treated him like the enemy he was now they were out of school and in the middle of the war on opposing sides.  

But he had become... frozen.  

Why had he lost control?  

He had been shocked by the state of Snape. 

He was unbelievably drunk- sloppy and provocative.  

Sirius could hardly process what he was seeing when the man had kissed him and grabbed his cock, cupping the erection that begged for more... 

He had been as hard over Snape in that alleyway as he had been all those years ago, laying in the Potters’ spare bedroom, using that charmed muggle pin up girl to make him cum.  

He had kissed him- Snape had kissed him, his mouth so desperate for contact.  

But kiss was the wrong word.  

Kiss sounded soft and delicate; what Snape had offered him had been ferocious.  

Destructive.  

Snape had tried to bait him, tried to get him to strike him- tried to enrage him, tried to arouse him.  

He had handed himself on a plate to him and he...  

Sirius had said no.  

To both options 

Of course he had.  

Sirius did not trail pubs trying to pick up the sloppiest drunks to bed- he wasn’t the kindest man or the most sensitive man, in a lot of ways he knew he could be a terror-  

But he wasn’t a monster.  

He didn’t take advantage of people like that. And that’s what it would have been, had he complied to Snape’s demands to fuck or fight him.  

But he had never felt so tempted by a request in his entire life.  

The man’s rough kiss lingered on his lips like a punch, his bottom lip bitten. 

He shivered in the alleyway, but not from the cold of the night.  

The image of the man’s provocation, the heaviness of his eyes, the desire.  

But Sirius could see, even through the unexpectedness, the shock, the freeze, that what Snape had desired at that moment was not him but the hurt he had been made to expect from Sirius from school. He had wanted to be hurt- just in a much more risqué way compared to the past.  

He remembered the taste of salt on those lips, the dampness of his eyes and he wondered what had led to this man spiralling so miserably, so distressingly, that he had pleaded for pain from him. 

And had been ... humiliated by Sirius’ refusal.  

Perhaps the war was breaking the Death Eaters as much as it was breaking the Order?  

This war was going to break them all.  

He leaned against the brick wall where Snape had leaned, a strange intimacy in standing in his steps. He closed his eyes could not escape the man’s distressed face. He smelled the vodka. He had tasted salt that had dried on his lips as he had launched himself towards him. 

He had been handed everything he had fantasised about in his youth but never wanted to admit to: Snape’s body, to strike or to kiss, he was lying if he said the choice out of the two was close.  

The fact that he had been crying not long before they had crashed into the other dragged a strange, alien sensation up from the very depths of Sirius’ heart.  

It took him a silent moment of rare reflection to realise that this was a protectiveness inside him.  

A feeling he had never in his entire life anticipated to be brought out by Snape.   

No one else’s tears had mattered this much to him. 

It made him feel sick. 

It occurred to Sirius that... he should have done more to keep him in the alleyway.  

He should have prevented him from dashing off in a stumbling apparation away from the alleyway.  

But what right did he have to do that?  

What responsibility was it of his whether a Death Eater killed them self via splinching from dangerous disapperation?  

They weren’t friends- they were enemies.  

Even if Sirius had spent the last few years secretly obsessing over this man, he was still an enemy and his madness couldn’t undo that.  

He had made that man’s life hell- that much he knew, that much he wasn’t proud of.  

He didn’t have the right to ... Sirius sighed. The weight of this collision was too much to iron out in an alleyway at night.  

Sirius eventually made his own way home, through the quiet cobbled streets of Diagon Alley.  

The pavements were deserted, the stars the only light.  

He made his way home to the comfort of his flat that overlooked the two divided cities, magic and muggle.  

He wanted to know where Snape had gone.  

He wanted to know where he could find him again, when he was ready.  

When he was prepared this time.  

When he had reasoned and planned what he needed to do- because his instincts would have him betray the Order by not apprehending him, by not fighting him.  

By kissing that man back.  

. . . 

The hangover that Severus woke up to was brutal.  

As if his brain had pushed its way through his skull, the skeleton cracking from within. 

As if his eyes were bleeding out behind his closed lids. 

He was laying on the sofa in his living room, having no recollection of how he had gotten home. The only consolation he felt was the soothing presence of his quilt wrapped around him. The quilt he kept on his sofa now since his own bedroom disturbed his dreams and reminded him of the humiliating incident at Christmas.  

He knew it was foolish to have a room he no longer used, in a flat where there was little space to make up the difference. His clothes were folded up by a desk on the other side of the living room. Books were stacked up in piles by the coffee table.  

Severus remembered, weeks ago, browsing pamphlets of available flats in the area.  

Lucius had seen these pamphlets and tutted at him, telling him it was not an option to move flat just then.  

So he was stuck in a flat he could not fully use. 

He lay on his side upon the sofa as if he was in the doghouse by his regrets.  

Looking down at the living room floor beneath the coffee table, he was horrified to discover that the awful taste in his mouth was not simply due to dehydration but due to having vomited at some point in the night like a sick child who had not made it to a bucket in time.  

Face creasing with disgust he shifted slightly to reach for his wand he kept beneath this pillow, the slight movement he made causing his brain to split with agony. A new wave of sickness overtook him but he had nothing left to give but hacking gags.  

He was shivering.  

His arm was so unfathomably sore from self-inflicted wounds he was not ready to face yet-  

And then it all came back to him: Lily was going to die.  

Because of him.  

No, no he cannot spiral again.  

He cannot go through that again.  

He had gone through it once and everything was still the same.  

He had sliced his arm to shreds- by the way it felt at that moment, hidden away beneath a long-sleeved bed shirt and the quilt he gripped on to for dear life. He had drunk himself to oblivion.  

And everything was as it was before he did it all.   

There was no escaping this mess of his own making.  

Severus knew he needed to get up, he knew he needed to think of how to fix this...  

But he was so crushed at that moment. He was so crushed by the hell he had been living in and hadn’t even known, had denied to himself for months and months.  

He was so crushed by the oblivion he put himself through the night before.  

He was so crushed by the pressure he was under that his bones were close to dust within him.  

And in this state of pressure, all he could do was lay there, frozen on the sofa.  

Cocooned within his quilt.  

He wanted to pretend the world no longer existed, that he no longer existed, that he would die wrapped up in his quilt upon this sofa, his stinking corpse discovered by Lucius when he did not turn up to work for more than three days in a row like last Christmas. Severus felt as if his crises were coming along too quickly, too regularly. He was at the risk of becoming unreliable. Useless-  

A fantastically loud knock pecked against the glass window by the kitchen sink.  

The open floor space of the studio flat, the kitchen divided by the living room simply by a change from floor tiles to wooden boards, offered no protection from the sickening noise. Severus grimaced and ground his teeth at the disturbance that had no sign of giving up or quietening down.  

He forced himself to sit up. He forced himself to look at what that noise was as he peered over the back of the sofa, seeing an owl at the kitchen window ignoring the post box outside, as if it was very important that Severus accept this post in person. Without knowing if it was possible, Severus found his feet and made his way to the kitchen window, feeling foolish as he leaned across the sink to open the window, feeling as if his night shirt was too short as the hem rode up the back of his thighs. 

Opening the window, he untangled a letter from the owls leg and felt the bird fly away, the wind beneath its powerful wings slapping Severus’ limp hair away from his face. It seemed the owls had been talking and Severus had a reputation for not having treats to offer them.  

The letter felt light in his hand; frustratingly light.  

If he was being dragged out of his cocoon of misery and agony, he had preferred the reason to be more substantial than this one sheet communication.  

He slumped his way back to the sofa, his inner arm stinging from the movement of his cotton shirt against his wounds. Severus felt the roughness of dried blood on the inside of his sleeve, his eyes cautiously tipping downward to see the dark red stains that had seeped through in the night. He felt the hairs on his arms tug from the movement, the grip they had on the blood soaked cotton sleeve.  

He wasn’t ready to face that yet. 

Sleep. 

Go back to sleep.  

But the letter held in his hand called to be open.  

With a frustrated sob of bleakness, at knowing it was an impossibility to be left alone to die with the letter in his hand, he tore open the envelope and found himself reading a set of instructions for a meeting place along the hilltops that surrounded Hogwarts.  

He was being summoned to meet Dumbledore. 

A crash of memories fell upon him as hard as if the ceiling above him had caved in on top of him. Panic struck him. How could he have done something so foolish without thinking it through? What if he had been seen? 

He had done something deadly and dangerous last night when he had been drunk out of his mind.  

Something foolish but desperate, something the child like part of him had sought to fix: he had told Dumbledore about the danger facing Lily. 

And her unborn child. 

It was still an impossible thing to absorb, that this girl he had been friends with for so long and loved like family was having a child and he had no idea because he had ruined the only friendship that mattered to him. She had lived a life without him, and he had lived a life without her.  

And now their lives had crashed into the other in the worst way imaginable.  

He had to meet Dumbledore in a few hours.  

He had slept all day. 

He had no time to rest or recover or dwell and dream of death. He grabbed his wand once again from beneath his pillow and summoned the first aid kit he had assembled for posterity when he had first moved in to his new flat.  

He had been slightly more hopeful back then: hopeful that if he were to experience a life-threatening injury that he would want to survive it.  

Hopeful that his occlumency skills would keep him on the straight and narrow and that he wouldn’t need the kit for a reason like this. It was only a year ago but he felt such a naive fool looking back. 

He grabbed the hangover potion he had brewed for emergencies, not that he had used it very often, he rarely drank this much and rarely needed the medicinal potion. He certainly needed it now.  

Knocking back the hangover potion gave him some semblance of stability to his fractured mind. He was no longer blinded by a splitting headache at least. He took deep breaths and thought of his next steps: he needed to clean himself.  

Clean the disgust from his body, clean the taste of vomit from his mouth, clean the wounds that remained hidden beneath the sleeve of his night shirt like a cloth covering a body at a mortuary.  

Draping his shoulders in his quilt, he forced his legs to once again work and made his way to the bathroom beside his bedroom. Switching the taps on was a challenge as he tried to hold the quilt around him and not let the rushing water dampen the material.  

The sound of hot water flowing into the tub roared in the echoing bathroom, the sound bouncing off the bare walls. Severus was not one for decorating, not one for cluttering up his space with the things he did not need. The bathroom just contained the necessities. He opened the small window to let the steam out, as the hot water began to rise in the tub. 

As he sat on the edge of the bathtub, he knew the space between his time not knowing what lay beneath his shirt sleeve and finally seeing the brutal truth was growing smaller and smaller.  

As the water ran behind him he finally exhaled the poisonous breath within him and began to peel back the sleeve, rolling the cotton to the elbow and facing slices of red with clouds of purpling bruises.  

Specks of dirty crimson clotted and coagulated on his pale skin in specks of dry blood.  

The Dark Mark had the appearance of being hacked to bits on his skin, held together only by wounds.  

The snake beheaded, the skull hacked to bits. 

His breath hitched as he peeled back the shirt sleeve, the sticky blood weeping at the separation of the cloth it had tried to heal itself with.  

The red began to flow again in thin streaking lines, like leaks from too many holes in a roof.  

A drip of red landed on the soft bathmat beneath his feet, this too stained and scarred now. 

His body turned numb as his feelings began to fade into the distance. 

A detachment happened whenever Severus had faced the morning after harming himself. 

It was as if there was a need to establish a mental schism within himself whilst he dabbed cleaning balms to his wounds, a need to uphold a state of denial as he became both healer and harmer.  

Because it felt madder to heal his cuts after he had ripped himself to shreds.  

In the wake of the destruction he had set upon himself, the punitive wounds inflicted like self-flagellation, he once wondered how it was possible for someone to bring such harm to another person and then there was the even bleaker knowledge that this person he was harming was himself.  

As he cleaned the wounds with such psychological distance, he felt himself falling further and further away from the belief that he was a person.  

That he had a personhood, that he was worthy of dignity and respect and reverence, was already obliterated by his time at school as well as the neglect and abuse he had faced at home as a child.  

Upon reflection it began to dawn on him that his time within the Death Eater circles, both inner and outer circles, had been a slow-motion hijacking of his sense of self as he had been convinced to give more and more of himself away to these people.  

Mind.  

Body.  

Soul?  

The people he had worked hard to belong to were the people who wanted Lily dead.  

Who wanted so many others dead that he did not think about; he had chosen to believe the party line that killing was not the foreplan but the last resort.  

He had known the violence of his Death Eater peers, he had seen the hooliganism, he had felt firsthand the sadism and the disregard for anything besides the satisfaction of their own fulfilment.  

He might have remained on the periphery, he might have just brewed potions- but he had tried to put himself forward into the inner circle and this was what brought him to the prophecy.  

It pierced him to the very bone that his ambition had such horrific consequences.  

The question therefore wasn’t how could someone bring such harm to another- but how could he not bring such harm to himself?  

He who was not worth healing the wounds, he who was not worth pain killers.  

He dunked himself in the bathwater, attempting to keep his arm above water but losing his energy with the weight of his forearm, the drips that slipped down his arm.  

His body lay in hued red bathwater, skin shrivelling as the water turned cold.  

Laying still, like a body in a lake, counting down the time until he had to depart and meet with Dumbledore.  

Water pressed against his ears, dulling his capacity to hear.  

He had traded his bed quilt for this watery one, this one burying him from head to toe but leaving him bare and open.  

The approaching meeting with his old headmaster brought anxiety to him, an electric current of agony within his chest as he weighed up what he hated about this meeting more.  

Was it that he was needing to ask for help, once again, from a man who had left him to suffer for seven years?  

Was it that he had been told for years now that Dumbledore was an enemy, Dumbledore was a strategic mastermind who saw no qualm with slaughtering enemies as he faced them...  

He was not approaching Dumbledore as a student seeking help. 

He was approaching Dumbledore as an enemy.  

As much as he had unlodged this Death Eater identity from his soul, as hacked to bits as his Dark Mark was on his arm- he was still an enemy.  

He was still a bad person and Dumbledore would see this.  

Voldemort would see this.  

The Death Eaters would see this.  

He could hardly renounce his past and get away with it.  

He hadn’t given thought to how he was seen by other people outside the Death Eaters before, not since the crushing self-consciousness of his youth had he been forced to care about how he was seen in public or society.  

It sounded incredulous to him now, but he had been taught that the only people that mattered were his brothers and sisters in the Dark Lord’s circle.  

Everyone outside that circle had been the enemy. 

Now he found himself in the uncomfortable psychological reality of existing in a No Man’s Land, neither friend nor foe to anyone in this war.  

He sat up in the bath, the cold water sliding from his body in a wave.  

He had to go to this meeting with Dumbledore, tell him what he knew- make it so Lily could live.  

And then he would leave, he would get out of here. Because there was nothing else to hold him here anymore. He could not give such important intelligence and then come back to see the aftermath play out amongst the Death Eaters, pretending it was not him who lied and betrayed them all. 

It hurt him as he tried to imagine a life without Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy checking in on him and offering him the support he needed to terribly since he was a teenager.  

He tried to imagine a future where he was not around to pay back the care and investment that they had put into his life and prospects.  

He felt ungrateful. Rude. It was a slap to their faces, a rejection of the family life they had offered him.  

But he knew that he couldn’t have both- he couldn’t hand vital intelligence to the enemy and keep his found family.  

He was well aware that his own personal security and comfort was less important than someone else’s life.  

He would not pay to keep his found family around him, if that price was Lily’s death.  

It was as simple as that and he found he could get out the bath now, a resolution and an energy steadying him as the sting of cold air burned his weeping wounds.  

. . . 

The freezing wind whistled through the branches of the few leafless trees that lingered along the hilltops. The sun was setting, causing the fear and dread within Severus to mingle with an unswallowable sense that he was stepping into a trap. He spun around where he landed, apparating from Diagon Alley to this wild and desolate space. Anticipating attack at every turn, he held his wand tightly in his hand as he sought out these faceless foes.  

The shadows lurched out at him, the wind shaking the branches of the trees causing the shadows to claw out towards him. In his dreadful mind’s eye he saw Aurors leap out to apprehend him, he saw members of the Order surround him and threaten to kill him before hearing him out- before hearing his message. 

A blinding, jagged jet of white light flew through the air like lightening.  

Severus dropped to his knees, distress striking him as he was disarmed of his wand.  

“Don’t kill me!” Severus yelled, desperation so tight in his chest he did not care how he sounded as long as he could be heard.  

“That was not my intention.”  

Severus finally found himself face to face with the man he had stalked, the man he had spied on, the man he had looked at through newspaper photographs. His face lit up by the end of the wand, he seemed timeless and ageless, as if the years had ceased to land upon him too many years ago.  

“Well, Severus? What message does Lord Voldemort have for me?”  

“No- no message- I’m here on my own account.” Severus insisted, wanting so terribly to distance himself from his mistakes.  

The wind whipped harder through his long dark hair, causing him to squint as he tried to focus through the disorientation.  

“I- I come with a warning- no, a request- please-” Severus felt as if every lesson Lucius Malfoy had taught him, every self-taught skill in Occlumency, had burned to the ground in this moment of pressure and despair. 

Guilt and shame and desperation choked him, making it hard to breathe, to think, to speak clearly.  

“What request could a Death Eater make of me?” Dumbledore asked.  

“The- the prophecy... the prediction.... that woman...” Severus began, each word burning off his tongue like a confession.  

“Ah, yes,” said Dumbledore, “how much did you relay to Lord Voldemort?”  

“Everything- Everything I heard.” Snape continued to confess, a need to unleash all his wrongs, all his mistakes to the man as if speaking was leaching a poison inside him, “That is why- it is for that reason- he think sit means Lily Evans.” 

“The prophecy did not refer to a woman,” Dumbledore said, “it spoke of a boy born at the end of July-” 

Severus did not believe that was self-evident. 

The thought that this prophecy pertained to a child was ludicrous.  

But now both Dumbledore and Voldemort interpreted the words this way, and Severus began to question why he had not understood the prophecy as these wise, all-knowing men had done.  

He began to think he had been more wrong than he had thought.  

“You know what I mean! He thinks it means her son, he is going to hunt her down- kill them all-” Severus tried to get back on track, tried to press the importance of his distress.  

“If she means so much to you,” said Dumbledore, “surely Lord Voldemort will spare her? Could you not ask for mercy for the mother, in exchange for the son?” 

“I have- I have asked him-” the stammer in Severus’ shaking voice did not allow him to speak his tale without his story being snatched from him by the older man. 

“You disgust me,” Dumbledore said, his voice drenched in contempt.  

Severus looked at him, shrinking beneath the weight of the words. He was already disgusted with himself- that much was obvious.  

He struggled to find the words- of course he could not ask Voldemort to spare the child 

The child was the target.  

He could only, would only, ask for Lily’s life. 

He could not save anyone else in this mess.  

“You do not care, then, about the deaths of her husband and child? They can die, as long as you have what you want?” Dumbledore continued to paint a narrative he did not fully understand.  

Severus realised there was nothing he could say to redress the man’s opinion of him.  

How Dumbledore viewed him was of little consequence when lives were at stake.  

If Dumbledore wanted to pretend that Severus was doing this out of a need to ‘have her’ then let him, as long as Lily was safe.  

If Dumbledore wanted to pretend he was not asking for the entire family to be saved by asking him to protect Lily, then that was a fair price to pay – Severus just could not figure out why Dumbledore was constructing this narrative.  

“Hide them all, then.” He croaked, as if it had to be asked, “keep her – them- safe. Please.”  

Why did Dumbledore need him to ask this- why did he need to be asked to save his own people?  

“And what will you give me in return, Severus?”  

He had not expected the older man to leverage his despair, his desperation.  

What on earth was this?  

This was the good side?  

This was the Order? 

“In – in return?”  

But at that moment, when it came down to it, Severus knew he would do anything.  

Anything to save Lily. Anything not to have her death on his conscience. Anything to not have any person’s death directly on his shoulders. Anything not to be the reason for her – and her family- dying. Anything not to live with this guilt and shame and despair for the rest of his life, because he could not do this, he could not- 

“Anything.”  

And he knew he meant it.  

He never wanted to feel as terrible as he did over the last twenty-four hours.  

He did not want to feel this way forever.  

He was not made of the same things men like Voldemort, or indeed, Dumbledore, seemed to be made of: men who seemed above and beyond the emotional toil of their own actions.  

“How far into Lord Voldemort’s inner circle have you found yourself, Severus? Are you privy to his strategies?” Dumbledore sought to clarify.  

“Somewhat.” Severus spoke, noncommittally.  

“I will inform the Potters that they need to go into hiding,” Dumbledore announced, “if you are serious about protecting Lily you will provide the Order of the Phoenix with intelligence to end this war-” 

“You- you want me to be a rat?” Severus asked, the weight of what was being asked struck him, “You want me to do something that amounts to suicide and ... and I disgust you? I requested the only person I could to live in this situation- but you- you are happy enough to send someone to be killed in your fools-” 

“There is no other way, Severus. This is not a negotiation.” Dumbledore stipulated, “you provide intelligence to end this war, or this war will go on for so long that Lily will live and die in hiding. Is that what you want for her?”  

“Of course not-!” 

“Then you will, of course, have no scruples with my request.” Dumbledore interrupted sharply, “I will send for word for you within a day or so. I will set up a handler to make contact-” 

“What do you mean, a handler?” Severus became alarmed.  

“My attention will be needed elsewhere in this war. And, it will not be safe for you to meet with me regularly.” Dumbledore spoke, offering Severus some insight into a degree of care for his safety.  

The small drop of care landed in the bleakness inside Severus, like a candle being dropped into a long dark well.  

He hated how much it meant to him.  

“I will arrange for a handler to be the go-between.” Dumbledore spoke, “but for now, act normal. Perform your Death Eater duties as you would, had you not discovered that Lily was the intended victim of this prophecy.” 

Severus remembered how he had wanted this all to end. 

How could he go back now?  

How could he put himself back into this evil when he so desperately needed to evacuate? 

Dumbledore might have seen his distress on his face, but Severus’ distress was not pertinent to his grand plans of winning this war.  

If Severus had felt like a traitorous monster before he met Dumbledore, it was nothing to how he felt now. The reality of the situation became bleakly clear to him, as he became aware that this was not a one-and-done betrayal, this was a long term, continuous stab in the back to the Malfoys. Afar too-bold lie to Voldemort- a man who could read minds, as weak as that description was for what Legilimency actually was.  

He would need to ... refresh his lessons on Occlumency, he bit the inside of his lips, trying to find some landing of control to hold on to in this unravelling situation. He would need to be able to defend himself for this madness to work. The very idea that he could even come close to defending himself from Voldemort was so bold an idea that Severus could only assume that the hangover potion he had consumed earlier had missed a bit of vodka in his system. He had to be drunk still, to think something so foolish.  

“Go home, Severus.” Dumbledore spoke, a softness in his voice that had never existed for him before, “Rest. And thank you, for what you have done. You have made the right choice.” 

Severus was not sure what litmus Dumbledore was basing this assessment on. 

But he... he did not feel as awful as he had done yesterday, as when he woke up, as when he arrived on the hilltops.  

Because at the very end of it all, Lily would be safe. 

That had to mean something.  

 . . . 

When Severus arrived back at his studio flat at Diagon Alley he just wanted to crawl back into his sofa bed and switch his mind off for at least a few hours.  

He was over worn with the events that had just conspired, he was exhausted with the range of sensations he had lurched from. His head ached from the tiredness of needing to juggle both a humility towards Dumbledore, an acknowledgement that he had done wrong, with a need to press the seriousness of the request he was making.  

He just had not anticipated Dumbledore... leveraging his misery, his despair.  

Leveraging this rot inside him to gain something beyond the scope of the intelligence that Severus was bringing to him as the point of the request to meet. He suddenly felt as young as he had done when he had first sat face to face with the headmaster in his office, so out of his depth, so ... manipulated. Dumbledore had manipulated him into silence that night, many years ago.  

But it seemed this time he had been manipulated into speaking.  

He put his key into the lock of the front door, pushing the wooden door open with his shoulder and finding Lucius sat on the sofa in his flat as if he had been waiting for him for hours. Severus froze as he saw the man, saw his blue eyes meet his black eyes with the same humility that he had approached Dumbledore with. 

With an awareness that he had... done wrong.  

Flashes of images, memories of the night before, submerged in a toxic haze of vodka...  

And he remembered seeing Lucius out at night.  

At a bar he was not supposed to be at, as a Death Eater. 

With... with a woman who was not his wife. 

Severus swallowed a bitter lump in his throat as he remembered the disappointment he had felt before moving drunkenly on throughout Diagon Alley, trying to get home...  

He wondered what else had happened that he couldn’t remember.  

He had momentarily forgotten about Lucius’ indiscretions. 

“Where have you been, Severus?” Lucius asked.  

“I went to get some air.” Severus spoke, without missing a beat, “I’ve been... unwell.”  

A silence hung between the two men, a silence that had never existed in their shared past. Lucius was a chatty mentor, a chatty friend and a chatty relative. He was more than happy to lecture Severus on every topic under the sun, and Severus was more than happy to take it all in. But it seemed... this was something that Lucius was reluctant to speak about, but knew he needed to.  

“Can I explain myself, Severus?” Lucius asked, his head bowed slightly, a shame heavy on his head like a crown of thorns.  

Severus hung up his coat and scarf and made his way over to the man. He saw that Lucius had gone to the effort of tidying the coffee table up a bit, stacking his potion notes in a pile for him. His quilt had been folded up for him on the sofa. A half-drunk mug of tea and the wine glass had been washed and left to dry on the drying rack by the sink.  

Severus sat down beside Lucius and gave him the space to talk.  

“I have let my wife down, I have let myself down.” Lucius began, “and, I can see that I have... let you down too. I am aware of all the things I have taught you, Severus. About the importance of family commitments and loyalty. The bond between a man and wife is something that should be protected and I- I slipped up.” 

“Who was she?” Severus eventually asked. 

“Just a random girl,” Lucius shook his head, “there is no... relationship. There wasn’t anything more than a kiss. But that was enough.” 

“Why did you do it?” Severus asked, feeling invasive, feeling naive.  

But needing to know. 

“It sounds so... trite, so cliché.” Lucius sighed, his voice tight, “this war has been so incredibly stressful. Narcissa’s pregnancy has been so stressful. As you know. And the Dark Lord has been... guiding me, in matters of pure blood doctrine and family. He suggested that I seek ... physical release where Narcissa was not... in a position to do so. He even suggested that family bonds are not necessarily held together by exclusivity to the other.” 

“What ...?” Severus found all this to be confusing, muddling, a contradiction to the lessons he had been taught by Lucius. 

“I feel so foolish now. I don’t subscribe to that at all- I love my wife.” Lucius suddenly broke into tears, “but it is so... heretical to contradict the Dark Lord, to disagree with him. To find... flaws in his word.” 

“Surely your marriage is... beyond what the Dark Lord can interfere with.” Severus spoke quietly.  

Knowing it was foolish to say- not when the Dark Lord infiltrated everything in their lives. 

“When I saw you passing by on the street that night... that’s when I knew for certain that I could not go through with it.” Lucius wiped his eyes and sniffed, “I felt so ashamed. I feel so ashamed.” 

“Have you... told Narcissa?” Severus approached. 

“Merlin, no- I’d lose her, Severus. What I did was unforgivable- I- I can’t. She cannot know.” Lucius pleaded.  

And once again Severus heard those words he hated and had never, ever, expected to hear from a man like Lucius.  

“Please don’t tell my wife, Severus.” Lucius begged, “please don’t tell Narcissa.”  

“I’m not going to tell her,” Severus sighed.  

“I will make it up to her,” Lucius vowed, “I will make every day spent as her husband my life’s work.”  

Severus rolled his eyes at his sickening romanticism. But found that he was... a touch jealous that he would never know the love that Lucius had managed to find with Narcissa.  

Because his life was forfeit.  

The second anyone suspected him... he was dead.  

“And, I will make it up to you, too, Severus.” Lucius spoke, standing up and drying his eyes with a hankie he pulled from his shirt pocket, “I will ... find a different flat for you. You obviously weren’t exaggerating when you said you did not use your bedroom anymore. For whatever reason-” 

“There’s no need to bribe me, Lucius,” Severus tutted.  

“It’s not a bribery.” Lucius sighed, “it’s a recognition that I have treated not just Narcissa poorly, but you too.” 

Severus didn’t know what to say. He was hardly attached to this studio flat- as nice as it had been, once upon a time before last Christmas, to have his own space.  

He watched Lucius step towards the front door, grab his coat and hat and slowly turn back to Severus as if afraid to say the next thing on his mind.  

“Severus... please, do not tell the Dark Lord about my.... disagreements with his ideology.” Lucius whispered, “I cannot appear weak in his eyes, I cannot risk appearing as if I disagree entirely with his word. The other Death Eaters are satisfied with infidelity, or accept it happens. My... not accepting this would single me out as a weakness.” 

Severus thought of all the sexual hypocrisy that existed within the Death Eaters and realised it went all the way to the top- it was sanctioned by Voldemort. Encouraged. It put the behaviour of men like Lestrange, Dolohov and Karkaroff into a new context.  

“You don’t have to ask me this.” Severus spoke, “I would not betray you like that.” 

As Severus spoke those last words he became aware that he was betraying Lucius- just not in the way the other man anticipated.  

A flash of realisation must have lingered on Severus’ face, must have been as obvious as it felt to Severus, because Lucius only seemed ninety-nine percent convinced by Severus’ word at that moment in time.  

But this was just what it was like, living within the Dark Lord’s circles.  

Doubt and dread and fear thrived between them all and they did all they could to master the unmasterable.  

They were a pit of snakes swallowing themselves whole and not realising the taste of blood was their own.  

. . .  

Dumbledore sat in his headmasters office within Hogwarts, having sent his patronus to call upon two individuals at the centre of this situation: James Potter and Lily Potter.  

It was an impromptu meeting, an emergency meeting, but Dumbledore chose not to advertise the message as an emergency to save the two the stress.  

He needed to get everything in order now that he had Severus’ intelligence- both concerning the prophecy and all the future information he would bring.  

He needed to establish a scaffolding of safety around both Lily and Severus, as separately as these precautions were set up- they were bound together, wrapped up in this tragedy.  

Dumbledore needed Lily and her family to be in hiding and Dumbledore needed to arrange for a handler for Severus now that he was working on their side.  

Within minutes, the two young Order members populated his office.  

He immediately offered the very pregnant Lily a chair to sit on and offered tea out of habit. The two weary faces refused a mug. Too stressed for the caffeine.  

“Why are we here, sir?” James asked, needing to get to the root of the call as quick as possible.  

Sensing that their nerves were held together by thin threads, Dumbledore got straight to the point.  

“I have summoned you here as I have received intelligence that you are in grave danger. You and your unborn child are being personally targeted by Voldemort as he believes the child you are carrying will be his downfall.” Dumbledore explained.  

He met the two young faces and saw the confusion, saw the unexpected uncertainty upon their expressions. Every parent believed that their child was special, Dumbledore knew, every parent dreamed that their child could do great things. Parenthood was a journey from imagination, from hopes and dreams, to reality and perspective as their child settled into their own life journey without the glitter and gold of parental prophecies...  

Rarely were parents confronted with their dreams coming true so soon, so suddenly: that their child truly was special and was born to do great things.  

And, sometimes, when dreams came true, they turned out to be nightmares. 

“What?” Lily spoke, “what are you talking about? How can this bastard think.... how can he possibly think an unborn child is his enemy-?” 

“Where did you get this intelligence?” James interrupted, “it’s fucking nonsense. Who told you this? No baby could beat Voldemort- this sounds like someone is trying to get a few of your soldiers out of the war-” 

“I cannot reveal my source as revealing their identity would jeopardise ongoing sources of intelligence gathering.” Dumbledore stated clearly and with commitment that this was not a line he was prepared to cross with the two angry and terrified parents-to-be.  

The firmness of his words silenced James.  

“You will need to immediately go into hiding, of course.” Dumbledore explained, “your house can be hidden securely with the Fidelius Charm. A secret keeper will protect you. Make your decision and we will arrange for support to be provided for as long as needed-” 

“You expect me to hide away for the remainder of this war?” James interrupted, a shrillness to his words.  

“I expect you to protect your wife and child.” Dumbledore narrowed his eyes.  

“By hiding? The Fidelius Charm will protect them- I need to...” James trailed off, sensing Lily’s eyes on him. 

A weight fell upon James’ shoulders, the weight that he was on the cusp of losing something very important. That he was on a tightrope bridge between valour and responsibility.   

“I need to protect my wife, my child.” James finally settled.  

The reluctance in his voice was something that both Lily and Dumbledore needed to ignore, there was no time for debating tone and temper. It was evident that a young man would struggle to decide between hiding away with his pregnant wife, in a house with the highest protections possible, and fighting a noble war with courage and valour.  

Like the Gryffindor he was.  

“Go home, decide between yourselves who will be your secret keeper-” Dumbledore instructed, standing up to call and to the meeting.  

“There’s no need for us to debate- it’ll be Sirius, of course.” James interrupted.  

Dumbledore thought as much. 

“But what about... what about when I go into labour?” Lily asked, turning attention to pressing matters now that the secret keeper had been decided.  

“We will make arrangements for a midwife.” Dumbledore assured, “please be assured, you will not be in labour alone.” 

“No, I will be there.” James spoke. 

There existed a small bitterness in his voice, microscopic, but there.  

“Once you have spoken to Sirius and conjured the Fidelius Charm, send him to me.” Dumbledore requested. 

He watched the pair disapparate away back to Godric’s Hollow and he made himself a mug of tea as he waited for his next guest to arrive later on.  

. . .  

Sirius had been reading a newspaper in his living room when a silvery stag burst into view.  

The mighty animal commanded attention and Sirius used the Floo to transport to the cottage in Godric’s Hollow where he presumed his friend to be. Frightening thoughts began to pop up in his head: had something happened to James, or Lily? Or their baby? Had something happened to Remus or Peter? Not more casualties- Sirius could not stand to lose another person but knew it was pointless to pray for this in the middle of a vicious war.  

He landed in the living room to the cosy cottage, finding Remus had arrived just before he had. The sound of shouting and fighting filled both men’s ears and Sirius asked Remus what on earth was going on.  

“I’ve just got here myself,” Remus narrowed his eyes, “I know as much as you do.”  

He moved away from the fireplace, sensing that soon enough Peter would be joining the four of them too. The shouting transformed from senseless noise to actual words as Sirius orientated himself to the space.  

“How could you think I don’t love you?!”  

“Oh, I don’t know, perhaps it’s the total bitterness you have about needing to stay inside with me!” 

“I am a man of fighting age, my place should be fighting! What world will our son have if I’m not fighting?!” 

“Your son won't have a father- that’s the world he will have. We are being targeted! He will kill you!” 

“We knew what we were getting into when we joined the Order, Lily!” 

“You knew what you were getting into when you got me pregnant- when you married me, James!”  

“None of this was planned, Lily, as politely as I can say that.”  

Sirius barged into the kitchen, finding the two red-faced and furious with the other. Lily was facing away but judging by her shaking shoulders she was crying. Sirius met James’ hazel eyes, the flushed fury etched into his prematurely aging skin. He saw the stress and the strain.  

“What on earth is happening?” Sirius asked.  

“Dumbledore has received intelligence that Voldemort thinks the baby has the power to destroy him.” James rolled his eyes, “Dumbledore is going senile and has swallowed this bullshit and now we have to stay locked up in this cottage to protect the baby-” 

At this summary, Lily rushed out of the kitchen and ran upstairs as fast as she could with her bump.  

Remus joined the two men in the kitchen, having heard the shouting that had now transformed into an oppressive, suffocating, silence. It made Sirius feel... unwell. It took him a moment to realise the reason this fight had made him feel so wrong inside was because it reminded him of his parents shouting and screaming at each other because of some error he had conducted throughout his time with them. He felt the same tightness in his chest that he needed to ignore, face head on. He gulped, focusing on the here and now and not the long shadow of the past.  

“Voldemort is after your kid?” Sirius repeated, each rephrasing of this statement sounding more ludicrous each time.  

“So I hear.” James tutted.  

“This is bad, James.” Remus stated, “that man is insane. He has an army of followers under his command. They have already killed so many of us without having a unified plan in place- if they all go after you- Lily is right-” 

“I am a man!” James roared, exploding at Remus, “I am a soldier. I do not hide away in a cottage whilst my friends fight and die around me.” 

“I understand, Prongs, I do,” Remus continued, trying to diffuse the situation, “but how can you even consider ... not being there for Lily? She needs you.”  

“She will be fine here-” 

“By herself?!” Remus spluttered.  

“What do you know, Moony? As if you would understand. You do not have a pregnant wife.” James rebutted, “you do not understand this at all-” 

“It sounds like you don’t understand, James.” Remus tried not to let his words get to him. 

At that moment, Peter barged through the Floo in the living room, calling out their names.  

“What’s happening?” Peter asked, seeing the tension on everyone’s faces and bracing himself.  

Sirius sighed, thinking that Peter’s lateness made it almost impossible for him to summon the energy to explain.  

“Has something happened-? Where’s Lily?” Peter asked, noticing her absence.  

“She’s upstairs. She’s fine.” James spoke, unsure if he truly believed his words.  

At that statement, Remus shook his head and walked away, too frustrated to be in the same space as James at that moment. Seeing Remus storm off, James called out to him mockingly.  

“What’s the matter, Moony? Am I not behaving well? Am I not doing the perfect thing?” 

“Piss off, James. You can be such a spoilt little boy sometimes. You can’t play soldier so you throw all your toys out of the pram.” Remus bit back, “I thought you had grown up since school.” 

“Come on, Moony, he’s under a lot of pressure right now.” Sirius tried to calm Remus down.  

Remus’ uncharacteristic outburst left him tremoring with adrenaline.  

“Don’t you start, Sirius. This is real life.” Remus shouted, “this is real life and you’re both acting like this is...” 

He exhaled deeply in the silent kitchen. 

“I need to leave. I’m going to say something I will really regret.” Remus sighed, making his way back to the living room with such a cloudy expression Sirius followed him to check he was okay.  

He watched his old friend make his way to the fireplace, grabbing a handful of soot. He had a haggard appearance of exhaustion, Sirius noticed. They were all so stressed and worn down.  

“I’m sorry, for the outburst.” Remus conceded before Sirius spoke.  

“We’re all due a bit of grace in this hell, Moony, don’t worry about it.” Sirius offered his hand to his shoulder.  

“It just... it makes me so mad sometimes.” Remus whispered, “he truly does not understand how lucky he is. He has what we are all fighting for: the chance for a future. I mean, I’m not fighting for my own future, I have none. But you know what I mean.” 

“Moony, don’t say that.” Sirius spoke sadly.  

Remus didn’t bother arguing, there was nothing that would change his mind on that topic.  

“I’ll come visit you later, I’ll sort James out.” Sirius vowed.  

“He wants to fight.” Remus rolled his eyes, “you’re going to support him whatever he wants, that’s how you both always are.”  

Sirius could admit to himself that he was.... permissive with his friend. Encouraging. Supportive to a fault.  

He was unaccustomed to doing the right thing, if that right thing was personally discomforting.  

“Just .... let’s see how it goes.” Sirius offered, the only thing he could offer.  

Remus nodded and turned to leave, departing to his parents old house in the countryside. 

Sirius stood there for a minute, holding himself up by the mantle and struggling to comprehend what was happening.  

What was happening to them all?  

What was happening all around them?  

The family that Sirius had found at Hogwarts seemed to be crumbling away.  

He made his way back to the kitchen, seeing Peter sat beside James, saying platitudes like maybe he could do both: hide and fight.  

“You could join the meetings, you could contribute to the strategy stuff, like a commander.” Peter smirked.  

“I’ve never been one for strategy, have I? That’s Slytherin shit.” James tutted, “no wonder we are losing, I guess.”  

“I wonder what strategy Voldemort has in mind by targeting a foetus?” Sirius joked sardonically.  

“I just don’t ... believe it.” James said, with a shrug, “I know I sound a complete berk, I know Lily is going to hate me- but she’s worried about the baby and me, and it’s making her blind to the wider situation. I just do not see how this can be true.” 

“But ... let’s just say it is Let’s just say it is true for now..” Sirius said, “we can pretend it is: Voldemort is going after your child. Dumbledore believes it- you learned this from Dumbledore right? Where did he get this information?”  

“He wouldn’t say. He said sharing this would risk... further intelligence gathering.” James repeated bitterly.  

Peter lifted his head up as his eyebrows narrowed.  

“It sounds like Dumbledore has a spy. A spy in the Death Eaters.” Peter whispered, incredulous.  

The realisation of the implications of this caused the three men to stand in silence as they absorbed this.  

There was a spy.  

There was someone on the other side who wanted Voldemort to lose the war.  

“But what if it is a double bluff?” James insisted.  

“We are pretending it’s true for now,” Sirius reminded, “what do you think would happen if this was true. How would you behave if this was proven to you to be true?” 

James didn’t know how to answer. 

His heart kept telling him to fight.  

But his heart was a childish thing.  

He couldn’t be childish and have a child on the way.  

He knew the answer he was supposed to say, the right answer, the answer he needed to commit to or lose everything he was fighting for in the first place.  

“I would protect Lily and the baby.” James stated.  

“I think, at least until we ... until we know more, we should pretend that this is true.” Sirius said, “because the risks are too high. That baby needs you. Lily needs you.”  

“Oh Merlin, I’ve really fucked it up now.” James broke down, looking up at the ceiling where above them his wife hid away in their bedroom.  

Alone.  

“Nothing you can’t fix, Prongs.” Sirius winked reassuringly before turning to Peter, “we should leave them to fix things, get out of the way.”  

Peter stood up, not wanting to linger in a domestic.  

“Thanks, all of you.” James sighed, “even Moony. The righteous prat.”  

“You know he means well.” Sirius tutted.  

As Sirius and Peter were about to depart from the cottage, James held Sirius back a moment before saying goodbye to Peter.  

“We want you to be our secret keeper.” James remembered, “if we are going to be pretending this whole nightmare is real, we should... put the Fidelius Charm up.”  

The two men made their way outside the cottage, raising a perimeter of safety and security around the property.  

As they passed the bedroom window, James noticed Lily stood watching them from above, a small smile on her face as she witnessed her husband doing what she needed to feel safe. Her hands wrapped protectively around her bump, she felt her pulse quieten and hoped her baby felt safe inside her as she began to feel safe inside Godric’s Hollow.  

When the two men were finished and the cottage was protected, Sirius said goodbye and James remembered that Dumbledore had asked to speak to him.  

“About what?” Sirius rose an eyebrow, hardly ecstatic to go all the way to Hogwarts to see him.  

Especially because it was not an option to apparate within Hogwarts. 

“No clue.” James sighed, “but best not keep the man waiting.”  

Sirius rose a mock salute and disapparated away to Hogsmede to walk the rest of the way towards Hogwarts, unsure if he could take much more strife. 

Not today. 

Not tomorrow.  

Nor the next days ahead. 

. . .  

Sirius had seen the inside of Dumbledore’s office more times than he could count.  

He had been sent to speak to the elderly wizard at least twice a year for foolish little misdemeanours, and an occasional prank that went too far.  

The office was a dazzling display of the history of Hogwarts, each portrait on the wall a living memory of times gone by. The room was adorned with magical artefacts that the old headmaster studied as well as endless tomes and scrolls of scholarship. Sirius had never been the studious sort- he was clever, with humility he knew he was a skilled wizard. But he was never one for studying for the sake of studying like some swot.  

His lips twitched slightly, secretly, at the corners as he thought of anyone considering Dumbledore being a swot rather than the most powerful wizard of the age. He reasoned that at some point, someone must have labelled him that and at another point in time this reading and learning became power.  

“Would you care for a mug of tea, Sirius?” Dumbledore asked him, pouring himself a mug and hovering the teapot above a second cup in question.  

“Yeah, go on.” Sirius nodded, sitting down in the chair opposite the man at his desk.  

He would have appreciated something a little stronger, after the evening he had just had at Godric’s Hollow.  

The screaming, the shouting, the crying, the despair... the anger... it would drive anyone to drink.  

Not Dumbledore, though.  

The elderly man handed him his mug and saucer, knowing from previous meetings how Sirius took his tea: milky with one sugar. A biscuit on the side of the saucer.   

“You are wondering why I have called you here this evening.” Dumbledore began, taking a sip of his tea.  

“The thought had crossed my mind.”  

The man looked at him through his half-moon spectacles for longer than was usual, longer than was necessary.  

It was as if he was weighing up whether or not to say what he had planned to say. 

Whether or not he was making the right decision.  

“I am of two minds about the task I need settling, I am of two minds on whether you are the man for the job.” Dumbledore mused, “the fact is, my options are... somewhat limited.” 

“You’re too kind, Dumbledore.” Sirius smirked, a sense of unease rising within him despite his bravado.  

“You are aware that the Potters are now in hiding, I am told you are the secret keeper.” Dumbledore continued, “I received this intelligence from a reliable source. I do not believe there to be any question about the validity and reliability of the source of this message. In addition to the warning that was passed on to me by this individual, they have agreed to provide a continuous stream of intelligence to the Order and they have the capacity to gather this intelligence within Voldemort’s inner circle.” 

Even though this was what the three men had guessed back at Godric’s Hollow, even though they had guessed that there was an informant in the Death Eaters... it was a shock to Sirius to hear the gift that was being handed to them by this individual. 

They had never come close to gathering this level of intelligence- not once since this war began.  

The Death Eaters were a closed circle, impenetrable.  

Not so closed as initially believed.  

“It is not safe for this individual to meet with me as regularly as would be required to get the maximum benefit of this intelligence gathering. It will not be possible for me to be the handler for this individual.” Dumbledore continued.  

“So... I take it, you want me to be this handler?” Sirius guessed.  

“I am not finished.” Dumbledore carried on, causing Sirius to look at him quizzically.  

“If I had other options, Sirius, you would not be the one I would ask.” Dumbledore explained plainly, “but the Potters are in hiding, Remus’ transformations would make this task difficult, Peter lacks the characteristics required to be a handler and the Aurors within the Order are immensely overworked as it is.”  

“Right.” Sirius put down his tea, well aware of how unwanted he was for the task at hand.  

“Not only that, but there is also a... pre-existing relationship between you and this individual.” Dumbledore spoke, finishing his tea and turning to face Sirius fully. 

“It is of the uttermost importance that you keep this name secret. You keep this secret on par in importance as your secret keeper role for the Potters. If this name gets out, you will be responsible for this individual being killed. You will be responsible for the loss of any intelligence for this war to end and Voldemort to be defeated once and for all.” 

“Fucking hell, Dumbledore, I’m not an imbecile!” Sirius hissed, “you’ve done nothing but berate me and tell me how shit I am for this job- but you seem to have no other options available so just get on with telling me who it is and what I need to do-” 

“It’s Severus Snape.”  

The name brought a smirk to Sirius’ lips that made Dumbledore narrow his eyes.  

So, it was Snape. Snape was a Death Eater and now he was an informant. A spy. 

He could not believe thi. The man he had collided with, the man he had grabbed hold of the night before. The man who had kissed him with such ferocity, the man who he wanted every excuse in the world to see again... 

Sirius was handed yet another plate full of everything he wanted in life. 

“Severus had gone to great risk to bring intelligence that has saved your friends’ lives.” Dumbledore reminded, “forget your past... animosities. You are in a war. Do not make me regret this, Sirius.”  

“I told you, Dumbledore. I am not an imbecile.” Sirius argued.  

“If you bring your past into this arrangement, if you make this unworkable-” 

“You seem convinced that Snape will make this easy.” Sirius tutted.  

“Let me remind you, once again, that Severus Snape approached me of his own accord, risking his life to provide this information. He may have chosen the wrong path at one point in his life, he may have made mistakes, but he has redeemed himself. Have you?”  

“... Have I?” Sirius asked.  

Dumbledore looked at him once again, Sirius’ suddenly self-conscious beneath his blue eyes.  

“You understand that you were not the paradigm of goodness in your adolescence, don’t you?”  

“Where’s this coming from now? You hardly made a fuss of me and James’ pranks at the time.” Sirius glared.  

“I very much hoped that you and Potter would grow out of that behaviour, redeem yourselves by making amends. Alas.”  

“We joined your Order-” 

“We have people from all walks of life in the Order, Sirius,” Dumbledore corrected, “we have a common goal of defeating Voldemort. But that doesn’t absolve us of our pasts.”  

“I come here, because you needed someone to be a handler for Severus fucking Snape, of all people, and all you have done is criticise me and tell me how shit I am-” 

“Is that how you interpret my words?” Dumbledore rose an eyebrow, “I am giving you an opportunity to prove me wrong, Sirius. I am giving you an opportunity to grow- as well as to ensure we win this war. You can either take this, or destroy it. This will decide who you really are. Severus will not make this easy for you- he does not know that you are to be the handler. I trust the information he had provided me recently. But it... would be prudent to test his resolve to providing this intelligence on a continuous basis- if he can work with you then we know he means it-” 

“But I am also being tested.” Sirius interrupted abruptly, “thanks.”  

 Dumbledore put away the empty mugs of tea and handed Sirius a small, weak smile.  

“I am thankful for you for agreeing to this task.” Dumbledore tried to placate the young man’s frustration, “as you have highlighted, Severus will not make this easy. But you need to make this work. I will send word to him to meet you at a location away from Diagon Alley, away from magical communities. Are you familiar with the pubs in your childhood local area?"  

"What?"  

“The Rook- it’s a pub in Islington, not too far from Grimmauld Place, but far enough. It’s between the Caledonian Park Clock Tower and the Theatre.” Dumbledore directed.  

“You want me to meet Snape... at a pub?” Sirius repeated, having a very vague idea where this pub was located, enough to safely apparate.  

“Perhaps a drink will help break the ice.”  

Oh Merlin you have no idea  

Sirius had to agree with him, just to end the conversation. Otherwise he risked bursting into laughter at the absurdity of this task and the clearly unspoken moment in the alleyway the night before.  

He still felt those lips on his, as hard as a punch to the face.  

But he also saw that despair on his face, those fractured and distraught eyes.  

“It can’t hurt, can it?”  

Chapter Text

Sirius ran himself a hot bath and rummaged through his wardrobe for something to wear that day. Ordinarily, he would just pull on whatever pair of trousers had been left on the floor and grab a fresh shirt and cotton waistcoat from the wardrobe. But today was a different day, a day that began with stirring from sleep with an immediate strike of anxiety. Excitement, he corrected himself. He had nothing to be anxious about, after all.  

He knew exactly what he was walking in to. 

He knew who he was meeting today, at The Rook.  

The same could not be said for Snape.  

Sirius presumed that Dumbledore had given him instructions to meet at The Rook but believed that Dumbledore would keep Snape on a slight information diet if it meant the meeting actually happening. He could not see Snape agreeing to willingly meet him if he knew that he was to be the handler.  

A strange blend of excitement and purpose grew within him as he decided on what shirt to wear. He laid the clothing out on his bed and made his way to the bathroom to switch the tap off, the hot water steaming around him as he leaned forward to tighten the slightly loose handle. Brewed within the excitement and the purpose, he felt a familiar sensation of being on the prowl rose within him. The dark focus of the hunt simmered within him and he realised that this was a sensation he had revelled within at Hogwarts. It was a thick fog of delirium inducing, all encompassing, monopolisation of his thoughts that seemed to begin from within his blood.  

In the time since he had left Hogwarts, he knew that the background to his thoughts had been a steady thrum of Snape. This had especially increased when he had learned from James that Snape worked in the vicinity of Diagon Alley. The night he had actually bumped into Snape had been like a wet dream come true- and as much as he knew he had made the morally correct choice for once in his life, his body screamed at him for rejecting the offer Snape had drunkenly presented to him to either fight or fuck him there and then.  

And now he was to be in charge of meeting Snape as regularly as was feasible, as often as the man had intelligence to provide...  

He felt a shiver run across his skin as he began to disrobe for his bath. His muscles tightened as a shower of bliss drenched his flesh, his cock hardening, standing to attention as his palm instinctively reached and wrapped around his shaft. His breath hitched as if his lungs had collapsed, he stroked himself in such a hurry- as if chasing the orgasm he was already on the brink of, as if hunting it...  

A flood of image and sound filled his imagination as he indulged the parts of him that would have said yes to Snape’s offer.

The part of him that wanted nothing more than to have and to hurt.  

As he closed his eyes, he was back in that alleyway.

He shoved the sloppy drunk man against the brick wall, his mouth invading his, delighting at the taste of vodka and shock on his tongue.

He imagined the man’s groans against his lips as Sirius ran his hands down his narrow waist, ripping his belt buckle open and giving the man just enough space to breathe as he spun him round so his face pressed against the rough brick wall.  

This was the part of his fantasies that tipped him over the edge most times, the part where his eyes would roll back and his cum would prematurely shoot from him.

He steered himself to see the fantasy to the end, to imagine himself tugging black trousers down and baring those legs, finally seeing what lay beneath the underwear he had seen that day by the Lake... 

His fantasies had no time for preparation or for foreplay, he needed to be inside that body like his life depended on it.

He imagined the tightness of breaching this man’s arsehole, he imagined the grip as tight as his own hand at that moment in the bathroom.

He imagined the gasps and pleads that would fall from Snape’s mouth and Sirius would love every single syllable, eating the sounds up as if Snape was feeding him each words like grapes by hand.  

His hand stroked himself so hurriedly, his body tipping forward, his free hand supporting himself up by the tiled wall. He imagined himself leaning into the man, enveloping his slighter stature, slamming into him as if giving the man both a fucking and a fight as he had offered that night... 

Not one thought passed his mind about why he was doing this, why he was so wrapped up in Severus Snape that this was the one and only way he could cum now.

It was like a curse had been placed upon him.

It was a curse he coveted and relished until the moment he released into his hand, streams of cum spilling onto his bathmat...  

Then he would remember how fucked up he was.  

The slither of shame would crawl around his shoulders, his throat. Tightening until he found it hard to swallow. A lump in his throat he could not shift.  

He felt unwell- as if he was catching a cold, each time he masturbated to that greasy bat. Perhaps it was a sickness. Perhaps it truly was a curse.  

He wiped his hands clean in the sink and made his way to the bathtub filled with hot water, deciding now he was feeling so filthy and disgusting, it was the perfect moment to cleanse himself. Sinking into the water his body winced at the scalding hot temperature, lowering his arse, his thighs and eventually his back into the tub.

Now he had got this... sickness out of his system, he found he could think more clearly about the upcoming meeting ahead.  

As he rubbed a washcloth lathered with soap to the hot wet skin of his arms, the suds tangling in the dark hairs that lined his forearms, he had the sudden realisation that this meeting could prove itself to be the cure to his sickness. Perhaps, if he was sat across a pub table, discussing war related intelligence with the surly and hideous man... perhaps he would finally be released from this fetish that had infiltrated his life.  

Every woman he brought back to this flat, every woman he had sex with, he could only, finally, cum if he closed his eyes and imagined Snape’s body beneath his instead of the busty, gorgeous woman in his bed. He must have been cursed, there was no other alternative explanation to this... embarrassing predicament he had stumbled into over the last few weeks. Months. Years.  

He dipped his wavy dark hair beneath the soapy water, drowning out the noise in his head with a rush of water plugging his ears. He felt the tide of the bathwater cup his cheeks, the line of white soap outlining his face. He combed his hair with his fingers and stumbled over the occasional knot, smoothing the bumps out before he sat back up in the tub. As soon as his hair met the air, it became untangleable, it became thick and coarse and needed conditioner to smoothen it out to feel as silky as it had been beneath the surface of the water he lay in. His eyes sunk towards his feet at the other end of the long tub, landing on the small collection of tattoos he had amassed upon his chest since he left his family and Hogwarts. He tried to think of what his next tattoo would be, but his thoughts dwelled on other things. 

How was a handler supposed to act?  

What was he supposed to say when he met Snape that afternoon? 

In the seven years he had known him at Hogwarts, living and studying in the same in the same vicinity as each other, Sirius could not recall a single incident where the two had sat opposite each other.

Face to face.

Except for the first ride on the Hogwarts Express, when he and James had barged into the cabin that Snape and Lily had been chatting together in first.

He had sat opposite the dark eyed, dark haired, boy; James zoning in on the red-headed girl. 

He was more than a little out of his depth, he admitted.  

How was he supposed to gather information from Snape? He reasoned that he would have to ask the right questions, get the man to spill more than he initially planned to. It was imperative that he get as much knowledge as possible about the Death Eaters and their plans for the war, so whatever... lack of confidence he felt in how to handle his handler role needed to be pushed aside so he could just get the job done.  

He bathed himself and stood up and out of the tub, water spilling down the long locks of hair and dripping onto the bathmat beneath him. He wrapped his waist up in a towel and made his way back into his bedroom, deciding the clothes he had picked out and arranged on his bed were no longer suitable.  

. . .  

Severus felt sick as he sat at the table inside The Rook pub.  

He had arrived early, demanding to take control of this interaction. Insisting that this was something he wanted to do rather than the maddening twist of betrayal and conscription he was stuck between. He held a glass of lemonade in his hand, finding nothing else non-alcoholic to sip on in the pub. He considered simply ordering nothing but it was not acceptable to sit in a pub without purchasing something. He hated the bubbles in his drink, the cloying sweetness on his tongue.  

The last few days had been hell for him as he waited for the communication from Dumbledore about meeting arrangements with his now so-called handler. He could count the amount of hours he had slept on one hand, he could count the number of mistakes he had made brewing potions with two hands as a result.  

The only saving grace that he had been blessed upon him was the lack of Death Eater meetings since the Baby Shower, since he had been informed by Voldemort that Lily and her own unborn baby was to be targeted as a result of the prophecy Severus had relayed to him. He could not imagine how he would... contend in Voldemort’s presence, his mind shattered and sleep deprived, practically reeking of despair and dread and betrayal towards the dark wizard...  

Every spare moment he had was spent reading and practicing the techniques in Occlumency that he had began to develop years ago. He would fall apart and explode if he did not get a handle on his own emotions. He would die slowly and painfully if Voldemort ever discovered what he had done. Or he would end up slicing his wrist too close to the bone and bleed out all over the place... And that was far too dramatic an ending for him.   

He needed to stay in control.  

He needed to stay focused. 

He tried to imagine who Dumbledore had arranged to act as his handler during this suicidal intelligence giving.

All he could picture was an old Auror type. A stern face, judging him for his poor life choices but committed enough to the task to tolerate sitting in his company for the advantages he brought. The use he brought to the Order. He could not imagine a situation where anyone would want to sit opposite him in a pub for the sheer joy of his company.  

He was used to sitting alone and a lot of his palpitations at that moment was due to the discomfort of having his loneliness invaded by a judgemental stranger. He repeated the lessons he had learned from War of the Mind, trying to supress the instinct within him to evacuate the pub whilst he still could. 

It was scenarios such as this that cemented the fact that Severus was not a man made for greater things, or for anything beyond the academic side of the dark arts.

Because was not a man who could cope under pressure- not without a massively distressing strain upon his chest that he was sure was going to bring on a stroke.

He had been so... ambitious before.

He had been so desperate for upward mobility within the Death Eater circles, he had been so embarrassed by his delegation to potion brewer. He would do anything to go back and stay where he was.

He would do anything to just go back in time and tell himself to stay put- it was infeasible to escape totally- to just stay where he was before everything had turned so bleak and uncontrollable- 

A shadow fell upon him as a figure stepped around the chair opposite him.

A tall, broad shouldered man.

A man much younger and much handsomer than he had imagined this handler to be.

He was dressed in a dark grey shirt and a brown waistcoat, a black coat he placed on the back of the chair.

A waft of cologne struck Severus, a mesmerising scent that captivating his senses- 

But then recognition sunk in.

He knew this face- he knew this face even though it was sharper and more sculpted than it had been as a teenager.

He had a moustache, facial hair, now. 

He recognised the wavy dark hair, longer and wilder than it had been before.

He recognised that warm glow of skin, that heat that seemed to exist within him when his own body was a wilting flame on a shrinking candle wick about to extinguish.  

It hardly seemed fair.

Life constantly sought to squash him, Severus decided.  

It was unfair that this man had revelled in his good looks in his youth and had now grown into a handsomeness that was unparalleled by any other man Severus had ever seen.  

It was unfair that this man that Severus thought was so painfully beautiful was someone who had tormented him for seven years without pause, without respite.  

And now, the cold distant auror he had imagined, the judgemental professional he had hoped would be sent to be his handler... was replaced by Sirius Black in reality. 

He couldn’t believe it.

He would not accept this.  

“What are you doing?” Severus’ voice escaped his lips.  

“Well, I’m here to meet you.” Sirius coughed, awkwardly. 

He seemed to be rummaging around in his coat pocket trying to find something. Severus picked up on the man’s obvious distaste at being sat in front of him, the obvious discomfort. His grey eyes flickering over towards him and retreating to look at the wall behind him. As if even landing his eyes on him was too terrible a thing.

Severus was about to push back, to end this disaster before it became catastrophic, but the man stood up and said he was going to get a round in. 

“Help break the ice, I guess.” 

Severus knew he needed to leave.

Every cell in his body was screaming at him to escape this danger, every single thought in his mind screamed at him to get away.

But his body once again betrayed him, his limbs frozen in place.

His ears buzzed with the adrenaline and fear that surged through him like an electrocution.

His eyes darted around the pub, from the man at the bar who was purchasing two drinks- one for him- to the wall in front of him.

It seemed safer to land on the painting on the wall, a scenic painting of an old castle.  

He considered the grain of truth that Dumbledore truly and utterly despised him.

The grain took root within his heart and blackened the corners of his self image so direly he felt his shoulders slump and his skeleton tighten.

How could this man send his tormentor to be his handler if not out of pure hatred towards him?

Dumbledore either wanted him to suffer during each meeting, or to have a reason to make the Death Eaters aware of his betrayal if he did not engage with Sirius as his handler.

He was trapped between a rock and a hard place, half way between his own cursed life and hell... 

Severus forced his breathing to steady, forced the adolescent panic to just stop.

He needed this childish, foolish, agony to just stop- 

A pint glass was placed on the wooden table before him, causing Severus to flinch as he was yanked from his thoughts.  

Sirius had a look on his face that made Severus nervous; an expression that told Severus he was being laughed at for his jumpiness. Severus’ jawline tightened as he clenched his teeth in annoyance, the target of this annoyance was an uncertainty, an unfair division between the man sat before him and himself.

He shouldn’t be... still like this.

He shouldn’t be still this pathetic.

He should not still be subjugated by this man.

He was not a child. He was not the same- 

“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.” Sirius commented, a taunting drollness to his words that prodded at Severus’ patience.  

No answer was fit enough for Severus at that moment: he had not seen Sirius Black since Hogwarts.

As far as he was concerned the years had not been enough.  

He looked at the man before him and realised how short the years had been and how little he had changed.

He was still... the same pathetic boy who’s hormones quaked at the sight of his tormentor.

Not simply out of fear and anger, but unbridled lust.

He was still the same boy who hated to be ganged up on by Sirius when his friends were there, but, one on one was a different sort of torment.

The only time they touched was in violence and so Severus’ soul seemed content to take what he could get as long as the hands that struck him were his.  

It was all he was going to get 

At that moment, sat in the pub opposite Sirius Black, he realised it had always been this way with him.

He realised how long this shadow was that he stood within; the convolution of lust with suffering, longing with grief.

He was more broken than he knew possible.  

And whilst it was giving Sirius Black too much credit to say he had been the one to break him, it was not so much of an exaggeration to say that he had been the one to thoroughly enjoy playing with the broken bits and pieces Severus had been when they had arrived at Hogwarts.  

When Severus did not answer him, the man took a long sip of his drink as if he needed the alcohol to get through a moment in his company. Severus could not trust himself to get through this interaction safely with alcohol added to the equation. He couldn’t even drink his lemonade.  

“So, you told Dumbledore about Lily and James being targeted by Voldemort.” Sirius summed up, causing Severus to freeze up further, “I guess I should thank you for that.”  

Severus thought he would die there and then with shame if Sirius Black was to know the full truth about this situation.  

“Listen, I don’t know how to be a handler.” Sirius continued, “and, truth be told, Dumbledore basically said I was a last resort. So don’t expect me to be an expert here. But ... I guess you don’t know how to be a spy either.” 

Grey eyes seemed to drill into Severus.

He seemed to be burning beneath that gaze and he wanted this meeting to be over with for good.  

“Look, can you just say something.” Sirius sighed in exasperation, looking around the pub as if afraid to be seen with Severus at that moment.  

“I have nothing to report.” Severus finally spoke, “there have been no meetings since... since I went to Dumbledore.” 

Sirius seemed unsatisfied with his response. As if he had expected more from him. The weight of this disappointment landed on Severus like tar.  

“You’re all business, I see.” Sirius eventually commented with a tut, “fine, how often shall we meet for you to give intelligence? How often do these little meetings happen?”  

“At least once a week.” Severus revealed.  

He had the awful sensation of being put under a microscope strike him. He seemed to burn with the knowledge that he was actively taking these steps into betrayal, his feet landing shakily like doe legs, knowing soon enough his betrayal will become second nature: if he was to meet Sirius Black once a week with intelligence then his betrayal would become a honed skill...  

He wasn’t sure if he was comfortable with the idea that this hell would soak in so deeply within him that betrayal would be like breathing.

As sincerely as he knew and accepted that the Death Eaters were wrong and he had been wrong to join them- that their ideals and actions were extreme and hypocritical- his life within the Death Eaters was more complicated than a simple political statement.

He was embedded within this world: his employment, his living situation, his family, his social circles, his culture, his knowledge... this was all constrained within the realm that Voldemort had assumed a leadership over.  

It was so controlling- Severus knew he shouldn’t even be in this pub.

The Rook was hardly Death Eater approved.

When he had been younger, and the world had been too large and too overwhelming for him to work out and carve his own path, when the world had felt so unwelcoming and devastating... he had been glad to have his life choices made for him. It sounded so pathetic, but he had honestly felt glad to have his path paved out for him because everything he touched turned to dust and ruin. He had even been glad to have a social rule book to follow, a series of pure-blood inspired doctrine because social skills were not his forte.  

It all seemed so vapid, so pathetic.

But he had just wanted to belong to somewhere and the Death Eaters had, on the whole, given him somewhere to belong.  

But he could hardly tell Sirius Black this.  

He could hardly admit this to himself, let alone an enemy. 

Because even if they were officially working on the same side... they weren’t.

They would never be.  

“So, we’ll be meeting once a week.” Sirius summarised, before adding, “where?”  

“I don’t know.” Severus tutted, before adding, “anywhere that’s not Diagon Alley. Or Hogsmede.”  

“... Are there a lot of Death Eaters in those areas?” Sirius asked with a smirk.  

Severus rolled his eyes.  

“It makes sense to keep away from those areas, seeing as we need to keep you alive long enough to get intelligence worth having.” Sirius continued to smirk, a tease to his voice that Severus did not appreciate, “I guess this pub can be our meeting place, until next week.” 

“Are we done here?” Severus asked, wanting to leave.  

“You haven’t even finished your drink.” Sirius commented.  

“I didn’t ask for a drink.” Severus rebuffed.  

“Ah. Perhaps it’s best you keep off the drink, you get a bit sloppy when you’re pissed.” Sirius dived in, “a bit slutty.”  

Severus stared at him in confusion and anger.  

“Who the fuck are you confusing me for?” Severus raked his brain trying to ascertain what he could be calling attention towards.  

“You don’t...  remember what happened a few nights ago?” Sirius’ eyebrows rose, “Merlin, I don’t even know if I want to tell you."

Severus remembered that he had been annihilatingly drunk a few nights ago and dread began to drop down his spine like ice.

He didn't....

"You were so drunk you grabbed my cock and snogged me in an alley in Diagon Alley. You don’t remember? It’s going to be stuck in my head for longer than I can deal with.”  

If Severus was burning with humiliation, if he was dying of shame, his face did not reflect this.

He focused on the skills he had with occlumency, focused and channelled them at that moment- he was not going to give Sirius Black an inch or he would run him over for a mile.  

“No, I don’t remember.” Severus tilted his head with a sneer, “you are not the first man I have fucked in an alley and you certainly won’t be the last. You’re not special. Especially if I have no recollection of this encounter. You must have been...ah, unremarkable.-”  

Sirius narrowed his eyes at him, a darkness to his glare as if he had been tripped up being seen to want something he had projected not to.

It was as if his mocking had been reflected backwards upon him; to be caught wanting and so harshly rejected.

Sirius was unaccustomed to being told he was not special, or memorable.

He had grown up knowing he was good looking, knowing that girls swooned over him at school, that women fell into his bed on a weekly basis.

But this was different.  

This felt dangerous, this felt thrilling.  

Severus may claim to not remember that moment in the alleyway, but Sirius certainly did. 

“- However, if you are so inclined to linger on a drunken kiss with another man,” Severus continued, standing up to leave, “if you are questioning your heterosexuality, there are places you can explore this with people who do not know how much of a psychotic monster you are. This pub you chose to meet today- it’s in the gay district of North London. How convenient for you.”  

“Where are you going?” Sirius snapped, watching him walk away to the exit.  

He couldn’t go now 

“Evidently, we are done with our meeting.” Severus hissed at him, “as you are so committed to changing the agenda.” 

Sirius stood up and followed him out the pub, watching him storm down the night street as he searched for a secluded space to apparate away from muggles. He caught up with him and grabbed hold of him- if he was going to apparate, he would end up taking him with him.  

“Get off me, Black!” Severus seethed, trying to rip his arm free of his grip.  

But he saw the familiar look on that man’s face.

The same expression of hunger and focus that existed on dogs that hunted rabbits on farmland, of greyhound dogs that chased a toy around a racetrack.

The look of an animal that wanted to rip and destroy and devour.

He felt Sirius’ hand tighten around his wrist, pressing into the healing wounds on his inner arm with an intensity that only seemed to grow.  

“What are you doing?” Severus found himself whispering, as if challenging the man to speak of the tension that lingered in his eyes upon him.  

“I didn’t say we were done.” Sirius forced himself to say, as if needing to say something, as if covering up his real words with denial.  

“What you say, is irrelevant.” Severus insisted, knowing deep down that these words were utter lies.  

Because if he made one movement, if he made one.... he would break, he would capitulate, he would- 

Severus chest tightened, his breathing hitched, as Sirius leaned towards him, his face too close to his.

He froze, his body shutting down, losing himself in the greys of his eyes and the dampness of his licked lips.

As Severus tried to steady his breathing, he inhaled the scent of cologne, a woody musk that only made his will weaker.  

“But what about what you want, Snape?” Sirius’ voice sounded like a taunt to Severus, “you certainly seemed eager before- what was it you asked? You gave me a choice, do you recall?" 

The hand around Severus’ arm tightened, uncomfortably tight.  

Those eyes burning into him.  

"I'll remind you: you gave me the choice to either fight you or fuck you, and at the time you were too drunk for either of those options to be... satisfying."

Severus felt his resolve dangle on a thread.  

He was weak, he was pathetic.  

But he hated himself enough to believe that Sirius was mocking him, to believe wholeheartedly that as soon as he caved in Sirius would laugh in his face. 

As if I'd fuck a man as hideous as you, even if this was not a prank and I really was into men 

He could hear Sirius say this, as real as if the words had truly fallen from the man’s lips, the monstrous self critical voice in his head ripping through his mind in the same voice as Sirius Black.  

He had been humiliated enough, Severus decided, shoving the man away from him.  

He saw that Sirius had not expected him to push him away, had not expected him to end this tension by fleeing from it. Severus felt a seed of strength within him, to know that he had not given the man what he had wanted: a reason to tear him down.  

“Tell Dumbledore this isn’t going to work.” Severus spoke before he disappeared. 

Taking advantage of the break in Sirius’ hold around his arm, he stepped into an alleyway behind the pub and disapparated back to the safety and isolation of his studio flat.  

. . .  

Sirius felt as if the air had been sucked from his lungs as he once again stood alone in an alleyway at night.

The sound of muggle cars filled his ears and he felt as if he was replacing the air he had lost from his lungs with the fumes from these cars, making  him feel sicker than he already felt at that moment. His lungs filled up with dirty air, as if he had been stuck in a vacuum before.

Out in space. 

What was he doing?

It was as if he didn’t know who he was anymore.

He didn’t know who this part of him was that seemed to be dragged to the surface whenever he was in Snape’s company: this animalistic, hungry, beast that saw Snape as the only thing in the world that could satiate this gnawing hunger within him.  

He ruminated over what Snape had said to him about his sexuality and he realised he had never even considered that he might be queer.

Not really.

Not factually.

What he imagined in the darkness of his bedroom, what he fantasised when he had charmed that muggle poster all those years ago...

He never wanted to consider that it was a part of him.

He had never allowed himself to consider that this was who he was.

He certainly never thought he wanted to fuck a man before.

Just Snape.

Because Snape was different.

Snape was special.

He was like a key that unlocked a part of him he could not let loose with anyone else.  

And, Merlin, did that sound really queer now he had given that thought life.  

Now that he had thought it, the realisation began to crawl around in his head, began to grow legs and walk off on its own accord.

Maybe - hopefully-  he was into men and this just manifested as a bizarre and inexplicable obsession with Snape.

The man was hardly handsome or charismatic nor did he have a winning personality- there was no real reason for Sirius to feel this way towards him.

Maybe it was just men in general and he needed to get it out of his system to get over his sick obsession for Snape.

He wanted to make Snape unimportant. 

Unremarkable.  

 He would get this obsession out of his system, one way or the other.  

“Tell Dumbledore this isn’t going to work.” 

He would sort out the handler role later.  

He certainly couldn’t let Dumbledore know he had made a mess of things on the first meeting. This was just a bump in the road, the rocky start. They vitriol they needed to spit at each other: it was a task he intended to fulfil. 

But first, he needed to get to know this so-called gay district of North London a bit more.

. . .  

 Severus leaned back on his sofa and stared at the ceiling.  

He had... anticipated the meeting to be difficult.

He had expected to be judged by his appointed handler, for the wrongs he had done.

But to be sent Sirius Black as his handler was a decision that Severus could only interpret was an act of hatred on Dumbledore’s part, an act of pure disgust. Not only had he allowed him to be bullied in his youth, Severus narrowed his eyes at the cobweb in the corner of his ceiling, but he was actively setting a dog on him as an adult. 

He had told Sirius to let Dumbledore know this wasn’t going to work.

But if the man had decided on Sirius being the handler he was hardly going to bestow an act of kindness upon him by finding someone else for the job.

It seemed so hopeless. His life was a complete car crash, a disaster from top to bottom, start to end. His misery seemed to stretch out in every direction and he had no where left to turn to now.  

He could hardly ask Lucius for help.  

He had asked Dumbledore for help and look where that had got him.  

He had no one neutral on his side, in his life.  

He felt more alone than ever.  

Maybe it was his loneliness that made Sirius’ behaviour so inescapable from his thoughts, so tangled up in knots he could not unpick.

If Sirius had acted like that towards him when they had been at school...

He would have succumbed to a very obvious, very cruel, trick.

He would have the weakness of will and the hopeful naivety to dream.

He would have given himself away to him and died for it when Sirius snatched the dream away and smashed it to pieces with a cruel laughter.   

His cheeks reddened at the suggestion that he had thrown himself at Sirius, unwittingly, drunk out of his skull as he had been days ago now. He wished he had a memory of it, wished he could remember the kiss Sirius had said had happened, he wished he could remember the feel of his erection in the palm of his hand...  

A sigh escaped him. Nothing every went right for him. 

Everything was wrong.  

And then there was a throbbing ache upon his inner arm, an ache that stung the still healing wounds.  

He felt the Dark Mark burn and he thought it odd that the Mark would still summon him, as hacked to pieces as it was. But it seemed even a beheading of the snake was not enough to free him from Voldemort. He wondered if losing his own head would do the trick, or whether his soul was owned by Voldemort even in death at this point.  

He had not been summoned in days, there had been no meeting in the time between the Baby Shower and Severus’ breakdown, his betrayal, the discarding of the Death Eaters from his loyalties.

He had no idea how he was going to be able to ... go back to this.  

An entire lifetime had passed since the last time he shared the same space with these people. 

He thought he was so different now that he would be sniffed out as a liar and a traitor immediately.

He thought he would be executed the moment he spoke up at the table.

He wondered if Voldemort killed people quickly, with efficiency, professional detachment.

Or whether betrayal was a sin worth the time and patience of suffering.  

It wasn’t as if he had anything left to live for  

. . .  

Sirius knocked back a shot of vodka that was offered as he stepped into the sauna.

He found himself walking into a purple lit reception area, paying with muggle money to walk further in if he dared. The man at the reception desk took his money and gave him a look, seeing that he was a new patron: a shiny new toy to be played with. He pointed him down the hall, as if he needed guiding, like a row boat pushed out down a river from the shore. 

The building was much larger, more spacious, than Sirius would have believed from looking at the outside. He wondered if there was magic involved in the architecture, the engineering of this place. He passed rooms devoted to relaxation and steam, men dressed in towels eying each other up appreciatively.  

He walked passed rooms where men fucked men, doors left open for people to watch and he could not look away.

He saw the creased and gasping faces of the men fucking, the unravelling of the men being fucked.

He stood, voyeuristically, watching the slamming of bodies, the grunts of pleasure and bliss, bathed in dim purple lighting.

He carried on walking, unsure what else he was going to see, but desperate to find out.  

He stepped into the end room, finding himself facing a wall with holes, spaces partitioned by walls that built up further secrecy and anonymity.

He saw men stood by these holes, either pressing their erections into the holes, or kneeling down to suck.  

He could imagine anyone on the other side of that wall 

He stepped into a partition, hurriedly unbuckling his belt and lowering his trousers.

Adrenaline deafened him to the world around him; his senses wrapped up in touch as he pulled his hard cock free from his underwear.

He wondered who was on the other side of the wall, his imagination erupting into detail. He closed his eyes and thought of black hair, shoulder length, black eyes, a thin sneering pair of lips. He pushed his cock through the hole in the wall and wanted to brush his shaft up against the curve of  a hooked nose, tapping this face with the tip of his cock as he enticed the other to devour him. 

He pictured this dark haired man sink to his knees, a slow submission, to his knees for him.  

And then fantasy met reality as a tongue stroked his cock, shaft to tip, causing Sirius to buckle with shock and delirium.

His fantasies enflamed, a lit pyre of arousal, as this mouth wrapped around his cock, appreciative moans audible from behind the wall.

He felt the vibration of these moans run down his cock and he groaned.

His own forehead pressed against the wall, looking down as he thrust his cock through this hole, the mouth on the other side sucking him with such intensity and enthusiasm his groans joined in to a salacious chorus of lust within the purple hued building.   

He imagined black eyes peering up at him through eyelashes weighed down by lust. 

Sirius felt his breathing deepen. 

His body heat up. 

He imagined a mouth wrapped tight around his cock, sucking and stroking and begging for him to cum. 

He bit down on his own forearm. 

Keening groans muffled by flesh.  

He imagined that face, anointed in pearly semen, a tongue licking the trail of cum that dripped down his lips...  

Cum spluttered and spilled from his cock in streams, soaking the face of the man on the other side of the wall.

Sirius shuddered through the bliss that rocked through him, his skin shaking like waves out at sea.  

He pulled his spent cock free and found himself immediately presented with a mirroring cock, pressed in where he had pulled out.  

It seemed only ... polite to drop to his own knees, to sink to the floor, to become face to face with this other cock.

Sirius knelt down, his eyes fixed on the swollen head of the erection before him.

The idea that there was a man attached to this cock seemed secondary to Sirius at that moment, all he saw and all he knew was what was put in front of him.

Thinking of what existed behind the wall... it was too much, too soon. He was thankful for the anonymity. What if he was terrible at sucking cocks?   

He had only ever known his own cock.  

He had only ever been concerned with the arousal of one cock during sex- now he seemed to be on the other side; his tongue curiously licking the salty surface of this stranger.

Now there was two cocks.  

He seemed to have fallen through a mirror world, a new world where sex seemed new and so alien but so familiar at the same time.

He was used to having his own cock sucked- to be on the other end was... a revelation.

He stared at the cock, the man behind the wall thrusting in and out of the hole in the wall for some friction whilst Sirius licked his lips in preparation. 

In his mind, it was Snape who was stood behind that wall 

Waiting for his mouth to take him 

Leaning forward, he parted his lips and wrapped his mouth around the head, applying pressure as he sucked, finally breaking free with a pop.

He watched the depersonalised cock twitch with appreciation, the skin shiny and slick with his saliva.

A surge of power rushed through Sirius, a desire to bring this man to completion, to master this cock in front of him- because Sirius was good at everything.

He never had to work hard at school, he never had to fight too hard against Death Eaters: he had a natural talent for success.  

He sucked and sucked, stroked and licked. 

He stroked the cock with his hand gripped so tightly around the shaft, his eyes watching so intensely.

He stroke until his own face was covered in pearly white cum.

He closed his eyes, feeling the thick slickness drip down his face, tickling his eyebrow as it dripped down his face.  

Watching the cock slip away, back behind the wall, Sirius felt as if he had done something life changing.

The purple hue of the lightings draped across him in the darkness, a colour he would always associate with lust from then on.  

He lifted his hand to his face, wiping the strangers’ cum with his fingers and licking it from his tips.  

Just for a taste.  

Just so he had more detail, more... inspiration, for his fantasies.  

Because this experience had not eradicated Snape from his fantasies.

On the contrary, it only made him want that man more than ever.  

And that was a bad thing, not because he was another man.

But because he was on the other side of the war- or, at least, he had been. Before he turned. Before he became a spy for the Order.  

But because he had been his handler, and he had ruined things: the war was never going to end because he had fucked up.  

Merlin’s fucking balls, what was wrong with him?  

In the post-orgasm glow that rushed through his body, he found himself crushed by reality he had pushed aside in favour of sex.  

He needed to get Snape back on side- the two missions becoming entwined: he needed to get Snape back on side, and he needed to fuck him to get this madness out of his system.

It was as if Snape ... was a virus that had invaded every part of him.  

He needed to get him to agree to work with him. 

Until then he would never think clearly.  

. . .  

As he landed outside Malfoy Manor, Severus’ boots seemed to freeze into the stony pavement that led up to the oversized house.

The four story mansion house looked so bloated in Severus’ eyes. His eyes seemed to have been reborn since his last visit, since everything that had happened. Since he was now a traitor. 

He felt sick.  

As he forced his feet to work once again, as he forced his legs to walk towards the entrance of the Manor, he had the horrifying sensation that he was walking to his own death.

But he continued to walk, stepping closer and closer to the familiar door, muscle memory pushing him ever onwards.

He had the realisation at that moment that the fear of walking to his own death was something he was overcoming, it was something he was simply pretending did not exist for reasons beyond his own understanding.  

Why was he pretending he wasn’t a traitor, why was he keeping up the pretence of normality when the states were so high?  

He owed nothing to the Order- he had done what he needed to keep Lily alive.

He had done enough. 

But ... even then, he knew that this was not true.

That he had not done enough.

That he was not doing enough unless he gave intelligence to the Order, as Dumbledore ordered.  

He had told Sirius Black that this was not going to work, that he was not to be a spy, that he was not to be a handler- but for Merlin’s sake, the world and its problems were more important than his discomfort and hatred.

These things had never mattered before, had they?  

This seemed to slot into place with the lessons he had learned from his reading on Occlumency.

He had read how to submerge his own emotions, in theory, and had been taught by life that his own feelings didn’t matter an inch...  

There was something liberating in living a forfeited life. 

If his life did not matter, if it had never mattered, then dying was meaningless. 

Powerless.  

So, if his life did not matter, and his death did not matter, walking into a situation like a Death Eater meeting as a traitor to the cause, a traitor to the so-called Dark Lord, seemed... almost easy.  

As he stepped through the door of the Manor, as he was greeted by a very pregnant Narcissa who should have been on bed rest. 

He forced his mind to forbid images of his once-upon-a-time best friend, pregnant at the same time as Narcissa. He found himself wondering, for the first time ever, whether she had been provided potions to help her through the early months of sickness and nausea, if she had been gifted a basket of after-birth potions to help with the healing of her post-partum body. Like he had gifted Narcissa at Christmas.  

Of course she did.

She had her husband.

She must have had loads of friends since their lives divided, he decided.

He was not special.

He had only let her down.  

He pushed this all aside, as if the thoughts and memories became transparent ghosts in his head.

Sitting down at the table, joining the Death Eater gathering, Severus wondered what was left of his own head, with his memories gutted of life and meaning.  

What was left of him, after he had shed himself of everything that mattered, everything that hurt him to the core?  

Eyes looked towards him, only to skim passed him as more people arrived.  

He had the giddy awareness, a naive whisper, that he was getting away with it all.  

Because no one had killed him yet 

The meeting went on and people around him spoke of attacking London Bridge, of killing muggles in broad day light.

And after the talk of business came to an end, they spoke about the pureblood witch, Walburga Black, on her death bed, dying of Cerebrasurri.

The table sat in a moment of silence, as if she had already died, an action that Severus felt was disturbing.  

The Death Eaters were too eager to chase death.  

“She has around a week to live.” Bellatrix announced, as she had been visiting her relative in the last few days, “her one and only son, Regulus, is caring for her in her final days. The family have asked for privacy in this time.”  

A wave of whispers washed over the table. 

“Regulus Black? I haven’t heard that name in a while.”  

“He was involved with us until about a year ago. As young as he is.” 

“He took a step back when his mother fell ill.” 

“Idiot, sacrificing his career, his future, for a piss-stinking old hag on her last legs.” 

Severus once again sat amongst the hypocrisy of the Death Eaters.  

The issue of family being everything: except when it wasn’t.   

The meeting then focused on things that made Severus suspicious simply because he was on high alert himself.

He was listening to the things that he would tell the Order, and the things he was now hearing being reported tipped him off to the suspicion that...  

Someone else had acted as he was acting now. 

Only this person would have to be reporting from within the Order.  

He wondered how long this had been happening.  

He thought back on the past meetings, the reports on how the Death Eaters were winning this war- was this the reason why?

Severus had no reason to question this before.

He had no reason to suspect what were easy victories.  

But now that he was a rat, he... could not help but see there existed a darker version of himself out there.

Sitting at these same meetings with Dumbledore, with Sirius Black, with whoever else existed in this Order.

Absorbing the same details he was.

And here was hearing it all on this side.  

There was a rat in the Order 

Both sides seemed to be leaking information and intelligence.  

He had a whole new reason to survive this meeting, Severus realised, to make sure that the Order became aware that there existed a rat in their midst.  

And if this spy existed- this spy would realise that the Death Eaters had a spy too, when Severus’ intelligence began to trickle down to their meetings.  

He had low expectations for surviving the war, for surviving this meeting in fact.

But he did not want to invite death to his door, he did not want to welcome torture upon him.

And the only way he could prevent this was to ensure that the only leak that existed was himself.

That he left no clues, no suspicions, no breadcrumbs to his feet. 

This rat in the Order was a threat to him, as selfish as Severus knew this sounded.  

But his drive to survive was not tied up in his own mortality, he was shocked to realise, but... in ensuring the survival of the Order and its victory in the war.

As hopeless as that felt, now that he was on the other side.

He ...felt something that he... had not felt during his time aligned with the Death Eaters.

He felt lighter.  

As if he knew he was doing the right thing, even if it was to cost him his life. 

He didn’t think much of his own life, did he? But this felt like a reason to hold on. It gave him a use he had not anticipated until he was sat here, face to face with death all around him.  

So this rat in the Order was an enemy of his own, an enemy he could not extinguish himself. 

With regret, he realised he needed to make use of his contact, his handler.  

He needed Sirius Black.  

. . .   

Chapter Text

 Severus watched as the meeting came to a close, the other Death Eaters standing up from the table, chairs scraping along the smooth floor with a screaming screak that channelled the high-pitched scream in his chest. 

It took him a minute to realise that he had snuck in to a war meeting with Voldemort and all his Death Eaters, he had sat down at the same table and listened, absorbing the words, the detail. He had hidden in plain sight.  

Because they had not expected him to be any different.  

He forced himself to his own feet, using the excuse of downing his glass of water to have a few necessary seconds to steady his tremoring legs. He took a deep breath and made his way back towards the door to the meeting room, hoping to feel braver the second he passed the doorframe to the meeting room and his feet touched the hallway floor towards the exit of the Manor.  

He remembered his book, the book that had been teaching him Occlumency all these years. 

He kept his face still, his mind still, like an untouched lake. 

“Severus, stay a minute.”  

And then the floor seemed to crack beneath his feet, the smooth stone floor seemed to freeze through his shoes at the voice that crawled through his ears.