Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/1065786.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Harry_Potter_-_J._K._Rowling
  Relationship:
      Harry_Potter/Severus_Snape
  Character:
      Harry_Potter, Severus_Snape
  Additional Tags:
      Character_Turned_Into_Vampire, Human_Trafficking, Alternate_Reality
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-12-01 Words: 21248
****** Your Eyes Close ******
by NecromanticNoir
Summary
     The first time Harry discovers Severus Snape’s sexual attraction to
     him is in a courtroom. A story from Snape's point of view, set after
     Deathly Hallows, about how far you have to go to find the one that
     you love.
Notes
     Originally posted in the 'First Time for Everything' Fest hosted by
     the Snape_Potter IJ / LJ community under username Necromanticnoir.
 
‘I'll wait here, for you, for I'm broken down.
I'm coming down this time,
For my heart lies far and away
Where they took you down,
Let them over to your house,
Where I'm broken.
 
Down by the people if they let you breathe
Don't give a damn if you still can't see,
Still my heart beats for you have become
All I lost and all I hoped for.
But I must carry on
Always one
Never broken.’
 
 
 
“Usually one starts these interviews by explaining the process to the client
but… Everyone knows you’ve been on trial before. This is hardly your first
time.”
“It was nearly twenty years ago.”
“I assume you want to mount a defence? You, ah, have the money to pay me?”
“I have money. What I want, however, is this to be resolved out of court. There
is evidence that… I believe the Prosecution has that… must not become public
knowledge.”
“What evidence is that? Mr Snape?”
 
~
 
Long, thin fingers hovered over a cauldron’s grey, glittering contents.
They clenched in frustration - then withdrew, as the liquid within swirled and
smoked.
After a few moments’ pause, the fingers returned, sprinkling a dark powder
across the undulating surface.
The liquid turned black.
 
~
 
“What evidence is that? Mr Snape?”
Snape’s lawyer has hair the colour – and texture – of molasses. Combed back
from his face into a greasy ponytail, it clashes horribly with his sickly
yellow robes.
 Snape’s own hair has long since bypassed the classification of ‘greasy’.
Six weeks in St Mungo’s criminally insane ward, then a transfer to Azkaban,
with no access to anything but a bucket of cold, dank water, makes even a man
who cares as little for his appearance as Snape feel… self-conscious.
No wonder the lawyer – Walter Somebody (he was the cheapest option available in
these desperate times) – sits as far away from Snape as possible.
He has his share of Dumbledore’s will to bargain with, but he needs to eke it
out. He could afford a shorter trial with a more expensive lawyer, but
considering Snape’s life, the prosecution could carry on the shit-slinging for
months. He needs to be prepared for the long haul.
“They raided my personal quarters. You know the charges being brought against
me,” Snape hisses, motioning to the parchments littering the table between
them.
“Murder, yes, and production of potions of an illegal nature concerning another
party – which always means it’s sex related. Were you spying on someone?”
Snape sighs, letting his head fall forward wearily.
 “We can try to get the court to overlook it,” Walter snorts, in a tone that
does not inspire Snape with confidence, and starts scratching away lazily with
a purple quill. “Every man is allowed his desires, eh? Who hasn’t used a potion
to have a sex dream about somebody they fancy?”
“Do you know what my potion does? It enables one to enter sexual fantasies as
though one were really there. Enables one to… act out one’s desires in a
physical manner!”
It sickens Snape to say it. But, he supposes, it will be worse in court.
Life is like a nightmare.
“Yes, it sounds like a violation, but we don’t have time to focus on something
like this. Your main charge is murder, and we only have a week to work on our
defence there. What makes this so serious? You’re not suggesting we give this
sex charge priority?”
They must have been the same age, Walter and him; both pushing forty.
In other circumstances, Snape could have belittled his intelligence; looked
down upon Walter. But what was the use? In the scheme of things, despite being
a Professor - being Headmaster of the largest wizarding school in the country -
Snape was still, now, once again… the man on the wrong side of the table.
“No-one must find out, that is my only priority,” Snape’s voice is thick with
self-loathing.
“No-one at all, or a specific no-one? Fantasising about someone inappropriate,
eh? Oh hell. You were. Who?”
Walter looks up and sees Snape’s face. His own falls.
“Just to make things worse! Who is it? A… Not a student of yours?”
 
~
 
Snape had to catch hold of the cauldron for balance as his feet landed,
abruptly.
Then, terrified of overturning its contents, he recoiled – and collapsed,
thrashing about on the flagstones like a caught fish.
Muttering darkly from the floor, he sat up. Head spinning, hair in disarray,
nose damp and eyes wet.
Thank God he was alone to suffer such indignities.
He regarded the cauldron with a bone-weary sigh.
Its contents did hold some potential, but he was unsure. He was too weary for
this.
He regarded his other options coolly.
Four further cauldrons bubbled away in the dimness, glittering like dark
jewels.
Snape’s groin throbbed.
 
~
 
Snape looks at the wall. Stares at it until little black dots begin to form in
front of his eyes.
“You have to tell me, Snape, I’m your lawyer.”
He only dimly hears the words. He has already been dragged through the courts
and before the Wizengamot before, at the tender age of twenty.
He has been the subject of publicity for years about his past, and reviled his
whole life long. He has changed sides, but then found his job was to pretend
that he hadn’t…  He has spied and lied and either been in the wrong - or
pretended to be - for a lifetime.
But he has never had his personal thoughts – his weaknesses - dragged through
the mud before. Even his childhood attachment to Lily Potter always remained
purely between him and Albus.
But now, something far darker is about to become public knowledge.
Snape isn’t sure he will survive it. His humiliation will be complete.
“Ptr.”
He hears his voice, but he can’t feel himself speaking. Perhaps someone else
has stolen his voice. Perhaps, if he can disassociate from himself, he can
pretend this whole sordid affair concerns another party, what a pathetic person
-
“I can’t hear you, Snape!”
“Potter! Fuck! Harry fucking Potter!”
“Shit! Shit, Snape… Shit. Is that what those phials the Prosecution have
contain? I need to see the contents -”
“Nobody needs to see them! Least of all Potter! You have to help me,” Snape
reaches across the table in desperation, but Walter shrinks back from his grasp
as though he were a leper.
There is no comfort to be found here.
“Easy, ok? Do you know how many phials the prosecution have? They’re keeping
their evidence very close-guarded. But you made the potions, you’d know! How
many?”
“No. No, they can’t -”
“Snape! I don’t know what planet you’re on but there is no settling out of
court! You’re being tried for murder, who’s going to be paid off? Now you can
bet your life they’ll bring this up as evidence of your perversity to put a
slur on your character in the murder trial – would you sit on evidence that
good, if you were them? Tell me exactly what is in those phials! How many are
there?”
“I… maximum of five. If they got them all.”
 
~
 
It was the dead of night.
The cauldrons still simmered.
Each had taken months to weave; to construct. The brewing had demanded the most
intricate of spells, the most expensive of ingredients. The highest level of
skill.
Snape brooded silently, stood in the dark. A sentinel.
In his own lifetime, he would never possess Potter. That he knew with finality,
and it felt like lead lining his stomach. Heavy, the weight of death.
There was nothing to hope for, here.
He regarded his options, slowly.
 
~
 
“If it will please the Court… Exhibit A: five phials of potion, each with
different contents, taken from the Accused’s rooms after the final battle. You
will get the hang of them by the end, but the first… that will be the shock.
Before you adjust to the perversity of the man’s mind.”
First, there is the pre-trial hearing.
Outlining the direction in which both Prosecution and Defence will try to take.
Present is only Snape, Walter Somebody, the Prosecution’s vast legal team (each
in pinstriped robes) and the judge and jury.
“This is a man who murdered his mentor and salivated after one of his
students.”
Snape tries to tune it out.
“Which student? You will learn as the trial continues. But it will shock you.
Prepare to be shocked.”
The Prosecution seem to have a hefty case constructed, for a trial that was
only ordered five days ago. Snape was released from St Mungo’s and picked up by
the Aurors approximately two hours later, then informed that his trial started
on Monday.
 
~
 
Outside the court room (Walter’s face considerably more sweaty than when they
went in) one of the pinstriped witches brushes past Snape, nose crinkled in
revulsion.
“We told Potter everything, of course,” she whispers nastily, into Snape’s ear.
“No!” Snape barks out, then claps a manacled hand over his mouth, going white.
“What did you say to him?” Walter demands, puffing over, hackles rising. “You
are being inflammatory to my client outside of court!”
“There was evidence concerning him that is about to be made public - he had a
right to know the gory details!” the witch smirks.
Snape recognises that smirk – it is one he has had many times, after catching a
student looking at ‘Playwitch’ in class. Sadistic satisfaction.
 
~
 
Snape, perched over the softly simmering cauldron, fumes puffing against his
lank, sallow face, closed his eyes.
It was four in the morning.
In an hour, he needed to be up preparing for the coming day. Hogwarts was a
withering stone husk under his control. Snape, the Headmaster of a living ruin.
Potter, there had been no word of in weeks. Snape was growing desperate;
sometimes, the clawing fear threatened to rise out of his throat and choke him.
His worry for the reckless boy’s safety was second only to his cruellest
weakness – the suffocating desire that had infected him like a disease in
Potter’s fifth year.
He had no will to live, personally; no need to prolong his life for the sake of
living. What drove him was the sickening injustice that one could covet, could
desire, could love so fucking much - and all in vain.
Of course, he was used to injustice. He had spent his whole life looking,
wanting things that had always remained just out of reach.
But it burned within him that there might be some variation of events that
might have caused Potter to… look back. As his own death approached – and it
was coming soon, he knew, as the skies darkened with each passing day – the
thought that he had been cheated out of his life with Potter became smothering.
Three more drops, stir counter-clockwise with a slight flick of the wrist…
And there it was.
He had lost count of the attempts he had made. Well into the hundreds. He had
watched Potter in a variety of different lives, but in not one of his initial
attempts had Potter looked upon Snape with anything other than loathing – or,
worse, pity.
In recent attempts, they had been friends, several times; the worst of which
was when Snape was invited to be Best Man at Potter’s wedding. He still
shuddered at the ‘memory’ of biting into his tongue to stop himself sinking to
his knees before Potter at the altar.
No, only a certain type of relationship would do – anything else was just
further torment. And death was far preferable to that.
He put down the ladle, and lowered his greasy face towards the bubbling liquid.
Perhaps, after a few tweaks, this one might just…
 
~
 
“That witch is a lying old tart – Potter hasn’t been told. The trial starts
properly in two days and I saw the witness list - he’s not even involved! He’s
been approached to join the Prosecution as a witness, but has refused. They’re
playing on this potion stuff because they want Potter to side against you. They
want Potter to forget that you were Dumbledore’s man and think of you as this
sick old pervert -”
Snape’s relief is short lived. Now, he will have to see Potter take the news
first hand. Will have to watch the light of revulsion dawning across that young
face and smothering any kindly feeling that may have remained.
The night before the first phial is due to be showed to the court, Snape
considers ending it all.
The realisation that the imminent threat of being Kissed has nothing on the
thought of Potter finding out how badly Snape desires him is… gut-wrenching.
His humiliation will be complete tomorrow, at the look of disgust on that young
face.
 
~
 
Vampirism had never been an interest of Snape’s – his teenage years, whilst
gothic, were never maudlin in that sense. He found, however, that there was
some appeal in this ‘fantasy’: himself as a newly-turned vampire, thrumming
with power, and Potter as one of his donors. Potter was in fear of him;
submitted to him meekly (for the most part; Potter’s tenacious spirit was not
yet dead, or so Snape hoped).
Inhabiting the body of this Vampire Severus Snape… happened with a jolt.
Snape had been standing in his study, hunched over the cauldron, phial in hand.
One sip away from… what? Bliss, perhaps? Landing in a ‘fantasy’ was like
Apparating in, but into another body – another version of himself.
It was an unnerving feeling. His own memories warred with that of this other
Snape – two persons inside one head. Warred, then… merged. Snape had memories
that were not his own lying alongside his real ones; seeping into one another.
More importantly, however, he now had Potter, kneeling at his feet.
“Do you still want to feed?” Potter asked, lifting his head; looking confused
at Snape’s hesitancy.
“As usual,” Snape croaked out.
Potter rose obediently, and bared his neck by unbuttoning his shirt - by a
meagre three buttons. Pathetic.
“More,” Snape snapped. Potter blinked.
“More?”
“More. Naked, in fact.”
“I… what?”
“Do it.”
“You have other slaves for that!”
“Take your clothes off!”
Potter glanced about wildly, but they were alone in a vast dark hall. Fingers
clenching and unclenching, Potter rose gracelessly, and hopped about from foot
to foot.
“Why?” he finally asked.
“Because your body is beautiful and I want it,” Snape snarled.
Potter’s eyes grew very round.
“Look, I don’t want a debate about it,” Snape snapped, when Potter opened his
mouth again.
To demonstrate such, Snape pulled his erection out of his trousers.
“Put that in your mouth!”
Potter’s mouth fell open.
“Which do you want?” he stammered. “Me naked, or me to suck that?”
“Both. Now, if you please. Do as you are told!”
Watching Potter disrobe, the look of disbelief still plastered across the boy’s
face, was priceless. Then Snape no longer cared, as Potter was pushing his
boxers down skinny thighs.
Potter here was thin, as thin as Snape’s version, and wiry. Doe-eyed and
quivering, the boy shuffled closer on his knees, skin prickling with cold all
over, nipples tightening. His mouth opened and Potter leant forward, still
confused, dazed even. Poised inches from Snape’s cock, he moistened his lips
awkwardly. Then started licking Snape’s purple erection with just the tip of
his pink tongue. Made a face. Licked again.
“Why do I have to -”
Snape put a hand on the back of Potter’s messy hair and forced his mouth down
around Snape’s erection. Potter made a gargling sound and breathed through his
nose - then choked, eyes huge. He batted at Snape’s hand and pulled back.
Looking up, he glowered at Snape.
Snape merely raised an eyebrow, and Potter sighed, then stuck his tongue out
again. Wet licking sounds filled his ears.
In those early days, Snape thought of little except enjoying the ‘fantasies’ he
visited. Taking the opportunities to have Potter sexually – a sharp contrast to
his own life, where Potter would not touch him to scratch him.
“Take it deeper,” Snape commanded, and Potter (who had clearly not done this
before) gripped the base of his cock in frustration, before trying to open his
throat around it. Snape could feel Potter shudder against the gag reflex, but
the wet heat, slippery and spongy around his poor neglected flesh, was so
beautiful. He pushed his cock in and out of Potter’s mouth leisurely, until
Potter’s lips and chin were wet and his eyes and nose runny. Then he came down
Potter’s throat.
Or tried to – Potter thrashed in surprise and spat his come all over Snape’s
thigh, grimacing at the taste. Snape didn’t care. Potter, however, wiped his
mouth and nose with his hand – then tried to clean Snape up by grabbing his
boxers and dabbing at the wetness -
“I’ll get another slave to clean you up -” Potter began, but Snape wasn’t
interested.
“No. Stay. Lie on your front and spread your legs wide. Wider.”
 
~
 
“We hardly need to see this evidence – every man is entitled to his own
privacy! Which was invaded, in Mr Snape’s case, by the destruction of his
personal property and removal of the items which the Prosecution now calls
‘evidence’. All they are evidence of is that this man is flesh and blood, which
is hardly a crime!”
Walter is trying, but he is already huffing and puffing like he has run a
marathon.
“Perhaps not,” sneers the pinstriped bitch witch. “But when the object of a
man’s sexual fantasies is someone in the public interest, someone who was
supposed to be under Mr Snape’s charge at the time and had been since he was
eleven – and who would have been underage when some of these were dreamed up…
Then it becomes an act of criminality to create such potions starring him!”
There is a mutter in the courtroom, a murmured assent.
Snape tries not to hang his head, but it feels so heavy.
“And, how do we know that these potions that were created by Mr Snape were not
sold for personal gain?” she adds, eyes gleaming. Snape hates her; wishes a
thousand horrible curses on her.
“That is pure speculation, I demand that it be stricken from the records!”
Walter cries.
“But now we come to the worst part – the name of the poor individual who was
subject to Mr Snape’s sickening fantasies!”
Snape closes his eyes.
His long dark hair falls over his face. This is it. His moment of deepest
shame.
“It is none other than… Harry Potter!”
Perhaps, if he pretends he is already dead… (Predictably, the courtroom goes
mad. Cries, screams – Snape keeps his eyes resolutely closed.)
When he opens them, he forces himself to look up. To look over at the public
gallery.
He knows who stands there.
Weasley and Granger are walking out, as are several others. Minerva has her
hands over her mouth and is looking directly back at him, eyes hard, shaking
her head in horror.
And Potter…
His face is pale (and thin, still too thin) but his eyes hold a mixture of
betrayal and… confusion.
Snape cannot make it out.
 
~
 
The liquid bubbled so black. Tar in the cauldron; stinking too.
Almost ingestible.
Unpalatable.
Unthinkable.
 And yet, it beckoned to him.
He had yet to try it out, for the fear the temptation may be too irresistible.
Once he enters, oh to remain there forever…
In this ‘fantasy’, the Dark Lord had triumphed. Everything Snape had worked for
in his real life had failed.
This other version of himself however, was instrumental in the success, and had
been duly rewarded, with the body of the young ‘saviour’. Potter, alive and
unharmed, belonged entirely to him, for his pleasure and delectation.
It was a fantasy he would never even dare to hold, not even in life.
He did not know whether he could stand it.
Or, worse, whether he would love it too much.
Potter as a whore - worse, as his own personal concubine…
A fantasy like a dark jewel; and sickly sweet, like rare honey.
Snape had never been a physical person, but his body lit on fire by just one
glance from Potter’s emerald eyes. He hovered by this cauldron night after
night, long into the early hours of the morning.
One night, at around three, his curiosity and weakness finally won out.
Shamed, and unable to meet his own eyes in the shimmering reflective surface of
the potion, Snape took a sample.
Somehow, it seemed to glitter more darkly than the others as he lifted to vial
to his lips, eyes tightly closed against the humiliation of it…
 
~
 
“There’s been a request, Snape,” Walter finishes, shuffling papers about as he
starts to rise.
“Grand,” Snape snorts, waving a hand indifferently in thin air. Slouched in his
chair, thinking only about the pointlessness of it all…
“From Potter.”
Snape sits up.
“What does he want?” Fingers drumming impatiently upon the table top.
“To see the evidence the court saw today, of course. The Prosecution are
pushing for it. They think if they can twist Potter in their favour, he will
give evidence against you.”
“He must not see them!” Snape barks, rising, pushing his chair over -
“Perhaps we can broker a deal. That he only sees one or two?” Walter looks
pleased by his idea. The imbecile.
“None! Not one!”
Walter’s smile fades.
“This is not within our control, Snape!” Walter barks. “We are lucky, given
Potter’s social standing, that he can’t just walk in and take them! Especially
as they all star him, which he is well aware now…”
Snape puts his head in his hands.
“Now I am suggesting, alright, that Potter be encouraged to view the
transcripts of some of these things – you know, a verbal description, instead
of actually seeing them for himself? I’m going to try to argue it’s in his own
good, stops him getting all traumatised. You may think you have a beautiful
thing going with Potter, but that stuff’s messed up.”
“I did not choose the content of… Never mind.”
“You didn’t choose them? Snape, they’re your fantasies!”
“I said never mind!”
“Well good, because Potter doesn’t ever need to see those, or that’s what I’ll
say. I can’t believe we are focussing on this now when I ought to be preparing
for the much larger problem of getting you acquitted of murder! This is why
they did it, of course: to focus our efforts into this lesser but much more
humiliating charge, and then hit you with being Kissed at the end!”
“I don’t care about that. All I care is that Potter not see the content of
those phials. Plead guilty to the murder if you have to. But keep him away.”
“You’re joking? You’d let them Kiss you to prevent him seeing you take him in
the arse?”
 
~
 
The taste of the tar-black potion was rank and fetid on his lips; he wiped his
mouth with his hand, wincing.
He almost expected to see Voldemort immediately, but no.
Instead, lying in an enormous canopied bed was the loveliest sight that Snape
ever saw.
 Potter. Naked and curled up in his bed, sleeping sweetly.
Snape approached, mesmerised; he leant against one mahogany bed post and
watched Potter’s slender bare shoulder rise and fall. This Potter looked weary
and careworn, even in sleep.
Transfixed, torn and aching with longing, Snape climbed up onto the bed.
The young man startled, and sat up, blinking rapidly.
“Oh, sorry, Sn – sir. I just closed my eyes for a minute -”
Snape waved a hand, dismissively.
“Sssh,” he murmured, softly. “You look tired.”
To his dismay, Potter scrambled up – to his even greater dismay, he heard a
chain clank, and watched Potter crawl urgently out of his bed.
Chained by one ankle, the boy scurried back towards a large iron cage in one
corner of the room.
Potter was chained to the cage. Inside the cage was a pillow and a blanket, and
a glass of water.
He could see the knobs on Potter’s spine.
Snape’s blood boiled.
“Stop!” he snapped, too harshly.
Potter slid on the wooden floor in his haste and slipped.
Snape drew his wand. The chain melted away and, to his horror, Potter’s eyes
grew wide and terrified.
“No! No don’t let them take me, I thought they gave me to you! They gave me to
you, they can’t do this again, they can’t!”
Snape caught Potter by the wrist. The boy weighed almost nothing, like a ghost
slipping through his fingers.
“You aren’t going anywhere, be quiet,” he said, disturbed by Potter’s distress.
Potter still refused to stay still, however.
“I’m sorry, I do as you ask, don’t I? Please don’t send me back there, I know
you’re the best option I could have got and I’m grateful, really…”
“Stop begging,” Snape spat.
Potter was silent. Then he sagged, sinking to the floor, head in his hands.
“You’re right. I used to be so much stronger than this.”
“Come… come here,” Snape ventured.
He wanted nothing more than to bury himself in this young man’s embrace, but
the Potter of this place was clearly in no mood for sex. Once, Snape might have
tried to force the issue. But no more. He had seen too much.
“You’re so…gentle tonight,” Potter muttered, leaning his head on Snape’s
shoulder.
“Am I not always?” Snape asked, carefully drawing Potter into his arms.
Potter snorted.
“Not often. Sorry, I didn’t mean -”
“It’s alright,” Snape sighed. “Just lie with me, here, and go to sleep.”
This was the first time he entered a ‘fantasy’ where Potter was sexually
available, and did not return to his own life smelling of come.
The first time he merely held Potter until the boy fell asleep, watched him in
repose with tender longing, then returned. It changed something within him.
Ruined something.
He was doomed never to be satisfied in a ‘fantasy’ after that, but he did not
know quite why.
 
~
 
There were other times, before and after that night. Other attempts, far more
sexual.
 
~
 
Potter was permanently aroused in one ‘fantasy’ he visited, having been the
victim of an errant curse.
Snape was not sure whether the Snape here had been trying to cure Harry, or was
simply keeping him here to fuck. He assumed the former, as Harry slept in a
small bedroom just off Snape’s lab.
Snape found himself at a workstation, a potion bubbling away before him and a
ladle in his hand. He barely had time to work out what was going on before the
door opened.
“I’m ready for my dose.”
Potter looked weary, resigned. He was wearing a loose fitting robe and his
fingers were constantly scuttling towards his groin, then retreating back
sheepishly. Snape almost wanted to laugh, but the young man looked like he was
in pain.
Stalling for time, as memories old and new swirled in his head, Snape glanced
at the cauldron.
“It will be ready soon. How are your… symptoms?”
“It isn’t ready? Shite. Um… It’s getting a bit… tricky, again. You know.”
“Describe what you mean.”
“I’m fucking hard,” Potter grumbled. “I barely slept.”
“Let me see, then,” Snape found himself saying.
Potter’s eyes widened, but his fingers moved resignedly to slide open his
robes, as though he had had to do this before. Snape watched Potter’s erection
bob into view; saw the young man trembling as he laid his robe to the side. As
he stared, Potter only seemed to get harder, redder, wetter; glistening...
“Please,” Potter whispered, eyes drifting closed and a single tear meandering
down his cheek from under one set of lashes. “Help me.”
Snape set down the ladle. Licked his lips. Potter moaned unhappily and one hand
drifted towards his erection - stopping just short of it.
“Why stop?” Snape asked, low.
“Because you said at… um… attending to it will only make things worse!”
“Forget what I said,” Snape snarled, striding forward. He grabbed both Potter’s
ripe buttocks and pulled the young man flush rudely against him. Potter almost
shrieked, hands flying up to grasp Snape’s shoulders.
Snape kissed him once, hard, before releasing Potter and spinning him around.
Dropping to his knees, he pushed Potter’s buttocks apart and set his tongue to
the damp opening he found there, sucking at it hard, nipping with his teeth.
Potter, eyes drifting shut with pleasure, writhed against him. Snape could hear
the shuffling sound of skin on skin as Potter masturbated. Only a minute or so
later, there was a soft scream. Come like cream splattered the flagstones
before Potter’s bare feet.
Looking up, between Potter’s legs, Snape inspected, and found, Potter to be
hard still. He slipped a finger into Potter’s bottom, wet with his own saliva,
and Potter cried out, parting his trembling legs.
“Oh thank God, thank God!” Potter was babbling.
Snape, one hand sliding his fingers in and out of Potter’s quivering arse,
shifted himself and sat up to lap at Potter’s sticky erection.
Potter, hands in his own hair, looking terrified and delighted all at once,
barked out a cry and came helplessly all over Snape’s face.
Blinking come out of his eyes, Snape sat back in surprise, listening to Potters
rambling apologies.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry – I haven’t come in weeks - you should know! Oh God!”
Snape wiped his cheek and started licking Potter’s erection again, and Potter
soon shut up. There was less come the next time. And the time after.
Potter’s legs trembled like they were about to give out, so Snape pulled back
from his mouth full of cock and shoved Potter to lean over the workstation.
Potter instantly started butting his erection eagerly against the wood, but
Snape let him, busy as he was with fumbling his own cock out of his trousers.
Potter squeaked when Snape started to press into him, but it only took a moment
for the boy to recover from his surprise before he was shouting about God again
and pushing his bottom back eagerly. After several attempts, the muscle
loosened, and Snape’s dick popped inside.
Potter came again instantly, clenching around him blissfully.
“Fuck yourself on me,” Snape commanded, fingers pinching at Potter’s flushed
skin, at his hips – and Potter did so, gingerly at first, then more and more
bravely each time.
Finally Snape, impatient and frustrated, gripped Potter’s hipbones hard and
shoved in, drilling into the boy hard over and over. Potter writhed and yelled
(and orgasmed) around him, as Snape shoved his blunt cock over and over into
the tight hole. Potter’s knees trembled and he sagged forward onto the desk,
face mashed into the ingredients – but the young man’s questing hands travelled
back, reaching for Snape’s hips and buttocks to pull him in tighter, harder.
When Snape finally came, he was fucking the boy so hard he could feel the
vicious slap of his balls almost painfully on Potter’s skin; feel the bump of
Potter’s bruised knees on the work surface and see Potter’s skin flushed,
scratched and sweating.
He half collapsed across Potter’s back, panting into sweat-slicked hair, his
cock softening but still burrowed inside Potter’s smaller body.
“I… oh… That helped, I think. I think. I’m still… still pretty hard but… Thank
you,” Potter whispered.
Snape snorted. Gullible fool, to think Snape was screwing him for Potter’s
medical benefit.
Inside, however, Snape was quietly rejoicing. His hands roamed freely over
Potter’s body, lit up with excitement. He could imagine a nice, tidy set up
here. Potter, the willing patient, and Snape ‘treating’ him… with mouthfuls of
cock.
Until:
“So, can I have sex with other people, now?” Potter ventured, turning around
and eyeing Snape cautiously.
“What?” Snape growled.
“I mean, we’d both rather be sleeping with other people, wouldn’t we. I…
there’s other people I’d prefer to… if I’m allowed?”
Snape wanted to snap ‘no’, and bitterly warn the boy against sleeping with
anyone but him – but what would be the point? If Potter’s heart was not in it…
Once again, the joy leeched out of Snape’s soul and he slumped, defeated.
Angry, he pulled out, wiping himself off on his robes and shoving his
traitorous penis back into his trousers. He knew immediately that he had to go,
that there was nothing here for him but jealousy and pain.
Once again, the encounter was ruined.
He was starting to understand why.
“Yes,” he sighed. “Who… whoever you need to. It’s fine.”
 
 ~           
 
“Potter has demanded a meeting. With you. Privately. None of us are allowed in!
Do you know how unheard of that is during a murder trial? His little bushy-
haired friend managed to wrangle it on the proviso that he only wants to
discuss your obsession with him and not Albus Dumbledore; that it isn’t
relevant. Bullshit! That lawyer bitch has managed to persuade them to have it
tonight, too, when we were going to have our strategy meeting! Well you need to
be here, Snape! We’ve had barely any time as it is, we need you at the meeting!
I’m telling Potter no.”
“You will do no such thing!” Snape yells, rising to his feet.
“Snape! Relax! Now, you need to attend, how are we supposed to plan your
defence without you?” Walter throws his hands up in despair.
“What time is Potter coming?”
“Here? You think they’d bring bright, lovely Harry Potter into this shit hole?
You’d have to go out – another reason I think they’re trying to waste our time
-” Walter grumbles.
“When do I leave?” Snape asks, trying to smooth down his hair.
“You’re really going? You disgust me. It’s six. And no, you don’t look alright,
you look like shit, before you start preening for your little crush. Well, if
you’re going to throw your life away like this, you need to at least try to
persuade him to testify for you. Did you hear me? You need him to testify that
you murdered Dumbledore at his demand!”
“I told you, I don’t care -” Snape growls at him.
“Do you have a death wish, Snape?” Walter shouts back.
“What do I have to live for? If you were me, would you have anything to look
forward to?” Snape sneers at him, gratified when Walter falters and splutters.
“I didn’t think so. I’ll be out from six.”
 
~
 
The taste of the potions were becoming sickly, too sweet.
Acrid, like bile.
Or that could just be his own bitterness.
He had had Potter in numerous different ways, but each Harry Potter he met felt
like a stranger wearing that beautiful face.  In fairness, each ‘Potter’ he met
had not had the same life experiences as his Harry. There was also no
connection between the two of them, more often than not.
He was used to being met with fire in his encounters with Potter. He never
found that spark anywhere else.
It was a bleak, and lonely existence. Each potion he tried made coming back to
his real life as a monkish, detested pariah, with no knowledge of even Potter’s
whereabouts, all the worse.
One night, he lay quietly beside the young man after another empty encounter,
and stared at the ceiling.
Here, they were comrades, fighting some unknown evil, but Potter was older.
Snape did not know whether the young man was still fighting Voldemort, or a new
dark threat. Either way, the meeting began with strategy, with pacing and
aggravation. Soon, however, Potter was taking off his clothes. The Snape in
this ‘fantasy’ was clearly an outlet for Potter’s frustrations.
The feeling of a naked body pressed beside his own had ceased in any way to be
comforting. Instead of drawing solace from the touch and smell of warm skin,
dark hair and pale limbs, each tryst was starting to leech something vital out
of Snape.
He rolled onto his side. This Harry Potter, who must be about twenty five, lay
on his front, face pillowed on his arms. His head was turned towards Snape. His
eyes were closed.
“Harry,” Snape urges, softly.
Harry opened his eyes, and Snape was engulfed in a sea of green.
“Where are you?” Snape murmured.
Harry’s brow furrowed in confusion.
“It’s been weeks since we heard any news. I am worried that I can’t stall
things much longer. What task have you been given? If you could only tell me, I
could help you. I know you don’t trust me, but if you could only -”
“What are you on about, Auror Snape?” the young man asked, propping himself up
and frowning at Snape.
“How I wish I hadn’t been backed into a corner, how I wish I could be doing
your task with you, instead of withering away at Hogwarts in that dead shell.
Come back and face me – fight me, curse me, only be there with me -” Snape
seized Harry by the waist and tried to strain Harry against him – but the man
flinched back, lashing out with one hand, face screwed up.
“Back off! I don’t know what planet you’re on -”
“That’s it – that spark, tell me you hate me! I find myself to be an
unspeakable pervert. I… hardly know myself anymore! Tell me I’m a coward, even
- just don’t -”
“You’re scaring me!”
Snape stopped.
“Why can you not love me?”
Harry Potter looked at him like he had gone mad.
“Love you, Snape?”
“Yes. I know I have little to recommend mys… But you’d want for nothing; not
for devotion, nor affection - I can give affection, I am capable! I am sure of
it, for the right person -”
“Have you been hit with a spell, Auror Snape?”
The sound of his own titled name was like a splash of cold water. Snape
recoiled, curled in on himself, bitterly.
“I-I’m sorry,” he stuttered, but the young man only regarded him suspiciously.
It was time to leave, to go back to his cold bed. Alone.
 
~
 
As he enters the room, Potter stands. Wringing nervous fingers, the boy watches
him approach the chair on the other side of the table.
This is the first time they have been this close since Snape almost died.
(At the last, he had failed. Years of searching: one option selected, one phial
prepared. Slipped inside his robes, ready… Not perfect, by any means, but good
enough. An escape.
But, in the end, when he ought to have died by Nagini’s bite, and gone, Snape
had been mesmerised by a pair of emerald eyes. By the real pair of green eyes,
the only ones he wanted to gaze into.
He had forgotten the phial entirely.
He has no idea where it is now.)
Snape reaches the table, then stands silent, hands manacled at his front. For
once, he is glad of them. It lends him a restraint that he feels he does not
possess.
He is so used to touching bodies that look like this one – but never this one,
never this Harry.
Only this one will do.
Snape knows that now.
Electricity burns through Snape’s veins. Being so close to his Harry sets him
on fire, but he just stands there, even though every nerve in his body is
tingling.
Potter’s gaze falls to the manacles, the boy clearly oblivious to the effect he
has on Snape.
“What are they for?”
“Your own protection, presumably,” Snape grits out.
He can see Potter swallow. The young man rallies fast, however, and motions for
Snape to sit.
“Is this room bugged?” Snape asks, cautiously.
“No,” Potter says, as though proud. “Hermione had it checked. Well, she checked
it.”
“My mind is at ease, then,” Snape says, sarcasm dripping like poison from his
lips.
“Leave off, Hermione’s good and you know it. The prosecution lawyers think I’m
only here to talk about… today… with you.”
“You’re not?” Snape raises one eyebrow.
“I’m here because they won’t let me anywhere near you to ask whether you want
me to show them your memories and testify on your behalf about Dumbledore!”
Potter hisses. “Well, do you?”
Snape is momentarily speechless.
“No,” he says, finally.
Potter looks at him like he has gone mad. He is used to it.
“Why not? I’d have been there sooner, except I didn’t even know you were having
a trial! No-one tells me anything. How long have you been preparing your case?”
(Since Wednesday morning, Snape does not say.)
“It is of no consequence,” he says, aloud.
“No conse – Snape! It’s clear the prosecution have been working for months on
this! And what was all that about, today? Hermione’s got this theory – she says
they’re trying to deliberately put me off helping you. They’ve been asking me
to testify against you! They clearly think if they make me run a mile with
today’s revelations that I’ll agree. Is that what this is about? Have they…
have they falsified evidence against you?”
Snape sighs.
“Calm down. No, they have not and yes, Miss Granger is probably correct. Let us
talk about something else. How’s Teddy Lupin? Are you to be his Guardian?”
“Teddy? Teddy’s fine! Why aren’t you concentrating? What do you mean they
haven’t falsified anything?”
“Surely you haven’t spent all day thinking those sordid details were entirely
made up?”
“I… I didn’t know what to think… You’re telling me they’re not? That you… Oh.”
Potter sags in his chair a little. Snape’s back remains ramrod straight.
“So you do want… all those things.”
“Not those exact things, no,” Snape sighs.
“You don’t want them? But they’re your fantasies!” Potter cries. “I can’t
understand why someone as intelligent and gifted as you spends all his free
time making sex fantasy potions! Don’t you have anything better to do, or are
you just that twisted?”
 
~
 
Time was running out. He knew this.
Soon, he feared he may be about to die, and he would be foolish to have all
these options available and not to take one. But which?
Few experiences Snape had had, since he began his strange journey into the
endless lives of himself and Harry Potter, were memorable by the end. Most
blurred into a sea of soft limbs and gasping voices; and hollow, emotionless
moments, driving Snape deeper into black despair.
One potion, which he remembered clearly, had entered him into a strange,
sanctuary-like monastery.
Where, he quickly learned, Potter was an Oracle and Snape his aide. It was a
beautiful ‘fantasy’; the sanctuary was on a secluded island in a blue tropical
sea. Potter had developed the ability at eighteen to see the future. He, Snape,
was Potter’s aide and guard.
Himself and Potter seemed to spend their days trying to hone Potter’s magical
ability.
Potter was quiet, peaceful, and practically nude. The heat was like the lick of
a warm tongue on their skin; even Snape was down to his shirtsleeves. Potter
had the silkiest, sleekest golden skin – which Snape knew first hand.
As the boy’s aide, he assisted with teaching Potter, feeding Potter, bathing
Potter… 
Himself and Potter, however, had taken vows of chastity.
So, every morning and night, he bathed beautiful naked Harry in a bath of milk,
sponging the young man’s skin with tenderness and reverence, as Harry leaned
back against him and sighed blissfully…
Snape felt the sigh down to his bones.
But his vows prevented him from acting upon his deep, forbidden desire.
It was a relief.
By this time Snape, sick of barking out his orgasms into indifferent flesh, was
glad of the reprieve.
Potter was a little distant, possibly a little drugged, but Snape was bound to
treat him with reverence and respect. It was hardly a chore.
He valued each touch as he bathed Harry far more than any sexual act.
“You’re lovely,” Snape murmured, one evening, as he bathed Potter in white
water under a pink sunset. Potter smiled sleepily, and clung to Snape’s neck.
Snape’s white shirt was wet and the ends of his hair damp, but he held Harry
tenderly as the boy leaned into him.
“So lovely. Out of all the places I have been, I could stay here. If only I
could now, but I have a job to do. Perhaps, after it is all over, I can come
back? If not him, then you. Please, if not him, then you.”
 
~
 
“Look,” Snape hisses, frustrated beyond all reason, “I shall tell you, and only
you, this once, and once only. You are not to repeat it to anyone, ever, am I
clear?”
Potter nods, dumbly, and Snape tell him the truth.
A truth he has never confessed to anybody.
“They are not… fantasies. There is a branch of Time Theory that presupposes
that there are, in fact, many different Realities existing at the same moment.
Many different versions of ourselves, in all different combinations of
scenarios and of… love interests. They are correct. These potions in court are
the results of years of experimentation to find realities in which I might not
end up in the miserable and lonely predicament I now find myself in; that I
might have what I want most. These are the ones I was successful in finding
where you and I have a… sexual connection. Drinking the potion has the power to
transport me into their reality, possibly for good, replacing the version of
myself that I find there. But, as you see, clearly none of them were to my
liking, as I returned, and remained, here.”
Potter’s mouth works, silently. He can see the boy trying to understand.
“You must think I’m stupid,” Potter finally chokes out.
“You can see what I think of you,” Snape snarls. “You will see in court, every
day, what I think of you -”
“I hear about you wanting to fuck your little sex slave, that’s what I hear!”
Potter yells. “You created some escapist dreams to feed your perverse need for
-”
“For what? If I am so perverse, why didn’t I just have you? I had ample
opportunity, all those detentions we spent alone together over the years -”
“You’re sick!”
“I finally found a few realities out of the thousands I searched through, out
of the ocean of time I travelled, where you and I were together! Yes, they were
not what I would have hoped for. Yes, I was disappointed, but yes, I did visit
them, and I did fuck you in them!”
Potter stands, chest heaving.
“Why would you do that?” he shouts.
 
~
 
One of Snape’s darkest nights came when, upon returning from the Forest of
Dean, he found he had stayed away too long.
He returned to a stench so foul and bitter; it tasted of desecration, of dreams
gone sour.
He tore through Dumbledore’s old rooms (his now, but he felt no ownership; he
was a cuckoo invading the nest) and burst into the bedroom.
Smoke was billowing out of the cauldron - black smoke, fetid smoke.
The sanctuary potion had spoiled.
Despair bubbled up in Snape’s throat and vomited out of his mouth as his
stomach lurched. He could barely cry out, barely move. All that work to find
something he could escape to – failed.
He would have to begin again.
 
~
 
“Because I care for you, you obnoxious brat!” Snape screams at him, rising
also.
Potter falters.
“You… you do?”
Snape turns away.
“I… had no idea,” Potter says, after a long silence.
“No,” Snape chuckles darkly, “you wouldn’t have. What those phials contain are
abortive attempts at finding some Reality in which we might have a meaningful
connection, but unfortunately I ran out of time.”
“So they’re like doorways to other Worlds?”
“Yes.”
“Worlds where we screw each other.” Potter looks disbelieving.
“Yes.”
“Why wouldn’t you take one of them, though? Over this reality, in which we
don’t?”
“Because I don’t want you in those ways. I don’t want you as my slave.”
“How do you want me? In… in your real fantasies?”
Snape is silent for a long time.
“I… reality is a lot more… mundane,” he mutters, embarrassed. “We share a home,
drink coffee in bed on weekends, fight sometimes. Make love. It, perhaps, is
the most unrealistic fantasy of them all,” he adds, bitterly.
“You couldn’t find a reality to escape to in which we really did all of that?”
Potter looks sceptical.
“As I said, I ran out of time. But who knows, it probably does not exist
anyway. And I will never know, now.”
Potter is silent now. Snape can almost hear his little mind working.
“I’ll testify for you,” Potter says, determination etched into his face.
“No, you won’t,” Snape sighs.
“Why not?” Potter snaps.
“Because if you, having seen my ‘fantasies’, still want to help me, people will
talk. About us.”
“Let them!”
“No.”
“Snape, it’s hardly going to ruin my perfect life! I’m in the papers every day,
there’s on-the-run Death Eaters who want my blood, gangs of people who think
Voldemort was doing a grand job! I’m not allowed out apart from under
supervision; training for Auror Academy is too dangerous, going back to school
endangers the other students. Professor McGonagall practically told me to piss
off, that I was too much of a liability to everyone else!” Potter cries.
“It will pass.”
“It hasn’t yet! But if you’re so worried about people accusing us of… whatever…
then tell them those aren’t real fantasies!”
“What part of ‘tell no-one, ever’ did your little brain not understand?” Snape
sneers.
“It’d show people you weren’t a completely sick pervert, for a start!” Potter
sneers back.
“Meddling with Time Theory is about as dark as it gets,” Snape snaps. “If I’m
not Kissed for Dumbledore’s murder, I’ll sure as hell be Kissed for that!”
“But you did it out of desperation, out of loneliness, out of… You’re in love
with me,” Potter exclaims, suddenly.
“Don’t get on your high horse, there’s no painting me out to be a romantic
victim,” Snape sneers. “What my reasons were doesn’t negate the fact that I
took the potions and engaged in numerous sexual acts with you, or someone very
like you, to assuage said desperate loneliness!”
“Are you in love with me?” Potter persists, sidestepping Snape’s very
deliberate attempt at a distraction.
Snape sighs, and the sigh is bone-deep. He feels a thousand years old.
He closes his eyes.
“More than my life,” he says helplessly, and hears Potter choke.
“Wow… Would you ever have told me?”
“Never in a hundred years,” Snape chuckles, darkly.
“This must be, like, the ultimate embarrassment, that it came out this way?”
“You have no idea,” Snape snorts.
“I… it’s just… I have no idea what to make of you, now. You don’t ever show me
anything consistent – first you’re a bastard, then you’re a hero, then you’re a
pervert, then you’re in love with me... I mean, perhaps I’m seeing many sides
of the same person, I don’t know.”
“In a few weeks, I’ll be dead, then the dilemma will be over,” Snape rolls his
eyes.
“You can’t want that. Please, let me testify for you.”
“No. There is nothing remaining for me here.”
“Not even me?”
“You are not on offer. You will fall in love, get married, have children… It
would kill me to see it. I will not torture myself for the rest of my life.”
“You might get released, move away, and forget me! Things can’t always be this
bleak -”
Snape rises.
“If that is all, Mr Potter…”
“Wait! God, I… I live to thank you, don’t you understand? We’d all be dead if
it wasn’t for you.”
“Going to reward me with your nubile young body, are you?” Snape sneers.
To his disquiet, Potter blushes a deep scarlet, and squirms a little in his
seat.
“I… everyone makes out like the thought is so horrible…”
An alarm blasts through the room.
Snape turns. The door is already opening.
He turns away, with regret.
“This will be, perhaps, the last time we shall speak.”
“No!” Harry moans, scrambling up.
“I would appreciate it if you would not come to the rest of the trial,” Snape
says, turning away at the sight of Potter’s lovely face twisted in misery.
Potter approaches his back.
“Why?”
“And if you would drop your request to see the contents of those phials.”
“No! You can’t make me stay away from you, not now!”
“It would give a dying man a bit of peace, can’t you understand?” Snape grits
out.
“You’re not dying, and I’m not leaving you – I said I’d testify and I will!”
“So fucking stubborn!” Snape snarls, whirling about. “Why can’t you leave me
be?”
“Because we’re not done!” Potter cries, tearing around the table, thin chest
puffing out and green eyes glinting.
He storms right up to Snape and pounds one fist on Snape’s chest, above his
heart, as though trying to restart it.
“There’s something… here, between us… I need to understand -”
“That is the last thing you need!” Snape shouts. Potter is too close, the heat
radiating from his little body too intense. “I will burn you, and break you,
and use you! I have searched for years, and found no reality in which you and I
join as equals! It never works! It can never work!”
“Maybe! But you love me. You love me!” Potter moans, wonder bubbling up in his
voice now.
He leans his young, upturned face against Snape’s shoulder. Slim hands ball
into fists against Snape’s chest.
Snape closes his eyes.
His nose is in Potter’s hair. Potter’s scent is like freshly cut grass, or a
forest on a summer’s evening. Snape’s withered heart sighs in his chest. His
blood feels hot again, pulsing in his dry veins.
“Stop touching me,” he growls, voice very deep. “I beg you.”
Potter looks up. Pressed against him, emotional and vulnerable and needy; eyes
huge –
Snape steps back. It feels like tearing himself in half.
Potter sways a little, his support suddenly gone.
Snape’s every fibre aches to go to him again.
“I think, before they add another criminal charge to my list -”
To his shock, Potter seizes his bound hands and presses his mouth to Snape’s
fist.
 
~
 
“Is he testifying for you?” Walter asks, when he returns.
It is the first thing he says. The only thing he cares about.
Snape, however, has his mind elsewhere.
“No.”
 
~
 
Snape lies in the dark cell that night, and looks up to where the ceiling might
be, far overhead.
His mind is fogged with care-worn daydreams. Over stimulated by the mere press
of Potter’s mouth on his wrist, he feels weak, watery.
He chuckles gloomily to himself; more overcome by the Love he idolises licking
his wrist than by the numerous sexual encounters he has participated in.
He remembers their first time. Well, not really their first time.
His first time with a Harry Potter.
He laughs again, bleakly, at the thought of himself at the time, just before
Potter started his sixth year: starved for affection; for touch and for
closeness in his bitter, bleak existence.
The first time he succeeded in calling forth a reality in which Potter did not
flinch at his touch, Snape remembers himself to have been so overwhelmed with
relief that he considered not coming back.
He had been visiting other ‘fantasy’ realms in the year previous, although he
does not remember exactly when he had realised that he and Potter would never
be in his lifetime, and become unable to stand the painful reality of it. The
potions experimentation had begun then; a long, lonely road.
The scenarios he found were never too far removed from this reality (straying
far from the path was dangerous, and unpredictable) and the characters are
usually the same. He has met endless Weasleys and Grangers, and been at
Hogwarts over and over. He has even been the same age as Potter.
He has seen Lily Evans precisely forty eight times.
But never has he got to… touch Harry Potter before.
He has been Potter’s enemy, Potter’s friend, even Potter’s best man… But never
the lover. Until now.
Their first time comes just after the real Potter’s sixteenth birthday. The
lead up to it is not pretty.
In the reality Snape tries out, he thinks the young man is older, but not by
much.
 It starts with – or at least, Snape at the time had thought so – the most
painful humiliation possible. (When he looks back on it now, he almost laughs.
To think, he had been convinced the revelation of his interest in Potter could
be no worse than this!)
Snape remembers it with bitterness.
 
~
 
When he found his feet, he was standing behind Harry Potter, who was just about
to push open to door to a room Snape had never seen before.
Never seen, and yet… he feared it, instantly.
To be more specific… He feared Potter’s presence there.
Feelings from his old life and this new reality warred within him.
Unfortunately, it took him too long to have any cemented memories from the new
reality – Potter had already opened the door.
It was too late.
“What… is this place?” Harry whispered. Gazing around, eyes huge.
Snape, standing in the doorway, slumped against the doorframe and placed a
weary hand over his eyes. He remembered.
“Come out,” he said, low.
“It that… me?” Harry asked, voice breathy.
He stepped forward, shakily.
A candle burned low on a little table, and by the flickering orange light Snape
could see…
Lining the walls of the tiny room were a riot of pictures; clippings,
photographs, drawings… all of Harry Potter, and all of him… naked.
Harry didn’t seem to have his shirt on in a single one. In some, he was
completely starkers, and bent over in all manner of positions; spread out on
fur sheets, leaning over suggestively, on his knees; on his hands and knees…
“This… I’ve never posed for these,” Harry spluttered.
“Of course you haven’t,” Snape spat, memories flooding to him of himself in
this life, sexually obsessed – worse than himself in his previous life. “Do you
know how great the market is for erotic pictures of you? Polyjuice works just
as well.”
“Did you Polyjuice someone?” Harry squeaked, gazing in horror at a photo of
himself, grinning, with a large black dildo up his bottom.
“No,” Snape growled. “I bought all these,” he lied. It was disturbing, knowing
that the body he now inhabited had had sex with whores Polyjuiced as Potter.
“Potter, what are you -”
Harry had opened one of the drawers. The forbidding objects he found in there
made him recoil in shock.
“Why do you need all those, then?” he squeaked.  “Are you going to use them on
me?” he demanded, backing away as Snape moved forward.
Snape strode over and slammed the drawer shut.
“Of course not!” he hissed.
(What would the Snape of this reality have done now, he wondered? Would he have
forced Potter against his will? Perhaps Snape had entered this reality in time
to stop a terrible tragedy…)
“Then why…”
“A man can have a fantasy without being a pervert!” Snape snapped, although he
didn’t feel like he believed it. This Snape probably was a pervert.
“You want to do all these things to me,” Harry said, flatly.
Snape turned away. It was true, but not like this.
“You want,” Harry began, slowly, “to stick these things up my various –”
“Shut up,” Snape growled, his back to Harry, fists clenched.
“Well do you?” Harry shouted, his voice sounding very loud in the little space.
“How could you – this is so bloody disturbing! All the time you pretend to be
my mentor, and secretly you’re keeping this! It’s… you know I can’t…”
“I know,” Snape said, quietly. “I offer no… explanation.”
Harry shook his head.
“Then why… How come you keep all this… Is that a ball gag?” He squinted at the
picture.
“Probably,” Snape said, not turning around.
“I think you need to explain,” Harry whispered.
“Outside,” Snape snapped, and he marched to the door, jerking it open harshly.
Harry walked slowly after him, trying not to look about, but his eye fell on a
half empty bottle of lube on a shelf, and he shivered.
Snape closed the door with an air of finality and leant his back against it,
looking at Harry searchingly.
It was only then that he noticed that Harry wore Slytherin robes.
Clearly different in this reality, then.
He could no longer rely on the innate Gryffindor nature of the young man.
A Slytherin Harry Potter… Snape suddenly felt out of his depth. This Potter was
an unknown.
With the door closed and the strange, other-worldly place shut away again,
Harry sagged against the table.
“Go on,” he said, looking exhausted.
“Tea first,” Snape said, and strode away.
As he made the tea, he realised how exposed the little kitchen was. From the
doorway, Potter could see Snape’s hands shaking as he poured the hot water.
When Snape handed him his mug, Harry took it silently and wandered, listless,
into the living room.
“Right,” Potter said. “Explain.”
Snape looked at him again; a hard, searing look.
Hell, what did he have to lose? Might be worth playing along… He had never had
his sexual interest in Potter exposed before. Perhaps something would come of
it…
“I do want you,” Snape admitted, low. “I can hardly deny it, now. The question
is… what are you going to do now?”
“Me?” Potter squeaked. “How do you mean?”
“You have knowledge over me – power. You can have me fired.”
“I could,” Potter said, thoughtfully, but he still looked too dazed to focus.
“I could do. I could run to Dumbledore. Or I could blackmail you.”
His Harry would never… But this was not his Harry. This was no Gryffindor.
“Or… or you could get the box of dildos out and we could… play.”
“I… I beg your pardon?” Snape spluttered.
Potter blushed.
“I’m going to be honest, I am probably going to blackmail you. But I’ll also
have sex with you, because the more I do that, the more I have to hold over
you. You have to decide whether having sex with me is worth it.”
Definitely no Gryffindor.
“I get blackmailed either way, I take it?” Snape smirked. “Only worse if I fuck
you?”
“Yeah,” Harry shrugged, smirking. “But you get to fuck me. Is it worth the
risk, the increased aggravation?”
“Yes,” Snape said, instantly. He, fortunately, could leave this reality at any
time. And he was overwhelmed by the offer of sex – one he had never had before.
The Snape here deserves whatever comes to him anyway, he thought nastily.
“Ok then,” Potter grinned. “Go and get the dildos and then… it’s up to you.”
Snape started towards the door eagerly, then faltered. This was not… how he
envisioned their first time. Surely he would be a fool to turn down an offer of
sex, after so much searching?
But an offer of sex purely for blackmail’s sake? Did that… count?
It was hardly the romantic ideal Snape had so longed for.
He would take what he could get.
 
~
 
Looking back on it now, it was so empty.
At the time, however, it was heaven, it was bliss; Merlin he could stay here
forever, fucking Potter, doing whatever whim Potter thought up just so long as
he got to bury himself in that blissful heat over and over… There was lube
everywhere – he had been inside Potter all night, had Potter standing,
kneeling, on all fours.
Four slick dildos lay discarded on the rug around them; Potter’s hole stretched
and cherry red. Potter looked exhausted, hair sweaty and stuck up in all
directions. Snape was currently photographing the boy, who was lying on his
back, young arse stuffed full of hard black dildo. Potter spread his legs and
grinned.
“Like that, old man?” he grinned, ankles in the air.
“Love it,” Snape snarled.
“Fuck me again?” Potter whimpered, pleadingly.
Snape dropped the camera and crawled, naked, toward him. Potter pushed out the
dildo and threw it aside, and Snape mounted him instantly, the boy on his back
still.
“Come on baby, fuck me hard!” Potter squealed. Snape pumped his hips into him,
gasping and growling into Potter’s neck.
It was bliss; inside Potter was bliss.
Snape had finally found it.
“Right. I want money,” Potter said, sometime later, as Snape pulled out and
started wiping himself off.
Snape’s mood soured a little. He was still optimistic at this point, however.
He had succeeded in a big goal – they had had sex.
He and a Harry Potter had had sex. His whole body sang with it.
He could improve on this for next time – perhaps in a reality in which Potter
was not Slytherin, for a start, or so manipulative.
Oh, but if only he could have the Potter of his reality – pure of heart, good
and lovely.
None he ever met came close, especially not this one.
But this one had had sex with him.
He would keep trying. He would find somewhere that would combine the two:
lovely Potter, his beacon of hope and beauty… and a sexual relationship.
Surely he could find just one reality in which the sex was respectful and
loving and equal? In which Potter was near enough how he was when Snape loved
him best?
He only needed one.
 
~
 
Snape, half asleep, twists in his sheet, sweating.
Sickening, this disease – why did he have to fall for Potter at all? Perhaps he
ought to have sought out worlds in which Harry Potter never even existed?
He should have known that an obsession this dark, with something he would never
– and should never – possess, would only lead to disaster. And it has.
To think of himself back then, when he started, so sure he would find a reality
in which himself and Potter had loving, fulfilling sex!
What a fool.
No such reality existed.
But then… why on earth did Potter kiss his bound hands today?
 
~
 
Suddenly, the door clangs; creaks open. Snape tries to sit up but he is tired,
so tired.
When he realises it is Harry Potter standing in the doorway, it only makes
things worse.
Potter merely stands there, watching Snape cautiously. He stays for so long
that Snape comes to wonder whether the boy is a vision.
Potter shifts from foot to foot. When he speaks, his speech sounds painfully
unsure; rehearsed, even.
“I’ve never felt so powerless, so useless. I can’t bear the thought of, after
all you went through, you not having the outcome you wanted…”
Without further ado, Potter opens his palm.
A phial is nestled there, glinting darkly in the cell’s dim light.
“I don’t know which one it is. It’s one of the five, we stole it. All of them
take you to some reality where you… get what you need, don’t they?”
Snape’s mouth has gone dry. He cannot speak.
He chokes, his tongue too thick.
Potter approaches him.
“Will this help? You’re not… saying anything?” Potter whispers.
Snape looks up at him.
“None of them were as beautiful as you,” he croaks out.
What is a little more humiliation now?
Potter draws back; but from shock, not disgust.
He stares down at Snape in fascination, as though seeing him for the first
time. His other hand slips across his mouth.
“You’re not going to take it?”
Snape shakes his head, wearily.
“You won’t go?” Harry hisses.
“My worst fear has happened: you know of my… weakness. No Kiss can be worse.”
“I’m giving you an out – an escape – one to where you get what you want!”
“And I am saying thank you, but I will take my chances here.”
“What if you get Kissed? Snape, it’s looking more likely by the day.”
Snape shrugs.
“None of them were you. Would you settle for a cheap imitation of the person
you loved? What is the point? I could be with a hundred people who wear your
face, but they are not you. Therefore… no. Thank you for your concern.”
Potter pockets the phial, frustration resonating from him in waves.
“You can’t have what you want, so you’ll have nothing?”
“Correct.”
“Snape, I… There’s something I… God! Why is everything always so difficult?”
“How is any of this your concern?”
“Because you want me and I… The idea isn’t totally… I would…”
Potter falters.
“If you don’t take this, you’ll die. I don’t know what to do. I only know I
can’t lose you. Please.”
Snape shakes his head.
Potter’s eyes grow hard.
“I’ll be in court tomorrow, and every day, until the sentencing. I’m not giving
up on you.”
He rises, and stalks out.
 
~
 
“…and so, without further ado, and after all the perversions we have seen in
these last six weeks, it is with little regret that I sentence you to be
Kissed!”
Snape raises his head as the judge speaks, so that, by the word ‘kissed’, his
gaze has locked with Potter’s.
The boy looks gratifyingly stricken. Perhaps this will be the last time he ever
sees Potter.
Despite the hubbub that breaks out around him, Snape thinks only of Potter’s
face; of trying to commit to memory that precise curve of his jaw; the almond
shape of his eyes. He drinks in that last look as one parched, drawing in
sustenance for his final hours.
A cocoon against the world, the loveliness of Potter’s mouth.
 
~
 
As the night wears thin, Snape’s mood sours still further. Bleakness enfolds
him.
At around two, there are footsteps outside. Snape, ragged, entangled in despair
as black as treacle, can barely raise his head.
“Snape? Se…Snape?”
That voice…
The cell door groans open, and Potter glides in, a pale light in the darkness.
Too thin still, and haunted-looking.
“Snape, look at me.”
Snape regards him wearily.
“I know I’m not particularly creative, but one of your scenarios got me
thinking. Vampires can’t be Kissed. It has no effect. Listen, please, there
isn’t much time!”
From the depths of his robes, Potter pulls out… nothing. Then he mutters an
incantation over it, and into being dissolves a small leather pouch.
Kneeling beside him, Potter lays the pouch on the dirty ground and gently
shakes out the contents.
Snape, expecting to see more illegally obtained phials of his potions, turns
away, sickened. It all seems especially sordid now, with the object of his
perverse desires kneeling in front of him.
A hand upon his cheek; soft and tender.
A touch worth dying for.
Snape closes his eyes.
When he opens them again, Potter is kneeling between his parted legs, much too
close.
He risks a look at the ground, and there is a phial, but it contains a red
liquid, not black, and sits beside a small, clean knife.
Confused, he looks up, and realises Potter’s face is inches from his own.
Snape, aware he has not washed in days, wants to shrink away into the stone
wall at his back. But Potter is looking at him in fascination, as though he
were a specimen in a jar – now Potter edges closer, all curiosity and hope and
he’s far too near…
He smells beautiful, lemongrass and ginger and something else, a raw tang of
sweetness, like fruit, oh, so much moist skin…
For all the times he has kissed Harry Potter, when he finally kisses the one
that he wants, he realises all those kisses were nothing.
He has never kissed Harry Potter before.
Potter kisses sweetly, tentatively. Edging close to him, he takes Snape’s
stubbled jaw in his hands. Ever so light; a touch almost imperceptible. Potter
touches his soft lips to Snape’s dry ones with the hesitancy of youth. Snape,
terrified, unused to being the one to be kissed, sits motionless as Potter
experiments by fluttering his mouth against Snape’s. Until, emboldened, there
is a more definite press of lips and a small, pink tongue tracing over his
bottom lip –
Snape crushes Harry to his chest and sinks his tongue into the boy’s mouth.
Harry feels smaller than he had imagined; there’s less meat to him, a small bag
of eager bones and sinews in Snape’s hands. He cannot pour out all the despair,
all the pain and desire and love into one kiss, so he winds Harry in his arms,
all the tighter for it being of no use.
Too late, he has what he wants (needs) so badly.
They kiss for a long time in the dark. Potter makes little sniffling noises and
sighs into Snape’s hair when his neck is nuzzled. When Snape bites down softly
on the juncture between neck and shoulder, Harry makes a high-pitched moan and
scrabbles at his shoulder.
He thinks about confessing love. He has not actually said the words to Potter
yet. It might be his only chance.
He draws back, and tries to read Harry’s face in the sparse dregs of light. He
feels the smaller body breathing, and imagines for a moment, a lifetime of
this, this bliss.
“You are my… greatest regret,” he says, instead.
He feels Harry’s head lift up.
“You’re mine, too.”
Snape snorts.
“Me saying that is far more – what have you to regret, for God’s sake?”
“That I didn’t understand what you were doing before – before I got your
memories. You played a part and I ought to have seen through it -”
“That would have defeated the point rather, no?”
“Please! You’re the most important person in my life. I don’t know what that
means yet, but I’m willing to, if you don’t just give up on yourself. The red
phial is Vampire blood. It’ll turn you.”
“You’re asking me to die, and live as a fugitive. How do you think we’ll have a
chance to find out anything?” Snape sneers.
He wants to believe, to have hope, but his heart is so tired. Perhaps it might
beat better dead, after all?
“I don’t know,” Harry whispers, and his voice is so small, he almost sounds
defeated too. “Please don’t give up on… on...”
“New Vampires are notoriously weak – are you expecting me to survive the Kiss
tomorrow and then fend off the Aurors who will want to lock me up for -”
“I’ll be there tomorrow too, we all will. Ron and Hermione. We’ll work it out.”
Snape’s lips twitch in a wry smile.
“Hadn’t thought that far ahead?”
“Does that surprise you?” Harry whispers, sliding his hands up Snape’s chest.
He glances at the door. “If you’re doing this, I want it to be while I’m here,
so we’d better hurry.”
“No time for me to enjoy my last breath, or my last sunset -” Snape snorts.
“It’s already dark.”
“You know what I mean!” he snaps. “And how exactly am I to -”
Potter shuffles back (Snape finds his hands suddenly empty, like his heart has
been torn out) and starts feeling about on the floor behind him.
“I brought… there’s a knife here, somewhere. Just a small one. And a phial of
the blood.”
“Where on earth did the Boy Saviour get that?”
“Don’t ask. With the security detail I’ve been assigned, what with all the
death threats… I can’t stay long.”
“Then you should have brought alcohol or something, makes the blood thinner.”
“Fuck!”
“Plus being drunk might have been a nice thought,” Snape snorts, bitterly.
“I wouldn’t know, I’ve never…”
“Hand me the knife, if you’re going to talk, then,” Snape interrupts.
“I… You’re sure about doing this?”
“As you so tactfully point out, I’m going to die in the morning anyway. Why?
Cold feet?”
Small fingers firmly press a pocket knife into his hand.
“No. And I want to be here.”
“Have you found the vampire blood?”
“It’s here in my hand,” Potter whispers.
“Alright then.”
There is a silence. Snape grits his teeth.
“How sexually experienced are you?”
“Eh?” Potter splutters.
“I don’t want details, just the basics. Have you been with a woman?”
“God! Er… in what way?” He can almost hear Potter blushing.
“Sex. Have you had sex?” Snape grits out.
There is a pause.
“No.” A bashful admission.
“What have you done?”
“Um… Handjobs. A couple, a… A couple of times.”
“More than one person?”
“No.”
“Oral sex?”
“No!” Potter squirms.
“Not at all?” Snape demands.
“I said no!”
“What about men?”
“Men? Not a thing. I never even kissed a man before today.”
“Never been drunk, ah… never had sex…”
“I know, I know. Too experienced in some ways, woefully innocent in others –
mainly in the good things, from what I can gather. Sucks to be me, right?
Snape?”
Harry scrabbles around in the rapidly growing warm pool, and Snape knows the
moment when the boy realises, for he hears a low moan.
He can taste the boy’s panic. For his own part, he is blissfully lightheaded,
even withstanding the throbbing pain in his right thigh.
“How does it come out so fast?” Harry is moaning and babbling. Their fingers
are wet when Snape finally locates, and links his fingers with, Harry’s free
hand.
“When I stop breathing, tip the blood down my throat. Don’t leave it too long.
Then get the fuck out of here.”
Potter is strangely silent.
 
~
 
The transformation is not pretty.
“I thought I said leave!” Snape gasps, as he writhes and thrashes, feeling his
dying body rage against movement without blood, without oxygen.
Potter, however, kneeling before him, eyes luminous, merely bites his lip and
edges closer.
“You’re weak! Bite me!” Potter whispers.
“I haven’t got any fucking fangs yet!” Snape groans.
“Oh, God – where’s the knife?” Potter starts blundering about in the darkness.
“What are you doing?”
There is a silence – then, a soft gasp.
“Ow, shite… Um… Quick, it’s getting everywhere…” Potter’s voice sounds scared
and small now.
Snape reaches out – to help him, to stop the bleeding – but suddenly Potter is
leaning against him, bodily, and Snape’s treacherous hands seize up handfuls of
him.
Their mouths meet, and soon after Potter’s damp wrist is in his mouth, and he
sucks at it in fear; in wonder. Gulping down Potter’s warm blood.
Potter stays with him until just before dawn, murmuring soft things against his
throat as his skin grows cold and his body dies, readjusts… and restarts.
 
~
 
The watery dawn light is sore on his raw skin. As he looks out of the barred
window with his dead eyes, Snape thinks bitterly that he is was glad his
execution is not at midday.
 
~
 
Executions at Azkaban are performed on a platform, overlooking the roaring sea
below. There are no guard railings, and no wards. People can easily take a
running jump, rather than face the Kiss.
From all accounts, several do.
At the sight of the Dementor that has been assigned the task of leeching his
soul out of his living flesh, Snape feels nothing. No foreboding, nothing. He
has been cold ever since last night, when the last traces of his body’s warmth
spilled out across his cell floor.
The platform is lined with people; Snape is flanked on both sides as he walks
toward the bleakly floating executioner. He tries not to look to left and
right, yet still he sees Potter, clear as day.
Perhaps it is his new Vampire senses, but each solemn form on the platform
seems washed with grey, pale as the dawn. But not Potter.
(Potter, gorgeous, anxious, resolved; the boy blazes like the dying autumn sun.
Snape feels it to his core, the burn of him; the beauty.)
As he reaches the Dementor, Snape is unsettled by the fact that the hopeless
feeling he had long associated with their kind is… missing.
He looks up into the faceless face of his executioner.
And bares his new fangs.
 
~
 
Watching a Dementor try and fail to suck out a soul is like watching a trapped
spider in a jar; grotesque, the way it starts thrashing and writhing. There are
gasps from the assembled crowd as the creature tries to tear at Snape in any
way it can. Snape stands firm and straight, eyes closed, as wizards around him
start to mutter their dissent.
Snape opens his eyes then, and watches in amusement as the Dementor, clearly
unmanned by its failure, shrinks back. Wringing its dead hands in horror at
itself.
He turns, amused by the muttering behind him – expecting some remonstration or
intervention from Potter’s camp.
Potter, however, has gone. No-one comes forward to Snape’s aid.
The officials from the Wizengamot are bunching together now.
Someone in the crowd starts the mutter of ‘Cast Avada Kedavra!’ Another cries,
‘Finish him!’
Snape wants to laugh. Then, in a moment of cocksure self-assurance, having
cheated death once again – having become death – he bares his fangs for the
crowd too.
Then instantly regrets it, as fifty wands all train on him within five seconds.
 
~
 
Snape stands tensed, fangs slipping in mortification behind his thin lips. He
glances about – surely Potter, having been so obvious earlier – ought to be
easy to find; to gesture forward for aid?
Snape can feel his presence on the platform, in the way it made his skin sing
and his dead blood tremble - but he cannot not see him.
Suddenly, from the back of the crowd somewhere, there is a scream.
“Harry, no! No, let him go, let him – HARRY!”
 
~
 
They bundle Snape down the stone stairs and into a holding cell so fast his
head spins.
Gone.
Taken.
“Did you organise this, Snape?” Weasley screams into his face.
Snape, pale and sweaty, shakes his head over and over, denial after denial.
“Do you know where Harry Potter is?”
“No!”
“Do you know who took him?”
“No!”
 
~
 
Hours pass. Wasted, useless hours.
“I can find him for you. I have had his blood,” Snape finally says.
That shuts them all up.
“How? Jesus, do I even want to know?” Weasley groans. “Kingsley – if it’s true,
can’t he help?”
 “I can hardly find him for you if I am incarcerated – or deceased – can I?”
Snape sneers.
There is a collective pause.
“Have you planned this, between you?” Shacklebolt hisses. “Is this part of your
brilliant plan?”
“No, the Vampirism was his brilliant plan. Potter added getting kidnapped all
on his own – how would that help me?”
“So you genuinely have no idea where he is?” Granger slumps down into a chair,
clearly devastated.
“There will be, if I am ever allowed out of the wards that smother this place,
a trail I can attempt to follow, through his blood. I have read about it. I can
attempt to find him, but not from within a cell. And, before it is suggested, I
won’t take kindly to being followed.”
“What do you want?” Weasley folds his arms.
“Just because you got accepted into Auror Academy on the merits of your more
popular, more talented and more attractive best friend does not make you a
master interrogator, Weasley,” Snape snaps.
“Tell me what you want, then?” Shacklebolt snaps back, rising angrily.
“Guarantee my freedom, permanently. Drop the charges. And I will return him to
you.”
“What guarantee do we have that you won’t just run off?” Granger cries.
Snape fixes her with his dead black eyes.
“I have wanted him since he was fourteen, have just been tried for obsessing
sexually over him, and have drunk his blood – which, under Vampire bonding
rites, makes him my property. I would go to him if my spine were snapped. Now
let me go, Shacklebolt. We’re wasting valuable time.”
“Alright - terms. You check in on Friday with us, tell us where you are, if you
haven’t found him by then. If he is returned alive, you may be able to buy back
your freedom. If you don’t find him… We will find you. Is that clear, Snape?”
“Crystal.”
“Good. Now fuck off.”
 
~
 
Three_months_later...
 
On a slender table, a turn-dial white telephone starts to ring shrilly.
Five minutes later, it is still ringing.
Surrounding it, three Malfoys regard both each other and the phone with
increasing anxiety.
“You answer it,” Lucius prods his son with the head of his cane, before
returning to leaning upon it far more heavily than he used to.
Swallowing thickly, Draco reaches for the phone.
“Wait! That old thing has never rung in how many years?” Narcissa grasps
Draco’s arm.
Draco sighs, shrugs her off gently, and picks up the phone.
“Hello?”
“Malfoy. It’s Snape.”
“Professor? Dad, it’s Snape,” Draco breathes.
“I am not a Professor. Draco, I need to speak to Malfoy senior.”
 
~
 
There is a fumbling and a few muttered voices.
“Severus? I heard you died,” Malfoy’s smirk is audible.
“I did. I need money, Malfoy,” Snape glances about. This telephone box has had
all its windows smashed. There is no privacy to be had.
“Again? How much?” Malfoy sounds amused.
“A mere trifle. Nine hundred thousand.”
There was the sound of choking.
“I hope you don’t think me rude, Severus, but… What are you intending to buy?”
“Something highly valuable,” Snape hisses.
“What is it?”
“It’s personal, Malfoy.”
“Potter, then. I thought so. You are aware that the Malfoy estate isn’t worth
as much as it used to be?”
“I need it by tomorrow night. Sell the peacocks,” Snape snorts.
“What’s in it for me, Snape?”
“Name your terms,” Snape grits out. He has been expecting this.
“Make me one of those potions you’re now so infamous for.”
“Lucius!”
“Not now, Narcissa!”
“You asked me for a sex fantasy potion in front of your wife?” Snape snorts,
amused.
“Will you do it? I don’t have much in this life any more, Snape,” Lucius
hisses.
“Yes. Put Draco back on.”
A fumbling again.
“I swear I am seriously traumatised now.” Draco’s voice.
“Draco, can you facilitate this if I give you my location? You must not reveal
this to anyone.”
“You’re buying Potter? Who’s selling him?”
“The people who kidnapped him. Draco, I can’t say more.”
“I followed the trial. You and Potter. It’s sick. And the worst part of it is,
I’m more pissed off that it wasn’t me.”
“Draco!”
“Mum, it’s fine. Snape, tell me exactly there you are.”
 
~
 
The market square is thick with coloured smokes (purples, oranges, violent
greens) and the smell of fetid meats. Perfumed and hazy, the gloom shrouds
Snape, a dank cloak of smells, as he moves through the dusty stone streets.
Hungry to the point of starvation, thin and beleaguered, Snape clasps his
tattered robe with one hand, and a brown briefcase in the other.
No-one pays him any notice in this dim, drug-addled place; his fangs have
refused to retract for five days now, but not one person has screamed, or
laughed, or even noticed.
Snape regards the passers-by with disdain; wide-eyed, barely dressed,
shepherded by heavies or collapsed in puddles of vomit in the streets. Snape
has fed on too many drug addicts in the past few months – their blood is putrid
and thick, clotting in his throat; or else too thin like alcohol, stinking like
alcohol too.
Dimly, in the back of his mind, he still remembers the gentle beauty of
Potter’s blood in his mouth.
Nectar instead of decay.
Snape has lost count of the men he had killed to get this far.
Potter had been sold into a slavery ring, and moved from country to country
across Europe. Thither went Snape, following in footsteps weeks old, trails
gone cold, or dying. Missed opportunities, false information, and numerous
fights – but finally, he is here, in this stinking place, where the pull
between him and Potter is stronger than ever.
It beats in Snape’s chest (as if he still had a heart able to beat, in there
somewhere).
Potter is here, in this town, somewhere close by.
Snape, squinting in the murky twilight, pauses before a large black door. There
is no number, nor sign. He knocks.
“I’m not sure you want to be here?” a man murmurs, directly into his left ear.
Snape turns. Two men loom directly behind him, stocky and tall, out of nowhere.
(Have they been following him, unnoticed? He is clearly losing his touch.)
“I am here,” Snape hisses, in practiced words, “to apply for a loan.”
He gestures with the briefcase towards the black door, impatient now.
The two men exchange glances.
“Got an appointment with the bank manager?”
“I have. Seven o’clock.”
Another shared glance. One of the men pushes past Snape roughly, and fits a
brass key into a rusted lock. He shoves at the huge door and it creaks open
onto a corridor that is dark and airless.
“Enjoy.”
Snape bows his head, and stoops inside, relieved. The corridor slants
downwards, taking him underground. At the bottom is a plastic purple bead
curtain, which rustles as he pushes through it.
 
~
 
The welcome room is a riot of purple sofas and gold plush cushions. The
chandelier creaking from the gold ceiling is missing several broken crystals.
The carpet is torn and a deep red, like spilled blood. A woman, covered from
head to toe in a lime green robe made of a rippling sheer fabric, approaches
him.
“Name?”
“Stoker.”
The name meets with recognition, to his relief. Snape has a flashback to the
real Mr Stoker, lying crumpled on his apartment’s toilet floor, congealing,
after Snape’s ‘questioning’.
“This way, Mr Stoker. Drink?”
Snape shakes his head.
“You are just in time, you are the last here. Bidding starts in five minutes.”
 
~
 
Snape is shown into a tiny black box of a room, with a glass panel instead of a
far wall. There is an executive style leather chair - and a wired panel with
buttons, like a remote, sitting on a spindly table beside it.
“Buttons light up, auction starts. Bid by pressing red button. When red button
goes out, you are highest bidder. When red button is lit, someone else is
highest bidder. Accept purchases by pressing green button. Retire from auction
by pressing yellow button. Understand?”
Snape sits, cautiously. He nods. He tucks the briefcase close to his right leg.
 
~
 
“Gentlemen, for your pleasure, we have our first lady tonight. Remember to bid
with the red button. Bidding starts at five thousand. Over to you.”
Snape sits in the dark, the button panel lit up next to him.
On the other side of the glass panel, in the centre of a circular room
obviously bordered by numerous other booths just like his, a young woman stands
in the glare of a single overhead spotlight.
She is wearing a gold bikini, and it looks like someone else has done her make-
up – it appears plastered onto her otherwise attractive face, turning it a sour
orange.
Snape presses the yellow button. Retire.
 
~
 
An hour passes. Each bidding war takes around ten minutes. A string of young
men and women are hustled into the spotlight, scantily clad and shivering under
the gaze of the booths surrounding them.
And then, just like that, a young man is pushed into the spotlit circle.
Dangerously thin, hair cropped shorter than Snape has ever seen in, doe-eyed
and resentful in the glare of the lights. A shorn lamb.
Beautiful.
Potter quivers, squinting in nervous anticipation into lights that must have
been blinding.
Biting his red bottom lip, shuffling his bare feet, clenching and unclenching
slender fingers into fists…
Dressed in nothing but a thin flesh-coloured pair of panties, barely there, the
slight of him makes Snape’s blood boil.
He grits his teeth, running his tongue over his fangs, which definitely refuse
to retract at the sight of Potter. The urge to possess the boy, after so many
trials, is almost overwhelming.
For Potter to be so close, yet remain just out of reach…
Snape adjusts his cuffs.
Calm.
He is transfixed by the sight of Potter’s ankles.
On the floor, to his right, in the brown briefcase, nestles the equivalent of
nine hundred thousand pounds.
 
~
 
After months of searching, the final event happens very fast.
“Special order – luxury item, this young man. Who will bid first?”
Snape makes no move. The red button taunts him, lit up bright red like a
glowing cherry.
Then it starts.
“Starting the bidding at fifty thousand. Begin, gentlemen!”
Behind Potter high up on the wall, a red digital panel records the amount.
Flashing up at fifty, it immediately begins to shoot up with alarming speed.
Snape bids once at ninety five thousand, then again at four hundred. He tries
not to look at Potter, blind and frightened-looking, wilting in the glare of
the spotlights. Potter, who must be completely unaware of Snape’s presence.
He sees Potter tremble at six hundred thousand, eyes downcast. Defeat starts to
etch itself into the lines of Potter’s bare body.
What must be going through the young man’s head, Snape has no idea.
He is not a man to fall at the final hurdle.
Nevertheless, when the rising figure starts to slow at eight hundred thousand,
Snape feels his dead palms begin to sweat. Not long before he has exhausted his
resources.
Surely, he cannot lose now…
The bidders start dropping out. First one, then five more, as if the
humiliation of losing is more acceptable in a group.
There are two men left, and Snape.
Eight hundred and fifty thousand.
Snape fixes his eyes on the red button. When the light goes out, he is the
highest bidder.
When it is red, he has to bid, or lose.
He bids.
Eight hundred and sixty thousand.
One more man drops out.
Eight hundred and seventy thousand.
Thirty thousand pounds stand between him and Potter.
Eight hundred and eighty thousand.
If he loses, he will have to kill every man in this room.
There is a pause. His adversary does not press the button.
Snape hold his breath. Such as a man can, who no longer needs to breathe.
Eight hundred and ninety thousand.
His last bid. He has no more.
He presses the button.
Nine hundred thousand.
Snape closes his eyes as his light goes out. When he opens them again, he fully
expects to see it illuminated red once more…
He had been foolish not to ask for more money. So foolish.
Potter is even more enchanting in the flesh than in his dreams – of course men
want him. Now Snape has lost the easy way out; a lot of blood stands between
him and his prize. But he is so tired; perhaps he will not make it.
He should try to fight them here; he has more chance of gazing into Potter’s
enchanting beautiful green eyes as real death takes him…
He opens his eyes.
His light is still out.
Almost wildly, he glances up.
A hand falls on his shoulder. One of the heavies from outside is standing at
his side.
“Bidder retires. You win.”
 
~
 
Snape slumps back in his chair; he is sure he can feel his truly dead heart
slamming about inside his chest.
Done.
Harry Potter is finally being delivered to him – rather than moving further and
further from his reach.
Mindful of the eyes on him, he collects himself; back ramrod straight, chin up,
eyes hard. As though what he has just purchased is a mere commodity and not…
his entire purpose for being.
Potter stands there, trembling, with no clue as to who has just won him.
Snape gazes at him; never has he felt so possessive of Potter as he does in
that moment.
One of the guards stalks over and seizes Potter by the arm, and Snape growls,
low in his throat.
He watches Potter flinch and struggle like a stuck fish, as the young man has
his hands bound with blue plastic rope, and is manhandled out of the glare of
the lights.
A tap on his shoulder.
“Money first.”
Snape hands over the briefcase in silence.
“Good. While we count, you may meet with boy. When doors open, money is
counted: you may leave.”
 
~
 
Snape has a moment to glimpse Potter through the cracked green glass of the red
door.
He watches Potter, glasses clearly lost some time ago, feel his way blind
around the new room.
Trembling; clearly trying to formulate an escape plan.
 He watches Potter fail to find the door, and sink in despair into one of the
green chairs.
“Fuck!” whimpers the young man, head dropping toward his skinny bound wrists.
He starts to pick at the rope with bitten fingernails.
Snape, overwhelmed with some emotion that feels like love, even to a man as
bitter and lost as him, opens the door.
Potter jumps up, falls over an occasional table and screams.
 Scrambling up, trying to right himself, skinny chest butterflying:
“Don’t you dare touch me, you bastards!” he yowls. “I will hurt you! I have
powers!”
Overcome with tenderness, Snape closes the door behind himself, quietly.
“Harry,” he says, softly.
A vase crashes against the wall, off-target. Ineffectual.
“Don’t come near me!”
“Harry,” he says louder. “Calm yourself.”
The small body freezes.
“I… who is there?”
“It’s S-Severus,” Snape whispers, voice breaking. “You’re safe now.”
 
~
 
That night, he tucks Potter into the single bed in his grotty hotel room, but
Potter refuses to be left alone. He eats a pack of biscuits as he sits, wrapped
in a stained dressing gown, under the battered coverlet.
Considering neither of them are the same as they were only a few months ago,
and have never been in a domestic situation together, it feels surprisingly
normal. Snape sits in the bathroom, towel drying his hair, a spare white towel
wrapped around his narrow waist. He could spell it dry, but he prefers to do it
himself.
He dresses quickly, and pads back into the bedroom. Potter sits in a shower of
biscuit crumbs.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go out to eat?” Snape asks, softly.
“No. No, I’m good. Maybe for breakfast in the morning?”
Snape nods.
“I’ll give you money.”
“Won’t you come?”
“I can’t, now.”
“Oh.”
There is a silence.
“I forgot,” Potter falters. “How did… being Kissed feel?”
“Honestly?” Snape asks, dryly. “It tickled.”
Potter laughs, wryly. The lovely sound makes Snape smile a little, in spite of
himself. Then his smile falls away.
“It was when that was happening that they took you, wasn’t it.”
“I…” Potter looks guilty, all of a sudden. Confused, Snape sits on the edge of
the bed.
“Harry?”
“It… God, I was so stupid. The… the plan, ok, was to make it look like I’d been
kidnapped, and then they’d do that they did – send you after me. Free you.
Vampire with my blood. Great way to find a missing person. I actually had a
plan. You thought I didn’t, but I did.”
Snape frowns.
“But the people I… I wanted it to look like I’d been taken, obviously, so I got
some people to do a good kidnapping scene – you probably didn’t see it from
where you were?”
“No.”
“But… when it came to letting me go – God, I must have looked such a fool. I
got up and said, ‘thanks very much guys, I’ll be going now’. They just laughed.
I was so desperate, I did it behind everyone’s backs.”
Snape is on his feet in seconds.
“Look, don’t start, alright? I thought it was the best way to help you and -”
“You’re seriously not telling me that you got into this mess – for me? How
could you be so stupid?” Snape yells at him.
Potter cowers a little.
“I know,” he whimpers. “I was so desperate. I had that security detail
following my every move – I could hardly take a piss without someone wanting to
know where I was – and I didn’t have much time. These men… I found them at
Remus’ funeral; they said they wanted to help, that they supported you.”
“Of course they did! For all the – I should kill you myself!” Snape cries.
“Never in my life have I heard -”
“I love you,” Potter whispers, miserably, and Snape’s anger crumbles around him
like the biscuits in Potter’s lap.
Potter sits up a little, brushing away the crumbs and patting down the
patchwork coverlet.
“Come sit with me?”
Snape turns. His chest aches a little at the sight of Potter, so small and pale
and thin, smiling hopefully up at him from the mess of blankets.
Potter, who has gone through hell to get Snape out of prison.
Drawn as though on a string, he approaches.
Sitting on the edge of Potter’s bed, suddenly awkward, he stares down at his
joined hands. The last time he and Potter were this close, his hands were bound
then, too.
Now, his own fear holds him captive. Somehow Potter always has the power to
make Snape feel as though his hands are dirty; that he would be sullying the
boy with their touch.
“Is there anything you’d like?” Potter murmurs, sliding closer. “Please don’t
leave me,” Potter adds, “I can’t be without you. I did all this for you, please
don’t be angry. I know -”
“I could have lost you,” Snape growls. “Saving my life is not worth what you
did. I wish I could be grateful, but I am so angry -”
“If it had all worked, we could have been safe together,” Potter murmurs,
edging closer to him. “That was all I wanted. But I fucked it up, as usual.”
“How could you be so reckless on my account?” Snape snarls.
“I… Because of all you did for me – there was only a few days remember, it all
happened so fast and I couldn’t just do nothing while they killed you! It would
have killed me too! Why don’t… why don’t you give me that bath we were talking
about, ages ago?”
Potter coaxes his face around.
 
~
 
It starts almost innocently; Harry trailing Snape into the bathroom and
sitting, smiling shyly, as Snape fills the tub.
“When we return to England, I can help you with some of those scars,” Snape was
saying, looking through the vanity cupboard and bypassing bottle after bottle
of scented lotion. “These will dry your skin out.”
“Severus.”
“I know several dittany infusions that will make a big improvement.”
“Severus.”
“How hot do you want the water? You looked quite chilly earlier… Oh.”
He has turned.
Harry Potter stands before him, naked, shivering like a newborn colt. All long
limbs and wide eyes.
Snape’s mouth falls open.
Harry, half hard, tugs at himself hopefully. Then his trembling hands brush
over bruises and tender-looking scar tissue, and Snape’s eyes follow them, in
spite of himself.
Then, to his horror, he watches Harry curl in on himself a little.
“Is it bad?” Harry whispers, looking mortified now, inching back. “I wasn’t
trying to show you something disgusting…”
“No,” Snape murmurs; springing forward, hands out limply, uselessly.
“I guess I can’t help it if I -” Harry hangs his head.
Snape looks at the scars of the last three months patterning the boy’s body and
hates himself; hates Harry, curses the boy for being trusting and foolish.
Hates him for trying to help Snape, to his own detriment. Fool. He has done
this to Harry. He has done this.
“You just wanted to undress. I’m sorry, I… This has been done to you. But it
doesn’t… detract. You’re still… everything I dreamed of,” Snape confesses,
softly.
“I… I am?” Harry whispers, his eyes filling with tears.
Snape gingerly tries to enfold Harry in his arms, but Harry seems torn between
wanting to hide his face and scars and yet still wanting to be held. They bump
arms and faces awkwardly until Harry rests his face in Snape’s neck and finally
allows Snape to hold him.
“All I want… is to be everything that you need,” Harry mumbles, into Snape’s
scarred neck.
“We all have scars,” Snape says, pulling back a little and allowing Harry to
see where the young man has his face. Instead of looking embarrassed, Harry
leans forward, and presses a kiss to the snarled flesh at Snape’s throat.
“I wondered whether that’d go when you were… turned.”
“No. Accelerated healing is not one of the properties I have inherited.”
“Can you fly?”
“I could fly before.”
“Do you have fangs?”
Snape bares them, nastily.
Harry merely smiles.
“How do you know where to bite people?”
“You don’t. There is no sense of it, either – I had hoped it would be
automatic, instinctual. But alas. My first attempts were… hideous,” he smirks.
“It wasn’t a sensual experience, then?” Harry chuckles.
“This is probably the most sensual experience I have ever had, right now,”
Snape snorts.
Harry steps out of the circle of Snape’s arms.
“Can I undress you?”
“If it would please you, yes.”
“It would,” Harry murmurs, and leans up to press his lips to Snape’s. “Can you
put the fangs away?”
Snape tries.
“They won’t… go,” he growls.
“It’s ok,” Harry says. “We’ll do it around them.”
Still, it is irritating. He wants to press his tongue into Harry’s sweet mouth,
but doing so would tear it and fill Harry’s mouth with dead blood. He presses
his mouth as carefully as he can onto Harry’s, and the boy clings to him and
winds slim arms about his neck and back.
Then there are small fingers at the buttons of his shirt, coaxing it open.
Soon, his chest is bared, and Harry is threading his fingertips through the
dusting of black hair there; brushing his nipples.
Harry opens his shirt, drawing it back over his shoulders, and kisses the newly
revealed skin, licking and sucking. It is so erotic; Snape has never had his
body attended to like this, with such attention and gentleness. His shirt
flutters to the floor and Harry kneels, kissing his sternum, his ribs, his
belly. Unbuckling his belt whilst sucking at his hip bones, then reverently
guiding his trousers and underpants down. Helping him to step free.
Harry licks along his cock lovingly, a broad swipe of his tongue. Not mean, not
disgusted, but tender. He puts it in his mouth because he wants to. He laps at
the slit for more and buries his nose in the wiry hair, breathing it in,
moaning happily.
It takes surprisingly little preparation – less than five minutes of Harry
shifting about, bent over the bath, with Snape’s fingers up his arse.
Finally, when they are ready, Harry draws him over to the huge bathroom mirror.
Leaning over the sink before it, ankles spread, he coaxes Snape to stand behind
him. Snape fondling Harry’s bottom, sucking on his spine, follows as though
dreaming.
He finds the hole and fidgets his wet cock inside, and Potter taps him gently,
reminds him to raise his head. In the mirror, their eyes meet. He fancies he
can see into Harry’s soul in that moment, and it blinds him with its light and
radiance and love. Potter pushes back slowly, a smile blossoming across his
flushed face.
“Oh. Oh, yes. Yes. Severus. You’re inside me, oh God!”
Harry leans his head back lovingly, encouraging Snape to pull his hands around
and hold Harry gently by his hips.
“Oh, wow! I can’t believe it!”
Nor can Snape. He trembles as he holds Harry.
As though one rough touch would shatter this perfect dream to pieces.
“We’re together now, we’re going to be together. I love you, I love you. Hold
me closer. Oh Severus!”
Harry’s chattering during sex could have been annoying, except that it isn’t.
It is a lifeline, reminding Snape that this is not just another empty
encounter. This is him and, finally, the body and soul of the young man that he
loves. Harry is here, fully present, loving each moment, loving him. It is more
than he could ever have wished for.
“My love,” he whispers, into Harry’s ear. Licks the skin.
“Yours,” Harry moans, delighted. “Yours.”
 
~
 
Malfoy Manor looks like a ruin from the outside.
Only one solitary light, burning in an upper window, betrays its inhabitants.
It is Draco who answers the door to them. He looks between Snape and Harry,
hands joined, and stands back to let them inside without a word.
“Mum left,” is the first thing he says, and that is only after they are
ensconced in front of the fire in the old servant’s parlour.
Snape has the sofa; Potter lies asleep with his head in Snape’s lap. Snape’s
fingers tangle in his hair.
It must be gone three; the shadows are cold and haunting. Draco sips tea from a
battered mug and fingers his wand, lazily. He does not look at Snape when he
speaks.
“What about your father?”
“What about him? Miserable old shite. He’s upstairs. You’ll see him tomorrow.
How long are you staying?”
“Until I can determine whether or not I am still a wanted man in this country.
Is that alright?”
Draco shrugs.
“They put quite a bounty on your head, or so I heard.”
“Oh.”
So much for the dream of being a free man with his Love, then. But they needed
somewhere to go, now that they have returned to Britain. Snape has almost been
tempted to stay away – it has been heaven, these past four days, travelling
back to England with Harry, in love, together.
 
~
 
Draco is skittish when Snape awakes, that evening.  Looking back on it, he
should have known.
He comes up from the cellar to find Harry and Draco sitting in silence in the
parlour, in armchairs opposite from each other.
Potter has a bowl of thin soup in his lap and is sipping at it quietly from an
ornate silver spoon.
As Draco hands Potter a cup of tea, the boy spills some of it across Potter’s
knee.
“Ow!” Potter mumbles, taking the cup.
“Sorry,” Draco mutters, turning away. He looks at Potter strangely as he does
so.
Snape joins them, without a word, sitting the threadbare rug at Potter’s feet.
He can feel Draco’s eyes upon him, and looks up.
“There’s a chair there,” Draco spits, motioning to the empty sofa.
Snape lays his head upon Potter’s thigh. He feels the young man startle, tense
– then relax. Potter’s fingers pet at his hair gently.
“Fuck that’s weird,” Draco murmurs, shuddering.
“Sorry,” Potter shrugs.
“Have you told your weird little mates about your new boyfriend, then?” Draco
adds, pulling a tartan blanket about his shoulders.
“We’ve not told anybody we’re back, save you,” Potter shakes his head.
“An honour, I’m sure,” Draco sneers, as Potter sips his tea thoughtfully.
 
~
 
Later that night, Harry lies in a white ceramic bath, which Snape has made up
for him to help with his bruises and scars. The water is a creamy white,
salted, and smells like honey. Steam rises from the water as Harry luxuriates
in it in silence, eyes closed.
All around him sits a sea of white candles. Snape perches on a chair by the
bath, cradling Harry’s thin wrist in his fingers. He watches the young man’s
rib cage straining against the skin with each breath.
“What are you waiting for?” Harry opens one eye.
“You still look weak,” Snape murmurs.
Potter has been going through phases. Sometimes he will surprise Snape and
demolish a box of biscuits, or a cake, or a loaf of bread. At other times, he
will barely eat at all. When asked about it, Potter will merely shrug. They
don’t talk about what happened in those three months before Snape found him.
Doing so only causes arguments.
The bruises, however, speak for themselves.
Snape still cannot shrug off his guilt; his anger. He pretends to study Harry’s
delicate wrist.
“I do feel a bit funny,” Harry says, half to himself.
“I can feed tomorrow,” Snape says, starting to release Harry’s wrist.
“No, it’ll pass. That soup tasted so awful. I think it isn’t sitting right. I
don’t know why it’s such a surprise, but… Draco’s an awful cook.”
Snape barks out a laugh.
“No, you’re right – it isn’t a surprise.”
Potter grins. Then shivers.
“Still feel shite, though. But you go on – there’s no point both of us feeling
like crap.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works,” Snape snorts.
“Give me a little while, then,” Potter sighs. “I’m sure it’ll pass.”
Snape kisses his wrist.
 
~
 
As the moon climbs higher in the sky, Harry lies under Snape, legs parted.
Snape leans up on his elbows atop him, sliding his cock slowly in and out of
Harry’s quivering body.
They are both bare; Harry clutches at the white sheets and keens softly as
Snape mouths open kisses over the boy’s sharp collar bones.
Snape’s hands slip under Harry’s back, clutching the boy closer. Harry lifts
his ankles, crossing them in the small of Snape’s back, over his buttocks, and
loops his wrists about Snape’s neck.
Snape’s hair falls into their faces, tickling Harry’s eyes and nose and cheeks.
Harry turns his head, a silent invitation.
Snape bites down.
 
~
 
Blood! Vicious pain and dark, thick blood, like red syrup.
Screams - horrific, terrified screaming!
Flesh tears.
Footsteps on stone steps; doors burst open.
Harry crawls up the stone steps, head spinning. His neck still leaking blood
and his mouth damp and torn.
All he can think of is getting to a place where his dead body will at least be
found; where he won’t be left to rot for weeks…
“Please, no,” he moans, when his shaking hands falter, only a metre from the
top of the basement steps.
His body is so weak, his head so fuzzy; he feels like he is crawling through a
thick, oppressive fog. Exhausted; yet his heart is pounding so hard in his
chest, battering against his ribcage like a bird fighting to burst free...
As the world goes black and his vision blurs, Harry’s last sight is of
unnaturally bright wand light streaming down the steps. He so nearly made it –
“OH MY GOD!” someone screams. “Potter?”
“Out of the way, Malfoy!”
Heavy footsteps. The swish of red robes.
“He’s covered in blood – something bit him! Was it Snape? Oh my God, it was
Snape! Snape’s here, he’s hiding here!”
“Malfoy, will you move? Harry, open your eyes, can you hear us?”
Harry passes out.
 
~
 
He risks opening just one eye. One side of his head hurts like hell, so he
keeps that eye firmly closed.
His vision is blurred and shaky.
He decides he’s probably not dead, if his head hurts this much. He tries to
move his arm, but it feels like moving through molasses, and exhaustion takes
over. The hand flops back down onto the bed.
“He moved his hand – Harry? Look, his eye’s open! Harry, it’s Hermione! Ron’s
here too, you’re ok, you’re safe here -”
“Water,” Harry murmurs.
Water is pressed into his questing fingers.
“Harry… I know you’re unwell, but we need to talk about who… did this to you?
It was Severus.”
“Sounds like you already know,” Harry says, frowning.
“I needed to hear it from you. It’s ok, he’s not here any more.”
“Where is he?” Harry gasped.
“Azkaban.”
“What? No!” Harry scrambles up wildly, head thundering.
“What do you mean, no?” Ron interjects, harshly. “That scumbag deserves all he
gets!”
“He didn’t… Didn’t mean it,” Harry finishes, weakly.
“What rubbish,” Hermione snaps, then colours. “I’m sorry, Harry, but…”
“Has he been tested for drugs?” Harry demands.
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t think it was him. Something had happened to him.”
There is a collective sigh.
“Isn’t that just wishful thinking? You sound like you’ve been Confunded, even!
Maybe, Vampires go feral with lust like that every time!”
“What, and he spent months trying to find me, looked after me all the way back
through Europe - all for one violent half hour? We’re in love, Ron!”
“He isn’t human, he’s a monster – that’s what they do! If he can’t control
himself -”
“It doesn’t make any sense. You haven’t seen how he’s been when we’re alone –
he’s nothing but respectful -”
“Harry, I’m sorry. You know he was released to find you. Well, now he’s been
arrested again… He’ll never get out this time. They’re going to destroy him.”
 
~
 
The chains bite. They bite into Snape’s biceps, his wrists, his ankles. His
neck.
His fangs have been filed down. Some of his hair has been pulled out. His
tongue is bitten, and his face bruised, but they heal. Once the injuries
disappear, fresh ones are inflicted.
Snape does not fight it. He knows he deserves every humiliation. He just wishes
he could… remember what he had done.
His last memory is of Potter gasping beneath him – but that had not been a
noise of pain, surely? Snape had been kissing his young man’s neck and
shoulders as he made love to him. And then… nothing but blood, everywhere. The
taste of it in his mouth; the metallic stench of blood all over the sheets.
Stains that would not come out. The screams that Snape had not heard at the
time, but that came back to haunt him after.
What had happened? How had he lost control like that?
The cell door opens. Snape struggles sit up, but it is Draco who enters, not
Potter.
“Draco?” Snape asks, in confusion.
“I had to see you,” Draco hisses, stealing into the room and pulling the door
almost closed, furtively.
“Have you seen Harry?” Snape begs, looking up in desperation, eyes searching
Draco’s pinched face.
Draco, however, refuses to make eye contact. He crosses to the window, drawing
a thin cloak about his hunched shoulders.
“He’s in the hospital, still.”
“Shite,” Snape groans, face twisting in agony.
“You really did a number on him,” Draco sighs.
“I cannot understand how – Draco, can you?”
“I dunno… Do you think it’s a Vampire sex thing?”
“What?”
“You know… when you come, you lose control?”
“No, I’ve come in him before, and never – sorry,” Snape adds, at Draco’s sick
choke.
“Well, you’ve lost him now,” Draco shrugs. “For good.”
“But I just don’t understand what I did!”
“Got yourself some sweet love from your little bitch, by the sounds of it -”
Draco snaps. He turns; approaches Snape with fast, measured steps. Kneels
before him.
“It will pain me to watch you die. But it would be worse pain to watch you live
with him. You understand. Goodbye, Snape.”
 
~
 
No matter how loudly he screams, nobody comes. Days pass like this – days where
he is chained in the same position: before an open window. The sun flays his
skin, burns it off with tongues of fire. Each night, he lays his cheek against
the cool stones, panting even though he does not need the breath. Anything to
distract himself as he feels his body heal anew, only to be stung again come
dawn.
The weeks drag on. An ocean of time.
When Potter comes for him, it is nightfall. Snape’s skin still smokes. His
lashes leave blooded smears on his cheeks with each blink.
“I’m going to kill Draco.”
Moments later, a hand soothes against his bloodied cheek.
“Hey,” Harry whispers.
Snape raises his head, fangs flicking out in spite of himself. Useless stubs
now – he tries to conceal his humiliation behind his hair.
Harry gently tucks it away; soothes his cheeks; pets his hair and nose.
“He ran straight to the Ministry, you know, the morning after we arrived at
Malfoy Manor? There never was a reward placed on you, for a start. He was in
there asking all sorts of questions, trying to find out if you were still
wanted for murder. Apparently, when he heard you weren’t, he got all… upset.”
Snape listens, in silence. Just the sound of Harry’s voice soothes his battered
soul.
“So he comes back, drugs me – remember I was feeling funny for about an hour
that evening, then it went away? He knew it would only be a matter of time
before you fed from me - and it was a poison to affect you, not me. To make you
unable to control the Vampire side of you. Which is why you attacked me.
Draco’s straight down the Ministry again – murder, murder! Turns you in like a
shot.”
“I know,” Snape chokes out.
“You… do? How?”
“He came to see me.”
“The fucker!
“He did it because he couldn’t stand to see us together. Am I free?” Snape
asks, attempting to sit up and feeling his burnt skin crackle. “If you know all
this, has he confessed?”
Harry is silent.
“Oh. I see,” Snape says, softly. “How long have I got left?”
“They’re all saying you need to be destroyed, that this is one injury too many!
You’ve violated the terms of your parole. I don’t know how to fight them
again.”
Snape nods. It is only what he expected.
“I am ready to die. I have known you. I can want for no more.”
Potter, however, kneels before him and takes Snape’s face in both palms.
“You remember… That other-reality potion I offered you? Ages ago? Your one?
Well, when you refused it, we sort of… kept it. It’s one of five, am I
correct?”
“It was,” Snape murmurs, confused. He reaches out for some part of Harry to
hold on to.
Harry sits back and gives him his hand; entwines his thin fingers with Snape’s
raw ones.
With the other hand, he draws the phial from his pocket.
“I need… I need for you to tell me exactly what those five were.”
“Why?”
“I need to know! Please.”
So Snape tell him, in soft whispers, their fingers linking. When he has
finished, Potter’s grasp on his cold hand is tighter, but Potter’s head hangs
low toward his knees. Snape wonders what thoughts weigh the young man down.
“So… The worst risk is that… What if this, in this phial, is the one where
Voldemort has won?”
Snape sighs.
“I think the colour of that potion was slightly darker – of course, I have none
of the others to compare it to now. But why does all this matter?”
“They won’t let us be together here,” Potter mutters, clearly lost in his own
whirl of thoughts. “In this… reality. I don’t want to be here and watch them…
destroy you.”
“You will move on,” Snape grits out. The thought of Potter – Harry – in a
clinch with another man; linking hands with another man, is unbearable. The
pain alone would kill even the strongest man, and Snape has nothing else to
live for.
In that moment, he almost has sympathy for Draco.
“I won’t,” Harry growls, head snapping up sharply, hurt glinting in his eyes.
“I can’t. Which is why I needed to know… what I might be facing.”
“Facing?”
Harry grips Snape’s hands so hard that Snape can see veins and nerves and white
knuckles popping and straining against the skin.
“When I come with you. We’re both going to drink the potion.”
Snape feels like he has been plunged underwater. Everything slows. Sounds
become deeper, resonating. The light blurs into mist. His dead heart lurches in
his chest, and muscles sinews straining to restart.
“Speak, please! Snape?”
“You know I cannot allow that,” Snape blurts out, throat so dry and closed, as
if an animal had crawled into his mouth and lay dying. “You were my slave in
some of those.”
“How would it work? Would we take the place of the versions of ourselves
there?” Potter is ignoring him, skirting the issue.
“Something like that, yes. It is you, but in another body. You retain both sets
of memories. It is… disconcerting at first. The body you leave behind here
remains in a deep sleep until you return. If you never did, I presume it would
never wake. But Harry, please, you were my slave. Please understand that I do
not wish that for you.”
“I’m sure you’d take care of me. We’d be together -”
“What if it is the reality where the Dark Lord has -”
“We’d cope,” Potter growls, in a tone that brooks no refusal. “Defeat him again
if we had to.”
Snape scoffs; rolls his eyes. Like it was so easy the first time.
“I don’t know!” Harry’s fingers burst out of Snape’s hold; the boy grips at his
own head in frustration, fingers digging into his scalp. “But I’d be yours.
Surely that counts for something?”
“It would mean everything to me!” Snape snarls, then breaks into a coughing
fit. “But I never wanted it to be under any of those… circumstances.”
“Well there’s no nice option! You said you didn’t want to go to one of those
realities before because it was me that you wanted – well I’m offering to come
with you!”
“I don’t want to… debase you like that.”
“You’d rather leave me instead? You’re forgetting – the fifth one. The one you
said you had in your robes when Nagini attacked you. What if this,” Potter
shakes the phial before Snape’s face eagerly, “is that one?”
“Then… it would be bliss. But life never works out that way.”
“It might! I’m going to be optimistic!”
“Foolhardy, more like.”
“Now, is this phial enough? Will it take both of us?”
Snape glances at it. In an instant, he knows what he ought to do.
But what he wants to do… That is another thing entirely.
“I should say no,” he hisses, “and drink it in one.”
“Please don’t leave me behind,” Potter whispers. “Will it… take me too?”
Snape’s sigh is bone weary.
“Yes,” he admits. “God, I… Harry,” he blurts out, “My love. My hea… How can I
let you do this?”
“Because you love me. And I love you. I’ll drink half first, then you have to
promise to follow?”
Snape holds out one hand again, burnt fingers straining. Harry links their
fingers; grips tightly. He does not seem to mind the blood, the broken skin.
Even though he does not know where they are going, Snape hopes it is the one he
chose, the one he had in his pocket that night in the shack, when he should
have died. There, they would find peace.
Even if it is not, he will be with Harry. His Harry.
That is all he could ever have hoped for.
 
~
 
On the floor of a cell in Azkaban prison, two figures lie in repose. One figure
chained to the stone wall, slumped awkwardly towards the other, who is curled
lovingly at his feet.
They never will wake, now.
The spirits within have fled together, like doves from a cage. There will never
be a funeral, for the bodies they have left still breathe, empty shells of what
they once were. The Vampire body has been thrown off, defeated finally, and
that of the young man, battered and scarred, in the same way, replaced for one
treated far more gently.
Where the sparks of life within have flown to, nobody in this dark place knows.
All they see are the empty phial, the sleeping figures, and the pair of clasped
hands that joins them.
 
FIN.
 
‘Your eyes close to me by fog
And I awake and arise
As the light in your eyes
Whose heavy lids close on me
My world, my life
They close on me
And I am not
No longer
They open
And I spring up their wish
Like a field of flowers
You close your eyes and I die
You close your eyes and I die
Whilst others in sleep follow lambs
I look at my hands
And count the Sun making another scar across my sky
And I close my eyes.’
 
‘Your Eyes Close’ by Michael Cashmore, sung by Antony Hegarty.
 
 
Opening lyrics from ‘Broken’ by Jake Bugg.
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