Completed Fics | Random | Help | Search | Log In | |
    | |
| Harry Potter | |
Coming to Terms by Arachnes Child [Reviews - 5] [1358
hits]  |
|
Disclaimer: The characters and setting are all JKR’s. I’m just playing with them for a while and will put them back where I found them, with no hope or desire to make money.
(This began as a time-turner ficlet for the 30-minute fic Live Journal group. The first section is pretty much as it was for the 30-minute fic. The rest follows from there.)
The walled garden is a favorite of his, especially on summer afternoons when there is no chance of his reading being interrupted by students. I watch him approach the gate from my position under the oak tree, and he is aware that I am there, but he does not pause to greet me. He never does; I am become invisible, to be acknowledged only when unpleasant duty demands it. As he enters and latches the gate behind him, I suck in courage from the air and rise to follow.
I land on the sod on all fours, having climbed the wall and dropped, so inelegantly, at his feet. He recoils, and sets his face into its accustomed impassivity as I rise. I am not even worth a sneer these days, it seems.
“What is it, Lupin? Chasing Mrs. Norris again?”
Brushing the grass and dirt from my hands, I face him. “I want to talk to you, Severus. About Sirius.”
Ah, there, the mask drops for a moment, and there is the old bitterness. But he quickly masters himself.
“The man is dead, for no other reason but his own arrogance. What else is there to say, Lupin?”
“There’s more. We need to talk about what happened twenty years ago.”
He snorts. “He tried to kill me. Tried to have you kill me, rather.”
“Why? Don’t you want to know why, Severus?”
He is not looking at me. Actually, that may not be a bad sign.
“He’s – he was – an irresponsible idiot. He hated me, and didn’t care if I died, or that you could be expelled, or worse.”
“Why did he hate you?” I hold up a hand to forestall his answer. “It wasn’t simply that you were Slytherin and we were Gryffindor, Severus. It was never that petty, although that was always the excuse, wasn’t it, for all of us?”
I move around to meet his eyes. “It was more than that. Sirius was jealous. He couldn’t stand it that there was someone who didn’t bow down and worship the golden Gryffindors. That there was someone equally deserving of loyalty and love.” My voice cracks a little on the last word. It’s not a word usually said in conversation with Severus Snape.
I adjust my posture to face him – he has shifted again to avoid looking at me.
“He was getting even, Severus. He thought he was getting rid of you, and punishing me.”
“Punishing you.” His face is a perfect blank, as it always is when he is under stress, as it always is when I speak to him. He’s not making this easy for me to say, but then I figure it’s not easy for him to hear, either. I plunge ahead.
“He knew I … I had a thing for you, Severus. Twenty years ago.”
He doesn’t move a muscle in his face, but his pupils change size, and I know I have shocked him.
“A thing. Twenty years ago. Me.”
“Sirius fixed it, though. There was no way, if you survived, that you’d see me as anything but that beast. And if you didn’t survive, well, I’d be gone, too.”
He begins to walk. Stalk, rather, back and forth. His agitation is apparent only in the rapidity of his stride; his face is still a mask. He finally stops and points the mask in my direction.
“Why are you telling me this now? After twenty years?”
I am suddenly not sure. What seemed right and necessary a few minutes ago now seems a cruel resurrection of adolescent rivalries and infatuations.
“Because – dammit, I don’t know. Either of us could be dead as quickly as Sirius, at any time. And I – I wanted to tell you. I never hated you. It was very much the opposite.”
It’s my turn to look down, to swallow hard before continuing.
“Even now.”
There is silence, and when I look up, he is fixing that impassive stare on me, and I know it has been a mistake. I hold out my fist and open it, palm up, to show him the time turner on its chain.
“Tell me if you don’t want to know what I just told you, and I’ll go back and stop this conversation from happening.”
He reaches out and lifts it out of my hand, and studies it for a long moment, his eyes down, and I can look at him, examine the planes of his face and the curve of his mouth. Suddenly, he glances up, his eyes unfathomable.
“That’s the dinner bell, isn’t it?” he asks, and turns to the gate, moving swiftly as he tucks the time turner into a pocket. Halfway through the opening, he turns and raises an eyebrow, and something in my chest cracks open. “You are coming to dinner, aren’t you, Lupin?”
The students arrive for the year, and I am still a hanger-on, an unofficial part of the environs. “Adjunct faculty,” though I teach nothing, and they’ve even given me an office. I spend my days waiting for Albus to send me on errands, to watch this location or that, to follow this or that person. When I am in the castle, I take my meals in the Great Hall. I always wait in the corridor for Dumbledore to enter first, giving me implicit permission to be there. As the staff arrives, I greet them, and most of them return the greeting.
He always ignores me. So today, before breakfast, when I greet him, I am unprepared for his acknowledgement.
“Lupin,” he says, and keeps walking with no break in his stride.
I am stunned. He has never responded before. But while I am still processing the fact, assimilating the feeling of my name being uttered without the usual snarl behind it, he stops, and I look down the corridor to him. He has paused at the door, so suddenly that his robes are still swirling from his abrupt turn back.
“I don’t mind, actually.” Another swirl and he has disappeared around the corner.
I am still standing there, gob-smacked, when the students begin to file into the Hall, and the Headmaster begins his morning announcements. Standing there, trying to make sense of it. “I don’t mind.” What does that mean? I think of two possibilities. A: “I don’t mind if you are compelled to worship from afar.” Or B: “I don’t mind, let’s jump into bed.” Neither is within the scope of comprehension.
Through the meal, he ignores me, as usual.
Two weeks later, I am preparing to shut myself in against the moon. I know I am more agitated than usual. He will be bringing the potion to my office at any moment. He will set it on my desk, make a sarcastic remark, or say nothing at all before leaving. But the structure of two decades’ careful maneuvering has shifted irrevocably, and I am uncertain.
When he enters, he walks silently to my desk and sets the steaming goblet down. We look at each other, and I start to speak, but he turns and sets a ward on the door before sitting in my chair. He says nothing, just places his hand on his crotch and locks his eyes with mine. His other hand beckons me over. I kneel between his thighs and release him and take him into my mouth. It is overwhelming, to have a twenty-year fantasy suddenly made real. The salt-musk of him and the smooth heat of him are a sacrament, and his hands in my hair give me the grace of a benediction. I am hard, too, but I cannot take my hands off him; my hands and my mouth are beggars for his charity.
“Wolf…” He jolts with the climax, filling my mouth with the clean sweet taste of him, and I am gulping and sputtering and trying to swallow. As he closes his trousers, I sit back on my heels and he hands me a handkerchief. I wipe my chin as he watches me, and know that he sees the outline of my erection straining against my trousers. But he only stands and moves to the door.
“Drink it before it cools,” he says, gesturing to the potion, and leaves. I keep the handkerchief.
He is sitting in my office chair again.
“Show me.”
I take myself, already hard and seeping, out of my boxers and he motions for me to caress myself.
“Did he fuck you? Black?”
“Yes.”
“Did you like it?”
“No.” I am about to come and I don’t want to think about Sirius. I want to think about Severus, Severus hard inside me. I can see that he is hard behind his trousers, but he makes no move to release himself. His eyes are fixed on me, on my hand, which moves faster.
“Why not?”
“Merlin, Severus…. Because it hurt, and he didn’t care. Didn’t use anything.”
“But you let him.”
“Yes.” Because afterward, I would pretend it had been you, I think, and want him to read my mind, so I don’t have to say it out loud.
“Do you want me to fuck you?” His voice is rough and his eyes are a little wild. He shifts in the chair.
“Gods, yes, Severus –“ I move to him, but he remains seated and I kneel. He comes quickly, and wipes my mouth and chin for me this time.
“Drink your potion like a good wolf,” he says as the door closes.
And that has been pretty much it for the last few months. He now comes to my office perhaps once a week, never to my bedroom. He has never touched me, except to hold my head as I attend to him. And I do not touch him otherwise – when I have tried to embrace him, he pushes me away. Pushes me away, and then calls me back with the force of his eyes.
Sometimes he watches me come first, and he tells me to clean it up, to lap it up from the floor or his shoes and trousers like a good wolf. And I do. Pathetic, isn’t it? But I tell myself that when I then go down on him that I will be holding both of us on my tongue. He mutters as he comes, “Wolf”, and I think he sometimes says “Remus.” I’m almost sure he does.
The transformation to wolf is painful, but since I rapidly lose the human, it is not as hard as the reversal, when my mind morphs back into Remus before my body does. I come to myself slowly, only aware that something is very wrong, that my joints are being bent the wrong way, that my vision is hyper-focused. Sometimes as I regain my self, I think I hear breathing and then hear the door click closed, but there is never anyone there.
This morning I awake, and as the spasms subside I know that I am not alone. The room is still dark, and silent, but I know. I am curled on my side, naked and shivering, trying not to breathe too loudly because I want to hear who is in the room before I look. I listen and I sniff, but the wolf is gone. My senses are human, muffled.
A smooth hand touches my hip, and slides down my thigh. “Wolf.” The voice murmurs in my ear, and then I feel the heat of the body behind me. He spoons against my back and his teeth graze the old scar on my shoulder as his leg moves between mine. I can feel his cock pressing against me, and I start to tremble.
“Shh, Wolf.”
The hands urge me to my knees. I grasp the front of my chair for support as the leg between mine nudges to make room for its partner. I moan and the hands slide up and down my back, warming a trail along my ribs before moving to my buttocks and opening me. The sudden coolness of a slick liquid makes me gasp, and then his fingers ease in, stretching, sliding. I start to relax and lean back to him, and I can feel his cool smile against my back.
“You like this, Wolf? You want it? Want me?”
“Oh, yes, gods, yes.”
I am surprised at how little it hurts. It’s nothing like it was with Sirius. He is slow and methodical and it is the first time he has touched me, really touched me, and I am sobbing with the consummation of my twenty-year dream, the all of it. The all of him.
“Howl, Wolf, if you like,” he says softly, and his hand moves around to stroke me, and we rock until we both call out, and this time I know that he does gasp out my name.
As usual, he ignores me at breakfast.
Author's Note: