Duel

Two: Wandless


He doesn’t want to touch Onslowe, but of course he has to. The touching rituals are the most important ones, the ones that establish trust. He is expected to shake all of the hands.

Dillon’s is first, and firm and fast and eager: a wet-nosed puppy, Severus thinks, savoring disgust on the tip of his tongue like the sickle edge of a hard candy. Dillon is the only one who bothers with a smile, though a brief and nervous one. Tokumoto’s hand is limp and sticky, a mollusk, a soft and unmemorable touch.

And Onslowe. The hyena. The sharp-toothed, glowing grin. His handshake is hard and slow, gritting the bones in Severus’ hand against each other. They have never touched before, but still it seems familiar, like a flare of pain from an old wound.

His wand had been taken away, of course, so he couldn’t even play with the insects that orbited the torches outside his cell. He remembered one of Avery’s long-winded stories about a sect of wizards who practiced wandless magic, and he narrowed his eyes at a huge, pale-green Luna moth, focusing, trying to send some spark of magic out his eyes. He visualized a glowing red bolt shooting from himself to the moth, knocking it through the air, making the wings crumple around the body as it dropped, smoking lightly. Or was he supposed to use his hands, concentrate his power there? He couldn’t remember, and he felt too quaky and dim to concentrate on anything right now. He let himself wonder for a moment if they were putting something in his food. Possible, but he hadn’t been eating enough of it to make a difference. The moth drifted between Severus and the flame, shifting into translucent silhouette, the eyelike spots on its wings livid with firelight.

“He’s down here,” said the voice of the night guard, disembodied and far down the corridor. A few cells down from Severus, bedsprings creaked, fell silent, then creaked again. The guard and his companion kept walking. “We can’t legally hold him here much longer, y’know; he ain’t a real suspect.”

“We’ll hold him as long as we need him, guard, and I’ll thank you not to remind an Auror of the law.” This was in a clipped, posh accent, a voice he had not heard before.

“Yessir,” muttered the guard, and the two of them come into view, segmented by the cell’s silvery, enchanted bars.

“Good, you’re awake,” said this new man, who was short and blond-haired and young, with small gleaming teeth. “I’m required by law to read you the following.” He pulled a thin cylinder of parchment from his robes and unfurled it, reading quickly and in monotone. ‘Be informed that in accordance with Clause Twelve Section G twenty-four hours subsequent to this rights-reading the potion Veritaserum shall be administered to the prisoner Severus Snape. A thorough interrogation is to follow.”

Severus grimaced and forced his dry throat to swallow. He had seen the results of Veritaserum, the senile indignities it produces. He had known this was coming, and dreaded it.

“I’ve been vouched for by Albus Dumbledore,” he tried, his throat dry and rusty. “Isn’t that enough for you people?” He could not keep a cutting, vindictive edge out of his voice.

The Auror smirked. “I’d be careful, Death Eater. You’re on my watch now. The old man isn’t here to wipe your arse for you.”

Severus felt a humiliating pluck of shock at the vulgarity, perhaps because it came out the mouth of an Auror. He hung his head, feigning defeat.

“May I please have some water?” he mumbled, spacing the words carefully in an unpracticed lament. He was young enough then to feel little shame in begging. Water would flush out his system and decrease the chance of the Serum reacting badly with anything he had eaten or been dosed with. He was also desperately thirsty.

“Hm,” said the Auror, laying a finger on his lips, glancing slyly at the guard. “I think not.” He paused, as if to begin an explanation, then simply turned and swept back down the corridor. “And guard,” he called, now out of sight. “Put out the lights for him, won’t you? He’ll need a good night’s sleep.” His voice ebbed away as he walked, echoing tinnily off the stone walls of the Ministry jail.

“No –“ Severus said, but the guard had already flicked his wand at the torch, bringing down a veil of darkness. The cell was now lit only by a dirty orange glow from the torches down the hall. The half-light irritated Severus’ eyes, and made things jump and twitch in his peripheral vision. The guard left, absently jingling the keys on his belt with one hand.

The moth floated ethereally down the corridor, looking for another torch. Severus sat mute on his narrow bed.


Their faces are in murky brown shadow because all of the torches are along the back wall. Severus narrows his eyes and a cold voice in him wonders if this was Onslowe’s doing, a tactic of decorative intimidation. It is working. The flames make an angry nimbus around each of their heads, a fiery crown of fly-away hair. They resemble wrathful, corporeal gods. Severus is glad he can’t see the three pairs of eyes that must be on him; at the same time the blankness of their faces scares him. He tells himself that he is simply tired.

He is sitting pillar-straight in an uncomfortable wooden chair, facing the long table at which they are sitting in a line. His face is impassive, arduously so; he has to make an effort to keep the corners of his mouth from sinking down, his upper lip from creeping toward his nose. He feels sulky and petulant and uncomfortable and slightly panicky, like a punished child. The three of them – the four of them; he can’t deny Dumbledore’s doing it too, sitting at the end of the table at the exact equator between next to him and next to them – are talking about him as if he is not in the room.

“Veritaserum would ensure the accuracy of his reports,” says Onslowe, the soldier, the strategist, the zealot, the bastard. His blond hair, still cropped boyishly short, has darkened and is beginning to gray at the temples. His face is as broad and tanned as it was twelve years ago, but the angles are sharper; there are hollows and lines, the topography of a hard life. Severus feels a pinprick of satisfaction at this.

Onslowe deserves sleepless nights.

“It would also be dangerous, invasive, and unnecessary –“ begins Dillon, the young one, the razor-thin one, with the crest of the Mediwizards sewn onto his robes. Onslowe cuts him off.

“- Dangerous? Pfft. We administer Veritaserum to our suspects virtually daily –“

“Professor Snape is not a suspect, Aramis,” interjects Dumbledore firmly. It is a slight shock, a hard pinch, to hear Onslowe addressed by his first name.

Concurrently, Dillon argues, “Not with the sort of frequency with which he’d be taking it. We don’t know what kind of effect a long-term cycle of doses might have.”

“There was a German study in the seventies that suggested it might cause brain damage if taken in large doses, or too frequently,” says Tokumoto, the elder with the down-soft voice. “Anyway, it’s so strictly regulated –“

“- the Ministry will surely make allowances for a problem –“ here, the angle of Onslowe’s head shifts slightly, and Severus knows without seeing that he has flicked his eyes in his direction. “- of this magnitude.”

“The Ministry will almost certainly be unwilling to accept that such a problem might exist. They wouldn’t even dispatch active-duty Aurors. Professor Dumbledore had to settle for us,” says Dillon.

“There are few I’d trust more readily than the three of you,” Dumbledore demurs. “And I believe, Aramis, that you are overruled.”

The three Aurors have come to guard him. Not like a valuable; like a prisoner. They have come to keep a wand pointed at him, to search under his tongue for pills, to grope between his legs for contraband. To check that his shackles remain tight. Onslowe, Severus knows from experience, will give them an extra, painful yank.

“None of them is a legilimens, Severus” Dumbledore said, laying a hand on the door of his office as if holding it shut, before they swept into the hallway for the shaking of hands. “Not that that means anything to you.”

But it does, it means a galaxy of things. It means that at Hogwarts his mind can still be a sanctum, dark and full of sharp things but safe from intrusion, nailed firmly shut. Sustained occlumency is an immense burden, a cerebral house arrest, keeping the doors locked and the curtains drawn. It means he won’t have to buy or borrow a Pensieve to squirrel his valuables in for safekeeping.

It means that Dumbledore respects his headspace, and still trusts him this far at least. Severus hates that he needs this sort of affirmation.


* * *


The owl comes the next morning. Severus had expected at least a week to pass; Lucius always took great pleasure in keeping him waiting. But when he woke up it was perched on one of the high-backed chairs in his antechamber, evidently instructed to wait for his reply. A broad, creamy envelope lay on the table, pimpled in the center with the Malfoy seal, in iridescent scarlet wax, a modified version of the Slytherin crest. The snake has its fangs sunk into a small bird. The shifting of the melted wax has rendered the motto illegible, but Severus knows it by heart: Nostra via semper pateo. He feels debauched ripping the envelope open; the fine paper is like a pale, private skin, a vestigial appendage. He tears it hard down the center, across the seal, ripping it off like a scab, spraying red flakes across the tabletop.


Severus,

Join me and a few friends at the Manor at ten o’clock on Monday the twelfth of July. I’ll send a carriage to fetch you.

Repondez s’il vous plait.

Lucius


The familiar, classically schooled hand. The familiar brevity and glibness, as if this were a simple clambake, as if any of the attendees are actually friends The familiar way of making no requests, only demands.

The owl is still waiting. It’s different from the taloned monstrosity that delivers to Draco every morning. (He once saw Draco’s eagle owl hopping about the courtyard with another, smaller owl in its claws. He remembers hoping Draco would be around to see the pellet it would choke up later, the tiny white beak entombed in it, evidence that one of the poorer students was missing their pet.) This one is small, sleek, and white, and the talons have been painted silver. Or maybe it’s a glamour. Severus closes his eyes for a moment, setting the invitation on the table and pressing it there. If he lets it go it may do something of its own accord: fly in his face and cut him, carving a thousand harmless and intensely painful scratches; fly up the dungeon stairs to Dumbledore’s office, or worse, to Onslowe’s chambers in the southeast wing; rub against itself until it bursts into flame.

He should go to Dumbledore with this. He hasn’t any choice. He folds the letter back into the ruins of its envelope, shuts the tiny, round window near the ceiling of his chamber – it wouldn’t do for the owl to lose interest and fly back to Lucius empty-clawed – and goes upstairs.

“Taste hSeveSeverus, before she clots up,” Lucius insisted, grinning generously, offering her as he would an hors d’re. re. Severus bent at the waist, shutting his eyes, feeling her elevated thigh block the candlelight from his face as his he followed his lips down to her. Someone behind him cleared his throat impatiently. Severus could smell her; she was unclean, musky, sharp with the scent of fresh blood. Her rankness excited him. He had never done this before.

“I thought you should know,” he tells Dumbledore, careful to maintain eye contact. He knows the man is suspicious of anyone who cannot hold his sparkling gaze.

“Thank you, Severus,” says the Headmaster softly.

There is a silence. They stare at each other, each expressionless. Severus will not speak until after Dumbledore does.

“Do you want to go?” Dumbledore asks, finally.

Severus nearly flinches. You must do what you feel is necessary. This man has faces that Severus has never seen.

“No,” he says, which is mostly the truth, but he reflexively occludes himself, clouding his mind over as if with a layer of smoke, making it a gray and inscrutable space. He knows that Dumbledore would not probe him, and Severus could likely block him if he tried; still he always has this need. “I know what happens at these… these things. What used to happen, anyway.” He pauses. “You probably do too, by now. It’s Malfoy’s worst-kept secret. Thanks in no small part to me.”

Dumbledore tilts his head back slightly but says nothing. The old man’s neutrality can be maddening.

“Malfoy will be expecting me,” says Severus, and decides to leave it at that.

“Then go. And listen well.” Severus draws his posture straighter, and Dumbledore quickly adds, “Not that you need to be reminded.” Severus nods and turns to go.

“I’ll be informing the Aurors,” Dumbledore says to his back. Severus halts mid-step. “As discussed, you’re to report to them after you get home. As soon after as possible. If – if you are –“ Severus turns again to face the Headmaster, who begins again immediately with an impassive face. “If you are in need of medical attention, Mr. Dillon will see to you.” Severus nods again, lingering a moment to avoid another premature exit. Dumbledore looks at him with hooded eyes, and his voice takes a sudden drop in pitch. “You may give your report to Dillon alone, if you’d prefer. I’me hee he will relay it to the others. Onslowe needs only be present when you have tactical information to divulge.”

Severus feels suddenly vulnerable, as if he has left a door unlocked overnight.


He doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to see Lucius, he doesn’t want to play what Lucius thinks of as party games.


He owls a note back, written on his best parchment. Yes, I will come. Lucius should get a smirk out of that. Like a punch in the gut he is reminded of Onslowe, his crudeness, his fondness for double meaning. Rather like Lucius, but with so little style. He hopes this – this what? He refuses to call it a party, or a get-together, or any of the other cruelly casual terms he used to use – this thing is meant for pleasure and not business. Though Lucius hardly ever distinguished between the two.

The Veritaserum was wearing off. Severus had expected it to be like waking up from anesthesia, but it wasn’t. It was less like getting sober and more like getting drunk: a gentle sliding, a loose jumble of words and feelings coming back to him, a slow creeping flood. The Serum had made his mind very clear, very cold, nearly empty, echoing like a deserted bathroom with precise, automatic responses. Now his mental language was becoming more fluid; words were coming to him more freely now, in a continuous flow rather than the cramped, ineloquent little bursts the Veritaserum had produced in him. Hot emotional flushes kept rising in him, short-lived and unexpected, and he was nearly shaking with the effort of suppressing them. He forced himself to think one thought at a time, to keep his face and carriage inscrutable. He had a wave that made him feel like laughing, a bubbling swell in his chest; it was chased off by a cold prickling in his soft palate that promised to precede tears. He clamped his throat shut and glared coldly at the three inquisitors seated across from him at a long, narrow table. He breathed evenly, clarifying himself.

“And what would occur at these - soirees, as you call them?” asked a gray-haired, bespectacled interrogator.

“Not much plotting. Mostly they were social. Decadent. A way of getting out from under The Dark Lord’s thumb, letting down our hoods. There was no ritual to them.” He found he was now able to edge around a direct answer by providing lesser truths. He continued intentionally to speak in the flat, clipped Veritaserum drone. “We would drink and talk. Sometimes there were Muggles there; we played with them.” This slipped from him accidentally, and he continued before he could rein himself in. “Sometimes there were women. Or girls. Boys. Didn’t really matter.” He laughed suddenly, high-pitched and manic, his eyes bulging, and then he snapped his mouth shut and locked his teeth together.

“He won’t be of use for much longer,” muttered Alastor Moody, standing to the right of the table, leaning stiffly against the gritty concrete wall. His wand was protruding from inside his sleeve, and his fingers were curled loosely around it. Severus felt a rush of anger, his mind growling: do it, Moody, use your fucking Clause Thirty-nine, your fucking Auror’s Prerogative. Two words. No one here would fault you for it, would they? His arms yanked against their shackles, making a startling, grating rattle, then relaxed. Moody jerked forward, gripping his wand, then froze. Severus slumped, his charcoal-gray prison robes bunching up against the stiff back of his chair, a cold delicate prickle of sweat leaking out his pores.

“And your preference?” asked the blond man, the Auror, the taker of light.

“Irrelevant,” snapped Moody.

“Boys?” continued the blond, lifting his chin and staring smugly at Severus. “We’re aware of your liaisons with Lucius Malfoy. Tell me, was he the reason you became a Death Eater? Or just one of the perks of the job?”

“Onslowe,” Moody growled.

“He came after,” admitted Severus, immediately flapping his mouth shut. He was losing the fight. He concentrated harder, gripping the scarred wooden arms of his chair. Wandless magic, he thought, tensing the muscles in the back of his neck. Focus. It can be done.

“I’ll bet,” smirked Onslowe. Several faces in the room pinched uncomfortably.

“This line of questioning –“ began Moody sharply, but Onslowe cut him off.

“- If he is to be trusted as an agent of Albus Dumbledore’s Order – and, by extension, the Ministry and all other combatants in the fight against You-Know-Who – we must take his deviances into consideration.” He sneered wolfishly. To Severus, he said: “It makes me sick to think of what the two of you must have done.”

Severus glared hard at him. He bit his lip, focusing, battling the Serum. “J-Jealous?” he stammered. A weak jab, but forcing it out was a triumph. Onslowe’s lips thinned; his face reddened.

“Poor Malfoy must be heartbroken that his beloved is in Ministry custody, eh, Snape? Think he’s gone fetal on some chaise in Malfoy Manor, sobbing over you?” Onslowe’s voice was strained, rising louder and higher with every sentence. He stood and leaned over the table, bringing his face within two feet of Severus’. “Think he’s lifted even one damn finger to get you out?” His face was flushed, shining with sweat, his eyes huge and wild. His knuckles were white, squeezing the lip of the table.

“Onslowe!” barked Moody. “Enough!”

“I’m not stupid,” said Severus slowly. The corners of his mouth quirked into an angry half-grin. “Lucius Malfoy ejaculates chilled champagne. He’s probably taken two weeks in Marseilles with Narcissa Black in order to forget me. I’ve no illusions left of him.” He was horrified at himself, at his loss of control, but there was a good, satiated feeling spreading in the middle of his chest.

“Get him out of here,” Moody snarled. Severus’ shackles unbuckled themselves, and Moody grabbed him by the elbow, forcing him to his feet.


* * *


The Hall is warm with a yellow, candlelight glow. The mingled scents of roast duck and fresh bread and melted butter and a hundred other still-steaming foodstuffs make a heady, homey incense, heavy in the air around him. The warmth of the school is like a blanket around his shoulders. But everything is too quiet. The students are too still. They move as if mired in something thick, as if the air itself has congealed around them.

Death is as strong and evocative in the Hall as the smell of food. The Headmaster has just spoken.

(And spoken well; they weren’t the words Severus would have chosen, but they were unequivocal and strong, simple enough to reach the dimmest of the students, laced with a subtly angry passion that should have stirred them, should have lit them up like bottle rockets, should have made their hearts rattle in their little chests like cheap broomsticks. Some of them must have been touched; some of them must have vestiges of honor and dignity and righteous rage. But most of them are behaving as though they are waiting for a polite moment to duck out and go to bed. His Slytherins, even, are lethargic and hushed, though it’s more petulance than trauma that has quieted them. He is proud of their civil disobedience, their fine form in refusing to kowtow to Potter, the wide-eyed little adulation-vacuum; still he wishes they’d let go their pride a moment and listen. This is one of the few things worth letting into their heads and hearts, as much as it may sting going in. He knows his Slytherins will be the last to realize how vulnerable they really are, despite their sharp and polished defenses. Remember Cedric, Dumbledore said. Severus would have added, because he could have been and may someday be you.)

All that is left is the meal, the goodbyes, the slow act of leaving. The end of term is usually bittersweet for him. It’s freedom from the frustration and impatience and plague of childhood noise that grips him throughout the school year; it’s also the beginning of an intense loneliness that is as inevitable and familiar to him as a season. Over summers, Hogwarts always seems more haunted than usual.

There is no sign of the Aurors. They haven’t been attending the meals, though he saw Onslowe ducking out the side door a few days ago at breakfast. Dumbledore tells him that their presence is to be kept secret. Only a few of the faculty know. The knowledge that he won’t have to run into them by chance reassures him, though he is certain that Onslowe must creep along the halls at night, after the students are in bed.

And now, not suddenly, but with a gradual dawning that gives him time to hope he is imagining it, his dark mark prickles, then burns.

There is a light warm rain outside and when he pulls up his sleeve to Apparate, the droplets that fall onto his mark hiss into steam.


* * *

Tonight they meet in a warehouse, cavernous and crumbling and abandoned. Probably in a city, but Severus can’t be sure. It’s inhospitable, dark in the corners, veined by huge, glittering cobwebs, but it’s a cut above the sandstorm. A quieter space was necessary for this meeting, which is officially over. Only a few remain.

“With all due respect, my Lord, I can’t be leaving Hogwarts at certain hours while school is in session.” Severus raises his head slightly from its deferent bow and looks to Lucius, who is standing at the Dark Lord’s right. Behind him, there is the startling pop of Disapparation from one of the lingering Death Eaters.

“You dare to refuse an order?” hisses Voldemort, his voice echoing in the huge space as if enchanted.

“I am not – I would be happy, my Lord, to apply myself fully to your n cru crusade.” Severus has always hated the regal flattery that Voldemort requires of his subjects, and tonight it almost makes him wretch. “However, there are certain boundaries –“

“Enough!” shouts the Dark Lord, sitting straight up in the huge oak chair that Lucius conjured for him. Lucius takes ap bap back and an abortive noise issues from his throat. Severus risks a glance and sees first fear on Lucius’ face – a rare, embarrassing sight – and then an indescribable wildness in Voldemort’s, his red eyes grown giant, irate, his cheek muscles twitching frenetically. His wand is out and raised.

Severus squeezes his eyes shut, and it comes, the hiss, the jolt, the entire and unbearable pain. He flops onto his stomach, screaming, writhing, grinding his face into the cold, gritty concrete floor, wanting to die. The pain shoots everywhere, in his teeth, his cuticles, his ankles, the folds and wrinkles of his ears. He can feel each of his vital organs, the stabbing ache in all of them, as if they’re about to burst open. Suddenly, he is lifted from the ground, still twitching and pulsing with Cruciatus, so taken by agony that he thinks this ascent must be death, the slow process of dying. But there is no relief; the pain is still there, still white-hot and crushing. Could it be that death is not release, but continuance? Could the last act of living somehow be the only act in death? He screams and screams.

Someos scs screaming with him, near his ears. He can see the ground below, blurred by the vibration of his body and the water in his eyes. Voldemort is there, standing now, tiny as a toy soldier. The screaming beside him could be his own voice, an echo of it. Perhaps the Dark Lord has ripped him into two, his halves still conscious and crying out. Perhaps this is Hell’s answer to the angelic choir, a chorus of Cruciatus shrieks.

Then it is over, he tingles with the memory of pain, and his soul is falling out of his body. Air rushes past, cold. This, then, is death, he thinks, his mind quiet with wonder. There’s no flesh left to hold me up. He squeezes his eyes shut.

There is an explosion of pain, a wet slam and a sick crackling that shoots through him, a synaesthesia of sound and agony. Another slam beside him, this one heard and not felt. A groaning. He is afraid to move.

“Are you –“ a quick, jagged breath. “- Severus, are you…?” Lucius. His voice is broken, shooting off sparks.

rus rus allows a slow moan to escape him, feeling the sound in the sides of his chest. His body is split into pieces, he thinks. He is littered over the ground.

“Can you move?” Lucius asks breathlessly. Severus can hear him shifting position, scraping across the concrete floor. He must be whole, or mostly. How will they collect their missing parts? “Here,” Lucius says, and takes him by the shoulders (he still has shoulders), gently, a kind of gently he remembers once thinking Lucius incapable of, and turns him slowly onto his back (he still has a spine, he can feel the bones bending and scraping together like a derailed train). He opens his eyes, and Lucius is lying next to him, propped on one arm, leaning over and against him. All his parts are there. The ones he can see, anyway. Lucius is sweaty, his hair clinging to his face in clumps. The side of his face is raw, oozing dark blood, the flesh scraped rough and ragged like a grotesque pilled sweater.

“Is he –“

“I think he’s gone.” Lucius looks around quickly, nervously.

“Why?” Severus whispers. Lucius blinks. “You.”

“I tried to make him stop…” Lucius says. “He went – he’s going - something is wrong…” He shuts his mouth suddenly, and averts his eyes. “Can you stand?”

Severus shifts his legs (of course he still has legs, he is not in pieces. He forces the fog in his head to dissipate. He is whole and alive. He needs to get out of here) and an ache wrenches one knee; the other is numb. He groans and goes limp on the ground.

“You fell farther than I did,” Lucius murmurs. He fumbles somewhere below Severus’ line of sight, pulling out his wand. “I’m rusty with healing spells,” he says, but Severus knows he hardly bothered to learn any. Lucius always had more interest in curses. He touches the wand to his own face first. “Innexum – innex –“

“Innexum visceris,” Severus mutters.

Lucius heals himself (though not totally; he is still wincing when he moves and a dark blot on his left hip is still growing bigger). When he is finished, he asks, “Do you have yours?” Severus squints at him for an instant, then pushes a hand inside his robes, rooting. He pulls out a fistful of sharp wooden shards. The dragon heartstring core trails from between his fingers. Lucius sighs.

“I’ll do it, then.” Severus feels a hot flash of indignation at the annoyance in Lucius’ tone. Lucius moves his wand from wound to wound, inexpertly mending him. For the deeper wounds, the damaged joints and bones, Severus whispers a series of more complicated charms. Lucius manages a few of them. He rests the tip of his wand to the corner of Severus’ mouth, where a hot bead of blood is forming, threatening to spill down his face. Severus hopes it is only coming from a bite wound in his mouth, and not someplace deeper.

“Tell me how,” Lucius says.

“I don’t know how.” Healing spells never fascinated him, either.

Lucius trails his wand down Severus’ torso, a curiously sensual gesture. “What else hurts?”

“Everything.” They are quiet for a moment. “Thank you, Lucius.”

Lucius shakes his head and looks away, up to the rafters from which they fell. “You’re still coming,” he says. “Next week.”

Severus’ mouth pulls at the corners. Frivolous, even for Lucius. “Hardly the time, is it?”

“I want you there,” Lucius murmurs. “I want to see you.” Severus wonders if Lucius is concussed, if he’s thinking unclearly. There is a brokenness to his voice that Severus has never heard before, a halting shake to his movements that he has never seen.

“We should leave,” Severus says. Lucius stares hard at him for a moment, then leans down – slowly, gingerly – and brushes Severus’ lips with his own, flicking them with his tongue, lapping up the cooling blood.

“We should,” he breathes. Severus’ face is bathed in heat.

“No,” insists Severus, but Lucius’ hand steals to his throat, and then slides down his chest, and lower, and tucks between his legs. He massages Severus through his robes; the flesh there is still pliant, a jelly. Lucius is hard already, somehow, and rubbing so hard against Severus’ hip that the friction of fabric is painful. Severus grabs onto his shoulders, digging his fingernails into Lucius’ robes, and tries to press Lucius away from him. Lucius grimaces and pushes back, pinning Severus’ back to the ground and shoving up against him. He lets out soft, tiny groans as he moves, and Severus knows that they cannot all be from pleasure. His body feels as if it’s been filled with broken glass; every movement pushes a shard into some vulnerable flesh, some inflamed vein, something bile-filled and vital. He feels as though the pressure of Lucius might puncture him. The cold of the floor seems to radiate through him.

“Gods, you’re disgusting,” hisses Lucius, running his palm across Severus’ forehead, over the clumping, oily roots of his hair. Severus turns his face away, but Lucius grabs it, holding his jaw tightly, and pivots it to face him. He covers Severus’ mouth with whispery kisses like the beat of insect wings. His lips curl back from his teeth when he comes, hotly, against the juncture of Severus’ hip and thigh. His growl of release is so familiar that Severus feels again as if he has been torn in half. He works at Severus harder now, pushing at his cock as if furious at it.

“No,” Severus says again, and pulls the hand away. He is so tired, and he hurts so much. Lucius rears back to look at him.

“I can make you feel better,” Lucius whispers. Severus shuts his eyes, and a hot, humiliating sting emerges from one corner and drips down his face. “I haven’t forgotten how.”

This is an old ritual, an old need. The touching, the little lovelike motions, these are the most important things. How he once thought they could heal him, how far they once made him fall. He doesn’t want this. He knows where it will lead. Still he needs it, must have it, like a deathbed wish: an intense, irrational, selfish and momentary urge. “You know where,” Severus murmurs, and lays Lucius’ hand on his belly, wincing a bit at the pressure on what must now be a huge, tender bruise.

Lucius does remember. He has forgotten neither how nor where. On this freezing floor, in this empty warehouse, in this nameless city, he incants with his fingers, he licks the blood out of Severus’ mouth; he does an old, flawed, and powerful kind of magic, with his wand resting unused at his side.

to be continued.