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Sirius
The first time I’d had a bit too much to drink. I’ll admit that. Do I also admit that it was essentially my fault? Well yes. And that I could have put an end to things many times over and didn’t? Yeah ok, since we’re confessing to things, I may as well admit to that too.
Alright, so things got a little out of hand. That hadn’t been my intention.
Back to that first night. I’d been trawling the muggle bars in Soho and who do I see sitting alone at the bar nursing a single whiskey, not even drinking really, just staring sadly into his glass as if it contained all the terrible secrets of the universe. Yeah alright, we’re all sad mate, I thought, give it a rest. He was dressed funny, like he was aiming for muggle but didn’t quite get there. His jacket was a strange colour and his jeans were ill fitting. If it wasn’t for that I might not have stopped. But for some reason my heart gave a little pang and I thought of us all as desperately young things all those years ago. Thought of Snape and his desperate desire to fit in and never really making it. Made me feel weirdly tender for the little bastard.
So I stopped.
Stupid git didn’t even register surprise at my sudden appearance. But he wouldn’t would he? Though he didn’t tell me to piss off either.
Later when I had had a couple more I expressed reluctance to go back to the house at number 12 that I shared with Harry. Didn’t like him seeing me when I was like this. For no real reason other than I still thought of him as 13 and hence felt a certain responsibility to shield him from the worst of me.
Was I shocked when Snape gruffly, grudgingly told me I could bunk at his? Probably not as much as I would have been sober. I accepted with all the politeness and humility I could muster. Just kidding. I probably made a stupid joke.
Fucking hell. That house. You should have seen this dump. I never did figure out why the dude continued to stay there. I know, I know. Number 12. But this place was another thing altogether.
He let us into the dark, cramped sitting room and led me up the narrow staircase. I had no idea where we were. Later I found out. Spinner’s End it was called. Which was appropriate because every single thing about the place made you want to off yourself.
At the top of the stairs was a landing with just two doors leading off. He led me into the first one then left me there. The bed was narrow and if I stretched out my feet were over the edge. The blankets were thin, worn, musty, and I had to do a couple of warming spells on the room before my teeth stopped chattering.
Why’d I do it? Oh I don’t know. I can’t tell you my entire thought process that night but what I can tell you is that lying there cold and alone I suddenly started to think of the warm body lying not ten feet away from me and then I sort of developed a sort of — ahem — problem that would not go away. If I were sober it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to do what I did next but if I was sober we wouldn’t be in this predicament in the first place would we?
He was sleeping when I slipped into his room. I almost felt bad that I was going to wake him up. He looked almost peaceful. Never seen him like that before.
His bed was as narrow as mine was but I climbed in regardless. He smelled good up close. Didn’t expect that either. I pressed my stiffy into his arse and he pressed back and the rest, as they say, is history.
I’m just messing with you, I’m totally going to tell you what happened next. That’s the best part right? That’s the part you’ve listened to all the rest of my incoherent rambling for. That morbid curiosity. What was it like to bang Severus Snape?
Shit. Fucking Snivelly. He — It’s just — fuck, never mind. It’s just that you’ve never been with someone like Snivelly. You just haven’t.
Back to me throwing myself at him then. So I shucked off my pants and pulled up his god awful nightshirt and pushed down his underwear and with some conjured slick I rubbed myself off into the crack of his arse, heavy mouth breathing into his neck. Later I would develop a sort of Pavlovian response at seeing that terrible, greying nightshirt, to this day the sight of it bunched up at Snivelly’s waist has me damn near hyperventilating. When I reached around he was hard. So I jerked him off in time with my thrusts. Seemed rude not to. When he came he made this sexy little cry that made my toes curl and pushed me over the edge so I was coming buckets into the crack of his arse. Nothing much to write home about, you might say, ho hum. You would think.
The next morning I left at sunrise without saying goodbye.
I think about that sometimes. I imagine instead, going downstairs into his ugly, cramped kitchen and making us cups of teas with the only two mugs he owned and bringing them upstairs, drinking them together silently as the first light fell through cracked curtains. I wonder if that would have changed anything.
Severus
When I think about Sirius, he is always leaving. If he were to ask I would have said, that’s what I like about you Black. And he would agree, that’s what was good about our relationship, we knew what was expected of us. What I like about you Snivelly, he would say, is you never want anything from me. Which isn’t true at all. I want a great deal. That is my cross to bear.
That first night I had offered up my spare room because I had wanted him to kiss me and I hadn’t known any other way to say it. Really it was quite pathetic. But you don’t go about propositioning devastatingly handsome men in bars when you look like I do. I hadn’t really expected to have to show him to my spare room at all but the man is really quite dense. And of course I never did get that kiss. Not that night anyway.
Some weeks after I see him at the Hog’s Head but of course that was why I was there. He was with friends and I, being that I have none, was alone. I caught his eye before stepping out into the side alley by the bins for a cigarette. I stood there smoking with my glass of firewhiskey, shivering against the cold when a fine rain began to fall. I had been looking down trying to get my soggy cigarette to relight when he stepped up to me and with a cupped hand muttered an Incendio. I looked up at him, probably desperately, and forgot to take a puff on my now lit fag. We stared at one another and the rain deepened. Though we didn’t move to go back inside. I suppose I should point out how heavy this moment was, how fraught. It was as if we were suspended on a knife’s edge and I suppose our life could have in that moment gone one of two ways. Both of us stood there probably contemplating a lifetime of heated exchanges and barbed comments and wondering why it had culminated in this one single moment. Just two middle aged men for whom lust had inched out hate, though just barely.
“You look good with something in your mouth.” Black said. It sounds stupid now but I tell you when he said that I thought only of the heat of his big body next to mine and the slope of his neck and I forgot every single thing that cruel mouth had said to me before ever and instead thought about what it would feel like on me. Yes pathetic, I know, Severus Snape, double agent, master Occlumens, capable of tricking the dark lord himself, not immune to the pedestrian charms of a handsome face and a tall, well built body. Well, now you know.
“Do I.” I stated. My voice had gone very deep. I do that on purpose sometimes, it is a useful form of intimidation, but that time I hadn’t, which goes someway to explaining how affected I was.
“Open.” Black said and I complied immediately. My cigarette fell to the ground and Black stomped it out. Then he inserted two thick fingers which I sucked on, greedily and instinctively while Black watched wide eyed and heavy breathing like I had performed some very amazing trick. He kept watching, pushing his fingers in and out, like he was fucking me with them while I swirled my tongue around and in between and licked them clean. I was still clutching my glass and I was obscenely hard, straining against my trousers. The more roughly Black fucked me, for that’s what it felt like, with his big fingers the harder I got. It was a struggle to breathe normally so I panted and drooled and Black watched me, his breath hot against my face. I wondered if he was imagining it was the most intimate part of himself that I was enthusiastically sucking on, it did look like he was. I wondered if he knew I would get on my knees for him, happily, without question, that I always would have. It is possible to hate someone with every fibre of ones being and still find them uncommonly attractive. I can attest to that.
Then, even now I colour at the thought of it, his free hand pushed aside my robes and brushed, just once, against the placard of my trousers and I was coming, fiercely and suddenly, into my pants. I had not expected it and the shock caused me to drop my glass which shattered on the ground with a loud crash. Black pulled his fingers free and wiped them on his jacket and I looked at the ground and muttered shit, as much for the mess I had made in my pants as for the wasted drink.
“So sexy Snivellus.” Black said and the way he said it made it sound not like a taunt but the highest of compliments. “So fucking sexy.”
But I, not knowing how to take compliments nor how to handle embarrassment, gathered my robe around me and took one then two steps and with a crack I was gone.
So you see, we had both mastered the disappearing act from the start. Though the way I would want to remember him, if anyone were asking, would be standing awkwardly on my doorstep scratching his head, a little drunk, though not as much as you’d think, hoping to get laid, or whatever passed as a thought in that silly little mind of his. Oh Sirius, if only you knew how much I liked you like that, standing waiting for me, hopeful, the whole night ahead of us. Coming not going.
Sirius
I had told myself after he had left me in a back alley hard and desperate and drenched through that I didn’t want the greasy git anyway. I told myself that the witch I had gone home with that night had made up for it. I managed to lie to myself for just as long as it took until my next drinking session with Remus.
I think I knew at the start of the night what I was going to do. Later I came to realise that that night in the alley way with Snape was akin to some kind of sexual awakening. Pathetic at my age I know. But come on, who knows they’re going to be into ugly middle aged men fellating their fingers and coming in their pants until it happens to them. And it turned out it wasn’t so much that particular act as everything that Snape did that got my engine going. So when Remus offered up his couch around midnight I declined and soon found myself stumbling down what I thought I remembered as the street Snape lived on. Even in the middle of the night the street was ugly, depressing, desolate, and every damn row of houses looked the same. It was a wonder I found the place, but find the place I did. I had the feeling Snape hadn’t been sleeping when he opened the door and scowled at me in his nightgown and robe but I didn’t ask why not.
“Damn lucky I found you.” I said. “Everyone of these houses look the same as the next.”
“I see we have differing ideas about what constitutes good luck.” He said but nodded me in grudgingly.
He didn’t ask what I was doing here. We both knew what. One minute we were standing eyeing each other off and the next I had crossed the span of his sitting room in three strides and taken him in my arms and lifted him up as easy as you please so his legs were around my waist. Our mouths found each other easily and I attached myself to him as if I thought him capable of weaselling out of my grasp and away from me if I didn’t tether him to me thus. Which come to think of it I do think him fully capable of. I don’t underestimate that man for a second.
“You left me.” I growled, still sore over the other night. “You’ll pay for that.” I said, still trying to kiss the life out of him but I didn’t get to hear what his reply was because I had thrown him on to that horrible grey mouldering couch with myself on top of him and I already had that awful nightgown pushed up to his hips.
I think I begged, begged him to let me fuck him. I had very little self respect from the start. But I had got a taste and I wanted more. He was begging me by the end though. And I made him come again. That felt pretty good. After I followed him upstairs and drunkenly passed out on top of him and he let me. Before I left in the morning I got him to show me just what he could do with that wicked mouth of his. It was as good as I imagined that night in the rain. Expert cocksucker that one. I was feeling a wee bit worse for wear but that perked me right up.
I guess later I felt bad about how I would treat him back then, like he was nothing but a booty call, a hole for me to fuck whenever I got the urge. He never asked me, never wanted anything from me, just let me in when I showed up. Severus, why the fuck did you let me treat you like that?
Severus
Hm? What was that? Was I in love with him? What a question to ask. Yes well I suppose I did let him call the shots. But what would you have done? What other choice did I have? I was lonely. So was he I suppose. Love didn’t even come in to it.
Yes I did open my wards to him and give him a key. In hindsight yes, I probably shouldn’t have done that. It only encouraged him.
For the months and years that followed I would see Sirius whenever he felt like it. Sometimes it was often, sometimes it was less so. I could always tell when he started seeing someone because I wouldn’t see him for awhile. He’d always come back to me though. Are they a better a fuck than me? I’d asked him once, god knows why, I must have been feeling maudlin. No, he’d replied, not looking up from his paper, not even close. I guess at the time I convinced myself he meant it. I guess that was always enough for me.
When Black wasn’t around I brewed potions and antidotes for the locals to get by. You need to start charging more, Black would say. Yes perhaps, I would reply but I never did. People would pay me what they could afford, which wasn’t a lot. Black would leave galleons in the fruit bowl in the kitchen when he thought I wasn’t looking and turn up laden with bags of groceries when I forgot to shop, which was more often than I’d probably like to admit. I’d tell him to stop but he’d shush me and continue going on about his ridiculous motorbike or something tedious and uninspired that Potter had done or some such nonsense. Black always had a story to tell, always had something to talk about, whilst I hardly ever did. I often wondered what he saw in me.
I hardly ever left the house, and I gave up the bars altogether, it seemed rather too much effort for very little reward, although I suppose it was the reason I had Sirius. I kept myself busy holed up in my lab with my research or with my books. I always find something to do, I’d tell him when he chastised me but what I didn’t tell him is often that was staring out the small kitchen window smoking cigarettes one after another and hoping he’d turn up.
And when he did come he would give me mind altering orgasms, make me feel things I never had before, and I him, I suppose, at least he always told me as much. There’s a point when two people are sleeping together that it starts to feel like real intimacy. That’s what we thought it all was, I think, an approximation. Some simulacrum of the real thing.
I suppose it’s a wonder we didn’t recognise it for what it was. But we never really gave it much thought.
So you see, he wasn’t really all that bad. He put up with my moods, my churlishness, my bad temper. We even began to understand each other, after all these years. “How would you know what it’s like?” I said to him once, childishly, belligerently, when he was on one of his rants about my hermitic lifestyle. “You’ve had everything handed to you on a silver plate.”
“Severus, do you really think I’m that person anymore?” He asked me, with none of his usual facetiousness. “I’ve had every single thing taken from me time and time again. I’ve had more rude awakenings than hot dinners. Life has been as unkind to me as it has to you.” And I suppose you could say from that moment something changed in how I saw him, because as much as I hated to admit it, he was right.
It occurred to me that the younger me would have rejoiced to know that, but the older me could only feel sorrow and a familiar stifling impotence. Nothing functionally had changed, he was still an idiot and a bastard, but he was my bastard. I suppose that makes makes no sense to you. It wouldn’t have to me once either.
Sirius
You ask me what I was thinking, what my thought process was, and I tell you, I didn’t really have one. I guess I wasn’t thinking at all. It was all a game to me, and one that I was winning. I thought I was giving us both what we wanted. I never stopped to think that what I might want, what we might want was something different altogether. Well, would you have? With someone like him? The great dungeon bat? The Wizarding World’s Most Intimidating Wizard 20 years running? The man who wears his clothes like armour and his expression as tough as dragon hide? Actually don’t answer that.
He has a good poker face, let’s leave it at that. I’m no Voldemort and he even fooled him. Come on, let me have that at least. With Severus, what you think about him is what he allows you to think, does that make sense?
Even so, as dense as I am, there came a time when I realised, well I realised I liked the man, didn’t I? I liked spending time with him. I liked sitting with him in his sad little house and talking to him and sometimes, if I was very lucky, making him smile, even if it was just to make fun of me.
You see, he has a wonderful smile really. Snaggletoothed and charming and genuine. It’s a shame more people don’t get to see it.
Yes I suppose you would want to talk about that wouldn’t you? Oh alright then. Go on, what do you want to know?
When I first saw her I thought she was pretty. I thought she was beautiful actually and she was. She really was. Good tits, nice arse, I believe were my exact words. Did I imagine that she would be the woman I would marry? No, of course I didn’t. Never thought I’d be married did I? Not then anyway.
Severus knew the drill. He never asked for more than I could give and I in turn never asked him to give more of himself to me. If I met someone and I wanted to spend time with them, well I would. Good sex and good conversation, that’s all we took from each other, nothing more. No one told us that’s as good as it really gets. Though I suppose we wouldn’t have listened if they had.
Didn’t the papers love us though? She and I. Weren’t we beautiful? Didn’t people fall all over themselves to get a glimpse of us? The golden couple. Our relationship was conducted almost entirely in the spotlight, in the open for the world to see. It was exactly and precisely everything I’d always wanted. And it was the exact polar opposite of my life with with Snivelly.
Snivellus my dear, my darling, do you remember when we used to steal upstairs to your room, to that narrow, creaky bed, with the draft under the door? To be under you my dear, with you on top of me, the sounds you would make and your body in my hands, was bliss, was very heaven. You remember Wordsworth my darling, I know you do, it was you who taught it to me.
Severus
Did you ask me if I liked her? Do I like anyone? No I didn’t like her.
Yes I did meet her once. That was a mistake. It was at one of those ghastly Ministry events. Yes, that was the reason I went. Haven’t we established by now that I don’t make good decisions? I knew what she looked like of course. Everyone did. She was in every one of my morning papers, in the arms of my lover. For he still was then. Of course he was, she was the same as all the rest. We had no reason to think any different. Not then.
She was… Luminous. And I was wretched, ugly, surly. I imagined him comparing us, I imagined what he must be thinking. We met, we spoke, she knew who I was but did not know who I was to him. Well I didn’t think she did, unless she was as good at dissembling as I am. But no, she had no need to be, she was normal in all the best possible ways, she had not been touched by war, by suffering like we had. She had no reason not to take everyone at their face value, not yet learned, like he and I had, that every single person wears a veneer, that absolutely no-one is to be trusted. I could have told her of course, what it was like to delve into a mind and be faced with darkness, filth and rot. But I don’t think that’s very good party conversation.
“Your girl is lovely.” I told him later, outside on the grass smoking a cigarette. I had heard it somewhere and I didn’t trust myself to come up with something on my own. There I was again, alone, in the dark, miserable. Sometimes I marvel at my capacity to be like that where ever you put me. I dropped my cigarette and ground it under my shoe and was reminded of that time years ago in the rain.
“Severus.” He said and touched my arm and for the first time, my facade dropped.
“Don’t!” I said sharply, drawing my arm into myself. “Leave me.” And I turned and I left. I think I knew then, even before he did, what she would become to him.
Later of course I pretended it meant nothing, that I was tired, that he was mistaken. I didn’t know any other way. One gets so used to lying.
I found out about it in the papers. He apologised for that. As dim as he was, he realised at least that it would have been hard for me. In fact, it was excruciating, I’m not sure that being told to my face would have made it any easier. But even I recognised that I deserved that.
What was the headline again? It seems seared in my brain. Wizarding London’s most eligible bachelor to be married. Oh, I wonder who that is? I had thought before I realised.
I swear to god if you make that noise again, I will hex you. I will not have your pity.
What changed? Everything. A marriage changes everything. We couldn’t be lovers any longer, we both knew that. And I couldn’t — I could never bring myself to say all the things I should have. I am sorry for that.
Oh, never mind, I’m well used to regret, child. We’re well past that. Regret is a constant companion for an old man like me.
Well, that’s probably all I want to say on that. I’m tired and it grows late.
Sirius
I’m sorry, yes, I did hear you. I was just thinking. Yes, is the answer. Yes, it hurt.
We said goodbye in his dark, cramped kitchen in the late afternoon. I’m not sure why that matters except that I remember noticing the room get darker and darker and I remember thinking that the sun was setting on us too. My gosh! Don't I sound like him! I suppose some of him had rubbed off on me, over the years.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I’d miss him, though I would, mightily, so I said, “You will look after yourself, won’t you?”
“Of course.” He said and I knew in my heart that he wouldn’t, not really, he needed me for that. But I didn’t push because admitting that I knew would mean admitting my own culpability, and I wasn’t ready to do that. Not then anyway.
Then he did something strange, something so out of character for us that I didn’t at first know how to take it.
He reached out and with the back of his hand he stroked my cheek. “So handsome,” he said. “My Sirius.”
And there was an expression on his face I’d never seen before.
I did not know how to respond, so I took his hand in mine and I kissed it gently and then, though each step felt like fire burned under my feet, I left.
I went home to my fancy Kensington apartment and kissed my beautiful wife-to-be and wondered why it felt less like home than dusty drapes and creaky stairs and piles of books for tripping over and unidentifiable liquids in test tubes that meant the fridge always smelled just a little bit strange.
And on top of everything was the constant nagging refrain; what could he have meant by that?
But me being me, I valiantly pushed it out of my mind determined to get on with living my life problem free if I possibly could manage it. Wasn’t this the life I had always wanted? To be known and looked at and envied? Sirius Black, you deserve this, I thought. If anyone deserves it it’s you, after all you have been through.
It’s alright, you can say it; what an absolute drip, what a moron.
It wasn’t until some weeks later that I sat up in bed in a cold sweat. “Wait.” I said.
Well there you are, have we had enough? Surely I’ve bored you stupid by now and I must be going anyway. I’m a married man, I have duties, responsibilities.
He’ll be here soon.
Yes ‘he.’ What did you think? Of course I married him. I’m not really as silly as I look you know.
Oh alright then, yes you are right, we’re not quite done. Yes I suppose that was cruel of me, I apologise.
The morning after I had sat up with such a start in the middle of the night, I broke it off with my fiancé.
You see I had finally realised what he had been telling me that afternoon in his kitchen. It had suddenly became clear to me; I, Sirius Black, could do what no other man or woman had managed to, I had learnt how to read him. I knew by the slight edge to his voice that he’d want coffee over tea, by the way he held his shoulders that he didn’t feel like speaking today but he wanted someone there anyway, to busy themselves around him and prattle on but not expect a reply. That when he said, my Sirius, so tender and wistful like that, he meant, I love you.
As I said before I’m not as stupid as I give the impression and I knew - as a life such as mine teaches you one or two things - that when someone like Severus Snape loves you, you do not squander it because that is a fucking gift and my lord, you do not deserve it. Oh boy, you don’t, but you can probably work on it and maybe even one day, you will.
And it was in that moment too that I knew in my heart that you could share a life with someone, a house, a bed and bodily fluids, and not know them at all, that knowing someone, really knowing someone was different and you felt that deep in your core and that he, to me, was what home felt like.
Was it any wonder I had been in cold sweats?
When I told my fiancé, I told her everything, I told her that I was I love with that man, with Severus Snape and I couldn’t in all good conscience marry her. Her beautiful face twisted in confusion, not quite comprehending what she was hearing. Him? She had asked and I smiled and said yes, him. Please don’t worry, she is fine, she didn’t love me any more than I her, she’s married now to a wonderful man who loves her, you know who it is, you’ve probably seen their photos in magazines, and they have two adorable children. We still speak, in fact, her and Severus like each other, if you can believe that, and her husband is a great admirer of Severus and they speak at length on patents and incubation periods and distribution and other things that bore the living daylight out of me.
That very day I went to Severus and I got on one knee on that ugly frayed carpet in the middle of his sitting room.
Oh no, I promise you it was nothing like a fairy tale, nor was it romantic, that’s just not how we are. It was simply something I should have done a long time ago and I told him as much.
In true Snape fashion he looked at me for a long time, to the point of discomfort, to the point that I started to think that perhaps I had misread wildly, and then he nodded, just once. If it weren’t for the small smile playing about his eyes and lips I might have thought him unmoved. No, I thought, I do know him and I know the bastard loves me even if he won’t tell me himself and we kissed deeply as if we might never get the chance again and it told me everything I needed to know.
When we pulled apart I pressed my forehead to his and, as though I were imparting something meaningful, said, “I’m not living in this fucking house though.” Because as much as I loved him I hated that house and he knew that. He laughed and said, “As you wish.”
“Are you crying?” I asked, just then noticing.
“Of course not,” he said, “I simply have something in my eye.” And he slipped away, presumably to tend to it. Look, if he thought anyone else knew what a sap he really is he would absolutely divorce me, so we’ll just keep that between us, but that man would die for me and make no mistake about it. Turns out I was right about that.
Speak of the devil, here he comes now.
Ah, I see you’ve met.
~