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It’s not an obsession so much as a way to pass the time. This is what he tells himself.
He logs in. He chooses the same one, night after night.
Hello, Darlin’. You’re awake. Slow smile, legs tangled in sheets. Tall, solidly built, too handsome to be real. A fantasy. Sun falls softly through sheer billowy curtains. Come on then, sexy. I want you over here.
Snape knows what comes next, doesn’t need to drag it out. He could if he wanted to, the program has algorithms for minor alterations. If he did nothing his bed mate would prompt again, perhaps with a being shy are we sweetheart? Or something similar, before proceeding to cycle through his small repertoire of programmed responses, then back to Come on then, sexy. I want you over here.
He doesn’t bother with that though, just crawls over the bed and swings his leg over. It always feels so real. Every time.
Small chuckle. That’s better. I’m so fucking hard for you. See baby? See how hard you make me. Do you want to touch me?
Snape can take him in his hand or he can suck him in his mouth, whatever he wants. Either way, the man will groan and throw back his head, bare his throat, suck air in through his teeth. You’ll make me come, if you keep doing that. He doesn’t though, he’s not programmed to.
Sit on me, baby. Sit on my hard cock…. Mm, that’s it. It feels so real, indistinguishable from the real thing. There’s pain too. Just enough to make him feel it.
Yes, that’s it… Fuck yes … so hot. A litany of perfect filth.
As they keep fucking the man gets dirtier, starts to fuck him harder from beneath. Encourages Snape to ride him harder, which he does. This is why Snape likes this one, the losing of control, the unraveling, the dirty mouth on him. He’s getting closer, he’ll come soon.
Fuck, your little cunt feels so good. Snape groans when he says that. He always does. So tight.
Are you close? Are you close sweetheart? Yes, Snape gasps, even though he can’t hear him, can never hear him, yes I’m close.
Breathless panting moan, I’m gonna come in your tight wet pussy. And Snape knows that it’s just because this program is hetero leaning but he likes to imagine the man is kinky, a bit of a freak. He likes how it sounds when he says those things to him. It’s always right then that Snape starts to come, feeling like he’s hitting that spot deep inside him over and over until he can’t stand it anymore and he’s crying out and shooting come all over his chest as the man pulls him flush and groans deeply and Snape can feel his come inside him, filling him. In real life no-one feels come inside them but this is VR porn and you do if you want to.
Perfect, beautiful. Why would anyone ever have real sex? Good question. He still does, sometimes. Nameless strangers, always human, their faces aren’t as chiseled or as handsome, the sheets aren’t silky and the curtains don’t billow gracefully. He’s always disappointed. He keeps doing it though he has no idea why or what he’s looking for.
The tower on West 104B has both synthetics and humans. Not everywhere does, he was lucky to have the place. Synths had their own quarters and most of them stick to it but the sterilised plasticity of those places gave him the creeps. He’d never been able to throw off the old compulsion for the tactile, pungent comfort of humans, as much as he tried.
His rooms were high up, so high that if the lifts ever broke, which they sometimes did, he was stuck either on the ground or inside. He put up with it for the view from the large main window, the bright neon holosigns that stretched up into the sky and below him to the cement pavement that he was too high up to see.
It’s late when he gets in. His apartment is lit with the sort of glow that only those who seek pleasure in the grit and the decay of the city at night take comfort in. He stows his plasma and takes a shower to wash away the night. A man with his sort of expertise could make money in this town if he knew where to look though you needed a strong stomach or at the very least a decent weapon. This city wasn’t for the weak of heart anyway, he’d learnt that a long time ago. The jobs were infrequent but they paid the bills. He didn’t need to eat but there were still utilities to pay, rent to make. Sometimes when things got dire he considered moving somewhere cheaper but he knew he never would, and if he got really desperate he could usually rely on Arthur to come through. It paid to have people in this town who thought they owed you.
He logs in and flicks on the VR. The thing is there are immersive realities with limitless possibilities, open world second lives indistinguishable from the real thing, he doesn’t really need to watch this old porn flick over and over, the same thing every night, the same man, the same generic programmed dialogue. It’s not an obsession. It’s really not. He just finds it comforting, familiar, knowable in a world where you can’t even be sure of yourself.
He lies down, pulls the headset on.
Hello, darlin’.
It’s the job with the man with the three arms where everything starts to unravel. When he meets him. Later he will wonder if it was a set up, all of it. If it had been all along. No such thing as coincidence, he will think. Albus had taught him that. Albus who always fixed things just so, Albus who was his only friend. Albus who he had killed.
Then again, maybe nothing happened for a reason and everything was random. Maybe that’s what he believed.
Most people don’t immediately clock him for non human, they’re supposed to be indistinguishable, but Black knew. “Describe in single words the good things that come to mind about your mother,” he said to him, lips close to his ear, a knowing smirk on his lips. Snape said nothing, he’d had a mother; after all he used to be human. What good were tests like these for creatures like himself? But his point was made. He knew. After, he tries to think of some words that fit but all he can think is, she was human. She had a pulse.
That night in his apartment, shifting neon lights slanting over the planes of his synthetic skin, he had stared at himself in the mirror and whispered, you used to be human, you used to be human, you used to be human.
But perhaps he’s getting ahead of himself.
He had held out for as long as he could before he’d gone begging to Arthur for scraps.
“There is something,” he had said, “but you’re not going to like it.”
As if that had mattered before.
As he’s leaving Arthur says, “Look if I don’t ask Molly will kick my ass, is it… getting any easier?”
He thought of waking up in a crisp white bed surrounded by four white walls, seeing Arthur’s face staring down at him. No tubes keeping him alive, no breath in his lungs, no thirst, no hunger, no anything. “What have you done?” He had demanded in his new machine propelled voice that sounded eerily, terribly like his old one. “You should have let me die.”
He looked at Arthur. “Tell Molly… absolutely.”
Arthur had quirked his mouth up at one corner and nodded. The good thing about Arthur was that he knew when to let things lie.
“Thanks.” He had said and walked.
Arthur had been wrong. He didn’t mind jobs like these. He could get his hands dirty. Wasn’t a problem for him. No second chances for human killers. Immediate retirement, no trial. He’d never had the balls to off himself properly but if he tried hard enough he might not need to.
He recognises him immediately. A decade or two older, moustachioed, streaks of grey in his hair, but it’s him. He’s sure of it. His first impulse is to bolt. Someone set this up. Had to have. But why? And how? He was supposed to be dead. Made no damn sense.
He’d been staring too long. The man tips his glass to him from the bar. Same handsome, crooked smile.
Hello, darlin.’
He was really in it now.
He sits too, orders a drink that he won’t touch. He’d gotten pretty good at pretending, most people don’t notice.
The man leans over. Snape thinks of his face contorted in pleasure. Thinks of cock and chest hair, thinks of billowing cream curtains and the soft cool breeze that made you remember the ocean.
“White.”
“Smith.”
“That your real name?”
“That yours?”
A grin, handsome but undercut with a threatening violence that he’d never seen there before. It was a good look on him.
“You playing?”
“Not tonight.”
White or whatever his name really was let his eyes linger pointedly on the man at the table with three arms. The man was overweight in a three piece suit, he held his cards in one hand and drummed his fingers on the table with the other. With the other he lifted a glass to his lips and sipped. Altereds always gave Severus the fucking creeps.
“Stakes are high tonight.”
Fucking Arthur, he thinks. What the hell was this? “Too high for me. Excuse me.” He pretends to go back to his drink.
Snape tries not to look alarmed as the man walks over and leans in. His breath ghosts at his ear as he speaks. Snape tries not to let anything show on his face at all.
Snape watches him join the table and get dealt in, watches as a synth lights his cigarette, watches his eyes follow her ass as she walks away. Born-synth, Snape thinks. Her skin was too perfect, her features too even, it gave her an other worldly eerieness that never failed to make made his skin crawl. Always had done, even before. Snape passed because of the ugly nose and the thin lips and the crooked teeth, none of which they had thought to fix, though he was grateful for that now.
“I’m not the only one on this job.” He tells Arthur. “Did you know?”
“No.”
“Fucking amateur hour.”
“Who?”
“You tell me. You fucking me Weasley?”
“No Severus, I’m not fucking you.”
Snape studies his face a moment. “I believe you.”
“Do you want me to pull you?”
He thinks about it. In truth, something about all this intrigued him. Definitely a bad sign. “No.”
“I’ll find out who.”
Snape was already walking away. “Don't bother.”
Back at his apartment it doesn’t take much effort to find out who he is. Sirius Black. Low level thug who managed to work his way up to killing for profit. Locked up not long before Snape had joined the Order with Albus, Arthur and the rest of the rag tag team of wannabe do gooders. (Joined of course being the genteel term for coerced but that’s another story for another time).
He still didn’t know who Black was working for.
Skin-jobs like him don’t get decommissioned on sight anymore but that didn’t mean people liked them any better. He got roughed up a bit, spat on. Nothing he couldn’t handle, though there wasn't much he could do about it either way. You get yourself a little reputation for retaliation, you get put down like a dog in the street and no one will spare you another thought. Most synths were programmed not to anyway. That’s the way it was.
The other way it was is that Snape has a fist in his hair and his face pressed up against the wet brick wall of an alleyway about six blocks from home. There is a hard on is pressed into the crack of his ass.
“Undo your pants hardware,” the man growls. He wore an expensive suit and had one of those two hundred dollar haircuts. Probably had a wife and a couple of kids to go back to after this; he knew the type. Snape had a scar from falling from a tree when he was twelve and memories of his mother but none of that mattered anymore.
“Fuck you,” he answers.
Two hundred dollar haircut laughs and reaches around for Snape’s belt.
That night he buys in. The man with the three arms has a tell and he and Black both pretend they don’t notice when he twirls the silver ring on the finger of one of his hands. Black beats him on no less than two occasions. He kept thinking of the way his hands felt wrapped around his waist though they weren’t really his hands and it wasn’t really Snape’s body. This was getting real weird.
It’s after three when he deals out. Black follows him outside to the unlit street and instead of apprehension his cortical circuits supply him with a white shock of excitement. Maybe it’s a fault in his programming.
Black lights a cigarette and peers at him darkly through a plump plume of smoke. Snape wants a cigarette more than anything in the world but his body no longer supplies him with the desperate chemical craving. He thinks it’s probably unable to at all anymore.
“Come on. I’ll buy you a coffee.”
Snape looks at him carefully.
“You can pretend to drink it,” he says.
Black takes him to a late night diner populated almost entirely by dealers and killers and prostitutes. He drinks his coffee black with three packs of sugar which he rips the tops off and dumps in all in one go with quick practiced movements. Severus adds cream and sugar to his cup for something to do with his hands though he used to have neither.
“You don’t look how synths usually look.”
“I’m an experimental model,” he tells him dryly. “European.”
He used to have a sarcastic humour back when he had a pulse. He hardly bothered anymore. He wonders why this dark stranger who wasn’t a stranger brought it out in him again.
“Upper East Division,” Black corrects him. “Europe doesn’t exist anymore.”
He shrugs. He remembers when it did.
“We look the same age. We might have run in the same circles if they hadn’t locked me up.”
Snape just watches him. If he was waiting for him to offer his own sad history he’d be waiting a long time.
“Can you still fuck?”
Snape gives him an incredulous look. That was basically what synths were designed for. Or at least that was what everyone assumed. “Are you kidding?” He asks.
Black shrugs. “How am I supposed to know?”
“How long were you locked up for?” Snape asks.
“A long time,” he answers then sniffs. “You lot give me the fucking creeps anyway.” But he still gives him that look that men sometimes give him and Snape wonders for a second if he was going to make him. Instead Black finishes his coffee then they both leave in different directions.
He supposed men that looked like Black didn’t need to make anybody do anything. They still did sometimes.
When he gets home Snape showers quickly then wraps a towel around his waist. There’s a new holoboard immediately outside his window - a woman, enigmatic smile, blue toned, finger crooked and beckoning - and tonight his apartment is bathed in a sweet, melancholic blue. He switches on the VR, lies down on his bed, just a double mattress in the corner of the room, and pulls on the headset. There was probably something wrong with him, though he already knew that. He wishes the hair was longer and there were more lines on his face. He wishes he had that sharp glint in his eye and spoke in that vaguely menacing drawl that said one thing and implied another altogether. Snape was starting to think he was in this too deep.
The following evening he slots his key in his front door and suddenly he gets the strongest feeling that there’s someone in his apartment. Call it sixth sense. Call it witch craft. He’d always been like that. Call it necessity when you had a daddy who had a fondness for cheap spirits and a tendency to blacken eyes and break bones. Call it smart when the boys at school would kick your teeth in for being a skinny ponce with frayed shorts and holes in your shoes.
Didn’t Black look good though, glaring at him with a dark smile tugging at his lips and Snape’s gun in his face. It was a pity. Normally he quite liked killing pretty things but this one he thought he might not.
Black dangled a headset between his fingers casually like he didn’t have a 409 Plasma trained on him.
“Hello darling,” he drawls. “Look what daddy found.”
Unfortunately synths could still feel embarrassment. He’s tries to not let it show on his face.
“How’d you get in here?”
“Think I’ll ask the questions. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
“Kind of,” Snape admits.
“Are you stalking me?”
He shakes his head slowly. There was probably nothing he could say to convince him he wasn’t.
“God, the idea of it, it’s disgusting. Fucking skin job. You disgust me. Remember that when you’re getting fucked by me.”
Snape said nothing.
“Virtually I mean.”
“I got what you meant.”
“I was young, I needed the money.”
Black’s eyes linger on his unmade bed in the corner. “Don’t know what I’m doing explaining myself to a piece of fucking hardware.” He doesn’t look at him, just flicks his eyes around the room. “Put that fucking gun away,” he says with a dismissive wave.
Snape doesn’t. With any luck Black would pull his own out soon then they’d be in business.
“What do you want from me?”
“To spray your brains all over that wall.” Snape answers truthfully.
“Put the gun away. That’s an order.”
Snape grins a mirthless toothy grin. “I’m not that kind of synth.”
Just for a second a strange look passes over Black’s face. He swallows audibly. “Fuck.” It’s said like awe but that can’t be right.
Snape pockets the plasma anyway and berates himself. Stupid. He’d lost the element of surprise. He’d wanted to impress the man. He wanted to kill for him and lay the body at his feet like a milk-fattened house cat. He has a feeling he’s about to get himself killed again.
Black examines the head set in his hands. “Did you use this after we met?”
“You can leave now.”
Black smiles and it lights up the room. “You disgusting little machine.” The way he says it makes him think of white sheets and billowing curtains and soft moans and slapping of flesh.
Snape was made of metal and plastic and wires. Zeros and ones. He didn’t even own a heart. He shouldn’t be feeling like this.
After he picks up the headset that Black had set carefully on the ground. There’s something nestled into the rim of one of the ear pieces. He pulls it out and a small cellophane wrapped sweet lies nestled on his palm.
It’s not even a surprise. He should have realised sooner.
We might have run in the same circles if they hadn’t locked me up, Black had said.
On Friday he leaves home early, just as the sun dips below the horizon and soaks the city in an eery, ominous red. He looses two hands of poker with a fierce singleminded deliberateness and he follows the man with three arms into the bathroom.
Inside the bathroom is sleek and shiny black with a long stretch of spotless mirror above twin sinks lined up side by side. His gun has a silencer. He pulls it out quickly, the alt has no time to notice or cry out, just keeps soaping all of his hands fastidiously under the faucet. Snape is good at that, not being noticed. The mirror turns red. Chunks of brain and skin cling and make slow downward paths through thick blood. He cocks his head and watches. He has no heart so it does not speed up. He has no nervous system so his hands do not shake. He smiles briefly, admires his handiwork. It’s beautiful really, once natural human revulsion is taken out of it. This is the truth that most humans don’t know. There is a beauty in death that does not exist in the squalor and slow decay of life.
He stows the plasma, checks himself in a clean patch of mirror, adjusts his hair and smoothes down the front of his jacket. He leaves the tap running. He liked how the blood mixed and swirled with the clear water into a translucent red whirlpool. He exits the bathroom, and then the building. Not his usual style. Inelegant, conspicuous. It would have to do. He has another appointment to keep.
*
“A lemon drop. Good god, I haven’t had one of these in years. Always hated the bloody things but I didn’t have the heart to tell the old bastard.”
“So did I,” Severus says.
“Where’d you get it?”
Snape almost didn’t want to tell him; he looked so pleased about the whole thing. He does anyway. “It was a message.”
“Oh?”
“From a man named Sirius Black.”
Arthur stills, keeps looking down at his desk, he flicks the sweet gently in circles with his forefinger. He nods.
“Why did you do it Arthur?”
“It wasn’t personal Severus.”
“It never is.”
“The Ministry have been sniffing around. You’re a loose end. And… well you know why.”
“Go on, I want you to say it.”
“You’re already dead.”
He nods. “You’re right, I am.”
He walks out into the night, turns his collar up against the drizzling rain and the bright neon lights that glimmer off the pavement and bathe the street in a haze of colour. Arthur’s blood runs down his forehead and into his eye. He wipes it off with his sleeve.
It was a pity. Seemed it was his destiny to kill the ones he loved, one way or another.
He didn’t even like Black. He would kill him anyway.
*
The door opens, dark silhouette back lit by fluorescent yellow. Snape would know that body anywhere. He holds his gun like he knows how to use it. Goddamn, he'd always had a weakness for a man who knew his way around a weapon. Snape steps away from the brick wall and out into the light. “Took you long enough to find me,” he says. He raises his plasma. Tries to decide if he should aim for the heart or the head.
“This is all a little theatrical isn’t it?”
After all the business with Arthur, Snape had gone to the roof of his building to wait, he’d been there most of the night. The rain had finally stopped and the air was warm and fragrant with the scent of rain on hot cement. He figured he’d find him eventually and the thought of tossing the man down six hundred floors pleased him. Black was probably right, he always did have a flair for the dramatic.
“You’re supposed to be dead. Imagine my joy in finding out that you weren’t and that I’d get to be the one to kill you. A dream come true.”
“I am dead really,” he muses. He’d always considered himself so.
“Did you like my message?”
“Most illuminating.”
“Makes my job harder I suppose but I do so like a challenge. I couldn’t kill the great Severus Snape without making it a fair match. The stories they’ve told about you. Did you really kill a room full of Eaters with your bare hands?”
“Who was the alt? Was he anyone?”
“Just your run of the mill crim. I wouldn’t waste any thought on him. I assume he’s dead?”
Snape shrugged lazily. “It wasn’t my bare hands. I had a crow bar.”
Black grins. “You’re a much more interesting target anyway.”
“So are you.”
Black steps closer, he has his weapon pulled too. “I know you’re good but are you better than me? I suppose we’ll find out.” Now we’re talking, Snape thinks.
He closes the distance. “I’ve already killed twice tonight. You may as well be the third.”
Black licks his lips. “Twice?” he asks breathlessly.
“Mm.”
“Did they struggle?”
“They didn’t get a chance.”
“Amazing.” His nostrils flare, his gun is so close to his face it’s almost caressing his cheek. Snape wants to nuzzle into it. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”
“I’m not a person.”
“No I know. You’re much better than that aren’t you? Can I touch you?”
Usually people didn’t ask. They just did it. He stares straight ahead and thinks about it, unblinking. “Ok,” he concedes.
Black’s hand comes up and Snape slides his eyes closed. He doesn’t know if he will ever open them again but it was probably always his destiny to be done in by an unnatural obsession with a pretty face. Black’s caress is soft and reverent over his cheek. His gun is still trained on him; the cold metal of the barrel in perfect counterpoint to the human heat of Black’s fingertips.
“Aren’t you beautiful,” Black is saying. Snape feels like a wild animal who is being tamed. He turns his head into the hand. He doesn’t want him to ever stop. He thinks if he stops then he’s welcome to kill him.
“It must have been fate that we met.”
“No such thing,” he says. “A logical fallacy.”
“I think I love you,” Black says. “I think about you constantly. Is that love do you think?”
“I’m an object. Circuitry and silicone. You may as well love a toaster.”
His gun twists and tangles in Snape’s hair. It’s unclear whether he aims to pull the trigger. If he does Snape will still have enough time to pull his own. He wasn’t human, he took longer to kill. “Do you love me, I wonder?”
“Machines like me are not programmed that way.” He thinks about them dying together, killing each other, watching the other blink out of existence and he decides that would be about the closest you could get to really knowing someone. Maybe that was what love was.
“Perhaps, but you do a lot of things you’re not supposed to do. Perhaps you do love me. Do you think about me constantly too?”
“No,” Snape says. “Sometimes I think about other things.”
“I would worship you if you let me. I would make sure no one ever hurt you. I would break their arms off for looking at you. I would stab out their eyes.”
“And what if they touched me?” Snape asks.
“I would rip out their heart before they drew another breath.”
Snape presses his gun harder into Black’s hip. Black’s eyes grow half lidded and his lips part with an exhale of breath. “I would like that,” he admits to him softly.
“Would you kill for me?”
“Yes,” Snape says, the words falling from his lips like rain.
“Would you let me watch?”
“Yes.”
“I should like to watch,” Black muses.
“I would drench this city in blood then, if it so please you.”
Black's nostrils flare. I want to have you, he whispers, I want you for my own. Snape presses his palm to hard chest. I would be anything you wanted me to be, I would be your plastic doll, he tells him, even though his compliance chip had been taken out.
Black slides a hand round his waist and tugs him in possessively. Snape lets him. Parts his lips obligingly in demonstration.
Black kisses like he’s commanding an army, his tongue waging battle in his mouth. He smells like musk and raw sweat and the sweetness of skin, he tastes of cigarettes. He would gorge himself on him if he had the chance. Black’s breath is coming out through his nose in hard in hard little puffs. Perhaps his would be too if he still had lungs.
Black’s hand shakes slightly. “My god. It’s just like kissing a human but better,” he says.
“I know,” Snape replies.
“Is kissing me the same as you’re used to?”
Snape thinks it was like comparing a thimble full of dishwater to a glass of sweet, fizzing wine. The man in real life was immeasurably better. He would bottle him if he could. Drink him down by the case full. “Cigarettes,” he says to himself, touching his lips.
“I’m sorry?”
“I used to smoke a pack a day. When I woke up like this there was no craving, though the want was there, the need was gone. It was all gone. I thought forever. You feel like my old cigarette addiction.”
Black smiles. “I think that’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me. It’s a pity one of us has to die.”
“Yes, it’s a pity,” Snape agrees.
“Unless?”
“Yes?”
“We could try not killing each other? I imagine I’m not getting paid anymore anyway.”
Snape pictures Arthur slumped over his desk. Tries not to think of Molly and their children. “Neither of us are,” he tells him. He wonders idly how he’ll pay his rent this month. “I’ve never tried that before.”
“What, not killing?”
“Yes.”
“Neither have I now you mention it. We could take it day by day. If either of us change our mind then we can circle back to this.”
He thinks about it. “I do not find the idea of killing you particularly agreeable,” he admits. “Though I suppose that may change.”
His eyes crinkle handsomely. “It well might. I’ve been told I’m hard to live with.”
“By whom?” Snape asks. “I will put a hole between their eyes.”
“Plenty of time for that my love.”
“What now then?”
Black purses his lips and his eyes glint in the light of the ever present neon. “We make them all pay. We make them sorry they didn’t kill us both when they had the chance.”
He was no longer human. He was creature, he was machine. He was feral Caliban, monstrous and misshapen.
But he could still hold a gun, still pull the trigger. And with Black by his side perhaps they could burn the world down and be warmed by its fire.
“Yes. I think I should like that,” he says. “I think I should like that very much.”
Black slips a blood-warmed hand into his and Snape smiles into the night. The summer wind whips around them.
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