Chapter Text
PROLOGUE:
December 3th, 1995
Sirius Black had been obsessed with Severus Snape long before he knew there was a word for it.
Since they were children.
He remembered the sensation with brutal clarity: that maddening impulse that forced his gaze to seek Snape out in the Great Hall, in the corridors, in the classrooms. The almost physical revulsion Snape inspired in him— his hunched posture, the way he always seemed to be trying to fold himself into nothing inside robes that were forever too large, forever threadbare. Black hair hanging over his face like a filthy curtain, perpetually greasy, as though water and soap were foreign concepts in his miserable little world.
Snape was worth nothing. That was what Sirius told himself back then.
Shoes two sizes too big, clearly passed down out of charity. Robes that stank of mothballs. Frayed socks. A thin, sallow boy who looked as though he hadn’t eaten a proper meal in weeks. And yet the bloody idiot dared to answer back.
To him.
To the bloody Sirius Black.
With his enormous nose and those twitchy, rat-like eyes, with that resentful, sour expression, Snape lifted his head and replied. Retorted. Spat words as though he had any right to them. As though he didn’t know his place.
To Sirius— who drew sighs wherever he went. Sirius— who ruled Gryffindor and, by extension, the whole of Hogwarts. To Sirius— James Potter’s closest friend, heir to an ancient name, raised for greatness. To Sirius— born with the world at his feet, able to bend it with a snap of his fingers.
And Snape dared to meet his gaze.
That was what infuriated him most: That silent defiance. That refusal to bow his head. Because Snape wasn’t one to stay down when attacked. Nor was he one to cry, no matter how often they called him Snivellus. He got back up. He struck back. He insulted them with a sharp tongue and a poisonous intelligence. Sometimes, he even fought back physically. As though Sirius had ever given him permission to exist.
And no one else did that. No one. Wherever Sirius went, others fell silent. They laughed, they nodded, they followed. Everyone—except that hysterical little Slytherin snake.
It obsessed him.
He followed him with his eyes when he caught him alone. Provoked him in the corridors. Attacked him alongside James, laughing, cruel, buoyed by adolescent glory. It was far too enjoyable a game, because Snape never surrendered. Never backed down. Always resisted.
And even then, Sirius found that resistance dangerously entertaining.
None of that had changed.
Only the setting.
Now he was thirty-five, and they were no longer at Hogwarts but in the Black family house. The old ancestral home he had fled, swearing never to return. Grimmauld Place— a mausoleum of dust and screaming portraits that bore witness to his failure.
Sirius was no longer a prince. He was a dethroned king.
Twelve years in Azkaban had stripped him of youth, arrogance and any certainty of his own greatness. His face was worn, his eyes hollow, his laughter broken. He drowned his grief in cheap alcohol and endless cigarettes. He lived confined, useless, consumed by the frustration of being unable to fight the war he had sworn to win while others carried it on without him.
But within that apathy, there was something that always dragged him back to the surface.
Snape.
Every time he appeared, something in Sirius stirred— feral and alive. The hatred was still there, yes, but it had changed shape. Now he didn’t hate Snape for answering back; he hated him for thinking himself superior.
Because Sirius had joined the Order from the very beginning. He had given everything for his friends. He had lost James, lost Lily, lost everything that mattered. He had been framed, imprisoned, reduced to a shadow.
And Snape… Snape, who had done everything wrong. Snape, who had consorted with Dark wizards. Who had despised muggles. Who had sworn himself to the Dark Lord.
Snape was now Dumbledore’s right hand. And he never missed a chance to remind Sirius of it.
He no longer spoke nervously. No longer hunched his shoulders or dropped his gaze. Now he walked upright, with calculated coldness, and looked at Sirius with condescension and disdain, as though Sirius were a footnote in his perfectly reconstructed life.
Everything Sirius had wanted to be, Snape had become.
In second-hand clothes. With greasy hair. With that long nose. He finally succeed.
So Sirius tried. Out of pride. Out of honour. Out of sheer desperation not to disappear. And every time, he came away scorched. The balance had shifted. Snape no longer needed to defend himself; a soft remark, a precisely placed comment, was enough to make Sirius bleed. And still, he couldn’t stop, because provoking Snape was the only thing that pulled him out of the numbness his confinement had turned him into.
The problem began the day Sirius realised he couldn’t stop looking at his hands.
Not at his words. Not at his contempt.
At his hands.
Long, bony fingers, stained with ink and potion residue. The precise way he rested them on the table when he spoke. The faint movement of his lips just before he pulled that familiar look of disgust. The subtle twitch of his right leg when he grew impatient.
Sirius began to realise that he watched Severus Snape far too closely.
And perhaps that wasn’t so strange, he told himself. He always had. But now he looked at him and thought things he shouldn’t.
He saw a man still thin, still sickly-looking, and wondered what it would be like to touch him. Not violently. Not entirely. What it would be like to grab him, feel those bones beneath the skin. To shake him. To silence him.
What it would be like to devour his mouth.
The thought struck him like a curse.
He recoiled from it.
The revulsion was immediate, visceral. He shot to his feet, spilling whisky, heart hammering. It made no sense. It was disgusting. It was Snape— his enemy, the living reminder of everything he had lost.
And yet…
When Snape appeared again at Grimmauld Place days later, clad in immaculate black robes, that dissecting gaze fixed on him, Sirius felt the same pull under his skin.
“Black,” Snape greeted him, with the faintest dip of his head. “I had hoped you’d finally decided to use Firewhisky to drown yourself in the bathtub. How disappointing.”
Sirius smiled through clenched teeth.
“Touched by your concern, Snivellus, but perhaps you should worry less about me and more about the cellar stench you carry around. You smell like a bloody crypt.”
Snape arched an eyebrow, amused.
“Ever the wit, Black. You ought to try stand-up comedy… for idiots, of course”
That was the spark.
They argued as they always did. Barbed words, decades of resentment sharpened to a blade. Sirius stepped closer. Snape didn’t retreat. They stared at each other, too close, too aware.
Sirius felt the heat.
The smell— bitter, chemical, strangely intoxicating.
“You think you’re important now that you’re licking Dumbledore’s arse?” Sirius spat.
“I don’t think so,” Snape replied softly. “I actually am. Unlike you, good for nothing but drunken scenes and crying like a pathetic child in corners.”
The words landed harder than they should have, because Sirius had already been drinking long before Snape set foot in Grimmauld Place that night. The Order meeting earlier had been unbearable— hours of plans he wasn’t allowed to take part in, glances that slid past him as if he were furniture, and Snape, of course, seated there with his measured voice and infuriating air of quiet authority, correcting others, advising Dumbledore, existing as proof that someone else had taken his place.
By the time the meeting ended, Sirius was already half gone.
He’d poured himself another drink the moment the last member disapparated. Then another. And another. Firewhisky burned down his throat, hot and familiar, loosening memories he didn’t want and resentment he’d been carrying for years. He’d stayed in the drawing room, alone with the bottle, the house creaking around him, the portraits whispering, pitying, accusing. Twelve years lost. A war fought without him. Snape’s voice still echoing in his head, calm and superior, as if Sirius were nothing more than a liability to be managed.
By the time Snape returned —only briefly, businesslike, dropping off a bundle of documents and potions Dumbledore wanted the Weasleys to collect in the morning— Sirius was properly drunk. Not pleasantly so. The kind of drunk where everything sharpens instead of blurring, where obsession resurfaces without warning, stripped of shame and restraint.
The moment Sirius heard his voice again, felt that presence in the house, the old fixation surged up with violent clarity. The same pull he’d felt since Hogwarts, the same relentless awareness of Snape’s existence, except now there was nothing left to hold it back. No pride, no self-control, no sense left strong enough to stop him. The alcohol didn’t invent the impulse— it simply removed his ability to resist it.
Something broke.
Sirius grabbed him by the front of his robes and slammed him against the wall. It was impulsive, fuelled by rage and something else entirely. Snape sucked in a sharp breath, startled, but didn’t struggle. His black eyes locked onto Sirius’s, bright with something dangerous.
“Are you going to hit me, Black?” he murmured. “How predictable.”
Sirius was shaking. Not with anger.
With desire.
“Shut up,” he breathed.
And then he kissed him.
It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t pretty. It was desperate, clumsy, years of compressed hatred crashing together. Mouths colliding, tasting of smoke and poison. Snape froze for a heartbeat— and then kissed him back.
He returned the kiss with a ferocity that tore a strangled sound from Sirius’s throat, his hands fisting in Sirius’s jacket as though he had been waiting his entire life for this moment.
When they finally broke apart, both were breathing hard.
“This—” Sirius began, horrified.
“Don’t,” Snape cut him off, voice rough, eyes burning. “For once in your life, Black, shut that filthy mouth of yours.”
Sirius kissed him again.
And he knew, with devastating certainty, that he would never hate him in the same way again.
Because hatred, in the end, had always been just another form of desire.