Newborn Devils
Title: Newborn Devils
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Severus/Regulus
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, angst, sex
A/N: giftfic for underlucius, the lovely person who inspired my first ever HP fanfic. This isn't it. Incidentally, Snegulus sounds like someone out of Sesame Street.
Length: Exactly 3500 words.
Regulus trudges, exhausted, up a flight of dusty wooden slats. They look like gaping teeth. He cannot bring himself, even in this dulled state, to call them stairs. Bone-weary, he feels the wretched things press up at his feet even as the fur cloak upon his shoulders presses down. Undoubtedly, between them, they intend to squeeze the thin bit of flesh that was once Regulus Black into something small and inconvenient. He is rigid, jet hair soaked with rain and dripping upon the numb tip of his nose. He stumbles on the last step; his cloak constricts maliciously so that he cannot quite catch his balance and goes down. Bright fire explodes along the front of his shin. He chokes back a childish sound he can no longer tolerate from himself clambers somehow into his narrow and dirty room.
The trip from stairway to bed is a hazy thing. A sequence of coloured blots to guide motor functions, incomprehensible. Regulus' brain has no room for labels. It has no room for passing things like the throb in his shin or the rainwater violating the arch of his neck.
Regulus' brain is full of screams. Some of them are silent, purplish screams. The screams that are eyes stretched wide as if to some white explosion, their apples tiny and dark and very possibly vibrating. There are screams that are high and shrill, screams that are words filled with nonsense syllables, screams of women and children and the terrible, doomed, humiliated screams of men. And there are his screams. His screams, trapped behind an impassive white face. His screams, which he now feels will echo, radiant winged things, within his head forever. His screams, screams he needed as he watched ideals he'd once accepted in abstract, now clothed in reality, become atrocities. Screams he did not have the courage to release, screams that will be the eternal reminder of his naivete, his cowardice, and his evil.
He remembers that his wand looked like a slender black tower, crowned with a darting bolt of emerald light. He remembers how bruised and vacant and naked the woman had looked in death. She had been fully clothed but stripped of every facial control or nervous gesture, she had seemed impossibly vulnerable, utterly sad. His brain had caught fire then, with rusty tongues of screaming flame, demanding he cry, or beg forgiveness, flee the scene of the crime, vomit… He had stood tall and straight, his head only slightly bowed, his eyes only slightly bloody.
He'd been dragged away by his elbow, in the grasp of some lean, rat-faced man. Some ragged, hard loon he hardly knew, and had no wish to know. His stomach had filled with the wet, twisted sensation of utter nausea. He did not want to be touched by these men, did not want the scent of their wet clothes and the ointments they used for their pimples to pollute his nostrils. He did not want to breathe the air they breathed. He shoved himself free and walked on alone. He never thought to Apparate. His head was full of death, full of torture. It weighted him with a lethargy that was dull and biting. He walked until he felt his bones might dissolve in the rain. He embraced that thought. Yes, Regulus had whispered to himself, I'll fade in the rain into a ghost, and all that I've seen and done will wash away.
But he had knelt there in the torrent until his cloak was possibly ruined, until his skin was tight and trembling and his hands felt as stiff as an old man's, but still he did not die and still he was not clean. He had looked up and seen that the place where he knelt was near the inn where he was meant to meet with Severus. With no volition but old instinct, he had staggered toward warmth. But now, within the confines of the ramshackle walls, he does nothing but soak his bedding and shiver.
His eyes, fixed upon the blank plaster of the ceiling, between rotting rafters, are dreadful things. They look as if the colour grey had leached into it all of man's worst emotions. They are clear, cruel windows, haunted by shame, vanity, anger and denial, loss and sadness, and beneath all that, a fear as deep as the earth. He will never be free of them. He will never be free of him. The Dark Lord. The perhaps-human amalgam and progenitor of all these horrors.
He is not strong enough to break free of this.
His body shakes.
* * *
The smell of things mixed in secret. A word tugs at the tip of his tongue. Something brushes the edge of his jaw and is gone. Regulus dreams that he is drowning in cold water, that he has cut his wrists and will empty himself into red nothing. The woman he killed is fresh and alive and radiant as a summer's day. Her flaxen hair floats around them. She rests her palm upon his forehead, and her fingers are long and competent and warm. He doesn't know her name, but in his dream she is smiling at him, understanding and forgiving, and as he floats up toward her, supported by her strong arms, she becomes his mother. He is clinging to her, weeping as he trails scarlet streamers of his polluted essence behind his wrists like scarves. The pool of cold water has become the night sky, where they drift among stars stained by Regulus' blood. That one, he thinks, is his, and he weeps to her, "Mother, mother, I am so lost. I think I have murdered my star."
But the person who is holding him is not his mother. Nor is that secret mixture of scents both pleasant and repugnant, or the rigid ambivalence of the muscles that support him, that of a woman at all. Regulus opens his eyes to see the features of Snape's face as though they were made of linen and draped over an abyss of white light. He cries out as the light stabs him, as it crawls through his bleeding eyes to tear him inside like a paper doll. He closes his eyes and without thinking, buries his face into the nearest dark. It is Severus Snape's shoulder.
"Black?" Snape's voice is sharp. "Black, what has happened?"
"I want to drift in the water forever," Regulus whispers against the rough black fabric. "Let me die, Severus."
He drifts upon an open sea of endless cold, a drowning sailor clinging to a taut, uncompromising bit of deluded driftwood, driftwood that still thinks the world is safe and sane and composed of colours that will not run like watercolour in the rain. Driftwood that stinks of herbs and sanity and an enigmatic pragmatism deeper than blood and older than sanity.
* * *
Snape hisses in annoyance. The night is chill, part of the slow and bloody death of autumn. There has been no fire here to warm or dry, nothing but the wet and the wind in from the walls carrying the bite of winter. "Pathetic," he observes, weight shifting upon the bed. "All right, up and out of there at once. I won't be abandoned for my task. As useless as I generally find you, this mission will not be possible for even the talented to accomplish alone."
But Black is not listening. He is staring through his eyelashes, and his eyes burn like the winter horizon behind prison bars. His body is heavy; it shivers reflexively, unaware.
Severus snaps his fingers sharply. The sound slashes silence, echoed by a renewed frenzy of wind at the shutters. Regulus' eyelids flutter in response.
Dreamily, like a child who has stayed up too late the previous night, Regulus makes a noise of protest and struggles back toward his soaked bed. Severus' fingers close, hard enough that the knuckles match Regulus' skin, paling from the colour of old ivory. They dig into Black's forearms like dull-toothed vises, they twist brutally as they drag him back, past his support upon Severus' shoulder, across the mattress, and scatter his legs behind him like inopportune sticks forced to dangle in sudden hot pain or find their footing. Regulus' eyes open and the dullness that has bled across them is swept clear in the wake of a childish glare.
Snape stares into the impotent heat of it, fingers still pinching, bruisingly hard. He is a man with a core of deep, terrible anger, anger the darkness of which is ultimate. It is a poisonous beast that scratches and bites at itself when denied other prey. That core of anger sleeps inside him, stoked and stroked and fed with care, capable of small explosions or of seething out in a Stygian undertow and devouring its living prison.
He waits until Regulus lowers his eyes, and a bit of the anger inside him fades. It settles, momentarily placated, at the place behind his eyes where it was engendered, and Snape allows his grip to loosen.
"Can you stand?" He asks, and Regulus nods. Severus releases his forearms, resisting the urge to wipe his hands upon his robes. Regulus is unsteady on his feet. His teeth have begun to chatter a staccato rhythm that seems to counter-time the howl of the wind.
"There are fresh clothes in the chest at the far wall. Put them on."
Regulus, already freed of his cloak, staggers in the indicated direction. He seems half-aware, spurred into action by reflex and Snape's bullying. His wild hair shimmers in the uneven glow of moonlight through a crack in the roof near the rafters and the waxed-paper window ensconced just above the larger, shuttered one. Ghostly, translucent, his cheeks already burst with chill-rouge and he can hardly move for trembling. It takes him several tries to manage the latch on the old wooden chest, and to swing up the lid seems to cost him almost the last of his effort. He falls hard on his knees and seems to break, to crack open like a china doll. His face does not crumple, it goes waxen and tense, his lips tremble and seem larger, and his eyes flood over with streams of unembarrassed tears. Regulus kneels upon the dusty floor in that dim room and cries until the red in his face smears and his eyes are glassy. He shows no sign of stopping for anything less than the end of the world.
Severus, at first almost captivated, feels his skin crawl and his stomach twist. He tries to look away, but the wet and helpless noises are relentless. He wants to leave, to stalk out and slam the door and leave the boy to his hysteria, but he is too afraid that he would return to lay his fingers upon the still pulse of a suicide.
He crosses the room, a sweeping shadow. Firmly, he leans down and takes hold of Regulus' wrists. Before he can speak, Black looks up at him wildly, obviously fearing more bruises, another unceremonious plunge on to unsteady feet. His eyes stab Severus in the gut and go on stabbing. They are hopeless and open and desperate and they need.
"That's enough," he says briskly, to hide his momentary weakness. "What is the matter? I have never seen such a pitiful wreck, even among the victims of the Cruciatus Curse." It is not precisely true, but Severus means it to snap Regulus out of whatever has inundated him in this anguish.
It does not have its desired effect. Regulus shakes his head numbly, negating something amorphous Severus cannot discern, until words burst out of his swollen lips like a popped cork, releasing an invasive and endless well of disjointed thoughts.
"I killed her, Severus, don't you see… I killed that poor woman with the long blonde hair… she had babies and a blue jumpers with flowers on, but I killed her… Severus, because they said, 'you have to do your part, Regulus… you have to show you believe in the cause,' I believed in the cause… until I saw those people writhing on the dirt and screaming and the children with their eyes almost popping out… but I was scared because I could see, couldn't I see that it could just as easily be me down there, so I killed her, I did it… and then I wanted to scream or be sick or run, but I just stood there… and they were all so surprised, so impressed, said they didn't think I had it in me to kill first time and wasn't I harder than they thought at nineteen, and, Severus, I'll never be clean… I'll never be happy… I just want to, want to, want to- I want to want to die, but I don't want to die, I'm so selfish, I can't let it happen, I can't, I'm afraid to die… I'm afraid to, to, to, to, to… and I'll never be free of this never, I-"
But that is more than enough, coupled with gasps and hiccups and streaming eyes, and Severus lays a long finger along Regulus' lips to stop his babble. "I begin to understand," he says dryly. "But don't test your health much farther. Between the cold, the wet and your crying, you'll make yourself ill."
Regulus fumbles with the clasps of his robe. His fingers slip on the wet metal; he bursts into a fresh round of exhausted tears. Severus brushes his hand away and does it for him. Soaked velvet parts to reveal the chill white skin, the sculptor's masterpiece at the throat and collar, the sweep of shoulders too broad for his youthful waist. His hands brush the skin and Regulus jumps. It seems to burn him. Severus is careful to look away as much as he can, to manage with his peripheral vision, unlacing the under-robe of sodden silk, getting Regulus free of it. He tries not to touch bare skin if he can, but once again he brushes against it with his thumb. It is pure accident, near the jutting bone of Regulus' hip. He is all long slender limbs and soft skin. Severus draws back, because something inside him insists that Regulus is glowing, that there is a faint trace of silver in every pore. And then Regulus is kissing him.
In a fraction of a second, in the space inside a breath, that much has changed. Regulus' soft mouth nuzzling his, begging so sweetly for attention, clinging so tightly. Regulus' face is still wet, and his skin is still damp and cold, and his hair is dripping. The kiss is not comfortable, it is desperate and not half as competent as Severus imagined from a boy with Regulus' good looks. It is punctuated as much by sniffles as breath. It is constricting, Severus is unable to untangle himself from it. Regulus' teeth graze his lip, on occasion. The boy is clumsy and shaking.
Severus' skin crawls. Gooseflesh rises under his own robes. A part of him claws its way back toward his spine, trying desperately to escape that kiss. Another part of him unfurls its warm black wings. It is this part that commands the arms that wrap around Regulus' bare back and pull him closer, this part that takes command of the kiss, that cups the tear-streaked cheek with his right hand and holds the head still, slowing them, listening to the helpless pants and sobs as Regulus tries to regain control of himself. It is this part that kisses Regulus gently, firmly, upon the mouth, the cheek, the throat,- warming him, calming him.
The other part of him despises himself for bowing to unabashed weakness.
But that part is distant: its small, petty voice can hardly be heard over the rushing rhythm of his own heart. He wraps himself tighter around Regulus, trying to kill with his own strength the cold and the hopelessness. His black wings, invisible, enfold them both.
* * *
Snape's strong fingers wrap new clothing over Regulus' shoulders. He can see, through tear-swollen eyes, the patterns of wetness his hair left upon Severus' robes. Blacker than the dry fabric, gradients of shadows. Like the two of them.
Regulus lets Snape support him, hold him, keep him moving along the hallway in the hours that must be tiptoeing toward dawn. He lets him guide him into another room, and a bed full of warm blankets.
He gently but insistently pulls Snape down beside him. Now the scent of him is known, rich, and more comforting than any other imagined scent could be, in a dream or not. He tries not to cling as tightly, and finds that Severus' bruising grip drags him back. Regulus presses himself into the dark warmth that is Snape and lets himself fall, exhausted, into a lull of sleep.
If he dreams at all, it is of lying there, with the smell of the dusty boards, the faintly mildewed sheets, Severus' oily hair and the musk and bitter sweet that clings to him.
When he wakes, it is to Severus' unclosed eyes, and in them claustrophobia, horror, doubt. It hurts him to see it, it puts him once again out in the ice, so he leans up on one elbow and strokes a strand of Severus' hair between the first two fingers of his hand. He says, "When you're a child you hear about the stars and the planets, and how earth is just one of many and it's spinning beneath your feet. You spin and spin and fall to the ground and imagine you felt the earth turning, but you don't feel it turning, it is always stable underneath you. You just feel the excitement of a child's game. Your world is sane and filled with beautiful, expensive things you never question, and when you're told that as a man some things are needed to keep you in that sane, stable world, you believe. I thought I was grown up when I graduated Hogwart's. I thought that when you grow up all that changes in the world is what you do. But last night I saw the things that keep the world stable and sane as the world I grew up in, and those things are dirty and uncomfortable and stained, and I can't bear to imagine learning to live with them. Now I can feel the world turning and tilting under me all the time. I can't see a clear path to anywhere worth going."
Snape's narrowed eyes betray impatience at this monologue. "Some people are born in that world."
Regulus kisses him. He feels, against the press of his own lips, the tension and anger and uncertainty beneath his skin. He kisses harder, and then he feels that dark intensity spill outward on to him. He feels diminished by it. His heart falters, and then falls back in a hot frenzy. Severus' mouth is hurting his, pressing his lips back against his teeth so hard he's afraid his mouth will be cut. One strong hand grips Regulus by the wrist, throws him on his back, and then his head is back, neck arched against lips and teeth that press so hard he can feel the pulse of his own heart against them, rising in a harsh crescendo.
His new robe is opened like a chrysalis, revealing the white fire at his heart. Regulus tries to love back, but his caresses are feeble, fluttering things, swallowed in the incredible darkness of Severus' passion. He lies back, helpless to resist the hot mouth drowning him, the marks that teeth and hands leave upon his skin. Their bodies twist amid the rising swirl of the blankets' dust. Pain and pleasure meld into an impossible symphony of ideas, Regulus strains against the boundaries of what he believed he could want, and is borne above it. Lifted, ravished, punished so sweetly by the teasing rhythms of Severus' love, he stares up into the rafters. As his mind burns, his body is an incendiary thing fading to silver ashes. The steel coiled desire-hate of Severus' advance pinions him, a butterfly on a page, and then his hips are pounding into the stretched strained anguish-glory of the sex, muscles sore and heart full to bursting, and in the instant before his spine arches and lips skin back to emit the feral snarl that is the proper orgasm-outburst in this love, he knows what it is he must do and the course that his life must now take.
As he hears the serpent's hiss, and feels the release of Severus' silent pleasure within him, he sighs and lets their bodies fall entangled. Snape is closed again, harsh but present; the faint rise and fall of his chest in breathing is his only motion. Regulus watches one last mote of dust gleam in the dawn sunlight and settle upon the sweat-soaked tangle of Severus' hair.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Severus/Regulus
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, angst, sex
A/N: giftfic for underlucius, the lovely person who inspired my first ever HP fanfic. This isn't it. Incidentally, Snegulus sounds like someone out of Sesame Street.
Length: Exactly 3500 words.
Regulus trudges, exhausted, up a flight of dusty wooden slats. They look like gaping teeth. He cannot bring himself, even in this dulled state, to call them stairs. Bone-weary, he feels the wretched things press up at his feet even as the fur cloak upon his shoulders presses down. Undoubtedly, between them, they intend to squeeze the thin bit of flesh that was once Regulus Black into something small and inconvenient. He is rigid, jet hair soaked with rain and dripping upon the numb tip of his nose. He stumbles on the last step; his cloak constricts maliciously so that he cannot quite catch his balance and goes down. Bright fire explodes along the front of his shin. He chokes back a childish sound he can no longer tolerate from himself clambers somehow into his narrow and dirty room.
The trip from stairway to bed is a hazy thing. A sequence of coloured blots to guide motor functions, incomprehensible. Regulus' brain has no room for labels. It has no room for passing things like the throb in his shin or the rainwater violating the arch of his neck.
Regulus' brain is full of screams. Some of them are silent, purplish screams. The screams that are eyes stretched wide as if to some white explosion, their apples tiny and dark and very possibly vibrating. There are screams that are high and shrill, screams that are words filled with nonsense syllables, screams of women and children and the terrible, doomed, humiliated screams of men. And there are his screams. His screams, trapped behind an impassive white face. His screams, which he now feels will echo, radiant winged things, within his head forever. His screams, screams he needed as he watched ideals he'd once accepted in abstract, now clothed in reality, become atrocities. Screams he did not have the courage to release, screams that will be the eternal reminder of his naivete, his cowardice, and his evil.
He remembers that his wand looked like a slender black tower, crowned with a darting bolt of emerald light. He remembers how bruised and vacant and naked the woman had looked in death. She had been fully clothed but stripped of every facial control or nervous gesture, she had seemed impossibly vulnerable, utterly sad. His brain had caught fire then, with rusty tongues of screaming flame, demanding he cry, or beg forgiveness, flee the scene of the crime, vomit… He had stood tall and straight, his head only slightly bowed, his eyes only slightly bloody.
He'd been dragged away by his elbow, in the grasp of some lean, rat-faced man. Some ragged, hard loon he hardly knew, and had no wish to know. His stomach had filled with the wet, twisted sensation of utter nausea. He did not want to be touched by these men, did not want the scent of their wet clothes and the ointments they used for their pimples to pollute his nostrils. He did not want to breathe the air they breathed. He shoved himself free and walked on alone. He never thought to Apparate. His head was full of death, full of torture. It weighted him with a lethargy that was dull and biting. He walked until he felt his bones might dissolve in the rain. He embraced that thought. Yes, Regulus had whispered to himself, I'll fade in the rain into a ghost, and all that I've seen and done will wash away.
But he had knelt there in the torrent until his cloak was possibly ruined, until his skin was tight and trembling and his hands felt as stiff as an old man's, but still he did not die and still he was not clean. He had looked up and seen that the place where he knelt was near the inn where he was meant to meet with Severus. With no volition but old instinct, he had staggered toward warmth. But now, within the confines of the ramshackle walls, he does nothing but soak his bedding and shiver.
His eyes, fixed upon the blank plaster of the ceiling, between rotting rafters, are dreadful things. They look as if the colour grey had leached into it all of man's worst emotions. They are clear, cruel windows, haunted by shame, vanity, anger and denial, loss and sadness, and beneath all that, a fear as deep as the earth. He will never be free of them. He will never be free of him. The Dark Lord. The perhaps-human amalgam and progenitor of all these horrors.
He is not strong enough to break free of this.
His body shakes.
* * *
The smell of things mixed in secret. A word tugs at the tip of his tongue. Something brushes the edge of his jaw and is gone. Regulus dreams that he is drowning in cold water, that he has cut his wrists and will empty himself into red nothing. The woman he killed is fresh and alive and radiant as a summer's day. Her flaxen hair floats around them. She rests her palm upon his forehead, and her fingers are long and competent and warm. He doesn't know her name, but in his dream she is smiling at him, understanding and forgiving, and as he floats up toward her, supported by her strong arms, she becomes his mother. He is clinging to her, weeping as he trails scarlet streamers of his polluted essence behind his wrists like scarves. The pool of cold water has become the night sky, where they drift among stars stained by Regulus' blood. That one, he thinks, is his, and he weeps to her, "Mother, mother, I am so lost. I think I have murdered my star."
But the person who is holding him is not his mother. Nor is that secret mixture of scents both pleasant and repugnant, or the rigid ambivalence of the muscles that support him, that of a woman at all. Regulus opens his eyes to see the features of Snape's face as though they were made of linen and draped over an abyss of white light. He cries out as the light stabs him, as it crawls through his bleeding eyes to tear him inside like a paper doll. He closes his eyes and without thinking, buries his face into the nearest dark. It is Severus Snape's shoulder.
"Black?" Snape's voice is sharp. "Black, what has happened?"
"I want to drift in the water forever," Regulus whispers against the rough black fabric. "Let me die, Severus."
He drifts upon an open sea of endless cold, a drowning sailor clinging to a taut, uncompromising bit of deluded driftwood, driftwood that still thinks the world is safe and sane and composed of colours that will not run like watercolour in the rain. Driftwood that stinks of herbs and sanity and an enigmatic pragmatism deeper than blood and older than sanity.
* * *
Snape hisses in annoyance. The night is chill, part of the slow and bloody death of autumn. There has been no fire here to warm or dry, nothing but the wet and the wind in from the walls carrying the bite of winter. "Pathetic," he observes, weight shifting upon the bed. "All right, up and out of there at once. I won't be abandoned for my task. As useless as I generally find you, this mission will not be possible for even the talented to accomplish alone."
But Black is not listening. He is staring through his eyelashes, and his eyes burn like the winter horizon behind prison bars. His body is heavy; it shivers reflexively, unaware.
Severus snaps his fingers sharply. The sound slashes silence, echoed by a renewed frenzy of wind at the shutters. Regulus' eyelids flutter in response.
Dreamily, like a child who has stayed up too late the previous night, Regulus makes a noise of protest and struggles back toward his soaked bed. Severus' fingers close, hard enough that the knuckles match Regulus' skin, paling from the colour of old ivory. They dig into Black's forearms like dull-toothed vises, they twist brutally as they drag him back, past his support upon Severus' shoulder, across the mattress, and scatter his legs behind him like inopportune sticks forced to dangle in sudden hot pain or find their footing. Regulus' eyes open and the dullness that has bled across them is swept clear in the wake of a childish glare.
Snape stares into the impotent heat of it, fingers still pinching, bruisingly hard. He is a man with a core of deep, terrible anger, anger the darkness of which is ultimate. It is a poisonous beast that scratches and bites at itself when denied other prey. That core of anger sleeps inside him, stoked and stroked and fed with care, capable of small explosions or of seething out in a Stygian undertow and devouring its living prison.
He waits until Regulus lowers his eyes, and a bit of the anger inside him fades. It settles, momentarily placated, at the place behind his eyes where it was engendered, and Snape allows his grip to loosen.
"Can you stand?" He asks, and Regulus nods. Severus releases his forearms, resisting the urge to wipe his hands upon his robes. Regulus is unsteady on his feet. His teeth have begun to chatter a staccato rhythm that seems to counter-time the howl of the wind.
"There are fresh clothes in the chest at the far wall. Put them on."
Regulus, already freed of his cloak, staggers in the indicated direction. He seems half-aware, spurred into action by reflex and Snape's bullying. His wild hair shimmers in the uneven glow of moonlight through a crack in the roof near the rafters and the waxed-paper window ensconced just above the larger, shuttered one. Ghostly, translucent, his cheeks already burst with chill-rouge and he can hardly move for trembling. It takes him several tries to manage the latch on the old wooden chest, and to swing up the lid seems to cost him almost the last of his effort. He falls hard on his knees and seems to break, to crack open like a china doll. His face does not crumple, it goes waxen and tense, his lips tremble and seem larger, and his eyes flood over with streams of unembarrassed tears. Regulus kneels upon the dusty floor in that dim room and cries until the red in his face smears and his eyes are glassy. He shows no sign of stopping for anything less than the end of the world.
Severus, at first almost captivated, feels his skin crawl and his stomach twist. He tries to look away, but the wet and helpless noises are relentless. He wants to leave, to stalk out and slam the door and leave the boy to his hysteria, but he is too afraid that he would return to lay his fingers upon the still pulse of a suicide.
He crosses the room, a sweeping shadow. Firmly, he leans down and takes hold of Regulus' wrists. Before he can speak, Black looks up at him wildly, obviously fearing more bruises, another unceremonious plunge on to unsteady feet. His eyes stab Severus in the gut and go on stabbing. They are hopeless and open and desperate and they need.
"That's enough," he says briskly, to hide his momentary weakness. "What is the matter? I have never seen such a pitiful wreck, even among the victims of the Cruciatus Curse." It is not precisely true, but Severus means it to snap Regulus out of whatever has inundated him in this anguish.
It does not have its desired effect. Regulus shakes his head numbly, negating something amorphous Severus cannot discern, until words burst out of his swollen lips like a popped cork, releasing an invasive and endless well of disjointed thoughts.
"I killed her, Severus, don't you see… I killed that poor woman with the long blonde hair… she had babies and a blue jumpers with flowers on, but I killed her… Severus, because they said, 'you have to do your part, Regulus… you have to show you believe in the cause,' I believed in the cause… until I saw those people writhing on the dirt and screaming and the children with their eyes almost popping out… but I was scared because I could see, couldn't I see that it could just as easily be me down there, so I killed her, I did it… and then I wanted to scream or be sick or run, but I just stood there… and they were all so surprised, so impressed, said they didn't think I had it in me to kill first time and wasn't I harder than they thought at nineteen, and, Severus, I'll never be clean… I'll never be happy… I just want to, want to, want to- I want to want to die, but I don't want to die, I'm so selfish, I can't let it happen, I can't, I'm afraid to die… I'm afraid to, to, to, to, to… and I'll never be free of this never, I-"
But that is more than enough, coupled with gasps and hiccups and streaming eyes, and Severus lays a long finger along Regulus' lips to stop his babble. "I begin to understand," he says dryly. "But don't test your health much farther. Between the cold, the wet and your crying, you'll make yourself ill."
Regulus fumbles with the clasps of his robe. His fingers slip on the wet metal; he bursts into a fresh round of exhausted tears. Severus brushes his hand away and does it for him. Soaked velvet parts to reveal the chill white skin, the sculptor's masterpiece at the throat and collar, the sweep of shoulders too broad for his youthful waist. His hands brush the skin and Regulus jumps. It seems to burn him. Severus is careful to look away as much as he can, to manage with his peripheral vision, unlacing the under-robe of sodden silk, getting Regulus free of it. He tries not to touch bare skin if he can, but once again he brushes against it with his thumb. It is pure accident, near the jutting bone of Regulus' hip. He is all long slender limbs and soft skin. Severus draws back, because something inside him insists that Regulus is glowing, that there is a faint trace of silver in every pore. And then Regulus is kissing him.
In a fraction of a second, in the space inside a breath, that much has changed. Regulus' soft mouth nuzzling his, begging so sweetly for attention, clinging so tightly. Regulus' face is still wet, and his skin is still damp and cold, and his hair is dripping. The kiss is not comfortable, it is desperate and not half as competent as Severus imagined from a boy with Regulus' good looks. It is punctuated as much by sniffles as breath. It is constricting, Severus is unable to untangle himself from it. Regulus' teeth graze his lip, on occasion. The boy is clumsy and shaking.
Severus' skin crawls. Gooseflesh rises under his own robes. A part of him claws its way back toward his spine, trying desperately to escape that kiss. Another part of him unfurls its warm black wings. It is this part that commands the arms that wrap around Regulus' bare back and pull him closer, this part that takes command of the kiss, that cups the tear-streaked cheek with his right hand and holds the head still, slowing them, listening to the helpless pants and sobs as Regulus tries to regain control of himself. It is this part that kisses Regulus gently, firmly, upon the mouth, the cheek, the throat,- warming him, calming him.
The other part of him despises himself for bowing to unabashed weakness.
But that part is distant: its small, petty voice can hardly be heard over the rushing rhythm of his own heart. He wraps himself tighter around Regulus, trying to kill with his own strength the cold and the hopelessness. His black wings, invisible, enfold them both.
* * *
Snape's strong fingers wrap new clothing over Regulus' shoulders. He can see, through tear-swollen eyes, the patterns of wetness his hair left upon Severus' robes. Blacker than the dry fabric, gradients of shadows. Like the two of them.
Regulus lets Snape support him, hold him, keep him moving along the hallway in the hours that must be tiptoeing toward dawn. He lets him guide him into another room, and a bed full of warm blankets.
He gently but insistently pulls Snape down beside him. Now the scent of him is known, rich, and more comforting than any other imagined scent could be, in a dream or not. He tries not to cling as tightly, and finds that Severus' bruising grip drags him back. Regulus presses himself into the dark warmth that is Snape and lets himself fall, exhausted, into a lull of sleep.
If he dreams at all, it is of lying there, with the smell of the dusty boards, the faintly mildewed sheets, Severus' oily hair and the musk and bitter sweet that clings to him.
When he wakes, it is to Severus' unclosed eyes, and in them claustrophobia, horror, doubt. It hurts him to see it, it puts him once again out in the ice, so he leans up on one elbow and strokes a strand of Severus' hair between the first two fingers of his hand. He says, "When you're a child you hear about the stars and the planets, and how earth is just one of many and it's spinning beneath your feet. You spin and spin and fall to the ground and imagine you felt the earth turning, but you don't feel it turning, it is always stable underneath you. You just feel the excitement of a child's game. Your world is sane and filled with beautiful, expensive things you never question, and when you're told that as a man some things are needed to keep you in that sane, stable world, you believe. I thought I was grown up when I graduated Hogwart's. I thought that when you grow up all that changes in the world is what you do. But last night I saw the things that keep the world stable and sane as the world I grew up in, and those things are dirty and uncomfortable and stained, and I can't bear to imagine learning to live with them. Now I can feel the world turning and tilting under me all the time. I can't see a clear path to anywhere worth going."
Snape's narrowed eyes betray impatience at this monologue. "Some people are born in that world."
Regulus kisses him. He feels, against the press of his own lips, the tension and anger and uncertainty beneath his skin. He kisses harder, and then he feels that dark intensity spill outward on to him. He feels diminished by it. His heart falters, and then falls back in a hot frenzy. Severus' mouth is hurting his, pressing his lips back against his teeth so hard he's afraid his mouth will be cut. One strong hand grips Regulus by the wrist, throws him on his back, and then his head is back, neck arched against lips and teeth that press so hard he can feel the pulse of his own heart against them, rising in a harsh crescendo.
His new robe is opened like a chrysalis, revealing the white fire at his heart. Regulus tries to love back, but his caresses are feeble, fluttering things, swallowed in the incredible darkness of Severus' passion. He lies back, helpless to resist the hot mouth drowning him, the marks that teeth and hands leave upon his skin. Their bodies twist amid the rising swirl of the blankets' dust. Pain and pleasure meld into an impossible symphony of ideas, Regulus strains against the boundaries of what he believed he could want, and is borne above it. Lifted, ravished, punished so sweetly by the teasing rhythms of Severus' love, he stares up into the rafters. As his mind burns, his body is an incendiary thing fading to silver ashes. The steel coiled desire-hate of Severus' advance pinions him, a butterfly on a page, and then his hips are pounding into the stretched strained anguish-glory of the sex, muscles sore and heart full to bursting, and in the instant before his spine arches and lips skin back to emit the feral snarl that is the proper orgasm-outburst in this love, he knows what it is he must do and the course that his life must now take.
As he hears the serpent's hiss, and feels the release of Severus' silent pleasure within him, he sighs and lets their bodies fall entangled. Snape is closed again, harsh but present; the faint rise and fall of his chest in breathing is his only motion. Regulus watches one last mote of dust gleam in the dawn sunlight and settle upon the sweat-soaked tangle of Severus' hair.