FIC: Vincetoxic, Remus/Severus, PG-13
Title: Vincetoxic
Author: rose_whispers
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Remus/Severus
Summary: After not seeing Remus for a year, Severus discovers that something has gone terribly awry
Word Count: 1994
A/N: Ever been bitten by an insistent bastard of a bunny that forces you to stop doing everything else and write? Yeah, that’s where this came from. Not fluffy, or at least not like my usual stories.
Severus Snape arched his back and sighed softly at the satisfying cracks that escaped his realigning vertebrae. Almost forty, he reflected with grim amusement, and already falling apart. He finished ladling the odious potion into the disused goblet before him. It had been over a year since he’d hand delivered the wolfsbane to its intended consumer. Over a year since the shaggy, detested, familiar werewolf had disappeared to gallivant across the seven continents, reveling in the freedom the fall of the Dark Lord afforded him. Afforded them all.
And Severus had gone on brewing the potion, month after month, and sending it by owl in a large glass phial carefully charmed to preserve its contents and not to break en route. He had no idea how the owls found their target, but each month the owl would return carrying a note. Always the same, in that well-known, hated scrawl.
Thank you, Severus.
RL
The only thing that changed would be the surface upon which the notes were written. The backs of theatre tickets. The corners of newspapers. The margins of pamphlets. Severus threw them all in a drawer and pretended they did not exist. Pretended, for most of the month, that Lupin himself didn’t exist. And for the most part, he was successful.
But then the last note had arrived only two days ago, from an owl not his own.
Severus,
Thank you again. I have returned home, to my cottage in Tintagel. If you have the time, why don’t you bring the wolfsbane in person? I would like us to get reacquainted.
Remus
Severus had stared at the note, unsure of himself. Why would the werewolf request his presence? Severus was tempted to owl the dosage to the cottage out of sheer spite, but he had to admit to a certain healthy curiosity. What had Lupin been up to all this time?
Soon he would find out. Placing a sealing spell over the goblet, he apparated with a pop even louder than the cracking of his spine and reappeared moments later at the front door of Remus Lupin’s cottage.
He’d never been to this house before, but he’d heard enough about it. It had been purchased as a place to spirit Harry Potter to during the war, should the need arise. Of course, the little fiend hadn’t consented, had cursed the Order eighteen different ways for trying to force him into the same corner his parents had been forced to. Instead, ownership passed to the werewolf, who had grown weary of squatting in the House of Black.
Severus looked at his surroundings with distaste. It was apparent from the overgrown garden and the three-foot high weeds, the broken fence and the coating of thick dust on the windows, that Remus hadn’t been here in a long time, and had only just returned.
He knocked on the rotting oak door, wondering briefly if the thing would fall off its hinge under the stress. Instead, it swung open with a whine, revealing the darkness within. Severus blinked owlishly, unable to see through the gloom, unable to make out the features of the man before him. But he was nothing if not a consummate chameleon, able to adapt to any situation. So he glided through the door and into the dingy foyer as though the shadows didn’t bother him.
“Lupin,” he said in his most practiced sneer. “How kind of you to invite me to your hovel. I can understand why even the Boy Who Lived in a Cupboard half his life saw that it wasn’t up to standard.”
A wheezy exhalation greeted his vitriol. He arched an eyebrow, turning to peer at the man behind him. He’d expected an argument, or at the very least a grudging laugh. In those last years of the war, Lupin had been the only one who had been able to interpret Severus’ sarcasm, had been the only one to laugh at Snape’s cutting jokes.
“This way, Severus,” Lupin said, and he disappeared through a door to his left. The Potions Master followed him into the kitchen.
They sat down at the rickety kitchen table and Severus placed the goblet before him, muttering the spell to unseal it. The pungent scent of aconite diffused through the room as Snape looked around. Sunlight seemed to have given up the struggle to penetrate the film on the windows, leaving the kitchen brighter than they foyer, but only just. Still, it gave Severus enough light to actually see Lupin for the first time in over a year.
He stared.
Remus, to his credit, didn’t flinch under the unwavering scrutiny. Until he was claimed by a coughing fit that lasted a full minute, sending convulsions shuddering through his thin body.
And what had happened to that body? Lupin, who had looked older than his years for a long time, was now almost unrecognizable. His clothing hung off his skinny frame. Lines cut deep, punishing grooves along the contours of his angular face, bracketing his eyes, edging his lips, charting his forehead. His hair, once golden brown, then brownish with gray streaks, was the colour of lead, lusterless and ancient.
He recovered from his fit and returned his gaze to Severus’. “How have you been?”
The Potions Master’s disbelieving stare turned into an outraged scowl. “How have I been? What the hell has happened to you?”
Remus blinked as though the dim light hurt his eyes and then let out a gusty, resigned sigh. “I’m dying.”
Severus was sure he hadn’t heard that properly. How could he have, with that thunderous whooshing sound in his ears? With the way his heart had suddenly begun to pound too quickly, too loudly. With the suddenly vertiginous sense that the floor had disappeared below him and he was tumbling downward?
“I wanted to let you know, Severus,” Remus continued, running his sticklike fingers through his steel wool hair. “I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else.”
Something was wrong with Severus’ larynx. The high levels of dust, some part of his brain rationalized. He was having an allergic reaction. That’s why he was dizzy. That’s why he couldn’t speak. That’s why his eyes were stinging.
The werewolf kept talking, almost as though he was telling a story. Yes, Snape decided. A story about a character named Remus who was ill. A story that had little to do with reality. “I suspected last year and I didn’t want to worry anyone. I didn’t want to be a nuisance, as nothing could be done lolling about at home. I thought I could find the cure somewhere out there.”
“You-”
“But it seems there is no cure. Oh believe me, I’ve been to healers. I’ve been to experts. There is nothing to be done. And so I’ve come home to settle things.”
“How can you be dying?” Severus managed. “Dying of what, for god’s sake?”
With a rueful shake of his head, Remus replied, “Dying of lycanthropy.”
“You’re not making sense,” Severus hissed.
“Surely you’re familiar with the strain a werewolf’s body goes through each month,” Remus said patiently. “Everything is torn apart and remade. Bones shift, internal organs reshape. Every month for thirty-five years is a long time.”
Snape stared very hard at the smudged goblet before him. “But that does not kill, Lupin. Werewolves do not die prematurely.”
“This one does.”
Snape surged to his feet. “What,” he ground out, “is doing this to you?”
Remus took a deep breath. “The wolfsbane.”
Stunned silence. Severus couldn’t dredge up even a trifle of snark. He fixed his attention on the exhausted, spent voice of Remus Lupin, trying to make sense of the words he was saying. Surely they were in a different language. Surely the syntax was wrong. He couldn’t be interpreting properly.
“Severus, werewolves can live normal lifespans because when the change comes, it takes us completely. The transition is painful to endure, but we become something... other, something outside ourselves. And it recedes when we return to our human state. But the wolfsbane has a side effect that none of us, not even you, foresaw.”
“It kept you in your right mind,” Severus murmured.
“Yes,” Remus agreed.
“It didn’t keep the wolf at bay, it caged you inside the wolf.”
“Yes.”
Severus was silent for a long moment and then finally tore his gaze away from the goblet. The goblet containing the potion that was killing Remus. “By forcing your own mind into the wolf’s body, it did something to you.”
“As near as we can tell, it caused my nervous system to, as the Muggles would say, ‘short circuit’,” Remus finished for him. “Rather than banishing the pain and the stress as is normal for a lycanthrope, my body has contained it, absorbed it, and is slowly being eaten by it.”
Severus glared at him. “Then why continue with the potion? When did you realize what was happening?”
“I’d guessed it might within the first year,” Remus said, squeezing his eyes shut.
“The first... you’ve been consuming something you suspected could destroy you for four years?” Severus felt faint. Stupid, idiotic, dunderheaded... He began to pace as he ranted. “Why? Have you a death wish, Lupin? You said ‘thank you’ every time!”
“Severus-”
“Damn you, Remus! How dare you do this! How dare you choose me as the instrument of your downfall?”
Somehow, Severus found himself towering over the seated man, his hands on the bony shoulders, fingers burrowing into wasted flesh. “How dare you choose to leave me alone?”
Severus seemed more shocked by his own question than Remus. The werewolf reached up with his left hand, interlacing his fingers with Severus’ where they dug into his shoulder. “I didn’t think you would ever get over the past enough to want me. I’d hoped, foolishly, you’d come to find me,” he whispered. “I thought you’d pick up on the clues. The place names on the notes I sent.”
“Why can’t you just ask for help like a normal person?”
“I’m not a normal person.”
No. He wasn’t. Especially not to the potions master. Severus hauled the werewolf to his feet, feeling as though he would hyperventilate as he searched the pained eyes for any real answer. All he could see was himself, mirrored in the dilated pupils.
“Why, Remus? Why keep taking the potion? Why force me to create your poison of choice?”
“Because it was better to live for a shorter time if I knew I would never be in danger of harming someone again.”
Severus couldn’t say ‘But you’re harming me now.’ Instead, he pulled roughly on the shoulders he still grasped and Remus came forward willingly, melting against the potions master and twining his weak arms around the taller man’s neck. Severus brushed his lips across Remus’ desperately, searchingly. Remus moaned and opened his mouth, allowing Severus a chance to taste what he’d wanted for so long. What he hadn’t realized he wanted. Needed.
And how could it all be so wrong when it was finally, wondrously right?
He held the ailing body close, feeling Remus’ heart beating in time with his. And as long as that heart was beating, there could still be hope, couldn’t there? “I’ll find you a cure,” he whispered, burying his face in Remus’ neck, feeling the pulse point thumping against his forehead.
“I won’t stop taking the potion.” Remus’ reply turned into a moan as Severus silenced him with another kiss.
“I’ll find the cure,” Severus repeated. “You’ll not disappear from my life again.”
Severus had unwittingly come close to killing this man, this creature who had infuriated and tantalized and confounded him for years. Decades. But he would undo the damage. He had no choice.
He released Remus long enough to watch the man drink his gelatinous venom in the tarnished goblet and then swept him into his arms again. He would find the antidote. Tomorrow would be for searching. Tonight was about reacquainting.
Fin
A/N: “Vincetoxic”, according to the Forgotten English calendar, means “An antidote to poison; adaptation of medieval Latin vincetoxicum; formed on Latin vincere, to overcome.”
Author: rose_whispers
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Remus/Severus
Summary: After not seeing Remus for a year, Severus discovers that something has gone terribly awry
Word Count: 1994
A/N: Ever been bitten by an insistent bastard of a bunny that forces you to stop doing everything else and write? Yeah, that’s where this came from. Not fluffy, or at least not like my usual stories.
Severus Snape arched his back and sighed softly at the satisfying cracks that escaped his realigning vertebrae. Almost forty, he reflected with grim amusement, and already falling apart. He finished ladling the odious potion into the disused goblet before him. It had been over a year since he’d hand delivered the wolfsbane to its intended consumer. Over a year since the shaggy, detested, familiar werewolf had disappeared to gallivant across the seven continents, reveling in the freedom the fall of the Dark Lord afforded him. Afforded them all.
And Severus had gone on brewing the potion, month after month, and sending it by owl in a large glass phial carefully charmed to preserve its contents and not to break en route. He had no idea how the owls found their target, but each month the owl would return carrying a note. Always the same, in that well-known, hated scrawl.
Thank you, Severus.
RL
The only thing that changed would be the surface upon which the notes were written. The backs of theatre tickets. The corners of newspapers. The margins of pamphlets. Severus threw them all in a drawer and pretended they did not exist. Pretended, for most of the month, that Lupin himself didn’t exist. And for the most part, he was successful.
But then the last note had arrived only two days ago, from an owl not his own.
Severus,
Thank you again. I have returned home, to my cottage in Tintagel. If you have the time, why don’t you bring the wolfsbane in person? I would like us to get reacquainted.
Remus
Severus had stared at the note, unsure of himself. Why would the werewolf request his presence? Severus was tempted to owl the dosage to the cottage out of sheer spite, but he had to admit to a certain healthy curiosity. What had Lupin been up to all this time?
Soon he would find out. Placing a sealing spell over the goblet, he apparated with a pop even louder than the cracking of his spine and reappeared moments later at the front door of Remus Lupin’s cottage.
He’d never been to this house before, but he’d heard enough about it. It had been purchased as a place to spirit Harry Potter to during the war, should the need arise. Of course, the little fiend hadn’t consented, had cursed the Order eighteen different ways for trying to force him into the same corner his parents had been forced to. Instead, ownership passed to the werewolf, who had grown weary of squatting in the House of Black.
Severus looked at his surroundings with distaste. It was apparent from the overgrown garden and the three-foot high weeds, the broken fence and the coating of thick dust on the windows, that Remus hadn’t been here in a long time, and had only just returned.
He knocked on the rotting oak door, wondering briefly if the thing would fall off its hinge under the stress. Instead, it swung open with a whine, revealing the darkness within. Severus blinked owlishly, unable to see through the gloom, unable to make out the features of the man before him. But he was nothing if not a consummate chameleon, able to adapt to any situation. So he glided through the door and into the dingy foyer as though the shadows didn’t bother him.
“Lupin,” he said in his most practiced sneer. “How kind of you to invite me to your hovel. I can understand why even the Boy Who Lived in a Cupboard half his life saw that it wasn’t up to standard.”
A wheezy exhalation greeted his vitriol. He arched an eyebrow, turning to peer at the man behind him. He’d expected an argument, or at the very least a grudging laugh. In those last years of the war, Lupin had been the only one who had been able to interpret Severus’ sarcasm, had been the only one to laugh at Snape’s cutting jokes.
“This way, Severus,” Lupin said, and he disappeared through a door to his left. The Potions Master followed him into the kitchen.
They sat down at the rickety kitchen table and Severus placed the goblet before him, muttering the spell to unseal it. The pungent scent of aconite diffused through the room as Snape looked around. Sunlight seemed to have given up the struggle to penetrate the film on the windows, leaving the kitchen brighter than they foyer, but only just. Still, it gave Severus enough light to actually see Lupin for the first time in over a year.
He stared.
Remus, to his credit, didn’t flinch under the unwavering scrutiny. Until he was claimed by a coughing fit that lasted a full minute, sending convulsions shuddering through his thin body.
And what had happened to that body? Lupin, who had looked older than his years for a long time, was now almost unrecognizable. His clothing hung off his skinny frame. Lines cut deep, punishing grooves along the contours of his angular face, bracketing his eyes, edging his lips, charting his forehead. His hair, once golden brown, then brownish with gray streaks, was the colour of lead, lusterless and ancient.
He recovered from his fit and returned his gaze to Severus’. “How have you been?”
The Potions Master’s disbelieving stare turned into an outraged scowl. “How have I been? What the hell has happened to you?”
Remus blinked as though the dim light hurt his eyes and then let out a gusty, resigned sigh. “I’m dying.”
Severus was sure he hadn’t heard that properly. How could he have, with that thunderous whooshing sound in his ears? With the way his heart had suddenly begun to pound too quickly, too loudly. With the suddenly vertiginous sense that the floor had disappeared below him and he was tumbling downward?
“I wanted to let you know, Severus,” Remus continued, running his sticklike fingers through his steel wool hair. “I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else.”
Something was wrong with Severus’ larynx. The high levels of dust, some part of his brain rationalized. He was having an allergic reaction. That’s why he was dizzy. That’s why he couldn’t speak. That’s why his eyes were stinging.
The werewolf kept talking, almost as though he was telling a story. Yes, Snape decided. A story about a character named Remus who was ill. A story that had little to do with reality. “I suspected last year and I didn’t want to worry anyone. I didn’t want to be a nuisance, as nothing could be done lolling about at home. I thought I could find the cure somewhere out there.”
“You-”
“But it seems there is no cure. Oh believe me, I’ve been to healers. I’ve been to experts. There is nothing to be done. And so I’ve come home to settle things.”
“How can you be dying?” Severus managed. “Dying of what, for god’s sake?”
With a rueful shake of his head, Remus replied, “Dying of lycanthropy.”
“You’re not making sense,” Severus hissed.
“Surely you’re familiar with the strain a werewolf’s body goes through each month,” Remus said patiently. “Everything is torn apart and remade. Bones shift, internal organs reshape. Every month for thirty-five years is a long time.”
Snape stared very hard at the smudged goblet before him. “But that does not kill, Lupin. Werewolves do not die prematurely.”
“This one does.”
Snape surged to his feet. “What,” he ground out, “is doing this to you?”
Remus took a deep breath. “The wolfsbane.”
Stunned silence. Severus couldn’t dredge up even a trifle of snark. He fixed his attention on the exhausted, spent voice of Remus Lupin, trying to make sense of the words he was saying. Surely they were in a different language. Surely the syntax was wrong. He couldn’t be interpreting properly.
“Severus, werewolves can live normal lifespans because when the change comes, it takes us completely. The transition is painful to endure, but we become something... other, something outside ourselves. And it recedes when we return to our human state. But the wolfsbane has a side effect that none of us, not even you, foresaw.”
“It kept you in your right mind,” Severus murmured.
“Yes,” Remus agreed.
“It didn’t keep the wolf at bay, it caged you inside the wolf.”
“Yes.”
Severus was silent for a long moment and then finally tore his gaze away from the goblet. The goblet containing the potion that was killing Remus. “By forcing your own mind into the wolf’s body, it did something to you.”
“As near as we can tell, it caused my nervous system to, as the Muggles would say, ‘short circuit’,” Remus finished for him. “Rather than banishing the pain and the stress as is normal for a lycanthrope, my body has contained it, absorbed it, and is slowly being eaten by it.”
Severus glared at him. “Then why continue with the potion? When did you realize what was happening?”
“I’d guessed it might within the first year,” Remus said, squeezing his eyes shut.
“The first... you’ve been consuming something you suspected could destroy you for four years?” Severus felt faint. Stupid, idiotic, dunderheaded... He began to pace as he ranted. “Why? Have you a death wish, Lupin? You said ‘thank you’ every time!”
“Severus-”
“Damn you, Remus! How dare you do this! How dare you choose me as the instrument of your downfall?”
Somehow, Severus found himself towering over the seated man, his hands on the bony shoulders, fingers burrowing into wasted flesh. “How dare you choose to leave me alone?”
Severus seemed more shocked by his own question than Remus. The werewolf reached up with his left hand, interlacing his fingers with Severus’ where they dug into his shoulder. “I didn’t think you would ever get over the past enough to want me. I’d hoped, foolishly, you’d come to find me,” he whispered. “I thought you’d pick up on the clues. The place names on the notes I sent.”
“Why can’t you just ask for help like a normal person?”
“I’m not a normal person.”
No. He wasn’t. Especially not to the potions master. Severus hauled the werewolf to his feet, feeling as though he would hyperventilate as he searched the pained eyes for any real answer. All he could see was himself, mirrored in the dilated pupils.
“Why, Remus? Why keep taking the potion? Why force me to create your poison of choice?”
“Because it was better to live for a shorter time if I knew I would never be in danger of harming someone again.”
Severus couldn’t say ‘But you’re harming me now.’ Instead, he pulled roughly on the shoulders he still grasped and Remus came forward willingly, melting against the potions master and twining his weak arms around the taller man’s neck. Severus brushed his lips across Remus’ desperately, searchingly. Remus moaned and opened his mouth, allowing Severus a chance to taste what he’d wanted for so long. What he hadn’t realized he wanted. Needed.
And how could it all be so wrong when it was finally, wondrously right?
He held the ailing body close, feeling Remus’ heart beating in time with his. And as long as that heart was beating, there could still be hope, couldn’t there? “I’ll find you a cure,” he whispered, burying his face in Remus’ neck, feeling the pulse point thumping against his forehead.
“I won’t stop taking the potion.” Remus’ reply turned into a moan as Severus silenced him with another kiss.
“I’ll find the cure,” Severus repeated. “You’ll not disappear from my life again.”
Severus had unwittingly come close to killing this man, this creature who had infuriated and tantalized and confounded him for years. Decades. But he would undo the damage. He had no choice.
He released Remus long enough to watch the man drink his gelatinous venom in the tarnished goblet and then swept him into his arms again. He would find the antidote. Tomorrow would be for searching. Tonight was about reacquainting.
Fin
A/N: “Vincetoxic”, according to the Forgotten English calendar, means “An antidote to poison; adaptation of medieval Latin vincetoxicum; formed on Latin vincere, to overcome.”