BRAVE / INFAMY

❝ ᴍʏ ᴛᴀʟᴇ ɪs ᴛʜᴇ ᴍᴏsᴛ ʙɪᴛᴛᴇʀ ᴛʀᴜᴛʜ:           𝖙𝖎𝖒𝖊 𝖕𝖆𝖞𝖘 𝖚𝖘 𝖇𝖚𝖙 𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖍 𝖊𝖆𝖗𝖙𝖍 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖉𝖚𝖘𝖙,                                                ᴀɴᴅ ᴀ ᴅᴀʀᴋ, sɪʟᴇɴᴛ ɢʀᴀᴠᴇ.❞

Snape regarded him with a dull blink, the sort of expression one might wear after being mildly inconvenienced by a particularly slow-moving ghost in the hallway. His forearm was still bleeding, a slow, deliberate ooze that painted his sallow skin in something almost theatrical - red against parchment, the colour of consequence.

"Oh, I assure you," he drawled, impassive, "I feel plenty. From existential dread to low-grade rage."

The pain was there, in truth, but it hovered like so much else in his life - abstract, unanchored, background noise in a body already crowded with worse.

Snape watched Lupin fuss with the salve and torn fabric with a look that hovered somewhere between mild suspicion and morbid curiosity. Lupin, ever the Samaritan, doing his best to patch up a man made almost entirely of scalpels and refusal. It was almost funny.

How heartening, he thought bitterly, bonding over mutual acts of self-neglect.

But for some unfathomable reason, he did not stop him after that first resistance. Did not recoil like a mistrustful cat as he once would have. In fact, the quiet press of another's hands - the care - sent a shiver through him. Not quite warmth. Not quite comfort. But something.

He looked down at the unsightly gash on his forearm then, as if noticing it for the first time, as though it had belonged to someone else entirely, and then tilted his head, black strands tiredly sticking to his sweaty forehead.

Ah - of course he had. Foolish, theatrical, unspeakably human.

It wasn't accidental - no mere brewing mishap or careless scrape during the handling of mandrakes. No, this was something ritualistic. Raw. Torn open with the reckless fervour of someone trying to erase a tattoo carved into the soul. It wasn't the first time. But the skin bore no memory of it - there should have been layered scarring beneath, each attempt a brutal palimpsest written over the same cursed flesh. But the Dark Mark returned smoothly every time, even though it had since faded into something barely visible now save for in certain light, like a bruise beneath water - and Severus had grown dreadfully tired of being its host.

The scalpel had been sterilised not for hygiene but for irony. The cut was long and vicious, jagged near the middle where his hand must've trembled despite his resolve. The skin had split willingly enough - perhaps it, too, was tired of being a billboard for shame.

And yet.

Still there, mocking. The Mark refused to be banished. A curse etched in faithlessness and black magic didn't vanish with blood. He knew that. And still, he'd tried. Again.

Perhaps tomorrow he would try something more creative - acid, maybe, or fire. Or poetry. But tonight he focused on Lupin's hands trying to stem the shame even time could not wash clean. Without meeting Lupin--Remus' gaze, he murmured:

"I'm afraid it's rather late in the game to start feeling anything else."

Friend.

The word had landed like a stray spell to the ribs - not deadly, but jarring, disorienting, bruising. Severus almost grimaced. Something in him jolted, a small, traitorous part of his brain that had never stopped keeping count of how often he'd been called anything else - traitor, snake, monster, coward, Death Eater, spy.

Remus Lupin's voice carried it so achingly gently, a quiet offering - as if it had always been true. As if Severus hadn't once stood in the wreckage of boyhood friendships turned sour, hadn't learned to lace kindness with suspicion, to meet warmth with teeth.

He fixed his gaze on the far wall, expression unmoved, but his fingers curled ever so slightly against the wooden cabinet beneath them, as if steadying himself against the echo of something he didn't know how to carry.

Severus felt the words settle into his bones like cold rain on gravestones - familiar, yet cruelly unyielding. Draco's face, too pale even for his usual ghostly glamour in the dying light, looked impossibly young, impossibly fragile - a porcelain figurine trapped in the hands of careless gods, all high cheekbones and too-sharp edges for a boy his age. He'd spoken with that infuriating tilt to his chin - the one that always hovered between defiance and desperation. The statement hung between them like a guillotine. Obvious, dramatic, and entirely unnecessary.

And there, hovering over him like an overprotective vulture (a role forcibly thrust upon him, not for the first time), Snape, momentarily arrogant enough to believe he could shield the young man from inevitability, fool enough to think he could pull him safely from the jaws of a fate that had already begun to close.

Yet he had no other option but try, even if it meant staining his soul blacker than midnight at the bottom of the Lake. Even if it meant that by the end, all that remained of Severus Snape was a ghost made of ash and regret.

But wasn't he already?

He took a slow, measured breath, schooling his hardened face into practiced neutrality as intensely dark eyes studied his unfortunate charge. "Perhaps not," he murmured softly, each word weighed carefully, "But you will allow me my delusions, Draco."

Hadn't he already spent every waking hour trying to plug the holes in a sinking ship with nothing but his own bloody fingers? And yet Severus knew the cold, unforgiving truth - that the path laid before them was a chasm bridged by fraying threads. Safety was an illusion. Love a fatal flaw. All he could offer Draco was the frail shelter of his own ruined life, the promise of a cautionary tale whispered in shadows, and a heart bound to break beneath the weight of things he could not change. He'd been that young man before. Knew what came next. He could only prepare him for it. For what, exactly? To kill a man who was already dying, with dignity still clinging to his bones? It was theatre, all of it - gruesome, necessary theatre - and Severus, stagehand to tragedy, was tasked with dressing the boy in conviction and calling it preparation. He stepped closer to the armchair Draco sat in, the hem of his cloak sweeping like the tail of a black bird, eyes gleaming with something fierce and exhausted.

"You must stop antagonising Potter. You have enough burdens without him nipping at your heels."

hey no I am the one in loving AWE with the sheer bloody poetry you infuse the imagery in your writing with !! but the more you write with me the less intimidating I get that's a FACT, I certainly don't bite and hiss and snarl when u approach unlike my standoffish muse - and LOVE to interact ooc too! ;)

OH NO PLEASE don't be, I'm just trying my hardest to channel professor bastard here-- but moi? I am VERY approachable I swear ?? come write with me, let's begin something beautiful-- ;)))

Snape closed his eyes briefly, as though offering a silent prayer for strength.

"That wasn't even a good pun, Potter. Shall I get you a beginner's guide?"

Snape blinked slowly, then drawled with the weariness of a man enduring cruciatus in conversational form.

"I would advise against pursuing a career as a comedian, Potter. Perhaps you should focus on physical comedy instead, if you wish to insist."

Snape regarded the bloom as one might a suspicious package left on the doorstep - possibly cursed, probably sentimental, almost certainly both, and far too complicated to deal with before his morning tea.

The black iris stood alone in its crystal prison, tall and shamelessly confident, as though it had every right to be there, basking in the flickering torchlight of his dreary dungeon classroom. It was not merely dark, but the shade of eclipses and widow's lace, its velvet petals curling at the edges like the corners of an unread letter. It smelled like indulgence, like something decadent and rare, like a secret meant only for those who understood sorrow as something intimate.

Naturally, it made him immediately wary.

He circled it once, arms crossed, expression unreadable as his gaze lingered on it longer than intended. Not a note, nor a signature. Just this gothic little affront to his routine, elegant and wholly out of place amongst the ink stains, crushed roots and adolescent idiocy.

His dark eyes narrowed.

"Subtle." he muttered aloud, as if the flower had ears and a fragile ego to bruise.

But a thought crept quietly into the corner of his mind - grey eyes, sometimes stormy and sometimes still, silvered, like a tarnished coin. Auburn curls smelling faintly of lavender oil, and beneath it all, something earthy, feral, that clung to her like a warning - the scent of moonlit woods and things that inhabited the undergrowth.

The bloom, like its sender, remained silent.

Still, he did not remove it. Didn't even banish it to a cupboard. He simply swooped around his desk with a dramatic flare of his robes and sat, adjusting the stack of unmarked essays beside it, and got on with the daily business of being Severus Snape - dour, bitter, exacting, and slightly unsettled by kindness - and punishing a batch of first years for existing.

He would never admit it, of course, but he found himself breathing just a little deeper that day.

Severus didn't hold hands.

He clutched books to his chest like shields, gripped his wand like a deadly weapon, and curled his fists in the dark like he could bruise the world back for what it had done to him. But this - this thin, gloved hand twined with his - was neither shield nor weapon. It was Lucius.

Lucius, with his silver-spun hair and silky voice soaked in arsenic, who looked like he was carved by a Renaissance master, or stepped straight out of a painting labelled Aristocracy: The Dangerous Edition. And he was holding Severus' hand casually, as if it were normal; as if Severus Snape, a half-blood from Spinner's End with a personality like a nest of hornets and the social graces of a nettle, were the sort of person one chose to hold hands with. Lucius, who had taken an interest in Severus when no one else dared, and turned it into something maddening, consuming - highly dangerous.

Though instinct bade him, he couldn't pull away.

And now they were together on the edge of something vast and terrible, where the future wore a black cloak and a silver mask, and Severus had already stepped one foot into the abyss. Because Lucius said it was the clever thing to do, because he said it was the only way to matter.

Because Lucius asked, and Severus had never learned to say no to him - not really.

They lingered in the shadowed corridor behind Malfoy Manor's drawing room, just beyond the chandelier's reach - the spectres of forbidden lovers hovering at the threshold of ruin. From within came the murmuring of others - older, wealthier, crueler - discussing the future like it was a feast they would gorge themselves on. And he was being led to the table, served up on a silver platter, with Lucius' elegant hand laced in his like a velvet rope.

He felt approximately seventeen emotions in the space of four seconds, most of them variations on horrified, suspicious, and mildly flammable. His fingers twitched, heart thudding against his ribs like it was trying to tunnel out. He'd wanted this. Didn't he?

He looked at their joined hands. One scarred, one gloved. One uncertain, one assured. And for a moment - just one, sharp, bleeding moment - he wanted to believe it, that he wasn't being used. That Lucius' gaze, his hold, wasn't just another form of control dressed up in rich leather, just a deplorable secret between them.

But the Dark Mark loomed on the horizon, and sentiment, he knew now, was not for people like him. Not truly.

Severus swallowed thickly, staring straight ahead like a prisoner before the gallows, and tried very hard not to feel anything. Not the warmth bleeding through Lucius' glove. Not the awful, slow-blooming hope rising in his throat like something sickly and sweet.

"I'm not afraid." he said hoarsely, a whisper above their breaths, dark eyes searching Lucius' beautifully pale face in the lowlight like a lifeline.

But Severus was afraid. Afraid of what came next, of what he was becoming. Afraid of how much he wanted this. This impossible, damning closeness, a tether to someone brilliant and wholly untouchable.

So he began mentally preparing his eulogy. Just in case.

please that was me the moment I saw your blog and realised you were going to KILL me right in the heart with perfectly characterised writing and sublimely distilled angst and there was nothing I could do about it, just let the tide take me and helplessly, blissfully drown in it. as far as I'm concerned I've been DEVOURED.

ooc: i see a lot of timid cryptids