[From Samhain to the Solstice]; All Men Kill The Things They Love, Harry/Snape, R, 3/4

[lomonaaeren]

Part Two.

Part One.

Title: All Men Kill the Things They Love (3/4)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Severus
Content Notes: AU (Severus survives), multiple character deaths, suicide, gore, violence, angst
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 4000
Summary: After the war, the last thing Severus wants to do is help Potter. But Potter’s tale of a curse that has killed almost everyone he loves, and his plea for help to break that curse, stirs Severus’s intellectual curiosity, if nothing else. As he and Potter work side-by-side on the curse, however, Severus begins to suspect, uneasily, that Potter may want to do more than simply prevent the number of dead from increasing; he may want to bring them back.
Author’s Notes: This is the first of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It is, as you can see from the notes, an extremely dark story. It should have four parts, to be posted over the next four days. The title is from Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” quoted below and at the end.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Part Three

Severus had never thought he would be tempted by such a thing.

Why should he think it? There had been Lily, mourned and lost. There had been the occasional fugitive assignation, held with another Slytherin student or with someone paid to be with him. And there had been no one else.

Not a Master of Death, a necromancer with green eyes and a blank gaze and sometimes the shadow of Death’s wings.

But as Potter’s fingers dug into his shoulders and his mouth sought Severus’s, Severus discovered a sluggish, growing desire. It swirled up in him like brackish water as Potter’s hands set further and harder, and then Severus groaned and let his head fall back against the wall while his hands trembled with something that might be fear.

“I’m sick of death,” Potter said, and mouthed the side of Severus’s neck. “Let me show you life.”

Those words were sickly enough that Severus should have stopped him, but it had been more than a decade. He didn’t have the strength to do that in his arms. He let Potter push him further and further back, and then they were on the bed, and Potter was kneeling in front of him to remove his socks and begin unbuttoning his robes.

Severus watched him with hazy eyes. Potter seemed to have taken on yet another overtone, not darkness this time but shining light. When he glanced up at Severus, his face looked almost relaxed, and his hands were steady as stones. He kissed the inside of Severus’s thigh, and Severus started.

“I wondered what you were like,” Potter whispered. “Beyond the façade of black robes, as still as death.”

Severus doubted that very much, but if it made Potter feel better about sleeping with him to think that he’d had a crush on Severus as a student, then so be it. Severus parted his legs, and Potter finished unbuttoning the robes and rolled Severus to the side, flinging them out from beneath him.

Severus wondered for a moment how he had the strength to do that, when he remained scrawny and Severus was so much taller than he was, but he didn’t care that much. He tugged on Potter’s shirt as the man bent over him. “You,” he said. “Out of this.”

Potter smiled slowly and tugged the shirt over his head. He was naked, then. Severus blinked. He hadn’t seen the moment that Potter had shed his boots and robes. Surely he had worn boots through the door? He hadn’t walked barefoot?

But the question became unimportant as Potter spread Severus’s legs and gazed down on his cock. It was erect and quivering, and Severus decided that he wasn’t going to worry about what it “meant” that he was responding in this way.

“Life out of death,” Potter whispered.

Severus glared at him. “Are you going to spend all your time speaking about death, or are you going to—”

But Potter lowered his head in a plunging motion, and Severus’s head thumped against the headboard. He had never felt something like this, heat so sharp it was nearly pain, spreading flickering tendrils like fire all through his body. He shivered once, which made no sense, and then Potter’s mouth gentled and his tongue felt more like a human’s.

“Will you come for me?” Potter murmured, and it made no sense that Severus could hear the words perfectly, but that was perhaps another part of the Master of Death’s privileges. “Make the air tremble with the power of life overcoming death?” He eased back and used his hand on Severus’s shaft.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Potter, I need more—”

He meant to end the sentence with Stop talking about death, but he didn’t manage, not when the orgasm tore out of him like something clawed ripping free from its burrow. Severus sagged back, gasping, half-panicked. He had never come like that from a little sucking and stroking.

Then again, he hadn’t been with someone else in ten years, either, he reminded himself.

Potter stood up and climbed onto the bed with him. He must have cast a Cleaning Charm already, because his hand felt as dry as bones when Severus clasped him and rolled him onto his back.

And now he has me doing it.

Severus shook the thoughts out of his mind and bent down to suck on Potter’s collarbone, something suddenly intriguing; he didn’t think he’d ever seen it out of robes. Potter gasped and reached up to place his hands, hovering, over the back of Severus’s neck, as if he wasn’t sure that pressing down harder would be welcome. Severus gave another ruthless suck, so that he would know it was indeed welcome, and Potter’s hands descended.

They were shivering-hot, with the same kind of almost unpleasant heat that his mouth had held, but Severus still rolled his neck back into them, and leaned sideways to kiss Potter’s mouth. His lips felt normal, at least, and Severus savored the slight wetness. He was already getting interested again, which had something to do with Potter’s magic or his long years of drought or something else.

Potter whimpered heavily, his neck straining back. But he met Severus’s eyes and managed to smile. “I’m not Master of Death right now,” he said.

“No,” Severus said. “I would not like you to be master of anything right now.”

Potter’s eyes widened to the point that he seemed to have pits replacing them. But he smiled. “I’d like that very much.”

Severus rolled to the side, reached for his wand, and cast carefully. The bonds that surged into place around Potter’s hands from thin air were made of silver rope, trimmed with fur: the sort of bonds that Severus had learned to conjure because of who his first partner in playing these games had been.

He fastened them to the headboard, watching all the time for some sign of Potter’s displeasure with the situation. But aside from a few tugs, which seemed to be gauging the strength and stretchiness of the bonds, Potter didn’t do anything. In fact, he spread his legs and smiled welcomingly at Severus.

“On top?” he asked. “Inside?”

That had been Severus’s intention, but it still stole his breath to hear it voiced that openly. He nodded and turned to cast the spell that would pull a small put of lubrication, capped long ago because he occasionally liked to use it on himself, towards the bed.

Potter kept quiet as Severus rubbed the lubricant along his own cock, although Severus had hoped to hear some of those deep breaths quicken. When he climbed onto the bed and stretched out alongside Potter, Potter’s eyes did flick down to his cock and widen, which was gratifying.

“Do you want to back out?” Severus asked, although he was trembling with eagerness to take Potter.

Potter shook his head. “No.” He closed his eyes. “I need to forget that I’m the Master of Death.”

“Here, you are not,” Severus said. It felt as if the words were dragged from him, but, well, what he said was true. Right now, Potter looked like a tired but very mortal man, and Severus was the one who could remind him of that. “Here, I am the master as much as I am anything.” He knelt above Potter and reached between his legs.

Potter’s eyes opened with a gasp when Severus’s fingers entered him. Severus took his own pleasure in moving slowly, watching Potter’s eyes all the while, and Potter only stared back with silent, boundless determination.

“Have you ever done this before?” Severus murmured, this time for the pleasure of knowing.

Potter licked his lips. “No.”

“With a man.” Severus let his fingers drift deeper and probe, and Potter’s head slammed against the headboard as he gasped. He gave no sign that he’d noticed the pain.

“No. Not with a man. Not with anyone since Ginny.”

Severus sighed with rattling dissatisfaction at that last piece of information, but he could hardly demand that Potter travel back in time and change the past. He concentrated on twisting his fingers until Potter was balanced on the edge and staring wildly into the air past his head, and then he pulled them out.

Potter made a protesting noise, or probably would have. He choked it back at the last moment, and Severus smiled smugly at him and moved until his cock was positioned near Potter’s arse.

Potter stared at him, eyes still blank. Severus tilted his head. “Second thoughts?”

“No.”

The sheer decision in those words propelled Severus inwards, not stopping even when he saw Potter’s mouth twist in a rictus. Only when he was fully seated inside did Severus close his eyes and rock a little, testing the waters, as it were. Potter’s gasp rose and fluttered and settled back in his chest like the last sigh of a corpse.

But for all that he lay nearly as still as that on the bed, too, he was warm enough, and Severus fucked him with an eye on his reactions. Yes, there was where his cock began to stir and lift, and when Severus hit his prostate more directly, Potter grabbed his shoulders and clung and scraped.

Severus leaned towards him, stilling the motions of his hips until they were barely present. Potter had closed his eyes and was whispering something to himself, something Severus couldn’t make out because he was too far away.

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that you’re saying my name,” Severus murmured, when Potter opened his eyes and focused on Severus again.

“Some of it was.”

The odd, somber pulse behind his words made Severus shake his head and begin to thrust again. Potter widened his eyes but didn’t make any sound, his lips still moving without even breath behind them. Severus began to snap his hips in short, sharp motions, determined to evoke some reaction from the man.

It seemed he got one, at last. Potter shuddered and came, a small sticky pool of liquid that Severus watched for a moment. When it failed to turn black or otherwise indicate that the man who had produced it was the Master of Death, Severus finally closed his eyes and surrendered to his own pleasure.

It was the emptiest orgasm he’d ever had. But it was there, and he came, and he had the satisfaction of knowing he was spilling, bare, into Potter’s bare arse.

When he pulled out, Potter might not have noticed. He was still lying where Severus had placed him, still staring at the ceiling and mouthing meaningless words.

Severus considered that for a moment, then shook his head. Well, as long as this kept the man from going out and robbing more graves to try and bring back his godson, then he would take it. He loosened the ropes around Potter’s wrists and lay down in the bed, turned away from him.

If Potter ever left or even stopped endlessly whispering to himself, Severus never knew.

*

“What do you think you’re doing, Potter?”

Potter raised dark green eyes to him from where he was sitting in the center of Severus’s drawing room floor, still naked. Severus wondered how he could bear it, since he had not chosen this house for its warmth. But perhaps the fire was close enough that it didn’t matter, or the Master of Death had abilities that Potter hadn’t mentioned yet.

“Thinking,” Potter said.

Severus snorted in disgust and moved around him. He felt an ache in his hip, and sighed. He was not old, but he might have too many ancient wounds to treat Potter as he had last night.

“What do you think I’m doing?”

Severus frowned and glanced over his shoulder. “I already asked that. You said you were thinking.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant in general.” Potter looked at him, and his eyes were truly unearthly now, filled with shadows that Severus thought had been in the bed with them last night. “Trying to break the curse.”

“You answered that for yourself, then.” Severus didn’t have to work hard to let the snappishness into his voice, or force away the uneasiness. “You are doing many things that are repetitive and imbecilic, I suspect, but then, you were never all that good at magic that didn’t have much to do with Defense, were you, Potter?”

To his astonishment, Potter began to laugh. He buried his head in his knees and quaked with laughter, shook with it. He swayed back and forth, and the eerie sound of a cackling such as Severus had only heard from Fenrir Greyback rose and pushed back the shadows stretching out from the fire, replacing them with Potter’s own.

Severus didn’t realize he was shouting until he heard the hoarse echo of his own voice, and then he didn’t mean to say the words until he heard them. “You are ransacking the graves of your loved ones to raise them as Inferi!”

Potter stopped laughing in the same unnatural manner he’d started, as if someone had cut his throat with a dark blade. He stared at Severus with parted lips, and Severus stared back, this time hiding dismay.

“Is that what you think I’m doing?”

Potter’s voice was low, inflectionless. Severus looked him in the eye and nodded once, glad both that he had spoken of this instead of his visits to Albus or the Unspeakables and that there was no sign the Deathly Hallows granted their Master the abilities of a Legilimens. “Yes, of course that’s what I think you’re doing.”

“Why?”

Severus faltered then. “You do not wish to see them again?” he asked, after a futile struggle to expunge emotion from his voice.

Potter shrugged, turning to face him and drawing attention to the bite on his collarbone and his wrists that still had rings of red around them. “Why would I want to bring them back when they would be soulless? I could just turn the Resurrection Stone around three times and see them if that’s what I wanted.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Trying to break the curse.”

“You would not need the teeth of the dead and the dust from their graves if your intentions were that innocent,” Severus snapped.

Potter tilted his head very slowly, looking like a great, alien bird. “You think that’s what I’m doing?”

Severus was in this now, and if he was not as secretive as he had desired to be, there was some pleasure to be found in confronting Potter. He folded his arms. “Of course it is. Draco told me about the grave robberies. I know that you took the deaths of your friends hard.”

“You could say that.”

Potter’s face looked like it was carved out of iron, but Severus pressed on anyway. He was not one to be frightened by a skinny eleven-year-old who had gained a decade and a few stone of muscle. “But bringing them back will only give you Inferi without their spirit.”

“And I already told you that I don’t want that, and that I could speak to them with the Resurrection Stone if I only wished to see them again.”

“I don’t believe you.”

An odd smile flickered across Potter’s face. “Fortunately, your belief isn’t required.”

The sheer arrogance in his tone took Severus’s breath away. “And if I said that I was going to stop helping you? That I was going to kick you out of this house and refuse you the use of my brewing facilities?”

Potter looked up at him, eyes shiny and black and flat. His voice was quiet. “No, I don’t want that.”

“Then what are you doing? Give me an answer that I will believe.”

Potter sat still for a long moment, still enough that Severus found himself watching to see if the man’s chest yet rose and fell. Then Potter nodded. “Very well. I can respect your need for that. I am taking the teeth and grave dirt and other components because they will be needed in the ritual of breaking the curse.”

“Tell me about this ritual.”

Potter shrugged a little. “It needs representatives of all the things I’ve lost because I’m the Master of Death, all that I’m struggling to leave behind. That means that my lost family and friends need to be part of the circle.”

Severus’s breath caught in his throat in an ugly way. He struggled for a long moment, and then managed to say, “Tell me that you have not robbed your parents’ graves.”

“You mean Lily’s, right?”

“What?”

“You wouldn’t care about my father’s grave,” Potter said, his eyes intense and eerie, shining like pools reflecting the moon. “You mean that you don’t want to hear that I’ve desecrated my mother’s grave.”

“I would be equally as upset about Albus’s!”

“But you didn’t mention him.” Potter bowed his head and flowed to his feet, stalking towards Severus. For a moment, his shadow spread out and swayed, but this time in the shape of giant dark hands, not wings. “You’re only upset because you’re thinking of my mother’s grave.”

And perhaps Severus was, and he hadn’t allowed himself to realize that before. But what did it matter? He met Potter’s eyes, brutal gaze to brutal gaze, and said, “It doesn’t matter. I will not allow you to raise Inferi.”

Potter paused, and laughed. The sound was a death rattle. He gestured, and the dark shadows vanished from his shoulders. Severus blinked in what felt like a flood of light.

“I was right,” Potter said. “I told you the truth, and you didn’t believe me.” He shook his head. “I’m not calling them back.”

“There is no ritual that uses the artifacts of the dead like this otherwise!” Severus snapped, although his head was beginning to ache with the realization that his Legilimency sense of when people were lying had so far not reacted to Potter’s statements. “I want you to let me read that book you’re always studying.”

Potter blinked, several times. Then he said, “You could have said. And I wonder if I should be worried about you. You’re leaping from thought to thought and acting erratic and refusing to listen to me.”

Severus snarled, and stalked over to him. Potter remained still and watched him come. Severus seized his throat and squeezed it, trying not to think that only a few hours before, he had been coaxing moans out of it. “I want to see that book,” he hissed, his face close to Potter’s and his cloudy eyes.

“Yes, very well,” Potter said softly. He reached out and turned, and the book was in his arms, melting out from the shadows.

“Where did you get it?” Severus found himself reluctant to touch the book now that he had his wish. There was a faint smell in the air that he associated with rotting flesh, and his skin crawled as he stared at the thing.

Potter gave a complicated shrug with one shoulder. “It was nearby. It’s always nearby now. That’s one of the powers of the Master of Death.”

Severus gave him a sharp glance as he took the book. “I know very well that I can’t kill you, Potter.”

“I wasn’t worried about that.”

That implied there was something he was worried about, but Severus wouldn’t drive himself mad figuring out for now. He tucked the tome under his arm and went back into his bedroom, expecting Potter to vanish some time in the near future.

*

The black book was—confusing.

The pages were full of information about what the book insisted on calling “the opposite of necromancy,” never by any shorter name. The circles Severus found were the ones that Potter had drawn on the parchment he had examined earlier that week, the circle with the roses in it and the one that Potter had put Ron Weasley’s name in. But there was no explanation of what they actually did. There was only illustration after illustration, and notes under them that said what the circles needed to be made of or how they should be drawn and what names should be placed in them to “achieve the desired result.”

There was blood magic. There was bone magic. There was what might be the ritual that the Dark Lord had used to return to life after Potter’s fourth year, although Severus had no certainty about that because of the odd terms the book kept using.

How can he be sure of what he’s doing?

Severus found himself skimming more and more, and he only left the bedroom to go into the kitchen once to get himself something to eat. Potter was still there, sitting naked in the middle of Severus’s hearthrug, his head drooped. Severus gave him a glance as he passed by, but Potter showed no sign of stirring or recognizing him.

Perhaps he’s asleep.

Severus ignored his own odd feeling that the Master of Death no longer did anything as mortal as sleep, and fixed a quick sandwich before he went back to the puzzling book.

There was no index, no table of contents, and even when he flipped back to the beginning, Severus found no sign that separated one spell from another. In fact, the more he looked, the more he realized the necromancers’ circles and the other illustrations on the page were blended. They overlapped, and so did the instructions, dancing beside each other in paragraph after paragraph of crabbed writing.

How can Potter be sure of anything he’s doing? How does he know that he copied down the right instructions?

He didn’t. Severus shut the book sure of one thing: whatever Potter was doing—whatever kind of necromancy it was, because of course it must be some kind—he was doing it purely out of hope. It wouldn’t actually bring his friends back.

Just like the other Potter you knew, Severus thought as he stepped out of his bedroom, the book tucked under his arm. Always arrogant, always thinking that he had more talent than he did. I remember Rosier telling me that he overheard Potter and his friends bragging about becoming Animagi. Sirius Black managed it, but all of them?

Severus felt a brief jolt of displeasure at remembering that Peter Pettigrew had managed it, too. But surely—

His thoughts broke off as he stared at the mess of black rose petals on the floor. Potter was gone now, but he had obviously been working on a potion again, probably something he hoped to use in some forbidden ritual, and he hadn’t cleaned up after himself. Severus’s drawing room floor was deep enough in rings of black rose petals that he could only imagine what the lab looked like.

With growing wrath, he flung the book on the kitchen counter and stalked into the lab.

The black rose petals were scattered here, too. And the cauldron was empty. It looked as though Potter had left his potion boiling so long that it had evaporated entirely.

Severus grabbed the edge of the cauldron, swearing under his breath, and winced as he cut his hand on an unexpected sharp edge. Well, it also made sense that Potter was so careless with his tools that he didn’t even notice when one of them hurt him.

Severus’s blood fell into the cauldron, and Severus found himself holding his breath. He had learned to his cost, while still young, that any combination of ingredients with blood was something to be avoided.

But nothing happened, and Severus let out a shaky curse. Potter’s incompetence at Potions had intensified, it seemed, if he had so thoroughly boiled this one away that not even reactive sludge remained.

Severus walked back into the drawing room, cursing again as his feet stirred the piles of black rose petals, and outside the house. He looked around carefully, in case Potter was waiting to ambush him or the like, but there was nothing in sight.

Except…

Severus moved towards a mark that Potter had made in the garden, his eyes narrowed. Severus’s garden was small, containing Potions ingredients only, and those packed as closely as they could be without interfering with one another. He still had to use trimming and pruning charms on them nearly every day.

In the middle of a patch of trampled nightshade was the symbol of the Deathly Hallows. Severus shook his head and turned to go back into the house.

Perhaps, he thought, if Potter stays occupied with this kind of madness, I don’t have to worry about him raising Inferi after all.