Small Artillery Tanks

Small Artillery Tanks

“Hagrid…” Severus drawled out the man’s name, placing the emphasis on the last ‘d’, so that he was speaking slightly through his teeth.

He didn’t want to open his mouth to speak; he didn’t feel he dared risk the chance that his tongue truly had been dissected by a blunt rusty blade, as opposed to simply feeling as if it had. He was afraid that if he opened his mouth the forked organ would drop out and land on the table before him. This alone wouldn’t bother him, under normal circumstances, but you could never be too sure where Fang was, and the idea of putting a dog’s chew toy back in his mouth was frankly repulsive.

Though he supposed he done exactly that enough times before…

On hearing his name, Hagrid had stopped in his task of removing another tray of- something dubious- from the black dragon of a stove in the corner of the hut. He was grinning happily; face flushed with childish excitement and infatuated love. It hurt Severus’s heart, it really did, the dog like devotion this man offered up. On the other hand, the fiery sensation wandering about his gums demanded revenge, and humanity had never been a strong point of Severus'.

“When Dobby taught you to make rock cakes, he did, I trust, emphasis the fact that they do not actually contain rock?”

Hagrid’s face visibly fell. “He did, but I’m not always such a good cook, y’know, and I could’ave got summit wrong I s’pose.” The giant sighed audibly. He’d wanted so much to make something nice for his Sevvie, but Severus was so hard to please.

The big man squinted down at the hand written recipe before him in concern, simultaneously prodding one of the latest batch of cakes, before taking the plunge and biting into it. There was a moment’s pause, before the normal ruddy red of his cheeks notched itself up by seven or eight degrees Celsius and he made a dive that wouldn't have shamed an Olympic athlete for the sink.

Severus sat back and watched the performance with satisfaction. “When referring to rock, I was in fact including reference to related volcanic gases, incorporating into that definition sulphur, you realise.” It had been almost worth the complete eradication of all skin inside his mouth to see Hagrid’s face at this moment. A perfect mixture of pain, guilt, and building anger at Severus’ relentless sarcasm. It was one of the greatest pleasures of Snape’s life, trying to goad the other man into a fury. It wasn’t some sort of strange kink or anything; simply it made him feel infinitesimally bigger to know that his partner felt that little bit smaller. He’d frequently wondered idly, in free moments, whether or not if he carried on long enough they would eventually be the same size?

Severus was constantly reading, or being told by some busybody inspecting his teaching methods, that the bullied become bullies in turn. Severus more constantly still wondered why they bothered to give him this sterling piece of advice. Could they not see they were preaching to the converted?

Of course, it wasn’t the overnight transformation that people seemed to expect it to be. Severus hadn’t gone to bed a weedy first year with a chip on his shoulder the size of a small artillery tank, and then just woken up the Potions Professor intent on wreaking revenge on the descendants of his tormentors. There’d been a period in the middle, a passage of time, when perhaps a good psychiatrist could have done some good, sorted the tangled chains of paperclips into something that resembled acceptance.

Because believe it or not, once upon a time, a long, long time ago, in a kingdom geographically the same, but emotionally as separate as Earth and Mars, he’d been a reasonable man, having his shot at a balanced and normal life…

********************

The Slytherin Common room is not hospitable territory. It bares remarkable similarity to the Florida Swamps in several key ways: damp, green, and staffed by alligators. From the heavy oak doors, down to the stone floor tiles, across the room to the silver and brocade tapestries framing the next set of doors, the Slytherin Common room was designed with aesthetics in mind, not functionality.

And as any of the Slytherin students could have told you, imposing coat stands as giant animate silver snakes may well make, they are not the most practical of items, a fact which Severus himself discovered as he stalked through the doors and crashed into a neck that promptly twinned itself around his midriff.

He stood there for a moment or two, helpless in the embrace of the furnishings, aware that his wand graced the pocket of his dirty jeans, which were slung carelessly on his bed in the dormitories; and even more aware of his arms pinned to his sides, completely unable to free themselves.

The snakes weren’t normally in the habit of giving the students a bit of extra affection. Normally they were enchanted to move only within a carefully constrained space of about a foot and a half in all directions. On the other hand, Severus was well aware that it wouldn’t take much in the way of brain to think of removing the enchantment from them a few moments before he re-entered the common room, which he had vacated only momentarily to retrieve library books. What he was slightly more impressed by was the fact that the culprit had bothered to do it at 2AM in the morning, when there was a comfortable chance that Snape would be the only person about for the next five or so hours.

The question was: who would bother to get out of bed, just to torment him?

Why they were doing it was a much more simply answered question. The laws of popularity are a static thing. They alter a little now or then of course, the girl with a certain brand of shoes briefly pulling ahead of the girl with last seasons hiar style, but generally speaking the possibilities for moving up the social ladder are fairly limited. For crashing down a snake however, they are seemingly endless, as again, Severus had learnt quickly.

Severus Snape was not well placed in this hierarchical pecking order. Not only was he the only child of non-death eating parents, but in the best of situations, tall gangling boys, who move like oversized spiders, are an acquired taste. Particularly when they come equipped with broken rhinoceros horns masquerading as noses and more than their fair share of naturally occurring hair gel.

From this inauspicious physical starting point, Snape had managed to slip down still further. It is said that the less you have to loose, the shorter the drop. This is a lie. You merely fall further, as Snape had discovered when his father lost every penny they owned playing the Muggle stock market.

Events had wreaked their inevitable toll on the first year Snape. He’d become a social liability, a nerd, a freak, a loner, not to mention a candidate for free school meals. It also created an overwhelming desire in him to be a death eater. He was outside the inner circle, and he wasn’t enjoying it. The grass could only be greener on the other side. He wanted in. Perhaps that way, by proving his worth to Voldemort, he could gain the respect he craved?

Immediately though, more immediately than joining the side of evil or wreaking sweet, so sweet, revenge on the perpetrator of this atrocity, he had to work out how to free himself from an amorous coat rack. The possibilities seemed limited because they were.

********************

Lucius Malfoy meanwhile was concentrating on keeping his figure crushed down against the sofa cushions so that Severus couldn’t see him. There was no particularly reason for his behaviour; he would have to show himself eventually, or the entire point of trapping the boy here would be lost entirely, but…not yet. He was enjoying watching Severus try to free himself, and he would doubtless freeze like a frightened rabbit before headlights when he realised Lucius was there. There was not even a reason why Lucius found Severus worth watching, it simply amused him, rather, to watch the boy struggle.

The boy wasn’t doing badly either.

By dint of much writhing, Severus had retrieved a vile of something the exact shade of white-gold as Lucius’s hair from inside his robes, and was now dripping the stuff at strategic points up the snake’s spinal cord. Lucius could only guess that it was acidic in some way, because the thing was fizzing most bizarrely.

Only Snape would carry dangerous potions inside his robes with him.

Only Snape would need to.

It was probably for protection.

And it was probably warranted.

No doubt he’d have freed himself in a moment or too more, and with that consideration at the fore front of his mind, Lucius carelessly threw a leg over the side of the chair. Still watching Severus’ face through the gap between the cushions and the mahogany chair frame, he swung the article lazily for a moment or two more, before tossing his arm over the back of the sofa. From where Severus stood it must have made an eerie sight, two seemingly disconnected limbs appearing from behind a vacant chair. Lucius liked to make an entrance, even when already in the room.

He didn’t bother to sit up to deliver his words, instead speaking from his recumbent position. "I need you to do this, Snape. I don't think you realise quite how imperative this is, to me, to my Father…"

It was a full thirty seconds before Severus’s face appeared over the top of the sofa back, black eyes abnormally hostile and wide open. Lucius reached up lazily and slapped one bony grey cheek with the open palm of his hand, the platinum of his engagement ring causing a satisfying ‘crack’. The boy would learn who was superior soon enough, and a little physical violence never slowed the learning process. “You will look at me with a little respect, boy, as you listen to my proposals, before you agree to them.”

There was another, equally long pause, as Severus slipped around to the chair opposite Lucius, twisting his hands convulsively around the edge of the high back rather than seating himself, and trying to seem full of confidence, as opposed to the quivering wreck he felt like inside.

Pulling his vital organs back into the appropriate places, Snape took a long look back at Lucius, challenging the older man to return his glare venom for venom. "I understand you Lucius. Well enough at least. You've told Daddy that you can get it for him, and you have no idea how. So you think you can bribe me to do the dirty work? Am I right?" He saw Lucius’s blonde eyebrow raise itself up, and assumed, wrongly, that he was right. His voice moving slightly higher with his rising anger, he continued. "Well, you can forget it. I can walk for myself, Lucius. I don't need whatever your intending to offer me..."

Lucius' stared for a moment longer, his eyebrows rising yet higher. Fool. When had a Malfoy ever had to bribe anyone? Lucius prided himself on being far too efficient for anything like that. Though the boy’s reaction at least confirmed that he had received Lucius’ letter…

"What makes you think I'm bribing you, Snape? I'm not. I'm blackmailing you. There’s a big difference between bribery and what I have in mind. Big, big, difference." Lucius shook his head again, and bared his characteristically sharp teeth. "But you are right that you'll be doing the dirty work. Let me explain..." Smiling savagely, Lucius popped an oversized blue, sugar coated sweet into his mouth, and began to talk.

The potion Lucius outlined wasn’t easy. It wasn’t simple, or clean, or legal, or moral, or any of those nice things. What it was however, was a challenge, and one both Severus and Lucius knew that Lucius wasn’t up to meeting. Whether Malfoy senior even intended Lucius to do it himself was debatable as well, part of being a Malfoy after all was learning how to manipulate others under your command. Either way, Lucius couldn’t afford to screw this potion up. It was for the Dark Lord, after all…

As Lucius spoke, Severus simply stared. Did this arrogant, brain dead blonde think him stupid? Did he really think that Severus would risk being caught involved in something like this? Not to mention the time and trouble it would take to make. His answer was instant. “Forget it Malfoy, you’ll have to do better than the empty threats you sent me this morning to get me to do anything this stupid.”

“Au contraire, Severus."

Severus flinched, he’d never heard Lucius use his first name before, and he couldn’t help but dislike the tone of voice.

“You will brew this potion for me, and you will like doing it, because if you don’t, I will tell everyone how much you like this…” Lucius leant forward, and brusquely caught Severus’s mouth in his own. It wasn’t a sweet kiss, or an affectionate one, rather more it was like a handshake, something to signify the agreement of a business pact between the two of them. Lucius transferred the half sucked sticky sweet he’d been working around his jaw into Severus’s mouth and let go. He continued however to stare at Severus for a moment.

"Wouldn't want everyone to know how much you enjoyed that, now would you? Shouldn't bring even more shame down on precious Mama's head, now should we?"

Lucius ran his hand along Severus’s jaw bone with an almost fond touch. “You’d make a hideous girl, Sev.”

********************

Severus moved from point A to area B with the same cold precision that he applied in adding ingredient A to liquid B; the same cold precision that characterised everything in his life. The selection of steaming, simmering monochrome bottles perfectly personifying his grey, empty mindset. Something about Potion making fit into Severus like a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. They were remarkably similar; the art form and the man. Scientific, precise, analytical, unemotional, lonely, isolationist. Where did you stop thinking about the subject and begin with the being?

There was that moment of hanging silence in the dungeon, before a cauldron containing liquid tinged a peculiar shade of blue grey blew it’s contents out across the room, closely followed by a thick black ooze like substance from a jar knocked over by the force of the explosion. There was that haunting split second when you know that all is lost, but in which you can’t react quite quickly enough to save anything.

Severus blinked. Once, slowly.

The moment ended, and with it, Severus sprang forwards, frantically adding salts and substances to the potion seeping amongst the floor tiles in search of prey, working fast to neutralize the mess he had built, before briefly moving to search for a broom to clean up again with. There was no point in risking magic around such a sensitive potion.

Lucius stayed propped, unseen, in the back corner of the dungeon, eyes transfixed by the two puddles on the floor, now mixing themselves together into a small lake of harmless spillage the colour of rotting meat, the edges tinged with a bright, childish pink.

Lucius was always there, in the dungeon.

Unseen.

Watching.

********************

The full moon shone bright that night, silver organza melting down from the sky. Stars winking on and off like lights in far off office block windows. The darkness all encompassing in a cloudless sky, aside from the shots of light produced by far off planets, suns, solar systems, and the occasional Muggle nellycompter. Severus would have noticed the beauty of the situation if it had been within his nature to do so, and had he not been so bent upon his

worries and his tasks. Even the sounds of far off screaming didn’t detract Severus from his concentrated picking of the small grey-cream mushrooms that grew behind the Groundskeepers hut. They should have worried him, those ear piercing, soul shattering shrieks. Normally they would have done. But Severus had far greater things to worry about; like the person following him.

Dredging the last small foamy fungus from the grass, Severus began to stand. He would then, in the normal course of things, have turned around, but a hand was already over his mouth, and strong arms were pulling him down to the ground…

Where the hand was replaced with a mouth, and his legs pinned down by others, longer and more muscled than his own.

He tried to scream, but the noises were swallowed before they could properly hit the night, and even given full reign, they should have been little more than terrified gurgles. He tried to kick out, but the man atop of him was to heavy, and his body was too efficient in it’s aim of pinning Severus down. He tried to at least identify his assailant, but he couldn’t see past the tangling sheen of platinum gold hair filing his eyes. So moving on to option four, Severus caught a fistful of that hair, and dredged back the creatures skull.

With a startled yelp he came eye to eye with Lucius Malfoy.

It must have been a shock, one would presume, for any poor souls taking an in promptitude midnight stroll in the woods; two naked bodies rolling in the mud, winter white flesh a stark contrast to the deep, wet green around them. We never think, genitals entwined, giggling and grunting like particularly silly animals, what a sight and sound we must make to passer bys, the inhabitants of nearby houses, the people in the downstairs flat. The person behind the curtain you can see is twitching.

Which is probably why neither Severus or Lucius bothered about their proximity to the Groundskeepers hut for quite some time…

********************

Twisting himself slightly, so that Severus could run should he want to, Lucius caught the other man’s eyes firmly for a moment before dropping his own and running them up the other man’s frame, from thigh, to hip, to chest, and back up to his face, his hands following suit.

He leant down to Severus’ ear, not removing his hand from where it had come to rest on the other boy’s crotch, and murmured almost inaudibly “You don’t have to do this Severus, only, I strongly advise that you do…”

Severus’ had begun to lift his head from the ground as Lucius had started to speak, but with those words it fell back again, in shock. The man was still trying to…This was what Lucius had meant by blackmail?

Making a mental note to investigate Lucius’ thought process after he’d finished test running the physical apparatus, Severus just snorted.

Opening his eyes a little wider, he caught Lucius’ hair for the second time in so many minutes, this time dragging his head towards him, and finding his mouth, savouring the unfamiliar taste, and the contours of the man’s face. He couldn’t help but smile slightly, when he felt Lucius shift again, freeing his other arm to wend its way up along Lucius’ backbone, ignoring the shaking caused part by the cold, and part by nerves and fear.

It seemed a short eternity later that Lucius let go, though in truth it could barely have been a moment. Sitting back on his haunches, Severus watched entranced as more clothing left the situation, and far more skin joined it.

********************

Later, a fair bit later, lifting his bleary head from Lucius’s chest, trying to ignore the chill in his sweat soaked body, pretending that there wasn’t grass clinging to his naked back, Severus blinked slowly, once.

He had heard that. He had.

There was a second sharp rap on the window of the hut about fifteen, twenty metres away, and the curtains twitched again. Straining his ears, Severus made out words, “There is, Miriam, there’s something out there! I can see the bushes rustling around!” A female voice, shrieking so loudly it was audible even at this advanced distance.

The curtains had fluttered back to rest again, and the door to the hut had began to open, flinging a blossom of light out over the garden and into the surrounding bushes, as Severus and Lucius stumbled half naked away from the intrusion, half their clothing left hanging in the bushes, moving further towards the forbidden forest, the howls of the creature in the forest now moving eastwards towards the Whomping Willow…

********************

Severus leant back again, sneer laugh tattooed once more across his face, narrow shoulders still thrown back against the broad back of the kitchen chair that he graced, head turned away from the window, where you could look out and view the hedge rows. And if his expression was a little more wistful for reminiscing, who was going to notice? That oversized excuse for a man, flushing his mouth out with cold water? No… And Severus couldn’t honestly say he wanted Hagrid to notice. Three years with a man worth kissing with your eyes open had spoilt Severus.

Three years, just for Malfoy senior to announce that Lucius must, ‘grow up,’ and learn to ‘be a man’. Three years of history, three years of happiness, three years of something worth having. Lost, just so Lucius could marry a blonde slut called Narcissa, and have blonde heirs; lost, so that Severus could get lost in turn in a series of meaningless relationships based on sex, and eventually reach the pinnacle of his career an overworked and underpaid educator. Lost. The word reverberated uncomfortably within the cage of his skull.

Meaningless relationships based on sex. And some times not even satisfactorily based on that. He took another sidelong glance at Hagrid, letting coal black eyes bore through layers of clothes and flesh into the man’s empty headed, dim witted, foolishly altruistic soul. Thinking of Hagrid in contrast with Lucius was painful. He relished that pain, it meant he hadn’t become as lost as he sometimes suspected he had.

Of course, and the smirk came back, he wasn’t the only one who relished pain. Though Hagrid’s feelings for it were some what more…erotic, than his. It really wasn’t Severus’ thing, those games, but at the same time, it was another way of lowering Hagrid. To compromise the other man, humiliate him, that made it all worth it.

Yes, that’s how he spent his spare time now. Chaining up ugly boys, playing power games, to see if they could scream louder than Lucius had been able too…