Strange Emulsion

"The castle?" Lupin asked, smiling. His heart was pounding, treacherously close to his throat, but he forced himself to keep his arms at his sides, casual, instead of crossing them protectively along his chest as he longed to do. "Are you sure it wasn't your own feet that brought you here?"

Snape opened his mouth to speak, his eyes darkening in a familiar way that made Lupin's blood run cold. It had not been his intention to drive Snape away a second time, but when Snape spoke, his voice was surprisingly soft. "I am nearly sure," was all he said. He let the door he'd been holding on to slip from his fingers, where it sighed back in to the frame and closed with a click that seemed to echo down the long dark hallway.

"Care for a cup of tea?" Lupin fought the urge to roll his eyes at himself. His British mother had firmly implanted the habit of offering and drinking tea at nearly any time, no matter how otherwise uncivilized the situation might be. In his mind's eye, Remus could picture the few arguments he and his mother had had in those tempestuous summers home from Hogwarts, and in every one there was his mother, putting the kettle on in the middle of the row.

"Thanks." Snape walked towards the light of the office, following Lupin, then nearly stopped short when he saw the mountain of papers covering the desk. Besides the mess, the only other thing that struck Snape was the severity of Lupin's surroundings. In addition to the papers Remus Lupin owned a multitude of cups and pots, but little else.

"Are you sure tea is a good idea?" Snape asked as he lowered himself carefully into the only chair not covered in paper. "You seem to be drinking quite a lot of it." He eyed the stained mugs with apprehension.

"Care for something else then?" Lupin asked. He had finished hanging the kettle over the fire, and had picked up the tea tin. Snape couldn't be sure, but he thought Lupin was picking a false bottom out of the tin.

"Tea is fine," he said, warily, not even wanting to broach what else might be lurking in the tea tin. If Lupin wanted to drown himself in herbal infusions, fine. Snape's own tea was handed to him in a mercifully clean white tea cup. The drink tasted more like hot lemon water than anything he was willing to call tea, but he let it go as he watched Lupin sip happily away. Did the man never become agitated over anything? Here it was, the middle of the night, and he was sitting with his feet propped on his desk, sipping away as if it were perfectly normal.

"You're up late." His words were calm, but as he spoke there seemed to be something like the Aurora Borealis around his head, an involuntary expression of emotion so strong that Snape couldn't help but catch it, even though he was not consciously trying to see Lupin's aura. The use of that ability seemed to him a relic of his time with the Death Eaters, and it seemed better, on the whole, to let people have their privacy.

"So are you." Given that little outburst that he probably didn't even know about, it seemed best to stick to obvious generalities for the time being. Still, there was something in him that anticipated the conversation changing, going down a different path, and that anticipation in him was warm and light, not the heavy cold dread he was more accustomed to.

"Strange dreams woke me." The light around him merely trembled at that, and Snape wondered if it were only that he was getting better at not looking, or that Lupin was simply becoming more comfortable in his presence.

"Me as well," Snape admitted, sipping at the tea before remembering the warm lemon swill that the cup actually contained.

Lupin leaned forward and placed his mug on the desk top, jackknifing his body into a shape that clearly showed he'd lost none of the leanness of his youth. For just a moment he allowed himself the luxury of vanity, then sat back, wondering how to proceed. The wonder itself seemed to be swirling within him, prodding him towards a boldness he shied from. "Other strange things as well, lately," he commented in a dry voice, hoping Snape would think it merely clinical. "For a moment this morning I thought myself back in my old dorm room, before the mirror."

Snape nearly spilled the remainder of his drink. "I had a similar moment this evening," he said, "for a moment I thought I was in the Slytherin common room."

His voice was dry enough that Lupin suspected some trick. "Well you might have been, being their head of house," he pointed out.

"I meant the Slytherin common room of our day, not this one."

The word "our" hung over them like a pendulum, meaning at once a multitude and nothing.

"Speaking of that time," Lupin began, the sensation of wonder beginning to swirl quite sickeningly in his stomach, "I have something to ask that you may find strange." He marked how quickly Snape's head lifted at that, and guessed that he had a question of his own.

"Go ahead." Snape drained his tea and set the cup and saucer on the desk, waving away Lupin's offer for more.

"Did you come visit me in the infirmary after I attacked you?" His words came out fast and almost garbled, and once he heard them he shrank from his own asking. Of course it had really happened, and why he had doubted his own memory became a mystery to him.

"I did." Snape pronounced the words with a finality that clearly said he'd be volunteering no more.

"Who was it who came in, yelling, to drag you away?"

Snape looked puzzled for a moment, then grated his teeth, once, a sound that normally would have made Lupin shudder. "Of course, I had forgotten you were too gone with that fever to remember. It was Lucius Malfoy. He had a few harsh words for me, but I redeemed myself in his eyes by accompanying him to my first Death Eater meeting." Snape spoke softly, but there was no way a single word could have escaped Lupin's ears.

"I had told you I wanted to change you, didn't I?" Snape nodded, a look on his face that was neither cruel nor kind. "The foolish words of a teenager. I could never have lived with myself had I done it. I had never contemplated such a thing in my human hours." Lupin paused, wondering how much to retouch his speech. It wasn't entirely true that he had never thought of it. In the silent, fantasy filled nights of his last year at Hogwarts he had dreamed of never being alone, not even during the hours when the moon was full. Still, when the sun had come up and he took a hard look at his position, he knew he could never ask anyone to undertake his disease willingly. The pain alone would most likely cause anyone to shun their former lover, and besides, it was absurd to think that Snape would appreciate being with him at all times. Snape was a young man who valued his solitude almost as much as he cherished his stolen moments with Lupin. Though Lupin would have happily clung to him, he would not badger away or seek to change that part of Snape's personality.

"Thank you." The two words, heavy, somehow, sealed the fact that Lupin would never tell him of the waking dreams of companionable exile. As if reading his mind, Snape added, "I in no way blame you for what happened afterwards. It was my own predilections that led me to that, that, and my own weakness."

"If I had been sensible at the time," Lupin began, hardly knowing where that speech was taking him.

"No." Snape's rebuttal did not invite further contemplation. "No, please do not think on it."

Lupin set his own mug, now long empty, down on the desk. The pleading note in Snape's voice was something he had not heard for a very long time. "I believe you had something to ask me as well." For a moment he wondered if he had been correct, to strike with this assumption while Snape was still vulnerable, but at least the other man was not leaving. "What else could have caused the castle to bring you here?" he asked when the silence had stretched too long for his liking.

Snape smiled, a real smile, not the sour line he often graced his students with. "I couldn't presume to guess on the motives of this castle, but very well. I do have a question to ask you." He fixed Lupin with a stare that somehow managed to be both piercing and warm. "When you promised me that you would never hurt me, did you know I suspected you to be a werewolf?"

Lupin's mouth tried at once to shape both a yes and a no, then stopped when he realized he was close to babbling. He paused, noting that Snape's expression had not changed at all. "I thought it best not to think on it," he said, finally, "I knew, I suppose, that you suspected. I knew that you knew." He paused to see if that would be challenged, but Snape sat silently, and he continued. "But I wanted to postpone that conversation. I didn't realize there wouldn't be a chance to continue."

"Oh, don't get melodramatic." Without realizing it, they had slipped back into their old former roles. "There would have been plenty of time if not for that little prank." Snape halted, then, wondering if he had taken a step too far.

Without meaning to, but unable to stop himself, Lupin twisted around in his chair to look out the window. It was too dark outside to see all but the vaguest shadows, but even in the daylight he couldn't have seen what he was looking towards. Far away across the lawns and grounds of Hogwarts, away beyond the borders of Scotland and the Port of Ness was the North Sea, and deep in the middle of its unplottable region was Azkaban, the terror of the Wizarding World and, more recently, the thwarted keep of Sirius Black.

"We'll not speak on that tonight, if you do not wish," Snape said gently. His voice seemed to draw Lupin around, and he smiled weakly.

"And what of us thinking we were back in time?" he asked. "Is the castle moving through more than space?"

"I think not," said Snape, continuing his role as the sensible one. "It is a wish, nothing more."

"A wish that we were back in school?" Lupin's voice held a note of wonder, and it was impossible for even him to tell if it was incredulity or hope contained therein.

"Would that be so hard to believe?" Snape's steady voice belied his trepidation, something bordering on fear that warned him Lupin's apparent interest might be nothing more than his vaunted good nature.

The feeling rose, making his throat tight, as Lupin stood from his chair. As Snape watched him he wondered at the grace that Lupin still possessed after all these years. Was it a remnant of the structure of the wolf he became each month? Snape felt two warm human hands grasping his cold ones, and all thoughts of the wolf were forgotten.

"In these times?" It might have been that Lupin's soft voice also held a note of sadness, but as he felt his hands lifted into a soft kiss, Snape hardly noticed. "It isn't so hard to believe."

Snape felt himself standing with something like wonder. Lupin was grasping his hands with such tenderness, he wasn't being pulled up, but then again he didn't seem to be expending any effort to stand. I have lost all awareness of my body, he thought with something not wholly unlike alarm. Then, with that same gentle pulling that wasn't pulling at all, Lupin drew him to his feet.

They were standing, perhaps a handshake's length apart, a normal distance, but the firm grasp Lupin held Snape's hands in made it feel anything but ordinary to either of them. Slowly, Lupin loosed his grasp, only to slide his hands up the outside of Snape's arms, beginning an embrace without even stepping forward. Snape could have ended it in a moment by simply dropping his arms, but he left them lifted, apart, hardly moving them when Lupin finally stepped into their boundaries.

When Snape's fingers brushed against the strangely soft fabric of Lupin's shirt he was awakened to his body again and stepped forward in kind, bringing their bodies together as he crossed his arms firmly across Lupin's back. Though they'd both grown taller since their last embrace, Lupin was still a good hand shorter than him; the suddenly familiar sensation of Lupin's heartbeat thudding into his solar plexus both elated and terrified him.

Both men took a moment to recover their equilibrium, until they seemed more to be holding each other than clinging to one another. When Lupin took a deep breath it pressed their bodies even closer at that point, rendering them both dizzy for a moment as the warmth of their bodies traversed the distance dictated by their clothes. Finally Lupin caught Snape's eye.

How does he manage that, Snape thought to himself as he stared into Remus' gray eyes, making it seem that he is meeting me face to face rather than looking up at me? It was a talent he had admired when they were young men, boys, really, and in the end it only made the moments when Remus really did look up at him even sweeter.

The gaze was timeless, it was a circuit, flowing from their faces, into the cores of their bodies, to the offset junctions of their chests and hips and back again, effortless and real as electricity. Remus licked his lips, and Severus wondered if he should bow his head and begin the inevitable and wished-for kiss, but in the space of a second he reasoned that the moment was not likely to pass by if a kiss was what was called for--he could wait and see.

Instead, Remus spoke. It was in a voice that managed to be less than a whisper, a secret that only the two of them could hear, or could ever have heard.

"Let's not wish our lives away."

It was at once a gentle suggestion and a command. Severus didn't so much bow his head to the kiss as lean in to it, lending his mouth and his body to a much greater being. It boggled his mind even as he was pressing and kissing and tasting and... as quickly as it had come, it was over. The moment passed and they were suddenly once again the sum of their parts, or even less than that. Snape closed his eyes, feeling the cool air most keenly where his lips were still wet, and fought the urge--not desire, but urge--to push Lupin away with a sneer on his face. It was not what he wanted, but it was the easier thing, easier, now that the sacred moment of a new beginning had passed, to be cruel. Far, far easier than giving in to the strong, but coarse pull of the man before him, easier than giving in to the earthy delight of physical contact. He opened his eyes, still not knowing which way his instinct would take him, when Remus decided for him.

This kiss was as real and mundane as the walls of the castle, the fumbling after years of separation, the profane answer to the sacred rejoining they had unwittingly started. In its very imperfection, it was as moving as the strange energy they had felt moments earlier. As the familiar wave of giddy sickness washed over him, Severus remembered the little flaws and the anticipation to be as important as those rare moments of precision.

"Come on." Remus' smile as he tugged Severus towards his bed, the oasis in the desert of mess, was purely of the earth. Severus let himself be led, tripping over his now disheveled robe, and looked not at where he was going but at the enduring brilliance of Remus' smile, which brought to mind both the cold austerity of the forest as well as an incomparable animal warmth.

He regained his autonomy as soon as Remus pulled him on to the bed, turning so his tall frame could mould itself to the minute curves and angles of Remus' slighter body--that, at least, he remembered. That, and Remus' unfailing enthusiasm for touching his bare skin, any bare skin at all.

"Damn these robes," Remus laughed as he strained to grasp the bottom hem. His hands were surprisingly cool once they were inside, sliding over his back and urging him closer.

The laugh seemed to echo through Snape's being, sending a warm shiver down his spine as he allowed himself to be drawn on top of Remus' body. This he remembered, the closeness, the subtle and unsubtle responses of his body to Remus' hands and heat and his smell, remarkably unchanged after all this time. He still smelled of the dark aged resin of cold pines, of the black earth beneath them, and cold air. He smelled forbidden. He burrowed his face in the hollow of Remus' neck, inhaling deeply before letting his tongue trace that smooth white basin, everything-- Remus' moan, his body's immediate response, the taste of clean salt-- a reminder of their past, and more than that, a repeat of it, a perfect, longed-for replication.

The crush of their bodies was almost unbearable, now, the clothes between them an abomination. Severus turned his face reluctantly from that tender spot and laid a line of kisses along Remus' jaw, moving towards his mouth.

When their mouths met again, Remus could hardly contain the deep sound of satisfaction that resonated deep in his throat. Here, this, these warm generous kisses, so different from the tentative meeting earlier, this was what he had been waiting for. The only sound in the room was their breathing, the rustle of Snape's robes as Remus continued to dishevel them, and the almost inaudible but somehow sensible meeting of the impossibly soft flesh of their tongues and lips.

Snape delved into Remus' mouth with something like hunger, marveling at the waves of cool sensation that fairly shook his body even as his mind was fully occupied with the heat of the other man's lips. So strange, that kissing should be ranked so far below the other bawdy diversions, he mused as he nipped lightly at the corner of Remus' mouth. At their lips there was so much heat, so much of another person that the world would never know, and such easy opportunities to hurt, and refrain from hurting, with the blood just below the surface of thin skin, all willingly placed in the cage of another's teeth.

Kissing was a tease, too, he thought to himself as another region of his body insisted on his attention. Remus was toying with the waistband of his trousers, running a finger just along the lowest extremity of what could still be called his back, making those cold waves crash over him again and again. The sensation of being back in school had gone, and he was acutely aware, as he was sure Remus was, that they were no longer in the same territory they had been, for all its similarities.

"Ooh," Remus murmured, with a laugh behind his voice. "Pinstripes. Why do you hide these underneath these robes?"

"I could hardly let my penchant for Muggle slacks be known, could I?" He managed to gasp out the words, despite Remus' fingers working, with little success, at the metal clasp inside the cloth. Those minute, frustrating movements were almost too much, and Severus decided to just undo it himself, in a moment, after one more kiss. He snatched Remus' hand away and held it pinned to the pillow as he pressed down on him, the blood singing in his ears as he took his time with the kiss. It was such sweet torture after all these years, postponing the inevitable, savoring the beautiful improbable turn things had taken. After all their infernal talking there was nothing Remus didn't know about him, nothing that could keep this from coming to fruition, at last. He pushed himself up and looked down at Remus, down at those eyes, closed now and lined with a fringe of thick pale brown lashes.

Then Remus opened his eyes, and as Severus looked into those deep gray wells, another kind of chill passed through him, taking with it all the enthusiasm he had had for their newfound intimacy. The light in Remus' eyes flickered as Snape drew his hand away and pushed himself up, but there was nothing that could be done, no matter how much he wanted to continue. It would be ignoble to continue, and, after the life he'd led, he would not tolerate any more shameful behavior from himself. One look at Remus' eyes had been all he needed to make a connection, to an evening when he had been charged by a wolf. It was a simple fact that memory brought back, but a deadly one. Being told a thing, and knowing, were two completely different things. No matter how much talking they'd done, Remus didn't know. Snape felt all his hope fall away. Then, as the confusion in Remus' eyes deepened, the most minute glimmer of hope presented itself in his brain. Then, there was always the possibility he could repress that reservation and continue, but one lurch from his body at the thought was all he needed to know that wouldn't work. Tearing his gaze away from Remus', he stood.