lunalelle (lunalelle) wrote in hpdesmutathon, @ 2008-06-03 23:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | fic, snape, voldemort |
FIC: apparitions of your soul (Severus/Voldemort) for kellyl
Title: apparitions of your soul
Recipient: kellyl
Pairing: Severus/Voldemort
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: character death, dub con, D/s, bondage
Word count: 2615 words
Summary: Is this all that is left? Is this all there is?
Notes: Post-DH canon. It was an honor to write for you, kellyl.
i.
He walked the halls of Hogwarts, sure that the end had come, that Voldemort had destroyed them all and the boy had failed. Ever since he woke up in the Shrieking Shack (he was supposed to have died, he was sure of it), his ears seemed stuffed with cotton. Everything was too quiet. Even his boots on the floor. Past portraits that paid no attention to him as he moved. They went about their business, eyes only occasionally glancing toward him. Or maybe that was just his imagination. With the last year, Snape could not deny that he was irrevocably paranoid.
As a spy, he had learned to embrace silence, but even that part of him cowered under the sheer oppressiveness of it. He wanted to yell, call out if someone could hear him. But he didn’t. He just passed through, looking in room after room, hoping to find some sign of life beyond his own beating heart. He found dust, cobwebs, desks, quills, books. No people, no movement.
He went down to the kitchens. No house elves, just ovens, stoves, cabinets, boxes with stasis charms, and food. At least there was food. He conjured himself a sandwich. His magic worked like it always had,
He delved deeper into the castle, to his chambers. His password was the same, and there was a fire in the fireplace as there had been when he last left it. His bed was rumpled, as he left it. Everything was the same. And yet nothing was. If he were a weaker man, he would have thrown something. Or run. But the thought of going beyond the walls of Hogwarts and finding more nothing chill his spine, and he stayed put. He may have almost died (he felt fine. why did he feel fine?), but he was surprisingly tired. He took off his boots, then his robes and his trousers. Without students and without the threat of Voldemort, there was nothing stopping him from a proper rest, the likes of which he had not had in years. But he charmed the bed, just in case, as he slipped between the covers.
ii.
It was as though everyone on the face of the earth had vanished. As though the world had narrowed to Hogwarts. He had gone looking for the thestrals so that they could draw a carriage out, but although he found the carriages, there were no thestrals to be seen. He could not hear birds. The air was so still that he could not even hear leaves and grass rustle, just the crunch underneath his feet.
He stood somewhere between the lake and the school, staring around him. All his senses were tingling simply because there was so little to stimulate them. It was not supposed to be this quiet. He was not supposed to be alone. It was not time to rest, last night’s sleep notwithstanding.
He raised his wand and called to the sky. A burst of red and green sparks shot up. In his loneliness (could Severus Snape get lonely? isn’t that what he had always wanted? to be truly alone for just five seconds…), maybe someone else just as alone would see it.
There was a shout, a startled cry from the school. Snape whirled around to see, but all he saw was the building, the walls of stone. No movement. No one running toward him. No flash in the windows. Nothing. But he hurried toward the school anyway. He ran from the echo of his footsteps.
iii.
He woke up. He did not know why. Perfect silence and no movement but the flicker of the fire. He slid his wand out from under his pillow and pulled a robe on.
Everything was as it had been. He could not put a finger on what woke him up in the first place, and for some reason, he was not very tired anymore.
iv.
“Is this my hell or yours?”
Snape found him in the Great Hall. Old habits died hard, and he was used to going to the Great Hall for meals, even if he had to make them himself, even if the Great Hall was too vast for its emptiness. Snape set his plate onto the edge of the High Table as he looked at the man before him. Not quite a man. Voldemort sat at the Headmaster’s seat, looking diminished. Snape did not think he had ever noticed how thin Voldemort was, or maybe it was that his thinness never used to indicate delicacy. The power of his presence had waned.
“We’re not dead.”
“You don’t remember,” Voldemort said. It was not a question. “But you will. I know you died. Poisoned by Nagini.”
“If I am dead, then you are, too,” Snape said.
Voldemort shrugged one shoulder, looking unusually young and old at the same time. “Not if this is your death and I am simply an apparition within it.”
“You don’t remember, either?”
Voldemort’s eyes closed. His face was a sculpture of porcelain. “I remember confusion. I remember Harry. I remember the spell. Nothing more. I woke up here. None of my other fallen Death Eaters have appeared. Only you, my beautiful traitor. I know that much.”
“Somehow, I can’t find it in me to care,” Snape said, sitting by his plate and beginning to eat. “If I am dead, it stands to reason you cannot kill me.”
“My magic seems to work, and so does yours. I could punish you. I should.”
“But you won’t,” Snape said. “There isn’t much point, is there?”
“If we’re dead, why are you eating?” Voldemort asked.
“Because I am hungry,” Snape said.
Voldemort raised his eyes to the enchanted ceiling. It was light outside, but Snape could not discern anything like sky, sun, or clouds. It was just light.
“Have you tried to leave Hogwarts?” Voldemort asked.
“I haven’t tried walking,” Snape replied.
“It won’t work,” Voldemort said. “You try to walk out, and you only walk in.” He stood. “Almost twenty years trying to get into Hogwarts, and now I’m dead and can’t leave.”
“Then you admit you’re dead.”
“As long as I can think and feel, can that be called a death?” Voldemort said. “I didn’t think it would be this way. I did not know that the end wouldn’t end, that it would be nothing but this… mundane emptiness.”
Snape did not ask whether Voldemort would have been so keen on immortality if he had known that there was something like an afterlife. He knew that Voldemort would only have worked twice as hard to preserve his disjointed soul. Snape wondered whether Voldemort’s soul, in his death, had become whole again. As whole as it had ever been.
v.
Snape tried to leave. He tried the Hogwarts gates. He tried the lake. He tried the Forbidden Forest. But the minute he crossed the border into the wild, it was as though he was crossing into the border, walking or floating into a reflection.
If nothing living was in this hell, Snape could not understand why there were plants – they were just as organic. Nor did he understand why the kitchen was always stocked and restocked. But it was not he who made this afterlife. He could not imagine why he would.
With Voldemort there, Snape slept soundly. He was not frightened of the man anymore. He was only a man.
vi.
“Crucio.”
Voldemort flew back into the wall. Snape heard something crack. His wand was in his hand, belatedly attempting to shield himself from the curse. But as Voldemort crumpled to the ground, Snape realized that he never had to fear Voldemort again. That bundle of creased cloth, that broken animal, that was nothing. Snape felt his mouth curve. It was unfamiliar. It was good.
Was this hell? Was this heaven? Perhaps it was neither. Perhaps they were simply given the tools to make what they could. Or maybe Snape was Voldemort’s tormentor for a time. Snape could not find it within him to care. He enjoyed the peace even as he dreaded the loneliness. Voldemort was not an ideal companion. But at least the mark on his arm had become nothing but a relic, a symbol of what he was no longer.
vii.
Snape was reading in his parlor when he heard his door open. It should not have opened with the spells he set on it.
He did not bother to look up. Indifference was a luxury.
“Your defenses are woefully lacking,” Voldemort said.
“I suppose so,” Snape replied. He could not remember the last time he read for pleasure. Not a potions journal. Not a dark arts or defense journal. A novel. It was delightfully ordinary, engaging.
“I may not be able to hurt you with my wand,” Voldemort said behind him, “but are you so foolish as to believe that I cannot hurt you with my hands?”
Smooth, cool, soft… long fingers sliding around his neck. Voldemort was almost tender as his hand closed. But Snape wrenched away and pulled out his wand. His posture was relaxed, and he almost wanted to laugh.
“And are you so foolish as to believe you could overpower me?” Snape said. “Face it, Voldemort. Your time has come and gone. You cannot hurt me. You have no power. It is finished. I am the one with the advantage, and you are not worth my time.”
Voldemort bared his teeth, and with one vault, he was over the couch in a move both surprising in its strength and beautiful in its execution. Snape admitted to himself that he had not expected anything like that from the Dark Lord.
“Your time has come and gone, too, Severus, or have you forgotten your own untimely death. You are as finished as I am. You have no idea the strength I have yet.”
“Yes, I am finished,” Snape said. “Unlike you, I welcome the opportunity.”
“You have a consciousness. You have presence. Surely you are not content with this nothingness,” Voldemort said.
“And surely there is something to occupy your time other than my second death,” Snape said. “I have millions of things I wanted to do when I had the time. Can you not stand the stillness?”
“Can you?” For all the power in his coiled limbs, Voldemort looked helpless.
viii.
There is nothing. Nothing but you, Severus. I will conquer you.
Hovering over him like a parasite. Snape grabbed him by the robes and pressed their bodies together. Severus would not kiss him. Intimacy was not his aim. Just contact. Weeks? Months? Like the light, time was indiscernible.
He would have Voldemort helpless. Perfectly helpless.
Voldemort’s body was not beautiful, and Snape had no illusions about his own. It was not about appearance. It was about contact. It was about power. Voldemort struggled, but not as hard as he might. He struggled against Snape as he pulled down Voldemort’s robes over his shoulders, pushed them down until Voldemort was naked against the wall. Vulnerable. Maybe that was what the Dark Lord needed in the end, in his end. Final submission in a life of struggling for dominance. An acknowledgement of his insignificance – with death comes the knowledge that one life gone leaves nothing empty. No one mourned for him, Voldemort knew. And he clenched his hands into Snape’s skin, leaving bleeding marks where his nails were.
Voldemort was furious. And dead. He let Snape into his body. He felt. Pain. Prostate. Pleasure. Sex was something Voldemort had forsaken in his life, and he was surprised to find that he liked it, even when it hurt as it did. He wondered how it felt when it did not hurt, when there was mouth and tongue and interest. He would not beg.
He came in a gasp and realized that he had submitted. He put his hand in his mouth and tasted Snape’s blood. It was small consolation.
ix.
Tongue around his cock and his hands above his head. He was not bound, but he might as well be. Voldemort clenched his teeth, and Snape tasted. He drew sounds from Voldemort’s mouth that Snape thought the whole world wanted to hear.
“Yes, my lord,” he whispered, running his fingers along the wrinkled sac, too light, too good. “I can make you mine. You’ll be mine in a way I never was yours. Are you finally seeing your place in this life, this death?”
Voldemort’s leg hooked over Snape’s shoulder, and Snape smiled. It was no romance, no partnership. It was fucking. But it was something Voldemort had not experienced or thought to ask for. Consideration. Perhaps in the presence of a soul, he could appreciate it. Perhaps in this purgatory, he could learn what he had forgotten.
x.
Voldemort clenched his fists against the headboard. “Is this hell?”
Snape groaned inwardly. He had been close to sleep. “Do you think this is hell?”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“You waited until the end to think about things like hell,” Snape murmured. “I think you’ve made your own hell. If you think this is hell, then it must be.”
Long fingers on his shoulder, but Snape did not have to worry about being strangled anymore. Most of the time. Tender and white against the rise and fall of muscle and bone. The fingertips stopped at Snape’s mark and stroked it gently, a reminder.
“You do not think this is hell.”
“It isn’t for me. I wouldn’t call it heaven.” He shook Voldemort’s hand off. “Hell may be other people, but I can mostly deal with one, especially if he cannot hurt me.”
“Then why can you hurt me?”
Snape rolled over to face Voldemort. Again, he had the sense that the Dark Lord had diminished. It was different seeing him in bed, under the covers, than seeing him in his glory before his Death Eaters.
“Can I hurt you?” Snape said. He raised himself over Voldemort, straddling the man’s hips and covering him.
xi.
Voldemort had not been down to the dungeons in several nights (weeks? months?), and Snape was surprised to find himself concerned. He went out onto the hill, searching the Quidditch pitch, the lake. He walked the corridors that he knew Voldemort frequented most, the Great Hall, the library, the Astronomy Tower. Snape finally found him in the Headmaster’s office, still fresh from Snape’s stint. He stared at the various accoutrements Snape kept in the office after Dumbledore’s death. Everything in this school, in this room, in this company, was a reminder of how Voldemort failed. Perhaps this was Voldemort’s hell.
Snape did not say anything. He waited for Voldemort to say what needed to be said.
Voldemort said nothing either. He stood, grabbed Snape by the robes, and kissed him. It was not a good kiss – it was fierce, hard, and it hurt, and Snape found himself holding Voldemort. Holding him as the last traces of life shattered. It was despair, perfect and beautiful.
Cords whipped out of Snape’s wand and bound Voldemort to the desk, his back on the blotter and his legs around Snape’s waist. Snape summoned lubricant that he had kept in one of the desk drawers and coated his cock with it. He was surprised at how hard he had grown for the broken man beneath him. Voldemort’s eyes were shut. He was somehow frozen, a shivering gravestone statue. But he was warm as Severus entered him. Warm as he cried out. Warm as he lost himself in the hell of his making. Warm as he took pleasure in it.
Warm.
xii.
You conquered yourself. You’ll come with my name on your lips, Voldemort. And you’ll like it.