Entry tags:

fic, rabastan lestrange, severus snape, slash

FIC: 'All the Ways We See' for leianora
Recipient: leianora
Author: edgewise
Title: All the Ways We See
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Severus Snape/Rabastan Lestrange
Word Count: ~3000
Disclaimer: Credit for the characters resides with Ms Rowling.
Warnings: Not as much plot as I may have liked.
Summary: Used to the direction of his father, Rabastan receives a new assignment from the Dark Lord, in which he learns to apply his talent of looking closely at things in a new arena
Author's Notes: My thanks to all who helped me with this story, to the moderator for running the exchange, and to Leianora for the inspiration. I hope you enjoy.

***

Soft light fell across the thick, creamy parchment that Rabastan had smoothed out on the desk before him. He felt a little guilty about sitting in Father's chair, even though he knew there was no chance of his being discovered. But, like with so much else in his life, drawing was something he knew he had to keep secret.

Rodolphus and Father were off courting the Blacks, and would not return for a few days, at least. Earlier in his life, Rabastan might have felt slighted somehow at being left behind, but he understood that the family needed to put their best face forward - or perhaps it was feet - Rabastan didn't remember exactly, but Father had explained it to him, once, and the result was he got to spend time at home being attended by the house-elves, which he found he didn't mind.

Especially when they supplied him with pencils, and paper, and didn't tell Father.

Today he had chosen Father's study because there was always something new to draw. He was no good at imagining things, and he'd long since tired of sketching the view out of his window, or the end of his bed, or his armoire. Father's study was packed with all sorts of interesting things, from knickknacks, which he called objets d'art, to the gold and silver cups, which he called trophies. Rabastan didn't care much what they were called, or what the markings across the bottoms of the trophies meant - he only cared what they looked like: the way the light glinted off the gleaming silver in the morning sun, or the intricate twists and turns of a moving statue on a pedestal.

Today he selected one of the smaller decorations, a bird no taller than his thumb that stood on a high shelf and never moved. Those kind were easier to draw, he'd found. He knew the bird was called a heron because Rodolphus had asked Father, once, but Rabastan knew only that he liked to look at the contrast between rounded body and thin, knobby legs, that there was something majestic about the bend in its long neck and the crest of feathers above its head.

He drew it large, to fill the paper from edge to edge, using long sweeping strokes to outline the body and the edges between light and dark, then coming back through with small swift pencil marks to make feathered wings, sharp beak, a shadow underneath where the light from the window couldn't reach. In a fit of imaginative excess, he added a few long strokes at the bottom of the parchment that might be reeds, or grass, and instantly regretted them.

He amused himself for a while, adding more depth to the feathers and shadows, until his calm was interrupted by a burning sensation in his arm. He ignored it for a moment, concentrating as he was on the movement of his pencil, but the burning surged suddenly, and his hand jerked across the page, leaving an ugly dark line across the heron. He blinked, and remembered.

Rabastan had never been summoned to the Dark Lord by himself, so he assumed Rodolphus and Father were being similarly called. He was wrong.

---

Most of the time, Rabastan was an agreeable sort, though most of the time, it was Father who told him what to do, and Father was easy to agree with. The Dark Lord scared Rabastan, and without Father there to reassure and do the talking, it was all he could do to try to follow along and nod in the right places.

Snape, on the other hand, had been quite vocal with the Dark Lord.

Rabastan had the distinct impression that Snape was unhappy with the assignment. Truth to tell, he wasn't very comfortable himself, but he didn't know how to break into the muttering that the other Death Eater was doing and tell him so.

He didn't know Snape as well as Rodolphus did, since Rabastan was older and hadn't stayed at Hogwarts longer than he needed to, anyway. Father said you could get on just fine in life with only OWLs.

One of the Lestrange house-elves had met them at the train station with a bag for Rabastan. Rabastan didn't ask about Snape's elves, because he remembered Father saying something about them once - that all the Snape house-elves in the world couldn't pour a glass of brandy if some-such-or-other depended on it - which Rabastan had taken to mean that they were numerous, but perhaps handicapped in some way. Snape carried his own bag.

The European Express was a sleek, lithe train, all built for power and speed. It was about as unlike the quaint Hogwarts Express as you could get, Rabastan thought, and his fingers itched for a pencil. When they were finally settled into their assigned compartment, he found the view out the window made him itch even more. They were just starting off and still picking up speed, but already the countryside was rolling past is bright swaths of green, dotted by the red and brown smudges of buildings and vehicles, and everything lit by the fading sunlight, which somehow brought out all the world's best colors as it dropped toward the horizon, as if making one last bid to justify its pre-eminence.

After the landscape grew too dim to see well, Rabastan carefully closed and fastened the curtain and turned to find Snape, sitting across, looking at him.

"What?" he said.

Snape shifted his body, leaning back against the wall and seeming to hunch over even more. "Just trying to figure out if the rumors are true," he sneered. Rabastan didn't know what that meant, so he didn't answer.

A few moments passed in which Rabastan was content to just sit, enjoying the movement of the train and the glow the inner light of the compartment lent to the surroundings.

"You really are stupid, aren't you?"

Rabastan shrugged. He'd been called names before.

"Ridiculous," Snape muttered. "He may as well have sent me to the werewolves, for all the help you're going to be at Durmstrang."

"I don't like werewolves," Rabastan said.

Snape gave a soft snort. "No doubt," he said. "I have no doubt that you don't like werewolves, or giants or vampires, or for that matter anything that requires hard work. You've no doubt coasted through your entire life without having to lift a finger or put yourself in anything like real danger. And now I have to drag you around like dead weight while trying to give Karkaroff whatever song and dance he needs, just so he joins some stupid - " He caught himself.

Rabastan watched Snape's face throughout this speech. "Does your mouth always do that?"

"Do what?"

"Curl up at the edges like that when you're talking. It's just like..." He imagined the arcing neck of the heron, stretching in flight but bending upon itself in repose. "It's interesting."

Snape didn't have an answer, but the way he was staring gave Rabastan a good look at his eyes for the first time. They would be hard to draw, he thought.

"Interesting?" Snape managed at last. "You don't get out much, do you? I was right; this is ridiculous."

It was dark early this time of year, but Rabastan was far from tired. They would arrive at the Durmstrang station around midnight and would have plenty of time to sleep then, but he didn't know what else to do to fill the time. Conversation seemed to be a bad choice. Feeling uncharacteristically hesitant, he ventured, "Do you play cards?"

"Cards!" Snape snorted again, then considered. "What sort of cards have you got?"

Rabastan's face fell. "I don't..." Then he remembered that an elf had packed his bag, and may have put in something for Master to while away the time. He fetched it from under his seat and began to dig through it.

In his eagerness, he missed the fact that his practice book, for sketching, was placed carefully on top of the assorted clothes, and it fell as he dislodged it, smacking into the floor with a heavy thump.

"What is that?"

He reached for it, but his fingers were suddenly thick and clumsy, and before he knew it Snape had crossed the small space between them and retrieved the book with a swift, darting motion, the way a beak might plunge into the river to catch breakfast.

Snape was flipping open the book before Rabastan could get the image out of his mind. He could feel his face heating up, but it was too late now, so he did his best to wait it out. He'd often imagined the way Rodolphus would laugh if he found out about Rabastan's habit, and it certainly couldn't be any worse coming from this boy, probably only just out of Hogwarts.

But there was no laughter. After a few silent moments, Rabastan opened his eyes to see Snape studying an old sketch he'd done, a close view of the bottom of the drapes in the Lestranges' formal sitting room. The folds of heavy velvet had lain across each other in a way Rabastan found fascinating, and he'd taken his time in trying to reproduce it with pencil. But what Snape could find to study for so long, Rabastan had no idea.

Presently Snape began to turn the pages again, pausing now and again, never looking up from the book. He was sitting next to Rabastan now, so that Rabastan could see by leaning slightly towards him which sketches caught Snape's eye the most - though he could find no pattern: now the tree outside Rabastan's window, now the leg of an armchair, now the detailed carvings around the edge of a door.

"You did these?" Snape's tone was skeptical, but mildly so; Rabastan felt pride subsume any caution he might have had.

"Of course I did," he answered indignantly. "I wouldn't go carrying around a book of someone else's sketches."

"I suppose not," Snape murmured. He had turned to the page with this afternoon's heron, and glanced at Rabastan sidelong.

"Can I have it back now?"

Snape closed the book and handed it over without a word. Rabastan clutched it to his chest in no small amount of relief. It wasn't so much that he minded someone else looking at his drawings, he found, but that he was afraid of someone taking it away and denying him the chance to draw again.

Thinking of it, he bent to his pack once more to get out a pencil.

"Some of them are quite... realistic," Snape said.

Rabastan nodded, not knowing what to say, and then opened his book carefully to a new page. It was difficult but not impossible to draw on one's own lap. He began to smooth out the parchment while wondering what he could draw this time.

There was a murmured spell and a flash, and then Snape handed him something odd - soft and pillowy on one side, large and flat on the other. He took it in bemusement, and looked at Snape.

"It's a lap desk," Snape said, rather stiffly. "My mother used one sometimes."

"Oh." Rabastan knew how a desk worked. He laid the book on the flat side and arranged everything just so - it really was nicer than working on just his lap. "Does she draw?"

Snape didn't look at him, but neither did he move away. "She... used to paint."

Rabastan looked at Snape then, and though he didn't have words to express it, he could see that there was something in Snape's face, something compelling.

"Hold still." His hand began to move, tracing very quickly the outline of Snape's face, head, the fall of his hair.

"What? No, you can't - "

Every word Snape said moved his mouth, his whole face, and it was messing Rabastan up. "It's hard enough to do this without looking," he said. "The least you can do is hold still."

Snape fell silent, for which Rabastan was grateful, but there was still something wrong. "Face that way," he instructed, trying to recapture the image he'd found so striking a moment ago. He couldn't draw it if he couldn't see it!

The young man frowned, obviously not accustomed to being ordered around by anyone save the Dark Lord himself. But, after sneaking a glance at Rabastan's page, he did as he was told. "I don't know why I'm doing this," he grumbled. "Spending time with you is hazardous to my..."

He trailed off, trying to catch another glimpse of what Rabastan was doing, which made Rabastan smile, and glance down at the sketch himself. He'd gotten the outlines down, the placement of the eyes and a quick fluid line to suggest the nose and tight curve of the mouth, but he'd never be able to create that expression unless Snape showed him again.

The train gave a lurch, then, and Snape, being somewhat lighter and also sitting at the edge of his seat, was thrown against Rabastan. They straightened themselves out quickly enough, but Snape was muttering something again, and not looking at Rabastan nor holding still.

"Look over there," Rabastan repeated, gently. Once he and Rodolphus encountered a dog in Knockturn Alley that had shied away from them, and refused to come no matter how Rodolphus shouted and cajoled. Finally he'd given up and gone away, but Rabastan had stayed, waiting, and talked softly to it, until the dog had been won over. Perhaps Snape was wild in some same way that dog had been.

"You were saying something about your mother?"

Snape's expression froze again, and this time there was even something more in it. His eyes spoke of memory, while his cheeks were slightly colored, as if he was having some silent conflict of emotions.

"Just like that," Rabastan whispered. He worked as quickly as he could, trying to get the shape of the bones right, and the depth of eyes. Snape had long lashes and small lines around his eyes, much as an older man would.

"My mother died when I was seven," he said conversationally, trying to keep Snape from moving or talking again. "At least I can remember her, though. Rodolphus sometimes forgets her name." What was it about Snape's eyes? Dark in color, with flecks of light reflecting - ah! Reflecting all over, as if a sheen of something had been applied to the entire eyeball. Rabastan frowned, worked with his pencil, erased a touch, worked again.

A long moment later, he relented. "You can move now, if you want. I think I have enough to work with."

Snape shook his head as if coming out of a trance and looked at the paper. "It's amazing," he murmured, almost too softly for Rabastan to hear.

"I just draw what I see," he said, feeling bashful.

"But that's the talent, right there," Snape said. His fingers lay lightly on the page. The page lay on the desk which lay on Rabastan's lap, which really wasn't a chain of connections Rabastan should have made, but he had, and now all he could think of was the warmth of Snape's body and the fingers just inches above his leg and...

Snape was continuing to speak. "I know that I... well, lots of people try to draw what they see, but it always comes out looking off, and wrong, and you've done better than that." His hair slipped past his shoulder, falling like a veil across his face. Before he thought better of it, Rabastan reached up and brushed it back again.

Snape looked up then, meeting his eyes suddenly.

"It's not in the drawing." Rabastan tried to explain. "It's just... you have to see the thing for what it looks like, and not what you think it is. Does that make sense?"

Snape shook his head.

Rabastan sighed. He'd never talked about it with anyone before. "At first you see a desk and you think, 'oh, I know what a desk looks like,' and you try to draw it and it comes out all wrong." His hand twitched, seeking something, and he gripped the pencil more tightly. "But when you stop trying to draw 'a desk,' and instead just look at the angles and lines and edges, and draw that, then what you come up with is more like a desk than if you had tried to just draw a desk."

"I see," Snape said. "It's... it's about throwing away expectations, and just taking what's there."

That didn't seem to require an answer, but there was something expectant about the way Snape was looking at him that made Rabastan uncomfortable.

"I had wondered," Snape said off-handedly, "why Rodolphus is the one your father is trying to marry off to Bellatrix. Shouldn't it be the elder son?"

Their bodies seemed closer than before, and Rabastan couldn't think all of a sudden. "I'm not supposed to talk about it," he mumbled.

Snape arched an eyebrow.

"I'm not - I mean - " He fidgeted, but that just increased his awareness of Snape's hand, which still lay on the sketch book. "Father says I'm not marriage material."

"And why is that?" His voice had dropped. "Is there, perhaps, some other secret that the rest of the world doesn't know?" His hand moved, just an inch, but Rabastan's attention was riveted.

"I - " Surely he wasn't implying what Rabastan thought he was implying! "How old are you, Snape?"

"Eighteen."

Old enough for the implication, then. Rabastan found himself at something of a loss: he simply had no basis for comparison for this sort of situation. But Snape was looking at him, and the nearness of him was distracting, and that funny curve of his lips...

And then, just as when he started to draw, the thinking part of Rabastan's brain shut down, and he leaned forward to catch Snape's mouth with his own.

Somewhere there was a small sigh of satisfaction, but Rabastan wasn't thinking anything beyond: Oh. And when Snape's hand moved again, Oh.

---

It turned out, to Snape's surprise, that the assignment was a success, in more ways than one.