undunoops (undunoops) wrote in lupin_snape, @ 2008-04-28 23:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | family fest |
Family Fest Fic: Love and a Hard Place - R, Parts 3 and 4
Title: Love and a Hard Place
Author/Artist: undun
Rating: R (mature/adult content)
Pairing(s)/character(s): Remus Lupin, Severus Snape, Nymphadora Tonks, Hermione Granger, et al.
Challenge: lupin_snape's Family Fest
Summary: Remus would do anything to be a father.
Disclaimer: Not-for-profit fan creation.
Warnings: I hate warnings. I don’t think anyone dies…
Notes: This story was started before the release of Deathly Hallows and is therefore non-compliant with that storyline. I leave it to the reader whether they judge it to be AU. Beta was gifted to me by the extraordinary Dillis. Thanks to lore for running the fest!
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III.
Remus entered their house quietly. It wasn't going to do him any good; she always waited up for him, only lately she'd waited with a disappointed frown rather than a tired smile.
"Hello," he greeted her weakly.
"You went to see Snape."
"Er, yes, as it happens," he confirmed. There was a trap closing around him and for the life of him he couldn't figure out how to avoid it.
"Why, Remus?"
Well, because, you know..." Remus gestured between the two of them. "You know – baby, and all that."
"You didn't ask me about it first. What happens if I've changed my mind, eh?"
"Have you?"
"We'll get to that. The point I'm making here is that you didn't consult me before you left to arrange another bonking for me from Snape."
"Ah. Sorry," he said, despite the fact that she was operating under a false assumption; he hadn't gone to Snape to arrange another bonking for her.
"So?"
"So... what?"
"What did he say? Honestly, Remus! What is wrong with you lately?"
"Oh, right! Well, he won't do it again, but I suppose he did warn me last time that there wasn't going to be a third time," he supplied, hoping he wouldn't have to answer the second, and hopefully rhetorical, question.
Tonks huffed a sigh. "Ah, well. That's it then."
"What do you mean?" he asked with a sinking feeling.
She shrugged eloquently. "No kids for us."
"There are other ways, Tonks! We don't have to give up yet, surely?"
Remus moved closer to her in agitation. His feelings were confused, ambivalent. On the one hand he did very much want to be a father, yet he wasn't sure now whether he wanted to be parenting with Tonks. But who else could he have a family with?
Playing like a silent film in back of his mind was Snape's mouth sliding up and down on his erection, his black eyes flicking up with an expression of mocking heat that he suspected only Snape could accomplish. With a superhuman effort of will power, he banished the images from behind his eyes. The damage had been done, however.
"You were gone a long time if Snape just said no," she observed shrewdly.
Remus turned and moved towards the kettle, making a lot of noise with taps and lids as he responded.
"Well, we chatted for a bit."
"Chatted? With Snape? He doesn't chat, Remus." Her eyes narrowed.
"Um, well, I've known him a long time. And I suppose he talks more to me than to someone like you," he said, desperately trying to shore up his defenses any way he could.
"Someone like me? What does that mean?"
Oh, shit.
"Well, young. You're young. And beautiful," Remus added in a bid to sidetrack her.
"Remus…"
He dropped everything, stepped up to her chair and said, "Let's go fuck."
"Remus!"
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Tonks was splayed out like a starfish on the bed when he entered the bedroom after a quick shower to remove the taint of Severus Snape from his pores. Remus turned her over, onto her stomach.
“What are you doing?”
“I want to do it this way. Do you mind?” he asked, stroking his hand down her back to rest on her small bottom.
“No, it’s fine. Bit nasty actually. Sort of like the idea,” she replied.
He smiled and stroked his fingers into her cleft. Nasty! He was fast developing a taste for Nasty. He groped in a drawer for the seldom-used lubricant.
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Remus stared up at the ceiling, watching flickering reflections from the clouds passing over the moon outside. He would have to start dosing with Wolfsbane potion tomorrow; only three days until the full. He had a convenient excuse for his aggressive libido at the moment, but he knew it wasn’t the pull of the wolf that had him sodomising his wife that night. It was Snape.
Tonks snuffled into his chest and he gently eased out from under her sleeping body. He needed to put space between them and just try and think his way through this mess. He sat on the edge of the bed, shivering without the blankets between his skin and the cooling night air.
His thoughts kept spinning in circles, trying to get out of the rat’s maze in his head. What the bloody hell was he going to do? He had a good marriage, or he’d had a good marriage before all this shite about having a baby the traditional way had come up. Why wouldn’t she let them use a potion, or some other magical technique? In his more paranoid moments he wondered if she had engineered the whole situation in order to get him to this point. Maybe she wanted a divorce from the start. Maybe she wanted him to get jealous; have him feeling so betrayed that he would leave her. If that had been her plan then it had succeeded in unexpected ways. He wasn’t jealous, he didn’t feel sexually betrayed, but he did think that their marriage was turning into a hollow farce.
Maybe it had never been anything else.
Maybe he’d been right all along; he wasn’t too poor anymore, but he was still too old, too dangerous. He loved Tonks, but it didn’t seem that they met each other’s needs anymore. He couldn’t give her a child, and she…?
She wasn’t Snape.
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IV.
"Lupin," Snape greeted him without inflection. He stepped back, allowing Remus to enter the house.
Remus stepped slowly past him with a fleeting feeling of unease; he couldn't remember the last time Snape had acknowledged his presence with anything other than sarcasm, annoyance, or a crippling combination of both.
Snape closed the door, throwing the interior into gloom, the high, small windows doing nothing to help the watery daylight penetrate inside. Remus turned towards Snape.
"I'm not a homosexual." It had been preying on his mind and he simply had to make the statement. He needed Snape to understand; he hadn't been living a lie with Tonks: he’d been living his life.
Snape seemed well able to handle the blunt declaration. With no time taken to marshal his argument, he responded.
"Is the label so important to you? You desire me and I confess to... some attraction to you. Is that not enough?"
"It is important! At least, it is to me. I'm trying to understand what has happened to me, Severus," Remus answered. He dragged his hands through his hair.
I think you'd better sit down before you break something," Snape suggested without humour.
"I've never had these feelings before," Remus sighed, sinking onto Snape's dusty sofa. "I've no idea who and what I am anymore."
"Oh, for Merlin's sake, Lupin! You are the same as you always have been; irritatingly polite, the caring do-gooder, a door mat whose only lapse in self-inflicted martyrdom comes once a month at the full moon."
Snape breathed heavily, folding his arms. Remus blinked up at him.
"You seek to please others before ever think to please yourself, Lupin," the man snapped.
Remus gazed at the dirty window, the world beyond it veiled and obscure.
"You think... Do you mean that I've been suppressing my own needs, my own desires? That I've been doing that for so long that I've forgotten I ever had them?" Remus asked. He couldn't look at Snape after those words, but he saw the man shrug out of the corner of his eye.
"Suppression isn't really successful unless one dupes oneself as well as everybody else, Lupin."
Remus sighed and hung his head, splaying his hands over his face. He heard Snape move closer and a moment later he felt a touch on his bowed head, Snape's fingers sifting through his hair. He looked up in surprise. He hadn't known Snape was capable of such a tender gesture.
The man froze under his scrutiny but didn't look away. His dark eyes seemed to glow: bereft of their usual mocking mask, they pulled Remus in. Remus stood, still holding Snape's gaze as he cupped the man's face between his hands.
"Take me to bed," he whispered. His lips met Snape's in a tickling kiss.
Snape pulled back an inch to say, "At this point, I defy the late Lord Voldemort himself to stop me."
Remus found himself firmly manhandled into a large, dim room at the top of the stairs, his clothes efficiently removed, and his body spread on Snape's large, wrought iron bed. Snape leaned over him. He seemed slightly unsure of himself as he asked, "I don't suppose you'd consider changing your command to 'take me in bed' by any chance?"
He'd known intercourse was a possibility, of course, but his arse clenched with reflexive anxiety. He closed his eyes, avoiding Snape's intense and oddly vulnerable gaze. Visions of Snape thrusting against Tonks swam through his mind: the beautiful flex of bone and muscle under his pallid skin. With a lurch in his chest and an answering surge in his cock, he knew what he wanted, and he had the power to give Snape what he wanted without compromise to himself.
He opened his eyes to see Snape studying his face, a frown deepening on his brow and the light in his eyes dimming. Remus smiled.
"Severus, take me... in your bed."
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“I had sex with Snape.”
Tonks burst out laughing. After a minute she stopped and looked closely at Remus, dumping her pack on the table.
“You’re serious.”
He nodded with a feeling of unexpected calm after his confession.
“He’s bent?” she asked, her mouth hung slightly open in shock.
She’s not surprised about me?
“I don’t really know,” he answered numbly, calm disappearing like mist in sunlight.
“Well I’d like to fucking know, Remus! I did have sex with him too, in case you’d forgotten!”
Remus’ mind was reeling. Of the various reactions he’d thought Tonks would have to his confession, he hadn’t even considered this one as an outside possibility.
“Is the label so important?” he asked, falling back on Snape’s question for lack of anything better to say.
“Of course it’s bloody important! What the hell’s wrong with you, Remus?”
Okay, this had gone on long enough.
“Why are you more worried about Snape’s preference than my own infidelity?” he asked. “I had sex with him, Tonks! I was unfaithful to you.”
She waved a hand dismissively. “So did I. Does that mean I was unfaithful to you?”
Remus boggled briefly. She had a point. But, no!
“That was a mutually consensual arrangement! Quite a different thing, Tonks.” Remus frowned, adding, “And I was there. You didn’t do anything behind my back.”
“So what’s going on? Are you suddenly gay then?”
Remus knew he had an answer for this, but now he couldn’t remember his carefully rehearsed reply.
“I don’t know, Tonks,” he sighed. He looked down at the kitchen table, spreading his hands against the wood. “I don’t know myself at all right now, but I am attracted to him.”
Tonks frowned at him across the table and folded her arms. He darted a look at her: she’d adopted her Auror demeanour.
“I’m sorry,” Remus said quietly.
“What about me then? I thought you loved me, Remus!”
“I do!” he hastened to assure her. “I still do, but… I don’t know! Things have been a bit off since we involved Snape.” Remus hesitated, then, taking a breath, added, “Maybe before that. Maybe since we decided to have a baby.”
“You don’t want children?”
“I do! I want to be a father, but…” His breath huffed out in a rush. “Maybe it isn’t the best time for me right now,” he offered.
“Bloody hell, Remus! We’ve been planning this for months! Why didn’t you say something?”
Remus hung his head, dragging his fingers back through the tangle of his hair. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know ‘til, until I saw him… when I saw him with you… in bed. Something happened to me, and it only got stronger the second time.”
He thought back to that second evening, when he’d met the heated, intense gaze that had him shivering as if in a fever. “He knew something. Snape knew what I was thinking,” he added.
“He used legilimency on you!”
He tried to remember what he’d felt. Had Snape seen inside his mind? How could he do that without a wand and, more to the point, while he was in the middle of having sex?
“No, I don’t think so. I doubt even Snape could do that,” he responded after a moment. “I think he just knows me better than I know myself.”
“Or better than I know you, apparently,” she commented with a frown.
Remus shrugged. He had nothing to say to that.
“He was the one who wanted you there when we fucked, Remus. He set us both up, didn’t he?”
“I don’t know. I think it was a manipulation of the situation, but then we were using him for our own ends, Tonks.”
“Yes, and look where it’s gotten us.”
“Yeah,” he whispered in gloomy agreement.
“I still love you, Remus,” she said softly.
Remus tried to smile at her but his mouth twisted in what might have been a sick sneer.
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