Merry Smutmas, cjmarlowe!

To: cjmarlowe From: ou_topos

Title: The Shrivelfig Bandit & Other Stories
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Snape/Draco. Snape/Magical Mystery Woman (MMW) too, I suppose.
Author's notes: Merry Christmas to CJ! I hope you like it. And a thank you to my lovely beta.


After months of believing that he would never dream again, Draco Malfoy dreams of Severus Snape's pornographic hands.

To be chronological about it:

It is, Draco realizes after Snape brings him to Spinner's End on the night of the murder-that-wasn't, a vile and stupid war. Only some of his classmates will give up their lives to win it, and it is not his ambition to be among them. That some families will become extinct is a matter of necessity; which, though, is a matter of circumstance. And Draco is willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance.

Draco doesn't like Spinner's End. He would certainly prefer Hungary, where butterbeer (or vajsör) is free and where he can sleep around riotously with beautiful boys and sire small villages of illegitimate Malfoys with willing girls. Sadly, this is only a fantasy, as the one time Draco has traveled abroad is to Romania, where Lucius enslaved a local rock gnome colony and made them carry Draco through the mountains, all Kipling-esque. It had been, Draco remembers, a good summer.

The summer after sixth year, however, is not a good summer. Snape shuts him in the basement with volumes of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu and Fulbert the Fearful*, and an enormous pile of shrivelfigs to peel. It is all too undignified even for a failed murder attempt. As if Draco has not read The Prince or A Healthy Fear of Hags before! As if he is some potions assistant to be ordered around! But before Snape shuts the basement door, he points to the shrivelfigs and says, "For a duty you can perform." Draco still does not understand why he could not kill Dumbledore, how the evening queered out of control into a trembling hand and lost glory. He just had not been able to say the words. Nice touch, though, blasting Dumbledore off the roof like that.

To make it all worse, the summer after sixth year is the summer that Draco learns what it is to desire a man. Maybe Snape thinks he can keep Draco from the world, but he can't keep him from Snape. Draco cannot bear knowing nothing about the goings-on of the house itself, so he traces great holes in the ceiling with his wand, and glamours the gaps up - not the weak visual glamours that Hufflepuffs use to cover up their acne in the morning, but a real, involved, sensual substantial glamour that looks and feels like the floor around it, and can be walked on. Most adult wizards cannot do them. And so Draco watches Snape whenever he can see him through the gaps in the first floor - watches him read (often) and drink (less often) and put bread into the snapping breadbox in the kitchen (rarely; suspiciously so).

And oh, Draco does not know the meaning of erotic, he does not know the meaning of desire, until he watches Snape handle the pages of a delicate potions manuscript in the living room between his thin, pale hands, pausing from while to while to rub at the Dark Mark; because it is then that Draco uses all the powers of his imagination to visualize what is below the five inches of skin Snape's robes reveal between his neck and his throat, what is under those great black layers, and how his pornographic hands would look stripping them away.


*


It is very limiting, this Peeping Tom system. No wonder he fetishizes Snape's hands so much - he can hardly see any more! Still, Draco can watch him cook and eat, can see most of the particulars of Snape's life on the first floor, and observes the afternoon that Snape and a strange woman shag up against that poor snapping breadbox.

Draco is working on his latest assignment in the basement one day - dinner - when the front door opens and in walks Snape and this spindly dark woman with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out, burning black eyes, a strangely deep mature voice. Snape must have picked up a shag from the library, or something. She looks like the kind of person who plays Queen Maeve operas and pantomimes them in her house robes - the kind that doesn't give a damn about anything. No wonder Snape likes her. She looks dirty - one look at her, and Draco comes to the conclusion that she is a big lecher who wants everyone in the world to take a bath in the same big cauldron which will give her a chance to squeeze everyone's arses under the water.

Snape kisses the woman, making her moan and wrap her legs around his waist. Snape hoists her up against the breadbox, which shudders noisily in protest. Through the gaps in the ceiling, Draco can see only part of Snape's body. The line of his back is splendid and thin. Snape breathes out against the woman's neck as he drives into her. Her nails lengthen, digging into Snape's skin, with each thrust. (Metamorphmagus, Draco thinks.) Snape hisses and she whispers "sorry" against his jaw. And those hands - those white hands - grip at the back of the woman's thighs, holding her open.

Draco wants those hands on his sternum and on his arse, making him shiver like an invisibility potion just before completion. He wants them in his mouth, and tugging at his hair as he stares into Snape's eyes. Draco strokes himself leaning against the cauldron, thinking of Snape's pornographic hands, and when the woman upstairs cries out, Draco does too. Settling bonelessly against his cauldron, he almost falls in.


*


According to Fulbert the Fearful, Draco discovers, everything is to be treated as if it is fatal. However, however: there is consolation to be derived from life. Unexpected, small things, in particular. Like the arse. That they're all spheroid, that none of them are shaped like wands or the invisible mannequins which laundered robes come back on to retain their shape. So we have that to feel good about. Thinking of the lovely arse beginning where the terrain of Snape's spine ended, Draco quite agrees.


*


Draco punches more holes in the ceiling. If Snape is going to shag people against the breadbox again, after all, Draco would like to watch.


*


Draco forgets that the glamours he uses to fill in the ceiling do not, in fact, have the structural strength equivalent to a real ceiling. On a bruise-grey afternoon in the third week of Draco's imprisonment, the ceiling collapses.

When this happens, Snape is talking to Dolohov in the sitting room. It begins as a rumble in the ground, a tremor that shakes Snape's tiny cast-iron goblin army on his chess board to its knees and sweeps them off the table. Then the ceiling supports fail, and the wood and the plaster crumbles and deposits the two men into the basement when the ceiling breaks completely. Snape lands on the basement floor, Dolohov lands on top of Snape, and a massive volume on psychological warfare lands on top of Dolohov's head, killing him instantly.


*


Well, fuck, Draco thinks as he applies salve to Snape's bruised stomach after he reparos the ceiling. Even Sabotage and Self-Loathing: The First Volume is better than he is at this killing business. He is happy, though; murder isn't all that difficult, after all! He feels warm, as if a Disillusionment Charm has just been lifted from his skin.


*


After his first kill, which after all is not his fault, although in his opinion he should get the credit for it anyway, Draco is giddy with expectation. There are ways to get over a debilitating sense of cowardice, self-doubt and inability to act in the Death Eating business! He will become the Ceiling Killer. People will fear the rooms they walk into, anxious that they will collapse and that copper toads will fall on their heads. "Look at what happened to Dolohov," they will whisper. "They say they've never seen a crushed cranium quite like it."

Draco is so giddy that he climbs in Snape's lap - Snape makes a protesting, pained noise as Draco brushes against his bruises - and kisses him.

It's not a timid kiss, either. Oh, no. Draco is a man who knows what he wants, now, and knows how to get it. He bites down on Snape's lip, and when he opens his mouth in surprise, Draco plunders it, because he has seen the way Snape looks at him, he knows the cartography of the man's desire, knows that the map ends at the splay-fingered hand which is currently stroking the side of Draco's face.

Snape breaks away, trying to hold onto his anger, and breathes it out into the side of Draco's neck instead. There is a smudge of dirt on his nose, and Draco imagines that he must have its twin on his own. Snape does not say, I don't want you, he does not say </i>I can't</i>. He says:

"Draco. People of our persuasion - "

"You mean manipulative, attractive - " Draco attempts.

"No. I meant - "

" - devious, positively Machiavellian, yes - "

A sigh. "We don't nurture romance - "

" - we butcher it," Draco finishes happily in the nervous hollow of Snape's throat, which he licks.

"You must be mad," whispered haughty-husky in Draco's ear as Snape kisses down his face; and oh, he's so fucking hard against Draco's hip.

"Mmph," Draco says, to show he does not disagree.

"You’re seventeen," moaned despairingly against Draco's right clavicle.

Draco does not worry about Snape's hesitation, because in his early days of life, his father, his jailed, absent, lovely father, had told him: offer people what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken. So Draco does not worry. "I am a fine wine," Draco declares, and gasps as Snape licks.

Snape is the first to grope his arse, but Draco puts his hands in Snape's pants first. He will wank off to the sound that Snape makes for months afterward. They remove each other's shirts at the same time. Draco expected more buttons, but is strangely undisappointed.

Oh, how Snape kisses, pressing Draco against the bulge in his own trousers as he claims his Draco's neck, demarcates the places that are Snape's with bites. He arranges Draco so that he lies facing upward on the bed, and as Snape crawls into the V of his legs, Draco can feel Snape, hard-gutted and shaking in his arms.

Snape - sometimes Severus in his head, sometimes not - has such dark eyes, rounded to the brim with blackness. Does he like the way Draco looks, the unchilded, unbreasted, long-hipped expanse of him? Draco nudges Snape's arse with his knee, wanting to say I wish you were more of an impatient bastard. But impatience! Snape leaves impatience somewhere between Draco's clavicles and the hungry weight of his thighs as he removes the pants covering Draco's cock, looks at Draco's cock, touches Draco's cock. (This makes Draco shove up into Snape's fist with a moan, but Snape prefers to smirk at him instead of doing more constructive things. Like get Draco off.)

And then, a change: Severus covers him with his body, then with his mouth (right in the center of his chest, up to his shoulder, a memorable moment underneath his arm - Draco does not know which; directions are so tricky when you are horizontal) and then just the heavy gaze of him. Snape looks at him intently. It is as if he is watching Draco's pale skin, waiting for a primary colour to appear and tell him yes, this is where you start to ravish him, right here at his arse/wrist/elbow. Snape decides to start at Draco's mouth.

Snape kisses him, and kisses him and kisses him.

They both moan when Draco winds his tongue into Snape's mouth while Snape grinds down onto him, more, more, and suddenly… it is gone. He has only a second to prepare himself before Severus is on him, biting his neck, trembling hands running over his ribs. He feels Severus' cock, burning and heavy, sliding up against his crevice. He hears Severus murmur a spell and the bottle of oil on the nightstand topples onto the bed; Snape is too distracted to make it soar into his hand, and Draco wants to smile. He closes his eyes, and can only hear the sounds of Severus slicking his hand before moist hands part Draco's thighs and push inside of him with two fingers. God, the feeling of it… Draco thinks Snape must have found all of his entrances (arse, mouth, the angry pursed door to his desire) and insinuated himself inside to massage just that spot.

Then, the fingers have gone, the head of Severus's cock is wedging between his cheeks and Draco wants so badly, wants it so much.

Draco stretches open as Severus sinks into him. Draco and pants through the entrenchment until Severus is fully inside. Coarse pubic hair brushes up against the tender curve of his arse and Severus rocks them both back and forth, barely shifting, and then rocking them back and forth, barely moving. Draco squeezes the other man's waist between his thighs, keeping him there, because Draco does not know what he will do if he cannot feel Severus' cock throbbing inside of him.

More. Please.

Draco feels Severus' hair brush over his nape, followed by Severus's lips and tongue.

"Draco," Severus whispers roughly, hot breath ghosting over his skin.

Draco trembles.

Severus runs his fingers over Draco's chest and then up his Dark Mark, scratching it softly with his nails. He circles his hips slowly and Draco holds his breath at the stretch feeling of it. It pulls and slides and then Severus pushes forward, going impossibly deeper, touching him just there. Draco feels his thighs shaking with the effort of holding back, of not spreading himself until he is halved.

"Beautiful," Severus breathes between thrusts that make Draco's lungs wobble.

Draco convulses and spasms and Severus moves then, fucking into him with long, full strokes. His thick cock moves in and out, deep, hitting Draco’s prostate over and over, as Draco comes violently, his hands clawing at the sheets. Come splashes against them in waves as Draco is gasping and biting his lip, full and dizzy and destroyed, oh oh oh. Severus is fucking him so hard, and fast, and it isn't stopping and then he hears, feels Severus moan, he feels Severus moan, as he surges forward one a last time and empties himself in thick, slow pulses, deep.inside of Draco.

The crush of Snape's body on top of him is as satisfying as the fall of a particularly sturdy ceiling. Draco strokes Severus's back as Severus kisses his left ear.

It is all much more enjoyable than skinning shrivelfigs.


*


Two weeks later, Draco and Severus arrange to meet Evan Rosier at the Hog's Head.

Rosier has no idea that he will die of a caved-in skull before the ceiling collapses on him.


*


Along the western roads of Hogsmeade village… come look: the hysterical yelling of hags in balaclavas as they cower in the Hog's Head, merging with the din of bawling babies as they are crowded into the secret tunnels left over from the 1612 Goblin Rebellion under the bar. Two Disillusioned wizards, one who if you peeled back the transparency and revealed him for himself would be black-haired with a hooked nose, the other white-blond and laughing, run through the village like a flicker. When they reach the clearing in front of the Shrieking Shack, the smaller, blond figure reaches inside his robes and pulls out what looks like a toothpick. It enlarges, swollen and strange, into a broom - a Nimbus 2000, he would tell you if he was able - and the two men settle on it excitedly, streaking up against the sky into the starry places.


*


Snape directs Draco to an ugly house outside of Ottery St. Catchpole. Draco can hear ghouls in the attic, and a party inside. The most terrible feeling falls into his stomach when he sees a familiar orange squash-faced cat perched on the roof.

"Why are we stopping?" he demands.

The cat is very interested in the mice beside the chicken coop.

"Today is Harry Potter's birthday," Snape says. "He is staying with Ron Weasley. You will knock on the door and say that you have brought Potter a present. They will probably abuse you and use you for their own ends in the Order of the Phoenix. But they will not kill you. Appeal to Lupin and Potter, if you can. Granger is too cold to sympathize with you, and Weasley is too poor."

"You're giving me up!" Draco yells before his mouth is muffled by Snape's hand.

"I told your mother I would keep you safe," Snape says. His robes are long and heavy, and he clenches Draco close to him, dark-finned. There are little agonies going off in Draco's lungs that make it hard to breathe.

Draco wilts against Snape's side. Severus is right, of course - if the agents of the Dark Lord can be killed with sneaky ceilings, then what hope do they have? He strokes Snape's throat with the very tips of his fingers. "But how about you? He'll kill you for losing me."

"I didn't lose you, Rosier did. At least, that is what I will say, Mr. Malfoy." A pause. "Now, knock on the door."

"Don't," Draco whispers in a moment of insanity and weakness. "Don't leave me with Potter." When Snape kisses him, he feels all his gruesome, shivering fears break apart in the middle of his chest. After all - Potter cannot have him. He is Snape's, he is Snape's, and shame and Veritaserum will not diminish his Snapishness. There is a clot of feeling in his chest that belongs to Severus.

Snape backs away slowly then. He is dark and tall, remarkable against the unmiraculous background of the Weasley chicken coop. He raises a hand slowly (Draco wants to kiss it): goodbye. A garden gnome gnaws on the edges of Snape's robes, and is alarmed when he Disillusions himself. Draco sees his Nimbus picked up, sees it zoom off into the distance. Gone, then.

So.

That fucking orange cat approaches the mice. Its tail is waving hello, goodbye.

Draco knocks on the door.

The fit Gringotts Weasley opens it. "I have a present for Potter," Draco announces before he is Stunned. As he is dragged inside, Draco can hear the crunching as Crookshanks eats his dinner.

Slowly, now… slowly: a silly family clock with the names of all the members on its angrily spinning hands, a radio of some ancient and extinct model tuned to the WWN, and a tiny dark owl flying by his side like a floating, loyal bruise. Celestina Warbeck sings You Stole my Cauldron but you Can't Have My Heart.

Draco has been taken hostage by red-haired barbarians.

It smells like Mudblood. It smells like prison. It smells like home.







The end.

* Fulbert the Fearful is a wizard "famous for being so cowardly he never ventured out of his house. Died when a Defensive Charm backfired and the roof fell in." At least, that's what it says on his Chocolate Frog Card.