Deeper by seeker

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It wasn't the reason he'd turned from his Dark Lord, but it certainly hadn't been a reason to stay in thrall. Enthralled. A good word, nicely rounded, quite descriptive, utterly deceptive. He'd started out interested, fell into fascination, tumbled deeper and deeper until he was enthralled.

Now he was fighting, if not for his life, then for something more important. Not redemption. Not absolution.

Perhaps survival.

Another lick of the Curse through his body, his nerve endings shrieking, his brain shorting out; his bowels gave, joining his bladder, as did his throat, from screaming itself bloody. It wasn't the first time Voldemort had taken out his displeasure with the failure of his plans on his followers. Not the first time Snape had borne the brunt of anger and frustration by sweating blood, soiling his naked skin, gibbering senselessly at his Master's touch.

It wouldn't be the last, either, and that was one of many realizations that had broken Voldemort's hold. For as much as Snape had always enjoyed pain, giving and receiving, the sheer mindlessness of it left him empty. In the beginning, he had convinced himself such a touch left him fulfilled.

Now he knew better.

Still, secrets were his to keep, and he would do so.

Even as he writhed.

Even as he came.

Even as the world went as black as the emptiness inside him.

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He woke bathed, stripped and tucked away between scented linens. Too fine to be Hogwarts', he must still be at Malfoy Manor. Squinting against the brightness coming through the high window, he felt more than heard the door open. He smelled the spice of Lucius' cologne as the mattress dipped.

They didn't need words. It was an old ritual, as old and deep as their knowledge of one another, seeded in childhood, flowering as young adults, rotting now in their maturity. One would suffer, bleed, lose himself in ecstasy; the other would bring him back. Not gently, but with a kind of affection no one outside themselves could ever understand.

When the time came, as he knew it would, it would hurt to kill Lucius. He would do it, of course; Snape never shirked a duty, and there would be as much pleasure as pain in killing his old friend. There were too many cross currents between them not to feel a measure of relief along with the loss. But that was for the future.

For the moment, there was only Lucius' long, clever hands on his body, fingertips pressing against his skin, teeth and tongue and lips mapping the marks left from Snape's uncontrolled thrashing against the stone floor under the Dark Lord's curse. Each tiny bite of pain a reminder and a blessing, the darkest kind, the only kind Snape ever truly understood. When he came again, pulsing against Lucius' hand, Lucius' prick forcing its way into him, Snape buried his face against the pillow and let it smother his hoarse cries.

He slept again, this time with the warmth of his hated friend behind him, warding off the chill.

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Debriefing went as it always did, a candy offered by the Headmaster and refused with a growl, tea that sloshed over the rim and filled the saucer from the tremble he hadn't quite got under control, toneless recitation of what few facts he had gathered before business had turned to Voldemort's pleasure and his own pain.

Dumbledore seemed satisfied. Snape set the cup down, tea dripping over the edge of the saucer to stain the desk, turned on his heel and returned to his dungeons. No body of any sort here to block out the chill, and that was just as well.

He needed the distance the cold gave him, to look on young Draco's face and not hex him until there was no more trace of Lucius in him; to look on young Potter's face and see something other than the scar; to look at all the frightened, defiant, dull and innocent faces and not sear them all to slag with one fiery damning curse.

Regardless of how tempting, such an action would defeat his purpose. The only purpose he had left. He certainly wasn't saving them for himself. Or even themselves. He wasn't saving them for the greater good, for he wasn't certain he believed in one. The only thing he truly knew, beyond a doubt, was that there was a greater evil. He was intimately acquainted with it.

They would not be.

No matter that he and he alone knew from what he was saving them. It was enough that he did. Enough that he didn't, couldn't, would never attempt to explain it to anyone else. No one else would understand. Except Lucius. Or Voldemort.

And they embraced it. As he had once. As, at times, he wished he could again, even knowing he never would.

For only in the dark, in the crimson-drenched depths of his own personal hell, Voldemort on one side and Lucius on the other, was Snape ever anything but alone.

At times, few, far between, avoided until unavoidable times, Snape wondered if this would be all he would ever know of intimacy. If the void of warmth and pain he'd first found as a child, growing and drowning and encompassing him as an adult, would be as deep as he would ever trespass into what passed for the human heart.

He seldom faced the question, because the answer terrified him.

A tiny voice hidden in the depths of his mind always answered, quicker than thought, "Yes."

And he believed it.

END