Mizumono

When their lips parted, it was not a mere separation of flesh, but the breaking of a pact sealed by tormented souls. Severus felt like an ancient manuscript, its pages rummaged by profane hands, its letters smudged by sweat that was not just sweat, but the sap of shame. A tremor ran through his body, not the creeping cold of dungeons, but the agony of a clock whose pendulum had come loose and now swung in the void. His eyes fixed on Sirius Black, whose ragged breathing echoed like the drumming of a funeral procession. In the Gryffindor's gray eyes — ashes of a fire that had never warmed anyone — there was no remorse, but the silent omen of a fate coiling around them both.

Severus' hand, pale as an extinguished candle, rose hesitantly. His fingers touched Sirius' wrist with the lightness of a ghost's touch. At the contact, a shiver ran through them both, like a specter's hand pulling at their guts. Sirius widened his eyes, and for a moment, the world around them bent like a broken mirror.

Severus then approached, slow as a sleepwalker guided by a cadaverous moon. Sirius, motionless, was no longer a man, but a statue of salt on a plain of despair. The Slytherin's wand rose, and from his lips escaped a whisper that was not a whisper, but the dragging of a blade on stone:

"Confundus..."

Black's eyes clouded, losing their combative gleam, like windows covered by mist. His body, once tense as a hangman's rope, slackened, surrendered to lethargy. Severus let out a sigh that carried decades of weariness, turning to the basilisk, which writhed under the siege of black flames — dancing in Dionysian ecstasy.

The wand rose again, and the flames, like fire serpents born from the bowels of the earth, enveloped the beast in a nuptial embrace. The basilisk roared, its cry a hymn of agony that made the chamber's walls bleed limestone tears. Severus, pale as a lily on a battlefield, panted under the weight of the magic, every muscle a thread about to snap.

And then, he saw it: the roof of the beast's mouth, moist and pulsating like a heart ripped from a chest. An altar of living flesh, waiting for the sacrificial knife.

"Sectumsempra!"

The spell cut through the air like the scythe of time itself, reaping eras in a single stroke. Blood gushed in red cataracts, bathing the floor in a macabre baptism. The basilisk shuddered, its jaws forced open until they broke, like the doors of a cursed cathedral. The creature collapsed, its colossal body falling with the solemnity of a defeated titan, raising a cloud of dust that smelled of ground bones and erased memories.

Severus remained standing, his chest rising and falling like the bellows of a condemned blacksmith. The dark magic now demanded its tribute: his veins burned like acid channels, his skin clung to his clothes. He staggered, not from weakness, but from the weight of a victory that tasted like defeat.

There lay the monster. There lay the triumph.

Before turning back to the basilisk, Severus paused. His gaze, heavy as a tombstone, fell upon Sirius, whose body lay in lethargy under the cloak of confounded magic. He approached like a starving man, his fingers descending to touch the Gryffindor's face — pale as a full moon under a veil of mist. The weight of his body, spectral and feverish, leaned over Black, dragging them both to the damp floor, where stagnant water mixed with dust. Severus, on top, watched Sirius' dark hair spread like roots of poisonous ivy on the dirty ground, the other's eyes — once sharp as ash — now cloudy, narrow as the cracks of a half-open coffin.

A sigh escaped him, not of relief, but of surrender. His icy fingers, ghosts of an existence without warmth, traced the contours of Sirius' face: the curve of his jaw, the parted lips breathing the same poisoned air. It was a study in morbidity, a liturgy of forbidden touches. Then, he leaned in. The kiss that followed was not sweet, but raw — a meeting of lips that tasted of absinthe and rust, of sin and despair. There was no reciprocity in the gesture, only the voracity of a man stealing the last breath of a dying man.

He pressed their mouths together with force, as if wanting to fuse souls through flesh. His eyes closed, not from pleasure, but from the vertigo of a wrong passion. In that moment, his soul resonated in perverse harmony with Sirius'.

The water beneath them was cold, but Severus did not feel it. And when he finally pulled away, leaving Sirius motionless on the ground, his lips trembled with the acute awareness that, in that chamber, two monsters had fallen: one by magic, the other by the kiss.

—

The house resembled a broken toy, its peeling walls revealing layers of old wallpaper — wilted flowers in forgotten patterns, gold turned to rust. A version of the Black mansion he did not know. They inhabited it like ghosts refusing to accept death, entwined in the shadows of a hall where even the air weighed like velvet. There was a piano in the corner, its rotten keys resembling necrotic teeth. Severus had run his fingers over them once, and the sound that emerged was not music, but the groan of a stuffed animal. Sirius had laughed. Or cried. He could no longer tell.

"Severus…" Sirius had whispered, the name leaving his lips like a dull knife cutting flesh.

Love was a corpse that kept them warm under moldy blankets. Sirius kissed him with the fury of someone trying to steal air from another's lungs, and the Slytherin allowed it, for suffocation was preferable to emptiness. Black's hands, cold as silver forgotten in snow, descended over his lover's neck, leaving marks that did not hurt — marks of possession, not violence.

"Why are we here?" Severus had asked, uncertain of the answer.

Sirius had pointed to the fogged mirror above the cold fireplace. In it, their reflections were doubled: two young men, with pallid faces and hungry eyes…

"Because there's no other place we could be," Sirius had said, his voice like the dragging of a chain on stone.

His beloved grabbed his wrist, feeling the poison running under the lion's skin — the same that pulsed in his own veins. They fed like this: one drank the other's disdain, devoured hatred as if it were sacred bread. A feeling that they had lived like this for a long time. They were devourers of psyche disguised by carnal desire, by touches, by offered embraces.

"Severus..." he repeated, and this time it was a lament.

Upstairs, the door to the room had creaked. They climbed, Black leading, Snape following the trail of his perfume — ether and absinthe. A room full of dolls, all broken, heads decapitated, glass eyes ripped out. The heir of the house had picked one up, a small porcelain figure in a lace dress, and placed it in his lover's hands.

"She looks like you," he had said, and it was true: black hair, thin lips, eyes the color of void. "Break her."

The serpent had obeyed. The porcelain had shattered like a heart under a bare foot. Sirius had smiled, and tears had glistened in his eyes.

"This is better. Now she's free."

He held the other's slender body, laid him on the floor covered in shards. The rival's body was light as a feather. When he kissed him, his breath tasted of blood and flowers — a sacred mix. Sirius' nails dug into his shoulders, not to stop him, but to pull him deeper.

"You have the answers, don't you?"

"And you have the key," Sirius had replied, opening Severus' shirt like someone opening a letter.

The key hung on his chest, rusted, stuck to his skin by decades of sweat and guilt. Sirius had turned it in the air, and a "click" had echoed in the depths of their minds. A door that had not existed opened in place of the mirror. Beyond it, there was only mist — mist and the echo of laughter.

"It's too late for regret."

"And for love?"

His answer had been a low, wet laugh that turned into a cough. When he pulled away, he saw that his prey's lips were red — with his own blood. Sirius had drunk it without him feeling.

"Love is regret," Severus corrected.

The house had groaned around them. The walls bled, the floor had swallowed the shards. And they, they held each other not out of desire, but because it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.

When the mist swallowed them, only the echo of Sirius' voice remained, soft as the cut of a scalpel:

"I celebrate the day you changed my history... Of life and death."

He closed his eyes.

—

When he opened them again, it was to the sound of dripping — slow, ritualistic, like the ticking of a clock submerged in tar. Drip... drip... Each drop echoed in his skull like the hammering of a nail into a coffin. Until one of them, cold and viscous, splashed on his face. He raised his eyelids with a groan, his blurred vision adjusting to the scene.

He was still in the chamber, sitting in a damp corner where mold grew. The air was heavy with the smell of decomposing flesh and ashes. The basilisk lay at the center, its torn mouth exposing broken fangs and a torn palate, from which a crimson liquid dripped. Severus was near Salazar's statue, his body bent like a branch in a storm, his trembling fingers tracing the stone's reliefs.

Sirius swallowed dryly. The chamber breathed. Not a metaphor — the walls sweated, the columns creaked like aged joints, and the ceiling, too high to be seen, dripped icy water. He tried to rise, but his legs failed, betrayed by a body that felt like lead.

"Snape…"

The name echoed like a bell in the damp chamber. Severus turned slowly, his eyelids rising like the curtains of a macabre theater, revealing eyes that gleamed with the coldness of a dagger dipped in poison. He stared at Sirius, and in his gaze was a bottled storm — anger, yes, but also something more: the oblique glint of an old wound, exposed like raw flesh to the salted air.

"Great, you're awake…" His voice was a serpent's hiss. "We need to get out of here by swimming, you know."

He rose like a specter reborn from the mists, the soaked cloak clinging to his body like a second skin. Sirius, in turn, stood up with the grace of a man carrying the weight of his own shame. His eyes avoided Severus', fixing on the puddles that reflected the chamber's ceiling — a ceiling of stone, without stars, without forgiveness.

"About that—"

"Spare me your apologies," Severus cut in, his voice as sharp as the wind howling through cracks in ruins. "I'm sure it was a desperate act of very poor taste."

He turned, his back becoming a wall of ice. Sirius felt his face burn — not like fire, but as if hundreds of ants were crawling under his skin, each carrying a fragment of embarrassment. And yet, beneath the guilt, throbbed a obscene desire: the impulse to grab the Slytherin, to repeat the kiss that now haunted his dreams like a lascivious ghost. "Just once more," he thought, his lips dry, "Just enough to forget I'm still alive.”