Part IV
The sun rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell. It rose and fell no matter what Sirius and Severus said to one another, no matter the events of the world. Severus had begun to open up slightly more every day, granting Sirius the occasional anecdote at breakfasts or lunches, but it wasn’t until Sunday - 18 days since Sirius had brought Severus home - that another real conversation took place. Sirius sat in his armchair reading, acutely aware of Severus staring at him, choosing to ignore it.
“I told you I joined them to escape. I was running from my family, from my past, looking for any out.” Severus said. He wasn’t speaking quietly as he usually did when he spoke of himself, instead his tone was deliberate. Sirius wondered if the man had been preparing himself to tell him this for a while. He put his book down, looking up at Severus. He was ready to listen.
“My Father- my father.” Severus took a breath. “He wasn’t kind to me as a child. Ever, really. He hated me for as long as I can remember, but things only got really bad once I started showing signs of being like my mother. A wizard.” Severus paused again, looking at Sirius and trying to gauge his reaction. Slowly, he continued, as Sirius peered at him intently, his brow creased in sadness. “The first few years that I can recall, he ignored me. I grew up alone. My mother wasn’t really all the way there, I don’t think. She never made any effort to connect with me or to help my father and I bond. She spend most of her days alone, coughing and moaning. And my father- well, he pretended I didn’t exist at first.”
“Severus-,” Sirius tried to interject.
“Wait, wait, just- let me finish Sirius. I don’t know why I’m telling you this - I’ve never told anyone before - and it’s hard enough as it is. I need to just get it all out and then you can say whatever nonsense you come up with.”
Sirius nodded. He understood - he couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to grow up like that, to be so alone for so long. Even though his parents hadn’t seemed to care about him, they always made an effort to interact with him.
“They hardly acknowledged my existence. I don’t know how I survived, Sirius, I really don’t. I don’t remember too much of that time other than that the constant ache of hunger that ate at my insides. Everything seemed cold and dank and smelled of rot. They didn’t buy me clothes, so I made my own out of scraps of things I’d find wearing around. When I reached 6 years of age, I found my mother’s old clothes. To this day I don’t know what career she followed before she had me, but she had a trunk full of these glamorous dresses. I vividly remember finding them - this great box of colorful dresses and shawls. It was nothing like I’d ever seen before, I don’t think. I was alone, of course, and I started putting them on. I was wearing a dark blue gown, so long it reached the floor and pooled at my feet, when my father walked in.” Severus looked directly into Sirius’s eyes. “That was the first time he beat me.”
Sirius was shook. He had never imagined that anyone could grow up in such miserable squalor. He wanted to comfort that poor shivering boy of the past, but it was too late, and the damage appeared to have been lasting.
“Can I-,” Sirius stuttered.
“Please just let me finish everything at once?”
“I was just going to ask if I could make you some tea, perhaps. You look cold.”
“Yeah, you keep it chilly in here. I just want to be done though, and I fear that if you stop me now I won’t be able to ever start again.” Severus looked into his lap.
“Oh. No- no. I mean, I understand. Keep going - at your own pace, of course.” Sirius tried to smile, but as he found himself too disturbed to do so properly, he simply nodded at Severus.
“The next few years were... they were hell. I honestly don’t remember too much of that either, except that some things were better. Most things were much worse though, and at times I’d long for that loneliness I’d once felt so often. My father would buy me things to wear, items so far from my mothers old wardrobe I almost couldn’t believe they could both be classified as clothes. Everything was beige or brown or black. I dreamt of those vivid colors.” Severus paused again, regaining his bearings. “So my father was paying attention to me, watching everything I did. My sharpest memories of that time were of him screaming at me until his voice turned so hoarse he choked. God, one time he shouted like that because of how much I bled. Fucking bastard beat me until I couldn’t breath then yelled at me for how my body reacted.”
When Severus paused again, Sirius realised he hadn’t been breathing regularly in a while. He hadn’t been prepared for this level of pain that Severus was sharing, and he didn’t know what he could do to comfort the other man. Before he had time to figure it out, Severus’s heavy voice fell through him once more.
“Anyways, that was my life before Hogwarts.” Severus tried to play it off as something that hardly affected him anymore, coughing gently into himself, but Sirius detected the heartbreak in his voice.
Sirius couldn’t speak; fear of saying the wrong thing and hurting Severus more than he had been already tore at his vocal cords, snapping them into tattered ribbons.
“Say something Sirius,” Severus begged. Sirius didn’t respond, he was lost in his own guilt and remorse. “Please, Sirius, say something to me. Anything, really.”
It took Sirius far too long to process what Severus had said, and by the time he had done so, pulling himself out of his endless maze of internal turmoil, Severus had tears running down his cheeks. His lips were pressed firmly together, his body rigid and frozen.
“Oh. Severus, no, please don’t cry. I’m so sorry I didn’t say anything I just needed-”
“It’s fine Black, I shouldn’t have expected anything more from you.”
Sirius looked up, staring directly at the tortured man, holding his gaze. “I don’t know what to say. I- I need a second to process all of that, you know?”
Severus nodded slightly. “Yes, I mean, of course.” He put his head in his hands briefly, then looked back up and met Sirius's eyes when he began to speak.
“I get it.” Sirius gave a pained laugh. “You feel terribly vulnerable right now, right?”
Severus broke eye contact. He nodded again, this time to the floor, still fearful that words would betray him.
The two were quiet for a moment, before Sirius finally spoke out again. “You want to hear about my shitty childhood? Not nearly as horrible as yours - you really won that competition, but you know - it might get your mind off of all that. Or at least I’ll be feeling bloody terrible too.”
“Go ahead,” Severus replied.
“Let’s see. I grew up in a huge mansion. They must have fed me four meals a day.”
“This is supposed to be helping me feel better, Black?”
“Ha. I’m getting there. It’s hard for me to not turn everything into a joke.” Sirius shifted in his seat. “So yeah, I grew up like royalty, but I don’t think my parents ever cared about me. They wanted an heir, and since the moment I could form syllables, they were teaching me everything about the history of the Black family line. God, the sheer amount of bullshit I absorbed as a child… There was a lot of that.” He gave a pained laugh, looking away from Severus. “Yeah, but they couldn’t have cared less about my interests or what I wanted to do with my life. I was pretty young when I realised that my parents couldn’t stand each other. I don’t think they ever really loved each other, and as the years went on, the divide between them only grew. My dad was yelling all the time, mostly at her, but at me too, and eventually Reggie.”
“I hated it.” Severus whispered. “My first year at hogwarts I got Professeur Villitte to teach me how to mute everything in my surroundings, so I wouldn’t have to hear it as much.”
“Really?” Sirius laughed again, a full, genuine one. “I can’t believe that’s what the two of you were up to. All these years we thought you were sucking him off.”
“You’ve got to be fucking with me, Black.”
“Dead serious.”
“I swear, if you turn that into a pun-,” Severus stammered.
Sirius cracked another smile. He was glad he could talk to someone about his childhood. He had told James a few pieces, but he had never really believed Sirius. He always thought Sirius was exaggerating how bad the yelling got; he couldn’t imagine a family that dysfunctional.
“My dad never beat me. I can be grateful for that, I suppose, but he really had a special talent for making me feel worthless.” Sirius scoffed. “You know I used to resent James for how perfect his family seemed. It only stopped when he accepted me as part of it.”
Sirius paused. His mind whirred, thoughts spinning like pinwheels in the wind. “I think that’s part of why I did - well, what I did to you. I wanted to impress James, wanted him to like me as much as he loved his family. I would have done anything for him to speak of me the way they spoke of them.”
“Parents,” Severus stated, “they really fucked us both up.”
Sirius nodded in assent, lost in thought of what could have been, imagining a life in which his parents cared for him properly. There was a chance James and him wouldn’t have become so close, but he had to believe everything would have worked out between them in the end. Better, even, perhaps, had Sirius had strong role models.
The conversation reached its natural ending point, Sirius understanding Severus far better than he ever imagined, something ancient yet still fresh as morning dew shared between them. They settled into quietude once more.
Sirius was still lost in his slumber as Snape’s aggressive voice broke into his dreams.
“Get of me Black, what the fuck is this?”
Snape lifted Sirius’s arm from his chest, dangling it awkwardly above himself before Sirius awoke and pulled himself together.
Still groggy, he mumbled, “What - stop yelling Snape - what?”
“I’m not your fucking armrest. Why were you on me, what do you think this is?” Snape gestured at the space between them, his skin pulsing with rage. Sirius briefly noted fear in his eyes, but the thought passed as he straightened himself up, resting his back on the pillows beneath him.
“I was just sleeping, Snape. That’s all.” Sirius took a breath, sensing the other man’s clear discomfort. “You can believe me when I say I have no desire to sleep in such close proximity to you, much less to hold you in my arms.” Sirius cracked a smile, trying to lighten the mood, but a rock sunk in his gut. His abdomen started twisting itself, pulling his guts down the same way they did whenever he withheld truths from Peter or Regulus. He did his best to ignore the feeling, shrugging it away as a mild case of food poisoning.
Snape stood, grabbing a blanket from the foot of the bed. “I can’t sleep here with you.”
Sirius couldn’t protest so he laid on his back, waves of confusion and different possibilities washing across him. Sleep chose to elude him for the next few hours, until finally greeting him and pulling him into darkness.
When Sirius awoke, it was to the sound of Snape rummaging through the draws next to him. He sat up in bed, leaning over the cold imprint Snape had left, and grabbed the man’s wrist. Snape’s jaw twitched as his body stiffened and quickly pulled away.
“Don’t-”
“Don’t touch you, right.” Sirius interrupted him. “Tell me what you’re doing. You have to know you’re not strong enough to leave here yet.”
“I'm stronger than you think Black. You’ve always underestimated me.”
“Fine, where are you going to go? Back to groveling for Voldemort? Back to the life that you were ready to fuckin’ kill yourself to escape from?”
“Precisely.” Snape turned away to continue filling his bag. “Thank you for the reminder of the pleasure I take in my work.”
“You and I both know you’re lying through your teeth right now. I’ve heard the way you talk - you hate all of that!”
Severus went quiet. Sirius swore he saw the man wipe a tear from under his eye, but the motion was so quick it could have been imagined. He turned around again, still acting as if Sirius wasn’t present, and walked out of the room in the direction of the door outwards.
Sirius tore the sheets off of himself and scrambled after Severus. “You can’t be serious right now, Severus. Tell me you’re fucking kidding right now,” he shouted loud enough that Severus would be able to hear him from a room away. When he reached the front door panting, he saw Severus struggling with the muggle lock he’d had installed months prior.
Sirius grabbed onto his wrist, firm enough that Severus couldn’t pull away. His thumb brushed across the open skin, resting on a frantically pulsing vein that mirrored Sirius’s own. Sirius’s head snapped up as he recognized that Severus shared the same unwanted feelings he did, as he understood, finally, why Severus felt he had to leave so quickly.
He took a stride forward, releasing Severus’s hand as he did so. Severus was frozen to the spot, one hand clenching the air tightly, furiously, as madness danced in his eyes.
Sirius brought a hand forward and stroked Severus’s wintry cheek. Severus gasped, the intake of air sharp as a blade. He closed his eyes, his breath caught. Sirius brought their faces close enough to feel Severus’s breath under his bottom lip.
Neither moved, both looking down as minds raced and hearts beat in sync. Sirius brought his hands up again, resting them on Severus’s middle. Silence feasted on the lack of space between them, licking its lips in hungry anticipation.
Breaths came more rapidly, time resuming before it raced past them. Air hummed around them in desperation as a fervent sweat layered itself onto their flesh.
Severus brought his head up, staring defiantly into Sirius’s eyes. As quickly as the moment had begun, it was over, and Severus was turning and brushing out the door. He couldn’t bring himself to look back.