[HP ficlet] Rotten love
Title: Rotten love
Length : 574
Characters/Pairings: Remus/Snape
Warnings: Present tense, semi-graphic sex
A/N: For stoicstella's birthday. Sorry it took me so long. I hope you like it ♥ Much love and hugs to you.


Love doesn't vanish, it rots. It festers unnoticed to a putrid root, black and shrivelled, coiled, misshapen and twisted like a mistreated child. Yet alive, hungry, wanting.

You can spend your life like this; burying love under your breast and letting it turn sour, never acting on it, never paying attention to it. Remus is good at lying, he can lie to himself. He can think that love ignored is love extinct. He can walk and talk and teach and shop, without anyone being the wiser. He can live, he doesn't need to be full, he doesn't need to be filled.

It's not like it makes sense, his love for Snape. It's not like he wanted it. It's so absurd it's seems like a joke. Ha, bloody ha. A few gropes as teenagers, a couple of quick shags in war time, it shouldn't have left him with such longing. It's not like Snape is a prize. It's not like Remus is desperate.

Yet, he is. Desperate for Snape's presence, his stare, his touch. So sharply aware of Snape's body that he must be very controlled and very flippant whenever he talks to him. He hates how helpless, how powerless love makes him, but at least he can control how he reacts to it. He neglects it stubbornly, wearing on his mildest demeanour.

He put love in a dusty storeroom at the back of his mind and hoped to forget it. Just another secret to keep in the dark. Time passes, and he doesn't change, really. Years wear the same wearied smile, the old washed out jokes. He's being frenetically normal and average. At the back of his soul, love rots away and grows sour and toxic with anger and spite.

He thinks it's funny, how fitting his love becomes to Snape. Just like him, it thrives despite any care, on dry, derelict ground nurtured by disdain and sarcasm. Every time he meets Snape, it's like a thick, bilious drop of venom leaking through to feed his love. It's not worthy of that name anymore - if it ever was - this obsession. It is bloated and pungent and ready to explode.

Then it does, and Remus does too. He pushes Snape against the wall in the middle of a diatribe, and he bites away the words onto his lips, and he kisses away his breath onto his throat, and he eats away his blood onto his skin. He tastes it, this fetid, intoxicating taste of his love. Like an exotic mushroom, he thinks. It could be poison, or it could be hallucinogenic, or the rare, precious flavour for a delicate meal. He doesn't know which and doesn't care much.

Snape doesn't say a word, his head is thrown back against the wall, biting at the palm of his hand as if he knew what it was to hide your love away and let it rot. Remus opens up Snape's dark robes and eats more of the smell. He sucks Snape's cock and licks Snape's scrotum until Snape's come floods his throat, and he can feel a little bit sated.

He lays his head against Snape's concave stomach and breathes in the smell of his pubis. He's painfully hard.

Remus chuckles softly. The taste in his mouth is bitter and vile and delicious. He thinks it's an acquired taste, like things like whiskey and smoke and coffee. He already knows it is just as addictive.