Archive of Our Own

And something just...breaks.

Argus isn’t an educated man. He left school when he was ten years old. He has his letters, and he can keep a ledger, and he knows the sorts of things a working man learns with his eyes and his hands.

How many drops of water a leaky roof can admit before the shingles give way. How many turns of a gear before the teeth wear down. How many threads can fray before it’s a tear.

It's all friction, isn’t it. Temperature. Pressure. Time.

Someone cleverer than him has probably got it written down somewhere.

"Useless," Snape spits.

Argus gets to his feet and starts pulling on his trousers. His shoulders hunch as Snape rises from the bed with a disgusted click of his tongue.

"I didn't think it was possible for you to put in an even sorrier performance than last time, and yet here we are."

The line of pretty red marks across Snape's shoulders disappears under his dressing gown. The bruises around his wrists and ankles are like bracelets.

"I did like you asked," Argus says—quietly, because he can hear the nasty satisfaction beneath the words.

Snape belts his dressing gown like he's trying to garrotte himself around the middle. Whatever unwinding got done to him is already wearing off, and Argus can see him coiling up tight all over again.

"Huffing and puffing away for all of two minutes before you're spent—pathetic. I'd do better taking up with a dog." A snort and a dismissive look his way. "I've practically descended to bestiality already."

Argus's face grows hot as he gathers up his things.

Snape heaves an impatient sigh. “Why are you still here?”

They’ve been doing this for eight months now.

Argus likes lists. You know where you are with a list. There's to-dos and there's have-dones, and there's a satisfying column of checkmarks to separate one from the other.

Snape writes in a clear, delicate hand on good paper. The piece of parchment is always lying face down on the table when Argus lets himself into Snape's apartments, just as Snape is always lying face down on the bed.

The list is just so. How many blows and with what. Whether to fuck him, and how, and where. A selection of words to use this time: wicked, nasty, slut, whore, dirty. Words that are supposed to shame the lad, but for the life of him, Argus can't see how.

Each and every time, Argus reads the list more carefully than he's ever read anything in his life. But it doesn't help.

"Hurry up," Snape will say.

He'll scan through as fast as he can, marking down the numbers with his fingers.

"I can hear you moving your lips," Severus will say. "Have you any idea how annoying that is?"

Argus's jaw will clench tight, teeth cutting into his tongue.

"I'm beginning to suspect you're illiterate," Snape will say. "Shall I attempt pictograms?"

It's always the same.

Until, one day, everything goes red.

And something just breaks.

Snape makes a funny sort of sound when he hits the floor. Hollow. Like a heavy rubber ball striking stone and refusing to bounce.

Half the bedclothes came with him when Argus yanked him off the bed by his ankle. For one second, there is only shocked silence. Then Snape is twisting, fighting like a cat trying to claw its way out of a washtub.

Argus yanks on his ankle again, flattening Snape on the floor. He hears the smart click of teeth jarring together. Snape is frantic beneath him, all bite and fury as Argus pins him down hard.

"Shut your mouth," Argus growls, and the words taste like rusted metal when he forces them out. "Shut your mouth, you filthy little mudblood!"

Argus is good with his hands. They're how he makes his living. He's always liked building things, and it's been no trial to spend what few free hours he has crafting special gifts for Snape: lengths of metal and wood, chains, bits, paddles. Anything he asks for.

But it turns out that all it takes to put the lad down is muscle.

Snape thrashes, but it's no use—not when Argus has him scruffed by the neck with a knee digging into his back. The lad's ten stone soaking wet, just a skinny thing in grown-up clothes, calling Argus all manner of big names in return. Argus can feel the desperate push of wandless magic, but he's immune to it by now. He'd have been killed a hundred times over by this place if he wasn't.

"You think I don't know?" He wrestles Snape's wrists together, then grabs the trailing sheet and winds it around and knots it tight. "You're as purebred as a pit dog, for fuck's sake."

Snape's wordless holler of rage is forced back under the palm of Argus's hand. Argus's fingers dig into Snape's fleshless cheek, stopping his mouth up fast.

"If you just want to feel sorry for yourself, that's your own doing." He gropes for his belt buckle. "But if you want to really be sorry, by God, I will make you sorry."

There's no keeping count.

His belt tears raggedly into Snape's bare arse in a riot of blows. Welts rise up in thick red lines that crookedly overlap. One cut of the leather across Snape's fingers is enough to stop the lad's frantic efforts to keep the strikes from landing.

"Death Eater," Argus names him grimly. The force of the next smack nearly separates his shoulder.

The lad surges forward, screaming into Argus's hand.

"Murderer."

The sob that breaks from Snape's throat makes Argus tremble. His chest is knotted up tight, and he can hardly breathe.

"You've done some terrible things," he says, choked. "Soddin' monster, ain't you?"

His heartbeat thuds in his ears, a terrible bloody sound.

"And I'm mad about you. So what's that make me, hm?" Something at the back of Argus's throat clicks as the words spill out of him in a garbled rush. "Reckon that makes me worse, don't it. Far worse. Reckon that makes me someone you should watch your spiteful fucking mouth around."

His eyes sting as he brings the belt down one last time.

"Love you."

And something breaks.

The belt coils like a snake as it falls from his grasp. It twitches on the floor as though it might slither off with a life of its own.

Then a harsh sound breaks through the fog in Argus's head. Snape is weeping. Snotting all over himself so hard that it soon becomes evident he's probably going to suffocate.

Argus removes his hand from Snape's mouth and hears him suck in a noisy breath like a man breaking through the surface of an iced-over pond. He reaches slowly for his handkerchief and puts it over Snape's nose.

"Blow," he says roughly, and Snape does.

His knees crack as he hauls himself to his feet. He moves through what comes after with the slowness of a sleepwalker. First, he unties Snape's hands. Then he stares at the lad for a while, watching him fold in on himself, knees under his chest, arms curled behind his head. His arse is a frightful shade of purple.

Argus gets out the jar of salve and sets it on the floor next to Snape's huddled form. He returns the covers to the bed and straightens the pillows. He makes a pot of tea and runs a lukewarm bath. Then he edges back towards the door.

Lets himself out.

Locks up behind him.

Argus isn't a drinker by nature, but he's sixteen hours soused when the knock finally comes.

He gets up from his sprawl atop his unmade bed and rights himself. It takes effort, but if he's going to be sacked or killed, he believes in being on his feet with his shirt buttoned up properly when it happens. It's the principle of the thing.

His brains slip to the back of his head and then slosh to the front as he weaves his way to the door. His hands are shaking as he turns the lock. A click, and then there's a sliver of black robes and black hair and one furious black eye in the narrow space of the cracked-open door.

Argus breathes in, waiting for the point of a wand. For the flash of a blade. For a word to accompany the disgusted flicker of a gaze that takes in his sorry state.

But there is only silence.

Until:

"I expect," Snape says, his voice strained and hoarse and lovely, "to bleed next time. And to come."

Argus stares at him.

The words are chewed and swallowed and chewed again before Snape spits them out. "Please," he says, "and thank you."

There is nothing to do but nod, so Argus does—hesitantly at first, and then with growing, desperate fervour. Snape turns from him in a dramatic whirl of robes and stalks back down the corridor, undeniably more stiffly than usual.

Argus watches him go and breathes out slowly in his wake. Then he closes his eyes and places his hand over his heart.

And something...