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We all live in dread of our teeth
falling out into our cupped palms.
We pray for our teeth, clattering
in the bone-chamber of the skull.
And when the little insanities
creep up from our throat, our teeth,
good soldiers holding their ground,
grind them down in our sleep.
—Barbara Goldberg, “Teeth”
There was no denying it anymore: his lower left incisor was loose.
Sirius opened his mouth wide, prying back his dark, sore-ridden lip, getting as close to the ornate old bathroom mirror as he could, ignoring its noise of disgust as his decaying mouth came into focus. My last good tooth, he thought, pushing it with his tongue, watching it rock forwards, its black root showing as it moved. You were my last good tooth.
The tooth, unfortunately, didn’t seem to care about mitigating his rapidly-intensifying hysteria. It just moved, wobbling like a child on playground equipment, with an equal lack of abandon.
“I’d feel bad for you if you weren’t a blood traitor,” the mirror said, and it really did sound pitying. “That’s positively repugnant, you know.”
Sirius pulled back, letting go of his lip, grateful for how readily it sprang back into place. “I know.”
“Well, you deserve it,” the mirror said halfheartedly. “Blood traitor.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Sirius sighed and headed downstairs, looking through the food Moony had brought him, trying to figure out how to break it to him that he hadn’t been able to eat anything more texturally complex than mashed potatoes in years. Well, he could hoist the food off on visitors; he’d taken up smoking again because it was such a potent appetite suppressant, and it was easy enough to claim he’d already eaten before they came by. He usually managed about five hundred calories of gruel a day, in any case. Good enough.
He closed the fridge in disgust, trying not to think about the tight, hard knot of his stomach, patting his robes until he came upon his fags and winding his way up the stairs to the cluttered attic, where Buckbeak was taking what seemed to be a tremendous nap, letting out little huffs, shifting his wings as though preparing for flight. Sirius flopped down on the beat-up old armchair, the scent of cigarettes jumping out of the stained, moldering fabric and invading his nostrils. Then he kicked his feet up on the window ledge, looking out at the roofs of neighboring buildings. Mansards and brick, chimneys and weather vanes; they were all soon hovering in a cloud of smoke, seeming to distill to a dull brown haze of urban decay.
Anxiety pushed at Sirius, and he took a drag, then exhaled, managing thirty whole seconds before he followed the compulsive demand of his animal instincts, pushing and examining each tooth with his tongue, one after another. Some moved; some ached; on others, he could feel cracks and abscesses. Half the time he thought they might kill him before he could even begin to approach freedom; but he knew full well exactly how long a human being could survive without adequate nutrition. Or at least he’d been doing it for so long that the sensation of a full stomach was a vague, distant memory. Once upon a time, he’d eaten as much as a human should. And he had taken it for granted.
He cursed his younger self for being so foolhardy, so impulsive, so naive. Not that he was doing much better on the impulsivity; but, well. He hadn’t left the house since September, had he? He’d been holed up here for months. It had been a pain to conceal how little he could eat during Christmas, but there had been mashed potatoes and soup, and he made a show of keeping odd hours, and everyone seemed to accept that he only smiled closed-mouth smiles. Or he’d thought they had; he’d overheard Harry and Hermione talking in the drawing room a few days before they were set to head back to Hogwarts, though he hadn’t meant to listen. But he’d heard his own name, and, well—he’d accepted long ago that he had no impulse control.
“Sirius seems so sad,” Harry had said, and Sirius had stopped just short of the door. “Do you think he’s okay?”
“He got used to having everybody at the house over the summer,” Hermione said. “And I heard Dumbledore tore him a new one about going to King’s Cross. It makes sense that he wouldn’t seem as happy.”
“I just thought—”
“It’s Sirius, Kreacher, and sporadically Lupin,” Hermione said. “He refuses to get along with Kreacher, and he’s stuck in the ancestral home of some of the worst people I’ve ever heard of. Of course he’s miserable, Harry. It doesn’t excuse how he acts, but—”
“He’s doing his best.”
Hermione sighed. “I know. I just wish he would treat Kreacher with a little dignity. If he would just free him—”
“With the amount he knows about the Order? And anyway, what the hell would Kreacher do if he were free? He’d probably go straight to bloody Voldemort!”
“You’re being absurd.”
“Elves are people, right, Hermione? And some people are awful. I trust Dobby. I do not trust Kreacher.”
“Oh, come on, it’s not his fault he—”
“You think that makes a difference?”
And then Sirius had walked into the room, desperately wishing he could smile at Harry properly without showing his teeth.
Sirius had been alone at the house for five days when the floo crackled. He was in the middle of counting every single crack in the master bathroom when he heard it, and jumped up and ran downstairs, resisting the urge to turn into a dog and jump Remus. “Finally! Where have you been?”
“I didn’t know you were expecting me,” came a slow, languorous drawl, and Sirius stopped, then picked up the pace. “Did he talk to you first?”
“Who?”
“Dumbledore.”
“Dumbledore sent you?”
“Weren’t you expecting me?”
“I thought you were Moony.”
“Oh.” Snape blinked once, very quickly and intensely, a wrinkle on his forehead creasing, his head twitching forwards, just infinitesmally. “Dumbledore sent me to make sure you weren’t dead, and to inform you that the Order meeting’s off this Saturday.”
“What? But—”
“I didn’t ask why. I just said, ‘Yes, sir.’”
“Brown-noser,” Sirius said, and Snape scowled. “You’re so bloody annoying. Do you ever question anything he says?”
“I don’t have time. Some of us have responsibilities beyond being pampered by our house elves.”
“Mate, I haven’t seen Kreacher in a week. I take care of myself. I didn’t ask to be trapped here.”
Snape rolled his eyes and shifted towards the floo. “Well, I’ve seen that you’re alive. Goodbye, Black.”
“Wait!” Sirius lurched forwards. “Wait, no, I—come on, we can trade a few more”—Sirius jabbed the air aimlessly—“a few more friendly jibes, can’t we?”
“You really are pathetic.”
Sirius had a sudden jolt of blinding pain from his bottom left molars, and felt his face twitch. Snape, thank Merlin, interpreted it as anger, and bared a mouth full of beautiful, intact teeth.
Now there was a pang in his chest, too, and he looked away. “Look,” he said. “I haven’t seen another person in a week. I was counting the cracks in the bathroom tile when you got here. Call me pathetic if you want, but I—I don’t—I mean, my God, man, are you completely heartless?”
“You wouldn’t rather be alone?”
“Have you ever been alone in your childhood home for five days?”
“Sure.”
“But it was by choice.”
Snape grimaced. “My personal life is none of your business.”
“We’re comrades-in-arms, aren’t we?”
A long silence. Then, begrudgingly: “I suppose.”
“Think of it as first aid,” Sirius said, not caring how pathetic he sounded. “I’m about thirty seconds away from going mad. Just have pity. Even the guards at Azkaban had pity on me sometimes. Are you saying those people are better people than you? People who would do that voluntarily?”
Another long silence. Then, even more begrudgingly: “You’d better have firewhiskey.”
Sirius gave him a closed-mouth smile, the sincerest he could manage. “I don’t drink,” he said, turning away. “But you’re welcome to it. I’m assuming you want a double?”
He had Snape laughing within half an hour, noting smugly that his firewhiskey remained largely untouched, watching with what he knew was inappropriate hunger as Snape threw his head back with the force of it, his stubble black and speckled and trailing down to his bobbing Adam’s apple. There was a mole below it, a little to the right, and Sirius wanted to lick it, to feel its raised surface under his tongue.
“Black,” Snape said, the word lingering in his mouth. “You didn’t finish the story.”
I want to make love to your neck, Sirius thought, mourning the fact that he couldn’t bite down anymore, and said, “Er—what was I talking about?”
Snape raised his eyebrows, his wrinkle creasing again. Sirius wanted to lick that, too, though he doubted it was an erogenous zone, and Snape frowned. “You look hungry,” he said. “Do you have anything here?”
Fuck. “It’s not that kind of hunger.”
Snape went still. “Oh?”
“Well, erm—”
“You want me to hold you down and fuck you, Black? You want a personalized detention?”
Sirius couldn’t stop himself from nodding rapidly, and Snape smirked and tugged him up out of his chair and kissed him. He kissed back, desperate, frantic, until Snape’s tongue attempted to slip into his mouth, soft and curious. Sirius wanted to let him in, but he couldn’t help it—he recoiled.
Snape pulled away, blinking. “Black?”
“No,” Sirius said, shaking his head, stepping back, distantly aware that he was trembling. “No. No.”
“Oh,” Snape said, abruptly appearing very small. “I—I’m sorry, I thought you wanted—”
“I do. But I can’t—I can’t do that.”
Now Snape looked confused. “You can’t snog?”
“It’s…” Sirius clutched his own arms, sat down hard, and looked away. “It’s rotting.”
“What?”
“The inside of my mouth,” Sirius said. “My teeth are… no. I can’t snog. I’m sorry. The last thing I need is another one falling out. I’ve already lost four.”
“Oh.”
There was a very long silence. Then: “Okay.”
“What?”
“We don’t have to snog,” Snape said. Sirius could feel his own nails sinking into the flesh of his forearm. “It’s okay.”
Sirius closed his eyes. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” There was a rustle, and Sirius glanced over to see Snape sitting down too. “Azkaban?”
“They didn’t give me a toothbrush. I think they thought—people usually don’t live long enough for it to matter. And I was in for life, so—they thought I’d be dead a long time ago. Who cares if a dead man still has teeth?”
He could see Snape shaking his head in his periphery, and cursed his inability to bite his lip. Instead, he clutched his forearms tighter. “Four are gone. The rest are cracked or loose or both. I can’t—I don’t—it’s—I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing.” Snape sounded annoyed. Sirius looked up a little, and found that Snape was watching him with an absolute and total lack of judgment or pity. He bared his own teeth, and Sirius looked at them: yellowing, crooked, gap-ridden, riddled with discoloration, and with a pronounced overbite. But they all seemed set firmly in place, and for a minute, Sirius was overwhelmed by such profound jealousy that he could barely breathe.
“Everyone has bad teeth,” Snape said firmly, and Sirius looked away again. “Except Hermione Granger.”
Sirius barked out a startled laugh. “What?”
“She has the most perfect teeth I’ve ever seen. Even before she got them shrunk they were perfect.” Snape shrugged. “Four?”
“Four.”
“It won’t help with the ones that are loose or rotten,” Snape said, “but for the ones that have fallen out, I can bring you Skele-Gro.”
“What?”
“It regrows teeth.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Snape said. “I’m sure your gums and jaw are horrifically infected, though. We’ll have to treat that first, or—I need to talk to Pomfrey. She’ll know the best course of action. Maybe we can pull and regrow them a few at a time. Or would you rather do it all at once? Skele-Gro is notoriously painful. I don’t know if you’d prefer—Black?”
Sirius’s head and vision were both swimming. “They can be regrown?”
“Yes,” Snape said again. “It won’t be pretty, mind you. It’ll hurt like hell. But yes.”
“Why—why would you do that for me?”
“So we can snog,” Snape said, and Sirius laughed so hard tears started streaming down his face. And then he was just sobbing, and Snape cursed and came to him and knelt in front of him, his hands on Sirius’s knees, his eyes boring into his own. “It’s going to be okay,” he said, gripping him hard. “We’re going to fix your teeth, okay? You’re not going to have to live like this forever.”
“I haven’t had solid food in years,” Sirius gasped, and Snape’s face grew pained. It wasn’t pity, but it might have been grief, and somehow that almost felt worse. “I haven’t—I’m afraid to smile. To laugh. To talk. For people to see. I don’t—” He choked on another sob. “And they hurt. All the time. Every second of every day. Even the ones that fell out hurt.”
“They won’t forever,” Snape said, in the tone of a vow. Sirius tried to believe him, and couldn’t. “Do you hear me, Black? They won’t forever.”
“Okay,” Sirius rasped, though he still didn’t believe him. Snape was probably just making empty promises to get Sirius to calm down. They hated each other, even if he knew now that he wasn’t imagining the sexual tension. “Anyway, er, if you still want to—to fuck me, or force me to suck you, or whatever you had in mind, I—”
“Don’t be absurd,” Snape snapped, and Sirius felt the last tendrils of hope that maybe his mouth wouldn’t completely destroy his last shreds of desirability wither up and rot to nothing. “I’ll be back, alright? I’m just going to see what I can learn. Obviously this can’t wait.”
“Whatever,” Sirius muttered, looking away, and did what he could not to react as Snape stood, kissed the top of his head, and left.
Sirius had to resist the urge to yank all his teeth out with pliers when Snape left, or maybe the good old string-and-door method; he wanted them gone, suddenly, even if Snape was wrong about the Skele-Gro. He wanted to go to a pub and let a football hooligan knock them all out in a rout, to never have to feel teeth in his mouth ever again.
But instead, he went up to the attic for a cigarette, breathing in, then out. Have to give these up if I get new teeth, he thought, simultaneously giddy and mournful, testing each tooth with his tongue. He’d had them his whole life, more or less, or at least since he was a kid; he was struck by a sudden, vivid memory of losing his upper left first molar, shoving a bit of rice under its hinged cap with his tongue and feeling it pop out, the sensation so painless and sudden, a release of pressure, the way he’d run to Kreacher and demanded money. The elf had laughed, his eyes sparkling, his mouth twitching, and told him to wait for bedtime, and he’d agreed with the sullenness of a pureblooded firstborn son.
He loved me once, Sirius thought, and did what he could not to feel the gasping grief of it. What he’d loved had been an unformed bit of clay, a lump of raw humanity that hadn’t yet been molded into a person by the world. He hadn’t ever loved Sirius for who he was—only what he represented. And what he had represented hadn’t been a life worth living. Even Regulus hadn’t been able to take it, in the end.
He took a drag, patting Buckbeak when he came over and nudged his shoulder with his great feathery head. “We’ll be alright, you and me,” Sirius murmured. “You’ll be free again.”
Buckbeak whinnied. Sirius sighed. Outside, the world went on, indifferent to either of them, human beings shouting and laughing and honking their horns and calling out to one another as the dim lights of London flickered across the absolute blackness of the night sky. Sirius poked his tongue through each of his gaps in rapid succession, and wondered what it would feel like not to be able to anymore.
Snape hadn’t meant it. He couldn’t have. It was impossible. Hope had never gotten Sirius anywhere before. Why on Earth should he let himself get entrapped in that particular bad habit again? He wasn’t coming back. He wasn’t.
Three hours of chain-smoking later, the floo crackled again. Sirius bolted upright, then barreled down the stairs, stopping dead when he saw that Snape was not only back, but had company. “You—Madame Pomfrey?”
“Poppy, please.” Pomfrey smiled. Her teeth weren’t perfect either, Sirius realized; there was a pronounced gap between her central incisor and her lateral incisor on the top left side, and on the lower right, the canine was sticking out nearly sideways, crowding the rest of her teeth. “I hear you could use a little help?”
“Y-yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Can you really regrow teeth with Skele-Gro?”
“Yes,” Pomfrey said, and Sirius collapsed like a marionette whose strings had been cut, sitting down hard right there on the kitchen floor. She tilted her head, then approached, swept her skirt out, and sat in front of him with her legs splayed to the side, holding her wand up. “Open wide, dear.”
Humiliated, Sirius obeyed. Pomfrey spent a long time casting medical spells and muttering to herself, pursing her lips, sighing. “I’m afraid Severus didn’t misrepresent the situation,” she said finally, stowing her wand. “What I want to do, if you’re open to it, is extract them all now and start you on a course of healing potions. Antibiotics, bone density loss prevention and repair, the works. We can speed up the healing magically, but it’ll still take a month to get your mouth completely ready to regrow your teeth. And you’ll have to quit smoking. I can give you a potion to ease that process too. I know it sounds scary, but my concern is that if we try to do them a few at a time, the infection and decay from the untreated teeth will spread to the new ones. I’d also like to spend some time teaching you the proper way to take care of your teeth so the new ones will last. What do you think?”
Sirius tried to speak, and couldn’t. Pomfrey tilted her head and gave him a gentle, patient gaze. Finally, he managed to rasp out: “Okay.” He cleared his throat. “Yes.”
“Good,” Snape said, and Sirius jolted. “When can you do it?”
“Soon,” Pomfrey said. “I’ll need to collect the necessary potions, and there are two you’ll need to brew.”
“Of course. Back to Hogwarts?”
“Quite.” Pomfrey nodded, and accepted Snape’s hand, rising to her feet. “It’s going to be okay, Sirius. In a month and some change, you’ll have a mouth full of healthy teeth.”
“Okay,” Sirius whispered. When they left, he laid down on the kitchen tile, stared up at the dull taupe ceiling, and let himself burst into tears.
Snape was by the next day in the early morning bearing a picnic basket, a harried look on his face. “Here,” he said, and Sirius sat up, bewildered. He was still on the kitchen floor, having cried himself to sleep there, though thankfully Snape didn’t seem to care. “Take it. I have to get to breakfast.”
“I can’t eat solid food.”
“Obviously,” Snape snapped. “Hurry up.”
Sirius stood, accepting the basket. He set it down on the counter and opened it, his mouth parting despite himself as he took in a platter full of gourmet soft cheeses and a ramekin filled with chocolate mousse and some kind of delectable-looking tofu dish with bright green flecked herbs and four different soups and five different puddings, artfully arranged atop a beautiful red-and-white checkered gingham cloth. “Severus?”
“It’ll help you recover if you’re not malnourished,” Snape said briskly. “And regrowing all those teeth is going to take a lot of energy. You don’t want to damage your magical core over it. Eat, okay? Three times today at least. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Okay,” Sirius whispered, and Snape stepped forwards, kissed the line of his jaw with almost businesslike efficiency, and stepped back through the floo before Sirius could even thank him.
He was crying again within the first few bites of the tofu, slow, steady tears that fell down his face in a hot trickle, like a geyser bubbling up before an eruption. New teeth, he thought, and set down the fork so he could hug himself, doubling over with the force of preemptive grief. He knew he should feel happy—relieved—overjoyed, even—but all he felt was a kind of full-body terror. New teeth. What do I do with new teeth?
He’d be able to eat. To snog. To laugh without self-consciousness. To pry things apart. To tear and gnash and masticate. To bend and bite and break and—
He clutched himself, hiccuping, sobbing without restraint, for so long his shirt was covered in snot and his eyes were sore and his septum had started to sear with pain, until he heard a voice, startlingly close. “Padfoot? My God!”
He forced himself to sit upright as Remus rushed to him, taking his face into his hands and tilting it this way and that. “Padfoot, what happened?”
Sirius sniffed, wiped his raw nose again, and said, “Snape came by.”
“What did he do to you? I’ll kick his—”
“No.” Sirius laughed, shook his head, wiped his eyes. “He—he brought Pomfrey by.”
“What?”
“Did you know you can regrow teeth with Skele-Gro?”
Remus looked bewildered. “Teeth?”
Sirius laughed again. “They’re all gonna go. Every single one of them. She’s extracting them.”
“You—what?”
“I didn’t want to let on how bad it was,” Sirius said, wiping away the last few tears. Remus’s mouth fell open. “I haven’t been able to eat any of the food you brought me unless I grind it up into a paste. My teeth are—I mean, Merlin, Moony. Look.”
He bared his teeth, watching as Remus looked, really looked, really took them in, sick comprehension dawning. “I—I never—I’m sorry. Merlin, I should have—”
“I didn’t want anyone to know,” Sirius said. “I didn’t think there was anything to be done. I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me.”
“Oh.”
“But they can be regrown,” Sirius said, and whatever look was on his face made Remus stare at him like he’d never seen him before. “I’ll have to go a month without any teeth at all, but—”
“What?”
Sirius laughed. “God, who cares?”
Remus sat down hard, glancing at the picnic basket. “What’s all this?”
“Snape,” Sirius said, and Remus tilted his head. “He brought stuff I could eat. He says I need to be as healthy as possible while my mouth is healing. I think there’s some kind of infection. It’s—I’m pretty sure I’ve actually lost weight since I left Azkaban. It’s been completely impossible to eat. There they gave you some kind of calorie-dense gruel twice a day. I’d just turn into Padfoot and gulp it down. It’s been harder to force myself to eat since I escaped. Why did you think I took up smoking again? It’s an appetite suppressant.”
“Merlin,” Remus said faintly, rubbing his left temple. “Sirius, I—you—how did Snape even find out about this?”
“We tried to snog,” Sirius said brightly, and laughed again as Remus started choking on air.
Remus became very insistent on cooking him foods he could actually consume after that; between him and Snape, Sirius started eating two or three substantial meals a day, usually including dessert. He ignored the movement of his loose teeth as he sucked custard off a spoon, watching Moony and Snape boast on their own ideas for recipes, tending to competing dishes. “He’ll like mine better,” Snape insisted, and Sirius blinked away pinpricks of tears. “Yours is far too simple.”
“Sometimes simplicity is the most beautiful thing you can do with a piece of art,” Remus said, and Sirius had to wipe his eyes. Both of them ignored him; he’d been crying so much in the past few days it felt impossible to imagine he’d gone years without it. “And furthermore, burrata—”
Sirius closed his eyes and let it all wash over him, their bickering becoming a wordless, soothing white noise, like the lapping of an ocean against its shore. Extractions tomorrow, he thought, trying to figure out if the flutter in his gut was anticipation or fear. Both? His mouth had already started hurting a little less just from the potions Pomfrey had him on, and the perpetual sores on the insides of his lips had almost healed. What would it be like without constant emergency signals from his teeth? He knew he’d still get phantom pain—the teeth he’d already lost had made that clear—but there wouldn’t be the input of new pain anymore.
He looked up as they each slid dishes in front of him, Remus smug, Snape a bit mad-looking from the force of his determination. “What’ve we got?”
“Butternut squash puree, brought to a foam,” Remus said. “It also includes a hint of bone broth, ginger, sage, and rosemary. Taste.”
Sirius tasted it, feeling tears start to slip from his raw eyes. “Moony, Merlin. It’s magnificent.”
“And,” Snape said pointedly, “we have a spin on a classic caprese. Dots of burrata with micro-tomato cubes and shredded basil marinated in olive oil and balsamic vinegar.”
Sirius took a spoonful, holding it in his mouth to taste before swallowing. The tears continued to flow. “You should eat too,” he said. “Both of you. There’s enough for everyone. And they’re both beautiful.”
Snape sighed and pursed his lips. “Oh, alright.”
Remus grinned. He and Snape continued to needle each other as they served themselves bowls of soup and salad, and then they quieted as they sat down at the table with Sirius. “How are you feeling about tomorrow?” Remus asked. “Nervous?”
“I’m ready to get it over with,” Sirius said. There was a sense of ultimate freedom in the ability to simply talk without worrying about moving his lips too much, about having to repeat himself because of mumbling. “I’m not more nervous than I am excited. And I’m hoping it’ll help with the pain.”
“Yeah,” Snape said, and took a bite of soup. “Merlin, Lupin, this is spectacular.”
He looked like he regretted it at once, but didn’t take it back; Moony grinned. “Yeah, so’s the salad.”
“Soup’s the clear winner, I’m afraid,” Snape said, though he sounded sour about it. But his mood improved as Sirius went back for seconds, and when they were done cleaning up and Moony went to bed, he lingered, until finally Sirius gave him a searching look. “What?”
“I know you have to get up early,” Sirius said. “You must be tired.”
“Well,” Snape said, and covered his throat with his hand, taking a deep breath. “Listen, I don’t want to—I know you don’t really like me that much, and I—”
“After this last week?” Sirius laughed. “Merlin, Snape, I don’t think I’ve ever liked anyone more.”
“O-oh.” Snape gulped. “Well, erm, look, I was thinking—only if you genuinely think it would be helpful, you understand—but I was thinking, well—maybe—”
Another gulp. “What?”
“I could—I could sleep here with you,” Snape said, and Sirius felt his mouth fall open. “In your bed. Keep you company. If you want. So you’re not alone. I actually—I put in for a day off tomorrow. Canceled my classes. Obviously if you—if you don’t want that, I’m sure I could get Albus to reinstate—”
“No,” Sirius said, and Snape’s face fell. “Yes! I meant don’t get Dumbledore—yes. Stay. Please. For the love of Merlin. I would—I’d really like that a lot. It would—yes. Stay. Yes.”
“Okay,” Snape said, and they both looked away, then back up. Snape was a little pink; Sirius suspected he was a potent crimson. “I, erm—extractions at noon. And I want to make you breakfast. I had this idea about elevating oatmeal with a thick ginger glaze that—anyway, let’s go to bed.”
Sirius grinned at him, and didn’t bother to conceal his teeth. Why should he care? It was one of the last times anyone would ever see them.
He woke up with Snape in his arms, his face buried in Sirius’s chest, his breath hot against Sirius’s neck. I think I might love you, Sirius thought, and then decided it was far too early in the morning to worry about it. He tucked Snape’s greasy head under his chin and breathed him in, the scent of Potions fumes and old sweat and mothballs and cloves, closing his eyes against the morning light when blinding pain shot through his upper right canine. Snape stirred, then went still. “Oh. Hello.”
“Good morning,” Sirius murmured, amused. “Extractions today.”
“Yeah,” Snape said, and nosed at his neck. “Fuck, you smell good.”
Sirius laughed. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
He could feel Snape smiling against his skin, and said, “You know, I’ll probably be able to suck cock like nobody’s business this next month.”
Snape started, then started laughing. “You’re incorrigible.”
“You’re just now picking up on that?”
Snape’s laughter vibrated against him, and Sirius laughed too and turned him over and gave him an experimental tickle.
Snape lost it, and Sirius dove in, tickling until Snape was begging him to stop with something edging on real panic. Sirius pulled away, grinning at him as he caught his breath. “You have to promise not to make fun of me when they’re out.” He winced. “I mean—not to imply that you have to, you know, keep coming around or whatever, if you don’t want to—”
“I will promise no such thing,” Snape said, and Sirius barked out a startled laugh. “Prepare for an equivalent lack of mercy to that which you just showed me.”
Sirius grinned again. “Oh, no,” he drawled. “What a terrible fate.”
Snape smiled back. On him, it was a dangerous, sharklike thing, and one could imagine him with nothing but triangular teeth, continually regrown into razor-sharp points. I think I might love you, Sirius thought again, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The words were clawing at the entrance to his mouth, scrabbling to get out, but he kept it shut, though it made his throat ache. “Breakfast,” Snape said. “Come on. I want to get down there before Lupin has the chance to one-up me.”
Sirius laughed, stood, and held out his hand.
Pomfrey partially sedated him for the procedure, at his insistence. She had tried to talk him into full sedation, but the thought of being unaware while the teeth went made his stomach roil, his lips go numb. He needed to feel each one leave his mouth, to gain closure as he lost his teeth, and Pomfrey ultimately acquiesced, though she looked unhappy about it. But she brought the potion for partial sedation with her, and waved her wand at the drawing-room chaise lounge, which transformed into an operating chair. “Drink,” she said. “And lie down. It takes fifteen minutes to kick in. And we’re going to numb your mouth now. Swish this in your mouth for as long as you can, and then spit it out into this basin.”
Sirius obeyed, spitting when he couldn’t bear to swish anymore, watching as she meticulously transformed the room into something orderly and clean, the garish antiques giving way to sterile medical tranquility. “Didn’t know it could look like this.”
“Mm-hm,” Pomfrey said absently. “Feel anything yet?”
“Now that you mention it,” Sirius mused, “I do feel a little…” He yawned. “A little…”
Pomfrey smiled at him. “Just lay back,” she said. “Five minutes to go.”
“Okay,” Sirius said, suddenly aware of exactly how drowsy he felt, of a kind of encroaching out-of-body dissociation. It wasn’t total, yet, but it was present, and he let himself sink into it, examining each of his numb teeth with his tongue a final time.
Goodbye, he thought, staring up at the ceiling, pushing his lateral incisor as far as it would go. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
And he closed his eyes until Pomfrey said, “Okay, Sirius. I’m going to begin working on the extractions. Keep still, okay?”
“’Kay,” Sirius mumbled, and there was light above him, turning the inside of his eyelids a livid red. He blinked up at it, then closed them again, and there was a sudden sensation of plucking, of release; and all input from his left top wisdom tooth ceased.
Huh, Sirius thought, unsurprised to realize that he was crying. One after another, they went, plucked and released, until all the input he had was air on numb, open gums.
He was weeping, but he didn’t care, and he wept harder as Pomfrey wiped his tears away. “There you are, love,” she murmured. “Just let it out. It’s alright. Do you want me to get Remus and Severus?”
Sirius nodded, though it made him feel like his head was attached with a spring, and she ducked out of the room and returned with Moony and Snape, both of whom looked anxious. Snape looked at Pomfrey; Remus came to him and took his hand. “How do you feel?”
“Gummy,” Sirius said. The word felt odd, slurred, but it was comprehensible, and Remus tilted his head. Sirius bared his bare gums, giving Remus a lopsided, toothless grin. “Get it?”
Remus gave him a gentle, slightly pained smile. “I get it.”
“Your sense of humor remains as puerile as ever, I see,” Snape said, and Sirius blew him a kiss.
When Sirius woke up, something was wrong. It wasn’t morning, for one; the room was pitch-black except for dim, scattered streaks of streetlights, and there was someone next to him in bed. And there was something wrong with his teeth.
He reached for them with his tongue, encountering only gum, and remembered what he’d done, and recoiled. Next to him, the body stirred. “Black?”
“Severus,” Sirius said, or tried to, and gripped his arm. Snape sat up, rubbing his eyes, blinking into the dim light. “Severus, my teeth.”
“What?”
Sirius gestured at his mouth in growing hysteria. “They’re gone!”
“Oh,” Snape said, and rubbed his back. “It’s only for a month. In a month you’ll have brand new teeth.”
Sirius hugged his knees, rocking back and forth, and Snape kept rubbing his back, letting out a sigh. “Why don’t I make you something nice to eat? I think there’s still some of Lupin’s soup left. I can heat it up on the stove for you.”
“Okay,” Sirius whispered, hearing how garbled the word was, hating it. But he let Snape pull him to his feet and put a robe on him, following him down the stairs, sitting down, then tilting his head and pulling out his wand, concentrating.
“Black?”
Snape blinked, then laughed as Sirius’s Patronus trotted towards him. “Does this sound normal?” it asked, in Sirius’s truest voice, nothing mangled or mumbled about it, and Sirius laughed in relief.
Snape’s mouth twitched. “Well, that’s an interesting way to talk,” he said, and pulled a Tupperware container out of the fridge. “Yep. One more bowl left.” He pulled out a saucepan and poured in the soup, starting the stove with his wand. “I wish I could’ve put in for tomorrow off too. Sorry I couldn’t.”
Sirius cast his Patronus. “It’s fine.”
“You ought to at least try to learn to talk without it. That’s going to get draining.”
Sirius rolled his eyes and opened his mouth. “Spoilsport.” Snape looked confused. “Spoilsport. Spoilsport. Spoilsport!”
“Maybe cast it for that one,” Snape said mildly, not flinching from Sirius’s growing frustration, and he took a deep breath and cast it. Comprehension dawned. “I can see how s would be difficult.” Snape enunciated the letter a few times. “You sort of hiss with your teeth. I never thought about it.”
Sirius looked away, and Snape sighed. “Well, if you want to practice, I’m happy to listen. Obviously I can’t be here all the time, but I’ll keep coming by as much as I can.” He stuttered. “That is—I don’t want to overstep, or to—obviously if you don’t want me to—”
Sirius cast his Patronus. “Whenever you want,” it said, and went to Snape and licked his face before it dissipated. Snape turned a little red, and Sirius wanted to talk, and couldn’t.
He got better at it, as the days went by, practicing in front of the mirror, letting it respond to him how it would, learning what he could. He grew used to his own toothless face, though he kept having nightmares about the pain from the Skele-gro, burning and all-consuming, about his new teeth falling out instants after erupting from his gums in a conga line of agony. At least when he woke up, Snape was almost always there; he started keeping the Hogwarts schedule so they’d be in the same place in the same time more often, and combined with the healing potions and eating three meals a day at least and not smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, he felt startlingly good, better than he’d remembered he could feel. Even when he was a kid, he hadn’t really taken care of himself; he’d run himself into the ground because he knew his body could take it, had done drugs and stayed up all night and had generally treated his body with the utter disregard that came with the assumption of invincibility.
Remus, thank Merlin, hadn’t left the house since he’d found out about Sirius’s teeth; he still went out during the day, but he came home at night, and the solitude during the day became manageable, especially after the first time Kreacher saw Sirius toothless. He stopped, then laughed, an awful, vindictive cackle that made Sirius want to fall through a hole into the center of the world. “So now Master knows what it feels like!”
“What?”
“Mistress pulled Kreacher’s teeth,” Kreacher said, pulling back his lip to display a gap-filled mouth. “When she was in a temper.” He wiped away a single tear. “Long live her memory.”
“Merlin, Kreacher, that’s terrible!”
“Master thinks he knows what Kreacher deserves?”
“Nobody deserves that, mate.” He was overenunciating, as he’d learned to do; but the slur to his words made Kreacher laugh again, that same cruel guffaw. “Look, I—I’m sorry she did that to you. I know what it feels like to be missing your teeth. Pomfrey came to the house to examine me. There might be something she could do for you too. Do you want to see her?”
Kreacher went still, his face contorting, and then popped away. Sirius blinked, then let it go.
But the elf was quieter after that, contemplative, brooding, and he didn’t make as much of a point of goading Sirius into small fights. And during the second week, a week before Sirius was due to take the Skele-Gro, he came into the kitchen during lunchtime, shooed him away from the fridge, and whipped up a soup that, while objectively middling, transported Sirius to the earliest days of his childhood, when he’d still been young enough to attempt to give his love away to anyone who would take it, hoping for love in turn, before he’d learned that the world didn’t work that way, that love was reserved for people who deserved it.
Though it was getting hard to figure out what the hell was going on with him and Snape, deserving or not deserving; he couldn’t tell if Snape was the world’s most chivalrous man or asexual as a plant or if he just wasn’t attracted to Sirius without teeth or if he’d been misinterpreting everything and they’d just fallen into the world’s most affectionate friendship. He obsessed about it at night, as Snape wrapped all his limbs around Sirius’s body and kissed his shoulder, trying to figure out how to convey that he would be absolutely fine with it if they snogged now without actually saying the words.
He finally broke three days before the Skele-Gro, as Snape looked away as he was undressing. “Okay!” he yelled, and Snape jumped. “What the hell is going on?”
“What?”
“Am I just disgusting without teeth? Is that it?”
“What? No!”
“You haven’t tried anything!”
“Why the hell would I do that?”
“So you’re not attracted to me!”
“What? What about my behavior indicates that?”
“I just said you haven’t tried anything!”
Snape stopped, ran a hand over his face, and sat down at the edge of the bed. “Okay. Let’s both just take a second and—you’re upset because I haven’t initiated sex?”
Sirius looked away. “Er—erm, yeah.”
“Okay,” Snape said. “I didn’t, erm—” He laughed. “God, this is embarrassing. I don’t—I don’t have any experience with this at all.”
“What?”
“I’ve never been in a romantic relationship,” Snape said. “Ever. I don’t—and I also don’t—I’m busy. Unbelievably busy. Between school and the Dark Lord, all I want to do at the end of the day is curl up and go to sleep most of the time. Obviously I’ve been thinking absolutely incessantly about your comment about blowing me without teeth, but—”
Sirius laughed, feeling some incandescent bubble of joy rise in his chest. “I don’t want to wait,” he said. “Not another minute.”
Snape rose to his feet, swept Sirius into his arms, and kissed him, tongue and all. When he pulled away, he looked dazed. “Should that feel that good?”
“Definitely,” Sirius said. “God, kiss me again.”
Snape grinned his sharklike grin, and obeyed.
The pain was intense, but it wasn’t as unbearable as Sirius had been expecting. He was able to sleep through most of it, and though the pain was stabbing, it was more or less comparable to the pain he’d felt every day from his teeth. It was nothing Sirius couldn’t live through.
He woke up the next morning with an odd sensation in his mouth, an extra awareness, input he’d read only as agony and rot for so long that it took a second to understand what it was: his teeth felt sore.
It was the soreness of an aching muscle, of being stretched to capacity and then released; it wasn’t unpleasant, and he knew that after another day it would fade, and the feeling would just be his tongue against the insides of his teeth, his lips against the front of them, held in place by gums. He bared his teeth, feeling them clack, and there was no pain, no movement, just a wall, him and his mouth against the universe, teeth ready and able to bite whatever stood in his way.
Next to him, Snape stirred. “Black?”
“Want to see?”
There it was, a perfect s. Sirius laughed, not caring how he moved while he did it, what was shown. He jumped out of bed, pushing down on it with his hands. “I have to go look. I can’t stand it. Come when you wake up.”
Snape was already scrambling up. They made their way to the bathroom he’d shared with Regulus as a child, to the mirror that was growing more soft-hearted by the day. He smiled at himself, a big smile, all his teeth, and laughed again at the sight. There they were: thirty-two perfect teeth, white, straight as tombstones, his canines razor-sharp and gleaming. Snape skidded into the room, then let out a noise of startled approval. “They look great!”
“I know.”
“Oh, Merlin. You’re going to be insufferably vain about this, aren’t you?”
“You bet your ass.” Sirius twirled around and kissed him hard on the mouth, opening his own wide, relishing the sensation of Snape’s tongue exploring every inch of his teeth. Then he pulled away. “God. I want to eat—God, Severus, what the hell should I—”
“Don’t worry. You’re going to enjoy the next day.” Snape grinned. “We’ve got a whole menu prepared. You coming?”
“Yeah.” Sirius took Snape’s hand, sparing one last glance for his teeth. There they were: straight, whole, and luminous as the moon. He turned back to Snape, kissed him again, and smiled with all his teeth. “I’d follow you anywhere.”