Ficlet: You Are Not Her
Aug. 16th, 2007 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
featherxquillTitle: You Are Not Her
Pairing: Rita/Snape
Rating: R at a pinch, but more like a heavy PG-13
Warnings: DH SPOILERS, character death (canon), pregnancy.
Summary: You are not her, his eyes say the first time she seduces him.
A/N: Many thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
celtmama, chibitoaster and norwegianne for looking this over. For ff100 prompt 034: Not Enough. My apologies to Live for completely twisting the meaning of such an uplifting song.
mine eyes have seen the glory of a love that does transcend
mine eyes have seen the worst inside of man
and fear is like a fallen bridge
a broken promise
and the proof is in the bloodshot eyes of the one who failed to see
-- Live, ‘Mystery’
You are not her, his eyes say the first time she seduces him. The message comes to her clearly, like some sort of reverse legilimency. His eyes say never enough even as bony fingers grip her hip and he fists a hand in her hair, burying his face in her neck and hissing ugly breaths into her ear.
Rita doesn’t know who She is but he maps their difference in his fetish for stockings and heels and tightly curled blonde hair (nothing like Her), in trash, you’re all trash, not a truthful bone in your body, and he’s trapped at Hogwarts giving Potter detention while the skull writhes on his arm and she thinks she can guess.
She writes and loves it. He teaches and hates it. He calls her whore when she visits him at midnight in lace. She calls him bastard when he wakes her at 3am with the shadow of the mask on his face. Still, there are nights when he pours them firewhiskey and tells her what he did to Longbottom today and she laughs and counters with that rumour about Araminta Nightwish and the centaur and it’s a strange shade of normal. Sometimes, he even smiles.
(All this is before the Old Man, though. There are no more easy nights after his death.)
In the summer of ‘97 he comes to her in the dark, smelling of dust. He doesn’t see the notes spread over the desk or Bathilda’s photos and she sees no need to tell him. He calls her Lily as he tears away the sheets. She digs her nails into his back to remind him who she is and she’s not sure if it’s cruelty or mercy.
When the book is published she visits him and he’s holding it open in his hands and glaring at her like he never has before.
“Severus, please,” she whispers, and he snaps it closed.
“You disgust me.”
The night the Ministry falls she’s working til 2am under the new world order, spinning the news for the public, and she forgets to take her potion. He’s waiting when she gets home and he’s a victor with the winning side but doesn’t seem happy about it. She lets him because maybe she needs this power over one of the masters to wash the taste of censorship from her mouth. When she’s on the verge of sleep he murmurs ‘they’re going to make me headmaster’ and she drifts off thinking he sounds like death.
She is sick in the morning for the next three weeks.
Under the new world order she finds there are certain procedures mediwizards won’t perform on pureblood witches, and she goes to Severus for a potion.
“You fucking bastard,” she hisses when he refuses, looking for all the world like he’s happy about the news. “I refuse to be disfigured. Do you have any idea what this will do to me? You and your fucking cock.”
“I don’t recall you ever complaining about it before.”
She slaps him and he catches her wrist and twists it hard. The portraits watch on in silence, condemning them both.
“I’m not her.” She all but spits it, held close in his grip and glaring up at him, and he turns to stone. She shakes her hand from his brittle porcelain fingers.
“Brew me a potion.”
The news of the Hogwarts battle is all over the wireless within hours. Not even the Ministry can keep it quiet. She arrives in the aftermath and where is he?, but no one will tell her and she wants to kill them all. When she finds her way home afterward there is a note on her desk with a phial of blue poison.
They give him a hero’s funeral. Dawn: a sun bleeding Gryffindor red and gold and a sea of faces with no idea what to think. She stays there long after, waiting for the green of the day and the silence he would have liked better.
She stands at the grave and doesn’t cry.
“You fucking bastard. You had to, didn’t you? Go and get yourself bloody killed. How in the hell can I get rid of it now?”
Blue poison swirls in rivers down the toilet.
She imagines a girl with black curls and sharp eyes and it doesn’t seem so bad. There’s a certain pleasure in the idea of moulding something into a version of yourself, ready to make all the mistakes you didn’t and get some of the other things right.
When he’s born he has black hair and eyes to match, but over the months they lighten to blue and it disgusts her. Rare, the Healers tell her, but Of Course. Of course he has his mothers eyes but looks so much like his father, because that woman and that family never stopped haunting them. She adjusts her glasses and hopes he’s not as blind as she is.
Pairing: Rita/Snape
Rating: R at a pinch, but more like a heavy PG-13
Warnings: DH SPOILERS, character death (canon), pregnancy.
Summary: You are not her, his eyes say the first time she seduces him.
A/N: Many thanks to
celtmama, chibitoaster and norwegianne for looking this over. For ff100 prompt 034: Not Enough. My apologies to Live for completely twisting the meaning of such an uplifting song.mine eyes have seen the glory of a love that does transcend
mine eyes have seen the worst inside of man
and fear is like a fallen bridge
a broken promise
and the proof is in the bloodshot eyes of the one who failed to see
-- Live, ‘Mystery’
You are not her, his eyes say the first time she seduces him. The message comes to her clearly, like some sort of reverse legilimency. His eyes say never enough even as bony fingers grip her hip and he fists a hand in her hair, burying his face in her neck and hissing ugly breaths into her ear.
Rita doesn’t know who She is but he maps their difference in his fetish for stockings and heels and tightly curled blonde hair (nothing like Her), in trash, you’re all trash, not a truthful bone in your body, and he’s trapped at Hogwarts giving Potter detention while the skull writhes on his arm and she thinks she can guess.
She writes and loves it. He teaches and hates it. He calls her whore when she visits him at midnight in lace. She calls him bastard when he wakes her at 3am with the shadow of the mask on his face. Still, there are nights when he pours them firewhiskey and tells her what he did to Longbottom today and she laughs and counters with that rumour about Araminta Nightwish and the centaur and it’s a strange shade of normal. Sometimes, he even smiles.
(All this is before the Old Man, though. There are no more easy nights after his death.)
In the summer of ‘97 he comes to her in the dark, smelling of dust. He doesn’t see the notes spread over the desk or Bathilda’s photos and she sees no need to tell him. He calls her Lily as he tears away the sheets. She digs her nails into his back to remind him who she is and she’s not sure if it’s cruelty or mercy.
When the book is published she visits him and he’s holding it open in his hands and glaring at her like he never has before.
“Severus, please,” she whispers, and he snaps it closed.
“You disgust me.”
The night the Ministry falls she’s working til 2am under the new world order, spinning the news for the public, and she forgets to take her potion. He’s waiting when she gets home and he’s a victor with the winning side but doesn’t seem happy about it. She lets him because maybe she needs this power over one of the masters to wash the taste of censorship from her mouth. When she’s on the verge of sleep he murmurs ‘they’re going to make me headmaster’ and she drifts off thinking he sounds like death.
She is sick in the morning for the next three weeks.
Under the new world order she finds there are certain procedures mediwizards won’t perform on pureblood witches, and she goes to Severus for a potion.
“You fucking bastard,” she hisses when he refuses, looking for all the world like he’s happy about the news. “I refuse to be disfigured. Do you have any idea what this will do to me? You and your fucking cock.”
“I don’t recall you ever complaining about it before.”
She slaps him and he catches her wrist and twists it hard. The portraits watch on in silence, condemning them both.
“I’m not her.” She all but spits it, held close in his grip and glaring up at him, and he turns to stone. She shakes her hand from his brittle porcelain fingers.
“Brew me a potion.”
The news of the Hogwarts battle is all over the wireless within hours. Not even the Ministry can keep it quiet. She arrives in the aftermath and where is he?, but no one will tell her and she wants to kill them all. When she finds her way home afterward there is a note on her desk with a phial of blue poison.
They give him a hero’s funeral. Dawn: a sun bleeding Gryffindor red and gold and a sea of faces with no idea what to think. She stays there long after, waiting for the green of the day and the silence he would have liked better.
She stands at the grave and doesn’t cry.
“You fucking bastard. You had to, didn’t you? Go and get yourself bloody killed. How in the hell can I get rid of it now?”
Blue poison swirls in rivers down the toilet.
She imagines a girl with black curls and sharp eyes and it doesn’t seem so bad. There’s a certain pleasure in the idea of moulding something into a version of yourself, ready to make all the mistakes you didn’t and get some of the other things right.
When he’s born he has black hair and eyes to match, but over the months they lighten to blue and it disgusts her. Rare, the Healers tell her, but Of Course. Of course he has his mothers eyes but looks so much like his father, because that woman and that family never stopped haunting them. She adjusts her glasses and hopes he’s not as blind as she is.
