snaples | It's just Pretend

This is a bit of retro-fic for me as I wrote this some years ago. I'm currently going through my archive in a desire to reinstate my website, and not all of the stories will be kept in this renovation. Some, I believe, were ghastly and scream for a rewrite. Others will simply not survive to see the new place. But as I reread some of the things I wrote (also in an effort to erradicate my writer's block), I stumble on stories that I will include in the new website.

This is one of them.

It's Just Pretend
by Snaples

He is never allowed to take off his glasses. It was the first of many rules. Harry has never asked why, but he doesn't need to. Without them, there would be intimacy. And there can never be intimacy.

He sighs, stretching against the cool sheets and moaning softly as an exquisite tongue lashes cruelly at one of his nipples. "Oh, God," he whimpers, baring his throat as sensation ripples from the mouth latched on his chest directly to his groin. He has lost count of the hours ensconced inside this -- their -- canopy bed, though his body has not and demands compensation for the taxing effort. "Please, Severus, I beg you--"

And Harry remembers that he isn't allowed to speak, either, nor speak the man's name. More recent rules, though no less important than the first. He feels a long-fingered hand curl over his mouth and compress his lips against his teeth tightly. He inhales unsteadily through his nose, hard, the sound saturating the silence, soon joined by muffled cries as Harry feels Snape's other hand touch his belly and press gently where pleasure is at its most sensitive inside his body. He squirms, pleading with his eyes and his body, using whatever means he possesses to communicate his desire. Wanting to end the madness, the dizzy pleasure and the exasperating torture.

Severus Snape, the quiet, fastidious and uncompromising lover, ignores him.

The older man shifts smoothly to the side, retaining the ability to both keep the young man silent and simultaneously coax him to the edge of madness. He juggles the two separate, though equally important, actions and disregards his own need. For now.

Harry is an exposed nerve beneath him. His touch on Harry's skin sends ripples of pleasure through the thin body he can almost taste like ephemeral ghosts on his tongue. His mouth, once parched for warmth, now glistens as it sluices the salt from the boy's flesh, and Snape nearly succumbs to an impulse to purr, but he keeps his pleasure bottled and safe like cor spiritus.

The boy must never know.

He will never know.

So he pinches the flesh, he paints his caresses with a dab of violence and refuses Harry's mouth. He takes him, raw, pounding into his flesh and forcing himself to forget that the body he fucks and defiles is sweet and undemanding and wanting.

For Snape would have never imagined that the remoteness he maintains, the cruelty he inflicts and the dispassion he employs are the very qualities Harry desperately seeks, eager to escape the spotlight, needing his heart to be ignored, loving that his name is a source of bitterness between them. The Boy-Who-Lived is tired of the title, and yearns to dispel the acclaim, the love, the affection rained upon him by pawing strangers.

If there must be pawing, he prefers it from Snape, who demands nothing in return.

It's not love. It's not even affection. But no less important, and certainly no less potent.

I'll just, instead, pretend to love you, they'll both think as they dress. It'll be enough. Avoiding each other's gaze as they part, one confined to dungeons that define the temperature of his heart, and the other released to protect the world and endure the Light.

And maybe one day, I'll pretend you love me too, they'll add quietly.

END