rarepair_shorts | FICLET: Lies (Severus/Barty Jr.)

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Title: Lies
Character Pairing: Severus Snape/Barty Crouch, Jr.
Prompt: "tit for tat"
Rating: PG
Word Count: 582
Summary: "Another pause, and then: 'So, if you love her, why are you with me?'"
Author's Notes: Parts 1, 2, and 3.
Link to Prompt Table: Link!

Severus doesn’t protest for weeks, which, honestly, is more disconcerting than it would be if he’d raise his voice to do so. It’s just strange, and because Barty can’t read him, he never knows if the older boy really approves of what they do. Honestly, he probably wouldn’t blame him too much. He’d be hurt, but he’d understand. With their fathers, something like this is supposedly out of the question.

Then again, there’s not that much to disapprove of. They sit together for meals (which Severus still spends making sure that Barty eats enough, even though the likes of Regulus have noticed that he looks better). They steal glances across the Common Room. In the library, sometimes, they hold hands. Their kisses are chaste, private, few and far between. Grousing’s hardly unexpected, especially given the joint existence of Potter and Regulus’s prat of a brother, but it never seems to come. Severus calls it discretion, but Barty knows that it’s merely the usual game: no one wants to pay them mind.

For the Gryffindor-Ravenclaw match, though, they get their much-needed time alone. It’s still not worth much. Macnair threatened everyone, and quite effectively, into going. Everyone save the two of them. They could be closer, but they’re not. They could, in theory, strip wholly naked and no one would give a damn.

As it stands, though, Barty just has his legs over Severus’s lap, almost, but not quite, touching. Proximity is nice, but it’s not satisfying.

“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” he asks before thinking otherwise, leaning his head on their sofa. “Evans?”
“That depends,” Severus replies, not looking up from his book. His voice isn’t normally so elegiac. “Do you want honesty?”
“Yes. So: are you in love with her?”
“Very much so.”

The power of three little words does not go unexaggerated. Not that Barty doesn’t know this power, or didn’t before – but he hears, “I love you” so infrequently that it’s easy to avoid thinking of such things. Now, though. Now… he’s sure that he’ll be sick, and that his heart’s gone on sabbatical. Someone has clearly dropped lead into his stomach. His lips tremble.

“But it isn’t like that,” Severus adds. He’s still reading.
“Isn’t like what?” Barty demands weakly. And Severus doesn’t answer quickly enough. Dangerously, his voice quavers again: “Isn’t like what?”
“She’s not in love with me,” Severus explains, “and so my affections mean very little. I’m not entirely unsurprised, either.”
“Is she in love with someone else?”
“Yes. …No. …I don’t know, but neither does she.”
“She is, isn’t she?”
“I have my suspicions, but they are only that.”
“Who”
“I’d rather not discuss it.”
Another pause, and then: “So, if you love her, why are you with me?”
“Who’s to say that I’m incapable of loving you both?”

Barty doesn’t wait for an invitation, he just shoves himself up and into Severus’s lips. He has to kiss him, has to know. Severus remains unfazed.

“What point would you like to prove?”
“I just… you are with me for me, right? I’m not just second best? What you’ll take because you can’t have her?”
“Hardly, and it betrays your intelligence for you to think so.”
“Honestly?”
“Always. If I didn’t want to be with you, I wouldn’t be with you. Besides, it makes you happy, and for what you’ve given me, I’d hardly settle for not making you happy.”

This kiss tastes a lie, but disbelief is easily suspended in this case.