Work Text:
KING I (dressed in gold): stately sympathies,
my good contemporary! i have brought
a rare treasure for you.
(gifts desiccated ellipsoidal xanth-ish
berry cordial)
KING II (dressed in lusty pearls): oh, you
shouldn’t have! aren’t we in for such a
treat?
(opens up the bumpy shell to luscious
carpels, liquid gold in tiny jewels)
KING III (dressed in salt): boo hoo hoo!
(weeps in a melting ovation)
—Stine An, “Orientation to Lemons, or Patience Is a Seed”
Severus Snape hates a lot of things. He hates days when the sun is too bright, blazing down on the world with a radiant vengeance; he hates children’s birthday parties. He hates the stupid squeaky step on his stairway that he hasn’t been able to fix after years of trying, and he hates Lucius Malfoy. He hates men who are so brazenly gay that it’s obvious just by looking at them: the tilt of the hips, the hint of lip gloss, the hand hanging limp in the air.
And yet here he is, two weeks and five dates in with one of the single faggiest men he’s ever met in his entire life. They meet at Sirius’s place, since he has a dog; Severus brings over his own ingredients and cooking utensils, unsure yet if he trusts the man near a stove. He’s a giggling, prancing queen, and despite himself Severus is so overwhelmingly attracted to him that he can’t think straight.
You could never think straight, his traitorous brain says, and Severus tries not to let his mouth twitch. He sits down on a barstool overlooking the kitchen and just watches Sirius, the shallow vanity muscles of his exposed arms and legs, the long, perfectly coiffed hair, the immaculately maintained mustache, the beautiful, feminine little divot of his lips that Severus wants to kiss until the man can’t breathe.
Sirius rifles through the bag of ingredients. “What’s all this come together into?”
“Hungarian mushroom soup,” Severus says, deciding not to divulge the truly outlandish sum he’d paid for wild-foraged chanterelles. “And bacon-wrapped asparagus.”
“Can I help?”
Severus purses his lips, sighs, and says, “We need a tablespoon of dill and a quarter-cup of parsley. You can chop those. I’ll handle the onion and the mushrooms.”
“Sir, yes, sir!” Sirius blows him a kiss. Severus, imbecile that he is, finds himself making a show of catching the kiss in the air and bringing it to his own cheek; Sirius looks so delighted by this that he can’t bring himself to regret it. He leans over and pets Bear, who is so bloody huge that his head comes up to Severus’s waist, even with the barstool, then hops up and starts chopping. When the onion makes him cry, Sirius sets aside his own prep work and presses big wet kisses around his eyes until he’s laughing instead.
He’s falling in love, he’s pretty sure; he’s not positive, because it’s never happened before, but he doesn’t know what the hell else to call this feeling. He and Sirius talk on the days they don’t see each other, spending hours on the phone every night, and yes certainly the man is loud but, well. Severus can find it in himself to admire that. He’s coming to realize that maybe part of the reason he hates men like Sirius is that he envies men like Sirius: they’re free, utterly free, in a way Severus will never be. He never came out to his mother before she died, and he’s still closeted at work; Sirius had come out to his entire school, and run away and lived with James when his parents tried to send him to a conversion camp. He may not be out to literally every stranger on the street, but he’s never been in the closet. Severus is not only in the closet but has set up shop there, decorating it with unobtrusive dull browns and unsuspicious, lifeless greens.
Sirius’s flat, of course, is what he’d expected; there’s a ceramic figurine of two men shagging laid out as a centerpiece on the coffee table, pulp romance novels and trashy magazines populating his shelves. Severus had felt at home here immediately, which—he isn’t sure what that says about him. The dog is meticulously well-groomed and immaculately trained, and Sirius pays another faggot with a thick Spanish accent who Severus has never seen wear normal-length shorts to walk him during the day when he’s away, the evenings when he’s busy or too tired. He’s a man taken straight out of Earl’s Court, a clone, except suddenly he’s Severus’s clone, Severus’s queen, and what if what he’d thought was hatred had been longing all along?
“You do drag,” Severus says abruptly, as he’s stirring the incomplete broth, the scent of mushrooms and paprika and bacon wafting towards him. “You go to clubs in drag.”
“Sometimes. Not every week.”
“Do you think you could make me unrecognizable?”
Sirius tilts his head. “We could start with a look here? And if you didn’t feel like it was good enough, we could just take it off.”
A long silence, and then Severus shakes his head. “God, I’m so far in the fucking closet.”
Sirius laughs. “Yes, honey, you are.” Another laugh. “That’s alright. I’m not gonna make you do anything you’re not comfortable with. I knew this about you going in. And I was forced out of the closet. I’ve never had a choice about it. You take your time, okay? You can’t take it back once you’ve done it. And everyone deserves to come out at their own pace.”
“I think I might be falling in love with you,” Severus blurts. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” He hears a creak, and footsteps, and then Sirius is next to him, turning Severus’s face towards his own. He closes his eyes in anticipation of the kiss, and Sirius lets out a very soft laugh and presses their lips together.
The timer for the soup starts going wild, and Severus pulls away and smiles at Sirius. “You should add the final ingredients. Herbs, lemon juice, and sour cream.”
He watches as Sirius pours everything together and stirs with obvious enthusiasm. “We had a cook growing up,” he says. “I never learned how. I pretty much live off preprepared meals and takeaway.”
“I had a feeling.”
“I hated it the few times I tried,” Sirius says. “But the way you cook—it’s beautiful. It’s like music.” He looks down at the soup, which is a gorgeous creamy orange with tiny fragments of chanterelles and onions disrupting the otherwise smooth surface. “I mean, it even—it felt like such a shame to chop up those mushrooms. They were gorgeous. I wanted to take a picture.”
Severus shrugs. “You should get good at something you have to do two or three times a day.”
“I love the inside of your brain,” Sirius says. “You’re so practical. I want to lick it.”
“You really are deeply strange,” Severus observes. “Come on. By the time we serve this, the asparagus should be ready.”
Sirius kisses him. “I didn’t realize artists could be so practical.”
“Artists? I’m not an artist.”
Sirius shakes his head. “You really are.”
“Maybe it’s more that art is all around us,” Severus temporizes, ladling soup into the bowls one by one. He pulls out the asparagus and sets it on the stove to cool, leaning against the counter facing Sirius. “Art is everywhere. In a hell of a lot more things than we ever think about. Art isn’t about producing a great work or a masterpiece. It’s a way of approaching the world with the intention to create. You have to want to make things. Invent. Discover. Learn. It’s why—you said maybe I should just get a new job. But that’s one thing I really like about working with kids. They’re too young to have had the art stomped out of them.” He serves the asparagus onto their plates, watching as they gently arch around the soup bowls. “Come get yours. It’s ready.”
“I’m definitely falling in love with you too,” Sirius says. “Pretty fucking hard, actually.”
“Oh,” Severus says. “Well, er, good.”
After dinner, which is so exceptional that they mostly talk about how good it is, they retreat to the living room, sitting across from each other, Bear between them. “I feel like I’ll never know everything there is to know about you,” Severus whispers. “You would still be surprising me at eighty.”
“Yeah,” Sirius says, and smiles at him. He’s dangerous to Severus’s work, to his life, to his goals, but he can’t make himself care. “Maybe the world will have changed by then.”
“Maybe so.”
Severus pictures it: a nondiscrimination clause enshrined in law, barring anyone from firing him for being who he is. It feels like such a small, stupid, specific dream, he’s embarrassed to even admit it. “All I want is not to be fired for it. That’s all I want. It would be nice to… to be able to go out with you without worrying about the school board finding out.”
“Yeah.”
“If you don’t think you can take it, I—well, I understand if you don’t want to still be in the closet at eighty.”
“You’ll have retired by then, right?”
“Sirius.”
Sirius sighs and scratches behind Bear’s ears. The great black dog shuffles and whines. “I don’t think we should worry about it too much. We’ve got time to sort things out. I’m sorry you’re in such a homophobic workplace environment.”
“The things I’ve heard those people say…” Severus lets out a breath. “I wish it were safe to come out. But it isn’t.”
“Well, I don’t—I won’t pretend not to have judged you a bit at first. But I see how passionate you are about those kids. I can’t blame you for not wanting to be ostracized from a path that gives you so much purpose.”
“Thanks,” Severus says, looking away. “I have school tomorrow. I should probably get going soon.”
“Okay,” Sirius says. “Call me? To say goodnight?”
“You bet.” Severus pats Bear’s flank, stands, kisses Sirius soundly, retrieves his coat, and heads out into a dusky flutter of snow dancing across the enstarred night sky. His car hasn’t had time to get covered with snow; it feels like a good omen, and he looks through his cassettes, grins to himself, cranks up his music, reverses back into the empty street behind him, and opens his mouth wide to sing.