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Fic: Body Merchants
Body Merchants
Author: ou_topos (snogster@gmail.com)
Pairings: Draco/Snape, implied Hermione/Ron
Rating: R

This story was written for kiarene, who said, "Something unusual would be interesting. No humiliation/silly fic. Sweet or snarky. Post-Hogwarts."

A huge thank you to merrycontrary for the beta. She did a gorgeous job.



BODY MERCHANTS



The clock struck nine, and Draco Malfoy was having a fag under the lean-to halfway between Hogwarts’ front gates and the train platform.

It was probably, Draco admitted, a better fate than eating in the Great Hall. There he would endure the stares of all the hordes of Potter’s funeral procession glaring at him, seeing him as the last great barrier between Pureblood superiority and the new ideal of the multiracially indifferent man. He had noticed that Weasley, inexplicably, liked to wear an orange beret while glaring at him, a hand on the shoulder of Granger to somehow anchor her while she ate, feeling her way around the plate in the oddly wise way that blind people do.

He heard the train pull into the station half a kilometre away. He heard it shriek around the bend and rumble into the station and under the magical reflection between the walls he sat in the whistle’s high howl, which echoed strangely, waiting for his head to clear completely. He put out the fag.

Snape was expecting him. Draco had always admired Snape. They seemed undeniably of a species.

*

The room was high and prison-lit, left and right, rows of closed doors, all blank and still.

Snape had led him into a high, domed chamber beyond the Slytherin dorms, and told him to leave his wand outside. It was a place you would only wander if you didn’t know the hall, because every Slytherin past their first week knew that the dungeons could hungrily receive you and spit only your bones back out, if you were so foolish as to become lost, past the lavatories and the prefects’ meeting room.

There were small windows at the top, but it was still dim enough for a candle. Draco struck a match with one hand. He’d learned this when he had first started smoking a month ago, casting cleaning spells on his lungs that left him gasping before his shower. The bronzed muchachos had gone crazy for the Continental blond with the Old Golds dangling out of lazy lips, though.

Snape watched him like something was funny. "You’ve been smoking."

Draco shrugged, and the sleeve of his sweeping robes, which had too many buttons, whispered on the paving stones. He wondered if Snape realised the compliment. "There was a boy. Boys, really."

"I hear Madrid is lovely this time of year. Lively."

"Hola. Adiós."

"That’s the only Spanish you know, isn’t it."

"¿Usted tiene cerveza? Caiga sus pantalones."

"If I dropped my pants you would get much more than a beer, Mr. Malfoy."

Snape whispered a revealing spell that takes the glamour on the room away. Draco recognised the bodies at once. Gregory Goyle, Percy Weasley, Millicent Bulstrode, Cornelius Fudge and Harry Potter.

"I have been waiting for their relatives to die, give in, or go mad," Snape said.

Draco looked up – a new direction for the dead – at the gently floating corpses above him, still dressed, with faces clenched in their final expression. He shook Percy Weasley’s hand as he floated past; there was no rigor mortis.

"They are in the exact state that they were in at the moment of death. A little dustier, perhaps."

This gallery of silly remnants. Not a ghastly exhibit, but a beautiful one, examples of lives just half-departed. They were objects on somehow tasteful display.

"What is it that you expect of me?"

"An assistant. Potions-based transplantation is a highly exclusive field. With this experience and my recommendation, you could apprentice with any potions maker in the country. Opportunities, Mr. Malfoy. We have had this conversation before."

Draco waited for his true feelings to arrive: for disgust and fear, but scholarly excitement held. Snape could feel it too, he knew; he was close, and could see the extracurricular jitters running through his frame and the excited flickering of the eyes.

Snape was holding a copy of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers with his fine, stained fingers. Draco saw them tremble slightly, and he knew then that he would become the boy who had worked with the dead for a while, because he knew Snape. He had known Snape since his first class behind a cauldron, watching him firm strokes with a ladle while his eyes saw everything, and his tongue flayed the Potter ego down to quivering smallness. Ah, he had thought in eleven-year-old tones. So this is the anatomy of genius.

Draco nodded, the vehement depth of gesture, man and redemption going different ways.


*

It felt like home, being at Hogwarts, and Draco raced through the days with their small ravishing routines, hours the same, paced and organised into an uncentered wallow. The slow ache of purpose.

He spent afternoons scrubbing out stains from cauldrons, labeling jars of powdered milkweed, and polishing dwarf’s eyelids.

He spent days in the library, getting odd looks from the NEWTs students who saw him reading 1001 Herbs You Need to Survive in the Death Trade. He liked studying all day and gently parting crowds of students after the final bell to prove his knowledge to Snape. He was comfortable with Snape; Snape meant safety, with none of the sun-smoked, patriarchal quality of the word.

"Miss Bulstrode and Mr. Weasley require a complex anointment ritual. I understand their families believe it will effect some kind of a posthumous redemption or something equally ridiculous. Mr. Goyle’s liver can be excavated and may yet be made compatible for Arabella Figg." Draco remembered that Figg had agreed to be put into a magical coma after being hit in the abdomen with an organ wasting spell.

"Fat girls and failures have stories too, I suppose," Draco suggested brightly.

He was trying not to think of Crabbe, who seemed to have grown exponentially thinner by the week, who had crumpled oddly on himself since the final battle, when he had had to fight without his other half.

Draco was the traitor and the witness both. He was not Dumbledore, after all, who had believed in his salvation, believed that the word 'salvation' was unridiculous. In sixth year, he had probed all the forces in Draco’s history and given him books to read and candy for thought to chew on while using that word many times over.

Even lying dead now, his face blurred by acne and upper lip still beaded with nervous drops of sweat, Goyle was a man anonymous to himself. He hadn’t lived long enough or vividly enough to expand past his sizable sums of flesh, no thanks to Draco, which Draco knew too. He made the incisions carefully and levitated the organ into a spelled container.

He turned to Percy and Millicent next. Covering Weasley's chest in potion, Draco actually kind of liked Weasley, when he lay there with this agreeable animal tension between them.

He set the cloth down gently on the potion, where it plumed inward and sank, and he swabbed Percy’s belly in a drone of motion, his hand slowly circling his navel. In feeling the curve of the small vertebrae and navigating between the muscles in his thighs, Draco understood this pompous boy’s breakability, which must also be Ron’s breakability. Hadn’t they been brothers, after all? Maybe next time Draco saw him, he would be easier on the Weasel, even if he did wear that strange hat.

*

Draco entered the Potions classroom to find Snape sitting behind his desk with his arms propped up stiffly in front of him, very still. Draco knew that stillness.

"Professor!" The black eyes snapped open.

"Must you knock things over, Mr. Malfoy?"

Draco looked at the bowl of butterfly wings he upset. "I thought you were –-"

"I do sleep, you know," Snape said slowly.

"At your desk? Teachers’ salaries can’t be that low, surely."

"I put my hands in numbing potion in preparation for working with Fudge’s stomach juices. It was stronger than I had anticipated. You’ll have to take away the numbness with Effusium solution," Snape said, nodding to two stone basins on the counter.

"The one you want is on the right." Draco put his hands into the murky liquid and knew at once. He pulled them back out with a gasp, but he had already lost feeling up to his elbows. He stumbled back to the bench on the other side of Snape’s desk.

"Oh," he laughed. "Oh, Professor, you’re a fool. Numbing solutions in both bowls. I expect my arms will get better before yours, though."

They sat there then, arms outstretched. "I – this has never happened to me before," Snape admitted.

After a few minutes, sensation crept back into Draco’s arms. He opened a cabinet with spiky sigils on it and took out the Effusium solutions. He laved his hands in it to drive away the last traces of numbness, then filled a bowl and plunged Snape’s hands in it.

They were quiet, and Draco felt his childhood religion of things coming to an end at Snape’s mistake.

"It’s not working," Snape whispered. "Considering the severity of the dosage of numbness serum, I may be incapacitated for a longer period –-"

He made as if to pull his hands out, but Draco caught them. He began to rub Snape’s hands under the solution, smoothing over the knuckles. He drew in breath and exhaled slowly, feeling the Snape’s pulse through his fingertips as they massaged sinew and flesh. It took all his concentration, and his hands began to shake with the sensitivity of the touch. When Snape’s hands drew up convulsively, Draco thought he could feel the other man’s fingerprints branded on his palm. Snape's eyes were wide on him.

"I am quite all right, Mr. Malfoy," Snape said, drying his hands on a washcloth. Draco wiped his on the front of his workrobes, shivering at the rough rasp.

Snape gestured to Fudge on the marble slab.

"I’m quite certain that everybody in the war effort has fantasized at least once about scooping Cornelius Fudge’s innards out with a spoon. Fudge’s wife has agreed to donate his heart to St. Mungo’s, although I won’t be surprised if we open him up and found some kind of large pimple in its place. Why don’t you do the honours."


*

"Potter, you must know, will remain a hero. His eyes will be used in an Oculus potion to restore Miss Granger's sight."

They have just pulled Potter’s body out of the domed room and lain him on the table when Draco notices that Potter – Potter is hard underneath his shabby, ill-fitting jeans. He is determined not to look at it, and somehow, by so adamantly not looking at it, he makes Snape look at it, who made a faintly surprised noise.

"They call it angel lust. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon."

"I suppose it would be wildly inappropriate to mention Death Eating right now."

Snape snorted, and continued disinfecting Potter’s brow, in the space between his eyes where, Moody had told Draco once, you could kill a man if you hit him hard enough.

The problem with death, Draco knew, was that it held everthing up to spectral brilliance: Potter’s life was rediscovered country, but impossible to claim again. Draco had considered nicking himself on the arm for every time he had somehow lost to Potter, but sleeveless robes were in season right now. Instead, he felt wet trickling out of the corners of his eyes. Bloody Potter and his bloody special eyes, who couldn’t help playing the hero even after he was dead.

Snape put down his scalpel with a clatter. "What on earth is it? I would have expected some joy."

"It’s over," Draco whispered. "Perfect Potter and his heroism. And now he’s had the unutterable gall to die. He’s won again, and I’m here, working on his dead body, under attack from the – the lemur of trivia, or something. That’s what I am. I’m endlessly trivial."

"The lemur of trivia," Snape repeated.

"I like animal metaphors, as long as they’re not ferrets," Draco sniffed.

Snape sprayed some lotion with verbena onto a handkerchief before handing it to Draco. "For the redness," he said. Draco glared, but applied it to his face anyway.

"We cannot all of us believe that we are victims all the time," Snape said. "He grew up in a cupboard, Draco. The beauty of Slytherin is that it is self-despising, so you will never have the instant gratification of foolish heroics."

"If he had lived, he might have thanked me one day," Draco said.

"Did his gratitude mean so very much to you, then? There are worthier candidates for that. I’m quite sure that Miss Granger would be glad to give you something once you restore her sight."

"Oh, intercourse," Draco moaned. "Sleeping with Granger would be like cooking nude in public. You’d only try it for curiosity’s sake, and never do it again because it’s really not worth it to put such beautiful bits at risk of being burnt and eaten."

"I assure you that I have never burnt my beautiful bits."

Draco cast a hardening spell on Potter’s eyeballs to stop bleeding and to make chopping easier. Looking up, Draco saw that Snape was smiling. "Why don’t I give the two of you a moment."

"I hate you, Potter. And your hard-on. But I’m going to put you in a potion tomorrow, so this is me, dangling the – the stoat of possibility that one day I won’t hate you. Be grateful."


*

It was on Potter’s second night that Snape substituted newly picked feverfew with spiced comfrey, and the explosion was deafening. Draco stood for a moment to despair for the red ash in his hair. “Professor,” he started, but then the smoke overwhelms them and the acrid smell of Touch-Me-Not potion filled his nostrils. For a moment, it is war again; there was even smoke roiling over Potter’s body, as before.

Then the vapours drew out thought and memory in thick, seductive scabs and he had no history trailing him and no future leading him. It was simply the moment, and what Draco wanted at the moment was Severus Snape, naked.

Somehow despite the heat in their blood and irritation in their eyes he and Snape know to leave the room and close the door. But now he was alone with Snape, Snape in Snape’s quarters, and he couldn't help it when he grabbed Snape’s hand and he is quite sure later that given the choice and his proper mental faculties, Snape would not have giggled and grasped his hand back, dragging him into his bedroom. Draco, still laughing, removes Snape’s robes, and his waistcoat, and his shirt, and his trousers, and then underthings whose proper names probably hadn’t been tumbled out of young, laughing mouths for twenty years or more. Draco’s eyes were watering now; he only knew that he had undone all of Snape’s clothing by touch.

They crawled delirious together in the blackness before the second stage of the Touch-Me-Not potion began, and they fell asleep.


*


Draco dreamed. He dreamed that he was working on Potter’s eyes again, but they kept healing over. Potter blinked and pushed him away. Snape’s voice, which murmured Potions ingredients, was coming from between the spaces between stones in the wall. Potter wraps his arm around Draco’s waist and walks him toward Snape’s bedroom, and Draco lets himself be led. Potter says, “Sex is much better when you’re alive. People are more willing to touch you, y’know. All that firm flesh, with skin wrapped around muscle wrapped around blood vessels, and you know, below even that, there’s living bone.” Words wrapping themselves around him, like Potter around his chest, with his fingers around his cock, until he drowned in them and came helplessly to the drone of “Add bloodwort in half-cup increments…” while Potter whispered, “Alive, alive.”


*

When Draco woke, he could still not see properly out of one eye. He and Snape were swooned together, and he detached himself gently. Snape lay there, open for observation, and so Draco just looked at him for a minute, trying to straighten out the mental undervolvements of this thing he felt. He reached into his robe for the vial of Effusium potion, uncorked it, and poured it all between his fingers. He smoothed it over Snape’s lips, his cheeks, and leaned forward to kiss him. Sleeping Beauty whose beauty will lie in the kiss. Snape’s eyes fluttered open.

But Draco was a coward, he has always been a coward. He could escape all roles but this: he could be the clown, the whore, endlessly young while he talks, and now he spoke as the boy who does not know his own intentions, struggles with his own tired deliberations. Tired-eyed, too old and undeniably graying, Snape was incredibly inappropriate for him, and Draco was afraid.

"You must think me chronically pathetic,” Draco says. “Professor, I assure you that I –-"

Snape leaned forward and kissed him quickly, wetly. "Shut up, you stupid boy. Shut up, shut up, shut up."

Snape said it viciously, and Draco was surprised, because he could tease out Snape’s mildness like the webbing on a frog’s foot, and maybe that should have told him that he would not be refused.

Draco swallowed. "Yes."

It’s like working on dead bodies, really. It seemed as illicit as that. Draco peeked up at him through his fringe, and Snape’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction. They were larger and stranger than before.

Snape pressed him back against the pillows and kissed him slowly, extorting all the taste out of his mouth. Draco’s arms came around Snape’s shoulders and pulled the warm weight down on top of him, and Draco sighed into his ear, and he shuddered and lifted his mouth for another kiss. Draco was startled again; Snape wasn’t a very big man, but he had thought his body against him would be a different size.

He worked his hands down Snape’s back while Snape kissed down his face – and then Snape undid the top button of his workrobes and pressed a fervent kiss to the hollow of his throat, and Draco pushed up suddenly and rolled on top of him, kissing him hard.

Snape's hands came up under the robes, which hung off him like limp white ribs, and Draco knelt up, straddling his thighs, and lifted them off over his head before they rolled again.

Draco lay back against the pillows and raised a hand, tickling Snape's collarbone. Draco's eyes drank him in and Draco's fingers feathered down his chest, thumbed a nipple carelessly, slid over his belly to caress his stomach muscles before tracing the curve of his hipbone.

At last Draco ran a finger up his cock. He shuddered as Draco explored him gently with his fingertips, eyes never leaving his face. Draco firmed his grip and Snape gasped, hands going to fists on his thighs. Draco saw his surrender and bit his lip in concentration while trying not to smile, tightening his hand again and moving it up and down slowly, and it was so good Snape thrust into the hand.

Snape leaned forward, pushing with his hips, and drove them both a little across the sheets even though they were pushed up against the headboard. He gasped out against Draco’s ear, puffs of air that resolved themselves into "Oh, god, yes – just there –- oh –-"

Draco breathed out heavily through his mouth, and his hand moved faster, harder – perfect – and Snape closed his eyes and threw his head back and climaxed violently over Draco’s chest and belly, over his hand.

Draco couldn’t help it now, and he pulled under Snape’s arm with his other hand until he came down on the boy’s chest clumsily. Snape went, still pushing into Draco's fist to chase the drawing, drowning sensation, and kept kissing him while Draco thrust against his hip and clutched his back and sighed. And Draco was coming too, and as he came, he clapped his hand over Snape’s heart, which beat out a tattoo of alive, alive, alive.


*

"Tell me how Potter slept." Snape traced the lines of Draco’s chest with his tongue.

"Only saw him – oh – but the once. After we fought in the Quidditch match in Sixth Year, you remember?" Snape made an assenting noise and started to suck.

"Restlessly. He slept like a condemned man," and then, suddenly, "This is wrong."

Snape raised his head from Draco's chest.

"Oh? May I remind you that it was you who initiated sex while I was still sleeping?" Snape said it guardedly, and triumphantly, as if he had just discovered a new, malicious formula for alchemy.

"Not that. This. Haven’t you ever read a book, Professor? This is wrong. I should have pined after you for years, watched as you married someone else, probably a – a despicable, greasy character from the Outer Hebrides, an ointment distributor. We would begin correspondence years later. Then we’d make love on a boat."

"I’m the despicable, greasy character from the Outer Hebrides, Mr. Malfoy. Why don’t you just enjoy this," a kiss, "and stop referencing Muggle literature to lure me into making love with you on a boat?”

They stumbled back to the workbench hours later, Draco in Snape’s nightshirt, which was too long for him, and Snape in pyjamas – pyjamas! – from the waist down. It was amazing, really: Snape was a man who wears pyjama bottoms and forgot to cover his mouth when he yawns, then said, “Excuse me.”

They smiled as Draco completed the last incision, and they smiled as Draco pointed his wand at the eyeballs and drew them out slowly. Snape stirred the potion clockwise with a beautifully grained wooden ladle and they watched as it changed from green to brighter green. The mixture was smooth and lush, and changed steadily. It was the simplest kind of colour diffusion, but Draco was transfixed.


*

Draco crept up to the hospital ward to see if Granger was awake yet, to find her and Weasley lying on the bed with a foot of space between their ugly jumpers. Why, he wondered, do they bother trying to hide it? Their feelings sat open on the bed between them in a demarcation that was stupid, the way that being flat-pocket broke was stupid.

Weasley’s hand twitched in his sleep, and Draco noted that it looked very young but for the scar across the left palm. They were vaguely pudgy in the way that all childish bodies were, though, and Draco is grateful for a second that Weasley didn’t die, because it’s always messier to cut into fat hands.

"Oh, for Merlin’s sake," Draco muttered, and gently lifted Granger’s hand so that it covered the Weasel’s, using his wand to shift them closer together.

He went back to the Potions classroom. "Let’s give it another hour," he told Snape when he looked up inquiringly.


*

They floated the potion slowly down the hall to the hospital ward.

Weasley was still reading to her from the catalogue. “Oh, this one is rimmed by Crup hair and allows you to see the underwear of everyone within a radius of ten meters,” Ron said, laughing. Snape had told them that Hermione would probably be nearsighted, as Harry had been.

"Underwear is for the faint of heart, Weasley," Draco announced as he entered with Snape. Ron grimaced.

"Is that it, then?"

"Your powers of observation are astounding," Snape said.

"Take this immediately, Miss Granger. Swallow everything." Hermione drank it carefully, and hissed in the way that people do when they see a nasty surnburn, as her vision slipped back into place.

"Thank you, Professor," she said.

"Until you decide whether to take the glasses with the Crup fur trim, or the Elton John imitations, may I suggest these?" He held out Potter’s glasses.

Hermione set them on her nose and blinked up owlishly at them. "Thank you, Professor Snape – and Draco." Weasley glared.

Snape nodded, and swept out before Hermione could ask about how he knew about Elton John.

Draco sat down on the very edge of the hospital bed.

"All right, Weasley. I’ll bite the bullet. I’ll take the bait. I will endure this odious, odorous task. Take me, take me, O mighty, yellow-bellied marmot of temptation. Don’t keep me in suspense any longer. Tell me about the beret."


*

When he returned to the dungeons, Snape was looming attractively.

“There’s been an accident on the U-WHIT tram,” he began.

Draco cast his mind back to his International Wizarding Relation NEWTs. “The Underground Wizarding Highway in Tripoli?”

"The Tunisians can’t do without their acronyms. Whole families wiped out, apparently, with no remaining relatives. Unclaimed bodies, unwanted corpses."

"A veritable goldmine for twisted Potions experts looking for rare human potions ingredients," Draco said slowly.

Snape was vibrating slightly in his sallow skin.

"Come with me."

"I’m vigorously thinking lucrative thoughts right now," Draco said, smiling.



The end.