confessor

He's been watching you. Observing, taking inventory of the whole great mess of you. The nicotine stains on your fingertips and your yellow-stained teeth. The hangnails, your thin bitter mouth. He's seen the birthmark on your throat, fat as a biting black fly. He sees the lines on your thin cadaverous face, and somehow he seems to see through you, down to the greying socks and the threadbare pants with fraying elastic and holes in the seat.

You dislike inhabiting your body, avoiding mirrors and tolerating showers only as you must. Your hair is greasy and lank and you've never cared so it's never been your problem. You prefer to live cerebrally, steadfastly ignoring the temperamental flesh, but something about his frank gaze makes you aware of yourself from head to toe. He sees the coarse black hair on your knuckles and it's all you can think about. He's seventeen and he's beautiful in a way you've never been. You see his broad shoulders catching sunlight and all you've got is this spiny sullen self, thin-mouthed and thin-lipped and a softness infecting your belly.

You're thirty-six and you're tired. You're thirty-six and you still get shamefully hot under the collar remembering another boy you'd despised, another one who stripped you bare, except he pinned you upside down against willow bark and showed the world your shame and cheap underwear. The father bared you and your arachnine fingers curl, tense, waiting for the son to follow. You'll be ready when it comes, when the Potter rears its head in that beautiful wretched boy. You keep your tongue poisoned, razor blades stuck between your teeth, but he's toying with you, isn't he, Severus? He's watching, swallowing you up with his strange enchanted eyes. He knows you prefer cottage pie. He knows you like a lager. He's quiet as you scrawl on the chalkboard and it shifts uncomfortably between your shoulder blades that while everyone else is taking notes on the careful addition of aconite to mercury, he's observing how you shape your letters and the bony bend of your underfed wrist. Your blood scalds. The chalk snaps in your hand.

the body snatcher, rated E, 2154 words