Snape regarded him with a dull blink, the sort of expression one might wear after being mildly inconvenienced by a particularly slow-moving ghost in the hallway. His forearm was still bleeding, a slow, deliberate ooze that painted his sallow skin in something almost theatrical - red against parchment, the colour of consequence.
"Oh, I assure you," he drawled, impassive, "I feel plenty. From existential dread to low-grade rage."
The pain was there, in truth, but it hovered like so much else in his life - abstract, unanchored, background noise in a body already crowded with worse.
Snape watched Lupin fuss with the salve and torn fabric with a look that hovered somewhere between mild suspicion and morbid curiosity. Lupin, ever the Samaritan, doing his best to patch up a man made almost entirely of scalpels and refusal. It was almost funny.
How heartening, he thought bitterly, bonding over mutual acts of self-neglect.
But for some unfathomable reason, he did not stop him after that first resistance. Did not recoil like a mistrustful cat as he once would have. In fact, the quiet press of another's hands - the care - sent a shiver through him. Not quite warmth. Not quite comfort. But something.
He looked down at the unsightly gash on his forearm then, as if noticing it for the first time, as though it had belonged to someone else entirely, and then tilted his head, black strands tiredly sticking to his sweaty forehead.
Ah - of course he had. Foolish, theatrical, unspeakably human.
It wasn't accidental - no mere brewing mishap or careless scrape during the handling of mandrakes. No, this was something ritualistic. Raw. Torn open with the reckless fervour of someone trying to erase a tattoo carved into the soul. It wasn't the first time. But the skin bore no memory of it - there should have been layered scarring beneath, each attempt a brutal palimpsest written over the same cursed flesh. But the Dark Mark returned smoothly every time, even though it had since faded into something barely visible now save for in certain light, like a bruise beneath water - and Severus had grown dreadfully tired of being its host.
The scalpel had been sterilised not for hygiene but for irony. The cut was long and vicious, jagged near the middle where his hand must've trembled despite his resolve. The skin had split willingly enough - perhaps it, too, was tired of being a billboard for shame.
Still there, mocking. The Mark refused to be banished. A curse etched in faithlessness and black magic didn't vanish with blood. He knew that. And still, he'd tried. Again.
Perhaps tomorrow he would try something more creative - acid, maybe, or fire. Or poetry. But tonight he focused on Lupin's hands trying to stem the shame even time could not wash clean. Without meeting Lupin--Remus' gaze, he murmured:
"I'm afraid it's rather late in the game to start feeling anything else."
The word had landed like a stray spell to the ribs - not deadly, but jarring, disorienting, bruising. Severus almost grimaced. Something in him jolted, a small, traitorous part of his brain that had never stopped keeping count of how often he'd been called anything else - traitor, snake, monster, coward, Death Eater, spy.
Remus Lupin's voice carried it so achingly gently, a quiet offering - as if it had always been true. As if Severus hadn't once stood in the wreckage of boyhood friendships turned sour, hadn't learned to lace kindness with suspicion, to meet warmth with teeth.
He fixed his gaze on the far wall, expression unmoved, but his fingers curled ever so slightly against the wooden cabinet beneath them, as if steadying himself against the echo of something he didn't know how to carry.
