Chapter Text
You and Severus have an arrangement.
Twice a month, you come in from Merlin knows where, crates laden with Merlin knows what, and top off Severus’ ingredient stores. Occasionally, you source something particular for him and you don’t ask any questions. The cold, expressionless Potions Master dips into the Potions Department budget and you can pay your rent and bills and feed yourself for a while.
That’s not the arrangement.
He doesn’t look so cold and expressionless anymore, pressing you against the wall of his storeroom. You’ve never told him that you didn’t think he’d be able to pick you up in a million years given his thinness; you know he’d take it the wrong way. He’s stronger than he looks. You still remember the way he smirked when you made that gasping little shriek as he pressed you into the wall like he wanted to fuck you into the castle’s stonework.
He rests his forehead against the wall and you feel his breath fan against your ear with every breath he takes. His breath is the only part of him that’s hot; the hands gripping the undersides of your thighs are always cold—well, by the time its over, they’re not, but that’s not his heat. It’s yours.
That’s the arrangement.
“Would it kill you to eat something?” He rasps between thrusts.
“You keep bringing that up,” you say. It’s hardly the first time he’s mentioned it and even before he did, he had looked at you like you were a particularly underfed feral cat, the kind of pathetic, mewling creature people can’t help but leave food out for and scratch between her ears. “You’re going to make me think you like me.”
He makes a noise between a snort and a scoff, “I just don’t want to have to see your ribcage every bloody time I strip you.”
“You don’t have to strip me.”
He doesn’t answer because it’s true. He could bend you over or push you up against a shelf or transfigure himself a chair and let you ride him, and he would never have to strip you naked to do any of that. He doesn’t say that he likes stripping you, and that he just doesn’t like what he sees when he does it.
You’re glad to shut him up. You prefer to avoid the topic. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, after all. He says would it kill you to eat something and doesn’t realize he’s saying you could afford to eat better if you’d studied harder. Rippers, they call you: one of the wizarding world’s unskilled labor professions and the most dangerous; not counting crime, you suppose. At least you couldn’t end up in Azkaban for what you did, just an early grave if you got gored by a graphorn, or mauled by a hippogriff, or touched the wrong fungus without the right gloves.
Unlike you, Severus is smart. You know that much; they don’t let morons teach. Morons make their living any number of ways, one of them being by going Merlin knows where to find Merlin knows what and sell it to whoever they can convince to buy it for next to nothing. Hogwarts, at least, pays better than the apothecaries.
Meaning it pays to be the favorite supplier of the surly Potions Master in charge of paying them. You told yourself that when you first made the suggestion; that it would benefit you if Severus had another reason to want to regularly see you. You suppose that means you should try to eat more—it wouldn’t do to have Severus not want to see your body, lest your arrangement lose its appeal for him.
And you like the arrangement, almost as much as you like the money. You like his hands, the way they squeeze you even where’s there little at all to squeeze. You like that it’s dirty—you like that you’re being fucked up against a damp wall in a dungeon storeroom like some kind of filthy little secret. Severus isn’t married, but you’d swear he fucks you like he is, and you like that too.
It’s lonely work, being a ripper. You rent a musty room from Aberforth out of the Hog’s Head cellar, but wouldn’t bother if the rent wasn’t a pittance. Most of the time, you’re in your tent, out in Merlin’s knows where trying to hunt down a colony of a particular mushroom or a nest of vaguely magical beetles for days and even weeks at a time. Sometimes months would pass without you talking to anyone, especially if you don’t find anything to sell. You don’t quite starve; if you don’t find something to sell, you at least typically find forage. Typically.
Things are better now. You’ve learned a lot since you started and have your own spots for specific ingredients. Sometimes you turn up only to find other rippers have stripped it clean which puts you in a bind, but you know what to look for these days and always make your deadlines. Nevertheless, you fear the day you turn up to the school without everything Severus asked for. Especially since you’re now guaranteed to see another human at least once every two weeks.
You feel his grip tighten on your thighs and know he’s close. You snake your hand down to your clit and your eyes flutter closed so you can focus on the delicious way his cock utterly fills you. He expects you to come and would do it himself were his hands not full of you, so you get to work. He likes it better when you come with him, you’ve learned, not that he ever told you what he wanted. Severus Snape doesn’t talk a lot about what he wants outside of the lists he gives you before you leave the dungeons.
It doesn’t take much—you think of him filling you, the heat of his spend filling every empty space inside you, just as you do beneath the stars when you’re Merlin knows where and completely, utterly alone. Your free hand clutches the front of his robe and you gasp as you come on his cock, fluttering around him until his hips stutter and he fills you.
Severus gets to come in you; that’s part of the arrangement. If he knows that’s not something you’re terribly bothered by, he doesn’t show it. Maybe he just wants you to think that you’re making a sacrifice by taking it, or maybe he likes to think it’s a sacrifice you’ll make for him. It doesn’t really matter, you suppose.
He holds you there against the wall, emptying inside you and then longer still, even when he’s finished. His breath steadies until you barely feel it against your ear. While you miss the warmth of it, his seed is just as hot, hotter even, and unlike his breath, you’ll get to take it with you when you go.
Severus pulls out of you and sets you on your feet. You dress quickly as he puts himself away. He watches you as you dress, leaning against the wall he just fucked you on, a finger pressed to his lips like he’s considering what to do with you now that he’s had his fun. When you’re dressed, he plucks a little vial off one of the many shelves and hands it to you. You don’t get to leave until you drink it, per the arrangement. You always comply; it wouldn’t do for a man like Severus to get someone like you with child.
You hand the empty vial back and now you’re staring at each other. The moments lingers so long, it finally strikes you that Severus is about to ask you a question. He thinks better of it when he realizes you’ve found him out.
Instead he pulls out a little scroll, but instead of pressing it into your palm, he unrolls it, takes a pencil from an inventory chart by the door, and scribbles something on the bottom. You don’t see what, but he rolls it back up, and now he presses it into your palm. Part of you wants to unroll it right it front of him and just read it, but he’s watching you and whenever Severus watches you, you have to think about every little movement you make and what he’s going to think it means. So you pocket it and hear the little scroll fall against the small sack of galleons and sickles Severus gave you earlier.
Part of the arrangement is that Severus pays you before he has you. It doesn’t take a genius to know why: he doesn’t want to feel like he’s paying for it.
You want to tell him he isn’t.
Instead, you exit the storeroom as he holds open the door for you. When you hear it click shut behind you, you already know he’s gone, but you turn around anyway. You see a flash of black as he and his cloak round the corner at the end of the corridor, and that’s it.
You’re alone again.
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