
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/65330.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      F/M
  Fandom:
      Harry_Potter_-_Rowling
  Relationship:
      Severus_Snape/Lily_Luna_Potter
  Additional Tags:
      Crossgen, Portrait!Snape
  Stats:
      Published: 2010-02-24 Words: 2720
****** Tantalus in Ink and Paint ******
by Greenschist
Summary
     It is almost a relief to hate this Lily after surrendering his life
     to a hopeless love for the other.
Notes
     This was started in October '09 for julia_linnea's "20 Random Facts"
     Fest but only completed now. So many warnings apply: crossgen,
     underage, darkness, unflattering characterizations where Snape is a
     perv and Lily is both a sociopath and a perv, voyeurism, obsession,
     sex between paintings, sex between a painting and a person, and a
     dash of nextgen incest.
See the end of the work for more notes
                                      1.
After his death, Severus spends the next twenty years in the Headmaster's
office. He could wander through the castle's paintings if he wanted, and
certainly Albus encourages him to explore, but Severus quickly decides there's
no benefit to it. He does not share the other portraits' desires to observe the
children, to greet new students and watch them grow, and then eagerly mark the
passage of time by the arrival of their descendants.
As disconnected as Severus becomes from Hogwarts' daily life, when sheer
boredom does drive him from the office, he is surprised to discover a new
generation in the castle, children of the last students he ever taught.
                                      2.
He notices her name first and her hair second, and the two together make him
nostalgic for the cool, green-shaded riverbank of his childhood before he can
stop himself. The old fool, Slughorn, remarks to the teacher beside him what a
lovely girl she is, so well named, so very like her dear grandmother.
Severus could tell him this is not true. The dark auburn hair spilling out
under the brim of the Sorting Hat is the same, yes, but he can see this new
Lily has the round face, brown eyes, and copious freckles of her Weasley
mother. Lily Evans was not so confident at eleven, either. She didn't flounce
up to the Sorting Hat with her chin high and a superior smile on her face. This
girl is a Potter.
Still, there is something about her, some hint of the familiar, something Not-
Potter and Not-Weasley that existed solely in Severus's memories until the
moment of his death. It is enough to send him out into the corridor after the
feast, to glower down and try to catch her eye. She passes under his painting
with nary a glance in his direction, already absorbed in a gaggle of
Gryffindors and slipping her way to the front of the pack.
                                      3.
After four years of spying, Severus hates Lily Potter.
She is, he decides, only a marginally talented witch. With none of her eldest
brother's charisma or her middle brother's warmth to recommend her to others,
the youngest Potter trades heavily upon her famous name, manipulating the
unwary and surrounding herself with sycophants. She cheats on her schoolwork,
flaunts her wealth, and encourages her toadies to taunt the socially
vulnerable.
It is almost a relief to hate this Lily after surrendering his life to a
hopeless love for the other.
It is pure bad luck, he decides later, that she should look up from her table
at that moment and spot him glaring at her from the still life behind Pince's
desk. Her small face is feline and predatory, and the tongue she sticks out is
pointed and rosy pink.
That tongue laps at his thoughts, and when he wakes the next morning from the
torpor portraits call sleep, he is harder than he has been in decades, his guts
twisting with arousal and self-disgust.
                                      4.
Severus has better things to do in this painted limbo than lurk through the
paintings gawking at a poisonous child, his favorite being the dark-haired
harpist hanging in a forgotten alcove on the third floor. Although no brilliant
conversationalist, she is buxom, dimpled, and after the sex, she sometimes
plays her harp for him. If he is relaxed enough, Severus will even fall asleep
in her bed.
The sex is almost good, but Severus learns quickly that even bad sex when alive
is better than great sex as a portrait. In his ink and paint existence, he
simply does not feel physical sensation with the same intensity he did when he
was flesh.
And isn't it just his typical luck, he asks himself, that when Voldemort has
gone to hell and he finally finds himself an attractive and willing bedmate, he
should be dead and unable to fully enjoy it?
His motto has always been that something is better than nothing, though, and
when he traces the curve of the harpist's hip, his world feels a little less
flat. He is rougher than he should be, scoring her with his teeth and nails,
slamming into her until her bed shakes and the strings of her harp vibrate in
sympathy. The scratches she leaves on his shoulders in return fill with
painless red paint and disappear quickly, but he feels great sympathy when he
sees them and knows they're both chasing the same thing.
It fills him with unaccustomed tenderness, something so uncomfortable he
considers leaving and not coming back. But what will he do with his time if he
doesn't spend it—and himself—here? Go back to spying on Lily Potter, now a
Fifth Year, using and discarding boys at an astonishing rate according to that
gossipy Fat Lady? Does he want to see that?
Severus stays where he is.
                                      5.
The last time he visits the harpist in her lonely frame is the first time he
spots Lily watching them from the shadows, her hands moving rapidly under her
skirt, eyes wide and glassy in the dark.
                                      6.
The first time Lily touches him, it's early in her sixth year at the castle.
Her fingers, slick with her own secretions, reach up to brush against his
mouth, and he catches his breath in anticipation of a real touch, of real skin
against any part of his body. He even parts his lips to taste her fingers.
Her hand is hot upon the canvas, but he otherwise feels nothing but the
familiar muted sensations and his tongue tastes nothing but linen and paint. He
is both crushed and relieved by the discovery.
                                      7.
It is Lily who suggests Severus might like watching her as much as she enjoyed
watching him. He sneers and calls her a pervert and a slut, but when she tells
him she will be in an empty classroom at ten o'clock with fellow prefect Calum
Whitby, Severus makes certain he is there and waiting by 9:30.
Lily's on her knees, the boy's skinny cock in her mouth, by 10:05.
She is loud and sloppy. Intentionally so, he thinks, and he could sneer at how
crass and juvenile she is, but he's aroused anyway, as much by the sound of her
slurps and the boy's moans as by the sights before him. When it is over, and
she smiles sweetly up at Severus while wiping her chin with the edge of her
robe, he slips behind a tree in his dreary landscaped perch, sinking down and
barely unbuttoning his trousers in time to spill onto the painted dirt between
his knees.
Severus never tells her he enjoyed watching, but when Lily informs him she has
a date, he is never, never late.
                                      8.
She pesters him for help with her homework and he refuses. "Helping" Lily
Potter means doing the work for her. If she spent more time studying and less
time whoring around the castle looking for someone willing to do her hard work
while she reaps the rewards, he tells her, she would have done better on her
OWLs than the string of Acceptables she took home. She pouts and continues to
fuck boys in dark corners while Severus continues to watch them from the
nearest painting.
Her grades improve anyway.
                                      9.
After Christmas, Severus learns the secret behind her suddenly exemplary
homework scores when an irate Harry Potter descends upon Hogwarts like an
avenging angel and Professor Cosimos is abruptly removed from his position as
Astronomy teacher.
Only the way Lily begs her father to not make the affair public spares the
school from scandal, and McGonagall is grey-faced and shaking by the end of the
day. No one, Albus assures her quietly, could have foreseen this, that an
innocent child should be so victimized within the castle, and the other
portraits commiserate as best they can. McGonagall holds her head in her hands
and weeps.
For once, Severus is glad to be a portrait. Not even shame feels as sharp as it
once did.
                                      10.
He stays in the office for the rest of the school year. He tells himself it is
for Minerva's sake.
                                      11.
They never discuss it, but when Lily returns for her final year, Severus
provides the answers to her assignments without arguing.
When he has dictated her essays, she stretches and sighs, as if even the act of
copying is too much work. If she catches him staring at the thrust of her
breasts when she arches her back, she'll smirk, but sometimes she will stand
and take off her blouse, lazily slipping buttons through their holes and
letting first the shirt and then her bra fall to the floor as she crosses the
room to stand beneath the painting. Her breasts, coral-tipped and splattered
with freckles, lift toward him as she reaches up to take his painting from the
wall, and he licks his lips involuntarily.
She likes to prop him against the wall and rub herself against him, scraping
her nipples over the rough oil paint and grinding against the frame. He opens
his trousers and she pets him roughly, knowing by now that he needs the
pressure. Even so, the sensation is muffled as if through thick cotton. But her
heat is addictive, her breath warm and damp as it billows from her lungs, and
he forgets he is nothing but paint and memories and reaches for her. His
knuckles scrape against surface of painting, and she laughs until her orgasm
chokes out the sound. She is red-faced and trembling, and Severus hates every
freckled inch of her. But she bends and licks the head of his penis, grimacing
at the taste of the paint, but following through until he comes against the
painting.
Her tongue is discolored, and he wonders if she could lick all the paint away
until there's nothing but bare canvass left.
He is glad she will be graduating soon so he can put all this behind him.
                                      12.
Ten years after her graduation, Headmaster Longbottom announces during a staff
meeting that Lily Potter will be returning to Hogwarts as Astronomy professor,
joining her brother Albus, who took over the Care of Magical Creatures position
the year before upon Hagrid's retirement. Severus feigns indifference, as he
does each time Neville Longbottom speaks, but he immediately scopes out the
Astronomy professor's office for convenient paintings.
                                      13.
When she enters her rooms for the first time and sees him hanging above her bed
in a painting of the night sky with constellations pinwheeling around his head,
she laughs. Dropping her cases to the carpet, she climbs onto the mattress and
kisses his painted mouth.
She chatters as she unpacks, scattering her belongings as carelessly as a
child. He watches, not really listening, and rubs his lips together hoping to
recapture that ghost of sensation.
                                      14.
Lily is even less well-suited to teaching than he was. She is quick-tempered,
distant, and devotes as little time as possible to lesson planning and
instruction.
She is made head of Gryffindor House anyway; there might be no one on Earth who
continues to be more impressed by the Potter name than Neville Longbottom.
Severus laughs himself sick at the news and pities the poor Gryffindors.
                                      15.
From the nightscape above her bed, Severus watches Lily seduce Longbottom, the
new squib who became caretaker when Filch died, three school governors, two
teachers, one Head Boy, and, after a drunken Christmas staff party, her own
brother Albus.
It is sickening but arousing, a perverse train wreck, and Severus cannot make
himself look away any more than he can resist wrapping his fist around his
cock. Lily theatrically moans her brother's middle name—his name—and smirks at
him over Albus's heaving shoulder, and Severus even smirks back.
Albus Potter resigns his position and moves to Romania before the school year
is out, and no one claims to be more confused by his "mysterious depression"
than his sister.
                                      16.
When Longbottom dies too young, the Governors appoint Lily Potter Headmistress.
In protest, the far more qualified Deputy Headmaster resigns his positions as
Ancient Runes Professor and Head of Ravenclaw immediately after the funeral.
Instead of their usual cacophony of greetings and advice, the portraits welcome
the new Headmistress with near silence. Severus, whose own appointment to the
office so long ago was anything but routine, is surprised to feel a surge of
anger as she walks around the room touching treasures that once belonged to
Albus, to him, to Minerva. She doesn't deserve to be here, and when she
carelessly rubs the soft textured leaves of one of Longbottom's many plants, he
tells her so.
Maybe not, she replies, but at least she didn't kill anyone to get here.
Severus knows he should have kept his mouth shut. He should have avoided the
office. He should have found the dustiest painting in the darkest, most
forgotten corner of the deepest dungeon and stayed there until Lily Potter was
nothing more than a painted shrew hanging on the wall. He knows he should have
done anything except make her angry.
Because, in retaliation, she tells the other Heads everything.
                                      17.
Albus and Minerva, and even Phineas Nigellus, stop speaking to Severus after
that, and it seems every portrait in the castle knows exactly what he and the
new Headmistress have been up to all these years. He spends most of his time in
Lily's private rooms.
Even though he hates her now, something is still better than nothing.
                                      18.
The night after she poses for the portrait that will one day hang next to
Longbottom's, Lily lies naked on her bed and asks Severus what he will do when
she is just a painting in a frame and he can finally get his hands on her.
He considers, watching her fingers dip between her parted legs. He could tell
her that he will watch her learn that wanking as a portrait is almost
unsatisfying enough not to be worth the effort. He could tell her he will fuck
her until she should be raw and use his nails and teeth to score lines in her
flesh that should hurt and that when she feels that absence of feeling, it will
be the most satisfying experience he will have had in years.
Instead, watching her fingers disappear into her greying curls as she rubs her
clit, he points out that he died at thirty-eight. By comparison, Lily is
already an old woman, her body softening and surrendering to gravity, and by
the time she hangs on the Headmaster's wall, she will be older still.
She stops, narrow-eyed and quiet, and when she climbs under her blankets and
douses the lights without another word, Severus is not sure if he has just won
a decisive victory or if he has lost everything.
                                      19.
After her death, Lily's portrait is hung beside Longbottom's in the
Headmaster's office, but she prefers her portrait in the Astronomer's Society,
where Severus cannot follow. She never appears to offer the new Headmaster her
advice, not even when called, and the other portraits generally agree this
cements her position as the worst headmistress in Hogwarts' history, even worse
than Ethelwige the Unwieldy, who forced Seventh Year boys to carry her up and
down the office stairs.
Severus sincerely hopes somebody will burn both her portraits to ashes.
                                      20.
After a few years, Albus is speaking to him again, and Severus rarely thinks of
Lily. His relations with the harpist have taken up where they left off, and
Severus tells himself that their encounters may be somewhat boring, but at
least it's a release of sorts. It's good enough.
Or, at least he tells himself this until the day he looks down and sees one of
the new Potters, grandchild of James or Albus. Messy black hair, anxious green
eyes behind small glasses, the girl looks around, worrying a lush pink lip
between small white teeth. She is so familiar, so Potterish, and Severus feels
a rush of heat like he has not felt in years. He grips the frame in reaction,
and the motion grabs the girl's attention. He smiles, close-lipped and as
benign as he can manage.
"You must be a Potter. I know your family well."
End Notes
     Many thanks to little_dollface for making this better than it would
     have been without her. All mistakes are my own.
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