Ok I have an idea: A one shot /drabble exploring their coping mechanisms (Sirius trying to move forward by pretending it never happened while Severus is stuck in an endless spiral of "what ifs" and "I wanna punch my past self so badly")
Alright friends, this is the longest thing I’ve written on this blog so far. I hope you like it. If you want me to make a second part, just let me know <3
It had been a mistake.
At least, that was what Sirius told himself every morning since it happened.
The thought came to him in fragments —between the cracks of memory and the brittle silence of the house— like a refrain rehearsed to exhaustion. It was easier to name it a mistake than to admit he couldn’t stop remembering.
Grimmauld Place made such denial feel almost natural. The place reeked of the past: rot and disuse, stale air steeped in Black family arrogance. The curtains clung to the walls like something diseased, the portraits whispered with venom when he passed, and even the floorboards seemed to creak with judgment. Sirius moved through it like a ghost misplaced among its own relics, barefoot on dust, his laughter echoing where no real joy remained.
He laughed often now. Too often. Especially when he didn’t mean it.
Laughter had become a kind of weapon— sharp, thoughtless, loud enough to drown the rest. At the dinner table, it grated against Molly’s patience, against the fragile calm Remus tried to maintain. But when Snape entered the room, Sirius’s laughter turned to steel.
Because if he didn’t laugh, he might have to feel.
It had been two nights ago. The Order gathered in the drawing room, every voice raised, the air thick with distrust and exhaustion. Dumbledore’s latest orders had been as opaque as ever, and tension was the only language they shared fluently. Sirius had been reckless with his words —because that was what he did when he felt trapped— and Snape, with his habitual disdain, had given him the perfect excuse to bare his teeth.
Insults became the currency of the evening. They traded them like blows—old, intimate, honed over years of loathing.
And when the others had left, when even Remus’s weary sigh had faded down the corridor, they were still there— two men circling each other out of habit, too proud to retreat, too wounded to stop. The fire had burned low; the house had fallen into the kind of silence that dares you to fill it.
That was when it happened.
There are moments that fracture time— moments so brief and unspeakable they exist almost outside of choice.
Sirius had reached out— he would later tell himself it was to shove Snape away, to punctuate a final insult. But his hand had found Snape’s wrist instead, fingers curling where they should not have. Snape’s breath hitched, sharp and furious. The air cracked.
Then the world held its breath.
Not a kiss— no, nothing so deliberate. But it was close enough to one that the difference hardly mattered. The space between them had become too small, charged with something that felt like hatred only because neither of them had another word for it.
And then —like every wrong thing in his life— it was over as quickly as it began.
Sirius stepped back, a curse caught between his teeth. Snape’s eyes—dark, wide, unreadable— met his for a heartbeat too long, and in that brief stillness Sirius saw his own confusion mirrored back at him, stripped of all disguise. Then Snape was gone, his robes sweeping through the doorway, leaving behind the scent of bitterness and smoke.
Now Sirius pretended it had never happened. That was his strategy: to pretend hard enough that perhaps even memory would bow to his will.
He had survived Azkaban that way— by deciding what not to think about. Denial was not cowardice; it was survival polished into art.
When Remus came by, Sirius laughed too loudly and drank too quickly. When Molly scolded him, he grinned like a boy caught with a stolen sweet. And when Snape appeared in the doorway —black-eyed, silent, poisonous— Sirius leaned into mockery as if it were oxygen.
Mock the bastard. Laugh. Keep the upper hand.
That was the mantra.
It kept the walls from closing in.
But sometimes, late at night, when the house slept and even Kreacher’s muttering had gone still, the laughter curdled on his tongue. He would remember the exact sound Snape had made —half a gasp, half a growl— and it would burn through him like a brand he couldn’t scrub away.
It hadn’t been tenderness. It hadn’t even been desire. It had been something far worse— something raw, ungoverned, born from all the years they had spent defining themselves in opposition.
Sirius knew ghosts. He had learned their habits in Azkaban: how they cling, how they whisper, how they feed on what you refuse to face.
But this ghost —this one with a hooked nose, thin lips, and too many secrets— was harder to exorcise.
Severus, for his part, did not pretend: he dissected.
He always had. Dissection was, after all, the only form of control he trusted. When the world refused to obey, he took it apart until it did. And so he took that night —the moment he refused to name— and laid it out under the blade of thought.
He examined it the way one might handle a cursed object: cautiously, clinically, yet unable to resist its pull. Not the act itself —he would not dwell on that— but the details that clung to it like residue: Black's expression, defiant even in confusion; the metallic taste of the air, thick with dust and firewhisky; the sound of his own breath, too uneven for comfort.
Memory was a treacherous thing. It refused to stay in the past. It replayed itself behind his eyelids whenever his guard slipped, vivid as if it had never ended.
He told himself it meant nothing. He told himself he hated Sirius Black— had always hated him, would always hate him. Hatred was clean, familiar, reliable. It had sustained him through school corridors and battlefields alike.
But the mind is a traitor, and Severus' was more cunning than most. It refused to obey the dictates of reason. It kept returning, again and again, to the wrong questions.
Why did I let it happen?
Why didn’t I stop him sooner?
Why, in Merlin’s name, didn’t I—
He would stop himself there, every time, as though the rest of that thought were corrosive.
It had not been desire. He would not allow that word. It had been power— yes, power wrested for a single second from a man who had taken so much from him before. Sirius Black had pushed, provoked, cornered; and Severus had refused to yield. It was a reaction, nothing more. An assertion of dominance.
That explanation was neat, ordered, safe.
It was also a lie, and he knew it.
Because when he closed his eyes, it wasn’t power he remembered. It wasn’t victory. It was the confusion in Sirius’s face afterward— the disorientation of a man who had reached for hatred and found something unrecognizable instead. It was that flicker of raw, wordless understanding that haunted him most.
Severus loathed that memory. He loathed that it made him human. That made him weak.
Silence was his only refuge now, and even that betrayed him.
Here, in the bowels of Grimmauld Place, he had no true solitude. The so-called laboratory —an old pantry pressed into reluctant service— smelled of mildew and compromise. His cauldrons sweated rust; his ingredients were stale. He worked there anyway, because it was the only place the house seemed to forget him.
He missed Spinner’s End— the narrow rooms, the dim light, the solitude that had once been suffocating but now seemed almost merciful. There, the ghosts were predictable. Here, they whispered with new voices.
Sometimes he caught himself listening for footsteps in the corridor, for the sound of Black pacing above, restless as ever. It was infuriating. To be aware of him —to anticipate him— felt like weakness. Severus despised weakness more than anything.
He told himself it was vigilance. That was easier to bear.
And yet, at odd hours, when the rest of the house slept, he would pause mid-task —quill in hand, potion half-brewed— and realize he was no longer thinking about the Order, or the Dark Lord, or Dumbledore’s endless demands. He was thinking about that moment, suspended between fury and something far less defensible.
It angered him that memory could hold such power. That a single flicker of contact could undo years of careful distance. That he could be haunted not by remorse for the act itself, but for the way it had made him feel alive— for a heartbeat, unguarded, unmade.
He wanted to excise it, to cauterize the thought out of existence. But thought, like magic, obeyed its own cruel laws. The more he tried to banish it, the more vividly it returned.
So he catalogued instead. He took the moment apart until it resembled something inert, drained of meaning. He told himself that was mastery.
But late at night, when fatigue blurred the edges of discipline, the truth whispered back to him from the dark:
That he had not been in control. That he had wanted, even if only for an instant. And that wanting, not hatred, was the unforgivable sin.
He pressed his palms against the cold surface of the worktable, breathing through clenched teeth. The house above him creaked—the sound of old wood settling, or of a man pacing restlessly through his own regrets.
Severus closed his eyes. The silence bit down again.
There would be no peace tonight.