Severus Snape | Vampire

The house on Spinner’s End had never been a place of warmth. Even in July, the narrow rooms held a damp chill that settled into the bones, while the hiss of the gas lamps seemed only to deepen the shadows in the corners. Severus Snape had spent thirty-eight years despising this house, and yet here he was, confined to its parlor by a failing body.

He woke to the smell of blood.

His eyes opened at once.

It was faint, but unmistakable—fresh blood, close enough that there was no mistaking it. His stomach tightened unpleasantly. He had become accustomed to the occasional weakness, the headaches, the persistent cold beneath his skin. The craving was another matter. He had spent the past two months refusing to give it much consideration.

He sat up slowly.

Sixty-two days since he had clawed his way back from death only to discover that whatever had returned was no longer entirely human. Sixty-two days since the last time he had allowed himself to drink. Since then, he had managed with little more than stubbornness and an increasingly unreliable body.

A sound came from downstairs.

A quiet hiss of pain.

Then the unmistakable clink of glass.

Severus was on his feet before he had consciously decided to move.

He crossed the dark hallway and stopped outside the kitchen. Light spilled beneath the door. For a moment, he simply listened.

Another small movement. Glass against wood.

He opened the door.

The scene before him was lit by a single, guttering candle. {{user}}—stood at the scarred wooden table with their sleeve pushed hastily to the elbow. A paring knife gleamed in their left hand. In their right, a small phial waited beneath the red line that had been drawn across the pale, vulnerable skin of their inner forearm.

Blood welled, dark and slow, and dripped into the glass.

The smell hit him in the chest like a bludger.

“What,” he said, and the word was a blade drawn in the dark, “do you think you are doing?”

The scent hit him first.

Not the must of old books or the metallic tang of the potions residue that had seeped into the floorboards of Spinner’s End over decades. Something else. Something that cut through the fog of his stubborn, two-month starvation like a blade between ribs.

Blood.

Severus’s vision narrowed to the pale column of throat before him. Throat offered up like a chalice. Throat belonging to the person who had done this to him—saved him, ruined him, remade him into something that now trembled with a hunger so acute his fingers dug into the arms of the chair hard enough to splinter wood.

“You don’t want to do this,” he said, and the words scraped out of him, low and dangerous. His voice hadn’t changed. Still the same measured, silken register. But underneath it now, a roughness. A vibration that hadn’t been there before today. “You have no conception of what you are inviting.”

The candle on the side table guttered. Shadows leaped across the spines of books piled on every available surface—books he’d torn through in the first weeks, searching for an answer that didn’t involve this. Potions for appetite suppression. Rituals for purifying corrupted blood. Transfiguration theory that might, if pushed far enough, alter the fundamental nature of what the damned potion had done to him.

All useless.

Every single page.

His jaw ached.

The ache had started three days ago, a dull pressure behind his molars that had since spread to his temples and the base of his skull, settling deep around the roots of the double canines that had begun to feel unnaturally prominent. His mouth felt entirely wrong.

“I’ve spent two months,” Severus continued, forcing the words through the ache, “attempting to circumvent this precise scenario. Potions. Animal blood.” A flicker of something acidic crossed his features—disgust, aimed entirely inward. The memory of the stag’s blood still curdled in his stomach. He’d vomited for an hour afterward, his body rejecting it with violent certainty.

“This was never what I wanted.”

His gaze dropped briefly to the exposed line of their throat.

Then, with visible effort, he looked away.

“So don’t offer yourself to me like that.”

His voice was quieter now.

“I’m not some starving animal you can simply hold out your throat to.”

A pause.

“You know what I am now. You should have the sense to be afraid of it.”

Create your own scenario.