I wrote this for loveneverdead
Godric/Salazar slash.
PG-13.


Godric glittered. He was a small sun, orbited by gaggles of admiring women and sycophantic men. It made Salazar sick to look at him. This was Salazar's idea of the ninth circle of Hell. Certainly, he had his own admirers, though they generally arrayed themselves wherever Salazar was enthroned. They were as gaudy and as shameless as Godric's... followers, but at least they would never have the audacity to claim that they were Slytherin's friends.

Godric would accept and adopt the lot of them. He never saw the disgusting way their eyes lit up as they watched him, never for a second suspected the calculation that hid behind their breathless compliments...

Salazar ground his teeth. When someone offered him another goblet of some rich ruby liquid, he accepted, and fantasized briefly that it was the blood of those sheep.

It does no good to continue to watch him. He will be at this all night. They love him. He loves to be loved.

Slytherin turned back toward his ring of hangers-ons. His sharp-featured, gaunt face caught the light. Grey eyes glinted coldly. Conversation faltered under his expression, then shifted tack and began again. Salazar held court in glacial silence.


The scent of beeswax and burnt cotton was thick in the air. The candles had dimmed and guttered. The party had stretched long, and most of its machinery long-since returned to the warmth of their beds,- or somebody else's.

Godric Gryffindor, disheveled and laughing, wove his way through the velvets and upended goblets of the vanished festivities. His golden hair,transformed to the finest amber by the radiant reddish glow of the candles, swept his broad shoulders. His beard perfectly suited the strong square jaw and the smiling mouth. He had a face to melt the heart of angels... and he smelled of someone else.

Salazar Slytherin had a good sense of smell, but it would not have taken an expert to recognize the scent of women. His lip curled. He should have known. He sipped more wine, enjoying the crisp bite upon his tongue and the heavy coldness of the jeweled metal against his mouth. He stared at the pattern of tiles upon the floor and tried not to breathe in the cloying, mixed smells of Godric and that woman.

It made him hurt.

"Did you enjoy yourself, Salazar?"

The man was talking to him. The besotted, overly-innocent, heroic slut was talking to him. Was he too drunk to read the signs? Was he masochistic? But that voice was warm and deep and sent Salazar's blood to a frenzy.

"Did I enjoy myself? You touched someone else tonight."

He'd spoken Parseltongue. It was a velvet whip, a verbal laceration. He turned and stared coldly into Godric's golden eyes as he said it. Gryffindor did not understand, but he flinched anyway. Salazar liked it. He rose to his feet like a silk-robed shark approaching through bloodied water.

"If it's about Honoria--"

"Was that her name?"

Godric's brows drew together. His voice deepened, on the brink of danger. "I don't like it when you use the past tense like that, Salazar. I wonder what you're planning."

"As if your sword-blade mind could possibly comprehend my plans!"

"Honoria just needed some comfort. Her father is sick--"

"Did she tell you that?"

"Do you think I read it off her like a map?"

"It is a possibility, certainly. Godric, you are impossibly naive."

"Not everyone is as twisted as you are, Salazar."

Those words hung in the air. They sizzled, they danced. The two men stared at each other. They were of a height: Godric broad and muscular, Salazar thin as a rail.

Salazar smiled. His smile was slow and started at the corner of his lips. It spread like blood from a wound, incarnated into something rare and cruel.


"And no practical definition of freedom would be completely without the freedom to face the consequences."


"You know I didn't mean that." In the darkness of his room, Godric's hair sparked like treasure in a cavern. He laid his large hand against Salazar's cheek. The palm was broad, warm and callused. Salazar allowed the touch, and allowed the kiss that followed. The kiss was as strong and as wild as everything was about Gryffindor, but it was also apologetic.

And inside, Slytherin burned with cold fury.

He bit Godric's lower lip sharply.

"S'blood!" Gryffindor pulled away, touching his fingertips to his mouth. They came away dark with something. Salazar licked his lips.

"I said I was sorry. I didn't mean it."

"Perhaps," said Salazar, "it only matters to me that you said it. And don't compound your lie with a third utterance. It is hardly chivalric."

Godric stared at him quietly. The moonlight danced in his large brown eyes. "Is there an apology you will accept?"

Salazar stared at him, then gently smoothed a finger over Godric's cut lip. "Go and wash the scent of that woman off you. Return. Lie down with me."

"Yes, Salazar, of course I will--"

Slytherin closed his fist in Godric's golden hair and pulled him back, just as the larger man had begun to rise. "Tonight you will call me Lord Slytherin... until you have earned back the privelege of my given name. And Godric..."

"Yes?" There was a tension in that sentence, a low growl. Godric despised it when Salazar was cruel.

"I will not be gentle."