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Sirius ran down the stairs, unconsciously skipping steps. He had been looking forward to this meeting the whole week, and his friends had not made it easier that day. He expected some grumbling and in the worst case scenario screaming and hexing, but it was all worth it to see Snape again. Not something he expected from himself several months ago but now… Hell, he even quietly borrowed James' mirror and gave it to Snape, when he said that he needed to go away for some time, but that bastard for some reason was always too busy to use it.
When Sirius finally burst into the gloomy classroom, he saw the familiar figure hunched over the cauldron with something slowly brewing there filling the whole place with fumes. Worn books lied all over the table opened on different pages, and one, as always, settled in long white fingers.
“Severus!” Sirius slammed his hands on the table and the other boy jumped in his place.
“Bloody hell, Black, you could've ruined it all!” he muttered, hitting the intruder with a book, but with much less force and irritation than Sirius expected.
Well, it just wasn’t right.
No cold shoulder and no ignoring. That’s just not how Severus’ functions.
“What happened?” he dropped the school bag on the floor and fell on the closest chair himself to immediately put his face too close to Severus’ for the other boy's comfort.
The book quickly appeared before Sirius’ eyes, blocking his view.
“You mean, except what your dear friends' did this afternoon?” Snape answered from behind his impromptu shield.
Sirius jerked away tiredly, raised his hands and sighed.
“I swear, I tried to stop them.“
“'Welcome back, greasy slimeball' banner and all of this annoying sticky confetti, it’s still in my bag on all of my textbooks and parchment, I can't get it all out even with magic!”
“I'm sorry!”
Severus didn't answer and slowly lowered the book. He never accepted apologies directly, and Sirius learned to figure out if they worked or not by carefully observing the next actions and reactions of his, well, boyfriend, who hated when he used that word. Right now he looked like he didn't care at all.
Not right. They had whatever they had between them, but even in that case there was no way Severus would just let this one go.
“What happened?”
“Not your business.”
“I plan to sit here for several hours, you can say now or I will bother you until the curfew.”
Snape sighed, looking at his brewing potion, obviously calculating if the time it needed to be ready made him able to endure the torture of Black’s exceptionally “intricate” and “imaginative” attempts to get information from him.
“My father died. Some kind of drunken fight.” He muttered after several minutes of weighing all arguments for and against it.
The silence fell on both of them, and Sirius felt like it was strangling him.
Crap. And he thought the worst thing would be apologizing for not being able to stop his friends from another prank.
Sirius just opened his mouth to say all the thoughts that immediately filled his sorry ass brain, but didn’t have time to start the speech with Snape putting the annoying book under his chin and moving it up, which made every sound an incoherent mumble.
“Sirius, I don't want to talk about it.”
The First-Name Basis. Objections weren’t allowed.
Sirius himself felt the need to talk about it, wanted to be that good guy with the right words and support plan, but Severus looked at him for the first time and the emptiness in his eyes said that it wasn’t the best idea.
Sirius slowly removed the hand with a book from his chin like it was much more lethal weapon than you could’ve thought and accepted the silent plea for not being annoying this time:
“Just inform me when you’ll need a shoulder to cry on or throw a party about it, all right?”
Snape closed his eyes, smirked and nodded reluctantly, which made Sirius smile, but he suddenly almost jumped in place, remembering something, bending down and reaching for his bag on the floor.
“Here, eat it. You'll feel better.”
He straightened up and threw a bar of chocolate on Severus’ side of the table, and Snape looked at it in doubt.
“I stole it from Remus.”
The answer to Sirius’ proud confession was the look of disapprovement.
“You're- Judging me for stealing from Remus? Are you serious?”
“No, that’s you. And he deserved it today,” Snape said, unwrapping the bar and breaking it in two parts.
Two seconds passed, an understanding happened and Sirius' laughter filled the room fuller than fumes from the cauldron.
“I'll buy him one next time we go to Hogsmeade, don't worry, he won't spend the next full moon without it.”
Severus silently offered him one of the parts and Sirius looked at him in amazement.
“Severus Snape, you know what? You are too bloody kind.”
“Maybe I poisoned it and you didn’t notice,” he answered with a blank face, and Sirius grinned, snatching the chocolate from his hands.
“Well, there is only one way for me to know, right?”