Disclaimer: Not mine! JKR's! And diverse other people whose names I do not know but to whom JKR has licensed HP! Although I don't think they wanted Salazar and Godric to be doing naughty things during their spare time.

Notes: This is the sort of thing that goodpeople do when they read fics like Setissma's (skyehawke) story "Covenant", which is even better. Special thanks to her for inspiration, and to samvimes for the idea of Slytherin being a Moor.

The dungeons seem lifeless when Godric walks through them. He knows that the students live there; the stains on the furniture and the laughter lingering in the air tell him that much.

Yet, now that Gaius is master and keeper of the dungeons, Godric feels that the stones are empty.

Perhaps it is the way the candlelight seems to flicker upwards and casts no shadow, or the way the walls echo only dully, and reflect only grey back at the viewer.

He can barely tolerate it any longer; he finds that he trembles when he tries. There is something missing here, in the way light falls too naturally in an attempt to hide the fading of the room's shades of silver-green.

Helga no longer sends him to the lower floors, but he can see in her eyes the pity, and he hates it more than he hates his own weakness. At least Rowena calls him what he is, if only in the crude speech of her native Wales. He can hear her murmur Coward when Helga takes the parchment from him and says, "I shall take it to Gaius – don't bother."

Rowena thinks like Plato; thinks that if he returns to the cold depths of the castle, he will find catharsis and grieve no longer.

Godric does not think, but instead acts like a man in love, his heart believing that the pain will never end, though his mind says, Today you did not hide in the forest to keep the rest from seeing your weakness; the ache of loss must be less today than it was last week.

He took the portrait of Salazar from the Arithmancy hall and hid it in an unused tower room so that he would not have to gaze upon that face when he went to see Gaius. He meant to never return to it, but since then, he has come there four times, and lain on the empty, unfurnished floor, limbs aching with exhaustion from teaching students, and waited.

Waited for Salazar to walk over, to hear that voice chide him for his Spartan dismissal of old scars, to feel the comfort of those hands pulling him to his feet. Instead, he was left only with silence, and the cold of the floor against a back that protested its mistreatment.

He sleeps alone in a tower that was meant to house two, and realised the winter after Salazar left how cold the castle would have been without the fires in every room, a task that Godric leaves undone in his own carelessness. Though some make sly remarks about a kinship to snakes, Godric knows that Salazar never did become acclimated to the chill of Albion, too accustomed to the sun and warmth of Moorish lands.

He misses the heat of Salazar in the bed that was once theirs; misses the shade of his skin, dark with the sun, and the sibilants in his voice when he spoke. In his dreams, he has all this once more, but they slip past him, fragmented memories that fade within an hour or two to only a vague feeling of loss.

The dreams are always strongest the nights after he enters the lowest floors. They are when he wakes up in tears, entranced by dream-memory-wishes of Salazar's body flush against his, skin to skin and hot even in the cold of the room. Those stay with him through the day – and he cannot bear the ache that comes with them.

It is better, far, to avoid Salazar's old haunts, and to forget him, that the ache in Godric's breast might fade.