“We know you’re innocent,” the brat said.
Severus met his eyes with a sneer and Potter blushed, mentally flailing through his previous words to catch his error.
“Uh… As innocent as – that is –” Potter paused. “Stop looking at me like that! I’m not the one who should feel awkward,” he muttered under his breath.
Severus watched in amusement as his confidence eroded into the shadows of the dim room and only then spoke, calmly, clinically, as if the words told someone else’s story, or facts of little import. “Kindly cease stammering, Potter. I killed Albus Dumbledore.”
Green eyes jumped up to meet his across the rickety table, perfect dark brows arched above them like bows about to rain down arrows on the object of their fury. Severus looked away but continued speaking.
“By now you know why; you know that you and I are on the same side, and someone still alive in the Order knows the importance of the information I carry and trusts me, or I would not have made it through your wards. The pleasantries are irrelevant. Any restatement of the facts is redundant. Shall we continue?”
Potter flailed, caught in emotions too strong to entirely mask. They were, however, rather more difficult to read than Severus had once come to expect. Perhaps it was nothing more than the poor quality of the flickering candlelight which hid too much. Perhaps the boy had managed to do some growing up after all. Potter swallowed forcefully and dropped his gaze to his hands, where the digits lay clenched between the two men on the linoleum tabletop.
“I still hate your guts,” the boy reminded him.
“Good,” he said.
“I’d like to see them strewn across the battlefield.”
“If we have a literal battlefield, Mister Potter, you may yet get your chance.” He didn’t question his own use of the honorific. If the gossip that had filtered through the Death Eaters’ networks was remotely accurate, the boy surely deserved it in light of recent events.
And I might as well pretend to at least a modicum of respect for this supremely irritating doorkeeper to the blasted Order, he thought, refusing to attend the quiet inner voice which whispered, sounding suspiciously like the boy across from him, that he just might have an ulterior motive for treating the young man with respect.
“Now,” Severus drawled, ignoring the inner voice, “where is Lupin, or whatever lunatic may be nominally in control of this pathetic excuse for a resistance?”
“You’re looking at him,” Potter said, confidence returning apace at the pall that spread across Severus’ ragged features.
“I would have expected better of even you – you myopic, arrogant child. I’ll ask you again: Where is the person running the Order of the Phoenix, and with whom I have been in correspondence these past three weeks?”
“You’re looking at him,” he said again.
Severus’ eyes narrowed. “Unshoe-the-horse,” he challenged.
“Honesty,” Potter answered smugly, the code of potions ingredients rolling off his tongue easily as the spell to reveal their owls. “Mugwort,” he elaborated, and had the pleasure of watching Severus slump forward in defeat.
“You must be joking.”
“And Voldemort’s a crumple-horned snorkack.” Severus’ fingers twitched atop the surface of the battered table. Potter grinned.
“It is enough,” Severus bit out, “that I may be forced to trust you with information of the utmost sensitivity, information that could win or lose the war. I will not be forced to endure your attempts at levity, Potter.”
The younger man tamed his grin and inclined his head in passive agreement. “Call me Harry,” he said.
Snape ignored him, frowning. “You didn’t write those letters yourself.” It wasn’t a question.
Potter grinned ruefully at the apparent non sequitur. “Er, um, no. Hermione engineered the potions-code.”
“The redoubtable Miss Granger,” Severus drawled. “I see.”
The rejoinder fell flat when Potter, suddenly serious, leaned across the table and said, “But don’t get me wrong. I’m the one you’ve been exchanging Owls with. I’m the man in charge of things. If you’re going to help us, you’re going to have to accept that you’re working for me.”
The final three words seemed to echo in the dark and stuffy room. They stared each other down until Severus extended his left hand across the table, wincing at the demands of the peculiar circumstance.
“It would seem I have no choice.” Incredulously, he offered a wizard’s handshake.
“There’s always a choice,” Potter said in a voice like an anvil, refusing the proffered hand. Severus noticed marks of strain that a layer of grime and the poor light had hidden until that moment, and wondered how it was possible that the boy – the young man – could seem to have aged five years in as many months. “In this case, sir, your choice is simple: Voldemort or me.”
Potter punctuated his statement by spitting crudely into his left palm. He held the hand out over the table, precisely between them, palm facing down. Severus managed to suppress a grimace at the gesture by nodding severely as he reached forward again. This time, Potter clasped the hand and held.
Severus felt trapped in the younger man’s gaze even as the hand holding his seemed to seize tighter like a vise. The only sound was the slow persistent drip of the kitchen faucet through the doorway at Potter’s back. They were struggling, somewhere, elsewhere, and Severus was unsure to the point of hardly caring whether they were fighting with themselves or with each other, and if so, who might be winning.
But all of this was distant to him now. The air was too still and yet it rushed past like a violent wind. The house was too warm but he shivered. Something was wrong here, inexplicably, horrifyingly wrong, but he had no words to explain it to himself nor voice to speak his pain aloud.
Potter gasped sharply and drew back, and the sudden trap was broken. “What was that?!” he exclaimed, face pale in the darkened room.
Severus, reeling, said nothing until he was pushed under by a second wave, this one of memory. “Damn blasted meddler – Dumbledore,” he muttered angrily.
“What?” Potter said.
“The headmaster,” Snape sneered, “warned me about this, in his usual useless way.” Pausing to catch his breath, he was put off by the furious look Potter shot his way.
“He said we would be true allies, you and I, Potter, as unlikely as it sounds; that we would be the weapon that would be wielded to chisel Riddle down. And when I asked him what that portended, all he would admit to knowing is that ‘strange things would happen.’ And then started babbling in something that sounded remarkably like Gaelic.” Damn it, the old lunatic had been twinkling, and Severus had thought it was half idiocy and half an old man’s foolish wish to have his two protégés finally find some measure of agreement. Severus had honestly dismissed the conversation until now - but the present moment had brought it rushing back with bizarre clarity.
“I was to finish things –” he choked off but was enraged enough at the sympathy in the younger man’s eyes to say, “I was to finish him off the following day. We both knew it. And no, Potter, before you ask, I don’t know what Albus’ words mean. I am no better at deciphering the maudlin schemer’s riddles than you.”
Like a cauldron bubbling over heat, Potter’s temper had apparently hit its boiling point. “Don’t call him that. I know you did – what you did – under his orders, but you can’t – you don’t –”
The building shivered as someone Apparated into a nearby room. The explosion of displaced air could be heard through the doorless arch behind Potter’s back.
“Harry?” a low female voice called. “We’re back, and we got the goblins to commit to thirty fee-on-charge debits. They practically fell all over themselves to agree once I mentioned that I’d been sent by the Boy Who Lived. I thought –”
“I’m in here, ‘Mione,” he called back before turning to Severus to mutter vehemently, “Be nice to them, goddamn it, or by all that’s holy, I’ll –”
“Harry, who are you –”
Granger stuck her head around the doorway from the kitchen – Severus’ earlier arrival point when he took up the Portkey sent by the Order correspondent. His first thought upon arriving had been dismay at the dreary spotted linoleum, the same off-white surface as that which covered the dining room table at which he and Potter now sat. A base so despondent did not bode well for the Order to which he offered the service of his hard-earned information and the bitter dregs of his life.
“Oh! You’re here!” Granger said. “Good. Now we can get down to business. Neville, come in here and – oh, Neville!” The force of her disappointment was directed at the rangy, open-faced young man who had followed her into the room, and who glared at Severus predictably fiercely. “Honestly, Professor Snape is here to help us. Can’t you –”
“You killed Dumbledore.” Spoken flatly, the three words bore more than their share of meaning.
“I did,” Severus said emotionlessly.
“Just so’s you know, I hate you.”
“Duly noted, Mister Longbottom.”
Longbottom, who apparently merited the honorific as well, snorted as his name was spoken, then turned and left the room. Miss Granger broke the ensuing awkward silence.
“I’m sorry sir, he doesn’t know what he’s saying. I’ve told him again and again, I mean, he knows, but –”
“Miss Granger. Don’t fawn.” Severus could hardly admit that he understood the boy’s sentiments, or that he wanted to say the same and worse every morning when he woke up and every time he caught sight of his own grim and disgusting face in a mirror. Or perhaps he could own it, if only to these children, playing at a war that was bigger than they might ever comprehend.
“Sometimes I hate myself too,” he said. “Now can we get on with this?”
“Yes, please, of course,” Granger agreed, pulling her startled gaze from Severus’ face to pluck a sheaf of Muggle paper from the sideboard by the door. She dragged a third seat awkwardly to the round table and sat to Severus’ left and Potter’s right. “Now, where are we…”
“As good a place to start as any. Where are we?”
Granger looked up at Severus and blinked, momentarily nonplussed, but Potter was already answering. “My aunt and uncle’s house. The Dursleys’. It got damaged in the last Death Eater strike on Muggle families – Malfoy was here himself. The power’s been knocked out, and most of the furniture’s been gone since my aunt moved and boarded the place up. As a bolt hole it’s pretty much as safe as we could make it. Unplottable, Inapparable, and looks like a ruin from the street. Inaccessible to the Muggle and Wizarding worlds alike.”
“Except for Portkey,” Severus pointed out.
“That was keyed to only transport you,” Potter told him firmly.
“Look, Professor,” Miss Granger interrupted what might have been the beginning of another staring contest, “we have more important things to worry about. Tonks tells us that Voldemort is going to make a move any day, but even Sirius can’t tell us what he’s planning. We need to know everything you can tell us. Now.”
“I agree, we have much to discuss. But after that remark, you will first explain to me how a man a year and a half through the veil can possibly be delivering information to you now.”
“Don’t you know about the veil?”
Severus shook his head curtly, and although she was looking elsewhere she seemed to detect his movement because she responded, “Harry can tell you. Excuse me.”
She jumped from her chair and waded through a tottering pile of scrolls and notes piled in the corner under a thoroughly bricked-over window. Severus turned to Potter and was surprised when the young man sighed dispiritedly. Even more surprising, the answer he gave elucidated the situation.
“It’s his ghost we’ve been talking to,” Potter said. “He can see some things through the veil. He talks to Remus… and sometimes Hermione and me.” He waved one hand and drew it tiredly over his eyes. As Granger started muttering to herself amidst what resembled several libraries’ wreckage, the boy glanced at her but refused to meet Severus’ gaze. He looked exhausted beyond his years - chronological or apparent.
“She’s brilliant, you know,” he told Severus. “Bloody brilliant, as Ron always said.” His mouth twisted wryly and Severus was startled by the sudden impulse to touch the boy’s lips, to smooth the creases from his forehead and around his eyes which only made him far too beautiful. “She keeps things in order when I haven’t a clue. Managed to figure out how to spell this place safe after Shacklebolt was killed, after Moody was captured. . .”
Severus shook his head at the questioning glance – no, Moody hadn’t been killed yet – and Potter continued. “She translated my Owls to you, translates coded communication between everyone and everybody else – and manages to keep track of it all. She figured a way through the barricade of spells around Hogwarts so we can at least talk to Minerva, and managed it not a week after Ron was killed and the grounds were cut off. Her mind’s so totally directed at keeping the Order going – so don’t mock if nothing’s left for her to keep her conversation sane and in order.” He gestured toward the corner, where she crouched, seeming to mutter randomly over scraps of parchment.
Severus forged forward with the conversation in order to hide his reaction. “Where’s Lupin, then?”
“With Tonks and Sirius, when he’s not helping Hagrid convince the giants to lend a hand.”
With a sneer, he asked, “And Weasley?”
Potter flinched, but answered, without meeting Severus’ eyes, “Arthur Weasley?” His voice just barely cracked with the pressure of emotion bubbling up from within. “He’s at Hogwarts. He was there when the Impenetra fell…” Potter’s voice seemed about to break but he rallied and went on. “Because of Ron, you know.”
He didn’t know, but neither did he care, so Severus nodded. And then it hit him and he said, “Good Lord, Potter, who’s running things around here? It can’t be only you for real?”
At Potter’s nod, he concluded bitterly, “So it’s you I have to deal with after all. Lucky us – Dumbledore’s parting words aside.”
“The two of us as chums?” Potter snorted and Severus’ nod was curt. “Very funny. I suppose we’d better get on with it, too. You’ve been here all of half an hour and all I’ve done is tell you our strategic weaknesses. If you were Voldemort’s spy, I suppose now would be the time for you to vanish and leave me scratching my head at my own stupidity.” His grin was crooked and less than cheery, but it was enough to dissipate the inner chill that Severus hadn’t noticed until it was gone.
“If I were Voldemort’s spy, I would still be unable to Apparate through your wards,” Severus pointed out.
“Naw, the wards have been keyed to let you in since last week, before we sent the Portkey.” When Severus startled at this news, Potter asked blankly, “How did you think you got in?”
“I had assumed an entry clause, some condition on the Portkey. Something Miss Granger could have cooked up.” He gestured toward her corner. “You trusting child. I should Apparate away just to teach you the error of your ways.” The words were mildly spoken, their cutting edge betrayed by the smooth-worn steel and velvet which bled through his tired voice.
Potter met his eyes in silence, refusing to be baited, and Severus relented. The past months had worn on him as well; his vitriol was not up to its usual piercing accuracy. Worst of all, he could hardly be bothered to care.
“But then, I am no longer your teacher. And it seems we have more important things to discuss.”
Distractingly, Potter half-grinned again. “Like how to defeat a Dark Lord.” There was something outrageously winning about the tired creases around his eyes, the way he seemed unable to meet Severus’ equally tired regard without glaring or flinching. Severus remembered the first time he’d caught the boy intently watching him, last year in class, and the overwhelming, soul-deep revulsion he had felt as he acknowledged his own sudden attraction to the child.
Severus pulled back from that damning green abyss by turning away to glance across the shuttered window and the open door. The candles were burning down and their light was steadier but no more vivid than before in the wilted room.
Abruptly, Granger returned. “I found it,” she said. “Now boys – er, Harry, Professor – what have you got for me?”
“So far, just the agreement that he’s not going to stomp on my feelings at every turn,” Potter said brightly.
“Well, then, good work. No rest for the wicked,” she replied. Severus was shaken again at her earnestness; there was no humour in the rejoinder, only a weary sort of ironic twist; and that was mild.
“But which one of us is the wicked one, then?” Potter pressed, and she frowned down at the papers on the table before her.
“How should I know?” she bustled. “Take one of each, and call me in the morning. Well, Professor?” she asked, turning to Severus without a beat between one thought and the next. “What do you know about the last two horcruxes?”
Severus stared at her for a critical minute, then cast all his suspicions and doubts to the bitter wind. There is nobody else, he told himself. No other option. Give it to them. Give them it all, and may Dumbledore’s monument rest in peace – the interfering fool.
“Your assumption, as expressed to me in your last missive, was partially correct,” Severus ground out at last. “One of the artifacts – aptly termed in the plural ‘horcrises,’ not ‘horcruxes’ – resides in Voldemort himself. But it is not his body nor, as in the Russian tale of the firebird, his liver or heart. Riddle was, in fact, able to extract all fragments of his spirit and place them in inanimate objects external to his own physical vessel; however, such an enterprise requires that one part remain in virtually constant contact with the body, the soul’s native demesne – and so, he had it implanted in his upper thigh, on the right side. The item in question being a small fragment of metal, shrapnel almost, in the shape of the Sword of Salazar Slitherin. Snake’s head and all.”
“He’s nothing if not predictable,” Potter remarked, as Granger scribbled furiously in a multitude of colours that flowed from her quill. Noting Severus’ pointed look, he muttered softly, “Red for locations. Purple for key facts. Green for unsubstantiated information… or some such. I have no idea how she worked out the spell.”
“Blue for key facts. A simple pigmentum,” the young witch corrected absently, before meeting Severus with a lucid gaze to ask, “And the seventh?”
“The seventh horcrux,” Severus said, “is Cymroch’s stave.”
“But it doesn’t exist!” Granger exclaimed, quill paused on her parchment mid-word, orange ink blotting the velum. Potter looked on expectantly and in clear bemusement.
“It would appear that it does, though Voldemort himself is not aware of the staff’s location.”
“How is that even possible?” Granger breathed. “I thought an object’s presence was needed for the soul transference.”
“As did I. Yet Riddle apparently found a way around that.”
Potter asked, “Shouldn’t he be able to find this staff now, at least, by resonance with the part of his soul that’s in it?”
“In theory, but not in practice,” Severus answered, “yes. My speculations have led me to three possible reasons for the loss of contact with the horcrux.” A brief dramatic pause left Potter time to roll his eyes in aggravation or amusement.
“One: whatever modifications were made to the spell structure in order to use a distant object as a focus seem to have severed Riddle’s ties to the thing. Two: the staff is in a shielded location so secure that even the ties of severed soul-parts cannot breach its wards.” He paused again.
“Or, three,” Granger concluded, “the staff really doesn’t exist at all, and the seventh soul part is gone, or lost in magical limbo, or – who knows.”
“Precisely. Pursuing it could lead us on the proverbial wild goose chase. But we cannot leave the possibility of the existence of a seventh horcrux to chance. And by all accounts, Potter, you have become adept at the sport.”
Potter snorted tiredly. “I really thought when the locket turned out to have been melted into Wormtail’s hand that anything else would be easier after that.” Severus mentally agreed but refused to pander to the man’s insufferable conceit by nodding. Potter continued, “So, tell me more about this staff thing.”
“If you would oblige, Professor,” Granger said. To Potter she explained, “Remus is scheduled to check in at any time and I want to make sure that Nev is okay. Gods, Harry, if you had only heard the goblins this morning!” She was out the door and ascending the stairs at the rear of the kitchen before the final exasperated words had left her lips.
Potter stared through the doorway in her wake, blankly opaque. His face seemed deadened until his eyes revolved back to Severus, who noticed, with some relief, the inquisitive emotive spark still blooming in their depths.
“So tell me the story of this nonexistent staff.”
Severus paused too long; something in his expression must have been unguarded. In dismay he realized that Potter had noticed his shock and horror at the state of Dumbledore’s once proud Order - the condition of these warriors that habit would have him perceive as irritating children.
“Come now, Professor,” Potter said after a long minute, “it’s not as bad as it seems. We’ll probably all fall down dead as soon as Voldemort is gone, but until then, I think we’ll hold up well enough to get the job done. You’ve been through worse…”
“That’s exactly what I’m concerned about.”
Silence fell for another moment as each man sank into his disparate thoughts.
“Just tell me what I need to know, and let me do my job.” Potter’s voice almost echoed in the still room, leaving Severus shaken by the emotion roiling behind the words and the clear glassy surface of Harry’s eyes.
“God damn it,” he muttered angrily. So this is what we’ve come to. Sending children off to war. Nay, let the children lead… We should have been able to protect them better, Albus. What else were all our sacrifices for?
“All right, Potter,” he finally said. “Cymroch and Caldwen were Celtic wizards, long before Hogwarts existed or the four founders were even born. Irish Muggles were for the most part pagan then, more in touch with the earth and the energies around them – Ireland is famous, and rightly so, as a center for magic and for mystical happenings, even in Muggle records. In the ancient past, the boundaries between the Muggle and the Wizarding worlds were far more ambiguous. Muggle rulers might be wizards, or employ wizards as advisors – much as Arthur employed Merlin or Ganndalfe was courted by one of the mythical queens of Old Eire whose name has been lost.”
“Wait – Merlin was real? And did you say Gandalf?”
Potter flushed when Severus merely snorted before continuing his interrupted tale.
“Cymroch and Caldwen were twins, born on the night of the full moon at midsummer’s eve. Their bloodline is said to have traced back to the Morrigan herself. Surely you know who the Morrigan is, Potter?” A quick shake of the head. “Half sister of the legendary Arthur or Arcturus. Part human and part something else – her father’s side was said to be descended from the Unseelie court, the Fenian Sidhe – she later became recognized by the Muggle Druids as a goddess. But in our world, she is known as a Dark Witch in her own right, though more on the scale of blood rites and death womb magic than world-domination like the madman we face.” He smirked at the mired look on Potter’s face, weaving bitter silk with his voice and hoarse music with parched lips.
“The Death Eaters aren’t entirely wrong,” he continued. “Blood does tell. Pureblood wizarding families carry magic in their veins – not in their head or heart, like you or Miss Granger or myself. They know the magic from the inside, and there is no escaping it, even should they wish. And madness – of one sort or another – tends to cling to it, like shadow to the underbelly of a lion on the plains.”
Potter grimaced at the disparagement of his Gryffindor mascot, but blessedly allowed Severus to continue without interruption.
“Cymroch, the elder twin by five minutes and thirteen seconds – magic numbers, as even you will surely recall – was mad. He killed his tribe’s equivalent of a King, and, using wizardry and an appetite for brutality to rival Voldemort’s, he coerced three other Kings to bow to him and name him High King of the Celts.
“It was a dark time for the British Isles. Caldwen, who had parted ways with his brother years before, was living on the continent in Southern Gaul when he heard rumors of his brother’s abuse and excesses. He raised an army. He had won powerful friends by such acts of folly and purported bravery as lion-taming, rescuing poor maidens, slaying dragons…” Severus drawled, “I’m sure a true Gryffindor can imagine the rest?”
Potter rolled his eyes and blessedly forbore to comment.
“In any case, Caldwen had won the trust of far too many people, and when he returned to Ireland to put down his tyrant brother an army of Muggles and wizards rode with him. One in particular, who helped him strike the final blow against Cymroch, was Thiadbad – a Saxon wizard shrouded in his own myths and mysteries, but nothing relevant to our current dilemma. What is relevant is that Cymroch, Caldwen, and Thiadbad expired together, underneath the new moon, and vanished before their armies’ bewildered eyes - sword, staff, wand, armour and all. Rumours sprang up about their bodies’ whereabouts, and the resting place of their weapons and magical icons – for in those times the staff or stave was often a powerful wizard’s best channel for his power, more so even than his wand. But they have never been found. Some say they were taken by the gods or the Sidhe, others that they were never real, that the story is all a myth.”
“So we’re talking about the staff of – am I understanding this right? - one of the worst villains in the history of British wizardry? Or maybe legend?” Potter asked.
“I would say Cymroch is one of the wizarding world’s most reviled ancestors, yes.”
“And Voldemort believes he’s used Cymroch’s staff as a horcrux, not knowing its form or its location?” Potter asked. “What kind of idiot…”
“He’s nothing if not predictable,” Severus remarked deliberately. One side of Potter’s mouth quirked up at the blatant echo of his own words.
“And he thinks we’ll never find it, since he hasn’t himself.”
“Unless you have a miracle hidden up your threadbare sleeve, we won’t,” Severus stated caustically. “But since there seemed to remain little more to learn that might be of use, and since you seem to excel at pre-ordered miracles, now seemed the best time to remove myself from Voldemort’s presence. Your Owl’s timing was fortuitous.”
“We –” the young man stuttered, stopping abruptly only to focus on the open air above and behind Severus’ head. He blushed furiously. “One minute. Yes, Sirius, I know. Sod off. – No, I can’t. Send them down. – I don’t care. He’s said it all before, and he’ll say it again. It doesn’t change a bloody thing.” After a brief pause in which he appeared to listen without interrupting, he added, “Yes, you can tell him I said that. I’m sorry, Sirius, but… yeah. I know.”
He closed his eyes for a moment and seemed saddened when he reopened them to meet Severus’ sour gaze.
“Black, I take it?”
“Evidently.” Potter lifted one eyebrow in a fair imitation of the man across the table, then rose smoothly as he spoke. “Remus wants to talk to me again. He never says anything different. I’m not going up,” as if that made something resembling sense.
“The floo is upstairs?”
The young man nodded and changed the subject. “Look, there’s no sense in my hearing the rest of your info until Hermione gets back here anyway. You’ll only have to repeat it all again. Let’s take a break. Stand up, walk around – do whatever it is emotionally constipated Potions professors do when they’ve just finished a stint as a Death Eater and want to pretend that a bunch of kids in adults’ robes stand a half chance of . . . whatever we’re trying to do here.”
Severus snorted, amused against his will. He stood up and stretched as he walked toward the blocked-up window in the wall that must be the front exterior of the house.
“It’s good that you don’t allow yourself to be ordered around by a ghost,” Severus said softly as he joined Potter by the barricaded window.
“Tell him that.” Potter snorted. “Seriously, the information he brings is important enough that I don’t mind. It is… a little too eerie, though.”
“If I had to deal with Black whispering sweet nothings in my ear from beyond the grave, it would be more than eerie.”
“Well, then, it’s a good thing you don’t. And a good thing that he’s gone back to Remus and isn’t hanging about listening right now.”
“I’m not telling you anything that I didn’t make clear to the mutt a hundred times over while he was alive,” Severus glowered idly.
“The feeling’s mutual, I’m sure,” Potter said.
Distracted from his train of thought by the tiny gap at the barricaded window’s upper right hand corner, Severus only muttered, “Hmmm.” The dazzling light cast Potter’s form in perfect outline through his threadbare robes, as he paced back and forth in front of the sill. Severus found he had nothing to say.
Managing to turn his face away from that blazing silhouette, he fumbled back to something resembling a relevant topic of conversation. “What is it that he always has to say to you?”
“Who?” Potter asked absently, staring out the gap at the tiny wedge of sky.
“Your godfather-in-law. What you were whining to Black about.”
“Whah – you mean Remus?” At Severus’ curt nod, Potter blurted jocularly, “Harry! Good to see you. How are you holding up? Followed closely by, Look, Harry. I know this is hard for you. I know the three of you have taken on too much. No, this isn’t about your age. You’re coordinating more than three trained Aurors with thirty years of experience should be asked to handle. Sirius is worried about you, Harry. I’m worried about you – about all of you. Blah, blah. Every damned week. I know he means well, but…” The boy looked through the fringe of his ragged hair and halted awkwardly as he was reminded to whom he was speaking. “Damn.”
After a moment Severus spoke. “You do a passable job of his voice.”
“Thank you,” Potter said uncertainly.
An uncomfortable silence descended until Granger spoke from the top of the stairs. “I will, Sirius. Thanks.” Potter sighed heavily, turning toward the kitchen doorway and the soft sound of footsteps that descended.
“But Harry said –” Longbottom’s voice was clear outside the door, only to be shushed by Granger’s hand on his arm as they stepped into view through the kitchen doorway.
“Nev, you know we can’t say…” She released his arm and reached toward his face, lightly smoothing her long fingers along Longbottom’s cheekbone, over his lips. Her nails were bitten to the quick and bloody on two fingers of one hand.
Severus broke the moment with irony but without undue criticism to say, “Touching as unnecessary displays of affection between compatriots at war may be, I believe we have more pressing concerns to attend to.”
Granger jumped and drew her hand away from Longbottom’s cheek. It landed on his arm. She had the panicked look of an owl that has just caught sight of an oncoming racing broom at three feet.
“I – Harry,” she blurted, moving a little too quickly to take a place at the table Severus and Potter had vacated moments earlier, “They’re on to the were-rabbits now. I think they’ll be meeting with the clan leaders soon –”
“And then we may have small furry allies to add to the list of possible Squamus-bomb carriers,” Longbottom finished cheerily, deliberately ignoring the hovering shadow at the far end of the room. He pulled up a chair beside Granger at the table while she scribbled frantically, recording what Severus assumed to be a transcript of the updates from Lupin.
“Harry,” Longbottom continued more uncertainly, “I’m concerned about Remus.”
“Isn’t that normally his line?” Potter joked. He jarringly chose the seat across from Neville, and sat.
“He made another comment today about the three of them having a ‘good working relationship.’ You know, one of those ones with the significant pause in the middle. Hermione and I –”
Potter swiped a hand through already wild hair and seemed to be at his wits’ end to find something to say. He settled on, “It’s wartime, Neville. We’re all insane,” adding a moment later, “Besides, we really don’t know what’s happening. For all we know, Sirius could be driving the two of them nuts and those pauses are just Remus trying to hide the fact that they hate him being here. I don’t know,” he shrugged haplessly. Though Severus could see that there was more to his thoughts than his response revealed, nothing more was forthcoming.
Longbottom, too, gave Potter a skeptical look that said he didn’t agree but would drop it. “All right, Harry. You’re the boss.”
“Thank you,” Potter said almost evenly.
Longbottom nodded stiffly. Severus, staring across the room, wondered idly how many times this drama, or others like it, had been enacted between the battle-weary children. “I’ve got to go check on the moon-dimming spider plants,” Longbottom excused himself and fled. As the thumping sound of his footsteps faded up the stairs, Potter’s fist hit the wall.
“I hate this,” the young man muttered fiercely. “He shouldn’t have to bow to me. We should be able to be friends.”
Granger said, without looking up from the flying quill that dove across her page in multicoloured splendor, “Harry, someone has to be in charge. Someone has to have the ultimate word.”
“I know! I just hate hearing Neville say, You’re the boss. Ron would never’ve –” He stopped. Ears flaming red, he turned to face the shuttered wall. One hand came up and he leaned against it furiously. Granger continued writing as rapid and evenly as though she hadn’t heard a thing.
Severus abruptly hated them, hated these fierce little children for putting him in a position where he could not help but listen to their private troubles, hated them for locking him in their house and in this room where he was forced to feel guilt and useless sympathy on their behalf. He didn’t care. He wouldn’t.
Granger abruptly blinked, twice, dropping her quill. She tilted her head back toward the door. When she spoke, the tenor of her voice was low and far too sane for this deranged place. “Harry, come back,” she said. “There’s nobody else.”
Potter slowly turned back toward her paper-strewn space. Severus shivered and drew his cloak closer. Potter took a quiet step toward the table. When he placed his hand on Granger’s shoulder, the room warmed palpably.
“Harry,” Granger said abruptly, “Remus told us one more thing. He said Sirius has been dreaming about the Hill of Tara. He says it’s urgent we go there right away. He’s been saying that we have to go under the Hill somehow. I said I’d tell you as soon as I got organized. I wondered if maybe…”
“…it might be connected with our other news?” The boy looked up at Severus, once again including him in the events transpiring in the room. “Ready to go on your first mission with the new and improved Order of the Phoenix, Professor?”
Severus blinked. Tried to formulate a thought, and failed.
“No, maybe not,” Potter decided. “You’ve been awfully silent. I’ll bet you haven’t slept in a week,” he concluded, fairly accurately. “Take the big bed, Professor. Up the stairs, first door on your right. You can stay here and get some sleep. We’ll be back before you wake up.”
“You intend to endeavor to reclaim the second-last horcrux now, without backup and totally unprepared, on a ghost’s whim?” Severus asked incredulously.
“We’ve done it before. And you heard what Remus told Hermione, Professor.” At the older man’s sneer, Potter said, “I don’t have time to argue with you. Sleep or don’t, I don’t care. We’ll talk when we get back. Hermione,” the boy commanded, on his way out the door. She cocked her head, spaniel-like, jumped to her feet and followed Harry out the door, barely nodding a farewell.
“Idiot children,” Severus muttered, collapsing into a groaning chair. “Idiots.”
~
They Apparated holding hands so they would land in the same spot, since they were using a picture torn hastily from the British tourist guide at a Muggle newsstand as their only reference.
The sky above was a vast, bright encumbrance after too long spent indoors behind boarded windows. Harry’s eyes watered at the brilliant dome of day – far too bright to eyes sensitized by weeks of nothing but candlelight. Hermione, unsurprisingly, was unfazed. Neville dabbed at his eyes as he looked avidly around them at the wild growth and greenness of the place where they’d appeared.
“We’ll start here,” Hermione said, gesturing toward the stone ruins. “Surely if there’s something magical, it’ll be keyed to this…”
Neville crouched to examine a handful of what looked like a grassy garden weed. Harry, who’d seen enough of weeds as the Dursleys’ gardener to last a lifetime, turned away to study the large heap of stone in the near distance, at the peak of the hill.
“Harry, Hermione,” Neville said. “This isn’t right. Columbine shouldn’t be growing here this time of year.” Hermione was instantly at his side. “Professor Sprout always said –”
“You’re right. This must be the place,” Hermione said, coming up beside Neville and leaning on his shoulder as she crouched to take a look at the early shoots.
Both were examining the ground, so Harry didn’t suppress his reflexive shudder at their contact. The irony and the wrongness of Neville’s concern about Remus, Sirius and Tonks’ relationship still rankled. Neville and Hermione were the last people who should be judging anybody’s choice of relationship. Ron had been dead all of two weeks the morning that Harry had walked in on them in the shower at four Privet Drive. Hermione still refused to hear Ron’s name or to speak it herself.
It had been almost a month now, and things were not getting any easier. Harry’s head ached. Damnit, Remus, how could you leave me to explain the mess of your marriage to the people who stand as my two strong arms in this war, but whose relationship I can’t stand? Sirius, how could you come back and do this to him?
There were days when he wished he could just hate them all. And then there was Snape. Snape, the bloody, Dementor-garbed bastard who still haunted his nightmares (Dumbledore’s body flying off the turret into darkness, a flash of sour green light from a wand grasped too tightly in stained but hauntingly elegant fingers). . . and his most sultry dreams.
And now the man was back, in the flesh, a little more timeworn but as haunting as ever. Harry wanted to reject his schoolboy crush with all his might. You idiot, his inner monologue proclaimed. We have a war to win here. You’ve got no time for this. Work!
He would work. With Snape, with Hermione, with Remus. It would all work out. Somehow.
“Hermione?” he asked. “Did Remus say ‘under the Hill’?”
“Yes,” she answered distractedly.
“Under the hill…” Harry pointed his wand almost ironically at the stone behind Neville and Hermione’s bowed heads and enunciated, “Alohomora!”
The air shivered. The ground where they stood trembled. Less than five feet away, grassy sod split open to reveal stairs made of earth, leading down from a doorway in the Hill.
Steely grey stone of one seamless piece formed a ring around the circular passage. Harry eyed the tunnel suspiciously as Hermione stepped closer to inspect the carvings on the stone. Neville had backed away from the opening and now stood back, watching for Harry or Hermione’s lead.
“They look like Runes, but they aren’t,” she whispered. “Or if they are, the form is very, very old.” She drew a quill and sketchpad from a concealed pocket in her robes and happily started sketching shapes and figures.
“Why was it so simple?” Harry wondered aloud. “Alohomora seems so obvious. Why hasn’t this been found before?”
Hermione paused in sketching the rune-like lettering to look up and say, “It is obvious. But there are so few wizards, Harry, and so many facets of the magic to explore.” She scratched three quick lines before continuing, “I’ve told Neville this before; I think a lot of it simply falls through the cracks and gets left unsaid. And then Muggle places, or places like this where even the Muggles know there’s something magical… well, they get left undisturbed for far longer because no one can be bothered to go in and convince a horde of Muggle tourists that there’s some reasonable explanation for what they’re doing - and then explain to the wizarding world exactly why it’s been left there so obvious for so long.”
Harry really had done her an injustice in his earlier comments to Snape. “You’re a genius, Hermione, you know that?” Or maybe her particular form of highly capable insanity was catching, and the words were nonsense after all.
Hermione made no response, just continued sketching in her black Shrink-a-Notes book.
“Well, I’m going in,” Harry said. “Ready, Neville?”
From the third horcrux on, it had become habit to leave Hermione as sentry and fallback-plan-in-case-we-all-die-in-there, while Harry and Neville went in - and with them, twice at least, had been Ron. Ron, fallen in the last Hogsmeade raid when the village was flattened. Ron, whom Harry refused to think about as he entered yet another unknown place, full of potential hazards, without his best friend by his side.
Neville nodded and moved up silently to stand at Harry’s right shoulder. Each drew his wand, made a quick visual check of the other, and then they stepped toward the doorway in unison –
– only to hit an invisible wall and bounce back hard.
“Ow,” Neville complained, rubbing vigorously at his left hand.
Harry covered his throbbing nose and exclaimed tensely, “What was that?”
“Revelatore,” Hermione intoned, wafting her wand toward the tunnel. Sparks scattered in a dozen brilliant hues across the apparent opening into the earth and hung suspended, caught in the middle of the silvered ring of stone like multicoloured insects dappling an invisible sheet. The runes gleamed even as a wind began to rise. A shadow seemed to fall across the sun.
“Lines of force…” Hermione said, sounding awed. “Oh, my. Well.”
Scribbling furiously, she ignored Harry’s halfhearted, “What?” until the force of the rising wind threatened to tug the vibrating quill from her grasp.
“Look!” Neville shouted suddenly. Harry spun around in time to catch sight of the roiling clouds as they began to stretch ominously. A red-eyed serpent’s head took shape before the violent wind.
“Nagini…” Harry breathed. “Hermione, Herm, we have to get out of here now!”
“Wait!” she shouted over the wind. “We can’t just –”
“Leave it!” Harry said, but Neville, obeying Hermione’s instinct if not her inaudible words, had already clambered to the passageway and screamed, “Finitemora!”
Harry dragged Hermione by her left arm. As the earth began to draw back upon itself he grabbed Neville’s right hand and performed a quick Apparition. The clouds spilled their tears upon a hill vacant as it had been the moment before they set foot upon it.
~
“Damn. Damn damn damn damn damn. Sod it all!” Harry said furiously. “How does she get there so fast? How does he know?”
“I don’t know, Harry,” Hermione replied. “Look, I can translate the sigils. Voldemort probably won’t be able to get through the stone circle any more easily than you and Neville did, if he even thinks to try something so basic as Alohomora. We can-”
They were standing at the foot of the stairs in the entry hall at four Privet Drive when a heavy tread became audible, accompanied by the creaking of the tired floor above. Neville started and shot an anxious look at the ceiling.
“What is all this nonsense about?” Snape demanded, sweeping melodramatically into view at the top of the stairs. “I was told that I would be given the chance to sleep before you infuriating imbeciles returned to haunt this prison-like safehouse in which we are entombed.”
Harry rolled his eyes, caught midway between wanting to hit his former professor and wanting to kiss the man. It’s stress. You’ve just escaped a very close and dangerous situation. It’s perfectly natural to want to . . . well, maybe not to want to kiss Snape speechless. Damn.
“Absolutely, sir,” Harry snapped. “We’re back so quickly just to annoy you.”
“Hmmph.” Snape looked down his nose at Harry, thanks only to the added height of the stairs. The two were virtually the same height now, as Harry had noticed earlier and had been sorely tempted to mention when Snape first Apparated in.
Snape descended the last two steps and the two stood glaring eye to eye for a moment before the elder finally asked, without prelude, “Who got there?”
“Whuh? – oh. Nagini.” The ghost snake had become Voldemort’s best weapon after Neville and Harry had killed her, believing her to be the sixth horcrux. “I don’t know how she moves so bloody fast. Doesn’t Voldemort need to know what he’s doing to send her…?”
“If by what he’s doing, you mean have a specific location in mind,” Snape sneered, his dark eyes lit strangely so they appeared to sparkle in the dusty air of the corridor, “I believe his control over the ghost bears much in common with the process of Apparition: Destination, Determination, and –”
“Debilitation,” Neville muttered. Harry grinned and watched avidly as one of Snape’s eyebrows twitched, but the man continued speaking as though he hadn’t heard.
“- Deliberation. As with Apparition, an insufficiency in any of the three coordinating factors may be accommodated by application of greater quantity of either or both of the other two.”
“So if he doesn’t know the place, all he has to do for Nagini to find us is to be more determined.” Harry felt disgusted with himself for not having figured it out sooner.
“The other and rather less pleasant alternative is that whatever you did out there on the Hill of Tara may have opened Voldemort’s connection to the missing horcrux sufficiently that he will now be able to detect it. And you may rest assured that he would not hesitate to send the snake and rally the troops at even a whiff of a chance of collecting the remaining piece of his soul. He may not have been looking for you at all,” Snape concluded ominously. The smug undertone of his voice made Harry look more closely – Snape was flushed and … did he seem uncomfortable?
“What aren’t you telling me, Snape?” Harry demanded. “I don’t have time for games. Did you betray us? Did you tell him where we were going?” Bloody damn. Was I wrong to trust him so eagerly? Distantly, Harry noted that Neville had taken hold of Hermione’s hand as his volume rose and was drawing her away from the furious pair by the stairs. They slipped into the darkened and almost unused dining room, closing the glass doors tightly behind them.
“How dare you, Potter, you ungrateful little twat,” Snape spat. “You know I –”
“Of course I know. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. But the snake got there too sodding quickly, and I think your answer was just a little too pat. What do you know that you aren’t telling me?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re lying.” Green eyes met darkest brown and were held transfixed.
“Nothing of any consequence, then. No part of our arrangement mandates my making you privy to my inmost thoughts. You will either trust me to tell you what I believe is important, from my extensive knowledge and history with Voldemort and his cronies, or I can be out that door and twelve Apparitions away within a minute. You will never find me or the information that only I possess about the Death Eaters, again. If you have no need or respect for my services, I can be –”
“Damn it, Snape. If that’s the way it’s going to be, fine, leave. But what I want you to remember is that you need me. The prophecy –”
Snape, as skilled at mental leapfrogging as Legilimency, bounded over Harry’s thoughts and was there with a retort before him. “Prophecies are not explicit, Mister Potter,” he spat. “Need I remind you that I overheard the prophecy in question spoken, and it –”
Harry cut him off right back. “You need remind me of nothing, Snape. You’re no longer my professor, and I’m about to be your boss. You’re going to work for me, because I’m in charge of things as they stand right now and we don’t have time to catch anybody up or get through a dozen petty squabbles to where we’re all able to get along – if that’s even possible for you,” he added in distaste. “We need to work together to get the job done. You need me, and I need you.”
Snape nodded, teeth clenched furiously. “I am here to work with you, and to beat that undead bastard styling himself a Lord back into the ground he’s not good enough to have arisen from. But I will not share with you –”
“Goddamn it, Snape, what you won’t tell me could get us all killed!”
“If you cannot refrain from swearing at me, Mister Potter, I will hex you six ways from next Sunday!”
“Take me seriously then, Snape, or by Dumbledore’s grave I’ll…”
Snape snorted as if he had just scored a point. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Here you hide, in this empty house, moving little men about on a great big board. Moving his men about as best as you are ineffectually able – but you and I both know how terrified you are inside. If one finger on a key piece should slip, if you should ever lose control…” he taunted cruelly, finger in Harry’s face, moist breath warming his cheek. Too close, too warm. “Understand this, boy. You’re not Albus Dumbledore. You can’t do what he did. None of us can. And I won’t allow you to get inside my head or to tempt me –”
Snape stopped yelling abruptly in order to catch Harry as he collapsed to the soiled carpet.
“Harry!” he barely heard Hermione calling his name, as consciousness fled. “Professor! Neville’s just –”
~
Harry woke with an achingly dry tongue and a bushy-haired young woman leaning over him with her wand pointed cautiously at his forehead.
“You’re awake.” Hermione smiled.
“Sure seems that way. Boy, did I have some weird dreams…”
“I wouldn’t be surprised in the least. You and Neville were both knocked out by what we think was an effect of that barrier you walked into.”
“We? – oh, right. Snape.”
“I thought at first he’d killed you, but of course, Nev had collapsed at the same time and… Actually, he was surprisingly helpful in taking care of you these past two days.”
“Two days!?” His eyes watered blearily at the exclamation and his throat felt ever so dry. “Water,” he managed to croak before he started coughing. A glass appeared in Hermione’s hand and he drank the contents down in what felt like one long restorative draught.
“Whoa… easy,” she soothed, and Harry’s mind flashed to a huge dappled horse. He was crooning to the sweaty mare, “Whoa, easy, girl.” She stood patiently and lifted first one giant hoof and then another at his soft request.
He clenched speckled white bedsheets in both fists even as he rooted out the pounds of road dirt and pebbles caught in her vast feet with a worn metal implement. It scraped along the sole and around the frog (frog? Harry mused, eyeing the strange indentation and curves within the hoof) but didn’t seem to hurt the massive creature.
When he stood up he gave a solid clout to her warm grey neck. She whuffled comfortingly.
“All right there, girl,” he heard his own throat say in a deep and unfamiliar baritone. “Let’s get you out and –” Two warm arms had swept around his midsection. Two hands were toying with the upper curl of the thick bands belted around his waist, creeping downwards to clutch him through his scratchy outer robes. The barn was dark, though a shaft of sunlight illuminated from behind a band of yellow hair (not his own, even here, even in this time and place) that swept past his face in a flash of brightest gold.
He stumbled backwards, caught in his lover’s warmth and the caress of breath against his dusty skin, as he breathed, “You fiend, I would have come looking for you next…”
~
“Harry! Harry, wake up!” Hermione’s shout pulled him back from the scents of horsehair and soiled straw. He felt suddenly cold and he drew the blankets tighter around himself, seeking something he had lost.
“I’m not – what –” he stuttered, ignoring the burgeoning erection caught between the twisted blankets and the leg of his pants. “I’m not awake!”
“No kidding, Harry,” Neville said, perched on the three-legged table across the room between the fireplace and the door. “We’ve been sitting here while you stare off into space for fifteen minutes now.”
“Neville, give Harry some space. He’s only just woke up, you had it much easier than he did,” Hermione staged-whispered across the room as Harry blinked owlishly. Neville gave Harry an inscrutable look and reacted to Harry’s returned wince with an aimless shrug. He slunk out to the hall, shutting the door until it latched politely.
“Herm…” Harry started cautiously, refusing to sit up in case his motion might make the bulge under the sheets more obvious. “Don’t you think you should…”
“What?” she asked openly if somewhat intently.
“I mean… Neville cares so muhh… he just…” clearing his throat, Harry chickened out entirely, reached for the glass beside the bed and whispered weakly, “More water?”
Obligingly, Hermione cast “Aguamenti.” A spring of water flowed from her wand into the glass. Harry sat up carefully while she wasn’t looking, bunching the blankets safely around him. When the glass was full he drank.
“Forget it,” he said.
“Forget what?”
Harry silently prayed that she was joking. Her mental state was beyond anything he could address. Changing the subject, he asked, “How long was I out now?”
“About half an hour,” Hermione answered. “After nearly two days. Neville was up and researching energy-draining barriers yesterday. I don’t know why the rebound effect lasted longer on you than on him, but I thought we’d better let you sleep it out - until you started muttering and twitching in your sleep, that is. We were worried. What were you dreaming?”
“I don’t – I don’t remember.” He thought he must be flushing to the roots of his hair, but Hermione took the words at face value and seemed not to notice.
“That’s too bad, Harry. It might have been really helpful in figuring the runes out.” At his quizzical look, she elaborated, “You know. The ones that were on the gateway into Tara Hill. I managed to copy them all down before you pulled us away.” She looked so smugly pleased that Harry didn’t have it in him to criticize her lack of instinct for self-preservation when new knowledge was at stake. They each had their strengths and their weaknesses. Some things, he thought, never change.
“I’ve been working on them almost constantly since you brought us back here,” she went on, oblivious, “well, other than trying to figure out what was wrong with you and Neville! Well, Snape helped me with that. But I’ve made very little headway. They look a lot like the Runic Futharc, but they aren’t!”
Harry nodded encouragingly and tuned out the rest of her talk on runes and coding. She’d explain the salient points of what he needed to know later, after her quicker mind had worked through the details and come up with an answer.
“…So if you could remember anything from the dreams,” she finished, “that might be relevant, or that would contain any of the symbols in a useful context, we might be able to figure it out…”
“I’m sorry, Hermione, I don’t. All I really remember is this horse,” and a man’s warm arms around me, his fingers stroking down my belly and upward, his mouth suckling warm kisses down my throat… “and, uh, some bad smells and things. I don’t think there were any symbols at all.”
He wished he could clear the crestfallen look from her face, but doubted that relating his ridiculously erotic dreams would help, especially given what she didn’t know or suspect about his sexual preferences. She wouldn’t care, he told himself again. Those things aren’t relevant to winning the war.
“I’m sorry, ‘Mione,” he said from his huddle of blankets and sheets as she stood up and moved toward the door.
“Don’t worry about it, Harry,” she answered. “Take your time getting up. Neville had an awful headache until he’d had something to eat. I’ll see you downstairs. I’ll figure this out somehow,” was her parting shot as the door clicked shut behind her mane of unruly auburn curls.
Darn. He would have to cross the hall to get to the washroom, and who knew where that monster Snape might be hiding hoping to ambush him and – wrap me in his long elegant arms and take me right here in the middle of the house in which I – Damn. Just, bloody hell.
~
“’Mione? Who slept in the bedroom with me while I was knocked out for two days?”
“Neville,” she answered punctiliously. “I shared the soggy futon in Dudley’s room with Snape. Oh, don’t give me that look, it wasn’t a hardship. Honestly, you boys…”
She trailed off, seeming to realize that the look he was giving her was somewhat different from the one she had been expecting. “What?”
“Nothing. Never – oh, damnit – mind.”
“Are you sure you’re feeling all right, Harry?”
~
He was pressed against one post of the bedframe, the slightly shorter man’s erection driven into his hip, a wooden splinter the size of a chisel marking its own route down his sore back. And by all the gods, did he feel good.
The body forcing his position groaned hungrily, tasted his cheek, his chin, down his neck to his barely ticklish throat and on to the sensitive – “Oh!” As teeth gently tugged on his right nipple he lost all sense and sensation that wasn’t right here, right now, touching hot flesh and starving for the lover who was determined to torture him by neglecting his desperate, rising need.
“Thi, you have to –” He hardly recognized his own voice.
“Have to?” muttered the long-haired golden head, barely lifting from laving his hard left nipple to breathe heavily upon the tenderized, swollen skin.
He moaned inarticulately. “Please?” The oaken shard drove deeper into his spine and made the lower, all-consuming throbbing brighter against its dull ache. “Need you – now.”
His lover only pinned his hips with the palms of both hands, using that elegantly upturned mouth to continue torturing each nipple in turn.
“Want you inside me – now, Thi’bad!”
“Greedy beast, aren’t you, Briton?”
“Domineering tart!” he rejoined faintly, almost wishing he had the strength of will to turn the tables on the other man. “Oohhh…”
Lost in sensation, he turned over and landed on -
- scratchy pillows (where did the downy ones go?) and the voice of a woman, calling him by someone else’s name.
“Harry.” He was in bed. The bed was shaking but his lover was gone. The wooden bedpost he’d been leaning against was… gone? “Harry, I’ve got it. Harry, wake up.”
“What is wrong with you, woman? Can’t you see I’m –“ No, that wasn’t right. He broke off abruptly. Blearily he asked, “Hermione?”
“Um… Harry?”
“Yes, I’m Harry. That’s right, I’m Harry…” He found the name he had been searching for. “Potter.”
“Yes, Harry,” she said, businesslike again. “Now, what I was saying is, I’ve found it.”
“Found what?”
“The correct spell to unlock the coding on the runes. Seriously, I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before, it was laid out in Under Sea, Over Stone: A Magician’s Guide to Celtic Traditions and Sorcery. Those unambitious Celts and their tripolar magic. Simple, really.”
“What does it say?” Harry asked, suspecting he would wish, once he knew the answer, that he hadn’t asked.
“It seems to be a poem,” Hermione answered slowly. “Or a chant of some kind. I’m not sure what it means or –“
“’Mione. Just read it to me, please.”
“You’d better look at it yourself. Here,” she shoved his glasses into his left hand and a scrap of parchment into his right.
Here once before
we bequeath our fires to you
gold turns black
sloe-eyed melts to green
ye who know us in dream
stand beside his inner shadow
heart to lonely heart
be well come and enter here
“It’s talking about us,” Harry muttered softly, fervently wishing it wasn’t real. “Hermione… you’d better get everyone downstairs. I think I know what this is saying.”
~
“Potter, you must be possessed.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying!” Harry shouted at the sneering disbelief in his lover’s – no, his former teacher’s – voice. Snape had to be the blond-haired lover in Harry’s dreams. He was sure, beyond any rational explanation, but he didn’t know how to convince the others without revealing the sordid dreams. He had no justification for how he knew - but there was no doubt. Harry held tight to this one instinct with hands, claws and teeth. “We’re possessed. I’m possessed. It has to be…”
“And yet you have been determinedly reticent in explaining to us what exactly has brought you to this rather extravagant conclusion. Possession? By Caldwen and Thiadbad?”
Hermione said consolingly, “It does seem farfetched even for you, Harry.”
“Fine. Maybe I’m nuts. Isn’t that what you’re all thinking? Maybe Harry’s finally cracked under the strain and has taken a nice jaunt down bongo lane.” He glared around at the three serious faces. “Fine. But what if I haven’t? Have you considered that? What if Caldwen is handing us the solution to all our problems on a silver platter, and we waste too much time sitting here being too stupid to recognize it, and then Voldemort wins?”
Hermione stared.
Snape glared.
“There’s no arguing with that kind of logic, Harry,” Neville finally said, raising his eyes from the line his left pinky had been drawing in tepid water, spilled down the cracks in the table.
“I’m not trying to be obnoxious or anything,” Harry spoke slowly, making an effort, in his earnestness, to help them to believe in what he saw. “But anything that stands a chance of succeeding, I think we have to try.”
“What do you have in mind, Harry?” Hermione asked tiredly, in the tone of someone humoring an invalid friend.
“You’re going to do Legilimens on me, sir,” he said, meeting Snape’s eyes. The air between them crackled almost audibly.
“Absolutely not.”
“You have to. Once you see this, you’ll know what I mean. Once you’ve seen these dreams –”
“No, Potter. I will not allow you -”
“Why not?” When no answer passed Snape’s lips, Harry pressed his point home. “You have to see these dreams. At the very least, to tell me whether I’m going insane.”
“With the chance of revealing once and for all your embarrassingly limited intellectual capabilities and how incompetent you really are to lead a force of this importance?” Snape remarked snidely, chewing on his lower lip. Harry thought irreverently that he had never known the former potions master to display a nervous tick before. He wondered briefly . . . no. Surely even Snape would admit it if he was having the same dreams, the same fantasies as Harry had? Maybe the older man’s resistance was just for show. Maybe he was afraid of what Harry might see inside his head . . .
“Well,” Snape said, after several silent minutes had elapsed. Hermione was scribbling and didn’t look up. “If there is no other alternative.” No one said anything, and Snape choked out, “Are you ready to begin now?”
At Harry’s quick nod, Snape cast, “Legilimens!”
~
Shock spun Severus around and at first he struggled to catch his bearings in the strange dimension in which he found himself. For a mind so determined, this one had changed its shape drastically since his last invasion into its watery depths. Clearer, more orderly, though foggier with shadows of greys and other lines of aching colour. Lightning glanced across Severus’ mind and then melted away.
He was being led by the hand down a gravel path half the width of a horse path – a tiny trail that cut and crisscrossed through the morass of associations in this overwhelmed mind.
The hand that led him was warm and smooth, and then abruptly roughened. Too much contact. Severus pulled away, and found himself in an upper room of what felt like an ancient castle.
Walls made of solid grey stone surrounded him, broken by vivid tapestries and hangings. With the window bright behind his back, the space seemed open and welcoming instead of claustrophobic, though the atmosphere was tense.
“Thiad, you know I love you. That was never in question,” the heavily muscled man on the bed said. His dark eyes pierced the farthest corner, where a man stood in shadow with his back to the room, gold hair disheveled and in a state of half-undress. “You know I’d never choose to marry Beatrice except that her father’s armies might save us the war.”
“I know,” the other responded, still turned away.
That’s me, Severus thought. Though he had never seen either of these men before, he knew them, toes to fingers, blood to balls. He recognized and knew them, through and through.
That man standing in the shadows, blond hair streaming down his naked back and chest - that was he. And the man on the bed was his beloved. His conscious self remembered nothing, but viscerally it was impossible to deny that something here spoke to his body, to his soul, in a language he intimately knew.
“I love you,” the dark-haired man said, and rose naked from the sheets to step lightly across the room to where the other stood. He wrapped his body around the shorter man’s back and sighed heavily. “This floor is icy, Thiad. Come back to bed.”
“And make love to you while you’re thinking of her?”
“Let me make love to you and forget about her.”
“I – Cald, you know I can’t sod a man who’s betrothed. It wouldn’t be honest.”
“Damn you and your honesty,” dark Caldwen said. “Since when do we put honesty above each other? I love you, Thiadbad, flashy amber hair and all.”
“You big Briton lout.”
“Soggy Saxon tease.”
The scene faded away into dusky grey space, leaving Severus wanting . . .
And then it was night time. After that, day again. Scene after ancient scene of the two warriors exposed itself to his vision and left him with a hard-on that he didn’t want to confront inside Harry Potter’s mind or in front of the boy over a linoleum table. Well, maybe behind him… Damn, he thought viciously. Bloody Caldwen, Thiadbad, and heroic bloody Harry Potter. . .
~
Caldwen and Thiadbad were riding across a scrubby moor on the hard edge of twilight. The ground beneath the horses’ feet was harsh and rocky. Stones and pebbles seemed more prevalent species than the native wild grass. The sky was cloudy, with a touch of black – a storm was surely brewing.
“Thiad,” Caldwen said seriously. “You know I may not survive this battle.”
“If you fall, I fall beside you,” his lover said, shaking the matted strands of his dusty hair out of his face. “On the enemy’s sword or my own.” The hollows of his cheeks were lined with stubble, enhancing his rugged blond good looks.
“I’m not going to argue this with you again. You know I think that’s rubbish – you’ve got your own life to live and things worth living for other than me.”
“I don’t.”
“But see, Thiadbad, either of us could fall. And I don’t want to be left without a succession.”
“You could have slept with the tramp before now if that’s what was worrying you, for all I care –” The edge of anger in his tone cruelly belied the words.
“That’s not what I’m saying!” Caldwen all but bellowed. “This isn’t about that! I’m trying to tell you, I’m agreeing to that crazy spell you suggested!”
Thiadbad’s whole demeanor suddenly lightened. “Really?”
“Yes.” Like a ray of sunlight shining through puckered clouds, the single word turned the fraught atmosphere of the conversation to one of raw hope.
“Can we do it here?” Caldwen whispered.
“Yes,” Thiadbad agreed. “But, love, are you sure you want to do this? It’ll mean you’ll never make it back to Beatrice…”
“Damnit, Thi!”
”. . .Never father children on her. . .”
“I don’t love her! I love you. None of that is important.”
“But your succession . . .”
“Goddamnit, that isn’t what I meant. This will be my succession. Here. With you.”
“I’m sorry I had to ask this of you,” Thiadbad said, staring into his lover’s eyes with something akin to grief or guilt. “I’m sorry these messengers came to me the way they did. But it’s clear.”
“One day there will be a need for us to help them. At least this way, we’ll be here. Together.”
“Yes,” Thiadbad said, drawing a length of finely carved and corded wood from the buckles at the side of his saddle pack. He wheeled his horse and stopped. Caldwen did the same.
“Eternis,” Thiadbad intoned.
The air was still.
A moment.
Then all the breath was sucked out of the world. Perception dipped and altered, everything simultaneously shrank and grew. As before, in the tiny darkened room at four Privet Drive, the wind howled yet the air was still. Severus felt himself falling into something and the years tumbled away - until he sat up and looked across the gulf between their two horses to find Potter staring at him out of Caldwen’s deep brown eyes.
“Potter?” His voice wasn’t his own. The soft-spoken name echoed on the moor.
“Snape - Thiadbad. We’re inside them, I think,” Potter whispered back.
“We are, in point of fact, inside of you,” Severus heard the voice not his intone from his own throat.
“Professor Snape?” Potter asked, Caldwen’s eyes wide in fear or amazement.
“I believe… that was Thiadbad,” Severus managed to say, incredulously. “This is… a feat of old magic the likes of which I have neither heard of nor seen. We are… still inside your head?”
“Are you asking me?”
“We are inside the young warrior’s mind,” Caldwen answered. “And will be in yours as well, as soon as you leave. Or rather, Thiad will. He rides with you.”
“You’ll be able to enter the Hill now,” Thiadbad said, from out of Severus’ mouth. Beneath the distraction of foreign thoughts, Severus underheard Potter think that although he looked like Thiadbad, the glaring bright blue eyes still carried a piece of the Snape he knew and hungered for. This experience is clearly turning both our heads, Severus thought shortly before pulling his attention back to the present. . . or what passed for it here.
“Trace the staff,” Thiadbad said. “Reclaim it before the monster has done. Bring the Dark Lord down again, as we once did.”
“You knew…” Severus muttered in comprehension. The horse pawed under him with boredom but held its place. “You knew that you would disappear under the ground and out of the past. And you stored your memories here – where?”
“Everywhere,” Caldwen answered. “We are all about you, and we always have been. We are a part of the very earth, the soil, the land from which your people spring. We are in the air you breathe, the fire you burn. Your wand is made from the wood of the ash that has inherited our bones. We are here as truly as though we had always been here. And now we stand in you, to help you to finish your long battle and bring down a killer as evil as the one we once came here to stop.”
“Why us?” Potter asked from out of those same perfect lips, lips that begged to be kissed and teased and fought over and licked with more than Beatrice’s insufferable cow-like manners. Potter/Caldwen turned and met his smoldering gaze and for a moment he found himself at a loss to remember which soul was which, who and what he was, or which was his purpose: to rid the world of Riddle or to ride the world’s newborn heroes to war with the latest crop of its villains?
“We’ve done this before,” Thiadbad/Severus told Potter. “They’ve ridden other heroes to battle before. We’re simply the latest in a long line of – no!” Severus shouted. “You can’t make me say that! I’m not –” We are not lovers! I’m not attracted to a student! And I am not gay!
He fought the tide of inevitable words and emotion until he thought he’d broken free and went spinning off of the saddle, out of the too-bright, fiery, cloudy sky to fly like an errant bludger off and into the untamed wilds of someone else’s brain and then -
~
- landed solidly in his own body, slumped across the horrible table.
~
He came out of his beloved – no, his enemy’s – his student’s – well, Harry Potter’s mind, struggling to gather his thoughts and with one word on his lips.
“Bloody…”
“…hell. Yes, sir.” Their eyes met across the table, black on vibrant green, but they could still see a shadow in each other of something other, someone that hadn’t been there earlier. They each looked away, aghast.
“Fuck,” Neville said, “So it’s real then?”
“Obscenities aside, Mister Longbottom, it is indeed real. Now what are we going to do about this?”
The drawling tone of Snape’s voice was threatening to turn Harry’s resolve inside out, but he forced down the desire to jump the man’s bones – to jump ugly, cruel, horrible, Snape’s bones, he reminded himself, with about as much impact as a bee trying to divert a spout of water – and managed to look at Hermione as he said, “We have to go back to the Hill. Snape and me.”
“Are you sure, Harry? What if it’s a trap? I have to ask –”
“It isn’t.” He glanced at Snape and saw the older (it seemed suddenly strange to think of him as older, when he had been the younger as well as shorter and more finely built) man nodding his agreement.
“We will be able to enter the passage now,” Snape said slowly. “Potter and I.”
“Why you?” Hermione asked. “I’m not questioning your certainty – just, why the two of you, out of all of the Order? Why not Neville and Harry, who walked into the barrier together, or Harry and me, who’ve been living in this building for two months before either Nev or you made it here to us?”
“Hermione…” Harry said, his voice low, but she either ignored or didn’t hear his warning.
“It might be important, Harry! Can you think of anything that might be…”
Harry glanced at Snape but looked away too quickly, afraid of what he’d seen. Their gazes mixed like fire and water, lava and mobile ice. There was too much between them, too much unspoken that wanted to be seen and touched and felt and could never exist within these bodies, never be allowed to be felt by teacher and former student, child and former spy.
Potter, for the thousandth time, I loathe you Severus thought viciously as he bit his own tongue to hold back Thiadbad’s vulnerable words. Turn it to vitriol, he thought, and then, I can do that.
“Granger,” he spat. “We are leaving now. Shut up.” Seizing Potter by the hand, he rose from the faded and creaking seat to tower above her irritably. “Caldwen,” he said softly in his beloved’s ear. “Let’s go show ‘em how it’s done.”
~
They Apparated to a different point this time and Harry had to break away from Snape/Thiadbad’s clammy grip to look around and locate the spot. He only found Neville’s out-of-place flowers when he was practically atop them.
“Here.”
“Alohomormiel,” Snape/Thiadbad announced, swiping his wand savagely downward to meet the ground.
“Careful,” Snape muttered protectively. “That’s my wand, not some hundred-year-old elephant’s foot staff.”
The earth cracked open in silence. Snape and Harry’s gazes met across the crease in time.
“It looks just the same as it did before,” Harry whispered.
“It should,” Thiadbad said. “All that is different is that this time, you – and we – will be able to enter.”
“And what if we can’t? I don’t want to risk getting knocked out on this hill for two days without Hermione around.” Before the words were fully spoken, Snape had gone ahead and was turning around demonstratively within the tunnel, gesturing him to follow.
“Come now, Potter. Some of us don’t have all day,” he said.
“Show off,” Harry muttered, prompting Caldwen to laugh under his breath and say fondly, “He always was.”
The passage was dank and dark despite Snape’s conjured Lumos. Harry found himself pacing exactly one and a half steps behind his (gloomy, irritating) (sexy, fascinating) former professor, reaching out to touch the man’s thin shoulder and drawing back each time just before the contact could occur.
The desire to take action sprang hot and bright within him, and, rationally, he knew it couldn’t be all his but that made no difference really and then –
The light ahead abruptly went out. He was seized from the front by a pair of warm hands and a smoldering mouth, a body which cast itself upon him with a fever like a hundred storms turned all to flame.
The darkness was total. Harry felt fear and disgust rise within him, even as his body conspired against his last fragments of shattered logic which screamed, Snape! Dirty, smelly, filthy, old, disgusting Snape! You’re supposed to hate him! What would Ron say!!? But Gods, the man was everything delicious. Harry could no longer hear that tired inner voice past the screams of his flesh as he fell, bent, crumbled… lost in raw sensation.
~
Severus, against all odds and counter to everything that his body and Harry’s were telegraphing each other, managed to tear away. Almost certainly, he thought, breaking something in the process. But, by Voldemort’s very name, I will not be controlled by lust like a randy teenager, unable to keep my hormones in check. . . or even like one particularly seductive randy teenager. . .
“Lumos,” Harry muttered and the curve of the rounded passageway could be seen again. Neither man would look at the other.
“Hollow. Empty,” Thiadbad whispered aloud. “That’s what you’ll be if you turn your back on this.”
“Shut up!” Severus held Potter at arms length as he bellowed at the earthen walls. “This isn’t your life or your time!”
Caldwen spoke breathlessly from Harry Potter’s swollen mouth. “Snape. Severus.” The sound was so honest and raw, Severus held his breath. “We couldn’t be here if what you felt wasn’t here before us in the first place. We can’t seize you and make you other than who you are.”
“But you’re – this is –” an abomination, he wanted to scream, but didn’t dare, so close to the final source of Lord Voldemort’s strength, with only these two specters between himself and Potter and the fall of the wizarding world.
“This is love,” Caldwen said. “Or, in your case, lust and the spark of a blazing fire. We could tease it true, you know. We’ve done it before and it’s not a difficult or complicated thing.”
Feeling his own mouth moving in a rictus of a grin under Thiadbad’s control, Severus shuddered.
“No,” Harry said, his second word since their brutal, hungry kiss. “If we’re to do this, we’ll do it on our own.”
“Not defeat Voldemort alone, surely?” Thiadbad asked snidely, the sound echoing as if spoken from high above.
“You knew what I meant,” Harry said and Caldwen continued placidly, “Come, Thi. You know what we have to do…”
“Fucking prudes,” Thiadbad sneered, but moved ahead to touch the wall of earth at its apex above their two dark heads.
“Portus Alohomeistris,” he intoned dully, slapping Snape’s wand against the rocky abutment. As a crack of light slid open beneath his palm, he turned to Harry and asked, “How many times is this now, Caldwen? Ten? Fifteen?”
“Maybe thirteen sets of homophilic heroes,” Caldwen answered. “But I’d swear, they’re becoming more afraid of themselves each time. This one’s positively shaking.”
I’m not, Harry wanted to say, but couldn’t voice the denial. He was trembling, aching from head to toe with the desire to reach out and touch this most hated of men who was standing between himself and the warm pale light. Light, streaming out - from another hidden chamber.
“The staff…” Severus breathed as he saw the shape rising like a god’s prize from the center of the circular room. The glaring light blinded his eyes to detail and made it impossible to tell whether it was simply designed, or ornately inscribed with curlicues and gemstones. He restrained himself from stepping into the chamber by the same force of will by which he stopped himself from reaching out to Potter. I can fight this. I will not give in.
“Don’t be absurd, Severus,” Thiadbad mocked his caution, arching one of his eyebrows – oddly, the opposite from the one he himself habitually used - in response to Severus’ restraint. “He’d love you to. And the staff has been here for longer than even we have; nothing can harm its magic or mar it. All you have to do is cast a deep-level cleansing charm and your Dark Lord’s horcrux will be defunct.”
“I’ll do it,” Harry said, but Snape refused to allow him to pass. “Professor – I’ve destroyed the other five. Don’t you think I deserve the –“
“What if it’s a trap?” Severus snapped.
“Don’t be absurd, Severus,” Harry said, shocked at his own gall (or was that Caldwen’s influence?) in calling the potions master by his first name. Pushing past him into the warmly scented room, he said, “It’s a miracle. We’re going to win this. Don’t look a gift stave in the mouth.”
“Fuck you, Potter. I see the memory of my tongue down your throat has improved neither your disposition nor your manners.”
Harry ignored him. Casting the charm, he waited a brief moment and said, “There. It’s done. Six down, one to go.”
“And when shall we beard the phony in his den?” Snape wondered why he even bothered to ask the question before recalling vividly the words, I’m your boss. Fuck. Damn. Rubbish.
“Don’t you get it?” Thiadbad practically groaned. “We’ve never had to face a prospective Dark Lord who cast anything on the staff before. We’re not here because your Voldemort wanted to make himself immortal and used my beloved’s wand as one of his horcrises; we’re here because the wand was itself made to be the tool to break a wizard’s power and confine him, within a tiny universe all his own. The staff is the key that will vanquish Voldemort as it has done for Grindelwald and all the others before him.”
“Grindelwald…?” Harry breathed. “You mean Dumbledore knew all along…?”
“The sadistic bastard,” Severus said.
Harry, emotions bottled past his limit, turned too quickly on him. “I told you not to say those things again!” he shouted wildly. “You couldn’t –”
But the angry words were washed from his lips by Snape’s hot invading tongue; Harry’s bitter gasp was swallowed like an errant breath of wind, carrying the scent of moisture before the coming rain.
Harry dreamed that he stood on a winding, narrow path through a field of knee-high grass and shrubby weeds. He took a step forward and swung the staff he carried in his right hand about, over his right shoulder and across his back. The metal tip of the rod gleamed as he flung it round then in a perfect arc, glorying in the strength of his body and the warm burn of muscles as his physical self seized this staff which fit so well, which belonged like a part of him.
He struck the ground. The bindings sung. He heard, or perhaps felt, with some unknown inner ear, a sensation like buzzing. A shadow passed between himself and the fiery sun. The shadow flowed, almost too slowly for vision or words to comprehend, into the staff.
The stave began to burn. Harry dropped it readily. The staff flickered and lightning that wasn’t there seemed to strike its metal tip, now black as ebony – and then the shadow was gone.
“It’s finished,” Caldwen spoke from his mouth as Harry collapsed inside a deep glowing cavern in the earth and was, once again, caught. He could feel arms around his chest, someone pressed up against his back. The warm, supportive presence was the sweetest thing in the world.
“We’ll be leaving you now,” Thiadbad said, more softly than they had yet heard the Saxon speak.
Harry managed to remember how to balance and stood on his own two feet to watch the form of the short but rugged blond slip out of Snape’s drawn figure. Caldwen’s darker ghost seemed to reach out and merge fingers with the other man as he emerged from Harry’s frame.
As they faded into the wall of the earthen cave, the two men seemed to be mouthing something – they might have been speaking to Snape and Harry or to each other. Whatever they said, the words were silent.
“Good riddance,” Snape said. Harry didn’t believe he meant it. There was an echo of something awful in the tone of his voice, in the shadows beneath his fiercely burning eyes.
“Kiss me,” Harry said softly. He felt sure that Snape would reject him, sure that he would deny what they both must be feeling in the wake of the lovers’ loss, but the man only leaned in close and groaned, a sound with all the textural richness of chocolate on a lover’s kiss. The embers in his eyes hid neither his eagerness nor his fear.
~
“Potter,” he said after, when they lay drained and empty on the ragged dirt floor, in the underground room that had earlier housed the staff of Caldwen. The staff was gone, but echoes of the chamber’s brilliance remained to light the empty space.
“Harry,” Harry whispered, brushing long black hair aside (and shouldn’t his lover’s hair be blond? But he couldn’t quite grasp the thought) to stroke the lean man’s wiry throat. “Call me Harry.”
“Potter,” Severus said, “you fool. It’s too late for my time. I’d only hurt you.”
“Fuck that,” Harry said, rolled his legs over top of Severus’ languid form, and was instantly asleep. Severus relented for an involuntary moment - and followed him down into dreams of long-dead wizards and thorny spines and brutal, needy sex.
~
When Harry opened his eyes, everything felt different.
Snape was awake, dressed, and watching him from the furthest corner. The instant Harry was aware enough to see him, Snape turned away.
“Your scar is gone,” Harry thought Snape said, though the sound was muffled by the shoulder of his robes, which he shifted and readjusted as he spoke.
“What?”
“It seems safe to conclude that Voldemort has been destroyed – er, vanquished.”
“By Caldwen and Thiadbad’s staff.”
“By your impulsive bravery.” Severus could hear the yearning approval in his own voice - too much yearning and perhaps not enough approval. It hurt just to speak to the boy, but Severus gave himself the credit he deserved for making an effort to be cordial. “They’re gone,” he repeated emptily.
“They’ve been gone since I released the staff.” Potter seemed puzzled.
“Impossible.”
“What are you on about now?”
“Surely you are not so naïve as to think –” He stopped. Deliberately stilled his breathing and forced his blood pressure down. “I see you are. Let me ask you a question, Mister Potter. Attempt for just a moment to refresh that disused, desiccated organ that might once have been your brain by presenting it with this simple puzzle: If you were a pair of ghosts who had been homosexual lovers two millennia ago and you found yourselves in the bodies of two living, appropriately sensitive, healthy and not too grossly malformed male bodies, what do you think you would do after helping the men to win their tired battle?”
At Potter’s lack of response, Severus continued, “I thought so. Get dressed. Undoubtedly half of the wizarding world, Miss Granger and Mister Idiot Longbottom among them, are goggling aimlessly and waiting to be disillusioned by the tale that we alone can present to them. After which I shall retire to my family estates and never been seen by another tiresome former student again.”
“Professor… Sna-,” Potter choked out before he rallied. “Severus. What are you saying?”
“I’m saying exactly what you think I said. This is finished.”
His back to the room, Severus swept the stained and threadbare cloak tighter around his frame. He hunched his shoulders high against the cold that wasn’t real but only imagined, like the voice that whispered in his ear that he was making a mistake and would regret it for longer than he had left to live.
“Buck up, Potter. It wasn’t us.”
~
A fine place to end it, he thought sardonically. It wasn’t us. As usual, things were never so simple.
Severus watched the fire burn in the antique grate and spun the half-snifter of brandy idly in his left hand. A few things needing mending and updating, but Spinner’s End was for the most part more functional than he had expected to find after thirty years of neglect.
A happy ending. And yet the story refused to end.
After all the explanations were done; once the Ministry had finished cheapening itself with awards and speeches; after bitter glory had been heaped upon Potter and himself so that those who had felt most vulnerable and fearful might unburden their miserable gratitude; once the world returned to what passed for normal in the wake of Voldemort’s ultimate disappearance, the facts still remained.
Severus felt a fool.
He wanted to berate himself but couldn’t manage it. The loss he felt was perfectly rational, he knew, and yet it cut twice as deeply for being so utterly logical. This sense of pain and loss wasn’t his own; he was missing a relationship and a sense of intimacy that had never happened to him, had never been his own. He missed those vibrant green eyes that, he reminded himself, had never met his of their own volition with anything more than animosity and anger. He missed and lusted for a body that had never wanted him.
He wanted to be angry with himself for thrusting it all away, whatever “it” might have been had it flourished. He wanted to hate himself for grandstanding (“Buck up, Potter. It wasn’t us.”) at the cost of - what, exactly? Your pride is intact, you fool. Your soul is your own. Thiadbad and Caldwen are long gone. Lucius and the rest are in Azkaban. You’re free again. So what’s missing here?
Severus looked down at the bare expanse of skin on his forearm where the Dark Mark used to be. He really had lost his heart to that damned infernal boy, and nothing he could think or say or do would change an iota of the way he felt.
Nothing for it then. I’m off to join the circus. Come one, come all, and see the foul Death Eater who lost anything akin to his good sense and fell in love with the Boy Who Lived. I think I might be sick.
He was doomed.
Sod it all. Who needs a heart, anyway? I’ve survived without before.
~
An hour later, the doorbell rang. It was close to midnight and Severus was somewhat less than perfectly lucid, but nowhere near bleary enough to deal with this visitor.
“What do you want?” Severus demanded forcefully.
After a long, slow minute in which they merely looked at each other, Harry spoke. “You know, I had a whole speech worked out. It was really good. You would have been convinced. And now I can’t remember a word of it.”
Clouds gusted across the pale moon which haloed Harry like an angel, or a hero. It was just past full and mottles could be seen across its ghostly face.
“Can I come in?” Harry said.
“No.” But the boy pushed past anyway, so Severus shut the door and led him down the long hallway to the sitting room, where the fading fire still lit the grate and his empty brandy glass sat undisturbed atop the antique ironwood coffee table.
“Well, this isn’t bad, is it?” Harry openly mused.
“Not quite up to the state of luxury in which you entertained at Privet Drive, but it serves.”
Harry flushed to the roots of his hair and blundered on. “So you plan to stay here for a while, then?”
Severus tried without success to decide which approach would get Potter to leave the soonest. “It’s not as though I have an illustrious career to return to,” he said. “I’m a war criminal turned war hero - remarkably, not the most employable combination.”
“McGonagall would hire you back,” Harry pointed out.
“Don’t be so sure of it.” Minerva had not forgiven his complicity in Albus’ death, and he had little doubt that she wanted him as far from Hogwarts as she could conceivably contrive. “Brandy?” Severus asked, not knowing why he offered.
“Yes, please.” The room felt warm and comfortable, even tranquil. They might almost have been friends, sharing a drink after dinner.
“Have you told anyone about...” Severus caught himself asking as he poured another snifter of brandy. He hadn’t meant to say anything to encourage conversation, hadn’t meant to so much as allude to the relations between them, but the question would just slip out.
“About what happened after the staff vanished? No.”
Severus felt deeply tired, from his heart, to his head, to the marrow of his bones. “Sit,” he said as he handed Potter the glass of amber liquid, and the young man did. “What are you here for, Mister Potter?” he asked wearily.
“I... well, you know I’m working with the Ministry. They’ve got me sorting books and itemizing things, trying to sort out which Death Eater relic belonged to who so they can pin down the last dangerous items.” He sighed heavily. “I know it’s important stuff, but it’s really pretty silly after a while. Hermione’s a lot more useful to them than me. And I’m trying to figure out what to do and where to go next, but it all feels so empty, you know? And I know what the easy answer is: I’ve been fighting Voldemort my whole life, and now that he’s gone, vanquished or whatever,” he waved one hand vaguely, “there’s this hole in my life and I’m looking for something...” he trailed off, searching for the word.
“Meaningful?” suggested Severus.
“Yes, exactly.” Harry grinned and his smile seemed to brighten the room and fill it with light. “Something meaningful. To give meaning. Or whatever.” He took a sip of his brandy before he spoke again. Severus watched every movement. Every twitch of an eyelash exposed the fragile spirit under that beautiful skin.
Harry spoke once more, a touch bitterly. “Or else I thought that having been taken over by Caldwen and Thiadbad, I’m still yearning for what they had, for that - that feeling of being totally loved and bound up in another person. Do you know what I mean?”
Severus could only bring himself to nod, just once, in total, terrified agreement.
“But that’s not all of it,” Harry continued, confidently, and then suddenly his voice was shaky and soft. Severus strained forward to hear his next words.
“You know, I used to watch you in class? To wonder what you’d look like under all those robes? And now I know what you taste like and I can’t get that out of my head. I want to feel you under me again. I want to know that I mean something to you, that you of all people care what happens to me and see me for who I am. I want to be loved. So I guess I’m here to say... if you have a real, solid reason for why this is impossible and why it can never work, then tell me and convince me,” he begged. “Show me how this isn’t happening and I’ll go. I promise. I’ll leave and you won’t catch me looking back. But if that’s... not something you really want to do...” Harry reached out and had almost touched Severus’ hand before he pulled back to form more words. “Don’t you dare try to push me away with a lie.”
“I can’t -” Severus croaked and had to clear his throat. “I wouldn’t lie to you, Harry.”
In amazement, Harry said, “You said my name.”
“And that is surely the most relevant portion of this conversation.” Harry laughed, and then he grinned, and Severus found he had no more resistance. There was no way out and nothing to win.
And maybe nothing to lose.
Maybe his heart mattered after all.
~FINIS~
Author's Chapter Notes:
Written for the Snarry Olympics on LiveJournal (http://community.livejournal.com/snarry_olympics) for the Prompt "Ancestry." Team Angst.
Thanks are due many times over to Djin7, who made the Snarry Olympics possible and invested so much time and effort; to all of Team Angst for supporting this, my first "published" fanfic effort; and especially to team cap'n RexLuscus, Melora98, StellaHobbit, LoupGarou1750 and Amanuensis1 for beta'ing and advice.
Cymroch, Thiadbad and Caldwen are my own characters. Please do not use them without permission.
Thanks are due many times over to Djin7, who made the Snarry Olympics possible and invested so much time and effort; to all of Team Angst for supporting this, my first "published" fanfic effort; and especially to team cap'n RexLuscus, Melora98, StellaHobbit, LoupGarou1750 and Amanuensis1 for beta'ing and advice.
Cymroch, Thiadbad and Caldwen are my own characters. Please do not use them without permission.
