Author's Chapter Notes:
Predatrix and Resonant were inspirations too, but it's for Psmith, with love.
And when it comes to laws, there is one you forget with a passion: the law of real death. - Luce Irigaray
PART ONE: MAY/JUNE
Eat your parents.
- Douglas Coupland
ONE
Forty minutes into the first History of Magic O.W.L paper: scrape of chair on flagstone. Everyone looked round. Harry Potter stood up, put his quill neatly on his desk, kicked the chair so it clattered across the floor, and walked out of the exam hall.
*
Hermione found him sitting by the lake, throwing stones into it. Occasionally he would throw a stone, then pull his wand from his pocket and blow the stone up before it hit the water; but mostly he just threw them and watched them splash.
She sat down beside him and didn't say anything for a bit, watching him cautiously.
"Just don't, okay?" he said after a minute or two.
"I wasn't going to - " She stopped, then started again. "It'll be all right, the exams don't really matter." Harry caught her eye incredulously as she went on: "You'll be able to resit them, Dumbledore'll understand."
"Hermione," said Harry savagely, exploding a stone in a tiny red and purple fireball, "*grow up*."
"Oh, right, because it's so mature to just walk out of your exams? Really considered decision, Harry, well done."
Harry's face twisted, then smoothed out into the blankness it had been wearing more and more often this past year.
"Shouldn't you be revising?" he asked smoothly.
"You're not going to get rid of me that easily."
He looked at her coldly, the wand still in his fingers.
"How hard do you want me to try?"
*
"You're joking, Sirius," Harry said flatly. "Safer? I've been here five years and Voldemort's tried to kill me *five times*. I'm starting to think I'd be safer at Malfoy Manor."
*
"I don't think you want to talk to me about rules, do you, sir?" he asked Dumbledore, paused, then said: "My godfather sends his regards."
*
"My *future*?" Harry repeated, staring at McGonagall's worried eyes, then started to laugh until he was gasping for breath.
*
But he still woke up the next morning, and the one after that; on and on.
TWO
"I need you to teach me," said Harry.
Severus Snape raised an eyebrow sneeringly. "Your decision to leave the school at which I teach seems a little ill-considered, in that case, Potter." He settled himself back in his armchair in the empty staffroom and watched Harry standing above him. The schoolboy awkwardness that came from not having yet learned where to put his suddenly-long limbs had been burned away in Harry's vehemence, his greed. It was an unexpectedly pleasurable sensation to have all that violent need directed at him: so much so, in fact, that Snape's cock stirred irrelevantly in his trousers. He frowned. Idiot thing.
Harry twisted his body as if he were physically deflecting Snape's words, turning away and back with a quick, graceful little gesture.
"I don't need to know about *Potions*," he spat. "I need you to teach me Defence against the Dark Arts. Dumbledore might *very well* - " (filthy look) - "have his reasons not to let you teach the other students, but every time he gave that job to someone else he was risking my life and I'm not going to let him do that any more. You know more about the Dark Arts than anyone in the country."
"Apart from Dumbledore," Snape corrected him pleasantly.
"Yes," said Harry, and stumbled on. Snape watched him wince over the words as though they were cutting his mouth: "But he... But you hated my father."
He stopped talking. Snape blinked, annoyed, and Harry made himself go on. His hands were shaking slightly.
"And - and Voldemort killed my father."
He stopped again, as if he expected Snape to understand what he was talking about. Snape sighed and said, with patience heavy enough to be an insult, "Potter, if you wish me to consider spending the little free time the Headmaster leaves me on the thankless task of teaching you, you will have to start making at least a minimum of sense."
Harry took a deep breath, stared hard and steadily at Snape and said, flatly: "You won't try to turn me into him." Then: "Dumbledore - and Sirius as well. Everyone, actually - when they're pleased with me, they tell me I'm like him. Like a reward. But I can't afford... whatever weaknesses he had, I can't afford them."
Snape's eyebrows went up again. "Well," he said, surprised, feeling a strange, grudging sensation which he identified after a second as approval. "What very Slytherin sentiments from our most famous Gryffindor."
That little deflecting movement again; if it were just a little coyer or more feminine it would be a toss of the head. "Oh, for ffff... Please." Not quite swearing in front of his not-quite-teacher. "Is Voldemort after me because I'm - I *was* - a Gryffindor? Is he going to spare you because you're Head of Slytherin? In the Muggle world it would be really *sad* for grown men to go on about what house they were in at school the way wizards do, you know. Lucius Malfoy and his ffff... bloody snake brooches." His lip curled.
"Well," said Snape again, finding himself slightly shaken by this revelation of a repertoire beyond the predictable blind anger, blind courage and blind loyalty that had so far proved themselves to inhabit that tousled little Potter head.
He stood up, fully intending to refuse, nonetheless; but as his eyes reached their proper level they were caught in Harry's framed, green gaze.
Harry had reached Snape's height.
It was like walking into a trap.
Caught, then, he heard himself say "All right, Mr. Potter."
THREE
Harry knocked for his first lesson promptly, which surprised and annoyed Snape, and put an end to his faint hope that he would not, after all, have to teach a four-hour private class in each of his three free evenings a week. Once Dumbledore had managed to convince himself (it hadn't taken long) that the new arrangements had been his idea all along, he had twinkled-and-drifted past every request Snape had made to decrease his official workload: the laws of space and time, it seemed, like those of Hogwarts and the Ministry of Magic, were mere regulations when it came to Harry Potter.
Snape had, nonetheless, rather expected Harry to take advantage of his umpteen layers of protection, his Ministry-paid-for room at the Three Broomsticks and his Special Exemption from the Restriction on Underage Wizardry Decree, and to spend his time doing nothing more strenuous than strutting about in front of the other students when they were allowed into Hogsmeade. Probably smoking I'm-a-grownup-brand cigarettes, if the other early school-leavers Snape remembered were anything to go by.
But here Harry was, a little hesitant, a little swaggering; wearing clothes which Snape considered underwear, although they were less functional in cut, giving him a most peculiar, almost conical, silhouette; standing just inside the door and looking around, twiddling with his fingers, as if his surroundings were unfamiliar.
"You'll remember this, of course, Potter," Snape remarked acidly, waving his hand round the room.
"I haven't broken in here since I was twelve." He looked round, swallowing. "And I thought..."
"Yes?" Snape prompted him.
"Well, there's only your Potions stuff in here. I thought we were going to be doing Defence Against the Dark Arts."
"Ah," said Snape. "And you assumed I had a vast underground chamber somewhere where I stored my demon minions and cursed artefacts? No, Potter, the practitioners of the Dark Arts may be a regrettably flashy lot, but the Dark Arts themselves are..." he hesitated long enough to make sure Harry got the point - "dark."
Harry gave him a sore look and mumbled: "All right, I get it."
"Well," said Snape with only mild sarcasm, "that's a good start."
FOUR
"It's an extremely good thing for Hogwarts' reputation that you're not sitting your Theory of Magic OWLs," said Snape, exasperated. "This is *basic* stuff, Mr. Potter. I am beginning to think the indispensible Miss Granger did even more of your work than I previously suspected. What *would* you have done had she had a life of her own, I wonder?"
"Fuck off," Harry muttered, throwing himself back into his chair. He looked exhausted today. Snape, however, was not in the humour to be sympathetic, since he was in little better case.
"I shall pretend I am still being paid to tolerate your rudeness, Mr. Potter," he said sharply, "and overlook that. Now try it again."
Harry sighed heavily and laid his hands flat on the table, where their trembling was even more marked than usual. He dragged his head up straight on his neck and looked Snape in the eyes, bit his lip in concentration, and began: "*Obduco*..."
"NO!" shouted Snape. "Potter, there are ten main classes of counter-curse. Four of these can be used against curses of the *Nefanda* type. This is your third attempt, boy! A *random* choice would have worked better!"
Harry picked up a glass tumbler from the table and threw it at the wall, where it shattered noisily and theatrically.
"Do you think this is a *game*?" he yelled back. "Do you think if you humiliate me enough I'll give up and go away? This is my *life*, Snape. So OK, you win, all right? I'm stupid. I know I'm fucking stupid. But I can't... So, if you want to play power games, go and make some little boys cry, if that's what you get off on, but right now, I'm *begging* you, if that's what I have to do, I'm *begging* you, *tell me what I'm doing wrong*!" He was standing up now and shouting with all the considerable power of his athlete's lungs down into Snape's face.
"CALM DOWN, POTTER!" Snape roared.
Harry drew a breath, then seemed to think better of it, closed his mouth abruptly, and sat down. Snape stared at him until he was quite sure Harry had subsided. "Finished?" he asked.
"Yes," muttered Harry.
"Good. Then let me tell you something, Potter, and I want you to listen, for once." Soft and menacing and slow: all this anger was rather exhilarating, but it didn't do to let it go too far. "You will not learn anything by coming in here and shouting at me. Albus and the Ministry might fall over themselves rewriting the rules every time the Boy Who Lived gets a whim into his head, but magic does not work like that and you can *not* treat mastery of the Dark Arts as yet another thing you are *entitled* to by virtue of your damned scar. You are a typical arrogant Gryffindor."
"I'm not *in* Gryffindor any more," Harry said. "I've left, remember?"
"Of course," Snape said sarcastically. "That makes all the difference."
"Yeah," said Harry vehemently, "it does. Dumbledore knows it, even if you don't. He doesn't treat me like a kid."
Snape raised a disbelieving eyebrow. "If you say so, Potter."
FIVE
"SNAPE!"
Snape's hand jerked and an extra grain of leech blood went into the particularly tricky infusion he was brewing. He looked round, annoyed, to see an unwelcomely familiar face in the fireplace, glaring at him.
"Ah," he said in a manner which managed to convey his utter lack of surprise that the universe should heap yet more suffering upon his head. "Black." He turned back to his cauldron and began to measure out tannin petals. "Harry isn't here yet," he added. "I'll be sure to tell him you called."
"That's all right," said Black heavily. "I rather wanted a word with you, actually, Snape."
Snape, accordingly, dusted his hands off and moved to sit in the armchair by the fire. He crossed his legs at the knee, wove his fingers together, and looked at Black.
"What word might that be, then?" he asked silkily. "Woof?"
"Did you think I wouldn't find out about this?" Black asked in return. "I'm the boy's guardian, you know. Dumbledore told me straightaway. Now, I don't know how the hell you've got your nasty little claws into Harry, Snape, but I don't appreciate it. What are you using? Imperius? No, you wouldn't take the risk: you're Unforgivable enough already. Confundus?"
Snape, naturally, made no reply.
"Whatever it is, take it off him *now* and let him sit his bloody exams."
"I assure you that this arrangement is as unwelcome to me as it is to you," Snape said. "Now, if that's all you -"
"No, it is *not* all!" Sirius shouted. "Do you think I don't know why you're doing this, Snape? Do you think I don't know what sort of perverted rites you Death Eaters use? I know *precisely* why you want Harry alone in your dungeons every night!"
"I will not have you talking to me like that!" Snape shouted back. He found himself on his feet and he could hear his voice trembling on the very edge of control: oh no, he thought, no, not now, not in front of him... He took a deep breath and continued, his voice full of silk as skilful, strong and costly as any spider's: "Harry is nearly sixteen years old and was never under your legal guardianship in any case."
"STOP CALLING HIM HARRY!" howled Sirius. "I'm warning you, Snape, if you lay so much as one yellow finger on him I am going to kill you, and Dumbledore be damned. James should never have saved you twenty years ago, you sneaking little coward."
"Don't you *dare* call me a coward," Snape said. Inside himself he was cold and calm but that same cold, calm part of himself could hear his own voice and knew that he was shrieking hysterically and he couldn't stop. "You, of all people. You were always too afraid to take what you wanted. You fucking *Gryffindor*. You trailed after his father for ten years without ever summoning the courage to touch him, and where did it get you?"
"Shut your sneering mouth, you greasy queer!"
Snape's hands were clenched in his robes and he didn't even know for sure any more quite what he was saying. And suddenly Harry was there, shouting "CALM DOWN, SEVERUS!" into his face. Snape stopped shrieking, wheezed, and stared desperately into Harry's face.
Harry stared at him unreadably for a moment, then turned towards the fire. His voice was very cold.
"And as for you, Sirius, don't you *ever* use that word again, unless you're prepared to use it to me." He cut the connection to Black and came back to the table.
Snape took a deep breath and pressed his nails into his palms until he was calm enough to say: "Please tell your godfather not to contact you here again. Now we've wasted quite enough time: let me see your notes on the *Nefanda* curses. Oh, and Potter?" he added.
Harry, rummaging in his bag, looked up.
"Don't call me Severus."
Harry went gratifyingly red, and the lesson continued.
SIX
Harry in the dark. In bed. Everything he tried to get himself to sleep being tripped up by the words Potter? Don't call me Severus, making him angrier and angrier. As if he were a child. As if Snape hadn't been the one throwing a tantrum. As if Harry hadn't just been standing up for him against... and what *business* was it of Sirius's, anyway?
And oh, *God*, he'd just made a complete mess of telling Sirius he was gay.
SEVEN
The next day was one of Snape's mornings on top table. He was unenthusiastically stirring a rasher of bacon in its pool of congealing grease when the students' owls flew in. Snape took no notice, since his letters had, at least *in potentia*, already been delivered to his bedroom by the earlier staff post: but Dumbledore's voice beside him made him look up. Dumbledore was twinkling at him, amused.
"One of your old students with a grudge, do you think, Severus?"
There was a red envelope at Snape's place.
"You'd better open it," Dumbledore murmured and returned politely to his breakfast.
Snape stood up and walked to the nearest door out of the Great Hall while he ran his thumbnail under the seal. The Howler opened tamely enough, with a series of variations on Black's "oily little git" theme, but he was shaken to hear, before he was able to shut the door against the students' hearing, the words "pervert", "corrupting schoolboys" and "excuse to get your hands on Harry Potter" in disconcerting proximity: then, finally and most seriously, as he closed the hectoring voice (Black did have the perfect voice for a Howler) out of the Great Hall and the letter fell to dust and ashes in his fingers, "Voldemort's lackey" and "sneaking spy".
Oh, idiot.
Snape dusted his fingers off. He went out of the chamber through its other door and down a staircase into the cool, stale air of the Slytherin corridors, where he stopped and leaned against a pillar, staring unseeingly at a wall.
"This is intolerable," he said aloud to the empty corridor.
More than fifteen years ago now, Dumbledore had given him the choice between Hogwarts and Azkaban: Snape wondered whether the Dementors could possibly have destroyed each and every possibility of happiness any more thoroughly than the schoolchildren had. The faint hope that Dumbledore might finally accept that Snape's situation was untenable and allow him to tender his resignation flickered into being and went out again, futile as a sunbeam on a cloudy day. Such flickers of desire for self-evidently impossible objects occasionally punctuated his days. They had nothing to do with the realities of his life; they left no trace; but at least, he supposed, they did no harm.
Snape shook his head, twitched his robes so that they fell looser about him, and walked down to his classroom for a morning of supervising fifth-year revision. That was, for a morning of Ronald Weasley sniggering about the Potions master being a poof and Draco Malfoy making devastatingly unsubtle attempts to elicit an unambiguous statement about Snape's allegiance that he could transmit to his egregious father.
EIGHT
"Sirius," Harry said shakily. He had been lying on his back on his bed waiting for Sirius to call all evening, but now he felt like he hadn't had any time to prepare at all. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and looked nervously at Sirius's face in the fireplace: but Sirius smiled at him straightaway, sunnily and broadly.
"You're quite right, Harry," he said. "I shouldn't have called Snape a queer."
"No," Harry said cautiously, "you shouldn't."
"I should have called him a vicious, greasy, power-worshipping, murdering Death Eater," Sirius growled, his face beginning to be stormy. "I don't give a stuff if he does it with women, men, or bloody *goats*, I just don't want you near him."
"I'm not doing this for the pleasure of his company," Harry snapped, distracted. "You ought to know me better than that. And you know damn well that every Death Eater in the country - and beyond - wants me dead. Who do you want me to train with? Malfoy?"
"All right," Sirius agreed grudgingly, adding: "Albus trusts him, I suppose."
"And so do I," said Harry. "At least to know about the Dark Arts," he added hastily, seeing Sirius's eyebrows shoot up.
"Well, just as long as you remember not to trust him any further than that," said Sirius. "I wish I could be here to keep an eye on him but I'm sorry, Harry, I'm not going to be able to get to Hogwarts for a few months: Dumbledore's sending me off again and I've got a long journey ahead of me. But Harry, look after yourself, and if he tries anything you tell Dumbledore *straightaway*. Or owl me, and I'll back here before he knows what's hit him."
And he was off, leaving Harry staring into the flames and wondering if Sirius had even *heard* him saying he was gay. And if Snape really was queer, or if it was just one of those things people kept on saying without checking. Like - now he looked, Snape's hair looked all right to Harry.
NINE
Snape in the dark. In bed. His cock in his right fist, his left hand clenching in the sheets by his hip. Scraps of memory and fantasy bright across the screen of his mind. His jaw tense, his eyes squeezed shut in concentration. *Accio* good images, *accio* what I want, *accio* orgasm, quickly, quickly, quiet me. Lucius on Veritaserum looking up and gasping yes I like it yes you bastard Severus stop it; various sense memories, almost clinical in their referents, abstract and faceless, having long since lost any context (arse/ finger/tongue/lip/finger/balls); Draco playing Quidditch, his thighs tightening around the broomstick (brief flicker of annoyance that he had been surrounded by schoolboys for so long that they had started hounding him even in his fantasies); Avery tightening the knot in the red thread and looking up from across the Slytherin dormitory, smiling and cool as Snape bucked and gasped; nipple/finger/nape/ teeth/cock/lip; the perfect bow of Harry's top lip; Bill Weasley's long loose seventh-year hair; Harry's mouth, opening...
He bit his lip hard, and thrashed, and cried out shortly *ah*, and for the half-second it lasted allowed himself to imagine someone was there to hear him. Then he wiped himself off, spread himself limply across the bed, and relaxed into feeling very pleased indeed to be alone.
TEN
Harry sighed angrily. "But it's a *curse*," he said, not bothering to keep the contempt out of his voice. "It's *obviously* Dark."
"Oh, really?" said Snape. "Like Jelly-Legs and Furnunculus and all the other curses and hexes you were taught in your first year? If you know so much about it, Potter, please do share your knowledge: the Ministry might be interested to know that Dumbledore is teaching Dark magic to eleven-year-olds."
"Then what *is* Dark magic? What makes it Dark?"
Snape sneered. "The laws, Potter," he said, bored, "and the people who write them, it's as simple as that; at least to us ordinary mortals. Less simple, perhaps, for The Boy Who Lived In Sublime Ignorance Of The Rules?"
"You're telling me that Dark magic is just magic that's been banned by the Ministry?" asked Harry incredulously. "But that doesn't make any sense."
"I agree," said Snape, "but it is the only definition that holds true. A great deal of the magic classified as Dark these days was once - as you would know if History of Magic were taught by a competent wizard rather than a raving anti-goblin propagandist - considered entirely standard practice. Conversely, in the eighteenth century there were over a hundred Unforgivable Curses."
Harry frowned, thinking about it.
"Now," said Snape, "we had better pass on to more mundane matters before your brain overheats with the effort of five minutes' theory. Take out your quill, please, and write me out an account of the herbs which protect against Dark location charms."
Harry took out his quill and stared angrily at Snape, who had started doing some marking - as if the first-year essays on aconite were as important as beating Voldemort. His old fourth-year fantasy, the day he'd seen Crouch/ Moody performing Cruciatus for the first time and been fascinated and sickened, swam back into his head: Snape flat on his back, jerking and twitching: Harry standing over him and...
Jesus. That's revolting.
Harry flushed and hurriedly tried to think about herbs or anything that would make his sudden erection go away.
ELEVEN
Harry in his bedroom at the Three Broomsticks, staring at a tattered pamphlet on Dark transfiguration theory. It didn't make any sense. Worse than usual, this time; almost literally. Karkaroff had translated it from the German when he wasn't much older than Harry was now, and he obviously hadn't been much better at English than Harry was at Dark theory.
He kicked irritably at the table leg, and wished that if Voldemort *had* been such a fucking genius and if he'd *had* to put his powers into Harry, he'd given him something *useful*, instead of bloody Parselmouth and a scar that transmitted pain and nasty, sticky, images into his head, dividing him against himself. Why couldn't he have been given an encyclopaedic knowledge of the bases of transfiguration and of what made Dark magic Dark anyway?
Snape was a fucking awful teacher and this was all *too hard* and - oh, it wasn't like Harry had any choice in any of it.
He sighed crossly and tried to go back to the pamphlet, but first he found himself ignoring the print and tracing its stains and tears and creases instead, thinking about Snape's fingers on it, handling it, treasuring it, all those years ago. It scared him that he wanted the fingers that had caressed this parchment (and worse things), that had attacked his godfather, to touch him. And then he found himself staring out of the window at the summer light on Hogsmeade, beginning to yellow and gentle into afternoon; at the horde of children in Hogwarts robes, trooping up the hill from the castle.
Oh, yeah. End of exams today.
Half an hour later, there was a tap on his door. Harry was shocked to find he was considering ignoring it.
"Harry?" called Hermione's voice.
"Come in," he said, and as the door opened on a cautious Hermione and a sullen, glaring Ron: "How'd they go?"
"Fine," said Hermione, cautiously, and "Yeah," said Ron, sullenly.
"How are you?" Hermione asked.
"All right," said Harry. "Bit bored. Doing *homework*," he added, gesturing at the desk. "Snape's just as horrible when he's teaching Dark Arts as he is teaching Potions." He saw the aghast looks on both their faces and corrected himself testily: "*Defence* against the Dark Arts. You know what I mean."
"Yeah," said Hermione, relieved. She stepped a little closer to Ron and Harry saw their hands clasp.
"Are you two going out now?"
"Yeah," said Ron, blushing, and "Sort of," said Hermione, then "Yes" when she'd heard what Ron had said.
"That's nice," said Harry, flatly, and felt himself lose interest entirely in the rest of the conversation. The contour of their two hands, entwined, cut a little piece out of the universe: the piece where he could have said I want Snape so much - yes, SNAPE - that I think I'm going to die; but then I'm going to die anyway, aren't I? Soon, I mean. And probably a virgin.
OK, so he wouldn't have said it anyway. He wasn't completely insane, just fucked-up and stupid and sixteen (nearly). But now he felt like there was nothing to say at all.
"Do you want to come downstairs?" Hermione asked. "Everyone's there. They'd all like to see you."
"Might as well," said Harry. His voice sounded whiny. He made an effort to remember what it had been like when he was real friends with Hermione and Ron, back in fourth year, and added: "Hey, I'll even buy you two penniless students a Butterbeer."
Ron scowled and Harry remembered that he hadn't remembered properly.
*
Harry was stuck at the end of a bench, in the corner, so he'd have to climb over four people to get out from behind the table. Ron was sitting to his left, talking to Dean and Ernie: Hermione was sitting opposite him, talking to Lavender. Ron's hands lay casually on the table near Hermione's, their fingers touching occasionally, perfunctorily: but the main business seemed to be for Ron to talk to Dean and Ernie, for Hermione to talk to Lavender, for everyone to see that their fingers were touching. It was like in the Christmas term, when Seamus had talked about how he was going to ask Parvati out for weeks, and then after Parvati finished with him, via Lavender, he'd talked about *that* for weeks, and they'd only gone out for two days and both evenings Seamus had been in detention.
Hermione and Ron had both laughed with him about it at the time.
Harry wished he knew how to Disapparate.
PART TWO: JUNE/JULY
In the world there are laws and there are desires. Convention is the path steered between them: but convention is the opposite of thought. - From Severus Snape's Dark Arts journals
ONE
Snape was sitting in a battered armchair by the fire in his bedroom, in the half-dark. The silence in his room had the particular wide, absolute quality of Hogwarts' summer-holiday emptiness. His hair hung down as he bent his face towards the heavy book in his lap. He had been holding it there, closed, for twenty minutes; now he tightened his mouth downwards a little, sourly, and opened the cover.
He leafed through the pages, closely covered with his own small, square handwriting, apparently idly at first; then, when he had reached the end, he set the book on the table beside him, summoned light, and turned back to the beginning to read more closely. His right hand, inside the left sleeve of his robe, was rubbing little gentle absent-minded circles on his forearm.
His reinvolvement with the Death Eaters so far had entailed little more than putting on a mask, striking the appropriate attitudes while Riddle postured and raged, and weathering a year of the boredom and the sick terror. Now, however, Riddle (like Dumbledore, like Potter) wanted to make use of his expertise, the last part of himself he had retained any respect for.
In some ways it was nonetheless almost pleasant to return to the scrupulous formality of his Dark Arts journals, to the days when he had been an experimenter, an innovator, and a brilliant magician. He supposed he must have been extremely angry, as well, when he was eighteen - it seemed the likeliest scenario, considering the bent of some of these beautifully documented, meticulous researches - but none of that came through here. He smiled a little. He *had* been the finest Dark Artist in the country (apart from Riddle, of course, the man was incomparable); he had broken out of every snare set for him by convention and usage and, rather melodramatically, written his refusal to be confined in letters of fire on the world.
Ultimately futile, of course.
Because eventually he had come up against Dumbledore, who had countered every curse Snape had thrown at him and then, when Snape was empty and finished, when he thought he had fallen as far as he could, had picked him up off the ground, battered but somehow intact, and sent him back to spy. And since, by then, Riddle was no better than Dumbledore, submitting the purity of his desire and the innovation of his thought to some law of nature he'd invented, some tortuously baroque and utterly conventional biopolitics, Snape had been happy to do so.
And now, fifteen years later, three days a week, he sat in a room alone with the Boy Who Lived, with Riddle's mark shining at him from the boy's forehead, *feeling* Riddle's power in the boy, so close and so entirely foreclosed. Three times a week he returned to everything he had once wanted, fiercely, when he had been able to want things fiercely, and he did so so that he could show Harry Potter how simple a step it was to annihilate these things. It was the same bitterness he had tasted when Harry had spoken to the snake at Lockhart's absurd Duelling Club: hearing the sibilant music of his youth, but this time hearing in it not power and the fulfilment of desire, but his own deception, his own impending, indigestible death.
He looked back at the book, its careful drawings and formulae, record of his younger, laborious, intimate understanding of the world, annulled now - and again, annulled again and again, three days a week - by Riddle's defeat and the disproof of Snape's basic premises. And fifteen years of failing to fall had taught him only that there was nothing he could not bear to lose.
Not much to take pride in, perhaps, after all; especially since he wasn't one to be impressed by scars.
TWO
Harry in the dark. In bed. His cock in his right fist, his left hand cupping his balls. In his head, some memories - other fingers where his own were now, the intriguing differences in their texture, their strength, their grip; Snape's eyes, the way his hair fell into his mouth and his fingers brushed it aside; Fred Weasley naked in the Quidditch changing rooms (shamefully/deleted) - but mostly fantasies.
His mouth was a little open, his eyes closed and smooth.
Their mouths meet/would meet. His lips part/would part, he presses/would press against Snape. Vague, the feel of an erection against his hip. *Oh.* Snape on him, warmer naked than clothed, kinder; this became mostly words, connecting not to memories or images but only to his right hand moving faster and faster on his cock, his left hand moving harder and harder against his balls, his thighs, his left hand that was too shy (though Harry was alone) to go where the words suggested: fuck, in me, hard, please.
When he came he was silent, a habit of five years' dormitory sleeping.
THREE
After he came into Harry's strong, imaginary fingers and just before he fell asleep that night, Snape had a random-flash idea about how to get the *Nefanda* defences into Harry's head.
FOUR
He had just finished cleaning up after his latest attempt to create a convincing but useless Truth Potion for Riddle when Harry knocked on the door for his class that Wednesday.
"Come in," he called, and went into the little washroom in the corner to wash his hands.
"Where are you?" said Harry.
"I'll be there in a - " said Snape. Harry was putting his head round the screen. Snape pulled his left sleeve down reflexively over his wet arm, his heart hammering, before he remembered that the Mark was very faint at the moment.
"Go and sit down, Potter," he snarled.
"Sorry," said Harry, and disappeared. Snape watched the water running over his hands until it ran clear, dried his hands, and went out into the main office.
"It occurs to me, Potter," he said without preamble, "that there are certain more... physical... ways of performing - and, hence, defending against - the Dark Arts, to which your particular talents might be a little more amenable."
Harry was staring at him, green and rapt, in such a way that Snape had very little energy to spare on wondering why.
"As you know," he went on, "I have very little time for wand magic, but it is perfectly possible to channel the Dark Arts in such a way. Please take your wand out, and we will begin."
Harry went red, and took out his wand. Snape showed him the wand-form defences against the *Nefanda* curses, slowly at first, then, as it became increasingly obvious that Harry found this far more intuitive, faster and faster, until Harry could anticipate what Snape was going to throw at him.
Snape threw the last variation he could think of offhand, swayed a little with the force of Harry's deflection, then looked at the clock: it was late.
"Well done, Potter," he said, sitting down and gesturing Harry to the other chair. "It is a little depressing to discover that your abilities do indeed increase in direct proportion to any given task's resemblance to a Quidditch match, but that was a very impressive afternoon's work."
Harry hesitated, shadowed and cautious, until he was sure Snape meant it: then he smiled, open and eager. Snape blinked again, burning the image onto the inside of his eyelids for future reference.
"I've kept you," he said, glancing at the clock again. "I'll spare you the homework this time. Good evening, Potter."
Harry, however, didn't leave.
"Snape," he said, "I can't work out how you cast the Nefanda curses. Can you..."
All the heart the afternoon had put in Snape drained out of him. "I can't show you," he interrupted brusquely. "Our agreement, if you remember, was that I should train you in *Defence* against the Dark Arts."
Harry glared at him. "I don't need protecting. Show me."
Snape sneered. "Dear, dear, Potter, there is no room at all in that pretty little Gryffindor head of yours for subtleties, is there? Now that you have ceased to believe I am plotting your death at every moment - "
"I haven't believed that since I was *eleven*!"
" - I must instead be acting in your best interests, albeit in some perversely disguised manner? I am not protecting you, I can assure you. But I can't show you this magic."
"Why not?"
Snape swallowed. "Because... There are - certain rituals which must be undergone before..."
"Sexual ones?" Harry asked coolly.
"In this instance, no," said Snape, glad to have the conversation back on safer ground. "Although your egregious godfather is, of course, right that several Death Eater rites have a sexual component. If you had studied for your Theory OWL," he added acidly, "you would know that sexual rites are, in fact, very common in conspiracy or brotherhood magics of all shades. But I'll teach you those when you're ready."
"Really?" said Harry, looking startled. His voice squeaked slightly. "When I'm...?"
Snape frowned, wondering what the boy was... oh. "Yes," he said repressively. "When you have a sufficient theoretical grounding for the very dry and laborious reading that will be necessary for you to understand."
"Oh," said Harry, and went red, again. Snape sighed.
"If that is all... good evening, Mr. Potter," he said again, and this time Harry did leave.
FIVE
July the thirty-first, and Harry Potter was, at long last, sixteen.
He was up before five and by eight-thirty he was ringing the bell at four Privet Drive. Over his right shoulder he had a grey fleece record bag; under his left arm, his Firebolt.
Vernon opened the door and stared at Harry as if he were a particularly ugly ghost.
"What are you doing here?"
"I'm sixteen today," said Harry serenely. "I need my birth certificate and my medical records. All that stuff. I'm going to get a flat in London, and I'll never see any of you again," he added, to encourage Uncle Vernon, who didn't seem to be going anywhere.
"Hmph," Vernon said, uncertainly, and turned his back, leaving Harry on the doorstep. As he disappeared up the stairs Harry spotted Dudley's not-much-thinner, agonized face staring at him round the frame of the kitchen door. He waddled to the front door and hissed: "You mean it? You're really fucking off, for good?"
"Yes," said Harry. "I would have thought you'd be pleased."
"But - " Dudley cast a nervous glance over his shoulder for his parents - "*they'll start on me next*!"
Harry laughed, pure golden joy bubbling up from his stomach. This was definitely the best birthday ever.
"Good," he said; then Vernon came back and Harry took the sheaf of papers from his hand, tucked them into his bag, and fucked off. For good.
PART THREE: AUGUST
victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni [the winning side must've had the gods' favour - but the losers had Cato's] - Lucan, On the Civil War
ONE
"North Europe," Snape said. He was looking at Dumbledore; Dumbledore was looking benignly around the room, anywhere but at Snape, as if the information were coming to him innocently, cleanly, from the air. "That's all I know, Albus. Recruiting the remaining giants, we think. And you might want to keep an eye on the Johnsons," he added.
"Oh, come now, Severus," said Dumbledore mildly, starting slightly as his eyes met Snape's, as if he hadn't expected to see him there. "I can't believe that. The Johnsons are Gryffindors for generations back."
"Of course," murmured Snape and clenched his fists as hard as if he were keeping a physical grip on his fish-slippery temper.
"How are you explaining your continued absence from the inner Council, if I might ask?"
"Research," said Snape briefly and prayed that Dumbledore wouldn't ask any more, wouldn't insist on watching Snape pervert his intellect along with everything else: but as ever, Dumbledore knew precisely when Snape was about to break, and brought him to that point and no further. He leant back in his chair and offered Snape the plate of biscuits: Snape took one and swallowed it, tasting dust and ashes, hearing fine, resonant echoes in his head.
And the Lord God said to the serpent: Because thou hast done this, upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.
"If that's all, Albus," he said. "I have a class with Potter this afternoon."
"Ah. Didn't Harry tell you? There won't be a class today. He will be joining us here in a moment, along with his godfather. There are matters we must all discuss, and since neither you nor Sirius is able to attend full meetings of the Order, for - er - obvious reasons, this seemed the best way."
Dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. Because thou hast done this.
*
Dumbledore was in the corridor, talking to a young wizard in Ministry robes who Harry didn't know. He waved Harry through into his study, winking at him.
Harry came through the door and froze, seeing Sirius in one armchair - squaring himself off, hands on knees, immovable - staring at Snape who, in another chair, drawn up tall, thin and haughty, was staring past Sirius.
"Harry," said Sirius warmly. "Good to see you. Come and sit down."
"Hello, Sirius," said Harry absently. "Hello, Snape."
Snape inclined his head. "Potter," he said. "No apology for missing your class, I see."
"But I thought Dumbledore - " Harry began, but Sirius was talking over him: "Oh, *come on*, Snape. Don't you think this is a *little* more important than testing Harry on his Counter-Curse Categories?" He winked at Harry.
Harry kicked one foot against the other. "Sirius," he said, hearing his voice plaintive in front of Snape, hearing his voice bitchy in front of Sirius, feeling himself ragged down the centre, "*don't* act like I have to choose between you and Snape. Please. And you," he added, glaring at Snape. "Just - behave civilly, all right? For my sake."
Sirius lowered his eyes and said, gruffly, "All right"; but Snape curled his lip and said: "For your sake, Potter? I see. The Boy Who Heroically Reconciled Two Warring Factions, eh?"
Sirius's face tightened in an alarming, murderous fashion, but Harry looked at Snape and suddenly started laughing, surprising himself so much he - almost - had no room for any more surprise when Snape joined in (sounding reluctant, sounding rather odd) a second later.
"Harry," said Sirius warningly.
"What? It was funny."
"Just don't start thinking you can trust him, Harry." Sirius's eyes were locked on Snape. "He doesn't know what loyalty means. The only thing he's ever cared about is Slytherin, and he tried to weasel out of that as well, you know."
"What?" said Harry. "When?"
Snape turned to look at Harry. Only some of the glitter and poison with which he had been looking back at Black had drained out of his eyes. It was a little overwhelming.
"In my first year at Hogwarts," he answered bitingly, "when Sirius and I were *eleven*, and many, *many* years before you were born. I asked Albus to re-assign me to Ravenclaw, since it seemed obvious I had only been Sorted into Slytherin to make the numbers up. An odd coincidence, isn't it, that *every year* almost exactly a quarter of the students' deepest natures correspond to each house?" The anger in his voice was old and new at the same time.
"You can't say he made the wrong decision," growled Sirius. "Look how you ended up. Archetypal Slytherin."
Snape gave his most dangerous smile. "One doesn't like to disappoint," he said.
"Certainly not," said Dumbledore, coming back in; "but one doesn't always get what one wants, does one, Severus?"
Harry felt as though someone had slapped him. Or as though someone had slapped Snape, in front of him, and Snape had just taken it. He thought about the feeling all through the rest of the discussion, while Sirius and Dumbledore laid plans and Snape, his passionate, vicious teacher, sat quiet and invisible and opinionless, supplying information when asked.
TWO
Harry came in clutching his Firebolt in one arm and his bag in another. He was flushed, breathless, robed, and late. Snape looked at him enquiringly.
"I was practising Quidditch moves now the students aren't using the pitch," Harry explained, "and I lost track of time."
"No chance of points for Gryffindor, and still risking that handsome face?" Snape asked sarcastically. Harry stared at him inexplicably for a second before Snape realized that - to a teenager whose mind ran on those lines, and more especially to The Boy Who Hadn't Lived Long Enough To Know That Some Things Were Just Impossible - it might have sounded like flirtation. He flinched.
"You think I'm handsome?" Harry asked expressionlessly.
"Don't fish, Potter."
"You do," said Harry, almost to himself. "I'm not a Gryffindor," he said aloud. He moved his chair closer to Snape and - dear Merlin, tried to kiss him. Snape dodged and glared.
"Don't be foolish."
Harry looked at him: framed, green, inscrutable.
"So I can risk my life secretly rescuing Sirius from Azkaban, and I can go up against Voldemort in single combat, and I can learn the Unforgivable Curses from you, but I can't put my hand," said Harry, and he leant in and rested his palm over Snape's cock through his robes, "here."
"That's right," agreed Snape. He removed Harry's hand from his lap before his cock had had time to do more than stir interestedly, and stood up. He felt extremely grateful for his advanced age: at Harry's age the touch would have had him instantly and fully erect, which would have been not only embarrassing but also entirely misleading.
"I'm not a student at Hogwarts any more," said Harry. "And I'm sixteen."
"That," said Snape sarcastically, "removes any reservations I might have had. Very well, Potter, let us fuck."
Harry stared at him for a moment, open-mouthed; incredulous, hopeful, guarded. Snape narrowed his eyes, which both made him look nasty and allowed him to photograph Harry's expression in his mind so he could keep it to himself, safe and surreptitious. It lasted only an instant before Harry gave that little almost-toss of his head to throw off the hope, and hurt and resentment faded in.
"All *right*," Harry said, hectic. "You could just say no, you know. You don't have to... You overreact to *everything*." He slammed himself about in his chair. "Maybe that's why I thought you'd have to go out with teenagers."
"*Thank* you, Mr. Potter. I suppose at least you have developed some respect for the law, even if not for common-sense or courtesy. Nonetheless, I should prefer it if you left your osculatory inclinations outside this room. Now. Please take out your quill, and we shall begin categorizing the fourteen varieties of *scelera*."
"What does *osculatory* mean?" asked Harry.
The boy was entirely incorrigible. Snape laughed before he had time to stop himself. Then he stopped himself. He put the silk and the slowness into his voice and breathed: "Look.. it... up. In fact," he added, "perhaps you ought to devote yourself to learning Latin, since you seem to have a fondness for incantations and it is unaccountably underemphasized on the Hogwarts syllabus."
*That* wiped the smile off Harry's face.
THREE
*Whomp.*
Harry swerved into a twisting dive, clinging hard to the Firebolt with knees and thighs and one hand: the other threw a pebble to the far side of the Willow, to distract it, and the branch whistled past his face. He felt the breeze of what could have been his death and breathed it in hungrily.
It was getting dark and he was still flying in the rhythm of the words Very well, Potter, let us fuck, stuck like a needle on a scratched record.
He dodged effortlessly round another branch or two and aimed a kick at the trunk on his way past, breaking off a few twigs.
Of all the things he had hoped, feared, fantasized and guessed would happen if he ever touched Snape, *nothing* hadn't even figured on the list. He had known, in his bones, the way he knew how to fly, that the moment he touched Snape a door would open, letting him out of his old life for good, for better or for worse, the way he had left the Dursleys behind: all he had to do was make up his mind to do it.
Very well, Potter, let us fuck.
You cannot treat it as yet another thing you are entitled to.
One doesn't always get what one wants.
*Whomp.*
FOUR
"All right," Sirius said cheerfully from the fireplace in Dumbledore's sitting-room. "I'll see you in a couple of months, then, Harry, provided that oily sod manages not to give the game away."
"I've *told* you," said Harry crossly, "*don't* slag Snape off. We wouldn't stand a chance against Voldemort without him and you know it."
Sirius stared. "Harry," he said slowly, "have you - Merlin's *beard*, Harry, have you got a crush on Snape?"
"Yes" and "No" would both have been lies, so Harry didn't say anything. Sirius's face, no longer cadaverous, handsome again and open, was still marked - would always be marked - by lines of bitterness and tiredness, and the expression on his face now settled familiarly into those lines.
"Harry," he said quietly, "you - "
"I *know*," Harry said, squirming. "He's a teacher, and he's old enough to be my father, and he'd never look at me anyway. I can't *help* it, Sirius."
"No," said Sirius, "none of that - though I hope for his sake you're right that he wouldn't look at you. What I was going to say, Harry, is... well, I know you're angry with me. You've got every right - "
"What?"
" - no, hear me out, Harry - you don't have to do this. I failed your father and I failed you. I failed to protect you. Most of all this past year."
"Sirius, you did everything you could! It's *me* Voldemort's after, it's me that has to fight him!"
Sirius went on as if Harry hadn't spoken, looking past his godson, eyes shadowed, into the last year. "I don't blame you for trying to punish me. But you know damn *well* you won't be any safer with the other side, Harry."
Harry stood up, trembling, knocking his chair over. "He's not *on* the other side!" he said, furious. "And I haven't - how *dare* you - I've just *left Hogwarts*, Sirius! That's not the same thing as going over to the Death Eaters! Can you lot not tell the difference between Voldemort and Snape - or any other poor bastard that gets Sorted into Slytherin?" He could hear tears somewhere behind his voice, and he took a deep breath, calming down for long enough to say: "It's just how I feel. It's just me. It's mine," but that sent him back into fury again and he shouted: "Why does it always have to be my *fucking* dad or fucking *Voldemort*? Why can't I have anything I want for my own?"
"You can," said Sirius, white-faced, "I just don't believe that what you want is *Snape*. If he -"
"Is everything all right?" Dumbledore asked mildly, putting his head round the door from his study.
"Yes," said Harry fiercely.
"That spying Potions master of yours has Confunded my godson!"
Harry sank down into a chair and wished the earth would swallow him.
"Oh, Sirius," Dumbledore said kindly, shaking his head. "Have you only just noticed?"
"*What*?" said Harry, but Dumbledore was carrying on.
"It's not Confundus. It's just a crush. You yourself must remember some of the unsuitable people you fell for in your sixth year. Harry's just practising for falling in love. If you were really ready," he added to Harry, apologetically, "you'd fall for someone who was *possible*. But Snape's *so* impossible, it's safe." Then, turning back to Sirius: "Have some faith in your godson. It can't do any harm, you know."
Harry managed to get out of the room before he said "Fuck the pair of you, you don't know anything," aloud.
FIVE
Harry in his bedsit, though hardly aware of it: no-one to watch him and the neighbours were out so they couldn't complain about the noise and he was jumping about, eyes open to make sure he didn't fall but blind, music so loud it jarred his body and emptied his mind, music so loud he could inhabit it, step out of his own life and inhabit it, lungs filling and shouting along with Bob Mould "then you get tight-lipped how do I know what you think... said I'm sorry I said I'm sorry I..."
He could never say it to Snape, of course, but this was better, saying it like this. He filled the music and it filled him and there was nothing outside, nothing waiting to trip him up, no sarcasm, no failure. Until the song ended and he was alone in the ugly, empty room.
SIX
Snape in bed, choosing to deal with his erection in an efficient and speedy manner rather than pontificate over what it might mean: but the flow of images, the steady staircase climb to orgasm, kept tripping on the uncompromising specificity of Harry Potter's right hand. He knew, now, what it felt like on his cock (although not, of course, *why* it had ever found itself there). Somehow that rather spoilt it for use as a convenient symbol of warm-and-tightness, or of beauty, or whatever it was that had granted it such a recurring place in Snape's night-time visions.
Snape let go of his wilting cock, turned over, and, reluctantly, wondered what it might mean.
SEVEN
Harry was on his way home from an exhilaratingly elbowy-and-chaotic career around Camden Market. He had six new badges (paid for) in his record bag; also four new CDs and some gaffer tape to stick down the carpet where the door caught on the rip (stolen). It was Saturday and the Tube was rammed, filling the atmosphere with the crackling, intoxicating static of hundreds and hundreds of vast indifferences to The Boy Who. Harry was reading the bits of the adverts he could see between people's heads and arms and not even *thinking* about Snape, when he remembered that he'd fucked up the carving on an amulet in his last class and melted the blade of his charged knife. He sighed and thought about going to Diagon Alley. He didn't want to: among other reasons, he couldn't shoplift there. He'd found that out when the Gobstones he'd pocketed had shrieked an alarm at the shop door and the shopkeeper had bustled over, all fulsome smiles and sidelong glances at The Scar That Lived, to assure him that he couldn't possibly be doing anything against the rules because he was Harry Potter.
Harry got off at Oxford Circus to go to an art shop he knew in Soho instead: but he'd come out without proof he was sixteen and they refused to sell him even a wobbly little craft knife. He thought of Mr Ollivander taking an hour to find him just the right deadly weapon when he was eleven; he thought of Snape saying "Very well, Potter, let us fuck"; and he went home in a strange mood.
*
Harry in his flat, watching *Buffy*, eating a Pot Noodle, feeling melancholy, and translating the copy of the Civil War Snape had set him, ostensibly to brush up his Latin but actually (Harry thought morosely, pushing up his glasses), to torture him, since this wasn't Latin like anything he'd seen before. Either that or Snape really did have Death Eater tastes: it was all deformed entrails and people dying in unlikely and prolonged ways and piles of corpses and shrieking women. Though there was something compelling about it. It should've been like Slipknot or the market stalls that sold cheap Satanic trinkets - *tawdry* - but somehow it wasn't; the attention it paid to its subject had a certain blackly humorous, despairing, rigour. A bit like Husker Du, come to think of it, the way their lyrics should've been banal (take out the garbage, maybe, but the dishes don't get done) but weren't.
The comparison somehow and suddenly tipped him over entirely into sadness: because Snape was *too old* to listen to Husker Du, too old to love Harry back. And because if Harry was normal, if he could have been normal just in this one fucking thing, he would be making a mix tape for Cho Chang, or even *Ron*, in the normal I-like-you way, and there would be a whole network of people around to carry messages and discuss things with. And he would accept that this was a hopeless crush.
But *nothing* about it was safe. Nothing about it was a rehearsal.
Harry blinked, looked back at the incomprehensible Latin, and wrote on his parchment: "Scarcely will it have been civil wars of how big a thing to move in order that neither of two", just in case: but no, it didn't make any more sense written down. He stared at the wall for a moment, then wrote: HARRY POTTER LOVES SEVERUS SNAPE.
That, on the other hand, made more sense on parchment than it did in his head. No: that wasn't quite it. Not that it made more sense, but that it looked truer. Or that there in black-and-white it was unarguable; it existed. It was almost as if it mattered. Whereas, as far as Harry could see, all the difference it really made was that he was going to have to copy out the translation onto a new bit of parchment.
PART FOUR: SEPTEMBER
Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything... - Saul Bellow; used as epigraph by Anne Sexton
ONE
"Apparating is neither a Dark Art nor a Defence against one," Snape said, and turned away. "Get someone else to teach you."
"No," said Harry and waited, interested, nervous, to see what Snape would do.
"*No*, Mr. Potter?" Snape turned back in a theatrical slow flurry of robe, but the effect was less menacing now that he no longer had the advantage of height.
"No," Harry repeated. "You're my teacher. And anyway, all the Death Eaters can Apparate, so technically it *is* a Defence."
"You're too young."
"Special Exemption," said Harry serenely.
"I might have known," muttered Snape. "In any event, you know perfectly well that it is not possible to Apparate here."
"About that," said Harry, and Snape sagged.
TWO
"You can't dress like that!" said Harry as soon as Snape came through the barrier at King's Cross.
"Oh yes I can," said Snape unpleasantly. "I can pass as a vicar."
*
The Muggle world was quite as repellent as Snape remembered it, full of huge machines and shiny, sharp-cornered things and dead-eyed people in ugly clothing. Everything was still either grimy or pathetically nearly-clean in a pathetically laboured-over way. He was, however, entirely unprepared for the increased noise levels into which the Muggles seemed to have been channelling the whole of their considerable technological expertise for the last fifteen years: every few seconds, as he sat on the bus beside Harry, forcing his breathing under control, there were bleeps and shrieks and unearthly, machine-made tunes and people shouting "Hello?" into small silver contraptions that looked like nothing Snape had ever seen before. Sounds travelled differently through this landscape of metal and plastic and concrete. Smells were brash and unfamiliar and violently clashing; everyone on the bus seemed to be wearing a different set of chemical scents. He felt ill and disorientated: of course, the last time he had been in Muggle London, with Lucius, he had expected an Auror's hand on him with every breath in, Lucius to turn and smile and charge him with treachery with every breath out. Now, when Harry touched his arm he jumped, and then glared at Harry with sheer relief.
"We get off here," Harry said. "Sorry."
"I was thinking," Snape said curtly, and began to make his way out of the bus. On his way down the narrow, twisting stairs, the vehicle lurched and his foot caught in his robes; he almost fell, but didn't quite. His heart, racing, seemed not to know the difference.
Barely seeing anything, he followed Harry off the bus, along a pavement, through a door, up some stairs. He stared half-desperately to calm himself at Harry, the only familiar thing in this chaos: since Harry was three steps above Snape, this meant focussing on his bottom as it came and went in the flow of denim, but Snape didn't mind. His breathing was controlled again by the time they reached the square of filthy carpet which appeared to pass for a landing, but he carried on looking at Harry, curiously, while Harry took out a key and opened the door.
Harry looked intriguingly different here, somehow: his thin body seemed to scale in this narrow, low-ceilinged building, and his movements were slung together loosely and gracefully. Or perhaps it was just watching him unlock the door to his own flat that made him seem so oddly adult and, at the same time, stabbed Snape to the heart with the sudden knowledge that he was terribly, terribly young; and that Snape wanted him. Really, *him*, not just a scrapbook of usefully attractive postures and body parts and safely impossible might-have-beens.
"Come in," Harry called over his shoulder and Snape shook the feeling off. It was only one more item on the long list of things he wanted and was too old to delude himself into believing he could have, after all. He stepped into Harry's flat and looked around the tiny room. Harry was standing in the opposite corner, awkwardly, a bare six feet away, his hands trying to suggest casually, generously, that Snape could make himself free with the space that was barely there.
"Potter," said Snape blankly, "where exactly did you think you were going to Apparate *to*?"
"Small distances, you said," said Harry.
"Yes, but I didn't envisage - " Snape swept an arm out, meaning *this*; his fingertips brushed the opposite wall.
"I said I had a flat in London, not a manor house," said Harry coldly. "What did you envisage?"
Snape smiled, sideways and quickly. "Probably something like a wing of a manor house," he admitted. "Being neither a Muggle nor a pauper, that's rather the scale I'm used to."
"You've been spending too much time with the Malfoys:" but Harry said it, rather than shouting; being in his own place suited him. "*Pauper*," he added disgustedly. "Can we Apparate here, or not?"
Snape looked measuringly around. "Probably," he said, "but you will have to be *extremely* careful not to end up halfway inside a wall."
Harry nodded, and they set to work.
Apparating, being wandless, was predictably enough not one of Harry's strengths. Somehow, though, they contrived to work amicably enough together until, once more, Snape found himself surprised at the time.
"Perhaps I should be getting back," he said unenthusiastically.
"Would you - " Harry hesitated. "Like a cup of tea?"
"Thank you," said Snape. Harry didn't move, so he added: "Yes."
"Right," said Harry and flicked a switch on a metal kettle that was standing on a surface with no visible means of heat. Unsurprisingly to Snape, this had no effect.
"Bollocks," Harry muttered: Snape remembered just in time that this was Harry's home and the lesson was over, and didn't rebuke him.
"Sorry, Snape," Harry said over his shoulder, "this won't take long. Sit down."
Snape sat and watched as Harry pulled the kettle's cord out of the wall, unscrewed the cover of the three-pronged extrusion at the end of the cord, pulled a tiny glass cylinder out, replaced it, re-screwed the cover, and plugged the cord back into the wall. His fingers, performing these unfamiliar movements, were deft and strong and knowledgeable, and suddenly Snape got a glimpse of how one might store one's intelligence in one's hands; how there might be a way of wand-waving that wasn't foolish.
THREE
Snape's last class on Tuesday was Potions with the Gryffindor/Slytherin sixth-years. He managed on this occasion to award Slytherin a hundred house points for particularly undistinguished behaviour and to take forty away from Gryffindor for particularly undistinguished misbehaviour: a hundred and forty difference. The best he had done this term. The outrage in Ronald Weasley's voice over such an entirely futile thing amused him all the way down the corridor to his office.
(To such petty revenges was he reduced.)
FOUR
Their class on Snape's free Wednesday afternoon, back at Hogwarts, ran predictably late. By the time Potter was gathering his things into his bag and putting on his jacket, it was almost seven o'clock. Snape thought he looked tired.
"You have a long and evil-smelling journey ahead of you, Potter," he said. "Perhaps you would like to have dinner here before you go back."
"Perhaps," said Harry, a little blankly. "Um... what do you mean, exactly?"
"I am inviting you to eat with me at top table," said Snape. "As my guest."
Potter looked at him levelly and greenly for a second, then, almost gravely, nodded. "Thank you," he said, "that would be very -" and if he paused it was only for a fraction of a second - "courteous."
"Not at all," said Snape.
They garnered a fair number of odd looks as they walked side by side, their steps matching, through the corridors to the Great Hall. Snape was mildly amused by the various permutations of the children's contradictory conditioned reflexes: their scuttling, fearful reaction to him and their awed, gaping response to Harry. He caught Harry's eye and raised an eyebrow as they entered the Hall and a Gryffindor second-year (another Creevey; they were proving to be as polyphiloprogenitous as the Weasleys) actually fell over his own feet in confusion; Harry smiled at him and they took their places at the table together.
FIVE
Snape glared at the beaker of clear liquid on the bench, casting the last of the revealing spells on it. The liquid sparkled back at him, transparent, unchanged.
That was that, then. Finished. Undetectably unfunctioning Veritaserum.
And now Riddle would gloat horribly and congratulate Snape on his new Truth potion and Dumbledore would smile benignly at him (I always knew you had it in you, dear boy, even if you are a Slytherin) for the successful deception and neither of them would have the *slightest* comprehension of how hard and how satisfying the rigorous, unhurryable work had been. How precious it had been; at least in itself, before it had to be put to its debased use in these ridiculous games that for the life of him Snape couldn't distinguish from the children's House rivalry.
He found that he was imagining that he could tell Harry about it. He shook the fantasy off, irritably, sneering at himself, within half a moment (Severus Snape and Harry Potter discussing Dark theory over dinner in the Great Hall?); but he was restless and unsettled, staring at the Potion, unable to relax into his customary pleasure in solitude. The silence of his chambers echoed.
SIX
Harry came in that Friday afternoon like a whirlwind, like the storm. He came into Snape's quiet chambers bearing the storm that was gathering outside. As ever. He had had a meeting with the Order that day, Snape remembered, and he waited a moment before he looked up from the homework he was marking. "Good afternoon, Potter," he said, the calm in his voice a warning.
"Snape," answered Harry. He was breathing quickly, his narrow ribcage butterflying under the soft cotton of his undershirt - his T-shirt.
Snape raised an eyebrow, but let it pass. "Take out your wand," he said. "We'll begin by drilling defences against the Unforgivable Curses."
"No," said Harry rudely, slamming his bag onto the floor and shrugging off his jacket with odd, vicious little movements. "Not drilling. I'm sick of rehearsals. Show me for real, Snape."
Snape hesitated for a moment, but the stormy air Harry had brought into the room filled his lungs, filled him with memories, and he had always enjoyed duelling, and - after all, Riddle might come at any moment, for real. It was for the boy's own good.
"All right," he said. "Ready?" Then, before Harry had managed to answer, "*Crucio*."
Harry's defence came up immediately and solid while he was still fumbling for his wand. Snape's curse rebounded off it. It felt like a small, metallic shock; it was almost exhilarating. Snape steadied, refocussed, re-cast, making it continuous, while the two of them moved quietly and slowly to their positions.
Snape was casting Cruciatus and Harry was defending. They stood at opposite ends of the dimly-lit room, so that Harry's face and hands floated palely in dimness. Their magics were braced and balanced against one another: Snape pushed a little harder and Harry pushed a little harder back; Snape relaxed a little and Harry relaxed a little in response.
All right, Mr. Potter. Let's change the rules.
"*Voluptas*," Snape said, flicking it in just for a second without stopping Cruciatus, and Harry cried out. He arched into an inhuman configuration, then went limp and fell to the floor as the Cruciatus took hold. His glasses fell off. Snape watched him for a minute or two.
Harry lay there, twitching. It became clear he was not going to be able to defend. Snape watched, rapt and dreamy, until his gaze settled on Harry's hand. The shape of it, curled and convulsing against Harry's thigh, somehow pulled him into the present from a long way away. Like the opposite of the Dark Mark automatically Disapparating him. It pulled him back and dropped him joltingly into his body. He had stopped casting the curse and was on his knees beside Harry before he had thought about moving.
For three long seconds Harry was entirely still; then his body relaxed and his terrifyingly-white eyes rolled back into place. He blinked, humanly, up at Snape.
Snape, helpless, silent, helped him to get up and settled him by the fire with a brandy and watched him shake.
"Ow," said Harry conversationally after a couple of minutes. "I think I've torn a muscle. Oh God, oh fuck, I'm going to die, aren't I?" He looked up at Snape. He was very white. "As soon as he stops playing the game with me. Whenever he likes."
"No," said Snape. Then he said: "Probably." Then: "Maybe. I don't know, Harry." He breathed. Harry looked at him over the top of his glass. He breathed again, and explained: "It does seems likely that Riddle can kill you: he is one of the most talented wizards of his generation, and you are a sixteen-year-old boy of some ability and some courage. But - he hasn't yet."
"Could you get me my glasses?" asked Harry. Snape found them on the floor and handed them to Harry, who hooked them on and looked more himself again.
"How are you feeling, Potter?" Snape said.
Harry flexed his legs and his back, looking thoughtful, and answered: "All right. I've had worse playing Quidditch."
"Very possibly, seeing that someone was usually trying to kill you during Quidditch matches," Snape said. Then he said: "Excuse me for a moment," got up, and walked into the little washroom in the corner, where he bent over the sink and vomited.
Gradually he became aware that Harry was watching him from the door. He rinsed his mouth, straightened up, and looked at Harry bleakly.
"I'm all right," Harry said.
"Intact," Snape said, hearing his own voice, foolish. "Yes, I see." He retched again, emptily. "Fuck," he said. He clenched his fists, digging his nails into his palms, and let the pain clear his head a little. Then he took three steady, gliding paces over the flagstones towards Harry.
Harry didn't step back.
Snape came to within a forearm's reach of Harry, stopped, and said glacially: "If you are well enough, Potter, you had better go home."
Harry moved a fraction of a pace closer to Snape.
"I will arrange for Albus to take over your tuition," Snape went on.
Harry moved his feet another inch forward. He was frowning in the way he did when he was trying to understand something, and Snape could have - if he had been someone else - wept for everything that he had just lost. That he had just destroyed. He swayed back just a little, and his arm moved as if it was trying to ward Harry off.
Harry picked it up, gently, and turned it over in his hands. They both looked at the Dark Mark showing clear and bright and ugly between them for a little while.
"You see you are not safe with me," Snape whispered.
"I know that," said Harry softly.
Snape looked up and saw the back of Harry's head; Harry had already dropped his arm, had already turned away, had already started walking out. Snape watched him go. The door closed so gently it was silent. Then he sat down on the floor and stared straight ahead of him.
SEVEN
He was startled to recognize Harry's knock at his door the next day, but before he could put stronger wards up Harry had come in and was walking towards him, silently, awkwardly. He looked as though he was being pulled.
Snape stood up defensively, but all that did was give Harry a level line between their eyes to walk along. His movements steadied. He came close to Snape and stopped. He was very still apart from the restlessness in his fingers, which pulled and twisted at one another down by his hip, their puppeteer's movements pulling at the strings of Snape's nerves, writing the panic and chaos jittering in Snape's blood invisibly on the air.
"I've come to apologize," Harry said.
"Apologize?" echoed Snape blankly.
"Yes," said Harry. "For yesterday. I didn't realize what I was asking you to do."
"Potter, I could have killed you."
"I *know*," said Harry hectically. "That's what I meant. You're not safe either, are you?"
Snape felt dreamy and distant, watching Harry's mouth move and listening to the unsynchronized words.
"I mean, just because you're a teacher, I thought... But it was stupid of me. You're not safe either," Harry repeated. "I shouldn't've come to you like this in the first place. I'm sorry. I'll ask Albus to teach me, like you said, but I wanted to say... I wanted to apologize."
Snape didn't say anything and after a moment or two Harry turned, awkwardly again, and began to walk out of the room. The sight of his back, leaving, shook Snape's heart.
"Harry," he said painfully. "Stay."
Harry turned round and stared at him for a moment, open-mouthed; incredulous, hopeful, guarded. Then wariness shaded his face and he said: "Only if you let me kiss you."
Snape blinked. "All right," he whispered.
Harry, six feet away, took off his glasses and folded them onto a shelf. He walked back along the blurred green line of his own gaze to stand barely an inch away from Snape, and bent his head slowly forward across the last inch.
His lips touched Snape's gently, hesitantly, dryly. It felt nice enough, but it was nothing particularly -
And then Harry pushed his tongue into Snape's mouth and something unrecognizable blazed through Snape and he was lost, entirely lost in this new arrangement of forces, like the kettle that stood inert until Harry's fingers somehow made it remember, all at once, in an instant, how it worked. It was as if all the walls of Hogwarts had fallen down, all of a piece, in an instant, and he was in the sunlight.
Harry's tongue was in Snape's mouth; and Snape was gasping for breath and grabbing at him and he couldn't remember ever feeling quite like this before; and his hands were shaking uncontrollably in Harry's hair and Harry's body was pressed against him. Specifically: Harry's cock, his hard cock, was pressed against Snape's. And he was sucking Harry's tongue and rocking his hips against Harry's, as if trying - inefficiently, unreasonably - to map the dimensions of Harry's cock through his heavy trousers and Snape's heavy robes, and he thought that in a moment he would come in his trousers, in his robes, against his sixteen-year-old apprentice who had taken everything he could throw at him and had - against all sense, against all reason - come back, come back, come back.
Snape grasped Harry's shoulders (and was instantly besotted by every detail of their curves and hardnesses) and began to wrench him far enough away to speak to him. As his mouth left Harry's he felt bewildered and upset and Harry made a small, unhappy moan which caused Snape to pull him closer and kiss him again before the sound had even had time to register.
Finally he summoned the strength to push Harry to half his arm's length away. *Accio* calm. *Accio* reason. Harry looked up at Snape, his messy hair and flashing eyes the same as always but somehow thoroughly debauched all of a sudden, as if they had always just been waiting for this transfiguring kiss to give them their proper context and reveal them as sexual.
"Slow down," said Snape.
Harry inhaled and bit his lip and Snape wanted to be his teeth and he wanted to be his lip. He clenched his fists in Harry's sleeves, desperately, and held himself fiercely still.
*
Harry stared at Snape, at his messy hair, his bright eyes. When Snape lost control, he *really* lost it. Why had he thought this would be any different?
But - *Slow down*, he'd said, but Harry didn't think Snape *could*, and he didn't see how *he* was supposed to. He was sixteen, and he was reckless and he was stupid, and Snape's body, for five years attested to only by those marble-cool, new-moon-thin scraps of skin above his high collar, below his long cuffs, was hot against the whole length of Harry's body and he could feel - not vague, not any more, this time for real - Snape's erection pressing into his hip. Harry's blood was pounding in his ears and in his cock, repeating its demand to come - *now* - more insistently with every beat of his speeding heart.
He was only sixteen. He was reckless and stupid. If *Snape* was out of control then this must, surely, be more than Harry could bear.
Somewhere in the back of his head, though, the calm little voice that never quite left him, even when Mad-Eye Moody had put the Imperius curse on him, was reminding him that Snape was still fully clothed (which was about twice as clothed as anyone else ever was) and that what he'd come back for was emphatically not this. Not just this.
All right, then, he *could* slow down. He pulled back a little and leant his forehead against Snape's, feeling every pore in his skin open thirstily to drink the contact up. When Snape moved his forehead away it felt violent, like being uprooted, but Harry managed not to whimper. He took Snape's hand and led him firmly over to the couch by the wall.
Snape smiled at him and subsided onto it in a maelstrom of robe. His face, pale against the dark fabric, was blurred out of its usual tired, distant lines.
"Nox," he said quietly; "Lumos," Harry said immediately. Snape looked at him, disconcerted.
"Can we?" Harry asked. He wasn't sure he would be able to deal with those fucking robes in the dark. He hoped Snape didn't mind.
"If you like," was all that Snape said.
Harry looked at him for a while, biting his lip, waiting for a sign; Snape just looked steadily at him and waited back until Harry couldn't wait any more and started unbuttoning his robes. There were ten buttons down the front to where the robes opened, just above the waist: Harry knew that already, of course, having counted them often and often with his eyes. It was so different and so the same now, now that it was his fingers counting them, that he was shaking. He felt a bit stupid - God, he felt *shy*. But he'd liked it when Snape was trembling before, so maybe it was OK.
Now Snape was lying on his back, naked, pale and warm and lovely. Harry could feel the heat coming from his body without even touching him. Then he did touch him.
Snape's skin under Harry's hands was soft, sliding a little loose over his bones as Harry ran his fingers over Snape's chest, his belly, watched him twitch and heard him gasp - God, it was almost a *sob* - as Harry's fingertips learnt their way around Snape's hips, the base of Snape's cock, Snape's balls and behind them. The muscles in Snape's legs tensed and relaxed, his feet arching and flexing. Harry thought that meant he liked it. He hoped so. He slid his fingers loosely around the shaft of Snape's cock and it jumped in his hand.
He laughed, low and happy, remembering his first flying lesson: *Up*! and the broom leaping of its own accord solid into his palm. Maybe Snape was right that he got better at things the more they were like Quidditch. He looked up, a little nervously, to see whether it was all right to laugh. Snape was frowning at him, curiously but not unkindly. Thank God. Thank God.
"Yes?" Snape asked.
"It's like Quidditch, this."
His frown deepened. "I devoutly hope *not*," he snapped, and Harry laughed again because this was Snape, really Snape, even if he was naked, even if he was pulling Harry's t-shirt off over his head, impatient and uncharacteristically graceless, even if he was pulling Harry down on top of him, even if his skin was luxurious against Harry's. It made more difference than he could have imagined: or, maybe not more difference, he didn't have much to compare this to; it mattered more. That it was Snape.
Snape was trying to get Harry's trousers off. Harry helped him, their fingers colliding and fumbling against one another, against the heavy denim; and then they were naked together and Harry was lying on top of Snape. His body was still but it felt jolted and helpless as a pinball, spun into dizziness by the violence of its own metallic, random demands; and he wasn't sure how far there was to fall.
Snape's mouth was on Harry's earlobe, his thumb tracing a slow and intricate path up the back of Harry's thigh. It reached the crease of his buttock and Harry shoved hard down against Snape's hips, arched his back, cried out.
"There?" asked Snape, and Harry panted: "Yes."
"Hmmm." Snape carried on rubbing his thumb gently over the spot in tiny circles while his other hand began to investigate the muscle under Harry's shoulderblade. This time Harry didn't wait for him to ask.
"There," he whispered, "yes," and started kissing Snape's mouth with small, quick, kisses until Snape's lips were making little chasing bites and snaps, little hurt noises, trying to keep Harry's mouth there. His left hand had fallen from Harry's thigh and was lying limp and forlorn on the bed; its fingers tensed and relaxed, seemingly unconsciously. Tiny ripples, tendons and muscles moving under the skin, asked Harry to touch them, and he did. The skin at the top of the arm was heartbreakingly soft and tender, having a certain velvet give to it that Harry wanted to taste. He traced the line of the muscle down the arm, found the Dark Mark, hesitated, looked at Snape's rapt, absent face - eyes closed, teeth on lower lip - and touched the mark.
Snape opened his eyes, grabbed Harry's wrist and wrenched his hand away, roughly, but his voice was courteous. "Don't touch that, please."
Harry looked up at him, caught. "It's all right, Severus," he whispered. "I told you. That's why I - I mean, I don't mind."
"It's not..." Snape began, closed his eyes, then, reluctantly, opened them again.
"Please don't touch it," he said. "I don't want you to."
Harry looked at Snape's face for a moment, silent.
"Does it... does it hurt?" he asked.
"No," said Snape, "it doesn't hurt. But it's - it's not... it doesn't entirely belong to me. It's not exactly part of my body any more. And... Harry, I - "
It was very obvious that he didn't want to talk about it. Something in Harry was fascinated by that, something pleasurable and secret and young. He knew he shouldn't, but he couldn't help keeping asking, not so much to hear the answer as to see Snape overcome something in himself, open shadowed, wary eyes, look past Harry, and force himself to answer courteously. He watched Snape exerting iron control over himself here at the very limit of his resources. It made Harry feel very tender and very fierce.
"It remembers the ways it has been used," Snape said dryly, finally. "And I don't want to think about them now." He looked up at Harry, something almost pleading in his eyes.
"*Oh, Jesus*," Harry said in reply and stood up, tugging on Snape's hand, until Snape, bemused, sat up on the edge of the couch.
"I want to come now, and I want to be standing up," Harry said, then, remembering himself: "is that all right?"
"Yes," said Snape and pushed him against the wall.
*
Harry's skin was so smooth and his muscles beneath were so hard that he was, fascinatingly, *springy* to the touch. Snape could barely get a grip on him; his fingers rebounded. He was slippery as a fish in Snape's arms, so that Snape had to push him against the wall to get any purchase on him.
Harry's back was against the wall. Snape's fingers fluttered on his throat and down to his neat, spiky nipples, over the ridges of muscle that armoured his belly, to - at last, at last - his wonderful cock. Its rock-hardness, the single-minded fierceness with which it butted into Snape's hand, were oddly moving: Harry's youth, his courage, his fervour, gathered in this cocksure vulnerability. The directness with which he had reached through Snape's defences and laid his hand on his cock (*on his heart*).
Two hard jerks and Harry was making an unexpectedly plaintive noise and thrashing like a fish and coming into Snape's hand. (Harry Potter, shaking himself to pieces in Snape's arms as Snape held onto him strongly; Harry Potter, pouring himself out into Snape's hand. Whoever would have thought it?)
Harry returned to himself quickly - he was barely sixteen, after all - and smiled at Snape. Their eyes were exactly on a level. His face was shiny with sweat, but on him it shimmered in an absurdly romantic fashion. Snape shook his head slightly so that hair fell over his face, but Harry pushed it back with tender fingers.
"What do you want, Severus?" he asked.
Snape took Harry's hand in his, kissed the palm, and curled its strong, calloused fingers, each with their memories of all the skill and wisdom he had learned in his short life, around his cock. Harry frowned.
"Really? I mean - don't you want to... fuck me?"
"Oh, hush," Snape said irritably, beginning to thrust into the frighteningly intimate cave of Harry's fist. It didn't take long for Harry to catch on and then one of his hands was working Snape's cock, the other travelling sweetly up and down the curve of Snape's bicep, before finding its place in the small of Snape's back, scratching at the base of his spine so that he shuddered and started to cry out in time with Harry's hand. It felt very good.
Snape put his wrist into his mouth and bit down, savouring the small pain that cut through the pleasure, showing him its extent, reminding him of his own edges, his existence in time before and after this moment. But Harry pulled his hand away from his mouth before he came.
"Don't hurt yourself, Severus," he said, looking worried. "Just - "
"I can't - " bear it? help it? stop it? and Snape fell headlong into limitless, wild and frightening pleasure.
*
Snape sighed shakily and ran a hand through his hair, pushing it back off his face. He was on the couch again, with Harry tucked against him and a blanket tucked over them. His heart felt desperately sad, his skin (apart from the usual malevolent itch at his forearm) felt warm and comforted and drowsy, as if nothing could be wrong in the world. His reason was a nagging ghost waiting to remind him, in Dumbledore's voice, that no matter how rescued he felt, he was more lost than ever.
Harry was looking at his own fingers, splayed on Snape's chest, with a worried expression.
"Severus," he began, then dried up. He tried again: "Was that because I'm too... I mean - don't you want to... have sex with me?"
Of all the things to worry about. Still, he was sixteen.
"I was under the impression that I just had," said Snape in his nastiest voice.
"OK," said Harry, and was quiet in such a way that Snape sighed again and asked: "May I ask whether you are in any doubt?"
"No," said Harry immediately. "Just - " He drummed his fingers gently on Snape and mumbled: "Someone said it wasn't, it didn't count."
"Didn't count?"
"Yeah. If it was just - you know, just hands."
Snape rolled his eyes, opened his mouth to snap at Harry, and then closed it again as something impelled him to take the question seriously. It wasn't as if he were an expert on sex *qua* sex, after all, since so many of his orgasms had been put to the service of other things: in fact, he suspected, grudgingly, that the last thirty-odd minutes might (as well as sealing his doom) have been the highlight of all thirty-odd years of his sexual life. The proposition distracted him and he considered it for a moment or two. There was, for example, the time he had kept Lucius under the Imperius curse for twenty continuous minutes, only losing him when he came in his mouth: but he suspected now that the pure, cold gratification that that had given him - intense though it had been - had not been wholly or even primarily sexual. It was hard to tell.
"So," Harry went on into Snape's silence, "if they *do* count, then I had sex with Oliver - er, and some other people as well, actually - and if they don't, then I haven't had sex with anyone, including you."
"Logically," Snape agreed. "*Crucio*," he added.
Harry's body stiffened for a second, then relaxed tentatively. "Didn't work," he said cautiously.
"No, it didn't," said Snape, and shuddered and tightened his arms around Harry reflexively and wished he had chosen a different example. "It is a question of intention. Once again, if you had paid more attention in your Theory lessons - "
Harry started laughing, and kissed Snape's neck.
*
But they still woke up in the morning.
PART FIVE: OCTOBER
when we're in your scholarly room who will swallow whom? - The Smiths
ONE
"*Ah*," said Snape. Harry felt Snape's legs tense and relax under his palms as he came into Harry's mouth and collapsed back against the wall. He stroked Harry's hair briefly with his fingertips as Harry rocked back onto his heels and looked smugly up at him. Showing off.
Not just my hands I'm good with, Severus.
Snape smiled. "Thank you, Harry," he said, tucking his limp cock back into his trousers and shaking his robes back into place. "Do you want - "
"Always," said Harry, standing up and beginning to undo the button of his jeans.
Which was the moment that the fireplace spat and crackled and shouted: "Harry?"
Snape froze. Harry swiftly converted the movement of his fingers into retrieving his wand from his jeans pocket, then turned to the fireplace and said: "Hello, Sirius."
"Hello," said Sirius warmly and Harry relaxed with the front half of his body, though his back was frozen rigid with the fear Snape was radiating. "Snape," Sirius added perfunctorily.
"Black," said Snape. "I'll leave you two in privacy," and he was gone into the little washroom. Harry glanced after him, then wrenched his attention back to his godfather.
"Are you all right?" Sirius demanded.
"Yes," said Harry. He could taste Snape's come in his mouth. "Why?"
"You look a bit shaken. Is Snape - "
"Snape is *fine*," said Harry, agonized and flustered. "Can't you just drop it for a *minute*, Sirius? Are you all right, anyway? How was Europe?"
Sirius looked at him, then obviously decided to drop it. "Europe was - eventful," he answered. "I won't keep you, though; I just called to tell you that I'll be seeing you soon. Albus has summoned me to a meeting of the Order next week, so I'll be at Hogwarts."
"That's brilliant, Sirius!" said Harry mechanically and wondered whether he meant it.
"I'll look forward to it," said Sirius. "Don't forget to tell Snape you'll be missing a lesson." He winked; Harry forced a laugh as Sirius cut the connection and faded back into flame. Then he sat down limply at the table.
Snape came out of the washroom, pale and nervous.
"I want to tell them," Harry said. "I can't take this."
"No," said Snape. Then: "Please."
"Why not?" asked Harry, trying to understand, trying to focus on the precious strain in Snape's face as he opened himself to Harry's questions, trying to keep his temper.
"They have enough of a hold over me already," said Snape briefly. He shook his hair forwards. "I can't stop you, of course," he added: "it belongs to you to tell whomever you like."
Harry kicked the table, irritably. "All *right*," he said, "but you know eventually I'm just going to lose my temper when they slag you off and tell them."
"Really?" said Snape. "I was under the impression you saved up your displays of temper for me."
TWO
Snape was still imprisoned at Hogwarts, still fearing that Riddle would discover his treachery or the Ministry his spy activity or, now, Malfoy or Black or Dumbledore his relationship with Harry; but in the interstices of his life there were Harry's hands, there was Harry's cock, his smile, the way he put his hand over Snape's heart when he thought Snape was asleep. Little beams of sunlight in Snape's overcast, sunless, stormless life. Ultimately futile, of course; only more items on the list of things that Dumbledore could take away from him whenever he chose, that Snape could learn to bear to lose; but, for the moment, they could be enough.
THREE
Harry paused the kiss, leaning back a little and holding Snape's face between his hands.
"I want you to fuck me," he said.
"Yes," Snape said, "that was the general idea," and pulled at Harry's arms to bring him back within kissing distance. Harry leaned back against the pull just hard enough to stay exactly where he was.
"I mean," he said crossly. "You *know* what I mean."
Snape held still. His right thumb carried on stroking back and forth across the skin just under the hem of Harry's short sleeve, but apart from that he didn't move.
"Please," said Harry, almost plaintively, then, more calmly: "Why won't you?"
"I don't want to," said Snape, and looked away. Memories clamoured in him: Lucius licking the drops of Veritaserum from his fingers and saying yes I like it Severus you bastard stop it; himself locking a hand around Lucius' throat, Lucius struggling hard, fighting back. The moment he'd broken out of the Imperius Lucius had used to put him on his back, grabbed Lucius by the hair, and said keep going don't stop or I'll kill you. Always for real, no matter how much they had both enjoyed it: the fighting, the hatred, the disgust. He looked back at Harry and his mind skidded away from all that violence, showing him the sickening, undefended curve of Harry's hand on his thigh when he had had him under Cruciatus, for real.
"I don't want to hurt you," he said.
"I don't want you to hurt me either, but if you do - " Harry took a nervous breath. "Well, you've hurt me before, and we both survived."
*
Snape paused for a second with the tip of his cock kissing the little wrinkle of Harry's arse. He looked down at Harry's rapt face, naked and smooth on the pillow below him. He stretched out the moment, watching as Harry opened the space of his dreams for Snape to trample; as he waited, like a princess or a frog, to be transformed. He was a little envious of that trusting apprehension, as his memories clattered dirtily through his own body, but he kept his eyes on Harry's and began to push his cock slowly and steadily, with desperate gentleness, into Harry's body as Harry gasped and bit his lip and stared up at Snape, puzzled, startled, his gaze coming from somewhere far away. As the memories and the voices in Snape were swallowed and wiped out entirely by the pure, blazing sensation of being inside Harry. As everything changed.
Snape eased the last centimetre of his cock in and held still and gasped. He suddenly felt terribly open, strangely vulnerable. His cock was being held in that perfect smoothness, blinder and closer than fingers; less skilled, yet more perfect; less personal, yet more intimate. When he had done this before his cock had been a weapon, blunt and brutal, part of the game, barely part of his body; now the completeness of the reversal unnerved him as his cock felt like the whole of him, as if all the rest of him - his body and the forty-five years that had made it and unmade it - were just delivering it to where it was meant to be.
He blinked and caught Harry's eyes and was caught in their unframed green gaze and his mind was restored to him. It settled into place, smoothing the break between his body and his mind, his heart and his cock. Apart from the blank place on his forearm, where he had cut himself out of his own life all those years ago, of course: that stayed blank and sneering; but the warmth around his cock and the expanding greenness in his heart swelled to meet one another and it almost didn't matter.
"Harry?" he asked.
Harry blinked and smiled. "Hmmm?"
"How does it feel?"
"Nice," Harry said simply.
It feels good, Lucius' voice echoed - lascivious, humiliated, angry - in Snape's mind, and he kissed Harry gratefully because it hadn't even occurred to the boy to be ashamed.
"I - oh," said Harry as Snape thrust, gently. "Oh. Do that again."
Snape did. Harry arched under him and he adjusted his angle to fit as close as he could into the sweaty creases of Harry's limbs, shoving his cock again and again into the centre of the X of their legs, the fascinating blind grip of Harry's arse. Again and again, everything he wanted on every stroke (except that his forearm reminded him that he did not belong to this).
"It's like," Harry said, sweating, biting, pulling hard on his own cock. "It's like - the opposite of Cruciatus," and Snape came, helplessly.
FOUR
Since he was expecting Harry that afternoon, Snape didn't look up from what he was chopping when he heard someone come in: though he did when he heard someone kick something wooden hard enough to splinter.
"I like that chair," he remarked. "Mend it, please. What's the matter?"
Harry, breathing heavily, stuck his wand out in the direction of the chair and said: "*Reparo*. There," he went on pointedly, "good as new. You can't tell anything ever happened to it."
Snape finished chopping his leeches and swept them into a careful, squarish pile on the edge of the board. "That's a relief," he said. "I find scars very tedious."
"FUCK YOU!" Harry shouted. Snape put his knife down.
"Harry," he said with some difficulty. "I'm sorry. Tell me, what's wrong?"
Harry collapsed raggedly into the mended chair, stuck his lower lip out mutinously, and studied his knee, which was making a little peak in the ample folds of denim falling from waist to ankle. Even in these circumstances, the unframedness of that sharp angle of bone, the vulnerability of it, snagged Snape's breath and tightened his throat.
"I'm sick of this," said Harry. "I'm sick of waiting. I want to get this over with. Does Voldemort want to kill me or not?"
Snape came to sit on the edge of the couch, at an oblique angle to Harry's chair. He smoothed his robes over his knees and turned his head so that he could see Harry's face.
"Every year," said Harry. "Every year he comes a little closer and I think it's the real thing, and then he just... Can't he make his fucking mind up?"
Harry took his glasses off and rubbed at the mark they left on the bridge of his nose with the heel of his hand. He looked up at Snape and Snape wondered what he saw, because something changed in Harry's face then and he leant in, close, and laid his palm against Snape's cheek. "I love you," he said angrily.
"Don't," said Snape softly. Harry's hand was gentle and warm.
"Shut up." Harry was quiet again for a moment, then he said suddenly: "Albus and Sirius don't listen to a word I say, you know. They want - I mean, I *can't* keep relying on being able to muddle through all innocent and brave. Like I'd win because my heart is pure, even if I'm stupid and ignorant and childish. Like you're corrupting me. Like knowing what I'm *doing* is corrupting me."
"They want me to stop teaching you?" Snape had been expecting it for months but he still wasn't prepared for the pain it sent through him. He hated knowing that he would not be able to fight for Harry, that all he would be able to do was lose and endure the loss, when he knew that Harry would fight for him, vicious and cocksure.
"Is that what happened to my father?" Harry asked painfully, not listening. "Is that why he died, because they took him out of the game, trying to protect him? I want to make a move. I want to get Voldemort out in the open, I want to face him, I want to get it over with, but they say wait. I can't do it any more, Severus, I *can't* wait, it's killing me."
Snape looked at Harry and didn't think he was exaggerating, or not by much, and suddenly he knew that there was something even Dumbledore couldn't make him bear.
"Your father died because of the Fidelius charm," Snape began slowly, "because he was cut out of his own life and reduced to a piece of information at someone else's disposal." He closed his eyes and added: "Might I offer you a piece of personal advice?"
Then he opened his eyes again, to remember this, in case he was about to destroy it. His heart was hammering. Harry was sitting up straight and serious and resolved. The lights here, away from Snape's worksurface, were low and strongly angled, making the shadows on his face emphatic.
"All right," said Harry, measured.
Snape gathered the whole of his life together in one place and said it.
"You need to eat your death."
Harry stared. His hands, bone and strength and will, clutched in the fabric at his knees. His lips were slightly parted.
"What do you mean?" he whispered. "Are you - ?"
"Recruiting you to Riddle's cause?" Snape raised an eyebrow at Harry's bare nod and went on: "Hardly. But I am quite serious, Harry. The term Death Eater is a very old one. Even older than me. It predates even Riddle by some centuries, in fact. When I was your age, I hoped to become one."
"But you," Harry started, then stopped, and started again: "But - Death Eaters..."
"Are a pack of self-deluding fools with no self-discipline and no right to the title," Snape spat. "Quite right. Short cuts and sloppy thinking and chicanery. No better than the other side."
"No *better*?"
"What? Oh. Yes, yes," said Snape irritably. "I was talking about their intellectual rigour. I said you have to eat *your* death, Harry. Your own. Not your father's, and *certainly* not some hapless Muggle's; and you have to *eat* it. Not savour it, not flirt with it, not steal it, not put it to flight. Not romanticize it, either. *Eat* it. Your death," he said, and refused to be distracted by the quirk in Harry's lips that meant he was starting to lecture, "is the shaper of your life, your fingerprint on the world: the *crucius* of your unique relation to the world. Now your death, Harry, was taken from you by your mother, when you were very small, and you have been living out the consequences of that, as well as taking on the not-quite-death of Riddle, ever since. I believe you are uniquely well-positioned to become the first true Death Eater in a hundred years."
"So I'd... Do you mean I'd live forever?" Harry was fiddling with his fingers in the manner Snape now suspected was his way of thinking. "And what's a crucius? Is it like Cruciatus?"
"No. It's from the other meaning of *crux*." Snape looked at Harry teacherishly. Harry sighed deeply and droned: "Cross."
"Cross. Indeed. It's a Latinization of the Greek *chiasmus*, a topographical metaphor for a temporal criss-cross, which designates both deferred effect in the manner of the future perfect tense, and a threshold which positions the entity on each side as being contained within the other entity. And absolutely *not*. One cannot simply escape the condition of being mortal. There *are* laws. That was the single, fundamental mistake that we - that Riddle and Flamel made. In fact, the Death Eater rite would neither delay nor hasten your physical death, nor would it affect its manner, nor would it stop you fearing - or desiring - it. It doesn't work on that level. But Harry - if you were to succeed, you would no longer have to be imprisoned between owing your life to your parents and your death to Riddle."
Harry thought about that for a while, then he asked: "Why not you? Why couldn't you...?"
"I don't want to tell you."
"Tell me."
Snape sighed. "Very well, Harry. I could never eat my death because of your benighted father and his idiot friends -" ("Don't slag my godfather off," Harry put in automatically).
" - and Dumbledore, I suppose," Snape went on more slowly, thinking. "When James... *saved my life*, Dumbledore forbade me to tell anyone about it: in fact, he laid it on me that I could never use it in any way. So my death belonged to your father until I saved your life in first year."
"So you could become one now?"
"I suppose I could," said Snape, and started shaking. "I love you," he said.
"I know that," said Harry.
PART SIX: HALLOWE'EN
Two tall, white flames leapt from the crown of the hill into the sky. They would have been visible from Hogwarts if anyone had been looking.
*
"God," said Harry. "God." He took his glasses out of his jeans pocket and put them back on as he and Snape floated gently, supinely, back down to the ground. "Do you feel any different?"
Snape landed with a slight bump and felt the wet grass prickle the back of his neck through his hair, prickle his bare, unmarked, arms.
"No," he said.
"No," Harry agreed, "nor do I. God. Severus?"
"What?"
"Do you think we could take on Dumbledore?"
Snape took a long breath. It tasted good. "Oh, yes," he said, turning his head to look at Harry, flat on his back on the grass beside him. The odd angle abstracted Harry's unscarred face into a handsome mask. "But Riddle first, don't you think?"
Harry grinned, and took Snape's hand. "Hey," he said instead of answering, "we'll still be in time for the Hallowe'en Feast."
*
They walked down the corridor together to the Great Hall. Holding hands. The looks they got were odder than ever.
The contour of their joined hands was like a fractal fold in space, like a tiny universe, spinning breathlessly in the interstices of this one: never quite escaping, never quite imprisoned.
END
Notes on the Latin:
The line of Lucan's On the Civil War that Harry mistranslates is 2.62f: uix tanti fuerat ciuilia bella mouere/ ut neuter, 'scarcely would it have been worth waging civil war, even if it ensured that neither side won'.
'Voluptas' means 'pleasure', with a strong sexual connotation.
