Improbable Things: "In the Cold Light of Morning"
Or maybe you saw this coming.
After years and years, I finally edited together these ficlets and gave the thing a real name. Belated, but somehow... it seems the right time.
XXX
Title: In the Cold Light of Morning
Fandom: Harry Potter
Canon Kosher: up to book five
Comments: "Dead Snape Series" was so descriptive a title I found it hard to tear myself away. My next choice was "Titus Alone" but the amount of satirical British fiction cross-referencing going on just seemed a bit too much. Instead, the old stand-by: Placebo.
It starts:
---
June 1996. The summer after fifth year.
---
Snape hung in the air, helpless, awake and struggling, or unconscious, flung against a wall, bleeding, and James held the wand, or Sirius, young and healthy, glancing over to flash Harry a brilliant, wicked smile and Harry wanted to vomit.
Harry woke up with his stomach quaking, turned his face into the pillow and groaned.
If it weren’t for Snape, he wouldn’t feel this way.
If it weren’t for Snape, Sirius might still be alive.
But Harry didn’t want to think about how things could have been, should have been, different. He felt a feverish wave of hatred for Dumbledore, but he let it pass. He didn’t want to think. He didn’t want to remember what should have been done, could have been done.
.
The Dursleys stared at him in wary silence when he dragged himself downstairs. Harry tried not to look at them. Most of all he didn’t want to see his aunt, didn’t want to glimpse more secrets in the tightness of her mouth, in the whiteness of her startled eyes. For once, Harry was glad that she hardly ever spoke about his parents.
The day wore on, full of hushed looks and the things Harry hated to remember. In the heat of the afternoon he slipped outside. He didn't really have chores anymore, but still he found himself on his knees in the dirt, attacking the weeds in the garden.
He felt satisfaction in ripping the plants out of the earth, using his muscles and feeling the ground give around each embedded root. His thoughts drifted to the Weasleys’ pest problems... Troublesome garden gnomes. Magical spells. Compared to this work, it seemed like a game.
In the summer sun, surrounded by garden walls, surrounded by neighbouring gardens on the most ordinary street in Surrey, the whole situation suddenly seemed fantastical to Harry. Impossible. Absurd.
For the very first time since he got the letter, and it had been like an escape from his nightmare - for the first time, Harry found himself imagining, wishing, that it had all been a dream.
He wished that there were no such thing as magic. Or at least that he, Harry, had nothing to do with it.
---
August.
---
He was sitting in class, close to Snape’s desk, and Snape was glaring at him, sneering at him and hissing accusations of negligence, of apathy. They were talking about some potions assignment, but “You allowed Voldemort access to your mind. You yearned for the gifts he trailed before you, you imbecilic boy.”
Snape's desk seemed to stretch higher away from him, and Harry would have felt small, but he had leapt to his feet and he was shouting, “No, it was you! You should have known! All that time you were probably helping him! Breaking into my mind, breaking me down, making it easier for him! And you baited Sirius! Then he left the house and he died and you are probably glad for it!”
Snape’s pale, compressed lips, his eyes eyes as dark and deep as inkwells, denying nothing… It all melted into pain and reality as Harry woke with his head practically splitting itself apart in fury.
The dream’s images and sounds were draining rapidly away, but one conviction remained: Snape was glad. Snape was glad that Sirius was dead. Just as he was glad that James was dead, and probably glad that Lily (the 'mudblood'!) was dead, and no matter what they had done, no matter who they had been, they were Harry’s, all he had, all he could have ever had, and they were gone gone gone and Snape was probably sitting somewhere right now, smirking about it.
He'd have to return to Hogwarts soon, have to see all of them again. Harry didn't think he'd be able to handle it. Snape’s arrogant voice or Dumbledore’s sympathetic eyes and Harry would just lose it, go completely berserk in the Great Hall and then they would have to expel him.
Harry didn’t care.
But no… No, they would lock him up. St. Mungo’s, maybe, ‘for his own protection,’ and then one day, when he really had gone mad, they would let him loose. And then Voldemort would kill him.
Or he would kill Voldemort.
But Harry couldn’t really imagine winning…
Ron and Hermione would never understand. Their letters over the summer… Ron always trying to distract him, Hermione trying to make sense of things, when what she didn’t realize was that none of it made sense! None of it had made sense from the time they were eleven, but they had been too naïve to notice it…
Dumbledore didn’t tell him. That stupid prophecy. And now that he had revealed… what? That what Harry could have figured out himself was true? Except he didn’t have any other choice?
One thing, one thing had changed. If underage magic were legal or if he dared to break the law, Harry was sure he could perform the killing curse now.
He thought of Severus Snape shooting down flies, lying in a grimy bedroom with a grimy t-shirt rucked up about his pallid waste, his expression blank as Harry’s could never be, but directing his spells with the same bitterness and rage that churned in Harry’s thoughts and dreams.
Exactly the same.
Harry rolled onto his stomach and shut his eyes around the still-pounding ache in his head.
He wished, for the millionth time, that he had never seen inside that man’s mind.
---
February, 1997. Sixth year.
---
You’re incompetent, Potter.
You’re lazy.
You’re a sham.
You’re an arrogant fool.
You’re the reason that Black is dead, that Diggory is dead, that your parents are dead. (Can you still hear their deaths, Potter? Do you still remember your mother’s cries?)
Your own worthless, pathetic brain cowering behind that hideous scar is the sole reason that you yourself will die one day.
And take the whole damn lot of us with you.
Now get up.
And try again.
…
Snape wanted him to study. “Focus on your hatred!” he’d said. Focus on anything, since he’d given up ever expecting that Harry would learn to be cold, controlled, emotionless.
Like him.
Harry was not like him.
And that was his mantra, lying in bed, fisting the sheets and feeling his head throb. Not like him. That miserable pale face and those tar black eyes. The infuriatingly still face he adopted whenever Harry reached boiling point, the face that was never going to apologize for Sirius’s death.
The face that said, ‘It was all your fault,’ and it wasn’t to goad him. It was truth.
You don’t know anything
But Sirius laughing-brutal-pranking-wicked-jealous-careless-murderous, in Snape’s memories, proved he did.
I’m not like you!
Those aren’t my memories.
Harry couldn't escape Snape’s face, all blacks and whites, haunting his vision behind his closed eyes.
When he shut his curtains and closed his eyes and tried to shut his mind, there was Snape - impassive, blank, heartless (heart wrenched out) - watching him. Silently reviling him. Guarding his dreams.
---
April.
---
“Expelliarmus!”
The spell drilling into his mind reversed, and there was darkness and then it was blood, a blood-slick hand on Snape’s wrist, caressing the skin below the Mark, Lucius Malfoy smiling and laughing, and Severus feeling happy…
And Harry had collapsed, trembling, exhausted, at Snape’s feet.
“That’s the wrong spell.” That crisp voice full of loathing, his body slightly bent as he braced himself against his desk. “And you’re still saying them out loud.”
Harry grinned around his panting, wishing a breeze would come through the dungeons to cool his sweat. “But it worked.”
“Yes, you do seem to be improving,” Snape sneered. “But you will forgive me if I reserve doubts as to the longevity of this trend.”
That brought Harry to his feet, staring eye-to-eye (only a couple of inches shorter now, even though Snape still seemed so tall) with his hated teacher, invading his space. “I’ve been practising,” he snarled.
I won’t fail again.
Snape glared at him until Harry felt his fury ebb, felt ridiculous for imagining that Snape would be the one to draw back. Suddenly uncomfortably aware of the small space between them, stirred by both their breath, Harry moved off, but still glaring right back, still waiting for Snape to acknowledge his effort.
“And tell me, Mr. Potter, how long do you expect your fury to sustain you? How long do you expect your effort to sustain you, until your next failure kills all hope, again?” Snape was bracing himself against his desk with both hands, and it could be a genuine lean by now, but this was Snape’s thoughtful tone of voice, his tracing-his-lips-with-his-fingers tone of voice. He could still be tired (so Harry was improving!), but he was watching Harry, waiting for an answer.
And Harry was terrified, for a moment, that he had none, and he could imagine the hopelessness like a Dementor’s presence sucking all his strength away. But - “What else should I feel? Whatever Voldemort does, however I fail,” whomever I lose, “what else could I feel but fury?” And how can that not help me?
It was all he had. The cavernous emptiness of winds and veils and whispered voices; fury was all he had.
Snape was grimacing at him so severely that Harry thought for a moment he really had done something offensive. It was so easy to offend Snape; perhaps Harry had reminded him of James again.
“You had better find something else, Harry Potter.” Snape’s voice had dropped into a menacing purr. “Find a reason to fight. Emotions are subject to manipulation.”
His lips were sneering, but in his eyes it was the lost look, the empty look, the look of truth and firsthand experience.
Don’t wind up like me, Harry Potter.
I’m not like you.
Angry, snarling boy who had thrown himself at Voldemort’s feet, shaking with the force of the injustices of Dumbledore. Black hair and eyes and hooked nose. The mindless fury and hurt of a wild animal beneath all that composure.
Not me.
I’m not like you.
---
December 1997. Seventh year, after the battle of Hogsmeade.
---
The air in Snape’s dungeon was cold around Harry's winter robes.
It leached the warmth between the folds, laid a frigid palm to the chest inside them.
Snape’s whisky burned in his throat, but he couldn’t taste it. Harry put the bottle down with his gloved hand, set it down on the stone floor and forgot about it.
Empty and still and silent and cold, and the pickled creatures in their jars dead as they had never seemed before.
Harry could imagine dust settling on the bookcases, a counterpart to the snowfall outside.
Snape would not intrude, sweep briskly into his office to find Harry here.
Not today. Not any day.
It was Christmas.
Harry had come to these rooms to be alone.
---
September 1999. More than one year since Voldemort's final defeat.
---
Anger came easily to Harry. He could grip it in his mind, sure and burning and powerful as Godric’s sword before it had shattered from the strength of Voldemort’s curse. That battle. That day… The memories were like cards. He could shuffle through them, throw them away… He had played at flicking them into a waste bin, pushing at them with his magic when they hadn’t allowed him a wand, sitting in a bed at St. Mungo’s with boredom and silence and their fear heavy all around him…
The memories kept bubbling up, but he pushed them down, down, down… Sliced the resentment and pain into ineffectual slivers that fluttered down, the king and the queen's separate halves shocked and offended… Breathing in the busy, polluted, metropolitan stench of London, muggle London, his home. Where lives went on and on and had nothing to do with him.
He had taken drugs, at first, to disrupt his dreaming. Never think about the potions, however addictive, that would have taken care of his problem so efficiently. Arsenic would have done it. An overdose of lithium would have ended his problems forever. But no… Better to stick with safe, simple muggle drugs. Marijuana. Ecstasy. Pills that left his days as convoluted as his nights, and sometimes the flashes so intense he couldn’t escape…
All Harry had wanted was escape. So he stopped taking them. At least when he was dreaming, he could wrench himself awake.
He remembered the taste of Ginny’s flesh, the rain of blood and the lost look in her eyes as she died. That whole room had stunk of curses and the odours of the dead. Or, no, that was a different room… a different… The madness of that other room, and all those... disfigurations. Those scars. Harry didn’t have a scar; his was just a… badge, compared to the deformations those muggles had suffered.
Bellatrix Black had died in that room, her end as painful as Harry knew to make it, as slow as his rage could stand. It was perhaps his only memory of the war that made him completely glad. A softening of his face that passed for a smile. Harry felt it as a smile.
…
He didn’t only think of the war. He had begun to take an interest in football and rugby. An obsession, really, with watching the scores. He didn’t play.
It was a novel experience, jostling other fanatics and shouting his throat raw, feeling his face heat, his veins and eyes bulging. So much energy and aggression and anger and fear and tension and at the end no one had been murdered and nothing had changed and it didn't matter. It didn't matter at all.
In the London sports pubs, Harry was just another overly enthusiastic young man, drunk on lager and testosterone. He had even made a few friends. And if their banter sometimes reminded him of Ron or Seamus… Well, they didn’t ask when he got quiet. Probably attributed it to the drink and the come-down.
There were girls, too. They didn’t flock to him, but they drifted by him, knocked against him, and if he extended an arm they responded. Just casual, easy things. They were always more interested in someone else, waiting a turn for Mike or Brent… And Harry was easy, undemanding, never jealous.
Something disquieting about him, the way he never talked about his past. Never talked at all, but inane comments on rugby or football, the way their makeup matched their eyes. A fatuous grin like he was stoned or making fun. Good-looking enough for one shag or several, but something like a disease eating away at him. Something already dead in his eyes.
…
Sometimes he dreamt of Snape. Just Snape. Glinting at him, his face contorted in a sneer or snarl, holding Harry in contempt while Harry ranted and raved. And Harry would pause, panting, waiting for that hissing, simmering voice to skewer him, rip his defences to shreds. He was ready to strike back just as hard and fast, shaping his rage like a lance against Snape’s coldly burning eyes. He knew this game. Years of it and he knew what would make Snape coil in on himself and what would make him lose control, attack.
I’ll get through you this time. I’ll see you.
Reaching out around the pain, reaching out to grip Snape’s barriers and…
Waking up aching, throbbing for the struggle, his whole body wound tight and tense and wondering, for a moment, where Snape had gone to, when Harry could still almost see him, looming before him like a negative impression from a flash bulb, and Harry’s fists were clenching, unclenching, around nothing...
He was horizontal in his bed. Reality filtering in with the hazy sunlight that shouldn’t be here in this room, along with the traffic sounds and the shadow of his muggle television and the fact that Snape was dead.
Harry’s heartbeat racing for a fight, but Snape was dead.
Coldness seeping into him (“it's the heat that moves,” Hermione would lecture) and he was there again, staring at Snape’s body with those dark eyes open and empty, open with one eye pressed into the frigid winter muck and all Harry wanted to do was drop his wand and lie down next to him, become just as cold and still. But, no, he had to keep on fighting, and it was just like the selfish prick to find a way out when Harry had to keep on going, on and on and on, and he was tired.
He was tired of waking up believing that Snape was alive.
Only Snape.
Harry lay awake in his cramped flat surrounded by dirty sunlight and siren sounds, surrendering his dream to the London morning, eyes empty, hand trying to rub away his frown.
---
Seven years later.
---
He finds himself staring after thin young men with proud strides and thick, glistening, shoulder-length black hair and for a while he thinks he's fixating on Sirius.
He chats them up sometimes, on those rare nights when he can admit to himself that he’s gay (not this, too, god damn it, can nothing about me be normal) and it’s not just another dysfunction he can blame on the Dursleys or… anyone else. He chats them up but their smiles are too open, their eyes are too innocent and bright. And even when a lithe Irishman with wicked, knowing eyes chats him up and takes him home and fucks him (considerate but firm) all night long, the way Harry imagines Sirius would fuck… It’s nothing. He feels hollow, hungover, Irish whiskey a gale inside him that left him empty and sick.
Serves him right, he thinks, for wanting to fuck the memory of his dead godfather. Sirius would have been horrified.
It isn’t until about a month later when a shadow falls over him at a bar and Harry shivers, expects to hear “Mister Potter” in that crisp, smoky voice and his prick is stirring, and it’s like he’s been waiting so long he’s forgotten what he needed in the first place, but now his heart is trembling in his chest… And then a freckled boy with sandy hair and a plasticine face drops into the seat next to him, smiling. Harry wants to vomit in disgust.
And when he realises what ghost he expected to visit, he wants to vomit twice over. He goes home to the cat he never got around to sending to the shelter and tries to forget his problems in red wine and Beethoven, thinks about what work he can do over the weekend to be ready for the office on Monday. He forgets the voice, the face, the walking corpse he wanted in the bar.
It isn’t until two months after that, watching a woman twitch her hips in a slim black dress, her attitude all the arrogance in the world, her shoulders thrown back and her Roman nose the proud beak of an eagle… Harry thinks that she still can’t match Snape for style, and though he’s thought that before, about lots of people, their sneers, their jibes, their swirling coats, it hits him now whom he’s been wanting all these weeks, all these moments, all these years.
And it’s worse than Sirius, somehow. It’s worse lots of hows. All he feels when he remembers Snape is hate. And despair.
It’s worse than loving someone he was fond of.
It’s worse than loving someone who was a convict, and then a memory, and then a fond memory.
It seems like Snape will never stop dying. Either completely absent from Harry's mind or blazing black and potent and Harry can feel that burning gaze... Resurrected in Harry's mind so that his death strikes Harry hard across the face again and again.
Just the way Snape would want it.
It’s almost fitting, that of all the ghosts he loves and hates, he has to be in love with this one. And the irony almost cheers him; he almost laughs. Imagining Snape's face twisting in disgust if Harry should proposition him...
But then Harry remembers that his bed and his life are empty, silence echoing around the memories, and one cannot sleep with ghosts.
---
2009.
---
Her name is Julie and she has thick, glossy black hair and vibrant green eyes. They could almost be siblings, but for her heart-shaped face and olive skin. Harry dates her because he has nothing better to do, and she dates him for the same reason. When he takes her to his flat, she asks, “What’s the cat’s name?” and Harry answers, “I don’t know.”
Julie stares at the tabby, who shrinks from her, and declares, “Magic.”
Harry tries not to flinch.
She cooks him hot breakfast, which Harry has never bothered to fix for himself, and periodically reminds him, “This is just a temporary arrangement, you know,” her large eyes flashing under her lashes. Harry answers, “I know.”
He tangles his hand in her hair and closes his eyes when they make love, quietly. It’s the closest he comes to peace. Julie closes her own eyes and moans. If their love life bores her, she doesn’t complain, and Harry sometimes wonders if she hasn’t been running, also, and just wants a rest.
It’s just a casual arrangement when she moves into his flat. A matter of convenience. Cheaper this way, and Julie was spending most her nights over anyway. Her belongings fill up the spaces Harry never thought to use.
She is still waiting for something better to come along, months later, when they’ve settled into a routine. Harry vaguely hopes she finds it, because he wants her to be happy, but also vaguely hopes she doesn’t, because he wants to continue being comfortable, content. He secretly takes malicious pleasure in the fact that true love is fantasy, and if he can’t have it, no one will.
...
Harry takes off for a couple of months. He was badgered and nagged into answering a summons. He's been visiting phantoms he's long wanted to forget.
He returns to find his apartment large and empty again, and the cat is missing. A note on the table says, ‘At my mother’s.’
Harry drinks in the evenings because he has nothing better to do, goes back to his pointless muggle job and wastes his time the same as always.
Three weeks later, she shows up with her luggage and a cat carrier, and while he busies himself making dinner she tells him all about her affair with an old boyfriend back home, and how she’s dreadfully in love with him but it will never work out. Her tears smear the make-up around her eyes, and Magic sits on her lap, purring.
She can’t eat the dinner, so Harry fixes tea. He places a steaming cup into her trembling hand and looks hard at her damp face while she seems not to notice him. He says nothing.
Later, Julie is sleeping upon his shoulder, naked in their rumpled sheets, her tears finally forgotten. Harry winds a hand into her smooth, heavy hair.
He pulls her closer and whispers a single spell into her ear.
“Stay with me.”
---
Fin.
---
Strange infatuation seems to grace the evening tide.
(I'll take it by your side.)
Such imagination seems to help the feeling slide.
Instant correlation sucks and breeds a pack of lies.
Oversaturation curls the skin and tans the hide.
I'm unclean, a libertine
And every time you vent your spleen,
I seem to lose the power of speech,
You're slipping slowly from my reach.
You grow me like an evergreen,
You never see the lonely me at all
...Without you, I'm nothing.
...Without you, I'm nothing at all.
-Placebo, edited
---
***
Tangentially related:
There Are No Heroes. Remus Lupin after the war.
An Unfinished Beginning. Harry Potter returns to Hogwarts.
*
After years and years, I finally edited together these ficlets and gave the thing a real name. Belated, but somehow... it seems the right time.
XXX
Title: In the Cold Light of Morning
Fandom: Harry Potter
Canon Kosher: up to book five
Comments: "Dead Snape Series" was so descriptive a title I found it hard to tear myself away. My next choice was "Titus Alone" but the amount of satirical British fiction cross-referencing going on just seemed a bit too much. Instead, the old stand-by: Placebo.
It starts:
---
June 1996. The summer after fifth year.
---
Snape hung in the air, helpless, awake and struggling, or unconscious, flung against a wall, bleeding, and James held the wand, or Sirius, young and healthy, glancing over to flash Harry a brilliant, wicked smile and Harry wanted to vomit.
Harry woke up with his stomach quaking, turned his face into the pillow and groaned.
If it weren’t for Snape, he wouldn’t feel this way.
If it weren’t for Snape, Sirius might still be alive.
But Harry didn’t want to think about how things could have been, should have been, different. He felt a feverish wave of hatred for Dumbledore, but he let it pass. He didn’t want to think. He didn’t want to remember what should have been done, could have been done.
.
The Dursleys stared at him in wary silence when he dragged himself downstairs. Harry tried not to look at them. Most of all he didn’t want to see his aunt, didn’t want to glimpse more secrets in the tightness of her mouth, in the whiteness of her startled eyes. For once, Harry was glad that she hardly ever spoke about his parents.
The day wore on, full of hushed looks and the things Harry hated to remember. In the heat of the afternoon he slipped outside. He didn't really have chores anymore, but still he found himself on his knees in the dirt, attacking the weeds in the garden.
He felt satisfaction in ripping the plants out of the earth, using his muscles and feeling the ground give around each embedded root. His thoughts drifted to the Weasleys’ pest problems... Troublesome garden gnomes. Magical spells. Compared to this work, it seemed like a game.
In the summer sun, surrounded by garden walls, surrounded by neighbouring gardens on the most ordinary street in Surrey, the whole situation suddenly seemed fantastical to Harry. Impossible. Absurd.
For the very first time since he got the letter, and it had been like an escape from his nightmare - for the first time, Harry found himself imagining, wishing, that it had all been a dream.
He wished that there were no such thing as magic. Or at least that he, Harry, had nothing to do with it.
---
August.
---
He was sitting in class, close to Snape’s desk, and Snape was glaring at him, sneering at him and hissing accusations of negligence, of apathy. They were talking about some potions assignment, but “You allowed Voldemort access to your mind. You yearned for the gifts he trailed before you, you imbecilic boy.”
Snape's desk seemed to stretch higher away from him, and Harry would have felt small, but he had leapt to his feet and he was shouting, “No, it was you! You should have known! All that time you were probably helping him! Breaking into my mind, breaking me down, making it easier for him! And you baited Sirius! Then he left the house and he died and you are probably glad for it!”
Snape’s pale, compressed lips, his eyes eyes as dark and deep as inkwells, denying nothing… It all melted into pain and reality as Harry woke with his head practically splitting itself apart in fury.
The dream’s images and sounds were draining rapidly away, but one conviction remained: Snape was glad. Snape was glad that Sirius was dead. Just as he was glad that James was dead, and probably glad that Lily (the 'mudblood'!) was dead, and no matter what they had done, no matter who they had been, they were Harry’s, all he had, all he could have ever had, and they were gone gone gone and Snape was probably sitting somewhere right now, smirking about it.
He'd have to return to Hogwarts soon, have to see all of them again. Harry didn't think he'd be able to handle it. Snape’s arrogant voice or Dumbledore’s sympathetic eyes and Harry would just lose it, go completely berserk in the Great Hall and then they would have to expel him.
Harry didn’t care.
But no… No, they would lock him up. St. Mungo’s, maybe, ‘for his own protection,’ and then one day, when he really had gone mad, they would let him loose. And then Voldemort would kill him.
Or he would kill Voldemort.
But Harry couldn’t really imagine winning…
Ron and Hermione would never understand. Their letters over the summer… Ron always trying to distract him, Hermione trying to make sense of things, when what she didn’t realize was that none of it made sense! None of it had made sense from the time they were eleven, but they had been too naïve to notice it…
Dumbledore didn’t tell him. That stupid prophecy. And now that he had revealed… what? That what Harry could have figured out himself was true? Except he didn’t have any other choice?
One thing, one thing had changed. If underage magic were legal or if he dared to break the law, Harry was sure he could perform the killing curse now.
He thought of Severus Snape shooting down flies, lying in a grimy bedroom with a grimy t-shirt rucked up about his pallid waste, his expression blank as Harry’s could never be, but directing his spells with the same bitterness and rage that churned in Harry’s thoughts and dreams.
Exactly the same.
Harry rolled onto his stomach and shut his eyes around the still-pounding ache in his head.
He wished, for the millionth time, that he had never seen inside that man’s mind.
---
February, 1997. Sixth year.
---
You’re incompetent, Potter.
You’re lazy.
You’re a sham.
You’re an arrogant fool.
You’re the reason that Black is dead, that Diggory is dead, that your parents are dead. (Can you still hear their deaths, Potter? Do you still remember your mother’s cries?)
Your own worthless, pathetic brain cowering behind that hideous scar is the sole reason that you yourself will die one day.
And take the whole damn lot of us with you.
Now get up.
And try again.
…
Snape wanted him to study. “Focus on your hatred!” he’d said. Focus on anything, since he’d given up ever expecting that Harry would learn to be cold, controlled, emotionless.
Like him.
Harry was not like him.
And that was his mantra, lying in bed, fisting the sheets and feeling his head throb. Not like him. That miserable pale face and those tar black eyes. The infuriatingly still face he adopted whenever Harry reached boiling point, the face that was never going to apologize for Sirius’s death.
The face that said, ‘It was all your fault,’ and it wasn’t to goad him. It was truth.
You don’t know anything
But Sirius laughing-brutal-pranking-wicked-jealous-careless-murderous, in Snape’s memories, proved he did.
I’m not like you!
Those aren’t my memories.
Harry couldn't escape Snape’s face, all blacks and whites, haunting his vision behind his closed eyes.
When he shut his curtains and closed his eyes and tried to shut his mind, there was Snape - impassive, blank, heartless (heart wrenched out) - watching him. Silently reviling him. Guarding his dreams.
---
April.
---
“Expelliarmus!”
The spell drilling into his mind reversed, and there was darkness and then it was blood, a blood-slick hand on Snape’s wrist, caressing the skin below the Mark, Lucius Malfoy smiling and laughing, and Severus feeling happy…
And Harry had collapsed, trembling, exhausted, at Snape’s feet.
“That’s the wrong spell.” That crisp voice full of loathing, his body slightly bent as he braced himself against his desk. “And you’re still saying them out loud.”
Harry grinned around his panting, wishing a breeze would come through the dungeons to cool his sweat. “But it worked.”
“Yes, you do seem to be improving,” Snape sneered. “But you will forgive me if I reserve doubts as to the longevity of this trend.”
That brought Harry to his feet, staring eye-to-eye (only a couple of inches shorter now, even though Snape still seemed so tall) with his hated teacher, invading his space. “I’ve been practising,” he snarled.
I won’t fail again.
Snape glared at him until Harry felt his fury ebb, felt ridiculous for imagining that Snape would be the one to draw back. Suddenly uncomfortably aware of the small space between them, stirred by both their breath, Harry moved off, but still glaring right back, still waiting for Snape to acknowledge his effort.
“And tell me, Mr. Potter, how long do you expect your fury to sustain you? How long do you expect your effort to sustain you, until your next failure kills all hope, again?” Snape was bracing himself against his desk with both hands, and it could be a genuine lean by now, but this was Snape’s thoughtful tone of voice, his tracing-his-lips-with-his-fingers tone of voice. He could still be tired (so Harry was improving!), but he was watching Harry, waiting for an answer.
And Harry was terrified, for a moment, that he had none, and he could imagine the hopelessness like a Dementor’s presence sucking all his strength away. But - “What else should I feel? Whatever Voldemort does, however I fail,” whomever I lose, “what else could I feel but fury?” And how can that not help me?
It was all he had. The cavernous emptiness of winds and veils and whispered voices; fury was all he had.
Snape was grimacing at him so severely that Harry thought for a moment he really had done something offensive. It was so easy to offend Snape; perhaps Harry had reminded him of James again.
“You had better find something else, Harry Potter.” Snape’s voice had dropped into a menacing purr. “Find a reason to fight. Emotions are subject to manipulation.”
His lips were sneering, but in his eyes it was the lost look, the empty look, the look of truth and firsthand experience.
Don’t wind up like me, Harry Potter.
I’m not like you.
Angry, snarling boy who had thrown himself at Voldemort’s feet, shaking with the force of the injustices of Dumbledore. Black hair and eyes and hooked nose. The mindless fury and hurt of a wild animal beneath all that composure.
Not me.
I’m not like you.
---
December 1997. Seventh year, after the battle of Hogsmeade.
---
The air in Snape’s dungeon was cold around Harry's winter robes.
It leached the warmth between the folds, laid a frigid palm to the chest inside them.
Snape’s whisky burned in his throat, but he couldn’t taste it. Harry put the bottle down with his gloved hand, set it down on the stone floor and forgot about it.
Empty and still and silent and cold, and the pickled creatures in their jars dead as they had never seemed before.
Harry could imagine dust settling on the bookcases, a counterpart to the snowfall outside.
Snape would not intrude, sweep briskly into his office to find Harry here.
Not today. Not any day.
It was Christmas.
Harry had come to these rooms to be alone.
---
September 1999. More than one year since Voldemort's final defeat.
---
Anger came easily to Harry. He could grip it in his mind, sure and burning and powerful as Godric’s sword before it had shattered from the strength of Voldemort’s curse. That battle. That day… The memories were like cards. He could shuffle through them, throw them away… He had played at flicking them into a waste bin, pushing at them with his magic when they hadn’t allowed him a wand, sitting in a bed at St. Mungo’s with boredom and silence and their fear heavy all around him…
The memories kept bubbling up, but he pushed them down, down, down… Sliced the resentment and pain into ineffectual slivers that fluttered down, the king and the queen's separate halves shocked and offended… Breathing in the busy, polluted, metropolitan stench of London, muggle London, his home. Where lives went on and on and had nothing to do with him.
He had taken drugs, at first, to disrupt his dreaming. Never think about the potions, however addictive, that would have taken care of his problem so efficiently. Arsenic would have done it. An overdose of lithium would have ended his problems forever. But no… Better to stick with safe, simple muggle drugs. Marijuana. Ecstasy. Pills that left his days as convoluted as his nights, and sometimes the flashes so intense he couldn’t escape…
All Harry had wanted was escape. So he stopped taking them. At least when he was dreaming, he could wrench himself awake.
He remembered the taste of Ginny’s flesh, the rain of blood and the lost look in her eyes as she died. That whole room had stunk of curses and the odours of the dead. Or, no, that was a different room… a different… The madness of that other room, and all those... disfigurations. Those scars. Harry didn’t have a scar; his was just a… badge, compared to the deformations those muggles had suffered.
Bellatrix Black had died in that room, her end as painful as Harry knew to make it, as slow as his rage could stand. It was perhaps his only memory of the war that made him completely glad. A softening of his face that passed for a smile. Harry felt it as a smile.
…
He didn’t only think of the war. He had begun to take an interest in football and rugby. An obsession, really, with watching the scores. He didn’t play.
It was a novel experience, jostling other fanatics and shouting his throat raw, feeling his face heat, his veins and eyes bulging. So much energy and aggression and anger and fear and tension and at the end no one had been murdered and nothing had changed and it didn't matter. It didn't matter at all.
In the London sports pubs, Harry was just another overly enthusiastic young man, drunk on lager and testosterone. He had even made a few friends. And if their banter sometimes reminded him of Ron or Seamus… Well, they didn’t ask when he got quiet. Probably attributed it to the drink and the come-down.
There were girls, too. They didn’t flock to him, but they drifted by him, knocked against him, and if he extended an arm they responded. Just casual, easy things. They were always more interested in someone else, waiting a turn for Mike or Brent… And Harry was easy, undemanding, never jealous.
Something disquieting about him, the way he never talked about his past. Never talked at all, but inane comments on rugby or football, the way their makeup matched their eyes. A fatuous grin like he was stoned or making fun. Good-looking enough for one shag or several, but something like a disease eating away at him. Something already dead in his eyes.
…
Sometimes he dreamt of Snape. Just Snape. Glinting at him, his face contorted in a sneer or snarl, holding Harry in contempt while Harry ranted and raved. And Harry would pause, panting, waiting for that hissing, simmering voice to skewer him, rip his defences to shreds. He was ready to strike back just as hard and fast, shaping his rage like a lance against Snape’s coldly burning eyes. He knew this game. Years of it and he knew what would make Snape coil in on himself and what would make him lose control, attack.
I’ll get through you this time. I’ll see you.
Reaching out around the pain, reaching out to grip Snape’s barriers and…
Waking up aching, throbbing for the struggle, his whole body wound tight and tense and wondering, for a moment, where Snape had gone to, when Harry could still almost see him, looming before him like a negative impression from a flash bulb, and Harry’s fists were clenching, unclenching, around nothing...
He was horizontal in his bed. Reality filtering in with the hazy sunlight that shouldn’t be here in this room, along with the traffic sounds and the shadow of his muggle television and the fact that Snape was dead.
Harry’s heartbeat racing for a fight, but Snape was dead.
Coldness seeping into him (“it's the heat that moves,” Hermione would lecture) and he was there again, staring at Snape’s body with those dark eyes open and empty, open with one eye pressed into the frigid winter muck and all Harry wanted to do was drop his wand and lie down next to him, become just as cold and still. But, no, he had to keep on fighting, and it was just like the selfish prick to find a way out when Harry had to keep on going, on and on and on, and he was tired.
He was tired of waking up believing that Snape was alive.
Only Snape.
Harry lay awake in his cramped flat surrounded by dirty sunlight and siren sounds, surrendering his dream to the London morning, eyes empty, hand trying to rub away his frown.
---
Seven years later.
---
He finds himself staring after thin young men with proud strides and thick, glistening, shoulder-length black hair and for a while he thinks he's fixating on Sirius.
He chats them up sometimes, on those rare nights when he can admit to himself that he’s gay (not this, too, god damn it, can nothing about me be normal) and it’s not just another dysfunction he can blame on the Dursleys or… anyone else. He chats them up but their smiles are too open, their eyes are too innocent and bright. And even when a lithe Irishman with wicked, knowing eyes chats him up and takes him home and fucks him (considerate but firm) all night long, the way Harry imagines Sirius would fuck… It’s nothing. He feels hollow, hungover, Irish whiskey a gale inside him that left him empty and sick.
Serves him right, he thinks, for wanting to fuck the memory of his dead godfather. Sirius would have been horrified.
It isn’t until about a month later when a shadow falls over him at a bar and Harry shivers, expects to hear “Mister Potter” in that crisp, smoky voice and his prick is stirring, and it’s like he’s been waiting so long he’s forgotten what he needed in the first place, but now his heart is trembling in his chest… And then a freckled boy with sandy hair and a plasticine face drops into the seat next to him, smiling. Harry wants to vomit in disgust.
And when he realises what ghost he expected to visit, he wants to vomit twice over. He goes home to the cat he never got around to sending to the shelter and tries to forget his problems in red wine and Beethoven, thinks about what work he can do over the weekend to be ready for the office on Monday. He forgets the voice, the face, the walking corpse he wanted in the bar.
It isn’t until two months after that, watching a woman twitch her hips in a slim black dress, her attitude all the arrogance in the world, her shoulders thrown back and her Roman nose the proud beak of an eagle… Harry thinks that she still can’t match Snape for style, and though he’s thought that before, about lots of people, their sneers, their jibes, their swirling coats, it hits him now whom he’s been wanting all these weeks, all these moments, all these years.
And it’s worse than Sirius, somehow. It’s worse lots of hows. All he feels when he remembers Snape is hate. And despair.
It’s worse than loving someone he was fond of.
It’s worse than loving someone who was a convict, and then a memory, and then a fond memory.
It seems like Snape will never stop dying. Either completely absent from Harry's mind or blazing black and potent and Harry can feel that burning gaze... Resurrected in Harry's mind so that his death strikes Harry hard across the face again and again.
Just the way Snape would want it.
It’s almost fitting, that of all the ghosts he loves and hates, he has to be in love with this one. And the irony almost cheers him; he almost laughs. Imagining Snape's face twisting in disgust if Harry should proposition him...
But then Harry remembers that his bed and his life are empty, silence echoing around the memories, and one cannot sleep with ghosts.
---
2009.
---
Her name is Julie and she has thick, glossy black hair and vibrant green eyes. They could almost be siblings, but for her heart-shaped face and olive skin. Harry dates her because he has nothing better to do, and she dates him for the same reason. When he takes her to his flat, she asks, “What’s the cat’s name?” and Harry answers, “I don’t know.”
Julie stares at the tabby, who shrinks from her, and declares, “Magic.”
Harry tries not to flinch.
She cooks him hot breakfast, which Harry has never bothered to fix for himself, and periodically reminds him, “This is just a temporary arrangement, you know,” her large eyes flashing under her lashes. Harry answers, “I know.”
He tangles his hand in her hair and closes his eyes when they make love, quietly. It’s the closest he comes to peace. Julie closes her own eyes and moans. If their love life bores her, she doesn’t complain, and Harry sometimes wonders if she hasn’t been running, also, and just wants a rest.
It’s just a casual arrangement when she moves into his flat. A matter of convenience. Cheaper this way, and Julie was spending most her nights over anyway. Her belongings fill up the spaces Harry never thought to use.
She is still waiting for something better to come along, months later, when they’ve settled into a routine. Harry vaguely hopes she finds it, because he wants her to be happy, but also vaguely hopes she doesn’t, because he wants to continue being comfortable, content. He secretly takes malicious pleasure in the fact that true love is fantasy, and if he can’t have it, no one will.
...
Harry takes off for a couple of months. He was badgered and nagged into answering a summons. He's been visiting phantoms he's long wanted to forget.
He returns to find his apartment large and empty again, and the cat is missing. A note on the table says, ‘At my mother’s.’
Harry drinks in the evenings because he has nothing better to do, goes back to his pointless muggle job and wastes his time the same as always.
Three weeks later, she shows up with her luggage and a cat carrier, and while he busies himself making dinner she tells him all about her affair with an old boyfriend back home, and how she’s dreadfully in love with him but it will never work out. Her tears smear the make-up around her eyes, and Magic sits on her lap, purring.
She can’t eat the dinner, so Harry fixes tea. He places a steaming cup into her trembling hand and looks hard at her damp face while she seems not to notice him. He says nothing.
Later, Julie is sleeping upon his shoulder, naked in their rumpled sheets, her tears finally forgotten. Harry winds a hand into her smooth, heavy hair.
He pulls her closer and whispers a single spell into her ear.
“Stay with me.”
---
Fin.
---
Strange infatuation seems to grace the evening tide.
(I'll take it by your side.)
Such imagination seems to help the feeling slide.
Instant correlation sucks and breeds a pack of lies.
Oversaturation curls the skin and tans the hide.
I'm unclean, a libertine
And every time you vent your spleen,
I seem to lose the power of speech,
You're slipping slowly from my reach.
You grow me like an evergreen,
You never see the lonely me at all
...Without you, I'm nothing.
...Without you, I'm nothing at all.
-Placebo, edited
---
***
Tangentially related:
There Are No Heroes. Remus Lupin after the war.
An Unfinished Beginning. Harry Potter returns to Hogwarts.
*