Fic: Cold Mornings, Harry/Severus, PG 13+
I'm a little hesitant about posting this here but everything is more suggested than realised and I hope it's acceptable.
Title: Cold Mornings
Author: Arachne002
Rating: PG 13+
Pairing: HP/SS
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my own invention. I borrowed a few characters and settings from JK Rowling.
A/N: I wrote this in response to the From Dusk till Dawn Severus Snape/Harry Potter
Fuh-Q-Fest at http://www.kardasi.com/HPSS/storyindex.htm Challenge: IX: Coming Out;
“a great lord’s kitchen with the fire gone out” - the reference is to Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy.
Summary: This is really a coming out to ‘one to another’ - er . . . and the sixth year Potions Class It’s AU since it ignores HBP completely and is more angst than smut.
Morning was grey and cold and even the shabby red and gold hangings, for all their comfort, and the tattered armchairs around the common room, for all their familiarity, couldn’t make it warm. Morning was autumn rain splattering on the bent leaded windows of the Great Hall and its heavy spelled ceiling, punctuated and interrupted by excited exclamations where owls dropped their messages and their feathers across four long tables and Albus Dumbledore sat with his half-moon glasses slipping down his nose while he read the Daily Prophet and dragged a careless bright sleeve through his porridge. And Seamus was laughing at them because he’d changed the pumpkin juice into brake fluid.
Harry Potter hated morning and its cold and its owls and its porridge and its bright expectation painted on a blur of young faces. He hated the way Ginny laughed back at Seamus and conjured the slick mess in their goblets into twelve year old Scotch with a flick of her wand and collapsed into laughter when Colin spat his mouthful over the table. He hated the way Hermione set everything to rights as though she had some kind of obligation to do that. Perhaps she did. And he never looked towards the High Table where Dumbledore sat with his damp sleeve and his disappointment turning towards Sinistra with every appearance of interest. And Severus Snape sat with his indifference gathered about him like darkness and a sneer on his lips - every morning he waited for something and every morning Harry watched him while he waited for something.
Harry Potter thought that morning might be something like Hell: a great lord’s kitchen with the fire gone out - he’d read that somewhere and it stayed with him because it made sense; it was a cold and lonely image. And it was true.
These first days of another school year were stuffed with cotton wool and not thinking about Sirius or other things. Ron kissed Hermione’s hand right in the curved small palm of it and then smiled at her so that she had to smile back before she lifted her teacup and sipped her tea.
* * *
Even before the bright ridiculous train carried him back to school - sixth year, his next to last year here where his life turned into the marvellous and where his life meant something he couldn’t grasp because it was too big - Harry knew that morning asked him questions that had no answers. He watched the train and he watched yesterday in his dreams as he fell into bed with his wand under his pillow into dark smattering dreams every night.
He knew the mornings of summer at Number 4 Privet Drive with Aunt Petunia rapping and shrill-voiced at his door and Uncle Vernon frowning into his bacon and pretending that nothing was wrong and Dudley being quiet again because the Dementors never left even when they were gone. He’d stopped trying to explain it all but he rehearsed words over and over in case they might listen some time . . . He wished that he could tell them that he understood.
He woke through summer in the spare bedroom that was never quite his own with the thin sheets stained, damp and twisted around his body and unsettling dreams fading with the light of another day there in the pause before something else happened and before he had to meet his friends again and face his life again.
The Dursleys went out for the day - the day after his sixteenth birthday when Tonks and Lupin came with a portkey to take him back to Grimauld Place and the whispering guilt along its dark corridors and Phineas Nigellus taunting him still from the edge of a portrait about how he’d failed Sirius and more mornings of summer and more questions with no answers. And he smiled at Mrs Weasley and tried not to cry when she hugged him and said nothing. He thought about Percy with his thwarted ambition and his blindness and his stubborn pride. At night he cried a little because he’d never known his mother.
After Privet Drive and before Hogwarts again, he dreamed. And the dreams were tangled memories and twisted wanting for something; and Sirius falling back against the tattered veil with surprise written on his face, and dark eyes looking into his in a still dim classroom, and a dark voice stroking his skin before waking into mornings at Grimauld Place with Molly bustling in the kitchen and the twins sniggering behind her back - still - and Mundungus smoking his dirty pipe on the stair and winking. And Hermione talking and talking about NEWTs and Ron yawning into his coffee and Ginny grinning as she practised hexes on inanimate objects and Harry thinking that Snape might drop by today looking tired and looking defeated and looking back at him with contempt because he could. Morning waited and Harry pushed his scrambled eggs around his plate and waited with it.
Despite the heat of August in the heart of London and the dense cluttered summer and the waiting and Tonks sitting with them in the long evenings making jokes about St Mungo’s, morning was cold and tomorrow was just out of reach. And no-one said anything about the bruises fading on his wrists because he’d sent Hedwig and reassuring messages every week, and now he was here again and he crept past the curtained portrait even though she’d been silent for a long time. Order meetings were later . . . even Hermione couldn’t stay awake and only Harry sat on the stairs and watched quick steps and the dark swirl of robes disappearing into the kitchen and only Harry fell asleep there on the stairs with his hands curling under his chin and woke hours later with a stiff neck and colder than ever.
He walked through the last days of summer with shadows under his eyes and shadows in his mind, and grinned at Ron over breakfast as though the two of them could still be uncomplicated.
* * *
Sixth Year Potions was a small group in September. Only ten students cared or dared to venture into this class no matter their OWLs or the dreams they’d once had of glorious careers. Draco Malfoy was there with Blaise Zabini, Theodore Nott and Pansy Parkinson; Padma Patil shuffled her notes and looked across at Terry Boot because they were still surprised at being the only two Ravenclaws. Zacharias Smith sat very close to Susan Bones and Justin Finch-Fletchley as though he realised that they’d broken with tradition somehow. And then there was Harry Potter with his unruly hair falling into his green eyes and his ink-stained fingers wandering across the desk.
Severus Snape sneered to hide his disappointment. He’d expected more. He’d expected Granger at the very least, perhaps that Thomas boy too, and he’d ended with Potter. But these were his students, the ones who cared or dared to choose his subject and so they deserved his best effort despite the other life curling in the back of his mind in a dim room and a thin hard hand on his shoulder and an incongruous high-pitched laugh when the Dark Lord asked him again why he was there and why he’d come back and asked him for the hidden answers.
They looked up at him, younger than he remembered being, as though he knew the answers to their questions too.
“A small class this year, then; I must have failed somewhere: ‘brewing glory and stoppering death’ might not have the attraction it once did.” He smiled - just a curl of lips and a raised eyebrow - Potter dropped his quill and Bones smiled back. Then they laughed a little nervously as though they understood.
“Sir?”
Parkinson raised a hand and looked worried and expectant all at once.
“You have something to say?”
“Just that,” she ducked her dark head for a moment. “I think you might have scared them off, Sir.”
Draco sniggered then again, brushing his pale hair out of his eyes and Potter sniggered too where he sat on his own without his housemates about him.
“Yes, Miss Parkinson. You could be right.” He waved his wand at the blackboard and the same old words unrolled there: a precis of his life now . . . “Enough of this pleasant banter, I have expectations of you all this year . . .”
Later, when the First Years were scribbling notes and being daunted in the dim light of the dungeon class room and the gathered jars around the walls, he wondered again at the irony of his life.
In the morning he woke and drank coffee and laughed a little in case bitterness caught him again before he caught it first and crushed it, and tried not to think about Harry Potter sitting at his lonely desk without Weasley nudging him or Granger bending her disapproval at him or Longbottom wide-eyed and cringing under words. He thought about the place where Harry Potter was sitting, looking not so much like James now, with his thin shoulders hunched under his robes and his green eyes. In the morning, Severus didn’t think about the next time he’d be called . . . and in the morning he worried about his students and their trust.
It was cold here in the dungeons with the damp stain on an errant parchment bleeding under ink spatters. Lupin arrived for coffee and talked quietly; Sirius Black was gone . . . James Potter was gone too and the werewolf was drinking coffee in his rooms and this was today.
Harry Potter hunched over his desk in every lesson with a new determination and turned away from the slights and insults that came his way and shivered as he measured each ingredient and stirred ten times clockwise and nine times counter . . . and looked back at his Professor from the doorway at the end of each lesson when he walked away.
Dumbledore invited him for tea once a week and told him nothing. Sometimes he saw Potter walking down from the Headmaster’s study with a thin look of desperation about him.
Morning was close to twenty years of regret and Harry Potter was thinner than ever with dark smudges under his eyes and fingerprints on his glasses looking nothing like his father and nothing like arrogant certainty. And nothing like the hope of all of them.
There was a defeated breath of knowledge about the boy now: Severus knew how that tasted and walked into his first class of each day with his well-cut robes swirling away from his boots marking time and waiting for the sudden burn in his arm.
* * *
Christmas break was tumbled this year into chaos while Severus lay in the infirmary and ached and clenched his thin fingers against the blanket over him and told Dumbledore that he could go back again because this was nothing . . . just the Dark Lord flexing his magical muscles because he could. Draco and Pansy shuffled in every other day with grapes and Susan, the Hufflepuff girl, held his hand late into the evenings when he had no strength to tell her to leave and when he had no strength to refuse her gentle fingers curling into his own or her tears; Pomfrey had left him alone in the evening with a jug of pumpkin juice on the table beside his bed because it was Christmas.
He closed his eyes and was glad that his Slytherins were thinking and doubting and proving themselves shrewd. He thought that some of them had joined Potter’s folly - the DA, Dumbledore’s Army indeed - and he was glad of it after all while he ached and watched the candlelight catch the shadows.
Granger sat with him, reading Muggle poetry - Hopkins was it? Utterly futile stuff and full of superstitious nonsense but richly satisfying with its awkward rhythm and its words on words and words - until he fell asleep before he could tell her that it was terribly obvious, and she left the book under his hand where he found it in the morning.
Another night.
He might have dozed and dreamed and light fingers were touching his face.
Hufflepuffs!
He pretended to be asleep because he was tired still and perhaps the jagged landscapes of loss were his end and his fate. He couldn’t go back, he realised that now, and he was trapped in the twilight. Lupin had come to visit with Tonks and Moody. They came sometimes in the evening. He tried to be asleep now because it was Christmas and too many students had stayed over the break with their small hopes and their smaller expectations.
“I’m sorry for this . . .” Fingers touching his face and he opened his eyes then. Not the Hufflepuff after all.
Harry Potter sat in the chair by his bedside and brushed his unruly hair away from his pale face and away from the pale scar that marked him. Severus closed his own hand over the dark stain on his arm.
“I’m so sorry for this.”
Not your fault, idiot boy, he wanted to say the words but gentle fingers were on his face and he turned into that caress with his eyes shut again and fell into sleep.
“I’m sorry . . .” Murmured words into his dreams.
He couldn’t go back now. Dumbledore smiled and reassured and disappeared into his plots and plans and Sixth Year Potions waited for him and Harry Potter still sat on his own bent over his books where the walls bled into another desolate day.
* * *
Harry waited outside the door of the Potions classroom with his books dropped on the floor and his heart in his mouth - shuddering and suffocating.
He couldn’t wake up any longer with this wanting in him when the snow scurried across the courtyard and gathered against the step. And he’d left the Hall and breakfast and Seamus spitting porridge across the table at something Dean said.
He knocked on the door and waited outside it with his dark untidy hair falling into his eyes and tried to clean his glasses on his robes and tried not to think about Voldemort or Dumbledore.
“Come.”
He went in and stayed with his back against the door for a count of ten.
He went in and never looked at the jars with vague pickled horrors in them and never looked at the desks set row upon row and never looked at the man standing with his wand pointing at the floor and a question hiding behind his long hair where it fell over his thin-lipped smile here just after morning.
“What do you . . . Can I help you, Mister Potter?”
“I’m cold.”
* * *
There were mornings to remind him of yesterday and Sirius Black was gone and James Potter was gone and Lily Evans, with her bright generosity and her hair tossed over her shoulder, was gone. His own dark dreams were dust under Dumbledore’s bright stare.
And here was just a boy with the future in his eyes and the past inscribed in every untidy needy gesture of him.
“I’m cold.” And the boy’s face was pinched and white.
His hands touching and green eyes closing and his hands closing and gathering in: his lips asking and the boy falling against him with a sweet abandoned sigh, with darkness behind him and power in him. Sweeter than frost on the windows where Severus’ hands wandered under bulky knits and onto skin that seemed to shiver under his fingers and his lips moved and lapped across stopped sighs under his mouth.
Just a moment of weakness because he was tired and alone and the boy was pressing against him, and that was enough and that was all until the door opened again and they’d seen it at once but said nothing and went to their desks and fluttered about their books and dropped quills and said nothing. Smith spilled his ink bottle and Parkinson demonstrated her rather neat wand work at the mess while the others sniggered. Terry Boot managed to scatter his books onto the flagged dungeon floor and Draco Malfoy knelt beside him to pick them up - one and two and onto the scrubbed desk with a smile.
Harry Potter sat in his place apart from the others again with a faint blush over his cheekbones and Blaise Zabini gathered his books and sat down next to the Gryffindor.
“Ten points each to Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff and Slytherin. We’ll continue with the transformative properties of moonstone today . . .”
* * *
“I don’t know what you want;” the boy stood untidy and awkward in the doorway with fear and courage burning into doubt again. “Do you want . . . ?”
It was late and the sun had gone down hours ago.
Severus knew what he wanted but his tongue curled into silence at the thought of the words. He closed his fingers against the dense weave of dark robes under his hand, “You . . .”
The candles glimmered into dark gathered evening and the hissed murmur of clothing opening under slow hands and spilling onto the floor, and the candles gusted against the moment when he moved closer and spread his hands over smooth skin with his own sleeves falling over his wrists.
He touched as though something might break; touched with his lips and his fingertips as though something might break forever in that moment.
“You . . .” on a kiss that breathed between them.
“Yes . . .”
And there were sweet lips opening under his and sweet shared spit back and forth under their tongues and there were hands touching his face like forgiveness and tugging at his pleated shirt when he moaned into more.
Severus kissed Harry Potter as though there had never been darkness at his shoulder - and James Potter was gone and Sirius Black was gone and the candle was guttering on the table and the morning was far way.
Title: Cold Mornings
Author: Arachne002
Rating: PG 13+
Pairing: HP/SS
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my own invention. I borrowed a few characters and settings from JK Rowling.
A/N: I wrote this in response to the From Dusk till Dawn Severus Snape/Harry Potter
Fuh-Q-Fest at http://www.kardasi.com/HPSS/storyindex.htm Challenge: IX: Coming Out;
“a great lord’s kitchen with the fire gone out” - the reference is to Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy.
Summary: This is really a coming out to ‘one to another’ - er . . . and the sixth year Potions Class It’s AU since it ignores HBP completely and is more angst than smut.
Morning was grey and cold and even the shabby red and gold hangings, for all their comfort, and the tattered armchairs around the common room, for all their familiarity, couldn’t make it warm. Morning was autumn rain splattering on the bent leaded windows of the Great Hall and its heavy spelled ceiling, punctuated and interrupted by excited exclamations where owls dropped their messages and their feathers across four long tables and Albus Dumbledore sat with his half-moon glasses slipping down his nose while he read the Daily Prophet and dragged a careless bright sleeve through his porridge. And Seamus was laughing at them because he’d changed the pumpkin juice into brake fluid.
Harry Potter hated morning and its cold and its owls and its porridge and its bright expectation painted on a blur of young faces. He hated the way Ginny laughed back at Seamus and conjured the slick mess in their goblets into twelve year old Scotch with a flick of her wand and collapsed into laughter when Colin spat his mouthful over the table. He hated the way Hermione set everything to rights as though she had some kind of obligation to do that. Perhaps she did. And he never looked towards the High Table where Dumbledore sat with his damp sleeve and his disappointment turning towards Sinistra with every appearance of interest. And Severus Snape sat with his indifference gathered about him like darkness and a sneer on his lips - every morning he waited for something and every morning Harry watched him while he waited for something.
Harry Potter thought that morning might be something like Hell: a great lord’s kitchen with the fire gone out - he’d read that somewhere and it stayed with him because it made sense; it was a cold and lonely image. And it was true.
These first days of another school year were stuffed with cotton wool and not thinking about Sirius or other things. Ron kissed Hermione’s hand right in the curved small palm of it and then smiled at her so that she had to smile back before she lifted her teacup and sipped her tea.
* * *
Even before the bright ridiculous train carried him back to school - sixth year, his next to last year here where his life turned into the marvellous and where his life meant something he couldn’t grasp because it was too big - Harry knew that morning asked him questions that had no answers. He watched the train and he watched yesterday in his dreams as he fell into bed with his wand under his pillow into dark smattering dreams every night.
He knew the mornings of summer at Number 4 Privet Drive with Aunt Petunia rapping and shrill-voiced at his door and Uncle Vernon frowning into his bacon and pretending that nothing was wrong and Dudley being quiet again because the Dementors never left even when they were gone. He’d stopped trying to explain it all but he rehearsed words over and over in case they might listen some time . . . He wished that he could tell them that he understood.
He woke through summer in the spare bedroom that was never quite his own with the thin sheets stained, damp and twisted around his body and unsettling dreams fading with the light of another day there in the pause before something else happened and before he had to meet his friends again and face his life again.
The Dursleys went out for the day - the day after his sixteenth birthday when Tonks and Lupin came with a portkey to take him back to Grimauld Place and the whispering guilt along its dark corridors and Phineas Nigellus taunting him still from the edge of a portrait about how he’d failed Sirius and more mornings of summer and more questions with no answers. And he smiled at Mrs Weasley and tried not to cry when she hugged him and said nothing. He thought about Percy with his thwarted ambition and his blindness and his stubborn pride. At night he cried a little because he’d never known his mother.
After Privet Drive and before Hogwarts again, he dreamed. And the dreams were tangled memories and twisted wanting for something; and Sirius falling back against the tattered veil with surprise written on his face, and dark eyes looking into his in a still dim classroom, and a dark voice stroking his skin before waking into mornings at Grimauld Place with Molly bustling in the kitchen and the twins sniggering behind her back - still - and Mundungus smoking his dirty pipe on the stair and winking. And Hermione talking and talking about NEWTs and Ron yawning into his coffee and Ginny grinning as she practised hexes on inanimate objects and Harry thinking that Snape might drop by today looking tired and looking defeated and looking back at him with contempt because he could. Morning waited and Harry pushed his scrambled eggs around his plate and waited with it.
Despite the heat of August in the heart of London and the dense cluttered summer and the waiting and Tonks sitting with them in the long evenings making jokes about St Mungo’s, morning was cold and tomorrow was just out of reach. And no-one said anything about the bruises fading on his wrists because he’d sent Hedwig and reassuring messages every week, and now he was here again and he crept past the curtained portrait even though she’d been silent for a long time. Order meetings were later . . . even Hermione couldn’t stay awake and only Harry sat on the stairs and watched quick steps and the dark swirl of robes disappearing into the kitchen and only Harry fell asleep there on the stairs with his hands curling under his chin and woke hours later with a stiff neck and colder than ever.
He walked through the last days of summer with shadows under his eyes and shadows in his mind, and grinned at Ron over breakfast as though the two of them could still be uncomplicated.
* * *
Sixth Year Potions was a small group in September. Only ten students cared or dared to venture into this class no matter their OWLs or the dreams they’d once had of glorious careers. Draco Malfoy was there with Blaise Zabini, Theodore Nott and Pansy Parkinson; Padma Patil shuffled her notes and looked across at Terry Boot because they were still surprised at being the only two Ravenclaws. Zacharias Smith sat very close to Susan Bones and Justin Finch-Fletchley as though he realised that they’d broken with tradition somehow. And then there was Harry Potter with his unruly hair falling into his green eyes and his ink-stained fingers wandering across the desk.
Severus Snape sneered to hide his disappointment. He’d expected more. He’d expected Granger at the very least, perhaps that Thomas boy too, and he’d ended with Potter. But these were his students, the ones who cared or dared to choose his subject and so they deserved his best effort despite the other life curling in the back of his mind in a dim room and a thin hard hand on his shoulder and an incongruous high-pitched laugh when the Dark Lord asked him again why he was there and why he’d come back and asked him for the hidden answers.
They looked up at him, younger than he remembered being, as though he knew the answers to their questions too.
“A small class this year, then; I must have failed somewhere: ‘brewing glory and stoppering death’ might not have the attraction it once did.” He smiled - just a curl of lips and a raised eyebrow - Potter dropped his quill and Bones smiled back. Then they laughed a little nervously as though they understood.
“Sir?”
Parkinson raised a hand and looked worried and expectant all at once.
“You have something to say?”
“Just that,” she ducked her dark head for a moment. “I think you might have scared them off, Sir.”
Draco sniggered then again, brushing his pale hair out of his eyes and Potter sniggered too where he sat on his own without his housemates about him.
“Yes, Miss Parkinson. You could be right.” He waved his wand at the blackboard and the same old words unrolled there: a precis of his life now . . . “Enough of this pleasant banter, I have expectations of you all this year . . .”
Later, when the First Years were scribbling notes and being daunted in the dim light of the dungeon class room and the gathered jars around the walls, he wondered again at the irony of his life.
In the morning he woke and drank coffee and laughed a little in case bitterness caught him again before he caught it first and crushed it, and tried not to think about Harry Potter sitting at his lonely desk without Weasley nudging him or Granger bending her disapproval at him or Longbottom wide-eyed and cringing under words. He thought about the place where Harry Potter was sitting, looking not so much like James now, with his thin shoulders hunched under his robes and his green eyes. In the morning, Severus didn’t think about the next time he’d be called . . . and in the morning he worried about his students and their trust.
It was cold here in the dungeons with the damp stain on an errant parchment bleeding under ink spatters. Lupin arrived for coffee and talked quietly; Sirius Black was gone . . . James Potter was gone too and the werewolf was drinking coffee in his rooms and this was today.
Harry Potter hunched over his desk in every lesson with a new determination and turned away from the slights and insults that came his way and shivered as he measured each ingredient and stirred ten times clockwise and nine times counter . . . and looked back at his Professor from the doorway at the end of each lesson when he walked away.
Dumbledore invited him for tea once a week and told him nothing. Sometimes he saw Potter walking down from the Headmaster’s study with a thin look of desperation about him.
Morning was close to twenty years of regret and Harry Potter was thinner than ever with dark smudges under his eyes and fingerprints on his glasses looking nothing like his father and nothing like arrogant certainty. And nothing like the hope of all of them.
There was a defeated breath of knowledge about the boy now: Severus knew how that tasted and walked into his first class of each day with his well-cut robes swirling away from his boots marking time and waiting for the sudden burn in his arm.
* * *
Christmas break was tumbled this year into chaos while Severus lay in the infirmary and ached and clenched his thin fingers against the blanket over him and told Dumbledore that he could go back again because this was nothing . . . just the Dark Lord flexing his magical muscles because he could. Draco and Pansy shuffled in every other day with grapes and Susan, the Hufflepuff girl, held his hand late into the evenings when he had no strength to tell her to leave and when he had no strength to refuse her gentle fingers curling into his own or her tears; Pomfrey had left him alone in the evening with a jug of pumpkin juice on the table beside his bed because it was Christmas.
He closed his eyes and was glad that his Slytherins were thinking and doubting and proving themselves shrewd. He thought that some of them had joined Potter’s folly - the DA, Dumbledore’s Army indeed - and he was glad of it after all while he ached and watched the candlelight catch the shadows.
Granger sat with him, reading Muggle poetry - Hopkins was it? Utterly futile stuff and full of superstitious nonsense but richly satisfying with its awkward rhythm and its words on words and words - until he fell asleep before he could tell her that it was terribly obvious, and she left the book under his hand where he found it in the morning.
Another night.
He might have dozed and dreamed and light fingers were touching his face.
Hufflepuffs!
He pretended to be asleep because he was tired still and perhaps the jagged landscapes of loss were his end and his fate. He couldn’t go back, he realised that now, and he was trapped in the twilight. Lupin had come to visit with Tonks and Moody. They came sometimes in the evening. He tried to be asleep now because it was Christmas and too many students had stayed over the break with their small hopes and their smaller expectations.
“I’m sorry for this . . .” Fingers touching his face and he opened his eyes then. Not the Hufflepuff after all.
Harry Potter sat in the chair by his bedside and brushed his unruly hair away from his pale face and away from the pale scar that marked him. Severus closed his own hand over the dark stain on his arm.
“I’m so sorry for this.”
Not your fault, idiot boy, he wanted to say the words but gentle fingers were on his face and he turned into that caress with his eyes shut again and fell into sleep.
“I’m sorry . . .” Murmured words into his dreams.
He couldn’t go back now. Dumbledore smiled and reassured and disappeared into his plots and plans and Sixth Year Potions waited for him and Harry Potter still sat on his own bent over his books where the walls bled into another desolate day.
* * *
Harry waited outside the door of the Potions classroom with his books dropped on the floor and his heart in his mouth - shuddering and suffocating.
He couldn’t wake up any longer with this wanting in him when the snow scurried across the courtyard and gathered against the step. And he’d left the Hall and breakfast and Seamus spitting porridge across the table at something Dean said.
He knocked on the door and waited outside it with his dark untidy hair falling into his eyes and tried to clean his glasses on his robes and tried not to think about Voldemort or Dumbledore.
“Come.”
He went in and stayed with his back against the door for a count of ten.
He went in and never looked at the jars with vague pickled horrors in them and never looked at the desks set row upon row and never looked at the man standing with his wand pointing at the floor and a question hiding behind his long hair where it fell over his thin-lipped smile here just after morning.
“What do you . . . Can I help you, Mister Potter?”
“I’m cold.”
* * *
There were mornings to remind him of yesterday and Sirius Black was gone and James Potter was gone and Lily Evans, with her bright generosity and her hair tossed over her shoulder, was gone. His own dark dreams were dust under Dumbledore’s bright stare.
And here was just a boy with the future in his eyes and the past inscribed in every untidy needy gesture of him.
“I’m cold.” And the boy’s face was pinched and white.
His hands touching and green eyes closing and his hands closing and gathering in: his lips asking and the boy falling against him with a sweet abandoned sigh, with darkness behind him and power in him. Sweeter than frost on the windows where Severus’ hands wandered under bulky knits and onto skin that seemed to shiver under his fingers and his lips moved and lapped across stopped sighs under his mouth.
Just a moment of weakness because he was tired and alone and the boy was pressing against him, and that was enough and that was all until the door opened again and they’d seen it at once but said nothing and went to their desks and fluttered about their books and dropped quills and said nothing. Smith spilled his ink bottle and Parkinson demonstrated her rather neat wand work at the mess while the others sniggered. Terry Boot managed to scatter his books onto the flagged dungeon floor and Draco Malfoy knelt beside him to pick them up - one and two and onto the scrubbed desk with a smile.
Harry Potter sat in his place apart from the others again with a faint blush over his cheekbones and Blaise Zabini gathered his books and sat down next to the Gryffindor.
“Ten points each to Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff and Slytherin. We’ll continue with the transformative properties of moonstone today . . .”
* * *
“I don’t know what you want;” the boy stood untidy and awkward in the doorway with fear and courage burning into doubt again. “Do you want . . . ?”
It was late and the sun had gone down hours ago.
Severus knew what he wanted but his tongue curled into silence at the thought of the words. He closed his fingers against the dense weave of dark robes under his hand, “You . . .”
The candles glimmered into dark gathered evening and the hissed murmur of clothing opening under slow hands and spilling onto the floor, and the candles gusted against the moment when he moved closer and spread his hands over smooth skin with his own sleeves falling over his wrists.
He touched as though something might break; touched with his lips and his fingertips as though something might break forever in that moment.
“You . . .” on a kiss that breathed between them.
“Yes . . .”
And there were sweet lips opening under his and sweet shared spit back and forth under their tongues and there were hands touching his face like forgiveness and tugging at his pleated shirt when he moaned into more.
Severus kissed Harry Potter as though there had never been darkness at his shoulder - and James Potter was gone and Sirius Black was gone and the candle was guttering on the table and the morning was far way.