[one-shots]: Snape/Harry, The Heart of the Sun, R, 1/3
b>Title: The Heart of the Sun
Pairing: Severus-Harry
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst, unexpected handfasting, intertwined timelines, traditions and rituals I made up and which are not meant to imply anything about real traditions
Word count: 26,000
Summary: Harry and Severus unexpectedly enacted a handfasting ceremony at last year's Beltane. Now, nearly a year and a day later, as Harry prepares for the next Beltane celebration at Godric's Hollow, he remembers their procession through the holidays of the sun-and wonders about its ending.
Disclaimer: Characters are the property of JK Rowling, et al. This was created for fun, not for profit.
Betaed by: Linda. Who rocks.
Author's Note: This was written in the 2014 hds_beltane for sassay-cat. I used her special requests for rituals, outdoor sex, unusual vocations, and happy endings, and her prompt of Handfasted!? But I thought… (Or when a plan to get easy and free sex turns out not to be easy or free).
The Heart of the Sun
Beltane Eve, 2005
Harry crouched down near the pile of sticks and eyed them. Then he nodded and straightened up. He would have a hard time convincing anyone that the pile wasn't already perfect. Anyway, he didn't know what he would do to improve it.
He bit his lip and glanced across the sloping meadow behind his house. There were piles of sticks everywhere, and a few of the stone hearths that Hermione said were “more traditional.” Harry shook his head decisively. He and Hermione had argued about that, but Hermione had pulled out the trump card of all the many, many things Harry didn't know about Beltane.
Hard to argue with that, given what happened last year.
Harry skimmed lightly around the thought, and glanced at the clusters of green and white and golden ribbons hanging in the trees. Green for new growth, white for the may blossoms, gold for the colors of fire. Or something. Harry had to admit he had tuned out when Hermione started talking about the ribbons. He knew that she thought them essential to the success of this year's ceremony, even though technically tonight was only Beltane Eve and a private little ritual with the kids, and tomorrow was actually Beltane, and that was all he needed to know.
The success of this year's ceremony would be the end of last year's.
Right.
Harry turned away abruptly from the meadow and walked back into the house. He had to check on the guests' drinks. There was the Firewhisky that was essential for Ron to have a good time, and the butterbeer that was all they could let George drink nowadays, and the special, watered-down butterbeer that Teddy liked and Andromeda drank along with him, and the pure spring water that was symbolic enough of Beltane for Hermione that she wanted to have it on hand, and, oh, all sorts of other things.
Harry's hand lingered on the bottles of Firewhisky before he stepped back. He wouldn't start drinking, yet.
Or maybe not at all. Maybe it wouldn't be necessary.
Harry made one final round of the kitchen, and then stepped into the drawing room. He stood there, slowly looking about. He had chosen not to rebuild his parents' house after all when he moved to Godric's Hollow, although that had been his first intention. But then he had decided that was a bit strange, to live in the place where his parents had died, and he would prefer to go ahead and set up a home of his own.
The house didn't look the way it had a year ago, either. The green carpet that Harry had chosen for this room was darkened in a few places by what could have been splotches of wine, but weren't. The small table beside the couch had a scar on it where a foaming cauldron had spilled. There was even an indentation in the leather of the couch where someone taller than Harry had spent hours sitting and reading. And there were Potions journals on all the shelves of the bookcase.
Harry swallowed. Then he gave in, and bent down to touch his nose to the leather of the couch, and the long, half-ragged blanket that hung over the back of it.
There was a smell there, not a smell that he could easily define, since he had stubbornly resisted all of Severus's efforts to educate him on Potions ingredients, but a noticeable one, spicy and salty and overlayered with olives.
Harry rose to his feet, swallowing again. He didn't want things to change.
But a year was enough to be handfasted, really, if it wasn't enough to teach him to know Severus's mind.
Harry turned and went back outside. He thought he had seen a clump of ribbons hanging crookedly. Intense concentration on small things could sometimes block unwanted memories. He ought to know.
*
Beltane, 2004
“No, Potter.”
Harry halted. He had been dancing, half-dancing, up to Snape, with his whole body feeling as if it was glowing, and now he could sure feel his face glowing, but for a different reason. He took a step back, staring at Snape. Snape, his face changed and softened by the flames of the fire playing across it-but not enough-stared back at him, and clutched the neck of the flask he held as if he was going to smash it into Harry's forehead.
“Fine,” Harry said. His tongue was thick in his mouth, the sweetness of Beltane and the fire and laughter and seeing people acting free and happy curdled on it. “I should have known you were still like this.” He turned to walk away.
Unexpectedly, Snape's hand caught him and dragged him backwards, and Harry was sad enough to revel in that, half-closing his eyes.
“Like what, Potter?” Snape hissed, close to his ear, his eyes darting around as if afraid that someone would see him committing the ultimate sin of speaking with Harry Potter.
“That you were still joyless and cramped-up and unhappy,” said Harry. He hadn't meant to say those words. He had come up and invited Snape to jump across the fire with him, and sleep with him, because he wanted to, and the desire flowing through him had needed to be shared. But he could mean a different thing if he was refused. “You don't want to take a risk. You don't ever want to think that I could change my mind about you. I mean, fine. But you're the one who won't take the risk.” He pulled his shoulder away from Snape's hand.
“You have no idea what you're asking me.”
Harry turned around and stared at Snape again. Snape was still cradling the flask, but now he glared at it as if it and not Harry had caused all those problems.
“Yes, I do,” Harry said. There was still a lingering tug of warmth in the bottom of his stomach, he discovered, the heat that rekindled as he looked at Snape's lean limbs and long face. So, all right, he didn't think Snape was the handsomest bloke ever and there was part of Harry that wanted to sleep with him just because he was curious and it was something he wouldn't do on any other night, but so what? “I know what sex means, and I know what Beltane means, and I wanted to do both with you.”
Snape was the one flushed now, although it was curiously hard to see. Harry had always thought of his complex as sallow, not ruddy, but the blush only changed it a little. He set the flask aside and told Harry, “Beltane is supposed to be a time of joy.”
“Which I wanted to share, you paranoid bastard.” Harry rolled his eyes. He thought about walking away, but this conversation was better than the blunt “No” he'd got the first time, so he stayed. “That's all it is. Yeah, I know Beltane is a joyous time. Thought I'd spread it around. I didn't know I'd get accused of-of still being a Gryffindor.” He thought that was behind the fixed expression Snape had used. “Anyway. I'll just go. Enjoy your evening.”
“Wait.”
“You really like that word, don't you?” Harry asked, but he didn't move.
“This is the first time I have said it.” Snape stood up and kicked over his flask. As it spilled onto the leaves, Harry peered at it, but all he saw was clear water. Snape didn't look drunk, anyway. “And I am not-what you said I was.”
Harry shook his head. “Fine.”
“Fine,” Snape echoed, and for a second they stood there, glaring at each other.
Harry was never sure who moved first, but he was willing to say that it was him, because Snape probably wouldn't do something like that. Then he forgot about it. Snape's nose was butting into his cheek, and he was grunting in frustration in a way that turned darker when Harry ran a hand down Snape's spine and to his arse, and he was trying to wrap one leg around Harry's thigh, maybe to trip him, maybe to rub against him.
It was different than anything Harry had ever had at Beltane, and that made it wonderful.
They ended up on a pile of mostly soft leaves not far from one of the fires, because you could do things like that at Beltane, but Snape still insisted on a semi-private spot. Harry thought he would have gone for one of the more private spots yet, the ones behind trees or in small nooks and crannies of the hills, but neither of them could wait that long.
Harry lifted his head and kissed Snape savagely, and got a long, thorough kiss in return. Harry tried to nip Snape's tongue, and Snape drew back and gave him a steady look.
“I am going to do this the way I want to,” Snape said.
“What about what I want?” Harry had wrestled Snape's arm partway out of his shirt earlier. He reached up and tried to push the shirt the rest of the way back, but it was caught on Snape's neck and Snape's implacable glare, and Harry wasn't at a good angle, anyway, trapped under Snape's clutching hands.
“You are going to want what I want, by the end of the evening,” Snape said. His voice descended like his hands, which found and unfastened the buttons holding Harry's shirt closed deftly. Harry half-hoped he would have some kind of trouble with the zipper on Harry's jeans, but that was put aside, too. Of course; Snape had lived in the Muggle world for a long time.
Then Snape's hands found his cock, and Harry decided he was glad Snape hadn't had any kind of trouble. Harry shoved himself impatiently forwards. Snape's fingers curled around him, at a strange angle, and Harry wondered if he was picturing a stirring rod.
Snape bent down and kissed him again before Harry could snicker at his speculation. Harry gasped onto his tongue this time, and Snape pulled his jeans off him by main force, then followed it with his pants, which he whirled and tossed grandly into the nearest clump of trees. Harry opened his mouth to complain about that, and Snape filled it with his tongue, then with his fingers. Harry sucked on them.
All his world was alive, prickling and poking at him, the way that the leaves beneath his back did. His skin was too hot on the side nearest the fire, too cold on the flank nearest the tree's shade, and all burning where it contracted under Snape's touch. His mouth shone under the slick slide of those nails; they tasted blunt, hard. Harry could smell a moldering scent from the leaves underneath them, and salt where Snape shifted and panted above him.
Above all, there was the smell of fire.
“Lift up your arse,” Snape muttered.
Harry did, and yelped a little as the feeling of cloth above him turned to all skin. Snape must have cast a spell that got him naked, Harry thought, and immediately felt like a genius for thinking it.
He didn't know that spell, but he did know the one that Snape cast on his arse, with the precision and aim that was the last reassurance Harry needed that Snape really wasn't drunk. Harry promptly opened his legs, holding them up as best he could when he needed to reach down and his fingers kept getting tangled with Snape's, or with Snape's robes.
Of all the things he had done tonight, that was the one to shock Snape. He simply froze, staring down at Harry, his mouth slightly open. Harry smiled. Snape would never be handsome, but Harry liked the gleam of his teeth and his tongue.
“So eager?” Snape whispered, apparently asking someone off to the side, with the way he looked towards the tree.
“Yes,” Harry said, and tried to wriggle closer to Snape. It made the leaves underneath him crackle but not move much, but at least it attracted Snape's attention back to where it belonged, on Harry.
“Yes, you are,” Snape said, apparently answering his own question, and bent down to kiss Harry. This time, it was so slow that Harry could barely feel Snape's tongue moving against his. Harry lifted his head, kissed urgently back, and kicked Snape's thigh with one foot. Snape winced and moved aside.
“Come on,” Harry said. He knew that spell. There was more than enough slickness covering his arse for Snape to put his whole cock in. Some of Harry's more cautious lovers tended to use it. “Come on now.”
Snape, still glancing off to the side a little now and then as if he thought that someone else must be there and casting all this magic, eased slowly into him. Harry tensed around the burn, then made himself not tense. He parted his legs further, because somehow there was more of Snape in the way than he had ever felt before, and clasped them around Snape's hips, or thighs, or whatever they were, as soon as Snape was inside.
But Snape didn't move. He just stayed where he was, as frozen as if there was no fire, staring down at Harry with wide, still eyes.
“You have done this before, right?” Harry asked, a minute later.
Snape made a sound that was indescribable, and shoved into him. Harry laughed and welcomed it, and that made Snape nearly pause again, before Harry glared at him and he got the point, and Snape began to really fuck him, and they were off to the races.
Harry kept getting pushed up the bed of leaves, and he didn't care. They were going to go a long way before he hit his head on a tree root or something, and in the meantime he could sometimes feel grass underneath his shoulders, too, and see the colors the fire stitched across Snape's face, and that was delightful.
And he could feel Snape inside him. That was delightful, too.
Harry doubled down, concentrating on those thrusts, luxuriating in how long they took, in the way that Snape had started to pant, how the burning from Snape's fucking blended with the burning in Harry's muscles from leaping over fires and dancing wildly around them and racing people he hardly knew in circles tonight, and his heart leaped up, flying out of his chest, circling around them, making him dizzy with inspiration.
It wasn't enough, it would never be enough, but at least by the time Snape stiffened and thrust and grunted and thrashed, Harry was ready to come, too. He reached down and squeezed his own cock, startled to find fingers already there.
Snape was touching him, and Harry came with that image in mind, riding the imagined sensation of the gripping hand as much as the real one.
They lay there for a little while afterwards, panting, but then Harry remembered the other thing he had wanted to do with Snape, the thing he hadn't got to do. He pushed at Snape's shoulders until Snape raised his head. The expression on his face was dazed, and Harry paused, tempted to let him rest.
On the other hand, “dazed” would work better for what Harry wanted to do than “alert.” He pushed at Snape's shoulders again. “Let's jump over a fire together.”
“After that?” Snape waved a hand between them, which pointed right at Harry's arse, which Harry took as a compliment. “I would fall into the flames.”
“Not with me to support you,” Harry said firmly, and reached for his own wand, to cast the necessary Lightening and Floating Charms.
So it came about that Harry and Snape ran straight at a fire a few minutes later, and when Harry jumped Snape came with him, and if his hand was caught up in Harry's and his face was pale and doubting, well, it didn't matter. What mattered was that they were aloft, over the flames, and then landing, whirling, laughing, someone flung a garland of flowers over Harry's head and another flask at Snape, and Snape had survived and Harry was standing there without his feet on fire, they were both alive.
I wish this could last for a while, Harry thought, eyes lingering on Snape, and the way his face was flushed in the firelight, and how he hadn't retreated back into the shadows yet. I wish it could.
But that was only madness, the madness of Beltane. Harry would have to wake up in the morning and accept that they weren't going to see each other again for at least a year.
Beltane Eve, 2005
Harry straightened up from the couch when he heard the front door open. He wouldn't be able to explain what he was doing bending over and sniffing Severus's seat to Hermione, the most sympathetic of his friends, let alone to Severus.
A year together had taught Harry a lot, but not much about explanations.
He moved towards the kitchen, already counting things off in his mind. Drinks, food, ribbons, all of those were in place. The Beltane fires weren't lit yet, the last chore, but then, they wouldn't be until the garden of Godric's Hollow was full of laughter and merriment. Harry wasn't looking forward to those fires at all, not the way he had last year. Then, a fire had burned in his heart to match them.
Now, the anticipation of what was going to come in two days' time weighed him down and smothered them like ashes.
“Harry! Are you here?”
It was Hermione, and Harry turned to put on the brave front he felt necessary, not so much for himself as for Severus. There was the chance that Hermione would try to browbeat Severus into staying with him if she knew how Harry felt, and Harry couldn't bear for that to happen.
Two more days.
Day After Beltane, 2004
Harry woke slowly, and grinned a little. So his eyelids were stuck together with what felt like gummy glue, and he had bits of dirt beneath his fingernails that he suspected would take scrubbing with soap to get out, and his limbs ached from making love on a bed of leaves. So what? It had still been fun, and traditionally, the day after Beltane was one where no one demanded a lot of you in the wizarding world, and people knew about speaking in lowered voices and sympathetically.
When he sat up, he almost fell back into the leaves again. Snape was sitting beside him, and his eyes were glittering. He had been so quiet that Harry hadn’t sensed him at all. True, they had come back to this bed of leaves, their bed, together after jumping over the fire, but Harry had assumed he would depart after Harry fell asleep. No reason for him to stay.
Snape seemed to find the question in Harry’s eyes and answer it, unnervingly-either that, or he had simply pierced past Harry’s Occlumency shields, which Harry had to admit had never been the best. “You have no idea what you’ve done, do you, Potter?” he whispered.
Harry shook his head, with a frown. Then he stopped. The motions that sent through his arse were a bad idea, and Snape’s smirk as he caught sight of Harry doing it was a worse one. Harry carefully bowed his head into his arms and whispered, “No. I don’t understand. Did you get burned when we jumped over the fire or something?”
“If it were only that,” Snape muttered, and paused, one of his significant pauses, but Harry had never understood those and this was no different. Finally, Snape sighed hard enough to blow the heads off some dandelions and said, “Look at your right wrist.”
Harry turned his head by degrees, and made his eyes focus the same way. Then he frowned and shrugged. Someone had knotted a green and gold ribbon around his wrist. He might have done it himself. Things got a bit blurry after the fire, he had to admit. He only knew that they had come back to their sheltered nook after the jump because they were obviously sitting in it. “So what? Some prank?”
Snape snarled and held up his left wrist. There was another complicated knot there, although these ribbons were white and green.
Harry blinked blankly at him. Finally, when Snape’s crowding presence seemed to demand some kind of response, he offered, “Well, at least we know it’s probably not some new kind of venereal disease?”
Snape made a noise now that he probably hadn’t used since the war. He reached up and plucked at the ribbons on his wrist.
His fingers went straight through them. The ribbons glittered and glowed, made of light, and then settled back into place. Harry had the impression that they might have been a bit tighter than before.
Harry blinked and peered at them, forgetting the aching of his body in his interest. The ribbons sparkled, and yes, they looked like they were garlands of light tied around Snape’s wrist instead of ribbons. He reached up and took Snape’s arm without asking for permission, turning his hand back and forth. The ribbons never altered no matter how he looked at them.
Harry reached out and slid his fingers up his own wrist, approaching slowly, wondering what would happen. The ribbons seemed normal until he got close to them; the bows were impressive, and Harry did have to wonder why he wouldn’t have felt someone looping this around his wrist. But when he touched them, all he felt was a gentle warmth like holding his hand in a beam of sunlight.
“Well?” Snape had his arms folded, and he was scowling at Harry.
Harry shook his head. “I don’t know what it is. I suppose we’ll have to find Hermione and get her to help us take them off.” He reached for his clothes, then paused. They weren’t here. Oh, well. He picked up his wand and Summoned them.
“This is not a prank that can be reversed,” Snape said between his teeth. “This means that we are handfasted. For a year and a day.”
Harry stared. He knew that he’d heard Hermione talking about that term, but not what it meant. Just that Luna had got handfasted to someone she liked last year at Beltane, and that the year before that, George and Angelina had been lucky to avoid it, because it would have messed up all their wed-
“We’re married?” Harry shook his hand, hard. The ribbons only hung there, and glowed. If light could be said to be smug, Harry thought in disgust, then these would be smug.
“That is what I have been saying,” Snape said. He was huddling with his arms around his knees now, and Harry didn’t have any desire as he looked at him. Well, maybe the urge to comfort him. No one who had survived what Snape had should look that cold and comfortless. “It must have happened when we made love and then jumped the fires. It-it usually happens the other way around, and that is why I thought there was no danger. But, perhaps because of the loosening of traditions in the wizarding community, sharing a bed before the marriage has been officially declared must not seem a bargain-breaker to the magic.” Snape’s eyes were closed.
Harry thought as rapidly as he could over what Snape had told him, then shook his head and scrambled to his feet. His arse protested. He ignored it. Lots more than his arse was going to be protesting if he didn’t get this fixed. “Come on. We have to find Hermione.”
Snape looked up at him and sneered, and at least that was more familiar. “She cannot fix everything for you, Potter. In particular, she cannot fix being handfasted to someone you hate. Handfasted is what we are, and complaining will not change matters.”
“Neither will sitting around and bitching,” Harry snapped back, and was glad to see that some of the steel returned to Snape’s spine at that. “You already said that this isn’t a normal handfasting. Maybe it’s something else, something different. We might as well at least ask Hermione. She will know if anyone does.”
Snape’s sneer was more half-hearted, this time, but he began to gather his clothes. Harry kept one eye on him, just to make sure that he wouldn’t run away.
Although, considering the faint, glowing line that appeared between the ribbons of light on Snape’s wrist and the ones on his whenever their hands passed each other, maybe that wouldn’t be so easy.
*
Hermione stepped back and glared at the ribbons of light as though they had personally offended her.
Harry felt a sharp shiver pass around his backbone. When Hermione did that, it was a good sign that she had given up on other options, and was hoping to change reality by the sheer force of her scowl. “Hermione?” he whispered, and reached out with his hand.
Hermione caught his wrist and held his hand still, then cast one more spell that Harry couldn’t be sure of, since it was nonverbal. But it made the ribbons light up and shimmer like a Muggle disco ball, and then the sparks leaped off his wrist and soared across the air to Snape’s wrist, where they made his ribbons sparkle in the same way.
“No,” Hermione said. “It didn’t manifest in the traditional way, maybe because you leaped the fire only after you bedded each other.” Harry was astonished that she could say that without turning red in the face, but apparently addressing this like a problem to be solved took away even the embarrassment of talking about her best friend’s sex life. “But this is more or less a traditional handfasting. For a year and a day, I’m sure. Until next year, the day after Beltane.”
Snape snarled an oath and turned away to kick the tree they stood under. They’d found Hermione near one of the trees that had decorations strung in them, unwinding them from the branches.
Harry swallowed and turned back to face Hermione. “You don’t think that there’s any way to be free of this, then?”
“I said it was a traditional handfasting,” Hermione said, and led his eyes to Snape. He was standing in front of the tree with his forehead resting against the bark, his hands curled around the trunk and cutting into it. Seeing that, Harry swallowed. It looked like there wasn’t going to be any easy way of getting away from this, then.
“It means you have to live together,” Hermione added, forestalling Harry’s next question because she was perceptive like that. “And you can’t have sex with anyone besides each other for the duration of the year.”
Harry closed his eyes. He was without any significant partners, luckily, but he didn’t know if Snape was. Even some people who were perfectly faithful at other times of the year would sleep around on Beltane, because it was part of the tradition.
“Do you have anyone you’re-dating?” he asked Snape, keeping his eyes closed. He didn’t think he wanted to use the word “dating” with Snape, but then, until last night, he wouldn’t have thought to use the word “attractive” either.
“No,” said Snape stiffly. “But my business…I brew potions that open up the full potential of a wand to spells, and increase the potency of a wizard’s bonding with his wand.” Harry opened his eyes, about to ask more, since all he had known about Snape’s business was that it involved potions and was therefore uninteresting, but Snape was continuing. “My flat is above the shop. I am unsure how we are supposed to share it.”
He turned around and glared at Harry. Harry winced. Snape’s eyes kept flicking away from him, around the trees and the clearing, as though he could spot some escape route if he looked long enough. That made it harder to face than if Snape had just gone about hating him in peace.
“You’ll find some way to make this work,” Hermione said. “Since you can reach your flat easily enough by Floo or Apparating, Professor, I think that you ought to share Harry’s house at Godric’s Hollow. It’s big enough for two.”
“I would rather die,” said Snape.
Hermione opened her mouth to protest, but Harry reached out and touched her arm. He knew she only wanted to help, and he appreciated that, but he had seen a spasm almost wrench the lines of Snape’s face apart. He thought he knew why Snape felt that way, and it was something they could talk about together.
“Mind if we take a walk, Hermione?” he asked, and smiled a little when she snapped her head back to him. “I promise that we won’t hex each other.”
“The handfasting wouldn’t like that,” Hermione said, which Harry had already reckoned on. She hesitated, then nodded. “All right.”
“Thanks,” Harry said, and turned to Snape. He would let Snape choose the direction of the walk. He thought he would probably want to get away from Hermione’s listening ears at least as much as Harry did.
Snape gave him a long glare that said he didn’t appreciate the privilege of choosing the direction of their walk, and then stormed off. Harry followed him, pausing to shrug a rueful acceptance at Hermione. Well, he had known that this wouldn’t be easy.
Snape stormed a long distance across the clearing. Harry followed him, feeling more and more strange. Last night, this clearing had been filled with a glow of radiance so warm that Harry had felt as though anything was possible, even forging a pleasant time with Snape. Next year, he would do his best to remember that Beltane could be deceptive.
Snape kept walking until he finally seemed to realize that he wasn’t going to leave Harry behind, and spun around to confront him. “Will you leave me to mourn the failure of my life in peace?” he snarled.
Harry shook his head. “No, because I wanted to talk to you about this. You say that you would rather die.” He paused until Snape was peering at him in irritation, because at least it meant Harry had snapped him out of his brooding, and finished, “That’s not what I expected to hear from a man who survived the war.”
Snape moved back, his nostrils flaring. “You know that how I survived the war is my secret, Potter,” he said, even more stiffly than he had said anything so far. “I do not intend to tell anyone how I survived Nagini’s fangs.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “I don’t want your bloody secrets. They probably only concern Potions knowledge that I couldn’t process, anyway.” He paused as Snape nodded, and his own lips twitched despite himself. Well. He had known that giving Snape a chance to get some blows in would probably come out of this little walk. “What I meant is that you did survive, since you’re here in front of me. And I didn’t think a man who did that would give his life up so easily.”
Other than opening his mouth a little, Snape didn’t reply. Harry paused, then played another card. “And I’d thought I was wrong to call you a coward. Well. Someone who would rather die than live with a mistaken handfasting for a year is a coward.” He nodded decisively and turned away. “I’m going to ask Hermione what happens to the other partner in a handfasting when their partner selfishly decides to die.”
“Potter, wait!”
Biting his lip, Harry turned around and widened his eyes innocently. “What, Snape? Don’t you have a suicide to plan?”
Snape marched up to him, his robes billowing around him. Harry managed to resist tilting his head back to look up at Snape, but it was an effort. They weren’t so very different in height anymore, but Snape could be as intimidating as fuck with that long nose and overbearing…bearing.
“It was a figure of speech,” Snape hissed into his ear.
“I’ve not always had good luck assuming, with you,” Harry told him sweetly.
Snape pulled back and looked at him as if Harry had decided to make his life difficult simply by existing. Since Harry had the impression that Snape always thought he had done that, this wasn’t anything new.
Last night had been something new, and it didn’t even have to result in strange ribbons appearing around their wrists for that to be true. Harry just waited, and waited. Either Snape would realize the same thing, or he would combust from the force of the glare he was giving Harry. Harry was fairly sure that he was less flammable.
Finally, Snape uttered a muffled oath, and turned around. “I suppose that one may begin in the understanding that one does not always begin as one means to go on,” he muttered. “I will fetch a few of the things that I need for an overnight stay, and come to your house.”
Harry clasped his hands in front of him and bowed. Snape eyed him sideways. Harry, straightening up to grin at him, didn’t care. This was enough for right now.
Beltane Eve, 2005
“What’s the matter, Harry? You seem upset.”
Trust Hermione to notice, of course. Harry looked around the back garden and stared at the shining clumps of ribbons hanging on the trees. They strongly resembled the ones that he and Severus had woken up with nearly a year ago.
The ribbons had sunk into their skins over time. If Harry wasn’t looking for them, they were just little gleams of color near his wrist that he didn’t notice. But he could summon them back up when he wanted, and make them warm, barely tangible bits of light.
He thought about doing it now. But Severus might come around the corner any moment, and he would see and he would-no, he would understand. But he would understand many things that Harry didn’t necessarily want him to understand, and that was all there was to it.
“Harry?”
Hermione’s hand was gentle on his arm. Harry turned towards her and opened his eyes, meaning to make some meaningless comment on the unusual warmth of the night, or the proportion of birch wood in the fires, or anything else that would be safe and calm and without significance.
But the warmth of the night was overcome by the warmth waiting for him in Hermione’s eyes, and Harry cursed softly and leaned against her. “Why do I want it to continue?” he whispered. “Merlin knows that I’ve been unhappy enough this year.”
Hermione hugged him, her chin brushing his shoulder. “But you have a certain amount of unhappiness that you go through all the years of your life,” she whispered. “I think that you’ve had a certain amount of happiness this year, as well.”
Harry closed his eyes, and lost himself to memories of one such certain amount.
Midsummer, 2004
“Potter, where are you going? You promised me that you would help me move the rest of my cauldrons over tonight. I will entrust you only with the things that cannot break, after the disgraceful job you did on the books.”
Harry bit his lip and turned slowly back to face Snape. “We discussed this,” he said, and made his voice as nice as he could. Yes, they’d discussed it, but Snape showed a tendency to forget, conveniently, whenever he wished. “I have a Midsummer celebration at the Burrow to attend. I do it every year.”
Snape lifted his head so high that Harry could have counted all the contents of his nostrils, if he had wanted. He didn’t want, and so faced the front door again. There was no reason that Snape had to finish moving from his flat to Harry’s house tonight. He had merely decided he had to because God forbid that Harry have fun.
Having Snape live in his house was precisely the opposite of fun, Harry had discovered. It wasn’t like he and Snape had exchanged that many harsh words, but…
It was little things.
Harry would come down and find the dirty teacups he had left in the sink cleaned up and replaced in the cupboard, in such a precise manner that they all stood the same distance from the edge of the shelf. There was something so passive-aggressive about it that it never failed to make his teeth grind.
He had tried cleaning up the teacups himself instead of leaving them in the sink, but to no avail. Snape would come down and rearrange them, so that they all stood the same distance from the edge of the shelf again, and they were all turned so that the green and blue stripes that ran along several of them appeared to form one continuous, unbroken pattern. Harry had tried chipping one of the cups and throwing the chip away, and somehow Snape had Summoned it from the rubbish and cast Reparo in a way that made it impossible to tell the rim had ever been broken at all.
Snape left no clothes on the floor. Snape never wore anything other than unrelieved black. Snape could concentrate on a book in a way that left room for nothing but the words on the printed page, and he had a trick of closing his eyes and turning his head away that made every suggestion for dinner or a trip out that Harry offered to him seem like the height of stupidity. Snape never had dirty socks that got lost in the wash, probably because no sock would dare. Snape would never have a chair that was out of place, or a hair, or anything other than the few bogies Harry had once caught him wiping from his nose, with a handkerchief that then vanished somewhere else.
After how dirty his hair had been during school, he was offensively neat.
And Snape always kept the door of his lab locked, with a casualness that at first amused Harry and then infuriated him. So Snape thought a few simple Locking Charms could keep Harry out? A trained Auror, even if it had been a while since Harry had quit that training and he was absent-mindedly looking about for something to do? Ha!
Then Harry had cast the first Finite to dispel those simple Locking Charms on the door, and been hit with the backlash from a completely unfamiliar spell that left him limping for days.
Snape also denied people who had tried to break into his lab-his lab, as if it wasn’t part of Harry’s house-pain-relieving potions.
All of that flashed through Harry’s head, and he shook it. “I don’t want to help you tonight,” he said. “I promised tonight to the Weasleys, like always, and you’re not going to get in the way of that.” He turned resolutely towards the door again.
“How long will it last, this celebration of yours?”
“Don’t worry, Sleeping Beauty, I’ll use Silencing Spells when I come in.”
There came the sound of a sigh that was old when the world was young, and Snape, picking his way through the words as through a minefield, said, “I had thought that I would come with you, in exchange for your help with the rest of the move when you return.”
Harry frankly turned around and gaped at him. Snape gave a fretful tug at his wrist. Apparently his ribbons did Something when Harry was upset. Harry had never got him to admit what the Something was, and it wasn’t enough to stop him from annoying Harry at every chance he got, so Harry had largely discounted its existence.
“You mean that?” Harry asked.
“Yes.” Snape tilted his head to the side as if Harry were a potion that had developed an unexpected complication. “I cannot complete the move by myself, and this would be a fair exchange.” The way he said the word fair made it clear whose side he expected to have the greater obligation.
“Fine,” Harry said, when he could make his tongue work again. “Then come on. We’re late.” And he escaped out the door, shaking his head. Snape must really want help with those heavy cauldrons, for him to have agreed to this.
*
Harry knew that Snape made kind of a blot on the brightness of the ceremony, from the looks that the Weasleys were giving them, but he was enjoying himself too much to excuse them or apologize.
The Midsummer celebration was a bigger one than the Beltane ceremony. No sane wizards would bring little kids to a Beltane celebration, unless it was going to be one of the tame, stripped-down ones on Beltane Eve where the ribbons were for the kids to collect and the fires were built low to encourage small feet to pass safely over them.
But at Midsummer, the bonfires blazed too tall to jump over, but just right to run in circles around and shriek, and all the Weasley children were there. Harry sipped a kind of “whisky” that Molly made by mixing together butterbeer and a bunch of different kinds of juice, which surprisingly tasted good together, and felt content.
This was what life was supposed to be about. People, on a summer evening, sitting outside, under the awnings set up in case it rained, and talking. Ron and Hermione were talking about the Ministry with Arthur, Charlie was describing a story of handling a particularly raucous dragon to an audience of Bill and Fleur’s wide-eyed children, and Molly stood chatting with Ginny and George, apparently describing a prank that had traveled around her kitchen and how she had doused it. Harry hid his smile in his drink.
“I notice that you are not talking with anyone.”
Harry glanced sideways at Snape in surprise. Snape hadn’t accepted a drink, hadn’t accepted food, hadn’t done anything that would make him part of celebrating Midsummer. Of course, Harry thought. Celebrating the day of longest light wasn’t for him. “No,” he replied, instead of saying that Snape standing there with arms folded and a scowl on his face was enough to put anyone off. “I will, soon. There’s something I want to ask Arthur, and George and I should discuss some of the investments he’s making. I don’t think they’re sound.”
Snape stared at him, so motionless that Harry checked his robes automatically. Snape sometimes stared at him like that before he went to work in the mornings, so that Harry was still trying to find the stain or speck of food long after Snape had left for his shop.
“There is nothing,” Snape said at last. “Nothing for me here.” He turned away with a flare of his robes that nearly brushed Harry’s nose, he spun so hard and moved as though so offended. “Finish what you are doing and come away as soon as possible. I grow weary of this spectacle.”
Harry ground his teeth and turned his back on Snape. So Snape had to be a spoilsport and weird and irritating, but that didn’t mean Harry had to let it ruin or rule his good mood.
And he didn’t. Even though he could feel Snape’s stare on the back of his neck as he moved among the fires, and took his turn telling stories to the kids, and teased Charlie about the new burn scar on his face-which Charlie took in good part-and had the conversations he’d wanted to with Arthur and George.
No. He might have to be handfasted to Snape, and they’d made some decisions that they both regretted, but Harry was still going to have fun with his friends and adopted family. Snape couldn’t make him give that up.
*
“I am amazed that you can still carry the cauldrons, after that.”
Harry was a bit too breathless to reply, but he didn’t think he needed to. Snape hated fun, he knew that. It didn’t surprise him that Snape hated Midsummer, too. Maybe he had a reason, after what had happened at Beltane.
Then again, no one had tried to force him to have sex he obviously didn’t want-he couldn’t want it, or he would have at least looked at Harry in the past six weeks, instead of avoiding and ignoring him as if he didn’t exist-and jump over fires this time. So maybe he didn’t have a reason to hate Midsummer, at least not as good a reason as he did to hate Beltane.
Harry flopped the cauldrons in the middle of the lab and looked up. Snape was standing behind him, frowning at him. Harry kept his shrug and rolling eyes purely internal, and said, “All done, then?”
“How can you carry them after that?”
“Your allergy to having fun isn’t common,” Harry snapped, and stepped around Snape, heading towards the door of the lab. But Snape’s hand closed on his arm, and Harry stopped. It was the first time Snape had touched him since Beltane, other than one time when he’d been coming down the stairs and Harry had grabbed his arm to help him when he stumbled. And then Snape had pulled away as though Harry’s skin was slimy like a Shrivelfig.
It probably made Harry pathetic, although he thought that it wasn’t that pathetic as long as he didn’t say it aloud, but he wanted Snape to touch him willingly too much to move away now.
“How can you stand, or walk, or carry things, after drinking what Molly Weasley made you drink?” Snape muttered, so close to Harry’s ear that Harry’s body woke up and remembered leaves and fire and a sore arse.
Harry then realized what Snape had said, though, and snorted. “That was mostly juice and butterbeer. There was nothing in there that the kids couldn’t drink.” Bill had warned Victoire away from drinking too much, which was maybe where Snape had got the idea from, but then, Victoire was six years old. It wasn’t as though what could knock her out would harm someone like Harry.
“Why…”
Snape let him go. Harry just shook his head and walked to the door. “I don’t know why you thought I was drunk,” he fired over his shoulder. “It’s not like I walked up and propositioned you, did I?”
And then he went out the door, and upstairs to bed. He might have a long day of nothing ahead, as Snape would put it, since he had quit the Aurors, but at least it wasn’t a day of resenting the existence of holidays and conversations he wasn’t a part of.
Beltane Eve, 2005
Severus arrived only when the bonfires had been lit for half an hour and the giggles were getting loud around the Maypole that Ginny had persuaded Harry to set up near the largest fire. Harry had been watching them twine green ribbons and pink flowers around it, and smiling, but now he stiffened and tilted his head back.
“You can feel him?” Ron had had enough Firewhisky that what he meant to be a whisper didn’t quite come out that way.
Harry sighed, nodded, and turned to face Severus. In truth, it wasn’t like smelling Severus, or even feeling a tug on the handfasting bond between them. He just knew when Severus was there, the way he knew if there was a wind, not from seeing it but from feeling its effects on the things around it.
Severus stood with his arms crossed between two fires. He was frowning at Harry. Harry swallowed. That frown had become familiar in the last month. He knew there was no way that Severus would agree to renew the handfasting-he hadn’t got enough out of it-but lately he seemed to be trying to figure out whether Harry would ask him to.
And what crushing response he’ll give in return.
It said a lot, Harry thought sourly, that he was still afraid of that crushing response, in a way, but it was a completely different way than it would have been a year ago. Six years ago. Ten years ago. A year shouldn’t have changed so much. It was abundantly clear that it hadn’t changed Severus.
“Yes?” he asked, once he got close. Since the equinox, he had mastered a neutral tone. It probably wouldn’t fool Severus for long, not when he could still pick up Harry’s surface thoughts simply from looking into his eyes, but at least it kept Harry from embarrassing himself.
Severus considered him so long and so deeply that Harry relaxed a little. Severus didn’t do that with things that didn’t matter. At least their parting would be friendly, as should befit people who had shared a home for a year.
And more than that.
Severus’s mouth turned down at the corners, probably because he had picked up on the thought from Harry’s mental surface. “Excuse me,” he said, in a voice distant enough to freeze, and turned away, gliding towards the far side of the garden.
Harry sighed. So, no, Severus wouldn’t publicly embarrass him by rejection. Harry shouldn’t have feared he would, really. He knew better than that.
But he still knew how deep his own heart had gone, and while Severus had the depth of heart to match it-Harry knew he did-that he would choose to do so was impossible.
Harry turned back to the fires, and Ron’s sympathetic pat on his shoulder. He still enjoyed his friends and family. He still loved them.
It was just his misfortune to have mistaken the false handfasting for the real thing.
Part Two.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/657711.html. Comment wherever you like.
Pairing: Severus-Harry
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst, unexpected handfasting, intertwined timelines, traditions and rituals I made up and which are not meant to imply anything about real traditions
Word count: 26,000
Summary: Harry and Severus unexpectedly enacted a handfasting ceremony at last year's Beltane. Now, nearly a year and a day later, as Harry prepares for the next Beltane celebration at Godric's Hollow, he remembers their procession through the holidays of the sun-and wonders about its ending.
Disclaimer: Characters are the property of JK Rowling, et al. This was created for fun, not for profit.
Betaed by: Linda. Who rocks.
Author's Note: This was written in the 2014 hds_beltane for sassay-cat. I used her special requests for rituals, outdoor sex, unusual vocations, and happy endings, and her prompt of Handfasted!? But I thought… (Or when a plan to get easy and free sex turns out not to be easy or free).
The Heart of the Sun
Beltane Eve, 2005
Harry crouched down near the pile of sticks and eyed them. Then he nodded and straightened up. He would have a hard time convincing anyone that the pile wasn't already perfect. Anyway, he didn't know what he would do to improve it.
He bit his lip and glanced across the sloping meadow behind his house. There were piles of sticks everywhere, and a few of the stone hearths that Hermione said were “more traditional.” Harry shook his head decisively. He and Hermione had argued about that, but Hermione had pulled out the trump card of all the many, many things Harry didn't know about Beltane.
Hard to argue with that, given what happened last year.
Harry skimmed lightly around the thought, and glanced at the clusters of green and white and golden ribbons hanging in the trees. Green for new growth, white for the may blossoms, gold for the colors of fire. Or something. Harry had to admit he had tuned out when Hermione started talking about the ribbons. He knew that she thought them essential to the success of this year's ceremony, even though technically tonight was only Beltane Eve and a private little ritual with the kids, and tomorrow was actually Beltane, and that was all he needed to know.
The success of this year's ceremony would be the end of last year's.
Right.
Harry turned away abruptly from the meadow and walked back into the house. He had to check on the guests' drinks. There was the Firewhisky that was essential for Ron to have a good time, and the butterbeer that was all they could let George drink nowadays, and the special, watered-down butterbeer that Teddy liked and Andromeda drank along with him, and the pure spring water that was symbolic enough of Beltane for Hermione that she wanted to have it on hand, and, oh, all sorts of other things.
Harry's hand lingered on the bottles of Firewhisky before he stepped back. He wouldn't start drinking, yet.
Or maybe not at all. Maybe it wouldn't be necessary.
Harry made one final round of the kitchen, and then stepped into the drawing room. He stood there, slowly looking about. He had chosen not to rebuild his parents' house after all when he moved to Godric's Hollow, although that had been his first intention. But then he had decided that was a bit strange, to live in the place where his parents had died, and he would prefer to go ahead and set up a home of his own.
The house didn't look the way it had a year ago, either. The green carpet that Harry had chosen for this room was darkened in a few places by what could have been splotches of wine, but weren't. The small table beside the couch had a scar on it where a foaming cauldron had spilled. There was even an indentation in the leather of the couch where someone taller than Harry had spent hours sitting and reading. And there were Potions journals on all the shelves of the bookcase.
Harry swallowed. Then he gave in, and bent down to touch his nose to the leather of the couch, and the long, half-ragged blanket that hung over the back of it.
There was a smell there, not a smell that he could easily define, since he had stubbornly resisted all of Severus's efforts to educate him on Potions ingredients, but a noticeable one, spicy and salty and overlayered with olives.
Harry rose to his feet, swallowing again. He didn't want things to change.
But a year was enough to be handfasted, really, if it wasn't enough to teach him to know Severus's mind.
Harry turned and went back outside. He thought he had seen a clump of ribbons hanging crookedly. Intense concentration on small things could sometimes block unwanted memories. He ought to know.
*
Beltane, 2004
“No, Potter.”
Harry halted. He had been dancing, half-dancing, up to Snape, with his whole body feeling as if it was glowing, and now he could sure feel his face glowing, but for a different reason. He took a step back, staring at Snape. Snape, his face changed and softened by the flames of the fire playing across it-but not enough-stared back at him, and clutched the neck of the flask he held as if he was going to smash it into Harry's forehead.
“Fine,” Harry said. His tongue was thick in his mouth, the sweetness of Beltane and the fire and laughter and seeing people acting free and happy curdled on it. “I should have known you were still like this.” He turned to walk away.
Unexpectedly, Snape's hand caught him and dragged him backwards, and Harry was sad enough to revel in that, half-closing his eyes.
“Like what, Potter?” Snape hissed, close to his ear, his eyes darting around as if afraid that someone would see him committing the ultimate sin of speaking with Harry Potter.
“That you were still joyless and cramped-up and unhappy,” said Harry. He hadn't meant to say those words. He had come up and invited Snape to jump across the fire with him, and sleep with him, because he wanted to, and the desire flowing through him had needed to be shared. But he could mean a different thing if he was refused. “You don't want to take a risk. You don't ever want to think that I could change my mind about you. I mean, fine. But you're the one who won't take the risk.” He pulled his shoulder away from Snape's hand.
“You have no idea what you're asking me.”
Harry turned around and stared at Snape again. Snape was still cradling the flask, but now he glared at it as if it and not Harry had caused all those problems.
“Yes, I do,” Harry said. There was still a lingering tug of warmth in the bottom of his stomach, he discovered, the heat that rekindled as he looked at Snape's lean limbs and long face. So, all right, he didn't think Snape was the handsomest bloke ever and there was part of Harry that wanted to sleep with him just because he was curious and it was something he wouldn't do on any other night, but so what? “I know what sex means, and I know what Beltane means, and I wanted to do both with you.”
Snape was the one flushed now, although it was curiously hard to see. Harry had always thought of his complex as sallow, not ruddy, but the blush only changed it a little. He set the flask aside and told Harry, “Beltane is supposed to be a time of joy.”
“Which I wanted to share, you paranoid bastard.” Harry rolled his eyes. He thought about walking away, but this conversation was better than the blunt “No” he'd got the first time, so he stayed. “That's all it is. Yeah, I know Beltane is a joyous time. Thought I'd spread it around. I didn't know I'd get accused of-of still being a Gryffindor.” He thought that was behind the fixed expression Snape had used. “Anyway. I'll just go. Enjoy your evening.”
“Wait.”
“You really like that word, don't you?” Harry asked, but he didn't move.
“This is the first time I have said it.” Snape stood up and kicked over his flask. As it spilled onto the leaves, Harry peered at it, but all he saw was clear water. Snape didn't look drunk, anyway. “And I am not-what you said I was.”
Harry shook his head. “Fine.”
“Fine,” Snape echoed, and for a second they stood there, glaring at each other.
Harry was never sure who moved first, but he was willing to say that it was him, because Snape probably wouldn't do something like that. Then he forgot about it. Snape's nose was butting into his cheek, and he was grunting in frustration in a way that turned darker when Harry ran a hand down Snape's spine and to his arse, and he was trying to wrap one leg around Harry's thigh, maybe to trip him, maybe to rub against him.
It was different than anything Harry had ever had at Beltane, and that made it wonderful.
They ended up on a pile of mostly soft leaves not far from one of the fires, because you could do things like that at Beltane, but Snape still insisted on a semi-private spot. Harry thought he would have gone for one of the more private spots yet, the ones behind trees or in small nooks and crannies of the hills, but neither of them could wait that long.
Harry lifted his head and kissed Snape savagely, and got a long, thorough kiss in return. Harry tried to nip Snape's tongue, and Snape drew back and gave him a steady look.
“I am going to do this the way I want to,” Snape said.
“What about what I want?” Harry had wrestled Snape's arm partway out of his shirt earlier. He reached up and tried to push the shirt the rest of the way back, but it was caught on Snape's neck and Snape's implacable glare, and Harry wasn't at a good angle, anyway, trapped under Snape's clutching hands.
“You are going to want what I want, by the end of the evening,” Snape said. His voice descended like his hands, which found and unfastened the buttons holding Harry's shirt closed deftly. Harry half-hoped he would have some kind of trouble with the zipper on Harry's jeans, but that was put aside, too. Of course; Snape had lived in the Muggle world for a long time.
Then Snape's hands found his cock, and Harry decided he was glad Snape hadn't had any kind of trouble. Harry shoved himself impatiently forwards. Snape's fingers curled around him, at a strange angle, and Harry wondered if he was picturing a stirring rod.
Snape bent down and kissed him again before Harry could snicker at his speculation. Harry gasped onto his tongue this time, and Snape pulled his jeans off him by main force, then followed it with his pants, which he whirled and tossed grandly into the nearest clump of trees. Harry opened his mouth to complain about that, and Snape filled it with his tongue, then with his fingers. Harry sucked on them.
All his world was alive, prickling and poking at him, the way that the leaves beneath his back did. His skin was too hot on the side nearest the fire, too cold on the flank nearest the tree's shade, and all burning where it contracted under Snape's touch. His mouth shone under the slick slide of those nails; they tasted blunt, hard. Harry could smell a moldering scent from the leaves underneath them, and salt where Snape shifted and panted above him.
Above all, there was the smell of fire.
“Lift up your arse,” Snape muttered.
Harry did, and yelped a little as the feeling of cloth above him turned to all skin. Snape must have cast a spell that got him naked, Harry thought, and immediately felt like a genius for thinking it.
He didn't know that spell, but he did know the one that Snape cast on his arse, with the precision and aim that was the last reassurance Harry needed that Snape really wasn't drunk. Harry promptly opened his legs, holding them up as best he could when he needed to reach down and his fingers kept getting tangled with Snape's, or with Snape's robes.
Of all the things he had done tonight, that was the one to shock Snape. He simply froze, staring down at Harry, his mouth slightly open. Harry smiled. Snape would never be handsome, but Harry liked the gleam of his teeth and his tongue.
“So eager?” Snape whispered, apparently asking someone off to the side, with the way he looked towards the tree.
“Yes,” Harry said, and tried to wriggle closer to Snape. It made the leaves underneath him crackle but not move much, but at least it attracted Snape's attention back to where it belonged, on Harry.
“Yes, you are,” Snape said, apparently answering his own question, and bent down to kiss Harry. This time, it was so slow that Harry could barely feel Snape's tongue moving against his. Harry lifted his head, kissed urgently back, and kicked Snape's thigh with one foot. Snape winced and moved aside.
“Come on,” Harry said. He knew that spell. There was more than enough slickness covering his arse for Snape to put his whole cock in. Some of Harry's more cautious lovers tended to use it. “Come on now.”
Snape, still glancing off to the side a little now and then as if he thought that someone else must be there and casting all this magic, eased slowly into him. Harry tensed around the burn, then made himself not tense. He parted his legs further, because somehow there was more of Snape in the way than he had ever felt before, and clasped them around Snape's hips, or thighs, or whatever they were, as soon as Snape was inside.
But Snape didn't move. He just stayed where he was, as frozen as if there was no fire, staring down at Harry with wide, still eyes.
“You have done this before, right?” Harry asked, a minute later.
Snape made a sound that was indescribable, and shoved into him. Harry laughed and welcomed it, and that made Snape nearly pause again, before Harry glared at him and he got the point, and Snape began to really fuck him, and they were off to the races.
Harry kept getting pushed up the bed of leaves, and he didn't care. They were going to go a long way before he hit his head on a tree root or something, and in the meantime he could sometimes feel grass underneath his shoulders, too, and see the colors the fire stitched across Snape's face, and that was delightful.
And he could feel Snape inside him. That was delightful, too.
Harry doubled down, concentrating on those thrusts, luxuriating in how long they took, in the way that Snape had started to pant, how the burning from Snape's fucking blended with the burning in Harry's muscles from leaping over fires and dancing wildly around them and racing people he hardly knew in circles tonight, and his heart leaped up, flying out of his chest, circling around them, making him dizzy with inspiration.
It wasn't enough, it would never be enough, but at least by the time Snape stiffened and thrust and grunted and thrashed, Harry was ready to come, too. He reached down and squeezed his own cock, startled to find fingers already there.
Snape was touching him, and Harry came with that image in mind, riding the imagined sensation of the gripping hand as much as the real one.
They lay there for a little while afterwards, panting, but then Harry remembered the other thing he had wanted to do with Snape, the thing he hadn't got to do. He pushed at Snape's shoulders until Snape raised his head. The expression on his face was dazed, and Harry paused, tempted to let him rest.
On the other hand, “dazed” would work better for what Harry wanted to do than “alert.” He pushed at Snape's shoulders again. “Let's jump over a fire together.”
“After that?” Snape waved a hand between them, which pointed right at Harry's arse, which Harry took as a compliment. “I would fall into the flames.”
“Not with me to support you,” Harry said firmly, and reached for his own wand, to cast the necessary Lightening and Floating Charms.
So it came about that Harry and Snape ran straight at a fire a few minutes later, and when Harry jumped Snape came with him, and if his hand was caught up in Harry's and his face was pale and doubting, well, it didn't matter. What mattered was that they were aloft, over the flames, and then landing, whirling, laughing, someone flung a garland of flowers over Harry's head and another flask at Snape, and Snape had survived and Harry was standing there without his feet on fire, they were both alive.
I wish this could last for a while, Harry thought, eyes lingering on Snape, and the way his face was flushed in the firelight, and how he hadn't retreated back into the shadows yet. I wish it could.
But that was only madness, the madness of Beltane. Harry would have to wake up in the morning and accept that they weren't going to see each other again for at least a year.
Beltane Eve, 2005
Harry straightened up from the couch when he heard the front door open. He wouldn't be able to explain what he was doing bending over and sniffing Severus's seat to Hermione, the most sympathetic of his friends, let alone to Severus.
A year together had taught Harry a lot, but not much about explanations.
He moved towards the kitchen, already counting things off in his mind. Drinks, food, ribbons, all of those were in place. The Beltane fires weren't lit yet, the last chore, but then, they wouldn't be until the garden of Godric's Hollow was full of laughter and merriment. Harry wasn't looking forward to those fires at all, not the way he had last year. Then, a fire had burned in his heart to match them.
Now, the anticipation of what was going to come in two days' time weighed him down and smothered them like ashes.
“Harry! Are you here?”
It was Hermione, and Harry turned to put on the brave front he felt necessary, not so much for himself as for Severus. There was the chance that Hermione would try to browbeat Severus into staying with him if she knew how Harry felt, and Harry couldn't bear for that to happen.
Two more days.
Day After Beltane, 2004
Harry woke slowly, and grinned a little. So his eyelids were stuck together with what felt like gummy glue, and he had bits of dirt beneath his fingernails that he suspected would take scrubbing with soap to get out, and his limbs ached from making love on a bed of leaves. So what? It had still been fun, and traditionally, the day after Beltane was one where no one demanded a lot of you in the wizarding world, and people knew about speaking in lowered voices and sympathetically.
When he sat up, he almost fell back into the leaves again. Snape was sitting beside him, and his eyes were glittering. He had been so quiet that Harry hadn’t sensed him at all. True, they had come back to this bed of leaves, their bed, together after jumping over the fire, but Harry had assumed he would depart after Harry fell asleep. No reason for him to stay.
Snape seemed to find the question in Harry’s eyes and answer it, unnervingly-either that, or he had simply pierced past Harry’s Occlumency shields, which Harry had to admit had never been the best. “You have no idea what you’ve done, do you, Potter?” he whispered.
Harry shook his head, with a frown. Then he stopped. The motions that sent through his arse were a bad idea, and Snape’s smirk as he caught sight of Harry doing it was a worse one. Harry carefully bowed his head into his arms and whispered, “No. I don’t understand. Did you get burned when we jumped over the fire or something?”
“If it were only that,” Snape muttered, and paused, one of his significant pauses, but Harry had never understood those and this was no different. Finally, Snape sighed hard enough to blow the heads off some dandelions and said, “Look at your right wrist.”
Harry turned his head by degrees, and made his eyes focus the same way. Then he frowned and shrugged. Someone had knotted a green and gold ribbon around his wrist. He might have done it himself. Things got a bit blurry after the fire, he had to admit. He only knew that they had come back to their sheltered nook after the jump because they were obviously sitting in it. “So what? Some prank?”
Snape snarled and held up his left wrist. There was another complicated knot there, although these ribbons were white and green.
Harry blinked blankly at him. Finally, when Snape’s crowding presence seemed to demand some kind of response, he offered, “Well, at least we know it’s probably not some new kind of venereal disease?”
Snape made a noise now that he probably hadn’t used since the war. He reached up and plucked at the ribbons on his wrist.
His fingers went straight through them. The ribbons glittered and glowed, made of light, and then settled back into place. Harry had the impression that they might have been a bit tighter than before.
Harry blinked and peered at them, forgetting the aching of his body in his interest. The ribbons sparkled, and yes, they looked like they were garlands of light tied around Snape’s wrist instead of ribbons. He reached up and took Snape’s arm without asking for permission, turning his hand back and forth. The ribbons never altered no matter how he looked at them.
Harry reached out and slid his fingers up his own wrist, approaching slowly, wondering what would happen. The ribbons seemed normal until he got close to them; the bows were impressive, and Harry did have to wonder why he wouldn’t have felt someone looping this around his wrist. But when he touched them, all he felt was a gentle warmth like holding his hand in a beam of sunlight.
“Well?” Snape had his arms folded, and he was scowling at Harry.
Harry shook his head. “I don’t know what it is. I suppose we’ll have to find Hermione and get her to help us take them off.” He reached for his clothes, then paused. They weren’t here. Oh, well. He picked up his wand and Summoned them.
“This is not a prank that can be reversed,” Snape said between his teeth. “This means that we are handfasted. For a year and a day.”
Harry stared. He knew that he’d heard Hermione talking about that term, but not what it meant. Just that Luna had got handfasted to someone she liked last year at Beltane, and that the year before that, George and Angelina had been lucky to avoid it, because it would have messed up all their wed-
“We’re married?” Harry shook his hand, hard. The ribbons only hung there, and glowed. If light could be said to be smug, Harry thought in disgust, then these would be smug.
“That is what I have been saying,” Snape said. He was huddling with his arms around his knees now, and Harry didn’t have any desire as he looked at him. Well, maybe the urge to comfort him. No one who had survived what Snape had should look that cold and comfortless. “It must have happened when we made love and then jumped the fires. It-it usually happens the other way around, and that is why I thought there was no danger. But, perhaps because of the loosening of traditions in the wizarding community, sharing a bed before the marriage has been officially declared must not seem a bargain-breaker to the magic.” Snape’s eyes were closed.
Harry thought as rapidly as he could over what Snape had told him, then shook his head and scrambled to his feet. His arse protested. He ignored it. Lots more than his arse was going to be protesting if he didn’t get this fixed. “Come on. We have to find Hermione.”
Snape looked up at him and sneered, and at least that was more familiar. “She cannot fix everything for you, Potter. In particular, she cannot fix being handfasted to someone you hate. Handfasted is what we are, and complaining will not change matters.”
“Neither will sitting around and bitching,” Harry snapped back, and was glad to see that some of the steel returned to Snape’s spine at that. “You already said that this isn’t a normal handfasting. Maybe it’s something else, something different. We might as well at least ask Hermione. She will know if anyone does.”
Snape’s sneer was more half-hearted, this time, but he began to gather his clothes. Harry kept one eye on him, just to make sure that he wouldn’t run away.
Although, considering the faint, glowing line that appeared between the ribbons of light on Snape’s wrist and the ones on his whenever their hands passed each other, maybe that wouldn’t be so easy.
*
Hermione stepped back and glared at the ribbons of light as though they had personally offended her.
Harry felt a sharp shiver pass around his backbone. When Hermione did that, it was a good sign that she had given up on other options, and was hoping to change reality by the sheer force of her scowl. “Hermione?” he whispered, and reached out with his hand.
Hermione caught his wrist and held his hand still, then cast one more spell that Harry couldn’t be sure of, since it was nonverbal. But it made the ribbons light up and shimmer like a Muggle disco ball, and then the sparks leaped off his wrist and soared across the air to Snape’s wrist, where they made his ribbons sparkle in the same way.
“No,” Hermione said. “It didn’t manifest in the traditional way, maybe because you leaped the fire only after you bedded each other.” Harry was astonished that she could say that without turning red in the face, but apparently addressing this like a problem to be solved took away even the embarrassment of talking about her best friend’s sex life. “But this is more or less a traditional handfasting. For a year and a day, I’m sure. Until next year, the day after Beltane.”
Snape snarled an oath and turned away to kick the tree they stood under. They’d found Hermione near one of the trees that had decorations strung in them, unwinding them from the branches.
Harry swallowed and turned back to face Hermione. “You don’t think that there’s any way to be free of this, then?”
“I said it was a traditional handfasting,” Hermione said, and led his eyes to Snape. He was standing in front of the tree with his forehead resting against the bark, his hands curled around the trunk and cutting into it. Seeing that, Harry swallowed. It looked like there wasn’t going to be any easy way of getting away from this, then.
“It means you have to live together,” Hermione added, forestalling Harry’s next question because she was perceptive like that. “And you can’t have sex with anyone besides each other for the duration of the year.”
Harry closed his eyes. He was without any significant partners, luckily, but he didn’t know if Snape was. Even some people who were perfectly faithful at other times of the year would sleep around on Beltane, because it was part of the tradition.
“Do you have anyone you’re-dating?” he asked Snape, keeping his eyes closed. He didn’t think he wanted to use the word “dating” with Snape, but then, until last night, he wouldn’t have thought to use the word “attractive” either.
“No,” said Snape stiffly. “But my business…I brew potions that open up the full potential of a wand to spells, and increase the potency of a wizard’s bonding with his wand.” Harry opened his eyes, about to ask more, since all he had known about Snape’s business was that it involved potions and was therefore uninteresting, but Snape was continuing. “My flat is above the shop. I am unsure how we are supposed to share it.”
He turned around and glared at Harry. Harry winced. Snape’s eyes kept flicking away from him, around the trees and the clearing, as though he could spot some escape route if he looked long enough. That made it harder to face than if Snape had just gone about hating him in peace.
“You’ll find some way to make this work,” Hermione said. “Since you can reach your flat easily enough by Floo or Apparating, Professor, I think that you ought to share Harry’s house at Godric’s Hollow. It’s big enough for two.”
“I would rather die,” said Snape.
Hermione opened her mouth to protest, but Harry reached out and touched her arm. He knew she only wanted to help, and he appreciated that, but he had seen a spasm almost wrench the lines of Snape’s face apart. He thought he knew why Snape felt that way, and it was something they could talk about together.
“Mind if we take a walk, Hermione?” he asked, and smiled a little when she snapped her head back to him. “I promise that we won’t hex each other.”
“The handfasting wouldn’t like that,” Hermione said, which Harry had already reckoned on. She hesitated, then nodded. “All right.”
“Thanks,” Harry said, and turned to Snape. He would let Snape choose the direction of the walk. He thought he would probably want to get away from Hermione’s listening ears at least as much as Harry did.
Snape gave him a long glare that said he didn’t appreciate the privilege of choosing the direction of their walk, and then stormed off. Harry followed him, pausing to shrug a rueful acceptance at Hermione. Well, he had known that this wouldn’t be easy.
Snape stormed a long distance across the clearing. Harry followed him, feeling more and more strange. Last night, this clearing had been filled with a glow of radiance so warm that Harry had felt as though anything was possible, even forging a pleasant time with Snape. Next year, he would do his best to remember that Beltane could be deceptive.
Snape kept walking until he finally seemed to realize that he wasn’t going to leave Harry behind, and spun around to confront him. “Will you leave me to mourn the failure of my life in peace?” he snarled.
Harry shook his head. “No, because I wanted to talk to you about this. You say that you would rather die.” He paused until Snape was peering at him in irritation, because at least it meant Harry had snapped him out of his brooding, and finished, “That’s not what I expected to hear from a man who survived the war.”
Snape moved back, his nostrils flaring. “You know that how I survived the war is my secret, Potter,” he said, even more stiffly than he had said anything so far. “I do not intend to tell anyone how I survived Nagini’s fangs.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “I don’t want your bloody secrets. They probably only concern Potions knowledge that I couldn’t process, anyway.” He paused as Snape nodded, and his own lips twitched despite himself. Well. He had known that giving Snape a chance to get some blows in would probably come out of this little walk. “What I meant is that you did survive, since you’re here in front of me. And I didn’t think a man who did that would give his life up so easily.”
Other than opening his mouth a little, Snape didn’t reply. Harry paused, then played another card. “And I’d thought I was wrong to call you a coward. Well. Someone who would rather die than live with a mistaken handfasting for a year is a coward.” He nodded decisively and turned away. “I’m going to ask Hermione what happens to the other partner in a handfasting when their partner selfishly decides to die.”
“Potter, wait!”
Biting his lip, Harry turned around and widened his eyes innocently. “What, Snape? Don’t you have a suicide to plan?”
Snape marched up to him, his robes billowing around him. Harry managed to resist tilting his head back to look up at Snape, but it was an effort. They weren’t so very different in height anymore, but Snape could be as intimidating as fuck with that long nose and overbearing…bearing.
“It was a figure of speech,” Snape hissed into his ear.
“I’ve not always had good luck assuming, with you,” Harry told him sweetly.
Snape pulled back and looked at him as if Harry had decided to make his life difficult simply by existing. Since Harry had the impression that Snape always thought he had done that, this wasn’t anything new.
Last night had been something new, and it didn’t even have to result in strange ribbons appearing around their wrists for that to be true. Harry just waited, and waited. Either Snape would realize the same thing, or he would combust from the force of the glare he was giving Harry. Harry was fairly sure that he was less flammable.
Finally, Snape uttered a muffled oath, and turned around. “I suppose that one may begin in the understanding that one does not always begin as one means to go on,” he muttered. “I will fetch a few of the things that I need for an overnight stay, and come to your house.”
Harry clasped his hands in front of him and bowed. Snape eyed him sideways. Harry, straightening up to grin at him, didn’t care. This was enough for right now.
Beltane Eve, 2005
“What’s the matter, Harry? You seem upset.”
Trust Hermione to notice, of course. Harry looked around the back garden and stared at the shining clumps of ribbons hanging on the trees. They strongly resembled the ones that he and Severus had woken up with nearly a year ago.
The ribbons had sunk into their skins over time. If Harry wasn’t looking for them, they were just little gleams of color near his wrist that he didn’t notice. But he could summon them back up when he wanted, and make them warm, barely tangible bits of light.
He thought about doing it now. But Severus might come around the corner any moment, and he would see and he would-no, he would understand. But he would understand many things that Harry didn’t necessarily want him to understand, and that was all there was to it.
“Harry?”
Hermione’s hand was gentle on his arm. Harry turned towards her and opened his eyes, meaning to make some meaningless comment on the unusual warmth of the night, or the proportion of birch wood in the fires, or anything else that would be safe and calm and without significance.
But the warmth of the night was overcome by the warmth waiting for him in Hermione’s eyes, and Harry cursed softly and leaned against her. “Why do I want it to continue?” he whispered. “Merlin knows that I’ve been unhappy enough this year.”
Hermione hugged him, her chin brushing his shoulder. “But you have a certain amount of unhappiness that you go through all the years of your life,” she whispered. “I think that you’ve had a certain amount of happiness this year, as well.”
Harry closed his eyes, and lost himself to memories of one such certain amount.
Midsummer, 2004
“Potter, where are you going? You promised me that you would help me move the rest of my cauldrons over tonight. I will entrust you only with the things that cannot break, after the disgraceful job you did on the books.”
Harry bit his lip and turned slowly back to face Snape. “We discussed this,” he said, and made his voice as nice as he could. Yes, they’d discussed it, but Snape showed a tendency to forget, conveniently, whenever he wished. “I have a Midsummer celebration at the Burrow to attend. I do it every year.”
Snape lifted his head so high that Harry could have counted all the contents of his nostrils, if he had wanted. He didn’t want, and so faced the front door again. There was no reason that Snape had to finish moving from his flat to Harry’s house tonight. He had merely decided he had to because God forbid that Harry have fun.
Having Snape live in his house was precisely the opposite of fun, Harry had discovered. It wasn’t like he and Snape had exchanged that many harsh words, but…
It was little things.
Harry would come down and find the dirty teacups he had left in the sink cleaned up and replaced in the cupboard, in such a precise manner that they all stood the same distance from the edge of the shelf. There was something so passive-aggressive about it that it never failed to make his teeth grind.
He had tried cleaning up the teacups himself instead of leaving them in the sink, but to no avail. Snape would come down and rearrange them, so that they all stood the same distance from the edge of the shelf again, and they were all turned so that the green and blue stripes that ran along several of them appeared to form one continuous, unbroken pattern. Harry had tried chipping one of the cups and throwing the chip away, and somehow Snape had Summoned it from the rubbish and cast Reparo in a way that made it impossible to tell the rim had ever been broken at all.
Snape left no clothes on the floor. Snape never wore anything other than unrelieved black. Snape could concentrate on a book in a way that left room for nothing but the words on the printed page, and he had a trick of closing his eyes and turning his head away that made every suggestion for dinner or a trip out that Harry offered to him seem like the height of stupidity. Snape never had dirty socks that got lost in the wash, probably because no sock would dare. Snape would never have a chair that was out of place, or a hair, or anything other than the few bogies Harry had once caught him wiping from his nose, with a handkerchief that then vanished somewhere else.
After how dirty his hair had been during school, he was offensively neat.
And Snape always kept the door of his lab locked, with a casualness that at first amused Harry and then infuriated him. So Snape thought a few simple Locking Charms could keep Harry out? A trained Auror, even if it had been a while since Harry had quit that training and he was absent-mindedly looking about for something to do? Ha!
Then Harry had cast the first Finite to dispel those simple Locking Charms on the door, and been hit with the backlash from a completely unfamiliar spell that left him limping for days.
Snape also denied people who had tried to break into his lab-his lab, as if it wasn’t part of Harry’s house-pain-relieving potions.
All of that flashed through Harry’s head, and he shook it. “I don’t want to help you tonight,” he said. “I promised tonight to the Weasleys, like always, and you’re not going to get in the way of that.” He turned resolutely towards the door again.
“How long will it last, this celebration of yours?”
“Don’t worry, Sleeping Beauty, I’ll use Silencing Spells when I come in.”
There came the sound of a sigh that was old when the world was young, and Snape, picking his way through the words as through a minefield, said, “I had thought that I would come with you, in exchange for your help with the rest of the move when you return.”
Harry frankly turned around and gaped at him. Snape gave a fretful tug at his wrist. Apparently his ribbons did Something when Harry was upset. Harry had never got him to admit what the Something was, and it wasn’t enough to stop him from annoying Harry at every chance he got, so Harry had largely discounted its existence.
“You mean that?” Harry asked.
“Yes.” Snape tilted his head to the side as if Harry were a potion that had developed an unexpected complication. “I cannot complete the move by myself, and this would be a fair exchange.” The way he said the word fair made it clear whose side he expected to have the greater obligation.
“Fine,” Harry said, when he could make his tongue work again. “Then come on. We’re late.” And he escaped out the door, shaking his head. Snape must really want help with those heavy cauldrons, for him to have agreed to this.
*
Harry knew that Snape made kind of a blot on the brightness of the ceremony, from the looks that the Weasleys were giving them, but he was enjoying himself too much to excuse them or apologize.
The Midsummer celebration was a bigger one than the Beltane ceremony. No sane wizards would bring little kids to a Beltane celebration, unless it was going to be one of the tame, stripped-down ones on Beltane Eve where the ribbons were for the kids to collect and the fires were built low to encourage small feet to pass safely over them.
But at Midsummer, the bonfires blazed too tall to jump over, but just right to run in circles around and shriek, and all the Weasley children were there. Harry sipped a kind of “whisky” that Molly made by mixing together butterbeer and a bunch of different kinds of juice, which surprisingly tasted good together, and felt content.
This was what life was supposed to be about. People, on a summer evening, sitting outside, under the awnings set up in case it rained, and talking. Ron and Hermione were talking about the Ministry with Arthur, Charlie was describing a story of handling a particularly raucous dragon to an audience of Bill and Fleur’s wide-eyed children, and Molly stood chatting with Ginny and George, apparently describing a prank that had traveled around her kitchen and how she had doused it. Harry hid his smile in his drink.
“I notice that you are not talking with anyone.”
Harry glanced sideways at Snape in surprise. Snape hadn’t accepted a drink, hadn’t accepted food, hadn’t done anything that would make him part of celebrating Midsummer. Of course, Harry thought. Celebrating the day of longest light wasn’t for him. “No,” he replied, instead of saying that Snape standing there with arms folded and a scowl on his face was enough to put anyone off. “I will, soon. There’s something I want to ask Arthur, and George and I should discuss some of the investments he’s making. I don’t think they’re sound.”
Snape stared at him, so motionless that Harry checked his robes automatically. Snape sometimes stared at him like that before he went to work in the mornings, so that Harry was still trying to find the stain or speck of food long after Snape had left for his shop.
“There is nothing,” Snape said at last. “Nothing for me here.” He turned away with a flare of his robes that nearly brushed Harry’s nose, he spun so hard and moved as though so offended. “Finish what you are doing and come away as soon as possible. I grow weary of this spectacle.”
Harry ground his teeth and turned his back on Snape. So Snape had to be a spoilsport and weird and irritating, but that didn’t mean Harry had to let it ruin or rule his good mood.
And he didn’t. Even though he could feel Snape’s stare on the back of his neck as he moved among the fires, and took his turn telling stories to the kids, and teased Charlie about the new burn scar on his face-which Charlie took in good part-and had the conversations he’d wanted to with Arthur and George.
No. He might have to be handfasted to Snape, and they’d made some decisions that they both regretted, but Harry was still going to have fun with his friends and adopted family. Snape couldn’t make him give that up.
*
“I am amazed that you can still carry the cauldrons, after that.”
Harry was a bit too breathless to reply, but he didn’t think he needed to. Snape hated fun, he knew that. It didn’t surprise him that Snape hated Midsummer, too. Maybe he had a reason, after what had happened at Beltane.
Then again, no one had tried to force him to have sex he obviously didn’t want-he couldn’t want it, or he would have at least looked at Harry in the past six weeks, instead of avoiding and ignoring him as if he didn’t exist-and jump over fires this time. So maybe he didn’t have a reason to hate Midsummer, at least not as good a reason as he did to hate Beltane.
Harry flopped the cauldrons in the middle of the lab and looked up. Snape was standing behind him, frowning at him. Harry kept his shrug and rolling eyes purely internal, and said, “All done, then?”
“How can you carry them after that?”
“Your allergy to having fun isn’t common,” Harry snapped, and stepped around Snape, heading towards the door of the lab. But Snape’s hand closed on his arm, and Harry stopped. It was the first time Snape had touched him since Beltane, other than one time when he’d been coming down the stairs and Harry had grabbed his arm to help him when he stumbled. And then Snape had pulled away as though Harry’s skin was slimy like a Shrivelfig.
It probably made Harry pathetic, although he thought that it wasn’t that pathetic as long as he didn’t say it aloud, but he wanted Snape to touch him willingly too much to move away now.
“How can you stand, or walk, or carry things, after drinking what Molly Weasley made you drink?” Snape muttered, so close to Harry’s ear that Harry’s body woke up and remembered leaves and fire and a sore arse.
Harry then realized what Snape had said, though, and snorted. “That was mostly juice and butterbeer. There was nothing in there that the kids couldn’t drink.” Bill had warned Victoire away from drinking too much, which was maybe where Snape had got the idea from, but then, Victoire was six years old. It wasn’t as though what could knock her out would harm someone like Harry.
“Why…”
Snape let him go. Harry just shook his head and walked to the door. “I don’t know why you thought I was drunk,” he fired over his shoulder. “It’s not like I walked up and propositioned you, did I?”
And then he went out the door, and upstairs to bed. He might have a long day of nothing ahead, as Snape would put it, since he had quit the Aurors, but at least it wasn’t a day of resenting the existence of holidays and conversations he wasn’t a part of.
Beltane Eve, 2005
Severus arrived only when the bonfires had been lit for half an hour and the giggles were getting loud around the Maypole that Ginny had persuaded Harry to set up near the largest fire. Harry had been watching them twine green ribbons and pink flowers around it, and smiling, but now he stiffened and tilted his head back.
“You can feel him?” Ron had had enough Firewhisky that what he meant to be a whisper didn’t quite come out that way.
Harry sighed, nodded, and turned to face Severus. In truth, it wasn’t like smelling Severus, or even feeling a tug on the handfasting bond between them. He just knew when Severus was there, the way he knew if there was a wind, not from seeing it but from feeling its effects on the things around it.
Severus stood with his arms crossed between two fires. He was frowning at Harry. Harry swallowed. That frown had become familiar in the last month. He knew there was no way that Severus would agree to renew the handfasting-he hadn’t got enough out of it-but lately he seemed to be trying to figure out whether Harry would ask him to.
And what crushing response he’ll give in return.
It said a lot, Harry thought sourly, that he was still afraid of that crushing response, in a way, but it was a completely different way than it would have been a year ago. Six years ago. Ten years ago. A year shouldn’t have changed so much. It was abundantly clear that it hadn’t changed Severus.
“Yes?” he asked, once he got close. Since the equinox, he had mastered a neutral tone. It probably wouldn’t fool Severus for long, not when he could still pick up Harry’s surface thoughts simply from looking into his eyes, but at least it kept Harry from embarrassing himself.
Severus considered him so long and so deeply that Harry relaxed a little. Severus didn’t do that with things that didn’t matter. At least their parting would be friendly, as should befit people who had shared a home for a year.
And more than that.
Severus’s mouth turned down at the corners, probably because he had picked up on the thought from Harry’s mental surface. “Excuse me,” he said, in a voice distant enough to freeze, and turned away, gliding towards the far side of the garden.
Harry sighed. So, no, Severus wouldn’t publicly embarrass him by rejection. Harry shouldn’t have feared he would, really. He knew better than that.
But he still knew how deep his own heart had gone, and while Severus had the depth of heart to match it-Harry knew he did-that he would choose to do so was impossible.
Harry turned back to the fires, and Ron’s sympathetic pat on his shoulder. He still enjoyed his friends and family. He still loved them.
It was just his misfortune to have mistaken the false handfasting for the real thing.
Part Two.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/657711.html. Comment wherever you like.