Chapter Ten of "Anularius"- Reeling
Chapter Nine.
Title: Anularius (10/16)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Snape
Warnings: Angst, time travel
Rating: R
Summary: Traveling back in time is safe. All you have to do is keep away from people who affect time, who are pretty rare. It's just Horcrux-collecting Harry Potter's luck that Severus Snape is one of them.
Author's Notes: A late Advent fic for thebookivore, who gave me this prompt: Harry/Snape. Time travelling Harry. As an unspeakable explains to Harry, time travel is actually very safe, because most people cannot affect the time stream except a rare few. You can tell who can affect time because they can see time travelers, otherwise "it's similar to how most Muggles cannot see magic, their minds naturally shy away from it and come up with the most incredible explanations for what they have seen". Harry knows to hide out from himself but doesn't realize that Snape can see him ...
I meant to complete this fic on time for Advent, but it got too long for me to finish on time, so I’m posting it as a chaptered story. The title is Latin for “maker of rings.”
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Ten-Reeling
The beast raised its head from Snape’s neck and snarled at Harry as he ran towards it. Harry took that as a good sign. It meant that he could distract the thing, that it wasn’t some beast sent specifically to stalk Snape.
Harry was already drawing his wand. He had a specific spell in mind, and he slipped it in between Snape and the cat with a sharp flick of his wrist. “Abscido!”
The spell left Snape lying safely on the ground, but it seized the cat and whirled it away from Snape, making it let out a loud, indignant cry as it went. Harry smiled, a bit breathlessly. Hermione was the one who had taught him the Separation Charm. You had to concentrate pretty hard on the two things you wanted to separate since you couldn’t add the word in Latin to the charm, but it worked. Harry had just wanted to separate things that had fur and things that didn’t, and that was easy.
The cat got its feet under it and came springing back at Harry, so wild and fierce that Harry did stumble back one step. But his retreat only lasted until he could raise a Shield Charm, and the cat rebounded off it with a disgusted hiss. It landed on all fours and began to stalk around him, as if looking for a weak spot in the shield. It ignored Snape entirely.
Harry nodded. The cast was looking for a prey animal it could take without trouble, and that somewhat increased the chances that he and Snape could both get away from it. “Can you run back to Hogwarts and make sure you don’t attract its attention while you do?” he called out to Snape.
“I’m not going to leave you here to handle it on your own.” Snape’s voice was low and clear, and he had risen to his feet to stand beside Harry. “I’m not that much of a coward.”
Harry groaned a little. The one time he would have given thanks for Slytherin self-preservation, and of course Snape would try to resist. “Come on, you can go,” he said, and strengthened the shield again as the cat crouched down. “I just want to make sure you don’t get hurt. You’re the one who’s hindering me in this situation, given that I’m the one with Auror training.”
“And I fought as a Death Eater.” Snape’s voice was strange, hard. “You don’t need to think that you have all the combat prowess in the clearing at the moment.”
Harry turned his head to argue, and the cat leaped.
It came flying over the shield, legs spread out and foreclaws clutching. It landed right next to Harry and lashed out with one paw. Harry spun desperately to avoid it, although he could feel some of the claws shred the skin on his thigh, dangerously close to the femoral artery. He swore and lifted his wand.
Snape got there before he could, casting a spell Harry didn’t know that sent the cat flying back into the woods again. Harry could only track where it had gone by the snarling sounds that came from it. Snape’s spell had pinned it against a tree and was slowly crushing it, to judge from the wails.
“Stop!” Harry yelled, unable to listen to the spell any longer, the shrieks and the noise of bones breaking. “You’re killing it!”
“I thought that was the idea,” Snape said, turning his head and looking at Harry with a grave stare. “So that it couldn’t kill us.” But he flicked his wand, and Harry heard the bones stop snapping. It sounded as though the cat had slumped to the ground.
“I just-not torture.” Harry shut his eyes. He probably shouldn’t have called Snape a coward. That had made him want to prove he knew lots of Death Eater spells, or powerful curses, or something. Harry had never seen the magic he’d used before, and didn’t know if it would fit into the category of curse or not.
“You saved my life.”
Harry slowly opened his eyes again. He had thought Snape would have stalked off in a huff about Harry getting upset that he’d hurt the cat, but instead he was in front of Harry, watching him. The only thing that made Harry relax was the critical look in Snape’s eyes. He might be realizing they weren’t perfectly suited to each other after all.
“I couldn’t let you die like that,” Harry said.
“Ah.” Snape nodded. “Because of the timeline.”
Harry stared and looked at him. He had missed the faint bitterness in Snape’s voice before, but there was no mistaking it now. “No! Of course not. Because no one deserves to die like that. And no animal deserves to be hurt like that, either,” he added. He listened, but he couldn’t hear the cat’s crying anymore. It had probably slipped off into the forest.
“I will overlook the insinuation against my character,” Snape murmured. His eyes were bright, and he reached out in a way that would have given Harry plenty of time to avoid the touch if he wanted to. Harry didn’t try, but he did eye Snape and shake his head a little.
“You do care about me,” Snape whispered.
Harry sighed. “It’s a way I care about other people, too, though. You want-you want this exclusive commitment from me, and it’s just not going to happen. I can’t stay here because of the timeline and because I have friends back in my own time. I can’t be your permanent lover for the same reasons. I can’t go away and come back because there’s no way to be sure I would always arrive at the same time, and it would change history, and a fling would prove wearing for both of us.”
“That is the first sensible thing you have said.” Snape inclined his head. “No, I do not want a mere fling. It would be hard to sustain, and while I was willing to sleep with you once in hopes that it might turn into a more permanent…affair, I would not want a succession of single nights.”
Harry nodded. “Right. So you agree that the best thing for me to do would be to go back to my own time?”
Snape’s face was cool and implacable, blank. “You wish to do this? You agree that what we had meant nothing?”
Harry rubbed his face. He wondered why he was the one who had to make all these judgments, when he was so bad at them. Yes, they should have sent Hermione back in time. “Not nothing. Just not everything. Not enough to make me abandon my time period and friends for it.”
“If you could have something here that you never had in your own time…”
“I already have,” said Harry, and although it was simply the truth, it was rather nice to bask in the glow of Snape’s smile. But then he sighed and came back to their problem. “But that isn’t-enough. It can’t be.”
Snape only nodded, after a long moment when Harry thought he could feel his heartbeat reaching into the earth, about to start a quake, and turned away. “We still need to find the ingredients for the potion that Albus wants me to make.”
“There’s that,” said Harry, and turned to gathering with a will. If they could think of something else, then he thought Snape would quickly get used to the habit. He had got used to so many other bad things in Harry’s time, why wouldn’t this be sort of the same thing?
I don’t want him to have to get used to something else bad. He’s done enough of it.
But he was so powerless to prevent it, Harry thought, he would have to treat it the way he did the murder of his parents: something he wished with all his heart hadn’t happened, but inevitable.
*
“I will still need your help at holding the temperature of the fire under the cauldron steady.”
Harry blinked. He had deposited the ingredients in Snape’s lab, the ones that Snape had assigned him to chop chopped, but then he’d begun to leave. The idea that Snape might have wanted him around, genuinely, to help with the potion had never occurred to him.
“I meant it when I said I was bad at Potions,” he ventured after a moment.
“It is good that I will be here to supervise you, then,” Snape said, not even glancing up from where he was chopping up some small petals into what was practically a mist, the cuts were so fine.
Harry shook his head. Well, if Snape wanted to deal with a mess all over his lab, that was his prerogative. Harry wouldn’t be here to help him clean it up or deal with the consequences, anyway. He turned and brought the fire to life under the cauldron, carefully raising the flames and then setting up the charm that meant they would heat the bottom of the cauldron absolutely evenly.
“You can’t be that poor at Potions, if you knew to cast that spell without instruction.”
Harry started a little, then shook his head as the fire almost spiked. “I’m poor at it because I have to really concentrate, and then that doesn’t leave me free to react to anything else that happens while I’m concentrating,” he muttered. He lowered the flames again. “You can’t rely on me to chop and check the fire at the same time.”
“It sounds like a difficulty you could overcome.” Snape carefully sifted the misty petals into the potion, then followed them up with some of the leaves Harry had chopped. “Why haven’t you bothered?”
Harry said nothing, eyes on the fire. Snape didn’t repeat the question or get offended and back off, though, the way Harry had hoped he would. He simply went on adding ingredients, pausing to stir on occasion, and then reaching behind him for something else. All the while, except for quick darting glances at the surface of the potion, his eyes remained on Harry’s face.
“Because,” said Harry, “of things I can’t discuss with you.”
Snape snorted. “Is there something about your potion-making abilities that is highly relevant to history? I must know this.”
“Something that’s more personal,” said Harry, and carefully adjusted the heat of the flames again when Snape made a flicking gesture at him.
“Then it involves me prejudicing you against the art,” said Snape, with a nod, and shrugged when Harry stared at him. “I am usually discerning about that sort of thing. You shouldn’t try so hard to keep the truth from me, Harry.”
Harry turned away without answering. Yes, okay, Snape was discerning and Harry was bad at this, but he had already thought that. He didn’t know how Snape tricked the information out of him anyway, even when he was trying to be careful.
“You look morose,” said Snape, and banged the stirring rod against the side of the cauldron so that Harry had to look up. “Was my future self such a terrible teacher? I will admit that I am morose myself, and impatient, but I hope I haven’t broken anyone’s spirit the way that he seems to have broken yours.”
Harry sighed. “I can’t answer these questions. Any of them. And you shouldn’t care about them. I should just be another Potter to you.”
Snape simply shrugged and went on stirring. Harry began to relax, a little. There was something relaxing about working on a potion with Snape, honestly. And when Snape murmured instructions to him, Harry could obey without question. It helped knowing there was an expert right there who could take care of problems as they happened, unlike the times that Harry had brewed with another student.
And unlike when you were in the classroom with the older Snape?
Harry paused, then nodded. Honestly, he had never felt safe around Snape, even though he hadn’t thought the man would deliberately sabotage any potion. He would only react after an explosion had happened, though, to make his “point.”
Whatever that was.
“Pay attention.”
Harry shook his head and did. At least that sounded like his Snape, he thought: snappish and full of power and authority. He bent his head over the cauldron, and watched the flames, and when Snape put a flower in his hand, a pink one with a twining stem that made it look as if Snape had plucked it from the ground that second, Harry followed his instructions there, too.
“Crush it up. Twist it. Grind it into your palm, until you see a golden dust fall from it. That’s the pollen we need.”
Harry wondered when this had become about what “we” needed, but he still did it, twisting and grinding. It was strangely soothing, he discovered. He had to work the flower with one hand only since his other one was holding his wand, ready to adjust the temperature as necessary, but he could do that without much trouble. The golden dust seemed to shower out too soon.
He extended his hand to Snape, asking without words if that was the way it should look. Snape nodded curtly, and Harry held out his hand and shook it. The golden dust didn’t cling the way pollen would have, but drifted at once into the cauldron. Harry curled his fingers around the flower’s stem until he received the nod that meant Snape also wanted the flower itself in the potion, and then dropped it.
“Good,” said Snape, his word barely a breath. “Now step back and get ready to cast the Stasis Charm when I tell you to.”
Harry blinked-he couldn’t remember any potions, even the ones in the Half-Blood Prince’s book, that needed a Stasis Charm cast in the middle of them-but he reminded himself that that was why Snape was the Potions genius and Harry remained a novice even after years of practice. He moved back and held his wand, the incantation hovering on the edge of his tongue the way the wand hovered on the edges of his fingers.
“Now,” said Snape, in a voice so calm that Harry would have believed he was absolutely calm if he hadn’t seen the way that Snape’s fingers tightened on the edge of the table.
Harry cast the spell, feeling, for a moment, a thrill as keen as he did when he watched a spell strike down an opponent in battle. This spell only hit the cauldron and froze the liquid in mid-bubble, but it was still similar.
“Now,” said Snape, and Harry glanced at him, wondering if he was about to indicate that Harry should cast the Stasis Charm again. But instead, Snape was calmly walking towards him, one hand stretched out. Harry didn’t point the wand at him, but it was a near thing. He didn’t think he would like whatever Snape was about to do.
It was nothing he hadn’t done before, though. He simply took up Harry’s chin and turned his face back and forth, staring critically into his eyes. Then he nodded and stepped back.
“You being naturally, inherently bad at Potions,” he said, “is as much bollocks as lots of other things you’ve said.”
Harry scowled. “I never said that I was naturally bad at Potions. Just that I was.” He looked at the cauldron again, and saw golden numbers, like the ones on a clock face, flickering into being beyond the edge of it. Snape had cast a Tempus Charm, but not one of the ones that Harry was most familiar with. Instead of telling the time, it looked as though it was counting down to something.
And it was almost at zero.
“Shouldn’t you go tend to your potion?” he asked, and motioned towards it with his head.
“Bad at something usually means naturally bad,” Snape pursued, in a calm tone.
“Do you go around analyzing all the ways that people use the word ‘naturally’ or something?” Harry demanded. “Just-shut up and go tend to your potion.”
“When the clock reaches zero,” said Snape, but he did step back around the table and flick his wand at the potion. For a moment, it bubbled sullenly, and Harry almost thought it would overflow. But then it did settle back down, and Snape shook his head and turned silently to study Harry. “You aren’t naturally bad at Potions if you can follow instructions and don’t have a fear of the art.”
“Why would anyone be afraid of it?” Harry asked. “I mean, do a lot of students witness explosions before they come to Hogwarts or something?” He knew that, in his time, lots of people had been afraid of Potions because of Snape, but that wasn’t the same as being naturally afraid of it, either.
And now I sound like him.
“The rumors of explosions, being around open flames, having to do magic without using their wands often,” said Snape simply. He was studying Harry. “You don’t need to use Potions often in your job as an Auror, of course.”
“No,” Harry agreed. He knew why the Aurors required NEWT’s in Potions-because they needed to be able to recognize the common poisons and effects of intoxicants on the murder victims and criminals they dealt with-but they didn’t use it often enough for him to think it was worth it. They could have learned the same thing through Healing magic, Harry thought, and Healers would have been good teachers and could have taught them other things, too.
“Hmm,” said Snape. Then he turned back to the potion smoothly, at the same moment as a huge spout of liquid rose from the surface and fountained over the side of the cauldron, moving quickly towards Snape.
“Snape!” Harry barked, because it seemed sheer surprise had kept Snape’s feet rooted to the floor. He rolled forwards and snatched Snape out of the way like he had when Slytherin’s bowl attacked, and flicked another Stasis Charm at the potion at the same time.
The bubbling stopped and the liquid remained in the cauldron, much to Harry’s relief. He rolled over and made sure Snape was all right. He looked a little stunned, but there was no potion on him, not even a bruise.
Then Snape smiled.
Harry stepped back and narrowed his eyes. “What are you plotting now?” he muttered.
“It worked,” said Snape simply, and spent a moment considering his robes. “Granted, I would have liked it better if you hadn’t wrinkled my robes when you grabbed me, but I can hardly complain that much when it got you to touch me again.” He gave Harry a smug look.
“Tell me what you’re going on about.” Harry gripped his wand tightly and gave another glance at the potion. It appeared completely normal now. He did have to wonder if Snape had ruined it when he’d told Harry to cast the original Stasis Charm, but that would suggest Snape cared more about talking to him than he did about completing the potion in the right way.
That…wasn’t the Snape Harry knew.
“I wanted to see how you would react to an emergency,” said Snape simply. “Casting that Stasis Charm and releasing the magic exactly when I did would cause an explosion. I knew that. I also thought you would react in an instant and choose the right course instinctively. The right course was another Stasis Charm. Events proved me correct.”
Harry clenched his teeth. “You had no idea that I would know. You could have caught us both in the explosion.”
“But I did not. You did the right thing. Which proves that you have some level of talent in Potions.”
Harry stared at him. “You would go that far to prove a point that doesn’t matter anyway?”
“It matters to me,” Snape corrected him, and his eyes flashed for a moment. “I could not stay permanently with someone who was so bad at my art that they flailed about and screamed and caused explosions on a regular basis. It is enough for me to know that you have some skill at it. I would not expect you to exert that skill regularly, but I would want you not to be incompetent.”
Harry massaged his forehead for a moment. He wondered what would have happened if Snape hadn’t told him about the Stasis Charm. Snape had gone back to stirring the liquid in the cauldron, and adding a few fine white hairs that might have come from a unicorn, his gaze never straying from Harry.
“I wouldn’t have known what to do if not for you telling me to cast that first Stasis Charm,” he finally said, not looking at Snape.
“But then you did,” said Snape, as if that was really the only thing that mattered.
Maybe to Snape, with his bizarre obsession with Harry, it did. Harry wondered if it was sort of like Voldemort’s obsession with him. Voldemort might hate Harry for destroying him as a baby, sure, but he had done other things like make up elaborate plots that had no purpose except to let him confront Harry.
I wish I knew what it was that made people have bizarre obsessions with me, so I could stop it.
Harry sighed. He was unlikely to get that wish. He turned back to face Snape, who looked at him with a calm face. He was stirring furiously, and then he broke the glass stirring rod and threw both halves into the potion, but he never bothered looking away from Harry, as if he had to make sure Harry wouldn’t disappear between one blink and the next.
“I don’t have much talent at Potions,” Harry said. “Maybe I should say that instead of saying that I’m bad at them.”
“That would be acceptable,” said Snape, and stepped back from the cauldron, watching the potion whirling in it. It was green, then red, and then it turned into a sort of devouring whirlpool that seemed to lead all the way to the bottom of the cauldron. Harry had to look away before he started to feel dizzy staring into it. “I can teach you better if you can admit that there’s not some barrier to your talent.”
“And I’m not staying.” Harry was starting to wonder why he had stayed this long, honestly. In an attempt to be a decent person? But Snape was never going to see sense. “I’m sorry that I-I did whatever it was that made you attracted to me.”
“I’m attracted to you simply because of who you are.” Snape gave a shrug with one shoulder as the potion settled into a smooth blue glow, looking like pictures of the tropical water that Harry had sometimes seen on the Dursleys’ telly. “And I think that you are not unattracted to me.”
“No,” said Harry, staring at the floor. “Or I would never have slept with you. But I still have to leave. And maybe doing it fast would be best.” He took a step towards the door that led out into Snape’s main room.
But it slammed shut, and Snape came striding around the cauldron. Harry turned wearily towards him, his head pounding. He would just have to-
His mind came to a halt when he saw that Snape’s wand was still in his hand, and this time, pointed at him.
“What makes you think I would allow you to leave?” Snape asked softly.
Chapter Eleven.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/742823.html. Comment wherever you like.