Archive of Our Own

‘Had I but all of them, thee and thy treasures,

What a wild crowd of invisible pleasures!’

-from The Laboratory, by Robert Browning

There's something about revisiting the places of your childhood that is perspective-altering. Unmasking. At first they seem so different to the familiar ones deep in your memory, until you realise that the places themselves remain unchanged – that they're, in fact, merely a mirror for the changes in yourself, the myriad ways you've grown and aged, too slowly to notice it happening at the time.

Which is to say that as Harry Potter passed through the narrow corridor to the dungeons, as he trotted down the little stone staircases and winding hallways, he found that they weren't anything like as dark or dreary as he remembered them being. On the contrary, the stone was surprisingly pale, and the high ceilings made the place stately, almost airy. Why had he always dreaded the long walk down to this place? The floor beneath him was deeply scuffed from the passing of countless children's feet, and indeed, rather than the threatening atmosphere of impending doom and misery he remembered, everything about the passageways had the simple, unmistakable feel of a school building.

Harry suddenly felt so very old that he had to laugh at himself.

“Something amusing, Mister Potter?” The tired, heavy door to the potions classroom stood open in front of him, and beyond it Severus Snape collected stained wooden boards, children's knives and the detritus of potions ingredients from the room's work tables, levitating them smoothly to the large stone sink by the wall.

It was the first time Harry had laid eyes on him in years. Snape himself was still the same. Unchanging as bloody stone. Still crow-dark and ragged, still lank and pale and sneering. It was almost comforting to Harry, in a nostalgic sort of way, to face this proof that some things really never did alter.

“It…” Harry glanced around the classroom that his rational mind knew was the same in virtually every detail as the one in his memory, and yet which felt so alien now. “It just looks so different down here since my day.”

Snape frowned. “I can assure you that it isn't.”

“Oh, I know that. It's just me, I suppose.”

Harry leant in the doorway, noticing that he was taller now, too. Either that or the doorway had shrunk. Which, with Hogwarts, wasn't an impossibility.

“Hmm. What seems changed, to you?”

“It's... I don't know. It's not as, well, dank as I remembered.”

“Dank?” Snape was looking at him like he was an idiot. It was a look Harry was very familiar with indeed, and in his mind he was transported back to eight years of hot cauldrons and copying notes from Hermione, and the sweet, grassy smell of asphodel.

“Or dark. For some reason when I remember potions it always seemed to be really dark down here.”

“Do you really think reduced visibility would be wise when allowing imbecilic teenagers to run amok with a variety of dangerous, controlled substances?”

Harry chuckled. “Well, no. I suppose not.”

“Quite.” Snape resumed his pacing, his quiet, methodical de-cluttering of the work spaces. The cauldrons he left untouched, presumably still cooling.

“It doesn't feel like that long since I was here. One of the imbeciles.” Harry grinned, half expecting to be ordered to scrub something. So many detentions in this room.

“Rest assured, Mister Potter, you will always be one of the imbeciles.”

Ouch. Harry’s grin widened. Can't put me on detention now, though. And oh, wasn't that worth taking advantage of in some small way? He stepped into the room and hopped up onto one of the tables, curling his legs up under him in a way that he knew would drive Snape mad – get those shoes off my work bench. “I suppose I thought it would feel just the same, coming back here now, like I'd been away for an extra long summer holiday or something.”

Snape fixed Harry's shoes with a dirty look, but to Harry's great surprise he didn't mention them. “And what exactly is the reason for your return? Or is this it, this engaging little heart to heart chat we're enjoying?”

“I'm thinking of teaching.”

Snape pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Of course you are.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Only that the gods have never looked favourably on me.”

Harry bristled. “Come on, professor. I know we never got on especially well at the beginning but I thought, I thought we put a lot of that behind us?” Not in so many words, perhaps. But they’d fought together, at the end. They’d fought and they’d won and it had made everything different. Hadn’t it? “I'm not a kid any more, you know. I'd like to think we can be adults about this.”

“Oh would you now?”

Snape raised an eyebrow, such a familiar gesture that Harry was smiling before he knew it. “Yeah.”

“Hopeless Gryffindor optimism.”

“Pointless Slytherin pessimism.”

“I'm sure you mean realism, Potter.”

Harry laughed. Was it his imagination, or was Snape far easier to talk to than he used to be? When he thought about it, he rather suspected that this, too, was a change that was more internal than external. Have I really changed that much?

“That still doesn't explain why you're down here bothering me. I don't see how it's any of my business whether you teach or not.”

“It is, though, isn't it? You've worked here for ages, and we've never exactly been friends. I don't want to make you uncomfortable.”

“And if it would make me uncomfortable, what then? Would you abandon this sudden desire to pass on whatever wisdom you've managed to glean over the last decade of ministry posturing to the next generation?”

“I don't know,” Harry replied frankly. “I've still not really decided if I want to do it at all.”

“I'm at a loss to imagine why you think I'd be at all interested in either giving an opinion on your career or your transparent attempts to alleviate your conscience by pretending to take said opinion into account.”

“I don't know, all right! I just don't know. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. What do you think I-”

“Surely you have someone better suited to talk to about this,” Snape interrupted hurriedly. “Minerva-”

“Is the one who wants me to take the job.”

“Ah. Well then, one of your friends. Surely the saviour of the wizarding world cannot be short of sympathetic ears.”

“Maybe I don't want to talk to someone who sees me as the saviour of the wizarding world for a change!”

Snape was sneering at him from behind a curtain of lank hair.

“All right, Potter. Do you want my advice?”

Harry found himself nodding. “Yeah,” he said. “Yes, I’d like that.”

“My advice is that you figure it out for yourself. It's called growing up. Get used to it.”

*

It wasn't that he got used to it, exactly – one never really gets used to the saviour of the wizarding world sitting cross-legged on tables in one's workspace, even if one is the sort of teacher with whom ex-students often voluntarily choose to spend their time, which Snape decidedly is not. But somewhere in the myriad visits between that first conversation and the first day of the following school year, the day of Potter's inauguration into the rabble that is the Hogwarts teaching staff, he stopped asking why Potter kept coming to visit and started leaving the door to the teaching lab ajar at the end of the day, just on the off chance.

Once Potter's mind was made up to accept the faculty position he would come to Snape to ask, of all things, for advice on teaching. And he proved… annoyingly persistent.

“Would that you had shown this level of appreciation for my expertise when you were in my class.”

“They respect you. It's the thing I worry about most, that they won't respect me and I'll be another Lockhart.”

“Are you always this needlessly honest?”

Harry laughed. “What do you think?”

Snape raised an eyebrow and declined comment.

“Are you always this needlessly uptight?”

“You've never thought it prudent to be a little more guarded?”

“With you? What's the point?” The words could have been accusatory, but Potter's smile was easy and his voice soft, as if laced with nostalgia. “You've been inside my head, remember. What could I possibly have to hide from you now?”

For some reason the words were like hot fingers along Severus's spine, inappropriate and too familiar.

“That was a long time ago, Potter.”

“You’ve changed that much?”

“No,” Snape replied, his words carefully measured. “I have not changed.

Potter looked up from the shelf he was organising. He’d been taking it upon himself for several visits now to assist Snape with menial tasks around the laboratory, insisting he “make himself useful” in exchange for Severus’s time. And while he berated himself for allowing it so readily, Snape couldn’t deny that it gave him considerably more time for his own brewing.

“I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Change. Am I really very different than I was at school?”

“Appalling grammar notwithstanding, yes.”

“In what way?”

Well, let me see, Snape mused. You walked out of here an obnoxious little boy with the entire wizarding world at his feet for what amounted, in the end, to a mix of stubbornness, bravado and the merest dumb luck; and here you stand now, mellow tongued and courteous, with evidence of at least half a working brain in your possession and, let’s be obscenely frank, the body of a fucking pin up, as confiscated copies of Witch Weekly delight in reminding me on a regular bloody basis.

He pursed his lips instead. “Your self-obsession seems unchanged, certainly.”

That rich, easy laugh. “I’ll have to give you that one,” Potter conceded with a grin.

*

“It wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t anyone’s. Stuff like that just happens, you know?”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“They had each other. I had Ginny. It makes sense that things changed, we drifted a little. I mean, we’re still close. We always will be. Even with Ginny, I think. But they’re closer now. There’s another level there that I can’t reach, I wouldn’t want to reach it.”

It was bizarre. Sitting here in Snape’s private rooms, drinking Snape’s private alcohol, talking about Hermione and Ron while his blood still practically sang with adrenaline. What a night. What a miserable sodding night.

“And yet they are enjoying still that marital bliss, whereas you and the young Miss Weasley…”

Harry felt himself smile slightly, and wondered when the mention of that name had gone from making him feel bleak to wistful. He loved Ginny Weasley, always had and always would. And yet – “It just didn’t feel entirely right in the end, if you see what I mean? Just sort of fizzled out before it even got started. It was a mutual thing, finishing it. We both knew, just couldn’t admit it. And then one day… we did.”

And that’s the shortest version of that story, Harry’s brain told him with a mental snort. Maybe he would tell Snape the long version some day. Some day when his nerves were less strained and his tongue not as whisky-loose.

“You don’t sound too upset about it,” Snape said cautiously.

“Well, at the time I was pretty gutted.” Understatement of the fucking year. “But I think… I think I was more upset because it felt like I’d failed, you know? Like being with Ginny was what I was supposed to be doing, but I couldn’t make it work.”

There was silence for a moment. Harry fidgeted with the drink in his hands, leaving smudges on the bottle-green glass. He could feel Snape’s eyes on him, just as he’d always been able to at school. It was a feeling like… like the heat in his throat from the whisky they were drinking, and the way his hair stood on end at the back of his neck sometimes. He looked up at Snape’s quiet sigh. “Why do you tell me these things?” Snape asked when their eyes met. “Merlin knows I have never invited your confidences.”

“I don’t know. I just feel like I can talk to you. I can’t really talk to Hermione and Ron about this – I mean it’s Ron’s sister for God’s sake.”

“Not just this – from the day you waltzed in here in June you’ve been haunting my laboratory, unburdening yourself of endless personal anecdotes and pointless inanity. Do you have even the faintest idea why?” He didn’t sound too annoyed – more confused and off-guard – but still, for some reason, it stung.

“Who else should I be talking to?” Harry snapped. “You were there. Throughout all of it – the war, the school back then, the day that...” He swallowed, letting his voice fall once again quiet. “And I keep trying to put all this distance between me and, and the war. But it didn’t work. I just keep having these conversations where I have to watch every word that comes out of my mouth in case I say anything, in case anyone thinks less of me because I say something stupid or insane or wrong or, or weird. Maybe I needed to hang out with someone who already thought I was all those things, and who understood and who’d been there and… oh bloody fucking hell.” Harry scrubbed at his face, feeling tired and angry and burned out all at once. He breathed deeply, and after a moment drained his whisky and looked up again. Snape was watching him closely. Both eyebrows up, Harry thought. Must’ve been some rant. “Sorry,” he said, and repeated it when he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“No need to apologise, Professor Potter. It’s been an exceptionally trying day.”

“You can say that again. What the hell was Alden thinking?”

“She wasn’t. Neither of them were.”

Harry scrubbed his face again. “But why? Why would anyone want to…” He gestured with his hands, unsure what exactly he was trying to represent.

Snape smirked. “It is hardly an unheard of inclination. Surely you remember the – how shall I put it? The experimental nature of young people?”

“Well, sure, everyone experiments when they’re young.” Snape gave him a look suggesting that he himself had always been quite above such things, thank you. Bollocks you have, Harry thought. “But this is pretty extreme, you have to admit.”

Harry’s own experimental phase had come in his early twenties – he always had been a late bloomer, after all – when, finally broken up with Ginny, he’d had a succession of short-term affairs. Many with women. Some not. He’d always thought that made him a little wild, a little rebellious and daring. Clearly the bar for rebellious and daring was set a bit higher than he’d imagined.

“Your idea of extreme is almost laughably naïve, Potter.” Snape wasn’t looking at him. He was just staring off into space. Harry wondered how much alcohol they’d actually consumed between them. “Pain and pleasure are inextricably interwoven, and people have been pushing at the boundary between them for longer than you can possibly imagine.”

Harry rolled his eyes. He’s started with his lecture-voice. God help us.

“Oh yes, I’m sure every couple out there is just falling over themselves to seriously injure each other. How silly of me, to miss how obviously sexy that would be. Nothing hotter than a night in the hospital wing, right?”

Harry didn’t think he’d ever forget the pallour of Alden’s face when he found them, how her hands shook as she tried to explain what happened and couldn’t get the words out. Like mine are shaking now, Harry thought, setting his glass aside and clenching his fists in his lap before flexing them again. So much blood, it was a wonder neither of them were more seriously hurt. He’d taken one look at it and thought they were fighting – with a Gryffindor and a Slytherin it wasn’t a big leap to make, but when Snape swept imperiously into Pomphrey’s ward later, moments after their own arrival, in a flurry of black that was impossibly dignified for the hour, he’d taken one look at Toulson’s face and known exactly what the fifth years had been up to. Harry, on the other hand, had needed a mortifyingly awkward explanation.

“It needn’t end in the hospital wing if one knows what one is doing.”

It was Harry’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “They were tearing at each other with hexes. For some sort of sexual thrill.”

“That was their first mistake, of course. Wand waving has its place in these situations from time to time, perhaps, but I find it very impersonal.”

“You find…”

Snape swirled the drink in his hands before taking a slow, deliberate mouthful. Harry found himself swallowing in tandem. “Indeed. I think in this respect the muggles actually have the right idea –  physical methods seem to be capable of far more… subtle results.” He barked out a dark laugh. “It’s like comparing a scalpel to a sledgehammer, really.”

“You’ve done this,” Harry whispered. “This… pain sex stuff.”

“Does the thought disturb your delicate sensibilities, Potter?”

Harry slumped back in his chair. “Bloody hell.”

A quick exhale of almost-laughter. “Quite.”

“We always thought you were a kinky bastard.”

Harry jumped as Snape set his empty glass down onto the table between them with rather more force than was strictly necessary. “I was a Death Eater, Mister Potter,” he growled. “Kinky bastard doesn’t begin to cover it.”

“Oh.” Harry’s voice was very small.

Snape sneered cruelly. “Still interested in swapping life stories over tea?”

Bloody hell. This is what shock feels like, Harry thought numbly. But he’d been the one who started this, hadn’t he? He’d been the one who wanted to share. And here was Snape finally talking back, finally sharing something in return. Harry cast about desperately for something to say, something to keep the conversation moving before it died in the water. “What,” he started, then paused and took a somewhat shaky breath. Gryffindor courage, he told himself. You’ve faced down a dark lord, you can talk to another adult about adult things. Come on. “What kind of stuff did you do, then?”

Snape narrowed his eyes, and was silent so long Harry was sure he wasn’t going to answer. He didn’t know where to look, so he grabbed for the bottle of Snape’s whisky from between the two armchairs in which they sat, and poured himself yet another measure – manners be damned.

The alcohol burned, and the quiet grew like a living thing.

But eventually – “Knives.” Snape spoke the word like a spell, almost too quiet to hear.

“You – Knives?”

Snape drew himself up, haughty and grim. “I do have some skill with them.”

“What, you cut people?” Snape gave him that look, that what-do-you-think look that always made Harry feel about five inches tall. “For fun?”

“I don’t know if that’s the word I would choose,” he said lazily, and Harry could almost believe he was bored by the subject, if the rigidity of his shoulders and the set of his jaw beneath the spill of black hair didn’t show otherwise. “Although I suppose it was always fun for someone.” Snape stared into the fire that blazed too warm and too close in the grate. “Not always the… recipient. Certainly not always myself.”

Harry swallowed. “He made you do it?”

Snape’s voice, by now, was barely above a whisper. “Sometimes.”

“Oh god.”

“Do not make me into a helpless victim of circumstance, Potter. I went to the Dark Lord of my own volition, I both performed and took enjoyment from tasks which would appal you. You have no idea what I am.”

Oh god. “I’m beginning to see that, sir.”

*

For a few glorious weeks following their revelatory tête-à-tête, Snape’s life was Boy Saviour free. They passed each other in the halls, they sat at the head table in the Great Hall, they greeted each other at staff meetings with the professional politeness of colleagues, but there were no more evening visits to the potions classroom. No more late night knocks at his office door, no more bewildering offers of assistance about the laboratory, no more tousled hair or fine green eyes. Everything was simpler. More straightforward, more easily categorised and anticipated. How things should be.

Snape was not quite sure why he felt, all of a sudden, so bereft. Bereft? Are you the hero of a bloody harlequin romance now, as well? You’re a fool, Severus Snape.

He inwardly cursed himself for an idiot, and outwardly ensured that nothing showed. How foolish had he become, to let himself grow so accustomed to being sought out and prattled at by an attractive young man; to let himself rely on it?

Nightshade. Nettle. Dragon scales in their miniature, corked earthenware bottles.

There was solace in routine. There was solace, as always, in brewing. He started work on potions that were new, complex. He lined ingredients along the work bench beside the slowly heating cauldrons and felt, inch by inch, his inner composure grow to match the outer once again.

Powdered copper. Larkspur. The crumbly, desiccated liver of a salamander.

The mess created by Mister Toulson of Slytherin House and Miss Alden of Gryffindor was more easily remedied. It was obvious that the shock of what they’d done, and what might so easily have happened, was enough to scare the both of them into avoidance of a repeat incident. One stern and awkward conversation with young Toulson, and the presumption that Potter would be having a rather similar conversation with Miss Alden in his own office at some point, and the situation was done with, as far as Snape was concerned.

A jar of stewed firefish eyes, still gaping, from his private shelf.

If only everything in life would be so simple.

*

On the cusp between Autumn and Winter the lake always reflects the grey-white sky above it like a mirror. When Harry was at school he had loved to fly low over it, close enough to ripple the water in his wake. Now he sits on the rocky edge of the far bank, broom resting beside him, feeling the wind chill the air in his lungs.

Everything is metal coloured at this time of year. The rocks, the water, the dome of the sky above it all. Behind him, the closest trees to the bank are loud with rooks.

Tuesday evening. Up until a fortnight ago, he’d have been spending this time in the dungeons, annoying Snape. But that had been before he’d known… what he knows now.

It isn’t that it frightens him – Gryffindor, remember? And it isn’t that he’s disgusted, exactly. Although Snape… It isn’t even that he hadn’t known, or guessed at, some of the things the Death Eaters did, some of the things Snape had chosen to do and had had to do, in the end, for the greater good. For the cause. No, it’s just that he’d looked into Snape’s black eyes the next morning at breakfast and felt like he was drowning in icy cold water. The words rang in his mind, over and over – You have no idea what I am. I know now, he wanted to say. I know enough and too much and not ever, ever enough. He wanted to say, I never really saw you before last night, and now I can’t see anything else.

And a question had loomed large and unspoken – would he ever be able to look at his colleague again without seeing knives and sex and lines drawn in blood? At Severus Snape?

Harry hadn’t realised he was staring, that early, hungover morning in the Great Hall, had no idea what look he was wearing on his own face that made Snape, in response, tip his head forward until his eyes were hidden behind all that dirty black hair. Those skilled, stained, beautiful hands had fidgeted with the breakfast cutlery for a few moments before he had swept to his feet and exited the room. So very graceful, Harry’s mind supplied. Even in the way he moves, so much bloody control.

“Poor Severus hasn’t touched his breakfast,” McGonagall tutted from Harry’s other side. “I do hope he’s not coming down with something.”

Harry had mumbled in response.

“He’s not said anything to you, has he Harry?”

“No, Headmistress. He’s said nothing to me.”

A fortnight later, Harry watches hidden currents sway the hairy weeds beneath the great lake’s surface and remembers how slippery they had felt against his skin back in fourth year. Over a decade ago now, but there on the bank at dusk he can almost believe that the years in between were a dream. Away from this place, Harry thinks, nothing is real.

He scrambles to his feet and grabs his broom. Time to get inside before the light wanes. Time to visit Snape. They’re friends, after all. Aren’t they? Harry’s sure Snape would object to the word, but it’s true. The past several months make it true. And truthfully, he misses their conversations, misses being on the inside of something again instead of looking in, or looking back.

*

A sharp knock. Snape sets down the abominably poor essay he’s been busy decorating with red ink, and runs a tired hand through his hair.

“Come in.”

The door swings tentatively open, and Snape is transported back ten years by the sight of Harry Potter lurking nervously in his office doorway.

“Professor Potter,” he begins cautiously. “To what do I owe the dubious pleasure of your company?”

Potter fidgets a little, scuffing his ridiculous muggle shoes on the stone, before standing up straight and looking Snape directly in the eye. “I just wanted to say sorry. I’ve been avoiding you lately and it’s pathetic of me.” He says it in a rush, like he’s been rehearsing it in his mind the whole way here.

Merlin’s balls, this is all he needs. A sentimental outburst from everyone’s favourite Gryffindor. He hastens to cut Potter off before he can spout more ill-considered apologies. “There really is no need-”

“Yes, there is.” It’s a voice that brooks no refusal. Potter steps further into the room. “It was really shabby of me. You didn’t do anything wrong, I shouldn’t have shut you out just for, for…”

He trails off, and Snape arches an eyebrow. “Being a kinky bastard?”

Potter’s startled laugh, so open and easy, sounds out of place in the dungeons. As if the walls should swallow the sound whole. “For taking me into your confidence. I hope we can still be friends.”

Snape frowns. “Friends?” The word tastes strange on his tongue.

“Yeah. I hope we can still, you know, spend time together. Talk.”

“This is sheer madness, Potter. Does nothing ever put an end to your stubborn insistence on forcing every unfortunate individual who crosses your path to like you?”

Potter grins. “Apparently not.” Insolent, maddening, hopeless brat. “And it’s not everyone, by the way. You don’t see me scrubbing cauldrons for anyone else, do you?”

“I have never once, since you left this school’s care, asked you to scrub my cauldrons.”

Potter’s been edging closer to Snape’s desk all the while, close enough now to lay his hands on the well-worn wood and leather surface. Snape’s eyes are drawn to the cuff of his robes, his too-short finger nails. The space between them is a sea of spider-scratched parchment. “Maybe I wanted to.”

Snape scoffs. “You wanted to clean potions equipment?”

“I wanted to – oh for god’s sake! Do you have any idea how intimidating you are? How difficult it is to just walk in here and say ‘Oh hi, Snape, fancy a chat?’ Does it ever occur to you that maybe I don’t know how to interact with you outside of sodding detention?”

Snape’s hands slam to the desk in a perfect mirror-image of Potter’s stance. “Does it ever occur to you, Potter, that maybe I like my personal life free of interfering busybodies desperate to inflict themselves on my meagre free time?”

Potter is breathing heavily, and Snape realises suddenly just how far into each other’s space they are. Too far. As always.

Potter’s eyes never leave Snape’s own. “Is that how you really feel?”

Say yes. It’s not even a lie. Say yes and he’ll go.

“I…” Bugger. The sentence won’t finish itself. Snape feels his shoulders slump, and his lank hair fall in front of his face, obscuring his view of the Boy who Wouldn’t Go Away. They’re so close he can feel the displacement of the air when Potter breathes. “What do you want from me?”

“I want things to go on like they were before.”

Snape laughs, hollow and brittle. He’s too old for this, this boy and his hero complex. Too exhausted to try to fathom overtures of friendship that could prove false. He once again runs a hand through his hair, looks up and fixes Potter with a glare that, from such close quarters, would have had the bravest students trembling. His gaze sweeps from head to toe and back again; the quidditch-strengthened legs, the narrow hips and broad shoulders, the pale neck and dark mop of unruly hair. He lets Potter feel every ounce of his attention before he speaks in a careful, quiet drawl. “In that case, there is a shelf of medicinal herbs to your right whose preservation charms could do with refreshing. If that wouldn’t tax your abilities overmuch.”

Potter grins once again. “Oh, I think I could probably manage that, Professor.”

*

They settle back smoothly into the rhythm that has become so familiar over the past year, only now as they work, Harry finds he can’t stop staring at Snape’s hands. Why has he never seen it before, how elegant and skillful and fucking clever they are beneath the ink stains and spilled potions? The way he holds a quill should be positively illegal.

There’s a little crescent scar at the base of his thumb, ragged like a burn, and one day Harry finds himself coming to the realisation that he wants to taste it.

He takes to bringing his marking down to Snape’s office, even to the potions lab if Snape is working in there.

“I do ignore the staff room for a reason,” Snape sneers. Harry cheerfully ignores him, and transfigures one of the desks into an armchair, settling in with some work from his advanced sixth year class and curling his legs up beneath him.

“You mark in green?”

“Hmm?” Harry looks up, lost for a moment, his mind still on the essay he clutches in his hands.

“The ink, Potter. Green.”

“Oh. Yes. Well, I read in a teaching guide that it was a good colour to use, less confrontational than red. You know, softens the blow a bit for the students if you have something negative to say.”

Snape snorts, as if the very thought is ludicrous. “You’re teaching the idiots to defend themselves from dark forces that would see them destroyed, in some cases, down to their very souls, and you’re worried that they might get their feelings hurt by your choice of ink colour?

Harry laughs. “It might be a load of old rubbish, but I like the colour anyway.” Bottle green, like old glass, or evening sunlight through heavy foliage. It stains the lower edges of the delicate, white quill that had been a gift from Ron and Hermione on his acceptance of the Defence professorship. “Too much red gives me a headache.”

“However did you manage all those years in the Gryffindor common room?”

“House spirit?”

Snape laughs – actually laughs, however briefly. Harry can’t look away. “Gryffindors,” Snape mutters, and his eyes are still smiling as he dices something wet and bloody on the table in front of him.

That’s the other thing that’s changed – Snape and knives have become twisted in Harry’s brain into something complicated and hot, something that sends spikes of wanting through his gut. A dark fascination that grows like a tendril from some unexplored corner of his psyche. He tries to imagine, sometimes, the things Snape has done, the things he’s capable of. Imagines him in the throes of passion, with blood on his hands. It makes him feel sick and stirred and so fucking aroused it’s untrue. What would Ron say if he knew what Harry was thinking about Severus bloody Snape? What would any of them say?

There’s something wrong with him. Something wrong with them both, perhaps. He stares as subtly as he can manage, and hopes he gets away with it. He watches the spreading red on Snape’s hands, on the wooden table. His quill leaves a spill of green ink unnoticed on the parchment.

*

His long fingers are green-stained and reeking of crushed betony within moments of taking his knife to the bitter, grassy leaves. The knife is small, wood-handled and old, well maintained. Sharp as a lemon. He slices stem and leaf in handfuls until the board beneath his hands is wet and pungent with fresh herb, cuts it clean and fine.

He's had this knife since he was fourteen years old. The weight of it in his palm is familiar enough to be comforting, the wood worn smooth by his grip. There's slow magic to an old knife well worn, and Snape hoards them – can't abide new ones, however functional or ornate.

There is no magic as methodical as this. He finds it soothing, the rocking of the blade against the wood, the back and forth of metal through plant fibre. There's a looseness to his shoulders that's missing outside of the laboratory, and a careful blankness to his mind.

The handfuls of betony are scraped from his board into the cauldron; boiling lake water over a soft, wide flame. He lets them stew, and uses the same knife, still damp, to take the tops off the flowering hyssop that lies in carefully tied, astringent bunches along the south side of his work surface. Direction is important. Source is important. Water from the loch; south for things still growing – anything ripe and fresh. With the tip of the knife he separates petal from petal, and quietly his fingers grow lavender purple in patches over the leaf green. It's delicate work, yet repetitive. Between his hands and his knife, there's a rhythm he knows well enough to let his mind slip away a little. Asperges me hyssopo, et mundabor, he mutters under his breath. Lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.

“Is that an incantation?”

And just like that, he's shaken from his reverie. He scowls at the intrusion. They'd been working silently for so long he'd almost forgotten Potter was there, still elbows deep in the wide stone sink.

“Of a sort,” he snaps.

“I didn't recognise it.” The boy – no matter how old or sinfully beautiful he grows, he will always be a boy to Snape – watches him from behind glasses smudged where he's pushed them back up his nose with soapy fingers. They're new, Snape notices. Smaller and dark-rimmed, rectangular; no longer those gawky, owlish monstrosities he used to wear. It does something to his face, draws out the angles, makes him look far less of an awkward child.

He turns abruptly back to his work. He imagines he can still feel Potter's eyes on him. “It's a muggle incantation.”

“Why would muggles have incantations?”

“You tell me, Potter. You lived with them for sixteen years of your sorry life.”

An irritated splash of water on stone. “There's only so much you can learn from inside a cupboard.”

Snape thinks that probably doesn't deserve an answer, so he doesn't offer one. Instead he returns his attention to the scattering of hyssop petals sticking to the damp wood beneath like wet lace. They cling to his fingers. He shakes them into the cauldron and stirs it thirteen times counter-clockwise, before removing it swiftly from the heat. With a small pair of brass tongs he picks up a flat, square piece of tin and drops it carefully into the pot, and the liquid within blooms suddenly blue. He sets it to cool. The next step won't be possible for several hours.

The blade of his knife is still heavy with hyssop. “That's beautiful,” Potter breathes, and for a dizzy moment Snape thinks he means the knife.

He shakes his head minutely, as if to clear it. “As you would have learned your second year in my class, if you'd had any success at all with bases for simple healing draughts.”

“That colour, though. It's amazing. What does it taste like?”

Snape looks at him like he's an idiot, which is a look he's had a lot of practice with when it comes to Harry Potter. “Like hyssop. And betony.”

“Oh, of course. Like I know what those taste like.”

Snape raises an eyebrow at him and very pointedly does not say you should. Instead he wordlessly lifts his soiled knife towards the boy saviour's mouth, narrowing his eyes like it's a challenge. “By all means, then, Mister Potter,” he purrs, his voice low enough that if Potter has any sense at all, he'll be terrified.

They stare at each other for a single, heart stopping moment, and nothing moves. It's sheer bravado, on both of their parts. This is what they’ve been building up to, for months now, this moment where one makes a move and the other decides to counter… or not. He can almost see Potter screwing his courage to the sticking place, and Snape expects a clumsy swipe of fingers through the petals still sticking to the knife, and he most certainly does not expect Potter to step forward and brazenly wrap his pink lips around the tip of the blade, or drag his tongue along the flat metal. But the boy takes a perverse pleasure in defying people's expectations.

There's a purple petal sticking to Potter's lower lip when he pulls back. He's breathing hard, eyes a little wild but otherwise resolute in their recklessness. He's incapable, as always, of subtlety, of being anything other than absolutely frank. His entire body betrays him.

“You're playing with fire, Potter.” He’s not sure how he intends the words to come out, but they end up sounding almost like a surprised compliment.

Slowly, Snape raises the knife. He touches the tip to one fine cheekbone of that ridiculous, handsome face and traces it so lightly he's sure it must be starting to tickle. Potter's mouth falls open, and his tongue can't seem to stop swiping at his lips, each time missing the hyssop still clinging wetly there. Snape wants to smear it away with his thumb, but fears that the contact of skin on skin will be too unbearably intimate, that maybe they need the intermediary of the cold metal between them in order to get this close without combusting.

They’re hyssop and betony, Snape thinks somewhat hysterically, as Potter’s breathing slows and his pink tongue once again deliberately, tentatively, touches the knife Snape’s still holding in his clenched, stained fist. A vivid reaction to the addition of a base metal. Potter sucks the knife into his mouth in a way that’s both charmingly innocent and utterly obscene, never once breaking eye contact.

Snape wonders if and when he’ll ever be able to breathe again – certainly not while Harry Potter fellates his potions equipment, he’s pretty certain about that.

“I can’t stop thinking about this.” The movement of Potter’s mouth against the knife’s tip as he speaks causes a tiny point of blood to well up on his lower lip. Just one barely visible scratch, but it holds such a wealth of possibility that Snape can’t tear his eyes away. Potter is a colleague, Potter used to be one of his students for fuck’s sake, and this is every colour of inappropriate, everything Snape’s wanted to move his life away from, but he can’t deny that some dark part of him wants to examine the exact shade of Potter’s blood against his skin, wants to catch it in a small, stoppered glass vial and brew something dark and powerful and new.

“Did you know,” Snape murmurs, rich and low, “that the blood of a powerful wizard adds potency to many potions?” As he speaks he brings the point of the knife to Potter’s throat, lets it dent the vulnerable skin at the base of the neck. “Still others are transformed entirely by the addition – some of the rarest potions are brewed in this way.” Snape keeps his attention focused on the knife-point, twisting his wrist slowly so that the boy feels the drag of it on his skin. “Depending on the power of the donor, even the merest drop can yield spectacular results.” Harry’s lips part, and he stares helplessly at Snape over the knife as if he can’t force his eyes away. Snape smirks. “My, my. If only you’d paid such rapt attention in my class, Mister Potter.”

“I didn’t exactly have the same motivation then.” With every word the knife in Snape’s hand bobs.

“If I’d only known that all it would take is a knife to your throat, I’m sure we could have made sure you were much more… motivated.”

Harry swallows, making the knife dip, and his eyes shut briefly. “Your voice is incredible, you know that?”

Something flares inside Snape, at once hot and cold. “Are you mocking me, Potter?”

The green eyes snap open. “No!”

“Good.”

“You really do have an amazing voice.” Harry is – Potter is staring at Snape like he could will him into believing it. “When I was at school,” he swallows again, “when you were teaching me, in potions – and occlumency, god – I could never concentrate and I, I never even knew why.”

Snape sneers. “Are you suggesting your abominable performance in my class was somehow my fault?”

“No, you daft git,” he whispers. “I’m trying to pay you a bloody compliment.”

Snape pauses. A compliment? He frowns. He supposes he is unused to them. “My voice?” he asks, somehow making the two words a question.

“It’s like honey and wood smoke.” Potter’s own voice is edging on hoarse, and somewhat breathless.

Snape laughs incredulously. Because what else is he supposed to say to that. “You’re an imbecile, Potter.”

“So you keep saying.”

Potter is grinning – grinning – at him, at the evil old ex-Death Eater he’s spent most of his life abhorring, who currently holds a deadly weapon to the most vulnerable point on his body. The boy is a lunatic. Absolutely certifiable. So fucking beautiful.

“What do you want?” Snape finds himself asking, keeping his voice steady and even through years of practice alone.

Potter exhales and pushes forward a few scant millimetres against Snape’s knife. “Cut me,” he breathes.

*

“Why do I have to be bound?”

“Because, idiot child, if you move unexpectedly I might find myself making a mistake.” Snape’s voice is at once darker and softer than Harry has ever heard it, brittle-hard and smooth as toffee.

“I’m not a child,” he insists breathlessly. Snape doesn’t respond, except to raise Harry’s hands and pin them to the door he’s pressed against. He mutters a spell that Harry doesn’t recognise and taps his wand against Harry’s wrists, neck, hips and even, stooping, his ankles.

There’s something indescribably intimate about being touched with someone else’s wand. More so than being led into Snape’s private rooms, more than the fizz of wards locking, more even than being perfunctorily instructed to strip from the waist up. More than baring his torso to a man with a knife in his hand and a mark on his arm, or stepping back up against the heavy wooden door at his command.

He’s so lost in the idea of Snape’s wand – Snape’s wand – against his skin, cool and crackling in reaction to his own magic, that it takes him a moment to realise that he’s stuck. Pinned to the wall like a butterfly in all of the places Snape’s wand has touched. He squirms, automatically testing the invisible bonds.

“Keep still.”

Snape sheds his outer robes without meeting Harry’s eyes. He looks strangely diminished without them. Harry watches him carefully roll his white shirt sleeves up to the elbow, the slow exposure of thin wrists and pale, marred forearms.

He’s not sure what he’s expecting – some preamble maybe, some time to get used to the position he’s in, but Snape gives him neither. He’s barely had time to draw breath before Snape is back in his personal space, looming over him, making use of the scant inches of height he has on Harry.

“Second thoughts, Potter?”

And although Harry feels trapped and hysterical and way, way out of his depth, he shakes his head defiantly. “I’m ready.”

Snape’s expression is unreadable. So blank, so closed off that his eyes are two black mirrors and his voice is a dead monotone. “Do you think you are?”

Where do you go, Harry wants to say, when you’re like this? “Yes,” he says instead. “I can handle it.”

The stained knife is suddenly cold at his collar bone.

“You won’t know that,” Snape whispers, “until I’ve already begun.”

Harry’s eyes are wide as he takes it all in: the metal at his skin, the unmoveable restraints, the man with the long, dark hair. He’s going to cut me, Harry thinks. He’s going to cut me. Oh Merlin, what have I done.

“You- You’re not going to clean the knife?”

Snape’s eyes glitter. “Hyssop is a powerful astringent, and the base for many healing potions.”

“Oh.” Harry feels the point of the knife move to the right hand side of his rib cage. It’s so light, nowhere near breaking the skin, but it feels like a threat, like a promise, and he can’t stop the instinctive reflex to try to jerk away.

“I said keep still.”

“Sorry, I, I’m sorry, I just…”

“Breathe, Potter.”

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can. Big, deep breaths now. In and out.”

Harry tries to focus on the note of command in Snape’s voice, tries to stop hyperventilating. Wouldn’t that just be the ultimate humiliation? To pass out like this, after having all but begged Snape for it? The knife never moves. Harry is trembling from head to toe, but Snape’s hand is rock steady. Make it stop, something in Harry’s mind begs him.

“Close your eyes,” Snape instructs, far more gently than Harry expects. God, his voice is like silk. How many others has he done this with? Did he speak this softly with all of them? “Inhale. Come on, a big breath. That’s right. Hold it there. Now – exhale. Better?” Harry nods. “Good. Again, then – inhale. Yes. Exhale. Keep breathing.”

It’s soothing, the rhythm of air in and out of his lungs, the smell of Snape and betony and hyssop, and all his senses focussed above all on that one point of contact between them.

“I’m going to cut you now, Harry. No, keep your eyes closed. Take a deep breath in and let it out slowly.”

There’s a moment of tension where Harry isn’t sure he can do this, before necessity wins out and he drags in a lungful of air. The clumsy exhale spins out into a whine he barely recognises as his own when Snape applies just enough forward pressure to break the skin on the downward stroke of the knife, grazing Harry’s torso – one clean line down to the jut of his hip.

He bites his lip trying to stop the noise that wants to sob its way out of his throat.

“That’s it,” Snape says, as Harry fights for breath and feels the knife moving softly yet again on his skin. The line Snape cut into him feels like fire – he hadn’t expected it to hurt so much. It’s nothing like being punched or kicked, nothing like a bruise – it’s a bright, sharp heat that can’t be ignored and that blossoms once again with every tiny movement Harry can’t help making. He can’t think any more. He can’t stop himself reacting.

He feels Snape’s empty hand on his hip, holding him still. “Th-thank you,” Harry says, with a voice full of shiver, and then: “It hurts! Oh god. Oh god.”

“That’s rather the point, I’m afraid.”

Harry can’t keep his eyes closed. When he opens them it’s nothing but black; black hair over black eyes that burn like the split in his skin, so close he can’t see anything else, and not close enough and under his skin.

“Deep breath, Harry.”

This time, when the pain comes in one bright curve across his ribs, he doesn’t try to stop himself from crying out.

*

The hand with which Snape grips the Boy Wonder’s hip is starting to slip in all that vivid red dripping from the runes he’s carved into the taut abdomen.

Potter has long stopped shouting himself hoarse. He’s even given up on supporting his own weight, and hangs limp from where he is invisibly bound to the wood behind, eyes on the ceiling, moaning disconnectedly.

“Shh,” Snape hushes him, smoothing the sweat damp hair away from Potter’s eyes. He pulls the glasses off and lets them fall to the floor. He wants to see those eyes, heaven help him.

“It hurts.” Potter’s voice is barely-there and out of synch. Transported.

“I  know. It’s about to feel different.”

“D-different?”

“It will still hurt. Make no mistake about that.”

But first, Snape accios a blue glass vial.

“This may be a little cold.”

Holding the opening against Harry’s skin he catches drop after gradual drop. It’s a slow process – Snape knows what he’s doing, and none of the cuts are deep enough to spill more than a few thin trails. At the first touch of blood on the glass the name ‘Harry Potter’ appears in elegant cursive on the bottle’s side. Later, Snape will thumb through potions texts, through the oldest and rarest, the darkest, to find something that will do justice to this latest acquired ingredient. For now, he stoppers the vial and sends it wordlessly back to its space on the far wall.

There is only one more cut to make.

Despite his care in rolling up his sleeves, Snape’s white shirt is splotched blood red. The air is heavy with the warm scent of iron, and Potter’s chest is slick enough that Snape has to concentrate to keep the line he carves precise on the slippery surface.

The first cuts are already coagulating.

Harry is beautiful as sin like this. His body wound tight and spun loose again, almost post-orgasmic in its lassitude. From the moment he’d raised his knife to Potter’s mouth in the laboratory, Snape had known that the boy was aroused. Blown pupils, wet lips, a totally naked expression on his face. He’d smirked at the blush on Potter’s face when he’d stripped off his teaching robe, groin so hot and hard Snape could practically feel it through the layers of clothing and air between them as he crowded him up against the door. As if he hadn’t been all but naked under Snape’s gaze already.

Snape knows better than to flatter himself that Harry’s getting off on the thought of him specifically. He has no illusions about his looks whatsoever, and both his personality and his past do him no favours. Harry is fascinated with him as he would be with any dark, seemingly mysterious thing.

Snape intends to make the most of it. Although Harry’s limp now with pain and adrenaline-overload, Snape steps closer. He cuts his own thumb, quick and efficient, and rubs it into the messy runes on Harry’s chest. It’s primal magic, primitive and unspeakably sexual. Harry moans and stirs under his touch.

“What is that?” Potter’s voice is still weak, but growing warm from the fizzy flood of hormones and power now gathering through the symbols cut into his body.

Snape is a little horrified to feel his mouth just beginning to smile. “Magic,” he whispers.

“It still hurts.”

“I told you it would.”

Harry’s head tips forward. His eyes, when he stares up at Snape, are inky green and blazing. “Want you.”

“Yes,” he says, even as something deep inside him groans in response to the tug of Harry’s rune-enhanced magic on his. He summons every bit of self-control he owns to keep his voice steady and his hands unrushed as he rubs his palm against the hard line of Potter’s newly revived erection, lush and firm where it strains against the confines of his charcoal grey trousers.

“Snape – Severus.” Snape closes his eyes at the sound of his given name on those lips. “Let me touch you, too.”

“It is unnecessary, I assure you.”

“I want to.” Snape knows that the knife and the spell have together wrought magic that now makes Potter pain-drunk, pleasure-drunk, straining mindlessly towards him. He also knows that Potter would react this way to anyone in the same circumstances, and that tomorrow he’ll likely be disgusted with himself for it. But it doesn’t stop Snape from being so very, very tempted. He is not, despite what his students may claim, made of stone. “Please, Severus.”

He shakes his head silently and undoes the fastening of Harry’s trousers with delicate efficiency.

“You owe me nothing. No thanks, no… reciprocation.”

“I know that – but I still want to. I want to touch you.” Snape shakes his head again. “Why can’t you take my word for it?”

With an irritated growl he stops what he’s doing and rests his arms on the wall, bracketing Potter in place. “Because I am neither blind nor delusional.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I am an ill-favoured, ill-tempered old man with a dirty soul and too much blood on my hands. You know that you would never in your right mind want to put your hands on me. The spell-”

“The spell is good.” Harry grins breathlessly, and it’s a wicked sight that makes Snape’s cock twitch. Harry writhes minutely in his invisible bonds. “Really good, my god. You don’t half know what you’re doing. But I’ve wanted to touch you since I was seventeen years old.” Snape bites his lip. God help me. “It just took me this long to work it out.”

Snape feels so desperately unmoored. “Why?”

“Because I’m an imbecile.”

“Oh for Merlin’s sake, boy. I meant why would you want to touch me?”

“Are you joking?” Harry looks into Snape’s eyes as if he’s searching for something there. Not for the first time, Snape is tempted to use Legilimency to dip behind those eyes and find out for himself what Potter is thinking. He’s so unguarded that it would take the merest push to draw out everything shimmering below the surface. “Well… You’re kind of the definition of striking. You’re complex and commanding and unconventional and, and sophisticated.”

Sophisticated? Potter is a stark, raving madman.

“And your hands-”

“My hands?”

“And your voice. For God’s sake, Severus. Let me show you how much I want to touch you.”

Snape has always believed that this young man will be the death of him. He brings his body flush against Harry’s, close enough that he can feel a spreading, bloody wetness soaking into his shirt and waistcoat from the firm body against him, and imagines the small black buttons digging cruelly at the broken skin beneath. Pathetic, he tells himself. Capitulating to the boy because he strokes your fucking vanity. He laces his fingers through Potter’s where they’re trapped above his head and utters a helpless finite incantatem in his ear.

Snape feels the newly freed hands almost instantly break away from his own and delve into his hair, pushing it back from his face and dragging him into a kiss that crushes Harry’s injured chest between them, no doubt re-opening the still-healing runes. Harry hisses into Snape’s mouth in response, as if berating him in Parseltongue. As first kisses go, it is violent and furious. Bloodsoaked and raw.

*

Snape’s lips are thin and dry against Harry’s, and his hair is lank in his hands. Harry wants more. He clumsily pulls at the waistcoat buttons, because he needs to get at Snape’s skin, needs to get him bloody and hot.

Snape is always so proper, always so buttoned up and cloistered away beneath endless layers of black wool. Harry wants to see him dishevelled. He wants to see him fucking wrecked.

The cuts on his front still sting enough to make him wince every time Snape moves too rough against him, but there’s also a buzz now, as if his magic’s been pulled to the outside of his body and is swarming like bees at the edges. All the blood-hot desire that the pain drove away, it’s back tenfold.

He feels Snape’s hands on his chest, fingers almost reverently exploring his handiwork. He bites at Snape’s mouth in reply. When he pulls back, Snape’s eyes – a little wild already – are on the runes too, like they can’t look away, and before Harry knows it Snape’s bending down to – sweet Merlin – to mouth at the cuts, to move his dry lips and wet tongue and even his teeth over them. He’s so gentle that it doesn’t exactly hurt, but the feeling is strange and indescribable nonetheless. An almost unbearable intimacy.

He runs his fingers once again into Snape’s unwashed hair, letting his own head fall back against the wooden door behind him. Although admittedly greasy, Snape’s hair is fine and smells metallic and potion-infused.

When Snape kisses him again his mouth tastes of copper. Harry pushes his tongue into his mouth chasing the taste. The skin on his chest burns. He finally gets Snape’s shirt open and fumbles it half-off his shoulders before pulling him close again until they’re skin to skin.

Snape leans down until his breath is hot against Harry’s neck. He sucks at the sensitive space beneath his ear.

“What do you want?” Harry hears himself asking.

Snape groans in response, as if he can’t even articulate his own desire. He brings his forehead to rest against Harry’s.

His eyes are closed and he looks positively undone. Harry wonders if the magic thrumming through him, making his nerves sing and his belly coil tight with longing, is working on Snape as well. He thumbs Snape’s sharp cheekbones.

“I want,” Snape says, and then- “Let me.”

Harry nods, as if the disjointed words make sense, and feels one of Snape’s long, elegant hands at the opening of his trousers, drawing him out. His cock is so hard it’s like an ache, every inch of his flesh over-sensitive and on edge. Snape’s other hand rests at the back of Harry’s neck, holding him steady. When Harry looks down he sees Snape’s stained fingers close round him, and begin stroking him in time with their laboured breathing.

And it’s that sight, as much as the physical sensation of hand-on-cock, that has Harry’s breath stuttering in his throat.

“Oh fuck. Fuck.”

“Eloquent as usual, Mister Potter.”

Their foreheads are still touching. It’s a weirdly intimate position, and Harry struggles to reconcile this passionate, quick-fingered man with the mean old teacher he and his friends spent their adolescence hating.

He reaches to reciprocate, but Snape bats his hands away. “No. Let me watch you.”

Harry blushes, because bloody hell. Because while he can’t tear his eyes away from Snape’s hand on his cock, he knows Snape is studying his face like it’s a fucking potions text, watching the blush spread to his neck, to his chest, watching him come apart in his hands. He feels more naked, in this moment, than he has ever been before. More exposed than in his Occlumency lessons when Snape was inside his head.

He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. They keep drifting from Snape’s face to his shoulders, his back, the back of his neck beneath that curtain of hair. He’s surprisingly cool. Or perhaps Harry is too hot, too feverish and frantic, wound coil-tight. The sound they’re making is slick and obscene, too loud in the quiet. Harry’s breath is hitching. He wants to hide his face. Snape’s pulling him relentlessly onward and oh god, oh fucking god, he’s going to come in Severus Snape’s hands.

On his skin, his magic hisses like a spitting fire.

*

When Potter climaxes, he shivers and buries his face in Snape’s hair. “Oh,” he says, voice deep and startled. Then again, “oh,” as he spurts over and over onto Snape’s hand and his own bloody stomach. His arms hang about Snape’s neck.

A lesser man would be giving in to the exquisite urge to thrust against the sated, pliant body flush with his own, but Snape is a master of delayed gratification – even his own. He smudges the boy’s come into his torso with his fingertips, until the wounds are pink and raw and he’s flinching in Snape’s arms and sucking in little gasps that test Snape’s self control far more than he’ll admit.

Then he’s on his knees, holding Potter’s hips firm against the wall, once again licking and sucking his skin clean. He can’t keep his mouth off those perfect, rosy lines he’s created. When he’s played these games in the past he’s always been able to keep things clinical, maintain at least a metaphorical distance, but this time the concept of distance was shot all to sodding hell as soon as Potter wrapped his defiant lips around Snape’s potions knife. He dips his tongue into Potter’s navel then, moving lower, sucks gently at his softening cock until Potter moans. Snape bites at the tender flesh of his inner thigh.

His hand is still slippery with Potter’s ejaculate. He rubs sticky fingers against Potter’s perineum and, knocking Potter’s legs wider apart, reaches further back to make the dark crevice slick and wet. He can’t seem to tear his lips away from Potter’s finely muscled flesh.

“What are you doing?” Potter whispers, a little shocked, a little breathless.

Snape stills. His head rests on Harry’s hip. “Let me fuck you.” His voice breaks on the quiet entreaty. He’s beyond caring if he’s mocked for his desperation. It’s been so long.

He looks up, and meets Harry’s eyes looking down at him. With part of his mind, he wonders if there will ever be a powerful wizard for whom he doesn’t end up on his knees. But then Harry is nodding, saying “Yes, yeah. Okay.” And all of his attention is on the place where the tip of his finger is starting to penetrate the boy’s body, and the whining sound Potter is making at the back of his throat. It’s the same noise he made during that first long, horizontal cut. That knowledge, the knowledge of what sounds he makes when he’s bleeding and when he’s got Snape’s greedy fingers inside him – it’s something he should never know about an ex-student. About Lily and James’s son. There are lines that shouldn’t be crossed.

A second finger, a little too fast into that dense, tight heat, and Harry is gasping. Snape licks his lips. They still taste of blood and come. There’s a buzzing in his ears that Snape thinks might be his own heartbeat. “Are you all right?”

Harry nods and spreads his legs a little wider, his palms braced against the door behind him. “Yeah. Just – slow, yeah?”

“Yes.”

It’s rough and haphazard, clumsy and not quite as wet as it should be, but eventually Snape is back on his feet, coaxing Harry’s legs up around his scrawny waist, pushing his come-slick cock into him in slow, unsteady stutters. When he’s finally fully seated, he feels Harry drop his head forward onto Snape’s narrow shoulder and hiss. Although still post-orgasm relaxed, he’s clinging on tight to Snape’s shoulders.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” he mumbles.

“Why? Never imagined you’d be fucked by your nasty potions teacher?”

“Never thought he’d want to.”

Certifiable. Snape shakes his head in bewilderment, and tries to keep his voice and his treacherous body under tight obedience. “Oh I think I’d say he wants to, Mister Potter. Wouldn’t you?”

Potter pulls back until Snape can see the smile the boy’s wearing on his handsome, insufferable face. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe you’ll have to convince me.”

Snape’s hips jerk, almost beyond his control. He shuts his eyes tightly.

He feels Potter lick at the outline of his ear. “Come on, Snape. You’ve never once treated me like I’m made of glass. Don’t start now.” Snape shifts his weight, tucks his hands under Potter’s knees and lifts them higher. Potter wriggles, and the motion is almost too much. “Fuck me then, if you’re going to.”

Snape thrusts forward messily. Again. “Fucking Gryffindor brat,” he spits, and Potter whispers a breathless “yes” in return. I’m lost, Snape thinks. I’m utterly lost.

And then there’s nothing but Harry Potter’s legs around him, and the ancient rhythm of skin on skin.

Afterwards, after he’s fucked Potter raw and come so deep inside him that, for one brief moment, everything whites out and goes strangely silent, they stumble their way to Snape’s armchairs and collapse in one together – a jumble of black hair and pale limbs.

Potter tucks his face into Snape’s neck and whispers “I can still feel you inside me,” and refuses a healing spell for his bruised and bloodied body.

Snape accios his heavy wool cloak and draws it around them both to stave off the chill of the dungeon’s bare stone walls and stagnant, underground air. He’s still shaking. A flick of his wand has a fire flaring up in the waiting hearth, and soon it’s warm and peaceful enough that Snape feels bone-deep exhaustion creeping up on him.

They mustn’t fall asleep like this. Absolutely not. They’re still eyeballs-deep in afterglow, but when it wears off the guilt and the regret will start to encroach as they always do, and this time they’ll be fighting it out nicely with the self-loathing Snape knows is lurking somewhere close by. He feels tainted enough without seeing it mirrored back in Potter’s eyes.

“Severus?”

“Mmhm?”

“What happens now?”

For the longest time, Snape doesn’t answer.

*

Outside of this place, nothing is real.

“Now you know,” Snape says, and Harry doesn’t completely understand what he’s talking about, but he doesn’t want to say so and look stupid.

“I’ve never felt more real,” he says in instead. Everything hurts, but it’s good. It’s grounding. Like he only knows the shape of himself by the pain at the edges. “My friends won’t understand.”

“No,” Snape agrees, carding a hand through Harry’s no doubt disgraceful hair. “Few do.”

Across the room, on the floor by the door, the discarded knife shines in the firelight. “Is it like this every time?”

“No. And yes.”

Harry frowns. “What kind of answer is that?”

“The only one you’re going to get.”

He twists in Snape’s lap. It’s a somewhat ridiculous position, but comfortable and close. “In the past – were you ever the one getting cut?”

Snape raises an eyebrow, and Harry has to fight down an urge to reach out and trace it with his finger. “Do you really think this is an appropriate time for an interrogation over my past exploits?”

Harry laughs, and presses his lips to Snape’s shoulder. “Since when is any of this anywhere near appropriate?”

“Touché, Potter.”

“So are you going to answer the question, or what?”

There’s a pause where Harry’s worried he’s pushed his luck too far. But Snape exhales and leans his head back on the rim of the chair. “I…Yes. I have”

“Did you like it?”

“I-” Snape takes another deep breath. Harry feels his chest rise and fall. “I would rather not talk about it, Harry. Leave it alone.”

“Okay.”

For a moment, neither of them move. But then Snape’s hand is soothing where it begins to hesitantly stroke Harry’s back, his fingernails long and ragged. The fire cracks.

Next time, Harry thinks sleepily, it’ll be my back. He can almost feel the deliberate, paper-thin cuts already.

“Severus?”

He looks up. Snape’s eyes are already closed, vulnerable and soft. Unmasked.