Disclaimer: Harry Potter, Severus Snape and all associated characters from the Harry Potter universe are the property of J.K. Rowling. The author, and the website maintainers, is making no profit by this story or any of the site's contents.
Plot summary: No owls, more than a little magic, and quite a few books.

Beta: regan_v. Amazing. To her this story owes both clarity and compassion. Mistakes are of course my own.
Additional canon-picking and grammar by Dementor Delta
Black Story was written for rexluscus.

Warning
Black Story contains scenes some readers may find distressing, in particular the explicit depiction of child sexual abuse and sexual dysfunction.

Black Story
Jay Tryfanstone
Jan-March 2006

Though all the maps of blood and flesh
Are posted on the door
There's no one who has told us yet
What Boogie Street is for.

Leonard Cohen.
Boogie Street, from Ten New Songs

After the war, Snape comes back to Hogwarts.

Three years after the war. He has no wand. His clothes are ragged. He is half-starved, battered, scarred. He can barely remember his own name and he can certainly not remember how he came to be here, on his knees in front of the wards. Afterwards, he will remember only snatched and fragmentary memories - stealing apples and the dry crumble of earth under his fingertips, ducking under a line of washing, shivering in the bend of a river bed, a flash of green light.

At this moment in time he can barely remember that there has been a war. There is only this imperative, this need, to be here. It has kept him alive mile after mile and day after day.

If the wards prickling across his skin do not let him pass he will die here. He will die a huddle of long white bones and a snatch of black cloth, little enough to say that here once stood a living man. Knelt.

It's raining.

He tilts his face up to the thin stinging raindrops and opens his mouth. The rain tastes of ash, but so does everything else. He can't remember why he has to wait. He would stand up, but he can't do that either. He crawls. The grass is wet and cold, and the rags of his clothing drag. He's pulling his own shroud, and the thought amuses in some corner of his mind that is not present but elsewhere, a dispassionate observer of his own progress. This battered husk of what used to be a man, crawling. Never has been much of a man. He feels as if he's laying it all aside now, the last rags of his self. His pride. His conceit. The bulwark of his anger. There's nothing left, only this journey.

And he is failing. It is harder to move now, hands digging into the mud, blades of grass tearing through his fingers. He was proud of his hands once but that's gone now. His legs no longer seem part of his body but detached and awkward appendages. He's not entirely sure he has a body any longer, but then it was never much use to him anyway. He doesn't know what he's moving towards, but it's warm. That's the only thing he knows. There is warmth in front of him. It's crept up on him slowly, the subdued lodestone of it, a hidden warmth. Power.

He's drawn to power. He crawls to it now.

~*~

Three o'clock.

Harry wakes up.

He lies in darkness, blinking up into the black absence of what in daylight would be the rafters and roof of Hagrid's hut, which is his hut now. This isn't unusual, this waking. He doesn't sleep well. Uneasily confined and bound by Harry's own choice, his magic flickers stronger at night when he's tired: he smashes cups half a room away, strips the blankets from the bed and summons rain. In dreams power calls to him with sickening images of himself inhabiting unthinkable futures. Dumbledore kneels before him in chains. He rapes Sirius. He rapes Sirius, with Remus looking on and laughing. He extends his hand and people die.

Sometimes it shows him other futures. He lives in a cottage with a woman. They have a daughter. Harry wants to say, 'can't you see the darkness in the cracks of the wall, under the doorstep?' He can't. He sits down at a checked tablecloth and eats apple pie that tastes of dust and ashes.

He dreams he is teaching at Hogwarts - he doesn't know what. He walks into a classroom and children's faces turn towards him, bright with hope, as if he is some kind of hero. "Why can't you see me?" Harry rages. "Look at me, I'm broken. I can't give you what you're looking for, don't ask it of me."

Sometimes he feels like he's a long way away, crawling towards himself through burnt out ruins, stumbling over broken glass. It's this dream that wakes him now, leaves him short-breathed and open eyed staring up into darkness. He wonders with a resigned and fearful apprehension what his magic has done. In his time he's forced the apple trees into unnatural blossom, turned a thestral white overnight and lit all the fires in the castle. It's cost him, his whitewash over the wound of the war, his rewriting of history. The forgetting.

In the book of the past Harry no longer exists. In grief and rage he's wiped out the war, the memory within the wizarding world of who he is and what he's done, removed the names of the roll of the dead and the guilty living. He has made himself almost powerless in the eyes of other wizards and pays the price in dreams he cannot share.

Sometimes his magic spills itself out regardless. Tonight, he will have to get up and look. He doesn't trust himself to feel what he's done: he can feel the wards of the castle, disturbed, itch at the edges of his magic.

Shivering, Harry pulls himself out of bed - Hagrid's bed, three feet above the ground and eight feet broad - he's never thought to change it - and pulls his clothes on with cramped fingers. It's raining; he can hear the raindrops falling on the roof, quick and hard. He'll need Hagrid's cloak. Autumn is coming.

Harry takes four steps to the back door and stops. It is not his own magic stirring the wards, not this time. There is something outside.

~*~

There is a point at which he can crawl no further. It doesn't happen, as expected, with a whimper, a silent collapse. It ends hard, as his forehead and then his hands slam up against something that doesn't move, can't be crawled over or through or round. It's not as cold as stone: it's wood, but it might as well be adamantine.

Now there's a word.

He laughs. He hasn't heard his voice in weeks. It's cracked and hoarse. He sounds a little mad, but that isn't really surprising and on the whole merely adds amusement to the situation.

On the other side of the door, warmth. But he can't reach it. He's been in exile all of his life - what's one more exclusion, here at the end of it?

Then, like the whip of a hex, noise.

~*~

He used to have courage. He can't Floo, but he could take the cloak and go up to the school, get someone - the Headmistress might come, may even be coming already to the call of the wards disturbed. Or Binns, who still looks at him some days with puzzlement, as if he remembers he should remember something although Harry knows the spell of the forgetting is as tight as an eyeless mask. But by the time help arrives or is fetched whatever it is might be gone.

He was not a coward, once. He opens the door.

~*~

What Snape feels - because he can't see, he lost sight about the third watch of the night - is heat. A blooming warmth on his skin, warm as a hearth fire, and then warmer, blazing, searing, hot as a dragon's breath, fiercer than a summer firestorm. Power. He didn't think he could move but he can, he'd rather face immolation than ice; he's going to burn in the fires of hell anyway.

He puts out a hand and touches something, cloth, takes hold of it and pulls himself onto his knees.

~*~

What Harry sees, opening the door, is a man. A man blackened and burned, his robes in shreds, his skin blistered and torn. His hair is wet and lies stranded over his face. His hands are filthy with mud and clawed, the nails cracked. He is barely recognisable as human. Harry thinks the creature is dead until it moves. It drags itself up onto its knees: its head sways like a blind snake. It reaches out a hand and touches his cloak.

~*~

Like touching the sun. Snape smiles. Because this is it, surely, this is death come to take his servant home at last. He gives it up everything he has left - which is not much: the chill of the rain in his face, the lingering pain of a cracked rib that remains when everything else has faded, the last hoarded dull ember of his power - and surrenders as he has done only twice in his life before. He falls into darkness.

A long way, into darkness.

It's warm. He didn't expect it to be warm.

~*~

The hand clutches Harry's robe as if the cloth is its last chance of forgiveness. It holds fast as the man collapses, as Harry himself falls to his knees. He puts his own hand out in return. The flesh he touches is cold, frozen, skin stretched so tight over bone that Harry's surprised it hasn't worn through. Almost, it's like touching a dead man. But this man isn't dead yet, Harry knows it. This battered remnant of the war - because it must be the war, what else is there? - this pathetic and hollow creature - it lives. It calls to his magic, this creature, offers up its own without condition, as if it wants to warm itself beside the fire of Harry's power.

It is...not frightened. There is no fear left in it.

Harry looks at his hand. It is touching someone else's skin, which is odd. Then he looks at that other hand, the hand that even after its owner is unconscious, clings to his own robe. It's a thin and elegant hand; the fingers long and well shaped, although each knuckle stands out like the links on a chain. After a while, he realises the hand is wet. It's raining. It's dark, and cold, and if he doesn't get this man - he thinks it's a man - inside, this man too might die and he doesn't want that to happen, even though Harry's better at killing people than saving them. He stands up and, propping the door open with his foot, tucks his hands under the man's armpits and pulls him inside.

Mud and leaves trail the body like guilt.

Harry pulls the man into the main room and lays him out by the fireplace. Unthinking he stirs the fire to flame and sets the lights on the wall ablaze. His hands strip cloth and sponge dirt: a bucket has appeared by his left elbow, and although the sponge comes away from skin black with mud the water remains clear.

There is a point at which he realises that he recognises the body under his hands and the magic in his mind, which he has absorbed, soaked up like a sponge.

There is a point at which he realises this is Snape.

This moment, delayed, is a gradual realisation, a slow and creeping knowledge that runs from stomach to bone to muscle to fingertips: his hands hesitate and stop. He sits back on his heels. Snape looks like a man at the gates of hell. He could leave the man now and let him die. It wouldn't take much. Snape's in the borderlands, lost. But this isn't the way Harry wanted it to be. When he killed Snape - because of course he was going to kill Snape - he wanted it to be at the point of a wand, with fire and burning words and above all fair, a fair fight that Harry would win fairly as a hero should. This isn't fair. And Snape would mock him for it. Afraid to face me, Potter? Too much of a coward to stand up with me?

And yet Snape has given up the last of his own magic as if it didn't matter. Harry has it, almost as if Snape has looked to him for protection.

'You fucker,' Harry thinks. 'You bastard. I will never forgive you for this,' Harry thinks, even as his hands reach out not for the sponge but for the rack of Snape's ribs. Under his fingers Snape's heart beats low and slow, faltering.

"Don't you dare die on me now," Harry thinks. "Don't you dare."

He can feel his own magic wrap around that heartbeat, align to it as carefully as he would feed air to the last ember of a fire.

'Live,' Harry thinks. 'Live, you wanker.'

He doesn't know how long it takes, kneeling on the floor, hardly aware of his own body but aware with every breath he takes of that other heart. He spells it by his own heartbeat. Breath. Breath. Breath. The sweat is pouring off him. Breath.

Harder than anything he's ever done before. Just enough power, not too little and he'll lose the man, too much and that overburdened heart will falter and die. An edge of control to walk step after step, an uneasy arête. Keep going. He's not even sure which heartbeat is his anymore. Beat.

"The Headmistress - the wards - no! Stop!" It's Poppy's voice, Poppy hurried and anxious as she has not sounded for three years.

No.

"Harry. Stop. Don't try. You don't have the magic for it - you'll kill yourself, you stupid boy. Stop!"

It's done anyway. He sits back on his heels, tired as he's ever been, and watches Poppy test pulse and skin tone and pull Snape's eyelids apart - Snape's eyes are rolled up so far up only a sliver of black can be seen, frighteningly blind.

"Blankets," Poppy says and, "Have you a hot water bottle?"

Harry stands on unsteady knees and strips his bed.

Poppy doesn't even bother about the mud, which means it must be bad, although she does say, "Harry, can you-" looks at him, frowns, spreads the blankets in front of the fire and very gently rolls Snape to lie on them.

In Poppy's eyes, Harry's as near to a squib as makes no difference. He's only glad she didn't arrive ten minutes earlier.

"...how did this happen?" Poppy says to herself. "This is...this man is nearly..." Her hands check skin, measure pulse, uncork salves and potions. She has not even bothered to brush the hair back from Snape's eyes.

Harry boils a kettle and makes them both tea. Even if he would, he doesn't think he has enough magic left in him, after what he's done for Snape, to heat a cup of water.

Poppy talks about things like blood pressure and lymphatic system and platelet counts. Her wand, set beside her, hums. But for the first time in years Harry doesn't feel someone else's magic, mute as it is to its owner, cry out to him with the knowledge of history mislaid.

It's a good feeling, detached, dispassionate, the kind of feeling he's been looking for in a very long time. He really is shaky. He sits on the edge of the bed frame and watches Poppy work.

It must be half an hour before she leans back, puts one hand to her back and reaches for the cold cup of tea.

"Thank you," she says. And then, "I haven't seen anything like that since...since.." She frowns, but Harry knows the memory she cannot place. She is thinking of the war, but she will not be able to remember.

Instead, she looks down at the tea in surprise. Taps it with her wand: steam curls. Harry's mug is cool as well, but he won't warm it, not here. He's still got both hands wrapped round the mug though.

"No," he says. Then he says, and thinks as the words leave his mouth, I shouldn't have said that, there is no Snape, not to Poppy, he never existed, he's gone with the war. "You know who it is?" The memory of Snape tastes vivid and acid-edged in his mind, as clear as if Poppy could see it.

Perhaps she can. Poppy looks up, looks at him, looks down. Her face sharpens and pales. She drops the teacup. It smashes. She stands up. Steps back. Her hands are tight on her wand.

"Holy Mary Mother of God," Poppy says, which must be something from her childhood, although she's not young in either world. And then she says, "Severus."

Which of course he is to Poppy, although to Harry he's Snape, snapped out and harsh and always will be. He doesn't comment. He will not remember Dumbledore dying. He takes a sip of cold tea instead.

"It must have been him the wards let through," Poppy says slowly. "I don't believe it. I thought-"

Harry can hardly believe it either. Snape shouldn't be here. Snape shouldn't be remembered. He should be dead, twice over dead, once with the forgetting and once with Voldemort: Harry should be the only wizard who knows the man's name and remembers the list of his deeds. World's last living Death Eater, Severus Snape. Yet the wards let him pass and Poppy knows his name.

Perhaps the spell of the forgetting is not as strong as he thinks. Perhaps it's Harry himself, Harry recognising Snape, so Poppy does....tight as he can, Harry locks the memory of Snape's crimes away, hoards them fast. His.

"I must tell the Headmistress," Poppy says. "I must...you'll be all right here?"

"I don't think he's up to murdering anyone just now," Harry says, tired and careless. Although of course if there is murdering to be done it'll be the other way round, although he won't tell Poppy that. Execution, not murder. Justice. Although for a moment it feels horribly, childishly, like revenge.

Poppy gives him a very strange look, but says, "I can't believe the wards let him through." She shakes her head. "In fact...where do you keep your Floo powder, Harry?"

"I don't have any," Harry says.

"Oh. Of course you don't. Well then. I'll be back in fifteen minutes or so, you just stay there. Make sure he's comfortable?"

"Yes," Harry says, and watches Poppy leave. He's tired, and cold, and not exactly comfortable himself. He is sharing a small room with Dumbledore's killer.

Quite suddenly Harry is curious to know what Snape looks like these days. Does it show, what he did, on that arrogant, angular face? Will there be lines of anger, of regret?

Harry puts down his mug and moves to kneel at Snape's side. He brushes hair out of the man's face, strokes it back, although it clings to his fingertips damp and sleek. There's more of it than when Snape faced him across the battlefield of a potions classroom, but it's ragged. Starvation has left Snape little more than bones. There's little to him but the blade of his nose, the flat lines of his cheekbones, the hollow of his jaw and the black sunken shadow of his eyes. He looks feral and dangerous even like this. Perhaps more so like this because that old Snape, Professor Snape, always gave Harry the impression that he chose to leash his anger and his contempt. This Snape looks as if reason has been discarded with his flesh, as if on waking he would bite and scratch and scream as any trapped animal.

'Where's he been?' Harry wonders, and thinks of broken glass and someone crawling. Then thinks, 'well, he's here now.'

Well, he's here now. What an odd thing to think. So certain. Could it be... But Snape is unconscious and Voldemort is dead and Dumbledore before him. There's no one else who can slide into Harry's mind like a thief in the night. He reaches for Snape's left forearm, just to check. And then suddenly, thinks - Harry, you idiot - because Snape, Snape will remember everything, and very quickly before Poppy comes back with the Headmistress, Harry pulls all the magic he can - not much, enough, just enough to make Snape forget the war, and starts to -

~*~

Snape's warm. It's so unusual it startles him, when he thought he was beyond any feeling. Warm. He'd forgotten what that felt like. Maybe it's the antechamber to hell. Maybe this is the moment before someone says, Snape, stand up. Account for your crimes. He hadn't known at Hogwarts, when he'd eaten the last meal for the dammed.

But warmth. It feels good. It feels like someone's thrown a blanket over him. Soft and enveloping.

He's Snape. No one throws blankets over Snape. Snape is cold and caustic and spiked with rage, dirty with anger, stained with an unsteady and cracked disdain. He is aware of his sense of self and is furious, because he thought he'd leave this behind, this broken angry wreck of a human being with all his promises and obligations, he'd thought it would all burn away. But it hasn't. He's still himself. Although he's aware... it's not all him. There is something blanketing his thoughts, enfolding them. It's something soft and gentle and encroaching, persuasive. There is no war, it says. There is no war, it's gone now. Give the pain away. I'll give you peace, it says.

Snape has not earned peace and no one has ever given him anything for free. He's himself. He's not mild. The war happened. He knelt to Voldemort, lied for him, killed for him. To the end of his days and beyond he'll be Dumbledore's killer. He's earned revilement, not forgiveness. He always has. Comfort is a lie offered by strangers he will not trust. He clings to the rags of his self-knowledge and holds onto his pride.

~*~

He can't do it. Even unconscious, Snape fights back like a man with everything to lose. Harry can find no kinship in Snape's mind and no acceptance of comfort. For the first time, he can't make things better. And there are noises outside the door, footsteps, and the door opening - he can't be seen to do magic. He lets go of the enchantment and sinks back on his heels.

"Harry," the Headmistress says. "Harry, are you all right? And-" She comes to a halt, slowly, five paces from the door. "Oh my God," she says.

Snape's face, with his hair smoothed back, is instantly recognisable.

"Oh my God," she says again, and, "Severus."

"He's badly hurt, " Poppy says, behind her. "Starved. Dehydrated. He's got a cracked rib that's dangerously near his lungs. I suspect pneumonia. And his feet - Minerva, his feet-"

"Severus."

"-should get him to the hospital wing-"

Minerva McGonagall walks forward, very slowly. Her eyes behind the severe frame of her glasses round and the pupil lengthens, as if in moments of stress she reverts to a more familiar form.

"Severus."

She kneels down by Harry's side and reaches out a hand. And Harry surprises himself, because what he wants to do, fiercely, is knock that hand away. Snape's his. Harry found him. Harry owns him, owes him. This last killing blow, it's between Snape and Harry and no one else has the right to get in the way.

"Minerva?"

"I never thought I'd see him again." McGonagall says, so low only Harry can hear her. It's almost tender.

Then she stands up. "We can drag him outside," she says. "Harry, you take one corner and I'll take the other. Poppy, get the door will you?" She's all Headmistress now, quick and decisive. "That's it - push up for the door? - oh, well done - Leviosa!"

The mattress rises two feet, tilts a little and steadies. One of Snape's hands falls and hangs loose, lax and broken as a crow's carcass on a gamekeeper's fence.

"Come on then," McGonagall says, and walks away, the mattress following her, and Snape on it, and Harry and Poppy behind.

Poppy's tired. Harry should lend her a hand, but he doesn't really like touching people anymore, not since the war. Although Ginny's skin under his fingertips was softer than anything else he's ever touched. She died too.

McGonagall's been efficient. There are house-elves at the great door, and lights, and cocoa for Harry, and a great bustle of stairs and people and light and blankets, possets and wringing of hands, wails and exclamation, and noise, too much of it. But Snape's unconscious. Snape's a sole point of stillness. Snape doesn't care. Harry trails after the mattress like a dog after its master, which is all wrong because surely it's the other way round.

It seems to take hours, with Poppy fussing, to get Snape into bed. Poppy wants him clean, McGonagall wants him dressed. Elves run for hot water, nightclothes, more pillows, essence of arnica, eucalyptus oil. Snape's body is crowded with bones. It's almost impossible to tell the colour of his skin - he's bruised all over, swollen at his joints. His feet - his feet look like he's walked from Dover without a moment's rest. Maybe he has. Harry's never known where the last battle was.

He's tired himself. He curls up on one of the beds, but he doesn't mean to go to sleep.

He wakes up later than he should, but before Poppy. Dawn's breaking behind the blinds. Someone's given him a blanket and taken off his boots.

Across the room Snape's head, all Harry can see of the man uncovered, is turned on one side. His mouth is open and his hair, clean, spreads over the pillow, black on white. There are wards on his bed but none Harry can't get past. He could try again to make Snape forget.

He doesn't have to.

He can have company in hell.

And if anyone deserves that it's Snape.

It won't be long now until someone arrives. Do it now, if he's going to -

Harry gets himself out of bed. Snape's head, on the pillow, tilts a little. Under closed lids, the man's eyes follow his movements, almost as if Snape can see him - but he can't. The man's asleep. Harry walks up to the edge of the bed and looks down. Snape asleep doesn't look like a monster. He looks like an aged and unhappy man, just a man, like Harry. Who doesn't think they've ever been this close before. He'd thought, close up, that Snape would be ugly, all open pores and broken veins, but he's not: his skin between bruises is pallid but smooth. Snape's eyes follow his gaze. It's almost unnerving. And when Snape speaks - fuck! - Harry is a step back from the bed before he knows what he's doing, and he has to creep forward and bend down again to hear Snape's voice. Nothing more than the ghost of sound, nothing like that hated, smooth "Potter."

"Do you expect me to confess my sins?" Snape says, and Harry looks round, because he doesn't want anyone else, this is his - "Fuck you," Snape says.

Harry laughs. It's more a snort, really, an incredulous, amazed amusement. For a moment, a very brief moment, he feels...not liking, but...respect. "Fuck you too," Harry says under his breath. "Sir."

He's left it too late. The door opens. Poppy. Two house-elves, broth, towels, potions bottles. Harry you're up can you do you -

He doesn't belong here. He belongs outside, where things don't talk back at him. Snape can wait. Snape, Snape's magic, is all Harry's now, although the man doesn't know it.

~*~

Harry doesn't go back to the infirmary for a week. He doesn't need to. Snape's return, for all McGonagall's efforts to keep gossip to a minimum, is the talk of Hogwarts. Even out on the Quidditch pitch Harry, mowing, hears -

"Potions Master"

"Dark Arts"

"Professor" - and Snape's name.

Whispers in the darkness of the struts under the stand, snatched gossip in the rose garden, stifled giggles by the lake. He doesn't mind. Snape's crimes are his, all his. He hugs the knowledge of them to himself, a private and guilty triumph.

"He's woken up."

"They say he's not talking."

"He asked for the Headmistress. In private."

"Was she crying? She can't cry. She's the Headmistress." Harry thought that once too, once.

"'Pomfrey asked for sherry. At breakfast!"

"The house-elves are frightened of him."

"I'd be frightened of him. He's Slytherin, isn't he?"

"No, he's Hufflepuff."

"Isn't he Ravenclaw?"

"Anjuli's Dad says-"

"My cousin said-"

"Jon said he saw someone at the window."

'He's six feet tall.'

"He looks like a monster!"

"No - he's part Veela. Vampire. He can-"

"Stopper death. He's faced a dragon. He's an animagus - a lizard. A cat. A snake."

Harry laughs. He sleeps well, these nights, curled round the memory of Snape's body splayed out on his hearthrug and the feel of Snape's magic constrained in Harry's own mind. In his dreams, he knows the taste of Snape's voice and the touch of his thoughts naked. He doesn't need to see the man to know he's awake, he's alive.

~*~

After a week he goes back to the infirmary. He picks his time well, after supper and before bed. There's been a afternoon of Magical Games, Slytherin v. Ravenclaw: hexes and arcane maneuvers. Poppy's got seven beds occupied and a delivery due from St. Mungo's, but Harry's got a bunch of freesias in his hands and a note from a grounded Ravenclaw to an incapacitated Hufflepuff - he's not stupid.

Snape is awake.

Harry stands in the doorway and looks past two empty beds. Snape's got the room to himself: Harry suspects the man's venomous tongue but maybe Poppy's being kind. Perhaps she's being kind to the students, not Snape. He's sitting up in bed and doing something with his hands. There's a tray hovering six inches from his knees and on it small coloured bottles and a measuring jug and a quill. As Harry watches, Snape writes out a label and smoothes it across one of the bottles. He doesn't look up.

Harry is acutely conscious of his own skin. He's not clean - he hasn't bathed yet. He's crumpled and sticky with sweat and there are grass-stains on his robe. His hair is probably sticking on end again. For a moment - how odd! - Harry thinks he might actually be frightened. But he can't be.

He walks forward, holding the flowers. Snape doesn't look up. Harry resents that. He doesn't sit down, or put the flowers on the table, or say hello or good evening or even how are you. He waits.

Snape's hands, bottling potions, are a mess. He's got splints on two fingers and his thumb cracks when it moves, bone against bone. There's a scar that runs through all the tendons of his right hand. His wand hand. But every separate dose of whatever potion it is - Harry doesn't know - is measured to a featherwidth.

'Maybe we're not going to say anything at all,' Harry thinks.

"I heard that."

"You can't."

"I did." Snape looks up then.

He has forgotten how black the man's eyes are. He's never seen another human being with eyes quite that colour. But maybe Snape isn't-

"I heard that too."

"How? I set -" It just came out. Harry remembers someone saying his foolishness would kill him someday. Someone he hated.

"Quirrell, I believe. Or rather, his involuntary tenant. Your first year. I have seen Dumbledore's memory of that conversation."

And despite himself Harry gasps. Because he hasn't heard another person mention Dumbledore's name for three years. He hid it, in the spells of the forgetting, made the man myth, long gone and far away and not someone who gave Harry family and took it away again.

"You're still angry."

He won't give that an answer. Although it's not Legilimency, not magic at all, he can feel Snape's awareness, cool and cutting in his mind, almost as if they could communicate without words. As if they are kin, as if Snape's magic binds them together. He blocks Snape out. Succeeds, although it's more power than he really cares to use within the school itself.

It's a long time until Snape stops trying. He'll have to be more careful in future.

"Do you presume to own the past?"

"No," Harry says.

"Then why?"

"Because I can," Harry says. "Because I wanted to."

Snape doesn't say anything to that. He bottles potions. Glass clinks against glass.

Harry feels as if he's been judged and found wanting. He'd forgotten what it was like to wait on Snape's words.

"No other activities to pursue, Mr. Potter?"

He'd been about to leave.

"No," Harry says. He sits down. He takes care, sitting down, to fill the chair, legs spread and elbows on the armrests. He wants to sit small and bunched up as a child in a cupboard but he won't, not in front of Snape.

Snape bottles potions. Harry watches him do it. There's an ease to watching something like this, the monotonous one-two-three and write label of it. He could stay here all evening - he's got time.

Eventually Snape says, "It won't last. The spell."

Harry shrugs.

After a while he does get up and leave. It's not until he gets back to the hut that he remembers the freesias.

~*~

Two weeks after he crawls to Harry's door Snape moves back to the dungeons.

It takes him most of an afternoon. He walks. It's quite a procession, although Harry hears about it two hours after the event while mulching rhubarb and raspberry canes for the winter. Harry thinks of the soles of Snape's feet, not just blistered: cut to shreds, scabbed and oozing pus, blackened, and of Poppy's voice when she'd said, "Severus."

He cuts the seed-heads from the last of the onions and turns over the asparagus bed. He's using Neville's grandmother's notes - nothing's dead yet, although Harry expects casualties sooner or later. By the time he's finished, it's evening. By the time he's cleaned his spade and his wheelbarrow, it's night.

And although for the last three years Harry's gone home at the end of the working day, on this occasion his footsteps turn to the dark bulk of the castle.

After Voldemort's death, after Harry came back to Hogwarts, after he'd counted the long line of the dead, he'd gone down to Snape's rooms. It was before he'd reined in his magic and he was fired with it, invincible, unassailable. Mad. He'd broken Snape's wards with a flick of his wand, ward after ward shriveling like spider silk in fire. Snape's rooms had looked as he thought they should look, so familiar to his mind's eye that it was almost impossible to believe he had not seen them before. He'd stopped, Harry remembers, in the doorway, before he drew his wand.

Book by book, bookshelf by bookshelf, papers, scrolls, photographs, journals, furniture, desk, leather-covered chairs, flambeau, fire dogs, threadbare carpet - Harry destroyed it. Wood smashed to kindling. Books turned on each other and tore themselves apart. Whisky, potions, inkbottles smashed, puddled on the floorboards, and soaked into the patterns of the hearthrug. Harry cracked destruction with the wand that had killed Snape's master.

He'd regretted it afterwards. He should have looked for proof of Snape's treachery, his hatred, his spite. But at the time Harry had looked at the utter destruction he'd made, all he knew of Snape's life, and been pleased. He'd never gone back. He wasn't sure if anyone had.

The new DADA professor wasn't a man for dungeons. Harry thought he might have a room in one of the towers, although he'd never bothered to find out.

But Harry knows the way to Snape's rooms as though he'd been walking that way all his life. He isn't surprised, when he comes to the door, to find it hanging ajar and although the last time he'd been here the wards were the strongest he'd ever met - stronger even than Dumbledore's - there is no protection on Snape's rooms now.

He stands in the doorway and looks in.

Nothing's changed. A torch burns on the wall, that's all. The bookshelves lurch from the walls. There is a smashed chair in the fireplace. The floor is black with gleaming liquid: it hasn't dried up. Papers float in the mess, torn printed leaves, the shreds of ideas scattered and abandoned. Harry doubts there's a whole book in the place.

In the middle of the room, Snape. Kneeling. Clothed. Someone's found him a black robe from somewhere - not his own, it sits uneasily on his shoulders and creeps away from the line of his thighs, and the sleeves bunch on his arms. His head's down. His hair is the colour of blood seen in darkness, dense and black. In one hand he holds the remains of a single printed page and in the other the mutilated cover of a leather bound book. Even from where he stands, Harry can see they don't match.

Snape doesn't appear to be doing anything. He's just looking.

Not even that. He's just being. Snape on his knees.

Harry watching.

He hadn't realised quite how much destruction he'd managed to wreak. There's not a part of this place, bar the walls, that's whole.

He's not sure how long he waits, until Snape puts the book down and looks round. There's nothing in his face, not fury, not fear, not pain - nothing.

"Did it help?" Snape says. He's not trying to read Harry's mind.

"I don't know."

"I don't suppose you have any idea what you have destroyed," Snape says. He doesn't sound angry. He sounds tired. He probably is tired. He's most definitely not well; there's a spot of red on his thin cheekbones, fever-bright, and his eyes are dull.

"I wasn't-"

"Did you honestly think I would leave anything here that I could not afford to lose?" Snape says, dispassionate.

Harry doesn't answer.

When Snape stands up it's slowly. His robe drags up with his knees, wet and reluctant.

"My blood pact with the devil?" he says. "My parent's marriage certificate? The children I've killed, the promises I've broken? Did you expect to find it all laid out with a note on the top reading 'For Harry Potter'?"

Snape drops the piece of paper from his hand. It doesn't flutter, it spirals light as a snowflake, meaningless as an unspoken promise. "What's wrong?" he says.

Harry says nothing.

The paper snags on an uneven stack of smashed wood, hangs still.

"Well. I'm sorry," Snape says.

Falls. There must be magic left in whatever it falls onto: the paper crumbles, soundlessly smoldering, and a thin trail of smoke reaches towards the stack of books and then the ceiling.

Snape says, "Perhaps you had better leave now, Mr. Potter."

Harry feels almost ashamed. He's destroyed far more than Snape's rooms. But something about this is so personal it hurts. He looks at the book in Snape's hand.

"Can I help?" Harry says. Quickly, quietly.

And then Snape laughs. He doesn't laugh all at once. It's a laughter that tears at his gut, forces itself out of his throat in shudders and stretches the tone of his voice into awkward, dark humour. It's not a laugh meant to be shared.

Harry walks away.

~*~

He's never owned much, himself. But what he does own is...precious to him. The last of his father's belongings. Some photographs. A hair ribbon. Snape...Snape probably wouldn't have anything like that. Snape probably had dead rats and books in dead languages.

Hermione had been learning Greek when she died.

Neville's death took five days. From a wasting hex. If Snape had been there - if Snape had been there, and also a cauldron, and fire, and twenty-seven different rare ingredients and five books on cell protein and anti-virus reactions..

Harry stands on the steps of Hogwarts and speaks to the boars. "I'm an idiot."

But it wasn't a night for replies. He goes back to his hut and makes himself tea, which tastes of dust though the packet is fresh. He drinks it lying on Hagrid's bed, boots muddy on the cover but he doesn't care.

Harry's got a few books. His schoolbooks. A couple of Quidditch texts. A Muggle copy of War and Peace that Hermione had been reading.

He's got the Half Blood Prince's potion book too, although it's the first time since Voldemort's death that Harry acknowledges possession.

That had been Snape's book, with Snape's notes in it. Snape, not the Half Blood Prince, who in Harry's mind had been someone entirely different, not Snape at all: someone patient, painstaking, someone who, when he spoke to Harry, saw someone whole.

That book is probably the only thing Snape's ever owned that is still undamaged.

And certainly Harry doesn't need it anymore.

He makes himself another cup of tea.

If it had come with a ribbon on top and a note saying 'from Severus Snape' Harry would have Incendio'd the thing.

He's a fool. But he's still getting up and taking the book off the shelf. It's raining again, and he's got nothing to cover it that resembles protection. He can't exactly give Snape the book wrapped in a two-years-out-of-date Chudley Cannons sweatshirt that once belonged to Ron. He's got one pillowcase and that's back on the bed.

In the end Harry wraps the book in a scarlet hand towel. It just about fits in the pocket of Hagrid's cloak: Harry, walking back to the castle, shelters it within the crook of his arm. It takes less time than he thought it would to get back to the dungeons and he arrives sooner than he wants to, all wet hair and dripping clothes.

The door's still off its hinges, but there's a mop by the wall and the floor's dry. Paperwork lies in stained drifts against the walls: the bookshelves have gone. Snape's still kneeling on the floor, but his hair is tangled and burred as if he's been running his fingers through it, although that's a habit Harry's never seen the man own. In front of him are little stacks of torn paper in neat piles.

"Doesn't Reparo work?" Harry says, eventually, when it becomes clear Snape isn't going to acknowledge his presence.

Snape doesn't even turn round.

'I guess that'll be a no then,' Harry thinks. Then, "I brought you something."

"A nice dose of arsenic, Potter?" Snape says.

"No. It's a book," Harry says. "I think...I think you might like it." He's too wound up, jumpy, to recognise the tentative sound of his own voice although he'll replay the words later and cringe.

"Oh, don't be a fool." Snape's head has snapped round, he's standing up, and for once the anger in his voice is showing. Harry feels it almost like recognition.

With both hands he holds out the package. It's with a sinking heart that Harry realises now, too late, that the towel is one he snatched from the prefect's bathroom six months ago. There's a Gryffindor lion embroidered on the cloth.

Snape smashes it out of his hands.

The noise it makes when it hits the floor is hollow, wood on wood.

"I want nothing of yours," Snape says, low and vicious, all the lines of his face sharp. He's close, two feet away: Harry can see spittle at the corner of his mouth, a patch on the robe, Snape's clenched right hand.

"It's not mine," Harry says.

"Neither was this!" Snape says. "But that hardly stopped you, did it? What gave you the right to walk in here and tear my life to shreds? Have you any idea - no, you can't have - how many years of my life went into this room? I could murder you for this," Snape says. "I could happily gut you with a broken penseive and believe me I would dance on your grave. Yours and your father's. Is that what you want me to do? You'd like that, wouldn't you? Fame without effort? You'd be a hero all over again, merely dead."

"Shut up," Harry says.

" The saviour of wizardkind, the man whose sacrifice saved the world again - don't you ever get tired of it? What was it meant to achieve?"

"Shut up!"

"Well go on!" Snape says. "What's one more death? Do it now."

"No," Harry says.

"Don't say no to me!"

"Don't tell me what to do!"

Snape says, silk smooth. "How was it your friends died again, Potter? Don't you think there are potions in here - oh, not now, but then - that could have saved them? There are books here only I owned, spells to redeem a dead man, charms to reconstitute a soul. If you'd looked."

"I don't believe you," Harry says.

"The world doesn't come in black and white, Mr. Potter," Snape says. "Not all promises are made to be kept. Not all truths are true. Isn't it time you thought for yourself? Oh, but-" Snape says, "I forget. You don't think. You destroy."

"As if you don't," Harry says, furious.

"Don't talk to me about-" Snape says.

"Because that's what I should have been looking for. Something to explain you. Something I could understand. And there was nothing, Snape - no explanations, no reasons, no-"

"So you were grubbing through -"

"- understand -"

"You ignorant fool-"

"- what you were hiding."

"As if I would leave anything for you to find!"

"So where did you hide it then?"

"What makes you think -"

"Oh come on, Snape. The signed confession, the death note, the will? The secret potions that prove to the world what a misunderstood genius you are? Your excuses, your reasons?"

Snape is not flushed but white, shaking with anger: he's as angry - angrier -than Harry's ever seen him, but Harry's not thirteen any more and they're long past points or detentions.

"Or maybe there are none," Harry says. "Maybe you just liked it - the power. The death. The killing. Did you-"

Snape hits him.

Not open handed. A closed fist, straight to his face, fast and powerful. Harry ducks but not in time: with a sickening lurch he hears the crack of something break, and when the pain kicks in a moment later he knows it's his cheekbone that's broken. His eyesight's blurred - no, his glasses are spotted with blood - he's stumbling backwards, taking them off. It takes a while for the lazy world to stop spinning. When it steadies, he wipes the glasses on his robes and puts them in his pocket. He'll fix them later. Snape's a black blur, standing still.

"Just like that," Harry says. "Exactly like that."

Snape, from what he can see, still hasn't moved. Harry walks forward.

"So, Professor Snape," Harry says. "Sir. How many people then, exactly, have you killed?"

He's closer to Snape than he's ever been before and keeps walking. Snape's moving backwards, giving ground.

"Did you keep score, keep count, take trophies? Some hair, some fingers, an eye or two?" He's got his hands on Snape's arms, pushing back. There's no resistance in Snape, no nothing. "Were they wizards? Did you lose count? Or was it the sex, Snape - is that what you wanted? Was it the only way you could get someone to shag you?"

Snape hits the wall violently, shocking. Harry pins him there, voice, hands, but the man has no reaction to which Harry can respond.

"Is that what you're hiding?" Harry says. "The women, the little girls? Did you tell them to call you Daddy when they took down their panties for you, Snape? Or was it little boys?"

He's got his face right up against Snape's, shouting, but the man doesn't turn his head, or duck, or move at all. Harry can't see clearly but he thinks Snape has no expression on his face - nothing at all, blank.

"Is it the photographs you keep, Snape?"

And Snape does react to that. He shudders, a slow, fine tremble that Harry can only feel against his hands, his thighs, his forearms pressed against the man's chest. It doesn't stop.

Feels like triumph. Because he's right. There are photographs and Snape knows where they are.

"Did you get off on them afterwards? Is that it? How many, Snape?"

But Snape doesn't answer. Snape isn't going to answer.

Deep breath. Harry leans back.

"I should have let you die," he says. Then he says, "But that's easy, isn't it? I don't think we should go easy, do you, Snape?"

He lets go. Snape stays where he is, as if it's only the wall and Harry's eyes that hold him upright, stiff and absent.

This is the moment when Harry punches Snape in the gut. It's a deliberate blow and it has all the force of Harry's arm and his shoulders behind it, his last late growth spurt, the muscle he gained over a long summer. It would have left Snape on the floor were it not for the fact that Harry's knee is between Snape's thighs, pinning him to the wall, and Harry's right hand is as tight as a wrench round his balls. As it is Snape's curled up over Harry's thigh, hands pressed to his belly with the pain of it: he didn't scream, but the sound he does make, a thin and almost silent wail, is almost more gratifying.

"Give me one reason," Harry says, "why I shouldn't rip your cock off right now?"

He doesn't expect an answer. Snape can't speak. Draped across Harry's knee, his body writhes, curling up slow, and his genitals are soft and creeping compressed between Harry's fingers. He hasn't lifted a finger to save himself.

Harry could kill Snape. No one would know. He could do it slowly: tear his balls off, burn his eyes out, cut the flesh from his bones strip by strip.

He could do more than that. Snape's as lax as a roll of cloth, but Harry's cock is as hard as he can ever it remember being. It's not sex, there's no sweet thrill to the way he feels now. It's power. He could lay Snape on the floor and take him open, rend him apart, with his own body, his hands, his cock. Snape would let him.

He could almost enjoy it.

Just like Snape.

Fuck.

Harry lets go as if Snape's become real. He doesn't step back, he stumbles, and as he does Snape falls to the floor and lies curled round himself, wheezing.

"I'm not you," Harry says. "I won't be you."

He'll never remember how he gets back to the hut. He does remember a sleepless night, making cup after cup of sweet tea with adrenaline-shaking hands.

He'll never go back to the dungeons. He doesn't want to see Snape again. He's disgusted by himself, his own reaction: he's even more confused by Snape's because in that moment Snape would have let him do anything. And Harry, who when he has dreamed of sex has dreamed of the soft warm willingness of female flesh, finds himself thinking instead of muscle under his fingertips, hard: of stubble and strength set against his, of what it would feel like...

Yes, he does think of that. What if he hadn't stopped? What if he'd ripped Snape's robes and lifted his own and thrust into the hot, clenching embrace of someone else's body? What would it have felt like - tight, he's sure, walls of flesh spasming, shocked - would it be embrace or rejection? Would he force his way in, stuttering, battering thrust after thrust, or would he be welcomed, a long slide home?

At night Harry comes often and hard into the clutch of his own hands.

~*~

The gossip about Snape dies down. He's vanished into the dungeons: were it not for the occasional sightings of nervous house-elves holding covered trays in blank stretches of corridor - or picture galleries, or cloisters, or halls lined with mirrors - he might never have come back to Hogwarts. Harry double-digs the potato bed and prunes the apple trees, with violence, out of season. He takes to having dinner in the Great Hall where he can't hear the sound of his own breathing. He considers taking up drafts and does take up patience. In moments of madness he considers asking Binns if he plays chess - but doesn't, and never will, and Harry knows it's all procrastination anyway

He wants to see Snape.

Oh, don't get this wrong. Harry no more wants to screw Snape - really - than he wants to be the golden boy of his third year once again. He's older, colder, apart: he feels himself balanced on the brittle edges of wizarding culture: he's not certain he's quite sane.

But he suspects Snape's grasp on reality is equally disturbed.

~*~

It's a fortnight after that abortive and angry exchange that Harry comes home to a parcel outside his front door. It's a neat parcel, the size of a cigar box, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. The knots are arcane and elaborate. There's no name attached, but it's for Harry and it's from Snape.

Harry's almost frightened to pick it up.

Which is stupid. Snape has no magic left in him. Harry's incendiary with power.

He picks the box up and carries it inside.

This means of course that Snape knows where he lives and has picked a moment when he knew Harry would be working to deliver the parcel. Snape's been watching. Harry...is careful: unties the string rather than cuts it and folds back the paper with care.

It's not the book back. It's a box, pine, lightweight and thin. There are no wards.

But there wouldn't be anyway.

Harry slides back the lid and looks inside.

And gasps. An image out of his worst nightmares stares back at him. Empty eyesockets, leering mouth, porcelain white lying over shadows. It's a Death Eater's mask. The first one he's seen within the grasp of his hands and it loses none of its frighteningly aware vacancy for being unworn. He's reluctant to pick it up, and fascinated: it feels heavy and rigid and the stuff of it clings cold to his fingers. It's a piece of dark magic that stains his skin with old and unwelcome memories. For a moment - a horrible moment, sickening - Harry considers trying it on and wonders what his own eyes would look like from under this particular disguise.

He has enough masks already. He puts it down on the table, propped up against his coffee mug.

Under the mask, photographs.

Snape's photographs.

The top one shows a dead man, splayed on his back across an operating table, half-dissected. Harry's stomach lurches.

He could walk away from this.

He can't.

He picks up the first photograph and only then sees that the man is still breathing.

Everything in him winces. Composure unravels. He drops the photograph as if it's ice: he's standing up, and the chair is falling backwards, and the floor is suddenly unsteady: he can taste bile in his mouth.

What did he expect, summer picnics and children's birthday parties? He can't not look.

The second one. Different angle, different man. Same pose. A third. A shot of a woman naked with a baby in her arms. Same woman, not quite dead. The baby - at least, Harry assumes it's the same baby - thin, bruised and blue. More barely living people. Some close-ups of things he doesn't want to see but does anyway, shades of glistening red and grey.

A teenage girl tearing her own nails out, expressionless.

An older man, crucified. A series of shots, that death.

A potions laboratory Harry does not recognise.

And then - Harry slaps his palm down over the image and feels it burn - Draco spread-eagled, tied across an old-fashioned tester bed with deliberately spaced welts laddering his back. The man with the belt is Lucius: there are half-round cuts, brightly bleeding, where the belt buckle has cut into Draco's skin.

Lucius is smiling.

In the next photograph he's spread over Draco's back, heaving and grunting.

Harry's less than halfway through the stack. It's only his stubbornness that moves him on.

A woman he doesn't know. A man he does.

A man he doesn't know and a woman he does but wishes he didn't.

It can only get worse. It does.

Students he shared a house with, naked and tearstained. It's not the bruised bodies - it's the absolute lack of animation that's horrific, the doll-like stiffness of their limbs.

Sex. Not sex. Rape. The moment of penetration, a woman's labia crooked apart by a pair of thumbs he's seen grasping his own robe but is more accustomed to watch distilling potions. A long, slim, pale penis - Lucius'? - unevenly flared at the head. The moment seems sickeningly banal reduced solely to the flesh.

A man coming over another man's face. Another, same. No one he knows.

A child, beaten. A boy with short dark hair.

Inexpertly and in fear, the same boy taking Macnair's cock in his mouth as tears stream down his face. This isn't sex. It's abuse.

A small girl strapped on her front to a table. Her hair covers her face, loose golden locks that curl at the tips: her hands are clenched. She's so young the fingers are still chubby and her nails small and soft. There are bruises on her wrists and in the small of her back.

A closer shot of the same girl, the slight round curve of her.

Bile surges unstoppably into Harry's throat and mouth, sour and acidic - he pukes on the floor by the side of the chair, over and over again, until there's nothing left in his stomach.

Her anus is gaping open, torn wide apart. The rim of flesh is split, deep purple, and there are bloodstains on her thighs.

She must be seven years old.

There's one more photograph.

Harry wipes his mouth, and his eyes. He gets himself a glass of water and one of brandy.

In the last photograph, she's being raped. Against a man's body she's a toy, thrust with terrible, implacable rhythm against the ties that bind her. The man is Snape. Robed, masked.

As Harry watches, the camera angle changes. It shows firstly Snape's cock, painfully flushed and uncomfortably distended, forcing itself over and over again into a sheath of flesh too small to contain it. Pans up to show Snape's hand twisted in the girl's hair, and then retreats. Snape looks round.

The mask shows no expression.

Snape, hips thrusting, cuts the girl's throat.

There's nothing left in Harry's stomach to regurgitate. He's retching dry in great shudders, waves of nausea.

More than anything in his life, now, Harry wishes he'd never opened the box, never looked at the photographs. It feels as if he's let something unspeakably evil into his house, his mind. He will destroy them. Burn them, and the box with them, and the string - and he cannot understand what Snape wants him to do. Because there's a reason for this.

Harry shuffles the photographs back into the box as quickly as he can and slams the lid down. His fingers feel unclean. His whole body, his mind, feels soiled.

He doesn't want to take a bath and leave the photographs in his house. He doesn't even want to touch the box.

But he does. He puts it back where Snape placed it on his front door step, and wards it as carefully and strongly as he's ever warded anything in his life. Then he bathes, scrubbing himself down over and over again, and when he's done he pours himself another brandy and drinks it.

Then he takes the box back to Snape.

~*~

Although the route is different Harry's feet know the way. The door to Snape's rooms is open, and for all Harry's wariness the wards are still down. Snape's waiting at the desk.

The shattered bookcases and the splintered chairs have gone. The only furniture in the room is whole - a battered wing-back settle by the unlit fire, a desk, the chair in which Snape sits behind the desk. His hands are empty, the desk clear, but Snape looks as if he hasn't moved for hours. As if he's waiting for something.

All around the walls of the room, piles of paper, the torn pages of dead books.

Harry takes two steps inside the door and flings the box in the fireplace. He sets it flaring up the chimney with a whiplash of a spell, harsh and white-hot.

"I didn't need to see that," he says. "I didn't want to see that."

Snape says nothing. Doesn't look like he's going to speak.

With a flicker of thought - he's careless tonight, but he has cause - Harry summons another chair and sits down on the opposite side of the desk.

"Why?"

Snape turns his head to Harry. His eyes are dull and blank: it takes minutes for him to collect himself, to bring himself back from whatever place in his mind he's retreated to. When he speaks it's low and uninflected.

"I thought you wanted company in hell," Snape says.

It's meant, Harry thinks, to be Snape at his worst, but what the words actually show is a blistering self-contempt. It's eating Snape alive: he's shivering with it, under his robes, and his right hand is clenched over his forearm with convulsive strength.

"I did not need to see that," Harry says.

"Potter," Snape says. "Why are you still talking?"

And what Harry realises then is that Snape has been expecting Harry to kill him. Has issued an invitation and left the door ajar.

But Harry will not be what Snape wants him to be.

"Who took the photographs, Snape?"

It takes a minute or two for Snape to respond. When he does it's with a shrug, sluggish and uncaring. Harry thinks that's all he's getting by way of reply. But he's wrong.

"He liked to watch," Snape says.

No need for either of them to delineate who.

Harry, silently, summons brandy. And glasses. He pours two measures and lets one rest in front of Snape.

Who says, explosively, "I never want to smell roses again as long as I live."

Harry says, "Satyrosa." It's a potion he has only ever heard of in whispers. Hermione, reading out loud late one night when none of them could sleep, looking up roses to remind them of Hogwarts, expecting paragraphs on scent and finding instead the instructions for a brew that creates a demanding and forced priapism. Satyrosa is without doubt on the Ministry's proscribed list.

"Yes," Snape says.

"Doesn't that-"

"It has unfortunate but well known side effects," Snape says. "Pain on ejaculation. Occasionally resulting in impotence." His voice is dead.

Harry pushes the brandy glass near Snape's elbow.

"Not that it matters," Snape says. He tosses off the brandy as if he's an actor in a cowboy film.

Harry pours more.

"Learnt enough?" Snape asks - there's a thread of acerbity in his voice Harry never thought he would welcome.

"Anything else you need to tell me?"

Snape takes a sip of his second brandy. Over the glass, his eyes meet Harry's for the first time that evening.

"Must you be quite so heroic?"

It's Harry's turn to shrug, uncomfortable. He glances round the room. Snape's got paper piled up all over the floor, contained in black lacquer trays. There must be a pattern to it.

"You're mending the books? I could," Harry says slowly, "charm them for you."

"Minerva has already tried."

"So what are you doing? Is this - I don't know - all the page ones or something?"

"Paper type."

"What?"

"I am sorting the scraps by the type of paper, Potter. One has to start somewhere."

"Yes, but - paper types?"

Snape sighs. "Take a piece of paper."

"Any one?"

"Yes. Any one. No, not that one-"

"Tell me next time. Here."

"No, you hold it. Rub it between your fingers. Note how thick it is, and also the roughness of the surface. Note too that the cut edge is slightly fibrous."

"Yes. Yes."

"It is a wood pulp paper. Nineteenth century and most probably made from Eastern European pine, with a size of soda ash." Snape frowns. He glances down at his second brandy, considers, and sinks the shot with a flick of his wrist. Leans back in his chair. "Note that we have already eliminated three quarters of what was my library. Now look at the print and observe the way it depresses the paper. This piece was printed on a press, Potter, not a roller or a digital copier, and that means it was printed at the time it was made. Put it on the pile nearest the door."

"What about the words?"

"The typeface? Later. At the moment my categorisation is purely physical. Once done, I will consider breaking the set down by font."

"Actually, I was thinking of the text," Harry says.

"Maybe later," Snape says. "If there is time."

"I have time," Harry Potter says. In his mind Snape's magic warms, the first glow of a new lit fire.

~*~

It is not the easiest task he has ever undertaken.

Harry learns more than he would ever have believed possible about paper. Both demanding and taciturn, Snape is impatient with his ignorance and disdainful of his assistance. The first evening is spent on a knife-edge, tiptoeing round precarious chronologies and abbreviated questions. The situation is brittle and the participants antagonistic.

Then Harry surprises himself. After the first few hours he can put his hand in a sack of scraps and recognise type by touch. The trays are filled and filed and filled and filed once more. He misses dinner and fails to realise until in search of a bathroom, he opens the door to find a flinching house-elf with food.

"Take the tray, Potter!" Snape says without even glancing up.

It's Harry who eats the food.

It's backbreaking, frustrating work, and the pile of sacks for sorting does not appear to diminish, but just before Harry says:

"Well, I'm off to bed then."(as he will say at the end of countless evenings to follow.)

And Snape says nothing, (although later he will deign to grunt in reply.)

A miracle happens. A small good thing.

Harry glances down. He's got a piece of paper in his left hand, and is just about to spin it into a tray - it's fine India paper, made just after the second Muggle world war- and one in his right, the same, fresh from the sack.

The edges line up.

He blinks. It's almost unbelievable, a bright moment of achievement.

"Snape," Harry says. "Snape, look up."

From where he is crouched in the far corner of the room, Snape does.

"Look," Harry says. He holds the two pieces up, and moves them together. Under his breath, the faintest whisper of a spell - "Reparo."

The pieces knit seamlessly. The words make sense.

Harry's grinning.

And Snape?

When Harry looks up from the complete page, what he catches, expression fleeting across Snape's face, is something that looks very much like exasperation and impatience and also - and if Harry hadn't spent six years in a classroom with Draco Malfoy he'd have missed it - what cannot be but is approval.

It cheers Harry more than the golden glory of the last moments of a successful Quidditch match. He's positively grinning, remembering, as he leaves the room, and he finds himself humming as he walks home in the dark.

And the next evening, bathed, hands scrubbed, Harry knocks on Snape's door and is admitted.

~*~

Autumn blusters to Winter. Harry stakes the young saplings, repairs the greenhouse glass, and cuts the dry chrysanthemums. In the evenings, he sorts paper.

At first it's almost meaningless, truncated syllables and torn-off descriptions, differentiated only by the nerves on his fingertips. Later it becomes almost a game. Harry picks up references he's never heard of and reads the tail-ends of spells he's never said - "Who's Prester John?" he asks one night, and gets a fifteen-minute presentation on cross-continental African trade, and dreams that night of silence and gold. "What's Oculus Colorare -?" He's treated to several vituperate comments on the uses of the colour palette and congenital photoreceptor disorders. What was meaningless becomes real: Snape reads linguistics, philosophy, the history of spell casting. He likes nineteenth century narrative verse and has an unexpected weakness for lampoonery - within three nights Harry has learned to recognise the distinctive typeface of what had been Snape's collection of bound volumes of Punch.

There are other things Snape won't discuss. Harry becomes accustomed to the layered texture of parchment, but the first time he looks down surprised to feel skin under his fingertips - he swears, drops the fragment - Snape spins round and snatches it up before Harry can blink.

"What?" Harry says and then stupidly - "That's skin."

"Yes," Snape says, after a pause. And then, "It may not be inert."

He doesn't say be careful but that's surely what he means.

Harry doesn't ask what skin. Or whose.

Although later he will find the webbing of a bat's wing and the script on it runic, not type, and that Snape will burn. It screams, when it hits the fire, and that night Harry has the old nightmare again for the first time in weeks. Something's crawling towards him. Coming for him.

He remembers what that feels like the next time he sets his hand to Snape's door and pushes it open.

Snape has no wards on his door. Snape has no magic. Harry has it, boxed in the corner of his mind. And yet Snape, powerless, is still protecting Harry.

He thinks about that, filing paper.

And when he answers the door to the house-elf - because no matter how much he tries Harry can't get the house-elves to come in uninvited and he's pretty much given up eating dinner in hall, and if he eats Snape will - he thinks about it again.

He stops later than usual, that night. It must be one o'clock when he reaches the bottom of his sixth sack and stares at the door, frowning.

"You've no wards on your rooms," he says eventually.

There's a rustle in the corner, which is at least acknowledgment that he's spoken.

"I think we should set some," he says.

"Don't be absurd," Snape's voice is dry.

"Why not?"

He can almost hear Snape's exasperation. It takes the man thirty seconds of theatrical rearrangement - Harry has a sneaking admiration for Snape's ability to convey emotion through the fold and swing of a robe - before Snape, cross-legged, hands steepled, says - "In case it escaped your attention, Potter, I have no magic."

"I don't think that's true," Harry says, "and of course it wouldn't hurt to try. I could key them to you, I'm sure."

"And how should we explain this to Minerva?"

It's the first time Snape has acknowledged there are secrets he and Harry share that he'll keep.

"Why explain?" Harry says, cheered and confident. "And I'd sleep-"

Snape looks away.

"-better if I knew the house-elves would never, er, tidy." Harry finishes. "So would you." He's occluding as casually as he can, a whisper of magic. Snape's never again replied to an unspoken comment , but all too often he's passed over the matching fragment to Harry's page or brought two sacks rather than one from the storeroom. Once or twice he's even poured the coffee.

Snape says, "No."

Why explain? Snape would say, mocking.

Harry folds the sack up and doesn't explain.

Snape may be taller than Harry but he's lighter, and Harry's reflexes are well honed. It's the work of a second to snatch Snape's wrist and his hand with it, and pull the man round, and slam their joined hands palm-over-palm against the door. Although Snape's a burgeoning spasm of anger at his back Harry holds them steady, and says the spell, and as he says it, calls Snape's magic and gives it back.

It slams into them both with the force of a small explosion. The wards set in a second: it's the incendiary power of Snape's magic and Harry's that fires a brilliance of unexpected compatibility.

It hurts, it burns, it's a whiplash arc of feedback finding a home: it leaves Harry leant boneless against the door and Snape kneeling at his feet, convulsed.

It hurts like fuck.

It feels like the best orgasm he's ever had.

Afterglow like lava sparks. Harry reminds himself to breathe and discovers oxygen deprivation in a rush of blood. He can't think.

He can think. He looks down. Snape seems to be all right, if winded and not yet back on his feet. Harry puts a hand against the door, testing, and feels the sweet song of the magic. This door will always open to him now. In fact he knows, not with a sense of shock but acceptance, that he could walk through the walls if he chose. His mind is his own.

"It worked," he says.

It's not a comment Snape acknowledges. Or perhaps is capable of acknowledging - he's still crouched at Harry's feet. From above, cloth stretches over the long delineation of his spine and the broad and wasted slope of his shoulders: his hair is lank and unbrushed.

Harry reaches out a hand and rests it on Snape's shoulder.

Snape's body twists in absolute and violent rejection. He's five feet away, upright and glaring, before Harry's had time to draw his hand back. Every shape and line of the man's body says, 'Don't touch me.'

"What did you do?" Snape says. His voice is harsh, cracking.

"I set the wards." He's done more than that. The tone of the air has changed, charged: he can feel the wards, but the room is filled with his magic and Snape's, both awakened now.

"How did you do that?"

"I don't know what I did."

"What do you mean? You did not-"

"Light a candle, Snape."

"You have no right to me-"

"Light a fucking candle!"

The fire goes up as if Snape had dropped a petrol can on the embers, flash-flame sucking all the oxygen out of the air and running it up the chimney in sparks and smoke. Gone in an instant, leaving Harry and Snape staring at the hearth.

"I didn't mean it like that," Harry says.

Snape straightens his robes. He brushes a smear of ash from his sleeve and flicks the cuffs into place. He closes his eyes - Harry suspects he may be counting to ten - and when he opens them looks down at his own hands. Snaps his fingers.

A tiny, incandescent flame burns above the palm of his hand.

"You wanted light, Mr. Potter?" Snape asks, sharp and snide.

"That's magic," Harry says.

Snape raises an eyebrow, but he's watching the light, not Harry's face. "What did you do?" Snape's voice is soft, but under it lies an absolute demand, darker than Harry's ever heard it before.

The light starts to spin.

"I was only setting the wards."

It's pretty, a core of silver with an aureole of paler glimmering flame. Harry can feel himself sliding into the light, comfortable.

Which is wrong. Snape's - it's harder than he thought it would be to look away, and although he should be angry he can't feel anything but dull disappointment. This should be a moment for pleasure, not suspicion.

"You don't need to charm me," Harry says. "I don't know anymore than that. But I'm glad you've got your magic back and I think it's time I went to bed. Oh," Harry says, "and the wards will work for you."

He waits.

"Goodnight," he says at last, and leaves.

~*~

They don't mention it again.

Although by the next evening Snape is summoning sacks of paper with a click of his fingers and from that moment on the coffee is always fresh. He does not, however, change the furniture and as far as Harry knows no one else is aware of the wards on the door. It's as if nothing has changed. It's not even as if Harry is more aware of the man: Snape's been in the back of his mind since one night in September, a presence that feels like...Snape, sharp-edged and deep. It's not something he wants to think about, nor the feel of Snape's magic smelling to Harry's mind of brimstone and ashes. Dark magic.

For the first five years of Harry's school career Snape taught potions. But the job he left behind him - unresigned - is Defence against the Dark Arts. Defence, not use of, although Harry knows well that Snape's skills lie as much in application as theory.

It's Thomas who holds the post now. Professor Liam Thomas, a slight young wizard from Glamorgan with a nervous twitch to his eye. Harry's never bothered to find out much about the man - it's nothing to do with him. School gossip overheard suggests he's a distant relative of Professor Sprout, a member of the Cymru Order. He stays in on nights with a full moon and doesn't talk to himself, that much Harry does know.

After the return of his magic it takes Snape three weeks and three days to get his old job back. Harry finds out the details afterwards, of course, in a hundred whispered conversations. Snape's arrival in the doorway of the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom: Professor Thomas' forced invitation. Snape's presence at the back of the room, silent and brooding and impossible to ignore. His terse one-word answers to Professor Thomas's polite queries.

By the end of the first day there are four pupils in the infirmary and Professor Thomas is known to have missed dinner and taken a bottle of firewhiskey to bed.

Harry doesn't mention it, that evening. He's brought a book on watermarks from the school library and spends his time with fragments of prints. Snape has a decided preference for nineteenth century landscapes, gothic and exaggerated.

On the second day, Professor Thomas stutters his way through the day's classes and breaks down when faced with a boggart. No guesses, Harry thinks, as to what he sees.

According to Robertson Jr. who was for reasons of his own passing by the appropriate doorway, he has a very long conversation with his mother.

Harry discovers Edward Lear and several sheets of eighteenth century anatomical sketches from the New World. He begins to wonder if some variation on a spell is the key - Reparo's like taking a crowbar to crush garlic, but the principle's right, he's sure of it. Snape is suspicious but not completely dismissive.

There is shepherd's pie for tea. It's a good evening.

"Couldn't you be a little bit, you know, kinder about it?" he says, leaving.

Snape just looks at him, unreadable.

On the third day Professor Thomas breaks.

It's a small thing. It's the moment when he looks round for the Botular Neutralising Ointment - which he has failed to request from the infirmary due to stress, hangover and a long letter from his mother at breakfast - and Snape produces same.

Professor Thomas throws the potion through the window, incinerates his register, and takes only four minutes to construct and sign one of the briefest resignation letters in the history of Hogwarts. It's on the Headmistress' desk within a minute of the ink drying and within twenty Professor Thomas, pursued by an untidily packed trunk and a ruffled owl, is seen heading past the Quidditch pitch to the nearest Apparition point.

He's in Glamorgan in time for tea and within two weeks has taken up a position as the village schoolteacher. Although Professor Thomas will begin the education of two future Prime Ministers, the world's foremost quantum physicist and the first Gates professor of cosmoarchaeology along with countless lawyers, doctors and artists, the Professor will never again set foot in Hogwarts.

That afternoon Snape will accept his reinstatement at the Headmistress' request with nothing more than a nod of his head.

Makes no difference to Harry. He uses the time before Snape arrives each evening to experiment with recognition and binding spells: has some success with Colingare, but finds it works only on single pages. It's something he thinks about at night.

He thinks about it quite a lot, because if he's thinking about binding spells he's not thinking about Snape.

He thinks a lot, these