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lomonaaerenThird part of a very long one-shot. Don't start reading here.
Midwinter, 2004
Harry hesitated a long time in front of the shelves in the apothecary. At one point he stretched out a hand towards a jar of what looked like pickled beetles floating in dung, and then snatched it back.
Then he scowled at himself. What he was doing was far more childish than the impulse that had brought him to the shop in the first place.
Resolutely setting his shoulders straight, he picked up the jar and turned towards the counter. The owner of the apothecary, a wizard with an eyepatch and burn scars on the left side of his face, gave him an incurious glance that didn’t change even when he saw Harry’s lightning bolt scar.
When he saw the jar Harry was carrying, though, he straightened up and sucked in his breath. Harry stopped, heart buzzing. “What is it?” he asked, wondering if he had somehow managed to choose the one set of illegal ingredients in a mostly legitimate apothecary, or if the description in Severus’s Potions books had led him astray. He barely understood the books anyway. “Is something wrong?”
“Do you know what those are?” The apothecary was whispering, one finger pointing at the jar.
“Um,” said Harry. “Not really.” The description in the Potions books had been confusing enough that he only knew they had once been insects, and that the liquid they were pickled or floating in made them magically powerful.
“Those are Beetles of the Sun, so they are.” The apothecary’s voice was reverent as he took the jar and turned it over in his hands. Harry told himself sharply not to take it back. The apothecary wasn’t going to steal it. He could have taken it at any time if he wanted to. It was in his shop. “I’d almost forgotten we had them. They’re so expensive…”
Harry picked up his courage. The apothecary probably knew Harry was handfasted to Severus, because most of the wizarding world did, but he didn’t seem to care much about who Harry actually was, so he also might not care who Harry was buying these for. “So they would make a good gift for a Potions master?”
The apothecary cackled, suddenly enough that Harry was glad he wasn’t holding the jar of the Beetles of the Sun anymore. He would have dropped them. “I’d say so, laddie! The potions you can make with these, the warmth they can create without a fire, the sweet taste they can bring to even the worst-tasting pain potion…” The apothecary caressed the jar again. “But it’s not every potions brewer who can use them correctly. The magic in them only comes out with the right training in crushing them, see? It only responds to the powerful.”
Harry relaxed. That described Severus all over. “I’ll take them, then.”
The price did make his hands falter as they reached for the Galleons he’d brought, but no matter. If Severus knew how expensive they were, he might even appreciate them more.
He might appreciate them, period, Harry thought, as he stepped out of the shop with the jar of the Beetles of the Sun clutched in his hand.
He might appreciate me.
But Harry refused to allow the thought to spend much time in his head, turning and striding energetically for the Apparition point.
*
“Severus?”
Harry stepped into the house and looked around, frowning. He hadn’t expected immediate acknowledgement; at this time of day, Severus would be in his Potions lab, and there would be only a robe draped on a chair or a newspaper placed under, or maybe over, a cooling cup of tea, whatever he had abandoned when his latest idea took him. Harry could reserve his gift for later; he’d already safely stowed it away in a cupboard he knew about and Severus didn’t.
But there was no sign of Severus’s presence in the kitchen, or the ground-floor room that had become Severus’s study, or the small bedroom where Ron sometimes stayed when he was too drunk to Apparate or Floo safely. Harry worked his way slowly up the staircase, wondering if Severus was asleep in his own bedroom, or if he would see the door of the Potions lab locked.
No. The door of the lab was open. And there was no sign of Severus in his bedroom, or the library, or the drawing room, or the bathroom. His heart pounding, Harry drew his wand, and called again. “Severus?”
No hum of broken wards. But there didn’t have to be, Harry thought grimly. He’d had a few old enemies attack him immediately after he left the Aurors and moved to Godric’s Hollow, because they thought he was vulnerable now that he didn’t have the Ministry wards or the protections of Grimmauld Place around him. Harry had swiftly disabused them of that notion, but he wondered if the recent public announcement about him beginning his training as a lawyer had changed things again.
Then Harry realized there was one place he hadn’t checked yet: his own bedroom. Severus would have no reason to enter it, but if there was an intruder in the house, or something had happened to Severus, there might be clues waiting for him there.
He made his way with slow steps to his bedroom, wand still drawn. He tried to keep his footsteps as silent as possible, even as he convinced himself that Severus might have stepped out to the shops, or still be at work—even though this was a day when he had his shop closed so that he could work on potions that involved wands—or have suddenly recollected a birthday party he needed to visit, or, well, anything.
He didn’t do a good job of convincing himself, which was probably the reason why he jumped when he peered around the door of his bedroom and found Severus standing there.
Harry stared. Severus stared. Of the two of them, he seemed to feel he was the one who didn’t need to explain himself. He just stood by Harry’s bed with his arms folded, and the most forbidding look on his face that Harry had seen outside his sixth year at Hogwarts.
But it was obvious that he wasn’t going to speak first, either about why he hadn’t responded when Harry was calling his name or about the large, flat, white envelope decorated with red ribbons that he had leaned against Harry’s pillow. So Harry put his wand away and did it for him. “What the fuck?”
Severus jerked a little at the term, and his face flushed. Then he looked towards the envelope on the bed, which meant he was looking at the bed. Harry flushed himself, but he still didn’t retreat. “Answer me, damn it,” he added. “And why didn’t you before? I was about ready to think that Death Eaters had taken you.”
“I was trying to come up with a Midwinter gift for you,” Severus snapped. “Trust you to ruin it all.”
Harry blinked and looked at the envelope again. Rather small for a book, which was the only thing he could think of that Severus might deem worthy of a Midwinter gift. Even then… “How did I ruin it?”
Severus shifted from having his arms folded to having his hands clasped in front of him. It didn’t work to stop Harry from looking at him, if that was what he had intended. Neither did making his face still colder. Harry waited.
“Fine,” Severus bit out at last, and as long as it made his eyes shine that way, as if he were alive, Harry didn’t care about his anger. “I was going to give you several days alone, so that you could bring your friends to the house and hold your Midwinter celebration here. I planned to stay in my flat above the shop, as before.” Before the handfasting, Harry thought, as Severus brandished his wrist. “A few days would not touch this—false marriage.”
Harry spoke before he thought. “And why would that make a good gift?” He had left the Beetles of the Sun downstairs, but at least he knew that he had chosen a good present, one that Severus could actually want. “And what’s in the envelope?” He pointed at it again.
“I left a note so that you would not worry about me.” Severus spoke the word like a martyr to Harry’s smothering concern, even though Harry had tried as hard as possible to maintain civility and peace the last few months. “And it is obvious that you do not want me around during your celebrations.”
Harry stared some more. “Samhain was the last one we shared,” he said, when he could find his tongue. “What gave you the impression I didn’t want you around?”
“Because you talked about gifts,” said Severus. He had gone back to being a statue. Or imitating a statue, maybe, because Harry couldn‘t live with someone more than half a year without picking up on some things about them, and Severus had this twitch of one nostril that got going when he thought someone was being obtuse. Harry watched, and said nothing, which got him more words. “About the presence of family. About the happy atmosphere that you wished to enjoy. To that I have nothing to contribute.”
Harry shook his head, a bubble of something warm and thick in his throat. He wanted to suppress it because he knew it might not come out the right way and alienate Severus further, but his words leaped out of him the minute Severus stopped speaking. Well, maybe Severus deserved words in return. “You right idiot,” he finally said, roughly, while Severus started at him in suspicion. “I include you in family. I got you a gift, and so did some of the Weasleys, but no one expected you to get us gifts if you’d rather not. And I want you to be happy, but I thought you’d go upstairs and brew in your lab or something if the kids got to be too much for you. It’s not meant—it’s not meant to exile you from your home.”
Severus’s hands closed so suddenly and sharply on air that Harry jumped again. Then he whispered, “You misunderstand me if you think I wish to be a part of that.”
Harry nodded. “Fine then. Go away if you like. But don’t present it as a gift to me. It’s not.”
Severus looked as if he wished he had another hand he could clench into a fist for the proper dramatic gesture. “You are placing it in a light that I did not intend.”
“Don’t I always do that?” Harry lounged against the door. He wondered if Severus had noticed yet that he was blocking the main way out. “Do whatever the fuck you want. But don’t stand there and tell me that it’s for me. If you’d paid the slightest bit of attention on Samhain, you would have noticed I wanted you there. And I want you here when you want to leave, sometimes, to ask questions of and have arguments with and tease. You don’t want to be around me all the time. I can certainly understand that. But I want you here more than I want you away.”
Severus recoiled. Harry winced. He hadn’t thought Severus’s hatred of the handfasting was that deep.
“I am trying to do something you want,” Severus whispered, voice unexpectedly soft. “I am trying to give you something you may not realize you want yourself.”
“Is this going to be another of those conversations where you try to present yourself as the older, wiser adult and I remind you that I’m grown up and I can make my own decisions?” Harry shook his head sadly. “I was tired of those years ago.” They’d had more of them recently, though, with Severus making abrupt, elliptical statements about the things he expected Harry to do when the handfasting was over, and Harry trying to reassure him, without saying it this openly in case he startled Severus into running or made him feel pressured, that he would like Severus to stick around when the handfasting was over. But Harry hadn’t thought it was leading up to this.
“Yes, when you were eleven, I have no doubt,” Severus said, and that was one of the least convincing sneers Harry had ever seen from him. “But nonetheless, it is true. You have your life ahead of you. You do not want to spend time with someone like me, no matter how much you think you do.”
Harry straightened. “What I find more infuriating than anything else,” he said cheerfully, “is being told that I don’t know my own mind.”
“I am merely saying—”
“People told me I didn’t know my own mind about becoming an Auror,” Harry said. “About fighting against Voldemort. About being the Heir of Slytherin. About going back to Hogwarts for one final year, instead of doing private tutoring for my NEWTS. About testifying at those Death Eater trials.” He saw from the flash of Severus’s eyes that that one had gone home. “About quitting the Aurors. About becoming a lawyer. About breaking up with Ginny. About handfasting with you. Every other day there’s some bloody story in the Prophet about how the poor little Chosen One, he doesn’t know what’s good for him, or he would be doing something else.” Harry dropped the false cheerfulness and leaned forwards. “I’m tired of hearing it in in my own home.”
“Your home. Mine only for the year. You have not considered—”
“I’ve thought about it more than you know.” Harry stepped forwards. “You’re not in my head.”
“I pick up on your thoughts from mere surface Legilimency. You have never properly tried to close your mind—”
“Because I prefer it open.” Harry came closer. There was really only a small strip of carpet parting them now, at least physically. “I know what I want. Perhaps it’s not always wise, and if it’s hurting you, then I want you to know that I would rather have you back off, the way you can leave if the Midwinter celebration here would hurt you too much. But I don’t want to drive you away. And I don’t want you to stand there sanctimoniously prattling on to me about what I want and don’t want. I know a little better than you.”
Severus gaped at him. Harry expected a lot of responses, but not, “When did you learn the word sanctimoniously?”
“Did you listen to a word I said?” Harry demanded. He knew how Severus would respond before he did, and added, “Any other word I said.”
“I heard you,” Severus said. His eyes had gone deep and contemplative, almost the way they had looked on Samhain—or Beltane. He held out one hand as though he was cupping the jar of the Beetles of the Sun that Harry had got him. “You got me a gift?”
Harry hesitated just once, because he had wanted to give Severus the gift on Midwinter Day itself, but that was long enough to make Severus nod briskly, drop his hand, and open his mouth to say something sharp and clever and wrong.
Harry sighed and said, “Accio jar.”
The apothecary had wrapped up the jar securely enough that Harry didn’t even wince when it zoomed up through several doorways and settled into his hands. Severus winced enough for both of them, seemingly unable to take his eyes away from the yellow glass showing above the wrappings.
“That cannot be what it looks like,” he whispered.
“You’re right,” Harry said, undoing some of the cloth bindings. “Because it looked like insect corpses in liquid dung to me, but the apothecary assured me it wasn’t.”
Severus was beside him in a moment, reaching out a trembling hand to touch the jar. For long, long seconds, Harry thought he was going to neither blink nor move, ever again. Harry cleared his throat. “Would you two like to be alone?”
Severus turned to face him.
And Harry swallowed. Apparently the way to a Slytherin’s heart was through gifts. Very expensive gifts.
Either that, or this had been what Severus needed to reassure himself that Harry wasn’t lying about him not needing to leave the house. Because he reached out, placed a hand on Harry’s shoulder much the way he had on the jar, and said, “I cannot return the generosity. I did not have an idea of another gift for you, and I have not bought one. And I do not care enough about the Weasleys to find out what they would like.”
“I know that,” Harry said, holding his eyes. “I don’t care.”
“But now I believe that you do not,” Severus breathed, and leaned forwards.
Harry met the kiss as gently as though Severus shimmered with the blue flames of Harry’s Mabon vow, as though he had the bleeding cut they had both made on Samhain, as though they were at this moment above one of the Beltane fires. And Severus met him back, so wary that it might not have qualified as a kiss except for the pressure of lips on his, the kiss that Severus had offered and Harry would take.
It lasted only until the jar shifted in Harry’s arms, and Severus stepped back and said sharply, “The beetles will be useless if you drop it!”
Harry found himself grinning, recklessly. There was the man he wanted.
Beltane Eve, 205
“And Teddy the Terrible and the dragon soared off into the sky,” Harry finished the story with a soft sigh, running his fingers through Teddy’s hair. He had drifted off to sleep, still holding onto Harry’s leg. His breathing was soft and regular, and Harry felt as if his heart was going to explode. This was different from the last Beltane Eve, sure, which Teddy hadn’t been able to attend because he was sick, but this was a lot better. Maybe if Teddy had been at the last one, Harry wouldn’t have been mad for the next day’s holiday, and thus mad enough to sleep with Severus.
“Harry. A word.”
Severus was the only person Harry knew capable of coming up to someone with his sleeping godson in his lap and talking to him like that, like Teddy wasn’t even there and didn’t even matter. Harry turned a glare on him, not getting up or removing Teddy from his lap. Severus would just have to get used to the fact that Harry wasn’t going to move him. “Yes? You wanted something, Severus?”
“I want to talk to you about the handfasting.” Severus opened his mouth to continue, and Harry realized that he apparently was going to just keep talking about it, even with the chances of Teddy waking up, if Harry didn’t move.
Luckily, Andromeda had been drifting towards them, and Harry could at least pick up the sleeping Teddy—he was an expert at not waking him, by now—and hold him towards his grandmother. “Will you take care of him for me?” he asked Andromeda, looking only at her and not at Severus.
“Of course,” said Andromeda, and looked at him for a second, a glance so full of pointed meaning Harry would have to be blind to ignore it. He grimaced back at her, and Andromeda sighed and moved off. She seemed to think that Severus lent some stability to Harry’s life, and stability was what Teddy needed his godfather to have, really needed all the adults in his life to have.
Harry could understand her position, but honestly, he didn’t see how he could have any more stability right now. Yes, he had changed his career and a lot about his way of living in the last year, but the handfasting had been one of those big changes. Keeping it around wouldn’t make things more stable. In fact, it would mean that he and Severus fought more, and Harry didn’t want to expose Teddy to those fights.
Not that it mattered. Severus sat beside Harry and said, “I do not wish to continue the handfasting.”
“I know that.” Harry reminded himself that he had faced down a basilisk when he was twelve and ought to be able to face down his lover when he was twice that age. He turned and looked at Severus. “Will you want help in moving your things out of the house and back to your flat?” There. That was a nice, mature question. He didn’t think anyone could fault him for the way he had asked it, either.
Severus’s face worked. “You do not understand me,” he said.
“I understand you all right,” Harry said, feeling a slight, bitter satisfaction that someone who scolded him often for acting young was doing the same thing, talking like a teenager, and stood and stalked away. Hermione frowned at him when he detoured to pick up a glass of Firewhisky, but Teddy was in good hands now, and it was late enough that he would probably sleep for the rest of the evening. Harry tilted the glass back and swallowed enough Firewhisky to make the back of his throat burn.
It was probably all his fault and his bloody stupid idea about the Imbolc party, anyway.
Imbolc, 2005
“We are having a party for Imbolc?” Severus had come home late from the shop, where he had apparently acquired a burned hand trying to help a particularly foolish boy bond better with his wand. Harry knew better than to ask for more details than that. It tired Severus to explain them, and it bored Harry to listen. Just like Severus knew the barest details of his own training in law, and the latest abuses and injustices he had uncovered, sometimes they got along better without talking.
Unfortunately, they did have to talk about this.
“Well, if you want one,” Harry said, and stirred his bowl of beef broth when Severus stared at him. Harry had been feeling sick the past few days, a headache and faint pain in his forehead and neck, and Kreacher had insisted on making this bloody stuff. “It’s a holiday that the Weasleys don’t celebrate. Molly doesn’t see much point in it. She says it’s never the beginning of spring until the leaves are fully out, anyway. She likes Ostara better.” He looked up and gave Severus a hopeful smile.
Severus said nothing for long enough that Harry finished almost the whole bowl of beef broth, and Kreacher only came from the kitchen to glare at him two times. Then he said, “You wish us to have a party on a day that matters to no one else?”
The tone of his voice was enough to tell Harry that he had fucked up again, although how he had done it this time, he really didn’t know. Nonetheless, it seemed to be a talent of his. He swore bitterly and dropped his spoon in the soup.
“I wanted to have a holiday that you and I could share with each other, and no one else,” he snapped, standing up. “I haven’t succeeded in that, and Merlin knows how I’ve offended you this time. I’ll just go up and we can pretend that we have two separate houses until you feel like talking again, how’s that?”
Severus had stood and come around the table, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, so that Harry couldn’t get out. That was so unusual that Harry paused and blinked at him. Severus put a hand on Harry’s shoulder—deliciously cool in contrast to Harry’s slightly flushed skin—and murmured, “You misunderstand me. I phrased it that way, but I was thinking of it in the way you mentioned.”
Harry jerked his head back and glared. “Yes, well, I’ll always misunderstand you unless you start fucking talking to me!”
That ought to have been the start of a fine row, but again Severus surprised him. “I can think of all sorts of things I would rather do,” he breathed, and lowered his mouth to Harry’s.
Harry nearly pulled away, nearly warned Severus about his sickness, nearly protested, nearly said that this was ridiculous, nearly did all sorts of things, until his common sense snatched him back.
Severus had brewed him some fever-reducing potions and another that had taken care of Harry’s cough. He knew all about the sickness, and obviously wanted to risk it anyway.
Severus didn’t do ridiculous things, or things that were obviously protestable. So he meant this, and Harry would be an idiot to give up what he had wanted for a while.
He formed his hands into claws, just in case Severus had any notion of withdrawing, and clenched his nails down into the flesh of Severus’s shoulders. Severus grunted but didn’t pull back even then, maybe because of Harry’s grip but maybe because he was wearing robes that dulled the pain a bit.
And he did most of the work to propel Harry up the stairs and towards the bedrooms. Harry didn’t know which one he’d chosen until his back hit his own bed and Severus trailed one hand down Harry’s breastbone. The cloth parted under his touch, sliding and shedding away as though Severus had Transfigured his nails into claws.
Harry saw it and laughed, breathlessly. “Nice spell.”
“I am rather good at the nonverbal,” Severus said, and kissed him again to prove it.
There was more proving, which involved more shredding of Harry’s clothes, and Severus taking off his own with such simple fussiness that Harry thought it would wear away the heat between them into exasperation. It didn’t. Harry just panted harder, and Severus gave him a look that tried to reach contempt and couldn’t.
“You are not often this nonverbal,” Severus murmured.
“There are times that you just shut up and take what’s offered,” Harry said, and turned over and spread his legs out, widely, arching his arse towards Severus to see what would happen.
It sounded like Severus was choking on his own tongue, was what would happen. Harry buried his face in the pillow, grinning.
“You are doing this on purpose,” Severus whispered, as if he had just now awakened to that conclusion.
“You suppose that?” Harry pushed his face into the bed and arched his back some more, wondering if he could make Severus say more inane things.
What happened now was a hand slamming down in the middle of his back, and Severus conjuring some slick potion to cover his fingers, or maybe just pulling it from his pocket. Harry wouldn’t know, since he was lying on his stomach. He did know that Severus had either stopped undressing or would have to fly through the rest of it. There was no way he could have finished, the pace he was going, when Harry had rolled over.
That didn’t seem to stop him from moving forwards now. He was actually muttering to himself, a stream of nonsense words. Harry didn’t think he’d made Severus have that reaction in the near-year they’d lived together. Even that first disastrous morning after the handfasting, Severus had had plenty to say, all of it article and (what Severus had thought was) well-argued.
Now he just muttered, and gasped when Harry turned his head back over his shoulder and smiled temptingly at him. “Are you going to satisfy yourself any time soon?” Harry murmured, cocking his head. “Because I’m ready, but I understand that it might take you a little more preparation.”
Severus’s robes were indeed pooled on the floor around his feet, but his shirt was still clinging to his chest, and his trousers were yanked down enough that Harry could see his cock but not much else. Severus made another wordless noise at his taunt and shoved his trousers the rest of the way down to his knees. Then he must have used that spell that turned his nails into claws again, because he razored his trousers to shreds the way he had with Harry’s clothes.
“Oh, good,” Harry said. “I thought I was the only one whose clothes would get that treatment.”
Severus clambered onto the bed with him. That was the only right word, and Harry would make sure to tell him that later. Later, because he did feel as though his own throat had gone dry and silent with the way that Severus was staring at him.
Severus started to say something else, but either it was always garbled or he knew it would be, because he shook his head after a moment and set about the serious business of pressing inside.
Harry enjoyed it, and either helped it along or got in the way by wriggling on the bed and aiming his arse in the general direction of Severus’s cock. He didn’t know which it was, but he enjoyed that, too, and it wasn’t as though Severus was capable of telling him to stop right now.
But finally Severus’s hands clamped his hips down, and Severus entered him with one rigid thrust. Harry muffled his cry into the pillow and wriggled back on Severus’s cock. Merlin, that felt good.
“That is enough for you?” Severus whispered to him.
He’d recovered use of his voice, damn. But Harry thought he knew how to take it away again. He braced his elbows on the sheets, judged his angle, and then jerked straight backwards, onto Severus’s cock.
Severus’s voice was thick, too soft for curses, but he bent forwards over Harry’s back and grabbed his shoulders instead of his hips. Harry sighed. There was a desperation to that grip that he hadn’t felt before, even when Severus was probing at him with his fingers.
And the desperation was what he wanted. Because the burning in his belly wouldn’t let him ignore it any longer, and he had to fuck himself with inadequate backwards movements until Severus got the hint and started actually moving.
Then Harry could put his face in the pillow again, and not hang onto anything, because Severus had hold of him.
Severus was muttering again, but this time, he was close enough that Harry could make out some of the words in between the thrusts. “Going to keep you close…want this…this is good…going to keep you close…”
Harry swallowed, and moved back to meet the thrusts again. No, he didn’t have to, not when Severus was doing so much of the work, but he wanted to, the way that Severus wanted to be here, with him.
Because those words were ones that Harry had wanted to hear for the last few months, since before Midwinter. But they were so bloody hard to get out of Severus. The man barely said anything, apparently under the delusion that Harry should understand his silences.
But now, he was saying them, gasping them out warm and liquid against the back of Harry’s neck, and his cock had sped up, pushing against Harry, pushing, pushing, until all the heat in his belly had become pleasure and Harry arched up again and came, this time, straightforward and open and honest and so much better than words.
It seemed to take Severus forever after that. He had slowed down when he felt Harry come, though, rocking on top of him with little movements for some reason. Harry glanced back at him, and found Severus staring at him, slightly crooked teeth showing where his lips were parted.
Harry smiled at him, and Severus lost the battle and sagged forwards and came, gripping Harry’s shoulders still in a way that made Harry hiss.
When Severus was leaning on him, Harry clasped one of his hands and examined it complacently. It was the one burned from the shop that day, but Severus wasn’t complaining now. Harry snickered to himself at that. Quite a feat to have brought Severus to a state where he couldn’t complain. Harry felt pride nearly as strong as his orgasm.
“Mine,” Severus whispered then.
Harry glanced back at him, wondering if he meant his hand. It wasn’t like Harry was going to forget that was Severus’s hand, which brought him so much more pleasure than his own. “What?”
“You,” Severus said. “This. It—it may have been a false handfasting that gave this to me, but I’m going to keep it.” And he dug in with the hand Harry had been holding, driving his fingers into Harry’s palm.
Harry closed his eyes and nodded, because if he tried to say, “Yes,” aloud at the moment, it would come out with a frankly embarrassing amount of enthusiasm.
But it seemed that Severus could understand silences as well as expect Harry to interpret them, because he grabbed Harry then, and twisted him around, and kissed him hard enough to seek out and swallow that Yes.
Beltane Eve, 2005
“I think Snape’s trying to get your attention, mate.”
Harry shrugged at Ron. “I know. But he’s told me all that he needs to say. He knows that he doesn’t want to continue the handfasting, and that’s what he told me.” He tilted his head back and let the Firewhisky work its way down his throat. He wouldn’t drink tomorrow, the actual day of Beltane, because he didn’t want to make an even worse decision than the handfasting had turned out to be. And he hadn’t wanted to drink while Teddy was still awake. But nothing to stop him from doing it now.
“I don’t think he agrees with that.” Ron’s voice was cautious, and he was eyeing the space over Harry’s shoulder nervously.
Harry snorted a little. “Well, he can just fuck off—”
“You do not wish to continue that sentence, Harry.”
Harry rolled his eyes as Ron made up a mumbled excuse about a potion brewing on the other side of the meadow, and fled. Coward. He couldn’t even make up good excuses.
Harry didn’t turn around, instead swallowing more Firewhisky and watching the bottle in his hands. Wasn’t everyone supposed to have the freedom to get drunk after their lover had rejected them? But Severus didn’t obey that rule, just like he didn’t obey all the other rules. He shouldn’t have been able to feel the vow that Harry had made at Mabon, according to the research Hermione had done on the subject, but yet, he had. He shouldn’t have been tied to Harry in this ridiculous handfasting, but yet he was. He shouldn’t have slept with Harry, but yet he had.
He shouldn’t have let what had happened at Ostara get to him, but he had.
Or was that me?
“Look at me,” Severus said. If Harry thought he had mastered the neutral tone after Ostara, it was nothing compared to Severus’s.
He looked up, shaking his head. “You don’t actually need to come over here and stand and stare at me,” he said.
“I was right,” Severus said. “You do not understand me.”
Harry shut his eyes and rubbed his hand over his forehead, over the lightning bolt scar that he had thought less about in the past year than he ever had before. He wished he could attribute that to his intense studies to be a lawyer and the excitement of being able to do new things with Teddy as he got older, but he couldn’t pretend like that, even to himself.
“And we’ve been through this again and again,” Harry said. “How I can’t expect words of affection from you, how I can never expect them from a Slytherin. I get it. I just—I just don’t want to spoil this night by brooding on it. Okay? And I want to know when you’re going to move out of the house.”
“I cannot speak the words.”
Harry nodded, his eyes down. He was the one who had taken that risk, like a good little Gryffindor, and he was the one who had been burned as a consequence. He really ought to have known better. He suspected that was what Severus would say.
“But I can show you.”
Harry blinked in confusion through the moment before Severus’s hand appeared under his nose, holding out a vial of potion so clear that it looked like Veritaserum. Harry took it and turned it around. No, it wasn’t like Veritaserum, which flowed like water. Instead, this sloshed and clung to the sides of the vial. It was viscous and a deep silver, not really transparent. Harry raised his confused eyes to Severus’s face.
“Will you take it?” That was a simple question, no threat, no demand. Harry didn’t know that he had ever heard Severus utter one like it.
It was enough to get his cooperation.
Harry took a deep breath and downed the bloody potion in one go.
Ostara, 2005
“I—I wanted to talk to you about something.”
Harry knew it was stupid to speak that way, to open any conversation with Severus that way. The stammering got his attention, sure, but it also meant that he was prone to pay exactly the wrong kind of attention. He turned from placing his cups in the cabinet—he no longer lined Harry’s cups up the same way, thank Merlin—and nodded.
“I know that it’s getting pretty near the end of our year,” Harry said. He had promised himself that he would be utterly straightforward, which made it all the more humiliating that he had started by babbling. “And the handfasting hasn’t been too bad lately, but it was horrible at first.”
Severus was still, watching him. Not a nod. Not a flinch, either. Harry told himself that was good enough, and pressed ahead. He couldn’t expect Severus to be all that enthusiastic about what he proposed, not when he had started off with such an unpromising beginning.
“But I was thinking that it might be different, now that we know how to make it work.” He moved around the table in Severus’s direction, needing to touch him. Sometimes he could feel, through the throb of Severus’s pulse if nothing else, what Severus was experiencing, even when he wouldn’t speak aloud. “That we could go on having a not-horrible handfasting even after it ends, now that we know.”
He managed to touch Severus’s wrist, but only for a moment as Severus turned to face him, his face strained and pale.
“You think that I would like to remain bonded,” said Severus. “Bound. When I have suffered enough from being bound for a dozen lifetimes.”
Harry opened his mouth, and stopped, blinking. He knew what Severus meant, but he had never directly compared the handfasting to the Dark Mark or the Unbreakable Vow or anything else like that before.
“I just—I mean, I thought this was different,” said Harry. He thought about saying that he didn’t think Severus would have slept with either Voldemort or Dumbledore willingly, but he had the sense not to say that a millisecond later. “Now that we know how to make it work. Now that it’s not horrid, the way it was for the first few months.”
“I will never want to remain bound,” Severus said. “Liking to sleep in the same bed with you has nothing to do with that.” He swept Harry with an expert, dismissive gaze, as if he could be all the more contemptuous of what was under Harry’s robes now that he had touched and seen it. “I do not wish to continue the bond beyond the day it ends.”
Harry swallowed. Then he said, “You think that you could just move out the day after it’s done, like it’s nothing?” Sometimes Severus couldn’t say the words, but he could respond after Harry had stated the obvious.
“I would be moving out sooner, if it were possible,” Severus said coldly, and turned towards the stairs.
Harry stared after him. What had gone wrong? Had it been worse than he thought? Had Severus simply been going along with what would get him free sex and—and maybe a nicer place to live than his flat, for as long as he had to? Had he decided that he might as well go along to get along?
And now Severus was walking away as if he owed Harry nothing, and his back told Harry nothing, either.
“You owe me more than that,” Harry heard himself saying, his voice shockingly low. Severus paused on the top step, turning halfway around. Harry still couldn’t see much more than his hair and the line of his jaw, but he didn’t care. He was going to demand answers. “I don’t care how hard it is for you to say. You can tell me.”
“It was not at all hard to say.” Severus glanced back down the stairs at him, musing, from the tone of his voice. “I did not ever enjoy being bound. That I might have enjoyed some of the consequences of it did not matter. I had already enjoyed those consequences once before the bond was completed, after all.”
Harry straightened his back. “Does this have something to do with the day?” he had to ask. He had thought the first day of spring was propitious to ask Severus to extend the handfasting, but maybe the party Harry had talked about going to at the Weasleys’ that evening had reminded Severus too much of Beltane. Or there could be some other bad memory associated with that day.
“It has nothing to do with the day, and everything to do with a dislike of being bound.” Severus’s voice had gone soft, too, but not soft enough that Harry didn’t hear what was in it. He didn’t have to shout down the stairs. “To know that when you do something, if you make another promise at the party tonight, I will have to watch those ribbons, those bonds, appear on my wrist again. I am done with being marked.”
And he went up the stairs.
Harry sat down at the table. He actually didn’t know how he had got back there from the bottom of the stairs, but it didn’t matter. He sat there and traced his finger across the tabletop, then stopped when he saw how his finger shook.
He had misjudged, but he didn’t know how.
Fucking Slytherins.
*
“Harry, dear?”
That was all Molly needed to do, that and a kind smile and one hand on his arm, and Harry couldn’t sit at the table the Weasleys had set up in the back garden and pretend to smile around at them anymore.
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” he muttered, and stumbled to his feet, working his way through the edge of the Warming Charm. Despite Molly’s best intentions to treat this party as the real beginning of spring, it was still too cold to sit outside without the spells.
The trees were decorated with green ribbons, and Charlie had brought fresh fruit from Romania and piled it at the roots. And there were fairy lights woven among the ribbons, making a different, gentler light from the half-Muggle Christmas celebration, and Harry’s eyes were blinded, and he stumbled on. He came up face first against a tree, and stood there, breathing little whistling breaths to himself.
He had been wrong. That was all. He had made a mistake.
Harry paused, and then stood back from the tree. Thinking about it like that made him feel better, strangely. If he thought that he hadn’t put his heart on the line and been soundly rejected, or reached out to Severus and had his hand slapped away again, the way he had during those first incredible days after he had realized that Severus had survived Nagini’s bite…
If he didn’t think those things, if he just thought that he’d made a mistake the way he had so often in his relationship with Ginny, then it was easier to bear.
Harry nodded a little and looked up at the green ribbons and fairy lights dangling in front of him. All right. Okay. If he thought of it like this, and knew they would get through the last six weeks of the handfasting with a better understanding of each other, then it was actually better. Not healed, not fine, but better.
He had made a mistake, the way he’d thought he had when he first went up and asked Severus to sleep with him at Beltane. Severus had relented on that, but Harry didn’t think he would relent on this. He’d spoken too casually about what not being bound meant to him, as if Harry should already know. He hadn’t rejected Harry’s offer at Beltane the same way.
So. No yielding. But Harry didn’t have to be yielding himself, either.
The first day of spring was a good day for making promises to himself, too.
I don’t have to be bound any more than living with him and being faithful already entails.
*
When Harry got home that evening, he Summoned his pyjamas and toothbrush and a few other things that had migrated into Severus’s bedroom and bathroom. They banged against the closed doors until Severus got up, swearing, and opened the doors to let them out.
And then Harry went on into his own bathroom, to brush his teeth and wash his face and do all the rest of the normal, nighttime routine, ignoring Severus’s sour demands for an explanation. When it came to the point that he thought Severus might stalk inside, Harry simply shut his own door.
They just had to endure through the last part of this bond. And Harry was good at ignoring pain.
He would apologize to Severus for his mistake in the morning, and do his best to immerse himself in the long, complicated study of precedence that Sita Patil, his latest mentor, had been recommending that he do for two months now.
He could do this.
No one knocked on his door. Harry curled up under the blankets and went to sleep, and that was really the last time that they spoke to each other except for utter necessities, before Beltane.
Beltane Eve, 2005
“Legilimens iter.”
When Harry heard Severus murmur the spell, he froze, because no matter how bad things had got between them, he couldn’t actually believe that Severus was going to read his mind without permission.
But he remembered the potion, and noted the word added on to the last part of the spell, and held still, trying to trust. Until very recently, he had trusted Severus, after all.
He felt the spell briefly touch his mind, and then it seemed to turn and reverse and go back the other way. And as Harry met Severus’s wide eyes, he fell into them, into his memories, the one place Harry couldn’t have managed to go by himself, at least not without causing Severus all sorts of pain. The potion seemed to stir in his blood, reinforcing Harry’s gentle drift through Severus’s thoughts, caught in a current that guided him towards one place.
And that was the memory of Severus standing outside Harry’s bedroom door, which must have been the night of Ostara, his hand raised to knock. Then he lowered it, and spent some time staring at the Dark Mark on his left arm, and the ribbons of light that manifested around the same wrist when he spent enough time looking at them.
Then he shook his head so hard and so bitterly that Harry nearly reached out to comfort him, before turning away.
Harry wondered why Severus had been so desperate to show him this, enough to brew a potion that must have been complicated. Harry knew that he had turned away, no matter how bad he felt that night. Why emphasize it?
But then the memories swirled and settled again, and Harry saw himself and Severus lying in bed, Severus tracing one hand down Harry’s cheek. Imbolc? It must be; Harry doubted he himself had looked that happy since then. Severus was staring at Harry’s face as though the expression of joy would dissolve any second.
I don’t understand, Harry thought. If he liked being with me, why did he say what he did about the handfasting and the house?
The memories shifted again, and this time Harry was confronting Severus in his bedroom, the Midwinter day that Severus had intended to steal off and leave him the “gift” of days alone. Severus’s heart beat wildly, his blood glinted, and the warmth in the middle of his chest made Harry feel as if he was standing in the heart of the sun.
This is what he couldn’t speak aloud.
There was no voice of Severus’s thoughts to answer him, but Harry was good at figuring out some things on his own.
And there was the night of Samhain in the garden, and there was the way that Severus had come out with that sun-like warmth frozen to moon-coldness in his chest, so afraid was he of having his reaching hand slapped away. And the way it had melted and burst into flame when Harry had smiled at him.
And the moment at Mabon when the blue ribbon had formed on Severus’s wrist, and his second thought was the panicked one that he might have been bound further into this fucking handfasting, but the first thought was the panicked one that something might have happened to Harry.
And the memory of Harry choking on the floor of the lab, the same day as his birthday, and how willing Severus was to stay with him and make sure that he got no worse, if he could have, because this was a mistake, a mistake that had hurt someone who had helped him.
And the resentment at Midsummer that Harry wanted to go and celebrate with people who were loud and constantly moving and didn’t understand the darkness and the silence and the stillness that Severus liked—the even-better-hidden resentment that Harry wanted to go to the Burrow instead of spending the day quietly in the house.
And the moment at Beltane, the wonder at Beltane, when Harry came up to him, giddy and prancing and gleeful, and offered something that was so far outside his dreams that Severus would never have thought to demand it.
All those memories sped and skimmed around Harry like swallows, and seemed to fly out through his ears, and he was back in his body in seconds, gasping, holding out his hands, and feeling Severus take his hands and hold them. Severus was looking at the ground. That didn’t surprise Harry. He might be able to let his own warmth shine through his words and eyes, but Severus couldn’t, and that was the way he was, the way Harry would have to accept that he was if he wanted to stay with him.
But for this moment, he still didn’t know if he did. And this moment was a fulcrum, the turning of a year, and Harry was going to ask.
“Why?” Harry whispered. “Why not continue?”
And Severus heard him, and answered.
“Because I do not want to be bound,” he said, and raised his head. His eyes were still defiant when they met Harry’s, still unwilling. They probably always would be, Harry thought, and resisted the urge to reach out and stroke Severus’s hair. That gesture wouldn’t do right now, and anyway, their hands were clasped so tightly that it wouldn’t work. “That does not mean that I do not wish to live with you. Of my own free choice. In a place of my own free choice.”
“You don’t want to be handfasted, and you want to live in your flat?” Harry asked. Severus had met him more than halfway. He could do his part by speaking the words that Severus could not.
Severus nodded, once, a hard, fast nod as though he wanted to shed the burden of the ideas as well as the words.
Harry reached out and finally separated their hands. Severus looked up at him, wary enough to retreat, Harry knew, if he said or did the wrong thing. The last six weeks of no more than common politeness had weakened Severus’s trust in Harry as Severus’s apparent disdain for him had weakened Harry’s in return.
But Harry laid their wrists together, the ones that glittered with the magical ribbons of the handfasting. Severus stiffened, and sneered, but Harry reached out and hushed him simply by pulling the nearest edge of the ribbon, the gesture of pulling it off, and flinging it away. The ribbons didn’t move—they were magical, and wouldn’t, until the day after tomorrow—but Severus watched the gesture as intently as if they had.
And Harry left their wrists together, his own wordless declaration.
Severus leaned forwards slowly enough to give Harry time to get away, but Harry didn’t. They had both made mistakes. They had both been sorry. But now was the time to go beyond that, to do more than that.
Harry met Severus’s kiss, met it with his passion, and his relief, and his bounding delight. They weren’t standing in a fire; they wouldn’t be jumping over one; perhaps they wouldn’t even share tonight on a bed of leaves, the way they had almost a year ago.
But it didn’t matter. Standing there like that, with the brightness of understanding between them, was enough like standing in the heart of the sun for Harry.
The End.
Midwinter, 2004
Harry hesitated a long time in front of the shelves in the apothecary. At one point he stretched out a hand towards a jar of what looked like pickled beetles floating in dung, and then snatched it back.
Then he scowled at himself. What he was doing was far more childish than the impulse that had brought him to the shop in the first place.
Resolutely setting his shoulders straight, he picked up the jar and turned towards the counter. The owner of the apothecary, a wizard with an eyepatch and burn scars on the left side of his face, gave him an incurious glance that didn’t change even when he saw Harry’s lightning bolt scar.
When he saw the jar Harry was carrying, though, he straightened up and sucked in his breath. Harry stopped, heart buzzing. “What is it?” he asked, wondering if he had somehow managed to choose the one set of illegal ingredients in a mostly legitimate apothecary, or if the description in Severus’s Potions books had led him astray. He barely understood the books anyway. “Is something wrong?”
“Do you know what those are?” The apothecary was whispering, one finger pointing at the jar.
“Um,” said Harry. “Not really.” The description in the Potions books had been confusing enough that he only knew they had once been insects, and that the liquid they were pickled or floating in made them magically powerful.
“Those are Beetles of the Sun, so they are.” The apothecary’s voice was reverent as he took the jar and turned it over in his hands. Harry told himself sharply not to take it back. The apothecary wasn’t going to steal it. He could have taken it at any time if he wanted to. It was in his shop. “I’d almost forgotten we had them. They’re so expensive…”
Harry picked up his courage. The apothecary probably knew Harry was handfasted to Severus, because most of the wizarding world did, but he didn’t seem to care much about who Harry actually was, so he also might not care who Harry was buying these for. “So they would make a good gift for a Potions master?”
The apothecary cackled, suddenly enough that Harry was glad he wasn’t holding the jar of the Beetles of the Sun anymore. He would have dropped them. “I’d say so, laddie! The potions you can make with these, the warmth they can create without a fire, the sweet taste they can bring to even the worst-tasting pain potion…” The apothecary caressed the jar again. “But it’s not every potions brewer who can use them correctly. The magic in them only comes out with the right training in crushing them, see? It only responds to the powerful.”
Harry relaxed. That described Severus all over. “I’ll take them, then.”
The price did make his hands falter as they reached for the Galleons he’d brought, but no matter. If Severus knew how expensive they were, he might even appreciate them more.
He might appreciate them, period, Harry thought, as he stepped out of the shop with the jar of the Beetles of the Sun clutched in his hand.
He might appreciate me.
But Harry refused to allow the thought to spend much time in his head, turning and striding energetically for the Apparition point.
*
“Severus?”
Harry stepped into the house and looked around, frowning. He hadn’t expected immediate acknowledgement; at this time of day, Severus would be in his Potions lab, and there would be only a robe draped on a chair or a newspaper placed under, or maybe over, a cooling cup of tea, whatever he had abandoned when his latest idea took him. Harry could reserve his gift for later; he’d already safely stowed it away in a cupboard he knew about and Severus didn’t.
But there was no sign of Severus’s presence in the kitchen, or the ground-floor room that had become Severus’s study, or the small bedroom where Ron sometimes stayed when he was too drunk to Apparate or Floo safely. Harry worked his way slowly up the staircase, wondering if Severus was asleep in his own bedroom, or if he would see the door of the Potions lab locked.
No. The door of the lab was open. And there was no sign of Severus in his bedroom, or the library, or the drawing room, or the bathroom. His heart pounding, Harry drew his wand, and called again. “Severus?”
No hum of broken wards. But there didn’t have to be, Harry thought grimly. He’d had a few old enemies attack him immediately after he left the Aurors and moved to Godric’s Hollow, because they thought he was vulnerable now that he didn’t have the Ministry wards or the protections of Grimmauld Place around him. Harry had swiftly disabused them of that notion, but he wondered if the recent public announcement about him beginning his training as a lawyer had changed things again.
Then Harry realized there was one place he hadn’t checked yet: his own bedroom. Severus would have no reason to enter it, but if there was an intruder in the house, or something had happened to Severus, there might be clues waiting for him there.
He made his way with slow steps to his bedroom, wand still drawn. He tried to keep his footsteps as silent as possible, even as he convinced himself that Severus might have stepped out to the shops, or still be at work—even though this was a day when he had his shop closed so that he could work on potions that involved wands—or have suddenly recollected a birthday party he needed to visit, or, well, anything.
He didn’t do a good job of convincing himself, which was probably the reason why he jumped when he peered around the door of his bedroom and found Severus standing there.
Harry stared. Severus stared. Of the two of them, he seemed to feel he was the one who didn’t need to explain himself. He just stood by Harry’s bed with his arms folded, and the most forbidding look on his face that Harry had seen outside his sixth year at Hogwarts.
But it was obvious that he wasn’t going to speak first, either about why he hadn’t responded when Harry was calling his name or about the large, flat, white envelope decorated with red ribbons that he had leaned against Harry’s pillow. So Harry put his wand away and did it for him. “What the fuck?”
Severus jerked a little at the term, and his face flushed. Then he looked towards the envelope on the bed, which meant he was looking at the bed. Harry flushed himself, but he still didn’t retreat. “Answer me, damn it,” he added. “And why didn’t you before? I was about ready to think that Death Eaters had taken you.”
“I was trying to come up with a Midwinter gift for you,” Severus snapped. “Trust you to ruin it all.”
Harry blinked and looked at the envelope again. Rather small for a book, which was the only thing he could think of that Severus might deem worthy of a Midwinter gift. Even then… “How did I ruin it?”
Severus shifted from having his arms folded to having his hands clasped in front of him. It didn’t work to stop Harry from looking at him, if that was what he had intended. Neither did making his face still colder. Harry waited.
“Fine,” Severus bit out at last, and as long as it made his eyes shine that way, as if he were alive, Harry didn’t care about his anger. “I was going to give you several days alone, so that you could bring your friends to the house and hold your Midwinter celebration here. I planned to stay in my flat above the shop, as before.” Before the handfasting, Harry thought, as Severus brandished his wrist. “A few days would not touch this—false marriage.”
Harry spoke before he thought. “And why would that make a good gift?” He had left the Beetles of the Sun downstairs, but at least he knew that he had chosen a good present, one that Severus could actually want. “And what’s in the envelope?” He pointed at it again.
“I left a note so that you would not worry about me.” Severus spoke the word like a martyr to Harry’s smothering concern, even though Harry had tried as hard as possible to maintain civility and peace the last few months. “And it is obvious that you do not want me around during your celebrations.”
Harry stared some more. “Samhain was the last one we shared,” he said, when he could find his tongue. “What gave you the impression I didn’t want you around?”
“Because you talked about gifts,” said Severus. He had gone back to being a statue. Or imitating a statue, maybe, because Harry couldn‘t live with someone more than half a year without picking up on some things about them, and Severus had this twitch of one nostril that got going when he thought someone was being obtuse. Harry watched, and said nothing, which got him more words. “About the presence of family. About the happy atmosphere that you wished to enjoy. To that I have nothing to contribute.”
Harry shook his head, a bubble of something warm and thick in his throat. He wanted to suppress it because he knew it might not come out the right way and alienate Severus further, but his words leaped out of him the minute Severus stopped speaking. Well, maybe Severus deserved words in return. “You right idiot,” he finally said, roughly, while Severus started at him in suspicion. “I include you in family. I got you a gift, and so did some of the Weasleys, but no one expected you to get us gifts if you’d rather not. And I want you to be happy, but I thought you’d go upstairs and brew in your lab or something if the kids got to be too much for you. It’s not meant—it’s not meant to exile you from your home.”
Severus’s hands closed so suddenly and sharply on air that Harry jumped again. Then he whispered, “You misunderstand me if you think I wish to be a part of that.”
Harry nodded. “Fine then. Go away if you like. But don’t present it as a gift to me. It’s not.”
Severus looked as if he wished he had another hand he could clench into a fist for the proper dramatic gesture. “You are placing it in a light that I did not intend.”
“Don’t I always do that?” Harry lounged against the door. He wondered if Severus had noticed yet that he was blocking the main way out. “Do whatever the fuck you want. But don’t stand there and tell me that it’s for me. If you’d paid the slightest bit of attention on Samhain, you would have noticed I wanted you there. And I want you here when you want to leave, sometimes, to ask questions of and have arguments with and tease. You don’t want to be around me all the time. I can certainly understand that. But I want you here more than I want you away.”
Severus recoiled. Harry winced. He hadn’t thought Severus’s hatred of the handfasting was that deep.
“I am trying to do something you want,” Severus whispered, voice unexpectedly soft. “I am trying to give you something you may not realize you want yourself.”
“Is this going to be another of those conversations where you try to present yourself as the older, wiser adult and I remind you that I’m grown up and I can make my own decisions?” Harry shook his head sadly. “I was tired of those years ago.” They’d had more of them recently, though, with Severus making abrupt, elliptical statements about the things he expected Harry to do when the handfasting was over, and Harry trying to reassure him, without saying it this openly in case he startled Severus into running or made him feel pressured, that he would like Severus to stick around when the handfasting was over. But Harry hadn’t thought it was leading up to this.
“Yes, when you were eleven, I have no doubt,” Severus said, and that was one of the least convincing sneers Harry had ever seen from him. “But nonetheless, it is true. You have your life ahead of you. You do not want to spend time with someone like me, no matter how much you think you do.”
Harry straightened. “What I find more infuriating than anything else,” he said cheerfully, “is being told that I don’t know my own mind.”
“I am merely saying—”
“People told me I didn’t know my own mind about becoming an Auror,” Harry said. “About fighting against Voldemort. About being the Heir of Slytherin. About going back to Hogwarts for one final year, instead of doing private tutoring for my NEWTS. About testifying at those Death Eater trials.” He saw from the flash of Severus’s eyes that that one had gone home. “About quitting the Aurors. About becoming a lawyer. About breaking up with Ginny. About handfasting with you. Every other day there’s some bloody story in the Prophet about how the poor little Chosen One, he doesn’t know what’s good for him, or he would be doing something else.” Harry dropped the false cheerfulness and leaned forwards. “I’m tired of hearing it in in my own home.”
“Your home. Mine only for the year. You have not considered—”
“I’ve thought about it more than you know.” Harry stepped forwards. “You’re not in my head.”
“I pick up on your thoughts from mere surface Legilimency. You have never properly tried to close your mind—”
“Because I prefer it open.” Harry came closer. There was really only a small strip of carpet parting them now, at least physically. “I know what I want. Perhaps it’s not always wise, and if it’s hurting you, then I want you to know that I would rather have you back off, the way you can leave if the Midwinter celebration here would hurt you too much. But I don’t want to drive you away. And I don’t want you to stand there sanctimoniously prattling on to me about what I want and don’t want. I know a little better than you.”
Severus gaped at him. Harry expected a lot of responses, but not, “When did you learn the word sanctimoniously?”
“Did you listen to a word I said?” Harry demanded. He knew how Severus would respond before he did, and added, “Any other word I said.”
“I heard you,” Severus said. His eyes had gone deep and contemplative, almost the way they had looked on Samhain—or Beltane. He held out one hand as though he was cupping the jar of the Beetles of the Sun that Harry had got him. “You got me a gift?”
Harry hesitated just once, because he had wanted to give Severus the gift on Midwinter Day itself, but that was long enough to make Severus nod briskly, drop his hand, and open his mouth to say something sharp and clever and wrong.
Harry sighed and said, “Accio jar.”
The apothecary had wrapped up the jar securely enough that Harry didn’t even wince when it zoomed up through several doorways and settled into his hands. Severus winced enough for both of them, seemingly unable to take his eyes away from the yellow glass showing above the wrappings.
“That cannot be what it looks like,” he whispered.
“You’re right,” Harry said, undoing some of the cloth bindings. “Because it looked like insect corpses in liquid dung to me, but the apothecary assured me it wasn’t.”
Severus was beside him in a moment, reaching out a trembling hand to touch the jar. For long, long seconds, Harry thought he was going to neither blink nor move, ever again. Harry cleared his throat. “Would you two like to be alone?”
Severus turned to face him.
And Harry swallowed. Apparently the way to a Slytherin’s heart was through gifts. Very expensive gifts.
Either that, or this had been what Severus needed to reassure himself that Harry wasn’t lying about him not needing to leave the house. Because he reached out, placed a hand on Harry’s shoulder much the way he had on the jar, and said, “I cannot return the generosity. I did not have an idea of another gift for you, and I have not bought one. And I do not care enough about the Weasleys to find out what they would like.”
“I know that,” Harry said, holding his eyes. “I don’t care.”
“But now I believe that you do not,” Severus breathed, and leaned forwards.
Harry met the kiss as gently as though Severus shimmered with the blue flames of Harry’s Mabon vow, as though he had the bleeding cut they had both made on Samhain, as though they were at this moment above one of the Beltane fires. And Severus met him back, so wary that it might not have qualified as a kiss except for the pressure of lips on his, the kiss that Severus had offered and Harry would take.
It lasted only until the jar shifted in Harry’s arms, and Severus stepped back and said sharply, “The beetles will be useless if you drop it!”
Harry found himself grinning, recklessly. There was the man he wanted.
Beltane Eve, 205
“And Teddy the Terrible and the dragon soared off into the sky,” Harry finished the story with a soft sigh, running his fingers through Teddy’s hair. He had drifted off to sleep, still holding onto Harry’s leg. His breathing was soft and regular, and Harry felt as if his heart was going to explode. This was different from the last Beltane Eve, sure, which Teddy hadn’t been able to attend because he was sick, but this was a lot better. Maybe if Teddy had been at the last one, Harry wouldn’t have been mad for the next day’s holiday, and thus mad enough to sleep with Severus.
“Harry. A word.”
Severus was the only person Harry knew capable of coming up to someone with his sleeping godson in his lap and talking to him like that, like Teddy wasn’t even there and didn’t even matter. Harry turned a glare on him, not getting up or removing Teddy from his lap. Severus would just have to get used to the fact that Harry wasn’t going to move him. “Yes? You wanted something, Severus?”
“I want to talk to you about the handfasting.” Severus opened his mouth to continue, and Harry realized that he apparently was going to just keep talking about it, even with the chances of Teddy waking up, if Harry didn’t move.
Luckily, Andromeda had been drifting towards them, and Harry could at least pick up the sleeping Teddy—he was an expert at not waking him, by now—and hold him towards his grandmother. “Will you take care of him for me?” he asked Andromeda, looking only at her and not at Severus.
“Of course,” said Andromeda, and looked at him for a second, a glance so full of pointed meaning Harry would have to be blind to ignore it. He grimaced back at her, and Andromeda sighed and moved off. She seemed to think that Severus lent some stability to Harry’s life, and stability was what Teddy needed his godfather to have, really needed all the adults in his life to have.
Harry could understand her position, but honestly, he didn’t see how he could have any more stability right now. Yes, he had changed his career and a lot about his way of living in the last year, but the handfasting had been one of those big changes. Keeping it around wouldn’t make things more stable. In fact, it would mean that he and Severus fought more, and Harry didn’t want to expose Teddy to those fights.
Not that it mattered. Severus sat beside Harry and said, “I do not wish to continue the handfasting.”
“I know that.” Harry reminded himself that he had faced down a basilisk when he was twelve and ought to be able to face down his lover when he was twice that age. He turned and looked at Severus. “Will you want help in moving your things out of the house and back to your flat?” There. That was a nice, mature question. He didn’t think anyone could fault him for the way he had asked it, either.
Severus’s face worked. “You do not understand me,” he said.
“I understand you all right,” Harry said, feeling a slight, bitter satisfaction that someone who scolded him often for acting young was doing the same thing, talking like a teenager, and stood and stalked away. Hermione frowned at him when he detoured to pick up a glass of Firewhisky, but Teddy was in good hands now, and it was late enough that he would probably sleep for the rest of the evening. Harry tilted the glass back and swallowed enough Firewhisky to make the back of his throat burn.
It was probably all his fault and his bloody stupid idea about the Imbolc party, anyway.
Imbolc, 2005
“We are having a party for Imbolc?” Severus had come home late from the shop, where he had apparently acquired a burned hand trying to help a particularly foolish boy bond better with his wand. Harry knew better than to ask for more details than that. It tired Severus to explain them, and it bored Harry to listen. Just like Severus knew the barest details of his own training in law, and the latest abuses and injustices he had uncovered, sometimes they got along better without talking.
Unfortunately, they did have to talk about this.
“Well, if you want one,” Harry said, and stirred his bowl of beef broth when Severus stared at him. Harry had been feeling sick the past few days, a headache and faint pain in his forehead and neck, and Kreacher had insisted on making this bloody stuff. “It’s a holiday that the Weasleys don’t celebrate. Molly doesn’t see much point in it. She says it’s never the beginning of spring until the leaves are fully out, anyway. She likes Ostara better.” He looked up and gave Severus a hopeful smile.
Severus said nothing for long enough that Harry finished almost the whole bowl of beef broth, and Kreacher only came from the kitchen to glare at him two times. Then he said, “You wish us to have a party on a day that matters to no one else?”
The tone of his voice was enough to tell Harry that he had fucked up again, although how he had done it this time, he really didn’t know. Nonetheless, it seemed to be a talent of his. He swore bitterly and dropped his spoon in the soup.
“I wanted to have a holiday that you and I could share with each other, and no one else,” he snapped, standing up. “I haven’t succeeded in that, and Merlin knows how I’ve offended you this time. I’ll just go up and we can pretend that we have two separate houses until you feel like talking again, how’s that?”
Severus had stood and come around the table, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, so that Harry couldn’t get out. That was so unusual that Harry paused and blinked at him. Severus put a hand on Harry’s shoulder—deliciously cool in contrast to Harry’s slightly flushed skin—and murmured, “You misunderstand me. I phrased it that way, but I was thinking of it in the way you mentioned.”
Harry jerked his head back and glared. “Yes, well, I’ll always misunderstand you unless you start fucking talking to me!”
That ought to have been the start of a fine row, but again Severus surprised him. “I can think of all sorts of things I would rather do,” he breathed, and lowered his mouth to Harry’s.
Harry nearly pulled away, nearly warned Severus about his sickness, nearly protested, nearly said that this was ridiculous, nearly did all sorts of things, until his common sense snatched him back.
Severus had brewed him some fever-reducing potions and another that had taken care of Harry’s cough. He knew all about the sickness, and obviously wanted to risk it anyway.
Severus didn’t do ridiculous things, or things that were obviously protestable. So he meant this, and Harry would be an idiot to give up what he had wanted for a while.
He formed his hands into claws, just in case Severus had any notion of withdrawing, and clenched his nails down into the flesh of Severus’s shoulders. Severus grunted but didn’t pull back even then, maybe because of Harry’s grip but maybe because he was wearing robes that dulled the pain a bit.
And he did most of the work to propel Harry up the stairs and towards the bedrooms. Harry didn’t know which one he’d chosen until his back hit his own bed and Severus trailed one hand down Harry’s breastbone. The cloth parted under his touch, sliding and shedding away as though Severus had Transfigured his nails into claws.
Harry saw it and laughed, breathlessly. “Nice spell.”
“I am rather good at the nonverbal,” Severus said, and kissed him again to prove it.
There was more proving, which involved more shredding of Harry’s clothes, and Severus taking off his own with such simple fussiness that Harry thought it would wear away the heat between them into exasperation. It didn’t. Harry just panted harder, and Severus gave him a look that tried to reach contempt and couldn’t.
“You are not often this nonverbal,” Severus murmured.
“There are times that you just shut up and take what’s offered,” Harry said, and turned over and spread his legs out, widely, arching his arse towards Severus to see what would happen.
It sounded like Severus was choking on his own tongue, was what would happen. Harry buried his face in the pillow, grinning.
“You are doing this on purpose,” Severus whispered, as if he had just now awakened to that conclusion.
“You suppose that?” Harry pushed his face into the bed and arched his back some more, wondering if he could make Severus say more inane things.
What happened now was a hand slamming down in the middle of his back, and Severus conjuring some slick potion to cover his fingers, or maybe just pulling it from his pocket. Harry wouldn’t know, since he was lying on his stomach. He did know that Severus had either stopped undressing or would have to fly through the rest of it. There was no way he could have finished, the pace he was going, when Harry had rolled over.
That didn’t seem to stop him from moving forwards now. He was actually muttering to himself, a stream of nonsense words. Harry didn’t think he’d made Severus have that reaction in the near-year they’d lived together. Even that first disastrous morning after the handfasting, Severus had had plenty to say, all of it article and (what Severus had thought was) well-argued.
Now he just muttered, and gasped when Harry turned his head back over his shoulder and smiled temptingly at him. “Are you going to satisfy yourself any time soon?” Harry murmured, cocking his head. “Because I’m ready, but I understand that it might take you a little more preparation.”
Severus’s robes were indeed pooled on the floor around his feet, but his shirt was still clinging to his chest, and his trousers were yanked down enough that Harry could see his cock but not much else. Severus made another wordless noise at his taunt and shoved his trousers the rest of the way down to his knees. Then he must have used that spell that turned his nails into claws again, because he razored his trousers to shreds the way he had with Harry’s clothes.
“Oh, good,” Harry said. “I thought I was the only one whose clothes would get that treatment.”
Severus clambered onto the bed with him. That was the only right word, and Harry would make sure to tell him that later. Later, because he did feel as though his own throat had gone dry and silent with the way that Severus was staring at him.
Severus started to say something else, but either it was always garbled or he knew it would be, because he shook his head after a moment and set about the serious business of pressing inside.
Harry enjoyed it, and either helped it along or got in the way by wriggling on the bed and aiming his arse in the general direction of Severus’s cock. He didn’t know which it was, but he enjoyed that, too, and it wasn’t as though Severus was capable of telling him to stop right now.
But finally Severus’s hands clamped his hips down, and Severus entered him with one rigid thrust. Harry muffled his cry into the pillow and wriggled back on Severus’s cock. Merlin, that felt good.
“That is enough for you?” Severus whispered to him.
He’d recovered use of his voice, damn. But Harry thought he knew how to take it away again. He braced his elbows on the sheets, judged his angle, and then jerked straight backwards, onto Severus’s cock.
Severus’s voice was thick, too soft for curses, but he bent forwards over Harry’s back and grabbed his shoulders instead of his hips. Harry sighed. There was a desperation to that grip that he hadn’t felt before, even when Severus was probing at him with his fingers.
And the desperation was what he wanted. Because the burning in his belly wouldn’t let him ignore it any longer, and he had to fuck himself with inadequate backwards movements until Severus got the hint and started actually moving.
Then Harry could put his face in the pillow again, and not hang onto anything, because Severus had hold of him.
Severus was muttering again, but this time, he was close enough that Harry could make out some of the words in between the thrusts. “Going to keep you close…want this…this is good…going to keep you close…”
Harry swallowed, and moved back to meet the thrusts again. No, he didn’t have to, not when Severus was doing so much of the work, but he wanted to, the way that Severus wanted to be here, with him.
Because those words were ones that Harry had wanted to hear for the last few months, since before Midwinter. But they were so bloody hard to get out of Severus. The man barely said anything, apparently under the delusion that Harry should understand his silences.
But now, he was saying them, gasping them out warm and liquid against the back of Harry’s neck, and his cock had sped up, pushing against Harry, pushing, pushing, until all the heat in his belly had become pleasure and Harry arched up again and came, this time, straightforward and open and honest and so much better than words.
It seemed to take Severus forever after that. He had slowed down when he felt Harry come, though, rocking on top of him with little movements for some reason. Harry glanced back at him, and found Severus staring at him, slightly crooked teeth showing where his lips were parted.
Harry smiled at him, and Severus lost the battle and sagged forwards and came, gripping Harry’s shoulders still in a way that made Harry hiss.
When Severus was leaning on him, Harry clasped one of his hands and examined it complacently. It was the one burned from the shop that day, but Severus wasn’t complaining now. Harry snickered to himself at that. Quite a feat to have brought Severus to a state where he couldn’t complain. Harry felt pride nearly as strong as his orgasm.
“Mine,” Severus whispered then.
Harry glanced back at him, wondering if he meant his hand. It wasn’t like Harry was going to forget that was Severus’s hand, which brought him so much more pleasure than his own. “What?”
“You,” Severus said. “This. It—it may have been a false handfasting that gave this to me, but I’m going to keep it.” And he dug in with the hand Harry had been holding, driving his fingers into Harry’s palm.
Harry closed his eyes and nodded, because if he tried to say, “Yes,” aloud at the moment, it would come out with a frankly embarrassing amount of enthusiasm.
But it seemed that Severus could understand silences as well as expect Harry to interpret them, because he grabbed Harry then, and twisted him around, and kissed him hard enough to seek out and swallow that Yes.
Beltane Eve, 2005
“I think Snape’s trying to get your attention, mate.”
Harry shrugged at Ron. “I know. But he’s told me all that he needs to say. He knows that he doesn’t want to continue the handfasting, and that’s what he told me.” He tilted his head back and let the Firewhisky work its way down his throat. He wouldn’t drink tomorrow, the actual day of Beltane, because he didn’t want to make an even worse decision than the handfasting had turned out to be. And he hadn’t wanted to drink while Teddy was still awake. But nothing to stop him from doing it now.
“I don’t think he agrees with that.” Ron’s voice was cautious, and he was eyeing the space over Harry’s shoulder nervously.
Harry snorted a little. “Well, he can just fuck off—”
“You do not wish to continue that sentence, Harry.”
Harry rolled his eyes as Ron made up a mumbled excuse about a potion brewing on the other side of the meadow, and fled. Coward. He couldn’t even make up good excuses.
Harry didn’t turn around, instead swallowing more Firewhisky and watching the bottle in his hands. Wasn’t everyone supposed to have the freedom to get drunk after their lover had rejected them? But Severus didn’t obey that rule, just like he didn’t obey all the other rules. He shouldn’t have been able to feel the vow that Harry had made at Mabon, according to the research Hermione had done on the subject, but yet, he had. He shouldn’t have been tied to Harry in this ridiculous handfasting, but yet he was. He shouldn’t have slept with Harry, but yet he had.
He shouldn’t have let what had happened at Ostara get to him, but he had.
Or was that me?
“Look at me,” Severus said. If Harry thought he had mastered the neutral tone after Ostara, it was nothing compared to Severus’s.
He looked up, shaking his head. “You don’t actually need to come over here and stand and stare at me,” he said.
“I was right,” Severus said. “You do not understand me.”
Harry shut his eyes and rubbed his hand over his forehead, over the lightning bolt scar that he had thought less about in the past year than he ever had before. He wished he could attribute that to his intense studies to be a lawyer and the excitement of being able to do new things with Teddy as he got older, but he couldn’t pretend like that, even to himself.
“And we’ve been through this again and again,” Harry said. “How I can’t expect words of affection from you, how I can never expect them from a Slytherin. I get it. I just—I just don’t want to spoil this night by brooding on it. Okay? And I want to know when you’re going to move out of the house.”
“I cannot speak the words.”
Harry nodded, his eyes down. He was the one who had taken that risk, like a good little Gryffindor, and he was the one who had been burned as a consequence. He really ought to have known better. He suspected that was what Severus would say.
“But I can show you.”
Harry blinked in confusion through the moment before Severus’s hand appeared under his nose, holding out a vial of potion so clear that it looked like Veritaserum. Harry took it and turned it around. No, it wasn’t like Veritaserum, which flowed like water. Instead, this sloshed and clung to the sides of the vial. It was viscous and a deep silver, not really transparent. Harry raised his confused eyes to Severus’s face.
“Will you take it?” That was a simple question, no threat, no demand. Harry didn’t know that he had ever heard Severus utter one like it.
It was enough to get his cooperation.
Harry took a deep breath and downed the bloody potion in one go.
Ostara, 2005
“I—I wanted to talk to you about something.”
Harry knew it was stupid to speak that way, to open any conversation with Severus that way. The stammering got his attention, sure, but it also meant that he was prone to pay exactly the wrong kind of attention. He turned from placing his cups in the cabinet—he no longer lined Harry’s cups up the same way, thank Merlin—and nodded.
“I know that it’s getting pretty near the end of our year,” Harry said. He had promised himself that he would be utterly straightforward, which made it all the more humiliating that he had started by babbling. “And the handfasting hasn’t been too bad lately, but it was horrible at first.”
Severus was still, watching him. Not a nod. Not a flinch, either. Harry told himself that was good enough, and pressed ahead. He couldn’t expect Severus to be all that enthusiastic about what he proposed, not when he had started off with such an unpromising beginning.
“But I was thinking that it might be different, now that we know how to make it work.” He moved around the table in Severus’s direction, needing to touch him. Sometimes he could feel, through the throb of Severus’s pulse if nothing else, what Severus was experiencing, even when he wouldn’t speak aloud. “That we could go on having a not-horrible handfasting even after it ends, now that we know.”
He managed to touch Severus’s wrist, but only for a moment as Severus turned to face him, his face strained and pale.
“You think that I would like to remain bonded,” said Severus. “Bound. When I have suffered enough from being bound for a dozen lifetimes.”
Harry opened his mouth, and stopped, blinking. He knew what Severus meant, but he had never directly compared the handfasting to the Dark Mark or the Unbreakable Vow or anything else like that before.
“I just—I mean, I thought this was different,” said Harry. He thought about saying that he didn’t think Severus would have slept with either Voldemort or Dumbledore willingly, but he had the sense not to say that a millisecond later. “Now that we know how to make it work. Now that it’s not horrid, the way it was for the first few months.”
“I will never want to remain bound,” Severus said. “Liking to sleep in the same bed with you has nothing to do with that.” He swept Harry with an expert, dismissive gaze, as if he could be all the more contemptuous of what was under Harry’s robes now that he had touched and seen it. “I do not wish to continue the bond beyond the day it ends.”
Harry swallowed. Then he said, “You think that you could just move out the day after it’s done, like it’s nothing?” Sometimes Severus couldn’t say the words, but he could respond after Harry had stated the obvious.
“I would be moving out sooner, if it were possible,” Severus said coldly, and turned towards the stairs.
Harry stared after him. What had gone wrong? Had it been worse than he thought? Had Severus simply been going along with what would get him free sex and—and maybe a nicer place to live than his flat, for as long as he had to? Had he decided that he might as well go along to get along?
And now Severus was walking away as if he owed Harry nothing, and his back told Harry nothing, either.
“You owe me more than that,” Harry heard himself saying, his voice shockingly low. Severus paused on the top step, turning halfway around. Harry still couldn’t see much more than his hair and the line of his jaw, but he didn’t care. He was going to demand answers. “I don’t care how hard it is for you to say. You can tell me.”
“It was not at all hard to say.” Severus glanced back down the stairs at him, musing, from the tone of his voice. “I did not ever enjoy being bound. That I might have enjoyed some of the consequences of it did not matter. I had already enjoyed those consequences once before the bond was completed, after all.”
Harry straightened his back. “Does this have something to do with the day?” he had to ask. He had thought the first day of spring was propitious to ask Severus to extend the handfasting, but maybe the party Harry had talked about going to at the Weasleys’ that evening had reminded Severus too much of Beltane. Or there could be some other bad memory associated with that day.
“It has nothing to do with the day, and everything to do with a dislike of being bound.” Severus’s voice had gone soft, too, but not soft enough that Harry didn’t hear what was in it. He didn’t have to shout down the stairs. “To know that when you do something, if you make another promise at the party tonight, I will have to watch those ribbons, those bonds, appear on my wrist again. I am done with being marked.”
And he went up the stairs.
Harry sat down at the table. He actually didn’t know how he had got back there from the bottom of the stairs, but it didn’t matter. He sat there and traced his finger across the tabletop, then stopped when he saw how his finger shook.
He had misjudged, but he didn’t know how.
Fucking Slytherins.
*
“Harry, dear?”
That was all Molly needed to do, that and a kind smile and one hand on his arm, and Harry couldn’t sit at the table the Weasleys had set up in the back garden and pretend to smile around at them anymore.
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” he muttered, and stumbled to his feet, working his way through the edge of the Warming Charm. Despite Molly’s best intentions to treat this party as the real beginning of spring, it was still too cold to sit outside without the spells.
The trees were decorated with green ribbons, and Charlie had brought fresh fruit from Romania and piled it at the roots. And there were fairy lights woven among the ribbons, making a different, gentler light from the half-Muggle Christmas celebration, and Harry’s eyes were blinded, and he stumbled on. He came up face first against a tree, and stood there, breathing little whistling breaths to himself.
He had been wrong. That was all. He had made a mistake.
Harry paused, and then stood back from the tree. Thinking about it like that made him feel better, strangely. If he thought that he hadn’t put his heart on the line and been soundly rejected, or reached out to Severus and had his hand slapped away again, the way he had during those first incredible days after he had realized that Severus had survived Nagini’s bite…
If he didn’t think those things, if he just thought that he’d made a mistake the way he had so often in his relationship with Ginny, then it was easier to bear.
Harry nodded a little and looked up at the green ribbons and fairy lights dangling in front of him. All right. Okay. If he thought of it like this, and knew they would get through the last six weeks of the handfasting with a better understanding of each other, then it was actually better. Not healed, not fine, but better.
He had made a mistake, the way he’d thought he had when he first went up and asked Severus to sleep with him at Beltane. Severus had relented on that, but Harry didn’t think he would relent on this. He’d spoken too casually about what not being bound meant to him, as if Harry should already know. He hadn’t rejected Harry’s offer at Beltane the same way.
So. No yielding. But Harry didn’t have to be yielding himself, either.
The first day of spring was a good day for making promises to himself, too.
I don’t have to be bound any more than living with him and being faithful already entails.
*
When Harry got home that evening, he Summoned his pyjamas and toothbrush and a few other things that had migrated into Severus’s bedroom and bathroom. They banged against the closed doors until Severus got up, swearing, and opened the doors to let them out.
And then Harry went on into his own bathroom, to brush his teeth and wash his face and do all the rest of the normal, nighttime routine, ignoring Severus’s sour demands for an explanation. When it came to the point that he thought Severus might stalk inside, Harry simply shut his own door.
They just had to endure through the last part of this bond. And Harry was good at ignoring pain.
He would apologize to Severus for his mistake in the morning, and do his best to immerse himself in the long, complicated study of precedence that Sita Patil, his latest mentor, had been recommending that he do for two months now.
He could do this.
No one knocked on his door. Harry curled up under the blankets and went to sleep, and that was really the last time that they spoke to each other except for utter necessities, before Beltane.
Beltane Eve, 2005
“Legilimens iter.”
When Harry heard Severus murmur the spell, he froze, because no matter how bad things had got between them, he couldn’t actually believe that Severus was going to read his mind without permission.
But he remembered the potion, and noted the word added on to the last part of the spell, and held still, trying to trust. Until very recently, he had trusted Severus, after all.
He felt the spell briefly touch his mind, and then it seemed to turn and reverse and go back the other way. And as Harry met Severus’s wide eyes, he fell into them, into his memories, the one place Harry couldn’t have managed to go by himself, at least not without causing Severus all sorts of pain. The potion seemed to stir in his blood, reinforcing Harry’s gentle drift through Severus’s thoughts, caught in a current that guided him towards one place.
And that was the memory of Severus standing outside Harry’s bedroom door, which must have been the night of Ostara, his hand raised to knock. Then he lowered it, and spent some time staring at the Dark Mark on his left arm, and the ribbons of light that manifested around the same wrist when he spent enough time looking at them.
Then he shook his head so hard and so bitterly that Harry nearly reached out to comfort him, before turning away.
Harry wondered why Severus had been so desperate to show him this, enough to brew a potion that must have been complicated. Harry knew that he had turned away, no matter how bad he felt that night. Why emphasize it?
But then the memories swirled and settled again, and Harry saw himself and Severus lying in bed, Severus tracing one hand down Harry’s cheek. Imbolc? It must be; Harry doubted he himself had looked that happy since then. Severus was staring at Harry’s face as though the expression of joy would dissolve any second.
I don’t understand, Harry thought. If he liked being with me, why did he say what he did about the handfasting and the house?
The memories shifted again, and this time Harry was confronting Severus in his bedroom, the Midwinter day that Severus had intended to steal off and leave him the “gift” of days alone. Severus’s heart beat wildly, his blood glinted, and the warmth in the middle of his chest made Harry feel as if he was standing in the heart of the sun.
This is what he couldn’t speak aloud.
There was no voice of Severus’s thoughts to answer him, but Harry was good at figuring out some things on his own.
And there was the night of Samhain in the garden, and there was the way that Severus had come out with that sun-like warmth frozen to moon-coldness in his chest, so afraid was he of having his reaching hand slapped away. And the way it had melted and burst into flame when Harry had smiled at him.
And the moment at Mabon when the blue ribbon had formed on Severus’s wrist, and his second thought was the panicked one that he might have been bound further into this fucking handfasting, but the first thought was the panicked one that something might have happened to Harry.
And the memory of Harry choking on the floor of the lab, the same day as his birthday, and how willing Severus was to stay with him and make sure that he got no worse, if he could have, because this was a mistake, a mistake that had hurt someone who had helped him.
And the resentment at Midsummer that Harry wanted to go and celebrate with people who were loud and constantly moving and didn’t understand the darkness and the silence and the stillness that Severus liked—the even-better-hidden resentment that Harry wanted to go to the Burrow instead of spending the day quietly in the house.
And the moment at Beltane, the wonder at Beltane, when Harry came up to him, giddy and prancing and gleeful, and offered something that was so far outside his dreams that Severus would never have thought to demand it.
All those memories sped and skimmed around Harry like swallows, and seemed to fly out through his ears, and he was back in his body in seconds, gasping, holding out his hands, and feeling Severus take his hands and hold them. Severus was looking at the ground. That didn’t surprise Harry. He might be able to let his own warmth shine through his words and eyes, but Severus couldn’t, and that was the way he was, the way Harry would have to accept that he was if he wanted to stay with him.
But for this moment, he still didn’t know if he did. And this moment was a fulcrum, the turning of a year, and Harry was going to ask.
“Why?” Harry whispered. “Why not continue?”
And Severus heard him, and answered.
“Because I do not want to be bound,” he said, and raised his head. His eyes were still defiant when they met Harry’s, still unwilling. They probably always would be, Harry thought, and resisted the urge to reach out and stroke Severus’s hair. That gesture wouldn’t do right now, and anyway, their hands were clasped so tightly that it wouldn’t work. “That does not mean that I do not wish to live with you. Of my own free choice. In a place of my own free choice.”
“You don’t want to be handfasted, and you want to live in your flat?” Harry asked. Severus had met him more than halfway. He could do his part by speaking the words that Severus could not.
Severus nodded, once, a hard, fast nod as though he wanted to shed the burden of the ideas as well as the words.
Harry reached out and finally separated their hands. Severus looked up at him, wary enough to retreat, Harry knew, if he said or did the wrong thing. The last six weeks of no more than common politeness had weakened Severus’s trust in Harry as Severus’s apparent disdain for him had weakened Harry’s in return.
But Harry laid their wrists together, the ones that glittered with the magical ribbons of the handfasting. Severus stiffened, and sneered, but Harry reached out and hushed him simply by pulling the nearest edge of the ribbon, the gesture of pulling it off, and flinging it away. The ribbons didn’t move—they were magical, and wouldn’t, until the day after tomorrow—but Severus watched the gesture as intently as if they had.
And Harry left their wrists together, his own wordless declaration.
Severus leaned forwards slowly enough to give Harry time to get away, but Harry didn’t. They had both made mistakes. They had both been sorry. But now was the time to go beyond that, to do more than that.
Harry met Severus’s kiss, met it with his passion, and his relief, and his bounding delight. They weren’t standing in a fire; they wouldn’t be jumping over one; perhaps they wouldn’t even share tonight on a bed of leaves, the way they had almost a year ago.
But it didn’t matter. Standing there like that, with the brightness of understanding between them, was enough like standing in the heart of the sun for Harry.
The End.
