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lomonaaerenTitle: Trust and Follow
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Severus, past Harry/Ginny
Content Notes: Angst, present tense, epilogue-compliant, ambiguous ending
Wordcount: 3300
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Long years after Snape’s death, long years after his own divorce, Harry is dreaming of Snape—and seeing a silver doe in the woods.
Author’s Notes: Another of my July Celebration fics.
Trust and Follow
There it is again.
Harry knows he’s not imagining it this time. He stands as still as an oak, his firewood cradled in his arms, and stares at the silver doe picking her way delicately across the flowers a few meters from him.
He has a lot of dreams now; he seems to spend most of his time dreaming since he retired from the Aurors and his children moved so far away that he almost never sees them. Before, he dismissed the doe as part of them.
But he’s awake now. There’s rough grass beneath his feet, even rougher wood biting into his hands. A blister on his heel that he got the other day from his new boots is making itself known. Blisters haven’t been part of any dream Harry’s ever experienced.
The doe turns her head.
Harry shouldn’t be able to see her eyes as clearly as he does, or if he can, they should be huge and melting dark—doe’s eyes. They aren’t. Harry remembers those eyes because he looked into them as their owner was dying. Black, angry, sparking with remembered contempt.
“Snape?” he whispers.
The doe leaps into the air, a thin bound that turns into a graceful one, and runs into the woods, the sun flashing radiantly from her hide. Harry turns his head to follow her. He expects the silver to turn into brown at any second, and prove that maybe he was daydreaming even if he wasn’t dreaming.
But no. She stays silver until she fades into the forest like mist, and Harry has to trudge back to his cottage.
*
That night, it rains.
Harry sits by the window of his little cottage, his fire singing merrily to itself in the hearth, and watches the slashing drive of the rain. It never seems to fall normally near the Forbidden Forest. It turns itself into dark arrows, like this, or cascades in blowing silver drifts with no wind to ruffle it, or sparkles like dew and becomes a weird miracle. Harry thinks back to when he talked to Neville about building a cottage near the Forbidden Forest, but still on Hogwarts’s grounds, and how the rain was the first thing Neville warned him about.
“Don’t open the door when the rain falls, Harry. We lost two groundskeepers that way. We went to their cottages in the morning and they were gone.”
“Did they leave a note?”
“No.” Neville frowned at him. “Why?”
“I’m just wondering how someone knew they opened the door when the rain fell, if no one was with them and they didn’t leave a note explaining what happened.”
Neville smiled then, and admitted, “Well, maybe it is just a Hogwarts legend. But I do know that the next people who came to visit them, in both cases, found their doors swinging open and all the papers in the cottage covered with water. That was after a heavy rainstorm.”
“Any footprints leading away?” Harry asked, figuring he might as well fit into the spirit of the stories since Neville was going to insist on telling them.
“No.” Neville hesitated.
“Come on, spit it out.”
“Not leading away,” Neville finally said, and his voice sank, and for the first time in decades he looked like the nervous first-year that Harry remembered. “Leading in. Big feet, clawed ones, aiming into the cottage and straight at the chair where the groundskeepers used to sit and watch the rain.”
The words gave Harry a delicious thrill at the time, but he only smiles about them now as he sits and watches the storm. He’s no groundskeeper. He just wanted to live in an isolated place with a touch of danger, and near his first home, and Neville was kind enough to grant him the land and the permission. The rain outside is only rain. His dreams about Severus Snape are only dreams.
Something taps against the window.
Harry has his wand in his hand before he thinks about it. It’s unusual for him to react that way now, given that he’s years retired from the Aurors, but thinking about Neville’s story probably made him paranoid. He moves slowly towards the window, standing back to one side so that a projectile launched through it won’t hurt him.
The noise repeats. It’s softer this time, as if whoever’s there knows that they have his attention. That suggests a greater intelligence than most beasts of the Forbidden Forest would have. Harry leans forwards to look, casting a skin-tight Shield Charm over his face and hands.
Turning the rain around her to a dazzling glow, the silver doe is waiting there.
Harry’s breath goes out of him as he stares. He supposes that he might be asleep now. It wouldn’t be the first time that a dream took him like this. He really does dream too much about Snape, and they’re the kinds of dreams that make him flush when he’s awake. Maybe he’ll start up in a second and find himself with his head nodding on a chair in front of a roaring fire, the rain dimmed outside to a murmur.
But moments go past, and the silver doe stays still. She’s already lasted longer than any regular Patronus that Harry can think of.
Which leads to the natural conclusion that she’s not a Patronus.
“What are you, then?” Harry mutters, and expects her to bolt the way she did when he asked about Snape. But instead, she leans her soft nose against the window and breathes on it.
It’s stupid. Harry thinks about Neville’s stories of big clawed footprints even as he goes to the door and opens it. But it still happens. She’s here, and he’s going to talk to her.
The doe moves softly into the room. She doesn’t steam like a mortal animal would, but her coat does seem to glow more brightly in front of the fire. She looks Harry long and deep in the eye for a moment.
Harry walks towards her. She lets him get to within a meter before she backs up and turns her head. At first Harry thinks she’s looking at the fire, and wonders if it would actually warm her.
Then he realizes she’s gazing beyond him, towards the window. He looks out at the rain, then back at her, and shrugs. “If you want to leave, I’m not stopping you.”
Again he thinks his voice will be the trigger for the end of this strange vision, but it’s not. The silver doe moves in until, although she’s not touching him, Harry can feel the soft mist of her breath. She gazes at him with what seem to be imploring eyes, and again they’re darker than a deer’s and remind him of Snape’s. She tosses her head and flicks her small tail and dances so that her forefeet hit the cottage floor. Harry notices she makes no sound, though.
“What do you want me to do?” Harry whispers to her. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
The doe turns and trots to the door again. Harry follows her to see her off, as ridiculous as he knows that is. But the doe turns to him again when she’s standing on the threshold of the cottage, eyes fixed on him and tail flicking. It takes Harry a moment, but this time he does understand. She’s looking at him the way a deer looks at another moment of the herd to get them to follow.
“No,” Harry says. It’s instinctive, the word welling out of him. At best, this doe is a ghost; at worst, she could be a manifestation of whatever is living in the Forest and killed the groundskeepers.
The doe vanishes with less sound than a gust of air. Harry blinks and shuts his door on the dripping trees.
*
He dreams that night of Snape.
Snape is long and lean and pale and sarcastic, his eyes gleaming as deep and dark as the doe’s as he hauls Harry towards him. They’re in what looks like the bedroom of his cottage, but the world is black and vague around them. With his arousal burning through him and Harry’s chest heaving with bursts of air, he doesn’t want to look and try to make it more definite.
“You are foolish,” Snape hisses at him. “To hold me at a distance, to think of me as your former Potions professor when you know well I am more than that.”
“I don’t know what you are,” Harry gasps at him. “I don’t know what that doe is. I only know I couldn’t follow her.”
“Because you are afraid of what you would find waiting at the end of the trail!”
Snape’s voice scorns and stings him, but that only makes him harder. Snape turns and slings him, with another sneer, onto a bed that forms out of nowhere. It’s a confused melding of the bed Harry has in his cottage and the four-poster he used when he was a student at Hogwarts. But not the bed he shared with Ginny. Never that, he thinks as he lies there and stares up at Snape, who’s stripping off his robes.
His body is even paler underneath them, but he laughs, and Harry returns his eyes to Snape’s face. “You will call me Severus,” Snape tells him dryly as he flings the robes onto a chair that also seems to just appear.
“Severus,” Harry whispers.
Severus falls on him. Both of them are naked, although Harry thought he was clothed when he came into this dream, and in the way of visions, there’s no pain and Severus can enter him as if they were always meant to be one. Harry cries out.
“Hold still.”
Severus tries to hold him like that as Harry writhes all over the bed, but it’s hardly possible. And it seems to turn Severus on more, if the diamond-like glitter that his eyes develop is any sign. He thrusts inside Harry, and every movement fills Harry up and flings him in some direction he’s never meant to go in, a direction that his heart can’t follow.
When Severus comes, it’s like being drowned in lava. Harry’s orgasm seems a small thing in comparison.
Severus thumps on top of him and hisses, but he’s already dissolving like the mist, like the silver doe. Harry blinks and tries to hold onto him, but Severus wisps through his fingers. Only his voice lingers in Harry’s ears.
“Come to me.”
And Harry wakes, confused and sticky.
*
This time, the silver doe is kneeling in the middle of the clearing right outside Harry’s cottage when he opens the door to fetch firewood, the earth softly steaming around her from the fresh rain. She turns her head as the door opens. Harry tries to see whether the weight of her body is bending down the grass she kneels on, but he honestly can’t tell.
The doe watches him, now and then flipping an ear, as Harry fetches in the wood, cleans some water from the stream for himself, chops more wood, and cleans up some mud that’s threatening the chinks in the wall on the left side of the cottage. She might be a tame pet for all that she moves.
But when Harry finishes scraping the mud away and starts to go back inside, she stands and trots towards him. Harry lets her come, knowing he can’t touch her, mildly curious about what’s going to happen next.
She halts nearer to him than she was last night, so near that Harry would have to feel her warmth if she was real, and fixes her gaze on him. Harry meets her eyes.
Images blow past like autumn leaves. His children, moving out of Britain or joining professional Quidditch teams, telling him he won’t see them often. Ginny, telling him that she can’t live with a husband who’s as distant from her as he is and always working. Other Aurors who were bewildered when he retired and thought he was losing everything that gave his life meaning. Himself, sitting around in his house and staring at his hands before he had the sense to ask Neville if he could build the cottage.
With a gasp, Harry manages to tear himself free of her gaze. He shakes his head and steps back, resting a hand on the cottage. It’s solid. It’s rough, but it’s home. That was one reason Harry wanted to come here in the first place, to live in a house that would require physical labor and keep him grounded.
When he does look up, the doe is several steps away. She dances softly, a shining figment, and then paces towards the forest and looks over her shoulder at him. The invitation to follow is clearer than ever.
“No,” Harry says. “No. I don’t know what I would find at the end of that path. The thing that caused the deaths of the groundskeepers, for all I know.”
But his voice is hoarse, and the silver doe dips her head as if in a mocking bow before she leaps into the sunlight and is gone.
*
“What do you have left, except these dreams?”
For once, Harry doesn’t go over to Severus the minute he realizes that he’s in the same room as him. He stares out a window that forms before him and shows nothing but a darkened, rain-drenched abyss. Harry can’t even tell if the things the rain is falling on are meant to be trees or stones.
He only shakes his head blindly. “My life has to be worth something. I’m only in my fifties. That’s still young for a wizard.”
“It’s worth something if the wizard wants it to be.” Severus’s voice is smooth and mocking. “If you have close relationships with your children, your spouse, your friends. What do you have left, except Longbottom?”
“That’s not…” Harry’s voice trails away. But it is true. Honestly, it’s true. Ron and Hermione and the rest of the Weasleys didn’t turn on him when he and Ginny divorced, but of course they spent more time with Ginny and her new boyfriend, now husband, and Harry stopped going over to the Burrow for dinner or joining any but the largest celebrations. And now he can’t even remember the last time he saw Hermione, and he hasn’t seen Molly or Arthur since Lily’s graduation from Hogwarts, and Ron for the last time at his Auror retirement party.
“They would keep up with you if they wanted to.” Severus’s voice isn’t condemning; it’s as neutral as the darkness outside the window. “They do not want to.”
Harry doesn’t know what to say. Even the relationships that should be closest have faded. The passion he had with Ginny died. He was close to James until his son went to Hogwarts, and then James seemed to change, becoming a bully and a prankster in a way that caused more than one fight. Albus was always quiet, and he kept things from Harry that he thought would cause him distress, like playing on a national Quidditch team. Lily resented the fame that smothered her from growing up as Harry Potter’s daughter, and it’s one reason, other than finding the love of her life, that she moved to Belgium. Harry hasn’t seen any of them in the longest time.
He might have grandchildren that he doesn’t know about. The thought strikes him hard. Lily said she was trying for children in the last letter he has from her. But he doesn’t know if she got pregnant, if she had one or not.
Why did I let myself drift away?
Either he asked that aloud or Severus has access to his thoughts. His response is quick and unsympathetic. “Because you have always been essentially alone. Many of the people that you loved are dead. You tried to gain more love by marrying into your best friend’s family, and that family ended when the marriage ended. You held yourself back because you did not want to become an overwhelming figure in your children’s lives, and severed the connection you should have had with them instead. What do you have left?”
Harry rubs his hand over his face. “I suppose I have nothing left.”
“Wrong.”
Harry turns around with a frown, only to find Severus’s hand encircling his wrist, Severus’s face bent close. “You have me.”
Harry stares at him. Then he shakes his head. “You’re only a dream.”
“The silver doe in the woods.”
“It’s a hallucination. Or a trick of whatever lured the Hogwarts groundskeepers away from their cottages. I won’t let myself be taken in by it.”
Severus laughs. “What else do you have left?”
And he melts away, the dream fracturing, until Harry opens his eyes in his cold, empty bed.
*
It’s a sunlit evening, but with clouds moving in that means rain coming later, and Harry has spent most of it sitting in the doorway of his cottage, thinking.
It’s not true that he has nothing left. It’s not. He could reach out and try to reestablish contact with his children. He could ask Ron and Hermione to catch up, invite them to his cottage for dinner. Yes, his marriage with Ginny didn’t work out, but maybe he could go and find someone else to love. Even someone who’s not a woman, which his dreams about Severus might have told him before if they had started earlier than ten years into his marriage.
But it’s also true that there’s a reason he let those bonds drift and break apart, a reason that he came back to the Forbidden Forest where he died all those years ago.
Probably even a reason that he’s dreaming about Severus instead of all the other possible victims of the war.
There’s unfinished business here. Harry doesn’t know what’s down the path that the silver doe could lead him on. He kept saying that to her, to Severus, and now he realizes that, although he doesn’t know, he wants to.
He lifts his head, and the doe is walking towards him through the falling evening light, her eyes wide and radiant. For the first time, they’re a color other than black. They reflect red and orange from the sunset for a second, and then she turns her head and they’re as green as his mother’s.
Harry stands up with a deep breath. “I’m ready.”
He has left a note for Neville, so that his friend doesn’t think he’s vanished like the groundskeepers, that the same thing took him. Harry is convinced that’s not the case, even though the silver doe could well be a mask for something else. He just—thinks she’s not.
And the dreams started a long time ago. This isn’t a creature in the Forbidden Forest that’s been spinning a net for him for years.
It’s a path he’s ready to walk down. He’s still young for a wizard. He’ll see where this leads.
The doe comes close to him and leans her cheek on his. Harry starts. This time, it’s soft and warm, and when he raises a hand in wonder, she slides her neck under his fingers. Her sleek hide is like glowing thistledown.
“Lead on,” Harry whispers.
She turns and walks into the Forbidden Forest, down a path opening into the distant light that Harry knows wasn’t there a moment ago, and won’t be here tomorrow when Neville comes looking for him. Harry strides confidently beside her, his hand resting on her neck still.
They melt into the sunset.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Severus, past Harry/Ginny
Content Notes: Angst, present tense, epilogue-compliant, ambiguous ending
Wordcount: 3300
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Long years after Snape’s death, long years after his own divorce, Harry is dreaming of Snape—and seeing a silver doe in the woods.
Author’s Notes: Another of my July Celebration fics.
Trust and Follow
There it is again.
Harry knows he’s not imagining it this time. He stands as still as an oak, his firewood cradled in his arms, and stares at the silver doe picking her way delicately across the flowers a few meters from him.
He has a lot of dreams now; he seems to spend most of his time dreaming since he retired from the Aurors and his children moved so far away that he almost never sees them. Before, he dismissed the doe as part of them.
But he’s awake now. There’s rough grass beneath his feet, even rougher wood biting into his hands. A blister on his heel that he got the other day from his new boots is making itself known. Blisters haven’t been part of any dream Harry’s ever experienced.
The doe turns her head.
Harry shouldn’t be able to see her eyes as clearly as he does, or if he can, they should be huge and melting dark—doe’s eyes. They aren’t. Harry remembers those eyes because he looked into them as their owner was dying. Black, angry, sparking with remembered contempt.
“Snape?” he whispers.
The doe leaps into the air, a thin bound that turns into a graceful one, and runs into the woods, the sun flashing radiantly from her hide. Harry turns his head to follow her. He expects the silver to turn into brown at any second, and prove that maybe he was daydreaming even if he wasn’t dreaming.
But no. She stays silver until she fades into the forest like mist, and Harry has to trudge back to his cottage.
*
That night, it rains.
Harry sits by the window of his little cottage, his fire singing merrily to itself in the hearth, and watches the slashing drive of the rain. It never seems to fall normally near the Forbidden Forest. It turns itself into dark arrows, like this, or cascades in blowing silver drifts with no wind to ruffle it, or sparkles like dew and becomes a weird miracle. Harry thinks back to when he talked to Neville about building a cottage near the Forbidden Forest, but still on Hogwarts’s grounds, and how the rain was the first thing Neville warned him about.
“Don’t open the door when the rain falls, Harry. We lost two groundskeepers that way. We went to their cottages in the morning and they were gone.”
“Did they leave a note?”
“No.” Neville frowned at him. “Why?”
“I’m just wondering how someone knew they opened the door when the rain fell, if no one was with them and they didn’t leave a note explaining what happened.”
Neville smiled then, and admitted, “Well, maybe it is just a Hogwarts legend. But I do know that the next people who came to visit them, in both cases, found their doors swinging open and all the papers in the cottage covered with water. That was after a heavy rainstorm.”
“Any footprints leading away?” Harry asked, figuring he might as well fit into the spirit of the stories since Neville was going to insist on telling them.
“No.” Neville hesitated.
“Come on, spit it out.”
“Not leading away,” Neville finally said, and his voice sank, and for the first time in decades he looked like the nervous first-year that Harry remembered. “Leading in. Big feet, clawed ones, aiming into the cottage and straight at the chair where the groundskeepers used to sit and watch the rain.”
The words gave Harry a delicious thrill at the time, but he only smiles about them now as he sits and watches the storm. He’s no groundskeeper. He just wanted to live in an isolated place with a touch of danger, and near his first home, and Neville was kind enough to grant him the land and the permission. The rain outside is only rain. His dreams about Severus Snape are only dreams.
Something taps against the window.
Harry has his wand in his hand before he thinks about it. It’s unusual for him to react that way now, given that he’s years retired from the Aurors, but thinking about Neville’s story probably made him paranoid. He moves slowly towards the window, standing back to one side so that a projectile launched through it won’t hurt him.
The noise repeats. It’s softer this time, as if whoever’s there knows that they have his attention. That suggests a greater intelligence than most beasts of the Forbidden Forest would have. Harry leans forwards to look, casting a skin-tight Shield Charm over his face and hands.
Turning the rain around her to a dazzling glow, the silver doe is waiting there.
Harry’s breath goes out of him as he stares. He supposes that he might be asleep now. It wouldn’t be the first time that a dream took him like this. He really does dream too much about Snape, and they’re the kinds of dreams that make him flush when he’s awake. Maybe he’ll start up in a second and find himself with his head nodding on a chair in front of a roaring fire, the rain dimmed outside to a murmur.
But moments go past, and the silver doe stays still. She’s already lasted longer than any regular Patronus that Harry can think of.
Which leads to the natural conclusion that she’s not a Patronus.
“What are you, then?” Harry mutters, and expects her to bolt the way she did when he asked about Snape. But instead, she leans her soft nose against the window and breathes on it.
It’s stupid. Harry thinks about Neville’s stories of big clawed footprints even as he goes to the door and opens it. But it still happens. She’s here, and he’s going to talk to her.
The doe moves softly into the room. She doesn’t steam like a mortal animal would, but her coat does seem to glow more brightly in front of the fire. She looks Harry long and deep in the eye for a moment.
Harry walks towards her. She lets him get to within a meter before she backs up and turns her head. At first Harry thinks she’s looking at the fire, and wonders if it would actually warm her.
Then he realizes she’s gazing beyond him, towards the window. He looks out at the rain, then back at her, and shrugs. “If you want to leave, I’m not stopping you.”
Again he thinks his voice will be the trigger for the end of this strange vision, but it’s not. The silver doe moves in until, although she’s not touching him, Harry can feel the soft mist of her breath. She gazes at him with what seem to be imploring eyes, and again they’re darker than a deer’s and remind him of Snape’s. She tosses her head and flicks her small tail and dances so that her forefeet hit the cottage floor. Harry notices she makes no sound, though.
“What do you want me to do?” Harry whispers to her. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
The doe turns and trots to the door again. Harry follows her to see her off, as ridiculous as he knows that is. But the doe turns to him again when she’s standing on the threshold of the cottage, eyes fixed on him and tail flicking. It takes Harry a moment, but this time he does understand. She’s looking at him the way a deer looks at another moment of the herd to get them to follow.
“No,” Harry says. It’s instinctive, the word welling out of him. At best, this doe is a ghost; at worst, she could be a manifestation of whatever is living in the Forest and killed the groundskeepers.
The doe vanishes with less sound than a gust of air. Harry blinks and shuts his door on the dripping trees.
*
He dreams that night of Snape.
Snape is long and lean and pale and sarcastic, his eyes gleaming as deep and dark as the doe’s as he hauls Harry towards him. They’re in what looks like the bedroom of his cottage, but the world is black and vague around them. With his arousal burning through him and Harry’s chest heaving with bursts of air, he doesn’t want to look and try to make it more definite.
“You are foolish,” Snape hisses at him. “To hold me at a distance, to think of me as your former Potions professor when you know well I am more than that.”
“I don’t know what you are,” Harry gasps at him. “I don’t know what that doe is. I only know I couldn’t follow her.”
“Because you are afraid of what you would find waiting at the end of the trail!”
Snape’s voice scorns and stings him, but that only makes him harder. Snape turns and slings him, with another sneer, onto a bed that forms out of nowhere. It’s a confused melding of the bed Harry has in his cottage and the four-poster he used when he was a student at Hogwarts. But not the bed he shared with Ginny. Never that, he thinks as he lies there and stares up at Snape, who’s stripping off his robes.
His body is even paler underneath them, but he laughs, and Harry returns his eyes to Snape’s face. “You will call me Severus,” Snape tells him dryly as he flings the robes onto a chair that also seems to just appear.
“Severus,” Harry whispers.
Severus falls on him. Both of them are naked, although Harry thought he was clothed when he came into this dream, and in the way of visions, there’s no pain and Severus can enter him as if they were always meant to be one. Harry cries out.
“Hold still.”
Severus tries to hold him like that as Harry writhes all over the bed, but it’s hardly possible. And it seems to turn Severus on more, if the diamond-like glitter that his eyes develop is any sign. He thrusts inside Harry, and every movement fills Harry up and flings him in some direction he’s never meant to go in, a direction that his heart can’t follow.
When Severus comes, it’s like being drowned in lava. Harry’s orgasm seems a small thing in comparison.
Severus thumps on top of him and hisses, but he’s already dissolving like the mist, like the silver doe. Harry blinks and tries to hold onto him, but Severus wisps through his fingers. Only his voice lingers in Harry’s ears.
“Come to me.”
And Harry wakes, confused and sticky.
*
This time, the silver doe is kneeling in the middle of the clearing right outside Harry’s cottage when he opens the door to fetch firewood, the earth softly steaming around her from the fresh rain. She turns her head as the door opens. Harry tries to see whether the weight of her body is bending down the grass she kneels on, but he honestly can’t tell.
The doe watches him, now and then flipping an ear, as Harry fetches in the wood, cleans some water from the stream for himself, chops more wood, and cleans up some mud that’s threatening the chinks in the wall on the left side of the cottage. She might be a tame pet for all that she moves.
But when Harry finishes scraping the mud away and starts to go back inside, she stands and trots towards him. Harry lets her come, knowing he can’t touch her, mildly curious about what’s going to happen next.
She halts nearer to him than she was last night, so near that Harry would have to feel her warmth if she was real, and fixes her gaze on him. Harry meets her eyes.
Images blow past like autumn leaves. His children, moving out of Britain or joining professional Quidditch teams, telling him he won’t see them often. Ginny, telling him that she can’t live with a husband who’s as distant from her as he is and always working. Other Aurors who were bewildered when he retired and thought he was losing everything that gave his life meaning. Himself, sitting around in his house and staring at his hands before he had the sense to ask Neville if he could build the cottage.
With a gasp, Harry manages to tear himself free of her gaze. He shakes his head and steps back, resting a hand on the cottage. It’s solid. It’s rough, but it’s home. That was one reason Harry wanted to come here in the first place, to live in a house that would require physical labor and keep him grounded.
When he does look up, the doe is several steps away. She dances softly, a shining figment, and then paces towards the forest and looks over her shoulder at him. The invitation to follow is clearer than ever.
“No,” Harry says. “No. I don’t know what I would find at the end of that path. The thing that caused the deaths of the groundskeepers, for all I know.”
But his voice is hoarse, and the silver doe dips her head as if in a mocking bow before she leaps into the sunlight and is gone.
*
“What do you have left, except these dreams?”
For once, Harry doesn’t go over to Severus the minute he realizes that he’s in the same room as him. He stares out a window that forms before him and shows nothing but a darkened, rain-drenched abyss. Harry can’t even tell if the things the rain is falling on are meant to be trees or stones.
He only shakes his head blindly. “My life has to be worth something. I’m only in my fifties. That’s still young for a wizard.”
“It’s worth something if the wizard wants it to be.” Severus’s voice is smooth and mocking. “If you have close relationships with your children, your spouse, your friends. What do you have left, except Longbottom?”
“That’s not…” Harry’s voice trails away. But it is true. Honestly, it’s true. Ron and Hermione and the rest of the Weasleys didn’t turn on him when he and Ginny divorced, but of course they spent more time with Ginny and her new boyfriend, now husband, and Harry stopped going over to the Burrow for dinner or joining any but the largest celebrations. And now he can’t even remember the last time he saw Hermione, and he hasn’t seen Molly or Arthur since Lily’s graduation from Hogwarts, and Ron for the last time at his Auror retirement party.
“They would keep up with you if they wanted to.” Severus’s voice isn’t condemning; it’s as neutral as the darkness outside the window. “They do not want to.”
Harry doesn’t know what to say. Even the relationships that should be closest have faded. The passion he had with Ginny died. He was close to James until his son went to Hogwarts, and then James seemed to change, becoming a bully and a prankster in a way that caused more than one fight. Albus was always quiet, and he kept things from Harry that he thought would cause him distress, like playing on a national Quidditch team. Lily resented the fame that smothered her from growing up as Harry Potter’s daughter, and it’s one reason, other than finding the love of her life, that she moved to Belgium. Harry hasn’t seen any of them in the longest time.
He might have grandchildren that he doesn’t know about. The thought strikes him hard. Lily said she was trying for children in the last letter he has from her. But he doesn’t know if she got pregnant, if she had one or not.
Why did I let myself drift away?
Either he asked that aloud or Severus has access to his thoughts. His response is quick and unsympathetic. “Because you have always been essentially alone. Many of the people that you loved are dead. You tried to gain more love by marrying into your best friend’s family, and that family ended when the marriage ended. You held yourself back because you did not want to become an overwhelming figure in your children’s lives, and severed the connection you should have had with them instead. What do you have left?”
Harry rubs his hand over his face. “I suppose I have nothing left.”
“Wrong.”
Harry turns around with a frown, only to find Severus’s hand encircling his wrist, Severus’s face bent close. “You have me.”
Harry stares at him. Then he shakes his head. “You’re only a dream.”
“The silver doe in the woods.”
“It’s a hallucination. Or a trick of whatever lured the Hogwarts groundskeepers away from their cottages. I won’t let myself be taken in by it.”
Severus laughs. “What else do you have left?”
And he melts away, the dream fracturing, until Harry opens his eyes in his cold, empty bed.
*
It’s a sunlit evening, but with clouds moving in that means rain coming later, and Harry has spent most of it sitting in the doorway of his cottage, thinking.
It’s not true that he has nothing left. It’s not. He could reach out and try to reestablish contact with his children. He could ask Ron and Hermione to catch up, invite them to his cottage for dinner. Yes, his marriage with Ginny didn’t work out, but maybe he could go and find someone else to love. Even someone who’s not a woman, which his dreams about Severus might have told him before if they had started earlier than ten years into his marriage.
But it’s also true that there’s a reason he let those bonds drift and break apart, a reason that he came back to the Forbidden Forest where he died all those years ago.
Probably even a reason that he’s dreaming about Severus instead of all the other possible victims of the war.
There’s unfinished business here. Harry doesn’t know what’s down the path that the silver doe could lead him on. He kept saying that to her, to Severus, and now he realizes that, although he doesn’t know, he wants to.
He lifts his head, and the doe is walking towards him through the falling evening light, her eyes wide and radiant. For the first time, they’re a color other than black. They reflect red and orange from the sunset for a second, and then she turns her head and they’re as green as his mother’s.
Harry stands up with a deep breath. “I’m ready.”
He has left a note for Neville, so that his friend doesn’t think he’s vanished like the groundskeepers, that the same thing took him. Harry is convinced that’s not the case, even though the silver doe could well be a mask for something else. He just—thinks she’s not.
And the dreams started a long time ago. This isn’t a creature in the Forbidden Forest that’s been spinning a net for him for years.
It’s a path he’s ready to walk down. He’s still young for a wizard. He’ll see where this leads.
The doe comes close to him and leans her cheek on his. Harry starts. This time, it’s soft and warm, and when he raises a hand in wonder, she slides her neck under his fingers. Her sleek hide is like glowing thistledown.
“Lead on,” Harry whispers.
She turns and walks into the Forbidden Forest, down a path opening into the distant light that Harry knows wasn’t there a moment ago, and won’t be here tomorrow when Neville comes looking for him. Harry strides confidently beside her, his hand resting on her neck still.
They melt into the sunset.
The End.
