Curse of a Damned Love:

Harry sat, half-naked and shivering, on the snow of the pond's embankment. He had the sword, and he'd survived the ring…but there was nothing to say he would survive the hypothermia he could feel settling into his bones. His joints had already seized to the point that he was certain he couldn't make the trip back to the tent, and the relative safety of Hermione's wards. He would die out here, frozen to death beside a pond masquerading as a lake. And for what? Ron was gone, he and Hermione were entirely alone in the world now. Up against a madman who had either enslaved or cowed the entirety of Wizarding Britain.

Harry started as a large, heavy weight fell upon his shoulders. The warming charm on the black fabric was like fire on his icy skin. His head shot up to see Snape standing very near to him. The black eyes were as cold and dark as ever, but his stance spoke to his wary discomfort. Harry scowled. If he'd had the energy, he told himself, Snape would already be a red smear on the white powder that shielded the Earth beneath their feet.

"Shouldn't you be off killing some little girl's puppy or something?" Harry bit out instead.

Snape scoffed. "The world is not so black and white, Potter. You should know that by now."

"You killed Dumbledore. There is no gray area."

"I don't have to explain myself to a spoiled brat with no respect for his elders."

Harry grunted as he felt feeling returning to his limbs. If nothing else, he had to be grateful for the warmth he'd been provided. Snape turned to go, and Harry stumbled to his feet after him.

"You can't just leave!"

"I can, and I shall," Snape bit out. "I have done my duty this night."

"Duty to whom?"

"I don't expect your miniscule mind to comprehend my purpose here, Potter."

Harry grabbed him. "Try me."

The kiss was hard and bruising, and far from the explanation Harry had been looking for. His first instinct was obviously to either pull away or shove the man off of him, but the insistence was contagious. So instead he bit down. It wasn't a tongue he captured angrily in his teeth, but a thin lower lip, and it didn't have the effect it should have. Rather than pulling away, Snape only seemed encouraged.

When slim fingers slithered under the heavy cloak to glide across Harry's skin, he was reminded that he was in nothing but his skivvy's and the cloak he'd been provided. His nerves, shot as they were, sparked angrily wherever he was touched. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling, Snape's fingers burning across his skin as feeling slowly returned to his body. In fact, the more it happened, the more Harry wanted it to happen, never mind the man who was causing the sensation. He had never been touched like this, like he was more than needed; like he was wanted. Desire grew and crackled between them like a thunderous cloud.

There was no explanation, and none would have been sufficient, but Harry found himself pressed against a tree. The thick cloak still dangling off his shoulders protected his back from the rough bark as Snape pushed against him bodily. Harry wrapped his arms loosely around a stiff neck as he was picked up, his legs wrapping around slim hips in the frigid air. The glide of his erection against another was so much that he threw his head back, and it bounced indelicately off of the tree. A hand went immediately to soothe the hurt, but it wasn't his own. The touch of Snape's fingers, caressing the lump growing on his head in what might have been concern, broke the Wizarding Savior. Tears slipped silently over his cheeks as a hard mouth suckled at his throat.

"S-Snape-"

"Silence."

Harry nodded and pulled that mouth back up to his own as their hips writhed against each other, pressed against a tree. He couldn't have said what was in him, even if he'd been allowed to continue. Emotions warred in his heart as the steam of their breath mingled. He was angry, and he was hurt, but in this moment he was desperate for the human contact he was being given. In this moment, the weight of the world had slipped off his shoulders like so much water. He would have to pick it up again, as well as the shattered remnants of his sanity, but for now he just wanted to feel. Snape seemed more than happy to oblige him.

Orgasm crashed over him with a violence that darkened his vision with blinding clarity. When his vision cleared, he was kneeling in the snow, shaking under the weight of Snape's cloak and what he'd just done. Snape was already walking across the embankment of the pond. He didn't stop or turn, and Harry forced his feet under him. He was stumbling again, and almost toppled to his knees again twice, but he reached Snape with a determination he'd thought he'd lost. His hand grabbed a thin wrist, and Snape tried to jerk free, but Harry pulled him back, kissing him soundly. The kiss was, at least, eagerly returned.

"Stay safe."

There was a stiff nod, and then Snape was gone. Harry trembled under the cloak around his shoulders. His tired, cold muscles were far overworked, and he still had to walk back to Hermione. Drawing a deep breath that ghosted in the winter's night air, Harry forced his limbs to cooperate as he dressed in his damp clothing. He threw the cloak over top of his muggle clothes and started to trek back. With each step, his mind lingered farther and farther behind, trapped in the clearing by the pond. He didn't dare consciously think about what had just happened. Snape was the enemy, period. Yet he had, with violent acuity, hardened Harry's resolve in a war he should never have been asked to fight. Where his friends had failed, Snape had won.

Snape, without meaning to, had become the most important man in the war against Voldemort. Harry couldn't make himself doubt that it had been Snape who'd left the sword for him. Merlin only knew why he'd put it at the bottom of a frozen pond, but it had to have been him. He'd done his duty, as had Harry. But it was that little bit extra that haunted the seventeen year old. Neither of them had been forced, and yet they had shared an angry intimacy that had settled like a stone in Harry's heart. What had he just done? And why did it matter so much that he had?

-Break-

When Harry had returned to the tent, it had been to find Ron waiting anxiously. The prodigal traitor had returned. Harry's forgiveness was more eagerly won than Hermione's. In a world where he was no longer sure about the men [man] he'd presumed the enemy, he could ill-afford to turn away those he knew to be a friend.

In the ensuing months, Harry thought again and again of that night in the woods by the pond. His mind, scattered as it was by impending insanity, focused on such small details that grew in his mind. The cloak, stowed away in a pocket of Hermione's bag, became a beacon of strong emotion that no longer resembled hatred. The soothing of potion-stained fingers on his injured head brought remembered tears burning behind his eyes. The marking of the angry red line where the necklace had cut into his skin, a bruise that had lasted longer than the mark of the necklace itself, became a symbol in his mind of kindness and caring long after it had ceased to appear on his skin.

And so, when Harry saw Snape fall in the Shrieking Shack, he had raced to his side with a torn heart. His hand went immediately to stem the flow of blood, but he knew when he saw those partially closed black eyes that he was already too late. He collected the memories with a heavy heart, at Snape's behest. He found himself reluctant to meet the black gaze as the thin chest heaved with shallow gasps.

"Look at me."

Harry had. There was nothing else he could have done, nothing to be said, no reparations to make. They had made their choices, and had acted out the predestined stories of their lives, two stories that had tangled together so much that they might have been one in the same. He gazed into black eyes, watched the flicker of life begin to die deep in the ceaseless pools. It didn't matter that Ron and Hermione were watching, or that an enemy could come through the door in the next moment. In this moment, in this terrifying final second before death would claim the man who deserved it the least, there was nothing but they two. In a disturbed, stomach-churning image only a truly mad artist could conjure, Harry leaned down and captured thin lips in a kiss, Snape's final breath ghosting between his lips in a horrifying testament of mortality. There were no Gods amongst men, and the one man who might have been had rejoined his immortal brethren in the pantheon above the world.

After Harry had reviewed the painful memories of a little boy who wanted nothing more than to belong in a world that wanted nothing to do with him, Harry thought he finally understood. Snape had loved his mother, and had carried her torch for 17 years. Death must have seemed a mercy when it had finally come for him. Still, it failed to explain why he had taken to Harry all those months ago beside a frigid, foreign pond. Then again, everyone else who'd ever known his mother had perhaps explained it well in advance. He had his mother's eyes.

"Look at me."

Snape had cursed him with those final words. Harry Potter would forever wonder if he had been loved, if only for a night, or if he had simply played his part in a Shakespearean tragedy that spanned a lifetime. Either way, he had his own Final Act to finish playing. Death waited for no one, and Harry thought he was, perhaps, ready to meet what awaited him in the Forbidden Forest. It would finally end, in the very place it had begun. His burden would be lifted, his duty done. He would finally be free.