Cogito Ergo Doleo
by grandiose
2497 words - Rated M – angst, depression, unrequited, unknown.
Summary: (18+) (slash) (complete) "I think, therefore I am depressed." Harry can't seem to stay focused. HPDM HPHP HPSS
/\\\\\\\\\\ /
Harry detests Potions. He walks to the dungeons with his head down, shoelaces untied, glasses askew. His hatred slowly congeals until its almost palatable; a force field of frustration surrounds him and deters his friends from walking at his side. Hermione, from somewhere behind his nest of hair, calls it "The Force" with a cheeky grin. Even Ron's ignorant smile can't take Harry out of this depression. After all, Harry detests Potions, regardless of what's being said on the way.
Hermione and Ron follow Harry like lambs to the slaughter, or kicked puppies, or a trail of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of a shoe after a horrible bathroom visit. Last week, old man Dumbledore decided to start "Taco Tuesdays" in an effort to bring the Muggle food experience to Hogwarts, Harry remembers with a grimace.
Last Tuesday was an experience, that's for sure.
When Ron trips on nothing, Hermione wonders if Harry's depression turned solid for a moment. It must be possible, since she knows she doesn't have any active imagination that's not based off of empirical evidence, and that idea had to have come from somewhere. She'll research the possibility after class, because she's Hermione, and that's what she does.
Harry abhors Double Potions. There's enough crap in his life, and adding two hours with slimy Slytherins, with greasy Professor Snape—with ferret-like Draco Malfoy—it's just too much to bear for the Boy Who Must Defeat Voldemort Or Die A Horrible Death.
"Death doesn't seem too bad at this point," Harry mutters as he approaches the Potions laboratory door.
"Whatcha say, 'Arry?" Ron asks, mouth full of Bertie Bott's Beans, and gets a shrug in response. Ron really wasn't expecting anything more than that. He asks every time because he's Ron, and that's what he does.
Harry pushes open the heavy leaden door, only to find a class full of Malfoys.
Well, if Harry was entirely truthful to himself, he would have to notice that there was only one platinum-haired and pointy-nosed Draco Malfoy, sitting somewhere towards the front, but far enough back to sabotage Harry's potion regardless of where Harry sat. Harry knows this, and so he sits where he can keep his eyes on Malfoy at all times, keeping constant vigilance on that poncy git and his fancy dress robes and those shifty slate eyes and his pink snake-like tongue…
"For such a racist bastard, he looks good, doesn't he?" Harry thinks aloud. Only he really doesn't; he turns his head only to find his nose tickled by fuzzy brown hair. Hermione, still somewhere behind Harry's own mop of hair, whispered the words into his ear carefully, conspiratorially, with a joke behind her fingers as they combed through her bushy mane.
"I doubt calling someone a mudblood constitutes racism, Miss Granger." Harry deadpans in his best impression of Professor Snape. Hermione scrunches her nose. Ron shrugs.
Harry turns back to Malfoy, and the mask is gone.
A ray of light shines down from somewhere heavenly, which doesn't make sense since they are all in the dungeons, but Harry's eyes accept it all the same. The light hits Draco's hair just so, and those slate eyes almost look glossy with something intangible, and Harry suddenly finds that Draco's face isn't quite so sharp as he might have thought not so long ago. Maybe it's the curve of his lips, enticing and friendly and happy for once. Draco is happy and handsome and Harry is humbled and oh so hungry for something other than tacos and he's…
"…calling you for three minutes and seventeen seconds!" Hermione huffs, as Ron shakes Harry by the shoulder. The Boy Who Should Have Died blinks his eyes out of reflex, and his eyelashes hitting his cheek sound like the click of steal bars against cement.
The mask is back in place, it has always been in place, and it will never be out of place again.
Harry turns back to slyly glance at Malfoy just to make sure, but of course, being a Gryffindor means nothing really can be done slyly. Malfoy glares back at him, sharper than a glass, and twice as hard. Harry glares back at Malfoy, and crosses his legs in frustration. He never noticed how heavy the mask was before.
Professor Snape enters like gravity, his nose above the crowd and far between. Hermione starts taking notes before he speaks, while Ron, head bent on the desk, starts to form a small lake of drool. Harry sits rigidly up, eyes daringly forward, hair unkempt and mouth shut.
Harry dreams with his eyes open.
Harry blinks and he's on the pitch. He's just released the snitch from his hands, and it's taunting him before he's even got on to his broom. He lifts off, hair floating around like tendrils of smoke in the air. The chase begins.
Up, down, left, left, right, up he flies. He's gaining on the silver shiny ball, and it knows it. He reaches out, and it skids away, almost like an apparition. He groans in frustration, and flies after it again. It's a smart snitch.
He ends up doing a sort of tumble, tricking the snitch to think he was going left when he was really turning right. Harry's always turning right, and he's surprised that the trick works.
As his right hand closes around the snitch, his eyes close, and the wind stops.
He opens his eyes again, only to find himself in the dark, cold cement under his chest and something warm and hard in his hand. The Astronomy tower.
"Faster, Potter!" Malfoy groans, his hands in Harry's hair, on Harry's skin, on Harry's everything. Harry squeezes that hand that caught the snitch, and Draco whimpers and pushes back. Draco's eyes are shut, his hair splayed out at all angles, and he's whispering something that Harry can't really hear. Harry rubs faster, and Draco's whispering becomes a quiet scream.
"A Deatheater, Not a deatheater, Love me, Harry, won't you…"
"… like detention?" Snape says in his deliberately slow voice. An iron fist in a silk glove. Harry's eyes are closed and he doesn't want to open them ever again.
/\\\\\\\\\\ /
Harry is three minutes early to detention. He's relieved to get away from the common room; it's too loud, and he's ears are too sensitive. The night air is cool, and damp. He can hear something dripping in the distance, water down the pipe. Blood down the spine.
Driiiip. Drippp. Driiiip.
He knocks cautiously against the door to Professor Snape's office. He hears the scratch of a quill, the shuffling of papers, an obscene word, a book closed, the creak of a chair, a subtle sigh, the swoosh of robes, and booted steps approach the door.
The door opens with a bang, and Harry falls back, eyes squinting up into the bright light. The gates to heaven have finally opened!
"Mr. Potter, insolent brat, if you will please get off the floor, and make yourself useful!" Professor Snape scowls down at Harry, his nose sharp like a beak.
Make that the gates to hell.
Harry gets up slowly, his knees rattling, his elbows popping, his neck twisted. He looks Snape in the eye before murmuring, "I'm here for my detention."
Snape smirks. "Well, what are you waiting for, impudent child? The cauldrons are not going to scrub themselves. Get in!"
The room is dark save for the moonlight: open, empty, and cold. A lost room.
Harry turns to his right, only to see a flash of something silver in the corner of his eye to the far left. He turns his head back towards the left, and he's looking at himself a few feet away.
The Mirror of Erised.
He approaches his own image slowly, his legs heavy, and his chest constricted. As he gets closer to the mirror, the image seems to fade into something else. He's still walking towards himself, only he looks different. Not different. But different.
His reflection waits for him patiently, no longer walking towards him. It stands, legs planted firmly in the ground, shoulders broad. Harry walks up to it faster, because it beckons him closer, a reflection waving towards him like a good friend.
Six inches from the image, Harry stares back into those green eyes. He stands perfectly still.
Reflection Harry smiles to the right, but when Harry turns, there's nothing there. Only there is. A hand reaches over from the right of the mirror; a reflection of a hand --- it grasps reflection Harry's right (or was it left?) hand tightly, causing him to soundlessly giggle.
Harry stares at that hand, that pale hand, all length and smoothness, a male hand, with ten fingers, and clipped, clean nails. On the forearm, there's something dark, like a shadow, only it's over the edge, and Harry can't see what it is.
Reflection Harry raises that pale hand to his lips, eyes challenging the real Harry as his lips graze the smooth surface, and lowers it back down again.
"In… your… pocket," the reflection mouths.
Harry reaches out to the mirror, and as his hand settles down on the glass, the pale hand disappears.
He's looking at his own reflection, his palm on his own reflected palm, and it's copying him, and it's just a normal mirror.
Harry reaches towards his pocket slowly, watching his image follow the movements, fingers trailing down his chest and stomach, slowly slowly slooowly.
His fingers dance around the edge of his jumper and he almost feels like a voyeur. He rubs his hand across his stomach, the skin trembling and smooth. He's hard. The fingers find a button, and then a zipper; the sound causes him to catch his lip in frustration, and he concedes that his reflection looks beautiful in the dim moonlight. He snakes his pants down with a slight tug, and a twist of his hips make his y-fronts slip off as well.
Harry brings his hand back up to his mouth and spits into it, clear and slippery.
He leans against the glass, pants pooled around his feet, and his slickened hand finally grasps himself, needy and stiff. He rests his scarred forehead against his own reflection, and it is cool and tangible against his feverish skin. His whole body is leaning against the mirror for support. His eyes focus on his reflected hand, his face skewed in concentration, his erection weeping and ruddy in color.
All he sees is a pale hand with trim nails running back and forth, and he rocks into the hand in the reflection. His other hand soon joins the rubbing one, dallying around his hole, one finger sliding in effortlessly.
Hunched over with only the mirror keeping him steady, legs tied by his pants, he gives and he takes, one finger, two fingers, three fingers, in and out, in and out, pumping up and down, up and down.
It hurts, but the pain only makes him pump faster, and he would shove his whole fist up there if he could, but the angle is not right and he's not that flexible. He wants to impale himself onto a stick, or his wand, or something, because nothing is big enough, and he wants to ripped apart in two.
But he makes do with his hands.
In his minds eye, those hands aren't tan and calloused: they are pale, and smooth, and strong, and the nails are trimmed.
He comes with a breathless, "Oh," collapsing against the mirror, humping the smooth surface, semen rubbing against his belly and his cold reflection. He rests for a minute, and then kisses his reflection lightly, because it feels awkward not to do so.
He wants to be alone, his penis limp and small and tired. It looks at him, abused and shriveled, empty. He touches his red hole gently, and it sucks him in again, muscles contracting and holding on for dear life. He wipes some semen from the glass; it is cool, and when he rubs it gently against the abused flesh, the pain recedes.
Harry pulls up his pants, when he feels something pinching one of his pockets tight.
And he gets to his pocket, and there's a bulge, there's something inside, and it wasn't there before.
He pulls out a silver snitch, engraved with the words:
"You wish…"
"… that you could stay, a dunderhead like you, Mr. Potter, yet I cannot stand seeing you beyond the scheduled detention, so please kindly remove yourself from my presence!" The words clip the air sharply, pinching Harry in the back of his neck. Harry blinks up at Professor Snape, standing above him like an overgrown bat, lips pursed and nostrils flaring. The cauldron is as sparkling as ever, silver in the light of the dungeons, his own reflection distorted by the curve of it's belly-like shape.
Harry stands up, and brushes his clothes off, first down the jumper, across his stomach, then down to the knees. His nails are black, dirt tucked under the white. On closer examination, his hands are rough, from quidditch and climbing up trees and scrubbing cauldrons and whatever it is that boys do with their hands in their spare time.
Harry surreptitiously glances at Snape's hands as he straightens back up, and they are pale and long and smooth with clipped fingernails. He wants to touch them.
And so he does.
Harry grabs Severus's hand, the professor limp from shock, and stands in front of that sparkling cauldron. He stands up straight, his legs planted firmly apart, his shoulders broad.
The reflection looks at him triumphantly, and a dark shadow hovers over that forearm—perfect!—Harry brings that hand up to his lips like he had seen himself do not too long ago. Forever ago. The back of the hand is dry yet soft, and he tentatively sticks his tongue out to taste it. Bitter. He can't get enough of the taste.
Only there's something slightly off about the picture. The clasp of the hands looks strained; the fingers are too long, the wrist is too bony, the hair is too dark.
The reflection sags. Harry lets go.
Professor Snape clasps his pale hand to his chest as if he's been burned by a hot poker, lips set in a line, his eyes dangerously narrow, shock now melting into indignation.
"That will be all, Mr. Potter! Leave, now!" The professor seethes, his words like steam from a kettle.
Harry doesn't need to be told twice. His glasses glint in the moonlight as the door closes.
Severus Snape rubs his hand against his reddened cheek with agitation, and strides towards his private quarters with purpose.
He could do with a shot of vodka right about now.