Title: Brush of Venus
Summary: Another screw that could have turned after Snape's Worst Memory. Order of the Phoenix, half-sad, half-soft fluffy slash. Harry/Snape when you tilt and squint. One-shot.
Warnings: Spoilers to Order of the Phoenix, slight angst, underage romance. Oh, and I haven't contributed to this fiction in, like three years. Yikes.
Disclaimer: I own nothing characters and make no money off of this. Please don't sue me.
Dedication: To my sister's girlfriend for her birthday. She's turning an age I'm not allowed to disclose to the public eye and requested this as I have no other useful things to give, other than the cake and brownies she wanted. Kudos for her turning BLANK years old and, with the request of this fic, reminding me what it is like trying to remember details to a book I haven't read in two years and no longer have in my possession. I have only seen the movie twice, so this is based solely off of the BOOK…gah.
Small Note: This little situation has probably been done, but I couldn't think of anything else. Oh, what a hack I am….

-:-
Suddenly, there is inner stillness. And within that stillness there is a subtle but intense joy, there is love, there is peace.
-Eckhart Tolle.

Harry most definitely had hoped not to see Professor Snape so soon as the morning after the incident with watching James Potter go about humiliating the Slytherin as a teenager in a memory. But, then, considering Harry's luck with everything under the sun, it wasn't quite that surprising that the tall, dark and—now, of course, with Harry just waking up to go to breakfast in the great hall—fairly terrifying man was waiting outside the portrait of the Fat Lady, leaning against the wall and an entirely too relaxed look on his face.

"Mr. Potter," he began, simple and dark and perhaps more terrifying with his voice level and in control as he stepped up beside Harry and moved him down another corridor away from breakfast, "I'd like to have a word with you about last evening."

Synching up his tie only half-way to his throat, leaving it loose in the event that Snape tried to strangle him with it, Harry simply nodded, stiff, rigid, completely aware of what was probably going to happen next.

Snape was most likely going to murder him and stuff his body in a closet somewhere…

Amazed at still being alive after the first ten minutes of dead silence they had been walking in since being brought aside and out of earshot, Harry did not want to ruin it as he found that his teacher was taking him up to the Astronomy Tower, clear and free of other students so early in the morning and on a Saturday, so he kept his mouth shut and stuffed his hands into his pants pockets. Snape hadn't looked at him, sure that Harry wouldn't run off as he lead the way, arms stiff at his sides and looking straight ahead with his back straight and his head held high.

When Harry looked sideways at the man, he couldn't help but notice the slight red about the pockets under his eyes and the way he looked like some of the non-magical portraits he'd seen when he was little in old art books. There was one he liked best, "Leroux's Opera Ghost"and as they traveled the stairs of the tower—Snape not looking at him and Harry doing his best to make sure Snape didn't notice Harry's looking occasionally at him—Harry found that his teacher looked almost exactly like the man in the painting. Sure, the face in that portrait had only half shown (the artist not revealing the Opera Ghost's full visage until his next painting) the Ghost's face, but it had been plain there as what was plain in this moment Harry was just silently watching the man.

Severus Snape had been crying last night after he had thrown Harry out of his office, chucking a bottle of dead insects at him on the way.

Coming to a stop at the top of the tower, where they could see and hear all around and all was at peace with the sun peaking his head over the horizon and through the mists of the morning yet to leave, Snape stepped to where most students placed things over the ledge of a turret and placed his hands on the stone. He closed his eyes a moment and took a breath, still not looking at Harry, but that was alright. For the moment, the man was less terrifying and Harry wanted to just look at him being an actual human being, breathing in misty morning air like it would be a part of him for longer than a minute—maybe for a bit of eternity, like a touch of a star crashing through the sky as it burnt out or the brush of Venus towards one of her lovers—and keeping his eyes closed so Harry, maybe, wouldn't see his internal, private pain.

"Did you," Snape began, pausing a moment like he hadn't meant to talk, hadn't thought of what to say, but had to keep going, "Did you tell Miss Granger or Mr. Weasley about what you came upon in my memory? Or, anyone else, for that matter?"

Harry, despite himself, felt a little pang in his torso at the sound of Snape's voice being so…he didn't know. Somehow the word destitute came to mind, though Harry didn't fully remember what the word, written down and in the Dictionary fully meant. It just fit, and thereupon made him feel worse.

Stepping over to Severus Snape's right, further from the stairs they had come up and closer to where the wind was starting to blow—some of his the Professor's hair fell into their own eyes and each had to brush it away at the same time, leading to Harry almost knocking his shoulder against the Potion Master's wrist in the motion—harder but not horribly, Harry took in his own breath of air to respond.

Breathing in the fresh morning, Harry could understand why Snape had done so before his inquest; it had a calming effect.

"No Professor, I would never do that. It's not my place and… You don't deserve to be treated like that."

There was a little sliver of Snape that Harry could see out of the corner of his eye at Harry's confession of doing no such thing as to tell his friends—best friends or not—about a situation of horrible teenage humiliation Snape had suffered at the hands of his father. Harry's glasses didn't quite distort the action of Snape turning his head and blinking down at the Boy Who Lived. His face hadn't changed from when he had asked Harry to come with him, but his eyes were…different. Not angry or somber anymore.

There was more light where once there was dark.

'He almost looks handsome…'was a little flicker of the voice in the back of his head speaking, but Harry didn't know how the Hell it had come to be or why the Hell he would think such a thing.

"You wouldn't?"

"No, I wouldn't. You've been helping me try and focus and keep me safe so Voldemort doesn't get to me or get to someone else through me," Harry shrugged, turning slightly to look at Snape with his lighter eyes that were not—REPEAT: WERE NOT—boring into him like Snape was Mephistopheles checking over Faust and deciding whether or not it was worth granting him wishes before taking up his soul and devouring it, as though he had turned into some kind of bipolar but still very nice person that Harry had never met and was a little uncomfortable standing next to, "It wouldn't be fair—let alone right—for me to do something like that to you. And besides, it's not even my own business, let alone anyone else's."

Snape was still looking at him, blinking every five seconds, and Harry noticed that his hands atop the stones were moving a little. Very, very little, but both of his pointer fingers were tapping up and down like they were chicken pecking piano keys, and the middle finger on his right hand followed after its own pointer after the first seven taps.

A small snap of something like worry for his teacher settled into Harry's gut and, like it was instinct, Harry leaned in close to the much taller man and swerved back, knees tucking forward and his robe settled on his ankles; he looked a little like a squirrel looking at a statue and he lightly waved his hand before Snape's face.

"Professor Snape, are you still with me here?"

The Potions Master stopped tapping his fingers and, with abruptness that nearly made Harry fall backwards onto his rear, he brought one hand to his mouth and coughed into it as hard as Harry was pretty sure no one on the planet could do unless they had something like Bronchitis or Asthma or, quite possibly, lung cancer. It sounded painful and it made Harry worry a little more.

"Yes, uh, Harry, I'm fine," Snape finally answered, looking anywhere but at Harry and he brought his arms behind his back, one big hand gripping his other wrist, "I…Thank you for not….saying anything about the other night."

Both pretended not to notice that Snape had called Harry by his given name instead of his sir name, and neither of them were left without something like heat creeping upon their cheeks at Snape's thanks. It was unnatural, of course; an unprecedented phenomena that was never likely to happen again—at least, not for a while—but at the same time it was…there was no describing it in words. It would be like trying to explain color to someone who could only see in black and white.

Clearing his throat again—oh, God, Harry knew and recognized that as a nervous tick; Snape was nervous—the Potions Master pressed out of the way of the door, his backside against the stone turrets, robes squishing against the hardness and making it so it was possible for Harry to leave if he wished, "Well, better get down to breakfast. Granger and Weasley are probably waiting for you."

Harry, as if he was older than he was and more mature than he felt at the moment (what was this heat upon his face, the sun?), nodded his head and with one last look at Snape, honest and as he really was, rather than a terror that lurked in the shadows, made for the way back downstairs and to breakfast. He would find a seat with Ron and Hermione and not say anything about this. He would stuff his face with bacon and eggs and say one of the staircases had turned on him.

But, first thing…

Stopping on the first flight down from the tower, where he could still see Snape looking back over the grounds, the forest, the sky, all things from such a height that only the Astronomy Tower could offer from above—oh, what it must be like if one were an owl or something of the sort that lived at such heights, thinking themselves gods or immortal—the bespectacled young man paused and called back.

"See you later this week in Potions, Professor Severus."

Harry was gone then, just as Snape looked back at him. The last thing Severus saw of Harry were his robes and the last Harry saw of Snape was his dark (handsome) eyes blinking at the speaking of his name and turning back to look Harry in his green eyes.

Snape counted to ten and allowed his shoulders to relax and his mouth to form into a relaxed line with the corners just turned up enough for the wrinkles at the edges to deepen inwards.

Down below, from the forest, one of the school owls took to the air and out of nowhere from another tree about twenty feet away from the other, one of the owls that belonged to a student—the school owl large and black, decidedly male and the student owl mid-sized and like snow—followed after. They flew up and above and well past Snape, together.

He watched the owls, and his lips with the edges raised slightly did not thin and did not whither.