Salazar Slytherin had originally designed the dungeon level himself. The bulk of Hogwarts castle had been built with slate and gneiss stone, but the dungeons had been constructed with mountain granite that sparkled with a million brilliant flashes from the overhead baroque crystal candle chandelliers. Each twisting hallway melted with vivid, moving paintings of revenants and fatales, each corner buttressed with gargoyle reliefs that roared at non-slytherin. The common room itself opened with two monolithic veined marble columns on either side of the great portrait, and inside mosaic stone floors and high ceiling vaulting similiar to the Baths of Diocletian, like a hard roman paradise if Salazar had decorated on the merits of muggles (he did not). The house colors of emerald and silver were displayed lavishly with triple count silks and thick turkish velvets that the first headmaster of Durmstrang had sent by the crate for Salazar, and most of the enchantments on the level (for security or otherwise) were old magic, as old as each piece of furniture with it's turn-of-some-century engravings and that waft of old cherry wood that spoke of regency. The gilded fireplaces gave off enough fractal light that one could see dust hangling lazily in the air, and all around was the stale remnant of Somalian myrrh that enveloped the cold alabaster busts and an echo of parseltongue that undulated from long, cold shadows.

The head of house (Slytherin, in this case) had private quarters, down one corridor and on the left from the common room and dormitories, adjacent to the potions classroom. Private quarters were for a proffessor to do with as they pleased, naturally, but a majority of Severus Snapes quarters were remnants of Slytherin house heads before him. The worn leatherbound books on the shelves were about might and magic, histories of the pureblood families, restricted dark arts books and powerful spell grimoires. The bed was cherry oak with a grandured canopy of refined mulberry silk in the deepest emerald, and one lavish grey rug spread out across the stone floor, so deep that when Snape set his bare feet to it they sank out of sight. He had changed almost nothing about the quarters from the day he had first walked into them because, as with most of what Snape deemed personality (with hard misgivings), he internalized everything that he was. He had never been free: not in the shadow of his hateful muggle father, not alongside his judging Slytherin peers, not in his double life as an adult. It might have been quite sad if Snape had not lost his use for sadness long, long ago and replaced it, instead, with a disdain that ran long and deep, a bitterness that pooled like vestiges across the walls in late hours that he walked alone. His steps echo alongside that familiar snake language that twines itself with everything in the dungeons, his lifes mistakes and regrets and casualties floating close behind in whispy phantasms that only he can see or touch: a man forever haunted.

Potter waits at his door, a single point of blue wand light in the darkness (metaphor, that) - Snape is just out of it's bredth, just a foot more into the otherwise inky blackness of the halls. He pauses there momentarily. Occlumency is only one of his many talents (of course) neccessary for his survival on all accounts, but it unnerves Snape to have Harry treading this arena with him, the two of them swimming in the vasts seas of conscious and unconscious, together. And Potter, so clumsy with his mind, spilling out everywhere for all to see. So different from Snape that it makes the hardened Slytherin's disdain spike, his bile for the boy comes like a second nature, like a fifteen year old perversion of nature dolefully eyeing the painting on the walls. Snape gathers himself into his cloaks and steps forward, his lip twitching only slightly when Harry visibly startles, and moves forward. The doors to his chambers push open without a hand to help, and after Harry has followed Snape inside and the fireplaces light for the presence of their lord they slam shut with equal solemn brevity. The only great comfort in all of this is, of course, that Harry Potter is as miserable as he is. That his body gives off waves of defeated discomfort with every broad sweeping gensture that Snape makes to clear off room from a chair, from a desk, a twist of his wand and a sigh from Harry's lips.

Snape is, however, free of those charges that he has ever hated the boy. Whatever it is between he and potter, he knows, stems from great misdirection on his part and his double life and old grudges that he doesn't hold the boy accountable for but .. can't help but feel the sting of when he looks at him, all the same. It is a bit tragic that they should ever find themselves alone together in a room, Potter oblivious to all the years that had existed before him and how they had shaped Snape, and why. There is a very dreamt up, ethereal Snape that is twisted into a hunch of black robes, alone forever to die with his secrets, a singular kind of man because so few have ever gone on existing in the way that he does. Infact, if he had not felt so suffered to go on existing for this purpose, in his duty to her memory, Snape might have gone ashen and blown into the wind long ago. How visible it felt, too. How much more it hurt him to know just how obvious it was that he was withered.

"Sit."

Snape whirls to resume their lessons wordlessly. He is momentarily caught off guard by Harry's wand already raised, his rigor, his features set in the most displeased, unhappy lines - not so different from the first time they had ever made eye contact in Harry's first year, there was a lopsided animosity that simply seeped from the boy that never ceased to throw Snape off everytime he had to confront it. In Snape's disquiet over Harry's seething green eyes it is Harry who again invades the potion master's mind. In gilded gold rose cages he's locked away the beautiful moments: strange, precious memories and it is then that he offers them - why - in some humble deliverance that everything inside of him is not ugly and ruined. The tapestries of stained glass in the Sainte Chapelle that she had wanted to show him at sunset, that light and her hand winding into his for the brevity of beauty that engulfed them. The intimate arias that unfolded on the steps of Teatro la Fenice, on a scratchy record, right next to Lily in the grass - her hair was long enough that it barely brushed his shoulder. The field behind their birthplaces where the gypsy families camped for the summer and their twine and stake curtain walls of thick damask - he had been spying on them when he'd first seen her on the other side of the plain, spying too, and the sun set behind her in amber, rose, gold as time slowed. Grimms to start the story, once upon a time, I don't need help from a mudblood & the porcelain heroine shatters and the memories go inky, foggy, and Harry is back in his own mind again. There is vulnerability in the air.

Last time Harry had invaded his mind Snape had roared him out and it had taken two weeks of Dumbledore's pursuasions over tea to bring Snape back round to the lessons. Now, though, the two of them breath hard and watch one another. Harry begins to apologize but Snape's wand is up and it is his turn, his magic fueld with a passionate kind of anger. "Legilimens!" Cap guns pop, Weasley fireworks fizzle, a planet burns on the horizon and then the first stars appear; a line of purple dusk steals across in a band, then it is night and Harry is in his bed in gryffindor tower holding a wrinkled copy of The Prophet staring at the scowling face of Snape in a moving photo that might have just well been a still muggle shot for all he'd moved & some tacky Rita Skeeter line about deatheaters in Hogwarts that Dumbledore had made them retract. The music of colorful bruises, swollen ankles, and sore muscles after quidditch, Harry on the bench alone, he removes that crumpled, unhappy photo torn from the prophet and stares at it. The scenes melt and twist into kaleidoscope realities, irish twined vines, pictish coiled snakes that speak softly. Harry stares over his date at the Yule Ball to watch Snape sitting gruff on the sidelines in dressrobes and there is such heartache and longing. Back in the tower, back in the tower, urgency in the memory, The wrinkled photo in one hand while the other slides down ...

"Stop!" Harry yells, horse and unnerved. "You've no right...just stop." He is reflected in the surrounding walls of potion bottles, Rubus Idaeus and Sarsaparilla scribbled with Snape's illegible handwriting and hundreds of angry, refracted Harry Potters all catching breath and indignant.

Snape is pale; more pale than usual, if possible. More pale than the last time when Harry had seen his father hoisting Snape up into the air and he can still feel the urgency and the longing in a way that he hasn't felt them in decades of his life, missives from Potter's world, mind and thought.

Without being asked Harry tears past Snape, knocking one of his bony elbows into several bottles that go breaking to the floor, out of the door and down the hall with Snape's face still drained of blood where he stands rigid. Outside one cathedral shaped window crows fill the sky like some vast black shattering of glass in an ill omen of things to come. Lily's ghost is a quiet heartbeat, fighting extinction, laughing and living in the tangles of time. "Harry," Snape whispers softly, barely understanding.