Potter stops by on his way home from his mysterious business again at the weekend. "Oh good, you're home," he says, and then, "Thanks for your note."
"You are thanking me," Severus says, "for a one sentence long message in which I invited you to continue torturing yourself and passed comment on your unsubtle attempts at appearing to use Muggle communication channels. See a mediwizard. Or a doctor, or whatever it is you do."
"Actually, I was thanking you for the note where you agreed to spend more time with me," Potter says. "But when you put it like that…"
Severus snorts. He has been very tired for a very long time now, and that must be why it feels oddly as though he is drifting, as though this is a dream. It could not possibly seem natural, otherwise, to look Potter over irritably and say, "I assume you're going to want tea."
Potter smiles, wide and genuine. "If you're offering."
A guest at his rickety kitchen table, elbows resting on the scraped wood, hands curled around a cup. The steam from the tea mists Potter's glasses. Ridiculous.
Severus across from him, shoulders stiff.
"I don't mean to be a dick," Potter says. "If you're not comfortable—"
"The last person who sat here and drank tea with me," Severus says, "was Peter Pettigrew. I'm sure even your limited imagination—"
Potter's mouth tightens. "Oh."
It all leads back to war stories. "I'm somewhat less inclined to slip rat poison into your tea, at any rate," he offers.
"Hmm," Potter says. "Promising start." One day he will develop exactly the same kind of twinkle in his eye that Dumbledore used to have.
Don't think about it.
He stares into his tea to avoid Potter's gaze. "I imagine you're less likely to gnaw on the furniture, too."
The existence of Potter's laughter is as surprising as ever.
And here it is, the temptation: to let this farce continue, to let Potter cover one or two old associations with new ones, move through his home and his life and carefully hide away the evidence without knowing that's what it is he's doing. Certainly very few people could be as bad as little Peter, sneaking and crawling and doing it all so badly that Severus could never understand the point of the man. But then, he had his one grand success—
Don't, don't, don't think about it.
"There's a family a few streets over," Potter says, into Severus' silence. "Mill Road. Non-magical to the seventh generation and all of that, except their daughter. I'm trying to get them to understand that it would be good for her… at least part time…" He shrugs. "They're good people, I think, but you know how it is. 'Hi, I'm here from a magical school to tell you that your daughter is very special.' I'd call the police."
You're friends with Granger, Severus thinks. There's no way you've been working on that for two weeks. But a change of topic is not unwelcome.
"That's your new mission, then?" he says. "Save all the Muggle-born from culture shock? How horribly—"
"Gryffindor?"
"Horribly you," Severus corrects, manages a modest sneer.
Potter grins. "And save all the pure-blood kids from vanishing up their own backsides while I'm at it. Something like that." He studies Severus, and Severus fights against the need to creep into himself, flinch away from inspection. He knows what he is. How he looks. "If you'd rather talk about something Muggle I can do that. Football scores. Council tax. Batman."
"Batman. Really."
Potter shrugs. "Actually, I like X-Men better, but you know."
"Not," Severus dredges through childhood memories, books passed around a classroom on one of those days when his father remembered about school, sitting in a corner and trying to get a good look at the cover without actually admitting interest. Looking through Lily Evans' collection of mags to kill time during those long summer holidays away from Hogwarts. Those Muggle comics Perry used to hide better than his porn, for all the good it did him in a dormitory full of teenage boys, "Spider-Man?"—Which he thinks was a title, and he must be right, because Potter makes a choking noise and mutters something that sounds like too surreal into his hand.
"You started it, Potter," Severus says mercilessly.
"And I take full responsibility," Potter says, straightening up a little in his chair, lifting his cup to his lips and sipping at his tea. "That's another thing on the list of stuff I never would've imagined you doing though. Reading comics, I mean."
"I was fairly enthusiastic," Severus says, not as irritated as he feels he ought to be, "for a short period around 1968."
Potter finds spaces in Severus' life and fits into them. Severus still moves through the same streets; is at home, at the pub, smokes and works and hurries irritably through grocery shopping at Morrisons and imagines running people over with a trolley as a substitute for really doing it, makes aggressive notes in the margins of all his books, finds ways to cohabit comfortably with his own memories. Fucks. But sometimes Potter sits at his kitchen table, or joins him with or without warning in a corner at the Gravedigger's. His old excuse must be long since expired, but he hasn't offered a new one.
It is—not uncomfortable, on balance, although it should be. It is—he does not know what it is, can only define it in negative terms. Not intolerable. Not entirely unwelcome.
It should be horrifying.
Severus tries to stare steadily at the page in front of him—tries to ignore the fact that Potter is going through his bookshelves. It isn't easy; he can see Potter from the corner of his eye for all his efforts, peering at titles and running his fingers up and down spines, pulling books out to flick through them.
"Checking for pictures?" Severus asks, aware that he is fast losing all plausible deniability on the topic of not paying attention to his visitor. He hardly even remembers what it was he was trying to read, blinks irritably at the page where Holmes is giving an uncommonly impassioned speech on the topic of blackmail and takes the story from the beginning again.
"I can read, thanks," Potter says. "Even big words. Even written in awful tiny handwriting by irritable gits, if you remember."
"I will never be able to forget, thank you."
"You really do make notes in everything, don't you," Potter says, after perhaps thirty seconds of companionable silence.
"Books are functional," Severus says, "and if you want to treat them as sacred fetish objects I suggest you go elsewhere."
"I didn't say I minded." Potter, a volume of the collected works of Asimov in hand, looks over at him with a smile. "They're interesting notes."
The sun has a little warmth left today and floods the room with orange-yellow light. Framed by the bookshelves, untidy and happy, Potter is—not unattractive.
Severus, suddenly uneasy, gives a noncommittal nod. Looks away.
Monday evening, and the candles on the kitchen worksurface are lit, casting wavering shadows. "Actually," Potter says, "I think you're the only person who didn't tell me this'd be a waste of my Auror training. But when I say explosive sneezing, I mean, it's not exactly a figure of speech. Eight feet in the air at least, and he almost landed on Sara Parkinson."
It has apparently been a long day in the land of other people's regrettably snotty children. "I would have more sympathy if you didn't do this to yourself," Severus points out, but he catches Potter smiling when he hands over the tea—the sod has noticed that he got the best cup.
"You wouldn't," Potter says.
"No," Severus says. "I admit it. I was less than truthful. I have never in my life felt sympathy for anyone. Drink your tea."
He still doesn't know what Potter wants. What price will be demanded of him for accepting—whatever this is. There will, of course, be a price.
Late November heading for December and the cold begins to let up a little, although it remains bitter inside the house. Severus has very little to do; he has collected and prepared and bottled and has as much alcohol ready as he could feasibly sell this side of New Year. It is tempting to go into a sort of hibernation, retreat under his blankets, read and sleep and sleep some more. Spend the winter safe in there, protected from Potter, from himself.
But he is restless, too, paces around the house and has a hard time sleeping despite winter tiredness. He's never sure when Potter will turn up, and begins to find it irritating, although he was the one who disliked the idea of constantly checking calendars, of letters and arrangements and being constantly required to give consent, to be an active participant in this erosion of his understanding of himself. He finds odd jobs to do, cleans everything, and when Potter turns up with a bag of shopping in one hand the last Sunday of the month he finds Severus covered in dust from the basement, in no mood to stop.
"You can help," Severus says, and only realises half way down the steps that this is a new level of trust. Potter has never been down here; they have not, in actual point of fact, discussed the details of what it is Severus does, although it's quite possible Potter knows anyway. Goodness knows half of Wizarding Britain seems to, in some strictly unofficial and entirely inexplicable way.
"I'm so fucking glad I'm not an Auror anymore," Potter mutters, staring around at the temporarily chaotic mess of bottles, leaning over to inspect labels; he has felt it, then, the background hum of magic in the room that Severus has never been able to do a damn thing about. "Dragon's blood? Really?"
A rare purchased ingredient, that one. He prefers to collect everything himself, from hedgerows and wastelands and people's neglected gardens; it is remarkable what can be found within walking distance. But there is a certain temptation on occasion to experiment. "Tree sap, Potter," Severus says, exasperated. "Dracaena cinnabari."
"The international statute of secrecy is relieved to hear it I'm sure," Potter says, shaking his head. "OK, what are we doing?"
They spend hours cleaning bottles and shelves. Severus re-writes labels, and labels the shelves, too, so that even Potter can manage to put things back in the right place. The space is in reality a little too small for two to move through, and they come up against each other constantly, take awkward steps back and try to ignore the embarrassment of close proximity with a person one is not, after all, intimate with.
"Where did you learn all this?" Potter asks, peering at his handiwork. "I mean, we never used stuff like—um—bird-cherry at Hogwarts."
"We didn't boil our own water for tea either," Severus points out irritably. "The bloody point of living like a Muggle is—"
He snaps his mouth shut. No, no, they're not talking about this. He's not talking to Potter about his life choices or, for that matter, his bloody father. That's the limit, exactly there.
They stare each other down. Potter blinks first. Shrugs, and goes back to filling the shelves in front of him. "Point," he says, as though there hadn't been a moment there at all. "Hey, can I shift the shelf labels along a bit? The elderflower's never going to fit in this space."
Finally tidying away the last of the day's debris, Severus finds himself wondering if his mother thought it would work to marry a Muggle just because he knew about herbs, believed in old cures—if it would be almost like talking to a wizard who loved potions or herbology. He wonders if she thought it would help that he was baffled by British Muggle society, too. They never talked about anything like this; his parents' marriage is a mystery to him. He has only fragments: Tobias Snape carrying him along a green lane at the edge of town, Severus perched on his shoulders, picking rose-hips and haws from the high tangled hedges, naming all the things that could be used against aches and pains and colds and scrapes, all the things that shouldn't be touched, naming them by names that Severus did not know were strange until much later. Eileen, showing him things Tobias could never see, redcaps lurking around the edge of a car park that must have been built on some old battle site, the faint shift in shade of dandelion leaves when the roots are at their best for potions, the twisting tendrils of devil's snare in the dark. A sort of competition, he supposes; a covert fight for his understanding, before open warfare took over entirely.