"Children, the night sky may seem like a scary thing sometimes. And it is. It's a very scary thing."
- Welcome to Night Vale
Snape takes his time, pulling the car into the empty driveway past the church parking lot and next to his cottage. The car shakes and rustles climbing uphill over the familiar curb. The overgrown lilac branches slap against the windshield, leaving a wet trail of dew and wilting petals.
Harry's seat belt clicks free and the click stings like a loaded gun: one of Moody's prized pistols. The sound is casually impersonal, as only the cold steel of a deadly weapon can be when pointed right against your ribs.
Snape turns off the ignition and takes the car keys out, the familiar routine taking over to tame the panic.
Home at last.
They take the sidewalk to the back door in silence. The smell of lilac, bitter and fragrant, fills the humid night. Ursa Major shines, hanging sideways over the church steeple. The porch light flickers, grows dim in silence and in stillness. Only the stars stay lit. On the nights like this one, the entire world is upturned, the starry bowl of night sky under the hanging earth, that dying porch light the only beacon of humanity into the starlit expanse. All that empty space stretches on, filled with unreachable galaxies of stars and unfolding farther than imagination. The void of the world is both beautiful and terrifying. Is that why countless, scattered humans always seek out something named, be it the familiar constellations or each other's company, to distract one another from the sight of an endless suspended abyss?
The infinity of the known and the yet-unexplored universe is a frightening sight, a chilling thought. Snape shuts the door against all such infinities but it doesn't help: Harry follows him in. Even here and now, in Snape's sanctuary against the outside world, the universe manages to seep in and invade through the cracks. Sure enough, soon enough, he's met with a dazzling, frightening sensory experience. Harry stumbles into him with a soft gasp, and leans closer, plastering himself against Snape's back. Touch, breath, sound, and sightlessness all meet to conspire against him.
"Severus." Harry's whisper sounds like a secret, a confession. The kind that rasps from Snape's raw throat in the nights when he's honest with himself and is too tired of asking the universe for an answer. Unbidden, unexpected, gentle arms slide and wrap around Snape's waist. Snape can tell the exact count of years, months, and possibly days since the day he was hugged by another. (Two Christmases ago there was an "Oho-ho-ho!" and the shock of being lifted up a foot up from the icy homeless shelter steps and then carefully set down. The cheery bearded giant could almost have been an unwashed, alcohol-soaked Santa Claus, and up to this day, Snape is quite sure that the vagrant merely mistook him for his pet hound.)
The tiny flash of memory is gone, irrelevant in the shock of the now. Harry obviously knows exactly who he's trying to embrace. Just as obviously, that doesn't mean Harry really understands what he's trying to achieve. Snape can feel the imprint of a nose and twin arches of glass frames in his back, right between his shoulder blades. Harry's breath is warm against his upper spine.
Oh. It takes all Snape has not to lean back, luxuriate in the support, give into the inevitability of this. It's quite a mess, the two of them alone together. A beautiful, frightening mess waiting to happen, an onslaught of emotional honesty in a single touch, just waiting to crack open every mental shell and shield Snape has raised out of instinctual self-preservation or by necessity.
"I can't believe it." Harry breathes, feverish, frantic. "We're OK. It's all turned out OK!"
I can't. I… Snape can't get the words out past the dry, choked throat. He is spun around, pressed against the shut door. Harry's entire bony frame is pressed hard and hot against him, shaking with adrenaline, with emotion. Harry's hands slide up Snape's spine tracing each and every bone until his fingers settle on the back of Snape's shoulders, right under his collar.
"They didn't see. They didn't see anything. And they can't see us now, not here. It's over. Whew."
Snape inhales and even now Harry's hair smells of green grass and fresh earth under the summer sun. So close. So warm. So sinfully, stunningly human.
"Harry." Snape turns his head, gasps into a wiry, firm shoulder. He pries one hand loose from its hold. He fumbles for the light switch, flips it, and his vision is flooded with light, with the proximity of Harry's green, worried stare.
A second of unspeakable brightness and then there's a sharp crack and it all goes dark. It takes Snape a breathless second to flip the switch again in a futile gesture: I just put in a new bulb last week! The switch for the reading lamp in the corner works, dimly lighting the room in green.
Harry clutches Snape to him, holding him close - almost as if he is something precious. That can't possibly be true, and so all the rest must be a lie, or worse, a trap. Harry's lips are wet and soft and not kissing him but this close to doing so, and the sight of them makes Snape's head spin as if the unthinkable happened and gravity failed, and he's falling upward into the abyss of the night sky.
"Harry. Stop."
"Why? What's wrong?" Harry's forehead is so hot, as hot as his breath feels, as Harry pulls back and presses his face against Snape's cheek.
"We can't just -" Snape pants. "We can't."
"Why?" Harry's stare turns in the direction of the church, the question obvious in his eyes, as his gaze flicks back to Snape's in a mute challenge. "I care about you. If we care like this, it's not a sin."
"According to who?" Snape huffs. Perhaps it is his finest moment of avarice. Like a dragon with treasure, he can't quite pry his arms open from the short, youthful body in his hold.
"Me. Everyone! It's common sense." Harry murmurs. "It just is. Trust me! It's OK!"
One breath at a time, Snape attempts to let go. He starts with a step back. "OK?" he latches onto the ridiculous assessment, bristling from the loss. "OK! The entire world is suddenly OK, because one young man said so, well then it must be true. Grow up!" he cries out indignantly. "Harry, this is not a game!"
"What?" Harry steps back. "This was not a game to me! Never!"
That step back has brought the burnt out light into Snape's field of view, just over Harry's head, and for the first time Snape notices something extraordinary. The lightbulb is completely gone. Not burnt out. Not shattered. Gone.
Banished. The proper word for it is 'banished', like Mother banishing dust and the postman's footprints and Church flyers off our doorstep every Sunday when I was a boy. As if someone with the Gift found that lightbulb so inconvenient they wished it out of the socket, out of sight, out of existence.
I didn't do that, Snape thinks. I'd never do anything like that, not when someone else could see. But if not me, then...
Did Harry do it?
That prospect is like a final betrayal in the long, long chain of betrayals that is Snape's entire life. Like Lily, leaving Pleasant Hope - and Snape - behind for the freedom and acceptance of Salem, Massachusetts. Like her death two years later. Surely if Harry's capable of an underhanded trick like that, he also knows precisely what he is doing to Snape. This shocking revelation is nothing like the horror of wide open starry skies: Harry must know exactly what he's after, and has meticulously planned every step of his trap.
"Why would you even think that?" Harry adds, quieter. "Today - with you - when I kissed you... This is the most serious thing I've done in my entire life."
It's hard to breathe, as if in one failed breath Snape has been buried under many layers of dirt and dust and weeds, and there's no use fighting against gravity.
Nothing this good can ever be a natural turn of events. Such sudden things simply do not happen to someone like Snape. Therefore it's deliberate. And deliberation only points to a trap.
"Say something." Harry looks terrified. "Please!"
Snape draws a breath. "This stops now," he commands, willing his stomach to stop sinking into the bottomless pit, curling his fingers into claws at the undeniable reality of the situation. "Whatever this is to you, it's dangerous for both of us, and I want no part of it. You must understand, I never consented to being the subject of a youthful experiment!"
"An experiment?" Harry's eyes widen in outrage at the accusation. "Is that what you think this is?"
"What could you possibly imagine would happen?" Snape carries on, overriding him, because he can't hold back the truth with further denials of reality at hand: "You'll be off to college soon enough - oh don't even try to protest - you will! There, you'll have plenty of stunningly hot young men for your... experiments. And I'll be stuck here . Alone." Thinking of you. Missing you. Wishing I was one of them. "Harry, this - us - won't work. Ever."
"Why?"
"Why what ?"
He expects Harry to question the obvious, but instead, Harry asks something else, his voice deep and soft. "Why are you 'stuck' here?"
It's only then that the tangent strikes Snape, suddenly as obvious as the ceiling lamp he's now carefully avoiding glancing at, that Harry hasn't once followed his gaze upwards.
Maybe he doesn't even realize he's done it.
Maybe he doesn't actually know anything! If so, I've got to keep it that way!
" What's keeping you here?" Harry pries, "Really, what?"
Snape sneers his disgust at own unforgivable mistake in letting the word out. At Harry being attentive enough, clever enough, to pick it out. For being an impossibly enchanting young man who maybe, possibly cluelessly, commits the impossible on a whim and an accident, leaving it up to Snape to deal with the fallout of consequence. "Isn't it obvious? No? Well then, the world must be positively bursting at the seams with spare pastoral positions for confirmed sodomites."
Harry pulls back a bit. His stare narrows. "Come on. Don't tell me you're that jaded. People are not completely horrible. I'd like to think some are reasonably human. Do you really think there's not a single church in the world that won't be OK with this? With us?"
"Yes!" Stating the obvious has never been so exasperating. "It's the church." The only human trait Snape has persistently, reliably witnessed over and over was the act of casting away the deviant, the outsider. Why would the church, any church, go against human nature?
"So who says you have to keep relying on something that would never accept you? There's nothing else in the world you can do?"
Snape stops. Truly, if one covers tending to a cemetery and providing quality counseling a suitable alternative, he could expand into all manner of service positions. If I take a leaf out of my dear Mother's book and pretend the answer to life, love, and the universe lies in a deck of cards, I could liberate endless gaggles of impressionable fools from their money merely by reassuring them that their world won't end the next time Mercury is in retrograde. How different, really, would that be from absolving them of sins as they confess? Absolution, far more often than not, becomes a currency for those who realize it can be turned more tangible than a taste of power, and far more precious than gold.
Snape shakes his head slightly, wearily, doing some banishing of his own, dismissing this entirely futile line of speculation. "Harry, this is my life. Do you expect me to throw all of that away on a whim? I can't not be who I am. This is what I do . I have a place. I have duties. I am responsible for my parish. They need me."
Harry's eyes are bright and wet in the dark. " I need you," he rasps quietly. It's not a question. It's not even an argument.
What can anyone say to that?
"Look, let's not do this..." Harry sighs and shakes his head. "Not now. You're tired, I'm tired. I'm going to bed. You should too."
Ah, finally something sensible out of that mouth. Snape bows his head in resignation, hoping the shadows of his hair hide his wince at Harry's confession of need. He draws a long breath, loud in the stillness, and squares his shoulders. "Good night."
"'Night," Harry murmurs and meets his eye. A hand rests on Snape's elbow and lingers.
Snape accepts it as a compromise. "Pleasant dreams."
Snape knows he should feel relief. Seekers are supposed to be annoyingly persistent until the last possible moment. They pry and prod and never ever give up.
He hasn't given up. Not yet. This isn't the end of the battle, just a temporary cease-fire.
Snape listens to the silence and hears the screech of a bathroom door, the slow drip of the water in the sink, the rustling of turned-down sheets on his couch, until he is forced to admit that Harry's motives are as sincere as his every other move. Even if Harry's current goal is to leave Snape alone to his privacy, to his thoughts, to his self-flagellating mental habits and the ever-brewing acidic concoction of guilt and bile and regret in the silence of his own mind.
But even as he adds a mixture of 'irresponsible', 'selfish', and 'fool, fool, fool!' to the ever-present, spitting, simmering mental brew, Snape wonders and asks himself something that's not guilt-inducing or punishing: When did he get so mature?
It's more than I can say for myself. Snape recalls the frantic, forward kiss in the dark of the parked car on that country road to Mother's place. He can still taste Harry's dry, chapped lips, and all his gentleness and desperation. It's far too likely that that was Harry's first real kiss.
It should have been with someone his own age, someone as gentle and innocent as him. Someone who deserves his attention and desire, someone who's free to return them in full. Not me. I should have never let this - whatever this is - develop this far.
We're both fortunate that it ends here. Snape reminds himself. It's much easier to stop now than suffer the results.
He closes the door to the bedroom behind him and this doorway is far more mundane to step through. No one follows him in. No one argues with him. No one invades his personal space.
No one kisses him.
There's a line of light on the floor of his room where there should be none. It's coming from the far wall.
Snape is almost - almost - unsurprised when he opens the sliding door to his closet only to discover a floating lightbulb unattached to anything as mundane as an electric wire. Against the laws of physics, against the fact that it shouldn't exist at all, here it is. Persisting. Shining. Not disappearing in a puff of smoke at his touch. It's light is so bright, it makes him squint.
Far be it from Snape to leave an unexpected fire hazard overnight. He cups both hands in a sphere, fingers spread a little distance around the hot glass, and concentrates. Breathes in. Feels the air expand his lungs. Breathes out slowly through his nose.
God grant me serenity…
The routine of taming the chaotic, crackling energy is as familiar as a prayer.
When Snape was ten, he broke into Mother's cellar stash of grimoires and jars by chanting insistently at the bolted, warded, spelled staircase door until the hinges creaked and the door slid open like an opening book to his touch. This is no different. He's always had a knack for taming Mother's magic, if not her curses. Apparently not only Mother's magic, if the contents of his hands is anything to go by.
The light bulb grows dim and cool enough to touch and falls into his cupped hands like an apple from a tree, an unexpected harvest from his conquest. It's still residually warm, its glass as brittle and delicate as a Christmas tree bauble heated by faulty fairy lights.
The electric charge in his fingers travels up his arms, light as a bubble, ticklish like the static in Harry's untamed, feathery hair.
Oh, Harry.
Apparently stirring trouble is the young man's calling. Even Lily, with her fondness for soaring off the swing, wasn't capable of altering reality so suddenly by complete accident.
He must have had other outbursts like this, before, when he was younger. Was he seen? Did he block it all out?
If he's like me and Mother, what else can he do?
Snape sets the cooling bulb on the top shelf, right between the dusty shoe boxes and closes that particular closet door. For now, it's no use wondering.
At six o'clock in the morning, as soon as his guest relocates to the bathroom, Snape quietly checks the room.
They don't talk about what happened. They have breakfast. And then they don't talk about it some more. Snape is getting rather good at maintaining the silent status quo. Harry seems not nearly foolish enough to tempt fate.
"Uh-oh, looks like the lamp needs fixing," Harry says while Snape does the dishes. "Do you want me to take a look?"
"No!" Snape stops him quickly. "I've got it." His mind searches quickly for something to distract his guest from poking around the house. "Actually, there is something you can do for me today."
"Whatever you need!"
"I need some books from the library. There is a list on the desk."
The next time Snape knocks on his mother's door, it's without Harry.
"Oh, it's you," Eileen says. Her cat slinks out - tail held high - through the cracked door, and winds its way, purring, around Snape's legs on the way past.
"Did you expect a client?"
"Not quite. Well, standing out here is about as much use as herding my cats. Come inside, sit down. It's not every week I get my son all to myself these days." She smirks. "What with that delicious young thing keeping you busy all day and all night."
"Mother."
"I know, I know. So how is that church-supplied chastity belt of yours? Must chafe ever so much."
The banter is familiar in its annoyance. He allows it to continue, as she sweeps her trinkets off the kitchen table and lights a centerpiece candle.
"When did you first know," he grumbles, eyeing her over the pitcher of iced tea, "that I was different."
"Different how?" Eileen asks briskly, cutting the cards and pulling out one from the deck. She taps the back of it, laid out flat on the table. "You were a queer child all along, from your pointy head to your crooked little toes. You'll have to be more specific. Which part?"
"Witchcraft," Snape growls the obvious.
"Ah." The tapping stops. "There's no such thing as 'witch' craft. Unless you need a perfect excuse to get together with the good ol' boys on a church night for a round of rape and pillage. As for your magic ," She flips the card suddenly, glances at it and presents it to Snape with a smug smirk. Magician. Of course. "It hasn't bothered you this far, Severus. Why such sudden concern?"
Snape sets down his untouched tea. "The situation... changed," he admits, through thinned lips.
"How?" The smirk disappears off Eileen's face. "Has there been an accident?"
Snape doesn't know where to start. There has indeed been one, yes. Finding Harry has been one massive accident.
Eileen's eyes widen. "Were you seen?" she hisses, all her usual snide banter utterly gone.
"No. Well, not quite."
"This isn't a laughing matter, Severus. Spill it. Who saw you? Was it Harry?"
Snape shakes his head. "He knows nothing. However, this week, while we were alone, he made something disappear."
"My, my!" Eileen grins, humor returning in a rush of relief. "What got in his way first? Your clothes or your self-control?"
"My lamp," Snape snaps back at the insinuation. "A single lightbulb. Vanished right out of the socket. Ended up hanging in my closet. No, not hanging, floating. Still lit! "
"Is that all?" Eileen shrugs. "Lovely parlor trick. That scrawny tadpole might even have his mother's Gift. He should have been taught control sooner. Properly. By someone who knows her way around."
"You will do no such thing. He does not even know what he is."
"Then tell him!"
"No!"
"Tell him, Severus! You owe him that much."
"He is under my care. I 'owe him' to keep him safe. Sometimes, it's best to keep things exactly as they are."
"Oh, keep on deluding yourself," she waves a hand airily. "And best keep an eye on that closet of yours: it might fill up faster than you think."
About that... "I do need something, with your help."
"Oh?" she perks up. "How can I possibly be of service to a priest?"
"Did you keep any of my notes?"
"Which ones?" Her smile widens. "The anatomical sketches or the angsty poetry?"
"All of them, Mother."
"But what will I have left to hang up on my fridge door? Oh, very well. There might be a few boxes up in the cellar."
She says goodbye smugly as Snape leaves that day, carrying her hoard of his childhood notes in his hands.
As soon as Harry's off on an errand in town, Snape sets to his work. The words Snape murmurs, freed off the musty pages and given life in his cottage, are not prayer. They are magic-dampening chants. With his carved walking cane that had seen plenty of morel hunts in spring, he marks a circle - deasil of course, never widdershins - around the couch that Harry claimed as his own personal space.
He purifies the center with sigils of protection traced in the air above the pillow. It's light magic, pristine as the pillowcase, chosen as carefully as Snape selects the Bible quotes to put up on the church board every weekend. Nothing intrusive, of course, nothing that would harm. With his own quiet desperation - as he hums the chants of his childhood - he continues his work: shielding his cottage from magical influence, shielding Harry from himself. His spine is straight, his steps firm, as if it's an ordinary task like sweeping the pews, not a complex bit of spellwork passed down through his mother's line and preserved for over three generations, prior to being rewritten by a twelve-year-old Snape with far too much time on his hands.
The task is anything but ordinary.
Solemnly, he screws the lightbulb back in. It shall glow bright when switched on, untouched by magic. Untampered. Resistant to banishing charms of any kind.
Harry won't know a thing about his accident. Not if I can help it.
He deserves a better fate than Lily's, or my own.
He deserves a normal life. And that's the best gift I am capable of giving him.
