Seven years later.
-
He finds himself staring after thin young men with proud strides and thick, glistening, shoulder-length black hair and for a while he thinks he's fixating on Sirius.
He chats them up sometimes, on those rare nights when he can admit to himself that he's gay (not this, too, god damn it, can nothing about me be normal) and it's not just another dysfunction he can blame on the Dursleys or… anyone else. He chats them up but their smiles are too open, their eyes are too innocent and bright. And even when a lithe Irishman with wicked, knowing eyes chats him up and takes him home and fucks him (considerate but firm) all night long, the way Harry imagines Sirius would fuck… It's nothing. He feels hollow, hungover, Irish whiskey a gale inside him that left him empty and sick.
Serves him right, he thinks, for wanting to fuck the memory of his dead godfather. Sirius would have been horrified.
It isn't until about a month later when a shadow falls over him at a bar and Harry shivers, expects to hear "Mister Potter" in that crisp, smoky voice and his prick is stirring, and it's like he's been waiting so long he's forgotten what he needed in the first place, but now his heart is trembling in his chest… And then a freckled boy with sandy hair and a plasticine face drops into the seat next to him, smiling. Harry wants to vomit in disgust.
And when he realises what ghost he expected to visit, he wants to vomit twice over. He goes home to the cat he never got around to sending to the shelter and tries to forget his problems in red wine and Beethoven, thinks about what work he can do over the weekend to be ready for the office on Monday. He forgets the voice, the face, the walking corpse he wanted in the bar.
It isn't until two months after that, watching a woman twitch her hips in a slim black dress, her attitude all the arrogance in the world, her shoulders thrown back and her Roman nose the proud beak of an eagle… Harry thinks that she still can't match Snape for style, and though he's thought that before, about lots of people, their sneers, their jibes, their swirling coats, it hits him now whom he's been wanting all these weeks, all these moments, all these years.
And it's worse than Sirius, somehow. It's worse lots of hows. All he feels when he remembers Snape is hate. And despair.
It's worse than loving someone he was fond of.
It's worse than loving someone who was a convict, and then a memory, and then a fond memory.
It seems like Snape will never stop dying. Either completely absent from Harry's mind or blazing black and potent and Harry can feel that burning gaze... Resurrected in Harry's mind so that his death strikes Harry hard across the face again and again.
Just the way Snape would want it.
It's almost fitting, that of all the ghosts he loves and hates, he has to be in love with this one. And the irony almost cheers him; he almost laughs. Imagining Snape's face twisting in disgust if Harry should proposition him...
But then Harry remembers that his bed and his life are empty, silence echoing around the memories, and one cannot sleep with ghosts.
