Title: The Sketchbook, the grump and the wheelchair
Written for: meeee
Ratings and Warnings: Mentions of genitalia, also strong language at times
Word Count: Around 33k all together
Summary: The Boy Who Lived had grown up to be The Man Who Lived in a Wheelchair, and although he's quite happy with a life of solitude and sketching - everyone else seem to think they know better. Will the reappearance of Professor Severus Snape in his life change things for the better, or will it end in aggravation like always?
Author notes: ngl one of my fav chapters. Thanks for all your comments etc again, I have been looking forward to reading my emails every day~ From now on, the chapters will be a bit less nicely edited because I'm going to a conference this week, but I will definitely upload them dw
**THIS WORLD AND ITS CHARACTERS ARE NOT MY PROPERTY AND I MAKE NO MONEY FROM THEM. I JUST LOVE THEM AND ALSO WANT THEM TO LOVE EACH OTHER**
Another few days went by. Every morning Harry woke, bathroom'd with the help of his somewhat creepy invisible hands - no matter how many times he squawked at it that he could do the wiping himself, it never seemed to understand his commands.
If Harry had to hear "I'm sorry, the key phrase RIPE IT MYSELF could not be recognised. Please see the manual for a list of viable commands, or say help me, Helping Hands!" one more time, he would throw the hands in the bin. If he could find them first. Revelio was probably on the list of spells too strong for him to be allowed to cast while the curse was being magically exhumed.
Things were definitely a lot easier now, between the Helping Hands and his sheet topper - but then, it was a lot harder in other ways. Without charms, he was finding it harder and harder to propel himself around the house. Even as the weather was improving, he couldn't go out into the garden for fear he wouldn't make it back inside before his legs froze off. It didn't help that his left arm had gone from bad to worse, and he had to massage it to life every morning. Thankfully, as promised, Snape had been giving him an ointment for his right hand. He'd also given Harry the go-ahead to use as much of any muggle arthritis cream he liked, and begrudgingly agreed that a mix of paracetamol and ibuprofen might actually be more effective - and not mix harmfully with the other potions in his body - than a pain relieving potion.
Harry didn't often see Snape about in the mornings. Most days, he was brewing from sun up to sun down and beyond so on days when he had less to do he tried to sleep an extra hour or two to catch up. From the bags under his eyes, it never worked.
So it was with great surprise that Harry rolled into the kitchen on a Friday morning to find Snape sitting rather uncomfortably in his usual seat - wearing the dragonscale vest.
Harry ogled. "I'm dying, aren't I?" he said. It was the only explanation. Snape was giving him his last wish, before letting him know that everything had gone south and he was about to die.
"We are all dying," Snape answered, shifting in the chair. How long had he been waiting like that? He could have just come to Harry's room and knocked on the door with the promise of a surprise, but instead had sat alone in the room and waited.
Harry grinned, already reaching for the sketchbook. He'd need to get Snape to move closer to the window, where the light would catch better on the vest. Just as promised, the dark leather scales were edged with green and pink light. "You said you wouldn't wear it, it's too pretentious. You sure all my drawings aren't getting to your head?"
Snape raised his chin, rested it on his hand with one finger up his cheek, and replied deadpan: "Yes, you have convinced me with your amazingly accurate drawings, that I am beauty incarnate and it is your duty to capture and preserve my iridescence for future generations. You may bow whenever you are ready, Potter." He took a sip of tea, feigning disinterest in the clearly inferior being that was Harry Potter.
"Yes, my king," Harry said through an ear splitting grin. He bowed his head and spun his hand in a little flourish, pencil twirling. This was great - getting Snape in uncomfortable positions like this tended to reveal hidden gems in the man's personality. It was like seeing glimpses into the person he could have been, given a different life. Witty and confident even in self-deprecation.
Snape sat still for most of the morning, drinking tea and staring out the window at the same view he must have watched for tens of hours already in the last few weeks. Harry thought he'd be more focussed on capturing the moving colours on the vest than on the man himself, and it did start that way - but by lunch time he was drawing more detail on the face than the clothing.
He'd started a new sketchbook the day before yesterday, and this one was quickly filling with endless drawings of Snape drinking tea, cooking, brewing, talking and even kicking the washing machine. There was a particularly enjoyable sketch of Snape's face after Harry had feigned ignorance on what he was doing wrong. "But you said you didn't need any help using a simple muggle contraption designed so that even an imbecile like me could work it," he'd reminded the man. Absolutely priceless.
If he was honest, he probably needed treatment for his brain more than his legs - he was clearly going insane. Rather than becoming bored or fed up with drawing the same face over and over, he'd become even more enraptured with it. He even saw it when he closed his eyes at night. At least he didn't have to worry about it coming to mind while he masturbated.
"Are you bored?" he asked at midday, after realising that Snape's eyes had taken on a glazed look. The man jumped, blinking slowly as if he'd been falling asleep.
"Hm? Ah no, only tired," Snape replied, taking this opportunity to stretch his neck. He looked at Harry, then out the window again. He never looked Harry in the eye when he said personal things, which is how he knew that's what was coming. "I am thankful to have survived long enough to see a little peace and quiet, and for reason to simply sit and enjoy it. I fear that when left to my own devices, I find new work and new worries. I can never seem to stop." At the last, he looked down at his open palms.
Harry's own hand stopped shading, and he stared down at it. When was the last time he'd spent a day without drawing? He'd thought that every day since leaving Hogwarts had been a day of rest, of getting away from everything that had plagued him through those years... But what if he was wrong? Maybe he was still running, just like Snape.
They had pasta for lunch - or rather, Snape did while Harry pushed his around the bowl. He got a bit of a random gift from Hermione - a deep red bowtie, delivered in a black card box via owl - as thanks for "letting me in". He couldn't think of any time he'd ever need to wear it, so he chucked it in a drawer. Then Harry went to his room to 'read' - nap - while Snape began preparations for the day's potions. When Harry rejoined him several hours later, the man was in full swing and at maximum capacity making up for lost brewing time.
"What drugs did you take?"
Snape didn't look up. He was juggling too many tasks to take his eyes away for even a moment. There were six cauldrons on the go in front of him and two more simmering on the counter behind. He was at that moment stirring two by hand and one by magic, while an autonomous knife cut the tops and bottoms off a blueish root. He didn't quite look manic, but he was definitely as close as Snape got. The perfect time to knock his guard down and get some juicy info. He'd been hoping that Snape would keep the vest on all day, but it was gone.
"As an angry mudblood teen, I mean. Did you take any? I won't judge." Harry continued, despite Snape's required concentration. So far as he was concerned, the professor was bringing it on himself by always refusing Harry's help. He was happy for an unsupervised mindless knife to do the chopping, but Harry wasn't allowed to so much as touch a surface without permission… Besides, he'd been suffering from hangover-like symptoms since waking from his nap so he was feeling particularly miserable.
He suspected things weren't going quite as the man had planned. Everything had been smooth sailing until the blood test, but since the resulting potion change his symptoms had grown worse each day. He had something new to take every evening, without any clue as to whether they were making progress at all.
It certainly didn't feel like progress, now that he suffered from periodic cramps, headaches and nausea. Everything he ate made him sick, so Snape was adding nutrient tinctures to the growing list of remedies to pour down his throat.
Snape didn't answer, so he sighed and slumped in his wheelchair, twirling the pencil in his fingers. Maybe he should go back to his room to draw, try and get at least a few non-Snape pages in. Or finally tell everyone they could shove the treatment where the sun didn't shine, because he wasn't anywhere near as invested in this quest for legs as they assumed. Except he was beginning to realise that he was invested in Snape, in having him here at the house.
"Weed," Snape said, pulling him from his thoughts. He glanced at Harry so quickly he might have imagined it. "Pot. I don't know what you'd call it these days. I smoked marijuana with Regulus Black on the regular. We spent every summer as high as kestrels."
Harry forced his mouth shut so that whatever noise might escape, could not. So he had done drugs. He couldn't suppress his grin - Snape had been a rebel. As if he hadn't already known that. It was almost enough to make him forget his thumping headache. "Sirius' brother?" He asked. The one who had taken the amulet horcrux.
"The very same. We were, ah... friends of a sort, as much as anyone could be in that particular group," Snape continued, taking hold of the magical knife and finishing the job for quicker than the pace it had been setting before, while reading through the book of notes he had on a stand. He even let go of the roots without slowing, to change the page. Harry wouldn't be surprised if he started using his toes next, that or cut his hand open again.
Toes! He had toes. Could he convince Snape to bare his feet? That was one part Harry hadn't seen of the man. One part among many, obviously. Most of the man, in fact. Which was fine. He didn't want to see the rest of him, because that would be weird and he wasn't weird and everything was just fine.
"You said you wouldn't judge," Snape said.
Harry quickly schooled his face to normality. He'd been thinking about… something else. "I'm not. It's… Just a headache, again." He lied, hiding his head in his hands. "Carry on, I like listening to you talk."
Silence stretched for a long moment, but he didn't dare raise his head for the blush he felt creeping. Then he heard the clink of glass against metal, and Snape continued. "I took cocaine once. I was supposed to 'blend in', and had no idea at the time it was expected that I'd only pretend. There isn't a spy training academy for that sort of thing. I was picked up by aurors in Portsmouth after nearly splinching my arm off apparating right into the gents of a muggle nightclub. Albus saved me from a sentence, one of the many things I am - was - indebted to him for..."
His voice carried on in a low drone that Harry was sure he was listening to, until he blinked himself awake and Snape was gone. Two naps in one afternoon, the treatment really was getting to him. He rubbed the sleep dust from his eyes, saw it had blue and purple specks in, and flicked a piece into a small dish for keeping in case Snape wanted to study it later. It probably meant he wasn't absorbing something properly.
The two simmering potions were still steaming away, but the fires were gone under the other six, and the ingredients that had been strewn about the workspace were all put neatly away. Clearly, Snape had finished the work required on them.
His eyes fell on Snape's notebook on its stand, and he rolled a little closer. He'd better not remove it - the professor was very protective of it, and he would probably notice if it was even a fifth of an inch from its original position. With a quick glance to the closed door, Harry put the brakes on and held the arms of his chair to push himself up so he could read the words on the page. His arms shook under the weight.
Snape's spidery handwriting was even more difficult than usual to decipher, scrawled in tight knots of words that bled into one another and looked more like some kind of elven fantasy script than English. He recognised his own name, but not the words to either side. Bequist Harry? Detritus Harry? Maybe it was hiss. Hiss Harry kind of made sense in that he could speak parseltongue, but he could neither fit that into a sentence nor make out other words in that paragraph. He deciphered a few other words from that page: "interfere", "don't know why", and "treatment". A bit disappointing, really. He'd hoped for some insight to how things were going.
He gave a start when Snape called his name from the other room. He bumped down and managed to turn the wheelchair to face the door just in time to see it open. "Food, if you want it." He told Snape he'd be there in a moment, and used his jumper sleeve to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He'd barely been holding himself up for a minute.
'Food' was an inoffensive brown soup, but he couldn't keep even the first mouthful down. Snape gave him a potion to take instead, and Harry showed him the speckly eye-dust but received no indication as to what it might mean. It made him miss his brief time in the muggle hospital, when he first ran away and pretended to have lost his memory. They were always so clear about what they were doing, what they hoped to reveal from tests, and what they found. Swelling on the brain, the paraplegia, and a brewing case of lung infection from who knew where. Oh, and that he was not immunised against pretty much any muggle disease, a problem they had rectified for him with various vaccinations.
They sat together in silence at the kitchen table for an hour after Snape had finished his food, despite the fact that he must have had a million other things to do. The skritch skritch of pencil lead was the only sound that passed between them, until Snape finally rose and pressed a fist against the small of his back. He muttered something about "too old for this", and Harry hid a smile.
He refused to let Snape do the dishes. "Have a nap or something, whatever you old people do after a hard day's brewing," he said. He collected the dishes and dropped them into the sink, grimacing as his left hand cramped and tugged itself into a fist.
He placed his wand in the hand to make it feel less useless, and used a spell to clean the dishes. Another wave of tiredness washed over him as he did so, and he decided there was no shame in having an early night. He felt so weak that he only got half undressed before climbing onto bed. A grey haze crept in the sides of his vision and he tried to rub his nose with his left hand, only to notice that the arm was spasming on the sheets beside him. He tried to call out, but all that escaped was a strangled groan as consciousness escaped him.
