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: Um, so I posted the first chapter yesterday expecting no one to read it and no one to care, but I got more reviews on one chapter than I have on any other fic (not that I've published many) so I wanted to say thanks :) And also thanks to the people who decided it was worth following.
I did obviously get a few more negative comments than usual too, and that's fine cos every one of them was legit and true. I've taken them on board as much as I can, and spent half the night going back over future chapters to try and give Harry some actual personality and backbone, and to improve the clarity of his general life goals. Although
This is a fic I started writing from a plot bunny, and I didn't do any research or even have a plot line planned when I wrote these first few chapters - and that really shows. I also didn't get it beta'd and I didn't spend as long editing it as I should have, because well I didn't think anyone would read it at all... I'm not saying it gets any better (although I hope it does just a bit, cos there's 3 years between the first and last chapters) so I guess I'm just making excuses before you read on. xD It's not a realistic fic, and it's almost definitely not a realistic description of living with a serious disability or trying to navigate friendships and or relationship with one.
I want to write fics about people and groups who are underrepresented or misrepresented in fanfiction and I can do better in the future (you know, I mean next year at my current rate of publishing xD), cos I fall into one of those groups myself and I know how amazing it feels when you find something after so long trawling through stuff that's so irrelevant to your life, and you're like oh my gosh that is me. Finally. Anyway thanks for reading~
**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**
"Potter, I didn't come here to be sketched," Snape said from his position seated across the table. He looked like he would rather be anywhere else - a sentiment Harry shared, yet there he was.
"Did you bring me anything? Generally, if you don't want me to draw you, you have to bring me something else to draw," Harry replied. He definitely should pay more attention to Hermione in the future. He carried on with his portrait, but his mind was working on the best way of backing out from what he had apparently agreed to - for Snape to come stay at his house and try again at healing the curse damage that he'd been living with perfectly fine now for five years.
"Try sketching the vast knowledge and mastery of potions which allows me to make bespoke remedies for reluctant, invalid heroes. Something which I am loathe to share with you after your incredible snub of the first attempt."
Harry personally couldn't remember the first attempt, nor the second. He had a vague recollection of the third, which had briefly involved the use of needles. He would have said as much, but he was concentrating on getting the shape of Snape's lips right. They were flat and thin, a typical English mouth, but with a beautiful cupid bow on top. Besides, there wasn't often a need for words – silence begged to be filled, and even Snape could feel the pull.
"You know what I mean, Potter." The man leaned forward suspiciously to glance at Harry's sketch, then his mouth turned downwards. "Would you stop that!"
"Stop what?" Harry replied, hands moving now with extra haste. This was it, if he could just annoy the man enough, he would leave. He didn't need to say anything or argue about the treatment with Hermione, since there was no way it would last anyway. Within a week or two, one or both of them will have had enough, and Snape would go storming off back to Hogwarts to harass his students instead.
Snape's hand flew over the table, but stopped short of Harry's own still-sketching fingers. "Stop- drawing me." Instead of the expected raised voice, he enunciated the words quietly. Pleading, if such a thing were possible. Harry paused, clenching his hand against the tide of energy now crashing against his motionless muscles.
He looked up and met Snape's eyes properly for the first time. It had been four years. "Give me something else to draw, then."
The man sighed, arm still resting across the table, hand a bare inch from Harry's. He withdrew it to his robes, then pulled out a vial. It was small, no taller than his little finger, and empty. Harry studied it for a few moments, moving it this way and that before placing it just-so on the table. At that place and angle, he could just about see Snape's face reflected upside-down on the inside of the thick clear glass.
He got back to sketching, potions master already forgotten as he identified shapes and shadows. The way light bounced from the outside and the inside of the glass, and the desaturated half-rainbows it cast on the table.
"I don't suppose you could direct me to the kettle?" Snape asked, moments later. Without pause, Harry flicked his left hand and the tea set floated into the room like a train on a twisting track, pouring itself on the way. "A pretty trick," Snape commented, snatching a cup from the air, "and you remember how I take it."
How could he forget, after the time he had spent in the man's company? He'd basically been a glorified tea slave outside of lesson time.
Now that Harry's attention was diverted elsewhere, Snape seemed content to sit patient and still. Perhaps he was waiting for the sketch to be finished, thinking that soon Harry would be more open to discussion – however, as soon as he was happy with the first he began another iteration. He was never finished with drawing. It was the fastest method to learn, after all. Draw, draw, re-draw, re-draw. Each time, he picked up on something he hadn't noticed before. Still, Snape sat as if he had nowhere else to be all week, which Harry supposed he didn't. When he had finished his tea, he simply tapped the pot with his wand and poured again. He sat and gazed out the window with his fingers resting idly on the teacup handle for all the world as if he were as human as the rest of them. Harry knew that could not possibly be true.
Now it was he who grew restless. Anxious. The pressure in his arm grew until he could no longer escape the urge to draw Snape again. Just the hand this time, he told himself. The long nails, once cracked and yellow, were now carefully cut and buffed to a neat shine – though still potion-tinged - but everything else was as he remembered. Long, almost delicate fingers led to a strong palm. If he had been born muggle, surely Snape would have become a pianist.
"You're quite good."
He jumped guiltily, then hunched to cover the blush creeping over his neck. "I haven't done ten thousand yet," he said. He kept his eyes ducked to the parchment, drawing in the teacup from memory.
The chair opposite creaked, possibly as Snape turned or leaned back. "It seems to me that you must have drawn a great many more than that."
Harry glanced up. The room was lined with shelves, mostly filled with reading books he had moved from Grimmauld Place – which he'd discovered was definitely not Wheelchair-friendly Place – but also with old sketchbooks. There were tens of the thick tomes in this room alone. "Not pictures – hours. Ten thousand hours is how long it takes to become a master at anything." He remembered that Snape was a master of potions, which had probably taken longer, so he added: "According to muggles."
When nothing else was forthcoming, he returned to his sketches. Snape's hand was almost exactly as it had been before, though he must have moved it when he leaned back. Huh, so he was letting Harry draw him. His hand, anyway.
Why now, when not earlier? Was it just that he was grumpy until he had tea? Or had he been nervous upon first entering the house? Harry frowned at the idea of Snape ever being nervous. That would be too... normal.
He realised that he'd stopped sketching. Snape had noticed too, and quietly moved both hands under the table, out of sight. "I don't like to be looked at," Snape said. The admission must have been difficult, but his face was unreadable.
"We looked at you in class." Harry retorted. "And I sketched you that summer, and in lessons. Didn't you notice?"
"I was your professor."
Harry stared, uncomprehending, until Snape offered more.
"Your sketchbook, you have it with you always?" he asked. Harry nodded. "If you were to sit opposite me now without it, would you be the same or would you be changed?"
Harry frowned, shook his head in confusion.
"Where is your tongue? Did you lose it?"
Harry opened his mouth and stuck it out, which only made the man scowl. Snape rolled his eyes minutely and went back to drinking tea. Harry almost sputtered – how dare Snape play the silent game on him! He was the master of the silent game!
Hastily, and with exaggerated movements, he turned back to his sketchbook. But for the first time, he couldn't concentrate on the paper. For months on end, he had barely glanced at anything else except for reference, but all of a sudden he could hardly bear to look at it. Damn. Was he so easy to read, or was he being played? Led along like a good little rat. Well, fine.
"Why is it different?" he asked.
"Who am I?"
Harry blinked. "That's a bit deep for discussing over tea, isn't it?"
"Say my name." Despite the shortness of his words, they were neither barked nor ground, simply stated. It didn't even sound like a challenge, which most things between them had, historically.
"Snape." Harry shrugged.
Said Snape leaned forward in a very Dumbledoresque movement. If he'd been wearing glasses, he would have been looking over the top of them for certain. "Yes, but which one?"
Now utterly confused, Harry grasped the edges of his book tightly. "You're a twin?" he guessed. "Split personality? Snape by day, bat by night. Vampire? I don't know." Come to think of it, he'd never seen Snape's reflection in a mirror... Ah, but there was the vial on the table.
The corner of Snape's mouth twitched, not downwards as usual, but the other way. The way his mouth never went, because he was Snape, Potions Master, Professor and much feared Head of Slitherin House. He didn't – he couldn't – smile.
Realisation crawled over him. "You're not my teacher any more. You're..." Here, he struggled. He called Minerva by her given name during rare, impatient visits, and had once managed a grimaced Horace – but they were people too, in a way Snape had never been. He swallowed away the feeling of his closing throat. "Severus."
The man gave a slow, accepting nod. "Harry," he returned softly.
The moment was too close, almost suffocating. Harry withdrew from it like a curling toe from pond water. "So potions is your sketching," he said, watching the pencil turn in his fingers.
"Hmm. It is a refuge that requires the full attention of both body and mind, leaving no space for doing or thinking… more unpleasant things."
Harry's heart slowed, dragging the moment out with it. Snape couldn't understand. No one could understand. How could Snape understand? He'd tried explaining it to Ron, in a great torrent of insufficient words.
It's like, I don't have to think about anything. I don't have to remember, or see what's not here now. Right now, this moment. I can look Hermione in the eye and see all the light and the colour, and how the lashes are slightly reflected on the surface of the eyeball, and not think about how she looked after Bellatrix- after... everything. Things are everywhere, and they're always reminding me. Even trees! Trees, and cars and people and scars and spells and- and just everything. And then I'm thinking, and I hate thinking, because that's all I can do. And I don't have to see how everyone's looking at me, because the shadow of their nose over their cheek is way more interesting than pity. And it's something to do. I can't ride, I can't walk or run, or even crawl properly. I don't have to sit here just thinking, thinking, thinking THINKING, stuck in my own head all day because I'm shit company. I'm just... shit. I'm so fucking shit, Ron.
He could never have boiled it down to so simple a sentence, delivered calmly yet with all that experience behind it. That understanding. He hadn't expected to find any, yet here it was – from Snape, who he would probably be expected to call Severus from now on, and who he hoped never to see again for that sole reason, yet needed to for every other reason.
The pencil fell into his lap as he covered his face.
"Harry-"
"I'm fine!" he snapped, and with that the quiescence was broken.
Snape's chair scraped back over the tiled floor. "Thank you for the tea. If you'll excuse me, I have a laboratory to set up."
When Harry dared remove his hands, the man was gone. He lit a cigarette.
He didn't see Snape again for two days. Apparently, laboratories were a lot of work to put together. He finished his sketchbook and started a new one. Secretly, he knew that this one would be full of him. If he could convince the man to sit still again. And again. And again, and again, and again...
He'd spent years resolutely not thinking about the past, Snape included, but now it was unavoidable. Strangely, he found that he didn't mind. He had something new to draw, after all. That face, those eyes - familiar, but somehow not. That giant hawk nose, and the lanky hair that fell around it. He wondered what Snape's ears looked like, and if he could convince the wizard to show him. And those thin lips, he wanted to draw them too. Even the crooked yellow teeth. The long neck and elegant nape, the bony wrists.
Everything.
It was bad luck that when he wheeled into the kitchen and saw Snape making breakfast, there was no sketchbook to hand, and no pencil. He took it upon himself to memorise every detail instead.
The man's hair was parted at the nape, split like curtains over pale skin, and fell forward past his bowed head. He stood casually, one hand resting on the bar in front of the AGA, on which Harry usually draped tea towels to dry. In his other hand was a paperback book, which he seemed to be engrossed in. Yellowish morning light poured lazily from the window to his side, casting a lighter hue on his black shirt. He wore no robe, though the shirt was buttoned right up to the neck and halfway over his hand to the base of his thumb.
On the stove, bacon sizzled in a modern but much-used and blackened muggle frying pan. It sent steam twirling up into the air, which hit the ceiling and then fanned out over Snape's head. As Harry watched, the man felt about with his hand, presumably for the cheap plastic spatula. He didn't look up from his book to do so, but didn't react with surprise when his finger touched the pan. With a hiss of pain, he raised it to his mouth.
Harry wished that he had the power to pause time, so that he could memorise that moment. He'd probably have to draw it tens of times before he could get it right – wet tongue darting out to meet the finger a moment before it was drawn behind his lips. The flash of teeth, and the bottom lip bent down to accommodate. He wanted to remember everything.
Knowing that he'd be in trouble if he got caught staring, Harry was careful to let the wheels squeak as he propelled himself into the kitchen area. Snape glanced up and quickly snatched his finger out of his mouth. "Breakfast?" he asked.
Harry shrugged. He usually didn't bother – he didn't tend to get hungry. Then again, it would be an excuse to sit opposite from his study... "Yes," he said. Then, after a moment, "please."
He tried not to make it too obvious that he was watching Snape turn the bacon, even as he tried to imprint on his mind the contrast between the backlit steam billowing against the man's face and his dark, fine hair. He summoned his new sketchbook and his second favourite pencil set – his first favourite had the best range through red and magenta, but Snape's tones were cooler than that. He needed subtle blues that could serve as undercoat for the black.
A plate appeared before him, on which sat a bacon sandwich. "Eat before you get the pencils out, Potter."
It was probably in his best interests to do as instructed for now. He had to appear obedient so that he could get what he wanted later. Surprisingly, once he took the first bite it turned out that he was hungry after all. He wondered if Snape had put something in it to increase his appetite. He watched the old professor through his fringe. The man ate delicately, as much as was possible with a bacon sandwich. He didn't hold the bread so tightly that it squished, or pull the bacon out with his teeth. When he licked the grease from his lips, Harry noted the shape of his tongue for later reference.
"Stop that."
Harry ducked his head again, trying to concentrate on the food in his hands. The texture of bread was something he had only studied a little, last year. He could do with a refresher.
When he was done, Snape took both their plates to the sink. "I can do that, myself." Harry said. Why was it that everyone tried to do things for him, as if he couldn't manage even the simplest of magic, just because he couldn't use his legs? He didn't need them. He didn't need his legs, and he didn't need any busy-body potions profess-
"I know you can," Snape replied.
Harry huffed, opening his sketchbook. He'd left the last sketch half-finished, but felt no desire to continue with it so he turned to a fresh page. He longed to draw Snape at the oven while the memory was still fresh, but he daren't do it while the man was there. He drew bread instead, then a hand holding it, and an arm after that. His heart skipped a beat as Snape returned to his place at the table, tea set following behind like a line of ducklings, and started on a fresh piece before he could get any further. Just the bread this time, he promised himself.
"Are they in any particular order?"
Harry glanced up just long enough to see Snape motion to the shelves. He pulled the book half onto his lap so that he could hide his drawings, and continued to sketch. "By date. Those are the oldest." He tilted the end of his pencil mid-stroke towards the farthest wall.
"What about at Hogwarts, do you have those drawings still?"
He paused. Before the books had taken over, he'd doodles on class notes and scrap parchment, the backs of homework assignments and even his exam papers. Snape featured quite heavily, and didn't look particularly good in any of them. They were before Harry had been enlightened to Snape's absolute drawability. Then again, what did he have to lose by letting the old professor have a flick through? The worst that could happen was that he'd get a bit upset, but the man had been remarkably good at holding it in so far. Second worse was a shouting match, and Harry relished the chance to memorise some different facial expressions. With his mouth wide open shouting, Harry would be able to see right down to his tonsils.
"Chest of drawers under the window. Oldest at the top." He tried to sound nonchalant. He pulled out a cigarette while Snape's back was turned. Hopefully he'd get a drag or two in before they were confiscated.
Snape went for the top drawer first, slowly pulling out the dry bundle of parchment. He brought it back to the table, leaving the drawer open behind him. Harry let the fag hang against his lower lip as he drew a succession of ten-second figure sketches. He'd almost finished it when Snape gave a loud sniff, lifting his eyes with a frown.
"You smoke," he noted.
"Muggle ones," Harry answered unnecessarily. Snape watched him for a long moment, considering. Then he shook his head in a very young-people-these-days way, and sat back down.
Harry didn't notice that he was looking too long again, until Snape quietly rested two fingers against the bridge of his nose, hand half-obscuring his face in a self-conscious gesture. It was a good pose though.
"Have you thought about exhibiting?" Snape asked a few minutes later. "I'm sure any number of galleries would be ecstatic to show works by the famous Harry Potter." Even that wasn't said with the contempt he'd have imagined from the man.
Harry felt his lip curl, and fought to straighten his face but couldn't keep the distain from his voice. This was another topic he'd been over time and time again with Hermione. "Yeah, I'm sure it'd go down great. Remember that super powerful, young wizard who brought down Voldemort? I wonder what he's up to these days... Oh look, here's twelve million pictures of a table leg. Turns out he's a bit of a loser now."
"Perhaps so," Snape answered, making Harry scowl. He wasn't supposed to agree. "But perhaps there would also be those who appreciate your drawings for what they are. Even I can begrudgingly admit that you have some talent for capturing the essence and loveliness of everyday items - even table legs."
Loveliness was not on the top ten list of words he thought he'd hear from Snape, not in relation to himself anyway. Hell, it wasn't in the top ten thousand words, but he was fairly certain that's what he'd heard. "I do have talent," he agreed. "And it's mine. I don't owe it to anyone, just because of who I am or what I did. I gave my legs for everyone else, and I would have given my life too. But these hands? These books? And these bloody pencils - they're for me, and me alone."
Snape held up his hands in a surrendering motion and didn't ask any more about it. Harry was suspicious of his constant backing down. Wasn't he going to argue with a single thing he said, or convince Harry that he was being a total dunderhead? The fact that he wasn't doing that was pretty peculiar. Whatever game he was playing, it was obviously going to be a long one.
They sat in silence for most of the morning while Harry drew, and Snape studied the yellowed old pages from Hogwarts, occasionally getting up to hunt out the next bundle. They drank tea, and it felt like the most ordinary and natural thing in the world.
He meant to tell the professor that he wasn't needed, that he could go home and leave Harry alone now please. He really did. But somehow the time ticked on by and Snape did nothing annoying, aggravating or inconsiderate. Nothing Harry could use to prove how catastrophic this would end up being. It was just good, quiet, amicable company - something he had forgotten existed when the other person thought you were an actual human being. So somehow - well, through no fault but his own passivity - he ended up keeping Snape on. For now, at least.