The Lost World
Chapter Two
Week after week the garden beckons, and Harry resists. But never for long. The garden and Snape's mouth. Snape's mouth and his hands, his undomesticated scent, his restless, whispered reminiscence. For weeks on end, Snape's loneliness plagues Harry, assaulting him at the strangest moments. He's obsessed with the yearning to see his former professor in the flesh, to lead him out of the woods and back into the world. Snape is sixty years old. Hasn't he atoned enough?
He's playing with fire, and he knows it. He goes anyway. Life with Ginny is a quick kiss on the lips; Snape offers the temptation of sucking a flame into his mouth so he can experience what it's like to burn inside.
"You're back." Always the mocking voice circles him, mingling with the hush of leaves. "Close your eyes," and Harry does. "Don't look," and he slips his glasses off, inviting the cool, controlling hand to bring down the darkness.
One day, arriving early, he braces himself against the fence, pulls a strip of black silk from his pocket, and binds his eyes, inhaling the aphrodisiac fragrance blowing hot and cold around him. "Snape," he calls, and waits, robes rippling around his ankles.
The gate creaks. Agile fingers explore the snugness of the blindfold.
"Stop calling attention to yourself," Snape murmurs. "You'd be sorry if some other creature found you before I did. If you want to sacrifice something, send your son instead."
"Shut it," Harry says, convinced Snape uses innuendo about Al to stir him up. He reaches out, imperious and blind. "You know what it takes to—" He blurts out a totally unintended, "Fuck," as his hands blunder into unforeseen flesh. He grips, first startled, then eager, then trembling with sensation, endless sliding soft skeletal contours, tickly chest hair, almost undetectable nipples that tighten under his scraping thumbs. Oh God, why didn't he think of this sooner? He almost chokes on the erotic absurdity. Primed with the illicit pleasure of black silk, his cock bulges. Snape is standing before him, a foreign landscape of endless skin, sinews and protrusions, cool bony slopes that warm to the sweat on Harry's fingers.
Then his mouth catches Harry's like a snake striking, a quick hard bite and lightning withdrawal.
Harry opens his arms.
They tangle front to front for the first time since he found the garden. His need is frantic, guilty, testing and intuiting the astonishing fact of Snape's physical existence, the pale, unbelievable body radiating heat under the spring sun. He clutches, pulls, pinches, scratches as Snape thrusts him roughly against the fence rail. They kiss with a wildness that terrifies Harry, because if this is passion it means being totally out of control, ravenous and spinning in the vulnerable dark, two predators tearing all modesty, all rationality, all prior loyalties to pieces. Then Snape drags his mouth away, and Harry's face is wet and aching. They slavered in their haste, the sheer frenzy of breaking a sexual famine. He hadn't known he was starving. He hadn't known this was what starving felt like, or that he could take like this, 'this' being the welts he's left on Snape's back, on his small but surprisingly tight arse.
Harry runs a hand down, tracing the tender inflammations, inflicting more. His other hand sneaks forward. In a shock of wobbly softness he's got Snape's bollocks, yielding and velvety in their loose sac, and holy fuck, the way they spread gently, overlapping in Harry's cradling palm, the tangle of pubic hair rubbing like fur along his knuckles—Harry nearly comes in an upwelling of desperate happiness, of inhibitions burnt away in the heat of surrender.
Then Snape takes Harry's face between his hands and kisses his scar, open-mouthed, sucking, stopping suddenly to breathe, "I'll have you."
Desire whips Harry's groin, furrowing the surface of his deepest fantasies, as if Snape has placed his lips directly on Harry's heart and bitten him back to life. A crowd of sensations swarms its way down his body, rubbing and mouthing and digging its nails in, as Snape makes sure Harry feels every inch of his descent. Arching back, sun beating the silk blindfold to a sea of black shimmers, Harry grips the fence rail so fiercely he drives splinters into his palms. Snape sets his teeth into the crotch of Harry's trousers, huffing through his nostrils and working his jaw back and forth. The sharp pinch deepens until it's almost intolerable. Harry shakes and swears and Snape finally claws his flies open, his long fingers strapping the thick, curved flesh inside, squeezing and massaging before he finally yanks Harry's cock out.
By the time Snape's finished blowing him, Harry's anchorless and afloat in a private world of sweat-soaked, sunspotted, pitchblack bliss. He's so boneless and insensible of his surroundings, still gasping, still groggy with the onslaught of helpless emotion and liquefying pleasure, that it makes perfect sense when a supple, rippling ring of magic coils up his body and lifts him off his feet. Since he's forgotten where his feet are, it doesn't even matter.
The magic bears him forward. Harry lies passive with pleasure, letting go, his trousers around his ankles and the sun blazing on his sticky thighs, his drying prick. Air wafts over his face, and he feels himself being lowered, laid carefully on the ground. Stripped of all layers, he dissolves, limbs outspread, toes and fingers distended. At the furthest stretch, he relaxes and reaches out with his senses instead, soaking up the fragrance of ripe plantings, pungent herbs, the heady, poisonous fragrance he associates with Snape. Against his eyelids the blindfold burns, but he leaves it there, loving the freedom of drifting through a dark universe of sensual repose.
He wakes wind-chilled, calm but slightly hollow under the surface, aware of imminent loss, a sense that nothing can stay this perfect for long. Sitting up, he peels back the blindfold like a pirate's eye-patch, squinting against the mellow, low-slanting sun, and is confronted by the sight of his glasses perched on a small, obvious pumpkin.
"Very funny," he grumbles, snatching them up.
The real world becomes alarmingly visible. Standing, Harry dusts off his bum, spells himself clean, and starts exploring to find out what's become of his clothes. The hybrid flowers rise as high as his waist, splendidly profuse, a luminescent, powdery sheen reflecting off the gateposts. Over the rail hang his trousers, and his shoes are lined up pointing toward the exit.
The moment he steps out of the Forest onto Hogwarts grounds, a robe-wrapped black chrysalis unfolds from the grass, wand in hand. "See anyone this time?" it says, and Harry Occludes at once, perturbed by his middle child's persistence. When he doesn't answer, Al complains, "If I can't go back, then neither should you." He turns with an amateurish swirl of robes and trudges off.
After that, Harry's hunger for Snape gets out of hand. It doesn't help that the bastard refuses to fuck him, which really oughtn't to matter, except that his heightened receptivity under the blindfold has created a constant state of incipient arousal. He wants Snape inside him, around him, the full glut of sensory overload, the experience of penetration combined with a possessive, enveloping embrace.
The thing is, Snape doesn't trust him. Sometimes he tells Harry to forget the black silk and just follow the path. Harry learns not to argue. On those days Snape leads him from one wonder of the Forest to the next: duelling unicorns and paradisical flowers, hippogriffs giving birth, crystalline waterfalls splashing into divinatory pools like giant Pensieves. He watches bejewelled insects shed opalline shells. Every venomous creature that slithers, flies, or crawls seems to be at Snape's beck and call. One day he accompanies Harry through all four seasons, the trees around them brightening, flaming, dying, frost riming the path, flowers multiplying underfoot. The beauty and strangeness Snape shows him revive a sense of wonder, reminding Harry that the world is magical in ways he's almost forgotten.
But he still wants to see Snape, and Snape says no.
From behind the safety of the blindfold, Harry murmurs, "Why am I doing this? I shouldn't. It's not anything I've ever wanted. 'Wanting' means a normal life, right? Family. People loving each other. Taking care of each other. Staying faithful. I got what I wanted. For twenty years it's been perfect. Why isn't it enough?" He gasps suddenly, "Fuck. No, don't stop. But don't bite me again or I'll—"
"Possibly what's got into you, Potter," Snape sneers against his hip, "is middle age." He undulates, tongue sipping at Harry's navel. "But more likely magic. There's room for strangeness in you, and having tasted strangeness you appear to want more."
Naked in the garden, with Snape between his legs and a blindfold around his eyes, Harry's in no position to argue. Snape rises to kneel over his face, and Harry keeps his hands flat at his sides, fisting the grass, because Snape's right not to trust him.
"It's my opinion you've never been as ordinary as you claim," Snape goes on, blocking out the sun, stubbing his erection against Harry's open mouth. "You've merely deceived yourself in order to live out a childhood dream." He moves with the strange fluidity the Forest has granted him, and semen paints Harry's lips. "I could conceivably be wrong about this, since I've never wanted to be ordinary."
"Well, congratulations, you've—"
Snape silences him with a thrust.
Later, inspired, Harry rolls over and grabs his arm, feeling a tough, uncanny resilience, an inhuman texture, slither under his hand. He wonders if he's touched the Dark Mark, but Snape merely pulls away without threat.
"The gamekeeper's hut," Harry announces. Brilliant. "Since Hagrid retired, no one uses it anymore. They all prefer to stay in the castle." He tugs at the blindfold, hoping to glimpse what Snape's thinking. Sinewy fingers haul him forward and twist his arm behind his back.
"So you propose we meet there. It's conceivable," Snape whispers, holding his arm bent back to the verge of pain, and maybe a tiny bit beyond. "Hogwarts is part of the Forest, after all."
Harry's always thought it was the other way around. "We can seal the windows. Cover everything up, make sure no light gets in." He leans away from the pain, and Snape lets go. "We could have a bed. It would be too dark to see, and we could—"
"I could fuck you," Snape purrs, "without fear of your blindfold slipping. Well, this is your show, Potter. Shall I leave the arrangements to you?"
Hearing the unspoken question of trust, Harry protests, "You should know by now, I'd never do anything to hurt you."
Behind him Snape uncoils, noiseless. His voice hovers overhead. For a second Harry hates the strip of silk that divides them. "Yet another difference between Gryffindors and Slytherins." Harry sits up, groping, but Snape's no longer within reach. In fact his voice seems to be rising higher. "Slytherins generally know when they're lying."
Right. Harry remembers: the bastard can fly. He tilts his blind head back. "That's a load of shite. I don't—"
"When was the last time you and your wife talked, Potter?" The voice is faint and far away, a departing hiss.
Harry rips away the silk and scrambles to his feet, but the sky is shining, uninvolved, and he's alone in a flourishing, treacherous garden. His heart sinks, and for the first time since this started he doubts his sanity.
He stumbles onto the Hogwarts grounds, unsurprised to find Al pacing the Forest's verge. The surprise comes when his son grabs him and shouts, "Dad, listen to me. Stay away from him. He's not human, do you hear me? Not human." Harry gapes at him, frozen with the need to deny and worried about what Al knows, and how much. The boy snarls, high-pitched, "And he's not yours," before sprinting off across the green, his student robes flapping like insufficient wings.
That evening Ginny confronts him in his office. "Al Firecalled me. About what you're doing."
Harry fingers the bite on his trousered hip. "Exploring the Forest, you mean?"
"I mean seeing someone." She sips her wine and scrutinises him sharply. "Who is it, Harry?"
"I'm not. I haven't." He barks a short laugh. "There's no one to see."
Ginny flicks her wand, and a silver salver leaps in front of him, transfigured into a mirror. Harry stares at his bruised lips and uncombed hair, his eyes flamboyant and feverish with self-absorbed dreams.
"Who do you see, Harry? Is that really you? I don't think so."
It is, but he banishes the mirror anyway. "I don't know, Gin." Guilt sinks inside him like a cold stone, a premonition of drowning. Merlin, don't let him lose his family. "But I'll find out. You're right, I need to take a serious look at what I'm doing."
He only hopes Snape doesn't kill him for this.
Harry steps inside and shuts the door. Blackness swallows him completely. Right, so that works. He'd been here earlier, clearing things out of the way so he wouldn't trip over them, doublechecking that his spells for blacking out the windows and sealing the door admit no bright lines or ambient light. It's already dusk. They shouldn't be interrupted.
Reminders of Hagrid still clutter every corner of the hut. Harry thinks he even detects a whiff of unwashed dog lingering in the throw pillows, but the smell of a cold hearth reigns supreme. The mustiness suggests cobwebs. It's a melancholy place for a passionate coupling, but perfect for self-flagellating infidelity.
He treads carefully across the floorboards, stripping off his shirt as he inches forward, straining his ears for telltale signs of Snape's presence.
It's the scent, of course, that gives him away. "Potter." Snape speaks with his usual mocking softness, but in an enclosed space his voice carries with eerie distinction. "That's the sloppiest striptease I've ever seen."
"Bugger off," Harry says, breathless, even though he'd been expecting it. Then, "Wait. You can see in the dark?"
The long hands alight with no warning on his back, skimming, stroking over his shoulders. They trace upward to his ears and relieve him of his glasses. Each touch lands with astonishing confidence, so yeah, Snape can see. Strangely, he's arrived for this rendezvous fully clothed, as if being inside four walls has made him revert to his previous practice of overdressing. Harry's outstretched hands map a barricade of layers. Since that moment at the fence, nakedness has been the rule, and Snape's desire to cover himself up now makes Harry uneasy.
He stumbles, so Snape guides him to the bed in the pitch dark, grips the back of his head, nuzzles him roughly, and shoves him down.
Harry almost calls it off. Regret cramps his belly through the whole surreal experience of being swallowed, fingered, impaled, taken over. His whole reason for giving himself now is undermined by grief. He knows what he needs to do, agrees it's the right thing, yet he's increasingly afraid the one he's really being faithless to is Snape. Ginny's upset, yes, but betraying Snape means crossing magic.
And magic can kill you.
Harry rocks and grunts and cries out into the mattress ticking, bent in half, fucked almost out of his mind by a greasy prick in thick, flapping robes, the soft material burying him under extra folds of blackness in an already black room. The obscene sounds his arse makes under Snape's assault, the ragged, sobbing breaths that fill his ears, the frenzy with which Snape inhabits him, plunging and bucking and crawling on his knees—Harry wishes he could see, oh he wishes he could summon light and that the fucking would never stop.
He claws Snape down on top of him, and they both come, it's inevitable, the bedframe knocking and squeaking, the blackness as tangible as Snape's famished hands. Harry embarrasses himself by shouting and curling up as if he's been gut-punched, grinding his sweaty forehead against Snape's mouth. Then he flops back, throat raw, waves of trembling radiating outward from the guilt in his stomach, from the obliterating ecstasy of groin and arse spasming in unison. Snape shudders atop him, smelling of the Forest, of growing things and dead things and iridescence and retribution. His flowing robes bestow an illusion of comfort, warm as the blanket under which they'll never sleep.
Harry retrieves his glasses and stares into the darkness. Then he reaches out, picks up his wand, and whispers, "Lumos."
Snape's off the bed in a flash, not scrambling, but in a single sinuous leap. "Incendio!" Harry shouts. The logs in the fireplace spit; the lamps and candles flare. Gold ricochets around the room, and for a moment Harry's conscience shrinks from the light of childhood memories.
He swings his legs off the bed, and they wobble so much he can barely support his own weight. There are marks on his body, and spunk oozing down his thighs. He aims his wand at the back of the figure with the stringy black hair.
"Snape," he croaks. "Look at me."
The figure turns in unearthly silence, his robes not even rippling, and—well, Harry's weirdly disappointed. All his exaggerated memories of Snape dwindle down to this one thin, unattractive specimen. Snape stands rigid, appalled, a glare gathering in his eyes and the corners of his mouth, gold dancing in his hair, yellowing his drawn, unyielding features.
He looks furious and afraid and no older than Harry. He was thirty-eight when he died; he's thirty-eight now. His compressed lips are ruddy with kissing, with bristle-burn from Harry's unshaven face, and a rumpled curtain of hair nearly covers his eyes. He looks much too young, worn to a frazzle, and—strange, this—not the least bit intimidating.
Inside Harry, a page turns and rewrites history.
He's human. Oh Merlin, he's human, and a sense of astonishment unfurls with the same surprised rush he'd felt sitting his first time on a broom, elated but knowing he was about to be sent skyrocketing into freedom; that the world was about to be changed forever.
His brief joy evaporates as Snape's black robes start falling away, turning to strips of snakeskin. In the dozen splashes of firelight his body elongates, his white skin vanishing under a shining set of scales, rushing down his sides like ripples down a stream, black patterned on black. Only his eyes remain unchanged, riveted on Harry.
"I should have known I couldn't trust you," hisses the apparition. "That you would never allow me to be human."
The snake's wings unfold, gossamer, ethereal, things more of spirit than flesh. The door bangs open to let in the night air.
"Wait," Harry says, taking a step forward. "Don't go."
The serpent's sleek head turns. "You broke the rules," it whispers. Why had it never occurred to Harry they were speaking in Parseltongue? "I must not be seen as I truly am. The mistake is yours, but I'm the one who will suffer." It hesitates, swaying. "I would stay if I could. I would be human again. Whatever the cost."
"Then stay," Harry says, and spells the door shut.
The snake says, "I am bound—" but its protests whisper to sibilance when Harry steps forward and embraces Snape's ugliness, Snape's unwilling resemblance to what should have killed him.
Its scales are slick and cold, flexible as vinyl, and the back-and-forth weave of its body disturbs him. He clears his throat. "Be human. I'll help you. Whatever it takes."
The snake twists fretfully in his arms. "Potter, don't you ever tire of playing the hero?"
"You're human, damn it," Harry snaps. "You are. A sorry excuse for humanity, maybe, but that doesn't give the Forest the right to hold you prisoner. Let me help you, Snape. Tell me what to do."
"You're doing it," Snape says, his serpent tongue restlessly testing the air. "Hold me. Whatever happens, don't let go or I'm lost."
Harry closes his eyes. It's easier to imagine Snape speaking to him when he can't actually see what Snape has become. "All right, I can do that. For how long?"
"Until dawn. Or the Forest reclaims me. Be warned, I'll do everything I can to throw you off." A shudder ripples the length of Snape's body and down Harry's side. "Don't let me. For God's sake, I don't care if I survive this. But I'd rather die human."
"Shut up," Harry says, teeth gritted against the revulsion the snakeskin inspires. "I've got it. No letting go. And for the record, no dying."
"I never thought I'd be so grateful for your stubbornness," Snape gasps, and coils suddenly into the air. Startled, Harry grips his scales, hands slipping on the flexing abdomen. The serpent's body feels like one long muscle pouring through his arms. The muscle thrashes, hoisting Harry off his feet. Cripes. This is going to be a nightmare.
The snake writhes, frantic, knotting and unknotting from rafter to wall. Dangerously limber, it wields its body like a bullwhip, lashing, hissing, drawing its head back to strike. Harry curses and stumbles and they spill to the floor, kicking and crashing everywhere. Chair legs splinter. Candles topple. Hot wax splatters Harry's face, and he shouts a spell to smother the dripping flames. Battered by his heart, he embraces the snake with both arms, hooks one leg around it, then the other, clamping on and rolling over and doing his best not to hurt it. The snake bumps and bruises without mercy but fails to bite.
Then from one second to the next, he's got an armful of skinny, distraught teenager in threadbare black, mad as a wet cat and raging like a dragon. Under other circumstances Harry might enjoy pitting his strength against a young Snape, but the figure's head turns, and Harry finds himself face to face with a white mask. Snape's vicious glare burns through the stylized eye slits. Overhead a shadowy effluvium condenses into a skull and snake, wavering in and out of existence.
"Shite," Harry spits, and wrenches Snape closer.
The adolescent Death Eater fades to a shimmer, a creature of pure light, and Harry nearly panics trying to figure out how to hold a Patronus. He cradles what feels like nothing at all, a sweet, fleeting blend of smoke and happiness. The silver doe dissolves, and for a moment Harry fears it's taken Snape with it.
"Stay with me," Harry mutters. "Come on, you bastard, stay with me."
Instantly the snake's back, catching him off guard and almost slithering away. Harry lets it drag him, his bare skin scraping over the floorboards, before he manages to anchor himself around the iron leg of the woodstove. The snake doubles back, and the next thing Harry knows he's wearing it from neck to ankle, swallowed in its coils. The slick slide of reptilian skin is nauseating. It squeezes, and he wrestles it across the rug, and they thump repeatedly against a wall, blow after blow. Harry keeps his head down and grimly rides out the spasms.
Finally the long body ripples and falls still. Harry lies atop it panting, worn out, wary of jumping to conclusions but praying to anything that will listen that it's over. How long have they been at it? It can't possibly be morning. The scales under him gradually soften to cloth, and Snape's in his arms, lying quietly on the floor. Giddy, exhausted, Harry relaxes his stranglehold and rests his face against Snape's greasy hair.
Not greasy. Sticky.
Oh God. He knows that smell.
Fuck this. No, really, fuck this. It's so fucking unfair. He's collapsed on Snape's limp body, Snape's corpse with its torn-open throat, blood soaking the rug, creeping down his robes, collecting in his ears, a dead Snape who stares through Harry as if he's a window onto another world. Harry's older now than Snape was when he died, and he'd rather be bruised and bashed against walls than watch Snape die again.
Maybe it's just another transformation. Or maybe this is Harry's betrayal carried out to its logical end.
Then Snape jerks, squirming, lengthening, lunging upward, and it's a terrible relief, no matter that it means the cycle's starting all over again, hours of it, never mind that Harry's not sure how much longer he can keep this up.
Hours pass, an eternity of grappling, of Harry blocking Snape's every attempt to escape. In a bleary moment he remembers the black-out spells, and mumbles, "Finite Incantatem." The windows rise grey and ghostly from the background, pale with unkept promise. The snake lies palpitating, Harry coiled around him. They're both sluggish, exhausted, all the strength wrung out of them. Harry's arms, locked for so long around one thing or another, have gone completely numb.
They struggle on, and on. The shadows lighten with great subtlety, as if the morning is a creeping secret. All the shapes in the room emerge blunted with charcoal.
As Snape bleeds to death one final time, the glass panes of the hut flame orange-gold, bordered with sun, as brilliant as if the house is burning. Harry blinks tears from his eyes and blots them on Snape's robes.
By now he can barely crawl, but he forces himself, humping the short distance up Snape's body to comb the bloody hair back from his empty face and kiss his cold forehead. Sunlight streams across the far wall as he waits for life to return to Snape's eyes. An invisible pressure rises to the ceiling and he feels it recede, the weight of magic dispersing through the walls.
Beneath him, Snape's chest expands.
Dreaming of black silk across his eyes, Harry aches and floats in suspended awareness, seeing no reason to ever move again.
"Potter," Snape's entirely human voice growls into his neck. "Get off me."
Finally, finally, Harry allows himself to let go and falls off Snape onto the floor, muscles screaming, joints stiff. They lie side by side as light gilds the rafters and illumines the shambles they've made of the room. There's blood all over the place, but right now it's not important.
Dozing and drifting, Harry starts when Snape wonders aloud, "Am I human? Can you see me?"
He pries his eyes open and manages to turn his head, even though his neck twangs. "Yes."
"Are you sure? Touch me," Snape says, his uncertainty bringing Harry fully awake. Shifting sideways, he reaches out. First Snape's face, then he works Snape's collar buttons loose and strokes his throat.
Snape shivers, and Harry traces the vibrations down every moment to where his marriage will inevitably end. He mumbles, "You're alive."
"Am I? I don't feel real," Snape whispers back. "Am I truly human, Potter? I can't tell anymore."
Harry painstakingly unbuttons the rest of Snape's shirt and sticks his hand underneath. He's not prepared for the sense of reverence that wells up inside him at the faint thump of Snape's heartbeat, so he manages in Parseltongue, "Do you feel this?"
A frown flits across Snape's brow. Harry repeats the question, hissing the words, and Snape says, "Speak English, idiot. I don't understand you."
Harry smiles and presses his head to Snape's armpit. "Because you're not a snake." He continues exploring, closing his eyes occasionally to compare a moment against his blindfolded memory, matching sensation to sight; and what had been an ordeal, one of the longest nights of his life, narrows down to this simple, magical act. "Guess what? You have nipples. Snakes don't have those. Hey, and chest hair. And a fucking lot of bones for a man your age. And no offence, but you look—" Amazing. Alive. "Like shite." He swallows, defenceless against the tenderness that keeps surging inside him, quaking, subterranean. Using Snape's body as his centre of gravity, he steadies himself.
"You don't see a snake, then?" Snape insists, like a child too tired to stop whinging and fall asleep.
Harry levers himself up and leans forward. "I told you, the spell's broken."
"As if that matters," Snape scoffs. His face is marble-white, like a funerary statue, but the intimacy of sharing a terrible experience seems to have loosened his tongue. "People see me as a snake. They always have. Dumbledore certainly did. I used to be proud of it. I used to gloat over my lack of common humanity. I thought if I could be elusive and cold-blooded, I'd be better off. If I could be deadly." He expels a shuddering breath. "Potter. Tell me what you see."
"I'd do a better job of it if you'd let me take your clothes off. Do you mind?"
"After you've endured every one of my pathetic disguises? I'm hardly going to insist on modesty now."
"No, I mean." Harry places one hand on Snape's narrow belly so it can rise and fall with every breath, participating silently in Snape's existence. "Will you let me prove to you you're human? Like you were before. Because I saw you, you know. Before the snake took over."
"You're not suggesting we have sex, are you?" Snape finally meets his eyes with a disbelieving glare. "Potter, if being flung against walls by a berserk reptile is what turns you on, I want nothing more to do with you."
Harry snorts. "Just let me take care of you, okay?" Refusing to admit how much he hurts—all fucking over, to be honest—he staggers to his feet. When he picks up his wand, Snape immediately snaps, "No levitating."
That prolongs the issue of getting Snape off the floor and onto the bed. He's as slippery as a snake from sheer weakness, lurching and swaying, furious with himself and Harry each time his legs give out.
Harry's just got him properly onto the mattress when someone knocks sharply at the window.
They're both struck still, and Snape squirms to sit up, propping himself with fragile dignity against the wall. Harry takes a deep breath and turns, just as an owl pecks the glass again.
Relieved, he goes to let it in. Behind him, Snape says, "Don't open the window." Harry hesitates. "Potter, don't."
"It's just an owl," Harry tells him, and unhooks the latch. The bird swoops to a chair and extends its leg.
"Potter."
Waving him to wait, Harry unfurls the parchment and studies it, frowning.
"Don't go," Snape whispers before Harry even knows what he plans to do.
"I—" Harry looks up, alarmed, stares around him, faces Snape with growing horror. "I have to. Fuck. What am I doing here? My kids. Al. Snape, I'm sorry, I'll be back as soon as possible, I promise. But I—" He dashes around the room, scrambling awkwardly into his clothes, hopping and twisting, the parchment crushed in one hand. "I can't wait. If I don't go now, I'm afraid of what might happen."
"May I read it?" Snape says quietly. Shaking with impatience, Harry smoothes the page and holds it out, snatching it back when it seems Snape might reach for it. "I see." Snape stares at the sunlight streaming across the floor, lips pinched, face inscrutable. "Very well, then. Leave me, Potter."
Harry flings open the door, grimacing when his muscles complain. Brilliance hits him in the face, a river of gold that sweeps his shadow behind him. The outdoor air smells spicy, glorious. He blinks at the dazzling garden surrounding the house, and says, "Snape. It's all right. You'll be protected now. Your garden's here."
Behind him, Snape hisses, "Just go, you stupid bastard," and Harry turns, offended, and for a moment forgets how urgent it is that he get home right now, that he be by his children's side. Snape sits on the mattress, legs tucked under and his back to the wall, bundled up to his chin in blackness. His bloodstained hair frames his beaky face, and his eyes stare out, despondent. Harry thinks in wonder, I kissed that face. The sunlight has made it as far as the bed, and Snape's patterned with gold, his skin ablaze, a bright spot amidst contrasting blackness.
Harry almost goes to him. He wants to. But he can't. Delay would be inexcusable. His children need him. Besides, he's afraid that if he walks over there Snape will simply melt away, a whorled knot hidden in the wooden planks, a reflection in a mirror, the way he was in the forest, all mimicry and misdirection, more illusion than man. Harry doesn't think he could bear that right now. Just looking at him there, alone, crushes him with loss, the loneliness they both exude, that each accuses the other of suffering. Harry tells himself that if he reaches for Snape now and encounters only a figment of his imagination, his heart will break.
So he can't. He has to go. He looks down at the scroll crumpled in his fist and steps outside.
Through the open door behind him washes a soft, deep vibration, reminiscent of something swinging in the wind. "Goodbye, Mr. Potter. May we meet again someday."
That can't be right. Harry hurries through the garden, sweating with anxiety. Surely he misheard. Well, never mind. His kids are what's important here. He'll explain when he gets back. Not that there's really any reason to go back. He brushes his free hand across the flowers proliferating alongside the path, a garden of living prisms, bright as a lie. Then he steps onto the grass beyond, recovers his balance, and starts to run. His kids need him. The parchment proves it. The same parchment he can't seem to let go of, even though there's nothing on it, no words, no message. It doesn't matter. As long as he doesn't let go, he hears Al's voice, demanding, "Dad, come here. Come home. Come now."
Harry picks up the pace, wishing he could fly, while the Forest shrinks to a memory, proof that magic shouldn't be trusted. He never needs to go there again, because—well, he doesn't know how to say this, but he lost the garden. Not that it ever really existed in the first place. But he lost it, whatever it was.
At least he still has his family. At least that.
He glances back once, startled by the violent colour rippling in waves outside the gamekeeper's hut. Stupid not to have picked a few flowers while he was at it. Whatever he was at. Well, too late now. The sight of the vines coiling up the walls and slithering through the windows bothers him for some reason, so he turns away, pulling a black silk handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his watery eyes. The sun's too fucking bright. He should never have come here. But they'll forgive him, won't they? His family. They'll forgive him. That must be why they're calling him home.
He Apparates, and then he's there, bursting through the door, shouting, "What's wrong?" All the familiar faces turn, chewing, talking—and hey, everybody's fine. Everything's normal. Al and Ginny sit side by side, all smiles.
It wasn't urgent, after all. They just wanted him home for breakfast.
Bewildered, Harry lets his hand relax, and the mangled parchment drops to the floor.
Al forks up eggs and pushes a plate toward him. "Hi, Dad. Thought you'd never get here."
Laid across the plate, tied in ribbons of snakeskin, two blue-green flowers glow like enchanted candles.
The peacock's-tail petals stare at him, unseeing. Harry stares back. His thoughts turn in circles. The knowledge of what he's lost coils around and around him until he feels nothing else, only his bruises, his devastating mistake, his heart pounding hundreds of miles away—
—where the door to the gamekeeper's hut slams flat under the weight of invading nature, bearing Snape forth strung up by his wrists, thorns at his throat, the robes ripped from his back like dishonoured wings left trampled in the grass.
By the time Harry comes running, shouting Snape's name along a trail of blood, the deed is done, the unfaithful serpent laid to rest, skinned of all hope, perfumed by the garden's incurable poison. The bitter, betrayed scent of a broken promise.
FIN.