Harry didn't consider himself an organised sort of bloke, but he'd learned early on that his job would consume him down to the bone if he didn't set boundaries and stick to them.
Tuesdays were his designated shopping nights, Thursdays his dinners with Ron and Hermione. Without their affectionate anchorage, he worried he'd eventually come unmoored and drift off into the sort of hard-drinking, risk-taking habits that would make him forget the kind of life he truly wanted.
Fridays were for unwinding. Call it his social night, his shag night, the time set aside for seeking release. Not that he usually followed prospective partners home, and he never brought them back to his own flat. He rarely even took meals at the Hogshead or the Leaky anymore. Not alone. It was safer not to advertise that he was unattached, for any purpose, be it charity events or one night stands. That was just asking for a hustler to wave a contract in his face or an autograph seeker to stand hovering over him, starry-eyed, like a painful reminder of Colin Creevey.
Sometimes, especially in Muggle pubs, he spent the whole evening hanging around the front of the house trading remarks with the bartenders, wryly comparing himself to the restless foragers, the charismatic predators, the hopeless romantics all angling for connection.
Or he sat tucked away in a corner, drink in hand, legs outstretched under the table. The chatty, tipsy, seductive companionship washed over him like the steam from a public bath, a streak of glamour here, a bouquet of friendship there, the presence of other warm-blooded bodies buoying him up after weeks of investigating the worst that wizardkind had to offer.
On one of these easygoing nights, having scored only a low-key headache from drinking over his limit, Harry cast a warming charm as he stepped out into the frigid winter darkness. The door thudded shut behind him. Chin tucked into his scarf, he crunched off, reasonably content, through the winter-caked streets outside his favourite local. The silence rang like glass. Packed snow creaked under his cleated boots. A few pints off sober and feeling pleasantly loose-limbed, he inhaled shallow lungfuls of searing cold air and exhaled ale-flavoured steam in the hope his head would settle before he Apparated.
One or two huddled figures ducked past him, pointy hats pulled low, wands shining with little white spheres of Lumos. Diagon Alley wasn't entirely empty, and never asleep, but it was late and quiet and dark enough for this stretch to feel deserted. The shadows lay frighteningly deep, like cave mouths into underground worlds, stirring a primitive dread of nocturnal ambush. By contrast, the moon-swept snow, purer and smoother than snow in daylight, looked like someone's frozen idea of heaven. The combination was beautiful, a surreal painting, taking something familiar and making it strange. Harry, who hadn't been feeling particularly lonely when he left the pub, felt it now as he scuffed at the head of a long line of his own footprints. It was an exhilarating sort of ache, perfect for a solitary stroll in the dead of a peaceful winter's night.
Someone came out of a culvert ahead of him, someone who chose to avoid the moonlight and keep to the shadows. By the time Harry covered his cold nose with his scarf and wiped his glasses, the figure was a mere billow of motion up ahead, the barest scrape of boot soles over the icy cobblestones. But somehow Harry knew, even before he made out the long greasy hair and manta-ray robes undulating through the darkness.
His steps slowed, but there was no reason to slope off down some random alleyway just because Snape travelled the same street. Still, he tried to walk as unobtrusively as possible.
Clearly alert to sounds echoing off the walls of the locked-up buildings, the figure spun around, a mist of ice crystals sparking out from under his boots. Harry hesitated, then raised a sheepish hand in greeting.
He didn't expect Snape to stride back toward him. He especially didn't expect to be grabbed by the front of his robes, propelled backward through a knee-high pile of slush, and body-slammed into a wall of cold brick.
In the past, his temper would have flared, and the shock would have had him spoiling for a fight. But he didn't even go for his wand. Never mind that Snape's fist was clenched in his shirt, that Snape's robes swept forward to slap his ankles, that Snape's upper lip twitched in a barely suppressed snarl.
What did alarm him was how his physical reaction to Snape blazed up the moment the git leaned into him, radiating heat through his heavy black layers. Moonlight ran a sheen of silver down his oily hair and greyed his face like a devil's head carved in granite, silhouetted against a backdrop of stars.
"You will cease this stalking of my every move, Potter," he said in a low, cloud-wreathed voice, "or I'll leave you for the streetsweepers to find in the morning."
Harry didn't push back. He didn't struggle. "You think I'm stalking you? You're mental." How bizarre to be this close to Snape's stark face, seen through fogged-up glasses and adult eyes. The sight plucked at his memory: came back changed.
There were a dozen sensible things he could have done next. Instead, he reached up and grasped a handful of the cool, flowing material below Snape's throat, mirroring the grip Snape had on his robes.
"Seriously, I'm not following you," he said, ignoring the incongruity between his actions and his words. Ignoring the fact that it had been six fucking years, and already they were fighting, their faces inches apart.
Snape's head was framed by the snowy eaves, slanted black lines of frozen rooftop glowing under a thick coating of white. Harry could smell the ale on his own breath clouding the air between them. The gloved fist pressing him against the brick wall burned through his robes like a red-hot coal.
"Stop watching me," Snape breathed. "I work for the Ministry, just as you do. I am not a common criminal."
"Nothing common about you," Harry agreed, but the nervous humour evaporated in the narrow space between them. He was acutely aware of the multiple points of contact whispering over their bodies, the scrape and catch of his clothes on the grimy bricks behind him, the man in front of him an iron stove of hostility that should have melted the clumps of snow around them. The darkness shook with the syncopation of their heartbeats.
"Still mocking me, Potter?" Snape gave him a small, angry push that left his forearm pressed against Harry's chest. "I realise my death wasn't nearly as dramatic as yours – "
"Shut up about our deaths," Harry said, pushing back. "I've put mine behind me." Snape's contemptuous silence called him out on the lie, and he finally started to get angry. "Look, what is wrong with you? I'm not stalking you, I swear."
The pressure from Snape's forearm eased. Harry leaned into it without thinking, as if keeping contact were necessary to getting at the truth.
"What's wrong with me," Snape repeated. "You of all people can't guess?"
A rush of half-formed concerns infiltrated the inebriated, vaguely pleasurable tension holding them in a bubble. The presence of things like ill health, death threats, legal actions flitted through Harry's mind, things traceable to their joint sojourn within Voldemort's shadow. "Came back changed," whatever Madam Pomfrey had once meant by it, could describe a more tenuous hold on life, a legacy of persecution, a less sure grasp on the mortal world.
Sober enough to be worried and woozy enough to let it show, Harry searched Snape's eyes for a clue.
"I warn you." Merlin, the cold menace in that voice, like an icicle sliding down his back. Harry had miss – no, he hadn't. "If you do what you're thinking of doing," Snape whispered, in that eerily precise way of biting through his words to sharpen their edges, "you'll get nothing but a migraine for your trouble. And an arse-blistering lecture after I file a complaint."
Startled, Harry tipped back from the brink of casting Legilimency. It had been drawn to the surface by the way Snape stared directly into his eyes, connecting on some still-traumatised level to the years-old echo of Look at me. The memory of kneeling by Snape's side while he choked and bled, and his own failure to do a damned thing about it, sent a panicked message to his hands to clench and keep Snape close.
"Everywhere I go, you're underfoot," Snape said softly. "If you haven't been assigned to report my every move, then what are you doing, Potter?"
Harry put a hand over Snape's to pry him off, and then forgot the prying-off part. The glove was wonderfully warm against his frozen fingers. Snape's eyes darkened, a fierce, suspicious probing that refrained from actually entering his mind. Harry had always hated the way Snape treated him as the second coming of James, but he almost preferred it to the times Snape let his yearning for Lily show, when he focussed on Harry's eyes, searching for someone who wasn't there and ignoring the person who was. No longer a teenager sneaking around beneath a cloak, Harry found he didn't want to be invisible to Snape.
"It's been six years, and I – all right, look," he blurted, and it was one thing for his feelings to be all over the place, but another thing entirely to voice the first bonkers thought to rise to his lips. "Why are we standing here freezing our arses off? Let's go for a drink."
Snape leaned even closer, threatening to overwhelm the sub-zero darkness frosting the empty street. Lamplit shutters, icicles glittering under the eaves, and stars like infinitely distant snowflakes all blurred within the confusing radius of his physical intensity. The emotion he gave off wasn't anger. Harry couldn't tell what it was, but it made his heart pick up speed like a runner who pushes himself recklessly at sight of the finish line.
"I think," Snape said, and he sounded strangely hoarse, "there is something very wrong with you, Potter. I suggest you go home and – "
Harry wasn't that drunk. He wasn't that desperate. A pint or three of alcoholic sediment lay heavy in his veins, his nose felt like he'd frozen it to an iron railing, and he was having swoopy, melancholy flashbacks to the Shrieking Shack and the spark that had gone out in Snape's eyes. None of that explained why he reached for the side of Snape's neck. If he'd been drinking firewhisky, he might have gone for his crotch; if wine, for his lips. But he'd been drinking stout, which Ginny said made him stupidly affectionate, so he just brushed his thumb gently back and forth where scar tissue crinkled the healed skin of Snape's throat.
For an instant, Snape looked utterly gobsmacked, on the point of boiling over, a thin dark volcano hissing smoke. He stood glaring in disbelief, as if Harry had just invited him to shuck his robes and swing from the lampposts while wailing the latest chart-buster on the Wizarding Wireless airwaves.
Then, with uncanny control, the cracks in his composure sealed up again. Very softly, he said, "You're absolutely shit-faced, aren't you, Potter." And smiled.
It was generally a bad sign when Snape showed his teeth. Harry lowered his hand with complete dignity. "I'm sober enough that if I received word from the Ministry to overpower and bring in the notorious criminal Severus Snape, I could fulfil my orders and you'd have a bloody difficult time taking me down."
He'd expected a flicker of amused scorn, not a blast of snarling breath that made it clear Snape had also been drinking. Harry wasn't exactly an expert at identifying alcohol content by smell, but he'd wager it was something harder than beer.
"Stuff the sodding heroics, you swell-headed, blithering fool. Always call for backup. Your constant risk-taking is merely showing off, and you don't have the Dark Lord as an excuse anymore."
Harry almost laughed. Where the hell did Snape get off telling him his job? But the contempt had been genuine this time, and he could have tackled the bastard to the ground. He wasn't even angry. It would just have felt good to have Snape flat on his back for once.
"Oh, shut up," he said amiably. "If you want to see me genuinely shit-faced, your best bet is to come to the pub with me. I've never stood you a drink, have I?"
Another beat of disbelieving silence. "Somehow," Snape said, "in all my years of luring grubby eleven-year-olds to my rooms with sweet promises of detention, that prospect managed to elude me." The sneer in his voice and the steam bursting from his mouth were more eloquent than any eye roll.
Down a crossing street, voices tore through the silence with a burst of high-pitched laughter. Snape stepped back, and ice cracked under his heels. "Pity I never caught you drinking in school," he murmured over the retreating echoes. "I could have banned you from any number of delightful snot-nosed activities, beginning with Quidditch."
"You were spotty and snot-nosed yourself once," Harry said equably. "We grew out of it. Well, I did, anyway." He wasn't sure what, besides calculation, lay behind the relentless stare Snape was giving him, but he caught himself starting to sway forward. "So, about that drink?"
Snape fended him off with one hand while the other performed a quick, furtive brush down the front of his own robes. Glass clinked faintly under his gloved fingertips. "Keep in mind, I'm fully stocked up on antidotes, so if one of us is going to be poisoned for this it won't be me." He shifted sideways, as if giving a cornered animal a gap through which to escape. "Well, Potter? Lead on. I won't wait all night."
Harry shook his head at the ungracious acceptance and shouldered past him, tugging at Snape's robes as he went by. He didn't know why he forced the contact. Following behind, barely audible over the double clatter of their boots on the frozen cobbles, Snape muttered in his ear, "I won't be responsible for your sorry arse if you get too far into your cups."
"Can't recall my arse ever being sorry, actually," Harry said. "But just imagine all the malicious pleasure you'll get out of telling people what a pathetic mess I'm making of my fame and glory."
Snape came up on his left side. In profile, his nose looked arrogant and almost impressive until they passed under a street lamp, where his nostrils glowed pink in the bitter cold. "It's been six years. Your fame and what you do with it is as pertinent as the Prophet's back pages, which traffick in imported Nundus and ads for talking dildos. So not at all." He cast a dry, dismissive glance at Harry. "Besides, who the fuck would take a Death Eater's word against yours?"
One way Snape seemed to celebrate his release from teaching was the pleasure he took in casual expletives. Harry wasn't surprised. No one who'd suffered Snape's presence at Hogwarts could have failed to notice he was a bundle of repressed obscenities. Said aloud, they were rude but unremarkable punctuation, not abscesses festering under the surface, unspoken rage that bled into his personality.
"You're not a Death Eater," he puffed, stopping outside the entrance to The Stirring Rod and stamping ice rinds off his boots.
Snape tipped an eyebrow upward. A flurry of snowflakes covered his hair. The tavern sign creaked slightly each time the wind licked it, the metal stick circling the bowels of a small wooden cauldron. "Get inside, Potter." This was accompanied by a slight push. Under the circumstances, it was almost companionable. "And for the record, your opinion doesn't count."
My opinion saved you from Azkaban, but Harry wasn't enough of a wanker to say this out loud. Besides, he was looking forward to that drink.
They abandoned the chilly, star-roofed street for the pub's smoky interior. Patrons talking and tippling when Harry had left half an hour before started to hail him, then frowned when they saw who followed him in. Candles and green satin-shaded lamps on triple-anchored chains encouraged a hidden-grotto ambience full of underwater shadows and undercurrents of desire, simmering below the surface of daily routine. A comforting fug composed of pipeweed, pies, and fry-ups, thick with hops and tinged with head-clearing, head-clouding distillations, permeated wood and flesh, wool and hair. There were no witches at any of the tables. Harry assumed they had their own meeting places to which wizards weren't invited.
Snape's eyelids had lowered into a sleepy, crocodile watchfulness, playing at indifference but unmistakably predatory. The light snowfall that had caught them on the way over had melted into his hair, and the black sludge hung in tangles as if he'd just got out of the shower. "So," he said, with an insinuating glance from Harry to the surrounding company, "you're the hotshot pretty boy tempting a grand lot of overdressed wankers? I would have thought this was more Albus' crowd."
The swipe at Dumbledore's memory came just quick enough to bump Harry past the 'pretty boy' comment.
"As if you'd know," he snorted, looking around for an unoccupied table.
"You forget, I spent half my time as headmaster immured with the old man's portrait. I was present for statements that would curl your hair." He eyed Harry shrewdly. "Well, perhaps not your hair."
Talking about Dumbledore with the man who'd killed him was something Harry doubted he could manage sober, let alone half-pissed. He elbowed Snape, testing his tolerance for physical contact. "Pot, kettle."
"Not quite," Snape smirked. Or maybe that was meant to be a smile. "Cauldron," and his finger poked the nape of Harry's neck, "pot."
The roots of Harry's hair prickled at the touch, but he shook it off and continued leading the way. The only available table was the last one nearest the loo. It meant putting up with constant comings and goings, a recurring cold draught, and an assortment of belligerent, suspicious, and concerned looks. Still, Harry preferred it to being in the thick of things, and he'd wager Snape did, too.
As they took their seats, Snape outflanking Harry to nick the side affording the widest view of the room, their gazes travelled over the same sightlines, exits and entrances, numbers of people drinking at the available tables, the cluster at the bar, the three couples swaying and shuffling together while music ebbed and throbbed over the chatter of conversation. Funny how they both automatically assessed the territory and identified the escape routes, the potential traps.
Or not so funny. This was Harry's job now. This was the shadow that would follow Snape for the rest of his life.
They sat for an awkward moment, then Harry loosened his scarf and rolled the fringed ends around his cold hands. "Here's the thing," he said, resting his forearms on the table. "You disappeared for six years. Just up and bloody vanished. Not a word until now. Were you off licking your wounds, or travelling the world, or what?"
Snape sat at an angle, straight-backed and guarded, still appraising the room. "Hardly disappeared, Potter. I always knew exactly where I was." At Harry's unamused snort, Snape said drily, "Even you should be able to see the wisdom in my dropping out of the public eye. I went back to the Muggle world with a few specific goals in mind." His restless gaze flickered over the crowd. "Money, for one."
Harry thought he saw a flash of recognition in Snape's eyes, so he snuck a glance over his shoulder, wondering if it was someone he knew. Who in this group of familiar, convivial faces would be desperate enough to sleep with the likes of Snape?
When he focussed forward again, Snape was watching him with every ounce of sardonic knowingness at his disposal, and Harry remembered. Hermione. Right. Hermione had had sex with Snape. Merlin. The world was full of desperate people.
"Erm, money?" he prompted, his neck a bit warm.
Snape rested an elbow on the table and ran a black-gloved finger over his lips, with a brooding, malevolent scrutiny that sent Harry right back to their disastrous Occlumency lessons in fifth year. Then, that same calculated stroking had made his blood run cold.
Now … well, it made him unexpectedly aware of Snape's mouth.
"Mr. Potter," Snape said in a slow voice, rubbing a knuckle along his bottom lip, "are you trying to get laid?"
Harry flushed. "Wow. Good one, Snape." So he'd been having a moment. Not the same as 'yes'. "Hell of a conversation-stopper."
"Just wondering. Since you've invited me to a gay tavern for a drink, and the drink has somehow failed to materialise."
A surge of frustration ejected Harry from his chair. "Right. I'm a terrible host. Stay here, and I'll fetch them in. What'll you have?"
"Ogden's Reserve. Since it's on your Galleon."
As Harry threaded a path toward the bar, he was impeded every few steps by protective pats on the shoulder and one (failed) attempt to steer him aside and check him for incapacitating alcohol levels or compulsion charms. All from men twice his age, two of whom had been good for a no-strings release out the back of a summer's night. He smiled his way past these well-meaning gestures, a little nervous about leaving his notorious companion unguarded.
Davey, one of the regular barkeeps, took his order with a slight jut of the chin, radiating an elder's disapproval for a youngster's folly. He clunked the pint and the whisky glass down, saying low, "Have some standards, lad. No need to scrape the bottom of the barrel."
Harry forced another smile. Snape was pointedly ignoring the room, although he had a clear view of everything, and Harry didn't doubt the hand buried in his robes was holding his wand at the ready. "Keep your shirt on," he said affably. "Just having a chat." But when Davey said, "Ah," and tapped the side of his nose, "under investigation, is he?" Harry smacked his tip down. "Don't be daft." He walked away, feeling Davey's frown following him. But Harry had seen Snape harassed and ostracised once too often. He wasn't in the mood to play along with that bollocks.
Drinks in hand, he navigated his way back, slid Snape's firewhisky in front of him, and dropped into his seat, careful not to tangle their legs together under the table. "You were saying?"
"Was I?" There was a laughing shout, a burst of raucous camaraderie off in a corner, and Snape's head swivelled, a scavenger on the lookout for scraps of debauchery. Whatever he saw kept him sharply interested for the duration of a nostril flare. His hand absently circled the base of his drink, and for a fraction of a second, he turned that hunting look on Harry.
Whoa, not scavenger. Predator. His face screamed hawk.
Harry's mouth went dry. Hastily, he raised his pint. Snape settled into his chair and mirrored him ironically, then set about working one hand out of its tight leather glove, apparently content to stay.
Harry took a swig, pouring more ale into his already saturated system. What had they been talking about? "Money?"
Snape's glove slapped the table, and he snorted. "Of course you'd want to know all about that." He rested his elbows on either side of his drink, twining the pale fingers of his left hand with those of his leather-sleek right. "Very well. Money. I spent my first year after the trial researching healing enzymes." His bare hand disentangled and moved toward his throat, his expression perturbed, possibly recalling the liberties Harry had taken out in the snow. "To deal with my injuries. Until the need to make a living became a pressing concern. This may come as a shock, Potter, but sixteen years of teaching doesn't lead to vaults full of inherited Galleons. And I'm fucked if I'll let myself be forced back onto the tender mercies of Wizarding society."
He inched the second glove off as he spoke, manipulating and stretching the leather, crumpling it then dropping it atop its twin. "So I took my experimental findings, and I brewed. By the following year, I had a product line marketable to the Muggle public." Something flexed on the side of his jaw, private, possibly a smile, possibly just a flicker from the glass candle holder. "Products with magical properties subtle enough that wizarding authorities aren't likely to notice. And Muggles can't duplicate them, for obvious reasons."
"Products?" Harry echoed, doing his best to keep any suspicion of drugs out of his voice.
"Topical ointments." The slow deadpan drip of each syllable suggested he'd failed utterly. "Your experiences as an Auror have made you as paranoid as Moody ever was."
Harry grimaced and raised his pint glass in acknowledgement. "Cheers." Snape didn't return the awkward gesture, and Harry drummed his fingers on the table. The recurring draughts from the hallway were colder than he'd expected, and he squeezed his hands together. "Being an Auror's my job, Snape. You realise you've just admitted to gaming the system?"
"Do I look like an incompetent who'd confess an illegal action to an Auror? One who most likely entertains thoughts of a little light revenge?"
"I'm not looking to throw you in Azkaban."
"Aren't you?" Snape put the whisky to his lips, then licked the rim of the glass to catch an escaping drop. "How unambitious."
Right. That flick of the tongue had to be a tease. "Did I miss a memo? Are we playing a game?"
"Why else would you invite me for a drink? If you say the pleasure of my company, I will give you a reason to draw your wand." Snape waited while Harry examined that line for innuendo. "Frankly," Snape exhaled as if bored, "you're not that good a liar."
Right. This was bollocks. Why had Harry invited him? "You really are a piece of work," he said, and snatched up one of the gloves. He wadded it into a ball a couple of times, enjoying the resilient texture, then smoothed it out with a bit less violence, sorry he'd let his annoyance get the better of him.
"Arrest me, then." Snape held the whisky glass beneath his nose and inhaled, tilting his head back when a small spatter of flame popped upward. Harry almost laughed. He'd never ordered Ogden's Reserve before and hadn't realised it actually burned. Snape blew gently across the whisky's surface until the flame streamed outward, directing Harry's attention to the roomful of covertly watching men. "Half the patrons here are on tenterhooks hoping you'll spring to your feet and perform a dramatic song and dance about how it was a mistake to have defended me and you know better now. If you want to cater to a fan club that sees you as a potential fuckboy, by all means. Embarrass yourself by having me hauled off to the Ministry."
It was bloody tempting to throw a dash of magic in Snape's whisky and see if it singed his nose hairs on the next sip. Harry shrugged instead. "Nah," he said, placing the glove carefully back in the centre of the table. "I've done my time being constantly wrong about you."
The tiny spark of hostility spitting in the air between them burned for a moment with something quite different. They locked eyes across the table, and Snape took a long, slow swallow from his glass without blinking or breaking eye contact. Harry liked how that made him feel and then was instantly awash with discomfort.
"So." He relaxed back with the pint glass on his thigh to give himself some breathing room from that weird moment of intimacy. "You rich yet?"
Snape's eyes glinted. "Getting there."
"Makes a nice change, yeah?" Harry extended his wand toward Snape's half-empty glass, and after a slight hesitation, Snape nodded. Harry tapped, and whisky brimmed to the top. Davey would make sure it went on his tab. "So, brewing – " He couldn't resist the jibe. "Moisturisers?"
"Skin creams, Potter."
Snape was smirking, and even though Harry reckoned it was at his expense, he felt foolishly pleased. "Brewing Muggle cosmetics kept you busy for six years, really?" This time Snape blew the tendril of flame in his direction, and Harry tipped his chair back, grinning. He hooked one foot around a table leg to guard against toppling over backward, because ending up on his arse and spilling beer all over himself wouldn't exactly score him maturity points. "Those other goals you mentioned, how'd they go?"
Snape held his refilled glass to his lips, and with his eyes alone peeled invisible strips off Harry, examined while he made up his mind about something, and then let them drop with a bored dip of his eyelids. The spurts of flame at the bottom of the glass gave a volcanic cast to his face, deepening when he smiled.
"During my first three months in Manchester," he said calmly, "I fucked more people than I had in all my previous years combined," placing a luxurious emphasis on fucked that undressed the subject on the table between them. Harry managed to keep his composure, although he brought his chair down with an audible thump, holding his sip of ale unswallowed for so long it almost started dribbling out his mouth. Snape stretched his neck, glanced casually around the room, then back at Harry. "I count that as a success."
Harry heard himself say, "Yeah, we're more alike than you might think," then wondered if it wouldn't have been better to just fall over backwards and bash his head on the floor to excuse the rubbish coming out of his mouth. His headache kicked up a notch, buzzing anxiously. "That's why - partly why I thought it might be worth trying to talk."
"Really," Snape said, deadpan. "Because we both use sex to compensate for all the other things we've fucked up?"
Harry's eyebrows jumped. Snape might not be falling-off-his-broomstick drunk, but he certainly sounded a few bristles short of a safe ride.
And he was doing that thing with his lips again, this time tapping them with his index finger. "Enlighten me, Potter. What do we have to say to each other?"
"I don't know. What do ordinary people talk about?" But Harry did know, and he could tell Snape was waiting for him to come out with it. Best to start small. "All right, then. You asked, so don't poison my beer. For starters - those memories." When Snape didn't instantly blast the subject off the table - didn't say anything, in fact - he added helpfully, "The ones with my mum? That led to - well, you know. When we both died. Remember?"
The sarcasm was skirting a line, but oh well. Not a blink out of Snape, just a strange sort of indifference closing over his face.
"You didn't lift a finger to save them. I know you were in a bad way and still recuperating, but - why not keep them?" The hurt from that loss had faded, but - God, so many lacerations from that moment had left their mark. "Not a single regret? Haven't missed them in all these years?"
Harry expected Snape's face to twist with rage or - something. He expected something. Snape remained perfectly inscrutable, almost blank. Only one finger contradicted his apparent passivity, tracing a small, steady circle on the table over and over like a top left to wobble in place.
After a moment, he said, "Personally, I'd rather talk about fucking."
Harry dragged his glasses off and leaned forward until his knuckles pressed the ridge of his brow. He'd drunk too much. It was mental to be having these thoughts in front of Snape, who would only sneer at him for being so upset.
So quietly Harry wondered if he'd used Legilimency to put the words directly into his brain, Snape said, "It's bloody presumptuous of you to think it's any of your business. Those memories were mine. If you had any sense of honour, you wouldn't bring them up."
Harry raised his head, brows knotted together to help him focus. "It's not about honour. It's about you not wanting to remember my mum."
"No." Snape swirled his drink, as if thinking of throwing the contents in Harry's face. "It was about me sacrificing a vital part of myself in order to survive."
Harry shook his head, scrubbed the corner of one eye, and wearily put his glasses back on.
"I wasn't exactly thrilled to be alive, Potter. And I knew taking those memories back would make me wish I were dead."
The churn and hum of other men's voices filled the silence between them, over which the pub's old-timey music wandered and occasionally soared, warbling nostalgically. A slight haze of pipe smoke blurred the air. When Harry couldn't take it any longer, he picked up one of the gloves and crushed it against his cheek, inhaling the smell of leather and whatever fragrance had been on Snape's fingers. Skin creams, yeah. He probably still used them on his scars.
From the rear of the house came the splintering shock of glass smashing on the floor, followed by loud exclamations of apology and dismay. Snape went on low alert, his wand drawn before the shattering stopped, the gleam of dark wood on the table.
Glad of the distraction, Harry shovelled all those feelings back down where they'd been packed away for years and consoled himself by wiggling his fingers inside the glove. He blinked, startled, first by the softness of the fur lining, then by the gentle heat of a charm radiating over his chilled fingertips. It was a tight fit. Snape's hands were longer, slenderer - no, skinnier. Slender made them sound too appealing. Aware he was being a prat, Harry hoisted his pint to show off his newly gloved hand.
"You know there's a door out the back way?" Snape murmured, precise beneath the raucous apologies and calls for another round.
"Yeah. It leads to - " A niggling piece clicked into place, and Harry set his glass down abruptly, jarring a few drops onto the glove. "Wait. You've been here before? I've never seen you."
A flask or two rattled in Snape's robes as he shifted in his chair, and he reached inside, presumably rearranging. "Polyjuice is a thing, Potter."
"Yeah, and so is having charges pressed against you for wrongful impersonation." Damn it. Harry shouldn't be surprised Snape's morals still fluctuated at his own convenience. "You use Polyjuice to get laid?"
"I do not." The razor's edge of a smile: he'd stepped onto thin ice. "Anymore," Snape conceded. "But perhaps you've forgotten. I was a spy. Scruples were rather far down my list of available strategies."
Without even commenting on the purloined glove, his hand whipped out and pinned Harry's wrist to the table. When Harry jerked back on reflex, Snape hooked a finger under the clinging leather, digging a line up his palm. The glove accommodated the stretch, and Snape folded the cuff back and skinned it off. Not in anger. No, he smoothed it almost voluptuously, rolling the leather inside-out, exposing the pale fur. Once Harry's hand lay bare, Snape continued gripping his wrist for two confusing seconds.
Harry stared at him.
Snape smiled almost imperceptibly and let go.
Merlin. What the hell was that?
Robes overflowing the table's edge, Snape sank back into his chair, idly reversing the glove to its original shape, stroking and inspecting the leather. "Remember what I was, Potter," and he could act relaxed all he wanted, it didn't disguise the sourness in his voice. "A penniless half-blood seduced by the promises of a charismatic maniac. I was expected to fuck, in all senses of the word, with the moral boundaries of behaviour. Boundaries most people would consider sacred."
"Seduced," Harry said, staring at his hand, still upturned on the table.
"Get the wax out of your ears, nitwit. By promises, I said. Do you seriously believe the Dark Lord would have considered me worth lusting after?" From the twist of Snape's lips, any respect for Harry's intelligence he'd picked up from the war had just vanished down the loo. "Although how would you react if I said yes, I wonder?"
As if the very idea weren't the stuff of nightmares. Harry shuddered, mostly because Snape didn't.
"As things stand," and ah, there was the old familiar sneer, "I've had my fill of being threatened with hexes, curses, and self-righteous diatribes by random arseholes. So yes, I'll bloody well borrow a Muggle's face when I want a quiet drink." Snape pronounced the words as if daring him to find fault and at the same time, with a small angry twirl of his wand, threaded a dangling lock of hair behind one ear. It was very absent-minded-professor of him, and Harry wanted to see him do it again. "Nor do I lack for partners, much as it may blow your tiny mind. There are always people eager to fuck a Death Eater. A murderer. I've even been offered money by lunatics hoping I'll do horrible things to them. Choke them. Tie them up and threaten them. Worse, Cruciatus. Imperius. Conveniently forgetting the Dark Arts can destroy your soul."
"And do you?"
The look Snape gave him through the wavering candlelight was so, so dark, and Harry flinched. "I won't pretend I don't enjoy tying people to the bed posts." His eyes swept Harry up and down. "I would have absolutely no qualms about using a modified Incarcerous on you, for example."
The urge to squirm nearly tipped Harry out of his seat. "Yeah, like that's a surprise. Don't get your hopes up, mate."
"I seriously doubt I'm getting anything up tonight, Mr. Potter," Snape said blandly, and Harry scowled. He'd walked right into that. They were quiet for a moment, Snape staring beyond him, bestowing his brooding on the universe. "Whatever lurid fantasies people project on me is their problem. I can't be bothered. They want sex or they don't. If that disappoints the imbeciles who dream about Death Eaters torturing them, I suggest they try their luck with the Malfoys."
His glance sharpened, and he straightened in that uncoiling way of a hunter who's caught sight of prey, a faint, feral twitch of interest on his face toward someone obviously looking back. Harry swung around, beyond subtlety at this point, his scowl aimed at whoever the fuck it was this time. How many men Harry considered part of his crowd kept furtively trying to catch Snape's eye?
Then it hit him, and he turned abruptly. "Hey. Were you following me? You accused me of stalking you, but you were the one bloody well spying!"
"I left because you came in, idiot." Snape's wand was up, but before Harry even registered cause for alarm, he lowered it, and Harry's levitated pint landed neatly where his elbow had just missed knocking it over. "I assumed you'd wandered in by accident. That you would exit in haste once you realised the nature of the clientele. Then I was curious to see how you'd behave." His fingers slid up the length of his wand and back down again with slow, dreamy care. Harry tried not to read anything into it. "When the Polyjuice started wearing off, it was easy enough to slip out the back."
The idea of being under surveillance while he was, however half-heartedly, on the prowl was vaguely mortifying and not so vaguely titillating. On the other hand, it fell right in with Harry's usual luck. He might not be front page news at this point, but his sexual escapades were still good for a scandal-mongering column or two.
"How do I know you weren't one of the blokes checking me out?"
"You really ought to see a healer about that swelled head, Potter." Snape stopped stroking his wand and turned those firewhisky-inflamed eyes on him. "Although, as we both know, you left without scoring."
So he had been keeping track. Exasperated, Harry reached under his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose. He couldn't believe he was talking about pulling blokes with Severus Snape. "Sometimes I just like to look, you know? Other times, I'll take whatever's on offer." He cocked a half-smile at Snape in retaliation for that squirmy moment. "Even sex with people I don't like."
A brief, vivid ugliness tightened Snape's features, and Harry, who thought he'd dished out a harmless spot of mock-flirtation, braced himself for things to get shouty. Which left him a bit flustered when Snape's face unclenched by slow degrees to normal levels of tension, so familiar in its narrow angles and excesses (a nose that signified flaming git, for example) Harry hardly even saw it as ugly anymore.
"World-weary confessions sound utterly ridiculous coming out of your mouth," Snape said in the same tone he'd used to talk about tying Harry up. "I believe I'm the one who's plumbed the depths of fucking people who want to wear my guts for garters."
Hiding behind a long swallow of ale, Harry glanced over at the bar and tried the old Boggart-banishing trick of imagining Snape wearing garters. Hilarious, right?
He reached inside his robes to adjust the stretch of his trousers.
"I didn't mean you personally," he said.
A last, feeble hiss of flame spat up from Snape's whisky, and he drained it in one swallow. "Well, if I ever decide to start sleeping my way through the ranks of former students who'd pay to see me boiled in one of my own cauldrons," he said, smacking his glass down, "I'll be sure to let you know."
Shite. Harry had banked on getting through a casual drink without a single reference to the fact that Snape had had sex with one of his best friends. Right now they were two spiteful comments away from bringing Hermione into it.
Or maybe not. Maybe Snape had been testing the waters to see if Harry was interested?
His thoughts darted around this idea like Cornish pixies around a glittering, curse-laden heirloom. One touch, and his brain might explode.
He risked a not-very-covert glance, but Snape had retreated into that peculiar stillness again. Harry knew damn well the git was as volatile as ever, but he'd apparently mastered a form of facial Occlumency that replaced emotion with – absence. It erred too far in the other direction. Drained. Almost dull.
Snape had been many things at Hogwarts, but never dull.
"Are you all right?" When Snape didn't answer, Harry raised his voice. "What is that? Your face keeps going blank."
Snape's eyes passed through emptiness and re-entered the realm of awareness like a coma victim slowly recognising his surroundings. "I'm…. " He paused. "I'm remembering what it was like to be dead." With a twitch of his shoulders, he shook off whatever - wherever - that was, and a vicious, quivering energy flared in its wake. His eyes burned at Harry. "It reminds me to stop wasting time."
"Oh," Harry said, and then all the air in his lungs got tangled up as Snape pushed away from the table. The scrape of chair legs grated on his nerves. A muffled tap and several clinks accompanied the pulling-together of Snape's robes. In a moment, he'd stand up. In a few strides, he'd be gone.
Harry's breath rushed back, and he flung out a hand, hoping that would be enough to slow him down. The words rose straight from his gut. "If the Polyjuice hadn't worn off, would you have - ? Were you tempted, did you ever think - ? If I'd said yes?"
Snape hovered in his seat. "No. Not with you."
Humiliation stung like vinegar in every nook and cranny of Harry's body, but really, what had he expected? It's not as if he actually -
"Polyjuice is for pretending," Snape said softly. The smoky syllables drifted out, and if voices could prowl, Snape's would have been stalking him across the table. "I'd want you to know exactly who was fucking you."
So this no was … a yes. The sort of yes that catches you from behind and caresses your throat with a knife.
Looking smug, Snape leaned over and scooped up his gloves, and - yeah, Harry's dick was already on it. A pulse of heat, whether he wanted it or not.
What the hell.
He caught Snape's wrist and forced it down.
There was a line. A line dividing good ideas from bad. Harry was aware of it, of course he was; he wasn't that drunk. Beyond that line lurked consequences. He should back off, like any sane individual would. Be sensible. Get the hell away from the table and Firecall Ron to come take him home.
It shouldn't be so easy to cross that fucking line.
"Come over to mine for a shag, then? What do you say?"
Snape's head lifted, baring an incipient snarl. The searing feeling along Harry's nerves amped up his heartbeat, a thrill familiar from night raids and ambushes, buzzing his system with adrenaline and giving him a bad case of the sexual shivers.
Sitting absolutely still, consulting instincts or morals or who the fuck knows, Snape levelled a long, narrow look across the table. Long and narrow like so much else about him, with the smoulder of a low flame just beginning to lick at spilled fuel. It could have been contempt or calculation, or the effects of drinking whisky that literally burned.
It could be that Harry had just lit a match.
Apprehensive and keen, he let go, but the snarl lingered on Snape's parted lips. Surely now he'd spring to his feet like a lightning bolt in reverse. Harry could already hear in his head, "How drunk do you have to be, Mr. Potter - " Surely Snape would rip him a new one. Then Harry would force out a laugh and insult him back. Snape would stalk out the door, and that would be the underwhelming conclusion to their one and only heart-to-heart.
Slowly, theatrically, Snape picked up his gloves and coaxed them over his upraised fingers, smoothing each one down with exaggerated care. "Why not?" he said. Watching Harry for any sign of a hoax, he pressed his supple black hands flat on the table and, with feline caution, both a threat and a stretch, stood up.
Oh Merlin. Harry was in for it now. Over the line and balls-deep in the soup. Cauldron. Whatever. Erotic panic pumped through him, and it was as if he could feel his pupils dilating. Snape with his tapping, tinkling, antidote-cluttered robes and snow-washed wet-soot hair stole all his focus. This feeling of pressure-valve insanity wasn't much different from standing on the beach blowing up rocks for the sheer destructive exultation, the brutal release of it. Only this was ... yeah. Full of living, breathing, explosive potential.
Harry's cock, tucked against his left thigh, nudged impatiently at the snug, distracting fabric of his pants.
Jaw tight to keep it from dropping, he lurched to his feet. An empty platter summoned to the kitchen took the descent a bit too steeply past his head, and he ducked with a slight jolt. Shite. His reflexes were rubbery.
"Well, all right, then," he said, equal parts horny and queasy, wand gripped tight as Snape pivoted and his gently swaying robes led the way into the back hall, invisible for a moment as the shadows beyond the torchlight swallowed him up.
Harry followed the soft tap of his footsteps, and a shock of breathtaking cold hit him as the back door yielded to Snape's push. They stumbled out into an alley piled with clumps of dirt-streaked snow, a ghostly contrast to the shadows spread alongside. Moonlight lay in sheets, yellowed here and there by streetlamps, human smudges under the quiet canopy of night. An owl hooted three notes from a distant rooftop, slow, fluted sounds. Snowdrifts glowed as white as icecream against the walls. In front of them, the ground was pockmarked with footprints and lines of wet pavement where the locals had stamped their way to the main street.
Snape turned to him in the shadows, an exhaled cloud curling out as if he were emptying his lungs of cigarette smoke. "Well? Having second thoughts?"
His face had a soiled pallor completely at home in this cold back alley, and his fondness for black gave him the air of an assassin. Stripped of his robes, the protection of his woolen shadows, he would probably be a lot less formidable, pale and imperfect as trampled snow.
Harry wanted to do the stripping.
"Keep your gloves on," was all he said.