Before the sobering cold could knock some sense into them, Harry threw an arm around Snape and spun him into an Apparition that slung them with a bit too much velocity into his sitting room.
They landed half-reeling and only didn't fall down because they were each other's ballast, caught in opposite staggers. The charmed lamps flared, displaying Harry's ratty comfortable chair (oh Merlin, sitting down would be brilliant) and overstuffed sofa (lying down even better) and the photos of - bugger. He waved the lights dim, even though his mum and dad, smiling from the frames scattered across the mantel, weren't like magical portraits. They didn't interact. They couldn't possibly have an opinion on his choice of bed partner. But a strange lurch of shame at what he was about to do - or rather, who he was doing it with - made Harry haul on Snape's robes to keep him from turning around.
Snape cursed under his breath and yanked the fabric out of Harry's grasp. That was all right. Harry knew they were off to a bumpy start, but they were fine, they were doing this. He'd probably Obliviate himself later, but right now he used his clumsy momentum to get in Snape's space, touch his shoulder, slip a hand into his robes, say (not very seductively), "Bedroom's this way, d'you want to - ?" while smoothing a hand over Snape's arse. Not much there, which didn't surprise him, but what was there deserved attention. It was just high enough, just round enough, that he couldn't resist giving it an approving squeeze.
And he kissed Snape - or tried to, foiled by Snape calling him an idiot under his breath and propelling him backward into a wall for the second time that night. At least it was his wall, not encrusted with ice or scraping against his spine.
There was a moment's stillness then, and in the precarious calm where every breath and shuffle was too loud, Snape seemed to Harry the epitome of a depraved fantasy, a billowing erotic nightmare, bitter and hungry to the core. After being snowed on three times in one night, his hair was a godawful mess, glistening wetly, gold-tinted in the dim, tickling lamplight, as if honey clung stickily to the strands. It really was a bit like inviting an assassin home. The way he hovered promised to spread and crush Harry into the nearest available surface, and Harry rather looked forward to him fulfilling that promise.
They were surrounded by the extra layer of cold they'd brought in with them, shrouded in winter. The floor was also a bit unsteady, or maybe Harry was just woozy from too much booze and no dinner and dawning confusion over what the hell he was doing getting sexual with a man experience suggested would rather spit on him than suck his cock.
Snape dealt abruptly with the robe situation by peeling Harry's off and letting it fall in a heap around his boots. His angular face was hypnotically focussed, as if seducing Harry were a complex bit of spellwork needing the utmost concentration to get right. One wrong move, and either one of them could turn this encounter into a smoking crater.
Harry's eyelids flickered, interrupting his own ambiguous desire with dizzy intervals of not being sure he could handle this. Being up close and personal with Snape's features, the huge, bony nose, the cruel lines around his eyes, was weirdly arousing - and not so weirdly inspired a violent rush of adrenaline.
He gave up trying to sexily divest himself of his clothes and tried to kiss Snape again, only to get shoved back for his trouble.
"For fuck's sake," he panted, distracted by the deft hand stripping open his flies.
The odd, ravaged, determined look Snape fastened on him brought the past surging into the room, tumbling Harry's brain backward, almost turned inside-out, his emotional molecules all tossed together by an eerie tide of half-submerged memories of what it was like to be young. Young, confused, and hated by his teacher.
Only this time with the teacher's hand down his pants.
"Fuck," he said, turned on and wildly unsettled by the cool, sleek sensation of Snape's leather glove twisting inside his clothing and touching his cock, closing snug as a hawk's hood on the jutting curve of it and warming rapidly under the influence of temperature-control charms.
"Here," Snape said in a low, hoarse voice. A leather finger prodded at Harry's closed lips and found a yielding spot through which to push and enter, invading his mouth. "Suck on this."
Harry did as he was told, all but one speck of his attention hungry for the way Snape's hand moved between his legs. As the outdoor chill faded, the glove's heat and slight drag of unslicked leather brought him fully erect, but it was too dry, and he shifted in frustration. Meanwhile, he was practically drooling from his attempts to suck on Snape's finger, but it wasn't the same as having a tongue in his mouth. Foolhardy or not, he wanted a kiss, and if the git wouldn't cooperate, Harry would have to go to him.
He shook his mouth free of the spit-covered glove and stumbled one step forward, forgetting how inebriated he was and how helpful the wall had been in keeping his balance.
Snape was right there, like an overhanging tree transplanted from the Forbidden Forest, all the available light bending around him. Right there, and yet Harry's attempt at a kiss didn't even come close. Now that Harry was an adult, Snape was no longer of a height to loom, but he still stood poised to entangle and ensnare. With the reflexes of a sober man, he curled his hand around Harry's throat, hoisted him back, and pinned him roughly in place.
Undulating points of light dazzled Harry's dilated eyes, sparkles of uncertainty dancing inside the heat of lust. His throat pulsed against the leather clasp bracketing him to the wall.
"Stay where you are," Snape whispered. "Let me do this, you intoxicated imbecile. I know perfectly well what you want from me."
Despite what he'd just said, the hand fondling Harry slid away. Harry squirmed, and Snape gave his throat a warning squeeze.
Predictably, cold air on a bare cock had a discouraging effect, so Harry fumbled to cover himself. Chin down, Snape caught the tip of one gloved finger between his teeth. He tugged on it, watching Harry with absolutely filthy, unblinking intent, then did the same to the next finger, lips drawn back so Harry could see how carefully his uneven teeth pinched the black leather, how the material strained as he drew the fur-lined sheath half an inch up his middle finger. Then the next one, Snape giving a quick, feral shake of his head like a carnivore snapping the back of its prey, and the next, the throb in Harry's groin keeping time with each jerk, each yielding stretch of leather. Snape paused to lick his lips, then bit the tip of his thumb, pulling, loosening the skin-tightness, his eyes never leaving Harry's. The blend of morbid dream and vaguely threatening sexual display shone an erotic light on a side of Snape Harry hadn't known was there, but it added fuel to his alcoholic haze.
Then Snape pushed his middle finger, loose at the tip, deep into his own mouth, and Harry grabbed for Snape's robes. God, imagine if that were his cock instead. Snape drew the finger out slowly, catching the drooping end of the glove in a bare-toothed snarl as his hand wrenched free, pale familiar skin and sharp knuckles and stained nail beds emerging with sudden fluidity. Once peeled, his hand snatched up the glove hanging limp in his teeth and stuffed it out of sight inside his robes.
Quickly then, he spat into his palm, whispered something too low for Harry to hear, and wrapped his now-bare hand around Harry's softened cock.
Harry moaned through closed lips, his back still flat against the wall. Whatever dripped from Snape's hand was warmer than body temperature, slippery and almost silky, something for which saliva was merely the base. The long fingers gripping him used a tight upward stroke, and Snape's thumb seemed almost prehensile in the way it massaged Harry's rigid, rising flesh. His clasp on Harry's throat didn't slacken.
Pleasure and pressure mounted as Snape jerked him faster, squeezing over the sweet spot every time he hit the knob, in his eyes a cavernous appetite burning for Harry's benefit, an old, rabid passion that called to Harry's years of ransacking his own unsated hungers. He watched Snape's thin lips part, watched how his nostrils flared as he bent his head, engrossed by the sight of Harry's prick flushed and wet between their bodies, straining and springing through his fist. Harry panted as the frantic rubbing sped up, the slick ring of fingers flying over him, succulent and squelching. Blood thundered hot through his body.
His eyes drifted shut, an involuntary response to rising ecstasy, and Snape whispered, "You want to come, don't you, Potter?" Harry's vision swam as he opened his eyes and then couldn't look away. Snape's face was so close. The black gaze burned on Harry's every grimace, every bob of his throat, every flush in cheek and ear. "You're going to come hard, aren't you?" Even with Snape's hand holding his throat, Harry could have pressed a kiss onto those dirty-talking lips, but he was too much in thrall to the sensation beating and slithering between his legs, the sweet slide up and down his cock. And watching Snape watch him sent all that heat straight down between his legs, a carnal loop of desperation.
Snape leaned all the way forward. His hair swept against Harry's cheek, and a smoky, mild fragrance enveloped Harry's face, so close, almost smothering. His soft voice smudged Harry's ear like smoke. "Come all over my hand, Potter. Come as if you were fucking my mouth."
Harry grabbed the back of Snape's neck, dug his nails in, and pumped upward, slow, hard, driving thrusts that would have plunged deep, would have filled Snape's throat if his cock were in Snape's mouth.
He came in thick, wrenching spasms, bolts of euphoric release, fullness emptying, hot and shocking, almost violent. His body shook with the tension spilling out, his incoherent thoughts swooning away into passive exhaustion. He swayed, trusting Snape's arms to hold him up. Warm semen oozed through the slender fingers still languidly greasing him, clasping and drawing out the last few blissful twitches.
Harry gasped, and laughed breathlessly, giddy with the sheer exhilarating weirdness of it. God. What was wrong with him. He'd let Severus Snape jerk him off, and he'd liked it.
After a second, the gloved hand peeled one finger at a time from his throat. Harry stood breathing deeply, his cheeks on fire, his chest still booming with excitement. A mild tremor coursed through his body. He felt fantastic and exhausted and even less sober than before. If he'd been alone, he might have folded bonelessly to the floor, possibly even passed out for a while in a state of satiation.
His cock hung loose as Snape let go. Harry braced himself upright. So this must be what debauchery felt like: shameless, squirmy, a bit disgusting, kind of degraded. Harry stewed in this slippery feeling for a second, at home with it. Happy to have let everything go.
"Hey," he murmured. Aware it was Snape's turn, he roused himself to go after that kiss. Leaning forward, he groped at the black, soft robes, recoiling briefly when a bottle clinked under his hand. As he searched lower, attempting to feel between Snape's legs and oddly relieved to be hampered by the layers separating their bodies, the sallow hand slippery with Harry's own come landed across his mouth.
Harry jerked back, but Snape was still using the wall to stage his sexual control over their encounter, so there was no way to put distance between them.
He grabbed Snape's arm to pry him off. A thin finger tested his mouth's resistance, and then, covered in spunk rather than leather, pushed inside. Harry almost spat it out, but then he looked at Snape, who was staring right into him, and found himself sucking it clean instead. Snape's face was strangely quiet. Focussed. Not the way it had been in the pub, empty, it couldn't be empty when his eyes seared Harry like that, burning not with skin-branding hatred but something else. Hunger. He'd never seen Snape show hunger before. Certainly not for him. Yet he wanted something from Harry. Not humiliation; he was an expert at extracting that. Snape wanted something voraciously, but either he expected Harry to figure it out or he simply wasn't going to admit it.
Harry softened his mouth, and the wet finger stroked his bottom lip as it withdrew. Snape inserted another. Harry sucked that one, too, and the next, then actually leaned forward to catch the little finger, relaxing into it, enjoying the disgusting intimacy. Snape's gaze dwelt steadily on his mouth and lifted again, darker, unsated, greedy for more. His hand dropped, and Harry expected a kiss, finally, the long-delayed meeting of tongues, a messy entanglement more personal somehow than a hand on his cock.
Instead, Snape stepped back. His gloved hand came up to wipe lingering streaks of come from Harry's lips and chin, his touch exploratory, the polish and pliancy of warm leather sensuous in contrast to the thin, slimed, dirty fingers of a moment before.
Harry smelled that scent again. The elusive smokiness emanating from Snape mingled with the taste of spunk. Harry braced himself against the wall, blinking, uneasily aware that his body wasn't dealing well with all the alcohol he'd consumed. Then he was standing untouched, for Snape had turned away and was cleaning his hands. Despite his rebellious stomach, Harry swayed forward, refusing to believe they were done here.
"Don't you want me to – "
A thick cushion of magic smote him like a pillow. "That's all you'll get tonight, Potter."
"What about you?" Harry remembered touching Snape's arse, and he rather wanted to dig past Snape's dismissal and all those protective layers and get a grip on it again. He didn't even know if Snape was hard. Despite his increasing wooziness, he missed the indulgence found in another person's skin, getting lost in the overheated pleasure of it and not minding who he was fucking. How much easier it was to give his own body then without reservation. "We haven't even – "
"Stop whingeing," Snape said, stepping even further out of reach. Harry started to point out that he was actually showing gentlemanly concern for Snape's lack of anything resembling an orgasm, but stopped mid-word when his clothes vanished.
Now? Snape wanted to get him naked now? Because if he had buggery in mind, Harry would have to tell him to he was shit out of luck.
As he fumbled for a way to beg off that wouldn't spoil any chance of it ever happening again, a torrent of cold Aguamenti smashed down on his head, a soaking-wet shock, briefly blinding him. Water cascaded down the wall behind him, splashed across the floor.
"Fucking hell," he gasped as every dripping inch of his skin and several internal organs puckered and shrivelled. Good way to give a bloke a heart attack, that was.
Before he could start shouting or retaliate in kind, a bubble of warm suction baked the dripping runoff from his body, evaporated the puddles, vacuum-dried the wall, and stood his hair on end with static electricity. Goosebumps swept up his skin. His glasses were so clean he could see his parents in the shadows, their photos waving from across the room.
Harry shook his head. The sensory dishevelment nearly knocked him over. His entire outer surface felt heat-fuzzed and at the same time drastically freshened. Too bad it hadn't helped his intestinal gripe. As the shock receded, queasiness oozed up to make his head swim.
He exhaled slowly, and something floppy hit him in the face. He practically banged his head on the wall, and the soft bundle tumbled to the floor while Harry stood there, naked and clean, blinking down.
"You're loving this, aren't you?" he managed. Pressing one hand behind him for balance, he scooted down just enough to snag a corner of his pyjamas, then undertook the labourious process of fitting the bottoms over his bare feet and up his wobbly legs and dragging the shirt on one uncooperative sleeve at a time. He didn't bother with the buttons. His hair was a lost cause, no doubt because Snape wanted to watch him teeter from side to side like some tufted, intoxicated owl.
Propping himself again against the blessedly solid wall of his own blessed sitting room, he grumbled, "Has anyone told you lately what an outstanding arsehole you are?"
"Poor Potter," Snape said sinuously, too far away to touch. "Never satisfied. I make you come with my own hands, wash you, warm you, and even do you the favour of fetching your pyjamas. Yet nothing is ever enough, is it? All you do is complain."
"I usually sleep naked, actually," Harry said, and then wondered why he thought Snape ought to know that. "Sorry, I'll be up for arguing about it some other time, but," he took a deep breath, "I'm going to be sick in a minute. Not because of you," he added loudly as Snape twirled the stem of his wand in a calculating way. "Way too much alcohol on an empty stomach." He sucked in several more breaths and started edging over to the archway, nausea climbing his throat at the spectre of vomiting in Snape's presence. "Sorry, I owe you one," he gestured stupidly at Snape's groin, "but you, erm, you might want to leave now."
"Entertaining as the idea may be that I could add to my resume 'last person to see the famous Harry Potter alive before he choked on his own vomit,'" Snape said, "I will decide what I do or do not want."
"Not helping," Harry groaned. "Just go away. I'm not kidding. I overdid it." He rolled sideways to grip the doorframe and nearly fell into the hall, then began the long, undignified stumble to the loo. He sensed Snape's presence behind him, exactly the sort of audience to make him feel even worse.
Between one stagger and the next, he was scooped off his feet as if wrapped in a blanket, lifted into the air, and suspended on his back. The bastard had Levitated him without a by-your-leave and was floating him to bed like a log down a river.
"Your bedroom?"
It took Harry a second to understand the question. "End of the hall," he said, confused but grateful. His upper lip felt clammy. A mild guiding Lumos teased the shadows out of their path somewhere ahead, but Harry was facing the ceiling and not inclined to move any part of his body. He didn't want to admit it was a relief to let someone else take care of this.
The door opened soundlessly, and he was guided through into the room's darkness. There, with almost insulting efficiency, he was deposited like a plated omelet flat atop the mattress, wobbling as the surface of Snape's magic slid out from under him.
"Hangover remedy?" Snape said, adding in a dry tone that might have been sympathetic if it were a few shades warmer, "I used mine earlier this evening."
Harry tried to swallow a burp. "Ran out. I don't usually - oh Merlin, get me, quick, get me something - " Harry groaned. "I'm feeling kind of spinny. I might need to – "
Snape twitched his wand, and with an unpleasant yank, Harry's insides were stripped of their bilious contents. Down the hall, the toilet flushed explosively.
"Fuuhh…" he mumbled, too nauseous to fully articulate the word. His stomach gurgled. His headache continued battering the inside of his skull. "Next time... " He coughed, then groaned again. "Next time, please just give me a bucket." He expected to hear there would be no next time, but only a faint snort answered him, and Snape's Lumos went out. The discreet glow from the hallway soothed Harry's aching brain. Eyelids drooping, he lay in the darkness, muzzily aware of sweat cooling on his forehead. Weirdly, Snape hadn't left yet. Resisting the pull of sleep, Harry forced his bleary eyes open again.
The urge to be sick was fading. Snape, seated in an overstuffed chair, swam into focus.
"Whew. Thank you," Harry said, his words gentled by the unlit intimacy of the room. He let his gaze rove, amazed as the slow spread of well-being continued. "You've got that spell down to a science." And then his mouth continued, because his mouth was an idiot, "Must be all those drunken orgies in your past."
He didn't know why he said that. He immediately wished he hadn't.
Snape was bent forward, keeping a critical eye on him. At this angle, his nose provided the perfect sightline for driving his glare straight down into Harry's skull. "Have the decency to pass out now, Potter," he said, leaning back until everything from his waist up was submerged in shadow. In this position, with the wings of the chair blocking his face from view, he said in a voice soaked in darkness and creeping foglike into Harry's sodden brain, "You can thank my mother. I used to help her clean up my father and drag him upstairs to bed after the pubs closed."
Harry absorbed that, then rolled cautiously onto his side the better to squint at him. "I'm not like your father."
The strange cough from the depths of the chair might have been a laugh. "The comparison never crossed my mind."
And there went Harry's mouth, free-associating again. "I'm not like my father, either."
A longer silence this time. "If you say so." This was more than Snape had ever conceded before. The light from the hallway touched his visible hand with a vaguely spectral glow, betraying how his long fingers gripped the scrolled end of the chair arm.
Neither of them spoke for a long, strange minute. With every passing second, the silence acquired another layer, growing larger and softer. A great weariness beckoned Harry to sink down into it. Snape could leave or stay, he wasn't going to worry about it.
"Potter." The whisper was almost inaudible. "Do you remember asking me what I saw when I died?"
Harry shuddered awake. The sudden lurch into vertigo left him clutching the sheets for fear of falling not merely off the bed, but down into some chasm that had opened abruptly into places unknown. Snape's voice evaporated in his mind, scarcely disturbing either the silence or the darkness. It was the muddled confusion of memories thronging upward, do you remember - he did, all of it, he remembered the tired-child fragility in the bath chair, the bandaged throat, the blood on the floor of the Shrieking Shack - and his tipsy brain fought for balance, the bed tilting on edge as if a crack in reality would swallow it. He barely kept himself from grabbing at Snape's knee, as if his physical existence were a rope that could pull Harry to solid ground.
But he didn't move, and Snape must have taken his silence as proof he was asleep. His voice sounded too subdued for a man who believed he was being listened to.
"The week after the battle, you said - I remember you saying you saw King's Cross Station." He paused, leaving room for a response. Harry lay still for fear he would stop talking, peered cautiously through his lashes. "There was no King's Cross Station. Not for me. No train waiting to take me onward. No Dumbledore. Nothing. No one." He fell silent again, face in shadow, his thumb circling the scrollwork where his hand rested, exposed. "It was dark. That was all, Potter. Dark."
Harry shifted, deliberately rustling the sheets to warn Snape he was awake. He'd heard. He waited a moment, listening for a clue to Snape's mood, then ventured, "That made it easier to come back, though, didn't it? To life, I mean."
The hand tinged with faint light lifted from the chair arm, and now Harry could just make out the lineaments of Snape's face, head tipped sideways to rest against his knuckles. "You think so, do you?" He said nothing more for several ticks of the clock on the bedroom wall, long enough for the silence to deepen to an almost unbearable weight. "It was dark this way, too, Potter. There was no light to lead me back. Nothing to look forward to in life. Just more darkness. No one was waiting in death. No one here."
For some reason, the vivid confusion of Snape holding him tight to the wall by the throat, Snape jerking him off while refusing to be kissed, rose up like a flickering torch under Harry's skin. He felt hot all over, not with his earlier, befuddled lust, but with the very personal knowledge of Snape's existence. There was nothing about him that wasn't alive.
"You might find things are different now," he said, groping on the night table for his glasses before remembering they were still on his face. He was more out of it than he'd thought. "And, sorry, I'm not going to change the subject, but it might sound that way." He hesitated, wondering about the wisdom of this, such as it was. In the context of sex, it made sense. If sex wasn't the context, what was he asking for? "I'd really like to kiss you before you go."
The silence that followed pretty well conveyed Snape's opinion of that even before he said, "What a very promiscuous drunk you are, Mr. Potter."
"Not so drunk anymore, Mr. Snape." Still careful, and with some doubts about the state of his head and stomach, Harry pushed himself into a sitting position. "I didn't ask for the one-sided hand job out there, you know. Don't get me wrong, it was a bit of all right, and I'd definitely be up for doing it again. But I was really hoping to snog your face off."
As though he and Snape were the positive and negative poles of a magical charge, the spike of electricity in the room sent a wave of prickles down Harry's bare arms. "Perhaps," Snape said silkily, "in my next life. Assuming I continue the odious habit of never quite dying when I'm supposed to."
"Merlin, you're stubborn." Harry frowned at the barely visible figure in the chair, but Snape's face remained in shadow. "Come on. What's so awful about letting me kiss you?"
"Apart from the fact that your mouth needs rinsing with scouring powder?" Snape huffed and stood up. "Don't push, Potter. I'm not in the mood."
Giving in, Harry sprawled back on the pillow, the familiar sense of failure welling up like a leak he patched every time he gripped too hard or not hard enough and the possibility of a relationship just drained away. This was the real reason draggng Snape here had been a bad idea. To the burden of unfinished history between them, he and Snape had just added sexual complications.
"You might as well stay. It's not like I can sleep now."
"In what way is that my problem?"
Snape was standing directly in the path of hallway light, a silhouette with features so spookily indistinct Harry's memories of his schooldays stirred again. After all, it hadn't been so very long ago that he'd believed to his bone marrow this man was the embodiment of evil.
"Although," Snape said darkly, "I believe I have something that will help knock you out."
Yeah, there was the voice that had once threatened to poison Neville's toad - but also the voice that had shrieked, "I am not a COWARD!" with an anguish Harry had mistaken for murderous fury. Small bottles tinked precariously in the silence, ringing at Snape's touch. Harry blew out an exhausted breath and scrubbed the acrid smoke of the past from his eyes. With an economic swirl of shadows, like a giant Animagus bat transforming back to merely human, Snape settled down on the edge of his bed.
"Close your eyes."
One knee-jerk moment of refusal, then Harry did as he was told.
A hint of something summery tickled his nose, as if he were lying face-down in an alfalfa field, grass-sweet and elusively warm. He flinched as fingers grazed his cheek and withdrew.
"Open them."
Puzzled, Harry obeyed, to be greeted by the sight of Snape scowling. "Do you sleep with your glasses on?"
The git had a point, so Harry wiggled them off, relinquishing the ability to see further than his nose. Snape took possession of the offending spectacles, dangling them by one ear piece, and deposited them with a clatter on the nightstand.
"Eyes shut, Potter."
Wondering how this was supposed to help him sleep, Harry snuggled in anyway and waited.
That peaceful smell again, then the feel of Snape's fingertips sleeking one side of his face with a light, slippery substance. The lotion warmed on contact, and the scent softened and faded as if sinking into his skin. Snape made a quick job of it, rubbing Harry's cheeks, chin, and forehead with brusque, efficient swipes that seemed calculated to refute any hint of sensuality or tenderness. Even so, Harry would have been happy for him to continue indefinitely. It was a different sort of touch, one he experienced much less often than the purely sexual kind. It felt good.
He didn't open his eyes when the lotion application ended and the clink of glass told him the bottle had been tucked away. The dip in the mattress evened out as Snape's weight lifted off it. Harry lay relaxed, breathing easily in the dark. He wanted to say thank you, but that would have broken the spell, and he suspected Snape would be peeved if he resisted the potion's effect.
There were no footsteps, but when next Snape spoke, his voice was farther away, coming from out in the hall. "I hope you're grateful, Potter. I usually charge money for my products."
The vague impression of light on Harry's eyelids dimmed. He floated contentedly inside his head, inside his body, all bundled up in comfortable, sweet-smelling darkness. He didn't hear Snape leave. Some distance off, he was aware it was a bad idea for this particular wizard - this particular Snape - to be alone and unsupervised in his flat, free to snoop as he pleased. But the awareness wasn't enough to push him over the threshold into waking up. He'd been launched upon a lake of velvet serenity where he no longer felt the slightest bit drunk, where his thoughts drifted anchorless and his body thrummed with the mellow aftermath of orgasm. The rest? Eh, he'd think about it later.
His dreams, when they came, were the usual jumble of worry and confusion, proof against the potion's soothing influence. Harry rarely remembered details; they were work-related, and that was all he cared to know. If he dreamed about the war, his mind managed to bury the memory by next morning. But throughout the night, like a crup given the taste of a treat who knows you're hiding a whole bag in your pocket, his mind kept snuffling its way back to the sensation of brisk, competent fingers stroking his face.
The lake grew deeper, calmer, absorbed all sound, cradling him in a pleasant rocking motion, buoyed up but also hidden from the nagging sense of things to be done and things he'd failed to do. At long last, by slow, luxurious degrees, he dissolved into a sleep untroubled by daily cares.