A/N: Mature content at the beginning of this chapter. For the full uncensored chapter, please see Archive of Our Own version- under the same author and story name. Thank you for the follows!

Chapter 7

There were no pictures or mementos or trinkets in Snape's room.

Just piles of papers here and there, that Harry hadn't noticed the first time, in stacks like Snape looked at them on the floor sometimes, and so many books. On the desk, there was a half-eaten bar of dark chocolate still in it's wrappings. The fire was on and it was red, like a Christmas sweater. Besides the lamp on the bedside table, it was the only light in the room. The bed was made in darker colors than Harry's was and Snape had a long couch with it's back against the end of the bed, facing the fire. There was a navy blue blanket and sheets folded at one end.

"The houselves know where you are tonight," Snape said, seeing the extra blanket and placing his wand on his desk. He started taking off his muggle coat.

Harry felt his face get hot. "Yeah, houseleves sort of have a thing for me."

"Who doesn't?" Snape said, sardonic.

Harry was too distracted to make a sharp reply because Snape's fingers were unbuttoning his shirt, moving over the fastenings of his belt and undressing himself.

"But you're not putting me on the couch, I'm sleeping with you," Harry said, trying to keep his voice from faltering.

"Is that right?" Snape said, shouldering out of his shirt.

"Yeah," Harry said, a little breathless. He took off his coat and threw it behind him on a chair.

"Get on the bed," Snape told him, low. Harry did, feeling not unlike someone making a deal with the devil.

He toed off his shoes and laid down on the bed to unbutton his trousers. Snape got on the bed then, naked, helping him pull them off, taking each of Harry's ankle's in his hands one by one, peeling his socks off for him.

Then Snape stepped off the bed and pulled him by the ankle to the edge as if Harry were a plaything. That elicited Harry's first desperate sound. The hand that pulled him remained clasped around his left ankle tightly. The other one rested, with opposite, infuriating lightness, on the inner part of his thigh.

Then Snape brought Harry's foot to his mouth, lips brushing the inside part of Harry's arch, where his pulse would be on his wrist and it tickled. Harry gasped, laughing, and his leg jerked away on instinct but Snape held him there.

Snape licked him from his heel to the back of his knee, where he stopped to suck and Harry whined, feeling the tickle down his spine, his nerves firing. He kept moving because he loved it so much when Snape held him down.

Then Snape's tongue touched the inside of his knee, traveling up in parts, slow, unbearably slow.

"Move back," Snape said and Harry couldn't scoot back fast enough.

Snape got on the bed, laying on his stomach between Harry's legs. Harry was straining his neck to watch Snape, to make sure they met each other's eyes when Snape looked at him.

But Harry couldn't look anymore when Snape's nose brushed the fleshiest part of his inner thigh so he laid down and rolled his eyes back when he felt that intimate piece of skin sucked into Snape's mouth and pressed down with his tongue. And then the smallest, most delicate kiss to each side, hands gentle.

"Is this alright?" Snape asked.

Harry raised his head again to look at him in disbelief.

"Harry?" Snape was insisting he say something but what could he say that would be enough to express himself fully? You make me love my name, I think you're life itself?

"Do me or I'll die," he said.

"Holy shit."

They were both sweating.

Then Snape was up, going to the bathroom and leaving Harry alone in the room suddenly.

For the first time in a long while, Harry's mind was completely silent and blank. He heard the shower turn on in the bathroom and thought about nothing except what the water might look like hitting the tile.

Then Snape was out, a towel hanging from his hips and dragging another one through his hair to dry it.

"If you're sleeping here, go shower," he said and dropped the towel to pull on a new pair of underwear.

Harry got up and went into the bathroom. It was exactly like his but with gold hardware that looked tarnished and older and a bigger shower. He made the water really hot and turned to face the spray, opening his mouth to it, letting the water fill and spill.

When he was out, Snape threw a shirt and underwear at him and they hit Harry in the face but he pulled them on happily, both of them fitting very loose and comfortable.

Snape had changed the sheets and the covers. And then he was pulling himself under the blanket, on his back.

When Harry was done switching off the lamplight, he got into the other side of the bed. He looked over at Snape in the dark dimming light of the fire before he closed his eyes and saw that he'd fallen asleep with his fingers interlaced on his forehead, elbows up.

In the morning, the bed was empty and for a few seconds he had no idea where he was.

Then he saw Snape with his back to him, sitting at his desk, fully dressed and writing.

They had classes. Harry cursed and rushed to get out of the blankets, dizzily finding his trousers and pulling them over Snape's underwear, which he was still wearing.

His coat was on the floor next to Snape's chair and he picked it up, pulling it on. He looked for his own underwear on the floor near the bed and stuffed it in his coat pocket when he found it.

He went to get his wand on the desk and Snape was still silent, writing what was surely a scathing comment on a student's paper.

Harry looked at the clock over him and saw it was a quarter to 8. "Do you think there are kids in the hall?"

Snape didn't look at him. "There's Floo powder by the fire."

Harry nodded and turned to leave, feeling both the urge to hit and kiss Snape goodbye at the same time.

When Harry got to his room, he changed and ordered coffee and toast from the houselves. He sat at his desk to eat it and his ass wasn't sore exactly, but felt different.

I had gay sex last night.

He laughed out loud to himself in the room, crunching his toast and feeling light. He couldn't believe he'd ever had straight sex. Thinking back on his times with Ginny was almost embarrassing- how could he have been so clueless? He supposed he'd never had the time or the idleness to wonder what more there was out there. Feelings of guilt where Ginny was concerned started to creep in when Ron's voice was in the room, booming.

"Harry! I wasn't sure I'd catch you here." Harry dropped his toast, staring at Ron's head in his fireplace. "We need everyone we have. Tower Bridge! Now!" And then Ron was gone.

Harry wrote a quick note, apologizing to McGonagall, although he hoped she understood this would happen when she hired him. It was the kind of thought that occurred to someone in a frantic moment whose brain was firing many signals at once, not yet catching on to what was important.

He hurried through the halls to get outside, where it was unseasonably warm for October. He was already sweating by the time his run down the hill was over and he was Apparating.

The first thing he noticed was the sky. While the sun was shining on Hogwarts, it hadn't found London this morning because it was buried in a sea of gray clouds, low and cumulous. It was drizzling and Harry was cold, even though he'd traveled nearly a thousand kilometers south.

The Thames was roaring under Tower Bridge, in tune with an approaching storm. He'd Apparated far enough from the bridge to see there were no cars on it but hoards of people on either side and something big in the very center, like a stone platform.

Harry closed his eyes, thinking of the center of the bridge and opened his eyes. He was there.

It was chaos.

"HARRY!" Dawlish was there, far from Harry and closer to the crowd on one side, struggling to keep people from jumping over what looked like a makeshift physical and magical barrier that a dozen other aurors and muggle police combined were trying to strengthen around the struggling mass of people trying to stampede them. Some of them were escaping the grasp of the police, pushing through weak parts of the magical shield, dodging stunning charms, all running toward Harry and past him.

"HARRY, GRAB HIM!" Dawlish yelled as someone small darted past him, running, rushing to get to the center of the bridge.

Harry ran. His mind short circuited when he registered what they were all racing toward. A raised dias in the middle of the bridge, a stone doorway with it's misty gray veil, like an extension of the sky, moving seductively with life.

But it wasn't life. It was death, calling to all of them from the deep. It was the Veil.

Harry pushed his body harder, picking up speed and overtaking the boy, who Harry could see now was a tiny black child in muggle clothes. He turned mid run and caught him in his arms.

The boy was screaming, struggling so hard against Harry that Harry had to sit with him in his arms on the stone steps of the dias, and louder than the boy's screams, louder than the crowds of people shouting on either side of them, louder even than the raging river was the collective whisper of the many souls beyond the veil.

"She's in there!" The boy was struggling, clawing at Harry's hands and arms savagely. "She's in there! Let me go! I have to go!"

A man a few meters from them was hit with a stunning charm and Harry looked around to see that the flow of people escaping had plugged.

Harry pressed his arms around the boy tighter, pressuring the struggle in, and said in his ear, "No, she's not. No one comes back from there. She's gone."

The boy screamed no, no, no, until the words came together in a howled string of grief and he was dry heaving and sobbing in a way that made Harry feel like they were both animals.

The boy was losing the strength to struggle. "Then I want to go too," he said, even then.

"No you won't," Harry said. "You'll stay right here where she would want you."

The boy's hands stopped scratching Harry, he stopped struggling against him altogether, and he just dug his nails into Harry's hands as he held them and shook with his cries.

"Mass murder."

Dawlish addressed the mostly silent group of Aurors in the team room at the ministry.

"Whether that was always his plan or it was a reaction to our turning two deaths into performances to the public, we don't know. But there's no hiding that many deaths."

The only sound in the room was coming from a woman named Alice Savage, a young auror who'd just joined 3 months before. She was crying quietly next to Harry, who'd folded one knee, held it to his chest and stared blankly at the floor. Ron was sitting on his other side with his head in his hands.

It was quiet because no one was saying what really mattered: that was the most horrible thing most of them had ever seen.

Something about the stealthy efficiency of the murders- the Veil being faceless, clean, undiscerning and undiscriminatory. The fact that they didn't have to fight the murderer but instead the willingness of the victims; it haunted them all. It was the elegance that was so ugly, flying in the face of all their training, which could never have prepared them to protect the killing machine from the population and not the other way around.

"This is the only thing any of us can afford to work on, moving forward. We won't be the only ones on this, there will be a few other players from now on. Each ministry in the European union and one from the states is sending a team of people from their departments to work on this. We are setting up a Headquarters as we speak."

Dawlish cleared his throat and it was quiet again, except for Alice.

Jamsen stood up from his seat and walked to one side of the room, leaning against the wall there. "What happened to the Department of Mysteries lead?

Dawlish looked deeply exhausted. "Nothing yet. We cross referenced a list of people with access to the department with a list of magical passengers going by plane from the UK to New York between Rebecca Rickton and Daniel Strause's death but there were no matches. But whoever it is obviously has been in Mysteries at least once."

"How the fuck," Ron suddenly said loudly, "did they manage to move a Veil of death on a stone dias through the entire Ministry and city without anyone noticing?"

A woman called Nikki spoke up. "Speaking of the ministry royally fucking us all, if Bernie and his secrecy boys didn't have us scared to death to use magic around muggles, even in a bloody emergency-"

The room broke out in uproar. Either they agreed with Ron or Nikki or had an earful for both of them and Dawlish's exhaustion made him hysterical. Not one rational argument could be made out because of all the conversation being had in the room, huge verbal spars and small side conversations and Alice just crying harder. Harry was silent in the chaos and looked through the side of the room that was paneled with a pane of glass. It looked out into the cubicles of their department.

In an office chair was the boy he had held back from the Veil. It turned out he was magical and they hadn't been able to find another guardian or adult. It was his mother that he'd been trying to follow.

His name was Marvin. He looked utterly not of this world, staring lifelessly at nothing in particular.

Harry felt ashamed. In all the confusion that followed after they'd gotten the crowd under control and shielded the Veil from muggle perception, no one had taken Marvin to Accidents and Catastrophes where they dealt with children without guardians.

Harry left the room, happy to shut the door behind him that quieted the yelling. He went to Marvin and knelt by his chair. The child wouldn't meet his eye.

"Hey Marvin, I'm Harry. I don't think I had a chance to tell you that."

Marvin said nothing.

"You don't need to see all these crazy people arguing with each other. I'm going to take you somewhere more peaceful and where they're going to help you find your family."

Marvin looked up then. "I need to find my dad."

Harry felt deep relief. "Okay! We can help with that. Let's go." He stood and offered his hand to Marvin.

The boy took it and they walked together through the ministry. When Harry said goodbye to him, he thought it was the way that Marvin had so readily taken his hand, habit of the helpless, the way he trusted Harry even after the card he'd been dealt that day, that broke the dam of emotion in him as he Apparated to Hogwarts.

The setting sun was shining brightly in his room when he got back. The weather at Hogwarts had been good all day, he could tell, because the grass was dewy and the students were happy.

He changed his clothes in an attempt to feel different, undressing slowly because his body ached. He wore a thick sweater since London's cold still clung to him and pajama bottoms because he knew he wouldn't leave this room until he had to. He sat at his desk and put his head between his hands.

His tears flowed easily, dripping onto the desk's shiny surface with loud, hard plops.

When he heard the knock on his door, he didn't move or look to see who it was because he already knew. The door opened on its own.

"Potter? Are you alright? What happened?"

His breath came faster. His leg was shaking, bobbing quickly up and down and he couldn't stop it. He looked hard at the grain in the wood.

"Um," he tried to speak. His voice was a mess but he carried on. "The bastard put the Veil on Tower Bridge and people were attracted by the voices. Once one or two people went through," Harry wiped his face with the sleeve of his sweater, "others followed to try and see where they went or save them but of course that's impossible."

He sniffed. "Then it was just madness. I got there when they had sort of a better barrier up, but I had to keep this boy from following his mother. He didn't understand what had happened to her. That she was gone."

He was tired of crying now and tried to shake his leg faster to keep from doing it anymore.

"He was- he didn't deserve that."

He felt Snape's hand at the back of his neck, placed there like an anchor.

"No, he didn't," Snape said.

The simple truth spoken back to him made Harry shut his eyes hard, bracing himself against the renewed strength of his sadness.

He turned in the chair to where Snape was and looped his arm loosely around Snape's leg. He put his face in the man's stomach and soaked his shirt through with his shapeless tears.