Chapter 10

Harry woke up with Snape's teeth in his flesh.

It was pitch black in the dungeons and he couldn't see a thing. He made a noise of pain, short but clear in the silence, and Snape released him. He was behind Harry on his side and Harry bent his legs back to twist their bodies closer together. He felt gauze at Snape's ankle. Snape was hard. It was an impatient heaviness against the back of his thigh. He inhaled sharply and stretched, his stomach contracting but then relaxing as he felt Snape's hands go under his shirt, nails trailing down his chest.

Harry squirmed, heart thumping.

"Why're you still wearing clothes?" Snape was asking him this in his ear, demanding so many things at once of his drowsy, horny haze.

He really didn't know why he still had clothes on. All he could offer Snape was an incoherent plea, reaching back behind him to feel Snape's ribs.

"Take them off. Right now."

His cock hardened with this command and he pushed his ass back, dizzy with Snape's hunger and a rush and a need to please him. He wished he could see Snape and just as he closed his sleepy mind around the thought, light trickled from the ceiling to the bed, a ray of artificial sun landing on his hip and Snape's hand there, tucked under his shirt, grip maddeningly light.

Everything about sex between them drove Harry mad. Like that moment, when what he wanted more, to see Snape's invading, entitled hands under his clothes or to be totally naked, bare chests touching. Then the questions, driving wedges in his mind, like who else Snape had used that voice with? How did Snape calculate when to be sweet or rough with him, how did he know how to keep Harry's want ticking inside him as surely as a bomb?

Harry didn't know if he was fitting his needs around Snape or Snape was reading his mind or if this was just the way both of them were, regardless of each other. All that was clear was that he didn't have to explain what he wanted.

He took off his clothes and left the rest of what would happen next in Snape's capable hands.

When Harry was dressed again and ready to Floo to his own room, where he needed to get ready for his classes, he dropped the question on Snape while he was showering.

"Hey," Harry called from the threshold of the bathroom.

"Yes?"

He could see Snape's shape vaguely through the foggy shower door, washing himself.

"Would you mind taking a look at the case photos with me after classes today?"

Snape's hands stopped moving around his body and he didn't respond.

"I know, I know, be a teacher, Harry," Harry said. "But I thought I might keep an interest in the case, because- well, shit I forgot to tell you." He stopped, not sure how to say it with the shower still running.

"Tell me what?" Snape insisted. Harry saw him go under the spray of the water one more time and turn the faucet off.

He stepped out of the rub naked, shameless. He was using a towel to dry himself when Harry found his words again.

"I was at my flat yesterday, packing the last of my things. Me and Ginny are giving it up since-," he didn't need to finish. "And there was a photo on the fridge in the kitchen. It was a part of the painting we found planted at Rebecca Rickton's house, little boys playing games with each other."

He fished in his pocket for the photo, folded into a square, and gave it to Snape.

When Snape saw, his face was impassive. He handed it back to Harry.

"Here," he said. "Three o'clock."

Harry left the dungeons and got ready for the day. Despite there being a mad serial killer breaking the peaceful 5 year streak of his life, he felt good. He'd slept the whole night through and had wonderful dreams, woken up to continuous proof that Snape wanted him, gotten him to agree to help him, and was looking forward to the look on his student's faces when he told them he'd finally graded those papers they'd been harassing him about.

During his break mid-day, he sought out McGonagall. She wasn't in the Great Hall for lunch, so he went to her office. He was standing in front of the gargoyle, not sure if just saying the password and going up the stairs was too presumptuous, when she surprised him from behind.

"Oh! I'm sorry, Harry, I didn't mean to startle you," she said, though she was smirking.

Harry held a palm to his heart, embarrassed that he'd been so easily walked up on. "That's alright, Headmistress."

"Please, call me Minerva. I take it you wanted to continue our conversation from last time?"

"Yes, I did- Minerva," Harry forced out. "Thanks."

They went up the stairs after ruby slippers and Harry was looking at Dumbledore's empty portrait when McGonagall cleared her throat pointedly.

"Sorry," Harry said. He very abruptly felt sad. "I-," he pointed to the portrait. "I miss him."

McGonagall looked at him carefully, and Harry thought he saw her eyes getting glassy. "As do I," she said.

"Is he ever there? Or wake?"

McGonagall turned her attentive gaze to the frame in question. "Rarely. But I think that's just Albus's way. To be so distracted by the adventure of his afterlife."

Harry remembered his conversation with Snape about what might come after death. He didn't think he believed it was some great adventure but he liked thinking about Dumbledore being too distracted to stay in the portrait.

He smiled. "I hope that's true." He paused for a beat and continued. "Well- I suppose I'll just get on with it. Um, I thought really hard about what you said the other day and I think you're right to ask for more from me. I do think the students deserve my best and my full attention. I was feeling ready to consider taking more space from my Auror duties, but there's been a development in the case that might prevent that for now."

Harry was meeting her eyes, thinking for the first time that she might fire him anyway. She looked upset by his last sentence.

"I've been contacted by the killer. Threatened. I'm involved now, whether I like it or not. I understand if you think this is unacceptable. Or you think it wouldn't be safe for the students if I stayed."

"Harry," McGonagall said and Harry felt chastised before she said another word. "Hogwarts stood by you in one battle and it will stand by you in another. I would never ask you to leave if I thought you were in danger. Hogwarts is where you must be, of course. It's safest, and we can fortify the wards. "

"Thank you. But you do know that I can't stop my work on this now."

She dipped her head. "I understand. As long as you understand it should be your last case with the Auror's office while school is in session if you wish to further your career here."

"Understood."

He got up to leave and then remembered something.

"Oh! I'd like to officially put my name down for study hall duties. Neville can cover me if there's an emergency but I'd like to take it on."

McGonagall hesitated. "Are you sure you don't want to wait until this ugliness is over?"

"No, I can manage."

She pulled out a scroll from her desk drawer and tapped it with her wand. It unfurled horizontally and Harry approached when McGonagall beckoned him.

It was a times table- the scheduling of every class in the whole school. Harry wasn't even sure how to read it, but didn't need to when McGonagall pointed to Neville's name, written under 'Study Hall'- and next to it read 'Filius Flitwick.'

Harry pointed. "Why two teachers?"

"It's the Great Hall and there are almost 40 students per session."

"Wow. My class was never that big."

"Yes. Your generation was part of a population dip," McGonagall said. "Probably due to Voldemort's activities when you were conceived."

"Oh. I never realized."

They both looked at the times table, not really seeing it for a moment. Then Harry saw Severus's name and Neville's listed again next to it.

He pointed to that time and day under the 'Study Hall' section. "I think that block of time will work better for me if Neville doesn't mind keeping his block with Flitwick instead."

McGonagall smiled, raising an eyebrow. "I'm sure Neville will have no objection to that."

Harry's lessons were involved, so when three o'clock came and he was headed to the dungeons with the case file under his arm, he was tired.

He didn't Floo to Snape's room because he thought it would be more polite, more business like and adult. He worried after their most recent fight that Snape would look for any reason to call it off. Harry could see him saying it, this is over, if he stepped over his bounds or angered Snape in any way with a gesture that was too intimate to bear.

Saying the password to his room seemed intimate too but Snape had told him to do that. He still felt on edge about it, though, and didn't relax his shoulders until Snape greeted him from his desk, where there was another chair placed next to his.

"Shall we?" Snape said, gesturing to the chair.

Harry took a deep breath and dropped into the offered seat. He placed the folder on the desk, which was noticeably clear of all of Snape's things.

"Show me the photos of the flat first."

"Rebecca's?"

"Yes."

It was easy to find those because they were near the top of the pile. Harry laid them out, spreading them across the entirety of the desk. Several of them were close ups of the painting and one of the zoomed out general picture, moving to show the magic of the phantom written message, Let's play/I hide/You seek. The rest of the photos were pretty useless ones of rooms in the flat, ones they took for procedure and not because the rooms told them anything.

Snape's fingers trailed the edge of one of the photos of the painting, one with the section in it that Harry'd found in his apartment. He picked it up and was looking at it for a full minute. Harry couldn't take it anymore.

"What?"

"Shut up."

Harry did, instead turning his attention to spreading out more photos on his side of the desk. There were ones that replayed parts of the broadcast of his death that he was interested in scanning because they were clearer than the CCTV footage he'd been reviewing.

Snape was looking at another picture of the painting when he finally said something.

"Centuries ago, when wizard painters wanted to make a living among muggles, they would hide the magic in their work." He picked up another photo. "They'd enchant them to reveal their magic only to those that knew where to look."

He was pointing to a part of the painting that Harry'd never looked closely at. It was such a densely laden image that it was hard to really focus on any one part of it. And at first Harry didn't understand why Snape was pointing.

When he saw it, he gasped.

It was tiny. Hardly there at all, but when Harry saw it, he couldn't unsee it. One of the boys in the painting was holding a wand close to his body. A muggle might think it was a stick but any witch or wizard would know from the position of the boy's wrist that that was most definitely a wand.

"I think if you pointed your wand over this spot of the painting and tried a revealing charm, it would show it's magic."

"Holy shit," Harry said. "Should we go to the Leaky Cauldron? That's where it is now."

"Write to Weasley," Snape said. "Tell him to point his wand to that spot and cast the charm, Aparecium. He'll send you photos of what it reveals."

Harry asked for parchment and a quill, which Snape retrieved for him from a drawer. He scratched his message to Ron furiously, wishing he could write faster. When he was done, he didn't roll it up in case he had to tell Ron anything else.

"You're like Hermione," Harry said. "You know all these things about the wizarding world and magic that no one else seems to."

Snape was still looking at the photos, moving on to the ones closest to Harry, the ones of Rebecca's death. "Everything you want to know is written in a book somewhere."

"Or edited into a book."

Snape spared him a half-hearted glare.

"By the half-blood Prince," Harry finished, smiling slyly at him.

Snape looked away, seeming almost embarrassed. Harry felt giddy.

"Shut up," Snape said again but softly, like he didn't really mean it at all.

"How did you know to even think of that?" Harry said, really curious. He was in awe of Snape and jealous. Snape was better than an auror, he was like special ops.

"It's about psychology," Snape said, focusing again on the photos. He picked up the one with the full painting. "Asking the right questions. Why would someone who hates muggles use a muggle painting in his murder portrait? Unless he didn't. Unless all along it was a tribute to a witch or wizard long ago who had to hide who they were."

"Hide," Harry repeated, taking the photo from Snape and watching the message on the painting play out, over and over again.

"Go on," Snape said.

"It fits the- the theme," Harry said, excited. "That's like the thread that connects everything. He hates that wizards hide, he plays hide and seek and Rebecca. He uses things from the Department of Mysteries, which are full of things hidden from even wizards themselves. The veil-"

"It was part of the game. People disappearing into it, hiding, people following their loved ones, seeking."

Harry's stomach turned. Snape was steepling his hands between his knees. He pointed at Rebecca's face, clearly terrified in one photo.

"She had a book on her shelf," Harry said, "called The Highly Sensitive Person."

Snape apparently understood this was not a clue, just a painful detail Harry couldn't forget. He took Harry's hand from the picture and turned over all the photos with Rebecca in them so he couldn't see her anymore.

They looked at each other and Harry felt a spike of attraction in his belly.

He shoved it down. "Whatever's next will fit the theme. Hide and seek. They're guarding the Department of Mysteries like a fortress right now, so I don't know what else he could possibly take."

"Perhaps he's already taken it," Snape said.

"Right," Harry said, picking up the quill again and adding their thoughts to his letter to Ron, Snape sitting impossibly still next to him.

There weren't as many photos from the incident with the Veil, and nothing illuminating in Daniel Strause's crime scene, so they put them away and Harry left to the owlery to dispatch the letter.

After dinner, Harry had the distinct feeling he wouldn't sleep if he didn't move more.

On his way out of the Great Hall and toward the main entrance, Snape called his name.

"I'm going for a walk," Harry said, not waiting for the question.

"Alone?" Snape wouldn't say more because students were passing them in droves, looking strangely between them as if the interaction should be impossible.

"Maybe not?" Harry said, not knowing how to tell Snape to come with him with so many people around. He was taken with the way Snape was frozen in his spot, asking after him.

Snape said nothing and Harry continued on his way, seeing the way some students lingered to catch the end of their conversation. He hoped Snape would know to follow him.

He sat on the stairs at the entrance, waiting in case Snape came. When he heard the halls clear, echoing of voices turning to silence, Snape's formal teaching shoes appeared next to him on the steps.

He bent his head back to look up at Snape. "Those don't seem like good walking shoes."

Snape took his wand out and transfigured them to black boots, the way they laced up under his pant leg making Harry shiver.

They walked for a long time in silence, the uneven cadence of their footsteps as they stepped over tree roots lulled Harry into a peacefulness. The grass was wet around his ankles.

Harry led them toward the lake. His own trainers were damp now and he felt the cold mostly in his feet, the rest of his body warm with the walk.

The light from Hogwarts was reflected in the water. It was still so dark that they could easily step into the blackness of the lake if they weren't careful to look down and distinguish it from the ground.

When they found the edge, they walked along it.

"Why'd you wait until the halls cleared?" Harry asked.

"Isn't it obvious?"

Harry wondered if the giant squid or the mere people were listening.

"You know, they'll never guess the truth."

"Why shouldn't they?" Snape asked.

"Because what even is the truth anyway. We don't know. Certainly they won't."

"At the very least, the truth is you're in my bed at night. Sex is never an easy secret to keep."

"Well if anyone can keep one, it's you." Harry slowed his pace, at the very least ringing in his ears.

"But can you?" Snape asked.

Harry stopped to turn to him.

"I remember how awful you were at Occlumency," Snape said and though Harry couldn't see his face clearly enough, he was sure he heard Snape smirking.

"I was only awful because I had an even more awful teacher."

"I was doing the best I could with an impossible task."

"Do you really believe that? All you did was bark orders at me and then invade my mind against my will and make me relive my worst memories."

"What else was I supposed to do? Dumbledore, yet again, asked for the impossible. It did not help that you hated me."

"Hey!" Harry said, indignant. "I hated you for really good reasons. You were a total asshole. You hated me first."

"I had to hate you, viciously, from the day I met you. If I'd liked you even for a moment, it would have torn me apart."

Harry felt like someone had hit him, hard, in the chest. "Wait- what…how? What?" Air was scarce and his mind was racing.

"It's complicated to explain," Snape said, walking on.

"Do it anyway," Harry said, holding him back. "What do you mean- you had to hate me? Did you not, really? Were you pretending?"

It was deadly quiet for some time.

"It's difficult to know," Snape said, "what I feel all the time." He took out his wand, waving it in the air in front of him to draw a cube with light.

It hung between them.

"Occlumency is like a rubix cube- those puzzles that clever muggles play with. Do you know them?"

"Yeah," Harry said, smiling at 'clever muggles'. "Goes without saying that Dudley never had one."

Snape was tapping his cube, adding dimension and color, so it looked just like an unsolved rubix.

"When your mind isn't protected and you can't control your emotions it's because the emotions and the memories infect each other. They're confused, raw, unsettled. They're enmeshed, so protecting yourself is like trying to undo a knot."

Snape pointed his wand at the bottom and swiped, so the cube rotated. As it moved, it twisted sideways and longways and started to solve itself.

"A trained mind is a solved puzzle. The perceptions match, the emotions, the linked memories. You have to sort out a picture of the truth to project to others. It has to be so contained that you almost believe yourself."

The colors on the cube started matching on each side. Harry's eyes flicked from the cube, to Snape, and back again, until he settled on watching the pieces of the cube settle into alignment.

"Hating you was like solving the puzzle. It was the algorithm that matched all sides. If I hated you, you would hate me and we would fuel each other. I could focus on that feeling instead of my pain feeling. If I could keep away the regret and strengthen the hatred, Voldemort would trust me. If Voldemort trusted me, I kept Dumbledore on track. But if I was going to keep Dumbledore on track, I needed to know how to treat you like a pawn. To be able to treat you like a pawn, I had to hate you. All sides," he finished and indeed, the rubix hung between them like art, solved.

Harry was speechless. Snape was like so many things, so many people in one person. It almost hurt Harry to try to hold him in his mind, to think about who he was.

"The truth was messy. So instead of the reality of you, I projected what I remembered and felt about your father onto you. I made you into him so I didn't have to know you to hate you. I needed you to be someone else because I couldn't afford anything more."

Snape waved his wand and the cube disappeared. Harry was blind for a moment.

"But it wasn't just for the Occlumency." Snape's voice was close in the dark and deadened, like he was flattening himself out of emotion even then, in that moment.

He stopped talking and Harry could hear his own breathing like a clock in the silence. Everything Snape said hung between them and everything he didn't say, too. I hate myself. I'm a coward. I couldn't see you because it meant looking at what I'd done.

Harry swallowed and licked his lips. "Just tell me it was hard to hate me, sometimes," he said quietly, because he wanted no one to hear this. Not the giant squid or the mere people or any other living soul except Severus. "Tell me that sometimes it was just me you saw-not him or her."

"Yes- sometimes."

Harry's vision was coming back to him. He reached for Snape's robes, pulling them closer together.

"Are you lying?"

Snape's hands came over his wrists. "I could tell you but it's meaningless. You'll never know when I'm lying. I barely know anymore."

Harry pressed his forehead to Snape's chest. "Please. Say something I want to hear."

But Snape wouldn't obey. "When I saw things that might make me like you, I twisted them."

Harry tried to pull away then, but Snape held onto him, leaning in toward his face. "The way your relatives abused you. The disappointment you had for your father after seeing what he did to me. I read it all, in your mind."

"Stop," Harry said, weakly trying to push Snape away from him.

"The sadness," Snape said, letting go of Harry's wrists and grabbing his head, wrenching their foreheads together. "I could hear it all then and I can hear it now, if I want to- what you're thinking this second. I don't even need to cast Legilimens."

Harry struggled against him.

"What? It doesn't feel good to have your mind torn open? To have your every private thought read like a Rita Skeeter byline? Because that's what I did to you."

"Stop it," Harry said again. His voice was raising. "You're not going to make me hate you by telling me this."

Snape carried on as if Harry'd said nothing at all. "I did that to you until I couldn't anymore. Until you pitied me."

Then Snape absolutely let him go and started walking back toward the castle.

"I never pitied you," Harry said, following him. "You prick. You infuriating asshole. I saw- I felt." Harry took a deep breath, shaking to get the words out. "I knew what you felt. I didn't realize it then but I could relate to you in a way I never could to my dad."

"Maybe that explains it," Snape said, driving on way too quickly toward the main entrance. "Daddy issues."

"Stop trying to explain it!" Harry caught up with him, matching Snape's long strides. "I'm not fucking you because I want you to be my dad. Though I would call you that in bed, if you asked."

Snape stopped mid-stride and kissed him. The momentum mashed their teeth together and Harry stopped thinking as the heated point of their lips together filled his entire body with awareness. When they pulled apart, he could see Snape better now because the light of the castle was closer and Snape looked on the brink of losing control.

Control your emotions. Snape used to tell him that during Occlumency lessons. But he was realizing that what Snape had really meant was don't feel anything at all.

"You don't know what to do with your feelings," Harry said to him and kissed him again, little kisses that weren't painful at all, hands pulling at Snape's robes again. "I don't know what to do with them either sometimes. But I can try. You can give them to me, fuck me with them, I'll try," they were kissing again and Harry felt light-headed, not sure what he was saying or promising anymore. "I'll try for you."