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The Liar and the Auror: Part IV
Four. Four parts. This had better do it.



The Liar and the Auror
By Trismegistus

Part IV

The tea had indeed steeped for far too long, but as it chased the chill from Snape’s bones, he drank it gratefully all the same. For once Potter was uncharacteristically quiet as he sat in his customary wingchair, griping his cup with both hands, saucer forgotten on the floor at his feet.

“I’m really not here with the Ministry,” he said again.

“Potter, this is entirely unnecessary. Your feeble attempts at mind games have not fooled me, and besides, we both know that I have nothing of interest to be tricked into confessing.”

"You still don’t believe me, do you?” Potter said as if he hadn’t heard Snape at all. "You could use Legilimens and find out. I don't understand why you haven't tried to already."

"Potter," he sighed. "We both know that I am no longer capable of either Legilimency or Occlumency."

"You aren't?"

He set his cup carefully atop its saucer with an all-suffering sigh. "If it weren't true, would I have bothered wasting my breath to say so?"

That Snape could no longer practise Legilimency was a fact well known to both the Ministry and Dumbledore, as it should have been to any Auror sent to Observe him. The only reason Potter could possibly have to press this point was to amuse himself, yet judging by the look on Potter's face, the brat did not appear to be pursuing this line of questioning for his own enjoyment.

"But I've studied Legilimency."

Snape raised his eyebrows. "Yes, I am well aware of that, Potter." Funny - recalling Potter's intrusion into his memory used to burn until he could hardly bear it. Now those memories were faded, like a taste he remembered as being unpleasant, without remembering the taste itself.

"I'm not talking about that time," Potter protested. "I studied Legilimens during my training - not how to do it, but the theory behind it, how it works. All Aurors have to, as part of their training, even if they don't have any talent for it."

Harry Potter, The Boy Who Could Do Everything, admitting that he was less than skilled at something? The universe continued to surprise. "Whatever did you manage to learn?"

"That it's there for life," Potter responded instantly. "That you can't just unhave talent as a Legilimens."

"No, you cannot."

"Then you can still use it."

"Yes." He didn't know why he was admitting this now, to Potter of all people, except that it was a relief to finally openly talk about it to someone.

Potter appeared to find this line of questioning frustrating. "Then why in Merlin's name are you insisting that you can't use it to see my thoughts?"

He truly didn’t know?

"What exactly do you know about the part I played in the final months of the War?" At one time he would have given anything to ask this question of the boy, to force him to see that he, Snape, had played just as large a role, made just as great a sacrifice, as had Potter himself. But now that the chance was finally upon him, he felt nothing but weariness.

"I know that you used Legilimency to see into Voldemort's mind."

"That is correct. And if you truly studied Legilimency during your training as an Auror, you should know that in order to Legilimens a subject over great distances, one must be bound to that subject. Permanently."

Potter went utterly still. Now, now, he finally understood.

"What do you see?" he asked.

Snape stared at the empty wall across from him, but did not see it. "Beyond his grave."

The boy had the decency to look stunned. "Oh gods," he whispered.

"Yes," Snape said. "'Oh gods,’ indeed."

At long last, Potter broke the silence.

“But why, Snape?”

“Because it was needed. Because in order for you to be in place to kill the Dark Lord, an accurate knowledge of his every thought, whim, and desire was necessary. Legilimency was the only way to obtain that knowledge, and I was the only Legilimens with enough aptitude to force the connection without the Dark Lord's knowledge.”

“But no one in their right mind would voluntarily choose to--”

“Of course not!”

“Then who convinced you to do it?” he whispered.

"Dumbledore, obviously."

"But he had to have known that once I killed Voldemort, you'd be forced to spend the rest of your life seeing everything Voldemort saw after he..."

"He did indeed. And you of all people should know that such petty inconveniences rarely concerned Dumbledore, when they served a greater good.

"And I imagine,” he said in answer to Potter’s continued silence, “that that is a good deal of the reason why he has yet to acknowledge my role in the War.”

Potter’s adam’s apple bobbed repeatedly. “And yet you agreed.”

“Yes, and in so doing I severely misjudged Dumbledore’s character. Oh, don’t think for a moment my choice had anything to do with some misguided desire to save the wizarding world,” he snapped. “I would happily have let the Dark Lord rampage for another three decades if it meant that I need not bond with him.”

“Then why?” Potter whispered.

He laughed, a tight, bitter sound choked from his throat. “Because I believed it to be the one act of heroism that would eclipse your own,” he said, and it was worth it to see the look on Potter’s face. “Only I never imagined that Dumbledore would never reveal it at all.”

“No,” Potter whispered. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“Oh? He suffered no qualms about doing similar to you, when he concealed the nature of the prophecy concerning your birth for so many years, all in the name of the 'greater good.'” He drew a deep breath and continued. “I do believe, now, that for the most part his motivation was...genuine. But regardless, once the War was over, it was far easier for him to let the villain remain a villain than to expose his own grey moral choices to public scrutiny.”

“My gods,” said Potter, his voice strangled. “My gods, if I’d had any idea when I came here, I never...” He raised pleading eyes to Snape’s face.

And at the half-anguished, half-crazed look on Potter’s face, he finally began to doubt.

“I don’t believe you,” he said at last, although it was easier to believe with each word he spoke. “No. What reason would you have for lying?”

“Because I hated you.” He spoke simply, quietly, and then looked Snape full in the eye. “I don’t now. I’m sorry.”

“No,” he said again. “Potter, I've no idea what you’re playing at, but for the love of god, stop.”

“I’m not playing,” said Potter. “I’m not here with the Ministry. I never was. I... I made all of it up.”

Snape could not break his gaze away from those eyes. “But that’s impossible. How did you even manage to find me, else? This house is Unplottable, and I use all my remaining magical aptitude to remain Untraceable.”

Potter laughed, a laugh as empty and bitter as Snape’s had been. “It was entirely by accident,” he said. “I happened to be on the street when a car ran the light and hit someone - you. I ran to help and I was so shocked when I saw your face, they must have mistaken it for me being shocked for you.”

Which was why Potter had been permitted to accompany him to the hospital. He buried his head in his hands. “And you just assumed that I was a Dark wizard?”

“Yes.”

“And you then decided to pretend to be an Auror sent to 'Observe' me because the idea struck your fancy?”

“Yes,” said Potter. He sounded anguished.

Good.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Snape could not reply.

“Snape, look at me.” When Snape did not look up, he repeated the words. “Look at me.”

Snape raised his head then, fingers still hovering just above his cheekbones, to find Potter staring at his feet. The boy shuddered, drew a deep breath, and raised his eyes to Snape’s. “I’m sorry,” he said again, almost beseechingly. “It didn’t take long before I knew you weren’t Dark at all, and I’ve felt horrible, you can’t have any idea, I...”

“That’s enough, Potter.” He stared for a moment at his shaking hands, and then began.

“You can’t possibly,” he said, and had to pause until his voice was under control again. “You can’t possibly know, Potter, what it was like, what it was like to come here, and still you, you--”

“But I do know!” Potter shouted. “I do! That’s the worst of it, I--”

“HOW CAN YOU?” He was shouting now too, and doubtlessly as flushed as Potter, but by the gods.

“You are the hero of the world,” he said. “The Ministry, the Order, the Hogwart’s staff, the Wessex Wizarding Ladies Auxiliary, they all lick the hems of your robes. I was naught but a villain, someone never to be trusted, let alone thanked, but you! How can my situation possibly compare to you?”

“But it DOES!” Potter took a step toward him, half made to take him by the shoulders. “I’m the hero, Snape! I’m the saviour of the world! I never asked for it, and once Voldemort was dead I was through with it! But no one else was!

“You can’t live like that, Snape, not when everyone expects you to conform to their image of you, not when no one sees you because they already think they know who you are. It’s--” He stopped, panting.

“You know what it’s like,” he said at last.

And the curse of it was, he did. Oh, he did. He’d never even considered that the adulation he’d craved so desperately could be as suffocating as the contempt he‘d sought to escape.

“Do you see?” said Potter softly.

“Yes,” he said.

They stayed there, motionless, for a good hour, Snape seated on the couch and Potter standing above him, neither of them speaking a word.

“I’m going to bed,” he said finally, rose, and left the room.

Potter’s voice pursued him as he ascended the staircase. “Are you angry?”

He stood, one hand on the banister. “Yes,” he said finally. “But not entirely with you.”

Potter said nothing, and made no attempt to stop him as he climbed the rest of the stairs and secluded himself in his room.

He lay atop the coverlet, eyes unblinking, until he heard Potter's soft footfalls several hours later, and waited for the click of Potter's door in the jamb before he roused himself to fetch a glass of water from the bathroom.

The liquid stuck to his throat like the most viscous of potions, and he abandoned his efforts to drink it before the glass was even half emptied. He sat on the edge of his bed, hands between his knees, and stared at his feet, ghostly and skeletal against the dark pile of the carpet.

He hadn't lied to Potter. He was angry, he was terribly angry, but the anger was directed at so much more than the boy. He could feel it, black and bilious, just beneath the skin, pulsing through his veins like blood. He wished he could be angry at Potter, at anything that would give his rage focus. He'd spent his life hating, but until now his hatred had always been fixed on something. The vastness of this emotion was something he had no experience comprehending.

He hated the world for it, for finally giving him an...ally, and then taking it away like this.

Snape was a naturally early riser and had never needed an alarm clock to wake by. So he had no clue, as he lay on his bed and stared unblinking at the darkened ceiling, whether seconds passed or hours, or whether the seconds only felt like hours. Occasionally a car could be heard passing on the street outside.

He awoke at seven the next morning, as usual. He'd anticipated nightmares, but had had none; it was as if his slumber had been an annihilation in which thought, fear, and regret did not exist.

He wanted nothing more than to remain in bed, never to emerge again, but he knew that Potter would get up eventually, and that he'd have to see Potter eventually, and that it would be better if he were up first. He stood slowly and slowly made his way down to the kitchen.

Potter emerged an hour later, wearing the same clothing he'd worn the night before. He seated himself across from Snape as though this morning were no different from any other. Snape handed him the cereal and was obscurely comforted that he'd kept his hands from shaking.

Potter accepted wordlessly, poured his cereal into his bowl, then looked at Snape with that piercing green gaze.

"You'll be returning to England, of course," he said before Potter could open his mouth.

Potter nodded slowly. "Only, I'd like a week to make travel arrangements. I came as a Muggle, so I can't just take my broom back over. And I don't think I'd be able to Apparate any longer."

Snape nodded. "You may have it," he said.

That the week Potter requested had stretched into a month, neither of them mentioned.

“I really am an Auror, you know,” Potter said one morning over breakfast.

“Potter, please stop.”

“No, it’s true,” Potter insisted. “’S why I sounded so convincing when I was lying to you. I knew enough to make it believable, especially since I knew you hadn’t had anything to do with the Ministry for twenty years.”

Snape thought back through two decades to an eighteen-year-old Harry Potter blustering about how he’d follow in his mother’s footsteps.

“So you managed it after all,” he said, not taking his eyes from his glass of juice.

“Yeah, I did,” said Potter. And then, “No thanks to all those rotten marks you gave me in Potions.”

And then they both started laughing like madmen.

A week later Potter was already seated at the breakfast table when Snape emerged for breakfast. It was only ten past, but judging by the sodden mess in his cereal bowl, the boy had been sitting there for quite some time.

Snape went to retrieve his own cereal bowl from the cabinet only to discover that Potter had already laid it out on the table. His hand strayed instead to a coffee mug, which he carried back with him. Potter politely failed to mention the fact that he'd already laid one of those out as well, as Snape set the mug down next to the first.

Snape seated himself across from Potter, crossed his arms over his chest, and trained his gaze on the Auror.

"I've made arrangements to go back... home," Potter said to his cereal.

Snape waited.

"My flight leaves tomorrow."

He nodded. There was nothing else to say.

Potter swallowed, loudly enough for Snape to hear it. "I... I, ah, wanted to apologise. For taking so long," he clarified.

"Don't-!"

Potter's head snapped up as if he'd been struck.

"...mention it," Snape amended lamely, and stared out the window.

And there they sat, for another interminable amount of time, studying the back garden and linoleum floor, respectively, as if each had been the most interesting of prospects.

When such an indecent amount of time had passed as to render the fiction that they were ever going to eat breakfast totally unbelievable, Snape mustered himself and spoke.

"You will, of course, accompany me into town."

Potter's gaze lifted immediately. "What?"

He rose, stalked to the dining-room entrance and whirled to face Potter.

"As you have seen fit," he snarled, putting everything he had into it, "to once again empty the contents of my pantry, you will be made to replenish them.

Potter swallowed and rose. "Fine," he spat, and Snape would had to have been blind not to see the gratitude in every line of Potter's posture.

So they made the journey into town one final time, taking it slower than they normally would have, but not so slowly as to be remarkable. A great deal of time had passed since Potter's arrival; the driving rains and cold winds of January were a thing of the past and it was quite possible that their leisurely pace was entirely due to the fairness of the weather.

Still, they did eventually arrive at the grocery. The automatic doors, running on some magic of their own that Snape had never been able to fathom, slid open to admit them to the supermarket. Potter wordlessly deviated to Snape's right and then returned presently, bearing a shopping cart.

"Figured we'd make this one worthwhile," he said, and flashed a lopsided grin.

Snape nodded and led them off into the aisles.

They spent at least half an hour canvassing each aisle in turn, heatedly debating the merits and demerits of every quantity, flavour, and relative nutritional content of the endless Muggle assortment of prepackaged foods.

It was at the seasonings shelf Snape glanced up to find Potter standing at his elbow, regarding him thoughtfully.

Potter motioned to the bottle of dried juniper berries in Snape's hand. "Just thinking," he said, mouth twitching, "'bout how Muggles use them for cooking, but wizards use them to raise the dead."

"And is there any particular reason," he said carefully, "that this little bit of trivia just happened to spring to mind?"

"Well, I am an Auror, after all," Potter said.

"Is that so," Snape murmured to the bottle.

"Yeah," Potter continued, a smile wobbling across his face. "And you do have a, er, spotty past. On further consideration, I think I might have to put you under Aurorial arrest."

It was too much. He raised his arms high above his head in an imperious gesture meant to envelop the entirety of the noisy, crowded supermarket. "Behold, Severus Snape, Dark Lord of the Wizarding World! You are all worms at my feet."

Several people turned to stare.

"Stop it," Potter gasped through his laughter, face flushed and grinning like a madman. "Snape, please..."

Snape turned and pointed a long, pale finger at woman who stood gaping at them from the head of the isle. "You!" he intoned. "Lower your eyes in my presence, Mudblood, or fear my wrath!

The woman stood rooted to the spot in shock, eyes widening she stared back and forth between Snape and Potter, who was now leaning against a shelf for support, arms wrapped around his stomach and heaving with laughter.

"What in the hell..." the woman began, but Potter, bent double now, waved a hand for her to stop.

"He's right you know," he crowed between gasps. "He really... is... a wizard. Bloody... good one... too. Could curse you... ten ways... to Tuesday. He--"

Now it was Snape's turn to stand incapacitated by laughter. "Desist, Potter! Or I'll be forced to--"

"That's it," Potter gasped, made a lunge for Snape's arm, grabbed it, and began steering him down the aisle. "We're getting out of here.

"Sorry for that," the boy tossed over his shoulder to the indignant woman. They were still gasping with laughter as they exited the supermarket, leaving a pair of flustered clerks in their wake.

They sobered soon enough as the reality that this would be their final walk together down these streets settled over them like the coming dusk. In less than twenty-four hours Potter would be on his way back to Britain, and from that point on, Snape would make this journey alone.

They walked home in silence, and prepared their dinner in a silence broken only when Potter asked for directions and Snape brusquely supplied them.

They ate in silence as well, their meal horribly prolonged by the fact that the food was dust in Snape's mouth, and still he was determined to eat every last bite of it. This was Potter, for Merlin's sake, the boy he would have given anything to have removed from his presence a mere two months ago, and that he was this reluctant to surrender the boy's company was nothing short of ludicrous.

So Snape soldiered through his meal, bite by bite. Then they washed the dishes and by some tacit understanding removed themselves to the living-room. Potter seated himself in his usual chair, but Snape moved to the window where he could watch his reflection, pale and hollow-eyed, in the dark glass of the windowpane. The minutes continued to tick by.

Snape kept his eyes resolutely focused on the pool of light cast by the streetlamp as Potter rose and quietly crossed the room to stand behind him. "I don't want to go," said the ghost-shape of Harry to the darkened window.

Snape snorted. "Be that as it may, we have little choice in the matter--"

"Only that's just it," said the ghost-shape. "I don't have to leave."

"What are you on about, Potter?" he said wearily.

"I don't!" insisted the ghost-shape of Harry, its voice gaining conviction. "There's no reason I can't stay here if I... if you don't mind."

The Snape-ghost in the windowpane crossed its arms over its chest. "And of course no one will come looking for wizarding Britain's most famous Auror following his disappearance."

Potter shifted impatiently; Snape felt the slight disturbance of air behind him. "They haven't come looking for me yet, have they?"

"If you are as adored as you claim to be, they will. Tell me, Auror, what on earth could induce you to surrender the career you worked so hard to attain?"

"You're assuming I had a choice," Potter muttered darkly.

Snape stared at the Snape-ghost in the window and waited for Potter to provide answers; he wasn't going to waste his time posing the questions Potter obviously wanted him to ask.

"You aren't the only one who was run out of a job, Snape," Potter said at length, and it obviously took effort for him to speak the words.

"I refuse to believe that you were ever suspected of being Dark."

"No, but that isn't the only way it could happen. I was a figurehead, Snape. I couldn't work! I couldn't do anything! There was always someone there to do it for me - because they wanted to be my friend, be close to the hero, be promoted, or because they were worried what someone would think if I, the slayer of Voldemort, had to lift a finger for something I wanted."

"So you left."

"And came here." Spoken so simply, as if that was all there was to it.

He swallowed. "Very well," he said at last. "You have no wish to return to the wizarding world, a sentiment with which I heartily sympathise. But what reason could you possibly have for staying here, of all places?"

And in response the ghost-Harry lifted his hand and trailed his fingers down the back of Snape's neck. Snape turned then, a quick, abrupt snap to face his adversary, so that he could look at the real Potter's eyes, because ghost-Harry's had told him nothing.

Only they had, because it was there in the real Potter's eyes as well, accentuated by the defiant flush of his cheeks.

He had to laugh then, though there was a touch of hysteria at its corners. “You can’t possibly fancy yourself in love with me.”

“No,” said Potter softly. “But I think it could easily happen.”

He choked. "What about me could you possibly..."

He broke off in disgust, with the sensation that he'd accidentally answered the wrong question. "Potter, you could have the pick of any of your admirers--"

Potter gave a short, bitter bark of laughter. "Oh believe me, I've tried that," he said.

"And?"

Potter shrugged as if to say, Here I am. Alone. "Obviously hasn't worked out spectacularly well."

Snape blinked as a sudden thought occurred to him. "You aren't... Are you?"

Potter's expression took on a far-away, considering quality. "No, I don't think I am. Least I haven't yet," he said. "But like I said, I haven't had any spectacular success with the things I've tried so far."

Snape locked eyes with the boy and held his gaze. More minutes passed. It didn't waver. In fact, something in the boy's eyes seemed to grow more certain with every passing moment, and it was fixed on Snape.

"You're mad," he whispered finally.

The spell broke. Potter looked away.

"Yeah. Yeah, I 'spect I am," he said, laughing shakily. "Look, just forget I said... any of that. It was stupid.

"Anyway, I'd better get ready for bed if I'm going to wake up in time tomorrow."

"Yes," Snape said, once again watching ghosts in the window. "I think that would be best."

Potter nodded once and went upstairs.

Snape stood facing the window with no one but ghost-Snape for company, and his empty black eyes held no answers. When the last sounds from the bathroom floated into silence and he heard the soft creak of the mattress as Potter climbed into bed, Snape finally turned from his reflection, extinguished the lights, and climbed slowly upstairs to prepare for bed as well.

The movements - using the toilet, washing his face, undressing, the sudden chill before he pulled his nightshirt over his head - were both mechanical and comfortingly mundane.

The mattress was familiar and comforting beneath his back, but try as he might, Snape could not sleep. Moonlight slanted across the ceiling, and his eyes, bleary with fatigue, tracked its progress as the night wore on.

When the moon set and the sun took its place, Potter would board a plane to Britain, and Snape would once again become an old, lonely man in a foreign country, living in a small suburban house in a city where no one knew his origins, his crimes, or even his true name.

Potter had offered to stay, though Merlin only knew what had possessed the boy. Certainly he couldn't think of Snape as... No, that had been nothing more than a moment of misbegotten sentimentality, which Potter was no doubt already in the process of regretting.

Snape's feet descended, unbidden, to the carpet at his bedside and then he stood, bathed in the moonlight streaking through the gaps in the curtains, and stalked softly to the bedroom door.

He emerged onto the landing and walked to the threshold of Potter's door. Then he wondered what had brought him there in the first place. The room within was absolutely silent; Snape couldn't hear so much as a quiet hiss of breath from Potter, who was obviously fast asleep, even if he wasn't.

Yes, it had obviously been nothing more than one of Potter's strange, eccentric outbursts. Snape had had long months in which to become accustomed to them, months in which Potter had probably become equally accustomed to making them.

As his eyes adjusted to the moonless dark of the landing, Snape began to pick out shapes from the surrounding blackness: the curve of Potter's doorknob; the bathroom door, half ajar; the snake of the banister as it curled down the stairs. And were those faint blots on the wall the floral print of the faded paper, or just tricks played by Snape's tired eyes?

"You might as well come in, you know." Potter's voice resounded like a thundercrack in the silence.

Snape's heart nearly stopped dead in his chest, and he fought to choke back his exclamation of surprise.

"And there's no point pretending you aren't standing there," Potter continued, at the exact moment Snape had resolved to do just that. "You've been there for the better part of an hour."

A sudden irrational wave of annoyance descended over Snape. How had the boy even known that to begin with? But it did free him enough to act.

"Oh, very well," he muttered, and opened the door to Potter's room.

Potter was lying on his back in the centre of the bed, head propped up by two or three pillows, eyes glittering from a pale face surrounded by an unkempt halo of dark hair.

"I couldn't sleep either," said Potter, and somehow managed to excuse both Snape's wakefulness and his own.

Feeling rather silly standing by the door as if guarding against the possibility of Potter's escape, Snape moved to the bedside, and then perched very carefully on the corner of the mattress.

Potter's head rolled on the pillow so he could face Snape, one glittering eye hidden against the pillowcase. "I meant what I said," he informed Snape, who sighed, and looked at the wall across from the bed as if it could provide answers.

"I don't see why we couldn't try," Potter continued.

"Disregarding the fact that we spent a good deal of time as sworn enemies," he answered, "Potter, consider. I am a sixty-year-old ex-wizard, living in exile in America - ignoring for the moment the absolute madness of any sort of liaison between the two of us, what about this situation could possibly entice you?"

Potter shrugged, sending a little half-stutter along the mattress. "I shouldn't have to answer that," he said. "Especially not before you've agreed to anything."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"I'm not!" Potter said. "But I'm not going to defend it to you, especially not now."

"And is this the part," said Snape, with more than a hint of self-defacing mockery, "where you kiss me and I transform into a handsome prince?"

"Hardly," said Potter. "I wouldn't have you if you did."

And then they were both laughing, only this time it held none of the crazed edge of their laughter that afternoon.

When they'd calmed down enough that the laughter had faded to an intermittent, quiet chuckling, Snape tried again.

"Potter, I would be...grateful...for your company," Odd how much harder this was than barbing an insult, "but you shouldn't come to expect anything beyond that."

Potter nodded. "But that's just how it happens. You know that."

"I have no practical experience with the emotion and I trust none of the books I have read on the subject."

"That's fine," said Potter, quite evenly. "I'm not saying it will even happen. Just that I wouldn't be upset if it did. And that I think, if things stay the way they are, that it might." He inflected the last word, as though it were a question.

"Ah," said Snape.

"I won't push you."

"Even so, tell me, Potter, what your friends will think when they learn that you've resolved to cohabit with their former Potions Master."

There was a sudden change in the quality of the stillness surrounding Potter. He caught Snape's gaze and didn't flinch. "They may never know."

"May I remind you that this is not some penny gothic, Potter? I will not have you playing the forlorn hero, forced to choose between lover and friends."

Potter continued to hold his gaze. "You wouldn't." He sighed. "We aren't as close as we were when you knew us."

Another piece slid carefully into place. "Another reason you came to America."

"Yes," said Potter. "I can tell you about it sometime."

He yawned hugely. "But not, I beg you, tonight."

"No," Potter agreed. "Not tonight."

It was late morning, well after the time of Potter's departure, when Snape awoke to find himself still perched on the corner of Potter's bed, the muscles of his neck loudly protesting the angle at which they were contorted over the headboard. The sun suffused the room with a warm golden light, but the early morning chill had yet to burn off, and his breath misted faintly in front of him.

Potter was asleep beside him, his head against Snape's thigh. Snape rubbed the heels of his hands over his bleary eyes, and briefly considered returning to his own bedroom. But then he thought of Potter's declaration - I won't push you - and the weight of Potter's head against his leg, and the overwhelming sense of gratitude he felt that Potter had not returned to England after all.

"Oh very well," he muttered, poked Potter over, and slid into bed beside him. Potter's back was warm against his own.

-finis-


Errata:

This fic began as an entry into an HP FQF - the opening line and reference to Valentine's Day being the challenge - but the plot soon eclipsed all of my original intentions for the story, as well as my ability to complete it by the deadline. I kept seeing more and more scenes as I wrote, as if Snape and Harry were saying, Not quite yet, Tris, there's just a little bit more we'd like to show you, and when lightening strikes, I'll stick around to watch.

I've always assumed that wizards live a fair bit longer than Muggles, although once I'd finished this story, I realised I didn't remember that being stated explicitly in canon. For my purposes, the average wizard lifespan is about 130-150 years, which means my Snape is just hitting middle age.

The Roman emperor Lucius Septimius Severus provided the obvious validation for there having been a Lucius Severus Snape, though I've willfully confused praenomen, nomen, and cognomen in my version.

Kudos to anyone who spots my small and obscure crossover. You are a true fantasy lover.


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