With the Aid of Time.
He muttered the password and his door swung open.
The very faintest of cheer coming from two floors below where the staff were holding their New Year’s gathering, shuttering to silence as he closed the door and took a moment to lean against the heavy oak. The breath that he’d been holding most of the night, came out in a heaving rush… the pinprick of tears at the corners of his eyes told him all he needed to know about his timing.
He pushed off the door and shook his head to get the longing and ambient thoughts out of his mind. He was a grown man, and grown men didn’t have crushes for…years. They didn’t cry over other men who couldn’t be bothered to even attempt to be friendly. They didn’t… he sighed again and poured two fingers of scotch into a tumbler and then with the barest hint of a thought sat on the sofa as the fire roared to life in the hearth.
He felt himself sink into the well-worn fabric, and contemplated the party he’d just left, hours before its climax. He’d gotten to the gathering early enough after it started that he had been able to shake loose any issues he might’ve been worrying over. He had sipped his butter bear and talked with Filius about the new Charms elective for his 6th years Defense Class project. Harry had been very pleased when around an hour later Snape had walked in.
Many had indicated that the man never showed for the events, but in Harry’s experience (broad that it was, since he couldn’t hardly stop staring at and thinking of the man in the previous 10 years he’d been working at Hogwarts), Snape would show up about 2 hours after a party started, would stay for an hour and then precisely leave when he counted the 60th minute.
Tonight had started off much the same, but Harry had felt his earth shift to the side when Snape had gotten up from his chair in the darkened corner and had welcomed a man into the room, and had taken the man around to several of the other professors, seemingly introducing him, and then they’d sat in the corner of the room for the next two hours talking.
Harry had not really seen much purpose in pretending to be enjoying himself any longer. He had hoped… had been hoping to have the courage to ask Severus for a walk under the moonlight as the new year struck and see once again about trying to get on more friendly terms with the man, but he’d seen the fruitlessness of the endeavor when he’d seen Snape openly laugh with the man in the corner.
He’d never seen Snape openly laugh.
He’d felt his heart beat a little harder, for the sheer joy that it caused him, before he remembered that he wasn’t the person that caused such joy to bubble forth from the taciturn man.
He downed the remaining scotch and then accio’d the bottle over to the sofa to sit there with him while he commiserated.
The knock on his door startled him far more than it should’ve for a man who had defeated the dark lord at 17 and had had a successful career as an Auror before becoming a DADA professor at Hogwarts. He chuckled to himself at the spilled scotch on his shirt before he scourgefied it and then loosened several buttons at the top.
There were no students in the castle this holiday and he wasn’t really bothered by the professors seeing him in general evening disarray. He was planning on it being an early night regardless, and he couldn’t be bothered to put on a new shirt when he would be removing it all shortly, for sleep.
He swung open the door as he put the bottle of scotch down on the table beside, and then halted all movement as his heart came to a hard stop for a moment before speeding up in his throat.
“You left early.”
It took him all of 7 seconds to process that Snape was standing in his doorway, looking very concerned, and had noted his absence at the party. “Right, well… I” he stopped and attempted to gather whatever wits he could, about him. “I didn’t really have anything else to say to anyone.”
“You didn’t meet the new Professor.”
He barely restrained holding back his eye roll. “I wasn’t introduced. I will have to say hello to him at staff breakfast tomorrow.”
“I had been hoping to introduce you closer to midnight.”
“What? Why so late? You always leave precisely 1 hour after you show up to an event, 2 hours late.”
“You… why do you know my habits?”
He stopped, and took his time contemplating his response. “Come inside, no point in you standing in my doorway if we are going to have a conversation.” He said, and then left the door open and walked back over to his bar. The scotch floating neatly beside him on the way, giving him some time to either come up with a response or hear the door close and Snape leave him alone.
“You didn’t answer my question.” He settled on, as he put Snapes drink together. He’d been watching the man enough in his life to know that he liked his scotch, neat with one candied cherry.
It was the only reason that Harry had the damned cherries in the first place.
“I was hoping that you would find him potentially enjoyable and might have someone to entertain you while the clock struck midnight.”
He couldn’t help it, he sputtered his drink up and all over his shirt. His grunt and laugh, mixing together in a not at all harmonic medley. “You what!” he said, after he caught his breath.
“Must I spell it out for you, Potter?” he couldn’t understand why Snape felt the need to have an attitude with him of all people… he wasn’t the one speaking absolute nonsense.
“Yes, I think you do, Headmaster. You expect me to believe, with a straight face, that you were trying to set me up with a colleague? That you, the man who has taken it on many an occasion to remind me of how desperately little you think of me, decided this new professor might, what, grace me with a snog as the bell tolled? That is what you are saying? If yes, then abso-bloody-lutely, do you need to ‘spell it out’ for me, Sir.” He could tell he looked a little harried, a little wild, but he could not for the life of him, understand what Snape was implying.
The silence stretched out, and Harry was genuinely starting to think that the man would sit there in stone cold silence until the morning came. “I do not think little of you.”
He stood there in stunned silence. Staring intently at the forehead of the man sitting on his sofa. Trying to will those charcoal eyes to look into his, to no avail. “Sir. It is the two of us here, no one else. You do not have to even attempt pretense. You’ve made yourself,” Harry scoffed and swallowed through the restriction in his throat, “plainly clear in the past decade, your thoughts on me. We’ve no need to sugar coat it.”
He looked away then, unable to stopper the thin sheet of shame that coated his torso. He wanted, had wanted for years, to earn even a modicum of respect from the man on his sofa, and had been shown repeatedly how unworthy he was deemed to be found.
“I…” he heard Snape say, and he kept his eyes on the fire. The crackle and flame, helping him soften the edges of the surreal situation he found himself in.
In for a penny, ever the lion…
“I know how you operate at gatherings because I watch you, Snape. I have… for years.” He stopped and floated his scotch bottle over and topped up his glass, all while making to look anywhere but the man sitting down. “It started originally, I think, out of rightly placed appreciation and gratitude. It was overwhelming just after the war to know how much you’d sacrificed, and how hard your whole fucking life had been.” He stopped and downed half the liquid in his glass.
“But you held no words for me on the occasions we spoke. Not a word did you say to me in the immediate year that followed. Not when I visited you in Mungos, not when we sat with several lawyers and reporters and your part was made plain to the wizarding world as a whole, not even when we worked with the aurors for those precious few weeks until we caught the last of the death eaters… not a word did you say to me directly in that year and change. And then we parted ways. I didn’t see you for, what… 4 years? Then I got hired on here… been here for 10 years, Snape. Around year two, I realized that you were not only tolerating me being here, but that you actively didn’t want me here but that the board of governors and the staff out voted you. That my being here was just further evidence of everything you believed of me, that I was only given opportunities because of my name never my value.” He paused, and sat his glass down on the mantle and then walked over to the windows that were adorning the far right wall.
“I have spent the last, I don’t know, 6 years easily, trying to win over any respect from you. Anything to show me that you didn’t think so ill of me as you had when I was young. When I was my father’s son. But nothing. Not a godsdamned thing has worked. You have said at total of 104 words to me in total time I’ve worked here until this evening, Headmaster. Each only when you had to, or the situation warranted it no other way, always in the presence of others until this evening, and only ever about matters of our students.”
He stopped and laughed snidely as he placed his forehead against the cold glass and closed his eyes. “And you tell me tonight. That you thought to set me up with a new professor? The swiftest and coldest of blows, and you don’t even understand how cruel. The reason I watch you Snape, the reason my eyes trail your robes, as if you are water and I need to drink of you, is because at some point in the last six years… I appear to have fallen desperately in love with you.”
He stopped speaking, and just breathed against the glass. Watching the steam ebb and flow while his heart slowed from a gallop to a deep beat. He was glad to be out with it, because no matter what, he now had to face it and figure it out. No matter what the outcome was.
His heart clenched at the thought.
“I have, on rare occasion been known to be cruel. I have also been known, on even rarer an occasion, to be taken for a shock. Tonight, I appear to be in the midst of a rare occurrence.” Snape said from across the room.
He heard the rustle of fabric as Snape made to get up. His breath caught squarely in his throat, and he was certain he would die of lack of oxygen this night.
“Your eyes have trailed my every move, Potter. I could feel you like a ray of sunlight, burning through me. You have not been subtle in your constant vigilance of me. However,” he heard the man stop but he sounded no nearer to him then he had a moment previous. “Not for a moment, did it ever chance to occur to me that it was due to anything other than a malevolent view of me as a person. A constant watchful eye, from the Savior of the wizarding world, felt like my just desserts. To be constantly watched, my every move dissected for your judgement.”
“That wasn—”
“Hush, let me speak now. You had your piece.”
Harry closed his mouth with a snap, but opened his eyes and turned around to see that Snape had walked to the other side of the desk. No more than a meter separating them from each other.
“To be watched by you felt like I was burning. It started out as an annoyance, a great blight on my post war peace. Something akin to a constant buzzing that you just couldn’t shake. But then… something shifted. I found myself missing your gaze when you were not looking at me. I found myself moving in a way to, maybe, cause you to stare for any other reason. I began to wonder what you found when you stared at me with your velvet green eyes.”
He stopped talking, and Harry was too nervous to speak. To ruin the moment… He couldn’t believe what was being said and needed it to be said as much as he didn’t believe it to be real.
“I can’t say that I am in love with you,” Harry’s heart stuttered in his chest, at Snapes words, “but, I can say that I brought Professor Mariwok in this evening because I wanted you to have someone to stare at. I wanted you to have someone that made you feel the burning ache and desire that I feel when you look at me. Then maybe you would stop tearing me apart with your razor sharp gaze.”
He stood there in dumbstruck shock as Snape looked him dead in the eyes. The frustration as palpable as the something that stood between them, around them, in them. The heavy weight of more that lingered like the smell of tobacco in a room where someone had smoked. He took a deep breath, in for a penny, ever the lion…
He took a step forward, slowly, making it abundantly clear that Snape had every opportunity to run, to flee, to say something, do anything.
“So what you are telling me, Headmaster,” he said, as he rounded the desk and stood inches from the other man. “Is that you and I have been dancing around one another for years, and a simple bit of communication might’ve figured us out, quick as a pinch?” he said, and let his lips curl up just a little in an affable smile.
“Why don’t I try communicating then?” he said, and took a final step closer, leaning up slowly.
“Severus Snape,” he whispered and took in the way the man’s throat bobbed when Harry had said his name. His eyes becoming hard and full of heat.
“Would you mind, if I kissed you under the moon of the new year?”
He waited with baited breath for a moment, until he heard a soft, “I would want nothing else more.”
He smiled, blinding, bright, and full of joy as he leaned up and closed the final distance and kissed the man. The response was lightning quick and all encompassing.
So this is what a happy ending felt like?
Or was it just a new beginning?
Maybe it was a little bit of both.
Happy New Year.