A surprise visit
One morning Snape bursts into what is now Harry’s room and the loud bang from the door smashing into the wall startles Harry awake and he scrambles to a sitting position on the bed, legs tangled in the covers and hair standing on end, blinking blearily at the source of the noise and fumbling around on the nightstand, fuck glasses, no wand wand, and the relief that flickers to life inside of him at the realisation oh it’s just Snape is quickly squashed by a second, more alarming, realisation that Snape’s eyes are wild with panic and his face even whiter than usual.
“What? What?” Harry yelps, feeling his own pulse pick up automatically.
“Wizards”, Snape says shortly. “I heard them. Quickly!”
“W-what--?” Harry croaks again and fumbles with his glasses, nearly dropping them before managing to push them onto his face.
“Quickly!”Snape snarls again and grabs Harry by the arm and more or less drags him out of bed.
“W-what do you mean you heard--?”
Snape gathers Harry’s trousers and shirt from the floor and tosses them at his head, successfully shutting him up for the moment.
“Heard them apparate. Come on, quickly now…”
“W-where am I going--?” Harry gasps pulling his shirt over his head and subsequently knocking off his glasses again, but he catches them automatically in mid-air and stumbles ahead of Snape who pushes him out of the room.
“What?” the older man hisses and gives him a final push into the hallway before turning away to seal the bedroom door shut with his wand.
An all too familiar lump starts to swell in Harry’s throat and he swallows desperately, please, he thinks, not now, not now, please don’t let me cry, and he pulls his trousers on to disguise the trembling in his hands. He clears his throat discretely, pull yourself together, you knew this day would come!
“W-where am I meant t-to go--?” he asks, aiming for casual and bold and strong even as he expects to hear Snape tell him he couldn’t care less as long as he got away from here, away from him, but Snape merely scowls at him and then proceeds to push and pull him, all the way into hall.
“You are not to go anywhere, you stupid boy!” he hisses and slams Harry into the bookcase, Harry winces as a few tomes topples over and falls to the floor next to them. “Nowhere!”
Snape taps one of the books next to Harry with his wand and a trap door springs open.
“But--?”
“Nowhere!” Snape snaps again. “Not even out into the living room – whatever you may hear - have I made myself perfectly clear, Potter?”
Without giving Harry even a chance to reply, Snape presses a small vial of some unknown potion into his hands and gives him one final push. Harry stumbles back through the doorway and trips over his own feet and ends up sitting down on the staircase leading up to Snape’s private quarters, hard enough that his backside immediately starts throbbing with what will surely grow into a spectacular bruise. Snape doesn’t appear to have noticed, he’s already shutting the door again, and just in time too because just before it clicks shut Harry can hear someone knocking on the front door and feels his heart start hammering away even harder than it already was.
He strains his ears and listens, muffled voices can be heard from the hall.
Fuck, he thinks desperately. Fuck fuck fuck, what do I do? What do I do?
He uncaps the potion Snape left him with shaky fingers, But what am I supposed to do with it anyway? he thinks frantically. Why the Hell didn’t he tell me?
For a panicked moment Harry entertains the possibility that Snape has given him a poison of some sort, so that if worse comes to worse, Harry can top himself before he’s captured by the enemy, like cyanide, but the thought is a very brief one because as soon as he gets a whiff of the potion he knows exactly what it is, he would recognise that stench anywhere, having made this potion himself once in second year with his friends Ron and Hermione, he knows exactly what it is and what Snape expects him to do.
The muffled voices in the hallway come closer and then Harry can hear footsteps, definitely more than one set, at least three, entering into the living room and he quickly downs the polyjuice potion in one go and bites down on his own fist to keep himself from gagging.
The effect is instantaneous. Harry clutches at his stomach desperately as potions starts working on his insides, transforming him into whom? Who am I supposed to be?
Immediately Harry starts picturing a horrible scenario where he’s surrounded by Death Eaters, once again, expected to act inconspicuously, else they kill Snape, else they kill both of us, expected to speak with the correct accent and timbre, say the right things and walk with the right gait, answer tons of questions…but before the whirl of thoughts has gained enough momentum to blossom into a full blown panic, a flash of silver catches his eye…the hand…Harry barely refrains from gasping as he gently touches the silvery hand with his other, transformed but at least natural, hand and realisation bursts inside him like a boil of bile.
“…Wormtail…”Snape’s voice travels through the bookcase and echoes Harry’s own thoughts, and before he’s had time to really register much of anything, the trapdoor has swung open with a bang and Harry snaps his head up and stares out of Wormtail’s beady little eyes into the room at Snape and his two visitors, one with platinum blonde hair and one with black, messy… Bellatrix!
Harry feels the all too familiar coil of pure rage stir to life in his gut…
“Wormtail--”Snape snaps at him, before quickly schooling his features into his stony, impassive mask again and continuing in a lazy drawl, “As you have clearly realised, we have guests.”
Harry feels his pulse pick up even more of a pace as he chances a couple of steps into the room, quickly glancing between the two women, neither of whom seem very concerned with him, and he lets his gaze rest a for a moment on the blonde woman’s face.
“Narcissa!”he squeaks as soon as he places her face, and her, fortunately having seen her once before at the Quidditch World Cup a year previous, when she was in the company of her husband Lucius and her son, Harry’s school rival, Draco Malfoy.
She’d barely glanced at him then, and now she wasn’t even looking in his direction.
“And Bellatrix!” Harry added quickly, mustering all of his self-control to keep the venom out of his voice and face. “How charming—“
“Wormtail”, Snape interrupts, possibly because Harry hadn’t been as successful at hiding his feeling as he’d thought, which wouldn’t be the first time this summer after all, or possibly to prevent him breaking character. “…will get us drinks, if you’d like them. And then he will return to his bedroom…”
Harry bristles instinctively at that.
“I am not your servant!”he protests, careful to keep Wormtail’s customary whine in his voice, but glaring defiantly.
Snape returns the look unflinchingly, but Harry could have sworn he saw his dark eyes flash for a second and recoils reluctantly, but keeps scowling instead at the carpet.
“Really?” Snape murmurs silkily. “I was under the impression that the Dark Lord placed you here to assist me.”
“To assist, y-yes…” Harry mutters, wondering how much of Snape’s conversation with the two Death Eaters he’d missed. “But not to make you drinks and- and clean your house!”
Glancing up quickly, Harry thought he detected a slight quirk of the older man’s mouth that could have been a barely-suppressed smile, but it was gone just as quickly and instead Snape sneered at him.
“I had no idea, Wormtail, that you were craving more dangerous assignments. This can be easily arranged: I shall speak to the Dark Lord—“
“I can speak to him myself if I want to!”Harry cut in, because that’s precisely what Wormtail would do, despite lacking every conviction to back up his own words.
“Of course you can”, said Snape, sneering all the while. “But in the meantime, bring us drinks. Some of the elf-made wine will do.”
Harry hesitates for a second, glancing at Snape’s face he searches for something, a sign, but of course it would be both foolish and reckless of Snape to do anything to break character in this situation, so Harry gives a small nod and scurries out of the room and into the small kitchen.
Elf-made wine, elf-made wine, he thinks frantically as he searches the shelves whilst keeping his ears peeled for any continued conversation out in the living room, but the three Death Eaters remain quiet and coolly composed, with the exception of Narcissa who is barely managing to hold herself together, wrecked with fear or worry or something, Harry tries to study her face more closely as he walks back out carrying the tray with, what he hoped was elf-made wine, and three glasses, briefly wondering what Snape would have done if he’d also brought a glass for himself, but Narcissa promptly turns her face away from him when he approaches.
Harry frowns, but puts the tray down and back up a few paces. Snape shoots him a quick, warning glare and Harry instantly scurries back to the staircase and slams the trapdoor shut behind him. He carefully puts his ear against it and listens.
“The Dark Lord”, Snape’s muffled voice reaches him after a moment, and Harry pictures him raising one of the glasses in a toast and feels something cold squirm in his gut.
“Severus”, Narcissa says after another moment, and at hearing the professor’s first name Harry feels a strange jolt inside for some reason. “I’m sorry to come here like this, but I had to see you. I think you are the only one who can help me…”
Harry’s heart starts hammering harder again, so hard in fact that he’s sure the others will be able to hear…
No sooner has he thought this, when suddenly an invisible force shoots through the trapdoor with a loud bang and punches him hard in the chest, sending him sprawling out on his back on the stairs with a painful yelp.
“My apologies”, Snape says on the other side of the door, not to me either, Harry thinks surly and rubs the new bruise on his backside and glares at the inside of the door as though Snape will be able to sense it. “He has lately taken to listening at doors, I don’t know what he means by it…you were saying, Narcissa?”
Does he really think I’ve left? Harry thinks incredulously, feeling almost affronted at the idea, as if a simple repellent jinx would force him to back down. He creeps closer to the door again and rests his ear carefully against it, wishing he had an Extendable Ear on him…
As Bellatrix starts questioning Snape’s loyalties, Harry feels another jolt of excitement, but not nearly as pleasant as the first one he’d felt at hearing Snape’s first name, which had tickled a bit, but now his insides are squirming uncomfortably, his stomach is churning, he feels sick, and the more he listens to Snape talk, the more he hears him spin his lies, please let them be lies, the more sick he feels.
“You are avoiding my last question, Snape”, Bellatrix demands and Harry thinks no, please don’t, and he thinks why the fuck didn’t I just go upstairs?
”Harry Potter”, she ploughs on mercilessly.“You could have killed him at any point in the past five years. You have not done it. Why?”
Without realising it, Harry is holding his breath, waiting to hear Snape’s answer, yet doesn’t want to hear Snape’s answer. It doesn’t matter anyway, he thinks. It doesn’t matter what he tells her. It’s just lies. Just part of the cover. Part of the plan.
“…when Potter first arrived at Hogwarts there were still many stories circulating about him, rumours that he himself was a great Dark wizard”, Snape’s words slither through to Harry’s consciousness and he finds himself listening anyway, because this particular story is unfamiliar to him.“…many of the Dark Lord’s old followers thought Potter might be a standard around which we could all rally once more. I was curious…”
Harry swallows convulsively as bile rises in his throat once more.
“…Of course, it became apparent to me very quickly that he had no extraordinary talent at all.”
Harry barely represses a scoff and turns his back to the door, as if that would shut Snape’s speech out. He feels a stinging behind his eyes and blinks it away furiously, feeling embarrassed and angry in equal measures but unsure of whom the emotions should rightly be directed at, Snape or himself.
“Potter has fought his way out of a number of tight corners by a simple combination of sheer luck and more talented friends. He is mediocre to the last degree, though as obnoxious and self-satisfied as was his father—“
Harry promptly stuffs his fingers in his ears, unable to hear any more and he screws his eyes shut too just to be safe, shutupshutupshutupSHUTUP he thinks desperately.
When Harry removes his fingers from his ears again a while later, Snape is still talking, but his tone is different now, he’s not talking about me anymore, Harry thinks and angles himself towards the door again and listens carefully.
“…I know of the plan. I am one of the few the Dark Lord has told. Nevertheless, had I not been in on the secret, Narcissa, you would have been guilty of great treachery to the Dark Lord.”
Plan, Harry thinks furiously, his pulse picking up yet again. What plan?
“…But what help do you require, Narcissa? If you are imagining that I can persuade the Dark Lord to change his mind, I am afraid there is no hope, none at all.”
“Severus…My son, my only son…”Narcissa whispers so quietly that Harry can barely make out the words, and at first he thinks he must have misheard her, because she couldn’t be talking about…
“Draco should be proud”, Bellatrix exclaims and Harry’s heart skips a beat.
The rest of the conversation washes over Harry in a rush of new bits and pieces of information that struggles with the horrific images cooked up by his own imagination. But from the facts gathered throughout the conversation, he gleans that Voldemort has a job for Draco Malfoy, Draco of all people, he’s just a kid, Harry ironically finds himself thinking,and yes, Malfoy and I might despise each other, but that’s school, that’s not real life, except now Voldemort has given him a job to do, a very real, dangerous job that no-one seems to expect him to be able to carry off, least of all Voldemort himself apparently, and just to punish his dad, and Snape…Harry swallows hard…Feeling slightly numb…Snape is going to help him.
Harry doesn’t know what an Unbreakable Vow is, but he can guess. And judging by the palpable tension in the room, so thick that Harry can actually feel it all the way here in his little hiding place, it’s serious. And Snape’s just agreeing to it, he thinks furiously. What’s he playing at!
“Should it prove necessary”, Narcissa murmurs breathlessly on the other side of the door. “If it seems Draco will fail…will you carry out the deed that the Dark Lord has ordered Draco to perform?”
For a moment everything is silent.
Harry doesn’t dare breathe.
Please, please, please, he thinks desperately, but he’s not even quite sure himself what he’s asking for.
“I will”, says Snape finally.
Harry quickly presses both hands to his face, smothering the dry heave that rips through him.
There’s a ringing in his head, a dull pounding not unlike the ache in his scar, except this pain swirls all around his skull and then trickles into the rest of his body like a cold snake slithering through his veins…and then it strikes him suddenly…the polyjuice potion…not caring if he’s heard anymore, Harry scrambles to his feet and bolts up the stairs.
He topples over the top step and stumbles onto the cramped landing, barely taking the time to catch his breath, he wrenches open the singular door he finds there and hurries inside. He’s not sure what he’s running from exactly, if it’s the Death Eaters or Snape, or even more ludicrously, the stuff he’s just heard. He leans back against the door the minute it’s shut behind him and looks out into the dim room.
With a jolt he realises that this must be Snape’s bedroom, his actual bedroom, where he sleeps and stuff… for some reason, Harry never thinks of Snape as entirely human, so to be reminded like this that the other man does in fact get undressed at the end of the day and crawls under the covers of his bed as opposed to a coffin or something, makes Harry feel a whole myriad of confusing feelings.
Hearing the soft sound of a door creaking open, Harry immediately springs to life again and for some reason unbeknownst to himself more than anyone, Harry climbs on top of the bed rather than diving underneath it. Of course, it would be embarrassing beyond belief if Snape came upstairs and found him hiding under his bed.
But finding me in his bed is much better, Harry thinks sarcastically, but by this point it’s entirely too late to change his mind because the door handle is already turning.
The door swings open silently. And then he’s there, Snape, framed in the doorway like a big, black-and-white statue staring down at Harry with bemused and slightly stunned expression on his pale, pointed face.
“Potter…”he says, and it’s impossible to interpret the emotion behind the tone of voice, carefully disguised as it is still. “What…do you think…you’re doing?”
“What”, Harry grumbles defensively.
He immediately feels his face heat up and he pulls his knees up closer to his body and hugs them, well aware of the image he’s presenting his professor with, ironically after two weeks of trying to convince the man that he’s not a child, here he is, the very picture of one, scared and sulking, at the far corner of the man’s own bed.
Snape carefully lets go of the door handle, almost as an after-thought. His gaze is unwavering, piercing. Harry bites his lip, don’t cry, don’t cry, but his eyes start stinging anyway.
“How much did you hear?”Snape murmurs.
“I dunno…some of it”, Harry mutters truthfully, having had his fingers stuffed in his ears for part of the conversation, but he doesn’t tell Snape that. “Enough.”
Snape nods. His gaze wanders away from Harry and seems to rest on something in the empty space in front of him for a moment. Then he nods again.
“Well, I understand it will be a difficult feat, but you’d do well to try and forget—“
“Forget!”Harry exclaims incredulously.
“I could modify your memory…”Snape mumbles, but he doesn’t even seem to believe it himself and barely acknowledges when Harry exclaims Like Hell you will, but keeps staring into space, clearly deep in thought. “Well, I have to talk to Dumbledore, preferably before nightfall…”
Something tight in Harry’s chest unclenches at the mention of the Headmaster, as if a small part of him was actually worried that Snape wasn’t lying after all.
“Yeah”, he breathes out, unabashedly relieved and Snape glances at him but doesn’t comment. “Yeah, that’s good. Dumbledore can fix it. He’ll fix it so you won’t have to—“
“Potter”, Snape interrupts softly. “Not even Dumbledore can fix this…you need to prepare yourself—“
“W-what do you mean—?“
“I have just made an Unbreakable Vow to help Draco Malfoy carry out a…an assignment for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named…and if that should fail, carry it out for him…”
Snape seemed impossibly even paler than Harry had ever seen him, almost ashen. Harry felt a bit sick again.
“S-so?”he said, desperately, hopefully. “W-we’ll think of some w-way t-to break it…”
A soft sound escaped Snape, it could have been a scoff or a chuckle, but since his face was set in its most perfect emotionless mask it was impossible to tell.
“Potter”, he mutters again, then glances over at Harry again. “Why are you in my bed?”
Harry feels his cheeks flare up again.
“Not in your bed, ‘m on it…”he mumbles, then looks up and meets the other man’s gaze defiantly.
Snape actually chuckles then. And it’s so bizarre that momentarily Harry forgets all the other stuff.
“Yes”, Snape agrees softly. “Of course…I think I’ll need to eat something before I head out. Come on…”
The thought of food makes Harry’s stomach churn unpleasantly, but he eagerly follows the professor back downstairs anyway, eager to make the most of this curious, softer side to him while it lasts.
“Why did you have to make this stupid vow then if it’s such a big deal”, Harry mutters halfway through supper and Snape scowls down at his plate, but doesn’t answer immediately. “I mean, who cares if Malfoy fails anyway—?“
“Not you, clearly.”
“Why should I?” Harry demands.
“Potter”, Snape says. “Let it be.”
“No”, Harry says stubbornly, his stomach churning again at the sound of Snape calling him Potter in that disdainful way of him…Potter has fought his way out of tight corners by a simple combination of sheer luck and more talented friends... He is mediocre…though as obnoxious and self-satisfied as was his father…
“Potter”, Snape says again, and this time there’s definitely a warning in his voice.
“What, because he’s in your precious house, is that it? Or because he’s your favourite?”
Harry doesn’t know why that bothers him so much all of a sudden, it’s not like he’d ever delude himself into thinking he could ever compete with the prat about that particular role. Even if Malfoy wasn’t Snape’s all-time favourite student, Harry would still be his all-time least favourite and that has nothing to do with Malfoy…But why do I care? Harry thinks irritably and staring into Snape’s face he gets the impression that the older man is wondering the same thing, luckily though, he doesn’t ask it aloud. In fact, he doesn’t say anything. And Harry really should shut up and back down, while he still has a chance of escaping this scene unscathed, but it’s like a dam has been broken inside of him and for the life of him he can’t seem to stop.
“That’s why you have to go and fuck everything up!”he more or less yells in the other man’s face. “Just because your damn preciousDraco—!“
“Potter, that is enough!”
For some reason that manages to shut Harry up immediately, and it seems to surprise Snape even more than it surprises himself because the man simply blinks at him a couple of times and although he’s opened his mouth to speak, not words actually make it out.
Harry sinks down further in his seat and glares at his plate. It becomes slightly blurred after a moment, and Harry is so angry that he doesn’t even care that Snape can see him, crying, weak, mediocre…
The older man sighs heavily and puts his fork down with a gentle clang against the plate.
“I need to get going…”he mumbles and gets to his feet.
Harry continues to glare at his barely touched food until he hears the front door shut with a gentle click, and then he jumps to his feet and walks over to the window. Snape strides down the street and with quick twirl, he disapparates.