Storytime
Snape turns back around, his dark eyes flashing dangerously, and before Harry has a chance to say anything else, the older man kills the distance between them. The impulse to recoil runs through Harry like an electric current, but he stands his ground.
Snape says nothing. But the furious glint in his eyes speaks volumes, of course.
Then suddenly, he’s grabbed Harry’s robe, and propelled him around to push him out of the bathroom. Harry stumbles, but before he can topple over, Snape is pulling him upright again.
He then continues to push and pull Harry along, all the way down to the dungeons, and — Harry realises with a jolt — his own private quarters.
As soon as the door squeals shut behind them, Snape lets go of Harry again as if the exposed strip of skin on his neck had burnt his hand. He pushes past Harry and disappears into the livingroom. Harry carefully follows, unsure of what he should be feeling now that the other man is sending him such mixed signals.
Or maybe they’re not mixed at all, he thinks wryly. Maybe he simply brought me here to torture me without the risk of getting interrupted.
Snape is on the other side of the room, retrieving a bottle of some amber liquid, probably whiskey or something along those lines, from a cabinet when Harry inches over the threshold. Snape continues to ignore him and pours himself a glass of whatever is in the bottle, then downs half of it in one go. He doesn’t offer Harry any, and Harry isn’t surprised in the slightest.
He glances over at the armchair he sat in the last time he was here, wondering if he should risk it.
”Sit”, Snape says curtly, deciding for him.
Harry scurries over to the armchair and perches on the edge of the seat, watching the other man apprehensively.
”I am going to tell you the story. You will not interrupt me. If you do, I shall stop, and you will be evicted from these quarters. Have you understood me?”
”S-Story, Sir?”
”Have you understood?”
”Y-Yeah”, Harry breathes out. ”I’ll be quiet. Promise.”
Snape refills his glass and puts the bottle back into the cabinet. He then takes a deep breath. His gaze is fixed on a point in the middle-distance, and Harry wants to reach out and grab him or do anything that will get him to snap out of it and look at Harry instead, but he barely dares to breathe too loudly, lest Snape will make good on his threat…
Then Snape starts talking again, but the cutting tone is gone from his voice, as is the ice… This is a new voice, one that Harry hasn’t heard before, softer and more vulnerable than Harry would ever think possible, and it makes his heart clench just hearing it.
He starts telling Harry about growing up in Spinner’s End, briefly touching on the tense atmosphere at home, as he calls it, and the lack of other children to play with outside of home, until suddenly one day he came across two girls his age… As he sums up the two sisters’ conversation — Petunia and Lily — Harry’s heart skips a beat as he realises, this it is… The story about my mum!
Snape plows through the telling of those early days with Lily, long afternoons spent together, getting to know each other, Severus telling Lily about the magical world, then confiding in her the truth about his home situation, and even though he carefully avoids any emotional descriptions, Harry understands that they grew quite close during that summer.
”Of course, once we got to Hogwarts, your mother was sorted into Gryffindor and I into Slytherin”, Snape says and takes another sip of his drink, but seems to savour it this time. ”We stayed friends, amazingly, but it was never quite the same after that… Even during the summers, when I got to see more of her than I did at Hogwarts, it wasn’t the same… Lily was beautiful, kind and amazingly talented, of course she had no trouble making lots of friends…”
Snape takes another deep breath and finally walks over to the other armchair and sinks down in it. Harry bites the inside of his cheek hard, so as not to blurt anything out. He promised Snape he’d keep quiet until the end of the story, and he has a feeling that it’s far from over.
”As the years past, I began to withdraw more and more. I think, the more Lily and I grew apart, the more I wanted to withdraw from everything and everyone, and the more… Black, and — his friends — became a nuisance…” Snape says diplomatically, with a curl of his lip. ”The more bitter and… vengeful… I became. I started reading about the Dark Arts. I became slightly obsessed even. Lily tried to talk some sense into me, but I wouldn’t listen. It felt like betrayal. Of course, she was only worried about me. But at the time, it felt like she didn’t understand me and my interests, and she was the one who was supposed to, she was the only one who ever understood me, and suddenly… suddenly she didn’t…”
Harry thinks back to Snape’s memory that he’d invaded last year in Dumbledore’s pensieve, the look of humiliation and fury — and, he now realises, betrayal and hurt — that had twisted the young Severus face as Lily had approached him and the Marauders, and then he’d spat out ”I don’t need your help, mudblood!”
And it breaks Harry’s heart a little to think that those two children, who spent countless summer days lying next to each other in the grass, sharing confidences and professing eternal friendship, as children will do, to think that only a few years after that, they’d turn into those teenagers, glaring daggers at each other surrounded by their school mates — well, her school mates, Harry thinks, peering over at the other man now, and feeling even more sorry for him — and then… it could only have got worse after that, he assumes.
”That was the beginning of the end”, Snape confesses, confirming Harry’s thoughts. ”I tried to apologise, of course. I felt awful about it and I told her as much, but it was too late. She wouldn’t forgive me. I was… quite devasted… I became even more obsessed with the Dark Arts, I started making… other friends… and—”
Harry can’t help it, he takes a deep breath and then lets it out again slowly, shakily. Death Eaters. Voldemort. He can fill in the gaps, no problem. But he doesn’t know how to feel about it. Snape glances at him through the corner of his eye, but he still won’t turn to look at him.
Harry takes another deep breath, and leans back in the armchair. I’m not saying a word, he thinks firmly. I promised I wouldn’t interrupt.
When it becomes clear that Harry is not going to break the silence, Snape bows his head and stares into his half-empty glass, swilling the contents a little absently.
”We never made up”, he says finally. ”It was only a few weeks left until graduation anyway, and after Lily moved away. I… I never saw her alive again. But not a day goes by when I don’t think of her… I… I loved her.”
Snape drinks the remaining drops of his drink, then with a shaky exhale he turns to look at Harry finally. End of story, Harry thinks, and nods in understanding.
”Right”, he says, his voice oddly choked. ”So you’re not…”
There’s an unreadable look on Snape’s face, that would have told Harry volumes had he ever seen it before. But this one is new.
”I kind of thought that you and… Malfoy—”
”I know what you thought.”
Harry feels his cheeks heat up a little, but doesn’t even bother trying to hide it.
”I guess maybe I’ve been a little jealous”, he mumbles.
There’s a glint in Snape’s eyes, but Harry is beyond hoping at this point. With his luck, Snape is probably livid with him again… and any minute now he’ll start screaming… not that I don’t deserve it…
”Mister Potter”, Snape says silkily, ignoring Harry’s flinch. ”I’m only going to say this once… I have never, and would not ever, engage in any untoward activity with a student — Although this very conversation is verging on changing that — Furthermore, Draco is like family to me.”
Harry swallows thickly, the blush deepening on his face but the rest of him feeling colder than ever. He nods and looks down, not to hide the traces of his emotions, because really, at this point, what’s the use? but because he can’t bring himself to meet the other man’s eyes any longer.
”I know that”, he murmurs. ”I do. And at first I honestly thought that’s what I was jealous of… it wasn’t until I talked to—”
He cuts himself off, realising he’s just dug himself a deeper hole and curses silently.
”Let me guess”, Snape says swiftly. ”My qualities as the object of teenage infatuation has been the recent topic of conversation in the Gryffindor tower?”
By the end of the small tirade, Snape has regained some of his usual snipe and Harry actually welcomes it, but shoots the man an indignant glare all the same.
”No! Who do you think I am?”
”So just the Golden Trio then.”
”No!”, Harry barks out, then quickly backs down again, feeling all of five years old as he mumbles, ”Just Hermione…”
”I see…” Snape murmurs at length.
He’s got that new look back on his face again. Harry sighs.
”I can’t exactly talk to Ron about… stuff like that…” he confesses. ”I mean, I only just told him I’m not really into girls, and he took that surprisingly well actually, but I don’t know…”
”There’s quite a leap from not being really into girls to coveting yours truly”, Snape supplies.
”Yeah”, Harry agress, with a wry smile. ”Something like that.”
Snape nods a little, looking away as though bored with the whole subject — Harry even thinks he might have caught half an eye-roll — but on the whole, bored is definitely a step up from the reaction Harry had expected… Nowhere near the reaction that his optimistically romantic Gryffindor heart had hoped for, but definitely not as bad as it could be.
Harry peers at Snape who peers at the bottom of his empty glass, as though considering a refill. After a moment’s silence, he speaks up again, slightly startling Harry who wasn’t expecting it, ”And you are sure that you’re not really into girls, are you, mister Potter?”
Harry can almost hear the quotation marks in his voice and bristles a little. Okay, so maybe I’m not as well-spoken as Snape, but who is? he thinks.
Then it strikes him that maybe the reason Snape is taunting him is that he thinks it’s immature of him not to refer to himself as gay, and maybe that’s why he’s questioning it. Maybe he thinks it’s a phase, Harry thinks and feels disproportionately appalled at the idea.
”I’m definitely gay!” he blurts out.
Snape blinks.