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“We were told that we had to win. Against whom?
The atom? Physics? The universe?
Victory is not an event for us, but a process.”
Svetlana Alexievich, Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
“Do not expect too much at the end of the world.”
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, Unkempt Thoughts
The terrible thing about all the history books, about all the stories, is that they never tell you about after . The Iliad takes us through to the end of the war, reels us back again to the death of Hector, breaker of horses. But the words fade out into nothingness, into space and time, we fill it up with our own desires for a happy ending. Harry knows that this is a lie. He has walked off with his fists in his pockets, after a war, after the burials, into that blank space. There is no happy ending. There is, in fact, not much of anything at all.
It is late September, two years after the Battle of Hogwarts. He sits there in the bedroom (the light blue paint seems grey in the morning sun), dull light streams through the window. Enough comes through the sheer white curtains; he doesn’t bother to turn lamps on very often. It seems like too much effort. He has lived in this rented flat with no art on the walls for just over a year. He rolls his shoulders, stretches his neck. He is so incredibly tired. His hair is ever-black, wild as a stormcloud. He is more drawn than any twenty-year-old should have the right to be. Perhaps he has no claim to the grey circles below his eyes, aged twenty. No claim to the paleness of his skin, aged twenty. (His eyes, if he moved his hand and you could see them, are green. Green as army tents; green as gangrene.)
Merlin’s balls, I feel like I just wrestled a Norwegian Ridgeback.
He looks at the photograph, hung and dusty on the opposite wall. Hi Dad. He is there himself in the photograph of James Potter, the long, heart-shaped face, the squared-off chin. They wear their stubble in the same way, their blackdark hair ever unruly. Glasses perpetually smudged.
You’re so much like your father. Everyone had said the same thing. They still do, in fact. It had felt good at first. He had ached for any connection to his old man, lost forever to the dirt and the worms. Later, it sits uncomfortably on his shoulders. Your father never did that kind of thing, others would say. As if they had forgotten that Harry was not James reborn, was not, in fact, just James redux, come again, 1980 instead of 1960. I am different. He wants to scream it into everyone’s faces. All of them, the entire miserable lot. Dumbledore and Hagrid, Remus and Snape. The living and dead alike. He wishes he could tear his face off, put on something new. Maybe just once they would see.
How are we different? Let me count the ways. His favorite color was red, mine is green. He liked English Breakfast tea and took three sugars, I’m an Earl Grey sort. No sugar, plenty of milk. What about the others? Did he like to swim? (I hate the water.) They expect me to be a morning person, like he was. I am not, I stay up late until the sun begins to rise. (I can never sleep.) He was good at Transfiguration. I got average marks, I don’t really care there.
Oh, oh. He was loved. That’s the real kicker. I am not. Well then. Never mind. Cut it out; burn it down.
He sometimes wants to mark the delineation between himself and his father by pointing out their different likes and dislikes. But it’s not quite fair. He doesn’t really have favorites, he never has. Favorites are a luxury for others, not for forgotten and lonely children. If you never have had anything, then any scrap will do. So even now, his preferences are mild, easily changed. Sometimes, in a fit of spite, he picks a favorite out of a hat, something he really doesn’t give a damn about at all. Take his favorite color, for instance. It is green. (Color of snakes and pine trees, moss and mold.) It isn’t really, he doesn’t really care at all. The only thing that had mattered was that it was not red , was not his father’s favorite. It doesn’t matter , he thinks. Nothing matters.
He sighs. He’s supposed to be in recovery. Not very good at that, are you, Potter? (He is not sure why he calls himself Potter in his head. He is not sure where that dark, sonorous voice comes from. It is ever-strange, on the edge of familiarity, ever discomfiting.)
He looks at the green digital numbers on the clock. Do I have time to lay down? (He doesn’t, he knew that already. Hermione is always early.)
Aftermath is an odd thing in places of war, places of disaster. We expect to turn away, wash our hands. That’s done now, I guess. Get on with our lives. We grow irritated that they need time; annoyed that they can’t keep up. Hurry up now, it’s time.
Some places don’t recover or they take so long that we look away, we give up. Turn aside. In April 1986, a nuclear reactor failed near Pripyat, deep in the Soviet Union. The scientists say it will be twenty-thousand years before the land near Chernobyl is habitable again. We don’t really hesitate to mark it off as ruined, as desolate. That length of time is too far beyond our comprehension. (We are impatient.) We know the deer there have three eyes, that to eat the fish is poison. We do not talk about how the land might feel, the lonely creatures, the workers who ruined themselves in the 2600 kilometer exclusion zone. Just shut your eyes, pretend it didn’t happen. Move along.
Harry had been five years old when the Chernobyl disaster occurred. It had played on in the background of the Dursleys’ home while Aunt Petunia had fussed over Dudley, while Uncle Vernon had fixed his mustache in the reflection of a window. He had been so young but it didn’t matter, he remembers it clearly. Such a shame, the news anchors had said. Oh well.
“How is everyone?” Harry asks. He stirs the tea a little. Burns his tongue. He hadn’t wanted to come out today, but Hermione had insisted. He knew she worried about him. (Most everyone did these days.) He looks at her square nose, the blush-colored sweater, the papers and lesson plans jammed into her leather shoulder bag. She’s always a relief to his own head; he’s glad he’s come.
“Much the same,” Hermione says, “McGonagall says hello. Hagrid sends his love. Oh, and -” she pauses, wrinkling her nose and fishing a strangely shaped and smelling box from her bag, “he sent you some ‘ tasty treats’ as he put it.” She laughs. Harry smiles. He fingers the edge of the rumpled pink box, faint warmth runs through him. He hasn’t seen Hagrid in months. I should visit.
“I don’t even want to know what’s in these,” he says, laughing.
“You and me both,” Hermione grins. She pauses slightly, flattens a napkin under her palm. “Oh, and Snape suffered a relapse last week. He’s been in the Hospital Wing.” Dread curls into Harry, through his nose, into his lungs. His fingers twitch. What is wrong with you? He runs his fingertips in repetitive circles over the woodgrain of the table. One, two, three, four.
“Is he okay?” Harry rushes (a vein throbs at his temple), “A relapse of what?”
She looks at him oddly, setting the tea down, brushing her hair back behind one ear. (Still ever bushy, it does not stay.) “It’s the snakebite. Didn’t you know? Madam Pomfrey induced a coma while he recovers. He’ll be fine, Harry.”
“I need to see him.”
“He’ll be fine , Harry. Don’t worry.”
“I’ll be there tomorrow.”
“Why do you want to see him?” Her brown brows furrowed, confusion plain in her face.
Harry shrugs, he doesn’t know.
To pass the time, Harry has taken to reading endlessly. He is fascinated and overwhelmed. Mostly, he reads about the end of the world. There are so many ways for it to go. The world hangs precariously in the stars. Just a swipe from an asteroid, a rogue gamma-ray blast, nuclear winter, then nothingness. Our lone cry silenced. Instead, it could be disease. We are not so far removed from illness as we imagine. (He reads of the Spanish Flu of 1919; more soldiers had died of influenza than of wounds. Treatments and immunizations have scarce changed, the virulence and combination of the virus is random, ever-mutating. It could come back. Recur. We have only gotten lucky.)
He goes often to the local library. He’s never one to look up topics. Instead, he wanders the shelves through science and history, medicine and fiction. He has no direction, so he goes aimlessly through the categories, running his fingers over the Dewey Decimal System. He finds that he likes the 900s best, histories and geographies. His own life has become quiet as a pond, so he reads about disasters instead.
Centralia, Pennsylvania . Now a ghost town. The stories gone, destroyed. In 1962, a landfill fire had not been extinguished properly, had crept down through cracks into the labyrinthine coal mining tunnels below. Caught fire and raged, emitting smoke, toxic gas, shifting the land below their feet. Chasms into hell open up in roads, backyards, in living rooms and hair salons. The fire has been raging for decades, everything is gone. The people have left. The stories are forgotten. The postal service even takes back their zipcode. Estimated time until return: 250 years.
Hiroshima, Japan. The flash of light, if you had looked directly, would blind you. Sear your retinas, steal your sight. From one second to another, there are thirty-thousand corpses in the streets. Some still hold their baskets, bread and milk. Checks for the bank to cash. Crying and burnt, with buildings split down the middle like a mis-sewn seam. Ash falling from the sky like snow. Little Boy dropped August 1945. Pull the clutch, look away. Time until return: Not long, a couple of weeks. Some wounds are psychological.
Chernobyl, Pripyat, Ukraine. Rapid heating, an explosion. Blows the top right off. Clean off they say. Scorching concrete blocks thrown into the air like meteors. Alexander Yuvchenko, Chernobylite, tells us that he stepped out of the building, eyes taken up toward the reactor hall. The ionization of air had looked like heaven, like a blue laser, pointing straight up to the sky. Estimated time until return: 20,000 years.
There is pleasure on the pathless woods, there is a rapture on the lonely shore . Hogwarts has always taken his breath away. You cannot Apparate to the grounds, so he goes instead to Hogsmeade. Cracks into existence a few yards away from The Three Broomsticks, straightens his jacket. It’s a short walk to the castle and Hogwarts is perched on a hill, scraping across the Scottish sky. He always falls in love with magic a little bit more at the sight of it, the promise of legend, the promise of greatness, the promise of more. Hogwarts is a castle designed of two main sets of buildings, centered around a courtyard. It had not all been constructed at once, several additions would be built in later centuries, stretching out from the south wall of the bailey. It is, as always though, a fortress. Towers pierce from the outer wall in regular intervals. There might be classrooms inside but the windows are still medieval castle windows, embrasures nestled into the stone. These are narrow slits that open to the outside world. They had always been invisible to the students until that final year, until the battle, when they are reminded of the windows’ original purpose. In the medieval times, centuries ago, archers would stand beside and fire arrows down at oncoming enemies, raining death on their opponent. (The students had replaced the old bows with wands, the once-slung arrows with curses.)
The Great Hall is not as empty as he would prefer. It has been two years since he has stepped in, heels on the flagstones. Last time, they had been stained with blood. He’s not quite sure what he had expected, but it had been quieter, more solemn. He grimaces as he thinks of the dead who are buried here, who fell in this castle, on the grounds (in this hall). Eleven-year-olds flit about, dashing between Charms and Transfiguration. They lose their toads, pull each others’ hair. Faces smeared with pumpkin juice and Chocolate Frogs. He is strangely comforted by it ( life goes on ). He is strangely discomfited by it ( do you have no respect? ).
You can’t go home again. Someone had said that once. (He’s not quite sure whom.) Uneasiness crawls up his back when he looks at the unfamiliar faces. There is a new Potions Master, a new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. He doesn’t recognize some of the paintings. Many had been destroyed, had been replaced. When he says I want to go back to Hogwarts, he doesn’t really mean the physical address. It’s the Hogwarts of old, the one from years prior. He looks at the old stones of the walls, touching his fingertips to it like memory. He swallows, throat thick with nostalgia.
He’s awake. Oh. Great. Harry grimaces a little when he sees Snape propped up in bed. He looks wretched, certainly, but unmistakably awake (unmistakably alive). That sharp profile scowling, made more severe in the harsh midday light streaming through a leaded window. Nose pointed like a beak, a frown etched permanently into the sallow skin. His hair is even greasier and lanker than usual (he’s been confined to a bed for six days), and he smells a bit rancid and sharp. But he’s alive. The bastard’s throat had been ravaged once, torn apart like Krakatoa had wrenched open the earth, spewing red magma like blood into the sky. It’s healed now into a silver-smooth memory, done by Madam Pomfrey’s gentle and capable wandwork. Magic is ever-imperfect; there will always be a scar.
“Hey,” he says, dropping the backpack at the foot of the bed. He kicks it to the side. Fumbles a bit at the tea service set on the table. “Do you want some?”
Snape grimaces, narrowing the scorch-black eyes. “Got you ministering to lost causes then, Potter?” Sour eyes, “Don’t you have some bloody banquet to speak at?”
“Shut up, will you?” He sighs (he is so tired), “Can you just not ?”
“Don’t you dare speak to me like -“
He drops the teacup (it cracks). “I can fucking speak to you however I like , Snape.” I am not a student; you have no power over me.
Snape rolls his eyes, “How wonderful. Adolescent tantrums. Just what I need to hasten my recovery.” He glowers, clearly still too weak to properly bar Harry from the room. “Why are you here?”
“You’re sick,” I needed something to do. I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t be. That goddamn bastard Voldemort is fucking dead, yes, but if you die it kinda feels like he still wins? Maybe a bit? I don’t know, I don’t know.
The heavy stare. “So you’re here, with me,” Snape says flatly. “ Marvelous. ”
His flat is in Bristol. He’s not entirely sure why he’s chosen it (neither, to their often-voiced disquiet, are any of his friends). It is far away, thrown out of the usual paths of any of his acquaintances. It’s quiet here, he says. It doesn’t matter, I’ve got a Floo and I can Apparate anywhere. I’m a fucking wizard, after all. If he is calm and honest with himself, he knows he chose it because it is not Scotland, it is not Hogsmeade. It is not Surrey (which he will never go back to alive, godwilling). It’s close to Godric’s Hollow; it is far enough to let him breathe.
It is a strange thing to not remember one’s own birthplace. Most of us live and die in the same spot. Some move on, move out, move up. Our culture thrives on our personal histories. How we celebrate holidays, whether or not you ring your mum on Sundays. Harry has never known. All he has are names, a pair of his father’s shoes that he is expected to fill. They tell him that his mother had been kind, that she had once had green eyes (like wormwood, like Harry). She had been good at Charms. They had been from Godric’s Hollow, deep in the West Country. Harry is from Godric’s Hollow, deep in the West Country. The cruelty of the truth is that he does not remember it, not really. (He had visited once, age seventeen. It had stuck in his throat with how unknown it was. He’d expected to look upon everything as familiar, to finally feel home. Instead, it had all been a stranger to him. His hope had turned to ash in his mouth. It has been two years, he has not been back.)
If he wanted, he could call Surrey home. Number four Privet Drive. He’ll never forget the address, the desolateness of that row of houses, all identical like some designer had gone rogue with the copy/paste function. The Dursleys with their purchased comfort. They were not so rich as they pretended (silk blouses, pearl earrings, holidays to Majorca), everything was bought on credit. Harry knew, he had fetched the mail, dusted the vases, made the beds. He took down all the answering machine messages, gave them to weasel-faced Aunt Petunia, scowling like he had held a dead rat under her nose (he wanted to, oh, how he wanted to). She had taken the messages from him, always glaring at him suspiciously. Don’t you ever tell anyone, they had hissed. Uncle Vernon had raised his thick hand as a threat. Harry glared back, silent. He was used to his uncle’s fist, his backhand. Besides, after all, he didn’t have anyone to tell. The only time he meets anyone is when the Dursleys throw parties. He carries the punch tray around to the guests. They don’t ask his name. They dip crackers into the nutty cheese ball; take pictures in groups that do not include him. (When he is older, fifteen, sixteen perhaps, he steals rum-laced punch from the bowl, sips it from that old familiar haunt under the stairs. They don’t look for him.)
He does not call Surrey home.
They get along (if you can call it that) a little better on the second day.
“I guess you’re the headmaster now, eh? Properly.”
“Yes, I suppose,” Snape murmurs. It is quiet. “I plan to give my notice to Minerva in the spring.”
“Why?”
“Why would I stay, Potter?” Why would he? Harry wonders. Snape had clearly always hated teaching, had hated children, hated their open faces, their sticky fingers. If there is no one to run from, if there are no arms to run to, then what purpose does he have to stay? Except. Except that it guts Harry, just a little bit, to think about Hogwarts without the sallow, miserable Potions Master. Somehow, and he is not quite sure how, it is not Hogwarts without Snape. The prospect of the castle left without the great black bat seems full of echoes and silence. It is like the loneliness of aging, sick with memory, glutted on regret. You can’t leave.
“What are you going to do now?” Don’t do it.
A long pause, “I have no idea.” What use is a soldier after the war? It’s an inconvenient fact that soldiers are expendable, they are not meant to survive the wars. The world had sealed up in their absence, like water rushes to fill a gap. There was nothing left for them to go back to, no one has made space for them.
“Yeah,” Harry breathes. “I guess.” He picks at the skin around his nails.
Snape raises a brow. “Out with it, Potter,” he drawls, “If I’m to put up with your irritating and annoyingly regular visits, I’m not also to put up with you sulking in the corner like a bratty child.” He glares, “I have an entire school of those to choose from.”
“I think,” he shrugs, shoulders ever tense, “I’m a bit angry. At the whole thing. At Dumbledore, Voldemort, fucking … everyone. ” He vibrates, on the edge of something. His anger is bright, it is incandescent. “I never had a choice .”
Snape is silent, he blinks a long slow blink, “Welcome,” he says, “to my life, Potter.”
He closes his eyes, “It’s just,” he pauses, breathes in, breathes out. “It’s just that I think everyone's pissed off that I’m not over it? The war. All of it. Everything, I don’t know. They just want me to show up on time, say their little speeches, give a bloody toast. They gave me fucking medals to wear. I’m supposed to talk about glory and honor .” (His hands shake. When had they started shaking?)
“They will never want to hear what you really think.”
He’s baiting me. “What the hell, do you want me to be angry?”
“Potter,” the low voice comes, “I have always wanted you to be angry.” The sharp bite dies in Harry’s mouth at the quietness of the statement, it is not an insult. He feels strange, unmoored. He is not quite sure what kind of statement it is after all.
After Chernobyl, the land was left fallow. Everyone stays away, avoids the edges of the exclusion zone. They do not buy apples grown nearby, except for their bosses and mothers-in-law. There is nowhere to hide in Pripyat, you cannot block it with a shield, shoot it with a gun. You cannot burrow underground. It is there, everywhere. But who contained the mess? Who built the fences? We do not talk of them. They were necessary, they were expendable. When they come back, we know the death is lurking in them. It does not take long, perhaps weeks. It might take a few days for the symptoms to arrive but they always come. A strange sunburn, peeling skin, loss of coordination, a shortness of breath. There is no treatment, you cannot heal. The cells, at that level of radiation poisoning, are already dead. Harry is curious, he has always been curious. He wants to see inside.
“Will you go home? Do you have a house?” (It is day three. Earl Grey tea has mysteriously appeared on the tea service tray, next to Snape’s preferred Ceylon.)
“Yes, Potter,” Snape grits out, “I have a house.”
“Where is it?” He is not sure why he wants to know. Where are you from? I remember stealing your memories. Your mother had dark hair and dark eyes. She looked a bit like you. You’re both proud, aren’t you? Your father was a mean son-of-a-bitch. I remember seeing him (I suppose, really, you remember seeing him), still drunk or drunk already at nine in the morning. Nine in the fucking morning. Smelling of stale beer and acid sweat. God, you were embarrassed by him, weren’t you? I can’t blame you. I could feel your feelings. You were always so angry when he drank; you were always relieved when he drank (he couldn’t aim then).
“Yorkshire,” The black-eyed man answers, “In Cokeworth.” Snape watches him suspiciously, eyes narrowed, as if he is as surprised as Harry to find them not trading barbs. Cokeworth . That rings a bell. He’s been there, to Cokeworth. It had been cold and wet, even in the thick of summer. Uncle Vernon had rented a room on a craggy, rocky hill in the middle of a lake. He remembers the leaky old boat. He remembers the unlit room, he’d slept on the floor. It had hurt his back, his shoulders. The town had stunk of exhaust fumes and coal. It is no surprise that Snape is from there, forged out of ache and poverty. Snape, with his care-patched robes, with his re-soled boots, who had clearly climbed out of that gutter. Harry feels an odd sense of weight hang over him, staring at the cautious face, bared just by revealing his own birthplace to the world.
He nods, refills his cup. Looks away. Don’t say anything weird.
“Fancy a game of chess?”
“With someone of your abysmal intellect?”
“Why Potions?”
“What on God’s green earth do you mean?”
"It's just...I never liked it. Why do you like it?"
Snape closes his eyes for a long beat. “I was always good at Potions, Potter,” he says, quiet as snowfall, “I liked it because it was quiet. Every other miserable class was chaotic with every idiot and miscreant nattering their damned heads off. Any fool can wave a wand.” There is a long pause. (Harry thinks then of chemicals and reagents. Of art, of synthesis, of toxicity and patience.) “And I was good at it. I’ve never been good at anything else like it. Every other moron just follows the recipe in the book.”
Harry nods. Cast back to sixth year with Slughorn. He had never made a potion from the textbook until then. He’d always followed the instructions on the blackboard, written in powdery chalk, in Snape’s tight and spidery hand. Not all of his creations had been perfect but he could never fault the recipe. “It is no different than cooking, Potter,” Snape says, (his voice is distant, like he has forgotten anyone else is in the room) “If something is burning, you turn down the fire. If a potion is boiling over, you can add powdered boomslang skin. It’s basic attention. Adding, subtracting, until you get something that looks right.”
Harry has never thought about potionmaking like this before. Like a recipe, like an art. He thinks of the boomslang, Dispholidus typus, slithering through the trees in sub-Saharan Africa. It is the color of dirt, of junebugs and beetles, of cinnamon and wheat. A bite can kill you in twelve hours with the myotoxins of its venom, working slowly on muscle tissue by binding to receptors. Eventually, you cannot move. (Your lungs are muscles, they freeze up, ice over. You cannot breathe.) He has stolen boomslang once, from a professor who had boiled over without it.
“Back again, Harry?” Madam Pomfrey smiles, “He’ll be ready to leave soon. He’s almost strong enough. It’s good timing, he’ll need to restock his treatment potion.”
“I thought he was cured,” Harry says, frowning. (He is wearing black today. It is not his usual choice but Snape has mentioned that it made him look older.)
Pomfrey looks at him with surprise. “Oh no,” her face softens, “he’ll never be cured. He didn’t tell you that?”
Harry shakes his head. No, why would he?
“I treat the venom as best I can. It’s a potion Severus makes himself. Poor thing, it’s a nasty business, that potion. He’s always ill after taking it, but it’s necessary. He still has relapses once or twice a year. The potion helps, he has fewer spells if he’s good about taking it.” There is a sadness to her face, “It can’t be cured, Harry. We can hold it off and treat the symptoms. It’s not getting worse. But it might someday. Or he might live a full life and just have to take these potions, we don’t know yet.”
Anger rushes through Harry. It starts like a miasma, red hot in the air. It comes through his nose, his breath, sucked down into his lungs and burning from the inside out. He didn’t fucking tell me.
“Don’t worry, dear,” she says, “He’s a survivor, that one. He’ll go on living out of spite more than anything else.”
He better.
“It’s good you’re coming,” Madam Pomfrey says, “He seems more like his old self when you’re here.”
The horrifying thing is that sometimes a tomb is not only to protect the bones from opportunistic hands or curious animal scavengers. (A graverobber, a fox.) Sometimes a tomb to keep the dead in, to keep it from crawling out. In 1986, the Soviets sent 600,000 “liquidators” to the disaster. They cut down trees, washed walls, built a concrete sarcophagus around the ruined, open reactor. (They would not be told of the extent of the danger. They do not know those savage subatomic particles of radiation floating through the air, that settle on their skin like dust. Yet still, as they mix cement in Pripyat, on the ruins of Chernobyl, they know there is death in the air.)
Why did you go? Because it was needed; because they asked me to.
“You didn’t tell me about the venom,” Harry hisses, fury written in the narrowing of his eyes, the set of his jaw. The door shuts hard behind him. Not quite hard enough to be a slam, not quiet enough to simply be closed.
Snape scowls, raising an arched brow and impaling him with those glittering crushed-beetle eyes. “Pomfrey,” he says, bitter as ash. He mutters a few more words that Harry doesn’t catch. “And should I have told you, Potter? What right do you have to know?”
Harry stands there, radiant in his fury, mouth agape. But he doesn’t know. It skewers him. What right do I have to know? There is more behind that question, weaved into the space between them. It weighs heavily. Why do you come back every day? Why are you here, Potter? In this room with your miserable ex-professor whom you hated so dearly? They are mirror images across the room. Snape in his grey nightshirt, Harry in his brown jacket. Each of them breathing roughly, eyes bright and hard and staring, staring each other down in challenge. Harry glares at the dark, violent eyes, he blazes at the way Snape is gulping at the air, swallowing it down (he is doing the same). Snape’s crossed arms. His fingers, long and pale and tapered, clutch convulsively at his bicep.
Have you ever felt the world give way beneath your feet?
Throughout human history, there are epochs. They are reference points, marking the sudden shifting of time, from period to period. In Harry’s life, watching Snape’s crossed arms, the long, pale hands twitching restlessly on his arms, this was one of them. I want you. It races through him faster than wildfire. He has never thought this before, not about Snape. (Not really about anyone.) There had never been time. He pauses, halfway to the chair. Snape raises one dark eyebrow at him. At Harry, still gaping with his mouth open like a codfish. What the fuck, Harry? It doesn’t matter, the thought cannot be unthought.
He has always considered them to be something of magnets. Perhaps too similar, if placed near each other, he and Snape, they will repel and fly backwards. You cannot push them close together without flashing eyes and a gnashing of teeth. This was a simple fact. What he has forgotten (there are always tiny details, fine print) is that the polarity of all magnets can be reversed. It doesn’t take much, a simple electrical current will do. Harry finds himself hooked up to a battery, attached to a solenoid coil and laid on a slab of stone. The current pulses through his body, wave after wave, starting at the crown of his head and pulsing down to his fingers, his toes. The polarity switches; he cannot look away.
Everything has shifted. Harry shifts a little too, uncomfortable in his own clothes.
I want you. Fuck you, I have never wanted anyone like this. I know it’s not right. No, I shouldn’t. I’d be ruined. You’re forty. My father’s age. What do you see when you look at me? Is it him? Please don’t be him. You hate me, have you grown to hate me of my own merit? I am not him. If you loathe me, at least do it for me.
I would like you to touch me. I have never really been touched like that, not the way I think you would, with coals in your fingertips. I want you. Don’t you dare tell me I cannot, should not, do not. Wanting you is the only thing I’ve ever done for me, only me. The only thing that had nothing to do with should or need or what another voice wants. You, I want you for me. Because I want you. That’s all.
He washes his face in the cool water, it splashes back into the white porcelain sink. Brushes his teeth, runs wet hands through his hair in an attempt to mollify it. He stares at his closet for a long while, fingers rubbing against the fabric of different shirts, wool sweaters.The green shirt looks nice on you, Harry, Hermione had said. (She had fixed his collar, brushed the lint from his sleeves.) It brings out your eyes. (He likes his eyes, green as ivy.) He fusses with the shirt in the mirror, smoothing down the front pocket. Cleans his glasses. Shakes the dust out of his shoes. He checks his reflection in the mirror one more time before leaving, his heart in his throat, his nerves electric.
A letter had come via owl post that morning. It sits open on his kitchen counter.
Harry,
Snape was released this morning to his rooms. If you come today, you’ll find him there and not in the Hospital Wing.
Love, Hermione
P.S. Ron wants to know when you want to do dinner again. He’s got a new chessboard and I’m tired of losing everyday. xx
“Potter,” Snape doesn’t invite him in, not with so many words. (Harry hadn’t expected him to.) But the tall man stands slightly askance from the door, allowing Harry just enough room to slip in. Merlin, this would be hilarious if it wasn’t so fucking awkward. They were terrible, these two fools dancing around each other. Harry feels the hesitation in each of them, like to like, each half-eager to snap, to bite, to fall back into familiar patterns. (Each of them cautious, gentle, curious. Each terrified of stumbling, breathing too hard and blowing out the flame.)
Harry takes in the man in his element. It is different here, less comfortable than the odd oasis of the Hospital Wing. He wasn’t sure what he had expected to find from Snape’s personal quarters. Once, perhaps, he’d imagined only rusty iron chains and bottles of frog’s breath and wormswort, heads of grindylows severed and suspended in jars of formaldehyde. A stone floor with bloodstains in the cracks, piles of evil Dark Arts books bound in human skin and smelling of putrescine and decay.
The room is nothing like that. He should have expected it. Instead, it is as spare and ascetic as a Cistercian monk’s cell. The stone floor has no relief of a rug. There is no ornamentation on the walls, no curtains, nothing on the shelves to indicate that this had been someone’s home for over twenty years. There are a few hints to Snape’s nature, a lonely oak desk in the corner with a few small accouterments. A pile of parchment (staff meeting notes, academic calendars, scholarly articles, a letter from the Ministry). A small silver pair of reading glasses sit upon a book ( Analytical Methods in Pure and Applied Potionsmaking, Second Edition. ) A bottle of Ogden’s Old Firewhisky, a half-full glass tumbler of the stuff. Two wingback armchairs sit before the fire, a small table in their interval. (Harry strongly suspects that all the furniture had come with the room.)
The old professor stands near the wall. Back in black, he would almost be intimidating if he wasn’t so near-comically unsure, crossing his arms and uncrossing them, shifting from side to side. Harry swallows. He puts his hands in his pockets. He takes them back out again. Casts out, around.
“Can I have a bit of that?” He points to the firewhisky. Severus says nothing but a quick nod, crosses to the bottle. The liquid is the color of wheat and burnt toast. If you hold it before the fire, it burnishes amber. (The color is not inherent in the liquid, it is stolen from the old oak barrels, it seeps through from the wood to the whiskey to his tongue.) It’s a particularly smooth sort of spirit, significantly better than that swill that Blishen’s produces. Made in Scotland, up near Speyside. Single malt. Harry thinks of whiskey so that he does not think of Snape. He bites his tongue, thinks of fire. He collapses into one of the wingbacks.
“I like your rooms,” he says simply. Snape smirks, raising his own glass from the desk.
“Oh?” One dark arched brow, a quirk to the lips that some might dare call a smile, “I suspect there are far fewer coffins than I think most of my students would expect.”
Harry snorts, “Former students.” Former. Definitely former. (The distinction is suddenly looming and critical. There is nothing between them but their own past. It matters now, when his fingers twitch, when they ache for pressure. He thinks suddenly of that throat, which he has never seen save torn by that godforsaken serpent. He wants to press his lips to the wound, to the healed scar. He wants to feel the drum of the other man’s heartbeat, to hold it in his mouth.)
“Yes,” the black voice agrees, eyes shadowed. Nothing further comes. Do you ever think about it? Are you, um, a bit like me? I think about it, I think about you thinking about it. God, you, if you told me that you lie in bed sometimes, one hand curled around your cock, if you told me that you liked to tease yourself. Do you pretend that it’s my hand? (Do you think about someone else? No one at all?)
What about the shower wall? You would lean forward, head down and your hair wet, water running like rivers, hair in plastered and soaked clumps like goddamn snakes, you would be so fast and hard with yourself. Like a punishment, maybe your eyes are closed. How long has it been? Are you quiet? (Do you think of me? Is it different?)
Harry shifts slightly, adjusting the lay of his jeans. He gives a quick thanks to God for closely-fitting boxer briefs. “I’ve got another bloody event tonight. I have to wear a medal.” His tone is flat and dark. He imagines standing before a room and speaking yet again of duty and honor, of things he no longer believes in.
“Potter,” the gravel voice asks, eyes focused on him, “Shit or get off the pot. If you could go back, would you make any choices differently?”
He pauses, adrift. “No.” It is true.
“Then move on,” Snape says, taking a sip of the drink. “Why do you agree to these things anyway?”
Harry shrugs, ashamed. “It pays the rent, I guess.” Snape nods, quiet.
Harry frowns, thinking back to the crowds waiting for charisma and light, for heroics and antics, “It isn’t me they really want anyway,” he says dangerous and low, “all they ever wanted was to get my father back.” Snape studies him, dark deepest eyes appraising. Is it fair to give a child their father’s name, not even allow them their own? I’m not him, you know. I swear to God. They made fun of you, said you smelled funny, looked funny. Even your clothes were funny. They didn’t fit right, they didn’t match. Have you ever worn hand-me-downs, have you ever picked your clothes out of grey dye? In second grade, they said I was funny, smelled funny, looked funny. I used the hose sometimes for showering, when they wouldn’t let me upstairs. You can make a quick shower out of a sink and a bar of soap. I know; I wouldn’t have laughed at you.
“You’re nothing like him,” Snape says. Harry looks at the darkhaired professor in surprise. Snape is grimacing, his hand tightly clenched on the unfortunate glass. In the tension of the jaw, Harry can read the fury. Snape is livid at himself for saying it.
That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me. Bitter as tonic, as rapini, as willowbark.
I want you. I shouldn’t, I cannot tell anyone (god, how they would look at me). Have you ever looked, really looked, at your hands? Knotted like the elder wand, covered with stains of cinnamon peel and ink. Those hands. You have killed with them (you have cast spells, protected me, pulled me from the edge of death.)
There is a strange image framed and sitting on Severus’ desk. A painting, heavy in rich jewel tones, the central figure in reds and blacks. It is clearly old, even to Harry’s untrained eye. The face is not unlike Snape’s own. Proud, facing the light. Strong nose, severe jaw, comfortable in his own power, cruelty threaded throughout the features, the curls of dark hair, the eyes dark as a pistol. He wonders if it is an old relative. “What is that?” he asks, pointing at the painting.
Snape looks over at the image, “Vlad Țepeș,” he says, a queer, soft accent to his voice that Harry has never heard before, gentle and like a song, “Vlad the Impaler. You might know him as Dracula,” he muses dryly, “although I severely doubt that he ever rose from the dead.” He pauses, glancing back, “It was painted in the sixteenth century, a copy of an original from his lifetime.”
Harry gapes, he fumbles a bit for his history lessons. The stories of the cruelty of Vlad the Impaler are well-remembered, all these centuries later. Ghost stories passed from generation to generation. He had constructed forests of pikes and impaled men on them carefully, so that they would die slowly. He would hold banquets among the dead and dying, feasting on the scent of rotten flesh, of iron-rich blood. When the Turkish messengers had come, bearing greetings from Sultan Mehmed II, they had refused to remove their turbans. Vlad, ever practical, ever cruel, had had them nailed to their skulls so that they would not be easily lost. He is sick with the thought. “You have a painting of Dracula in your rooms?” (It is exactly the sort of knowledge his twelve-year-old self would have feasted on, telling everyone about the monstrosity of the wicked old bat, that evil vampire in the dungeons.)
Snape rolls his eyes, takes a breath. “He is not a villain to everyone, Potter,” he says quietly, Harry leans closer to hear each word. “To many, he held back the invading Ottoman army. Kept their homes safe, protected them. To many in Romania, he is a national hero.” Snape pauses, looking away, the rest of his words pushed out under his breath, “My mother was Romanian.”
Oh. It is strange to think of Snape as bearing a history, a legacy. He looks different suddenly, less a vampire, more like an uncomfortable warrior-prince who would go to any lengths, would dip into torture and savagery to protect his language and stories, the ones he loved, his little corner of the world. The similarities make him uneasy; it is hard to look away. He wonders what it is like to know the past, to have to bear it forth. He knows nothing beyond his parents, their names, dates of their births (dates of their deaths). He has been told that he comes from the West Country, from Godric’s Hollow near Cornwall. He knows that his looks are common there, the dark hair and pale skin, small bones, small hands. They are holdovers in that corner of the island kingdom, lost Brythonic tribes retreated to rolling hills and clutches of willow and hawthorn trees, telling tales of when they and their legendary king will rise again. He clings to any mention of being Cornish, he has St. Piran’s flag hung up in his little flat to remind him that there is a story there. But it is not settled in him, he does not know his own history. It had been stolen from him that same night that everything else had, in a flash of bitter green.
This peculiar man, this strange, unsettling person he has never met before, not really. You’re not much of a monster are you, Snape? (Snape’s boggart is Voldemort; his Patronus is a doe. These are not the hallmarks of a beast.) Harry furrows his brow, bites his lip. What if? He wonders, there is so much wonder. What if I’ve been wrong about you? He realizes belatedly that he has been staring at Snape for several minutes. (Damn you, Ogden’s Old.) The other man looks increasingly disturbed at his frank focus, grasping for something, settling on anger.
“ What, Potter?”
“Nothing, nothing, it’s just -“ He moves slightly closer, he is not sure why. (Later, he will blame magnets.)
“What game are you playing, Potter?” Snape hisses, his voice cruel and cyanide-edged. (There is terror in his eyes; there is fear on his breath.) Sweat glistens across the professor’s forehead, his carotid artery twitches violently in the lamplight.
“This isn’t a game.”
“ You are not supp-“
“Look,” Harry hisses, sharp as tacks, “if you fucking say supposed to, if you fucking dare to tell me one more goddamn thing I’m supposed to do or supposed to want with my life - I swear to fucking God, Snape, I won’t even bother with a wand and I will kill you right where you stand.”
There is a long, low silence. He watches the bleak-faced professor close his eyes, breathing rapidly. His chest rises and falls like a wave. Harry’s does the same; he is drowning in the open air. Snape draws one long hand over his face, as if to shield himself from view. A scream builds in Harry’s throat. Stop it, stop it. (He is not sure if he is thinking this about Snape or about himself.)
“Say it,” Snape says. Low and dark. That voice licking up at Harry like flames. Say it. He could stall, ask for clarification. He doesn’t need it. They both know the unspoken question. Say it. His head swirls in dizziness, a flash of vertigo, of nausea. The sick washes over him, the wave of ataxia. He is sweaty and shaking.
Say it.
“I want you,” he rasps. Finally. (Snape’s knuckles had long since gone white.)
“ Fuck ,” the older man groans in blackness, half a whisper. (Harry is wild, straining, desperately aroused. He is afraid he might come right there, untouched and terrified.) Those black eyes stare at him, as wild and panicked as an unbroken horse. Harry has lost his balance, he sways slightly. He sees only a flash of darkness, of shadowy robes surrounding him. His eyes are open but unseeing, unfocused. He goes by touch. Long, hot fingers press along the sides of his face, grip at his shoulders. There is the sweep of hair like a moth’s wing along his cheekbone. “I cannot be blamed for this,” Severus Snape whispers brokenly, skin to skin, mouth to mouth, sealed upon each other like they are desperate for air.
Oh, yes. Please, you don’t know how much I need this, need you. Snape, Severus, whatever you are. Take me apart, I want you to crawl up inside me, you cannot get close enough to me. Are you scared? (I am terrified.) What if I am wrong? What if I hate you again? God, I know that you’re ugly but you’re sort of beautiful here, to me, that jaw, that voice, that nose. (Those eyes.) I am better in my head. I cannot say these things to you out loud. Fuck, Severus, touch me, please now, before I die here on the spot.
Severus grips at him, his fingers digging into his shoulder, his hips. There is a moan that snakes up the back of Harry’s throat. Severus tastes of salt, of dust. Harry’s lips are bruised, split under the pressure (teeth scraped against skin). He tastes the blood, like iron, in his mouth. “Oh God,” he moans, hot breath against the curl of Severus’ ear. He feels the other man tense and twitch beside him.
“Are you absolutely sure?” Severus asks, whispers, there is a quiet angry need in it. Yes, yes, I need you, oh god, if you stop touching me I’ll die, please.
“Yesss,” Harry groans into the air between them, his eyes opening into the black of Severus’ own, fierce and penetrating. (Like ink and leather, spiders and batwings.) “I have never wanted anything more, I swear to fucking God.”
He hears the whispered curse again, the faint tightening of Severus’ fingers. He arches into the touch. Brushes his lips across Severus’ neck, the arch of his Adam’s apple, the sandpaper of the start of his dark beard. Severus smells like vetiver and sandalwood, like cheap soap and the sharpness of firewhisky. There is dirt and dried dragon’s blood beneath his fingernails. Harry wants those hands on his back, clawing at him, his own blood under those nails. He is about to explode. “If you don’t do something right now, I will finish right here, I swear to God.”
“Move then,” Severus grunts, hauling him to his feet. (Voice rough, dipping into the shabby tones of Cokeworth.)
Severus, laid out against his grey sheets, hair spread like ink. Harry hovers over him, absorbing. There are so many things he wants to say, he cannot say. He is not good with words; he has never been a poet. Severus, hair like a wine-dark halo. Eyes closed. He thinks of Christ, under the Shroud of Turin, secreting oils into the linen. Sebaceous oil, greasy hair oils. Laid out like a dead priest to be watched for sainthood. He dips his mouth to Severus’ forehead, his eyelids, his mouth, kissing prayers into the other man. Severus arches up, cracking like fire.
“Harry,” he begs (Harry knows he is beyond everything; Severus Snape would never beg.), “don’t. Harder, please .”
Hands rove over the swells and eddies of their bodies. There are public senses and private ones. We navigate the world by sight, sound, smell. The others, touch and taste, are more private. Harry has never touched Severus before, has never tasted him. He feasts. Inhales iron muscle, flesh like clay and yielding to his explorations. Consumes the taste of the dark-eyed man, eyes clenched in a mix of violence and sick want, licks away salt, licks away ash. In the beginning, there is salt. It is in every recipe, the building block of all food, intensifying taste, delivering flavor and pleasure. Salt is critical for our bodies, a central component. Without sodium, we would die. Severus tastes like salt.
The professor grimaces, teeth baring into a snarl. His long fingers sink, lower, lower still. Press of a hot palm against Harry, hard as a blade of obsidian and as fragile. He whines, “Oh my god, oh my fucking god.” Dark eyes glitter. A smirk, a swirl of hot tongue. Somehow, Harry steps out of his jeans, leaves them shed like a caterpillar’s cocoon, lies naked and glorious as Ganymede to the sky.
“I have always wanted -” Severus hisses. He drinks with his eyes, clenches his fists. “Do you have any bloody idea?”
“Show me,” Harry whispers, half a groan. A hand wraps around him, spit-wet and sliding against. Like an oil pump, a piston. That wrist, godforsaken, beautiful, and skinny, pumping back and forth. Severus watches him with famished eyes, like a monster in a cave with prey, waiting to consume. Harry goes willingly to the flame, wraps the spiderweb around himself, wears it like silk. “I want you.”
“What do you want?” Dark as the wine-deep ocean, those mysterious stygian depths we do not know. Dark as the center of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, where no man dares step.
“Your mouth,” he cries (oh how he has dreamt of it, dipped his hand in water, pretended it is Severus’ hot mouth, not his own clumsy fingers), “oh please, God.” Silence. The hand slinks away. The lack of touch is as shocking as the first touch. He floats in a sensory deprivation tank, keening for anything. Can you hear me? Is anybody out there? Swallowed suddenly by the boiling ocean, sucked down into Severus’ aching mouth. ( You have wanted to eat me this whole time, haven’t you? ) Harry cries out.
“Please,” he rasps harshly, his voice snapping like wind, “ harder .” It isn’t enough, it is never enough. He wants to be demolished by the older man’s hands, his mouth. Pummeled into the sheets, left a dark stain on the bed. All the tension is worked up in knots. It is between his shoulder blades, the small of his back, deep in his neck. It has been there for years. Dig in, I need you to dig in to me, get it all out. He is desperate, aching, needy. He hears his keening voice, his moans, thrown out to the ceiling like a ventriloquist’s trick. Severus’ pitch-colored eyes are hooded and dark, they close at Harry’s voice. He watches the other man breathe in sharply, the long fingers dig into his shoulders. Yes, harder. Now, I need it, I need you. You have no fucking idea. He fumbles there, between the spaces between them (he wants no spaces between them). Shoves between the trouser fabric, the coil of dark hair, the needy, desperate cock hot as magma. Severus hisses, mouth full. Harry’s hand might blister, he holds the sun in his aching fingers. They rock into nothingness, that great nothingness, arching into exhilaration and sweat, into that great white supernova. Trading explosions, trading epochs, desperate as a nuclear disaster.
Lift up your hands to the sky.
(In after , Severus falls dead asleep. Harry turns to face him, wraps his arms over the skinny frame, draws the grey cotton sheets up over their shoulders together.)
The next is the same as the first. A man with a sharp profile and a displeased frown (fear in the lines of his face, the pupils of his eyes) dressed in grey, with dark hair and bathed in sunlight through a window.
He didn’t think I’d be back. Something breaks in Harry, a little bit.
“You should go, Potter.” The voice is quiet, entirely flat.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“It’s going to happen again, Potter, do you not understand?” Severus hisses, angry and wild. “It is in me. That foul snake and her godforsaken fangs and that fucking venom is in me and it is going to kill me.”
“I know that, you fucking bastard,” Harry cries, “do you think I fucking care for a second? I don’t care, I don’t care what you’ve done and I don’t care what reasons you’ve got now. Yeah, you’re sick. We’re all gonna get sick. I could get gored by a manticore. Shut up, Severus, and fucking deal with the fact that I want to be with you.”
Severus stares, surprise in his mouth, in his eyes.
He closes his eyes. Breathe, just breathe. This is just Severus being his goddamn usual prick self. (Harry knows that there is no such thing as a happy ending in Severus’ stories. The man will never believe in ever after.)
“What’s in the potion?” He grips the unfortunate back of a chair, the oakwood unyielding.
“Dittany,” The older man says quietly, “and motherwort. Powdered leeches. Graphorn bile.” He grimaces. “You can never conceal the taste of that foul goddamn bile.” (It is a slimy and acidic taste, oddly sweet, like a rancid pickle. Harry grimaces. He knows the repellent flavor; he’d gotten a little in his mouth once, age fifteen, when one of Neville’s potions had exploded in spectacular display.)
“How often do you take it?”
“Every other week.” Severus sighs, “It is … not pleasant.” Yeah, Harry knows. He has heard Pomfrey describe the side effects of the potion. The sense of fatigue, the quickness to bleeding and bruising. The ease of infection, loss of appetite. The numbness in extremities, the shooting pain. It is worse at the time of taking the potion and the subsequent three days. It fades into barely tolerable after. Then, at the fourteen-day-mark, Severus pours out a measured vial, sets out a shotglass. He pounds the potion first, straight to the back of the throat and swallow. Don’t give yourself a chance to taste it. Then, a shot of firewhisky to burn the mouth clean.
“Then I’ll be there when you take it. And after.” Harry glares, his jaw set, hard as stone. Severus lifts his head, eyes hard and angry. There is a brief nod. Alright, it seems to say, you can stay.
In all things, there are opposites. Balance. So out of one the land of history’s greatest ghost stories, also do we hear love stories. The tsarevich, the little maiden, and her golden slipper. Ruslan and his lost Ludmila. Perhaps, somewhere on an empty battlefield in Scotland, there are two men with black hair and curious scars; one with dark eyes, the other with thistle green.
“Stay here,” Severus says. It is quiet and hesitant. Harry’s eyes widen, he looks up at the uncertain professor. Severus is weak today, he had taken the potion a day ago. Today he is grimacing with nausea, buffeted by headaches and pain. (Harry is gentle with his touches. A hand on the arm, a hand on the back. He traces small circles on Severus’ shoulders, scratching lightly at the skin.)
“Here?” He asks. Stay here, at Hogwarts? With you?
“Yes, you ridiculous brat, here . Where else could it possibly be?” The dark professor says, shifting from side to side, clearly uneasy and about to snatch the offer back.
I love you, you know. He looks at the gentled frown lines, the easing of Severus’ face. Do you love me? He wants to drip Veritaserum into Severus’ tea. (Ceylon tea, brewed strongly. No cream, no sugar.) I want to but I would never do that to you. He understands a little more about Dumbledore’s words, about how our choices define us. He is human, capable of base, dark things. Things that make his skin crawl. Things that make him want to burn out his brain with bleach and ammonia. No, like all men, he is made of his choices. He studies Severus, the proud, sharp face cast into the grey Scottish sky, breathing in the forests of Scotch pine and juniper, rowan and birch. They look out on the forests, the waves of pine, where they sway and mix together, the great Caledonian and Forbidden. They can smell the sharpness of the mountains, the creeping lichen, the dank, dark loch. I love you, you bastard. You perfect, ridiculous, mean bastard. I love you, I will never hurt you.
One sly eye peeks at him, a smirk on the thin lips, “What the devil are you thinking about, Harry?”
Harry grins, puts his thoughts away, “Have you ever um…. you know, done the ol’ wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am on your desk?” The black eyes widen, sharpen with heat. The smirk is feral.
“Harry, I’m scandalized ,” Severus drawls, tired but interested, “What will the house-elves think?”
“Did you know you can’t cast cleaning charms on bras?” Ron says as Harry takes a stool at the pub. Ron, copper-haired and ever-lanky, is chewing on his tongue as he frowns over the beer list. (Ron, long-limbed, towering over Harry, had shot up in the last two years. When he bends over, fits at a table or desk, he always gives Harry the impression of a folding chair.)
“You can’t?” Harry asks. He grins, Ron is always a measure of home. Can you be brothers without sharing blood? Harry thinks so, something maybe like this. “Why not?”
“Beats me,” Ron says, sighing, “Hermione’s in a snit about it. She threw them all at my head . They were wet .”
At the end of the night, Ron laughs, shakes his head. He’s damp with spilled lager, his cheeks hurt from laughing. “You look good, Harry,” Ron says. Eyes soft, gentle on an old friend.
“Yeah,” Harry says, thinking of someone far away, close enough by a spell, suffering through staff meetings and detentions. “I think I am. Good, I mean. Pretty good.”
The venom will never be entirely gone. It flows slowly through Severus, metastasizing from cell to cell like a cancer. All venoms fall into four categories, Nagini’s deadly saliva is a necrotoxin, killing each cell as it passes through. It is made up of phospholipase and serine proteases, silent killers moving through cytoplasm.
Let me fix you. Can I? I have magic. It is in my blood (in your blood). How closely have they looked? If I get down, down to the cellular, can I rebuild you? I am patient; I will take all the time it needs. What if I suck the poison out with my mouth, keep a little bowl, spit it out? Does it hurt?
I want to write you a song. A letter. I am not good with words, not like you. They are in my head but in the translation from my mind to my hand, to ink and parchment, I lose it. Gone forever. Why is your body so fascinating to me? I do not know. It is both like mine and unlike mine. You are sharp, your hipbones jut out like a knife. Sometimes, if I brush against you too hard, I come back dripping with blood. I regret nothing. I want to lead you out of the darkness, like Orpheus to Eurydice. I will not make the mistake of looking back, I promise you. I will keep you safe.
Dipterous. I learned this word once. I thought of you. It is a botanist’s word, an entomologist's. It is about wings, having wings attached. Things that evoke wings. I think of you, when you are over me, on top of me, within me. Your sharp shoulder blades, the scapulae, thrown back into sharp and jutting bony and fleshy wings.
I love you. I wish I could find a new way to say this. It is always clumsy. (I have never been good with words.) Let me breathe it into you, brush it into your hair. Sometimes, I study medical texts so I can gather the words to name the places of your body. Occipital bone, mandible, patella, stapes. I have been to these places, I want to mark them with my mouth, my tongue. I want to breathe into every part of you, behind the lungs, under the stomach, the empty space of the atria and ventricles of the heart. What will I say? You are loved, loved. I love you, my love will stretch forward and backward. Into the future, to our end. Into the past, to our beginning. I will swallow up all hurt, hold it in my mouth like mouthwash, like tobacco chew, spit it out.
Where is it now? Sometimes I look at you, wonder where the venom, the toxin lies. Where it creeps. It is slow, arrested by your magic, your brewing skill (you are the best, I have never doubted). If I can find it, catch it in my sight, catch it in my teeth, maybe I can pick it out. Set you free.
Later, later still, he lays in bed, one arm propped under his head, tracing the lines of Severus’ old scars. The flat, shiny snakebite at his neck, the mark on his arm (faded now and murky). There are many others that he cannot name but touches with each fingertip. This is the job of all lovers, to read the history of their loved one’s scars. Bear witness. Kiss it better. Severus runs mild hands over his ribs, counting them, making sure everything is there and correct. Harry’s skin prickles with gooseflesh.
“Will we be alright?”
Severus studies him. The older man’s eyes look dark as dried blood and bright. (Was there always that strange softness? He does not know.)
“Perhaps, Harry." The crow-faced man drawls, "I suppose if we have to be.” There is a softness to Severus’ face, humor to the rich voice.
“I love you,” Severus says. Harry stares, wide-eyed in shock. He said it first. I never thought he would say it first. A faint redness colors the pale, gaunt cheeks. Severus looks away, his jaw tight. Stop it, you idiot. Harry’s arms wrap around the older man. Severus relaxes imperceptibly into the embrace. We always learn the ones we love, so Harry knows how to talk to Severus without saying a word. Skin to skin, he touches his forehead to the other’s cheek. It’s okay. Runs his fingers through Severus’ inky hair. You’re safe. Locks his mouth, his lips, his tongue, against the taller man’s own. You’re loved.
I’ve been saying it this long anyway. “I love you,” he breathes. Severus holds his face against Harry’s, forehead to forehead, eyes shut. His breathing is harsh. It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m here. I’m not leaving. (Severus is good with words, deft in an argument. He is less wary in touch, so Harry rolls over him like a wave, grinding into him like the sea into a cliff. Severus moans, grasping, always needy, even now. I have you, you’re mine. It’s okay. Harry can feel the desperation seeping from the other man into him, the ache, the absolute need. You have me. You’ll never completely believe that, will you? Let me show you. His mouth fumbles at Severus’ collar bones, the divot of his throat. He licks the salt away. One hand takes them both together, tightens like an anaconda, fucks like a storm wave. He crests against Severus, they cry out, arching into seafoam and phosphorescence.
Love is never a happy ending. We walk into love knowing that with love always comes loss. If we are lucky, it is decades away. We can live whole lifetimes in the interval between falling in love and losing it. Harry doesn’t know where the venom sits within the old professor. He doesn’t know if he has fifty years or five days. Severus doesn’t know if Harry will drown, be hit by lightning, come down with Spanish flu. It doesn’t matter. Love is always worth it. Loss comes at the end, but the gift of love is that the end of the world might come slowly. That we will cherish the time while we wait.
Long and sallow fingers clutch at him, possessive even in sleep. (There will be times to come when acquaintances will try to convince him to leave, will recite a resume of Severus’ worst deeds. He’s not a good man, Harry, they will say. He’s a Death Eater, a murderer, he’s paranoid and possessive. Harry will always shrug. He knows the damning truths already, knows them all.) Harry covers the grasping hand with his own. Presses his lips to the knuckles like a ghost. I love you, you miserable wanker.
Returning to Chernobyl is not a sudden thing. It is not up immediately at the stroke of the clock twenty-thousand years later. It is not dangerous one day, it is not suddenly safe the next. The grass grows in gradually. The histories grow, forgotten in the long day. Perhaps the children tell strange tales of once upon a time . Once upon a time, a terrible darkness happened here. Eventually, after a few thousand years, it will be entirely lost. In thousands of years, the river will be safe, the sky will be safe. Healing is inevitable. We march on, ever upward and to the light. The ruins of the nuclear reactor will be erased, from the earth and our memories, torn apart by sand, by wind, by rain. Eventually, not even the stories will remain.