Chapter Text
Small, was the first thing he thought of her, even with the later starting age Hogwarts had adopted since his own schooling, the girl smaller than the other first years around her. He could pick her out even before he could truly see her by the way others reacted to her, the tangled nimbus of her hair around her head the only thing poking out above the crowd of her peers fawning over her. Just like her father.
The new students shifted, an anxious, chattering mass, and he could see her more clearly. Small, he reaffirmed. Short and stick-limbed, coltish in the unformed way of children with her flyaway hair drifting around her shoulders, robes secondhand and perhaps a size too big, thin hands fidgeting on her wand, round glasses crooked on her nose. And then there were her eyes beneath, that haunted green in James Potter’s narrow face. They flicked to him and he tensed further in his chair, glowering.
She was a hatstall, her eyes squeezed closed with childish intensity, but then it blared “GRYFFINDOR!” across the hall, the girl tripping towards the cheering tables in red with a dazed sort of smile on her face. He didn’t want to know her and so he didn’t, took what could pass for evidence as proof that she was the same sort of arrogant as her father and was content in his loathing.
He thought it worsened in her second year after her grand feats, signing autographs and taking photos with Lockhart, the girl reckless in pursuit of further accolades when he was where he was only to protect her.
He came upon the two of them during a supposed detention, Potter fifteen and still scrawny, the man’s hand on her shoulder as they stood entirely too close in his empty classroom. He saw Lockhart’s fingers start to drift over the edge of her shoulder down her arm, white-toothed smile meant to charm, the girl leaning back as if to avoid his proximity, his desk at her legs blocking her retreat, headshot held against her chest like it formed any barrier.
“Potter,” he said, the girl snapping upright, Lockhart stepping away from her with an unhurried casualness that made his desire for his wand grow.
He held out his hand and she scurried over, more relieved to see him than he’d ever expected her to be, placing the picture in his waiting palm. “Upstairs,” he ordered, and she darted past him with only a nod, her footsteps rapid down the hall.
He waited until she’d gone to look at the photo, a blonde grin winking roguishly at him, preening itself, silver script sparkling in the corner that advised Potter to “Think of him.” Severus raised an eyebrow, Lockhart leaning blithely against the desk, as if the words were innocent.
“Have you considered occamy egg yolk shampoo, Severus?” he asked. “I might have a spare bottle I could lend—”
“I tend to consider all things carefully,” he replied frostily, turning on his heels in a harsh flap of robes.
He considered carefully when asked to participate in the duelling club, accepted when he was certain of Lockhart’s participation.
He saw her there, in the crowd when he moved to duel her suitor, her eyes turned up to him, face unusually serious. He wondered which of them she rooted for as he sent the useless fop hurtling into the wall with his expelliarmus, or if she hated them both equally.
She was seventeen when she entered the Triwizard Tournament, her name on a singed little slip of paper that belched out of the goblet after the rest. It would have been easy, to think that like James she was allowed to do as she pleased and escape any consequence. But a small part of him wondered, lying in bed staring at his ceiling and thinking of her apprehensive eyes in the hall, why Dumbledore would insist on her participation. Either she had entered herself and deserved punishment, or someone else had entered her and their motives were suspect. Why was it that when she wasn’t hurtling headlong towards danger herself, she was thrust towards it, allowed to be thrust towards it, their “great hope”?
The Gryffindors and Slytherins were assigned dance lessons together, Severus unsure what sort of warped amusement prompted Dumbledore to so often arrange the pairing. He lingered at the back of the room, not pretending he was doing other than reading as the students tittered, awkward and adolescent, eying each other from around the room. McGonagall was brusque, unembarrassed, had them dancing in assigned pairs to the steady metronome of a broom on the floor easily enough.
He looked up at a particularly vicious swear, Potter paired with a red faced Gregory Goyle who had trod again on her toes, the boy sweating, cursing, and casting Pansy Parkinson furtive glances. Potter's expression was kinder than he expected, her voice too quiet for him to hear her tell Goyle to just relax though he saw her mouth form the words. Small, he thought again as they turned away from him. She was small in the larger boy’s arms, his hands meaty where they clasped hers, sylphlike and only half his width, her head barely to his shoulder. He noted Draco dancing with Granger, both their faces a little pink, the boy stiff backed though they moved smoothly about the room, not sure whether to be amused or concerned as he went back to his book.
Potter danced more gracefully in Diggory’s arms at the ball, her hair spilling from the low knot at her neck to curl around her face, her dress a soft silken gold. He snorted into the rim of his glass when she was the one to step on her partner’s toes during the opening dance; if her stumble hadn’t given her away, the way her face instantly turned bright red would have.
He thought about the ball again when she fell to the ground with the Cup, clinging to Diggory’s lifeless body. He was on his feet, watching her for years, long enough that there was no moment of confused cheering from him, no instant where he mistook her arrival for a victory, but he was not the first to reach her.
He was the one who healed her arm later, after they burst in, wands drawn, to Crouch’s hands on her as he pressed her against the wall, his tongue digging into the wound on her arm, her face twisted in disgust. She looked exhausted, empty, dirt streaked over her face while the adults talked around her. He wiped a bit of it off absently, and she listed into his touch. Small.
Their occlumency lessons became a form of torture for them both. He had no desire to understand her, to know the way she lived at home, to feel her desire to do right, to belong, catalogue her shames and embarrassments, her griefs. It was much easier for her to remain an instantiation, a stand-in for her parents without any motivations or feelings of her own.
“Potter,” he said. He meant to snarl, her head Voldemort’s head, but it was just a word.
She was on the floor, breathing like a wounded, dying thing. He could tell she’d heard him by her eyes on his, but she didn't move, her cheek pressed to the dungeon flagstones, ribs working like a bellows.
“…You should quit,” he said, ambiguous enough you could read the words either way.
It was enough to force her up, shaking her head, her arms trembling as she pushed to her feet. He saw the marks on her hands from her detentions with Umbridge, ‘I must not tell lies’ angry and red across the back of her palms. She hadn’t looked twice at the dittany he’d begun leaving by her desk, as if it wasn’t meant for her. “No— I can— I can do this.”
She couldn’t, too open, too good, too desperate for any scrap of affection. They had relived her memories of Diggory fucking her, and now he had to walk through his days knowing that she still felt lonely when he was inside her.
He considered her, her eyes burning with that familiar stubborn light, shaking as she tried to stand opposite him. She should’ve quit, but she kept refusing. He wanted to accuse her of carelessness, wasting his time, but the girl took their lessons more seriously than he expected, actually practised, and still her thoughts teemed, bursting out of her. “…Legilimens.”
She’s thirteen in a locked cupboard under the stairs.
Push me out, Potter.
She was trying, strained and desperate, but they both knew it wouldn't be enough.
It’s dark as pitch, too little light in the hallway for any of it to seep under the door, but she’s wide awake, her stomach in knots. She can hear their voices outside her door, not even her cousin but his friends over for the night; she’s made herself forget their words so he can’t make them out either. The padlock on her door rattles outside angrily, the boys testing it while she lays in flat, absolute stillness, even her breath held. She wants to move, wants to hide or find something to threaten them with if the lock should break, but she’s paralysed by the belief that as soon as she moves she’ll break whatever protection keeps the door intact. There’s another sharp jerk on the lock and then the loud bang of a fist against the thin wood of her door, Harry jumping in her bed, the boys laughing to themselves as they drift off down the hall. She doesn’t sleep that night, too tense, too sure they’ll come back if she relaxes.
She looks at him, the him in her mind lying next to her thirteen year old self in bed, her small fingers finding his and curling around them in the dark.
He wanted to leave, tired of knowing her. Her next memory started to resolve, one of him, and he could feel her panic but didn't allow himself to move away, show sympathy.
She was in the doorway of the kitchen at Grimmauld Place, watching he and Black glare at each other. His hair was lank, hanging like curtains around his face, and she wondered briefly if anyone had ever pushed it back so they could better see his eyes before they were both looking at her.
“Hi,” she said, looking at Sirius first in greeting, though she let her eyes linger on him.
“Potter,” he drawled. She sometimes forgot how deep his voice was until she heard it again, and then it washed over her anew.
“I was meant to see you alone, Potter,” he said to her, the quiet sneer she’d grown used to curling his mouth, “but Black—”
“I’m her godfather,’ interjected Sirius, louder than necessary, making her glad she hovered in the doorway instead of being truly in the room between them.
By contrast he grew more silkily, waspishly quiet. “The Headmaster has sent me to tell you, Potter, that it is his wish for you to study Occlumency this term.”
“Who’s going to be teaching me?’ she asked, watching him carefully. She thought she knew, but wanted him to say it.
He raised an eyebrow, and she found the gesture more elegant than she should have. “I am,” he replied.
She kept her knees straight, though she felt a bit like she was melting, her emotions confused and tangled.
“I assure you I did not beg for the job,” he informed them snidely, misinterpreting her expression. He rose to his feet in one sinuous motion; she always had the sensation when he stood of a mountain rising, growing taller and taller until he stood to his full height, towering over the room. “I will expect you at six o’clock on Monday evening, Potter. My office.”
She nodded, not sure what else to say. She wavered in the doorway and he seemed to notice, waiting the briefest moment for her to speak. She wanted to offer him tea, but couldn’t think why and doubted he would accept.
It was Sirius who spoke instead, unusually serious. “If I hear you’re using these Occlumency lessons to give Harry a hard time, you’ll have me to answer to.”
His eyes left her as if they had never been on her, his sneer firmly back in place as he looked down at Sirius. “Were you hoping to be the first to give her a hard time yourself, dog?”
“What the fuck did you just say?” Sirius roared, wand out and raised, Snape’s own in his hand.
“Don’t!” She was away from the door before she really thought about it, trying to get in between them and feeling smaller than she usually did with them both livid and looming over her.
“Harry— get out— of— the way—” Sirius growled, trying to push her bodily away with his free hand, but she was too stubborn, too slippery, her hand curled in his robes at one point to maintain her position defending him, defending them both from something stupid.
“You’re being idiots,” she snapped, both of them far too old for this testosterone filled nonsense, and then the kitchen door swung in, Hermione and the entire Weasley family walking in beaming, Mr. Weasley recovered in their midst.
“Cured!” he announced brightly, before the sight of her between them both seemed to register.
“Merlin’s beard,” Mr. Weasley said, wide-eyed.
He pocketed his wand, eyes on Black before he turned to sweep across the kitchen, passing the Weasleys without comment. At the door he looked back at her, dark eyes forever unreadable.
“Six o’clock, Monday evening, Potter.”
Sirius glared after him, his wand at his side. He waited until the Weasleys had all drifted away again to pull her aside, hand heavy on her shoulder. “Be careful with Snivellus, Prongslet.”
She thought about defending him, but decided instead to smile. “It’s nothing I can’t deal with, Siri.”
Black shook his head, eyes dark. “It’s not that he’s an arsehole or could be working for Voldemort… I don’t trust him with you.”
“He isn’t like that,” she said quietly, so sure.
Her memory looked at him, observing from the corner. “You aren’t,” she said steadily, as if he needed the assurance.
The memory broke, Potter finally pushing him out, her embarrassment the roar of an ocean before their thoughts further intertwined and she was in his mind.
His father shouted at his mother, today cowering instead of screaming back, while he sat in a corner, five years old and wary-eyed, dark eyes rimmed with red from before he’d run out of tears. She sat next to him, her confusion dissolving into an empathy that seared. His father raised his hand and she turned his face to hers, speaking to him like he was truly a child, her hands gentle.
“Don’t look.”
He lay in his darkened bedroom, pointing his wand at the fat flies that buzzed in slow circles along the ceiling, swollen with the detritus his parents left around the house, half empty liquor bottles spilled on the floor, days old leftovers on the counter, a feast for the scavengers. She lay in his bed next to him, the two of them nearly of an age, his memory a year or two younger and still far taller than her with unwashed hair lank around his shoulders, dressed all in black muggle clothes. His teenage self looked at her next to him, this girl who shouldn’t have looked twice at him much less been in his bed. Her face flushed beneath his attention, at their position—
“Enough.”
He gripped her arms in the classroom, Potter drenched in sweat after the hours he’d spent ripping through her mind, her wide eyes looking up at him. He could feel her a little, still, see through her eyes the way his skin had greyed after her intrusion, the tightness around his mouth.
She opened her mouth, but didn’t seem to know what to say once she’d started. Her eyes flicked across his face, as if trying to reconcile the younger versions of him she’d seen with who he was now.
He pushed her away from himself, ignoring the way she stumbled and nearly fell to her knees. “Go to bed,” he ordered, hating the raggedness in his own voice, the exposure.
She hesitated but ultimately moved to do as he asked, gathering her things for “remedial potions” to her chest with shaking fingers, smoothing her dark, sweat-soaked hair back behind her ears so its disarray was less noticeable, her wobbly legs like a newly birthed foal as she forced herself to the door. He felt her behind him as he pretended to be absorbed in the papers on his desk, the way she stopped at the door, her eyes on his back.
“Empathy isn’t pity you know,” she said. “Just because I understand—”
“Go to bed, Potter,” he said again, sharper, not turning to face her.
He searched for her with a degree of franticness wholly unexpected when she didn’t return from the Forest, the foolish, foolish, emotional girl. He’d stopped teaching her, thrown her out after he pulled her from his pensieve though she tried to cling to his robes, her body down the length of his in a way he chose not to dwell on as she tried to make him look at her, tried to apologise. She was— He knew— They were both fools.
He caught her at the end of the year, ready to curse Draco, her grief a rage that seemed to steam off her skin. Part of him wondered when she would learn to hide herself.
“Come with me, Potter,” he ordered coolly.
Her grip on her wand didn’t loosen, but she followed after him, the Slytherins sneering as he led her to his office and waved a hand for the door to close.
“You’re grieving,” he said, watching her from behind his desk.
“How perceptive,” she replied acidly, eyes burning.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he informed her dispassionately, still watching her as carefully as ever though he was conscious of how their interaction might appear to Voldemort if observed.
She flinched at the words. He saw the way she wanted to crumble, how she tried to fight it off. “I should’ve— should’ve known—”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he told her again quietly. “Believe me, Potter, I very well know.”
“He was the only one who— He was all I had left.” Her lip trembled as she tried not to cry, big green eyes luminous with gathering tears. He could see why Dumbledore had kept her in misery all these years; she was beautiful in her heartbreak.
He crossed to her, reluctant, and she fidgeted where she stood as if trying to restrain her need for comfort, trying not to reach for him. “You have your friends,” he told her, offering a handkerchief dismissively. “Granger and Weasley.”
She blew her nose shamelessly, like a trumpet, his eyebrow raising when she tried to hand the snot rag back. “It’s not the same as family.”
He knew what her family was, what his own had been. “Isn’t it?”
She looked up at him, eyes searching. “Severus?”
His eye twitched, but for once he chose not to correct her as to the proper form of address.
She took a hesitant step closer, still looking up at him. “Can I just—?” Without waiting for an answer she took another step forward, into him, resting her forehead against his chest. He breathed steadily, listening to the unevenness of her own breaths, nearly sobs, her face hidden against his chest.
The next year she had his old potions textbook, absorbed in it with an unusual interest for her when she wasn’t off having private lessons with Dumbledore. She wasn’t the idiot he had often derided her as, but she’d never been one to spend hours with her nose crammed in a book. He didn’t know what the feeling her interest had inspired was, pride or possessiveness or discomfort, but it had been many years since he’d struggled to ignore his more inconvenient emotions.
And then came the truth, from a dying, manipulative old man, remorseless in the course he had set for them all.
“You have used me,” he accused, voice low.
“Meaning?” The casualness of the word was yet another insult.
“I have spied for you, and lied for you, put myself in mortal danger for you, all to keep Lily Potter’s child safe. Now you tell me you have been raising her like a pig for slaughter—”
“But this is touching, Severus,” said Dumbledore, serious or mocking it was hard to tell and hardly mattered. “Have you grown to care for the girl after all?”
Had he? He had grown to know her, but “care” was a question he was more comfortable with unanswered. “Expecto patronum!” From the tip of his wand burst the silver doe, the same as Lily’s, the same as the girl’s. It circled the office once and bounded out the window, real enough the sound of its hooves could almost be heard. The old man watched it fly away before turning back to Snape, his eyes full of an empathy still unusual after all their years together.
“After all this time?”
“Always.”
He left the headmaster’s office in an unusual state of emotion, robes flapping around him as he stalked through the halls, not entirely sure where he was going but certain of a need to move—
He knocked into the girl, her nose in his book as she walked around the corner, and he snarled. “Potter—”
Dishevelled, she thought, her eyes wide and guileless looking up at him. “Are you alright?”
The question shouldn’t have been so genuine coming from her to him. He pulled her closer, hands on either side of her face, and pressed his lips fiercely to hers. She made a soft, surprised noise that made him think of Diggory fucking her across his desk in an empty dorm room, but then she was holding him back, hands fisted in his clothes, kissing him back, trying to meet his desperation. He pressed her tightly into the wall, his book falling to the floor with a soft thump, hands roaming over her, harsh and exigent. She clung to him in return like a piece of driftwood in a storm, but she didn’t push him away, kissing him like she needed him too, had been waiting for him. The lie that he was unaware of her crush grew tiresome to maintain. He pushed her skirt up, her breathing rapid, lips bruise red, using both hands to tear her underwear from her legs. He unbuttoned only enough of his robes to fish his cock out, wrapping her legs around himself and pushing inside her in the corridor where anyone could’ve seen.
“Tell me you want me, Potter,” he ordered darkly, eyes holding hers.
She nodded, her hands curled in his hair as his thrusts pushed her up the wall. “I do,” she promised, voice quiet, mostly breathless.
“Do I feel good inside you?” he demanded, grinding himself deeper, his harsh breaths hitting her neck. He hadn’t done enough to prepare her, but she was still wet, still taking him.
She whimpered rather than answer, clenching around him, and he pulled back to meet her eyes. “Do you still feel lonely?” he asked, more vicious than he needed to be.
She leaned forward, kissed him, and he could feel her, could feel how good she felt on his cock, how she wanted him to fuck her so she could come apart, but he could feel her melancholy too, her confusion.
He fucked her harder, her quiet mewls somewhere between pain and pleasure, both of them close when he could hear students coming down the hall. He should have ripped away from her, but he didn’t care anymore, didn’t care about keeping the sacrificial lamb pristine before her slaughter.
“Snape,” she said, pushing at his chest even as her cunt tried to milk his cock.
He bit her lips and she spasmed, soundless as she climaxed on him, scrabbling at his arms and shoulders for purchase, body twitching around his. He grunted and followed her over, face buried against the pale, delicate column of her neck as he poured himself inside her.
The students were almost upon them by the time he pulled out of her, her cunt fluttering and trying to hold in his seed, her underwear ripped on the floor. He pulled her skirt down and handed her back his book, the two of them avoiding eye contact. He watched her walk past the chattering first years, torn bit of pale fabric that had been between her legs tucked in his pocket.
“Is this why you fucked me?” she asked him after the astronomy tower, angrier than he had ever seen her, her wand out. As always there she was in his head too, her thoughts a scream more than anything coherent; he knew the feeling.
She attacked with a viciousness he didn’t return, merely defending with a bored expression posed on his face, though the strength of her roiling emotions nearly let her spells land a few times.
“Sectumsempra!” she yelled, a wound opening along his cheek.
He reached up, surprised, and looked at the red on his fingers. She stood opposite him, chest heaving, her rage not visibly abated by the spilling of his blood.
She raised her wand again and he knocked her back, Potter still struggling to get to her feet when he hauled her up by the front of her shirt.
“You dare use my own spells against me, Potter?” he asked her, pretending to a dangerousness he didn’t feel. “I, the Half-Blood Prince?”
The knowledge rippled across her mind, the girl not as shocked as she could have been; a distant part of him wondered if she had already suspected. “You’re a coward,” she spat, eyes furious and wounded.
He kissed her again because he knew that she would hate it, the press of their lips longer than he expected her to allow before he dropped her to the ground, swishing out of the school gates and disapparating with the rest of them.
He followed her as best he could during her year of hiding. He led her to the sword in the pond when the portraits found her, hand tight around his wand as she was dragged under. He waited for the boy, Weasley, to come and fish her out, listening to the water as she thrashed beneath the surface. He thought of her, the way her chin lifted when she grew stubborn, the way her eyes could light, and strode forward from his hiding spot when he shouldn’t have, pulse in his ears the only sound until his arm broke the water. He hauled her out, broke the chain strangling her, the two of them collapsing into the snow, Potter wet and shivering, pale blue hands fisted in his clothes out of reflex as much as anything.
“S—S—Severus,” she said, teeth chattering.
“It's alright,” he lied, holding her, and then he took the memory of himself away.
His search for her in the battlefield that Hogwarts became was desperate before Voldemort called him to the Shrieking Shack, and he knew he would die before he told her all he needed to.
He knew less that she would appear, kneeling at his side, hands quick and a little unsteady as she tried to staunch the wounds on his neck.
“Hermione—!” she called, an importunate plea for assistance, but he had no knowledge of Granger, saw only her and her eyes.
“Potter,” he tried, though he didn’t think the word truly made it out of his mouth as such. She looked back at him and he reached up, the girl leaning down to meet his hand, nestle her cheek into it. “Look… at… me,” he begged, her hands stained with his blood smoothing his hair from his face.
“You have to stay,” he thought she told him, but already the world grew dim. It could have been his imagination, that he felt her lips before he slipped away.
***
Harry pulled herself out of the pensieve, on her hands and knees in Dumbledore’s office. She tried to swallow the acid rising up her throat, but instead she vomited across the rug.