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Chapter Text

There’s something desperate in the way she looks at Potter. 

Of course, there’s something desperate about all of the children. Born in wartime, mired in tragedy, searching desperately for light like weedy flora seeking out the sun. Not a one of them survived their childhood unscathed—those who survived at all. 

She stares at Potter with wide, glistening eyes, perpetually red-rimmed, lashes salted and clumped. She watches his back when he turns away, turns her ginger head to follow his every motion. Her fingers clench in her robes when she thinks she’ll lose sight of him. 

Potter, for his part, gives her wan, wispy smiles, cracking at the edges, falling shy of his eyes. 

He reaches for her hands as he settles at her side, and they brace against each other like an ancient house collapsing. 

~*~

Severus watches them from his bed at the far end of the infirmary, smoothing trembling fingers over the gauze at his throat. 

He wonders if he’d recognise the feeling of desperation.

He wonders if a fish knows it’s in the ocean. 

~*~

On his twelfth birthday, Severus asked his mother if he was bare.  

She’d stared blankly into his eyes, her own vacant and hazy with the booze, then turned her gaze to her own mark—a black smudge near her elbow, lost in a ring of yellowing bruises. 

She’d sipped at her gin, clinking the ice against the glass, and whispered, “One can hope.”

~*~

When Severus was fourteen, Lily stretched the neck of her blue dress over the curve of her shoulder and showed him her mark.

A wild cluster of little circles around a small hollow diamond; pretty and strange, an alluring stain on her porcelain skin. 

She’d bitten her lip then, and gently asked to see his, and a weight had settled heavy and cold in the pit of his stomach. 

“I’m bare,” he’d said, and felt her slip through his fingers like sand. 

~*~

At seventeen, Severus sold his unmarked soul to the highest bidder—the only bidder. 

He knew it was wrong, knew it for a mistake. Already, he could see the light of madness dawning in the man’s eyes, could see the writhing scaled creature twisting under his skin. 

And yet, to feel the brand etching into his own flesh, staining him with wretched purpose, burning away the endless white expanse of bare, bare, bare —

To finally, finally, be marked. 

~*~

Potter’s mark was a strange thing—as everyone and their mother seemed to have noticed. 

A seven-pointed star, solid black, just beneath a speckled hollow circle on the inside of his right wrist. A sun and moon bound by gravity, forever separated by a hapless inch of bare skin. 

Severus spent the majority of the boy’s first year confiscating scribbled replicas from his starstruck classmates. 

He burned the parchments to ash in the grate, one by one by one. 

~*~

Snape stared. And stared. And stared a bit more. 

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. This—more than anything simple or pleasant, Merlin forbid—was precisely the sort of thing that would happen next in the Greek tragicomedy of his life. 

He shifted his belly against the sticky floorboards, slithering toward the patch of moonlight a metre away. The wound at his neck still bled sluggishly down his front, but the antivenin concentrate had done its work, and really, none of it mattered at all any more. 

Close enough now, he stretched his arm into the shaft of blue light. 

Nearly gone was the dark mark, fading from his flesh like the last flicker of morsmordre, the final tribute to his worst mistake sputtering out. And underneath it—

Of course. 

Underneath it sat a seven-pointed star, tucked beneath a speckled hollow circle.

An awful sound crawled up Snape’s throat, pressing its way through his gritted teeth. 

He hadn’t the water to spare for tears, nor the energy to scream or tear at his limp hair. So he stared at the mark—his mark, His mark—and hacked out a laugh, spitting black blood onto the rotted floor. 

~*~

There’s something desperate in the way she looks at Potter. 

Yes, Severus thinks. That will do. 

Chapter Text

Poppy releases him from the infirmary six days later, eying him with a warm regard he hadn’t expected ever to receive again. He assures her he’s fine with a sneering remark, but she only smiles at him with shining eyes. 

He makes his way through the castle with his hand poised over his wand, but there are precious few students milling about, and no Ministry personnel to speak of. 

Of a sudden, he recalls startling awake in the infirmary several days prior, vision swimming with the cocktail of potions Poppy had poured down him. Shacklebolt and two fresh-faced young Aurors had stood near his bed, wands in hand, allayed only by Potter himself, stood between Snape and his reckoning like a damned guardian angel. 

Snape can’t recall what the boy had said, only the urgent, outraged pitch of his voice and the buzz of unintentional magic thickening in the air. They’d had words for barely a moment before Potter had pointed a steady finger at the door, head held high and shoulders back, immovable as a bloody statue. Shacklebolt and his lackeys had left without another word. 

Severus had let his eyes flutter closed as the boy turned to face him, burying his left arm ever deeper beneath the covers. 

~*~

Severus enters his rooms with little fanfare, though when he’d left them last he had presumed he wouldn’t return. Better to die on one’s feet, and all that rot. 

The place is mostly unchanged, save for a few toppled books and phials, likely knocked from their places by the destructive spells that had rocked the castle. 

He kneels carefully to pick them up, replacing them as a matter of course, before striding towards his bedchamber. 

The room is precisely as he left it: bed studiously made, cold ashes in the grate, and several bookshelves lined with esoteric texts. 

Not esoteric enough, though. 

He drops to his knees, bones creaking at the motion, and slides the little iron safe from under the bed.

It’s rusted and strange, spelled to reveal no seams or hinges. Severus presses his thumb to the place where he knows the latch to be and murmurs the passphrase he’d set when he was thirteen. 

“Pulchrus macula.”

The little box pops open, a plume of ancient dust rising from its depths, and Snape sticks a spindly hand inside. 

There are trinkets and baubles, silly bric-a-brac he hardly remembers putting there. Bits of parchment with scribbled shapes on, and finally, there, there—

A small, leather-bound book at the bottom, its title inlaid in gold filigree.

It’s likely the last copy in circulation—banned as it was almost immediately after its publication some two hundred years ago. He’d come across it by sheer happenstance, sitting on a dusty shelf at Borgin and Burke’s, expertly transfigured to resemble an old ledger. Foolish boy he’d been, he had emptied his pockets onto the counter, given Mr Burke every last knut he had. But he’d walked out of the shop with a spring in his step, lighter than he’d ever felt before. 

Snape peers down at the little book in his hand, running his fingers over the shining title. 

A Treatise on the Alteration of Soulmarkes by Hepzibah P Tallow. 

~*~

Of course, the book had offered little in the way of granting Severus the mark he’d so desperately wanted. In fact, Ms Tallow had decried the very existence of bareness, had advised any such readers to simply “check between their toes.”

Severus had nearly thrown the book out then, but something had given him pause. A fluttering strain of hope perhaps, or the childish determination that he would succeed where so many others had failed. 

No matter, Severus thinks. It was all for the best. 

~*~

It’s dark magic, of course. Altering a mark has always been taboo, bordering on sacrilege—an affront to the oldest magic known to man. 

The Weasley girl needn’t know that, though. 

Snape writes out the incantation on a slip of parchment, annotates with simple instructions—the wand movement, the ink needed to draw the new shape, how often the spell must be recast to prevent reversion—and slips it into the girl’s coin purse. 

She stares unblinking at Potter’s back, observing nothing at all, and Snape slips away unseen into the welcoming shadows.

~*~

Precisely one week after the Dark Lord’s all too timely demise, someone releases select memories from Albus’s pensieve to The Quibbler. 

The Prophet runs with it, of course, and the WWN. Potter very loudly corroborates, as does Malfoy the younger. The Ministry releases a near incomprehensible statement lauding their own paltry contributions to the war effort and offhandedly naming a handful of notable allies—Severus P Snape listed amongst them. 

Snape ignores them all in favour of packing up his things, penning a three line resignation letter (To Whom It May Concern: I hereby resign my post. S P Snape), and slavering over Tallow’s treatise like a man possessed. 

(And possessed he hatefully is.)

By the time a month has passed, he’s poured half of his savings into a bleak property in the West Country, ignored correspondence from the Ministry thanking him for his “service” and firmly suggesting he not leave the country, and viciously refused interviews with The Quibbler, The Prophet, and (for Merlin’s sake) Witch Weekly. 

When two months have passed, the world at large breathes a sigh of relief and goes about its silly business. Snape rearranges the letters of his name until he’s marginally satisfied, sets up his garden with painstaking precision, and applies for six different patents, which he leverages for an Associate Master position at a mid-level laboratory. 

And Harry Potter elopes with Ginevra Weasley. 

~*~

Snape perfects Tallow’s rudimentary removal charm—more an invisibility spell, really, and a temporary one at that. But it does as intended, disappearing the wretched mark from his flesh for a period of six blissful days. 

When he sees the shadow of the seven-pointed star poking up through his skin, he casts a silent obscurus macula, cutting it down like an errant weed. 

Chapter Text

The day after Raven Perseus Spince’s forty-eighth birthday—coincidentally shared with the long-forgotten Severus Prince Snape—he is unfortunately called to attend a mandatory meeting of the laboratory’s master brewers. 

Snape casts a glamour over himself—straightens his nose and shrinks it several sizes, lightens his hair and eyes to a forgettable brown—and dons an unremarkable blue robe. He assures himself that his mark is still faded—another day or two, he thinks, before it turns up like a bad penny—then floos directly into the conference hall. 

Several of his colleagues have already arrived; Culvert and Sinclair stand huddled together in the corner, and Wickshaw sits alone at the large marble table. 

“Spince,” Wickshaw greets him with a rakish half smile. He’s a passably handsome fellow, American, and a decent brewer, though all too affable a sort for the solitary art of potion-making. 

Snape nods an acknowledgement and seats himself two chairs away.

Wickshaw, of course, hoists himself up and moves two seats over, countering Snape’s scowl with a genial smirk. 

“Aw come on, Raven,” he grouses. “I don’t bite.”

The sharp, too-white sparkle of his smile says otherwise, but Snape only rolls his eyes, folding his arms across his chest. 

Wickshaw huffs a laugh and settles back into his seat. “You know what this is about?”

Snape glances at him sidelong then turns his gaze toward the table. “Haven’t the foggiest.”

Wickshaw nods and tips his head toward Snape. “Last time they brought us all in was when Hollister bit it,” he grumbles. “Though I think I would’ve been more surprised to hear he was still kickin’. How old was he again?”

Snape huffs a sigh. “One hundred and sixty-two.”

Wickshaw guffaws. “Jesus, quit while you’re ahead.”

Snape gives a vague hum, and the fireplace roars as Madam Atropa steps through. 

She’s a stern-faced woman, though generally kinder than her appearance would suggest. Snape vaguely recalls her from his school days; she’d been a prefect for his house when he was a first year, respected amongst the Slytherins and even reasonably well-liked by the other houses. 

She’d worn a black silk glove over the mark on her right hand—similar to the laced one she wears now—as was common practice amongst a certain generation of pureblood witches. 

To hide our shame, Snape’s mother had once said, though it had taken him many years to truly understand. 

“Be seated, gentlemen,” Atropa says, and sits herself at the head of the table. Snape scowls as Culvert and Sinclair grumble to one another, settling in opposite Wickshaw and himself. 

Atropa sucks in a short breath. “I do apologise for pulling you away from your work. I realise some of you may have been at a delicate stage—”

“Very delicate,” grouses Sinclair. Snape represses an eye roll while Wickshaw snorts a laugh. 

Atropa gives a tight smile. “Yes. I do apologise,” she repeats and sounds nearly sincere. “However. We’ve taken on a… highly visible new client.”

Wickshaw leans forward in his seat. “Oh?”

Atropa nods. “Yes. Perhaps the most notable client Panacea Laboratories has ever served.”

Snape feels something tighten in the pit of his stomach, and he grits his teeth against the sensation. 

He steels himself against her next words, plucked from the air like presque vu: “Harry Potter.”

Sinclair and Culvert stiffen across the table, and Wickshaw leans back, giving a low whistle. Snape—Spince, rather—reveals nothing at all.  

Atropa dips her head and smiles more like a grimace. “Rather, Mrs Potter, actually, but Mr Potter is handling correspondence while his wife is indisposed.”

“She’s fallen ill, hasn’t she?” Culvert inquires. “The Prophet’s been—“

“Yes, yes,” Atropa mutters offhand. “All the rags have seen fit to weigh in on Mrs Potter’s condition—vultures that they are.”

That’s certainly true, Snape admits. He’d begrudgingly subscribed to The Prophet monthly (abridged, thank Merlin), as well as The Quibbler’s weekly review—if only to ensure no charges were brought against him in his absence. 

Unfortunately, Potter and his maiden fair were all too often in the news, their trivial carryings on emblazoned across the front page at every opportunity. When Mrs Potter fell ill—some months ago now, though Snape had studiously skipped the articles—the papers had turned, of course, to baseless supposition.

Atropa taps her lacquered nails against the tabletop, and a thick file of scrolls appears under her hand. “What said rags do not know,” she continues, “and what will not leave this room”—she casts a sharp look around the table—“is that, over the course of the last several years… Mrs Potter has lost three children.”

Snape feels his spine go ramrod straight, toes curling into the soles of his boots. 

No. 

No, that can’t—

Sinclair and Culvert share an inscrutable look, and Wickshaw clears his throat, leaning forward with a bald frown. 

“Is she alright?” he asks. 

Atropa blows out a sigh, dipping her head in a weary nod. “More or less, yes. Point of fact, that’s why Mr Potter has engaged us.” She flips open the file, fluttering through the crisp pages. “According to experts at both St. Mungo’s”—Culvert gives a sharp snort at that, silenced by a quelling glare from Atropa—“and the British Institute of Mediwizardy… both Mr and Mrs Potter are in perfect health.”

She peers around the conference table with narrowed eyes, expectant. 

Snape knows precisely what she’s waiting for, knows precisely the conclusion any one of his admittedly rather astute colleagues will draw—

“Pardon my bluntness,” Wickshaw says into the thick silence, and Snape clenches his fists beneath the table, “but… are the Potters mated?”

Snape barely contains a flinch, smoothing his face into a vague scowl. His left forearm burns like a summoning. 

It’s the most obvious answer, of course. True mates rarely have any difficulty conceiving; between a healthy young pair like Potter and Weasley the Seventh, such a thing is all but unheard of. 

Atropa nods an acknowledgement. “Mr Potter says so, though he…” She trails off briefly, and Snape stares intently at the speckled swirls on the tabletop. “Well,” she concedes. “Mr Potter says so. Though they aren’t registered with the Ministry.”

Sinclair sputters. “Why ever not?”

Atropa flutters a dismissive hand. “The modernism of youth, I imagine. It’s hardly relevant.”

A churlish breath escapes Snape’s throat, edged in something not unlike hysteria, and Wickshaw cuts him a concerned glance, though none of the others seem to have heard. 

“In any case,” Atropa asserts, “Mr Potter has put his trust in the masters here at Panacea, and we will not fail him. 

“Master Culvert,” she continues, “I’d like you to run screens, if you will. I’ll send you the samples from the BIM forthwith.”

“Of course, Madame,” Culvert says with an unctuous smirk. 

Atropa gives a tight-lipped smile in response. “Master Sinclair, if you’d be kind enough to assist him.”

Sinclair scowls, grumbling, “I’m at a delicate stage—”

“In your own time,” Atropa sighs. “Master Wickshaw, I’d like you to run point with Mr Potter. He’ll need progress updates, instruction, translation for the layman—“

Wickshaw holds up a hand, giving a wan smile. “Say no more.”

“Lovely. And of course, Master Spince, I’d like you on—“

“No.”

The room goes abruptly silent, and Snape feels all eyes snap to him.

A moment passes, anxious and awkward, and Atropa shifts in her seat. 

“I… beg pardon, Master Spince, did you say—”

“I said no,” Snape repeats, tone sharper than is entirely appropriate, though Atropa seems rather too bewildered to notice. “My contract clearly stipulates that I may refuse any engagement”—not that he ever has, of course; in the six years he’s been employed by Panacea, he has thrown himself into every project he’s been offered, has sought out further work when none was forthcoming, has done anything and everything to distract himself from the ever-itching mark branded into his—“and I am refusing this one.”

Sinclair harrumphs loudly while Culvert gasps like an idiot, and Snape feels Wickshaw’s eyes boring into his side. 

Atropa ignores them all, lacing her fingers together over the stack of parchments. “Yes, Master Spince, I am fully acquainted with your contract,” she says archly. “I am simply confused as to why you might—”

“If you are, in fact, acquainted with my contract,” Snape snips, “you must also know that I am not required to offer explanation regarding any refusal of engagement.”

Sinclair gives a derisive snort at that, then cowers under Snape’s pointed glare. 

Wickshaw shifts in his seat and leans toward Snape, murmuring, “Raven…”

“Thank you for your attendance, gentlemen,” Atropa interrupts, rising gracefully to her feet. “I’ll deliver your assignments posthaste. That will be all, for now.”

Sinclair and Culvert push back from the table, smirking at each other like the twats they both are, and Wickshaw hoists himself up and saunters towards the door at a leisurely pace, glancing back at Snape—Spince—askance. 

Snape ignores him, electing instead to primly gather his robes about himself as he rises to his feet. 

“A moment, Master Spince,” Atropa says, then glances toward Wickshaw still hovering at the door. “That will be all, Master Wickshaw.”

Wickshaw has the good grace to look chastened, and departs shortly thereafter, casting a last concerned glance toward Snape as he goes. 

Madame Atropa takes her seat, angling herself toward Snape. “Please sit, Master Spince.”

Snape’s hands clench uselessly in his robes as he bites out, “No,” tacking on a bland, “thank you.”

Atropa sighs. “Master Spince—”

“I will not be dissuaded,” Snape hisses. “I am entirely within my right, not to mention the bounds of my contract—”

“I’m aware of that, Master Sp—”

“—and I will not be moved otherwise. If your intention is to convince me—”

“Master Snape—”

“I assure you, Madame, you are wasting your br—.”

Snape bites down hard on his tongue, jaw snapping shut in alarm. Atropa peers up at him, one brow arched high and a smirk playing at her mouth. 

Snape’s eyes narrow to slits. “Beg your pardon, Madame, what… did you call me?”

Atropa crosses one leg over the other, folding her arms across her narrow chest. “I called you your name, Severus.”

Snape sucks in a harsh breath, spine straightening in dismay. 

It’s been a long while since he heard his given name spoken aloud—longer still since he’d been addressed so. He’d nearly forgotten the sound of it; its tumbling cadence and sharp sibilance, redolent of snakes and skulls and seven-pointed stars—

“I was so very proud to be a prefect,” Atropa says, mild voice cutting through Snape’s wayward thoughts.

He glances down at her, smoothing his face into careful blankness—pointless, as he’s already been caught out. 

Atropa leans forward in her seat, crossing her tiny wrists daintily on her knee. “I paid close attention to the students of my house,” she says, and tips her head to the side. “The first years, in particular.”

Snape swallows. “How long have you known.”

Atropa huffs a laugh. “Why, since the moment you introduced yourself, of course,” she smiles wryly. “I doubt anyone on earth can inject as much disdain into simple pleasantries as you, Severus.”

Snape’s teeth grind hard. “It’s a gift.”

Atropa snorts indelicately and shifts in her seat. 

“You must know, Severus,” she posits, tone circumspect, “that you needn’t hide yourself away.”

Snape huffs and casts his eyes toward the floor. 

Minerva had said much the same thing the last time he’d deigned to open his flue to her some years ago now. You were exonerated, she’d insisted, You’re free.

He’d taken her half-drunk tea from her hands, ushered her toward the fireplace, heedless of her squawked protests, and after she’d gone, he’d pickled himself in a bottle of Old Ogden’s, pouring finger after finger until he couldn’t see straight.

Exonerated he may well be, but free he is not. 

“I’m glad to have Master Spince,” Atropa murmurs, and Snape’s eyes cut to her. “But I’d’ve hired Master Snape in an instant.”

Master Snape is dead, he wants to say, wants to languish in the fanciful melodrama of the declaration—if only to displace himself from the stark truth of it. 

He bites his tongue and looks away, and Madame Atropa heaves a sigh. 

“Well,” she says a moment later. “I realise you and the Potters”—Snape staves off a flinch at the name, though only just—“have a bit of a… history, as it were.” Snape gives a bitter grunt at the bald understatement, and Atropa arches a brow. “However… Mrs Potter is quite unwell. Any assistance you might—”

“I will not,” Snape repeats, softer now, but no less resolved. Point of fact, he has already given Mrs Potter his assistance—has given her far more than that, truth be told. 

Atropa sighs again. “Severus—”

Snape straightens his spine and lifts his chin high. “If Panacea requires the input of the Senior Master on this engagement,” he says flatly, “then I will resign my post immediately.”

Atropa forgoes the sigh this time and rolls her eyes instead. “Heavens no, Severus,” she mutters, and Snape feels his shoulders loosen slightly. “Certainly, if any potioneer could craft a brew to aid in unmated conception, I’d imagine it’d be you.” She quirks a brow at him. “Ruddy genius that you are.”

Normally, Snape would bristle at the compliment, offput by recognition as he’s always been, but his ear catches on—

“Unmated conception,” Snape repeats, keeping his tone scrupulously flat. 

Atropa frowns, tipping her head to the side. “Well… yes?” She glances toward the stack of scrolls, then back to Snape. “Two young healthy mates should have no trouble conceiving. There’s no other plausible explanation I can think—”

Snape balls his hands into fists to keep them from trembling. “Potter told you—”

“Mr Potter told me very little, and I did not ask further,” Atropa interjects firmly, and Snape’s jaw clenches at the chastisement. 

“But,” she offers, “from our brief interview, I gather that Mr Potter is… a fine, upstanding young man, who, near as I can tell”—she catches Snape’s eye with an inscrutable look—“is poised for heartbreak.”

Snape stares at her for a long, interminable moment and does not speak. 

Finally, she blows out a sigh and rises to her feet. She’s a petite slip of a thing, as she’s always been; even as a first year, Snape had stood an inch or so taller. But she’s a formidable witch, an excellent brewer, and a Slytherin to boot.

“I can’t make you take this assignment, Severus,” she murmurs, and Snape arches a brow. She knows his identity, his history, his bloody home address; holding all the cards as she is, Snape doubts there’s anything she couldn’t make him do. 

She sighs again, pursing her mouth in vague disapproval. “I won’t make you take this assignment, Severus. I’d never blackmail one of my employees,” she says, then tips her dark head to the side. “Except Sinclair. And perhaps Culvert.”

Snape raises a brow, and Atropa leans her hip against the tabletop with a wry smile. “I’ll get one of them to whip something up for the Potters. I doubt it’ll be as effective as one of your brews, but”—a graceful shrug—“well. Every little.”

Snape glances down at the sheaf of parchments on the table. The lettering is strange and illegible—likely spelled unreadable to prying eyes, though Snape wonders if he’d be equally confounded otherwise. The markings blur as he stares at them, forming strange nonsense shapes, the sharp black lines stark against the white parchment, and Snape feels a lurch in his belly like vertigo. 

He hears Albus’s voice in his head, weary and saddened but hatefully unsurprised: Dear boy… what have you done?

A light touch on Snape’s arm draws his eyes toward Atropa, stood at his side with a wrinkled brow. Snape sniffs, straightening his spine, and steps out of her reach, angling his chin away. 

Atropa sucks in a breath and drops her hand. “Go home, Severus,” she murmurs, tone far more kindly than Snape rightfully deserves. “Get some rest. You look like you need it.”

Snape grits his teeth; he’s never needed much of anything, really. Rather it’s the wanting that’s always done him in. 

He turns a quick volte face and strides toward the fireplace, Atropa’s stare stuck to him like yet another brand. 

~*~

For the next several days, Snape busies himself with as many menial tasks as he can find. The linens are washed, the baseboards cleaned, every corner of his home laboratory vigorously scrubbed until he’s nearly taken the finish off of his workbench. He hand-polishes his mortars and pestles, rearranges the other accoutrements, takes inventory and re-sorts the list by each ingredient’s expiry. 

And when he can find nothing more in the old drafty house to keep his attention, he settles himself on the threadbare sofa in the sitting room with a tepid cup of tea and a submission draft for Potions Quarterly that Wickshaw had asked him to look over ages ago. 

When he finishes his corrections (and an entire pot of red ink) several hours later, he’s got a crick in his neck, a cramp in his hand, and can barely keep his eyes open. 

Even so, once he settles himself into bed, hands fisted in the worn cotton sheets, sleep eludes him. He counts the passing seconds in his head, but gets the sudden feeling that he ought to count backwards, ought to count down. 

The hateful mark on his arm aches—not like a bruise or a scar, but like an old broken bone that smarts before a storm. 

Chapter Text

Half a week passes (three days, though Snape refuses to admit he’s counting), during which Wickshaw sends several unsolicited updates on Sinclair’s shoddy work (which Snape summarily ignores), Atropa gives him a bevy of small, simple assignments (which he accepts without argument), and a sudden cold front brings rumbling thunder and a scrim of dense fog. 

He slogs his way home from the market, worn linen tote already sodden from the moist air. He’d forgone his usual disguise in light of the inclement weather, but even accounting for the empty streets and poor visibility, he keeps his head down. 

He follows the cobbled street for a ways then cuts through the wild pasture, keeping to his beaten path toward the old dirt road. One hand clenches at the lapels of his coat as he bears down against the cold. 

The road winds through a sparse copse of spindly trees, gnarled branches dripping dirty water onto Snape’s back as he treks up the lane. He can see the jagged outline of his homestead, the silhouette of the windswept farmhouse and the dilapidated conservatory fading in through the fog. 

Snape breathes out a sigh as he steps onto the lawn, shoulders loosening at the prospect of settling himself in front of the fireplace and waiting out the coming storm, but—

Snape freezes in place, ten paces from the entryway. 

The front door stands wide open, swaying on its hinges with every shift in the wind. 

Snape’s jaw clenches tight, and his wand slips into his hand from its place tucked into the arm of his coat. It’s warm and dry against his clammy palm as he casts a wordless silencing spell over his feet. 

He sucks in a quiet breath and steps forward, climbing the short stairs up to the porch, where he sets down the shopping with nary a sound. Then he crosses the threshold and pulls the door shut behind him, briefly glad of his recent cleaning frenzy, as the well-oiled hinges make nary a creak. 

At a glance, the foyer looks perfectly normal, with nothing broken or out of place. The vase by the door hasn’t moved, nor the coat rack behind, and the sideboard on the opposite wall is undisturbed. Even the little bowl of spare change on the tabletop looks untouched. 

He wonders for a brief, hysterical moment if he simply left the door open—perhaps senility is setting in, or he’s cracking up—but then he notices the wards. 

He’d spent nearly a month casting them when he’d first purchased the property, pouring every bit of his not insignificant power into the bindings. He’d purchased a talisman—Malagasy ironwood, seven hundred years old and triple that in galleons—which he’d used to build an artificial nexus; then he’d bound the land to it, wrapping his will around it all like a clenched fist. 

With both Albus and the Dark Lord gone, Snape had doubted anyone on earth could break those wards—himself included. 

And yet.

Well. Technically, they aren’t broken. He can sense no tear, no hole, no fracture in the defenses. Rather they are entirely obliterated—gone as if they never were. The pulsing warmth of the nexus has winked out, the talisman likely burnt to char, if not atomised completely. 

In fact, as he holds his wand aloft and scans over the house, he senses nothing at all; no jinxes, no curses, no hextraps laying in wait. Nothing.

Nothing, that is, save for the warm, woody-scented residue of a magical signature he’d foolishly hoped never to encounter again. 

(Hope is always foolish.)

Snape grits his teeth and cancels the silencing spell with a flick of his wrist; this trespasser is expecting him, after all—likely already knows he’s here. 

He keeps his wand upraised—more for appearance’s sake than any real intention of using it—and heads towards the sitting room, thunder rumbling ominously in the distance. 

(He recalls huddling before the television when he was eight or nine years old, his father in his cups but quietly, and his mother on the sofa with her arms wrapped tight around her knees. T minus 15 seconds, guidance is internal*, came the voice from the telly, barely audible over the thundering hum of rocket engines. T minus 5… 4… )

Snape rounds the corner, inching towards the sitting room doorway. 

(… 3… 2… )

Snape steps over the threshold and into the room, eyes alighting on the dark-haired man seated on the sofa. He’s got sunken, downcast eyes, and his bony-jointed fingers grasp at a worn slip of paper crumpled in his hands. Skin ashen with stark blue veins, he looks at once sickly and ghostly. If Snape didn’t know him, hadn’t recognised him immediately, he might’ve wondered whether the man was dying or already dead. 

( … 1.)

Snape steps fully into the room proper, wand trained on Potter, though the man has yet to look up. Rather he keeps his head down, eyes glued to the slip of parchment in his hand. 

Snape swallows sharply. “Trespassing is a crime.”

Potter turns the bit of paper in his hands again and says nothing for a long, interminable moment. 

Snape nearly speaks again—perhaps a slightly less veiled threat this time—when Potter raises his chin. He doesn’t meet Snape’s eyes, rather he stares into the unlit grate and holds the slip of parchment aloft. 

His voice is low, gravelly when he speaks. “Ginny gave me this,” he murmurs. “Few days ago.”

Snape casts an eye over the parchment but doesn’t linger overlong. He knows what it is. In hindsight, he thinks he knew even as he scribbled it out ten years ago that it would come back to haunt him. 

He takes a short, steadying breath. “Did she.”

Potter hums and nods. “Mm. Said she- she found it. Tucked in her bag, just after the battle at Hogwarts.”

Yes, indeed, that is where Snape had left it. 

Snape lowers his wand, but does not speak, and Potter’s glassy eyes squint into the darkness of the fireplace. 

“There was something,” he begins, then shakes his head, “something so- familiar about it. The handwriting.” Snape grits his teeth. “… But I couldn’t place it.”

A bolt of lightning cracks white-blue across the grey sky, sharp light pouring briefly into the room through the old bay window. For a moment, the shadows stretch and distort, ominous and unearthly against the stained wood floor. 

“Had a meeting yesterday,” Potter continues, tone bald and flat, “at Panacaea Laboratories.” He angles his chin toward Snape but does not look up. “Perhaps you’ve heard of it.”

Snape smooths his face into careful blankness, jaw clenched tight. Potter nods as if he had spoken. 

“Mm. Rather nice bloke I spoke to. Wickshaw? I think?” But of course. “Very helpful. Empathetic.” Potter breathes out a bone-dry laugh. “Doubt that means much to you.”

Snape stiffens, hand clenching tight about his wand. 

Potter’s right, of course. Empathy means nothing to him. In the handful of times he’s given or received it, nothing but tragedy has come in its wake. 

(Case in point.)

“He had a- a stack of papers on his desk,” Potter says. “Looked like a—. I dunno, a manuscript, maybe?” Snape’s left eye twitches, and he wonders hysterically if he should owl-order another pot of red ink. “There was a note on the front, in that same familiar writing.” Yes, he’s most certainly out of red ink. “Just one word…” Or perhaps he should simply never edit a paper for Wickshaw again. Or speak to him. Or speak to anyone.

“Abysmal,” Potter mutters. “Signed, S.”

Silence hangs in the damp air, even the thunder falling quiet. 

Guidance is internal, the announcer had said, and a thousand—a million—onlookers cheered as Apollo took to the sky. 

Snape had read once that it’s silent and cold in the vacuum of space. To his mournful, childhood ears, that had sounded unspeakably lovely, and he’d wished desperately, foolishly, for the rocketship to take him along. Perhaps he’d missed his calling—if he’d ever had one at all. 

“Have you any idea,” Potter murmurs, and Snape falls back to the earth like burning debris, “how many of my assignments you wrote that on?” His mouth twists in a facsimile of a smile. “Abysmal.”

Snape swallows hard around the dry lump in his throat.

“Don’t answer that,” Potter says and chokes out a brittle laugh that makes Snape’s teeth itch. 

“Potter,” Snape begins, though it comes out scratchy, barely more than a whisper. 

“So I asked good Master Wickshaw,” Potter continues as if Snape hadn’t spoken, “who, pray tell, is S?” Snape’s eyes shut for a moment before he prises them back open. “To which he replied ‘Well, Master Spince, of course.’” 

Snape’s chin drops as his shoulders rise, bunching up around his ears, and Potter finally looks up at him. 

“Raven Perseus Spince,” he enunciates sharply, “as a matter of fact.” His eyes are dark and dull, the green so subdued as to look nearly grey in the low light. There are lines etching their way into the man’s forehead, and a little furrow between his eyebrows. He looks— “Interesting combination of letters… don’t you think?”

Snape’s spine straightens, neck twinging sharply. Nothing is ever truly created or destroyed, the strange man had said. He wasn’t handsome, even all those years ago. But he had a gravitas, a charisma, a sort of self-containedness that had called to Snape’s wayward sixteen-year-old self like a siren. The glowing letters had danced in the air, moving about until they had spelled something new, as Snape watched, enchanted and enamoured. 

Nothing is ever truly created or destroyed, Tom Riddle had whispered into his ear. Only rearranged. 

“Turns out,” Potter goes on, “Raven P Spince owns a dreary old house in the West Country, purchased ten years ago.” Snape’s teeth grind together, and Potter has the gall to quirk a sarky smile, though it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Public record.”

Snape turns his gaze toward the bay window, and his left forearm itches. The fog outside has broken, though the clouds still hang low and dark, and rain begins to patter against the glass. 

“How did you dismantle the wards?” he asks, though he doesn’t really care to know the answer. 

“Easily,” Potter retorts. 

Snape supposes he rather knew that already. After all, he’s spent the majority of his miserable life bound helplessly to stronger men. Why should Harry Bloody Potter be any different.

“I’ve been sat here,” Potter says a moment later, “trying to-. To figure out some—any—answer.” Snape bites down on the hysterical sound bubbling up his throat, eyes settling on the old oak in the yard. “Some… explanation,” Potter goes on, “to make any of this”—a vague gesture toward the accursed parchment crumpled on the table—“…make sense.”

A cool numbness spreads from the tips of Snape’s extremities inwards, cloaking him in an impenetrable layer of indifference. It’s a familiar sensation: a sudden shift of identity, a displacement of the self. He’d employed it as a tool in his service to various masters, had worn it close like a second skin. It’s all too easy to slip into again. 

“Yes,” Snape murmurs flatly, spine straightening as he turns to face Potter. “Yes, I imagine this does stretch the bounds of your intellect.”

Potter ignores the insult and shifts awkwardly in his seat. “You wrote this,” he says, pointing a shaking finger toward the parchment. 

Snape swallows. “Yes.”

Potter nods and wets his chapped lips. “And you… You gave it to Ginny. Ten years ago.”

Snape’s hands clench briefly, and he lifts his chin high. “Yes.”

Potter’s jaw twitches, nostrils flaring as he stares askance at Snape for a long, fraught moment. 

Then he shakes his messy head, mouth twisting into an odd shape. “Why would you…” he starts, then blows out a long breath. 

His voice is a harsh, hollow whisper when he asks, “Why would you do that?”

There’s a sharp twinge in Snape’s back as his spine tries to curl forwards, weighed down by a sudden, familiar gravity.

(Mum, on her knees in the kitchen, pressing a dish towel to Da’s nose, blood pouring out like a tap, screaming Why—)

(Lily, wide-eyed and lips turned down, hands wringing as she stares at the fresh brand on his arm, pleading Why—)

(Albus, wrinkled and grey, shoulders sagging in unbearable disappointment, eyes glistening in the light of the Halloween moon, decrying Why—)

Why would you do that?

As always, as ever, he has only one answer. 

“It seemed a viable solution.”

Potter flinches, though whether at the tone or the sentiment, Snape cannot be sure. 

“Viable,” Potter repeats, and Snape feels a muscle in his jaw twitch sharply at the word. 

“Yes.”

Potter pulls his lips through his teeth and gives a slow, measured nod. “And what exactly was it meant to solve?” he asks flatly. “This… viable solution of yours.”

A seven pointed star, tucked beneath a hollow moon.

Snape’s left forearm burns as the image appears unbidden behind his eyes. 

“I received something,” he says, circumspect. “Something that I… did not want.”

Though Potter is undoubtedly an idiot, Snape cannot bring himself to clarify further. It’s bad enough that he can feel the thing mouldering on his arm, can see it whenever the obscurus macula wears off; he cannot also be made to talk about it. 

Potter gusts out a sharp breath, and Snape peers down at him. 

Apparently, Potter is slightly less of an idiot than Snape remembers, as his shoulders have sagged low, face twisted in something not unlike devastation. 

(Snape imagines it’s rather like he himself must have looked, crawling toward the moonlight in the Shrieking Shack, poisoned and bleeding out, but with eyes only for the hateful seven pointed star and its feckless speckled moon.)

“It became clear to me,” Snape continues, turning away from Potter’s dark, bageyed stare, “that someone else did want it.”

He thinks of the aftermath: Tallow’s book, the fateful (hateful) slip of parchment, his sudden resignation and subsequent flight from Hogwarts. In hindsight—as always—he can see the actions for what they were: the thoughtless madness of a desperate man, trying frantically to extricate himself, to relieve himself of the very thing he’d once so badly wanted. 

I know your desire, Ssseverus, Tom had whispered, breath hot against Snape’s cheek. I can grant you a mark, he’d promised, and Snape’s battered teenage heart had sung. An indelible mark—

“How long have you known.”

Snape’s eyes flick to Potter, staring sightlessly at the coffee table before his eyes widen, cutting up to meet Snape’s. 

“Is that—” Potter starts, then interrupts himself with a muttered curse. “God, is that why you were so cruel to me? When I was a kid?”

There’s a sour, accusatory note in the man’s voice that gets Snape’s back up; he can hardly pretend to be blameless—he never could, really—but he won’t be lambasted for crimes uncommitted. 

“I was cruel to you because I am cruel,” he corrects, and Potter frowns, perplexed. 

“So… you didn’t know then?”

Snape’s teeth grind nearly hard enough to hear it in his head. 

He hadn’t known what was in store for him—for them both—when Potter was a boy. Though he’s often wondered, after the ice has melted in his whisky, if it would have changed anything at all. Perhaps this moment, now, is a fixed point in time and space, a static obstacle with which he was always meant to collide—

Potter huffs an angry breath. “For fuck’s sake, Snape, answer m—”

“I received the dark mark when I was seventeen years old,” Snape intones. “You were born when I was twenty-one.”

Potter stares at him askance, mouth opening and closing like a beached fish. 

“What does that—?” His eyes flutter, then squeeze shut. “What are you talking about? What the fuck does that have to do with—”

Snape hisses in frustration, though whether at Potter’s idiocy or his own inability to say the words, he isn’t sure. “A mark does not appear,” he sneers, “until the mate is born.”

Potter’s mouth snaps shut at that, brow furrowing. Snape supposes he can’t blame the man; such a simple truth, so easily provable, and yet unknown by the vast majority of the world—all so desperate to believe their marks to be the mysterious, inexplicable work of a higher power. 

(Snape has served enough higher powers to know better.)

Potter shakes his head again, voice lowering to a soft rumble. “I’ve been marked all my life.”

“Yes,” Snape murmurs. “And I’ve had mine since I was twenty-one.”

Potter’s hands go to his wild hair, tugging sharply. “Then how—? Why did you not—”

“I received the dark mark,” Snape repeats, slower now in the narrow hope that Potter might understand, “when I was seventeen.”

Potter stares at him blankly for all of ten seconds, before his eyes flick down toward Snape’s left wrist. He squints for a moment, eyes flicking over Snape’s clenched hand, before his brow smooths in realisation. 

“It was…” he says in a startled whisper. “It came up—”

“Underneath,” Snape finishes, and clasps his hands behind his back. “Yes.” 

Potter shakes his head, eyes flicking side to side as if parsing an antiderivative in his head. And rightly so, Snape can admit; after all, it’s a circumstance so wildly improbable, so incalculably unlikely as to be nonsensical—bordering on madness. 

“Draco said…” Potter starts, and Snape raises a brow. He’d heard nothing of Malfoy the Younger since the announcement of his nuptials in the Prophet, and that had been nearly ten years ago. “Draco said his dark mark disappeared right when Voldemort died.”

Snape staves off a flinch at the name, but cannot stop his jaw twitching at Potter’s rather impressive—if ill-timed—insight. He remains silent, waiting for Potter to continue, to follow this strain to its (appalling, humiliating—) inevitable conclusion. 

“Ten years,” Potter says in a crackly, ruined whisper. “You—. You’ve known for ten years.”

The breath gusts out of the boy—man—as he says it, like he’s been hit in the solar plexus. Gutted. 

Something cold and clammy climbs up the back of Snape’s neck, even as a sharp spike of heat churns through his belly. 

Mr Potter is a fine, upstanding young man, Madam Atropa murmurs in his head, who, near as I can tell—

Snape tastes bile on his tongue.

—is poised for heartbreak.

“Why?” Potter whispers again, and Snape glances down at him before he can think better of it. 

Potter’s eyes have gone a startling, liquid green, accented by the red rims and the sheen of heartsick tears clinging to his eyelashes—and he looks so much like Lily that Snape nearly chokes on thin air. 

All these years later and nothing has changed.

“I am bare,” he murmurs to Potter, just as he had Lily. 

Potter’s brow furrows, eyes squinting just enough to push a few errant tears down his cheeks. He scrubs a weathered hand over his face, smearing salt across the bridge of his nose, and shakes his head. 

“What?”

“I am bare,” Snape says again, through gritted teeth. Potter is still squinting, confusion writ large across his sallow face, and Snape releases a silent breath, steeling himself. “… By choice.”

Potter blinks several times in succession.

“By choice,” he parrots. “You—.” He huffs out a bitter laugh that has Snape’s elbows pulling into his sides. “You identify as bare,” Potter grits out, chin jutted forward. “Is that it?”

Something itches in Snape’s chest at the cold, nearly sneering way Potter’s mouth had formed the word identify, and he straightens his spine. “Yes.”

Potter rumbles out another laugh, its cadence sharp, bordering on cruel. “Right, yeah. But see, you’re not though.”

The immediate, almost offhand denial has Snape’s hands clenching in a helpless sort of rage, and suddenly the boy looks far more like his father. “I am precisely what I say I am, Pott—”

Potter is on his feet and crowding toward Snape in an instant. “You’re a cruel, manipulative bastard, that’s what you fucking are,” he hisses, near enough that Snape can feel the heat of the man’s breath against his chin. “Do you have any idea… what you’ve done?”

—fallen ill… lost three children… quite unwell… poised for heartbreak—

“I saved your life,” Snape intones, and the words sound hollow even to his own ears. 

“You ruined my life,” Potter bites, voice breaking as he sucks in a humid breath. “My marriage. My—. My family.” He swallows a bitten off noise like a choked sob, and Snape’s throat closes up at the awful sound of it. “For God’s sake, Snape, why?”

Dear boy, what have you done?

Snape swallows hard and sucks in a sharp breath through his overlarge nose, but his jaw stays clamped shut, tongue pressed up against the backs of his teeth. 

Potter makes a frustrated noise and steps ever closer to Snape. “Are you really this evil? This fucking broken of a person—”

Bet he’s bare, Black had sneered, bumping a laughing Potter the Elder with his shoulder. Prob’ly hasn’t even got a soul. Bare, broken little Snivell—

“—that you would actually do something like this?”

“Get out,” Snape whispers, and he feels his shoulders curling forward, but he can’t seem to stop it.  

Potter goes on unheeded. “What is wrong with y—”

“Get out of my house,” Snape grits out, rising voice tugging at the old scar on his throat. 

Potter is a scant few inches away now, eyes wild, hands curled into claws around his ears. “Why would you do this?”

“Because I will not be marked, I will not be branded, I will not be owned ever again!”

A heavy quiet descends in the room, jarring in contrast to the recent tumult. Rain patters against the bay window at an even tempo, distant thunder rattling the panes. 

Potter stumbles backwards as if struck, head shaking side to side, quick like a shiver. He stares at Snape like he’s never seen him before.

(Quite frankly, Snape doubts anyone has ever seen him. Most days, he cannot even see himself.)

Snape straightens his shoulders, piling up his vertebrae, as he always has, until he stands tall. 

He stares past Potter, through him. “Go away.”

Potter is panting like he’s run a marathon, shoulders sagging low, and his head shakes again. “Show me.”

Snape’s eyes fall closed. “Go away.”

“Show me,” Potter demands, then breathes out a sigh, tone softening to a dull tenor, “… then I’ll go.”

Snape huffs a breath and flicks open his eyes. Potter is near again, though not as close as before, and his jaw is set, determined. 

Snape thinks for a moment of drawing his wand, of casting the boy out, or apparating away himself. Perhaps he’d find himself an even drearier flat in a greyer countryside, quit his job yet again and live out the rest of his pointless years as a penniless hermit.

(Potter would look for him. Potter would find him. Potter is a fixed point in time and space, a static obstacle with which Snape was always meant to collide.)

Snape lets out a shaking breath, eyes cutting to Potter. “If you touch it,” he says sotto voce, “I will kill you.”

Potter swallows hard and dips his head in a sharp nod. 

Snape sucks in a breath and reaches for the cuff of his left sleeve. His fingers fumble at the buttons, yellowed nails catching on frayed threads. Ashamed, he cuts his eyes to Potter, glaring preemptively, but finds Potter’s gaze is fixed on the left side of Snape’s throat rather than his shaking hands. Snape frowns and turns his attention back to his sleeve. 

Buttons finally undone, Snape squares his shoulders and quickly rolls up his sleeve, lest he lose his nerve. Finite incantatem sits on his tongue, but (of course) there’s no need; the obscurus macula has worn off—likely unable to adequately mask Snape’s mark when its mate is so near. 

Snape takes a moment to slip back into his cloak of indifference, then peers up at Potter. 

The man has gone almost preternaturally still, no movement at all save for a slight wobbling around his mouth. His glassy eyes are still inexplicably focused on Snape’s neck.

Snape frowns again and clears his throat, and Potter twitches, eyes cutting to Snape’s. He takes three long breaths, eyelids fluttering, before he slowly looks downward. 

Snape watches him closely, right hand ready to draw his wand should Potter move even an inch closer—

A short, high whine sounds from Potter’s throat, bleak and devastated as his face crumples.

He brings his hands up to clasp tightly over his mouth, and a low, wretched sob leaks out through his straining fingers. A rash of tears ride the curve of his cheekbones, slipping over the backs of his hands to drip down onto the floor between his feet. 

(… poised for heartbreak.)

Snape snaps his sleeve back down—lungs burning, vision blurring, pulse stuttering in iambic pentameter—

Guidance is internal. 

Without another word to Potter, Snape turns on his heels and strides out of the room. Away from the hunched man weeping into his hands, away from the wrinkled slip of parchment with Snape’s handwriting on, away from the raindrops leaving water stains on his freshly cleaned windows—

Away, away, away. 

Chapter Text

Nearly, my dear…

… Very nearly. 

No tears, now…

… This is wh—

~*~

Snape startles awake, clutching urgently at his chest like he’s been shot. 

The nightmare is already fading from his recollection, gaussian blurred images disappearing before he can make sense of them, and he lies still for half a minute while his pulse slows. 

Were he a different sort of man—the simple, unexamined sort, Snape reckons—he would spare nary a thought for the happenings of yesterday. He’d hoist himself out of his lumpy bed, apply a bit of ointment to the aching scar at his throat, and go about his day. He’d brew himself a sweet tea (he prefers it black, but PG Tips is all he’s got in, so milk and sugar it is), look over his agenda, perhaps get started on a few of his assignments. 

He’d carry on, he thinks, if he were a different sort of man.

Of course, Snape has never held any illusions about just the sort of man he is. 

~*~

In the kitchen, he fills the kettle and sets it on the range, curling his hands over the edges of the pockmarked countertop. 

Though Hogwarts had been his permanent residence for twenty odd years, once he’d left, it had been all too easy to slip back into the old ways: flicking on light switches, rinsing dishes in the sink, boiling water on the stove for his morning tea. 

He glances down, eyes catching on his distorted reflection in the speckled metal. 

(“Watched pot never boils,” Da grunts as he stumbles through the kitchen. He reeks of liquor and stale smoke, and Severus leans away as he walks past.

Mum turns back to the hob after he’s gone, and Severus watches as she raises her hand, hovering over the glowing element as if to press her palm against the surface—)

The kettle whistles.

Snape waits, watching the steam thicken until the whistle turns to a screech. Then he switches off the hob and pours himself a cup. 

The milk’s gone off and he’s run out of sugar, so he drinks it piping hot—scalding his tongue and tasting nothing. 

~*~

The wards have been restored. 

Snape stares blank-faced at the sigil etched into the stone floor of the basement. He’d carved it by hand—tedious, but necessary so as not to disturb the complex web of spellwork—then set the ironwood talisman in the center, binding the wards to a single and (he had thought) unbreakable nexus. 

But Potter had broken it, Snape’s sure of that much. He had sensed the emptiness as he’d crossed the threshold yesterday, felt it against his skin as surely as if he’d been stripped bare and left to perish of exposure. 

And yet, here sits the unbroken sigil, the talisman glowing even brighter than it had when Snape had first placed it. 

Quite bright, actually—too bright. 

Snape steps closer, careful not to cross the leylines, and crouches low, grunting as his knees hit the cold floor. He leans in close, squinting against the bright light, and sees—

Gold. 

The talisman was shattered; this close up, Snape can see the fault lines, countless tributaries cutting across the sun-blackened wood. But at every separation, every rough splintered edge, a band of gold shines through, sealing the void like a glistering scar. 

Snape stares for a moment longer, jaw clenched tight against the strange pinching sensation near the center of his chest. Then he rises gracelessly to his feet, pivots swiftly and makes his way out of the basement. 

The glow of the talisman chases him up the stairs, and he feels it against his back like a touch. 

~*~

He has to cast Tallow’s charm three times before the accursed mark fades from his arm.

Obscurus macula. 

Obscurus macula. 

Obscurus macula. 

(Exhale.)

~*~

Like a martyred messiah, Potter returns three days later. 

Snape feels it when the man crosses the wards, a sharp shiver riding down his spine, and he grits his teeth. Of course, as Potter has rebuilt the nexus in its entirety, it’s keyed to him now. Until Snape figures a way to remake them (which would first necessitate the Herculean—perhaps impossible—task of destroying them), Potter may come and go as he pleases. 

Of course, if Snape is being fair (which, quite frankly, isn’t his wont), he can admit Potter likely hadn’t intended to grant himself open access to Snape’s homestead. Wardscasting is a fickle business in the best of circumstances; excising the caster’s signature from the spellwork is all but impossible. 

Then again, dismantling impossibilities is something of a pastime for Harry Bloody Po—

A knock sounds at the front door in a familiar, rhythmic fanfare. 

Shave and a haircut, five bob.

Snape’s eyes roll then squeeze tightly shut before he hoists himself up from the sofa. Something in his back pops, sending a hot, stinging flare to the scar at his throat. He’d meant to brew a relaxant—his neck stiffens something awful during winter storms—but he’d found himself plagued by a startling exhaustion this morning, pulling downwards on his bones until he’d collapsed onto the couch. He’d lain on his back, greasy head propped up on the hard armrest, and stared up at the mould stains on the ceiling for—he glances toward the clock on the mantel—God’s sake, nearly seven hours. 

Shave and a haircut, five bob.

Snape huffs, barely restraining himself from shouting piss off! at the door, like his father would have done. 

As it stands, he limps towards the foyer, joints aching with the cold, creaking with every step. As he stands before the door, straightening his spine insomuch as he’s able, it occurs to him that he hadn’t even bothered to dress himself; his tattered dressing gown hangs loose, open at the front to reveal the worn, sweat-stained flannels he’d slept in. 

Had he any energy at all, had the upheaval of three days prior not spawned in him a bruised sort of numbness, blanking his mind with dull, grey static—the indignity of it all might have rankled. 

But of course, if Snape had learned anything in the last half a century, it’s that dignity is not a right, but a privilege. 

Shave and a haircut—

Snape pulls his dressing gown closed, cinching the lapels in a shaky fist, and yanks the door open. 

Potter stands before him, one hand upraised with reddened knuckles (serves him right for the incessant banging), and eyes wide. While he certainly doesn’t look well, per se—the furrowed brow and downturned mouth add a good ten years to his face—he’s dry-eyed and upstanding. A marked improvement over the demeanour of three days ago—

“Hi,” Potter murmurs, eyes raking over Snape’s disheveled state.

Snape feels heat bloom at the back of his neck, throat tightening in something not unlike shame, and says nothing. 

Potter gives an awkward harrumph and drops his hand. “Can—. May I… come in?”

It’s a ridiculous question. The man may, of course, do whatever he so desires, and he bloody well knows it. Having redrawn the wards, the old drafty flat is Potter’s in all but deed. 

Snape turns abruptly and stalks toward the kitchen, leaving the door ajar. He hears Potter step inside behind him, feels it like someone walking over his grave. 

Snape crosses the threshold into the kitchen and busies himself filling the kettle from the rust-speckled tap. He flicks on the stove, twisting the knob of the ancient range to its highest setting, as the blasted thing barely warms at all if set lower. 

He senses Potter somewhere behind and to his left, likely stood across the counter, but does not look over. 

Full up now, Snape places the kettle on the stove, folding his arms across his chest as he stares down at it. He ignores the tension at his back, the nearly audible gearworks as Potter rallies himself to speak, and hides his shaking fingers in the folds of his gown. 

The kettle whistles before Potter summons the nerve (thankfully), and Snape switches off the hob, setting the kettle on the pockmarked trivet next to the range. 

He reaches toward the overhead cabinet and grabs himself a chip-lipped mug. Without any input from his nervous system, his arm extends again, hovering in air near the small assortment of cups on the shelf.

Several seconds pass—during which Snape’s bicep begins to ache, and he barely keeps his arm from trembling—before Potter notices. 

“Oh,” Potter intones, and Snape hears him swallow. “Yes. Please.”

Snape’s hand wraps around a second mug—one of the better ones, crackless and only slightly stained—and sets it next to his own. 

(He could fix them, he knows; reparo and a bit of polishing potion ought to do the trick. But it’s always seemed a wasteful exercise in vanity, when he only ever pours for himself. Not to mention they’re better suited to him this way: fragile and unsightly.)

He drops a bag into each mug—PG Tips yet again, as he hasn’t yet summoned the energy to go to the shops—and pours the steaming water over them. The water darkens to an opaque dishwater brown as he slides the better cup over to Potter.

His mouth opens with the familiar, obsequious urge to offer milk or sugar before he bites down hard on his tongue. He hasn’t got anything in, anyway. 

“Thank you,” Potter murmurs, and sips daintily as if he were dining with the Queen. 

Silence descends, awkward and overbearing. 

Snape ought to be famished and parched alike; he’s had nothing to drink today, and his last meal was beans on toast three days prior, if memory serves. Even so, as he stares down into his cup, he thinks he’d rather tip it over, watch the seasoned water seep into the ugly countertop. 

“I’m sorry,” Potter says finally, and Snape glances up at him, “for the wards.”

Snape’s jaw clenches and he casts his eyes downwards. 

He remembers seeing an old Japanese vase in some museum or other; it had been broken into pieces, then mended with gold—sparkling rivers over painted porcelain land. Though pretty, in its way, Snape had thought it rather silly; the thing was hardly functional, after all. Better to sweep up the shards and leave them in the bin, certainly. 

“I imagine you put a lot of time into them,” Potter continues, turning his cup between his hands. “And galleons, I’d reckon. Bolivian ironwood?”

He raises an eyebrow at Potter, but the man’s eyes are settled firmly on his mug. 

“Malagasy,” Snape corrects. 

“Ah,” Potter nods awkwardly and takes a sip of his tea. “Hard to come by, African totems.”

Snape is well aware of that. It had taken weeks to track down a reputable dealer, and even after a fair bit of haggling, the damned thing had cost nearly half as much as the ruddy house. 

 “I can—” Potter starts, then shakes his head. “I- I’d like to… pay for it. The talisman. So you can, er…” He shrugs one low-slung shoulder, glancing briefly up at Snape. “I dunno. Get another, I s’pose.”

Snape frowns down at his mug, elbows pulling in close to his sides. He’s not sure why he’s surprised; Potter has always been something like gallant. Upstanding and forward, like the trochaic hero of an old epic. 

Snape runs his fingers along the lip of his cup, scratching the pad of his thumb over the cracked bits. “You repaired it.”

Potter shakes his head again. “Yeah, but it’s not—.” He blows out a short sigh, head dipping low. “I know it’s not the same.”

Of course not. For one, the woody scent of Potter’s magical signature has become all but overpowering; the whole bloody property smells like a deciduous forest. 

“How did you repair it,” Snape asks flatly, though he isn’t sure why. He’s almost certain of the answer. 

Potter’s brow pops up and he shrugs again. “Oh, I—. I dunno, really. Guess I just sort of…”

Snape feels a sneer curl his top lip. “… Willed it so?”

Potter peers up at him, furrow-browed and mouth straight. “Yeah. I guess.”

Snape cannot contain the short huff of bitter laughter, tinged with something not unlike envy, and Potter’s jaw visibly tightens as he brings his cup toward his mouth.

“I said I’d pay for it,” he says sharply, and Snape nearly laughs again. 

“Whyever would you pay for it?” he snaps. “Certainly your roughcast patchwork will suffice, priceless artefact or no—”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Potter interrupts and sets his mug down hard—that’s another one chipped. “Has some awful thing I’ve done inconvenienced you in some way—”

There it is. 

“If you’ve come here expecting contrition,” Snape spits, “I shall happily show you the door.”

Potter falls silent at that, and stares up at Snape as he had three days ago: wrongfooted and appalled. Then he sighs again, shoulders sagging as he stares sightlessly into his cup. 

“I don’t know what I was expecting,” he murmurs, before his mouth quirks up in a joyless smile. “S’pose if I were smarter, I’d not have expected anything.”

Kintsugi, Snape recalls of a sudden. That’s what they’d called the gold-mended pottery at the museum. Kintsugi, though he can’t quite remember what it means.

He casts a sharp glance at Potter, then settles his eyes on the grotty countertop. “Would that you were smarter.”

Potter’s teeth grit at the insult and he blows out a restrained breath. “We need to talk about this.”

Snape snorts indelicately. “We shall do nothing of the sort.”

Potter groans low in his throat. “Damn it, I need to talk about this. You owe me that much—”

A dismayed breath escapes Snape before he can contain it, and he feels his spine straighten for the first time in days.

He’d spent the last thirty odd years, the majority of his life, repaying various debts—most of which were owned by Harry Bloody Potter. He’d knelt at the feet of two masters—distinct in ideology but alike in impenitence—and had given the paltry sum of himself in service. 

Stripped of all dignity, all agency and virtue, he had weighed the scales in his own flesh—pound by bloodied pound. 

“I owe you nothing,” Snape hisses at Potter, and it is unequivocally true. 

Potter huffs a shocked laugh, and Snape’s hands clench on the edge of the countertop. 

“Nothing,” Potter mutters to himself before glancing up at Snape, askance. “Nothing?”

Snape opens his mouth to retort, but Potter continues, leaning forward across the counter. 

“I have spent the last five years sick with grief,” he bites out, voice cracking harshly, “watching my wife wither to nothing, waiting for a heartbeat that never comes—all because of a stupid slip of paper that you gave h—”

“I gave you a soulmate, you vainglorious cur. It’s hardly my fault she can’t carry your spawn.”

Potter rears back, eyes fluttering like he can’t quite believe what Snape has just said. Some small, unbruised part of Snape can’t quite believe it either; particularly since no part of this—none of this at all—had ever been his intention. 

Take her, he had thought, in a quiet, wine-dark corner of his mind. Love her, he’d begged, and leave me be. 

A simple request, Snape had foolishly thought. The only request he’d ever made of the boy—of anyone , really. And still, still—

“What would you have called them, I wonder?” he asks, voice a low, dark rumble. “James? Lily? Albus?” Potter flinches from each name as if pricked under the fingernail, and the air thickens with wild, pine-scented magic. 

Had Snape any shred of self-preservation to speak of, he’d bite his tongue bloody—sew his mouth shut and fall to his knees (as ever, as always). But something unfamiliar is writhing inside of him—defensive and hostile like a thorny-stemmed weed. He cannot stop, he cannot stop—

“Perhaps you’d have even named one for me, blithering idiot that you are,” he sneers, and feels a vein throb at his temple. “And for what? Remembrance? Honour?” The malaise in the air sharpens, fluorescent lights flickering overhead—“The soft-headed belief you could offset the lives ruined so that you might live?”

The flickering stops abruptly, and the flat goes eerily silent. Potter is still as a statue, save for a straining tendon in his neck, and instinct has Snape glancing toward his wand, sitting haphazardly across the corner of the dining table. 

His eyes flick back to Potter, only to find the man has followed his line of sight. Potter stares blankly at the wand for all of three seconds before his gaze cuts back to Snape. 

Snape swallows dryly. 

“Accio.”

Potter has him bent over the counter in a quarter second, backhanding the wand halfway across the room before Snape’s fingers can grasp it from the air. 

Snape shifts his weight, throwing his head back hard—but Potter’s younger, quicker. He dodges the move with a deft tilt of his own head and wraps a calloused hand around Snape’s throat, gathering Snape’s wrists at his back with the other.

Snape feels the muscled line of Potter’s shoulder pressing into his nape, Potter’s collarbone hard against the bony knobs of his spine. The hand at his throat tightens like a vise, and his vision blurs at the edges. 

“Do it,” he hisses, teeth gnashing. “Do it.”

He’d seen his parents this way once. His mother held down firm, his father heaving like a beast over her back. She could’ve cast him off, could have killed him with two words and a wave of her wand—but she’d only collapsed underneath him, eyes hollow and bitter black, glued to the accursed mark that trapped her like an iron maiden. 

He’d thought her weak then. Bowed and hatefully spineless in the face of the man who claimed to love her—the man the ancient magic of the mark had fecklessly named her soulmate. 

Severus had loathed her, despised her, stuck his hooked nose in the air and vowed never to become such a hapless farce of himself—marked or no. 

And yet. 

“Do it,” he whispers again. 

He should have known better than to think he was different from his mother—from any of the other poor sods marked for misery. He should have known that no amount of self-preservation—cowardice, his traitorous mind offers up—could keep him from the inevitable. 

He wonders now why he bothered at all. Perhaps he might even enjoy it—being crushed under heel, ground to dust by the boy whose weight he’d carried like an albatross. 

Potter’s hand tightens further, and Snape’s mind goes blessedly blank as he pushes all the air from his lungs. He sags against the countertop, and the hand at his throat shifts to hold his weight, one blunt nailed finger catching on the scar there. 

Potter sucks in a startled breath, grip loosening suddenly, and Snape’s lungs expand on a pained, involuntary inhale. 

Potter stands abruptly, cold air rushing to fill the space between them, and—before Snape can move his numb legs, before the haze clears from his vision, before he can decry Potter’s inability to give him even this—

Potter disapparates with a sharp, resounding pop.

~*~

Snape prepares for bed. 

Or rather, he climbs into bed having performed none of his nightly ablutions at all. He had contemplated a shower; his hair is appallingly dirty, after all, and he seems to have developed a second skin composed mostly of grease and sofa-lint. But as he’d stepped into the bathroom, he’d caught a glimpse of himself in the spotted mirror and frozen in place. 

The blue-bagged eyes he’d expected—and the wrinkles at his brow, his eyes, the corners of his mouth. The lamentable nose, colorless skin—even the awful ropy scar at his throat. Unsightly, all, but familiar. 

Instead, his eyes had alighted on the thick line of purple ringing his neck, angry blue-black bruises shaped like the pads of Harry Potter’s fingers. 

Snape had stared at them for minutes, maybe hours, before he’d flicked off the light switch and turned back toward his bedroom. 

He settles now beneath the threadbare sheets, wrinkled something awful as he hasn’t made the bed in days, and lays his head on the pillow. It’s cool against the raw skin at his throat, nearly soothing, so Snape grabs it by a baggy corner and throws it to the floor. 

Apropos of nothing, he thinks of his great aunt Elinor. She’d been a forward, self-assured woman—an invert, the other old ladies in the home had called her—and she’d been kind enough that Snape had often wondered how she could possibly be related to his father. 

He’d asked her something to that effect once, and she’d got a somber, weary look on her wrinkled face. 

Touch guilt, find hostility, she’d said in her crackly voice. 

Snape hadn’t understood it then, and as he shifts his aching neck against the lumpy mattress, he finds he doesn’t really understand it even now. After all, he’s a creature composed entirely of guilt and hostility, in equal, overabundant measure. 

His eyes close, finally, and he gives himself over to fitful dreams. 

~*~

Crouched, shivering, naked shoulders bone-white and goose-fleshed, greasy head held firm, trapped in a humid isosceles triangle. Jaw aching, lips curled over teeth, throat raw, coated with bile, pulling sweat-scented air into his nostrils—

“Nearly, my dear…”

Arm aching, splotchy red all around, stinging with blisters, charred black at the wrist, foul stench like burning roast—

“… Very nearly.”

Sharp, lancing pain at the back of his scalp, bitter salt on the flat of his tongue, knees scraped raw against the cold stone floor, vision blurring, hazy and wet—

“No tears, now, Ssseverus.” Soft pat against the top of his head. Gentle. Sickening. “This is what you wanted, after all.”

He gurgles, humiliated, but cannot speak. His mother had warned him, had given herself over as a cautionary tale, had told him the clear, unvarnished truth when she said ‘One can hope.’ 

“This is what you wanted.”

Clawed fingers digging bruises into the bolt of his jaw, and he cannot breathe. 

He should have hoped. He should have hoped. He should have—

Chapter Text

A handful of days later, the bruising at Snape’s throat has gone violet and muddy, petering to a jaundiced yellow at the edges, and the woody scent emanating from the basement has become so overpowering he’s taken to mouth-breathing like an oaf. 

Strangely though, being very nearly strangled by Harry Bloody Potter seems to have shifted the foggy malaise that had settled over Snape like a favoured robe. Though he’s hardly anything like invigorated, he finds it easier now to hoist himself from his bed, shower and clean his teeth, and dress himself in something other than his waxy, greyed pyjamas. 

He spends the following week tackling a woeful backlog of assignments: he pens a detailed missive on the long-term storage of Dragonpox vaccine (requested long past its usefulness by the morons at St Mungo’s), crafts a variant of Sleeping Draught suitable for Sopophorus bean allergics, and, serendipitously, amends Culvert’s embarrassingly ineffective Bruise-B-Gone elixir (which he ends up reformulating entirely—much to Culvert’s amusing dismay).

The missive is barely a day’s work, and the Sleeping Draught about the same. The bruise remover proves more challenging—and certainly more diverting—and he finds himself wiling away the week tinkering with it. 

When the brew is finally finished (pale pink in color and faintly strawberry-scented; an irritating outcome, but hardly worth the effort of addressing), he tests its mettle on a thrice-dropped apple, watching yellow-brown flesh return to deep, gleaming crimson.

The fingerprint bruises moulder on his neck. 

~*~

Bright light seeps through the crack under the basement door, the nexus thrumming with warm, wild magic.

Snape can taste the pine now, burning on his tongue like cold, dry gin.

~*~

The next two weeks pass swiftly and blessedly without incident, and Snape finds his life returning to the comfortable, greyscale monotony of before. The aberration of a month ago—the overwrought melodrama of confrontation, his own humiliating spiral into morbid piteousness—fades from view, taking with it the Rorschach blemishes on his throat and the fine tremble in his hands. 

Even the weather eases, thunderclouds dissolving into a fauvistic blue sky that has Snape squinting under the visor of his hand as he makes his way home from the market. 

As he approaches the house, a glance toward the side yard shows his herb garden in startling disarray, the new sunlight having triggered a melee of sudden growth. The monkshood and comfrey tangle together like string lights, belladonna running roughshod over moonflower. Snape eyes them critically then continues his trudge towards the front door. 

Inside, he puts away the shopping, taking particular glee in placing the tin of English Breakfast on the shelf and sending the remainder of the PG Tips to the compost. Then he trudges toward the side entrance, slipping his sore feet into the dust-coated wellies by the door, and steps out into the blanching sunlight. 

~*~

Detangling the vine plants takes most of the afternoon, and deadheading the overgrowth carries him through the brisk, rim-lit evening. 

As the last splashes of colour sink below the horizon, Snape considers retiring for the night; his knees creak with the effort of kneeling, palms forming blisters where he clutches the little spade, and the bitter chill has seeped into his old, brittle bones.

But there’s a strange, dogged force driving him—a sudden irrepressible need to salvage what he can, to put to rights that which he had nearly seen destroyed—and he finds himself clutching ever tighter at his spade, knees sinking into the damp, turned earth. 

~*~

The gibbous moon is well into the sky, sparse pillars of white fog drifting aimlessly across the grass, when Snape feels Potter cross the wards. 

Snape huffs a sigh and swipes his right forearm across his face. He can only imagine the picture he makes: cold sweat shining on his forehead, sunken cheeks splotched ruddy with exertion, mud-caked from the knees down like some sort of bog monster.

Of course, disheveled or no, there’s no avoiding Potter. If Snape knows the man at all (which he hatefully does), Potter will wait on his steps until the cock crows—persistent little shit. 

Snape hoists himself up on shaking legs, joints popping in succession, and makes his way toward the side entrance. He casts a quick cleaning spell over himself—uncomfortable and not especially effective—then steps into the house. 

He hears it before he even crosses over the threshold: 

Shave and a haircut, five bob.

(Potter’s very own morsmordre.)

Snape treks towards the front door, slipping his gloves off and tucking them under his left arm, heedless of the burs poking through the fabric. The overhead light in the foyer (which Snape hadn’t switched on since the bulb burnt out some years prior) glows a soft gold, the nexus radiating warmth at Potter’s nearness. 

Snape’s teeth clench tight as he grasps the knob and wrenches the door open. 

Amber light spills from the doorway, illuminating Potter, stood hunched on the steps, and Snape feels his mouth purse. 

As disheveled as Snape had been but a moment ago, Potter looks somehow worse. Uneven stubble crawls across his sharp jawline, petering out halfway up his gaunt, sallow cheeks. His skin looks blue-white in the half-light, deepening to a sickly mauve at the eye sockets, and his colourless lips are chapped to cracking. 

There’s something in the eyes, too—a manic sort of listlessness, glazed and red-rimmed—and Snape finds himself grasping the doorframe, mud-flecked arm barring entrance. 

Potter takes this in stride (or perhaps fails to notice at all), and mutters a low, “Hullo.”

Snape arches a brow and waits. 

Potter stares at him blankly for all of ten seconds before his mouth twists in a rictus of a smile, shoulders rising in a detached shrug. “Gin and I are getting divorced.”

Snape feels his face go blank with surprise; he isn’t sure what he’d expected Potter to say, but that certainly wasn’t it. 

Wrongfooted, Snape grumbles, “Felicitations.” Then, after a short beat of silence, during which Potter stares inexplicably at Snape’s collared throat, “Why are you here.”

Potter’s bruised eyes flick up to Snape’s, and he proffers a large glass bottle from behind his back. “Thirsty?”

Snape frowns down at the bottle. Potter’s clenched hand covers half the label, but Snape recognises the swirling insignia as Glennigheag, an appallingly expensive spiced whisky. Minerva had kept a bottle of the stuff in a hidden drawer in her desk (“for when the children become particularly loathsome,” she’d confided).

In general, Snape had found all of the students to be rather consistently loathsome. Save, perhaps, for the incorrigible whelp stood before him now, loosely gripping several hundred galleons worth of fine scotch. 

Snape arches a brow. “I’m afraid I’m busy.”

Potter frowns, eyes narrowing to slits. “Busy,” he repeats flatly. 

“Yes,” Snape says. “Gardening.”

Potter blinks thrice in succession. “It’s half eleven.”

Snape feels a muscle twitch in his jaw. “Night gardening.”

Potter stares at him in bemusement for half a moment, then shakes his head with a bitter chuckle. “Right, well. If you won’t have any, I’ll drink it all myself.”

Snape sighs and folds his arms across his chest, mindful of the dirtied gloves tucked against his side. “Is that a threat or a promise?”

Potter steps forward into the newly unbarred space at Snape’s side, chest brushing against Snape’s crossed arms as he murmurs, “Yes.”

Potter steps past him, making his way down the hall, and Snape shuts the door with a resigned sigh. Idiot though Potter certainly is, he’s always had a way of making an entrance. 

~*~

The orbis shines bright overhead as Potter tops his glass off yet again. 

After Snape had begrudgingly fetched Potter a tumbler (and watched the man shoot his first three helpings like a bloody heathen), he’d sent his nettle-ridden gloves to the hamper and made his way back toward the garden. 

Potter had stumbled in tow—unsurprising, as the man had drunk nearly enough fingers to make a hand—and settled himself on the steps just outside the door, muttering incoherently while Snape harvested the belladonna. 

The worn wicker basket is over half full, ripe berries glistering in the soft light, when Potter sets down his glass. 

“I should—I should tell you,” he starts, then scrubs a hand over his gaunt face, a bitter, wet laugh burbling out of him. “God, you’re gonna hate me.”

Snape drops another berry into the basket and says nothing. 

A beat passes, and Potter snorts. “Ha, right. Status quo.”

Snape frowns and picks another berry. 

As usual, Potter has misinterpreted the situation. Snape has only ever hated two men, and both had died some years ago—one at the bottom of a bottle, and the other at the end of Potter’s own wand. 

(In point of fact, had Snape not been beside himself with outraged terror at the discovery of his—Potter’s—mark, he might’ve thanked the man for a job well done.)

Of course, there’s little point in disabusing Potter of his notions now, so Snape simply reaches for another berry. 

“I knew.”

Snape’s hand freezes midair, purple-stained fingers outstretched. 

He hardly needs clarification, of course. He knows precisely what Potter means. 

And yet. “You—knew,” Snape replies, inflecting just so. 

Potter nods in his peripheral vision. “Yeah. Not—” a shake of the head “—not ‘bout you, or the- the spell.” Snape frowns, and reaches for a berry. “But Ginny, I—. I knew she- she wasn’t… wasn’t mine.”

Snape’s spine stiffens, and he tugs a bit too forcefully at the little black fruit, squishing it between his fingers. 

He supposes that shouldn’t surprise him. Mated pairs are all but guaranteed to conceive, after all; even an idiot would have cause to doubt after so many failed attempts, but—

“We never talked about it, ‘course,” Potter goes on, and Snape feels the furrow in his brow etch itself deeper. “Just—let it lie. But…” Potter huffs a bitter chuckle. “If she’d had my mark, she’d’ve shown me when she was ten, for God’s sake.”

Snape’s eyes widen and he angles his head away. 

It’s something that had occurred to him a few times over the last decade—on the rare occasion he’d allowed himself to think about it (Potter, his mark, the ridiculous, mad, appalling thing he had done). Being younger than Potter, Ginevra would have been born with his mark, had she truly been his mate; her parents would have known, perhaps her brothers, as well. And as Potter had always been irritatingly unabashed about his own mark, it likely would have been a matter of hours—if not minutes—for the two to be brought together, partnered off at ten and eleven like noble children of the Regency. 

It hadn’t occurred to him at the time, of course; but then, in the days following the final battle, nothing like logic had crossed his mind at all—only the desperate, overwhelming need to escape. 

“I knew,” Potter says again, taking up his glass. “I knew it wasn’t—. Wasn’t real.”

Snape swallows hard, staring down at the black juice dripping down his hand, thinning to a bright violet near his wrist. “And you did not wonder how—”

“I didn’t care how,” Potter snorts and downs the rest of his drink. 

Snape frowns, eyes cutting briefly to Potter before turning back to the belladonna. 

Potter sighs at his back, and Snape hears the soft clink as he sets down his glass. “After… everything. The war, that is. We were all so…” He trails off for a moment, and the scratchy sorrow in his voice has Snape glancing warily over his shoulder. “I dunno… Terrified, I s’pose.”

Snape’s eyes settle on Potter, the orbis and the midnight moon painting him in warring shades. 

“And me and Gin,” Potter goes on, bright eyes shining and unfocused, “we sort of—. Sort of clung to each other, you know?” Snape doesn’t know, actually, but he doubts Potter expects an answer—doubts Potter is even aware of Snape’s presence, lost in reverie as he is. 

“And even after we married,” he continues, “we’d hardly leave the other’s sight.” He breathes a dark chuckle, scrubbing a hand over his face. “She’d go to the loo, and I’d stand outside the door, wand drawn, so bloody scared of- of… everything.”

Of a sudden, Snape recalls the first time someone had knocked on the door of this dreary old house. He’d only just finished unpacking his things, had not yet finished constructing the nexus, when they’d arrived; missionaries—Mormons, he’d presumed from the attire. 

And yet, even knowing precisely who they were and what they wanted, he’d stood the other side of his closed front door, wand pointed, arm trembling, breaths coming in short, choked gasps. 

They’d chatted inaudibly as they waited for him to answer, laughing idly with one another, and Snape had held a green-flavoured curse on the flat of his tongue, ready to fight to the death for himself and his land—however little either was worth. 

“S’pose that’s not really love, is it,” Potter murmurs. 

Snape’s eyes cut to Potter’s of their own accord, but the man is still staring sightlessly into the middle distance. 

“Well,” Potter continues, seeming to collect himself. “It was good enough to be getting on with, anyway. We were good to each other, me and Gin. Attracted to each other. Compatible.” His eyes darken of a sudden, brow sinking low. “Until…”

Ah yes, Snape realises. The fly in the ointment, the spanner in the works. The seemingly ordinary, innocuous move that had since led to a bloody and disastrous stalemate.

Snape turns back to the overgrown belladonna. “You wanted children.”

He sees Potter shake his head in his peripheral vision. 

“She did,” he clarifies, and Snape’s jaw clenches tight. “From a big family and all, you know. I…” Potter sighs and shakes his head again. “I could take it or leave it, really, but… She wanted it so bad, you know? And the way she talked about it—raising them, teaching them. Lacing their tiny little shoes.” Potter’s face goes soft, wistful, and Snape swallows against the sudden tightness in his throat. “I dunno. Made me want it too, I s’pose.”

Snape watches as Potter takes up the bottle again, pulling out the stopper with a soft pop. The scotch flows slowly, thick with bespelled cold, and Snape looks away, shoulders crowding around his ears. 

Potter takes a slow sip, then grasps the glass in one hand, fingers splayed evenly around the lip. He rests his forearms over his upraised knees, wrists folding over one another in the vee of his legs, and gusts out a low sigh. 

“And I knew,” he starts, then shakes his head. “I’d heard how hard it is for- for unmated folks, but”—another shake of the head, this one wearier and more heartsick than the last—“but I thought maybe…”

Snape hears what Potter doesn’t say, and for a moment a sharp, shining anger overtakes the ever-present shame. 

“You thought you would be the exception,” Snape sneers, and of course Potter would think that. Harry Potter, saviour of the world; Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived—

“No!” Potter demurs, voice sharp and overloud. 

The orbis brightens overhead, warming to a vibrant gold as if to calm Potter’s shot nerves. Snape, on the other hand, has no such charitable intentions and fixes Potter with a heavy-browed scowl. 

However impractical (and however little it absolves Snape of his crimes), the status quo could have continued indefinitely, had Potter or his maiden fair not tempted fate—had they not presumed that fortune would smile upon them, as it arguably had done before.

Snape holds Potter’s gaze for another handful of seconds before Potter relents, shoulders sagging on a waterlogged sigh. 

“Yeah,” he murmurs, limp and shamefaced. “Yeah, I did think that. That it’d be- be different. For us,” he whispers, and his lips downturn. “S’pose Gin thought it too.”

Snape feels the clench of his hands loosen, the sudden streak of lightning-white anger dispersing as quickly as it had descended upon him. 

For all he’s been alone most of his life, Snape has rarely ever wanted for family. The one he’d been born into had been nothing short of awful, and the friends he had chosen for himself (if they could even be called so) had torn through his life with all the devastating force of a natural disaster. 

No, Snape has never wanted for family, but he knows he is an outlier. For most of humanity—all the Potters and Weasleys of the world—children, white picket fences, and crowded dining tables are simply a matter of course. A natural urge—intensely human and entirely irreproachable.

And, strangely enough, even Snape—disconsolate bastard he knows himself to be—cannot fault them this. 

“The first time,” Potter murmurs, and his voice is brittle and miles away, “she was just over five months. We’d… We’d built a nursery. I painted it—purple.” He snorts a sour laugh and shakes his tousled head. “Then she—. She woke up one morning, and she was just”—his mouth twists, chin wobbling in a way that has Snape casting his eyes away—“so sick.” He pauses for a moment, breaths coming in sharp pants, before he swallows hard and continues. “She’d been sick since the word go, really, but this was… I was scared.” He bites his bottom lip, dragging it through his teeth. “Took her to St Mungo’s, and they—. They told us that…”

Potter goes silent for—by Snape’s estimation—half a minute or so. Snape waits and does not speak; he knows Potter isn’t finished. After all, this is a tragedy in three acts—a triptych of shameful regrets. 

“Second time was mostly the same,” Potter continues. “‘Cept we only made it four months.” He glances down at his worn hands, fiddles with the glass sandwiched between them. “She didn’t… She didn’t heal as well.”

Briefly—and against his better judgment—Snape tries to imagine it: the ache of a loss made worse by the never having, the mounting dread at the emergence of a recurring theme; once is mere chance, twice a fluke, but thrice—

“Didn’t even need a pregnancy test the third time,” Potter murmurs, huffing an empty, humourless laugh. “Could tell just looking at her. How weak, how- how sick she was.” He chews his lip, mouth twisting. “Even the mediwitch said we should—. We should consider…” 

Potter lets the word hang there, unspoken in the cool, blue air, but Snape hears it like a klaxon. 

Abortion. 

A necessary right for equality between the sexes, his great aunt Elinor had once said—to a susurrus of outraged murmurs across the drawing room of the home. Hardly a tragedy.

As he’d grown up—rather liberal-minded, if only because his father had always voted Tory—he’d come to agree with her. Though he’d rather wondered at that last bit; even as a boy, he’d known that necessary and tragic are not mutually exclusive. 

“Ginny wouldn’t hear it, of course,” Potter says dryly, setting his glass on the ground between his feet. “We had a row about it.” A shake of the head, quick like a shiver. “No, not a—. Not a row, I just… It was hurting her,” he murmurs plaintively, bright sightless eyes casting about. “And it… It killed me to see her so—.”

Potter’s jaw snaps shut, and he winces sharply. Snape wonders if he’s bitten his tongue. 

After a moment, Potter sniffs, brows rising in a look of blank, fragile detachment. “Lost that one three months in.”

Snape doesn’t speak. 

For all his bluster in denying he owed Potter anything (and for all he had not intended anything so devastating as the thrice-borne tragedy Potter describes), he knows that this is the least he deserves. To assume the abject misery Potter has heaped at his feet; to wear it as his own, like rain-soaked robes. Like a collar of finger-shaped bruises. 

The flavour of Potter’s silence has gone expectant, anxious as he waits for Snape to speak. 

Snape blows out a deep, slow breath, and his voice is surprisingly steady as he murmurs, “What would you have me say.”

Potter twitches, and the movement draws Snape’s eye. 

The man’s face is scrunched, mouth pinched, and a deep groove cuts between his eyebrows—bemused and wary.

“Nothing,” Potter responds, matter of fact, eyes fluttering in mild offense. He stares at Snape for a moment, and Snape lets his eyes drop to the glass at Potter’s feet, twinkling in the moonlight. 

Potter sucks in a quiet gasp, face going slack as with sudden realisation. “I don’t blame you,” he says quickly and just a touch too loud. 

Snape clenches his teeth and turns back to the belladonna, twitching hands tearing at the nearest leaves. He’s not sure why Potter has felt the need to lie—and about this, of all things—

“I don’t,” Potter insists, as if privy to his thoughts, and Snape’s jaw tightens ever further. “Not any more than I blame her.” Snape wrenches an unripe berry from its stem. “Or… myself.”

Snape freezes at that and his eyes cut sharply to Potter’s. 

Potter’s staring at him, and his eyes are very green. There’s a sad smile playing at the corners of his mouth, tremulous and fragile like spun glass. 

“You made a choice,” he intones, and, inexplicably, there is no hint of accusation there. “But so did she.” He gives a slow nod then tips his head to the side, smile twisting a bit at the edges. “And so did I.”

He shrugs his shoulders, a slow, deliberate gesture of forbearing acceptance that Snape doubts he’s ever made or seen before in his life. 

I don’t blame you, Potter had said. And apparently—nonsensically, absurdly—he meant it. 

Snape’s mouth has gone dry, the frigid night air chapping his lips. He snaps his jaw shut with an audible click and swallows hard. “What fools these mortals be.”

Potter makes a sound that might be a laugh and hums. “Shakespeare.”

Snape’s eyes widen and he glances sharply toward Potter. 

Potter does laugh then—a loud, sudden bark of amusement at whatever appalled expression Snape wears—then shakes his head. “Lucky guess.”

Snape feels his shoulders relax just slightly, strangely comforted by the knowledge that, however odd and ridiculous Potter’s sentiment, at the very least he’s still a poorly-read idiot. 

The world rights itself on its axis, and he turns back toward the belladonna, ignoring the worryingly soft look on Potter’s face. 

A moment passes, during which Snape wrestles a handful of berries from their stems. His little basket is nearly full when Potter speaks. 

“You were,” he starts, then chews his lip for a moment before trying again. “You were bare all th—”

“I am bare,” Snape corrects, casting a scowl toward Potter. 

Potter blinks owlishly, then nods. “Yeah. Yes,” he says, then nods again. “You are.” There’s a pointed sort of acceptance in his tone, a determined, almost stubborn show of deference that leaves Snape wrongfooted, frowning in bewilderment. 

If Potter notices, he doesn’t let on. “But before. When you were a boy, you were—. You were bare all through school.”

Snape feels his face go blank, and he turns away, grasping blindly at another berry. “Yes.”

Potter shifts behind him. “That—. Must’ve been hard.”

Snape hums flatly and pops an unripe berry between his thumb and forefinger. “More fodder for ridicule,” he mutters, and nearly winces at the bitterness in his tone. He squares his taut shoulders and shakes his head, neck twinging at the motion. “Hardly anything I was unaccustomed to.”

Potter is silent for a brief moment, and Snape counts the seconds in his head while he waits for Potter to formulate the all too predictable question. 

T minus three. 

T minus two. 

T min—

“Did you want one?” Potter whispers, then primly harrumphs. “A mark, I mean. Back then. Did you—. Did you want—”

“Yes,” Snape hisses.

“Okay,” Potter returns quickly. 

Snape is tempted to leave it there. Though Potter had instigated this little tête-à-tête, had laid out his painful truths like offerings at an altar, Snape is hardly obliged to respond in kind. He had told Potter once already that he owed him nothing, and he’d meant it. 

And yet. 

“It was,” he starts, then flinches at the sudden roughness of his voice. The scar on his throat—in his throat, actually; Nagini’s bite had pierced the musculature beneath his jaw, sliced through his carotid, and fractured his hyoid—often aches when he speaks more than a handful of sentences, particularly in the cold. He should have gone inside hours ago, if only to warm up. 

(Of course, there are a great many things he should have done.)

Snape clears his throat, though it does little to ease the aching tightness there, and murmurs, “It was no small part of why I joined the Dark Lord.”

“What?” Potter asks, and Snape can hear the bemused frown in his voice. “Why would—?” He pauses briefly, then sucks in a short inhale—not quite a gasp, but near enough. “The dark mark.”

Snape doesn’t bother to respond—is frankly unsure why he offered this bit of macabre personal history at all. Perhaps Potter’s drunkenness is catching. 

Behind him, Potter blows out a short puff of air. “That’s… I—”

Snape’s violet-stained hands clench. “I am aware it was foolish—”

“—understand.”

Snape’s head turns toward Potter, sending a sharp zing of pain from jaw to clavicle. Snape ignores it in favour of balking at Potter. “You… understand.”

Potter looks up from where his eyes have settled on Snape’s little basket, and he gives a small shrug. “S’pose so, yeah.” He shrugs again, looser now, and a vague fondness colours his face as he glances in Snape’s direction. “I’ve had a mark for as long as I can remember. It was—it’s been… a comfort.” Snape frowns down at the basket at his knees, but does not interrupt. 

Potter sniffs. “Whenever things got bad, with- with the Dursleys or at Hogwarts… I always knew I wasn’t alone.” There’s a lightness in his voice, something soft and almost wondrous, and it sets Snape’s teeth on edge. “I knew that there was—. That there was someone out there for me. That I had a soulma—”

“You were wrong.”

Silence hangs in the frigid air. Snape hadn’t spoken loudly enough for the words to echo, and yet they seem to resound all the same, ringing sharp and final through the night. 

Potter is trying to think of something to say—Snape can nearly hear the gearworks of the man’s sluggish, drunken thought processes—and Snape sighs. 

“A mark does not a soulmate make,” Snape murmurs with a mild sneer. 

Potter is quiet for another short moment. Then, “You don’t believe in it?”

Snape huffs and reaches for another berry; the bush is picked nearly clean now. “I also don’t believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.” Potter doesn’t say anything, but the flavour of his silence has gone bemused. Snape glances at him over his shoulder. “You’re surprised?”

Potter blinks at him, once, twice, then shakes his head. “Thought all magic folk believed in soulmates. I mean, in the muggle world—”

“Every muggle is marked for someone of a different sex,” Snape interjects. 

Potter frowns at him, dips his head. “Ye-es?”

Snape huffs a frustrated sigh and sits back on his haunches. “Do you believe that all muggles are heterosexual,” he asks, raising a brow. 

Potter frowns harder, eyes flicking side to side. “I… Well. No. But—”

Snape huffs again, cutting in before Potter does irreparable damage to his intellect—such as it is—trying to riddle his way through the cognitive dissonance. “A mark determines reproductive compatibility and nothing more.” An obvious and salient fact, which most people—magical and Muggle alike—ignore in favour of nonsensical fairytales. “As homosexual wixen can reproduce with the aid of magic, our marks are not bound by sex.” Another simple truth lost in the whimsically-storied annals of soulmates.

Potter shakes his head again, eyes gone hazy—though whether with the booze or his inability to comprehend a simple chain of logic, Snape can’t be sure. “Right, but—”

Logic, it is, then. “And as I’ve no intention of procreating whatsoever,” Snape interjects archly, “my mark—and yours… are meaningless.”

Potter stares at him blankly, breathing slow and deep. He has that look about him again, like he’s performing discrete maths in his head. 

After a moment, his chin dips, eyes settling on the stretch of ground between his feet. “Better to just—. Be without, then?” he asks, voice strangely small. 

Snape sniffs, murmuring, “Indubitably,” then turns back to the belladonna. His eyes scan over it, alighting on what appears to be the last fruit. He reaches a hand through the leaves and plucks it from the limb. 

“What are those?” Potter asks behind him, and for God’s sake, had the boy truly learned nothing in all the years Snape had painstakingly taught him?

Snape grits his teeth for a moment, then arches a brow, tossing the last berry in Potter’s general direction. Potter extends a hand to grasp it from the air, quidditch reflexes still intact even as the man approaches blind drunk. 

Potter stares down at the berry, then frowns inquisitively at Snape. 

“Eat it,” Snape says flatly. 

Potter eyes the berry, turning it between his fingers. Moron though the man is, Snape doubts he’d eat unidentified flora, and certainly not at Snape’s behest—

Potter pops the fruit into his mouth, chewing deliberately.

Snape stares, jaw loose and brow furrowed. Good God, but the boy is a fool. 

“Mm,” Potter hums, then swallows. “That’s nice. Sweet.”

Snape’s eyes flutter as they roll skyward, and he breathes a frustrated sigh. “Yes,” he murmurs, scowling sharply at Potter, who has the nerve to look confused, “which is likely why it’s killed so many people.”

Potter blanches, a brief choking sound emanating from the back of his throat. “Wh—. What.”

“Belladonna fruit,” Snape sneers, matter-of-fact. “It’s dreadfully poisonous.”

Potter stares blankly at him for another ten seconds or so, glassy eyes wide and unblinking. Snape feels something strange burbling up his throat—a laugh, he thinks, though he hardly recognises the sensation. 

He suppresses it with a prim harrumph and takes pity on Potter, little though the man deserves it in this instance. “To muggles,” he clarifies, arching a brow in distaste at Potter’s ignorance. 

Potter gusts out a sigh, slumping forward. “Christ,” he chokes out, hand settling over his breastbone. “That’s not funny, you know.”

Snape hums. “Not to you, certainly.”

Potter shakes his head. “So it’s not gonna kill me?”

Snape rolls his eyes and takes a fruit from the basket. It’s slightly overripe, so he bites carefully into it, mindful of the violet-black juice staining his lips and fingertips. He chews demonstratively, peering up at Potter with an arched brow. 

Glazed and bloodshot though Potter’s eyes are, they focus rather intently on Snape’s mouth, pupils wide and steady. When Snape swallows, they flick down toward Snape’s throat, bobbing in time with his adam’s apple. 

Something tightens in Snape’s gut, hot and uncomfortable, and he turns away, casting his eye over the naked belladonna.

A quiet, awkward moment passes before Potter speaks. “Our second.”

Snape frowns and risks a glance over his shoulder. 

The sharpness of Potter’s gaze has dulled, though his eyes are still fixed on Snape, his expression earnest and inexplicably warm. Snape grits his teeth and arches a brow, askance. 

Potter sniffs, and the left side of his mouth quirks up in a crooked smile. “Our second try. We—.” He wets his lips, head shaking minutely. “We were gonna call him Albus Severus.”

What would you have called them, Snape had asked, cornered and fretful, trading guilt for hostility. Perhaps you’d have even named one for me—

“Ah, yes,” Snape says in a dark, anguished whisper, neck throbbing as his shoulders stiffen. “A great man, and the bastard who killed him. Rather appalling, even for you, Pot—”

“Two great men,” Potter interjects softly. He stares at Snape with sad eyes and smiles incongruously, raising a hand with the fore- and middle fingers extended, mouthing two. 

Snape stares blankly at him, wrongfooted as he always seems to be whenever Potter opens his damned mouth. Potter stares resolutely back for all of ten seconds before his eyelids flutter, gaze going unfocused. He sways precariously, nearly toppling over on the stair, head lolling about on his shoulders. 

Snape sighs. That’ll be the belladonna. While not fatally poisonous to magic folk, it’s certainly still an intoxicant. Paired with the frankly appalling quantity of expensive whisky Potter has imbibed over the last hour or so, it’s likely to take the man entirely off his feet.

Snape sighs again and hoists himself up from the soggy ground, grunting at the lance of pain that shoots from his sore feet to his stiff neck. 

Potter tips his head back to peer up at Snape. “What are—ohh,” he starts, then cuts himself off with a drunken groan, teetering to the side. 

Snape grumbles a curse under his breath and approaches the man, navigating around him as he climbs the stair. Potter mutters something unintelligible, and Snape ignores him in favour of grasping the young man by the collar and hoisting him gracelessly to his feet. 

Potter makes a startled noise, knees buckling briefly before he rights himself, and Snape half-drags him through the door and inside.

Fortunately the sofa is barely a handful of paces from the side entrance, and Snape deposits Potter there with nary a mishap.

Well, excluding the fact that apparently Potter will be remaining for the evening. 

“What—” Potter starts, trying (and failing) to sit up as he looks bemusedly about the sitting room. “What are—”

Oh, for God’s sake. “Sleep, Potter,” Snape grumbles, shuffling stiffly toward the corridor. “And if you vomit on my sofa, I’ll curse you.”

“Oh,” Potter mumbles, “no, I- I couldn’t—. I can just—” he shifts his weight forward as if to stand, then squeezes his eyes shut, head shaking. “Give me—. Give me a moment, and I can- I can floo—”

“I’m not on the public network,” Snape mutters. 

Potter frowns, shakes his head again. “Alright, I’ll appar—”

Idiot. “And as amusing as it would be watching you splinch yourself dead,” Snape sneers, folding his arms over his chest, “I doubt my reputation could withstand the dismembered corpse of Harry Potter rotting in my sitting room.”

Potter stares up at him for a moment, eyes bleary and unfocused, before he quirks a crooked smile. “Could use me for potions ingredients, eh?” he mumbles, shivering slightly in the midnight cold. “Desiccated spleen of Boy Who Lived.” 

Snape raises a brow and waves a purple-fingered hand, summoning a blanket from the airing cupboard. He plucks it from the air, shaking off the fine layer of dust as he unfolds it. “Considering how much you’ve had to drink, I’d say desiccation is a ways off.”

Potter giggles—giggles, like a ruddy schoolboy—and slumps into the sofa, eyes fluttering shut. “S’funny. Were you always funny?”

Snape peers down at the man, bemusement warring with irritation, before he breathes a low sigh, settling the blanket loosely over Potter’s half-comatose form. “Sleep, Potter.”

Potter nods—or twitches, Snape isn’t sure—and settles ever more bonelessly against the sofa cushions, mouth parting slightly as he breathes.

Snape straightens his aching spine and turns about, making his way toward the hallway. He flicks the light switch as he crosses the threshold, and darkness descends. 

~*~

Snape rises early—earlier than he should for having toiled so long into the night. He groans as he heaves himself upright, sore from sole to crown. 

He imagines briefly that the conversation of last evening was nothing more than a fever dream—a vivid figment of his ever-addling mind. It’s a preferred (and frankly more believable) alternative, if not a pleasant one, and he lingers for a short moment in the delusion. 

Until, of course, he spies the small glass phial of hangover remedy on his nightstand. 

(As he’d trudged toward his bed last night, his legs had carried him—without conscious thought—towards his stores, where his stained, blistered hands had taken up the little phial, seemingly of their own accord. 

He’d not had the energy to do more than scowl at himself and continue his sojourn to the bedchamber, where he’d apparently set it on the bedside table before collapsing into fitful slumber.)

So, all things considered, Snape is either significantly more cracked than he’d previously thought, or Harry Potter is currently passed out drunk on his ratty sofa. 

There is, of course, only one way to find out which. 

~*~

Snape scowls as he sets the phial of hangover remedy on the kitchen counter (he remembers picking it up from the nightstand, though he once again cannot recall consciously deciding to do so), and sets about brewing his morning tea. He casts furtive glances toward Potter, strewn haphazardly across the sofa, and tries to ignore the way the magic of the nexus has settled ever more comfortably over the house since the man’s arrival. The air is warm and thick, and the morning light glows where it cuts through the soft shadows, coating everything in a syrupy layer of something like contentment.

Snape bristles and pulls the infuser from his chipped cup, tossing it into the sink with a clatter.

It stands to reason, of course. A talisman is a living thing, after all, its innate magic pulsing within it as a heart beats within a man. Though Potter destroyed it, he also rebuilt it, stronger than before and with a purity of spirit that Snape could hardly feign, let alone muster from within. 

And so, the talisman—and, by extension, the nexus, the wards, and the whole bloody house—rejoices in the presence of its new maker, its very own prodigal son. 

Snape’s hand clenches tight around the handle of his teacup as he takes a scalding sip. 

A handful of quiet moments pass while Snape drinks his tea. The warm morning light pours in through the grotty window over the sink, illuminating flecks of dust floating in the musty air. Snape might call it peaceful, if not for the dread of the impending—

Potter groans pitifully as he wakes, the sofa creaking beneath him as he shifts stiffly in place. 

(Peace never lasts.)

Snape grits his teeth, squaring his narrow shoulders, and takes up the hangover remedy. Not for Potter’s sake, he assures himself, only so the blighter will get out of his damned house—presently, if at all possible. 

He marches out of the kitchen, past the dining table, and into the sitting room. Potter flinches as he approaches, though Snape rather thinks that’s more due to the bright light streaming in through the bay window. 

Snape frowns hard, sets the phial on the low coffee table before Potter. “Drink.”

Potter squints up at him, then glances down at the phial, brow quirking in suspicion. 

“S’it poison?” he mutters, and his voice is low and raspy, rough with sleep. 

Snape swallows sharply, hands fisting as his belly tightens inexplicably. He opens his mouth to respond—an insult he hopes, though he hasn’t quite formulated it yet—but Potter heads him off with a wave of a hand. 

“Nevermind,” he murmurs lowly. “I don’t care.”

He grasps the phial, deftly displacing the stopper with a flick of his thumb, and knocks back the bottle’s contents in one deep swallow. 

Snape’s jaw snaps shut, and he stares blankly down at the man, eyes catching on the dark stubble shadowing the sharp jawline. He should probably inform Potter that one phial contains four doses, but, considering the greenness of the man’s gills and the whiskey-scented sweat clinging to him, Snape refrains. 

Potter makes a face at the flavour—it’s not Snape’s vilest concoction, but it certainly isn’t pleasant—and smacks his lips, head shaking jerkily even as his color evens out, red eyes clearing. 

Once the potion’s done its work a handful of seconds later, Potter’s brow pops up, mouth quirking in a startled smile. 

“Merlin,” Potter swears, peering up at Snape. “You should patent this.”

Snape rolls his eyes and snatches the empty bottle from Potter’s hand, sneering, “I did patent it, idiot.”

Inexplicably, Potter’s smile only widens. 

Snape arches a wary brow at him, then pivots swiftly, marching back towards the solace of the kitchen and his half-drunk tea.  

He hears Potter shift behind him—likely putting himself to rights after a drunken sleep on a lumpy sofa—followed by the pad of hesitant footsteps as Potter pursues him to the kitchen. 

Snape frowns, shoulders tensing as he downs the dregs of his tea. Potter cannot possibly want to talk more, for God’s sake. The tête-à-tête of last evening was the longest—and most arduous—Snape’s had in a decade, and he’s frankly rather drained. For all the old house is warmer with Potter present, Snape would much prefer it damp and dreary again, if only to be alone—

“I should go.”

Snape glances up sharply to find Potter stood on the other side of the counter, gazing at him with a faint smile. 

Snape frowns in bemusement and glances back down at his teacup. Drowned leaves litter the bottom, clinging to the stained ceramic, and Snape digs his thumbnail into a chip on the lip. 

Potter clears his throat awkwardly, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “Got a meeting at Panacaea later,” he murmurs. “Apparently, Gin’s regimen isn’t working like they’d expected, so they need to—”

“You are still handling her treatment?” Snape asks, peering up at Potter before he can think better of it. 

Potter blinks twice, frowns. “I—. Yeah?” he says, shrugging a shoulder. “‘Course. Why wouldn’t I?”

Snape arches a brow. “You are divorcing her.”

Potter shifts uncomfortably in place. “We’re divorcing each other,” he corrects, “but I—. I still care about her. I don’t”—another twitchy shrug—“Don’t want her to suffer.”

Snape frowns and looks back down at his mug. Potter has always been a moron, certainly, but usually he’s the predictable sort; Snape has rarely struggled to follow the boy—man’s ostensible logic. Now though, Snape finds Potter and his motives—presuming he has any beyond being as much of a nuisance as humanly possible—rather elusive. 

The tea leaves at the bottom of Snape’s cup form no particular shape, offering no answers, and Snape’s jaw tightens. 

“She deceived you,” he mutters flatly and does not say As did I. 

Of course, this newfangled Potter seems to hear it anyway, and he tips his head, that strange, soft smile returning. “I deceived myself, really,” he murmurs, smile quirking with a bloodless sort of bitterness. “Think we all did.”

Loath as he is to admit it, he thinks Potter may well be right about that. 

“We loved each other for ten years, me and Gin,” Potter continues, glassy eyes cutting toward the window as a sparrow flies past. “Maybe not quite the way the other would have liked, but…” he trails off and shakes his head, peering down at his feet. They’re bare, Snape notes absently, and large for a man of his stature, with a dusting of dark hair across the tops of his toes. 

“I forgave her,” Potter says plainly, glancing up at Snape with firmly set shoulders. “I am forgiving her. And—myself.”

Snape holds the man’s gaze for a short moment then peers back into his empty teacup, shoulders tensing in irritated confusion. Forgiveness is a gift he has rarely requested or received, and he’s certainly never been in a position to offer it—least of all to himself. 

Potter is silent for a short moment—waiting, Snape thinks, though he can scarcely imagine what for—then he breathes a quiet sigh, swallowing audibly. “I better go.”

Snape dips his head. “Yes.”

Potter waits another moment before Snape sees him shift awkwardly in his peripheral vision, pivoting toward the hallway. 

He pauses at the threshold. “Thank you.” 

Snape peers up at him before he can stop himself, and whatever expression he wears brings a light flush to Potter’s sunken cheeks. 

“For last night,” Potter mutters to the grotty floor. “For letting me…”

He trails off, and Snape is tempted to sneer, to remind the whelp in biting tones that Snape didn’t let him do anything. Per usual, Potter had traipsed in with all the grace and deference of a bloody lorry, and Snape, as always, had been infuriatingly powerless to stop it. In point of fact, Potter is no different from any of the others who have staked their claim upon Snape, demanding of him what they wish until even the illusion of his autonomy is incidental.

“Thank you,” Potter says again and disappears down the hall before Snape can formulate a cutting reply. 

Snape stands stock-still in the kitchen, hand clutching at his empty mug. He listens as Potter summons his shoes, wrestles his way into them. He hears the front door creak open, then close with a soft snick. He feels it when Potter crosses out of the wards, a startlingly hollow sensation as the traitorous house gives a doleful sigh in the man’s absence. The musty air cools, pimpling the unscarred flesh of his neck, and the bright morning light dulls to a joyless grey.  

The little sparrow flies past the window again, and Snape glares as it perches on the sill. He casts his cup sharply into the sink, where it shatters in a plume of ceramic dust, and watches as the bird flitters away.