HP: light as a surrogate for everything
light as a surrogate for everything
severus/harry. Severus is afraid to fly.
A few days after Dumbledore died, they locked Severus up in the dungeons and ordered him to wait there until Harry Potter came to see him. It wasn't the first time Severus had been locked up, and it wasn't the last time either, but it was the first time a child at least 10 years younger than him with the translucent skin of a baby whom he could remember teaching would wave a hand to pardon him and let him go. By then, everyone had already started calling Harry "He", a cross between the Christian pronoun for God and the unnamed eloquence of He-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, and Severus couldn't figure out if the almost arrogance of Harry's manner was a reflection of that status.
They still keep Severus in the dungeons, but the door isn't locked anymore even if there are guards at his door, and they bring him all the ingredients, glass bottles, beakers, knives, and paraphernalia associated with potions that he can ever desire. They took his wand when they first put him in the dungeons and they didn't give it back to him, so he has to ask the guards for fire, and it's granted to him reluctantly; he has to convince them each time that he isn't a mad scientist like the ones in the Muggle stories they read. He doesn't even know an exact potion that would react violently to stone, much less use it; besides, the walls are too thick, and it is, if not comfortable, than not hazardous to his health to remain here. If he closes his eyes or just focuses on the little table cluttered with multicolored liquids in thin glass tubes, he can even pretend he's back in Hogwarts instead of in this fortress-like base they've concocted. All dungeons are the same on a very basic level. His current one is certainly no exception.
It takes him a while to adjust anyway. Severus is lucky, although he hardly considers it to be luck worth mentioning. His dungeon is isolated from the rest, and that provides him with the seclusion he needs to think. But he can still hear the sounds of the other prisoners banging against their walls and doors, some hexing the place five times over, others begging for the freedom like low-rate peddlers offering to sell their soul for a little fresh air. Once in a while, Severus thinks he can hear a familiar voice, somebody he may have sneered at, long ago, or a classmate whose secrets he wasn't privy to in his schooldays. It's only once in a while, not often enough to mean anything, except maybe that he wishes he isn't here anymore and is instead outside, where he could see the sun from a window larger than the size of his head.
Severus has never seen sunlight as blue as the sunlight streaming from that window. Severus has never felt sunlight as cold either, or as cruel, or as tempting, than the sunlight from that window.
The first time they send him to Harry was the first time-he barely remembers the actual day, just the distorted recollections-they send Ron and Hermione to oversee a field mission without Harry, and the first time after the war began that they left Harry alone at night. From the dungeons, Severus can't hear anything, but as soon as he clears the steps up into the rooms on the upper floors, most often referred to as the war rooms, he can already hear the sounds: a lot of wordless screaming and glass breaking and pounding, and above it all voices in a constant shrill din. It's a lot of garbage and static noise at first, but it's loud, and the boys taking him up wince as they near it.
Severus finds out from the harried young men and women gathered at the door that he's sent there to calm Harry, all the teachers having been put to better use than babysitting and two parts of the Trio send to the field. He tells them with the quietness born of too long in seclusion that it's no use, and they spend the next five minutes alternating between staring at him and the door that separates them all from the storm inside. Then they push him in. Later he wonders why he didn't resist more. The hands that grabbed his back and shoved were white and soft. He had once taught these hands how to cut in perfectly even strips and how to pour blistering hot liquids from cauldron to vial. Now he just stands and waits until they thrust him into a direction. Now he doesn't know what authority feels like. About five weeks worth of damp dirt, dust, and mold from the stone walls of his prison, and nothing to show for it except a motley collection of half filled bottles, overfilling cauldrons, and some knives with the remains of plant matter still drying on the metal.
Severus hasn't seen Harry since the day they sent Harry to his dungeon room to tell the guards to unlock the room. He doesn't see Harry when he immediately walks in the room either, because some even more harried young men and women are gathered in the room picking up the messes Harry's making by throwing what looks like paperweights around in the room, and some still more harried young men and women trying to get Harry to sit down and drink some water. They part when they see Severus, though, and, harried and young, stand in a half circle behind him so he can see what he assumes to be Harry, angry and afraid in a way Severus has never seen. There's black hair, and somewhere under the mess of it, green eyes, a gash across the cheek, and a disgusting sham of a military uniform on his body, the collar hanging like a loose robe around his neck. Severus figures after a brief few seconds of shocked disbelief that the uniform isn't meant to be humor at all and was probably just the effect of too many Muggle war films, a few of which they displayed on the stone dungeon walls, the ghostly uniformed figures as real as the illusory sunlight through the cubicle window.
Harry isn't a filmstrip hero, though, at least not yet. Severus isn't back in his dungeon either. He tries calling out Harry's name a few times, first and last name, in all the different intonations he can think of, and eventually Harry responds by grabbing the front of Severus's five week old robes and pressing his face into them, not crying, just shaking like he would never stop. The first night, when they try to take Severus away, Harry emits a wail like a newborn baby bereft of its mother, and they let Severus sleep in Harry's room that night, trying not to breathe too hard so as not to move Harry's head. The rooms upstairs taste and smell and even sound different from the rooms downstairs, not cleaner or more comfortable, but drier and whiter, with more of a displayable image, and the noises travel more because the walls are thinner, so Severus doesn't go to sleep until it's late, listening to Harry's breathing and the breathing of the guards outside and his own breathing. In the morning, by the time Severus wakes up, Harry's already gone, and the boys that take Severus down are the same boys who took him up. They don't look him in the eye, but they stop treating him like a prisoner and more like a guest who has just barely overstayed his welcome.
The second time, even though Ron and Hermione are there, they still call for Severus, and eventually it gets to be a habit. Some nights, Harry isn't falling apart, just needing company, and those nights Harry goes down to the dungeons to learn potions from Severus again. The night they're either making the potion that eliminates shadows or the invisibility one, Harry gives him a room on the floor with all the war rooms so that Severus doesn't fall asleep at night hearing the prisoners plea for freedom or wake up to the sounds of fists pounding against the prison bars. They take the guards away as well and let him walk around without anybody looking over his shoulder. Severus figures that it's because it makes it easier for Harry to call for him at night. There're still guards at Harry's door, and wards, and spells and protection that Severus can't even begin to imagine, but it's easier than getting the uniformed boys to drag him up from the dungeon depths and his little cubicle light at least three times a week.
That night, Severus sneaks close to Harry's door and listens to the buzz of the protection wards and Harry pacing in his room, and he discovers that he is very much in love with Harry. Being in love with Harry is not very different from being in love with anybody else, Severus would like to think, except he soon realizes it is very different, different because everybody loves Harry and everybody wants to be a part of Harry's life, Harry's secret life, and Severus decides that for the second time in his life, he is lucky. Although he's never seen Harry cry, he's been close, and he's touched Harry's skin before. It doesn't feel like silk or anything; it feels like the stuff of legends and wild, inspired dreams, and even a bit of immortality. But Harry's older now, and he doesn't have the translucent baby skin he had when he visited Severus down in the dungeon. Harry's taller now, too, and eats less, and works more, the effect being that Harry looks at least five years older than his age. Severus wonders how much older Harry will have to become to catch up with his own body, or how old Harry will seem to be by the end of the war. If there ever is an end.
They move Severus's potions stuff up from the dungeon as well. The uniformed boys and the harried young men and women sometimes stop by to complain about the smell, but more often than not they drop by for old times. Harry still takes his night classes. They don't learn much, mostly because they either take the time to squabble and argue like old times or watch Harry fumble stupidly through the ingredient list. Sometimes Severus forgets himself and barks out the number of points he's deducting from Gryffindor when Harry does something wrong. Once he even accidentally assigned detention. He got it from Harry too: an extra ten minutes of Harry just staring at Severus with grave green eyes, not as wide as a church door, Severus quotes to himself, or as a deep as a well, but beautiful, grave, silent green eyes anyway.
Afternoon, Severus guesses it's a Sunday because some of the harried young men and women walked around carrying Bibles under their arms. "You're is the only sane person left in the world," Harry tells him, looking at Severus from the emotional vantage point of someone almost like a stranger. Harry crosses his arms, and the expression on his face is somewhere between 'hold me' and 'old'. Severus's room is always smoky from the vapors and the dust from the plants. The light from the window, no longer as big as Severus's head, but not the wide open spaces he dreams of, makes swirls in the air, and Severus wonders if Harry is maybe just hope reborn in a person and how much that would weigh on one person's shoulders.
Gradually the visits from the harried young men and women aren't about the smell anymore and instead are about asking Severus if he'll make them potions of all sorts. He's made so many Veritaserum-filled bottles that if he lined them all up they would probably stretch across England. He's made a lot of strange potions as well. Once they made him cauldrons of what is commonly called the Shakespearean, a draught pulled straight from the pages of Romeo and Juliet, and not too dissimilar to the Draught of Living Death. Each of the soldiers carries one in their pockets. Harry tells them that it's in case they lose a raid. They can drink it and pretend to be dead.
They demand Severus to invent some potions as well, because the enemy, all being Slytherins and good at what Severus does, have started making antidotes and little protectors against various potions. If Severus refuses, they send in Harry, and Harry, with his grave green eyes, will look at Severus and say, quietly, "For me." Harry will take Severus's right hand between the two of his, patting it softly. It's a gesture Severus thinks Harry learned from either the old Muggle war films or the petty, useless diplomats in the Ministry. Children are impressionable things, Severus was once told. He too was an impressionable youth, long ago.
But Severus can never refuse Harry anything, even if Harry borrows gestures from the bowels of B rated war films. Cliches are cliches because they are true and were once genuine, or so Severus would like to believe.
The night they attack the Malfoy Manor is a summer night, something Severus only knows because the harried young men and women keep yelling out the date. Inside, it's colder than ever, and whiter and quieter besides, because almost the entire army is approaching the Malfoy Manor from all sides, and the rest of the staff is in the large war room, the one in the center of the building, receiving surveillance reports from the wizards at Malfoy Manor and planning more strategic attacks. Severus is left alone in his room, surrounded by silent bottles and plants, and eventually he falls asleep, slumped halfway over his cutting board and his face mashed into the uneven remains of ginger roots.
When they wake him up a few hours later, the harried young men and women around his table are all jabbering constantly at each other and at him, some of them on the verge of crying and others of them quite stiff. He finds out somehow that he's supposed to make something to soothe the wounds of some of the soldiers and something else to make them go to sleep. He tells them all that he isn't a damn Mediwizard and if they want a nurse they can find one themselves. It's only then does he find out that Harry's been captured and that most of their medical staff was killed. Their numbers are down by 38%, one of the girls tell him, and Severus, confused, sleepy, half in despair, and tired of everything, wonders how much of that 38% Harry should occupy.
He does try his best to make some salves for the wounds, though. They even let him out of his room so he can try to help bandage up some of the wounds on the soldiers in the medical wing, but the worst of the injured still need to see a real Mediwizard and not some weary Potions master who hasn't taught for upwards of half a year. Still. Something is better than nothing, and nothing is, supposedly, worse than everything else, and Severus spends the night waiting for someone to tell him that they've found Harry. He figures that's what half the wizarding world is waiting for.
It doesn't happen that night, or the night after, or the night after the first night after, but the fourth night, sleepless and restless, Severus hears sounds banging around outside his door and a keen wailing coming from all floors of the building. A few minutes later one of the girls barges into his room, only vaguely sorry that she didn't knock first. They've rescued Harry out of Voldemort's place, she says, but he's badly injured. They're getting him treatment tomorrow; right now they just need Severus to make something soothing to put Harry to sleep and numb the pain. She stands there waiting in his doorway while he tries his best, cutting his left hand three times in the process and giving himself a burn on his right hand, even accidentally drops one of the ingredient bottles on the floor. She doesn't say anything, and neither does he, just pours the liquid into the cup she has in her hands and rushes out of the room with it, leaving her behind to clean up the mess the glass made.
Next door, Harry is heaving, sweaty, dirty, bloody, and just a few breaths away from being dead. Severus starts yelling nonsensically at the people around him, demanding that they get Harry to the doctor now, but all that serves to do is spill a few drops of the numbing drought he's made, burning the carpet in the places where the drops fell. The room quiets down, the whole crowd shoving Severus closer to Harry, who doesn't look like he has enough strength to swallow. Severus forces the whole thing down Harry's mouth and tears out of the room, down the hall, screaming for a doctor. His hair gets in his mouth when he runs. Most of the place is empty. The only person answering him is his own echo.
Two of the guards that weren't sent to the Malfoy Manor attack find him an hour later crouched in a chair in the medical wing of the building, staring accusingly at all the people around him, and they don't ask questions when they lead Severus, still demanding a nurse or a doctor or someone with the proper training to get Harry fixed up, back to his room. He doesn't remember falling asleep or even entering his room. The next morning, though, he wakes up to find that, for the first time in upwards half a year, they brought him clean clothes.
It's a few days, maybe not even a week, before he gets to see Harry again, only to find out that Harry is starting a two-week campaign to launch a break-in of the Malfoy Manor. Harry is putting on his uniform as Severus enters the room, and Severus can see the bandages all over Harry's body. Harry is fastening the button right under his chin, his back to Severus. There are fake windows on three sides of Harry's room with white framing curtains. The artificial sunlight is warm, tinged with a bit of orange and yellow and soft colors, and it makes Severus's eyes ache. He remembers the people waiting for Harry outside, walks forward and leans in close, whispering, "Don't go," into Harry's ear. Harry turns around, his eyes still gravely green and wide, but there is something distant about him now, and his eyes are already surveying the surroundings and the hiding places around the Malfoy Manor. He is already thinking about victory and balance and beautiful, noble, brave things.
"I can't," Harry replies absently, leaning his chin back and up so Severus can help him button the rest of his uniform. Severus's eyes are blurring, but he's still trying to manage the buttons and the little slits where the buttons go, and his fingers catch with Harry's as they both try. Because the sunshine is bright, Severus thinks to himself, his thumb brushing the worn-out fabric of Harry's uniform. He's crying because the sunshine is so bright it fills the room, he tells himself, but the sunshine was bright in the dungeons as well, especially in the morning when the sun rose, and the sky would be pink. Later on in the day the sunshine would turn blue.
But Severus has never been in a room filled with this much sunlight, even if it is fake. He has never seen sunshine this yellow, this fragrant, or this sad.
He trembles at the edge of the last button. Harry is thin, and the uniform is large, hanging off his shoulders and his body like an ugly body bag. Soon, Severus thinks, Harry will be older, will fill out the uniform, will grow muscles and be strong and be a man. But he's still a boy now, with bony shoulders, and the uniform is so very big. "I would stay," Severus says, his hands fluttering up and down the buttons and trying to straighten out Harry's collar. "If you asked me to. If I had to leave."
"I know," Harry says, taking both of Severus's hands into his own.
"I love you," Severus says.
"I know," Harry says. "I know that too," and walks past Severus, limping a little from the slash the enemy had cut into his right inner thigh so deep that it still leaves a scar even after the doctor treated it, the soreness in both of his legs because both leg bones had shattered into a thousand pieces, and the herbal soaked and healing-spelled bandages they keep around Harry's ribs and chests to keep the broken ribs and gashes from splitting open again. Maybe faltering because of the millions upon millions of hopes pinned on his shoulders. A little stumble when he pushes the door open, the kind of stumble Harry never makes when other people are around. Intimate, painfully so, and even worse because all Severus can think is how much Harry is hurting and how little Severus can do about it.
He watches Harry leave, and already he can see Harry walking through the masses of the troops, all of them touching his hands and his shoulders and arms, grabbing a little luck from him. Can already see Harry, covered in grime and dirt, slamming against the ground and waving his wand in the air, trying to control a desperate and wavering army. Can already see the blood and the fire and the pain. Can already see the people cheering Harry's name. Can already see Harry, years from now, afraid to sleep alone or in the dark, always keeping his room filled with artificial lights, and Harry in a room that can never have a real window or an unguarded door. Can already see Harry in his rare unguarded moments of truth, a boy who never grew up but grew too old, too experienced and too unqualified to be anything but a child hero.
Can already see himself getting older, older, older, fifty and sixty years old, watching Harry grow up in his face, and rehashing in his mind all the little moments he remembers of Harry, maybe even finding some little place similar to Hogwarts, telling all the children that when Harry was a student, he made stupid blunders, like blowing up a cauldron of swelling potion. Can already see himself older, older, older, and living a meaningless life, and Harry's biographer asking him to say a few words about Harry as a student, and him trying not to be anything but a living container of pure memories, a little Pensieve with a body.
Severus sits down on Harry's still unmade bed when Harry's footsteps finally disappear from Severus's hearing range. Moments later the guards creep into the room, wands outstretched and ready to kill the light in the room with a few whispered words. Severus gets up and blows up in their faces. He's at least taller than the guards; for a minute he feels like being a teacher again because they start to back off with shocked looks when they hear his voice rise in three-note intervals. They leave him alone after that, closing the door behind them. Severus watches the closed door for a few minutes before he watches the light in the artificial windows flicker. Instead of light, though, the window starts displaying leaves passing at a horrendously fast rate, clouds streaming by like ribbons, the sunlight suddenly changing as it flutters through the cover of leaves.
Severus has never been one to fly because brooms have never listened to his command. The first time he flew, he threw up when he touched the ground again. But sitting here, on Harry's bed, watching the leaves simulate flight, he wonders if Harry, someone who likes to fly, to be grounded in the midst of a faith-hungry crowd, knowing he can't do anything but stay where he is, knowing there's no escape to fly into, is satisfied by simply falling asleep surrounded by three walls of fake leaves and soft sunlight when he knows there is a sky just a few steps away, a sky waiting to be touched, and Harry not being able to be the one to do it.
severus/harry. Severus is afraid to fly.
A few days after Dumbledore died, they locked Severus up in the dungeons and ordered him to wait there until Harry Potter came to see him. It wasn't the first time Severus had been locked up, and it wasn't the last time either, but it was the first time a child at least 10 years younger than him with the translucent skin of a baby whom he could remember teaching would wave a hand to pardon him and let him go. By then, everyone had already started calling Harry "He", a cross between the Christian pronoun for God and the unnamed eloquence of He-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, and Severus couldn't figure out if the almost arrogance of Harry's manner was a reflection of that status.
They still keep Severus in the dungeons, but the door isn't locked anymore even if there are guards at his door, and they bring him all the ingredients, glass bottles, beakers, knives, and paraphernalia associated with potions that he can ever desire. They took his wand when they first put him in the dungeons and they didn't give it back to him, so he has to ask the guards for fire, and it's granted to him reluctantly; he has to convince them each time that he isn't a mad scientist like the ones in the Muggle stories they read. He doesn't even know an exact potion that would react violently to stone, much less use it; besides, the walls are too thick, and it is, if not comfortable, than not hazardous to his health to remain here. If he closes his eyes or just focuses on the little table cluttered with multicolored liquids in thin glass tubes, he can even pretend he's back in Hogwarts instead of in this fortress-like base they've concocted. All dungeons are the same on a very basic level. His current one is certainly no exception.
It takes him a while to adjust anyway. Severus is lucky, although he hardly considers it to be luck worth mentioning. His dungeon is isolated from the rest, and that provides him with the seclusion he needs to think. But he can still hear the sounds of the other prisoners banging against their walls and doors, some hexing the place five times over, others begging for the freedom like low-rate peddlers offering to sell their soul for a little fresh air. Once in a while, Severus thinks he can hear a familiar voice, somebody he may have sneered at, long ago, or a classmate whose secrets he wasn't privy to in his schooldays. It's only once in a while, not often enough to mean anything, except maybe that he wishes he isn't here anymore and is instead outside, where he could see the sun from a window larger than the size of his head.
Severus has never seen sunlight as blue as the sunlight streaming from that window. Severus has never felt sunlight as cold either, or as cruel, or as tempting, than the sunlight from that window.
The first time they send him to Harry was the first time-he barely remembers the actual day, just the distorted recollections-they send Ron and Hermione to oversee a field mission without Harry, and the first time after the war began that they left Harry alone at night. From the dungeons, Severus can't hear anything, but as soon as he clears the steps up into the rooms on the upper floors, most often referred to as the war rooms, he can already hear the sounds: a lot of wordless screaming and glass breaking and pounding, and above it all voices in a constant shrill din. It's a lot of garbage and static noise at first, but it's loud, and the boys taking him up wince as they near it.
Severus finds out from the harried young men and women gathered at the door that he's sent there to calm Harry, all the teachers having been put to better use than babysitting and two parts of the Trio send to the field. He tells them with the quietness born of too long in seclusion that it's no use, and they spend the next five minutes alternating between staring at him and the door that separates them all from the storm inside. Then they push him in. Later he wonders why he didn't resist more. The hands that grabbed his back and shoved were white and soft. He had once taught these hands how to cut in perfectly even strips and how to pour blistering hot liquids from cauldron to vial. Now he just stands and waits until they thrust him into a direction. Now he doesn't know what authority feels like. About five weeks worth of damp dirt, dust, and mold from the stone walls of his prison, and nothing to show for it except a motley collection of half filled bottles, overfilling cauldrons, and some knives with the remains of plant matter still drying on the metal.
Severus hasn't seen Harry since the day they sent Harry to his dungeon room to tell the guards to unlock the room. He doesn't see Harry when he immediately walks in the room either, because some even more harried young men and women are gathered in the room picking up the messes Harry's making by throwing what looks like paperweights around in the room, and some still more harried young men and women trying to get Harry to sit down and drink some water. They part when they see Severus, though, and, harried and young, stand in a half circle behind him so he can see what he assumes to be Harry, angry and afraid in a way Severus has never seen. There's black hair, and somewhere under the mess of it, green eyes, a gash across the cheek, and a disgusting sham of a military uniform on his body, the collar hanging like a loose robe around his neck. Severus figures after a brief few seconds of shocked disbelief that the uniform isn't meant to be humor at all and was probably just the effect of too many Muggle war films, a few of which they displayed on the stone dungeon walls, the ghostly uniformed figures as real as the illusory sunlight through the cubicle window.
Harry isn't a filmstrip hero, though, at least not yet. Severus isn't back in his dungeon either. He tries calling out Harry's name a few times, first and last name, in all the different intonations he can think of, and eventually Harry responds by grabbing the front of Severus's five week old robes and pressing his face into them, not crying, just shaking like he would never stop. The first night, when they try to take Severus away, Harry emits a wail like a newborn baby bereft of its mother, and they let Severus sleep in Harry's room that night, trying not to breathe too hard so as not to move Harry's head. The rooms upstairs taste and smell and even sound different from the rooms downstairs, not cleaner or more comfortable, but drier and whiter, with more of a displayable image, and the noises travel more because the walls are thinner, so Severus doesn't go to sleep until it's late, listening to Harry's breathing and the breathing of the guards outside and his own breathing. In the morning, by the time Severus wakes up, Harry's already gone, and the boys that take Severus down are the same boys who took him up. They don't look him in the eye, but they stop treating him like a prisoner and more like a guest who has just barely overstayed his welcome.
The second time, even though Ron and Hermione are there, they still call for Severus, and eventually it gets to be a habit. Some nights, Harry isn't falling apart, just needing company, and those nights Harry goes down to the dungeons to learn potions from Severus again. The night they're either making the potion that eliminates shadows or the invisibility one, Harry gives him a room on the floor with all the war rooms so that Severus doesn't fall asleep at night hearing the prisoners plea for freedom or wake up to the sounds of fists pounding against the prison bars. They take the guards away as well and let him walk around without anybody looking over his shoulder. Severus figures that it's because it makes it easier for Harry to call for him at night. There're still guards at Harry's door, and wards, and spells and protection that Severus can't even begin to imagine, but it's easier than getting the uniformed boys to drag him up from the dungeon depths and his little cubicle light at least three times a week.
That night, Severus sneaks close to Harry's door and listens to the buzz of the protection wards and Harry pacing in his room, and he discovers that he is very much in love with Harry. Being in love with Harry is not very different from being in love with anybody else, Severus would like to think, except he soon realizes it is very different, different because everybody loves Harry and everybody wants to be a part of Harry's life, Harry's secret life, and Severus decides that for the second time in his life, he is lucky. Although he's never seen Harry cry, he's been close, and he's touched Harry's skin before. It doesn't feel like silk or anything; it feels like the stuff of legends and wild, inspired dreams, and even a bit of immortality. But Harry's older now, and he doesn't have the translucent baby skin he had when he visited Severus down in the dungeon. Harry's taller now, too, and eats less, and works more, the effect being that Harry looks at least five years older than his age. Severus wonders how much older Harry will have to become to catch up with his own body, or how old Harry will seem to be by the end of the war. If there ever is an end.
They move Severus's potions stuff up from the dungeon as well. The uniformed boys and the harried young men and women sometimes stop by to complain about the smell, but more often than not they drop by for old times. Harry still takes his night classes. They don't learn much, mostly because they either take the time to squabble and argue like old times or watch Harry fumble stupidly through the ingredient list. Sometimes Severus forgets himself and barks out the number of points he's deducting from Gryffindor when Harry does something wrong. Once he even accidentally assigned detention. He got it from Harry too: an extra ten minutes of Harry just staring at Severus with grave green eyes, not as wide as a church door, Severus quotes to himself, or as a deep as a well, but beautiful, grave, silent green eyes anyway.
Afternoon, Severus guesses it's a Sunday because some of the harried young men and women walked around carrying Bibles under their arms. "You're is the only sane person left in the world," Harry tells him, looking at Severus from the emotional vantage point of someone almost like a stranger. Harry crosses his arms, and the expression on his face is somewhere between 'hold me' and 'old'. Severus's room is always smoky from the vapors and the dust from the plants. The light from the window, no longer as big as Severus's head, but not the wide open spaces he dreams of, makes swirls in the air, and Severus wonders if Harry is maybe just hope reborn in a person and how much that would weigh on one person's shoulders.
Gradually the visits from the harried young men and women aren't about the smell anymore and instead are about asking Severus if he'll make them potions of all sorts. He's made so many Veritaserum-filled bottles that if he lined them all up they would probably stretch across England. He's made a lot of strange potions as well. Once they made him cauldrons of what is commonly called the Shakespearean, a draught pulled straight from the pages of Romeo and Juliet, and not too dissimilar to the Draught of Living Death. Each of the soldiers carries one in their pockets. Harry tells them that it's in case they lose a raid. They can drink it and pretend to be dead.
They demand Severus to invent some potions as well, because the enemy, all being Slytherins and good at what Severus does, have started making antidotes and little protectors against various potions. If Severus refuses, they send in Harry, and Harry, with his grave green eyes, will look at Severus and say, quietly, "For me." Harry will take Severus's right hand between the two of his, patting it softly. It's a gesture Severus thinks Harry learned from either the old Muggle war films or the petty, useless diplomats in the Ministry. Children are impressionable things, Severus was once told. He too was an impressionable youth, long ago.
But Severus can never refuse Harry anything, even if Harry borrows gestures from the bowels of B rated war films. Cliches are cliches because they are true and were once genuine, or so Severus would like to believe.
The night they attack the Malfoy Manor is a summer night, something Severus only knows because the harried young men and women keep yelling out the date. Inside, it's colder than ever, and whiter and quieter besides, because almost the entire army is approaching the Malfoy Manor from all sides, and the rest of the staff is in the large war room, the one in the center of the building, receiving surveillance reports from the wizards at Malfoy Manor and planning more strategic attacks. Severus is left alone in his room, surrounded by silent bottles and plants, and eventually he falls asleep, slumped halfway over his cutting board and his face mashed into the uneven remains of ginger roots.
When they wake him up a few hours later, the harried young men and women around his table are all jabbering constantly at each other and at him, some of them on the verge of crying and others of them quite stiff. He finds out somehow that he's supposed to make something to soothe the wounds of some of the soldiers and something else to make them go to sleep. He tells them all that he isn't a damn Mediwizard and if they want a nurse they can find one themselves. It's only then does he find out that Harry's been captured and that most of their medical staff was killed. Their numbers are down by 38%, one of the girls tell him, and Severus, confused, sleepy, half in despair, and tired of everything, wonders how much of that 38% Harry should occupy.
He does try his best to make some salves for the wounds, though. They even let him out of his room so he can try to help bandage up some of the wounds on the soldiers in the medical wing, but the worst of the injured still need to see a real Mediwizard and not some weary Potions master who hasn't taught for upwards of half a year. Still. Something is better than nothing, and nothing is, supposedly, worse than everything else, and Severus spends the night waiting for someone to tell him that they've found Harry. He figures that's what half the wizarding world is waiting for.
It doesn't happen that night, or the night after, or the night after the first night after, but the fourth night, sleepless and restless, Severus hears sounds banging around outside his door and a keen wailing coming from all floors of the building. A few minutes later one of the girls barges into his room, only vaguely sorry that she didn't knock first. They've rescued Harry out of Voldemort's place, she says, but he's badly injured. They're getting him treatment tomorrow; right now they just need Severus to make something soothing to put Harry to sleep and numb the pain. She stands there waiting in his doorway while he tries his best, cutting his left hand three times in the process and giving himself a burn on his right hand, even accidentally drops one of the ingredient bottles on the floor. She doesn't say anything, and neither does he, just pours the liquid into the cup she has in her hands and rushes out of the room with it, leaving her behind to clean up the mess the glass made.
Next door, Harry is heaving, sweaty, dirty, bloody, and just a few breaths away from being dead. Severus starts yelling nonsensically at the people around him, demanding that they get Harry to the doctor now, but all that serves to do is spill a few drops of the numbing drought he's made, burning the carpet in the places where the drops fell. The room quiets down, the whole crowd shoving Severus closer to Harry, who doesn't look like he has enough strength to swallow. Severus forces the whole thing down Harry's mouth and tears out of the room, down the hall, screaming for a doctor. His hair gets in his mouth when he runs. Most of the place is empty. The only person answering him is his own echo.
Two of the guards that weren't sent to the Malfoy Manor attack find him an hour later crouched in a chair in the medical wing of the building, staring accusingly at all the people around him, and they don't ask questions when they lead Severus, still demanding a nurse or a doctor or someone with the proper training to get Harry fixed up, back to his room. He doesn't remember falling asleep or even entering his room. The next morning, though, he wakes up to find that, for the first time in upwards half a year, they brought him clean clothes.
It's a few days, maybe not even a week, before he gets to see Harry again, only to find out that Harry is starting a two-week campaign to launch a break-in of the Malfoy Manor. Harry is putting on his uniform as Severus enters the room, and Severus can see the bandages all over Harry's body. Harry is fastening the button right under his chin, his back to Severus. There are fake windows on three sides of Harry's room with white framing curtains. The artificial sunlight is warm, tinged with a bit of orange and yellow and soft colors, and it makes Severus's eyes ache. He remembers the people waiting for Harry outside, walks forward and leans in close, whispering, "Don't go," into Harry's ear. Harry turns around, his eyes still gravely green and wide, but there is something distant about him now, and his eyes are already surveying the surroundings and the hiding places around the Malfoy Manor. He is already thinking about victory and balance and beautiful, noble, brave things.
"I can't," Harry replies absently, leaning his chin back and up so Severus can help him button the rest of his uniform. Severus's eyes are blurring, but he's still trying to manage the buttons and the little slits where the buttons go, and his fingers catch with Harry's as they both try. Because the sunshine is bright, Severus thinks to himself, his thumb brushing the worn-out fabric of Harry's uniform. He's crying because the sunshine is so bright it fills the room, he tells himself, but the sunshine was bright in the dungeons as well, especially in the morning when the sun rose, and the sky would be pink. Later on in the day the sunshine would turn blue.
But Severus has never been in a room filled with this much sunlight, even if it is fake. He has never seen sunshine this yellow, this fragrant, or this sad.
He trembles at the edge of the last button. Harry is thin, and the uniform is large, hanging off his shoulders and his body like an ugly body bag. Soon, Severus thinks, Harry will be older, will fill out the uniform, will grow muscles and be strong and be a man. But he's still a boy now, with bony shoulders, and the uniform is so very big. "I would stay," Severus says, his hands fluttering up and down the buttons and trying to straighten out Harry's collar. "If you asked me to. If I had to leave."
"I know," Harry says, taking both of Severus's hands into his own.
"I love you," Severus says.
"I know," Harry says. "I know that too," and walks past Severus, limping a little from the slash the enemy had cut into his right inner thigh so deep that it still leaves a scar even after the doctor treated it, the soreness in both of his legs because both leg bones had shattered into a thousand pieces, and the herbal soaked and healing-spelled bandages they keep around Harry's ribs and chests to keep the broken ribs and gashes from splitting open again. Maybe faltering because of the millions upon millions of hopes pinned on his shoulders. A little stumble when he pushes the door open, the kind of stumble Harry never makes when other people are around. Intimate, painfully so, and even worse because all Severus can think is how much Harry is hurting and how little Severus can do about it.
He watches Harry leave, and already he can see Harry walking through the masses of the troops, all of them touching his hands and his shoulders and arms, grabbing a little luck from him. Can already see Harry, covered in grime and dirt, slamming against the ground and waving his wand in the air, trying to control a desperate and wavering army. Can already see the blood and the fire and the pain. Can already see the people cheering Harry's name. Can already see Harry, years from now, afraid to sleep alone or in the dark, always keeping his room filled with artificial lights, and Harry in a room that can never have a real window or an unguarded door. Can already see Harry in his rare unguarded moments of truth, a boy who never grew up but grew too old, too experienced and too unqualified to be anything but a child hero.
Can already see himself getting older, older, older, fifty and sixty years old, watching Harry grow up in his face, and rehashing in his mind all the little moments he remembers of Harry, maybe even finding some little place similar to Hogwarts, telling all the children that when Harry was a student, he made stupid blunders, like blowing up a cauldron of swelling potion. Can already see himself older, older, older, and living a meaningless life, and Harry's biographer asking him to say a few words about Harry as a student, and him trying not to be anything but a living container of pure memories, a little Pensieve with a body.
Severus sits down on Harry's still unmade bed when Harry's footsteps finally disappear from Severus's hearing range. Moments later the guards creep into the room, wands outstretched and ready to kill the light in the room with a few whispered words. Severus gets up and blows up in their faces. He's at least taller than the guards; for a minute he feels like being a teacher again because they start to back off with shocked looks when they hear his voice rise in three-note intervals. They leave him alone after that, closing the door behind them. Severus watches the closed door for a few minutes before he watches the light in the artificial windows flicker. Instead of light, though, the window starts displaying leaves passing at a horrendously fast rate, clouds streaming by like ribbons, the sunlight suddenly changing as it flutters through the cover of leaves.
Severus has never been one to fly because brooms have never listened to his command. The first time he flew, he threw up when he touched the ground again. But sitting here, on Harry's bed, watching the leaves simulate flight, he wonders if Harry, someone who likes to fly, to be grounded in the midst of a faith-hungry crowd, knowing he can't do anything but stay where he is, knowing there's no escape to fly into, is satisfied by simply falling asleep surrounded by three walls of fake leaves and soft sunlight when he knows there is a sky just a few steps away, a sky waiting to be touched, and Harry not being able to be the one to do it.