Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The one good thing about your life collapsing so entirely and so catastrophically around you is that there’s nothing left to do but build it back up from scratch.

The inpatient facility Harry’s sent to is a beautiful building, with all the stern charm of 1940s architecture and wide windows that let light flood in, and there’s a beautiful green park all around it, lush and teeming with life. It feels out of time, Harry decides on his first night there. A purgatory of sorts—neither heaven nor hell, but a place to breathe perhaps.

Ron visits him on the first day Harry’s allowed any visitors. They sit together under a large cedar tree. Ron tells him about Rose’s first day of school and about the odd boy Luna brought back from her latest expedition to Peru. About Neville’s engagement party and about Parvati’s first published novel. Then, Ron runs out of news and they watch the clouds trail across the sky in silence.

“I’m sorry,” Harry finally tells Ron. “I thought I was getting better. I was really trying. I am really trying. It’s just so hard, you know?”

“I do,” Ron says.

“It’s like one of those bloody snakes, eating their tails. You can’t tell where grief ends and recovery begins, sometimes. You think you’re getting better and then you’re straight back to the beginning, drowning in everything, and you can’t tell where you went wrong, where you made that wrong turn.”

“An ouroboros. I think Luna actually found that one, you know? Or at least, that’s what she claimed in the quibbler.”

Harry chuckles. The July air is warm and smells of linden tree blossom. He lies back, resting his head on his hands.

“I know what you mean,” Ron continues. “About grief and recovery. I wish I didn’t. I wish getting better was as simple as wanting to and putting in the effort. But it’s not a straight line, is it? It never is. It twists and turns until you’re in a place you’ve promised yourself you’d never visit again—but Harry, the trick is to hold on when you do. Just hold on a little longer. Because you did get better. And if you hold on just a little longer, you’ll find that the dark only lasts for a few weeks now, where it might have lasted for entire months before. Getting better doesn’t mean never falling into the holes your brain digs for itself every so often, you know. I don't know if you can even learn that—perhaps, in time. But you can learn how to climb out of them, and it’ll come just a little bit easier every time."

Harry is silent for a long time, after that, letting all the words slowly seep through his skin and drip into his heart like honey.

“Thank you,” he tells Ron at the end of the afternoon. “For everything. Thank you.”

And he thinks Ron holds him just a little tighter than he usually does when they hug.

Harry eventually moves back to his flat. 

A month later, he finds a different flat and moves out again.

His new place is larger and airier, with white walls and immaculate tiles. The windows are charmed to look out onto beautiful gardens although it’s in the middle of London. All his friends help him make it feel like home. Hermione gifts him books, and Ron helps him pick a beautiful oak table for the dining room, and Luna brings him seven extremely large house plants of unknown origins which she assures him will bring him luck. Neville confiscates three of them the very next day, with anxious lines between his eyebrows and words like “warn the competent authorities” and “thank Merlin it did not bloom while you were in the room, at least” coming out of his mouth.

Harry’s magic is still unreliable at the best of times, but he sets up one room to serve as a small study and writes a few articles about the history of time-freezing spells that he sends to The International Journal for Magic Research . When one of them gets published, Hermiones shows up at his door with a bottle of champagne and they end up drunk on the balcony, under a blanket and several layers of warming charms in the cool air of March making up ridiculous constellation names.

Little by little, Harry finds it easier to inhabit his body again.

“I’ll cast the spell, you know?” Hermione tells him on a late May afternoon as they’re having coffee in her garden. “If you still want me to. I’ll cast it.”

Harry freezes, cup halted midway between the table and his lips, the dark liquid sloshing dangerously inside it.

“I’m not sure it’ll do you any good,” she continues slowly, “and I want to be sure you can take it, when he wakes up and acts like the absolute prick he’s always been. But I think we owe it to him to wake him up. So he can get on with his life, you know.”

Harry puts his cup down with trembling fingers. He takes a deep breath.

“Yeah,” he exhales. What else can he say?

(I’m afraid it’ll break me, waking him up. I’m afraid I won’t know how to live in a world where he doesn’t love me—where he doesn’t love me anymore, where I left him alone for years on end and he’s gotten over me while I still carry a hole shaped like him inside my heart everywhere I go.)  

“You’re right.” He closes his eyes slowly, rubs at them with coffee-warm fingers. “We owe it to him.”

(I’m afraid he’ll love me. I fear it more than anything else perhaps. We were tinder and fire, the two of us. Filled with bitterness and grief and too-strong emotions that were bright and destructive as lightning. I’m afraid he’ll love me. I’m afraid I’ll love him back until it consumes me entirely and turns me to ash.)

“I’ll be there,” Hermione tells him. “Whatever happens, I’ll be there. We’ll do this together.”

It happens early on a radiant morning of June. Hermione’s gotten official permission from the head of Saint Mungo’s and from the Ministry, and she’s standing at the foot of the bed in her pristinely pressed Unspeakable robes, her wand in hand and a look of intense concentration on her face. Besides her, Harry wishes that he had a wand of his own to clutch. A spell of his own to remember. Anything to escape the intensity of the hornet-hive feelings inside his chest.

(But his wand is broken in two, and he knows the spell so perfectly by heart that he wakes up reciting it, some nights, and he’s almost certain he’s made of nothing else than skin and bone and anticipation, now.)

On the bed, Snape is lying statue-still and wax-faced. Harry knows the hard edges of the jaw, the slack line of the mouth, the dark eyelashes resting on the soft skin, he’s been cataloguing every line in Snape’s face for the past thirteen years. (It’s been his entire world for a good portion of that time, staring into Snape’s face and pretending it was Severus.)

(It’s been his entire world, and by the time he leaves the room today, that part of his life will be over. It was complicated and messy and painful, but it will end, and Harry can’t figure out how he feels about that.) 

Hermione closes her eyes and starts casting. Immediately, Harry sees the magic take effect—a subtle glow in Severus’ veins, a tentative pulse on the alabaster skin of Severus’ neck. 

(Snape, he reminds himself. Not Severus, not anymore.)

(Harry refuses to break at the thought.)

Suddenly, the sound of Hermione’s soft chanting is interrupted by a cough, then another. Beetle-black eyes jerk open, spider-fingered hands clutch at the sheets.

The  room fills with motion and sound.

“He’s awake! Quick, we’ll need the antivenom! Chilperic, cast the standard diagnostic spells,” a mediwitch commands.

“Stop the bleeding!” someone yells. “We’ve got to stop the bleeding!”

Everything smells like war, like death, like blood. Healers flock to Severus’ body like flies to a corpse, crowding it, touching it, hiding it from view, and Harry thinks his heart might stop entirely. He loses sense of time, then. Of his own existence perhaps. He lets his body stand and be still until the flurry of healers calms down.

“He’s stable,” someone announces in a low voice. “He’ll make it.”

“Merlin, that was close,” someone else says. In a corner of the room, a nurse runs a gloved wrist over their sweat-covered forehead. 

On the bed, Snape’s eyes are closed once again, his face tense in the glowing light of diagnostic spells that hum softly with the indication of a steady heartbeat. Harry had expected the face to seem alien, once Snape was awake. He’d expected the man to turn into a stranger and he’d been ready to make his goodbyes and grieve him in earnest, but he finds he knows the way Snape’s mouth curves downward with pain—Severus’ did too, when he talked about the dead over pints of warm beers on that night where he kissed Harry under the snow.

And in Harry’s chest, his heart shatters in a million glass-sharp shards at the thought that he’ll have to grieve the only man he’s ever loved while a stranger wears his face in the same city or the same country or the same continent. 

(And in the middle of Harry’s glass-shard heart, there is a small, bright spark. A hope that, perhaps, this man who looks so much like Severus could learn to love Harry too. And it is more dangerous than the glass-edged grief cutting slashes into Harry’s flesh, this hope. It could consume him entirely if he let it. Burn him alive until there is nothing left of him but ash.)

Before Harry can break apart entirely, a soft hand encloses his.

“Come on, Harry. We’re done. It’s over,” Hermione tells him.

He follows her out of the room and into the bright sunlight of the courtyard. He does not feel the warmth of the summer air, does not register the soft breeze caressing his cheeks. Every single one of his veins is filled with ice.

It’s over , he tells himself. It’s over. It’s over.

(Maybe his traitor heart whispers. Maybe. And it takes Harry all he has not to listen to it.)

It’s all over the papers the very next day, Snape’s miraculous recovery.

Harry does not read any of it. Does not stare at the pictures printed on every front page. Does not turn on the wireless, either.

It’s over , he keeps telling himself.

Maybe , his heart keeps answering.

Another day goes by. Another week. Harry tries hard to settle in this new reality where Snape lives and breathes and doesn’t think about him.

He tries to turn the page, start a brand new chapter on his own story, one that could be filled with light and laughter and—no, not hope, but the comforting knowledge that he’s not standing at the edge of a cliff anymore. That all the mysteries have been solved and all the ghosts have been put to rest and that there’s nothing left that could go catastrophically wrong, now.

But this empty calm Harry tells himself he feels, it only lasts until there’s a knock on his door and until the Floo blares open. Then, his heart is in his throat and his pulse races like hummingbirds under his skin because—it’s not over. It’s not. It can’t be.

(He’ll come, his heart whispers, He’ll come if he remembers at all. If he doesn’t remember, even. To say thank you, perhaps. To say goodbye.)

But it’s never him, at the door or in the Floo, and day after day after day, Snape doesn’t come.

It’s a funny thing, about time (about hope too), the way fate always waits until you’ve given up, or you’re thinking about something else entirely to unfold change like an avalanche onto the careful routine of ordinary actions you call a life. You can know change is coming like you know your own name, and yet, you’re never quite ready for it when it happens.

In the honeysuckle-scented days of June and in the warm, gold-red evenings of July, Snape doesn’t come. Snape doesn’t come until he does, and Harry’s been waiting for him for months, but it still catches him by surprise.

It is Harry’s thirty-second birthday and the clock has just struck five. Harry’s spent the entire day eating cake and pretending he knew exactly what Hugo meant to draw for him and showing Rose where to find cool bugs in Ron and Hermione’s mess of a garden. He’s full of love and laughter, tired from spending the afternoon on all fours and not thinking about Severus at all.

Then, there’s a knock on the door.

And for the first time since June, Harry doesn’t think it might be Snape. It’s not been him for two months now, and perhaps Harry is starting to move on, or perhaps it makes more sense that it would be one of Harry’s friends, dropping unexpected with a hug or a cake.

But it is him.

He’s dressed in the same black wool robes he’s always worn. His hair is dirty and he looks like hell, but the sight of him punches the air clean out of Harry’s lungs all the same.

(He came. He came. Maybe he hasn’t forgotten, after all. Has he? Has he? He can’t have. Can he?)

“You kissed me,” Snape asserts before Harry can say anything at all. “I did not make this up. Tell me I did not make this up!”

Every single word that falls from his mouth is drenched in cheap alcohol and desperation, and it shouldn’t, it really shouldn’t but the knowledge of it pierces Harry’s heart like an arrow because—Severus was drunk too, the first time they kissed. The second too. Because the man in the hospital bed was Snape, but this man on his doorstep, with a flaming heart and bad whisky coursing in his veins? It is Severus.

(He remembers. He remembers. He remembers.)

“Tell me it was you,” he growls, fisting his hands in Harry’s t-shirt.

Inside Harry’s chest, a bindweed-hope grows leaves in his lungs and blossoms in his throat.

“Severus…” Harry whispers, the words muffled by the blooms closing up his airways. “Oh, god, Severus, you remember.”

Severus softens at the words, exhales a whisky-drenched breath onto the skin of Harry’s neck, and Harry thinks, for a wild second, that he might kiss him again. That he might want him still. And Harry finds he still wants Severus too, that he’s never stopped wanting him at all, that he doesn’t know how to stop loving him.

Instead, Severus takes one step back and rearranges his face back into a mask of Snape. Impassible and distant.

(It makes Harry want to punch him, that face. It makes Harry want to kiss him.)

“I thought I was going crazy, you know,” Snape tells him. “For more than half my life, I thought I had gone crazy with grief or stress or guilt and started hallucinating a version of James Potter that didn’t hate me.”

(His whisky-slurred vowels are shaped like factory smoke and riverside weeds, and it makes Harry want to cry, all of a sudden, remembering the boy who loved dragons and scrubbed cauldrons and got drunk in a forest before he was even old enough to know what he was doing.)

“But I kept hoping.” Snape pauses and scoffs at the words, like it is entirely ridiculous.

“I’m sorry,” Harry whispers, and he’s not entirely certain what he’s sorry for. That he could never stay, perhaps. That he never told him who he was. That all his love ever achieved was to fill Severus with fears of madness and an awful sort of loneliness.

Snape’s face cracks again at the words, and he tightens his fists until his knuckles turn white.

“I kept hoping, when I died. That you’d show up one last time. Figured bleeding out would make for excellent hallucinations. Then, Harry bloody Potter showed up, with the same gorgeous eyes you’ve always had and his mouth twisted in the exact same way yours always did and—I realised.”

Severus looks like he’s about to punch a wall or set himself on fire, dangerous and beautiful. He looks like the man Harry kissed, long ago, in a flat where grief hung in the air like knives  and where the kitchen bin was filled with empty glass bottles, and it makes Harry want to jump off a cliff or profess his undying love or turn himself inside out. But it is not the same place, and it is not the same time, and Harry’s not entirely certain it is the same man, and so he doesn’t do anything.

“It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? That I never realised the child that sat in my classes and ignored my orders was you. He looked like you, for Merlin’s sake! He wore your name! And still, I refused to see what was plainly in front of me.”

“Severus,” Harry breathes. All the words have all disintegrated and turned to sand inside his mouth and Severus’ name is the only one he can hold on to, now.

“And then I was dying,” Severus continues. “And I’d accepted my fate. Everyone knew death was all I deserved, and I’d never expected anything else—but you had to come. Of bloody course, you had to come because when have you ever had the good sense to stay away?!”

“I couldn’t...” Harry starts, tears welling up hot and angry behind his eyes. “What did you expect me to do, Severus? How was I supposed to let you die?”

Severus stares at him with storm-dark eyes. In that instant, Harry knows like he knows his own name that a single word from the man before him would be enough to destroy him entirely. (To burn him to the ground and salt the ash-blackened earth.)

“I saved you,” he adds all the same, in a voice cracked and fragile as broken glass. “I gave you your life back. You deserve it.” A breath. Shaky. A bitten lip. The words weigh like lead on Harry’s tongue. Stay, he wants to say. Oh Merlin, please stay. Don’t leave me now, Severus. Don’t make me live with the knowledge you remembered and walked away all the same.

“You saved me once,” Harry says instead, the words slow and bitter in his mouth, “I saved you now. We’re even, Severus. Nothing owed, nothing due. You can leave with an easy conscience. You’re free. We both are.”

It breaks his heart, it really does, but he owes the man his freedom, doesn’t he? He’s lived his entire life under someone else's cusp and Harry refuses to step into the role of his new captor, holding him close with a leash made of guilt and gratitude.

“Oh, is this how you’re calling it?” Severus snarls, taking a step towards Harry. “Saving me, is it? So I can live my entire life in happiness and far away from you? Well, look at you, aren’t you a real hero, now. The golden boy in all his glory, truly.”

And it razes Harry to the ground, Severus’ flood wave-anger. Severus’ forest fire-guilt. But still, he tries to stand against the wind and the hail of the man’s reproaches, like a madman holding a kite in the midst of a storm.

“Yes!” he cries. “Yes, you bastard! You don’t owe me anything, and you don’t need to see me ever again if you don’t want to, but at least you’re fucking alive, Severus! At least I can live with myself now! Did you think I could leave you there, half dead in that hospital room?”

“You should have!” Severus roars. He steps back. Smoothes the crumbled fabric of his robes with his open palms. When he speaks again, his voice is icy and lethal. “In fact, you should never have come at all. It would have been kinder. But you never thought of that, did you? Of course not. You don’t know how to think of anyone but yourself.” 

He pauses, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Still,” he continues, cold and quiet as the winter wind, “you needn’t worry about it. I’ll keep out of your sight now that you can’t disappear every time you get bored with me.”

The words lodge themselves inside Harry’s heart, heavy and cold and painful like bullets.

“You heartless wanker, I didn’t...” he starts, but his indignation dies in his throat before he can even finish his sentence. “I never meant to leave,” he whispers instead, desperate and pathetic and willing Severus to believe him with every fiber of his being.

“And yet, you did,” Severus answers.“Every single time.” (his words: the cool blade of a knife, cutting gashes into Harry’s skin.)

“Do you think I wanted to leave?” Harry screams. His voice is loud (too loud, too loud) but he’s filled with rage, all of a sudden, with a sense of injustice and impotence, with all the old pain he thought had quietly fossilised at the bottom of his stomach. “Do you think even for a second that I had a choice?”

“You had more choice than I did!” Severus yells, and Harry might believe that there isn’t anything but anger in his voice if he didn’t know the man well enough to hear the pain-cracks in every word. After all, they’ve drowned in grief together already. They’ve sat in silence and stared at all their bad choices and there is intimacy in that. No matter how much this Severus wants to keep him at arm’s length, there is intimacy in that.

“You never told me what was going on,” Severus continues, in a calmer voice that reminds Harry of freezing rain or hail. (Of something cold and deadly and entirely bigger than himself.) “You never even told me who you were. How can you expect me to believe you couldn’t have decided to stay?”

There are tears, running hot and angry on Harry’s cheeks. It’s a funny thing, about desperation (about love too), the way it comes in waves. The way it fills you up entirely, violent and unexpected, until you are drowning in it and it is all you can think about. Harry knows, in that instant, that he should walk away, keep his sanity intact and his heart carefully protected inside his chest. But he sacrificed everything for this man—he almost died and gave up his entire heart in the process too, ruined it completely until it could never love somebody else. (Oh god, oh god, he’ll never be able to love somebody else.)

And so, Harry snaps.

“Fine,” he says, spitting the words like cherry stones onto the ground. “Fine. Do you want to know what happened? I’ll fucking tell you, Severus, if you want to know so bad. I almost killed myself because I loved you so much. I went mad with grief, you see, after the war ended. You wouldn’t know, you were in a bloody magical coma at the time. So I went mad with grief, and I ran away from my life and—that’s not the point. The point is there was a spell. It wasn’t supposed to bring me into the past, but it did, and there you were. And I don’t know, Severus! You were a child and I was a mess and—I saw myself in you, I guess! It’s not like you can ever get over growing up unloved! And I wanted to make a change because there was no one there for me when I was that age! There was no one to tell me I was worth anything at all! And I know how that feels, okay? I know how much it fucks you up, how it stays with you no matter what happens in your life.”

Severus’ face is cracked open by landslide pain. Memories too, perhaps. But Harry cannot stop, not now, not while every single word he’s never been able to properly say rushes from his lips in a confession waterfall.

“And that spell, I could only do it on the solstice. Completely fucked my magic up in the process too. But still, I kept coming. Because I never wanted you to think I abandoned you, Severus. Because what little I could give you, I wanted you to have it. And then—I fell in love with you, like an idiot, while we drowned in grief and alcohol. And I couldn’t keep away, Severus. It was killing me, and I couldn’t keep away! Do you want to know where my wand is? It’s broken in two. I can’t perform any spell more powerful than a lumos, and even that’s taken a full year for me to achieve. Would you like to guess why? Or would you perhaps like to imagine for a fucking second what it was like for me, getting back to my time and counting down the days until I could see you again? What it was like feeling like I’d been emptied out, feeling like my entire soul was left in a different time with a man who had no idea he was my whole fucking reason to stay alive? Would you like to tell me again that I don’t care, perhaps, Severus, so I can tell you about the fact I had to stay in Saint Mungo’s for a whole week after I came back from that last trip to the past and still didn’t regret it? I would have given my life if it meant I could save yours, Severus. I would have done it gladly, because I love you, you immense arsehole. I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life, more than I ever will. I don’t even care if you don’t love me back because you’re alive and that’s precious enough, but you don’t get to come into my home and accuse me not to care about you! Because I do, Severus, oh god, you have no idea how much I do.”

“Harry,” Severus whispers, raising a hand to touch Harry’s cheek. “Harry.” 

Severus seems to choke on the words like they’re too-dry pumpkin pasties, clinging to the roof of his mouth. His eyes are shining bright with complicated emotions that Harry can’t quite name but that go straight through his chest all the same.

“Severus,” he replies, and this is it, he thinks.

This is it.

He can feel the warmth of Severus’ whisky-sour breath on his mouth, the soft, coolness of his hands on his skin, and—they’re going to kiss. Severus’ eyelids flutter closed and his face is close, now, is so close, and the sight of it punches the air straight out of Harry’s lungs, turns his tongue dry like a slice of quince and fills his skull with beehive thoughts of:

This is it.

This is it.

This is it.

Oh, God, this is it.

Harry closes his eyes, half delirious with the knowledge that he can have this, this time—that he won’t have to leave this time—and he waits for the warm press of Severus’ lips on his.

(It doesn’t come.)

When Harry opens his eyes again, Severus’ face is a funeral mask (eerie and unmoving and made of wax rather than blood or flesh.) For an awful moment, Harry thinks he’s never woken Severus, that the man is still time-frozen and alone on a hospital bed and Harry’s hallucinated everything. Then Severus’ hand moves away from his cheek and everything inside Harry’s chest turns into a festering swamp.

Severus steps back.

“I can’t do this,” he tells Harry. “I’m not the same person I was, all those years ago. I’ve changed, and you’re in love with a ghost.”

Inside Harry, something fragile and brittle snaps at the words. His blood freezes. The room spins.

I’m in love with you, he wants to say. I’m in love with the only person who ever found a way to see me for who I was, And that’s the crux of it, perhaps, the way throughout his life, Harry’s always been all a hero or an idol, the way everyone always pretended not to see all the ugly feelings stashed away neatly behind his skin. Look at me, he wants to scream. Look at me. You loved me once! You knew me once! Couldn’t you love me again? Couldn’t you learn?

And he would have said all those things, Harry would, just a handful of months ago, when he still lived with the pungent smoke of loss inside his head, when his heart was still pain-swollen and tender and entirely too large to fit inside his chest, but he’s not that man anymore, now. He’s grown into something more than a cloud of human-shaped sadness, more than a grief-pincushion-man who doesn’t know how to do anything but hurt.

“I’ve changed too,” Harry says instead, leaning against the wall and pressing his fingers hard on his forehead. “It’s been years since I last saw you.”

Severus’ face does not move at the words.

“I can’t do this,” Severus repeats. “It was unstable at best, what we had. I only allowed myself to love you because I didn’t want to believe you were real. Things have changed too much.”

“I know,” Harry says because he really does. He wants Severus more than he’s ever wanted anything in his entire life, but he knows it’s almost pushed him over the edge of the cliff, this love. He knows it’s dangerous and reckless, and he’s worked so hard to find himself again, he’s not entirely certain he’s ready to let go of that. Not even for love. (Or perhaps it is love that lets him hold on: the knowledge that he can love himself too, that he must love himself first.) “And it’s okay, Severus. It is. I loved you so much. I still do, and if I’m honest, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to do anything else. But it hurt me too, and perhaps you’re right. Perhaps it was never good for us, what we had, perhaps we were never the right fit for each other in the first place.”

Harry swallows his tears. In his throat, the bindweeds keep winding across his trachea and strangling him.

It’s okay, he tells himself. You’re doing the right thing. It’s okay if it hurts.

It doesn’t stop him from breaking apart when Severus leaves.

Luna finds him crying on the floor less than an hour later. Harry can barely stop crying long enough to greet her.

“Would you like some company, Harry?” she asks, removing her humongous hat. “Or is this the kind of crying that’s best done in private? I wouldn’t want to impose.”

“It’s okay to be sad,” she tells him, lying down next to him when Harry tells her to stay. “Tears are just the way love leaves the body, sometimes.”

Then, she stares at the ceiling and she doesn’t talk until Harry’s tears have dried, and in a way, Harry’s happy it was her, at his door. No one else would have thought to do this for him, waiting in silence until the tides of sadness receded. And it was what he needed, he thinks. For someone to just be there. To see his pain and accept it and not try to take it away from him.

Luna brought cake. They end up eating it with their fingers, sitting on the floor.

“Would you like to know my thoughts, Harry?” Luna asks after a while. She’s got a smear of yellow icing on her nose. It clashes awfully with the purple fur of her cardigan.

Harry nods.

“I think you need to remember that sadness is a lot like water. You’re drowning in it now, but it’ll run right off you when you’re ready to get out of it. It’s always good to keep that in mind.”

She smiles and stuffs another piece of cake in her mouth.

Harry smiles back. It feels awful, it really does, but it feels different too. He brings his knees to his chest and tries to trust her about how his sadness will get better eventually. He’s not entirely sure it ever will.

After Luna leaves, Harry Floos Ginny. She’s still up, of course. She’s never believed in sleeping schedules unless there was an important match the next day, and she answers the Floo sweaty and out of breath, in full work-out gear.

“Can I sleep on your sofa?” Harry asks her. “Just for tonight?”

And because she’s Ginny, and because she’s wonderful, she agrees.

“You know,” she tells him the next morning, “I never understood what you were going through before, but I think I do now.”

The sun is barely up, and Harry has barely slept. Ginny made him coffee at four in the morning, when he gave up pretending he was going to fall asleep and made his way to the living room. She’s good like that, Gin, and Harry’s grateful for her, despite the empty hornet-hive love tearing up and falling apart inside his chest.

“You used to bury yourself in grief,” she continues, “don’t make that face at me! It’s true! You’ve done nothing but declare your entire life a period of mourning since the war ended, and—we all cope with reality in different ways, I guess. When Fred died, I needed to keep moving or the quicksands of everything would have swallowed me. I could never understand why you kept finding new ways to hold your grief close to your chest, how you made a space for it in the middle of your life and insisted on existing all around it.”

She drinks a sip of coffee. She’s beautiful, in the golden light of summer, with her flaming hair and her piercing eyes, Harry thinks. She’s blunt and honest and kind, the kind of friend you need when your life’s breaking apart and you can’t afford to let yourself be caught in the destruction. 

“But hearing you talk yesterday, it reminded me—” Ginny pauses again, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “When Oliver left, it was really hard, you know? I was so in love with him, and even if we fought, I thought we could make it work, if we tried long enough. Then, one day, I come home and he’s packed all his bags and—it’s over. Just like that. I didn’t even have a say in it. He decided for both of us, and it tore me apart for months afterwards.”

Harry lays his hand on hers, silently, with a soft smile. She takes it and gives a squeeze.

“I was angry at the entire world all day, and I drowned in all my doubts every night because—I couldn’t figure out what I’d done. Why I wasn’t good enough for him, why he wasn’t willing to fight for me the way I was going to fight for him. It’s over now, and I’ve moved on, but it really hurt, at the time. My Harpy teammates took me out for drinks and we talked shit about him, and it helped. Eventually, he stopped being all I could think about.”

“He didn’t deserve you,” Harry tells her, drawing small circles on the skin of her palm with his thumb. “You’re a national treasure and he’s a prize idiot.”

Ginny chuckles.

“Thanks. But where I was going with it is: you used to be grieving the death of a lover, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Now that the only thing standing between you and the relationship you thought you were going to have is that you forgot to take into the equation what a colossal arsewipe the man you love is… We can go for drinks. We can go for runs. We can get the gang together and talk shit about him—I’m sure my brother would be all too willing to swear at the bastard for an entire evening. And eventually, you’ll realise you’re a national treasure and he’s a prize idiot too.”

It’s Harry’s turn to laugh.

“Brought a guy from the dead just to have the opportunity to get dumped. The latest episode in the saga of things that happen only to Harry Potter because fate apparently hates him and wants him to suffer, eh?”

Ginny’s bright, crystalline laugh fills the room too, and in that instant, Harry thinks she’s right. That Luna was right too. That this too shall pass, and he’ll be okay, eventually. 

He’ll be okay.

It is almost nine in the morning when Harry leaves Ginny’s flat. She hugs him tight and tells him she loves him and makes him promise to Floo, then Harry’s alone on the cobbled streets of wizarding London. The rush of office workers has died down, but it will be another good half an hour before the shoppers show up, and Harry’s almost alone. There is a brightness to the sunshine that announces the day will be hot; the air is pleasantly warm as Harry lets his feet guide him back to his flat.

He’ll be okay, he knows. Luna and Ginny knew it too, and they’re two of the people he trusts most in the entire world. He’s learned to let all his friends in, and it isn’t so hard anymore, talking to them. It’s almost natural now, not being alone.

By the time Harry reaches the door of his building, the summer warmth is sticking to his skin like melted ice-cream and he’s itching for a shower. He might see if he can take Rose and Hugo for a swim, he decides. Let Ron and Hermione enjoy some quiet grownup time together.

He doesn’t think about Severus. Almost doesn’t see him either, not until he’s at the top of the stairs and fumbling in his pockets for his keys.

The man is sitting against the door to his flat, knees drawn against his chest and head resting on the dark fabric of his trousers. Harry recognises Severus at once, and all the breath leaves his lung in a soft exhale as he drops his key to the floor.

At the noise, Severus raises his head. He looks a fright, sallow-skinned and hollow-faced. The dark smudges of purple-blue under his eyes tell Harry he hasn’t slept.

(He’s still the most beautiful man Harry’s ever seen.)

“I’m an idiot,” he says at the same time Harry blurts out:

“What are you doing here?”

“I came back,” Severus says, slowly pushing himself to his feet. “We need to talk.”

“You already told me you couldn’t do this,” Harry says, because hope is lighting up like glow worms in Harry’s chest and because he can’t let himself catch fire. Not again.

“I’ve been waiting here like a pathetic bastard since two this morning.” The words sound like sandpaper in Severus’ mouth, choking him. “Not something I like to admit. Here’s another thing I don’t like to admit: I’m a coward. Always been one.”

Severus lets out a small, dry, laugh, averting Harry’s eyes.

“It shouldn’t surprise you,” he adds, “you’ve been there to witness it all along.”

Then, in a sudden, smooth motion, he steps forward and grabs Harry’s wrists between his cool fingers. His gaze intense on Harry’s face, his eyes bright and wide and filled with thunderstorms.

“You’re so beautiful, Harry,” Severus continues, cheeks burning with love or guilt or shame, “you’re so fucking beautiful, and how could you love me at all when I look like this? How could you love me at all when I’ll wear the worst mistake I’ve ever made on my arm for the rest of my life? How could you still love me when you could have me and the mystery was gone?”

“Severus,” Harry whispers. The sensation of Severus’ skin on his is almost too much to take, now that he’s gotten used to the idea he would never feel it again, but it fills him with light, and he never wants it to stop—oh he never wants it to stop so he steps closer still, until they’re standing face to face. 

“So I left,” Severus continues. He pauses and laughs again, but it’s not a laugh, not really. It sounds hollow and dry and like Severus might crumble entirely if Harry tried to hold him too tight. “It fucks you up, you know? Never being loved. Never being anyone’s first choice. It fucks you up, being in love with a man who shows up once every three or four or six years and disappears in the middle of the night. Makes you think you’re not worth anyone’s time, you know? Makes you believe you’re not good enough for him to stay.”

“No,” Harry whispers, lifting his hands and placing them on Severus’ cheeks. There’s his heart in his throat and all the feelings that live in his chest on the tip of his tongue. “No, Severus, no, no, no. It wasn’t like that. It was never like that.”

Severus closes his eyes at the touch, beautiful and pained, and Harry loves the man. Oh, Harry loves the man like he’s never loved anyone else. Like he never will again.

“So when all of a sudden I woke up here and realised you couldn’t run away, I knew it was only a matter of time before you left. And I couldn’t stand that thought. It would have destroyed me, you leaving, but how could I have stopped you? I didn’t have anything to offer. I still don’t. You could have anyone else you wanted, in the entire world, when all I could ever want was you.”

I’ve never wanted anyone else, Harry thinks feverishly. It’s you. It’s always been you. It’ll always be, Severus. You’ve ruined me entirely with every part of you, you’ve carved your name upon my heart with everything you are and it is never going to be able to love anyone else again. It’s you. It’s you. It’s only you.

And Harry opens his mouth, but the words keep flowing out of Severus like a river:

“So I ran. Because I’m a bloody coward and I figured I could lie to myself like I’ve always fucking done. Pretend I didn’t care. Pretend I never loved you. Pretend I never needed you. But I do, Harry—I do, and when I made it back home, you weren’t there and I couldn’t live with the thought that I wasn’t ever going to hold you again.”

Harry has lost himself entirely in the dizzying darkness of Severus’ eyes, in the promise enclosed like gold inside his words. And in this instant, he lets himself believe Severus could be his. He lets himself believe that every iteration of Severus there ever was carried his name in their heart and that there is a chance in the world he could have this. Just this. This flawed man against him, this beautiful man willing to love him through the bad days and the sadness and the battle-scars.

Still, Severus continues, inexorable and  with words bitter as willow bark:

“So I came back. And if you only want me for two months before you tire of me, I’ll take it. I’ll take it and I’ll be bloody grateful that I’ve even had this long.”

“Severus,” Harry whispers, delirious and so in love that it hurts.

Severus’ body is close, now, so close. Harry can smell his skin, feel the warmth of him seeping through his clothes. Let me touch you , Harry thinks, half-mad with hope and desire. Let me taste your skin and learn the shape of you. Let me make you moan in ecstasy, let me make you mine. Oh, let me be yours too. Let me  be yours for as long as you’ll have me. 

“It’s always been you, Harry.” Severus’ face is split in two like an apple, the soft core of him exposed and bright.

(Beautiful. Harry thinks.)

“It’s always going to be you,” he continues, voice quiet and rough with tears, “whatever I do. So this is me being brave, for once in my life, this is me being brave. I love you. I’m yours, if you still want me.”

“Severus,” Harry whispers again. His voice is ocean-wet and there’s sea-salt stains on his cheeks. Inside his chest, everything is blooming, blooming, blooming madly. He’s turning into a rose-garden or a rainforest, and still, there is Severus’ skin under his fingers, and there are Severus’ fingers around his wrists, and he can feel Severus’ breath on his skin with every beautiful word that falls from the man’s mouth.

“I’m glad you left,” he continues, pushing the words through the tears and the cotton-pod emotion closing his throat, “Not because I wanted you out of my life, god no. It hurt more than I can say, to watch you walk away. I’m glad you left, because it made me realise I could live without you. It would have hurt, and I would have been absolutely miserable, Severus, but I would have made it through. You leaving made me realise that.”

Harry’s thumb is tracing the shape of Severus’ lips. They fall open as Severus’ eyes flutter closed, and it takes everything Harry has not to kiss him there and then.

“I’m not staying because I need you, Severus. I’m not staying out of some toxic sense that I am not whole without you. I want you. Listen to me, I want you. I’m choosing you. You’re my first choice, you’re the only choice I ever want to make. You’re the only person I’ve ever been this in love with, you’re the only person I’ve ever wanted this much. You’re everything to me, Severus, do you hear? Everything. So this is me choosing you, of my own free will. I’m choosing you because I love you and because you were always worth loving, despite all the waiting and the pain and the sheer impossibility of it. You were always worth it. You still are, Severus. You always will be.”

When Severus kisses him, it is bruising and hard, full of desperation and urgency, and the kind of hope that burns down everything in its path.

“I love you,” Harry sobs into Severus’ mouth. “I’ll never stop loving you.” The words taste of blood and happiness.

“I love you,” Severus answers. “I’ve loved you since I was fifteen. I’ve never loved anyone else a single second since then.”

They kiss for a long time, in the dark stairwell, in front of a closed door. It feels like breathing fresh air after spending an entire life underground, Harry thinks, kissing Severus in front of his own closed door, in his own time. It feels like seeing the sun for the first time. Severus’ fingers are digging into the flesh of Harry’s back, snaking under the soft cotton of Harry’s threadbare T-shirt, caressing maddening promises onto Harry’s skin. It’s everything Harry has ever wanted. It’s more than that even. They’ve waited for this moment for years or decades, for longer than Harry’s been alive, and it’s here. Oh, it’s here, it’s here, it’s finally here!

Harry stops thinking and drowns himself in the kiss, in the warm tangibility of Severus’ body against his, in the endless want pooling at the bottom of his stomach and in the endless love singing like a nightingale inside his chest.

They kiss, hungry and frantic, moaning into each other’s mouth and taunt with desperation and desire. They kiss for a long time, until they’re entirely certain it is real and that they can hold onto it, this time. That they are in the right time and in the right place, that they have found each other again and that they won't have to let go, for as long as they as they live.

When they finally come apart, holding each other close still, as though the absence of contact would break them, Harry picks up the key and opens the door and pulls Severus inside.

There is only one word, whispered, before the door closes again: “Stay.”

And an answer, bright and true and solemn like a promise: “For as long as you’ll have me.”

Later, Harry will start telling people he fell in love with Severus after the war.

They’ll be happy together then. It’ll be the sort of love poets sing about—it’ll be better than that, even. It’ll be the sort of love that is so omnipresent and permanent that even on your worst days, you cannot doubt that you are known and loved entirely, with all your flaws and all your cracks and all your jagged edges. 

They’ll be bathed in a warm sort of happiness, then, always humming softly in the background of their lives, and they’ll find it hard to remember, sometimes, the way everything used to hurt, the way their love had to grow in the barren cracks of their souls and through the thick fog of time, like weeds through concrete.

They’ll find it hard to remember, but it will be the truth all the same.

And isn’t it a funny thing, how this dandelion love grew through asphalt-thick grief and it found a way to bloom all the same, when you think about it? 

Isn’t it a beautiful thing too?