Title: "Return to The Fire"
Summary: Post-war. Two men meet in the mountains of Japan: one burned by excessive affection, the other frozen by its absence.
Disclaimer: You can tell they're not mine because if they were, this is all they'd ever do.
Rating: NC-17, but nowhere near often enough.
Beta: Funny story, that. Turns out not a single person on my flist likes Snarry, so, no, not beta'd
Author's Notes: None.

It should have been winter.

The thought echoed and re-echoed through numb moments in Harry's mind the way voices echoed in the castle during the empty winter breaks.

Putting his glass on the cluttered table, Harry absentmindedly fought to loosen his robes. It seemed strange that memories of the unique characteristics winter break gave the castle were lingering in his mind, especially considering the last winter break had been anything but solitary. Hogwarts had been under siege, and not only did every student remain bound within castle walls, but entire families as well. Forget leaving the grounds, they'd been unable to leave the building.

As if winter had been cancelled.

Six months later, Harry found this strange loss to be the dominant one of all those that hovered like a snitch around the back of his thoughts. Voldemort was dead. Dumbledore, Hagrid, Neville, Ron…

Ron.

Harry pulled again, now frantically, at his dress robes. Somewhere underneath were Muggle clothes. T-shirt. Jeans. Souvenirs from a world where'd meant nothing, been no one. A world that failed to notice him at nearly every turn.

The memories tasted like oxygen.

"Are you all right?"

Harry looked to Hermione. Like him, she was dressed formally for the Order of Merlin ceremony and reception. Like him, she'd stoically waited through the speeches and applause. It seemed as if everyone had come to speak to Harry afterward, but no one spoke with him. With either of them. Everyone had a speech to impress him with; bit by bit the wizarding world was pecking at his brain's ability to resist shouting, breaking things, or just plain walking away…

Come to think of it…

"I need air," he stammered.

Harry wasn't away from the Ministry building thirty seconds before his stiff wizard's robe was stuffed into a bin.

The paintings absorbed his interest.

Harry had no idea how long he'd stood in front of the shop window. It could have been minutes. Or hours. Neither would matter because he wanted to stare for days. Forever.

"I said, if you're not looking to buy…"

"Where is this place?" a voice asked. Harry looked only vaguely aware that is was his.

Something about the question took the salesmen by surprise. "Japan, someplace, I'd expect." He studied Harry. It was a long moment for the man; he was older, his strength not what it was. The heavy door was straining his arm. But something about the moment was too delicate to risk disturbing with its usual greaseless creaking. Teenage boys in jeans and t-shirts only stopped by his window to laugh. That or brandish a traditional two-fingered salute.

Then again, teenage boys usually moved in packs, and they never stared. Not at the art. Not at the subdued subtle tones of Japanese woodcuts, at detached renderings of pale snow on pale roofs.

And never before had the old man felt one stiff breeze away from falling into his wares.

"Look, this door's not getting any lighter. Come in, and I'll see if I can find some information for you."

Information. Knowledge. Power. Harry nodded without blinking and somehow found his feet leading him through the doorway toward his new quarry.

He needed to find winter.

Years later, it would make sense. With enough perspective, he could see what his subconscious, the only part of his mind still showing up to work those days, was trying to do. For starters, his internal clock was wildly off. He'd sweated out the summer, survived the autumn and then… nothing. Weeks, then months, of nothing but hallways and walls, stairways and stones. Without a release from the crushing weight of hundreds of conversations buzzing around him, often about him, time felt disjointed. Like when he worked all day on his defence training without stopping for food. When he looked up, he was never surprised it was late; he was surprised it was dark. Night. Another time. As if the natural world had been spinning without him (and very contentedly, too).

Harry felt nothing, but in those nothing thoughts was a desperation for time to stop in his hands. To stare at something real, something belonging to the world, and watch time move at its slowest pace, if at all. The deaths… They weren't really in the past but in the future, a future of perspective, and believing, and letting it all sink in.

He knew that if it did sink in, if reality found him at all, he wanted to be nowhere near the real world when it happened. He wanted to leave the world where Ron and Fred and Hagrid were dead and exist someplace where they'd never been born.

He was still within sight of the Ministry buildings when he'd Disapparated. If someone had called his name or watched him leave he wasn't sure he'd have been able to do it, but now that Voldemort was gone, he was alone again. He'd saved their world once and disappeared into myth. Well, if that was all they wanted this time too, a safe family to come home to and fantastic stories to tuck their children in with at night, then they could have their legends. Wrapped in a cloak of impossible stories, he knew he could disappear.

It was a month before he found the mountain range in northern Japan that inspired the perpetual snowfall of the paintings, but the view from his new home was worth the wait.

Hours would go by. Weeks. Harry would lie and stare out the floor-to-ceiling windows. Sometimes he would push his mattress up against the glass and watch the brook trickle past down below. Other days, colder days, he'd leave the mattress near the open fire in the middle of the floor and watch the branches of the trees gather falling snowflakes. No position was maintained for less than a day.

Dawn meant food on his doorstep. Strange food, food he didn't know and didn't want to know. He ate mechanically, his body moving on instincts so deep not even depression could penetrate them. In a strange way, depression aided survival; he was equally apathetic toward living and dying. To fight against instinct would have involved caring one way or the other. He ate because food showed up everyday. He ate because a hand lifted it to his lips. He ate because it prolonged the stasis, the new state that lacked all pain, all guilt, all anything.

There was a fire in the room that seemed to intend to keep burning. There was a mattress that impeded his non-thoughts less than sleeping on the wooden floor would have. There was a bathroom, doors of rice-paper panels that you had to shift to the side rather than pull or push, and a house-elf who came with the 'retreat' and dropped off food and picked up dishes twice a day.

There was crying, but not as much as Harry might once have guessed. There were memories, but rather than relive them with terror, he watched them from far away. Like a character in a story he found interesting but didn't really care about. The few people and customs he'd seen on his travels had all looked equally strange to him. Conversations were cloaked from any interest he might have had by virtue of being in a foreign language. People still stared at Harry, but only long enough to express their lack of interest; just another traveller, no point of origin, no destination.

The threat of Voldemort may have been to the entire wizarding world, but someone forgot to owl the Far East. He'd come and gone without touching them. Somewhere underneath the surface of their strangeness, they had lives and traumas of their own to worry about. Harry counted on that strangeness to deflect his interest, but he knew he didn't need to. Even after filling his own life with apathy he found he had more than enough to share.

After a few weeks of letting his hair grow until it gathered around his shoulders, of letting weight drop off his body until nothing resembling youthful softness remained, Harry began to take walks. It didn't matter to him if it was intensely uphill in the snow or gently down on one of the myriad cool diffused days. Clouds gather so reliably at his new elevation that he never had to concern himself with the idea that oddly bright light from above would break through the consistency and force him to pay attention to individual things instead of to the landscape as a whole. Specifics were a distant memory. He saw each moment from far away. Taken as a whole, there seemed to be an orderliness, if not actual order, to the world. A comfortable point of view.

Soon he was walking to the local village for lunch. The hunger of efforts expanded would reach him on his walks and it was easier to stop somewhere and eat than push on. He ate at odd times. Three in the afternoon. No one for lunch, no one for dinner. He sat by the window and stared.

He wasn't sure how long he'd been watching the figure in black before he got up and crossed the road. Long enough to know he was watching the doorway to the holiday company from which he'd rented his retreat. Long enough to see the man read each posting in the window, enter, and exit again as unobtrusively as he had come.

Long enough for Harry to leave a pile of money on his table and walk out into the snowflakes.

Outside of time as he'd been living, he also failed to notice how long he followed the black clad figure in the snow. A part of his mind that had no voice and cast no shadow knew that if the subject of his walk turned around he'd have nothing to hide himself with. What he did he did blatantly, but an innate respect of silence caused his feet to tread lightly. They were a long ways from the nearest living soul when one of them finally broke the silence.

"If you're going to kill me, get on with it."

If Harry was surprised, it wasn't enough to cause so much as a blink. They were in a clearing, and the dim darkness settling through the trees around him was the closest he could come to understanding that it was dusk, that they were on the brink of night. "Why would I kill you?"

Snape turned to face him. They were the same height now. "Why would you follow me?"

Harry looked him full in the eyes without evasion or fear. In that moment, Severus was just another tree, another feature of the environment, of no more or less interest than any other, save that it was new.

"I saw robes I knew. I saw black hair."

They stared.

Harry didn't even look curious. "What are you doing here?"

"The same thing you are, I suppose."

A calculating look worthy of his former teacher passed through Harry's eyes. "What was the name of the shop? The art shop?"

"Digsby's."

Harry stared at Snape. If it mattered to him that Severus seemed to truly have had the same experience as he, that he'd walked away from the Ministry in the same direction, stopped at the same window, had the same idea to disappear in a swirling mist of glory and snow flakes, he didn't show it. "Where were you going?"

"I was looking for a clearing."

"Why?"

"I didn't want to die in the woods. It'd be easier to find me here."

Snape's eyes flashed toward Harry's wand hand, but he looked neither alarmed nor concerned. Instead he looked tired, too tired to care. Or to find his way home.

Harry looked around at where they were. "Where's your place?"

"The other direction. A few miles back."

Harry sniffed the air of the clearing. Biting cold was coming, and fast. "Mine's just over the ridge. We won't get lost going that far."

Now Snape's expression finally changed. "You're not going to kill me?"

Harry turned and started to lead the way.

The food left on his doorstep was spelled to keep warm. Still, Harry put the dish on the shelf that ran in a perfect square around the fire, just in case.

When he'd first entered his new rooms, he'd seen the shelf and assumed it was meant to keep you from accidentally touching the fire. But it proved practical, too. After long wet walks, he would leave his shoes there to warm. He could use drying spells; he found he was good at all sorts of dull magics now that his focus had nowhere else to go. But the fire was just easier. And drying spells didn't make them toasty when he slipped them back on in the morning.

"You don't look surprised to see me."

Harry watched Snape hang his damp cloak a corner peg near the fire and considered his response. The room was an open space, but somehow everything came back to the fire. "I'm not," he replied.

Snape sat down near, but not too near, the food. He clearly didn't expect it was now for him, too. "You don't look disappointed, either."

Harry stopped washing out the saké set that had sat unused in the corner that passed for a kitchenette. "Neither do you. And you thought I was gonna kill you."

He passed the older man a drink, almost daring him to be suspicious of it.

Snape wasn't. "You're not angry?"

Harry divided the food in half and passed a portion onto another plate. "I'm not anything. Why did you follow me?" Harry's voice belied no change in subject matter.

"You followed me." Snape stared at the fire.

"I meant to Japan."

"I've been here two months."

Harry did some quick sums in his head. "So you found this place before I did?"

A twinge of the old edge returned. "As I said, you followed me."

Harry nodded at that. He'd spent a few weeks travelling, trying to replace the too-vivid thoughts fighting for control of his mind with something, anything, that could push them away. Not knowing where he was going to sleep was the one thing that had worked a treat. "So you just looked up the one magical vacation hideaway that offered private homes in the mountains of northern Japan and, pop, were there."

Snape said nothing, but tellingly failed to argue the point.

"So why did I see you at the agency?"

"Making payments."

Harry nodded blankly. He'd arranged for the company to simply draw the proper amount from his account each month, but it made sense to think that Snape wouldn't trust anyone that far.

Seven years and another world away and he'd finally found the place where Snape made sense.

He stared openly at his former teacher. The war had not been kind to him. His greasy hair fell lankly over his face like a dead thing yet perfectly matched the blank, absent look behind his eyes.

His skin was as sallow as ever. Harry had injured his leg in the night weeks ago, misjudging his step around a corner in the dark. He hadn't cared enough about the pain to charm the contusion away, so when he awoke the next morning he had a pretty cluster of tiny purple spots to show for it. But there was something else, too. Between the most intense bursts of colour, his usual skin tone had taken on an unhealthy tint of yellow, like someone had taken the paint from a Muggle highlighter and soaked his skin from the inside out.

That was what Snape looked like, like there were a thousand black bruises under his skin but only the dead blood between them showed through.

"Why would I kill you?"

Snape looked at him now. "I am your tormentor."

Harry poked at his food. "You had reasons. Some of them I get."

"And the others…"

Harry exhaled so suddenly it was nearly a laugh. "What do I care?"

Something flared up behind Snape's eyes like a dying ember catching a second wind. When he spoke, it was with the measured, silky, restraint that used to warn Harry when he was treading on dangerous ground. "What do you know of my reasons?"

Harry shrugged. "You caught me breaking all sorts of rules without much punishment. Malfoy and his goons needed to see you as one of them or their parents would probably kill you. Someone who everybody loved and looked just like me used to bully you to pulp, then maybe tried to kill you, then maybe thought you weren't worth the bother.

"I dunno, then you spend a couple decades risking all sorts of nasty death to find the only one anyone wanted to thank was a kid who got off a few lucky shots. That sound about right?"

Harry noted the way Snape's lips parted for just a moment in surprise. Maybe the last few weeks had involved some sort of thinking after all.

"About," Snape muttered, mastering his moment of being involuntarily impressed.

"I get that you're a bastard. I'm glad you're a bastard."

"And why is that?"

"Because at least I mean as little to you as anyone else would."

Snape nearly choked on a sip of his drink. "Has our celebrated Mr. Potter tired of being a star?"

Harry stared at Snape and could feel a little of the old hate coming back, but it wasn't rage this time, just impatience. "You know I'm not that. Anymore than you're really a bastard. People just keep grabbing bits of our life and sticking labels on them. Maybe they're true but they're not worth shit."

Harry stoked the fire as if this sort of wisdom fell from his lips every night. He couldn't tell if what he said came from weeks of looking at things from far away or was merely the result of pouring saké into an almost empty stomach. He supposed it didn't matter.

"There's only one mattress. The floor's hard as fuck and if you leave now you'll be dead by morning. Get in or not, I'm going to bed."

And with that, Harry kicked off his shoes, pulled off his jeans revealing boxers that covered his body as modestly as most summer shorts, and lay down on the mattress facing the window. It was black as pitch outside due to the trees, but you could still see the branches move in time with the rustling of the wind, could watch the way they caught errant slips of moon and starlight and reflected them to you if you knew where to look.

Behind him, he could just make out the sound of Snape levitating the dishes out onto the doorstep and the dampened noise of fabric being moved and removed. After a long few moments, he could feel more than see the fire soothed down to a subtle flicker. It took a rustling of the blanket for him to realize he was not alone, that Snape's probably still injured body had conceded his point about the floor and deigned to balance on the edge of his mattress.

Night in the room was as quiet as always. Harry could hear the slight noise of the nearby brook as if a volume dial on it had been turned up. But tonight there were echoing breaths that followed his own. He knew he wasn't alone by the warmth of a nearby body. He knew it by his sudden desire to talk.

"Tonks gave me a mercy shag the night before. I was supposed to die, not her. I didn't even tell Hermione I'd figured it out, found a way to kill him but only by killing myself, too. I only told Tonks 'cause… I don't know. Maybe after everything I wanted people to know I'd done it on purpose. I wasn't supposed to fall into water when I went down. No one was supposed to try and bring me back."

He didn't connect the thoughts very well, but somehow he knew the darkness had followed them. How he'd figured out that his mother's charm had somehow, maybe by accident, been protecting Voldemort too, and only by destroying it could either of them be killed. How he'd collapsed on the edge of the lake, how Ginny had seen the way the explosion of the force between them had been sent back into Voldemort's face a thousand fold. She'd assumed Harry was only drowned for a moment or two, capable of being pulled back. She'd just managed to put her own desperate energy into his heartbeat before an enraged Rookwood decided that if he was going to be killed anyway, he might as well take one more young heroine down with him.

"I was still out cold, so the first mediwizard who bothered to check I was dead was pretty surprised when I woke up. If I woke up." He almost laughed. "Sometimes I wonder."

"You wonder if you survived?"

"Yeah… I mean, I wonder if this counts."

Harry had almost imagined himself absorbed and dissipated by the soothing blackness around him when he felt the tight pinch on his arm. "Ow!"

"You certainly sound alive," Snape purred. Of all the reliable normalcies to be lost to the war, Snape's ability to sound silkily sarcastic was apparently not one of them.

Harry rubbed his arm in the dark and mumbled. "…should've known…"

"Pardon?"

"I said, I should've known you'd do something like that! Anybody else would've…"

"Would've what? Kissed your scar? Laid offerings of tea and sympathy at your feet? If you'd wanted that you'd have stayed in their little cluster of devotion. But you left... "

Snape had been balanced on his side for this encounter, offering at least a token amount of attention. Harry could hear Snape shift onto his back, disappointed or bored. Or both.

He continued with one of his usual tirades… "The day you figure out what you want from your spoiled useless life…"

Harry found the sweet silence of shutting that incessant lecturing absolutely worth the kiss he planted on his bedmate's lips. Maybe Snape'd still be bitter and ranting after, but bored was now firmly out of the question.

For all his experience of sneak attacks, Snape had been surprised by the act, by the wet feel as a tongue tentatively brushed his lips. His eyes had already adjusted to the dark, so when Harry pulled away he was quick to notice the young man didn't pull back far, just enough to stare down at his former professor and watch his actions sink in.

"What in…"

"Oh, shut it!" Harry used the slimmest moment of surprise to press his advantage again. Before Severus could finish his thought he felt insistent kisses trailed down his neck.

Closing his eyes, he forced his mind to search for perspective. He'd frequently witnessed first hand the power of death to work as an aphrodisiac. The only times anyone had looked at him with anything resembling want had been after the heat of an attack. Invariably it was a fellow death-eater, no doubt wanting their devotion to all things profane to be topped off with the most perverted act they could think of.

And when it had been a long time, when the feel of hands working into his clothes raised interest, and something else, in his body without permission, he had willingly obliged. It may have been more degrading in its way than anything visited on him by the bullies of his school days, but it felt like something, felt better than nothing. It was contact. And without any more humane options to choose from, he'd convinced himself it was enough.

A breath that sounded as if it had been held for years exhaled into the room. Snape immediately tried to forget it had come from him. "And what makes you think I'd accept a mercy fuck?"

Harry pulled away from kissing his cheek long enough to look into Snape's eyes, surprising Snape with the hope etched clearly on his face. "I don't want you to accept one, I want you to give one."

"Why?" Snape made the word sound like it contained at least fourteen syllables. He watched Harry trace a finger over his face and through his hair until he had to close his eyes from the torment of it.

"Because I do know what I want."

Snape knew if he'd opened his eyes he'd see something that wasn't capricious, wasn't another taunt or sneer. He opened them just long enough to confirm his worst suspicions – that Harry, the one person still alive who actually had reason to believe him a monster – was staring at him as if he was any another man but infinitely more fascinating. Was staring at him with want in his eyes.

He stared fixedly at the ceiling. "And what, pray tell, is that?" The blistering Mister Potter he'd planned to end the question with somehow died on his lips.

Fear flared as he waited on the answer.

Harry pulled back from covering Snape's body with his own and considered the question.

What did he want? He wanted something real. Something that had nothing to do with the love, the fear, the nearly God-like worship that had run hot and oh-so-cold since he'd been pulled into the world he supposedly saved. Snape may have treated him horribly during those childhood years, but when he was dangling by a finger three hundred feet above a Quiditch pitch his first year, where were they? Those legions of admirers? When Voldemort returned, who dangerously double-crossed him at every turn and who spent the year trading gossip from the Daily Prophet? That was the difference. Snape hated him, loathed him with a fury so hot you could feel it across the dungeon, but he still risked death and worse to protect him. Those who'd 'loved' him had simply waited for his life or death to play out as another amusing story.

"Everybody wants something from me," he heard himself saying. "They haven't done shit for me compared to you, but they all want to be entertained or patted on the head. And they want to know things, like my life's their public property or something. But you've never been like them. You're on the outside, too. And even after all the things you did for me, for everybody, you knew they weren't ever gonna let you in. They were never gonna stop staring at you, pointing, laughing…"

Harry watched Snape react as the words struck home with deadly accuracy.

"All that you went through…"

Images flashed in Harry's mind: Snape at Order headquarters after returning from a meeting with Lord Voldemort, moving slowly in the dark in the dead of the night in case someone was awake and waiting to laugh at his obvious pain, at the temporary scars. Snape being stared at by people who let their faces clearly reflect how they thought someone really ought to talk to him. Snape receiving the Order of Merlin (first class) from an uncomfortable new Minister of Magic on Harry's last day in England. The awards had been flying through the air like owls – all of them first class, even Fletcher's. Harry had heard talk that Dumbledore had left a letter in his will for the Minister requesting that a special designation be created for someone who spent nearly six years undercover but from the speed with which the Minister rushed to announce the next recipient, Harry knew Snape was probably lucky to receive even that.

"And all you asked for in return was a decent bit of respect and to be left bloody well alone. I bet you didn't think you'd even get that – but you did it anyway."

It struck Harry as horribly out of balance. Here he was trying to avoid the crushing weight of adoration in the same place where Snape was hiding from barely feigned tolerance; twisted pity transformed into both too much affection and nowhere near enough.

Harry had affection to spare. "I don't know why you did it. I mean, I think I do, but I don't know how just knowing it was the right thing and somebody had to do it could possibly have been enough."

He looked down at Snape's body, at the dangerous fear flashing in his eyes. He could tell there hadn't been a single compliment in Snape's life that wasn't a disguised attack or subtle declaration of ownership. Not even the ones that were just plain true.

With what he hoped was a soothing touch, Harry brushed perfectly black hair back from perfectly black eyes. "What I do know is that I'm sick of their love. I'm drowning under it. And if I don't put it where it belongs soon, it's gonna kill me."

Harry leaned in to kiss Snape's lips but watched the man's eyes close in what looked to him like intense pain. So instead he settled for a chaste buss on the cheek and laid his head on a very cool shoulder. "It's wrong. They shouldn't be able to kill us both with the same stupidity. They should at least have to think of a new one."

Harry waited. He was surprised to note that, for the moment, he appeared to be out of miraculous insights.

But the man whose heartbeat he could just make out had also spent months focusing nowhere, distracted by nothing. "You want to punish them through me? Is that it?"

Harry wanted to wrap himself in the man's voice like a Lethifold. "No. But they gave me all this… whatever it is. They should know it's not their business what I do with it." He replayed the words in his mind; they didn't sound like enough. So he risked turning to bury his face in the chest of the man at his side, running a hand down his thigh. "…what I want to do with it."

A gasp rewarded his tenacity.

Somewhere along the way the beautiful things of the world had turned ugly for Harry. Happy smiling people looked ingratiating, flirtations and confidences became pernicious. In truth, the only things about the world that had ever rewarded his affection were the cast-offs of others, the refuse. The few toys that were truly his as a child were tiny broken things nicked from the bin and fit to hide in his little private space. He was rescued from that life by a half-breed who appeared to have been kept alive solely in case the world needed him to retake his assigned role as scapegoat. Befriended by an awkward girl with bushy hair and big teeth, adopted by the least respected family in the community... What the world considered trash he found a universe of worth in. 'Ugly' things had not become 'beautiful,' a shallow word, superficial at best. Instead, they became something deeper; they became valuable.

And on that night, in that place, the value of a man usually considered too worthless to hate shone brighter to Harry than any of the stars.

Harry had tried to explain these thoughts to Snape, but Severus decided to spare Harry (or himself) the jumbled explanations. His wants seemed genuine enough, and even if they weren't, the number of miles and cultures between Severus and anyone else he knew made the threat of this being another deliberate humiliation seem minimal. Though why Harry had protested against Snape's suspicions so thoroughly, Snape didn't pretend to know. Apparently the boy had never learned the axiom 'when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging!'

The dark helped. Snape could protect himself from having to see first-hand that these moments were somehow meant for pleasures shared, not simply taken. Though the night couldn't shield him from all the surrealness of the affair. He'd been used as an object before, and as a pawn. But the green eyes he watched by the light of the banked fire were not interested in theft, or even lechery. Instead, they reflected concern and sought permissions. May I… an article of clothing was peeled away, a touch became more intimate… May I… kisses were placed where they had never existed before.

The part of his mind still capable of detached observation marvelled at how the boy… no, he was more than just 'of age,' he was obviously a young man now… knew which acts needed to be asked for. And not a single piece of clothing was brushed aside until he had, almost clumsily, shed himself of it first. If he were anyone else, Severus would have protested this aspect of the proceedings. But the once and forever Snivellus could not interject a word of his inclinations into the strange night. To ask for any privilege, even that of simply helping a partner off with his shirt, was to court a mocking 'no.'

The same small voice in the back of his mind reminded him that this one discovery of the night, of compassion mixed with passion, shouldn't be so shocking. Hadn't he seen from within Harry's own mind the life the boy'd been subjected to before Hogwarts? And hadn't those images burned behind his retinas for hours, days, afterward? Freed from the watchful eyes of the would-be spies of potions class, Snape had allowed himself to treat Harry as he would any other (spoiled, arrogant, Potter) student. He found for his efforts a student capable of creative responses… and that a boy he'd assumed spent his life as a spoiled centre of attention was actually a hurt loner, attacked by bullies, set upon by dogs, mocked by adults, played as a pawn between the machinations of evil and slightly-less-evil; a voice saying 'you'd do well in Slytherin…'

If Harry found those sessions unsettling, he'd barely grasped a tenth of what they'd done to Snape. He knew from rooting around in it so frequently that the boy's mind was weak. To dissemble motivation through Occlumency was hard enough, but to invent a life of false memories? The tragic boy wonder couldn't do it – not even his predecessor to that title, the once adored Tom Riddle, could. The only possible conclusion was that the child he'd once assumed had his every whim catered to, who never felt fear because there was always someone around hoping to die in his name, was a figment of his imagination. That he'd spent the last five years tormenting not the new extension of James and Black, but their exact opposite.

He'd been almost relieved to find the little brat breaking into the most private and hated moments of his life. At last there was some justification for continuing the war, the private one he answered only to himself for. And the tortured confusion that were writ large across the boy's face for days were practically healing to Snape. So all the boy's assumptions were wrong, so all his trusts and hatreds had been out of whack. Good. Finally it was someone else's turn to taste the bitter end of an Occlumency session.

But he'd been fifteen at the time, Snape's thoughts now goaded him. What was your excuse?

He left this moment in his mind and found that time had moved on in a way that surprised him. Being lost to swirling thoughts had left him appearing to find no fault with the explorations that had been taking place about his person. He could hardly feign surprise at the destination their journey was approaching, that ship had not only sailed, it had circumnavigated the globe, retired to an obliging dock, and was now the sort of permanent museum piece school children were often dragged to. But surprise was the only option open to him as he felt warm moist lips wrap around the head of his shaft and draw him in tight. A groan left his mouth as he felt his body move in response to the glorious wetness, his hands fisted searching for something to clutch, his legs kicked out only to bend back in again when they found nothing to push against, to transfer wave upon wave of energy to. It seemed to him that the entire world, not to mention all of human history, had collapsed to a single point – and when a hot tongue found that point and began to coax it tenderly he knew he wasn't long for this world.

Harry knew he had no reason now to linger in his current position, with the side of his head leaning contentedly against the curve of Snape's hip, but he couldn't think of a better one, either. Confused memories skated around the outskirts of his mind. The strongest tried to identify itself as the first time he was introduced to Severus (his professor would always be Snape, but the man who waited patiently to be killed with only the hope that his body would be found quickly could be 'Severus' in Harry's mind), even though he knew his mind was misfiring. It couldn't have been when he met Severus because he'd only been nine years old.

He'd done the serving around the house for almost as long as he could remember, and the first and foremost on his list of duties was making tea for everyone else. He'd never thought he'd drink any himself – they just allowed him tap water, and would markedly complain about that extravagance when the water bill came after a month in which Dudley had done things like insist Harry make him a hundred water balloons or turn the back garden into an ice-rink for him. But that day he'd felt bold and asked for a cup of his own.

Aunt Petunia had of course shushed the idea away, but Uncle Vernon turned to Harry with a very strange glint in his eye. Harry didn't have much experience with the idea, but he wasn't prepared to rule out the possibility that Uncle Vernon was thinking.

"Well, that does sound like a reasonable request, now doesn't it?" He taunted. Harry wasn't sure how he knew this was taunting – aside from years of experience, that is – because even in his anxious mind it did sound at least a bit reasonable.

But still he'd been surprised to see his uncle tear himself away from grumbling at his crossword puzzle and set the water to boil on the stove. "A boy's first cup of tea in an important business, after all."

So pleased and surprised by this turn of events was Harry that he immediately rushed to fetch the tea from the cupboard. He had already stood on the cracked, upturned pail that was his stepladder to the contents of the kitchen cabinets when his uncle put a very firm hand on his shoulders. "Oh, no. We're going to use the special tea for this."

Harry had never heard of any special tea before and was very much beginning to wish he could just go back to his plastic cup of water. Even Aunt Petunia looked up in surprise. "For God sakes Vernon, what are you playing at?"

"Playing? You know I've been saving this tea for a special occasion."

A light bulb seemed to go off above Petunia's head at that moment, a red light bulb that flashed on and off while a recorded voice yelled warnings of danger and impending doom. "Ah, I get it. He wants tea, tea he gets!"

Was it Harry, or was the room suddenly quite a bit warmer? And scarier? He thanked whatever God might be listening (if any did) that Dudley was safely ensconced in his room playing with his new toy, 'Nintendo.'

As the adults stared at Harry in expectant glee, Harry focused on the teapot. "Thank you," he muttered when the silence got too much for him. Whatever tea they were using, it seemed to be steeping for quite a long time.

Harry looked at the box and immediately wished he hadn't. There were words on it, that much he could tell, but the queer thing was they didn't appear to be made of letters.

"That's about done it, I should say!" Uncle Vernon pronounced.

"Um, aren't you going to join me?" Harry stammered hopefully.

"Oh, no," Aunt Petunia replied, a malicious glint in her eye. "This should be a private experience."

Harry couldn't help but notice that they were standing awfully close and staring awfully hard for such a private experience.

Uncle Vernon placed a cup in his hands. It was a real teacup, and out of the corner of his eye Harry could just see Aunt Petunia open her mouth to protest before forcefully shutting it and returning the poisonous fake smile to her face. Harry looked down into the cup.

The contents were pitch black.

"Go on, boy! Drink up!"

Closing his eyes, Harry brought the cup to his lips and let the contents wash inside.

It was horrible, worse than horrible. The hot temperature burned the roof of his mouth while pinpricks of individual taste buds seem to physically recoil into his tongue. It tasted like something had crawled into his mouth and died, like something you'd have to dig out from under an empty land at midnight. Spitting was his first impulse, with retching following a close second. It had looked a hopeless black, but somehow tasted even blacker.

But with his eyes still screwed shut, Harry willed himself not to spit it out, not to give his guardians the satisfaction. He couldn't bring himself to swallow either, so instead he let his mouth be laid siege to by this warring faction.

Except it wasn't warring. It wasn't fighting Harry half as much as Harry was fighting it. The liquid swilled around his mouth, dispassionately inspecting what it found. It seeped its taste, its darkness, into everything, but once the initial shock wore off the taste started to surprise him. It had first tasted like blackness, like night, but then it changed in his mouth. It changed to dark walnut wood or ebony, it changed to the charred delight he associated with hot crisp bacon on a snowy Sunday because he was only allowed to keep the burnt bits, it changed to the time of night when his tormentors were all asleep and he could softly push back his door, stretch his legs out into the hallway, and let the scent of a hundred night time smells into his cramped space. The scent of it in his pillow was almost as good as sleeping out in it, where air flowed all around you and the nearest wall was whole yards away.

His mouth started to cradle the intensity of the flavour and tiny spots on the sides of his tongue that Harry didn't even know he had seemed to reach out for the flare of sensation before it could slip away forever.

And it would be lost forever. Somehow Harry knew that no matter how much tea he drank in his life, how exactingly he prepared it, how desperately he let it seep until it was practically a solid food, it would never again be this dark, this rich, this perfect in his mouth.

But that didn't keep him from draining the glass and immediately asking for more.

"What are you staring at?"

Harry looked down at him from his sitting position in the dark and half-smiled. "You. You remind me of some tea one of my Uncle Vernon's co-workers brought back from India once. Black as pitch, made him retch."

"And you nicked it in innumerable midnight raids, no doubt."

"Too right, I did." A full smile there. Pale, half what it once was, but it carried the weight of civil war, of hard work and brief funerals, and somehow, also, the promise of something better.

It was a small gesture, the way Severus removed his hand from his own chest and let his arm lie across the mattress next to him. From the detached, almost bored, look in his eye, it shouldn't have been interpreted as being of any great importance.

Maybe it was the Occlumency lessons, or the years of similar experiences. Or maybe it was just the same shared inner quirk that led them both away from the celebrations that would last a lifetime in the memories of others to isolated retreats in the frozen mountains of Japan. In the end, it didn't matter how Harry knew the signal for what is was. It mattered only that he curled into the shoulder of the older man to watch the starlight flicker in the dark.