suitesambo (suitesamba) wrote in snape_potter, @ 2014-07-23 12:01:00 |
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Entry tags: | summer challenge14 |
SUMMER CHALLENGE 14: Let Him Be (General Audiences)
Title: Let Him Be
Author: suitesamba
Other pairings/threesome:
Rating: General
Word count: 2019
Theme chosen: Holidays/Travel
Warning(s): none
Summary: The summer after the war, Harry and Severus find themselves recuperating at the same Wizarding resort, and Severus realizes he doesn’t know Harry Potter at all.
Severus rests on a lounge chair in the shade of the palm trees, his view of the ocean unobstructed. The chair sits well back from the water, at the very edge of the private facility where he is summering. Summering, regaining his strength, recovering from the injuries that should have killed him. There’s a privacy fence of sorts – a spell, a ward – that makes this little piece of heaven appear as an overgrown patch of beach grass cluttered with sharp stones and dead palm fronds.
He’s not fond of the sun, and dislikes the sand, but he loves the ocean, and enjoys the sea breeze. He is strong enough – finally – to get himself out here each morning, to settle himself on his reserved chair, pull his journals and books from the canvas beach bag, and pile them on the little table at his left elbow.
He submits to the prescribed care, and to the amenable service.
Staff members bring him beverages and potions, serve him lunch, bring him a wide-brimmed hat and stand waiting at the edge of the warded area while he walks on the beach, on the packed sand at water’s edge, fifteen minutes one direction, then back again, three times a day.
He doesn’t know who arranged this therapeutic retreat, here at the dividing line between the civilised world and the edge of paradise, or who is paying for it, and really, he doesn’t care. He has survived Voldemort. He has survived the Death Eaters. And in the end, he has survived the Ministry.
Pardoned. Absolved. Cared for.
If he never sees Hogwarts again, he will not cry. He’s served his time, and when he gains his strength again he’ll return to Spinner’s End, and contemplate the years left him, and reinvent himself.
He doesn’t often wonder about any of the others. He was in St. Mungo’s long enough to learn what he needed, to overhear the mediwitches and healers, to submit to the Ministry interviews, to turn over the names of the dead in his mind.
On the eighth day of his stay, on a day when milk-white clouds form dragons in the sky, he finds Harry Potter asleep in a lounge chair not far from his own.
He stares at Potter for a long moment, considering why he is here and if it means anything. In the end, after careful contemplation, he decides that it means that Potter needs the sea breeze and time to rest and recover, with no demands upon him, and no well-meaning friends pointing him this way or that.
He settles back into his own chair, and picks up his book, and goes about his day.