Fic: Quicksand Title: Quicksand Author:leni_jess Giftee:regasssa Word Count: 5,961 Rating: NC-17 Pairing: Just Snape/Harry Warnings: Snape's alive, so it's AU so far, but that's a given for this fest! Moment of dub-con. Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended. Summary: If Snape is the solution to Harry's problem, does Snape have a problem, and would Harry want to be the solution? Author's Notes: This is too short, alas, to contain all that regasssa would have liked to see – including plot, I fear. I hope, though, it gives you some pleasure, regasssa. Thanks to my helpful beta, F, and to chiralove for being such a tolerant mod.
Quicksand
"Harry."
Kingsley's deep voice was calm, but the interlaced fingers of the hands that lay palms upward on the desk before him were tight. Harry braced to attention and kept his mouth shut. Even a "Yes, sir," seemed unwise.
It wasn't the first time in nearly three years of Auror training he'd been carpeted for losing his temper and lashing out, but usually it was his supervisor or, more recently, the chief Trainer and even the head of the Aurors. The Minister didn’t interfere in the affairs of his department heads.
They wouldn’t throw him out, would they? They'd made such a thing of letting him in to Auror training, saying that defeating Voldemort meant he didn’t really need to take his NEWTs: he'd shown his ability. He still didn’t learn easily from textbooks, but the trainers seemed to be able to cope with that, and let him learn by example and practice, even though he missed having Hermione shoving the theory down his gullet and making sure he could cough it up again.
"May I have your attention?" Oh hell, he'd been wool-gathering again. That was another thing his trainers objected to.
"Sorry, sir."
"I don't lightly get involved in disciplining trainee Aurors, Harry. I'm not involved in it now."
Kingsley leaned forward fractionally, hard eyes drilling unforgivingly into Harry's. "Remember those conversations we had, three summers back, about cleaning up the Aurory, getting the service back on the straight and narrow, putting an end to the use of Unforgivables, making sure that Aurors harassed Dark wizards and no one else?"
Harry swallowed. They had both been in earnest, and while Harry had flinched from the responsibilities the new Minister had wanted to load onto him, he could see, both then and now, why it would be helpful for Kingsley to use him as a poster boy for the kind of Auror he wanted to have. Harry supposed he tended to forget about being a good example, and leading by doing, when all his attention was on keeping up with the demands of his training. Being The Boy Who Lived To Inspire Us All was still not his ideal career.
"Yes, sir," was the only possible response.
"So what kind of an example are my Aurors getting from a third-year trainee who still has fits of childish temper and hexes someone who disagrees with him? Not for the first time, or the tenth, either. And the disagreement was a perfectly reasonable one, by the sound of it. So, you and Michael Corner never got on. I don't care! The wizarding world doesn’t care! Any Dark wizard you're supposed to be catching would be delighted to know how readily you'll take your mind off your job. If you can't act like an adult, Harry, you're no use to me, whether as an example or just as an Auror."
Kingsley was going to throw him out. Harry closed his eyes tight for a moment, holding back another unacceptably childish response, until the tears retreated.
"Please, Kingsley! I'll try to do better; just don't turn me off! I won't hex Corner again, I promise you."
"That's the symptom, Harry, not the disease. You must learn to control yourself. You don't get an unlimited number of chances." Kingsley sat back, then asked, "If I send you to someone who can help you learn an adult's self-control, will you go? Will you learn from him?"
Harry didn’t like the way he flew apart when something made him angry, and he still became angry a lot. He didn’t always resort to hexes, but he hated feeling the idiot afterwards, whatever he'd done under the influence. He'd wondered sometimes if a little bit of Voldemort was still in him, infecting him with Tom Riddle's boundless anger and resentment and entitlement, but he supposed Hermione would tell him that was just an excuse. Even if it was true, which he didn’t really think, it would still have been an excuse. He had learned to keep Voldemort out of his mind, after all; Snape had managed to teach him that much.
So being able to get rid of that remnant of helpless childhood that still lashed out even though he was now a powerful wizard would be good, yes. He had tried, whatever Kingsley thought; he didn’t like being reprimanded by people he respected and whose respect he wanted; he didn’t like knowing that it screwed up his ability to think, or to act as he should. He didn’t want to be that kid locked up under the stairs, too powerless even to acknowledge his hatred. But these years of trying hadn’t made much difference.
So he asked uncertainly, "Can someone teach that, sir? Yes, I do want not to fly off my broomstick whenever the wind blows wrong. But how can I learn?"
"Most people learn, Harry," Kingsley said dryly, "even if it's harder for some. You have to try, and to keep trying, though. So will you do it? This may not be the last chance, Harry, but no one can think of any other way past your problem."
"Hermione thought I should go and see a Muggle therapist of some kind, after the war and we'd all had a chance to get our breath," Harry confessed, "but I'd had enough of people prying into my head. She said she did, and it helped, but she wouldn’t talk about it, just said her problems weren't anything like mine. I think that's why she got unengaged from Ron, though. I didn’t want someone changing the way I felt about my best friends."
"It might indeed have helped you," Kingsley remarked, "but I gathered, when I was working for the Muggle PM, that the patient has to want to get better for it to work, and has to trust the expert to know what they're doing. Explaining what it was all about would have been near impossible; I can’t imagine how Hermione got around that. Anyway, you'd have had a problem then, and maybe now, too –you need to trust that what they're doing will help you. The wizard I want you to work with will expect you to trust and cooperate too, though; he won't be able to wave a wand and fix you."
Harry couldn’t imagine his life without the prospect of being able to be an Auror and to help people by stopping Dark wizards in their tracks. He might not want to be a poster Auror, but he did want the wizarding world to be a better place, and to work on that in every way he could. What was the point of living, if he couldn’t be part of making sure that the horrors he and everyone he knew had lived through never happened again?
So he said, "I will work, I promise." It wasn't going to be fun explaining his problems to a wizard, either, but it would have to be done. "Have I met this person? Does he do this for a living? I didn’t think the wizarding world had psychiatrists."
"We don't," Kingsley said dryly, "but we do have people perfectly capable of observing and drawing conclusions, experimenting and testing theories, and keeping on with the methods that seem to work.
"Yes, you know this person. As well as he allowed you to know him, that is."
Suddenly Harry knew just what Kingsley was going to say. And he'd said yes already; Kingsley wasn't going to let him back out.
"You're sending me to Snape, aren't you?"
He managed to say it calmly. Screaming at Kingsley that Snape didn’t know the first thing about keeping his temper with people he hated (or anything else) wouldn’t go down well.
"Yes."
Kingsley was eyeing him speculatively. This was a first test of his willingness to cooperate, wasn't it. If he failed it, Kingsley might toss him out on his arse with no further ado. And if he had to work with Snape, whom he mightn't hate any more, now that he knew what the man had done for them all, and for himself especially, but still couldn't see any reason to like... That was going to be continuous assessment with a vengeance.
Harry took a deep breath and hoped that Snape would be at least a little bit easier to get on with, a little bit more ready to think he might be able to learn something.
"If he'll teach me, I'll try to learn." He couldn't help adding plaintively, "But Snape never bothered to keep his temper with us, you know. Some days we just had to breathe and he screamed at us."
"I didn’t say Snape was a nice man, or a tolerant one. But surely you can see that what he was doing was taking all his frustrations out on targets that wouldn’t hit back lethally?"
"Oh yes," the remembered bitterness welled up, "we couldn’t protect ourselves, so he said everything he could to make us feel terrible about ourselves."
"How well do you think he felt about himself, Harry? He was making you as miserable as he was, because he could. He couldn’t scream at Voldemort, though – or Dumbledore, either, and if he criticised everyone at Order meetings, he was at least half right a lot of the time; we had some real prizes in our version of Dumbledore's Army."
Kingsley leaned forward again. "I'm not saying Snape won't criticise now – he probably will. His teaching tactics are definitely take no prisoners, none of this leading children kindly to the light. He expected you to learn from observation and experience, and of course you didn’t – not just you, Harry, but all the students – and found it frustrating. His natural temper is irritable. But he can control it, perfectly, when he has to. I believe he can teach you the same control, so that even if you're ready to explode, you won't. Be aware that he may use on you the same tactics life used on him to teach him that skill: extreme terror and peril. You may be in danger from more than his sharp tongue and his enjoyment of insult."
Harry could see it now. Snape on the warpath would definitely be an incitement to learn quickly and get out of range as soon as he could.
It didn't make him feel any better to be told that Snape had deliberately allowed himself to persecute his students – he had already known that Snape got a real kick out of persecuting him – but it was plain that one thing he was going to have to learn fast was to ignore the teacher and concentrate on the lesson. If he could learn that with Snape he was sure he'd be able to learn to ignore Michael Corner's petty provocations; that was one good thing. Actually, maybe learning to put up with Snape was the only lesson he'd need to learn. If he could do that, perhaps he could do anything.
Then Kingsley laid another hazard on him.
"Snape won't be doing this for free."
"Will he make do with just money?" He could always hope.
"He'll take a fee; he always has, when he's done anything for the Ministry after he got out of St Mungo's. The Ministry will be paying whatever cash fee he asks for, if he takes you on for this. But he almost always charges a – levy, on top of that. Which is never cash. That levy, you'll be paying, and it'll be between you and him."
Right, so Kingsley was going to use that as a punishment: let Snape have another piece of his ex-pupil's happiness and peace of mind.
Okay, the only way out was through.
Harry said, feeling wrung out already, "Yes, Kingsley. Yes to everything. If you fix it with Snape, I'll take his lessons. And if I hex Corner again, I'll do it on my own time, out the back of the pub, all right?"
Kingsley laughed, though briefly, so Harry knew he was ready to believe Harry would do his best. Harry could look forward to trying to convince Snape of that same thing.
*** #### ***
Harry thought he had accepted that working with Snape would be hard, but possible to live through, even with that ominous levy Kingsley had spoken of. His dreams that night told him differently.
A good thing he'd be awake when taking lessons on self-control, then. That was something he really did want, not just to please Kingsley or even to stay in the Auror training program.
While he slept he had reverted not just to the boy who had wrecked Dumbledore's office in a fit of grief-driven rage at Sirius's death, but to the eleven-year-old who had found the unknown wizarding world terrifying, and who, for all his self-protective indignation and hatred, had been overwhelmed by Snape's wholly real hatred and scorn. That child hadn’t understood how he could possibly have deserved it; Snape, after all, wasn't a relative.
When he woke up Harry swiped the sweat from his forehead and throat, and scrubbed it out of his hair, before he resignedly knuckled the almost tears from the corner of his eyes, working on making his breathing steady and slow, pushing away the distorted view of a monstrous Snape looming over him and pushing him back into the hostile crowds who were angry with him because he hadn't done what they expected of him.
That had been a bad one. It wasn't often that child-Harry came so vividly back to life. The six years at Hogwarts had done a lot more for him than accustom him to Snape's horrible ways.
He knew now, though, that he hadn’t learned nearly as much as he should have about how the wizarding world worked, even if he had learned plenty about its impossible expectations. That ignorance he'd managed to make up for, these last three years, as well as getting a more balanced view of how irrational those expectations had been.
The trainers had a knack for practical teaching that at Hogwarts had been approached only by the Half-Blood Prince. More than one of them had echoed Snape's view that Dumbledore had been wrong to make such demands of a child, never mind to isolate him among Muggles who hated him in order to train him to be ready to die in meeting those demands. Just as Harry had learned Snape wasn't the villain he had allowed himself to be seen as (however nasty and unkind), he now understood (even if he still didn’t feel it in his heart) that Dumbledore hadn't truly loved him enough to put his welfare above that of Dumbledore's battle plans.
Harry had developed strong views on how not to train children to fulfil their adult roles. He wasn't sure, though, that he would ever be able to bring children up properly, caring for them, much as he'd love to have a family.
The last year that he should have been at school, when he had been chasing Horcruxes, however successfully in the end, hadn't taught him much of general use beyond giving him a post-graduate course in keeping going no matter what. Dumbledore had certainly ensured that he'd learn that from early childhood. With any luck that lesson would see him through lessons with Snape.
At least he didn’t have to face Snape today. If he was lucky, he wouldn’t have more nightmares before he had to get through that meeting.
The only thing that hadn't stood over him in his dream was whatever Snape was going to charge him, Harry, for the lessons. He supposed that someone who'd survived whatever Voldemort could do, could live through anything Snape could think up, and his dreaming mind knew that much.
Kingsley told him Snape wanted a couple of uninterrupted days of his time, to start with. When the meeting did come, a week later, Harry had managed to sleep the night through without bad dreams. He resisted the temptation to take the Elder Wand rather than his own holly and phoenix feather wand with him. He wouldn’t need that sort of protection; Snape wasn't going to kill him. Just make him world-without-end miserable. What was new about that? Snape was very good at it, but his family had been better.
That was a hell of a thought to be a consolation. At least he knew by now that his family was no more normal than he was, or Snape either. For most people, such traps and torments just didn’t exist, and never would, which was something he was able to be grateful for.
*** #### ***
These days, it seemed, Snape lived in a second-story London flat in the no-man's-land between Diagon Alley and Charing Cross Road, somewhere behind Greek Street, in a building that could be accessed through a French patisserie. You went up the stairs beside the ones that led to the café. Snape's stairs were invisible to Muggles, due more to Muggle-repelling charms, Harry thought, than to an actual Fidelius. He wasn't fool enough, these days, to ask who would be a Secret Keeper for Snape. A lot of people owed him, from Kingsley Shacklebolt to the Malfoy family. Harry didn’t doubt Snape's flat had other entrances, and that he'd never find them by himself. Snape even showed him around the flat (however briskly), even if he didn’t offer him anything but water in the occasional short breaks he permitted.
Snape also washed his hair more often, unless today was Harry's lucky day, and had found time to visit a dentist, so at least his teeth looked clean, if not much straighter. He dressed in lighter robes than what had probably been needed at Hogwarts to keep the cold out and to give him some protection from the combination of thoughtless students and dangerous potions and their ingredients. Still black clothing, of course, except for the barely-visible high shirt collar, starkly white, but hardly more so than his skin.
His tongue had much the same edge, but he wasn't using it to slash permanently bleeding wounds; more like paper-cuts, too shallow to sting beyond the moment.
"Mr Potter, still our celebrity, though without the shine of novelty. Don’t you find it wearing?"
That was almost friendly, especially given that Snape was smirking, rather than glaring at him.
Harry smirked back without effort. He didn’t even tell himself that he was grown up now, he could do this, but reacted to an instinct that Snape would respect him more if he could demonstrate some kind of equality. The trick was attack, not defence.
"Mr Snape, a teacher with a class of one again. Maybe you'll get somewhere this time."
That could have been a disastrous challenge to the old Snape, who lived on his nerves and survived on his ability to dominate, so Harry moved on rapidly, trying to show he didn’t mean to be confrontational unless Snape wanted him to be.
"This time, though, you've got a student who means to pay attention, and to practise."
More soberly he repeated the substance of what he had said on his one visit to St Mungo's, nearly three years back. "I was, and am, grateful for all you did, sir, and did for me, not just for everyone else.
"This time, I'm going to work."
Snape's lip lifted, but the sneer was only half-hearted, and hardly showed in his voice or his words. "Promises, promises, Potter. At least this time I know you might choose to work, and are able to think, if you concentrate hard enough; I had no evidence of either last time."
Then, like a snake striking, he demanded, "And can you occlude, now, Potter? Do you practise what you should have learned from me last time?"
Harry could answer that honestly. It was a skill he had belatedly realised the value of, and not just because Hermione had somehow learned Legilimency. She didn’t have anything like Snape or Dumbledore's skill at it, but she used to be able to make him sweat. Not so much, nowadays, when she teasingly tried to find out if he knew whether Witch Weekly or the Daily Prophet had cottoned on yet to his preference for boyfriends rather than the girlfriends the press credited him with. That wasn't necessarily a truth they'd be in a hurry to publish. Repeated fictional titillation probably paid better than one big blast of scandal would, especially if the rare thinking witch or wizard decided indignantly that the Saviour deserved to have his personal choices left as just that.
"Yes, I can occlude; I do practise, every night."
Even before he said it he raised the conscious barriers that he had worked so long and hard to make unobtrusive, and impenetrable.
Snape's gaze sharpened, and focussed, and Harry felt the thrust of his will. He had to fight to keep up the shield of a mind apparently scurrying around in circles, and very nearly took a step back. He felt the perspiration breaking out, but that didn’t matter. They both knew what Snape was doing. The scurrying weakened, and the shape of the wall behind it would be becoming visible to Snape, but its form, its substance, held.
Harry didn’t drop his eyes, and, after a time he couldn't estimate, Snape released him.
"Respectable."
Was that a faint note of approval? If so, the first ever, surely. Harry suddenly felt much more confident about surviving this course of lessons without suffering agonies of humiliation and resentment.
It was only after he was home again that he decided that Snape had paid him some sort of backhanded compliment by holding his "class" in the barren attic above the flat, rather than in the comfortable sitting room or, heaven forbid, the substantial Potions workroom that he gave Harry a brief glimpse of before getting down to work.
"Hang up your hat and your outer robes," Snape directed briskly. "This will probably be warm work, Potter, since I've yet to see you see you do anything without making a great fuss over it."
Harry didn’t even feel a throb of irritation at the automatic sneer. He hadn’t needed Kingsley to tell him that Snape would make this difficult, not that Snape was putting any real effort into it. So far.
As he obediently hung his things on the entry way hooks Snape pointed him at, Harry managed to wipe away the remaining trickles of sweat that irritated his spine, without being too obvious about it. Snape might feel, or pretend, that self-control included hiding your physical responses as well as suppressing any inclination to start throwing hexes. Harry wasn't likely ever to need to be a spy like Snape, or any kind of under-cover worker, given how conspicuous he would always be, but even at the simplest level of not letting Michael Corner see he'd been irritated, physical self-control would have its uses.
By early afternoon Harry was much less confident, and way past wiping off the sweat.
Snape's teaching techniques were more like testing to destruction than providing him with helpful methods or ideas. That wasn't new. The means he used ranged far beyond Potions, Occlumency, and personal insult, though.
He made Harry live over and analyse some of his worst moments in training, whether it was getting blindly furious with a fellow trainee, or the many times he had in some way put a foot wrong, or not paid enough attention to what his trainers showed him, or done something stupid in full view of the wizarding public. Having made Harry lay himself open to critical analysis, he then provided it, mercilessly, but so fairly that Harry couldn’t once tell himself that Snape was trying to get his goat by cheating.
He made Harry explain why he had done some particular thing in that year of blindly thrashing around trying to carry out Dumbledore's plans without really knowing what they were. Then he made Harry think about what it might have been more sensible, more effective, to do instead. Harry had devoted enough of his own time since then to that examination, which didn’t help in the least when he had to share his conclusions with Snape.
Snape even tried to make him discuss why he wasn't seeing Ginny any more, but Harry refused. He would let Snape use his actions as Voldemort's opponent, or as a trainee Auror, or as a school student, but not his private life. After three attempts Snape had accepted that, and moved on to worse things.
Snape did manage to infuriate him with a series of condemnatory comments made at unexpected moments about other members of the Weasley family. They were still the nearest he had to family of his own, and he hated having to acknowledge to himself, never mind to Snape, that Molly Weasley hadn't in fact been the ideal mother in the things she'd allowed the twins to get away with in bullying Ron and Ginny (never mind what they did to other people at school), or the way she'd ignored Ron's need to be loved and attended to, even in the littlest ways, like giving him an appalling set of second-hand frilled dress robes to wear to a school dance. Then there was the way all of them had treated Percy, who was still a pompous idiot, though a better judge of the honesty of Ministry officials. Percy hadn’t deserved to be belittled all his life by his siblings and then abandoned by his parents when he did something no stupider (and possibly less damaging) than any of the twins' "larks".
Snape had several times brought him to the point of hexing. Harry hadn’t done it, though, largely because the part of him that was still sober and alert knew that if Snape let him carry his wand, as he had, then Snape wasn't much worried about Harry hexing him successfully. He had certainly screamed at Snape as the only way of holding back from going for his wand. Snape had generally smirked at him, not even bothering to scowl reproof, and his criticisms had mostly been limited to Harry's grammar and vocabulary.
That Snape hadn't even got excited enough to scream back, or to comment on Harry's loss of temper, was far more humiliating than remarks like, "Is that all you can think of? You realise it's magically as well as anatomically impossible? Ah, of course, that's probably beyond your understanding."
In mid-afternoon, Harry had recommended him, at top volume, to fuck a manticore and to eat the resulting offspring for breakfast, before he had turned his back on him and walked away to rest his head against the back wall of the room, shaking, sweating, and praying incoherently for some lightning strike to annihilate his tormentor.
After a while he had taken out his wand, very slowly, and laid it on the floor, before turning back to Snape. Only to see Snape shaking his head.
"No, Potter. Any time you're wandless, you're not going to be losing your temper. You're going to be too busy squirreling your way out of the situation."
Harry had to admit the truth of that, given some of the ways in which theoretically safe field trips had sometimes turned to dragon droppings. Great heaping helpings, sometimes. He never lost his temper then, and more than once he had played a bigger part than his trainer or practice partner in getting them out of trouble. He hadn't even yelled, afterwards, at the idiot or idiots who had caused the cock-up in the first place. Bad practice, after all, to yell at either the Head of the Aurors or someone from Supplies who could make them (or at least him) sorry for ever and ever, without once doing anything illegal. Counterproductive to yell at trainer or partner, when it had been their doing – the times it hadn’t been his own fault.
So Harry had put his wand back in its sleeve sheath and let Snape provoke him some more. He gave up trying to insult Snape. Today, or in this situation, that didn’t seem to be possible. Either Snape's self-esteem was better off than the way Kingsley had implied it was during the war, or their current relationship shielded it from any such pinpricks as Harry Potter's imagination could provide. Which was certainly a massive change.
Then Snape had piled insult on injury by offering him a glass of water. Harry had accepted it: his throat was dry, his head ached, his hands still had a slight tremor, and he had no idea when Snape was going to call it a day. He could try to kill Snape some other time.
*** #### ***
Harry didn't know how it happened. One minute he was exchanging hexes with Snape – hexes limited to minimum harm; harm wasn't the aim, here – and sweating blood, feeling his control waver, hitting harder than he meant, maybe even starting to panic, as Snape continued to fire beautifully controlled magic at him – the next he was on his back.
On the floor, arms flung wide (but wand still in hand, thank Merlin), with Snape looming over him. Snape dropping to his knees, those knees gripping Harry's thighs and hips, holding him, pinning him, controlling the instinctive heave of the knee aimed at his bollocks. Snape's black eyes snapping fire at him. Snape demonstrating that Harry wasn't going to be allowed up. Snape might be lean, but his muscles must look like steel hawsers when he was stripped. And where did that image come from? Harry tossed it aside to concentrate on essentials.
He gripped his wand harder, tilting it towards Snape, determined to get free if the contest wasn't over. He wasn't just going to lie there until Snape let him up. Snape's left hand came down hard on Harry's wand hand, fingers digging into the back of it, the agony of pinched nerves making him almost scream, forcing his fingers to release his wand. He heard the small clatter as his wand came to rest feet away, somewhere inside the ring of protective charms that confined the runaway hexes; most of them had bounced off Snape's shields, or his, something they were both very good at.
So now Harry was wandless, trapped under Snape, confined inside Snape's charm wall, staring up at Snape, and belatedly re-erecting his Occlumency warding.
Snape smiled. In that sort-of way he had, promise of bad and threat of worse rather than acknowledgement.
"I know I said that wandless you'd keep yourself in hand, Potter, but let's see how you do in this particular case."
He didn't trouble to use Legilimency. The next assault was purely physical.
Snape's mouth came down on his, hard but not brutal, lips pushing against his, before they opened, to let his tongue thrust, seeking entry, demanding Harry reply. Snape's body slid along his, still imprisoning, constraining. Harry could feel Snape's prick against his hip, just beginning to harden, and tried to swallow as a primitively mechanical response heated his own groin. Snape took prompt advantage, his tongue prying Harry's slackened lips apart, dipping into his mouth, teasing his tongue, while Snape rubbed himself against Harry's hip bone and belly.
Harry felt himself flushing, felt heat run all through his body, felt some muscles tighten while others relaxed, and suddenly realised his left hand was free. He brought it up, pushing against Snape's jaw, trying to get the man's mouth away from his, while his hips bucked up in rejection. Snape promptly let his whole weight lean into Harry, turned his head a little and pressed deeper into Harry's mouth, forcing it wide open to admit his tongue fully, before his free hand seized on Harry's, without words showing that his body had mastered Harry's even before Harry was completely immobilised. Then Snape gathered both Harry's wrists into one hand and pushed his arms flat to the floor, holding the imprisoned hands above Harry's head, leaning on both as he had previously done with the right hand.
It was as if Harry's body, rather than his mind, was Confunded. Fighting didn't work, Snape was impervious to screaming, so his body pursued the heat, not caring why Snape was doing this, or that he hadn’t asked, but was taking.
He couldn't move much, but he found himself wanting to: not to escape, but to respond, to make his own demands. When Snape's head lifted a little, so they could both catch their breath, Harry lunged up to kiss him even while he was still dragging in air. Snape made a small, surprised noise and Harry found himself aching. He didn't understand the pain, but he tugged at the hand gripping his wrists. When the hold loosened he lifted his hands, wrapped his arms fiercely around Snape's shoulders, drove the fingers of one hand into Snape's hair, and held on for dear life. Harry didn't worry about the next small sound, either. He was concentrating too hard on Snape's mouth and on getting his own cock alongside Snape's, so they could frot together productively, rather than both being frustrated by less than perfect touch.
After that it was all heat and determination and surprise and intensifying pleasure, until his orgasm knocked his hold loose. In the brilliant peace that followed he became aware of Snape's pleasure cresting in turn, and the sounds Snape was making now, private and almost inaudible, but entirely his, made him slide his hands hard down Snape's back to grip his bum, holding him hard against Harry's eased and triumphant body.
Snape didn’t try to pull free when he was done; he let his head drop onto Harry's shoulder and his hands move over Harry's body, idly investigating shirt and trouser buttons, the hard fingers gentler now.
A while later, when Harry became aware of the hard wooden floor and bruises in all sorts of places and the weight of the body lying over his, he began to wriggle out from under. He kept a good hold to make sure Snape knew he was moving around, not away. They settled silently side by side, bodies touching wherever possible, and hands languidly possessive still.
Since it seemed Snape wasn't going to bother, Harry clicked his fingers for his wand and cast a Cushioning Charm; Snape settled closer with the faintest sigh.
Later still, starting to think again, Harry asked, "Was that your price? The levy Kingsley warned me about?"
Then he wanted to kick himself for inviting Snape to take advantage of him in yet another way.
Snape lifted his head enough that Harry could see his smirk. "No, Potter; I haven't claimed that yet. That was testing your self-control, yet again. Alas, you only managed to prove that you could fight back. So it's all to do again."
Snape was pretty much back to normal, then, even if he hadn't closed up and withdrawn.
Harry rolled his eyes. "You're tougher than I think you are, if you can do that again right now."
The smirk got wider. "You may rest until tomorrow, Potter, if you're too tired to continue with lessons. We can talk price later."
Harry didn’t want to talk price at all, but there was no point in saying so. Snape had liked that pretty well, and if Harry was still confused about why he himself had liked it (or, rather, been willing to go with it and then bloody loved it), he was quite clear that he wanted some more. He'd just have to work out the best way to get Snape to give it, probably under the guise of taking it, or testing his resolution, or whatever.
Self-control might have uses neither he nor Snape had been thinking of, if he succeeded.