InsaneJournal

“You’re alive!”

 

So very Potter, stating the bleeding obvious, but his hair is streaked with grey and the green eyes have seen too much. Snape hefts the stump of his arm.

 

“Most of me is, I suppose.”

 

“Severus.” Three syllables tripping from hiss to hiss, almost Parseltongue; Harry’s fingers light as a cat’s paw tracing the scars on his face. “Why didn’t you come back sooner?”

 

The scars give Snape’s face a scaly rigidity, imposing their own smirk, but his serpent’s eyes could betray him to this stranger who is Potter.

 

“How we both grow to resemble Voldemort,” Potter whispers. 

Pacing the night through Hogwart’s silent halls, behold the Lion King; his unshed power crackling like a golden mane. Snape follows on silent feet. The wards part like silver water; Snape visualizes the lash of a tail.

 

“Do you have an animagus form, Snape?”

 

When did he gain such intuition? Snape runs a tongue across his teeth, remembers how the forked tip flickers between slender needles armed with the most potent of potions.

 

“Do you?” he counters.

 

“This is my animagus.”

 

His other form, the Golden Boy, was burned away in green fire and ash. Snape understands only too well. 

“They want me to kill you,” he whispers, his voice raw silk and duplicity. Harry’s tongue follows a raised line on his chest, bringing the pins-and-needle sting of circulation to tissue he had thought dead.

 

“They think I’ll turn Dark.”

 

“Will you?” He wrinkles his lip, baring a tooth.

 

“If they push me far enough.” The eye that Harry turns to him is not green but golden as the sun, a lion’s eye. “How far have they pushed you, Severus?”

 

The black eye stares back, inscrutable, then Snape shrinks and coils and whispers in Parseltongue “Far enough,” as he strikes.

The potion was brewed in the dark, of scarce ingredients selected, stolen, hoarded and blended by the master. It runs through Harry’s veins like fire, burning away his innermost scars, tearing away the residue of old curses. He writhes in mutable flesh and arises, Aslan if he but knew it, lion of the Light. He roars and shakes his mane and pounces upon the viper in his bed, pinning him. Snape transforms, scowling.

 

“Idiot!”

 

“What have you done?” Harry slips into human form as easily as Minerva.

 

“Cured you.”

 

“Can you cure yourself?”

 

“No,” says Snape, smirking, “But you can.”