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A Walking Shadow	By : yymeatha Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 865 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-A Walking Shadow
- 2-Creeps in this petty pace
- 1
- 2
Title: A Walking Shadow

Author: Yymeatha

Pairing: Snape/Harry

Rating: NC-17

Feedback: Please! This is my
first ever slash fic and my first serious and complete fic. baasheep87@aol.com

Disclaimer: Not mine, however
much I wish that were untrue. I have also taken quotes from Shakespeare and
Eugene Ionesco.

Notes: Many thanks go to my
muses, namely Kat, KT, Hollie and Amy who provide many bizarre and wonderful
conversations to draw upon. Extra thanks to Amy for beta-reading and
commiserations to Kat whom I suspect wanted to beta-read but didn�t get her lot
in on time.

This fic is part of the
�Order of the Phoenix� Harry/Severus Fuh-Q-Fest
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/After_class/). Challenges: Harry needs
comforting after Sirius� death, Harry sees a sexual fantasy about himself in
Snape's pensieve, Occlumency practice creates a link between Snape and Harry,
and they start experiencing each other's dreams.

Spoilers: Books 1 to 5.

Archive: After_Class archive
and other random places after 30^th September. If you want it, please
ask me first so I can go and see the site. Many thanks.

Life�s but a walking
shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is
heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.-William Shakespeare

A
Walking Shadow

Harry Potter had long since decided that
the July of 1996 was unnecessarily hot, needlessly Dursley-infested and
unquestionably the strangest summer of his nearly-sixteen-year old life.
Unfortunately, while he could at least do something about the heat
�specifically wearing as little as possible and staying in the shade where
Uncle Vernon couldn�t see him- the presence of the Dursleys was a necessary
evil. The Dursleys themselves had been behaving awfully strangely all summer
and, although this was, at times, a welcome state of affairs, it was beginning
to unnerve him just the slightest.

For one thing, they had left him mostly
alone. Harry was not naive enough to believe that this was due entirely to the
Order�s threat at the end of the previous term; if anything, his Aunt Petunia�s
innate tendency to poke her considerable-sized nose in where it wasn�t wanted,
should have been fuelled by her eternal quest to know everything about others�
lives. But there had been no neck-craning, no beady-eyed glances when she
thought Harry wasn�t looking, no spontaneous checks to �make sure you�re doing
what you should be doing!� Harry had decided that either he wasn�t noticing
anymore or Aunt Petunia had inexplicably gained experience in the art of
not-being-seen.

The alternative was, of course, that Aunt
Petunia had simply stopped� but Harry had made an observation several years
back, that when Aunt Petunia stopped spying on other people�s lives, Hell would
freeze over. And Privet Drive
had showed no signs of becoming the sudden centre of an unscheduled
snow-blizzard in the middle of July.

If Aunt Petunia�s strange behaviour wasn�t
enough to confuse him, the rest of his family�s activities certainly were.
Uncle Vernon, while definitely not being �nice� to him by any stretch of the
imagination, had noticeably made an effort to curb all insults thrown his way.
When Harry had accidentally broken a piece of priceless Wedgewood as he dusted
the living room last week, Uncle Vernon had made no nasty comments whatsoever.
He had turned several interesting shades of purple but Harry was feeling
generous enough to chalk that up to the heat.

If Harry hadn�t known better, he would
almost be tempted to believe that the Dursleys were trying their very best to
be nice to him. But �nice to Harry� and �the Dursleys� had never mixed well in
any sentence before and Harry held no beliefs that they would now.

Although the days were undoubtedly strange
and confusing, Harry preferred them substantially to what awaited him when
darkness fell and he had only his own dark thoughts for company.

In the silence and solitude brought on by
the thick night Harry found himself thinking more than was probably healthy.
Although he had been told time and again that he was not to be blamed for any
of the events which had caused people to lose their lives, he couldn�t see how
he could not be blamed. If he hadn�t told Cedric to take the Cup, Cedric
would still be alive. If he had listened to Sirius, Remus, Ron,
Hermione�anyone, if he had just swallowed his damnable pride and returned to
the Occlumency lessons, if he hadn�t been so impulsive and downright stupid...Sirius
would still be alive.

That one hurt the most.

Despite Dumbledore�s insistence that it was
himself whom had caused Sirius� death, Harry couldn�t see how anyone except
himself could be blamed for the loss of the most important person in his life.
He wanted to blame Dumbledore, oh god how he wanted to pin the blame
on someone else (and a small part of him recognised that that was exactly what
Dumbledore had tried to allow him to do) but the fact of the matter was that
Sirius� death was utterly, inescapably his fault. And no amount of
begging, of crying and screaming and trashing Dumbledore�s office, would ever
bring him back.

Sirius had been the most important person
in Harry�s life for two years. It was the dim hope that Sirius would be cleared
and that Harry would be able to live with him that had kept him going when
people refused to believe him or else betrayed him behind his back. Sirius had
been a link to his parents and, more importantly, someone who would care for
him not just because he was James� son but because he was his godson.

And now Sirius had left him alone and his
world had been torn apart. Nothing would ever be �alright� again because there
would be no one to go home to. Just as Harry�s world had ceased as certainly as
Sirius� life had, he felt that the world itself should have ended. The stars
ought to have winked out, for where was their beauty without the brightest of
them all? Time itself should have come to an end because what was time worth if
it wasn�t time spent with Sirius?

BuB>But each monotonous day came and went, the
sun rising and falling and glowing with its disgustingly cheerful light. The
stars continued to shine despite the fake amongst their midst that mocked him
with its light. Time passed slowly and swiftly as another day came to another
end and Harry felt as though it should be The End. People went on with their
stupid, insignificant, boring, everyday lives and Harry just wanted to shout
from the rooftops for them to stop! What was the point anymore?
Because Sirius was dead!

And when he had worked himself into a state
of mingled anger and grief and guilt and helplessness, Morpheus clawed at his
mind and he fell until he reached the depths of abysabyss with no way out and
could fall no more and the dreams of death and gore and torment prowled his
unsuspecting mind.

* * *

Severus Snape had come to regret many
things in his life and while a number of them could be attributed to some
higher power that enjoyed mocking him, the majority had come as a consequence
of his own poor decisions. Joining the Death Eaters, he reflected sourly as he
stalked across the Hogwarts grounds to Hogsmeade, his left arm throbbing
violently, had definitely been one of his more foolish choices. Reaching the
Apparation borders on the outskirts of Hogsmeade, Severus took a brief moment
to compose himself to his satisfaction before he Apparated to this week�s
unknown destination.

He arrived with a deafening pop in a
large spacious area, more of a cavern than a room, that boasted elaboratecarvcarved spiralling pillars which snaked up and up to the high-domed gothic
ceiling above. His arrival startled several nearby junior Death Eaters to his
vicious delight �not that he enjoyed terrorising children, of course -but he
paid them little attention, instead striding across the room towards the large
ornate doors, lost in his contemplation. Joining had seemed like a good idea at
the time. And, as it turned out, Lucius had been interested in him�just
not in the way Severus would have liked. Reaching the doors, Severus halted and
carefully drew out a white mask from within the depths of his robes. He allowed
himself a brief moment to sneer in disgust at the lavish, absurdly intricate
engravings on the otherwise flawless mask, before placing it over his face and
entering the room beyond. The Dark Lord really was ridiculously fond of the
ostentatious.
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A Walking Shadow