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Anularius	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Snape Views: 11886 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Eleven—A Lucky Accident
            “I don’t understand why you think you can keep me here,” Harry said, and his eyes remained on Snape’s wand. Looking at his eyes or his face was a bad idea right now, both in terms of distracting Harry from his next move and—well, in terms of distracting Harry from his next move. He couldn’t let himself be trapped by Snape’s pleading to stay with him any more than he could by a spell Snape had managed on him because he was unwary.
            “You are here at the same moment as a younger version of you is in the Muggle world,” Snape said calmly. “Correct?”
            “It’s an unstable situation that can only endure because—”
            Snape continued as if he hadn’t heard Harry. “It should remain stable long enough. You can be here and in that place at the same time. The other version of you will grow up and become the Harry Potter of the future. I think that I can mask my feelings and show the false ones well enough.” He shrugged with one shoulder, which had the effect of leaving his pointed wand rock-steady. “And who knows? The younger version of you might be so annoying that I don’t think I’ll have to feign very long.”
            “The future I came from will be destroyed,” Harry snapped.
            “There will still be a version of you to grow up,” said Snape. “There won’t be another version of me because I wasn’t the one who traveled in time. But eventually, we’ll reach the time period when the younger version of you vanishes to go back in time. And then you can take his place.”
            Harry shook his head. It sounded horribly plausible, and if he had been a completely different person, he might have been tempted by it. But precisely because he hadn’t had many lovers, physical passion wasn’t going to be something that could hold him here by itself.
            And Snape, interesting and even fascinating as he might be, hadn’t really endeared himself to Harry, either.
            “I won’t stay,” said Harry quietly, shifting his grip on his wand. “The only reason that I didn’t strike back at you before was because I didn’t want to hurt you, and I thought it would mess up the timeline if I did. But at this rate, you’re going to do more damage to the timeline than a mere duel between us would do. Get out of my way, or I’ll move you.”
            Snape’s eyes were alight. “You were an Auror,” he murmured, and began to move to the left. Harry didn’t move, but tilted his head to watch him, so Snape stopped after a few steps. “I was a Death Eater. Shall we find out whose wand is truly stronger?”
            He even sounds excited by that, Harry thought, resigned, and whipped in a smart circle, his wand striking out towards the cauldron he had chosen as his first weapon. Borne by his nonverbal Blasting Curse, it somersaulted end over end and, although it didn’t strike Snape in the stomach and knock out his air as had been Harry’s first intention, it did tumble him off his feet.
            Harry was already jumping as Snape stretched his wand arm along the floor, and even if he did somersault end over end like an idiot or the cauldron, he managed to escape the curse. It destroyed the legs of one table instead, and tipped it over. Harry immediately kicked it into Snape’s way to serve as one more object that would hinder him, and headed for the door.
            Flying splinters of burned wood warned him the barrier hadn’t lasted long. Harry spun forwards, then sideways, and the hisses of spells went past him and slammed into the door. One was meant to lock it, Harry thought, but the Stunner that followed that was of such force that it broke the lock and slammed the door open.
            Harry went with his good luck, heading straight for the exit from Snape’s rooms. This time, though, Snape used a spell that was the one he meant to use, and it sealed the door by Transfiguring it into part of the stone wall.
            Harry knew he could perform the Transfiguration that would open that part of the wall. He also knew he wouldn’t get the chance to perform it quickly enough to make a difference. He reversed, kicking the table in the center of the room into Snape’s path. He heard a bang, although he wasn’t sure if it had caught Snape on his hip or leg, and then heard him grunt in pain.
            Again a curse came for him, probably one that was meant to entrap him; again Harry dived forwards, and it splintered the wall above him, sending pieces and parts flying. Harry twisted, so fast and evasive that it wrenched a gasp of pain from his own throat, and found himself next to the bookshelves. For an instant, no more, he was trapped against them.
            It was enough for Snape to use a curse Harry had never heard before, but which filled his throat with a warning burning taste. A second later, he was bent over, vomiting.
            Snape moved casually towards him. Harry tensed the muscles in his neck, and Snape sighed a little. “I think that we’ve both proved our point,” he said. “Why don’t you calm down, and I’ll use the countercurse? Otherwise, it lasts as long as my will to keep it going does.”
            Harry didn’t answer, and Snape seemed to realize that might be a problem, because his eyes narrowed slightly. Then, just once, they flickered down to his wand and away from Harry, as he considered a possible solution to the problem.
            Harry twisted his head up and vomited full into Snape’s face. As he jerked away, trying instinctively to protect his eyes, Harry drew his wand, seized the moment between one clenching heave and another, and Stunned Snape. Snape went down with a rustle and a crash, nearly hitting his head on the wall. But he didn’t.
            He did fall unconscious, though, and the moment he did, Harry’s vomiting stopped.
            Harry straightened back up, breathing so hard that he wondered for a second if he would be able to get out of here. Then he shook his head. Snape wouldn’t wake up right away from the Stunner, and Harry made sure that it would be harder for him when he did by Summoning his wand and carefully laying it on the table near the hearth.
            I have to go.
            That caused a prickle of guilt to start to life in his gut, because he didn’t like the notion of leaving someone he’d slept with without saying goodbye. But he knew exactly what kind of answer Snape would give him if he tried to say it, so Harry stepped over Snape and made his way towards the door, ready to Transfigure it back to wood.
            It opened before he could get there, and Harry was bracing himself for a quick explanation followed by an Obliviate before it occurred to him that not everyone would be welcome to simply walk through the wall into Snape’s quarters. Not to mention that not everyone would have the skill to change the door back from the wall.
            He hesitated, and Dumbledore stepped into the room. He looked from Harry to the motionless Snape for a moment, and then sighed. “Lovers’ quarrel?” he asked, with such mildness that Harry flinched.
            Harry sighed and braced himself for the truth. “I’m a time traveler, sir. I came—I came here to do one specific mission, and then I ran into Severus and he delayed me and changed things. I should have left already, but I kept finding reasons to stay, and I thought I would have to hurt him to get past him.” He stared down at the motionless Snape for a second. “I did.”
            “Well. I can’t say that I’m surprised.”
            Harry blinked. No, he could see why if anyone would figure out he was a time traveler without being told before this, it would be Dumbledore, but he hadn’t expected him to take it so calmly. He especially didn’t expect it when Dumbledore looked around the room and cast a spell Harry didn’t know.
            An orange blaze of light answered him from behind a couch. Dumbledore walked across the room towards it and bent down. A truly terrible crack sounded, and Harry jumped. Dumbledore only smiled as he stood up again.
            “Excuse an old man’s creaking knees,” he said, and held out the silver bowl with Slytherin’s symbol on it. “Was this what you came looking for?”
            “Sort of,” said Harry, and then shook his head. If he just took the bowl and walked away because he didn’t want to tell Dumbledore about Horcruxes, then that would be a much worse betrayal than leaving without saying goodbye. “But it turned out not to be. There’s a different artifact I need to locate and destroy. Leave it for him, would you? He wanted it.” Harry swallowed. “And tell him I’m sorry.”
            “Unless I’m greatly mistaken,” said Dumbledore, turning over the bowl in one hand, and peering down at the S on the side with interest, “you’ll be telling him that yourself.”
            Harry sighed. “Even if I saw him again in the future, he would never forgive me.”
            “I didn’t mean that.” Dumbledore lifted his head to meet Harry’s gaze again, and his eyes were twinkling like mechanical Muggle stars. “Do you notice something different about this bowl from when you first saw it?” He held it out.
            Harry looked at it, blinking and baffled. No, he couldn’t see anything. The silver was still there, still untarnished, and there was no change in the marking. “I don’t know what you mean, sir.”
            “It’s changed color,” said Dumbledore. “I saw it the first time I met you, you know.” Harry flushed when he recalled that, but Dumbledore went on serenely. “There was a ripple of light to it, as if it was reflecting a sort of depth then, that it doesn’t have now. With your permission, I will perform a series of spells on it to find out why.”
            Harry shook his head. “It really doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to Severus.”
            “I will take that as permission, then,” Dumbledore said, and gestured with his wand to the bowl. Again it blazed with orange light, and then it grew darker around Slytherin’s symbol, in a way that reminded Harry of fast-growing mold. Dumbledore gave a little sigh.
            “Some powerful wizards,” he said, while Harry edged towards the door and Dumbledore’s wand performed a series of spells faster than Harry’s eye could follow, “are unfortunately dedicated to the notion of protecting their artifacts from common use even after their death. If they can’t use them anymore, then they’ll make sure no one else can. It’s selfish.”
            Harry hesitated near the door. He had barely ever heard Dumbledore that angry, he thought, except when something threatened Hogwarts. He wondered if Dumbledore didn’t like the bowl just because it had belonged to Slytherin.
            Then he thought of what Dumbledore was really saying, and he recognized one of the charms that Dumbledore had performed on the bowl. “You’re saying—you’re saying that the bowl affected Severus somehow, sir?” he breathed, taking a step back towards him.
            “Did Severus manage to summon Slytherin’s spirit?” Dumbledore set the bowl down on the nearest table, and considered it some more. Then his wand flicked one more time, and something curled around the bowl, spitting like a snake. If it was speaking Parseltongue, though, Harry couldn’t understand it.
            “Yes,” said Harry cautiously. “He wanted to learn Parseltongue. He thought he could get the spirit to teach him.”
            “I thought it was something like that.” Dumbledore’s pattern made a cross in the air above the bowl, followed by a circle, and with a sound louder than his creaking knees, the dark thing coiled around the bowl vanished. So did the discoloration that Harry had thought of as mold, and the bowl rocked in place. Dumbledore turned to Harry and smiled. “It should be safe now.”
            “I don’t understand.” Harry was getting tired of saying that, but it was only literal. He didn’t understand. He took the bowl and turned it back and forth in his hands. The ripple of light in the sides didn’t change as he moved it, which probably meant it was some inherent property of the bowl that was supposed to be there. “What did it do to Severus?”
            “An acceleration of his emotions,” said Dumbledore calmly. “I’ve seen the like, when a portrait of Slytherin near the dungeons was disturbed by Gryffindor students and cast a curse that made them grow extremely angry at each other over small things. Then they’d forgiven each other in fifteen minutes, and then they were discussing complex things that most of the time, only adults would care about.” Dumbledore chuckled. “It was interesting, to hear third-year Gryffindor students wrestling with the state of the Ministry.”
            Harry blinked at him. “But they didn’t age?”
            “Not physically.” Dumbledore tucked his hands over his belly in a way that made it clear he wasn’t going to give Harry any more information, and just watched him over his glasses, with an encouraging smile.
            Harry turned and stared at the motionless Snape, frowning a little. “So—say that he was attracted to me, and he might—he might have developed feelings for me really fast,” he muttered. “Faster than he would normally have.”
            “Yes,” said Dumbledore, nodding. “The emotional development of months, weeks, or years compressed into a short span of time.” He paused and eyed Harry shrewdly for a moment, but Harry didn’t have anything in particular to say. It was Dumbledore who went on, his voice a little stern. “What he felt was authentic. Only accelerated. It could have developed, just as the argument I told you about, and the concern those young Gryffindors felt over Ministry politics, could have happened. It was only that they couldn’t have happened in that short an amount of time.”
            Harry didn’t know what to say to that, either. He turned the bowl over in his hand for lack of anything better to do, then put it back down on the table that Dumbledore had taken it from.
            “It still means that I have to leave,” he said.
            Dumbledore didn’t nod or smile or do anything else encouraging this time. He only gave Harry a patient look, and Harry rushed to fill the silence with explanations.
            “It’s going to be even worse for him, when he wakes up and realizes what the bowl did to him. It’s—I know that he values his ability to act on his own. There’s lots of situations where he can’t, where he has to do what someone else tells him, but I think he didn’t feel like that with me. He thought it was all his own idea, and I was the only one not cooperating. When he finds out he was under the magical control of an artifact…” Harry shook his head.
            “I can understand not wanting to be in the same room with him,” said Dumbledore in a musing voice. “But in the same time period?”
            Harry scowled at him. “Surely you understand that I have to safeguard the timeline, and go back the way I came.”
            “There are different ways of going and coming,” said Dumbledore placidly again,
            “That doesn’t tell me anything at all,” Harry snapped.
            “No,” Dumbledore agreed. “You are the one who must make the decision as to what you will do, of course.” He paused, while Harry ran a hand through his hair and said nothing. “You seem to know Severus. Has it occurred to you what it would do to him if someone he found himself open to left without saying goodbye?”
            Harry scowled at the floor. “I assumed he would take away his own memories once he figured out what had happened,” he muttered. “Either to put them in a Pensieve, or with a Memory Charm.”
            “I do not think he would wish to,” said Dumbledore. “He has never done that with memories of others he hated.”
            Harry jerked his head up and glared at Dumbledore. “You said that he was really attracted to me! That he didn’t hate me!”
            “I am talking about now, and the emotions that the bowl prompted,” said Dumbledore, his eyes softening. “Not even Slytherin could create genuine emotion where none existed, any more than love potions can. What he can do is make things hard to deal with. And Severus will be reeling when he awakens. Will you desert him now? What will that do to his mind, and the timeline?” The Headmaster paused, then added quietly, “What will that do to his heart?”
            Harry said nothing, only stood there with his head whirling.
            Dumbledore stepped past him, putting a hand gently on his shoulder. “You must make the choice, and do as you think best,” he said.
            “But what if it’s not the best for him?” Harry nodded at Snape again.
            “Follow your heart,” Dumbledore advised him as he opened the door again. “I don’t think it can often have led you wrong.” He closed it quietly behind him.
            Harry stood there, wondering what he should do.
            But in the end, there was only ever one choice. It had been one thing when he thought he had to escape from Snape and go back home right away. It was another thing now.
            He cast the spells that would remove the pain from Snape’s hitting the floor, and then lifted him up and put him on the couch. He didn’t wake him, though. He covered him with a warm blanket and, after a bit of searching, found the Floo powder and summoned a house-elf through the fireplace to bring some food and tea.
            Then he sat down and waited for Snape to wake up.
*
            The black eyes that met his were so cold and accusing Harry bloody well wished he had left.
            But he hadn’t got to be a Gryffindor by running from things. He stood up grimly, moved away from the table so that Snape could see the food and tea and eat them if he wanted to without reaching across Harry, and sat down in a chair on the other side of the room.
            “Dumbledore was here,” he said. Snape hadn’t moved, only watched him with the tension of a coiled snake, but Harry would have to accept that. He doubted that he would find it harder to accept than Snape’s kisses or Snape’s attempts to keep him here. “He came in just after I Stunned you. He cast some spell that let him find the bowl with Slytherin’s sign on it.” He made a gesture with his chin at the bowl, sitting on the table where Harry had left it before.
            “And why would he do that?” Snape’s voice crushed and ground such simple things as courtesy in it like a river smashing through earth.
            Harry ignored it and went on. “He said that the bowl was influencing you. Slytherin was probably annoyed when you summoned his spirit out of the bowl. Dumbledore said that the spell accelerates emotions.”
            Snape looked bloodless. He was no longer staring at Harry, but through him, past him. Harry, not that eager to have Snape’s attention back given that, waited, and finally Snape looked at him and hissed again.
            “The creation of false love? A love potion?”
            “No,” said Harry. “He said the spell sped up what you—could have felt naturally, if it had more time to develop. He described a spell that one of Slytherin’s portraits had cast on some third-year Gryffindors. It made them go really fast through an argument and then make it up really fast, and then they were talking about Ministry politics as though they’d developed a concern in them overnight.”
            Snape shut his eyes. Harry, assuming he wanted to be alone, stood up.
            “No,” said Snape, in a tone of simple command. If he had ever used that voice in Potions, then Harry would have obeyed him at once. He nodded, and sat down again.
            “It makes sense,” Snape continued, in a dreary voice, as if he was talking to himself. “The way that I could hardly control the desire, the way that I wanted to take you to bed when I had barely known you two days.”
            Harry nodded. He wondered how much of the Snape he had been attracted to actually existed. Perhaps the manic energy and the courage he’d had to confess his urge to seize the moment to Harry had all been a creation of the spell.
            No, wait, Dumbledore said it couldn’t make Snape do things he wouldn’t have done. But it would have taken a month or more before he did them, and I didn’t have a month to spend here.
            “But there is something else,” Snape whispered. “My dreams the last few nights…”
            Harry flushed, not sure he wanted to hear about Snape’s wet dreams. On the other hand, that was maybe a silly qualm to have when they’d actually had sex. So he tried to fasten a calm, polite smile on his face, and nodded when Snape sat up and looked through him some more.
            “They didn’t make sense,” Snape said, as if explaining them to an audience that he assumed to be wholly sympathetic. Of course, Harry thought he had to be more sympathetic when it came to Snape’s actions developing under the control of a spell. “I was dreaming that I saw you through smoke and dirt, and the vision was familiar. Utterly familiar. You walked through rubble and came up to me. I could never hear what you were saying.” He opened his eyes and glared at Harry for a moment, as if he was responsible for the actions of his dream self.
            “I don’t know,” Harry said, shaking his head. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he added, when Snape’s glare made it clear that that wasn’t going to be acceptable as an answer. “I didn’t have any dreams like that.”
            Even when he’d been getting visions from Voldemort, he thought, he’d never had any like that, where he’d interacted with Snape. He finally shrugged and shook his head.
            “I might have slept with you eventually,” Snape murmured on, voice like a flowing river. “If I had spent long enough with you.”
            “Yeah,” Harry said quietly. “But I wouldn’t have stayed here long enough, unless I hadn’t met you at all and tried to destroy the wrong Horcrux, instead of realizing the cross was one. So…I owe you. But I wouldn’t have stayed.”
            “And you do not wish to stay now,” said Snape, staring at nothingness.
            “No,” said Harry. “It’s…it wouldn’t be the best thing for either of us, would it? I mean, not really. We’d always have the memories of this between us, and tainting whatever developed. Not to mention anything about history or the timeline, but that’s the simple fact of it.”
            Snape shut his eyes, and said nothing. Then he nodded. “You should go,” he said.
            Harry stood, heart aching. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry for what happened. I hope—hope you can recover.”
            He waited, but Snape only kept his eyes shut and his head turned away as if he didn’t want to interact with Harry, which Harry could understand. He made sure everything he might have brought here was tucked away, and then glanced back once at Snape as he left the room.
            Snape’s face was tense and tight, and he looked years older. Harry sighed once, thought about going over and kissing him, and decided it would be unforgivable unless Snape himself asked him for it.
            He shut the door quietly behind him.
            Off to find a safe place to destroy this Horcrux, and then I can return to my own time.
*
Severus1snape: Yes. A week.
Jan: He meant exactly what he said .But he didn’t know why.
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