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Separation Anxiety: A Manual	By : gwendolynflight Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 11246 -:- 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
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Some people have commented on how I've written a nice Snape in this piece. First, I haven't really written Snape yet; he merely reacted to Harry's arrival. Second. . . Okay, I didn't have a second point. :P
For Evil!Snape, read my fic "A Perfect Circle"(shameless self-promotion:)
A/N Guilford is a town in Surrey, England. I've decided that Little Whinging is a suburb around there someplace.
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Worksheet #10: This Temptress Rage
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He could've forgiven her if she'd been unhappy.
And what did that say about him?
In Epsom, third stop on the London-Guilford daily, dressed all in black --not because he liked the color but because that was the only color Severus Snape owned-- Harry was nearly invisible in the shadows of the Launderette. Or at least inconspicuous. She was doing laundry, as would be expected, the laundry of a healthy family, husband, at least two children of opposite gender. And laughing.
It was the laughing that got to him.
The man with her must mean something; he can make her laugh, a full belly-deep giggle that he'd never imagined possible. None of the clothes she tosses with such equanimity into the machine are dark; instead, she risks a riot of blues and greens and sunshine reds to the same chemical treatment.
He stands in his darkling corner, drinking coffee he bought at the little sweet shop next door; she'd gone there between loads, and caught his eye. He hadn't even been ready to confront her, but there she was, unlooked for, smiling superficially and buying an iced mocha, to go.
The warmth of the late summer air made his own cappuccino seem superfluous. Oh, but he was cold inside, and the sight of laugh-lines, a sign of a time of joy, made him even colder.
She'd left him with the Dursleys for *this*?
The man with her was a typical, stolid Englishman, though apparently he was also wickedly funny, and in quite good shape for a man in his late thirties. He wasn't a wizard, though.
Harry could tell.
He couldn't sense any other wand nearby but hers.
He had nothing against Muggles, but she should've at least told the man.
Harry's arrival was going to come as quite a shock. ***
It had to be a dream.
There was a sense of having been confined for a long time, of abstract cold and damp, but no physical sensation. Of having smashed something living against cold brick and running running running through empty residential streets.
But none of it real.
He was being chased, the omni directional feeling of terror another clue. He couldn't be feeling this.
The world around him reeled, and he with it, shifting wildly like a changing camera angle. He fell, but with little feeling of pain; a voice roared out of the distant sky plans for rape and murder, driving him back into his lumbering flight.
It couldn't be real. This things his mind insisted that man had done to him couldn't be real.
The terror pressed down on him, huge, massive, intangible; no warning pain from his scar, no twinge of magic, no thought even of his wand. Just the giant, ghostly hands scrabbling at his torn, bloodied jeans.
He already looked like he'd been to the wars.
A hand touched his sex, and--
***
--though it was a dream, it *had* happened.
Harry thrashed awake in a large, four poster bed, huddled beneath down comforters and soft cotton sheets. He was naked, and clean, and felt more at home than he'd felt in his entire life. In fact, he could almost be at Hogwarts, except that the bed curtains were black and green--Slytherin colors-- and he didn't usually sleep in the nude when at school.
He levered himself onto one elbow, swallowing a yawn as he pawed aside the bed curtains to feel for his glasses.
"I see you're finally awake, Mr. Potter," Snape growled from across the room.
"Jesus," Harry yelled, diving back under the covers. His heart stumbled, and then began to gallop. His hand flew to his bare chest. "Don't *do* that!"
"Speak?" Snape said icily, with a dripping sarcasm. "Greet you in the morning? Offer a touch of civility? Please, feel free to interrupt when I happen upon the source of your distress."
"Don't scare me like that," Harry said dully, looking down at where his fist had twined inextricably into a twist of comforter. His heart battered at his rib cage like a dragonfly, fragile and glitter-bright. He kept his eyes down, turning a blank face to Snape's facetious words.
Snape raised an eyebrow. Harry couldn't see it, but he could sense it from across the room.
"Lost a bit of gumption with the night, have we?" Snape said silkily, apparently willing to ignore Harry's distress. "A fine breakfast should remedy that," the Potions Master continued, standing smoothly.
I'm not hungry, Harry wanted to say, but his stomach chose that moment to growl.
He sighed, and looked down at the covers.
"I'll be down in a minute?" he said hesitantly, trying to get the older man to leave.
And up went Snape's eyebrow.
"It's not like I haven't seen it before, Potter," Snape said lightly; any younger and he would've been rolling his eyes.
"Could you please just leave?" Harry said quietly, still not looking up. His stomach knotted around itself, growling again.
He could feel Snape's eyes on him, wondering. Harry swallowed a tremor, trying not to guess what the Potions Master probably assumed.
"It doesn't matter,' he insisted stubbornly under his breath, ducking the glare.
"Fine," Snape said after a considering moment. "Follow the hall down to the kitchen. And *don't* touch anything."
Harry stared at his clenched fists. Snape strode through the door at his usual ramming speed, robes billowing behind him. Why the Potions Master wore his teaching robes while in his own home, Harry did not ask himself. The door slammed shut behind Snape. Harry was left curled against the headboard, alone.
He was shaking.
"It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter , it doesn't matter,' he chanted to himself, squeezing his eyes shut as though to intensify that one thought or to chase away all others. "It doesn't matter,' he insisted, not feeling the single tear that slipped from beneath one crinkled lid.
He pushed everything back down, and clambered unsteadily to his feet; Snape was probably right, in as far as the food went. He wasn't precisely hungry, he decided as he wandered over to the lead-paned windows, but he should eat. He looked out; the Strait was just visible beyond the low-lying scarplands. His stomach curled again, and made a little moaning sound.
Correction, he should *definitely* eat.
Snape's mansion was apparently void of house elves, which seemed odd until Harry considered the repercussions should a servant let something slip to one of Voldemort's followers. The results could be deadly for Snape. Harry shuddered at the thought of causing yet another death. He dressed himself quickly, swathing his thin body in layer after layer of undershirt and button-down and jumper until he felt secure again.
His things had been put away in a large wardrobe, black walnut, like something out of C.S. Lewis. Snape must have undressed him and put him to bed after he'd . . . fallen asleep the night before, and then unpacked his bag.
Harry froze in the process of tugging on his left sock, stumbling in his thoughts. Where was the bag? What had Snape seen?
Oh Merlin, what if he'd taken it?!
He fell to his knees and began rooting through the bottom of the wardrobe without further thought; his fingers brushed furs, musty woolens, the sharp edge of a shoe's heel, but nothing of nylon. A spider skittered away from his touch, but he ignored it, his breaths coming in great gasps as he began to panic.
"Where is it, where the fuck is it," he muttered under his breath, not really aware that he was speaking aloud. His own clothes quickly joined the growing pile on the flagstoned floor as his fruitless search continued.
Finally he sat back on his heels, gnawing at his lip worriedly. His chin fell nearly to his chest, and his black hair flopped into his face.
"Now what am I supposed to do?" he wondered aloud. "What the hell am I going to do?" ***
Severus Snape was in the midst of buttering his toast when the Potter boy drifted down the back stairs; the stairs dead-ended into the kitchen behind the pantry, and Harry turned the corner in a slow slumberous state. Snape let his toast fall to his plate.
"It's good that I am a very patient man," Snape began, attention more on his cooling coffee than on the boy before him. At least the house elves were still obeying the order to absent themselves; with Potter in this state, all chaos could break loose at the slightest provocation. "Your eggs are growing cold."
Potter stared at him sullenly, the same mad, glittering look in his jade-green eyes that had initially aroused Snape's suspicions the night before.
Snape swallowed, hiding it in his coffee.
"Where is it?"
"The lavatory?" Snape asked, deliberately obtuse. "Just down that hall behind you."
Harry ignored his words, taking an unsteady step forward.
"I *told* you about it, you didn't have to take it," he continued, a fine trembling now visible in his hands and around his lips. His tongue darted out, a kitten-pink scrap of velvet.
Snape returned to knife and toast, clattering things about, restless.
"I suggest you sit down and eat something, Potter," Snape said icily. "You're quite malnourished, and possibly hallucinating. Sit. Eat."
"Please," Harry said, his voice ragged as he stepped forward. His hand caught the back of the chair across from Snape. "Just tell me where it is. I *need* it."
Snape squeezed his eyes shut, hands very still over his plate. He breathed in. Then out.
"Mister Potter, I'm sure you've had quite the trial of it. Your physical condition would certainly seem to suggest hardship, and your mental state has likewise deteriorated. However," Snape continued, meeting Harry's desperate eyes with every ounce of hate garnered from a lifetime of serving hatred. "I am forced to demand that you offer me the same respect in my home as that to which I have become accustomed at Hogwarts. Whatever you've lost," Snape went on, overriding Harry's protest. "I am sure that it will be found easily enough."
"But, sir--"
"After breakfast, Mister Potter," Snape said, returning to his calm.
Harry glared at him, panting lightly, hand clenching the chair's back in a grip bleached white with strain.
"Sir . . ." he whispered, wavering on his feet.
"Sit down, Potter," Snape said, with a glare that implied his dislike of repeating himself.
Harry lowered his aching body into the chair, slowly, huddling around his several layers of off-the-hanger new GAP clothing. It could not stop the shudders. They rose in him like waves heralding a storm.
Snape glared at him after a few moments.
"Eat, Potter," he commanded sardonically. "You're wasting away to nothing as I watch. Try some egg."
Harry glared up at the Potions Master through his bangs, and picked up a fork.
What am I going to do?
"Well?" Snape was glaring at him. Big surprise, that. "Eat."
Harry looked down at the cold eggs, over easy, the runny yolks congealing in puddles on the fat-striped bacon. The grease was visible, and Snape was apparently wiping up his with toast. Perhaps the greasy hair could be directly linked to diet . . .
A generous portion of blood pudding was intruding upon the eggs; the pudding had actually retained its warmth, and wafted the scent of charred blood through the overwhelming acidity of coffee-smell.
Bile rose in his throat. He'd never gotten used to eating breakfast at Hogwarts: too many years of going without left him queasy of a morning. His fork clattered against porcelain dinnerware. His chair screeched in protest as he pushed back, hand going to his mouth.
"Potter?" Snape called after him as he ran; where was that lavatory? He staggered around the corner, feeling the rise of acid scouring up his esophagus. He hadn't thrown up in years, damn the luck.
He hit the bathroom door with his shoulder, stumbling through into a parlor-like room antecedent to the actual bath. He reeled, turned, and lost everything in a large, decorative urn. It had probably been in Snape's family for centuries. He clung to its rim, unable to move, convinced that he would vomit again if he so much as lifted his head.
Snape found him there. Harry's eyes were squeezed shut against the vertigo, but he heard the door open and shut around the ominous swish of Snape's robes. The Potions Master tsked.
"In my great-great-grand-uncle Dorian's urn?" he said dolefully. Harry shrugged, as much as he was able. "Care to try for the toilet, next time?"
Harry didn't answer, though he began a slow slide to his knees as they gave way. His stomach was quieting, away from the smells of food; he'd only thrown up bile this first round, and wasn't anxious to reach blood.
Snape audibly bit his tongue on another snide remark, and crouched onto his heels next to Harry's pitiable form. Reaching out one hand, he patted Harry on the shoulder, once, then pulled back into his own personal space.
"Sorry, sir," Harry whispered, not raising his head from his folded arms.
Snape's eyebrow went up.
"For what?"
"The urn."
"Nonsense," Snape said gruffly. "It can be cleaned easily enough. Perhaps I'll teach you the spell, when you're feeling better."
"Thank you," Harry whispered, rubbing his forehead against the back of one arm as though burrowing into a hiding place.
Snape sighed.
"What for this time?"
"For not yelling," Harry said, still in a whisper. Snape didn't answer. He also didn't leave. Harry decided to worry about his back pack later. His bout of nausea had brought his exhaustion to the fore; head pillowed in arms, he fell near to sleeping.
"It's alright, Harry," he heard Snape whisper. "It's going to be alright."
And then he sank into darkness. ***
To be continued in SA Chapter 6: Won't Be Saved by Morning
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- 6
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Separation Anxiety: A Manual