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Love is Cold	By : CruelHero Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Snape Views: 9211 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter nor any of the characters associated with the Harry Potter universe. I make no profit from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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                                                                    Chapter Seven

It was the last class of Harry’s first Friday. He sat behind his desk trying to avoid all the batting eyelashes. Somehow those girls had the ability to turn his cheeks red with shame. He couldn’t wait to be done with the lot of them. Then he just had to make it through his appointment with Pomfrey, and finally he would be able to find a spot for a nice long nap.

Harry covered his mouth in a slow yawn and scanned the room with one of the cheat-detecting spells Hermione had shown him. It flashed clear but he decided to walk the room anyway. His legs were starting to cramp from disuse and sitting behind a desk all day was tough on his backside.

He paced slowly from potion to potion, careful not to stay at any one for too long. Harry didn’t want to be labeled at playing favorites when he was trying so hard to be perfectly fair. Even if he was disappointed in the amount of Gryffindors whose potions looked like crap and felt sorely tempted to help them out.

Then Harry noticed that not far from where he stood a smaller seventh year Gryffindor, with pale brown eyes and a weak gaze strongly reminding him of twelve-year-old Neville, was about to make a disastrous addition to his cauldron. He rushed to him, wand ready to produce several shields, but before he got there an elegant hand shot out, smacking the ingredients clear.

Harry stopped short.

The hand belonged to a Slytherin named Allan Blackwater, who sat across from the Gryffindor boy named Turner. He had dirty blond hair and cobalt blue eyes. His features were sharp, strong, and strikingly handsome, and his easy smile lent him a false air of approachability. When Harry looked at him he saw Draco Malfoy. Only Allan wasn’t as pale and far less stuck up. Harry didn’t like him. He hated how cruel Allan’s gaze felt and how it always seemed to be trained on him.

Allan flashed him a warm smile, then Turner, and with a nasty sweetness told him that if he dropped in that Acramim peet, his cauldron would explode and he would be forced to hex Turner for ruining his favorite set of robes weather or not they actually received damage.

Harry couldn’t resist the urge to roll his eyes. Allan must have taken lessons from Malfoy back when they were in school together- he was almost a carbon copy. Though Harry couldn’t actually remember having seen them talking to each other.

Harry thought about it as he went back to checking cauldrons. Allan would have been a second year when he was in his fifth and Harry’s mind was too preoccupied with the war, with Malfoy, the order and everything else back then. There wouldn’t have been a point in taking notice in a little kid.

But now he was being forced to notice Allan. He watched Harry with something akin to hunger and it made Harry nervous.



                                                                           *****

Madam Pomfrey bit her bottom lip. She appeared to be wrestling with whatever idea she had in her head. Harry wasn’t sure he wanted her to tell him what it was. Nothing she had told him so far had been very good. But finally, she smiled and took a deep breath and said, “Harry, the most important thing I want you to do is not to lose hope.”

Harry immediately dropped his head into his hands. “What now”, he groaned.

Pomfrey hesitated and shifted in her seat. “Just don’t panic dear. I’m sure you can find som-“

Harry glared. “Would you blood well get to the point,” he growled, cutting off her words.

The medi-witch sighed. She looked at her desk instead of him and absently tapped her finger on a stack of parchments. “The girl we spoke of- her name was Harriet.”

Harry frowned. “Was? What do you mean, was?”

“She didn’t make it, Harry. I’m so sorry. The boy -Jacob- he tried, but he just couldn’t love her back. No one ever found a solution and she…well she burned up.”

Harry stared blankly at his knees. “Oh.” She died. She died and he was going to die just like her. Bullocks.

The majority of Pomfrey’s remaining words never made it to Harry’s brain. All he could think about was the word death. Did he care? Was he still okay with dying or did he want to live? It had been a long while since he last wished for death and he wasn’t sure anymore. But he thought that, as long as he had enough time to do –well, whatever it was he thought he could do for Snape- it would be okay if he never got cured.

And then he remembered that he wasn’t in love, and therefore Madam Pomfrey was wrong. This whole diagnosis was all wrong. He wasn’t cursed. He wasn’t in love. And he wasn’t going to die from not being loved back. He was just…something else…but definitely not that.

Harry smiled, raising his hand to stop her rambling reassurances. ”Look,” he said, “I truly appreciate what you are doing for me Ma’am, but I told you, I’m not in love. I’m not going to die because I can’t find love either. This has to be something else. I agree that my symptoms are similar but the most important thing that would relate the cases is missing. I’m not the same as that girl. I’m not.”

Pomfrey stared, her frown slowly morphing to pity that shown in her eyes.

Harry sighed. He hated pity. “You asked me to report any other things that happened to me and I wasn’t able to get to you like you wanted, but something did happen last week after the ceremonies.”

The medi-witch nodded silently and began to take notes. Harry recounted what little he remembered, from running down the hallway to when he passed out in his rooms. He answered her questions on how he felt at any particular time, what the liquid was like, and if he tried doing this or that to stop it.

Harry was surprised to realize the he never really tried all that hard to control the cold.

Could he control it?

He pulled his gloved hand into his sleeve and decided not to tell her that it was spreading until he tried to make it recede on his own.

Pomfrey slumped in her chair and rubbed the back of her neck. “Perhaps you are right dear,” she yielded. “Key ingredients seem to be missing in your case, but we must remember that all individuals will be different and we must not rule this out just because of those differences.”

“No, no of course not, “ Harry halfheartedly agreed.

Pomfrey paused to look back over her notes. Harry shifted towards the door hoping that she would see his eagerness to leave and let him go. The nap that had been calling to him all afternoon drew out another yawn, and he could see a lovely looking spot under a tall oak tree from the office window. Harry had been resisting staring at it from the moment he noticed its existence.

Pomfrey rapped her quill on the table – a habit Harry noticed she liked to do before she asked a question she found particularly important. He braced himself.

“You say you were just about to have dissert when you realized it was hard for you to breath. Correct? And then you panicked because of what happened the last time you felt something similar?”

Harry nodded. ”That’s right. Why?”

“Well…Can you remember what you were thinking about? Were you having a conversation with someone, something that bothered you perhaps?” she asked, tapping her quill yet again. “If we can figure out what triggers these events then we might be able to link them together and find out what the source of the outbreaks are.”

Harry froze. He knew damn well what had caused it this time, but he refused to tell her that. He couldn’t tell her that he was upset because he thought Severus Snape was mad at him. He couldn’t tell her that being ignored by Snape hurt, that he had some kind of horrendous guilt involving the man that he needed to appease. She would laugh. She would twist it into something so bizarre, something that it absolutely wasn’t. She might even say that she was right all along and that he was in love with Snape and that was just not true. At all. Mostly.

Harry swallowed thickly.

And besides, Snape wasn’t the trigger for every other time he had broken a cup of frozen tea or sneezed tiny ice-sickles across the room, or when his hand would stick to a doorknob and he would rip his skin off just trying to get it unstuck.

No.

Harry wouldn’t tell her the truth.

Harry couldn’t even tell himself the truth.

He shook his head. “I wasn’t talking to anyone and I don’t remember what I was thinking about except for the Poire Belle-Hélène that I wanted to eat,” he lied.

Pomfrey made a disappointed hum. “Alright, well it was worth a shot.” She closed Harry’s file and laid it aside, smiling sadly across at him. ‘You look tired darling. Go get some rest. Well solve this eventually. I promise. Next time something happens, no matter how small it is, try to make certain you remember what you were doing and thinking just before it occurred.”

Harry smiled and thanked her before he passed through the door. He made it a point to put that entire conversation out of his mind or his nap would be ruined, and the oak tree that had been eyeing him looked much to inviting to waste a good sleep on worry and stress.

Harry folded his cloak into a pillow, settling down in the shade where he could feel the autumn breeze. He was going to dream about flying and playing Quidditch with Ron and his brothers. And nothing was going to stop him from feeling happy for a just a little while.



                                                         *****

Harry’s weekend had been extremely dull so far. Each morning he locked himself in his chambers until the sun went down and only left when it was his turn for the night rounds. Admittedly he liked catching the misbehaving students, berating them and taking points. It was like payback for when it happened to him and it somehow eased his building frustrations.

That night the sky was bright and clear and a blue-hued crescent moon shown overhead, telling him it was just past midnight. Harry saw a shooting star as he passed the corridor’s windows. He missed picking Asphodel and Fruewana Balm under a blood moon in the clear night sky, when all the stars would twinkle and he could hear and feel the magic of the forests pulsing. It was the purest Harry had ever known magic to be and missing it now made him homesick for his lakeshore shack.

Harry took a detour to the Astronomy Tower hoping if he concentrated hard enough the Forbidden Forest would speak to him from there. But a cold wind swept though the open tower and an eerie silence was all that greeted him.

He sat on the stone windowsill, resting his back against the wall, as he closed his eyes and tried not to be disappointed when he felt nothing. He tried not to give in and retreat to the comfort of his past solitudes. And if he thought about it, it was nice to look at the heavens from the same place he had for so much of his youth.

Remembering the stories that he’d heard of hormone-ridden teens and the liaisons that took place right where he sat made him smile childishly. How true they were, he didn’t know, but if the other Professors found reason in checking the tower, then he could only imagine the wild action they must have walked in on and what their faces might have looked like upon those discoveries. He thanked the Heavens the Astronomy Tower wasn’t actually part of his jurisdiction.

Footsteps filtered up the stairway. Harry could only make out one pair and whoever it was didn’t bother disguising them. They probably wanted to be heard. No doubt the reason was to give any out of bed students time enough to get decent.

Harry gripped his wand reflexively and pulled his gloved hand into his robes. He almost forgot that he couldn’t be scalded for being out after curfew.

The footsteps stopped at the top of the stars. Harry didn’t bother to turn around. Whoever it was could see him clearly enough in the moonlight to know that he wasn’t a student. Then he remembered that he wasn’t a student, but he was supposed to be looking out for them. He should at least check to see if he needed to dock points and hand out a detention, even if all signs pointed to another Professor being in his presence instead.

Harry turned with a greeting on his lips, but faltered.

Snape’s back as he took to the stairs once more was all that waited for him.

Harry frowned and slumped over, feeling kind of disappointed. Though he didn’t really know what he would have said to the man had he stayed.

And then the footsteps came back in a rush and Snape walked right up to him, pointing his wand directly at Harry’s throat. Snape’s face was so close to his that he could feel soft breathing and the man’s free hand twitched as if it wanted nothing more than to wrap around his neck and squeeze.

“Why are you here?” he asked, voice as harsh a tone as it ever was, though an obvious hindrance kept it from reaching its full force.

A chill ran down Harry’s spine. It was the first he had heard Snape speak since that day at his house so long ago. Harry opened his mouth to respond, without knowing what would come out, but before he could answer Snape lowered his wand and shook his head.

“Forget it,” he said, backing away, “I don’t care what pathetic excuse you have.” He turned and as he left the tower, Harry heard him grumbling.

“I just pray your ignorance doesn’t find us all blown to kingdom come.”

Before Snape was completely out of earshot, Harry also heard him muttering something along the lines of McGonagall being daft for letting an idiot teach.

It left Harry perched on the edge between confusion and laughter. He didn’t know what to make of it except that Snape hadn’t hexed him and that was a good sign for the future. All the sly and charming things he could have said, all the situations he though he could make that would work in his favor- Harry realized then that he didn’t need them. Being there was enough. Time would take care of the rest for him and he looked forward to it.
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Love is Cold