Rating:
R
House:
Schnoogle
Ships:
Harry Potter/Severus Snape
Characters:
Harry Potter Severus Snape
Genres:
Slash Angst
Era:
The Harry Potter at Hogwarts Years
Spoilers:
Philosopher's Stone Chamber of Secrets Prizoner of Azkaban Goblet of Fire Order of the Phoenix
Stats:
Published: 01/12/2005
Updated: 02/09/2005
Words: 146,361
Chapters: 30
Hits: 275,831

Green Eyes Sublime

AngelSpirit

Story Summary:
When Harry returns to Hogwarts for his sixth year, only Severus seems to truly notice how deeply Harry's despair goes. Since Dumbledore is as blinded as everyone else, Severus decides to take matters into his own hands and help. But doing that means opening up his own soul and secrets to the Boy-Who-Lived, because Harry isn't going to just heal in one day. SS/HP, SLASH and depression related theme.

Chapter 03

Chapter Summary:
Harry returns to Hogwarts for his Seventh Year with a new determination to overcome all obstacles in his way. It doesn't take him long to realize that there is just a little more that he has to learn in order for him to win the love of a master. And in the confines of love and war, Severus must now learn when to let Harry go. SS/HP SLASH and Violence.
Posted:
01/13/2005
Hits:
11,446
Author's Note:
Thanks: To my wonderful beta readers Amanda_Saitou and Philo whose wonderful help kept me sane.

Chapter Three

Looking Glass Self

x

If Harry had known that his day, from beginning to end, would have gotten progressively worst he would have remained right where he was in bed when he had awoken that morning. As it were, since he had failed Divinations horribly in his OWLS, there was no way he could have seen his future.

Not that he would risk it. Harry had enough about thinking of the future without the mistake of actually making an effort to unravel it. With his luck he would have probably ended up seeing himself and his final moments before being destroyed by the Dark Lord.

"Mr. Potter what are you doing? Please concentrate on the task at hand."

"Sorry Professor," Harry said as Professor McGonagall walked by him on her way to inspect Neville.

However it was fifteen more minutes before he could sort his mind out enough to remember the spell that duplicated and transfigured the piece of string on his desk into each of a rat and a squirrel. It didn't take him long to notice that he had the completely wrong animals on his table though, because he was sure the Professor had mentioned 'predator and prey'. Somehow he didn't think squirrels preyed on rats.

"Goodness Harry, what did you do?" Hermione did a double take beside him when she noticed his mistake. "The spell words to do what you just did are totally different from what McGonagall taught us!"

Harry waved her off, partly because McGonagall would be getting around to him and he needed to fix the mistake, and partly because of his own sanity.

By the time the Professor got to his desk again, Harry had both a rat and a snake transfigured. His task however had taken a turn for the worst. His snake refused to take a nip at his rat and that was the only true way to transfigure them back into his original piece of string without an extra animal remaining.

"What do you mean you don't want to?" Harry literally hissed in Parsletongue at the snake in a low tone.

"I'm not hungry ssssir wizard," was the reply from his brown and black snake.

Harry wanted to hit it and wondered if anyone would care. "I'm not asking you to eat him! You only have to take a small nip and his life source will merge with yours. Then I can transfigure you into the piece of string again."

The snake seemed to get a little anger at that. The rat meanwhile had curled itself into a ball as if to await it's end.

The snake slowly shook its head, "I don't think I likesss the idea of being a ssstring again. Besssidess, he doess not seem like a tassty meal and I am not hungry."

That settled that then since the snake turned his attention from both Harry and the rat to curl itself into a coil. Harry groaned loudly and it was only in doing this that he realized that all eyes in the class were on him as always. Professor McGonagall had the odd look of being speechless and wanting to laugh at the same time. Perhaps because it should have occurred to her that Harry would have transfigured a snake and that the two would have wanted to converse.

Harry filled in the blanks for her and everyone else, "He refuses to eat the rat."

If there was ever a time for Mcgonagall to stutter this would have been it. As it were she merely pointed out, "But he does not have to eat the rat Mr. Potter. He merely has to take a nip."

Harry shook his head, "He isn't hungry and he really isn't into the idea of being a string again either."

The whole class up until then had been trying desperately not to laugh. At that point they could not hold it any longer and the room erupted in howling laughter. In the uproar, with a small smile, a quick spell and the wave of her wand, the Transfiguration professor relieved Harry of the burden of his experiment.

"That was brilliant Harry!" Ron said as the class began to disperse a few minutes later with a few chuckles and outright laughing still from some. Ron himself had tears glistening on his cheek still and he violently wiped it away.

"I'm glad I could be of entertainment today Ron," Harry said, having been the only person who hadn't laughed at all.

'Well, at least Neville gets a break today for once,' he thought as he watched his dorm-mate leaving the room with a huge grin on his face and random bits of laughter escaping past the smile.

x-x-x-

"Mr. Potter, could you please refrain from doing that."

This time the request was made in Charms class and Professor Flitwick turned an interesting shade of red, as if to prove that even after all the years it was still too much for him to scold Harry Potter in class. Of course Professor Flitwick, hardly scolded anyone in Charms, so Harry took that to mean that he was indeed being unruly.

"Sorry Professor," he said quietly.

He had been doodling on his parchment while the Professor taught but had gotten bored and had just moved on to doodling on the back of his hand. The problem was that Harry had spelled the drawings to move on his skin and this had caught Ron's attention. With the antics that the doodles had been up to, Ron couldn't help the small laugh that had escaped. Of course when the Professor had turned his attention to them it was the moving doodles that he noticed first.

Impressed as he was with Harry's skills in getting such a difficult charm to work, he did not appreciate the lack of attention.

So there Harry sat in Charms class having turned a shade of red himself, utterly embarrassed to have been caught doing something not only trivial but juvenile at that. If he was to be scolded by the mild Professor he hoped it to have been something enormous as a fight of some sort.

Not only that, he could have sworn that the whole class had their eyes on him and were probably wondering what had gotten into him.

Well, he didn't look up to see if they were indeed staring.

x-x-x

"Potter are you trying to be of competition to Longbottom's history today? Please pay attention otherwise I will let you drink whatever potion you create at the end of class," Professor Snape warned as he walked by Harry's cauldron for the fifth time that session.

'If you stop bloody hovering then maybe I would get the damn thing right!'

Harry didn't voice his opinion. Instead he glanced quickly at the Potions professor to see if there was anything remotely connected to the man he spoked to two nights before, but there was nothing. There was nothing but icy coldness in the dark eyes. There was nothing there. The person that looked back at Harry was exactly as he had always remembered him and nothing like Harry had thought he was.

'It had been a lie. The whole thing was a lie,' Harry realized.

If his day had been horrible before, it certainly seemed to have gone downhill at that point. Harry took a deep breath and tried to calm himself as he watched the Professor walk on to another victim, but the breath had no calming effect. In fact, it only seemed to make everything worse. Since his mind had cleared from thinking of the change in Snape it got lost in other despair. Like, perhaps he had been such a hopeless case that Snape had just given up. He wondered if it was ethical in the wizarding world to just bail on someone in need of help.

"Potter!"

Harry jumped at the shout, not knowing what ingredients he had added to his potion last but knowing that they must have certainly been wrong if his potion was at that point light green instead of yellow. Before the Professor could shout out Harry's mistake, Hermione casually leaned over from where her own potion stood and added something to Harry's. The potion of course immediately turned it's proper shade.

"Ten points from Gryffindor, Granger for tending to potions not yours," Snape snarled at her. Hermione didn't even bat an eyelash. "And ten more points from Gryffindor, Potter for inattention to a potion as potent as 'Omni-heal'. Please move your cauldron and effects away from Granger and the other students. I don't want you harming anyone but yourself."

Ten minutes later Harry stood outside the view of all the other students, all of who had their backs towards him and dared not look back. Harry stirred his potion clockwise and hoped that this was the right direction, because he had a nasty feeling that Snape would be keeping his promise at the end of the class by making Harry ingest the potion. Even though the potion was intended for victims of war in need of rapid and vast healing, Harry knew that wouldn't sway the Potions professor if he was serious.

'Stupid Harry! Bloody hell that was dumb! Merlin, you would think I'd learn my lesson in this class with this man after five years. Damn! How could I believe he would treat me any different or that I deserved to be treated any different? Why me? Why does things never go the way I want them to when I try so bloody hard? Merlin, I try so hard....'

Harry's self scolding continued unending in his head until he had developed a conversation between his conscience, his anger and Snape. The more he thought was the more he could feel the anguish building up inside his body. It became so strong that a part of him wanted to hurl the ingredients on his desk across the room, but he didn't. Instead he fought the anger with helplessness and in the end the anguish won. His hand began to tremble and he fought tears at the back of his eyes, determined that there was no way in hell that he was going to start crying like a child in the middle of Potions.

"Potter," Snape was behind him once again and though the words were softer, Harry ignored both the man and the voice.

He couldn't ignore the hand that slowly closed over his as he held a vial of cobra's blood though. Immediately his hand appeared to stop shaking, but really it hadn't. He was sure that Severus could still feel the trembles beneath his own fingers.

Harry turned slightly to look at the man who spent the past hour and a half deducting points from Gryffindor in Harry's name, and who was now being uncharacteristically kind outside that of the dungeons in the middle of the night. Severus' eyes had gone softer, his features just a little kinder as he looked into the emerald eyes of the Boy-Who-Lived. For a few minutes he was allowed to see into the tormented soul and then it was gone, replaced by a small scowl and narrowed eyes.

"Sorry Professor," Harry said, though neither of them knew quite what he was apologizing for.

"Come and have a talk with me tonight," Severus said, but Harry shook his head and gently removed his hand from the other man's.

"No. I would rather not.."

When Snape walked away towards the front of the class, Harry quickly added the ingredient to the cauldron then replaced the vial. All the while willing himself to stop trembling.

All the while, he forced himself to fight the pain inside.

x-x-x

By the time the students were seated for dinner, Harry had retreated within himself. Not even Malfoy's antics from across the room at the Slytherin table could warrant a response from him. Ron, who hardly noticed, made up for both of them as he chattered away about Snape and Malfoy and what he hoped he would have the opportunity to do to them. Hermione noticed, not so much the silence, but the lack of food that Harry seemed to be consuming.

"Harry, are you okay?"

'No I'm not okay. I'm not. Everything inside me feels so numb Hermione. I can't see past the darkness clouding my inside and I can't feel anything but the emptiness. I need to feel something. Anything. I don't know anymore....'

"Yeah, I'm okay."

"Then why aren't you eating?"

"I am. I'm just not very hungry."

Hermione gave him a pointed look as if to discern the truth from his expression, but he wouldn't look at her anymore. His attention was focused on the corns and beans in his plate. His fork jabbed at them almost viciously but in the end the hand was never raised to take food to his mouth.

"Harry you said that yesterday and the day before," she said in a louder whisper than they had been using previously.

The din at the table had increased as Ron had switched his attention to Seamus and Dean who had enlarged a bean and a grain of corn, given them legs and were watching as the two danced. The whole table was laughing and commenting on the fact that both the corn and the bean were masculine and both wanted to lead the waltz.

Harry shook his head, both to Hermione and the dancing food as if to clear his mind of all thoughts. "Well it's the truth. I don't know. I'm just not hungry, it's not like it's the end of the world."

He rose and quickly left, not giving Hermione time to answer or even to see her reaction.

"Oy Harry! Where're you going?" Ron called out when he noticed his best friend leaving, but Harry just kept walking away. "Why does he keep doing that Hermione? He's always in such a rush to get away at dinner."

"I don't know Ron," Hermione said thoughtfully.

Harry didn't wait to hear if she had come up with an excuse of some sort or not.

x-x-x

Dear Professor Dumbledore,

I just woke from a horrible nightmare and my scar hurts terribly. I don't know if you still want to be informed of these things since Voldemort knows about my connection and can get into my head now. It was about Voldemort and the Death Eaters torturing a Muggle family. I don't know where they were but they were probably nowhere near here. Anyway, that was my dream. It probably wasn't anything. It was probably just a dream and I think it's a vision and maybe my scar doesn't really hurt as I think, but there you have it. Just telling you in case you still want to know these things.

--Harry.

Harry climbed out of his bed, got fully dressed and tried not to groan as he made his way to the door of his dormitory. As it was, his glasses were no use sitting on his nose, while he slowly tried not to slip and fall as he made his way down to the common room. One of his hand held the note for the Headmaster, the other was wedged between his glasses and his face. It covered his left eye and his scar as a means of relieving the throbbing pain he had been experiencing.

He had lied in the note to Dumbledore of course. They was no way that he was imagining such blinding pain. He had wanted desperately to feel something as he sat at dinner with Hermione and the Gryffindors before but as if through twisted irony this was not the pain he had in mind.

Pain from his scar only made the inner hollowness feel worst.

Finally removing his hand from his face, he grabbed a small amount of floo powder from the pouch he kept in his pocket and with a small thanks to Professor Flitwick for teaching it in the first lessons when they got back, he flooed the note to Dumbledore's office.

Settling in a seat by the fire, with closed eyes and both hands over his face, he waited and waited until finally the pain in his head lessened to a stop.

"Tempus," he whispered with a flick of his wand and a thin line of red mist drifted out of his wand to form the time in the air.

It read 1:30am.

Harry fought the urge to bounce up from his seat and scurry through the corridors to the one person he was fairly sure to be awake at such an hour.

Well, except that he was fairly sure that Severus would throw him out of his quarters if he dared enter.

x-x-x

Severus had just flooed back minutes before from Dumbledore's office, and had just once again settled to do more grading of parchment when he heard the knocks on the door.

He didn't have to check the time to know that it was not yet two in the morning since he had only just checked it when Dumbledore had requested his presence upstairs. He was surprised at the knocks though. He had been so sure that Harry would not have been visiting him again.

"What are you doing?" Harry asked as soon as he closed the door.

Severus raised an eyebrow slightly. No matter how even the question had sounded he could note the look of a storm brewing in the younger man's green eyes.

'Perhaps venting his anger would do him some good.' Severus softly cast a silencing spell before he replied to the question.

"I am grading parchments, Mr. Potter."

"May I help?" Again, the words were calm but Harry's eyes had narrowed as if he was merely testing the man before him.

Severus actively took the bait and replied in the coldest manner he could, "Potter, have you forgotten what a mess you are at potions? I dare not let you involve yourself with anything to do with the subject, lest you instigate an uproar of some sort. Sixth year Potions student that you are or not."

Well that was all Harry had been waiting to hear. "You - I knew it! You just couldn't wait to rid yourself of me! Why did you offer to help me if you didn't want to? Merlin I can't believe I deluded myself into thinking that you would be a little nicer than always. It was just a lie wasn't it!"

Harry spun on his heels and proceeded to storm out but Severus' voice stopped him.

"You expect me to treat you like some sort of a demi-god Potter when you yourself have been telling me how much you hate being put on a pedestal? I won't treat you any different than I do any other student. I may have in the past but I had already decided to not do it anymore. This morning, however, you were doing rubbish! I couldn't let you blow up my dungeon could I?"

Except for the emphasis he put on 'rubbish' Severus' answer was suddenly just as calm as that of the other conversation Harry had held with him two nights before. Harry wavered on indecision for a few seconds before he turned back around to face the potions teacher. Severus had already gone back to his grading.

"Don't call me Potter. I said that before and you agreed not to."

Severus looked up and silently nodded.

"Where's my couch anyway? You didn't write on it did you?"

With a wave of his wand to the right of the room, the couch suddenly appeared near one of the set of shelves lined with books. Another wave and a "Accio couch" from Severus, and the couch took it's original position before the table. Harry sat on the middle cushion and simply stared. Severus pretended to be oblivious to the piercing emerald gaze.

"Why do you have to be so mean in class? Twenty points from Gryffindor! Besides Hermione was just trying to prevent your dungeon from being blown up you know."

Severus looked up at him then slowly averted his eyes back to his work. "You have your issues and I have mine. I'm very familiar with having different facets of my personality shown in specific places and times. I have not yet learned to compromise. Compromising in the previous area of work that I did could have gotten me killed."

Harry took that as the only apology he was going to get so he returned to staring, somewhat more pensive this time.

Severus sighed so softly that Harry barely heard it. Then Severus transfigured another chair beside his desk from a broken quill in his drawer. With a bit of shuffling, the Potion's master finally set a stack of parchment, an inkbottle and a quill on the side of the desk in front of the transfigured chair. He gave Harry a look of impatience when he was done.

Smiling just a little Harry got up and sat at the new chair then glanced at the stack of parchments. First years, but then at least it was better than nothing. He knew how to do first year Potions. He probably would be able to understand Sixth year Potions in time too but Harry had already decided that today had been a rather bad day.

"How is your scar? Dumbledore showed me the note you wrote. I wouldn't have dismissed the vision so lightly," Severus broke the silence though as usual his eyes and fingers danced across the parchment he was correcting.

Harry shrugged. "My scar stopped hurting ages ago and I really doubt the vision was real. I think he's just trying to scare me."

You will be next Harry Potter. No one escapes my wrath....

Harry shuddered in disgust before he continued, "He was angry and I got the impression that he was trying to distract me. Don't know from what. Who knows how the mind of the evil works."

Severus nodded and seemed lost in thought for a few minutes before he returned to his work. In the silence that followed, neither spoke again.

Inside, Harry felt a little of the suffocating emptiness slipping away and the pain receded as he become occupied with trying to decipher what the student whose parchment he was marking was going on and on about Wolfsbane. It seemed he had read about it in Lockhart's novel on the subject.

Severus glanced over as Harry fought back a grin and he adamantly refused to allow himself to smile proudly at the tiny improvements Harry showed in small moments such as these.

He really should get Harry to shout a little more, a lot more often he realized.

X-x-X