Negatives

Some people, Potter muses: they glow. People like the Weasley twins. Potter can't be in a room with them without knowing exactly where they stand, illuminated by their light as he is: a bright bubbling stream of jokes and sarcasm and brash retorts. Dumbledore glows, too, but his is a steady, deceptively distant dawn, permanent as the sun and as quick to burn.

Other people, he continues thoughtfully: they radiate darkness, a strange vacuum that drains and repels and absorbs. People like you.

Potter can't be in a room with you without knowing exactly where you stand. Sometimes the thread between you feels so tangible to him that Potter jumps when people walk through it - a pulsing cord of hate you, hate you, hate you. These days, when everything outside your still-rigidly-structured Potions classes has fallen apart, Potter will sometimes slip up intentionally in class, mutter a few insults under his breath just within your hearing, purely for the pleasure of drinking in that overpoweringly heady emotion that brews between his defiant scowl and your dangerously-close glare.

He tells you all of this carefully, in measured words, so haltingly that you could have known he was drunk even if you didn't smell the whisky from four feet away. You try to stop him talking, but this is a crowded Muggle pub in the middle of the bloody Royal Mile, and Dumbledore would most certainly fire you for spellcasting in Muggle Edinburgh, even if it is to stop a seventeen-year-old student from ensuring that the rest of your classes with him are even more of a perpetual hell. As for non-magical means of shutting him up: you've tried The Stare, and you've tried snarling at him; you've even tried boxing his cheeks, until he grabbed your hand with that damned Seeker swiftness and pulled it to his lips.

(There's still the prickly afterimage of wetness from his tongue on your palm, too, but you're going to do your best to forget about that.)

Anyway, he continues, that's why he called you with the Phoenix Summons. He knows he's not supposed to use it except in emergencies, but he's bloody Harry Potter (he pronounces the name with more hatred than he pronounces your own), and that's what Harry Potter does, is break rules, right? You tell him that so often that he always wants to break even more rules around you, just to watch you glower, and did you know that there's actually a law against having sex with your students, no matter how old they are? Because Potter is gay, you know; he hasn't told anyone else, but he thought you ought to know since he hates you so much. Sirius told him once that everyone thought you were queer, and it would be much easier to experiment with someone he hates, since things couldn't get any worse.

You absorb him. He stops after saying that, swirling the statement around in his mouth. Yes. You absorb him, like tissue paper on an ink blot, because you are solid and defined and rigid, whereas he can't even control himself enough to stop from spilling out his heart to his Potions Professor. He feels himself draining away inexorably when he's around you, which is why he hates you so much. That's all.

By now you've dragged him outside the pub, trying to avoid the stares of Muggles who clearly think you're some sort of costumed tour guide, and you wrack your brain for the nearest floo location, which ought to be easy on a street with a castle, Scotland's highest concentration of ghosts, and enough fake wizards to populate a fake Hogsmeade, but isn't. In the mean time, you lean Potter against the window of a chip shop and try not to listen to him talk.

You're not listening, Potter says. Haven't you heard that he hates you? So, you know, it's safe for you to shag him; he hates you, and he thinks you're really quite ugly, and he can't imagine why anyone would ever want to date you, which is why he can know that he's doing it to experiment and for nothing else. You should know that. He's seen you watching him, after all, and he's old enough to know the difference between wanting to kill someone and wanting to fuck him.

Potter's words are slurring more now; he's slumping more deeply against the window, but suddenly his hands scramble for a grip and he pushes himself back up. Sharp electric lights flash off his green eyes and make you blink. He says now that no, don't believe him, he was lying. He doesn't really hate you. He doesn't, he doesn't. After all, Snape, isn't hate pretty much the same thing as love?

Harry Potter clutches your robes, presses his sweaty face to your chest, and proceeds to pass out cold.

finis.