Harry hadn't thought about that. Severus mightn't want anyone informed of his personal business.
"I've never been anyone's miracle before," Severus said, his voice thick with emotion.
The hand resting on Harry's shoulder gripped it tightly.
"Well, you're mine," Harry said, stepping closer. He slipped his hands under Severus' open robe and wrapped his arms around his slender waist. It felt very natural now to rest his head against the taller man's chest, to feel Severus' heart beat against his cheek as his lover's chest rose and fell.
Severus leaned into the embrace and returned the hug. His loose, open robes enclosed Harry in a warm cocoon as they fell around him when Severus returned the hug. His lover was so much taller than him that only Harry's head was sticking out of the draping black tent of fabric.
"Potter . . . Harry, I am sorry. I didn't consider -"
Severus never called him by his first name. Harry tightened his hold and whispered, "Ssssh. It's all right."
They stayed that way for a long time, until Severus finally gave a reluctant, "Class will start in fifteen minutes."
Harry pulled back with a sigh. The room felt ridiculously cold once he'd stepped clear of his lover's robes. He looked up and met Severus' gaze to ask, "So, will you come with me on Friday?"
"If you truly wish it. However, it will cause . . . complications," Severus warned. "Your friends won't welcome this development."
"Maybe not, but they'll get used to it," Harry assured, hardly able to believe that Severus was agreeing.
"Very well, then."
"Thanks, that's great!" Harry couldn't help but grin. "We still on for tonight?"
"After detentions."
"Yes, of course. Do you want to come up to my rooms for a change? I found a Muggle word game the other day that I think you'll enjoy. Have you ever played SCRABBLE?"
Severus had that startled-but-trying-to-hide-it air that came over him whenever Harry suggested anything new for them to do together. "No, I've never even heard of it."
"Don't worry. With your vocabulary, you'll be a natural. You'll trounce me," Harry predicted.
"Isn't it enough that I slaughter you on the chessboard?" Severus asked, obviously unable to control the arrogant superiority that seemed the earmark of all Slytherins.
Harry chuckled. "I must be a masochist."
"You'll be a late masochist at this rate. We both will," Severus said.
"Damn. Well, come on up after detention. My quarters are the last in the hall on the top floor of Gryffindor Tower, next to the Head of House's."
"Will I need the password to your security wards?" Severus asked.
Harry shook his head. "No, you shouldn't, but I'll give it to you anyway, just in case." He'd been waiting for this opportunity all week. Keeping his face and tone perfectly straight, he said, "The password is: Severus Snape, Slytherin Sex God."
To his credit, Severus' jaw didn't quite drop.
"It is not!" Severus exclaimed.
Grinning now, because Severus' expression made the silly joke totally worthwhile, Harry assured him, "It is. I swear. Go up and check it at lunch when I'm not there if you don't believe me."
"Why would you . . . ?"
"Well, we're supposed to use something nobody would think of. It isn't like anyone would guess that about you. Only I know the truth."
Severus didn't seem to know how to respond at first. Harry could see his lover wrestling with his suspicions and the demons of his past that made him so uncertain of his desirability. He waited for the inevitable challenge, or an accusation of mockery, but instead of protesting his claim, Severus' cheeks turned bright red and he asked in a soft, bewildered voice, "You really are quite mad, aren't you?"
Harry grinned and laughed. "Did you just realize that?"
Then, because he could, Harry reached up to hook Severus' head and draw him down into a tea-flavoured kiss. It was good, always so good when their mouths met. He could have lost himself in the kiss and ended up in a clinch on the dusty floor, but Severus had the presence of mind to pull back before things could get entirely out of hand.
Severus' eyes were hot and hungry as they met his own. "We're both late."
"Yes." Harry nodded. "See you later."
Side by side, they left the empty classroom. Harry's infamous luck held; no one seemed to notice their exit.
As he climbed the endless stairs to his DADA classroom, Harry prayed his body would relax before he had to teach. He might have been joking when he'd chosen his new password, but it was proving quite apt. He only hoped they'd both survive. At the rate they were going, they'd end up dried out husks before Christmas.
*~*~*
The Arithmancy Club had once again run more than an hour late. Hermione was overjoyed with the bright students she had this term, but it made for a long day. Well, it wasn't like she had anything to run home to, she thought as she climbed the stairs to Gryffindor Tower. Ron was still working those horrible shifts. It seemed like forever since he'd been there to hold her when she got home from an evening meeting.
Harry'd been gone nearly as much, though she at least got to see him during their free third period and at meals. Luckily, she wasn't the type who needed constant attention or she'd be miserable. But no matter how much she enjoyed her clubs and other interests, coming home to completely dark quarters always made her feel lonely.
She froze as she stepped into the sitting room. The room was still dark, with neither the hearth nor wall torches lit, but there was a rectangular square of light spilling across the room from the adjoining door to Harry's quarters, which they always kept open. Hermione smiled when she heard laughter ringing through from Harry's. Ron must have returned early and caught Harry in the hall or else the lights would have been on in here.
"Lumos," she said. Dropping her heavy book bag on the chair by the door, she shouldered out of her teachers' robes and hung them on the hook by the door. Feeling ridiculously happy, she hurried over to the open door to Harry's rooms, and stopped dead in the doorway.
Harry was there, but the person with him wasn't Ron. It was Professor Snape, but not a Professor Snape she readily recognized. The Snape she knew was shrouded from chin to toe in black. He didn't have rolled up sleeves or bare arms. His shirt wasn't open at the collar. He sat stiffly on wooden chairs, rather than sprawled on couches. And, most tellingly, the Professor Snape she knew never smiled. Or if he did, it was an expression of cruelty and malice, not the playful, relaxed smile she was looking at now.
It was so shocking to see Professor Snape sitting there in shirtsleeves on Harry's couch that she could only stand there and gape.
Harry was on a cushion on the floor in front of the coffee table. He was wearing jeans, a grey sweatshirt, and a happy, relaxed grin that she hadn't seen in what felt like forever.
They seemed to be playing SCRABBLE.
As she watched, Harry put several tiles down on the board. Snape said something in a low voice she couldn't hear from across the huge room. Harry looked down at the board, back up at Snape, then threw back his head and howled with laughter.
Spellbound, she watched Snape pick up a pad and use one of the little pencils that came with the game to mark something on the paper, probably Harry's score. It was the first time she'd seen Snape write with anything other than a quill. After marking the score, Snape turned to his own tile board, chose a handful of letters and put them down.
She'd known they were friends, of course. Harry mentioned Snape a dozen times a day, and this morning at breakfast when Harry had joked with Snape, she'd had some idea as to what Harry saw in the man, but she'd never pictured them quite like this. At first she couldn't understand what it was about the pleasant scene that troubled her, other than the surreal sight of Severus Snape behaving like a normal human being and playing, but then she twigged onto the cause of her uneasiness.
The whole scene was just so . . . domestic.
Casual intimacy was totally out of character for Snape, but there he was with his shirt unbuttoned, lying in an almost sensual sprawl on Harry's couch. While Harry . . . he mightn't be as severe as Snape; but in his own way, he was just as guarded. Harry might laugh with friends or new acquaintances, but he was never the way he was when alone with Ron and her. The giggling Harry sitting on cushions on the floor, the one who was absently levitating a butterbeer from a sideboard across the room without using wand or word, she noted, was their Harry, the Harry only she and Ron saw.
What was perhaps more stunning than Harry's allowing his magical controls to slip like that in front of Snape was the fact that Snape failed to react to it. Snape glanced up as the bottle landed in Harry's hand, but made no comment as his attention returned to the board.
After a moment, Snape reached for his own glass beside him. As he did so, his face turned in her direction.
She knew she hadn't moved, but Snape's gaze focused unerringly upon her. She felt almost guilty as she saw his smile drop and that familiar glacial freeze tighten his expression.
Snape didn't move a muscle, either; she'd swear to that. Nor did he speak. It almost seemed like Harry felt the change in his companion, for he looked up from his tiles, glanced at Snape, then turned to look over his shoulder to where she was standing.
"Hermione!" Harry grinned and called out. "Come on in."
"I, er, didn't mean to interrupt," she said self-consciously as she approached them, unnerved by the change her presence had had upon Professor Snape.
"You're not interrupting," Harry assured. "Actually, you arrived just in time. I need your opinion on something."
"Professor Weasley's opinion will count the same as consulting a dictionary," Snape quickly said in the chilling tone that would quell any classroom. "If you're wrong, you'll forfeit the points."
"Word of warning," Harry said to her as she joined them, "Don't ever teach a Slytherin to play anything. They play for keeps. Sit down and make yourself comfortable."
Feeling nearly as nervous as she had when sorted into her house in first year, she took a seat in the armchair beside Harry's floor cushion. At least she wasn't talking to herself, she thought as she perched on the edge of the blue chair and asked, "What did you want to know?"
Snape snorted. "How to spell correctly, for starters."
"Hey!" Harry scolded, and then reminded him, "If I spelt better, you wouldn't be winning. Anyway, Hermione, would you please tell him that the word 'NEPENTHE' is not a Muggle word and isn't in the Muggle dictionary."
Hermione glanced down at the board, where Snape had obviously managed to make the word NEPENTHE from the existing word PEN, which she suspected to be one of Harry's words. Looking the board over, she saw a slew of similar incidents: the word BIRD with DEVOID intersecting it. Her eyes practically bugged out when she followed the word HOUSE to where QUININE met it. Poor Harry.
Biting her lower lip, her sense of loyalty warring with her honour, she met Snape's gaze. He gave an expectant rise of his eyebrows. Clearly, he was enjoying her discomfiture.
"Ummm, Harry?" she began.
"Yes?" Harry looked up at her with puppy dog eyes worthy of Ron at his most pathetic.
"I'm afraid that the word NEPENTHE is a Muggle word," she said.
"But it's a potion we did in sixth year! I know because I helped chop horehound for it last week," Harry protested.
Feeling terrible, she explained, "That's true, but it was also a drug the ancient Greeks used to speak of. I don't know if it actually existed or not, but it was supposed to make people forget their sorrows and troubles. Edgar Allen Poe mentions it in his poem The Raven."
"Damn," Harry said.
"Triple word score. That will be 72 points forfeited," Snape snidely announced.
"I don't have 72 points left, as you well know," Harry said.
"Then it appears I win. Again," Snape responded.
Harry gave Snape a pleading look. "You're not going to enforce it, are you? I mean -"
"All's fair in love and war, Potter," Snape crowed in a tone that made her want to smack him.
"Yeah," Harry replied in a soft voice that had the oddest inflection, "but we're not at war."
Hermione waited for Snape to shoot Harry down with some comment about their houses always being at war, or, at the very least, by pointing out that neither designation was applicable to their situation, but when she looked at their former teacher, he seemed to have been thrown off balance by Harry's words. The implication of Snape's restraint from making either comment was slow to hit, but when it did, her heart almost stopped.
After a moment, Snape said in a less aggressive tone, "Perhaps Professor Weasley would be willing to join in for a game or two? We could play Gryffindor against Slytherin."
"I'm not four, you know," Harry said, sounding all of three. She had to avert her gaze to keep from giggling at him. In fact, she was having a hard time keeping from breaking into hysterics over what she suspected. "I can play by myself. But Hermione's welcome to join us. Will you?"
She swallowed hard. "All right."
"Excuse me a moment," Snape said, getting to his feet. "You might offer Professor Weasley a drink."
Snape made the suggestion exactly as she would if too busy to see to their needs when Ron and she had unexpected visitors. Of course, she wasn't a guest here and would have gotten a drink herself if she'd wanted one, but Snape wouldn't know that.
They both watched Snape walk to the loo next to Harry's bedroom.
Once he was gone, Harry immediately cleared the board and put all the tiles back in their little bag for the next game.
