Work Text:
Harry Potter was known for many things. Bravery. Loyalty. A particular talent for surviving what should have killed him. Thinking things through, unfortunately, had never made the list.
That was probably why the letter had worked.
It had arrived a week ago on cheap parchment, by someone claiming to be the mother of Mary Macdonald, an old friend of Lily Evans from her school days. The letter had said that she had found a few of Lily's things among Mary's belongings, which had been kept all these years, and thought Harry might want them back. It had spoken of Lily so warmly, of her laugh, of the way she had always made Mary feel welcome, of small, specific details that felt too real to be invented, that Harry had found himself reading it twice, and then a third time, and by the fourth, he was already imagining Severus's face.
That was where he had gone wrong.
He had pictured Severus standing in the doorway of the sitting room. Severus taking Lily's things with hands that would pretend very hard not to tremble. Severus saying something cutting, because tenderness had always embarrassed him, and then going quiet in that particular way that meant something had reached him too deeply for words.
It had seemed like a gift worth having. A risk worth taking.
So he had come alone, on the one night of the year when his judgment could not be trusted at all, and now his hands were stuck flat against his father's headstone.
Harry took stock.
His palms were pressed hard to the cold marble, fingers spread wide. The spell had caught him cleanly; he had to give them that. One moment, he had been stepping closer to the grave, squinting through the dark at something left near the base of the stone. Next, his wand had gone from his hand, and his body had pitched forward into the binding. It held him with his back against the headstone, arms spread to either side, shoulders pulled taut. His wand was somewhere in the grass behind them. He had heard it land.
He pulled against the spell once, testing it properly. Nothing. He pulled harder, and pain shot through both wrists and up into his elbows. The magic did not give. It did not even tremble.
He knew this type of casting. Modified Incarcerous variant, anchored to a fixed object. Severus had shown him the counter for it roughly three years ago over dinner, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely, because that was how Severus operated. Harry had not thought about it since.
He thought about it now and came up empty.
Right.
"That was dramatic," Harry said, because silence felt like a concession.
Someone laughed behind him.
There were three of them. He could hear that much. Robes shifting. Shoes in the damp grass. One was breathing slowly through his nose, entertained. Another moving around the far side of the grave. Harry cataloged their positions as best he could without being able to turn his head properly, and filed the information away under not great but workable.
His right hand found the inside of his wrist.
The signal point sat just below the pulse, a small charm pressed flat to the skin, keyed to Severus and only Severus. They had set it up eighteen months ago after a mission had gone sideways in a way that had left Severus very quiet for several days and Harry without a good argument against precautions. Harry had tested it exactly once, by accident, and Severus had appeared in their kitchen inside forty seconds, looking like a man prepared to level a building.
Harry did not press it yet.
He was fine. He was annoyed, and stuck, and increasingly aware that he had made a fairly textbook error in judgment, but he was fine. He would give himself two minutes to find his own way out before he called in the cavalry and dealt with the consequences.
"Let me guess," Harry said. "You lot missed the part where this never works out for the people on your side."
The man nearest him chuckled. It was not a kind sound.
"No one is coming to save you, Potter."
"Right," Harry said.
"You are alone out here."
"I noticed."
A boot pressed against the inside of his ankle and shoved outward. Harry's footing shifted, and he caught himself against the headstone, shoulders protesting. The laughter behind him deepened.
Harry's jaw tightened. Not with fear. With the specific, focused irritation of a man who was already composing the incident report in his head and did not love how it would read.
"My husband is," he said.
The three men laughed.
Of course, Severus was going to be absolutely furious, Harry thought. Not loudly, of course.
That was the thing people who had never met Severus Snape always failed to understand. He would not shout. He would go very still, and then he would take Harry apart sentence by sentence with that voice of his, and Harry would have no defense whatsoever because Severus would be completely right.
Harry had looked at a letter and seen what he wanted to see. He had come alone. He had not pressed the signal before leaving. He had not even left a note. He was going to hear about this for a very long time.
Worth it, he had thought, if it meant watching Severus's face when he held something of Lily's.
Except that was looking less likely by the minute.
"Your husband," one of the men said. "That old bat."
"He is probably stirring cauldrons right now," another added, "and forgetting you exist."
Harry said nothing. He knew Severus. Severus forgot meals, sleep, and basic civility toward people who deserved it. He had never once forgotten Harry. The comment did not land the way they intended.
"No one is coming," the man said. "Not tonight."
Harry opened his eyes. His father's name was in front of him. Below it, his mother's. His breath fogged against the marble.
Behind him, the sounds changed.
Cloth shaken open and smoothed flat. Glass against glass. Something heavy was set down with deliberate care. Harry listened, filed it, and told himself it was probably an intimidation prop. Dark Artifact theatre. The sort of thing people did when they wanted to look more prepared than they were.
Then the smell reached him.
Bitter herbs. Old smoke. Something beneath both of those things pressed at the back of his throat in a way he did not like at all.
Harry's Auror brain shifted registers.
He pulled at the binding. Once. Twice. He tried to push magic down his arms and crack the anchor point. He tried to summon his wand with intent alone. None of it worked. The marble stayed cold and impersonal against his hands.
He turned his head as far as the spell allowed.
Dark cloth on the grass. Stitched symbols in thread that looked brown until the moonlight found them. A silver bowl at the center. A bundle of pale, thin objects that his mind categorized before he could stop it.
Bone.
Fuck
He had been in a graveyard like this before. He had been fourteen and bound to a headstone while a voice that should not have existed spoke words that should not have been possible. He knew the early stages of a resurrection ritual. He knew what the next component was.
His thumb found the signal point on his wrist.
He pressed it.
"No," Harry said. The word came out flat and certain. "He is gone."
One of the men stepped into his line of sight. The blade in his hand caught the weak moonlight cleanly.
"Blood of the enemy," the man said. "Still very useful, after all these years."
Harry looked at the knife and thought, with complete practicality, that Severus had better be moving quickly.
He pulled against the binding one more time, felt it hold, and accepted that he was going to have to wait. He was not frightened, exactly. He was very aware of the knife, and very aware of his own stillness, and very aware that the next sixty seconds were going to depend entirely on how fast his husband could cross the country.
He thought Severus could probably manage it.
He was going to be absolutely incandescent when he got here, but he was going to manage it.
The knife lifted.
Harry pressed his palms flat to the marble, to his parents' names, and waited.
Then the air cracked open.
Severus landed six feet away and was already moving.
There was no dramatic pause. No assessment. No wasted second spent taking in the scene. His wand arm came up mid-stride, and the first man dropped before he had finished turning, crumpling forward with his knife still in his hand.
The blade slipped from his fingers and disappeared into the dark grass without ceremony. Severus had not even broken his stride.
The second man got his shield up. It was a solid casting, the kind that would have stopped most people, and Harry saw the brief, sharp assessment in Severus's eyes as he registered it.
One second. Less than one second, even. Then Severus cast something Harry did not fully recognize, spoken under his breath, and the shield did not break so much as cease to exist. The force of it carried through into the ritual cloth, the silver bowl, the carefully arranged bones. All of it was scattered across the grass as if it had never mattered at all.
The third man tried to Disapparate. Harry saw him begin to twist.
Severus's wand snapped sideways without him even fully turning, a movement so economical it barely looked like a movement at all, and the man froze mid-spin and hit the ground hard and did not get up.
Harry counted it afterward. He thought it had taken perhaps five seconds from landing to standing still again.
Severus lowered his wand.
He stood in the middle of the cemetery with three men unconscious around him and his robes settling back into stillness, and he looked, Harry thought, exactly like a superhero. The sort the tiny Harry in the cupboard under the stairs had once wished for.
He smiled a little at that, at what eleven-year-old Harry would have made of it.
Severus's eyes moved across the scene. The bodies. The perimeter. The dark tree line. The scattered remnants of the ritual. He cataloged all of it before he allowed his gaze to move to Harry, and when it did, it did not move away again.
Harry was still bound to the headstone, arms spread to either side, palms flat against the marble. He had not moved more than a few inches the entire time. His parents' names were pressed beneath his hands. He was fairly sure his knees had gone partially numb from the cold.
He tried for a smile anyway. It came out small and crooked.
"Hi, love."
Severus stared at him.
Harry held the look as long as he could, which was not very long. There was something in Severus's eyes that made innocence feel like a fairly thin strategy. He tried it anyway, tilting his head slightly, aiming for harmless. Possibly pathetic. Whichever worked faster.
Severus closed his eyes.
It lasted only a second, that small deliberate pause, but Harry had known this man long enough to know exactly what it meant. Severus was deciding, very consciously, not to say the first thing that had come to mind. Or the second. Possibly the third as well.
When he opened them again, he crossed the remaining distance in two strides and dropped to one knee in the cold grass in front of Harry without a word.
The gloved hand that came up to Harry's face was gentle. The backs of Severus's fingers brushed his cheek slowly, and then his jaw, and then pushed his fringe back from his forehead with a carefulness that was so at odds with the last five minutes that Harry's throat choked up. Just a bit.
His eyes moved slowly over every visible inch of Harry, checking for blood or injury.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
Harry shook his head. “No. Just… stuck.”
“I can see that.”
Instead of releasing the spell immediately, Severus rose, unhurried, and stepped to the side. He walked a slow half-circle around Harry, his eyes moving over everything: his arms, his shoulders, the angle at which the binding held his wrists against the stone. He crouched slightly at one point to look at Harry's hands, where they were pressed flat to the marble, checking the skin at his wrists, checking that the spell had not cut in anywhere.
Harry let him. There was no point arguing with Severus in this particular mode. He had learned that early.
He also, if he was being honest, did not entirely mind it. There was something about being looked at that carefully that was difficult to object to, even under the circumstances.
Severus completed his circuit and came to stand behind him. He stepped in close until Harry could feel the warmth of him all along his back, solid and real and present, and one arm came around Harry's waist and drew him gently upright, taking the strain off his shoulders. Harry exhaled slowly.
Then, Severus pressed a slow kiss to the nape of Harry’s neck.
Harry gasped.
It came out sharper than he intended, involuntary, pulled from him by the graze of Severus's teeth against the side of his neck. Severus did not apologize for it. He stayed exactly where he was, pressed close behind Harry, one arm locked around his waist, mouth moving slowly along the curve of his neck with the same deliberate unhurried attention he gave to everything.
Harry's fingers curled uselessly against the marble.
"You absolute, suicidal, Gryffindor moron," Severus murmured against his skin. His voice was very low and very dry and thoroughly exasperated in a way that was somehow also fond, which Harry found deeply unfair given the circumstances.
"The spell," Harry managed. "Severus, you could just remove the spell and then we could—"
"I could," Severus agreed, conversational. His free hand moved to the front of Harry's robes. "I will. Shortly."
Harry opened his mouth.
"After," Severus said, "I have made my point."
His hand moved, and Harry's robes fell open. The cold night air hit Harry's skin, and he pulled in a sharp breath. A warming charm followed immediately, blooming across his chest and stomach, Severus casting it with the same matter-of-fact competence he did everything, as though taking Harry apart in a cemetery at midnight was simply a task that required proper preparation.
Harry would have laughed if Severus's mouth had not chosen that moment to press open against the side of his throat.
"Severus—"
"You read a letter," Severus said against his skin, not pausing, his bare hand sliding slowly across Harry's stomach, "written on cheap parchment, by someone you had never corresponded with before. You did not check it. You did not show it to me. You came here alone, on this night of all nights, because it said what you wanted to hear." A pause. His mouth moved against Harry's neck. "Your father would have done exactly the same thing."
Harry's head tipped back against Severus's shoulder. "That is not the insult you think it is."
"It was not intended as a compliment."
"The details about my mother were—"
"Convincing," Severus said. "Yes. I am sure they were." His hand moved lower, unhurried. "That is not a defense, Harry. That is precisely the point."
Harry made a sound that was not entirely dignified.
Slick fingers pressed inside him slowly and carefully, and Harry's whole body went taut against the binding, wrists straining uselessly against the stone. Severus held him steady with the arm locked around his waist, the grip tighter than necessary, almost bruising. His fingers moved with patient, thorough attention, curling and pressing with deliberate precision.
"Perhaps this is not—" Harry started.
"The time?" Severus said. His voice was dry enough to sand wood. His fingers moved deeper, pressing against that spot that made Harry's vision spark white. "You were bound to a headstone in Godric's Hollow while three men prepared a resurrection ritual over your parents' grave. I think I am entitled to take my time."
Harry pressed his forehead to the cold marble and breathed.
"That is," he said, somewhat unsteadily, "a completely unreasonable position."
Severus grazed his earlobe with his teeth.
Harry laughed. It came out breathless and a little wrecked, caught somewhere between exasperation and something warmer than that, and he felt Severus's mouth curve against the back of his neck in response. Not quite a smile. Close enough.
"Mary Macdonald," Severus said, withdrawing his fingers slowly, "is Muggle-born."
Harry made a sound of protest at the loss.
"Her mother is a Muggle in Manchester," Severus continued, unhurried, lining himself up with a careful hand, "who has never set foot in Godric's Hollow." He pushed in slowly, one long steady press that forced the breath out of Harry's lungs entirely. He did not stop until he was fully seated. Then he stayed there, arm locked tight around Harry's waist, mouth at Harry's ear. "Which means whoever wrote that letter was not who they claimed to be. Which means they constructed it specifically for you. Which means they have been watching you, Harry. Long enough to know what you cannot resist and exactly which night of the year to use it against you."
The words landed differently than Harry expected. Not a lecture anymore. Something quieter and more serious underneath, something Severus was saying because he needed Harry to actually hear it.
Harry went still.
Severus's rhythm did not change. But his arm tightened around Harry's waist, pulling him back harder against his chest.
"You pressed it when a knife was already in the air."
"I was handling it."
"You were bound to a headstone."
"I had a plan."
"Harry." Severus's voice dropped, quieter now, the dry exasperation giving way to something underneath it. His free hand reached around, wrapping around Harry's cock with slow, deliberate strokes, drawing a long, shuddering breath out of Harry.
Harry closed his eyes.
He did not have an answer for that one.
Severus pressed his mouth to Harry's temple. He kept moving, slower now, deep and steady, his hand matching the same pace. Harry felt the argument go out of him entirely, replaced by something that was not quite relief and not quite grief and not quite the heat building low in his stomach, but all three of those things at once, tangled together.
"I wanted to bring you something," Harry said. His voice came out smaller than he intended. "That was all. I just wanted to give you something of hers."
Severus was quiet for a moment.
His hand kept moving. His mouth stayed at Harry's temple.
"I know," he said finally. In the voice he used only when there was no performance left in him at all.
Harry's throat tightened.
"I'm sorry it was a trap."
"Stop apologizing," Severus said, "and come home with me."
He shifted the angle slightly, and Harry's whole body arched back against him, a broken sound pulling free before he could catch it. Severus's arm locked tighter around his waist, and his hand moved with focused, relentless attention, and the lecture was apparently over because Severus stopped talking and simply held him, close and steady and completely present, while Harry came apart against his father's headstone with Severus's name in his mouth and both hands flat against the marble.
Severus followed not long after, quiet and controlled even then, just a low exhale against the back of Harry's neck, and his arm pulling Harry flush against him as he spent himself, and then stillness. Both of them breathing. The wind moving through the yew trees.
After a long moment, Severus cast the counter-charm.
The binding released. Harry's arms dropped, and his legs immediately buckled.
Severus caught him, turned him, pulled him in. Harry pressed his face into Severus's chest and held on with both hands and said nothing. Severus's arms wrapped around him and stayed there.
Neither of them spoke for a while.
Then, Severus pressed a kiss to the top of his head.
“Come,” he said, voice recovering its familiar dryness. “Before you catch pneumonia on top of all this nonsense.”
Harry huffed a small laugh into his robes. “You’re never going to let this go, are you?”
“Absolutely not,” Severus replied. “Not for the remainder of our natural lives.” A pause. “And even then I’ll probably haunt you about it.”
Harry tightened his arms around him and didn’t argue.