now posting: omitted - a snape raises harry fic
Harry knew his dad was ill three days before his dad would admit it.
He clocked it on a Tuesday. The pause before Snape stood from the chair by the fire. The half-second longer on the stairs. The cup of tea left to go cold at his elbow, which Snape never did, because Snape drank his tea while it was hot and held opinions about people who let theirs sit.
By Thursday the voice had dropped half a register and gone rough at the edges, and his dad taught anyway, three classes back to back, and Harry sat in the second row of double Potions and watched him brace one hand against the demonstration bench in a way that wanted to look casual and did not.
Harry catalogued it the way he catalogued everything. By type, by weight, by the specific thing each detail told him. He had learned the system from the man currently pretending he could measure out powdered root with a hand that was not steady.
That evening Harry went down to the quarters early.
Snape was at the desk with a stack of fourth-year essays and a quill he was holding more than using. The fire had burned low. The room had gone cold around him, which meant he had not noticed, which meant he was further gone than the voice let on, because Snape noticed the temperature of a room the way other people noticed whether the sun was up.
"You're early," Snape informed him. The words came out gravel.
"You're cold." Harry crossed to the hearth and built the fire back up, kindling first, the way he had watched done a thousand times. He did not ask permission. He had learned that from watching too.
"You're holding a quill."
Snape set the quill down with deliberate care, which was the tell, the placing of an object as though the object had done something. "I do not require management."
"I know." Harry took the essays off the desk. He moved them to the side table in the order they had been stacked, because the order meant something, because his dad's grading had a logic to it that Harry had understood since he was seven and sat on the potions stool watching the red ink go down the margins. "You're going to bed."
"You're going to bed." Harry had not raised his voice. He had gone flat and certain, the register he did not know he was using, the one that made Ron's eyes go wide and made Hermione stop mid-sentence, the one he had absorbed through ten years of proximity to a man who never shouted because he never needed to.
Something moved behind the fever-glassed eyes, there and managed, and Harry could not read it because it was not on the list of things he had learned to read. It was new. It belonged to a category his dad did not usually let into the room.
"This is temporary," Snape told him. "A cold. I have had them before. They resolve."
"Okay." Harry held out the blanket from the back of the chair. "It can resolve in bed."
The Pepperup was in the store cupboard, second shelf, blue stopper. Harry knew where everything was. He had been told where everything was, item by item, year by year, in the careful flat voice his dad used for things that mattered, the voice that pretended it was reciting an inventory when it was building a child who would never be caught unprepared.
He brought the vial and a cup of tea. He had made the tea the way it was made for his dad. Strong, no sugar, the splash of milk added after, not before, because the order changed the way it sat. He had never been taught this. He had simply watched it happen every morning of his life and reproduced it without knowing he had memorized it.
Snape was in bed, upright against the headboard, looking deeply unimpressed by the entire arrangement. He took the Pepperup. Steam came out of his ears, which it did, and Harry did not laugh, which cost him.
"You may go," Snape informed him. "I am perfectly—"
His dad took the cup. He looked at it. He looked at it the way he looked at things that had caught him off guard, which was to say he looked at it for a beat too long and then arranged his face back into order. He drank. He did not comment on the milk going in after. He did not have to. The not-commenting was its own kind of comment, and Harry caught it, and put it away with all the other things he was not supposed to have noticed.
Harry pulled the chair over. The one from beside the fire, dragged across the stone with a sound that made Snape wince. He sat.
"You stayed." Harry said it plainly, without weight, as though it settled the matter, which it did. "When I was sick. Every time. You sat in the chair. I'm sitting in the chair."
The room was quiet. The fire moved. Somewhere above them the castle did the things the castle did at night, the long settling of old stone, the water-sound of the lake against the high windows.
Snape did not argue. That was the thing Harry would remember afterward. His dad, who argued with everyone, who could win a disagreement against a closed door, set the empty cup on the side table and leaned back against the headboard and let his eyes close and did not tell Harry to leave again.
Harry sat in the chair and watched him breathe and refilled the water glass when it got low and built the fire back up at the hour mark and did not sleep, because someone had taught him that you did not sleep when the person in the bed might need something, and he had learned it so young he did not remember being taught.
Severus surfaced near three.
The fever had broken into the damp, shivering aftermath that meant the worst of it had passed, and the room was warm, which it should not have been, because he had let the fire die before dinner and had not got up to tend it.
The fire was high. Banked properly, kindling to log, the way he had shown a seven-year-old who had wanted to be useful and had stood too close to the grate until he was moved back by the collar.
There was a fresh glass of water on the side table. The essays were gone from the desk, restacked in order on the side table, untouched, the third-year set still on top where he had left them.
And there was Harry, in the chair, awake, with the specific posture of a child who had decided he was not tired and had been losing the argument with himself for some hours.
He had built the infrastructure. All of it. The fire, the water, the tea made in the correct order, the blanket, the chair pulled close. He had assembled the entire architecture of care without being asked, without being thanked, without any expectation that it would be acknowledged, because somewhere in ten years of being kept, he had learned that this was what keeping looked like. Not the saying. The doing. The quiet, relentless, unannounced doing.
Severus had built that. Brick by brick, ward by ward, shoe by replaced shoe. He had told himself for a decade that the building was duty. That it was the discharge of an obligation he had not chosen. That it was, in its way, temporary, a thing he was managing until some unspecified point at which the managing would no longer be required.
He looked at the boy in the chair, who had stayed because Severus had stayed, who had memorized the milk going in after, who had moved the essays in the right order, and he understood, with the undefended clarity that came only at three in the morning with the fever just broken, that none of it had ever been temporary, and that he had known this, and that the child had known it longer.
"You should be asleep," Severus told him. His voice had come back partway. It was almost his own.
"You're awake." Harry got up. He refilled the water glass that did not need refilling. He put another log on the fire that did not need it. He sat back down. "Go back to sleep. I've got it."
He did not say the thing. He had never said the thing. He was not going to learn to say the thing at three in the morning with his head full of fever and his throat full of gravel.
But he let the boy keep the watch. He let himself be kept. He lay in the warm room his son had warmed and listened to him refill a glass that was already full, and he let it happen, and the letting was the closest thing to the saying that he had.
In the morning the fire was still high.
The chair was empty. Harry had gone up to the tower before the castle woke, the way he had carried a cake down before dawn another year, the way he did the things that mattered when no one was looking to see him do them.
On the side table, beside the restacked essays, the tea things had been washed and set out to dry.
Severus did not put them away.
He left them where they were, clean and drying in the grey morning light, for three days, until the next time the boy came down, and found them, and put them away himself without a word, because that was what keeping looked like, and they had both always known it.
