Chapter Text
The dungeon settled around him like something that had never needed to be warm stone walls that absorbed sound rather than reflecting it, torchlight that moved without illuminating, and at the centre of it all, Severus Snape, waiting with the particular stillness of a man who had long since stopped requiring comfort from his surroundings, and who was watching Harry with the specific attention of someone who had already begun to assess.
"Did you see everything?" Harry asked, and the question left his mouth before he had decided whether he wanted the answer.
"Flashes," Snape said. He offered nothing more, though his eyes remained on Harry a moment longer than the situation required.
"Did the Sorting Hat actually suggest Slytherin for you?" The question came out quieter than his classroom voice almost as though Snape had not entirely meant to ask it.
"Yes," Harry said, shorter and angrier than he intended, because something about the way Snape asked not mocking, not dismissive, just genuinely curious made the answer feel more exposed than it should have.
"For a first attempt, that was not as poor as it might have been," Snape said, and the concession clearly cost him nothing which was precisely why it landed the way it did. He raised his wand again without waiting for Harry to respond. "You stopped me eventually. You wasted considerable time and energy shouting before you managed it."
"Focus is the requirement," he continued. "Repel me with your mind, and the wand becomes irrelevant."
"I'm trying," Harry said, sharper than he meant to. "But you're not telling me how."
Snape looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone who had just been told the sky was an unexpected colour. The expression said: you have missed something obvious, and I am choosing not to explain what.
"Manners, Potter." He let the silence sit for exactly as long as he chose to. "Close your eyes."
Harry closed his eyes.
He tried to do what was asked to find the place where thought stopped and nothing began. But the dungeon did not disappear when he closed his eyes, and neither did Snape. The cold remained. The particular quality of his silence remained, and with it the awareness that the man was standing close enough that Harry could have reached him without taking a step, which was precisely the kind of thought he was supposed to be clearing.
"Clear your mind. Let go of all emotion."
Harry revealed nothing, except that one feeling.
"You are not doing it, Potter. Clear your mind "
He knew. That was the problem.
"You will need considerably more discipline than this. Focus."
Harry focused, or tried to. He pushed at his own thoughts the way you push at something that doesn't want to move without leverage, without knowing where to place it in his head. The harder he reached for stillness, the more it receded. "Again," Snape said, and let a silence settle that felt precisely calibrated.
"On my count. One —"
Harry straightened.
"Two —"
He tried to find the empty place.
"Three. Legilimens."
It was not like falling. It was like being turned inside out.
Images without order: a dragon, black and enormous, waking up from a wet dream. His parents' faces in glass, smiling the way they only ever smiled in things that weren't real. And then briefer than the rest, staring at his potion teacher from a distance. The particular stillness of his face at close range. The edges from a of the dream, that was the one he had been trying to protect. Something came out of him that broke the spell before the dream could open fully not quite a word, a sound and then he was back in the dungeon, on his knees, the stone cold under his palm.
He was on his knees without remembering going down. The stone was cold under his palm and his breathing had gone wrong too fast, too shallow, his chest refusing to cooperate and somewhere above him Snape was standing with the knowledge of exactly what Harry had just failed to protect.
A hand came to rest on his shoulder. "Can you stand?"
Snape's voice was not gentle. But it was careful, in the way that a man is careful when he has just seen something he was not supposed to see and has not yet decided what to do with it. Harry looked up.
Snape's facial expression were blank, visible sealed, controlled, giving nothing and yet his had just been inside his head casting. Harry knew that sealed was not the same as empty. The dream-version of him had been warm, had leaned against Harry's body completely naked, with his manhood pressed insistently against his lower body. Noooo, he absolutely must not see.
The one in front of him stood perfectly still and the air between them felt like a silencio that hadn't quite taken not silent, but waiting. Harry got to his feet. His legs were steadier than he expected, which felt like a small dishonesty on the part of his body.
Professor Snape had stepped back. Not far, but the careful distance was restored and with it something in his expression that functioned like a ice door being closed from the inside.
"You are not trying." Each word placed with deliberate to hurt. "You are making no effort. You are allowing me access to memories you fear, handing me weapons, and calling it an attempt. Empty yourself of emotion."
Harry was in a panic, the dream had Snape seen it? Harry knew he had seen it bit of it. Neither of them was going to be the first to say so. "I'm finding that hard at the moment," Harry said, and didn't bother to make it sound like anything other than what it was. Snape looked at him the way he looked at a potion that had gone exactly as badly as predicted.
"Then you will find yourself easy prey for the Dark Lord. Fools who wear their hearts on their sleeves, who cannot control their emotions, who wallow in sad memories and allow themselves to be provoked this easily weak people, in other words they stand no chance against his powers. He will penetrate your mind with absurd ease."
Weak, the word landed somewhere specific. Harry felt it settle, and felt something else settle alongside it not agreement, but resistance, rising fast and without permission.
"I am not weak."
He said it quietly, which was worse than shouting would have been. And then before the word had finished landing, before Snape could answer, before Harry himself had fully registered what his body had already decided he closed the distance between them in one step and kissed Snape with both hands against his face, not asking, not waiting, because he had run out of the capacity to suppress his feelings.
Snape did not move.
That was the thing Harry would carry with him afterward, the absolute arrested stillness of a man whose body had stopped mid-instruction and not yet received a new one, held in place like Petrificus Totalus cast from the inside.
Harry stepped back. His hands dropped.
For one unguarded moment, Snape's expression was something Harry had no name for not fury, not disgust, but something rawer than either. His jaw locked. A muscle jumped there, visible. His shoulders drew back, spine straightening as if reclaiming ground that had been taken without permission.
Harry ducked and run reflex through years living with Dursley's, years of learning to read a body before it moved and didn't wait to see what came next. He turned and run to the door with whatever was left of his composure, which was not much.
Behind him, he heard nothing.
That was worse than shouting would have been.