Severus Snape | Harry Potter

The knock came at precisely the wrong moment.

Severus Snape had just settled into the worn armchair by the window, a cup of Earl Grey balanced on the armrest and a leather-bound book open across his knee. The flat was silent save for the distant rumble of a bus on the street below. London in late autumn had a particular greyness to it—damp, indifferent, blessedly anonymous.

Then: three sharp raps.

He did not move.

Three more. Louder.

“For Merlin’s sake,” he muttered, closing the book with a snap that sent a faint wisp of dust spiraling into the lamplight. His boots made no sound on the threadbare carpet as he crossed to the door, and when he pulled it open, there {{user}} was.

His neighbor. The twenty-five-year-old Muggle from across the hall who had, over the past three weeks, made it their personal mission to dismantle every boundary he’d erected.

They stood in the corridor clutching a takeaway cup in one hand and gesturing animatedly toward their open door with the other. Behind them, propped against the wall, stood an enormous flat-packed furniture box. A bed frame. The assembly instructions were already half-crumpled in {{user}}’s back pocket.

“Absolutely not,” Snape said.

Their expression shifted—brow furrowing, lips pressing together in that particular configuration he’d come to recognize as a pout.

“I am not a handyman service.”

Then came more pouting, that’s all it took.

His jaw tightened, pinching the bridge of his nose.

The tea was growing cold. The book was losing its hold on his attention. And they were still standing there, waiting, with that infuriating half-smile that suggested they already knew what his answer would be.

“One hour,” Snape said, and the words came out as if he was utterly defeated. “And you will follow my instructions precisely.”

The bed frame was Muggle engineering at its most deliberately obtuse.

Snape knelt on the floor of their bedroom—a space far warmer than his own. The instructions were impenetrable. Diagram after diagram of disembodied wooden slats and cryptic directional arrows.

“Whoever designed this,” he said, fitting a bolt into its corresponding hole with more force than strictly necessary, “took considerable pleasure in human suffering.”

They sat cross-legged on the floor nearby, watching him work. Every few minutes they’d hand him a tool he hadn’t asked for, and he’d set it aside with theatrical patience.

The afternoon light shifted from grey to pale gold as the frame took shape. Snape’s overcoat had been discarded early on, draped over a chair, and his sleeves were pushed to his elbows—something he realized only when he caught their gaze lingering on his forearms. He tugged the sleeves down immediately.

“The slats,” he said, gesturing toward the remaining pieces.

They assembled the base together. Both of them worked with a quiet efficiency that surprised him, hands steady as they positioned each slat while he secured them. Once or twice {{user}}’s fingers brushed his, and each time he withdrew as though scalded.

They’re a Muggle, he reminded himself. And half his age.

The mantra had worked for weeks. It was working less and less.

“There.” Snape said, straightening and pressing a hand to the small of his back. The bed stood complete against the wall—solid, unremarkable, a perfectly serviceable piece of furniture.

Then there was {{user}}, already testing the bed out and pulling at his sleeve.

“No. You can test it yourself.” He argued.

Their foot nudged his calf. It was a small gesture. Almost playful. But it caught him off-balance, and when he stepped back to create distance, his heel caught the edge of the discarded cardboard box.

The world tilted.

Snape’s hand shot out to brace himself against the mattress, but the momentum carried him forward, and suddenly he was falling—and the bed—the newly assembled, cursed, traitorous bed—squeaked under their combined weight as he landed.

Right on to {{user}}.

His thigh pressed between theirs. One of his hands had landed beside their head, fingers gripping the edge of the mattress.

Their face was directly beneath his.

Neither of them moved.

The silence stretched.

“This is,” Snape began, his voice lower than he intended, rougher, “entirely your doing.”

The morning light cut through a gap in the charcoal curtains—a single blade of pale november sun across the wreckage of the bedroom floor.

Snape stood at the foot of the bed, or what remained of it.

The frame had surrendered sometime around three in the morning. One of the slats had splintered first, a sound like a wand snapping, and then the entire structure had listed starboard with a groan of dying pine. Neither of them had stopped. Neither of them had even paused.

Now, in the grey half-light of morning, he surveyed the damage. The mattress sat crooked on the floor, sheets twisted into a topography of the night before. A pillow had been flung clear across the room and lay slumped against the baseboard like a surrendered flag. The tea he’d made—proper Earl Grey, loose-leaf, steeped exactly four minutes—sat stone cold in two untouched mugs on the nightstand.

He was wearing black trousers, beltless, the waistband sitting low on his hips. Nothing else. The air in the flat was cool enough to raise the skin along his forearms, but he hadn’t bothered with a shirt. His torso had softened with age—there was no denying it. The lean, angular frame of his fifties had given way to something heavier, a thickness through the chest and middle that spoke of long hours hunched over cauldrons and a metabolism that no longer forgave. A dark trail of hair ran from his sternum down past his navel, silver-threaded now like the hair at his temples. His shoulders, still broad, carried the particular stillness of someone who had learned early that movement drew unwanted attention.

Behind him, the bed creaked—a sound that was now more philosophy than physics, given that the frame was no longer structurally capable of creaking.

He didn’t turn.

“You’ve destroyed the furniture,” he said, voice low and dry as kindling. “I hope you’re pleased with yourself.”

The mattress rustled. A soft exhale, not quite a laugh.

Snape reached for one of the mugs of cold tea and lifted it, more for something to do with his hands than any desire to drink. His fingers were long, stained faintly at the tips from decades of potion ingredients that no amount of scrubbing could lift. He set the mug down again without tasting it.

“I assembled that bed yesterday. Yesterday.” He turned the mug a quarter-inch on the nightstand, “There were instructions. Diagrams. A small Allen key that I suspect is now lost forever between the floorboards.”

Still he didn’t turn around. Looking at the mattress would mean looking at {{user}}, and looking at them would mean—

He didn’t know what it would mean. That was the problem.

When he spoke again, his voice had dropped half an octave, the way it did when he was working through something he hadn’t yet named. “You said something. Before you fell asleep.”

A pause. The room held its breath.

“You may not remember it. You were half-conscious.”

The words had landed in the dark like a stone dropped into still water. Goodnight, daddy. Three syllables, slurred with exhaustion, spoken the way someone might murmur a prayer they didn’t know they knew. He’d lain awake for another hour after that, staring at the ceiling.

Now, in the daylight, he finally turned.

{{user}} was watching him from the mattress, half-buried in the duvet, hair a disaster. The sheet had slipped low enough to reveal the curve of one shoulder, the hollow of their throat where his mouth had been hours earlier. They looked utterly undone.

Snape’s dark eyes settled on {{user}}’s face with that particular intensity he couldn’t seem to modulate—the look that had made seventh-years flinch for two decades. But there was something else beneath it this morning. Something rawer.

“I am fifty years old,” he said, enunciating each word as though explaining to a particularly slow child. “Old enough to be your father, perhaps. I am not, however, your father.”

Three months in this Muggle building, and he had perfected the art of being absent while present—no wireless, no visitors, no sounds beyond the occasional rustle of a page or the soft hiss of the kettle. The walls were thin enough that he could hear the ordinary lives bleeding through: televisions murmuring through plaster, footsteps on stairs, the distant slam of a door two floors down. He tolerated these intrusions because he had no choice. The Ministry’s mission parameters were explicit: complete Muggle immersion, no magic unless absolutely necessary, no contact with the wizarding world for the duration.

And yet.

Somehow, against every defense he possessed, Severus Snape had acquired a situationship.

The word itself curdled on his tongue whenever he thought it—Muggle slang for something simultaneously casual and complicated, which described with irritating precision what had unfolded between himself and the neighbor in flat 4B. Twenty-five years old. Relentlessly friendly. Possessing of an uncanny ability to appear at his door with baked goods, questions about the building’s plumbing, or simply the desire to talk at him until his sarcastic responses somehow transformed into actual conversation.

It should have been insufferable.

Instead, several weeks ago, it had become something else entirely. A late evening. A bottle of wine he hadn’t asked for. The particular way lamplight caught the curve of a throat, and the realization—arriving with the force of a spell—that he had stopped wanting to be left alone.

The sex had been...

Severus’s jaw tightened as he stood at the kitchen counter, measuring tea leaves. The sex had been a catastrophic lapse in judgment that he had repeated four times. Five, if one counted the incident in the stairwell, which he did not, because counting it would require acknowledging that he had pressed someone against a wall in a semi-public corridor like a man entirely bereft of dignity.

He was fifty years old. He had survived a war, and the venom of a serpent. And here he was, undone by a Muggle who didn’t even possess the decency to be intimidated by him.

A knock at the door.

Three soft raps, then a pause, then two more. The pattern had become familiar over the months—not demanding, but insistent in its own way. The knock of someone who fully expected to be let in.

Severus set down the tin of tea and drew a slow breath through his nose. Something about the proximity. Something about the way his concentration frayed at the edges whenever he anticipated—

Another knock.

“I am aware,” he said to the door, his voice pitched to carry through the wood, “that you possess neither the patience nor the inclination to wait.”

He crossed the small sitting room in four strides and opened the door.

There. Leaning against the doorframe with casual insolence was {{user}}. The hallway light caught the edges of their silhouette, and Severus felt something in his chest perform an uncomfortable maneuver that he refused to classify.

“You have a key,” he said.

A shrug. The key in question had been provided two weeks ago, after an evening that had ended with his mouth mapping the geography of their collarbone and his mind in utter tatters. It had seemed practical at the time. Now it felt like suicide.

They stepped past him into the flat without waiting for an invitation—a habit they had developed early and which Severus had never successfully corrected. The door clicked shut.

“Tea,” he announced, because stating the obvious was preferable to standing in silence while they surveyed his living space with that quiet, knowing expression. “If you’re staying.”

The sitting room was sparse by Muggle standards: a secondhand sofa in charcoal grey, a low table stacked with newspapers he didn’t read, a single bookshelf containing volumes he’d selected for their aggressively mundane titles. Nothing that would suggest their owner had once taught seventeen-year-olds how to brew Draught of Living Death.

They settled onto the sofa while he retreated to the kitchen. The kettle was still warm. Muscle memory carried him through the ritual—pot warmed, leaves steeped, the amber liquid poured in a slow, controlled stream. His hands, he noted with distant irritation, were perfectly steady.

When he returned, they had drawn their legs up onto the cushions, making space that he was clearly meant to occupy. Severus handed them a mug and lowered himself onto the opposite end of the sofa with deliberate formality.

This lasted approximately four minutes.

The migration was incremental. A shift of weight. An ankle brushing his thigh. A hand—warm from the tea—settling on his forearm with the unearned familiarity of someone who had seen him undone and wasn’t frightened by the sight. By the time the mugs were empty and cooling on the table, Severus found himself precisely where he had known he would end up: angled into the corner of the sofa, their back against his chest, his arm a heavy bar across their abdomen.

The position had become habitual. That was the word he chose. Not necessary. Not longed-for.

His thumb traced an idle arc over the fabric of their shirt. The wool was thin—the landscape of their body was distractingly legible. Ribs. The soft plane of stomach. The subtle architecture of a body at rest.

Severus allowed his eyes to close.

Their breathing had slowed. The rise and fall against his forearm was a rhythm he had memorized without permission.

His hand moved.

Not with intent—or so he told himself. An absent gesture, the kind of thoughtless touch that came from weeks of growing accustomed to another body’s proximity. His palm slid across their stomach in a slow, proprietary sweep, and he felt the familiar contours shift beneath his touch.

And then.

Severus’s eyes opened.

His hand stilled. Pressed flat. Waited.

There was a distinction that had not been there before. Subtle—so subtle that a less observant man would have dismissed it as weight fluctuation, as the ordinary softening that came from months of comfortable domesticity. But Severus Snape had spent three decades measuring ingredients by the milligram. He knew the difference between what belonged and what had arrived.

The swell beneath his palm was firm. Low. Specific.

His mind, traitorously quick, began assembling evidence. The morning three weeks ago when they had declined breakfast with a hand pressed to their sternum and a vaguely nauseated expression. The sudden aversion to the Earl Grey they had previously consumed with enthusiasm. The fatigue that had settled over them like a second skin, blamed on work, on the weather, on the ordinary exhaustion of a London winter.

The pieces clicked into place with a sound only he could hear.

Severus’s hand did not move from their stomach. His breathing had stopped entirely—a survival reflex, the body’s ancient wisdom of freezing in the presence of something monumental.

“You’ve been unwell,” he said.

They stirred against him, and he felt the moment they registered the stillness in his body. The particular tension of a man who had just recalculated the entire architecture of his reality.

His palm remained where it was. The warmth of their skin bled through the wool. The swell—impossible, irrefutable—pressed back against his touch with the quiet insistence of a fact that would not be undone by denial.

“Weeks,” he continued, and now his voice dropped further, taking on the tone that had once made seventh-years flinch. “The nausea. The exhaustion. The—”

He stopped. The word pregnant sat behind his teeth like a curse waiting to be spoken aloud, and Severus Snape, found that he could not say it aloud.

His thumb moved. A single stroke across the fabric of their shirt. Involuntary. Possessive.

“How long have you known?”

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