A Helping Hand
Rushing through his office, one arm overhead trying to stuff it into his dangling robe sleeve, a hastily grabbed leftover dinner roll crammed in his mouth since he'd missed breakfast, Severus Snape glance up at the clock on the stone wall of his office. Usually it told him useful things, nothing as worthless as the actual time of course, but things to get him places on time when he lost himself in the depths of a simmering cauldron. Since he lived alone his clock had one single ornate hand. But even his hasty glance told him something was wrong.
There, nestled there as if it had always been there between 'Time to Stir the Potion' and 'Time to Give Detention' was a new setting. 'Time to Shag Harry Potter'.
Snape saw red. Not lively happy Christmas red, nor even subdued graceful Gryffindor red, but seething boiling bottom of the cauldron red. The dinner roll dropped straight from his mouth to the floor.
'Time to...'
A hasty glance around the roughly circular face assured him that the other settings were untampered with. As if aware of his scrutiny the black arrow shaped hand backed off a stroke and clicked more firmly on 'Time to Teach the Brats', insisting on his attention.
Luckily there was no setting for killing anyone, though he was pretty sure there had been once, more as a joke really. For Severus Snape was truly in the mood, not to shag, but to kill Harry Potter. His temper, barely in check through the first two periods of the day was still at critical, boiling red level, and he didn't need a malfunctioning office clock to tell him it was time for lunch. Visions of feasting on oozing boy entrails danced before him as he made his way up to the teacher's table.
The Dream Team were all in place. He deliberately lowered his gaze at the shining star of the wizarding world currently inhabiting the lithesome body and sent his best glare across the table, through hapless student bodies still scrambling for their seats and into one just-looking-up-now, boy.
Harry Potter paled. Snape slitted his eyes. Potter had not been afraid of him, not enough to lose the youthful blush, for years. The Boy Who Lived was now the Boy Who Was So Busted.
By the time he got back to his office he'd decided not to confront the irritating child, refusing to give further ammunition for this particular prank. Instead he tried to focus on the warm satisfaction that comes from planning a really good revenge. He would take it out on the boy in slow delicious stages. The slightest infraction would earn Potter detention until the end of term.
The Slytherin tempered his gliding stride. End of term was only a few weeks away. Not nearly satisfying enough. A few weeks and his nemesis would be gone from these halls forever. That should be enough to recapture the satisfying glow in his belly. But it wasn't.
Snape stormed into his office enraged anew by the sodding clock and leaned over his desk to yank it off the stone wall. Bare fingers scraped bare stone and a tingle of magic rippled up his arm. The clock didn't budge. The arrow hand did though. It swung around to 'Time to Go to the Infirmary'. Snape looked down at his fingers. They were roughened and bleeding. Pulling out his wand he muttered a useful healing spell. His knuckles pinked up and the clock hand notched away from the infirmary setting, almost sulkily.
Narrowing his eyes Snape turned the wand to the timepiece. First he tried to remove the offending setting. Since he didn't know the actual spell used to hex the setting every version of 'finite incantatum' hung in the chill dungeon air like so much useless Latin.
Then he turned his attention to the clock itself. A simple removal spell should...didn't And unbinding spell then. By now he almost expected the stunning lack of results. Whoever had cast this particular set of spells was either an amazingly talented wizard or an insanely lucky one.
Unfortunately Harry Potter fit both descriptions. Snape had an uncomfortable flashback of the boy defeating the Dark Lord little more than six months ago, and then blithely going on with his studies as though nothing more untoward had happened than casting a warming spell on a shivering dog.
Not that Snape himself had ever done such a thing.
So he sat brooding over the sodding clock, drumming his fingers endlessly on the desk until the clock ticked over to 'Time for Some Damn Annoying Meal or Another'. This particular setting was set in tiny cramped letters near the bottom and took up the space of nearly two reminders.
Potter was insolent enough to look up at him as he walked into the Great Hall, but he easily squelched the odd look with a glare. Then, once the young man had looked away he tried to catalog that look. What had it been? By now however, the Gryffindor had his eyes firmly on his heaping plate.
Snape avoided looking at the cursed timepiece as he went through his office on the way to his quarters behind his office, vowing to end this annoyance tomorrow when he had the boy in class.
Not surprisingly Potter avoided his gaze during midweek potions class. In fact he was concentrating so hard on not looking at his teacher that he managed a credible potion. As the class filed out Snape waited until Potter was nearly at the door.
"Mr. Potter," he said simply, creating a whipcord effect with teenage necks as the one in question turned guiltily back. Burdened with books, cauldron and scales even a thin young man could effectively block the door that led to freedom.
For the rest.
"A word, please."
Looks were exchanged, running the range from sympathetic and curious to indignant as Potter watched with woeful eyes as the others filed out. Eyes down he made his way to the front of the classroom where Snape was waiting.
When the disconcertingly almost-his-height Gryffindor reached the front of his room Snape tucked his hands into the voluminous sleeves of his robe. "Two words actually. Remove it."
Owlish green eyes looked up at last and blinked. Then a dull flush crept up the nearly smooth cheek. "Excuse me?"
Snape's lips creased into a thin line. Oh good, the boy was going to try to bluff. "The spell, or charm or hex or whatever you used." Truth be told Snape still had trouble telling them apart. "The joke is over."
A frown compressed the young mouth. For a moment he looked like something violent was going to spill out until a burst of maturity tamped it down. "It wasn't a joke, sir."
Snape dismissed the nonsensical statement with a wave of his hand. "Prank, bet, dare, whatever. Remove it."
Something glittered deep in the emerald depths of the boy's eyes. As quickly as it interested the older man it vanished, replaced by a smooth mask. "It's...a complicated spell," the impudent pup said shrewdly. "I'll probably have to look stuff up."
Stalling. But why? "I will give you until after class on Friday on one condition."
Interest revived the slack posture. Snape continued, "If you tell me how you broke into my office."
Potter shuffled his feet and shrugged. "Invisibility cloak."
The teacher sighed. "Well, of course I thought of that. But you couldn't have cast the spell from under the cloak while I was present."
Snape didn't much like the look he got back. "I waited until you went into your quarters," Potter explained as if to a child. Snape resisted the urge to tap his foot impatiently.
"How did you get out then?" the older man asked. The offices and attached quarters were warded in each direction.
Youthful shoulders shrugged. "Waited until you went out the next morning."
Snape gaped. Then, hastily trying to ignore the thoughts that accompanied the idea of the boy sleeping scant yards from him, covered it, as he always did, with sarcasm. "Obviously the Gryffindor Head of House is more lax with her charges than I suspected." He made a dismissive gesture which moved the miscreant to action, gathering cauldron and books, turning to leave before turning slightly, looking over his shoulder.
Almost apologetically Potter said, "She thinks I have a boyfriend in another house." Just like that, tossed quickly behind the still too thin frame, and the boy was gone.
Snape began to avoid looking at the clock all together. Whenever he would think of one of the settings he missed he would visualize the errant one. 'Time to..' and he would stop himself with an inner snarl. He missed stirring a potion at a critical moment, and the batch was ruined. The potions professor stared into the sticky morass, head filling with acrid fumes and thought fleetingly that he saw shapes in the swirling, smoking fluid.
That...Sodding...Clock.
The boy continued to look up with whatever that expression was whenever Snape came to meals, even the ones the increasingly frustrated professor was late for. But this time whenever he sent his Death Glare toward the Gryffindor table the green eyes didn't turn away. Delicate red lips pursed first into a frown, then into a decidedly frustrated frown but the initial...expression, was always the same.
What was it? It looked suspiciously like hope. But that was absurd. The boy *was* hope. He needed none from his soon-to-be-ex Potions Master.
Snape managed to sleep until nearly 3 a.m. on Thursday night and knowing full well it would be useless to try to sleep any further, got up and dressed and went into his office. Finally, when he snuck a glance at the sodding timepiece it had gotten something right. It said, 'Time to Look For Miscreants'. At least that setting lay on the opposite side of the offensive one, the molded curves of the ornate hand looking almost gravid as it etched downward in a swirl of intricate loops and swirls of the design.
As he swept out of his office he thought he felt the slightest brush of something go past him, as though a slender form, wrapped in an invisibility cloak had been waiting in the halls for just such an occasion. Though his first instinct was to catch the boy red-handed, out after curfew, he knew he himself had set the deadline for Friday afternoon, but had given no thought to how the snoopy brat was to accomplish it.
As long as it was DONE.
Even though he was wandering the hall restlessly, the restlessness seemed more intense, as though he were searching for something. Slapping Potter senseless, perhaps. Yet, that wasn't quite it either. He gave it up after an unproductive two hours.
It was disquieting to stand in front of his own office door and think someone, anyone was inside. He unwarded the door and opened it slowly. There was no brush against him as of a retreating form. A near silent incantation, and the room glowed with soft light. With growing dread he looked up to the wall.
'Time to Shag Harry Potter.' Still tucked in between two useful entries. Things he *wanted* to do.
Had it been his imagination then, that near spectral brush of another? Severus Snape was not prone to fits of imagination. Perhaps because he'd just spent two solitary hours roaming the halls, or because he could not get the perceived unexpected brush of something out of his mind, but for the first time he allowed himself to wonder why the young man had done it. Had intruded, invaded, changed the orderly pattern of his Professor's life. And bollixed up his clock.
On Friday he found an excuse at least once an hour to check his office. As always, when he had no specific activity to be on time for the ornate hand stood in between two activities, poised to anticipate his schedule. The magical theory was, like most theory, tediously complicated.
Was Potter going to wait until after class itself to remove the spell? If he thought Snape was going to waste time on the project Potter was in for an awakening.
So it was with near fiendish glee, something he usually relished but hadn't felt much lately, that he watched the young Gryffindor enter his classroom with a definite air of resignation. Snape knew in that moment the boy couldn't remove the spell. Perhaps he'd tried and failed. Perhaps he'd just been stalling to try to learn the way of it. A satisfied smile stretched the edge of his lips. Any wizard who couldn't remove his own spell wasn't worth the name of wizard--a fact Snape would certainly enjoy dangling over Potter's head.
He could probably even count it against him on his upcoming N.E.W.T.S, if it hadn't been for that whole "killed Voldemort and saved the world" thing.
Class dragged on, and this time Potter didn't even try to escape when the last sands of the huge hourglass he kept on his desk dropped through. Slowly gathering his things, Potter shook he head at the inquiring entourage, resigned to his fate. When they were alone he hovered over the downcast youth.
"My office," he said tersely, and they were inside, and Potter hadn't even looked at him. "You can't remove it, can you?" Wordlessly Potter shook his head. "Then who cast it?"
Pride lifted the tousled head. "I did!" Potter exhaled sharply.
"Then you should be able to remove it."
"There's only one way."
Snape blinked. Then he slitted his eyes angrily. "Don't be ridiculous." Potter had the nerve to blush. "You owe me a clock."
The green eyes appeared to glaze over before the boy shook himself, almost literally. "Uh, you said 'clock' right?"
Snape's patience snapped. "Oh for...don't play this game with me. You won't win."
The scarred forehead furrowed. "I never thought of this as a game."
He forced his hands onto his forearms to prevent them from wrapping them around that pale throat. "I don't care what you thought it was. Remove the spell."
The thin frame heaved a heavy sigh. "It's spelled to you, sir," the young man said resignedly. "You just have to say, 'I don't want to shag Harry Potter'."
Simple. Elegant. Probably crackling with magic that would never be taught at Hogwarts. Whirling to face the wall. "I don't want to shag Harry Potter," he said clearly.
Nothing happened. He did notice that the hand sat firmly between the notch closest to the offending entry. Back around to face the boy in a 'well?' gesture. Potter coughed nervously.
"You, uh, have to mean it."
"Damn it, I do mean it," he said, turning back to see if there had been any change. There had been. The hand was one notch closer.
Behind him, Potter's voice was strange. "Maybe if you put more, uh, feeling into it."
Facing the offending device squarely he eyed it with his most malevolent glare. "I do not, repeat, do not want to shag Harry Potter." The arrow moved. Closer to 'Time to Shag Harry Potter."
Again Potter cleared his throat. "Are you sure you mean it? I tested the spell myself."
Of its own volition his face came down into one hand. "This is humiliating." And that, he realized must have been the point of the whole miserable exercise.
A very quiet voice just behind him said, "Not as humiliating as getting turned down, sir, if you don't mind my saying so." The slight form brushed past him, so reminiscent of that phantom last night that Snape startled. But Potter only stared at the clock on the wall.
Snape lifted his head from his hand and shook the hair back from his face. The boy didn't sound triumphant. He sounded...puzzled. Snape turned around just about the same time Potter did and watched, fascinated as a flush of color rose in the youthful cheeks.
"Maybe if we tried to...fool it," the boy suggested.
Snape frowned. "What are you talking about?" Green eyes flickered nervously up to his mouth, then away guiltily.
"Maybe pretend we..." The gaze flickered back to his mouth with that slightly glazed expression, then away again. "Never mind."
The Potions master harumphed. "I take your meaning." His own gaze flickered involuntarily toward the young man's mouth, the source of so much torment--verbal torment, he reminded himself. And came to the uncomfortable realization that warm green eyes rested on his own mouth.
Behind him, with an audible whirr of machinery, the ornate hand slid with the softest 'click' one notch closer to 'Time to Shag Harry Potter'. And he realized they'd go on staring unless he said, did something, that his downfall had to be of his own making. He wondered if the brat would laugh about it later, and to whom.
"Very well," he said resignedly, watching the glazed over eyes flee guiltily from Snape's mouth, as though his professor hadn't been doing exactly the same thing. He stepped forward, too focused on the brief movement to hear another slight 'click'.
The young man was still shorter than he was but not by much, his face turning up receptively like a woman's, not that either of them, apparently had kissed many of those. Nearly seven years of antagonism about to be wasted by the press of scant centimeters of skin. Never mind that the young man's centimeters were looking particularly delectable at the moment.
He leaned in slightly, making a move at last, but it was enough. Tentative lips touched his, started to part as if willingly, then slammed shut. A challenge then, he thought, though admittedly his brain wasn't quite clear. And there were all those infernal clicking noises.
Unsealing his own mouth Snape felt Potter start in surprise, surrendering to the assault before it had truly begun, slender arms sliding around his neck. Suddenly there was no space between their bodies at all as Potter clung to him with mouth and arms and restlessly moving thighs. Hips burrowed into his and he felt something hard, and something harder.
They parted suddenly, panting. Out of swollen, damp lips Potter said, "That wasn't enough."
"Not by a mile," he agreed, reaching for the boy again.
But the damp mouth grinned. "I meant for the clock."
Slowly he turned, and together they watched the ornate hand click over one notch closer.
"Sod the clock," he said, wondering where his breath had got to. A giggle beside him as Potter's hip settled against his own. At least it was a masculine giggle.
"I think you'll have more fun with me," said that insolent mouth.
"This wasn't a joke, was it?" he said, tracing a finger along the boy's lower lip.
"It was a gift."
Both of them knew they weren't talking about the clock anymore. Strong arms slid around his waist. "Don't you want to unwrap it?"
And now, unheeded, the ornate hand clicked with terrible triumphant finality onto the newest setting. 'Time to Shag Harry Potter'.
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