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This new life with Harry is... bizarre, to say the least. They eat together, they sleep together. They've adopted a deaf cat, for fuck's sake.
“Felix!” Harry cries as the goddamn feline attempts to steal a dollop of whipped cream from his plate with a determined paw. “You're acting as if we starve you.”
The fat thing has the nerve to meow back. Way too loudly, since the sorry thing cannot hear itself.
Severus sighs and puts the newspaper down. He's taken to reading the Prophet every morning while they have breakfast. “Why do you keep speaking to him?” He takes a drink of his deliciously bitter black coffee. “It's not like he can hear you, or understand you for that matter.”
Harry's mouth quirks up. “At least he pretends to listen to me when I'm talking, unlike someone else.”
Severus stops reading for a second, scowls at Potter.
“Are you sure you don't want any cream?” Harry asks, eyeing his mug as if it contained acid.
“Quite.”
Severus steals a glance at his odd companion. The morning light peers through the blinds, spilling over Harry's soft features. His hair is a black curly mop, wilful and untamed over his forehead. His eyes are bright and familiar. They flick up to Severus's face. He's breathtakingly beautiful—always has been, he thinks. Why couldn't he see it before? Was he that blind? He curses himself for having been so bitter and resentful for so long.
Severus had, against all reasonable expectation, survived the war. He had even been granted the dubious privilege of growing accustomed to being alive. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that he should eventually notice things he had once been too busy surviving to appreciate. Harry's hair. His cheap, obnoxious vanilla perfume. His strawberry shampoo. His ridiculous jumpers. His breath on Severus's marred neck.
“Sev...” Harry mutters, a lovely blush spreading across his face. “You're staring again.”
Severus frowns into his mug. Sorry, he wants to say, but what is the point of apologising when he knows it will happen again? He can hardly help himself. It occurs to him that Harry must be even more beautiful than Lily. He has her grace and lithe build, and of course her eyes, but Harry has a... solidness and self-assurance that she never possessed. There is something more grounded about him, something that seems to belong entirely to himself. He carries himself with an ease that Severus cannot quite reconcile with the boy he remembers—no longer all elbows and knobby knees, but broad-shouldered, warm, and unmistakably alive. Whatever Harry inherited from his mother, this is his alone.
Severus is profoundly appalled by this... domesticity of theirs. The routine they've established, it feels so shockingly natural, as if they've been doing this for decades instead of mere months. Their liaison, so to speak, was supposed to be a casual thing at first, the accidental, repulsive result of a night of too much drinking. Then it turned into something scandalous he did to take his mind off things, an escape of sorts. Then, before he knew it, he realised he'd started using the same filler words as Harry. Started thinking of the man while brewing his potions, or showering. Harry's bashful smile. The way his eyes darted to the wall as soon as Severus caught him looking.
Now if Harry goes to bed before him—which happens practically every night—as soon as Severus climbs in, Harry reaches for him. Even if he's half asleep, he'll roll over and stretch toward his side—his side! How strange to share the bed with anyone at all—until a hand or a foot makes contact. Then he sort of sighs and relaxes back into his dreams. He's not completely aware that he does it, but it happens every time. And, every time, Severus's heart does a stutter-thing, as if it wants to stop for a couple of seconds, aching like a gash in his chest. He kisses Harry on the shoulder and pulls up the blankets over him.
Harry also talks to plants whenever he thinks no one is looking, and talks in his sleep when he is really wiped out. Severus's secretly favourite thing is the time he mumbled, 'I don't want to be a turtle'. When Severus brought it up the next morning, Harry's face and neck flushed pink as he denied everything, and he definitely wasn't adorable, with his messy bed hair and sleepy eyes.
And when Harry is ill he becomes extraordinarily pathetic about it. Severus is exasperated but becomes almost absurdly attentive: potions, diagnostic spells, blankets, warm soup, checking his temperature. Harry milks it shamelessly.
About a month ago, on a random Tuesday, Harry announced they were going for a walk. Severus had already stopped pretending to protest. And what was he to do, besides follow this boy wherever he pleased? It was a nice day; the sun was out and the flowers swayed gently in the breeze. The cracked asphalt gradually gave way to a rough track. The houses thinned out as they went, replaced by overgrown lots and rusting fences. The path sloped gradually downhill, winding between weeds and heaps of discarded rubbish until the smell of rot and diesel announced the dump before they could see it.
Harry stopped in front of a dump. A literal garbage dump, apparently. He looked at Severus and said, “Give it a moment”. All of a sudden, about ten cats started emerging from random piles of garbage.
One of them was dragging its hind leg, looking quite thin and malnourished, and that's how Felix came along.
“Alright,” Harry relents, tearing a small piece from his disgustingly sweet waffle. Felix pounces, mewing way too loudly. “You can have one bite.”
He looks up at Severus, and he has no idea what expression he must be wearing, because Harry's face immediately splits into a giant grin.
He would kill and maim for this infuriating boy. There is no point pretending otherwise. He would happily give up his life again if need be; there's no question about it. He supposes this is love. An appalling condition. Quite incurable, apparently, and with the unfortunate side effect of making a perfectly intelligent man willing to die for someone who still couldn't tell him what would happen if you added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood. He loves him despite himself, which is perhaps the most damning part, because someone like him surely—
A sudden weight lands on his lap. Severus looks down.
The furry thing stares back at him.
Severus stiffens, afraid he will spill his coffee. For several seconds, neither of them moves.
“Why,” Severus asks eventually, “are you doing this?”
The cat, having apparently decided that this is not a question requiring an answer, turns in a circle twice and settles down with his entire weight against Severus's stomach.
He was pretending to read, but actually thinking about Lily. About Harry. About the past, and all the things he had done wrong, and all the things he had never done at all.
Now he is thinking about the fact that his trousers are covered in cat hair.
“Get off.”
Felix closes his eyes.
“Harry.”
No response.
“Harry. Your cat is sitting on me.”
“He is your cat too, you know.”
“He is sitting on me,” Severus repeats dumbly.
“That sounds like a you problem.”
Severus blinks at the ceiling.
The cat begins to purr.
Severus closes his eyes. This, he thinks, is his life now.