Someday My Prince Will Come (Harry Potter fanfic)

[onkoona]

Fandom: Harry Potter
Summary: "It had all started with that Advanced Potions book. Harry knew that very well. Even on the first day he used it, it helped him win the Felix Felicis potion, on which so much had depended later. Being distracted by the mystery book, it had also been the first time he wasn't thinking of Sirius' troubled life and horrible death for hours on end. It was the moment the fun of magic returned to him."
Original prompt: #5 The Order moves Severus to Grimmauld Pl. to recuperate from Nagini's attack and be kept safe from Death Eaters still at large. He shows up with a baby (up to 2 years old would do). Potter's baby. How did it happen? How is it that Harry doesn't know about it? Happy ending please.
Pairing: Harry/Severus
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 23k
read it on AO3
or in the original fest pages: DW,LJ or IJ

or read it here:

Someday My Prince Will Come (...and if he doesn't, I'll just go and bloody well fetch him myself!)

Disclaimer: Don't own, just playing with some one else's shiny toys, no offense intended.


Ten days. It had been ten days since the 'Battle of Hogwarts', as the Prophet was calling it now. Not that Harry had bothered to read more than the one issue that listed all the casualties. That one he'd put in the bottom drawer of his dresser in Sirius' - now Harry's – room at Number 12. Harry didn't touch a paper after that, not wanting or needing to know more.

So many had died. Some had been his friends, like Fred and Lupin and Tonks and Colin, some he'd known from school or from the Ministry, mostly by their names or their faces in the hallways at school, and in the magically moving photos in the Prophet, and some whose names or faces meant nothing to him. And they were all dead.

As Harry lay back on his bed - Sirius' old bed, with clean sheets - he looked up at the canopy roof with its bunched-up material in the middle. From his vantage point he couldn't see whether the pointy part of the canopy was held up in a proper peak or whether it was woefully sagging down like a sack. But he didn't feel enough curiosity for that minor question, or for any question at all, to sit up and find out, actually. No, he only felt inclined to lie in the middle of the bed, in a practically empty old house, in the middle of a late spring day, and stare into space for as long as possible.

Such were the young man's thoughts that day; ten days after the battle that ended the first part of his young life.

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It was his stomach that drove him out of his room some hours later, and he, almost out of habit now, moved nearly silently on the landings and the stairs on his way to the kitchen. It didn't occur to him until he arrived at his destination that his stealth had been totally unnecessary; Snape was in Regulus' old room, still deeply insensible in his coma, and Harry knew better than to putter around the kitchen by himself, lest he upset Kreacher. So he put stealth aside and called the old Black family house-elf for a plate of sandwiches and a pot of tea.

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As he munched on finger sandwiches, again lying on his bed, looking at the canopy again - it was only sagging a little, Harry had noted as he'd come back into his room to receive the 'proper tea' Kreacher had insisted on serving - Harry's thoughts turned into a different direction from before.

Snape. In the room on the other side of the landing. Alive, but in a coma. And, Harry thought, even if he wasn't comatose, what good was that to Harry? Snape was not Harry's Prince, now was he?

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It had all started with that Advanced Potion-Making book. Harry knew that very well. Even on the first day he used it, it helped him win the Felix Felicitas potion, on which so much had depended later. Being distracted by the mystery book, it had also been the first time he wasn't thinking of Sirius' troubled life and horrible death for hours on end. It was the moment the fun of magic returned to him.

Harry had been enchanted and captivated by everything the Half-Blood Prince had written in the margins of the tattered tome: from potion recipes, to mysterious spells, to random bits of wisdom, and even a few lines of poetry here and there. And Harry read and reread pages of it every night before bed.

And then, one night not long after Halloween, he had the first dream.

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Harry knew at once he was dreaming; from past experience he could at least tell a vision from a dream, even if he couldn't always tell one kind of vision from another. And this was definitely a dream.

Harry's dreams - if they weren't of the flying-in-the-clouds variety - were usually dark and shadowed affairs, and this one was no different. Harry found himself standing at a potions worktable, like the ones in class, with the far side of the table swallowed up by shadows and with a seemingly black nothingness to his left. In front of him stood a lit burner with a small pewter cauldron on it, bubbling merrily, and jars, packets, pouches and bottles of all kinds of ingredients were laid out on the table, ready for use.

"You'd better add the Marigold tincture or you'll lose this batch," a male voice spoke from Harry's right. He looked over to the shadowed figure that stood there, tending a simmering cauldron of his own.

"Get on with it," the voice urged, some irritation showing in it. The figure's head nodded as if to indicate Harry's cauldron and Harry quickly looked back, seeing it starting to blow big black bubbles. Oh dear, that was no good.

He quickly grabbed the nearest ingredient bottle, one with a green sluggish substance inside, but found it had no label. He put it back and tried the next to it, a brown bottle with some inky dark liquid inside, and found that also unlabeled. He tried the next one, something blue: unlabeled. And the next one: unlabeled again. And the next and the next, and in fact all bottles on the table turned out to be unlabeled and Harry's cauldron was now starting to spew oily bubbles that released a caustic smelling vapour upon bursting. And he started to panic, knowing he'd gotten caught, yet again, in a horrible nightmare.

"Here, use this," the voice said from his right and a clear bottle holding a golden liquid appeared in Harry's desperate grasp.

He looked over at his neighbour and asked, "How much?"

The figure actually harrumphed, and shaking his shadowed head, he said, "All of it, you idiot," before turning back to his own cauldron, apparently not bothered by the eye-watering smoke drifting his way from Harry's work top.

Harry turned his attention back to his now madly sizzling potion. He quickly broke the neat wax seal on the bottle with his thumb, yanked out the cork and upended the bottle over the cauldron, while using his other hand to ward off some of the fumes from his face. The moment the golden liquid hit the out-of-control potion, the ominous hissing stopped, the bubbles died down and, instead of noxious gasses, a light floral scent now emanated from the cauldron. Harry exhaled his tension in a deep sigh, almost haphazardly putting the empty bottle on the work station. There was a clank of glass on wood.

"A bit more respect, if you please; quality glass vials are costly, you know," Harry's companion said, not even bothering to look over at Harry and seeming not even to pause the steady stirring of his own potion.

Harry turned around to look properly at the shadowed figure for a long moment. He couldn't see much but a young male's physique, dressed in school robes, with dark hair and a light complexion. When he tried to see his face or his house crest on the robe, he found he couldn't, that it all remained vague, undefined. That too seemed to confirm that this was a dream and not a vision. Visions were always painfully detailed.

As the student worked on his potion in silence, seemingly being on an endless loop of adding an ingredient, then stirring for a while and then adding another ingredient, Harry had time to decide what to do next. The dream hadn't ended yet, and at the moment it wasn't an unpleasant dream at all, so Harry was quite keen to keep it going for a while longer.

Harry found his eyes hypnotically following the shadowed man's smooth movements. This student looked to be really good at making potions. Each movement was as though rehearsed to perfection, making the whole process look like what Harry thought a ballet ought to look like: graceful, but without frills or a single wasted motion, beautiful. Just as Harry would imagine the Half-Blood Prince's style of brewing would have been.

The Half-Blood Prince. Of course! Harry found he could've hit himself for not seeing it before; this was a dream, so of course his whatsit mind had called up a dream version of the only other person - apart from Ron and Hermione - Harry had felt a connection with since Sirius died.

A warm feeling went through him. Thank you, whatsit mind - 'subconscious' mind, Hermione had called it, Harry was almost sure - for giving me a nice dream for once. Now he only needed to keep the dream going. And Harry found he wanted to get to know this dream person a bit, before the dream faded. After a moment of thought he decided to go in boldly.

"Uh, you're the Half-Blood Prince, right?" he stammered. The figured stilled in mid-stir and then slowly turned his head toward Harry, still holding the stirring rod dipped into the potion and a few leaves of some ingredient or other in his other hand.

"I am," he said, his dark eyes glittering for a moment before he turned back to the cauldron and started stirring again, adding the leaves one by one to the purple potion he was making.

"So, may I call you 'Prince'?" Harry asked.

"You may," came the reply; this time the 'Prince' kept his eyes on his potion, which was starting to come to a soft boil, turning a deep blue, with light blue steam coming off the surface. Harry was mesmerized by the pure colors; he wished he could do it that cleanly.

"So what are you making?" Harry asked. And the Prince told him, but this being a dream, Harry was not too surprised he couldn't hear the potion's name properly. Harry then asked how it was made and the Prince started on a long dissertation on potion properties and brewing techniques, and to Harry it was just like reading the Prince's Advanced Potion-Making book and it felt restful and soothing and...

And Harry found he didn't have any nightmares that night - or visions, not that he'd seriously expected those - and the next day's Potions class was a roaring success, because Harry remembered that, in the dream, the Prince had advised always to use a stone pestle to pulverize dried berries and not the brass one, and so Harry had the only potion that achieved full marks on potion color that day, much to Hermione's annoyance. Of course Harry was sure he'd gotten that trick from the notes somewhere in the book, even if he couldn't find them again after a cursory flip through, and that his own subconscious had inserted it into the dream, but he was grateful of the reminder nevertheless.

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Over the next weeks, schoolwork was keeping Harry and his friends busy. Besides that, Harry had his interesting but slightly scary meetings with the headmaster about Voldemort and his past and any time Harry had left over, meaning none, he spent being at odds with Snape.

Snape had started off Harry's DADA year with trying to hex him. Harry was sure it had been a deliberate and vindictive action on the part of the DADA-teaching Death Eater, but none of his friends seemed to agree with him on that and, to be fair, after that horrid first class of the year, the Greasy Git had been a great teacher to the whole class, Slytherins and Gryffindor alike.

Urg, the man was just playing nice to throw people off the scent, was what Harry thought privately. But publicly he took every single one of the disagreeable man's lessons to heart. Because even Harry had to admit reluctantly that Snape was a brilliant DADA teacher.

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Harry knew at once that he was dreaming again. He was walking down a shadowed generic Hogwarts hallway, going from one class to the next, judging by the heavy school bag that hung off his shoulder and the thick tomes he was pressing to his chest. And next to him walked the Prince, setting a strong pace, as if in some hurry. With his shorter legs Harry quickly started to fall behind.

"Hold up!" he called and changed his stride to a running action to catch up with his companion, who indeed was slowing down some.

"Oh, there you are," the Prince grouched as he gave Harry a quick look, making a tuft of half-long hair swing into the Prince's face. Harry hadn't noticed until now that the young man's hair was longish and quite black. He decided he liked it.

"Well, are you coming?" the Prince asked, sounding a little impatient.

"Come where? I mean, where to?" Harry asked.

"Charms, of course," the Prince said, and he turned back into the direction he'd been going and started walking again, albeit noticeably slower.

"Sure," Harry said excitedly as he quickly caught up with his companion and started walking next to him. Charms with the Prince, well that's gotta be good, if the Advanced Potion-Making book was anything to go by!

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Charms class with the Prince was great. It was just the two of them in a space that vaguely looked like Flitwick's classroom, but at the same time not. And, of course, it was a lot darker because it was a dreamscape, after all.

The next morning Harry was very disappointed that he couldn't remember which charms they had practised, but at least he remembered how wonderful it had been to have the Prince help him with the wand movements. Flitwick was a good teacher, no question, but the Prince was better; it wasn't that he had more knowledge - he had lots, but that wasn't it - it was more that he remembered how he had learned it and he was able to teach Harry to do it the same way.

The power of Charms turned out to be largely about clearly formulating one's desire and doing the wand movement as precisely as possible. And the Prince had hinted that the same applied to all spell work, Charms, Transfigurations and DADA. Harry was very glad he remembered that part, and he promptly applied it in all his classes, not always successfully at first, but practice makes perfect, the Prince had said so.

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It wasn't until Christmas, when his friends started to divvy up into couples and started snogging in any halfway private location, usually where Harry could see them before deliberately turning his back, that Harry started thinking about the Prince in a different light.

He spent a rare free hour sitting on the windowsill of the dormitory Harry shared with his male house- and year-mates, staring out over the cold Scottish countryside that was softly lit by a steel grey sky. But his eyes didn't register the near frosty peaks and defoliated trees. No, his mind was on the shadowy figure of the Prince, with his deep dark eyes in a pale face, lank black hair hanging close to a strong nose, long pale fingers that held a wand or stirring rod with such grace.

Harry tried to recall the many dreams he'd had with the Prince. More often than not he'd only had a snippet of a moment with the Prince before his dreams moved on into another scene altogether. Long or short, each dream had both of them together, either in a class, Potions, Charms, Transfiguration, even History of Magic one time, or it had them walking from one classroom to another.

Sometimes there was time to talk, but mostly the moment Harry made eye contact with the Prince, he would feel a brief flash of happiness and the dream would move on to other things. Even though the dream would be short, that happy feeling seemed to dispel the bad dreams for the rest of the night, so Harry couldn't feel totally sorry for himself. But still, he did wish there was more time to be shared between them.

And then there had been the time that they had accidentally touched. It was in the Potions-class setting and the Prince had handed Harry an ingredient bottle – unlabeled, of course - and Harry had misjudged the distance between the bottle and his hand and he had wrapped his hand around the part of the bottle where the Prince was holding it.

As his fingers had touched the other's, it was as if electricity had gone up his arm, and part of it had gone to his brain and the other part had traveled down low. He had looked up straight into the Prince's widely startled dark eyes and for a moment the world stood still while Harry's brain and masculine bits seemingly started to sizzle. Then the other drew his hand back and Harry experienced a brief vertigo before realizing he was now riding a broom at great speed, so high up that he was enveloped in a white fluffy cloud and icy cold winds pulled strongly at his cloak. But Harry was not feeling cold at all, quite the opposite.

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Sitting on his windowsill in the sixth-year dormitory, Harry decided he wanted to touch the Prince again. The Prince had felt different from anybody he had touched before. He made a short mental list of the people he'd touched in his life. Not the Dursleys. If anything, Vernon and Petunia had dragged him around by his sleeve or any other handy piece of clothing. There had been the Weasleys, first Ron, but he wasn't much for touching people, males in particular, then Mrs. Weasley: touching her was warm and soft but there was no electricity there, good thing, too, 'cause that would have been kind of weird.

Then there were the other Weasleys, and Harry remembered enjoying looking at Charlie and Bill that summer; they were both very handsome. And Harry also remembered getting a talking-to from Mrs. Weasley - he and Ron and the twins - for excluding Ginny from whatever it was they had been doing that afternoon. It was only then that Harry had noticed Ginny had even been there. He remembered feeling guilty; it's rude to ignore someone, however unintentionally, and he had done his best to include her more.

Hermione was like a sister to Harry, so he had never sought out any more from her but a close friendship. And then Cho had made a move on him last year and he had decided to let it happen, hoping fireworks would ensue, but, disappointingly, they didn't. Harry very gently broke it off with Cho and after that he'd been too busy with Voldemort's attack on the Ministry and Sirius' death for any more interpersonal stuff.

Harry had enjoyed the last holiday at the Weasleys'. He had realized he could easily fall in love with the older boys, but he had decided that he wasn't quite ready to do something about it, actually, and he also was worried what kind of danger any lover of his would be in from his enemies. So he just decided to enjoy the happy flutter in his chest and leave it at that.

But now he realized he wanted more and he wanted it with someone whom it was safe to be with, who had no actual existence to be put into danger. He wanted the Prince as his dream lover and he hoped his subconscious would oblige.

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In the next few dream snippets, Harry made a point of touching the Prince straightaway upon entering the dream. He'd catch his pale slender hand, or if he couldn't reach it he'd catch the nearest arm, shoulder or elbow. Most of the time he couldn't do much more than that before the dream changed again, but every skin-to-skin touch sent sparks up and down Harry's body, and he wasn't about to waste a single dream snippet not trying to get more.

Then one night the snippet didn't end and Harry was holding on to the Prince's wrist, the quick grab movement Harry had made now roughly pulling the stirring rod that the Prince was holding out of the man's potion.

"What the deuce?" the Prince exclaimed, giving Harry a dirty look before turning back to his now ominously spluttering potion. He raised his wand in his left hand and cast Evanesco, and the potion disappeared.

The Prince then turned around, pulled his wrist free from Harry's grasp, crossed his arms over his chest and gave him a disapproving look. "And what did you think you were doing?" he asked.

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, Harry thought. And it's a good thing this is just a dream, he thought next when he had taken a good look at his companion's expression. 'Murderous' came to mind. Oh well, here goes.

He took a breath, stepped forward, grasped the sides of the Prince's head in his palms, tilted the head a little to the left and down, his own to the right and up, before firmly pulling the head towards him while he moved forward. Lips touched. And it was as if the whole world erupted in sparks.

The Prince's lips were soft and warm, and Harry pressed closer when he found that the other man wasn't immediately pulling away. Then he felt the lips part and a hitched breath escape into his own now slightly opened mouth. He opened wider and pressed closer, letting the tip of his tongue enter the other's mouth, where he encountered teeth. The Prince's soft moan sent shivers up Harry's spine and, where the Prince's open palms rested on Harry's sweatered chest, heat was radiating, warming Harry to his core.

Another moan from the Prince as Harry ran his tongue over the other's teeth and inside of his upper lip made Harry step even closer, causing the Prince's hands to move to Harry's shoulders and cause the full length of the man's upper arms to touch Harry's chest. He moved one of his hands to cradle the back of the Prince's head, while the other moved away from the face and started to snake around the man's shoulder, to embrace him properly.

The Prince moaned again, sounding both aroused and needy, and Harry made to take the last step closer that would give them full body contact. He was ready and he wanted it and...

"No," the Prince breathed into Harry's mouth and Harry felt a flexing of the muscles of the man's forearms; he was being pushed away. Not knowing what to think - it had been going so well, hadn't it? - Harry let himself be pushed off. An ache settled in his heart when the lip contact was lost, but Harry had never been one to make anyone do anything they didn't want, and he wasn't about to start now. It did hurt, though.

In being pushed away, Harry moved back half a step and now, to acquiesce to the Prince's wish, he started to move back further, his hands moving down to the man's back, Harry intending them to have a parting touch there before falling away altogether. But then his backwards motion was stopped by the hands on his shoulders and the Prince exhaled a deep breath, as if ventilating an anxiety of some kind. The Prince stopped Harry from moving either back or forward; the only thing he did do was bend his head until, gently, their foreheads met.

The Prince exhaled again, and Harry could feel the man tremble a little. Harry was feeling none too steady himself, if he were honest.

They stood like that for a long time, brows touching, the Prince with his hands on Harry's shoulders and Harry with his hands gently touching the thin back.

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"This isn't right," the Prince at last said in a low voice. He made as if to move away, but Harry stopped him and said, "What isn't right?"

The Prince let himself be halted and he looked straight into Harry's eyes for a moment, as if to say, Do I even need to explain? Harry found the gesture so much like the Half-Blood Prince's often barbed writing in the Advanced Potion-Making book that he couldn't help but smile, and be happy his subconscious was giving him all this.

"This is but a dream. We, you and I, are but dream people; we can do what we want here. And nothing we do here can be wrong, because it just isn't real," Harry said.

As he spoke the Prince's eyes seemed to widen and he turned his head a little to the side, taking his gaze off Harry's face and just looking into infinity over Harry's shoulder for a long moment, his eyebrows first all the way up on his forehead, then down in a thoughtful frown, before his face evened out altogether and he turned back to look at Harry.

"You are right, of course, it's all an illusion," the Prince said in a voice as calm as his face. Harry smiled; hopefully he had convinced his dream lover to do some more loving. He wanted it almost desperately: a few timeless moments of forgetting Dumbledore's lessons and sticky social climbing from Slughorn and detention with Snape and talking about creepy Horcruxes and soddin' Christmas and even Ron and Hermione who, however unintentionally, were putting Harry in the middle of their whatever-it-was-they-had-going.

No, Harry wanted some me-time and he wanted it with the Prince. To that end, he gently pulled him closer and tilted his head suggestively. The Prince seemed to catch Harry's meaning readily enough, for he, too, tilted his head and moved closer, his hands now traveling around Harry's shoulders to wrap him in a high embrace while Harry embraced his Prince lower down. Their lips met in a long, deep kiss.

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In the new year, Harry was kept busy with all those things he wanted to forget at night, with the addition of Apparition lessons, which weren't too horribly difficult, and, much to Harry's relief, Snape appeared to be making sure he and Harry were at least at the other side of the classroom during DADA lessons and never alone anywhere else. Harry guessed that the headmaster had probably warned the Greasy Git off. Not that Harry much cared about the why of it—he was plenty happy not to have to interact with the man; the incident at Slughorn's party had been quite enough. Harry was under no illusion he wouldn't be running into Snape alone again at some point; the way the man was trying to 'help' Malfoy pretty much guaranteed it. But if he could avoid it, he certainly would.

And once in a while at night he'd be able to forget all of that and he'd meet his Prince and they would snog for a while, or they would lie on dew-covered grass on a dark summer morning, just holding each other or sitting by the darkened lake, the Prince reading some poem or story of which Harry could never remember the content the next morning. Despite the continued twilight, it was quite idyllic.

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Even when, in May, Harry used one of the Prince's spells from the Advanced Potion-Making book with disastrous effects, Harry still wanted to dream of his Prince. He had never been able to predict or force a dream with the Prince to come to him, but now he wanted one desperately; he wanted to ask what kind of 'enemies' the Prince had had that he had needed a spell as horrible as Sectumsempra to feel safe. Had the man even used it way back when?

But then Harry remembered that his Prince was merely a dream concoction of his own mind and that asking the dream man for answers that Harry himself didn't even have would be futile. So when the night came that he met his dream Prince again, Harry decided not to waste their precious time together on asking dumb questions; he'd much rather snog. And even though the Prince seemed a little sad and aloof to begin with that night, Harry managed to get the man in the mood in the end and they had what Harry would call the most fabulous snog ever. (Though he didn't say it out loud to the Prince, because he knew the man didn't like the word 'snog' very much. Odd, really, since he seemed to be a pro at it, as Harry could attest!)

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Harry's detentions with Snape after the Sectumsempra incident were unusual in that there were no horrid ingredients to cut or crush or whatever, but instead Harry had been made to copy out old detention records, starting with those pertaining to the Marauders' infractions.

At first he hated it, a lot, then it just made him sad. Sad to see what stupid things his father and godfather had done, and sad that Harry would never be able to talk to either of them about it. It was a closed book, deeds done long ago. Like the Advanced Potion-Making book: fifty years old, as likely the owner of the book was as well, whom Harry was unlikely ever to meet.

Harry sighed as he copied out yet another 'James Potter and Sirius Black: letting loose a wild Kneazle in Greenhouse 3, detention for 1 week and clean-up duty.' He missed his Prince and hoped he'd have another dream that night.

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As it happened, he didn't, at least not that night. The dreams would come when they would and no amount of wishing seemed to change that. But he did get lucky again a few nights later, and then he got luckier still because Harry managed to seduce his only slightly reticent Prince out of his clothing.

As soon as the buttons on the man's white button-down shirt gave way, Harry started to understand the Prince's reluctance; the chest was so thin, Harry could count the man's ribs easily. It was also the palest skin he'd ever seen, almost as if it had never seen daylight, had never had a chance to acquire any coloring. The Prince's hands and face were pale, too, but not that pale; there was some natural color there and, whenever Harry made his advances, which were getting bolder every time, the skin covering the high cheekbones would turn a pleasing pink, spurring Harry on to be even bolder.

Now he had the Prince lying on his back on his opened-out school robes on the dark grass, with the dark twilight sky overhead. Harry was kneeling between the man's legs, his hands exploring the pale chest, while the sweetest blush rode high on the Prince's face. And the man was moaning; Harry could feel the sound with his hands, even if his ears couldn't quite catch it.

Harry smiled. Giving, and thus receiving, pleasure like this was wonderful and he was finding it an incredible turn-on. He let a hand drift lower just to confirm he wasn't the only one who was hard. His hand encountered what he expected through the woollen pants and his smile became a grin when the Prince pressed his hard length against the wandering hand by flexing his hips. Oh, yes!

Harry decided the teasing was over for both of them and he leaned forward towards the blushing face with its closed eyes and open mouth, and he used his arms for support as he sought out the mouth - where the tip of the Prince's tongue just peeked out and wet the upper lip, oh god - capturing it in a kiss as he lowered his body fully onto to body beneath him.

The moment Harry had made contact, the mouth had opened, the moaning had increased, the hands he had been holding on to now-rumpled tufts of grass latched onto his head and the legs opened wider to accommodate Harry's form before trying to wrap around Harry's lower back, and thus tilting the Prince's pelvis just so that their hard lengths met full on, only their pants preventing the ultimate contact. Harry couldn't help but groan loudly and thrust from his hips into the other, who groaned in turn.

So they kissed and moaned and thrust and groaned and it was topping any snogging Harry had participated in before that, by about a mile. And the next morning Harry had to cast three different cleaning spells on his sheets to get rid of the sticky evidence.

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As the last month of the school year loomed, Harry was making significant headway in the mystery of the Horcruxes, and he did his best with his schoolwork, trying not to daydream about his Prince too much.

He felt lucky that he was getting dreams now twice a week or thereabouts. Nice dreams with snuggling and snogging and hot dreams with open clothing and rubbing skin to skin and thrusting and cleaning spells in the morning.

While he was in the library for schoolwork anyway, Harry had looked for, and found, a book on male sexuality, which unexpectedly turned out to have a chapter on male-on-male sexuality. It was a bit of an eye-opener for Harry and, after he'd finished the whole 30-page chapter in one go, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with the Prince the next time they met up. The only thing he wasn't so sure of was how to get the lubricant into the dream.

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But the best laid plans of mice and men, and horny little wizards, can go awry. Before Harry had a chance to dream again, all hell broke lose and the headmaster ended up dead, killed by Snape, after Harry had been forced to hurt the old man horribly and had chased Snape off the grounds, after Snape had told him he was the Half-Blood Prince. And all that after Harry had found out it was Snape who had effectively betrayed Harry's parents to Voldemort, thereby getting them killed. What a mess!

And the biggest mess was the one in Harry's head: the Prince, his Prince, was none other than this horrible traitor, who had ruined Harry's life at age one and a half, who had been the cause of pretty much all Harry's suffering in his life, whom Harry now hated more than Voldemort. But Harry found he still wanted his Prince. Despite knowing the truth, despite the feelings he had about Snape.

During the days that followed, Harry's head was spinning with the same arguments over and over. The Prince was Snape, whom Harry hated most in the world, and he wanted him dead (or at least under Cruciatus for a few hours or years, preferably), but Snape was the Prince, whom Harry wanted more than anything (for lots of juicy sex and his company, too), but the Prince was Snape, and so on, round and round.

Things happened: a funeral; decisions needed to be made: Harry decided he wouldn't be back for the next school year; it was just too dangerous for the school, and Dumbledore wanted him to find those accursed Horcruxes, anyway. To Harry's relief, Hermione and Ron pledged to go with him.

But through it all, Harry's head ran in that small cycle of thoughts, and it was a good thing that a few days later Harry had another dream, or he would have gone insane soon afterwards.

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Harry felt intense relief the moment he realized he was in the dream world again. He recognized it by feel alone, for he didn't see the Prince right off. In fact, now that he looked around, he didn't see anything at all, just blackness.

He made a complete circle and then doubled back a bit; there had been a speck of something in the distance. Harry started walking towards it. He noted that the surface on which he walked was quite flat and featureless. He walked for a while, the speck only very slowly growing in size; it must be quite far off. Harry picked up his walking speed.

After a while, the walking surface first became damp and then actually wet. But Harry's shoes seem to grab on the wet surface just as well as the dry so he didn't feel the need to slow down for fear of slipping. And the speck was indeed getting closer; it was now the size of his thumb. Harry increased his speed to running.

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After a lengthy jog, which was not nearly as tiring as it ought to have been, Harry could see the speck was appearing to be a figure hanging in space with its arms wide and wearing a white gown of some type. The figure's pose and the stillness of the scene gave Harry an odd feeling of dread; he broke into a full run.

As the scene got closer, Harry's dread increased. He could see there was some kind of thin wire loosely wrapped around the figure, who was suspended at least a few feet off the ground. Then he could see that the wires - were they wires or vines? Damn his eyesight! - had small red and white blobs on them, the red ones closer to the figure. And then he could see there was some sort of red staining on the figure's white robe that seemed to drip down. He speeded up again.

And then he stopped abruptly when he had come close enough to see the scene properly. Before him hung his Prince - even with his head bowed low and not wearing his usual school robes, Harry identified him immediately; there were black barbed vines, bearing red and white blooms - roses - wrapped around the man's bleeding body. The body was covered in a thin nightshirt-type robe, white with blue pinstripes, that was streaked with blood where the barbs had cut into the flesh, straight through the thin material, and were still cutting the Prince when he breathed, even as shallowly as he was breathing.

Harry stood stock still and looked on in horror. Yes, he had wanted to see Snape severely punished - the man deserved that after all he had done - but not his Prince and not like this. Harry's horror deepened when he realized that the body wasn't just floating magically in the air but that two barbed vines had pushed themselves through the shoulders and out the back, and so carried most of the body's weight. He then noticed that the arms, with the nightshirt's sleeves in place, were suspended by a vine - one to each arm - that went straight through the forearm and thus pulled the arms up and out, with blood dripping from each wound.

Harry looked at the rest of the body and found two more vine wounds, one in each upper thigh. There seemed to be no traction on these vines, but a steady stream of blood flowed from there down by the legs and feet; from there, it dripped on to the ground.

Harry felt the strength in his own legs wane and fail, and he went to his knees, splashing onto the wet ground, as he realized why some roses were white and some red. Before his eyes he saw one change from white to red and he could see the pulsing on the vine that was feeding the rose the Prince's blood directly from his right shoulder.

He bent forward, almost heaving with disgust and horror, catching himself on his hands. Abruptly, he was stopped in his emotional display when the wetness under his hands felt oddly sticky. He looked at his hands, palm down in the odd liquid, and realized where it was gently undulating around his palms, his hands were colored bright red: blood.

Harry immediately sprang into action. The fact that the Prince had originally been Snape be damned, Harry was not going to let his Prince bleed to death, sucked dry by Vampire roses; no one deserved that. He got up and set about getting the Prince down as fast and as painlessly as possible.

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It was a good thing that the Prince appeared to be out cold, because the only way Harry could think of getting him down was by using a cutting spell on each vine, cutting it lose from the enormous black rosebush that Harry found to be growing behind the Prince - hidden by the fact that it was black against an equally black background - and then as carefully as possible pulling the vine end through the wound and then repeatedly using the one healing spell he knew on both wounds left by the vine to stop the bleeding.

It took a very long time and, when Harry had worked on the two shoulder vines, there had been a dreadful moment when Harry thought the Prince was waking up and he realized he really didn't know any sleeping spell at all. But the moment passed and with the aid of a Leviosa spell, he finally managed to get the Prince down.

As he sat on the bloody floor, cradling his bloody but breathing Prince, waiting for him to wake up, Harry found he couldn't stop the tears that had wanted to come out for some time now. In the end he just let them flow as he thought of all the people he had lost and the Prince that he had almost lost.

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Harry wasn't sure whether the dream had faded and then had returned or whether somehow the scene had slowly changed while Harry had been distracted by his own thoughts of death. But once Harry was in a state where he started noticing his surroundings again, he found himself sitting tailor-fashion on the now-familiar dark grass, with the Prince's head and shoulders cradled in his lap. The Prince seemed to be sleeping peacefully. His face was calm and free of blood and he was wearing his school uniform, as usual, with one added thing: Harry could now clearly see the house crest, Slytherin House.

He looked at the face that was upside down from where he sat. And he could now see the resemblance to the adult Snape in this much younger face. The nose was there, crooked and large, and the cheekbones, high and angular. The jaw was the same, even if the face was a little rounder in its youthfulness, and the makings of the patented Snape sneer were not nearly as pronounced. The eyebrows, with their sardonic slant, were fully as they were in the adult version. The hair, half-long and greasy-looking, lay draped over Harry's thigh and he couldn't help but gently pet the thick strands. And he found he didn't care that they were a little bit greasy.

As Harry petted the hair with one hand and just let his other hand rest on the man's shoulder, feeling peaceful, he realized that the Prince had looked vaguely like this before Harry found out that he was really the young Snape. His Prince had always been but a figment of his subconscious imagination, and now that Harry knew about his origins, the Prince's looks had changed accordingly. He wondered if...

Harry gently reached over and caught the Prince's left sleeve by the lower arm and gently moved the arm closer, laying it down on the still-sleeping man's chest. He undid the cuff button and carefully moved the material up the arm. He stopped when he saw the tattooed snake's tail appear. So his Prince bore the Dark Mark, just as the real Snape did.

In all their snogging, neither Harry nor the Prince had done more than open up their shirts to be able to touch each other's chests. Harry had never seen the Prince's left arm uncovered and therefore could not say if the Mark had been there at that time. But Harry was pretty sure it hadn't been. No, this was his subconscious updating the situation according to the new information.

Did his subconscious want to turn Harry away from his Prince? Well, if that was the case it was out of luck, because Harry felt himself become very agitated at the thought of having to give the Prince up. Real or not, the Prince was his. The only thing that could not be taken away by any real person, simply because he wasn't really real to begin with. No, Harry would keep his Prince, even with the deterrents his subconscious seemed to put in his way. He would keep him, he would own him and he would enjoy him in any way that Harry saw fit.

With that thought he leaned over the peaceful face; his hands gently moving the head into the right angle, he kissed the man full on the lax mouth and, after the initial kiss, he gently probed the tip of his tongue between the thin warm lips until they opened and he could explore inside.

For a while he was content to kiss like that; that the Prince remained unresponsive was only slightly dampening Harry's ardor: the man tasted as sweet as he ever had. But after a while Harry decided he wanted more and he slipped out from under the Prince and laid him out on the grass that was now covered by a blanket that hadn't been there before. Well, this was a dream world, things could pop up just like that, couldn't they? Harry gave it some thought while he laid the Prince on the blanket. Then he decided he might as well try out his thought, and he closed his eyes and scrunched up his face in concentration.

When he opened his eyes, the grass and blanket had been replaced by a mattress-like surface covered in dark green velvet. There were some pillows covered in the same green velvet spread around, together with a few folded dark green blankets. There were no sheets, but that wasn't too surprising: Harry wasn't fond of sheets; the damn things tended to wrap around his legs at night like ropes. There was one other item, as well, one that made Harry very happy: a silver tray sat to the side with an ornately capped jar on it. Harry knew exactly what was inside of it.

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The Prince's eyes were still closed and his breathing was even as Harry set about getting the man naked; he wanted to see him properly now, no more hiding anything, he decided. To that end, Harry quickly undressed himself. He felt that honest nudity went both ways even if the Prince was only a fantasy and had no real feelings to hurt.

Once both were naked, Harry knelt by the prone body to take a long look. Even before Harry had known about Snape, he had found his Prince to be quite skinny. And so he was now: all skin and bones with some muscles on his arms and shoulders and legs. He was as white as milk, creating a strong contrast with the dark surroundings. It was almost as if he gave off a pale light, he was that white. The belly was quite concave, especially with the Prince lying flat like this. Apart from the Dark Mark, the body was free of marks and scars. That in itself meant nothing, Harry knew; using magic, an enemy could seriously hurt and even kill someone without leaving a single mark on the body.

There was a smattering of hair on the man's chest, some more in his armpits and a proper amount around his genitals, which were in themselves quite sizable and quite dormant. Harry's, on the other hand, were not and he let his hand drift towards the dormant set and wrap around the penis and start to move on it, gently squeezing it, to remedy the discrepancy.

The penis firmed slowly and the Prince seemed to feel it, for his limbs twitched a little but, to Harry's disappointment, it wasn't enough for the man to wake up. Harry redoubled his effort, enjoying the feel of the penis in his hand. Up to that moment, their mutual lovemaking had never included touching either one in such an intimate way. Mostly it had seen them both come inside their clothing just from kissing and rubbing against each other. 'Frottage' the book had called it, mentioning it early on in the chapter about male-on-male techniques. Harry now felt ready to try some techniques that had been described a little later on in the chapter. One had talked of what delightful things could be done with the mouth, Harry recalled, and he bent forward and gave the half-hard penis a lick across the top. It tasted kind of salty.

He was gratified to feel the organ harden. He wanted to try sucking it as the book had described, but from this angle it was kind of awkward, so he repositioned himself to lie on his belly between the pale legs so he could support himself on his elbows while holding the penis like a lollypop and trying to consume it in much the same way as one would such a sweet.

All the while he was licking - to much effect, as the penis grew harder - Harry kept an eye on the Prince's face. But, to Harry's continued disappointment, the eyes stayed closed and the face slack. Harry would much rather do this with the man awake, but if he couldn't, well, the Prince wasn't real as such, so it would do no real harm just to do as Harry wished. And so Harry continued indulging his oral fetish and found he grew quite aroused just from arousing the man before him.

The penis had grown long and hard, with veins standing out and pulsing with subcutaneous blood flow, coloring it quite purple. It fascinated Harry, and it awed him that he had produced such a response in the dormant man. The Prince's limbs twitched almost continuously and his hips shifted back and forth, sweat standing out on his brow and chest, but still the man stayed asleep. Harry was quite ready to come himself. The heat from his belly had traveled around his body, making his hands and feet tingle and sweat run down his neck to his shoulders and back.

He gave the face one last look and then concentrated on the blowjob. It didn't take long before the penis in his mouth suddenly started twitching and Harry found his mouth flooded with a thick tangy substance: semen. As he swallowed it all, and with the added stimulus of his grinding his own penis into the velvet mattress beneath him, Harry came, seeing white fireworks going off behind his eyes.

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Harry was languid after his orgasm, almost too languid to do anything for a while. But then he became alert again when he thought for a moment that the Prince was gone and the dream was over. As he scrambled up, he encountered two pale legs on either side of him, and he quickly verified that it was indeed the Prince and they were exactly where they had been before the fireworks. Harry exhaled in relief; the dream was still going. There was so much more he wanted to do with the Prince, and he was worried his subconscious wouldn't let him have another dream with the Prince after this.

Harry's heart fell a little when he found the Prince was still out cold. He crawled up from his position to lie next to the pale body and he snaked an arm under the Prince's back and scooped him up close in an intimate embrace.

For a while they lay like that, with Harry enjoying the rise and fall in the Prince's chest and his even breaths caressing Harry's neck.

And still the Prince didn't wake up.

At some point Harry's free hands started wandering over the Prince's partially prone form again. And just over the man's shoulder Harry had had that tray with the jar on it in his sight for some time now and his body, which was getting hot again, was encouraging him to go try out what the book had said under 'anal intercourse'.

But to do it to someone who was unable to participate, consent even, that wasn't right, Harry knew that very well. On the other hand, the Prince was only a shadow, not real at all. It was the same argument Harry had grappled with from the beginning of this dream, even before it. And the heat that Harry felt at the idea of taking the Prince, awake or not, was quickly overriding the weaker argument of doing right by an illusion.

Harry reached over and grabbed the jar. He slipped his other arm out from under the pale body, sat up tailor fashion, his cock twitching with anticipation, and he used both hands to open the jar. A light cedar wood scent wafted from the light green cream, and Harry set the lid aside and scooped up a dollop and tested in between his fingers: very slippery indeed.

He set the jar down after putting the cream back inside as far as that was possible, got up and started to prepare the scene. If the Prince wasn't going to come 'round for this and actively participate, Harry would need to rearrange the man's positioning for easiest access.

He decided he wanted to see the man's face during the act, just in case the man woke up, so he placed the pillows under the Prince's hips and legs, one pillow per leg, supporting him in the back of his knees. He put the jar nearby and knelt between the pale legs.

Harry quickly realized that the leg pillows were not helpful, and he pushed them aside and draped each pale leg over his own thighs. He found he could scoot closer, too. Yes, this way his penis would be able to reach its goal.

He scooped up some more of the cream and gently probed down the hollow under the Prince's genitals. At first he found smooth skin, but then, as moved his fingers lower he encountered a crinkly rosette: bingo.

He followed as closely as he could the instructions from the book for as far as he could remember. First gently massage the cream into the puckered skin until a fingertip could be inserted. Than add more cream as the finger is wiggled about while it is slowly pushed into the hole.

Just the feeling of the channel gripping his one finger was turning Harry on something fierce. He decided to speed up the procedure, lest he come before the act could even take place.

He started working the channel with first the one, then two and finally three fingers that were bunched up tight from the pressure of the channel walls. The book said to try and use a scissor action. Well, there was no chance of that. But it had also said that sometimes, with a virgin anus, that was just not possible.

Was his Prince a virgin? The very idea made Harry break out in a sweat and almost made him come on the spot. But then he remembered that the Prince was just a product of his own imagination, so of course he'd be a virgin if that was what turned Harry on. Well, whatever; Harry was turned on, very turned on, in fact, and he wanted inside, right now.

He removed his fingers, took one last look at the Prince's face - still out, drat - hoisted the legs up — one over his shoulder, one over his arm — aimed his cock and touched the head to the puckered hole. It slipped right in.

Harry hadn't expected it being so wonderfully tight and warm inside. He gently nudged forward and he could feel slipping by something inside just before the body under him seemed to convulse and the so-far limp penis started to firm up. He eased out a bit and, as he sank back in, causing another smaller tremor, he took the Prince's cock in hand and started caressing and squeezing it as he had before. The fact that the man didn't appear to be going to wake for this didn't mean Harry was going to leave him unsatisfied, however contrary that might seem to anybody but Harry.

He started pushing in and pulling out slowly, all the while keeping his attentions on the penis in sync with his own thrusting. But he quickly found that he wanted to speed up, needed to speed up, as he felt a thick wave of pleasure start in his belly and work itself outwards. He knew he wasn't going to last long.

And he didn't. A few more thrusts had the Prince spilling over his hand and himself shuddering with orgasm, pumping his seed into the Prince's warm innards. As he came to the end of the mind-blowing experience, he found he couldn't hold his pose and let himself sink on top of his Prince, resting his sweaty head on the man's still heaving chest. He closed his eyes for a moment, enjoying the aftermath of almost the best experience he had had in his life. 'Almost', because he had much rather had the Prince awake for this.

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Harry didn't wink out as he had done with the first orgasm, he just lay with his ear to the Prince's heartbeat for a long while until he felt something on the other side of his head. It took a moment to realize it was a hand, gently touching him on his hair. He looked up at once, dislodging the hand, and found the Prince's glittering dark eyes looking at him. The man was awake at last. And he was giving Harry a wistful smile.

Harry quickly crawled up, covering the man's body, to reach his face so he could kiss him softly and say, "Hi there. You okay?"

The Prince nodded, their noses touching briefly, and said, "I'm fine. I think?" He made it a question. "I think I was in danger, of some sort?" he asked.

Harry shuddered at the memory of the bloody scene he had witnessed earlier. One his own subconscious had called into being. He was hoping the Prince wouldn't remember any of it, so decided to downplay the whole thing.

"Not really, you were just asleep. I was hoping to wake you," he said, realizing too late how that had sounded.

"By buggering me?" the Prince said, softening the coarse word with a smile.

"Uh, yeah, kinda dumb I guess," Harry said. He wasn't about to use the 'you really aren't real so anything is allowed' argument on the Prince; after all, the man might not realize he was not real. Mentioning that fact could be construed as being rude. Sort of. Harry wasn't sure what to say to the man.

"I wish," the Prince started. Harry held his breath; would his behaviour be deemed unacceptable by this illusion Harry himself had called forth? Wouldn't that be the height of irony? And the beginning of misery, because Harry realized he didn't want to lose the Prince, not for any reason.

"I wish you would have waited for me to wake up, so I could have enjoyed it more," the Prince said at last and Harry let out the breath he had been holding.

He scooted up a little more, kissed the thin lips while holding the head at just the right angle, and said, "We can always do it again. And again. And then again," while he pecked the lips with his own between 'agains'.

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Harry got a lot of chances to show his Prince how much they could enjoy each other's bodies over the next months and seasons. Time seemed to mean very little in their dream world and none of the horrible happenings of the real world seemed to penetrate their idyll.

In August, just after his birthday, Harry, with Ron and Hermione, decided the time had come to start the offensive against Voldemort. Their first objective was to find and destroy all those damn Horcruxes. It was a quest that would be keeping them busy for the rest of the year and then some.

But all that determination and urgency, and all the stresses that they caused, were forgotten once Harry entered the dark and warm dream world where his Prince received him with open arms, and often open legs, and where Harry could be happy and carefree for a few hours every week or so. It was a life-saver.

It was the night of one of the less fruitful days of the Quest, in September sometime, when Harry was lying down naked on his side on the velvet mattress, his head propped up on one arm and his free hand gently tracing circles on the Prince's milk white abdomen, where the Prince lay flat on his back, letting Harry do whatever he liked, bar tickling him, that Harry noticed that the man's belly wasn't quite as concave as it once had been. It had filled out quite a lot and Harry decided he liked it, because it meant that the Prince was eating better, or more, at least. As Harry teased the Prince about getting fat - which unaccountably seemed to turn the Prince's cheeks rosy with embarrassment; it wasn't that horrible, surely - he thanked his subconscious for finally accepting the Prince enough to keep him healthy for Harry.

Soon the Prince diverted Harry's attention with an offering up of the lubricant jar and by opening his legs, an invitation Harry never would see himself turn down, and after that he gave the incident no more thought.

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That was, until in November sometime, when Harry had rolled the Prince over from the position of lying on his side that the man had started to prefer, often covered with a blanket, claiming it was chilly, to a flat position. Harry drew the blanket away gently away so he could explore more of the torso.

This time Harry could see clearly that the Price wasn't simply fattening up; he was developing some sort of lump in his belly that didn't look natural at all. Harry was instantly alarmed, and the Prince must have seem the emotion on his face because he, too, looked shocked and quickly tried to roll over and away from Harry, pulling the blanket along, as though covering up.

Harry stopped him from getting very far and pulled the man to him. Harry had noticed some time earlier that he was stronger than the Prince, even though the man was some three inches taller than he. So he had no trouble pulling the struggling man, backside towards him, to his chest, where he held him with one arm and used the other to try to capture both thin wrists. The legs he caught by wrapping his own about them and he effectively ended the fight by rolling the man under him, pinning him down with his own more bulky frame.

"No," the Prince sobbed, his shoulders hitching underneath Harry's chin.

"What's going on?" Harry asked, his concern now starting to turn into fear at the nearly inaudible sobbing of his lover. When no answer was forthcoming, Harry carefully loosened his grip a little and tentatively said, "I'll let up if you promise not to run."

He waited until he could feel a nod of the head against his own and he slowly rolled them back over so they were pretty much in the position they had been when the conversation had started: Harry on his side and the Prince flat on his back. But now both of the Prince's hands were framing the lumpy stomach and the man's face was paler than Harry had ever seen it before.

"Well?" Harry asked.

The Prince refocused his gaze from up and far away into darkness to Harry's nearby face, and gave him a watery smile. "I'm pregnant," he said.

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Between all that happened out in the real world, which was at times depressingly little, Harry spent some time thinking about his Prince's pregnancy.

He had talked about the power the subconscious has with Hermione, keeping it all hypothetical and theoretical; telling her he was trying to suss out what made someone like Voldemort tick. The discussion hadn't led to any real insight into the madman but it was helping Harry with his own situation.

A person's subconscious had needs and desires, was what Harry had understood. These needs and desires are not always known by the person consciously, and the subconscious can't directly tell the conscious anything, either; no, that would be too easy. So the subconscious communicates in feelings and, more directly, in dreams.

So the fact that the Prince, who was undoubtedly a male, was now pregnant - in the next dream he was as well, so Harry was assuming it hadn't been a fluke - could indicate that Harry wanted a family. Not much news there; Harry had always wanted loved ones, a spouse, some kids, a dog and a cat, stuff like that. But apparently he wanted it so desperately that the Prince was now providing it for him.

Harry shuddered at what he was putting the illusion through: a pregnant man, oh dear. It was a good thing it was all his subconscious speaking and just make-believe. As it was, the emotional scene at the end of the dream where he had found out about the pregnancy was tough enough; imagine if it had been actually real!

"Pregnant?" Harry had breathed. "How can a man be pregnant?"

The Prince had rolled over so he had his back to Harry, and asked, "Do you think me disgusting? Shall you abandon me now?" in such a low tone Harry almost didn't hear it.

He quickly closed the distance between them, spooning up behind the Prince and putting his free hand over the Prince's where it lay on the baby bump.

"No! Of course not," Harry said. "I just didn't know this could happen, but then I shouldn't have been surprised I guess; in a dream, anything is possible," he added.

"A dream? Ah yes, of course," the Prince sighed, snuggling back into Harry a bit, much to Harry's delight.

"We can still, uh, do, each other, can't we? Even with this going on?" Harry hedged, feeling a little stupid and a lot boorish.

After a long pause the Prince said, "Yes, of course we can. It's a dream after all," in an almost sing-songy way. Harry was about to comment on that when he felt the jar being pushed into his hand and the Prince rolling over onto his stomach and then lifting his backside up as he rose onto his knees. And Harry found himself ready and eager for another round of lovemaking.

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For a thing that was really an illusion within a dream, the pregnancy developed consistently with a real pregnancy as far as Harry could tell. The Prince got bigger and bigger, and by February, Harry realized that the Prince was finding their couplings harder and harder to do. It was Harry who, after he'd seen the Prince's face contort in discomfort instead of ecstasy in their last fuck, turned down the offer of the jar, for the first time in their fling, and convinced the Prince that cuddling was just as good sometimes. Even in the daytime Harry couldn't forget the look of relief on the Prince's face at the suggestion.

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And then, in March, it seemed everything went to hell, in both worlds.

A week earlier, Harry had snuggled up to his now very big Prince, trying to talk about baby names and other fluffy bunnies. The Prince had not rebuffed Harry's choice of topic, but neither had he seemed to encourage it. Basically whenever Harry's almost-monologue required an actual response, the Prince had cleverly diverted the conversation to other topics. It really hadn't been until Harry had woken up in the Trio's cold and dreary tent that he realized he had gotten no answer at all out of the enigmatic illusion. On the one hand he was miffed, on the other he was impressed at how the Prince was playing him. And with a faux wicked grin, Harry vowed he'd get even with the man in the next dream.

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But the next dream was not one of those nice long cuddly ones. No, it was short and cold and worrisome.

Harry found himself standing on bare feet wearing his blue pajamas. That in itself wasn't strange; after Harry had discovered the pregnancy, the Prince would often appear wearing the white with blue pinstripes nightshirt and Harry would then suddenly be wearing his PJs as well. Maybe a subconscious sympathy thing, Harry guessed.

But now he appeared to be standing alone on the mattress, and he did a full 360 to look around. A big fat nothing. Not even the tray and the pillows and blankets where there, just miles and miles of mattress surface.

The hair on the back of his head stood on end and he spun around again. There in the distance a pale figure stood. His heart started pounding even before he started running. But as in any truly bad dream, he ran and ran and moved no closer. Then he saw the figure fall and every fiber in his being was screaming, 'Wrong, wrong, WRONG.'

When he finally arrived it was to see his Prince on the ground with a pool of blood forming underneath him, face turned away. 'NO!' Harry was about to touch the shoulder to turn him over to see if he was even alive when he woke up.

It was still dark out and Harry tried to go back to sleep and recapture the dream but it was just not happening.

That was the start of a very bad day. One that ended with Harry cradling a dying Dobby on a deserted beach at dawn.

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Things had quieted down after their escape from the Malfoys. Dobby had been properly buried and plans had been made about the next step in their fight against Voldemort. Now there was time to rest up and recuperate, and Harry's friends certainly did that. But Harry himself couldn't put his dreamlife aside, and he was frustrated beyond belief that he wasn't getting the dreams any more. He wanted to know that the Prince and the Baby were alright. Hell, he needed to know. But the dreams could not be forced into appearing and Harry had to keep reminding himself that it was all a fantasy to begin with. In his head he knew that well enough, but his heart still ached at the thought of the Prince, not breathing, lying face down in a pool of blood.

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After the silence came the storm. In only a few days into May, Harry's world had been turned upside down, both in ways he had expected - the Trio, with a lot of help, managed to find and destroy all the Horcruxes, and Voldemort right after that - and ways he in his wildest dreams would not have expected.

Harry had been slated to die so the Horcrux in his head could be destroyed. And it had been Snape - greasy Snape, traitor Snape - who had passed him the message by way of Pensieve memories. Harry had learned more about Snape than he had ever wanted to know, but even before that, for the sake of an illusion that existed only in Harry's dreams, Harry had ordered Hermione to do some magical first aid on the dead-looking Snape. After Dobby had died, Harry and Hermione had stuck their heads together and organized a home study version of a first aid course, especially geared towards the kinds of wounds they expected to run into when battle finally came. So Hermione encased the probably dead Snape in a stasis bubble, with a notice-me-not stuck on top so it was less likely the enemy would get their claws on the man. She was finished just before Voldemort came out with his ultimatum, and Harry didn't give the physical person of Snape - dead or alive - any more thought; he had bigger fish to fry.

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And so, ten days later, Harry was lying (almost) alone on the bed in his - Sirius' before him - bedroom at Number 12 Grimmauld place, munching on a ham sandwich.

After the one dream where the Prince had lain in that pool of blood, Harry had not had another dream. And now he was feeling so numb all around that even the possible fate of his dream Prince didn't seem able to move him anymore. So many had died. The Prince, possibly, too. But Snape lived. How unfair was that?

After all the sandwiches were eaten and all the tea drunk and what daylight there had been peeking though the curtained windows had long gone, Harry finally sat up on the bed. He got up, if for no other reason than to stretch his legs and visit the bathroom.

On the way back he looked into Regulus' old room. There in the freshly made bed - Madam Pomfrey came by every afternoon with a house-elf in tow, to check up on the man and make the bed - lay Snape, ugly, beak-nosed, pale-faced, a bandage around his neck, his hands on the covers, still like a corpse: a breathing corpse.

Harry moved back to his room and got ready for bed. The clock read eleven o'clock and Hermione had promised to come by the next day, something Harry looked forward to. Ron would not be coming; the Weasley family was having some together time after Fred's funeral a few days earlier. Arthur and Molly had invited Harry to come and stay when they had met at the funeral, but Harry had turned them down; he just wanted some alone time.

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It was the dream again; he recognized it immediately. He was wearing his pajamas and his bare feet stood in a shallow pool of some liquid. Oh no! He quickly reached down and scooped up some of the liquid; it was thin, cool, and transparent: water, just water. Harry exhaled his now unwarranted anxiety in a long breath and then looked around.

He was not surprised the place was inky black. Whenever the dreams were bad, the locale was always dark. It was actually a depressing thought that Harry was getting used to these kinds of horror dreams. He looked around, trying to find his Prince; he had to be there, if the previous dream were any indication, and he was likely to be in deep trouble.

Not seeing anything yet, Harry started walking in a random direction. It was a long time before he spied a light dot up ahead. He speeded up to a run, his bare feet splashing in the water, but his PJs stayed perfectly dry.

Coming closer, he saw that the expected figure was not high up as before, but low down, as if flat on the ground. For a moment Harry flashed back to seeing the Prince in that pool of blood and he speeded up again.

When he arrived at the supine figure, his feet still stood in only an inch or so of water, while it looked like the man was floating face-up in a deep pool; only his chest, head and hands were above the surface. Harry leant over carefully and saw there were no bleeding wounds on the man. There also was no baby bump. What there was dismayed him so much he sat down heavily, folding his legs tailor fashion.

The face, the nose, hair, eyes and hands were unmistakably that of the adult Severus Snape. Harry's young Prince was not there. Snape is the Half-Blood Prince, Harry's head reminded him. Yes, but... His heart was breaking; finally grasping that the Prince had never been real. It really hurt.

For a while he sat looking at the shallowly breathing man before him, who wore the Prince's nightshirt and his face, now years older, his neck heavily bandaged after Nagini's bite. The man who had been the Prince's original, and who was nothing like his Prince. It was a travesty: a horrible trick Harry's own mind had played on him, and he could feel his heart breaking inside of him.

At last he got up, his PJs magically dry again, though he hardly noticed it, feeling only the total devastation of his dreams. There was nothing for him here. He turned around and started walking away without a second glance.

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It was a thump that woke him. Something blunt on wood, Harry thought, trying to clear his head of sleep. He listened for a moment, but no other noise came after, so he was about to roll over and get back to sleep when he heard something that sounded not unlike a wail. Some creature in pain or at least sounding very upset.

Harry put on his glasses, got out of bed, slipped on his slippers and dressing gown - even in May, Number 12 was a chilly place - securing his wand in his pocket, glanced over at the clock - nearly seven in the morning - and headed for the door.

It was dark on the landing but even so Harry could see the door to Regulus' room was ajar, where Harry was sure he had closed it last night. There was whimpering coming from in there and Harry took out his wand. Carefully, as silently as he could, he walked up to it and pushed the open the door a little wider so he could peer inside.

At the side of the bed stood a diminutive figure, one thin hand holding onto the sleeve of Snape's night shirt, shaking the arm desperately, softly calling out, "Master Sevvy, please, wake up, Master Sevvy! Sassy need help! Please wakey-wakey, Master Sevvy, please!"

The figure was one of the smallest house-elves Harry had ever seen. It wore a grubby worn towel fastened over one shoulder and was clutching some sort of bundle to its chest with the hand that wasn't uselessly trying to pull Snape from the bed.

"Hey, what's going on here," Harry said, after casting a wordless Lumos.

The creature stiffened, dropped the sleeve it had been clutching, letting Snape's hand hang over the side of the bed, and slowly turned around. As the face appeared Harry could see that this was probably a female house-elf, hence her smaller size, by the large eyes and round face it - she - had. She also had her free hand out, palm first, towards him, and her palm was staring to glow with magic.

Harry took a small step back and prepared to cast a Protego, if the elf decided to attack.

"Whoah there, not doing anything here," he said, seeing the fear in her eyes. When she didn't immediately attack he added, "What are you doing here?"

The elf actually looked calculating for a moment, a look Harry almost didn't recognize on a house-elf; Dobby had only looked like that once or twice in the time Harry had known him, and Kreacher had more often just looked disgusted at anything in the world.

But then the face changed to something more trusting but still serious, and she spoke. "I is Sassy. I must looks for Harries Potter, Master Sevvy says so. Is you Harries Potter?"

'Master Sevvy'? She actually is calling Snape 'Sevvy'? Harry thought, his estimation of the elf rising; if she used that to the man's face and lived to tell the tale, well, wow! But that wasn't very important right now, and Harry prepared for very bad news; after all, why else would Snape send a house-elf to find him.

"I am Harry Potter," he stated.

At once the demeanour of the elf changed. She came towards him in that frantic way that Dobby always did, though she didn't pull her ears, as she was still holding the bundle to her chest.

"At last I finds you! Master Sevvy will be so very pleased! Here, I has something for you!" she squealed when she came to a stop right in front of him and thrust out the bundle with both arms as though it was breakable and should not be upended. Surprised, Harry knelt down and accepted it, expecting to find a hard object like a Pensieve or a small cauldron inside, but the bundle was warm and soft and it moved.

"Hey," Harry called out after he had felt the movement, but the house-elf had already Disapparated, leaving Harry holding the baby.

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Literally. For that was indeed what was wrapped up in swaddling cloths and a soft towel: a baby. Harry sat down tailor fashion on the floor, since he was close to it already in his kneeling position, placing the bundle in his lap and, with one hand cradling a bumpy bit which was hopefully the child's head, he carefully pulled away some of the fluffy material, uncovering tiny fists first and then a toothless head. It smiled at Harry above it, pumping its fists and presumably kicking its feet, because the other end of the bundle was wiggling wildly. Then it gurgled at Harry.

Harry just sat and looked at it, uh, he, uh, she? It took a while before Harry remembered babies came in male and female versions and that 'it' was the one or the other. He also remembered there was only really one way to find out. He set about finding out. And then he quickly stopped because of the smells he was unearthing. Also something babies were good at.

For a short moment he considered calling Kreacher for help. For a very short moment only. But if not the old Black house-elf, then who? He quickly glanced at the clock: 7:27. Who would be up? Mrs Weasley, probably, but the last time he'd seen her, she had been going to pieces at the funeral and from friends' reports she wasn't doing much better only two days ago. No, he needed someone who was together and who wouldn't waltz all over Harry, as the grown-ups still tended to do even though Harry was nearly eighteen years old. That left Hermione. Of course, Harry thought. She'd flip, of course, but everybody seemed to do that lately, and about the least little thing, too, and Harry was pretty sure he could unflip her fast enough for her to become helpful in this situation.

He rewrapped the baby as best he could and, cradling it close to his chest, he got up and went to his bedroom. There he threw his bath towel over the middle of the bed with one hand, not worrying about how neatly it landed, just so it was spread out enough the baby could lie on it and, hopefully, keep the bed clean. He placed the baby in the middle, pulling the towel that was wrapped around the baby open a little so the child could move about some more. He sat back for a moment, perching on the edge of the bed to check the baby was all right like this. Satisfied that it was—the baby's happy gurgle seemed to indicate that it was all good—he turned to his bedside table, searched the drawer and came up with the goods: his enchanted Galleon from 5th year. As he tapped it with an addressee and a time and place message, Harry hoped Hermione still had hers close by.

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Hermione had flipped, but not quite in the way Harry had expected. "Where are the parents? Was the baby stolen from somewhere?" Hermione had asked, a question Harry hadn't even thought of. But of course babies had parents, people that took care of them, people they belonged to, even if Harry himself had never belonged to anyone in such a way. And now those became added questions. But first the baby needed tending and Harry mentioning that fact unflipped Hermione pretty quickly. And an unflipped Hermione is a textbook example of efficiency.

Turned out she had a magical baby how-to book in her purse. "Is there anything you don't have in there?" Harry had asked.

"I've only got practical stuff," she had stated. "I had to pack for every eventuality, including us getting stuck in a magic bubble or on an uninhabited island for the rest of our lives," she added. The thought that she would pack a baby book for such a situation boggled Harry's mind; she was expecting to have babies there? And what if Ron hadn't been able to come, too? Would she have expected Harry to, to, well, uh? Harry had turned bright red at the thought of having to you-know-what with his best female friend, causing Hermione to ask if he wasn't running a fever; that would not be good for the baby, she was sure.

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After doing the necessary with the child, who had turned out to be a girl just over a month old, they decided to find some answers. A maternity spell was the first choice.

"Mater Identificus!" Hermione's voice rang out confidently, followed by a precise swish and flick. A vapour formed above the still gurgling and now clean and nasty-smells-free infant. It coalesced into a mini cloud and Harry's jaw dropped when he saw the scowling face of Severus Snape appear.

"Hermione, you didn't do it right; that's a man," Harry said, directing the words towards his best friend while keeping his eyes firmly on the apparition, hoping the picture would change to a more appropriately female mother.

Hermione looked down at the baby book and used a finger to trace the words on the page. Her head came up quite quickly and she said, "No mistake; the spell was executed perfectly. That," she pointed her wand at the mini cloud, "is correct; Snape's the mother."

Harry just sat there, his mouth opening and closing like a fish's.

"I'll do paternity next," he heard Hermione say from beside him.

"Pater Identificus!" Swish and flick. The mini cloud turned back into a vapour and then into another little cloud, which now displayed the stupid grin of Harry himself.

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To say that Hermione flipped again would have been an understatement. But once Harry started telling her about the dreams she calmed down again. He decided to leave certain parts out of the story, though, like the fact that he had taken the Prince while he had been unconscious. Harry didn't think she needed to know about that, especially because Harry didn't feel right about it now that it looked like the Prince was really actually Snape.

That last realization had Harry out of his bedroom chair and running out of the bedroom and across the landing to the other room and Snape asleep in there. He came to a halt at the foot of the bed, gripping the headboard tightly.

Snape really was the Prince. And Harry had used him and knocked him up and the latest thing: he had left him to slowly drown in the dream world's pool. All because he had thought Snape wasn't worth saving, that he wasn't his Prince.

"Harry?" Hermione's voice held concern as she joined him.

"The baby?" Harry asked, feeling a slight worry that the child was left unattended.

"I put a monitoring charm on her," the witch said. It made Harry feel a little better, but not much, because his main worry didn't lie with the baby girl.

He turned towards his friend and said urgently, "I need to dream about him again, so I can rescue him and bring him back, hopefully."

"Rescue?" she asked and Harry explained how he had left the man in last night's dream.

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It took all day and most of the evening for Hermione, assisted by Harry, to make the potion Harry would need for his attempt at Sleep Walking. Hermione's purse had produced a tome that dealt with the oddest archaic disciplines and Sleep Walking was one of them, as were Occlumency and Legilimency.

The brewing process was quite long and arduous, and Harry was happy to leave Hermione to it after the initial ingredient cutting and grinding was done, so he was going to be babysitting all day, armed with the baby book for guidance.

And that's how Madam Pomfrey found him: sitting on his bed, with the baby asleep beside him, trying to transfigure an old footstool into a bassinet.

"Oh, thank Merlin," she exclaimed, bending over the bed and scooping up the child. She brought it to her chest, rocking side to side, and said in a soothing voice, "Well, there you are. We thought we'd lost you."

Harry was flabbergasted. He stood up, putting the partly Transfigured stool aside and said, "Madam Pomfrey, what...?"

The nurse was still rocking the baby when she directed her eyes at Harry, but she didn't say anything.

"What is going on?" Harry asked, realizing the nurse wasn't going volunteer any information.

"Mr. Potter, uh, I'm happy you found Anne for us," she said at last.

"Found? A house-elf dumped her in my arms! How do you know the kid's name? And what do you know of its parents?" he asked, adding the last question because of the guilty look Pomfrey was showing now.

"Uh, oh dear," she said, exhaling a breath of something like resignation. She gave Harry an OK-you-win look and sat down on the edge of the bed, gently laying the baby, Anne, against her chest. Whether Anne had woken up with the rocking earlier, Harry hadn't been able to see. But now little Anne had her eyes closed and her little fists had stilled: definitely asleep.

"Uh, maybe you should tell me what you know," Madam Pomfrey said. "I'm not at liberty to tell you much because of my oath."

The Healer's Oath, of course, Harry should have thought of that; a person as righteous as Poppy Pomfrey would never break that oath when privy to adult medical secrets.

"I know her mother is Snape," Harry said, watching the school nurse nod confirmation. "And I'm supposed to be the father. But how that happened I don't know," he added.

"Now, now, Mr. Potter, I think you are well aware of how babies are made. You can't have escaped noticing taking part in the act, as it were," she said, a knowing smile on her matronly face.

"But it was in a dream, for crying out loud! And Snape is male, in case you hadn't noticed! How is it even possible?!" Harry was shouting so loud the baby woke up, but the nurse started to rock her again and coo at her, too, and she settled down again to sleep some more.

Again looking Harry full in the face, flashing him a genuine widely amused smile, Madam Pomfrey said, "Why, magic, of course, what else?"

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Harry knew the potion was working when, a long moment after having closed his eyes to sleep, he was again that dark place, wearing his PJs and standing barefoot in the shallow water. The only different thing was that the water was now quite a bit colder—almost freezing, in fact.

He did a 360 and spotted the white dot far away. He turned into that direction and started a full-out run.

He ran, it seemed, forever, but slowly, slowly the white dot did get bigger. He ran on and on until he finally arrived at the Prince's - Snape's - still floating body.

Harry immediately noticed that Snape was now lying lower in the water than before and that his skin was white and wrinkled and his lips were blue. He didn't waste any more time observing, he just stepped forward, intending to reach down and pull the man up out of the water.

But instead of finding solid, if wet, ground beneath his foot, he found himself falling leg first into deep icy water. A shock of freezing cold went through him and it robbed him of his breath, much like when he had tried to retrieve the Gryffindor sword from the pond in the Forest of Dean.

His head went under and he spluttered getting back to the surface. He was flailing his arms when he got back up and one arm hit an ice-cold leg: Snape's. Harry reoriented himself, holding on to the leg while keeping himself afloat and away from freezing by kicking his own legs in the water. He moved the floating body about until he reached the head and he took the position Charlie had taught him years ago for rescuing somebody who was knocked out in the water. He slipped his hands underneath Snape's arms, and his own body, lying on his back, underneath Snape's unmoving body. This way he could put Snape's head, of which only the nose and mouth had broken the surface earlier, on his chest, using Harry's own buoyancy to lift the man out if the water rose some more. Once Harry had an arm securely wrapped around Shape's chest - where he could feel more than see the man's slow and shallow breathing - he started a strong kicking pattern with his feet, his free hand feeling out for obstacles over his head.

Harry had only practised this move once, with Charlie as the victim, and then had had to go only three kicks before reaching the side of the old canal they'd been swimming in that summer. Then the water had been lukewarm, but this water was freezing cold and, after endless minutes, Harry's hand hadn't encountered anything like a shore or artificial sides.

He had been swimming like this for a while when his body started hurting with the cold; then it turned numb, but still Harry kept going for seemingly forever. But then finally, he felt something bump his almost frozen shoulder. And the next kick pushed him against something flat and solid under the water. He stopped kicking and, when his feet sank, they hit a flat surface, too. He felt around right under his butt and just a few inches down appeared to be solid ground. He sat up, bringing Snape with him. And he found himself sitting in about a foot of shallow water.

With some awkward manoeuvring, he got to his feet, carrying Snape bridal style, and he set off walking on in the direction he'd been swimming in.

The walk took nearly forever, Harry having to rehoist Snape's dead weight once in a while, but finally they reached dry land. There he carefully sat down with Snape in his lap, the head propped up against his shoulder. He tried to get the man to wake up, but it was no use. And so he sat there, not knowing what else to do.

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The moment Harry woke up, he grabbed for a second dose of the Sleep Walking potion. As before he gave Snape a spoonful that he carefully poured into the mouth, and then he rubbed the throat through the bandaging as he'd seen Hermione do. Then he took a spoonful himself and grasped the man's motionless hand, retook his seat, laid his head on the bed and closed his eyes, feeling the potion taking effect.

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Harry fully expected to find himself in the dark watery place again, but that's not where he ended up. He stood in a circular tower room, not unlike some of the tower rooms at Hogwarts, except that this one was quite large and had no roof; Harry could see the dark overcast sky above him. Directly in front of him was a semicircle of tall arches that seemed to lead outside and, in one of them, with the icy winds pulling at his nightshirt, stood the Prince, barefoot and with his back turned to Harry, leaning against one of the arch's pillars, silhouetted against the thunderous sky outside.

"Snape!" Harry called, taking a step nearer. Slowly, as if dazed, the Prince turned his head and gave Harry a glassy look.

"Oh, it's you," was all the man said.

Harry moved a few more steps forward until he was close enough to grab the front of the man's shirt. This new incarnation of Harry's Prince who now completely looked like Snape, was also a few inches taller than the former version had been. Harry, being used to being the shortest male in the company of his peers, had not even noticed that the Prince had been a good three inches taller than himself, but now this version was again a few inches taller, making Harry have to look up a lot further than before. For a moment the change irked him; it showed yet again how not like his Prince Snape really was.

"Was this your idea of a joke?" Harry snarled at the man. He shook him once to underline his question, but the man just seemed to sag into Harry's arms and Harry had no choice but to take the weight and help himself and the Prince down to a sitting position. That is, Harry sat and Snape ended up propped up against the base of the pillar he'd been leaning against earlier. One leg rolled out and ended up hanging over the edge of the platform the floor was making. Harry looked over and saw there was a sheer drop from the arch's opening. He quickly pulled up the lax leg and pulled the man's whole body a bit more inside the room. He himself scooted up and away a bit as well; he had a healthy respect for heights.

For a long moment they sat like that, Harry hoping Snape would start talking on his own. But all the man did was let his head roll to the side so he could look out at the sky as he'd been doing when Harry had arrived.

"Hey, I'm talking to you," he said as he sat forward and grasped the collar of the man's night shirt, pulling it forward and over so the man's head swung around and Harry could look him fully in the face. He abruptly let go when he saw the emptiness in the dark eyes; hopelessness even.

"You are not real," Snape said in such a soft wistful voice that the sound almost didn't reach Harry. But he did hear it. And he saw the sad look in the man's eyes and the single tear that ran down his cheek. Snape limply flopped back to his previous position up against the pillar, but this time he didn't turn his head away.

"I am real. We have an effing baby together; a very real baby," Harry said, feeling anger course through him; he wasn't going to let the man get away with dismissing Harry like that.

Snape didn't seem to react to Harry's tone, the wistful look deepened and he raised an arm to feebly reach for Harry. He reached, but before he could touch the movement seemed to stop as though the man was wary of touching a ghost and so dispelling it. The arm dropped and Snape sighed.

"You were real, but for a while only, now you are nothing but a flight of fancy, a wish, something I can never have, something I don't deserve." With the last whispered words, Snape turned his face away from Harry and towards the grey sky that had grown darker while they had been sitting there. In the distance a flash of lightning could be seen and a long low rumble could be heard not much later.

"I. Am. Real. Our baby is real. Or don't you care about Anne? Don't you want to know how she's doing, who she's with, that she's being taken care of?" Harry asked, his heart racing with both anxiety and anger. He had to get through to Snape, make him see reality. Reality in the middle of a bad dream.

At that last question something in Snape changed; his eyes suddenly became more alert and he spoke with stronger voices too when he asked, "You've seen her? Is she all right?" looking Harry in the eyes with an open earnestness that had seen in his Prince but never in his old schoolteacher. For a moment it shocked him and he felt compelled to reassure the man.

"She's with me. She's fine," he said, not comprehending the sudden loss of the fire in the man's eyes at his words. It was as if Snape sank back into himself, becoming small and empty.

"Ah, then she is dead too. I had so hoped that she at least..." but Snape didn't finish what he was saying and turned his face away again, exhaling a long breath.

Snape thought Harry was dead. And he thought Anne was dead. Anger sluiced through Harry, anger not at Snape but at the one person in the real world who had tried to kill his little family: Voldemort.

"Snape," Harry called, gently grasping a fold of the man's nightshirt where it lay over the man's legs and giving a tug to get the man's attention.

"Snape!" Only sluggishly did Harry's Prince turn his head back and he looked at Harry as if seeing him for the first time. A tiny smile formed on the man's lips, an upturning of the corners of the mouth really, while at the same time Harry saw Snape had turned paler over the last few minutes, unnaturally so.

"Oh, it's you," Snape said again, though the tone was different from the first time, softer, more quiet. He tried to lift an arm but it really only flopped a bit.

"Come and do me," the soft voice invited him, the legs shifting the tiniest bit apart before they lay still again. This had been a standard thing between them whenever the Prince had wanted to change the topic of conversation, but now Harry got a bad feeing. Things weren't right. The man was too pale and too languid. He hadn't even been this limp at the end of the pregnancy when Snape had had to lie on his side on the mattress because he couldn't sit up any more with the bulk of the baby.

No, this was more like when Harry had had that short dream with Snape face down in a pool of blood. The one with his Prince dying.

"No!," Harry yelled, jumping up and lurching forward to grab the man's thin shoulders in both hands. "No, I am not dead, Anne is not dead, you are not dead!" He gently shook the shoulders to make his Prince listen. "The one who is dead is Voldemort. I killed him and I lived!" That had caught Snape's attention, it seemed, and Harry stopped his movement.

"You are not dead? But Albus was so sure..?" was the feeble question.

"Yes, I died," Harry said, then quickly added, "But I came back. I chose to come back. I saw my parents and Remus and Sirius. And then I saw Dumbledore, he said I could go back if I wanted, he showed me the way, and I came back."

"Professor Dumbledore," Snape mumbled and Harry could not help curling his lips in a smile; even on the brink of death ol' Snape couldn't stop himself from demanding proper decorum from those around him. The Prince had had that trait too, but since he had been in Harry's peer group, it had shown less.

"Professor Dumbledore," Harry corrected dutifully. "Now that you know we're alive I need you to wake up. Come on." He moved his grip to the man's upper arms and started pulling him up.

"D-don't think I can," Snape mumbled as his head lolled back and Harry found the man's arms were so limp he was losing his grip on them. Realizing he wasn't going to get Snape off the ground like this, and realizing that he really should as the stone floor under them started to crack and the pillars around them started to crumble down in slow motion, Harry bent down and just scooped Snape up bridal style, only having a moment to notice how much lighter the man was now than when he'd been wet, before he found himself standing on only a square foot of floor tiling, with all the rest of the tower having crumbled away. And the tiny platform swayed a bit too.

Harry's heart hammered in his throat, not least because of their precarious situation, but also because the dead weight that Snape now was seemed to cool even as he held it. He could feel a shallow breath move the chest a bit, but there were long pauses between breaths, too long. And the man's head was lolling back, eyes closed, skin translucent, bordering on icy blue.

This situation was really bad, Harry realized and he looked about for a solution, but there was nothing but approaching thunderclouds all around him and only the one floor tile to stand on. 'Come on, think!' he yelled at himself. Think!

Then he remembered; this is a dream world, a world where magic is even more powerful than in the real world. Anne was living proof of that, wasn't she?

He closed his eyes and cast a wandless, wordless, spelless wish. The Prince had said magic was basically all about clearly formulating one's desires, that the words were unnecessary and the precise wand movements only focused the caster's innate magic so Harry formulated his deepest desire as well as he could, and then he pushed all his magic at it.

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Harry lifted his head from the bed and looked over the blanket to the occupant. Snape was as haggard-looking as Harry had known him but now the man's skin was emitting a soft light. Harry smiled faintly as he still held the thin hand; he recognized the light, it was his own magic infusing the man he loved.

The light increased in intensity and Harry could only smile fully as he felt the magic course through himself as well; it was like a homecoming. Then Snape on the bed tensed and the light flickered and then went away all together, taking that wonderful feeling with it. And it took Harry a moment or two to draw his mind away from the abrupt ending before he realized Snape was not sleeping peacefully but was thrashing wildly about the bed, eyes still closed and mouth open in a silent scream.

Harry was shocked into action when a strong spasm went through the hand he'd been holding. He quickly dropped the hand on the bed, pinning the wrist under his flat palm, and he climbed up on the bed to hold down the other flailing arm and sit on the kicking legs. The body beneath him bucked wildly and Harry knew he needed help.

"Dobby!" he yelled. Fuck no. He realized his mistake and tried again, "Kreacher! Come here! KREACHER!" There was a pop next to the bed. "Get Madam Pomfrey, NOW!" Harry ordered and took note of the fact that there was another pop before he'd even finished talking, and then dismissed everything else as he valiantly tried to keep Snape from hurting himself in his seizure.

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Madam Pomfrey was just finishing up re-bandaging Snape's neck when Kreacher arrived with a requested tray of tea and cookies for Harry and Madam Pomfrey and a bowl of porridge for Snape. Harry could still see the daggers in the eyes of his old Potions teacher when Madam Pomfrey had informed the man of his diet for the foreseeable future. Well, Harry thought, he's at least alive to resent having to eat it.

It had been touch and go for a while there, but Madam Pomfrey knew her business and she still had a good supply of the anti-venom Snape himself had brewed when Mr. Weasley had been attacked by Nagini a few years ago. Between those two things, and Harry's trip into the dream world, Snape lived. Harry's Prince lived.

Alive, yes. Annoyed, definitely. Unable to speak, also. Hence the annoyance. Snape's and Harry's both, because Harry desperately wanted to talk to his Prince, ask him where they stood. And that most definitely could not be a one-sided conversation. But, no matter how frustrating, it had to wait. Possibly for a long time.

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Progress with Snape's health was even slower than Harry could have dreamed possible; after a full month, all the man could do was open and close his eyes. Most of the time he slept and Harry ended up sitting next to the bed if he wasn't helping out with the baby. Anne also just slept, when she wasn't eating or in need of changing. At least she could make noises crying, Snape couldn't even do that.

Then one day Harry had had enough of just talking at Snape; he wanted to talk with the man, with his Prince. He wanted to ask the tough questions and get the honest answers. He also wanted to get to know this enigmatic man, who was both Harry's peer and his other half - that feeling had only increased over the last month, not decreased - and also the man who had tormented him for years, seemingly just because he could. He was also the man who had sacrificed his whole existence and his actual life to avenge Harry's own mother. Which brought Harry to another horrifying thought; if Snape had been in love with Lily all this time, how did Harry figure in it all?

He wanted to know. He needed to know. And the next morning, after Pomfrey had done her rounds and Anne was sent off on a visit with the Weasleys, Harry administered a spoonful of fresh potion - made the day before by Hermione - to Snape, who looked awake, as far as he ever looked awake, and a second spoonful he swallowed himself, before sitting and putting his head down next to their clasped hands.

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Harry looked around the semi-familiar room. It was the tower room again, but this time there was a roof overhead - oak beams supporting plank skirting, cobwebs and all. The previously open floor-length windows held stained glass panes with stone seating in front of them, and in the middle of the space an empty table stood with two chairs. At one side of the octagonal room a fireplace sat, dark and cold. On one of the stone seats Harry saw Snape sitting wearing his nightshirt, bare feet pulled up on the cold bare stone seat, one arm circling around his bent legs, face turned to look out of the ornate window. Harry himself also was wearing his nightwear - still the blue PJs - his feet also bare on the flagstone floor.

For a moment Harry just stood taking in the scene. At least it was a thousand times better than the freezing water or that blood-sucking rosebush. However... Harry focussed his mind and his feet instantly felt warmer with the fluffy slippers he now wore. He saw Snape turn his head as a similar pair appeared on his colourless feet, as well as a woollen cloak wrapped around his too-thin shoulders.

Harry focussed on the fireplace and it blazed up with a big warm fire, heat beginning to pour off it. He looked at the floor and a large round dark green deep carpet covered the centre of the floor. The table and chairs disappeared and a pile of blankets and large cushions appeared, the kind you could sit on or, if you put a few together, you could comfortably lie down to sleep on them. Harry was about to put his focus to the windows; a strong cold draft came off them which Harry thought could be improved on.

"Potter, stop." Harry turned back to Snape who had stood up from his seat and who looked both grim and sad. For a moment Harry wanted to ask why the man had stopped him, but then he realized that was the least of his questions and so he found himself asking something else instead.

"Did you know? From the beginning; that it was all real?" he clarified after the man had given him a puzzled look. Harry saw comprehension dawn on the thin face before it morphed to sadness. Snape turned away, moving closer to the cold windows, away from any warmth. To Harry's momentary disappointment also away from the slippers and cloak Harry had conjured, for both lay untouched upon the stone seat.

A thin hand was laid on the green and blue coloured pane. Harry could see the man's breath fog the glass as Snape spoke, "No. No, I didn't." The man then dropped his hand away and turned around in a swift movement, making his nightshirt ripple not unlike the way Snape had always made his clothing move about him; like wings that carry you nowhere.

"Tell me, when did it start for you?" the man said, using that accusatory tone that the Potions Master had most often used and the Prince only sometimes. It put Harry's hackles up as it may have been meant to do, but then Harry stopped himself from responding; he wanted answers and starting an argument - or letting himself be drawn into one - wouldn't be helping him get any. So he drew out a breath to calm down and just answered the question.

"I first dreamt of you, of us, around Halloween sometime. We were brewing in class, you stopped me from blowing up my cauldron."

Snape nodded and looked down, his arms folding across his chest as though he were cold. Hell, he probably was cold; he was standing with his back to the cold window, furthest away from the fire and the warm rug. "I see," he said. Then he sighed and hunched over a little more. He was looking down at his own feet as he spoke, "I've had that dream for more than twenty years."

Twenty years? But then how...? But the man spoke again. "It was a year and a half ago when I realized something had changed." The head came up, the dark eyes found Harry's. "That Lily had changed." What? Had Snape dreamed of Lily for years and not even noticed it had been Harry in the dreams?

Harry found he must have said his last thought aloud for he saw Snape turn away again. "No. No, not like that," the man said, the pain in his voice audible. "I thought that in my dream world I could have the most perfect thing; I could finally fall in love with my best friend, my only ever friend." The pain and longing in the voice were palpable, that was clear, even if the rest left Harry baffled.

"What do you mean?" Harry asked.

Snape lowered his head to rest his forehead against the decorated glass. He exhaled. "I loved Lily Evans from when first I met her." Harry's heart sank, leaving his hands cold; he knew he stood no chance against the kind of love the Snape of the Pensieve appeared to have had for Harry's mum. "But," the man continued, making Harry's heart jump firmly into his throat, his ears pounding with the loud beating. "But I had known all my life that I was attracted to my own sex, that I couldn't ever want a woman. Not even Lily." The pounding increased and Harry felt a sudden warmth tingle though his extremities.

"Then you weren't in love with my mum?" Harry asked, just to be sure he had understood it right.

Snape's shoulders shook for a moment and the odd sound of a chuckle came from the man as he lifted up his head and turned back around. So suddenly it startled Harry, the man sank down on the floor where he had stood putting his arms on his pulled-up knees and he tilted his head back to rest against the glass.

"Ironic, isn't it?" Snape looked Harry in the face again. "My own proclivities mismatched me to the woman I loved but did not desire, and then in my dreams one day I realize she's become a male and I find I desire that male and I give in to that desire, only to find myself pregnant with an all-too-real baby." Harry resisted the urge to come closer lest he interrupt the man's flow; Harry wanted to know it all.

Snape ran a thin hand through his hair, accidentally revealing more of his thin face. "It was only then that I knew it who really had been entering my dreams. I made very sure I kept away from you from then on."

"But why?" Harry couldn't stop himself from asking, taking a step forward before forcing himself to stop. What he would have given to have known he really was going to be a father, have a real family!

Snape was silent for a long moment and Harry got the sudden fear that he'd bollixed it all up, that now Snape would clam up. Snape's mouth formed a thin line and Harry tried to prepare his heart for the worst. "Albus had slated you to die. He had assured me, convinced me, that for the world to survive you had to die. And that you had to go to your death willingly." Snape's face fell as he breathed for a beat, a desperate sadness setting over the drawn features.

"If you had known you had a child somewhere, regardless of what you would have felt for its 'mother'," Snape almost spat the word, "you could never have sacrificed your life. I knew enough about you by then to know that at least."

"But," Harry cried, taking another step but stopping as the seated man put up a hand, palm out, to signal a halt.

"I stayed away from you through the rest of your sixth year and when I was told you were not returning for your seventh, I contrived to take the headmaster's position. I knew I would need Poppy's services when the time came and my presence at Hogwarts would keep me away from the Dark Lord; I couldn't risk him suspecting I'd had a child."

A cold thought pushed itself forward in Harry's mind. "So why didn't you just abort" - Harry just couldn't stop a wobble in his voice there - "the baby."

Snape snorted. "What have you been learning all this time at school? Magical pregnancies can't be aborted. It would kill both mother and child. And worse, if I died attempting it and the Dark Lord had found out, he could have harvested the unborn fetus and have used it in any number of Dark rituals, to get at her sire. No, I had to lay low in familiar ground, with people I could trust to help me."

"Pomfrey and Sassy," Harry supplied.

"Madam Pomfrey," Snape corrected him "Yes, those two and a few others."

"Who? Not the Carrows, surely."

"No. Some of the older Hogwarts portraits who had no liking for the Dark Lord, and Albus' as well. And Draco, to an extent. But I told no one who the father was. I just couldn't afford the risk." Snape was resting his head against the glass again, looking worn out.

"I see," Harry said. He wanted to get his Prince away from the cold part of the room and he even wanted him in his arms. But there was a question open still. After a pregnant pause he said, "I have one more question." When Snape gave him a neutral look, Harry continued. "In that last dream before I knew, you were bleeding, looked to be dying, what happened? And why didn't you come back to me again?!" He found he'd shouted that last question.

When the sound of the shout had faded Harry saw Snape looked drained, defeated. It took a while before he spoke, just long enough for Harry to agitate himself into thinking he was going to lose it all. "I don't remember that," Snape said. "I had Anne on April 21st. I don't remember that either, I lost consciousness pretty early on in the proceedings. Poppy later told me some of it; it was pretty messy. I can't say I'm sad to have missed it. But I survived and that was most important; I had a message to deliver, after all."

Message? Oh, the Pensieve memories. Harry found couldn't care less about those, or about Voldemort, or... Oh. That was exactly why Snape hadn't told him, Harry realized; Harry would have chosen his own child over his supposed destiny.

"I'm very very sorry I missed Anne's birth. I'm sorry I didn't know my time with you was real. If I had I would have treated you better," Harry sobbed, his face wet with tears. He felt like a user, abuser, a rapist; he had used his dream Prince, taken him while he was asleep, knocked him up and then kept having sex until the man had cringed away from his touch. He felt like the scum of the earth.

While Harry was busy berating himself a silence had fallen, one that was offset only by Snape's increasingly anxiety-driven breathing, had Harry had but ears to hear it. As it was, Harry almost didn't hear what Snape said next. "Will you let me see Anne?"

"Uh?" Harry took a moment to grasp the words he had heard. "What? Of course. I will bring her to you as soon as we wake up," Harry said not quite grasping the annoyed look on the man's face.

"No, I mean after I leave. Will I have visitation rights?" Snape said softly, hesitantly.

"You're leaving?" Harry exclaimed. "Why? Don't you want to be with Anne and me?"

Now Snape looked more than puzzled. "I do!" he said. "I want that, but why would you want me to stay? A man who lied to you and treated you badly, even for good reasons."

Harry gave that but a moment's thought before saying, "We have a child together; we are a family. I've always wanted a family. And there is nothing and nobody that will stop me from having one!"

HP*HP*HP*HP*HP

Epilogue.

"Merlin, I never would have thought having a birthday party for a five-year-old could be so much work!" Harry exclaimed, flopping on the double bed he had been sharing with his Prince for the last four-plus years.

"A five-year-old and three of her friends, plus three-year-old twins who are already showing signs of developing magic, a two-year-old with a sugar fixation, and a six-year-old Metamorph," came the voice of Harry's Prince, from the hallway to the bedroom where Snape was moving slowly, on his way to join Harry in the bedroom.

Harry quickly hopped off the bed and with a practiced move he turned down the bedding on Snape's side, as he did every night. Then, while Snape was still manoeuvring through the door, using every wall handle Harry had put in strategic places to help him stay upright, Harry did a quick turn about the room, clearing up dirty clothing and laying out Snape's fresh nightshirt and towel just where he would easily be able to reach them.

"Yeah, I do feel for Bill and Fleur; those two will grow up to be just as crazy as their namesakes," Harry said as he pulled out a fresh pair of PJs for himself and sent a quick warming spell at the bathroom through the open door and another at the bed. It might officially be spring, but the weather outside and the ambient temperatures inside were not showing it yet.

"Anne did well today, I thought; she said a proper hello and farewell to every guest. I swear, she's studying to become a princess one day, " Harry continued talking, as he quickly stripped for bed. He kept his head down and on his task, since he knew Snape didn't like to be observed when moving about the house. For a moment Harry reflected how far Snape had come, how far they both had come.

After Harry had brought Snape back from the brink of death, it hadn't been exactly plain sailing. Snape had been close to completely paralyzed, and while magical healing was able to do a lot to help, it was still a year before the man could speak properly again and even longer for him to get some of his mobility back. In that time, Harry had had to fight his Prince many times on the same point; no, Harry wasn't leaving and neither would he let Snape leave. Not on the basis of health or lack thereof. As long as Snape needed him Harry would not let him go.

The matter of love was different. In all the time they had been together, over six years if you included their time in the dream world, Snape had never actually said he loved Harry. Harry himself had said it a thousand times in his head and a few times aloud. But he had never dared to broach the subject, for fear of maybe reminding Snape of what situation the man was in. Harry didn't want to force a decision that might end his dream of having a family.

And the sex was great. A little one-sided, though, because of Snape's physical limitations. Most of the work was up to Harry and as an effect of that they tended to have intercourse only one way around. It suited Harry fine; he loved making his Prince squeal, but he couldn't help worrying about what Snape wanted, what Snape was not telling him.

So Harry ended up walking on eggshells in a less than ideal situation. It was just that any alternatives could mean a break-up of Harry's family and honestly, he loved Snape, couldn't that be enough for the both of them?

A loud crash and some choice cussing roused Harry out of his thoughts. He left the last two buttons on his PJ top unbuttoned and quickly rounded the bed to get to the bathroom, where Harry found Snape sitting on his nightshirt clad butt on the floor, trying and failing to pull himself up by the support rail on the bath. Harry quickly moved behind the angry-looking man, hunched down, wrapped both arms around the man's torso, underneath the man's arms, and then used his legs to push both of them up to a standing position. Snape falling was a common occurrence. Not everyday, thank goodness, but still so often that Harry had the moves down pat. He held on to Snape until the man had managed to get his feet under him and both hands were holding on to something; only then did he carefully let go so Snape could try to stand on his own. That day the man stood with only one retry. Harry decided to call it progress.

HP*HP*HP*HP*HP

By the time both were lying in bed and Harry was about to Nox to kill the candlelight, he felt more than saw his lover turn over from his spooned position in front of Harry to a flat position, leaving Harry on his side facing the reclining man. Harry could already guess what Snape would say. "We need to talk."

As such this phrase wasn't such a cliché as it might have been; Snape and Harry often talked about important matters just before sleeping. Anything from the progress of Anne's potty training, to scheduling Snape's potions work in with family life, so he'd be able to do the more time-consuming potions, to discussing Harry's latest idea on how to be of help to the Wizarding world, to tomorrow's grocery shopping list were all subjects discussed just before bed; basically the only time they had a shared quiet moment each day. So Harry wasn't too worried about Snape's request at first, but when he let his Prince continue, that changed rapidly.

"Potter," Snape began.

"Harry," Harry corrected him, as he'd done for all their life together. It had been the subject of a few minor arguments until Snape had admitted that he was just a creature of habit and that the slip of the tongue was just that and nothing more sinister. Harry had let the matter rest, bar reminding his Prince to use 'Harry' from time to time. But it hadn't helped Harry's need for signs of true affection from the man.

"Harry," Snape started again, "I wish to speak of my lack of progress in attaining my health." A cold draft ran down Harry's back; he wasn't liking the topic already.

"You're doing fine; you were on your feet very quickly today. And yesterday..." Harry stopped talking when Snape put up a silencing hand. The hand went down on top of their shared bedding as Harry heard Snape draw a long breath; the man could talk for a long while with such an intake, Harry knew well enough.

"My progress in the last year or more has been minimal. I can still only walk short distances and I need wall grips within the house and crutches outside. I have come far enough that I can earn my keep even if it is with the aid of others. It's time I admitted to myself that this is as good as it gets." Harry opened his mouth again to protest, but the hand came up again and Harry subsided. As Snape turned his gaze straight ahead to the ceiling and away from Harry's face, that cold feeling at his back had moved to include his belly. He knew he wasn't going to like what would be said next.

"I have taken enough of your time and generosity. I don't think I can ever become what you deserve, so it's time I left, so you can get on with your life."

Harry couldn't restrain himself any more and burst out, "No!" He sat up, putting the bedding in disarray, before framing the Prince's head with both hands and manually turning the gaze to his own face. "No. You listen to me. I'm not giving you up, that's not what I've been working for these last years. I've not spent my time and money on you as an exercise in charity; I love you. And Anne loves you. You are part of our family. End of."

Harry held his Prince's black gaze. As he put as much sincerity and determination in his own he saw puzzlement, suspicion and sadness war in Snape's. In the end the sadness won out and it sent a wave of fear down Harry's spine; Harry had put Snape on the spot by declaring his love; was the man sad because he was about to reject him?

"Harry," Snape looked pained for a moment, "don't you understand? I will never get better than this. I will never be an equal to you. Anne will grow up and she'll stand on her own, but I will likely be a burden forever." Snape turned his head away from Harry, displacing Harry's hands, before saying, "You may think you love me now, but I don't want to see that love turn to resentment of the fetters that my care will bind you to over time, of my inability of being a whole person, a real man. It would kill my heart as surely as piercing it with a dagger would."

"What are you talking about? 'A real man'? What does that mean? You are a real man and a bona fide hero to boot. You were ready to give your life for what you thought was right and just, and when you lived instead, you worked tirelessly to regain your health and even regain your profession. Why, you even became a good teacher and employer! You are a great father to Anne and a wonderful lover to me. What more do you want?"

Harry was upset that Snape apparently saw their life as unsatisfactory. They had a loving home in which they reared their bright daughter. Snape had a potions lab where he mentored Draco - who had begged for a chance of learning a 'clean' profession after the ruination of the Malfoy reputation - and employed Luna - who seemed to channel Snape's brewing instructions before the man had even spoken them, thus creating a synergy between them that compensated for Snape's lack of physical staying power. In short, Snape said and Luna did.

Early on in the collaboration, Harry had been worried Luna's own potions abilities were being overrun, but talking to her set him straight; Luna told him she had never had any potions abilities, she had always channelled Snape's and later Slughorn's, to lesser effect. Though she said her magic hadn't liked channelling Slughorn, she liked Snape's magic a lot better; it made her feel energized every day. Harry decided to leave it there; as long as everybody was happy, he was happy.

He looked at his lover of over five years, expecting an answer to his question of 'what more do you want?' The man turned his sad eyes back to Harry.

"I want you to be happy, satisfied. You deserve it and I cannot..." Snape trailed off.

"I'm more than satisfied, and I'm happier than I had ever hoped to dream of," Harry said. "Why would you think I'm not satisfied?"

"Because," Snape spoke to the ceiling again. "Because, I have not, I cannot..." Even in the darkened room Harry could seen a rosy blush grace the pale cheeks and embarrassment enter the dark eyes as they glanced over to his own. He kept his own gaze calm, enquiring, hoping to cajole the man into continuing.

Snape inhaled. "I cannot take you like a man should." He exhaled.

Uh? Harry needed a moment to try and figure it out. Snape thought Harry was left unsatisfied because the man couldn't top him?! Harry almost burst out laughing, of all the ridiculous...

"Severus, I don't want to be topped, I never have," Harry said earnestly.

"What? But you have talked of it so many times during sex, of ways to make it work," Snape spluttered quite endearingly, so much so Harry couldn't help but smile widely.

"I thought you wanted to. And I'm very willing to do anything you want. For myself, I much prefer topping you, making you scream and shag you into next week; I love it!"

Harry saw the blush darken. "I also, uh, love it. But more than giving you sexual gratification, which is indeed pleasurable to me too, I want you to be happy and fulfilled. But Harry, are you sure that you are not just settling for what's available? On no account do I wish to find when in the future your love had turned to hatred, that you had never informed me of the fact."

"My dearest Prince, you have my promise: I will never lie about my affections to you. Now if you will promise the same, we can get on to the good part," Harry said smilingly, pulling off the tangled bedding and revealing their nightwear-clad bodies to the soft light, before reaching behind him to grab the jar of lubricant that he kept on his night stand.

"I solemnly promise," Snape said before casting a general warming charm, a Divesto and a Nox in quick succession.

 

-The End-