Courting Disaster. Chapter 21.

[pekeleke]

Title: Courting Disaster.

Rating : NC-17.

Author: pekeleke

Word Count: 2969

Warnings: None.

Disclaimer: Don't own these characters. No money is being made out of this work.

Summary: For once in his life Harry Potter has a plan. A carefully plotted plan to help him conquer the heart of an extremely reluctant Severus Snape, only... conquering a suspicious ex-spy isn't for the fainthearted and soon Harry finds himself -quite literally- courting disaster.

A/N: I want to dedicate this fic to Delia Cerrano, who is the kind of wonderful reader and reviewer who never tires of reading -sometimes even more than once- the shenanigans of my particular version of the boys.

I don't know how many times she has expressed a desire to read a story featuring the gradual dismantling of Severus' defenses through romantic courtship, so... I thought I should indulge her for once and attempt to finally write this dynamic for her. Here is my take on this particular trope then, Delia. I do hope you enjoy it as much as I relished the challenge of coming up with this story-line for you. :D

Courting Disaster.

“Have you really read all these books?  There's an awful lot of them”  Harry asks, staring at the packed shelves that frame his walls with something that looks suspiciously like wide-eyed awe.

Severus chuckles under his breath, allowing his relaxed upper body to sink against the soft cushions of his fireside couch and lifts contented dark eyes to stare lovingly at his books.
“I'd be picking one of them right about now if you haven't come to dinner.  They've been my faithful companions for a very long time.  I've found...  refuge... from my daily troubles within their beloved pages.  They've kept me sane and helped me recover after the war ended.  Some of them have offered me the kind of wisdom I would have never learned for myself otherwise. I—my books are precious to me, Harry."

The Gryffindor nods understandingly, placing his empty bowl of Treacle Tart on the small coffee table that rests directly in front of the sofa they've decided to retire to with their pudding.  Green eyes travel around the room once again, taking in the crammed shelves, the lush green plants, the potion-related paraphernalia dotted all over the place, the aged rug that Albus gifted him long ago, the gleaming trophies he's won through nothing but hard work, the small pot of red ink with which he still crosses out whatever irritates him the most on his craft-related periodicals...

“I love it here, Severus.  Sitting in this room feels like I've curled right in the middle of your heart.  This place shows you just as you are, like the kitchen at the Burrow, or Dumbledore's crazy office.”

“Did you really just compared my intellectually-driven personality to the most unholy set of crazy Gryffindors out there?  I'm not sure that's a great compliment, Harry, even though I've got no doubt that you meant it as one.”

Harry laughs, places a playful right hand on Severus' bony knee and whispers teasingly.
“I know for a fact that you're not as much of a bookish cold-fish as you'd have me believe, you, fiend.  You can act crazily enough when you want to. You are the most Gryffindor-like Slytherin I've ever met, my Prince.”

“Harry, I...”  Severus’ eyes drop down towards Harry's capable hand, which is still curled around his knee.  He feels the warmth that emanates from that slightly calloused palm all the way down to his toes and forgets the half-hearted protest he's been thinking about voicing as soon as he hears the brat's agitated gasp of dawning realization.  Harry's fingertips clench reflexively around his knee, crumpling the dark cloth of his formal trousers slightly as the moment stretches and the silence grows tense.  Severus finds himself utterly unable to look away from that hand and those wrinkles.  From those slowly whitening knuckles.  From that tempting, slightly tanned skin that will drive him literally mad if he doesn't find the strength to stand up right now.

“If you're trying to talk yourself into ignoring the thoughts that are crossing your mind in favor of leaping off this couch as if it were on fire, let me beg you not to do it. Please.”

Severus lifts shamed dark eyes to look right into a slightly blushing face that shows nothing but fierce hunger.
“I didn't bring you here to do this, Harry.  I had honorable intentions all along and I think it’d be better to…”

“I want you.  I've wanted you every second of every day since the first night we slept together.  I love you and you love me back. There is nothing wrong with letting things go further, sweetheart.”

Something daring, something utterly sweet and needy and powerfully passionate awakens in Severus at that moment, but he still hesitates on account of too many years of alcohol-driven sexual encounters.  He's never fallen into bed with anyone while being as stone-cold sober as he's right now, and the idea of taking such unprecedented risk with Harry, of all people, terrifies him more than anything.
“I'm not ready for it, Harry.  I—this isn't how I usually have sex.  I often need...”

“Booze?  Darkness?  A stranger?  How can any of that feel safer to you than this?  You know I'd never hurt you, don't you?”

Severus swallows with utter discomfort and turns his head away.  Unable to force himself to confront the disappointment he's certain must be painting dark shadows in Harry's lovely eyes.
“Don't look away from me, please.  You're making me feel like a monster.  I'm not trying to push you into doing something you're not ready for, Severus.  I'm just trying to understand what's going on.”  Harry's hand lifts away from his knee then, traveling confidently upwards until it ghosts over his shoulder in a wordless attempt to encourage him to face him once again.  Severus feels a wave of shame so strong at his own ridiculous behavior that he can't bear not to yield, so he turns reluctantly around to face this remarkable youth who is generous enough, patient enough, to want him despite his Hogwarts-sized basket of hang-ups.

“I want you too, Harry.  Never doubt that.  It's just that I—I...  I can't cope with the idea of baring myself to you yet.  Not while I'm in my right mind.  Not after seeing with my own eyes the kind of blokes you usually go for.  I'm nothing like them at all.  They were gorgeous, all of them, while I am utterly...  ugly.”

Harry loses all traces of color.  His lips part as if to offer some sort of answer but no sound comes out of them.  His green eyes become lackluster, shattered and heavy with the kind of sorrow that Severus would have given a great deal to remove from them at once.
“You realize that I've already seen you naked, don't you?”  The Gryffindor finally asks, curling a trembling right hand around the nape of his neck and holding him still.  Captive.  Tethered to a conversation he'd rather avoid completely.

“I remember most of that very hazily, nyingdu-la.  I was drunk.  I'd have never found the courage to take my clothes off in front of you, if I'd been in my right mind.”

“I remember all of it very clearly, though.  And I've never been more turned on by anyone in my entire life.  You are not ugly at all, Severus.  You are beautiful inside and out.”

“That's easy for you to say, but...”

“It's not easy.  It's the truth.”

Severus closes his dark eyes, trapped as he is by Harry's delicate hold onto his neck, and thoroughly unable to keep looking into the green eyes that bore into his own, trying to search the very depths of his gaze like twin probes sent to map the darkest corners of his hastily pounding heart.

“Severus?”  Harry calls him softly when he doesn't respond, addressing him with the kind of worried tone that somehow manages to break something reticent and frightened that's been hiding deep within him for years.  He arches his neck backwards, purposely pushing his pale flesh more firmly into Harry's callused palm and opens anxious black eyes, begging the brat to help him, to take over, without daring to actually utter a single word out loud.

“Oh, sweetheart...”  His lion whispers and curls tender fingertips around the base of his skull a bit more firmly, dragging his head closer, his torso nearer and his mouth downwards.  Setting them both on a path that has no other option but to end in the softest of all kisses.

Warm lips brush against his own, sweet with the flavor of the Treacle Tart he'd cooked just for the brat, and gentle, oh-so-gentle.  Severus sighs and allows himself to melt into the loving caress, ignoring every thought trying to talk him out of doing this, surrendering only to his own wants and needs.  To his desire to trust Harry.

The seeker smiles against his lower lip as soon as he opens his mouth, allowing himself to be entered in this small yet thoroughly disarming way, and making them both groan roughly in unison.  Strong, yet delicate fingertips shift around to frame his face, tilting it slightly to the left and holding it fast like a treasure or a priceless work of art.

“Harry...”  He mumbles as soon as his swelling mouth is set free and all but swallows his own tongue when the brat shushes him quietly, tracing his reddening ear with his lips in a move that makes Severus' already thrumming pulse pound like a war drum.

Soothing kisses rain on his eyelids and cheeks.  On his brow, his nose and the slackened corner of his mouth.  On the side of his neck and all along the hem of his starched collar.  They don't come to a stop at all when they reach the prominent lump of his Adam's apple but settle over it, as if determined to thoroughly adore that one spot, mouthing the paper-thin skin and pulling on it gently with teeth that seem to be willing to devour him one little nibble at a time.  Severus growls deep in his throat and arches his neck backwards, opening the vulnerable spot further to his partner's insistent ministrations without any hesitation.  Without any fear.

“You are so beautiful like this...”  Harry grumbles, lost in passion, and the conviction that colors his lust-roughened voice heals something fragile, something utterly wounded inside Severus.

“I want this.  I want you, Harry.”  He says out loud and laughs wildly when the brat runs disbelieving greedy hands over his neck and shoulders, over his heaving chest, like a kid whose stern parent has just given him green light to gorge himself with candy.

“I don't know where to start.  I want all of you at once, my Prince. I want...”

Severus arches more fully into him, lifting his narrow hips off the couch and allowing the straight lines of his slender body to fit themselves to Harry's far more muscular frame.  The Gryffindor gasps and shivers.  His bright eyes darken with sheer lust and rake over him hungrily even as a trembling pair of strong, masculine arms curl around him, holding him securely against a washboard stomach with an avarice that sets his blood on fire.
“Take what you want.  Anything.  Everything.  I'm begging you, nyingdu-la.”

The seeker rears backwards then. Feverish green eyes boring into his, struggling to bring himself into some form of control.
“Are you sure?  We don't have to go all the way.  I'll be happy enough with this, Severus.  I don't want to make you feel coher...”

“Will you stop trying to be so maddeningly chivalrous?  I want you to fuck me into this couch, Potter.  I want you to do it right now, for Merlin's sake!”

Harry jumps, clearly startled, and then starts chuckling low in his throat, planting those smiling lips back on the skin of his neck as if he's never, ever, planning to remove them.  Severus' world reduces to that single mouth, that playful tongue, the ten branding fingertips restlessly moving over every inch of him and the thousand tingling nerve-endings they are so very deftly playing to the most ancient tune of them all.

Hasty hands claw at the buttons that keep his white shirt closed, ripping some of them off and working around the rest with flattering impatience.  The soft cloth parts without resistance, leaving the skin it kept hidden openly exposed to the darkened gaze that seeks it out so greedily.   Playful teeth ghost over his exposed shoulder, following the prominent line of his clavicle and zeroing in on the hollow at the base of his throat.  Severus arches up into the open-mouthed kiss that's trying to consume him and they both cry out sharply, thoroughly overwhelmed by a lust that makes them blind and deaf to everything except one another.

Soon they are both equally naked.  Both gasping.  Feverish.  Breathless and impossibly hard.  Both desperate for further intimacy, and Severus looks right into Harry's glazed eyes and parts his legs in silent invitation, exposing himself dirtily and with a wantonness that would have shamed him if he'd bestowed it upon any other man, but that feels nothing short of... right... when he offers it to Harry.

His lion stares at him, apparently unable to form a coherent thought.  He looks shocked, awed, delighted beyond words, and the groan that rents the air as soon as he allows himself to breathe once again betrays such potent lust that it turns Severus' already quivering muscles to jelly, flattening his back into the couch's cushions as if he were a rag-doll.  Or a spineless, mindless creature.  Or a lump born of the most primal of needs.  A beast who can't do anything at all that doesn't involve lying back with a soft sigh and wait impatiently for his conqueror to stalk closer and...  claim... him.

Harry kneels between his too pale, hairy knees in the next second and sets warm, callused fingers on the back of his quivering thighs, rubbing painfully slow, soothing, circles into them.
“Is there any lube around, Severus?  I realize you weren't expecting...”

Dark amusement colors the bark of laughter the Slytherin releases in response and Harry halts, frowns for a second, and ends up blushing charmingly as soon as he catches his partner's rueful look towards the small drawer of the coffee table.
“This is where you wank, isn't it?  You do it right here, on this sofa.  You pleasure yourself into orgasm while the firelight paints all this snow-white skin a gorgeous golden color...”

Severus bites his lower lip but ends up groaning at the picture Harry is so breathlessly describing, anyway.  He can't understand how the brat is managing to do it, but he can't help the thought that he sounds utterly beautiful when referred to in that awed, reverent tone.  While having his quivering flank caressed by a thoroughly worshiping hand and watching his Gryffindor's face contort with unmistakable need as he opens the bottle of lube and begins to coat those Quidditch-callused fingers with the slightly viscous substance.

The seeker grins as he hovers over him, plants a single kiss on the very tip of his long nose and nudges his tight entrance with a careful digit.  Severus doesn't dare to close his eyes, doesn't dare to turn his face away or even breathe.  He can only gaze right back into those loving green eyes and thank Merlin for having found him worthy of Harry.
“I love you.  I love you.  I love you...”   He whispers and all but shatters into a million joyful shards when his own personal savior repeats those words in his ear.

Harry finger-fucks him carefully, but with a relentlessness that doesn't let him ignore the fact that he's being utterly possessed by a man who has every intention of crawling right into his soul.  The world shifts and blurs and whirls in and out of focus as he yields to his lover's slow, deliberate thrusts, letting himself be taken in every way.  Gasping and pleading and undulating his straining hips wantonly to the maddeningly slow rhythm set first by Harry's fingers and then by his hot, hard, cock.

He lays contentedly there: long hair tangling around his flushed face, black eyes pierced by green emerald, sweaty pale back flattened to his own couch's cushions while the savior himself seems determined to spear him right into orgasm, untouched, and feels nothing but a wild and exhilarating sense of  freedom.  He's awake, alive and sober.  He's beloved, desired, wanted.  He has finally become the man he's always wanted to become, and he couldn't have done so without his Harry...

The thought shatters whatever is left of his resistance, launching him into an endless abyss of white-hot pleasure and he gasps under the weight of his Gryffindor's body.  Harry pushes hard into him, riding his quivering hole furiously, clearly adamant to get himself milked by the pleasure-fueled tremors he so gloriously brought forth.  Seconds later he gasps breathlessly and stiffens above Severus, filling his still fluttering channel with the most intimate of essences before collapsing atop him.

Severus grunts and blinks dazedly towards the ceiling, unable to conjure a single logical thought or pronounce one measly word.  Spiky tresses of messy dark hair tickle the underside of his jaw and his lion's moist, warm breath puffs against the side of his neck, making him shiver with over-stimulation.

“I sincerely hope you're not planning on kicking me out after that.”  Harry whispers softly into the silence and Severus would have smacked him on the head for daring to say such idiotic thing at a moment like this, if he hadn't caught the undercurrent of genuine worry that had probably prompted the comment.

“You, my dear nyingdu-la, will now have the dubious honor of being the first Gryffindor to set foot inside my bedroom.”  He deadpans and decides that all is well with his world when his lover giggles like a teenage girl and has the actual balls to whoop out loud.

“Yes.  Oh, yes.  Yessss!  I've made it!  There's no way I'll ever achieve anything greater than what I've accomplished tonight, then!”

Severus laughs, entertained by Harry's ridiculous antics despite himself and whacks him on the side of the head for his disrespecting idiocy anyway, just because he can.
“Oh, shut up, you, silly lion!  It'd be in your best interest to learn the fine art of quitting while you are ahead, now that you're stuck with me, Harry.”

The seeker wiggles his brows, teasingly playful, but his words are vow-serious and fierce when he answers him quietly:
“I will never quit when it comes to you, Severus.  Not while I'm behind and definitely not while I'm ahead.  That is a promise, my love.”

TBC...

( Chapter 20 )

( Chapter 22 )