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Harry is barely a foot into the store, the door chime still ringing in his ears when Snape says, "I've not yet completed your order, Potter."
Harry smirks and shuts the door behind himself. "Oh? Getting slow in your dotage?"
Snape huffs a sarky laugh–fair enough, seeing as Harry's the one who's gone silver at the temples and requires potions to keep his knees from audibly creaking–and glances up from his place behind the till.
"Oddly enough, Potter," he murmurs, "you aren't my most important customer."
"No?" Harry asks, and tips his head toward the entrance, Potter & Prince etched into the frosted glass pane. "Funny, my name's on the door."
Snape's eyes flutter in an expression Harry recognises as a barely suppressed eye-roll. "Is it."
Harry smirks wide. "First on the door, in fact."
"Yes," Snape sighs, glancing down at his ledgerbook open on the counter, "the alphabet is tragically flawed, ordering your name before my own. I shall have to write a scathing letter to the Phoenicians."
Harry shrugs and smiles like butter wouldn't melt. "I've no idea what that even means."
"Quelle surprise," Snape mutters then flips the ledger closed, glaring up at Harry. "If I brew your silly tonics now, will you make some effort to be tolerable?"
Harry hums. "Doesn't really sound like me, but–"
"Follow, whelp."
Harry smiles at his feet and follows Snape around the counter, then through the wide stone archway behind.
It's a fascinating space, Harry thinks as he steps into the laboratory; rigorously organised, impeccably clean, walls lined with strange contraptions and bookcases of esoteric titles. It's certainly evolved in the twenty odd years since Harry had offered to sponsor Snape's business venture.
(Harry had been rather shocked when Snape had agreed to the deal with very little coaxing. But of course, a thousand words could describe Severus Snape, and not a one of them is predictable.)
"Sit there," Snape says, nodding toward a stool at the end of the workbench. "And for god's sake, don't touch anything."
Harry seats himself, raising his hands in mock surrender, and settles in while Snape shuffles through the nearby pantry for ingredients.
"So," he says to Snape's back. "How are you?"
"Irritable," Snape snips, and alright, perhaps he's a little predictable. "And disinclined toward pleasantries."
Harry shakes his head and chews on a smile. "Oh, I'm quite well, thanks for asking."
Snape returns to the workbench with a bounty of unidentifiable substances in little glass jars, and raises a brow at Harry before getting to work.
A quiet moment passes, punctuated by the soft, rhythmic thunk of Snape's knife against the cutting board. Harry chews his tongue; he probably should've planned this all out–his opening gambit, at the very least–but if there's one thing he's learned in his forty odd years on the earth, it's that the quickest way to make God (and Snape) laugh is to make a plan.
Bugger it. "Business alright?" Harry asks, tone a practiced casual.
Not practiced enough, apparently, as Snape raises a suspicious brow and says flatly, "As usual."
Harry grits his teeth and dips his head in a nod.
The quiet descends again, and Snape turns away to add the prepared ingredients to one of the simmering cauldrons behind him.
"Any adverse side effects with the last batch?" he inquires.
"Never are," Harry murmurs, then quirks a smile. "You're far too good a brewer for that."
Snape sighs and sprinkles a sparkly blue powder over the other cauldron. "A historic lack of side effects does not preclude them occurring in future," Snape mutters. "I'm a potioneer, not a miracle worker."
Harry extends his legs, his bad knee (courtesy of Krum taking him off his broom at the '08 Cup) bending painlessly with the motion. "My joints say otherwise."
"If your joints are talking, I fear you aren't taking your potions as directed."
Harry snorts, settling his elbows on the countertop as Snape returns to the workbench. "You're in rare form this afternoon."
Snape hums. "Am I."
Hmm, on second thought, "Nnno, s'pose not." Harry smirks. "Always a git, aren't you."
"Just so."
Snape opens a jar of something that looks like (and very likely is) dried slugs, and pulls one out with a pair of tweezers. Harry watches the play of his hands, the spare, precise movements of long fingers as he quarters the specimen with a paring knife and tips the pieces into a jade mortar, spinning the pestle once against his palm before he sets into grinding.
"It's my birthday today," Harry says before he can think better of it.
Snape doesn't miss a beat. "I'll alert the Prophet."
Harry huffs a laugh. "No need. They ran a, er, modest spread on me this morning."
Snape snorts. "Six pages is modest?"
”For the Prophet? Definitely."
Snape gives a flat hum and taps the pestle against the lip of the mortar, then turns to deposit the foul-looking (and smelling) paste into the first cauldron.
"So you read it then?" Harry asks the man's back.
Snape gives a prim harrumph. "I read the headline then skipped to the classifieds."
"Ah." Harry smiles down at his hands and nods. "Anything interesting?"
"Mrs Ashwater on Harrington Road is auctioning off her lime green fainting couch. Starting bid twelve galleons."
Harry hums in mock consideration. "Think it'd complement my eyes?"
"Based on Mrs Ashwater's detailed description, I imagine it would destroy your eyes entirely." Snape stirs the potion widdershins, then extinguishes the flame under both cauldrons before returning to the bench. "A moment to cool, then I shall decant them."
Harry nods and watches as Snape caps the jars and returns them to the pantry, then wipes down the cutting board and countertop with a dry cloth. There's a curious set to his shoulders, a tension along his sharp jaw, and Harry gets the sense he knows what's coming.
Perhaps they are both predictable.
Harry steels himself with a breath as Snape returns to the workbench. "I had a question for you."
Snape breathes a tired sigh, chin dropping to his chest as his hands grasp the edge of the countertop. "Potter–"
"And I've no reason at all to think you'll let me ask it," Harry interrupts, "let alone give me an answer. You never have before."
Snape's thin lips purse. "But."
Harry nods. "But… I am forty-two years old today. Lived twice as long as my parents did." Snape's eyes narrow briefly in something not unlike a wince, and Harry looks down at his own lined hands. "Lived longer than I ever expected to, really."
Snape sniffs and looks away. "It was certainly touch and go for a moment."
Harry tilts his head. "For us both."
Snape meets his eye for barely a second, but Harry sees the shadows moiling there, the skulls and snakes, and look at me–
"Yes," Snape intones, and takes up the mortar and pestle.
He marches to the sink a few paces away and spins the spigot, wetting the mortar before he sets about scrubbing it.
"So I was thinking," Harry says to the long line of Snape's profile, "about… the question you never let me ask."
Snape scrubs hard at a dark spot on the jade bowl. "And?"
"And," Harry murmurs, "it occurred to me that… you already gave me an answer."
Snape stills for half a second, shoulders going taut before he attends the mortar again. "Did I."
Harry hums and folds his arms over his chest. "Twenty years ago," he says. "You set up shop here, ready to face the- the vitriol of the uninformed public." Harry snorts at the memory of a disheveled Snape, hauling crates into the ramshackle little Hogsmeade shop, pointedly ignoring the hecklers and gawking onlookers. "Practically dared them to run you out of town. Former Death Eater selling poisons half a mile from the schoolyard."
Snape huffs a bitter laugh. "If only," he laments, and sets the mortar on the drying rack. "Pepper Up and Dreamless Sleep, mostly. Poison orders are tragically rare–"
"And I," Harry continues, "fresh-faced idiot that I was–"
"Was?" Snape interjects with a raised brow.
Harry rolls his eyes. "Idiot that I was, I thought to myself… You gave up everything for me," he says, voice soft in wonderment. "Your career, your reputation, your- your good name–"
Snape snorts. "It was never–"
"The least I could do… was give you mine."
Harry glances through the archway toward the shop door–Potter & Prince emblazoned across–then peers back up at Snape.
Snape's jaw clicks shut, and he casts his eyes away.
Harry feels his mouth quirk in a weary smile. "Figured you'd laugh me out the door," he murmurs. "Call me a moron and send me on my way."
Snape sniffs and folds his skinny arms over his chest. "Uninspired. I'd've called you much worse."
Harry shakes his head. "But you didn't."
Snape doesn't move, doesn't speak, barely appears to be breathing.
Harry continues. "And I thought… I figured it was just business, yeah? I'd sponsor you, give you my name for your door, help grow your patronage, and maybe… Maybe the wizarding world would–." He shrugs with a bleak smile. "I dunno. Forgive you. If not thank you, like they ought to."
Snape's shoulders sag on a quiet sigh, limpid black eyes fluttering shut, and Harry knows–in the pit of his belly, in the marrow of his bones–that he's right.
Harry leans forward in his seat. "But you never cared about that, did you?"
Snape's eyes remain stubbornly closed, and his head twitches in an aborted shake.
"You didn't need them to thank you," Harry goes on, "or forgive you… Didn't need them to know what you did, what you sacrificed. Didn't need them to know you're a hero." Snape's jaw clenches at that. Unsurprising; Harry knows how Snape abhors any sort of acknowledgement, but this–
This has gone unacknowledged for far, far too long.
"You didn't need my name," Harry whispers, and Snape's chin drops to his chest. "But–"
"Potter–"
"You wanted it."
Snape's eyes flick open, blank and sightless in that way Harry knows is an act–a mask to hide whatever stirs in the darkness beneath.
Pointless now, since Harry has finally seen the light.
"You wanted my name there," he says surely. "Wanted it next to yours– before yours, even." He glances briefly toward the storefront window, then back to Snape. "Potter and Prince. Phoenicians be damned."
Snape doesn't speak, doesn't look away from where his shadowed eyes have settled on the countertop.
Twenty years, Harry thinks. Twenty damned years dancing around the elephant in the room like a bloody circus. Twenty years tiptoeing on eggshells, the ever-present question rattling around somewhere between his heart and his head, why? why? why?
Why did "You never let me ask the question," Harry says, and only now–watching the minute plays of expression across Snape's pale face, the way the lovely bolt of his jaw goes taut–does Harry realise the answer.
"You never let me ask the question," he repeats, "because if I did, then–"
"Potter–"
"–for the first time in your life," Harry continues as if Snape hadn't spoken, "... you might've gotten something you wanted."
Snape's eyes close again for a brief moment, before snapping back open. "I must decant your tonics," he murmurs flatly and turns away.
Harry watches as Snape ladles out the potions, wondering if he's pushed too far or not far enough.
But indecision is a young man's game, and Harry has long since forgotten how to beat about a bush.
"Ache-Away and Rider's Remedy," Snape intones, setting two little vials on the table, eyes fixed on a vague point in the middle distance. "Two drops under the tongue, twice per day, with a meal."
Harry sighs. "Snape–"
"On the house," Snape interrupts, then flicks his eyes to Harry with a mild sneer, "for the old man."
For god's sake. "Severus–"
"You said it yourself," Snape cuts in sharply, favouring Harry with that flat stare of his that burns hot around the eyes. "You've no reason to think I'd let you ask the question, so–"
"I don't have a question, I have an answer."
Snape's brow furrows for half a moment, then smoothes out, and Harry knows he's been understood.
"An… answer," Snape repeats, and there's something wispy in his tone, soft and hesitant and nearly hopeful.
"Mm," Harry hums and bites down on the wide smile pulling at his mouth. "Seven o'clock tomorrow evening," he says, and hoists himself out of his seat. He takes two short steps to stand before Severus, closer than he's ever dared to before.
Harry thinks 42 might be a year for daring.
"Seven o'clock tomorrow evening," he repeats, "is when I'll be picking you up."
Severus's eyes flick back and forth between Harry's, gleaming liquid black like spilled ink, and a lock of jet hair spills from its place tucked behind his ear.
"... I didn't ask," he murmurs.
Harry hums, and something warm spreads from the core of him to the tips of his fingers. "You've been asking for twenty damned years."
Severus lets out a breath as Harry slides a hand up his becloaked arm, settling his palm over the warm place where Severus's shoulder meets his neck.
Harry leans forward, a hair's breadth from the other man. "You'd not turn down a gentleman on his birthday, would you?"
Severus swallows. "Produce said gentlemen, and I'll let you know–"
Harry chases the retort back to Severus's lips, where he tastes the lemon tea Severus had with lunch, the sharp peppermint of his toothpaste, and the bittersweet tang of helpless desire–of a want grown warm and smooth with age.
Severus's large hands settle on his hips, and no–no, these twenty years weren't wasted at all, but a prelude, a steady quickening, an overture–
"Seven o'clock," Harry breathes against Severus's mouth.
Severus sighs, weary but contented, and tips his forehead against Harry's. "…Seven o'clock."