Incentive Plan
by Beth H.
(c) June 8, 2007

***

Harry crossed his arms over his chest and stuck his chin out defiantly. "You can't make me do this!"

Stubborn as a mule, Kingsley thought, but he just smiled benignly. "Oh, I think you'll find that I can, Harry. If you still want to be an Auror, that is."

"But it's not fair," Harry said angrily. "You know the two of us still hate each other. Isn't there somebody at the Ministry who can teach me?"

"Nobody who can be trusted with the Order's business. The war may be over, but that doesn't mean that aren't still secrets to be kept, a fact that you should know better than anyone. In any case, Snape's one of the strongest living practitioners of the mind magics, and besides, he owes me."

"I still think it's ridiculous," Harry said, pushing back from the table and standing up. "Tonks isn't an Occlumens, and she...."

"Enough. What Nymphadora Tonks can or cannot do is irrelevant for the purposes of this conversation. The new regulations state that all trainee Aurors must prove themselves to be at least competent in Occlumency before being given full status in the department. Or...were you expecting to be given a special dispensation because you're the Boy Who Lived?"

Harry glared at Kingsley through narrowed eyes, then sat back down. "You know," he said, slumping down in the chair. "You look like a nice person, but you're really a prat, aren't you?"

Kingsley laughed. "Get it out of your system now, boy, because once you qualify and your probationary period starts, comments like that will earn you a suspension without pay."

"Fine," Harry muttered. "Whatever."

"That's better."

"Prat."

***

The room was empty, save for a small round table and two wooden straight back chairs, one of which Harry was currently slouching on.

"Of course the git's late." Harry muttered to himself, kicking the nearest table leg. "Git. Rotten git."

It would appear that the power associated with calling something by name three times wasn't just a feature of the Muggle cinema, because before the echo of Harry's third use of the word 'git' had faded, Severus Snape swept into the room...and he was wearing the oddest expression on his face.

On anybody else, it might have been called "cheerful," but this was Snape. Harry had a vague memory of Hermione trying to explain the theory behind the meeting of matter and anti-matter, and as far as he was concerned, 'Snape' and 'Cheerful' was the same thing: they couldn't possibly exist in close proximity to each other without bringing about annihilation.

Except...Snape did seem to be smiling. Cheerfully. It was hard to imagine Snape smiling about anything that wasn't going to end up being bad news, one way or another.

"The war is over," said Snape, looking down his long nose at Harry. "Against all reasonable expectations, you completed your task successfully. However, unsurprisingly, it appears that being instrumental in bringing down the most feared dark Wizard of the century has not satisfied your need to play the hero."

Harry bristled and instantly regretted it as he saw one corner of Snape's mouth curl up into a smile. For nine years that prick had been baiting him, and for nine years, Harry had let himself be baited.

"So be it," Snape said, reaching into one of the pockets of his robes. He pulled out an unlabeled bottle and put it down on the table in front of him. He then pulled out a second bottle, then a third and a fourth, bottle after bottle, until a baker's dozen were arrayed before him, each filled to the top with some kind of sludge-like potion that Harry couldn't identify.

"Neither of us needs any reminder that traditional methods of teaching you Occlumency proved fruitless."

Harry was on the verge of saying that he would have learned if the teacher hadn't been such a prick, but the image of that damned pensieve flashed immediately into his mind, and he shut his mouth.

"Now that you are no longer a...boy, perhaps you will respond better to a different pedagogical approach - one which proved effective in developing my Occlumency skills."

"You want me to learn the way you learned?" Harry said with a frown. "Why didn't you just use this method in my Fifth Year?"

Snape snorted, then shook his head. "No, that really wouldn't have been at all appropriate."

Harry looked at the bottles once more, then looked back at Snape.

"What does this potion have to do with Occlumency instruction," he asked finally.

"The connection," said Snape, removing the stopper of the first bottle with a lazy wave of his wand, "will become obvious to you in due course."

Harry sniffed at the odor wafting towards him, then wrinkled his nose and coughed. The smell of that potion, whatever the hell it was, could not possibly have been any more foul.

He glanced up at Snape. The git was smiling malevolently, almost as if he was about to require Harry to drink the loathsome stuff.

Oh no.

Absolutely not! There was no way Harry was going to drink that disgusting sludge. He glared at Snape. If that git thought for one second that - -

"Legilimens!

***

Shutting his eyes did nothing at all - eyes opened or closed, Harry couldn't erase the images (a rose and gold glow, the sparkle of fairy lights, a crystalline pool beneath a stand of willows), block the scents (sandalwood and clove and apples and a hint of musk), keep from feeling (butterfly wings fluttering like kisses against his eyelids, skin on skin, heat on heat).

He looked away for a moment and when he looked back, a bed had appeared, blinked once and he was in the bed, and it was soft and there was a faint scent of spice and skin and sweat, as if the bed hadn't always been occupied by Harry alone, and the deep blue sheets mirrored the color of the sky, and they were cool and smooth and cotton, exactly as he preferred (did anybody really like silken sheets?).

Harry knew he should get up, should find a way out of this dreamscape, this Snape-scape. He knew this wasn't real, that he needed to fend off the sights and sounds and scents, but he couldn't.

It was all too delicious to just lie there, under the twilight-dimmed sky, seeing each cloud and each petal and the branch of each tree shift and reshape themselves into ever-changing images of seduction, at one moment taking on the likeness of a man or woman, beckoning to Harry, and in the next moment, showing him only the merest glimpses of freckled breasts and gently curved arses and thick purpled phalluses and half-open mouths, and all the while a breeze blew across the dreamscape, ruffling his hair and tightening his nipples.

And there was a sound, deep within the stand of trees and Harry twisted in the bed, trying to identify it. Was it the beat of a drum or the cry of a raptor or...was it no sound at all, but a throbbing deep within himself? He clutched at the sheets and writhed on the bed, trying desperately to find the source of the heat that was pulsing so fiercely through him, strong and stronger as each moment passed, and oh, God...just another minute and he'd be there and it was all too powerful, too strong, too wonderful, absolutely magnificent until all at once...

...it stopped.

"Snape, what..." What did that bastard think he was doing now? "Don't you dare!"

"It's not working, idiot boy." Snape's voice was as ragged as his own. "By now you should have been able to create at least some semblance of a defensive Occlumency shield."

"Fuck Occlumency," Harry said desperately, as the images started to fade around him. "I couldn't care less at the moment!"

"Oh, for God's sake," Snape snarled. "Don't tell me you're enjoying this!"

"What I'm telling you is that if you stop now I'm going to kill you," Harry gasped, squeezing his eyes shut tight and arching his back, and Snape must have believed his threat, because in the next moment, it was as if the sensory input had never weakened in the first place, and all at once, the whole world was nothing but heat and tension and blood and the driving force of need and then a voice, breathy and harsh - Snape's voice - said "Now!" and Harry, obeying Snape's instruction as he'd never done in the classroom, came so hard and so fast that for a moment (or maybe more than a moment), Harry was sure he was going to black out.

***

Flat on his back on the floor and still breathing heavily, Harry turned his head toward Snape.

"Are you absolutely sure that's how you got so good at Occlumency? Because, okay...I can't believe I'm saying this, but that was one hell of an incentive to never learn how to block somebody's thoughts."

Snape smirked in the most disgustingly self-satisfied way. Bastard. He hadn't been that good.

Harry could get up from the floor anytime he wanted to.

"In the first place, Potter, Occlumency requires a mental discipline that you've never shown any evidence of possessing."

Before he could open his mouth to argue, Snape lifted a hand. "Discipline. Not perseverance or creativity or power, all of which," he said, grimacing as if the words he was about to utter were capable of causing him physical pain," you possess in abundance."

"And in the second place?" Harry asked, once he recovered from the shock of Snape saying something complimentary about him.

"In the second place," he said, looking utterly serious for the first time that day. "My skills at Occlumency developed from necessity, shall we say, as I was learning to protect myself from the Dark...from Voldemort's mental touch. I'm certain that to you, there's little difference, but...."

"No," Harry interrupted immediately. "It's not at all the same. You were amazing and...um...."

Harry's words trailed off. Snape was leaning against the wall, just watching him, and Harry could feel his face start to heat up.

"Never mind," he muttered.

"Oh, please continue," Snape said, not half as smugly as Harry would have expected under the circumstances. "This is all very interesting. Are you saying you liked it?"

Harry stared at him in disbelief.

"You couldn't tell?" he asked.

Snape waved his words off dismissively. "You responded physically. That was to be expected. But...no accusations that I took advantage of you? Because whether you are aware of it or not, Shacklebolt already knows the nature of...."

"I liked it."

"Ah.

For a moment, neither man spoke, then Harry turned to Snape and asked, "So...what about the potion bottles?"

Now Snape did smile smugly. "They were full of nothing but sludge."

"Thirteen bottles of sludge? What the hell was the point of that?"

"They served," Snape said, "as a distraction. I assumed you'd be so worried about whether or not I was going to make you drink them, that you wouldn't spare a moment's thought for attempting to block me from your mind."

What an utter bastard, Harry thought. Why did he have to be right?

"I shall assume by your lack of response that you are in no position to disagree?" Snape shook his head slowly. "Sometimes it astounds me that it was you and not Voldemort who emerged triumphant."

Despite his annoyance, Harry couldn't argue. Sometimes he couldn't understand how he'd survived that encounter either. He sighed.

"I'm never going to learn Occlumency, am I?"

Snape's eyes narrowed, searching Harry for a moment, then he just shrugged. Strange how human that simple gesture made Snape look.

"I doubt it, Potter," Snape said, getting up from the floor and brushing off his robes. "Or at least, not well enough to meet the new Ministry requirements for the Aurors Department."

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Harry said, then pulled back as a claw-like hand appeared before his face.

"Take it," Snape ordered impatiently, "and stand up. You can feel sorry for yourself on your own time."

Harry glared at Snape, but for some reason he found himself taking the man's hand. It was much warmer than it looked.

"I'm not feeling sorry for myself," he said. "It's not as if there aren't other things I can do."

Snape smiled...nastily.

"There are, dammit!"

"Of course there are," Snape said, still smiling, although maybe not quite so nastily as Harry had first imagined. "And now, much though I'm sure it will disappoint you greatly, I must leave. Feel free to tell Shacklebolt...whatever you wish to tell him."

Snape hadn't taken three steps when all of a sudden it was very important to Harry that he not leave.

"Wait," Harry said. "I just thought...well...."

Snape stopped just before he reached the door and turned slowly to face Harry. "What is it you need to say, Potter?" he asked.

There was nothing for it but to just say the words.

"Do you think we could try this again sometime?"

Snape frowned. "I thought you finally understood that Occlumency isn't an area in which you are likely to excel. I don't...."

"No," Harry said, cutting him off. "I meant...um...what you did."

His face felt hot and he felt absolutely ridiculous. Was he actually propositioning Severus Snape? It was totally absurd, but...God! He'd never meet anybody so talented again. If Snape could do all that without even touching him, imagine what he could do if...

Harry looked up to find Snape just watching him, a bemused expression on his face.

Fuck.

How many times was he going to forget that the man was a Legilimens? He really needed to get out of here before he said - or thought - something even more stupid. Damned Ministry Apparition wards!

"Yes."

"Huh?"

Had Snape actually agreed?

"Was that word too complicated for you?" Snape said. "Maybe I should have just nodded."

He really was a git.

"All right...why are you agreeing?"

Snape raised one eyebrow. "Perhaps it's just because I'm such a very altruistic man."

Harry snorted with laughter. "Yeah, right. And maybe...maybe it's because it was getting you off, too."

"Don't be absurd, Potter," Snape said, but he was the one who was flushing now, and Harry knew he'd been right.

This was going to be...interesting. Snape might still be a terrible teacher, but his lessons were excellent!

Comments, critiques, chit chat: bethbethbeth [at] gmail

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