Counting the steps to the door of your heart (chap 1)

[danzanelfuoco]

HARRY POTTER

Harry Potter/Severus Snape 
Soulmate!AU 

Cow-T #14, week 2, m2 - prompt - Destino 







I - It takes Harry a week to realise who is in his dreams. 

* 

The night he’s supposed to turn seventeen, Harry doesn’t sleep. 

It’s not that he doesn’t want to - oh, he’s tired and he would like nothing better than to lay down his head and completely pass out, waking the next morning without a though. But tonight is the night he turns seventeen and he will start sharing dreams with his soulmate. 

If he even has one.  Which, honestly, is not even the scariest part. 

Harry dreaming of nothing, Harry waking up without remembering his dreams, would actually be a blessing at the moment. It doesn’t even mean Harry will never have one - maybe they’re still unborn, or too young to form a proper connection and while that’s not exactly optimal, Harry would prefer it to the alternative. 

Because Harry has already shared dreams and mind and thoughts with someone. And it scares him to think that - even if that was before he was seventeen so, of course, it’s not him - in fact it might have been Voldemort all along. 

So Harry doesn’t sleep the night he turns seventeen - he lays in bed, tossing and turning and nodding off, never quite reaching the REM phase of sleep that would allow him to dream.  

The morning after Ron is the first one to corner him, “So, did you see her?” 

They’re sitting in the kitchen of the Burrow, it’s Harry’s birthday and Mrs Weasley is baking a cake for him even in the chaos that is organizing a wedding for the next day. 

Harry shakes his head. “I couldn’t sleep. I was too worried.” 

Ron nods, emphatically, as if he could understand. He can’t. Ron had been so eager to find out who his soulmate was that he had taken a sleeping potion that night, just to knock himself out sooner. There was no stress for him, only eagerness, and when he had found out - when the morning after he had woke up, he had looked at Harry with a flabbergast expression and had said, “Damn, I’m an idiot, no wonder Hermione was so damn angry at me,” - the biggest problem he had faced was apologising to her. No wonder Hermione had sent a storm of bird after him, when she had just spent the last six months after her birthday knowing to almost certainty that Ron was her soulmate, while watching him being in a relationship with Lavander Brown - because you start dreaming about your soulmate as soon as you turn seventeen, but your soulmate doesn’t dream about you until they turn seventeen and it’s only then, when the both of you are mature enough, that the bond actually forms and you get in each other’s mind. 

But Harry knows, deep down, that for him it won’t be as easy - when does something ever works as it should for him? 

The number of people asking about his dreams dwindle during the day, as Harry keeps saying that he didn’t dream of anyone. Ginny goes from lingering in the periphery of every room Harry goes into - maybe hoping to give him the opportunity to tell her he dreamed of her - to completely disappearing from the house. Harry can’t really blame her. 

By night, he’s so on edge that he thinks he’ll never sleep again. But as he lays in his bed in Ron’s room, he can’t really help closing his eyes and getting lulled to sleep by the rhythmic breathing of his best friend. 

In his dream there are two children: a redhead girl and a dark haired boy. They’re young, ten or eleven maybe, but that would be too young to form a soul connection with anyone, so Harry knows their whole appearance is part of the dream - a memory replayed maybe, or perhaps just some weird construction of the subconscious. 

They’re sitting on the ground on the banks of a small river, shoulder against shoulder, watching the stream flow by, talking to each other so low that Harry can’t make out the words. 

Harry gets closer to them, and they turn to look at him, the boy first and then the girl. 

“That’s Harry!” The girl shrieks as she jumps to her feet, and she runs toward him, throwing her arms around his neck and hugging him. 

The boy gets up too, but he stays behind, he looks at Harry with eyes way too wide, almost a deer in front of highlights, but Harry doesn’t pay him too much attention. For a brief instant he had thought the girl could be Ginny - for a brief immense instant of relief. But Harry had known Ginny at eleven and this girl it’s not her, despite the uncanny resemblance. 

“You are not my soulmate, are you?” He asks her and she laughs - and her laughter is crystalline and lovely and Harry feels so good in her arms, almost at home, but not quite. It’s not as it should feel. 

So Harry turns his face to the boy who’s looking at him with a flabbergasted expression on his face. Harry disentangles himself from the girl - a figment of the boy’s dream - and moves toward him. 

It should bother him that his soulmate is a boy, shouldn’t it? He’ll never marry Ginny, he’ll never have the kind of family you see in the movies, a lovely wife, two and a half children., a dog and a picket fence. It’s not for him. It never was. 

Somehow Harry is not distraught by the idea as much as he thought he would be. 

“It’s you, isn’t it?” 

The boy makes a strangled sound, almost panicked, and takes a step back. Falling into the water behind him.
Harry runs to him, but he’s gone before he can reach him, and then he wakes. 

* 

Severus wakes up clutching his chest, his breath ragged, and the feeling of drowning still etched in his lungs. 

It can’t be happening. Not now. Not him. 

Severus has spent the past twenty years knowing he didn’t have a soulmate, knowing he was alone in the world. And now Harry bloody Potter turns seventeen and he ends up in his dreams. 

Severus hadn’t seen it coming - how hadn’t he? After all, Potter had started being a constant in his dreams as soon as he had gotten into Hogwarts. But Severus had figured it was because the bloody idiot was now his problem, he had never thought that the boy’s soul was grown enough to start reaching his dreams, he would have never thought possible, not in a million years... 

And now this. This is a bloody fucking joke. Oh, the universe is so funny. 

Severus gets up, and fights the need to throw anything at the wall. It wouldn’t do to wake his... guests. His loyalty has been proved, but that doesn’t mean that the Dark Lord won’t dispose of his house just as he disposes of any asset of his subordinates, just as if they were his own. 

So Severus restrain himself and then he spends the rest of the night building walls in his head. Potter didn’t recognise him, thankfully, but Severus knows it’s just a matter of time, so he takes precautions. He doesn’t know what Potter will do if he finds out Severus is his soulmate, but he’s sure it will be something stupid. 

So Severus carefully locks away most of his memories, and prepares to dream of himself as a child  - to dream of Lily and Cokeworth and nothing past her acceptance letter to Hogwarts. If he has to share dreams with him, the least he can do is giving Potter his mother, giving him the few happy moments of his childhood and the gift of ignorance about who is soulmate really is.