The Warp-Spasm overtook him: it seemed each hair was hammered into his head, so sharply they shot upright. You would swear a fire-speck tipped each hair. He squeezed one eye narrower than the eye of a needle; he opened the other wider than the mouth of a goblet. He bared his jaws to the ear; he peeled back his lips to the eye-teeth till his gullet showed. The hero-halo rose up from the crown of his head.

As a young child, he slays the maddened white elephant of the king Manuchehr with just one blow of the mace owned by his grand father Sam, son of Nariman. He then tames his legendary stallion, Rakhsh.

That was one of the reasons Harry loved him.

But paradoxically, it was also one of the reasons Snape would probably never be able to love him in return.

The boy moved closer, his lean, Quidditch-hard body giving off heat to rival the flames flickering in the grate. Snape's eyes became even more impenetrable, though there was a fine tremor in the jaw muscle under Harry's fingers.

Leaning in to brush his lips against the other man's, Harry murmured:

"Then fuck me, if that's all you think you have in you."

There was a brief flicker in Snape's coal-black eyes then, one Harry would hold against his heart in the lonely nights which followed. Before it died, Harry read lust, and shock, and passion, and most surprisingly...hope.

But it was all gone in an instant, and in its place was the old, frosty disdain.

"Ten points from Gryffindor for language, Mister Potter. Now get out of my sight."

Harry drew back from him slowly, allowing himself the childish indulgence of imagining the unforgiving pressure of Snape's mouth on his, instead of the barest whisper of contact which had been the reality.

"I had to try," he said quietly. His mouth curved in spite of the growing hole in his chest cavity. "After all, I was taught to fight by the best."

He left without looking back.