Notes: This was written for aubrem as a belated birthday present. It’s been a little bit of a struggle, getting my bearings in the dangerous waters of post-HBP Snape/Harry, which this is, but for you, my dear, I would do anything. Hope you like! And also, for the curious, I pretentiously filched the title from Vladimir Nabokov: "In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free."

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When everything was finally over, all the fighting and cleanup and repairs and atonements, all the stale awards ceremonies and fresh promises, Harry went back to Godric’s Hollow, just to make that circle, just to keep everything tidy. If you’re worried about him there, though, languishing and living among ghosts, you needn’t be. He knows there’s no such thing as closure, really. He understands that there’ll always be nights when he wakes from dreams that are more memory than dream. (Torture sessions, Harry as victim or as torturer. Screams and blood and bone. Fire and flashes of green light and terrifying stillness. Kisses and punches and soft smiles and friendship. These things will never be over.) And he has no interest in dwelling in the past, or indeed the future, for reasons which will likely be obvious to you. The thing is that Harry has come to an appreciation of symmetry unusual in someone so young and relentlessly concrete--and also has a decided predilection for holding on to the broken things and repairing them if he can, for making them new and usable and (almost) entirely his.

So, Godric’s Hollow. It’s his now, honestly, and maybe Remus can feel echoes of Lily and James and (very faintly) Sirius in its cosy little rooms, but he's the only one, and that’s only because he’s reaching for them, wanting them, and maybe even then it's only the bits of them in Harry that he senses. Otherwise it’s all Harry, who did the work on the Hollow himself, slowly, over a couple of years of near-complete postwar isolation, avoiding everyone, studying architectural magic. He made mistakes and unmade them and stalled out and pulled things down and started over again, and again, until if you concentrate very hard, you can feel the sturdy walls and wards pulsing, faintly, to the rhythm of Harry’s heartbeat. He casts a spell and the air shimmers in empathy. When Ginny spends the night with him, as she does occasionally (fitting together sleepy and nostalgic, sweet and sharply painful at the same time), she feels as though she’s curled up inside Harry, and this comforts her. When Malfoy spends the night with him, as he does occasionally (fitting together angry and awkward, avenging and penitent at the same time), he feels as though he’s curled up inside Harry, and this makes him shaky and uneasy.

When Snape visited, the house all but spat him out, all but crushed his skull.

Snape doesn’t come often, understand. Just the once, and that was a couple of years ago now and if you were brave enough to ask about it, they’d probably say the once was enough, for the both of them. Not that either of them would talk about it, of course. Not that you’d be brave enough to ask.

Oh, certainly Snape’s been vindicated. Certainly his crimes have been explained to the understanding (if not necessarily the satisfaction) of most everyone who matters. But Harry couldn’t help his first visceral reaction: all those years and the rage and the many deaths and in the end that horrifying victory between them, and as soon as he saw Snape in his newly-planed and freshly-painted doorway, Dumbledore’s face loomed staring and lifeless between them, and the lights dimmed perceptibly and the whole house thrummed with hostility. And things went downhill from there.

I can’t say precisely what happened between them, because not even Harry has the whole story straight, but at some point the shouting degenerated to an outright attack which ended with Harry flat on the floor and Snape looming over him with one hand at Harry’s throat and the other at his cock, Harry blind with fury and lack of air and struggling more to breathe than to get away, but struggling also with this unknown thing lurching inside him, wanting more and more and more and not knowing what to do with all that want, knotted with desperation, coming it felt like from every pore on his body, bruised, aching in every extremity.

After it happened, Snape left wordlessly and Harry didn’t even watch him go. There were no explanations or expiations from either of them and the door slammed behind Snape with such force that it splintered on its hinges and barely missed his fingers and Harry couldn’t tell you whether it was Snape or himself or the house did the slamming, or if that distinction even mattered. And all either of them would say to anyone afterwards was that planned negotiations and/or reconciliations were notably and unequivocally unsuccessful, and I’m sure you can imagine the looks on their faces as they said it, that glaring and mute intractability that they share. And not one of his closest friends ever asked about it more than once, and you see why I say you’d have to be braver than the bravest man who ever faced down a dark lord to ask again.

Still, though. Keep in mind that Harry likes to take old broken things and make them his own. And Merlin knows that he would never admit this out loud, not under the worst torture imaginable. But sometimes he gets out the book he liberated from the Room of Requirement at Hogwarts a while back (you didn’t think he’d forgotten about it, did you?) and he’s memorized most of the spells and comments by now but he flips through the pages anyway, and he reads, and considers the fragments of Snape that he’s known. The boy from the pensieve; the Half-Blood Prince; the Death Eater; the teacher; the spy; the murderer; the refugee; the can’t-precisely-call-it-lover.

Sometimes Harry enrages himself all over again with that book, but if he’s in the right mood, and if he thinks about it in just the right way, he can fit the fragments together, make some sort of sense of Snape. Maybe not exactly the right sense, because Harry doesn’t think for a second that he’s seen all the fragments there are to see, but enough to know that there’s something there worth fixing, and he thinks about that night on the floor, fighting to breathe, coming harder than he has before or since and not understanding how that could be but knowing that it’s undeniably true, and he knows that someday he might get his chance to try and get repairs underway and he’d best be ready for that chance because you don’t get many of them, with Snape, and sometimes you have to take them whether they’re offered or not. Make them.

And things are resting here for now. Snape lives his life however he’s living it just now, far outside Harry’s circle, and Harry prefers it that way, because they’re not even close to being able to speak to each other or sit in the same room together without all that hostility and violation and hurt rising up to choke them both. But Harry understands symmetry, and he knows that there’s no such thing as closure. That it wasn’t over that night. That it’s not over now. That it never will be over.

He’s not one to wallow in the past, nor to count on expectations for the future. But let’s agree, shall we, that he has a certain impetuous talent for coming up with dazzling solutions on the fly, a certain knack for seizing the moment to his advantage. And if we can agree on that, surely you can understand why I think that whatever his feelings in the matter, really Snape doesn’t stand a chance, that in the end Harry will get what he wants from Snape.

Once, you know, he decides exactly what that is.