The next few days went by in flashes, starting with the trip to Diagon Alley. It was as if some strange hand had taken his very first visit with the Weasleys and mixed it up with the very latest one with Snape, then added a dash of, "Hurry up, children," every half hour just to keep things interesting. Harry spent the rest of the time getting packed and reacquainted with his friends, and before he knew it, it was the morning of the first. Everyone was rushing to get ready to go to King's Cross while Snape scowled at them and gave Harry no opportunity to steal a last anything; Snape barely offered an indifferent and entirely unsatisfying farewell.

He spent the train ride brooding on the inequities of his life and hoping his marks, if not his chances of survival, would be improved by his summer of extra lessons under Snape's watchful eye. He hadn't been able to skive off at all as Snape's only student, and the Professor was merciless in his criticism although, ever since Harry's shouting in Occlumency, he had made more of an effort to explain what Harry didn't understand. Harry had a sinking feeling it wouldn't last much into the year, and vowed to keep up with his revising so that the etiquette lessons, at least, would be tolerable.

Which brought him to the other thing he'd miss; Fred and George wouldn't be able to pop over for a shag twice a week while Harry was staying in the dorm, and Harry's body hadn't yet gotten the memo. Just the memory of their creative farewell lesson had him squirming a bit in his seat, glad that Luna was busy toying with Neville's new plant, and Ron and Hermione had wandered off to the Prefect's car, so no one was paying him and his erection one whit of attention.

He managed to get things under control by thinking of unpleasant potions ingredients, just in time to be herded off the train and into the coaches, then finding his seat in the Great Hall with Ron and Hermione by rote. He glanced up at the head table and found Snape watching him, black eyes full of things Harry couldn't name and something that wasn't quite the usual sneer decorating his mouth. Harry resisted the urge to blow him a kiss, and instead explained to a curious Neville that the Danger Daisy had mostly been cared for by the house elves and, in fact, was being delivered to Hogwarts by Dobby rather than have the delicate plant jostled during travel.

Impatient for the food to arrive, Harry pulled out his new watch and looked at it. One of the hands pointed to the number 291 while another sat resolutely in a patch of green the colour of new leaves, a couple of the dials were whirring away happily, and a little window had opened up to the left of centre with a picture of an owl in it. He still had no idea what any of it meant, but sometimes he thought he almost might, and anyway, pondering its mysteries gave him something to do besides watch Ron and Hermione pretend not to moon at one another.

The food arrived, and gave him something else to do. He took a little of all his favourites and glanced up again to see Snape scowling at the new Defence teacher, a willowy bloke with boyishly curly brown hair and a quick smile who Harry was sure would turn out to be incompetent or insane or both, and for just a moment Harry felt as if he were home. Hogwarts might not be the best, safest or even sanest place in the world to be, but it was the very first place where Harry had ever been happy.

It didn't hurt that it was where he'd met Snape.

---

Gryffindor Tower was the usual hustle and bustle of students, the older ones greeting friends long-missed, the firsties mostly staring in wonder at everything around them. Harry let himself get caught up with his mates, Seventh Years now and entitled to the very best seats by the fire with Lavender and Seamus making eyes at one another, Dean playing Exploding Snap with Ron and Neville smiling shyly in his corner.

"How did your summer go, Harry?" asked Parvati, looking more interested in him now that Snape had polished off some of the rough edges.

"Long," said Harry, though of course that wasn't the half of it. "I had remedial everything with Snape as my keeper the whole summer." This declaration was met with sympathetic groans and a pity chocolate frog from Dean, though he kept the card, as it was one of the new set that he didn't have yet.

"I bet you'll do brilliantly on your NEWTs, though," said Hermione, getting laughs from the group that were a bit strained; they'd all be feeling the NEWTs pressure soon enough, even those who only had three or four classes.

"I hope so, or all those headaches were for nothing," Harry replied, then regaled them with one of the safer tales of his Dark Arts lessons, one of many entertaining humiliations he'd suffered at the end of Snape's wand. Soon enough even the sting of Snape's dismissal today was fading as he began to think of himself as just another student, albeit one with a particularly heinous schedule and far too many adults poking about in his life.

Ron took over with a story of his own, of Percy's appearance at Harry and Neville's party, getting the gossip out of the way himself rather than having his friends hear third-hand that his big brother was gay. Harry squirmed at the ensuing talk, staying quiet despite the sympathetic looks from Neville and Hermione -- Ron seemed to have already forgotten about Harry's preference, or perhaps decided that it didn't matter when it was Harry. Surprisingly, most of the wizard-born students didn't have any problem with it, though Dean found the whole idea of it a bit odd.

"He did it so perfectly, can't you see?" said Parvati, when Dean said once again that he didn't understand why a bloke had to go advertising it. "It was absolutely proper, he wore his token to a gathering of friends, he hasn't gone trying to hit on his friends or anything. In a way it's almost romantic, you know, like declaring himself the lonely bachelor forever." Lavender sighed right along with her, and Harry had to fight not to roll his eyes, even though he agreed in principle.

"This way no one will try and fix him up with girls, and there's no more expectation that he'll get married," said Harry, speaking up for the first time in the discussion. "And if some girl needs a chaperone, not that they do that much these days, Percy's considered as safe as your maiden aunt. So in a way, it's not like he's some Muggle in a pink spangled top saying he's out and proud or anything, he's just gone and quietly let it be known that he's not on the market for a wife anymore."

"Huh," said Dean, looking almost thoughtful. "Do they have stuff like that for witches, like in those romance novels, all coming-out balls and courting and stuff?"

"Sadly, no, not anymore," said Lavender, with an air of one who'd spent hours bemoaning just this fact. "Mostly it's just meeting up and dates and such, though there are some older families, the pureblood ones, that still have balls and such where a man like Percy would be a safe escort for an unmarried girl who wanted to find herself a suitable husband."

Harry coughed, suddenly very glad that those traditions were dying out, envisioning himself dragged to an endless round of incredibly boring dances by all his female acquaintances, once he, too, had outed himself. "I suspect that's for the best," said Harry wryly. "After all, I can't imagine it's a gay man's paradise, to be hauled around a dance floor by bored matrons night after night while his date stalks the eligible bachelor of her choice."

They all laughed at that image and the subject turned to the unfortunate Yule Ball from their fourth year, which got him and Ron a certain amount of good-natured ribbing before the conversation wandered away again.

Eventually the fire grew dim and the hour late, and Harry found it stranger than ever to go back up to the dorms and try to sleep in the tiny-seeming bed he'd stayed in for the past six years, all alone with no hope for company any time soon, at least not of the overnight, naked sort. He could hear the breathing around him, but it was too far away for comfort tonight, and he huddled in the middle of his blankets, missing the twins and trying very hard not to resent Professor Snape for stealing his Severus away. At least Neville had promised to take over the care and feeding of Horton and his Daisy, since there were half a dozen others in the greenhouses, though the lipstick plant had made a reappearance in the dorms and Harry could just make out the obscene blossoms where it hung near Neville's bed, green leaves and red petals both looking black in the moonlight.

He drifted off and dreamed predictable dreams, and woke early enough to spell away the stickiness from his stomach before getting up and being first in the shower. He wanted to look good, or as good as he ever did, anyway, for his very first class of his very last year at Hogwarts -- Potions.

---

Harry paused outside the familiar classroom door, palms sweating despite the chill dungeon air, heart racing and expectations varying wildly from one moment to the next. Deep down, he knew nothing could really change for better or worse, but that didn't stop his imagination from painting him pictures of everything from being greeted with a kiss to being yelled at even worse than he had been in Fifth Year after the Pensieve incident. He took a deep breath, wiped his palms on his robes, accepted the attendant funny look from Hermione stoically, and went inside.

Ironically, after all his mental preparation, Snape wasn't even there yet.

Rather than take his usual seat with Hermione -- second row from the last, so Snape couldn't accuse them of hiding in the back anymore -- Harry dragged her up to second from the front, not quite willing to fight the usual assortment of Slytherins and Ravenclaws for the front spots. "You're always wanting to be closer," he said reasonably when Hermione gave him an odd look.

"And you're always fighting it. Don't tell me the summer really has mellowed him toward you," she replied, already pulling out her book, parchment, quill and ink.

"I think not," came a dark voice from behind them, and Snape swooped past them both, waving his wand at the blackboard to make instructions crawl across the surface in lines of charmed chalk. "I suggest you all settle in and begin demonstrating to me how little you've retained of last year's teachings, so that I may use the convenient House point system to remind you why it is best to revise before class and not during, Mr. Boot."

Terry flushed and stuffed his notes in his bag, opening the book to the page noted on the board. "Yes, sir, sorry, sir," he mumbled, pulling his cauldron out while his table mate, Morag McDougal, went to get ingredients from the student cupboards.

"I'll get the things," said Hermione, wisely refraining from any further commentary as Harry pulled out the proper cauldron, his mortar, pestle, knife and brass scales, and began by reading through the potion once in its entirety as Snape had taught him with painful repetition over the summer.

Harry looked up when Hermione came back and began to sort things in order of addition for them to begin. "We should do the three beetle mix first," said Harry absently, still reading over the tail end of the recipe. "It's got a tricky bit of timing, and won't be hurt sitting out for an extra ten minutes."

Hermione looked unflatteringly startled that Harry was making an intelligent contribution, but passed him the three jars of beetle carapaces without comment. Harry propped his book off to one side with a bit of magic and measured them carefully into his mortar, then took up the pestle and began to grind them into a uniform powder. He was surprised at just how much his skills had improved with three exclusive tutors, Snape providing the bulk of the lessons and the twins adding in their own measure of knowledge simply by being interested in the subject and willing to talk about it.

By the time he had the powder to the proper consistency, Hermione had the base, a mixture of equal parts mineral oil and seawater, bubbling merrily away in their cauldron as though they weren't two incompatible elements. "I'm almost done with the cherry blossom petals," she said without looking up, "if you wanted to add the murtlap essence and cacao nibs."

"Sure," said Harry, snagging the two phials from the head of Hermione's precise ingredients line. These only required measuring, so he carefully dripped in nine drops of the murtlap, and then weighed out seventeen grams of cacao nibs, adding and stirring according to the directions, using the careful, even motions that Snape had finally managed to teach him this summer. He blushed but kept counting as the memory washed over him, of Snape's chest against his back and Snape's hand over his, the fingers warm and gentle as they guided his own.

Hermione sprinkled the finely shredded petals over the surface of the cauldron and Harry kept stirring as the surface roiled, the pink slivers disappearing beneath as though snatched, and then a soft red colour suffusing the whole thing. Harry stopped stirring and flipped an hourglass, tapping it three times with his wand to get three minutes of sand. "I'll weigh, you do liquids?" he offered to Hermione, who kept pausing to stare at him as though he'd grown a second, more competent, head.

She shook herself and then nodded briskly, obviously not willing to let amazement jeopardize her grade. She measured each ingredient into one of the little bowls they both kept just for this purpose, lining them up in front of their bottles so there would be no question of what was what. Apparently, however, her tongue couldn't be held forever, and she asked halfway through, "Is this from tutoring or because you've got the hots for... someone?"

"Both," said Harry cheerfully, adding a few grains of black sand to the pile to get it exactly up to measure, then clearing the scales and starting again with newt eyes. "It's amazing what men can do when motivated by pathetic crushes."

A snort came from behind them, where Padma and Parvati were sharing a table; apparently they had trouble crediting anything properly romantic from someone who could ignore his date for an entire ball. "I was fourteen at the time, you know," he shot over his shoulder, waving a plump newt eyeball at them reproachfully.

"Our little Harry's all grown up now," said Malfoy from in front of him, and it was only the thought of Snape's disappointment that kept Harry from throwing the eye at him. Instead he added it to the pile on the scales, making a perfect six ounces, and then set them aside in order to measure the last dry ingredient, powdered sunsnail shells.

"Too bad you're not," said Harry under his breath, carefully measuring the shimmering stuff into a specially charmed glass dish; the dust could be harmful if inhaled, burning the sensitive tissues of the lungs until an antidote could be administered.

"It would behoove you to pay attention to a volatile ingredient rather than your classmates," came Snape's voice from behind him, and Harry winced. "Two points, and your hourglass is about to run out."

Harry just barely kept himself from swearing, and Hermione was there dumping in the wet ingredients and stirring just as ordered. "It'll be the sand and beetle mix next, why don't you use both hands and pour both, and I'll stir?"

"Perfect," said Harry with a grateful smile, picking up both bowls and waiting for her nod as she hit nineteen strokes. The two powders made a gentle hissing sound as they fell into the cauldron, leaving glittering trails in the pale green concoction. Thankfully, both bowls trickled empty at nearly the same time, and he snagged the newt eyes and began dropping them in one by one until they, like the flower petals, had all vanished beneath the opaque, glittering surface.

"Let me add the bat blood to the shell powder," said Hermione, once she'd counted out the last few strokes of the stirring rod and left it to sit. "That's the last ingredient, so you can start putting things away."

"All right," said Harry, happy to give her the most volatile bit of work. Despite having been far too busy to watch Snape the way he dearly wanted to, he'd been aware of being in the same room with the object of his affections, with his prick acting as a lodestone that always pointed toward Snape.

"It's too glittery," said Snape, leaning over to peer at the surface of their potion. The green had brightened up to the yellowish tinge of new leaves, which Harry was fairly sure was the correct shade. "More of the beetles should have dissolved by now, provided you did everything properly."

He swallowed against a suddenly dry mouth and said in a reasonable voice, "Did I add the beetles and sand too quickly?"

"That remains to be seen, once your cohort adds the final ingredients," said Snape, nodding toward where Hermione had the eyedropper full of blood poised carefully over the sand, dribbling the fluid over the fine grains with obsessive care.

"Yes, sir," said Harry as Snape moved off, feeling as though he'd just escaped. Though he'd braced himself for it, Harry was still surprised at how much it hurt to be relegated back to just another pathetic student, incapable of properly adding beetles to a Sight-Enhancing Solution.

"Don't mind him, Harry, it's already looking better," said Hermione soothingly, the dropper set aside, and the ground shells evenly coated in gruesome-looking red.

"We don't add that until it turns properly yellow, right?" Harry asked, though a glance at the book would have confirmed it just as well. The liquid still held a distinct green tinge, though it was fading fast.

"'The yellow of brightest sunshine'," Hermione quoted, tapping the dish with her wand to dismiss the charm that kept its contents inside no matter how it was tipped.

"Paler than this, then," said Harry, a pile of used glassware in front of him just waiting for a good Scourgify.

"Right," she said, holding the dish poised. It was important, according to the book, that it all go in at once, right in the centre, and the fire be doused at the exact moment it went in.

Harry poised his wand as they waited, watching the last of the green vanish and the colour grow brighter, whiter. "I think it's ready... now!" said Hermione, dumping in the little cake of red, just as Harry dismissed the flame spell. They both stared expectantly and the potion gave one huge burp and changed from day to night, little flecks of sunsnail shell making stars in the midnight blue liquid.

"It appears that even the famous can be taught... eventually," said Snape sardonically from the front of the class. "Potter, I do believe that you have managed to create an actual, useful potion."

Hermione looked expectant; everyone else who had finished correctly had been awarded House points. Harry could only admire her foolish optimism; they were, after all, two of only three Gryffindors in the Seventh Year NEWT class. "Thank you, sir," said Harry, turning to cast the appropriate cleaning spells on all their glassware.

He'd nearly thought Snape had moved on until he heard something that made every jaw in the room drop. "Five points to Gryffindor," said Snape dismissively, turning to examine the placid blue surface of Malfoy's potion.

Harry felt it was a lucky thing that Hermione had elected to be the one to decant their creation and not him, or else he'd have dropped the phial and gotten them a zero after all. Hermione beamed, looking insufferably smug, while Harry returned ingredients to the cupboard in a daze.

Apparently, even Snape could be swayed by love, or at least regular sex from the twins and a lot of mooning about on Harry's part.

Of course, Snape also had to have the last word. When Harry and Hermione turned in their summer essays at the end of class, Snape eyed them with distaste and commented dryly, "Don't get used to it."

A Question of Etiquette XVIII: Higher Learning