#atttid

“You’re doing all that you can,” Albus’s portrait had assured him, more than once, but it never made him feel any better, not really. The Headmaster’s office without Dumbledore was just a shell of what it once had been, as was Hogwarts before the Death Eaters had been welcomed inside; the school was bones in a graveyard of good days gone by, and Severus was in the center of it.

He had spent many days in that office, held many meetings; the Carrows had come to him with the names of students that refused to do as they were told and had boasted about their subsequent methods of discipline; Minerva had continually spoken her concerns to him, all veiled under a thin layer of stiff fury, disgust in her eyes every single time she could bring herself to look at him. Most of his 38th birthday had been spent in there, too, before he was called out to a meeting with Lord Voldemort.

Despite the many horrors he had faced recently — his disturbing brush with death being one of them — Severus found himself dwelling also on another year, his thoughts pulling towards a time further back in his past, a time of similar turmoil:

1981.

It had been a period of darkness, anxiety, and stress, and not just for him — the entirety of the population had been panicking, fearful to even speak of Lord Voldemort, let alone say his name. The distress that he had felt in the air over the past year was all too alike to the kind felt during 1981 and the years building up to it.

He could clearly remember the moment he had found out that the Dark Lord was targeting the Potters and how his life had subsequently been sent into a whirlwind of changes — approaching Dumbledore, swearing his allegiance to the man, desperately doing all that he could to save Lily and her family from the fate he felt he had very much set into motion —

And yet it had all been for nothing, so it seemed.

All in one night, Lily and James were murdered, the Dark Lord had vanished, Sirius was sent to Azkaban, and Peter was dead… A list of names that fit right in with the litany of dead and damaged people making up his generation.

Severus himself had been left with a fading Dark Mark on his arm and no purpose in life, just waiting to answer for the sins he had committed.

The weeks following Lily’s death, he had all but become a ghost right along with her. He had drifted through the halls of Hogwarts, taught his classes, and maintained his Head of House position, but through it all had only thinly concealed his rage at the world and his intense grief — grief both for Lily, and for the sorry excuse of a life he had made for himself.

On top of it all, he’d been the youngest of the Professors by far and because of it, he felt as though he had had double the amount to prove of himself. He could tell the majority of the staff thought he was too young, too neurotic, too volatile, to teach students; he struggled socially, and mostly kept to himself. Minerva’s distrustful eye had trailed on him nearly everywhere he went, the woman having been completely unconvinced of why Albus had hired him.

Dumbledore had kept the Aurors at bay for as long as he could, but eventually Alastor Moody and a couple of his colleagues had come to collect Severus, for he had been named by one of the other Death Eaters; and so it was, at 22, he had landed in Azkaban. It was his luck that he didn’t stay long before Dumbledore yanked him back out, the man having proved his case of being a spy for the Order to the Ministry.

As he lie in the hospital bed, hidden from the outside world by curtains, the flow of time interrupted only by the mediwitches who came to deliver his healing potions, Severus couldn’t help but feel that he had escaped one cage only to be placed into another — but hadn’t that been his whole life? He had found escape from his home life at Hogwarts, and then, when Hogwarts had become another nightmare, he had his time with Lily to cherish; when that too had been crushed at his own hand, he found himself running with Death Eaters and blood purists, soon to change the course of his life forever.

In truth, Severus could barely remember what it was like, before he was a spy… before he was a Death Eater. He wasn’t sure if there ever really was a before. If there was, he knew he couldn’t exactly pinpoint when before ended and became now.

Sometimes he wondered if he was always going to be branded with Lord Voldemort’s Mark, or, if things had happened differently, he would have made different decisions.

Even amidst all of these thoughts, his mind continued to replay the moment the Aurors had dragged him away from the school grounds of Hogwarts all of those years ago, and he couldn’t help but think that he was soon to face a similar fate once again — this time, however, Dumbledore wasn’t here to save him.

Often, he fell asleep with these things still swirling in the forefront of his mind, and all he was able to do when he woke up was continue to mull them over.

————

A number of days had passed when Severus woke up to another presence in the room, disrupting the routine he had become so familiar with.

Harry was sitting in the same chair he had before, but now his eyes were idly observing the tiles on the ceiling. Truthfully, he looked as though he may drop off to sleep at any moment, but despite his apparent weariness, he still must have sensed Severus’s movement, as slight as it was, for then his eyes trailed down from the ceiling and met his.

Severus blinked at the boy, studying him for a moment, before looking away dismissively.

“I’ve been thinking,” Harry began, the unexpected initiation of conversation winning Severus’s eyes on him again.

“How were you able to keep the password as Dumbledore with all of those Death Eaters coming in and out?”

It took a moment for him to understand that he must be referring to the password needed to get into the Headmaster’s office, to the Pensieve.

“I enacted… special instruction to the Gargoyle,” he explained. “It would have permitted you to enter no matter what you may have said.”

“Oh,” Harry said. “I didn’t know it could be… instructed, or whatever.”

After a second, Severus raised an eyebrow, ever so slightly. “‘Dumbledore?’”

“First person I could think of,” he mumbled.

Severus supposed he couldn’t blame him for that.

“Oh, and another thing,” Harry added, a second later. “You knew my Aunt Petunia?”

Those were hardly the next words Severus expected him to say, and for a second, he was stunned into silence. The last thing he wanted or expected to do was dredge up memories from his childhood, particularly not of that dreadful girl.

“…You could say that.”

“Huh.” Harry crossed his arms. Then, after a moment, “She kept me in a cupboard.”

Severus blinked at him. “…What?”

“A cupboard,” he repeated, as if that would be any more clearer the second time. “The only other unoccupied bedroom in the house was used for Dudley’s — er, her son’s — toys. I got the cupboard.”

He didn’t know what to say.

“You thought I lived an easy life, didn’t you?” Harry said shrewdly. “Born with a silver spoon in my mouth, that sort of thing.”

There was a storm brewing in Harry’s tired eyes, no doubt born from the trauma and grief of all of the things that had happened to him that he had never been allowed to fully process, and it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Severus would become the listening board for the brunt of it. It wasn’t necessarily anger, no; Severus more or less got the sense that the storm inside Harry was compiled of mixed emotions and what could have been carefree childhood years gone to waste.

“Sometimes they would lock me in there,” he continued. “If I did something wrong, I mean. They might remember to feed me, might not.”

Severus watched him steadily, feeling a pang in his chest at the words. If he was reminded of his own childhood of fending for himself, he would never say, just like he would never admit that Harry was completely catching him off guard with what he was saying.

“You don’t know me, not like you always acted like you did,” Harry said. He stared at Severus with Lily’s eyes, full of conviction. “…But I suppose I don’t really know you, either. We were both wrong about each other.”

I’m sorry.

The words crawled up Severus’s formerly ravaged throat, willing themselves to be spoken aloud; they were appropriate words, something anyone else would have said, but as much as he knew he should speak them, the apology couldn’t make it out of his mouth; he had never been a person that was good at apologies, and his near-death experienced had still not changed that about him. The opportunity passed, and Severus finally tore his gaze from the boy, letting the moment go to simmer in silence.

When it was clear that Severus wasn’t going to say anything, Harry rose from his chair, a sound that scraped against the former quiet.

“The reason I came is to tell you that I went back to the Pensieve and got your memories,” he said. “I turned them in to the Ministry. They’re going to review them.”

With that, Severus watched him push past the curtains and leave.

————

Severus hadn’t expected Harry to come back.

He had barely expected to see him again after the first time he had woken up, but even less so after their last conversation — this was why he was surprised when Harry did in fact return again, and more times after that.

It seemed that after getting out a most of what he had wanted to, Harry was more liable to speak to Severus with a lack of pent up emotion, seeming to consider him with trust and perhaps even respect, which was what was most shocking of all.

Either way, Harry was quickly becoming his source of information for what was going on in the outside world.

“They’re taking their time on deciding that your memories haven’t been tampered with,” Harry had told him the third time he had come back, his tone indicating that he rather thought they were dawdling. He seemed a bit more well-rested, less emotional.

“It is difficult to determine whether or not memories have been altered,” Severus said dismissively. “Surely you know this.”

“No—well, yes, I suppose—but yours haven’t,” Harry said. “I’ve seen tampered memories before, they don’t look like that.”

Severus refrained from rolling his eyes at the boy’s naive certainty, for once managing to rein in his annoyance. “What it really depends upon is the current… political climate,” he remarked instead. “Who is the new Minister?”

“Oh. His name’s Willem Ironwood,” Harry said. “I’m not sure about him, yet. The public likes him, though. He seems like the strong leader sort. I guess that’s what everyone’s looking for, these days.”

The name rang vaguely familiar to Severus, which was a bit concerning, considering the typical manner of the crowd he had been acquainting with, but nothing of certainty could come to mind, so he let it go, for the moment.

Harry had told him, in greater detail this time, of how he survived his confrontation with Voldemort, how he had gone to the forest and taken the Killing Curse, and then how Narcissa Malfoy lied about his death.

Severus had disliked Harry for a long time. It made things easier, as was having the boy hate him in return. It was easy to picture the boy who was a nearly exact copy of his father’s image as having the same personality, one born from an arrogant, pampered life; surely, the Boy Who Lived would have grown up in one similar.

Instead, he found that it was him and the boy who had far more in common than he had ever considered. Their near-deaths had even been delivered by the same person, their fates much the same, when considered in accordance to Dumbledore’s plans.

“Why didn’t Dumbledore leave you anything to help prove you were working as a spy the whole time?” Harry asked.

The Headmaster had never expected Severus to live, but Severus couldn’t exactly hold it against him — he, too, had never considered a life after Voldemort’s death. Truly, Voldemort’s death was a concept he could never really imagine at all, as impossible as it seemed.

Dumbledore had instructed Severus to kill him, and in doing so, Severus was to become the true owner of the Elder Wand, thus keeping Voldemort’s damage potential as minimal as possible — but Tom Riddle was no fool. Both Severus and Dumbledore knew that he would work it out eventually, and then kill Severus, seeking the wand’s full potential — but by then, Harry would have had an ample lead on getting rid of horcuxes, which Voldemort didn’t even know he would be hunting.

“It was not in Albus’s plans for me to survive.”

Other days, Harry wasn’t so well off. Severus found himself listening to the rants brought to him by the boy, all about those he had cared about that died in the war, about Dumbledore and everything the man had kept from him, about what it had felt like, walking through the forest to face his death.

It was obvious the boy felt guilty, and, well, guilt was an emotion Severus knew well — the difference was that Severus deserved to carry his guilt. His guilt was his contrition, his penitence, and he never expected it to ease, never thought he would ever be due for it to. He had committed many mistakes throughout his life, mistakes he could never run from; their damage was done.

Harry, on the other hand, was just a child, and his guilt was misplaced — it was not Harry’s fault that all of those people had died, as he seemed to think. They had all died facing Voldemort and his army, fighting for their freedom, for justice in the Wizarding World — but Severus hardly found himself qualified to know how to tell the boy what he needed to hear in a way that would be sensitive, so mostly, he just let him talk, let him say whatever he felt he couldn’t to his gang of friends or to his surrogate Weasley mother. Maybe it was the fact that Severus listened and didn’t try to argue that Harry felt he could speak his mind at all.

Sometimes Harry stayed briefly, sometimes he stayed for an hour or more. Severus had been able to focus some of his thoughts on the boy and maintaining a conversation with him rather than on the memories that had begun to be relentlessly turned over in his mind, but even so, things had become to easy, too peaceful.

Calamity was surely lurking, just beneath the surface. It was just something Severus had come to expect.

————

As usual, Severus was right.

It was one morning Harry came in rather early, a look of urgency on his face.

“Professor,” he rushed. “I came as quickly as I could — they didn’t validate the memories. They want you to go to trial. The Aurors are on their way to get you now—”

It was at that moment that a hush fell over the ward outside the curtains, and somehow, that was louder than any of the routine bustle had ever been.

“Potter,” Severus began, making to tell him to leave, but it was too late. Two Aurors pushed past the curtain, led by a Healer.

A stiff second of silence passed.

“Harry Potter,” one of them said, looking Harry up and down. “Fancy seein’ you here. I thought we made it clear you weren’t to conspire with the accused.”

“I wasn’t—”

The other went over to Severus, undoing the magical ties with a couple quick flicks of his wand, beginning the next quick succession of events distracting Severus from whatever argument Harry had been attempting to make. The Auror gripped him with a tight hand, urging him from the bed and pulling him to his unsteady feet; upon standing, a weight seem to crash down on Severus’s shoulders, as if he weighed much heavier than he had before the war, but he straightened himself, unwilling to appear weak.

“Severus Snape,” the first Auror said, obviously having dismissed Harry, and gripped him by his other arm. “It’s about time.”

With that, they drug him out of the curtains and into the bright world that Severus had almost forgotten what it was like to be a part of.

Here is a great post that served as inspiration for the bit about Snape and Dumbledore’s plan regarding the Elder Wand.

He breathed in a deep breath of morning air, staring out at the courtyard where he had been just hours earlier. He hoped the air would fill him in some way, cleanse him of the heaviness that persistently tugged at his skin.

Voldemort was gone, the Wizarding world saved — so why did Harry feel so lost, so hollow?

His consciousness echoed with the faces of the dead; memories of cold, lifeless bodies strewn on the ground, overwhelming in number, were imprinted onto his brain, imprinted onto the back of his eyelids; every time he closed his eyes, he saw Remus, Tonks, Fred...

Snape.

The loss of his parents, the loss of Sirius, Remus, Fred, Tonks, Hedwig... out of all of these, it was Snape’s death that was bringing Harry the most confusion—

This was because he wasn’t sure how to feel, how to cope with it. Snape, the man he had hated since coming to Hogwarts for the first time, the man he thought had hated him in return... Harry couldn’t stop picturing the anguish on Snape’s face when he learned that his mother had died, the way he had stood in Dumbledore’s office in complete despair; the horror in his eyes after Dumbledore told him that Harry was a horcrux and must be killed by Voldemort.

Most of all, though, Harry couldn’t shake the way Snape had met his gaze as he bled out into the palm of Harry’s hand, the silvery residue of memories on his cheek; it was Snape’s black eyes that were seared into his brain most hauntingly.

Harry picked up a nearby rock and tossed it into the clearing; it clattered against the cobblestone ground, an action that scraped the silence and broke the calm stillness of the morning.

He wanted to feel angry; angry with Dumbledore, for withholding the entire truth from him all these years; angry with Snape, for giving the prophecy to Voldemort, for sacrificing his life as a double agent, for playing his part so convincingly, for loving his mother — but he couldn’t.

Anger was a familiar friend, an emotion that Harry knew well. He had felt it in intense bouts for the better part of his life, been chained under its control again and again—

But he didn’t feel that now. Now, all that was left in Harry was grief.

He once again picked up a stone; its roughness pricked his hand. He hesitated a moment, taking a second to consider the weight of it— but before he could throw it, another sound cracked the silence: the scuff of a shoe, not his own.

Harry turned automatically to see Ginny, who was rushing outside with a look of urgency, her red hair pouring over her face as she moved over to him.

“Ginny,” he said, standing. “What—”

“Harry,” she interrupted, her voice breathless with shock, “Snape is alive.”

The news utterly knocked the wind out of him. Again, Snape’s eyes flashed before his mind, as did the memory of the man’s blood staining the palm of Harry’s hand. Pure shock electrified his nerves, and he was unable to do anything else but blink at Ginny, dumbfounded.

Distantly, he heard himself repeat, “Alive?”

She nodded quickly. “In the Great Hall. McGonagall went to go get his body and— well, Fawkes was there. Fawkes had saved him.”

Harry continued to stare at her for several seconds, in complete disbelief.

“He doesn’t look good,” Ginny warned, and in fact she did look paler than normal, a testament to her warning. “But he’s still alive.”

Harry moved past her, an automatic reaction more than anything, but he felt her presence close behind, following him. He went back inside and turned to enter the Great Hall, in which he immediately spotted the location of the commotion.

People were grouped together, murmuring in hushed voices; those that weren’t amongst the crowd were quiet too, observing with various expressions of dispassion, their lack of reaction influenced by their lack of knowledge of Snape’s heroism.

Harry pushed through the throng of people numbly. In the center of them all indeed lay Snape; Fawkes was at his shoulder, the Phoenix’s tears dripping onto the man’s ravaged neck.

You must have shown me real loyalty down in the Chamber. Dumbledore’s voice rang clearly in Harry’s mind, the memory from his second year at Hogwarts tossed to the surface of his consciousness. Nothing but that could’ve called Fawkes to you.

Harry stood there for an indefinable period of time, staring at the Professor’s bloodied and torn black robes, the undeniable but faint rise and fall of his chest, awash with utter shock; McGonagall was there, muttering spells and pointing her wand at the wound on his neck.

Madam Pomfrey came through the crowd seconds later, looking disheveled but commanding.

“All of you, give us space,” she ordered. The people dispersed, leaving behind only Harry, Ginny, and Professor McGonagall.

Madam Pomfrey murmured healing spells, her wand moving from various puncture wounds throughout Snape’s body, while McGonagall stayed at his neck. To Harry, everything was muted in silence under the blanket of his shock; he only distantly heard the rush of footsteps behind him that announced the arrival of Ron and Hermione.

“So it is true,” Hermione said, her voice hushed, as she looked at Fawkes. “He really was Dumbledore’s.”

The sound of Hermione’s voice drew Harry back out of his stupor; the Phoenix chirped, peering at Harry with characteristically shrewd eyes.

“If it wasn’t for Fawkes,” Madam Pomfrey remarked, overhearing the exchange, “Severus would be dead.”

He didn’t look far from it, even still. Harry found himself crouching nearer to the former Headmaster, staring at his pallid, sweaty face.

“Will he live?” Harry asked faintly.

Madam Pomfrey didn’t answer at first, murmuring another string of spells. Finally, she glanced up at him, her eyes grave.

“If I can get him stable enough to Apparate before he dies here, he’ll need to go to St. Mungo’s immediately.”

Harry nodded shortly, expecting such answer, but hearing it aloud still gave him an odd feeling in his chest.

Suddenly, the shock of everything, the war, the loss of so many lives, his grief, the shock of finding out Snape was miraculously alive and still might die yet, caught up to him all at once, and exhaustion seeped over his bones in such a crushing manner that he all but swayed where he crouched.

He felt a gentle hand on his shoulder, and looked up to see Ginny. “Come on, Harry,” she murmured, concern in her eyes. “There’s nothing you can do.”

————

Harry managed to find several hours of exhausted sleep in one of the salvaged dormitory beds.

He had all but fallen into the sheets and, despite his certainty that he wouldn’t find rest, collapsed  quickly under the weight of the mental and physical strain he had faced not just hours before, but also the months leading up to the battle.

He had woken to find himself alone, and wandered back down to the Great Hall. There were a lot less people there now, and similarly, a lot less bodies. It seemed that most were now healed or moved to Saint Mungo’s, and nearly all of the bodies of the dead were placed away with proper arrangements.

He had moved carefully around the Hall, dreadfully certain he would soon stumble across Snape’s dead body, but instead, Madam Pomfrey approached him first.

“Severus is at St. Mungo’s,” she had told him.

A strange and surprised relief had washed through Harry, and subsequently, he planned on going to see him. Some part of him didn’t believe it was possible, that Snape could have survived; the images of the last two times he had seen him were stained in his mind, and Harry felt like he needed to see him for himself.

Hermione and Ron insisted on going with him. Together, they walked through the wards of Saint Mungo’s, finding themselves in the Dai Llewellyn Ward for Serious Bites; all three seemed to be feeling uncomfortably reminiscent of the time they had come to the very same ward to see Arthur Weasley.

Finally, they approached one of the Healers; she was at the front of the dingy ward, and when she saw Harry, her expression had taken up the familiar amazed recognition, but only for a moment before she surveyed the three of them in a businesslike manner.

“How can I help you?”

“We’re here to see Prof— Severus Snape,” Harry said.

The Healer’s eyebrow quirked up in the slightest, as though surprised. “I see.” She looked again to Ron and Hermione, seeming to be carefully considering something. “I’m afraid I can only permit you, Mr. Potter,” she said finally.

“What? Why?” Ron spoke up.

“Mr. Snape’s legal circumstances are unique,” she explained patiently. “We’ve been instructed to allow only those from the Ministry to see him. However, Mr. Potter, seeing as you are who you are…” she allowed her sentence to trail off, for it needed no further explanation. After a second’s pause, she addressed Ron and Hermione again. “As for you two, I’m sorry, but I simply can’t allow it.”

“It’s okay,” Hermione rushed, before Ron could say anything else. She looked at Harry. “We’ll wait for you outside.”

“Okay,” Harry said. His mind was churning with the information, the words legal circumstances and only those from the Ministry sticking out in his head, but in the moment, he was unable to make sense of them, to fully process what they might mean. “See you outside.”

He parted from them there, allowing the Healer to lead the way in the opposite direction; as they walked, they passed many beds of several injured people. Harry had no doubt that all or most of them were from the recent battle, and the thought made his stomach twist with a guilt so painful that he felt sick.

Eventually, they reached a set of curtains, and the Healer peeled them back, nodding for Harry to go in.

He entered to see Snape laid in the bed, not looking much better than the last time he saw him. At least now, he was no longer covered in blood; his throat was wrapped in many bandages, and he was wearing white, a color that looked decidedly wrong on the man he was so used to seeing in black. Though his Dark Mark was exposed, its color was fading fast now, just a faint grey.

“He’s lucky to be alive,” the Healer remarked, then studied Harry shrewdly for a moment. “And if the rumors are true, so are you, Mr. Potter.”

Harry scarcely heard her, for he had wandered to the bedside, something catching his eyes — Snape’s wrists were tied, confined to the bed with magical binding. “What’s this?” he asked, looking back to the Healer, his mind once again calling attention to the odd information she had given the three of them earlier. “Why is he bound up?”

She blinked at him in surprise. “You know he’s served under You-Know-Who for the past couple of years, at least,” she said, as if it were obvious. “As soon as he’s stable enough, the Ministry is sentencing him to Azkaban.”

“But— he’s innocent,” Harry blurted, an immediate reaction that allowed him no time to think about his words before he spoke them — of course she wouldn’t know that Snape was innocent; no one did, save for a few.

The Healer was regarding him strangely. “Sir?”

“Never mind,” Harry muttered quickly, returning his gaze to his former Professor. He needed to get the memories to the Ministry as soon as possible, though it seemed he had some time before they threw Snape in Azkaban — he was far from fit enough to be sent there. “Has he — been awake yet?”

The Healer shook her head. “Not yet. His injuries are quite extensive. He seemed to have been poisoned, as well.” “Voldemort’s snake,” Harry supplied, ignoring the way the witch flinched at the name.

“Ah, yes,” she murmured. “That’s what we were told — we had seen nothing else like it, not since Arthur Weasley. Not many who encountered You-Know-Who’s snake lived to tell the tale.”

This made an uncomfortable chill go down Harry’s spine. He watched the faint rise and fall of Snape’s chest.

“So, you were there when he was attacked?” The Healer asked, a note of timid curiosity in her voice.

Harry remembered vividly the sound Snape’s body made as it was thrown against the glass from the force of Nagini’s striking, over and over and over again, the amount of blood pouring from his throat, soaking his robes…

You have your mother’s eyes.

Harry ripped himself from the memories and finally looked away from where Snape lay, blinking at the Healer. “I thought he was dead,” he answered simply, assuming that would be all the response she needed.

She nodded, her gaze thoughtful. “It’s a miracle he isn’t.” After a second longer, she moved towards the curtains to leave. “If you need anything—”

“Actually, I’ll be going too,” Harry broke in, not impolitely. “I’ve just realized I’ve got something important I need to do…” He glanced at Snape once again, determination glinting in his eyes. Snape had saved his life several times over; he’d loved his mother, for all these years — Harry owed it to him to work his hardest to let everyone know the truth about the man, that he was a hero all these years, not a Death Eater.

————

What came to Severus’s awareness first was the noise.

He heard the murmur of voices, the bustling of light activity.

Next came the pain, the dull aching in his neck, traveling seemingly throughout his veins; then the heaviness of his eyes. With effort, he opened them, and flinched from the bright whiteness of everything; curtains surrounded him, oddly familiar.

Under his mounting awareness, panic thrummed in his heart; having thought himself dead, he was surprised to find himself obviously living, and was even more disturbed that he wasn’t altogether sure where he was; he tried to move his arm only for it to be jerked back, confined by what he dimly recognized as magic binding around his wrist.

“Professor,” said a voice, filled with surprise; it was a voice he would always know.

He turned his head, a searing pain scorching through his neck at the movement, and his gaze finally found Potter, sitting beside the bed he was in. There were too many lines on his face for his age, and he was wearing dark circles under his eyes, a testament to his lack of sleep— his eyes… the green of them stared out at him with concern so much like Lily’s.

Severus ripped his gaze away from the boy, back to the sheets of the bed he was in, now recognizable to him as St. Mungo’s.

“How?” he murmured.

“Fawkes,” Harry said. He swallowed. “I suppose he found you, sometime during the battle.”

Flashes of memories tore through Severus’ mind; the Dark Lord’s face; a burning gash across his throat; Nagini, striking him over and over again.

Potter, staring at him with Lily’s eyes as he died, not a trace of his father’s cruelty in him.

“You,” he clarified aloud, a question still in his voice, which didn’t sound quite right, even to him. Speaking caused pain like fire to burn across his throat and down his neck. He finally returned his gaze to Harry, who was blinking at him in surprise, wearing the same expression as when Severus called on him unexpectedly in class. “You survived.”

“Oh,” Harry said, understanding. “I went to the forest, to let him kill me, and he did… but not really. He killed the horcrux, I suppose — but I lived.”

Severus absorbed this information, dimly noting how little of it answered his question, but not having the energy to voice his irritation aloud. Instead, his gaze flitted downwards once again, this time with enough awareness to take in details; his black robes were gone, and instead he had been donned in white. His forearms were exposed, his Dark Mark revealed to the world — except now, it was nearly faded completely, leaving only the outline where it had been burned into his skin.

His gaze lingered on his left forearm, taking in the near absence of the Mark tainting his skin, and with sudden abruptness, it hit him fully that the Dark Lord must truly be gone.

The idea seemed like an utterly impossible reality, and it took several moments of staring at his skin before he allowed himself to feel a tremendous weight lift off of his shoulders that gave way to a relief that — had he been standing — would have brought him to his knees.

“You did it, then,” he said softly, his eyes moving back to Harry.

“Not just me,” he murmured, sounding years older than he should. Despite everything, the words shocked Severus, some part of him still expecting the boy to jump on the chance for praise with a hubris that mimicked his father’s. “If it wasn’t for Ron, Hermione, and Neville getting rid of some of the Horcruxes…”

Harry let his sentence trail off, and silence washed over the room. Severus’s gaze flickered away from the boy and fell once again to the bindings around his wrists; both of them were confined, he realized now.

He peered at them for a long moment in resigned contemplation. He knew, and perhaps he had known for several minutes now, what they were for, why he was bound. It was something he had considered happening many times, and yet also he had never considered the thought of him living long enough to meet the consequences that awaited him now.

“Azkaban?” he murmured.

Harry blinked at him in surprise before insisting, “I’m not going to let them.” The annoying and naive stubbornness that Severus remembered so well was making a flaring appearance in the boy’s tone. “I’m working with the Ministry, telling them the truth. You won’t go there.”

Severus absorbed his words, pondering them, but was unwilling to speak aloud any more. No matter if they believed the memories hadn’t been tampered with; he was still responsible for Dumbledore’s murder, along with a number of other things.

Deeply doubting the likelihood of his salvation, he closed his eyes, half succumbing to the sea of exhaustion he was swimming in and half wishing Fawkes had just left him to die.

I hope you enjoyed the first chapter!

I’m also posting this story to ao3, where it can be found here.