“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.