Goyle had taken Zabini’s empty bed across the hall for the holidays, leaving Harry and Theo alone in their dorm. It was a welcome relief from the bigger boy’s snores, and it meant that when Harry woke up on Christmas morning, he didn’t have any reason not to rip Theo’s curtains open and wake him up with a Tickling Charm.
When Theo was done cursing at him and disentangled from his blankets, they got dressed in short order and hurried out to the common room.
Malfoy gave them a reasonably polite nod and the rest of the Slytherins greeted Harry and Theo cheerfully. “Just waiting on Pucey,” Barrow said, as he and Snyde joined Harry and Theo at a cluster of armchairs right next to the hearth. “He always takes forever in the mornings.”
“And he’s the last out of the showers after practice,” Harry said, rolling his eyes.
Snyde grinned. “Even boys need their beauty time, no?”
“Not me.” Theo stuck his nose in the air. “I woke up like this.”
“Yep,” Snyde said, leaning over and ruffling Theo’s unbrushed hair. “You sure look like it, kid.”
Pucey appeared from the boys’ corridor, slightly out of breath. “Sorry, everyone.”
“Boooo,” Alen Weise called. He and Dimitrova started pelting Pucey with dried cranberries. The older boy scowled and chucked a pillow back at them.
“Jeez, it’s not like there’s a gala tonight,” Barrow said.
“Excuse me for wanting some small comforts in the morning,” Pucey snapped, but for once his prickly manner seemed mostly for show. He took the last of the empty seats drawn up around the hearth. “Shall we?”
The students needed no more invitation. Weise and Dimitrova were the first to dive into the piles of gifts, hauling those with their names on them back towards their seats. Snyde and Barrow levitated theirs over without getting up; their easy nonverbal magic impressed Harry, a little.
Harry’s own pile of gifts was a bit larger this year than it had been. A warm feeling settled into his stomach as he saw the brightly-wrapped parcels with his name on them. After a childhood devoid of gifts, the holidays at Hogwarts had their own special magic, and the Slytherins’ unusually relaxed attitude was infectious.
“Merlin, Harry, this is great,” Theo said. He’d unwrapped Harry’s gift first, a set of gleaming brand-new classic novels in the style Theo liked so much. They were Muggle, but Harry already knew Theo liked Muggle fiction. The luxury cloth covers made them less obviously non-magical and Harry had looked up a spell that meant no one but Theo could read their titles unless Theo wanted them to. Already Theo was hungrily flipping through the top one. The sight made Harry have to swallow a smile.
He’d stolen the books from a sixth-year halfblood in Hufflepuff who liked hexing Slytherin first-years in the corridors. The same kid had also had an absolutely ridiculous stash of sweets under his bed, though, which Harry had also plundered so that he could send wizarding treats off to Thomas and the students from the orphanage, all of whom had been required to return for some reason or other. Luna had gotten several spools of metal thread that Harry had nicked out of the Runes classroom, since he’d noticed her penchant for homemade jewelry and hand-embroidered robes. For Zacharias, Harry had gone with a Muggle switchblade. It was a risky gift, but after seeing the weapons in the Hufflepuff common room and hearing Zacharias’ stories of his war-hammer-wielding grandfather, he’d gone for it. Portia’s gift, a small orange kneazle kitten, had been the easiest to acquire: Harry had just sent Mrs. Figg a note asking if she had any kittens recently. The thing was so cute Harry had even considered getting one himself.
Zacharias had gifted Harry a book on magical hand-to-hand combat, complete with moving illustrations of the techniques it taught. Since Professor Crouch seems determined to ignore any and all physical forms of combat, the accompanying note read, and Harry grinned. There were spells in the book, too, for balance and defense against physical attacks, and for using physical objects to block or conceal offensive spells. It was a brilliant gift.
From Luna he got a string of butterbeer corks, apparently to be worn as a necklace. Harry almost set them aside before he noticed a strange, slippery sort of magic clinging to the corks. He frowned and concentrated. There–and there. Raising them to eye level, he squinted. No runes, but the thread holding them together seemed to be knotted in some kind of pattern. Luna had written merely To ward against ill fortune, and Harry shrugged. He’d carry the corks in his book bag or something. Couldn’t hurt.
Thomas had sent him sweets and a plain wristwatch–Muggle, but it was leather and metal instead of plastic and would pass as wizarding, so Harry buckled it on right away.
The last gift was a large box in solid green wrapping. Harry levitated it over and grunted as it landed on his lap. The thing was heavy.
“It’s from me, Portia, and Neville,” Theo said. His words were almost lost in the noise of tearing paper, delighted noises, and a Fizzing Whizzbee that had gotten out of Weise’s grip and was now zipping around the common room, trailing sparks and taking bites out of the curtains. Harry peeled the paper away carefully and found a plain crate inside holding what looked like at least a dozen books.
The first one made his breath hitch: The Complete Guide to Substance Interaction: A Potions Master’s Companion, it said in gilt letters. The black leather cover was scuffed and pocked with use but when he opened it the pages were pristine, and it was massive, probably the biggest book Harry had ever held.
“Merlin, Potter,” Snyde said, eyeing his gift. “That’s almost impossible to get your hands on unless you’re in a Mastery program.”
“Father is resourceful,” Theo said with a tiny smirk.
“He would be,” Barrow muttered.
Snyde kicked him in the shin, and they went back to their own gifts–they appeared to be trading sweets so each got their favorites–while Harry set his book aside reverently.
Underneath it was a treasure trove of knowledge. Theo had procured a brand-new set of NEWT books, the Complete Guide to Substance Interaction, and two books of potions recipes that he warned Harry were barely legal. Neville had contributed six books on magical plants that all looked very old. From Portia, the magical creature angle was covered; along with two smaller books about the theory and practice of using byproducts of magical creatures in potions and rituals, she’d sent a compilation of creature parts’ properties that rivaled the Complete Guide to Substance Interactions in size. My family is distantly related to Newt Scamander, she’d written, and we have at least ten copies of this lying around at home. This is the latest edition. Potions isn’t my thing, but I expect you’ll enjoy it.
“This is… incredible,” Harry said, staring at the books scattered around his lap. “Theo, I…”
“You said you couldn’t find this sort of thing here,” Theo said, shifting. “I asked Neville if he had any ideas, and Portia overheard, said she’d help out too. One of the NEWT-level books is about crafting new potions, since you keep testing ways to change them… d’you like it?”
“It’s perfect,” Harry said, looking Theo in the eye. He’d never been more sincere in his life.
Someone had sweet-talked the elves into bringing them breakfast in the common room. It was a lazy morning; Harry carefully stowed his small but precious assortment of gifts away in his trunk and rejoined everyone in time for a game of Exploding Snap. Pucey taught everyone a version of the game that reminded Harry a little bit of poker. When everyone had singed fingers and eyebrows, they somehow switched into a competition to see who could do the most complicated Charms work on the common room furniture. It promptly turned into a contest between Barrow, Snyde, and Pucey, although Snyde called a halt to the whole thing when the boys started making couches joust at each other using the tall lantern stands as spears.
Snape appeared to chivvy them up to dinner that evening. Grudgingly, the Slytherins went and smoothed hair and robes into perfect order, their one day of lowered standards over. Harry carefully smoothed his hair into order with Sleakeazy’s, the one cosmetic product he’d allowed himself to purchase as it was the only thing that worked on his unruly hair. Fortunately, it also didn’t bother Raza too much, although the snake often made comments about how superior it was to have scales.
Dinner wasn’t quite as extravagant as the feast the night before, but it was still so much more than Harry had ever known in the orphanage. He settled in at the one long table everyone used during the holidays, between Theo and Weise.
A tall figure sat across from them. Harry looked up, startled. It was a professor he didn’t know, but found… oddly familiar for some reason.
“Professor White,” the man said with a smile, reaching across the table. Harry hesitantly shook his hand, and sat back as Weise and Theo exchanged greetings with the man.
“What do you teach, sir?” Weise said.
“Muggle Studies.” White winked at them. “You see, after last year, I thought I ought to introduce myself to you younger students, so my subject doesn’t get too poor a reputation.”
Weise laughed, but Harry couldn’t bring himself to find it funny. Something about White made his teeth hurt and his hair prickle.
White made small talk with the students around them at the table. Most of the Slytherins were polite if a bit distant, but Percy Weasley and some Ravenclaw girl were all too eager to discuss Muggle theology. Harry picked at his food and hid a frown as White told them about exorcisms and demons and the things Muggles believed about witches. Somehow, the wizard managed to make it all sound innocent, like the Muggles were just being logical and trying to defend themselves. Harry knew better. He still remembered the way the Sisters used to threaten him with exorcisms, when he was younger and still had bouts of accidental magic. They’d made him spend hours once watching grainy videos of exorcisms being performed. They were horrible things that involved holding someone underwater, cutting or burning a cross into their body, and other things that supposedly drove ungodly spirits from the body. Some of his nightmares still involved being tied down to a bed while a faceless priest approached him with a red-hot brand of the Cross, and no matter how Harry struggled, his magic wouldn’t respond.
“What about you, Mr. Potter?”
Harry looked up: everyone was looking at him expectantly. “Excuse me, Professor, I’m afraid I was lost in thought,” he said with a rueful smile. “What was that?”
“I asked what you think of Muggle religion,” Professor White said, eyes sharp.
“I don’t think I have an opinion either way,” Harry said, choosing his words carefully. “It’s not very relevant, is it? Interesting, but a bit pointless for people who can do what Muggles call miracles every day.”
“Ah, but is that not precisely what makes religion applicable to us?” White said, smiling. Something about his teeth, or his eyes, didn’t fit. Harry resisted the urge to shrink back. “Wizards and witches wield a power Muggles attribute only to God. Is it not possible that their God is the source of magic?”
“I suppose, sir,” Harry said. “I can’t say I really know anything about it, though. I’m only a second-year.”
“Mm.” White mercifully left him alone after that, but Harry felt the wizard’s attention lingering on him, and left the table as soon as he could without being rude.
***
“I can see what Larkin can find out about him,” Theo offered later that evening. “White, I mean.”
Harry hesitated, then nodded. “I would appreciate it.”
***
Two days after Christmas, he finally worked up the courage to open his mother’s trunk.
It had been sitting next to his bed, under the strongest wards Harry could cast, for weeks now. With most of the students gone and Theo off reading one of his new Muggle novels, Harry had locked the door to his dorm and settled in bed with the trunk in front of him.
It was an ordinary school trunk, made of a dark brown wood with bronze fittings, but of a much higher quality than Harry’s own secondhand trunk. The lock was smooth and untarnished by age.
Taking a deep breath, Harry cut his thumb with a whispered lacero–a fourth-year spell he’d found in the library–and pressed the bloody digit to the lock.
It pulsed and grew warm beneath his finger. Harry felt magic wash through the cut and into his body, searching, then approving, before it faded again. The lock clicked open and a small metal plate below it shimmered, going from plain bronze to showing a series of engravings. Harry squinted: they were small runic numbers, going from one to seven, the most powerful magical number. He cautiously pressed on the number one.
With a click, the trunk lid opened slightly. Harry took a deep breath and opened it.
The inside of the trunk was much bigger than it should be. This compartment held clothes: robes in bright jewel tones, several pairs of shoes, a few small drawers that Harry, to his discomfort, found full of women’s underthings as well as small items like gloves and scarves. It all smelled faintly of a floral scent he couldn’t place, and something else he associated with potions labs, rich and heavy but not unpleasant.
Swallowing around a lump in his throat, Harry brushed his fingers over the neatly arranged rows of robes. She’d loved bright colors and geometric prints, with no florals or small patterns in sight. Most of the robes were in the traditional closed style and looked professionally tailored, although five sets of uniform robes were standard make and in the open-front school style. She’d favored trousers and button-down shirts beneath her robes. Interestingly, her winter cloak, made of dragon hide and lined with a wool-silk blend, had runes embroidered into the lining in black thread. Harry didn’t know exactly what they were for but resolved to look them up. The cloak was far warmer and sturdier than anything he owned, and luckily, wizarding cloaks were unisex. It looked like it might fit him, although he might have to shorten the hem with Sticking Charms.
He closed the trunk again and pressed the number two. This time, it opened to a neatly organized set of cubbies, with a vertical series of shelves that popped out to stand upright out of the back of the trunk. She’d left this compartment mostly empty, although it was well-stocked with quills and ink and parchment. He went through the storage slots and found miscellaneous student things: a pile of knuts and sickles, forgotten hair ties, a scrap of notes from Transfiguration, some small personal knicknacks, a white jasmine-scented candle.
The third compartment made Harry’s eyes gleam. It showed three shelves of books, but when he tugged on two small grips carved into the shelves, they split apart and expanded. The top layer of shelves folded up and out of the trunk to the sides, revealing a round shaft about five feet across with a tight, narrow spiral staircase going down. The walls were full of bookshelves.
Carefully, Harry climbed in. He couldn’t see the bottom, even peering through the inches-wide gap between the staircase and the shelves, but the top few shelves themselves were packed with books. The lid of the trunk, a few feet above his head, showed the ceiling of his bed’s canopy above.
“Potenji, what are you doing down there?” Raza said, poking his head over the edge of the trunk. “Are you stuck?”
“No, just exploring. Want to come?”
Raza’s tongue flicked out a few times. “I will come,” he decided.
Harry raised a hand and levitated Raza down to coil around his shoulders, and then started down.
The bottom of the shaft looked exactly like the inside of a trunk, if it had been extended fifteen feet down into the ground. Harry started climbing back up. The bottom ten feet or so of shelves were empty but the top third of the shaft was packed with books on various subjects. His eyes hungrily skipped over the entire set of school books for years one through seven, and then more, tomes on runes and magical theory and history and arithmancy and spellcrafting and potions.
The fourth compartment sprang open and spat out a desk, which lay to Harry’s left, forming an L shape with the body of the trunk itself. The desktop was simple enough, made of solid wood, but it had two stone-lined cavities of the sort that held fires for brewing. A brass cauldron was placed over one of them, but the other looked unused. Inside the trunk itself, he found stasis-charmed compartments for potions ingredients and a slot for a portable potions kit. A vertical panel lined with vials, some empty and some full of potions, had popped out to face him, standing against the back of the trunk and extending up about two feet above where the lid had been. Harry pulled one of the vials out: it was labeled Strengthening Solution Version 3 in neat cursive.
“I wish I could have known you,” Harry whispered to the empty air, closing his eyes for a moment as he imagined brewing with his mother, being raised in a magical home, watching as she worked in a proper lab.
“She would be proud to call you her hatchling,” Raza said, tasting the air inside the compartment. “You can make good use of what she left for you.”
“Wasn’t for me,” Harry muttered.
Raza flicked Harry’s hand with his tail. “Foolish hatchling. You landplodders give things to your hatchlings when you die, no? So this is yours now. Whether she meant it as a gift or not.”
“True.” Harry rested a hand on Raza’s back, let the cool scales comfort and ground him, before he took a deep breath.
Pressing the number four again caused the trunk to neatly fold up inside itself. The fifth compartment made Harry grin in delight; it was the same setup as the potions compartment, but with a stove-top instead of cauldron slots and cooking supplies instead of potions tools and ingredients in the trunk itself. With the stasis charms, he could stash food in here, and never go hungry in the summers again.
The sixth compartment was another variant on the L-formation, but this time it was just a writing desk. The vertical panel extended to wrap around the L this time, with several shelves lined up above the desk itself as well as against the inside of the trunk’s lid. Writing supplies and a neatly arranged stack of class notes sorted by year and subject lay inside the trunk itself.
Harry took down one of the books from the shelf above the desk. It turned out to be a thick leather-bound notebook. At first it wouldn’t open, but after he reopened the cut on his thumb and pressed some blood to the cover, he felt an odd pinching sensation on his finger and then it opened easily enough.
The first page appeared to be a self-updating table of contents. Harry scanned down it and his eyes went wide. She’d been a spellcrafter and potioncrafter. There didn’t seem to be a logical order to the entries; it could go from a spell to identify bowtruckles to a series of experiments with the Draught of Living Death to a set of notes on an alchemy lecture delivered by a visiting scholar. The manufacturer’s information on the inner cover of the notebook indicated that it was a self-updating personal grimoire designed to contain one thousand pages while maintaining the weight and size of a notebook a quarter that size. Harry flipped through it: his mother had only used maybe a third of the notebook. He kept it out as well.
The rest of the books were reference books and several magical language dictionaries. Harry also found a large, heavy tome bound in black leather and silver fittings, titled only Magick. Something urged him to open it, but he resisted and set it aside to look at later.
The desk folded in on itself and he took a deep breath before opening the last compartment.
Harry blinked in surprise. It was… an altar?
The trunk opened to show a flat surface that was covered in a black cloth and several unlit candles, all of which had been used before. One was black and one was red; both had runes carved into their sides. Harry set them gently aside and lifted the top of the altar. Underneath it was an eccentric collection of candles, runic arrays woven out of wire or embroidered into more cloth altar coverings, and various crystals. When he lifted one of the stones out, a dark green thing that shimmered with bits of orange, gold, and blue light in its depths, he almost dropped it. A powerful sense of peace and clarity radiated from the stone, but not in the manner of a compulsion. Harry relaxed his mind slightly and let the feeling wash over him. Vaguely he felt a sense of someone, red-haired and small, with magic that crackled with the sharpness of peppermint and the bite of fire.
Reverently, Harry set the crystal back in the compartment. The feeling faded as he let go, but now, as though the stone had cleared his perceptions, he could feel a dim sense of power pulsing from the other crystals, candles, and runes. Unsettled, Harry closed the altar top and then the trunk.
“What is wrong, hatchling? Surely you are pleased that your egg-mother’s belongings are here?”
“I am,” Harry said. He lay down and Raza climbed up his stomach. “Just… it makes me miss her.”
The snake’s tongue tickled his chin. “I do not pretend to know the ways of landplodder egg-mothers, but any self-respecting snake would want her hatchlings safe and strong. I have known some egg-mothers to give their lives so their eggs would be safe. She would not want you to waste away wishing for what cannot be.”
“Have I ever told you that you’re surprisingly wise?”
“Of course I am,” Raza said smugly. “I am a snake.”
***
Harry decided to shift his things into his mother’s trunk, and packed her clothes away in his own. His books were carefully shelved in the library compartment, in the top shelves so they were easily accessible. Magick and the books on potioncrafting, including his holiday gifts from Theo, Neville, and Portia, were put away up top as well.
Going through his mother’s trunk’s second compartment had turned up a shock. Jammed down in a cloth pocket, seemingly forgotten, was a very battered collection of Muggle and magical photographs. The earliest showed his mother, young and happy, in still photographs, and in almost all of them she appeared with a dark-haired boy whose nose was too large for his face. It had taken Harry several minutes to recognize a young Severus Snape in the child who wore oversized Muggle clothes and a somewhat less unpleasant expression. When he did, the shock nearly made him faint.
For days, he wrestled with himself over the decision in every moment he wasn’t furiously annotating the fourth-year potions book. His mother’s copy was annotated as well and Harry saw many of his own frustrations reflected in her blue ink marks. The theory side was mostly guesswork and it contradicted itself from one potion to the next. In one case you were supposed to use a rusty iron cauldron for a fog potion but there was no mark as to why. Harry spent a ridiculous amount of time with The Complete Guide to Substance Interaction trying to reverse engineer the reasons behind each potion and it was a complete pain.
***
That in itself was a distraction from the question of whether to ask Snape about his parents: it was a delicate and complex process, requiring intensive research into every ingredient’s interaction with every other ingredient in the potion, depending on whether it was solid or liquid, chopped, diced, ground, or whole, stirred widdershins or deosil, the phase of the moon, the positions of the stars and zodiac signs in some cases, and a host of other factors. Not everything mattered to every potion. The Boil-Cure Potion could apparently be brewed at pretty much any phase of the moon with only slight variations in potency, but others required ingredients to be gathered during a thunderstorm or at night, or brewed under the light of a blue moon, or during an incident of solar flares, in order to work properly. There was also a lot of rune and arithmancy work involved, so Harry had to keep setting the potions-specific research aside to look up those concepts. Luckily, his mother had taken both subjects as electives, so he had all her books to reference. It all made Harry’s head ache slightly but he plowed on.
Theo summoned the books out of his hands after seven days of this and demanded that he go see Snape already if he wanted them back. Harry had stared flintily at him, hard enough to make Theo blanch, and summoned the books back with enough force that they slammed into him like a bludger. Still, he decided Theo had a point, and this brought him to Snape’s door the day before everyone would return to school.
-----
The knock at his office door made Severus scowl. In one day, the dunderheads would flood the school again, and someone was here to ruin his peace of mind?
“Enter,” he snarled. The door opened, and Potter walked in. Of course. Snape sighed through his nose and set aside the stack of idiotic first-year essays he’d been trying to mark.
“Professor,” Potter said politely. “May I speak to you about something?”
“I am your Head of House,” Severus said.
Potter hesitated. Rare. The child always seemed eerily self-contained; the only people around whom he appeared to relax were Nott and to an extent Longbottom, Smith, and Bole. Severus wished he would make more friends in Slytherin, but had to concede that many of the house of snakes might be disinclined to befriend a Potter, for various reasons.
“It’s about a personal matter, sir. Personal for you,” Potter said finally.
Oh no. Oh Merlin, fuck no. Severus’ lips curled back involuntarily into a snarl. “Potter, my life is none of your business whatsoever.” Was his blasted father’s blood finally showing through? The sheer arrogance, butting his nose in where it didn’t belong, assuming he had a right to know anything–
“This, sir,” Potter said, placing something on Severus’ desk. A photograph.
Severus felt the blood drain out of his face as he saw it. Lily. He remembered when that had been taken like it was yesterday. They’d spent the day brewing in her mother’s kitchen, since Mrs. Evans didn’t seem to care if they blew things up and made a mess. Lily had cedar oil in her hair that day, but she hadn’t cared. She had dragged Severus out into the woods behind Spinner’s End to look for wildflowers and he had taken a picture of the two of them, holding the camera awkwardly away from them with still-gangly limbs.
“Where did you get that?” he said through numb lips.
“Professor Flitwick still had her old trunk, from when she meant to get her Mastery.”
Of course she’d sent it ahead. Always prepared, his Lily. Severus picked up the photograph in a hand that did not shake and studied it. Really, he should’ve known this would happen. A boy like Potter wouldn’t be content to go his whole life without looking into his parents and it was inevitable that someone would remember Severus had gone to school with them. Not to mention, the blasted wolf was still out there somewhere, and he may well turn up when Potter was older, telling tales.
“I met your mother when we were young,” he said stiffly. “I saw her doing accidental magic in the park and told her… who she was, what she was. At first she thought it was an insult.” Severus felt the ghost of a smile cross his lips. “She was never one to take an insult lying down. We were best friends… for so long.”
“Can you tell me about her?” Potter sat down, eyes hungry. “And my father? You must have known him as well–”
“Do not ask me about that man!” Severus snarled.
Potter almost flinched.
Cursing himself, Severus closed his eyes and rapidly ran through an Occlumency exercise. “James Potter and I… did not get along,” he said.
“I gathered,” Potter said.
Severus glared at him. “I would prefer not to speak of him if at all possible.”
Potter seemed to gather himself. Severus had no more luck than any other time at deciphering what was going on behind those eerie green eyes, but his magical sense warned him that the boy’s power was a roiling, unsettled sea. “Sir… I am asking you, as the son of your friend, not… a student. I will make an oath that none of it will leave this room, if that would help, and I would not ask for anything that’s personal for you. I just… want to know about them.”
It was as close to begging as Severus imagined the child ever came. And dammit but those eyes, they were not Lily’s eyes but there was enough of her in Potter’s canny expression and the careful movements of his hands as he brewed and in his straight, patrician nose that Severus couldn’t help softening. Just a little.
“The problem there is that my perceptions of them are inextricable from my personal experiences,” he said drily.
The boy was silent.
“Fine,” Severus said, pinching the brow of his nose. “Only because Lily would probably come back from the dead to smack me if I sent you away.”
For the first time, what looked like an actual emotion crossed the boy’s face, like he had almost laughed and swallowed it back. It was so much like Lily when she had her poker face on that Severus had to close his own eyes for a moment.
Actually that made things easier. He kept them closed. “I met your father and his… cronies on the train to Hogwarts. He befriended Sirius Black in approximately four seconds. The two of them were the most arrogant, spoiled sods Hogwarts had ever seen.” In hindsight, Severus knew enough from Regulus about the hell that had been Black’s life outside of Hogwarts to feel some aborted sympathy for the missorted Gryffindor Black had been back then. But at the time… “I was… not from a wealthy family, a half-blood with secondhand clothes and admittedly poor hygiene. Potter was thoroughly spoiled and used to getting away with being cruel to children unlike himself. He instantly classified me as a target and Black, I believe, was too desperate to keep his first-ever friend and one his parents would hate to boot. On top of that, his upbringing was not the sort that instills a modicum of kindness or boundaries in children. Lily chased them off. Things only deteriorated from there.”
“Sir?” Potter was frowning faintly. “First-ever friend..? I thought the Blacks were, well, one of the richest and oldest families in Britain.”
“They are. Unfortunately, they are also one of the most inbred,” Severus said acerbically. “In polite circles, their… affliction is generally referred to as the ‘Black family madness’. Some of the family are more affected than others, but all of them seem to suffer from some degree of emotional instability. Your paternal grandmother, Dorea Black, was one of the best of her generation, as her parents were wholly unrelated. Sirius Black, on the other hand, was the child of two first cousins.”
Potter winced visibly. “That’s… disturbing.”
Severus nodded. “Indeed. They were violently insane, pureblood supremacists of the worst kind. Even the Dark Lord despised Walburga Black for her narrow mind and rigid personality. She in turn hated him for being an uppity half-blood. I later learned that Black’s upbringing was… not pleasant.”
A dark expression twisted Potter’s face for a second. Severus understood. “I see, sir. Continue?”
“Lily… she was the light of my life,” Severus admitted. “The Hat wanted to place her in Slytherin, not that the Gryffindors ever knew as much, but thought it would endanger her. So she went to the lions’ den and I to Slytherin, and… it was a difficult era for a Slytherin to befriend a muggleborn Gryffindor. A quarter of Slytherin House openly planned to join the Dark Lord upon graduation, and that quarter tended to be the students with money and influence.” He saw that Potter was putting the pieces together, and decided to avoid the gory details. “In fifth year, I had to… well, stage a fight with your mother. My own House had taken to shunning and cursing me. I was one against many.” Even now, in hindsight and knowing it had not been his fault, Severus found his former helplessness galling. “I called her a mudblood in public when she defended me from… your father and his gang of minions. Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Peter Pettigrew.”
“You speak of my father as though… he was a bully,” Potter noted.
“He was.” Severus fought to keep the vitriol from his voice, with imperfect results. “James Potter’s Hogwarts career was a story of callous mistreatment of his fellow students under the guise of pranks and laughs. Specifically, the students he perceived as weak or lesser.”
“Was he… a blood purist?”
“No, his assessment of the lesser orders relied more on anyone he did not perceive to be the perfect Gryffindor,” Severus said bitterly. “Imagine the youngest Mr. Weasley with a few extra degrees of charisma and brains, as, regrettably, James Potter was not unintelligent or uncharismatic.”
Potter nodded, face grim. Severus suspected the boy had been on the receiving end of that particular Gryffindor-centric attitude more than once and found it all too familiar. “So… if you don’t mind me asking, sir, why did they get married?”
Severus laughed hollowly. “James Potter was obsessed with Lily from the first moment she stood up to him. I don’t believe he knew how to cope with someone who was neither cowed by him nor remotely inclined to like him, and so he fixated on her as some sort of conquest.” The word tasted vile on his tongue: he had heard Potter refer to Lily with just that word in sixth year. “She agreed to date him in seventh year for reasons I couldn’t understand. It almost broke our friendship–it was like she suddenly forgot everything that we’d always thought about him.
“I found out later that Peter Pettigrew had, without James’ knowledge, dosed Lily with a love potion.”
Potter sucked in a breath, eyes huge.
Nodding grimly, Severus paused to compose himself before he continued. “Pettigrew… he was always jealous of James, I suspect he ingratiated himself with them so that he wouldn’t be their constant victim, given that he had to share a dorm with Potter and his cronies for seven years, and he told me… under duress that he had thought to get back at Potter,” Severus sneered the words as viciously as he knew how, “by giving him the prize he’d always wanted and then ripping it away when the potion wore off and Lily came to her senses. He thought it would be funny.”
“Where is he?” Potter said flatly. “Pettigrew. Is he alive?”
“No, Sirius Black killed him after Black betrayed your parents to the Dark Lord and Pettigrew tried to kill him in revenge.”
Potter blinked. “I’m sorry, what?”
Severus shrugged. “It never made a whole lot of sense to me either, given Pettigrew’s hatred of your father while Black was his alarmingly devoted friend, but the Wizengamot found Black guilty and tossed him in Azkaban for life. Regardless, Pettigrew has been dead for a decade.” And wasn’t that a relief. Severus didn’t feel like dealing with the cover-up that he would inevitably have to arrange if Lily’s son had gone off to find and kill Pettigrew, as he no doubt would have if the look in his eyes was any indication.
Then again, if Black hadn't gotten there first, Severus would have hunted the little traitor down himself and made him beg for death.
“Why didn’t she leave, then? If the potion wore off.”
“She’d already married him and conceived you,” Severus sighed. “And James, being James, thoughtlessly used some archaic marriage contract his lawyer dredged up without looking at it closely, and Lily had already signed it. She had no choice.”
“Wasn’t love potion a defense?” Potter said. “Legally speaking, I mean.”
“Yes, but…” Severus sighed. “She was pregnant, with you. In our world, a muggleborn carrying the bastard son of a noble family, even a comparatively minor one like the Potters, would have been an outcast. If she’d even gotten custody–most courts would have given you to your father, unless he didn’t want a halfblood child, in which case you would have been completely disinherited.”
Potter frowned.
“Indeed.” Severus was already exhausted by this conversation and it was far from over. In fact, arguably the most difficult bits remained to tell. “Unfortunately, being Lady Potter and the wife of James Potter placed Lily smack in the middle of the brewing war.”
“My father was… in the resistance?” Potter asked.
Severus dearly wanted a glass of firewhiskey. “In the resistance… he was one of its most active members, a close protege of Albus Dumbledore, and one of the biggest financial backers of Albus’ little vigilante club. The Order of the Phoenix. Pfft.”
“Mmm.” Potter frowned down at his hands. “And what about you, sir?”
“What?”
“The war, sir. Were you in the Order of the Phoenix?”
No child’s eyes should be that cold, that piercing. Severus actually found himself at a loss for words momentarily. “Nominally,” he finally said. “I…”
Oh, Merlin damn it. He was having a firewhiskey if he was going to be telling this brat things that he really, really shouldn’t. Just–Lily couldn’t be here for her son. Severus could still hear her voice: Swear to me you’ll protect him, Severus, that you’ll be there for him if I can’t. Swear it! And he had, of course. A flick of his wand brought a glass half full of ice and a bottle of Ogden’s finest soaring over to his desk from a cupboard where he kept such things in stasis for moments just like this.
Potter waited patiently while Severus poured himself a drink and took a larger sip than was perhaps wise. “I was a spy,” Severus found himself saying hoarsely.
Was he seriously using this child as his confessor? What had his life come to?
Damn you, Lily. “The Dark Lord wanted me. A Slytherin, a potions prodigy… I’d already invented several curses and potions by seventh year, and his new little Death Eaters knew it too, because I’d turned my inventions on them. I was having none of it, but even then his connections were… undeniable. No one would accept me to a Mastery program unless I went outside Europe, and the overseas programs were… exorbitantly priced.
“I accepted, finally, and gained an apprenticeship with Damocles Belby.”
“Wolfsbane,” Potter said instantly.
Of course he knew it instantly. “Yes, that Damocles Belby,” Severus said irritably. He’d also been an Unspeakable, but that was very secret and not something he felt a need to share with the child. “It was any potion crafter’s dream. But the price I paid was steep.” Unconsciously, his hand shifted to brush his left forearm. Potter’s eyes followed the movement, but he said nothing, waiting patiently.
“I passed information to your mother. She made sure it reached Albus through James. We both hoped… that the Dark Lord would fall, so we could all be free again. Her from the fear, me from… my role.
“Then… there was a prophecy.”
Potter sat upright. “A prophecy?”
That was only to be expected. “Albus kept it out of the public eye,” Severus said with a grim smile. “It said that a child born as the seventh month died would be the Dark Lord’s equal and have a power the Dark Lord didn’t. The Dark Lord would mark this child, who might have the power to vanquish him.”
“That all sounds very vague,” Potter said.
“It was a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Severus agreed. “Notoriously imprecise and prone to misinterpretation. True Sight is a tricky art to begin with, mostly impossible to teach unless someone has a gift for it, and, well, the ‘seer’ who made that particular prophecy is a known alcoholic.
“I overheard it,” he admitted, “and the Dark Lord ripped it from my mind. I could not stop him.” Phantom pain assaulted his mind and Severus remembered the headache he’d had after that night, a migraine that lasted for two and a half weeks. He had thrown himself into occlumency afterwards, harder than ever before, and mastered it, but the pain… it lingered.
“My birthday is July thirty-first,” Potter said. “So that is why he attacked us?”
Severus nodded, took another drink. “Keep in mind, Albus would not want you knowing any of this.”
“There are many things the Headmaster would not want me to know,” Potter said with a very sharp smile. It reminded Severus, uncomfortably, of the Dark Lord. “I plan to learn those things regardless.”
Apparently Severus’ openness was being returned. Potter had at last admitted to what he had only obliquely mentioned, his animosity towards the Headmaster, of which Severus wholeheartedly approved. Albus was far too uncontested for his own good. He did Potter the courtesy of an approving nod and thin-lipped smile to reward both his show of honesty and his good instincts.
“The other candidate was Neville Longbottom, born one day prior. The Dark Lord, however, chose you. Albus suspects that he saw himself in you: a half-blood, born of a lesser noble family and a muggleborn, someone without the pedigree and status of the Longbottoms. He marked you, and his body was destroyed in the process.”
Potter nodded along. “So he heard the prophecy–”
“Part of it,” Severus corrected. “I only overhead the first two lines or so. The Dark Lord knew that there would be a child born at the end of July who would have the power to vanquish him, and nothing more. The rest was revealed to me… much later.” Albus and his bloody meddling. “Such is the manner of self-fulfilling prophecies. Hearing them typically only leads people to alter their actions in such a way to bring about the prophecy. Or, by some arguments, to find a set of events that seem to fit the prophecy. As I said, divination is a complex art.”
“So he heard part of the prophecy and decided to kill me before I could be a threat. And he marked me… my scar?” Severus nodded. “As his equal.”
The boy looked far more calculating than any twelve-year old had a right to be. “Is it true, sir, that something my mother did saved my life?”
“It is.” The memory rushed back: painful, vivid. Severus had arrived at the house only to find a squalling child in its crib and Lily’s corpse on the floor in front of him. Her robes, shifted aside, revealed a single rune slashed into her chest just below the collarbone. Algiz, meaning protection, a shield. The blood had not yet dried: she had cut it into herself in the seconds between the Dark Lord arriving and his journey finishing in the nursery. “It was runic blood magic of the oldest, most powerful kind.” How much should he tell the boy about this? Severus eyed Potter across his desk. There was a hunger in his eyes that he couldn’t quite mask. Frankly, Severus expected him to find some mention of this kind of magic eventually. Better he be told of the concept early on, so that he would appreciate the risks. “Do you plan to take runes next year?”
“I do.”
“You will be taught to use runic arrays,” Severus said. “Arithmancy impacts the shapes of the standard arrays and the numbers of runes in each. If you take arithmancy as well, you may learn to combine the two disciplines and tailor the array to your intended outcome and the specific runes in use, although that is an extremely advanced skill. You will never be taught, unless you pursue a Runes Mastery, how to wield runes without an array, merely intent and purity of purpose.
“What Lily did that night took incredible mental fortitude. Normally, a runic array brings about a certain end because the meanings of the runes relate to one another in specific ways governed by the structure of the array itself, the order in which they are written, and a few other things. This is to protect the caster: should you attempt to set a log on fire, and happen to look at or think of me as you activate the runes, the log will burn but I will not. Unguided use of runes has no such safeguards. It was augmented by the fact that Lily cut the rune into her own skin, using blood magic–sacrifice–to strengthen the magic. She then had to activate the rune and hold her intent and the connection between her intent and the rune’s meaning clear in her mind with absolute, unwavering focus. If she had faltered for even a heartbeat, if she had doubted her choice in the slightest, or permitted herself the smallest distraction, the magical backlash would have killed her, you, the Dark Lord’s body, and probably everyone in the neighboring homes as well.”
Potter’s eyes were wide, control temporarily forgotten. Severus ruthlessly crushed a feeling of minor guilt for laying the events of that night out so clearly. The boy had a right to know, and Merlin knew Albus would never tell him, but that didn’t mean Severus was about to let him run off half-cocked to try and learn the same kind of magic.
“She must have been brilliant,” Potter said softly.
Severus closed his eyes. “She was.”
He’d run to her son, as he knew she would want him to do, and ascertained the child was alive and not in immediate danger or in need of prompt medical care, before he fell to the ground and cradled her body. Mind blank but for endless grief. Only the crack of apparition had driven him to flight, not knowing who had arrived or if they would know of his position as a spy, but certain that Lily’s lingering protection would keep the child safe until Albus inevitably showed up.
“Thank you, sir.”
Severus opened his eyes and looked at Potter. This was inevitable, wasn’t it? He sighed through his nose. “You may as well call me Severus in private. I was to be your godparent,” he said grudgingly.
“Why weren’t you?”
“Your father struck my name from the paperwork while Lily was recovering from labor.” That incident still made Severus see red, and judging by Potter’s expression, he wasn’t much happier about it.
“Call me Harry, then, P–Severus,” Potter–Harry–said, trying for a smile. It was utterly unlike the smooth and charming smiles Severus had seen him summon in class, with his peers, or for the other staff members. It was also distinctly stiff and unpracticed. Which led him to believe it might be the closest thing to a genuine expression that had ever crossed the boy’s face in front of an authority figure.
Severus steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “I would be honored,” he said very softly.
P–Harry hesitated, glancing at the stack of ungraded essays on Severus’ desk. “I can help mark the first year papers,” he said. “As… gratitude for taking the time to speak with me.”
“Your work was exemplary last year. Very well,” Severus allowed, shoving the essays across the desk. It would save him a headache and be decent review for the boy, and also, Severus would be a very poor Slytherin if he turned down such gratuitous assistance. “But you may need a headache potion when you are finished.”
“Thank you.” Harry took the quill and red ink pot Severus slid his way, and drew the first essay in the pile towards himself. Then he hesitated again.
“Ask,” Severus sighed.
“Would they be proud of me?” Harry’s eyes remained glued to the desktop; his entire body was stiff as a board. Severus suspected that it had taken quite a lot for the boy to bring himself to ask such a question. Frankly, he was surprised Harry had even come and asked about all of this.
“I daresay your father is rolling in his grave at just how very Slytherin you are,” Severus drawled. “But I can say with certainty that Lily would be proud of you no matter your House, and want nothing for you but happiness and success.”
Harry didn’t answer with more than a jerky nod, but Severus could accept that. If the conjectures he had drawn about this cold, independent, untrusting child’s upbringing were even remotely true, it was frankly a minor miracle that he’d even opened up this much. It was arguably uncharacteristic of a Slytherin but Severus had always maintained that Slytherin was not about refusing to trust, but about knowing who to trust, and how much. Harry had demonstrated reasonably good judgment for a boy his age.
-----
Harry had expected the essays to help distract him while the flood of information settled. He had not, however, anticipated the levels of sheer idiocy that seemed to characterize all of them. Even having read some of Neville’s attempts the year before, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Neville at least had a clever mind and made unusual connections between things even though he wasn’t the best writer. He thought about the subject matter and it showed. These students, on the other hand, apparently wouldn’t recognize logic if it mugged them in Knockturn Alley and stole their wand.
As Snape—no matter what the man said, Harry would keep him at a mental distance for now—had promised, he was in dire need of a headache potion by the time the stack was graded. Harry forced out a thank you and fled the office.
“Are you glad that you went to the snake-leader?” Raza hissed from his bag.
Harry cast a Notice Me Not on the snake as he lifted Raza out and tucked him into his robes. Feeling his familiar wrapped around him was a small comfort. “Yes… I am, I just…”
How to explain to a snake that what his father had done to his mother was arguably rape? Even if James Potter hadn’t known, which it seemed he hadn’t until after Pettigrew stopped with the potion, it was still… well, something. Wrong. Harry knew he was not an especially moral person but something in him recoiled from that particular kind of pain. Years of being held down and hurt and left helpless under other kids’ hands had taught him just how awful it was to lose your autonomy to someone else, and how much worse would it be to lose control of your body’s most private places? “It’s unfortunate that Peter Pettigrew is dead, or I would find him and make him pay.”
“The snake leader would help you.” Raza generally approved of Professor Snape. “You landplodders are strange. No egg-mother would accept a mate unless he came to her with bright scales and masterful hunting. And any snake who must trick another into being their mate can never be respected by another snake.”
“You have the right of it,” Harry said glumly. Visions of Pettigrew, who he pictured as vaguely small and pudgy and smarmy-looking, being hung from a dungeon by his wrists danced behind Harry’s eyes. Some of the curses he had taught himself, well, they would be amusing to try out on a man like that. Harry expected he could get this Pettigrew to scream until his vocal cords gave out.
Somehow, he did not think his mother had ever screamed, not even when she found out what had been done to her.
He was a little surprised she hadn’t killed the little traitor herself. Maybe she’d been afraid James would report her or some such nonsense; that seemed in character based on what he’d heard of his father. If she was as Slytherin as Snape had indicated, she’d probably been planning a slow death for the wanker, one that wouldn’t get her implicated.
Harry’s black mood had not diminished in the slightest when he reappeared in the dorm. Theo frowned at him. “You all right?”
“No,” Harry said shortly.
Fortunately Theo took the hint and merely nodded. He left and came back a minute later with biscuits and tea in a set of china that Harry was almost certain belonged to some fourth year twit with a trust fund almost as large as her ego. Harry accepted the tea without a word and thought how glad he was that Theo had proven clever enough to commit to him in first year, and that Theo had proven loyal.
One day, Harry would tell Theo what he had learned today. But for now it was his own, a collection of secrets about his parents that he would clutch all the harder because they were so few.
***
Within a few hours, the novelty of learning something about his parents had worn off a bit, and as Harry lay in his bed that night, he began to think about the implications of the things Snape had said and especially the things he hadn’t. First up was the fact that Dumbledore had apparently kept all mention of the prophecy out of the public eye. From a propaganda point of view, Harry thought saying a literal prophecy had determined Voldemort would die was priceless. It was like saying Fate herself was on your side. But he hadn’t. The focus of most of the books Harry had read on it, insipid as they were, lay with ‘the lovely Lady Lily Potter’s brave and selfless sacrifice’ and on the power of mother’s love. Thinking back on it, Harry snorted. They had a point, true, but it wasn’t as if love alone had done all the work, it had just impelled her to use incredibly risky and powerful magic to protect him.
The thought still startled him. Once upon a time, he hadn’t been Harry Potter, freak, witch-child, outcast. He’d been loved so much that two someones had given their lives trying to save his. Even James Potter, who by Snape’s account hadn’t been that great of a person, had died defending his family from Voldemort, even though by then he knew his marriage was a lie.
What seemed oddest was Dumbledore’s decision to toss all that useful propaganda to the wayside. After hearing the gist of the prophecy, well, Harry was inclined to believe Raza when he said, “The old one would not want you to be equal to such a powerful hunter, would he?”
“No,” Harry realized. “He wouldn’t.”
In fact, he’d be willing to bet a lot of money that Snape had been forbidden to tell Harry any of that at all. Which begged the question: why did he?
“He was not lying,” Raza said. “I could scent him. There was something thick and heavy about his scent but not of trickery.”
Snakes knew trickery well. Harry nodded, grateful as ever for Raza’s nose. Or, well, his tongue. “He really… cared about her that much, then.”
“Sometimes one egg-mother or egg-father will guard hatchlings not their own, if they are abandoned or their egg-mother is killed,” Raza agreed.
So he could trust Snape, at least a little. That was… reassuring in an odd way. One adult existed in the world who was more likely than not to have Harry’s interests in mind before their own. Or at least whose own interests included furthering Harry’s well-being.
Two if you counted Flitwick. “I feel weak,” Harry said. It was not something he would admit anywhere other than here, in his warded and silenced bed, in a language only he and Raza could understand. “There are too many people in my life now, Raza.”
Raza stuck his tongue in Harry’s ear, making him flinch. “Silly hatchling. They are your allies. They take you into their nest if yours floods and you share prey and guard them when they are weak. You are stronger with allies than alone.” He paused. “So long as they are good allies. You are a good snake-speaker, you choose your allies well.”
“Thanks, Raza.”
The snake made something that sounded a lot like a serpent version of one of Peeves’ rude noises. “As if I would stay with a hatchling who was stupid.”
***
The return of the student body put Harry oddly at ease. With hundreds of students flooding the halls, he could go back to eating at the Slytherin table, far away from the eyes of Professor White and his little comments. If Harry hadn’t spent a year and a half now surrounded by Slytherins, he might not have noticed how White’s jabs almost always tried to make him admit to knowing more than he should about Muggles. But he had, and he did.
Weise and Dimitrova more often than not invited Harry and Theo to sit with them at meals now, which amused Harry to no end because of how angry Malfoy looked whenever this happened. He hadn’t received any such signs of favor from the older students. Meanwhile, Harry also sometimes sat with the Quidditch team, in seats of honor almost as far from the head table as you could get. On those days, Theo didn’t usually come with him, but they were relatively few, as the team usually sat with their own friends.
Graves approached Harry the first day back with a wide smile and a list of books on a scrap of parchment. Harry rolled his eyes at the theatrics, but he tucked it away all the same.
That night, he and Raza vanished under his Cloak and slipped out of the dorms.
Walking Hogwarts’ halls at night was always an experience. In the dark, alone, he could feel the magic that filled her ancient stones. Every step reminded him he was very small and very young, and Hogwarts held more secrets than he even dreamed.
That was all right. Harry would enjoy hunting them all down.
Getting into the Restricted Section was fairly easy now, even routine. Harry just hid under his cloak and the wards slid over it like water off a duck’s feathers. The books themselves were trickier; some had to be bound shut with rope and others were jinxed with caterwauling charms. He silenced them all, to be safe, and stowed the six Graves wanted in his bag.
Afterwards, they wandered. Raza loved being free to roam the corridors at Harry’s feet, sticking his tongue into every interesting nook and cranny he found. Several times he almost caught a mouse but let it go, saying that he did not want to be full and lazy when there was so much night left.
Harry found himself in a mostly-abandoned wing of the castle between Ravenclaw Tower and the twin bell towers. The ground floor of the wing was often used as a warm, indoor way to get from the clock tower entrance back to the main school, but there were six floors above that that no one really used.
Between Raza’s nose and Harry’s liberal use of the revelio charm, they sussed out a number of interesting things. There was a column with a quaffle-sized cavity that opened if you said pretty please; nothing was in there but Harry made a note anyway. It would be a good place to stash things, or to coordinate passing things to people who he couldn’t be seen giving things to. One of the windows sang lullabies when you got too close to it. All the rooms on the top level were unlocked and empty but the view to the southeast of the castle would be amazing during the day.
Grinding stones made Harry whip around, wand out. It took a second to piece together what had happened: there was Raza, sneezing and looking pleased, on the ground next to a section of wall that had rotated inward to leave a narrow gap.
“It opens if you press in this crack,” Raza said, drawing his tail out of the narrow gap he’d apparently somehow found.
“Good find,” Harry said. “Let’s see where it goes?”
The passage turned out to be a narrow, cramped staircase, seemingly packed into the walls with space expansion charms. Dust choked the air and Harry had to hold in several sneezes. His lumos showed plenty of spiders and no footprints. No one had been here in a very long time.
The staircase led up a short way and ended at a trapdoor. Harry squinted, cast a few detection charms, and then shrugged. Anything this abandoned couldn’t be that dangerous. He shoved upwards.
Immediately, dirt and dust rained down. Coughing and blinking furiously, he pushed harder. The trapdoor fell open with a dull thunk.
When his vision cleared, Harry poked his head into whatever he’d just found, and his mouth fell open.
Hidden along the top of the wing was a greenhouse. It stretched almost the whole way between Ravenclaw Tower and the clock towers, a distance of at least a hundred meters. The glass overhead was filthy and dark. Any plants had long ago died for lack of care, but there was still thick earth underfoot. It was narrow, only maybe two or three meters wide, to fit along the roof in between two rows of sturdy crenellations.
Harry squinted: those were slits in the walls, too, designed for arrows or spellfire. This had been a defensive post once. He guessed that as the years passed and Hogwarts didn’t need as fierce of a defense as she once did, that someone had turned this space into something more useful than a walkway. It probably had something like a notice-me-not spell on it, too, if no one had flown over the castle or looked down from Ravenclaw Tower and spotted it.
There was a lot Harry could do with this.
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