lomonaaeren

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Chapter Thirty-Five—The Last Confrontation

“You don’t have to do this.”

Harry smiled a little and met Orion’s eyes in the mirror from where Orion stood behind him. “I know.”

“Let me put it another way.” Orion stepped up behind him and put his hands on Harry’s shoulders, and Harry shivered. The warmth of them made it feel as if Orion was cupping separate sunbeams in the palms of his hands. “I would prefer that you did not do this.”

“It’s the only way that I’m going to get any kind of peace,” Harry replied, twisting away from Orion’s hands and studying the hang of his robes again. He had to make sure that he looked put-together, not for the man he was going to see, but for the Ministry guards, who would expect a certain appearance from him, and to serve as the best guardian of his heart that he could make.

“If Mariana or young Severus have been—”

Harry laughed, startled. “Hardly. They’ve also been begging me not to go.”

“Then who do you have to ask for peace?”

“Myself.”

Orion’s hands went right back to his shoulders. Harry twisted again and faced him from a short distance away, shaking his head. “Listen to me, Orion. If we’re ever going to have a relationship of equals, then you can’t just grab me and haul me around and act as if you’re in charge of my every move.”

“Would you like to be grabbed and hauled around?”

Harry hated the way the blood rushed to his cheeks. “In a different context,” he managed to say, without his voice shaking too badly. “That context is not the one we are talking about.”

Orion smiled for a long moment, and then nodded. “You’re right. But please explain to me why your own emotions are not giving you peace.”

“I broke the timeline, and that’s the only reason Snape was resurrected and the only reason he suffered. He would have remained dead if I hadn’t. No, I don’t think that what he was trying to do was the right thing, either. If all he had wanted was death and nothing else, he could have killed himself. He wanted revenge and for other people to hurt as badly as he did. But regardless, I’m still the reason he was in pain, and I’m going to face him and acknowledge that.”

Orion opened his mouth, closed it, and then muttered, “It’s my own fault for falling in love with a moralistic Gryffindor.”

Harry’s cheeks could still flare up when Orion said things like that, for entirely different reasons. But he managed to clear his throat. “I—I need to go, or I’ll miss my appointment, and I don’t know if they’ll let me see him.”

“Yes, I can see that. Go.”

Harry touched Orion fleetingly on the cheek and rushed out of the room before Orion’s astonished, pleased expression could change to something else.

*

“Harry Potter, here to see Septimus Snape.”

That was the name Snape was being held under, to match the cover story they were putting about that he was some disgruntled relative of Severus’s father. If anyone knew for sure that Eileen Prince had married a Muggle instead of a Squib, as the official story now insisted, they were keeping it to themselves.

The door of the holding cell drew back. Harry stepped inside and blinked at the sight of the ward stretching down the middle of the room and the rattling chains on the walls. Then he saw Snape, and knew why they were there. Snape was probably feeling murderous enough right now that he would have crossed the distance separating them if he could have used magic.

And indeed, the man was staring at him with that obliterating black gaze Harry remembered from what seemed to be an armchair on the far side of the cell. Harry swallowed and folded his hands behind his back, feeling for a moment like a misbehaving student standing in front of the professor.

“What are you doing here, Potter.”

Harry suffered a moment of intense relief that anyone who overheard him, in the seconds before the cell door closed and sound-dampening wards sprang up, would just think that he was speaking about the relationship with the living Potters Harry refused to acknowledge, rather than having secrets of time travel revealed to them. “I came because I made you suffer, and I owe you,” he said steadily.

“You will not release me from this prison, and you will not allow me to die. What do you owe me?”

“The chance to talk to me, if you want. To make me understand. Or just to express your anger. I’m not picky about what you choose to do.”

Snape stayed silent for a long time, raking Harry with his eyes. Harry had known it would be uncomfortable. He stood still, and ignored the sharp prickling sensation in his spine and in the back of his skull that wanted him to talk, to defend himself. The whole point was that he couldn’t defend himself, not from this. Yes, he had accepted that he couldn’t go back and resurrect his original timeline, and that he had people here he needed to stay for, Severus and Sirius and Regulus and Mariana and—and Orion.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t bear some guilt for what he had done.

Snape might have seen that in his face, or decided that this was the best chance he was going to get. He leaned forwards, expression blank but eyes full of rage. Harry braced himself the best he could.

“Do you know what I thought the first time I saw you in my Potions class in 1991, Potter?”

“That I looked like my father?”

“That you were more arrogant than ever he was,” Snape said softly. “How could you not be, with the celebrity going to your head? At least no one ever hailed James Potter as a savior from the time he was one year old. And look, I was right.” He waved his hand around the cell, his voice growing in volume. “Look what you have done!”

Harry could have said a lot of things, including that Snape hadn’t been right about the source of his arrogance when Harry hadn’t even known for most of his childhood that he was famous.

But he was here to offer Snape the chance to speak his mind. So he kept his mouth shut.

“Created a whole new world because you decided that you just knew better than everyone involved!” Snape spat. “Including pulling me out of death! I was at peace there. It was oblivion, and that was the way I liked it.”

“I know, sir. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry does not begin to comprehend what you have done!”

Snape spent a little while talking after that, complaining bitterly about Harry going after the Stone, his resemblance to James Potter, how he had dishonored his mother’s memory by destroying the timeline that had housed her, and how much he hated Harry for destroying his peace. Harry stood through it. Snape didn’t want him to talk anymore, it seemed, and what else could he have said? Even if somehow he had contrived to get all the charges against Snape because of what he had done to Harry dropped, he still would have faced charges for attempted time-travel and for manipulating Seneca Prince’s mind.

“Are you listening to me, Potter?”

“Yes,” Harry said softly.

“Then you could repeat what I said?”

“Not every single word, but yes. I’m too much like my father. My mother sacrificed her life for me, and I dishonored her sacrifice by destroying the timeline. Albus shouldn’t have put so much trust in me. I shouldn’t have thought that I knew best to try and repair things that didn’t need repairing. I dragged you from the peace of death. I thought I knew better than anyone else.” Harry swallowed hard. “That is the reason that I broke the timeline. I thought I knew better. I’m sorry, sir.”

Snape stared at him in silence. Harry didn’t know what was going through his mind. He felt like he’d always understood Snape too little.

He understood Severus. But the boy he had come to love here was not the man from his original timeline. That was the point.

“Tell them,” Snape said abruptly.

“I can’t tell them about everything without revealing the destruction of the original timeline, sir—”

“No. Tell them I want the Kiss or the Veil as my punishment. Argue that Azkaban wouldn’t be secure enough for me when I can use Legilimency and might corrupt the minds of the guards. Use whatever excuse you want. But I want to die, not live on and on in some kind of hellhole, or even in St. Mungo’s. Tell them. That is the only restitution I will accept. Do you understand me, Potter?”

Harry nodded slowly. He wondered if he should say that he didn’t know if the Wizengamot would alter Snape’s punishment based on Harry’s recommendation, but he reckoned that Snape probably already knew that. He was asking anyway, because there was nothing else to be done.

There was nothing else to say.

Snape seemed to have decided that at the same time Harry did. He settled back in his chair and jerked his chin towards the door.

Harry turned, fighting against the temptation to apologize again or confess something. There was nothing to apologize, and nothing to confess. He walked from the room, vowing only one, quiet thing to himself.

He would be there for Severus, so that he never felt as though his only option for peace was death.

*

“Mr. Harry!”

Severus ran across the room in the Black house when he saw Mr. Harry coming towards him. Mr. Harry bent down and hugged him, hard. Severus hugged back, enjoying it for a few seconds, and then pulled away.

“I want you to teach me something specific.”

“All right.” Harry sat down on the couch in the room where they’d been having their lessons lately. Grandmama had said a few times that they should consider moving back into the Prince house, but honestly, Severus liked it better here. It was dark, sure, but there were no memories of Grandfather, and no rooms where he was told to sit up straight or he would get cursed, and Mr. Harry living here. “What is it?”

“I want you to teach me defensive spells, Mr. Harry.”

Mr. Harry blinked as if he hadn’t thought of that. Severus thought it was stupid. He taught Defense at Hogwarts, after all. “I—well, I don’t know if I should, Severus. You’re too young—”

“But I’ll have to defend myself, won’t I? Specially?”

Mr. Harry promptly focused on him. “Did Sirius or Regulus tell you that?”

“No. But it’s obvious, right? You said that Voldemort isn’t dead.”

“I knew…” Mr. Harry trailed off and shook his head. “I can’t say for sure that Voldemort here is the same as in my original world, but no, I think that he’s not dead. That’s the kind of similarity that would travel from world to world and haunt me along the way.”

“He’ll come back,” Severus said. He didn’t know for sure if he was making a prediction, but he sure thought it was true. He touched his scar. “I feel it here.”

“Is there any pain there? Any blood?”

“No.” Severus didn’t know how to explain how certain he was, so he just went back to his original point. “I want to learn defensive spells, Mr. Harry.”

“The problem is that I don’t think you could handle the injuries you’ll receive. You’re too young. And your grandmother would probably try out those Skinning Spells she’s talked about wanting to use on your grandfather if I hurt you.”

Severus smiled. He had thought Mr. Harry might think something like that. “Just teach me to throw the spells, Mr. Harry.”

Mr. Harry eyed him. “And who would be standing there to get the brunt of the spells?”

Severus smiled innocently at him.

Mr. Harry rolled his eyes a little. “I have something else in mind. I’ll show you the incantations and wand movements, all right? But the only ones you’ll practice, until I can trust that you’ll know how to hold back when you need to, are the ones that are countercurses or shield spells. That way, you won’t hurt yourself or me if something goes wrong and the shield breaks or something.”

Severus thought about whether he could get a different bargain out of Mr. Harry, but he decided probably not. Mr. Harry’s jaw was set too stubbornly. “Okay,” he said. “Can we start learning this afternoon?”

“Why this afternoon in particular?”

Severus squirmed, but although Mr. Harry didn’t always look at him in that stern way, he was worse than Grandmama when he did, and Severus finally said, “Because I told Sirius that I would get to learn those spells this afternoon and he wouldn’t.”

“Severus, that wasn’t a nice thing to say.”

“But it was true, wasn’t it?” Severus asked, and then he had to say things he hadn’t meant to say when Mr. Harry looked confused. “I can learn better and faster than them because of what my mum did to me. I heard Grandmama talking about it once with you.”

Mr. Harry’s eyes softened, and he patted the couch next to him. Severus wouldn’t ignore an invitation like that, at least not from Grandmama or Mr. Harry. It would have been best to ignore it from his grandfather. He climbed up next to Mr. Harry.

“I promise you that I’ll always be here to teach you,” Mr. Harry said, and wrapped an arm around Severus’s shoulders. “And yes, there are things you’ll be able to do better than other children because of the spells that your mother cast on you. It’s like the way that I told you more about what happened than I told Sirius and Regulus.”

Severus squirmed, because he knew all that, and he wanted to hear Mr. Harry say something new.

“But that doesn’t mean that you have to learn all those countercurses and shield spells and so on to make me care about you,” Mr. Harry went on, and that was new, but it wasn’t what Severus had wanted to hear.

“I know you care.”

“Sometimes you act as if you don’t.”

“Well, I didn’t mean to do that, that’s all.” Severus squirmed harder. Mr. Harry acted as if he would lift his arm away, and Severus hastily leaned against his side again. Sometimes he wished he could speak into other people’s minds, so they would just know what he meant without words. “And I still want to learn shield spells and countercurses. If that’s all you’ll teach me.”

“Yes, of course it is, until you’re older.” Mr. Harry looked at him some more, and Severus could feel his cheeks turning pinker and pinker. Then he smiled. “But you don’t have to try to show up Sirius and Regulus.”

“I want to, though.”

“Why?”

“I want to prove I’m smarter than them. They’re just little kids.” Severus didn’t mind that so much with Regulus, who was a little kid, but it kind of stung with Sirius, who was the same age as Severus but wasn't like him. “And I want to prove that you can like me better.”

“Of course I like you.”

“Not as much as them. Sometimes you act as if you want to spend time around them, and not with me.” And then Severus really had to bury his face against Mr. Harry’s side and not look up into his face, because otherwise he would look pink-faced and so much like a little kid.

Mr. Harry sighed and ruffled Severus’s hair. Severus would have grumbled and tried to pretend that he didn’t like it, but he did. Just…when his face was hidden and Mr. Harry couldn’t see how pink his cheeks were turning. Not the rest of the time.

“I love you, Severus,” Mr. Harry said quietly. “I’ll always have a unique relationship with you, because I started teaching you first, and because of who you are, and who I was in my other timeline.”

Severus opened his mouth, because he wanted to hear details of that, but Mr. Harry was going on. “That doesn’t mean that I don’t like the other students I teach, and Sirius and Regulus. But it’s not the same. I’ll be here for you, I can promise you that.”

“What if I need you and they want you to come over, too?”

“I can’t imagine that will happen all the time. And if it does, then we’ll deal with it. I promise, I’ll find a way to make sure that all of you get some time and what you need from me.”

Severus scowled into Mr. Harry’s side. He almost would have preferred Mr. Harry to just say that yes, he would always put Severus first, or even that he would always put Sirius and Regulus first, just because that would be something to argue about. But Mr. Harry was being so nice about the whole thing.

“Are you going to show me shield spells today?” Severus asked, when they’d sat like that for a few minutes, and Mr. Harry had kept gently stroking his hair.

“Yes. Just keep in mind that they can be dangerous because they use so much more magic than other kinds of spells, and these are the kinds of things that I teach kids at Hogwarts. You have to tell me if you feel magically exhausted, right?”

“Okay,” Severus said, drawing back and already planning not to say anything so Mr. Harry would let him keep on learning.

He caught Mr. Harry’s eye, and stopped moving. Mr. Harry shook his head a little. “I mean it, Severus. If I magically exhaust you, then your grandmother will be angry with me, and it might be a while before she lets me teach you magic unsupervised again.”

Severus gulped. He couldn’t imagine something worse than that, even Sirius learning that Severus didn’t know any defensive spells yet. “Okay,” he whispered, and drew his practice wand.

Mr. Harry smiled, and drew his own, and Severus settled down to study some more with his favorite person in the whole world.