Kestrel- One-shot, PG-13, 2/3

[lomonaaeren]

Severus raised an eyebrow as he moved through Hogwarts on his way to the infirmary, the preliminary potion he had created to assuage the pain of James Potter’s injury swinging lightly in his hand. He was noticing many things about the school he had forgotten or never known. The sliding staircases were a waste of time, and what did the ghosts and most of the portraits contribute to actual academic excellence? Letting a ghost teach a class had proved to be a failure. Altogether, Hogwarts was too individual, composted of ragged pieces added together without a care for the whole. Students could learn about a Founder’s life, perhaps, or how many vagaries existed in the heart of a teenage Slytherin; there was considerably less chance that they would be able to cast a proper Shield Charm when they left school.

He had reached the seventh floor and the hospital wing at last, however, and paused to assess the situation from the door. A dark-haired boy sat up in a bed, staring gloomily at the door to Madam Pomfrey’s storeroom. He was playing aimlessly with the edge of his blanket, ignoring the large stack of books that sat on the table beside the bed.

Of course. Probably dreaming of Quidditch, or pranks with his friends.

Severus cleared his throat and moved forwards. “James Potter?” he said.

The boy started and turned to face him. Severus grimaced. Yes, indeed, his old enemy reborn. Perhaps the boy’s eyes were a deeper shade of brown than the Marauder’s, and his hair had a glint of red, but otherwise there was nothing to choose between the older and the younger. The Potters continued on and on, stamping an image of father and son through the generations, whilst Severus’s family—in every sense of the word—would end with him.

Again, that was something he thought he had made peace with long ago. But the nearness of the boy stirred enough violence in him to close his throat. He was glad the boy said, “Who’re you?” only after a few moments of staring, and gave him the time to respond.

“Severus Snape, artificial limb master,” he said, and watched in satisfaction as the boy leaned into the pillows. The curious nature of his profession could frighten dunderheads even though he no longer had the power to assign detentions and condemn children to two hours full of fear. It was one reason Severus had chosen this path.

“My dad told me you might be here,” said James, and picked up his right hand with his left. “Here to see about this, then?”

The fear does not last long enough, of course, when confronting a Potter, Severus thought in irritation, and moved closer. The hand appeared almost exactly as Potter had told him it would (those years of writing Auror reports must have done something for his descriptive skills): withered and limp, the fingers hollow, a hand only by courtesy. The skin itself had turned an ashy gray. That was a consequence Severus had predicted given what he knew of Ashwinders and Runespoors, and it gave him confidence that he could solve the boy’s problem quickly.

“So why’d you give up potions?” the brat asked, drawing Severus’s attention briefly back to his face. “I mean, Dad told me how good you were at them, and even Mum mentioned it sometimes.”

Severus shook his head, pitying the child’s teachers. This Potter son sounded like Draco Malfoy come again. “It does not matter,” he said, sitting on the chair beside the bed and holding out the potion to the boy. “This is a diagnosis potion. It will tell me the inner damage to the hand that I will have to repair.”

“I don’t want to drink it until Dad comes back,” said the boy, folding his left hand over his right and staring at the potion as if it held the snake that had bitten him. “He says I’m not s’posed to drink things like that unless he’s here.”

“Your father is present?” Severus looked around the hospital wing. He had hoped to avoid an encounter with the senior Potter, despite some curiosity to see how the wings were settling in. They had not yet established a method of curt visits and owl post that would allow Severus to feel comfortable in any interaction. “But he is not here.”

He turned back to see James regarding him as Severus had once been used to regard Neville Longbottom. “He’s going to the loo,” James said. His voice implied, You know, like normal people.

“Professor Snape, sir. Good to see you.”

And there was Potter. Severus turned around, thinking he was prepared for the impact, and found himself staring all over again. The wings were half-spread around Potter now, fanning lightly as he strode towards Severus with his hand out. One trailing edge nearly snared a bed; Potter lifted it out of the way with smooth grace.

Appalled, curious, wondering, Severus blurted before he could stop himself, “You shouldn’t have gained that much control of them yet.”

Potter halted, eyebrows raised, then glanced over his shoulders. The wings lifted and lowered, languid as weeds underwater, and Potter shook his head. “I don’t control them completely yet,” he said. “They don’t always go where I want them to, for one thing. But I can do this.” And he spread the wings to their fullest extent.

Severus bit his tongue to keep from exclaiming as he watched the feathers extend almost to the walls. Of course he knew their measurements better than anyone else in the world, having constructed them as well as constructed the wood-and-canvas frame to hold them, but he had not accounted for the new angles and proportions they would take on when attached to a human body.

That was the only reason he was so startled, he reassured himself, ignoring the second pulse of emotion that seemed to beat beneath his heart. Once again, Potter looked wild and odd, a magical creature Severus was not familiar enough with to classify as a set of useful ingredients. And the shine in his eyes said that perhaps Severus did not want to classify him that way.

Which was, of course, ridiculous.

Severus cleared his throat and said, “Can you close them?”

Potter nodded and pulled the wings shut, then cursed softly as the left one stopped halfway in and dangled awkwardly in the air like a rag. After a bit of wrestling with the edge of the primaries, he managed to make it rest against his shoulder blade. By that time, Severus had overcome the sense of upsetting strangeness. He could smirk and nod from his potion to the boy in the bed. “Shall I feed him my diagnosis potion, then?”

“You can take this one, James,” Potter said, and walked a little closer, tripping on the edge of the right wing, which had suddenly decided to dangle beneath his foot. Severus wrinkled his nose and hoped the young fool wouldn’t actually break the wings before Severus had a chance to watch them work effectively. “I trust Professor Snape.” He put a hand on his son’s shoulder and smiled down at him.

And Severus was forced, once again, to see his enemy alive; this was exactly the way James Potter would have looked when comforting his son, he knew, in the year and a half he’d had before the Dark Lord came hunting him. And that thought stirred up Severus’s old guilt along with everything else, meaning his hands almost shook when he held the vial of diagnosis potion across the bed again. Potter shot him a quizzical look, which made it worse. How could James Potter’s grown brat, father of yet another James Potter, a static image reproducing itself without end, ever understand the way he was feeling?

The boy still eyed the potion dubiously, but drank it off in a long swallow. Almost at once red dots of light began moving about beneath the surface of his withered right hand, causing him to shoot an anxious glance at his father. Potter smiled and patted the boy’s shoulder again.

“That’s all right,” he said. “That’s normal.” But his left wing ruffled a little, anxiously, as he glanced over at Severus.

Severus nodded curtly and then bent over the skin of the hand, forcing his mind to shut out the distracting collision of the past and the future and focus only on the immediate problem.

*

Harry had never watched Snape at work before. Of course, most of the times he’d seen him, Snape had been stalking around a classroom barking orders, or taking points from Gryffindor, or participating in a demonstration of hexes and curses in Defense Against the Dark Arts. As entertaining in some ways as the hexes and curses had been, they weren’t the result of Snape’s passion, and he had to constantly break his mood of concentration in order to snap at someone who had displeased him.

Here, he didn’t. Harry stood as still as a pool of clear water and squeezed James’s shoulder whenever his son stirred or took a heavy breath. And Snape bent over his son’s hand and showed them the work of a master.

His eyes moved tirelessly, tracking each flash of scarlet light as it appeared beneath the leather of James’s hand, reading a pattern they obviously spelled out which was utterly invisible to Harry. His right hand acted independently of his eyes, writing on a piece of parchment he’d dug out of his pouch, scribbling down odd notations that Harry didn’t understand, either. Now and then he spoke under his breath, an incantation that sped the quill up or made it shine anew with ink. Those spells he performed wandlessly.

Harry shivered a little. Strangely, now was the moment he first began to appreciate what a formidable opponent Snape must have made in battle all those years ago, and what kind of foolishness he’d performed by trying to battle him on the night he’d killed Dumbledore. Snape possessed the ability to shut out the world and look only at what interested him. What would happen if he’d lost patience and decided to destroy Harry?

What would happen if he wanted to do something else to you?

Harry almost stepped back from the bed; only James’s steady focus on his face kept him from doing so. He had to make a little shrugging motion to conceal a shiver, which of course upset the wings and made them flop about, and then Harry had to try frantically to control them in case the movement made Snape lose his concentration. He could feel the heat of a mounting blush climbing his face, though Snape never once looked up from his staring and his transcribing.

“It hurts, Dad,” James whispered breathlessly.

That was just the hook Harry needed to pull himself out of his own troubles. He immediately stepped closer to the bed again and frowned at Snape. “In your hand?” he asked quietly. “Or in your throat?” Perhaps Snape would have put some kind of acid or harmful ingredient in the potion after all. Harry had said he trusted him, but could he really trust Snape to have got over his hatred of the Potters? This was Harry’s son, after all, with James’s name and a good part of his looks.

“The—the lights,” said James. “They’re bringing sensation back. I couldn’t feel my hand at all, and now I can.” He sounded as though someone had smacked him in the face with a wand.

Harry took a deep breath. The potion must be doing something right, if it could restore feeling of some kind to James’s hand. “Tell me if it gets really bad, all right?” he whispered, and watched Snape again, barely waiting for his son’s nod.

The red dots had clustered thickly in the middle of James’s hand, forming a coruscating pattern like the Northern Lights shining under his skin. Snape was scribbling furiously on his parchment, head swinging back and forth like an angry bear’s. And still he never seemed to lose his place or doubt for a moment what he ought to do. Maybe he should be doubtful, but Harry found this confidence reassuring.

James let out a quiet whimper or two, but never said it was unbearable, so Harry never moved his hand from his son’s shoulder and confronted Snape. The odd tableau went on and on, with no perceptible change except the continual brightening of the red lights. Harry felt his muscles tense and coil, the hair on the back of his neck rising. James began biting his lip and leaning his head heavily on his father’s shoulder. Snape alone never moved, never lost his fierce concentration. On and on and on the quill moved, whilst the wandless spells kept Snape from having to reach for ink and the eyes flickered.

Harry was nearly ready to scream—would have been, if Snape hadn’t been so obviously in control—by the time the red lights vanished in one sharp blaze and Snape sat back, nodding. “I can repair the damage the Ashling has done,” he announced. “I will create a new hand for the boy.” He managed to look neither at Harry nor at James as he spoke, but somewhere at the pillows in the middle of them. “But it will take time, and interviews.”

“Interviews?” demanded James, sounding suspicious. Perhaps he thought Snape would try to trick the truth about every prank and embarrassing childhood nightmare out of him.

“I will need to write to your father,” said Snape, giving that word such a weight of coldness that Harry nearly recoiled, “about your activities, your constitution, your resistance to healing potions, your magical vulnerabilities, and much else before I make the final decision.” He rose to his feet with a sharp snap of his robes and spent a moment looking at Harry with an expression Harry couldn’t read. Then he said, “Potter, you will accompany me to the doors of Hogwarts.”

James gave Harry a pleading look. Harry squeezed his son’s shoulder one more time, murmured, “Al will be out of Potions any minute now, and he said he’d come visit you. Besides, I won’t be long,” and then hurried after Snape, tilting back and forth now and then to balance the dangling wings. They would half-spread and then trail slyly along the floor when he wasn’t looking.

Despite his demand, Snape said nothing until they were on the second floor, far from the hospital wing and almost out of the castle. Harry had worked himself into a frenzy by then imagining what Snape might have wanted to say to him that he couldn’t say in front of James, and had to clench his jaw to keep from shouting. But, no, he would show Snape that he’d matured, and that he cared about his son more than about their old animosity. He forced himself to walk on in calm silence.

Snape turned towards him suddenly, and Harry jerked to a stop, teetering on the balls of his feet and perilously close to collapsing into Snape. The other man looked down at him with a sneer, and Harry wondered again if his trust was misplaced. Snape had changed so little, really, and he seemed to take no account at all of the changes Harry himself had made. Perhaps he had decided James deserved to suffer for looking like his grandfather. Perhaps he was envisioning revenge by feeding a subtle poison to James, and then being realistically able to claim that the venom from the Ashling had been too much for him to cure. Perhaps—

“I will require you to visit my home often,” Snape said. “Every third day, at least. And you will speak with me not only about your son, but about how you get on with the wings.” He dropped his voice, as though someone might be lurking around the corner to steal his precious kestrel design. “I require every detail, do you understand me, Potter? The least event may have significant consequences for the bonding of the wings to a human body, and I do not trust you to recognize them.”

Blunt as always, Harry thought, and wondered why he felt an obscure hurt. He must have wanted Snape to acknowledge that he’d changed more than he realized.

“Understood,” he said. “But why couldn’t you say that in front of James?”

He received an incredulous look, Snape’s nostrils flaring and his pupils dilating. “Would you condemn the boy to knowing his father paid such a price for him?” Snape asked curtly. “Would you yourself have wanted someone to remind you daily of how your parents died to save your life?”

Harry laughed before he could stop himself. Snape tilted his head to the side like an owl, examining Harry with one oddly brilliant eye.

“If you think I don’t live like that already,” Harry said, “if you think I don’t find that reminder in the eyes of every person who looks at me or writes an article on the Boy-Who-Lived or sends me a letter about the power of ‘mother’s love,’ then you’re blind.”

He turned and walked away, shoulders stiff with disgust and anger and a residual guilt that he hadn’t thought of the effect the wings might have on James. He’d owl Snape later to set a time for him to visit. At the moment, he couldn’t stand to be near him.

*

Severus began work on the artificial hand the next day.

The diagnosis potion had told him that the boy had nothing left in his hand that might regenerate or make the healing easier. Bones, tendons, veins, muscle—all had been sucked out by the magical fire, and less than ashes was left. Even if it had been possible to make it solid and strong again, he would never have done magic with it, and would have had to start all over in learning the wand with his left hand.

Severus would hardly admit it aloud, but he was intrigued by the challenge. When he replaced the hand on James’s wrist, he would have to counteract the possible lingering effects of the poison; it seemed that some of the venom had hardened into crystallized capsules in the bones of James’s wrist, and not even the amputation of the hand might remove all of them. They would certainly spread into Severus’s magical creation if they had the chance.

So he began to make what would not only be an instrument, capable of grasping and using a wand and writing like a normal hand, but also a weapon, capable of defending its owner’s body from re-infection. He sat down with his work at dawn and didn’t rise from his seat until well after midnight, when his body had begun to scream for food, water, sleep, and the relief of his bladder.

He used stretches of artificial human skin as the beginning, even though they would form the outer shell of the hand. He wrapped them first around articulations of bone, then frames of ivory, then pseudo-wands of ebony, looking for the material that would best resonate with the magic in the skin. It was none of those, in the end, but a set of delicate-looking reeds, which Severus had hollowed out and filled with a mixture of water and mud, drawing on practices of ancient Egyptian magic first worked by the Nile.

Within the reeds, he needed something that would sustain the shape of the hand, render it able to perform delicate work, and rest heavily against the wrist to chase the remaining venom away. His eyes fixed on several vials on his table, then moved on restlessly from item to item—bits of fur, shards of obsidian, pebbles picked up on roadside walks, gems ordered from lapidaries all over the world, scrapings of horn and nail and tusk and tooth. Severus let his gaze wander. He recognized this mood in himself, and he knew he would find what he needed when he needed it.

At last his hand reached out, moving slowly and with many pauses, and scooped up a series of small quartz pebbles, then the shavings from a unicorn horn, then an unusually powerful mortar and pestle. Severus used the mortar and pestle to crush the other two ingredients together until he had a glittering dust that flowed over his fingers like cool sand. He let a few flakes of it rest on the reeds, considering the effect by holding the reeds up to the light and shaking them. He nodded. The unicorn horn would purify the venom, and the quartz pebbles would keep the purity flowing as they kept reflections of light flowing in their natural form.

But he would need yet another binding, to tie around the dust and keep it in place; the absolute outer rim of skin would not be enough.

His body interrupted him then, and he had to rise and attend to it with the problem humming in the back of his head, not at all solved. But it hummed productively. When Severus sat down at the next dawn, he reached confidently for a series of large, flat leaves often used in wizarding communities in South America to wrap fragile, intensely magical objects so they would not be harmed in transport.

He poked the white dust carefully in among the reeds, packing the space between the stalks with it, and then bound the leaves in place about the reeds with swallow-spit, and then nodded in satisfaction. Yes, this would work. Now he needed a potion that could strengthen the whole construction, so it wouldn’t fall apart the first time he moved it, or, worse, the first time it was fastened to the child’s wrist.

He started to stand and turn towards his cauldron.

And then his body, either on general principles or because he hadn’t taken his dose of antivenin for more than a day, rebelled. Severus found himself lying on his back, staring at the ceiling of his cottage. His first emotion was annoyance. The position reminded him far too much of the way that Potter had found him just after Nagini had bitten him.

It seems I am destined to die in this position, even if I managed to escape it the first time, he thought, and his eyes blurred, and beneath him he could feel the floor tilt as if it had suddenly decided his body should be in sympathy with the great orbits of the planet. Severus didn’t have time to snort at his own poeticizing before he slid into unconsciousness.

*

Harry hesitated as he raised a hand to knock on Snape’s door. He really should have owled ahead, shouldn’t he? What if he interrupted Snape in his work and then he refused to keep the bargain in a fit of pique? Or what if Harry somehow caused damage to the hand by the interruption?

But he had come all this way, and Ginny and Ron had asked several good questions about the magical hand that Harry had been dismayed to find himself unable to answer. He knocked.

No response. Harry narrowed his eyes and looked the door up and down. He couldn’t see any spells which might have identified him and made Snape decide not to answer, but that didn’t mean there weren’t some there, probably designed so as to make it impossible for anyone else to detect them.

Harry did not care to be put off, not when he had taken some trouble to be here at all; his superiors had been sympathetic about his asking for time off since James was injured, but he really had been supposed to work on the latest case with Ron today. He began circling the house, hoping to find a window not blocked by grime, wards, or a collection of the artifacts Snape was using in his research.

He found the window at the back of the cottage, which must look in on the room where the wings had been. They flexed and stretched on his back, apparently reminded. Harry folded them down irritably and walked about until he finally found the next window, tucked behind a flickering Notice-Me-Not Charm.

Harry used his wand to dissipate the traces of the charm, and then to clean a portion of the dusty glass so he could look inside.

He grunted with surprise, and his wings stood straight out from his body, when he saw a pair of black boots lying on the floor. He could just get a glimpse of leg and robe above that, and he doubted Snape would have deliberately let himself sprawl on the floor in such an untidy state (especially when the floor itself was in an untidy state, and he would have had to move some of his objects to find a place in which to fall comfortably).

The wings beat anxiously, causing Harry to cough and gasp as tendrils of magic raced through his body. He didn’t know what they were about to do, but he knew he didn’t want them to do it. He concentrated hard on folding and smoothing them down, then raised his wand and cast a Blasting Curse.

The weak window gave at the first touch of magic, and Harry winced as he listened to several vials and glass jars shattering. But the next moment, he was climbing through the window, ignoring the way his feathers snagged on the edges. He fell over a pile of wooden planks and scrambled back up again.

Snape lay still, his face turning blue, one hand helplessly curled palm-upwards next to him. Harry knelt, swearing. He would have given a great deal at the moment for Snape to open his eyes, scowl, and threaten to take points from Gryffindor for inappropriate language.

He cast a diagnosis spell of his own. Rough and crude compared to the potion Snape had used on James, it still worked to let Aurors pinpoint a wrongness in someone’s body—invaluable when they were dealing with criminals who liked to use time-delayed spells and long-lasting poisons.

A blue glow welled around Snape’s body, centered in the chest. Harry stared. There was a poison of some kind settled in Snape’s blood, but he didn’t recognize it, and he didn’t think any of the small stock of emergency antivenins he could Apparate from the cottage to fetch would help.

He slung his arms under Snape’s shoulders and started to drag him to his feet, intending to get him to St. Mungo’s, but just then Snape coughed and opened his eyes. He conveyed his contempt for Harry’s small efforts in a single scathing look, then whispered, “An emergency supply—of the antivenin. Closet behind the bed.”

Harry laid Snape on the floor again and turned to run in the direction of the bedroom. That wasn’t simple, given the amount of objects he had to hop over, duck under, or edge past, and with the wings now and then booming open as Harry failed to control his fear that Snape might die before he could return with the potion. By the time he reached the doorway of the bedroom, Harry was wondering why Snape hadn’t fallen and broken his neck long since.

He did manage to locate the closet after a few minutes’ hard searching—Snape hadn’t told him it was protected by charms—and he pulled out a vial of thick green liquid. It looked like the potion Snape had been brewing the last time he was here, and that gave Harry hope. He charged back through the bedroom door with it, though the charge immediately turned into another confusing series of leaps and dodges through the obstacle course.

Snape seized the vial the moment Harry offered it to him, but his weak, shaking hand fumbled it, and green liquid started to tip all over his chest. Harry Summoned it before that could happen, then ducked the mass of the potion and sent it back at Snape with another sharp wand movement. Snape opened his mouth and gulped, any protests silenced by the threat of drowning for a moment. Then he had to put his head back, close his eyes, and rest. Harry saw no reason to be displeased about that.

Finally, Snape said, “Move me to my bed. Slowly. Be sure that you don’t bump the table on the way, or I may lose all the progress I have made on your son’s hand.”

Harry bit back a retort to the effect that he wouldn’t have to worry about that if not for the wings Snape had made him wear and the mess he had left about his cottage. Using both his magic and his arms, he levitated Snape carefully over piles of debris and past the table, without altering the position of a speck of dust. Snape made no grateful sound and gave no thanks as he was laid in bed; he simply let his head fall back on the pillow with a pained sound, and then commenced a series of steady breaths that made Harry feel entirely pushed out of the room and ignored.

Harry fidgeted about a bit, trying to think of something to say, and finally thought, Fuck it. “What kind of progress have you made?” he asked, leaning against the wall in a clear area not far from the closet. The wings at once spread; they didn’t particularly like him leaning against them. Harry was glad, now, that he no longer shared a bed with Ginny for a more mundane reason. The wings tended to spread away from him as he lay on his stomach and drape over half the blankets. They’d suffocate anyone lying next to him. “And how could you make any kind of progress at all if you’re still waiting for information from James and me?”

Snape said nothing for long moments. Perhaps he really had decided to ignore Harry. Harry stifled the temptation to kick the wall or something equally childish. Not much he could do if Snape chose to indulge his eccentricities in the process of forming James’s cure.

So long as he makes that cure.

Finally, Snape murmured, “There were some things my own diagnosis potion told me. Or did you think that potion useless?” He rolled his head to the side with painful effort, keeping his eyes on Harry, although they were so large and so glossy that Harry almost would have preferred him to shut them.

“What kinds of things?” Harry wanted to be involved in the process of creating the cure if Snape would let him be. He certainly didn’t want to be left out to pine and mope in the darkness, forced to trust someone else to do all the vital things. He’d had enough of that whilst he was still a teenager.

“The purity of the wound, the condition of the flesh inside the hand, what I would have to do to restore the bones,” said Snape in a long-suffering voice.

“But some of that is information you asked me about.”

Snape shut and opened his eyes as though that were the best way of expressing his inexpressible weariness with the world. “Potter,” he whispered, “I have no time and no patience at the moment to explain the exact mechanics of my trade to you. You will have the hand for your precious son. That should be all that matters to you.” He rolled away again and faced the wall.

Harry hesitated. Perhaps it was just his inherent need to contradict Snape’s words, no matter how or why he said them. Perhaps it was his curiosity about the venom that had shown up in Snape’s blood when he performed the diagnosis spell. Perhaps it was that he really had thought the wound that lay between Snape and the Potters should have been healed by now.

“It’s not all that matters to me,” he said, and his wings flared out, propelling him away from the wall. Harry stumbled and glared over his shoulders. The wings, of course, did not respond to that, unlike Lily and Al, who always at least pretended to be contrite. James would just grin up at him and then dart away to do something else.

“What?” Snape’s body had gone stiff with what was probably disbelief, but he didn’t turn around to face Harry, and so he couldn’t be certain.

“It’s not all that matters to me,” Harry repeated, and carefully crouched down beside the bed, arranging his wings in a series of half-curves to avoid all the obstacles they could catch on. “I want—I would like to know more about you, too. Why are you still living here alone after all these years? What will it take to give you peace? Have you ever invented something that didn’t work?”

“You need not seek proof that my talents will not work,” Snape said coolly. “I am perfectly able to create what you need.”

“But suppose I want more than that?” Harry murmured, staring at the back of Snape’s head. The iron-gray hair had a slight curl at the ends where it fell down Snape’s shoulders that he couldn’t remember noticing before. He did not give in to his odd impulse to reach out and touch it, but only because he was sure Snape would curse him to London and back. “Suppose I do want to know you?”

Snape said nothing at all, and even his pained breathing had stopped. Harry knelt there, frowning, feeling as if he were trying to work out a difficult equation in Arithmancy. (Hermione had insisted he learn at least a few elementary problems in it when he became an Auror, but no matter how long Harry sat down with the books, he found the subject as baffling as Potions).

If he’s been alone all this time, I don’t think it was by choice. He was friends with my mum once; he must have wanted a friend. But on the other hand, he could have sought someone out after the war, and he never did. Maybe he really does prefer to be alone. Harry shook his head a little. He couldn’t comprehend wanting solitude forever, which might have been one reason his marriage to Ginny had lasted as long as it had. But if he has friends, that doesn’t mean he’s interested in adding me to the collection—

“Get out,” Snape said at last, in a deep, raspy voice Harry was more accustomed to hearing from Muggles who spent all their time smoking cigarettes.

Harry blinked a little, then said mildly, “All right,” and stood. He did pause on his way out of the bedroom, though, partially to smooth down some ruffled feathers and partially because he felt he should say something else.

“You know,” he said, “as strange as the price for your aid may have been, it isn’t so horrible. I’ve had clothing made that fits around the wings. And you are still helping me, when you might have told me to go bugger myself for a good reason.”

Nothing from the bed, not even the breathing.

“I just wanted to say that I’m—grateful,” Harry continued. The words were like pebbles in his throat, easy to think but not to say, after all. “If you need anything, if you want me to be something more than a person who wears these wings, I’m willing.”

And then he stepped hastily from the room, not at all sure where that offer had come from, and not wanting to look ridiculous in Snape’s eyes.

Though I’m sure it’s already too late for that.

*

Severus spent some time trying to decide which god he must have annoyed, to make his fate as awful as it was.

Potter feeling compelled to offer friendship to him? As though Severus was some pathetic crawling thing that needed help to reach its food? Or an owl with a broken wing, to be taken up and repaired and then set free? Potter’s offer had that kind of condescending overtone to it, Severus decided. His natural Gryffindor compassion couldn’t stay within its bounds, so of course he had to prove how wonderful he was to all and sundry.

Except—

Except there was no one to prove it to, here. Potter might brag to his friends about how he had offered friendship to Severus Snape, but Severus couldn’t envision those friends coming to his cottage to taunt him about it. It was too long a journey for too little reward. And Potter hadn’t done this in front of an audience.

It was, indeed, a mystery. Severus might have been able to take it at face value, but he had inflicted wings on the other man and not been exactly grateful when Potter saved his life. No one was compassionate enough to get past that in the space of a few minutes, no matter what he told himself.

He lay still for some minutes more, perhaps an hour, letting the antivenin work its way through his system. He made quiet plans not to become so absorbed in creating the hand again, no matter how fascinating it was, and to have a cauldron of the antivenin boiling at all times whilst he worked on this project. If he could not trust himself to remember the one task it was important to do daily, then he could not trust anyone else to remind him.

But his mind returned again and again to the puzzle and the problem of Potter.

He has changed, yes. But I do not think he could have changed that much.

One thing Severus was certain of, at least: Potter had not changed enough to become cleverer than Severus was, which meant he would be baffled and tripped up if Severus asked the right questions. Silence could be as telling as the right answer, but Severus doubted that Potter would preserve silence. He would try to press forwards, to show how well he could fool an old enemy, and be caught in his own contradictions and the exposure of his own hidden motives.

His mind pleasantly full of speculations as to what would happen the next time Potter visited, Severus rose and went back to his art.

*

“Harry. Go home.”

Harry started and raised his head. He’d fallen asleep by James’s bedside, he realized blearily, and suffered an immediate surge of panic. What if James had needed something in the night? What if the rest of his right arm had started to wither from some unanticipated side-effect of the venom and he hadn’t been awake to keep watch? What if—

A hand caught his chin and turned his face around. Harry blinked up at Ginny, though he couldn’t see her well since his glasses were smudged. He coughed and pulled them off to clean them, smiling at Lily, who stood holding her mother’s hand. Lily smiled back for a moment, but her eyes shifted to James and she frowned, sucking on her lower lip.

“Go home,” Ginny repeated gently. “I’ve caught up on my column-writing, and anyway, that’s something I can do sitting here more easily than you can catch criminals and track down forgeries.” Her hand tangled in his hair for a moment, stroking it the way she sometimes stroked James’s. “You’ve spent too much time here, and it’s weakening your ability to help him as well as to do your job. I’m sure James wouldn’t want to know his father got sacked, on top of everything else.”

“But he might need me,” Harry whispered. His son was sleeping peacefully now, but just whenever Harry thought everything might be all right, his gaze would come back to that collapsed hand, and he would be reminded, forcibly, that it wasn’t.

“Yes,” Ginny agreed, “but you’re losing sleep and not eating well. Like I said, you won’t be able to do anything for James if you’re like that.” She nudged Harry hard with her shoulder, so that he had to stagger out of the chair or be pushed out. His wings rose around him, of course, the feathers bristling defensively. Ginny raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Harry had already explained the price Snape demanded for helping James, and she seemed to accept it. “Go home, sleep, write a letter to Snape, and eat a big meal. Then, tomorrow, you can go in to work. I’ll be here, and I can tell you in an instant if something changes with James.” She sat down in the chair and conjured another one for Lily, who sat down, opened a book, and began to read, sneaking glances at James the whole time.

“How come we’re not married and you’re still telling me what to do?” Harry muttered, but the tone of his voice was affectionate, and Ginny grinned at him. It was much easier to be friends when they weren’t required to put up the pretense of sleeping together, Harry reflected.

“Because sometimes you get stupid and someone has to,” said Ginny, and shooed him out of the room with a wave of her hand.

Giving one last, long look at his sleeping son, Harry went.

*

“Harry! Down!”

Harry flung himself flat without asking questions; one consequence of his being friends with Ron as long as he had been meant that Ron could command him to do nearly anything in that tone of voice and he would. Right now, that meant curses coming in, and sure enough, the tiles on the roof next to him splintered a moment later and the air turned hot and sour-smelling where his head had been. Harry winced and raised himself to a knee, his wand poised.

He and Ron had been tracking a petty thief who went by the name of the Gray Cat, and unexpectedly stumbled into the midst of a much larger set of criminals apparently employing him. They’d been looking forwards to a lazy afternoon and an easy capture; now they had at least ten wizards after them, desperate men and women not afraid to use the Dark Arts. Harry was on a roof in a grimier section of wizarding London, with Ron a short distance away on his left.

And the criminals? Nowhere in sight, at least from the limited glances Harry could give before paranoia itched at him and he turned his head in another direction, but they wouldn’t have given up that easily. Harry and Ron had explored the house they were using for about ten minutes before someone sounded the alarm; they had information the Ministry would find both useful and interesting.

A movement stirred to his left, and Harry nearly fired off a curse in panic before he realized it was Ron. Ron raised an eyebrow, and Harry grinned sheepishly, reading the source of a thousand future jokes about his jumpiness in that one gesture.

And then a burning pain spread through his left leg, and Harry sprang to his feet with a hiss. He and Ron were still inside the criminals’ anti-Apparition wards, or this problem would have been easy to solve, Harry thought as they lurched and started running, Ron pounding along the roof opposite to him. And God knew how much further they had to go before they got outside them.

More tiles splintered and cracked; chips of dirt and stone and metal flew up around Harry; voices shouted for him to surrender in what seemed to be every possible direction across the gray sky. Harry folded his arms around his head and rolled across the roof to avoid another curse, then whirled and tossed a Blasting Curse behind him. He heard a sharp, short cry, and then another yell, this time of mourning. He smiled grimly. The Ministry wanted them to avoid every kill they could, but whether Harry had killed this time or severely injured someone, he wasn’t going to be sorry.

A line of lemon-yellow light he didn’t recognize blew past his face; he flinched. Then he took two more running steps backwards to gain, he hoped, the perspective necessary to do some real damage.

“Harry!”

And that was Ron’s warning tone again, but too late, far too late. Harry had paid too much attention to the dangers behind instead of in front of him; he hadn’t realized he was running out of building.

He tumbled, arms and legs flailing. By the time he tried to cast a charm that would cushion his fall, he’d already lost his wand. He cursed himself. Stupid idiot, to let panic overtake you when you’ve had worse falls than this aboard a broom—

And then he stopped and hung suspended in midair.

Harry stared at his hands. No, he didn’t clutch the wand; he hadn’t saved himself accidentally. He looked up, expecting to see Ron leaning over the edge of his own building casting the spell that had saved his life.

He saw Ron’s face, all right, but he was staring, his face so pale that the freckles looked like wounds. And then Harry finally directed his attention where it should have been in the first place.

The Kestrel wings, which he had been able to control better in the past few days since he’d started getting enough sleep and which were folded so closely to his back that he forgot about them most of the time, were fully flared out now, beating steadily, making him hover. When he drew in a breath, Harry thought he could feel his lungs flex more deeply than before, and there was a lightness throughout his body, circulating like blood, which certainly hadn’t been there until now.

He was flying.

Harry laughed, or made some other kind of choked cry; he was in a situation so different from anything he’d ever experienced that he thought he could be excused behaving strangely. He willed himself to rise, and did, flapping up gently past the edge of the building where Ron crouched. Ron reached out, his hand shaking, and then halted short of the dark feathers on the edge of the wing, as if he thought touching them might cause Harry to fall.

Harry didn’t think he would. The wings required a strange combination of concentration and not-quite-thinking about what he was doing, rather like Quidditch. If he spent time trying to analyze every little movement he made, he would try to consciously control the process and fall. But at the same time, he needed to keep track of how far he was from the walls, how broad the wings were, and what they would and would not brush.

He shivered. A moment later, he spotted his wand lying in a shallow alcove formed by crumbling stone on the side of Ron’s building. He reached out and scooped it up. So long as he thought about that rather than the many movements he would need to reach it, Harry found, his wings functioned perfectly. He thought of going closer; he flew closer. And then he wanted to be back between the buildings again, on a level just below Ron’s face to lessen the chances of their enemies seeing him, and that’s where he was.

“Incredible,” Ron breathed. “I’ll have something to thank that greasy bastard for after all.”

Harry glared before he could stop himself. He felt a kinship with Snape just at the moment, perhaps because Snape was the only other person in the world who stood a chance of knowing what it felt like to fly on these wings. “You would have had to thank him for James’s hand, if nothing else,” he said shortly.

“Yeah, but—“

Another curse made Ron wince and duck, and set fire to the solid brick of a chimney not far from them. Harry pivoted in the direction the spell had come from, the world turning around him as smoothly as an owl’s head.

He could see one of the wizards who had followed them now, a towering figure in a robe at least three sizes too big for him and decorated in outlandish patterns of black and mauve. Even Dumbledore might have thought twice about wearing a robe that garish, Harry decided. Behind him were three distinctly smaller wizards and a witch with black hair that hung halfway down her back. All of them were aiming their wands directly at Ron.

Have they not seen me yet?

Well, then I can surprise them.

Harry took off before he thought about it. Maybe the wings were affecting his production of adrenaline along with his capacity for flight.

The lean wizard started to shout an order when Harry hurtled up over the edge of the building, but was reduced to staring with his jaw hanging open. Harry laughed and Stupefied him, then lifted elegantly above another curse and swooped down on the witch at the back of the group. She backed up, not panicking, which was to her credit, and concentrating her spells on his wings rather than his body. Harry could approve of her as a fighter, though unfortunately not as much else.

He rolled to the side, a Quidditch move that had never felt as natural as it did now, with his wings bursting out into the air, scooping wind, and then tucking close to his body. He came closer, faster, than he would have thought possible before this, and slammed her in the stomach with his elbow, hard enough to knock the breath out of her and ruin whatever spell she’d decided to perform next. She staggered, eyes blazing with fierce hatred, and then drew her spell down the center of the air, bisecting it. A gaping red door opened in front of Harry, a spell he didn’t know but which he thought was pretty clearly meant to transport him elsewhere.

He pulled up quickly, shot away to the side, and then reversed around the spell, coming at the witch just when she’d thought she was safe. A quick Expelliarmus took care of her wand, and then he put her in a Body-Bind and turned back to the other three wizards—

Only to find that Ron had Stupefied them all already, and was standing over them with his wand in hand, panting. Harry blinked. Ron raised an eyebrow and said, “They were all too busy staring at you to notice when I came up to them.”

Harry nodded and landed on the roof not far away from their new captives, his wings drooping around him. Immediately he felt a sensation like the popping of a balloon in his chest; his lungs would be returning to normal now, he supposed, shedding the air sacs. He coughed and glanced up at Ron, anticipating a scolding.

Ron sighed and said, “Those things saved your life. I can’t really get upset because you used them, can I?”

Harry smiled and punched his friend’s shoulder, then joined Ron in rounding up the criminals to take back to the Ministry. They hadn’t captured all of the wizards chasing them, of course, but the Ministry would have to be content with a description of the general location and a few captives to start with.

Snape would be gifted with more. Harry fully intended to visit him and tell him that his wings had saved his life—and not only because Snape had insisted on knowing all the details of Harry’s coping with the wings. This incident had transformed them from an unwanted burden into a gift. Harry was already envisioning solitary flights after a long day at work and freedom he had never known on a broom.

I’ll tell Snape that, I think. Whether he wanted to or not, he helped me as well as James.

Part 3.

Comments

[brumei.livejournal.com]

I still love this. It's so completely believeable, and that is a wonderful think. Yoiu have this great combination of imagery (like the monstruous and odd things in Snape's house - sort of a dark mirror of Dumbledore's office, as you alluded) and actual plot (Harry being compelled to offer friendship and Snape responding badly). And I'm so amazed at how well you've incorporated everything, and done it so fast at that. I mean, it's so wonderful. I don't want it to end at all.