The evening was quiet and the clammy dungeon study was warmed by a crackling fire. Severus Snape sat on a green velvet couch and stretched his bare feet towards the fire. His skin was golden pale in the flickering light and shadows kissed his face and neck. He held a tumbler of whiskey in one hand, but did not drink.

The silence of the room was punctuated by small cracks from the fire and by the soft sound of Severus breathing. He stared into the fire, his eyes unfocused and his breathing even. The ice was melting in his whiskey, and condensation dripped off the glass, down his pale elegant fingers, and onto the green velvet of the sofa, but he paid no heed to the moisture. He took even, deep breaths of the dungeon air, savoring the acrid smell of pine from the fire and the rich golden smell of the whiskey.

The comfortable study overflowed with books and scrolls – they filled every shelf and covered his desk, his table, and every flat surface but were kept in meticulous order. Books and scrolls were arranged in neat precise patterns, each in their place. Flickering light from the fire shone on the gold embossed titles and leather covers, but the Potions Master made no move to select reading for the evening. The clamor of his heartbeat against his breastbone, the susurrus of dungeon air in his throat, and the flickering light of the fire were enough to charm him into a tired reverie filled with the quiet satisfaction of having no further duties to discharge. His lesson plans were prepared, his marking was finished, and his Slytherins were safe in bed – Severus had no further obligations. With the war long since over and one master dead and the other placated, he had no one to whom he must answer and no claims on his evening.

Quiet, tentative raps at the door to his study broke the silence and his reverie. The knock was repeated before Severus pulled himself off the sofa and went to the door. His bare feet slapped in a quiet pattern on the cold floor. He pulled open the heavy wood door to see Hermione Granger standing there. She was carrying a scroll bound with a black ribbon and a wooden box.

“Miss Granger,” he said. His voice was dry but lacked the automatic rancor it had held when she was his student – when he was the servant of two masters and walked a knife blade with his life. Now his voice was tired, aged like good whiskey, and though he had the power to make cutting remarks with his tongue – just as whiskey had the power to burn the throat – he refrained. “May I enquire as to the reason for your presence here?”

Hermione Granger blinked and stammered before answering in a thin stretched voice ready to crack. “Pro-Professor Snape, I – May I speak with you in private, sir?”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “Do please come in, Miss Granger.”

He led her to the sofa by the fire and gestured for her to take a seat. He did not offer her a drink – he certainly did not drink with his former students – but rather seated himself and stretched his feet toward the fire again. The warmth erased the memory of the cold stone floor from his skin.

Miss Granger was pale and trembled as though she’d cast a Feather-Light Charm on herself and been caught in a breeze. Her eyes were shadowed and she spoke with an uncharacteristic hesitation. “Have – have you read the Daily Prophet today, sir?”

“No, I have not. I have very little use for that wretched waste of ink,” Severus said without making any of the harsher comments that once tempted him.

“You – I guess you hadn’t heard, then,” she said. Her fingers trembled and she twisted her hands in her lap. “The – since it’s been a year after You-Know – after Voldemort’s defeat and – and there’s been no news of Harry – well, the – the Ministry declared him legally dead.”

“Miss Granger …” Severus paused, rose, and poured her a tumbler of whiskey. He handed it to her, careful to brush his fingers against her fingers to steady her. “Miss Granger, I am not unsympathetic to your loss – I know that you and Potter were close. But I do fail to see why you have approached me for comfort. You know very well that Potter and I were … never friends.”

She clutched the drink in one small hand, her knuckles turning white in bright contrast to the golden liquid, as though she was clinging to an anchor. With her other hand, she fidgeted with the scroll that she had placed in her lap. The shadows cast on her face by the firelight moved as she fidgeted. The shadows were as dark on her pale skin as the black ribbon that bound the scroll. “I don’t – I don’t think you realize how much – how much he respected you, sir.”

Severus raised one elegant eyebrow and said nothing. He did not admit to the Granger girl that Potter had become quite tolerable after his fifth year at Hogwarts or that he owed the boy a debt of gratitude greater than a Life Debt for ending the war and releasing him from Voldemort. The silence was filled with the sound of wood cracking in the fire and the strong sweet smell of whiskey. Miss Granger took a gulp from her tumbler, the moisture shining on her lips as she swallowed without coughing.

“I – well – I suppose, I suppose maybe you did know then after all. Well. At any rate – he asked me to take care of his will for him, you know.” She took another gulp of whiskey.

“Well.” She set the tumbler down on the table next to the sofa and unrolled the scroll partway. The crackle of the parchment was louder than the strained, quiet tone of her voice. “I’ll just read it to you then, shall I, sir?” Her tense, nervous half-smile flickered faster than the firelight and disappeared.

“To Severus Snape, I wish to leave the cherry-wood box that was given to me by my mother. It is spelled shut but he will be able to open it if he remembers the first time he spoke to me. Other than the box and all its contents, he may have any of the Potions or Defense against the Dark Arts books that I possess or have stored in my vaults. I’m sure he owns many of them already, so any of the books that he does not want are to go to Hermione Granger. If I do not survive the confrontation with Voldemort, I’ll never be able to give Professor Snape half of what I owe him, so I hope that he will accept these few things that I can give him.”

Miss Granger’s voice wavered in uncertain patterns, like the beads of condensation that slipped down the smooth sides of her glass of whiskey. After she finished reading, she took another large gulp of the drink. There were tears bright in her eyes but she did not shed them.

Severus stared at the cherry-wood box. He had often seen it in Lily’s possession – the color of the wood had matched the dark highlights in her hair. “Why?” he asked.

The girl shook her head. “He doesn’t explain any of the bequests.” She passed the box to him, her fingers lingering for an instant on the smooth wood. Severus hesitated before taking the box – it was as though he was reluctant to accept a connection to Potter while she was reluctant to release the connection.

“I haven’t sorted through the books yet,” she said. “A lot of them are in the Potter vault. I – I’ll send the Potions and Defense books to you in a week or so.”

Severus nodded, not saying anything. He felt the heavy weight of the box – Potter’s box – Lily’s box – not knowing why Potter had given it to him. The smooth wood was cool to the touch, chilled by the dungeon air.

He was still staring at the carved wood when Miss Granger drained her glass of whiskey, made her excuses, and left. He was shaken by the fact that the Potter boy, who had hated him, had bequeathed him this treasure – too shaken to comfort the grieving girl. Her footsteps echoed on the stone floor like the stutter of a heartbeat that had fallen out of rhythm with itself, faltering and uncertain. The quiet sound of the closing door and the return of silence to the dungeon washed over Severus like an ocean wave, wild and ungraspable.

Engraved in the dark cherry-wood, lilies twined around each other, bound together by sinuous vines, and he traced the patterns with one sensitive fingertip. This had been Lily’s box. Emerald-eyed Lily, Lily who he had loved, had treasured this box, had treasured her son enough to die for him. He pressed his finger on the lid of the box, hard enough to leave an imprint of the lily pattern carved there.

Lily had loved the pattern on the lid, had traced it with her own small finger. She had once touched this box just as Severus now did. This box connected him to Lily more than it connected him to her boy – this box had been hers. She had left the box to Potter and not to Severus when she died. A brief flare of resentment, like a spark from the fireplace – she had left everything to the brat and nothing to him when she died. Severus traced the pattern cut into the polished wood, the smooth beautiful lines calming him. Shadows flickered over the pattern, dancing their arrhythmic dance on the cool wood, overlaying it with their own changeable pattern. The noise of the fire echoed in the silence and banished the cold of the dungeon.

Potter – his childhood nemesis had a son, loved his son, and had died. The Potter brat had been an exact copy of his father for five years. In his sixth year he was different – quiet, studious, and preparing for his fate. With the weight of the Prophecy on his mind, the boy had resembled James Potter very little.

Severus didn’t hate the boy – not even because of his father. He didn’t hate the Potter boy, not after the noise and blood of the battle, not after the noise and blood were followed in an abrupt jerk of Fate by the quiet of his freedom. He couldn’t hate the boy – Harry – after seeing the expression on his face that last morning, quiet and wistful and resigned. The boy’s emerald eyes had been wide, like Lily’s had been the last morning that he saw her – almost as though the boy was looking toward a future he would never have. Severus snorted, disgusted by his own sentimentality. He hadn’t drunk any of his whiskey, not even a swallow of it, and there was no reason to be maudlin.

He traced the lily pattern in an endless spiral with his fingertip, following the vines around the perimeter of the box. Harry had left it to him – had given him Lily’s box. The boy must have cherished the box, treasured it as his mother had – because his mother had treasured it, and because he had precious little else that had belonged to her. In the end he had left the treasured box to his hated Professor – perhaps not so hated, the past two years, but never a favorite. The smooth pattern of the lilies held no answer, no explanation.

“If he remembers the first time he spoke to me,” Severus repeated the words from Harry’s testament. The words dropped from his lips into the silence of the dungeons and were swallowed by it. The first time – how could he forget the first time that he saw the boy, pale and thin and tousle-headed? The boy had been a mirror reflection of James with Lily’s green eyes pasted into his face behind those ridiculous thick glasses. Seeing him had pierced through the mask that Severus had worn then – yes, he could admit now that the mask was gone that seeing the boy, James’s son, had hurt.

“Lily,” he whispered, his finger tracing the pattern on her box in an endless spiral, in mindless repetition. His quiet evening had been shattered, just as an ocean wave shatters on the shore and disappears, and he was caught up in thoughts of the past and the woman he had loved and left. He stared into the golden fire, stared past it, looking at memories of an emerald-eyed girl and her emerald-eyed son.

Days and evenings slipped through Severus Snape as a string of beads slipped along a chain, both beads and chain heedless of the movement. Severus moved through the smooth rounded days like a dreamer. He had lost his sneer and his dry sarcasm – he walked through Hogwarts in his billowing black robes, deducting points and teaching lessons without malice. He did not rant when cauldrons exploded, he did not make snide comments about Gryffindor foolishness to Minerva McGonagall at staff meetings, and he did not stalk the Hogwarts hallways late after curfew to catch and frighten unwary students. It was as though he was floating under the surface of the lake, able to see the world through a seaweed-green dim filter and make sluggish responses, but unable to break through the surface of the water and touch the life he observed.

He spent his evenings and his free hours locked in his dungeon rooms, sitting on the sofa in front of the fire. His skin was sallow and moonlight-pale, paler than usual, with lack of sunlight. The low table next to the sofa was cluttered with untouched tumblers of whiskey, drinks that Severus had poured for himself and forgotten – they left pale rings on the dark mahogany wood of the table where beads of condensation had dripped down the sides of the glass and sunk into the wood. His rooms took on other signs of his preoccupation – books and scrolls were left out of their places, his careful organization disrupted. Severus ignored the clutter and the discarded glasses and spent his evenings on the sofa, clutching the box.

He continued to finger the smooth wood of the box and trace the engraved lilies on the lid. He sat on the sofa and stared at the box in the evenings, he spent his free periods between classes staring at the box, and he ducked into his office during classes to check that it was still there. The box grew in his mind, snaking vine-like tendrils into every thought. It was his Lily’s box, the only memento of Lily that he possessed, it was Potter’s box – Harry’s box – it was his box, his treasure. He ignored his experimental potions, tolerated his classes and daily obligations, and focused his life on the small cherry-wood box.

His evenings were full of memories. He stared at the box and traced the design on the lid and lost himself in memories of his Lily. She was a ghost in the room, a memory almost strong enough to sit on the sofa and place her hand over his, trace the pattern of the box with him. She was his golden-hearted Gryffindor, his green-eyed girl, and he lost his heart to her once again.

His mind, which was trained and honed by years of lies and disguises and Occlumency, had broken through the masks and the shells to dwell on the memories that he had locked away. He had forced himself to forget – now he remembered.

He remembered eleven-year-old Lily on the Hogwarts train, her open face alight with a smile that shone like sunlight on red poppies and her green eyes sparkling as she shook his hand – he remembered that first touch, the feel of her pale skin against his pale skin, her hand smooth and clean while his was stained and oily from potion-making. He remembered her first Chocolate Frog, her pure bright delight at the new world around her. He remembered that her laugh rippled like sunlight on the lake. She was light and fire and she was delighted by everything – not knowing that she was as foreign and strange to Severus as his world was to her. They were both entranced.

She was bright and sharp like no indoor fire – she bore no resemblance to the fire that leapt and crackled in Severus’s fireplace. She was like sunlight, wild and ungraspable, her temper as untamable as her flame-red hair. Lily, thirteen, holding the carved wooden box to her chest as other girls cradled dolls or Puffskeins, traced the design on the lid with her free hand. She was silhouetted by sunlight and reflected in the lake. Her copper hair was blown by the wind and she sat with Severus, the two of them speaking of light meaningless topics – their friendship yet untouched by the shadow of James Potter and the other Marauders. Severus touched his hand to his left elbow, remembering how she had grasped that elbow with her pale hand to make a point – he could still feel the imprint of each slender finger on his skin as though she had left a permanent mark there.

Severus remembered fourteen-year-old Lily, surrounded by books in the Hogwarts library – books piled higher than her head in wobbly towers. He remembered the scratch of her quill on creamy parchment, the spiky lines of her handwriting, the clean flow of the ink in dark lines. Her smile burned with a quiet fire, a rosy smile at some secret delight – Severus watched her from a shadowed corner and wanted to touch her pink lips with his rough fingers.

Fifteen-year-old Lily wore emerald-green robes and a pearl necklace to the Yule Ball. She laughed like ripples of sunlight skittering across the ice of the frozen lake and she danced once with Severus and once with James Potter. Severus had watched her dance with James from the side of the room, his fingers clenched into sweaty fists and his breathing uneven and rough. When she had finished dancing with James, he took care to wipe the sweat from his fingers before he asked her to dance. She was weightless in his arms and he was weightless too – he didn’t feel his feet touch the floor once.

He remembered a sixteen-year-old Lily throwing herself at James Potter, her face flushed with anger as she raised her fists to hit Potter’s shoulders. Her words tumbled out, mixed together in her rage, as she defended Severus from the Marauders. He remembered the coppery smell of her hair, flaring in a corona around her face. Severus had been humiliated – first by the Marauders and then by the pity and defense of a girl. Unforgivable words had crossed his lips that day, and that open-hearted girl had forgiven him. Shadows in her eyes, she had placed her small pale hand against his cheek the next day and forgiven him.

Lily’s son had once worn robes of a similar color – his eyes were a perfect match for his mother’s eyes, although his complexion was not as pale. Severus had watched the boy dance as he had watched the girl dance, with pain wrapped around his heart like a chain. Now – this boy, this once-hated boy, who had been arrogant and disrespectful like Potter and who had a laugh like Lily’s laugh, like ripples on still water – this boy had given him the cherry-wood box with engraved lilies, had brought him back to his locked-away memories. Severus wanted to hate the boy for shattering open his careful, ordered world and he wanted to love the boy for Lily’s sake, love him for having carried something of Lily into the world past her death.

Harry’s ears had been shaped like Lily’s ears. His fingers had been shaped like Lily’s fingers – though Severus remembered the boy’s fingers clutching a cauldron or a broom and he remembered Lily’s fingers clasped in his, smooth skin on rough skin. His bravery and his determination to save people – that had been Lily’s fierceness, the burning passion of her quick temper carried over into her son. A year after Harry had died, a year after Harry had freed him from his servitude, Severus began to grieve for him – began to grieve for a boy who had something of Lily in him – began to grieve for the open-hearted boy who had left a precious gift for a disliked professor. Severus traced the smooth pattern on the cherry-wood box and let his tears fall as they had not fallen since her death.

He remembered Lily. He remembered Harry. A jumble of memories cluttered his mind, overflowing the constraints and boundaries he had set for himself. Fragments of memory haunted him during the day, superimposed themselves over the world around him. A wide-eyed first year student with dark hair became Harry, staring at his Potions Professor – confused by the unexplained hatred in Severus’s voice and eyes. A red-headed girl sitting by the lake and teasing the octopus was Lily, carefree and laughing in the sunlight. A Gryffindor girl who stood up to the teasing of older Slytherins – that was Lily, defending him again from the malice of the Marauders. A Ravenclaw turned in an essay with clear lucid logic and spiky handwriting like Lily. A Slytherin was caught out of bounds after curfew – Harry, sneaking around the castle late at night with an invisibility cloak, slipping himself and his friends into trouble and danger despite the best intentions.

Despite the memories that haunted him and pursued him through the night and day, Severus clung to the box – the box that had brought him this pain, the box that Lily had loved, the box that Harry had given to him. His fingers learned the lily pattern by heart and began to memorize the grain of the dark wood. One night, Severus sat by the fire that was burning down to embers and traced his finger down the side of the box to open it. His finger snagged on the catch, the smooth gold metal cool in the dungeon air.

The box refused to open. His fingers scrabbled at the catch, leaving sweaty desperate fingerprints on the metal as it warmed to his touch. The stubborn box did not open and Severus, resigned, cradled it in his lap as he had once seen Lily cradle it. He held the smooth wood and traced the pattern of lilies on the lid with a practiced fingertip. He held the box, held his memories close to him – its contents were less important now than his memories were.

Severus’s distraction, his preoccupied reverie with his memories, did not go unnoticed by the other inhabitants of the castle. Albus Dumbledore invited himself to tea in Severus’s quarters on a student-free Saturday afternoon. Severus hid the carved cherry-wood box underneath one of the green velvet cushions of his sofa – hid it close enough to him that he could stroke the smooth wooden sides of the box without the Headmaster noticing. The Headmaster’s words flowed past him like beads of sunlight carried away by a river. Severus was caught up in the stream of his memories, his mind learning new constraints and patterns as the old masks and locks had fallen away.

He poured the Headmaster tea, smiled and nodded without listening to his words. The steam rose from the hot liquid like a snake slithering out of its den. Severus added milk and watched the lazy white swirls form before stirring in the sugar and passing the cup of tea to Albus. He poured himself a cup and with a subtle flick of his wand, added a shot of whiskey to it. The wood of the hidden box was as smooth as pearls under his fingertips.

Albus was cheerful and eccentric and offered Severus some Muggle candies, which he declined. Comments about the weather were ignored, inquiries about potions classes were dismissed – Albus’s chatter washed over Severus like birdsong, a bright floating stream of sounds that held little attraction.

“Severus, my boy,” Albus said at the end, “Is there something troubling you?”

“No, Headmaster – there is nothing,” Severus murmured.

“You can come to me with any problems that you might be having,” Albus said.

Severus smiled and shook his head and touched the smooth sides of the box under the cushion, careful not to let Albus see the box, careful to keep his secret.

The evenings turned warm and damp as the school year drew to a close – just one more month until the brats left him alone with his quiet dungeons and his box and his memories of Lily. The box still refused to open and Severus was nowhere close to an understanding of why Harry had left the box for him. The boy tormented him still, filling his life with ungraspable mysteries and memories that he had chosen to lock away. Severus lit a fire in his fireplace – not needing the warmth, he stared into the red-gold flames, the fire the color of Lily’s hair.

Fourteen-year-old Lily, with red-gold hair and a mouth that always smiled, sat next to him and they stared at the lake. Its smooth surface was unmarred by ripples, the green seaweed that lurked beneath the surface just ungraspable out of reach. Severus had reached over and placed one fingertip against Lily’s hair, traced one coppery tress with his fingertip. Her hair was soft and smoother than the surface of the lake.

Lily, fifteen years old, chose to ride with him on the Hogwarts Express instead of sitting with the Marauders. He remembered Lily’s smile – sweet and smooth and warm as sunlight. James Potter had hexed him, but Severus hadn’t felt the pain.

Lily, seventeen, was wearing a golden engagement ring and smiled up at him through her eyelashes. Severus remembered the taste of her lips, the velvet feel of her mouth against his mouth. Lily, with bare fingers less than a month later, smiled at James Potter. Severus, skulking in the shadows nearby, turned away as she stood on her tiptoes to kiss Potter.

Lily, ageless, with her red-gold hair framing her face with a corona, sprawled pale on the blue tile floor. The house at Godric’s Hollow had been silent and James had sprawled on the floor a room away from his wife – husband and wife separated in their deaths. Lily’s eyes were still open but the green eyes did not sparkle, did not reflect the sunlight. Severus knelt by her body and touched her smooth cold hand with his large rough hand. He lifted her body, carrying her as he would have carried a bride across a threshold. Her body was light, as though death had taken away her weight. Severus carried her into the next room and placed her on the floor next to James Potter – let the wild red corona of her hair spill onto James’s face.

“The brat gave me this box to torment me,” Severus whispered into the silence of the dungeons. The crackling sound of the fire covered the sound of his voice, covered his pain. He pulled at the catch, pulled up on the lid, tried again and again to open the box. “Why? Why did he do this to me?” The box refused to open. Severus poured himself a tumbler of whiskey and drained it in two quick gulps. The lines of the lily pattern were smooth and unchanging underneath his fingertips.

Albus appeared as Severus finished his third glass of whiskey. Severus cursed the fact that the Headmaster of Hogwarts, the most powerful wizard alive, had nothing better to do with his time and power than spy on his professors and interfere with their personal lives. The irritating old man always showed up when Severus was drinking.

“Have you no respect for my privacy, Albus?” he asked, careful not to slur his words.

“My dear boy,” the Headmaster replied, “Had you forgotten about our chess game?”

“Our chess game,” Severus repeated. Each word fell with perfect enunciation in a slow smooth arc, echoing in the quiet dungeon.

“Why yes, you had promised me a rematch – don’t you remember?” Albus said with a smile and bright happy eyes.

Severus sighed and sank down onto the velvet couch. His wand trembled only a little as he summoned the chess board and cleared the half-filled whiskey glasses off of the low table. Albus conjured himself an armchair in bright Gryffindor colors – Severus grimaced but said nothing.

The pale and dark ivory pieces of the chess set clinked, soft and uncertain, in the silence between the two men. The Headmaster ate lemon drops like an addict, letting the silence stretch between them. He was a master manipulator, but Severus was Head of Slytherin House – he began to demolish Albus’s pieces in efficient silence, refusing to speak first.

“What a beautiful box you have there,” Albus said as Severus took his knight with a pawn. “Wasn’t that Lily’s box?”

Severus looked up from the chess board at last. The Headmaster was staring at him, the merriment gone from his eyes. “Yes,” Severus said. “It was.”

Two more moves – Albus moved his castle and Severus captured it with his queen. “How is it that you recognize it?” he asked.

Albus popped a new lemon drop in his mouth, held it between his teeth for a minute. “I like the sweet taste of these, Severus – you get used to the sourness after a while. Are you sure you won’t try one?” When Severus shook his head, the Headmaster continued. “Well of course I saw Lily carrying it around when she was at school here – she was attached to it, dear girl, since her grandmother had given it to her. Hagrid brought it back from Godric’s Hollow when he fetched poor little Harry out of the ruins, and I gave it to the boy when he was older.”

Albus’s eyes were brimming with questions, but he voiced none of them. The Headmaster appeared wise because he waited and listened. Severus sighed. “The Granger girl brought it to me,” he admitted. “Ha- Potter left it to me in his will.”

“Ah, I see,” the old man nodded. He blinked when Severus captured his queen, putting him in checkmate. “Why, I do believe you’ve won again, Severus. We’ll have to do this again sometime.”

Severus ran his finger along the side of the box, searching for that invisible crack between the lid and the bottom. He knew that there was no crack there – Lily had charmed it closed. He remembered the bright shine of sunlight through the library windows on her face, the light sparkling on her lips as she paged through an old charms text looking for the spell. She ran her tongue around her teeth while she thought, a habit Severus had found endearing. The shape of her fingernail against the creamy pages of the book –

No. Severus had been lost in his memories for too long. “I will know why that boy gave me this box,” he whispered. He shook his head and focused on the box, his fingers gentle as they traced the grain of the wood, searching for an entry.

Lily had charmed the box to open only to her touch, but Harry must have opened it as well. Harry had wanted for Severus to have this box, had wanted him to open it. “What did that boy say? That I could open it if I remembered the first day we met? No, it was the first day I spoke to him – what did I say to him?”

Severus fingered the unresponsive clasp, the cold metal that refused to open the box for him. He remembered a small boy with bright green eyes and an innocent smile – Harry’s first potions class. The boy hadn’t known anything at all about potions, he’d been impossible during his first five years at Hogwarts though he improved in his sixth and seventh years.

There had been nothing exceptional about that first potions class, but the boy had remembered something. “What did you remember, Harry?” Severus murmured to himself. “My usual first speech about how you can bottle fame, brew glory and stop death?” The fire crackled and Severus stretched his cold bare feet toward the warmth – even in late spring, the dungeons were chilly.

Severus’s Potions Professor had made a similar speech during his first potions class, but he had paid no attention. Lily sat across the aisle, and her copper hair swayed in the breeze made by the heat from the fire under her cauldron. Professor Grimmell, noticing that Severus was inattentive, had thrown a handful of porcupine quills into his cauldron. He’d had to scramble to fix the mistake, humiliated in front of the class when his potion frothed green.

No, Harry’s potion had been adequate – not perfect, but quite adequate for a boy raised by Muggles. He’d never seen a cauldron before, never made a potion before – Severus supposed that the boy’s Gryffindor courage was all that made him persevere in the face of the odds against him. Without background knowledge, with a Potions Master who mocked him and Slytherin classmates who sabotaged him, it was a wonder that the boy had turned around and made good progress in his final years. Severus sighed, remembering the set look on the boy’s face in his seventh year, the hunched shoulders as he curled in on himself, the determination with which he stirred and chopped and measured precise amounts, the glint of pride in his eyes when he handed in a perfect potion.

He remembered the battle in the boy’s seventh year – the second-to-last battle. The foolish Gryffindor boy had been in Hogsmeade with his friends when the Death Eaters attacked both the village and the school. The boy had managed to escape injury through some minor miracle and he showed up, smelling of blood and the backwash of curses, in Severus’s dungeons afterwards. “Let me help, Professor Snape,” the boy had demanded. There was a fire in his eyes – like the light that had shone in Lily’s eyes – and Severus had conceded, setting some of the easier potions and salves for the boy to make. There had been a silence, tight with mutual dislike, between them as they worked, but Harry had been faithful, precise and clean in his measurements. Poppy kept them busy for hours with demands for potions to heal the students who had been injured in the battle, but Severus had sent the boy away when he was pale and worn-looking. “Tired hands make mistakes, Potter,” he had said, too tired to put real venom in his voice.

Severus ran his finger around the perimeter of the box in a continuous loop. What had inspired the boy during that first Potions class? Had he set some word as a password to the box? What did he expect Severus to remember? Severus poured himself a glass of whiskey and took slow shallow sips.

Condensation ran down the sides of the glass like beads of memories running through Severus’s mind. He tapped his fingernail against the glass, the quiet sharp sound echoing for a brief instant. He almost smelled the potions that he had made with Harry that evening, over a year ago, still lingering in the air – the sharp tang of mint, the musky smell of wormwood, the crystal-clear spiky smell of the pain-numbing draughts that the boy had made.

No – further back, to the boy’s first year. “Focus,” he muttered to himself. He let a harsh little sip of whiskey slip down his throat. Why did Harry think he would remember? What had been so important? Severus traced a line around the perimeter of the box, finding no answers.

Severus went to the door, his bare feet silent on the cold stone floor. He rested his forehead against the heavy grain of the wood and closed his eyes for a moment, blinking the sleep out of them, before opening the door. He blinked again. “Miss Granger,” he said.

The frizzy-haired Gryffindor nodded. “Professor Snape,” she said. Her arms were piled full with books and more stacks of books floated in the air behind her.

Severus scowled. There was sunlight shining in through a high window, light shining into his dungeons and leaving a bright patch on the stone floor of the hallway. “Miss Granger, what are you doing here before noon on a Saturday?”

The wretched girl blushed and stammered. “Pro-Professor, did I wake you? It is past ten after all, and I thought that if I called on a Saturday, you wouldn’t have any classes.”

Severus moved aside and gestured for the girl to enter his study. The piles of books bobbed in her wake like obedient ships floating down a river. Severus scowled at the books and called a house elf for coffee.

The Granger girl took tea, and was sensible enough not to speak to him until he’d finished his second cup of coffee. Severus looked up from the scalding dark liquid in his third cup when she said, “Professor – would you call me Hermione instead of Miss Granger?”

“Miss Granger,” he said, his acerbic tongue recovering from the dull fog of sleep, “Do you think that you can invade the privacy of my quarters with a small library and demand to be on a first name basis with me?”

She looked down at her teacup, the golden-brown liquid pale with cream. “I wasn’t asking to be on a first name basis with you, Professor – just for you to call me by my first name. I’d rather not be called Miss Granger.”

Severus blinked, caught off balance with no objections ready. “Very well, Hermione,” he said. “Please explain to me why you’ve decided to move your latest research project to my rooms.”

“I haven’t, sir,” she said with Gryffindor sunshine, earnest and open. “These books are yours. Remember – Harry’s bequest?”

Severus took another gulp of coffee. It scorched his throat with welcome heat. “I hadn’t realized that there were so many of them.”

“His textbooks, the books that he had bought for himself, all of his parents’ books that were retrieved from Godric’s Hollow, and all of the books that were stored in the ancestral Potter vaults – he had quite a lot of potions and defense against the dark arts books,” Hermione said.

Severus glanced at the books, haphazard piles with no organization, and felt a headache coming. He drank more coffee.

“Would you like help organizing them? Your own books are organized so well – it must be hard for you to see books like this, in no particular order or system,” the Granger girl said – too clever for her own good, that girl.

“Ah – Miss Granger,” Severus said, setting his coffee mug down and folding his hands on the table. His long pale fingers twitched.

“Hermione,” the girl reminded him.

“Yes – Hermione. Do you happen to know where Harry’s first year Potions text is?”

Severus sat on one end of the sofa while Hermione perched on the other end. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, tapped her fingers while she read, leapt up to look for another book – so this was the Granger girl in research mode. It was no wonder she’d had the top grades in her year, with this intensity and dedication. “Something you said to him the first time you spoke to him,” she said, touching her quill to her chin.

Severus traced the lily pattern on the lid of the box with his forefinger. “I must admit, I don’t recall what I said to that particular class.” The Granger girl – Hermione – had spread out before her all of the references that pertained to the potion they’d made that class in a ring around Harry’s first year potions text. She flipped through pages, frowning.

“None of the ingredients we used in that potion are the password,” she said. “We’ve tried all of the substitute ingredients that are known, too. It’s got to be something else – Harry wouldn’t have picked anything too difficult, would he?” Her voice still trembled when she said her friend’s name but she kept her focus on the project before her. “Wait – wait just one minute,” she said and dashed over to the stack of books perched on Severus’s table.

She returned with a smile – the first smile Severus had seen on her face since she was a student. “Harry’s first year potions notes,” she said. “He found a spell in the library when we were in our third year. He used it to turn his notes into books, said he was tired of having so many scrolls floating around. They do get annoying, you must admit.”

Severus reached for the book. It was something that Harry had written – that wide-eyed boy who he had insulted and belittled, Lily’s boy who had saved him in the end. This book had been in Harry’s hands, had been touched by his fingers, bore the imprint of his thoughts.

The handwriting on the first page was spiky and uneven. Blobs of ink marked places where his quill had paused.

Bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses

Bottle fame, brew glory, put a stopper into death

Powdered root of asphodel added to an infusion of wormswood – makes the Draught of Living Death

Bezoar – in the stomach of a goat, will save you from most poisons

Monkshood and wolfsbane are the same as aconite

Severus jumped when Hermione’s hand brushed against his. Her hand was cool and her fingernails were rough. “You did rather intimidate him that first day,” she said. “He felt bad because he didn’t know anything. He thought you hated him and he didn’t understand why.”

“I …” Severus stopped. Touching the lily-carved box gently, he whispered “asphodel,” and the clasp came open with a quiet click.

One look from Severus’s dark eyes and three seconds, the space of a breath or a heartbeat, and Hermione Granger jumped up from the green sofa. “I’ll just – that is – perhaps – I’ll see you later,” she said. She stumbled over the strewn books and scrolls on her way to the door. Severus smirked at her graceless exit.

The box on his lap was open. The crack between the box and lid widened, the dark triangle expanding as Severus opened the box, one protective hand smoothing the lily pattern on the lid. “Harry’s box,” he murmured.

Severus felt his heart pause a beat. The box was full. Perched on the very top of its contents was a delicate gold ring that sparkled with a small ruby. Lily’s engagement ring shone in the dim light – Severus reached out to touch it with his forefinger and he felt the cold of the metal, a silent reproach, a memory of the warm finger that had once worn this ring. Severus lifted the ring out of the box and caressed the smooth gold band. It was gold to match the sunlight that Lily had loved, and a ruby to match her hair. She had teased him, telling him that she’d turn him into a Gryffindor one day.

Severus slipped the ring onto his finger – made for Lily’s delicate hand, it fit onto his smallest finger – and closed his eyes. He could still picture her face, her mouth with its upturned corners, when he’d presented her with the ring. Now the ring warmed to his skin – this metal that had once felt smooth and cold to Lily against her own delicate finger.

Severus blinked twice, blinked the image of a still Lily lying on the floor of her cottage at Godric’s Hollow out of his mind, and turned back to the box.

A book, leather-bound and worn, the pages inside filled with Harry’s distinctive script, was next in the box. A quill and a pot of ink – perhaps Harry had put them in the box the last time he’d written in the book? Or were these also treasures that Harry had hidden away in his mother’s box?

A pile of papers – the top was a marriage license, Lily’s and Potter’s names written with a kind of solemn dignity. Severus closed his eyes again – he did not want to picture Lily and Potter signing the license, less than a year before they were both killed. He set the pile of papers aside, underneath the journal.

Severus lifted a small circlet of dried poppies out of the box, his reverent hands trembling. The poppies were bleached with age and fluttered in the cool dungeon air. Severus had made this circlet of flowers for Lily, sitting in the sunlight by the lake, when they were fifteen. “Gryffindor flowers for a Gryffindor girl,” he’d said as he handed the crimson flowers to her. She had kept them – Harry had kept them – for all of these years.

Lily had slipped the circlet of poppies around her wrist and, with a rosy tinge to her cheeks, brushed her lips against them, red touching red. She had worn them all day, a quiet freshening spell sent at them at odd intervals by Severus. The flowers had looked like a violent scar against her slim tanned wrist – but that sunny day, Severus had read no omens into it.

Lily, who had hated Herbology, because “there was no point in mucking around with all those boring, useful plants,” had loved the bright, flashy flowers. The pale elegant lily that was her namesake held no attraction for her. She had liked bright sunny daffodils and tulips and poppies – any flower that was flame-colored. “You were a Gryffindor before you ever got here,” Severus had teased her.

Severus brushed the faded poppy petals with a gentle finger. Had Harry understood the significance of the poppies? Had he kept this faded circlet of flowers, thinking that James had given it to his mother? Had it pleased Harry to think that his father was the sort of man to bring flowers to his wife?

Severus shook his head, setting the poppy circlet down to rub at his temples. “It doesn’t matter,” he told himself. “Harry didn’t have either of them so what does it matter, if he took some comfort in thinking that? Potter made her happy, that’s what mattered.”

The open circle of the poppy bracelet stared at him, unblinking. Potter made her dead, it seemed to say. “That’s not how it was meant to happen,” he told it. He shut the flowers back into the box and stalked away. He refused to have conversations with dead flowers.

After two glasses of whiskey and three hours of broken nightmares, Severus gave in to the magnetic pull of the box. The box held answers – and more questions – about his beloved Lily and her beloved Harry. Years swirled and melted together, brought him close enough to touch Lily, to feel her touch, to see her again, when he held the box that she had held.

The dried poppies rested on top of a small pile of photos. Severus held them with his fingertips as though the photos would ignite. Lily waved and blew him kisses, her red-gold hair a corona around her face, while she held baby Harry and Potter scowled at him. The wind that caressed Lily’s hair and sent it in elegant swirls around her face only served to make Potter’s hair more untidy, and he swept his hand through his dark locks. Potter scowled at Severus again before bending to coo over baby Harry, a silent “mine – never yours,” shaped by his lips. Severus turned the photo face down to avoid Potter’s possessive gloating.

The next photo was of him and Lily, the two of them sitting by the lake during their last year at Hogwarts. Severus had a casual arm around Lily’s shoulders, her hair twined around his fingers in a smooth, fire-gold net. She was smiling at him. She hadn’t looked at the camera. Her lips were the ruby red color of the ring that glinted on her finger.

Severus dropped the photo. Had Harry seen this? Had he thought – what had he thought? Severus bent to pick up the photo, scraped his knuckles against the cold stone dungeon floor. If Harry had seen this, why had he never asked Severus about his mother? Had the boy never wondered at their intimate pose or at the tender look in his mother’s eyes?

Next was a photo of Lily and Potter at their wedding, the happy couple beaming at each other. Lily’s hands were clasped in Potter’s hands and her left hand sparkled with the diamond engagement ring that he had given her and with the gold of her wedding band. The beautiful corona of her hair was masked and dimmed with the white lace of her veil. Potter raised a hand to touch her cheek, a soft gentle touch that made Severus hate his old rival with deeper bitterness, before pulling her close in an embrace.

Severus turned to the last photo. It was a picture that Lily had taken of him in their fourth year. He’d been brewing potions in the dungeon – Professor Grimmell had let him use one of the small labs reserved for the upper years to experiment – and the potion he’d been making was on the verge of exploding. Smoke billowed out of the cauldron in hazy greenish puffs – Severus still remembered the clinging musky smell of it, boiled newt skin and porcupine quills, one of his least successful experiments. Lily surprised him by taking the photo at the worst second, had giggled after taking it and jerked the camera out of his reach.

Had she kept the photo to remember their friendship, the days before Severus had spoiled everything? Had she kept it to torment Potter, a subtle Slytherin hint that he wasn’t her first choice? Had she even remembered that she had it, locked away in this box?

What had Harry thought of it, his hated Potions Master making a mistake with his brewing? The boy had never mentioned the photo, not to Severus or any of the students – Severus had heard no rumors circulating the school about the nasty Potions Master who ruined a potion. Had Harry wondered why his mother kept the picture? What had the boy thought?

Severus sighed, placing the photos back into the empty box. He wanted to shut away his memories and unanswerable questions in a box, but the mental walls he had put up around them had fallen. He set several rings of protective wards around the fragile circlet of dried poppies before retiring again for the night.

Severus stood by the lake and watched his dark reflection shimmer in the still water. With absent, careless fingers he shredded the early daffodils apart, casting their torn petals onto the surface of the lake where their impact with the water made small concentric rings. His hands were pale against his dark robes and their distorted reflection in the lake lost them their elegance. The ripples and shimmers of the water made his thin fingers look clumsy and awkward.

Severus had stood here, beside the lake in this spot where the shadows of the Forbidden Forest never reached the velvet grass, two decades ago. He and Lily had stood here. The sunlight had cast their reflections onto the lake, but the lake had been rough with wind and their reflections were distorted.

The sunlight had glinted off the ruby ring that Lily wore. The shine of the light on her ring had matched the shine of the light on her smooth hair. Her face was pale and her eyes were cold and Severus had stepped away from her.

Severus looked down at the daffodils that his fingers were tearing into small pieces. He bent to pull some more daffodils out of the patch where they grew. His movement sent their cheerful blossoms bobbing up and down. Shredding the blossoms, he tossed the fragments into the lake.

There had been no daffodils growing here that day. He had stood here, and Lily had stood there, and he had said hurtful distant words and he had stepped away from her when her eyes turned cold. He had pushed her away, and she had run to Potter.

She had run to Potter, and she had died with Potter. He had killed her with his rejection. Severus shredded the last of the daffodils and flung them into the lake. Sunlight glinted off of the ruby ring that he wore on his smallest finger.

Severus sat on his velvet green sofa, watching the empty fireplace and tracing the lily pattern on the lid of the box. He had locked the memories of Lily inside – the photographs, the poppy circlet – but he still wore the ring. It was tight on his finger and he kept the metal warm with the heat of his body. Lily had worn this ring.

His free hand touched the journal that Harry had left in the box, felt the leather cover rough under his fingers. It felt like an intrusion on Harry’s privacy, touching the book where he had kept his secret thoughts.

Harry must have known of the relationship between Severus and his mother – known or suspected – or why would he have left the box to Severus? The pictures, the ring, the poppies – but why include the picture of James and Lily, why include their wedding license? Perhaps the boy had wanted to taunt his hated professor, wanted him to feel his loss again. Severus shook his head. No.

He lifted the book and picked up the stack of papers beneath it. He let his fingers ghost over Lily’s signature on the wedding license – he touched the paper where she had touched it – before looking at the next paper.

Harry’s birth certificate was glossy with the official seal of the Ministry. He touched the seal with his forefinger and felt the light zap of magic that the official seals contained. Then his eyes focused on the writing and he gasped. Aiden Severus Snape was printed in Lily’s distinctive spiky handwriting.

Severus’s hands clenched and unclenched in tight, frantic spasms. What joke was this? “Lily, why would you do this?” he whispered. His breath rattled the parchment in his hand. The official Ministry of Magic seal – Lily’s own handwriting – could this be a joke, or was it real? Severus looked down at the ruby ring that held his littlest finger in a tight metal embrace.

“Lily,” he said. “Oh, Lily, why would you do such a thing?”

He stared at the parchment, waiting for it to explode or burn or disappear. It remained inert. The Ministry of Magic seal vibrated when he touched it.

Severus put down the papers and took his head in his hands, rubbed at his temples in frantic circles. “Lily, what does this mean?” he asked the silent dungeons.

He paced the room, his footsteps echoing on the stone floor. Harry James Potter – Aiden Severus Snape. He was listed as the father on the birth certificate. He twisted the ruby ring around and around in endless circles on his little finger. Was Harry his son?

Shaking, Severus returned to the velvet sofa where he had left the papers. There were two more papers in the small pile of papers that had held Lily and Potter’s wedding license and Harry’s birth certificate. Had Lily left him with an explanation? Severus’s hands shook as he picked up the papers.

Underneath Harry’s – Aiden’s? – birth certificate was another official Ministry form, glowing with its own seal. Severus traced the ink with an uncomprehending finger. This certified that Aiden Severus Snape was adopted by James Potter and renamed Harry James Potter. The handwriting was firm and strong, like Potter’s handwriting always was. Rattled like an empty sieve, Severus set the adoption certificate next to the birth certificate.

“Lily, what did you do? Why didn’t you tell me?”

The last paper was Lily’s and Potter’s will, or a copy of it – it lacked an official seal. Short and brusque, it left all of their belongings to Harry James Potter. Potter had added in an addendum – dictated by Lily, Severus imagined, the style was too flowery for the blunt Potter – that although Harry was not the son of his body, he was the son of his heart and that he acknowledged Harry as his sole living heir despite the lack of a blood connection.

Severus set this aside as well. With careful hands, he placed all of the papers into the box and he walked, shaking, to his liquor cabinet. He’d never heard of a more appropriate time for a glass of whiskey or three. He carried the bottle back to his sofa and sat staring at the carved wooden box.

Morning brought clarity and brightness, even in the windowless dungeon. Severus shook the last of his hangover away and made his way to breakfast in the Great Hall. The children were subdued at this early hour, chatting among themselves and feeding their teenage stomachs. Severus clutched at memories of Harry sitting at that table, the mornings Harry had spent in this hall, the breakfasts he had eaten here, surly and uncommunicative like any teenager in the morning. His son – Severus felt a brief pang at the thought that he had never eaten breakfast with his son, never teased him out of a sleep-induced mental fog, never reached out to straighten his clothes in the morning. He had missed so much of Harry’s life.

Harry was his son, there was no doubt about that. Those Ministry documents could not be forged and neither Lily nor Harry would have wished to hurt him with an untruth of this magnitude. No – Harry was his, had been his – but Harry was gone now. Severus moved through his day in a cloud, his mind and heart lead-heavy with the haze of that knowledge.

Harry was his son, and Harry had known it – and yet Harry had never looked to him for the parental approval that he must have craved. Had the boy feared rejection? Had he – had he rejected his greasy Potions Professor, decided that no father at all was better than a Death Eater father? Which way did the rejection go?

Severus scratched at his head and let his long fingers rest, tangled in his greasy hair. He had given Lily poppies, a ruby ring, and his love – had in the end given her freedom, which had driven her to James Potter and her death. It seemed that he had also given her a child, and she had taken it from him with a vengeance, taken it and kept it hidden. What were her motives in this? Had she meant to keep the boy safe? Had she been so deep heart-wounded by his rejection that she couldn’t bear to speak about the boy to Severus? He set his fork down by his breakfast plate with a metallic sharp clang and stalked out of the Great Hall.

----------

The journal was resting on the Slytherin-green sofa where he had left it. Its leather cover was pale and innocuous, as though it held no secrets. Severus touched it, picked it up as gently as though it were Lily’s fragile impromptu bracelet made of dried poppy petals, dried flower petals that could shatter in a strong wind. This had belonged to his son.

Severus held his son’s journal, traced the leather cover with an idle finger, the rough texture of the leather sharp against his skin while his thoughts spun. Harry, Harry Potter, Aiden Snape, his son, had touched this, had written in it – to pour out his soul or dream about Quidditch or scratch out ideas for his essays or voice his fears about the confrontation with Voldemort. Severus ran his finger up and down the length of the spine, wondered if Harry had ever sat and fidgeted with the book.

Severus scuffed his bare feet, restless, on the cold dungeon floor before leaning back into the cushions of the sofa. He could not flee from this. He could not open it. There were a million and one things that Harry could have written in this book, a million things that he could have written that were guaranteed to hurt or shatter Severus.

Why had Harry left him this book? Was this his idea of posthumous revenge, forcing his father to read in stark black and white that he was hated, unloved, condemned, rejected?

Severus traced the edges of the pages, the line of gilt that shone in the dim light from the fire, with one slow-moving finger. How could he read his son’s last message to him? How could he ignore it?

Tapping at his door jolted Severus from his reverie. Placing the journal reverently on the sofa, next to Lily’s cherry-wood box, he stalked to the door barefoot and opened it. “Albus, I’m in no mood for interrupt…” he said, trailing off when he saw that Albus was not there.

The cool air in the dungeon corridor swept into his room, chasing itself in feathery eddies and caressing his sallow face. The torchlight flickered over the countenances of Hermione Granger and Remus Lupin. Severus stared at them as though he could with some obscure magic divine the purpose of their visit without speaking to them.

He cleared his throat. “Miss Granger, Professor Lupin,” he said. He became conscious of his informal attire – slacks and a long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned at the throat, instead of his formal teaching robes – and his bare feet, and a flush crept up his neck to tint his cheeks.

This man, his childhood tormentor, his colleague these past three years, made no remark on Severus’s attire. His golden eyes, like honey flecked with dark toffee – like the comfort of drinking whiskey by a fire after a winter walk – hid no unspoken malice. “Severus?” he said, his voice soft in the echoing corridor. “Could we perhaps come in?”

With a nod, Severus stepped inside and led them through the disordered piles of scrolls and books, the unsorted piles of books that Harry – his son, his son, the reminder echoed again in his thoughts – had left him, through the disorder and to the oasis of warmth and clutter of half-finished whiskeys by the sofa. With a flick of his wand, Severus adjusted the fire to burn warmer. He’d stood too long slack-jawed at the door and needed to chase the cold of the dungeon floor out of his bare feet.

He sat next to the journal and Lily’s box, one idle hand going to trace the now-familiar patterns on the lid, sat and waited. The rancor that had bled out of his soul after the end of the war, the sharp curiosity that had once driven him, the verve and the venom – they were all gone. Severus waited to hear their purpose in visiting. He was empty and bereft, lonely for all of the years with his son that had been taken from him without his knowing, and it made him cold and still and quiet.

“We – I – That is, Professor …” Hermione began and then trailed off into silence.

“Hermione told me that Harry had left Lily’s box to you. I just – that is, we just wanted to make sure that you were … dealing with it, that you were all right. I … well, you and Lily were so close once and …” Lupin stopped, his warm eyes fixed on Severus.

There was, in the moment of silence that followed Lupin’s words, a kind of peace that settled into the dungeons, fragile like poppy petals and unfamiliar.

Lupin broke into the silence with another pronouncement. It occurred to Severus, as the werewolf spoke, that he was being tested, that the two of them were testing his mental stability – trying to discover whether he was wallowing in grief for his lost Lily. Had Lupin told Hermione about his relationship with Lily? Had Lupin even known?

“I was … I was impressed that you and Hermione figured out the password. I had to help Harry figure it out after Albus gave him the box, after … after Sirius died,” Lupin said, and it sounded as though he had forced the words to emerge from a frozen throat. The words crackled in the quiet air.

“Lily’s password was asphodel?” Severus asked, and then froze as the realization struck him, as Lupin’s words penetrated the fog that had encircled his brain. “You knew? You knew what was in the box and didn’t tell me?”

Sharper words wanted to drip off of Severus’s tongue and rip into the werewolf, to castigate him and threaten him and shame him for the theft of those three years with his son, three years of knowing his son. Severus stared into the fire and counted the sparks sent off from the dry wood, focused on the swirling Gryffindor colors of the flame, reined in his anger.

“No,” Lupin said, and Severus turned to look at him. “The password wasn’t asphodel, and I didn’t know – I still don’t know – what Lily kept in the box. Harry never told me.”

The werewolf’s hands made a tired, small gesture in the air and Severus stared at them, stared at hands that had once touched his Lily, had once touched his Harry, his Aiden, his son. “Lily always set the password to lines from her favorite poems,” Lupin said. “Harry had the box from Dumbledore and wrote to me, asking me how to open it. It was … It was a distraction for him, those days after Sirius … after Sirius had died. It was like a puzzle, finding a window that gave him a glimpse of his mother and finding a way to peek into it. He was stuck with the Dursleys all that summer, isolated and grieving for Sirius, but he had that box, that one connection to Lily … knowing that he had something, even something that small, that was the only thing that kept me from snatching him out of there, rescuing him from those Muggles and ruining Albus’s plans.”

Hermione spoke up from her end of the couch, her words hesitant and slow. “Harry … Harry, he never told any of us what was in the box, Professor. He … he did love it, you know, he used to keep it under his pillow at Hogwarts so that it would always be near him.”

“He never told anyone?” Severus asked. The words felt strange and fuzzy in his brain, on his tongue. Harry, his Harry, had kept this knowledge close and secret from his dearest friends, from all the world, from his father. It was uncharacteristic. Severus couldn’t imagine it – the bright shining boy he had known, the Golden Gryffindor, the sullen and defiant boy who defied orders and ferreted out mysteries and saved the world with his faithful friends – couldn’t imagine that the boy he remembered, his son, his Harry, would have kept something of this magnitude secret for long.

Severus reached out an unsteady hand and closed it around Harry’s journal, fingered the rough leather cover. This journal, a simple book that Severus hesitated to read, was perhaps the only confidant Harry had used, the only receptacle for his secret.

Bare feet silent on the cold stone floor, Severus made his way to the liquor cabinet. Despite the early hour, he opened a new bottle of whiskey and poured the golden liquid into three glass tumblers. The rich, almost spicy aroma of the alcohol had been the only solace, the only focus for his weary thoughts during these long days since he had received Lily’s box and Harry’s secret.

“She was very much like you in some ways, Miss Granger – Hermione,” Severus said at last. “Muggleborn and determined to show that she was as smart and competent and worthwhile as any pureblood witch.”

“You – Sir, I always thought that you hated Harry’s parents – the way you treated him and Remus and Sirius – the way you talked about Harry’s father in class – I don’t understand,” Hermione said.

Severus’s fingers tightened around his glass of whiskey at the reminder of his comments to Harry about his father. He’d taunted the boy about James Potter during all of his years at Hogwarts, used his memories of the elder Potter to hurt Harry, to hurt his son, even after Harry knew that Severus was his father. Harry had said nothing, all of those times that Severus had attacked him, all of the times that Severus had unwittingly insulted himself.

It felt as though the air was trapped in Severus’s lungs, trapped and heavy and stinging. Severus forced the air out, forced himself to say, “I loved Lily.” Hermione’s eyes were large at the revelation but Lupin only nodded. The werewolf had known years ago.

Lupin swirled the amber-colored whiskey – the liquid almost the same color as his eyes – repeatedly in his glass, fidgeting with it. “Severus and Lily were engaged once, the perfect couple. It was a surprise to all of us when they quarreled and broke it off, but she married James almost immediately afterwards.”

“I killed her,” Severus said, taking a large gulp of the whiskey. The pain as it traveled down his throat was almost welcome. “I rejected her because I wanted to protect her, because I thought that she would be happier with an Auror than a Death Eater, because marriage to a spy is foolish. She wanted to marry me in spite of it all, and I sent her away, sent her to her death. Not even two years passed between my rejection of her and her murder.”

“You didn’t kill her, Severus. There’s no way you could have known.” Lupin leaned carefully into Severus’s personal space and rested a tentative hand on his shoulder. “You must not blame yourself,” he said while he fixed his gaze on Severus’s dark eyes, looked directly at him.

Severus looked away first, looked down at the carved cherry-wood box on the sofa. The wood shone on the background of the green velvet cushion, gleamed in the firelight. The box and the journal sat on the sofa between Severus and Lupin, the secrets that they contained forming a barrier between the two men that was almost tangible to Severus. Unspoken words, unacknowledged truths, secrets that had been kept for so many years – there was no way for them to retrace their steps, to go back in time and start afresh, with the truth known to both of them.

Severus traced the lily pattern on the lid with one fingertip, a comfortable, habitual motion. The secret that Harry had kept for so long now burned inside of Severus’s heart, burned at his throat and his conscience. Harry had never told. Had he been ashamed to tell his dear friends the truth about his father? Why had he kept the secret for so long?

The wood of the box warmed under Severus’s fingers. “I …” he said and stopped. “I … what was the password that Lily had left on the box?”

“Do you remember her favorite poem?” Lupin asked.

“Autumn nibbles its leaf right from my hand: we’re friends.

We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk:

Time turns back into its shell,” Severus quoted from memory.

Time turns back into its shell – if only it could – the thought of it tugged at his heart, the memory of Lily reading her favorite poem, with her red hair spread out on her pillow like the corona the poem was named after. It was Lily who had loved him, it was Lily who he had pushed away, she had been his precious Lily and yet – and yet she had hidden his son from him.

“Yes,” Lupin agreed. A smile haunted his eyes for a half second. “She chose the lines:

we love one another like poppy and memory,

we slumber like wine in the seashells,

like the sea in the moon’s blood-beam.”

Lily’s poem, and for a second it was as though he heard her voice again, her slow careful reading of the poem. The fire flickered in the fireplace, casting shadows into the room, and Severus stared at it, its Gryffindor colors a painful reminder of his Lily.

Severus turned from the fire, turned to two of the people whom Harry, his lost Harry, his son, had once loved. The secret that Harry had kept beat at his heart one last time before he told them, “I was his father.” The words fell into a sudden silence,and two pairs of eyes were staring at Severus, two sets of lungs were caught full of breath and unable to exhale. Severus opened the box, his fingers lingering on the carvings that had been beloved by Lily. As he passed the birth certificate and the other papers to Lupin, he said only, “I found these yesterday.”

The pounding at the door echoed the throb of Severus’s pulse in his temples and for a long moment he couldn’t separate the two rhythms. The cold dungeon air burned when it hit his skin and Severus pushed the blankets aside, hopping barefoot on the cold stone floor as he went to answer the door.

It was Hermione, her hair ruffled and her eyes shadowed as though she hadn’t slept since she left the dungeons five hours ago. By the look of the equipment that she had levitating in the air behind her – three cauldrons, a tripod and an enormous scroll – she probably hadn’t.

“Miss Granger,” Severus said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, trying to minimize the contact of bare skin with cold floor without undignified hopping. “I assure you that when I wish for my quarters to be turned into some kind of high-traffic motorway, you shall be among the first to know. Until then, please stop barging in here at these absurd hours.”

He’d truly lost his touch, Severus knew, when her full lips curved in a half-smile. She brushed wayward strands of hair away from her face with a gesture that reminded Severus of Lily and said, “I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour, but I wouldn’t have come if it weren’t important. May I come in?”

Severus stared at her for a long moment, shaking the last wisps of sleep from his mind and then he stepped aside to allow her to enter his rooms. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Gryffindors have decided to run roughshod through my life yet again,” he said. He led her to the sofa by the fire, past the stacks of untouched books, and gave up the last vestiges of his dignity in the eyes of this particular Gryffindor by conjuring a pair of slippers for his cold feet.

Fortunately, Granger modeled herself on her mentor Minerva rather than the other Gryffindor role model, Albus – she was gracious enough not to look at Severus’s feet and there was no gleam of hidden amusement in her eyes.

“It may surprise you, then, to learn that Harry was meant to have been sorted into Slytherin, sir,” Granger said. Again, there’s no gleam in her eye, none of the obvious Gryffindor facial tics that suggest deceit. Gryffindors don’t lie, James Potter had said to him once, but Severus had known even then, even dangling upside down and wandless, that the truth was that most Gryffindors were either too stupid to think of a lie, or smart enough that they’d realized how utterly transparent Gryffindor lies tended to be. Severus suspected that Granger fell into the latter category.

Still, it was inconceivable that the daredevil Potter could have been sorted into Slytherin House, the house of self-preservation and cunning – it was inconceivable that Severus could have been so close to the opportunity to know his son. “Indeed?” was all that Severus said, not rising to Granger’s bait.

She gave him a knowing look and he said, allowing a hint of his old snap to re-enter his voice, “Take care, Miss Granger. I believe that Minerva has copyrighted that particular expression.”

“Well,” she said, “I suppose that the debate over where exactly Harry got all of his finger Slytherin questions is resolved now.”

“That begs the question of whether he possessed any Slytherin qualities, Miss Granger.” There was a start of something warm and jumpy and electric in his heart when Severus realized that he was bantering with one of his son’s closest friends, that this girl had indeed accepted him as Harry’s father.

She smiled and wet her lips with her tongue in a quick nervous gesture. “Professor, I’m here to ask you for your help.”

Granger was trying not to fidget, he gave her credit for that, but he saw her knee twitching and the tension in her joints. She gulped and wet her lips again before continuing.

“Trouver par sang. It’s a surefire tracking spell, Professor, because it’s based on blood relationships. As an only child with both parents dead and no other children, the spell will recognize Harry quite clearly. It’ll lead us straight to him.”

Granger clasped her hands around her knees, unclasped them, and twisted them around each other. “Please say that you’ll help me.”

Like an unexpected summer storm, Severus felt his old self return after this long period of dream-like lassitude and blankness – the anger and bitterness, the acid tongue, the walls that protected him from a curious world, it all came back to him. “Miss Granger, my son is dead and you are an impertinent, meddling know-it-all child in need of a connection with reality. How dare you trifle with his memory? How dare you disturb my peace at this hour?”

She blinked and shifted on the couch. “Professor Snape, it’s …”

Severus loomed over her, forgetting that he was wearing a dressing gown and not his usual teaching robes. “You’re just a child who doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone, Granger. Like a child, you think that you can fix everything with a wave of your wand, but somehow I will make you understand that my son is dead, that he has been taken away from me, taken away from us all, and that there is no chance of his ever returning. He died protecting your precious hide and the safety of a thousand others like you, he died to allow you a chance in this magical world and you’re squandering his death by polluting his sacrifice with this nonsense. There’s no spell or potion or magic of any sort that can alter death, you brainless, heartless, inconsiderate child.”

“They never …” she said.

“Get out.”

She scurried to the door, slamming it behind her and leaving a hodgepodge of cauldrons and magical paraphernalia cluttering Severus’s living room.

----------

There was an echoing silence in Severus’s quarters after Granger left, a silence that would never be filled with Harry’s voice. Severus cursed himself for his maudlin, disgusting sentimentality, and went to the cabinet to pour himself a glass of whiskey.

Harry’s journal was still perched on the velvet green cushions of the sofa. Severus curled in on himself, hunched over with his knees drawn up to his chest and his elbows sticking out at an angle like stubby featherless wings. He was still shocked by the nerve of that chit, suggesting that his Harry was still alive, disturbing the quiet acceptance and tranquility that had cradled Severus. He had been safe, enclosed in a bubble of grief, separate from the rest of the world.

With a shaky, uncertain gesture, he reached out and touched his son’s journal, ran a finger down the spine. There was a thrill, a tiny swirl of magic that came from touching something that his son had touched, a journal where his son had kept his private thoughts.

Severus downed the remainder of his whiskey in one burning gulp and picked up the journal. This was the closest that he could come to his son.

The first entry was in a cramped, illegible scrawl that made Severus remember Harry’s first Potions assignments. There was something about the handwriting of Muggle-born or Muggle-raised students, something about childish hands unused to holding a quill, which made blobs and scrawls and illegible messes.

Sirius is dead and it’s all my fault. For some reason the Headmaster thinks he can make everything better by giving me some sweets and a box my mother owned. I can’t even open the box so it makes me feel like she’s farther away than ever.

I am glad that Hermione gave me this journal. I thought it was a girly idea at first, writing down my emotions to get over Sirius’s death. But now that I’m here at the Dursleys’, and am locked up with no-one to talk to … I think I’d just explode if I didn’t have this.

Severus drew a breath so sharply that it cut into the soft tissues of his throat. His son’s pain left a vivid feeling in him, sharp and prickly and uncomfortable. Harry had been hurting and it had been due to Severus. If he had not failed to teach his son Occlumency – if he had explained matters to the boy – none of the fiasco at the Ministry would have happened and the boy’s godfather would still be alive. Severus touched one gentle finger to a splotch on the page, a wrinkled circle where a tear had fallen. The paper was rough and uneven to his fingertip.

Severus touched that fingertip to his lips, a gesture soft and bittersweet as a petal. He had never seen Harry cry, had never seen through the façade that Harry Potter had presented to the world, the Golden Gryffindor that he’d shown himself to be. He had probably, with his harsh behavior, caused some of Harry’s tears – but he had never witnessed them, had never comforted the boy.

Severus turned the page with a sharp crackling sound before the maudlin emotions welling up inside him could get out of control. He was a Slytherin, he was a spy, he did not have emotions, again and again he told himself.

I’ve opened the box, Harry’s writing was a stutter across the page, interspersed with inkblobs and scratches such that Severus could barely read it.

I’ve opened the box and I wish I never did. Nothing I’ve ever known is true and it feels like I belong back in my cupboard, huddling in the corner nearest the door where the spiders don’t go and wishing that my Mum would come to get me.

The worst of it is that I’m not sure I want Mum to come and get me any more. It’s like she’s a stranger to me – of course she’s a stranger to me – but before, I could pretend that I knew her. I had the pictures Hagrid gave me, and I … I had that one memory of her from the Dementors, and I knew she was good at Charms – the little things that people told me about her, and I built an image of a mother out of those. She was sweet and loving and maybe when I was a baby I liked to pull at her bright hair and maybe she sang lullabies to me.

Now – now she’s the woman who left my father to marry another man. Somehow nobody knew, despite the papers that they filed with the Ministry for my adoption, that I wasn’t James Potter’s child. They must not have known, or they would have told me. I have to believe that they would have told me, that they wouldn’t have lied to me all my life.

Did she ever tell Professor Snape? I don’t think that she could have told him. Draco Malfoy is the man’s godson, and look how he’s treated in class. If he knew that I was his son, he would be kind to me in class as well, wouldn’t he? Perhaps I’m no good at Potions, but neither is Malfoy and Snape praises him. So he doesn’t know.

Or else he knows and he’s already rejected me. Perhaps something tragic happened between him and Mum. It must have been some clandestine love affair, if no one could put their relationship and my date of birth together to realize that two people and nine months make a baby. Perhaps they were secret lovers, and they quarreled – whatever. This isn’t a soap opera, even though it feels a bit like one right now. The Marauders and Snape hated each other, and Snape and my mother – loved each other? – and then my mother and my … James loved each other. Or did they?

I wish I had a brain like Hermione’s, she could put all these puzzle pieces together and come up with a story. But even then – I think some of it can only be answered by my Mum and Snape and James. Two of them aren’t here and Snape … well, if he doesn’t know that I’m his son, I don’t think he knew the whole story to begin with. Well. I’ll be logical anyway and see how far that gets me.

What I know so far:

1. The papers in the box – wedding license shows that Lily Evans married James Potter and took his name; the birth certificate shows that Severus Snape is my father; the adoption certificate and the will show that James was aware of that fact and wanted me as his son.

Questions: 1. Can these papers be faked? 2. Were Mum and Snape married? 3. Is there some other way of proving that Snape is my father?

2. The photos – Mum and Snape were engaged and the ring that Mum is wearing is the same ring that she left in the box. You can tell from the photo that they did love each other. Question: What happened to their engagement? Was it broken, and who broke it?

There’s a picture of James and Mum with me as a baby, but no way of telling whether Snape saw me as a baby or not.

There’s a picture of Mum and James at their wedding. The ring that she’s wearing is different from the ring that Snape gave her. Question – what happened to that ring?

There’s a picture of just Snape – Mum must have still felt something for him to keep it.

3. Bracelet of dried flowers – I have no clue why Mum kept this or what it means.

4. The engagement ring from Snape – Mum kept it.

Questions: 1. It’s traditional for Muggles to let the woman keep a ring if the engagement is broken – is it also true for wizards? 2. Is there any significance to the ring being set with a ruby and not a diamond?

Severus traced the writing with his forefinger, moving along the jagged spikes and lines. There were no rough splotches from tears, no dark blobs of ink, no other signs of agitation – Harry had calmed himself by writing the list. A spike of pride ran through Severus’s veins at the thought that it was his son who was capable of such a calm response in the destruction of everything that he knew, his son who was logical and precise in the face of crisis.

If I could only talk to Ron and Hermione – but they would blow up at me and ask so many questions and fuss about it. The less fuss, the better in this case, because I bet Voldemort would kill Snape if he found out about this. So – I could tell either Dumbledore or Snape, because they’re so brilliant at Occlumency that Voldemort would never find out from them. I reckon that no one else could keep it safe, and even if they promise not to tell – no, it isn’t safe. There’s no way I’m going to be responsible for another death.

Dumbledore – if I tell him, he’ll just say that it has to be a secret and send me back to the Dursleys in the summer anyway. Maybe he’d offer me some lemon drops or sweets or something to try to calm me down after I start yelling at him about how I don’t want to go back to the Dursleys.

Snape – I can’t even guess how the man would react. I don’t know him well enough. I guess there are two options: he could yell at me and sneer at me and want nothing to do with me because he thinks I’m a spoiled arrogant brat, or he could accept me, change his personality completely and decide that we need to become a normal, loving family. Maybe he would tutor me in Potions because he couldn’t tolerate having a son who was such a disgrace at them. Maybe he’d find out about the Dursleys and hunt them down and use some Death Eater torture tricks on them. He’d go on being horrible to me in class, to keep up the act for the junior Death Eaters, but in private he’d be nice to me and say he was proud of me and forbid me to go out doing reckless Gryffindor things that are likely to get me killed.

Right. I guess there’s only one option after all. He can never know.

Severus closed the journal, his fingers lingering on the leather cover. Harry’s words bit into him like acid, the knowledge that his son had been afraid to tell him the truth about his parentage cut into him. His breath felt like it was caught in his throat and he choked on the lack of oxygen.

Harry had chosen not to be his son. He had chosen to ignore their relationship.

Severus sat on his sofa, his fingers curled around the cover of the journal. This was as close as he would ever come to touching his son.