Savior by lesyeuxverts
Past Featured StorySummary: AU. Harry is Sorted into Slytherin and Snape is confronted with some disturbing realizations.
Categories: Teacher Snape > Trusted Mentor Snape Main Characters: .Snape and Harry (required), Draco, Dumbledore, Hermione, Other, Petunia, Ron
Snape Flavour: None
Genres: Angst
Media Type: None
Tags: Alternate Universe, Slytherin!Harry
Takes Place: 3rd summer
Warnings: Abusive Dursleys
Challenges: None
Series: None
Chapters: 12 Completed: No Word count: 49313 Read: 74289 Published: 24 Apr 2006 Updated: 12 Sep 2006
Chapter 11 by lesyeuxverts
Author's Notes:
Disclaimer: I own nada, zilch, rien, of anything even remotely associated with the wonderful Harry Potter. I am indebted to the HP Lexicon for the calendar showing me the correct day of the week for Halloween in Harry's first year - otherwise the timeline would have come out funny.

AN: This was a really difficult chapter for me to write, especially given the spate of reviews that hit after the last chapter. I do appreciate hearing everyone’s opinion, however negative or positive it may be, and I’d be really happy if you’d let me know what you think about this chapter as I’m feeling quite insecure about it right now.

There’s quite a bit more profanity in this chapter than there has been in previous chapters – mostly Severus saying “Damn, did I screw up!” – I’ve indicated that this is PG-13 but I’m not sure if I need to change that. I find it quite hard to remember how much profanity I used when I was that age, or to reconcile that with how much children curse nowadays. I’m really not so good with understanding the distinctions between ratings and why certain things are rated the way they are, so if anyone has an opinion about this, please let me know.

Sorry, I hate long author’s notes too, but I have just one last thing to say: I know I said it last time, but I was overcome by weakness and succumbed to the addiction of writing and receiving all the reviews from y’all – this time I am quite serious when I say that updates are likely to be sporadic if not non-existent throughout the month of August. No amount of reviews or pleading will change my mind, honest – I want to stay in grad school, I really do. I’ve written you guys a relatively long (by my standards at least) chapter that doesn’t end quite as horribly as the last one … so please please please be understanding of the fact that it’ll be a bit of a wait for the next update.

Posting a scrawled note on the classroom door to inform his students that his classes for the day were cancelled, Severus rushed into his room and barricaded himself inside of it, setting his wards at their highest and making himself inaccessible to everyone including Albus. His breath caught in his throat and his heart pounded with the adrenaline that had spiked its way through his fatigue. It took all of his self-control to keep his mind focused on the present instead of flashing back to the excruciating pain that he’d known as a child when he tried to heal his injuries with uncontrolled magic, the excruciating pain that had followed when his father had discovered what he had done. The phantom fire of the remembered pain licked at his nerves, threatening to consume them, and Severus made his way to his personal stockroom to gulp down a calming potion before he sat down at his desk.

With the turquoise haze of the calming potion to separate him from the immediate reactions, Severus began to shiver. In a decade of potions classes with incompetent students producing some of the worst explosions and poisons known to wizardkind, Severus had never come so close to death as when the stupid little Potter boy had decided to experiment with uncontrolled magic and healing. The boy couldn’t have had any idea of the danger behind his actions, how close he’d come to disfiguring Severus’s leg or worse – could he? Potter was such a Ravenclaw-like bookworm at times it was hard to know what the Muggle-raised boy knew about magic.

Severus’s hands were shaking, not from the cold air of the dungeons, as he rolled up his trouser leg. He had never appreciated mobility before, had taken the ability to walk about on two legs for granted, but now – now when it had almost been wrenched away from him – his fingers trembled as he probed his leg to discover the effects of Potter’s little magical outburst.

His leg was whole. The angry red gashes left by Hagrid’s pet were gone as though they’d never existed. A scar from his childhood had marred his kneecap – it too was gone. With frantic fingers, Severus felt up and down the length of his leg, probing it for any fault or imperfection and finding none. The nerves still functioned, the bone was whole, the muscles flexed, the skin was unmarred. It was whole and perfect. A strangled hiccough-like sound broke from his throat and through the muffling haze of the calming potion, Severus clutched his leg to his chest, unwilling to let it go now that he had come to a full appreciation of its importance.

It seemed an eternity before the shock and adrenaline wore themselves out of his system. With a start, Severus remembered Potter and Draco – remembered his words to Harry and now that his anger had run out of his body, realized the damage that his words had done. Draco – Draco had seen some or all of his tirade, and now Severus was no longer the beloved godfather but rather, the boy flinched and escaped from him as though he were a monster, and Harry – if Harry ever consented to see him again, the boy wouldn’t be trying to impress him in class, wouldn’t call him for comfort after a nightmare, wouldn’t care enough about him to want to heal him.

“Damn it,” Severus said aloud. He started for the door and then hesitated, reconsidering. Neither boy would want to see him now. He didn’t want to imagine Harry now – the boy probably cowering in his closet with Draco trying to comfort him through the door. He didn’t want to make the situation worse with his mere presence.

He returned to his desk and penned a swift note, which he then sent to Malfoy Manor by portkey. While he was waiting for Narcissa to arrive, he took another calming potion to soothe his nerves and made an attempt to neaten his face and hair, washing all signs of his recent distress from his appearance.

“What have you done to my son, Severus?” Narcissa asked. Severus hurried from the bathroom to greet her and found Narcissa as beautiful and elegant as she always was, even after a portkey landing. Golden hair framed her face in delicate spiral curls that were seemingly undisturbed by the whirlwind motion of the portkey, and her thin fingers smoothed out a skirt that had hardly been wrinkled.

“I … I was rather unguarded with my anger toward Potter – the brat assaulted me, Narcissa, he practically killed me – and Draco heard me berate his friend.” Severus clenched his fingers in the folds of his heavy wool robes to prevent them from fidgeting of their own accord.

Tiny lines formed around Narcissa’s eyes as she looked down her nose at him. “You expect me to take care of the disaster that you caused, Severus?”

“I expect you to take care of your son, who needs to be comforted and will not accept it from me. Do not think that I would be hesitating to comfort him if I could help Draco, but I cannot help him now.”

“You want me to do nothing for the other boy, then?” she asked, one eyebrow raised in an arch more elegant than Severus ever produced with his thick dark eyebrows.

“I would be indebted to you if you could help him, but Narcissa … he is not an easy boy to manage. He’s shy of strangers and may not even talk to you.”

“You will owe me a favor if I succeed, then.” With that, Narcissa left in search of the boys, assuring Severus that she would summon him if they agreed to see him.

When Narcissa returned to his chambers and reached for the portkey without speaking to him, Severus felt as though he’d aged a hundred years in waiting for her – unable to focus on books or potions or marking essays, he’d paced the length of the room again and again, reaching down on occasion to confirm that his leg was still whole. “How is he?” he asked, reaching out to block her from touching the portkey.

“Do not lay one finger on me, Severus Snape, for I will not be sullied by your touch. After which of the boys,” Narcissa said, her voice raised a dangerous octave, “are you asking?”

Severus recognized the anger that twisted her lovely face into a mask of lines and wrinkles with no beauty and took a hasty step away. “I was asking after Draco, of course.”

“You were asking after Draco.”

The pause between them was deep and dangerous and although Severus hesitated to throw his words into it, Narcissa seemed ready to wait him out. “I want to know about Potter, of course, but the wretched brat nearly killed me, Narcissa, am I supposed to somehow overlook that and smile at him like a simpering Hufflepuff? Of course it’s Draco who worries me. He looked at me as though I was …”

“As though you were a despicable excuse for a human being who deserves that black mark on your arm, as though you were a monster who lacks even the smallest shred of human decency, or as though you were a cruel heartless bastard who deserves to fry in the lowest level of hell, is that how he looked at you? Or did he look at you as though you were a man who had risen above all of his angry past, all of his petty grudges, and decided to help the abused son of his enemy, decided to build his trust and work to help him, only to turn around and spew the worst sort of vituperative trash ever known to come out of a man’s mouth? Did he look at you as though you were the man who sent a frightened eleven-year-old child to cower in a closet and ask to be sent back to his abusive Muggle relatives because someone he trusted had ruined the only sanctuary he has ever known? Is that how he looked at you, Severus?”

Narcissa’s face was twisted, her hands were clenched in her silk skirt and ruining the delicate fabric with perspiration, every elegant line of the aristocratic pureblood lady destroyed. “The only reason why I am willing to leave Draco at Hogwarts for the rest of this year is because it would completely destroy Harry to lose him now, and that poor boy – an innocent boy who saved us all from You-Know-Who all those years ago, a boy who’s done nothing to deserve what you did to him – that poor boy doesn’t deserve to lose Draco as well as you. I warn you, however, Professor Snape, that if you ever do something like this again, or if you ever try to so much as touch my Draco, or if you say one more word to hurt Harry Potter, I’ll have both of them back at Malfoy Manor before you even realize that I’ve made a portkey.”

Narcissa reached out for her portkey, fingers poised above it, and added, “I’ll be visiting them after dinner every day. Don’t even imagine that you can get away with hurting either of those boys again, because I will know of it and then I will make you suffer for it.”

----------

The weekend passed, the days stretching out longer than they ever had now that there was no Occlumency lesson with Harry, no intelligent questions about the Potions reading, no excuse to drag the boy in his office and feed him, no Harry to fill the hours. The silence that surrounded him took on its own language and meanings as it caressed his skin, coursed along his veins, wrapped itself into his bones, entwined itself into his being so deeply that it pained him.

Severus cursed himself for his weakness – why had he been so slow as to allow the dog to maul him? – and cursed the boy for his impulsive good nature. Potter’s genetic tendencies to Gryffindorism had made their presence known with a vengeance, the utter ill-considered nobility of them enough to make Severus want to vomit. Severus should have known better than to expect more than this from any son of James Potter, he told himself late at night as he clutched at an old pillow and ignored the voice that reminded him of the occasions when he’d realized that Harry was not his father.

Severus moved from marking essays to brewing potions for Poppy, and then back to the undiminished pile of essays when the addition of too much dragon bile salts caused the Skelegrow potion to spatter itself over all of his worktables in a spectacular puce explosion, the resultant pattern something like a lacy doily that ate into the countertops until he cast a hasty banishing spell.

‘I will not be sullied by your touch.’ Narcissa’s words echoed through his mind, looping through all of his thoughts like a mobius ribbon. Her pretty face distorted like a caricature of a harpy, the mother protecting her young – and when was it, when on the path that had wound its way through all those empty silent years, that Severus had become the monster from which children needed a defense?

Severus let his quill fall from his hand, the dry ink in the nib leaving no splotches on the untouched essays. He was in no mood to plow through the unmitigated idiocy of the third years’ essays on hellebore. Potter – when Harry was in his third year, Severus was sure that his essay on hellebore would be a concise, elegantly written joy to read. Damn the boy for appealing to Severus’s weakness and damn him for studying potions in his pathetic attempt to make Severus “like” him. Severus did not “like” people, he was not a simpering Hufflepuff and he refused to fawn over the bloody Boy Who Lived.

The light that had sparkled in Harry’s eyes when brewing a potion correctly, the enthusiasm in his shy demeanor for studying them with Severus, his essays that displayed comprehension far beyond the average Muggle-raised wizard – these were all of no consequence. It had been a ploy on the boy’s part to gain sympathy and now that the boy knew all hope of being “liked” by his Potions Master was gone, he’d be like the other excruciatingly incompetent imbeciles. Severus had no reason to look forward to Harry’s third year essay on hellebore, no reason at all. There was no reason why the boy wouldn’t hate him now, no reason why Harry wouldn’t torment him with sloppy imprecise essays.

Severus returned to teach his classes on Monday, wrung out by the feeling of every cell in his body exploding with phantom pain that was worse than the silence of his empty rooms throughout the weekend. He said nothing when Draco and Potter missed his class, he said nothing to Neville Longbottom who exploded his tenth cauldron, he said nothing to Hermione Granger who came to him after class to ask after Harry. All of his elegant and vituperative words, all of his cutting remarks, all of his polysyllabic joy had drained out of him and he wished to be locked into the silence of the dungeons, where the whisper of air on stone spoke its own understanding language.

He made a brief visit to the Slytherin common room in the evening – hoping through the dark feelings that clutched at his chest – but Draco sat there with his textbooks piled before him, Narcissa’s reassuring hand resting on his arm, and neither of them would look at them. Harry wasn’t there.

Harry wasn’t there in the Potions classroom with his detailed correct answers and sound logic, Harry wasn’t there dwarfed in his favorite armchair in the library with stacks of books on his lap, Harry wasn’t there in the Potions lab where he and Severus had once brewed together. Harry wasn’t there in his private quarters where he’d once taken tea with the boy and wondered if he’d ever convince Harry to eat more than chicken broth and toast. Harry wasn’t in his private office where he’d helped the boy struggle through Occlumency and tried to cure him of his stutter.

Severus didn’t dare to walk past Narcissa’s watchful eyes to the first year boys’ dormitory, where Harry was – didn’t dare look at the tiny closet where the boy crouched in on himself, trying to take up no space in the closet because that was what he thought he deserved.

Severus wandered the stone hallways of the school that night, walking through all of the places where Harry wasn’t and paying no heed to the students out after curfew who fled at the noise of his boots on the floor. There was no rhyme, no reason to the feelings that clutched at him – the uneasiness, the shame at being reprimanded by Narcissa, the leaden feeling in his arms and legs when he thought of going through months of Potions classes without Harry there, the ache in his stomach when he wondered if Potter had managed to eat today. No rhyme, no reason to it – Severus after all was the wronged party, it had been Potter who’d tried to kill him and not the other way around. Just as when the boy’s father had …

The Bloody Baron, floating beside him for the length of several corridors now, broke the silence. “It’s no good thinking of the boy’s father,” the ghost said. “You’ve tried that and now you see where it led. You thought you were being clever, Severus, with the pretty revenge that you had planned out against the boy’s parents. That was always your trouble, thinking that you were clever and envisioning yourself as the victim. Even now you’re trying to brush it aside and make yourself out as being the victim. No, don’t say anything. You had your chance to talk and now it’s your turn to listen.”

Severus avoided looking at the ghost’s eyes and motioned for him to continue.

“You’d like to dismiss me because I’m only a ghost, and I may have stopped breathing, but I’ve lived more than you have and I’ve watched more lives than you can imagine. I’ve watched Slytherins grow into the knowledge of what being a Slytherin means more times than I can count, and I know enough to see that you haven’t done it yet. You’d like to think that being Slytherin is about vengeance and receiving what you deserve when the whole world is against you and trying to take it from you. You like to be the martyr, the victim, so that you can feel justification when you take what you want from the people you dislike.”

The moon shone in through the diamond-paned windows and cast eerie shadows through the Bloody Baron. Severus watched him drift along the corridor, his ghostly feet motionless in the air. This was the same helpful ghost who’d warned him about unruly students and acted as a confidant when Dumbledore’s highhandedness had become irritating, when the other Heads of House took every last drop of glory that should have fallen to Slytherin – and yet the Baron was somehow changed tonight, more solemn and eerie and ghostlike than ever before.

“You were justified in your dislike of James Potter, who tormented you – but Lily Evans tried to help you and you never accepted her help. You used it as an excuse to be bitter about her, because if there was one good Gryffindor out there, one Gryffindor who could see past the stereotypes and try to befriend you, your whole worldview would have collapsed in upon itself. You expected their boy to be as Gryffindor as they come and you expected to hate him for his parents’ perceived sins – and when you couldn’t do that, you turned your care for him into a twisted game of revenge. It suited you to feel like the martyr once again, to be the noble misunderstood Slytherin who came and fixed the disaster that was left behind by two reckless, impulsive Gryffindors.”

“They …”

“No, Severus, don’t say anything. Yes, they did die, but they did not get themselves killed as you would put it. Why would they have chosen to leave their son alone in the world? Would they have chosen to leave him in a horrible situation from which only you could rescue him? If they ever looked through the Veil between us and what lies beyond us, do you think that they would feel envy that you were taking care of their son? Did you think that they would despair, that you were taking care of your son where they could not? Do you think they felt rage or misery or anxiety?”

The Baron paused, and Severus took the silence as an indication that he was allowed to speak. “Of course they would. It would be the only way they could feel, the only proper way that anyone could feel if their own flesh and blood were treated the way that Potter had been treated.”

“You’re being ridiculous, Severus, and the lapse in logic is remarkable for someone normally as astute as you are. You don’t know that they feel those emotions and I can tell you that they don’t. They felt glad, they were happy that you were willing to care for him when you did. Now they rejoice because Draco and his mother are taking care of him. James and Lily Potter have reached a place where the negative emotions that feed your overdeveloped sense of vengeance have no existence. They are dead, Severus, and you can have no revenge on them in this life or your next.”

Severus opened his mouth to contradict the Baron’s assertion, but he was silenced once again. “Don’t deny it, for you know nothing of these matters that I can see dimly from here. Go now, Severus, and think on what you have done to the boy. Think about your foolish notion of revenge and tell me where it would take you if you pursued it – twenty years from now, where would you and young Harry be if the only motive that you pursued was revenge? Don’t bury the boy in your thoughts of obligation and duty to your Slytherin students.”

“Think about the boy for himself, on his own merits and flaws – not of the boy who defeated Voldemort, not of your student, not of James and Lily’s son – and think about what you will do to mend what you have broken.” The Baron drifted away backwards, his solemn countenance fixed on Severus while never-quenched rivers of blood ran down his face, until the ghost encountered a wall and passed through it.

----------

On Tuesday, the fourth day since Severus had driven him away in tears, Harry had not returned to take meals in the Great Hall or to attend any of his classes. Severus paced the aisles in his classroom, counting the steps, heedless of the incompetence and mistakes that bubbled and fountained around him in the students’ cauldrons. It was after lunch, during the third year Ravenclaw-Hufflepuff class, just as one of the potions turned an incredible incorrect purple that frothed over the rim of the cauldron and spread across the floor, that the realization came to him: he was walking.

He was walking through the corridors, through his classes, walking on two sound legs and he was alive. Potter, despite the magnitude of the potential disaster, had healed him and not killed him. Severus held his breath in his lungs, held himself motionless, for long seconds. There was no need for anger or vengeance against a boy who might have done harm and who had only helped him.

Dismissing the class, casting a listless Scourgify at the mess on the floor, and sitting down at his desk, the reality of that statement reverberated in his bones. He was alive, healed by Potter, and there was no conceivable way for him to thank the boy for the healing, no way for him to explain rationally to Potter the reasons against using accidental magic on other people, no way for Severus to speak with him at all even to make sure that he was eating. Harry wouldn’t want to see the scary old bat who had ranted at him, degraded him, insulted him in every conceivable way – even if Harry was willing to forgive Severus, Narcissa and Draco would never allow him to see the boy again.

Severus stopped Draco outside the Great Hall before dinner to ask after Harry, to ask if the boy was eating or if he’d emerged from the closet. Draco stared past him, his pale eyes focused on something beyond Severus’s shoulder. “Please,” Severus said, the word feeling thick and foreign on his tongue. “Please, at least tell me something.”

Draco looked down at the floor, never looked at Severus, but he said, “Yes. He’s eating,” and while that wasn’t enough to stop the irregular thump of Severus’s heart or the rattle of the air in his throat, it was enough for now – he would somehow make it be enough for now.

After dinner, Severus watched Draco disappear from the Great Hall – going off to a mother who loved him and a Harry who Severus could not see – and Hermione Granger interrupted his reverie, the trance-like focus on Draco’s departing back with its straight proud lines, his shoulders with their elegant curves, as she came up to the Head Table to speak with him.

“Professor Snape?” she asked. “I – well, if you’ve finished eating …”

Severus looked down at his plate and saw the untouched beef stew, the piles of vegetables that had been put on his plate courtesy of Poppy Pomfrey, the mangled roll that he had torn to shreds, and looked up to nod at her. He dropped the last fragment of bread and dusted the crumbs off his fingers. “Yes, quite finished, thank you.”

She thrust a bundle of scrolls at him. “I took notes for Harry during classes today and yesterday and wrote down all of the assignments. I – we don’t have exactly the same classes, not in the same order I mean, but I thought it might help him to have an extra copy of the notes.”

“Yes, thank you Miss Granger,” Severus said and reached out to take the notes from her, one hand brushing against her tiny slender fingers. He looked at her with something close to horror hitting him in the ribs and abdomen – horror at having touched her, at the possibility of having sullied her with his touch as Narcissa said his touch was unclean, he was a filthy leper, he did not want to contaminate her – the emotions curled around his intestines and ran up his spine in a filthy, oily pool. He quickly dismissed her, turning his attention to his plate to avoid meeting her eyes.

In the Slytherin common room, there was light and light-heartedness and warmth, with Severus once again an outsider to it all. He stood, with his severe posture slumped and awkward, waiting beside the table where Narcissa and Draco played a game of chess. Draco’s normal poise had returned to him and the boy chatted with his mother, their conversation easy and unrestrained – Severus felt it like a blow to his soft unprotected throat, that this unsullied boy could have a carefree conversation with a loving mother while a monster, unclean and unwanted as he was, could have never had such a thing. The rightness of the thought struck him and sunk into him and he turned away from their game to hide the shame he felt at watching something that was never meant for him.

“Yes, Professor Snape?” Narcissa asked after he heard her bring Draco to a decisive checkmate. “Was there something that you wished to say to either of us?”

“I …” he paused. Turning his gaze back to them, he saw that Draco was still refusing to look at him and Narcissa had put one elegant, manicured hand on her son’s arm.

“I have some notes for Harry,” he said at last. “Miss Granger copied her class notes for him and asked that they be given to him. I … may I see him?” His throat muscles froze and the last sentence was hard to force out into the air. He felt as though he was placing all of his vileness, all of his weakness on display before them.

“It is difficult to see a boy who’s locked himself inside a closet and put a ward extending a foot around it,” Narcissa said without a shadow of mercy in her voice.

“I … Draco said that he is eating, though?”

“The house elves bring him food, yes, and the plates are empty when they bring them out, allowing one to assume that he is eating. Since he hasn’t emerged to make use of the facilities, one might doubt that conclusion.”

“Damn it,” Severus said, dropping the handful of scrolls onto the chessboard with a clatter. Several of the pieces toppled over but he paid them no heed. “I have to talk to him,” he said and hurried up the stairs to the boys’ dormitory, only just conscious of Narcissa and Draco in his wake.

Severus stepped over the clutter on the floor, the strewn articles of clothing and textbooks that had been tossed aside by their owners, moving directly to the closet. A foot away from it, he reached a hand out to feel for the wards and felt them tingle across his skin and down into his bones. They vibrated in his fingers and wrist bones, a not-unpleasant hum that pierced the skin and sank into the marrow.

“Harry?” he said. “Harry, can you hear me?”

There was silence for his answer, silence and the hum of the wards across his hand. “Harry, I understand that you’re upset with me but I need to know whether you’re all right or not. Please say something, Harry.”

It was Draco’s hand that he felt on his arm, he realized when he looked down, Draco who was touching him to try to pull him away from the closet.

There was silence from the closet, and Draco was pulling him away from it, but Severus struggled to stay there. A bubble of something close to hysteria rose in his chest, the knowledge that the boy had been locked in the closet for four days without eating. “Harry … Harry, please just say one word. You’re not going back to those Muggles, you’re never going back to them and you don’t deserve to be locked in a closet and you don’t even have to forgive me, Harry, just let me know that you’re alive in there.”

Narcissa added her efforts to Draco’s as they tugged him away from the closet, but before they pulled him from the room, he heard the knock that came from it, the sound of someone knocking on the inside of the door and he knew that it was Harry.

----------

Searching through some of his old texts that evening, Severus found an obscure monitoring ward and cast it on Harry’s dormitory. He was beyond caring about the impropriety of spying on his students – the boil of emotions that had been storming inside him since his outburst, since Narcissa’s reprimand, since the Baron’s chiding, all of the emotions were burbling and storming, eating at his insides like a viscous poison eating through a thin cauldron.

His brain was full of words, Narcissa’s insistence that his touch would sully her, the Bloody Baron labeling him as a martyr by his own choices, the damning echo of his own words to Harry, and while the words swirled and swirled around in his head, he was haunted by the image of Harry, shaking and afraid as he’d seen him last, the image of Draco with tears in his eyes.

He needed to know if Harry was all right, when he emerged from the closet, whether he had been eating, whether he had been crying. The fire had burned down and the dungeon air was cool against his skin, but he wrapped a robe around himself and stood before the bubble he’d charmed to depict the dormitory. It was empty now and there was no sign of life in the closet.

Severus felt as though he’d stood watching the room for hours, waiting for a glimpse of Harry, when the scene finally changed and the room filled with the young Slytherin boys, readying themselves for bed. Narcissa came into the room, once the boys were changed and settled, and sat in a chair between Draco’s bed and Harry’s empty bed. Severus watched as she cast a silencing ward between them and the other beds and produced a book of fairytales from thin air. “Shall I read your favorite, Draco?”

Severus stood and watched the two of them until his legs grew cramped and numb, enthralled in the sight of the golden-haired Narcissa reading to her son. Her smooth clean fingers paused to stroke Draco’s hair after every page they turned and though he felt like the worst kind of voyeur, he could not help but watch them and envy the brightness of the affection that flared between them.

It was Severus who first noticed that the closet door had opened. Narcissa paused in her reading moments later when she noticed it and then resumed as though nothing had changed. Draco, dozing off into dreamland as Narcissa drew near the end of the story and her caress of his hair grew gentle and light, noticed nothing, but both Severus and Narcissa kept their attention focused on the closet door. As Narcissa read of the dragon that was conquered and tamed by the valiant wizard, Severus saw the rim of Harry’s spectacles emerging from the closet, and by the happily ever after, most of Harry’s face – pale and dirty, but thank Salazar, not overly gaunt – was visible.

Narcissa gave Draco’s hair one last caress, and then held the book out toward Harry. “Would you like to choose the next story?” she asked.

Severus’s heartbeat thudded in his ears as he watched Harry emerge from the closet and make his slow, cautious way over to Narcissa. He stopped when he was several feet away from her and she leaned over to extend the book to him. Severus watched Harry’s face as the boy studied the book, watched the cautious light flare in Harry’s eyes.

“Ch-chapter seven, please, lady,” he said, passing the book back to her.

“Of course,” Narcissa said. “Now tell me, do you need to get into bed by yourself, or are you still willing to be tucked in to bed? I wish Draco would let me baby him more often, but he thinks that he’s grown too big for that. I don’t know if sons ever realize that a mother thinks that they are never too old to be babied.”

Harry stared at her, his eyelashes twitching. In that moment, seeing the translucent skin around the boy’s eyes and the way he shook when he was close to Narcissa, Severus longed for a time-turner. If he’d never followed that idiot Quirrell – if he’d never agreed to meet with Albus at that forsaken hour – if he’d never lost his temper and shouted at Harry – the alternate scenarios piled themselves, one atop another, on Severus’s breastbone and he felt as though it was crushed under the weight.

There was a light in Harry’s eyes as he submitted to Narcissa’s mothering, the brief contact of her hand against his shoulder as she pulled the blankets up to his chin, and Severus recognized that light, the hope that Harry had held for him during their earliest meetings. He watched Harry’s tense muscles unclench as Narcissa read the story in a light, soothing tone of voice, watched Harry’s sleepy excitement as she read him the story of the wizards who uncovered the goblin treasure and were welcomed as heroes when they returned to their homeland.

He watched Narcissa’s clean white hand smooth the hair away from Harry’s forehead as he slept, watched Harry’s chest rise and fall with deep, relaxed breaths.

Severus sank to the ground, canceling the spell. His arms went out to clutch his knees to his chest, his shoulders slumped and he shook with the loss of Harry’s trust.

To be continued...


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