“Severus, are you all right?”

Snape started, and turned to stare at Remus Lupin, seated across from him on the other side of the werewolf’s antique oak table, which looked as though it had taken nearly as many slings and arrows as its owner. “Pardon?”

“You seem disturbed,” Remus commented in the low, soothing tone in which he uttered most everything, including Expelliarmus. He toyed with his quill, twirling it between ink-stained fingers, gazing up through his lashes solemnly.

“I am sorry if I am disrupting your concentration,” the Potions Master replied with a sneer.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Severus, that wasn’t what I meant and you know it,” Remus said, frowning. “I’m trying to help.”

“Are you planning on putting a mark at the top of that essay any day soon?”

“You know me – I can be rather indecisive, sometimes...”

Snape sighed, standing from the table and beginning to pace. “Have you taken your potion?”

“Yes-of-bloody-course I’ve taken it.” He smiled, to take the sting off his next words. “Now, you’re making me dizzy. Do sit down.”

“I am anxious.”

“I can see that. About what? Shall I echo you and ask, ‘what has Harry done now?’”

Snape whipped around to glare at Lupin, only to find that the other man had already risen to meet him.

“Honestly, Severus,” he said quietly. “Whatever it is, it’s all right. Stop storming about like a great raven and sit down.” He placed a hand atop the other professor’s shoulder and squeezed.

“I may know how to bring Black back from behind the Veil,” the Potions Master snapped.

There was a small pause. “Come again?” Lupin whispered.

“I was looking at a Potions journal, and something I read sparked a thought. Draught-of-Living-Death amended with a handful of other ingredients coupled with a strong Protection charm supposedly enables one to walk briefly in the Land of the Dead, and return. The author of the article I was reading claimed that this legendary Potion could be made and used, and postulated an ingredients list as well as some Arithmancical theory that fits well behind it. I am convinced it is possible.”

Lupin stumbled slightly back, groping for his chair. For a moment, he stared straight ahead. Then, after a moment, his eyes found Snape’s, and the hope in them was painful to see. “A-are you sure?” he stammered.

“No. Of course I am not,” Snape returned darkly, his usual demeanour regained in the face of Lupin’s query. “I debated whether even to tell you before attempting it.”

“Why?” Lupin demanded. “This is the best news – the best news I’ve had since I found that he wasn’t a murderer!”

“He was anyway,” Snape replied coolly. “He nearly murdered me, with you as his unwitting accomplice – or had you forgotten?”

“You remind me nearly every day. How could I forget?” Lupin demanded bitterly.

For a moment, both wizards were silent.

“I did not wish to inform you because I fear it may not work,” Snape said. “Where would that leave you?”

“Right where I started,” Remus said. “And I’m finding... really... it’s not such a bad place to be,” he said, looking directly at Snape.

The Potions Master blinked in surprise. “Well,” he said.

“That’s a first,” Remus said, smiling his quiet smile. “Severus Snape, Potions Master, at a loss for words!”

Snape felt himself flush. “I most certainly am not–”

“You are!” Remus exclaimed. “If only–” He paused, looking thrown.

The delight drained out of Severus rather suddenly, and he crossed his arms across his chest with a snap of his dark robes. “Oh, please do finish the sentence. If only James could see it. Or Sirius. Or – Peter?”

Remus flushed, too, with anger instead of embarrassment, rising to meet Severus. “How dare you mention that rat to my face...?”

“Peter,” Snape bit off viciously. “Peter, Peter, Peter.”

“James,” Lupin countered, his nose mere inches away from his opponent’s. “James-bloody-will-always-be-better-than-you-Potter...”

There was a small pause where the Potions Master took this in, the sneer on his face wavering. He suddenly snorted. Then, he began to laugh. What would his students say if they could see him arguing with another grown wizard as though they were scarcely out of second year?

“I hate you, you know,” Lupin said. “And d’you know why?”

“I could hazard a guess or two,” Snape replied, smothering his uncharacteristic laughter in the sleeve of his robe.

“But you’d be wrong,” Lupin replied. “It’s because you bring out the absolute worst in me. The things I’ve said to you... sweet Merlin, I haven’t said anything half so nasty to anyone else in my life...”

Snape’s laughter finally stilled. “It’s a quality unique to me that I bring out the worst in everybody,” he informed the startled werewolf. “You are in no way special.”

“You call transforming into a werewolf every full moon run-of-the-mill?” Lupin inquired.

“I deal with Dark Creatures every day,” Snape replied. “They are called first-years,” he added, and almost began to laugh again; then he gulped in a large breath and held it, containing his mirth, which it fell from his features slowly. He realized that he was babbling, and let the breath out in a long, low whoosh. “Draco Malfoy has taken the Mark,” he said darkly. After a moment’s time, his eyes fled to Remus’s. “And you are not to repeat that to anyone!”

Remus shook his head slowly, his eyes softening with sympathy. “I am so sorry,” he replied.

“He isn’t dead,” Snape snapped angrily.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Remus soothed. “I just – well, he’s on the other side now...”

“When you have been a spy as long as I have,” Snape mused, “you come to the very discomfiting realization that there is no my-side-your-side.” He looked up at Lupin. “Instead, people fit into three categories: those I love, those I hate, and those to whom I am indifferent. All three sorts of people exist on both sides,” he added. He laughed again, his harsh bark of a laugh, this time. “I suppose I serve an ideal, then, in the truest sense of the word, in that I have picked a side at all.”

Remus frowned, puzzling that out. “I don’t know that there’s anyone I love on the side of the Dark–”

“But there was,” Snape said mercilessly. “You loved Pettigrew. You loved Black. At different times in your life, you believed them both murderers. Did you stop loving either one?”

At this, Lupin fell silent, hanging his head. After a moment, he shook it. “I suppose that's a bit mad.”

“It only means that your loyalties are to people rather than causes,” Snape said. “As are mine, most fundamentally.”

“A commonality!” Remus exclaimed in faux wonderment. He paused on catching the expression on Snape’s face. “I’m sorry, Severus. What did you say to Draco Malfoy?”

“Not very much as of yet,” Snape revealed. “Madam Pomfrey has deemed him malnourished and sleep-deprived, and would not allow me to wake him for the longest time. It was just as well, as I did not know what to say at first... Albus wants him for a spy, however. I am obviously outliving my usefulness.”

Lupin tilted his head to one side. “I don’t think so,” he said seriously. “You’re a fixture here, Severus.”

“Oh, and what is that?” Snape sneered. “Nothing more than a teacher, wiping up after sniveling brats and containing the pretensions of my House–”

“Nothing could contain the pretensions of your House,” Lupin protested. “But that’s besides the point.” He eyed the other man curiously. “I see you won’t be convinced, though. You’ll see – after the War is long since over, you’ll be here, reducing first-years into quivering puddles of mush. In your dotage,” he tacked on, his expression now suspiciously smooth.

“Oh, but by that time,” Snape mused, “Granger or Potter or both will be teaching here as well. I am not certain I could stand to have either one of them for a colleague. No, I shall live out the remainder of my years in – hmm...”

“A cave,” Lupin suggested mildly.

“A deserted one,” Snape added.

“With bats.”

During school, Snape had often wondered what made Potter and Black hang around quiet, bookish Remus Lupin; and after the infamous trip to the Shrieking Shack in his fourth year, he had supposed that it was the lure of being aware you were friends with a werewolf. He had never thought that the shyest boy of their year, always half-hidden behind some text or other, should have such a dry, witty sense of humor.

His school days reminded him of the last Obscura he had Revealed, one of the greatest humiliations of his life. He had been upside-down and hanging from the branches of a tree, and then he had blacked out.

Or so he had thought, all these years.

Instead, what he had actually done was unwittingly perform his first Obscura, which, until now, had made the rest of the memory considerably fuzzy.

Last night he had seen it in full: Remus tossed his book down in the dirt and shoved James, whose concentration then broke; Lily clambered up the tree during the distraction; and it was Peter of all people who had helped her ease him down. Snape recalled Lily’s voice, high with tension, overwrought and furious to the point of murder. He had never before nor ever since heard that tone from Lily Evans.

If he hadn’t buried that memory, he might’ve been friends with Lily beyond the necessity of completed Potions assignments. He might have had Peter and Remus for friends, if he’d bothered to try; and while perhaps Peter Pettigrew had not turned out to be the most loyal of friends, he certainly found the werewolf’s company... tolerable.

How could he have forgotten the only redeeming episode of the whole debacle? It was as though in ridding himself of the horror of the memory, he had also submerged any good that could have come of it.

Snape felt the urge to apologize for his behaviour to Remus after the boy had risked the friends that meant so much to him – he’d been abominable to him and to Lily, afterwards, treated them as terribly as he had the others – but he wasn’t certain how.

Maybe Lupin didn’t even recall the event in the first place.

When Snape looked up, Remus had returned to grading papers, marking and circling an ‘E’ at the top right corner in red ink. “I’m not normally bothered by these silences of yours,” he commented when he caught Snape looking at him again, “but they are growing in frequency. I understand you have a lot on your mind, but I don’t believe it’s healthy for you of all people to be quiet that long. Sometimes I think that when you’re silent, it only means you have one of your diatribes blasting away internally.”

Severus flinched.

“Do you?” Remus demanded in surprise. “Do you really?” He paused, obviously taken aback by the expression on Severus’s face. “Never mind. Papers are safer,” Remus muttered with affected gravity, turning once more to his stack.

“I’ll take my leave of you, then. There is... something I have yet to do.”

Remus straightened. “Really?” he demanded, looking slightly puzzled. “But it’s midnight.”

“To think that Albus foresaw your talents where I did not,” the Potions Master sneered. “You can mark second-years and tell time.”

“You’re funnier every moment,” Lupin commented dryly. After a moment’s quiet, while Severus shrugged and moved for the door, the werewolf slammed his quill down. “Why did you have to tell me about Sirius now?” he demanded. “I won’t be able to sleep, you know.”

“Then once the three days are over you should be very exhausted, indeed. That is how long I expect to wait for the last of the Potions ingredients to come in. I suggest you sleep now, and obsess later. Preferably while I am not present?” He twitched a derisive eyebrow in Remus’s general direction before departing in a dramatic swirl of robes.

Both times, he had blacked out and woken in his school robes in the morning, stiff in a thousand unnamed places. Now he knew better, and prepared. Still, it seemed to him like he was a man preparing himself for a nightmare – complete with pyjamas, just to add to the sense of the surreal.

Last night, it had been the torture of a Muggle child, and her subsequent rape playing across his consciousness. For all that had gone on before, it was the pain and uncomprehending raw terror in her face when she caught and held his eye that had finally sent him into the bushes to vomit. He had been nineteen.

Nine to go. He could feel them, crowding for his attention like confused first-years tugging at his sleeve in the classroom. He arranged the necessary glass of water near to him: near enough so that he could not knock it away if his arm flailed out, close enough so that all he would have to do would be sit up and lean over if he needed it. Sometimes, especially lately, the dreams left him parched beyond all comprehension, and he had to gulp an entire glass of water before he began to once more feel human.

His breathing was already quickening, and he cursed himself for weakness.

“Revealeo!”

The pain came, stabbing sharp, the kind that ignored the fact that certain nerve endings and helpless ways of thinking had long been burned out of him; it sank into his soul, a scalpel cutting the cancers away from him.

He gasped as the darkness lifted free of him, and he identified the Obscura:

He was afraid that Potter would die.

When? He’s nearly died so very many times...

Snape, panting, sweat-covered, examined the memory. Why?

Potter was hurt, in pain. It was very bad. Severus could almost hear the screaming. No – no, he’d never heard Harry scream like that. Had he?

Sweet Merlin, it was just the way the little girl had screamed. With a horror so great that it was obvious she was no longer screaming for help – just to let some of the pain leave her through her voice.

Snape stiffened in his bed, eyes narrowing. From the summer – it has to be, drifted through his thoughts, but he shoved that impatiently aside. Could it be that an Obscura had actually served to protect this memory? Keep it safe? The tissue around tumors were often engineered to protect the rest of the body from the harm they contained... perhaps while his Obscura had protected him, it had also protected the memory nestled within it...

He closed his eyes, forced himself to listen closely to the sound, the sound of Harry’s terrified screams...

...and in mere moments he was transported to the voice, colors bleeding together to make a picture, rough wool covering his arms as he –

As he carried Harry Potter, who was screaming loudly enough to wake the dead. He was transferring him from one cot to another, and perhaps time was of the essence, or he would have used Mobilicorpus?

His intent drifted back to him through time, sluggish as old molasses but definite and reliable: he was trying to keep Harry from hurting himself, and Mobilicorpus wouldn't do the job. As Snape watched, nearly an outside observer to himself, he saw his own form place Harry down on – where? Was that in his own chambers? There was someone else in the room...

Albus. Of course.

Snape caught Harry’s arms and held them. “Petrificus –”

“We cannot risk it!” Albus exclaimed. “Harry must be able to fight him!”

Snape blinked in his bed as he felt the rush of remembered fury that had gripped him.

“He is not fighting! He is dying! I don’t see how keeping him from–” – a breathless moment, where one of Harry’s hands slipped free and raked at his pale skin, drawing blood, gave him pause. “He cannot do this! He is a child, and a hopeless failure at Occlumency besides!” he shouted, as Albus remained sad but impassive. “The Dark Lord will tear him to pieces and there will be nothing left. What will become of your golden child then, Albus?” He was bruising Potter’s wrists, and didn’t care. It had occurred to him in a stunning and almost painful rush to wonder if anyone cared for Harry Potter very much at all. Here the boy was, dying, and all Albus could do was shake his head in sorrow, as if he were some sort of blasted phoenix pushing its chick out of the nest?

The unfamiliar feeling of solidarity with Potter caused him to growl and glare at the Headmaster. “If you are unwilling to help, you may as well depart.”

There was precious little time to begin with, and now he had spent it arguing. He could have used the help of a student, or some sympathetic faculty, but he and Albus were the only ones who had elected to stay over the summer holidays, and the Headmaster was rather obviously useless.

Snape stared briefly at Harry, still screaming through a ravaged throat, before shaking himself into action. He transfigured a throw pillow into rope and bound the teenager there so that he could visit his Potions stores, secure in the knowledge that the boy could not do himself any more damage.

He moved to the Potions cabinet, forcing himself into calm. A mistake now could be deadly. He claimed a double-dose of Calming Draught and, on second thought, downed the last of the bottle himself before arriving once more at Harry’s side.

He immediately regretted his selfishness when an abrupt motion of Harry’s knocked the glass from his hand with a crash. The phial could be repaired, but there was no gathering the spilled potion.

“Damn it, Potter!” he shouted, fear beginning to eat away at his composure. “If you’ve ever listened to me, listen now! Blank your mind, Potter! Occlude!” Snape knew that he could do it, could slam a powerful barrier between the Dark Lord and the boy... but the Serpent-eyed bastard would know it, would recognize him, his mental signature, and then the Order would no longer have its spy...

While he puzzled, the boy’s screams continued unabated, although the rattle as Harry gasped for breath signaled that he would not be screaming for very much longer.

“Potter!” he shouted, but it was no good; Harry jolted, as though moved by the sound of a cry from a faraway room, but he was too absorbed, too ensconced in his own private pain to be very aware of his surroundings.

“Potter!” he said, shaking the boy for emphasis. “Harry! Do you know where you are?.! Do you know who I am?”

“Professor?” Harry managed, lids flickering to reveal a slit of feverish green eyes.

“Good,” Snape praised. “Can you hear me? Can you try to listen?”

Harry moaned, then screamed afresh, screamed unabated until he actually began to frighten Severus. The boy turned on his side and coughed, falling onto his back the moment he could get air.

He’d left the pillow damp with blood.

At that moment he was certain Harry Potter would die. In that moment, he was certain he had chosen the wrong side after all. It was the moment he knew for a fact that the fairy-tale nonsense of the Boy Hero who would save the Wizarding World was just that: a fairy tale.

It all rushed upon him like he’d frozen himself from the inside out, and he rapidly performed an Obscura because he could not afford such a wasteful imprudence as a panic attack.

“None of this foolishness, boy! You will listen!”

It seemed to work. Harry nodded jerkily, bit back the beginnings of a scream, only allowing it to escape him when the pain caused him to lose control utterly. Snape pressed his hands into the boy’s shoulders, hoping the real pain would bring Harry to the here and now.

“Empty your mind of all emotion! Fear, anger – none of it matters! There is only pain and absence of pain. Do you understand?”

When Harry didn’t respond, Snape increased the pressure on Harry’s shoulders, digging his nails in until the boy cried out.

“Do you understand?.!”

Harry nodded again, and the Potions Master watched him wrestle for the calm necessary for Occlumency, watched his features empty of all fear.

“Good,” Snape praised. “Now. Think of what protects you, Potter. What shelters you. And bring it between yourself and his reach.”

Harry gasped, and Snape realized the boy was in no state to understand his words, to appreciate their meaning.

“Your Patronus!” he cried through clenched teeth as Harry let out another blood-curdling scream, bringing his hands up to claw at his scar; the ropes... the ropes had disappeared, transfigured back into a dark blue throw pillow and tossed across the room, courtesy Harry’s thrashing...

Snape caught at his wrists. “Your Patronus, Potter! NOW!”

Harry let out one, final scream, and then a beam of light blasted out of his mouth, as though it was the scream itself that had brought it into being...

A corporeal Patronus. Wandless. Wordless. It was perhaps the most impressive bit of magic Snape had ever seen – but then, it had been called into being during what was undoubtedly one of the most traumatic experiences of Harry’s life...

The magnificent stag could barely turn about in Snape’s spare room; it ducked its head and turned to face Harry, then pawed the nonexistent earth with its hoof, like a bull preparing to charge... Snape gasped as he realized where the animal was headed and interposed his body between it and Harry Potter, raising his wand...

The apparition gave pause, eyeing him with a hint of incredulous sarcasm that he could swear looked familiar.

Directed, focussed menace now emanated from the Patronus as it bared its teeth at him, its expression informing Severus in no uncertain terms just what would happen to him if he did not rather quickly move out of the way.

The stag reared, sounding a trumpet-like note of challenge, then charged Harry, leaping past Severus, over the boy’s sickbed and passing through his head – no, his scar, disappearing into its depths. With a flash of light and a noise like a clap of thunder, it was gone. The room echoed with dazzling afterimages.

Severus realized, in the ringing silence that followed, that Harry had stopped screaming. In the quiet, Severus observed that Harry had slipped quietly into shock, that his work was far from done, that Voldemort had been unceremoniously shoved from the boy’s mind.

That Harry Potter had finally learned Occlumency.

Completely, thank Merlin, on his own.