The cherry blossoms thud against the roof like raindrops falling, a methodical plop-plop-plop that lasts through the night and keeps Harry awake. He turns and turns, flopping around gracelessly in the tangle of sheets on his bed, before he gives it up as a lost cause. Harry wraps a light quilt around his shoulders to ward off the lingering cold drafts and sits in the window seat.

The moon is full and the fallen cherry blossoms gleam in the eerie pale light. Harry closes his eyes at the thought of Remus’s ghost running through the moonlight, kicking up puffs of cherry blossoms with his huge rough wolf feet, wagging his tail and chasing after Padfoot. Eyes closed, Harry can almost see them, can almost feel the stubble on Sirius’s chin scratching against his face as he was pulled into his godfather’s embrace. He can almost hear Remus’s comforting voice, can almost taste the tea that they once drank together.

The wind rustles the tree branches, pushes a wave of cold through the window pane. There’s a renewed shower of falling cherry blossoms thudding against the room and with his eyes closed, Harry can imagine the smell of them, thick and luscious. If he went out into the moonlight, if he ran through the orchard at night, if he rolled in the piles of fallen cherry blossoms, he’d be able to float in the aroma, soaking it in through his pores until he became airborne.

With his eyes still closed, Harry can almost hear Ron’s voice, can almost hear his best friend asking him if he wants to go flying, challenging him to a game of Quidditch or a race in the moonlight. His memory of Hermione joins in and he can almost see her put aside her knitting to curl her fingers around Ron’s fingers, can almost hear her reminders of homework and exams. Harry scrunches his face against the impending headache and tries to pretend that he’s in the Gryffindor common room once again, tries to hear the light-hearted chatter, the twin’s outrageous pranks, Neville’s soft murmurs, Seamus’s rough jokes. For an instant, he can imagine himself there, but the thud of the blossoms against the roof brings him back to the present, away from the remembered voices and remembered laughter.

There’s a deep, mellow sound downstairs, the grandfather clock chiming midnight. The steady peals echo Harry’s heartbeats, vibrate through his bones. He leans against the window, against the cold air that’s seeping through it, and draws the quilt more tightly around himself. The beat continues, but now that the clock has fallen silent, it’s the sound of steady careful footsteps in the hallway. The noise stops, and Harry hears the door open.

“Potter.” The voice is as deep, as beautiful as ever, the brusque hatred that it conveys a reassuring constant. Harry doesn’t look up at Snape. Instead, he closes his eyes and he can almost hear that voice, silky and dripping with malice, lecturing in class, attacking his friends, insulting him. Harry clings to even this memory, sinks into it and wishes away reality.

“Why aren’t you sleeping, Potter?”

Harry scrunches his eyes closed, pretends that Snape has screamed at him for his incompetence, pretends that he doesn’t hear a hint of concern in Snape’s dark tones.

With a flick of Snape’s wand, the window seat is lengthened and Harry almost loses his balance. Snape sits at the opposite end of it, stares at him. Harry closes his eyes against Snape’s gaze, against Snape’s Legilimency.

The cherry blossoms thud against the roof, but at last Snape breaks the silence between them. “The young – they always think that they have invented suffering, that no one has ever felt such deep and poignant emotions. No one else has grieved or loved or hated. It’s when a few years have passed and they’ve acquired some perspective that the emotions are dulled, less intense.”

“What would you know about it?” Harry asks. “You’re stuck in this house just as I am.”

“I’m not determined to relive every memory, Potter. Albus gave us this refuge to provide us with time to heal, time to recover from our losses. It’s a poor tribute that you pay to his memory, rejecting his gift in this way.”

“I’m not.” Harry’s words are choked in his throat, trying to escape past the sudden huge lump there.

Snape leans to bridge the distance between them, offers Harry a small glass vial and withdraws without touching Harry once. “Drink the potion and go to sleep, Potter."

There’s something comforting about Snape’s curt tone of voice and all the words that he leaves unspoken. There are no platitudes, no empty wishes, there’s no pretense that Snape, who hated Harry’s friends, shares his grief.

------

Pinching the bridge of his nose and massaging his temples in deft semicircles is not enough to relieve the painful headache, and at length Severus takes a pain relief potion from the cupboard. His stock is half-depleted already, and another late night brewing potions will do nothing but aggravate the problem – Severus’s migraines born of sleep deprivation, the children’s due to his short-fused temper.

The birds are twittering in that infernal orchard, Albus’s frilly pink trees a virtual haven for the feathered pests. Severus makes a note to have the house elves do something about the birds, and his irritation chases away the last of his headache. His quill trembles in his hand and he sets it down to massage his forearm.

It’s another reminder of the war – his ruined muscles which ensure that he will never again brew a potion to any exacting standard, the shaking which has transformed his elegant penmanship into an illegible scrawl. The war was cruel to them all, to Severus no less than to the children under his care – but Albus hadn’t wanted Severus to think of himself and his own losses, had he?

Severus pushes the bitterness, the thoughts that are frayed at the edges from frequent re-use, the resentment of Albus’s overbearing kindness, all of it into a dark locked cupboard in the depths of his mind. It’s one of the advantages to Occlumency, this convenient compartmentalization – Severus would have surely gone mad within the first two weeks in this makeshift orphanage without it. The brats have never realized the extent to which their squawking and whining has infuriated him. He hasn’t strangled a single one of them yet, and surely even Albus, with his impossible expectations, would have been proud of him.

Severus wrenches himself from that train of thought again. He will not think of Albus – Albus who must have known that this was the strictest penance that Severus could perform. A parole sentence here, tucked away from the world in this madhouse and nursing the children scarred by the war back to health – it may have been Albus’s idea of redemption, but it was Severus’s idea of damnation. No other sentence that the old man could have arranged, not even the Dementors in Azkaban, could remind him so thoroughly, so constantly, that he’d sacrificed everything when he’d sacrificed Albus’s life.

The youngest Creevey brat comes whimpering down the stairs, and Severus reigns in his temper. “What is it?”

The brat only continues to whimper, clutching at the camera he carries everywhere. His fingers stroke along the camera strap as though he expects to follow the length of it to end in touching his brother. Again and again, he fails to find Colin, and he tries again and again.

Severus suppresses a grimace at the boy’s sniveling and wipes away the drool with a clean handkerchief, which he then banishes so that the house elves can deal with it. “What is it?”

“T-T-They,” Creevey says, and Severus conjures another handkerchief to wipe away the drool. “T-T-They fight.”

Severus closes his eyes and voices a silent prayer to Albus’s spirit. Following the old man’s orders should never have earned him this fate.

It’s Draco and Pansy again – the one a spoiled brat who hasn’t lost his sense of entitlement, hasn’t realized that his ill-considered actions have cost him all hope of a future, and the other a shrewish chit clawing for supremacy among the Slytherins in this madhouse. Neither of them have any idea of their losses. Draco thinks that his escape from here and re-entry into the wizarding world will be heralded with admiration and joy – he has no idea how far he’s fallen, how much the attempted murder of Dumbledore has condemned him. Pansy’s lost her good looks and a well-placed Severing Charm cost her her voice, but she hides behind her glamours and her postures and still thinks that it means something to be queen of Slytherin.

Severus can’t be bothered to disillusion them, doesn’t want to deal with the repercussions of hitting them with an icy dose of reality, but their fighting disturbs the other children again and again, until he’s sorely tempted to make them see the truth.

He pulls the two of them apart with a quick Mobilicorpus and treats them with his patented annoyed glare. They remember it well from his days as their Head of House and slink off to his office to wait for him. He lets them stew and takes the time to soothe the other children. It wouldn’t do to have the little monsters overexcited and unable to sleep.

Lavender Brown, who bursts into tears at the slightest hint of violence, needs a calming potion, but Severus placates the Creevey boy and the young Cho Chang – irreversibly deaged to be three years old by a crossfire of spells during the final battle – with sweets and the promise of a story at bedtime.

In the end, it’s only Potter who he has to deal with, and the boy is sitting on the ground, curled up like a squirrel in its winter home. He isn’t sobbing or drooling, but Severus has become accustomed to such small mercies when it comes to Potter. The boy’s sunk far enough in his depression that he can’t be arsed to tie his own shoelaces, but his mental state is more adult and sane than the others.

Severus considers leaving the boy, but his promise to Albus drags him to kneel in the dirt next to Potter and place a cautious hand on Potter’s shoulder. The boy doesn’t react, and Severus shakes him a little. “Potter?”

The boy starts and jerks away from Severus. “It – It wasn’t – I didn’t mean it, I swear, I didn’t know what it would do. You have to believe me, Professor, I didn’t know, I didn’t know.”

Severus puts a hand on Potter’s other shoulder and steadies the jerking, tearful boy. “Calm down, Potter. What are you talking about?”

“No, Professor, I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing special about my potions book, nothing special at all. I didn’t know what it would do, I didn’t know, I didn’t, I didn’t.”

Following the boy’s gaze, Severus sees the small patch of blood on the ground. It isn’t much – Pansy had scratched Draco’s face with those manicured talons of hers – but it’s obviously distressing Potter. Severus cleans it up with a Scourgify and drags Potter to his feet. “It’s all right, Potter. Go back inside now.”

------

The cherry blossoms have been pelted from their branches, victims of the heavy rain that kept Harry wide awake last night. Looking out the window, he shudders to see them – the glare of the sunlight on the deep pink petals looks almost like the sheen of fresh blood.

Nausea roils Harry’s stomach and he clutches his knees to his chest, curls around his stomach in an attempt to calm it. The blood stretches all around him, pools of it with a sickly, heart-wrenching odor, and the pools of blood serve as reflecting pools for the light of curses cast in battle. The green of Avada Kedavra shines off the blood, sparkles and gleams.

Harry squeezes his eyes shut, wills the memory away. He doesn’t want to remember this, doesn’t want to feel the battle again, doesn’t want to hear the shouting and the curses and the screaming, doesn’t want to see the corpses piled high.

It is too much, it’s too much for Harry to remember, and he turns away from the window to vomit. A house elf is there with a pop, vanishing the wave of its bony hand.

Dobby, the house elf looks like Dobby, with strange ears and bulging green eyes. Dobby’s corpse joins the pile of corpses that haunts Harry’s dreams and waking hours, and it’s small and lonely-looking, a child-sized corpse among all of the larger ones. Harry clutches his knees to his chest and begins to keen, which sends the elf away with a startled-sounding pop.

The elf’s departure doesn’t matter – this house elf is not Dobby, has no ridiculous socks and that half-maddening eagerness to please, that willingness to hurt himself to save Harry. This house elf didn’t try to save Harry from the monster in the Chamber of Secrets, didn’t give Harry a pair of mismatched socks for Christmas, didn’t bring Harry Gillyweed when he needed it.

Strong hands are shaking Harry, jostling him out of the memory, and Harry knows it’s Snape without looking up at him. It’s Snape, who was angry about the stolen Gillyweed, and Harry stutters out an apology.

“Foolish, foolish boy,” Snape says and forces a potion into Harry’s mouth. It’s slimy and tastes of earthworms and beetles, but Harry recognizes it as a calming potion, Snape’s favorite remedy, and he swallows. There’s a sudden moment of clarity, the panic dropping away from Harry’s mind. The light from the window etches out the shadows that have gathered in Snape’s wrinkles, highlights the crow’s feet around his eyes.

The clarity is enough for Harry to answer Snape’s impatient question, to tell him that it was Dobby’s death that had made him so distraught. Snape gives him a light shake and pulls him from the window seat.

Harry stubs his toe on the stairs, and Snape catches him, keeps him from falling down them face-first. He’s dragged out to the orchard. The fallen petals still look like blood and Harry turns his face aside, focuses on Snape’s neutral black sleeve. “No blood, no blood, no blood,” he repeats over and over, stopping only when Snape shakes him.

“Dobby,” Snape calls, and then the little house elf is there with a pop. He’s wearing three hats and Harry jabs his fingernails into his palms at the sight of Hermione’s knitting. The soft click-click-click of her knitting needles in rhythmic counterpoint to the crackling of the fire, the soft, messy balls of yarn that were scattered around the Gryffindor common room, the parchments and clutter left hiding her knitting to trick the house elves – she’ll never knit again, Harry knows, and he digs his fingernails deeper into his palms.

Dobby’s wiry arms are flung around Harry’s knees and the elf presses his cheek against Harry’s leg. “Dobby is ever so happy to be doing anything for the great Harry Potter, anything at all.”

Harry’s throat is choked with words and Snape answers for him. “Mr. Potter just wanted to make sure that you were well, Dobby. You can go back to your gardening now.”

“Mr. Harry Potter sir is a great wizard to be inquiring after the likes of Dobby, a great wizard indeed, Dobby will never know how to thank such a great wizard for saving the poor house elves from the evil reign of He Who Must Not Be Named.”

“That will be enough, Dobby. Go back to your garden,” Snape says, curt as ever, but he’s brought Harry here, he’s diminished the pile of corpses by one.

Weak-kneed with the reprieve, with Snape’s off-handed kindness, Harry doesn’t protest when Snape guides him back into the house and deposits him on the window seat looking out on the orchard full of blood. “Do try to behave, Potter, if it isn’t genetically impossible for you to do so.”

------

The nightly trips to give Potter a sleeping potion are worth it, Severus judges. The boy’s nervous twitching has subsided a little and he’s put on weight now that he isn’t vomiting up two meals out of three. Another counterclockwise stir, and Severus counts to three until the potion turns purple. With Potter calmer, the other children are easier to manage – either the boy, with his thrice-blasted natural leadership skills, exerts a steadying influence on them, or else it’s that much easier to put up with the whining and drooling when Severus isn’t forced to deal with Potter’s psychoses and sulks. Either way, the missed five minutes of sleep are well worth it.

He’d sent the children out to “play” in the orchard today under the supervision of the house elves while he caught up on the potions they needed. He didn’t imagine that much actual playing would occur, unless the rivalry between Draco and Pansy counted, but the sunshine and fresh air tended to keep the children entertained.

Shaky, uncertain, his mind now failing him and refusing to provide the exact details for each potion – and this final betrayal of his body is the worst – Severus brews by the book like some witless, incompetent first year. He’s forced to banish the contents of three cauldrons when his shaking causes him to add too much of an ingredient.

Severus runs a finger along the rim of his cooling cauldron. The title may be permanent, but he knows that he’ll never be a true Potions Master again, and somehow the loss of his potions is harder than anything else that was taken from him by this war. He’d never truly had his freedom, never had a clean reputation, never had anything but his potions and Albus’s mentorship.

The last he still has, in an indirect way – he has Albus’s old house and the children whose care was Albus’s last command to him, Albus’s last wish for Severus uncovered in the will that had finally exonerated Severus of his murder, a wish turned into a command by the vengeful Wizengamot. The last he still has, and he curses Albus for condemning him to this – he’d rather have Albus’s mentorship directly, he’d rather have Albus still alive.

The first, he’s lost forever and – he banishes another mismade potion – Severus knows that he should stop clinging to it. All of these potions can be obtained by owl order in less time and with the amount of ingredients he wastes, at a fraction of the cost.

He summons a house elf to ladle the purple sleeping potion into single dose vials – this potion, at least, Severus could make with one hand in his sleep, he’d made it so many times during the war. The cheeky house elf reminds him of lunch time, but Severus is too weary to do more than snap at it for its impertinence. The elf continues bottling the potion without a flinch and Severus knows that he’s lost his edge, lost his acid tongue, yet another casualty of the war and this mad scheme that Albus had devised.

There’s the patter of feet upstairs, audible through the ceiling, and Severus turns away from the piles of roughly chopped ingredients without banishing them. He’ll continue to brew the potions until his muscles spasm out completely, continue to cling to his resentment of Albus for this situation – inertia propels him through the comfortable routines, and that’s all Severus asks for now.

Lunch is bedlam, as usual. Each house elf minds a child – even Potter needs one, as Severus learned in the first two weeks. The boy didn’t eat at all if he wasn’t forced to eat, didn’t even do his food the courtesy of fidgeting with his fork, but sat staring into space as though he were prepared to divine the mysteries of the universe from his string beans.

The other children are easier to manage – they’re prone to spills and food fights and tantrums, even the older ones. The house elves clean the messes as fast as they form and ensure that each of the brats eats enough, and beyond that all that Severus has to do is end any of the fights that arise.

These, too, are comfortable routines – sending Chang back to her chair before Creevey can pull her pigtails in retaliation for her attack on his camera, quelling Draco’s snide remarks with a pointed look, removing Pansy’s hand from Potter’s arm when she repeats her tired old flirtations. Severus snatches quick bites of his own meal standing up, poised to intervene when necessary. It isn’t what he’d envisioned for his life after the war, if he’d envisioned anything beyond a shallow unmarked grave, but the routine is enough to keep him going through the day.

The afternoon brings another one of Potter’s crises, this one prompted by the portrait in the sitting room. Other than her dark hair and shrill voice, the woman in the portrait bears no resemblance to the mutt’s mother, but the sound of her scolding one of the other children for running in the house is enough to send Potter into a panic attack over the loss of his dead godfather.

Grasping the boy’s shoulders, Severus shakes him until he stops muttering about corpses and curse-light. Potter is caught by the delusion and addresses him by Black’s name, a sure sign that the fit has progressed too far. Severus administers a calming potion and sends the brat to bed – a nap at this hour will have him missing the lemon scones that the house elves make for tea, but Potter isn’t capable of appreciating food or responding to conversation when he’s struck by these attacks.

Potter’s panic attacks have become more frequent rather than less ever since Severus started administering the sleeping potion every night. It isn’t one of the formulations that suppresses all dreams, but it might do the boy some good to spend a few nights without the potion every week. There’s little chance that Potter can bring himself to a natural, restful sleep without the aid of a potion, but Severus can see no harm in trying. Albus would have known what to do, known how to reassure the boy and break him out of this self-destructive cycle, would have offered Potter a lemon drop and made the world right with just one candy, but Severus isn’t Albus and isn’t capable of fixing Potter’s problems.

Settling under one of the cherry trees in the leafy green-gold patterns made by its shadow, Severus watches the children, brooding. He isn’t capable of fixing their problems, as Albus would have been – is his role here anything more than a temporary bandage? He curses Albus again for his impossible expectations, for thinking that Severus was capable of fixing any of the mistakes that have been made. This is a cage, a cherry tree-ringed cage provided with every comfort, but a cage where Severus is reminded constantly of his failings, where he must daily watch a microcosm of the world where his faults repeat and repeat.

Chang chases Creevey around the orchard with a toy broomstick grasped in one hand, Draco darts venomous glares at Pansy, and Severus closes his eyes, shuts out the image of all his failures.

------

Harry takes refuge in the sunlit orchard – with all of the blood washed away, it’s a safe haven with no bad memories. He’s never been in an orchard before, never seen anyone die in an orchard before, he’s quite safe here. He steers his thoughts away from trees and spiders and flying cars, tries hard not to think about Ron and the amazing flight to Hogwarts, the cruel reception that they were given by Snape. He tries to focus on the orchard rather than the trees – it’s a trick that Snape taught him late one night when the supply of sleeping potion had been gone.

There’s always something to focus on that has no memories attached to it, and Harry stares at the branches of the cherry trees. The branches bend down earth-ward, weighted by the unripe cherries that sway in the breeze. There will be cherry preserves and cherry pie and cherries with whipped cream for tea later in the season, and perhaps if the house elves are very busy, they’ll ask Harry to help them harvest the cherries. He’s never picked cherries before, never climbed the swaying boughs of a cherry tree.

Snape settles on the ground next to Harry, a familiar dark shadow in the orchard now. “A Knut for your thoughts?” Snape asks, and because Harry is focused on the cherry trees, because he isn’t caught in a memory, he notices that the derision and anger are gone from Snape’s tone of voice. There’s no malice in the question, there’s no sneer on Snape’s face.

“I was wondering if the house elves would let me help them pick the cherries when they’re ripe. I’ve never picked cherries before.”

“Good,” Snape says. “Focus on things like that, things that you’ve never done before.”

“I should have liked it better, though, if I could have gone cherry picking with Ron and Hermione,” Harry says. “Perhaps Ron would have been caught up in the romance of the orchard and he would have swept Hermione off her feet and proposed to her – only I don’t suppose he ever can now, because I saw it, you know, the ring. They took the ring off her finger, and her corpse was in the pile with the other bodies, all of them stiff and cold, and they took the ring off because …”

Snape’s hands are on his shoulders, but Harry doesn’t want to stop. There’s a relief in saying it aloud, in telling Snape his memories instead of keeping them locked up in his mind. “They took the ring off because she isn’t engaged to Ron anymore, she’s dead and he’s dead, both of them were just lying in the pile with the other bodies. It was an Avada Kedavra that killed Hermione, I could tell because the green light of the curse was still shining in her eyes.”

Snape has taken his hands off of Harry’s shoulders and put them on his back, pulling him into an awkward hug. There’s wetness running down Harry’s face and he isn’t sure if it’s tears, doesn’t know why Snape is running his thumb under his eyes and smoothing the moisture away.

“It was something else that got Ron, it mangled his torso something awful, but there was something peaceful in his eyes, still. He didn’t look as though he was angry with me, but he should have been. I failed him, I let him die, and now he’ll never marry Hermione. We’ll never play Quidditch together again, never laugh at the twin’s jokes, never pick cherries together, never never never.”

Harry dips into hysteria, but Snape is there to shake him out of it. Snape’s hands are on his shoulders again, shaking him, the tentative embrace gone. The wetness down Harry’s cheeks has gone out of control and Snape conjures a handkerchief to wipe his face. “I should have known that you’d start producing disgusting bodily fluids just like the other monsters here,” Snape says. “Here, blow your nose.”

The hysteria dries up, gone as quickly as the tears, but Snape’s hands remain on his shoulders, and Harry feels steadier now, more centered, as though the memories that had been keeping him off balance and jerky had been purged.

It isn’t enough to make him smile – maybe it will never be enough, maybe Ron and Hermione and the others will be gone, maybe the pile of corpses will always haunt Harry’s dreams – but when Snape wipes away the last of Harry’s tears and offers to pick cherries with him when they are ripe, the corners of Harry’s mouth twitch upwards.