Harry didn't know quite what Snape had in mind until they reached the kitchen and he saw the pensieve sitting in the middle of the table. It hadn't been there, earlier. Harry supposed that Snape had brought it through the Floo again, which meant that he'd intended for them to practice Occlumency. But Snape had never arrived in Grimmauld Place before nightfall, before.

"How come you're here so early?"

"We can dissect my schedule after you know everything, Mr Potter," Snape sneered, yanking his wand from inside his robes and jabbing it to his temple. He drew out a silvery strand that roiled and twisted under its own weight, then sank heavily toward the floor as it drifted towards the pensieve. With a furious motion of his wand, Snape propelled it into the stone receptacle.

Harry backed up a step. He didn't want to see last night's Death Eater meeting. He hadn't even wanted to hear about it, not the way Snape thought, anyway. He'd just wanted to be sure he knew what his teacher thought of Voldemort's . . . methods.

"Get back here!" Snape barked, even as he withdrew another heavy strand from his mind.

Harry didn't. "This isn't necessary, Professor," he argued, trying for a tone that might calm the man down.

"I beg to differ, after your insistence upstairs that you must know everything about the Dark Lord!"

"All right, all right!" Harry shouted, wrapping his arms around himself. "That was misdirection, all right? Or lying, whatever you want to call it! I didn't want to know all that, those things you told me! I just wanted to know if I could trust you!"

"You would have made a dreadful Slytherin," Snape sneered, still pouring memories into the pensieve. Harry sort of shuddered. "Trust! It matters so much to you that you feel you have every right to trample my clear request to not discuss last night's festivities, does it? Then so be it, as I said. You will watch the meeting, Mr Potter. You will know not to question me again!"

"Look," Harry tried. "You're angry. I'd be angry too, if I were you. I'm sorry I asked, and I'm sorry I doubted you. I just . . . Look, it's hard for me, all right? I . . . like you, now. Well, most of the time, anyway. And I couldn't just split my feelings up into neat little slices where one part of me ignores what the other parts know, and I didn't want things to change and go back to how they were--

"Stop babbling and look in the pensieve!"

"No!"

Snape took a step towards him, his teeth clicked together as he snarled in clear intent, "Look in the pensieve, Mr Potter, or I will shove you in!"

When Harry didn't move, Snape snaked out a hand, wrapped his fingers around the back of his neck, and began to thrust him towards the edge of the kitchen table.

Harry struggled, but since he didn't have much chance against a grown man, he did the only thing he could think to do, in the circumstances. "Remus!" he screamed, his lungs close to bursting with the force of the yell. "Remus! REMUS!!! REEEEEMUS!!!!!"

Snape gave a harsh laugh and tightened his fingers. "Your beloved werewolf is not here. He went to get you ice cream. He thinks you are a little child who needs protecting. But you're not, are you? You're old enough to challenge me. You're old enough to know everything."

As Snape began to remorselessly shove him towards the pensieve again, Harry screamed, desperate, "I don't want to violate you, not again!"

At that, the Potions Master let him go, releasing him so suddenly and unexpectedly that Harry half-stumbled across the floor, knocking into the table. The liquid in the pensieve sloshed towards the rim, but didn't spill.

Unable to really believe Snape had relented, Harry froze in place and cast a wary glance over at his teacher.

Snape still looked furious, but now, he also looked controlled. Yanking out a chair, he seated himself on the far side of the pensieve, and glared at Harry. The glare quickly became a scowl. "You can wait for Remus and your ice cream sundae," he sneered, "or you can prove yourself an adult and finish what you started."

Harry pulled out a chair, too, and flopped into it, feeling sick with relief. "How does it make me an adult to look in that again? I told you, I don't want to violate you!"

"You violated me already, upstairs," Snape returned in a voice coated with ice. "You demanded my version of events, though you knew I preferred not to speak of such things. Not to mention, you made it clear you didn't trust what I'd said."

"I thought you didn't care about trust!"

"I don't," Snape snapped, curling his fingers and looking away. "Unfortunately for me, your trust is necessary to fight the Dark Lord effectively. We failed last year, Mr Potter. You doubted my intentions, my very allegiances, and Sirius Black died! Now the Order has one fewer member to carry on the fight. I will not allow that to happen again!"

"I do trust you, all right?" Harry was starting to feel even more desperate than he had when Snape was threatening to plunge him into the memories by force.

"You don't," Snape returned in that cold, hard voice he hated, his gaze seeking Harry's again. "You can't. It was evident upstairs. You need to see for yourself."

All true, though Harry was ashamed by then that he hadn't had more faith in Snape.

"Are you a man or a child?" Snape taunted.

Without another word, Harry yanked the pensieve towards him, leaned his face down into it, and felt himself sucked into a scene of carnage and horror far worse than anything he'd ever imagined could exist.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Snape's hand was on his neck again, though this time he had his grip on the collar of Harry's shirt, and was pulling him backwards. Disoriented, still caught up in the cyclic terror whirling in the pensieve, Harry fought, but Snape was stronger, and jerked him free.

"Drink," he ordered, shoving the pensieve out of the way and slamming down a glass of something clear yet viscous.

Harry quaffed the liquid, which tasted vaguely of rotting melon. It quelled his churning stomach, though not completely, not after all he'd seen. Upstairs, he realised now, Snape had told him just the barest outline of what last night's victims had suffered. The truth was worse, so much so that he felt tainted. Dirty. Reeking with it.

"I'm sorry," Harry whispered, his voice rasping painfully against a lump of regret in his throat.

"I'm certain you are," Snape returned, his voice still glacial, though without that dreadful fury that had filled it, before.

"I . . ." Harry gulped, not knowing really what to say, after all that. "I think I need more potion."

Snape narrowed his black eyes. "You are going to be sick?"

"Um, probably not, but my stomach still feels . . . awful," Harry understated, pressing his hands into his midsection. Then another thought came to him. "You gave me potion! I thought I wasn't supposed to have magical cures until my own magic came back!"

"It is back, as I have painstakingly laboured to explain to you. You simply do not have clear access to it, except through certain restricted avenues."

"Oh, right," Harry murmured, rolling his shoulders a little. It felt like he couldn't get his bearings. The images in the pensieve still haunted him, and as a particularly gruesome sequence replayed in his head, he felt the sickness in his stomach surge up into his lower throat. He swallowed it back down, gasping, "Can I have more potion? Please?"

His teacher shook his head, then tilted it to the side as he considered the request at greater length. "The amount you drank should have worked completely. Apparently you can tolerate magical cures at present, though they are not as efficacious as they should be. Interesting."

It wasn't terribly interesting to Harry at that moment, though he was relieved that the Potions question appeared to have calmed Snape down. Unable to bear the taste of acid in his mouth, he pushed up weakly, filled the glass with water, and sat back down, drinking it with a sigh.

"So, you just happen to carry Stomach Calming Draught around with you?" Harry asked, thinking to keep the conversation on safe ground. He wasn't too comfortable chatting with Snape, not after a few words put wrong upstairs had led to so much fury. He wondered how long it would be until Remus returned.

"I conjured it," Snape shortly replied.

"Oh." Harry actually hadn't thought of that. "Um, how come we don't just learn to conjure them, then, instead of make them? It'd be quicker. Less mess." Fewer explosions.

Snape stared at him as if not even a blithering idiot would ask a question as daft as that one. "I conjured it from my personal stores, not from the thin air," he drawled.

"Oh," Harry said again, thinking that that would be the end of his Potions questions for a good, long while.

"Go ahead, ask your questions," Snape uttered in a long-suffering tone.

Harry's gaze snapped up. "What, about Potions?"

"Merlin preserve me," Snape intoned, jerking a thumb towards the pensieve. "Of course not, Mr Potter. About that. What you saw."

"I don't have any questions," Harry denied.

"We'll work on your pathetic inability to lie convincingly another time, Gryffindor. Ask your questions."

"It's called civility," Harry retorted, his stomach finally calming. "You didn't want to talk about it, remember? I'm trying to respect that."

"So you can lie convincingly?" Snape mocked.

It was on the tip of Harry's tongue to say Sod off, Snape, but he thought he'd better not. "Where did Remus go for that ice cream?" he said instead. "All the way to Diagon Alley?"

"Stop procrastinating and ask your bloody questions!"

"Okay, okay." Harry held up his hands as though to ward off Snape's rudeness. "Since you insist. How come Voldemort let you just stand there and watch? I mean, every other Death Eater there, he told them what to do and they did it." A low shudder coursed though his shoulders at the thought of just what the Death Eaters had done.

"Every other Death Eater?" Snape mocked.

"Turn of phrase," Harry excused it. "Don't pretend you didn't understand me. I know you did."

Snape curled a lip. "You must be feeling better, you insolent brat."

"Be glad I trust you enough to be insolent," Harry snapped. "I'm not stupid, you know, whatever you like to call me. I wouldn't speak my mind around you if I didn't feel safe doing it."

"That explains a great deal," Snape retorted, nostrils flaring. "I suppose I can understand what makes you so horrendously rude to Lupin, in that case. You must feel extraordinarily safe with him."

"Yeah, well, I do. So what about my question?"

"Ah yes, the Dark Lord." Snape sat up straighter in his chair and conjured a cup of tea for himself as he assembled his words. "He trusts no one else to make his potions, Mr Potter, and contrary to what you might think, not all the elixirs he needs are strictly Dark Arts. Many consist of what the uninformed tend to term 'Light Magic.'" He paused to sip his tea. "I convinced the Dark Lord years ago, during his first reign of terror in fact, that the preparation of certain elixirs requires my hands to be clean of blood."

"How'd you convince him of that?" Harry had to ask. Compared to Snape, he didn't know much about potion-making, but he knew enough to recognise a cock-and-bull story when he heard one.

"My position as the foremost Potions Master in Britain helped," Snape informed him, nose lifted a bit. "Add to this the fact that many of the elixirs I refer to are my own development. No one else can make them, thus the Dark Lord is in no position to dispute me when I tell him what such potions require."

"And you're good at Occlumency, lies, and misdirection," Harry added.

Snape sneered down his long nose. "You think matters are so simple, Mr Potter? I don't break under Cruciatus; that's the main reason the Dark Lord believes my claims. He summoned me every night for a week and cursed me as thoroughly as his powers would allow. And when I still insisted that I could not have blood on my hands, then he finally let me be."

"Cruciatus every night for a week?" Harry gasped, closing his eyes. He remembered the Longbottoms, tortured with the curse until they lost their minds, and realised with some measure of respect that Snape was far stronger than he'd ever given him credit for.

"I, however, was not fourteen," Snape admitted, his eyes a bit shadowed at the memories.

Harry cleared his throat. "Um, well . . . how come you didn't tell him, while you were at it, that you couldn't watch things like that, either?"

"A spy is not much use unless he has a chance to be present," Snape dryly explained. "Who can say what the Dark Lord might reveal of his plans and intentions during one of these . . . sessions? He finds them recreational, did your poor pure Gryffindor brain not glean that much from what you saw?"

"Yeah, I got that," Harry answered, deciding to ignore Snape's phrasing.

"He is more likely to let things slip over his tongue when he is relaxed," Snape said with some measure of disgust. "It was during a raid on Muggles that he revealed his plan to capture a certain prophecy, for example. I have to be there to hear such things."

Harry swallowed, nodding. "But . . ." Tears rose to his eyes, though he didn't let Snape see. "But don't you wish that you could stop it, save them?"

"I don't wish anything," Snape flatly denied, his eyes hard. "I can't afford to. I Occlude my mind, and layer my thoughts so that he sees nothing but bloodlust, and rage, and deep-seated regret that I can't partake as the others can."

"How do you make yourself feel things like that, things you really don't feel at all?" Harry whispered, appalled.

Snape's lips twisted into an expression of self-loathing. "I have a memory, Mr Potter. Unlike you, I know how to use it."

"You mean you used to like seeing people being tormented and torn apart?"

"You oversimplify everything, which, I might add, is one of your major failings in Potions class," Snape mocked. "Shall I explain it in terms even you can comprehend? Once upon a time, I was an angry young man. The Dark Lord used that. And before you decide, in your Gryffindor nobility, to somehow idealize me as just one more of his victims, allow me to share another shard of truth. I fully agreed with his views on blood purity." He snapped his fingers, the sound almost explosive, it was so abrupt. "I would not have thought twice about killing your mother, and even less than that about killing you."

Harry was quiet for a long moment, before he asked, "What changed?"

Snape scowled. "I found I could not agree with executing blood traitors, as the Dark Lord called them. Any fool could see that there were too few purebloods as it was."

Harry didn't like the sound of that. "That's it?" he quietly questioned.

"At first, yes. But it led me to other questions, other conclusions." Snape sighed, and leaned his chin on his hands as he sat at the table, his dark eyes turbulent. "I began investigating bloodlines and discovered to my dismay that everything I had believed about wizardkind was founded on entirely false suppositions. There are no purebloods, not in the sense I once thought. We all have Muggle heritage; yours is simply more proximate than mine. And to say that only wizards are fully human is a complete misrepresentation of reality. We are the ones with non-human ancestors; it's where the magic comes from."

"I just knew Malfoy was part veela," Harry weakly joked, biting back on the other part he wanted to add, that Snape was likely part vampire.

"A hundred generations back, or more," Snape merely commented. "It's why Muggleborns exist, in fact. The magic mated into the bloodline finds full expression at some point in time. Pure-bloodedness is a myth. You are no less a full wizard than I, and your mother was every bit a witch."

"But about the Death Eater meeting . . ." Harry gestured hopelessly with his hands, trying to communicate regret that he still didn't understand. "Afterwards . . . when you get back to your dungeons, when you're free to really think, don't you wish then that you could have saved them?"

Snape suddenly shoved his chair back as he stood. "I can't save them. It's not in my power. I stand there with twelve, sometimes twenty, Death Eaters, every one of them intent on worse than murder. If I make a move to save anyone," he sneered, "it will not succeed. I will have sacrificed my only advantage for nothing!"

"I know you can't save them, Professor," Harry murmured, his words washing over Snape's obvious pain. Pain the Potions Master was trying to deny, he recognised. "I'm sorry you have to see those things, time after time, and even sorrier that I asked you about them. You're a brave man."

Snape turned away, each of his hands grasping the opposite elbow, but before he could reply, Remus was strolling through the front door, a large white bag in his hands. Animated ice cream cones across the front of it appeared to be involved in a food fight. "Anyone for sundaes?"

"Um, I'm not really hungry," Harry denied. In fact, he felt a bit like his stomach would never tolerate food again. "But thanks, Remus. It was really sweet of you to go out and get me some."

"Severus?"

Snape huffed. "I'd thought to advance Mr Potter's Occlumency, but I am distinctly not in the correct frame of mind."

With no more comment than that, he stalked from the kitchen. Not a moment later, the whoosh of the Floo told them that Snape had gone.

"What was that about?" Remus asked, setting the ice cream down next to the pensieve.

"I asked him what he got up to last night," Harry admitted, miserable.

"Ah." Remus didn't add that he thought that hadn't been such a capital idea, but he did inquire, "Do you want to talk about it?"

Nice of him to ask, Harry thought, instead of just launching into a reprimand, or worse, a discussion. Harry didn't need one. By then, he felt every inch the idiot child Snape liked to call him. A tightness in his throat had him gulping a bit, and casting his thoughts about for something to distract him.

"I'd rather talk about my dreams. I was trying to stay awake, but I dozed off over Hermione's notes, and when Snape woke me up, he said that I'd been screaming in parseltongue. I don't remember a thing from the dream, myself."

Remus stared at him. "Do you feel ambivalent about parseltongue?"

"Not really. Well, I used to. A lot. But even then, it was more a feeling from outside, than one of my own. I mean, half the school thought I was up to no good, and the other half didn't trust Parselmouths on principal. That's probably why I pretty much tried to forget I was one. But since chatting with Sals so much . . . and Snape and I had a talk about it, too . . . No, I really think I'm okay with it."

"I don't know, then," Remus admitted. "Maybe it was just a nightmare."

"Maybe," Harry acknowledged, but he really didn't think so. The dream meant something; they all did. He felt like the knowledge was just out of his grasp, that if he could reach out a bit further, he'd finally understand.

"Where is Sals, anyway?"

"Haven't seen her all day," Harry realised. Surely the little snake couldn't have been offended as Snape had claimed. Could she have? Just because Harry had basically told her to stuff her questions about fathers? "Oh, she'll come out when she's ready," he decided, scooping up the ice cream bag to stow it in what passed for a freezer. The fridge was pretty similar to an old-fashioned Muggle appliance, he decided; it was just kept cold through magic instead of electricity.

"Well, if there's not going to be an Occlumency lesson tonight," Harry announced, "let's you and me work some more on my magic. Wandless, I think. See if my wand, or even a wand, come to think of it, has been the problem all along."

"Could you cast wandless spells before?" Remus gasped.

"Nope, not one whit," Harry replied, trying to get himself into a cheerful frame of mind. "Not intentionally, anyway. I don't count accidental magic. I mean, all children do that; Snape told me it was normal. I don't think it means we can all bring it under conscious control. But I have to try something different than we have been doing."

"All right," Remus agreed. He went to move the pensieve out of their way.

"Don't look in that," Harry quickly cautioned. "It's full."

"With your thoughts?" Remus glanced about as if afraid to offer, but aware that he probably should, as Snape had left so abruptly. "Shall I help you put your memories back, Harry?"

"They're not mine," Harry told him, deciding he'd let Remus draw his own conclusions. "Come on. We'll go out to the parlour where Snape and I always work. And for Merlin's sake, Remus, don't be afraid to use your own wand. It's all right. I'm okay."

Harry didn't glance once at the pensieve as he strode from the kitchen.