Ginny sat down clumsily on top of the unused teacher’s desk at the front of the classroom, breathing heavily. She yanked back the extendable ear from the window and mashed it together in her hand. A dry sobbing gasp rattled in her throat. Her nails dug into the soft rotted wood of the desk. She wanted to run, or to scream, but the window was still open. A wave of her wand shut it with an imperious flick, but her hands shook so badly the wand fell from them and clattered to the floor, and she jumped down from the desk to retrieve it.

A tear trickled down her cheek and she swiped it away angrily as she clasped the door handle and opened the door. Her breathing came quick and loud as she hurried off through the quiet hallway to find Ron, cheerful, direct Ron, who could never keep secrets and certainly not ones like this until he met Harry and Hermione. But this time, he hadn’t known either, and she would be the one to tell him.

She found him in the common room, his forehead smeared with grass, collapsed in one of the red squashy armchairs clustered around the fireplace. “Ginny! Where were you? You missed Quidditch practice!”

She barely noticed Hermione sitting next to him as she flung her arms around his neck. “I know, I was spying on Harry!” she shrieked, a few fat tears gathering in her lashes.

Ron went rigid in her embrace. “You were doing what! Why?”

Hermione broke in, horror and shock warring in her voice “You can’t just do something like that!”

Ginny ignored her, “That doesn’t matter,” she burst out. “Oh Ron,” He patted her shoulder awkwardly, sprinkling dirt onto her back, his arms tensing as if he wanted very badly to push her away.

The Fat Lady’s portrait opened with a soft swish, and Harry stepped through. Ginny scowled over at him even as she sniffed back tears. “What’s,” Harry gazed around the room before focusing on Ginny. A few stray third years and a pimply fifth watched her cry interestedly. “What’s going on?”

Ron shrugged his shoulders helplessly and the top of one shoulder shot into Ginny’s chin. Hermione stared wide-eyed as Ginny disentangled herself from her brother and shot to her feet. Her mouth opened and closed several times over as her fists clenched and she breathed heavily through her nose, unable to think of what to say. “You cheated on me,” she finally gasped weakly. The answer vaguely surprised her as her eyes misted up again. Of all the betrayals inherent in his secret, she accused him of cheating on her first?

Ron sputtered indignantly while Harry stared at his sister blankly. “What? No, I wouldn’t… I haven’t…” but he had, he remembered, feeling sick. He had slept with Eileen. He felt even sicker, because if she knew about that, then she knew about the rest too. His breath hitched, and he reassured himself ineffectually that Ginny couldn’t have found out about it, because no one who knew would have told her. Snape wouldn’t McGonagall wouldn’t, and Harry didn’t dare.

“Ginny,” Hermione said reasonably, “He was in detention just now; he couldn’t have been doing anything.”

“I heard him talking about it!” she shouted, “Just now.”

Hermione snorted, “With Professor Prince? Not likely.”

Ginny could hear her almost say “Snape” instead of “Prince”, and if anything the substitution made her angrier. “You can say ‘Snape’,” she spat, “I heard that too.” Ron made a small choking noise in the back of his throat and Harry had to grasp the arm of one of the chairs to keep his hands from shaking. The three third years and fifth year moved closer, but the four didn’t notice. “You went back in time and got Snape’s mum up the duff!” she shrieked, “With Snape!”

A croaking sound from one of the third year girls reminded Harry suddenly of their presence. He waved at Ginny to be quiet and turned to face them. “Go away,” he snarled, and as the fifth year opened his mouth, Harry growled. “None of you will mention any of this to anyone.” They scattered to their dormitories, or at least to the staircases and out of sight. If Harry didn’t think he would scramble their brains entirely, he would have cast a memory charm.

“It can’t be true,” Hermione pleaded, appealing to whatever sense of logic Ginny had. “How would he have gone back in time? Why would he?”

“I don’t know,” Ginny howled, “but he did!”

Ron rubbed a thumb across the top of Ginny’s hand trying to soothe her and stop her lunatic raving, but she slapped his hand. Hermione turned to Harry and he gazed back shamefaced. “No,” she said, and he hung his head.

“Harry,” Ron mumbled, “Are you telling us that you’re Snape’s dad?” No one had ever put it quite that baldly before, not even Harry in is own mind. He and Snape had done their best to avoid it. “And I’ve been taking lessons from Snape for months?”

“How,” Harry swallowed hard, “how did you find out about this?”

“I heard you, just now, in detention,” Ginny hissed fiercely, holding up the smashed Extendable Ear.

“You spied on me?” Harry raged, “You spied on me?” A buzzing emerged in Harry’s ears, first faintly, then overwhelmingly.

“You cheated on me!”

“I didn’t!” Harry shouted back. “We weren’t even really dating at the time!”

As soon as he said it, he knew he’d said the wrong thing. Ginny let out a tremendous wail, as much fury as misery. “When did you go back then? Fifth year? The beginning of Sixth?” She scoffed. “You didn’t have any idea what to do with a girl back then.”

“During the last battle,” he replied tartly, “When Voldemort cast the Killing Curse at me.”

“We hadn’t stopped dating, Harry, Not really.” Mucus dribbled from her nose and Hermione tried to offer her a handkerchief, but she brushed it aside.

“It was nearly forty years ago! Neither of us was even born yet!”

“It was barely a year ago,” she insisted, her voice muffled.

“It wasn’t like I went back and said ‘Well Ginny’s gone, I’m going to shag the first girl I see’!” Harry shot back. “I was there for a long time.”

“How long?” Ginny challenged, “It can’t have been too long, you didn’t look any different when you came back.”

“Three months,” Harry retorted, “And we only shagged once, right before I left.”

“Three months?” Ginny roared. “It only took you three months to forget about me?”

“It wasn’t like that!” he shouted. “I was alone and I tried to get back and I couldn’t, and I didn’t know anyone, and I didn’t know if I’d ever get back…” He stopped speaking and shivered. “And she was nice to me.” Harry didn’t think he should mention making blanket nests in the middle of Eileen’s kitchen; Ginny already looked at him as if she were imagining him as a blood stain on the common room carpet.

“Well you got back,” didn’t you?” Ginny hissed coldly. “You should have been able to wait three stupid months!”

“Ginny,” Harry shouted, his hands jerking, and he didn’t know if he wanted to shake her or try to comfort her. “I got back because I got Eileen pregnant. I couldn’t come back until Snape had been conceived!”

She tossed her head. “You could have waited a little longer.”

“You don’t know what it was like,” Harry told her, voice shaking. “I never left the house. She was terrified of what her neighbors would think if they knew she had a strange man living with her-“

“And they would have been right, wouldn’t they?” Ginny interrupted snidely, folding her arms across her chest and glowering at him.

“And months passed and nothing happened.” Harry sucked in a breath, trying to calm himself down, but it didn’t work at all. “Nothing changed! I was no closer to coming home, and I was starting to think I wouldn’t, and I’d just have to hide out until it was 1998 again. I didn’t think I was ever going to get to see you again anyway.”

“You still should have told me,” she howled, “instead of letting me make a fool of myself!” Harry tried to remember Ginny making a fool of herself and couldn’t. He decided it probably didn’t matter.

“You shouldn’t have spied on me!” He retorted, the curtain rods and windowpanes shaking. “Why should I trust you with anything if you spy on everything I say with Extendable Ears?” From out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hermione flinch.

“I wouldn’t have to if you’d just tell me things! I’m not a little girl, Harry; I don’t have to be protected from the truth!” She slammed a fist down onto the back of one of the chairs, where it sunk into the padding with an unsatisfying rustle. “And you,” Ginny cried, rounding on Hermione. “You’re no better!”

“Me?” Hermione responded startled, her voice shrill. “I only knew that Prince was Snape, I didn’t know any of the rest of it!”

“That’s bad enough!” Ginny shrieked back, balling her hands into fists and storming out though the portrait.

“Where are you going?” Ron called uncertainly.

She turned her head back. “The Quidditch pitch,” she snapped, and slammed the painting back in place. Ron rose to his feet and started to follow. He stumbled and turned back to Hermione apologetically, and Harry noticed he didn’t meet his eyes.

“Go,” Hermione told him, and he nodded and pushed the Fat Lady’s portrait open.

~*~

Ron found Ginny when she was already up in the air doing loops around the poles of the Quaffle hoops. He grumbled up at her and mounted his own broom to follow her, thinking irrelevantly that she wasn’t dressed to be flying. She halted in mid air and blew into her hands before grabbing the handle of her broom again and shooting upwards and to the other end of the pitch from her brother. Her hands slipped on the broom handle with the moisture of her breath.

Ron accelerated and turned, chasing after her, and as he came level with her, she dove to skim the grass with the tips of her toes. Plummeting after Her, Ron called her name, and she shook her head, streaking just above the ground to the other end of the pitch. Ron sighed heavily and flew after her, and when she tried to rise, he was right above her. “You could’ve always flown earlier, at Quidditch practice,” he said to her, trying to sound nonchalant.

“He was keeping something from me,” she twisted away from him, but he followed, just above her.

“Yeah, he’s allowed to do that sometimes,” he replied dryly, his throat hurting.

Ginny pulled her knees up trying to gain more speed and get away from her brother. Each time she tried, he checked her and she ground her teeth together. “Not with something like that! You heard him; did he get to keep that from me? From either of us?”

Ron shifted uneasily on his broomstick. “Well no,” he acknowledged, “but you shouldn’t be spying on him for anything anyway!”

She whirled around in the air to face him. “Oh yeah, you can talk, I’m sure you never spied on anybody while you and Harry and Hermione were off having your adventures!”

Startled, Ron shook his head. “That was different! If we didn’t know things and if we didn’t find the Horcruxes, people would die! We would die. You spied on him because you wanted to stick your nose in his business, and he wasn’t telling you.” His eyes widened as he spoke, wondering if she had really missed that or if she was just ignoring it. “And I never spied on Hermione! You’re just not supposed to do that to friends.”

“Well Hermione didn’t think so; she’s the one who asked me to spy on Snape in the first place!” The broom bucked under her as she sought to push past him and he pushed her back. She landed with a thump on the grass. “And then she found out who he was and told me that there was nothing wrong and I should stop watching him, and nothing else when it was obvious he wasn’t who he said he was. What was I supposed to do?”

“You could have talked to me,” he said, landing beside her. “You could have talked to Harry.”

“Even you said Harry and Hermione were acting weird,” Ginny blew onto her hands again and their breath rose out in front of them, “and Harry would have just put me off.”

“Probably,” her brother responded grudgingly, “which should have told you to drop it, shouldn’t it?”

“No!” She thundered. “It would have told me he was hiding something!”

“He gets to do that, Ginny! Everyone does! You do, you hide things from him.”

“This was Snape! He killed Dumbledore; he cut off George’s ear. This was important. It was something he should have told us all about!”

“He was on our side; Dumbledore was dying anyway, and they both knew it. It was planned. Dumbledore planned it. And he wasn’t trying for George, he was trying for a Death Eater and missed.”

“You weren’t here last year. He was awful. He just let the Carrows and the Death Eater kids do whatever they wanted to us, and cast the Cruciatus Curse, and beat us…”

“No, you’re right I wasn’t there, but none of you died, did you? Not even you and you were my little sister, and Harry Potter’s girlfriend, and everyone knew it, and you made it though with Snape as the headmaster.” Ron might have hated the evil git, but he was very glad his sister was safe.

“Because a lot of us went into hiding!”

“He could have told Voldemort he thought you were helping us and had you killed as soon as you came to Hogwarts!” He picked at a blade of grass near his foot. “Besides, that wasn’t why you were spying anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”

Ginny grumbled and muttered too low for Ron to hear her, but she didn’t make a reply, and instead sat with him, shivering as the afternoon wore on. At last, she smiled at him unhappily. “I should have known you were going to take his side,” Ginny tried tentatively.

“Yeah, well, don’t think you’re the only one who’s getting yelled at.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You were here to fly, right?” he asked, trying to sound cheerful.

“Yeah,” she responded, thrown by the sudden change in conversation.

“Then let’s fly.” He took off one of his gloves and charmed it to fall slowly like a Quaffle and tossed it to her. She caught it with a grin and flew headlong to the hoops. Kicking off the ground after her, he rushed to block as she threw the “Quaffle” to one of the hoops. He caught it and held it out to her with a satisfied smirk. She plucked it from his fingers, glaring at him wryly. They played until the sun sank below the horizon and Ginny couldn’t see his glove as it fell. Her lips were blue and her freckles stood out against her icy cheeks as she hung her broom up. He threw an arm around her shoulders and trudged with her back up to the castle.

~*~

Hermione tapped her foot into the plush carpet. “So that’s why Snape looks like you,” she said slowly. “He was under a glamour and now it’s off?”

Harry nodded. “McGonagall thought there wasn’t any point in casting a new glamour when no one knew his real face anyway.”

Hermione sat across from him quietly for a moment, piecing together the implications. “He was planning on being here this year incognito after the Daily Prophet article?”

“He and McGonagall kept getting death threats, and McGonagall wanted to cast a glamour, so he dragged me up there to tell her why she couldn’t.”

“It must be hard for him to look like your father, and you of course,” she remarked pensively. “What glamour did you use?”

He hadn’t thought about it quite that way except in brief moments of spite when he had hoped it galled Snape until he choked on it. He flushed shamefaced and replied softly, “Occulto verum.”

“So now that you’ve cancelled it, he can never go back to his old appearance.”

There was something intrinsically soothing in Hermione’s predictable pursuit of information and logic over condemnation. He hadn’t told her before, but once she knew, all was forgiven, because she had something new to think about and turn over in her head. “I suppose not.”

“You are the father of Snape, who is himself old enough to be your father-“

“Don’t even say such a thing!”

“Who is old enough to be your father instead, and has long despised you for your father, and certainly I’m sure doesn’t like you any better for your biological relationship to himself.”

“I doubt it, yeah,” Harry wondered if she were trying to make a point or simply thinking aloud.

“Well,” she said definitively, “I suppose I can understand why you wouldn’t want to tell anyone.”

“It wasn’t just that,” Harry murmured, “he asked for me not to tell anyone.”

“Asked?” she raised her eyebrows.

“Well, demanded, actually,” Harry laughed nervously.

“I didn’t think you were easily intimidated, Harry,” she smiled.

Harry sighed with relief. “Not usually.”

Hermione rested her hands on the arms of the chair and nodded sharply, and to her at least the matter was settled. There was one last think she wanted to know however. She leaned forward in an almost predatory manner. “Exactly how did you go back?”

As he opened his mouth, he realized he hadn’t talked to anyone about what had happened, not Snape, to whom he had shown his memories, not McGonagall, who had endured his forced confession, and certainly no one else. He took a breath, shaking, and told her about landing on Eileen’s couch, about rushing to Hogwarts to find the spot where he had travelled back from, about being trapped and going back to Spinner’s End, and about being unable to leave for months, never seeing anyone else, about being afraid he would never come back and that he’d somehow mess everything up while he was there. She listened patiently and nodded for him to continue whenever he paused, until at last, his speech flowed easily, and he began to tell her things he hadn’t even wanted to acknowledge he had been thinking about.

“I left her, you know,” he mumbled darkly. “No, I didn’t just leave her, I left her to Tobias Snape, and I knew how he was going to treat her and Snape. I saw it in Snape’s memories.”

Hermione ran a hand over her hair. “You had to come back, Harry, history had to be the way it was.” He hunched in on himself and she narrowed her eyes at him. “It wasn’t as if you could stay and marry her. You would have caused a paradox.”

Somehow the reasons why it had been necessary to leave weren’t any more appealing and helpful when Hermione said them as when he had told them to himself. “I might have stayed if she hadn’t thrown me out.”

She shook her head, her mouth twisting wryly. “No, I don’t think you could have stopped yourself from coming home.” She reached over and laid a hand on his shoulder. “It would have driven you mad.”

Harry thought it might still be driving him mad. “I could have stayed at least for a little while,” he whispered, “A few days, a week, enough to say goodbye at least.”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t your choice, she didn’t want to say goodbye.”

Sometimes, sensible, clinical Hermione couldn’t untangle his dilemmas any better than he could, but at least she didn’t make them worse. He smiled halfheartedly. ”I guess Ginny should be jealous. I wanted to stay.”

~*~

When Ginny came back to the tower, her brother on her heels, she didn’t even look at Harry as she sped up the stairs into the girls’ dormitory, almost tripping over a stray third year as she climbed. Hermione met Harry’s eyes and told him gravely, “She’ll come around, Harry, she just needs some time to cool off. It isn’t as if you arranged to go back in time on purpose to meet someone.”

“I’m not sure I care if she gets over it,” he replied sullenly. “She spied on me. She listened in on I don’t even know how many conversations of mine!” Hermione, who knew only too well the desperate curiosity which had driven Ginny, said nothing.

Ron flopped down into the chair next to Harry, eyeing Hermione warily. “You shouldn’t have kept that from her,” he began without preamble.

“She shouldn’t have been spying on me, should she?”

“No, but what was she supposed to do when you weren’t telling her anything?”

“She shouldn’t have pried in the first place!” He sent Hermione a dark look and she shorted. “Don’t I get to have any secrets?”

“Of course you get to keep secrets, but you might have told us that we were being taught by Snape!”

“THAT WASN’T EVEN MY SECRET!” Harry shouted. “I only knew because Snape and McGonagall couldn’t avoid me knowing!”

“Yeah,” Ron shot back, matching him for volume, “but you still knew it, didn’t you, you could have told us anyway! We certainly found out enough things we weren’t supposed to know before this! We’ve even spied on people before!”

Harry stood up to look down on Ron, but Ron stood up too, and he still towered over Harry. “Yeah, but that was different!” Harry felt an eerie sort of déjà vu, and thought that at least Hermione hadn’t yelled.

“How?” Ron shot back. “Do you think when we were eleven we really realized we were fighting Voldemort? To us it was just an adventure!”

“It wasn’t going to help anyone to know!” Harry refrained from pointing out that they weren’t eleven anymore, but only barely.

“It wasn’t going to hurt anyone either!”

“It might if someone had spread it around school, or if someone had overheard!” Hermione winced and Harry tried to suppress the slight satisfaction it gave him. “There were death threats!”

“Well, it wasn’t like we were the ones making them!”

“So?”

“We can be trusted to keep quiet about it, can’t we? We always have before!”

“That doesn’t mean I could tell you! How do you think Snape would have felt if I ran to you and told you his secrets?”

“Who cares?”

Harry wondered the same thing for a moment. So Snape didn’t want anyone to know. Why did that matter to him? But it mattered. He wasn’t sure why, but it mattered that he not tell other people’s secrets when he didn’t have to. He glowered up into Ron’s face, and Ron stared furiously back at him. They held each other’s gazes for a full minute before Harry dropped his eyes and stomped up the staircase into the boys’ dormitory, unconsciously taking the same path Ginny had taken.

Out of Harry’s earshot, Ron turned to Hermione. “I promiced Ginny I’d yell at him too.”

Hermione observed, “They’re both being a bit petulant, aren’t they?” but Ron wasn’t so sure.