Harry walked back to Gryffindor Tower in a daze of self-recrimination. His footfalls echoed dully on the stone floor, and by the time he had made it back to his four poster bed, he never wanted to come out from under the covers again. The light from Ron’s candle trickled through the thick velvet drapes, staining the air a dark unhealthy maroon, and Harry’s blood pounded in his ears above the sharp scratching of Ron’s quill. With a sick feeling in the bottom of his stomach, Harry wondered why he had never thought about the fact that he’d contributed to his parents’ deaths by leaving Eileen and keeping things the way they were.

The candle went out and plunged the dormitory into darkness. Harry heard the faint rustling that told of his roommates climbing into bed and settling under their covers. Within a few minutes, faint snoring filled the room, but Harry couldn’t sleep. He pushed the curtain open to breathe and look out the window at the half full moon. Tears spilled from his eyes as he sat up and curled his knees against his chest. His whole childhood, he had tried to find a reason why he had to live with his aunt and uncle, instead of with his parents, or friends, or with anyone who didn’t shove him in a cupboard and feed him as little as possible. When he had been very little, he had thought that every family had a child that they didn’t want hidden away somewhere, but when he had gone to school and there was no one like him, he had wanted to know why. In some way, it was vaguely comforting to know that he had been part of the process that had put him there after all.

As quietly as he could, he slipped the photo album Hagrid had made for him at the end of first year. Letting it fall open onto his lap, he traced the forms of his parents in a silent apology before he closed it and fell asleep with it in his arms like a small child.

~*~

Before Harry went down to breakfast the next morning, red eyed and quieter than usual, he had composed the first draft of an acceptance letter to the Wizengamot. Before lunch, he had ripped it to pieces and thrown it into the fireplace. With a last dark look, he slunk up to the dormitory and rummaged through his trunk for his Charms book. His hand slid across slick plastic as he tugged fresh parchment free from the jumble in his trunk to shove it into his bag. He hafted the sack of gobstones in the palm of his hand as if testing their weight before throwing it as hard as he could back into his trunk and slamming the lid.

Ron peered over at him. “Something wrong?”

“No,” Harry responded, swinging his bag over his shoulder with unnecessary violence. “Why do you ask?”

Ron stared. “Alright then.”

Most weeks, Harry would have been much happier if Ginny had her free period on Friday before lunch with his instead of after. That Friday however, he tip-toed through the common room hoping he didn’t have to talk to her. He had no such reprieve, though. She smiled at him as he passed the chair in which she lay, head and feet hanging over the armrests with a careless sort of grace. Hauling herself at the waist and leaning over her knees, Ginny poked his arm. “You alright?

“Yeah,” he mumbled, and she wrinkled her nose, brimming with skepticism.

“Sure you are,” she replied dubiously after an awkward pause, hopping down from the chair. “Since I don’t have to be anywhere for a few hours, do you mind if I walk with you?” Harry couldn’t think of a way to say no to her, so he nodded reluctantly. Her hand slipped into his and she squeezed it gently as they stepped out of the common room together. “Where did you go last night, Harry?” she smiled as she said it, trying to keep it from sounding like an accusation, because it wasn’t one, really.

“I didn’t-”

She cut him off. “I saw you. Those snitch pajamas were very memorable, actually.”

Harry’s face colored. “Oh.”

“So are you going to tell me?”

“I was just, wandering around, walking,” he lied, looking away.

She glanced at his face sharply, but when she spoke, her tone was teasing. “Yeah, you always go out wandering in the evenings and spend the next morning staring at Snape like you hope he chokes on his bacon.”

“He ate waffles this morning.”

“See?” she refused to be deterred, “You were watching him closely enough to notice that.”

“If you knew where I was, why did you ask?” he questioned, doing his best to keep his voice light and untroubled, but he didn’t think he had fooled her at all.

“I want to know what he said to you,” she hissed fiercely, brown eyes slitted unhappily. “I want to know what he did to upset you like this!”

Harry shrugged his shoulders. “He was just… being Snape.”

Ginny pulled her hand out of his and folded her arms across her chest. “How was he being himself this time?” she demanded. He shrugged again, unable to make himself repeat Snape’s words, but Ginny pressed on. “What did he say?”

The words wanted to rush out, but he held them in until he could shape them into something that made sense. He sucked in a large breath. “After the Malfoys’ trial, Snape told me that the Wizengamot would invite me to become a member because they like to have popular heroes join them so that they can look better.” Ginny nodded, wrapping her hand around his again, and he licked his lips which had gone dry. “So I guess I went to him for advice.” Harry didn’t really know why he had gone, only that he had. “He said I should refuse because I wasn’t ruthless enough to lie to everyone that way.”

She kissed his cheek lightly and leaned her head on his shoulder, guiltily agreeing with Snape wholeheartedly. “I wouldn’t love you if you were.”

Swallowing, Harry continued, his voice rough. “He said I was ruthless enough, later though, because I left him with Eileen knowing he would grow up to overhear the prophesy and pass it on to Voldemort…” he swallowed again, trying desperately to bring some moisture to the dry tissue of his throat, “and knowing that Voldemort would hear it and decide to kill my parents and me because of it.” Ginny gasped, white with rage, eyes suddenly wide. “He said that I had as much to do with their deaths as Voldemort.”

Her hands suddenly cold, she dropped his and threw her arms around him, pulling him close. He froze, ridged in her embrace until she kissed him furiously, nibbling his lower lip until he opened his mouth and kissed her back. Hugging him tightly, when she surfaced from the kiss, she breathed into his ear, “Don’t you dare listen to him.” She clung tightly to his shoulders as she walked him to class, and at the classroom door, he let her pull him into another deep kiss.

~*~

The soapy brush scraped against the clear aquarium walls as Ginny scrubbed it under Snape’s inscrutable gaze. From its place in the sturdy little spare cage, the Red Cap waved its bloody wool hat at her and grinned nastily, showing off its sharp black teeth. She hissed at it wordlessly, aping its predatory manner unconsciously, fingering her wand, and the Red Cap hunched back irritably. Ginny seethed, the brush slipping again and again from her fingers as the furious shaking in her hands made her clumsy and anger clouded the edges of her vision. “If you crack the glass, Miss Weasley, I will see to it that your parents pay for it.” Snape’s voice cut through the furious buzzing in her ears, and Ginny’s nails dug into the wood handle. “Or perhaps I should send the bill to Potter instead. I doubt your parents have sufficient funds.”

The brush hit the plastic bottom of the aquarium, bouncing. Ginny whirled around, her teeth bared. “Don’t you dare talk about Harry!” she snarled. “I know what you said to him about it being his fault his parents died. You had no right!”

Snape leveled her with a cold stare. “Do you want another detention, Miss Weasley? I’d be more than happy to oblige.”

“I don’t care if you give me detentions every night until the end of seventh year!” she snapped, her face flushed around her freckles. The Red Cap started screeching and rocking his cage so hard that she was worried that he would tumble off the top of the bookcase that she had set him on earlier. “Shut it!” she shouted at it, but it only started screaming louder. Snape whipped out his wand and hit it with a silencing charm and then a freezing charm. The cage wobbled for a moment before coming to rest only a few inches from where it had begun.

“That is a dangerous declaration,” he said quietly, and she had to strain to hear him.

“So?” she fired back defiantly, without needing to think.

“And if I stripped every point Gryffindor has?” he hissed threateningly. “I’m sure your housemates would adore you for that.”

“I don’t care about that either,” she hissed back, her arms folded tightly over her chest, her hands each clutching the opposite arm. “You said something really horrible to Harry, and I’m going to make sure you know it.”

“How, pray tell are you going to do that? You have already said your piece.”

Ginny didn’t have any idea right then, but she was sure she could come up with something quickly. “You’ll know in a few days. I want you to stew about it and wonder what I’m going to do to you.”

“You have a very inflated sense of your own self importance if you believe that I am intimidated by the mere suggestion of a few pranks.” His wand twitched in his hand, and Ginny supposed he wasn’t afraid at all. He was angry though.

“They won’t be pranks,” she asserted, putting on her best show of confidence. “They’ll be,” she searched her mind for the best word, “retribution.”

“Fifty points from Gryffindor!” he thundered, “Get out!” Ginny scampered out of the office, throwing her bag over her shoulder as she ran. With a backwards smirk at his office door, Ginny chose to believe she had won that round.

~*~

That night, Harry found himself thinking of Eileen as he curled up in one of the armchairs in the common room. The last of the students, three “old” first year girls, first years who had suffered through Snape’s tenure as headmaster, ascended the stairs to their dormitory, leaving him alone in front of the empty fireplace. The lights in the common room went out a few minutes later, and the only light left was from the moon and the stars outside the window. Someone had latched the window improperly, and it had blown open. The curtains fluttered eerily in the purple darkness, and Harry wrapped himself tighter around his knees, against the chill damp breeze.

Her face had always opened up when she smiled, when the faint sulkiness that she had always worn dissipated. He had felt so trapped with her in that house, shut in for months before Eileen had given in and gone walking with him by the river. Harry shivered, his fingers twitching, remembering the way her hand had felt inside his.

With an abrupt pang in the center of his chest, Harry wanted to rush up to his dormitory, drag the pillow and blankets off of his bed and make a nest out of them. He wanted to start a fire in the fireplace and drink a cup of tea as he watched it die. His hand brushed the arm of the chair, and he stroked the plush fabric with the tip of his finger, imagining for a moment that it was strands of black hair. Her shampoo had smelled of lilacs, he remembered.

Eileen had been so uncertain, and trying so hard to hide it. He had been as uncertain as she, and scared, with no idea what he was supposed to do. After a while, going home hadn’t mattered much. After a while, he would have happily stayed in the past for the rest of his life. Tears ran down his cheeks and he swiped at them, blotting his eyes with his robe. He remembered the way Eileen had looked at him when she had told him she was pregnant, and how the dreamlike world they had made came crashing down around him when he realized with a horrible shock why he had come, and why he had to go back. She had wanted him to stay as much as he had wanted to never leave.

Heaving a sigh, Harry pushed himself to his feet. He pushed the window closed and dropped the latch into place. Metal clinked against metal as he wiped the last remnants of tears away from his face and blinked back the dampness in his eyes. He padded his way up the stairs without turning on the lights or lighting his wand. Stumbling in the dark, Harry fell a few steps before he caught himself and crept into his dormitory, slipping into bed without bothering to undress, careful not to wake the four boys sleeping close by.

~*~

Saturday dawned bright and warm, with only a few wisps of cloud outside the dormitory window. Harry slept late in the morning sun, almost missing breakfast and scrambling down to the Great Hall just in time to see someone else take the last of the bacon. “Why didn’t you wake me?” he grumbled to Ron, plopping down beside him and piling his plate high with scrambled eggs and toast.

Ron stuffed a forkful of sausage into his mouth and gulped it down before he answered. “You looked like you could use the rest, mate.”

Hermione smirked at his chest, and Harry looked down at the gaps in his shirt where he had buttoned the buttons into the wrong holes. “It looks like you could still use some,” she said as he unbuttoned and rebuttoned his shirt.

Harry muttered, smoothing his shirt and sleepily nibbling on toast. A few places down the table, Ginny snored softly next to a full plate. “She didn’t get to bed until after three in the morning,” Ron told him, seeing where he was looking. “Hermione had to go down and get everyone to go back to sleep after she came in, turned on all of the lights, and started passing around food.”

“A little late for a kitchen raid,” Harry commented, slipping out of his seat and stealing her bacon.

~*~

Back in the dormitory, Harry opened his trunk and pulled out the bag of gobstones, wincing. Foul smelling sludge coated the inside of the bag from where the gobstones had sprayed after he had thrown them in. Swearing under his breath, he opened the bag and vanished the slime with a sharp flick of his wand. He shut the bag tightly, and stuffed it into his pocket hissing at Neville, who sat on his bed, a quill in his mouth and his Herbology book open on his lap. “Neville!”

Neville jumped, and the book tumbled off of his lap, slamming shut. “What?” he mumbled, his words muffled by the feather in his mouth.

“Can I borrow your gobstones?”

“Yeah, sure,” Neville replied, righting his book carefully on his bedside table, opening his trunk, and digging through it. “What do you want them for?”

Just after Neville tossed him the velvet sack with his gobstones in it, Harry said lightly, “I’m going to play gobstones with Snape.” Neville stared in horrified puzzlement at him as he strode out of the dormitory deliberately.

The common room and the hallway were both mostly empty, as most of the students were spending the sunny spring Saturday outside, enjoying their fleeting freedom. Harry jogged through the corridors, winding his way downward, absentmindedly hearing the whispered conversations of the portraits along the way. He breathed deeply, his hands trembling around the lumpy bundles in his pockets. Glancing around him, he slouched into the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom and palmed a piece of chalk. He walked the last few steps to Snape’s office door and stopped with a gulp and paused before he pulled his hand out of his pocket and knocked resolutely on the door.

The door opened smoothly, without creaking, and Snape stuck his head out to peer around the doorway. “What do you want?”

“Can I come in?” he asked, with as much temerity as he could summon.

Snape stepped aside sourly. “Get in, then.”

Harry stepped inside, wiping his sweaty hands on his jeans. “Are you busy?”

“What do you want?” Snape repeated tersely. “Whether or not I am currently occupied has never stopped you from bothering me before, Potter.”

Harry decided to take that as a no. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Then talk, Potter.” Harry started feeling like an idiot, which he had been expecting, as it was par for the course when dealing with Snape.

“And I brought a gift.” He held out the bag with the white gobstones with the glazed red foxes. Snape folded his hands behind his back and didn’t take it.

Kneeling down in the center of the office floor, Harry took out the chalk he had stolen and sketched a large circle on the wood. “What are you doing?” Snape screeched murderously. “Are you out of your mind, Potter? Stop it!” He dropped to his knees and tried to pull Harry away from the circle, but Harry dumped both sets of gobstones into the circle. As soon as they landed, they lined up into two opposing circles near the center of the chalk circle. Snape’s shooter tried to gather with his other gobstones, but Harry herded it back to the edge of the circle with his left hand. He yanked his arm down and out of Snape’s grasp, tapping his wand on the asymmetrical chalk “circle” so that it shifted and evened into a perfect circle “You clean that up-”

“I would have drawn it on your desk, but the gobstones really don’t like it when they fall off,” Harry said, false innocently. “They start spraying slime everywhere-”

“We are not paying gobstones, Potter!”

“Would you rather play with Neville?” Harry asked sarcastically, dropping pretence. “They’re his gobstones.”

“You are expecting me to play with you, using Longbottom’s gobstones?” Snape hissed, grabbing for Harry’s arm again, but Harry scrambled away, and Snape overbalanced and fell to his knees with a loud thud.

“No,” Harry told him, flicking Neville’s shooter and sending it straight into Snape’s circle of gobstones. “I’m expecting you to play with your set. I’m using Neville’s.”

One of Snape’s new gobstones landed outside the circle and rolled over to its owner, squirting thick brown goo into Snape’s face. Some of it landed in his mouth and up his nostrils. His face contorted venomously as he spit the goo onto the floor and wiped his face with his sleeve. With a sharp flick, he sent his shooter careening towards Harry’s marbles, and Harry thought the professor didn’t care much about playing with him, but wanted very badly to see Harry with a face full of horrible tasting brown sludge.

Harry’s gobstones scattered with a harsh crack, but none of them sped out of the circle. With a sigh of relief, he fetched his own shooter and aimed at Snape’s mostly intact circle of gobstones. One of the gobstones shot to the edge of the circle, and for a moment, Harry thought it was about to stop there, but Snape glowered a warning at it, and it started rolling again and made its way to Snape and sprayed him again. Plucking the two gobstones from their place at Snape’s knees, Harry threw them into their original clear bag.

Taking careful aim, Snape sent his shooter directly at one of Harry’s gobstones, sending it speeding out of the circle so hard that it bounced off the wall before it drifted lazily over to Harry and squirted its fluid into Harry’s eyes. He snatched off his glasses and rubbed them clean with the edge of his shirt, not bothering to tuck it back in. When he looked up at Snape, he smirked, and Harry did his best to hide a victorious grin. He handed Neville’s gobstone to Snape, who dropped it smugly into its velvet drawstring sack, and Harry sent another of Snape’s spinning out of the circle.

“I used to play gobstones with your mum,” Harry remarked. It wasn’t the first time he had referred to Eileen as Snape’s mum since he came back, but it felt strange even so. Slime dripping from his nose and cheeks, Snape gave the shooter a particularly hard flick, missing the gobstone that he was aiming for entirely. “Only we actually did play on the table. When they fell off, the gobstones would spin around the goo would make a little circle-”

“Shut up Potter, you sound like an imbecile.”

“I got you to play, didn’t I?” Harry shot back, sending another of Snape’s gobstones out of the circle. Snape replied by propelling his shooter into one of Harry’s borrowed gobstones, which hit another, and they both rocketed out of the circle. The sludge oozed down Harry’s face and spilled onto the collar of his shirt. “You’re much more enthusiastic than Eileen was, though,” he said aggressively, sending his shooter flying into one of Snape’s gobstones, but the glancing impact just made it spin instead of sending it speeding out of the circle.

“I bet she was significantly better than you,” Snape muttered, shooting another of Harry’s gobstones out of the circle, and he reflected that he sounded particularly childish.

“Well, she played a lot more than I did,” Harry acknowledged, retrieving his shooter and flicking it at one of Snape’s gobstones, “so she was. She was head of the gobstones club when she went to school here.”

Snape did his best to hide his surprise, but before he reapplied his ordinary stern demeanor, Harry saw it. He supposed Eileen hadn’t talked much about her time at Hogwarts when Snape was a child, and that made Harry inexplicably terribly sad. He shook his head while Snape sent one of his gobstones out of the circle and it squirted into Harry’s hair. Why should that particularly make him sad, he wondered, when there were fat worse things about Snape’s childhood than not hearing a few school stories?

He picked up the gobstone that he had just lost and brought it up to the light streaming into the office from the window.  It was translucent purple glass, with a thick swirl of opaque green in the middle.  Harry thought that they looked like little grapes.  The light danced on the wood floor, twisting as his fingers trembled ever so slightly around the gobstone. With a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach, Harry glanced at the window’s edge to see that it was completely closed and latched. At last, he held the gobstone out to Snape, who snatched it away to put it in the velvet bag.

“I’ve been thinking,” Harry began nervously, biting his bottom lip, “about what you said on Thursday.”

Snape’s expression froze, and Harry’s skin became clammy, but he felt reassured that he had put Snape off balance for once. “I believe I made my meaning plain enough that you didn’t have to think,” Snape managed at last his voice cold, and Harry gulped.

“You made more plain than I think you realized,” Harry said flatly. “I didn’t know you felt that responsible for my parents’ deaths.” He paused for effect, unconsciously mimicking his son’s method of attack, “As responsible as Voldemort.” As nonchalantly as he could manage, he flicked his shooter without aiming it. It connected with one of Snape’s gobstones, knocking it out of the circle.

Snape flinched back, and Harry felt a guilty rush of pleasure at scoring a hit. “My actions were the catalyst for the events that led to their deaths, Potter,” he snarled, “Surely I bare responsibility.” The shooter slammed into Harry’s gobstone so hard, that Harry was worried it might shatter.

“Yeah, but you didn’t know,” Harry whispered, “You didn’t know what he was going to do with what you heard, did you?” He did his best to squelch the terrible little voice that sprang up to remind him that he had known, taking a leaf from Snape’s book and lining up a shot that sent two gobstones rolling out of the circle at once. One rolled in Harry’s direction, and he stopped it with the palm of his hand. It started to vibrate, and he let it go, making its way to Snape. The other gobstone waited for it to catch up before they both turned and sprayed him in tandem.

“I knew the Dark Lord would go after someone!” Snape shouted, his voice strangled. “And it was a fair assumtion that someone would be an infant.” Harry could see a drop of dark, bluish blood on Snape’s fingernail, where it had split when it collided with his shooter. Snape used his other finger to flick it at a gobstone. It spun lazily, stopping just a little bit away from the edge of the circle. Harry breathed a sigh of relief.

Harry flicked his own shooter, and it clacked dully against one of the fox gobstones, which sped out of the circle. “Still, you didn’t know it would be someone you knew,” he said gravely, swallowing, “someone real.”

Snape used his thumb to send his shooter at another of Harry’s gobstones, but he missed, and Harry rolled the shooter back to him. Momentarily gaining some of his composure, Snape focused on a spot on the wall above Harry’s head. “Stop talking, Potter.”

Harry ignored him and aimed his shooter. When the gobstone rolled over to empty its fluid into Snape’s eyes, he finally spoke. “It doesn’t matter, you still feel guilty, for both of them.”

“Your mother, Potter, Lily-”

Harry shook his head, stopping him, barely seeing Snape’s shooter sending one of his gobstones out of the circle, “No, not just my mother, my father too.

“Don’t be ridiculous; I hated your father,” his words came so fast that spittle landed in the circle, smearing the chalk and sticking to the floor.

His shooter thwacked against the last of Snape’s gobstones, and it shot out of the circle and hit Snape in the knee. “I know,” said Harry, smiling painfully, “but that just makes it worse.” His son froze, unable to meet his eyes.

“I won,” Harry said awkwardly, putting the last gobstone back into the bag and gathering up Neville’s gobstones. He helped Snape to his feet and examined his fingernail. Tapping it with his wand, he cast a healing charm and held the hand uncertainly. He forced a sad smile. “I’d kiss it better, but I think you’d hex me.” When Snape didn’t reply, Harry dropped his hand and left his office, looking back to wave.

Before Harry realized it, he was back in the dormitory. Neville grinned at him, his eyes lingering on the stains on his shirt and the dried sludge on his face and hands. “So you really got Snape to play a game.” Harry nodded.