Severus bit down on the caplet in his mouth, releasing the anti-venom he kept for just the situation he found himself in. As he fell to the ground of the Shrieking Shack, he tried not to smile. He was going to survive, and the Dark Lord wouldn’t even know it.

He waited until Potter had left and pulled himself to his feet and balled up a bundle of cloth at his throat. Thankfully the snake’s fangs had missed his veins and arteries, or he would have already been dead.

Hobbling to the rotting bed, he collapsed, blood loss making him weak. He pressed the wad of cloth from the bottom of his robe tight to his throat. There was nothing for him to do except wait for the battle to be over, and hope the light side won, and that Potter had told them to find his body. He could hardly walk, and blood seeped from his neck.

~*~

After Harry spoke with Dumbledore for the last time, he left Ron and Hermione behind and told them to go back to Gryffindor tower. Instead, he headed for the Shrieking Shack.

Prodding the knot with a nearby stick, which he had come to believe was kept there for just that purpose, he trudged down the tunnel. It seemed odd, this pilgrimage to a man whom he had just sired a day before. The flask full of Snape’s memories thunked against his thigh, stuffed into a jeans pocket. He snorted. At least the man had liked his grandmother, even if he didn’t know it.

As the tunnel opened, he gazed at the bloody pool where Snape had been. “Potter!” Harry’s heart stopped for a moment, and then started beating again at twice the speed it had been before.

His eyes rolled around his head, twisting to the bed. “You’re alive!”

Snape almost took points for stating the supremely obvious. Instead, he raised an eyebrow. “You’re supposed to be dead as well.”

“Sorry to disappoint.” Harry felt blood flood his face. The strange and wonderful three months he had spent away from this time had dimmed his memories of Snape’s sheer unpleasantness. He wished he could just turn around and flee back to Hogwarts without speaking to him.

“Tell me, you incompetent fool, is the Dark Lord dead?” The question was rhetorical. Snape knew Voldemort couldn’t be dead if Potter was not.

Harry nodded, surprising him. “Voldemort managed to destroy the horcrux without killing me.” He held up his hair to reveal his normal looking lightening shaped scar.

Snape snarled, but Harry suspected it might be the closest sound he had to a sigh of relief, especially in the presence of Potters. He also suspected that Snape had too much pride to ask him for help back to the school. “Can you walk?”

The air rushed out of his chest. “No Potter, I can’t.”

Harry felt terribly composed. After the previous day, he doubted anything could faze him ever again. He stepped dutifully towards the bed and helped Snape stand up, half carrying him out of the Shack.

Halfway down the tunnel, Harry stopped. “Would you mind,” he panted, “if I levitated you out?” Snape turned to him, breathing heavily, and glared trying to catch his breath. Harry took his silence for agreement. “Alright then, mobilicorpus!”

As soon as his feet left the tunnel floor, Snape started struggling. “You imbecile!” Clearly he had his breath back. “Put me down.”

Harry smirked. “Nah, can’t carry you any further. If you want to get to Hogwarts, you got to go this way.” The professor gave him a look of pure disgust, but didn’t protest further. His neck had started bleeding again when he struggled, and Harry thought his silence might have had more to do with that.

~*~

The sterile smell of the hospital wing filled Severus’ nose as he awoke. For a moment, he imagined the last year had not happened, and he could wake to that instead. He pulled the sheets up around himself trying to ignore the groans from his fellow patients. The bandage Poppy fastened to his throat pressed against his trachea, and he brushed it idly with a fingertip. The fabric was hard, crusted with dry blood.

Any moment, Poppy would cheerfully (far too cheerfully for anyone just after a battle) announce that she knew he was awake and that he wasn’t fooling anyone. The attention of the whole hospital wing would be focused on him.

He was not in the mood to be the focus of a dozen students who would be quite glad to see him suffering, no matter how justified their glee was.

Sure enough, Poppy patted him lightly on the shoulder. “Feeling better Severus?” There was too much exhaustion in her voice for it to be cheerful, much to his relief. He scrunched his eyes tighter and relaxed his limbs in an imitation of sleep. “Stop being childish. I know you’re awake.”

Severus wished she would just go away and stop being a mother hen. His eyes opened and he glowered at her. “Do you interfere in everything?” His sleep clouded mind bypassed thought and went straight to reflex, which in his case was preemptive confrontation.

Though of course neck wounds with severe bleeding were something that she was supposed to interfere in. She stared at him perplexed. “Only in such minute details as headmasters who nearly get themselves decapitated by snakes.” He raised his lip into a less than human snarl. She pointed to the blood replenishing potion on the table next to him. “You should drink that before you fall asleep again.”

He sniffed the potion gingerly. “Who brewed this?”

For a brief moment, she considered telling him that Neville Longbottom had brewed it. It would serve him right for being such a difficult patient. “St. Mungo’s shipped us all of their extra potions stores.” In the Wizarding World, little things like a hostile takeover of the ministry and the ousting of the orchestrater of the takeover didn’t interfere with shipping. Wizarding infrastructure was indomitable.

With a last suspicious glance, more for effect than anything else, Severus gulped it down. Poppy stood beside him to make sure he drank it, just as she did with the students. “And I would appreciate it if you could get better quickly. St. Mungos didn’t have many extra potions.”

He handed her the empty vial, barely managing a glare for her, and she shuffled off to tend to other patients. Severus had a moment to appreciate that the people in the hospital wing after the battle were the gravely injured and ill. None of them had the energy to trouble him.

~*~

Casting an indefinite glamour the same day he was to fight the climactic battle with his generation’s Dark Lord was likely not the stupidest thing Harry had ever done. Sneaking out of Hogwarts when there was a mass murderer loose supposedly to kill him after all had to figure high on the list, but it still was a poor idea. The morning after found him waking up with heavy rubbery limbs.

Sunlight tried to stream through the velvet curtains in the Gryffindor dormitory. It was a wonderful bubbly feeling to know that no matter what happened the beloved Gryffindor tower hadn’t changed. Somehow it meant that there was something still salvageable of the Wizarding World.

He didn’t want to leave his bed. Something told him that once he pushed open the curtains, Harry was going to have to face the aftermath of the battle. The ministry had to be set back to rights; new teachers had to be found for Hogwarts. Killing Voldemort hadn’t set back time.

Time. There hadn’t been any the day before to absorb what had actually happened. Voldemort was dead. The omnipresent blight on the wonder that was for him the Wizarding World was gone. The task he had dedicated himself to completing was over. He smiled tentatively up at the canopy. It was a strange feeling. He felt lost, but in a good way, not so trapped.

His head spun as he raised himself up on his arm and pulled the curtains open. Ron stretched out dozing in the bed next to him, the curtains never closed the night before. Neville’s snores rose from another bed. All of the boys were back in the Gryffindor tower, safe, alive, and relatively unscathed.

Yet the Death Eaters had run the school, had controlled the ministry. He had not been around to suffer though any of it. Given who he was, he would not have survived it, but it still remained that he had escaped much of the misery.

And he had three precious peaceful months away from Voldemort entirely, when the Dark wizard had been barely a sinister rumor spoken in the shadows.

Harry’s chest contracted and he shot out of bed in the sunlight pouring in from the windows. Ron opened one eye. “What’re you doing up, Harry?” he mumbled groggily. “It’s not like we have class.”

“It’s nothing, Ron.”

“Then go back to sleep before you wake everyone else up.” He took his own advice and closed his eyes and had soon slipped back to sleep.

Harry instead slipped out into the common room. As early as it was, the room was empty as he collapsed into a chair in front of the fireplace. There was no fire in the grate on the June morning, but he gazed into it all the same. Whatever other pressing concerns he had left his mind when he remembered those three months. He wrapped his arms around himself. He was Snape’s father.

It would be easier, he mused, if Snape had died in the Shrieking Shack. Immediately his stomach tangled itself with the rest of the mess in him. Even if it might be simpler if he could occasionally remember him as a hero instead of actually face the reality of the bad tempered, miserable human being that he had somehow sired, he shouldn’t think that way. He didn’t want him dead.

He pushed his hair out of his face. A quiet cowardly voice insisted that he didn’t have to tell Snape. He supposed it was true. Snape wouldn’t suffer any hardship if he never knew Harry was his father.

Yet there was something distasteful about not telling him. He was too much a Gryffindor to keep silent for long.

~*~

Minerva McGonagall sat ensconced in an overstuffed chair robbed from the Gryffindor common room. She placed a hand on the Headmistress’ desk, and favored a single sheet of paper in the middle of it with a smug smile.

As soon as Severus was awake enough to do so, he dashed off a resignation letter. Severus’ resignation lay in pride of place at the very center of her desk and she rubbed it lightly with her thumb. When the ministry was functioning again, there was little doubt that she would become officially the headmistress. The office already let her in. It should have given her an idea that Severus was more than a Death Eater when the gargoyle opened for him as well.

“Well Potter, Weasley, Granger,” she began, startling the three in front of her, “Will you be rejoining us next year?” The whole of the school would be repeating the last year. If they wished, they could take their seventh year with the rest of their year mates.

Hermione leapt to answer, “Of course Professor!”

Ron’s eyes doubled in size. “But I thought…”

“I think it’s best if we thought about it, Professor.” Harry looked up at her solemnly.

McGonagall nodded, glancing at Ron. “Yes Potter, that would be best I think.” She waved them out of the office, and they followed Harry out.

~*~

“I thought weren’t going back!” Ron exploded before they had even trooped their way down the hall.

Hermione sighed. That sigh was her sigh. Poor Hermione couldn’t come to grips with the fact that Ron was an idiot. He wasn’t stupid. He and Harry each had achieved moderately good marks without really trying, but while he might be quite bright when he wanted to be, he usually didn’t want to be. “Ronald!” she demanded, “She’s giving us a second chance! Why wouldn’t you take it?”

Harry’s sigh was internal. After all Hermione had sighed enough for both of them. Privately, he agreed with Hermione. He wanted still to become an Auror, and even if he had defeated Voldemort, he wanted to have his N.E.W.T.s. Besides, he loved Hogwarts, and he wouldn’t mind another year, even if he had to take classes. His natural inclination towards diplomacy prevented him from saying this however.

“We don’t need another year, Hermione, we already got rid of Voldemort!”

“We need to set a good example, Ron!”

Slowly, Harry spoke. “Hermione’s right. We have the chance to get our N.E.W.T.s without Voldemort hanging over our heads, we should take it. I’m staying.”

Ron shot him a look of pure desperation as only someone faced with the prospect of extra work could.

Hermione stared at him, outraged. “Don’t you want to learn?”

Ron’s shoulders slumped and he nodded. If Hermione and Harry were staying, he would too.

~*~

There was another reason Harry wanted to stay at Hogwarts, and she was smiling at him from outside the portrait of the Fat Lady. “Hi Ginny.”

She snatched his hand as soon as he came close. “Hey Harry.” Her smile was infectious, and his lips began to twitch up. “”I was thinking…”

“Yeah?”

“Now that Voldemort’s gone, can we get back together?

A sudden sharp twist of guilt shot through him. He remembered Eileen and silently hoped Ginny would never know about her. He told himself that he and Ginny hadn’t been really dating at the time, and that it just sort of happened, but he doubted she’d see it that way. His first time was supposed to be hers, and she was Ron’s little sister.

He quickly covered it with a grin. “Yeah, of course.” His chest hurt. He hadn’t thought that when he saw Ginny again, he would miss Eileen that badly.

~*~

Madam Pomfrey opened the hospital wing door and ushered Harry into the room. “He’s sleeping again, but he should be waking up soon.” A glance at the window told her it was evening. Perversely that’s when he woke.

Harry nodded, smiling weakly at her, fingering the pensieve he had retrieved from the Room of Requirement. “Thanks.”

“I don’t know why you want to see him now, he’s never exactly civil when he’s in pain.” Unspoken was that he was never exactly civil at all, or that Harry had never gotten along with him. Or that he had no visitors until then.

“It’s alright, I’m not expecting much.” It was Snape after all.

Madam Pomfrey bustled off to treat a third year Ravenclaw with bad burns and Harry lowered himself into an unpadded wooden chair next to Snape’s bed. All he could see of him was his hair, his forehead, and the bridge of his nose. The blanket covered everything else. If he hadn’t been afraid to wake him, he would have pulled the cover down a bit. It was probably instinct that made him need to find something of himself in Snape’s features, even if he had masked them with the glamour. Yet what he really wanted to see was some trace of Eileen.

Harry leaned back against the hoped the chair back. The battle the day before and his early morning began to catch up with him again, and the evening light soon combined with it to lull him off to sleep too.

~*~

Severus drifted back to waking as soon as the sun sank below the horizon. A hand reached up to pull the sheets down as his still sleeping mind tried to figure out where he was. He wasn’t in his bed in his room at Hogwarts, and he wasn’t back at Spinner’s End. Finally his memories caught up with the rest of him. He was in the hospital wing. He turned over and opened his eyes cautiously.

“Potter!” there the brat sat, next to his bed, apparently asleep. “Potter!”

Harry started. “Snape? Good evening.”

“What on earth are you doing here?” he hissed, wondering if he could still take points.

Harry set a flask on the table next to the pensieve. “I brought you this back,” he explained. “And this.” He sat a second flask down next to the first. Actually, it wasn’t a flask so much as a red and gold bottle he had found lying around, but at least that way Snape wouldn’t get them mixed up. “You’ll want to look at those.”

Harry knew he was being a coward, giving the memories to Snape to see instead of telling him straight out, but he didn’t care much. He also knew it was a bit spiteful for him to give Snape the memories in a red and gold bottle, but he cared even less.