Severus slumped in his desk chair, staring at the wood grain.  The fury and disbelief that had sustained him through his battle with Potter had dissipated and he had sunk into torpor until a magical alarm on his desk began flashing, whistling, and dancing irritatingly.  He slammed his fist onto the top of it, and it stopped its antics with a squeak.  Unless he wanted to be imprisoned in the hospital wing again, he had a potion to brew.

He set the cauldron up over a burner and dug through his cabinet for usably fresh ingredients.  He sat back down and prepared the ingredients, casually adding them to the potion, and stirring lazily.  When he had first taken the Defense Against the Dark Arts position, he had taken a perverse pleasure in watching Slughorn slave away over the hospital wing potions, and had even asked him to brew a potion or two for him.  Unfortunately, the other professor had taken the task with good humor.

When he finished the potion, he poured a dose into a cup and bottled the rest.  He sipped it absentmindedly, flipping through a year old copy of “The Practical Potioner”.  A plate of chicken, carrots, and roast potatoes had appeared while he had been gazing at his desk and he nibbled on them as well.

A hesitant tapping at the door disturbed him halfway through his meal.  He gulped down the rest of the potion before he answered the door.  A mousy girl with brown hair and a braid stood there in mid tap.  It took a moment for him to remember who she was, “Miss Davis.”

“Professor, the headmistress sent me to tell you she wants to see you as soon as you can come down,” she spoke very quickly.  Her rushed high pitched mode of speaking was far more distinct than her freckled cheeks and oval face.  “I’m supposed to bring you.”

He sighed and closed the door behind him, his absentminded meal abandoned.  As they walked, they passed the window he had leapt from, and he favored it with a nasty look.

Minerva met him at the gargoyle and the student scampered off.  The new headmistress led him inside and up the stairs.  “Ah, Severus, I wanted to clarify your future plans.”

He examined her office.  Gone were the spindly silver objects and the phoenix perch, and gone too were his jars of exotic potions ingredients and scribbled notes.  She had once teased him that the only reason more of his students didn’t crowd the hospital wing in hysterics after receiving their assignments back was because they couldn’t read what he had written in the margins.  In the place of his and Albus’ possessions were bagpipes, a thistle wreath, pictures of her nieces and nephews (and great nieces and nephews), and a bust of Athena amongst the books in the bookcases.  “I would understand, Severus, if you wish to retire.”

“It depends, Minerva.” She seated herself behind the desk and raised an eyebrow at him, urging him to continue.  “On whether there is a position here for me.”

She started.  “Of course there is!”  She tried her best to give him Albus’ searching look, “We’ve lost enough teachers as it is, Horace is even leaving, says he only agreed to come out of retirement as a favor to Albus.”

“I would have thought that he would have relished the chance to aid in the decisions regarding the reconstruction of the school,” he kept his face purposefully bland.

“As would I,” she favored him with a sidelong glance.  “He must have relished his comfort more.  Well, the point is we need four professors, and I would be grateful if you would make that number three.”

It was his turn to raise an eyebrow as he folded his arms, a slight smirk playing on his lips.

“I should have realized you were on our side,” she whispered, her voice thick with self reproach.

“You should not have,” a large portion of him was sickened that he hadn’t gloated, at least a little bit.  “I played my part well.”

“I should have known when the gargoyle allowed you to take this office.”

“I take it as a complement to my acting abilities that you did not.”

She fixed him with her shrewd gaze, “He knew he was dying?”

He nodded.  “He put on a cursed ring.  He thought it would be best if he could turn his death to some tactical advantage.  And he didn’t want Draco Malfoy to do the deed.”  He shook his head.  “Actually, he cut it very close, less than a month.”

Minerva smiled at him, grateful he hadn’t made her suffer for it, but nonetheless quick to change the unpleasant subject.  “I’m sure the curse is gone from the Defense post.”

“Don’t be ridiculous Minerva, that’s a foolish superstition.”  He turned to the door, but stopped.  “Did Potter ever tell you why he trusted me?”

“No, Severus,” she leaned in curiously.  “He did not.”

His smirk returned, wider than before.  “Then you shan’t know.”

~*~

Harry sighed with relief as soon as he was safe in his chair in front of the empty Gryffindor fireplace.  His eyelids drooped as he sank deeper into the cushions.  A terrible anxiety had settled over him the moment he found that Snape was his in some small purely biological sense.  The knowledge that he would have to tell him had pressed on him, clawing at the back of his mind, waiting to burst forward.  The telling itself, leaving the bottle on Snape’s hospital wing table like a coward had not abated it. 

Even fighting with the man, most of what he had been afraid of, had drawn the fear away.  At least it was over with.  Some unreasonable portion of his mind had feared Snape might want to acknowledge their kinship in some way.  That at least was comfortingly not true.

The warm summer air mingled with his exhaustion, lulling him off to sleep, sprawled in the chair. Whatever fatherly duties he had towards Snape had been discharged.  He could do his best to forget the whole matter, secure that Snape didn’t want to remind him of it.

Neville still dozed next to Harry when he awoke, the sunset sky blazing in through the tower windows.  The bottle poked into the small of his back, but a lazy lassitude pervaded his limbs and he pondered not trekking upstairs to the dormitories to sleep, but instead staying right where he was.  If he fell asleep again the, he would probably awaken some time in the middle of the night, and he could slip on his invisibility cloak and wander the halls as he had when he had first come to Hogwarts.  The halls in the deep hours of the night were probably safer than they had been in first year when he had found the Mirror of Erised, or in fourth year when he had fallen though the trick staircase.  The only Death Eaters left in Hogwarts were safely locked up in Snape’s old class room.

~*~

Summer passed in a haze of repairs, midnight wanderings, loneliness, and the sort of boredom that only came from doing necessary, tedious, difficult work.  Flitwick had shown Harry how to repair the many broken windows, and Ginny liked to remain close to him, levitating bits of masonry back into place.  When he had reached the window Snape had leapt so dramatically from, he had flicked his wand sharply, a fierce jolt of satisfaction running through him as the glass rose from the floor and ground outside and oozed back into place.  He hadn’t thought there were so many windows in all the school as needed repair, and he desperately wished he could be doing something more interesting, such as repairing the portraits and statuary blasted apart in the battle or follow Hagrid, Professor Sprout, and Neville out to the grounds to tend to the injured magical plants and creatures.

A few days before his birthday, he had overheard Professor Sprout tell Professor McGonagall that when she retired (“not right now, Minerva, not to worry”) Neville would be an admirable choice to succeed her.  Harry had grinned as he heard it, and rushed off to tell him.

Harry had caught Neville straightening his tie in front of the mirror and scrubbing his nose until it was bright red, and when he confronted him with his strange behavior, Neville said he had to rush off to see Hannah Abbot.  Harry had wished him luck, and because he alone of all the Gryffindor boys was there to tease him, told Neville to give her a kiss from him.

Ginny had told Harry after the funeral that if she had to be present at another funeral, she would prefer to be in the box, thank you very much, but though she remained at Hogwarts throughout the summer, she moped trough the halls, helping when someone put the task before her.  If Fred had not so recently died, Harry would have called it sulking.

They didn’t kiss again all summer long, at lest not real kisses, but she let him put his arm around her shoulder and cuddled up to him in the common room, and that was alright too.

When on the rare occasions that Harry and Snape were out of their respective territories within the school and they passed each other, they walked by without a word.  If deep glowers grew on their faces and their strides became stiff, neither they nor anyone saw fit to bring it up.  If Snape’s eyebrows often met in the middle as he scowled, Harry refrained from commenting that they were Eileen’s eyebrows.

Harry’s world slowly settled into the new idea that Snape didn’t want to berate him, or deride him, or throw him into detention, he just wanted to ignore him.  Punishing Harry, or informing him he had less intelligence and character than the Whomping Willow would have involved acknowledging his existence.  Actually, it reminded him of the way Snape had treated him after Harry had viewed his pensive.

~*~

On August third, just under four weeks before classes were about to start, Hermione, brown from head to foot arrived on the school doorstep, trunk in hand.  Atop her trunk sat a cage containing one rather irritated great horned owl.

Up in the Gryffindor common room, her trunk safely stored away at the foot of her bed, in the dormitory, Hermione grasped Harry around the neck in a hug closely resembling a stranglehold.  “Hi, Hermione.”

“Oh Harry, how are you!”  Her grip loosened marginally.

“Fine Hermione,” he gasped.

She let go of him, much to his relief.  “It’s good to be back you know; my parents are quite angry with me.”

Harry could imagine.  Not many parents would take kindly to their children modifying their memories, sending them to Australia, and then proceeding to get themselves into numerous life threatening situations as soon as they were gone.  “I’m sure they’ll come around.”

“Of course, but I’m glad I’m here until it blows over,” she smiled wryly.  “Oh, and I bought you a birthday present.”  She ran off.  As she hurried up the stairs, harry decided that if she was about to give him a book, he could always use it to prop up his bed.  One of the legs had been cut short sometime during Snape’s reign as headmaster.  When she returned, she did so with an owl in a cage, and she hefted the cage up to show him.  “I know she isn’t Hedwig, but you need a new owl now…”

The owl glared disapprovingly at him in a way eerily reminiscent of Professor McGonagall.  “She looks a bit bad tempered.”

“Nonsense,” intoned Hermione firmly.  “She just looks it.  It’s why no one wanted to buy her, she’d been there for ages the shopkeeper said.”

“Did he really?”  A disturbing pattern was beginning to form in his mind.  First Crookshanks, and then the feathered monster in the cage she had handed him, really if it weren’t for the small stature of her acquisitions, Hermione would have been as notorious as Hagrid.

“Best I could tell anyway, I bought her on the way back in France, and my French isn’t terribly good.”  She ignored Harry, shaking his head.  “So, what’s her name then?”

“Bodmin,” Harry answered uncertainly as the newly christened owl’s ears twitched.”

“Bodmin?”  As avid a reader as Hermione was, Harry guessed Quidditch Through the Ages wasn’t her normal choice.  “Why on earth would you name her that?”

“There’s supposed to be a wild snitch loose there,” Bodmin fluffed her feathers and peered at him.  “I always wanted to chase after it.”

Hermione sighed in a long suffering sort of way and Bodmin clicked her beak.  “Well, she’s your owl now.”

He laughed and climbed the stairs into the dormitory, setting Bodmin and her cage down on his bedside table.

~*~

A day later, Ron walked reluctantly through the front gates of Hogwarts.  His eyes widened as he walked down the hall to see scaffolding and floating masonry lining the corridors.  He ducked as one particularly large slab of rock sailed over his head.

“Ginny,” Harry called from somewhere ahead of him, “Be careful with that!”

“Oh come on, Harry, it was four feet above him.”

“Hallo you two,” he greeted, meeting up with them near a pulverized arch that had once been a window.  “Where’s Hermione.”

Ginny hugged him round the middle, her wand swishing behind his back to keep the rocks flying into place.  “She’s helping Flitwick repair the suits of armor.  Why?” she asked, “Do you need a welcoming kiss?”  Harry couldn’t help grinning as she let go of him and puckered up.

“Have you been down to the common room yet?”  Harry asked quietly.

“No, not yet.”

“The fat lady still isn’t repaired, so she’s a bit put out about that, but this morning Peeves painted a beard and handlebar mustache on her, and she isn’t letting anyone in unless they have a ‘good reason for disturbing her in her misery’.”

Ron snickered.  “How did McGonagall take that?”

“Said if she didn’t let us in, she’d drop her in a vat of turpentine.”  Harry smirked, reveling in the feeling of small school troubles.

“Well, anyway, she’s sulking in a corner of her frame, hiding her face and moaning.  You can hear her up and down the hall.”

Ron laughed but continued up to the Gryffindor tower.  Harry and Ginny abandoned their posts to follow him.  The Fat Lady as predicted was hiding her defaced visage behind the frame.  “Widdershins,” the three chorused.

“Another student, oh another student, can’t you just leave me in peace to dwell on my agony?” she wailed back.

“Wow, Harry, you didn’t tell me Moaning Myrtle was now guarding Gryffindor Tower.”

The fat Lady shrieked theatrically.  “Students, I hate students, they're always to rude, and cruel, and…” she whimpered, sobbing loudly, her emotions seeming to overwhelm her.

Harry groaned.  “Look, just let us in okay?  We gave you the password.”

She swung open huffily.  “You tell the headmistress I deserve to be restored!  There will be new students who see this of me first!”  Her voice rose nearly to a scream as Harry and Ginny slammed her shut.

“So,” Ron said, “It’s good to be back.”

~*~

Over the next few weeks, a few students trickled back into Hogwarts and the students and professors rushed to get the school ready for the rest.  When the school had begun to look like its old self- to a thousand year old castle, a little battle between the forces of light and darkness wasn’t much to get exited over- the headmistress called a staff meeting.

A few of Professor Trelawney’s absurd poof chairs had found their way into the headmistress’ office.  Severus and the other professors lowered themselves onto them gingerly as Minerva paced around the room.  “I’ve found the Muggle Studies, Potions, and Transfiguration teachers,” she announced, “And I thought only common courtesy to inform you who your new colleagues would be before the feast.”

Her fingers drummed on the top of her desk.  “I have managed to convince Damocles Belby, Emeric Switch, Blenheim Stalk to teach Potions, Transfiguration, and Muggle Studies respectively.”  An audible sigh of relief escaped from the mouths of the collected professors.  Severus had clearly not been alone in his fears that it would be like Defense Against the Dark Arts all over again, with a string of incompetent professors filling the post.

“Ahhhh,” Professor Trelawney began in her misty voice, “I knew you would hire them Headmistress, the stars have told-“

“Yes, thank you, Sibyll.”

Binns awoke from his daze, floating above his own poof.  “Professor McDougall,” he had to pause when several of the assembled tried to stifle their mirth with strangled coughing.  “Who are these people?”

Minerva made a mental note to sack Binns… next year, if the new professors continued to teach.  “Belby invented the Wolfsbane potion, Professor, you must remember, it enabled Remus Lupin to join us for a year.”  She wondered how the ghost’s tenure had lasted as long as it had.  In the portrait behind her, Albus waggled his finger at her back.  “Emeric Switch wrote the text book we use for first year Transfiguration, and Stalk is one of the most noted experts on Muggles.”

Severus held in a groan.  Damocles Belby had been three years ahead of him as a student, and the only Ravenclaw irritating enough to bother with.  Furthermore, he had devised the potion enabling Lupin to return to Hogwarts as a professor, and for that alone Belby deserved his scorn.

“I trust you will all treat your new colleagues with the respect due them,” she winked almost unnoticeably at Severus, “and the Daily Prophet will be running the new appointments as their cover story sometime in the next few days.  Tales of the rebuilding supposedly lift spirits.”  With that, she dismissed the professors, and watched them file out like their students from class.