Slowly Snape’s features evaporated, leaving behind a man who resembled nothing so much as an underfed, sallow Potter.  His hair beneath the layers of oil tried valiantly to stick up in the manner that it did on both James and Harry Potter.  Only a few traces of the face Harry and Professor McGonagall had come to associate with Severus Snape remained.  His eyes continued to be hollow and black, his brows remained heavy, and his height hadn’t changed at all.  Harry noted absently in the part of his mind prone to noticing pointless details like egg in a furious Uncle Vernon’s mustache that he was still taller than Snape.  Harry would never be a tall man, but Snape was a shorter one still.

Severus surveyed himself in a mirror Minerva had hastily conjured for him and flinched back from it and almost let go of the mirror.  The face he saw within it looked strange without glasses, and even more strangely sharp edged, but recognizably Potter’s.  His mouth would not have sneered in the same way he had always so terrified his students with, his chin jutted out in unintentional arrogance, and his hair attempted to arrange itself into the Potter rat’s nest.  Strangest of all, his notorious hooked nose had transformed itself, in an unappreciated ironic fashion, into the elfin point that had once adorned the face of Lilly Evans.

Even knowing beforehand that the resemblance was likely to be startling, seeing it in the mirror was still perfectly appalling.  He passed the mirror back, hands trembling, to Minerva who vanished it.  “I have something to fetch from the library for the pair of you,” she informed them, “I’ll leave you to talk.”

Harry couldn’t fathom what they had to talk about, or he did, but he couldn’t fathom how to talk about it, so he just sat silently as Snape stared disgustedly at his hands.  He leaned back into the chair, hunching down.  Night had fallen, and he thought wistfully of his bed in the dormitory.  His eyes had closed and he was just slipping off to sleep when Snape spoke.

“I don’t believe either of us has anything to talk about,” he snarled down Potter, enraged that the boy could so calmly take a nap.

“No,” Harry agreed coldly, waking with a start, “we don’t.”  It was strange looking at the face so much like his own and knowing that the man wearing it was in fact his son.  It defied understanding that this man could also be Snape.

Severus folded himself into a chair next to Potter and tried to explain to himself again that he would be wearing the face he had just seen in the mirror for at least the rest of the school year.

“You might want to wash your hair,” Potter quipped, “if you don’t want people to recognize you.

~*~

Minerva returned, her arms full of scrolls, to find the two staunch foes seated side by side in moody silence.  Well, she hadn’t expected any better.  “The Potter and Prince family trees,” she informed them, "do try to come up with a plausible explanation.”

Harry frowned at the pendulum clock shoved into the corner that Fawkes’ perch had once inhabited.  “Professor, it’s getting late.”

“You can slink back to your tower after we’re finished,” snapped Snape.

“While Severus’ words were impolite, they were essentially correct.  You may leave only when you and he have agreed on a reasonable back story for Severus’ new alter ego.”  She dropped the scrolls onto her desk and crossed back to the doorway.

Harry stared after her horrified.  “Where are you going?” he cried as she opened the door.

“I need to discuss Professor Flitwick’s lesson plans with him,” she explained calmly as she left.

As the door closed behind her, Harry wondered why she didn’t stay to help or guard them, or stand at the door imprisoning them, or something.  He sat in horrified silence as Severus too tried to calculate why the headmistress hadn’t at least stayed to referee their discussion.  Finally, he broke the stillness, unrolling one of the scrolls.  “We’re looking for Prince males and Potter females between the right ages to sire me.”  He gestured to Potter to pick up the other scroll.

“Eighteen?”  Harry asked flippantly.  Snape growled.  “Why Potter women and Prince men?” he queried less sarcastically.

“We are looking for those specific genders because I will take the Potter name when you agree to take the Snape one.”  He glowered balefully at Potter.

Harry smirked not at all offended.  At last, he couldn’t hold back from reminding Snape any longer.  “Technically you are a Potter.”  He refrained from saying that he wanted Snape to share his name about as much as Snape wanted to share it.  That was actually very convenient.

Severus’ scowled as he scanned the Prince family tree.  His scowl deepened when he saw that Potter hadn’t even unrolled his scroll.  “Read it, you idiot, the sooner we’ve formulated a story, the sooner you can scurry back to your aggravating cohorts.”  Potter unrolled the scroll, tracing the lines and names reverently. “Make whoever you pick is closely enough related to you to explain this,” Severus remarked, waving an eloquent hand in front of his new features.

“My father’s father had a younger sister, born in 1933,” Harry read, pointing.

Severus followed his finger.  “Conveniently dead too,” he mused, marking down “Elizabeth Potter” as a possibility, and going back to the Prince family tree.  His eyes narrowed further.  There wasn’t anyone of the proper age even out to third and fourth cousins.  Of course there weren’t many third and fourth cousins.  The Princes were a small family, and like Elizabeth Potter, conveniently extinct except for him.

Harry stared in wonder at his generation with something that might have been awe. “My father had a lot of siblings, wonder what happened to them all.”

Severus glanced over and pointed to the dates.  “Miscarried or died in infancy.”  Potter grimaced.  “And if I could have some small measure of quiet, I might be able to find a mate for Miss-” he glanced at the parchment with the one name list of possibles, “Elizabeth Potter.”

It would have been too much to expect that a Potter woman and a Prince man had married in recent memory, but Severus hadn’t thought it was too much to ask that there might be a Prince man the proper age at all.  Potter peered over his shoulder.  “Bloody hell, there just isn’t anyone, is there?”

“Language, Mr. Potter,” Severus murmured.  “That might have been an astute observation if it weren’t written out in ink on parchment for you.”

“Then why are you still staring at it?”  Harry laughed when Snape snarled.  “You have an aunt and uncle, here.”  He pointed at the scroll, “dead and childless.  They left your mother the house.”

Severus turned around to face him.  “How did you know that?” he queried darkly.

Harry grinned at him.  “Eileen told me.”  He tapped the names, “Ian and Catherine Prince.  We’re making up an identity four you; we could just make up a son for these two, and claim he’s your father.  Eileen would vouch for you if you ask.  You are her son.”  The last two words came out almost too softly.  Snape was Eileen’s son.  It hadn’t struck him before.  That somehow was as important as the glaring horrible fact that he was Harry’s.

Severus went very still.  His eyes met Potter’s, and he held them for a moment before he spoke.  “My mother died fourteen years ago.”

“Oh,” Harry mumbled, shamefaced.

The quill in Severus’ hand wrote down the names of his aunt and uncle and drew a line between them and one leading down from them.  Aurelius Prince he wrote beneath the line.  “Aurelius?”  Potter asked bewildered.

“If you were in anyway at all informed about history or philosophy, you’d know Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor and a stoic philosopher, and furthermore that he was the emperor who came six before Septimius Severus.  If you knew the slightest bit of Latin, you’d know the word means ‘golden’.”  He paused for a moment, and Harry had time to note that this was probably the most Snape had ever said to him without screaming.  “It also happens to be a family name.”  He jabbed his finger at his great grandfather’s name.

As Snape drew another line from the fictional Aurelius Prince to a box he labeled Elizabeth Potter, Harry rolled up the scrolls and set them aside.  “I didn’t know Hogwarts kept family trees around.”

Severus, who had been contemplating which name he would find least offensive to bear until such time as his historical redemption had taken place, started.  “Hogwarts is an institution of scholarship.  It keeps many records that are of no interest to students and therefore not accessible to them.  He gave Potter a fearsome look.  “You will not inform Miss Granger of these documents.”  Doubtless, the insufferable young woman’s compulsion to find new pieces of knowledge would overpower her love of the rules.  In Hogwarts, as in most places, it was safe to assume that one was not supposed to open locked doors, but Potter and his usual companions had a gift for prying into things under lock and key.

Harry nodded absently and Snape tapped his fingers against the desk.  “Eileen had an owl named Nero, you could use that, since you like Roman emperors so much,” he suggested annoyed.

Severus wrote down a name.  “No self respecting wizard would name his son ‘Nero’,” he snarled back, passing Potter the piece of parchment, who took it gingerly.  “You will take this to McGonagall.  You will inform your fellow miscreants that my alter ego has been abroad and that he was educated at Durmstrang.”

Harry leapt from the chair, grateful to have any pretext to get away from Snape even for a few minutes.  The distance to the office door seemed too long even as he grasped the door handle and sped out.

After he passed the gargoyle, Harry slowed down.  Glancing at the piece of parchment, he read the name Snape had scratched on it, connected to his falsified family tree.  Sebastian Prince, he named himself.  Harry tilted it sideways and wondered why Snape hadn’t named himself after a Roman emperor after all.

Harry liked Hogwarts at night.  There remained some visceral thrill to sneaking around left from first year.  So many of his most terrifying assignations had come out of midnight wandering through the Hogwarts halls, but the terror and occasional bloodshed had always come far removed from the late night adventures, safe in his invisibility cloak.

It took some of the excitement out of the journey to be taking it on a professor’s direction.  Given who had sent him on it, he had no fear of running into Snape or another professor, and very little of running into Filch.  Even without his invisibility cloak, he felt no need to slink through the halls, hiding in the shadows from the caretaker and Mrs. Norris prowling around the corridors.  Instead, his trek to Flitwick’s office felt more like a daytime walk, except that the halls were dark and empty.

Harry rapped on the office door and waited a moment before Flitwick answered.  “Yes?” he squeaked.

“Could I speak to Professor McGonagall?” asked Harry as McGonagall hurried over.  “Professor, I’ve been sent to fetch you,” he handed her Snape’s note and she scanned it briefly.

“Excuse me, Filius, could we resume this discussion tomorrow?”

“No need Minerva,” he chirped, “So long as you saw nothing wrong with them?”

“Nothing at all,” she assured him, “Good night, Filius.”

“Night, Professor,” Harry felt obliged to call.

“I assume I can conclude from your presence that you and Professor Snape have reached an agreement,” she spoke as they walked back to her office, Harry trying not to drag his feet.

“Yeah,” Harry replied noncommittally, barely keeping up with her quick strides.  “We made up a few people, though.”  A sudden unpleasant thought struck him.  “Err, Professor, what if someone checks the records?”

“Minister Shacklebolt has agreed to edit the records as a favor to the school,” she informed him, her tone clipped. “Now I suggest you return to Gryffindor tower, Mr. Potter.  It’s well after hours.”

~*~

Harry whispered the new password to the Fat Lady, who opened without complaint because she didn’t wake up enough to do any complaining, and crept inside the common room.  Quietly, he crossed it, slipping up the staircase to the seventh year dormitory and sank into his four-poster, sighing with relief.  The lack of Neville’s snores and a small groan to the side of him told him he hadn’t gone unnoticed after all.  “Why is it always you, Harry?” Neville whispered.

“Huh?”

“You’re always the one sneaking back in here,” he mumbled sleepily.

“Hush, go back to sleep, you’ll wake the others.”

Harry pulled on his pajamas and threw the blankets over his head.  He didn’t want to talk with Ron yet.  He needed time first to come up with a reason for Snape dragging him out of the common room earlier.  Right then however, his mind was still reeling from having spent all that time in McGonagall’s office with Snape with neither of their corpses shoved in some back corridor.  The blankets were warm, and he was too tired to ponder the implications of having come up with a usable story together without any blood spilled.  Regardless of whether or not their cooperation was more a factor of their mutual wish to flee each others’ company than any actual reconciliatory impulses, they had achieved a temporary truce.  Of course, that truce was likely to have ended by the time Harry woke up the next morning.

~*~

Severus stalked swiftly down the halls, the billowing of his robes impeded slightly by the boxes in his arms.  Minerva had pointed out to him only minutes before that a Defense Against the dark Arts professor who nominally had never taught Potions at Hogwarts should not be residing in the Potions Master’s rooms.  He had muttered and grumbled, but he had agreed with her, and so he was moving, in the dead of night, to the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor’s rooms.

Minerva had also told him that for appearances sake, he should leave his stores of hideously expensive potions ingredients behind for Belby.  He didn’t have much to carry up to his new rooms, which was a good thing, because each way he had to climb three staircases, his arms laden with delicate magical instruments like his pensieve.  Even secondhand, the cost of a pensieve was prohibitive on a professor’s salary.

He surveyed his new office, stripped of the gruesome possessions of its previous resident, and began tearing the bare necessities of an office, quills and parchment and ink bottles and his Dark Arts books and placed them where they should go in his new office.  As he unpacked each box and found places for each of his belongings, he glowered at the room suspiciously.  Somehow, having to move had never entered his mind when he had asked time and again for the Defense Against the Dark Arts job.

Last of all he unpacked the box with his grey rug.  Knowing from whence the pink flowered comforter he had transfigured it from had come, he wanted to burn it.  To satisfy his anger instead, he unfurled it and beat it against the air ruthlessly.  Had it been its previous possessor, he would have broken the boy’s neck.  When he had laid it where he wanted it, he gave it one last firm stamp.

He surveyed his Spartan room and silently pronounced himself satisfied, though he supposed he would have to collect interesting objects to place around his office to maintain the illusion that he had some previous existence.  He had never had many useless belongings to clutter his living space.  Let Minerva accuse him of keeping half his potions stores around simply to distress students awaiting his wrath.  He knew only a quarter at most were on display for that purpose.  The rest he had kept shut away in supply cabinets anyway.

Loath as he was to ever do such a thing, he knew he had to follow Potter’s earlier mocking advice.  One greasy git couldn’t suddenly disappear and another appear in his place without the students, at least the rare intelligent ones, concluding that the two might in fact be the same greasy git.  On the way to the shower, he caught a glimpse of his new features in the mirror, and turned it deliberately to face the wall.

Equally deliberately, when he had scrubbed himself clean, his hands hesitating over his shrunken nose and disturbingly unfamiliar features, he turned the mirror back to face him.  The features, so foreign beneath his fingertips, became so distressingly familiar in the mirror.  When his jaw tightened, the image in the mirror’s jaw tightened.  When his mouth twisted in disgust, the image’s mouth twisted.

He backed away from the mirror, trembling.  His hands shook as he touched his face, sliding the fingertips over his forehead and cheekbones, searching for every little difference from the features of his hated school foe.  Though the overall resemblance was disconcerting and somewhat nauseating, there were enough small differences he could cling to in his new visage.

~*~

Minerva decided, tucked into bed with a copy of Emeric Switch’s perspective lesson plans on her lap, that she would need a great deal more whiskey than she customarily drank to mull over Severus and Potter’s revelations, but that she had no intention of doing that to herself so soon before school began again.