Potter was edgy around Severus after that. He tried to hide it but Severus saw it. It was the uncertainty of an animal that knew he could be very dangerous but wasn’t sure if he was going to be. Maybe Severus should have made that vow of no harm after all.

Wouldn’t have helped, whispered an echo of the boy he’d once been, and Severus knew it was true. People who meant you no harm could still hurt you as much as those who did. Look at Albus.

There were still those who did mean the boy harm, of course.

“Longbottom’s family’s all right but he’s nothing more than a squib,” he heard as he strode through the corridors, bringing him to a stop. It took no intelligence to know it was Draco Malfoy or that he must be talking to Potter. “And Granger doesn’t have a family. They’re not the sort you should be hanging around with.”

“They’re my friends,” Potter said flatly, and there was seething anger under that false calm. When a boy has finally found acceptable he will not gladly accept criticism of those who give it to him; Severus knew that from personal experience. His first friends would be defended with the ferocity of a mother wolf.

“My father says—”

“Malfoy,” Potter said, and his voice was pitying, “just because the grown ups say it doesn’t make it true.”

Children should not have learnt so young to dismiss adults so easily. Everything Severus observed about Potter only made him more furious with the boy’s relatives. Judging it time to interfere, he swept around the corner. The young Malfoy shut his mouth with a snap, glared at Potter, and stalked off. Potter watched Severus cautiously.

“Do you trust anyone, Potter?” he asked finally.

Potter tilted his head to one side. “Hermione. She tells me the truth even when she thinks I won’t like it.”

And how had a boy worked out that was a good reason to trust someone?

This was the son of the boy who’d done his best to make Severus’s school life a living hell, the son of the boy who’d demanded all the attention when Severus would have been happy with just a few scraps. This was the boy who had destroyed his brother for ten years (and whatever he’d done, Voldemort was still his brother). This was the boy who made Severus feel uncomfortably like he was looking in a mirror through time.

He watched the boy trot off down the hall and slowly resumed his own travels. He still didn’t know how he felt about Potter, but now it was more because he didn’t dare investigate his feelings. He didn’t want to know what he might find there.

-

The school year got under way. Every weekend Severus left the castle for a few hours, saying nothing to anyone about where he was going, and found himself somewhere new, somewhere where his brother waited for him. His meetings with Voldemort followed no script usually used by a Dark Lord reunited with his most faithful servant. There was no talk of revenge, no anger, no tests of loyalty. Because they weren’t lord and slave, they were brothers.

In fact, they hadn’t ever spoken about what had happened that October night when they’d been separated. Sometimes Severus wasn’t even sure Voldemort remembered (and he tried not to think about why Voldemort had been almost killed, because he couldn’t believe his brother had killed two people and tried to kill a baby). Instead they talked about the things family normally talk about, as if they held a family reunion every weekend.

So Voldemort asked eager questions about Severus’s life: was he still at Hogwarts? was teaching any better now he’d been doing it for years? had Dumbledore become more or less annoying over time? what was his latest research? had he holidayed anywhere interesting? what was the conference like? In short, what had he been doing for ten years?

And, like any family, they reminisced. “Do you remember your first polyjuice potion?” Voldemort would ask. “How it was contaminated by dog hair without you realising? I thought I’d never stop laughing!”

“I hoped you’d choke,” Severus said sourly, for he certainly hadn’t forgotten and to this day suspected Voldemort had tampered with his potion just to annoy him, but his brother’s amusement made him smile too. “Did I ever thank you for fixing it or was I too annoyed with you?”

“Oh no, you did thank me. Through gritted teeth and sounding more like you were cursing me, but the thought was there.” Voldemort reconsidered this. “Perhaps not the thought. The words were there.”

“I am grateful,” Severus said suddenly. “For everything. You gave me so much, helped me—”

“Don’t be a fool, Severus,” Voldemort cut him off hastily. “It was all perfectly selfish. I couldn’t have my little brother running around looking like a mutant dog-human hybrid, could I?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know.” Voldemort sighed and refused to meet his eyes. “Don’t thank me, Severus. I don’t deserve it.” And he swiftly changed the subject.

-

Neville sat in the library with his friends (he had friends! him!), chattering and laughing quietly. They’d started out doing homework, but Hermione had been successfully distracted by questions about Muggle life. Not that Neville’s interest was feigned, because Muggles sounded so remarkable. All the things they could do even though they didn’t have any magic! He’d never known they were so clever.

When Hermione and Harry got into a debate over exactly how a telly worked, though, Neville laughed to himself and drifted off in thought. He liked Hogwarts. He liked being with his friends and he liked doing magic and he liked that no one was comparing him to anyone and he was allowed to succeed or fail on his own merits.

But he missed his parents. He’d visited them every week for as long as he could remember and now he’d gone four whole weeks without seeing them. Even if they weren’t real parents and didn’t even know his name, they were his parents. Who was going to brush his mum’s hair just the way she liked? Who was going to fly wooden Quidditch figures around with his dad? Who was his mum going to give bubblegum wrappers to? Would the nurses remember his dad didn’t like malt biscuits if Neville wasn’t around to remind them? He hoped they were okay. Gran said they were okay when she wrote, but Gran would.

Neville shook off the despondent thoughts. If only he could have visited his parents he’d love Hogwarts more than anything and never want to leave. Even if most of the other kids looked at him kind of weirdly.

He’d quickly realised on coming to Hogwarts that he wasn’t normal. Since he’d been left to his own devices most of the time at home he’d had to amuse himself. And it happened that the Longbottoms had been collecting books for quite some years and had amassed a remarkable collection. So Neville had lived in the library. Books didn’t treat you like a baby or try to hide their disappointment in you only to make it glaringly obvious. Books didn’t seal themselves shut because they didn’t like you. Books were faithful friends, Neville’s only friends.

It wasn’t until he came to Hogwarts that he realised he wasn’t like other kids his age. He’d been treated like he was five so he’d had to bring himself up, but he’d only ever interacted with adults and it showed. His reading comprehension, for example, was far in advance of his classmates’ – but his social skills were non-existent. Once he would have hated being so different but now he didn’t mind it because he had friends. And no one in their right mind would call Neville’s friends normal.

Hermione had surprised her parents when she, aged two, corrected her mother’s reading aloud of the wrong word in a new storybook. The Grangers had fostered their daughter’s remarkable intelligence and inquiring spirit, letting her grow and blossom. By the time she was three she could read fluently and discovered algebra. At five she found calculus and started learning French for fun. All her life she had used her brilliant brain as a lever to unlock the secrets of the world. By the time her Hogwarts letter reached her she was steaming her way through high school with her eyes firmly fixed on university, set to get her PhD and a ‘doctor’ in front of her name before she was old enough to vote.

Then came Hogwarts. Hermione couldn’t have turned down Hogwarts, not when she’d discovered a whole new world to explore. And, as she pointed out to her parents, she could still go to university afterwards, at the same age as normal people would; attending Hogwarts wouldn’t limit her education, only broaden it. So here she was. But Hermione was used to relating to older people, adults and teenagers. Her parents had treated her as an intellectual equal and her peers at high school had been at least four years older than her, a great age difference in children. So she was about as capable as Neville of interacting with her own age group.

Harry, of course, was Harry Potter, which made him different to everyone else immediately. But Harry hadn’t known that. When his relatives had decided, when he was five, that he didn’t have magic they’d given up their campaign of suppression (though no amount of questioning would get him to admit what relevance a cupboard had to this). Instead he’d been treated as a slightly unwelcome boarder. By doing chores he’d earned money and that money had been used to pay for his food, clothes, toys, and school supplies. Harry was used to acting as an adult in the adult world; he understood finance and weighing words and acting independently, relying on himself because he’d never had anyone else to rely on. Scholarly achievement was not fostered in the Dursley household, but his aunt and uncle hadn’t cared what he did as long as it was quiet and unobtrusive and he didn’t turn Dudley into a nancy boy. So Harry had buried himself in his schoolwork and books – for much, Neville suspected, the same reasons Neville had.

Not that it was easy to drag this much information out of Harry. He was used to telling lies to prevent people wondering about his home life, which was a little weird for Neville, who’d been brought up to tell the truth no matter how painful. He was getting used to it now though, and had adopted Hermione’s habit of, if Harry said anything about his family, nodding and then saying and “And really?” so he would tell the truth. It was just automatic for Harry to lie the first time.

Neville grinned to himself. Yup, his friends were definitely not normal. Still, he wouldn’t change them for anything. Around them Neville had no chance to believe himself clumsy and forgetful because they refused to believe it and when he was trying to keep up he forgot that was how he really was. And he was their source of magical society knowledge; it was funny how much Muggleborns just didn’t know (Neville thought Muggleborns must be so very brave to come a world they didn’t know anything about). But what he found really strange was the things Harry and Hermione pulled faces at. They didn’t like things like halfbreed laws or house rivalries and hereditary Wizengamot seats and other things Neville found perfectly normal. Azkaban appalled them, and was roundly denounced as state-sanctioned torture. As for house elves... Hermione had just about had a fit; Neville was pretty sure that before she’d left Hogwarts she would have found a way to free all house elves.

“Neville? Neville!” Harry poked him in the arm. “You still with us?”

He blinked. “Yeah, I’m here.”

“You sure? You looked like you were away with the fairies.”

Neville frowned, trying to figure out why anyone would want to hang around with fairies; they were pretty and all but they weren’t interesting.

Hermione laughed. “Not real fairies. It’s a Muggle expression.”

“Oh!” he said in understanding.

“I can’t believe you just said ‘real fairies’ and meant it,” Harry grinned. “I think our lives have gotten really weird in these last few months.”

Hermione elbowed him, laughing too, as Neville shook his head. “It must be so weird not knowing magic exists,” he said.

“Not,” Harry told him firmly while Hermione nodded, “as weird as knowing it does.”

-

A normal school year was muddled enough. A school year starring Harry Potter with Draco Malfoy and Voldemort as co-stars was so tangled up Severus was seriously considering laying in a direct line of Firewhiskey into his quarters from the manufacturers. Potter hadn’t responded well to Malfoy’s clumsy overtures of friendship because Malfoy, as trained by his father, couldn’t understand Potter’s friendships. Spurned, Malfoy had begun what would have been a bitter rivalry if Potter had cared. Since Potter didn’t care about the other boy (which probably didn’t help Malfoy’s enmity in the least) it was a very one sided rivalry.

Unfortunately, Severus got caught up in it. He was stalking through the corridors during the lunch hour when Malfoy snuck up behind the Potter and Granger and cast a tripping jinx on an unsuspecting third year. It was done to look like it came from one of the Hufflepuffs, but with just enough openness that Severus couldn’t help but notice it was Malfoy. Severus sighed. It was a test, of course. Lucius Malfoy had never been particularly subtle and Severus had dealt with far more devious people (Albus, for example, even if Albus would be hurt to hear him say it), so it was an obvious test and therefore easy to pass.

“Potter, Granger, detention! No magic in the corridors.”

Malfoy grinned triumphantly and dashed off. Severus rolled his eyes. The pair followed him obediently.

When they were alone, Potter said casually, “It was Malfoy really.”

“I am aware of that, thank you, Mr Potter. However, it is better if I allow certain elements to think I’m sympathetic to their cause.”

“Death Eaters,” Granger suggested. Severus gave her a sharp look. They were strange, these two, for children. They saw too far.

He made a non-committal noise. “Come and see me at seven.”

When they’d gone he headed for the dungeons to prepare for his next class, wishing absently that he could send Lucius a note telling him he was an idiot. Slytherin stock had grown of poorer and poorer quality in later years, though perhaps that was because the intelligent ones who could have gone there, like Potter, had found ways of never being there in the first place. A true Slytherin wouldn’t want people knowing he was a Slytherin, especially not in the current political climate. To be in Slytherin was to mark oneself with expectations and assumptions, to be judged by reputation and not on one’s own merits.

In fact the whole house system, in Severus’s private opinion, had outlived its usefulness and was an outmoded and dangerous creation. The Founders had used it to decide which student would be better placed under which of the four teachers. It had been intended as a means to place a student in the situation where he or she would best learn, not as a tool to divide up students in ways that had become, a thousand years on, entirely arbitrary.

Unfortunately, the wizarding world was founded on tradition and a tradition of a thousand years had no hope of being dismantled now. Severus’s scowl was still so black by the time his next class arrived that one boy almost had a nervous fit.

Then he had the blasted detention to turn up for. To his surprise, he opened the door to find three students waiting for him, not two.

“Can I come too?” Longbottom pleaded before Severus could comment.

“To detention?” He’d never had anyone ask for a detention before. Longbottom looked at him pleadingly. “All right, Mr Longbottom, if it means that much to you.” His voice gentled as the boy came into the room. “You’re a good friend.” Longbottom flashed him a nervous but grateful smile. “Now, wands to me, please. On the desk. No talking. Then you can clean those cauldrons, they need a rinse.”

Having obediently placed their wands on the desk, the children turned to stare at the four small, mug-sized cauldrons waiting for them. They were specialty cauldrons, each made of a certain metal, and seldom used, which meant that they sat in the store room and, since house elves weren’t allowed in there for fear their magic would upset the more delicate ingredients, got dusty. Potter smiled suddenly and stepped forward. His friends followed, looking confused, though a growing suspicion was dawning on Granger’s face.

When they’d rinsed the cauldrons and dried them off (taking a whole five minutes only because they were being careful), Severus said, “Much better, thank you.” And, just in case someone hadn’t figured it, added, “Now if anyone asks you can say that for your detention you had to hand over your wands and clean cauldrons by hand. Not even a truth spell would detect it as a lie.”

“It isn’t a lie,” Granger pointed out cheerfully.

“True,” he acknowledged. “But few wizards would ever think to question it. Once a truth spell or a dose of veritaserum proved you were telling the truth they would assume you spent a couple of hours scrubbing the dirtiest cauldrons I could find.”

“An interesting lesson,” Potter said contemplatively.

“Wizards aren’t much interested in logic, are they?” Granger asked.

Severus smiled thinly at her. “Miss Granger, I have yet to be convinced wizards know what logic is.” Maybe it was something to do with the fact that magic could do just about anything without worrying about rhyme or reason. Maybe magic and logic just weren’t compatible.

Longbottom looked thoughtful. Severus collected up the wands and handed them back. But he paused after handing back Granger and Longbottom’s, studying Potter’s. Potter’s wand was old, with the scratches that even a carefully tended wand couldn’t help picking up over the years. Using his rare gift of logic, Severus knew that made no sense. “This cannot be your wand,” he said flatly.

“I swapped wands with Neville. Mine works better for him than this one and wands don’t work at all for me so it doesn’t matter what one I have.”

Severus eyed him suspiciously. “Wands don’t work for you,” he repeated.

“I told you, remember? Uncle Vernon got rid of my magic.”

Severus stared at him. He knew better now than to believe Potter was telling anything but the truth as he saw it and not trying to gain sympathy or manipulate anyone. “Are you trying to tell me you can’t do magic? Any magic?”

“Not a bit,” Potter said cheerfully.

Severus sank down onto the nearest stool. If the year kept doing this to him he wasn’t sure he was going to survive until Christmas.