Hedwig’s trip to Hogwarts must have been her fastest flying ever, because their angry letter to Dumbledore brings him much sooner than anyone expected. All three of them wince at the sudden blaze of unwanted magic. Anger flares up inside Erasmus’s chest and he struggles to hold it in because he thinks if he lets go he will cry and if he starts crying he’s not sure he’ll ever stop. “Is it true?”

“Erasmus—”

“Is it true?” he shrieks.

Dumbledore opens his mouth, closes it, closes his eyes, and sinks down onto the couch. “Yes.”

Erasmus leaps to his feet and strides around the room. He was sure, sure Hermione was right, but he’d hoped that somehow, this once, she was wrong. He doesn’t know how to deal with it, so he doesn’t, he just paces around as if moving fast enough can keep him ahead of the revelation. “Why? Why?”

“It was the only way to protect you.”

If he gets much angrier he’s going to burst. “To take away everything I am and leave me with nothing? How is that protecting me!”

“They were going to have you Kissed.” There is real and genuine horror in Dumbledore’s voice and Erasmus pulls up short. He can’t bring himself to look at Dumbledore, but he meets Harry’s eyes. He hasn’t had time to deal with this yet, to realise just what it means to be Severus Snape. To realise it means he was a Death Eater. Sentenced to death. Evil. Harry’s eyes narrow as if he’s reading that thought in Erasmus’s face and Erasmus also remembers that Snape is one of the few people Harry ever talks about. If Harry likes him, he can’t be evil. That is more of a relief than he wants to examine right at this moment.

He summons the courage to look at Dumbledore. “You had no right.”

“I had to protect you.”

“You killed me!”

“Erasmus—”

“No, I’m not!” His voice rises hysterically. “Apparently I’m Severus! But he doesn’t exist anymore because you took that away from him!”

“Had I not acted you would have been Kissed—”

It is the look on his face that silences Dumbledore, not anything he says, because Erasmus just stares at him. Stares and stares and stares. And then finally he says, “If I’d been Kissed I would have had my soul taken. How is what you did any different?”

-

Harry stares at the two wands on the coffeetable, Snape’s and Hermione’s, Erasmus’s and Hermione’s. Matching wands with matching stains – Harry’s bloody hand prints.

Snape is alive. Alive.

Harry tries to reconcile the fact that one of the very very few people he actually trusts is the fourteen-year-old boy pacing around the Grangers’ living room in hopeless, useless anger. It’s difficult to do. Erasmus is the lonely, angry boy who is only just learning that the world doesn’t have to be entirely made of pain and fear. Snape is a bitter, angry man who stood by Harry when no one but Hermione was there to support him. Erasmus is not Severus. Not to Harry.

But even if he doesn’t believe it in his heart he knows it in his head and one final barrier crumbles. Erasmus is a fellow refugee from the world. But Snape, Snape gave up everything for Harry. If Erasmus is Snape, he can be trusted. If Erasmus is Snape, he is Harry’s. And Harry has so little that he defends that poor hoard fiercely.

“You should have told him,” he tells Dumbledore in a fierce undertone.

Dumbledore looks pained, as if he never doubted that Harry would understand once he knew the truth. But Harry has been that boy, ‘protected’ from the realities of his world, sheltered and shielded. Lied to. Lies only make finding out the truth hurt worse. A hard truth is, in the long run, kinder than an easy lie. And Harry will not, can not, understand another way of seeing the world.

If Dumbledore tried to explain about preserving innocence, about protecting childhoods, about trying to let children be children, Harry wouldn’t understand. Harry has never been a child as Dumbledore understands the term. And so they stand on opposite sides of an uncrossable gulf and shout to each other as the wind whips their words away.

Harry stares at Dumbledore and, for the first time, realises that he will probably never understand the man, however he tries.

It’s almost a relief. He doesn’t have to understand. All he has to do is protect what is his. That means Hermione. That means Snape.

That means Erasmus.

-

“Erasmus—Severus. Please, I did it for the best.”

“Will my memories come back?” Erasmus isn’t sure what he wants the answer to be. This great vast hole of a memory isn’t comfortable, but he’s not sure he wants to remember Severus. He’s not sure he likes Severus very much. And having the memories of an adult while trapped in a child’s body wouldn’t be much fun. Still, the gaping holes in his brain are no fun at all.

“Most probably not,” Dumbledore admits. “You must understand, I never intended for you to know the truth. I wished you to have a second chance at life, a happy one this time.”

Erasmus gives him an incredulous look. Happy? With no memories and no knowledge of who he is? Did this man ever actually think his plan through?

“I wanted only for you to be safe. In retrospect, leaving you with Miss Granger and Mr Potter was not a wise plan for the purposes of keeping your identity a secret, but I knew they would protect you, perhaps even help you. I wanted you safe. Nothing more. Even if you hate me, even if you never speak to me again, I will be satisfied so long as you are safe.”

Never speaking to him again sounds like a great idea to Erasmus, but even without Severus’s memories he knows the man well enough to know that isn’t going to last, no matter how much he might wish it.

“Why?” That is the most pressing question, isn’t it? Of all the options, why do this to him? Why turn him into this?

Dumbledore’s hand goes unconsciously to his left forearm. “You bore Voldemort’s Mark.”

burning, aching, angry skull

Erasmus looks down. His hand has done the same as Dumbledore’s.

“As long as you bore that Mark no one would ever accept you. You would be Kissed or, at best, kept in Azkaban for the rest of your life.” Dementors, reaching for him in his dreams; Erasmus shudders. “There is no way to remove the Mark. Therefore the only way to be rid of it was to return you to a time before you had it.”

Erasmus stares at him incredulously. “You could do a permanent de-aging but not get rid of a tattoo?”

“He bound it to your soul, Severus.” Dumbledore closes his eyes, pain in his face. “He bound it to your very soul. It was damaging enough that it was there, to remove it would—I would have been better to kill you.”

“So why didn’t you?” Erasmus mutters.

Dumbledore’s eyes open wide, he stares at Erasmus. “Severus, I couldn’t.”

“Erasmus,” Erasmus says. He’s not Severus. He never will be again.

“Erasmus, yes. But this was the only way to remove the Mark without destroying you. There are many things I have done wrong but for this I do not apologise.”

Erasmus wraps his arms around himself and wishes he could just disappear. When he speaks his voice comes from very far away. “I don’t remember and I’m never going to remember. You took that away from me.”

-

The atmosphere in the house when Dumbledore leaves is stifling. No one talks. In deference to Erasmus, maybe, but Harry really thinks they’re all just too scared to put anything into words. If they put it into words it will become real. If they face the dragon in the room it will turn on them. If they talk about it they will have to believe it is true.

Even Mr and Mrs Granger are silent. They know who Snape was from Hermione’s letters home from school. They know who Snape is from Hermione telling them a little about the graveyard and from Harry’s fight to free him. And they know all too well from being here in this house that Erasmus has enough to worry about without confirmation Dumbledore’s been lying all along. Without needing to be a forty-year-old man in a fourteen-year-old’s body.

Dumbledore, Harry thinks with a sullen, tired anger, thinks about What Is Best, all the time, for everybody. But he never thinks about what people have to live through as a result.

And he lies. He lied that whole time and never gave them the courtesy of acknowledging it.

Harry feels very very old. The house, worried and upset, presses down on his mind as if it wants to make everything better but doesn’t know how and he buries himself in its magic as if in a blanket, cocooning himself off from the world.

And the silence goes on and on.

No one cooks dinner. Mr Granger goes to the fish and chip shop down the road and they all sit silently around the table eating and not meeting each other’s eyes. When Erasmus leaves the table and hides in his room, no one moves for a long time.

-

Erasmus lies on his bed, sobbing into his pillow in desperate, useless anger. Someone sits next to him and he rolls over to look up at Hermione, her face concerned. He angrily shoves the hair out of his face and glowers at her. “Why did he do it? Why would he lie to me?”

She folds her hands in her lap and stares down at them. “I think he loves you,” she says quietly. He flinches and scowls. “I know, but... Have you seen how he looks at Harry, desperate and hoping, lost and confused? He looks at you the same way. Even your name...”

“What about my name?” he demands.

“ 'Erasmus’ means ‘beloved’. Maybe it’s just a coincidence but—”

“But this is Dumbledore.”

“Yes. I think he loves you and Harry, he really does, but he’s been in charge of the world so long he doesn’t know how to be in charge of people, he doesn’t know what to do with love.”

“So he just messes us up.”

Hermione purses her lips a moment, then meets his eyes. “Everyone messes up the people they love. Dumbledore... just does it on a grander scale.”

“I’m not going to forgive him.”

He expects a lecture, pointing out all the reasons why he should do just that, but Hermione nods. “No,” she agrees, and there is in her face a fierce, implacable certainty. Not anger or hatred, too cold and rational for those emotions, yet somehow scarier for that calm, detached determination. She has decided, carefully and for all the right reasons, to feel this way.

Erasmus is glad he’s on her side. Glad, too, that she agrees with him. One small knot in his stomach starts to unwind.

Hermione watches him with calm, steady eyes. “Understanding,” she tells him, “is not agreement. And it is not forgiveness.”

-

“We discovered that someone does know who Erasmus is,” Harry tells Mrs Carter.

“You’ve found out who he is?” she asks in delight.

“We can’t tell you,” he says immediately. “It’s too dangerous.” If the wizarding world found out, if someone discovered that Severus Snape was still around, was hiding in a vulnerable fourteen-year-old boy... Harry doesn’t like to think what would happen. He’s failed Snape once. He’s not going to fail him this time. No matter what Dumbledore says. “But Dumbl—He didn’t tell us. He didn’t tell anyone. He knew who Erasmus really is all along and he didn’t say a word.”

She hears him out in silence as he makes what explanation he is willing to make. “And how does that make you feel?”

He hates that question. Loathes it. Is sick of it. Answers anyway. “Angry.”

“Not hurt?”

“No.” And that is true. Too many lies, too many disappointments. Dumbledore has lost his ability to hurt Harry. He doesn’t know if that pleases her or saddens her.

“Why are you angry?”

“Because he lied. Because he should have told Erasmus the truth. Because he has no right to make our decisions for us.”

She watches him and he knows she hears more than his words but he doesn’t mind because she never uses it against him. She just tries to help. In Harry’s world, that’s rare. “Is that all?”

He pauses, and then he says slowly, “Because he hurt Erasmus.”

-

The three of them, weak and injured, propping each other up, battered and bloody, nevertheless were still standing in defiance of Voldemort and his Death Eaters. It was no wonder half of Voldemort’s lackeys were laughing: they must have looked like no threat at all, like a trio of rabbits defying a pack of lions. If the Death Eaters all acted together the three of them would be dead instantly. But they were laughing, they wanted to play. And so Harry and his friends were still alive.

Cats played with mice in the same way – and sometimes the mice escaped. Harry had a feeling he, however, was the dead kind of mouse.

Voldemort circled them with a dramatic flourish, enjoying himself, drinking in their fear and weakness, revelling in their hopelessness. Then suddenly he pointed his wand at Harry. “Crucio.”

Despite himself, Harry cried out at even the brief pain and the Death Eaters rustled with laughter like it was a show. Snape caught the wand as if fell from his hand and hauled him up with shaky arms.

Harry felt naked without a wand, even though it was no real use, but there was no time for feeling because Voldemort, with the air of a Muggle conjuror with an appreciative audience, aimed an Avada Kedavra at Hermione. Snape pushed her behind him in order to take it himself.

Harry screamed “No!” and thrust out his hands as if he could somehow catch the green light.

A shimmering phoenix shield sprang up in front of them. Voldemort laughed. And then the spell hit the shield. The golden light absorbed the curse. The unblockable curse. The power of it bled into Harry’s hands like fire and he wrapped his fingers around his burning palms.

The Death Eaters stared. Voldemort stared. And Harry realised with slow, dawning wonder in a second that seemed to last a small eternity that he still had his wand. It was just that now it was a part of him.