-Severus-

Severus had marked the 6th year homework but had not returned it in class on Friday. Of course, that meant no letter for Harry. Harry had barely managed to keep his cool when it became evident that the anticipated homework would not be forthcoming. Of course, this also meant that Snape didn't actually give out new homework—he didn't want Harry to vent in a second letter before he had a chance to answer the first.

Changing his lesson plans to accommodate this correspondence with Harry…what was the world coming to?

But he needed more time, time afforded by the coming weekend. If he truly wanted to answer Harry's question about his parents (and he wasn't sure he actually wanted to but somehow felt the effort would be good for Harry), he needed a day to sort out his thoughts.

He would do it Saturday, then head to the Hog's Head afterward for the drink—or two—he was sure to need after writing about his father.

/

16 November, 1996

Saturday

Dear Harry:

I realize you expected a return letter on Friday, but I needed a bit more time to compose my response to your last letter. Because of this, you and your class have a weekend with no Defense homework. I hope that is adequate recompense for my failure to complete a response to you before the weekend.

The questions you ask are fair, considering what I have asked you and plan to ask you in the future, but the answers are complicated and the reasons behind them more so. I could quite readily have taken the easy way out, telling you that as a child I was afraid of water, and telling you that my mother was a witch and my father an older Muggle who didn't quite know what to do with a magical wife and child.

But those are not the kind of answers that interest you, nor do they give you much insight into my past or my character.

Let's first dispense with the pleasantries, however. Your questions of me were but a small part of your last letter. I fully encourage you to invite Nymphadora to Professor Slughorn's Christmas party. That would certainly send a message to young Miss Weasley, wouldn't it? She's also likely to already know those important contraceptive spells. Furthermore, it would make my day—no, indeed, my year—to see both o f you hauled off to have "the talk" with Minerva and Poppy.

As for reading only "the good bits" of a book, I encourage you to always read the complete book, in the order the author intended, from beginning to end, first. You can then go back and read "the good bits" over and over again. This reminds me of a certain book that made its way around the fifth year dormitories while I was in school here. It was a seedy novel featuring pirates and wenches and adventures of the carnal sort on the high seas. In any event, one had only to drop it on the floor and the book would open to a page which contained "the best bits." This, of course, was the result of the book being opened to that particular scene so often. But I digress…I am certainly not encouraging you to read this sort of fiction (I cannot in good conscience call it literature) but instead illustrating that reading only "the good bits" will leave you with only half the story (as the pirates involved of course all contracted all sorts of communicable diseases from these adventures, died and were buried at sea in later, mostly unread, pages)

About your grandparents and their death—I cannot fathom why Petunia never spoke of them or why you never knew how they died. I suppose, to be fair, that she lost a great deal in a short time, and perhaps putting it all out of mind was her way of dealing with grief. I do not condone that method but do recognize it for what it is. It seems to me that Petunia lives in the present, a not altogether bad thing. But ignoring the past does not make it any less important, or formative, and ignoring it completely means one fails to honor those that gave them life—no matter how the relationship turned out in the end.

Which brings me to my own past and to your second question. As you indeed already know, I am the product of a witch and a Muggle. My mother, Eileen Prince, was the only daughter of elderly parents, both magical. They were a modest family, and there were no mansions or estates or manors to leave o their daughter. After Hogwarts, my mother apprenticed at an apothecary in Diagon Alley. She met my father, a laborer, at a bookstore in London. He was twice her age. They married without her ever telling him she was a witch. She got a job at a Muggle pharmacy and I believe they were both happy for a number of years. She was eventually forced to tell him about her powers when she became pregnant with me. She was past 30 when I was born, some 10 years into their marriage, and my father was in his 50s. She knew that I would likely be magical, and would most certainly have bouts of accidental magic, and felt it necessary to finally admit this truth to my father. I don't believe my father had ever contemplated having children. He did not know how to relate to a child, and most certainly not to a magical one. He began to drink, to frequent pubs after work, and by the time I was a teenager, to take his anger out on me physically with the belt. Fortunately, I was only home during the summers and during my earlier years was the victim only of harsh language and verbal abuse. I knew my father as onemight know an older great-uncle. He took little interest in me and I in him. He died of a stroke when I was a sixth-year at Hogwarts. My mother kept the house at Spinner's End, the home I still own, after his death and became a recluse of sorts, filling it with even more books and living out her days surrounded by these "friends" as she called them. She loved me—I am sure of that. She encouraged me as much as she was able, gave me my first pet, took me to King's Cross and picked me up each year, put up a Christmas tree during the holidays and did her best to keep me and my father from getting in each other's way. She taught me all about the wizarding world and would, on occasion, treat me to a day of immersion in the magical world in Diagon Alley. We used to while countless hours away in the summertime playing gobstones. She taught me at home—as wizarding families often do—and that was considered an oddity in my neighborhood. She died in 1989 after a short illness. Neither of my parents had siblings, nor did they have any other children other than me. She is buried beside my father in a Muggle cemetery at the Catholic church where we attended services with my grandmother when I was a child.

My father had a great affinity for Muggle literature, despite his lack of advanced education. He was certainly distant, and occasionally abusive, but when he was of the mood, and sober, he would walk into the sitting room and scan the shelves then with great purpose pull out a book and hand it to me, often without comment at all. I always read what he selected, for this indeed was his legacy to me. He handed me "Treasure Island" when I was ten and "The Hobbit" when I was eleven. He introduced me to science fiction at thirteen, and I spent that summer reading Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. The next summer was spent reading the complete Sherlock Holmes and books on modern European and American history. He never discussed the books with me but always checked to be sure they were back in their rightful places before I left on September 1 for Hogwarts. I cannot explain his odd brand of parenting, and even the best book could not make up for him whipping me after a night out at the pub. While he didn't like much, and certainly not magic, I doubt that the beatings or the insults had anything to do with my being a wizard. I was a road bump in his life—unexpected, cropping up in his path at a time when he would have liked to sail into retirement, slowing him down, an inconvenience who carried his name and eventually inherited his library. This library actually outgrew our sitting room and to accommodate more books, my father built sliding shelves that could be moved away to reveal the staircase leading to our upstairs bedrooms. I've added to the libary over the years, of course, as my mother did before her death, so that now it contains a great many wizarding books as well.

I never once had your mother over to our house, though my mother came with me to the park once to meet her. Even though she herself had married a Muggle and produced me, a half-blood, she carried the prejudices of her own pureblood childhood, and could not readily accept that her son had a Muggle-born witch for a best friend. I think she would have preferred seeing me vandalizing cars with the other neighborhood Muggle boys rather than fraternizing with a "mudblood."

And that, Harry, is enough I think. I have told you now, in this letter, more about my past than I have told anyone save your own mother. While our pasts shape and define us, they do not limit us nor do they contain us. My father gave me my name, a few scars and a box of condoms yet he opened up a world of possibilities for me with the library he bequeathed me. It's an enigma and I am still puzzling it out.

By the way, you are showing great progress with your non-verbal spells, though you may have just ended the great Zabini line with that unintended (I hope it was unintended anyway) bounced stinging hex. I suppose the Zabinis could invoke old magical law and demand your own firstborn as payment. But don't worry about that now—it's likely years away.

Ah—your second question. Simply put, I am afraid of failure. I'll leave it at that, since I elaborated at such length on your first question.

And now, two questions from me:

If you could not be an Auror, what would you do with your life? At this point in your life, what would you name your first child?

Regards,

Severus

/

Severus would never admit it to anyone, but the delay in getting the letter written gave him an extra weekend to plan his next move in the chess match now openly between himself and Weasley. He spent half an hour studying the mock-up of the game on his own chessboard before committing his move to paper.

The wrenching feeling in his gut—the one he always got when thinking too much about his parents or his childhood—reminded him that he had promised himself a drink or two with Abeforth this weekend. He was in no mood to spend the rest of the evening alone. It had been months—certainly since before the weeks spent with Harry in August—since he'd had more than a social or casual drink. He toyed with the idea of asking Minerva to come along with him as he had the idea she'd be a very lively drunk. But in the end, he slipped out the front doors of the castle bundled up in his cloak, alone, as usual.

He was not alone when he returned four hours later, nor was the castle foyer deserted as it had been when he'd left. Abeforth was helping him walk, holding him around the shoulders as he lurched forward, belting out an old song his father had frequently sung:

"Beer, beer, glorious beer ! Fill yourselves right up to here ! Drink a good deal of it, make a good meal of it, stick to your old fashion'd beer !"

"Albus." Abeforth greeted his brother calmly as the Headmaster appeared at the top of the stairs leading up to the castle entrance. "I found this in my pub. Could you take him off my hands?"

"Certainly," replied Dumbledore, letting Abeforth transfer Severus' weight to his own shoulder. "And thank-you for returning him. Fortunately, we had advance warning that he'd be in this state." Abeforth shrugged and turned back toward the gates as Minerva appeared and helped Albus half-drag a still singing Snape inside.

"Up with the sale of it, down with a pail of it, Glorious, glorious beer!"

Up in the infirmary, Harry belched and giggled.

-Harry-

He'd considered skiving off Potions in order to read Snape's letter but his conscience—a.k.a. Hermione—had kept him on the straight and narrow. Now, alone in an empty classroom after a hasty lunch, he unrolled it and started reading. It was apparent that Snape had written it in its entirety before Saturday evening and for some reason, had not added a note (or an apology) after his binge Saturday night.

Reading about Snape's parents was depressing. Harry was struck by the similarities in his early years and in Snape's…and in Tom Riddle's. It was more comforting than it should have been to add Snape to the "guys like me" list that to this point had held only Riddle's name.

/

18 November, 1996

Monday

Dear Severus:

I always thought that the first time I got drunk, I'd be with my friends and that I'd actually DRINK something. I suppose that a night on the town, even one spent at the Hog's Head with the old barkeep and no "upstairs room" with "Candy" can be considered "passion." Remember we discussed this last summer? Pain and passion? Well, now we've proven that this connection I've developed to you sure goes beyond the pain part!

I'll get this part all out of the way first because I DO want to answer your questions and say something about your letter as well. I didn't realize that my questions would drive you to the pub—or rather that thinking about them and answering them would make you want to drown your sorrows. I know you've had a run-down from Minerva and from the Headmaster, but I doubt Ron told them the details of what I actually did up in Gryffindor Tower while you were enjoying your first half-dozen pints. Let's just say that I was inspired to lead all of Gryffindor House in a Beatles sing-along. I apparently got down on my knee in front of Ginny Weasley and sang the "I love you I love you I love you" piece from "Michelle" and then serenaded Mary Greystone (she's a second year so this is even more humiliating) with "Let it Be." Then Ron got me going on "Yellow Submarine" and that's apparently when I got too dizzy to stand up.

Oh, it gets better. You SO owe me!

Romilda Vane and Demelza sat down on either side of me on the loveseat—they really squished me in it—and I let them paint my fingernails! Bright red! They convinced me it was OK because red was a Gryffindor color. Of course, Colin was there with his camera. That's when Ginny (probably still reeling from my botched "Michelle") transfigured a belt into a hula hoop and had me give all the girls "lessons." The price for a lesson was a kiss. I'm brilliant—I came up with that one all on my own. So at least I can thank you for that part of the evening, Mr. "When I Drink my Inhibitions go out the Window" Snape.

Hermione came in while I was inside the hula hoop with Romilda. At least I am in the photo. I can't figure out how I thought that was the right way to teach hula hoop technique. Anyway, she was livid (or so Ron says) and asked what we'd been drinking. It took a while to convince her that I'd had nothing, and a bit longer for her to believe that no one had had anything. That's when she grabbed me by the arm and hauled me down to the infirmary. Of course, I was still inside the hula hoop with Romilda but she managed to escape before we made it through the portrait hole.+

I don't remember much after that point. Madam Pomfrey had me drink some disgusting potion and seemed very confused when it didn't do anything. She put me in very unstable bed that kept spinning around and Hermione stayed with me while she went to fetch the Headmaster. Hermione said he came in with Minerva and I told them both that I'd kissed nearly every girl in Gryffindor except Ginny and then I started crying and I hugged Minerva! Hermione thought I had been cursed, but Dumbledore sent her back to the dorm and told her I'd be fine by the morning.

And I was. Until you woke up with your hangover! I understand Minerva had to force-feed you the hangover potion. According to her, you have a "masochistic tendency to want to punish yourself for your transgressions" and had planned to suffer it out instead of going for the instant cure.

I am sure this is the talk of the castle. I have found photos of me with my lips locked with various girls—some as young as third years—posted in almost every boys' bathroom I have used. I've managed to explain it as an "Inebriation Curse." Professor Dumbledore gave me that idea. I'm supposed to be really mad and am looking for whoever cursed me.

So…since I've shared my drunken exploits with you, it's only fair that you do the same with me.

It's kind of hard to totally change the mood of this letter, but you might get another crazy idea NOT to assign us more work and another week will go by before I can write you again. Wow. You really answered my question…well, one of them anyway. I mean, you answered both of them but one in a lot more detail than I had imagined.

I always thought, growing up without parents, that even having bad parents would be better than what I did have. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe you'll feel like talking about this at Christmas with me. If it's too hard, we can both get drunk and you can do all the actual drinking.

I guess I could answer your questions now, since you did such a good job of answering mine and of taking me out drinking afterwards…

OK, first question… If I couldn't be an Auror, what would I do? I've considered professional Quidditch, but I couldn't do that forever. Eventually I'd get knocked in the head too many times and would have to retire. I guess I'd like to be a teacher, maybe take over your current job here at Hogwarts when you are all old and crotchety and start firing spells off in the wrong direction. I think I'm pretty good at teaching, and I have more patience than some. And if I couldn't be a teacher, I think I'd like to work with animals—maybe train post owls or breed hippogriffs.

Second question… You know, it's a bit unfair to ask me what I'd name my first child. I'm pretty sure I'd stick with James for a boy, and definitely Lily for a girl. Not sure about middle names—do those matter? If I had to do it TODAY I'd pick "Severus" for a middle name for the boy, and everyone would think I'd been hit with an Inebriation curse again.

And now, my questions:

Why are you afraid of failure? I mean, I understand people not wanting to fail, who would? But why do you fear it?

Do you want kids of your own?

I suppose I should stop now and go finish my homework. Then I need to search the castle again for more pictures of me kissing half of the girls in Gryffindor. I keep finding them in all the bathrooms—I'm pretty sure the Slytherins somehow got hold of them and are replicating them. Bad Slytherins!

Ron says your last move was predictable, by the way. He wants me to hold off on returning this letter until he comes up with the perfect next move, but if I hold off on the letter, I'll also hold off on the homework, and I'll probably get a detention.

Regards,

Harry

/

Harry had spent most of his free time the last two days in his dorm. The girls didn't bother him there and he was also less likely to find a picture of him hula-hooping with Romilda.

He hadn't had the opportunity to exchange any private words with Snape for quite some time, and definitely not since he'd awakened in the infirmary yesterday morning, with only vague memories of his exploits the night before.

Professor Dumbledore had called him to his office upon his release from the infirmary and had not been able to keep the twinkle from his eye as he apologized to Harry for "not having thought" of that particular potential aspect of the Harry/Snape connection.

"Was he celebrating something last night?" asked Harry, not knowing the reason Snape had gotten drunk.

"I suppose, in a way, he was," answered the Headmaster, hoping fervently that Harry, also, would, at Severus' age, be able to celebrate the fact that he, too, had survived.