The silent, green-eyed observers are always as disturbing to Severus as the deja vu but never as disturbing as the seventh Potter was proving himself today.

It wasn't exactly like being alive, Severus decided. It wasn't like being dead either. He thought, felt, and experienced, but he had lived through most of these thoughts, feelings, and experiences before--twelve times before. In fact, this present was, as far as Severus knew, the thirteenth time he would introduce the Slytherin and Gryffindor students in the class of '98 to potions for the very--well, not very--first time.

His entrance is as dramatic as ever--dramatic to a fault. The potions master's robes billow perfectly as he turns. The children's eyes widen in appropriate awe, admiration, and fear even though they have seen this act a dozen times before. This crowd never tires, but repetition has made the performer too aware of the performance. It has, Severus feels, morphed into caricature although nothing, of course, has changed... except for Potter.

Today, there are seven of him: The youngest, wide-eyed next to Ron Weasley; three men in their twenties, each with the same lightening-bolt scar, scrutinizing a fourth who is intently examining Draco Malfoy's class notes; one perched precariously on Severus's desk; and the seventh and most ragged Potter smelling strongly of cheep liquor and standing uncomfortably close to Severus Snape.

Potter is using some sort of modified instrument. Mixed magics--a disacknowledgement spell and a... To be perfectly honest, Severus has no earthly idea how the boy has managed to inflict this particular brand of temporal punishment on his professor and classmates. However, a yet-to-be-developed variation of the time-turner does seem the least unlikely of the twenty-three possibilities floating through Severus's head.

"... I can teach you how to bottle fame," the professor purrs halfway through his standard first-year speech. He has given it twice every year since he first started teaching and now, thirteen times in September of '91. Severus remembers finding a perverse pleasure in the profound effect of a lecture that, for him, had become mundane on students that, for him, had always seemed like penance. But now, the speech is its own kind of penance. Severus speaks without thinking--the words forming in his mouth on their own volition, his legs moving through the classroom without his leave. His body is entirely faithful to the performance even if his mind no longer is.

At "stopper death," the seventh Potter smirks and then looks incredibly sad. Out of the corner of his eye, Severus notices a man reflected in the glass of the store cupboard in the back of the classroom, and the potions master has the strangest suspicion that the man is bleeding even though the image refuses to come into focus. The sight is alarmingly new, and the freshness of something unexpected is far more intriguing than the suspected morbid strangeness of the scene. Severus, of course, is curious, but neither his head nor eyes turn to oblige his curiosity as the speech continues.

"Well, let's try again. Where, Mr Potter, would you look if I asked you to find me a bezoar?" Severus brings his face inches from the youngest Potter's for added effect or maybe something else. That first of the thirteen, had he wanted to see the child squirm? Was he drawn to those startling eyes?

As Severus awaits Potter's answer, the Crabbe and Goyal boys, as usual, wear their signature vacant expressions. And Draco, for the thirteenth time, looks on in condescending approval as Severus Snape interrogates the young Gryffindore. Granger, inevitably, almost does herself injury in a desperate plea to be called on, and Neville (characteristically cowering behind his cauldron) seems to have perfected the human embodiment of fear. But Potter, most unusually, answers correctly. "The stomach of a goat, sir." It is not the voice of an eleven-year-old boy but the slurred speech of an inebriated twenty-something. The seventh Potter, now leaning into Severus over the youngest Potter's desk, empties the contents of his stomach into a nearby cauldron seconds before the classroom begins to tear. A black swath rips through the lab, replacing Zabini's right arm, the center isle, one entire Potter, and Longbottom's head with void. But the seventh Potter, with the reflexes and grace he inherited from his father, rolls away from the chasm, unharmed and still wiping kippers marinated in whiskey and stomach acid from the corners of his mouth. Zabini continues to take notes, his arm moving eerily in and out of the emptiness, and the professor continues to question the youngest Potter as if it is entirely normal for Longbottom to function not only brainless but headless as well. The potions master would smirk if he could.

"Not a time-turner, then." The thought barely has time to flit across Severus's mind before the seventh Potter disappears, and the scene dissolves into insentience and blackness. 

The flattened space is as disturbing to Severus as the sensation of traveling between frames and painting styles but never as disturbing as a particularly ragged Potter would prove himself today.

It wasn't exactly like being alive, Severus decided. It wasn't like being dead either. He thought, felt, and experienced, but these thoughts, feelings and experiences had less depth than those he remembered from before the attack. The loneliness was also of a different sort. He had once been desperately lonely for a specific, missing someone. Now, he was lonely for human conversation; even the garden variety pleasantries he had once found detestable had become a welcome relief.

The portrait in the headmaster's office had been commissioned after Severus's death, but this painting at headquarters--not his usual habitat by any means--was found among the professor's belongings at Spinner's End. Severus sat for it shortly after the 1985 Dublin Potions Conference. A band of Irish werewolves wanted to mark the first effective, safe, and successfully brewed formulation of a potion to dampen the change. The Wolfsbane potion, the wolves decided, was infinitely preferable to the poison by the same name traditionally slipped into meals before the full moon to weed werewolves out of the population--undetectable, harmless to the unbitten, but deadly to the infected and their non-were children. Of course, the poison had been technically illegal for decades, but there remained inns, pubs, and restaurants werewolves knew to avoid. Severus took perverse pleasure in preserving the name even if he altered the formulation. The werewolves, like Lupin, seemed too good natured to notice the malice, or perhaps the painting was their revenge.

Severus's place is in the foreground. The background reeks of heavy-handed metaphor: three docile, protective wolves nap amidst a flock of affectionate sheep, nuzzling the wolves in grateful admiration. Of course, Severus didn't know his surround would be utterly obnoxious, or else he never would have consented to have the thing done. Now, in the painted afterlife, he regrets his decision every day. Sentenced to an eternity alongside three vicious reminders of the most terrifying experience of his youth. Wonderful. Albus's portrait, of course, is very amused.

What is the probability that the world would be left with two renditions of Severus Snape's homely visage--one for Hogwarts, one for Potter's private enjoyment--but only a single painted memorial of the great Albus Dumbledore? None. Albus's eyes had been twinkling with nothing but deceit two months ago when the old man had intoned for the umpteenth time, "Severus, you know I have no other portrait to travel between. Otherwise, I would gladly take this burden myself." How many cock and bull excuses had the man concocted over the years? And of those, how many were crafted especially for Severus Snape? The painted potions master could only hope that he wasn't his mentor's biggest dupe. "Lemon Drop?"

Severus had rolled his eyes at that. Yellow was, Severus had discovered by trial and error the least palatable paint color in the spectrum. "No. No to the lemon drop, and no to this ridiculous scheme."

"You are the only one I would entrust the boy's safety to, Severus. Remember your promise." Albus echoed the words he had used once before in life and in far more dire circumstances.

"Really, Albus. Enough with the melodramatics. Keeping your boy wonder from drinking himself to stupor three times a week hardly falls within the purview of my promise."

Severus had protested but knew he would look after the boy in spite of himself. Life as a painting had proven unsurprisingly meaningless. Severus was not in any position to turn down useful occupation. Besides, the former headmaster hadn't lost his hold over Severus and never would. The painted world despite its animation tended to be relatively static.

Spying for Albus, however, has changed. The profession has become less dangerous in death than it tends to be for the living. Safer too because Potter, who lives in the room directly above Severus's wall in Grimmauld place, plays the Dark Lord's role. Spilled beer and vomit are the only dangers Severus must contend with at secret weekly meetings nowadays.

A woman in her fifties with orange hair and a warm smile looks up as a heavy thud shook the ceiling above. "Harry must be home from work," she excuses the noise to a roomful of witches and wizards ranging in age from twenty-four to.. well, Minerva had always been very secretive about her age. "He never has mastered the floo," Mrs. Weasley adds fondly as she nods to her youngest son.

"Mom, I'll go check on Harry, then."

"Thank you, Ron." The two redheads share a meaningful look before Ron disappears through the door.

"As you all know, we have ninety-three remaining unadopted and underage war orphans to tend to, thirty-one of whom will be attending Hogwarts in the fall. Including school supplies and fees, we are short roughly 350,000 galleons." Minerva McGonagall is tight-lipped as she reads the amount. Several people sitting around the table gasp.

"And how many of these ninety-three are DE children?" Moody's question is characteristically accusatory.

Minerva's eyes harden. "Alastor, honestly..." but the remonstrance is interrupted by nine and a half stones of twenty-six-year-old Boy Who Lived stumbling through the door.

"Harry, have a seat and some pie. You look starved." Mrs. Weasley offers the glassy-eyed boy a plate while Charlie Weasley helps Potter find his seat. The boy is obviously too incapacitated to do so on his own--a fact that leaves Mad-Eye and the twenty-something's snickering and the rest of the room awkwardly embarrassed at the state of their savior.

"Yes, well, now that Mr. Potter has joined us, shall we continue?" Minerva has resorted to her teacher voice, but Potter doesn't notice. "The Memorial Foundation Ball should raise half of that amount, which still leaves the fund short 175,000 galleons..."

"Mom, I can't find Harry anywhere, but his room is a..." Ron Weasley bellows, before he is even through the door. "Oh. You're here." Potter doesn't bother looking up.

The meeting's business is resolved in five minutes as usual. The Order is largely a defunct organization. Its only real responsibility is financing the care and education of the victims of the war--a task Minerva simply doesn't trust the ministry to execute. Although why anyone would trust the Order with war orphans given its first attempt, who is currently drooling and staring blankly at the wall, is beyond Severus's understanding.

"How's work been Harry?" Ron asks around a mouthful of Yorkshire Pudding. Potter turns his head in the direction of the sound. He looks perplexedly at his friend for a moment until Hermione comes to his rescue.

"Ron, you know he can't talk about work. He can't break his oath, can you, Harry?" She rests a comforting hand on his shoulder, and Harry turns to smile at the know-it-all.

"Why don't you spend the weekend at the Burrow, Harry? Charlie and Bill are home for a week before the kids are off to school. We can get a few pick up games of quidditch in before they leave, and I can show you Dai Llewellyn's broom from the '61 cup."

Potter shoots a sloppy smile at the second youngest Weasley, but those green eyes ignore their friend in favor of staring at a painted visage almost as intensely as they did the night it came to life. "The stomach of a goat, sir," Potter answers much to the confusion of his interlocutor before promptly passing out in a pool of his own slobber. Unnoticed, Severus's painted eyes widen and then harden. The most peculiar image of a drunken Potter uttering those same words in the potions classroom comes to Severus like a memory the portrait doesn't remember having. Some unknown but significant parameter is fundamentally and terrifyingly wrong. The Order and portrait stare quietly, nonplussed at what has become of the evening's meeting.

"Mr Weasley, Mr. Ron and Charlie Weasley, if you would please." Minerva, Severus observes, hasn't lost her knack for being at a loss without ever appearing to be so. Perhaps that is all it takes to be headmaster.

The two Weasley boys share a confused look, but eventually the younger takes the feet; the older grabs their friend under the arms; and the three make their way back up to the inevitable mess the bespectacled manboy emerged from only minutes before.

"Shouldn't you call Madam Poppy, Headmistress?" asks Ms Granger.

"Hardly. I imagine even Mr Potter can survive a hangover unassisted." Granger bristles at that. Severus smirks. "Should he require medical aid," Minerva continues, "I hope someone in this house has the sense to floo St Mungo's and not disturb Poppy's holiday. I apologize as I hope does the young man in question" --the last Minerva mutters to herself (and inadvertently to the portrait behind her left shoulder)--"but I am needed back at the castle. Good evening."

 Within minutes, the crowd clears out, leaving Ron Weasley to tend to the mess left behind--although why he is allowed anywhere near the flatware is beyond Severus. The boy brakes more dishes in one night than Longbottom melted cauldrons in his entire career at Hogwarts. After the fourth tea cup shatters, the potions master's nerves require tonight's mission come to an abrupt end. "Mr Weasley, a word if you would," Severus drawls, but the effect, the professor fears, is largely dulled by his medium: sound, Severus has learned, unfortunately loses much of its resonance when traveling from the two to the three dimensional. 

“How much can you possibly care for your friend, Mr Weasley?” Of all the questions the redhead’s deceased potions master might ask him, this, Severus could tell, was the one Weasley least expected.

“My friend?” was the boy’s gormless reply. “Harry?” he added in response to the professor’s sneer.

“Mr Weasley, recall for me, if you would, the last time you have enjoyed the company of a sober Mr Potter.”

“Harry’s had a rough time of it what with the muggles, the prophecy, Sirius, the headmaster—it’s not wrong that he should want to have some fun now that he did what he had to do.”

“Fun. Does Mr Potter appear to you to be having fun, Mr Weasley? The young man I saw sprawled on the dining table was unable to comprehend the events unfolding around him, much less enjoy them. When do you think Mr Potter has fun? Is it while spending the first eight hours of the day drinking himself to stupor or afterwards, vomiting all over the belongings of his deceased godfather?”

“He doesn’t,” Weasley interjected defensively.

“Doesn’t what, Mr Weasley? Doesn’t vomit? I assure you, much to my annoyance, he does. I often spend hours in this room with nothing but the sounds of your young friend retching to keep me entertained.”

“Well, if he disgusts you so much, why don’t you just pop back to the Headmistress’s office and stay there?”

“And leave him to die should he asphyxiate on the contents of his own stomach? Yes, Mr Weasley, that is a marvelous idea. I only wish you had shown this aptitude in you school days.”

The young man in front of Severus had the good grace to look ashamed. “Sir, I meant earlier that he doesn’t drink all day. He goes to work. He’s an unspeakable.”

“And where, Mr Weasley, did you learn this little bit of drivel? Witch Weekly?”

“Hermione. She said that Harry must be one. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“No, Mr Weasley. The only thing that is unspeakable is the deplorable state of degradation the savior of the wizarding world has been allowed to sink to all under the cover of a polite fiction solicitously supplied by your fiancé!”

“Sir?” The young man, it seemed, had managed to lose the thread of the conversation and was very near unraveling the potions master’s sanity.

“Let me be a clear as possible so there is no misunderstanding. Mr Potter is not an unspeakable. He is a drunk at best. Your friend drinks himself silly upstairs and stumbles down to the living room almost accidentally once a day. Those with the sense to see the truth of the matter have not approached him because the boy is sacrosanct. Those close to him, like you, are too blinded by the glaring light of his touted virtue or else your own stupidity to see Mr Potter for what he has become. So, Mr Weasley, let me return to the question at hand. How much do you care for Mr Potter? Because if you care for him at all, you will cease hiding behind Granger’s ready excuses and use the common sense Albus claims you were born with.”

“What should I do?” Severus smiled at that. If only young Mr Weasley had been this ready for direction in potions class.

“What you should do, Mr Weasley, is retrieve Potter’s invisibility cloak from the trunk in his bedroom. Drape the cloak over my frame and place me in his room preferably out of the way of anything wet and without Potter’s knowledge.” The last, Severus observed to himself, should be easy to manage, even for Weasley: Everything that has transpired these last five years has been without Mr Potter’s knowledge.

Weasley stood quietly for a moment. “I imagine you are right. Someone needs to help Harry. You have been helping him for so long; it might as well be you this time too.”

Mr Weasley’s loyalty to Potter being put to good use for a change instead of mischief and harebrained schemes—and it only took eighteen years.  Minerva will be beside herself. 

Severus waited a full hour in Minerva's office for Weasley to carry out his task, which should have taken no more than five minutes in all honesty, but the portrait did not want to risk the indignity of being manhandled by one of his former students. No, the potions master would rather stare at Albus feigning a snore indefinitely than at Weasley's groin for the duration of the short walk from the dining room to the master suite. Besides, should the youngest Weasley male manage to trip over his too-long legs, Severus would rather learn of the tragedy indirectly than through the undoubtedly unpleasant sensation of a knee ripping through his canvas.

At half past nine, Albus was losing patience and made quite the show of awaking from his nap. "Oh, Severus, what a pleasant surprise! I expected you would have already popped back over to Grimmauld Place by now. Look at the time. Shouldn't you be on your way, my boy?" But it wasn't until nearly fifteen minutes later that Severus left, taking his cue from the entrance of the newest in a string of incompetent, Potter-worshipping ministers, Elmira Pollywig.

~ 

The sensation of popping from portrait to portrait was exactly like guided apparition, the destination tugging helpfully at the core. But this time, there was no pull to guide, and Severus drifted aimlessly long enough to grow uneasy. When he finally did feel the jarring snap that signaled the end of any of the transportation magics, Severus was a mere teenager, hanging upside down at the end of James Potter's wand. Every detail was precisely as Severus remembered it: his acne, his stained pants, the look on Potter's face. Had someone painted this horrendous scene? It would be just like Potter-- either of them--to immortalize Severus's worst memory for all eternity. Severus's temple throbbed, his breathing grew erratic at the indignation of being so callously treated by that arrogant snotrag of a ... temple throbbing, breathing--neither of which, technically, should be possible. The reality of the experience is terrifyingly inexplicable but it is also enticingly, lusciously palpable. It is a wonder to feel one's heart beating, one's lungs expanding, one's temper flaring after almost a decade of calm interrupted by a shadow-play of emotions. This, Severus observes, is nothing like being dead, being painted: this angry passion is life itself. But, of course, Severus is dead.

Before the deceased potions master has time to fully dismiss these now impossible bodily functions as mere memory of life, a captivating woman with vibrant red hair walks towards the suspended teenager, singing a lullaby and weaving a chain of lilies into a ladder. She holds the ladder up for Severus to climb down, and he does in a stunned daze at the sight of someone he has not seen since October some twenty-five years ago.

Severus reaches to embrace her, but before he can, a snake with a man's face and a wand between its fangs binds the lady to a teenage Harry Potter. "Blood of the mother, willingly sacrificed. Blood of the enemy, forcibly taken," the snake intones, piercing his victims' arms with three-inch fangs, the woman first, then the boy. The blood drains into a small, floating, roughly-hewn, first-year cauldron. "Severus, my most trusted servant," the snakeman purrs, handing the young potions master the cauldron. "The instructions are on the board."

Severus, torn between terror at the gory scene before him and confusion at its absurdity, is as gormless as Weasley in his reply. "Instructions?" After a pause, he adds a reverent "master" because the being before him, despite never having assumed this form in life, is unquestionably Lord Voldemort.

By now the sheer incoherence of the strange sequence of events in which Severus has inadvertently become a player has superseded Lily in the still teenaged potions master's mind. As Severus makes his way to a nearby lab table, intent on playing the part--to spy as always until he has assessed the situation--Potter the elder, no longer frozen in that provocative pose he had assumed when this strange episode began, throws a handful of dark slivers towards the cauldron. Seemingly out of nowhere, a twenty-something version of the man's son appears between the projectile and its target. "No, the porcupine quills must be added after removing the potion from the fire. I will not let you waste my mother’s sacrifice." The voice is oddly fierce and purposeful, a coherent intentionality out of sync with everything Severus has heretofore observed in this strange realm.

This new Harry Potter shakes himself before coming to some greater awareness of the situation upon seeing his professor's stern gaze directed his way. Severus looks from the young man to the background—oddly, the busy, delicate blues and whites of Burleigh China--and then down at his own attire, which the potions master is thankful to find is once again his own customary black teaching robes.

"Mr Potter, where, precisely are we?" The question rolls off Severus's tongue as pure accusation.

"A teacup, sir." Harry answers before falling unconscious. The scene disintegrates into silvery swirl, blue and white floral patterns, and an inky blackness that Severus almost remembers encountering in a potions classroom once or perhaps several times before.

~ 

When Severus opens his eyes, he is positioned in his frame mostly as requested apart from the bottom left corner of the portrait, which Severus is disgusted to find lodged in something uncomfortably greasy. Although, perhaps this is to be expected given the state of the quarters. The Potter boy's room is infinitely more disturbing than the professor had anticipated. No one had bothered to bring down the dishes in months. No, it had to have been years. But perhaps "dishes" is a misleading term. The room is a gallery of containers filled with shimmering liquid that a Legilimens of Severus’s caliber does not mistake for rotting leftovers. Even the owl's cage pushed to one corner is doused in the stuff, the water dish full to the brim with a mix of the shimmering silver and the occasional feather--so full that some of its contents had splashed onto the newspaper lining in eerie oily blobs that refused to leech into the absorbent surface below.

What startles Severus the most, however, is that the room is unexpectedly void of life. He cannot recall a single instance in the last seven years when Mr Potter was not holed away in his suite by nine in the evening. Thankfully, Severus can still hear some of the Weasleys lingering below or else he might have found himself in the awkward position of having to alert Minerva that the Boy Who Lived needed finding. The portrait would much rather his former colleague never learns of the embarrassing tasks Albus set Severus to in the afterlife. The thought leaves Severus sneering derisively at his own pettiness.

He had long ago--shortly after his demise--recognized how shallow his thoughts and concerns had become, how shallow he had become in painted death. It was the invariable fate of all portraits--the price they paid for deriving their animation solely from the memories and the ambient magic of the living. Portraits, of course, have no souls because the memories of the living can hardly be expected to reproduce a human being with all his complexities, contradictions, and unique interiority. This was common knowledge--wizarding families teach their children these facts of painted life after a death in the family or perhaps during a trip to the National Gallery.

Yes, portraits have no souls. There are ample stories of magical portraits lying frozen and insentient in muggle homes. Even portraits in magical buildings fall unconscious an hour or so after the living magical occupants leave. But most damming of all, portraits cannot truly dream because they can have no awareness so independent of reality.

But if not a dream, what, Severus pondered, was the last twenty minutes of his painted existence?

In life, Severus had once debated with Albus whether someone as tainted as a Death Eater, even a former Death Eater, and much less the Dark Lord himself, could still have a soul. Albus was frustratingly reassuring and yet, as evidenced by the necessity of Harry Potter's destruction of the seven horcruxes, also incontrovertibly right. Nothing else could explain the peculiar manner in which Voldemort was killed or the story of Harry's survival and experience in the afterlife, which, of course, at least among the Order, had become legend.

On canvas, Severus and Albus had reenacted the old debate countless times, Severus obliging Albus's portrait despite the former's obvious distaste for the subject. Only now, the question was not whether Severus had a soul, but whether Severus's portrait did as well. "I think you will be surprised by the mysteries of the great beyond," was Albus's trite reply whenever the painted Dumbledore could no longer keep up or find fault with the logic of Severus's argument. But whether or not the tainted have souls had at least been a question--there was no question here. It was simply fact. Paintings were nothing more than reflections of the collective memories the living harbored of the dead. As enticing as a less unforgiving answer was, Severus refused to believe what was easy at the expense of what was real.

Still, if not a dream, then what? Severus thought over the question silently, staring at a chipped teacup in the same pattern as the Burleigh in the not-dream. The silvery liquid in the cup was unexpectedly troubled, ripples growing increasingly violent as if a lorry were rolling by on the street below, but there was no lorry or else the surfaces of the other containers would not have remained so entirely calm. Seconds later, a heaving Potter is expelled violently from the cup.

"Mr Potter," Severus shrieked, a dawning sense of what the boy has been up to these last eight years becoming evident, shaking the professor to the core and making him careless of the ruse he had planned. "Ten thousand points from the House of Gryffindor for producing what is without a doubt the most thoughtless, careless waste of human potential in the history of Hogwarts."

"Sir?" Potter responded, disturbingly unalarmed by the voice of the invisible professor.

"What memories could you possibly have been so desperate to view that you could not wait to do so in the safety of the headmistress's pensieve?" The boy finally began searching for the source of the voice, looking oddly into cups and bowls and cauldrons. "For heaven's sake, I am in the corner by the desk under your invisibility cloak. Remove the blasted thing carefully if you would." Potter grew tense at the revelation, but grasped at the desk until he felt the shimmering fabric and gently lifted it off... the portrait. Potter sighs in relief. 

"Did you think I was speaking to you in the flesh, Mr Potter, or perhaps from a memory in a saucer? Were you worried you might have gone quite insane? A stupid question. It appears you already have done so. I came up here concerned about the contents of your stomach, namely the excessive quantity of alcohol you manage to pour down your gullet, but I now realize I should have been much more concerned about the contents of your brain, which you have for some unfathomable reason decided to vomit all over this room. Potter, just how many of your memories are currently missing from your skull or is your knowledge of basic numeracy lying at the bottom of your owl cage as well?"

"I... I am not sure. This is difficult to explain. I had wanted to ask you to help first in the dining room, then in the memories, but honestly, I don't think too clearly or even function all that well away from this room anymore."

"Mr Potter," Severus began, but the boy interrupted.

"It had better be Harry, sir. I have to have some way of telling you apart from the others... in the cups."

"Harry, then," Severus grated but continued where he had left off. "Of course you are unable to function without physical proximity to the majority of your thoughts. What else could you possibly have expected would happen after emptying half your brain into bowls of cold soup?"

"I never meant to sir. I mean, I meant to empty the memories, but I didn't think I was meant to live. If I had known, if someone had told me to expect anything but death, do you think I would have let this happen? When I learned I would have to die, to die willingly, I left what I could behind, so I wouldn't be distracted... and so..." Harry sniffled incoherently into his shirt, but Severus understands what is left unsaid perhaps better than anyone: the willingness to die paradoxically intermingled with the selfless desire for immortality--one for duty and the other because even spies and heroes are human.

Severus had never been one to offer or seek comfort in life, yet now, in painted death, he found himself regretting the isolating limitations of his medium. "It is normal to grieve for yourself," Severus offered in place of something warmer, in place of whatever physical contact the situation warranted. 

“Potter… Harry,” Severus corrected, remembering his interlocutor’s earlier admonition—one surprisingly sound given the state of the young man’s room and thoughts, which, unfortunately, were now one and the same. “Do you recall from which of these appalling pools of rotting humanity you last viewed your first potions class?” Harry looked at the painting blankly, evidently not comprehending. “Another question, then: Do you recall the contents of the tea cup from whence you just emerged?”

The twenty-six-year-old shell of a man looked confused and then sad. He sounded uncertain when he finally replied. “I was in the tea cup? I usually avoid that one… bad memories I think. I can’t remember whose.”

“Harry,” Severus said in a voice that was strained not so much with derision as with exhaustion and defeat. “Go to sleep. Can you manage that much?” The boy nodded, moving towards a half-eaten box of Bertie Bott’s overflowing with jelly beans marinating in strands of human consciousness. “No, not in there.” Severus said sharply but without his usual sneer. “In your bed. I know it is hard, but I will help you.” Harry obeyed mindlessly, climbing into sheets that were rumpled and likely unwashed for nigh on a decade now. Portraits, thankfully, do not smell the world of the living.  

When the savior had situated himself under the covers, Severus began in an uncharacteristically soothing tone: “Close your eyes. Excellent. You are a ten-year-old boy in a cot in a dark cupboard. No one can get you in your cupboard because, as everyone knows, cupboards are exceptionally safe. Your cupboard is dark, but there is enough light shining through the vent to illuminate a small spider named James.” Severus admirably did not choke on the name as he narrated one of the few happy pre-Hogwarts memories he had stolen from Harry during the disaster that was the boy wonder’s occlumency training. “James loves you.” There was irony in that. Severus smirked but continued, “James loves you and will keep you safe as you sleep in your dark, safe cupboard and dream about giants and flying motorcycles.” Severus’s voice trailed off as Potter’s breathing grew slow and rhythmic.

Then, faster than apparition, Severus was back at Hogwarts—travel for the dead, after all, is instantaneous and impossible to ward against, one of the few advantages of being a portrait. As soon as he was back in his preferred frame, at a decibel level that would put Walburga Black to shame, Severus began shouting for his old colleague to attend to her lions for once in her damned useless existence as the most inept head of house Hogwarts had ever known.

“Really, Severus,” Minerva chided emerging moments later from her private quarters in her night clothes, looking prim as ever. “I am not above placing a silencing charm on your frame or, better yet, relocating you directly above the Hufflepuff table in the Great Hall.”

“Minerva,” Severus intoned, his baritone voice reverberating with a seriousness that the headmistress had never heard from a painting before. The living had a way of ignoring portraits that the freshly dead in painted form found insulting, but as the living’s memories of the dead grew stale, this sharp hurt faded much like the painted personalities themselves, who within a few years devolved into caricatures of their former selves. Then, sadly, within a few decades, when the last living acquaintance of the portrait’s subject met the inevitable fate of all mortals, the portrait became nothing more than a caricature of a caricature—fueled only by the living’s memories of former interactions with the painting. Hogwarts walls were literally overflowing with these long-dead silly painted people—caricatures of caricatures pantomiming old arguments and loves in exaggerated distortions of human experience that only encouraged Hogwarts school children in their belief that the people of history led trivial lives of less substance and meaning—even if occasionally more exciting—than the romantic escapades of living teenagers. Never, in the entire course of magical art, had any painting reversed this inevitable natural course, “until now,” Minerva thought.

“Severus,” the headmistress said, her eyes were hard. “Is that you?”

“Of course it is me you insufferable woman.” This response, this return to petty rivalries and old arguments, was more in line with her expectations. Minerva shook her head. She was only half dreaming moments ago, the Gryffindor reassured herself.

“What can you possibly require from me at this hour?”

“Minerva, when did you decide to wash your hands of him? At what point precisely did you absolve yourself of putting back together the pieces of the young man who, loathe as I am to admit it, not once, not twice, but almost half a dozen times saved this God-forsaken world from a fate too unconscionable to imagine?”

“Severus?” Minerva said questioningly, her eyes taking on that same hardness they had assumed moments ago. The witch continued to examine the portrait as it berated her.

“How a boy so doted on by umpteen capable adult witches and wizards and enamored by the entire wizarding population under thirty can be so utterly neglected by…”

“What happened to your paint?” the headmistress asked, interrupting Severus’s rant, her long index finger pointing to a splotch of iridescent silver infusing the lower quadrant of the painting and a good deal of Severus’s robes.

The potions master looked down. The dawning realization struck him like a blow to the chest. He was winded—a sensation no portrait had felt before. “Headmistress, please sit down.” Startled by Severus Snape’s unnatural politeness, Minerva did. Severus examined his robes, his face vacillating between awe and terror. “How much do you know about the pursuits of your star Gryffindor since vanquishing the Dark Lord eight years ago?”  

“The Weasley clan insists on ascribing him a profession he no doubt is incapable of maintaining. Harry Potter, has, as you well know, spent the last several years wasting his parents’ fortune and the donations of his countless admirers on what I can only assume is a never ending supply of whiskey and gin.”

Severus shook his head. “The boy is no drunk. I find myself wishing he were.”

Minerva’s eyes widened. “Not a drunk? You were present for that shameful display at dinner or are you entirely out of your painted mind?”

“Yes,” Severus smirked. “That is precisely the problem. I am out of my painted mind and currently occupying the consciousness of one Harry Potter.” Minerva inched up to the portrait of the dour former headmaster. Her nose was nearly touching the silvery splotch infusing his painted self with life.

“Good Lord. What has the child done to himself?” Minerva sighed, falling back into her chair. At the sound, Albus’s portrait blinked to life and cheerily offered the headmistress a lemon drop. “Thank you, Albus, no,” Minerva replied dismissively.

“Severus? Lemon drop.”

“Go back to sleep, Albus,” Severus urged, a long suffering sigh escaping his lips. Albus harrumphed but obeyed his former spy, befuddled by the interaction.

“Minerva,” Severus continued, “Potter’s quarters are a disheveled array of unintended concoctions that would put the first year potions lab to shame. He has, from what I can gather, emptied the vast majority of his memories into basins, food containers, dishes, and even, in places, his bedroom floor. This began sometime during the final battle. He knew he was going to his death. I think he wanted to leave something behind and also to insure that he had the courage he needed to fulfill the task at hand. Do you know that the Hat wanted to place him in Slytherin? The child is frustratingly dense at times, but evidently not entirely without cunning.”   

McGonagall was quiet for a time. She stared blankly at the other portraits adorning the office walls. “Is the damage irreparable? I don’t imagine the remedy is as simple as replacing the memories.”

“No, Headmistress,” Severus sneered. “The mind arts are nothing like a half transfigured pincushion that can be fully transformed with the wave of a wand. The human consciousness—even the consciousness of a Potter—is infinitely complex and intricate. Removing a single memory or a small collection of memories is innocuous because the remaining memories form a lattice supporting the integrity of the self. Even when a single memory is taken from the puzzle, the outline of that memory remains as a shadow—the vivid sensory information is gone, but knowledge of the events themselves remains. Obliviate blurs this shadow by damaging the memories immediately connected to the forgotten events. What Potter has done, however, shredded the very lattice. The Dark Lord split his soul into seven pieces, but even these seven pieces shared a coherent narrative—a unifying self. Potter… Truthfully, I know not into what madness Harry has descended, but I, it seems,” Severus said, looking at his robes glistening with the Boy Who Lived’s memories, “am uniquely situated to find out.”

When the painted potions master leaves the headmistress’s office for Grimauld Place, it is half past 127 according to the unorthodox time piece on Minerva’s desk. The sunlight falling across the sleeping Mr. Potter’s brow, however, suggests an hour closer to 11 am.

Severus Snape stares from his frame at his no-longer-quite-so-young charge a few minutes before roughly shaking himself out of something too akin to sentimentality for this early in the morning sans scotch. “I find it truly perplexing, Mr. Potter, that you are somehow managing to waste my time yet again, given the fact that I have,” Severus pauses, “the good fortune to no longer be thrall to its passage.”

“Grrh” is the succinct reply of the bane of all Slytherins’ existence.

“Quite. Let’s begin, then, with something simpler. Good morning, Mr. Potter.” By now, the potions master’s usual sarcasm has slipped into unnecessarily virulent seething, but, truth be told, and it won’t be if Severus has anything to say about it, the painting is taking an unsportsmanlike pleasure in one-upping the manchild before him no matter how vacant and empty a challenge Potter has become.

“Professor,” Harry cries in alarm.  “I am late for Occlumency?” The last is addressed not to the painting but disturbingly to some seemingly invisible conversant. Severus is quiet a moment, watching as the shell of a man before him makes its way to a splattering of silver in the well of an empty candelabra.

Before Harry has time to drag Severus down whatever unpleasant wormhole from the boy’s fifth year at Hogwarts is swirling around in the candlestick, the professor interrupts. “No, Mr. Potter. Not yet I should think. I can’t imagine you will be mentally ready for anything quite that taxing for some time. However, the idea in principle does, surprisingly, have merit. Given your state, we should perhaps take that for a happy accident rather than evidence of any latent aptitude for coherent thought on your part.”

“Detention, then,” Harry sighs, making his way to a worn pair of brown dragonhide gloves, marinating in the former contents of Potter’s brain. The potions master should, of course, stop the boy. There are innumerable dangers in entering an improperly stored memory—inability to exit, physical injury, transfigured fusion to the container itself, and whatever it is precisely that has happened to the young savior wallowing in the shredded remains of his own consciousness. However, at this moment, the spy’s curiosity, as it has done in the past to spectacularly ill effect, gets the better of him.  Severus watches with a hard eye as Potter disappears into the memory. Instantly, the professor’s world goes black.

Severus’s first thought upon returning to consciousness is confusion over the leathery brown moss that seems to have taken over the walls of the potions classroom. “Who is responsible for this travesty?” Severus intends to say, but instead, the words that come from his lips are a similarly harsh “What are you waiting for? Get to work.” The potions master wonders silently to which students he is speaking. The dungeons are poorly lit at the best of times, but for some unaccountable reason, they are especially dark and dank today, and the professor cannot quite make out the visages of the trembling twelve-year-old before him, his calmer compatriot of the same age, and the smattering of taller students—seventh years, for sure—surrounding the two young boys. The professor strains to move in the direction of the wayward students in a vain attempt to identify them, but for some unknown reason, is unable to move forward.

Severus remembers vaguely experiencing this peculiar sensation all before in a classroom fifteen years ago or was it just yesterday or one year ago or, perhaps, a lifetime ago. Something is very wrong, Severus observes, as he continues to find himself at odds with a body that moves entirely independent of his will. Rather than examining the students he has set to the messy task of disemboweling frogs, the professor returns to his desk to grade papers that, in the unusually dim light of the dungeons, he cannot actually see. 

“You brought him,” says a childish voice encouragingly—belonging certainly to one of the two second years.

“He came on his own.” The voice that replies is too old to be a seventh year’s. This is a man’s voice although uncertain and strangely at odds with the confidence of the child who spoke before.

“It doesn’t matter. As long as he is here, we will both be fine.”

The man’s response is a mix of wariness and exhaustion. “How can you be so sure?”

“Have I ever been wrong before?”

“No, I don’t suppose you have.” The man chuckles good naturedly.

Severus listens intently to the conversation although outwardly focused on the impossible task before him and wonders briefly why he isn’t more disturbed by the presence of an unknown man in detention, the insubordination of a child who should be silently tending to his frogs, or the professor’s powerlessness to control his own movements.

“Sir,” the child in question says, approaching Severus’s desk. “What did mother teach you about the difference between the past and the present?” From the angle of his head, inclined as it is towards the stack of half graded essays, Severus can just barely make out the lank midnight black hair of the boy before him. Although the professor doesn’t remember the student, the features are oddly familiar as is the question. The impertinence of small children! Another detention is warranted, especially considering the boy’s inattentiveness to the punishment underway. The constraints of the present reality, however, leave the man with little else to do besides consider the boy’s words. “What did mother teach you about the difference between the past and the present?” How on earth did this unnatural child know anything about the dying words of Eileen Prince?

“Remember, she said ‘You are a good boy for wanting to help your mother, but all the timeturners in the world can’t change the past.’” Everything about the child speaking to him is uncanny—the boy’s unaccountable knowledge of Severus’s personal past, his odd confidence, even his strangely familiar features. The potions master grows increasingly uneasy, truly comprehending for an instant the overwhelming fear of the unknown that fueled Tobias Snape’s and Petunia Evans’s hatred of wizards. “’What’s done is done,’” the boy continues to quote Eileen. “’You can only change the present. What you can’t change is the past. If my time here on earth could be changed, it would already be changed. Go back if you like, darling, to replay happier memories, but I would rather you make new ones instead.’” The boy’s voice waivers and he pauses briefly. “Sir, if you can only focus on the truth that you can only change the present, I think everything will become clear.”

The past, then, Severus realizes. This is the past. The spy attempts methodically to force himself into the present, using all the mental discipline he spent a lifetime honing. He imagines possible futures, discarding them quickly until one solidifies as immutable. A wispy awareness of the last few days and last fourteen years seeps into Severus’s consciousness—hurried memories of basilisks, of dark lords rising, of boy heroes, of murdering his last earthly friend, of countless students dying, of Severus himself dying, of the state of Potter’s room. Potter’s room. This isn’t just the past. It is a memory. The swiftness of the realization is jarring—so much so that Severus is nauseated, but of course, the professor never once was ill in the potions classroom, so he has no reason to fear being so now.

No sooner does the knowledge of the present come than Severus hears his own disembodied voice flood the classroom, the sound dampened by the dragonhide walls. “It is true, however, that those who have mastered legilimency are able, under certain conditions, to delve into the minds of their victims and interpret their findings correctly.” Severus’s speech is a distant echo but clearly audible above the squelching sounds of school boys drawing and quartering frog carcasses. The speech is familiar despite being from the future because, as Severus is now aware, it is from a future that is already past.

The odd unnamed boy and the man, a man Severus now recognizes as a twenty-six-year-old Potter hear the voice as a calling, disappearing into, no doubt, the candlestick from earlier in the day. Severus’s awareness, however, lingers briefly in the memory. His body rises from the desk to inspect the work of the remaining twelve-year-old boy, whose lightning bolt scar is now just barely visible in the dim light. “Pathetic,” Severus announces. “Unfortunately, I have no more frogs for you to mangle. Dismissed. Get out of my classroom.” In the periphery of his vision, Severus counts seventeen grown Potters disemboweling frogs alongside the twelve-year-old child. “Against all odds, you survived the war, and now, you are spending your victory in detention. Life is wasted on the living, Potter.” Severus muses before the memory fades and he finds himself in another.

“The usual rules do not seem to apply to you, Potter…” Severus is relieved to find that this memory has survived more intact than the last and, thankfully, with sufficient lighting for the professor to be able to make out his interlocutor. Harry is now fifteen, willful, and, the professor remembers, half possessed by the Dark Lord. Outwardly, the professor continues to reenact the conversation marking the start of a series of unfortunate events he would all too happily forget and that Potter, however, seems to be intent on reliving. Standing behind the fifteen-year-old are the strange boy from the previous memory and the twenty-six-year-old Potter.

“Sev,” the older Potter says with a shudder at Severus Snape’s utter disdain for the fifth-year student. “Do you really think he can help?” The hatred Severus felt in life has dulled even if the display is as cold and sneering as ever, and the man finds himself not regretting his demeanor but not triumphing in it either. Only yesterday, Severus would have assumed the muting of his dislike for the boy an aftereffect of death, but now, Severus is not so sure.

Sev nods. “Occlumency is the art of organizing and mastering your thoughts, Harry, and not like you have done--sorting similar memories into tea cups and bowls. If I wasn’t scattered across this room in your memories as much as you are, I could help you, which means, since he is not, he can help you. Trust him, Harry. I know what he has to do.”   

Severus is staring into the eyes of the fifteen-year-old but the young boy’s face, Sev’s face, is close enough to Potter’s for Severus to make out. It is startling to recognize his younger self in Potter’s memories and more startling still to recognize the child’s sentience. This child is no memory of Severus’s youth, or rather if he is memory, he is no mere memory. Sev is more a part of the present in Potter’s memories than Severus is a part of the present in the outside world. The thought is troubling, and the possible explanations—all of them terrifying, some of them tantalizing—leave Severus ambivalent at best about the unexpected comradery between the black haired child and the twenty-six-year-old Boy Who… well “Lived” is surely a bit too generous at present.

Severus ponders the puzzle while making a show of not murdering the fifteen-year-old occlumency student. Just before the memory ends, as the edges begin to fade, and the grown Potter’s attention is on the world outside, Sev runs up to Severus and whispers urgently. “Help him, but sir,” the boy’s voice is no longer confident but laced with fear. “I don’t think we are entirely dead.”

When the painted professor returns from the candlestick, Potter is sprawled across the floor, breathing heavily, muttering something to himself, his wand pointed at his temple. Severus Snape is renowned for his sharp intellect and quick mind, but perhaps because death has dulled his wits or perhaps because he has had more than several shocks in the last twenty-four hours or perhaps because the reality of Potter’s consciousness is entirely at odds with everything reasonable and magically possible, the professor is at a loss. 

“Potter, what do you think you are doing?”

“I have to clear my mind.”

“No. I think you have done quite enough of that for a lifetime. Put your wand down now.” Potter listens, for once, but Severus doubts that will continue should Harry leave his sight.

“Sev says I have to clear my mind.”

The reference to the young boy brings Severus’s attention back to thoughts he would rather ponder in the familiar comfort of Hogwarts. “How, precisely did he tell you to clear your mind?”

“Memories of memories go in the container the memories came from.”

The invective has sense despite its dubious source. “Alright then, but memories of the memories only. Do you hear me? I will know if you let loose more than that. Severus watches closely as Harry empties his recollection of the majority of the last two hours into the dragonhide glove and the candle stick. “That is quite enough.”

Harry yawns, and moves towards the blasted box of Bertie Bott’s. “Potter, the mental gymnastics of the morning are no doubt too much for what remains of a brain in that thick skull of yours. However, should you find yourself in need of a respite now or at any other point in the future, you will avail yourself of the bed. Bed. Now.” Severus emphasizes the last two words in case the meaning of the rest of his diatribe is lost on the young man.

“Ok,” Harry says agreeably before climbing under the covers. He looks expectantly at Severus, who, with a long suffering sigh begins to narrate the story of Harry’s eleventh birthday as best he remembers it from Hagrid’s frequent retelling at staff meetings.