Albus Potter learns he has a middle name in his third year of life. He’s sitting on his daddy’s lap, idly stroking the embossed cover of the book laying over his father’s knees, loopy H flowing into a curvy J before joining a blocky P. Nobody knows he can read yet-James still hasn’t learned and he’s six. Albus keeps it to himself because somehow he likes having that, something just his own. Growing up surrounded by peripheral Weasleys is all he’s ever known and he loves his family, really, but sometimes they’re just loud.

He mouths the letters to himself for a moment, attempting to ascertain their meaning. Stumped, Albus raises his bottle glass green eyes to meet their older replicas, his little piping voice quavering quietly into the previous rarity of silence. “What does the J mean, Daddy?”

To his credit, his father is only startled for a minute, before he draws Albus closer to press a kiss to his son’s unblemished forehead, breathing the words into Al’s auburn hair. “It means James, it’s my daddy’s name, my middle name. Sometimes people’s parents have more than one thing they want to call them, so they have a middle name between their first and last names.”

Albus ponders this for a moment, cocking his head to the side. James’ middle name is Sirius, he knows this because James loves to introduce himself as James Sirius Potter, future auror and marauder. Albus looks down at the letters again. “Do I have a middle name daddy?” His father stiffens against his back, his arms tightening around Albus. He breaths out a noise Albus will later realize sounded pained.

“Yeah Buddy, you do.” His father’s voice is thick, like Grandma Molly’s gets whenever anyone mentions the Weasley brood in its old entirety. “It’s Severus.” Albus is rather a lot smarter than his parents give him credit for sometimes.

“Severus, like serious?” His father predictably doesn’t make the connection to his son knowing any Latin at age three, and instead jumps to the name option. “No son, not like Sirius. Your middle name is just yours.”

Albus lacks the willfulness to correct his father. Plus, he likes the idea his middle name comes from someone, because his daddy said middle name, not name. Like the trusting child he is, he asks instead. “Then what does it mean Daddy? Why did you choose it?”

His daddy hugs him tighter still, listening to the sound of the front door opening to admit to more boisterous side of the family, before ghosting another kiss onto his son’s forehead and standing up. Albus thinks he won’t get an answer afterall, until his father leans down close to his ear, and says. “It means you’re the bravest little boy I’ve ever known.”

No further mention is made of the incident, but from that moment on, he thinks of himself as Albus Severus Potter.

                        ***

When Albus is five, he asks his father again what his name means. They’re standing outside Flourish and Blots, Ginny finally giving in and realizing Albus needs writing supplies, when Al puts his hand in his father’s and tugs towards the left of the store window. In the center is an embossed book with green and silver lettering across the front. The most prominent words are “Always” and “Severus”. Albus stares at the book for a moment, before swiveling his head up to his father. The question is unspoken but oh so clear.

Harry sighs and lifts Albus up carefully, carrying him into the store before he can ask for the book. On the way out, they pass the same window without pausing, but later that night Albus finds a copy of the book lying on his bed. It reads “Always: the story of a love that saved the world.” It’s got a picture of a fluttering daisy on the front cover, and the author is listed as one “Severus T. Snape.” The book is charmed to be age appropriate, and therefore unopenable to the underage child, but it remains among his most treasured possessions well after he’s finally able to read it at the age of seventeen. By then, he knows almost everything it will say, including its real author. He treasures it anyway.

                        ***

When Albus reaches six, he asks the question everyday for two months. Harry eventually gives in enough to sit Albus down in front of a photo album, an old cracked muggle one, and point to a little girl that looks like his little sister just a bit, holding hands with a ghost like little boy just a bit older and a wee bit thinner. Harry caresses the picture slightly, before handing it to Albus. “This is your grandmother and her best friend, Lily and Severus.”

Albus puts the picture on his beside table, next to the sealed book. If he tilts it just right, he can see the spidery “always” scrawled across the back.

When Albus is seven, the answer changes to “the man my mum loved first.” This is shouted in an argument to Ginny across the supposedly soundproofed kitchen. His parents are still ignoring James’ proclivity for pranks, and Albus isn’t above using the potential for eavesdropping it offers.

At ten, the answer becomes “the closest thing to a parent I’ve ever gotten, which just shows how fucked up my life is.” This is said to uncle Ron, garnered through extendable ears, and Albus never mentions it because he isn’t supposed to know those words yet.

His father’s revelation on the express platform is unexpected to say the least, but offers Albus more of a look at his namesake than he’s ever gotten, so he’ll take it.

                        ***

Later that same night, an old musty hat pressed firmly onto his head, Albus closes his eyes tightly and thinks about shadows and twirling daises and fiery red on ebony black. He listens to the hat whisper about his parents and his siblings and his potential, and allows one thought to blast forward. “Put me somewhere where I can be brave.” Black flits across his closed vision for reasons he can’t yet fathom. Albus is the only one who doesn’t gasp when the hat screeches “SLYTHERIN!!!” across the expanse of the hall like so many shattered perceptions.

                        ***

When Albus is six and three quarters, he writes a family tree for primary. Across the tree branch from Lily Evans, he writes Severus T. Snape in an approximation of a spidery hand.

His mother gently corrects him, and Albus takes the correct one to class. He doesn’t see the original for seven years, until he stumbles across a yellowed paper covered in childish scrawl in the usually locked drawer at the bottom of his father’s desk. Beside the paper is a brittle, dried daisy.

                        ***

Albus is fifteen when the twentieth anniversary of the Second Wizarding War roles around, a precocious potions student with his nose in a book. He sits quietly when his father gives the memorial speech in the great hall, where it all ended. When Harry pauses before a name, before half shouting it out with the kind of weary defiance that’s born of innate stubbornness and the conviction that some things really are that worth fighting for, Albus deafens the apathetic world with his cheers.

                        ***

Albus finds the lake in the photo when he’s nine, lying quietly in the daisy strewn grass, making grass float and dance in the breeze. He never takes anyone there, not even Lily. He goes there to think, to get away, to be comforted. It’s his favourite place in the world, although he couldn’t really say why.

Sometimes, when he turns his head quickly, he could swear he sees a flash of black on the other shore, in a corner of the sky.

 There are no bats indigenous to that area.

                        ***

Albus gets his first real book on his second birthday. It’s really old and crinkled, letters that will later form into “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” scrawled across the top in motionless curves. It’s the first book he reads, and remains his favourite for life. He’s obsessed with it throughout his childhood, and knows the stories word for word by heart by the time he’s four.

                        ***

Albus asks for a snake the year he turns eleven, showing the only rule bending tendency Harry’s ever seen in his serious middle child. Ginny is understandably apprehensive, but Albus is such a quiet child who rarely asks for anything, and the ghosts of the war are sixteen years faded, so in the end, they buy him a Flared Viper for his birthday.

She comes with the name Mongoose, which somehow sticks, despite how incongruous it is.

Harry really doesn’t mind, but as he watches Albus attempt to converse with his new familiar, he swears he can hear a deep chested chuckle ghosting past his ear. He turns, muscle memory more than anything else, the empty space behind him echoing out as reality reestablishes itself for the millionth time in seventeen years.

                        ***

Severus Snape has no final resting place. No grave stone or memorial of marble and time, no cross or marker. Partly, this is because, even more than ten years and hundreds of hours of writing, talking, cursing, and screaming Snape’s innocence to the world, Harry’s a bit worried about such a marker being in constant danger of vandalism.

Mostly, it’s because they never found anything to bury, burn, or entomb.

On some days, this allows Harry to feel a small glimmer of impossible hope, a dream of a dream flickering somewhere in his soul, like a fairytale in reality, one where happy endings do exist. More often though, it just makes him bitter.

But, there is a place they go (Harry takes Albus Severus from the first year of his birth on), every year on the day it ended, and every year on the day they ended. It’s perhaps the only place in the world where it still feels like Snape never left, alive for once in more than just Harry’s memory. He doesn’t quite know why this death is the one that affected him the most, the longest, harder perhaps even than his own parents.

He thinks it’s because, in a way, he’s the only one Snape had left.

He knows it’s because Snape was the only one he had left either, really. Snape did more to raise him than anyone-it just took him twenty years to realize it.

                                                         ///

When Al is fourteen, he asks one last time. It’s not that he expects a different answer, it’s not that he’s ignorant of the facts anymore, he knows them so well by now he could write a book about them. It’s just that after four years in the House of Snakes, his ability to think cunningly has increased exponentially, and he wants to know more than facts. At an age when he’s far too young still to know that the truth is at the very least a fraught and vexed pursuit, he seeks it with abandon. So, he changes track.

He asks his mother.

Ginny Potter has always been very close mouthed about her feelings on the topic of Al’s middle name, although Al knows enough at this point to know his mother’s aloof attitude toward the topic-and Al himself, on occasion-stems more from her brother’s unaddressed prejudices than her actual feelings on the topic. Still, he asks.

His mother doesn’t answer in words. Al thinks she isn’t going to answer at all, at first, until she comes into his room after dinner that night and tucks him in-like she hasn’t done since before he started Hogwarts. As she turns to leave, still silent, she reaches under his pillow and draws out his old, cracked copy of Sherlock Holmes.

“Mustn’t forget this,” she says, in a tone that gives nothing and everything away. Al stares at the book for a moment, then the doorway his mother’s just disappeared through. He lets the book fall open into his lap, sighing in frustration, there’s nothing ther- on the open cover leaf, which he’s somehow never opened before, is a hauntingly flowery dedication. For Sev, my love, my life, my hope. Don’t forget me. Lily

It’s dated the twenty third of October, 1979, three weeks before Al’s grandparents got married.

It’s not an answer, not really, but somehow, it’s what Al’s always been looking for.

When Albus Severus Potter is sixteen, he meets the love of his life. Unsurprisingly, she has red hair. Perhaps more surprisingly, she calls him by his middle name. Or, more particularly, she calls him Sev. It’s the first thing she says to him, and that’s the moment he knows this is love.

                                                             ///

When Sev is seventeen, he steps out his parent’s front door into a wall of black. His mind blanks, but as the world fades away, all he can think about, besides lamenting the lack of a convenient bookshelf to slide down, is Emily Dickinson.

He’s always liked things with feathers

                        ///

On the trunk of a certain tree, under a long faded heart with a line scored through it and the barely distinguishable letters S and E carved in it, there is a years more fresh, childish inscription, loving in its simplicity: “The Bestest and Bravest man my daddy ever knew”. It’s a call, one that will never be answered, can never be answered.

Except, carved under a branch above, where no one will notice it for years, until a much older but still little boy will see it one day while lying under the tree, and start to hope again, is a simple line, elegantly carved in minute size: Once one has eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however inconceivable, must be the truth.”

It is unsigned.