Harry's feet hit solid ground; his knees buckled a little and the golden wizard's head fell with a resounding clunk to the floor. He looked around and saw that he had arrived in Dumbledore's office. The portraits of the headmasters and headmistresses were snoozing in their frames, heads lolling back in armchairs or against the edge of the; picture. Harry looked through the window. There was a cool line of pale green along the horizon: dawn was approaching.

The silence and the stillness, broken only by the occasional grunt or snuffle of a sleeping portrait, was unbearable to him. If his surroundings could have reflected the feelings inside him, the pictures would have been screaming in pain. He walked around the quiet, beautiful office, breathing quickly, trying not to think. But he had to think . . . there was no escape . . .

It was his fault Sirius had died; it was all his fault. If he, Harry, had not been stupid enough to fall for Voldemort's trick, if he had not been so convinced that what he had seen in his dream was real, if he had only opened his mind to the possibility that Voldemort was, as Hermione had said, banking on Harry's love of playing the hero . . .

It was unbearable, he would not think about it, he could not stand it . . . there was a terrible hollow inside him he did not want to feel or examine, a dark hole where Sirius had been, where Sirius had vanished; he did not want to have to be alone with that great, silent space, he could not stand it -

Harry strode across the room and seized the doorknob. It would not turn. He was shut in.

The guilt filling the whole of Harry's chest like some monstrous, weighty parasite, now writhed and squirmed. Out. Out. Have to get out! Harry could not stand this, he could not stand being himself any more . . . he had never felt more trapped inside his own head and body, never wished so intensely that he could be somebody, anybody else . . .

The empty fireplace burst into emerald green flame, making Harry leap away from the door, staring at the man spinning inside the grate. It was the last man he wanted to see at the moment, the man he loathed most in the world.

As Snape stepped from the green flames, his eyes roamed the office until falling upon Harry, who had turned his back and continued trying to tear open the door.

"And just where do you think youare going, Potter? Off to cause more mayhem and destruction?" The man asked silkily.

Harry whirled around, anger threatening to consume him like a raging, fiery inferno. "Don't you talk to me!" He shouted.

"I just came from the hospital wing, Potter. Aren't you worried about what's going on with your little Gryffindor admirers? Don't you want to know if they are going to suffer any lasting injuries from the damage you've caused tonight?" Snape sneered. "Or do you even care?"

Harry was shaking with guilt and anger – at Snape, but mostly at himself for everything he'd caused. He knew Snape was right. This devastating night was all his fault.

Suddenly the fireplace flared green once again, and Dumbledore unfolded his long frame, standing to take in the scene before him.

"Harry…" the headmaster croaked, his voice breaking. For the first time since he'd known the man, Harry thought he actually sounded his age. He walked slowly to his desk, leaning heavily on the wooden surface before allowing his head to fall into his hands. He stood like that for long moments, holding his face in his long-fingered hands and looking exhausted and worn, before slowly raising his eyes to Harry once again.

"I know how you're feeling, Harry," said Dumbledore very quietly.

"No, you don't," said Harry, and his voice was suddenly loud and strong; white-hot anger leapt inside him; Dumbledore knew nothing about his feelings.

"You see, Headmaster?" Snape scoffed. "After everything that's happened this evening, of course you couldn't possibly understand what Golden Boy Harry Potter was feeling. He would much rather be tragically misunderstood, wallowing in self-pity, stewing in his own – "

"That's enough, Severus," said Dumbledore, and the potions professor retreated to the corner in a swirl of black cloaks, crossing his arms over his chest and glaring at Harry.

Harry turned his back on the two men and desperately tore at the door handle once again. It refused to budge. He couldn't do this. His insides were seething and roiling like a pit of snakes. Anger, shame, and guilt were all trying to surpass the other within his gut. If he didn't get out of this room now, he would explode.

"There is no shame in what you are feeling, Harry," said Dumbledore's voice. "On the contrary . . . the fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength."

Harry felt the white-hot anger lick his insides, blazing in the terrible empty chasm that Sirius's death had left within him. The desire to hurt Dumbledore for his calmness and his empty words threatened dangerously close to the surface.

"My greatest strength, is it?" said Harry, his voice shaking as he paused in his struggles with the doorknob, staring down at but no longer seeing it. "You haven't got a clue . . . you don't know . . ."

"What don't I know?'" asked Dumbledore calmly.

It was too much. Harry turned around, shaking with rage.

"I don't want to talk about how I feel, all right?"

"Harry, suffering like this proves you are still a man! This pain is part of being human –"

"THEN - I - DON'T - WANT - TO - BE - HUMAN!" Harry roared, and he seized the delicate silver instrument from the spindle-legged table beside the door and flung it across the room; it shattered into a hundred tiny pieces against the wall, precariously close to Snape, who let out a yell of anger.

"How dare you, you little—!" Snape seethed, but Harry cut him off.

"I DON'T CARE!" Harry screamed, snatching up a lunascope and throwing it into the fireplace. "I'VE HAD ENOUGH, I'VE SEEN ENOUGH, I WANT OUT, I WANT IT TO END, I DON'T CARE ANY MORE!"

He seized the table on which the silver instrument had stood and threw that too, taking a harsh satisfaction as he aimed at Snape once again. The man dove out of the way just in time, and the table exploded against the wall Snape had just been standing rigidly against, the legs bouncing off and rolling in different directions.

"You do care," said Dumbledore. He had not flinched or made a single move to stop Harry demolishing his office. Where Snape's eyes watched him with lethal fury, the headmaster's expression was calm, almost detached. "You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it."

"I - DON'T!" Harry screamed, so loudly that he felt his throat might tear, and for a second he wanted to rush at Dumbledore and break him, too; shatter that calm old face, shake him, hurt him, make him feel some tiny part of the horror inside himself.

"Oh, yes, you do," said Dumbledore, still more calmly. "You have now lost your mother, your father, and the closest thing to a parent you have ever known. Of course you care."

"YOU DON'T KNOW HOW I FEEL!" Harry roared. "YOU - STANDING THERE - YOU – "

But words were no longer enough, smashing things was no more help; he wanted to run, he wanted to keep running and never look back, he wanted to be somewhere he could not see the clear blue eyes staring at him, that hatefully calm old face. He turned on his heel and seized the doorknob again, wrenching at it.

But the door would not open.

Harry turned back to Dumbledore.

"Let me out," he said. He was shaking from head to foot.

"No," said Dumbledore simply.

For a few seconds they stared at each other.

"Let me out," Harry said again.

"No," Dumbledore repeated.

"If you don't - if you keep me in here - if you don't let me – "

"By all means continue destroying my possessions," said Dumbledore serenely. "I daresay I have too many."

He walked around his desk and sat down behind it, watching Harry.

"Let me out," Harry said yet again, in a voice that was cold and almost as calm as Dumbledore's.

"Not until the headmaster and I have had our say," Snape interjected in a growl.

"I DON'T CARE WHAT EITHER OF YOU HAVE TO SAY!" Harry roared. "I don't want to hear anything you've got to say!"

"You will," said Dumbledore steadily. "Because you are not nearly as angry with me as you ought to be. If you are to attack me, as I know you are close to doing, I would like to have thoroughly earned it."

"What are you talking - ?"

"It is my fault that Sirius died," said Dumbledore clearly. "Or should I say, almost entirely my fault - I will not be so arrogant as to claim responsibility for the whole. Sirius was a brave, clever and energetic man, and such men are not usually content to sit at home in hiding while they believe others to be in danger. Nevertheless, you should never have believed for an instant that there was any necessity for you to go to the Department of Mysteries tonight. If I had been open with you, Harry, as I should have been, you would have known a long time ago that Voldemort might try and lure you to the Department of Mysteries, and you would never have been tricked into going there tonight. And Sirius would not have had to come after you. That blame lies with me, and with me alone."

Harry was still standing with his hand on the doorknob but was unaware of it. His gaze flicked back and forth between the two men. He was hardly breathing, listening yet barely understanding what he was hearing.

"Sit. Down. Potter," Snape purred menacingly.

Harry's eyes met the dark gaze of his professor, and a bolt of purest loathing shot through him. "Screw you, Snape."

"Severus…" the headmaster said in a warning tone. After a moment, he addressed Harry again. "Please sit down." It was not an order, it was a request.

Harry hesitated, then walked slowly across the room now littered with silver cogs and fragments of wood, and took the seat facing Dumbledore's desk.

"Harry, I owe you an explanation," said Dumbledore. "An explanation of an old man's mistakes. For I see now that what I have done, and not done, with regard to you, bears all the hallmarks of the failings of age. Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young . . . and I seem to have forgotten, lately . . ."

The sun was rising properly now; there was a rim of dazzling orange visible over the mountains and the sky above it was colorless and bright. The light fell upon Dumbledore, upon the silver of his eyebrows and beard, upon the lines gouged deeply into his face.

"I guessed, fifteen years ago," the headmaster continued, "when I saw the scar on your forehead, what it might mean. I guessed that it might be the sign of a connection forged between you and Voldemort."

'You've told me this before, Professor," said Harry bluntly. He did not care about being rude. He did not care about anything very much anymore.

"Yes," said Dumbledore apologetically. "Yes, but you see - it is necessary to start with your scar. For it became apparent, shortly after you rejoined the magical world, that I was correct, and that your scar was giving you warnings when Voldemort was close to you, or else feeling powerful emotion."

"I know," said Harry wearily.

Snape, his arms still crossed over his chest, had silently stalked to where Harry was sitting, and was now standing directly behind him. Harry jumped when he spoke, "This ability of yours - to detect The Dark Lord's presence, even when he is disguised… to know what he is feeling when his emotions are roused - has become more and more pronounced since The Dark Lord has been restored to his own body and his full powers."

Harry did not bother to nod, simply glared over his shoulder at his hated professor.

"More recently," said Dumbledore, bringing Harry's attention back around, "I became concerned that Voldemort might realize that this connection between you exists. Sure enough, there came a time when you entered so far into his mind and thoughts that he sensed your presence. I am speaking, of course, of the night when you witnessed the attack on Mr. Weasley."

'Yeah," Harry muttered, scowling darkly at the man standing behind him. The potions professor met his glare, giving Harry one of his own with narrowed eyes. "Snape told me," Harry said.

"Professor Snape, Harry," Dumbledore corrected him gently, but Harry didn't break his gaze with Snape. Harry's hatred for the man spiked as a corner of Snape's mouth came up insolently.

"Did it never enter that thick skull of yours, Potter, why it was me who explained this to you, and not the headmaster? Why he did not teach you Occlumency?"

"Why I had not so much as looked at you for months?" Dumbledore interjected.

Harry looked up at the headmaster. Dumbledore looked sad and tired.

"Yeah," Harry finally mumbled. "Yeah, I wondered."

"You see," Dumbledore continued, "I believed it could not be long before Voldemort attempted to force his way into your mind, to manipulate and misdirect your thoughts, and I was not eager to give him more incentives to do so. I was sure that if he realized that our relationship was - or had ever been - closer than that of headmaster and pupil, he would seize his chance to use you as a means to spy on me. I feared the uses to which he would put you, the possibility that he might try and possess you. Harry, I believe I was right to think that Voldemort would have made use of you in such a way. On those rare occasions when we had close contact, I thought I saw a shadow of him stir behind your eyes . . ."

Harry remembered the feeling that a dormant snake had risen in him, ready to strike, in those moments when he and Dumbledore had made eye-contact.

"Voldemort's aim in possessing you, as he demonstrated tonight, would not have been my destruction. It would have been yours. He hoped, when he possessed you briefly a short while ago, that I would sacrifice you in the hope of killing him. So you see, I have been trying, in distancing myself from you, to protect you, Harry. An old man s mistake . . ."

He sighed deeply. Harry was letting the words wash over him. He would have been so interested to know all this a few months ago, but now it was meaningless compared to the gaping chasm inside him that was the loss of Sirius; none of it mattered . . .

"Sirius told me you felt Voldemort awake inside you the very night that you had the vision of Arthur Weasley's attack. I knew at once that my worst fears were correct: Voldemort had realized he could use you. In an attempt to arm you against Voldemort's assaults on your mind, I arranged Occlumency lessons with Professor Snape."

Harry watched the sunlight, which was sliding slowly across the polished surface of Dumbledore's desk, illuminating a silver ink pot and a handsome scarlet quill. Harry could tell that the portraits all around them were awake and listening raptly to Dumbledore's explanation; he could hear the occasional rustle of robes, the slight clearing of a throat.

Snape couldn't keep quiet, "And when I discovered that you had been dreaming about the door to the Department of Mysteries for months, despite everything I warned you about, you stubborn, spoiled, exasperating boy...!"

Dumbledore cut in before Harry could respond to the insults. "Voldemort had been obsessed with the possibility of hearing the prophecy ever since he regained his body; and as he dwelled on the door, so did you, though you did not know what it meant.

"And then you saw Rookwood, who worked in the Department of Mysteries before his arrest, telling Voldemort what we had known all along - that the prophecies held in the Ministry of Magic are heavily protected. Only the people to whom they refer can lift them from the shelves without suffering madness: in this case, either Voldemort himself would have to enter the Ministry of Magic, and risk revealing himself at last - or else you would have to take it for him. It became a matter of even greater urgency that you should master Occlumency."

"But I didn't," cried Harry, jumping to his feet, his eyes flicking wildly between the two men. Grief and the dead weight of guilt propelled him to continue. "I didn't practice, I didn't bother. I could've stopped myself having those dreams, it that what you want to hear?!" His voice broke on a sob, and he gasped, "If I had, he'd never have been able to show me where to go, and - Sirius wouldn't - Sirius wouldn't—"

Something was erupting inside Harry's head: a need to justify himself, to explain… He sat quickly back in the chair and looked pleadingly into the headmaster's gaze. "I tried to check if he'd really taken Sirius, I went to Umbridge's office, I spoke to Kreacher in the fire and he said Sirius wasn't there, he said he'd gone!"

"Kreacher lied," said Dumbledore calmly. "You are not his master, he could lie to you without even needing to punish himself. Kreacher intended for you to go to the Ministry of Magic."

"He - he sent me on purpose?"

"Oh yes. Kreacher, I'm afraid, has been serving more than one master for months."

"How?" said Harry blankly. "He hasn't been out of Grimmauld Place for years."

"When you gave Professor Snape that cryptic warning, he realized that you had had a vision of Sirius trapped in the bowels of the Department of Mysteries. He, like you, attempted to contact Sirius at once. Members of the Order have more reliable methods of communicating than the fire in Dolores Umbridge's office."

"I found that the dog was alive and safe in Grimmauld Place, much to my dismay," Snape muttered.

Dumbledore continued, "When, however, you did not return from your trip into the Forest with Dolores Umbridge, Professor Snape grew worried that you still believed Sirius to be a captive of Lord Voldemort's. He alerted certain Order members at once."

Harry sat back in his chair, numb from everything that had already happened and trying to find room to accept all this new information. He still refused to believe that Snape would ever do anything to actually help him. There had to be more to the story for Snape to be involved…

Harry was so lost in his own tumultuous thoughts that he almost didn't hear when Dumbledore heaved a great sigh and continued, "Alastor Moody, Nymphadora Tonks, Kingsley Shacklebolt and Remus Lupin were at Headquarters when he made contact. All agreed to go to your aid at once. Professor Snape requested that Sirius remain behind, as he needed somebody to remain at Headquarters to tell me what had happened, for I was due there at any moment. In the meantime, Professor Snape intended to search the Forest for you."

Yeah, I'll bet he did… Harry thought viciously. Searched the Forest to make sure that Umbridge finished the job, more like.

"But Sirius did not wish to remain behind while the others went to search for you," Dumbledore continued. "He delegated to Kreacher the task of telling me what had happened. And so it was that when I arrived in Grimmauld Place shortly after they had all left for the Ministry, it was the elf who told me where Sirius had gone.

"Voldemort knew already, of course, that Sirius was in the Order, and that you knew where he was - but Kreacher told him information that Voldemort could use to his advantage. Kreacher made him realize that the person Sirius cared about most in the world was you, and that you were coming to regard Sirius as a mixture of father and brother."

"The Dark Lord knows of your hero complex, Potter.," Snape hissed. "You stubbornness, your refusal to learn Occlumency, is the reason The Dark Lord realized that the only one you would go to any lengths to rescue was Sirius Black," Snape spat the name as if it left a bad taste in his mouth.

Harry's lips were cold and numb. There seemed to be very little air in his lungs; his breathing was quick and shallow.

But the potions professor wasn't finished. "You might say, Potter," he murmured silkily, "that the blame for the dog's death lays directly at your feet."

"Severus!" Dumbledore said harshly, loudly.

But Harry was on his feet in an instant, knocking his chair to the ground with a clatter. "What about you?" Harry yelled, "When I told you Voldemort had Sirius, you just sneered at me as usual—"

Harry had advanced to within an arm's length of Snape, and the man was not backing down. Instead he advanced and practically shouted in Harry's face, "Think, idiot boy! Even you can figure out that I had no choice but to pretend not to take you seriously in front of Dolores Umbridge! But it was me that informed the Order about what you had said! It was me who deduced where you had gone when you did not return from the Forest! IT WAS ME who gave Umbridge fake Veritaserum when she was attempting to force you to tell her Sirius's whereabouts!"

Harry disregarded the man's words; he felt a savage pleasure in blaming Snape, it seemed to be easing his own sense of dreadful guilt, and he wanted to hear Dumbledore agree with him.

"You goaded Sirius about staying in the house – you made him out to be a coward!"

"Your godfather was an immature swine, just like your father!" Snape spat hatefully. "What he thought of himself for hiding in that house was none of my concern."

"You BASTARD!" Harry cried, and he launched himself at the man. His fist connected with the professor's jaw, making the man stumble backward before Dumbledore had hurried around the desk and hauled him away. Harry shook the old wizard off, but didn't go after Snape again.

"Severus, leave us!" the headmaster said sternly.

Snape slowly straightened, a dark bruise already blossoming around his eye. Harry knew the bruise would be gone as soon as Snape could get to his potions, but Harry was gratified to see that he had caused the man pain, as fleeting as it may be. Snape narrowed his eyes at Harry, purest loathing emanating from his gaze. But in a swish of black fabric and a slam of the door, he was gone.

Much later, Harry sat alone in the fifth year dormitory of Gryffindor tower. Harry's knuckles and wrist sent sharp, shooting pains into his elbow. He'd refused to allow Madam Pomfrey to heal his hand, which she claimed was badly sprained and had bandaged nonetheless. What no one understood was that Harry welcomed the pain. It allowed him to push away the overwhelming grief, the agony of losing Sirius. The physical pain in his hand only narrowed and focused his mind on one singular thought: how much he hated Severus Snape.