Days passed. Harry ignored the Prophet—he had no desire to read the other side of the interview with Skeeter. He learned how to charm parchment to do some interesting things, but he didn’t know how the Map knew where everyone was. He managed to make a copy of the physical part of the Map with his additions and even gave it modes where it showed just a normal map of the school with the current classrooms labelled or, with an additional charm, showed the secret passages including the one to the Chamber of Secrets that the old Map also lacked.

He made two more copies and sent them off to Ron and Hermione, feeling anxious about their replies after he did so.

His friends didn’t reply by the next day, making Harry realize that he needed something else to occupy himself. There weren’t any potions to work on. Bored, Harry wandered the castle and the bailey. He wondered if he should start up a new hobby, like sketching, or violin, or…anything. The bailey was too small for much flying which was a shame as the weather was beautiful, but then again the sun was shining like this the day Voldemort showed up. If the Ministry would just catch the remaining Death Eaters, he could go flying again around the much larger outer grounds.

Feeling frustrated and caged, Harry sat beside the fountain and rolled up his sleeves to get some sun. He tried to imagine what Voldemort’s remaining followers were doing right then. They didn’t seem particularly close in his dreams. He hoped that meant they didn’t have any good plans after the Dementor one failed so brilliantly.

That night, Harry was jarred awake, shaking with chills. He jerked the drapes aside and turned up the lamp. His own breathing sounded harsh and urgent in his ears. The sight of the curved walls of the dormitory calmed him somewhat. He pulled his legs against his chest and hugged them while he waited for the remainder of his distress to fade.

Remembering Pettigrew’s falsetto words of reassurance from the dream, he started shaking again. Wormtail had been leaning over him, stroking his forehead about where his scar was. Harry felt a bit as though vomiting might improve his stomach. He grabbed his dressing gown and shrugged into it as he stumbled down the steps. The Fat Lady slammed closed as he stepped out into the corridor.

By the time he made it to the boy’s toilet, his stomach had calmed even though his shivering hadn’t. He ran the water hot and held his hands under it until they turned pink, then washed his face. Feeling better, he walked back to the common room and sat on the couch. The clock read half past three. The room was utterly silent. Harry really wished he had someone to talk to, as he wondered tiredly what had brought on this new dream. He toyed with the notion of going to Dumbledore, but the thought of him coming to his office door full of overbearing concern when all Harry wanted was an ear, dissuaded him.

When his eyes tried to fall closed, he went back up to his dormitory room, took a large sip of potion, and crawled back into bed.

Harry woke when the light came through the window since his drapes had not been re-closed. He rose, fuzzy-headed, thinking that a bath sounded like a treat, and that he would have to do it before the day heated up, or it wouldn’t be as pleasant.

Harry’s bath made him late for breakfast. As a result, everyone finished before him. Sprout and Hagrid idled over a second coffee before moving on and leaving him alone. The Hall became as quiet as the common room had the night before. 

Harry wished in vain for some kind of distraction, but the day oozed by, mind-numbingly.

That night, Harry took the potion before lying down at ten. Early, but then a good long rest was what he wanted most in the world. Exhaustion pulled him easily into sleep as he snuggled down between the covers.

Harry was cold—so cold he could barely move. He looked around himself groggily. The air was foul and dank. He was looking at the edge of something woven, like a basket or a coarse sack. Eventually, a figure approached and reached out to him. It was Pettigrew again. Harry tried to jerk away and managed to turn his head. It made him dizzy to do so. A hand stroked his forehead as Pettigrew chanted vague phrases of comfort. Harry jerked away from the hand again and caught sight of thick snake coils surrounding him.

With a cry of surprise, Harry tumbled out of bed, his unexpected limbs refusing to absorb his fall. He wriggled, gasping, to the center of the floor on flopping paralyzed arms that felt alien to him. He huddled there and waited for the panic to ease. His stomach rebelled. He swallowed hard over and over since he didn’t feel capable of making it down to the toilet.

When he finally came to himself, he looked at the clock which read fifteen before five. Almost morning. In fact, the sky looked to be brightening. The thought of imminent daylight and company at breakfast soothed his rattled nerves enough to give him enough sense to push off the floor.

Harry sat through breakfast in near silence, giving one syllable replies to Hagrid’s attempts at conversation. As badly as Harry longed for company, he didn’t actually want to participate in it. He also wasn’t very hungry, although he drank a lot of orange juice and coffee. Harry was still pushing his scramble around on his plate when everyone else got up to leave. He peered into his empty coffee cup, only vaguely aware of the movement around him.

At the door to the Great Hall, Dumbledore paused to look back at Harry, who sat with unusually bad posture on the far end of the long table. The headmaster stepped out and let the door close. “Severus,” he said to the retreating backs of his teachers. When Snape looked back, Dumbledore gestured with a tilt of his head that he should return.

Snape came back down the steps and over to the old wizard. Dumbledore said quietly, “Talk to the boy. Something is bothering him unusually so.” When Snape raised his chin in surprise, Dumbledore added, “I am not unaware where Harry has been spending most of his time.”

Snape huffed. “Why do you not speak to him?”

The old wizard sighed as his gaze focused beyond the wall. “Because after all that’s transpired, he still honors me to the point of sacrificing himself for my sensibilities. That and he will not have me to rely on forever. So at this point I do not want to bridge that gap.” He tossed his head at the door to the Great Hall to urge Snape back in.

Snape shook his head in faint disgust, pushed his hair back, and opened the door. The hall stood in a late morning grandeur it could not equal during the school year. The entire east wall of windows stood alight with color, setting the dust motes aglow like fairy lights. The floating candles glowed their most intensely, attempting to compete. Harry still sat at the far end of the Hufflepuff table, looking more forlorn than usual. Looking more like James than usual. The James near the end, beaten down by fighting against a lost cause.

The door to the hall, tall enough for a giant, closed with a low ringing thud at Snape’s back. Harry didn’t stir, saving Snape from immediately producing some appropriate approach to the problem before him.

For the first time in a long long while, Snape considered what Lily would want him to do just then. And for the first time since that awful night, he lacked any sense of what she might want beyond being there in his place to take charge of things her own way. At some point, that voice had slipped away. While she was alive, he’d spent too much time assuaging himself that he was better off not cursed like James with meeting her expectations. Then later, spent too many dark nights hoping against hope that she could not see beyond the veil just how low he had sunk. And what terrible choices he was facing—she who always found the high road, even if it meant building it from scratch. Too many times, and now… now where was that compass when he was facing this, of all things.

Snape approached with a sigh, shaking his head. Frowning at his own discomfort, he sat on the bench beside Harry, facing outward.

It required dozens of ticks of the clock over the hearth to conjure up words and an appropriate tone of voice. “Did something happen?” he asked.

Harry jumped lightly as though, as unlikely as it seemed, he didn’t realize Snape was there. Harry cleared his throat and replied, “Potion stopped working.”

“It does not completely eliminate dreaming, that is why it is safe to take regularly,” Snape explained. “Are the shadows moving in?” he asked, suddenly concerned that he’d neglected something so basic.

Harry shook his head. “Different dream.” He didn’t elaborate.

Snape watched the boy’s hands rubbing over each other as though to warm them, even though the Hall temperature was quite comfortable. “Does this other dream lead you to believe that you are in danger?” he asked, being as specific as possible.

Harry considered that before he shook his head. 

“If it does, you will inform someone immediately?” Snape half asked, half ordered.

“Yes,” Harry replied faintly. He hadn’t looked up from his barely touched plate of breakfast.

“The dream has removed your appetite?”

Harry nodded and swallowed hard as though to demonstrate his nausea.

Snape stood, having run out of angles to pry at with this topic. He watched Harry push his plate back to make room for his elbows on the table. The boy put his head on his hands, looking rather defeated. Snape departed, unwilling to probe further because he would certainly not appreciate anyone doing so to him in the same situation.

Dumbledore visited Snape’s office about an hour later. “You spoke with Harry?” he prompted.

Snape put down the crate of marble blocks he was sorting through for student spell practice. Many were cracked or had serious burn marks. “He is suffering from a new nightmare.”

“Did he tell you what was in it?”

“No, and I didn’t pry. Unless it is critical to, it seems unnecessary,” Snape went on, although he felt a bit like he was post-justifying.

Dumbledore stepped over to the desk. “I am concerned the dream represents some real danger to him.”

Snape replied, “I asked that specifically. He says it does not.”

“Hm.” Dumbledore picked up one of the cracked blocks of pure white marble and examined it.

Snape said, “If we are willing to trust his retelling, we should be willing to trust his interpretation.”

Dumbledore set the block back down. “I want you to keep an eye on him for the next few days.”

Snape studied the headmaster a little suspiciously. “Meaning?”

“Speak to him if this continues. Check on him: make certain he is sleeping, because clearly he is not doing so regularly.”

Snape blinked in surprise and gave Dumbledore a dismayed glare.

“Severus,” Dumbledore said congenially, “it is very little to ask. Especially compared to what has been asked of you in the past. I have worked hard to keep him unattached to me. Now, when my immediate future is even less certain, I do not wish to tether him to me more than he has managed to on his own.”

With a frown Snape turned away to pick up another crate of blocks to sort. Dumbledore stood and watched for a time, as though to verify Snape wasn’t going to protest further.

The dream woke Harry just after midnight, which wasn’t surprising considering he had crawled into bed at nine. He stumbled from the room again, unable to resist the need to satisfy his urge to flee if only from one room to another. The common room was its usual silent self as he dropped onto the couch. He stared at the bookshelves and wondered what he was going to do.

It was two when Professor Snape headed up to the Gryffindor Tower. As he approached the end of the dark corridor where the portrait guarded the entrance, he huffed his annoyance at this task. The house passwords were all set identically for the summer and the Fat Lady opened to Periwinkle. As he stepped into the common room and eyed the staircases to the dormitories, it occurred to him that he didn’t even know which floor the boy slept on. There were only seven floors to search, he thought in further annoyance.

It wasn’t until he stepped across the room that he noticed the figure in striped pyjamas curled on the couch before the empty hearth. He turned one of the lamps up slightly and considered the still form. At least Potter was asleep—that simplified his task, but it was a tense sleep, not normal and probably not restful. The boy even appeared to be shivering although the room felt pleasantly warm from the sun-baked stones of the tower. As well, the pilly, crocheted throw pillow his head rested on would have only seemed comfortable to a monk from an exceptionally strict order.

Snape surveyed the room. The houses all had spare bedding accessible somewhere. He tried one of the wardrobes—it contained games and sundries random. The next one had games as well but the top shelves had pillows and blankets. He pulled down one of each.

Using a transpose spell to avoid disturbing Potter’s sleep, he swapped the pillows before covering him. Potter still shivered. Snape was beginning to be curious what this dream was. He went to the hearth and opened the flue before lighting the logs that were stacked decoratively on the grate. The room didn’t need the heat, but the fire would provide more than one kind of warmth.

Harry woke up early the next morning. His first thought was that his memory of leaving his bed again must be mistaken as his head was on a very soft pillow. That was, until he opened his eyes and saw the common room. He fingered the blanket and noticed the black shards pulsing red in the hearth. Sitting up and scratching his head, he stared at that. If Dumbledore or McGonagall had come in, though they would simply have woken him and sent him to his bed. Maybe Dobby had done it, he considered, or one of the other house-elves. He stretched and, feeling better than he had the morning before, went down to wash up. 

At breakfast no one paid him any more attention than usual, leading him to assume the house-elves had bedded him down. He relaxed at that notion and forced himself to eat enough to cover the burn in his queasy stomach.

Harry wandered the castle most of the day, because if he sat still he felt chilled and sick again. His friends’ replies arrived and out in the sunshine, on a bench beside the keep, he read them. They were impressed with the maps. Hermione offered a few possible ways the Marauder’s Map knew where everyone was although she had to admit they were unlikely to really work. Ron was visiting his brother in London and his letter had a return address there. He described a little of what he had seen in the city in a way that made it clear he was holding back to not make Harry feel badly.

A chill overtook Harry at that moment. He folded the letters haphazardly and stuffed them into his pocket as he stood up to walk around the bailey perimeter yet again.

That evening, exhaustion drove Harry to his bed. Nothing short of nodding off in the library three times in a row could have done it. He took a sip of potion before pulling the covers up with painful reluctance.

His unease was more than justified. His dream this time was a confused blur of bloody white fur, animal panic, and an odd gulping swallowing of something still struggling ever so slightly, although part of him seemed to find that deeply satisfying. 

Harry fell down the steps to the common room and immediately vomited the little dinner he had eaten. He rubbed his mouth on his pyjama sleeve and suppressed the sob that tried to follow. 

“Potter?” a voice asked as someone stepped in through the portrait hole. A startled Harry looked up as Snape turned up one of the table lamps before coming over to him. “You are unwell. Let us get you to the dispensary.”

Harry managed with some assistance to get to his knees. “No, it’s the dream,” he explained as another bout of shivering overcame him. Snape pulled out his wand and Scourgified the mess before stepping away. Harry watched him step straight to the corner wardrobe and pull down a blanket. Surprise at the implication of that erased Harry’s fear. Dazed, he let himself be wrapped up and pulled to his feet.

Harry stepped toward the portrait hole and out with Snape keeping a grip on his arm for support. Harry insisted on stopping at the toilet.

As he leaned on the sink to wash up, Snape said, “You are certain you are not ill?”

“It’s just the dream,” Harry insisted. He bent down, washed his face, and rinsed his mouth before washing the cuff of his left sleeve. As usual, the warm water was a blessed relief to his panic. Clean, he finally had to turn it off.  He glanced at his dripping face in the mirror and shivered again, despite the warmth of the room and the steam still rising from the basin. He tugged the blanket tighter around himself and held it with his left hand. He felt dizzy so he leaned heavily on his right, propped on the sink edge. 

“She’s cold,” Harry explained. “He doesn’t know to keep her warm.”

Beside him, Snape straightened and said in deep tones demanded, “To whom are you referring?”

Harry closed his eyes with a wince and replied, “Nagini.”

Snape grabbed Harry’s arms and steered him to the bench along the wall where he forced him down. Crouched before him on the floor, Snape said, “Occlude your mind, Potter. Now.”

In a tired voice, Harry said, “I’ve been trying—I can’t.”

“Look at me,” Snape ordered.

Harry raised his eyes to his teacher’s unnaturally dark ones.

Snape said, “Put your emotion aside, Potter. You know how to do this. Force her out.”

Harry shook his head. “I don’t know if it’s me or her.”

“It does not matter,” Snape said sharper yet. “The result is the same.”

Harry forced himself above the sickening fear. He organized his thoughts with excessive effort, concentrating on the discomfort the tight grip Snape caused his left arm. Like a switch being pulled, the second existence went away. Harry blinked in surprise, fearful it was just going to jump back in again the next moment. After a minute of relief, his shoulders fell as he relaxed.

“Better?” Snape asked snidely.

Harry nodded and accepted the towel that was handed to him. He dried off his face and patted down his damp sleeve. With a hint of impatience, Snape held Harry’s arm out and used a drying spell on his sleeve.

“Thanks,” Harry muttered. He had left his wand beside his bed and he wasn’t very good at that spell anyway. 

“You should return to your dormitory,” Snape said.

Feeling almost himself, Harry stood up, hugging the blanket around him for moral support. 

As he escorted Harry back to the Gryffindor common room, Snape said, “From now on, do not fall asleep without Occluding your mind first.”

Harry nodded and stopped at the base of the stairs to the boy’s dormitory. “Yes, sir,” he said, feeling overly obedient. 

Snape didn’t reply beyond tilting his head to the side. 

Harry’s previous uneasiness around Snape returned with a vengeance. He delayed going down to breakfast so that he would have to sit on the close end which was usually where Hagrid, Sprout, and Filch sat. Through breakfast he occupied himself with steering a reluctant Hagrid toward the topic of wombats, and avoided looking over at the occupants on the end of the table. 

Feeling better than he had in days, Harry went back to his reading about parchment spells. Several times he thought of taking a break and checking if Snape needed help with anything. Each time he vetoed the idea immediately.

Occluding his mind before falling asleep worked well to keep his mind from wandering, and after a few days, he didn’t even have to think about it consciously. Safely separated from the horror of it, he thought back to the dreams to try to remember if there were any clues to Pettigrew’s location. Other than being in a cellar, he could not recall anything helpful.  

Harry fell back to his previous routine, fearing that he was going to spend the entire summer at Hogwarts. Pettigrew didn’t seem to think he was in any danger, which didn’t give Harry much hope. His notions of visiting Ron in London or the Burrow were now seeming to be only so much fantasy.

At dinner one evening the next week, Dumbledore observed, “It is almost your birthday, Harry.”

Harry glanced up and thought about that. It was July eighteenth. A month of the summer was gone already.

“I think perhaps a small party is in order,” Dumbledore continued. “Why don’t you invite a few close friends—not as many as I invited last time if you please. You can have the Great Hall for that evening.”

“Thank you, sir,” Harry said, feeling a bit honored by the offer. “I’ll do that.”

Harry used one of his new parchment spells to make up invitations. At first he was going to make them very elaborate, then decided all that showed was he had way too much time on his hands. He went instead with a simple animated flourish at the bottom.

Hermione wrote back the next day, accepting his invitation and asking if she could bring her parents as Ron was bringing his whole family and she wanted them to meet again. She also made some suggestions about his new Map and thought it was coming along nicely.

Harry wrote again to Neville, telling him to bring his grandmum. Neville replied the next day, sounding surprised to be invited, which made Harry think he needed to try harder with his shy friend.

The day before Harry’s seventeenth birthday party, he got up early and asked McGonagall if she would take him to Hogsmeade to get favors. She seemed to have much less to do now that they had all been there for so long.

As they entered Honeyduke’s, someone gasped and everyone turned to stare. Harry put his head down and looked around the shelves, determined to not be affected. He was uninspired though. Up at the counter he said to the clerk, “Anything new and interesting? I need party favors.”

The lady in a pink striped apron said, “We have you on a chocolate frog card.”

“Newer than that,” Harry said, trying to sound easy-going. “A little tacky to hand those out at your own party.”

“There isn’t anything newer than that. And I’d hand them out at my party, especially if they had me on them. Oh, except these.” She pulled out a box of red, shiny-wrapped sweets. “The wrapper is grain and sugar, so you can eat that. And inside each is different. All of them are fruit flavored and they turn your eyes the color of that fruit. Low-key, but tasteful.”

She rang him up for those and as he reached for his package, she said, “Can you sign this for me?” as she held up his chocolate frog card. “Headmaster Dumbledore signed his,” she pointed at the card pinned behind a sheet of glass on the wall behind her. Harry had never noticed it there and it looked like it had been there a while, given the amount of dust on the glass.

Harry shrugged and she happily slid the card over to him and handed him a never-out quill. When he gave it back, she stared at it a long moment then smiled at him and slipped it in next to Dumbledore’s.

The grass at the great curving base of the castle had been cropped short by the sheep brought in to graze on the grounds in the summer. The muted sound of their clustered bells drifted in and out on the breeze in eerie sync with the shifting of the cloud cover over the evening glow. By this time, the Muggle-innocent animals would be bedding down in the corral beside Hagrid’s shack.

Professor Snape swung his wand to take the closed flowers off an invasive symphyotrichum novae-angliae as he passed it. Unlike the other teachers he did his turn at grounds patrol alone. He strode rapidly, robe flapping, wand out, three or four spells at the edge of casting.

He reached the crumbling wall where the castle foundation met the lake and stopped. The breeze on this side emerged from the forest, chilled as if summer didn’t exist there. From the slight rise of the hillside, he scanned the dark tree line, half hoping something might emerge, something that he could take action against without any sort of moral quandary about it.

All remained quiet, however. The kinds of creatures that survived in a forest of this sort would sense this energy and never do him such a favor.

Late that evening, Harry stepped into the Great Hall in search of a snack, and stopped just inside the doorway. Massive piles of presents had been stacked on the Gryffindor table near the hearth where a fresh fire crackled. Since it was his birthday the next day, he feared they were all for him.

“A bit startling, isn’t it?” Snape’s voice came from behind him.

“Those aren’t for me, are they?”

Snape ignored the question and strode with his usual haughty purpose along the row to the piles.

“Professor Sprout has been intercepting the owls bringing these over the last weeks. The piles are sorted into people you might know…” Snape picked up a long narrow box. “Such as Victor Krum. And complete strangers.” He gestured at the larger pile on the end closest to the Head Table.

Harry gaped at the varied and colorful packages. Some of the wrapping had wizard pictures on it with little moving scenes. “Well,” Harry said quietly, “this makes up for a lot of birthdays with absolutely no presents.” He reached out and picked up a strangely shaped box with maroon and gold wrapping. Curious, he shook it and then glanced at the tag. Alarmed, he set it back down gingerly at full arm’s length, gave it a last little shove so it wouldn’t tumble off.

“What is it?” Snape asked.

“Fred and George,” Harry said and breathed out in relief when nothing untoward sprang out of it.

“I would imagine that nearly everything a seventeen-year-old wizard could want is somewhere in this assortment,” Snape drawled.

“Yep,” Harry agreed, trying to keep the restlessness from his voice. Some of the larger boxes from total strangers worried him. Fortunately, none of them appeared to have air holes. He worked his way back down the line, stopping beside Snape. “Do I have to write thank you notes for all of these?” Harry wondered aloud.

In his driest voice Snape replied, “Having never faced this dilemma, I do not know. Perhaps if Mr. Lockhart were here, he could tell you.”

“Having spent detentions helping him answer his post, I think I know what his answer would be.”

Harry sighed. The presents felt like a burden in that light, like a pale mockery of something actually meaningful.

“There is perhaps one thing you still wish for that is not here,” Snape stated as he picked up a silver-wrapped ball, looked it over casually, nose raised, then balanced it between other boxes.

Harry looked sharply up given how this comment spoke straight to his uneasiness. Snape wasn’t reading his eyes as Harry expected, but was looking over the presents. The low firelight was outlining his features, making them starker yet.

“Such as?” Harry asked, even though asking seemed dangerous.

Snape shook his head and spoke, half to himself, “Determining what one truly needs in the present seems to require some modicum of optimism for the future.” He picked up a black-wrapped box about wand sized, weighed it in his hand. “But the future is not something most of us are accustomed to hoping much for.” He breathed in and out once, set the box down and dropped his hands to his sides so they were hidden by his frayed sleeves. “For one thing, doing so would have broken us.”

Harry swallowed hard. This was open revelation of the sort he’d rarely heard from any teacher but Dumbledore, and never ever expected from Snape.

Snape tilted his head to the side and spoke ploddingly. “And it seems the reverse is true as well. Embracing the future requires facing the present without cowardice.”

“You should be used to that?” Harry trailed off. He thought he should manage to say something actually helpful here, but floundered.

“No.” Snape picked up a box wrapped in black velvet with a golden ribbon tied into a bow that continuously curled and uncurled. “It turns out. No.” He trapped the ribbon with his thumb to peer at the tag under it. “It turns out taunting fate and possible martyrdom is the easier path. Especially when there is no choice anyway.”

“I kind of understand that,” Harry said, glad to have something to say. “Sometimes it’s the only way to manage to do what needs to be done.”

Snape straightened to his full height and turned from the pile with a swish of his robes on the stone floor. “I did not intend to bring such maudlin thoughts when I entered. Certainly not to your celebration.”

“It’s tomorrow anyway.”

“Even so.”

“Well, it’s okay anyway. You’ve certainly been suffering my hopeless issues with…” Harry struggled for the right words that wouldn’t make things uncomfortable again already. “Good grace.”

“Really,” this sounded vaguely sarcastic. Snape moved one hand as though at a loss for words. He looked out of his depth, which would explain rambling on the way he was.

Harry spoke more forcefully, “You’re always the one willing to keep facing things that may be going horribly wrong. Everyone else is tired of it. Pretends it’s not happening because that’s much easier.”

“I can do no differently. To do otherwise is to court complete disaster.”

Harry had to look down at the floor to say the next bit. “Well, I really appreciate it. I probably haven’t said.” He swallowed against a new wave of uneasiness and turned back to the piles to distract from it. He picked up the box from Fred and George again, shook it lightly near his ear. It sounded like boxes inside of boxes. He held the box in both hands, looked over the hundreds more. “I feel ungrateful,” he confessed.

“Misguided they may be, the senders undoubtedly mean well.”

“Right,” Harry said quietly. “Yeah. I’ll keep that in mind.”

Snape tilted his head back, but not far enough to look at the night sky forming on the ceiling, more at the darkened windows opposite. “Are you wishing for something not in this pile? Something simple everyone else seems to have. Like…a home besides this castle, perhaps?”

“What do you mean?” Harry asked.

Snape appeared to bolster himself with a small frown. “It is not too late to be adopted, for example.”

Harry laughed in relief. “Oh, you mean those twenty-seven offers of adoption McGonagall sorted through?”

“There were that many?” Snape turned to him finally, pose shifting to challenging.

With a shrug Harry replied, “More than last time, according to her. She thinks it’s because I’m less hazardous now. I’d like to think that’s not true.” Harry acted a little put upon. Then moved a few presents between piles, sighing faintly.

A log shifted on the fire and it began crackled merrily again, shedding a yellow light on the scene.

“Don’t want to take any of them up on their offer?” Snape spoke with the kind of neutrality that could signal danger, but Harry was wondering what the large ring shaped gift was. It was large enough for a set of Quidditch hoops, which he could give to the Weasleys.

Harry shot him a look of humored disbelief. “Not really.”

Snape’s voice took on a strange distance. “Any particular reason?”

Harry shrugged helplessly. Sleepless nights had left him a litany ready for this. “I don’t know any of them. They think they know me but they really don’t. They almost certainly won’t be getting what they expect—” Harry stopped before he admitted how damaged it made him feel imagining trying to fit into a cheery home. He couldn’t deny that, in a fanciful moment or two, he had entertained the notion of being adopted by Lord Freelander, if only because it would mean hanging out on a nice estate instead of here at the castle for the rest of the summer. In reality the idea was awkward and strange, and he feared that it wouldn’t really address that deeply buried longing, might in fact solidify it into depression. With his hands Harry gestured that he couldn’t explain.

“What if someone you knew very well wished to?” Snape asked. He shifted a half step closer, while looking Harry over. “Someone who understands what has happened to you over the last six years.”

Harry hesitated answering. Thinking about it meant opening up buried memories and since his life didn’t depend on it, he really didn’t want to. It threatened to breathe new life into that tangle inside him and he had it managed at the moment. They both stood in silence. Finally, Snape stepped closer still, making Harry look up at him.

Quietly, Snape said, “Myself, for instance.”

Harry blinked at him. “What?” he asked loudly. The question echoed in the vast hall.

“I think we know each other rather well,” Snape said.

After a long stare of disbelief, Harry said, “You aren’t joking—are you, sir?”

“Have you ever known me to joke?”

“Not about something like this.” Harry thought about it more. “Maybe not at all. No, that’s not true,” Harry corrected himself. He was scrambling for space to think. “I thought you hated me,” he said.

Snape stood in complete stillness. “Have I given you that impression at all in the last three months?”

“Uh, no. I guess not.” Harry swallowed hard. “I don’t…You…” Harry’s heart was rushing in his ears.

Snape backed up a step. “You certainly don’t have to answer now. And there is no time limit on your answer.”

Harry regrouped. “I’m seventeen tomorrow. Isn’t that a little old to be adopted?”

“By wizard law, one can be adopted up to the age of financial independence, considered to be the average age to finish an apprenticeship, which is twenty. One can have a successionary adoption anytime at all after that.”

“You’ve, uh, researched this,” Harry said. Snape returned a look that said, of course. Harry stared at his hard angular face again, trying to slow his fast circling thoughts. “You’re seriously offering this?”

“I have been thinking it over since the end of last term.”

Harry dropped his arms and stared while a cold darkness leeched into him. “This is Dumbledore’s idea.”

Snape bowed crookedly and held up one finger. “His idea. But not his command to me. He made himself very clear on that point. And I admit, the idea was…quite startling at first.”

“But he talked you into it,” Harry said.

Snape suddenly stepped forward again, eyes fierce. “You talked me into it, Mr. Potter. Every time I, rather surprisingly, looked forward to your company in the dungeon. Every time I showed you a spell and, no matter how complicated it was, you required only at most three or four tries to produce a reasonable replication of it and I would think to myself how proud any wizard parent would be of you.”

Harry dropped his eyes to the stone floor as the gap inside himself twisted around like a snake.

Snape went on, “I do not offer this simply out of gratitude, in case you in turn think that true.” Harry continued to stare at the floor and didn’t respond. Softly, Snape said, “Consider it, Harry. You certainly know where to find me.” With that, he turned and stepped away.

Harry felt a bit like he did staring down at Voldemort’s body, as though someone had taken his heart out and haphazardly stuffed it back in upside down. He stood in the vacant Great Hall for a long time, watching the flames make his shadow flicker around the edges.