Morning brought clarity and brightness, even in the windowless dungeon. Severus shook the last of his hangover away and made his way to breakfast in the Great Hall. The children were subdued at this early hour, chatting among themselves and feeding their teenage stomachs. Severus clutched at memories of Harry sitting at that table, the mornings Harry had spent in this hall, the breakfasts he had eaten here, surly and uncommunicative like any teenager in the morning. His son – Severus felt a brief pang at the thought that he had never eaten breakfast with his son, never teased him out of a sleep-induced mental fog, never reached out to straighten his clothes in the morning. He had missed so much of Harry’s life.

Harry was his son, there was no doubt about that. Those Ministry documents could not be forged and neither Lily nor Harry would have wished to hurt him with an untruth of this magnitude. No – Harry was his, had been his – but Harry was gone now. Severus moved through his day in a cloud, his mind and heart lead-heavy with the haze of that knowledge.

Harry was his son, and Harry had known it – and yet Harry had never looked to him for the parental approval that he must have craved. Had the boy feared rejection? Had he – had he rejected his greasy Potions Professor, decided that no father at all was better than a Death Eater father? Which way did the rejection go?

Severus scratched at his head and let his long fingers rest, tangled in his greasy hair. He had given Lily poppies, a ruby ring, and his love – had in the end given her freedom, which had driven her to James Potter and her death. It seemed that he had also given her a child, and she had taken it from him with a vengeance, taken it and kept it hidden. What were her motives in this? Had she meant to keep the boy safe? Had she been so deep heart-wounded by his rejection that she couldn’t bear to speak about the boy to Severus? He set his fork down by his breakfast plate with a metallic sharp clang and stalked out of the Great Hall.

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The journal was resting on the Slytherin-green sofa where he had left it. Its leather cover was pale and innocuous, as though it held no secrets. Severus touched it, picked it up as gently as though it were Lily’s fragile impromptu bracelet made of dried poppy petals, dried flower petals that could shatter in a strong wind. This had belonged to his son.

Severus held his son’s journal, traced the leather cover with an idle finger, the rough texture of the leather sharp against his skin while his thoughts spun. Harry, Harry Potter, Aiden Snape, his son, had touched this, had written in it – to pour out his soul or dream about Quidditch or scratch out ideas for his essays or voice his fears about the confrontation with Voldemort. Severus ran his finger up and down the length of the spine, wondered if Harry had ever sat and fidgeted with the book.

Severus scuffed his bare feet, restless, on the cold dungeon floor before leaning back into the cushions of the sofa. He could not flee from this. He could not open it. There were a million and one things that Harry could have written in this book, a million things that he could have written that were guaranteed to hurt or shatter Severus.

Why had Harry left him this book? Was this his idea of posthumous revenge, forcing his father to read in stark black and white that he was hated, unloved, condemned, rejected?

Severus traced the edges of the pages, the line of gilt that shone in the dim light from the fire, with one slow-moving finger. How could he read his son’s last message to him? How could he ignore it?

Tapping at his door jolted Severus from his reverie. Placing the journal reverently on the sofa, next to Lily’s cherry-wood box, he stalked to the door barefoot and opened it. “Albus, I’m in no mood for interrupt…” he said, trailing off when he saw that Albus was not there.

The cool air in the dungeon corridor swept into his room, chasing itself in feathery eddies and caressing his sallow face. The torchlight flickered over the countenances of Hermione Granger and Remus Lupin. Severus stared at them as though he could with some obscure magic divine the purpose of their visit without speaking to them.

He cleared his throat. “Miss Granger, Professor Lupin,” he said. He became conscious of his informal attire – slacks and a long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned at the throat, instead of his formal teaching robes – and his bare feet, and a flush crept up his neck to tint his cheeks.

This man, his childhood tormentor, his colleague these past three years, made no remark on Severus’s attire. His golden eyes, like honey flecked with dark toffee – like the comfort of drinking whiskey by a fire after a winter walk – hid no unspoken malice. “Severus?” he said, his voice soft in the echoing corridor. “Could we perhaps come in?”

With a nod, Severus stepped inside and led them through the disordered piles of scrolls and books, the unsorted piles of books that Harry – his son, his son, the reminder echoed again in his thoughts – had left him, through the disorder and to the oasis of warmth and clutter of half-finished whiskeys by the sofa. With a flick of his wand, Severus adjusted the fire to burn warmer. He’d stood too long slack-jawed at the door and needed to chase the cold of the dungeon floor out of his bare feet.

He sat next to the journal and Lily’s box, one idle hand going to trace the now-familiar patterns on the lid, sat and waited. The rancor that had bled out of his soul after the end of the war, the sharp curiosity that had once driven him, the verve and the venom – they were all gone. Severus waited to hear their purpose in visiting. He was empty and bereft, lonely for all of the years with his son that had been taken from him without his knowing, and it made him cold and still and quiet.

“We – I – That is, Professor …” Hermione began and then trailed off into silence.

“Hermione told me that Harry had left Lily’s box to you. I just – that is, we just wanted to make sure that you were … dealing with it, that you were all right. I … well, you and Lily were so close once and …” Lupin stopped, his warm eyes fixed on Severus.

There was, in the moment of silence that followed Lupin’s words, a kind of peace that settled into the dungeons, fragile like poppy petals and unfamiliar.

Lupin broke into the silence with another pronouncement. It occurred to Severus, as the werewolf spoke, that he was being tested, that the two of them were testing his mental stability – trying to discover whether he was wallowing in grief for his lost Lily. Had Lupin told Hermione about his relationship with Lily? Had Lupin even known?

“I was … I was impressed that you and Hermione figured out the password. I had to help Harry figure it out after Albus gave him the box, after … after Sirius died,” Lupin said, and it sounded as though he had forced the words to emerge from a frozen throat. The words crackled in the quiet air.

“Lily’s password was asphodel?” Severus asked, and then froze as the realization struck him, as Lupin’s words penetrated the fog that had encircled his brain. “You knew? You knew what was in the box and didn’t tell me?”

Sharper words wanted to drip off of Severus’s tongue and rip into the werewolf, to castigate him and threaten him and shame him for the theft of those three years with his son, three years of knowing his son. Severus stared into the fire and counted the sparks sent off from the dry wood, focused on the swirling Gryffindor colors of the flame, reined in his anger.

“No,” Lupin said, and Severus turned to look at him. “The password wasn’t asphodel, and I didn’t know – I still don’t know – what Lily kept in the box. Harry never told me.”

The werewolf’s hands made a tired, small gesture in the air and Severus stared at them, stared at hands that had once touched his Lily, had once touched his Harry, his Aiden, his son. “Lily always set the password to lines from her favorite poems,” Lupin said. “Harry had the box from Dumbledore and wrote to me, asking me how to open it. It was … It was a distraction for him, those days after Sirius … after Sirius had died. It was like a puzzle, finding a window that gave him a glimpse of his mother and finding a way to peek into it. He was stuck with the Dursleys all that summer, isolated and grieving for Sirius, but he had that box, that one connection to Lily … knowing that he had something, even something that small, that was the only thing that kept me from snatching him out of there, rescuing him from those Muggles and ruining Albus’s plans.”

Hermione spoke up from her end of the couch, her words hesitant and slow. “Harry … Harry, he never told any of us what was in the box, Professor. He … he did love it, you know, he used to keep it under his pillow at Hogwarts so that it would always be near him.”

“He never told anyone?” Severus asked. The words felt strange and fuzzy in his brain, on his tongue. Harry, his Harry, had kept this knowledge close and secret from his dearest friends, from all the world, from his father. It was uncharacteristic. Severus couldn’t imagine it – the bright shining boy he had known, the Golden Gryffindor, the sullen and defiant boy who defied orders and ferreted out mysteries and saved the world with his faithful friends – couldn’t imagine that the boy he remembered, his son, his Harry, would have kept something of this magnitude secret for long.

Severus reached out an unsteady hand and closed it around Harry’s journal, fingered the rough leather cover. This journal, a simple book that Severus hesitated to read, was perhaps the only confidant Harry had used, the only receptacle for his secret.

Bare feet silent on the cold stone floor, Severus made his way to the liquor cabinet. Despite the early hour, he opened a new bottle of whiskey and poured the golden liquid into three glass tumblers. The rich, almost spicy aroma of the alcohol had been the only solace, the only focus for his weary thoughts during these long days since he had received Lily’s box and Harry’s secret.

“She was very much like you in some ways, Miss Granger – Hermione,” Severus said at last. “Muggleborn and determined to show that she was as smart and competent and worthwhile as any pureblood witch.”

“You – Sir, I always thought that you hated Harry’s parents – the way you treated him and Remus and Sirius – the way you talked about Harry’s father in class – I don’t understand,” Hermione said.

Severus’s fingers tightened around his glass of whiskey at the reminder of his comments to Harry about his father. He’d taunted the boy about James Potter during all of his years at Hogwarts, used his memories of the elder Potter to hurt Harry, to hurt his son, even after Harry knew that Severus was his father. Harry had said nothing, all of those times that Severus had attacked him, all of the times that Severus had unwittingly insulted himself.

It felt as though the air was trapped in Severus’s lungs, trapped and heavy and stinging. Severus forced the air out, forced himself to say, “I loved Lily.” Hermione’s eyes were large at the revelation but Lupin only nodded. The werewolf had known years ago.

Lupin swirled the amber-colored whiskey – the liquid almost the same color as his eyes – repeatedly in his glass, fidgeting with it. “Severus and Lily were engaged once, the perfect couple. It was a surprise to all of us when they quarreled and broke it off, but she married James almost immediately afterwards.”

“I killed her,” Severus said, taking a large gulp of the whiskey. The pain as it traveled down his throat was almost welcome. “I rejected her because I wanted to protect her, because I thought that she would be happier with an Auror than a Death Eater, because marriage to a spy is foolish. She wanted to marry me in spite of it all, and I sent her away, sent her to her death. Not even two years passed between my rejection of her and her murder.”

“You didn’t kill her, Severus. There’s no way you could have known.” Lupin leaned carefully into Severus’s personal space and rested a tentative hand on his shoulder. “You must not blame yourself,” he said while he fixed his gaze on Severus’s dark eyes, looked directly at him.

Severus looked away first, looked down at the carved cherry-wood box on the sofa. The wood shone on the background of the green velvet cushion, gleamed in the firelight. The box and the journal sat on the sofa between Severus and Lupin, the secrets that they contained forming a barrier between the two men that was almost tangible to Severus. Unspoken words, unacknowledged truths, secrets that had been kept for so many years – there was no way for them to retrace their steps, to go back in time and start afresh, with the truth known to both of them.

Severus traced the lily pattern on the lid with one fingertip, a comfortable, habitual motion. The secret that Harry had kept for so long now burned inside of Severus’s heart, burned at his throat and his conscience. Harry had never told. Had he been ashamed to tell his dear friends the truth about his father? Why had he kept the secret for so long?

The wood of the box warmed under Severus’s fingers. “I …” he said and stopped. “I … what was the password that Lily had left on the box?”

“Do you remember her favorite poem?” Lupin asked.

“Autumn nibbles its leaf right from my hand: we’re friends.

We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk:

Time turns back into its shell,” Severus quoted from memory.

Time turns back into its shell – if only it could – the thought of it tugged at his heart, the memory of Lily reading her favorite poem, with her red hair spread out on her pillow like the corona the poem was named after. It was Lily who had loved him, it was Lily who he had pushed away, she had been his precious Lily and yet – and yet she had hidden his son from him.

“Yes,” Lupin agreed. A smile haunted his eyes for a half second. “She chose the lines:

we love one another like poppy and memory,

we slumber like wine in the seashells,

like the sea in the moon’s blood-beam.”

Lily’s poem, and for a second it was as though he heard her voice again, her slow careful reading of the poem. The fire flickered in the fireplace, casting shadows into the room, and Severus stared at it, its Gryffindor colors a painful reminder of his Lily.

Severus turned from the fire, turned to two of the people whom Harry, his lost Harry, his son, had once loved. The secret that Harry had kept beat at his heart one last time before he told them, “I was his father.” The words fell into a sudden silence,and two pairs of eyes were staring at Severus, two sets of lungs were caught full of breath and unable to exhale. Severus opened the box, his fingers lingering on the carvings that had been beloved by Lily. As he passed the birth certificate and the other papers to Lupin, he said only, “I found these yesterday.”