He’d had this dream for the past few nights. He wasn’t complaining. It was fairly tame, as far as his dreams usually went. Anything was better than Voldemort or his parents dying or Cedric dying or Sirius dying or Dumbledore dying…. He felt safe in this place. In a kind of abstract, passive way, he felt loved, cared for. In a way that didn’t demand anything at all of him. He liked that.

The dream was a curiosity in itself, in that nothing actually happened. He was just sitting in a room which looked a bit like the common room, only it wasn’t. Nothing ever happened, no-one walked past, and he never did anything. It was just a place.

So when he was there the sixth night in a row and someone actually walked into his dream room, he stood, a little surprised. She was normal-looking, he supposed. Muggle-type normal, around his age, long brown hair, blue-ish eyes, plain face, jeans and, strangely, a Weasley jumper.

“Do I know you?” Harry asked in his dream. He eyed the jumper; it was green with a black infinity symbol, instead of an initial. What did that mean?

“No, you don’t, but we know you, Harry.”

He looked around for others, but there was only her. “We? What’s your name?”

She shook her head. “I am we. All of us. We are one.”

Great, he thought, even his dream-people had delusions of grandeur. “Okay,” he said slowly, “but do you have a name?”

“You may call us Parcae.”

“‘Parcae’, uh, that’s… The Fates?”

She sat down, nodding. “History of Magic finally proving useful?” she grinned. He remained standing, eying her warily.

“Why are you here?” It seemed rude to add what he had been thinking: because I like this space empty.

“We created this place so you would feel comfortable here.”

“And?”

“We have come to tell you that you shouldn’t be here.”

He blinked. Huh?

“Not here,” she gestured round the room, “we mean in this life. We are going to give you a better chance, Harry. We are going to show you an alternate world, the way your life should be.”

Harry wondered if this was all merely wishful thinking, a product of his own mind..

“It happened wrong, you see.”

“Er, what did?” Harry asked.

“Your life, Harry,” she answered simply.

Harry snorted. “Tell me something I don’t know,” he muttered.

“You feel bitter, angry,” she said calmly. “And you should.”

Now she was sounding too much like Dumbledore for his tastes. He tended to get fed up and irritated with people quickly these days. “Are you going to apologise, too? Say it was your fault, but could I look past an old man’s mistakes? Or a spirit’s, whatever.”

She did not seem at all perturbed by his attitude. In fact, she was grinning. “No,” she answered, matter-of-fact. “We are going to fix it.”

Now she had his attention. Still cautious, he asked, “How?”

“We go back to the fork in the road. The moment that could have been handled differently. That should have been handled differently.”

Harry was getting really frustrated now. “Look, are you going to answer in riddles or actually explain what’s going on?” he asked with exasperation.

She smiled and patted the seat next to her. After a small hesitation, he sat.

“Some years ago,” she began, “there was a prophecy about you. Prophecies, Harry, are simply pieces of information that we give you early. We craft one when we sense that you will need to be prepared. It was our job to make sure that this one was sent to the Seer who would reveal it to Albus Dumbledore. He, in turn, was to take care of matters after Voldemort tried to kill you.”

Her face tensed a little, and it was the first time her face wasn’t cheerful. “But he didn’t. He didn’t have the resources. He did the best he could,” she broke off when Harry snorted. “He did, Harry, believe that. But he should have been able to do more. We had created a situation that made it impossible. Your parents, Sirius Black, the Dursleys.

“We gave Trelawny the prophecy for Dumbledore to hear, and everything went as it should. Or so we thought. But we didn’t realised that our mistake had already been made.”

Harry thought for sure that she was going to say something about Sirius and Pettigrew, but instead another name came from her lips.

“Severus Snape is your father, Harry. But no-one knew, not even Snape himself.”

Harry stared at her. Snape?

Snape.

His mother had dated Snape. Had….urgh…with Snape. A bizarre image struck him: a teenaged Severus Snape, hook nose, greasy limp hair, with an awkwardly-not-quite-adult gangly walk and the ever-present scowl, snogging in the Astronomy Tower.

He snorted. He tried to put his mother into the cartoon-like scene and was disappointed when he couldn’t. While it was easy to imagine one of his school mates or professors in any situation, he couldn’t grasp a clear image of his mother. He didn’t know her well enough. He only had one memory of her that had not been defiled by Voldemort, and it wasn’t even his. In Snape’s Penseive, the Marauders had –

Wait. Snape’s Pensieve. She’d defended him. Was that what he hadn’t wanted Harry to see? That he and Lily had feelings for each other? Were there other memories like that in the pensieve? He must have been jealous of James …. and perhaps he had never let go of that…

Was that why he hated Harry and made his life hell? Had he loved Lily Evans? Maybe he saw Harry as proof of his own failures, or as something that could have been his.

Harry looked up, realisations buzzing around in his head like a disturbed hornet’s nest. His thoughts seemed irritated with one another, dodging each other and zooming back and forth without destination.

The girl stared back at him with a passive little smile. Harry stood suddenly, for some reason, very pissed off that she seemed to be aware that she’d dropped a bombshell and was happily waiting for him to catch up. He blustered about for half a minute, annoyed there was nothing in the room to fiddle with, wondering what the hell was going on.

After a moment of aimless pacing, he huffed and sat back down, recognising there was nothing he could achieve by it.

She continued as if he hadn’t moved at all. “Lily and Severus were friends with similar interests. That’s where most of the animosity between he and the Marauders came from. after spending a few years studying together, they began a romantic relationship in their seventh year at Hogwarts. It wasn’t heavens-singing, one-true-soulmate love, but it was enough.

“Then he pushed her away for her own safety. Malfoy was after him to join the Death Eaters, through orders from Voldemort. She turned to her other friends, the Marauders, for comfort. That they gave her. After a while – a long time, Harry, she had loved Snape – she and James got married. One year later, she gave birth to you, Severus’ son.”

The look on Harry’s face made her laugh. “You’re so Muggle sometimes,” she giggled, ruffling his hair. “Have you ever heard of a child born out of wedlock in the wizarding world? Or a family not being prepared for a child?” She didn’t give him time to think, let alone give an answer. “There is a spell you can place on a conceived foetus before it reaches three months. This Stasis spell can be held for up to five years, it’s purpose was to give the parents-to-be time enough to create a safe environment for a child.

“The reason there are so many witches and wizards two and three years younger than you, Harry, is that those couples who conceived during the bad years leading up to the night in Godric’s Hollow, chose to remove the spell shortly after you vanquished him.”

Harry’s subconscious decided at that moment that nothing else could surprise him, so he listened with attention rather than complete disbelief. “But my mother did it to protect Snape?”

“She did it for you and Severus and herself. She hadn’t had the chance to tell Severus she was pregnant, so James was the only one who knew. The spell was his suggestion when she came to him distraught over her break-up.”

She sighed. “Snape became a Death Eater, the prophecy was made, Pettigrew betrayed the Potters, Voldemort came, Sirius was sent to Azkaban and Snape went to Dumbledore in his grief.”

“That was the mistake?” Harry now had a good idea where this was leading, and was waiting for her to say it. That his parents shouldn’t have died, that they shouldn’t have switched secret keepers.

“We’re sorry, Harry,” she said with true sorrow. “It was unavoidable. The Potters were destined to lay down their lives for you. Even we cannot completely change fate. But we can nudge it a little.”

He lowered his head, defeated. It had been too good to be true, of course. Things like this always were. “So?” he said sullenly. “What’s good about that? How can you make this better?”

“She never told Severus about you. And we let it slide,” she answered. “Severus was Marked shortly after he pushed Lily away. If he had known about you, no matter that you were to be named a Potter, he would have had something to live for. He wouldn’t have taken the Mark.”

“But what about my – about James?”

“Snape would not have begrudged James his own wife’s baby. Remember the reason he’d pushed her away: they’d be safer.”

“Fat lot of good it did.”

“Safer, Harry, not safe. If you had been the son of Lily and Severus Snape, Lucius Malfoy would have been ordered to kill you to ensure Snape became a Death Eater. Malfoy, not Voldmort, and the prophecy would never have been fulfilled, Voldemort would have won. And before you ask,” she held up a hand, “it wasn’t Neville. He just happened to fit the description.”

“So how should it have been?”

“Had Snape known about you, he would not have taken the Dark Mark. He would have been able to claim you as his son that night, in a Voldemort-free world.”

“No Dursleys?”

“No Dursleys, Harry. And Sirius would have been cleared. Everything is a chain reaction. Lucius Malfoy, for example, was never supposed to have the influence he does in the Ministry. That came inadvertantly because Snape was a Death Eater. However much he regretted the decision, things he had done and was forced to do had consequesnces. It was through Snape that Pettigrew was able to remain in hiding. But without that indirect help, and the fact that Snape would be hell-bent on finding justice for his son, Pettigrew would be caught a year after the incident and Black cleared.”

She leant back into the sofa to wait for his reaction.

“Are you saying that I have the chance to do it all again?” he asked. “That you’ll fix this one little thing and the world will be all different?”

“It seems impossible, doesn’t it, that such a little thing could change the world? For almost twenty years, it has seemed not to matter.” She looked directly into his eyes then. “Harry. We wanted to stop and help you before this, but we sensed only your need for a better life, and that is not enough for us to interfere. Recently, though, we have sensed the need of the world. In this life, Harry, you will die to Voldemort. If we continue down this path, you will fail.”

Harry blinked. He had often felt his own inadequecy regarding the prophecy, unsure that he was so special; to hear it like this took his breath for a moment.

“We’ll come again tomorrow night, Harry, to show you how it should have been. Sleep well.”

He hardly noticed her leaving, but he spent a few more hours in that room before he woke.

He spent most of the next day in a daze, just going through the motions of his seventh year classes. He realised he hadn’t for one moment not believed his dream to be true. Was it just a product of his warped imagination begging for a way out? Or was it true? It made just as much sense as not. Something like that was just the icing on the cake of his life. Every time he seemed to find his equilibrium, he was shoved through another twist.

Harry thought about the events that defined his existence. He’d thought he was an orphan with a not-so-grand home life. Nothing so strange there. But no, he was a wizard. An ordinary wizard? No, he was a hero, his parents were heroes and the world knew his best friends’ names and how he liked his tea. One of his professors was acting strange… didn’t every school have an eccentric teacher or two? No, this one had a revengeful evil spirit living in his skull.

He’d set a snake free at the zoo. Okay, Hagrid often let worse things out on the students, but no, that was also bad. Voldemort, The Dark Loser had made him Slytherin’s heir by default, so now he was a hero of both Gryffindor and Slytherin. Then he discovered that plenty of other freaks and abnormalities just happened to be closely associated with him. An infamous convict had been his parents’ best friend. The professor who taught Defence Against the Dark Arts – incidentally classified as a Dark Creature himself – was also a dear friend of his parents.

The next teacher wasn’t even a regular freak, but was an evil freak disguised as good freak. This one had rigged an entire inter-school competition in Harry’s favour in order to sacrifice him to the aforementioned Dark Loser. Well, that just made perfect sense, didn’t it? Then fake prophetic warnings had been inserted into his already-questionable state of mind, which, in effect, turned out to be true.

Now his arch nemesis, it transpired, had deposited parts of himself in all sorts of places to insure against complete destruction (well, who didn’t now-a-days?), and the man who had killed the only person with any real power in his life was his father.

Figured.

When he got to Potions, he could hardly sit still. Hermione only slightly misinterpreted his worry.

“Why are you so jittery? It’s not as if Professor Snape will be teaching potions ever again. Ron has been celebrating his departure all summer.”

“What?” That had been pretty close to the direction of his own thoughts, if with a completely different meaning. If he had grown up with Snape, what would Potions class have been like? Would Snape even be the professor?

Would Harry know – understand – the enigma that would be Severus Snape, Potions Master and Non-Ex-Death Eater? He’d always been fascinated by the fact that such a dislikable man, to put it mildly, was for all intents and purposes, good. Until he killed Dumbledore. Even then…

He felt that he’d kind of missed out on that opportunity somehow. The chance to use his Slytherin side. The Hat had said that the serpents’ house would help him find his way to greatness… Parcae said he would fail on his current path. Would he have been better off as a Slytherin? Would he be able to defeat Voldemort as a Slytherin?

That night, he made an excuse to go to bed early and luck was with him, he fell asleep fairly easily. He was both excited and terrified to be in that room again. But once he was there, he was filled with a calm sense of purpose.

“Hello, Harry.”