Severus arrived home a few short minutes after Gavin, he unlocked the door and entered the hallway just in time to see a rather disheveled boy in a green T-shirt and black jeans step out of the fireplace clutching a blue backpack. Gavin was small and slight for his age, a fact which used to help him con people out of money when he ran with the Ravens, for hardly anyone could resist a pitiful looking small boy. Since coming to live with Snape, however, he’d lost some of his scrawniness and filled out a bit, though people sometimes mistook him for eight instead of ten. He had dark hair, which Snape made him keep trimmed neatly, much to his disgust, and thickly lashed cocoa brown eyes that had induced many an innocent lady to part with a few dollars and sometimes more than that. Large and liquid, they reminded Severus of a deer, though the owner of them was more mischievous than a monkey.

Right then they were a study in misery, as the boy dropped his backpack with a soft groan. Severus was at his side in an instant, ignoring the protest from his stiff leg at moving so quickly across the room. “Gavin, how long have you been sick?” He placed a hand on the child’s forehead, it was slightly feverish.

The apprentice swallowed sharply, then said softly, “I dunno, just after fourth period, I think. I feel damn horrible, Sev.” No sooner had the words left his mouth then he threw up all over the floor. Well, the floor and Severus’ shoes.

Snape stepped back with a grimace of distaste. “Damn it, kid!” he growled before he could think better of it.

Gavin cringed at the harsh tone, whimpering, “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it, honest! I’m really sorry!”

Snape drew his wand, casting a cleaning spell. “Never mind. It’s not your fault,” he sighed, cursing himself for his quick tongue. Under times of stress, Gavin sometimes reverted back to the shivering child that had grown up in the orphanage beneath the strict tyrannical Mr. Ferrous, starting at the slightest raised voice and cowering at sudden movements made by an adult male. The way he was doing now.

“Gavin,” Severus made his voice very soft. “Stop crying and look at me. I’m not angry with you.”

“You are!” the child hissed, refusing to meet his gaze. “I didn’t mean to get sick all over you, sir. I’ll never do it again, I swear.” The small frame trembled, clearly fearing some awful retribution for his actions.

“Gavin, listen to me,” he repeated, keeping his voice soft. “It’s okay, you’re not the first student that’s ever thrown up on me. You’re sick, now let’s get you in bed.”

One wary eye peered up at him. “You’re not mad, Severus?” Snape shook his head firmly. “No. Why should I be? You being sick isn’t anyone’s fault. Come, you need to be in bed and take some of my Anti-Nausea Potion.” He gently laid a hand on his son’s shoulder.

Gavin flinched slightly, but then he drew in a breath and nodded. He felt terrible, all achy and weak and his stomach was killing him, worse even than the time he’d eaten some spoiled food out of a dumpster. Normally, he’d have protested being fussed over, but the way he felt now, he welcomed someone else looking out for him. He didn’t even mind when Severus picked him up and carried him into his room.

Severus paused on the threshold of Gavin’s bedroom, a frown stealing over his features. “Good God, boy! You call this–this pigsty a bedroom?”

Heaps of clothes were scattered all over the floor, what little Snape could make out of the blue carpet, that is. Magazines were piled haphazardly next to the bed and the TV, which had a tangle of gaming controllers and Nintendo games in front of it. The waste basket was overflowing, empty cups and plates were piled atop the clothes. The closet looked as though a bomb had hit it and the bed was a wreck, the sheets and blankets all wound around each other and dragging on the floor. More books and papers were covering the desk, which could barely be seen beneath them.

“Uh, I was going to clean it this weekend,” the boy said lamely, squirming slightly in his guardian’s hold.

Scowling, Snape gestured sharply, using a wandless version of a neaten-up charm. “You’re lucky you’re sick, young man, else you’d be grounded for three days for letting it get this bad. How do you find any clean clothes–or anything else--in this disaster?”

“I know where my clean clothes are,” Gavin muttered crossly, not in the mood for one of Snape’s lectures.

Severus raised an eyebrow skeptically. “Really? What do you do, flip a coin and then sort through the nearest pile?” The spell was sorting through the seemingly endless pile of laundry, putting the clean clothes in drawers and the dirty ones in the hamper in the corner of the room. It had whisked the sheets off the bed and replaced them with new ones and was currently working on the closet and the desk top.

Within five minutes, Severus could see the floor again and he quickly walked into the room and set the child down on the bed. Gavin looked about at his bedroom with something like dismay. “How am I gonna find anything like this?” he whined.

“Look through the dresser like a normal person,” Severus answered, opening a drawer and tossing a pair of pajamas at the boy. The neaten-up charm had finished cleaning by then and the older wizard gestured pointedly to the now clean bedroom. “This is what your bedroom should look like from now on, Gavin Snape. Got me?”

“Yeah,” the boy said, tugging on his pajamas. “Like an ad for Good Housekeeping, sure, whatever.” Then he groaned as his stomach cramped.

Snape took pity on him then and did not bother lecturing anymore, but tucked his ward in bed and summoned a vial of Anti-Nausea Potion with a snap of his fingers. He emptied the pink gel-like potion into a small teacup and stirred it briskly with a spoon. It could be diluted in a glass of milk, but in this case, Snape deemed it would be more effective at full strength. “All right. Here you go,” he said, and scooped up a tablespoonful of the pink substance.

“What’s it taste like?”

“Peppermint ice cream. Come on, open up.”

Gavin made a face. “Yuck! I hate peppermint.”

Severus sighed. “Quit giving me a hard time and just take your medicine.” He thrust the spoon at the recalcitrant child.

Gavin clamped his mouth shut.

“Gavin!” Snape began warningly. “You’re behaving like a four-year-old.”

“But it’s gonna taste nasty, I just know it,” he whined.

“All the more reason for you to just swallow it and get it over with.”

The kid shook his head stubbornly, and Severus gritted his teeth, trying to control the urge to shake the boy until his teeth rattled. Contrary, mule-headed, stubborn little brat! It’s not like I’m trying to poison him, for Godsake! And this is one of the better tasting medicinal potions, not like the Decongestion Draft. He locked eyes with the child, giving him one of his uncompromising glares that never failed to make his students obey.

Gavin merely pressed his lips together tighter.

“Fine!” Snape snapped, thoroughly exasperated. “Don’t take it and see how you like throwing up every fifteen minutes.” He made as if to banish the cup with his wand.

“Wait!” the boy cried, changing his mind as his stomach churned in warning. He’d already vomited three times in an hour. “Okay. I’ll take it.” He opened his mouth and allowed Snape to give him the first spoonful, grimacing slightly. To his surprise, the potion didn’t taste half as bad as he’d thought, and it began working immediately.

He took the other two spoonfuls without protest, finishing the cup. “Was that so bad?” his mentor queried.

“No,” Gavin admitted, flushing slightly. “But I still don’t like peppermint.”

“That dose should last three hours. Now you can take a mild sleeping draft and fever reducer,” Severus said, conjuring them as well.

The boy took them without a problem, he’d had them before and knew they didn’t taste bad. Then he snuggled down under the covers and closed his eyes. “Thanks, Severus,” he murmured before he fell fast asleep.

“You’re welcome, son,” the Director said, tucking the covers more securely about the boy’s skinny shoulders and dimming the lamp. Then he glided out of the room like a shadow, leaving the door half-open in case Gavin should wake up and want something else.

Scout rose from where he’d been lying in front of the hearth and thrust his nose into the wizard’s outstretched hand. Severus scratched the big golden magehound’s ears and petted his head before letting the dog outside in the backyard to get some fresh air. His house was about ten minutes away from the shore house his Amarotti inlaws owned, by broomstick that is, and about three miles from Point Pleasant Beach. Snape often walked along the beach when he needed to clear his head or ponder some new problem with his ward, the sound of the waves and the brisk sea air often soothed his frazzled nerves better than any Calming Draft.

He didn’t have that option today however, and so he busied himself making some lunch for himself. He quickly put together some ham and cheese turnovers, made with pie crust and sliced ham and Swiss, putting them in the oven to bake and then making some chicken broth for Gavin, figuring the boy’s stomach could tolerate that once he woke up. He hoped fervently that this stomach virus was one of the 24-hour kind, because he really couldn’t afford to take more than two days off from work.

Still, if the boy was no better by tomorrow he would take him to Arista and let her examine him. She worked at St. Martin’s General in Brick nearby as their Master Healer and Gavin liked her, she had therapy sessions with him once a week, since her empathic gift made her a first-class psychologist as well as a healer. In six months she had managed to coax Gavin into slowly accepting the fact that he was a wizard with an extraordinary gift and had mostly banished the nightmares of his time with Mr. Ferrous.

Mostly, because there were times that Gavin would wake up shivering and sobbing from nightmares of his early life in that hellhole of an orphanage and Severus would have to go and comfort him, holding him and humming soothingly until the kid fell asleep. Gavin always tried to pretend he didn’t need the older man, but Arista had told Severus that in fact the boy desperately wanted someone to care for him, because no one ever had, and thus Snape ignored the child’s protests. There was a very lonely, very sad child hidden beneath Gavin’s streetwise tough guy exterior, and once Severus was aware of it, he was careful to make the kid feel as if he belonged here and was not an unwanted burden. God knew, he had felt that way often enough when he was growing up, he would never knowingly inflict that kind of pain on this child, who had been made to feel as if he was a freak and unnatural because of his growing magical abilities.

From what little Gavin had told him, Ferrous the orphan manager was a great deal like Snape’s father Tobias had been, except that Ferrous had not been an alcoholic. The drink had exacerbated Tobias’ temper, making him ten times more volatile than normal, and even so it was no excuse, but at least Tobias had a thin reason why he was such an abusive bastard. This Ferrous man didn’t even have that, he was simply a vicious self-righteous bully. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” had been one of the man’s favorite expressions, according to Gavin, who shuddered when he’d said it. “He never spared me any, that’s for sure!” the boy had spat, and his eyes blazed with remembered pain and fury, so much that Severus quivered in sympathetic anger. “I was the devil’s spawn, see, and he beat me for my own good always.”

“That was a lie, Gavin,” Severus had told him then, meeting the boy’s gaze with his own. “He lied to you, because he knew what he did was wrong, and he sought to justify his own brutality. You deserved none of what that–that hellspawn did to you, d’you understand? None of it!”

“How do you know that, sir?”

“Because no child does, no matter how badly he misbehaves,” Severus replied heatedly. Then he added in a much quieter tone, “I know you find that hard to believe right now, Gavin, but it is the truth. You are not a freak, or unnatural, or a devil’s spawn because you have magic. Everything that bastard told you was nothing more than a lie. You should believe none of it. Ever!”

“But he showed me, sir. It said so, right there in The Bible–Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Gavin quoted softly, looking down at the ground.

And Severus had fought to keep from swearing. He was very familiar with that blasted quote, as was any wizard raised in a Catholic household. And he hated it as much now as he had as a child. He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. Then he said, “Gavin, what’s written in The Bible is just words, put there by men. Men, not God, men who make mistakes and are subject to all the typical failings–fear, hate, prejudice. Men wrote that damn book, and who’s to say they didn’t put things in there that never were true in the first place? Things to suit their own narrow little vision of how the world should be, not how it is?”

The boy had gaped at him. “But, sir! That’s blasphemy!”

“Yes. I can show you a dozen other passages which contradict that one, child. What’s in there was meant as a guide, not an absolute. Unfortunately people like your beast of an orphanage manager find it all too easy to take it as the one true way, and use it as a means to prove how righteous they are, how holy, and use it to commit unspeakable crimes against people. Don’t believe everything you read, young one. Not even in that Book.”

Gavin had gaped at him. “Then what’s true, sir?”

“That God created wizards and magic the same as He did everything else, son. And there is good and evil in all things, for all things have an opposite. And you have a choice, in magic, as in all things, to use it for good or evil. Magic is not, in and of itself, evil or good–it simply is. It is a force, and we who use it have to make a choice as to what it will be used for. God gave men–and wizards, for we are men too–free will and free choice. And it is up to you to choose what you will use your magic for, son. And that is the truth as I know it.”

“But. . .what if you choose wrong?”

“Then you can choose again. I believe in second chances, Gavin. One way or another, life always gives you second chances. You simply have to learn how to see them,” Severus told him, with a bittersweet smile. For those were Amelia’s words, and it was the same lesson she had given him so long ago, a lesson that he had never ever forgotten. Second chances, for him and for the boy he had adopted, mercy and grace and forgiveness, they were all possible if you believed.

Snape did. Amelia had made him believe. Now he would do the same for the troubled orphan he had promised to teach. It was the most important lesson he would ever teach. And also the hardest.

Gavin still had not mastered it. But that was all right. It had taken years for Severus to absorb the full impact of those simple words, and accept them for the truth. It was a lesson that needed time to sink in, and Snape knew he would have to repeat it many times before the boy absorbed it.

Right then however, Snape had his hands full just convincing his wary apprentice that magic was a good thing and he shouldn’t be afraid of using it. In the eight months since the boy had come to live with him, Severus had shown him all the various little charms and spells that could be used around the house, getting the child accustomed to seeing magic as a useful force, not a tool of the devil. He had made certain that he never used magic to discipline the child, for he wanted Gavin to view it as a positive thing, not a negative.

He thought that, for the most part, he had succeeded, though the boy had yet to cast a spell on his own. Still, Gavin no longer started like a deer when Snape took out his wand, or gestured, or clapped his hands, or chanted a spell in Latin, the way he had when he’d first come to live with Snape. It was a definite improvement. The integrated Muggle-Wizard school he had enrolled Gavin helped too, since the teachers there were both wizards and non-wizards, coming from families that were comfortable with magic and those that wielded it.

Such a school had been quite a shock to Severus when he’d first learned about it, two years ago when his daughter Trish had begun teaching preschool at one. There were no such schools in Britain, where the Ministry thought it was best to keep the wizarding world as separate as possible from the ordinary one. But in America, the integration of Muggle and Wizard had been going on for the past century and a half, though the Muggles who attended the school did have some knowledge of magic, and at least one family member who was a wizard or witch.

Severus found he approved of such a school wholeheartedly, since it fostered a degree of tolerance and understanding between Muggle and wizard that was unheard of elsewhere and had proved to be beneficial to all in the long term. It had been the Director’s hope that the school would stress even better than he could to Gavin that magic was not evil or perverted. So far, that seemed to be working.

The timer on the oven beeped and Severus removed the turnovers from it and transferred them to a wire rack to cool. They needed a few minutes to cool down before you could eat them. He busied himself setting down a plate, a bag of chips, and a glass of iced tea on the kitchen table.

He had just sat down and placed a turnover on his plate when Scout began barking.

Severus was on his feet immediately, for over the years he had come to interpret the magehound’s barks, since the dog rarely barked for no reason. This particular bark was one of welcome, and told Severus that the visitor approaching the house was known to the dog.

Seconds later, he heard his door chime, as the wardstone set in the porch also acknowledged the visitor as one who could cross the threshold, something that could only happen if the person bore no dark aura and had been keyed to the stone by Severus. Yet at the same time he knew this was not a relative, for the dog did not bark at relatives.

Severus walked over and opened the door, fully expecting to see another Dark Hunter on his front porch.

What he did not expect was one of his former students, the most famous one of all, the Slayer of Voldemort, Harry Potter.