‘Just in case,' he thought reluctantly, guilt waiting portentously on the fringes of his awareness.

"It is not a potion to be consumed," he corrected the nervous boy, and he watched the boy relax minutely. "However, I shall need several strands of your hair," he added, placing the beaker onto the middle of the solid desk.

The boy again looked worried, but he reached into his robes. ‘No doubt for his wand to sever a portion of hair,' Severus deduced.

"Not cut," he clarified, "but plucked from the root. Five to seven will do," he illuminated quickly.

Potter nodded his compliance and reached up to his head. And as he waited for the boy to hand over the hairs Severus reached into his pocket where he had placed his own selection of newly plucked strands. He retrieved them and held them in his hand.

Once the boy held out his offering, Severus swiftly took them and added both sets to the blue potion immediately.

Without being wholly aware of their actions, all three in the room leaned curiously closer to the beaker to see the reaction. It first began to simmer, then quickly started to boil rapidly and Severus breathed quietly the two differing possibilities they might yield.

"We shall see a purple froth for a confirmation of kinship. Or, alternatively, dense, orange clumps for none at all."

It was surprisingly quick considering the significance of the results for those that sought guidance from the potion; one might anticipate an elaborate and torturous wait for such evidence, but this was fortunately one of those with blissful variance from the expectation.

The potion bubbled merrily, higher and higher, and then with an abrupt explosion of shimmering brightness, where each male in the room had to shield their eyes momentarily, the potion settled into dusky, amethyst foam.

Or... purple froth, to be consistent with Severus' description... therefore, to everlasting marvel, the potion established a confirmation of kinship between Harry Potter and Severus Snape!

Whilst one in the room was quietly contemplative, the other two were utterly astonished and stared somewhat aghast at one another for several seconds.

Severus was the first to break out of his stunned bearing and shot around his desk toward a fearful and astounded teenager.

Just as Severus reached the cowering boy the Headmaster called sharply to him.

"Severus!" he roared, giving the sense that this was not the first time the man had called his name, but merely the first time it had made it through the pounding in Severus' ears to reach his brain.

Severus paused only long enough to assure the Headmaster of his intent. "I won't hurt him... I would never hurt him," he promised, with every ounce of sincerity he possessed. "I just want to look... see..."

Harry Potter looked terrified to be within the reach of his grasp, so Severus crouch down to his level and he also whispered a word of reassurance to the boy. "I just want to see... without these," he said, reaching gently to remove the most insistent, obvious resemblance to his, until now, assumed father - Harry's round glasses.

With them gone Severus began to explore the features with both his eyes and his fingers, smoothing every curve and tracing every ridge to see if he could identify anything familiar to his own.

His chest resounded with ache every time he identified one of Lily's features. They were few and far between, but they were there; the most obvious, her striking, green eyes, hauntingly identical though set into the slightly darker face; there was how the boy's lips curved slightly up at the corners, Severus had never noticed that before; and also the way the child's forehead crinkled with surprise...

It was her, and he ached to see it so closely again after all these years.

But what he also suddenly shocked to realise, was that he yearned to see something noticeably his blended with the features of Lily in the boy. For a moment he wanted to find something... he wanted the child to be his.

Though, looking closely and going over every inch of the boy's face Severus did not come up with anything definitive. The boy's hair colour, though similar in colour to Severus' own, could also have been handed down from James Potter; the curve of his cheek, too adolescent to determine its final, mature shape; the set of his jaw, too soft to be Severus', but Severus could not be sure his own had even been this angular at Harry's age; the arch of his eyebrow, not steep enough to be Severus', but not necessarily James' either... yet. It was too hard to be sure.

With the hateful glasses on his face, Harry Potter had seemed to be the clone of James Potter, but now without them it was harder to discern the features individually and Severus' doubt remained.

His hands pulled slightly back from the boy's face and he scrunched them into a soft fist, frustration and disenchantment tensioning his limbs.

Gentle hands had now clasped him around his shoulders and were encouraging him to rise and move away from the boy, and he complied; out of excuses for even himself to be so close to the child. His eyes roved the teens face once more as he stepped back and it wasn't until then that he recognised that Potter's expression had shifted away from terror to fall into intrigue... with even a touch of longing of his own.

Dumbledore was talking to him, so he had no time to consider the occasion.

"Severus... you must realise that this potion proves that nothing but a genetic relationship with Harry exists. And that relationship could very well be quite a distant one. Your mother's family could easily have shared a mutual genetic line with the Potters just a few generations back, or several. It does not, and cannot ever, definitively prove what that relationship might be. Severus, you do know this, don't you?" the Headmaster asked, imploringly.

"Severus?!" he asked again, prodding for an answer when the Potions Master had not yet responded.

"Yes... yes, I am aware," Severus swiftly granted at the nagging, and though he would not admit it the Headmaster's advice did ground him a little from the shock and turmoil this matter was causing within his mind and deep in his chest.

"But we are related, though?" Potter asked, his voice sharing the astonishment that still filled him.

"Yes, it would seem so, Harry," the Headmaster responded, "though most of the pure-blood wizarding families are related in some manner. This is not a unique result and in some ways we should have expected it."

HP.SS.HP.SS.

Harry was beyond astonishment now.

Whilst he was being accosted by the Potions Master, Harry distinctly had become aware of the emotions and turmoil the other man was experiencing. Obviously the man was an expert at keeping his physical responses veiled in times of stress, but at this proximity, and during these circumstances, to keep it all masked must have been beyond his capabilities. It was true that the betrayals were minute and subtle, but they were enough for Harry to recognise them.

He'd first seemed intensely shocked, as Harry had felt too, but after the man had raced around his desk and knelt in front of Harry to gently remove his glasses and had begun to survey his face, Harry was immensely surprised to find the extent of tenderness the typically harsh man possessed. Snape had even used his fingers to softly trace the angles of Harry's features, apparently looking for clues to ascertain Harry's heritage.

At least three times Harry read devastating hurt in the man's eyes as he continued, and at some point the almost frantic search turned into a desperate longing to find what he was looking for, followed by what Harry could only define as a level of disappointment.

‘Did the man want to find traces of himself in me? Did he wish to discover he was my father?' Harry had thought incredulously. And suddenly he had found himself longing for it to be true, for someone to want him, be proud of him... to love him.

Harry realised instantly that if Snape found what he sought, then Harry would have a living, breathing, real life father. Someone to count on, to advise him... someone to care and defend him... finally!

At that moment he didn't care that it was, ugly, greasy, acid-tongued Snape, of all people; for what mattered most in that moment was that Harry would finally have someone for himself.

Snape had been guided away from him and he heard the Headmaster tell the man that although they were related that the potion could not prove what the relationship was exactly. It could be from several generations previous, Dumbledore was saying insistently, but Harry could only grasp one point.

"But we are related, though?" he said, wanting to be sure he'd heard and understood correctly even though it was an incredible revelation.

Professor Dumbledore answered, confirming what Harry had supposed. And at the Headmaster's further explanation Harry recalled what he'd once been told by Sirius whilst staying at 12 Grimmauld Place before Harry started his fifth year about the pure-blood families being interrelated. It made sense, but to find out the fact may apply to him and his family, whoever they really were, was a bit surreal.

Especially to find out that, in whatever way it had come about, he was a blood relative of Professor Snape.

"Perhaps, in order to be absolutely certain, you should begin with a little research, Severus," the Headmaster suggested, clicking his fingers in the air and softly calling, "Fawkes?"

The great, flaming red and gold bird burst from the air and immediately settled on her owner's shoulder, folding her wings against her body. Fawkes then leant close to Dumbledore's ear and chirped soothingly in greeting.

"Fawkes, would you be so kind to retrieve my Genealogy volume from the bookshelf in my office?" Dumbledore requested, with a kind scratch to the fantastic bird's breast.

The bird agreed with a sharp trill and popped out of the room, only to return moments later bearing a heavy book in her talons that she swiftly let thump down onto Professor Snape's desk.

"Thank you, Fawkes," the old Professor said, and correctly sensing she was no longer needed Fawkes promptly vanished once more.

Both Professor Snape and Harry leaned in to read the title of the book: Nature's Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy. Snape reached out to touch to book lightly with his fingers, looking up to nod in agreement.

"If you do not find a connection amongst your ancestors then you might wish to explore a more exact method for determining paternity, Severus," Dumbledore said, eyeing the Potions Master shrewdly.

Harry saw Snape swallow tensely and could not help imitating the act, the nervous butterflies fluttering within his stomach making him feel a little giddy again. An uneasy Snape did not inspire confidence after all.

"Yes, Headmaster," Snape agreed again, taking in what appeared to be a bolstering breath.

HP.SS.HP.SS.HP.

Severus was substantially unnerved by this point, and the Headmaster's proposition made him shiver internally. He hoped it would not need to come to that, as the process needed to make the particular potion he assumed the older wizard was suggesting was, even by his standards, barbaric. Let's just say it brought a whole new meaning to the term ‘Flesh and Blood'.

At that moment the bell for first lessons of the day pealed through the barren dungeon corridors.

"Right, well I shall leave you two to it. I will send your apologies on to Professor Flitwick, Harry, and I'll step in for your first lesson, Severus... to allow you time to sort this out," the old man offered genially.

Severus glanced quickly at Potter and noticed that the teenager seemed just as uncomfortable about being left with him as he was to be left with the boy. But this matter needed to be dealt with and this was the most appropriate option.

He nodded again to the Headmaster's proposition. He banished the wards and unlocked the door so the older wizard could leave, then re-evoked them once the door had closed behind him.

Potter had stood from his chair when the Headmaster had departed, and this now left them standing and staring awkwardly at one another; clearly neither one of them knowing just how they should proceed.

The boy was the first to look away, glancing at the book the Headmaster had supplied (which appeared both insidious and liberating at the same time) and Severus took advantage of the direction the boy's attention had taken.

"Well, I shall begin," he proposed, ushering the boy back into his seat. Severus was feeling quite lost regarding how he should act under these circumstances without the senior authority of the Headmaster guiding him, so the dark man determined diving into research in avoidance seemed a rather favourable alternative. He stepped around his desk and took his seat. He realised it would be quite impossible for them both to examine the book with each of them on either side of the desk, but considering the awkwardness of their relationship at the moment Severus felt content with the distance the circumstances provided.

He slid the Genealogy volume in front of him and flipped open the cover to the opening chapter which, at first glance, looked as though it instructed the reader how to use the publication most effectively.

"Well, what shall I do?" the teenager whined.

Or ‘whining' was what it sounded like to Severus. He glanced up and eyed the boy a moment, supposing eventually that he'd better give the dolt an occupation.

"You can take notes as I call them out," he recommended; retrieving a quill, ink and parchment from a desk drawer and sliding it across to the child.

Potter looked a little put out at the suggestion, but had the good sense not to argue.

Pleasantly surprised for once Severus put his head down and got on with his reading of the chapter, wondering with deep seated disquiet whether anything would be revealed by this book, or if the relationship was much closer than this particular text was capable of illuminating.