Poppy, Severus, Hermione and the girls were already in the Great Hall when Harry and Minerva returned from the gravesite.  They were seated at the faculty table facing the doors from the entry hall, the girls’ heads just visible above the plane of the high table.  Harry and Minerva exchanged a quick glance—Severus looked quite at home at the table, despite having the general appearance of a very proper Muggle. 

“Dad!” exclaimed Lily.  The word echoed and reverberated around the nearly empty room.  “We’re having treacle tart—your favorite!”

A flapping of wings above their heads as a tawny owl flew in with a letter in its beak made everyone at the head table look up before Harry could answer his daughter.

“Owl post!” Lily called out.  “We get our mail by owl here…well, everywhere in the wizarding world,” she explained to Anna, who was watching the great creature swoop down toward them.  The owl landed in front of Severus, who eyed it warily as it dropped the letter on the table in front of him and cocked its head, awaiting its reward.  More wings and an entire flock of owls—from the look of things, nearly every one in the Hogwarts owlery—flew into the Great Hall and headed toward Severus.  He began to look more than mildly alarmed as the owls landed on the table and began to crowd toward him, each of them carrying missives in their beaks instead of tied to their legs.  Harry and Minerva hurried forward, exchanging worried looks.  The owls had dropped their letters and scrolls and Minerva shooed them away as quickly as she could while Harry stood in front of the table and stared at the pile of parchment, some of it yellowed and becoming brittle with age and exposure.

“Minerva, what happens to a letter an owl can’t deliver?” he said, eying the messy stack as Severus opened a scroll that had rolled under the edge of his dessert plate.

“I assumed the owl returned the letter to the sender,” she said.  There were at least forty pieces of parchment on the table now and she was beginning to understand what had happened.  Her initial fears that someone had seen Severus or had given away his location were eased.  Instead, it appeared as if the letters sent to him over the past twenty years were now being delivered, that Hogwarts had been his last known location so the owls, unable to locate him, had, by the look and smell of the parchment letters, been dropping off their undeliverable owl post in the owlery. 

“I thought so too,” said Harry, glancing over at Hermione.  “But now I’d have to guess that they’ve got a dead mail drop box up in the owlery somewhere.

“This one’s from you,” said Severus suddenly, glancing over at Harry as he continued to read the letter, his eyebrows knitting as he worked his way through it.  As he neared the end, he raised an eyebrow.

“It seems you had some anger issues to work out,” he said, placing the letter to the left of his plate and reaching for another one.  Hermione shook her head and smiled.

“Oooh!  Here’s a pretty one with a red wax seal!” exclaimed Anna, reaching for and picking up a tightly rolled scroll of rich vellum, closed with a dollop of wax with a very recognizable seal.

“Here, honey, let me have that one,” said Hermione, taking the scroll from the small girl—it was obviously from one of the Malfoys.  “Why don’t you look at this one instead?”  Hermione handed over what appeared to be a Potions journal.

Severus had finished a second letter and started on a third. 

“Are all of these from you?” he asked Harry, pulling his attention away from the letter and giving Harry an interested look.

“No, surely not all of them,” muttered Harry, reddening slightly.  He looked like he very much wanted to sweep the letters off the table into a trash can.  “I usually wrote only twice a year…”

“Yes, in January and May,” commented Severus dryly. 

“Your birthday is in January,” muttered Harry.  Severus looked up at him and gave an odd little half smile.

“Sounds like you could have used some grief counseling too,” remarked Severus as he finished the third letter. 

“Look Papa,” said Anna excitedly, pushing the open magazine she’d been examining over toward her father.  “You’re in this one.  Page 33.  What’s lycanthropy?”  She did a remarkable job with the pronunciation.

Snape put down the letter he was reading to stare at the article she pointed out.  He scanned it then looked quickly over at the adult wizards in the room.  Harry interpreted his unvoiced question correctly.

“Yes, it really does exist in our world,” he said quietly, thinking, as he always did, of Remus.  He smiled wryly, remembering how Snape had made the Wolfsbane potion for Remus while Remus was the DADA teacher here and how Harry had instantly suspected Snape of trying to poison him.

“You were one of the leading researchers in the field,” put in Poppy, a nostalgic smile softening her lined face.  “The wizarding world lost more than a brave Headmaster when you disappeared.  Potions research in several key areas was set back as much as five years.”

Severus shook his head slightly as he picked up yet another letter and began to scan it.

“You named your child after me?” he said a moment later, fixing Harry with an unreadable gaze.  “You named a child Severus?”

“Albus Severus,” replied Harry, meeting the man’s eyes.  He was not going to be embarrassed about this one.  He had a lot of practice—13 years of it, in fact—in defending his choice of middle name for his second child.  “And it’s not a bad name.  He’s named for the bravest two men I’ve ever known.  He considers it to be an honor.”

The two men locked eyes for a long moment.  Finally, seeing the sincerity in Harry’s eyes, Severus nodded curtly and folded the letter.  He didn’t pick up another.

Minerva conjured a basket and helped scoop all the letters into it.  Severus suddenly looked up, after filling the basket to the brim and shooting a calculating look at Harry.

“Did you retrieve my wand?” he asked, dark eyes searching the pile of items Minerva had placed on the Ravenclaw table as she had hurried to the front to deal with the owls.

“Of course,” she answered, collecting the wand and bringing it forward.  “And it’s in perfect condition—beautifully preserved these past 20 years.”  She placed it on the table and scooted it across toward Severus.  He reached out with his right hand and grasped the wand by its handle, picking it up in much the same way he must have when he last held it twenty years ago.  Yet when he lifted it, he did so carefully, almost tentatively.

“Try a Lumos,” suggested Poppy.  “It’s quite a commonplace spell—one of the first learned.”  Harry took out his wand and demonstrated the simple forward motion.  The tip of his wand lit up with a bright glow and he pointed it into a corner of the room to illuminate a painting depicting a herd of centaurs pursuing a squat, human woman.  It had always been one of his favorites.

Severus eyed Harry’s wand then looked back at his own speculatively.

“You didn’t say the word,” he commented, looking back at Harry, who was now pointing his wand at the helmet of a suit of armor in the opposite corner.  He light bounced off the shiny steel and danced across the opposite wall.

“Non-verbal magic,” commented Minerva before Harry could open his mouth.  “It’s not always necessary to speak the words of a spell out loud. You can think them—with intent, of course,” she added.

Severus shrugged.

“Lumos,” he said, firmly but not too loudly, jabbing his wand forward as if poking it into the chest of an errant student caught out after curfew.

“Whoa!” exclaimed Lily as a blinding beam of light poured out of the wand tip straight into an unsuspecting Harry’s face.  Harry dropped his wand and covered his eyes with his hands, crying out.  Poppy was up in an instant, her chair toppling over backward as she rushed around the table toward Harry who was now blindly groping around on the floor for his wand,  his arm still covering his eyes.  Lily shrieked and followed, going under the table instead of around it.

“Nox, Severus, Nox!” instructed Minerva.

“Harry!”  Hermione stood up but stayed on her side of the table, a hand on Anna’s trembling shoulder.

“Nox?” repeated Severus.  His wand, which was now pointed straight up, its beam of light as wide as a searchlight and ten times as intense, snuffed itself out and he dropped it in surprise.

Lily was hovering near her father who had curled up on the floor, still clutching his eyes, as Poppy tried to coax him to open them so she could examine him.  Severus had sagged in his seat and was staring accusingly at his wand which was resting quite innocently on the table.

“His didn’t do that,” he stated.

“Harry isn’t storing twenty years of repressed magic,” answered Minerva, glancing over at Harry with concern then back at her former colleague.  She looked flustered.  “I’m sorry, Severus,” she said apologetically, “I should have realized…normally it’s such an innocent spell…”

“Is he going to be alright?  Did I blind him?”  Severus had gotten to his feet and was leaning forward over the table to watch Poppy examine Harry. 

“Poppy?” asked Minerva.

“Retinal damage,” she answered.  She then directed her attention to Lily, who, at her pronouncement, had been unable to stop the flow of tears she had been holding back.  “We’ll fix him up in a trice, Lily,” she reassured her.  “He’ll have to keep his eyes covered for a day or two, but he’ll be right as rain.

Harry was struggling to sit up.  “Covered?  I can’t…”

“You can and you will,” answered Poppy forcefully.  “This is 100% treatable but you’re going to have to take it easy for a day or two and let the regenerative potion do its work.”  She conjured a stretcher and helped him scoot over onto it.

“But the boys…” he began, looking helplessly toward where Hermione had been sitting before the blinding Lumos.

“We’ll keep them,” said Hermione.  “If there are any problems, we’ll take them to the Burrow to degnome the garden for Mum.”

“You’d best come up to the infirmary too, Severus,” said Minerva.  “Now that you’ve started to unleash some of that power I doubt it will stay dormant.”

Severus’ hand, resting now on the table, was trembling and unbelievably, seemed to be inching closer to the offending wand.  Hermione, still standing behind Anna, reached out quickly and picked it up.

“Tempting, isn’t it?” she said quietly so only Severus could hear.

“You wouldn’t believe…” he muttered in reply. 

He was extremely shaky as he stood so Minerva walked beside him to provide a steadying arm as they followed Harry’s stretcher up to the infirmary. 

“Be still, Harry,” warned Poppy as they neared the hospital wing.  Harry was shifting on the stretcher, seemingly rummaging around in his pocket. 

“Hermione, can you help Severus?” asked Minerva, moving up toward Harry as Hermione took her place beside her former professor.

Harry’s fingers seemed to be glowing softly, the light brightening when he opened them to pass the vial he had removed from his robe pocket to Minerva.

“Oh, Harry…” breathed Hermione, clearly understanding the significance of what Minerva was holding. “You kept them!  I’ve been wondering ever since you apparated over and told us about Severus…but I didn’t dare ask.”

“What is that thing?” asked Anna.  “It’s glowing.”  She followed her father and the rest of the group inside the infirmary where Poppy helped Harry off the stretcher and onto one of the beds and Hermione helped Severus settle on another.  The bed had not been used all summer and the house elves had not yet stripped them to wash the linens to prepare for the coming influx of students.  A cloud of dust rose up around Severus as he sat down and he sneezed.  Smoke poured from his ears as he did so.  Anna jumped back in alarm but Severus simply sighed, seemingly resigned to one of those kinds of days where you feel like you’re dreaming no matter how many times you pinch yourself.

Poppy had hurried to the dispensary and returned with a potion bottle which she uncorked and handed to Harry.  It began billowing pink steam as soon as she opened it.

“Drink up,” she said.  Harry grimaced but obeyed, his face taking on the disgusted look of a small child made to take his medicine.  The temporary mask Poppy had conjured in the Great Hall to protect his eyes was removed and she used a localized Petrificus on his eyes to prevent him from opening them, then covered them again with a gauze bandage which she wrapped around his head several time, making his hair stick up more than usual. 

“Severus, it may not be safe for you to return home this evening.  I really need to call in a specialist—I don’t know of any other cases like yours.  I imagine there must be a way to siphon off some of that excess magical energy…”

Severus sneezed again.  Several butterflies flew out of his mouth and fluttered about his head.  Anna clasped her hand to her mouth as Severus dropped his head into his hands.

“Now, now, Severus,” said Poppy, sitting down next to him and patting his knee.  She disturbed the dust in doing so and it billowed up around them.  Hermione, Anna and Minerva all took a step backward as Severus held a finger up to his nose.  It seemed as if he had managed to stifle the sneeze but as soon as he replaced his hand in his lap the sneeze erupted. 

“Bat bogeys!” screamed Lily, recovering a bit from her funk as two great green bogeys flew out of Severus’ spacious nostrils and flapped around a bit before Hermione managed to get her wand out and cast a Finite.

“Wow!” breathed Anna, seemingly completely in awe.  “I’ve never seen you with bogeys before, Papa.”

Severus managed a smile.

“Well, I’ve seen you with them,” he said. 

“Papa!” Anna exclaimed, her face pinking a bit as she glanced over at Lily.  The conversation, and the giant flapping bogeys, had apparently helped to lift the girl out of her funk over her father’s injury.

“You should have seen it, Dad,” said Lily with a giggle.  “Giant bogeys flying out of Professor Snape’s nostrils!  They were really really green too.”

Harry smiled.  “Finally, a reason to be thankful I can’t see,” he quipped.

“Why don’t we have him try another spell?” asked Hermione.  “Perhaps a Summoning or a Levitation charm?”  She was still holding Severus’ wand and Poppy snatched it away from her quickly.

“You’re usually much more grounded in reality, Hermione,” she said.  “He could kill someone with an Accio!”

“Accio?” asked Severus, following the exchange, his head moving back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match.

“The incantation for the summoning charm,” explained Hermione.  She pointed her wand at a pillow across the room. “Accio pillow,” she said and the pillow flew across the room toward her.  She caught it deftly.

“While all of this hocus pocus is highly entertaining,” said Severus, “I have a job to get to tomorrow and Anna has a harp lesson in the morning.  I am sure I can contain my magic for another few days…”

“And if butterflies fly out of your mouth when you sneeze at work?” asked Minerva, her usually stern face relaxing into a smile.

“Hmmph,” said Severus.

“I have another incentive to get you to stay a bit longer,” said Minerva.

“Isn’t sticking around to see if I can see when Poppy unsticks my eyelids incentive enough?” asked Harry, a bit crossly.

“From what I read in those letters, me blinding you is no worse than you letting me nearly bleed to death,” replied Severus.

“Git,” muttered Harry but a pleased smile crossed his face as he settled back into the comfortable pillows Poppy had piled beneath his head.  Those letters, written so long ago, had helped him work out his guilt, his sense of loss and his confusion over the man who hated him, yet gave up everything for him.

“Back to my incentive,” said Minerva.  She held up the glowing vial.

“Severus, 20 years ago, just before you apparently died, you gave these memories to Harry to help him with his quest to kill Lord Voldemort.  He saved them and placed them in your coffin before it was interred.  We found them intact when we retrieved your wand.  It’s possible that they can be restored and provide you with at least some memory of your past life.”

“But a memory is not a tangible thread,” said Severus, eyes fixed on the vial with its moving, glowing strands.  “And while memories can certainly be lost, they cannot be restored from an outside source…”

“Magic, Papa,” said Anna, sitting down on the other side of Severus and placing her small arm around his waist.  She’d forgotten about the dust, of course, and Severus sneezed again as it flew upward into his nose.  This time, his hair grew several inches as if forced out from the roots by the force of the sneeze.

“It’s the record of the memory that’s tangible,” explained Hermione, “not the memory itself.”  She pulled one of the old-fashioned straight-back wooden chairs from beside the bed behind her and arranged it in front of the bed Severus, Poppy and Anna were sitting on. “ Hundreds of years ago, wizards discovered a way to extract the record of a memory so that it could be viewed and studied from an outside perspective.  Memory strands are placed in a special basin called a Pensieve and examined and even relived.”

“I’ll go get Albus’ Pensieve,” said Minerva, slipping out the infirmary door while Hermione continued to explain the phenomena.

Hermione scooted her chair a little bit closer to Severus.  Her eyes were shining with emotion.

“I was there that night—in the Shrieking Shack—with Harry.  You’d been bitten by Voldemort’s snake without having had the chance to tell Harry what he had to do to defeat him.  You couldn’t talk so you forced out the memories and we collected them.  He came back here to view them…well, the rest is history, I guess,” she said.

“A memory…once it is removed…can be restored?” asked Severus.

“Yes—it’s a simple wand motion,” answered Hermione.  She looked at Severus frankly.  “However, I have no idea what would happen to a handful of memories returned to the brain of an amnesiac.  Would you have enough context to make sense of them?”

“That’s why I suggested a specialist,” commented Poppy.  “As I told you earlier, I didn’t detect any magical reason at all for your memory loss during your exam.  Basically, that means no Obliviate or Confundus spells, no blocks.  But I didn’t find any brain trauma or other physical causes either.”

Harry, obviously listening from the other bed, spoke up.  “Isn’t it possible that Severus’ amnesia was caused by him giving away the memories?”  His voice had a slight worried edge to it, as if it were somehow his fault that the man had lived twenty years in the Muggle world with no knowledge or awareness of his past.

“Harry…”  Hermione’s voice had that tone he’d learned to recognize so well over the more than 25 years he had known her.  It was the tone that said “Don’t blame yourself…don’t put yourself down…you’re not alone in this.” It was a tone he’d hated when he just wanted to have a little pity party for himself and the tone he’d loved when he felt like it was Harry against the world.

“I know,” Harry said.  “Not my fault.  I didn’t ask for the memories.  But still…”

Minerva pushed through the swinging doors into the ward just then carrying a heavy stone bowl with runic engravings.  She placed it on a small table near the bed Severus was sitting in.

“I took the liberty of floo calling my niece’s husband,” she stated as she adjusted the position of the heavy bowl, centering it carefully on the table.  She looked up at Severus.  “Stuart is a researcher at the Hoffenmeister Institute of Mind Studies.  He was very interested in your case, Severus, and agreed to come by as soon as he can.”

Severus nodded distractedly as he looked at the basin.  “This is a Pensieve?”

“A particularly fine example of one,” answered Minerva.  She held the tip of her wand to her temple, pausing then pulling the wand away at an angle.  Severus and Anna stared in awe as a whispy and glowing strand emerged, clinging to the end of her wand.  She dropped it into the Pensieve.  It expanded into a misty smoky sort of liquid, filling up most of the space in the bowl.

“Lily, I know you already know all about the Sorting, but Amanda surely does not.  I’d rather like it to be a surprise for her, and since this memory is about her father’s sorting, it would be best if you two sit this one out.”

Lily’s face fell a bit, but she glanced over at Anna and Anna shrugged.  Not wanting to be the childish o-ne, she shrugged too. “Alright,” she said.  “Can we play gobstones, then?”

Poppy handed Lily a rather rumpled Quidditch magazine.  It was at least six months old and had been left in the hospital wing by one of the students after an extended stay for appendicitis.

“Why don’t you read to your dad first to entertain him?” she suggested.  “I’ll just be in my office.”  She pointed to a door at the back of the room.

“I’m pretty sure he’s already read this one,” said Lily, looking at the date then shooting an exasperated look at her dad who, of course, was currently sightless and couldn’t appreciate it.

“It’s fine, Lils,” said Harry, patting the bed beside him.  “I don’t mind hearing things twice.  Come on over here.”

Lily and Anna both flopped on the bed beside him as Hermione and Minerva showed Severus how to bend down over the Pensieve and touch his nose to the almost-liquid in the bowl.

“How long are they going to stay like that?” asked Anna a few minutes later when the three adults at the Pensive hadn’t so much as moved. “They don’t look too comfortable.”

“They’re fine,” said Harry, remembering the cricks in his back he’d sometimes had after a particularly long time bending over Dumbeldore’s Pensieve.  “They’re just watching Minerva’s memory inside the Pensieve. Sometimes that takes a while.”

It was a full fifteen minutes later when Minerva stood up.  Her back gave an audible creak.  Hermione was next and together they took Severus’ arms and raised his face out of the bowl.  He looked more confused than ever.

“Who is Lily Evans?” he said, whirling to face Minerva.  “And why did she cry when I was sorted into Slytherin?”

“Lily was my mother,” said Harry from his bed, his voice soft but steady.  “You were childhood friends.  I guess she had hoped you’d be in the same house at Hogwarts.”

Severus stared at Harry for a moment, then his gaze flicked over to the other Lily who was staring back at him curiously.

“You look like her,” said Severus, also softly, as he sat down and dropped his head into his hands.  “This is surreal.  I should not be able to observe a memory and witness my childhood self.”  He looked up, his eyes wide and slightly lost.  “I can’t explain it, but I have a memory of my childhood now.  It’s almost as if I remember that day…but not quite.”  He stood up and walked over to the Pensive again, looking into the strange substance that reminded one of clouds lit by starlight.  “There is nothing to connect the memory to, nothing before it, nothing after it.  Yet still…”

“Sorry to interrupt,” said a voice at the door, interrupting none-the-less.

“My nephew, Stuart Bell,” said Minerva.  Hermione introduced herself and Harry waved from his bed.  Stuart looked at him and tried to hide his surprise.  Lily caught his look,  however, and rolled her eyes.

Finally, he turned to Severus and shook his hand.

“You must be Severus,” he said.  “I went to school in the States so haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you before.  Are you comfortable being called Severus?”

Severus rolled his eyes.  “I doubt I’ll ever be totally comfortable with an appellation like that,” he said.  “In my other life, I’m known as Stephen Squires.”

Stuart’s mouth dropped open.

“Stephen Squires?  As in Stephen Squires the Research Scientist?  The one who’s made so many advances in Alzheimer’s research?”  His voice was becoming higher pitched and he virtually shook with excitement.

“That’s him,” said Anna, a bit smugly.

“I am so honored to meet you,” exclaimed Stuart, taking Severus’ hand again and pumping it.  “I’ve read everything you’ve ever written. You’re closer to a break-through with Alzheimer’s than anyone else in the world.  While we don’t have Alzheimer’s per se in the wizarding world, we do have a variety of brain maladies and are of course plagued by cognitive loss from brain injuries…”

Severus was staring at Stuart. 

“Do you publish under another name?  Stuart August, perhaps?”

Stuart laughed.  “Caught me.  Wouldn’t want anyone in the magical world to think I’m giving away secrets so I disguise my identity.  Ironic, isn’t it?  I’ve been reading your work for at least ten years and never once suspected you were a wizard.”

“Neither did he,” said Harry.  His tone of voice conveyed the rolling of eyes you couldn’t see behind his bandages.

“I think I need a drink,” said Severus.

“That will just make the errant magic more hard to control,” said Stuart.  “Have you tried using a wand yet?  You can usually channel excess energy with the wand…”

“That’s how I got in this situation,” commented Harry, trying to direct his statement at the invisible—to him at least—Stuart.  “It’s probably best to work on some other ways to siphon off that magical energy.”

“Yes, if you insist on Severus using a wand, you should probably go out on the Quidditch Pitch where not much can hurt you,” suggested Hermione.

“Except rampaging centaurs,” said Harry.

“Centaurs?”

“Magic, Papa.  Remember?” asked Anna.

“I remember,” he answered.  Severus looked around the room, taking in the sleeping portraits, stone walls, bubbling potion bottles and collection of wizards, each one dressed more oddly than the next. How could I forget?