“Potter… Harry,” Severus corrected, remembering his interlocutor’s earlier admonition—one surprisingly sound given the state of the young man’s room and thoughts, which, unfortunately, were now one and the same. “Do you recall from which of these appalling pools of rotting humanity you last viewed your first potions class?” Harry looked at the painting blankly, evidently not comprehending. “Another question, then: Do you recall the contents of the tea cup from whence you just emerged?”

The twenty-six-year-old shell of a man looked confused and then sad. He sounded uncertain when he finally replied. “I was in the tea cup? I usually avoid that one… bad memories I think. I can’t remember whose.”

“Harry,” Severus said in a voice that was strained not so much with derision as with exhaustion and defeat. “Go to sleep. Can you manage that much?” The boy nodded, moving towards a half-eaten box of Bertie Bott’s overflowing with jelly beans marinating in strands of human consciousness. “No, not in there.” Severus said sharply but without his usual sneer. “In your bed. I know it is hard, but I will help you.” Harry obeyed mindlessly, climbing into sheets that were rumpled and likely unwashed for nigh on a decade now. Portraits, thankfully, do not smell the world of the living.  

When the savior had situated himself under the covers, Severus began in an uncharacteristically soothing tone: “Close your eyes. Excellent. You are a ten-year-old boy in a cot in a dark cupboard. No one can get you in your cupboard because, as everyone knows, cupboards are exceptionally safe. Your cupboard is dark, but there is enough light shining through the vent to illuminate a small spider named James.” Severus admirably did not choke on the name as he narrated one of the few happy pre-Hogwarts memories he had stolen from Harry during the disaster that was the boy wonder’s occlumency training. “James loves you.” There was irony in that. Severus smirked but continued, “James loves you and will keep you safe as you sleep in your dark, safe cupboard and dream about giants and flying motorcycles.” Severus’s voice trailed off as Potter’s breathing grew slow and rhythmic.

Then, faster than apparition, Severus was back at Hogwarts—travel for the dead, after all, is instantaneous and impossible to ward against, one of the few advantages of being a portrait. As soon as he was back in his preferred frame, at a decibel level that would put Walburga Black to shame, Severus began shouting for his old colleague to attend to her lions for once in her damned useless existence as the most inept head of house Hogwarts had ever known.

“Really, Severus,” Minerva chided emerging moments later from her private quarters in her night clothes, looking prim as ever. “I am not above placing a silencing charm on your frame or, better yet, relocating you directly above the Hufflepuff table in the Great Hall.”

“Minerva,” Severus intoned, his baritone voice reverberating with a seriousness that the headmistress had never heard from a painting before. The living had a way of ignoring portraits that the freshly dead in painted form found insulting, but as the living’s memories of the dead grew stale, this sharp hurt faded much like the painted personalities themselves, who within a few years devolved into caricatures of their former selves. Then, sadly, within a few decades, when the last living acquaintance of the portrait’s subject met the inevitable fate of all mortals, the portrait became nothing more than a caricature of a caricature—fueled only by the living’s memories of former interactions with the painting. Hogwarts walls were literally overflowing with these long-dead silly painted people—caricatures of caricatures pantomiming old arguments and loves in exaggerated distortions of human experience that only encouraged Hogwarts school children in their belief that the people of history led trivial lives of less substance and meaning—even if occasionally more exciting—than the romantic escapades of living teenagers. Never, in the entire course of magical art, had any painting reversed this inevitable natural course, “until now,” Minerva thought.

“Severus,” the headmistress said, her eyes were hard. “Is that you?”

“Of course it is me you insufferable woman.” This response, this return to petty rivalries and old arguments, was more in line with her expectations. Minerva shook her head. She was only half dreaming moments ago, the Gryffindor reassured herself.

“What can you possibly require from me at this hour?”

“Minerva, when did you decide to wash your hands of him? At what point precisely did you absolve yourself of putting back together the pieces of the young man who, loathe as I am to admit it, not once, not twice, but almost half a dozen times saved this God-forsaken world from a fate too unconscionable to imagine?”

“Severus?” Minerva said questioningly, her eyes taking on that same hardness they had assumed moments ago. The witch continued to examine the portrait as it berated her.

“How a boy so doted on by umpteen capable adult witches and wizards and enamored by the entire wizarding population under thirty can be so utterly neglected by…”

“What happened to your paint?” the headmistress asked, interrupting Severus’s rant, her long index finger pointing to a splotch of iridescent silver infusing the lower quadrant of the painting and a good deal of Severus’s robes.

The potions master looked down. The dawning realization struck him like a blow to the chest. He was winded—a sensation no portrait had felt before. “Headmistress, please sit down.” Startled by Severus Snape’s unnatural politeness, Minerva did. Severus examined his robes, his face vacillating between awe and terror. “How much do you know about the pursuits of your star Gryffindor since vanquishing the Dark Lord eight years ago?”  

“The Weasley clan insists on ascribing him a profession he no doubt is incapable of maintaining. Harry Potter, has, as you well know, spent the last several years wasting his parents’ fortune and the donations of his countless admirers on what I can only assume is a never ending supply of whiskey and gin.”

Severus shook his head. “The boy is no drunk. I find myself wishing he were.”

Minerva’s eyes widened. “Not a drunk? You were present for that shameful display at dinner or are you entirely out of your painted mind?”

“Yes,” Severus smirked. “That is precisely the problem. I am out of my painted mind and currently occupying the consciousness of one Harry Potter.” Minerva inched up to the portrait of the dour former headmaster. Her nose was nearly touching the silvery splotch infusing his painted self with life.

“Good Lord. What has the child done to himself?” Minerva sighed, falling back into her chair. At the sound, Albus’s portrait blinked to life and cheerily offered the headmistress a lemon drop. “Thank you, Albus, no,” Minerva replied dismissively.

“Severus? Lemon drop.”

“Go back to sleep, Albus,” Severus urged, a long suffering sigh escaping his lips. Albus harrumphed but obeyed his former spy, befuddled by the interaction.

“Minerva,” Severus continued, “Potter’s quarters are a disheveled array of unintended concoctions that would put the first year potions lab to shame. He has, from what I can gather, emptied the vast majority of his memories into basins, food containers, dishes, and even, in places, his bedroom floor. This began sometime during the final battle. He knew he was going to his death. I think he wanted to leave something behind and also to insure that he had the courage he needed to fulfill the task at hand. Do you know that the Hat wanted to place him in Slytherin? The child is frustratingly dense at times, but evidently not entirely without cunning.”   

McGonagall was quiet for a time. She stared blankly at the other portraits adorning the office walls. “Is the damage irreparable? I don’t imagine the remedy is as simple as replacing the memories.”

“No, Headmistress,” Severus sneered. “The mind arts are nothing like a half transfigured pincushion that can be fully transformed with the wave of a wand. The human consciousness—even the consciousness of a Potter—is infinitely complex and intricate. Removing a single memory or a small collection of memories is innocuous because the remaining memories form a lattice supporting the integrity of the self. Even when a single memory is taken from the puzzle, the outline of that memory remains as a shadow—the vivid sensory information is gone, but knowledge of the events themselves remains. Obliviate blurs this shadow by damaging the memories immediately connected to the forgotten events. What Potter has done, however, shredded the very lattice. The Dark Lord split his soul into seven pieces, but even these seven pieces shared a coherent narrative—a unifying self. Potter… Truthfully, I know not into what madness Harry has descended, but I, it seems,” Severus said, looking at his robes glistening with the Boy Who Lived’s memories, “am uniquely situated to find out.”