The next day is a Monday. I am surprised when I open my eyes and realize that my dreams have been pleasant. I get out of bed, my leg throbbing as it always does, and ready myself for the day. I send Harry a note to see if he wants to meet me for lunch in my quarters, but he declines, saying he is busy. For a moment, I am afraid. What if he does not want to come because he believes me a coward? And then I tell myself that is silly, for he had said only the other day that he believed me to be a hero. I only wish I could see myself in the way he did. Yet, thanks to his insistence, I do feel a little differently. The guilt seems to have lessened now that he knows what I did, and is not angry over it. Although I am still unsure as to whether or not I deserve to be called a hero. I accept this to be a question I will always ask myself, one that I will never truly have an answer to. At least now I do not feel so guilty. That's a start.

I teach my classes without thinking, and when I make to retreat to my quarters, I pass through my office and find a letter sitting in my in-tray on my desk. It must have come too late for breakfast, and one of the house elves delivered it.

I tear it open eagerly, for I recognize the handwriting as my mother's. I have not heard from her in a little while, and I am looking foward to know how she is.

Dear Severus,

I hope you are well. I apologize for the late delivery, but I did not send this as quickly as I would have liked. I have good news! But I will wait to tell you it when I see you, which leads me to ask, would you like to drop by for tea Monday evening? Just the two of us? I will be in all evening so just come by if you can.

Love Mum

I smile. Yes. I would, so I send Harry a little note with Hedwig, who I find in the owlery on my way from the castle. A second note goes to Albus so he knows I am away from the school. Then, without a backward glance, with the recently found photo album under my arm, I apparate to the mucky banks of the river by Spinner's End. A few minutes later I knock once on the door to the house and open it, because Mum never minds.

"Just a minute, hon!" she calls down the stairs, and I take my black overcoat and toss it on the peg by the door, glad it is cool outside so I could just cover up my robes and apparate, rather than come by floo. The walk is sometimes nice, even if Cokeworth isn't exactly the most ideal of towns.

I put the kettle on and sink down at the kitchen table, just in time for Mum to arrive in the kitchen, wiping her brow on the sleeve of an old jumper of Dad's, her hair back in a loose bun.

"What a job!" she says with a light laugh as she puts a few chipped mugs on the table. "I've been busy packing all day!"

"Packing?" I say, intrigued.

"I sold the place at last," she says to me with a mixture of excitement and sadness. "Which is perfect, because I found a nice little cottage down in Godric's Hollow, just the right size for me, and a spare room in case you two stay the night on occasion. Needs just a little fixing up, but nothing I can't handle."

"That's great," I say, although I look around the kitchen, a strange feeling in my stomach.

"I know," she says quietly. "I will miss some things about this place too."

Mum sets the tea pot on the table and pours me a cup, setting out a little plate of biscuits. I smile slightly when I notice they are oatmeal chocolate chip, my favourite. I suspect she baked them specially in the hopes I would come by. I make sure to tell her they are great.

"Harry knows now," I say quietly a few minutes later, figuring I might as well get it over with. Mum's hands, which are wrapped around her mug, tighten slightly.

"Oh, Severus," she says, and you can tell in her eyes that she knows just how hard it has been for me.

"I had to tell him. He found the box. I had to give him a bit of a talking to for looking through it, but he didn't have a clue what it all meant, so I had to explain everything first. He thought the uniform and medal were Dad's, until he read the tags."

"How did he take it?"

"Better than I thought he would," I say thoughtfully, but that's all I can manage for the moment, so I change the subject. "And ... I found something, when I went back into the box after the first night I spent talking about it." I take the photo album, and I set it on the table. Mum slides her chair so that it is next to mine. "It was sitting at the bottom, hidden under Potter's invisibility cloak. Lily must have hidden it in case they were found, so that nobody could tie them to me. I never knew it was even there, all these years."

Mum puts her hand to her mouth, and lets out a laugh that is half smothered by tears when she opens it. She flips page after page, seeing the pictures.

"Lily was going to make copies for us of the pictures we took of Harry's birth," explains Mum after a moment, wiping her eyes, "but she never really got the chance, especially once she went into hiding. I thought they were lost ... so I never mentioned them. Oh, my, I forget how much Harry looked like you as a baby, besides the eyes. Well, that, and you had a birth mark right on your bu-"

"Mum," I moan out of habit before I remember that nobody is here to hear her. Goodness knows she laughed over enough silly details of me as a child with Lily before we were dating. Sometimes I forget that those days are gone. All those years seem to blend to one when I sit in the kitchen at Spinner's End, changeless and familiar.

Mum just laughs and kisses me on my red cheek.

"Come upstairs, I have something for you," she says, now on her feet.

Intrigued, I follow. The living room looks strange, with boxes stacked on the sofa and bed frames unassembled, stacked in one corner. The upstairs rooms are empty, and Mum takes me into what was their bedroom, but now it is almost all but bare, with the exception of an end table with a drawer pulled out of it. The drawer sits on top of it. Mum feels around the base of the drawer, and something clicks. Curious, I bend over to get a better look at it. She pulls out a thin wooden board.

A false bottom.

"Kind of like that one in that trunk upstairs for your things, huh?" she says with a twinkle in her eyes. "You and Toby are so alike sometimes. That wily father of yours kept this hidden even from me - I suppose he never got the chance to mention it. It seems that in this family I'm the only one without invisibility cloaks or hidden compartments!"

Under the drawer is a thin, leather bound notebook.

"I found this just the other day," she says rather sadly, and she hands it to me. I take it with delicate fingers. I look at it, confused.

"Dad kept a journal during the war?"

"Not during his, if that's what you mean," Mum says, her eyes damp around the edges. "We couldn't send as many letters as we wanted. Your dad seemed particularly bothered by this, when I look back on it. I remember him saying how important letters were to him when he was away, hearing from the people he loved. That's where the idea for the notebook must have come from, I think. He never told me of it. Maybe he didn't want to upset me, or remind me where you were. Either way, he did it because he missed you, and I think one day he planned to give it to you, when the war wasn't so close still, but ... well, he didn't stay as long as he wanted to."

I look at her curiously, not entirely sure where she is going with this. Mum just smiles, and then answers me.

"They're letters, Severus, all to you. It looks like he wrote one for every day that you were away, and one for the day you returned."

She puts it in my hands and clasps them tightly before leaving me be for a few moments. I stare down at the leather binding, my fingers travelling over its surface as I turn it over in my hands. I blink hard, staring at the creases in the leather spine, the signs of use. I want to open it right now, but I get the sense I'm going to need a good block of time to myself to read them all, so I slip it into my pocket instead, although it takes a great deal of restraint.

"I'm glad you found that," I say to Mum as I sit down in the kitchen again.

"It might not be easy to read," she says, "now that ... that he's gone."

"Yeah," I say quietly. "Maybe a weekend project."

Mum takes a sip of tea, looking thoughtful.

"I miss him," she says softly. "You know, it's silly, but I thought I heard him the other day, calling from the back garden and asking me to bring him his garden gloves. It gets lonely without him. Maybe that's why I trick myself into thinking he's still here."

She shakes her head, and I feel a pang, knowing exactly how she feels.

"Do you think ... do you think you'll ever want to marry someone else?" I ask, curious.

"After Lily, do you?" she says in reply.

"Not really," I say quietly. "I think that I would always be comparing her to Lily."

"That's how I feel about your father and I. But ... then again, one doesn't know. Life is full of surprises."

I nod slightly. We are silent for a little while. Outside, the rain has started. There is the gentle patter of it falling on the glass. It slides down, drop by drop, the cool skies visible through the splotches on the pane.

"You know when you asked me what Harry thought, of my story, that is?" I begin, trying to say what has been on my mind.

"Mhm? What about it?"

"Well ... Harry seemed to think the whole thing was some sort of ... adventure," I say uncomfortably. "He got some of what I was saying, but still, it was like it was just a story to him."

"To an eleven year old, they are stories. You weren't much different then."

I sigh. "I know. But he didn't seem to understand it, not really, anyhow."

"Severus," Mum says firmly," be glad he doesn't understand. Be glad he cannot comprehend what it was like."

I look up from my cup of tea to find that Mum is looking at me with one of her strong, blazing looks, the one she gets when she really wants me to listen.

"I know," I mutter. "I just feel like ... like maybe I didn't tell it well enough, that maybe, if I would have worded it differently he would have understood that war is not what he thinks it is. Perhaps then he could see that war is anything but an adventure. It was just so hard to put something like that in words when I was telling it to him ... I feel like I did not do the story justice."

"Justice," Mum mutters aloud as if to herself, looking thoughtful. After a moment, she continues. "You know, I don't think the way you told it matters as much as you think. Harry took from it what he will, and how you told it has little to do with that. If he wanted an adventure, then it would have been one to him, and if he felt it was a tragedy, he would have thought of it as that. Severus, nobody can fully bring justice to the events of a war. Novels, plays, and entire lives have been devoted to that purpose, but no matter how much you write, speak, or try to explain, there are some things that need to be experienced to be understood fully. If a simple story could bring war to life every bit as much as the real events do ... well, very few would be able to listen. So be glad he doesn't understand fully right now, and hope that he will never have to."

I am silent, not knowing what else to say, because her words seem astonishingly wise to me. Then again, I would not be surprised if she had experienced a similar conversation with my father. Some things about being a survivor never change, and the fear that you can never make others see exactly what you were through is one of them.

We visit a little while longer before I must be off. I throw on my black overcoat and give her a hug goodbye. I wish I had the right words to say how much her advice has helped me, but I have to hope that she understands with the ones I can say. Mothers just seem to know those things though, and she sits on the steps with the neighbourhood tomcat, which has joined her to watch me walk down the street and out of sight.

I feel the notebook in my pocket, its soft leather against the fingers on my left hand brush against it in my pocket. I smile slightly, and wherever Dad is, I hope he sees.

This smile stays with me as I enter the grounds to Hogwarts, the turrets greeting me with a familiarity I find comforting. The evening stretches before me, my only thoughts on a nice, hot shower and curling up in my armchair with the notebook. I suspect it will be a quiet evening. After all, the students are usually too tired on Monday nights for too much mischief.

***

Harry stares out the window with a pair of omnioculars, twiddling the dials. A nervous rustling is going on behind him.

"He's coming!"

Silence falls.