When Severus Snape returned to his quarters after making sure that all of his Slytherins were inside their common room, he poured himself a glass of fire whiskey before retreating to the large armchair in front of the fireplace. The first few weeks of the school-year had been rather challenging, to put it mildly. The Gryffindor Golden Boy was by no means the only one who was affected by the presence of the Dementors.

He had already had to accompany over a dozen of his snakes to the infirmary, and the last two weekends he had spent in his lab, brewing Pepper-Up, Calming draught and various other potions that would counteract the disastrous effects the guards of Azkaban had on the students. While chocolate helped better than anything else in the immediate aftermath of a confrontation with a Dementor, some students needed additional help to get over the things they had had to relive during those encounters.

For obvious reasons, the Slytherins - particularly the older years - were especially vulnerable to those horrible creatures. During the last years of the war, they had been small children, and with some of their parents being either Death Eaters or otherwise linked to the Dark Lord, they had witnessed things no child - and no adult either, for that matter - should ever be forced to see.

As far as he knew, non of the other heads of houses had to make so many tours to the hospital wing as he had. And he was fairly sure that it would only be a matter of time until one student would be affected in a way that surpassed Madame Pomfrey capabilities. Perhaps then, when a student was admitted to St Mungo's, the ministry would re-evaluate its decision to place Dementors at the edge of the school grounds. If Black wasn't caught soon, that was.

Despite the fact that Sirius Black had avoided capture for over two month now, Snape hadn't given up hope that the man would be caught some time in the near future.

He wouldn't allow himself to dwell on the possibility that the Dementors might stay at Hogwarts for several more month, or even the whole school-year. And while he was certainly worried about the safety of the students, his main reason for wishing that the next morning, the headline of the 'Prophet' would read "Black captured" was a more egotistical one: He couldn't bear the thought of having to see Lily's body again and again and again.

Dementors forced you to relive the worst moments of your life. And while Severus Snape certainly had enough bad memories to drive ten people into insanity, the only one he saw when a Dementor came too close was the one of how he had found the lifeless body of the only human being he had ever loved.

There simply were no word to describe the anguish he had felt when he had discovered that he was too late, that Lily Potter nee Evans was no more.

During the last twelve years, the Potion Master had tried his best to suppress the grief, the agony. It might not have been healthy, but it was the only way to cope with what had happened - with what his foolishness had inadvertently made possible - without committing suicide.

Now, however, with the dark creatures surrounding the school, containing the memories became more and more difficult. Sometimes impossible.

The horror he had felt when the other Death Eaters had informed him that someone had betrayed the Potters, and that their Master had already gone to Godric's Hollow to destroy the only person alive that could, one day, pose a danger to him.

The sight of the ruin of a house when he had apparated to the small village. How he had refused to think about the implications of him being able to see the Potter's hideout. How he had approached the premises, cast a Hominum Revelio, the fear that had overcome him when the spell had revealed that only one living being was inside the house.

At first, Snape had been sure that it was the Dark Lord whom is wand had shown him. But the seconds had trickled by and no Dark Mark had been burnt into the sky above the house, and neither had the Dark Lord reappeared from the building. Why should he linger?

And so, hope had flared up inside the spy.

What if... what if, by some sort of miracle, the Dark Lord had been defeated? Severus Snape didn't believe in prophecies, but what if?

Still, though, there had been three people living in the house, not just Lily Potter. What if one of the two he didn't care about had survived? Then everything he had done - betraying the Dark Lord, placing his fate in the hands of Albus Dumbledore, making himself vulnerable - had been in vain.

There was no other way to find out what had happened in the Potter's house than to look for himself. If it turned out that it indeed was the Dark Lord who had survived the fight, Snape would be killed instantly, sure. But it wouldn't matter. If Lily Potter was dead he didn't have a reason to continue to live anyway.

And so, the Ex-Death Eater had entered the Potter's last residence.

When he found James Potter lying on the floor in the hallway, unseeing eyes still open, he couldn't help but to feel some kind of vindictive pleasure. Even much later, Snape wouldn't feel guilty about this. He had never claimed that he was a good man. No, he had returned to the light side solely for egotistical reasons. And the man whose body he had almost stumbled over that night had made his years at Hogwarts a living hell.

His heart beating faster now that the chances that it had indeed been Lily who had survived had increased, the Potion Master made his way up the stairs.

Only one door was open.

From where he was standing, he could spot a changing table. It had to be the nursery, then. That meant the Dark Lord had reached his destination.

There was no chance that the baby could have survived this, was there? But that meant...

Not wanting to allow his hopes getting up only to have them crushed later on, Snape covered the last few meters in record time, entering the nursery, casting a quick glance at the destruction, before his eyes fell on a sea of awfully familiar red hair.

When he fell to the ground next to the body of the love of his life, he didn't even register the hoarse, gurgling sound that came out of his own mouth, nor the tears that were streaming down his face.

It could have been an eternity, it could have been seconds that Severus Snape had cradled Lily Potter's corpse, for the first - and last - time in his life crying freely, openly showing all the pain, the despair, he felt.

The shock, the hollowness, the bitterness - those feelings had only surfaced later. During the first few moments after discovering that Lily was dead, Snape had simply felt the the most intense pain a human being could suffer, only that in his case, the pain was increased by the certain knowledge that it had been his fault that the witch had been murdered.

When the numbness had started to set in and Snape's senses had began working again, he had become aware of the sobs and cries that echoed through the otherwise silent room. Only after several more minutes, reason caught up with his senses. It wasn't important any more, not now, not now that he knew that Lily was dead, but why hadn't his former Master killed him by now? He certainly had had an abundance of opportunities while Snape had been unconscious with grief.

His earlier spell had clearly shown that one person was alive inside this house. There was no way- surely it couldn't be...?

But his unasked question had already been answered, as it had been by this point that Severus Snape had realized that despite the fact that the sobs coming out of his own mouth had stopped, the crying continued.

Slowly, his gaze turned away from the empty green eyes of Lily Potter. When he turned his head around, Snape actually flinched when an identical replica of those very eyes stared back at him from behind light brown bars. Only that this pair of eyes was very much alive.

The black-haired child in the cot was crying loudly, making Snape wonder how it was possible that he hadn't noticed it until then. There certainly had been no sound from a distraught child when he had climbed up the stairs or entered the room. He barely registered the small cut on the boy's forehead, or the drops of blood that were running down his face, now mixed with tears.

Harry Potter was looking alternatively between his deceased mother and the foreign person in front of his bed. Snape couldn't tear his eyes away from the baby's face. Or more precisely, from his eyes. He had only ever seen Lily and James Potter's child at Order meeting and of course had never been close enough to tell that the boy didn't just have the same eye-colour as his mother. No, his eyes were an exact copy of those of his mother. Only that now his eyes were full of confusion and fear and hurt, an expression he couldn't remember ever having seen on Lily's face.

For a brief moment, raged had flared up in Snape. These eyes' should be Lily's! He would rather see hurt or even hate in her eyes than the complete emptiness that was now all that was left in the green orbs of the woman in his lap.

The rage was gone as quickly as it had come, though, and once again all that was left was hollowness.

A short while later, after carefully positioning Lily's body on the ground, Severus Snape stood up. Soon, this place would be swarmed with either aurors or Death Eaters, and he didn't want to be found by either of them. Not that he cared if he was killed. He didn't plan to be alive when the sun rose again anyway. No, he simply had no strength left be confronted with any other human being.

As if on command, Harry Potter's soft cries stopped when the tall, dark man - not dissimilar to the one that had entered his room earlier, making his mother fall to the floor - rose from the ground. Expectantly, he looked up to the dark figure, reaching out with his arms. "Up!"

Snape stared at the boy with a blank expression. The child was now an orphan. What would happen to him?

"Mama?" When the dark man didn't show any reaction to Harry's request to be lifted up and held and comforted, he pointed his little fingers at the body of his mother, eyeing the person in front of his bed curiously.

That simple word proved to be to much for Snape. The fact that Lily Potter did no longer exist hit home with an unbearable certainty. Stumbling, he turned around, heading towards the door. He couldn't breath any more, couldn't think - he felt as if his very being would simply break apart if he stayed in this house only for one more second.

"Mama!"

Snape was already gone. He didn't hear the child's desperate attempts to make his mother stand up again, to make her comfort him and make the hurt on his forehead go away.

The Potion Master was pulled out if his memories when the clock chimed midnight. He knew he should go to bed - it wasn't healthy to take Pepper-Up regularly - but he knew for sure that if he would go to sleep now, he would have horrible nightmares again. Nightmares of what he had seen and felt the night his Lily had been murdered. But also nightmares about her son. Because he, Severus Snape, had been the one who had left a fifteen months old crying baby in his cot in a destroyed house.

At that time, the Potion Master hadn't even thought about whether it was, well, ethical, to leave such a young child alone in a room with the corpse of his mother. In fact, he hadn't thought about it until very, very recently. Until that day he had seen what forms Potter's Boggart assumed, to be precise.

He had expected the boy to see the Dark Lord, maybe even the Dark Lord in his different forms. After all, that Halloween had by no means be the only occasion when Harry Potter had been confronted with the evil wizard.

When he had entered the teachers room on that day, Snape had even been prepared that Potter's Boggart might at one point turn into the body of Lily Potter - though he didn't know how he would have coped with this. He would probably have ended up in a state much worse then the werewolf's.

But Bellatrix Lestrange? Bellatrix Lestrange who was about to cast a Crucio at him?

Snape grudgingly admitted that the annoying boy might have spent more time with his studies than he had previously thought, but even if he had seen a picture of the crazy witch in one of the many books that had been written about the last war, Potter certainly couldn't have known the sound of her voice. Nor should he have known about the torture curse, which was only covered in Defence against the Dark Arts at NEWT-level, if at all.

And why, if he had only ever seen pictures, should the boy be afraid of her, of all Death Eaters? The female Lestrange might have been the craziest one of that lot, but she had by no means been the most dangerous one - her insanity had seen to that.

And then there had been the large, beefy man Snape was almost certain had been a muggle. Who was he? Why was Potter equally afraid of him as he was of the Dark Lord and one of his Death Eaters?

The most worrisome question, however, was how the Gryffindor's Boggart had been able to physically hurt the boy. That shouldn't be possible, unless... unless a person's fears weren't only fears, but had actually come to pass. But surely a pampered prince like Potter couldn't have experienced things that were as bad as the average person's worst fear?

No, of course it wasn't possible! The Boggart had turned into Bellatrix Lestrange, and Snape knew with absolute certainty that the boy could have never, ever met her! The witch had been incarcerated in Azkaban only weeks after the Potters had been attacked, there simply was no way for something like this to have happened!

Yet the Head of Slytherin couldn't deny what he had witnessed, both in the teachers room and later in the infirmary.

As hard as he tried, Snape could no longer suppress the awful suspicion that had started to form in his mind quite a while ago.

That Night, he had left a defenceless child alone in a house that had recently been the scene of an attack of the Dark Lord. He knew for sure that his former Master had told some of his Death Eaters what he planned to do that night. So what if some of the more loyal Death Eaters had decided to follow their Master, to witness his greatest victory, the victory over the only human being that could have defeated him?

It was even possible that the Dark Lord had brought some of his followers voluntarily, in order to have witnesses for how he killed his 'equal', as the prophecy had said.

When their Master had failed to reappear after bringing half of the Potter's house down, how likely was it for those possible observers to simply stay outside and leave?

Of course, this left the question why they hadn't attacked Severus himself when he had entered - and later left - the destroyed building. However, as everyone had still thought him to be a loyal follower, it wasn't out of question that Bellatrix - and whoever else might have been there - hadn't thought it suspicious that he, too, had arrived at the scene. The Dark Lord was well known for only telling each one of his inner circle certain parts of his plans, after all.

If Death Eaters had entered the house after Snape had left... if they had found Voldemort missing, but the child that had been prophesied to conquer him still alive... what would they have done?

Snape doubted that the Dark Lord was really dead. He knew that the man - if you could still call him that - had taken measures to prevent his own demise. Probably, other Death Eaters had known this as well - maybe in even more detail than he had. And of course, there was also the simple fact that there had been no body.

Was it possible that some of his 'colleagues' had used the child to somehow determine what had happened to their Master? There were ways to extract information even from the mind of a baby. Though how Potter could have survived this - survived this (largely) sane - that was beyond Snape.

He poured himself a final glass of whisky, emptied it quickly and decided that this night was the perfect night to make use of one of the more delicate potions he had in store. To hell with all that caution! He needed sleep, restful sleep, and he certainly wouldn't get it if Potter kept haunting him the whole night.

Honestly, wasn't it bad enough that the boy kept annoying him at daylight? Did he really need to sabotage his nights, too?

Still, the feeling of guilt - the thought that he could have prevented whatever else had happened to the child that Halloween - didn't leave Snape until right before he finally fell asleep. Maybe it would be a good idea to keep an even closer look on the boy than he already did - if only to fulfil the promise he had given Lily.