“So what happened after you ran into him in the shop?” Harry asked, breaking Severus out of his memories once again.

“I confirmed that you were indeed his while also stating that I had no desire to make the considerable fuss that many would attempt to,” Severus replied. “I knew that, no matter what I did, his name would not be on your birth certificate, and I had already come to terms with that. Our relationship had been good, while it lasted, but it was not a situation I would have wanted to bring a child into. He had abandoned us, and even knowing of your existence did nothing to convince him to make a statement. He did, however, offer money.”

“Money?” Harry asked, confused. The man wouldn’t admit that he was his son publicly, but he would give Snape money?

“He wanted to ‘ensure that you had the proper resources to care for a child’,” Severus replied, quoting the line that Lucius had attempted to feed to him. “It was a way to help alleviate his guilt. I told him to keep his galleons as we did not need them.” His muggle job had paid well enough to cope with his expenses while he was unable to brew. “I had planned to quit and return to my studies and re-open my owl order potions business once you were a few months old.”

Harry could see the sense in that. Babies cost a lot, and a potions master would make more than an apprentice or whatever Snape was at the time.  Obviously, that plan wasn’t needed, thanks to what Dumbledore had done, but Harry had another question. “Who was he? Your partner?” Harry wasn’t going to call the other man his father, even if he managed to be comfortable enough with Snape to call the man Dad, or something like it. Snape would have done his best to raise him, the other man wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with him because of his blood status.

Severus debated on whether or not he should answer that. Harry already knew that he was a spy, and knowing that his partner had been Lucius Malfoy…it had been Lucius who had convinced Severus to join the Death Eaters in the first place and once in, he hadn’t been able to leave. Still, he could tell that the boy wanted to know, and he wasn’t going to keep it from him. Too many people had lied to Harry so far, and he was not going to do so now that they were, however tentatively, building a relationship. “Lucius Malfoy.”

Whatever Harry had been expecting, that certainly wasn’t it. He was glad that he’d already finished his tea, otherwise he likely would have embarrassed himself in front of Snape by spitting it out. “Malfoy?! I’m related to Draco?!”

Despite his own reservations, Severus couldn’t help a small amount of amusement at the boy’s reaction. The look of repulsed horror on his face was nearly comical. “Lucius Malfoy, yes, and if you had been claimed, your half-brother would have indeed been Draco.”

Harry made a face at the thought. Growing up to be a spoiled, entitled brat like Dudley and Draco, ordering around house elves and making fun of muggleborns. “Not a chance.”

Severus actually chuckled at that, the sound slightly rusty as it had been some time since he’d last had a reason to use it. “It would not have happened, Harry. Lucius would not and did not claim you, so I would have raised you on my own. “

Harry had a comment ready for that, but paused when he realized something. “You called me Harry.” Snape had never called him that before, it was always ‘Potter’.

Severus blinked, and then his expression turned from amusement to wariness. “You are my son. Perhaps you were not raised as Henry, and I certainly intend to hold your miserable relatives accountable for everything they did to you, but that does not change the fact that you are my son, and calling you Potter would be pointless.” They would need to have a discussion about names at a later time, for now their main concern was seeing if their relationship could be repaired enough to tolerate living together.

Harry accepted that, fiddling with his mug just so that he had something to do with his hands while he tried to come to terms with what he’d heard. He would have more time later, hopefully, to talk to Snape about it, right now he wanted to go back to a relatively simpler question.

“So, when Mr. Malfoy tried to give you money…was it like a bribe? ‘I’ll help you support our son as long as you don’t tell anyone that he’s mine?” That sounded like something a Malfoy would do, in Harry’s experience. They seemed the type to throw money at a problem to make it go away.

Severus sighed softly, setting down his empty mug. “I believe that Lucius and Narcissa were honest in their intentions with the offer of money, they were not as arrogant and cold as they are not. They were arrogant, I will not deny that, but they have gotten worse as the years have passed.” They all had changed, one way or the other, as the years had passed. “I also am not foolish enough that I don’t know that Lucius hoped that by giving me the money, it would put paid to any ideas I had about having him claim you publicly.”

“Which you didn’t want,” Harry pointed out, Severus nodding.

“Precisely. Lucius has always been as proud as a bloody peacock, he actually believed that I took the potion deliberately to become pregnant with his child, until I corrected him. He hoped that giving me money would ensure that I had no reason to want to give you the Malfoy name. And cemented the fact that I did not wish for him to be more than an acquaintance.”

Harry couldn’t blame the professor for that. If someone had walked out on him, abandoned him for someone ‘respectable’, and then tried to give him money to ‘help’ him while also trying to buy his silence…Harry would have told the man to shove his money where the sun didn’t shine, and he wasn’t surprised that Snape had done the same.

“What happened next?” Harry asked, curious to have the rest of the story. He wanted to know what else had happened to his father before he was born, and he really wanted to know how Dumbledore had managed to convince Snape that he was dead and convince Lily and James Potter that he was their son.

“I continued my work in the muggle world, coping with the pregnancy fairly well although I did miss my brewing,” Severus admitted. Harry could understand that, it was like him and flying. “It was one night in June, slightly over one month before my due date, that I received an urgent letter from Lucius. Narcissa had gone into labor early, and the doctors were unsure if their son would survive.”