Snarry Games :: tarteaucitron :: Look for me here

Title: Look for me here
Author: tarteaucitron
Team: Phoenix
Genre(s): wartime, postwar
Prompt(s): treasure hunt
Rating: Adult
Warning/Kinks: *total departure from epilogue canon, slight suggestion of previous partnerships, language.*
Word Count: 22,497
Summary: It is the fag-end of the Death Eater trials. Despite some initial reluctance, Auror Investigator Potter finds that his last assigned case gives him something to get his teeth into.
A/N: thank you to everyone who looked at or beta'd this fic, and to everyone who provided encouragement, especially fitofpique, buckle_berry, algernon_mouse, and all at Team Phoenix.

Look for me here

Part I

2003

"Rupert Reginald Yaxley, you have been found guilty of first-degree magical murder, numerous counts of the unsanctioned use of Unforgiveable curses between 1994 and 1998, two counts of abduction, two further counts of common assault and the possession of proscribed dark artefacts." Undersecretary Jordan paused for effect. A shuffling quiet ensued, and Harry glanced away from the accused towards the wooden benches at the far side of the courtroom. In the second row, a middle-aged woman in a large green hat stopped examining her fingers to yawn loudly.

"Considering the degree of remorse you have demonstrated," Jordan continued – Yaxley used the opportunity to demonstrate further with a humble dip of the chin – "and the many more extreme precedents this court has recently seen, I am inclined to be lenient. I hereby sentence you to six months' imprisonment, after which, in accordance with your professed wishes, you will spend a two-year probation bound over into the occupational custody of Miss Rita Skeeter –"

"– make full use of the rehabilitative opportunity that is being offered you."

Almost before the hammer fell, Harry was out of his seat, shouldering his way through a crowd of shuffling jurors, and down the corridor.

"Assistant to the Director" announced the door in large calligraphic letters. As Harry stopped in front of it, the inscription abruptly obliterated itself to be replaced with thick capitals: "PRIVATE".

"You know I spent the best part of ten weeks picking over reanimated elf heads?"

"Don't bloody say it." He sat with a thump in one of the waiting chairs against the wall and stared at his knees. "Policy. I suppose Yaxley's always had a burning desire to be a lying, filth-mongering reptile."

"A journalist. Yes. So he says." There was a pause. Then Hermione went on, in her firmest head girl voice: "Look, no one wants to see Azkaban re-open, and there's been a certain amount of preliminary research on outcomes for Death Eaters thrown straight out into the community. They're not good, Harry." Another longer pause. The sound of a quill tapping on paper. "He's got a little boy, you know."

Harry stuck a finger up under his glasses and knuckled at his eye. "I was aware." He sighed. Rehabilitation was all well and good, but some of these probationary partnerships really were beyond the pale. Last week he'd come close to resigning when Alecto Carrow had been assigned to Borgin's Emporium of Exotic Bric-a-Brac. It was a subject he could hardly bear to bring up again.

Hermione, meanwhile, was fingering at a corner of the file on her desk. "How was the crowd?"

"No crowd. There hasn't been a crowd since the Malfoys. Nobody cares about the ones they haven't heard of." Hermione's mouth flattened out sympathetically. "They'd care if they saw what I saw in that cellar."

Practicality meant that Harry hardly ever let himself think about the horrors he'd turned up in the course of three years of investigation, but that was one image that really seemed to stick. Often in bed he'd cast nox and bury his nose in the pillow only to find himself thinking about those tiny body parts in their jars of cloudy goo. One little thin-fingered paw had twitched in his palm and gripped onto his thumb; he'd shaken it off in queasy fear and watched it land on the floor with a snapping sound. Bit of a sicko on the side, Yaxley. Not that they weren't all sickos, but at least most of them confined it to their reading. Death Eaters proved surprisingly big readers. Even Bellatrix Lestrange had had an account with the British Wizarding Library, still mysteriously active five years after her very visible death, and delivering the most poisonous and bloodthirsty volumes to the Azkaban drop-off point.

But that was a matter for the Subdepartment of Cultural Suspicion, and Harry was glad to leave them to it – however dawdling their methods.

Hermione cleared her throat, fingers tapping. "Shacklebolt asked me to call you in after lunch, but since you're here." She turned the file over and edged it over the desk towards Harry. Black sticker. A posthumous case.

The whole thing would be a hundred times simpler if pensieve memories were admissible in court, but the law had been revised in 1946 when Herman von Osterfig, later an inmate of the secure ward, had produced an apparently unimpeachable memory of being crowned Muggle queen of Belgium.

"If you fancy trying to prove that Severus Snape was of sound mind..." Shacklebolt had said, when Harry turned up at his office, desperate, at four o'clock that afternoon.

Harry flung an arm out and huffed into the pillow. No, he emphatically did not fancy trying to prove that. The thought of pawing through Snape's house for evidence didn't fill him with joy either. Harry was, by his own estimation, a pretty poor investigator. No particular skill in curse-breaking; a limited, though growing, knowledge of disillusionment magic; a low threshold for frustrating situations. Still he plugged away, and there seemed to be a never-ending stream of suspected war criminals for him to direct his mediocre skills at.

Everyone, or so it seemed, had expected Harry to take some dynamic figurehead role at the end of the war, but it had taken a good deal of bedrest and restricted visitor hours to get his head back on anything approaching an even keel. After the first few weeks the cherished myth of his mystically enhanced magical powers had finally vanished from the papers and the public imagination, but the Ministry still apparently felt in some way responsible for putting him to good use. Investigation it was, in the end. Ron had joked (although not in front of Hermione) that his sense of justice was too well developed for the regular aurors.

Sometimes he sat in the evenings and wondered about other careers: deep-sea diver; dragon wrangler; Quidditch pro, obviously. Stupid chocolate frog card fantasies. This evening all that had been shoved aside in favour of Severus Snape.

Overwhelmed with guilt in the aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry had spent hours looking at those pensieve memories. His suggestion of a portrait had been met with a refusal that was at first gentle, then increasingly firm and long suffering. He still couldn't think of it without wincing. He remembered clearly a very profound feeling of obligation that often swelled into warmth – a weird sort of longing, almost – especially when drinking. What had been the most confusing was the anger, the caustic frustration. None of it had been his: Snape standing at the front of the potions class, hands muffled in the sleeves of his robe, eyes gimlet-sharp in Harry's forehead; Snape pinning him in the dungeons, slicing into his mind; Snape clinging onto the front of his own robes, bleeding out a lake in the Shrieking Shack. Not his – his mother's. Strange, embarrassing really, to think that the hatred that he'd thought of as being so entirely his own, had in fact as much to do with him as his eye colour. Harry, never a very effective self-analyst, had stopped investigating his feelings exactly at the point where he began to suspect that his feelings for his mother were curdling into resentment.

"Going a bit fruity, mate," had been Ron's verdict. Well, it was ancient history now. He'd just do a quick sweep of the house, pick up what was to be picked up and clear the man's name. Simple.

The pillow had grown warm under his cheek. He heaved himself onto an elbow and turned it over, shoving at it and lying back down with a whump. Static stuck his hair to his forehead. Sleep, he thought to himself. He spread his legs out under the duvet, exhaled slowly. Sleep. It never worked.

Harry's thoughts meandered to the little bottle of memories, sitting now in his cutlery drawer, where, until this morning at least, it had remained unnoticed, except on the rare occasions that he needed to find the corkscrew.

1998

I find myself at first by the side of a road. I turn from the wood, orientating myself, and find a broken line of birch to my back, then white fields. The sky is pale grey through the trees, the early sun a blur under a thick broth of cloud.

I have never been here before. I have no idea what is beyond the bend in the road in either direction. If there was more time, I would sit on a stump and consider it logically, but there is not. I pause until my head begins to clear a little – I can hear the muffled swish of Muggle traffic away to the north – then I pull my cloak tight about my arms and cross over into the gloom of the trees.

Harry ran a finger down the spine of Aloysius Deepditch and the Ministry of Lies, but stopped short of pulling it off the shelf. He rubbed the dust away against his trousers. History books. Potions encyclopaedias. Atlases and almanacs. Nothing to justify the prickling of his skin, the numb awkwardness of his movements.

A pulse of magic bellied out behind it, but at the top of the stairs there was only a little kitchenette, slicked with grime and damp beyond any hope of recovery; arctic, too, due to a large triangle of glass missing from the window over the sink. Overturned jars and packets sat on the short worktop by the stove, littered with rodent droppings. A patch of wet brown mould crept in ripples across the floor. Harry opened the cupboard under the sink, but found nothing except several small stacks of mismatched crockery and the bittersweet stench of rotten vegetable matter.

It was not difficult to work out whose bedroom was whose. One was almost bare, apart from a beige tasselled table lamp and a bed with a grubby pink quilt, a carpet stained with tea and cigarettes – the bedroom of a lodger at best. The other was smaller and choked with dust, but neat in its own fashion: a narrow metal bedstead opposite another wall filled with books, olive green blankets on the bed, an empty table. Half-closed shutters let in a dribble of bright autumn light, diffused and dampened with dust. An unexpected pair of faded black slippers had been left, half under the bed, toes pointing together, heels trodden down, and Harry loitered on the threshold, staring, unable to get past the door.

Pettigrew's personal effects amounted to a shoebox shoved a foot or so under the bed. Harry sat with weary creak on the bed and lifted the lid. Letters, mostly – a sheaf from Gringotts. Wormtail, it seemed, had amassed a pretty serious overdraft. Harry flipped through them.

Harry set the letters aside and dipped his fingers deeper into the box. More letters. Near the bottom, a pair of ancient exploding snap cards, yellowing, one of them torn – soft and fibrous – a centimetre in the middle. Harry held it in his right hand, his thumb running along the tear, while with his left he pulled out a photograph. People he'd only seen in a pensieve memory – young, laughing, pushing, fearless. They were younger still, here. It had to have been taken with a long exposure; it took ten seconds for the shot to play over, boys hanging over each other, shoving at shoulders, making bunny ears, a knee jokingly aimed at a groin. People walked past in the background in old-fashioned shoes. For a bare moment, someone slid into frame, several feet back, scarcely there, but peering out towards Harry, then the picture clicked back to the beginning.

For five minutes straight, Harry sat and examined the photograph, before dropping his hand back into the box and looking up, through the open door, across the landing, and into the room opposite.

The whole of the tiny dark house breathed of Snape, cold and dismissive, with the musty stink of the dungeons, and yet, beyond the toothbrush and comb in the bathroom, the cracked sliver of grey soap, there was no sign of anything personal. No clue to the great exhalation of magic he'd felt when the hidden door opened, that threaded its way more subtly round the first floor. Harry shrugged and decided in favour of the bookcases in the sitting room.

Halfway down the stairs, he felt the whoosh of that magic again against his face and chest, and stopped short. He laid a palm against the wall on one side and then the other. On a whim, he crouched and put his cheek to the edge of a riser. Ward magic vibrated through his back teeth.

"Something underneath the staircase," Harry said, as Bill stepped out of the floo. "I've tried every version of patefax I can think of."

"What a dump!" Bill squinted and rubbed at a soot smudge on his cheekbone. "Who the hell –? No don't tell me."

"Couldn't if I wanted to." Harry took a large breath and smiled. The room felt bigger and brighter with Bill in it, but he had no intention of letting him get a good look at the bookcases. "It's through here."

The door swung open and Bill stepped through into the stairwell. "Well, you're learning."

It wasn't the first time Harry had seen Bill spread himself over a warded surface, tapping with his fingertips, and he wouldn't normally have loitered in quite such an obvious way. He crouched by Bill's head.

No answer. Harry waited, bouncing a little, until his thighs began to burn, then stood.

The taps creaked drily, but there was a kettle, and there was always an aguamenti, a heating charm and a couple of teabags accio'd from some unseen caddy down the street. The kettle spat and popped at him in a temper as it boiled, and the water, when poured, looked a little brown. It hardly mattered once the tea bled out.

A little way down, the wall had bowed away from the staircase, leaving a two-foot gap. The stairs dropped away to the floor. A muffled clunk, just below where Harry stood. He put two cups of tea on the stair against the wall, and let himself down into the space on the other side. A thin door of plywood stood open in the bare plaster.

Harry's lumos arc faded out where Bill's faded in, then Bill stepped back, head bent to miss the doorframe. Beyond him, a stack of boots made long shadows, knifing upwards on the back wall, books slid from overfilled boxes.

Potions Poisoned, said a book in the box nearest, with the sinister subtitle: Ontology and the insidious advance of the unobservable.

After a moment or two he turned, worried he might have given something away, and found Bill looking at him with a half smile. "Cupboard under the stairs." He slapped Harry on the back, which was about as close as a Weasley boy would ever come to sentiment, and swung himself back up and out of the gap.

It was bald reflex that made Harry reach out a hand and shove the cupboard door shut in front of him.

I make good ground for two hours as the cloud thickens and the weather pulls slowly into a freezing shroud. Caution keeps me from the path and my boots slide on the slick barnacled V where oak roots meet. I have cast obscurus, but cannot stop myself glancing over my shoulder every few yards, like a fool, to ensure there are no tracks. I wonder if he has done the same.

The certain knowledge that he has not makes me pick up my feet.

Fucking hell. Leaving a thumb in between pages fourteen and fifteen, Harry looked back at the box. Modern Meta-theory of Charms was the book now on top. He slid it aside. Master Brewing in the Second Enlightenment.

Harry frowned. Potions Poisoned slid to the floor. It wasn't that he understood more than three words in a row, but if there was anything dark in any one of these books, he was a monkey's uncle. Why would anyone bother to hide them? For less than half a second, Harry considered the Subdepartment of Cultural Suspicion. He ran a palm gingerly over the surface of Master Brewing. Nothing there at all. Nothing worth telling them about.

Something dragged heavily against his back, and Harry shot a guilty glance over his shoulder. Nothing – just the ward trying to pull closed. It was late. Harry grabbed Master Brewing, slid it into his charm-proof satchel, along with Wormtail's Gringotts letters, and climbed backwards out of the cupboard.

"I don't approve of off-the-record meetings, Harry." Hermione had flickered sternly in the fireplace. "And neither does Director Shacklebolt."

Ten minutes later, nose stuck in a book from Snape's most private library, you would never have suspected her of such scruples.

"I thought it must be something like that," Harry said, scratching his cheek. "Not dark?"

"Well, it's neither dark nor light. It is what it is – it's philosophy. Only its practical application can make it one or the other. It's rather interesting, though. The author argues against the modern reaction-based theories of potion making. Rather a believer in magical noumena, if I'm reading him right. You see –"

"No. Really. No need to explain." Harry closed his eyes and stretched his eyebrows upwards, furrowing his forehead into stiff lines. There was always the danger with Hermione that the stuff she spouted would somehow lodge and squeeze out the things you really needed to know. He shook his head gently. "What I'm really interested in is why he'd try and hide them. I mean, if there's nothing for us to worry about –" He put out a hand for the book, with the strange urge to stuff it out of sight, back in the satchel.

"Who –?" Harry asked, feeling cold all over, like a curtain had been pulled back and he'd suddenly remembered he wasn't in his own front room at all but perched on a broad hillside in a driving wind. He thought of Snape standing there his whole life.

"It looks like Snape was a bit of an empiricist on the quiet, if his annotations are anything to go by."

Unlike the foreword, which was, in point of fact, as far as Harry had got, the middle section of the book was punctuated with Snape's splattery scrawl. Not the long amendments and formulas of Advanced Potion Making, but sharp little comments, dripping with derision and oddly familiar:

Hermione put a hand to her mouth, goggling at him, and Harry suddenly felt as if they'd sneaked into Snape's chambers and found him undressing. He shut the book with a guilty start.

"In any case," Hermione cleared her throat, "you should tell Cultural Suspicion about it. Even if it's harmless. It's just the way things are done."

"I don't see why. Like you said, it's all about interpretation. They're not the brightest buttons in the box at Cultural Suspicion – what if they got it wrong? Too risky. Not yet, at least. I mean – obviously he wasn't exactly a nice man or anything, but he deserves our best shot, doesn't he?"

Harry scowled at the book on his lap. This was the same claptrap Dumbledore used to try and feed him. It never really took then either. Evil was evil, dark was dark, there were no two ways about it. Snape, to Harry's never-ending surprise, wasn't really dark, just a bit – gloomy round the edges. The revelation that Snape was the exception didn't change the overall principle of the thing.

"It's the way the law works, Harry." Harry stared at a frayed corner of the binding. "I'm not going to be able to back you up if you don't follow the process properly."

"But this is off the record, right?" He glanced up in time to see Hermione's shoulders lift in a great sigh. "And you won't tell Ron?"

That was it, that was definitely the one, Bill had even written it down for him. He'd practised it last night in the bath. And yet not even the smallest stutter interrupted the hum of magic coming up through the stairs.

This time when Bill stepped into the living room, he swung a stubby pint bottle of milk into Harry's chest.

"Clever!" was all he had to say when he lowered himself again over the hidden cupboard, but by the time it was re-opened, he had sweated through two cups of tea and sent Harry down to the corner shop for a sandwich.

"A pseudo-reciprocal paratactic ward," Bill said finally, through a mouthful of BLT, wiping his wand on his trousers.

"A real-ly trick-y one," Bill said slowly. Then he grinned, a large scar pulling at his bottom lip. "Although not for me!" He clapped the crumbs off his hands, and thumped Harry on the back. "Should be fine now. Same counter charm. Just floo me if it gives you any more trouble."

Harry, halfway into the cupboard, lumos at his shoulder, barely heard the whump of the floo as Bill left.

The rest of the morning was spent rifling through books that Harry was now able to identify, without recourse to the Ministry, as philosophy of magic. Some were annotated, some were not, but if Harry had been hoping to find some gaping clue, some hard evidence of Snape's allegiance – as opposed to the relentless reminders of his intellectual snobbery – his hope was vain.

The afternoon saw Harry making tea and upending boots. Out of one of them dropped a five-knut piece, then after a further shake, a large beetle shell with its useless cat's cradle of legs; the rest were empty. At twenty past four, Harry let his lumos dim and sat down hard in the cupboard. In his hand he had a right-footed black boot, buttons stitched into the scuffed edge of the leather all the way up the ankle. He ran a thumb over the bottom button and it wobbled like a loose tooth. Stupid shoes. Only Snape would wear something so puritan and impractical. So old-fashioned and severe. So bloody unmistakeably Snape. Harry slid it onto his own foot.

At twenty-two minutes past four, as he stood up, lost his footing, stumbled over a box of books and hit the back wall with his shoulder, Harry discovered the hidden space within the hidden cupboard.

Time is moving on. The sword at my waist grows heavy and clanks against my shin with every step.

It is early afternoon and the light has flattened out almost to nothing. I have been walking for hours, I think; the arches of my feet are stretched and aching. I will not allow myself to think about my stomach, but it reminds me that I left in haste and poorly prepared. It would be a blissful relief to spread my fingers and lift into the air – smoke trails and trodden ground might show me my target in minutes – but they would recognise the dark ripple of that magic across hundreds of miles and be here in an instant.

I trudge on.

The forest is dotted with clearings. I linger on the edge of each one and squint through the gloom, looking for cloaked figures. I listen. I have never trusted a quiet this deep. This is not the banal quiet of rustling parchment and muffled expletives; this is the quiet of war, the blanketing silence of held breath that seems to swell against the eardrums. The split-second before Cruciatus crunches into the bones.

I skirt each patch of open ground, cloaked figure that I am. In one, the dry split of a thick twig and a scuffed patch of snow by a stump two feet from the path convinces me he has been here. It is no surprise to see that he is not careful. As I lean down to look closer, the sword swings out from my cloak and slices forwards through the snow, clangs like a gong against the stump.

I step back into the trees, eyes closed and breath held. Out of habit, I blame the boy for my clumsy frozen fingers. For five wasted minutes I stand, blood screeching round my body, still as a tombstone.

A loose brick had turned, scattering masonry dust over Harry's clothes and the ends of his hair and the box of books at his feet. He blinked and pulled the brick from its place with a gritty scrape of over-dried mortar. Then he stuck his hand in the gap, leaning into the wall, threading his arm in until he was up to the shoulder, like a vet examining a horse in foal. He waved his hand around, scissoring his fingers, stretching until the rough edge of broken mortar bit into his underarm.

Harry frowned, pulled his arm out and began to dismantle the surrounding brickwork.

Ten bricks down, the gap came to an end. A long thin book lay propped on its spine and several pieces of paper sat crumpled around it, as if shoved into the wall in haste.

A year and a half ago, Harry had pulled a sheaf of papers out of a cupboard in Fenrir Greyback's hut, and found list upon list of Muggle-born children. He hesitated a moment before sticking his hand in.

Harry flattened out the rest of the bits of paper, flipped quickly through them, and heaved himself to his feet. He was going to need a cup of tea. And maybe a copy of Advanced Potion Making.

Lovage; hellebore; dragon eggs; lacewing flies – polyjuice? Harry sat up straighter. Knotgrass; hellebore again, valerian, asphodel.

The book was filled with lined paper, carefully scored into columns. Page after page of potions recipes, handwritten, ink growing darker and more distinct as Harry flicked further through the book. He turned back to the front. There was a date at the top: June 1991. It was a recipe that Harry didn't recognise – not that that ruled many out. The ingredients listed tidily in a column to the left of the page, the method in long and complex steps down the rest of the page. Several of the ingredients were bracketed together in a darker ink, with the note: toxic combination.

There were several pages each year, most with comments and observations: a better catalyst than the runespoor venom – try gathering after a frost – copious oral and nasal bleeding. Hard to imagine many of these were curriculum preparation. More likely murderous fantasies. Harry grinned to himself, hardly even aware why, as he turned the thick paper leaves of the book, imagining Snape bent over his cauldron, concocting grisly deaths for Gryffindors. One page he found, marked with another receipt. No heading on the recipe, but a note beside one of the ingredients, sanguis re'eminis: is this it? He turned the receipt over, expecting to see some ludicrous price per pound of sanguis whatever it was –

Harry's pulse jumped, lumos guttering, so that the broken plaster flickered with barbed shadows and the neat little signature was momentarily hidden. He held his jaw shut for several heartbeats of startling and thunderous fury, which began with the impulse to rip the scrap of letter to pieces and ended with Harry glaring at his own bitten thumb and forefinger that pinched it like a moth by its wing. Then he shut the book with the paper still inside, and put it back inside the wall.

Something crunched under his heel as he stepped back. He lifted his foot to the side and bent down, wand in hand, to see a long rusty key with a length of string, grubby and frayed, tied to the ring end.

A key. That was enough to make Harry forget his strange flurry of anger. A key. Better than a book. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand.

"We're auditing early this year," Kingsley announced, and Hermione crossed her legs, a little red in the face, but brazening it out with her habitual air of self-justification. Harry glared at her. He was shaping his mouth into a silent expletive, when Kingsley looked back up from the file.

"Snape and Pettigrew. Much in the way of evidence at the Snape house?" He licked a large square finger and flicked to the second page of the file. "Spinner's End?"

"Not much, Director." Harry crossed his own legs. "Lots of books." One book in particular that he had to get out of his desk drawer and back to the cupboard pronto. "Nothing very useful, I'm afraid."

Shacklebolt sighed. "Nott will be over to your office tomorrow afternoon to look at the paperwork." He stood up. "Four bloody years of trials. Do you know what the rest of the Wizarding World is doing these days?" Harry shook his head. "No. Neither do I." Harry looked at his feet. "Let's just get this over with, shall we? It's not like anyone cares anymore. Four bloody years."

A week ago Harry would have agreed. He watched the brow of the Director of the Auror Office furrow like a wide ploughed field.

"It all needs to be turned over to the Subdepartment," Hermione said, when Shacklebolt had closed the door on his next meeting.

She took hold of both his hands. "I know there's stuff you're not telling me about." Harry tried to pull at least one of them away. The ledger was sitting in his desk drawer in his cubby hole, probably pulsing with some sort of palpable trackable Snapeness. The desire to scuttle back there and stick it down his jumper was becoming visceral. "I think you're a wally."

"He's been dead for five years, Harry." She hung on the doorframe and her voice followed him down the corridor.

I have been walking for hours in wet socks. I am not sure whether my circles are spiralling outwards or inwards, but every path, every crippled branch over every stile looks the same. There are a hundred dark spells I could use. It cannot be risked.

To my right the ground slopes down along a steep bank. I turn that way partly for novelty, and pick up my pace. My stride shortens, making me trot ungracefully down into the hollow. The smothered ground tilts and slides under my feet like the deck of a ship.

At the bottom of the slope the trees thicken and gang together, and the twilight of the path is lost. I go onward across the knotted ground with no idea of my direction. I think I had some moronic idea that I would be able to find him by instinct.

I've walked no more than two hundred yards when there's a dip in front, a foot at most, I almost stumble right into it. The hollow is lined with short stretches of blue metal and oxidizing copper – graves. My feet snap to a standstill and the breath is snatched out of my lungs. Death hangs in the air. I cannot escape from the dead. Shapes come out of the trees – hunger has made me light-headed. The Evans girl, that dog Sirius Black, Albus Dumbledore. I don't know what they could possibly want from me – a lifetime of Death Eating would not be enough to empty all the graves that populate this war.

I have nothing left to say to them – to any of them. I stride across, eyes down, and the metal clang of the graves shudders up my calves. I won't even look. I remember the terrified rush across a parapet wall back when war meant bombs and uniforms and black and white film, not this extravagantly emotional sacrifice of life. I step out of the shallow ditch at the other side and stride back up out of the trees.

There is enough to do with the living. I no longer have any love to spare for the dead. 2

There were those people in Harry's life, few and far between admittedly, who did not consider him irredeemably stupid. Late that afternoon, barely able to hold his quill in his hand as he scribbled off an owl to Gringotts, Harry was not among that select number.

"If anyone ever deserved the frigging Dementors' Kiss, it's this fucker. I've never seen anything like it." Bill swore at Harry like a docker when he found the ward had reset itself again, and took an hour and a half dismantling it. "I can't wait for the trial."

Afterwards Harry had tried the key in every lock in the house. Twice. He had had three cups of tea. It was only when he was pulling a new hole in the wall – in the kitchen this time – for the decoy stashing of boots and philosophy, that he wiped the dust from his eyes and woke up.

A ward cannot reset itself forever. A spell renewed again and again. It was like dreaming for the first time in a decade of a childhood monster and finding, surprisingly, that there is something in the cupboard after all, even if the cold light of day showed you that the face you'd thought was twisted with malice was actually only a little distorted by shadow.

For all of two seconds, Harry considered telling Hermione she was wrong. He wrote his letter with a shaking hand and something scrabbling with clumsy excitement inside his chest.

"Looks like Voldemort did eventually cover Wormtail's debts. That explains a lot."

Theodore Nott, second assistant penpusher of the Subdepartment of Cultural Suspicion, looked up from Potions Poisoned, his frown of concentration not quite smoothing over.

Blah blah blah – As to the other matter, please refer to my enclosed communication under separate unmarked cover, as requested.

A small plain envelope chose that moment to slip from the folds of parchment. Harry caught it between his knees, blushing as if caught out in the empty charms classroom with a Hufflepuff prefect, and forced his eyes to stay on the letter. Bragshank was about as obliging as the Gringotts goblins got, but he was a bit of a jobsworth when it came to off-the-record investigations.

As smoothly as he could manage, Harry retrieved the envelope and stuck it in his trouser pocket. He pointed at the door.

"To be honest, I'm probably not your best bet there." The lower half of Harry's body was sandwiched between the door and the frame. He slid out and hurried along a narrow passage to the gents.

The envelope was sealed so thoroughly that it opened in a series of small and frustrating incremental rips.

Harry's hand fell to his side, crumpling the letter against his trousers. He'd had visions of a little rag-wrapped parcel in cavernous stone vault, another philosopher's stone.

He bent down and pulled the key out of his sock. It was warm from the heat of his calf, but when he squeezed it in his fist, closed his eyes and concentrated, he saw only the same answer as he always saw. Harry grunted with frustration.

said Hermione's office door, but she'd always been a bit of a pushover. Harry explained in a rush about the ward, the potions ledger, the key.

"Alive?" she said. Her expression was more cynical than anything else. It didn't really chime with the taut feeling choking its way up Harry's windpipe.

Of course, as always, she was the answer, and at ten o'clock, half an hour after Nott had finally given up deciphering Snape's books and ratified Harry's paperwork, Harry and Hermione were at the head of the dungeon steps at Hogwarts.

Slughorn had retired for his dinner; the Slytherins were safely sealed in their common room; the potions office and storeroom were darkened, spread and empty.

For the first ten minutes, Harry and Hermione had crept round the office like cat burglars, almost afraid to touch anything for fear of tripping a ward or a snare. They had held their lumoses like candles, leaving deep puddles of darkness and feeling round the wall for joints and fissures in the stone, an extra fizz of magic.

By the time they'd been over the office twice, then the storeroom and finally, in desperation, the classroom, they were levitating chairs and benches and turning over burn-proof mats. Harry smashed a jar of slimy purple-red things that looked like they might once have been something's insides, and slithered over each other and over the sharp flecks of glass in a soft wet heap. Nothing.

It was Hermione who suggested the headmaster's office, and it brought back a renewed trepidation. They loitered in the potions classroom.

"It's okay – Percy rotates them for safety. He leaves a spare copy with Ron in case he forgets which one's rotated in. I – brought it just in case." Hermione fished a scrap of parchment out of her hip pocket.

"Doesn't sound exactly watertight." Harry frowned at the writing, which didn't form any words in his vocabulary.

Hermione was blushing. It had taken her about three years to get comfortable with breaking school rules; perhaps those principles – or lack of them – had to be relearnt in the Auror Office. Under other circumstances it would be highly tedious. Harry straightened a chair, feeling like a prize fool for being so nervous of a room he'd been in dozens of times.

Inflagrante was the password of the month. It hinted at unknown dimensions in Percy, but did nothing to make either of them feel any better.

The office ticked and whirred and crept with the signs of inanimate occupancy, but there was no one there. Beginning at the door, Harry and Hermione turned in opposite directions and began a slow circuit, feeling along the walls and ducking to peer at cabinets. On a low shelf a little mirror framed with greying wood caught Harry's eye. He bent down to inspect it and found himself staring into a pair of black eyes.

He stood up suddenly and backed hard into a cupboard. Dumbledore. Fucking hell. The doors of the cupboard nudged against his shoulderblades.

The cupboard nudged harder and Harry was shoved forwards. He glanced behind him, to see the cupboard sliding open and a large stone bowl wheeling outwards. Bloody pensieve.

"I knew that eventually someone would. I hoped it would be you, Harry. And you, of course, Miss Granger." Dumbledore's portrait, uplit by lumos light, aimed a reassuring smile at Hermione.

Hermione came to his rescue. "Do you know where he is?" She stepped towards the portrait, full of business.

"I?" Dumbledore's eyebrows arched into points. "Dear girl, Severus is not one to share his secrets. But he is waiting somewhere, I'm certain of it."

Harry gripped the key hard in his fist. Half of what Dumbledore said in life was unhelpful or an out-and-out lie. As he felt the bit pressing into the heel of his palm, something caught his eye in the pensieve cabinet. He turned to see a small dark patch disappearing on the wall.

The dark patch winked into existence again, as they peered into the cabinet, then swelled, spreading outwards in great bubbles and spirals. It formed into a bossed metal plate, slate grey and flecked with mildew; in the centre of it, like a question mark, was a large keyhole.

There were two failed attempts to get the key in, the lock shrinking away each time he loosened his grip.

He fumbled and got the string caught round his middle fingers. "Bastard – sodding –" That time the lock stayed put, as if affronted out of its bloody-mindedness.

The tumblers slipped almost before the key was in, and Harry, watching breathlessly for another cubby to appear in the back wall of the cabinet, was disappointed when for a moment or two nothing happened.

Then the pensieve shifted and creaked like something much larger and older and the sides folded out in thick stone petals. The contents spiralled upwards and vanished, and out of the gap where the bottom of the basin had been, there rose a smaller bowl, made of rough black stone, marble or granite, unpolished. Runes were pressed unevenly into the side and the bowl was thick with memories.

I find a new path.

Twenty yards along, something glints in the snow next to my foot. A person with a penchant for shiny things and less reason to be cautious might reach out a hand; I bend to take a closer look.

The something is shaped like a radish and the size of a snitch. Snow slides lazily off it. Having confiscated a number during my teaching career, I know it immediately for what it is. A sneakoscope. In my palm it whirrs and whistles furiously, and I find myself smiling with a species of relief. It must be his. How clumsy to have dropped it and yet how entirely typical.

I look about me. To my right the trees thin into a ragged clearing. In between clumps of bracken, I see it. A little round blue tent. It is lit from within and filled with indefinable shadows, crowned with a thin tonsure of snow.

I work my way slowly round to the front opening of the tent, sticking to the trees, keeping tight hold of the sacred sword of Gryffindor. He could doubtless exercise some malign influence and force it blade-first through my gut with a single glare.

Only a foot and its shin are visible in the tent mouth. For an instant I feel as though I have been hollowed out like a canoe, then the foot twitches wildly and I breathe out, the space filled up again with a flood of anger.

To stab him now would be a cruel waste of the combined effort of generations.

Harry pulled himself slowly out of the pensieve and stood looking down in the strands of silver floating in the bowl, because he had no idea what else to do.

"The runes are really interesting," she said, when he didn't venture an explanation. Harry was still staring into the bowl. "It says 'travel light' here." Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her bending to touch the basin. "I think these bits are some sort of sacrificing charm." He nodded. "Harry."

"Maybe this – whatever he put in there – maybe it was something he had to get rid of. Do you think?"

"Weird ones. I don't know. Like not angry or sarcastic or, you know, evil." He thought of the threat against Petunia, nasty for all it was probably justified. "Well, maybe a little bit evil."

Happy. Maybe. Harry couldn't quite see himself featuring in any of Snape's happy memories, but then he had been pretty severely bashed up. So maybe –

Hermione grimaced. It did seem slightly obscene. A bit – what was that word? – prurient? She cleared her throat.

Hermione frowned. "Where would someone without a single happy memory go to hide?"

Over the sudden clatter of his heartbeat, Harry found himself thinking of Bellatrix Lestrange's library ticket.

Part II

1998

Potter is asleep. I crane over to creep inside the tent, and the rest of his body comes slowly into view. He is bundled in a thick cloak, but his face is pale and cold. His hair is sticky, slick with dirt, smearing against the floor mat, and he looks thin, but he is not frowning in sleep. I do not loiter to crouch and smooth his hair back, or to wonder if he still has nightmares.

Just beyond the mouth of the tent I find a likely table and spot the Granger girl in the space beyond, also sound asleep. They are a pair of children. I could curse.

As soon as it has left my hand, the sneakoscope quiets down and begins to spin more slowly. I creep out of the tent and away. The boy does not so much as turn or twitch. Under the circumstances I ought not to regret it.

I scout about for a quarter of an hour. I cannot be sure I have not been followed and I am not so ready as some to leave invaluable articles lying around, sticking out of tents.

Finally I find a small lake, iced over, half fenced around. There is a bench for summer visitors, now three inches thick with snow. A small incision in the ice crust of the lake is enough to slide the sword in, and I watch it glide lightly downwards and away, as if it has not been pulling me into the ground for the last seven hours. Infragilis reseals the ice to stop idle lookers. I doubt anyone would choose a dunking in the freezing water. I hope it will wake him up at least.

When I return to the little campsite, nothing has stirred. An inch or two of snow has settled on a fallen trunk a short distance behind the edge of the trees; I flick it away with the edge of my cloak, sit, and wait.

2003

Harry had expected to see Azkaban rise out of the rock like a dark dystopic nightmare, or perhaps like an upturned finger. But on a nice sunny day in calm waters, it was surprisingly picturesque. It reminded him of Corfe Castle.

Still – Azkaban. No way in and no way out. Bit of a bugger really. Harry flew round the outside. It was in pretty bad nick. The turrets looked like a set of teeth knocked out during a fight, but there were no holes in the stonework that he could make out.

He landed gently on a boulder and leant his Hermes Swiftspark 3 against the colossal foot of one of the buttresses. The castle façade was blank and, to all appearances, completely impermeable.

"Alohomora." More of a joke really than anything else, and greeted by a stony silence.

Harry sighed. "Retrusus retectus." Another shot in the dark, but almost immediately the buttress kicked out, flinging his broom off the rock and knocking him onto his backside. When he levered himself back up, an opening had appeared underneath it, and something like cellar steps leading down. Leaving his broom bobbing like a bather in the crisp sunlit ripples of the North Sea, Harry went in.

Five steps down the staircase, Harry felt as if his innards had chilled to a state of paralysis. Ten steps down, he despaired of ever finding Snape. It was only the learnt necessity of sacrifice that kept him going. The staircase led to a huge circular space where the plaster seemed to melt from the walls with the sheer hopelessness of staying stuck. The room stretched up for what looked like hundreds of metres of crushing misery, spiralling into the bleak upper quarters of Azkaban, where the Dementors were corralled. At ground level it was punctured with a hundred identical doorless passages.

The need to sit and press his forehead to the ground and never ever get up almost overcame Harry completely, but he was strong, he could get up off his knees, he'd dealt with this before, he was just going to… going to…

Then black robes swam in front of Harry's eyes like a shroud for the world's torments, and he reached for them in blissful agony, wrapped them round his fingers, and fell face-first against shins of iron.

Harry sipped at something that looked and smelled like tea, and tasted like firewhisky. He clamped his hands round the mug to tempt some warmth into them. Bloody hell, it was depressing in here, even with that door that Snape had somehow cobbled together to keep out the sharpest pangs of despair.

The room was small but high-ceilinged. Harry couldn't be sure – Snape had half carried him from that place where he thought he was going to die – but it seemed to him that they were at least a couple of hundred feet underground. And there was furniture, which did not tally at all with Harry's idea of Azkaban. A tall cupboard without handles, a bookcase, ladder-back chairs, a desk, all some sort of dark honey-coloured wood. Azkaban smelling of old distressed timber, just like Hogwarts. The desk, and most of the space at its feet, was littered with books, open and shut, rolls of parchment, small stone paperweights. It was here that Snape sat, his back to Harry, writing ten to the dozen, for all the world as if this were an appointment in the potions office, and he were a man who did not have a lot of explaining to do.

Approaching it all was the difficulty. The anticipation of the last two days had left Harry on the back foot, and Snape was certainly not pleased to see him. It was all a bit hopeless.

Harry swilled the last puddle of his drink around the bottom of the mug. The idea of knocking it back filled him with some obscure dread. "No."

"Is it poison?" Harry sniffed it. It wouldn't be that much of a surprise, nor even that unreasonable. His shoulders sagged.

Snape turned in his chair, one skinny black arm across the back. He didn't precisely look at Harry, but he looked as though he might. "No, Potter. It is not poison. It's a depressant."

"Be that as it may, these walls are thick and Gryffindors are known to be irrepressible. For obvious reasons, I cannot have you skipping about my quarters as if they were the back room at Honeydukes." Snape looked at him then, and Harry couldn't even summon the will to straighten up. "I don't doubt for a second that you have come here to finish me off, but I can assure you, they'll see you long before they see me. Accio cup." The mug pulled abruptly out of Harry's loose grip and floated over. Snape examined the contents. "That will probably do."

Harry looked up at the ceiling in expectation of a sudden invasion. "Should you be using magic?"

"Dementors are not attracted by magic, Potter. They are attracted by happiness. Not to be melodramatic, but I fall somewhat under their radar."

It sounded bizarrely like an invitation. Harry put out a hand and pulled the parchment from under Snape's fingers.

"You like reading this?" Harry held it by one corner. It was covered with the disgusting details of a variety of different fire curses. For a second a little gush of anger broke through the frost in his chest, then died down to nothing.

"Whether I like it or not is irrelevant. It is an academic exercise." Snape shifted in his chair, sliding his legs around so that he faced Harry. He held out his hand, palm up. "May I have it back?"

"Potter, why are you here?" They both jumped a little at his sudden shout. "Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you don't mean to bring my hideous fate to me here, you wish to drag me back to face the braying mob. Is that it?"

"Your case. You're supposed to be dead. You can't blame me for being a bit –" Harry clenched and unclenched a hand in front of his chest. He couldn't think what he was being a bit of.

"And now you have found that I am not dead." He tucked the side of his hair behind his ear and began to write again. "I can imagine how overjoyed you must be. When may I expect Director Shacklebolt's bloodhounds?"

Harry took a deep breath, and allowed it to settle and calm his irritation. Who would have thought it would be so difficult to maintain a safe degree of depression around Professor Snape? He fetched his chair and sat on it, so that they were at right angles to each other, Harry's knees pointing at Snape, Snape's knees pointing at the desk.

"No bloodhounds," he said. "No one else knows." Snape, whose writing had already slowed a little, looked up sideways, one eyebrow raised. "Except Hermione."

"Yes, but you see it's not an Easter egg hunt, Potter. Humiliating as it is to admit it now, given my abject failure, I had intended to remain hidden. I am, in point of fact, hiding. Or I was." He turned the page of Conjuring Hell and traced slowly down with his finger. "Naturally I never counted on your highly trained investigative techniques."

Harry, who had been on the point of raising Dumbledore's theory, was stung into closing his mouth. He never asked to be an Auror Investigator. Out loud it would probably sound a lot more childish than in his head.

A long silence – during which Snape continued to write his filthy dark concord– whatever it was, and Harry stared sadly at his lap – began to feel uncomfortable. Since he was here, he may as well investigate, however ineptly. And however off the record.

"A thousand possible answers come to mind. You may wish to narrow your field of enquiry."

"Fine. You were dead – or you pretended to be." Harry watched Snape's eyebrows draw lower. "What happened?"

It was an obvious question – a glaringly obvious one – but it didn't stop Snape turning to look at him as if he had just asked what a cauldron was for.

"Potter, my life has been in severe jeopardy for at least the last twelve years. Your own was under threat for the majority of that time, I'm sure you had some kind of plan B."

Harry shook his head, wondering for the first time if Azkaban had sent Snape doolally. "No."

"No? You had no fallback plan? No failsafe? You mean you relied entirely on blind faith, the help of others and your own blundering good luck to keep you in one piece, and if they failed, then – what? Ta-ta?"

"Because that's what heroes do?" Harry opened his mouth. He'd never even questioned it. "Then I am a thousand times grateful I am not a hero."

Snape stood up in a rush and threw down his quill with a spatter of ink. Harry considered reaching forward, but couldn't think what to reach for, so sat still. When Snape had stood, fingertips on the edge of the desk, chin on his chest, long enough for a deep breath or two, he seemed to calm slightly.

Snape didn't turn, but seemed to be looking at him out of the corner of his eye.

"How did –?" He didn't finish the question. Snape rounded on him again, mouth tight and eyes narrowed.

"How did what, Potter? How did I survive? How did I effect my escape? For the sake of investigative thoroughness? Very well. Do you have your Quick Quotes Quill?" He counted off on his fingers. "Occlumency; antidotes, cupboardfuls of them, taken prophylactically; blood-charming spells, blood-clotting spells, blood-replicating spells; drafts – living death, dreamless sleep, confuddlement; lies – millions upon millions; aliases; false fucking passports." His nostrils flared. "Prepared to ensure my continued existence at whatever cost to my professional pride and quality of life, as you can see. Perhaps you would also like to hear in detail about plans B, C and D? Do let me show you my collection of wigs and my open ticket to Iceland!"

Snape was stalking across the room. As he put a hand out to the door handle, Harry panicked, imagining a huddle of Dementors clawing at the other side. He hurried forward, jostling round Snape's abandoned chair.

"My bedroom. You would prefer to imagine that I slept on the floor? In a hair shirt?"

Harry had never in his life consciously imagined Snape sleeping anywhere. Before. This was the most confusing argument he had ever had, and now that the moment of panic was over, depression was beginning to crowd its way back in. His shoulders slumped. "No."

Snape took a breath, looking strangely deflated too. He kept his hold on the door handle, but made no move to leave. "If you have not come here to drag me back, then why exactly have you come here?"

The depression had long lifted as Harry set about his dinner that night, but the confusion had not.

He'd left home that morning, if he was honest, thinking of all the things he'd thought he would never be able to say. Imagining Merlin knows what sort of reunion: all misunderstanding swept aside, or something.

Harry burst out laughing. He bent forwards and almost knocked the pan of beans off the stove. Snape was alive. He was a bastard still, but a living one. Perhaps it was the relief of leaving Azkaban, but he felt optimistic. He felt delighted. By four o'clock the temperature had dropped, physically as well as metaphorically, to such a degree that the Dementors could not have been more than a few metres from Snape's door. Harry had been forced to leave. He could barely remember his blind scramble up the stairs, but when he got to the top, the stag had leapt like a bird from the hollow under the buttress, and shimmered in the low light of the autumn evening. He'd accio'd his Swiftspark out of the North Sea and sped after it until it melted into air.

And why had he been there? The baked beans fizzled and thickened round the edge of the pan.

Perhaps he had had a thought of bringing Snape back. Or – even more ridiculous – saving him. Well might he laugh at himself. Whatever, when he went back tomorrow, he'd try to make his questions a little less naïve, he'd arm himself mentally for a struggle, and he most certainly would not pass any of this on to Shacklebolt's office. Not yet.

At half-past ten, Hermione floo-called him. She bobbed in the fireplace for almost five minutes, while Harry hid behind the sofa. Just to prove the point to himself.

"I've brought one of your old books," Harry choked out, as soon as the fog had cleared enough for him to lift his head. "Where's my bag?" Snape was writing again and did not turn round, but stopped long enough to point towards the bookcase.

Harry opened the bag and took out Potions Poisoned. "I know. Isn't it a bit risky?" Snape didn't answer. That was one of those naïve questions. "Here. I got this one back from Cultural Suspicion. They say it's not pertinent to the case."

Snape turned and took the book. To Harry's great surprise, his frown loosened a little and he rubbed a thumb over the cover. "They would."

"Why did you hide these books?" Harry stood, awkward, at his side, wondering if it would feel more comfortable to kneel at Snape's feet so that they could look at the book together, but was stopped by a realisation of the ridiculous position that would leave them in. He cleared his throat, and put his hands in his pockets, feeling suddenly stiff and stupid. "Hermione says you were hiding them from the Death Eaters."

"Truly?" He was flicking through the book now. "What else does Miss Granger say?"

"I wish I had the leisure to be. Sadly my entire involvement in the development of magical knowledge is that of a reader." He snapped the book shut.

Snape looked at him, one eyebrow high. He slid the book onto the desk and took up his quill, pulling the heavy fall of his robe cuff away from his wrist. "Those books concern what is at the forefront of modern magical theory." He dipped the quill.

"Which is – a particulate understanding of the nature of magical reactions. A rejection of the mystical essences. Sorcery is the manipulation of molecules, nothing more. Some are born with an aptitude for it, just as some are born with an aptitude for the piano. There is nothing unknowable, nothing spirituous in it at all. To put it bluntly, Potter, there is nothing magical about magic. Skills should be refined, of course. We research, we practise, we experiment." He was making no pretence to writing, but punching emphatically forward into the air with his quill. He paused for a second and glanced at Harry, as though remembering who he was with. "I use 'we' only in the loosest sense."

"Exactly. Why. People who persist in the outmoded separatist notion of wizard and Muggle will always bump up against the reality that the non-magical community is the more powerful."

"I mean, that in all necessary ways they control their own environment, they are top of the food chain – purely because of their unfathomable headcount. If Voldemort had genuinely wanted to subdue the non-magical masses, he should have spent less time killing and more time fornicating."

"What a – disgusting idea." Harry fought back the insistent awareness of his crotch that always resulted from the mention of sex. He burrowed his hands to the sides in his pockets.

Snape appeared not in the least uncomfortable. "Isn't it? Fortunately – unfortunately, perhaps, for the pureblood zealots – all the recent generations have shown very little inclination to mass procreation. Excepting your Weasleys, of course."

"I can't think why you would presume to know anything about what I am into." After the tiniest of pauses, Snape dipped his quill again and searched on the open page for his place. Slowly he wrote the first two words, oddly rounded, then faster and faster, until it was clear the conversation was over.

Harry had long since put aside Potions Poisoned when Snape stopped writing. He lifted his head, turned it slightly, so Harry could see the tip of his nose, but not his eye, behind the black drape of hair.

"Um," he looked at his watch. It was only about twenty to eleven. He sat on a question that might well seem naïve. "Yes?"

Snape reached towards the edge of the desk for his wand, and pointed it towards the outer door. "Accio two lunches."

Apart from a light doze in the ladderback chair, and a stiff neck, nothing happened until an hour and half later, when the door slipped briefly open and two Tupperware containers, one white, one dirty orange, sailed through and landed next to Snape's book.

"I've got a scotch egg," Harry said. He'd pulled his chair up to the desk and was picking out the contents of his designated lunch. Dirty orange container.

Harry pulled apart the two thin brown halves of a sandwich. Corned beef. "Whose lunches are these?"

"Specifically? I have no idea. To surmise from our location, I would imagine they were intended for oil-rig workers. And to surmise further, from the contents of this little white box, mine comes from the same oil-rig worker as yesterday's."

"He'll be pretty hungry by now, then." Harry bit into his sandwich. He smiled a little at Snape, an overture that was requited with an odd look, and a summoned cup of depressant.

Dreariness returned like the grey North Sea tide. "I didn't realise those books were so subversive," he said, as they maundered through lunch. He felt an idiot. Not worth telling anything. "I would have had no idea at all why they were hidden."

Snape crashed his own cup on the desk and had to dry his fingers on the chest of his robe.

On the morning of the third visit, Harry came round to find himself dumped in a green cushioned armchair, which had certainly had not been in the room before. One leg had gone to sleep, curled underneath him, and his cheekbone pressed against the arm, making his jaw ache. His whole body felt thin and listless, worn to fragility from running the gauntlet of the Dementors day after day.

Harry hadn't even started it. It sat, wan and lukewarm, on the floor a foot or two below his forehead. "I don't think I can." He stared into it.

"You shouldn't come here," Snape was saying, and though Harry couldn't quite lift his head to look, on the edge of his eyeline, long black legs shifted and crossed. A little warmth came into Harry's chest.

"Come back then. Tell them all the truth – you'll probably get an Order of Merlin."

"What truth? What on earth would make you think your lot have any respect for my truth? They never have before."

A loud snorting noise. "I'm not interested in their trials or their pardon. They've made an absolute pig's ear of it so far, and I have no wish to be associated."

"Some people deserve to punished, Potter. And yet they think evil is only in books." He leant closer. The shadow of his hair swung over Harry's face. "I've seen things that would make your brain curdle."

Harry lifted his head minutely to see that Snape was bent forward, half off his chair. His heart kicked up, ready to tell Snape about the things he'd seen – tiny body parts in jars – he knew too.

"Yes, it's a terrible life you lead, forcing yourself upon unwilling hosts, and being asked to drink drinks so that they don't die."

He drank it without stopping, and let the world and all its inexplicable uselessness slip into a monochrome blur, then slumped back into the chair.

"I'm waiting for a book." Snape sat facing him, legs crossed, hands laced on his knee. "That's assuming they haven't yet burnt it." He looked at Harry expectantly. It felt a little like a job interview. Harry glanced about a bit.

Snape frowned. "Initially yes, although I did not charm it out from under some roustabout's backside just for you. I've been keeping it in my bedroom."

"Your –" Harry looked round at the closed door, and found himself imagining behind it the Slytherin dormitories of 1975 and the sandy-haired boy.

"Yes, it's awfully comfortable here, a dungeon boudoir all of my own, fully fitted with shackles, thumbscrews and other instruments of torture."

Harry stared at him. "You could come back. No –" Snape had stood up, "I don't mean to stand trial. There must be other places."

"And yet none so impenetrable as this." He was at the bedroom door. "Isn't that ironic?"

Snape shut the door behind him, leaving Harry perplexed. He wasn't totally without fellow feeling, even in this subdued state, and he could swear that Snape was afraid.

This wasn't fair. He'd make up some lie for Hermione. He wasn't going to bring him back, so what the hell was he going to do? Leave him alone. Just visit him once in a while. He looked towards the bedroom door. Or not even that.

The door opened almost immediately when he knocked. He stepped back a pace. The light was on in the room beyond, and he saw the blankets as smooth as the beds at St Mungo's. Hospital corners. He looked back up and met Snape's irritated frown.

"Pseudo-something paratactic ward. The one at your house – other people'll find it eventually. They'll come looking for you too."

"I can't think why anyone would bother." He rummaged in his left cuff and pulled out his wand, then, closing his eyes for a second, gripping the wand at his waist: "Finite incantatem. There. Gone." Gone. "Did you want anything else?"

"No. I don't think so. That's – I'm going to go." He bit the bullet. "It's just I don't think I'll make it past the Dementors yet. I want to use your bed. To sleep."

Snape, his expression as blank and cool as it could ever become, took a small sideways step from the door and gestured. He didn't stay.

Harry took his shoes off and sat on the bed, his legs stretched in front of him. He thought of the chain of minuscule chances that had put him there, the precarious right he had to imagine Snape lying under these same blankets, and steeled himself to collapse gently onto the pillow. Once down, it seemed pointless not to burrow his cheek and nose against it. It smelled clean and scented, as other people's bedlinen often does when we don't know their smell as intimately as we know our own. Harry scissored his legs out and took a lungful of breath. He slept.

"But the defence syllabus is ridiculous." Snape is breathing smoke into his mouth. "We'll leave school and go to Azkaban. No one'll look for us there."

Harry curls into him on the bed, slips a hand in his cuff. "What will we do for lunch?" He pulls Snape's hand to his mouth, drags on the cigarette.

Harry smiles. "What point is there to this endless obfuscation?" He leans forward but aims badly, and kisses Snape half on the chin. "Should I stay?"

There was an arm reaching across him. Harry grabbed for it: "Should I stay?" He almost shouted it, then they both let go suddenly. Harry blinked away the remnant of his dream.

Snape had his wand out. "They're here," he whispered through clenched teeth, bending into Harry's face. "You've brought them here. Get up!"

Harry kicked his way out of the blankets. "Patronus!" Where the hell was his wand? "Use your patronus!"

"Right." The wand had rolled from his sleeve and become caught in the sheet tuckings. He dug it out with his fingers and made for the door.

Condensation clung to the walls, and the lumos lanterns guttered in the outer room. The Dementors must be outside on the stairs. They couldn't see Snape, they were here for him. Harry had to send them way back up into the tower, and not for his own sake.

He dragged his bare feet across the floor of the study, slowing and hunching at each step, closed his fingers round the door handle, too weak to grip. The door opened a crack and a ragged black corner of a Dementor's shroud drifted in.

The stag did not so much spring from his wand as wobble like a newborn, but the tiniest contact seared at the Dementor's bony claw and sent it shrieking back. The first, then the second, then the third. They cascaded away like swimmers, and Harry, who could not afford a look back, crawled up the endless stairs to the buttress and the rock.

"Get the crème fraiche out of the fridge, would you?" She took a knife from the drawer by her hip and began slicing into a large yellow tart. "Do you think that's the effect of the Dementors?"

"Thanks." The lid came off with a creak and a snap. "Pissed off to be there, or pissed off that you found him?"

He hadn't wanted to talk about Snape at all. He'd even stuck to his plan to lie – Snape wasn't there, or he was there the first day, gone the next – composing himself behind the oak tree in their front garden for a good five minutes. Then Hermione and Ron had stood at the open door, and he'd blushed like a wanker in the face of her omniscient squint.

"Doesn't look like it. I don't think he's too enamoured of our lot." Our lot. Even as he said it, Harry was aware of the subtle dissociation.

"It might be better if he swallowed it, though." Hermione looked at him out of the corner of her eye as she dolloped the cream onto three slices of tart. "The trial starts in two days. I don't think we've got enough to exonerate him."

For a moment Harry stared at the taps. "He was on our side," he said. And that time, he meant it.

Hermione put a hand over his on the edge of the sink. It felt odd – not big enough to offer any real comfort – and Harry pulled his own hand away. "Can I get myself a glass of water?"

"It doesn't smell of anything!" Hermione shot a look at Harry, eyes round and head shaking.

Harry's glass clattered against the tap. Hermione made as if to reach out again, then stopped herself.

There was no talk of Snape or of Ginny over pudding. They sat round the little dining table in Ron and Hermione's two-up two-down, Ron all elbows as he used to be in the Great Hall, though more tastefully dressed these days. There was talk of Quidditch, of the joke-shop trade, of jumpers, Christmas plans, an awful cup of tea Ron had been given at the last Ministry Spouses meet and greet, and finally of the Malfoys.

"Do you ever see them in the canteen?" Ron was using the tines of his fork to rake together the last bits of cream.

"Finch-Fletchley's other half says he's had all his hair cut off. Wears it in a quiff or something."

"I've seen Draco a couple of times, though, trailing around after Junior Minister Clearwater."

"God." Ron put down his fork with a clank. "He must think all his Christmases have come at once."

"No-o! Obviously. I only mean that he's done pretty well considering. Being assigned to Penny Clearwater. Better than Azkaban, I mean. Which is where he should be."

"Yes, dear." He nudged Harry with an elbow. "Don't get much of that round here. You all right, mate? You look a bit peaky."

He found himself cornered in the kitchen again, as the plates were cleared away, this time by Ron.

"You look like a deer in headlights. Look." Ron put one hand on his shoulder and pointed with the other at the kitchen window.

Harry saw two pale faces side by side, hovering over the black reach of the Granger-Weasleys' back garden. He looked at his own reflection, lower by an inch or two, his wide dark eyes almost obscured by the unfortunately perennial specs, and swiped at the cowlick over his forehead.

"All this reparation and renewal stuff. I don't know why she's on at me about it. Unless –" Ron turned to look at him with large and apprehensive eyes, and Harry felt his shoulders bunch reflexively. "Oh god. I'm not getting a probationer, am I?"

Harry breathed out, his stomach boiling a little, then he thought about it and had to laugh.

"Yeah. A hardened Death Eater, hundreds of Unforgiveables under his belt, all because of his thwarted childhood dream of working in the joke shop trade."

"Well. Yeah. Why not? Think about it. Explosive spells, semi-legal potions," Ron warmed to his theme, "disguising charms."

"Plus it's very profitable. Short hours, except for Halloween. Come to think of it – come and work with us!" He stopped drying his cup and turned to peer straight into Harry's face. "It'd be brilliant – we'd sort you out. George'd be over the bloody moon!"

Harry laughed half-heartedly into the washing up water. "I'll think about it." He fumbled up a plate.

Ron nudged him in the upper arm, and the plate hit against the side of the sink. "Sorry, mate. She's convinced you're still after Ginny. She's a bit slow on the uptake there. I've told her there's about as much chance of that as there is of Malfoy carrying on the family name, but I don't think she caught my drift."

Despite his stated intention of leaving Snape alone, and Ron's flattering job offer, the next morning – which happened to be the morning of the day before the day of the trial – Azkaban drew him back. Snape insisted that he didn't care about the outcome; Harry, who had poured two-thirds of his depressant into Snape's wastebasket, abruptly lost his temper.

"Well I do care." He watched Snape stalk from the bedroom end of the study to the outer door with no apparent intention. "There must be something we can use to prove – look, stop –"

Harry clenched his fists. "If you're so keen on punishment for the people who deserve it, then surely the same goes for you – the opposite I mean. People need to know what really happened."

Snape whirled round, with an almighty crack of his robes and a look on his face that effectively made up for a full five years of having nothing to terrorize. "Surpassingly stupid."

Harry marched over to where he stood and stopped just short of jabbing a finger into his chest. "Well fine. I'm stupid. And you – are a bloody hypocrite."

For a second or more they stared at each other. Fury washed around in Harry's veins before ebbing into a confused crossness. Snape looked to the side, showing Harry the jawbone he'd been about to punch a moment or two ago.

"What exactly do you imagine there could be? And if there had been anything, do you suppose I could have remained alive?" Snape elbowed past him and strode to the desk. He stabbed the quill into the inkwell and began to write.

When he shoved the page of parchment into Harry's chest, it crumpled between their hands, and for a moment their fingers tangled and hooked. Snape pulled away and drew his hand up his sleeve.

By the time Harry had folded the parchment up and stuck it in his pocket, Snape was sitting in the chair by the desk. His forearms rested on his legs, hands hanging lax.

"Do you? That is certainly more than I had hoped for." It was definitely intended as an insult, though towards whom was less clear.

Snape looked at the floor. He appeared sapped of something – anger, maybe, or comfort. Harry imagined his hand on Snape's arm – which sensation it might provoke, and whether it would be too small and ridiculous to work either way.

He stood and made an odd fluttering gesture with one hand, while the other one gripped the desk. "As you wish, Potter. It's all the same to me."

For the next hour, Harry watched Snape work at his concordance, though slowly and with many pauses and losses of place. By the time lunch came whisking through the door, the atmosphere in the room had grown so portentously frigid and gloomy that he felt compelled to ask for a dose of depressant.

"That is what they term Muggle wit." Snape chewed his bacon roll with a lofty expression. "I believe it was my father's humorous response to the fact that there was a surviving pureblood great great grandfather-in-law at the time of my birth. He little realised how appropriate it would turn out to be."

"Potter, I am ancient. And at all events I've long beaten any odds that might have been laid on my life expectancy at your age."

Snape's face went flat, as if he were considering the benefits of vomiting the sandwich back up again. "I prefer mine."

"You surprise me." Harry scrunched up the tinfoil his own sandwich had been wrapped in. The heavy, seedy taste of egg sat on the sides of his tongue. He considered the apple that sat in the corner of the Tupperware box, coated with crumbs.

He found that he was doing something he tried to avoid doing these days for more reasons than he could enumerate. He was thinking about his parents.

Eventually the question that seemed determined to colonise his insides to the exclusion of all else choked its way out.

It didn't seem as momentous a question to Snape, although he laid his kiwi fruit carefully down and wiped his fingertips on his robe. "What stuff?"

That provoked a sneer. "I take it you are referring to certain memories to which you may have been privy."

"If they are memories I have released I can hardly be expected to know anything about them. And what makes you think they were intended for you?"

Harry blushed, remembering Snape's hand clutching the front of his robe, his terrified eyes. All he'd wanted to do at the time was pull away and run. Not for you, he reminded himself, gaping at his shoes.

For a moment Snape stared at him, then his jaw twitched and he looked away at the wall, grimacing. "Don't answer that."

Harry swallowed. "Did you love my mother?" He could hear his pulse beating in his voice.

Snape's mouth stayed tight shut for a very long time, then his chest filled slowly. "Some people have very little to love, Potter. They may – keep hold –" his eyes narrowed slightly, "longer than is strictly rational."

"I learnt to develop more appropriate interests." He crossed his legs, staring fixedly at the wall. "For the most part."

"But I saw you reading her letter. That was just after – that was sixth year."

Snape flinched a little. "If your pusillanimous little allusion is to an event I have considerably less difficulty acknowledging than you do, then I had just murdered my only friend. I believe I was entitled to a little emotional outpouring."

"And you, you little prick, chasing after me, wand half-cocked." He glared at Harry, then, and Harry felt the most almighty surge of relief.

"I'm sorry – about that." Harry gave in to his urge to reach forward, just as Snape reared backwards to re-cross his legs. His hand landed on a half-peeled clementine – which was just as well, because he didn't have much idea what he would have done with it if it had connected with Snape. "I'm sorry about a lot of things."

Snape looked at him from under his brows, as if there were a pair of glasses on his nose, some distorting barrier. He didn't look precisely angry, more curious.

Minerva McGonagall left the witness chair tight-lipped. There was no good way to spin it. Was Severus Snape proven to be a Death Eater? Yes. Did Severus Snape cast the Killing Curse on Former Headmaster Dumbledore? Yes. Did Severus Snape allow such and such and such abuses on the pupils of Hogwarts Academy during the academic year 1997 to 1998? Yes, yes and yes.

Harry forgot all talk of sides and imagined the possibility of pulling her hat off and hitting her on the chin. He gave her a death stare as she passed his bench, but she withstood it with her typical reserve. She hated Snape. Even if she believed in his role in the war, she still hated him. Harry wondered if she'd hated him at school, when he'd been just a rather odd boy in her Transfiguration class. The kind of instinctive gut-deep hatred that can't be shaken off, even after years of penance. That was a thought that gave him no comfort at all, and it niggled at him all the way down the corridor.

He went to see Director Shacklebolt, who was in with Hermione and a table full of open files. When he walked in the door, she closed as many as she could reach, leaning half across the table palms flat and fingers spread, as if he'd interrupted a game of twister. Shacklebolt merely sat back in his enormous padded chair and looked exhausted.

"They're asking the only ones available to them, Potter. You brought us the evidence yourself."

Shacklebolt held up a hand. "And however much we may wish to, we can't acquit a known Death Eater without a scrap of hard evidence. Not even on your say-so."

Harry's instinct to storm out exerted itself, and he was at the door when something occurred to him. He stuck a hand in his pocket and pulled out a letter.

"This," he said, holding it out. Shacklebolt took it and read. Hermione left her files and peered over his shoulder, her eyes narrowing and her cheeks sucking into her teeth. Harry faltered. "It's – Justin found it in –" He winced. Wholly unbelievable.

Director Shacklebolt laid the bogus letter on his desk and smoothed over it with the heel of one large square palm. Hermione gawped at Harry. He let his eyes drift out of focus so he couldn't see what she was mouthing at him.

The temperature in Snape's quarters had gone haywire. Snape sat at the desk, in a white shirt and black waistcoat and trousers. The shirt-sleeves were rolled loosely and creased, as if they had been hauled up and down several times. His harassed expression had seemed to set hard when Harry had stumbled through the door and fallen into the armchair.

Ten minutes later it had not lifted. He was shuffling through the books on the desk; Harry found himself staring at Snape's pale forearms.

When Snape turned, Harry tried a smile he did not quite feel. He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a small cardboard packet. "I thought we could sit out on the rock and have a cigarette." The muscles round his mouth fluttered uncertainly.

If Harry found it hard to name the hope that he held in his hand with the cigarette packet, it was not because he didn't know exactly what it was. It was a hope that not even the Dementors and the depressant potion had quite snuffed, and it had nothing to do with the trial.

"I don't smoke." A bewildered look, as if that were the only element of Harry's suggestion that could be comprehended far enough for a response.

"What on earth brings you to that conclusion? Have you been investigating my fingers?"

Harry hoped he wasn't blushing. "I saw your pensieve. When you were at school – you and another boy in the dormitory."

Snape turned back to the desk and put the book he was holding on top of a stack, squaring off the corners carefully with his forefingers. His shoulders lifted and settled sharply.

"No, I don't remember. I may, however, have my suspicions." He glanced at his cloak, hanging over the door of the cupboard, and looked away again. "I'll have one of those cigarettes, Potter."

It was a fuck of a stroll for a smoke. By the time they climbed out onto the rock, Harry was wheezing from what felt like a thick layer of ice in his lungs, but the day was bright and sheer, and the sea glittered. He scrambled on his hands, feet and backside over a metre of ground to sit leaning against the buttress.

Snape was standing looking out to sea. Robeless, he looked thinner. The sun shone through the cotton of his shirt lining his arms and the bones of his elbows. Harry pulled the cigarettes out of his pocket again. He put one in his mouth and it stuck instantly to his drying lower lip.

"Incendio," he whispered. The second lungful made his head buzz. "You want one?"

Snape came and sat on the buttress, one knee perilously close to knocking against Harry's shoulder. Harry lit his cigarette for him and passed it back, not turning to look, but feeling it pulled from between his fingers. There was the hum of an exhale behind him.

"Naturally. Just as I would never suspect you of entertaining a liaison with anyone other than a clean-living Quidditch-trained Gryffindor girl." There was more than a nod towards sarcasm, but it did not stop the hairs standing up on the back of Harry's neck.

With a series of infinitesimal jerks and a deliberateness that felt like it was straining at every ligament in his neck, Harry inclined his head, until it brushed against the knee to his side. The knee twitched.

The wool of Snape's trousers was rough against Harry's cheek. The tiniest sweep of a fingertip against his forehead, tickling at the edge of his scar. He stared at the horizon and put the cigarette to his mouth. Inhale. Exhale. The sudden impatient tug of his prick.

"Flit–" he swallowed, "Flitwick found me once in sixth year with Simon Careslow."

If it hadn't been for varied looks of horror on Snape's face, Harry would swear he'd imagined what came next.

He felt like he'd been hit over the head with a malleus curse. He hung on Snape's neck all the way back from the circular room to the study and through to the bedroom, where his sight gradually unfuzzed and his hearing began to pick up more than a swarming white noise.

He sat on the bed, listing to one side. He thought of lying back, or being pressed into the coarse springiness of the blanket.

The dark haze that was Snape drifted a little further away. "Congratulations. You may yet be the next Dark Lord."

The haze moved around in the corner of the bedroom. "Surely you mean 'imperio shut up'?"

Was he trying to be funny? The room tilted a fraction and Harry lolled back onto an elbow. "That was illegal even before."

Harry blinked at him, and Snape came slowly into focus, rummaging in the top drawer of a small chest. "What's the matter?"

"Not a thing." When he turned, he had a long white smock pegged between thumbs and forefingers. "I thought you'd probably need to – recuperate – again." He was staring at the wall over Harry's head with a look of intense concentration.

"Thanks." Harry took hold of the bottom of the nightshirt and, when Snape finally let go, bunched it into his lap.

Neither of them moved for longer than was comfortable. Then Snape waved his hand loosely in the air, still eyeing the wall.

"Yes!" In among the folds of nightshirt, Harry's fist clenched a little. He gritted his teeth. Snape had always brought out his less promising, adolescent aspects. The Hufflepuff in him flinched at acting on a tiny mishmash of ancient and somewhat private memories, but there was another side that thought of this very nightshirt tucked around Snape's sides as he slept. Harry's erection twitched eagerly.

But Harry's hand shot out and closed on a sparsely fleshed knuckle of wrist. His sight sharpened in time to see Snape's mouth close and stretch into a very Snapelike grimace.

It was with a sudden and contrary hopelessness that he managed to force out the word "Stay."

Harry wanted to kiss, but Snape kept his face just out of striking distance. He sat, knees primly together, pointing off the bed towards the door, but one hand lay on Harry's side and the other touched and petted compulsively at his hair, threading it through fingers and smoothing it back in a way that felt awkward and unflattering. Harry reached forward and laid a hand on the waistcoat, at the point below which must have been Snape's ribs, and shivered. With the briefest glance upward, he shifted closer and lined his body against Snape's, opening his mouth against the cotton at his shoulder.

His fingers went to the buttons down Snape's front, and the hand that was not suddenly clenching in Harry's hair fell onto the blanket. The waistcoat was easier than it looked, even with dry approximate fingers, and it hung from Snape's shoulders while Harry ran his knuckles down the shirt underneath, pressing thin cotton against thin flesh. He was absorbed in the tiny outcrop of a nipple when a hand grabbed at him.

His own hand was forced downwards and held against the warm hardness of Snape's crotch. It shifted minutely, shockingly, under Harry's palm. Harry's immediate instinct was to tear at something, do something, get closer, but the shirt was stronger than it looked and only tugged sideways over Snape's shoulder. His arm was slapped away. Snape took hold of Harry's own shoulders and forced him down onto the bed. Then they kissed.

Harry opened his mouth eagerly – too wide, he knew – pressed the body of his tongue against Snape's, felt his teeth pressing lightly in the thin cushion of Snape's lip. For a few moments, his body was beguiled into stillness, centred in the sucking broth of the kiss, then a hand brushed at his hip and he began to kiss harder, shorter, to struggle and press for more.

"Clothes," he managed, then, amazingly, Snape was on his back, mouth open, and he – Harry Potter, despised Gryffindor and inept potioneer – was clambering on top, giddy with lust and surprise.

The shirt pulled off from the hem upwards. Snape lifted his shoulders from the blanket to help its transit, and unbuttoned the cuffs while Harry straddled him to pull off his own jumper and t-shirt as a single garment, with a series of clumsy jerks and rips.

The jumper-shirt landed on the floor and slid into a corner. They looked at each other.

Snape was white and thin, all dipping bones and furrows and – so much smoother than Harry had imagined. Only one tiny diagonal scar on his abdomen that looked stitched, not cursed. Smooth as silk, white as parchment. It was too cold to stare long, so Harry measured his breath out to give himself time, then laid himself gently down so they were chest to chest.

"Oh, this is ridiculous –" If Snape had been any less breathless, it might have given Harry pause.

"Shut up," he said instead and pushed his own hips down, his bound prick crushing into glorious, glorious hardness. "Shut up." He curved his back and pressed a sucking kiss onto a shoulder, the top of a pectoral, a nipple. The noise Snape made did not qualify as talking.

Fred had once taught him a charm for "the smooth removal of restricting garments in romantic emergencies", but it had left Harry's head completely. He shoved a hand between them and groped around for the fastening of Snape's waistband, and when Snape breathed hard through his nose and twitched restlessly up at his scrabbling fingers, Harry thanked Merlin for his sudden memory lapse.

Trousers were tugged down, then underwear; thighs slid together. Harry was drunk on the power of lying on top, the not-quite-painful combat of his prick against Snape's, drunk with the strange softness of that thin pale body under his hands and belly and legs. He craned for another kiss, tongue half out, blearily missed his target and, toppling sideways, found himself pincered round the upper arms and as good as flung onto his back.

He stretched himself out as best he could, his feet cramping and tangled in trousers, and clamped a hand on Snape's buttock. Too close already. And however ridiculous, Snape was going at it with a vengeance, Harry's right leg clasped between his thighs, his teeth digging mercilessly, brilliantly, at Harry's collarbone, his hand stroking and clutching and twisting at Harry's cock, both of them breathing in time with it, like they were trying to inflate Azkaban's only lifeboat. Other fingers fluttered their way between his legs to stroke drily at the crease of his arse and he jolted with pleasure, choking on air, an inch from coming.

Snape did stop – long enough that Harry opened his eyes, and got a mouthful of fingers. He sucked hard, insinuating, felt Snape's head knock against his shoulder. Then the fingers were gone, were back at his arse, pushing, pushing, stretching, in.

Snape did, with tongue and teeth and long miraculous nose, hair dragging in both their mouths, and Harry's amazement was lost in the sudden flip and surge in his balls and the vague knowledge that he was too far gone to pull himself back. He stretched and grasped and pulled at flesh, articulating a rhythm that took him too far too fast.

A high sound he afterwards hoped never to remember, and he was coming, jerking and twitching, panting, sweating, pushing up chest to chest. Second after second his orgasm beat out of him, until finally it softened and dragged, and Harry opened his eyes, his lungs scoured, his heart galloping all over the room.

Snape's hand stopped and peeled away. He wiped his fingers on Harry's hip. "That was quick."

"Fuck me anyway," Harry panted, consonants blurring, beyond embarrassment. "Fuck me anyway."

Snape fucked him, carefully at first, his face buried in the crook of Harry's neck when his prick nudged inside, as if he was ashamed. Then it stripped away, and his hands pinned and tugged, and Harry jostled him higher, deeper, with his shoulders under Snape's arms. Snape's mouth smeared over Harry's face, hot breath punching at his ear, in his mouth.

Snape clamped a hand on his face in the area of his mouth; the ends of his fingers dabbled against Harry's tongue, and Snape fucked him harder, harder, scratching and pinching, and his hair whipped against Harry's chin and cheeks.

He came with a grunt and a sigh but no words, curved like a thin silver fish, and Harry squeezed his eyes shut, grinning and grinning.

It had grown so cold that only a warming charm kept their mingled sweat from freezing and fusing them together. They lay under the blanket, touching at the side and at their crossed thighs. Harry's hand curled in the shallow valley of Snape's chest – almost an embrace.

He tried to fix everything in his mind: the conical candle holders that made shadows like eyes on the ceiling; an ink well on the chest of drawers, dabbled with ink, its quill slanted away, feather filaments gathered in greasy clumps; the pair of boots, tripping over one another against the chair legs, buttony fastenings splayed.

Snape coughed and Harry looked up at him. After the fact, his expression seemed to want to resume its blankness, maybe wipe out his ignominious stumble into carnality. But he lay with his mouth open and his eyes on the ceiling, and a certain hard set to his jaw seemed missing.

Snape shifted and looked to the side. "That's an illusion. This body with another mind in it would be unmarked and trading contraband potions out of Knockturn Alley, and you'd despise it as much as you ought to."

It didn't feel like an illusion. Harry ran a fingertip along Snape's rib, felt the flicker of movement in the surface of the skin as Snape's breathing stuttered and smoothed. It felt like an action of body, not mind.

"If you saw a memory again – watched it in a pensieve I mean – would it have the same effect as remembering it?"

The key slid into the lock first time, and Harry watched as the little granite basin rose up from the bed of the split pensieve.

Harry was thrown back into the Headmaster's study, tripped over his feet and lurched back, breathing hard. He put a hand in his robe pocket and closed his fingers over the little glass bottle. He hadn't thought this through at all – reminding Snape of that boy he'd clearly been so happy with, who only died a couple of years ago. What an idiot.

A nice surprise, he'd thought – a little taste of the things that had made him happy. Maybe even ultimately something to tempt him back out of his prison.

Harry jumped and turned. Even though he recognised the voice, his hand was up his sleeve for the wand before he could stop himself.

"Ah no. Not any more." Even in the dimness of the unlit study, Harry could pick out the portrait's wistful expression. Watery blue eyes fixed on him. "Well, my boy?"

Harry opened his mouth to lie, hand grasping the incriminating bottle, before realising how futile that would be. "Alive," he said instead. "Annoyed." Dumbledore smiled. "You were wrong, by the way."

"Yes." Harry remembered it now, and remembered to be annoyed himself. "He didn't want to be found at all."

"He was furious. He won't even consider coming back – he'd rather be miserable there than miserable here." He looked over at the dark little pensieve, the lock in the wall. "And it took me forever to find that bloody key."

Dumbledore nodded. It was the same nod he always used to use when he was pretending to give weight to anything Harry said. Immediately before blowing it out of the water. "Ah, but consider, Harry –" nothing if not true to form, "how you struggled with the ward at his house."

"Think how he can walk in and out of his hiding place and never be found. Not by his gaolers and not by his seekers. Until now, of course."

The portrait smiled patronisingly at him, and as Harry stared at it, something almost slid into place, then slid straight out again. He stared so long that Dumbledore's eyes ratcheted shut behind his spectacles and he dropped off. Manners apparently counted for nothing when you were a portrait, and clarity had certainly never counted for anything with the sainted Albus Dumbledore.

A cold wind blasted out of the passage under the buttress, and Harry wrapped his cloak tighter around him. As he padded down the steps, blood retreated inwards from Harry's extremities until only his heart felt hot – a hard little coal kicked out of the fire into a pile of snow.

The circular room was full of a whispering that trickled, icily burning, over the skin and seemed to strip it away from the bone. Harry trudged forward towards the doorway that led down to the bowels of the castle and Snape. The whispers became shouts, the spit and snap of fire and the darker crackle of curses. Before he was halfway across the room, his head was beginning to roll heavily on his neck, and his knees turned rubbery, bending and giving way till he was so low to the ground, he felt he might as well crawl. Dark wisps of cloth seemed to float around the edge of his vision.

Four feet to the doorway… three. Was this it? His legs had turned to stone. He began to collapse forward bit by bit, faintly stretching fingers inside the sleeve of his cloak for his wand. From somewhere underneath him there was a clinking sound and a small glass bottle rolled out, under his chest, teetered for a second in the doorway, then clink clink – down the stairs. Harry pushed himself towards the stairs, reaching out for the bottle, until he was hanging over the top step himself, confused and swaying like a deadweight. Then his centre of gravity settled forward and tugged him down.

He fell for ever, the air startled out of his lungs, stairs cracking against his spine, knees, head. When he landed, it was with his cheek pressed into fragments of broken glass. One shoe had been torn off and his chest and thigh felt damp. Many metres above his head a few wispy strands of happiness were suddenly obliterated in a swarm of sucking, clawing ghouls. He levered himself carefully to a sitting position, a bolt of pain in his left wrist when his fingers touched the ground. He found he could stand, just, hunched and bleeding. Severus, he thought, a crazy dream of kindness and tea in his head, and just enough clarity to realise how addled he must be.

"Expecto patronum," he croaked, and the effort made him stagger. Fuck. The floor bowed up towards him. Concentrate. Snape's hand in his hair. "Expec–" Snape's fingers in his mouth. "Expecto patronum!"

The stag shimmered out, snorted once, skewered the Dementor on an antler, and carried it shrieking off up the stairs. Harry fell forward through the doorway.

Books were scattered in a wide arc, ink dripped from the table edge, the desk chair had tipped onto its ladder back. A small white Tupperware box lay upturned at the foot of the armchair. Snape, who no longer had a patronus, was not there.

Harry limped into the bedroom. The blankets were tight and smooth on the bed, hospital corners; only one flat little pillow sat at his feet in the doorway. Harry picked it up and put it back on the bed.

The Macnair trial concluded with a verdict of guilty on several counts of miscellaneous death eating, and a small amount of family property was confiscated. His son, Gavin, a fifth-year Slytherin, basked in the notoriety and became briefly an it-boy, featuring prominently in the gossip pages of The Quibbler. Macnair's widow, whom no one had met before, but who sat on the benches at the trial in a black headscarf and was far more beautiful than anyone had any right to expect, moved to Spain.

Mrs Winifred Pettigrew did not move anywhere, but found that her best neighbours did not hold any of it against her. Her treasured knitting circle remained unbroken, and her friends still came over for her fabled Victoria sponge, although many of them resorted to the tactic of switching off their hearing charms when she told the story again of how her Peter had died saving Harry Potter's life, in the end.

The last Death Eater trial – that of Severus Snape, former headmaster of Hogwarts and rumoured spy – trundled finally to a conclusion.

"I realise that. It was a posthumous trial anyway." She looked down, and wavered doubtfully in the fire. "Sorry, that was insensitive."

Harry squinted at her, and wondered if she knew quite how insensitive it was. Not that it mattered in the slightest. In the end a little rush of hope and possibility drove him down to the court.

The room was packed as it hadn't been even for most of the live trials. Harry sat at the back, and two minutes spent scouring the benches, ignoring Dean Thomas waving frantically at him from the spectators' gallery opposite, was enough to demonstrate that his hope was misplaced. It was hard to imagine what sort of disguise someone like Snape might choose, that might conceal any of his utterly distinct parts. No. Of course he wasn't there. It was a posthumous trial.

The crowd shifted and muttered. Ron, who had arrived earlier and was sitting next to Bill, turned in his seat and frowned at Harry. It made no difference. He spun back round as the presiding entered and court officials stood. It was Junior Minister Clearwater, in heavy academic robes, thick-rimmed spectacles and hair scraped into a knot. So much Ron's type that she could have been assembled from parts.

Harry's heart hung leaden in his chest. He looked at his shoes while the jury shuffled and settled.

Penelope's eyes and lips thinned alarmingly. She huffed through her nose like a horse. "Very well. You're the jury." Another throat clearing. "In the matter of Severus Snape's alleged allegiance with and crimes on behalf of Thomas Riddle, one count of murder, three counts of the use of Unforgiveable curses, how do you find the deceased?"

"Fine." She palpably rolled her eyes. "Severus Snape is hereby posthumously exonerated of all charges. This court further acknowledges the petition of members of the Auror Office that his case be passed to the Order of Merlin Scrutiny Committee."

As the hammer landed with a morose thud, Harry's gaze found Hermione in the seat usually reserved for Kingsley Shacklebolt. She was smiling.

Harry was first out of the door at the back of the courtroom, and ran her down halfway to the office.

"The letter?" He panted, one fist still clutched in the loose fabric of her robe.

She grinned at him. "I know! I was totally against it at first, but if the Subdepartment really are stupid enough to verify it, then who am I to argue?" She put a hand on Harry's arm. "I knew you'd be pleased."

Harry remembered how he'd looked at her hand in the kitchen and felt it too small to offer any real comfort. He felt guilty and suddenly awfully miserable, and forced the muscles round his mouth into a tight, uncomfortable smile.

"Don't let it boil. A gentle rolling simmer, okay? It mustn't reduce. Three clockwise stirs if it starts to separate."

The kitchen door swung shut behind Ron, and Harry returned to the paper. The ads that Hermione had circled were a combination of entry-level ministry jobs on the diplomatic side, and charity work.

Do you have what it takes to work with disadvantaged young goblins in a variety of settings? You will need a sense of humour and long or extendable arms –

He glanced up and out of the kitchen window. Hermione was bent over the wide crescent rose bed halfway down the garden with a pair of secateurs. He watched Ron swagger up to her and slap her on the backside, jolting her forward a bit in shock, but probably not surprise, he thought. The exchange of views that followed was muffled by the window and the inevitable tussle of arms and faces. The secateurs were dropped, and they edged, apparently by instinct, towards the little holly nook behind the shed.

They'd be a few minutes at least. Harry turned back to the picture he'd had to cover up with an awkward crunchy flap of the page when Ron walked in.

Snape in the portrait slept, in white, black and dark grey gouges of newsprint gouache. His head tilted forward just slightly, mouth open, strings of hair hanging like plumb-lines from his forehead. It was the ugly waxy sleep of a paralysed nightmare, not like Dumbledore's easy doze when he'd first appeared in the headmaster's office. If Harry looked long enough, would he wake up? And if he went to visit Headmaster Weasley to discuss that Defence job, would it look strange if he spent the entire time staring at the wall?

There was no movement even of breathing. When he first saw the picture in the Prophet this morning, Harry had had a minute or so of wild, almost euphoric speculation – the portrait didn't move – that meant… didn't it? Much like the hope that piped up when his head had cleared enough to reflect on the empty Azkaban quarters. But perhaps it would be just like Havelock Baddesley to pinch a body and paint its portrait.

Two visits to Spinner's End, that he'd desperately tried to resist, had turned up nothing more than his own loosely strung warding charm in the kitchen, and he'd lain on the stairs until all four limbs had gone completely dead.

He became aware of a muddy belching noise over his shoulder, and a familiar sinking feeling of the stomach and spirit. He got up quickly; his chair staggered a foot across the kitchen floor. If Ron was hoping to tempt him into the family business, a love potion – a potion of any colour – was not the way to go about it.

It definitely looked like boiling. Little lumps. Was that separating? Where was the ladle? How could he be expected to stir clockwise without a ladle – was he going to use his arm?

"Reducio." The potion flattened. "Caldius." It frothed instantly, swelling to the top of the cauldron. For fuck's sake. What was wrong with gas anyway?

Ron didn't answer. Harry turned. No one there. When he turned back a large bird was fluttering over the cauldron. Its tail trembled in the air an inch above the seething potion.

It settled on the utensil rack, so softly that the ladle didn't even – there was the ladle – the ladle didn't even shudder. But it wasn't Fawkes. Its head bobbed up and down, looking from the potion to Harry and back again, and its beak was longer, more hooked; it didn't have the same bleeding heart eyes. It looked more – disparaging.

"Hello." Harry reached up, a finger out hopefully. The phoenix picked a couple of steps away along the rack and cocked its head. A step further, deliberately, gently, until it was in line with the window. The sun slanted through it and it glimmered, translucent, silver-white.

Harry and the bird stared at each other. It tapped its foot impatiently. Harry's pulse chased up his throat. Snape, who doesn't have a patronus.

"Fuck!" He rushed to the window. Ron and Hermione were trudging back up the garden, Hermione running a hand over her hair, and stretching the smile back out of her lips. He craned forward, looking past them. No one there. Too slow.

Over the cauldron, the phoenix was already evaporating. "Wait!" he gasped, and even as it disappeared, its eyes seemed to roll upwards in disgust.

Then – of course! Surely. Antidotes, blood-clotting spells, false fucking passports. This was Plan C.

The kitchen door opened as he turned away; the love potion foamed over the top of the cauldron and began to drop onto the floor.

He was toeing his shoes on, bent over to do the laces with thick crampy fingers.

Hermione said, "Scandinavia," at the same time that Ron said, "I don't know, I'll get the at– Harry!"

But he was pounding down the hall towards the front door, wand in hand for apparation. There was no point pretending the truth wouldn't be out the second he got back: he'd smile like a wanker, or flush, or there'd be some stupid question he couldn't avoid asking, but right now he was happy – more than happy – to leave them mystified. Just for a bit.

The sun was setting as Harry left the house; it flickered through the bare branches of the hundred-year-old oak. Something seemed to toss and flutter enticingly ahead of him.

1998

I wait for hours, or so it seems, on that damp trunk. The cold, which had carved its way in like teeth when I sat down, has turned to a cottony numbness. I am no stranger to waiting, it is a habitual activity of Muggles and spies, but my foolish desire to let him sleep is at odds with the absolute necessity for us both to disappear – in our several directions – from this place where we've stayed too long.

At last there's a minute rustle and his foot disappears. The yellow light brightens inside the tent. My heart jumps from sleep, and I stand, breaking through the stiffness in my knees. I must do this now. I page through my tiny collection of memories for the right one.

It's been so long since I needed to do this. Her red hair. I think of us in the alley behind her house. I make her laugh – a happiness I've had so little experience of. The snow. The triumphant heat in my chest.

Expecto patronum.

No. The sand under his back. His knee awkwardly bent underneath him. His face grey, ash-strewn. The egg glints between the fingers of his flying gloves. Then he blinks back to life. For a second I think he peers up into the stands. I look away and thank everything under the sun.

Expecto patronum.

The doe jumps from my wand, light as dust, canters about, stretching her legs, then looks back at me. I usher her into the clearing. As she passes the little tent, and arcs away into the trees on the other side, Potter is drawn out, as if they were attached by a magnetic field.

He hesitates, fooled for a moment. I hear the distant murmur of coaxing words. When she begins to trot away, he calls out to her, but she knows where she is going and he is going with her. I knew it would work: the smallest nudge and the boy can't help but grab on and follow.

I stand and watch – flattered, seduced – letting the frost gather on my cheeks, as he trails after her into the trees.

Disclaimer: Harry Potter, Severus Snape and other Harry Potter characters belong to J.K. Rowling, her lawyers, handlers, editors, personal umbrella carrier, pedicurist, and those guys in the suits from the WB. The Snarry Games and its participants want nothing to do with that lot or their money. Okay, we'd take their money, but they aren't offering. Web space doesn't come for free, ya know?

Conjuring Hell	fol. viii	FLAGRANTE will obtain a more subtle excoriation. With three or four seconds of tactile exposure, a sticking of flesh will draw pain, a cleaving of the tongue to the mouth will inhibit complaint. The organs will melt, the stomach will drop burning acid into the gut, the fingers will web, the eyes will weep jelly, the blood will simmer in the vessels.
	fols. 43–44	The wand flourish must be different again. A thrust and tapered serif to the heartside will produce a F. curse with effect of thirty or more days depending on the length of serif and the age and potency of the caster.
	fol. 46	A F. inscribed to the liverside will have unpredic–