Harry woke the next morning stiff and disoriented. He buried his face against the rough wool at Severus' shoulder, wondering wearily if he would stumble through the night in the footsteps of that dream for the rest of his life. He yawned before that thought could start to depress him. Then, with a sigh, he reluctantly rolled away from the comforting warmth next to him and rubbed his bleary eyes. "Time to start another day," he commented softly, deliberately emptying his mind of everything but the next task to be performed.
He ate breakfast without tasting it and checked the wards perfunctorily with a feeling of resignation; it would hardly matter if the Ministry came for him after today, because they would probably find nothing but his husked-out shell lying there beside Severus if he failed. The corner of his lips lifted a little at that image. What ridiculous tale would the Daily Prophet concoct to explain the tableau? "Death Eater Wakes from Enchanted Sleep to Kill Boy Who Lived, then Himself"? "Misfired Spell of Vengeance Transforms Victory to Tragedy"? "Gone Potty: The Dark Lord's Last Victim"? Harry snorted.
But he knew that he did not have much longer. Salazar Slytherin had written of only two such soul journeys in his journal, and then the thin, elegant lines of his tale had come to an abrupt end. Slytherin must have known that like all magic, Soul Wizardry exacted a price; no matter how strong the wizard, there came a time for each when that price became too high, when the body was no longer strong enough to pull the soul back into itself. And then the soul wandered, lost, until the body, dying, released it to the world on the other side of the Veil.
He wondered if that was how Slytherin had died, leaving his body behind to explore magic's mysteries until he had simply slipped through the Veil into that other world. If so, had he left a Will for his once-upon friends to find, lying there on the coverlet besides his still body? Could no one have followed in his footsteps and led him home?
Harry shook his head abruptly. Concentrate, fool, he chided himself.
The journey was easy this time—much, much too easy. He shrugged his body away like old, outgrown clothes and soared ecstatically in the freedom of limitless flight, of complete, effortless control over the harsh, wild wind that surged toward him from the frozen north.
He followed the wind back to its source, to a narrow cobbled street whose name he had whispered back in that room where his body sat unmoving, cradling Salazar Slytherin's journal with slack fingers. He landed next to a dilapidated brick house whose broken windows looked down at him with a toothy, slack-jawed grin. He shivered a little as he took in the decay all around.
The tall chimney of a mill loomed ominously closer as he set off at a brisk pace toward the end of the street. He looked up, startled by a shadow passing over him in this town which seemed to have been abandoned by all living creatures. His eyes followed the flash of glossy black wings as they glided to a perch atop a streetlamp with crackled glass. A large raven with bright, sharp eyes stared straight back at him as if it could see him.
Harry smiled. Well, perhaps it could. Perhaps it was some stray piece of magic, lost and ownerless now, waiting for someone to name it. Waiting...
Harry closed his eyes and then slowly pieced himself out of the shadows of a house that seemed to be held together by nothing more than the memories of a long-past glory. He looked up again, grinned, and flourished a sweeping, elaborate bow.
The raven stared on, unimpressed.
"What, not even a 'nevermore'?" Harry asked whimsically.
The raven's sour look seemed to convey a certain pique at that undignified suggestion.
Harry laughed softly and raised his arm. "Might I request the pleasure of Your Majesty's presence? Perhaps you can convince the house to not eat me alive."
The bird regarded him with its head cocked, as if it were debating whether its dignity would be comprised by accompanying him. But finally, in a near-silent flutter of black wings, the raven floated gracefully from its perch to land on Harry's arm. He smiled in delight and stroked the gleaming black feathers at its breast. "Well, you're a handsome fellow, aren't you? Bet you're keeping me company just because you thought I looked lonely."
The bird looked mollified by that statement, and Harry chuckled. "Well, I assure Your Majesty that your company is much appreciated."
The bird gave him a sardonic look. Harry settled it on his shoulder, where it worried a mouthful of his hair. He turned to face what stood waiting for him at the street's end.
He had never seen it before, this neglected, lightless house which had held so little warmth for Severus in his memories. And yet...and yet...
He wondered what he would find there, in the rooms that Severus had walked first as an unlaughing, grave-eyed child, and then as a bitter, lonely teenager. Was there truly a chance he would find Severus at last in the house where he had been born, which he had hated with the same passion Harry had hated the Dursleys' as a child, but which had somehow compelled him to return, year after year, as a man?
He stopped in front of the door and paused for a moment with his hands hovering above the wards layered there upon wood and iron like an intricate green tapestry. He leaned forward slowly until his forehead rested against the door, smiling at the familiar touch of Severus' magic. He murmured to the wards in the language of the snake upon Severus' door at Hogwarts, yielding to them his name and his purpose, revealing himself and his need. For a moment the house stood as silently as a mausoleum. And then the wards rippled apart in front of him, and the door swung noiselessly inward.
He stepped inside and paused for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust to the gloom. He was standing in a small sitting room, its four walls entirely lined with books. He turned to the nearest shelf. They contained, as nearly as he could tell, an entire legion of books on geography, some in languages he had never seen before. Above them was a bewildering assortment on herbs: herbs used in healing, herbs used in poisons, herbs used in partial transfiguration, herbs used in every type of potion imaginable. At the center of the room were a sofa, an armchair, and a low table, all of them so worn that his Aunt Petunia would have tossed them out decades ago; beyond them were more books on philosophy and astronomy, alchemy, the making of wands, the art of summoning, theories of warding, a collection on magical creatures, and even a shelf full of fairy tales. These books were markedly more innocuous than Severus' collection at Hogwarts, but Harry boggled at the mind that could have accumulated such a collection.
He smiled for a moment, then moved to stand next to the armchair, closed his eyes, and sent tendrils of his magic seeking among the books. There seemed nothing out of the ordinary about the house itself, but it puzzled him. Why would Severus leave his comfortable though austere rooms at Hogwarts for this old house which made even the Dursleys' seem spacious by comparison? What memories could have lured him back to this place which he had so despised?
Harry sighed and shook his head abruptly. The raven on his shoulder, which had been so still that he had almost forgotten it save as a warm, living presence, squawked indignantly at the suddenly movement. Harry smiled, murmuring an apology, and slowly smoothed its ruffled feathers.
"I'm not going to learn anything if I just stand here, hmm?" he commented to his companion softly. The smile faded from his face, and he bit at his lips for a moment before moving forward to the hidden door behind the shelf of books facing the entrance.
The door swung open at his gesture to reveal a dark, narrow staircase. He touched the warm feathers at his cheek for reassurance, then stepped onto the stairs.
He emerged into an equally dark and narrow hallway with doors on either side. He moved to the right and paused with his hand upon the doorknob. Then he took a deep breath, turned the knob, and slowly pushed the door open.
His heart beat a ragged staccato rhythm as he stepped into the room, but nothing moved save for dust motes dancing in the weak morning sunlight streaming in through the windows. He exhaled a long shaky breath. This room was Severus', he realized with a start as he recognized the bed against the wall from Severus' memories. Books also covered this room, but it felt just as empty as the room downstairs. There was nothing of Severus here: no framed wizarding paintings on the desk in front of the window, no scattered scrolls or half-finished parchments, no memoirs of his years as a student or photo albums of bygone days. Even the closet was empty.
He stood in the room's center and stared blankly at the bed, bewildered. Why? He asked himself again. Why come here at all, if it was so obviously not "home" to Severus? Why would he not have been drawn to Hogwarts, if it had been his chosen refuge, his sanctuary?
He slowly backed out and closed the door behind him. Then he turned and walked into the opposite room.
This room was empty of even books, he saw, though it was more comfortably furnished with a worn armchair by the fireplace, a writing desk, rugs that had once been richly colored, a large bed. This room would have belonged to Severus' parents.
He stopped abruptly in front of the life-sized painting hanging above the fireplace. It was the portrait of a man, wearing a formal black suit with a traditional cut. He was standing before a table filled with tubes and beakers and other glassware that looked vaguely like potions equipment, though there was no cauldron. Harry frowned, studying the portrait quizzically, until it dawned on him that the man in the image was a chemist, not a Potions master.
He realized suddenly that he knew that face. Severus had inherited his father's hooked nose and the aristocratic sneer that seemed a trademark of the Snape family. Those fierce black eyes were the same, exactly, but though he had seen them snap with ire or burn with hatred, he had never seen them like this, cold with a basilisk's calculated cruelty. The man in the portrait stood unmoving, one hand resting upon the blackwood table that held the tools of his mastery, his stance that of one accustomed to absolute dominion over all within his domain.
Then he turned. Harry blinked and took one step backwards. Severus' father hadn't been a wizard, so why...?
Someone had captured this man in all his coldness and cruelty in a wizarding painting. Harry's jaw clenched stubbornly. He had come for a purpose, and he would not be deterred by the portrait of a man who had died before he had been born. He deliberately pieced himself out of his magic to reveal himself to the portrait.
The man's reaction was instantaneous; in a second Harry found himself staring at the barrel of the gun which had suddenly appeared in the elder Snape's hand. The man hissed, "How dare you break into my house?"
Harry hesitated, then gave a little bow. "I'm sorry for my intrusion, but I came in search of your son. He is in danger."
The man hissed, not relaxing his stance in the slightest, "You're one of them, aren't you?"
"I am a wizard," Harry responded steadily.
"A wizard!" the man sneered. "And I suppose you think that your magic tricks give you the right to walk into my house uninvited and question me about my son?"
"I..." Harry hesitated.
"You magic-users always think you're so much superior to the rest of the us, but did you know that you're just as vulnerable to ordinary Muggle drugs as the rest of the wretched human race?" the man smiled chillingly.
"You..." Harry choked, hardly believing what he had just heard. "You used drugs on your own son?"
Neville had once mentioned in passing that some substances that were so addictive for those without magic could be as addictive or even more so for wizards. There were magical ways to wean someone away from the addiction, but they were usually much more painful than Muggle methods.
"Oh no," Tobias Snape murmured. "They were much too valuable to be wasted on him. But his mother—oh, she was pathetically easy to control. A pity her talents fell so short." The man continued as Harry stared, "But the bitch never told me about the wand. I could have surpassed Newton, Edison, Einstein, become the greatest scientist in the world. But no, she secreted it away, and gave it to him. Magic," he spat, "wasted in the hands of a mindless child when it should have been mine."
Harry stilled, remembering the only other time he had seen this man, looming with cold menace in Severus' memories. It had haunted him to know exactly what the young Severus would have gone through in that loveless house. But he realized now that he was wrong about this too, that he didn't understand at all what it was like to have your own father look at you with contempt and resentment. Better, even, to have been an orphan...
Harry slowly looked up and raised his wand. "You—you're the one," he whispered, voice gone taut with fury, cutting the other man off mid-tirade. "You're the reason he turned to Voldemort. Because you never gave him any choices to choose. You made him what he was, when you tried to raise a son in your image with so little love and so little understanding. You're the reason for all of it!"
With a whoosh a corner of the portrait ignited with blood-red flame. The man fired the pistol in his hand in a precise, controlled gesture, but the bullet simply disappeared at the surface of the painting. The man tried again, the movement a jolt of incredulity, with no more success this time than the first. Harry stood coldly watching, bitter satisfaction surging through him along with a heady rush of power, as the man slowly retreated from the advancing fire, disbelief plain upon his face.
A sharp nip to his ear broke through the siren duet of power and destruction. He blinked, and the red gauze of fury cleared from his eyes. He saw the man, Severus' father, backed against the far frame of his portrait while crimson flames, irrevocable and unstoppable, reached for him hungrily across the span of the portrait. His elegant blackwood table had already collapsed to the ground, and the shards of delicate beakers mingled with the jewel-toned ghosts of their contents upon the floor.
No, he thought, grappling with his own unreasoning thirst for vengeance. No, it was not true. This man had not been the entire reason. There had been his own father and Sirius, and then Voldemort, Dumbledore, himself—all of them and countless more had touched Severus in some way, had changed him for good or ill. He looked up again at Tobias Snape, gun still raised defiantly, uselessly shooting off round after round, helpless fury and fear glazing the dark eyes he had given to his son. Harry's heart gave a little lurch, and he doused the fire with a small gesture. He turned away, sick to his stomach.
"Your son—" he said softly, after a moment of silence in which he tried unsuccessfully to steady his voice. "When the wizarding world remembers the name of Snape, long after all of us are gone—long after your portrait crumbles into dust, it will be your son's name they will remember. They will remember him for his brilliance, for his unwavering courage and his faultless honor, and they will remember him as the man who was willing to sacrifice everything he had for the Light. And you—you would've been a charlatan even with a wand, because there is no magic that can be a substitute for knowledge. That is what I learned from your son."
And then he turned and walked out of the room, still tasting the acrid stench of the burning portrait in the back of his throat.
He slowly went back down the stairs, one hand reaching up to caress the glossy feathers at his shoulder. "Thank you," he whispered, and the raven brushed warm wings against his fingertips and cawed a word he could not understand. Harry sighed, weariness leaching at his magic until he felt as transparent and powerless as a ghost. But to return now was impossible. To admit defeat...after all the winding roads they had walked to come here, to this moment...
In the sitting room, he turned towards the second door leading to the kitchen. Severus' orderly, precise touch was evident in even this small cramped space, and he smiled unconsciously. Then he saw the secret the pattern of rings upon the floor had hidden, and he pulled it open to see steps descending down into a cool, dark room.
He took each step with deliberate slowness to avoid startling his companion, though his heart dove like a falcon down those steps. The raven, far from being afraid, watched each section revealed by his wandlight with bright curious eyes.
He stepped off the last stair into a room that was almost identical to Severus' workroom at Hogwarts. There were the familiar cauldrons and packets of dried herbs, bottles of potions and ingredients in solution, scales and measuring cups and books.
But Severus was not here; the thick layer of dust upon the tables and floors bore mute testimony to the fact that he had lost his last gamble. He swayed in place, throat locking against the cry that might shake loose all the books from their shelves and rearrange their contents into the language of his despair.
"Why didn't you come back?" he finally murmured hoarsely. "Why didn't you come back? Bastard. Fucking cowardly bastard." He sank to the floor, hands clawing at the ground as if he could etch his pain into the stones. "Severus."
A restless movement out of the corner of Harry's vision startled him. He looked up to see expression stirring in the raven's dark eyes.
And suddenly he thought of a question he had not asked. He reached out gently to touch its mind and was flooded with a mystery as dark as the raven's wings. The raven's black eyes, still, secret with ambiguity, assaulted him with a swirling storm of white memories.