Harry awoke alone in the infirmary. He sat up and stared at the blurred contours of his hands twisting in the folds of his comforter until his eyes burned. An abrupt knocking on the door interrupted his trance. Harry jerked, startled, and hastily reached towards the nightstand beside his bed for his glasses. His clumsily grasping hand bumped against something hard and cool, and he jumped at the loud shattering that resulted.

"Harry!" two voices shouted simultaneously, and he finally managed to put on his glasses with only slightly shaking hands, to see Ron and Madame Pomfrey both hurrying towards him.

"Okay there?" Ron asked worriedly, wand already out in his hand. He quickly used a spell to mend the broken glass and another to clean up the spilt pumpkin juice.

Harry nodded. "Sorry. I knocked it over when I was looking for my glasses."

"Well, that's okay," Madame Pomfrey said soothingly. "I'll ask the elves to bring another. You should eat before you leave the infirmary, Harry. That and rest are the best cures for an overcastting."

"Thank you, I will," Harry promised her, and she left the room.

Ron sat down next to Harry with a wide grin.

"What?" Harry blinked, disconcerted.

"You sure showed them, didn't you?" Ron crowed. "A Death Eater and an Auror under Imperius! Even Shacklebolt was impressed!" He eyed the spread on Harry's nightstand and swiped a tart.

"What? But..." Harry shook his head, confused.

"But nothing! Snape told the Order everything?too bad you had to miss the sour expression on his face?like he'd swallowed picklepeaches whole! Nobody can say you're too young for the Order now!" Ron enthused between bites of his pastry.

"But I...I made a real hash of it, Ron," Harry admitted. "If Snape hadn't been there, I'd probably have been captured or killed."

Ron scoffed. "That's why you always have a partner on a mission. Besides, he only got the Auror under Imperius. You're the one who took care of the Death Eater."

Harry looked down silently, hands twisting again in his comforter. "Ron, I..." He struggled, but could not quite say the words.

"What?" Ron asked, concern now in his voice.

"I...I k-killed him," Harry finally managed, hands clenching into fists in the comforter.

Ron frowned in confusion. "But he was the one you wanted, wasn't he? The bastard who took the elven children? He deserved it, didn't he? You said so yourself."

Harry hunched down further, staring at his fists, at the memory of a hand clutching a cherrywood wand in the moonlight. "I thought that when it was over, when...after I...that I would be glad, you know? But it's not like that. I keep seeing...his—I'm...not...I can't be..."

There was a strange sort of tightness in his chest that hurt when he breathed. He shook with all the words that were trapped within him like a cage full of panicked birds for which he could not find the right key. The silence stretched, and Ron fidgeted next to him, as lost for words as Harry.

"Mr. Potter. If I may have a word."

Neither of them had heard the man enter. Ron squawked like a startled parrot and stood so quickly that his stool fell over with a crash. Harry looked up with wide eyes at the last person he would have expected to visit him in the infirmary.

"Pro-Professor Snape," he stammered, as Snape approached. No matter how hard he tried, trying to read Snape's expression was like trying to read a book of ancient runes without his glasses. He hastily transformed his nervousness and guilty relief at the interruption into a smile for Ron. "I'll come visit you later," he promised.

Ron nodded. "Take care of yourself, mate. And make sure you eat!" He shot Snape a warning glance before going out the door.

Snape ignored him. He stopped a few feet from Harry, piercing him through with an opaque gaze for a long moment. "The Order, as I'm sure Mr. Weasley has already informed you, was quite pleased with our handling of the mission," he said abruptly, without pre-amble.

"Yes." Harry looked down. "I-I don't understand why."

Snape replied in a clipped, precise voice, "We succeeded in what we were trying to do. That is enough for most."

Harry lifted his head abruptly to meet Snape's guarded black eyes. "And yet I was under the impression that you were under orders to report my handling of the situation to the Order," he challenged. "Why you didn't tell them about the way I endangered both our lives and the mission?" He tried to keep all traces of bitterness from his voice, but knew from the sudden hardness that entered Snape's eyes that he had failed.

"Do you imagine me to be so petty?" Snape asked disdainfully.

Harry shrugged, refusing to enter into another verbal sparring match with the Potions master. "You never gave me reason to believe otherwise," he replied, suddenly very tired of the perpetual animosity that lay between them like a snarl of nettles. He reached for his wand on the nightstand to cast a quick time-check spell. It was nearing luncheon, Saturday morning. "Why are you here, Professor?"

Snape scrutinized him with those unfathomable eyes. "Last Rites will be performed this afternoon for the Death Eater that we brought back, Mr. Potter." He turned and walked away, only pausing in the doorway to add over his shoulder, "Do eat your lunch, Potter, unless you wish to have house-elves trailing in your footsteps offering you pastries and sweets."

He sounded like a man speaking with experience, Harry decided as he stared at the empty doorway. And then, as any man with delusions of sanity would when ordered to do so by a mediwitch, his best friend, and an irritable arch nemesis, he turned to the excellent lunch waiting for him on his nightstand and dug in with as much appetite as he could muster.

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He could still recall the Last Rites for the elven children so clearly. It had been raining that day: a steady, murmured symphony of raindrops and shifting leafs filling the silence of the elves as they patiently dug six resting places in the earth for their children a handful at a time. They had told him that one did not cry at the Last Rites, for one did not cry when a life was given back to the forest which sustained them. Harry, watching as the elves entrusted their children back to the earth, could not tell if the tiny rivers that ran down their faces were raindrops or tears. The rain trickling down his own cheeks had tasted of salt.

Only two came to witness the Last Rites of the nameless Death Eater, which took place on a high cliff overlooking the sea. Harry quietly followed Snape into the warded space that contained the Death Eater's body, shrouded now in a long white cloak and laid upon a wooden pyre. Here the salty air was infused with the gentle fragrance of an Eastern incense that reminded him of the elven forests after a thunderstorm. The sea and the sky stretched out in iron-grey uniformity from the coast until they met somewhere beyond the reach of the westerning sun. Below them, waves crashed ceaselessly against glistening black rocks, sending salty foam high into the air.

The Master of Rites, a wizard with long hair and beard as white as his robes, began chanting spells of cleansing and blessing in a clear, unwavering voice. Standing there in silence, Harry reached back into the peace of the deep forest and then deliberately began to recall the memories he had witnessed in the man's mind—

—a small boy lying in a crib, gazing up into his mother's smiling face as she tenderly stroked his golden locks with her fingertips and sang to him a lullaby of the ocean; the boy again, taller now, standing in front of a Christmas tree glowing with sparks of fire, holding embers in his hands like orange blossoms, laughing, "Isn't it pretty?"—and his mother, unsmiling now, something dark and frightening rising from the depths of her wide eyes before she screamed and slapped him. There were men with cold eyes, dressed in black robes with crosses around their necks or in their hands, who prayed over him, held him in freezing water or touched him or beat him to try to exorcise the demons from his body. There were people who muttered his name with distrust, who crossed to the other side of the street at his approach, who taunted him because he could never become one of them. And then there was the woman: black hair falling like silk to her waist, eyes brilliant in an aristocratic, beautiful face, lips lifting in a smile for only him, holding out her hand to lead him into power and knowledge and a new master...

He held each memory for a moment, and then released them back to their owner one by one like snowy doves flying back to their nest.

When the Master of Rites had finished his spells, he turned to Snape and asked softly, "Have you, sir, read this man's Will?"

"I have," Snape responded steadily, his voice seeming to meld into the boom and strum of the waves far below them. "He asked only that his ashes be scattered across the sea."

His mother had loved the sea, Harry remembered as the old wizard raised his staff up to the grey skies. He felt a curious mixture of emotions at that: regret and anger and an almost-sorrow. But that was fitting, wasn't it? Not even this man's life was simple enough for blind hatred.

"Return to the soil that gave thee birth, and be at peace!" The power of the wards surrounding them sprang up in a white blaze along the Master of Rites' rowan staff, as if the wood itself could conduct lightning. A strong wind flew through the space of their ward, fast and hard. A shaft of sunlight burned through the clouds overhead and touched the pyre with flame. In a few moments the Death Eater's fire-consumed body had been carried away by the wind, mingling freely with the salty sea

[[center:***]]

Twilight had descended towards the end of the ceremony, flushing the sky dusky rose and staining the sea with royal indigo. Harry, filled with a wordless melancholy that he knew would find no succor in the warmth and innocent cheer of a Saturday night at Hogwarts, had remained there by the restless sea, searching for an answer to the frozen weight that had descended on him as the numbness receded. He found no reply in the lonely whisper of the wind or the forlorn sighs of the waves below. He sat down on an outcropping of stone, arms tight around his chest, staring straight into the sun as it appeared below the clouds for a moment before sinking into the waves.

"I wanted to hurt him," Harry admitted in a whisper to the unmoving shadow still standing beside him. The first stars were appearing, blue and clear, high above their heads as a cold wind herded the clouds across the sky. "I thought that he deserved the worst sort of death for doing what he did to take those children. And he did—he did! But in his mind I saw that he had already been touched by all the cruelty I could ever show him." Harry stopped, choking. He pounded at the hard slab of rock beneath his fists as if by doing so he could dislodge the words from his throat.

"Why?" he demanded of the burning stars wheeling overhead. "Why do we do this to each other?"

"Because we must." He had not expected an answer, and so the slow, deliberate voice startled him. He turned to stare at Snape's profile. The other man was gazing out at something very far away, in the midst of the Pensieve-dark sea.

"But why?" he directed his question to the man this time.

There was a long moment of silence.

"Because we are alone," Snape finally replied. "Because kindness is a luxury which few can afford, if they wish to survive."

"And so we tear and claw at each other for it like dogs in the street?" Harry challenged.

Snape responded impatiently, "Think, Potter. If you had not been left to be raised by Muggles who despised you, would you have been so quick to abandon that life for a world at war without a backwards glance?"

"I..." Harry began, and stopped. How could he answer that question? How could he, when he had spared no more than a few moments' thought for the Dursleys since he had walked away from that despised prison of his childhood? Then he asked, without quite knowing why, "Am I destined to become either the next Dumbledore or the next Voldemort?" The bitterness of that question startled even himself.

But Snape did not seem surprised. "One always has a choice," he said steadily. "Though it seems that few care to acknowledge that truth."

"Because then we're responsible for our own actions?" Harry asked.

"Precisely," Snape replied, and Harry smiled unexpectedly.

"I think that's the first time I've heard 'precisely' from you," he told the Potions master, whose expression he could not make out in the darkness. He turned his gaze back to the sea and rested his chin on his knees. "I don't know the answer to your question," he said quietly. "I don't know what would have happened if the Dursleys had actually wanted me. But in the end I probably would have had to fight anyway, don't you think? If the Prophesy is right, and I'm the only one who can stop Voldemort, then eventually I would have to fight him, or watch him destroy everything I love. But I don't want to become either him or Dumbledore. I want to live life my way."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a slight movement. "Then walk your own path, Harry Potter," Snape said.

It sounded almost like a blessing, Harry realized, blushing inexplicably. Unaccompanied by scorn or contempt, his name was strangely heated by Snape's voice, as if the anger that usually scorched those words had somehow left an ember behind in its absence.

"Th-thank you," he stuttered, and could almost feel Snape's smirk before the subtle shifting of fabric and quiet footsteps left only emptiness beside him.

He leaned back once more and regarded the great sweep of stars overheard. "Why?" he asked them softly. Why had Snape chosen to stay with him, to offer him companionship? Why did he suddenly wish that he had not spoken, and thus allowed the other man to walk away? Why did he yearn to return to that hut, at the moment when Snape had hissed his hatred of James Potter, and give another answer to the pain behind the bitterness?

Yes, he had hated Dudley with that same dull, helpless hatred that had sometimes flashed into soul-searing rage. But he had walked away from Dudley when he had found magic, friends, a place to belong. He had walked away from his hatred. But Snape...had not. Could not. Because of the price he had paid for his choices, which still choked him with chains that he could not break and demanded from him retribution for mistakes for which no atonement existed.

But was there truly no middle ground between them—no way to cross the chasm of a dead past? And yet, tonight...

Not just tonight, Harry suddenly recalled. When he had taken up his study of the Dark Arts, Snape was one of the few people in or out of Hogwarts who had accepted his decision without protest. At the time Harry had been much too busy justifying his resolution to puzzle over the professor's simple acceptance, but could it be that even back then, Snape had understood? Could he have understood the desire to shape darkness until his fear of it no longer controlled him, understood the need to accept all the shadowy places of his magic because that was the only way he could be whole?

Could he not start again from the beginning and build a bridge out of the foundations of the present?

Harry stood up slowly and spent another moment gazing out at the sea, lit now by a trail of silvered moonlight. He sent a tiny spark of magic along the paths of the wind: a prayer, a hope for the future. "Good-bye," he said softly. "I won't forget." And then he turned and Apparated away, filling his mind with thoughts of home.