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Chapter Text

The warm orange light of the Gryffindor boys dorm reminds Harry of another place, far smaller and darker with flickering bulbs that run on electricity rather than this conjured luminescent brightness made from nothing. The curtains around his bed made the space seem smaller than it really is. It’s comforting in a way, familiar in a sense that he can pretend that he is once again shut off from the outside world. 

In the cupboard, cobwebs used to cling to his skin relentlessly, even when he tried his best to remove that clinging sensation. But often, Harry didn’t want to remove them. It is, after all, what spiders consider their home. Not tiled roofs and hardened walls, not a place with laughter and love from a parent to a child and vice versa. No, for spiders it was strings and webs made from their own tiny bodies; their hard work turning it into intricate art that they use to feed and sleep on. To remove it is a cruelty that Harry can only sometimes muster the will to do so. There is no need to punish these little creatures who only desire to live without harming anyone else. 

Uncle Vernon would disagree vehemently. 

As long as anything that takes up space near him ruins his picture perfect life, it is tantamount to the highest of sins. He squishes the poor critters into mush using his shoes and then would make Harry clean them, including the floor. In the case that Uncle Vernon is unable to squish anything he doesn’t like into oblivion, he throws them under the cupboard instead. Giving the unwanted freak more companions in the already cramped space. 

Cruelty is something that the house Number Four in Privet Drive knows intimately. 

Harry would describe their cruelty as something casual; as if it’s something normal. Growing up, it certainly was. Pans swung to his head, small fists and kicks on his body at the school playground, big thick fingers wrapping around his neck hard enough to leave bruises. Occasionally, if something particularly displeasing occurred, such as a failed contract at the company or a targeted piece of gossip or something more freaky like Harry’s magic, the leather and metal of a belt would meet little Harry’s back. 

It would bleed and ache and bleed some more. The fabric of his shirt sometimes gets stuck to the dried blood, providing more pain and no relief to the poor lad. Even with that, he still had to complete his long list of chores. Cooking, folding, cleaning, gardening, and everything in between. 

Harry learned to get used to it. 

In Hogwarts, there are no chores to do but there is certainly still pain. There are still whispers that follow his every move and hatred displaced to him. There are teachers who loathe and teachers who care but not enough . There are friends who love and fight and make him feel normal for once. There is a headmaster who is too cryptic and clearly cares but Harry just cannot trust. 

But there were also three-headed dogs, trolls, possessed professors, basilisks, dementors, deadly tournaments, and death. 

And now, Voldemort is back. Really back. All snake-features and dramatics, black covered servants with skull masks kissing his feet. Purebloods at a half-blood’s bidding. It was a revolting display of power at a corrupted soul’s hands. What is it that Tom really wants? Exterminating muggles? Absolute power? Immortality? 

What is it that allowed numerous purebloods to fall at his feet? What could possibly be so enticing to give up freedom? To become nothing more than slaves? 

Harry can never understand them. Purebloods are born into power and yet they gave it all up just for a chance, to gamble on their legacy on an insane megalomaniac hellbent on killing a single child that survived each and every attempt. 

Then again, everything Harry knows of the world was turned upside down the moment he learned that he was a wizard. Nothing in this world made sense. This unpredictability itches at him, makes him more wary and tense. His fingers are always twitching, hoping for a pen to sketch and create something that makes sense. To have precision and give him back control. 

That’s why he is drawing now in his sketchbook decorated with stickers on the covers. He doesn’t think that anybody really knows that he has this hobby, he never once drew publicly, only in the safety of dark corners and quiet spaces. At first it was with broken crayons and scrapped paper in the cupboard, now it’s on an impulsively bought sketchbook and mechanical pencils from a random shop in Diagon Alley that he caved into. Harry doesn’t allow himself a lot of things, thinking himself undeserving, but this he just cannot resist. 

And so he sketches and draws. Hogwarts under the graceful snow when winter comes to visit, his cupboard that he misses sometimes when things got too much, Hedwig eating bacon at the Great Hall, Sirius falling through the veil and the distance between him and Harry, his own eyes and his mother reflected back, the mirror of erised and what he saw.  

Harry drew and drew and drew until morning light came. Trying to escape the dreams plaguing his mind every time he closes his eyes. Cold laughter and red eyes, blood dripping from his arms, and the dead eyes of Cedric and Sirius and sometimes of his parents. 

Eyes eyes eyes—always eyes. 

It is the eyes that tell Harry the truth. He remembers the dull eyes of his parents—rich honey brown and bright emerald green—and wonders what it could have looked like with the passion of life.  He looks back at Cedric and wonders what picture his eyes could’ve painted after happiness carves its place on his face when time takes its toll. The eyes showed the insanity of Voldemort, of what the charming Tom Riddle became in the after . Harry tried to look for the remains of the once brilliant boy he met down in the chambers, but only madness remained in the eyes of the serpentine creature . No sly cunning, no sharp intellect. He became a pathetic and corrupted mess. 

It is the eyes that Harry always looks into. The sharp gray of his godfather, shining and shimmering in the same manner the veil was. Sirius, in his last moments, looked like he was surrounded by constellations. The bright neon colors of the ongoing fight around them reminded Harry of fireworks going off in the vastness of the night sky. His godfather had never looked more like his namesake than then . 

In the aftermath of his death, Harry in the hazeness of grief, memorized an entire book on constellations and stars. Sometimes he uses the invisibility cloak to sneak into the Astronomy Tower and tries to name all the lights in the sky. Sirius would always be the first to be named. 

Harry would always choose him first, always. 

But he doesn’t sneak out too often. Too many times Harry thought of putting one foot forward and letting go. Of free falling and feeling the wind on his face, the coldness of death’s fingers brushing against his soul. But he cannot allow himself to fall. It is not only his life at stake.

There is movement from outside his bubble. Harry stopped drawing and looked to his right, parting the curtain with his arm to see that Neville was already waking up.  The illusion of being alone is now broken. Life begins to rush through his blood again. 

“Good morning Neville”, Harry softly whispered. 

Neville yawned and rubbed sleep away from his face. Blinking blearily, he squinted at Harry and smiled slightly. 

“Morning Harry, did you get enough sleep?” Neville whispered back, furrowing his brows in concern. 

“Don’t worry about me”, Harry said as he puts his sketchbook back in his bag, “I’ll take a shower first”. 

Neville still looks concerned and Harry finds it sweet but truly unnecessary. He never did sleep for too long, never felt safe enough to indulge in the comforts of sweet dreams. Not that he had many. Nightmares are more frequent visitors. 

Harry quietly got out of bed and grabbed his school robes and his towel. Shaking Ron awake on his way to the bathroom. 

“Wha….?”, said Ron, still sleepy and not at all awake. 

“It’s already morning Ron”, Harry fights back a laugh. Ron murmurs something inaudible and pulls up his blanket, cozying up to his bed. 

Harry shakes his head and continued his walk to the bathroom. Not wanting to inconvenience his other roommates, he showered as fast as he could. Taking a small moment to appreciate the warmth of the waters then scrubbing away. 

Afterwards, he took his brush to his hair and tried to get out all the knots he could find. Once he was sure that there were none, he placed the brush back on the cabinet. He doesn’t style his hair, it will always be a losing battle. But at least he can give some effort to looking decent which is one of the lessons Aunt Petunia drilled into him. 

When Harry got out of the bathroom, most of his roommates had already woken up. Dean is stretching and popping his joints. Seamus is staring at the wall, unmoving and unnerving but also kind of funny. He was obviously not a morning person. 

Ron is still warm and cozy on his bed. Harry shakes him harder this time, dodging the arms lazily batting him away. A loud groan can be heard, a long drawn out nooo loud enough for everyone to hear. 

Harry and Neville’s eyes meet as the latter steps out of the other bathroom in their dorm. Both of them smiling and fighting down a laugh. This scene is almost part of their daily ritual; Ron never ever wakes up first. It’s a battle between the soft warm sheets and the horror of being late to their first class. 

And it truly is a horror, since it’s Defense Against the Dark Arts first. 

Harry cannot help the grimace that graces his face. Nose scrunching up with furrowed brows as he dreads the venom that will be spat on him by the one professor that competes for the first place of who hates the Boy-Who-Lived the most. 

Some days, it doesn’t even anger Harry. Not anymore. It just brings about numbness and resignation, a bone deep weariness that makes everything feel a little heavier, a little colder. 

When he was a first year, he once felt so hurt by the sheer amount of hatred directed towards him. Sharp vitriol towards him in class, snide comments whenever they passed each other in the hallways. 

He didn’t know what he did wrong. So he reacted with anger, with resistance. There’s no reason for him to be treated that way. There’s no Dursleys to tell them of his roughness, of his otherness, his freakishness. It was supposed to be a fresh start in a new world. 

But it’s just the same. 

Same hurts, same experiences just with magic mixed in. 

Harry snapped away from his train of thought as Ron finally rolled over from his bed to the floor. Yawning and slowly getting on his feet, he stumbled to his trunk at the foot of his bed, probably to get his school robes.

Harry smiled at the sight and went back towards his bed, tidying up his belongings and choosing what’s needed for today’s classes. He debated on whether or not his sketchbook should remain in his bag or if he should put it under his pillow, where it is often placed when not in use. 

Thinking about what would happen during DADA, Harry is inclined to believe that he would need it later. And so in the bag it shall remain. 

Harry hopes that he is just imagining the dread crawling up his throat. He prays for a good day to come, but deep down he knows no one will answer. He traces the edge of his sketchbook inside his bag, wondering, not for the first time, what it would feel like to stop existing. Not die, just... pause. Like a spell frozen midair, a breath held in time.

Chapter Text

The doors slammed open and a man strides in, long black robes billowing in a dramatic manner. All eyes were fixed on Professor Snape as he made his grand entrance. 

“Take out all of your wands and form into lines,” Professor Snape demanded, his voice quiet but authoritative in the smallness of the classroom. 

Harry, even while a tiny part of his brain wanted to disobey, took out his Holly wand and quickly followed Ron as they formed into their usual lines. They are still practicing nonverbal spells with the majority of the class still failing to cast a single successful spell. 

Harry, for some reason, was already able to master it easily. His magic is becoming stronger, more foreign. Everything flows more freely now like there’s nothing holding it back anymore. Not that he knows what that thing holding it back is, just that it feels that way even though there’s nothing he can think of that should trigger this major improvement. He tried asking Ron about it, wondering if it was a coming of age thing for wizards, but Ron denied anything of the sort. 

So he wondered if grief had something to do about it. Perhaps losing Sirius tore something away from him, more than his heart, that allowed his magic to flourish? But that cannot be. If that is true, then everyone in Magical Britain would have already showcased such powers after the first blood war. 

It must be something else. 

Harry fears it has something to do with his connection to Voldemort. The scar that marked him as an equal, the proof of a prophecy that shaped his life ever since. But now Harry knows, it’s  not just a scar. It’s his soul. Voldemort’s piece inside of his body, allowing access to his mind, his dreams, his reality. 

It’s inescapable torture. Sharp slitted eyes, radiant red eyes, ordinary brown eyes wide with terror, and unfamiliar eyes but slowly becoming familiar screams. Harry sees through Voldemort and there’s an unsettling feeling that Voldemort also sees through Harry’s eyes. 

It’s an awful thought, an awful feeling, and an awful reality. 

“Potter! Why are you not participating?”, Professor Snape bellows out, snapping Harry away from his thoughts and back to his other awful reality. 

Harry looks at Ron and Hermione to see what they should be doing, but both of them are also just looking back at Harry. The duo throwing him looks of concern and looking at Professor Snape with barely hidden annoyance. Everyone in the class is silent, looking at Harry and Snape start their usual dance of words woven with disobedience and anger respectively. 

“Giving them all a head start”, Harry chose to say after a moment. His hands clenched his wand tighter, wanting to give himself a slap in the head for his words. When, in his 16 years of living, would he ever learn to keep his mouth shut? Looking at Snape, with his downturned lips and raised brows, Harry prepared himself. 

“Oh?”, Snape said softly—dangerously, “it seems like our resident celebrity thinks himself invincible, the greatest.” 

Snape sauntered closer to Harry, looking directly into his eyes. His hands also clenching his wand, scowl firmly in place.

“Do you believe yourself better than everyone here, Potter?”, he continued. 

“Not really, but I am the one that the Wizarding World is counting on, aren’t I?”, Harry interjects bitterly. And he is bitter. For a whole world consisting of grown adults, they still chose to put their faith on a teenager—a child. Since he was fifteen months old, they already bestowed the word savior to him. Like it’s some sort of gift that he should be thankful for and not a reminder of what happened to his parents, of what happened to him. 

“Arrogant! Just like your father, strutting your way to lessons you cannot even comprehend. What is the use of your brain, Potter, if it’s just for decoration?”, Snape sneered at him. “Do you truly think that you have the skills to back up your claim when you cannot even perform a simple spell?”

“But I can,” Harry answered back confidently, knowing his magic would not fail him. 

“Twenty points from Gryffindor for your insolence!” Snape snapped back, “and do show and not tell. Your previous instructors may have left you with an overinflated head, starstruck as they were, but you will not get such compliments from me with just your mere existence.” 

Harry stared defiantly, the same venom bubbling its way out his throat. He swallowed instead and raised his wand, poised with precision, he perfectly cast a nonverbal protego. 

Snape’s eyes narrowed and his scowled deepened. Harry must have guessed correctly then, it was the shield spell, basing it off what he scanned from the syllabus earlier in the year. Snape’s hand suddenly shot forward, flicking his wand towards him. A silent expelliarmus surged towards Harry, quick, silent, and precise. 

Harry’s shield charm flared a shimmering silver-blue, cracking the spell like glass meeting stone. A clean wordless block. His shield not even wavering from the force of Snape’s spell. 

A stunned silence stretches in the room. Harry once again looks at Hermione and Ron just to see their looks of shock and awe. Flitting his eyes around the room, even the Slytherins were impressed. Malfoy wasn’t even smirking. 

Harry supposed that for all that he hates Snape, he cannot deny that he is an impressive wizard. With that in mind, not anyone can cast a shield strong enough not to waver in the face of such magic. The magic of perhaps one of the most powerful and intelligent wizard of his generation. Too bad his personality—his bitterness, his cruelty, and everything else always seemed to precede it.

Snape’s hands twitched. The faintest flicker of something passed across his face, perhaps confusion or something like irritation would be more accurate to his character. Displeasure because what he expected to occur failed to happen. 

“Beginner’s luck”, Snape said, low and dismissive, though his eyes hadn’t left Harry’s. 

Harry didn’t respond, still basking on the rush of his magic. Uncontrolled and reckless, his chest rising and falling quietly in a purposeful manner, trying to calm the hum of his magic beneath his skin. Of course Snape dismisses him, of course he believes everything Harry does to be mere luck. As if Harry didn’t work hard for almost everything he got. The meager meals he had in the Dursleys that he sometimes snuck out of the kitchen, the ill-fitted hand-me-downs he got by perfectly grooming the lawn, the chore list he had to complete in order to get one glass of water. Not to mention the books he poured over, the spells he memorized, the game of connection he had to play everytime Dumbledore drops another piece of the same puzzle— of fucking course, Snape will never ever get over his version of Harry that he seemingly created even before Harry came to Hogwarts.

His magic still buzzed at his fingertips—ready to be unleashed. Defensive, offensive, and everything in between. It’s prepared to fight. And Harry is too. 

But not now. 

Voldemort may be in his dreams but he cannot appear here in Hogwarts. Harry is surrounded by friends he loves and people who may hate him but will not kill him. He must control himself here, there is no real enemy here, just other children and a single professor that hates his guts. He won’t be tortured in ways that will leave permanent damage, not like what Voldemort does to his victims. Harry can stomach ill rumors and slanderous whispers, that’s just the story of his life. He can also stomach the poison of his former Potions Professor. 

This is nothing. 

So why can’t Harry just control his flaring temper? One minute he’s listless and numb, staring absentmindedly into the nothingness and then the next he’s like a volcano erupting. This is getting tiring. The bone-deep exhaustion returns. 

Snape turned sharply on his heel, robes snapping behind him like the tail of a serpent. “Continue practicing in pairs. No talking. If I hear one word—” He left the threat unfinished as he stalked to the front of the room.

The moment he was no longer between them, Ron leaned in. “Bloody hell, mate,” he whispered, eyebrows raised. “That was—”

“Don’t,” Harry said quietly. “Just—don’t.”

Because praise would make it seem like his anger was something to be applauded, to be celebrated. It isn’t. It’s something that can be easily used against him.

He paired with Ron automatically, both of them casting and blocking half-heartedly for the next half hour. Hermione kept shooting him sidelong glances as she worked with Neville, clearly torn between worry and focus.

Control, learn it. 

Harry’s thoughts keep echoing in his head. Control, control, control. Everything always seemed so out of his control, even himself. 

It was his lack of control that left Sirius dead last year. He allowed emotions to control him. Rational thought seemed to have left his brain ever since he entered the Wizarding World. He hates to admit it, but Snape had been right that he is arrogant. It was arrogant of him to think that he can play savior with so little information. It was arrogant to think that it was supposed to be a fresh start here, like escaping the chrysalis of what the Dursleys made of him means that he should also forget all the lessons he learned from his upbringing. But that’s naive, isn’t it? 

He is who he is.

To forget all that, to simply discard it like an unwanted pet, means to betray his younger self who did his best to survive. To become the present him . And he learned, a long time ago, to never give in to emotions. Giving in to emotions means no food, no water, no clothes. It meant longer time in the cupboard and excruciating pain from bruises and broken bones. It meant humiliation, as he recalled that time that he gave Aunt Petunia a mother’s day card, thinking if he loved loudly enough then he might be loved back. 

How could he forget such hard-earned lessons?

Snape didn’t look at him again, but Harry could feel him. Felt those eyes on his back, distrustful and analytical. As if Snape had just glimpsed something he didn’t quite understand—and that uncertainty bothered him more than the insolence ever could.

When the class ended, Snape dismissed them with a sharp flick of his fingers. “Out.”

They filed out quickly and quietly, glad to be out of the class. Harry was the last at the door, his fingers tightening around the strap of his bag. 

“Potter.”

Of course , Harry thought with a grimace. He waved his hand towards Hermione and Ron, both of them stopping just outside the classroom, briefly telling them to go ahead. He turned and looked directly into Snape’s eyes, challenging, defiant. 

“Your magic,” Snape said slowly, voice like the scrape of iron, “is different. Wild and uncontrolled.”

“I know”, Harry admitted. 

“It’s erratic. Dangerous.”

Harry tilted his head. “Useful.”

Snape’s eyes narrowed his eyes, a sneer making its way back to his face. 

“Perhaps it can be. But its potential for harm, either towards others or yourself, cannot be ignored.” 

Snape’s hand slides inside his outer robe, pulling out a small  envelope with the Headmaster’s seal. He held it between his fingers, not really giving it, but just hovering it close to his head. As if contemplating if he should grant Harry the right to read what’s written inside. 

There was a long silence between them. Not the usual one of contempt, no, not yet. This was different, anticipatory, searching. 

And then, softly, Snape said, “Come to my office. Tonight. After dinner.”

Harry furrowed his brow, “another detention?”

“No,” Snape’s tone was dry, “read this letter. Then you are dismissed.”

He handed the envelope to Harry like he was passing off a bomb, like something he doesn’t want anything to do with. Harry, feeling the heaviness on his hands, felt the same way. 

Chapter Text

The letter was from Dumbledore, as expected. It was brief, written in his neat looping letters. 

Harry,

I ask that you attend the lessons Professor Snape has agreed to give you, not only for your safety, but for the sake of what is to come. Trust in the guidance, even if the guide is not to your liking.

—A.D.

Harry reread it three times, looking for anything hidden, but there was nothing. Direct and straightforward without really explaining anything. That should be considered a talent really. Only Dumbledore can be so candid and cryptic at the same time. He shoved the parchment in his bag, desperate to get away from the scent of lemon drops and guilt. 

He doesn’t know if he’s angry or exhausted. Maybe both. The numbness from earlier returns with quiet cruelty, sinking into his ribs like something ancient and familiar.

He doesn’t tell Ron or Hermione about the letter.

“What was that about, mate?” Ron asked with a mouthful of food. 

Harry chewed slowly, contemplating what to tell. He drums his fingers against the wooden table, wishing that he can just bring out his sketchbook and draw until the world goes away. But no, he doesn’t want anyone to know about the sketchbook. Ron and Hermione wouldn’t laugh, but he still wouldn’t show them. It’s his. Like the silence. Like the aching spaces no one touches.

“What did Professor Snape want with you, Harry?” Hermione added after throwing a disgusted look at Ron’s antics, “You know you can’t get in trouble for doing the class work, right?”

“I wasn’t in trouble”, Harry answered back. “Lessons, like last year.”

Hermione and Ron shot him looks of understanding and sympathy, knowing the disaster that the Occlumency Lessons disguised as remedial potions brought him. 

“At least this time it isn’t because I’m failing a subject,” Harry said with a small smile. That comment apparently sparked something in Hermione, launching one of her rants about their NEWTs and the study plan she had created. 

Harry is glad that both of his friends stopped fighting and cleared the air. Their jealousy and cold wars were taking a huge toll on Harry, feeling like he was stuck between two nesting dragons. But thankfully, they agreed to have a private talk that Harry wasn’t privy to, but he was glad for it the same. Ron is still dating Lavender Brown but Hermione now has a renewed focus on her studies, putting her career first. 

Harry will make sure that all of them will live to see their careers—their lives, flourishing. 

“But isn’t Professor Dumbledore already giving you lessons, mate?” Ron suddenly asked. Hermione stopped her info dumping and gave a contemplative look. 

“Yeah but that’s different,” Harry answered quickly. Because it is different. Dumbledore had been showing him memories of Tom Riddle, of who Voldemort used to be. And he was also shown an important memory, the only one that mentioned horcruxes. 

Dumbledore admitted that he didn’t plan on showing him that one that early, but with Harry’s worsening dreams and visions, he thought it prudent to reveal it to him. Dumbledore didn’t explicitly state his assumptions, perhaps hoping that he is wrong, but Harry isn’t exactly stupid either. 

Harry is a horcrux. 

And that’s an information that he doesn’t really know what to do with. 

Later that evening, he finds himself standing outside Snape’s office. The torches flicker low in the corridor, casting long shadows on the stone.

Harry doesn’t want to be here.

But then again, he hasn’t wanted to be anywhere lately. He raises his fist and knocks on the door. 

“Enter,” Snape’s voice calls, sharp and clipped.

Harry opens the door, the hinge groaning as it swings. Snape doesn’t look up from his place at his desk, sitting like he’s been carved out of the shadows themselves, quill scratching. Probably marking essays. 

Harry took the opportunity to look around the office, noting the dim lighting and the clutter that fills it. A fire burns lows in the hearth. Bottles line the walls in different sizes and colors. Harry doesn’t think he can name all of them, he is no Potions Master after all. No matter what compliments Slughorn piles on him, he only achieved what he did because of the used potions book he was fortunate enough to receive. Perhaps he could have been better, if Snape didn’t sour his passion for the subject he was actually looking forward to back when he was a first year student. 

“Close the door, Potter.”

Harry does, slower than necessary.

Snape finally lifts his head, and the air seems to shift. “Sit. We haven’t the luxury of time or patience.”

Harry sits, arms crossed. No words. No questions. He’s been here before, hasn’t he? A year ago. With the same hatred simmering just beneath Snape’s skin. The same tight coil in his chest, winding and unwinding. Last time ended in disaster.

But this time, he doesn’t care if Snape screams at him or throws him out. Let him. Maybe then they can be done. Harry is too tired for this. Maybe he’s too broken. The Magical World did what the Dursleys failed to do for eleven years. 

Or maybe there was already something fundamentally wrong with him that other people can see like a lighthouse that warns them off from perilous rocky shores. Maybe Harry just doesn’t know it. Maybe that’s why the Dursleys took one look at him and called him freak before he even knew what the word meant. 

“You read the letter,” Snape says. Not a question.

Harry nods once. “Yes.”

“Then you understand why we’re here.”

“No,” Harry says, honest and blunt. “But I came anyway.”

Snape puts down his quill, setting aside the essay he was marking. “Dumbledore decided to repeat past mistakes,” Snape says, sneering as he stands, “this time, not only for Occlumency, but also for Defense.” 

Snape walked closer to Harry, holding his wand leisurely in his right hand. He circled Harry, like a snake scouting its prey, analyzing, assessing its weaknesses. 

“As though your fragile mind can withstand Occlumency any more than it did before.”

Harry doesn’t flinch, maintaining a straight gaze to the front of the room. “You’re not exactly an improvement either.”

Snape’s eyes narrow, “still insolent. Still arrogant.”

“Still bitter. Still miserable.”

The silence after that hangs sharp. And in that moment, Harry wonders—has anyone ever spoken to Snape like that? Not with fear. Not with awe. Just exhaustion. Just matching cruelty with honesty.

Snape allowed the silence to linger for a few more seconds, until he decided to let it go for now, diving straight into more important matters. 

“You have proven to possess at least a sparse amount of intelligence in Defense Against the Dark Arts and apparently, if Professor Slughorn’s words are truthful, even in Potions.” Snape starts, voice flat and somehow still insulting. “Thus, it means that you have not been performing to your full potential these past few years.”

“And why does that matter to you?” Harry asked pointedly. 

“It matters because it is an insult to my work,” Snape retorted. “It matters because it means that you have been depriving yourself of practice, knowledge, and tools that could help you do what needs to be done. It means that you are playing savior with only your untameable magic as your weapon.”

Harry stayed silent, having no defense against that. Because it is, painfully and excruciatingly, true. 

Back in elementary school, he used to possess such a large amount of curiosity and passion that allowed him to devour books like a man starving on an island. And he was starving , physically and figuratively. Not until he got the best grades of his year, which resulted in Dudley creating a legendary tantrum that lasted for hours. Harry can’t forget the look on Aunt Petunia’s face, eyes faraway like remembering something else, in another time. She reacted viciously and slyly, spreading rumors of how hard it was to raise the orphaned son of her sister, the delinquent offspring of two drunkards who offed themselves in a car crash while drunk driving. Uncle Vernon locked him in the cupboard for two weeks and when he got out, everyone’s eyes on him were different, harsher. 

He avoided the playground for weeks; hiding in the shadows of the school, where it was safe. It was only later when he learned that Dudley was still crying about him in the playground, saying how mean his cousin is and how he always steals the spotlight. An attention seeker. That’s the label Dudley branded on Harry. 

That, combined with Aunt Petunia’s rumors, changed their whole perception of Harry. Everything he does, every cry of help, suddenly becomes attention-seeking tactics and not desperate actions to save himself. 

Harry doesn’t get it. He probably would never get the minds and mental gymnastics that adults often perform when it comes to reputation and perception of people. It’s difficult to comprehend them, but in some way, it is also admirable, how strong they can hold onto their beliefs. But for Harry, it was just plain annoying and miserable. 

How can they consider his finger-shaped bruises as attention-seeking? His subpar clothes that don't even provide him warmth? His skinny wrists and sizes-too-big converse? What happened to the saying that the older you are, the wiser you become? 

So Harry just….stopped trying. 

It was easier than getting hurt. Because he knows he will be hurt. The more that he triggers Dudley’s tantrums, the higher the risk of getting the belt. And Harry would choose smeared reputation and sunken grades over being beaten bloody and wondering if he will survive. 

Coming to Hogwarts, he wanted to try anew. He drunk up the sight of Diagon Alley and felt the covers of books that he thought he would only see in fictional sections of libraries. But his first encounter in the Leaky Cauldron dampened his excitement. But it was his first lesson with Snape that truly extinguished his passion. Because even here, there are already preconceived notions, prewritten reputations, and expectations unwittingly passed on to him. 

So why try? He doesn’t know the rules here. Everyone is unpredictable so it’s better to play safe. To be the average wizard that doesn’t know shit about the world he apparently belonged to. 

“None of those matter now,” Snape declared, snapping Harry away from his thoughts. “I do not care if it was your pettiness or arrogance that prevented you from doing so previously, but from now on you will work your hardest .” 

Harry swallows hard. His hands curl into fists at his sides. “Fine.”

“Tonight we will, once again, start with Occlumency. Legilimency is dangerous when uncontrolled. It breaks into memory, emotion, thought.”

Snape raised his wand, “clear your mind.”

Harry doesn’t know how. 

“Legilimens.”

It slams into him like cold water. A sharp shove into memory.

Flashes—Uncle Vernon’s fist, Dudley’s laughter, the hiss of a belt. Red. Pain. Cooking breakfast with a bleeding hand. The cupboard, dark and damp. Spiders watching from the corner. The slap of a pan.

NO! Not those , Harry thought desperately.

The memories shifted. Snowball fights in the courtyard. Exchanging notes during class. Casting spells and practicing wand movements. Harry teaching his schoolmates the patronus charm. 

Then Sirius, smiling. Then falling.

Harry yells and pushes back.

When he comes to, he’s on the floor, breathing hard. He can taste blood. Bit his tongue, maybe. Snape is silent, looming above him.

“You didn’t even try to clear your mind,” he says, voice tight with anger. With the frustration of a parent with their child not performing to their fullest potential. 

I don’t know how, Harry wants to say, I never had a clear mind in my entire life.

Harry wipes his mouth. “What’s the point? You’ll dig through everything anyway.”

Snape’s expression flickers—just a moment. A crack. Then it’s gone. “Occlumency is a shield. Not a weapon. You are not only vulnerable to the Dark Lord, you are vulnerable to anyone who dares to look. Anyone.”

Harry glares. “So stop looking.”

Snape’s voice drops low. Cold. “You want me to stop looking, Potter? Then learn .”

Harry stiffens. 

The tension between them coils tighter, breath by breath. This is different from last year. Snape’s fury doesn’t burn; it curdles. It tastes like disappointment, not rage. And Harry—Harry’s not angry anymore. Just tired.

He sighed. 

“I don’t know how,” he mutters. 

“I already know you don’t know how to learn,” Snape said harshly, “you had been my student for the past six years. What I need from you, Potter, is for you to try.”

“I meant that I don’t know how to clear my mind!” 

Snape narrows his eyes. “Then we’ll start there.”

He pointed at a chair, a silent order for Harry to sit. When Harry does so, Snape strides towards one of the doors on the right side of the office, disappearing for a while. Harry took the opportunity to inhale one big breath and exhaled through his mouth. Calming his beating heart, he fumbled for his wand and silently cast episkey on his still bleeding tongue. 

Snape appeared again, holding a book which he handed over to Harry. 

“Read it. It contains an introduction to Occlumency and listed ways to clear one’s mind.” 

Well that would have been bloody useful last year, Harry thought bitterly. 

“Are we done?”

Snape stares for a long moment. Then nods, just once.

“Yes. For now.”

Outside the room, Harry pauses in the corridor and presses his forehead to the cool stone. His hands are shaking. He doesn’t know if it’s from the spell or the memories.

He only knows he’s not ready to do this again.

But he will.

Because he’s always been good at surviving things he never should have had to.

Chapter Text

That night, he dreams.

He’s standing in a corridor he doesn’t recognize. The walls are lined with portraits, but the faces are wrong. They don’t move, don’t breathe. They’re still and hollow, their eyes gouged out with black paint. Their mouths are open as if they’re screaming. 

The walls are bleeding. The stone weeps black ink. His own drawings drip from the ceilings—Sirius mid-fall, the cupboard under the stairs, red eyes, and veils.

There’s ringing in Harry’s ears.

Harry walks slowly, careful not to make a sound. The corridor stretches and stretches and tilts , like the world itself is beginning to lean.

He turns, and Tom Riddle is there.

Maybe he’s already Voldemort. But the serpentine features and pale blue-gray skin are missing. Right now he looks like a grown up version of the boy in the chambers, all handsome in the way of sculptures and sharp things, as if carved from marble and ambition. His eyes gleam in a way that makes Harry’s stomach twist.

“Hello, Harry,” Tom says pleasantly.

Harry’s wand isn’t in his hand anymore. It’s never there in these dreams.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Harry says. His voice is quiet, but clear. 

Tom smiles. “But I’m always here. You dream of me even when you don’t sleep. I’m becoming… quite fond of our chats.”

“This isn’t real.”

Tom laughs. “That’s the thing about dreams. They’re always real. They just don’t last.”

Harry swallowed and clenched his fists. “Why are you always here?”

“Because we are the same,” Tom says simply.

Harry finally looks at him, something acidic crawling up his throat. “We’re nothing alike.”

Tom smiles, something slow, sharp, patient. “You keep saying that. Yet here we are. Again.”

“You’re in my head.”

“And you’re in mine, Harry. This door swings both ways.” He takes a step closer. “I see the things you hide from everyone else. I see how you want to fall. I see the way you touch the edge of your magic like it’s a blade you don’t know how to hold.”

Harry grits his teeth. “I’m not you.”

Tom’s expression softens, almost pitying. “But you could be. That’s what frightens you, isn’t it?”

The ringing becomes louder. 

Tom raises a hand and the hallway melts around them. Now they’re standing in the ruins of the Astronomy Tower. Rubble everywhere. Harry realizes his sketchbook is open on the floor, pages torn out and fluttering through the wind. Pages of death, of nightmares, of self-portraits with empty eyes.

“You think they’ll still love you when they see what you are?” Tom says, quiet now. “When they realize what’s inside you? You’re rotting from the inside out, Harry. You’re just a ticking clock with a shard of my soul screaming to be free.”

“I’ll get it out,” Harry says, jaw tight. “Even if it kills me.”

Tom’s smile turns feral. “Oh, it will. One way or another.”

The ground shakes. The ink drips faster. The stars above them shatter, falling like glass.

Tom steps close enough that Harry can feel his breath, feel the cold of his magic. “Tell me something honestly, Harry.”

Harry stares.

“Sometimes,” Tom whispers, “don’t you wonder what it would be like… to stop fighting? Just once. To give in. Let the power have you?”

Harry doesn’t even finish processing what he said before their surroundings started to shift again. Suddenly they’re in the Department of Mysteries. The veil whispers from across the room, rippling without wind.

Harry’s breath catches. He takes a step back.

“No,” he whispers. “Not again.”

“Sirius was always doomed,” Tom says mildly, stepping forward. “Just like you are.”

The veil rips open with a scream.

The ground crumbles.

Harry opens his mouth—but the scream never comes.

Harry wakes up with a gasp.

He’s drenched in sweat, shirt clinging to his back, breath tearing its way out of his lungs like claws. The dorm is quiet, save for the soft breathing of his roommates.

He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes until stars bloom in the darkness.

He can’t keep doing this.

Tom is wrong in many things and he is wrong about this too. They are nothing alike. Harry doesn’t dream of power, doesn’t kill other people for it. He wants to be just Harry so much that he wants to deny all of his fame, all of his role in this fucked up mess. But he can’t. 

Too many lives are at stake. 

But Tom was right about one thing. Harry was doomed from the start. That godforsaken prophecy that killed his parents, that condemned him to a life of suffering, of pain. He didn’t ask for this. He didn’t want any of this to happen. But it did. And now Harry is the one who has to solve it, to finish it. 

He sits up slowly, wiping his face with trembling hands. Taking big heaving breaths as attempts to calm his mind. His chest feels too small for the weight in it.

Tom was just trying to rile him up, to lose control. Harry cannot allow that to happen. But he feels like something inside him has been split . Cracked, like an old mirror—and Tom’s reflection is bleeding through the gaps.

He swings his legs over the side of the bed and sits there for a while, hands limp in his lap, staring down at the floorboards. The moonlight catches the edges of his sketchbook half-protruding from under his pillow.

He pulls it out. Opens it.

The page he landed on is a drawing he barely remembers making the night before. The not-Harry. Not-Tom. The face in-between. Its eyes seem darker now. Like it knows.

Harry shuts the sketchbook and shoves it in his bag. The book Snape gave him peaks out during his hurried attempt to rid off the drawing. Harry hesitated for a second before he made up his mind and grabbed it.  

The Basics of Occlumency for Absolute Beginners

The title was almost insulting in its cheeriness. A pale blue cover, soft corners worn from overhandling. There were faint creases in the spine evidence that Snape must have used this before. The thought was oddly grounding.

Harry opens it up and soaks up line after line under the pale wash of moonlight bleeding through the windows, thinking that this book really would have given him an easier time last year. 

“Occlumency is the act of protecting the mind. Not through force, but through understanding. The mind is a home, and Occlumency is its lock, its walls, its choice to shut the door.”

He read on.

“To clear the mind does not mean to erase all thought. It means to let go of their weight.”

That part was harder. His mind was never clear. Not when it was filled with faces—dead ones, mostly. Cedric. Sirius. His parents, always imagined, never remembered. And now Tom, who was alive and watching, whispering through dreams and cracks in the soul.

Still, he read.

The chapter on “emotional anchoring” caught him off guard.

“When thought spirals into panic, return to the present. Use grounding points: the feel of fabric beneath your fingers, the sound of your breath, the weight of your own name spoken aloud. Magic thrives on focus. Occlumency begins where feeling meets fact.”

Harry let the book rest against his chest. He lay back against his pillow, staring up at the ceiling canopy, trying to count his breathing like the page suggested.

In, two, three, four.

 Hold.

Out, two, three, four.

His hands flexed against the sheets. Anchor points. He could do that.

Not for long, but maybe for now.

He didn't sleep again that night, but he didn’t dream either. That, he supposed, was a small victory.

By morning, the headache was sharp and unforgiving. But he felt... steadier. Or maybe just resigned. Either way, he was ready to pretend again. He dressed in silence. Grabbed his bag. Slipped the Occlumency book inside beside his sketchbook, carefully.

Hermione makes a worried noise when she sees him, but he shrugs off her concern with practiced ease.

Ron frowns. “Mate, you look like death.”

“Thanks.”

“Did you—” Ron stops, then lowers his voice. “Did you have nightmares again?”

Harry nods once, quick. Hermione reaches out like she wants to touch his hand, but pulls back.

“Everything will be alright,” she says. “It has to.”

Harry wants to believe her.

But he feels like a glass about to shatter.

His hands shake during breakfast, though he hides it by tapping a rhythmic beat on the tabletop with his spoon. Hermione gives him a look. Ron doesn’t press, but he shifts closer, a subtle sort of protection Harry doesn’t have the heart to acknowledge.

There’s a buzzing under his skin again. It hasn’t left since the dream. Magic—it stirs and simmers like a restless storm just beneath the surface. His fingers twitch. The weight of his wand in his pocket is suddenly too loud.

He doesn't speak during their classes, doesn’t eat much during lunch, and by mid-afternoon he can feel something inside him cracking.

It’s time for DADA again. Harry sat straighter in his chair this time. He tried to listen. He really did. But his thoughts began to drift again. Not violently. Just… sideways.

Tom’s voice again. Not as loud. Just echoing at the corners of his brain. The same question, over and over.

“Don’t you wonder what it would be like to stop fighting?”

He closed his eyes briefly.

“I’m not you,” he mouthed to no one.

And when he opened them, Snape was watching.

Not glaring. Not sneering.

Watching.

And Harry didn’t look away.

The air between them stills. Magic hums softly in the background like a warning.

And somewhere deep in Harry’s chest, the dreams linger. Tom’s laughter. The veil. The blood in the Department of Mysteries. All of it waiting just beneath the surface, eager to break free. Harry fights it. He’s always fighting. It’s all he has ever known. 

Fighting to keep himself alive in small ways. To live while pieces of yourself are slowly chipped away by the people who should protect you, to love you. Surviving by inches, by luck, by reflexes honed in heartbreaking ways. 

Harry rubs at his lightning scar. 

Harry thinks of shattered souls and the one thing that Voldemort is afraid of. Death. Harry is prepared to die. 

He thinks he has been for a long time. 

Every book he managed to get his hands on, especially from the Black Family Library, has said the exact same thing. There is only one way to get rid of a horcrux. It has to be destroyed beyond repair, beyond saving. Between saving himself or saving the Magical World, well, there really is only one option for Harry. 

Magic is his home. 

Pain is an accompanying feature in all of his homes. He thinks of the one in Godric’s Hollow and imagines one full of love, one that he cannot experience and what he did, he cannot really remember. He thinks of what lies beyond death and hopes that there is laughter and soft sunshine and fresh air. He hopes it won't hurt. 

Harry imagines that there are no pans hurled at his head or belts to his back there. No more hurtful whispers, deceitful headlines, narrowed eyes. No teachers who sneer. No students who judge. No cold laughter and red eyes. 

Harry even thinks of the quiet days at the Dursleys, the ones where he wasn't hit, just ignored. Those were sometimes worse. Being unseen is a kind of death too. 

He wonders if he’s just very good at dying in small ways.

Chapter Text

He’s in his bed in the Gryffindor Boys Dorm, skipping dinner and opting to draw in his sketchpad instead. He occasionally looks at the time to not miss Snape’s lessons, no matter how much he hates to attend it. Dumbledore deemed it important enough to repeat and Harry is willing to take any help he can get. Snape was right about the fact that he cannot play savior with virtually no weapon to protect himself

He’s sketching the empty portraits from his dream, pondering on their identities. Were they Voldemort’s victims? Pieces of a past long gone? Whoever they are, knowing Voldemort, they are probably already dead. It seems like the people that appear in Harry’s dreams are only those who have already crossed over: Sirius, Cedric, his parents, Tom Riddle.

Tom Riddle had died long ago, the moment he chose to perform the ritual that split his soul and murdered another. The only thing that remains are pieces, tethering the monster he had created into this realm. Doomed. If they were one and the same, as Tom obstinately asserted, then doesn’t that mean that Tom is doomed too? 

If Tom isn’t, then Harry will doom him. Damn him. As far as Harry can pull him down when he removes the piece inside him. 

Now Harry’s inking the shadows of the veil. He tries to make sense of the way it moved in the dream when his quill suddenly snaps in half. The ink bleeds across the page in a sharp blotch that spreads and spreads until it resembles something close to a scream. 

His magic pulses. Small. Barely there. 

Until it surges.

The curtains sway violently from the force of his magic. The windows are rattling loudly, his books fly off his study table, candles are snuffed out. The bookshelves are shaking, the lamps above him are dangerously swinging. His ink bottle explodes. It’s escalating.

What’s happening?, Harry thinks, feeling scared of himself. 

His vision blurs. Something pulls. It feels like his soul is being stretched thin. Someone shouts his name. Was it Ron?

“Harry!”

But he’s not really there.

He’s somewhere in between.

When Harry wakes, the world is white.

Blinding, sterile white—the kind that hums and aches behind his eyes. The ceiling above him is smooth stone, faintly glowing in the candlelight. He smells antiseptic potion and dried blood and something clean and minty. His limbs feel heavy. His mouth tastes like metal.

Everything is familiar, even the mattress he is laying on. He hears quiet voices whispering near him, welcomed voices. He’s in the infirmary, and as always, Ron and Hermione are beside him. That thought is enough to make him smile.

“…no, he’s still asleep, and if you wake him too fast after something like that—”

“Hermione, I know how to talk to Harry without knocking him unconscious, thanks.”

Harry opens one eye.

“’M not unconscious,” he mumbles.

Hermione’s face appears above him, eyebrows furrowed so hard it looks like it physically hurts her. “Harry!”

Ron’s voice follows. “Bloody hell, mate, you look like you got trampled by a hippogriff. Again.”

Harry croaks out something like a laugh, then winces.

Hermione gently adjusts his blanket. “Don’t try to speak too much. You’ve had a very serious magical burnout. Poppy said you were practically glowing with residual magic when they brought you in.”

Ron adds, “You also exploded an ink bottle. It’s all over your bed. Looks like a crime scene.”

Harry groans and closes his eyes.

“Sorry,” he mutters.

Ron blinks. “You’re sorry you almost died?”

Harry exhales, heavy. “I didn’t mean for any of it to happen. It just…snapped.”

Hermione sits at the edge of the bed, gently brushing hair out of his eyes. “We know. We were scared, Harry.”

“You were screaming,” Ron says, quieter. “And everything was flying around the room. It was like the air itself wanted to tear something apart.”

Harry stays quiet. He doesn’t want to say what it felt like. He doesn’t know if he can even begin to describe it. How, for a moment, it felt like he wasn’t in control of himself anymore—his magic was. 

Hermione speaks softly. “You’re not broken, Harry. Just overwhelmed. This isn’t something anyone should face alone.”

Harry doesn’t answer right away. His throat burns. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

Hermione’s gaze doesn’t waver. “Then tell us.”

Harry swallows.

“It’s loud, Hermione,” he says. “It’s like my magic and the thing inside me—they’re fighting. All the time. And I’m stuck in between.”

Ron stiffens. Hermione looks close to tears.

“You think I want this?” Harry continues, voice rising. “I didn’t choose this. I didn’t choose to be the Chosen One, or whatever.” I didn’t choose to have a piece of him inside me , he thinks privately, not ready to share that piece of information so soon. Not without the confirmation from Dumbledore’s lips.

“You didn’t,” Hermione says fiercely. “That’s the point. None of this is your fault.”

Harry turns his face into the pillow. “Then why do I feel like I’m the one breaking everything?”

A long pause.

Then Ron, awkward but honest, says, “Because you care.”

That gets Harry to look up.

“If you didn’t,” Ron shrugs, “you wouldn’t be lying here feeling guilty. You’d be like You-Know-Who. Cold. Empty. But you’re not. You’re you.”

Hermione nods. “You’ve always been you, Harry. That’s what matters.”

Harry bites his lip, staring up at the ceiling. He loves his best friends so much, of course they would tell him the one thing he craved to hear. The words he begged so badly to be true in front of his own reflection. 

I’m not you Tom. I’m not.

Harry replays it inside his mind, like a scratched record that is only capable of stuttering the same words over and over again. He plays it louder, now joined with the melody of Ron and Hermione’s affirmation, the music of it is so much more settled, complete. It’s easier to believe now. He hopes it will remain that way even on nights when the dreams feel too real and the line between him and Tom blurs, when the whispering in his scar coils like a snake beneath his skin, when the uncertainty terrifies him; there are still the voices of the people who love him to remind him who he is. 

“I try,” he says quietly. “I really do. To be good. To do what’s right. To protect people. But it’s like… everything I touch just breaks.”

Hermione sits back down beside him. “That’s not true.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I can,” she says, voice gentle but firm. “Because you never stop trying, Harry. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.”

Ron shifts in the chair next to her. “Honestly, mate, most of us would've given up ages ago. But you keep going. That’s the difference.”

Harry blinks hard against the sting in his eyes.

He wants to believe them. Wants it so badly it aches in his chest. But the guilt is thick, tar-like. It claws its way out his throat like a drenched cat, violent and agitated. He thinks of Sirius, lost to the veil. Cedric, struck down before he could move. His parents. All dead. All gone.

And still, he’s here. With a soul that isn’t entirely his own.

How many more will I lose before this ends?

“Do you ever think it would’ve been better if I wasn’t—”

“No.” Hermione’s voice cuts in immediately, fierce and trembling. “Don’t say that.”

Ron stands so abruptly the chair scrapes. He runs a hand through his hair, frustrated. “You’re not allowed to say that, okay? You just—you’re not.”

Harry startles a little at the intensity of it.

Ron turns back to him, face red but serious. “You’re my best mate. You’re like—you’re family, alright? I don’t care what’s in your head or what you think you are. You’re Harry. And I swear, if you ever think you don’t matter—”

His voice breaks. He shuts his mouth with a snap.

Hermione is crying silently now, dabbing her eyes with her sleeve.

Harry doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t really know how to deal with this…with such clear emotions intended for him.

So he just says, “Thanks.”

It feels small. Inadequate. But it’s all he can manage without falling apart.

Ron nods and clears his throat, embarrassed. “Just don’t do anything stupid again, yeah?”

Harry huffs a soft, watery laugh. “No promises.”

Hermione reaches out again, this time taking his hand and holding it tightly. “I know you’re scared,” she whispers. “And I know something’s wrong—more than what you’ve said. But we’re here, okay? Whenever you’re ready.”

Harry squeezes her hand in return. “I don’t deserve you two.”

Ron shrugs. “You really don’t. But we’re still sticking around, so you’re stuck with us.”

A quiet settles over them—heavy, but not hopeless.

Harry sinks back into the bed, staring at the ceiling again, and for the first time in what feels like forever, he feels the tiniest flicker of something that’s not fear. For the first time in days, Harry breathes without feeling like it’s going to shatter something inside of him. It’s been replaced with something warm, like something he used to pray for in his cupboard, when he dreamt of flying motorcycles and green light and of soft strong hands to take him far away from Surrey. It feels like the love he used to beg for, more desperately than food, more vital than water. 

It was a few days later when it happened again. Harry is sitting in the common room, trying to finish all his assignments. He was given the whole week off from Snape’s extra lessons, Dumbledore giving him a small break due to his sudden magical outburst. But in exchange, Snape gave him a ton of books to read and essays to write. He had already finished the whole book on Occlumency and started on the Defense books he was given. A particular unfamiliar word caught his eye and he jotted it down, eager to research it later.

When he closed the book, Harry felt as if the common room was too loud.

Someone’s laughing. Someone’s arguing about Gobstones. A fire crackles too brightly, and the walls feel like they’re pressing in, closer and closer, until Harry’s vision tunnels and the edges blur with silver sparks. He grips the edge of his chair.

It’s happening again.

Magic thrums under his skin like a trapped heartbeat. Restless. Humming. Angry. And afraid.

Harry squeezes his eyes shut and tries to breathe.

In, two, three—

Tom’s voice: “Don’t you wonder what it would be like to stop fighting?”

Hold.

His fingers twitch. He clenches them into fists.

Out, two—

His scar flares.

He stumbles to his feet without thinking. His bag topples over, spilling his sketchbook and pencils across the floor. He doesn’t stop for it. He can’t. He shoulders past a confused Seamus, barely hears Hermione’s, “Harry? Where—?” and bolts out of the portrait hole.

The hallway is blessedly empty. Cold stone. Dim light. Quiet.

He sprints until he finds a disused corridor on the fourth floor, one he remembers from a previous year, where the suits of armor have long since been removed for repair and the tapestries don’t talk.

He presses his back against the wall and slides to the ground. His breath is ragged. His wand burns in his pocket.

“Stop,” he whispers. “Please, stop.”

But his magic isn’t listening.

He gasps as a jolt of it flares through his chest, rushing up his spine like lightning. His vision whites out.

Red eyes. A whisper behind the veil. His own hand reaching for a wand, for a knife, for—

“NO!”

The corridor explodes.

A shockwave bursts from his body—silent, blinding, pure instinct. Stone cracks along the walls like spiderwebs. Torches fly from their brackets. The ground trembles. Windows at the far end of the corridor shatter, shards clinking to the floor like ice.

And in the center of it all, Harry curls in on himself, screaming into his arms, trying to hold the magic down.

Footsteps thunder in the distance. Wands raised. Then—

“Finite incantatem!”

The wild magic slams to a halt, choked mid-burst. Harry can feel it clawing to escape again, gnawing on his skin, as if begging to be freed but it’s contained. He lifts his head, panting, and sees the one figure he least wanted, but most needed, to see.

Snape.

Face pale. Robes windblown. Wand steady. He looks at the shattered corridor, then back to Harry.

“You absolute idiot,” he breathes.

Harry swallows. “It wasn’t—I didn’t mean to—”

Snape cuts him off with a sharp gesture. “Up. Now.”

“I can’t—” Harry’s voice breaks. “It’s still—it’s still fighting me—”

Snape’s face flickers, not with sympathy, but with calculation. Then he kneels beside Harry, gaze sharp, wand held aloft. “I’m casting a containment ward,” he says tightly. “Don’t move.”

Harry nods once, barely.

Snape draws a complex circle in the air, whispering Latin under his breath. Harry feels the moment it latches onto him like a soft cage made of iron threads, holding the worst of the magic back, but not silencing it entirely. The tremors in his fingers stop. The pressure in his head dulls.

For now.

Snape exhales. And then, surprisingly gently, says, “Can you walk?”

Harry nods again.

Snape stands first, and for one terrifying second, Harry thinks he’s about to walk away. But instead, he waits. Offers no hand, but waits all the same.

Harry pushes himself to his feet, shakily. They don’t speak as they walk.

When they reach the gargoyle guarding the Headmaster’s Office, Snape doesn’t even pause, sharply gritting out the word “curly wurly”. The image is almost enough to make Harry laugh, but if he did, he thinks he might vomit from the trepidation he feels mauling his stomach. No, better to not worsen Snape's mood.

Dumbledore looked surprised for a moment, until understanding dawned on his face. Snape speaks with a voice like poisoned silk.

“I caught Potter mid-outburst. If I hadn’t arrived when I did, he could have brought down half the east wing.”

“I didn’t mean to!” Harry cried out, feeling as though he had to defend himself. Because he didn’t want that to happen. 

“We know”, Snape says coolly, but something’s off. His voice is still rough, still sharp, but the edge is dulled. Like it’s no longer meant to wound, to attack. 

Dumbledore looks grave. “I suspected as much.”

Harry is too tired to feel betrayed. “You knew.”

Dumbledore folds his hands. “I feared. But your recent… volatility confirms it.”

Harry’s hands curl at his sides. “It’s the Horcrux.”

Snape turns to him, sharply. Harry was too shaken to question if Snape was already informed of Voldemort’s soul pieces. Well if he wasn’t informed previously, then he certainly was now. 

Harry meets Dumbledore’s eyes. “It’s fighting my magic. And my magic—” he hesitates, “my magic wants it gone.”

Snape says nothing. Dumbledore only nods.

“Then we must ensure,” Dumbledore says, “that you are not alone.”

There’s a pause. Then, very quietly:

“Potter,” Snape says, “you are not safe on your own. Not anymore.”

Harry stares at him. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Snape says, like it costs him something, “that the Headmaster has made arrangements. You are to remain under observation.”

Harry blinks.

“By who?”

Snape looks at him.

Harry stares.

“No.”

“Yes.”

Harry’s voice rises in pitch, “but that’s insane! I’m not—”

“You’re a danger to yourself and others,” Snape snaps. “This is not a punishment. It is protection. For all involved.”

Harry’s breathing grows shallow. “So I’m what? Locked up now? Watched like a bomb?”

Snape folds his arms. “You are not a prisoner, Potter. But you are… unwell.”

There’s a strange look in Snape’s eyes. Something Harry doesn’t have a name for.

It isn’t pity which Harry is thankful for. He might have exploded more if Snape, of all people, felt pity for him. Not, it might be something closer to recognition. Harry lowers himself to the nearest chair and breathes deeply. Being under constant supervision of their resident dungeon bat wouldn’t be the worst thing that happened to him. But he just can’t accept the fact that he’ll be babysat like a toddler, watched night and day. No, Harry can’t embrace the idea with open arms. 

But looking at the two in front of him and keeping in mind everything that is happening to him, Harry knows that the most rational idea would be to accept it. His magic is silent, waiting. And as Harry continues to mull over the offer, he can’t shake off the sense that this is only the beginning.

Harry thinks of the offer and thinks some more, until his head feels like it’s about to explode. Because there’s really nothing else to contemplate on, he’s just scraping off crumbs from the floor now. Because really, the alternative is worse. 

The alternative is waking up in a pool of his own magic, blood on the floor, ink in his lungs, with no one around to pull him back from the edge. The alternative is losing himself—to Tom, to the Horcrux, to the power that still hums low under his skin like a live wire.

So Harry straightens his shoulders, meets Snape’s eyes, and says, quiet but steady: “Fine.”

Snape inclines his head. No triumph. No mockery. Just a quiet, clipped, “You’ll move in tonight.”

Chapter Text

The fireplace crackled low in the Headmaster’s office, casting a warm glow over the shelves full of eccentric trinkets that clutters the already overflowing office. It smells like lemon drops and old parchment. The portraits are sound asleep, Fawkes in his perch, quiet, watching.

Snape stood near the door, arms folded, jaws tight. He was tense when he felt the powerful magic bouncing against the castle walls, then he heard shattering, and he feared for the worst. Only to see Potter in the middle of the hurricane, vulnerable, out of control. Coming near him, the magic was almost enough to make Snape drop to his knees, feeling drunk on the power it emits. But he was able to withstand the Dark Lord’s magic even at his angriest, he had learned to hold his ground.

They had already sent Potter out, allowing him some time to pack his things and explain recent events to his friends. Snape had never seen the boy so quiet, so still, before. He was hunched on the chair, looking smaller than the weight on his shoulders, clenching his fists until he suddenly relaxed. 

“I’m done here,” the boy said as stood up. His voice was paper-thin. Tired. Like something had cracked behind it and he hadn’t decided whether to let it break. Then he was gone, slipping out the door like a shadow. Not even slamming it.

Now only Dumbledore and Snape remain, a herd of elephants still unaddressed. When  Potter spat out the word horcrux earlier, it shocked something in him, something furious and horrified. How did he know about horcruxes? And what does that have something to do with this?

Dumbledore steepled his fingers. “There is no easy way to say this,” he began, which Severus had learned long ago meant he had already decided not to spare you .

“There is a piece of Voldemort’s soul inside Harry,” the old man said.

Severus blinked once. A single, surgical pause.Then the world tilted.

“You mean to say,” Severus said slowly, as if testing out the words, “that the Dark Lord… used him—made him—into a Horcrux?”

“Not deliberately,” Dumbledore replied. “It was an accident. The night he tried to kill Harry, when the curse rebounded, I believe he was so fractured that… a piece of his soul attached itself to the closest living thing.”

Severus felt something lurch inside his chest. His stomach twisted with nausea he hadn’t felt in years. Not since he first served in the first Blood War, not since he first knelt to the Dark Lord and feared discovery of his true allegiance. He wants to reach inside and physically stamp down the revulsion he feels crawling up his throat, because a horcrux—a piece of that monster’s soul is inside a child. Lily’s child. 

“How long have you known?” Severus asked, voice like stone, unwavering despite the sickness.

“I suspected it for so long, much stronger last year. I only confirmed it this summer,” Dumbledore said.

“And you didn’t think to tell us?”

“I needed time.”

“Time for what, Albus?”

Dumbledore didn’t flinch. “Time to prepare. The locket. The ring. The diadem. The cup. I’ve found them all, or at least their traces. The soul fragments are weakening. I believe we can destroy them.”

Severus didn’t care about the damn trinkets. “And him ?” he demanded. “What about his life?”

Dumbledore’s gaze dropped. “Not yet.”

It was soft. Final. Cowardly.

“You should have told him,” he said. “You should have told me.”

Dumbledore’s eyes, suddenly old and tired, didn’t meet his.

He remembered a conversation with Albus, years ago, when he’d first agreed to watch over the boy. “He is your responsibility now, Severus.”

And Severus, foolish, bitter, drowning in guilt, had said, “I will keep him alive.” That had been the agreement. Keep him alive. But now Severus understood, he hadn’t succeeded, not in the ways that really matter anyway. Because Harry wasn’t living, not really. He was surviving. And even that thread was fraying.

How can Severus keep the boy alive if the only option they have is his death? How can he justify all the cruelty, all the coldness, all the bitter control, if in the end, it was never going to save him? What kind of man agrees to guard a lamb when he knows it’s meant for sacrifice? 

Snape turned away from the Headmaster and stared at the fire. It snapped gently, like it didn’t know it was bearing witness to something unforgivable. Albus had spoken as if it were strategy. A chessboard. Pieces. Sacrifices. Acceptable losses.

But Harry wasn’t a pawn.

He was a child.

A sixteen-year-old child with a monster inside him and a war on his shoulders and no one to tell him it was okay to be afraid. And somehow, despite all of that, he still tried to protect others. He still tried to be good. Snape had seen it now. Not in headlines. Not in Lily’s eyes. In Harry’s own actions. In the way he charged towards uncertainty just because he thought a loved one was held hostage. In the way he looked at pain and didn’t look away.

Severus wanted to scream. Or hex something. Or make Albus feel it the way he did. But all he could manage was a whisper, rough and bitter, “You’ve doomed him.”

Dumbledore didn’t deny it.

That was the worst part. Because Severus had known Albus for most of life, as his student, as his spy, as his closest confidant. Long enough to stop mistaking his gentleness for harmlessness. Long enough to understand that mercy and strategy were not opposites in the man’s mind, but twins.

Albus loved Harry.

There was no doubt.

Snape had seen it in a hundred small moments: the way the Headmaster’s eyes softened when the boy entered the room; the way his hand would hover over Harry’s shoulder, not touching but close, like a grandfather afraid to break a wounded bird. He called him “Harry.” Not “Potter.” Not “The Boy Who Lived.” Not even “my boy,” which might have been more distant. Just Harry , like the name itself was a kind of prayer.

He had watched him grow. Guided him. Indulged him. Let him fail and protected him from the worst of the consequences. Dumbledore had always carried Harry like a secret joy. Snape had sneered at that once, called it favoritism, sentimentality.

But now he saw the truth.

It wasn’t that Dumbledore didn’t love the boy.

It was that he loved him too much.

And yet, he was willing to let him die.

Because Dumbledore weighed lives. Always had. He saw the world in numbers and balances, in sacrifices and outcomes. He was a man who had stood in the middle of a war twice and more and decided, with unbearable calm, who could be spared and who could not.

And Harry, Harry, who was so loved tenderly, had been marked from the beginning.

Severus thought of Dumbledore’s words again. “Not yet.”

Not yet.

As if death were already scheduled, just waiting for the appointed hour. As if Harry were a strategy. As if timing were more important than mercy. As if Harry’s life was a candle on the altar of peace, flickering slowly to its end.

Severus wanted to shake him. To scream at him. To ask him how, why, what right he had to make that choice for someone he claimed to love. But he knew the answer. Because Dumbledore did love Harry. And still, he had to act.

That was the curse of leadership, wasn’t it? To carry the greater good in one hand and a boy’s life in the other, and still choose. 

Severus clenched his fists. He thought of Lily, of her laughter, her anger, her absolute refusal to be ignored. She would have fought. She would have burned this office down with her bare hands if she’d heard the words " not yet ." And what had he done? For sixteen years?

Sneered. Mocked. Blamed James.

What a coward he’d been.

Severus had agreed, once, that Potter must be prepared. He’d hardened himself to it. Told himself that cruelty in the moment was better than weakness in war. He thought protecting Harry meant shaping him into a weapon that could survive.  Now he understood—it meant protecting the boy from becoming that weapon at all.

Severus found Potter later. He almost hadn’t looked—he thought Potter would have been waiting outside the Gryffindor Tower or down the dungeons, but the wards told a different story. 

Potter was in the courtyard, just beyond the stone archways. He was sitting on the edge of the low wall, a sketchbook on his lap. The stars are overhead, abundant and twinkling, with the lake glimmering back its shine. Moonlight spilling like silver paint across the grass. 

Severus didn’t speak first. He just stood there, leaning against the stone column, arms crossed, watching Potter drag slow lines across a page. The boy’s posture was tense. Guarded. But his hands, the scrape of quill against parchment, were steady, soft. The drawing was something simple: a tree. A rock. The edge of a tower. Just architecture. Stillness.

Severus thinks of the sketchbook that Potter is holding.

He had seen it once, just briefly, Potter had left it open on the arm of the chair and stepped away during one of their lessons. Severus assigned the boy some reading while he graded essays. Severus had glanced down and caught a glimpse of something... human. Raw. A face—not Voldemort, not James—but something in between. Empty. Not Harry. Etched in jagged lines. Not Tom. Hollow. 

Snape had looked away.

But it had stayed with him.

It still did.

What kind of boy draws his own soul splitting in half?

One who knows it is.

“You should be inside.”

Potter didn’t look up. “I couldn’t breathe in there.”

Snape studied the boy beside him, hunched over, bearing more than anyone should, and still upright. Still drawing. Still breathing.

“Does it hurt?” he asked before he could stop himself.

Harry blinked. “Sometimes,” he said. “It’s not loud, though. Just… always there. Like a splinter.”

When Albus had said the word horcrux , the bottom had dropped out of Snape’s world.

He’d seen horrors in his life. Had created some. But this? This was monstrous. This was taking a child, Lily’s child, and turning him into a vessel. A container for something vile and broken. A boy whose entire existence had been built on sacrifice, on silence, on survival, and now this. A living prison for the darkest piece of the man who killed his parents.

It was obscene.

And worse, Albus had known. Had watched that child suffer, had watched him burn out year after year, and still waited. Still spoke in riddles and half-truths while the boy bled in silence. Aching from unseen horrors or ignored hurts, from places that should protect him. Hogwarts, the ministry, and perhaps even his home. Albus had dropped hints, half-truths, assurances that the “protection” on Privet Drive came at a “price.” But Severus had not asked what that price was.

Right now, he cannot bear to think of the implications of what those words and what the memories, however fleeting, that he saw during their Occlumency lessons should mean. No, he will tackle this one at a time before he invites a massive breakdown. 

Severus still heard the echo of Harry’s voice in the Headmaster’s office: “I’m done here.”

He wasn’t angry. That was the part that haunted Snape. He was empty. Burnt out, already grieving something he hadn’t yet lost. Grieving while the body is warm, bleeding out in every crevice of his hurting soul.

Snape clenched his jaw, arms tightening across his chest. He had seen that look before. In himself. In other children Voldemort had broken. But never in someone so… determined to carry it alone.

Snape studied him now, this strange, sharp, weary boy he’d spent years despising. And he realized, with a bitter twist of something too close to guilt, that he didn’t know him at all. What he knew were versions. Headlines. Hallway scowls. James’s ghost in a borrowed face.

Not Harry.

Not the child who traced trees at midnight just to feel his own hands moving.

Not the child who still hadn't asked Severus a single thing about the prophecy, or the future, or his own death. As if he’d already decided it didn't matter. As if he’d accepted it.

Snape’s voice surprised even himself when it came, “You are not him.”

Potter looked up. No sarcasm. No anger.

“I know.”

And Snape, against every instinct, believed him.

Because the boy didn’t carry darkness the way the Dark Lord had.

He carried it like it was leaking from a wound.

Severus found himself standing outside the guest room door. It was late. The dungeons were silent. The hearth had long gone out. Severus didn’t knock. He didn’t speak. He just stood there, one hand hovering near the doorframe, and thought, like a man standing at the edge of something impossible: I will not let you go to your death without a fight.

Even if it meant defying Albus.

Even if it meant rewriting fate.

For once in his life, Severus Snape would not be the reason a child died.

He could feel Harry on the other side, magic steady but quiet, pressed down like a bruise under bandages. 

He got up slowly and paced toward the shelves. Not looking for anything in particular. Just moving. Thinking. Breathing. He remembered the look on Albus’s face when Harry left the office. There had been sorrow there, yes. But also resolve.

And Severus, who had devoted his life to serving causes and men who never deserved it, felt something tear in his chest. Dumbledore was not the Dark Lord. He was not cruel for pleasure. But in some ways, his sins were colder. Cleaner. Because they were necessary. Because they were justified.

Because they were done with love.

Snape closed his eyes. He could not be that man.

Not again.

He’d always told himself that caring was dangerous. That to care for a child born of James Potter’s arrogance and Lily Evans’ sacrifice was a cruelty too personal to survive.

But he had been wrong.

Harry was not James.

And Lily was not the reason he owed this boy anything.

Harry should be reason enough. What does it say about a man when he serves two people who calculate a child’s death like it’s nothing? When they see it as something that needs to happen and the man denies it, stupidly, hopelessly?

He stopped near the window. The stars outside were faint through the dungeons’ thick stone, but still visible. 

He wondered if Harry was drawing again.

Or just trying to breathe.

Chapter Text

The Gryffindor Common Room was quiet when Harry returned from Dumbledore’s Office, just a few students pulling all-nighters and the heat from the flickering fireplace. He spotted Ron and Hermione conversing in a secluded corner, perhaps wondering where he was. Harry approaches them, with the quiet numbness once again settling on his shoulders. 

“Sorry to keep you guys waiting,” Harry said quietly, unsure of how to begin the conversation. Sorry my magic exploded again and now I have to live with Snape.

“Harry! Where have you been? We were so worried!” Hermione exclaimed when she saw him, concern written all over her face.

“We thought we’ll find you in the infirmary again, mate.” Ron added, “you ok?”

“I’m fine,” Harry began, unsure if he even believes his own words, “but I can’t stay for long.”

His best friends both look towards him in concern and puzzlement, wondering why he can’t stay in the dorm. 

“It happened again—my magic, I mean. It almost exploded a part of the castle…I can’t stay here anymore.” Harry said with a confidence he doesn’t really feel. 

“What? Then where are you staying?” Ron asked, confusion etched into his brows. Hermione looked at Harry with the same question on her face. 

“Somewhere safer…with Snape,” Harry said, not meeting their eyes. “He was the one who saved me, created a kind of ward to stop my magic from exploding. I’m not safe anymore.”

Hermione opened her mouth, maybe to deny his statement or to assure him that he’s perfectly safe, but Harry was quicker. “I was lucky that nobody was hurt during my outbursts, but what if innocent students were caught up in it? I exploded ink bottles, windows, and moved everything that could be moved. I can’t forgive myself if any of you got hurt because of me.”

“I need to go pack,” Harry added after a moment of silence. They didn’t push, knowing that Harry’s already exhausted from today’s events. Hermione squeezed his shoulder and Ron muttered something about dungeon mold being good to the sinuses. 

Harry packs in silence, he only takes the essentials. Wand, books, sketchbook, Occlumency text, clothes, and other school supplies. He contemplates leaving the Marauder’s Map, what’s the point if he’s already being watched after all? But in the end, it’s a piece of his family. He doesn’t bring his broom. There’s no time for that anyway.

Snape’s quarters are deeper in the dungeons than Harry expected. They pass through an archway sealed with wards Harry can feel in his bones—wards that ripple across his skin like cold water as they step through.

Inside, the space is... unexpected. It isn’t warm, but it’s not harsh either. There’s a bright warm fire in the hearth. A battered but sturdy desk covered in neat stacks of parchment. Numerous bookshelves filled with thick tomes and well-used books. A worn green armchair. Two doors on either side of the room.

“This,” Snape says, gesturing to the smaller door on the left, “is the guest room. It has been warded. You will sleep there, study there, and stay there unless otherwise directed. You will attend meals and classes as usual. And you will report here immediately after.”

Harry nods.

Snape looks him over. “If you lose control again, I will know.”

Harry swallows. “Okay.”

They stand in silence for a moment longer, the flicker of the fire casting long shadows over the stone. Then Snape says, in a voice like gravel scraped clean, “I will not coddle you, Potter.”

Harry nods again.

“I’m not asking you to.”

Later, in the firmness of his borrowed bed, Harry stares up at the ceiling. The stone here is colder than the tower, and the shadows are longer. But for the first time in weeks, he doesn’t feel entirely alone. Snape, who shortly retreated to his room like he was allergic to company after their short conversation, is just beyond the door. No Dumbledore riddles. No prophecy platitudes.

Just another scarred soul who knows the weight of silence.

Harry pulls out his sketchbook, turns to a new page, and begins to draw. Not a veil. Not eyes. Not the face between. This time, he sketches the fireplace across the room. The soft chair beside it. The faint flicker of warmth in the cold stone. This time, he draws something real.

The first few days in the dungeons are quiet.

Not silent, Harry’s magic still hums under his skin sometimes, restless and irritated like a caged cat, but there’s a kind of hush over everything, like the world is holding its breath. It’s quiet in that brittle tiptoeing way where neither party wants to be the first to speak unless absolutely necessary.

Snape is precise, predictable, sharp but no longer barbed without cause. He doesn’t bark out orders, but he doesn’t indulge, either. He made it clear that he expects punctuality, cleanliness, and silence. 

Harry can do silence. But he doesn’t know what to do with the absence of anger. There are no heated arguments, no shouting matches, no “Potter” spat across the stone floor. 

By the third day, they had developed a strange choreography of avoidance. Harry wakes at dawn. Leaves for classes before Snape does. Returns just after curfew. They sometimes pass each other in the main room, Snape with tea and Harry with books, but the exchange is usually nothing more than a nod or a single word.

“Evening.”

“Sir.”

Snape never enters the guest room. Harry never enters Snape’s.

There are boundaries. Unspoken, but firm.

But Harry keeps expecting anger—the bitterness, the scorn, the cold remarks that used to dig under his skin. But Snape is… still. Withdrawn. Professional. He gives Harry reading lists and study tasks and the occasional sharp look, but nothing that hurts. Not really.

Additionally, Snape begins leaving out extra bread during tea. Not explicitly for Harry—but it’s there, next to the second cup he never acknowledges.

Harry starts rinsing the cups after they’re used. Folds the tea towel. Stacks the books Snape leaves by the fire.

It’s not warmth. It’s not affection.

Harry feels off-balance.

He drops a mug on the fourth morning. It slips through his fingers and shatters against the flagstones.

Snape appears in the doorway immediately, wand already out. Harry freezes, heart pounding—half-expecting a sneer, a raised voice, some biting comment about recklessness or attention-seeking.

Instead, Snape just flicks his wand. The pieces vanish.

“Next time,” he says dryly, “use both hands.”

Harry blinks. “Right.”

And that’s it. Snape leaves. No lecture. No punishment. Just… the sound of retreating footsteps.

Harry stares at the now-clean floor for a long time.

There are moments when Harry forgets where he is.

He wakes one night and almost ducks, instinctively bracing for a cupboard ceiling above him.  Another evening, he pulls out a pencil to sketch and stops, because part of him is waiting for someone to yell at him for making a mess.

No one yells.

Snape sees the sketchbook again and simply raises an eyebrow. Harry doesn’t feel like hiding it in Snape’s presence, he already saw it after all, after the confrontation with Dumbledore. But he was still tense, waiting for a sarcastic comment or two. But Snape doesn’t touch it nor does he comment. Just looks at it for a moment too long before turning back to his notes.

Harry doesn’t know what that means.

The awkwardness doesn’t go away. It lingers like a third presence in the room—an invisible thing made of too many unsaid words. Sometimes, they eat at the same table. Not together, Snape is always buried in a book, and Harry eats quietly, eyes on his plate, but they share space.

Once, Snape passes the salt without being asked.

Once, Harry mumbles “thanks” and Snape nods.

It’s the strangest peace Harry’s ever known.

The expected explosions never come.

No one tells Harry to leave.

No one slams the door.

And maybe that, more than anything else, is what begins to feel like safety, made him feel like it’s okay to relax his shoulders he didn’t know was tense in the first place.

One evening, after a particularly difficult DADA class (Snape hadn’t called him out once—worrying in itself), Harry drops his bag onto the armchair and sits down too hard, exhausted. His hands are shaking again.

“Occlumency,” Snape says without preamble, standing by the hearth, wand already in his hand. His robes were somehow fluttering faintly in the still dungeon air. The fire is low. The torches in Snape’s office burn low, casting long skeletal shadows that stretch across the stone floor like they’ve been trying to escape for centuries. The air is thick with dust and tension and the metallic tang of something unspoken. The smell of burnt candle wax and ink stains cling to the back of Harry’s throat, cloying and dry.

Harry looks up. “Now?”

“You’ve read the book,” Snape said in a clipped manner. “You will show me what you’ve learned.” 

Harry’s palms are laid flat on his thighs, jaw locked. He’s tired. He’s always tired lately. His magic hums just beneath the surface, an echo of something louder, something fiercer. 

“Clear your mind,” Snape said, voice flat.

Harry closes his eyes. The lids are heavy. His lashes stick slightly with exhaustion. He breathes. He counts.

In. Two. Three. Four.

Hold.

Out. Two. Three. Four.

But his mind is never clear. It’s never still. Not really. Just underneath the silence are the sketches: of falling, of drowning, of burning. Faces with no eyes. Words that were never said. He tries, honestly—he tries to push everything down. The ache behind his eyes. The weight in his lungs. The noise in his chest that never, ever stops. He imagines calm. He imagines silence. He imagines the Astronomy Tower and his feet planted firmly on the stone, looking up at the stars instead of down.

Snape doesn’t wait long.

“Legilimens.”

The spell hits like a crack of thunder.

Suddenly, Snape is inside his mind, inadvertently seeing more than he should, sliding along Harry’s mind like it’s made of broken glass and ink and teeth. It unspools through Harry’s mind like a thread pulled too tightly. And on that thread hang images, charcoal stained fingerprints and clear crisp lines of sketches. A page on the corner, crumpled and old, depicts the darkness of his cupboard, the rusted bolts, the spiders who share his space, all drawn in charcoal so black it stains the paper like soot. 

Then there’s a page, lines drawn soft yet frantic, Sirius falling through the veil, Harry’s hands reaching for his outstretched ones, the rest of his Godfather’s body already slipping away. Harry imagines crumpling the page in his mind, he doesn’t want to see that, not again. They move on to another page, a drawing of a boy, of Harry in a portrait, with no mouth and hollow sockets and a shadow where his heart should be. There’s red smeared across the page, blood staining where it shouldn’t be. Ink drips through the ceiling like rain. 

And then, a fluttering piece of paper, portraying the inside of the Astronomy Tower. A boy, with his back to the audience, standing on the edge, drawn softly and quietly in graphite and blurred lines. Abruptly it cuts off to a real memory, of Harry on the precipice, hands on his sides and shoulder slumped. His eyes closed as he savored the cold wind that toys with his hair, his shoes are half off the stone ledge, toes hanging over the abyss. He isn’t falling. He isn’t jumping. But he isn’t not doing it either.

There is a stillness to him in the drawing that makes it worse. A silence so loud it screams. The image stays longer than it should. A beat too many. Everything in the memory aches. 

The spell breaks like glass under a hammer. The air rushes back in. 

Harry bolts upright, the chair clattering to the floor behind him with a hollow crash that echoes off the stone walls. His chest heaves, not from fear but from exposure. From being seen .

Snape is still standing, but his expression has cracked, only slightly, a shift behind the eyes, a twitch of the jaw, but Harry sees it.

“What,” Snape demands, and his voice is not the cold drawl Harry is used to, “was that?”

Harry doesn’t answer. His arms are locked at his sides. He’s trembling. “You tell me,” he snaps, sharper than he means to. “You’re the one rifling through my head like it’s a bloody storage closet.”

“That wasn’t just a memory,” Snape says. His wand is still out. “That was something else. Thought. Image. Feeling.” His voice is unsteady, as if he’s not used to naming things that aren’t logical. “You’re supposed to shield them, not display them like some—” he cuts himself off. 

A pause.

“I saw the Astronomy Tower.”

Harry’s breathing turns jagged, slicing down his throat.

And then everything erupts.

“You want the truth? You want the bloody hero? You can’t have both!”

The words come out of him like a hex—raw, bitter, unrefined. Magic sparks along his fingertips, faint and flickering. Not enough to destroy, but enough to burn.

“You want me trained and obedient and full of hope, but I’m not. I’m—” He falters, breath catching. “I’m cracked open. I don’t sleep. I don’t eat. I can’t even draw anymore without it turning into a nightmare. You keep cutting me open and wondering why I bleed.”

Snape doesn’t move.

Harry breathes, hard and shallow. “You can’t demand strength and then be surprised by the scars. You can’t beg for answers and then flinch when you see what’s left of me.”

“Enough,” Snape said, voice low, his eyes burning, not with contempt, not with anger. It takes little time for Harry to name the emotion, the grief in his professor’s eyes, but it does take him longer to understand why. 

“You want me to fight for a world that’s chewed me up since I was eleven—ten—five , and now you want access? To the pieces?” Harry continues, Snape doesn’t get to shut him up, not now. “I didn’t ask to be this,” voice quieter now, breath catching. “I didn’t ask for any of it. Not the scar. Not the prophecy. Not the magic that won’t shut up. I’m tired, Professor.”

There’s silence. And then, quietly, like a confession, Snape says, “I failed her.”

Harry blinks.

Snape is staring at the floor. His voice is slow, unfolding, and careful. “I failed everyone,” Snape continued. “Lily. James. Myself. You.”

The words shouldn’t matter. But they land like weights dropped from a great height.

“I hated you,” Snape says, not with venom, but with shame. “Not because of anything you did, but because you existed. Because every time I saw you, I saw what I destroyed. What I couldn’t have. What I was too much of a coward to deserve.”

Harry doesn’t speak, something inside of him curls tight. 

Snape’s voice is quiet. 

“I didn’t know how to help you. So I punished you instead.” Snape confessed with remorse. ”I still don’t. But I know what it is to carry too much of someone else inside your skin. To have everything you are buried beneath what they left behind.”

And then, Harry says, in a voice so small it almost disappears—

“I don’t want to die.”

Snape closes his eyes.

Harry swallows. “But I think I’ve been ready for a long time now.”

The torches flicker low. The walls seem to draw in tighter around them, as if listening. 

Snape doesn’t move. Harry doesn’t either. They sit in the stillness like ruins that refuse to collapse. Neither of them leaves first.

The dream wakes him slowly this time. Not in a gasp, not with the sick lurch of falling, but like drifting up from deep water, lungs full of salt, eyes stinging from the dark. His shirt clings damply to his back. His pillow’s been twisted halfway off the bed. The blanket is tangled around his legs.

The room is quiet. Too quiet. No whispering veil. No screaming portraits. No red eyes waiting for him behind the lids. But the ghost of it still lingers. Heavy and sour in his throat.

He sits up carefully, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes. There’s a tremor in his hands again. Not as bad as before, but enough. Enough to make the world feel a little sideways. When he swings his legs off the bed and presses his feet to the stone floor, it’s cold. Brutally cold. He doesn’t mind. He welcomes it.

The dungeons are always quiet this time of night. Still. Listening.

Harry moves on instinct, padding slowly out into the sitting room of Snape’s quarters. The walls are lined with books, their spines cracked and tired. The fireplace glows faintly, the embers warm but fading.

And there, on the table, is a cup.

It’s plain and clean, white porcelain lined with subtle silver leaves and trim. Steam still curling from the top in slow spirals. Not charmed, not conjured. Made.

There’s a second cup beside it.

Harry stares at them.

He doesn’t drink right away. Just wraps his hands around the warmth and lets the silence settle on his shoulders like a blanket. Snape doesn’t enter the room, but Harry knows he’s awake. He feels it in the quiet pressure of the space, in the absence that feels just deliberate enough to count as presence.

In the morning, there’s a stack of parchment by his door. Thick and high-quality. Smooth under the fingers. Alongside it is a small box, charcoal and graphite pencils, neatly arranged, each one sharp. 

Untouched. There’s no note. No acknowledgment. Just the offer. Just the fact of it.

And that, more than any apology or speech, feels like mercy.

Harry stares at the pencils for a long time.

He doesn’t take them in immediately. Just looks. Breathes. Feels something he doesn’t know the name for stretch its fingers into his chest.

He leaves the door open.

That evening, the silence breaks. Not because of magic. Not because of a fight. But because Harry speaks.

“I didn’t think I’d make it to sixteen,” he says, voice flat. Like he’s saying the weather. Like he’s saying his name.

They’re not in a lesson. They’re not in crisis. Just two people sharing the same quiet space, the same stillness, the same wariness. Snape doesn’t look up immediately. He’s seated in his usual chair, a book open on one knee. But he doesn’t turn the page.

“Why sixteen?” he asks, eventually.

Harry shrugs, curling his fingers into the hem of his sleeve. “Fifteen already felt like a mistake.”

The silence that follows isn’t shocked. It isn’t horrified. It’s something heavier. Something more honest. Snape closes the book. Slowly. Deliberately.

“You’re not a mistake,” he says, and it sounds like it takes effort. Like the words are unfamiliar in his mouth. “You are… consequence. But not mistake.”

Harry lets out a laugh. It’s ugly. Frayed. “That supposed to help?”

“No,” Snape says. “It’s supposed to be true.”

He leans forward slightly, elbows on his knees, gaze sharp but not cold. “I’ve thought about it, too.”

Harry looks up. Snape doesn’t flinch.

“Before you. Before this. After Lily. After… everything. There were nights I thought about slipping away in the silence. Thought about leaving my wand behind and just—disappearing.”

Harry watches him like he’s never seen him before. “I thought you hated weakness,” he said, after a moment.

“I do,” Snape replies. “Especially my own.”

A beat.

“But that wasn’t weakness, Potter. It was despair. It was grief.” He said it like he’s naming old friends. Familiar. Bitter.

Harry swallows hard. “I wasn’t going to jump,” he said quietly. “I just wanted to know what it felt like… to be close.”

Snape nods once. “I know the difference.”

The silence after that is softer. Not empty. Just quiet.

They didn't talk again that night. But they stay in the same room. Reading. Breathing. And in the morning, the tea is already waiting.

So is a clean sheet of parchment.

And this time, Harry picks up the pencil.

Chapter Text

Harry dreams of burning. 

It isn’t the kind of dream where flames lick at the walls or his skin sizzles in pain. It’s deeper than that. The fire lives under his ribs, in his blood, in the marrow of him. It hums like a second heartbeat. It flares like a matchstick in the dusk when he wakes, without reason. He’s starting to think the only reason is him .

And when red eyes and cold whispers join his dreams, he sometimes wakes up with scorch marks on his bed sheets. Sometimes, he doesn’t sleep at all. 

The room Snape gave him remains the same: plain stone walls, a shelf half-filled with books, a narrow bed with gray linens. But lately, the air crackles faintly when Harry steps inside. Magic bleeds from his skin in slow waves, like heat off pavement. It curls in the corners, nestles in shadows, waits at the foot of the bed like a loyal animal. Watchful. Unruly. 

Harry doesn’t know if he can tame it. If it’s even possible. 

He depends on the grounding technique the Occlumency book gave him. Like a trained dog when it hears the bell, Harry breathes everytime he feels it consuming him. 

In. Two. Three. Four.

 Hold.

Out. Two. Three. Four.

It doesn’t really matter if it’s impossible. Harry will try anyway. He may not be able to clear his mind, but his real goal is to make space for himself within it. 

In the corridor outside the library. Harry hadn’t been paying attention. He turned the corner and walked straight into another student.

“Watch it, Potter,” Draco snaps, tone sharp but lacking real venom.

Harry frowns. “You walked into me.”

Draco looks tired. Too pale, thinner than usual. There’s shadows under his eyes, gone are the sparkling mischievous steel gray eyes. The burdens of adults are etched on his face, looking like he was held together by little more than stubbornness and will to survive.

They stare at each other for a long moment. And something… passes between them. A kind of recognition. Not friendship, not even civility, but mutual exhaustion.

Draco’s eyes flicker. “You’re not in Gryffindor Tower anymore.” It’s not a question.

Harry narrows his eyes. “Keeping tabs on me?”

“I have ears, Potter. And eyes.” He pauses. “Snape’s not exactly known for hospitality.”

Harry’s lips tighten. “I’m not here for tea and biscuits.”

Draco tilts his head slightly. “No. I suppose you’re not.”

Then he walks away without another word. Harry watches him go, stomach twisting with something he can’t name.

That night, when he returns to the quarters, Snape is at the fire grading essays.

“Malfoy,” Snape said without looking up. “Was he polite?”

Harry blinks. “You knew?”

“I know more than you think, Potter.”

A beat.

“He looked tired,” Harry said, cautious.

“He is,” Snape replied, voice unreadable. “And he is also none of your concern.”

Harry sits across from him, thinking of children with burdens they didn’t choose. Of the looming war and their places in it. He thinks of death and survival and wonders which is one easier. In another life, he might have made Malfoy his concern, as antagonistic as they both were to each other, they were both open books to one another. But in this life, Harry is too tired, too burdened by the knowledge of fates and decisions that told him of what he had to do. Circumstances that urges him to choose to die, to come and welcome death with open arms. He finds that there’s no more room for other people’s burdens in his life and opens his sketchbook. He doesn’t press. 

But he draws Draco anyway.

Not as an enemy.

Not even as a rival.

Just as a boy with too much weight on his shoulders and no one to carry it with him.

“We will start with Defense lessons today,” Snape said as soon as Harry entered the room. 

Harry blinks and tilts his head, “what lessons?”

Snape looked at him, his eyes boring into Harry’s. “I did say that Dumbledore decided to include Defense lessons in his long list of mistakes, yes?” Snape’s eyebrow is raised, daring Harry to say no. “You did, I assume, glance at the Defense books I instructed you to read—unless that was too arduous a task?”

Ah, so that’s why. Harry was surprised when he received those books from Snape, of all people, days after he was given the one on Occlumency. Now that Harry thinks about it, Snape did say something like that during their first lesson. But Harry was too numbed to properly insert that to his memories. 

“Here?” Harry asked after pointedly looking around the small room. 

“ Morgana no , Potter. We will conduct it in other, far more suitable surroundings.” Snape said with something like fond exasperation. 

The walk to the Room of Requirements was quiet but comfortable. Students were already in their own respective dorms so only the scuff of their shoes against the stone floor were heard. When they reached it and opened the room, it had styled itself into a long, empty dueling chamber—cool and echoing, torchlight flickering along the walls. A table stood at the far end with a pitcher of water and two glasses, untouched.

Snape moved to stand at the far end of the chamber, robes already half-shed, sleeves rolled up, wand in hand. Harry mirrored him at the other end, his hand already fumbling for his wand. His stance wasn’t perfect—slightly hunched, jaw clenched—but he looked steady. Not like a student. Not like a child.

“Show me what you know, Potter.” Snape’s eyes was a gauntlet thrown down in silence, a challenge with no words but all intent.

Harry cast without hesitation. “ Expelliarmus !”

Snape parried, wand flicking up with a grace born from years of battlefield instinct. “ Protego . Too slow. Again.”

“ Expelliarmus !”

“ Protego . Try thinking with your body instead of your ego. Again.”

This time, Harry didn’t speak. He cast nonverbally. The disarming spell darted across the room like a red snap of lightning. Snape blocked it but with effort. His eyes narrowed.

“Better,” he said. “But predictable. You always lead with the same spell.”

“I’m not trying to kill you,” Harry muttered, breath quickening.

Snape’s eyes flashed. “And that is your greatest weakness.”

He sent a hex flying toward Harry—sharp, fast, designed to sting, not wound. Harry dodged. Just barely.

“Your enemy will not hesitate, Potter. He will not duel you with honor. He will not offer you fairness. He will aim to destroy. To unmake. Again.”

Harry was already casting before he finished. This time it wasn’t just defense, he mustered up all the anger he buried inside his chest, discarding the numbness in his mind like dirty laundry.  “ Stupefy !”

Snape sidestepped it. “Good. Now again. Let it speak for you.”

Harry didn’t understand what that meant until he cast again. This time, he felt it. The hum in his bones. The roar beneath his ribs. His magic responded like it knew what Snape was asking for.

“ Expulso !”

Snape blocked but the air rippled with the force of it. They dueled in silence after that. Quick bursts. Fast movement. Sweat. Focus. Then the duel changed.

Snape stopped holding back. A flick of his wrist sent a shimmering chain of fire across the room—Harry countered with a spinning shield of water that hissed as the flames struck. He wasn’t thinking anymore—he was moving. The spells were pure reflex. Light sparked from his wand tip like lightning from a stormcloud.

“ Serpensortia !” Snape shouted as he cast another spell unfamiliar to Harry. A thick black snake coiled onto the floor, hissing. Harry didn’t flinch. He raised a hand, not his wand, and the serpent froze mid-slither, then dissolved into smoke.

Snape’s eyes widened. Just a flicker. But it was there.

“ Protego Maxima !”

The shield around Harry was nearly translucent—shot through with gold and shadow. Snape’s other curse hit it and scattered like wind against glass.

Harry stepped forward, wand at his side. “You said let it speak for me,” he said. “It’s screaming now.”

Snape nodded once. “Then scream well.” He raised his wand again.

The room was filled with light. Jets of crimson and emerald, blue and gold. Conjured smoke, waves of energy, spells layered upon spells. The Room of Requirement shifted to keep up, strengthening its walls, reshaping the floor where their boots scraped deep into the stone. Neither held back now.

Snape swept a barrage of stunners toward Harry and Harry met them with a burst of wind that turned them aside. Not with a word. Just will.

“Impressive,” Snape breathed. “Again.”

“Gladly,” Harry snapped.

Their magic met in the middle of the room like two beasts colliding. For a moment, it felt like the world bent with the weight of it. Then, as Harry raised his wand again, a sharp disarming charm flew from Snape’s direction before Harry could cast. It hit him square in the chest. He fell backward, wind knocked from his lungs. His wand clattered to the floor.

Both men stilled, breathing heavily. Not enemies. Not teacher and student. Just two powerful forces at rest after impact. Harry expected a sneer. A lecture. Instead, there was quiet.

When he looked up, Snape was already crossing the room.

“As shockingly hopeless as you are at Potions, you display an unsettling degree of aptitude in Defense,” Snape said flatly.

Harry took the offered hand. “Thanks.”

Snape didn’t let go immediately. “Your magic is fierce. You control it well, but not when you’re angry.”

Harry looked away. “It’s hard not to be angry.”

Snape released his hand, “I know.” His voice scraped raw at the edges, as if the words had to be dragged from some reluctant depth.

“I know.” Snape said again. 

They stood there for a beat. Then, without venom: “We’ll resume tomorrow, Occlumency. Come prepared.”

Harry nodded, chest still tight, but steadier.

As he turned to leave, Snape spoke again.

“You led with Expelliarmus because it’s what you know. But it’s also a symbol. You fight to disarm, not to dominate.”

Harry blinked. Then gave a half-smile. “You quoting Dumbledore now?”

Snape’s lips twitched. “Merlin forbid.”

And somehow, the silence that followed wasn’t uncomfortable.

It was just quiet. And safe.

Harry noticed it gradually, but he already felt it from the start. How could he not? When it feels like the world has tilted ninety degrees to the left and he feels off-balance. 

It wasn’t that Snape had become warm. He didn’t smile and suddenly became soft. No, Harry is sure the world could be all sunshine and rainbows and Snape would still be an immovable scowling force. But the sharp edges had dulled, somehow. His voice was still cold, but it no longer cut. His presence no longer felt like a threat—it felt like… structure. Like walls. Like safety, even if neither of them would ever admit it aloud.

The problem is that he isn’t sure when it began.

Maybe it was the night Snape didn’t yell when Harry shattered a glass in the kitchenette, just calmly vanished it. Maybe it was the way Snape always made enough tea for two. Or maybe it was that he never commented on Harry’s sketchbook, even when he could clearly see what was drawn. Or maybe when Harry is able to make Snape’s mouth twitch upwards due to his sarcastic comment or two, the most smile-y expression anyone has ever seen from their mostly sneering or stoic Professor.

Whatever it was, it left Harry… unsettled.

He found himself watching Snape the way he watched a storm from a distance. Respectfully. Carefully. With something like wonder. He tried to cover it with sarcasm, like armor.

“You’re being suspiciously decent lately,” Harry said over tea, eyes fixed on the swirling steam.

Snape arched an eyebrow without looking up from his book. “Don’t get used to it.”

“Too late.”

The corner of Snape’s mouth twitched. Almost.

There. Harry from a year ago would have deemed it impossible to make their former Potions Professor smile, but it seems like he has been able to do it for many times now, twice in one night . Harry doesn’t really understand this man. How come he hated Harry for almost all his Hogwarts years before this year? Why now? 

Harry wanted to ask, but he’s afraid it would break this tentative truce, this peace that he hasn’t experienced for a long time, and yet craved like a child thrown into war. 

Harry opened his mouth to speak, when another question popped into his head and blurted it out before he could even process it. “What was she like?” Snape looked up, startled, the firelight catching on his features. He hadn’t planned that, didn’t even know what prompted it, except for the fact that he knows that Snape was close to his mother, revealed during their last occlumency lesson. Harry didn’t want to ask about his dad, he knows of what his father did to the man in front of him. Harry can be mean but he isn’t cruel, not when experienced it himself. 

Snape is studying him now, staying silent for almost half a minute. Harry almost takes it back but he looks at Snape and waits. Hoping that Snape won’t look at him and see just James Potter or as a reminder of failure or betrayal. He hopes that Snape just sees a boy aching to know who his mother was. 

“My mum,” Harry clarified. “Lily.”

“She was brilliant,” Snape said, taking a pause to swallow. “Fierce. Stubborn. Kind in ways most people aren't. She didn’t just speak about fairness—she lived it. She was the sort of person who made others better simply by expecting them to be.”

Harry let the words settle like dust on old shelves. He could feel how still the room had become. Snape kept his voice even.

“She had a temper. She hated injustice. She loved magic like it was music. She could make flowers bloom with a flick of her fingers and insult you so elegantly you didn’t realize you’d been wounded until an hour later.”

A small smile tugged at the corner of Harry’s mouth. “Sounds like Hermione.”

Snape didn’t smile. But his expression softened.

“She had your eyes,” he said. “But not just the color, though yours is brighter. Hers were as deep as the forest, enchanting and calming. You also inherited the way she looked at people. Direct. Unyielding.”

Harry looked down at his sketchbook. “You were friends?”

“For a time.”

“What happened?”

Snape looked into the fire for a long time before answering. “I made mistakes,” he said. “Some you don’t come back from.”

Harry didn’t press. But he remembers the mark in Snape’s forearm; the way he spat out the word mudblood in the memory, humiliated and mortified. The truth lived between the spaces. 

“Did she love him?” Harry asked. “My dad?”

Snape paused. His voice was measured when it came. “Yes.” Harry nodded. He stared down at his hands.

He didn’t hate James Potter. Not really. Not anymore. But he had built an image of him growing up—a hero, a protector, a father who would’ve swept in and taken him away from Privet Drive with a grin and a wand and warm hands.

He didn’t expect perfection. He just needed kindness. Just needed someone to be the man who saw him, the way no one in that house did. And James hadn’t been that. Maybe he would’ve been, given the chance. But it hurt, knowing the father he needed wasn’t the one he had.

“I used to pretend,” Harry said softly, “that he’d come get me. That he wasn’t really dead. That he was just… waiting. Watching. That he’d knock on the door and take me home.”

Snape didn’t speak. But something in his posture changed.

“I didn’t need him to be perfect,” Harry added. “I just needed him to be… safe.” The fire crackled between them. Gentle and familiar.

“You called me arrogant for years,” Harry said, once the quiet stalled too long. “Said I was just like my father. And I hated you for it. But I think I hated myself more. Because I wanted him to be proud of me, even if he wasn’t the person I thought he was.”

“He was not perfect, yes,” Snape said, carefully. “But he was also not a monster. People are rarely one thing.”

Harry looked up, startled. Snape shrugged slightly, a gesture so casual and unexpected that Harry had to blink numerous times to see if his eyes aren't tricking him. “I hated him. I don’t deny that. But I can no longer afford to see the world only in the colors of my grief.”

“Is that what you see when you look at me?” There it was. The question. Vulnerable and sharp.

Severus let out a long breath. “Not anymore.” 

They let the hearth fill the silence, the shadows become longer, but the mood is not uncomfortable. It was heavy and light, secure and enjoyable. It was just two vulnerable people clearing the air.

“I remember her,” Snape said quietly. “And if you want to know more about her—I will tell you. When you're ready.”

Harry nodded. He opened his sketchbook and turned to a fresh page. He didn’t speak, just began to draw. The firelight reflected in his eyes.

And for the first time, Snape stayed long enough to watch the portrait take shape.

Chapter Text

It started with the tea towel. 

It started much earlier than that, but it’s the one that made Snape remember his suspicions. It was folded too precisely. Not a wrinkle in sight. Left neatly by the sink after Harry had rinsed the mugs they’d used.

Severus wouldn’t have noticed it, except the boy folded it the same way every single time. Corners aligned. Seam tucked under. No creases. No mess.

It was the sort of thing that would have been called orderly. The sort of thing purebloods would have called bare minimum from their house elves—and Harry acts as if he’ll be punished if it wasn’t done perfectly.

Severus stared at it for a long time, arms crossed, eyes narrowed.

It was just a towel. But it told him everything.

He’d suspected for years that the boy’s home life was not pleasant. He hadn’t wanted to know.

He had imagined scoldings. He thought, once and with satisfaction, guardians withholding indulgences without depriving basic needs. Or maybe the kind of emotional neglect that breeds arrogance and insecurity.

But he hadn’t imagined this.

He hadn’t imagined a boy who moved like a servant, who flinched when footsteps passed too close behind him, who apologized for the sound of his own breath when it broke too loud in the dead of night.

He hadn’t imagined scars covered by oversized sleeves or how Harry never asked for anything, even when he was clearly in pain.

Severus had seen abuse before. He knew how to recognize it.

He just hadn’t wanted to recognize it here. In Lily’s boy.

The fire in his quarters hissed softly, casting long shadows across the stone like memories that refused to stay buried. The remnants of their meal still sat on the small wooden table between them. Two plates: one picked clean, the other half-full and cooling fast. Snape hadn’t eaten much. He rarely did when his thoughts were restless. The tea had gone tepid.

Harry sat across from him, one leg tucked under himself, hunched over his plate in the way someone does when they’re used to protecting their food. Not out of greed, but habit. Muscle memory born of scarcity.

He had thanked Snape, barely above a whisper, when the food had appeared. Not out of politeness. Not gratitude. But something closer to disbelief.

And now, in the hush that followed their silent meal, Harry had cracked open his sketchbook. Not a word. No preamble. Just fingers smudged faintly with graphite as he resumed whatever image he had begun before the meal had interrupted him.

Snape watched him over the rim of his cup, the warmth seeping into his fingers, grounding him. It should’ve felt strange, this quiet domesticity. This… stillness. But it didn’t.

Not exactly.

It felt unfamiliar, yes—but not unwelcome. Harry’s brow furrowed as he sketched, bottom lip caught slightly between his teeth. His movements were deliberate, careful. Intentional. Like if he drew precisely enough, something inside him might finally make sense.

For the first time, Severus considered that what he had once read as arrogance might have been armor. A boy growing up beneath fists and whispers would learn to hide behind sharp words and sharper eyes. Would learn that silence is a kind of shield. That survival demands performance.

Potter had been performing for years.

And he, Severus, had clapped the loudest for his failure.

There was something quietly intelligent in the way the boy deflected, not just the words, but the intent behind them. He wasn’t trying to win. He was trying not to break.

Severus shifted in his seat, the recognition bitter and slow. A kind of shame settled deep in his chest, not sharp, not immediate, but lingering. Like ash that clings long after the fire is gone. He had seen James in Harry for so long. But now, painfully, unmistakably, he saw himself.

A memory flickered: a younger version of himself in the Great Hall, hunched over bread he didn’t think he was allowed to eat. Lily’s voice calling his name. The way his spine never quite uncurled, even when she smiled.

He had hated that boy for being weak.

He had hated Harry for reminding him of him.

And now, watching the way Harry’s shoulders rose every time Snape so much as moved, he hated himself.

The silence thickened, but Harry didn’t seem to mind it. He stayed immersed in the motion of pencil on parchment. There was a smear of ash on the side of his hand. Something about that moved Severus more than he liked.

This child, this weapon the world had shaped and sharpened and thrown into battle, still found room in himself to create. To sketch veils and stars and memories onto paper as if it were a tether to something real. Something safe.

Snape reached for his wand, murmured a charm to clear the plates. He moved slowly, deliberately, giving Harry space, watching him not as a teacher surveying a misbehaving student, but as a man trying— belatedly —to understand a boy the world had failed.

Harry looked up at the soft clink of cutlery vanishing. Their eyes met. For a moment. Harry’s were shadowed, unreadable. Not scared. Not expectant. Just tired.

Snape didn’t speak.

But when he stood to leave the table, he left behind a small stack of new parchment. A fresh set of charcoal sticks. Arranged neatly beside the sketchbook.

He said nothing. Neither did Harry.

But as he crossed the room to his desk, Snape swore he felt the boy’s eyes follow him. Not with fear. But something closer to relief.

Severus had known anger before. He had known guilt. But this... this was something stranger. Something heavier. He should have seen it. The boy had been unraveling right in front of them. The explosive magic. The silence. The way he flinched not from violence, but from kindness. The way he bore scrutiny like someone who had long since accepted that to be seen was to be punished. 

He had seen it now. Not just suspicions. Not just denials. But Severus had truly seen it, not through gossip. Not through the Headmaster’s careful omissions. But through the boy’s eyes.

The fists. The belt. The screaming silence of a child who learned to make himself small, make himself silent, make himself nothing at all.

And Merlin, the cupboard.

It was not a metaphor. Not a fanciful invention of a dramatic mind. No, it was wood and nails and darkness, stale air and spiderwebs and bruises not yet yellow. It had the shape of a memory that had never been meant to surface—buried so deep it had no name but still pulsed like a scar.

Severus had flinched when he saw it. Not outwardly. Not in the way that boys like Potter would notice. But inwardly, deeply, like something old and bitter inside him had been named.

He remembered the first time he saw Number Four, when they were guarding the precious boy-who-lived’s home after the resurrection of the Dark Lord. A pristine square of suburban sickness. All trimmed hedges and lace curtains, smiling faces that wouldn’t last a second under truth serum.

He remembered Petunia as a girl, scowling at him with her sharp little mouth and clutching her baby sister’s hand too tightly. The jealousy had been plain then. It had grown into something worse. Rotten people with lovely lawns.

And Harry had grown up in that rot, treated like an infestation. Hidden. Worked. Feared.

No wonder he didn’t know how to ask for anything. No wonder his magic had begun lashing out, seeking protection he’d never been given.

Snape felt sick.

He had spent five years calling the boy arrogant. Lazy. Coddled.

And all that time, he’d been scrubbing blood out of his own shirtsleeves.

There were memories even Legilimency should not touch.

Severus staggered back a pace—not physically, but internally, as if something ancient inside him had flinched. Harry’s memories had never been easy to witness, fragmented and saturated with grief as they were, but this—

This was not just grief. This was longing curled like smoke around a rooftop, despair as silent and treacherous as snowfall on stone.

The Astronomy Tower.

The image slammed into him with ruthless clarity: Harry, wind-ruffled and too still, standing at the edge like a question. The night sky inked in stars. The tilt of his spine spoke of surrender. A breath away from falling, from flying. From giving up.

And beneath it all, magic— wild, furious, desperate —clawing to pull him back, to tether him to this world that had done so little to deserve him.

Severus gripped the edge of his desk, nails biting into the wood. He had seen battlefields of memory before, wounds that festered and scars that clung, but this was a boy ready to become a ghost, not in a blaze of heroics, but in a moment of quiet resignation.

It unsettled him more than he could admit. The question was out before he could stop it, gritting out the words what was that in a frenzied manner. 

Because Severus knows guilt and grief, he knows his sins more intimately than anyone else. He also dreamt of disappearing, of rotting somewhere unknown to his masters. To slip away and never come back. But that was after all his mistakes, all his failures. He romanticized death, made it so tempting and compelling, after the wreckage had already been done. 

But Harry had not even been given the chance to live before wanting to leave it all behind. And that was what gutted him.

That the boy had come to the edge not out of weakness, but exhaustion. From being asked too much and offered too little. From carrying a world that only ever named him savior, never son. Severus had spent so many years looking for James in Harry’s defiance, so many hours poisoning their fragile rapport with bitterness. But there was nothing of James in that memory. No arrogance. No pride.

Only a boy who stood in the wind and wondered if the world would even notice if he vanished.

And Severus—so long a dealer in debts—was starting to understand what it meant to be entrusted with something fragile.

Not a weapon. Not a symbol.

But a life.

Snape had always known Harry was powerful but not like this. The duel revealed something far more dangerous and far more human: Harry’s magic wasn’t just strong, it was instinctive. Reflexive. Alive.

It didn’t lash out blindly. It listened. It responded. And worst of all, it chose not to destroy.

Snape saw the precision, the restraint—the way Harry wielded power like someone who could burn the world but kept holding the match just short of the flame. Even when furious, the boy disarmed, defended, resisted the urge to dominate.

He was not like his father.

And he was not like the Dark Lord either.

That terrified Snape most of all—not the power itself, but the choice Harry kept making: again and again, to protect rather than harm. Because power like that, paired with mercy, was something rare. Something dangerous. Something holy.

And something doomed.

It was late. The sitting room was still warm from the dying hearth, the embers throwing pale orange arcs across the scattered books and half-drunk tea.

Severus didn’t mean to look.

The sketchbook was left open on the table. Carelessly, or perhaps deliberately—Severus  couldn’t tell. The page curled slightly from the moisture in the air. He meant only to set a quill beside it, but his eyes betrayed him.

It wasn’t a portrait. Not exactly.

The lines were quick, fluid. A figure, neither boy nor man, standing on a shoreline, waves curling toward bare feet. The sky overhead was heavy with stars, yet blank. The subject's back was to the viewer, as if facing something just out of reach. One hand was raised, not in defiance, but in question.

At the bottom corner of the page, in small careful print, were four words:

If I were real.

Snape did not touch the page. He only stared. He thought of Harry's eyes, too tired for sixteen. Of the spells that hissed at his hand. Of magic alive and aching.

And he said nothing.

When Harry returned hours later, the sketchbook was closed and untouched. But the quill had been moved slightly left—just enough to let him know.

Another lesson. 

Harry sits again, bones stiff, shoulders tight, eyes sunken but clear. There’s less resistance in the way he sits. Less posturing, less pretending.

Severus raises his wand, slower than usual.

“ Legilimens .”

And the memory comes instantly. The cupboard. Damp. Small. Dark.

Harry is eight. Or maybe even younger. His skin is too thin, his ribs show. His nose is bleeding. Dudley’s fists have stopped but the ache remains. Harry is curled in on himself, hands over his head, waiting for the storm to pass.

Then the memory changes. The cupboard again, its walls closing in. A belt in motion. Harry flinching instinctively. Blankness where memory should be, as if the boy had learned to erase pain by sheer force of will, then—

—Cedric, collapsing. Green light, then silence. Not just horror, but shame. A scream never voiced—

—and Sirius. There’s an overlapping melody: one full of rage and noise, demanding to be heard, screaming NO and another softer voice that is repeating itself over and over again in grief God, Sirius please please . A scream frozen on Harry’s face, the veil already swallowing. The boy’s fingers reaching like he believed, truly believed, that he could pull him back—

Severus pulled out with a soft exhale, closing his eyes and digesting the tumultuous emotions in Harry’s memories. 

Harry inhales like he’d been drowning. Didn’t meet his eyes. Didn’t speak. But he didn’t cry, either.

There’s way too many things that should be addressed. Severus didn’t know what was more unbearable: the silence, the Dursleys' abuse (because it was abuse, there’s no denying it now), or the fact that this boy, this child , believed his grief was not worth mourning aloud.

“You think it was your fault,” he said finally.

Harry stiffened. “It was.”

“It was not.”

“Sirius wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t believed—if I hadn’t gone—”

“And Cedric?” Severus cut in. “Did you lure him there too? Did you cast the Killing Curse?”

Harry’s breath hitched.

“No,” Severus said, quieter now. “You did not. But you carry them anyway. You drag their shadows like chains.” 

“You do not get to rewrite history to punish yourself,” he continued, voice low but firm. “You are not that powerful, Potter. None of us are.”

A long pause. Then Harry whispered, almost to himself, “If I had been stronger…”

Severus did not sigh. He didn’t reach across the desk. But he leaned forward, voice like steel ground against sorrow. “Strength is not the absence of failure. It is surviving it. Learning from it. You are not a monster for mourning, Potter. Nor are you weak for breaking.” He let the words hang there, heavier than any hex.

Harry sat rigid in the chair. His fingers twitched, as though resisting the urge to sketch. To make meaning of the things inside him in graphite and shadows.

“You cannot keep burying these memories,” Severus said at last. “They will rot in your mind and poison everything they touch. Let them surface. You are not alone in this.”

Harry didn’t look at him. But his shoulders, ever so slightly, lowered. “I don’t know how to not blame myself,” he admitted, barely audible.

Severus stared at the boy with his mother’s eyes and the war on his shoulders and felt something bitter lodge in his chest. He had seen so many versions of Harry Potter in his mind over the years: James’s clone, the reckless show-off, the Gryffindor golden boy. But this was none of them. This was a child carved into an adult too soon. A boy who had turned guilt into religion. Who offered himself to every shadow as penance.

“I don’t know how to not blame myself,” Harry whispered again. “It feels… wrong, to let it go.”

Severus inhaled, held it. Released it slowly. He wanted to say I understand. But that felt inadequate. Patronizing. Harry didn’t need understanding. He needed truth.

“There are things I have done,” Severus began quietly, “that I cannot undo. Words I cannot un-say. Lives I cannot return.”

Harry looked up, surprised.

“I know what it means to wake with blood on your hands and no way to wash it off. I know what it means to carry a death inside you and wonder if it changed who you are.”

Harry’s eyes widened. Not in fear, but in comprehension. In recognition.

“But guilt is not a compass,” Severus continued. “It is a weight. And if you let it decide your direction, you will sink.” Silence followed, deep and measured. Then, like something fracturing open, Harry said, “I wanted someone to stop me.”

Severus blinked. “From what?”

“From thinking like this. From believing I should have died instead. I thought if someone— anyone —had told me it wasn’t my fault… maybe I wouldn’t have hated myself so much.”

There was nothing left to hide behind. Not sarcasm. Not rage. Just that terrible, aching honesty.

Severus nodded once. “Then let me be the one to tell you now.” He let the silence settle before adding, deliberate and sharp: “It was not your fault.”

Harry looked away, jaw clenched. His eyes burned, but he didn’t cry. Instead, he whispered, “Okay.”

A lie, probably. But it was something. Severus stood and walked to the bookshelf, pulling down a slim leather volume with a green ribbon tucked between its pages. He placed it in front of Harry without explanation. The boy looked at it, then at him.

“What’s this?”

“A journal,” Snape said. “Unused. I assume you prefer sketching to words, but you may find it easier to speak when no one is listening.”

Harry blinked.

“And if I don’t?”

“Then it is a blank book. Do what you will.”

A pause. Then, very softly, “Thank you.”

Snape didn’t reply. He simply turned and walked back to his desk, the memory of the Astronomy Tower still burned behind his eyes.

But this time, he knew the boy had stepped back from the edge.

When Dumbledore had first proposed the idea to him, Severus was taken aback and rejected it on the spot. But after infirmary trips, broken items, and actually catching the boy on the verge of exploding; he had no choice but to accept it. Potter would have to come live with him in his quarters which would no doubt be an unpleasant experience for both parties. 

Severus Snape had spent years detesting Harry Potter—first on principle, then out of habit, and eventually out of sheer, bitter inertia. He knew what it was to carry rage like a second skin. To be so consumed by it that it left ash in its wake. Every time he looked at Harry— Potter —he saw the curve of James’s arrogant smirk waiting just beneath the surface, the flicker of defiance in how he stood, the same insolence in the jaw. And every time he thought of Lily—her eyes, those damned eyes —he felt the venom rise in his throat. The guilt. The grief. The failure he could never undo. He could not bear to see her looking out through James’s face, not when all he had left of her was regret.

It was easier to scorn. Safer to lash out. If he kept the boy at a distance, if he sharpened every word, spat every syllable like a curse, then perhaps he could forget that this was her son. That Lily had trusted him once. That he had broken that trust.

That he had not been the one to save her.

But none of that—the overwhelming grief, the crippling guilt, the bottomless anger—had prepared him for the small, shivering figure curled in on himself in the recesses of memory.

Not James. Not even close.

Just a boy.

Just a boy who had been taught, over and over, that he was inconvenient. That he was unwanted. That his worth depended on how clean the dishes were and how quiet he could be. 

After their Occlumency lessons, Severus couldn’t stop thinking about that cupboard. The way Harry had returned to it in his dreams like it was a safe place. As if the absence of pain had been the closest thing to comfort. 

He ran a hand down his face, dragging his fingers along the tired lines of his jaw. Dumbledore had said it was best—had insisted that the blood wards mattered more than affection, more than sanity.

But what good were wards if the boy within them was broken?

Severus had known Petunia Evans. Knew how jealousy could calcify into cruelty. But he had not, could not , have imagined this. Harry had been a servant in that house. A scapegoat. A target. And no one, not the neighbors, not the teachers, not the Order—no one had stopped it.

Severus had failed him. Everyone had. Even Lily. Especially Lily, as much as it hurts to think of her that way. But even burial does not break the bond of blame.

Because she had trusted Petunia with her son.  He thought of Lily’s letters. Thought of her pleading, once, for Petunia to take care of her son. Thought of how completely that plea had been spat on.

Snape stood, pacing to the bookshelf where an old photo of the original Order was hidden behind stacks of potion texts. He didn’t look at Lily’s face. He couldn’t.

He had promised to protect her son.

At first, it was just about atonement. Duty. A cold, bitter way of paying back the universe for his sins. But now…

Now, he had seen the bruises. He had seen the fear. He had seen the boy who flinched from kindness—basic human decency—more than from cruelty. Severus finally stops resisting what he's seeing and begins to grieve it. 

Snape clenched his fist. He would not fail him again.

Not because Harry was Lily’s son. Not because of some prophecy or war or obligation. But because no child deserved to be taught that survival was the best they could hope for.

And no adult should be allowed to look away and call it protection.

It was about time Severus did something about the Dursleys.

There were spells—potent, vicious ones—that Severus had designed over the years and often daydreamed of applying to those wretched Muggles. A truth serum laced with Veritaserum and vertigo. A hex that left its victims mute but entirely conscious of their guilt. A skin-itching jinx that would make Vernon Dursley tear at his own flesh until it matched what he’d left on Harry’s. The possibilities were endless.

But those indulgences—however deeply satisfying—would cost him everything. His post. His place in the Order. And the bitter, condemning weight of Dumbledore’s disappointment, which Severus would sooner endure a Cruciatus than face again.

So instead, he turned his attention to the aftermath.

He compiled a list: diagnostic charms, scanning spells, potion regimens. He accounted for nutritional deficiencies, missed inoculations, skeletal microfractures, occluded magical channels. The sheer length of it made him sick.

The first spell he cast glowed a hopeful blue—then flickered, fizzled, and died. Severus frowned. Tried again.

The second spell, gentler and older, designed to read the slow tides of a person’s magic, wavered the moment it touched Harry. It recoiled like a hand scalded on hot iron. The resistance wasn’t physical. It was intentional .

Harry sat rigid in the chair at the edge of the office. Arms crossed. Wandless. Silent. But the tension in his frame buzzed like static before a storm.

“I’m not doing anything,” Harry muttered.

“I’m aware,” Severus said curtly. “Which makes this significantly more concerning.” He moved to his side table, inked a few short notes into a scroll already crowded with alarming results. Spells reacting like they were entering a war zone. Ambient magic that bit back. And his own— his own —recoiling as if Harry’s core had grown teeth.

This wasn’t normal teenage magic. This wasn’t even accidental magic. This was something else.

Harry’s magic was alive.

Not metaphorically. Not as a poetic turn of phrase. Alive. Aware. Protective in the way a wounded animal is, snarling and bristled, lashing out at anything unfamiliar. The first spell had not resisted. It had judged. And rejected him.

That night, after giving Harry the appropriate vaccinations he should have already had years ago and potions for different ailments and malnutrition, Severus brewed. 

He didn’t need the potions he set to task. Not really. Muscle memory took care of the slicing, the measuring, the clockwise stirs. What he needed was the quiet. The pattern. The space to think .

He lit no lamps beyond the simmering cauldron. Let the glow of bubbling aconite bathe the walls in flickering gold. He found himself chopping valerian root with more force than necessary.

Severus stood very still. The idea came slowly, creeping like frost along the edges of thought. He thought back, years, perhaps decades, to old texts and case studies long buried by the Ministry. Clinical notes from his early training. Children found in closets and basements. Families that refused to acknowledge a magical heir. Magical cores crushed under fear and turned monstrous. Shadows turned wild. The word rose like a ghost in the steam:

Obscurials.

The forgotten branch of magical study, buried by shame and fear. The phenomenon they dared not speak of outside archives.

He remembered the descriptions: suppressed magic growing parasitic, twisting into a thing of shadows and fury. A smoke-dark force, violent and consuming. Often fatal. Nearly always irreversible.

And Harry—by all logic, by all markers—should be one of them. He should be. By all accounts, he should be. The trauma. The silence. The locked doors. The starvation. Merlin, the sheer force of repression, any other child would have cracked, would have erupted.

But he wasn’t.

Why?

The more he studied the boy, the more the answer began to form. Because Harry didn’t hate his magic. He had hidden it, yes. Had been taught to fear it, punish it, swallow it. But not once, not once in all the memories Severus had seen, did he ever reject it.

He clung to it. Loved it. Even in secret. It had been his lifeline. His only companion besides spiders who share space. A spark of light in the cupboard. A flicker of power when he was powerless.

So instead of manifesting an Obscurus, Harry's magic had done something far rarer. It had buried itself. Not out of hatred, but out of love. Out of instinct. It is not death that Harry’s magic feared, it was extinction. So it had waited. It had survived. And now, this ancient and aching thing has awakened.

Feral. Overprotective. Sentient.

The timing, too, made sense now. Voldemort’s return. The Horcrux growing louder, bolder. The soul fragment in Harry’s scar stirring like a parasite sensing its moment.

And Harry’s magic, so long asleep, heard the alarm and rose.

It knows, Severus realized. It knows what he carries. And it’s trying to protect him. At all costs. Of course the diagnostic spells recoil. Of course his wand hums with warning. The boy's magic isn’t just conscious. It is at war.

And then the final piece slid into place. The Occlumency lessons. The failures. The headaches. The frustration. He can’t do it, Severus realized. Not because he won’t. Because he can’t.

Every time Harry tries to still his mind, the Horcrux stirs. And his magic rises like a storm to silence it. He’s trying to meditate during a duel. Trying to speak over screams. It’s no wonder the boy’s mind is fraying at the edges. He’s not broken. He’s fighting for his life.

Severus returns to the living room of his quarters, where they conduct their Occlumency lessons. Harry is still there, a pencil between his fingers, moving across the page like blades on ice.

 “Your magic is fighting the Horcrux,” Severus said aloud, casting a containment ward around the room.

Harry stiffened, hunched and pale in the chair, watching him with wary eyes, but he didn’t deny it. The words he said that night in Dumbledore's office echoed in Severus's mind: " It’s fighting my magic. And my magic wants it gone.”

“It’s not just reacting,” Severus continued. “It’s defending you. The real you. Against him.”

Harry blinked. “So you believe me?”

“I believe what I’ve seen.”

Harry exhaled shakily. “It’s never quiet. Not anymore. Even when I sleep. My spells feel like they’re shouting. My wand burns sometimes.”

“It’s angry,” Severus said. “Not at you. At him.”

A long silence stretched between them. Then Harry asked, “Can magic hate?”

Severus considered. “Magic can remember. It can protect. That’s close enough.”

“Did they—” Severus hesitated. The question tasted like bile. “Did they punish you for accidental magic?”

Harry looked away. “They called it freakish. Dangerous.”

Severus’s jaw clenched. “And what did they do?”

Harry shrugged. “Cupboard. No meals. Sometimes worse, if something broke.” No venom. No dramatics. Just memory. Worn and well-rehearsed. And that was what made it unbearable.

“They told me if I wanted to be normal,” Harry said softly, “I had to stop being strange. So I stopped. As much as I could.”

Severus closed his eyes. Of course the child had buried his own nature so deep it nearly strangled him. Not to be safe, but to survive. And now that buried thing, raw and radiant, was clawing its way back up. 

Harry thumbed the corner of his Occlumency book. “I used to wish it would stop. The magic. I thought if it went away, maybe they’d stop locking me in.” 

A vision unfurled behind Severus’s eyes: a smaller, quieter Harry curled in the dark of a cupboard, whispering secrets to broken toys, sketching shapes in dust with calloused fingers, wishing fervently, hopelessly, not to be strange. Not to be himself. 

Despite that, Severus’s voice was edged like glass. “They wouldn’t have.” Because abusers do not feel for the children in their care. They only punish what they fear, and destroy what they cannot control.

Harry didn’t flinch. He just nodded. “I know that now.”

Later that night, when Severus returned to his quarters, he did not light the fire. He sat in silence, letting the dimness settle around him like dust. He thought of cupboards. Of bones too thin and skin too pale. Of bruises and broken spells and sketchbooks filled with things too painful to say aloud. He thought of Lily’s child, raised to fear the very thing she had loved most.

And he wondered—if the magic was finally alive again…

Did that mean, for the first time, Harry was too?