Archive of Our Own

Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
(Tennyson, 'Ulysses')

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid." C.S. Lewis, 'A Grief Observed'

NOW:

Sometimes, when the sun is shining into the kitchen, and he can sit at the corner table and stare outside, it feels like there's nothing misplaced. Everything is lined up: the pathway has been weeded and is dusted by the bending stalks of forsythia; three canisters sit on the table from biggest to smallest; the failure of a scarecrow that he made last year peeks out from the sunflower stalks, topped by the same two unintimidated crows. He can stir his tea five times right and once widdershins to counteract the swirl. From this angle he can't see the dust motes in the beams, or see the rise of fur and dander when the cat jumps on the table and falls to its side on the counter with an expiration of breath that resembles a blown out bellows.

It's nice, in the sun, for the most part. Because every day has started this way for the past four years, and every afternoon has been much the same, for perhaps this first hour. It's easy to forget, because he has always been alone at this hour, and so it takes a while for him to realize that time has ticked by and that the regular time at which he should have heard footfalls on the patio has come and gone, and there is no one to belittle his tea-making skills or scoff at his bakery choices. Remembering is like hearing all over again.

Then again, sometimes, like today, it is different. Hermione comes with a sack full of groceries: fresh bread, packets of sliced sandwich meat, some very reliable and sensible cheese, and fruit, mostly tangerines and apples, despite that the boughs of the trees in the orchard are overflowing with fruit on the verge of rot.

He can't go there anyway, to pick the fruit; it wasn't his orchard, not fully, not after the first time he'd fallen from the picking ladder and had been laid up for a week. Instead, he passes the fence of it every day on his way to the shop, holding his breath, not looking, taking the long way into town to skip the bridge. He had never realised how the sweet smell of rot could so easily turn a stomach.

When Hermione arrives, breezing in through the back door with her packages and bags, hair tied up in a kerchief –something she could only have learnt from Molly Wesley—he finds that the most reassuring thing about her is that she doesn't smile or make a sympathetic face. She looks as tired and as worn as he must.

"I've cream, but those sugar cubes you like are out of stock. I've packets instead." Secretly, he doesn't even care about packets or cubes; he isn't the one who used them. He throws them out after she visits to give her the comfort of knowing that her efforts aren't in vain.

"I'll make tea," she says, and when he points to the half full pot on the table she looks surprised, perhaps because she hadn't seen it, and then with the grace of the exhausted simply accepts her shortcoming by dropping rag-like at the table across from him and accepting the cup and saucer he slides across the smooth surface.

When Hermione reaches over to realign the tea canister, he sees the dust swirling in the beam, and he wonders for just a second, if some of that dust –dirt, dander, dead skin, ashes most assuredly—is left over from Him, pieces of Him twirling about the house still. He wonders if it mightn't be perfectly fine to breathe deeply for a while, or perhaps never clean the house again, and he's also just a little bit sad that he was so quick to get rid of His clothes. Hermione had told him that he didn't have to do anything just yet, but he hadn't listened to her, even though it seems that she is once again rather correct.

"All the sunflowers are wilted," she says off-handedly.

"No rain," he says. The cat, unhappy with being ignored, stretches her legs out to prod at his teacup.

"I'll water them when I leave."

"Let them go," he tells her. He can't see them from here, but he can imagine that they look rather sad and parched. Knowing that they're out there, dying, soon to decay with the apples and the body in the ground gives him satisfaction, not unlike peeling off a scab.

Hermione reaches across the table to grasp his hand. Her forearm presses on the cat's belly, which puffs up indignantly. He claps a hand on the cat's head and jangles it back and forward.

"Don't torture the cat," Hermione says, but she sticks her finger into the cat's toes and tickles. "Did you two ever name her?"

He shrugs. "I call her Penelope. He called her D.T."

"D.T?"

"Double Trouble."

D.T. closes in on Hermione's hand like a vice and kicks with her back feet. Hermione just raises an eyebrow.

"She keeps shedding on the sofa," he says. "I'm thinking of having her shaved." The cat, in response, rolls towards him and sneezes into his saucer. "Or teaching her to brush herself."

"Good luck," Hermione tells him, liberating her hand and examining the red scratches on the back of it.

He shrugs. She stirs her tea and stares out the window. Minutes tick by on the clock over the stovetop. The waxy leaves of the azaleas slap against the window.

"You know he was crazy," Hermione says softly. "He wasn't thinking."

He doesn't say anything because she repeats this every day, also followed by: "He wasn't in his right mind. I think there was just a moment."

What he always thinks but doesn't say then is that it's scandalous, unfair and ultimately terrifying that one moment can be so monumental that it stretches out to colour the rest of a lifetime.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart." (Camus, 'The Myth of Sisyphus')

TEN YEARS BEFORE:

It was most curious, or downright infuriating; in fact, it was one of the most indescribably frustrating things, in the aftermath of it all, to discover that Snape's body had disappeared from the Shrieking Shack. For a while, he had thought that Ron and Hermione had done something to it when he'd left in the middle of it all, but it was inconceivable that they would have had any idea what to do with it, or that they wouldn't have mentioned it to someone after everything had somewhat settled down. He hadn't thought of it until a few days later, when he was finally clean and mended to a reasonable degree.

He had been spending time in the Gryffindor common room with everyone, trying to make up for a lost year, trying to salvage any sense of a teenage experience that he could. Ron and Hermione were giddy and affectionate, Ginny was attentive and rather sure of their renewed relationship, and Harry hadn't felt any need to argue with her. After all, he'd spent the last year in an ascetic haze: not a lot of touching, not much of anything beyond the occasional head pat or hug.

And, he had to remind himself several times when he and Ginny ducked into the Quidditch shed, he was seventeen, and seventeen-year-olds did this. Like rabbits. Or coathangers.

He should have thought of Snape before, but to be honest, he'd got so used to thinking of Snape as an enemy that it wasn't natural to consider him in any favorable light. And what with the funerals and the emergency activity and all, even if he hadn't had Ginny to distract him, Harry probably wouldn't have remembered.

He was more than genuinely surprised to find the body gone; at least, he was after Hermione had explained to him that there was no wizarding world loophole in which a body could just disappear after death. He hadn't wanted to be disturbed by it and find that she'd read about it in Hogwarts: A History five years ago.

The Shack hadn't been disturbed much, unless one counted the massive amount of dried blood on the wood floor. The windows were covered and looked to have been that way since time began. The trapdoor and passageway under the Whomping Willow were free of blood, the dirt floor undisturbed, as far as Harry could tell. He hadn't really ever paid attention to it before.

"Cor," Ginny said, turning in circles when they had climbed out of the trapdoor and into the shack proper. "Look at the blood."

It reminded Harry vaguely of the splatter movies that Dudley had favored a few summers ago, before his personality transplant. What had surprised Harry the most had been that blood dried rusty brown, and in some places it hadn't soaked into the wood like he had thought it would, but rather covered the floorboards as if someone had painted and forgotten to put a tarp down.

Ron shook his head. "You don't suppose some sort of wild animal..." He blanched, and Hermione clambered out of the trapdoor in time to catch his hand and hold it tightly, her eyes surveying the evidence of travesty. "What about those spiders..."

Harry shook his head. "They'd have left something behind, wouldn't they? Webbing, bones, something, right?" He looked beseechingly at Hermione, who shrugged.

"I'm sorry, Harry, I just don't know." Her hair framed her face, making the foreign expression even stranger. It took a second for him to register what was so odd about it. For the first time in a long time, Hermione Granger was completely clueless.

The professors in their portraits hadn't any clue as to where Snape had gone, and the only reason, really, that Harry had asked them, sneaking up into the Headmaster's office (not that he'd had to; The Boy Who Lived had become The Boy Who Had An All Access Pass To Everywhere, Especially The Girl's Dorm), had been that he was sure that Dumbledore might have some information for him.

"I'm sorry, Harry," Dumbledore said softly. "I'm not quite sure where Severus is anymore."

"Is, Sir?" Harry breathed. The phrasing had given him pause.

Dumbledore regarded Harry over his spectacles. "No portrait, you see." He raised his hands and looked left and right. "Though I don't see how he could have survived with that much blood loss, really." His face seemed blank just a bit, before a noise form another portrait caught his attention. "Ah, Phineas, is there something in your throat?"

The scowly portrait waved his hands about in a set of exasperated circles. "Merlin! Am I the only one in this office who remembers whom we're dealing with?" His mouth crooked up in a bit of a smile. "Severus Snape carried more potions on himself than a first-responder mediwitch. Do you really think—"

"But all the blood—" Harry began.

"Because blood is so hard to replace," Phineas sighed, then coolly regarded Dumbledore's amused painting. "I have no idea what you did to the curriculum, Albus. What do you teach them? Seven years of sherbet lemon and sock darning?"

Albus crossed his arms, but his eyes twinkled. Harry was fastly feeling the ineffectual bystander in The War of the Portraits. "I wish someone had taught me to darn socks when I was the boy's age—"

"It's true," Professor Dippet's portrait said. "He always did go through socks so quickly."

Phineas threw up his hands in an 'enough!' gesture, just in time to cut off three other portraits who had attempted to offer input. "I'm finished. If anyone wants more than useless conjecture, I might be awake later. And you—" He focused a dark look on Harry. "Tell your little friend to get my painting out of her bag and back in the house." He shook his head. "It's boring, and not a little bit insulting."

Harry had to think for just a minute as to what he was referring, and then he remembered Hermione's bag of tricks. "Oh. Uh. Sure."

Phineas rolled his eyes. "Saves the wizarding world, brain like a sieve." And with that, he closed his eyes and seemed to promptly fall asleep, though in reality he was probably just ignoring them.

"If I were to start looking for Snape," Harry said to Dumbledore after several paintings had finished offering advice on everything from socks to sweets and even a place to get his hair cut, "I don't even know where that might be. Do you?"

Dumbledore smiled.

***

The house on Spinner's End was even more dreary than Harry had thought it would be, not just because of the location, but because of the run-down nature of the building itself. The shutters half hung by nails long rusted out, paint that might have once been merely depressing peeled away and the bleached wood underneath had the dark gray of a house located in an industrial area whose mill unceasingly belched smoke into the air. The door was warped and probably didn't keep out water or snow. All of the windows seemed to be intact, but some of them were so filthy they looked to be frosted.

When Harry stood at the front door, he could vaguely read an old wooden, carved plaque next to the pushbell that simply read 'Snape'. Over it, someone had crudely scratched, probably with a knife, the word 'traitor'. It was surprising that anyone would go out of his way to vandalize the place.

No one answered the door when he rang the bell, and he considered for a long while coming back with Hermione or Kingsley, preferably Kingsley, mostly because he had the feeling that Snape, if alive, might not be in the best of moods. Harry didn't put it past Snape to hex both him and Hermione if they burst in, no matter what his Pensieve memories revealed. In the end, really, though, he was worried about the hexes that might be in the house even in Snape's absence: poison darts, dust creatures, tongue tying curse, maybe a giant boulder to chase him from the house. Harry knew that Kingsley would be up for all of that.

The doorknob twisted unresistingly, and the door didn't stick in the slightest. Harry pushed at it, and then stepped out of the way, preparing himself for something hideous, maybe a jet of fire to incinerate unwelcome visitors, but nothing came. After waiting a few seconds, he stepped into the room, which was a sitting room, no preamble of a foyer or coat nook. A light switch Harry knew wouldn't be operational glowed in the light of his wand.

The room was dark and smelled like must, or maybe a dank, hospital smell of old people. Perhaps dead people. The light from his wand was weak in the face of the scrubbed up windows, and a faint glow of a fire in the corner was actually doing more good to light his way. A tall, decaying wingback chair blocked most of the light, but just that the fire was burning was curious and also a little indicative.

"Professor Snape?" he ventured, raising his wand higher and moving closer to the chair. Maybe it wasn't even Snape. Maybe it was a psychotic house-elf, or a lone Death Eater, or another monster minion of Voldemort's who had escaped the fight. As he drew nearer, Harry felt his pulse quicken in response to his racing mind. "Is that you, Professor?"

Snape's form huddled in the chair, hands out towards the fire. His usual erect posture had left him, and his spine bowed like someone much older than he really was. His hair hung in an even lankier curtain than ever before, and through it, Harry could see a roll of bandages that encircled his neck like a demented collar.

"Get. Out," came the rasping sound, so different from the domineering voice he was used to hearing. One shaky hand reached for the side table, on which Harry made out Snape's wand and wads and wads of spent, blood-soaked bandages and empty potions bottles. They were everywhere, really. When Harry stepped on one with a glass crunch, he glanced at his feet and saw the empty bottles strewn about, some of them broken as if they had been tossed with too much force.

"Professor," he said, hoping that Snape didn't just pick up his wand and use some wordless spell to turn his head into a turnip, or maybe his blood into pumpkin juice, despite that Hermione would have told him that both of these were impossible. The past few days had given him a better appreciation for Snape's abilities.

Snape grasped his wand, but he didn't do anything. Just the act of lifting it seemed to take the energy out of him, and he lowered his hand and turned his head slightly in Harry's direction. "Out," he rasped.

Harry had been prepared to find all manner of things when he arrived at the house, the most likely one of them being a corpse; he had also been prepared to find nothing, or to have his ears hexed off in a tragic accident that would forever make him The Boy Who Was Deaf and Kind of Funny Looking. He hadn't really given much thought to Snape being alive, really, no matter what Phineas and Dumbledore had suggested, mostly because, well, he'd seen the Shrieking Shack and its new organic paint job.

So really, he didn't have anything with him to help Snape. Just himself and his wand, which was rather useless with these kinds of things. He hoped that Auror training included healing spells, because he always seemed to find himself in situations in which they would have been useful.

Snape bent over even more in a fit of coughing and Harry realized what else a wand could do. Snape let him approach, his wand apparently forgotten, though he still clutched it tightly in his hand. His other hand glistened ruby red.

Harry pulled the man into a standing position and yanked one arm over his shoulder, so that he could support his weight. "Come on. We're Apparating to St. Mungo's."

That Snape didn't argue with him was refreshing.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"That is the saddest part—when you lose someone you love, that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, 'Is this the same person I lost?' Maybe you lost more, maybe less, ten thousand different things that come from memory and imagination, and you do not know which is which, which was true, which was false." (Amy Tan)

NOW:

He likes the shop. It is clean and bright, and the windows are filled with empty colored bottles. Colored, so that they create a rainbow of light in the shop front, and empty because no potion could withstand that much sunlight without turning. The wooden floors are unfinished and stained, but when swept clean they remind him of something good and strong and dependable. The counters are warped just enough that when he decants things anywhere other than where he's currently standing, he has to brace the bottle on a platform so that he gets the right measurement.

He hadn't picked out the shop, and to be honest, if he had seen it before they'd got the mortgage, he wouldn't have kept it. The walls had been cracked and peeling, cold wallpaper shredded and coming off when he had run his hand down it. The stockroom had been small and smelled like something had died in it. In fact, the first time he'd seen the shop, he had actually turned around and walked straight out.

But persuasion had taken place, and perhaps bribery on the sexual level, and he had relented, and it had been amazing, the transformation that had taken place. He had insisted on new walls and windows, but the floors and counters had remained the same, mostly because they had run out of money after the initial deposit. Some days he thinks of renovating entirely. He could even hire someone else to do it.

The bell above the door rings and he looks up to see one of their semi-regular customers, an old woman by the name of Maggie Baggins, who hasn't yet cottoned on to the fact that half of the people living in her town are wizards, and not simply bohemian artists and musicians in caftans. Her steel wool hair is capped with a straw hat that has to be tied on to keep it on her head, and she smiles with her whole face, which is sometimes heartening. She's wearing a pair of hideously large overalls

Maggie shakes a satchel of clinking glass. "I brought back my empties," she says. He sighs. This means that she gets a fifteen-percent discount. He isn't for the discount; but he is for the recycling. It hadn't been his idea, actually, but he notices that every time the woman comes with empties, she seems to buy a little bit more than she spent the previous time.

He doesn't say anything, not even a hello, because he knows that she'll be off and running into a one-sided conversation in no time. He is not disappointed.

"I think I need three of the Bellwether Blend this time—" She means the lemon-scented facial cream. "And if you have any of that replenishing potion, the one with the peppers..." Here she means the Pepperup without the Murtlap and with a dash of ground habaneros, their Muggle version. "I wasn't going to try it, you know, what with the chilies, but your partner is a very persuasive man."

He doesn't argue as he takes the empties from her and deposits them in the sink behind him, pulling five fresh bottles from the shelf above it. The potions are stored in bulk, and he measures off when it's ordered. That hadn't been his idea, but it's a good one. He hates filling all those fucking bottles, so every time he'd had to pour out an expired potion from those painstakingly funneled little bottles a part of him flared to irritability.

Maggie is still talking, her hands shoved in her expansive pockets, her eyes roving the shelves as she mills about the shop. It doesn't take long for her to make a complete circuit; the shop is less than thirty by thirty feet. "He talks me into all kinds of things that I would never have purchased," she says, smiling.

He shrugs and holds the flask up to the light. He hates this part, the selling; it hadn't been his job before. "Yes, well. He's like that." And He had been; separating witches and wizards (and Muggles) from their money had been a skill He'd employed often—something about being poor as a child had ingrained a need to hoard money.

"That one he gave me for my arthritis, that is a gem." She balls and unballs her hands.

"Bend-Ease," he says to her. "Fresh, if you want it." He doesn't even wait for her reply of 'two, please,' before snatching a few more bottles from the shelf behind him. They always say yes.

Well, except for that one time, with the black sludge guaranteed to ease gout. He thinks there might have actually been snake oil in that one.

"And that potion, the one with the green flecks—"

"Adeste Fidelis," he interrupts. He'd worked on that one with...well, they'd made it together. It had been very popular around the winter holidays, what with the glitter and the overall sense of cheeriness. He hadn't named it. "Only available around Christmas," he adds. He hasn't decided whether he's going to continue making the shared potions anymore.

Maggie sighs. "That was a great one." She looks around. "Where is your partner? Working in the back?"

Well, they've been talking about Him for the past few minutes, and he hasn’t told her. It's not that he doesn't want to tell her, it's that he does, desperately. He wants it to be the first words out of his mouth. He wants to go out into the street and grab the shoulders of everyone he comes across and shake them and say, 'He's dead. He killed himself and left me here.'

It is that there is no way to work it into the conversation. He usually waits until someone asks about Him. Sometimes that doesn't happen until later in, and that just makes it more awkward. He doesn't volunteer the information, mostly because he is waiting for the day in which he could have a complete conversation in which he never has to reveal it. It might happen. Someday. He's dreading that, too, sort of.

"He died," he says, "three months ago." And part of him thinks that it's odd that she doesn't know, because there had been a funeral and press coverage, and a Muggle obituary. And flowers, waves of flowers that spelled his name throughout the town. Children had laid homemade wreaths on his grave.

Her face straightens and her eyes widen. He doesn't bother to look at it, because he knows that she will be shocked and then sad, and then pitying. And her hand will come out, and she will either pepper him with questions, like the ones who don't think very clearly about social conventions, or she will say 'I am sorry,' and give him the knowing eyes, though in fact, she knows nothing. Then she will go home and contact anyone she knows to glean information.

A few weeks from now she'll be back with her empty bottles, and she will not make small talk. Instead, she will bring a covered dish or a jar of preserves, because she will assume that as a bachelor he does not know how to cook, or even that he might have somehow managed to feed himself for three months without her.

"Oh, my dear," she says, the bottle she is holding forgotten and clutched to her chest. She reaches out one hand to touch his face, and he shies away. There should be a law about touching the bereaved. "I am so sorry." And he is grateful, because he just cannot answer questions today. He places the stopper in the bottle and pours wax on the join.

"Thank you," he says, because there is no response to that statement. What does one say? 'It's okay?' Because it isn't, not a bit.

"He loved you very much," she says, because people always want to remind him that he has been loved, like this is something that he himself, who had actually lived with, eaten dinner with, fought with, fucked, drank with Him, et cetera would have forgotten as soon as they had flattened out the mound of dirt over the grave.

He knows why they say it. What he doesn't tell them is the simple fact that he understands as only half true, but it's the true part that he identifies with, and less the falsity of it:

Not enough, apparently. Not nearly enough.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Cutting a swath
Through thick-dewed grass,
I set out.
(the death haiku of Kifu, autumn 1898)

SEVEN YEARS BEFORE:

Here he was again. It was starting to become a thing, really, this arrival at Spinner's End, looking for Snape and meeting with dust and mold and dirt. Harry ducked under a spider web that looked very much like it had been remodeled right over the previous one since the last time he'd been here. He had half a mind to clean the house himself, or better yet, ask Molly to unleash the dogs of war on the place.

Harry had lost count of the number of times he'd had to come to Snape's house and quiet him down in the past three years, whether he was drinking, or breaking something or occasionally blowing something up in his potions lab. Three months ago he'd had to come when a Muggle lady had called the fire department because pink smoke had been pouring from the upper levels of the house. Harry had arrived in time to Obliviate the entire fire crew, the old lady, and fifteen people who had decided to leave their houses and gawk at the fuchsia billows. He had found Snape in the lab up in the top of the house, boiling something that smelled like moldy socks and, he had been informed curtly, was worth fifteen hundred Galleons an ounce.

The Wizarding-Muggle Relations Office had long passed Snape off to the Aurors on the claim that he'd otherwise intimidated all of them over there, mostly because they were all former students. All the other Aurors played 'rock, paper, scissors' when the assignment came up, an act they hadn't done since Mad-Eye had been alive. Harry thought Snape would be gratified to know that he had now taken Moody's place as General Nuisance Number One in the Auror offices.

It wasn't that Snape was out of control, really. He was just...fully himself in some ways. Eighteen years of holding himself in check for one thing or another had created a buttoned-up personality that had only been the surface of the man. Apparently, real Snape liked to occasionally get drunk and break a few failed potions on the walls, and sometimes when he was sober, real Snape enjoyed breaking Muggle-detection laws by boiling potions outside on the night of the full moon or transfiguring his trash bins into metal mouths with legs that chased the neighborhood vandals down the street.

Really, though, no one seemed willing to call Snape on anything, probably a just reward for the longest and most secretive act of heroism the wizarding world had seen since Gladys Knightley of Cheshire had used her Metamorphmagus form in 1779 to transform into a goblin and spy for thirty three years before being caught. Harry wouldn't have even known about her if Snape hadn't told him on his last 'visit.' It was just as well. The Daily Prophet got a big kick out of his exploits, and the Ministry was tossing about the idea that Snape should be their poster child for the necessity of improving Wizarding-Muggle relations in everyday life.

Interestingly enough, the real Snape still favored his black get-up, sarcasm and berating Harry Potter. Strangely, Harry didn't mind as much; it was like discovering that the dog he'd been afraid of all his life didn't have any teeth and really just liked to sloppily mouth his arm a bit, as opposed to ripping it off and prancing about the yard with it. He still had to pretend he was afraid, but really, it was kind of endearing.

He didn't even bother to knock on the door because Snape never answered his door. Instead, Harry let himself in and called out at the same time. Snape's house wasn't chock-o-block with traps and tricks, but he did like to shoot curses around corners before looking.

"Snape?" No answer, but that was also common. Snape had developed selective hearing, and Harry was pretty sure he was claiming it was the result of Nagini's attack. He moved through the sitting room and its claustrophobic bookshelves, tucking his wand into the leather holster on his hip.

"Look, Snape," he said, making a face at an open book that he was pretty sure should have been confiscated and destroyed in the Black Arts purge three years ago. "I'm just here as a courtesy, you know. I don't have to stay long. But you have to promise me that you're not trying to brew that 'Scream-In-A-Bottle' potion again, unless you want to come in and use the Ministry labs." He glanced in the small kitchenette, but it was empty, so he moved to the downstairs toilet. "I'm sure George would love it if you could—dear lord."

Snape looked up when he opened the door, but Harry wasn't sure if he saw him. He sat on the floor, hands hanging over the toilet, blood pouring from cuts in both wrists into the bowl.

Well, it wasn't something he saw every day. Harry stared for a few seconds before dully wondering just how many times Snape was going to be exsanguinated, and if he would have to take the man to St. Mungo's again. Sooner or later the healers there would start looking at him funny. It was only a second of delay really, because Harry reached across the cramped distance to grab Snape's wrists in both hands and cover the slashes with his palms. It wasn't the most sterile thing he had ever done, but it stopped the blood long enough that he could wrench Snape to his feet, lower the lid of the toilet with his foot and sit the man down before holding both wrists in one hand over the sink.

"What the hell are you doing?" he spat, grabbing the towel from the edge of the bathtub and pressing it to Snape's left wrist, winding the length of it around the right wrist so that they were not only bound together but placing pressure on each other.

Snape sighed. "It's as if you thwart my every attempt at melodrama," he muttered softly. Harry opened the small potions case on his belt, standard Auror issue, yanked out the phial of Dittany and set it on the sink before crouching down in front of Snape. Somewhere in this blasted utility belt the Ministry issued he had rolls of gauze. Ah, they were in the packet with the hard tack and notepaper. He enlarged the shrunken medical packs and unwrapped the gauze before placing it on Snape's knee for the moment.

"Do you have a sixth sense for when I'm in mortal peril, now?" Snape groused, his voice hoarse. So he had been yelling, then.

"The lady next door called Aurors," Harry said softly. "She heard banging and screaming."

Snape laughed. "And so you're here. Auror Potter is here." He pressed hard on the towel on his left arm. "Is this a crime now?"

Harry sighed, unwrapping one hand enough to check if the bleeding had ceased. "No. But it should be." He unstoppered the Dittany and held out the bottle. Snape looked away and pulled his arm back.

"One more thing to add to my list of sins, then. And I don't want that." He gestured to the bottle with his still bleeding right hand. "Just the bandages."

Harry tossed his hair from his eyes and knelt on the floor in front of Snape. "You were cleared of all charges," he said. He was less concerned right now about cleaning the wounds. They could do that later, when the bleeding was lessened. He really wished that he knew the spell to knit flesh. Snape probably knew it; Harry doubted he'd use it this time.

Snape made a scoffing noise. "I said sins." His eyes lifted from the bandages and met Harry's. "Of course you would confuse the laws of man and the laws of God."

"You don't believe in God."

Snape tilted his head. "This is true."

Harry shook his head; he would worry about all of this later, really. For now, he concentrated on running the warm cloth over Snape's wrist before wrapping the right one up in gauze. He started on the left before he tried the next part of their inevitable conversation. "I don't suppose that you'll want to talk about this, will you?"

Snape pressed on the butterfly clip securing the gauze and snorted. "No and no. And I think, maybe, no, Potter." When Harry had finished his left hand, he stood up and brushed past him. "You can leave now."

Harry handed him the cloth and pulled Snape gently back into the small room. "I'll make tea. Wash your hands." And he left him in the bathroom, not entirely sure if he'd just tear the gauze off and start again, or sneak out the back window, or maybe come out into the kitchenette and have a cup like a sane person, despite that he clearly wasn't entirely. Snape needed someone to watch him, not because he was a nutter, but because he wasn't all there himself. Something in the freeing of Severus Snape after the war had also unleashed a bit of self-destructiveness that Dumbledore would never have allowed if the man were still back at Hogwarts. Harry felt the sneaking suspicion that Snape's retirement was eating away at him. Maybe he could get him a job at the Ministry.

And maybe Snape wouldn't break him in two if he heard Harry say that, but it was highly unlikely.

Digging about in the cupboards was easily depressing; Snape's dishware was dingy and chipped. Most of it had cobwebs all over it, and Harry suspected the only plate not covered with fine dust was the one in the drainboard next to the sink, which he used over and over. Snape only had tea bags. Somewhere in Ottery St. Catchpole, Molly Weasley was raising her face to the wind and sensing that one of her many children wasn't drinking proper English tea. That Harry wasn't a biological Weasley didn't really matter; he had a space on the clock. In fact, he seemed to recall that there was a setting on the clock that said 'drinking bagged rubbish.'

Harry heated the water to boiling without using the stove, which may or may not have worked. He poured the water into two clean but supremely uncheerful cups and dunked teabags in them, shoving them down into the bottom of the cups with a spoon. He was suddenly glad of the teabags; he had the feeling that in Snape's house, any tealeaves in the bottom of his cup would look like a Grim.

He heard running water and knew that Snape hadn't made a hasty exit out the back. He located a bag of sugar cubes so old that they all stuck together, and by the time Snape emerged from the bathroom and into the kitchen, he had pounded a cube off the mass for his own cup, setting it on the saucer and smashing the bag onto the counter for another try at cube liberation for Snape.

"No sugar," Snape said quietly. Harry saw his sleeves had been pulled down over what he hoped were bandaged wrists, and his hands had been washed. There was a faint scent of something clean when the man reached past him to snatch his cup and saucer from the counter.

Harry mashed his teabag into the bottom of his cup so hard that he tore it. Leaves floated to the surface of the water. He tried to read any shape he might be able to see, but they just looked like leaves in a cup. He heard the vague ticking of something designed to gauge time.

"The war is over, you know," Snape said to him suddenly, "and I find myself wondering why I am even here." He sighed. "I was all about the war forever, even when there wasn't one. Albus had been so sure that we'd see another conflict when you grew up. I forgot what it was like not to be at war." He shrugged. "One should have the courtesy to bow out when they've outlived their usefulness."

Harry stirred his tea. "The Ministry is dying to have you—"

Snape snorted and sipped from his cup, which he held by the rim, not the handle. "The Ministry is full of former students and classmates desperate to prove that they trusted me all along, that I'm really not that bad of a person." He looked at Harry finally. "The truth of the matter is that in reality, I really do despise each and every one of them."

Harry chuckled and drained his cup. "You don't mean that." His eyes met Snape's and they stared for a few seconds.

Snape broke it first, setting down his saucer and shrugging. "You're right. 'Despise' is too strong a word. Maybe 'abhor.'"

"That's another word for despise."

"Loathe?"

Harry shook his head and poured himself another cup. "Now you're just being troublesome." When Snape didn't say anything, Harry made sure his back was turned to him before he asked again. "Do you want to talk about this?"

"I live in this house," Snape said softly. After a few seconds, it was clear that he wasn't going to offer any more.

Harry didn't press. Instead, he closed his eyes and walked the path of the house with his memory; bookshelves hung like stiff monsters from everywhere including doors, claustrophobic rooms with furniture that was so old it probably predated Snape himself, and dust so invasive that it was ground into the very fiber of the house. The floor alone made Harry think of the dirt floors of old Muggle houses, and how he'd always wondered if one couldn't make a hole in the floor just by sweeping.

He thought of the upper levels, with its potions lab constructed from both rooms with the dividing wall torn out, and the paltry cot in the corner that served as Snape's nightly bed. He thought of the lone clean plate and its dusty brethren. He thought of a toilet full of blood and wondered what Snape had used to cut himself so cleanly-- probably one of any number of weapons that seemed to clutter the corners of this house.

Nothing to it, then. "I think I should stay here with you," he said finally, realizing that this was indeed the solution to the problem, and a simple one at that. Now, he had about fifteen seconds to suss out exactly what that meant before Snape went ballistic.

Instead, Snape's form moved away, sliding farther across the room, still leaning against the counter edge. "I'm not the best host," he mumbled, and Harry noticed that he hadn't cast him out. "And I certainly have nothing to feed you."

"No no," Harry said softly, fishing his teabag from the cup and dumping it on the saucer. "I mean, I think I should stay here with you." He leant back against the counter and held the cup in front of his mouth when he said it, his eyes trying to stay in contact with Snape's. He wasn't sure really, what all that sentence meant, but it surely meant more than just the morphemes and denotations; surely there were hidden connotations that even Harry hadn't thought about when he'd said it. It hadn't been until the words had left his mouth that Harry realized that yes, this sentence was the start of something new.

And rather intriguing.

"I think you might be engaged," Snape said, his eyes darting from the teapot to Harry's hands on the cup. Somewhere down the street a man yelled at a woman that she was a lazy tart. Harry sipped the tea and wondered if he mightn't be able to procure better for Snape. This was atrocious.

"I'm not engaged," he said softly, choosing to ignore what should have been a non sequitur. It was true, sort of. It was pretty much expected that he and Ginny would be sailing down the aisle any day now. Theirs would be the maiden voyage of the post-war flagship, complete with banners and flags and roses tumbling from the rooftops when their wedding procession trailed its way through the public arenas of the wizarding world. Ginny would wear white, and he would wear something in Gryffindor scarlet and gold, and snapshots of their loving embrace would be sold as posters for the next generation to plaster on their dormitory rooms in Hogwarts that Autumn.

This was what Ron had told him the last time they'd got drunk. He had suggested a double wedding too.

A bit terrifying, that.

He set his cup on the countertop and moved closer to Snape's huddling form, resting one hand on his shoulder.

Snape shivered. "You should get on that, really. Molly Weasley must have ordered fifteen hundred pounds of crab claws by now."

He wasn't far off. Molly Weasley had a hidden cache of wedding catalogues. This wedding would bankrupt them. He wondered how long it would take before the Ministry would offer to sponsor it. Not a bad idea, really, but only if they got brand new brooms out of it.

"I'm not engaged," he repeated, stepping even closer, just enough to smell the antiseptic scent of the gauze on Snape's wrists and the slight hint of the jasmine soap he'd used to wash the blood from his hands. Up close, Snape's clothes were worn and baggy, old and tired. Easier to close his eyes and breathe him in.

"People have begun to talk. That means something if I'm hearing about it," Snape said sharply, but the end of his sentence was tied up in a sharp intake of breath as Harry reached out to capture his upper arms in his hands. "You certainly shouldn't make a mockery of Miss Weasley. I hear she's quite the dueler."

"Hmm," he mumbled noncommittally. Snape's eyes glittered with something, and he hadn't moved away, and that was very good. It was even better when Snape let him step into his circle of access, so he could press his forehead against Snape's cheek. The other man stilled like frosted water.

"You should be engaged by now," Snape whispered, instead of something like, 'What are you doing?' or 'Are you huffing my hair?' His hands trembled just short of Harry's shoulders, and Harry could smell the dampness of his hair, the scent of something that was probably just Snape, wafting from his skin when Harry's teeth grazed his neck.

"Hmm."

"Oh god," Snape moaned when Harry reached one hand down and into the waistband of his trousers, brushing the back of his hand along the skin he encountered as he went. Harry smiled into the smooth expanse of neck.

"You don't believe in God," he reminded him.

Snape's hands finally managed to work again, one of them slipping up to grasp the back of Harry's neck, the other finding the top button of Harry's shirt. "This is true." And then, "I'm quite broken, you know."

Harry ran his free hand into Snape's hair and breathed deep, finally: quills and must and jasmine. "Yes," he said softly, "this is true."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"'How did it go so fast?' we'll say as we are looking back. And then we'll understand: we held gold dust in our hands." (Tori Amos, 'Gold Dust')

NOW:

Cukluk is the tallest goblin that he has ever seen and he's seen a lot of goblins. In fact, he doesn't look all goblin, but his ears are pointy, his skin grayish, and his fingers preternaturally long in that way so that one can't help but stare. Luckily, he knows that no one will expect him to be all in his right mind, so he's able to get away with a lot of things that he normally wouldn't. He takes the time then, to stare at the goblin and his definite goblin entourage, three of them, actually, looking perfectly menacing and awful.

"Would it surprise you to know that in addition to this insurance policy, he had a great deal of money in his account with us?" Cukluk leans forward and folds his rather long and unnaturally knobby fingers on the table.

Of course He did. Wouldn't have been just like Him to have it? And isn't it almost like someone, maybe God, is buying his silence, his contentment, with it?

"How much money do you think a human life is worth?" he says to the air.

The goblin sitting next to Cukluk sits back and crosses his arms. "Forty-seven hundred Galleons intact. Thirty-seven if it's underage." Cukluk's eyes widen and he says something guttural.

When he turns back to them, his manner is frightfully apologetic for a goblin. "You have to understand that in the old days…"

What follows is a speech about goblin-human relations from past to present, and Hermione is poised on the edge of her seat, staring as if Cukluk is Binns and she is getting the best history lesson of her life. Her eyes are slightly dewy and her mouth is set in that determined rictus that either means she's just received a gift that she secretly hates or is trying to have a completely different stream of thought in her head whilst pretending to listen intently.

He flips the papers over and stares at the writing on them. How like the goblins to still write everything by hand, and it looks like in blood; He would have had to sign the insurance forms in His own. The signature is loopy and partially scrawled, the hand of a busy person who signs without thinking, mind already on one of the many other things He has to do still in the day. It is the hand of a person who, for all intents and purposes, signs because it makes sense, not because He ever expects these papers to be slid across an old wooden table for His loved ones to see, to see how much He cared to leave them with something so that they can try to 'get on' in His absence.

That's what Minerva calls it—'getting on', like he is getting on a broom and riding away.

Cukluk is apparently not finished with him. No doubt he is under instructions to sell Gringotts' savings and investment services for his newfound wealth. And they would be wise to do so, and he would be wise to listen to them. "We have several certificates of deposit with five-year maturity rates—"

"Take it all," he says suddenly, because he doesn't want it anyway. Thinking of it makes him ill, makes his stomach turn.

Hermione grabs his arm and gestures to Cukluk, one hand going up, board-like, foreboding. The goblins look less than pleased. Cukluk's hands knit on the table. "A minute," she says firmly, then turns to him. "You can't afford not to take this, you know. The shop is one thing, but the mortgage on the house…."

It had been His pension that had actually paid the bills, he knows. The shop is all fine and well, but it cannot pay for their House of Dreams, and it most certainly cannot even pay for itself. He thinks of the orchard and the rotting apples, something else there: bleak, sanded, gray. He thinks of his dilapidated scarecrow, which as of this morning had been missing an arm, and yet was still topped by two very shifty looking crows with apparently macabre senses of humor.

He has to take the money, because he literally needs it to keep anything that the two of them made.

"All right," he mutters, "but I'm selling the damn orchard."

There are papers to sign. There are always papers to sign, and he has to show a certificate of death so that he can take His name from the accounts. The goblins look surprised that he hasn't done it already, but he can't explain that he finds comfort in some financial institution still believing that He is alive. It's much like creating a fantasy life in one's head.

Cukluk doesn't shake his hand. Hermione, to her credit, tries, but seems to realize, as her hand is halfway out that goblins aren't very friendly and probably won't be shaking much of anything. They give him an embossed leather case to hold all of the scrolls of paperwork copies he receives. It's much like a parting gift. It will probably become the new scratching toy for D.T.

He doesn't really care about watching his back anymore. It doesn't occur to him to be nearly as wary as he used to be in public places; these days, mobs of people who might have approached him stay away. Any number of reasons could explain it. Maybe Hermione has cursed them all. A young witch sighs dreamily as he walks by. It occurs to him that Hermione has been with him in public ever since he'd met Malfoy on the road, and after the exchanges of pleasantries, Draco had asked him what he'd done to get Him to kill Himself.

"Hermione," he whispers, when they are halfway down the stairs of the bank and the sunlight is perforating the clouds and illuminating Diagon Alley in such a manner that he might even be convinced that the world is ready to usher him onto some new stage of life.

She has her arm through his. He is unsure if she is the one who needs such a gesture, or he is. He uses it anyway, coming to a dead stop and watching the rotating hat on the top of Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes spin and emit showers of red sparks.

"Yes?"

He clutches her elbow just a little, because then he can say this aloud. "I don't really want to sell the orchard."

She doesn't say anything, but grasps his hand in her other one, and leads him down the steps and into the crowded street, full of busy people with busy lives. He knows how it is. He used to be one of them.

***

"Are you feeling fine?
On sleepless nights, the illusion of you...
She said, 'Loving you made me happy every day.'"
(L'Arc~en~Ciel, 'Feeling Fine')

FOUR YEARS BEFORE:

He had convinced Severus that it was perfectly normal and hysterically funny to carve pumpkins for Halloween. He had cajoled, praised Severus's superior knife skills, and somehow, through a convoluted series of events that had taken a layover in the bedroom, he found himself standing in front of a demented looking pumpkin with a knife in his hand, while Severus held the innards of the thing, goopy, stringy and slopping on the floor.

"Please tell me that this is part of that wonderful experience we are supposed to be having," Severus said, eyebrow raised.

He could do one of three things here: Goofy Harry, who was sheepish and smiling, Responsible Harry, who was All-Grown-Up-And-Serious, or Sexy Harry, who was rakish and did amazing things with props.

Severus's hands were full. He went for option one.

He smiled, lopsided. "Yes. Yes most definitely. Fun on a stick."

Severus dumped the seedy glop in a bowl. "There are sticks involved?" he asked skeptically. Severus was never particularly literal, but something about the past few years had made him more so, really, as if he favored playing off of Harry's sense of humor more than creating his own jokes. Harry happily complied with a fount of jokes for him to bounce around. In fact, Harry would have preferred that their house be a fortress of laughter for the rest of their lives, really.

He didn't have to reply, and that was nice, even nicer than he had ever really thought about.

"You could use your wand," Severus murmured. He dumped the seeds from a bowl to a sieve and shook it. "I could be using my wand. Why aren't I using my wand for this?"

"Because," Harry said, "wands aren't the answer for everything, remember?"

Severus frowned and gestured with the sieve. "Sometimes I'm not sure I like this brave new world you have thought about for us. What with not having a house-elf and doing menial work with our hands." He stopped and stared into space, his face a little surprised by what he had just said. "Not that I've ever had a house-elf. Probably for the best; the house-elves at Hogwarts always reorganized my potions stores. Alphabetically." He rolled his eyes at the memory.

Harry shifted on his bare feet a little and curled his toes against the ceramic tile. "We lead by example," he said softly, "not by law." Severus snorted, but he didn't say anything. "Becoming more familiar with Muggles, by using some Muggle technology, we identify with them more closely."

Then Severus had something to say. "Muggle philosopher Baudrillard said that universality is a myth." When Harry gave him a curious look, he shrugged. "The Internet is good for some things. Besides, out of all of this, I suppose it's worth it to watch Arthur Weasley electrocute himself, trying to install wiring into his work shed."

Harry didn't have anything to say to that, because it had been funny to see, except for the fact that Molly held him personally responsible for her husband's rabid 'Mugglization' of the shed, and Hermione had more than once singed her hair trying to help Arthur install a light switch and outlet.

That brought him back to tonight, and the fire and the party next week that he'd been trying to convince Severus to attend. "'Remember remember the fifth of November, the gunpowder treason and plot.'" He paused, his knife wedged in the pumpkin at half-mast. "Huh, I don't remember…"

"Remember what?" Severus said grumpily. His hands were full of pumpkin seeds, and the sieve he was using wasn't particularly well-suited to removing the stringy pumpkin parts. "These things are burning my fingers."

"The rest of the rhyme," Harry muttered, wiggling the knife. If he made this hole any bigger, the jack o' lantern would start to resemble Alastor. He made the hole bigger.

"'I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot,'" Severus told him distractedly, using a slimy hand to tuck his hair back behind his ear before making a face and running his hands under the faucet. "Everyone knows that. What did they teach you at that Muggle primary school?"

Harry smiled "You mean St. Brutus's Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys?" When Severus paused and began to repeat the words, he cut in. "Caning, lots of caning."

Severus shook his head. "A pity that you don't remember more than your delusions of persecution."

Harry withdrew the knife and stabbed it back in at an acute angle. "I remember Dudley setting things on fire," he said grumpily.

Severus snorted. "Really though, who doesn't want to set things on fire?"

"Good point." He pushed the rest of the eye he was carving into the pumpkin and then stepped back to admire it. One eye was horribly narrower than the other. "Oh, I've made it all winky." He had originally cut the mouth first so that he wouldn't run out of room, but it was crooked too, like a half-snarl.

Severus glanced over from the sink before shaking his head. "Well, we certainly have the most lecherous pumpkin on the lane," he said before tossing the seedless innards into the compost bucket. "I suppose that's only apropos, if one thinks about it."

Harry stared at him for a moment. "You're not on that again, are you? Because I told you—"

"Who even eats pumpkin seeds?" Severus said suddenly, dumping the seeds onto a baking sheet. "They're even worthless as ingredients. Not one potion uses them."

Harry didn't push the subject. The scars were still too tight, too shiny, and when Severus held his hands under the faucet stream, the roughness of the puckered tissue diverted the flow of water down his wrists.

"So," Severus said after a minute of silence in which Harry wondered about the time limits on broaching sensitive subjects. The seeds were in the oven. "Everyone is going to just step back and not worry about the inherent dangers in allowing the Weasley boys to ignite a five-foot bonfire?"

Harry stuck a holder for the candle into the squished innards of the pumpkin, rammed the candle securely into it, and used his wand to ignite it. "I'm sure you'll be sure to tell them if they're about to horribly maim themselves," he said dryly.

Severus dried his hands with a towel and reached for his cold cup of tea, grimacing when he finally tasted it. He'd only recently accepted the concept of the refrigerator, and so Harry wasn't sure if he would go for a microwave yet.

"How exactly, pray tell, can one ever protect the Weasleys from themselves?"

Harry hefted the pumpkin, put it in front of his own head and turned to Severus. "CONSTANT VIGILANCE!"

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

What days have come to keep us far apart,
A broken promise or a broken heart,
Now all the morning birds have winged away,
I need you at the dimming of the day.
I need you at the dimming of the day.
(Linda and Richard Thompson, 'Dimming of the Day')

NOW:

He is in the garden, frantically trying to save the sunflowers when he hears the footfalls on the pathway. He had asked Pomona what he might do to save them, and she had mentioned a few spells before suggesting that she mightn't just drop by and fix them herself, as he's been dismal with plants from the very go in life, but he doesn't want her here. Part of him thinks that she will be mortified at the state of the garden itself, which she had helped create as a present to them the previous year.

"Ho there," Arthur Weasley says, appearing over the wild growth of bushes and flowers. "I've brought you sandwiches." He waggles a brown paper bag back and forth in one hand before setting it on the patio table. "From a Muggle shop. I think it was called 'Bread Place.'" He watches Arthur nod sagely. "I used Muggle money all by myself."

It is actually funny, but not in a constructive way, so he goes back to the dirt, wiping the back of a hand across his forehead. Arthur generally entertains himself while he's here, and conveniently, no one expects him to be a proper host. It fits in well with his general temperament, anyway.

Arthur settles into one of the wire patio chairs, moving himself back and forth in the cushion. "You know, I daresay that I could transfigure up something a bit more comfortable if you—"

"No magic," he says, and he means it. "This world is too dependent on it as it is."

Arthur sighs. "That's an unpopular sentiment," he mutters. "I had rather hoped that you'd grown out of that."

He doesn't say anything to that, because this is a conversation he never loses to Arthur 'I Have A Muggle Leaf Blower" Weasley. He's also fairly sure that Ron has told him that Arthur is trying to enchant it to fly these days. He smirks into the stems of the calla lilies. D.T. strolls out of the peonies, ignores Arthur completely, and stalks a gnome across the garden. He hasn't the heart to tell her that it is a ceramic statue; she'll discover soon enough.

"I've always thought," Arthur says hesitantly, "that sunflowers were an odd plant." He looks up into the sky, squinting. "Look nothing like the sun, really. Then again, peonies look nothing like peas or knees…"

He's off on some rambling thing, which is what he does when he visits. It's ironic, that the Order, which is all but obsolete, has this one last job, it seems. They could disband, go back to their lives and their jobs, and for the most part they have, but this one last thing, this mission to save him from himself, ties them together. Shacklebolt had torn himself away from the Ministry last week to come and sit in the garden with him, drinking ale and shelling peanuts with his long fingers.

"Just what are you fertilising those plants with?" Arthur says finally, sniffing. He has taken something metal out of his pocket and has begun to tinker with it using a small set of metal tools.

He grunts noncommittally. "Peanut shells." When Arthur looks confused, he adds, "Shacklebolt was here."

"Ah."

D.T. lunges for the fake gnome and they tumble into the azalea with a screech and a bonking noise. He can see her tail twitching in the grass and knows the gnome is getting it right and proper for being a lie.

"I daresay you've turned this garden around. Most excellent job." Arthur leans back in his chair and sighs. "Won't be many days left like this, will there?"

He's right. It is the end of summer, and already some of the flowers have taken their final bows and retired. He knows that if he gets the fertilizer in now, does what he can, in the spring there will be more growth to work with. He isn't sure why it's even such a necessity to save the garden, truthfully, since He never worked out here. But he suddenly wants Pomona to not come over and cluck at it, and he sort of wants the violent swath of colors that will erupt after the frost melts and the ground thaws.

Arthur is back to tinkering with his thing, probably something Muggle, and so it is surprising when he starts his usual pitch. Sometimes he gets distracted. "We could use you at the Ministry—"

"No," he says, digging with a trowel around a rather stubborn dandelion.

"Are you quite sure? Maybe something else, then. Gringotts hasn't had a good curse breaker since Bill, well, since Bill took up his thing." He is referring to Bill and werewolf rights, with his full time lobbying position in the Lupin Foundation, he knows, because he gets the paper, and because Hermione moonlights for them in the hopes of setting up a similar foundation for house-elves. He wonders if she plans on calling it the 'Dobby Free Elf Society'. D.F.E.S. is much better than S.P.E.W. He wonders if he mightn't suggest it to her the next time she visits.

Back to the matter at hand. "No, Arthur. I'm quite sure." The dandelion finally surrenders and come up in a shower of dirt.

There is a clink of glass and ice as Arthur fills a glass with pumpkin juice; the sun filters the juice in the pitcher so that it matches Arthur's hair perfectly. "It seems like such a waste that you're here, making Pepperup and picking apples."

He stiffens. He likes making Pepperup. And forget the apples. "What are you implying?" he says sharply.

Arthur hides his smile behind his glass. "I paid you a compliment. Just take it."

"Well, the person who used to say nice things to me is dead," he says, patting the dirt flat with the palm of his hand, "so I'm afraid I haven't been in the habit of hearing positive things about myself."

It is probably self-serving, that comment. Strangely, he would have never said anything like that before this time. But it is surprising for a second, firstly that he had said something to make someone feel bad (or rather, that he would have exploited this situation), and secondly that it is true, actually. He had never been one for compliments (or rather, he had never outright solicited them), but he had got used to them in the past six years. They had become as much a normal part of his day as his morning cuppa.

What other things is he unconsciously doing without now?

Arthur usually isn't one to mince words, and while he generally leaves the sensitive emotional things to his wife, especially this one, he seems to be in a mood today. "We'll have to do something about that," he says. And then, suddenly, rushed, as if this has been the point of his whole visit: "There's a group that meets over in the Leaky Cauldron, survivors of sui—"

He stabs the ground with the trowel. "I think my presence would draw a bit of attention," he says to Arthur, and finally, this is his way of nicely ending the conversation. Because that's not the real reason.

The real reason is that he doesn't want to talk about it with anyone. He doesn't want to talk about how angry this has made him, because he isn't angry, not in the way they will talk about. And he doesn't want to forgive Him, like everyone says he should, not because he is in fact, angry, but because he secretly knows that He has done nothing that needs to be forgiven.

Because no matter how arresting and selfish what he did was, it was, in fact, a valid choice he made, and in some ways he wants to respect that. He sometimes thinks that he might have wanted a little notice, is all.

So no, he doesn't want to talk about how the Aurors came to Hermione and Ron's that night, or how there are all manner of things that he doesn't understand in their house, things that he never thought to ask about. He doesn't want to talk about the money or the funeral, or the nights in which he chooses not to eat and instead wanders the house with a glass of whiskey and pets the glass on the photos before turning them to face the wall. Or the big empty bed and the thought that the next time he fucks someone it won't be Him. That there was no last fuck.

Because there should have been a last fuck. One last bright, screeching thing, and not the brusque handjob in the bath he'd got the night before they'd had their big row and he'd moved out.

And he doesn't want to tell anyone about the fight. That doesn't belong to anybody but him, and he knows they'll wonder if that was what did it, what made someone they all thought they knew do something so very strange and final.

Arthur doesn't push it, and he is grateful for small things. He tugs his gloves off, tosses them on the grass beside him, and leans back onto his heels, looking at his guest with a critical eye. "What kind of sandwiches?"

Arthur raises his wand and conjures plates, and he isn't bothered in the least.

***

The sun is dipping low in the sky when Arthur leaves, weaving just a little from some of the ale Shacklebolt left. Something about it is stronger than usual, as he had discovered last week when he'd been plied with it the first time.

He is seeing Arthur to the gate because he doesn't trust him to not break something, and he wonders about the statistics on drunken Apparition, since the Ministry hasn't done a study in years. The last time it had been shocking enough that the Daily Prophet had gone undercover at pubs to catch drunken witches and wizards in the act of splinching themselves. The photos had been hysterical.

But after Arthur says, "I'm just a little squiffy," and turns on the spot, leaving nothing behind, he can breathe a sigh of relief and watch with some manner of surprise as the white van drives over the crest of the hill and down the lane to his house. His house, on a dead end. He thinks to go into the house, but the driver has honked the horn at his retreating back, and he sighs and turns back to the gate, hoping they don't want directions, or are not lost looking for that fictitious 'Pemberley House.'

But the van parks, and he can see the logo of a florist on the side of the door. The last of the flowers had been delivered by Floo five months ago, and so he's vaguely curious as to who would be getting around to sending a funeral wreath six months after the fact. Surely no one else would send him flowers for any other reason.

He is expecting some old man with Muggle shorts and a smartly ironed shirt (This, he had been informed, is only the uniform of the ice cream man, and not every Muggle delivery person, but so far he has yet to be proved wrong.), but instead, he is greeted at the back of the van by a small young woman, her hair pulled back into a long blonde tail and with the whitest teeth he has ever seen. He is more curious about her dental hygiene than the flowers. Maybe.

She flips her hair over her shoulder and smiles. "I have a delivery for you, I think. I can't read the name, but it's this address. Is this you?" He reaches out to take the card and then hands it back to her, nodding. "Oh no, that's yours," she says. "And so is this—" She opens the back doors of the van and pulls out a huge plant, it's roots wrapped in burlap. He knows immediately that Pomona has been shopping in Muggle nurseries again, a small addiction of hers in the summer months. "We've been growing it for you for a month, so it'd be nice and big."

He takes it dubiously. "What is it?"

She smiles again, not altogether unattractively. "A Willow," she says, closing the van doors and dusting off her hands on her trousers. "It'll be very attractive out here in the yard, away from the garden. It's a serious shade tree."

He loosens his grip on the stem and holds it away from himself. "It's not aggressive, is it?"

As soon as he says it he knows that she's confused, and he's confused the wizarding and Muggle world. Pomona probably thought this was funny.

"Oh, well, it won't take over everything, if that's what you mean," she says slowly, and he nods in relief. The tree is attractive, and come spring, when it's more firmly ensconced in the soil, he'll hang a harp on it.

The tree distracts him and so it takes him a few seconds to realize that the woman is still there. She regards him with a raised eyebrow, and he notices that she might very well be getting a bit flirty, as one hand is on a jutted out hip, and her head is cocked in that coy way. He sets the tree against the fence; he'll think of somewhere to put it tomorrow.

"Thank you," he says, not entirely sure what will get her to go away. Because he's not in the mood to rebuff someone, and he isn't even sure if his language is up to the task. It is rusty, a bit, stuck in the sheath, like some cranky old weapon he regrets not using more often in the past few years.

"Do you have a girlfriend or something?" she asks.

"Or something," he says, bolting into the garden.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch." --Anonymous

SIX MONTHS BEFORE:

They'd rowed, in a major way, and Harry wasn't really ready to talk to Severus that morning when they woke up and dressed to go off to the shop. Severus had made toast magically with one scornful glance at the toaster oven, and Harry had slammed the fridge door shut so hard that all of the magnets on the front had jumped off and fallen to the ground. Then he'd let Severus go on the main road and taken a shortcut across the orchard bridge. He had already unlocked the shop and was setting out ingredients when Severus walked through the door, looked vaguely surprised, and flipped the window sign to open.

"I'm saying that I don't know if I would believe those reports," Severus said, pausing in front of the workbench. "Just because there's unrest on the North doesn't mean that someone is trying to lead a revolt in the name of the Dark—"

Harry rolled his eyes and mis-chopped a shrivelfig so noticeably that Severus was distracted momentarily and glanced at it with malice. "Look, I'm not interested in having a conversation in which you don't call him Voldemort."

Severus rounded the counter and uncapped a jar of mugwort. "Oh yes, let's get on that again. Let's toss my whole argument out because of semantics."

Harry narrowly missed his finger with the knife, and so he decided to set it down and do something else. Something that didn't involve cutlery. "The man is dead, Severus. Dead and gone."

Severus tipped the jar onto the scales and dumped a load of dried mugwort on the platter. His hair fell into his eyes and he tossed his head a bit, so that it fell into a curtain. The only part of his face that Harry could see was the tip of his nose. "And yet, you feel the need to follow his ghost every-which-where."

Harry dumped the shrivelfig into the trash. It was mutilated beyond repair. "He doesn't have to be alive to do damage," he said brusquely. The bell above the shop door rang and he held his tongue for the several minutes it took to sell the old man three flasks of Bend-Ease Joint Draught. By the time he was finished, Severus had taken both pairs of earmuffs and escaped to the glass greenhouse they'd built behind the shop, and from there Harry heard the very muffled cries of Mandrakes.

***

It wasn't until after lunch, in the very late afternoon, that Harry felt the urge to revive the argument. It would be tea soon, and he wanted some resolution before they closed the shop and lost some modicum of privacy in their afternoon routine.

"It doesn't have to be a long trip," he said softly as he took the broom from behind the counter. Severus's hand shook a moment at the sudden noise; they'd been completely silent since the beginning of the day, except for the occasional customer. Harry didn't like these days of silence—he felt like he was back in primary school playing 'giraffe' because someone had done something wrong and the whole class was being punished for it.

"That's the thing about investigations and Dark magic and conflict," Snape said. "You cannot, in any way shape or form, promise me that the trip will be short." He finished sealing the last bottle of ingredients in a Wolfsbane Potion assembly kit and set it in the box with the rest. They would ship a whole case of potion assembly kits to Bill at the Lupin Foundation later this month.

Harry swept under the edge of the counter with the broom and came up with a dead mouse. Just great, rodents again. "You could come with me," he said, wondering why he hadn't thought of it before. "We could make a really good team, and you could...." He trailed off when he looked up and saw Severus standing stock still behind the counter, his face one of patent frustration and disappointment. Harry stopped sweeping.

"I'm tired, and I feel old," Severus said after a moment of silence. Harry opened his mouth and closed it when Severus shook his head and held up a hand. "No, really. I cannot go traipsing about with you on some grand adventure, and more to the point, I don't want to."

"I thought maybe you might not, and I was going to ask Ron—"

Severus sighed. "And I didn't agree to a house and shop and orchard and whatever else we agreed on, on the contingency that a few times a year you'd leave for three months at a time to go chasing a specter with your comrades, while I wait at home and..." He stopped, seeming to consider his words. "Keep house."

Harry clenched his jaw. "When have I ever asked you to keep house? When have I ever asked you to stay at home and—"

"I agreed to a joint venture," Severus said sharply. "This is not a joint venture." He untied the strings of his dragon skin apron and tucked them into the pockets before taking the loop from around his neck. "These rumblings will never go away. Some evil will always be out there. And you believe that you are in the position to stop it."

Harry stopped sweeping. How could he explain that he was in the position to stop it? That he felt things in his gut, like back when he'd been an Auror and he'd always been able to tell where traps were before he and Ron had come across them, or how he always seemed to know where Dark objects were hidden in people's houses.

"Maybe I'm not the only one," Harry said, "but I could help and—"

Severus cut him off with a wave of his hand, then stared off into the distance. The sun cut into the window and lit up the colored bottles Harry had arranged yesterday to resemble a rainbow. The current argument dulled his satisfaction at the result: a chaotic cascade of reds, greens and blues across the back wall.

"No, that is fine," Severus murmured. "You might be right. You really might be. But that doesn't mean that I'm wrong, either." He set the apron down on the counter. "And maybe that's something you should be doing more, then."

Harry furrowed his brows and stabbed at the floor with the broom, wishing it was one of the kind that could carry him out of the shop and somewhere else. He hated having this argument, even if he did start it, and they had it all the time now, it seemed. Maybe once a month, every month for the past year.

He understood where Severus was coming from, he really did. He loved the house, and the shop, and Severus and their orchard, brimming with fruit. He loved opening the day with tea and cold porridge, chopping slimy things and charming witches into buying things, going to the pub or walking in the orchard over the trestle bridge with its running stream. They had a running stream on their land. They had a garden in which sunflowers bent over with the weight of seeds, and a cat that seemed to think the ceramic gnomes he'd bought three months ago were alive.

These were the things he'd be giving up if he left, and the thought of it killed him. But something out there, up in the North loomed, sinister, threatening to eat sunflowers and cats and their shop and the little bridge with running water. Something he knew he could stop.

Oh, he didn't really want to leave most days, really, and that bothered him. Maybe he'd got so used to fighting for his life when he had been at Hogwarts, and then in his years with the Aurors, that he had no idea how to do this whole 'settling down and owning property' thing. If he, as George had once told him, had a 'marketable and unique skill,' wasn't he obligated to use it?

On the other hand, whoever said a person was just their abilities? Severus certainly wasn't the sum of his skills, nor Hermione, who already had two children, a frenetic career, and a handful of projects so numerous that Harry sometimes suspected that she still had a Time-Turner stashed somewhere. Even Ron had seemed settled, retiring from his Hit Wizard position to join in with the normal Aurors when Hugo had been born. Everyone seemed to have figured this Life After Wartime out.

Severus leant against the counter and massaged the bridge of his nose with one hand, something he did more and more often. Harry wondered if he mightn't need spectacles.

"Harry," he said softly. "I'm tired of arguing. And you should go. You were sort of raised for that." Clouds covered the sun and killed the colored prism of light from the bottles in the window. Outside a gaggle of wizarding children waved at him, mouthing, 'Hullo Harry Potter!' and mimed casting spells with non-existent wands. One child yelled, 'Expelliarmus!' and tackled his friend.

"I feel like I'll be wasted if I don't go," he said suddenly, realizing as soon as he said it that he hadn't wanted to say it. But he meant it. Really he did. "Look, I didn't mean—"

"You did, and you should go, really," Severus told him. "But I can't. And I can't wait anymore for you to figure out what you want." He opened the shop door and stepped out into the sunlight, taking off for the heart of town at a ground eating pace.

"Oh come on." Harry opened the front door and leant into it. "That is ridiculous. We'll talk about this when I get home tonight."

Severus turned and stared at him, still walking backwards. "I don't want to talk about it anymore." Then he turned without breaking pace and continued to stalk down the road.

Harry sighed. He threw the broom across the room and sat down on the raised steps to the upper storeroom, waiting. Severus would be back in a few minutes, after which Harry would grovel and apologize even though he wasn't sorry and they both knew it; then they'd finish the day in silence and go home, where Severus would shut him out of the Potions laboratory and he'd rethink his whole position on leaving, until the next morning, when everything would seem back to normal. Until next month, or until Ron sent him another top-secret report on the Northern situation, despite that he didn't have the clearance for it.

It took him fifteen minutes to realize that Severus might really mean it this time. He was probably at the pub, eating Muggle fish and chips out of a greasy newspaper or fuming into a pint of ale. Harry closed his eyes and punched the shelving next to him; the middle shelf came loose from its anchors and crashed down, catching the lower shelf. Bottles fell and smashed, their contents pouring out onto the floor, mixing with each other and in general creating a mess. Something pink mixed with something green and began to smoke. He stamped at it with his foot.

The bell above the shop door rang, and he looked up to see Maggie the Muggle, her hat askew, poke her head in and blink a few times, staring at the broken bottles in confusion. "Oh, did I come at a bad time?"

***

When he finally decided to go home, the sun was setting. He trudged across the bridge, ignoring the rushing water that usually cheered him up, and practiced what he was going to say: 'I'm sorry, I mean it, you're right. It's a thing, really. I'm just nervous. Old habits die hard. Maybe I need to get involved in something at the Ministry, something to make me feel like I'm doing some good.'

He had a whole spiel worked out by the time he reached the house, which was dark, unlit, and not at all welcoming. A trip around the rooms showed that Severus had been true to his word; the closets and drawers were empty, and his personal journals were missing from the shelves.

The house suddenly seemed too quiet and too small. He decided to go for a walk.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"Let us die young or let us live forever." (Alphaville, 'Forever Young')

NOW:

They come every other Sunday now, with food and wine and smiles. They come willingly, when for years the last thing they ever wanted to do was be around him. The Weasley women push him out of the kitchen, then proceed to disrupt his fragile order. It takes him days to find anything after they've been in there. It's been three months since he's seen the garlic press.

Severus is confined to the lawn with Ron and the rest of the Weasleys. Some part of him thinks that it is a strange thing indeed that he would end up on a lawn with nothing but three generations of Weasleys milling about, kicking gnomes and trying to play croquet with the wood axes and a few heads of cabbage from the garden. But then again, he never might have predicted that he'd be here, that he would have once been happy, that he'd be alive, and not firmly acquainted with a noose or the inner walls of Azkaban.

He certainly hadn't predicted that the happy ending he'd dug out of the dirt, the blackness of his own self, the one he'd compromised so much for, would have dissipated with something as harmless as a plunge from a low bridge. Because it's not the fall that would have killed Harry. It would have been the sudden stop, or the rushing water, or a sharp stone to the skull, things that any wizard worth his salt could have got out of, if he'd wanted to.

Ron always brings him Muggle beer, and he isn't sure if he likes it or not. He likes the colored bottles it arrives in. They're so attractive they sell anything he puts in them. He also likes the act of flipping the bottle cap off; Ron bought him a special opener just for it, a metal bit shaped like Shakespeare's head that sticks to the refrigerator with a magnet. The bottle cap itself is intriguing. All the power of the wizarding world and they still haven't got around to making a bottle cap.

Ronald Weasley is a much more pleasing development than Severus will ever admit, mostly because he seems to understand the manly art of not talking about things. Maybe Hermione is emotive enough for the both of them, but Ron likes to bring the beer and play with the children and softly chuckle when Arthur curses over his motor parts and sucks blood from a cut on his finger. The years have mellowed his hair color and his personality, and Severus thinks that he can tolerate him as long as he doesn't try to recruit him or talk about Quidditch. Unlike Arthur and Shacklebolt, Ron learnt these rules long ago.

"And remember to say please," George says, punching Hugo in the back just a little bit, enough to push the child within Severus's reach.

Hugo frowns and tosses a cabbage from one hand to the next. "Mr. Severus, please," he looks back at George, who nods emphatically. "May I please go to the orchard for apples." With another look at George, he adds, "Please."

Bill misses the cabbage he's been lining up to knock through the fence with the woodaxe, and Victoire punts it with her foot, laughing. Ron turns his head away to stare at the sun at just this point, and Arthur looks up from the innards of the lawnmower motor. Hermione stops in mid-sentence in the house. The orchard is a testy subject, understandably. He hasn't been there since, well. He hasn't had the courage to sell it, but he certainly doesn't go there either. And he has recently rebuffed a local who'd offered to 'take them apples of yer hands.'

Severus looks at Hugo and realizes that his hair is red, despite Hermione's genes. Oh hell, at least he hadn't called him Uncle Severus.

"Fine," he says curtly. And before the child can race off to wreak havoc, "But take that one with you, and don't climb any ladders." He points to George, who is already halfway across the lawn to the road and the orchard beyond. Hugo doesn't need to be told twice. He pitches the cabbage off into the bushes and twirls so fast that he has to flail his arms for balance. Victoire attempts a cartwheel and fails before scrambling up and racing Hugo to the gate.

"Oi," Ron says to his son's retreating back, "What do you say?"

Hugo stops and regards his father with a quizzical look before replying, "'Uncle George gave it to me?'"

With a small panicked look at the kitchen window, Ron widens his eyes and waves his hands to shush him. "No! The other thing."

Hugo smiles then, front tooth gap filling with his little tongue before he looks at Severus. "Oh. Thank you."

Severus doesn't bother to respond, because the boy is already climbing the fence to the orchard, where he sees George hanging from the lower branches of a tree, attempting to juggle apples upside down. Instead, he looks at Ron, who is avoiding his eyes. "Uncle George gave it to me?" When Ron shrugs, Severus folds his arms. "That was the same excuse Harry gave me for that copy of the Wizard's Kama Sutra."

Ron grins. "Harry called him Uncle George?"

Severus ignores him and opens another beer with the Bard's head. Mentions of Harry in conversation usually lead to big reminiscence parties, in which they all tell stories about Harry, funny things he did, things he thought, and Severus knows that he'd tell too many stories, say too many things. He has become acutely aware of just how much he talks about Harry; he wonders if people wonder when he'll move on. Because Harry is the only link he has with these people, no matter how many Order meetings they all went to together; and when everyone is tired of talking about Harry so much, when everyone has let him fade to a fine memory that they resurrect on All Saints' Day and his birthday, then Severus will fade too, and he'll be back to puttering about his house and shop, taking walks past a ghost orchard and dusting photographs that hold moving images of the dead.

He wonders if the Daily Prophet will do an anniversary piece in six months. He'll probably be asked to comment. Or not; the last time they'd come round, he'd lobbed tulip bulbs at the reporter.

"I think," he says softly, "that sometimes I completely misjudge what he might have said or done when new things happen." He turns to Ron, who is swilling beer and completely lax, as if they had never once been at odds. Before Harry's death, Ron had been civil to him. Now they are lounging in his garden, drinking Muggle beer and waiting for Molly to finish whatever culinary masterpiece she's thought up using his pantry stores, which might contain only turnips and shrink-wrapped rump roast with 'freezer burn'.

"Well, he certainly was for excitement," Ron says, turning the bottle by the neck. "I thought I was easily bored." When Severus doesn't say anything, he sighs. "You know, he wanted to be here." He waves a hand at the house, the garden, and stops short of the orchard. "He just wanted to be there too. He wanted to do everything all at once."

That is the best way to say it, and he hadn't thought of it. Severus considers the simplicity of it while raising his empty beer bottle up to his eye like a spyglass and viewing everything through the green lens.

"I talk to him," Ron says. "A lot." He slouches further in the chair and takes a pull from the bottle. The sounds of Hermione and Ginny talking about Ministry regulations waft out the window, an aural perfume.

Severus snorts and lets D.T settle herself on his lap. Within seconds, his trousers are plastered with cat hair. He has long stopped caring.

"Look, it's not like I believe that he's there, or anything, but I think it helps me deal with it." Ron sighs, and the sun hits his hair for a second, painting him with a halo of fire. All across the lawn and orchard, heads seem to burst into flame. Severus thinks that a dozen years ago the thought of such a thing might have caused him to smile. Then again, a dozen years ago he was still teaching witless third-years how dismal they were at everything.

"I can't do that," he says to Ron, realizing that for the first time they are having a conversation in which he is being forced to admit something so frightfully personal that he hasn't even written it down in his journal. Severus picks at the paint peeling from the table between them; the sun steals into his face and he is grateful for the blindness of it.

"Whyever not?" Ron plunks the empty bottle on the table between them and hesitates before opening a third. Severus wonders if they both have to be drunk for this conversation.

"Because." It's that Severus doesn't believe he's there, and talking to Harry, knowing that he's not there, that this is nothing, is silly and unhelpful. He doesn't visit the grave, he doesn't write those silly letters that Minerva had once suggested he write to him, and he doesn't approach Harry's spirit as if there is anything that he can salvage.

The thing about death is that it always means severance. If it didn't, people wouldn't be wary of it, be afraid of it. And the dead cannot, unless they choose to remain on this earth in ghost form, communicate with any sense of accuracy. Severus doesn't care for conjecturing and theories about Resurrection Stones and seances with ectoplasm. So what is the point of having a one-sided conversation to say things he already knows he feels?

This isn't to say that he hasn't inwardly thought about many things that he would say, but only under the completely unrealistic and fantastical circumstances of Harry's total resurrection; for that he has a running list whose order changes according to his mood, well, except for number one. The first thing he would do, without a doubt, is grab onto Harry and clutch him, and maybe they would fall to the ground, and then maybe in about five years he'd think about letting go.

But if he were to say something, he knows that secretly, he'd be apologizing, and maybe that's why he doesn't talk to Harry. Maybe he's afraid that if he started to say that he was sorry, he might never be able to stop, not until he got an answer. And then he's back to square one. There's no point in asking for forgiveness from the dead. If there were, he'd be at Godric's Hollow on his knees every day.

Inside, Molly yells that dinner will be ready in five minutes, and Ron uses the Sonorus charm to call the others from the field. He can hear the sizzle of something frying in a pan, and Fleur singing something in French that his paltry language skill interprets as 'And silver on the edges, oh la! Something something sweeter, oh la!' Bill helps Arthur shut the lid to the lawnmower and Victoire flips herself over the orchard fence, showing the world her knickers. Severus looks away out of instinct, shaking his head.

When everyone has meandered inside and washed up, Severus sits at the head of the large table Harry had said they should buy and which is normally covered with discarded post and folded laundry. Hermione sits to his right, little Rose in her lap, bouncing the baby up and down absently on one knee as she cleans Hugo's face with a napkin. Ron fills Severus's glass with wine, and Molly carries in a huge turkey, which she must have brought, since he is fairly sure that one cannot transfigure beef into poultry. A cavalcade of dishes enchanted to rank and file, follow behind her, filled to overflowing with potatoes and dressing and summer squash. George uses his wand to shoot a stream of pumpkin juice out of the pitcher and into an arc, which his protege Hugo catches in a glass.

It isn't until Fleur brings in the silver frosted cake with the green candles that he remembers that it is his birthday.

***

Hermione obviously had been in charge of picking his birthday present, he decides, glancing at the dragon hide gloves, apron and mask on the table. Everyone always forgets the importance of the mask. That is, anyone who has never handled an engorged bubotuber. Molly has knitted him a scarf, even though it is way too early for it, and it must have killed her to use green and silver. Harry had once told him that Gryffindors erupted in hives when the color combination touched their skin.

George has given him the first official phial of 'Yikes! The Scream-In-A-Bottle' he's bottled. It has Severus's manufactured signature of approval on the label, since now that he no longer teaches he can approve of all manner of troublesome things. For the first time he is grateful that Filch isn't very good at curses himself, otherwise he'd have to cancel his weekly visit to Minerva at Hogwarts in the Autumn; he'll never forgive Severus for this.

Fleur and Bill have washed the dishes, a present in and of itself, and someone, probably Molly, has gone about the house and dusted the photos and furniture. Hugo and Victoire have fallen half asleep, stretched out in front of the novelty of the television, which softly blares something animated. Ron rouses them long enough to slip their cloaks on, then picks up Hugo and hefts him on one hip. Severus's house is Muggle-made and doesn't have fireplaces that accommodate Flooing, so they have to go to the local pub down the road or else Apparate, which they usually do at the end of the walk and in the road.

He sees them to the door, where Arthur pats him on the back heartily before leaving. Hermione hugs him to herself, the kind of hug that he sees her give her children, and something deep in his soul is repulsed and rather gratified. Behind him, the television plays something lively and jazz-like. He realizes that it has not been on since Harry was alive. The sound of it is reassuring, and he understands that this is the first of many accidental steps.

Soon he'll be able to turn on the 'player' that Harry bought him for his birthday last year, and he'll be able to try to listen to all of the 'see dees' that go into it. He'll finally get that 'macrowave' something or other that Harry had told him would be useful, not because he can't heat things magically, but because Harry would have wanted him to. He'll open Harry's trunk and try out his old broom.

But all of those things will come slowly, surprisingly, like the fading of irrational flares of anger and screaming and weeping. Severus watches Hermione grasp Ron's hand as they walk out of the gate, and it doesn't make him angry anymore; somewhere ahead of them Molly yells something to the effect of 'George, if you levitate that baby one more time I'll—'

He closes the door and uses his wand to lock it behind him as he makes his way to the lounge, where he turns off the television and stares at the little white dot left in the center of the screen until it fades away. He turns out the lights in the dining room and kitchen, then makes his way down the hall to the upstairs staircase. He is halfway up when he stops to look at the photos that line the ascent to the second story. Some of them are stationary, Muggle images. Some of them, like the one in front of him, are not.

He stares at the photo, Harry tugging hard on his own sleeve, in the picture, trying to get him to leave the recesses of the frame. A lot of the pictures are like this: happy Harry, an arm and half torso of Severus.

Harry waves and gives another tug on the black covered arm. On the stairs, Severus sighs and shoves his hands in his pockets. "I hope you're kicking yourself right now," he says finally.

Harry continues to wave, smiling, smiling, always smiling.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"There may be some who will recall the dead, and think of him with grief. But soon they themselves must pass away. Then how can later generations grieve, who know him only by repute? After a time, they no longer go to his tomb, and people do not even know his name or who he was. True, some feeling folk may gaze with pity on what is now but the growth of grasses of succeeding springs; but at last there comes a day when even the pine trees that groaned in the storms, not lasting out their thousand years of life, are split for fuel, and the ancient grave, dug up and turned to rice field, leaves never a trace behind." (Yoshida Kenko, 'Essays In Idleness')

END