CONFESSION

The room they were in was dank from years of leaking ceilings and the fester of rats that scurried in and out of the holes in the corners. The air was cold and the room was poorly lit, which cast long shadows across the floor and high onto the walls.

Harry, who stood under the source of light on the ceiling, appeared gaunt and almost evil as he tapped his foot and clenched his fists, pacing slowly back and forth in front of the figure tied to the chair in front of him, scowling at the hunched form with malevolent fury.

The war was over, Voldemort was dead, the death eaters were captured, and as head auror it was Harry's job to question them all. He had been waiting a long time for this one.

"Are there any pleas of innocents before I begin?" He growled. The head of the figure in the chair shot up and absolutely death glared at him from between curtains of pallid, disgustingly matted and dirty black hair, the sneer that curled his lips was amplified to far more than its normal nastiness and the thin man scoffed at him, baring his uneven yellow teeth.

Severus Snape was indeed a changed man. Although he was thin and pale before the war, he had never looked sick, but now he looked upon the verge of death. Of course Azkaban would do that to a person; the prison would sink your eyes into your head, protrude your bones to the point where they look as if they would burst through the flesh and even go as far as to detach your mind from reality. But the prison had not done the latter to this man. Despite his poor state he was just as sour as ever.

"Don't test me Potter; Do I look like I'm in the mood?" He growled.

"Enough!" Harry barked. "You will speak when I speak to you or I will send you to the dementors right now." his voice was icily threatening, and unbeknownst to him, amazingly similar to that of a certain professor. Snape bit back an insult but continued to shoot daggers from his eyes.

Harry conjured a chair and sat in it so that he was facing Snape, eye to eye.

"I won't screw around and ask you a bunch of crap about where you were on when's and what you were doing at such and such a times. Which I expect you'll be overjoyed to hear." He growled.

"Ecstatic." Snape snarled, the word absolutely dripping with sarcasm.

"Enough!" Harry barked again. Leaning back he rested against the back of his chair and stared at the prisoner over the top of his glasses. "As I was saying I won't ask you that nonsense so let's get right to it. There's only one thing I want to know, professor."

"And what would that be?" Snape sneered while raising on of his thin eyebrows. Harry stared into the man's black orbs trying to use the ligilimens he had never been very good at.

"You should know not to use that with me Potter; don't you remember how terrible you were with that at our lessons?" Snape chided.

"Yes I also remember some other things that happened on that night." Harry shot right back. Snape's raised eyebrow immediately fell back to an angry line over his empty eyes.

"Get on with the questions. That is your job, need I remind you" Snape barked.

"I know my job." Harry whispered. "Better than you knew yours."

"Well if you know your job so well Potter I suggest you get on with it before you're docked pay." Snape said icily, he was recovering his Professor persona in the company of his former student.

"As I said, I only want to know one thing." Harry continued.

"Get on with it."

"Why?" Harry demanded. Snape stared at him blankly.

"Why what, Potter? I'm sorry if I'm too slow for the boy who lived but there are a great many number of why's which people would like answered and you're going to have to thin it down just a bit." Snape snarled, his usual smart ass self.

"You know what I mean," Harry yelled. "Why, why did you do it, why did you betray the order, why did you kill Dumbledore?" he bellowed. Snape's face darkened.

"How do you know?" He hissed.

"Don't play that game," Harry warned. "I was there under the invisibility cloak. Why." He demanded. It was no longer a question.

Snape leaned back in his chair, and even though his hands were tied, he looked menacing as anger coursed through his eyes.

"If you were there Potter, then I can assume you can probably guess as to why I did it, we don't need to waste time here, Besides, I have no reason, nor am I bound in any way to tell you why." He said his voice silky and poisonous.

Harry clenched his fists and nearly screamed in frustration, this man was so impossible!

"You want me to guess?" He shouted. "Fine, I guess that you were following Voldemort's orders, as usual, and that, as usual, you were saving your own skin by killing someone else." Snape's eyes glittered with all of their old malevolence, almost as if he hadn't changed at all.

"Shame Potter." He said coldly. "You're only guess and you get it wrong."

"Don't lie to me!" Harry screeched. "I saw you there, I saw the way you barely hesitated, only pausing to scowl at him, I saw the way you hated him, I saw the look of revulsion in your eyes-"

"WELL OF COURSE I HATED HIM!" Snape bellowed; suddenly losing all of his composure he shook so violently with rage that his chair skidded four inches back towards the wall.

"And what for? How could you possibly hate him, he trusted you when no one else did, he was the only reason that you even stayed out of Azkaban in the first place or even got a job! How could you hate him when he did so much and asked so damn little of you?" Harry had stood back up and kicked his chair, sending it flying towards the other wall where it smashed and fell to the floor.

"You call being a spy little work? You can't even imagine the things he asked me to do."

"So you hated him for what he asked you to do?" Harry asked unbelievingly.

"Of course. Isn't it obvious?" Harry ignored the sarcasm on the man's voice and began to pace to keep himself from striking the bound man.

"I can't believe this; you killed him because of something he asked you to do? What was it? Did he make you promise not to tell Voldemort when the back door to the school was open?"

Snape sighed, his chest was heaving slightly, and he looked tired, no, more on the brink of exhaustion.

"Fine, I'm tired, and I want sleep, If you must know so badly then I will confess," He said testily, Harry realized that the older wizard was giving in. "As it were, Dear old Dumbledore made me take an unbreakable vow, promising to him that when the time came that little Potter was ready, and little Potter had been shown a horcrux and how to destroy it, that I would have to kill Dumbledore to keep Draco innocent and ensure that little Potter could go on alone, because little Potter relied on Dumbledore far too much." Snape said; his voice was stiff with triumph as Harry stared at him speechless. "Satisfied?" He sneered, somehow he always got the last word.