The Lost World
A/N: I'm currently working on a longer version of this story, but since it's taking longer to finish than I expected I've decided to post the shorter version here. Written for the Snapecase 2011 fest on LiveJournal. Many thanks to Loupgarou1750 for looking this over.
Chapter One
The Forest in the late afternoon has the tint of both cathedral and graveyard about it. Grey-green. Morbid. Seething with magic.
It's Al's fault that Harry's lost, searching for the garden from which his son has been harvesting belladonna, datura, amanita muscaria. Al's head of house caught him sneaking back with the evidence stashed carelessly under his robes, and Owled a rather snippy request to Harry to contact her. The Forest is Forbidden, no exceptions, and that goes double for the first Potter in generations to be sorted into Slytherin.
Harry Apparated to Hogwarts to look into the matter. Whoever—or whatever—is luring his younger son with promises of botanical poisons, he wants to be sure nothing fatal occurs.
Besides, it's not like he's doing anything in particular. He rarely is these days. It's been more than a year since he retired from the Auror corps. Longer since he's flown, since a malicious hex destroyed his rapport with a broom.
Al doesn't say exactly what he was doing or admit to getting lost, or to coming back with dubious potions ingredients packed in moss and wrapped in snakeskin in his pockets. "I found this path," he says, shrugging. "It led me to this garden. I didn't see or talk to anyone, Dad, I swear. I just took some cuttings, found stuff to keep them fresh, and got back in time for dinner." He unknots his school tie, and it hangs from his neck like a dead, striped snake. "Maybe whatever planted the garden isn't human and that's why I can't see it."
Harry rolls his eyes. "Yeah, that makes me feel so much better about you wandering around in the woods alone."
"Maybe," the boy blurts like a rabbit dashing from cover, "maybe it's Snape. Maybe that's where he used to grow potions ingredients, and he spelled it to take care of itself, and nobody's touched it since he died. Maybe the garden's glad another wizard's come along and—"
"It's not Snape," Harry says, annoyed. "You've got to stop dragging him in where he doesn't belong. It makes you sound mental."
For Merlin's sake. He wishes now he'd never explained to Al the significance of his middle name. The boy already gets teased for being gangly, shambling and speccy, and for smelling like an unwashed cauldron. The last thing he needs is a Snape fixation.
Besides, times have changed. Despite Harry's best efforts, Snape's left little trace. At war's end, during the chaos of grieving and mopping-up, someone nicked his corpse, so the Ministry allotted him a marker but no grave. Harry shudders to think where his bones lie now. His exploits and betrayals rate three meagre textbook paragraphs in the lengthy chapters on the Riddle Wars. His house at Spinner's End was finally repossessed once the local council got word that squatters were stripping it to the support beams. In the headmaster's office, the frame bearing his name enshrines a black canvas, utterly empty, as if painted over. To today's crop of kids, Snape is old news, a story long since ended, unreal.
Harry's aware (because Ginny's told him) that he spends too much time obsessing over the way Snape treated him and the secrets Snape kept, the whole fucked-up mess he found out about too late to resolve other than by accepting the bastard's sacrifice.
It's a rather useless pastime, regretting Snape. Not that Harry wastes much mental energy on bygones, or admits that he smuggles regrets about like pocketsful of poisonous harvest. Really, he has no idea what to do with all these purgative notions. He'd probably be here every week getting up in Snape's face if the git were still alive.
A nearby swish of movement over wet, dead leaves recalls him to his predicament, and he pauses, canvassing the area for landmarks, acromantulas, or cultivated beds of psychotropic plants. Two steps forward, and a spicy, wild odour overtakes him, a mocking incense as provocative as the rumours that have persisted for almost two decades: rumours of a corpse smuggled from the Shack, of potions brewed in dark bowers and an undead professor pacing the midnight halls.
Harry doesn't know what it is, but trusting his luck he plunges off after it, hoping the scent will guide him.
Nagging thoughts about his stagnant marriage, the depression of not being able to fly, fade in his wake. Feeling freer than he has in ages, Harry jaunts about, smiling at stray creatures that run away rather than smile back. A kaleidoscope of branches shifts overhead, gold-leafed greenish domes perforated with stray bits of sunlight. In the distance, a unicorn—no, make that a Thestral—whinnies.
Drilled to caution, Harry charms his boots not to squelch or crunch. In passing he notes split hoofprints here, sharp claw prints there, sap bleeding from gnarled trunks, the fatal lace of rain-dropletted cobwebs stringing barren twigs together. The scent beckons him over a rotting log, past stands of nettles, around fungal excretions luminous in the rook-infested gloom. The birds jeer at him as he hikes by, then wing away in ones and twos as if to report his incompetence.
The usual jealousy barely registers, he's so accustomed to the cruel darts whenever he sees anything take flight. Ginny straddling her Firebolt, for example.
"Tell whoever—tell Snape," Harry feels idiotic and bold, calling the dead man's name into the silence, "to stop lurking about and produce this blasted garden. I haven't got all day."
Actually, he has. He could stay here for the rest of his life if he wanted.
He finally notices a faint, gleaming track winding through the ferns. Long, smooth S-curves slide through the mud. Harry hesitates, his senses sharpening in anticipation, then steps onto the path, alert for any presence not his own.
There's a moment of exorbitant clarity. The connection delivers a resuscitating shock to his nerves, as if he's completed a circuit by taking this step. He draws breath in perfect accord with the tumbled sky, the quivering intimations of magic. Whichever way he turns, the cool, vaulted canopy of the Forest looks identical, darkened tunnels of softly dripping trees endlessly mirrored, grottos of shadow, trunks branching like torsos hoisted up and hanging from the sky.
For some reason those elongated, overwrought knots bring Snape—Snape naked and shackled, his arms raised over his head—to mind. Harry stops, startled by whatever convolution in his brain projects such a disturbing image. It's the Forest, really; there's something moodily erotic about it, the dark wet wood, the mist that rises from leaves steaming in the sun. The impression of palpitating life crouched behind tangled foliage, watching him.
Without warning the trees open out, and sunlight blinds him. The path curves and ends at a wooden gate. Beyond a weathered fence that's more border than barrier, meticulous rows of herbs and beans and varieties of squash stretch into acreage, alongside mandrake root, devil's snare, damp mucky clumps of bulbous mushrooms.
"Hello?" Harry's astonished by the untouched bounty flourishing in the depths of the Forest. This isn't what he'd imagined when Al described a garden. "Anybody here?" He rests his hand on the rain-soaked gate, listens to the murmur of bees and inhales the faint stink of mulch. Now that he's arrived, the spicy odour seems to have vanished.
The gate opens at a touch. Suspicious, Harry slips through and lets it swing shut behind him.
He treads for a while amongst fresh and tender leaves, fruiting vines, the perpetual sensual exuberance of irrigated nature. His footprints sink in the fertilised soil. Al's right. There's a Sleeping Beauty quality to this garden, a trance of quietude, no sign of human life.
The sun is considerably lower, muffled in cloud, by the time he finishes his tour. The bees have retired, and only an occasional bird cheeps into the silence. On his way out, Harry spies a spray of tall, elegant flowers growing by the gate, a blend of iris and orchid, prismatic in the underwater light, the petals as electric as peacock feathers. Wand alert, he gazes around, weighing the options, then squats down and grips two waxy stems.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you."
Heart shrieking like a steam whistle, Harry hurtles upright. The murmur came from just over the fence, but bugger if he can see anything. Frantic, he jerks around, searching. A breeze strokes the nearest branches and they shiver. Nothing else.
"Snape?" he croaks.
That voice—fucking hell, he'd stake his life on that voice.
Silence. Harry swallows, trying to quell his adrenalin jitters, then yanks open the gate and prowls toward the treeline. "Snape," he demands of the shadows, wand flicking this way, that.
It drifts from his left, like a gust of wind on a hot, still day.
"So it's you, is it."
The soft spit and sizzle, as of grease hitting an iron skillet, taps an involuntary reflex in Harry. In the same way a mouth waters from hunger, his mind floods with memories. He can taste the past, the hatred, humiliation, the desire for revenge. The ache inspired by irreparable tragedy. Flustered, he steps from drab sun into overwhelming shadow, spots of colour pulsing and fading as his eyes absorb the gloom. He looks around, breathless; looks again. No thin sneer lies in wait, no pale, baiting, embittered face.
"Potter."
Harry spins around, blurting, "You're alive," even though he doesn't know that yet. Snape says it back to him at the same moment, the same words, a faint hum like a bronze gong vibrating in the wind. Their voices reverberate in the echo chamber of encircling trees. For the first time in their lives, perhaps, they're in harmony.
A hippogriff screams in the distance, and the spell breaks. "Come out where I can see you."
"I'm neither a crup nor a criminal, Potter. I don't take kindly to being ordered around. Is there something you want, or are you merely a manifestation of my worst nightmares? I see no other reason for you to be here. The sooner you explain, the sooner the Forest will be quit of you."
Harry's mouth opens and closes as the word 'want' tangles his thoughts, and he remembers the erotic image prompted by the sight of the wet-boled, long-limbed trees: Snape naked, gnarled, hanging by his wrists. A dragonfly zips past, glinting electric blue, aiming for the sunshine.
"Bloody hell. Twenty years, and you're alive. All this time I—" He has no idea what he's about to say here, and hurriedly substitutes, "Why haven't you come back?"
"After 'all this time' it should be obvious that either I don't want to or I can't." The voice circles as it speaks, and Harry pivots, trying to follow. "Why are you here? What is it you seek?"
Harry snorts. The things he could say to that. "My son," he begins.
"You have a son?" Merlin, the withering contempt.
"He found the garden." Harry pauses, but the voice doesn't react. "I thought it best to have a look, because he picked some—"
"Ah, yes," Snape murmurs. "I recall now. The dishevelled beanpole idling down the path, stinking of discontented youth, exuding a Potteresque air of entitlement and self-absorption."
It's mild by Snape's standards, but Harry spits back, "Wow, you could really smell all that? No wonder your nose is so bloody enormous."
A crack splits the air, abrupt as a gunshot. Harry scrambles back, swearing, as a branch pitches down. It crashes at his feet in a billow of snapping twigs. Standing back, breathing hard, he thinks wildly of Petunia and 'that awful boy,' his mum's sullen friend with his fits of wandless violence.
"I've spent twenty years free of your insolence," Snape growls. "I cannot otherwise explain my lapse in judgment. I find I have no desire to renew my acquaintance with it or you."
"For fuck's sake," Harry pants. "I just—" Sodding hell. He's gone and royally bollocksed this up. "Look, I'm sorry, all right? Insult me all you want, but lay off my kids."
A desolate creak is his only answer. Harry frowns toward the garden, where the long gate knocks and wobbles against the frame.
"Snape?" Picturing the git's insufferable face only intensifies his desire to see it. "Snape, don't go yet."
"What makes you think I'm going anywhere?" The voice keeps moving, evasive, insidious. "Let me remind you, Mr. Potter, which one of us is lost."
"Right," Harry says, levitating the fallen branch to one side, then spearing the nearest bush with his wand. He walks in a half-circle, repeating the procedure, getting splashed by runoff from shaken leaves. "Why are you hiding? Is it because you're—" He wipes his wet face and hesitates.
"I'm what? Disfigured?" Harry shrugs; he was going to say 'a ghost.' "And if the answer's yes? Do you intend to mock that, too?"
"Of course not." Frustrated, he strides across the clearing, spelling the bushes to part and bend. "I just want to see you." Snape has probably haunted the Forest for years. The idea pains Harry more than he's willing to admit. "So what happened, then? After I— I mean, you— ?"
"What happened, Potter, is that I didn't die," Snape says with surprising directness. "I crawled out of that wretched place on my belly and bled out my life upon the Forest's floor. When I awoke, I was as I am now. I will continue in servitude, guarding and watching, until the day I fail to do as the Forest requires and it reclaims my life."
"So you're never coming back."
"I…" The voice fades, and Harry suddenly, fiercely wishes he hadn't asked. "No."
There's nothing to say to that. The finality of it aches, as if under his ribs something's pushing the bones outward.
Then, for one extraordinary second, the whole wilderness flares up, and Harry sees. He sees Snape. Snape's standing in the gap where two branches divide, backlit by the sun dipping under the clouds. Snape, face ablaze, peering through the dense, geometrical shadows of his hair, his narrow body patterned by overlapping leaves. Harry walks forward, hand outstretched, and as he comes closer the optical illusion falls to pieces, dissolving into dappled bark and ragged outlines, sunlight brimming in pale, late-autumn blooms. It's not Snape after all, yet when Harry's fingertips enter the glow that mimics Snape's face, he touches the same depth of melancholy that darkens his future, the same loss that settled in his bones when he realised he'd never fly again.
"Is there anything I can do?" Beyond the interlaced boughs, the sunny garden shimmers, a separate world. "Anything to help?"
"Help?" The voice is bitter. "Not likely. But there is something you can do." The carpet of leaves rustles like a quilt being thrown back. "Potter. Let me touch you."
Harry's heart stamps once, hard, in his chest. It leaves an impression like a cleft hoofprint, the track of something dangerous running through.
"One touch."
He imagines his lit-up fingers finding Snape, Snape's pale hand emerging from inside his robes, subtle and quiet as a predatory snake. The knowledge that Al has walked here before him is suddenly unbearable. Magic will fuck you up; magic's not to be trusted. And Snape is a bastard, Harry knows this, Harry's visited his memories again and again, Harry's bloody well wanked inside the bubble of Snape's past.
"And in exchange?" The sun dims; shadows thicken under his hand.
"You tell me. You still haven't—"
"Swear." He whirls, wand extended, cursing inwardly at sight of the empty clearing. Anxiety sparks through him, and the fallen branch just beyond his feet ignites. "Swear you'll stop luring my son into the Forest."
"I'd sooner lure a flobberworm, you trespassing half-wit. In point of fact," the voice turns sinuous, sly, "I'd sooner lure you."
"What?" Harry stiffens. "What did you say?"
"I said," Snape hisses, "if you don't wish to be tempted, get the fuck out of my garden."
The crackling branch disintegrates in a wave of black smoke.
"Fine," Harry snarls, angry even though he's brought it on himself. "Right. I'm out of here. Nice not seeing you, Snape. Guess I'll not-see you around, okay?"
"Coward," Snape says behind him, and Harry spins on his heel. If Snape is a ghost, casting 'Stupefy' won't work, but bugger if he wouldn't like a clear shot anyway. "A bargain, Potter," the voice rasps, only it comes from an entirely different direction. "One touch. I won't harm you, and I think you know that. You're just indulging your license to be difficult. All I want—" He trails off. "Perhaps it would be best not to go into that right now. But proof."
"Of what?"
"Reality."
Harry snorts to cover the ironic pang this gives him. "For fuck's sake, I'm real. You only have to—"
"Not you, imbecile. Me."
His heart speeds up. Not a ghost, then.
The voice spirals closer, languid, insinuating. "Tell me, Potter, do you believe I'm real?"
Small bright spots fleck the ground at Harry's feet, shining like coins. Fairy gold, they vanish as another wave of cloud overpowers the sun. He pushes his fringe back from his forehead and doesn't answer.
"Very well. Since the strain of conversation is apparently too much for you, I'll keep it short. This, Mr. Potter, is what I propose. Roll up your sleeve, and I'll touch your forearm. In exchange, you may take whatever you want from the garden. After which the path will show you the way out."
Too irked to speak, Harry wrestles his sleeve above his elbow. He knows his face is flushed. Mutinous, he holds his arm out sideways.
"Now close your eyes."
"What the hell?" He backs up a step and retracts his arm against his ribcage. "In your dreams, Snape."
Silence. The wind blows. Cursing himself, Harry says, "Why?"
"Sod off, Potter." The voice is somewhere to his right, circling, agitated. "Do you think I don't dream? I fucking well dream. I dream that I walk out of this Forest and back into the world." A sudden blast of wind makes Harry's shoulders hunch. Dead leaves swirl around him as if flying up a spout, flitter about like gold-winged insects, then clatter slantwise to the ground. "I dream I'm a man like any other," Snape whispers, "walking unchallenged."
"Yeah?" Harry clears his throat uncertainly. "Good for you, I guess. And when you wake up?"
The brief silence brings with it a sharp lowering of temperature. "I am myself again. There's the path, Potter. Take it."
The last words snarl away like unravelling rope. It's as if all the vitality in the Forest is in full retreat, drawing back from Harry, layers of shadow, of secrecy, of ancient magic being dragged off someplace he can't follow. The path ox-bows around him, offering escape.
"Wait!"
The silence drifts, expectant, but Harry doesn't speak again until the spicy scent rises inside the small clearing. Itching to lash out, he snaps, "Go for it, arsehole. Prove you're real."
Arm extended like a plank of wood, he squeezes his eyes shut.
If not for the odour of—whatever it is, capsicum and shagbark, spikenard, scorched leather, human sweat (which wasn't there before, and oh Merlin, Harry hates the weird rush of arousal it gives him), he'd wonder if he was actually standing alone in the Forest with his eyes closed, as gullible an idiot as ever lived. His skin prickles. He'd bet anything Snape is hovering behind him, noiseless, exhaling creepily against the back of his head, so close it's a wonder they're not already touching. The silence stretches, dazed, dark. Harry's anchor to the world fades second by second until it seems his feet barely touch the ground.
"Under no circumstances are you to open your eyes." Snape's murmur slips like a drug down his ear, along inner pathways of personal memory and repeated immersion in a life not his own; a life he thought had ended. "Don't," the voice catches, pain poking through the sneering faade like a bent nail. "Don't look at me."
Harry scowls with the effort it takes to keep his eyes shut. He has perfect recall of that moment even after twenty years, and he has to stand there in the dark, fending off the spray of blood, the gaunt agony and hoarse, haunting whisper. His arm trembles, and he says without meaning to, "Just touch me."
There's utter silence, no breathing, no crisping of dry leaves, no birds or blowing wind. The air is buzzy around him, static-electric. Harry wouldn't be surprised to hear a sharp ozone crack followed by sheets of rain. Then Snape's hand—what he imagines is Snape's hand—brushes his arm. It's as if the very tip of an arrow has grazed his skin, an inflammation, a faint aphrodisiac of divinity welting upward into loneliness. The burn of desire rushes in to fill this vacuum, like the heated kiss of glass suction drawing bad blood to the surface.
"For God's sake," Snape murmurs. "Are you always this lonely?"
Harry can barely breathe. He shakes his head, meaning, You, not me, but he doubts the denial comes across. Snape's voice is rough, as if the impulse toward sympathy is an imposition he resents. The intimate disdain of it, rubbing on a subject Harry would rather not discuss, startles his pulse, sending short, spanking rushes of blood to his groin.
Something clasps his wrist. Harry's never thought about Snape's hands before—there were too many other peculiarities in Snape that took precedence—but he does now. The fingers are supple and cool. He would gladly vouch for their reality; they are almost, at this moment, the only reality.
Afloat in his off-kilter blindness, he says, "I'm sorry." The words quiver behind his eyelids, concepts softening into meaningless shapes and breaking apart like soggy bread.
"A Potter apologising? You must want something desperately."
"No, just—sorry I didn't save you."
"Don't be tedious," Snape huffs. His hand slides sensuously up Harry's forearm. "All this begging forgiveness—it changes nothing."
Harry swallows; his eyelids tremble but he holds them down by sheer force of will. "Snape." By standing behind him, Snape has made it impossible to reach Harry's wrist without leaning on him, without trailing his robes against Harry's shoulder. Each touch evokes trespass, a radiating web beaded with intensity. "Snape."
"You sound like a lamb bleating."
"When I died—"
Snape's fingers tighten, denting his skin. Harry adds, "I've never told anyone this before."
Snape bends Harry's arm up until it's pressed against his heart, and Harry hitches himself backward until he comes to rest against something only slightly more yielding than a tree. How odd that Snape's body qualifies as a resting place. The creepy-crawly tickle of hair makes him shiver.
"Tell me." Snape's breath across his cheek reeks of woodsmoke.
Harry doesn't know why he's doing this. It's as if there's nothing else, nothing but the two of them standing together, the magic roused by making peace with this essential, inescapable part of his past binding them in a risky embrace.
Fist against his heart, Snape's fingers entwined around his pulse, he whispers, "I feel as if half my soul never came back. I've never been fully alive since then. Some part of me wanted the peace of being dead." He wonders if he should straighten up now, and feels an immediate pressure over his heart as Snape restrains him. "Nobody knows," he says. "I never let it stop me."
"When I was dying—" Snape says, and Harry's eyes start open. A swift hand douses them like flames, forcing the cross-piece of Harry's glasses up the bridge of his nose. "I looked for your mother in your eyes," Snape breathes, pressing blackness down over Harry's confusion. "I didn't find her. If I'd truly died, I doubt she would have been there, either. But you were, Potter." Harry squeezes his lids together, almost wincing. The hand stays where it is, both blindfold and caress. "You were there, and you saw me."
Intoxicating waves circulate through his body, giddier than blood. He might as well be lying flat with Snape as his mattress. They could even be floating in midair. It seems perfectly natural, in this unnatural state, to say, "I can't fly anymore, d'you know? I might never fly again. Brooms throw me off before I'm even seated. It's been two years now. I miss the sky so much I dream I'm falling out of it."
"Someone cursed you?"
Surprised he would care enough to ask, Harry lifts up. His head bumps something. Snape's nose? Bloody hell. It doesn't get much more real than that. "Two joyriders on a Muggle-pranking spree. Christ, it's so easy to lose things you never knew you could. I stuck it out for another year before resigning from the Aurors." He subsides again. "I've lost too much already."
The dark voice sneers, "That's the wizarding world, Potter. Magic giveth, and magic taketh away." One finger rubs back and forth at Harry's temple, admitting flashes of daylight. "However much I've lost—more than you, I'll wager—at least I can still fly. I don't even need a broom. If you behave, I may take you with me someday."
Harry frowns. Trust the bastard to taunt him for confiding a weakness.
"I might even," Snape's teeth skim his ear, "let you ride me."
Startled out of his confessional trance, Harry jerks upright, but he doesn't get far. The hand across his eyes grips harder and drags his head back, stretching his neck at a vulnerable angle. A leaf shuffles down onto his mouth, and he almost panics.
The leaf vanishes with a breath. Under a downpour of hair, amidst the fragrance of burnt wood, Snape kisses him. Harry stops pretending he hasn't been waiting for this, and kisses him back.
Contrary to assumptions based on the way he wields it, Snape's tongue isn't thin or sharp or forked. He pulls Harry sideways, nearly gouging an eye out. In the darkness that magnifies every sensation, his mouth is a harsh smear of goblin fruit, a consuming ambush, not teasing, taking, angry teeth adding a savage edge. Harry struggles in his grasp, not to escape but to get his arms around the bastard. He wants to harness Snape's body with both hands, hold him to the real world, straddle his unghostly human warmth, his fevered incarnation of thwarted love. His prick rises, unruly as a broom between his legs.
With a grunt of furious longing, Snape forces him to be still, pulling his tongue out and driving it back in, the kind of tongue-fucking Harry's never had before. Desire shocks painfully up his legs, throbbing deep as a battered gong, the singing, spreading, groin-shivering resonance making his nipples pucker, his cock pulse.
He hates this. He wants this. He's always known his feelings for Ginny fall short of tempestuous romance. It's never been an issue, because Harry stopped believing in passion long ago. Maybe never believed. Not because of Ginny. He just doesn't have it in him, and he expects someday she'll decide, "Enough." Because it's not. Not enough. Family comes first, but his is almost grown. And the lust of a rutting, elusive Snape resurrects all the wordless yearning he once nurtured as a boy, the promise of completion for which his code word used to be 'family.' But there's something missing between him and Ginny, something they compensate for in different ways. Something even the children can sense.
Especially Al. Al's always been clear he'll never settle for that.
As if reading his mind, Snape places his hot, damp lips against Harry's ear and says, "Your son followed you, Potter."
"What?" Horrified, Harry doubles over, trying to buck Snape off.
"Spare me your hysterics. The path led him in circles, but he's started calling for you." Harry can't get his wand in position, so he rams his elbow back. In retaliation, Snape shoves him, hard. "Take your brat and get out."
Daylight scalds Harry's eyes, his pupils contracting so sharply he can't see. He blinks, disoriented, and by the time he staggers around, the clearing is calm and smells of nothing but rotting leaves.
"Arsehole," he says on a heaving breath, and wipes his mouth. He's shaky from his body's confused signals, dizzied by a hammering sense of shame.
With one last glance at the garden, he pounds off down the path. Al hears him coming and turns, wand uncertain. "Dad!"
"You shouldn't be here," Harry gasps, grabbing the boy's arm and hustling him onward.
"Did you find it?" Al demands. Harry nods, touching his mouth self-consciously as they fall into step, wading through the ferns and sending lizards scuttling into the underbrush. Al's face mottles strangely at his silence. "Anyone there?"
Rather than lie out loud, Harry shrugs.
At the castle, Al stops him from coming in. "I found it first, Dad. Remember that." Then he's up the steps and through the doors without saying goodbye.