Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.

Chapter 7: The Truce

A few minutes later, they were in the stairway. "I'm not sure I want to know how many decades it's been since I was here last."

"At least you're not as old as the stones. Yet."

"Snape, watch it. You're no youngster yourself anymore."

"There should be a landing a bit further down, just after a turn in the stairs. Good defensible position."

"I think I remember that spot." Theodore went ahead and checked it out. "It's clear."

The noise from the top of the stairs was growing louder. "Is the door going to hold?" Harry whispered.

"When the headmaster of Hogwarts seals a door inside the castle, it tends to stay sealed, Potter."

"Besides the fact he didn't muffle it," the elder Nott joked. "If he had, it would have been simpler to hang a big 'Snape Was Here' sign on it."

"Why?"

"Because back when Severus here was sixteen and stupid..."

"Oi!"

"...he was a little braggart who really wanted his ego stroked. Every Death Eater from the first war knows what that buzzing sound on a door means. Quite the Slytherin, letting everyone he might need to hide things from know what him hiding things sounded like."

Theodore chuckled.

"Oi!"

Snape helped Harry sit down on the landing, leaning against the the wall. Theodore went to check further down and his father stood by the turn in the stairs.

"You were sixteen?" Harry whispered.

Snape nodded. "It happened a lot. The Dark Lord likes to get to teenagers before their parents give them the adulthood talk at seventeen. Say just what they want to hear, promise the moon and the stars, and get someone who can't sign an employment contract sell himself into lifelong slavery and offer thanks for the chance." He paused. "I think all of us who just left were Marked before we were adults. I know Nott was Marked almost as soon as the Dark Lord invented the spell."

'Our age.' He'd been saying it all year. But this... "That's sick."

"That is life." Snape leaned back, chest still heaving slightly from the exertion of the near-constant flight. "And now I have a question for you. I want the truth. The first words in your mind when I looked in your mind were 'Going to trust you'. Why after last night and last year would you trust me?"

"When he hit me with that curse, I made it halfway. I had the choice to come back or not." He felt tears running down his face again. There was a limit to what he wanted to reveal. "Someone met me there, from the other side, and explained what happened to me and why, and what happened to Professor Dumbledore. I got spoken to about some of the things that happened yesterday, and what I did to Draco last year. And..." He choked.

"And what?" Snape's voice was soft and even.

"I promised I'd be willing to have a truce with you until the end of the battle, and after that would be between us to decide."

"And?"

"Not sure yet." He couldn't stop the tears. "Let me think once this is all over."

"I think all of us have some thinking and talking to do once this is over." Snape held up his wand, flicked it a certain way, and handed Harry the resultant handkerchief. "I read you wrong, when you were Sorted. I sensed a thousand horrible things, and wondered how everyone who wasn't a Legilimens missed it." Snape looked away, up the stairs, then looked back. "There is the issue, however, of the continuous stream of lies and half-truths you have given me since you were a first-year, along with what happened to young Mister Malfoy last year. And the things you did today. Breaking into Gringotts was one thing, but you Cruciated when Stunning would have served."

"Not going to again. I promised I wouldn't use any of those spells again."

"And you intend to keep this promise?"

Harry nodded.

"And promises you make to the living? All of the living?"

"I'm sorry."

"Severus, you can grill him after he can stand without falling," Nott called softly from his place higher on the stairs. "You're covering up the sound."