Snape stared at the desks in front of him and then his gaze fell to his hands. Desks and hands, both empty. His heart, too. He was thirty-one; this was his eleventh year to teach at Hogwarts and he still had the same reaction every year on the first day of classes. Emptiness.

This year was different. This year, when he looked down at the hands that were supposed to hold tight to a three-year-old's, he felt rage. Harry Potter started at Hogwarts this year. He was eleven now, when he should have been fourteen.

He had a job that provided housing and food and a chance to share his knowledge, but it had come at a high price. If he had not returned to Hogwarts for his final year, he wouldn't have lost Harry. He was convinced of that.

Lily would never have deaged his son—James's son—if he had refused to desert him for that final year at Hogwarts.

This year, as he had every year since the deaging, Snape went to the Hogwarts library and scanned the shelves for information about magical pregnancies. As Arthur had told him years ago, they didn't exist. Wizards got witches pregnant the same way Muggles did.

The heavy dungeon doors banged open and Snape's first class dawdled through the doors. Neville Longbottom, the stupid boy the prophecy almost applied to, hung behind the group.

"To your seats!" Snape ordered. Feet scurried, desks scraped, and twenty-nine pairs of eyes stared up at him. The pair on the second row unnerved him. Lily's eyes…Harry.

He swallowed around a lump in his throat. This is what his son would have looked like at eleven. He could have walked him to the Hogwarts Express.

There was a buzz in the room.

Snape shook his head. This wasn't what his son would have looked like. This was him, four years younger, with different life experiences and a different set of guardians.

The murmur intensified.

"Silence!" He launched into his first day lecture. Twenty-nine heads swiveled to follow him. An obnoxious girl seated near Harry copied down every word he had to say and appeared to be cross-referencing everything from a different textbook.

Insufferable know-it-all.

He stopped short when he felt Harry's eyes on him. He wondered how much Harry remembered. What a scene he would make kneeling beside Harry's desk and whispering, "I'm proud of you." But he wasn't proud of this boy. He was bloody miserable and wished this boy had never existed so that his son could. The fact that they were the same was too much for his first-day-of-school brain to handle.

His eyes grazed Harry's scrawny frame and he wondered if the stupid Muggles had given him enough to eat.

He launched into his first day speech. Years ago, he'd had a different first day speech. He used to explain how potions was an exact science, how it could never be changed. Then he would tell the students how other areas of magic could be distorted—creating something out of nothing, transformation, and…prophecies. He'd explain how prophecies could never be trusted. How a fool of a man had brought about the death of his own son through a terrible combination of Deaging Potion and misinterpretation of a prophecy.

Dumbledore had asked him to address the students differently. He said it depressed them.

So he said new things to these students so as not to depress them: "I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death -- if you aren't as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach."

Harry flinched at the word "dunderheads" and then raised his head defiantly. Something within Snape struggled. He was proud of Harry's will to prove he was not a dunderhead, but at the same time, his stubbornness drove him insane. It was as though he were two again, staring Snape down through the window when Snape was freezing outside the locked door at Spinner's End.

He took points from him—his own child. He felt terribly guilty so he acted surlier to dispel that bothersome emotion. When he dismissed his first class, he stood taller and even managed to make a first-year girl cringe when he glared at her as she walked out the door.

Harry, though, he was different. He scowled at Snape and ran to join Ron, the one born after Snape had lost touch with the Weasleys. Snape refused to cower to that! He stormed after the boys and when he felt their eyes on him, he made an impressive show of sweeping his gradebook open and marking things down.

Harry jumped out of the way when he saw that great bat of a professor swooping in behind him.

Ron's mouth gaped open when Snape opened his gradebook. "He's going to mark us down. Fred and George said he would hate me."

A packet slid out of the front pocket of the gradebook. Snape continued on, seeming not to notice.

Harry and Ron looked at each other at the same moment. Ron broke into a grin. "You reckon it's got answers to our first test?"

They ran toward it and Ron picked it up first. It was unsealed, so he peeked into it. "Aw," he said, disappointed. "It's just photos of a house." He handed them to Harry. "Look, it's not even as big as the Burrow. You can tell because…"

Ron kept talking but Harry couldn't hear him. He was staring at the photographs. He recognized the house. There was a big bedroom with a crib in the corner. He remembered standing on the edge of the crib bars when he learned to climb and a man picking him up and carrying him to bed with him.

"This is my house!" Harry said excitedly. "This was where my mum and dad lived. My dad used to carry me to bed."

Ron peered over his shoulder, now curious, and pointed to the living room. "Do you remember there?"

Studying the ratty couch and the cauldron on the coffee table, memory dawned on Harry. "Yeah, I do. Mum read to me on that couch." He looked at the front door and a strange memory, a memory that didn't match, popped into his mind. He remembered his mum always leaving through that door, he remembered asking why his mum wasn't coming back.

He looked up to see Ron surveying him with a shocked expression.

"Are you all right, mate? You look awful."

Harry's knees were shaking. "I'm all right. It's the pictures. I'd forgotten…I couldn't remember my mum and dad before."

"Why did Snape have your pictures?" Ron asked distastefully.

Harry shrugged. "Maybe he wanted to give them to me," he said, but he thought that as likely as Snape deciding to throw a party during class.

"Let's go see if we can sneak some brooms out of the broomshed," Ron said and with the prospect of flying, Harry stuffed the pictures in his bag and forgot all about them.

On Friday, Harry walked to Potions with a determined step. Snape was not going to get to him today.

When he walked into class ten minutes early, Snape only said, "Start on your essay, Potter."

When had he assigned an essay? Harry stared at him but saw nothing in those coal black eyes. He huffed and pulled out his parchment. He wasn't about to ask Snape what essay he was talking about. Instead, he hunched over the parchment and pretended to write.

Snape sniffed and turned his back to wave his wand at the chalkboard. The day's date appeared in the upper right corner.

Somehow the pictures of Harry's home had fallen out of his sack. He bent to retrieve them when suddenly a dark shadow fell over him.

"Stealing, Potter?"

The voice was angry and very nearly demented.

Harry shrank back in his chair. "I didn't steal them from you," he said weakly.

Snape's palms pounded onto Harry's desk. "How did they come to be out of my gradebook?"

"They fell out," Harry said. He straightened, finding it hard to do with Snape's nose nearly touching his. "But they're pictures of MY house!"

Snape stepped back at this. For a second, Harry saw a waver of fear in his eyes and then he sneered. "Indeed. And what a hovel it is. Tell me, did James Potter build this crude crib with his bare hands?"

Harry glowered at Snape, knowing he hated him much more than Snape could ever dream of hating him. "How would I know? He died when I was…" His voice fell away. He had suddenly recalled a horribly embarrassing memory, one of his father toilet-training him. But James had died when Harry was only fifteen months old. And he hadn't even been talking then but he remembered carrying on full conversations with a black-haired man who smiled a lot.

Snape was grinning widely like a jackal who had just killed its prey.

Harry hated him.

"Incidentally, I saw the lock on the broomshed had been jimmied." (Harry sucked in a breath.) "Since first years aren't permitted to fly, that will be twenty points from each Gryffindor involved."

Harry tried not to listen as forty rubies rattled down the Gryffindor hourglass.

Snape's lips formed a thin line. "In addition, breaking into the broomshed carries the penalty of fifty points each. With detention."

"Detention?" Harry exclaimed. He hadn't meant to say it aloud and hated that Snape's eyes glowed with pleasure.

"Yes, my office. Tonight at seven. Do not be late."

Harry glared at his desk. Why did Snape hate him so much?

"Oh, yes. Tell Weasley--" Snape's glare disappeared and he actually looked flustered. "Rather, the skinny one with bad skin, that he has detention with Argus Filch."