Another day's report finally done, an exhausted Harry struggled to his feet and stood clinging to the back of his chair, hoping that once again he would find the balance he so easily misplaced these days.

His team leaders were attentive to his signals that he wanted help, but knew to stay back otherwise. On this day, Harry found his footing and looked up to a row of serious faces. "What? The day that I need you to do a structural charm to shore me up, Inglewood, you'll be the first to know," he joked to the Structural Repair leader.

No one smiled.

"Captain, Harry," said Michaels, one of his most trusted lieutenants. "Maybe you should sit. We have something to say."

Harry listened to their very sensible concerns about him being unable to fend off an attack from one of his many ill-wishers. Or worse yet, being photographed in a compromising position.

"Taking a tumble in front of your mates is one thing, but—"

"That Skeeter woman would have you dying of some terrible illness quicker than you could pick yourself off the ground."

"We worry about you."

"But we need you at the same time."

"Which is why we think you should start sitting things out," Abercrombie, the Potions leader concluded.

Harry tensed and looked around for the wheelchair he thought they were referring to. The group exchanged glances. "The beauty of Polyjuice is that you can choose who you give your hair to on a given day, sir, totally up to your discretion," the Abercrombie girl said quickly. "I've been collecting ingredients for a while now, just in case," she reddened at being caught brewing the controlled potion, "so no one will be the wiser. None but us."

He made a show of reluctance, but Harry was incredibly relieved at this non-wheelchair solution to the legs that were failing him. He should have thought of it before now.

He only wished the young people didn't need him so much, but without Harry Potter, the army felt as though it was being controlled by shady politicians who cared little for their welfare. And they were right. Harry was a physical reminder that the army only lent itself to whichever regime was in power.

He worked out the particulars with his soldiers: he'd personally deliver a pep-talk every so often, but the Harry du jour would concentrate on being seen, rather than heard, as much as possible. "I'll need to meet with the me-for-the-day to let them know what goes on at mealtimes and find out what I supposedly did the day before. Whatever you do, avoid giving me any new romantic liaisons," he said, only half-joking as the audience concluded and they helped him to his feet. Everyone thought of Samuels, but no one said anything.

He made his way back to Lawrence by apparating rather than having to push through crowds. The streets and the Ministry hallways were all a-bustle these days. Harry's chance comment about the poor diet among the Traditionalists had gotten all of Wizarding society's mothers up in arms.

"Save our children!" was the campaign women took from house to house. Ostensibly they were collecting food to be offered to the bands of rebel youth who set up shop in the Alley, but something crucial had changed in the public's awareness. Before, those who went over to the other side were viewed with suspicion and shame, as they brought unwanted Ministry attention to the entire family. But now, mothers began to see their lost children as sick, deprived, manipulated, but not entirely out of the fold.

The Conservative front disappeared overnight. It was now more urgent to save Wizarding Youth than it was to take pledges to buy Wizard-made. The old Conservative factions were absorbed among the groups creating neutral zones for young people wanting to leave the rebels, but for the most part the battle was being won in the press.

The first ragged Malfeasant who was tempted to stop her chanting for a boxed lunch appeared in a photograph on the front page of the Prophet mouthing the words "I want to go home."

In the midst of the tearful family reunions being celebrated here and there, Harry and Morris Lipswitch knew that they had made little progress where it counted.

What Uncle Morry did not know was that Harry had returned to the Other London. Many times.

As far as anyone knew, the entrance and exit to this other place was controlled by Malfoy. But Harry crawled through Lawrence as often as he could because, for whatever reason, in that world his legs worked fine. Now that some false Harry was going to be taking over his duties as figurehead, the real Harry was delighted to spend as much time in that other world as possible.

He'd walked around a lot, mainly because he could, but these explorations also served to show that he didn't know many people in this version of magical London. But then, it was so much more densely populated, so maybe he hadn't come across them yet.

The muggle settlements were a fright. Everyone was dirty, sickly, and most of all, frightened. They averted their eyes from the man in the wizardly suit and confident bearing. Every once in a while one of the villagers would take time out from raising livestock or plowing fields to offer him a few eggs or a slice of honeycomb. He walked around, forcing himself to see this side of a Wizarding world that otherwise felt so welcoming. When the muggles mistook his curiosity for something else and various daughters were paraded before him, he beat a hasty retreat.

Then it was a relief to have nothing else to do besides sit in that stately house and talk with the other Severus and his mum.

Miss Aurelia was very kind but extremely unnerving. He still couldn't follow half of what she said, but every time he tumbled out of their bureau she'd forewarned the servants to have something ready for him to eat. Everyone in the household was treated like family, and Harry grew to understand that the only reason why there were servants was that Miss Aurelia was entirely too distracted to be trusted with tasks like cooking.

There was a tremendous commotion in and out. The front parlor was reserved for her paying clients, Severus' laboratory was in the attic and he did consultations in his own parlor every afternoon from two to five. Mother and son were mainstays of a high society they never ceased making fun of, and Harry had seen this Severus all decked out in a frock coat and formal cape on his way to some stodgy affair with the Very Best People.

His first several visits were so that Harry could soak up all this happiness, respect and prosperity for his Severus, whom he still didn't know how to help. "Your mother has me in stitches!" he couldn't wait to tell him. "You definitely inherited your disrespect for all authority from her."

Usually Harry went back to his own world so that he could keep his eye on the Ministry scuttlebutt over dinner, but one evening Harry crept back through Lawrence to finally ask his questions.

Predictably, Severus was sitting before two glasses of wine when Harry poked his head out of the bureau.

"Your mum-?" he asked knowingly.

"Said tonight would be the night you would quit pussyfooting around watching me as if I were the most fascinating spectacle you'd ever seen, and begin prying into my private affairs in earnest. Mother also said you would like this vintage," Severus replied in a neutral tone as he poured the wine.

"Why don't you have someone?" Harry bolted out after the first rich mouthful. "And where is your father in all this?"

"The two answers are related, as it turns out," the other man said, savoring his wine for a moment. "To begin with the second, my father was a Muggle, as I gather, was the father of your version of me. He was our chauffer. My is a free spirit, as I'm sure you've noticed."

Harry giggled.

"She knew the moment she set her eyes on him that they would fall in love, but my mother deliberately avoids seeing too clearly into her own future, so she could not have seen she was signing his death warrant."

The potions master refreshed his glass of wine with a steady hand. "Mother has a way of transforming her environment and everything in it into her particular vision, but the illusion quickly wears off for most people when they're not in her presence. She did carry on the affair in the public eye, and then when she got pregnant, announced that she would keep the child and set up full-time housekeeping with her paramour, intermarriage being illegal then as now. This was not something our society was prepared to accept."

"So they murdered him? I thought you said that many witches and wizards seek their vices in the Muggle villages." Harry was shocked.

"The beam of his hut fell on his head as he was packing to leave. No foul play was ever proven. Aurelia Courtenay, beloved medium, was back in high society with her amusing antics and a son whose uncommon magical talents made him without a doubt 'our sort of people.'"

"I'm sorry," Harry said. He was glad that this Mr. Snape wasn't a monster, but he wished some Severus somewhere had a relationship with a loving father. Then his brow furrowed. "But what does that have to do with why you're single?"

"Because my charms, though undeniable, are not enough to make anyone risk their social standing," his host said wryly.

"You do have them, you know," Harry said quietly. "Charms." Severus looked at him sharply. "But I thought you were Society People, you and your mum."

"My mother, yes. People are terrified of her, for one thing. You never know what she's dreamed about you and you can count on her speaking her mind. But you may not be aware that when young people come of age in this society, they take a pledge to only procreate with others of the finest magical ilk. The right marriage protects the all-important bloodline, you know."

"But—"

"This applies even for relationships in which an eventual issue is not at issue." Given the amount of sex trade in the Muggle villages, magical folk closing ranks against Severus was entirely hypocritical, Harry could see. He stared at the man before him, who seemed relieved after delivering a long-carried burden. Severus poured his guest another round of wine and then sat back to direct a calm look at the man across from him.

"They're making you pay the way they would never make your mother," Harry grasped. "She must be pretty pissed about it, though."

Severus shrugged. "She's been telling me for years about this mysterious man who would come to visit me-that is, you—and it's never been clear to me if it was because she was desperate to pair me off with someone, even in her imagination. But there you are." He laughed shortly. "And the menfolk in our circle are frightfully dull," Severus said with a tinge of longing.

"They don't know what they're missing," Harry said with all of his mate's lingual skills hot in his mind. He felt himself being watched. "Really, they don't," he said. "You're almost exactly like my Severus and he is—something special."

The gaze of the man before him went from surprised to embarrassed to curious.

"It's lack of opportunity, is all," Harry said. "But I had one more thing to ask you tonight, and I'm hoping you can keep an open mind."

Harry handed over the log book in which Severus had recorded the steps to his cure. "I can scarcely walk in my reality, and, well, you're just as much of an ace with potions as my guy, so I was hoping you could recreate it." He handed over one of his last phials of the prepared potion. "I thought you could use this for analysis."

His host read his counterpart's notes in silence for some minutes. Suddenly his face flushed, evidently at the secret ingredient section. "You mean you can-? Right now?" Severus' eyes didn't know where to alight on Harry's chest and finally settled on his face.

"I was going to wait until I went back to my place to give you some to work with, but yes. The treatment's not illegal here, is it?" Harry smiled.

"No, but if it had occurred to anyone they might have made a law." Harry found this virginal Severus very amusing.

"Will you mix it? I can leave the samples for you in the cabinet, like I used to with my Severus."

"Of course," came the formal reply. "This will be a fascinating challenge."

"I'm glad you can read his notes. He's got some personal code that doesn't make much sense to me."

Severus looked up, his eyes bright. "Your lover and I must have some things in common after all, because it doesn't seem like it will be that hard to unravel."

Harry made no move to go. "There was one other question. Do you have any family from your father's side? My Severus was close to his gran."

"As am I," the resident of this reality said. He took in Harry's surprise. "Surely you guessed. Most of the so-called servants are from my father's side. You're sitting on the center of the united Muggle/magical resistance to this cruel regime."

Severus laughed at Harry trying to keep up. It was the first real laugh his visitor had heard from him. Harry sat there, pleasantly drowsy from the wine, watching the last piece fall into place to make this man recognizably a Severus. The usually formal man's reticence turned into a delight at cooking up schemes for undermining the social order.

It was so familiar that Harry couldn't think of a better way to fall asleep.

When he woke up in the library he found a blanket tucked around him and Severus placing several phials on the table nearby.

"I got quite excited looking over the notes and decided to make all the potions I had ingredients for," Severus said. "These are part of your daily regime."

Harry gulped them down and was overtaken by the feeling of normalcy that came with being fed medicines by someone who looked exactly like his boyfriend.

"Would you like some breakfast?" Severus asked softly, as if also touched by the moment. "Mother's going to choose to believe you got a leg over anyway, so you might as well act the gallant and have something to eat."

Harry didn't have much choice to follow into the dining room where some spirited political discussion was going on. Miss Aurelia didn't say anything until the end of the meal.

"We can find you another suit of clothes, Harry," she offered.

"Thank you, but I have something I need to do at home," Harry said, jumping up with the realization he needed to give his hair to someone for the day, and that he missed showing up at the officers' dining hall.

"Thank you, thank you both," he said and darted off to the cabinet.

"You seem very cheerful," Lawrence observed as he hurried through.

"This Severus thinks he can make my potion. I'm delighted," Harry said. "And from what I learned last tonight, he could use the self-esteem boost." He caught Lawrence studying him and missed the way he seemed from the outside, the old semi-animate cabinet with its totally accepting demeanor. "What? I can't rescue my Severus if I can't walk. It's not like I'm going over there for social hour. I'm just saying, his life isn't easy."

"I wouldn't expect any Severus to have an easy time of it," Lawrence remarked. "No one else would be quite so difficult. That's how he's recognizable as Severus."

"As 'a' Severus, you mean. I wonder what will happen when I get mine back and I introduce them. Is that possible?"

"More than one Severus Snape at the same time? Goodness me, what an idea! I have more than enough to do keeping track of one," Lawrence chuckled. His face became serious. "You didn't actually think that there could be more than one version of an individual—and that I could look after the interests of both? That's a logical impossibility."

Harry said slowly, "So if there's only one, my Severus is the one that's back there, the one who barely knows me? How is that possible?" Then he followed more vehemently, "Why didn't you think to tell me this?"

Lawrence made a pacifying gesture. "As I said, I can only speak when spoken to. I'm being especially circumspect with you because you're not even technically my responsibility, but you are Severus' only hope."

Knowing that his troops would be concerned about his delay in showing up at their habitual meeting place, Harry tore himself away so he could express some of his secret ingredient into phials, shower and dress using a less-cooperative body. All the while, the bureau was transmitting ideas to him, as it had since he had started developing a relationship with Lawrence. Perhaps these ideas were best expressed by bypassing words.

It was a terrifying concept—that there was nothing of Severus left of the body that had been taken over by Horus. But it was beginning to make sense. Apparently, this god was obeying Draco/Set's demands to create a new reality, but it was doing so using the psychology of the brain it took over.

That was why there were a few people Harry knew through Severus—the apothecary, Bill, Serena, the restaurant proprietress, his mother, of course. The rest was how Severus would view a segregated world—profoundly unjust. A Severus couldn't imagine life with a father in it, or love, nor would he ever live without the spice of clandestine political groups and intrigue.

Captain Potter smoothed his uniform and took the stick, though he felt slightly stronger already from the tonics he'd consumed this morning. "What if I were to go over there and just pull him through the wardrobe and into here?" he asked.

"Don't you think I would have done that by now?" came the testy answer. "That Severus and I have no relationship because in that world there was no cult-member father who bound us together when he was a month old. You and everyone else that's been sent to that world aren't bound to stay there because your destinies are here. But what do you think will happen to that reality when Horus finds a way to wriggle out of whatever enchantment he's under? Unless Set wins and somehow manages to pull all of us over there."

There were many more questions he'd like to ask Lawrence now that he was actually saying something useful, but a knock came at the door

"Yes?" Harry said, stepping into the hall.

Niamh was there with her unpleasant smile. "A little slow-moving this morning? I thought of bringing a stretcher."

The people who saw Harry in the dining room had, of course, noticed his occasional trouble walking, but they had been much nicer in their offers to help. "A migraine, nothing serious, thank you so much for your concern. Right as rain and ready to harangue the troops."

"They'll have to do without. Minister Lipswitch has been waiting to speak with you." His brow furrowed. "That's right, not someone to be kept waiting."

Harry knew that this was no simple breach in protocol at stake. He wished he could walk faster, but he went at his enforced sedate pace to the ministerial offices section, ignoring Niamh's attempts to needle him into conversation. He did think that Severus would be pleased to see her looking so unkempt without his beauty products, and then he remembered that the Severus of today had never met her.

"Potter decided to sleep in this morning," the girl said, and then her look of triumph disappeared behind the door Lipswitch shut in her face.

"You look a little better today," Uncle Morry said. It was actually something of a relief to be forced into honesty with this person who saw everything.

"Thank you sir. I took your advice and some of the names you recommended have managed to reproduce a few of the potions Severus had me on," was the half-truth from Harry as he lowered himself into a chair. "They seem to make me drowsier than the originals. But I'm sure this is about more than my health."

Lipswitch nodded. "I'm an old man and the dreams I'm being subjected to are—unspeakable," he said tiredly. "Would that I was the only one suffering them."

"What did you see Draco doing?"

"As I've told you, performing all sorts of rituals with the idea of bringing us all over to a world ruled by magic. But I've had some people trying to match the underground space with the city's topography and architecture, especially your clue that it might be near the tube, and I believe we've made some progress."

"That's great news!" Harry exclaimed. "Why do you not seem optimistic?"

"Because the Ministry has sent people to comb the area with our very best technology and they found nothing." Harry slumped in his chair. "But they wouldn't, if Draco's spellcraft is so different. A few trusted people are aware of the ancient magic angle and they tried a few supposedly Egyptian charms that Draco might have gotten ahold of."

Harry leaned forward excitedly. "Let me try. I've heard the way they talk. They're probably not saying it right."

Morris nodded. "My suggestion exactly." He handed over a small envelope. "Subterfuge will set you up with an invisibility charm so you aren't recognized. Your regiment already knows that you have a special assignment today."

The younger man was so excited to have something concrete to do that he rushed out without any further questions. Just as the minister had hoped.

His dreams had been telling him all along that Draco Malfoy was in poor health. He wouldn't be the first to burn out his body with strange and unfettered magic, and such a death would be better for the world, even if his recently rediscovered relation had to die too.

But last night, the Ministry became aware that approximately 100 people had disappeared at around noontime. One was the elder Lucius—others were his father's known associates. The connection was unmistakable. This was also the first time that there was no clear physical connection to Draco Malfoy—the other disappeared individuals having received a package in the mail, or in Harry's case, he'd been in physical proximity to the Traditionalist leader. So far, none of them had returned.

"From what Harry has described, this lot wouldn't want to come back from a world run by wizards," Morris said to himself. He disliked the Conservatives because they were idolators of the Wizarding world he loved too well to idolize. He reached in his pocket and took out his small sack of runes.

He remembered watching his cousin Aurelia using every divination method in order to locate her kidnapped boy. She was far more gifted than he, and she was unable to penetrate the barrier thrown up by muggles who had little idea of how to cast a spell. Draco might master this new magic in time to remake the world, no doubt banking on finding a way to heal the damage done to his body by channeling a forgotten deity.

The runes were equivocal. As he expected. He thought of the young Severus he'd found in a basement—dirty, hungry, frightened and wearing only a white sheet tied with a golden ribbon. The adult version of this boy had suffered worse insults, but unlike the boy there was none of that Fudge haughtiness. It was as though he'd already died. Lipswitch thought himself a very good judge of character, and it frightened him that this hardened spy could have been broken into the shattered thing he saw coerced in his dreams.

Harry was not at all an objective operative for this mission, but perhaps that was a virtue at this point.

Lipswitch poked the rune that meant "love" and remembered it hadn't been enough for the mother to rescue the boy.

Going through channels meant a tedious amount of bureaucracy before he was given the spell and the coordinates, but finally Harry had apparated to the signaled neighborhood.

He knew he wasn't making the queer sounds like he'd heard Draco make, but under the sound-dampening charm he bellowed in every possible intonation.

Nothing happened.

Harry wore himself out walking every possible inch of the area, until finally he had to sit down. "Damn, I didn't express very much this morning," he thought, rubbing his chest. "With everything going on, I'm all off-schedule, but now that Severus is making the potion again I'll have to go back to producing as much as I can." He smiled. Knowing that the other Severus was his Severus might be kind of fun. He felt a pleasurable pressure and wetness while looking forward to getting the straight-laced Severus to stimulate his production—

Wait. Wetness. That could only mean one thing.

Severus was near. There was a powerful link between people who shared this physical bond, his lover used to say. Harry had never experienced the letdown except when Severus was close by. Occasionally it had happened when Severus was coming down the hallway to his suite. It was the body he was accustomed to sharing this intimate act with, and none other, that must be in the vicinity.

The syllables that he'd been hurling around all day were much the same as the ones that came out of his mouth once more. But this time, Harry uttered them with certitude. He knew that the remnant of Severus was there, and his allegiance to that body devoid of humanity was still stronger than any other concern. That body had brewed the potions that cured him, had held him when he was flailing with pain and with lust. It had introduced Harry to the truth about his love for men. It had consumed of him, and he had consumed of it.

Harry forgot about the Ministry, about Draco, about Lawrence.

The air around him buzzed with certitude.

A moment later he was in.