The first time Harry visited a graveyard was at the funeral of Uncle Vernon's father. He was five and constantly shushed by Aunt Petunia, who had broken a brush in her futile efforts to tame his hair. The suit she had got him from a charity shop itched, and the overpowering smell of mothballs would cling to him for a week afterwards. Trying to stay still despite Dudley's pinches, Harry thought about death.

He was aware, of course, that his parents were dead, like he was aware that the flames of the stove burners were hot and that the important woman on the telly, according to his uncle, had all the right ideas. Before that day, however, he had never stopped to think any further and just accepted it as a fact of life. Watching the casket being lowered into the ground, he wondered if they also had had a funeral like that, where people looked sad and an oddly dressed man spoke sentences whose meaning Harry could not quite understand.

He cried then, and some old lady gave him, 'poor boy who had lost his grandfather', a hug under Aunt Petunia's glare. He would later get in trouble for causing a scene, but at that moment, he sobbed ugly tears into the strange woman's arms, struck by the unfairness of the world, certainly not for the first time but never before so deeply.

The second time Harry visited a graveyard was when Voldemort returned. He did not cry then, and nobody from the crowd that gathered for the occasion was likely to console him if he had.

As he stood at the same spot now, he was struck by how similar it looked to the graveyard from his childhood memory. This place had haunted his nightmares for years: gravestones grew into the sky, blocking his way, and the stone angels leered at him wickedly as he clutched Cedric's body, but now, in the light of day, the graveyard looked peaceful. The grass over the graves was well-kept, and the light breeze gently ruffled the branches of the yew trees which hid a small chapel. Even the other witnesses to Voldemort's resurrection did not try to kill him anymore, unless it was possible to die from an uncomfortable silence.

Since Snape had not trusted Harry—perhaps justifiably—to apparate them to Little Hangleton, this task fell onto Malfoy as one other person who had been to the area.

"Well," he said, brushing an invisible speck from his sleeve. "This is rather awkward."

"More awkward than crawling in the dirt kissing the hem of Voldemort's robe at this very spot?" asked Harry, feeling short of patience towards his particular brand of fudging here of all places.

Malfoy pursed his lips. "I'm done kneeling before anyone," he said coldly.

This was not quite a renouncement of his former activities, but Harry did not expect any more from him.

"For what it's worth, you won that night. What's more, you made a fool of him, which is something that no one had ever managed before or after."

"What did it matter if Cedric died?" Harry balled his hands into fists. "Cedric Diggory? Do you even remember that name?"

Snape, who was sulking next to Tom Riddle Sr's grave, looking the part of caretaker in his severe black robes, startled.

"Who knows, maybe if he'd lived, he'd have hated you after losing the Tournament, become a Death Eater and ultimately prevented you from winning the war."

Harry could not believe the gall of this man. "It's not funny, Malfoy."

A complicated expression flickered in the grey eyes. "No, it's not," Malfoy agreed, losing the glib tone just in time for Harry not to hex him, Trace be damned. "He's still alive and well in this time, Potter, and will hopefully remain so until his dentures fall out from old age."

Harry shook his head and walked over to the familiar grave, looking at it thoughtfully. His therapist had once suggested coming back here to get some closure. Maybe he was onto something, although what Harry was going to suggest right now was certainly not what Roger had had in mind.

"We should probably do something about this so Voldemort could not use the bones of his father in the ritual anymore."

"Can you stop saying his name?" Snape said sharply. His curiosity must have won, because next, he asked, "What ritual?"

"To get a new body. He used the bone of the father, blood of the enemy—me—and flesh of the servant—Wormtail chopped off his hand."

Snape made a mutinous face at the mention of Pettigrew. To say that he had not taken the news of Sirius's innocence well would be the understatement of the century. Narcissa—who roped Harry into a bizarre experience of playing Quidditch with baby Draco Malfoy and then made him reveal entirely too much during their conversation about Sirius—managed to stave off the worst of the explosion, but Harry did not possess her Snape-calming talent. Quite the opposite, in fact. He suspected that the atmosphere at Spinner's End, surprisingly amiable up to now, would turn much grimmer.

Malfoy looked down at the dandy robe he was wearing over a tweed waistcoat with a pocket watch that was, in Harry's fashion-unconscious opinion, just this side of gaudy. "I admit I'm not dressed for a spot of grave-robbing today," he said. "As novel as this activity would be, Cornelius is awaiting me in fifteen minutes."

Harry snorted. They had agreed earlier that Malfoy would go to the Ministry to put feelers out about Sirius's case while Harry and Snape dealt with the ring, but still his eagerness to flee at the first sign of any dirty work was hilarious. Not that Harry himself was not eager to say goodbye to the infuriating git, even though the fuming Snape was not going to be pleasant company.

"Lucius Malfoy, defender of justice and fair trials," Snape muttered.

"Severus." Malfoy turned to him fully. "He's a half-mad dementor fodder, and you're the future Headmaster of Hogwarts. I'm pretty sure you're the winner of this particular class reunion."

The pop of disapparition muted Snape's reply.

With a jerky motion that would not meet Professor McGonagall's approval, Snape transfigured two shovels from twigs on the ground. Harry took one and examined the rusty blade before getting to work. As he put his foot onto it, thinking that there had been no point in transfiguring his trainers after all, the other shovel came to life and started digging by itself.

"Don't stop on my account," Snape drawled when he let go of the handle.

"There's actually a spell to do this instantly," Harry said as they stood and watched the growing hole.

Snape looked at him oddly. "To dig up a grave?"

"Our Forensics instructor mentioned it during the Auror training. Definitely from personal experience. Herbert Burke, maybe you've heard of him? Brilliant but a right creep."

"Of course I know Herbert. His necrosis reversal potion got him a Golden Cauldron last year."

"Is he really experimenting on Inferi?"

Snape was silent for a moment before saying carefully, "Those are tasteless rumours. Herbert's been working on a potion to revert Inferi to life after the Dark Lord turned his wife into one, but his research is purely theoretical. As you are indubitably aware, practising Necromancy is illegal."

In other words, Burke was definitely engaged in some Frankensteinian action.

"I didn't know that about his wife." Harry frowned.

"Why would you?"

Burke had pestered him for the details after hearing about his first-hand experience with Inferi, but Harry had refused to tell anyone about that, let alone this weird man with the dark family name surrounded by gruesome rumours. "Maybe I'd have told him about the cave then," he said.

"The cave?"

"Voldemort put the locket Horcrux into a cave full of Inferi. Probably hundreds of them."

Snape whirled to face him. "You didn't mention any Inferi-infested caves."

"It's not there anymore, not that we knew that at the time," Harry said bitterly. "Regulus Black died trying to destroy it."

"I wondered what happened to him," Snape said after another long silence. "Hoped that maybe he had managed to get away after all and was living somewhere in Argentina under an assumed identity."

"I'm sorry."

"We weren't close."

Harry suspected there was more to it but did not press; it was not his business, and he stretched the limits of Snape's forbearance as it was.

"Where's the Horcrux now?" Snape asked.

"Grimmauld Place."

"And that is?"

"Siri—the Black family townhouse."

The scowl returned to his face at the mention of Sirius. "How fortunate."

The shovels scraped against the shape of a skull, and Snape reverted them to twigs with another jab. Harry stared at the skeleton among the remains of the casket. Tom Riddle Sr had not been a nice person, but he did not deserve the fate that had befallen him. Harry told the whole sordid tale to Snape, feeling it deserved to be heard at least once outside Dumbledore's Pensieve before the last traces of the man vanished from the Earth.

Snape was not impressed by either of Voldemort's parents. "Mixed marriages between Purebloods and Muggles are doomed in the best of times, even without all the inbreeding and love potions," he said darkly. "Now, are you going to deliver a Hamlet soliloquy, or can I finally see our good Mr Riddle out?"

Obeying Snape's wand, the bones disappeared, the soil moved back, and the new grass popped up on top so that nothing would look amiss to a cursory glance. Herbert Burke might have done a better job, but then Harry was glad Snape's expertise lay in different areas.

An old man limped out of the cottage outside the graveyard just as Snape turned his robe into a jacket. It turned out he remembered Morfin Gaunt well, and predictably did not have anything good to say about Voldemort's maternal uncle. He also believed their house long gone and was reticent about its location, whether because of whatever enchantment Voldemort had put on it or out of general unwillingness to share the town secrets with strangers. In the end, however, he pointed them in the right direction, for which Harry was very thankful; the sun was reaching its zenith, and he didn't fancy wandering around. Not to mention, Snape would probably get a heat stroke in all that black.

With a jaunty wave, the man headed towards the manor house on the hill that probably once belonged to the Riddles, while Harry and Snape tracked to the outskirts of the town. In contrast with the joyful countryside, the Gaunt shack stood half-crumbled among dead trees and nettles. It hadn't looked particularly liveable in the memory Dumbledore had shared, and now it was a ruin held together entirely by the heavy magic radiating from the walls. As they approached, tiles from the half caved-in roof crunching under their feet, an insistent feeling to leave welled inside Harry with each step. He kept his eyes firmly on the house and walked forward anyway, and Snape at his right did the same.

"Intruders!" a female voice called, making Harry jump and whip out his wand.

Snape looked at him questioningly.

"There's someone—Oh."

A brown adder slithered between the tiles, forked tongue vibrating in a warning.

"We apologise for disturbing you," Harry said, Parseltongue rolling off his own almost unnoticeably. He hadn't lost the ability with the Horcrux out of his head, as he had half expected, but the language had got much hissier. Now it sounded clear English again.

"This one talks!" the snake said excitedly. Unblinking reddish eyes looked at him with curiosity.

"Yeah. Look, we need to get something from here. A ring with a big black stone. Have you seen it?"

She coiled on herself. "Hard to miss, that one. It whispers and stinks up the entire room with nasty magic. Can't even eat a rat from there without chuckin' my guts up."

Harry hummed sympathetically. The few snakes he met other than the basilisk and Nagini were all laid-back creatures up for a friendly chat, and sometimes he wondered if he would have ever got one if Voldemort hadn't ruined the idea of snake ownership for everyone.

"It won't bother you anymore," he said.

"Look under the rafter in the kitchen. But don't go through the door! Bits of that daft fox who last tried are still all over the yard." The snake warned and slithered back into the crack in the mossy wall. Harry tried not to think about the origin of the stains on it too hard.

He turned to Snape. "It's in the living room, but the main entrance is cursed."

Next to him, Snape's face was carefully blank, but his fingers clutched his wand with force.

"What?" Harry was pretty sure he had mentioned being a Parselmouth when discussing Malfoy's involvement in the Chamber.

"The Dark Lord always claimed Parseltongue to be a language most arcane. It's... unsettling hearing it from your mouth."

"I just hear it as normal English. This one has a Yorkshire accent."

"Yorkshire accent?" Now Snape looked almost disappointed.

Harry shrugged.

"And you got the ability from the Dark Lord," Snape said slowly, eyes zeroing on Harry's forehead where his scar was covered with his hair.

He rubbed it self-consciously. "That was Dumbledore's theory, yes."

Dark eyes searched Harry's face for a moment before losing their unnerving intensity. "Headmaster Dumbledore," Snape corrected, retreating into the familiarity of speaking to Harry as his student again.

"Headmaster Dumbledore," Harry agreed, pushing away the heavy feeling in his stomach. It was better than discussing whatever theories Snape had about his scar. He would probably have to share his Horcrux status with Snape sooner or later since this man and his extensive knowledge of Dark Arts was his only realistic prospect for survival, but that day was not today.

"Enough dilly-dallying," said Snape, suddenly business-like. "Give me your wand."

Harry rolled his eyes. "I'm not going to use it unless it's an emergency."

"That might not be good enough."

"So you want to leave me without a weapon? When there are more curses in this place than warts on a hag's a—face?"

"Potter. Cease your dramatics and give me your wand before I change my mind. I'll return it to you in a moment."

Did he trust Snape that much? Ignoring his every instinct that screamed against it, Harry handed his holly wand over, ready to snatch it away. Holding it in his left hand like a test tube, Snape tapped it with his own one and muttered a lengthy incantation before returning it as promised.

"What was that?"

"The Trace is now muted," he said. "You are not to abuse this privilege, especially in the light of your control issues."

Harry gaped at him. "How is it possible?"

"The Headmaster and Heads of the Houses are granted this power by Hogwarts Charter, paragraph 24(f) of Article 293."

Trust Snape to be this specific.

"Well, the DMLE is not aware of this." Which was for the best at this point in time. "But McGonagall never said anything either, even after the war!"

"Firstly, how arrogant of you to believe that you are owed the castle secrets. Typical Potter."

"And secondly?" Harry ignored the jab, too glad to have the last of the restrictions lifted.

"And secondly, I'm not certain Minerva is even aware of this feature. The only copy of the Charter available in the Library is a two hundred feet scroll written in Middle English."

"And you read it all? Why?"

"Only fools sign up for anything without reading the small print," Snape said haughtily, which was a rich statement for a person with the Dark Mark on his forearm. Then again, maybe that was the reason. "Aren't you glad now that I did?"

As he examined the curse on the doorway, Harry wondered if Dumbledore knew of the loophole.

Harry thought himself to be a patient person, but when Snape produced a notebook and a quill and started scribbling arithmantic equations for a countercurse, he had enough. Despite Snape's protests about the indignity, they climbed through the grimy window, which, to be fair, was much easier for Harry, as it was rather small. When he jumped down on the other side, mindful of the broken glass, Harry imagined Malfoy with his prissy attitude, immaculate hair and the outfit that undoubtedly cost as much as Harry's sports broom, here with them. He bit back a chuckle; Snape would surely take it on his account.

The inside of the shack was as pitiful as the outside. The kitchen—doubling as a living room—was not affected by the roof cave-in but still looked like it had been through a thunderstorm. A thick layer of cobwebs and dirt covered an overthrown table and chairs, one missing a leg, and the floor next to the collapsed hearth was littered with rusty cauldrons and broken crockery. The shimmer of the concealment spell under the exposed rafters was almost unnoticeable in all the dust in the air.

Before Harry could point at it, Snape already moved in that direction.

"Watch out!" the adder called from the other room, likely one of the bedrooms.

An enormous half-decomposed snake lunged at them from the rafters, its fanged mouth open in a silent snarl.

"Sectumsempra!" Harry shouted. The head fell down with a heavy thud, but the tail kept moving, reaching for Snape's neck.

At Snape's Incendio, it sprung back but was not fast enough, catching fire halfway to the floor. Soon both parts were neatly eaten by flames, leaving the decaying wooden planks untouched. For a moment, Harry was in a different shack, with a different snake and a very different Snape gurgling blood and memories. For the first time since he had woken up in the past, he was unreservedly glad to be back.

"I wish we could just burn down this place with Fiendfyre," he said. Unfortunately, it would be too conspicuous, not to mention likely to burn down the entire area too.

"And I wish to know where you learned that spell."

"Erm... from you?" Sometimes, white lies were necessary. "Look, it's neither the time nor the place."

"Don't think this issue is closed." Snape hissed, sounding more snake-like than the local adder.

He dismantled the enchantments and curses around the ring in a huffy silence, forbidding Harry to come within one foot of his 'most delicate spellwork'. Harry readily agreed; even if his magic were fully under control, he did not possess nearly as much knowledge about the Dark Arts as Snape did. He wondered if the man ever considered becoming a curse breaker.

Watching Snape work, he idly chatted with the adder. She told him the tales of her childhood; how she and her siblings had used to, to their nestmother's distress, poke at the 'great dead one' until it had snapped at them, and then slither away as fast as they could.

Engaged in the conversation, Harry almost missed when Snape raised in the air, hand outstretched to the rafters.

"Don't touch it!" he shouted, but Snape ignored him completely.

Swearing, Harry pointed his wand at him. "Stupefy!"

Snape collapsed in a heap, Harry's cushioning spell landing at the last moment.

"Sorry, Professor," Harry muttered and carefully levitated the ring down into the iron box Snape had prepared for it. (If only he, Ron and Hermione had known it was a much better way to transport Horcruxes than around their necks in the Forest of Dean.)

"The compulsion is external to the curse, although amplified by it," Snape said as soon as Harry revived him. He sprung onto his feet, ignoring Harry's outstretched hand, and paced the floor, footprints disturbing the dust. "It's something innate to the ring itself. Or maybe the stone?" He stopped abruptly and looked up, pale and slightly shivering. "Where is it?"

"I've got it," Harry said, the box burning his pocket.

"Give it to—" Snape cut himself off abruptly and swallowed, Adam's apple bobbing. "On second thought, keep it for now. We'll apparate to the mill and destroy it right away."

He turned and climbed out of the window without any complaints, shaking off a fat spider that fell onto his hair with a chunk of dirt almost as an afterthought. The absence of commentary alone proved how much the Resurrection Stone affected him.

The mill was empty this time and much the same except for a blackened hole in the middle of the floor. Harry worried that after all the trying revelations of today Snape's control would be affected, but if anything, the fiery chimaera he sent at the ring was even more focused. The frown did not leave his face until there was only a cracked pebble in a puddle of molten gold on the floor. He vanished them with a flourish.

Satisfied, Snape left the mill with a spring in his step, even explaining to Harry the curses that protected the ring in a lecturing tone reminiscent of their sixth year Defence lessons. Harry listened and nodded, relieved that more than the piece of Voldemort's soul was destroyed today.

Stories always focused on the flashy Elder Wand, but out of the three Hallows, he found the stone the most dangerous. Sometimes late at night, he would wonder if the shades of his parents it had brought as he had walked to die during the Battle were real or an insidious illusion, and would itch to go find the stone in the Forbidden Forest and call for them again.

He somehow knew that as a master of the Hallows, it would not be difficult at all. But as Fiendfyre consumed the ring, Harry finally felt a knot release in his chest. He would save as many people as he could this time around, but the dead were better left to rest in peace.

A/N: Clarification re pairings, since I got a few questions about that. I'm not planning to give Harry a love interest for this story, and he certainly won't end up with anyone of his generation (or if he will, it won't be anytime soon), considering he's mentally 22, and they are still kids.

Thank you so much for reading and reviewing!