Pensieve
by Spyke

Summary: The function of the Pensieve is to clear your mind. Dumbledore uses it.

Spoilers: Up to and including 'Goblet of Fire' Notes after the story.

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"What made you think he'd really stopped supporting Voldemort, Professor?"

"That, Harry, is a matter between Professor Snape and myself."

- Goblet of Fire.

**

I remember what the boy used to be. I remember when he was a boy. Not a man, not as he is now. A boy.

I never knew him entirely innocent, but I remember a boy. I remember a boy, a young man with jet black eyes, no separation between pupil and iris, merely coal dark under eyelashes of equal intensity that seemed painted onto ivory skin. I remember the slight sheen of sweat on his upper lip, the way his mouth stretched into shapes, sometimes words, but always aimed to please, aimed to mark, aimed to score.

Well-taught, that mouth. Not by me, even though I did receive much of the benefit.

I remember the boy, remember scenting it, a pale remnant wrapped deep inside the coiled intensity fostered by his mentor, Voldemort. I remember that it was buried far beneath layers of ambition, covered by too-pale skin, but it was there. A shadow of a boy. I remember thinking *danger*, but I also remember how angry I was.

I remember my hair was red.

Now when the thoughts grow too thick I touch my wand to my head and withdraw pure silver strands. They were red once, like my thoughts still are. Masked by silver, but still angry.

It's a different anger these days. In the old times I had anger only for myself, anger that clouded my vision to show me only a boy playing off tricks his master had taught him, too angry to see more than the obscenity of the offer clearly made the first time he came through my door, voice saying 'Please sir,' and lips shaping something completely different. I was too angry those days and it seemed to be hot, searing and cleansing. Fire. Pure fire.

So I thought. So I paid.

The phoenix burns too, but its tears are healing. I...

I couldn't. Heal him. When he came to me two years later.

I could only remember what he had been. And pay silently too, along with him. But never the same debt. Never enough.

I take that thought too and drop it into the Pensieve. Its waters swirl, growing murkier with a dash of hidden brightness.

**

Hogwarts follows the fine old traditions of mentoring and student rule. It isn't unusual for prefects to have a hand in choosing their successors, it isn't even unusual for a Head Boy to spend much time with someone of his own house, grooming him for future better things. It was almost expected that Severus Snape would follow in Tom Riddle's footsteps, and this he did to the extent of becoming a prefect. He was also an excellent student and perhaps I was lulled by his chosen fascination; potions, and he seemed to spend all his spare time in the laboratories, concocting, decanting and learning a delicacy of touch that Dippet raved about.

Sometimes I watch him now, the man grown, see him take a tender pinch of something dry, sift a gentle pile of dust, add the whole to an innocuously bubbling concoction that becomes something fantastic. And... and...

And I weep inwardly. I'm grown old now, so I weep. Times were the sight of his fingers plucking restlessly drove me to distraction.

I'm grown old now and we walk side by side as we used to, years ago, when none questioned the sight of Professor and student striding around the walls together. But then it was our bodies restrained under terrible misery, prevented from leaning towards each other as we walked, backs ramrod straight, hands not permitted to touch in passing. The boy because he thought he was keeping our secret. I because.

I couldn't bear to touch him.

Because I knew what he was. What he was sent here for, and by whom. And I laughed because his seduction of me was bound to fail and .

And I was angriest because I hadn't foreseen the lad of nervous intensity and deep love for the intricacy of potent mixtures would become Voldemort's catamite. I hadn't foreseen it. I hadn't prevented it.

So when he fell to his knees before me I didn't stop him. Not even when his hands reached up to me and showed me the delicate butterfly touch that handled skeleton leaves and mandrake skin with equal desire. Easy enough for his young hand to simulate passion for me. So I thought. So I knew.

I was younger then. And when I take the thought from my mind and put it into the Pensieve, it grows glitter-red in the light thrown from my phoenix's tail.

Phoenix tears heal. I didn't have Fawkes when Severus came back to me two years after. A man. Broken. But a man.

At least...

At least I remember now. At least I didn't laugh then.

**

Those memories are fractured at best. Most swirl in darkness inside an almost bottomless well. I remember I looked through them at some point of sanity, the time when my hair grew so white I no longer was ashamed of the color.

But I remember the boy. No, the *man* who lay on his side, gasping through tortured ribs and sweat-tangled hair, whose eyes, snake-black as ever, were hollow. For the first time empty of the lust I'd grown used to seeing in them.

We had no Potions Master then, no adept Healer either. I did my best. We were at war.

"No more," he whispered, when I tried to raise him up, to give him a drink of water, to feed him. "No." I thought he wanted to die.

I was wrong.

"Tom," he called out once, a lost boy and when I went to him he pushed me away. I tried to hold him down and found I was gazing into sanity-crazed eyes.

"No more," he said to me. "No more Tom."

I remember understanding. I remember weeping.

There was a time when I believed love belonged to Gryffindor, that Slytherin's folk were incapable of anything but selfish ambition. I have since. Grown very old.

**

He lets his hair grow, careless and tangled, sweat-choked and greasy. It hurts him, I think, to touch or brush or even seem to cherish an instrument used in his degradation. Sometimes I wonder if there isn't more to it than that, but I have too many thoughts. I have to drain away the absolutely unnecessary so as to keep space for the essential. Harsh truth, that in times of war there is no time to ponder the death of a boy or the desolation of the man he became. No time for wrath at the savage idiocy of Voldemort's crime against a boy who loved him. A boy whose only crime was to have failed.

In seducing. Me.

There is supposed to be some great satisfaction in knowing that one has sided with virtue. I have never achieved it. Sometimes my hands itch to take a brush to that hair and I sit on them. Use them to peel sweets. I eat a lot of sweets. They prevent me from thinking of other things.

Lost.

When all else fails I take my thoughts and put them in the Pensieve. Sometimes it works. Sometimes.

Other times I remember.

**

I remember...

A boy. With jet-black hair and open eyes asking earnestly as if this is the only question in the world he needs answered. "What made you think he'd really stopped supporting Voldemort, Professor?"

(We stopped having it off. He stopped washing his hair.)

(And I lost him. Before. I even got to know him.)

Those words won't do. Even as I notice his hair covering the jagged scar on his forehead and remember the phoenix feather in his wand. Even then I tell him, "That, Harry, is a matter between Professor Snape and myself."

Later that evening, in the great hall, I see them looking at each other. Severus looks away as though his eyes just flickered over once, but Harry keeps it up. Intent.

I see Severus. Look back at him. Until the boy flushes and turns away, leaving the man - who turns back to his food, with a shuttered glance in my direction.

I observe all this and my hands creep into hidden pockets looking for sweets. I find my thoughts are too much for even the Pensieve.

~ Fini

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Author's notes: Thank you for reading. This was written because I wanted desperately to write Snape/Harry slash.
Feedback would be so neat.

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