Quick author's note - Thanks to all my reviewers so far. Mostly that means you, Jen, though I've gotten a couple more now.
More specifically, to Jen - yeah, I wondered if anger was the way to go with Harry, but he never really wanted to murder anyone anyway, so I think he's just hoping it's over.
To Barbarataku - Thanks? Um. I can't figure out if that's good or bad, or if you think my Snape's wildly OOC. But thanks either way.
To Silverthreads - Heh. Course it's not that easy. The only suckers who think it would be are...the characters in the story. Heh.
And Logoreo - Merci beaucoup, et ne vous inquiétez pas. Votre anglais est beau.

"Tomorrow?"

Harry nodded grimly.

"Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow."

"Bloody hell. Doesn't believe in a day off, does he?" Ron sighed and threw himself back on Harry's bed.

"Ron." Hermione smacked his arm, sitting more demurely beside him. "This is important. It needs to be resolved. The more time Voldemort is in custody the more of a chance there is that he'll escape."

"So? Harry's obviously not the person meant to kill him, so why make him sit through any more of this? Trelawney bolluxed something up, as usual, and everyone's made his life hell because of it."

"Honestly, Ron. It's not as simple as all that. Of i course /i Harry's the one meant to kill him, but obviously using the killing curse isn't the way to do it."

Harry stared at the ceiling, hands folded under his head, and wondered what would happen if he just said no. For once in his life.

"There's something else. Something in the magic Voldemort studied to keep himself alive, or something in the blood between he and Harry. It's just a matter of finding it."

"Well, if anyone can, genius..."

Harry tilted his head over at them, seeing Ron chucking Hermione on the arm, a dopey smile on his face. The Couple Smile, Harry had dubbed it.

Hermione blushed and grinned back.

Harry smiled wryly and looked back up at the ceiling.

There was a thump from the door, jerking all of their attention. Tension rose like a sudden cloud of smoke. Someone was trying to get in.

Harry drew his wand, standing and going to the door. "Ready?" A glance at his friends revealed wands in their hands and grim looks on their faces.

He muttered the words to unlock the door and threw it open, wand shooting out.

Right into the astonished face of Seamus Finnigan.

Harry's wand tilted back instantly. "Oh. Right. Hullo, Seamus."

Round green eyes locked on him, then took in Ron and Hermione. "Well. Hello then."

Ron laughed, cheeks red, tucking his wand back into his pocket. "Sorry about that, mate. We don't take surprise visitors well."

Seamus recovered his decorum, smiling. "Of course not. We only have a dinner date and this is only our old dorm room. Why on earth would you be expecting me?"

Harry felt his cheeks warm. "Guess we forgot about dinner."

"Yeah. What with Harry being in hospital all day and everything."

Seamus grinned. "All the more reason. Now come on. We can get the house elves to bring something to the common room."

Hermione frowned, and there came another of her patented faces. The Spew face, Harry thought of it as secretly.

"Seamus, we can take care of "

But Seamus was already out the door, going down the stairs.

Harry shrugged at Hermione. "We'd better go if you want to lecture him properly."

Down in the common room they found Seamus crouched down in conversation with an unfamiliar house elf. He was practically beaming, and the elf was chattering enthusiastically. Around them more elves appeared with trays, and one transfigured a small table into a dining area large enough for four.

"Seamus!" Hermione moved past Harry and barrelled down the stairs, as if to catch him before he could make them do another moment of work.

Seamus turned to her with a grin. "Hermione, you must know Poddy!"

The house elf he was speaking to glanced at Harry and his friends as they came in, and when he saw Hermione his face darkened and his ears went flat. "Oh, no, Seamus Finnigan. Poddy is not knowing that one. That one is setting us free and making us accept wages. Poor Dobby is still...still..." He swallowed, looking around with wide crystal ball eyes. "On vacation," he whispered, pressing an ear flat in obvious horror.

Seamus gaped at Hermione. "You set them free?"

Hermione was looking at him in equal shock. "You know the house elves?"

He straightened, patting Poddy as he rose to the elf's delight. "I do. Or, did." His cheeks went pink and he glanced at Harry. "Fifth year...I spent a lot of time on my own. I went to the kitchens to get meals and things sometimes."

Harry remembered. Seamus and his foolish mother, and the fighting between them that lasted most of the year. It pained him now, because that was the last year he had known Seamus, and he said goodbye to him that summer still holding a grudge.

"If you claim to be their friend how can you make them work for you?" Hermione demanded, nice enough to pull Harry out of those memories.

Seamus blinked. "It's what they do, isn't it?"

Poddy muttered a confirmation and moved off to help the others.

"It's i slavery /i !" Hermione's eyes flashed.

Ron moved in close to Harry with a sigh. "Bloody hell."

"It's what they've been i told /i and i taught /i and i trained /i to do. It's abhorrent. I would have thought better of you."

Seamus laughed in surprise. "Don't go thinking better of me than to do anything, Hermione. I can't believe they haven't talked you out of this yet. How long have you been working on these poor elves, tricking them and lecturing them and all?"

Hermione sputtered, looking to Ron for support that wasn't coming.

Seamus moved to the table the elves had set up. "We may as well enjoy it as long as it's here," he said with a look at Ron and Harry. "You know, there's a saying back home that you hear some of the old folk saying when they don't understand the ways of the world these days. 'Tis what 'tis."

Hermione movied to the table in front of Harry. He followed her, Ron at his side. "What does that mean?"

"It means...well, that you don't really have to understand why something is the way it is. A snake will attack because that's what it does. It's a predator. You don't have to like it, and you don't have to think that's the way it should be. It just is what it is. Predators kill however much you lecture them against it. I think the house elves are the same. If it's their nature you can't deny it. Setting them free is like putting a snake in a cage; it only stops it from being able to follow its instincts. It doesn't change what it is."

Poddy was the last house elf to leave. He tugged at the leg of Seamus's slacks with a wide, stretched house elf smile. "Seamus Finnigan can be asking Poddy for anything."

Seamus grinned at him as he vanished from view with a pop. He looked back at Hermione. "I know you're smarter than I am, and you've been working hard at this for a long time. I just...see things differently, I guess."

Hermione's face was red, but she didn't answer.

Ron nudged Harry, eyebrows raised. Harry shrugged. He'd stopped taking sides on the SPEW debate years ago. He had too many other battles to fight.

"Er. Right. Anyway." Ron grabbed for a tray of potatoes.

"Right." Harry took a platter piled high with corned beef and heaped it onto his plate.

Snape paced back and forth in his large sitting room, alternating glares at the door with glares towards the empty bedroom.

What were they filling his head with? What were they laughing at him about, and making him feel bad for? What were they telling him?

The truth, probably. That he deserved better. That Severus Snape was nothing but a bitter old man who would never be as young or as nice as Seamus deserved. That he was evil and had been evil for years.

Seamus knew all that already, but sometimes all it took was seeing through the eyes of an outsider, expecially a friend, and it made everything clearer.

Seamus had never taken his warnings of his past seriously. He had never understood that the Mark on his arm meant he had killed and tortured and enjoyed it.

They would change that tonight, if they could.Bloody i children /i . Laughing at Snape. Speculating on things they couldn't know about, making judgements they had no right to make. Confronting Seamus with their 'truth' that Snape couldn't be worth a sickle, because he had once been a bad, bad man.

The ironic thing was that Snape used to believe that himself. It had taken Seamus to begin his mind changing.

Bloody sodding fuck.

There was a knock on the door and he bolted to it faster than he cared to think about.

He opened the door and fixed cold eyes on...Remus Lupin.

He blinked in surprise. "What?"

Remus cleared his throat quietly. "Is your...er. Your i ward /i present?"

"No." The word came out more cross than Snape cared for. "He's playing with his friends."

Lupin lifted his hand. It held a bottle, a truly surprising bottle. "In that case, I've brought a peace offering. "

Snape's eyebrow rose. Absinthe. Wry amusement went through him, sending a smirk to his face. "I could spend an hour reciting the many ways the wormwood in that bottle would do us more harm than we can afford."

Lupin smiled, irritating in his knowingness. "That was a yes, yes?"

A drink with an old comrade in arms, even one as incredibly annoying as Lupin, wouldn't be unwelcome. It would fill the silence and keep him from further useless speculation about what was going on in another room of the castle.

But not in his quarters. His sanctuary.

He stepped out instead, shutting the door behind him. "There are glasses in my office," he said, moving past Lupin and starting down the hall.

"You gonna give, mate?"

Seamus sipped at his butterbeer. "Give what?"

"You know what. What happened? Why'd you die, and when you were resurrected why the bleeding fuck did you decide to spend your second chance with Severus greasy git arsehole-of-the-universe Snape?"

Seamus laughed, but something flashed in his eyes. "I didn't die. I know that's a great shock to you, but I didn't."

"So what happened?" Harry asked, more curious the more butterbeer he drank. Mostly about the Snape part of the question, he had to admit.

Seamus shrugged. "We were attacked. We lived in Roonah Quay, right by the water, and I'd been off by the shore watching the clouds coming in." His voice lilted more than usual. "I saw four of them go in, and three come out. I think mam took one of them with her." His near-constant smile faded. "You remember me telling you about home? Maybe you don't. We weren't rich. Da worked on the water, and mam was very religious about her magic. I mean, she was religious, and it passed to her magic. She didn't use it to better us more than we needed to survive. Arrogance, she thought it. Or greed. A sin, either way."

Harry studied him, seeing suddenly all the ways he had gotten older. His face seemed thinner and more pale than the boy Harry remembered, and his hands trembled minutely.

"Our house was a hut, not much more. The thatching on the roof made it burn fast, and I could hardly even call out before it was nearly gone. I had to run when the Death Eaters came out. I don't know if they realized I belonged in that house or if they thought I was just a witness, but they chased me."

He hesitated, and the room around him was silent save the flicker of the fire.

"I don't know how I survived, really. My wand was in the house, destroyed. I didn't know any charms or spells to hide myself, and if I did I was never good enough at magic to fool real Death Eaters. " He sighed and looked up, and Harry marveled at how every emotion in Seamus's head was right there on his face to be examined.

"At any rate, they passed me by with only the smallest rocks between me and them." He smiled faintly. "Mam would have called it a miracle before she'd have called it magic."

"His family was murdered. They found three bodies and assumed he was dead too. That is, the few wizards who bothered to investigate."

"There were a great deal of attacks that summer," Remus reminded him.

"Right. Which means Merlin only knows how many children like Seamus there are out there." Snape glared at his visitor.

"It was a mistake. But accidental."

"Sod accidental. It was clumsy and foolish."

"He was my student once, Severus. If anyone had suspected he were alive somewhere..."

"Of course." Snape meant the retort to be snide, but it was soft enough to make him angry at himself.

"What did he do, then?" Remus asked after a moment.

"Made my way to Dublin. My mam had Muggle brothers up there, but when I got there they'd been thrown into prison. They were IRA, I think. And there I was, so...I did what I had to. I got a job and scraped by." Seamus shrugged, smiling though his face seemed drawn. "Never stopped waiting for an owl to peck at the window, either."

Harry frowned. "That must have been hard." He had known it the other way around - grown up abandoned and then adopted by a new world.

"It was." Seamus looked at Harry. "When I was feeling truly petty I thought it was your fault."

"Mine?" Harry straightened.

"I thought, I'll bet Harry is still sore with me and is glad I'm gone, and nobody will bother to look for me because they want him to be happy. It was horrible of me to think it, but...well, I was being petty, wasn't I?"

Harry frowned.

Ron cleared his throat. "So. Now the big question - how in Merlin's bearded balls did Snape find you?"

Snape stopped then, setting his glass on his desk hard. "It doesn't matter. I found him."

Remus looked taken aback for a moment, then lofted his drink and tilted it in a sort of toast.

Snape met his eyes and saw his acceptance of the story's end, and felt a flash of gratitude.

He took up his glass again and looked away. Remus let it die. What was the chance others would be so forgiving? He wondered whether Seamus was telling Potter and his friends the story even then.

His eyes caught on a small bottle of powdered bloodroot, and he nearly tripped over his own feet standing and moving around the desk. "Bloody i hell /i , I'll be right back."

"Alright, forget how. What are you doing with him now? He didn't adopt you or something, did he?"

Seamus nearly choked on his drink. He laughed as he coughed. "No! He didn't adopt me."

"But. You're in his room, aren't you? And you were with him before, when he got the message to come here?" Hermione leaned in, curious gaze on Seamus.

Harry's eyes went wide as she spoke. No, of course they weren't some sort of father and son. If Snape had ever had the first paternal feeling towards anyone he would have been shocked.

But what that left was even more wrong and impossible to comprehend.

Ron turned dark red suddenly. "Oi," he muttered, staring at Seamus. "You've got to be kidding me."

Seamus grinned, looking relieved they had pieced it together. "Not at all."

Hermione's brow furrowed and she looked from one to the other of them.

Harry gaped at Seamus. "But... i why /i ? How?"

A light laugh. "Don't tell me you don't know the mechanics, Harry."

He blushed. "No! I don't know the mechanics of anything involving i Snape /i ."

"Well, granted we're not exactly a run-of-the-mill couple, but-"

"Couple?" Hermione flushed, but her expression screwed up as if Seamus were suddenly a much more interesting form of study than he had been before. "You don't mean."

"He does," Ron replied, sick fascination in his voice.

"And that's all I've got to say on the subject, actually." Seamus grinned and reached for a meat pasty.

Poddy popped into being beside Seamus's chair. "Seamus Finnigan, Mister Snape is looking for you." Distressed, the elf's voice was higher than usual.

Seamus stood. "Where is he?"

"Coming this way! He is having a potion in his hand."

Seamus's face lost color instantly. He pushed away from the table and moved to the door without even a word to them. He looked suddenly more drawn than he had when remembering his parents' deaths minutes ago.

Harry frowned and exchanged glances with Ron and Hermione. They stayed silent, trying to hear what was going on. The door hung open, and a low voice sounded from outside, unintelligible.

Harry stood without thought and moved towards the portrait hole. It was definitely Snape's voice.

But before he could make out words, the voice stopped and brisk footsteps moved away down the corridor.

Harry darted back to his seat and sat just as Seamus returned. He was wiping his mouth, pale and trembling. But he smiled at them, and it came over him like a mask.

"Right. Sorry about that."

Harry exchanged dark glances with Hermione, wondering suddenly if there wasn't something more between Snape and Seamus than their old friend was letting on.