Thank you for the reviews on the last chapter!

Note: This is a highly non-linear chapter. It's also very, very unpleasant, but it's necessary to let you know what Snape's been doing these last few months, and where he is now.

Chapter Fifty-Nine: First Guardian and Last Line of Defense

Snape sat down slowly. He had become very good at putting off this moment, this necessary but horrible part of his day. He would mark essays, cast cleaning spells on his quarters—unneeded, as he continued to permit house elves into them—number his potions ingredients, brew complicated experimental mixtures that usually came to nothing, read books on history from the Hogwarts library. He would count the minutes remaining until another class began or he could go to the Great Hall and eat. His free hours, once a precious, jealousy guarded time that always ran away from him, now dragged.

Until he approached the desk, of course, and pulled out the glass bottle filled with flowing, silvery liquid and the parchment and quill he was using to write down the memories he had seen.

He had not realized, when he created the Pensieve Potion, how well it would work. Not only were the memories as sharp and clear as they were in an ordinary Pensieve, but they responded to the touch of Snape's mind. If he cast his thoughts into the liquid while concentrating on something Harry had done in Potions class, they would fetch the memory in which Harry had most probably learned that behavior, or one like it. If he thought about Draco Malfoy, the Headmaster might appear reading a letter from Lily in which she mentioned Draco. He could also tell in an instant whether he had seen one of the memories before, and slide into another.

It was useful in that it let him create a record of the Headmaster's memories of Harry's childhood, without repeating incident after incident.

It was terrible in that it drove him closer and closer to the edge of rage, and he could not tell anyone of it. McGonagall or Narcissa Malfoy might have been willing to help, but Harry would never forgive him for betraying his trust like that. Dumbledore was obviously not an option. Draco, who would have understood best, had refused to give Snape his own memories.

Alone, Snape sometimes wondered if he should stop recording the memories. The scrolls and scrolls he had so far would have been more than enough evidence for any plan of revenge he cared to enact. And it would release him from the dread of sitting down to do it again each night.

But still a compulsion, strong as any magical one that Dumbledore or Voldemort might have fashioned, drew him on, made him take up the quill, and lower his face, and open the bottle, and enter into a world he had never known existed quietly beside him during the ten years he'd taught at Hogwarts before Harry came there, lying like a coiled basilisk in Dumbledore's head.

Lily Potter came striding across the lawn of Godric's Hollow, her eyes anxious and her hand already held out to clasp Dumbledore's. The older wizard took her wrist and peered keenly into her eyes. The memory did not show Snape whatever he saw, since he was standing on the grass and observing them both from the outside, but he saw Dumbledore's face grow weary.

"I thought you might have exaggerated in your letter, my dear," he said, gently patting her hand. "I came here intending to soothe your fears. I see that I was wrong. Of course you would know your own son best."

Lily nodded. "I wouldn't have contacted you if it were just the once, Albus," she whispered, turning and looking at the house. Snape followed her gaze. He had learned to hate the sight of that place, Harry's prison, even though right now it was doing nothing but slumber quietly in the sun. "Or even just for a week. But it's been two weeks now, and he's still doing it."

"I understand, my dear," the Headmaster said. "Can you describe again, for me, exactly what happens when young Harry gets angry?"

Lily shivered. "The air around him boils," she said. "I can feel the web bucking, as if his magic's trying to force its way out. And, of course, I smell dog vomit. I always do, when he's exercising his strength."

"That is a concern," Dumbledore murmured, his brow wrinkled. "The web should hold at all costs. And you are certain that it happens only when he gets angry, and at no other time?"

Lily nodded.

"Why has he had so much occasion to get angry in the past two weeks?" Dumbledore asked, and Lily immediately turned her head and stared intently at a spot on the ground. Snape did the same thing, not because he expected to see any explanation for her fixed gaze, but because it kept him from trying to draw his wand and curse either one of them, which always interrupted the memory.

"Lily?" Dumbledore prompted, after a few minutes' silence.

"I was trying to teach him that, even in front of people whom he trusts, he needs to keep his guard up at all times," Lily replied in soft tones. "I was making little threatening motions towards Connor—oh, not anything that other people would interpret as a threat, but gestures as if I were going to draw my wand, gestures linked to specific hexes. Harry, though, has to hold still and not respond, because I was doing it in front of James and Sirius, and he's been told not to show what he is to them. Afterwards, he's always very angry. The instincts I placed in him are being thwarted, I know. But I thought he had better control than this, or I would never have tried it." Lily crossed her arms and shivered. "He is foul, Headmaster. I smell that all the time. I don't want to have that magic turned on me."

Snape wanted to scream. No, wait, he thought, as his anger acquired a cold and dangerous edge that he hadn't felt in years. He wanted to make them scream. He had once seen Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange, trading off in smooth coordinated movements, keep a Muggleborn witch alive for seventeen days. He would better their record, if he could have had his way with Lily Potter.

"I don't think anyone would," said Dumbledore. "And you are bearing a burden greater than anything he has, Lily. Living alone with your sons, raising one to be a hero and trying to train the other out of being a Dark Lord, deprived of the support of your husband and your friends…I know no one who would envy you."

Lily slowly raised her head, her green eyes acquiring a tinge of determination and stubbornness that Snape had seen far more often on her son's face. "Thank you, Headmaster. What should I do about Harry's anger, though?"

"Let me talk to him."

They went into the house, and found Connor asleep, taking a nap on one of two beds in a bedroom that Snape had also learned to hate and detest. Harry was sitting on the other, crouched above a book. He looked up when the two adults—not including Snape, whom he couldn't see—entered the room. His face was blank, emotionless, until he caught sight of Lily. Then Snape saw a wind make the pages of his book tremble. He went on staring at Lily, and his eyes held very nearly the same feral gaze that Snape had seen on Christmas night.

"Harry. Harry, look at me."

Carefully, Harry looked away from Lily and at the Headmaster. Dumbledore shook his head, and spoke in a chiding tone.

"Harry, you are old enough to know that getting angry with your mother will do no good. Why should it? She's the one who has to raise both you and Connor, and she's the only one who can tell you everything that you need to know. And she loves you. Don't let the anger get the better of you."

Harry cocked his head to the side, in silent question as to what he should do instead. Snape thought he was about six in this memory. They had already turned Harry into someone who went quiet and watched the world. Snape wondered whether that mask would have shattered so easily if not for the near-complete destruction of Harry's mind at the end of his second year.

"Learn to put your anger away," Dumbledore told him quietly. "Imagine a box into which you put your rage. Your mother told me that you have one for bad thoughts about your brother. Can you put your rage into that box?"

Harry lowered his head and closed his eyes. The wind died in the next moment, and the pages of the book fell flat again. Then Harry murmured, still without opening his eyes, "It worked."

"Of course it did," said Dumbledore, and touched his arm, and smiled at Lily over his head. "You're growing into a proper wizard, Harry. Getting angry at people isn't productive, and you've learned that."

Snape watched the boy the day after he saw that memory, and noticed that Harry simply slid aside, calmly, from most confrontations that might have provoked irritation in another boy that age. He did get angry with himself fairly often, but even that was soothed when Draco complained about the sensations it caused. His rage no longer went into a box, but Harry did send it away.

It was no wonder, Snape thought, that Harry lost control in situations where he was angry but had no immediate goal to take up the magic that that emotion raised. He could fight for others' lives, he could attempt to subdue Voldemort if he faced him, he could use the strength of his own convictions to cow Dumbledore into backing down, but outside that—

His fury simply went wild.

Snape was sorry, now, that he had taught Harry to resist the De Profundis curse, and shut those emotions in a cage, another version of the box. Harry had put them there by his own choice, but that didn't matter. He still had no idea how to handle them.

And if the cage was ever broken…

Snape shuddered to think.

That emotion pounded his hatred into iron-hard determination to take revenge, someday, when Harry should have seen the light and understood that his parents and Dumbledore would have to suffer for what they had done. But Snape was still a young wizard, having lived only thirty-five years compared to the lifespan of more than a hundred that he might see. He could wait. He would wait. He would take revenge the moment Harry gave him permission, and not before.

This was a memory that Harry would not have known included Dumbledore's presence, because Lily had sent him a proud letter informing him of Harry's progress, but not told Harry that he was coming. The Headmaster stood under a Disillusionment Charm near the corner of the house, and watched Lily come out of the door and move towards Harry, who stood on the lawn studying the stars. His mother had told him to be here at this hour, just after dinner, and not to bring a book, but he was never one to waste any time when he might get some studying done.

Lily crouched down behind Harry and called his name. Harry turned to face her. He was eight, Snape thought, his face pale and utterly calm. If his magic had escaped his control any time in the last two years, it was not evident. He still had an aura of power, but judging from the tender smile his mother cast at him, it was not one that disgusted her.

"It's been two months, Harry," said Lily. "You've passed this test."

Harry blinked a few times. Then he shuffled a foot as if he would walk towards his mother, but in the end kept still. Lily nodded at him.

"It's all right," she said, and held out one hand, at the height, Snape thought, in his storm of fury and contempt, that she would use to pet a dog.

Harry walked over to her and took her wrist in a firm grasp. Snape could see a fine shiver run over his frame. He bowed his head and stood still for a moment, while Lily stroked his hair.

Snape glanced at Dumbledore's face. The Headmaster was smiling, pleased, just like Lily was, that Harry had got through this particular test.

Lily had not touched Harry for two months, and had also charged him to resist anyone else's attempt to touch him, in such a way that neither Connor nor James nor Lupin or Black would realize that Harry was shrugging off their embraces, ducking away from friendly punches or rufflings of his hair, managing just not to be there when they reached towards him. He'd done it expertly. Perhaps Sirius had thought something was strange a time or two, Lily had said in her exultant letter to Dumbledore, but he'd dropped all suspicions after a few days when yet another of his numerous love affairs preoccupied his attention.

They were training Harry to stand by himself, and not show others that he was doing it. Both parts of the lesson were equally important.

Snape had come nearest to shattering the bottle of Pensieve Potion that night. He had thought Harry's inability to casually brush against other people was a consequence of his other training, not something that Lily had specifically drilled into him. And now, to learn it was not…

Lily and Dumbledore had had the justification that Harry couldn't let himself be distracted by other people, not when he needed to focus on his brother. Besides, a casual touch from a Death Eater could disguise the wand that would press against his side or the knife that would slip between his ribs. He had to avoid most contact out of simple common sense.

Snape did not care about their justifications. He did not care about the twisted, poisoned little world in which Harry had been raised beyond the isolation wards at Godric's Hollow. He needed to understand it, so that he might help heal Harry when the moment came, but he would never admit that what had happened there had been in any way excusable, in any way rational.

He raged, and he stared at the wall when it was done, and he let the fires die within him.

He still needed to wait for Harry's permission before he did anything, or, failing that, some sign that Harry was being abused again and would not rescue himself.

But sometimes it was hard, and he did not think he could be blamed a bloody fantasy or two of the Headmaster dying throughout the day.

This memory was one that Lily had sent Dumbledore in a Pensieve of her own, and which had therefore become part of his mind concerning Harry's training even though he'd never witnessed it in person. Harry was seven. He sat beside the window of his bedroom on a summer evening, his eyes closed and his hands clasped in front of him. Lily sat across from him on his brother's bed, reading. Snape could hear a child's eager shouts from beyond the window. Probably Connor Potter was outside playing; he seemed to spend a great deal more time immersed in games and pranks than Harry did.

Harry had timed even his breathing to be quiet, and so the loudest sound in the room was Lily's voice.

"…held near Ottery St. Catchpole. The names of the Death Eaters who began it are unknown, but almost certainly they did so at You-Know-Who's suggestion. The Dark Lord did not take kindly to his servants claiming initiative that he himself would not have given them."

Lily paused to turn a page. A bird's piercing whirr came through the window. Harry nodded his head a little, as though he were falling asleep, though Snape doubted that; he would be memorizing everything he had heard, more than likely. Meanwhile, he himself stood in stupefied silence that a mother was reading this to her child. He knew what had happened at Ottery St. Catchpole when the Death Eaters still ran free. Everyone did. Harry could have waited until he was fourteen to know the details, and his life would not have been marred.

"The Death Eaters took dozens of Muggleborn children from their homes, and, most unusually, did not kill their families. It was believed they did this as part of their strategy, to encourage desperate hope and anticipation, and even to encourage their families to withdraw from the war. Of course, when the news of the Children's Massacre came a few days later, all thoughts of strategy vanished in a tide of overwhelming grief.

"The Death Eaters raised crosses from the ground near Ottery St. Catchpole, and crucified the Muggleborn children upon them. They used spells that heightened the pain of the nails being driven through their wrists and ankles, and other spells to make sure that they stayed alive throughout it and did not die from the shock. Finally, they set a ward around the crosses in one of the rare examples of Dark wizards cooperating during You-Know-Who's War. The ward took hours to knock down when the Light wizards and the Aurors finally reached it. When it finally fell, lines of lightning lashed from it and struck every child dead before they could be rescued. The emotional destruction of many families was complete, and far fewer Muggleborns remained in the war; instead, they applied for sanctuary from the Aurors and Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, and retreated into hiding."

Lily paused in her reading. Harry still sat before her with his eyes closed, but he blinked them open when she softly called his name. Snape's stomach was clenching, with revulsion and with memory. He hadn't participated in the Massacre—that had been Evan Rosier's brainchild—but he had seen the aftereffects of it. That was enough. It was one of the foulest, bitterest memories of Voldemort's War.

It was nothing a child Harry's age should have heard.

"What have you learned, Harry?" Lily whispered.

"That this is war," Harry said, in the same calm, neutral tone that Snape had heard many times during his first year. "That I can only trust former Death Eaters if they come to me on formal terms of alliance. That our enemies will stop at nothing to take down the Light." He paused a moment. "And since Connor's the heart and center of the Light, they'll stop at nothing to take him down."

"That's right," said Lily earnestly, and laid the book aside to lean over her son and clasp his cheeks in her hands. "That is why you have to be so carefully prepared all the time, Harry. You're the first guardian and the last line of defense. Most people won't think you're dangerous, since you're Connor's brother and just the same age as he is. And if you can keep up your façade, then they'll never know. But you can be right there, and you can shield him from Death Eater attacks."

Harry nodded. "When do you think Voldemort will come back, Mum?" he asked her, looking supremely contented as Lily kissed him on the forehead. If this was the most contact he had with his mother, Snape supposed, this might well be one of his happiest memories.

I am going to make myself sick if I keep on thinking like that, he realized, and twisted his thoughts as firmly as he could back onto the familiar track. Hating Lily Potter was far more refreshing than dwelling on all the piled scars Harry had accumulated.

"He might return at any time," said Lily softly, seriously. "He might wait years, or he might strike before you and Connor enter Hogwarts." She paused a moment, and turned her head from side to side. "Speaking of that, do you know where your brother is right now?"

Harry's eyes widened, and he leaped to his feet. A laugh came through the window, though, and made him spin around in relief. "There," he said. "He's outside, with Dad."

"You should go and check," said Lily. "Always check on him first, Harry, and you'll be doing your duty. You don't know what condition he's in, wounded or fine. Or he might be dead, and one of the Death Eaters might be imitating his voice with a spell, and then you'll have failed."

Panic flashed in Harry's eyes, and he charged out the door. Lily remained sitting where she was, head bowed and an expression on her face that made her old before her time. A litany of spells ran through Snape's head, all of which would kill her, and he saw at least five places in the room to hide the body so that her disappearance would not lead to immediate conclusions of murder.

He controlled himself with an effort. This was a memory, only a memory, and what she had done to Harry was already done.

Harry came back into the room a few minutes later, looking relieved. "Thank you, Mum," he said. "He was all right, but you're right. I should never take it for granted. I should always check."

He kissed her on the cheek, a gesture that Lily only tilted her head to passively accept, and then whispered, "I love you, Mum," and ran back out of the room to watch his brother some more.

Lily bowed her head into her hands and wept.

Snape recorded that memory with a steady hand, unlike many of the others, where his fury made his quill shake and blot the parchment. He had gone out beyond anger into some place on the other side of it, and when he was done, he pushed his chair back from the table and left the school by a secret way he knew, walking on the grounds near the edge of the Forbidden Forest and looking up at the stars.

It was May now, season of life, season of spring. Snape had danced at Walpurgis Night two weeks ago. He could feel his own power rearing up in him at all hours now. It had never gone completely to sleep since the wild Dark magic summoned it. It remained patiently within call, and it eagerly took to any task that he might be able to find for it.

Snape stopped at the very edge of the Forest and breathed. The scents of thick, growing grass and turned earth filled his nostrils. Hagrid was making a garden of some kind, probably for the insanely dangerous creatures he would acquire for his Care of Magical Creatures class over the summer. Snape could hear the wind brushing through the leaves, restless and always in motion. It came close enough to him to stir his hair, though it did not ruffle his robes. There were certain sins even the wind knew better than to commit.

Snape looked up at the stars some more, and thought he could hear a twitch, a tingle, of frenzied music on the edge of hearing. He'd heard it a few times as a child, before his mother had given him a wand and taught him sternly to use that instead of giving in to his own accidental magic. It called to him now, and promised surrender, and wonder in the surrender. Riding that magic, he could do anything, be anything.

Snape knew it was a lie, of course. He would lose himself in that wildness, lose his self-control and his prepossession and all the other cold virtues he had spent a lifetime constructing. He had seen that much on Walpurgis. Any wizard attempting to master that sheer rush of power would die. It was not meant to be mastered.

Besides, he wanted to use his own magic to punish the Potters and Dumbledore, if it was allowed, or at least his own means of revenge, the Pensieve Potion and the scrolls he'd been carefully compiling and the knowledge of minutiae in the raising of a pureblood child that he'd painstakingly assembled from the books he read.

But he did wish, for just a moment, that the wild Dark had swooped down on Godric's Hollow years ago, shattered the isolation wards, and borne Harry away, even if it meant that Snape would never have known him.

This was another occasion when Dumbledore had come to Godric's Hollow to witness the culmination of a test that Harry had carefully gone through for months. Like the one with not touching anyone, it was a conscious test. Snape knew the perimeters already, and stood behind Dumbledore in his Disillusionment Charm, faint and sick and attempting to deal with his own faintness and sickness before Harry appeared, so that he could remember everything properly.

Harry and Lily at last stepped out of the house. It was another nighttime scene, but rainy this time, sullen drops dripping from the clouds and plopping on Harry's cheeks. The boy didn't appear to notice. Of course, by this time, when he was almost ten years old, Snape knew, he had been through pain curses more debilitating than any rain, and had trained himself to ignore sensations like cold, wetness, and heat, long past the point when another child would have been whining. He had to keep going, as Dumbledore and Lily thought of it. He had to learn to be a soldier, and a soldier might have to fight in any and all sorts of conditions.

Lily faced him now, and waited. Harry copied her stance, his head tilted up towards her, and his hands loosely folded in front of his body, seemingly awaiting a direction or a command.

"Good," said Lily, and then cast a charm that Snape recognized as one that mediwizards used to ease patients who had suffered from the cold touch of a malicious, powerful ghost. It would warm the person, and usually the blankets around him, up, and make him fall asleep more easily.

Harry at once wriggled his shoulders uncomfortably, and then murmured, "Finite Incantatem," throwing it off with a wave of his practice wand.

Lily smiled, the smile that Harry lived for and drank in as if it were ambrosia, and then proceeded through a series of other charms and incantations. Some of them gave Harry a pleasant taste, as if his mouth were filled with chocolate. Some mimicked the effect of Calming Draughts. Others were used to create entertaining illusions, or to fill a wizard's ears with sweet music, or to cause dazzling lights and shadows that Snape remembered running after in mad busts when he was a child, some of the few moments of happiness he'd ever had.

Harry dismissed each of them with various signs of discomfort, none of them, so far as Snape could tell, feigned. Then he met his mother's eyes and waited for the final verdict that she would give him.

Lily walked forward and knelt in front of her son without trying to touch him. Harry lifted his head. Snape could see the pulse beating faster in his throat, but that was the only sign that he was at all agitated or worried about what his mother might say.

"You did it," Lily whispered. "You pass, Harry. The last two years are the best you have ever spent."

Harry bowed his head, making no sign of relief; the very small sigh he let out might have been mistaken for weariness or even disappointment. Lily stroked his hair, once, then stood and walked back inside the house.

Harry turned and walked thoughtfully away, sitting down at a distance from it. The position he took was one that Snape knew sentries practiced, to remain unmoving as long as possible. He gazed into the distance, and Merlin alone knew what he was thinking about. His eyes shone, but his face gave no clue.

The memory ended there, since Dumbledore was well-satisfied that he and Lily had accomplished their purpose, and he had no reason to stay longer.

Snape found himself back in his own office, the Pensieve Potion floating dangerously off to the side. His wandless magic had arisen and flared out around him, and was prepared to drop the bottle if he wanted it to. It would shatter all over the floor, and there would go the memories that tortured him so, the memories that weren't even his and which he could tell no one he had seen.

Snape sat down, though he let his magic hover the bottle over the floor to wear itself out, and calmly wrote his conclusions into place. They started with an exact account of the memory first, much aided by the year he'd spent as a spy, training his mind into recalling many details that no one else would have even noticed; on such small things did survival in the Dark Lord's service depend. Then Snape added a note at the end, in the place where he always put what that particular test or piece of abuse had been meant to accomplish with Harry.

They trained him to be afraid of things that feel good.

Snape did snap the quill after that, and allowed his magic to set it on fire, because there was nothing else that he could have done to ease the crowding pressure. That made the bottle of the Pensieve Potion start to fall, though, and he had to put out a hand hastily to catch it before it hit the floor.

Snape sat at the head table on the morning of the twentieth of June, the day before the Third Task, and watched Harry sitting with Draco as if he hadn't a care, moving one hand in a gesture that made Draco pretend to cower and then burst out laughing. Harry joined him. It was a wonder that he could laugh, nearly a miracle, and it added the final hammer blow to the iron will Snape had been forging for himself throughout the last few months.

In silence he'd borne it, though he knew Harry had suspected something was wrong from the flashes of temper he'd displayed these last months. He'd been angry again and again that he couldn't simply go out and take revenge on the Potters and Dumbledore, but he'd promised. The iron will was as much to restrain himself as it was to bind him to his most crucial task.

It all only confirmed that vow he had made months ago, before he began thoroughly investigating the memories in the Pensieve Potion.

So long as he could best help by making sure that Harry was protected, then he would do that. Harry needed to trust him, and his trust would be broken if Snape even spoke to him about punishing the people who had abused him.

If the moment ever came when Harry was in danger from Lily and James and Dumbledore again, and could not protect himself, then Snape would move.

To hell with whether he hates me after that, he thought, each word a distinct, ringing strike on the surface of his mind. He has come through too much, survived too much. I will not let them take that away and reverse his progress, even if Harry wants me to.

Better he hate me and be able to laugh like that than to love me and be silent.