Back again for some KS/SS! I know it's been ages. Just to recap, this is another fic which HBP rendered AU. I fell into the fanon trap of having dear Severus as pureblood minor aristocracy with an unpleasant father, Tristan. Hey, I was close, it began with T.

…….

Kingsley had showered, drunk his coffee and was donning his outer robes by the time the figure in the bed stirred and looked up at him.

"Morning," he said cheerily. Snape blinked and stretched.

"What time is it?" he asked, leaning up and experimentally brushing his fingers over the damaged skin on his arm. He was pleased to note that it barely twinged anymore.

"Ten to eight," Kingsley told him, putting on his watch. "Do you want a coffee before I go?"

"Go?" Severus queried blearily. He sat up straight when he noticed his lover was wearing his auror's robes and apparently making preparations to leave for the Ministry. "They surely are not forcing you to go back to work already? You ought to be permitted more recovery time!"

Kingsley sighed, having already had this argument with himself twenty minutes earlier.

"There's a lot to be done. No one has asked me to go in, but with everyone rushed off their feet the least I can do is go and shuffle some paperwork around. I figured that if I'd come home if I felt ill."

Severus nodded, immediately sympathetic with the need to keep busy. He felt slightly guilty that the only task he had been assigned so far since the end of the war was coordinating the acceptance letters for new batch of first years and leaving them on McGonagall's desk. He had gone from being a warrior to a teacher in the space of a few days, though he was certainly not the only one finding the adjustment between his wartime and peacetime roles unsettling.

Unsettling, not unpleasant.

He got up and hunted around for his clothes so he could head back to school and do something pedestrian and un-earthshattering like brewing a batch of anti-histamine salve for Poppy.

"Oh, I almost forgot," Kingsley mentioned as he bowed Severus through the fireplace. "Mad-eye called a second ago. He said he'd have something to tell you later this afternoon."

Preoccupied with the day ahead, neither man noticed that they had not kissed each other goodbye.

…….

Compiling full Veritaserum statements from the captured Death Eaters would take weeks to complete, as the Ministry was desperate for as much information as possible. Inside the twisted minds of these hated individuals lay the tools for their own prosecution, as well as the explanations behind some of the most heinous crimes history had ever seen. Several families were desperate to discover what had happened to loved ones who had been found dead or obliviated for no apparent reason, or even worse, simply vanished never to be found at all.

Catalogues of horror tumbled from resentful mouths as the aurors worked around the clock to gather evidence. Puzzle pieces from past mysteries fell into place just as often as entirely new outrages were revealed. More than one Ministry employee had been found dead from a self-administered potions 'accident' since word began to spread that no stone would be left unturned.

Moody referred to it as 'crossing the 'I's and dotting the 'T's.

It was during these endless sessions of questioning that Mad-eye learned from a defeated and broken Avery exactly how the late Tristan Snape had become involved in Voldemort's plans.

"You want to see the memory, Snape, or will the transcript do you?" he snapped through the floo, more irritable than usual after five days of catching the bare minimum sleep on the lumpy sofa in the Azkaban human guards' break room, uncomfortable but not prepared to miss a beat for such a puerile reason as relaxation.

"The transcript will be fine," Severus grunted, in no hurry to see his former dorm-mate whimpering out dark secrets while manacled to the dank walls of that place.

"Fine. For your eyes only then, Snape. Not even your boyfriend has access to this yet, so don't give him a reason to slip up and land in shite with the Classified Info Squad," he copied three pages from the sheaf of parchments in front of him and thrust them through the flames. Sensible of the great favour Moody was granting him by doling out confidential information months before it would be made public, Severus expressed as much gratitude as his personality would allow, which was probably about as much as the old auror was capable of accepting.

"Cheers," he muttered.

"Mm," nodded Moody, and disappeared.

It was the last week of the eventful summer holiday and Severus decided to enjoy a final fling of lassitude before the harsh regimentation of boarding school took over his life again. Changing into his nightclothes at five o'clock in the afternoon simply because he could, he flopped back into bed with the enlightening documents and fumbled under the pillow for a bag of pistachio nuts he had been keeping there in case of emergencies. Balancing the paper on his knees, he cracked the first shell and began to read.

Avery had been in Ontario, on the trail of a dark witch who was rumoured to have developed an incantation which removed the automatic curse damning drinkers of unicorn blood. Voldemort had been very interested in her findings, having convinced himself that the reason he kept losing confrontations with Harry Potter was because the strength of the boy's purity and capability for love gave him an advantage over the indelible taint dogging the unicorn-slayer.

Naturally, the witch was rather secretive about her unsavoury discovery and had Avery chasing all over North America before he found even the vaguest link with her. The link was a seventy-seven year old British wizard who, according to Avery's source, travelled from his home in California to meet with the woman in the wizarding district of Toronto once a week for an illegal medical treatment. Money changed hands, a covert rendezvous was arranged and Avery found himself drinking in a bar with the patient, Tristan Snape.

Voldemort had been thrilled to make contact with his old friend after all these years. Remembering the cunning brain of the boy he had known and the reported bloodcurdling cursing ability of the adult, he ordered Avery to get Tristan on board, delighted at the prospect of adding another powerful dark wizard to his coterie. Tempted by his school chum's gold, which he believed would go a long way towards acquiring the shady potions keeping him alive, Tristan came home to England for the first time in twenty-five years.

If the Dark Lord had been expecting a new lieutenant or kindred spirit, he was sorely disappointed at the return on his investment. The old man's hands shook so badly that no one within five miles was safe when he cast a spell. Years of heavy drinking and disregarding his health had left Snape senior frail and bent, the whites of his eyes yellow and his sharp brain limping bluntly a few seconds behind every conversation. More irritating to Voldemort was his inability to grasp the significance of the war they were waging, or to remember that he ought to use the title 'Master' instead of 'Tom' or – horror of horrors – the old endearment 'Riddikulus'.

After these flaws were discovered, poor Tristan ended up as a kind of dogsbody, performing only the most insignificant tasks. It was Avery's belief that the single reason he was not executed at once for incompetence was the Dark Lord's need for all the troops he could get leading up to the final battle. Setting him to work brewing the tea or dusting the throne room in the Riddle house freed up Wormtail for other duties. Such as kidnapping Harry Potter.

Voldemort cursed himself for letting the 'old moron' (the fate of the first person to remind him that he and Snape were precisely the same age ensured that no one else was so foolish) near his treasured prisoners. Then he cursed everyone else. He had assumed that instructing him to take a jug of Veritaserum-laced water to the cell was simple enough for even his diminished intelligence to handle. He had been wrong. Tristan had pulled enough of his old magical power from wherever the alcohol had entombed it to deliberately drop the wards and let Potter and the squib escape.

His only attempt at justification had been to inexplicably squeal,

"But it was Bella!" Which unfortunately led Mrs Lestrange to think he was trying to shift the blame onto her and to blast him with such a strong series of Cruciatus curses that he was dead in under two minutes.

Severus collapsed back against the pillows as it all fell into place.

Automatically cracking nuts and flicking the shells at the opposite wall, where they struck the wardrobe door with a satisfying 'click', he tried to decide which aspect of Avery's story was the saddest. There was the image he had conjured of a pathetic old man shuffling around Death Eater headquarters, trying to make himself useful and failing miserably. It was hard to reconcile this person with either the memory of the stern and powerful father of his childhood, or with the romantic love of Mrs Figg's life. Judging by the state he had been in, things had not been much easier for Tristan once he left his hated English responsibilities behind.

Then there was the reason he had agreed to join Voldemort. Had he bothered to investigate the most rudimentary facts about Severus's life, he would have realised that his son would have been perfectly capable of creating the dark potions keeping him alive. Any former student would have hazarded with little persuasion that Professor Snape would not object to supplementing his teacher's salary with the odd clandestine, no-questions-asked commission. Instead he had gone to hedge-witches and sold himself to a madman in the mistaken belief that he could make it all better.

Alone in his room, Severus gave a single harsh cough of laughter. That last part sounded uncomfortably familiar.

When Moody and Dumbledore had schemed behind his back (as he liked to describe it) and decided to stop sending him on spying missions six months ago, he had been irritated at the apparent slight. Albus explained kindly that he believed the situation to be too dangerous to risk his colleague's safety any longer. Mad-eye had sneered about him knowing too many secrets to be allowed free access to the enemy. With the headmaster still in the room, Moody hinted that this concern sprang from the possibility of Snape being discovered and tortured into telling all; once they were alone he revealed his real reason. The conviction that the slippery turncoat would inevitably defect back to the other side.

At the time, Severus had seen it as a painful humiliation. Now, he was rather glad. Of all the circumstances in which he had dreamed of rediscovering his estranged father, grovelling beside him at the feet of the same dark lord was not his favourite scenario. He had seen the frail corpse in St Mungo's morgue. It had been something of a mercy that he had not met the living shadow which Tristan had become before his faux pas with Bellatrix Lestrange.

Then there was the really uncomfortable part. Recalling what Potter had told Kingsley, Tristan had given his life – what was left of it - to save Arabella Figg. The man who had never shown a moment's fondness for his own son had effectively killed himself for love.

Severus used his newly confident and rational mind to draw the conclusion that he was quite justified in being upset on discovering that the parent he had written off as incapable of love, had actually just been incapable of loving him.

That hurt.

An entire bag of nuts and a few dozen 'clicks' against the door later, he had fathomed it successfully. Tristan's world, before becoming a fugitive at least, had been fractured into two distinct halves. Love and Duty. Love had been living with his mistress Bella Micklethwaite, freedom from all responsibilities, joy and peace every day. Then on his brother's death, Duty had taken over. Duty meant living in the formal family home, marriage to a stranger, a thousand rules of how to conform to polite society, learning how to be something he was not. The heir he had created at the demand of his parents had not been conceived through Love, but through Duty. To Tristan, having Severus was as much of a chore as dressing for dinner. He must have abandoned the whole torture chamber of son, wife, castle, society, the explosive day of his flight without a single backward glance.

Reaching the end of his pistachios, Snape smirked sourly at the thought of Potter, saved once again by that power which the Dark Lord knew not, even if it was indirectly.

It would all be so simple now, to lay the blame for his own many mistakes at his father's door. He had the perfect garnish for his usual arsenal of excuses for becoming a Death Eater: bullied at school, ugly, lonely, misunderstood, from a broken home, ignored by his bitter mother and now the crowning glory – Daddy had never loved him. Snape knew that he should not be amused, but the hisses of twisted laughter came and kept on coming until he had to stop to catch his breath.

What a psyche-wizard's cliché I am, he sighed.

…….

At the auror's office in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Kingsley stayed behind in the Briefing Room after yet another meeting to consolidate the individual testimonies of the three Death Eaters who had murdered Dudley, Petunia and Vernon Dursley.

Despite the gallons of Veritaserum pouring in through the gates of the prison, there were still numerous discrepancies in the information being collected. It seemed that like beauty, truth also existed in the eye of the beholder, unfortunately generating mountains more paperwork for Kingsley. He had no right to complain, however, scaling the Himalayas threatening to completely overgrow his desk-space was a picnic compared with digging the dirt to build them from Azkaban.

Michael Ivetsy had put forward an interesting theory and Shacklebolt was noting it down in full before he could get caught up in another issue and forget it, when someone rapped their knuckles on the doorframe of the otherwise deserted room.

"I'll be two seconds, I'm just finishing something off," he murmured, without halting his hasty scribbling.

"Sorry," said a voice Kingsley could not quite place. He looked up to see Percy Weasley standing on the threshold.

"Oh, hello!" he smiled. "How are you doing?"

"Better than last time we spoke," he said wryly. He looked it, Kingsley thought, studying him. Outside St Mungo's the night his brother Bill had been grievously injured during the decoy battle in Little Hangleton, the young man had been pale and anxious, chain-smoking in the rain. Now he had the relieved air which many people were manifesting as a result of their delight at the end of the conflict. He seemed taller and stronger, with a hint of the mischief which the auror had noticed in the twins' blue eyes, but never before in his. "You offered then to take me for a drink. I know things are pretty busy up here, but if you have half an hour at some point I'd like to buy you a beer."

"That sounds like a fine idea," Kingsley smiled. "Is everything all right? I mean, nothing's worrying you?"

Percy hesitated.

"Nothing life-threatening. I'd just like a chat, if you don't mind."

"Not at all," the auror reassured him.

…….

Snape stood in the corridor outside the hospital wing wondering whether this was such a good idea.

He had continued to muse about his father's life and death, until he reached the conclusion that as Potter had been one of the last people to see him alive, he ought to speak to him about exactly what had happened at the end. Now he was not so certain this was wise. Did Severus really need to hear the impressions of an adolescent boy who had, while under extreme duress, witnessed a loving exchange between two much older people – one a hopeless Death Eater and the father of someone he hated, the other his cat-obsessed neighbour of almost fifteen years?

Not for the first time, the potion master's scientific curiosity overruled his common sense. There was no guarantee the brat would even agree to discuss it. He had to try.

Lupin was healing very slowly, but he and Potter had been bustling around the castle with the wheelchair, looking happy enough at having survived at all. The werewolf was living in a private room in the infirmary with Potter or Poppy in regular attendance. Snape grimaced. The impoverished wizard was probably exaggerating his injuries deliberately to prolong his right to regular meals and a warm bed.

The door to Lupin's room was ajar, so he cleared his throat as a warning before stepping inside.

"Good afternoon," he greeted.

Lupin was resting on the bed, propped up on pillows but not underneath the covers. He had no visible manifestations of the damage he had suffered, until he turned to Severus and tried to speak. It was clear that he was struggling to control his body. His head lolled limply on his chest, his eyes rolled back in their sockets and his shoulders jerked at random with the effort of concentration. His fists balled and pressed against his stomach, and when he finally gathered enough coordination to articulate, Snape had the impression that his tongue was four times it usual size and made not of muscle, but an unresponsive hard substance under the control of somebody else.

"Eh lo Shev…erush," he ground out at last.

Snape was glad his face's natural impassiveness did not register the shock he felt at seeing his old enemy in this state.

"I was looking for Potter," he said with his usual coolness. He waited while Lupin recommenced the intricate procedure and replied at length;

"Eesh noth ear," there were large gaps between each declaration, where irregular gasps of breath snatched themselves into his lungs, not respecting the structure of the sentence he was trying so hard to complete. "Shoult nobby long. Wouldya like toooo w..ait?"

No, thought Snape immediately, but that curiosity piqued again and he found himself sliding into the visitor's chair to find out more about the spells which had almost killed the werewolf.

"Thank you, Lupin. I understand you are out of danger now. Will you undergo more hospital treatment, or is it simply a matter of waiting for time to heal the damage?" He settled back in the seat and waited for the laborious response, reminding himself that he was in no hurry.

"Rrrregime of. Po…shun. Will havta take em fffforyears," Lupin screwed up his face, jerked an elbow in the air and finally managed to indicate the cabinet beside the bed. "In th…there. Donnnnn't knowthe namesh ov all ov em. Sure y…youdo."

Opening the cupboard, Snape was confronted with a shining array of bottles. Blue, red, yellow, turquoise, purple and clear crystal twinkled at him, the odd solid ceramic jars mingled in with them looking dull and stout in comparison. His trained eye recognised some seriously strong medications and he felt a flicker of grudging sympathy for Lupin. Having no wish to share it, he resumed his usual flat tone.

"You were always abysmal at potions. I suppose that with this little cocktail sloshing around inside you there is no question of taking any wolfsbane?" While the answer formed itself, Severus closed the cabinet and straightened up.

"H…arryyy!" yelped Remus, the question forgotten, or perhaps too complicated to process. Snape turned to see Potter leaning against the door, obviously having had the audacity to silently watch the awkward conversation for some time.

"Hello," the young man strolled in with an odd half smile on his face. "Hello, Professor."

"Pot…Mr Potter," Snape corrected himself halfway through.

"This is weird. I never thought that you…" the brat ran his fingers through his hair as he addressed his teacher. Snape raised an eyebrow in a way that would have made a first year whimper and Harry grinned sheepishly. "Sorry, Sir. It's just that everyone really patronises Remus because he has trouble speaking clearly since the attack. Oh, they don't mean to. Even Dumbledore gets this look on his face as though he's talking to a baby and tries to finish his sentences for him. Yet you've disliked Remus for decades and you are the only one talking with him properly. Treating him like a normal human being."

Unable to resist such a gift-wrapped opportunity to upset the pair of them at once, Snape assumed a mien of distaste.

"Weird indeed, Mr Potter, as I seem to be the only person aware of the fact that Lupin has not been a human being since the age of six."

Behind him, Lupin inhaled sharply with what may have been either surprise or amusement, but Severus did not turn to find out, preferring to watch outrage flood across Potter's features as the insult – or rather, the cold hard fact - sank in.

Then, without warning, Snape's nose exploded and a brick wall smacked into his back at high speed.

Blinking in confusion, it took a few seconds to register that he was actually lying on the infirmary floor with a broken nose.

"Ha…arryyyy!" shrieked Lupin with something akin to horror.

Only then did Snape realise that after years of torment, harassment, bullying and sniping, that single comment had finally pushed Potter over the edge and the little toad had punched him in the face. Rising to his feet with as much dignity as was possible under such circumstances, he fished a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped up some of the blood, glaring over the top of it at the boy.

Harry stood frozen in the attitude of landing the punch, his eyes wide as dinnerplates behind his round glasses, clearly not quite able to believe what he had just done.

"What on earth is going on here!" McGonagall's voice sliced through the tableau like Sectumsempra. Knowing how distorted his voice would be by the injury, Snape did not speak. Unfortunately neither did Potter. Lupin, obviously agitated by the shock of the event, made a series of indistinct squawks and waved his arms around helplessly. Not receiving a coherent response, Minerva drew her own conclusion, turning to the young man like a hawk spotting a rabbit. "Mr Potter, did you just strike the Deputy Headmaster?"

Harry regained control of himself.

"He deserved it!" he moaned. "He said Remus was…wait a second. Did you just call Snape the Deputy Headmaster?"

"Professor Snape," she corrected automatically. "And yes, Mr Potter, I did."

"Since when?" he sounded outraged and Severus felt a malicious thrill of delight that the Gryffindors had not yet bothered to tell their golden boy about the new staffing arrangement.

"Did Professor Dumbledore not mention his retirement, Harry?" she peered over the top of her glasses, face softening slightly.

"Yes. You're the Headmistress now. But I thought Flitwick…" he tailed off as she shook her head and corrected his nomenclature once more.

Snape levelled what he hoped was the most evil glare of his career at Potter as the realisation sunk in. Unable to hold back any longer, he risked sounding silly and nasal by issuing a polite threat from behind the hanky.

"I ab looking forward to next week, Mr Botter. This bromises to be an ideresting school year."

It was not his fault, Snape mused as he stalked back to the dungeons after letting Minerva fix his nose and generally fuss over him for a while. In the excitement he had quite forgotten about finding out his father's last movements. Perhaps fate had intervened in a highly improbable way and decided that he was better off not knowing. He smirked at the memory of Potter's face.

Potter had declared open hostilities and now it was up to him to respond. There would be no delicate dances around the Death Eater children or unsung support for the Order of the Phoenix to worry about this year, just the simple matter of teaching children and acquitting his deputy's and housemaster's duties. He would not have to shadow the boy-who-lived in case his flashy adventuring threatened to invalidate the title, nor spend each waking moment looking over his shoulder for Death in its many forms. This year, he could unashamedly devote himself to the little war which had been smouldering between him and Potter for the past six years. His head would be swollen even wider than normal from all the adulation since he bumped off the Dark Lord – it was obviously Snape's moral duty to burst the nauseating bubble, for the general good of humanity.

And the good of Potter, whispered a tiny voice inside his head. He grudgingly agreed. It was technically thanks to brat that he was free. Snape would repay the debt by keeping the young hero's feet on the ground in the harshest way possible. And he would have so much fun in the process.

Comforted by the realisation that though everything had changed since the end of the war, one thing at least was still the same, Severus began to plot a selection of direct and covert ways to annoy the hell out of Potter.

It was only when he sat down to an enormous plate of smoked salmon and cream cheese while sprawling on the floor of his chambers with the Daily Prophet crossword that he remembered someone he ought to have contacted during the day. Clue number 9-down, 'Shacklebolt, auror hero of the Battle of Diagon Alley, (8 letters)'. First letter 'K'. Ah.

He had not thought about Kingsley all day. He wondered what that signified. They had agreed, during the war, that when Severus was upset or needed anything he should go to his lover for help. But that had been when he was lost and clingy before the battle, before everything had changed, before the memory loss. They hadn't really discussed the change in the nature of their relationship brought about by the external circumstances, though it was obvious that it, and they as individuals, had changed enormously.

It was not the sort of conversation he relished. Perhaps they would have it another day.

He picked up his quill and filled in I-N-G-S-L-E-Y with a flourish.

…….

AN: Lots of change afoot now! Let's hope our boys can cope. Love to hear you views. Love SN x