Chapter Seven:

Memory Date: 31-10-1980

Location: The Potter Residence, Godric's Hollow

Harry watched as the familiar scene of Severus curled around his mother's corpse rocking with her madly as if trying to revive her corpse, her beautiful locks of red hair flowing over his shoulder, rippling with his every gut-wrenching sob. His eyes watered once more as he looked on as the once figure of hate and mistrust and fear mourned Lily Potter's exit from this world with unspeakable and inconsolable sorrow.

"I can't watch this again, Morgana." Harry muttered to his companion, who was clutching her arms around her body, highly perturbed by her father's anguish.

"My father did not present you with the full memory – he only gave you the snippet you needed to defeat Voldemort. You will watch the rest. If I can watch my father, the strongest man I've ever known, who never bat an eye at torture or the many sins he was forced to commit whilst protecting you, in this state you can watch what happens next."

Harry was about to respond to her snarling comment when he heard a whoosh followed by a graceful step puncture the constant din of Severus' sobbing.

"Oh, my heart."

Severus looked round at the other voice, coming face-to-face with his wife. "They're dead. I got here too late. The child…lives."

Hermione turned from Severus to glance at the crib in the corner. There was no sign of the Potter boy at first, so she approached hesitantly. Once she was close enough to peer down into the child's bed, she saw the young brown-haired baby with his mother's famed emerald eyes and a lightning bolt scar on his forehead. He was curled up in his blanket with his thumb adorably in his mouth, his eyes red from crying. Hermione knelt to scoop him up, blanket and all, into her arms and she began to sway as she checked the unfortunate orphan for injuries.

"She looks so natural with me. I can't believe she was the first person to hold me after my parents died." Harry whispered, unable to take his eyes off his adult best friend with her arms wrapped around him as a baby.

Morgana smiled at him, "She was. She used to tell me she could never resist you or papa in pain and that was the first of many where both of you were suffering so intensely neither of you could cope. Obviously, as a baby you don't really remember the pain, you barely remembered the memory until your third year."

Hermione deposited Harry back in his crib and patted him softly for a minute or two to send him off to sleep, the little one having exhausted himself with his untended crying. She knew there was someone else she needed to tend and then they had to leave the Potter house before Albus and inevitably others descended on the macabre site.

Dropping to her knees behind her husband, still keening for his lost first love and holding her tight to his chest, Hermione placed her chin gently on Severus' shoulder and rocked with him before enfolding him in her arms, subtly coaxing him away from Lily's cold corpse and into her own warmth. Slowly, gradually, Severus loosened his grip on Lily and leant back into Hermione's open embrace.

"I failed her, Hermione, I believed Riddle when he promised to leave her be. I am a fucking fool and now she's dead."

Hermione turned him towards her, resting his weight on her lap, and crooned, "Hush, my love, there was nothing, nothing anybody could have done. The Potters are dead and it's awful, tragic and such a damn waste, but there's nothing we can do here. Dumbledore will be on his way and we cannot be found here."

"She's not suggesting they leave me behind?! On my own?" Harry interjected.

"Shut up and watch – you know you survive this night, you cretin!" Morgana snapped back.

"Tom Riddle has marked him – the scar – and I do not believe this is the last of Riddle. He'll be back, Severus, and when he is there will be war unlike none before. And this, this child foretold in the prophecy will be the saviour of the wizarding world. He'll be in danger until he can win the coming war."

"Voldemort is dead, Hermione. Remember, neither can live while the other survives! The boy is here, alive, breathing unlike his mother! So, Riddle is dead! There is no coming war." Severus bit back.

"Alas, I believe your wife is correct, m'boy." A voice uttered from the shadows.

Hermione's hand moved for her wand, but Severus held it fast.

"Your gifts – as well as my own – are apparently fading, old man. I expected you to arrive here before me."

Albus Dumbledore emerged from the hallway and smiled sadly down at the couple sat beside Lily Potter on the floor. As he started to approach the crib, a slight hand wrapped around his wrist.

"Leave him, Dumbledore," Hermione ordered, "he's unharmed and he is asleep. His world will be turned on its head soon enough. Let him take one final rest in his own crib before you send him away."

"Quite right, Madam Snape, quite right." Albus said, nodding his head.

"Who is coming for the boy? Black, I assume."

Albus winced, "No, Severus. Black will not be assuming custody – in fact he has been taken into custody. He betrayed the Potters and will serve a life sentence in Azkaban. Furthermore, because our sweet Lily sacrificed herself for Harry, she left behind powerful blood magic that will serve him well as a first line of defence. This magic can only survive to protect him if he is with her blood relatives, so I am forced to entrust his care to Lily's sister."

"Petunia?! She loathes magic, Albus! Who can predict how the boy will grow up if left to her? There must be another way. Spinner's End perhaps…with Morgana"

"No!"

Harry turned with Albus and Severus to look at Hermione in shock. He couldn't have heard her correctly. She couldn't have just said no to her husband's proposal of giving him a magical, a better home. Yet, he had grown up under Petunia's thumb, but why, if Snape of all people wanted to adopt him?

"Why doesn't she want me?" Harry almost cried to Morgana.

Morgana Snape felt the same sorrow in that moment as the man beside her. She hadn't realised how close she had been in that moment to growing up side-by-side with the boy in whose shadow she had grown up. They could have been companions rather than a younger version of her mother. She never knew it was even a possibility, or that it had ever been suggested, especially by her father.

"I don't know," Morgana whispered, "but I'm sure she's about to tell them."

"My love," Hermione crooned at her husband, "Voldemort will return. Look around you, there is no body, no ashes where he stood, nothing. He simply fled beyond pursuit like the true coward he is, but he will return. His loyal followers are still out there, and his credo still endures. What Harry Potter needs is to live a Muggle life and be protected by the magic his mother died to create around him. I hope with all my heart that his aunt, as awful as you make her out to be, will find it in her to love him for the innocent child he is and then, when he is eleven, it will be our job to protect him. He cannot grow up around Morgana, a child no one outside this room knows exists. It would put the both of them in untenable peril, for if one were discovered and hunted, then so would the other be and we would lose them both."

Severus nodded sombrely, "Very well. The child goes to Petunia. But."

Hermione gulped as she looked into her husband's eyes at the sinister tone his 'but' had. What she saw there was an abject warning and a severe mistrust she had not seen since the early days of her pregnancy. It terrified her in that moment.

"On your head be it, wife." Severus finished.

"Bloody hell," Morgana interjected, "I've never, ever seen papa look at mama like that. He looks almost murderous."

Harry replied, "Well, he had just lost his first love and 'Mione just suggested shipping me off to the people who abused me and starved me for fourteen years of my life. Oddly, at this point, I'm well on his side."

Morgana smiled, "Good. That means you're starting to get all this."

"He's not much older than Morgana. After all this, after all this death and sacrifice, after all our efforts, she will still grow up in a world where Riddle is still at large. I thought the prophecy over. I was a fool. How could a baby defeat the evilest wizard in history?! It will be years – decades even – before the boy is primed to take on such an enemy and emerge victorious. Voldemort's followers will have their chances to eliminate him from the moment he is introduced to magical society. Hermione, you say we will protect him once he enters Hogwarts, but how? We cannot be everywhere all the time with him. Having two adults – one a professor, no less – trailing him about will make him more of a target, not to mention us."

"Uh oh." Harry moaned.

Morgana smiling cryptically, "Ha! He gave her the idea!"

In the moment after Severus finished, Hermione began to tremble as she was overcome by joyless cackles and harrowing sobs all at once.

"What is it, Madam Snape?" Albus asked, tentatively touching the hysterical woman on the elbow.

"I know what has to be done," she replied, wiping the unwelcome tears from her cheeks, "and what I'm prepared to do for Morgana and for Harry Potter but neither of you are going to like it."

"Well do not keep us in suspense, woman." Snape barked and thankfully could not hear the Harry laugh at the familiar bite in his tone.

"While Harry is a student at Hogwarts, I and I alone will be by his side and will help him learn all he needs to and survive to spell the end of Voldemort and his followers."

Harry and Morgana could only watch as Dumbledore's eyes pierced his half-moon spectacles and bore into Hermione's resolute expression, attempting to divine her meaning and Severus' face reflected more confusion than his daughter or former student had ever beheld on his erudite features.

"And, pray tell," he bit back with grating sarcasm dripping from his serpentine tongue, "how would a grown woman and a mother with a child of her own to parent whom the Potter boy will not know from Eve sitting in on his first year Charms or sleeping in a fourth-year boys' dormitory work? Merlin's beard, if being raised by Petunia Evans does not qualify Potter for lifelong therapy, your plan will! Then, where will the world be?! Yes, Hermione, let's send a barmy teenager into battle with a psychopathic wizard with severe megalomaniac tendencies and watch as the world disintegrates around us and our daughter! I'll agree with you on one point, however."

"Yes?"

"I don't like your idea one bit."

Morgana smiled at her parents' back-and-forth, "This is more like it. They used to scrap like this when the Triwizard Tournament was going on. Mama used to say she had leftover teenage hormones and sometimes they made her say crazy things to papa. The arguments were hysterical to listen to, though neither knew I was eavesdropping. They'd always make up at the end of it though."

Harry heard the wistfulness in Morgana's tone and sympathised. He would have given anything to have some memories of his own parents while they were living before he had begun the odyssey through the Snapes' memories with their daughter. He had simply never thought to ask Sirius or Remus but now, he saw the pain in her auburn eyes and knew it was the same near-madness he had experienced when he discovered the Mirror of Erised.

The pair turned their attention back to the goings-on in Harry's old nursery and watched as the Snapes continued to snipe at each other as Dumbledore watched, half amused, half weary.

"Severus, will you just let me finish?!" Hermione snapped.

"I will when you can say something remotely on par with your above average intelligence."

"Enough!" Dumbledore interjected, Severus' last compliment to his wife thinly veiled as an insult being the final straw. "Hermione dear, if you have more to add that paints a clearer picture of your plans for young Harry here who must be going shortly to his new home, I advise you to tell us now."

She nodded dourly, "I was going to say…I have no intention of being a grown woman following Harry Potter through his life. I know a way I can join him as a girl his own age."