Author note #1: I'd just like to put it out there that I'm going to university in a couple weeks, so preparations for that are currently taking up the majority of my time; and, of course, once school actually starts, my writing time will dwindle even more. I can't yet give an estimate of how frequent chapters will be come September, but I will endeavour to update at least every 7-10 days. I imagine this will be easier when I'm describing events from the actual books, and as such, my goal is to wrap up the "prologue" before the end of this month. (I also have Harry's arrival at Hogwarts through the troll incident already written, which will help immensely.) All right, sorry, I'm done babbling. Onwards.

Author note #2: I hope that you enjoy this chapter. Please review!

Guest: Don't worry about the length, I always love long reviews. I think the Order meeting might be getting into some grey area between canon and AU, but I felt like we heard little enough about that time period that I could justify it, or at least get away with it. I wrote it mostly because I was interested in writing it. The thing about the Longbottoms being in hiding as well had somehow completely slipped my mind. I made a small adjustment to the previous chapter; thanks for bringing that up. As for Alice's maiden name, I couldn't find any official information on it, so Fortescue is just what I came up with. To add to your speculations, Dumbledore explicitly tells Harry near the end of Order of the Phoenix that the prophecy was made before he was born. So no getting around that one. I, too, thought that Sirius was the original Secret Keeper and they switched later. If Pettigrew had been spying for a year already, then October 1981 seems to make the most sense for when they changed it, although after a whole year has passed and they're all still safe, it seems odd to me that they'd suddenly decide Sirius was too obvious a choice. If Severus had known that Sirius wasn't a Death Eater, you'd think that he'd also know Pettigrew was one, and even if he were bitter enough to knowingly let an innocent man rot for a decade in Azkaban, I imagine he would have wanted Pettigrew caught. To be honest, I never understood why Dumbledore just let Sirius go to Azkaban, even with the stunt that Pettigrew pulled. But anyway…. Thanks for another great review!

SheilaRegulusBlack: Thank you!

Warnings: Swearing

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I referenced pages 544-545 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows while writing this.

The Boy Who Lived

It was October again, marking one year since Severus had begged Dumbledore to save the Potters, to save Lily. Severus felt like it might as well have been a decade.

The death of the Prewetts in March seemed to have set a trend of bad luck for the Light. A much-respected wizard named Caradoc Dearborn had gone missing during combat—his body had never been recovered—and was presumed dead; Auror Moody had lost a leg and an eye, the latter for which he'd gotten a magical glass replacement, which had a disconcerting tendency to look around the room on its own accord; and except for Amelia and her baby niece Susan, the entire Bones family had been murdered, as well as the McKinnons.

The Dark Lord had eventually decided that it was too risky to send his spy into the fray of battle, and as such, Severus hadn't participated in any raids in months. This did not, however, mean that he was uninformed. Because he had connections on both sides, it was quite the opposite: He got to hear about each raid twice. Lucius was particularly enthusiastic about telling his friend what he had missed, providing blow-by-blows of everything that Severus neither wanted nor needed to know.

Severus was still keeping the Dark Lord's suspicion at bay. Being accomplished in the Mind Arts himself, Dumbledore had helped Severus strengthen his Occlumency shields, which proved to be great incentive for success, as he didn't particularly want the Headmaster rummaging around his head. Dumbledore had also taught him how to modify memories. This had spared him a lot of extra pain on one particularly memorable occasion, when he had planted false information and was subsequently able to show the Dark Lord a false memory to back up the story, to prove that he hadn't willingly misled his master, he had just been misinformed by the other side.

In an ironic twist of fate, Severus found himself using many of the skills unwittingly taught to him by his very muggle father to help deceive the muggle-hating Dark Lord: coming up with believable lies on the spot, interpreting body language, facial expressions, and vocal inflections, noticing patterns and acting pre-emptively… living with Tobias had taught him all of these things. It seemed that the bastard had been good for something. Then again, his rotten childhood might have been the reason he'd gotten into this situation in the first place.

But Severus didn't have time to wallow. He was too busy working on potions and spells and not dying. Regardless of his success, the fear of being a double agent, of knowing that his life was constantly on the line, never completely abated, he simply got better at managing it; or, in other words, he got better at pretending that anything which remotely resembled an emotion didn't exist. He was quite good at being apathetic. He got a lot of practice.

Severus was scribbling notes in the margins of a potions book when he suddenly became aware of a lack of tingling in his left forearm. The Dark Mark was, of course, no ordinary tattoo; even when the Dark Lord wasn't calling, it produced a faint hum of magical energy. It had taken Severus over a year to notice this, but once he had, it had entered his hyperawareness.

Frowning, he set down his quill and pulled back the black fabric of his shirtsleeve—the memory of a younger Lucius Malfoy doing the exact same thing flashed through his mind. His eyebrows rose when he saw the Mark, which had turned from jet black to a faded red.

He picked up his quill, but instead of resuming his note-taking, summoned a blank piece of parchment.

"L,

Mark has faded. What is happening?

SS"

He promptly sent the pithy letter off with the owl that he had bought shortly after moving into the house on Spinner's End. Then he began to pace. What did this mean? Severus's instinct told him that the fading of the Mark wasn't intentional, although where that impression came from, he didn't know either. Perhaps he should have contacted Albus Dumbledore first.

It took exactly twenty minutes for Lucius to respond. Severus knew, because he had been glancing at the clock every ten seconds.

The message was a single line: "It has yet to be confirmed, but they say that the Dark Lord is gone."

"It is true." Dumbledore's Patronus had reached Severus not long after Lucius's letter. "Come to Hogwarts" was all that the silvery phoenix had said.

"How?"

"He attacked the Potters. James and Lily are dead. His third Killing Curse rebounded and struck him."

Time seemed to stop. Severus suddenly felt a strange weightlessness, like he was disconnected from his body, and especially his brain, like he couldn't understand what he had just heard. It couldn't be true. The Potters were safe. Lily was safe. Dumbledore had put the family under Fidelius Charm, it should have been foolproof…. He sank into the chair in front of Dumbledore's desk, feeling like his leg muscles had ceased to exist.

He slumped forwards, gripping the edge of the desk. He had caused this. Lily Evans had befriended him, defended him, put up with his sullenness and his snark. In return, he had called her a—the word sickened him now—and then made her the obsession of a powerful Dark wizard. She was—had been—kind, intelligent, beautiful, brilliant, and he had joined the Death Eaters, and given the Dark Lord the prophecy, and the Dark Lord had killed her. He had killed her.

His head hit the desk with a dull thud. All semblance of composure gone, he was barely aware of the anguished sound that ripped from his throat, some amalgamation of a sob and an animalistic scream.

After a moment, he raised his head to look at Dumbledore, who still stood above him and whose face gave nothing away.

"I thought… you were going… to keep her"—there was an extra long pause—"safe."

"She and James put their faith in the wrong person," Dumbledore said grimly. "Rather like you, Severus. Weren't you hoping that Lord Voldemort would spare her?"

Severus squeezed his eyes shut and felt some tears escape from beneath his eyelids. He wasn't sure if his lungs were working properly or not. How could he have forgotten that? He had been busy with the war, as they had all been, but how could anything pertaining to Lily and her safety ever get pushed to the background of his mind? His guilt increased. Not that it matters….

"Her boy survives."

No response.

"Her son lives. He has her eyes, precisely her eyes. You remember the shape and colour of Lily Evans's eyes, I am sure?"

The use of Lily's maiden name got through to him. "Don't!" he shrieked. "Gone… Dead…."

"Is this remorse, Severus?"

"I wish… I wish I were dead…."

"And what use would that be to anyone? If you loved Lily Evans, if you truly loved her, then your way forward is clear."

These words, too, seemed like they were in a foreign language and took Severus a while to understand. Finally, he asked, "What- what do you mean?"

"You know how and why she died. Make sure it was not in vain. Help me protect Lily's son." Dumbledore's face was still inscrutable.

"He does not need protection. The Dark Lord has gone-"

"-The Dark Lord will return, and Harry Potter will be in terrible danger when he does."

Yet again, he was silent. "The Dark Lord will return," echoed in his head. There was no mistaking the Headmaster's certainty. He knew that Dumbledore was not infallible, but Severus's gut was telling him the same thing. He wanted to ignore the idea. It scared him.

"Very well," he said, collecting himself. "Very well. But never- never tell, Dumbledore! This must between us! Swear it! I cannot bear… especially Potter's son…"

He was at a loss for how to articulate or explain it, the desire he had to keep his motivations a secret, this terrible desperation to protect the vulnerable part of himself, which felt like it might be broken now, especially from the son of his childhood nemesis.

"I want your word!"

Something in Dumbledore's expression softened. "My word, Severus, that I shall never reveal the best of you?" He sighed. Severus held his gaze. "If you insist."

On the thirty-first of October, the wizarding world celebrated; on the first of November, the Aurors began rounding up Death Eaters. Severus himself spent two days in a cell in Azkaban, ruminating over his part in Lily's death and his bad life choices in general, wishing more and more that the Dementors would just suck out his soul and get it over with already.

And then Dumbledore pulled some strings, and they released him. There were plenty of people unhappy about this, but Dumbledore was very firm in his testament that Severus was a spy.

A week later saw him back in the Headmaster's office.

"Tell me, Severus," said Dumbledore, peering at the young man over his half-moon spectacles, an action that Severus had begun to associate with scheming of some sort, "what are your plans now that Voldemort is gone?"

The Dark Lord was dead enough that his name didn't cause the Mark to burn.

Severus shrugged. "Make potions," he said listlessly. "Maybe see if I can get a job at St. Mungo's, although I doubt the demand for ex-Death Eaters is high."

"You could teach."

"Teach?" he repeated incredulously.

Dumbledore leaned back. "Horace Slughorn informed me that he is going to retire. I will need somebody to take his place. And you did apply for a job, after all."

Severus let out a humourless laugh. That felt like a lifetime ago, and anyway, it had been a ruse. Besides, he didn't want to teach Potions. If anything, he would have liked to teach Defence Against the Dark Arts, and he said as much.

"Ah, yes, well, I am not so inclined to give you the Defence post."

"Why not?"

"I have my reasons." Dumbledore obviously wasn't going to elaborate.

Severus presumed it was because Dumbledore figured that he'd had enough exposure to the Dark Arts. There was the supposed curse, which caused each teacher to leave after one year—Severus had always done well in Defence, despite the spotty instruction, and had thus paid little attention to the rapid-cycling of teachers—but it seemed unlikely that the Headmaster was trying to protect him from that.

"I hardly think that I am an appropriate person to fill the position."

"You are a Potions Master. I hear that you achieved your mastery summa cum laude. I would say that you are highly qualified to teach Potions."

"I am a criminal."

"You were acquitted, on the basis of being a spy."

"Children send me into anaphylactic shock."

Dumbledore's blue eyes twinkled at that one. The old man seemed to find it amusing.

"You can observe Horace's lessons until you take over. Some exposure might take the edge off of your allergy."

"I'm not getting a choice here, am I?" Severus asked, pinching the bridge of his nose.

"Of course you get a choice, Severus," Dumbledore said cheerily, "you could always go back to Azkaban instead."

He paled. Dumbledore had demanded his help with protecting the Potter boy, which he definitely couldn't do from prison; Dumbledore wasn't going to retract his statement to the court if Severus didn't join the Hogwarts faculty. Still, the idea was enough to make him nervous.

"When exactly is Slughorn retiring?"

"The end of this term. I will have a contract for you then." The Headmaster gave him a wide smile. "Sherbet lemon?"