Author's Note: There is one scene in this chapter that is not for the kiddies. It's not graphic but it's still disturbing. I thought you should be warned.

First Times, Second Chances

Chapter Eighteen: The Second Chance

He didn't think it was possible to reach the end of his patience but with two weeks of trying to survive with Draco Malfoy and Meri Potter, Severus had absolutely reached the end of his rope. Between Malfoy's sulking and Meri's retreat into herself, he was running out of time and ideas of how to rectify the problem. Draco was a lost cause and the least important of his problems. All he needed to do was keep the kid alive till the end of the war. That was if he could keep himself alive.

Meri ghosted into the cramped sitting room in yet another muggle hotel. He didn't even know where they were at the moment and hoped it was the same for any Death Eaters that may have been sent to track them. Meri sat down in a rickety chair and tucked her long legs underneath of her.

"How many times has he tried to summon you?"

"How many times has your mark burned?"

She pulled her left arm towards her and pressed it against her stomach. Severus grimaced inside. He should have known better than to mention her Dark Mark. She was already ghostly pale with sunken in eyes and now, due to his careless remark, she seemed even more withdrawn, if that was possible.

"Three times," he answered. "He's summoned me three times. And I daresay, he's not very happy. Voldemort will not take sixteen years of treachery very lightly."

Meri brightened somewhat. "You just said Voldemort."

"I was under the impression that was who we were speaking of."

"Yes, it was, but you said his name. No 'Dark Lord' or 'He Who Must Not Be Named' or anything. You just came out and said it."

He hadn't even realized what he had done but he felt a small rise of victory come to him. "He's no longer my Dark Lord."

She gave him a slight smile. "Good for you."

Severus cleared his throat, uncomfortable with the praise. "We need to get something to Harry."

"What?"

Severus reached down and pulled a bundle from underneath the couch. He unwrapped the worn canvas and held it out to Meri. She took the ruby encrusted handle with a sense of awe.

"It's the sword of Gryffindor. How did you get this, Sev?"

"Dumbledore hid it before he was…" he should have said murdered but he choked on the word. "killed. Before he was killed. I had a fake one made and gave it to Bellatrix to keep in her vault at Gringotts. When I told him that I was afraid I would have to leave my position as Headmaster, he told me to take the sword."

"How have you been hiding it?" she asked, handing it back to him.

He gave her a sardonic smile. "I don't wear oversized robes for no reason. When I came to your room to get you I had the sword strapped to my back under my traveling cloak."

"And with your posture, no one would have thought twice about your back being so straight."

It was the most lighthearted thing that she had said in the last few weeks and it gave him a spark of hope that perhaps she could put the events behind her and move on. But the cloudy, numb look came over her face once again. He sat there and watched her retreat further and further inside of herself for close to an hour. If he wasn't certain that she was so involved in whatever was running through her mind, he wouldn't have tried to infiltrate her mind at all. He just skimmed the surface, picking up the rush of memories that were being shuffled through her mind.

The first one was her and Lily in the Gryffindor Tower. Both girls were in their dressing gowns, Meri had a pleading look on her face while Lily's look thunderous.

"He said he's going to sleep out there all night!"

Lily tried to look disinterested. "Let him."

"It was a mistake, Lil. Look, I hate the term just as much as the next witch but it was bound to slip out with the people he has to hang round with."

"That's the point, Meri." Lily's angry face faded into one of concern. "He doesn't have to hang round with the people he does. He's always been interested in Dark Arts and he just refuses to give them up! I don't know what to do."

Meri seemed thoughtful for a moment. "Give him an ultimatum. Make him choose. I mean, if he's willing to sleep outside Gryffindor Tower until you go out there to talk to him, he has to choose you over those morons he calls friends."

"You think so?"

"Be tough."

Lily nodded resolutely and disappeared from the room. After a few minutes, she returned and Meri rushed towards her.

"Well?"

Lily swiped at her eyes. "I'm done. I can't keep trying to come up with excuses."

"He didn't apologize?"

"Oh, he tried." Lily sniffed and wiped her eyes again. "But he won't leave his friends. I even accused him of hanging out with wannabe Death Eaters and he didn't even deny it."

Meri looked crestfallen, as if she was expecting a different reaction from him. "I'm really sorry, Lil. I thought he would come around."

The scene shifted to her sitting in bed in a brightly painted bedroom. A twenty-something year old Remus Lupin was curled on his side, sleeping peacefully while Meri was reading a book. Judging from the looks of Lupin's coloring it was the day after a full moon. Even though nothing was spoken in this memory, Severus couldn't help but feel the contentment the permeated the memory.

Just as that memory was quiet, the next one was chaotic. Music, laughter and bright colors assaulted his eyes and he realized with a jolt he was at Lily and James' wedding. Meri and Lupin were dancing to a fast paced song and were making an impressive show of talent. Sirius danced up to them with Lily.

"Mind if I cut in?" Sirius asked Meri and Lupin. Lupin good-naturedly stepped back but Sirius grabbed him instead. Nonplussed by the act, Meri and Lily paired up and danced out the remaining portion of the song, or at least trying to in spite of the fact they were laughing so hard.

Another memory came to the surface and it took place in a small kitchen. Lily was very pregnant and seated at the table with James and Meri. All of them were laughing about something the memory cut out.

"Well," Meri said wiping her eyes and stifling a laugh, "if this little one has any siblings, watch out. When my parents brought me home from St. Mungos, this one," she pointed at James, "tried giving me away to anyone and everyone that graced out front stoop."

James looked indignant. "I was there first!" But then he burst out laughing as did the two women.

The memory shifted but not the location. It was still James and Lily's kitchen and Meri walked in on James and fussy baby Harry. There was shouting in the background and Meri looked annoyed.

"James, would you go out there and separate Peter and Sirius. They're fighting like children! I would have taken them over my knee and spanked them but I'm fairly certain that Peter would cry and Sirius would like it."

James turned a burst of laughter into a cough. "Here, take him. I'll go deal with the other two children."

Meri took the baby Harry who stopped crying the instant Meri had him in her arms. "Hey, kid. You know, you're the best behaved person in this house right now. You know that?"

The baby let out a squeal of laughter and Meri started rummaging through cupboards. "Where does your Daddy keep the fire whiskey?"

The next few memories went by in a blur and he was only able to make the bare essentials: one of her fights with Voldemort…Christmas at Lily and James'…Lupin's proposal…the news of Frank and Alice Longbottom being told to her…her standing in a gown shop in a wedding dress…the grief she felt at losing Lupin…the pain of the Dark Mark being burned into her arm…a piece of glass…

He broke the connection and jumped to his feet. "Give it to me!"

She looked up at him with confusion written all over her face. "What?"

"The piece of glass you have, you took it from the Malfoy's. Give it to me."

The confusion melted and morphed into anger. "You had no right to be in my mind!"

"I have every right to be in your mind right now! You've been wandering around here completely disconnected from everyone."

"Who am I going to connect to, Sev? Draco? An adolescent who doesn't know which end is up right now? Or perhaps you? A man who was trained to have a mental connection with me but refuses and keeps his mind under lock and key! So forgive me for not 'connecting' to anyone!"

"You want to see in my mind," he threatened. "You want to know why it's so important to me that you stay in one piece." Without pausing, he called up the conversation he had with Dumbledore just a few weeks ago, along with another memory that no one had ever had seen before, and with a mental push, shoved them into her mind.

He came back to Spinner's End immediately after his graduation from Hogwarts. He would stay one night before starting an apprenticeship in Diagon Alley at the apothecary. He opened the door and dropped his trunk in the small living room. Maybe he would get lucky and his father would trip over it in one of his drunken stupors.

"Mum? I'm home." He listened for any response but couldn't hear anything. He could have sworn she said she would meet him back at the house after the graduation. He checked the kitchen, which he found empty and then headed upstairs. Both bedrooms were empty which only left the bathroom. The cracked painted door was ajar but he knocked on it anyway.

"Mum? You alright?" The door opened and there she was in the bathtub, floating in red water, her eyes closed like she was sleeping. His father's metal razor floated in the water. He could tell from the grayish tinge of her skin that there was no way to bring her back. A door banged downstairs and he heard his father's voice come up the stairs.

"Eileen! Where's dinner?"

Meri reeled back from the memory, thankful she was already sitting down. She had no idea that was how Eileen Snape had killed herself. It made sense to her why Dumbledore would set him as her protector from herself now. He knew warning signs. He had suffered from it once and wouldn't want to live through it again, even if it was her.

"Especially if it was you."

"Why? You made it very obvious in the past that you hated me."

A variety of emotions played over his face, all of which she could see he was trying to push back and conceal. "I tried. Every time I saw you I thought of James. Both of you were great Quidditch heroes, brilliant in whatever you set your mind to and popular with all your peers. There were even people in my house that spoke of you in glowing terms."

"If I didn't know any better I'd swear you were paying me a compliment."

"Don't get carried away. You want to know why Dumbledore trained us together in legilimency? He did it to protect us. To keep you from killing yourself again and to keep me away from the Dark Arts."

"Bloody brilliant job we both did."

Severus held out his hand towards her. "Give me the piece of glass."

"What's with all the shouting?"

Meri turned her head and saw a groggy Draco emerging from the bedroom. She needed out. She needed a place to think and just be in silence. She closed her eyes and imagined the little church in Godric's Hollow. When she opened them, the church doors were directly in front of her.

Without pausing, she pushed her way into the church. Thankfully, despite the fact it was in the middle of the day, the church was deserted. Since the church didn't have a particular denomination, there was a shallow basin of holy water at the entrance. Meri believed in God but didn't follow one particular religion. She figured God was limitless, that's what made him God, so she didn't think her faith should be limited to one specific school of thought.

She peered into the holy water and was momentarily surprised at the face that stared back at her. The wound had healed into an angry welt that crossed from her temple, down across her nose and over her cheek. Severus told her it would most definitely be a scar. She dipped her fingers into the water just to be rid of the reflection and moved down the main aisle of the church.

Out the stained glass window, she could see Kendra and Ariana Dumbledore's headstones. Two rows of stones later, she could make out the white marble of James and Lily's. Tears pressed the back of her eyes and she took in other familiar names: Abbott, Prewett, even Alastor Moody's parents were buried out there. And those that were represented out there died because of Voldemort, and that wasn't even the tip of the iceberg.

Her breathing started to become shallow, almost to the point of hyperventilating. The tears that were pushing at the back of her eyes had made their way down her face, with many more following. As she neared the front of the church her knees gave out in front of the alter and crashed down on the old wooden floor.

She was alone and she took advantage of that fact. She sobbed and wailed every time the name and face of one lost came to mind. Frank and Alice Longbottom. Gideon and Fabian Prewett. Marlene McKinnon. Edgar Bones. Dorcas Meadowes. James and Lily. Sirius. Remus. Dumbledore. They were all in the original Order and now they were all gone. How many would have to die this time around? How many more that she called friend would pass away now?

She bowed her head to the floor and continued to weep. Faces of the those who survived the first war swam before her eyes and it was getting harder to breathe now. Hagrid. McGonagall. The entire Weasley family, surely all of them wouldn't live out this war. Mad-Eye Moody. Tonks. And of course, Harry and his friends. She even found herself crying over the dubious fate of Severus and even Draco. Despite the idiocy that came from the boy, he was just another son of a Death Eater that had been brain washed into that way of thinking. So many people…so much at stake.

"I can't…" she gasped, "I can't…do this…alone." She repeated it like a mantra, as if by some miracle, her friends that had supported her all those years ago would suddenly appear. She needed James' teasing, Lily's companionship, Sirius' energy and Remus' love. But she had none of that now. Harry was depending on her to survive but it didn't seem that important. He was a man now. He had been a baby when she was taken from here only to return when he didn't need a protector anymore. Everyone else seemed to have filled the role for her: The Dursley's, Molly, Arthur, Dumbledore even. She would be treading on their territory by taking her position as Aunt. She couldn't even remember Harry calling her "Aunt Meri." She had heard it fall from James, Lily, Sirius and Remus' lips but never from the ones that mattered to her now.

So, it was true. She was isolated and exiled, brought back to a world that didn't need her anymore. It had learned to function without her in it, just as it learned to move on without any of the dead that had seemed so important to it when they were alive. What was the purpose then of being in existence? Why was she put on earth, in this time as well as the other, if what she did didn't matter when she was gone? Voldemort would die, eventually, and with him, his reign of terror. Why fight? Why lose people that you love? Why go through that sense of pain and grief? The strength of rage pushed her up into a kneeling posting as she screamed as loudly as possibly.

"WHY?!"

The large, round stained glass window behind the modest pulpit shattered into a million pieces.

He was all for giving her the privacy she needed to cope with things but when he heard the glass shatter, he knew it was time to intervene. He opened the door of the small church and peered cautiously inside. He wasn't sure what to expect, an attack or finding a dead body. Luckily, he found neither. Meri was sitting on the floor facing the front of the building, propped up on the side of a pew. She looked semi-conscious and half dead.

Severus never entered churches much. He always feared that God's wrath for his sins would strike him dead before he even passed over the threshold. As he was halfway down the aisle now, he had yet to be struck with anything except a sense of foreboding. He wasn't sure how to calm Meri this time. The first time had been merely a fix, a band aid on a critical wound. This needed to be something permanent. The light fixtures started to swing on their own and the other stained glass windows were rattling in their pains. If she couldn't control the severity of her emotions then the whole church was going to come down around them.

He was standing directly behind her and was still at loss of what to do. She was shaking and trembling, he could hear her laboring to draw in air as if her lungs were going through spasms. What did he want when he was raging at the world? When he was reeling from the injustice of a mother who thought her son no longer needed her when he came of age? Of a father who showed more remorse at there being no alcohol in the house than at his own wife's death? When the sick feeling came over him after torturing another human being because it was expected? Or worse…when he killed a man who he once called friend? Then, it came to him what needed to be done.

He kneeled down behind her and gathered his courage, wishing despite everything that he ever felt, for an ounce of the Gryffindor daring. He couldn't show any second thoughts, any quaver of doubt in his actions. He had to do something he hadn't done in years and that was let his guard down and let someone else in. Dumbledore had trained him to do this with Meri and not once did she betray his trust. Trying not to think too much about what he was doing for fear he would talk himself out of it, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders and held her to him.

She started sobbing even harder and he was afraid he had done the wrong thing and had only made matters worse. But when he started to pull away, her hands grabbed at his arms and held him there. She started muttering things and he leaned closer to her to make them out.

"Don't…leave me…alone," she repeated over and over again through chattering teeth. "Please, Sev…don't leave…me alone."

He had to say the words and mean them. The odd part of it was, he had no trouble meaning them, it was the saying part that caused him pause. But he had to, if he wanted her functional again. He felt something strange twinge in his chest as he realized, he wanted to see her whole again not just so they could continue their fight against Voldemort but because it unnerved on him on every level to see her broken.

"You're not alone." The words came easier to him than he expected. "You're not alone anymore." And he dropped his mental barriers, all of them, allowing her full access to his thoughts and emotions. Her breathing hitched at the onslaught of what he had done but soon she seemed to deal with it and slowly, layer by layer, she opened her mind to him and he felt the full force of her grief.

Finally, she seemed to quiet. Her breathing started to even out and the trembling was easing. He sat there, unmoving, until she relaxed completely against him. He allowed the familiarity of her mind to settle back into his own. It wasn't long before exhaustion seemed to catch up with him and he realized Meri was already asleep. He pulled out his wand and pointed it at the shards of glass on the floor.

"Reparo."

All the pieces reassembled themselves and the glass panel looked as good as the day it was installed. A dim glint caught his eye though and he found one sliver of glass that remained on the floor. It wasn't colored but clear. It was then that he realized it was the piece of glass that Meri had hidden from him. He left it on the floor and carefully stood up, taking Meri with him. He held her tightly, not wanting to risk a splinching at this point in the game, and concentrated on the back alley behind the hotel. In the next moment, he was gaining access to the emergency stairwell and headed back up to the room, Meri still sound asleep.

He always had doubts in the back of his mind that Dumbledore was merely trying to bridge the gap between Gryffindor and Slytherin by trying to get him and Meri to work together. Perhaps it was, as he said, for them to preserve each other from self-destructive behavior. But he realized now, that their training had stemmed from a desire to see them work towards ending Voldemort's grip on power. And if not end it, then at least put a major dent in his forces. Meri had come back from alternate time. He had come back from being a Death Eater. This was their second chance to finish what Dumbledore wanted them to do.