So here he was, back in his own chambers, safe and sound within the thick and rather damp walls of Hogwarts' dungeons.
Somehow, he had expected to feel happier when he had envisaged this moment at Potter's little cottage of madness, but then he hadn't expected a conflict with his Headmaster, an unconscious Potter in the infirmary and the threat of the Weasleys hanging over him to ruin the moment.
At least there were no students here for the next month. That would have ruined the moment on an entirely different level.
Snape cast a glance at his clock – a proper, useful clock, showing the time and nothing else – and grunted in irritation. Three more hours until the time he had proposed in his letter, and at least an hour until he could hope for confirmation.
Which left him with decidedly more time than he needed to unpack or finally brew that enhanced Pepper Up he had been planning for so long.
For the fifth time in as many minutes, his eyes darted towards a vial filled with the silver of liquid memory, lying on the desk in front of him.
He had found it when unpacking Potter's memories from the case especially spelled for protection, and for a moment he had wondered if he had forgotten to correctly label one of them.
But then he had remembered that strange breakfast with Ayda and the memory she had handed him with the command to 'take a look at it' whenever he had the time.
On the one hand, he didn't feel the wish to enter yet another person's mind – the visits to Potter's memories had left him slightly dizzy and suspicious of anything that could be stored in a pensieve.
On the other hand, he did have time. And leaving the dungeons would only lead to forced interaction with his colleagues, and he couldn't really be trusted to keep his hands off Unforgivables this afternoon.
Grunting once more and silently cursing meddlesome old knife-wielders, Snape emptied the memory into the stone basin of his pensieve, waited until it had turned into a calm sea of silver, and lowered his head down into the liquid.
Darkness. And silence.
It was different to enter a memory alone, he realized after a moment of unconscious waiting for Potter's serene babbling. He had know idea where he was, and, more importantly, when he was, and…
Concentrate on the hints your surroundings give you, then, he commanded himself. You haven't been a spy for nothing.
He was standing in a corridor richly decorated, the walls hung with dark red silk, the floor polished wood with inlays of a strange, iridescent colour. A wealthy person's house. He half turned to examine the paintings hung here and there, but before he could discover more, voices approached him swiftly from the darkness
"Really, old bat, sometimes I wonder why we didn't annihilate your race after all. I allow you to borrow my perfectly stable general, and what I get back is an angsty teenager with identity issues. I really don't want to know what'd happen if I lent you a book."
Ayda. Sounding and looking exactly like the woman he had met a few hours ago, but then her age had always seemed impossible to determine. She turned her head towards the person she had been speaking to, and Snape rolled his eyes. Shadow. An immortal was even worse material to judge the process of time from.
"He's more than just a general, woman! He's a human being with…"
"It's easy for you to glorify humanity, bat," Ayda interrupted. "You're spared from the disadvantages."
Shadow seemed more than a bit angry, and Snape was glad that he was just watching a memory, since the last contact with the vampire's wrath had been more than uncomfortable. Shadow also seemed worried, however, worried in the way he had been when finding out about Potter's illness, and to Snape's surprise he saw Ayda's face settle into the same, slightly cross expression. So she was worried, too. He hadn't been quite sure she was capable of that.
"What happened?" She now asked, much of her irritating flippancy gone, and turned fully towards Shadow. "Your vampires didn't eat a little girl in front of him, did they?"
Shadow's brows darkened like a thundercloud (Snape had always abhorred poetic expressions of this calibre, but with Shadow they somehow seemed appropriate). His eyes glittered dangerously in the scarce light of the corridor, and for one moment Snape expected him to attack Ayda.
But whether the odd tension both felt controlled his temper, or whether he had already come into contact with Ayda's knife, he refrained from grabbing her the way he had grabbed Potter, raising an elegant hand and pinching the bridge of his nose instead in a gesture of utter irritation.
"Why do you suppose one of my vampires did something to cause this," He inquired in a barely controlled voice.
Ayda shrugged flippantly. "They always do, don't they?" She answered, but Snape could see that her heart wasn't in it.
"He hasn't had an episode in months," She added, more quiet and subdued than Snape had ever heard her.
Shadow sighed, and for a fleeting moment his face looked almost human.
"One of the younger vampires visited a…client two nights ago," He began, and Ayda snorted at his choice of words. "Gregory found a book on her night stand and took it home with him. He and some of the others read aloud from it, and although they didn't notice him, Harry must have listened for quite some time…"
"What book?"
Shadow sighed again. "The official biography of Harry Potter – The Boy Who Vanquished the Dark Lord, by Rita Skeeter," He answered tiredly.
Ayda's anger was audible silence.
"It's understandable, in a way," Shadow continued. "They are all curious about 'their human', and Harry has been less than forthright about his past. When Gregory discovered that book, he and the others were simply…"
"Incredibly dense," Ayda interrupted in a hard voice. "As they always are. What happened then?"
"The book exploded in Gregory's hands. There wasn't a bit of paper left larger than a snowflake, I think. Harry walked through the room without looking at anybody, and he's been sequestered away in his room ever since. I tried to talk to him, but he simply wouldn't…"
"Let me guess," She interrupted again, her face turned upwards to the vampire, eyes glinting with an anger Snape couldn't entirely understand. "You mothered him, didn't you? Told him what a poor boy he was, how much he had suffered, and that the pile of shit his life has turned out to be wasn't his fault."
"It isn't his fault, Ayda, and the least thing we can do is…"
"Nonsense, bat! The boy's life has been stripped of anything he ever possessed. He has lost everything he cared for. The least thing we can give him is control and responsibility for what happened."
The tightening lines around Shadow's mouth told Snape clearly that he disagreed, but for reasons he couldn't fathom the vampire refrained from disagreeing. Instead, he shortly nodded his acceptance – or rather resignation – and resumed walking.
"The wards on his room prevent him from hurting himself," He said, his fury a stream of fire barely hidden under his composed surface. "But he hasn't eaten for days and the way he carries on suggests that he won't…"
"Snap out of it himself, I know. I'm going in."
Ayda brushed by him, her eyes and mind already fixed on a door at the far side of the corridor. A hand on her shoulder stopped her, however, and she turned back to the Prince of vampires with a gesture of impatience.
"I don't know what quality you possess that soothes him, old woman," Shadow whispered. "But please, for my sake. Be gentle with him."
Ayda just snorted and after a moment, Snape realized that he had unconsciously joined in.
He followed her through the heavily warded door into a set of rooms that looked much like the ones Shadow had inhabited at the vampire tavern. Only that they were dark. Dark and emanating an atmosphere of dreary unhappiness.
"Harry. So here's where you're hiding."
Ayda's voice was curt and crisp, much like McGonagall's when she found a student in a situation she couldn't quite condone.
It took a moment for Snape's eyes to adjust to the darkness around him. When they did, Snape could make out a shadow in one of the armchairs near what had once been undoubtedly a merrily burning fire, before someone had distinguished it with enough water to fill the great lake.
He stepped closer and saw Potter, knees drawn to his chest, eyes closed to slits, staring into nothing. It didn't seem as if he had noticed Ayda. Snape saw a strange expression cross her face as he watched her, something like pain, like the hurtful memory of a bleeding wound one had received a long time ago, but it was gone before he could analyse it completely.
"Oh, this is ridiculous," She scoffed. "Just because your life is a mess doesn't mean you have to sit in the darkness and angst."
She flung her arms wide in a way Snape had only ever seen with Dumbledore, and the shutters swung wide open, light streamed into the room and air, the song of the birds and the morning sounds of a beautiful day in spring.
"There," She said curtly. "That's much better. Maybe we can talk like grownups now that the melodrama has left the room."
Snape wouldn't have admitted it to anybody, of course, but Ayda's behaviour intrigued him. It was very much like the method he had used with his Slytherins when they had descended into their bouts of self-pity (and them being Slytherins meant that these descents could be a long way, and take a very long time).
Make an entrance grand enough to startle them and redirect their attention from their own, pitiful problems, shock the depression out of them and confront them with a good deal of morning light and rationality. Normally, that was enough to get them back on the road.
Not Potter, though. A tired blink of his eyes was the only reaction he showed to the sudden onslaught of light and Ayda. Whether he was too tired or too depressed, or whether he simply knew this routine too well by now, he didn't seem impressed. Not even interested.
"Go away, Ayda," He said softly, no inflection in his words at all.
While Ayda took her time choosing the most comfortable armchair in the room and moving it so that she could sit opposite to Potter, Snape stepped closer to the man – boy, he corrected himself.
Potter certainly looked older than he had in the last memory Snape had seen, but he lacked the relaxed maturity that made it so easy to accept the present-day Potter as an equal.
Still… Snape stepped even closer, his eyes narrowed in thought. This Potter's face wore more lines and shadows than he had ever seen with his Potter, and his body, clad in black and well muscled for one so young, held an open declaration of power even in this hour of misery that Snape had seldom ever seen in the present one, only in short glimpses when his control had slipped.
The line of his shoulders demanded attention and warned of danger in a way Snape had only ever seen with the great leaders of his time. Now that Snape thought of it, he had sensed this with his Potter, back at the very beginning of this mad week, in the Headmaster's office when he hadn't yet known his identity. Before the harmless act fooled me, he thought, surprised by his own realization.
So Potter had possessed this sort of authority in the past, possessed it to this day, but had given it up for the image of a harmless young man he usually sported? Stranger and stranger.
Ayda snorted darkly. "I take it you didn't like what your official biographer wrote, Potter," She said.
For one moment, a blast of heat seemed to fill the room as Potter's eyes turned the dark green of the Killing curse and the very air seemed to boil around him.
Snape found himself backing away quickly from this sudden blaze of fury, entirely forgetting that this was not a memory, that this could not hurt him no matter what happened. He had often wondered how the Potter-in-between might have been, the man that had killed Voldemort and understood the lie his own life had been, but had not yet found that eerie serenity the Potter of his time sported.
Now he was rather glad he had never met that man. This combination of power and emotional instability was simply too much.
The sensation lasted no more than a heartbeat before Potter closed his eyes in tired resignation, his head falling back against the armchair and his face losing all expression.
"Go away," He said again. "I don't need you to mock me, Ayda."
"Oh, but every hero needs a court jester by his side," Ayda disagreed happily, but Snape saw that despite her outer disinterest, her eyes were resting on Potter, and she was watching very closely. "It's a dramatic necessity, really, to balance the awe a bit."
The Potter Snape had come to know over the last week would have laughed to that and added a comment or two about jesters and their tendency to be beheaded, but the Potter of this memory didn't even smile.
"I don't want to be a hero," He whispered.
She shrugged, but her eyes showed that she was thinking fiercely. "Then stop," She said.
He laughed, a cold, sudden bark that made Snape twitch in uneasy surprise. "I tried that," He answered darkly. "You and Shadow stopped me."
"God's holy underwear, Potter, there are other ways to change your life than end it. Only teenagers think that suicide is the only way out. Grow up. Do something."
Potter barked again. "Like what," He said, sarcasm heavy in his voice. "Running away and falling in with a bunch of vampires didn't help, exactly. All it did was give me another bunch of fancy titles and magic marks," He lifted his hair for a moment to display the tattoo Snape had already seen in the vampire tavern. "I've had that all my life."
"Ever considered that it's your attitude, Potter?" Ayda offered. "Barging into a room ready to take responsibility for everything and everybody really isn't the sort of thing that helps you stay in the background."
He sighed. "I have tried all that," He said quietly. "But it seems my destiny to fight, it seems my destiny to…""Bullshit," Ayda simply said, and Snape's expression of surprise was mirrored on Potter's face.
„"There is nothing like that thing called destiny, Potter," She now continued, her voice rough and strong and very confident. "There are outside forces that determine your life, like the sun, the rain, the soil and the river determine a tree's life, but there is no fate, no grand scheme of existence you or I have to follow."
She pointed up to the ceiling. "Nobody up there gives a damn if we live or die. Nobody cares, unless we do. Nothing is pre-determined. There is no master plan."
Potter stared at her for a long time.
"If that is true, then my life has had no value at all," He finally said, quietly. "I have spent it living up to a prophecy, to a destiny that I never wanted. It's either believe in fate or to have thrown away everything I held dear for nothing."
Ayda pursed her lips in frustration.
"You are dense," She announced decisively, and Snape's lips curled in amusement without his will. "That you weren't meant to do these things doesn't make them less valuable. Let's face it, brat, you saved the world. Repeatedly. It seems to be a hobby of yours."
"I did not save the world. My friends did. And then I got them killed."
"Doesn't change the end result, I'd say."
"The end result is that my friends died."
"Oh, your friends died," Ayda echoed mockingly, and Potter sprang to his feet so quickly that Snape backed away in surprise.
"Don't you dare," He hissed, his sudden fury frightening Snape. He was no longer used to the angry Potter. "Don't you dare mock my friends! They were better than I ever could be, and you have no idea what happened to them, you have no idea…"
His anger crumbled in the presence of a pain so great Snape couldn't name it, couldn't even imagine it, and he whirled around and punched the wall with all his strength, and the sound of breaking bones made Snape wince.
Potter however didn't even seem to feel the wound he had caused himself. Slowly, like an old man, he rested his forehead against the wall and closed his eyes in desperation.
Silence fell on the room, suffocating every thought, until Ayda stood, slowly, and walked over to Potter.
"Harry," She whispered, her usually dry and scratchy voice suddenly soft. "It's been a year. A year, and still you can't even bear speaking their names. You are not helping anybody with this."
"Perhaps that's because I never wanted this, Ayda," He answered, his voice scathing in its anger. "I just wanted it to stop. Want it still. It's you who want me to go on, you and Shadow, preaching to me about the joys of life and all the wonderful things I could still do. And what are they? Killing yet another bunch of Death Eaters? Leading others into their ruin? Be the hero for yet another bunch of imbeciles that pant after lies they can spread about me? I've had enough of it all!"
Ayda sighed, and it was impossible to judge from her face what she thought, whether she was shocked by his outbreak or happy about it.
"Harry," She said, only to be interrupted by a snarl of rage.
"Don't Harry me, Ayda," He hissed. "I've had seven years of that, being led on a leash by Dumbledore, being made to believe that what happened to me was right and necessary. He manipulated me till the death of everyone I ever loved, and I won't ever allow that to happen again! My life is a joke, a chapter in a history book, but nothing more. And now that I've killed the bastard and rounded up his Death Eaters it's over! I'm finished. It would only be fair to let me go!"
"You're not the only one who got his loved ones killed, brat," Ayda said quietly. "My daughter and her husband died under my command during the first war."
Concern and worry replaces Potter's anger so quickly as if it had never existed.
"Ayda, I'm sorry," He now whispered. "That was thoughtless of me. Of course I didn't want to say…"
"You're doing it again," Ayda interrupted once more. "I don't want you to ignore your pain in favour of mine, Harry. I want you to understand that you can't avoid death, or pain, at least not with the sort of life we're leading. Nor can you avoid guilt. And I'm not telling you that it wasn't your fault. I don't know what happened down there. I'm just saying that they weren't destined to die, and that the only value of their life and death can come from you. Accept your guilt and learn from it, or leave them to have died in vain."
"That's just guilting me into 'living on for the sake of others', Ayda, and you know it," Potter answered, his mocking voice turning the words into something ugly. "I'm still alive, right? I've accepted my duties and responsibilities, and I promise that I won't try to kill myself. Happy? Then leave me alone."
Tired resignation again. Potter's moods were changing faster than Peeves' now, and Snape finally understood what Ayda had told him during their impromptu breakfast. This was a Potter unable to deal with his pain and his past, and emotionally unstable Potter who longed for death just because he couldn't face his life.
It was a far cry from the quiet acceptance his Potter had shown, and not to see the difference and accepts its consequences would have been foolish.
Snapes were never foolish. It wasn't compatible with their genes.
"I tell you something, Harry," Ayda now said, suddenly very serious. She moved her hands in a gesture Snape didn't recognize, and for a moment Snape understood how this old woman could be a leader of the druids.
"If you should ever choose death willingly, not out of fear or stupidity but because you decided, freely, that it is the right path, I promise to respect your decision and aid you in whatever way I can. But such a decision requires maturity and calmness and an understanding of your own life. At the moment, you are lacking all of that. You are like a small child in the storm that has given up because it doesn't know the way home, and giving up is something I don't accept."
Whether it was her words or the strange gesture she had made, Potter seemed to recognize the honesty of her promise. Something seemed to lift from his shoulders, and he turned away from the wall, to meet her eyes.
"What do you want me to do?" He asked quietly.
"Stop hiding behind your past," She said roughly, but even Snape could hear how much she cared. "Deal with it, in whatever way you have to. When you have grown beyond this, and mourned for them, and discovered ways into the future you could take, then you can come to me, and I will help you with whatever you have decided. It is hard, believe me, I know that better than most, but not doing it would be even more stupidity than I have come to expect from you."
Potter nodded again, showing that he had understood, and something in his face told Snape that he had, and that the strange promise Ayda had given meant something to him.
"What did you do, back when your family died?" He asked softly, not quite managing to meet her eyes.
She grinned, a fierce, feral expression that made her face look younger and older at the same time.
"Well, first I killed every single bastard who hurt them, but since you pretty much took care of that already, you could probably move to Step Two directly."
"Step Two?"
"Let go of all that hurt and anger and pain. It's only burdening you, and no one on earth cares if you angst yourself to death," She paused for a moment and cocked her head thoughtfully. "Except for Shadow and his merry band of imbeciles, but I'm rather sure they could find a new occupation."
He smiled, softly, hesitatingly, but it was the first real smile Snape had seen in this memory.
"I might agree," He said. "But how do you do that?"
"Letting go?"
"Hmm."
"Hell if I know," She answered. "It always seemed to come rather naturally to me. Probably to do with the brain capacity. But what I can promise is to kick you in the head if I see you doing it wrong."
She grinned broadly, as if the thought of kicking him was just making her day, and as if in answer, Potter's smile grew, softening the lines in his face and lighting up the shadows that nested below his eyes. And Snape saw, only for a moment, dancing across his face like a beam of sunshine, the man that Potter would become, one day, the man mature enough to see his paths and settle for the right one.
"That's a beginning, I guess," Potter said softly, and the room melted into the mists of the pensieve.
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A/N: Thank you for your patience, my dear, wonderful readers! If you want explanations for my overly long absence, or answers to your questions posted in reviews, or update notices, please go to my lifejournal (homepage-link on my author profile).
That said – please review!