Good day, readers. Sorry to keep you hanging. Well, that's not true. I was hoping to shake a few reviews from the trees by giving you a cliffhanger. I did get a few new followers, which is kind. Thank you! It is wonderful to look at the charts and see new readers from all over the world (Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Luxembourg, Algeria, many more). Please leave your thoughts, even if they are pointing out errors/inconsistencies.

Let's get to the story. Enjoy! DN

First a forceful and unexpected collision, followed by the crash through ice and into the water. Snape had not planned to feel the water. It was blindingly cold, knocking him unconscious for a moment. When he came to, he remained calm, despite the cold screaming through his body. Though this was not part of his plan, he knew that he could not last long in the icy water. The result would still be the same. He felt his clothes bind him, his heavy cloak pulling against his jacket, swirling around him, weighing him down. He had no sense of what direction was up. He steeled himself as the blackness began.

As he sank into the water, Harry felt the cold biting into his flesh, stunning him. He was never a good swimmer. Cold, breaking every bone, muscle, and joint. Synapses now functional again, sending alarm to his brain in an overload. Pain. Cold so deep it burned. Lungs burning already, now screaming for air. His robes twisted around him, tightening as he flailed, trying to figure out what direction was up. He thought of Ginny, waiting; his mother and father. He found his direction and tried to pull and kick at the water. He struck something in the water, but blackness closed in before he could identify it. Gillyweed, nowhere. Blackness overcame him.

He was struck by a hand and kicked, jarring him out of his pleasant image of the end. What was that?

Harry. In the water, freezing with him. Dying with him. Dying because of him. Dying for him.

A slimy, muscular tentacle wrapped around his ankle, pulling him in deeper. No. Snape conjured every drop of will to move his muscles, locate his wand, and cast a Relashio spell. No effect, it was cast too weakly. No. No. Blackness overcame him.

The tentacle released. His ankle was freed. Hands, pushing him strongly upward. The surface, air, filling his lungs, choking out water, the taste of grime and slime. The feeling of rocks under his body. The shore. He felt the effect of a warming spell, then a drying spell as he rested, still half in the cold water. Once he could think again, he turned toward the lake. Harry was still in the water.

He cast a Relashio spell again, this one stronger. At last, Harry's head broke the surface, his arms and legs making no contribution to keeping him afloat. He coughed out water, gasped desperately for air, then began to move slowly to towards the shore. Still lying on the rocks, Snape cast a weak warming spell on Harry which seemed to have a useful result. He then tried a feeble "Accio," which didn't work well at all. Harry seemed to be moving more quickly to the shore, despite the look of exhaustion written on his face. Snape managed a crawl toward Harry's collapsed form. The young wizard offered no resistance or assistance to Snape's hauling him into shore, and contributed nothing to the effort to get out of the water.

Once Harry was fully clear of the water, Snape collapsed again beside him. He cast a drying spell on their clothes, then a warming spell, both of which worked surprisingly well, despite Snape's near-inability to breathe. With a wave of his wand, he transfigured a mat of mosses into a sort of blanket, which began as a small, thin sheet, but continued to grow until it had become a thick woolen blanket large enough to cover them both. Then he rested, utterly depleted from the exertion, barely having the strength to breathe. The rising sun added to the warmth, though weakly. He added to the warming charm as much as he was able, needing to rest after each cast.

He had a body again. That was good. His lungs seemed to function. Also good. He was still too tired to open his eyes, so he took an inventory of his body. It seemed there were no broken bones, nothing separated, but also nothing that wasn't alive with pain. He could feel every rib, every fold of his stomach, even his ears, every part of him telling him there was trouble. He must have been imagining his hair hurting.

The symphony of agony was subsiding a bit now. He could feel the dirt on which he lay, each layer of clothing between his body and the rough ground. Now he tried moving, but then gave up at the combination of effort needed and pain elicited. He focused on listening then. His breath was rasping as he coughed out additional, foul-tasting water from the lake. The effort exhausted him once again. Once he'd calmed, he heard the birds in the forest, the slow lap of tiny waves on the lakeside. Someone else breathing.

He rolled his head towards the direction of the breathing. Snape was there, pale and drawn, looking older and weaker than he had even when he'd been dead (technically). But breathing. Snape's head slowly turned toward Harry's, his eyes opening slightly. He said nothing, but seemed relieved to see Harry's eyes open. His eyes closed again.

Once assured that Harry was likely to live, his anger rose. He lay for quite some time before speaking.

"Why must you interfere, Potter? There's no point in rescuing a wizard who cannot be saved."

Harry was resting, enjoying the warmth as the charms and blanket coiled around him. As the cold left him and it became more and more certain that both he and Snape would live, anger began to take over. He was readying himself to let fly with his pent-up anger, when he heard Snape's words. His rage boiled over.

"How could you betray me, Severus?" he spat out in disgust.

Snape's eyes shot open in surprise. He rolled his head towards Harry, his mouth opening, but no further words coming out. Harry continued, taking full advantage of a rare time when Snape either couldn't or wouldn't answer back.

"You used me, allowed me to think there was some real link between us, just to get what you wanted."

Snape looked away, coughing as he did so. "Harry…" he said weakly.

Harry had no interest in Snape's protestations and let loose with every monologue he'd pictured during every night he'd stayed awake, hoping their predictions of the Headmaster's intent had been wrong. "Explain yourself, Professor. You've been given an opportunity by virtue of your having lived that lots of witches and wizards never had, and now you throw it away."

Snape looked on in agony, hearing the echo of his own words. "Harry…"

"And then you tried to destroy yourself, to destroy a part of her. All over again. Well, as long as I'm living, I plan to keep every bit of her alive, including what small amount of her blood you got from our Binding. And if you had a soul, you'd do the same." The rage that Harry felt was no longer a match for his exhaustion.

There was so much more he'd wanted to say, so much longer he'd pictured himself going on for. His betrayal, his disloyalty, his shame. Even in his imaginations, the shouting had eventually petered out into blather, having no rational words to describe the combination of both a desire to never lose even this small link to his mother, and his revulsion of Snape's decision to destroy that. He both loathed and needed him in equal measure, a fact that furthered the downward spiral of his thoughts into an incoherent mush of pain, loss, connection, and rejection. Instead, having nothing else he could do in his depleted physical state, he spit.

Her blood. Those two words. The waves of realization washed over him again and again, more powerful than an incoming tide.

Her blood.

The presence of just a tiny bit of her persisting within him, the key to it all.

He had only a small capacity for something like love when he'd know her. It would have been easy to call it possessiveness or jealousy. It was painful, desperate, violent. Its loss had been a lingering wound, a cavernous gap. A gap he'd sought to fill for the past 17 years, without success. But with Morgan, it was him who'd been different. And the loss of her love, thanks to his suspicions and foolishness, had been unbearable. To live without her love, knowing that he would face a long future alone, feeling this pain, was beyond enduring.

And Harry. His godson. He now saw himself as a true, living link to Harry's family, a genuine blood bond, not only to the son. Her blood, and James' blood, was in him, and in Harry. He was more that only his roles, his duties, his obligations. His physical body, this mattered, too.

Snape cursed himself wordlessly. How had he been so ignorant not to see this? And if only a few drops of her blood in him could cause feelings that seemed so extreme to him, what must Harry feel? And what must Morgan feel?

He'd rejected her in the cruelest fashion possible, casting her forgiveness of his boorish mental invasion as evidence for her duplicity and hexing her, threatening her. Now he would need to persist in this life, until its natural end, whenever that should be. His obligation was now truly forever.

He had a lot of repair work to begin and it would start now.

Harry lay still, feeling each stone in the dirt on his aching back, but still unable to shift or roll for better comfort, never mind sitting, standing, or walking away. Tears were not coming, he was beyond that, so he simply allowed his words to sink into Snape while he listened more. He felt and heard his own heartbeat as his awareness of his own blood increased. Thank Merlin for this blanket, too, providing much-needed warmth. The breeze moved the branches of trees that were beginning to show signs of spring buds, at last throwing off the long, cold winter. A few more birds hopped from branch to branch, looking for early bugs and worms for a meal.

And then words, from Snape. Not surprising, but annoying. His not being able to move and having run out of words himself trapped him into silent submission. He braced himself for a lecture of denial, or worse, an admission of guilt.

"Harry," Snape began. He was then silent for a long time, as though trying very hard to say the right thing. What the right thing was when you'd just run out on your life and nearly killed the person you'd just spent 17 years protecting was clearly not obvious, as the silence gathered around them.

Harry had never heard the tiredness, the defeat in Snape's voice that he heard now. "When I died before, during the war, I was ready. I wanted death, was thirsty for it. I had wanted death so many times before, but denied it to myself as penance. But I was sent back, still having more I needed to do for you."

Harry pondered these words. He wondered who had sent Snape back and from where, but the white hot anger within him stopped him from giving the appearance that he cared.

"I thought that I had fulfilled all that you needed by sending away your recommendations and paperwork for college. I couldn't have imagined that I meant anything more than that to you, or to anyone. Having her blood within me has changed me, Harry, made me feel more. It has also meant I felt my losses more acutely. I have no skills in matters of personal relationships. Only now I feel their absence more painfully. And this will always be so. I am too old to learn how to deal with people, damaged beyond repair since birth. First an unwanted burden at home and a magical freak in the Muggle world. Even at Hogwarts, a place I'd dreamed of fitting in, I was never able to discover friendship, only strategy and maneuvering. Joining the Death Eaters seemed like the best way forward for someone with so few prospects, but that, too, was a disaster. Dumbledore helped me seek what is right, but there was no way to have an ordinary life, given my precarious situation. I was too much in Dumbledore's possession to think about my own emotions. Now, I have had too much time to ponder with too little hope of change. Nothing lies in front of me but years of emptiness. I take solace in knowing that some part of your mother survives in me, as she does in you, but this is tempered by knowing I will likely live the years in front of me as I have those before, alone."

Harry considered how much in common he and Snape shared, having been an unwanted burden to the Durselys and a freak at Muggle school. But he'd found friends at Hogwarts. It didn't hurt that he was already famous before he'd even set foot in the place, even before he knew of the place. He might have turned out the same if he'd never felt the warmth of friendship, if he'd been sorted into Slytherin. So much could have been so different for him, but for small turns of fortune.

Still his anger burned. How could such a brave man have tried to do something so cowardly? Could he really have believed that he was only the sum of his functions and no more? Even on Harry's darkest days, and there had been many this year, he'd never thought of doing himself in. But he knew that he was loved, knew that he meant something to others. Did Snape not feel that way? Harry stubbornly fanned the flames of his own anger, not ready to concede. He would not be understanding, he would not be sympathetic, he would not allow clemency for this most grave of insults.

As soon as he was cautiously optimistic that he was capable of walking back up to the castle, Harry sat up and shakily got to his feet. Snape sat up, as well, but seemed slower to recover, his head hanging and his breath still labored. He wanted to say something kind, something conciliatory, but his temper bested any lenience. He attempted to storm off, but the steepness of the slope prevented his heading back directly. He opted to seek the main entrance by a longer, but flatter route.

Morgan Hunter heard footsteps coming up from the lake and immediately was on her guard, wand drawn. She dashed behind an outcropping of boulders and crouched down, muscles tense and ready to spring. Had someone invaded the school grounds? Was some creature on the loose? Her senses were alert and her heart raced. She put up mental defences, as well, in case her consciousness should give away her presence. The energy for defensive magic was coursing through her, ready to blast through her wand in an instant if she were provoked. She waited silently as the footsteps grew nearer.

Then two figures passed her, still silent. All pretense of a guarded consciousness gave way. Did her eyes deceive her? How could he possibly be so deceptive? Severus and Sybill Trelawney, in a wholly unprofessional clutch, walking back to the castle, clinging to each other as though their lives depended on it. As though they were the students' age. He'd snuck out of the castle during the all-school assembly to take advantage of a few moments alone with his new lover. They'd been so discreet that there had been no rumors that she'd heard of this pairing. Hunter couldn't believe her eyes.