Severus gave up trying to get back to sleep. After a werewolf nightmare, he wasn't going to sleep any time soon without a Dreamless Sleep potion. Besides, he was due to take over Vader-watching duties in – he lit his wand to peer at the bedside clock – about an hour and fifteen minutes. It wasn't worth trying to get back to sleep, and if he got up now, he had time to have a long bath and wash his hair, he thought, remembering Cheiron's strictures on personal hygiene and setting a good example.

It wasn't as though it ever made much difference in practice. Even if he shampooed and conditioned his hair every day, it still went from being soft, fine and uncontrollably mobile first thing in the morning to lank and greasy by lunchtime without ever seeming to go through a phase of just behaving like normal hair. His magical field seemed convinced that he was still a teenager – and he couldn't really argue with it. In the seventeen years that he had been teaching at Hogwarts, ever since he really had been not long out of adolescence and teaching children who remembered him from when he was the nerdy kid whom everyone bullied, he had never stopped feeling like a teenager Polyjuiced into the form of an adult, and his scalp wasn't about to stop reminding him of this fact.

The logical thing to do would be to clip his hair into a crew-cut, like Konstantine, so that it couldn't take more than a few minutes to wash and dry. But long hair – preferably grey and accompanied by a massive beard, at least for older male humans, though being androgynous and purple-haired seemed to work fine for Vaarsuvius – was as obligatory for wizards as short hair was for soldiers. Could you imagine Merlin or Gandalf with close-cropped hair? Besides, Severus's long black hair was about the only part of his appearance that he didn't hate.

Oh well, being able to have a bath in relative peace was a luxury not to be sneezed at. At home, there hadn't been even been indoor plumbing when he was a lad, let alone hot water. At school, there had been queues for the showers, with boys his age teasing him about how scrawny he was and older boys ogling him – unless he used the haunted bathroom which at least meant that the only person spying on him was Moaning Myrtle. As a teacher, he'd had the privilege of his own bedroom and bathroom, but what with trolls, basilisks, werewolves, students duelling in the corridors, or occasionally false alarms that turned out to be just Sybil Trelawney being drunkenly melodramatic, he hadn't usually had time to do more than cast a quick cleansing charm on his hair.

He lay back in the bath until the hot water had cooled and he felt marginally less stressed, got out, dried himself, and shaved. Whatever people thought of a teenager who could invent a curse like Sectumsempra, it kept its edge far better than a physical razor, quite apart from being useful for sharpening quills and chopping potions ingredients. He smirked at the thought of how shocked most wizards would be at the idea of his using 'Dark magic' for anything so mundane.

Vader, though – Vader wouldn't even be surprised. A man from a universe where wizard children practised defending themselves with swords instead of wands – perhaps it was some kind of rite of passage to find the sword that chose each owner, the way children in Severus's world went to a wand shop to find the wand that chose them? He would have to ask Vader about that tomorrow.

In the meantime, he put on a clean robe, folded his nightshirt and tucked it under his pillow, and went down to the kitchen. Cheiron and Konstantine were waiting there, along with Cheiron's Pensieve and an assortment of phials laid out on the table in two rows. One set were labelled 'Cordelia Naismith – Escobar War – part 1,' then 'part 2' and so on up to 6. The other row were labelled '1st November 1981 – Vernon Dursley, Minerva McGonagall', then 'Harry Potter, 23rd June 1991,' 'Harry Potter, 25th-31st July 1991 – Hogwarts letters,' 'Harry Potter, 31st July 1991 – meets Rubeus Hagrid,' 'Harry Potter, 1st August 1991 – first Diagon Alley shopping trip,' and – Severus's stomach lurched suddenly – 'Severus Snape, various memories 1969 – 1998, donated to Harry Potter 2nd May 1998.'

How dare they? He had given those memories to Potter because, while mortally wounded and bleeding to death, he had had no other way of simultaneously demonstrating the impenetrably obtuse idiotic brat that he actually was on Potter's side (well, on the side of defeating Voldemort, at any rate) and had been helping him throughout the year, and of conveying the information that Dumbledore's plan for Potter to be the Chosen One was, in fact, a suicide mission.

Of course, there had been no guarantee that the boy actually would bother to view the memories. He had been willing enough to poke his nose into private, personal, highly emotional memories when it was none of his business, but it had been a fair bet that when Severus actually wanted him to read his memories, he would have thrown them away out of sheer perversity. Severus could have wished that Potter would discard them, or refuse to believe them, or ignore them. After all, even as the most infuriating pupil Severus had ever had, the fact still remained that Potter was a seventeen-year-old boy who did not deserve to die, and the whole business of grooming him to offer himself up as a sacrificial victim stank. But equally, even bearing in mind the fact that defeating Voldemort was unlikely to bring in a golden age of freedom and justice where people didn't automatically assume that 25% of wizards were automatically evil from the age of eleven for being Sorted into Slytherin – the consequences of not defeating Voldemort would be even worse.

And presumably Potter had read the memories and believed them, had allowed Voldemort to kill him, and had come here in the afterlife, somewhen or other. Time on the Rock wasn't related to time as experienced by people in any of the worlds. It didn't just flow at a different rate, like the differences in timing between Narnia and Earth, but didn't even follow the same continuity of past, present and future. Otherwise, how would Severus, and Konstantine who came from a colony planet hundreds of years after Severus's time, have just acquired Darth Vader, whose time had been 'A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,'?

So that made sense. But – those memories were private! Even if he didn't remember them first-hand, he remembered remembering them, remembered deciding which remembered scenes and conversations he had needed to give to Potter, and he was fairly sure that all of them had been emotionally painful scenes. Even if they started off hopefully – the first time he had plucked up the courage to talk to Lily, the first time he had explained to her about Hogwarts – they had always dissolved into quarrelling.

Surely even Harry Potter should have recognised that these weren't the sort of memories you make bootleg videos of and distribute to all your mates? Well – no, why should he? Having green eyes like his mother didn't alter the fact that he was James Potter's son. The sight of his least favourite teacher as a teenager having pleaded with Potter's mum to go on being friends with him, and being coldly rebuffed, must have been too entertaining for him to resist sharing with all and sundry.

Severus remembered all too well the time he had been called away from his office for a few minutes and come back to find Potter sticking his head in the Pensieve to watch his father and his cronies tormenting Severus, choking him with soap, dangling him upside-down in his underwear, pulling his drawers off – well, maybe he'd managed to interrupt Potter before it got to that point. Had the boy sniggered about it to his friends afterwards? Stupid question – he was a Potter, of course he would have!

But even if Harry Potter behaved like that, Cheiron wouldn't, would he? Why shouldn't he? It wasn't as if Severus hadn't been betrayed by everyone else he had ever trusted in his entire life, after all.

'Enjoy the show?' he spat.

'This evening, Konstantine has been looking at the first of the memories relating to him, and we've been discussing that,' said Cheiron calmly. 'It can be quite disturbing, finding out how you look through someone else's eyes, so we haven't gone any further than this one vial, tonight.'

'Really? You didn't decide to watch some of this group, for comparison, perhaps?'

'No. I brought them here because it would be helpful to me if you could watch them and decide which bits of Harry Potter's memories of you – if any – you don't mind letting Konstantine and Anakin watch. Not that these first five have you in them, but they help the viewer make sense of the world you come from.

'It's going to be even harder viewing for you than for Konstantine, I'm afraid. At least most of the memories relating to him come from friends, rather than from an enemy. But this is why – only if you're willing – it would be helpful if you could look over Harry's memories and decide whether you want to let Anakin see them, or whether you'd prefer to tell your own story, or whether you'd prefer not to discuss your past, at least for the moment.

'But first of all, I thought you ought to have these memories of your own back.'

'You told me that when I first arrived here,' Severus retorted. 'My answer has not changed. Clearly, if I was able to function without a few minutes' worth of memories then, I am able to function without them now.'

Konstantine regarded him intently. Severus wasn't good at understanding other people's emotions or reading facial expressions, and nobody found Konstantine easy to read, but as far as Severus could tell after having shared a house with him for three years, he looked unconvinced. Probably he was thinking back to his own experience of memories stolen and restored…

'It's not the same!' Severus explained hurriedly. 'These memories were conjured out of me, not locked away at the back of my brain. The absence of them doesn't cause me any harm or discomfort.'

'I'm sorry,' said Cheiron. 'I didn't mean to nag you. You don't have to look at any of these – your own memories, or anyone else's – if you don't want to, or if you decide that it isn't the right time yet.'

'But if I do not take my own memories back, it will prove me to be as great a coward as all the Gryffindors believe I am,' retorted Snape.

'Does it matter what they think?' asked Cheiron. 'You know who you are.'

'These memories are part of who I am. If I do not take them back, I am a coward.'

'Well, if I give them back to you, you can view them when you decide the time is right,' suggested Cheiron.

'The time is right now. Putting it off any longer won't make it any easier.'

'Want me to stay with you?' Konstantine offered, obviously remembering how Severus had stayed with him while he suffered through the return of his own memories.

Severus was touched at his concern. On the other hand, the older man was already looking grey with exhaustion. Severus opened his mouth to say something like, 'You have had more than enough stress for one day and you should have been asleep hours ago,' and realised how patronising this would be. Just because he's a Muggle and you feel protective of him doesn't mean you can treat him like a child! he told himself furiously.

Instead, he managed to say, 'It's very kind of you, but – this is more private than I want to share. I suggest I watch it on my own – or with Cheiron to keep me company, if he can spare the time. After all, Cheiron already knows the contents of the phial.'

Author's note: sorry, not a very eventful chapter! This was going to be another Pensieve-viewing chapter following on from the last one, but I didn't want to rush Snape into this before he was ready.

Incidentally, as a note to people who are only familiar with the film version of Harry Potter, I just want to mention that of all the things people complain about in the way the films diverge from the books – the costumes, characterisation, Snape being played by an actor a generation older than canon!Snape and too good-looking, etc – the alteration that bugs me the most is the Pensieve scene in Order of the Phoenix. In the books, Harry sneaks a peek into the Pensieve (because he suspects that Snape is hiding information from him, because he doesn't see Snape as a person and it doesn't occur to him that Snape might be hiding anything as ordinary as painful personal memories), Snape walks in on him and is devastated by what he sees as Harry gloating over his suffering, therefore, quite understandably, gets angry with Harry and refuses to give him any more Occlumency lessons. It's the sort of stupidly preventable misunderstanding that could occur between any two well-meaning people who can't bring themselves to trust each other and who jump to the wrong conclusions. In the film, Snape gets angry with Harry and forces him to watch the scene in the Pensieve (toned down from the book version, since at least in the film, Snape is wearing clothes and is only being threatened with having his trousers removed, rather than his underwear) because he wants to punish Harry by confronting him with the reality of what a horrible person his father was. It makes Snape out to be someone who understands how Harry thinks and is deliberately cruel to him, rather than someone who is just too angsty and sleep-deprived to think rationally, and misjudges Harry as much as Harry misjudges him.