A walk, Sirius thought. A walk was just what he needed to clear his head.

The summer dragged on and on, seeming to last even longer than the school year, if that were possible. Mrs. Snape did not return after her son's funeral. It did not seem like her, Sirius mused, to miss her own son's funeral- dour a woman as she was, he was sure she would not miss an opportunity to punish him with her presence. The resemblance between Mrs. Snape and Severus had truly been striking. Every time he had looked at her, all he could see was the younger Snape's face the night he had died, laying in that bed as though his very essence had been sapped from his body. But the worst part was the terror Snape had been in- The tremors and all of the shuddering, the pale, frightened look on his face that gradually faded to nothingness.

And the screams. Dear Merlin, the screams. That was enough to make Sirius shudder.

He found himself thinking of the attack more and more now. At first he had tried to put it out of his mind, but living in Snape's room had made that truly impossible, which was no doubt Dumbledore's intention. No wonder he tried to avoid it now, after seeing the way that everybody had looked at him- how was he supposed to go back there? How could he go back to that dingy, horrible, smelly room?

Sirius was consumed with all of these things when he realized that there was someone up ahead of him on the path was a man, a very old man, hunched over on a log in the middle of the woods. He had hung his head as if half of his body was stuck in a deep grave.

When he saw who it was, all of the breath nearly left Sirius's body.

"Shouldn't you be back at the Snape's?" Dumbledore asked, voice so quiet it was barely audible. He did not look up.

"I…er…" Sirius did not know what he could possibly have said. Finally, Dumbledore heaved a giant sigh, and sat straight up, looking Sirius directly in the eyes.

"I do not suppose that it matters much now," he continued wearily. "Severus is gone, and no amount of punishment can bring him back."

Sirius took this to mean that he had no choice but to sit down on the log next to the Headmaster, whose eyes continued to bore deeply into his soul.

"Professor," he asked, "Do you… Did you care about Snape?"

"I care about all of my students," Dumbledore said in that blasé tone that said it all for him. "But I must confess, Severus was… of particular concern to me."

"He was?"

"Oh, yes. Severus Snape came to Hogwarts at a very vulnerable period in his life. The experience he would have had the power to persuade him either in one direction, or another. I was intrigued from the first by his… unnatural ability, his great intellect- and at once repelled by his bitterness and rage."

Dumbledore sighed again.

"I realize now that this bitterness, that deep rage was partly my fault. I was not fair, and I was not there when he desperately needed me to be. Seeing the condition of the Snape's since his death has only proven that. Perhaps if I had given him a reason to believe in the light- even one- then he would not have oozed such impenetrable darkness. I should have protected him. I should have gotten there in time, I should have… I should have stopped you."

Sirius was stunned by all of this. He tried to swallow the complicated mixture of jealousy at Dumbledore's concern for someone who wasn't a Gryffindor and the feeling of shame that began to well up in his bones and start to rot them like a hideous infection. How could Dumbledore care about Snivellus? How could he see anything worth caring about? Great intellect, hah! But he recalled at that moment all of the many spells he had found in Snape's room, oodles and oodles of them-

After all, he had known Sniv- Severus wasn't stupid. After all, wasn't that one of the main reasons he had never actually expected him to go down to the Whomping Willow in the first place? He never actually thought-

"I never really thought he'd go," he whispered after a moment. A leaf whistled and fluttered to his feet. The words had left him against his will, pulled from him by some force he didn't understand, and which completely terrified him. "I just can't understand why he actually"- Dumbledore turned sharply to look at him again.

"It must be a crushing, terrifying cruelty indeed that would drive someone into the jaws of a werewolf," he said slowly, each word falling down more and more carefully and crushing Sirius as if under some terrible weight.

Sirius shuddered. There is no way it could have been that bad- But memories flooded back, tangled and ugly and deranged, memories of making Snivellus puke slugs, of breaking his arm, of putting him in the infirmary on multiple occasions, on making him gag and vomit soap-

But Snivellus had deserved all of that, hadn't he? He hung around his creepy housemates who used dark magic and put curses on Muggle-born students just for the crime of their lineage.

Sirius sniffled. He hadn't realized he was starting to cry.

"We never meant for that to happen, really we didn't, it was"-

Dumbledore merely looked at him again. This time he did not say anything.

"You had better be getting back," he said finally, after several minutes of stern, smothering silence. Then, without a word, he rose, straightening up to his full intimidating height, and left without looking at Sirius ever again.

The walk back to the Snape's house was unimaginable.

Mr. Snape was passed out drunk when he got there, thank Merlin. Sirius didn't want to stay. He fought every impulse in his body telling him to leave, to run, to get out of there before something even worse happened-

But what was really tearing him apart was the thought that, after all these years, he had actually been wrong to do those things to Sniv- Severus. That Severus had somehow had feelings, and those things had actually mattered.

Sirius shut the door without making a sound, barely able to breath, his chest feeling so constricted that he thought his lungs must cave in on themselves. For the first time in his life he actually could not breath, until he was heaving and heaving and not able to stop it... He needed to sit down, he had to… But this did not help either. He melted onto that broken and disgusting mattrass and began thrashing and wailing and thrashing and wailing, the thoughts playing over and over again in his mind.

He had hurt Severus. He had hurt Severus. He had really hurt Severus.

It was an unbearable thought, for precisely for the reason that he thought Severus was incapable of being hurt, incapable even of being human. But he was, Sirius thought, recalling the pure sickness in Snape's body that had stayed with him until he died.

Snape had died petrified and scared. He had died frightened and afraid. And worst of all, he had died alone, and it was his fault, it was all Sirius's fault.

Slowly Sirius began to fall into a paralyzing calm that overtook the frenzy gradually but then all at once. All of the hairs on his arms stood on end and his breaths continued to be uneven but were steadily becoming more even.

He even, with a great sniff, managed to notice something out of the corner of his eye when he glanced back at the pile of messy, horrid papers amongst which he had found Snape's old books and, along with them, many spells he had created. He picked up the corner of one that had gotten stuck under the Advanced Potions book.

On it were plans for a new book. Snape had been planning to write a brand-new potions book, with both improved and original potions.

Sirius passed out on the spot.