Chapter Text
Christmas morning was another story.
Severus drank a cup of Lily-brewed coffee while James stirred something that smelled warm-spiced on the stove, but they seemed harried, and when they settled down to eat after feeding Harry, Lily holding the baby, James alternating bites for her and bites for himself, he understood why.
“We promised Pet we’d see her and her new boyfriend, what’s-his-face, for brunch at ten, then head over to see Mum and Dad at eleven-thirty. Then, Marauders are coming at one,” Lily explained.
Severus nodded, eating the oatmeal James had made, with cinnamon and sugar. Everyone had family obligations around Yuletide, and he refused to feel put out. “Do you need me to look after Harry?” he offered.
Lily looked surprised, then opened her mouth when she realized that James was trying to feed her another bite of oatmeal.
“Pet’d kill us if she didn’t get to see Harry,” James countered. “Not to mention Mum and Dad.”
Lily nodded, her mouth full, and gestured wordlessly to her coffee. James, smiling, lifted the cup to her lips.
“Well, then. I suppose I should be getting back to Hogwarts,” Snape said, slowly.
He didn’t think it was his imagination that the temperature of the room dropped a few degrees.
“If you like,” said Lily. She swallowed her mouthful of oats. “But… you could come back, tonight.”
Severus’s gaze flicked to James, whose features looked pinched. But he did nod, and Severus was already regretting leaving, already wished to be back. So it was easy to ignore the disquiet on James’s face and press on.
“If you'd like,” he said.
Lily smiled at him and then kissed the side of little Harry’s head. James fed her another bite of oatmeal and sip of coffee. Severus watched the three of them, feeling that familiar jealousy rise up within him, but with a warmer tinge, like at the wedding: pleased they were pleased, happy to see them happy. Wanting desperately to be a part of that happiness, one reason they were glad to be alive in the world.
He wasn’t sure where to put it, so he scooped Harry up. The baby fussed and wriggled for his mother for a half a minute, but Severus bounced him, walking into the living room and finding the rattle. He entertained Harry for long enough to let Lily eat unimpeded, no matter how sweet it had been to see James feed her morsels like a bird.
Harry went swiftly from being a distraction to a preoccupation. His eyes had lost that newborn grey and Severus could tell they were going to be a snapping green, like his mother’s. He didn’t have much hair, but what he did have was very dark and already curling, laying against his head in soft whorls. He was alert, looking at his rattle, back at Severus, and back at the rattle again. He was warm and heavy in Severus’s arms.
“Hello,” Severus said quietly. “Hello, Harry.”
The baby had gathered just enough about communication to try and make a noise back.
“You don’t say,” Severus murmured.
Maybe he should try and have one after all, he surprised himself by thinking. He tried to imagine finding a willing woman, trying to picture himself in Jamie’s place. On the one hand, it would feel good to come to Godric’s Hollow with a woman on his arm. Severus imagined her as Lina, or someone like her: pretty enough to make him seem worthy, nice enough to make him seem normal, clever enough to impress, his other bookend. Together the four of them would brunch and go see plays and have quiet evenings listening to the Wireless together. And eventually, she’d have a baby only a year or two younger than Harry, and they’d grow up together, be close their whole lives. And his child would never grow up and shout something unforgivable at Harry; they’d all make sure of it.
Only, that wasn’t what he wanted at all.
But maybe it was the closest he’d ever come.
Harry seemed to sense his change in mood. He reached up with a baby-frown and took hold of Severus’s nose in one, flailing hand.
Severus laughed, nasally, and bounced him.
The baby smiled; it was the best thing Severus had ever seen, a baby who could barely smile, smiling because he’d tried to cheer Severus up. Almost as good as making Lily laugh in a dark mood.
He looked up to find Jamie watching him, that now-familiar mixture of welcome and warning on his face. “We made the right choice,” he said, moving to sit at the coffee table so he could face Severus and the baby on the couch. Their knees knocked together, legs tangling. James reached out and cupped the baby’s face; Harry turned to look at him and started making faces.
James looked up at Severus, a kind of, you see this? warmth in his eyes, and something in Severus’s gut lurched unexpectedly. He wondered if he was getting sick.
James blinked a couple of times and then cleared his throat for some reason.
Severus wondered if there was something going around.
“So, we’ll see you tonight?” James said. “I mean. We probably won’t be great company after all the fuss today, but…”
“If you’re sure you want me,” Severus said.
“Of course,” James said. “It’s not Christmas without you.”
Severus looked down into the baby’s face. “What a strange thing to say,” he murmured.
“You’re part of the family,” James said, and Severus couldn’t make himself lift his chin, for fear he’d be able to read the lie in James’s face. But then he said, “you’re my family,” determined, and Severus couldn’t help but look.
There was resolve in James’s face, and he looked frustrated, too, with something wild about the eyes, like he was teetering on the edge of some breaking point.
“I don’t know how to make you believe me,” he said. “I know I was terrible to you, Severus. If I could undo it, I would. I was a terrible little shit.”
“You were,” Severus said, quietly.
“So were you!”
“So I was,” Severus agreed, lips curling.
James was smiling ruefully back, and a long-standing crack in Severus’s heart began to knit. The feeling was, strangely, most analogous to relief: James’s smile, his apology, seemed to reach back into Severus’s past and reassure a much younger boy.
“I tried to apologize, once. Will you accept it, now?”
Severus’s gaze flickered over the other man’s face. Did he want to forgive Jamie? Could he?
“C’mon, Jamie, or we’ll be late for— oh,” said Lily, and both looked up.
“Sorry, Lilies. Let me run a comb through my hair, at least,” James said, and rose from his perch.
“What was that about?” Lily asked, once her husband was well out of earshot, Severus noticed.
“Asked if I’d forgive him.”
“And what did you say?” Lily moved to sit beside him on the couch.
“Nothing, yet.”
That was all they had time for before Jamie strode back into the living room. “All right, do we have the diaper bag?” he asked, striding to the coat hooks by the door to shrug on his winter cloak.
“Of course,” Lily said, waving her hand; wandless, it appeared at her feet. James tossed Lily her cloak and she shouldered into it. Then, she shrank the diaper bag and stuffed it into the pocket.
“Okay. Severus? Sorry to have to dash…” James said, the pair’s scurrying sliding to a halt at the cottage door. Severus stood with Harry and walked him to his parents. Lily scooped him up and the scene struck Severus, hard, for some reason: the picture of them standing at the door, poised to leave.
“S’all right,” he said, and Lily went out the door. James followed a step behind, shooting Severus a look over his shoulder as he closed the door behind him.
And then he was alone, and empty-handed.
The fire sparked in the hearth. The kitchen still smelled of sugar cookie and apple-spice, and the scent of pine lingered everywhere. But the cottage at Godric’s Hollow was empty, now, of life.
Severus wandered about, tidying up, to have something to do with his hands: he cleared the coffee cups and scrubbed the pot of now-congealed oatmeal. He ate the remainder of his own bowl, drank his own cold coffee before scrubbing his own plates. He meandered, then, to the Potters’ bookshelf, unsurprised to see that Lily had kept some of her old textbooks. He drew her Potions fourth-year manual, gleaning some old joy from their scrawled notes to one another in the margins: fourth year, before their falling out. He traced their childish handwriting with one finger, struck by a sense-memory of Lily leaning over this selfsame book, scrawling with what looked to be diligence, but which Severus knew would be a display of her excoriating wit, aimed Severus’s way like a sunbeam. He could hear the scritch of quills, Slughorn’s droning voice in the background, feel the warmth of cauldron flame against the skin of his forearm as he observed her, waiting for her latest message.
Such memories were usually followed by wave on wave of bitter regret. But Severus knew that he didn’t have a right to that bitterness, anymore. The Potters had let him into their home, welcomed him into their lives. They’d made him Harry’s guardian. They’d spent Christmas Eve with him. Once again, he’d gotten to see Lily happy, close-up. Held her little boy in his arms. What more could he demand?
What right did he have?
Severus’s face was wet. He carefully placed Lily’s old Potions book back on the shelf before he could spot it with tears. This is ridiculous, he thought; you’re ridiculous. By chiding himself so, he managed to stop crying, but the effort left him feeling drained and wooly-headed. In a flash, he wished for the laudanic bitterness; if he still felt angry and cheated, he’d never be so sad.
But that darkness was gone, and he was suddenly, fiercely glad of it.
Severus’s laugh in the empty cottage chased away the last of the urge to weep. He wiped under his eyes and moved to sit on the couch, feeling like a wound had been lanced, the poison drained away, but a hollow space was left behind. He wasn’t sure, anymore, how to fill it.
Or… perhaps he did know, after all.
Severus gathered up his nearly-done marking, dusting sugar cookie crumbs off of the stack and gathered up his coat and cap, gazing about the cottage as if saying farewell. Then, he strode out into the light of high morning until he reached the Apparition barrier and returned to a side-alley just outside Hogwarts.
His absence at Hogwarts’ Christmas dinner, he supposed, might have been noted. People might have tried to offer Christmas wishes, come knocking at his door—
People, he scoffed to himself. Albus had; possibly Minerva as well. They’d accept some excuse, even if it were that he simply preferred to be alone over the holiday; yes, that was what he’d say. That he’d been alone; that he liked it that way. He unshrank his marking and placed the small pile on his desk.
After grumpily making his excuses to Minerva, he spent Christmas Day tidying his apartments, finishing his marking with a sigh of relief, and then watching the snow fall through his enchanted window with a cup of cocoa in hand. When evening fell, he ordered up a bottle of nice wine from the kitchens, and a charcuterie board: crackers, sausage, cold chicken, three kinds of cheese. He enchanted everything to stay fixed to the board, shrank the lot, wrapped it in a clean handkerchief, and stuck it in his pocket. He cast about for something else to bring or do; at least he’d had his paperwork, before, something he could look at if looking at the Potters grew too difficult. He ended up wheeling about the room three times before grabbing a Potions journal at random and fleeing his apartments.
Then, he strode out of the Castle, casting Tempus as though he had some important appointment for which he dared not be late, just in case anybody might be looking; but evening had fallen, and even the children home for Christmas were warm and snug inside, occupied by playing with their new toys, reading their new books, or eating handfuls of chocolate at a rate that would make them ill. Severus encountered no one in the near-deserted Hogwarts, much less the absolutely deserted Hogwarts grounds.
He moved past the Anti-Apparition wards and popped into being in the familiar, friendly little clearing just outside of Godric’s Hollow. A gust of wind sent him shivering: it was colder, here, wherever here was; even people who’d once known its location couldn’t recall, since its location had a Befuddlement Charm cast on it in October.
Severus was up the walk and to the window before he registered that the voices coming from within weren’t just the Potters’. He hunched just outside the window in the bitter cold to listen.
“…So glad to see you,” James was saying in a strange, too-hearty voice that suggested the opposite; Severus could hear the baby wailing. “But me and Lily are knackered, not to mention little Harry.”
“No, no, I understand,” came Remus Lupin’s banal tones. “Let me just… Sirius! Stand up , will you? I’m so sorry, he’s been just awful lately.”
“Sirius is just cutting loose.” Peter Pettigrew. “Iss Chrissmas .”
“Yeah,” James said, vaguely. “It’s just, we’ve all had a very long day.”
Now Lupin sounded exasperated. “James, I can barely… why don’t we let him sleep it off? He can stay on the couch, we can stay on the floor… like old times, you know?”
There was a silence except for the baby’s wailing, which was rising to a hysterical crescendo.
“But it’s not old times,” James said, tightly. “Harry's overstimulated and overwhelmed and, well, so am I! Babies don’t let you just sleep it off tomorrow. I can see you on bloody Boxing Day, now can you drag Padfoot home?”
“Geez, Prongs, you used to be fun,” Peter muttered, sounding not a little sloshed, himself.
“And you only egg him on!” James shouted, and the baby’s voice rose, somehow, in volume.
“James,” said Lily, though Severus was hard-pressed to know what the reminder meant. She sounded as tired and furious as Jamie did, so it didn’t sound like she was urging caution.
Remus, however, seemed to be recalling his manners. “I’m so sorry, you’re right, of course. Let me see if I can… c’mon, Sirius! Up you go…”
There was a sharp crack, followed by a clatter, and a string of curses. “You could at least connect to the bloody Floo Network,” said Peter.
“No,” Lily said, firmly. “We can’t.”
“And just share the way with your friends,” Peter said, and he sounded wheedling, now. “Make things so much easier…”
“The Anti-Apparition wards are only a hundred steps past the door,” James said tightly.
“Now you’re being cold,” Remus chided him. “We’re going, already.”
“And you make too many excuses for him,” Lily said, sharply.
“All right, all right,” Peter muttered. “Here, Remus, I’ll help.”
Severus cast a silent Notice-Me-Not charm on himself. Remus, Sirius, and Peter stumbled out of the house, Sirius dead-drunk between them; Severus then slipped through the door whilst it was still open, his cloak nearly brushing Peter’s.
The quaint little sitting-room was a disaster.
There were liquor bottles and beer cans and food everywhere. Half-full cups and plates sat on the couch and coffee table, and there seemed to be more of them than there had been people, just now, implying that others had come and gone. Severus only became aware how loud the Wireless was beneath the sound of Harry’s screams when Lily raised her wand to flick it off.
Severus canceled his Notice-Me-Not charm, and the Potters startled.
“Severus!” Lily exclaimed. “Oh…” she said, and then tears pricked her eyes.
James was looking at them both blankly, and Harry was still screaming, so Severus steered Lily for the couch and then Jamie, and retrieved the baby, whose cries were even more piercing up close. Harry didn’t smell like he had a dirty diaper, but maybe he was wet. Severus set him on the changing table in the Potters’ bedroom, to Harry’s red-faced fury; Harry despised getting his diaper changed. Soon enough, though, he was warm and dry, and back in Severus’s arms, screeching now more out of outrage than anything. Severus rocked him and murmured to him and eventually, in returning to the living room, found the rattle covered with crisp crumbs. He rinsed it off in the sink as best he could— which was full of more dishes— and shook it at Harry, who finally consented, reluctantly, to be soothed. Though his uncertain expression said he was more than happy to go off again at a moment’s notice if his world didn’t stay pleasant and predictable for an extended and unbroken period of time.
Severus returned to the living room with a grudgingly pacified baby to find Lily burrowed into Potter’s side. “Perhaps I should come back another time,” he said evenly.
“No, no!” Lily said immediately, sitting up, her eyes bright. “Oh, poor Harry. Poor dear one, I’m so sorry,” she said, and looked like she might start up again, so Severus swiftly handed the baby off to her.
Harry looked up at her as though he was contemplating forgiveness. Lily stroked the little whorls of hair atop his head, and he kicked his feet happily, fit forgotten.
Severus turned his attention to Jamie, who looked wrecked. He was slouched backward, his legs set wide, hands loose. “S’ my fault,” he slurred as Severus leaned down to begin gathering up the liquor bottles. “Something’s wrong with him and I’ve been too busy to get on it like I should.”
“Black?” Severus said, dropping all the bottles to the trash and returning for the dishes.
“I know he’s your least favorite person,” James said.
“…But?” Severus peered out of the kitchen to see Jamie looking after him.
“But nothing. Today, he’s my least favorite person. He hasn’t shown up to anything sober since Hogwarts. And that includes mum and dad’s funeral, our wedding, our Christmas get-together that was supposed to just be some old friends…”
“Ah,” Severus said. “I’m guessing your friends invited their friends, who invited theirs.”
“Like they still thought we were at Hogwarts,” Jamie said, ruefully, looking at his wife. “Like Padfoot didn’t know we had a baby in the house.”
“He told us to just send Harry off,” Lily said, with a hard expression on her face. “Like you can drop a five-month-old off at a sitter at a moment’s notice!”
That sounded cold, even for Black. “Maybe it was a misunderstanding,” he said, not liking the expression of befuddlement and betrayal comingling on Potter’s features.
“Let me help you clear…” Lily began, features scrunched up in determination.
“No,” Severus said. “You stay put and play with Harry, he’s had a Day. You’ve all had a Day. Go on, then, tell me about it.”
So they did, first mostly Lily, who was used to unloading her troubles onto his shoulders. Her way of putting things was so sharply funny, though, that soon she had James relaxing enough to chime in. Lily’s parents had gotten lost on the way to the restaurant, and when they’d finally arrived, the food was some of the worst they’d ever tasted; perhaps the regular cooks were home for Christmas. Petunia’s beau scoffed audibly every time Lily or James mentioned magic, Hogwarts, or the war until Lily was ready to deck him, or maybe Petunia, who seemed to find the whole thing incredibly droll. Knowing Pet, Severus thought, she’d probably invited the most offensively boring man she could find, her revenge for being endlessly snubbed by Lily’s inner circle. Tit for tat and all, Severus thought, but it was hardly fair play at Christmas.
Worse, she’d found a dozen things to pick on about Lily and James’s parenting, from their choice of swaddling cloth, to the spot of dirt on Harry’s chin, which Petunia claimed was proof they didn’t mind him. Even the two new parents taking turns holding the baby was too much for Petunia’s new friend, who claimed the boy’d never grow up a real man unless he had one for a father.
They’d come home to regroup, only to find that Sirius and Peter had gotten there first, and brought almost a dozen friends. Remus had arrived later, so at least he hadn’t been party to the plan to make their quiet get-together a… party, but he still had chided James and Lily for not being more welcoming. And then Harry had started screaming and wouldn’t stop, but some inhuman person, Lily said, her voice shaking, just put a Silencio over Harry’s bedroom door and turned up the Wireless, so Lily only knew he was even awake after he’d been screaming without help for an hour. Lily had ended up hiding in there awhile, rocking Harry, before realizing he wasn’t going to calm down until everybody had gone, that James was having trouble getting them to go. She’d finally managed to calm down enough to storm out and get rid of everyone without actively hexing them, in case they still wanted any friends tomorrow.
By that point, all the dishes were in the sink and a spell was scrubbing them, rinsing them, and setting them off to a washtowel on the counter to dry. The carpet had all its various crumbs and stains lifted and removed. The Christmas tree, which had listed or been knocked into, was prodded upright. A bottle had been procured for Harry, who was three-quarters knocked out already, exhausted now that he was finally calming down. And Severus reached into his pocket and placed the handkerchief-wrapped charcuterie and bottle of wine on the coffeetable before the Potters, who looked blankly at the spread as Severus enlarged it and sat beside it on the coffee table, facing them.
“Have you eaten?”
Lily looked up at him, and her eyes squinched, hard, in a way he knew meant she was trying not to cry.
“Come on, Lilies. You had a miserable day, but it’s over, now. It’s all going to look better once your blood sugar’s up.”
Lily nodded jerkily, and Severus made her a cracker with the kind of cheese she liked and handed it off. She chewed, resolutely, still looking determined to hold herself together.
“You too, Jamie. Sit up. Come on. Eat something.”
James took a cracker and piled it with chicken and cheese. Once he was chewing on it, Severus firmed his shoulders.
Time to be a grown-up.
“And yes,” he said.
James frowned.
“Yes, I forgive you,” Severus said. “We can’t go back in time and change what happened, but you’ve grown up. And so I forgive the man you are today, even if I can’t forgive the boy you used to be.”
“You do?” Jamie said, searching Severus’s face. “You’re not just saying it because— because you feel like you have to?”
“When’s the last time I did anything because someone made me feel I had to?”
James’s features relaxed into a grin. “Good point.”
“And,” Severus said. He closed his eyes, tightly, or he wouldn’t get through it, what he might see on their faces. “You’re my family, too. You and Lily and Harry. I don’t have any other. So I’m sorry, too, because I think I’ve still been a little… childish… about wanting things I can’t have, being angry I can’t have them. When what’s in front of me, is…” Severus’s gaze flickered between Lily and James, Lily’s armful of Harry. “Better than anything I earnestly hoped for. So if you’ll both have me as a friend, I’d— I’d be honored.” He opened his eyes.
James laughed wetly and covered his eyes with one hand. He ruffled his hand through his hair, something Severus had long since learned meant he was anxious, not showing off. Lily was looking at Severus tenderly, features more open towards him than he’d seen in years, full of warm approval.
Finally.
He’d done the right thing.
The breath whooshed out of his body in a tide of relief.
Only Potter still seemed distressed. Severus hoped James could read his receptivity in his face. “Have I upset you?” he said. His voice sounded foreign to him: reassuring. Settling. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
James gave him an awkward smile. “I dunno,” he said repressively. “Fatherhood. The war. Take your pick.”
It was the first time Severus had heard him call it a war.
So maybe that acknowledgement had brought Potter’s troubles to a head, but Severus knew it wasn’t just the war. It was an upset in the James-Severus push-pull dynamic: Jamie wanting to keep him close but not too close. In the strange universe inside Jamie’s head, Severus’s acknowledgement might have lifted him in Lily’s estimation. Eventually, he supposed, something had to give.
“You can say it’s the war or fatherhood, but I won’t believe you,” Severus shot back. He ordered his hands and voice and gaze steady. “I know it’s me. I even understand,” Severus went on, holding his hands out helplessly. “But I’m no threat to you! And Jamie…” Severus took a shuddering breath. “I couldn’t bear it if I came between you and Lily; if I hurt Harry. I couldn’t ever. And I don’t know why you’re making me say all this, making me reassure you…!”
“Jamie.” Lily was frowning at her husband, now. “Say something.”
Severus realized with a thrill of shock that tears were standing in James’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” James said, rapidly. “It’s my fault. Please don’t go.”
Baffled, Severus placed his hands on James’s shoulders. “I won’t if you don’t want me to. But you have to tell me something. Tell me why you’re entrusting me with Harry. Start there.”
“You’re the best man I know,” James hastened to say. “Clever, kind, and strong.”
Something in Severus’s chest stuttered.
“And humble. Too humble, so that every kindness is a surprise. Wish I could do so many nice things that you’d start to look for them.”
“I’m truly touched, Potter,” Severus stammered, trying to regain a rapidly diminishing sense of distance.
“And you’re responsible. You juggle all this insanity— work, and us, and the Order and all the rest of it— with a grace I never could.”
“Jamie,” said Severus.
“I know you’d do a good job with Harry,” James said, with utter faith. “As good as me and Lilies. Better, maybe, given that we can both be a bit self-absorbed.”
Lily snorted.
Severus turned back to James, who was still looking into his face, like there was something life-saving written there. “So you trust and respect me,” Severus said, slowly, “but you occasionally resent that I’m here, the space I take up. You’re only human—”
“No,” said James. “I wish you took up more space.”
What?
“I wish you were always here,” James said, and once he started, his voice sped up and his words spilled out over each other. “I wish you came here after work every day. I wish you ate dinner with us every evening. I wish,” he said, then closed his eyes, tightly. “I wish you stayed here at night.”
Severus felt like he’d been dunked head-first into the Great Lake rimed with ice. “I’m sorry?”
“And I’m only going to ruin everything,” James said, wiping tears out from under his eyes. “But sometimes it feels like I’m going mad with wanting.” He stared up at Severus.
Lily swept under her husband’s arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The baby needs to eat so often that we haven’t slept the whole night through in weeks. There are spells to keep him fed, but Harry needs to bond, and— James isn’t thinking straight. I told him not to do this.”
They’d discussed this.
They’d discussed him.
“My thinking is just fine,” James snapped. “I’ve told you.”
“I,” said Severus, slowly. “If you need help with the baby—”
James emerged from his wife’s embrace to lean forward on the couch, wrapping his arms around Severus’s shoulders. He buried his face in the crook of Severus’s neck.
“Or, oh,” Severus said, and slowly brought his arms up around James’s back, feeling as though he’d stumbled into a foreign country from one step to the next.
“Jamie, you can’t just do this,” Lily was saying. “You’ll break him,” and then she was crying, too, and Jamie opened one arm and she ducked into it again, and then all of them were huddled uncomfortably, baby between them, the air still sharply scented with beer, apple and clove and cinnamon and sugar cookie, baby-milk-smell underlying the lot. Severus squeezed his eyes shut, hoping to ground himself, then quickly blinked them open, needing the reality of the living room around himself to believe this was happening at all.
Maybe it wasn’t.
Maybe he’d gotten the bad end of a spell at the last Death Eater meeting, something slow-acting and poisonous. Maybe he was lying in the snow, seizing, right now.
“This is where you say something, Severus,” James was saying, disengaging and looking up. James’s expression pinched, and suddenly he looked like he had the day Severus had shown up at his door covered in blood: pained, on Severus’s behalf. He reached out to cup Severus’s cheek.
Severus’s breath caught in his throat.
“Maybe you don’t want to be here,” Jamie said. “Maybe it’s too much. But when I picture our future, you’re in it. Holding Harry, dancing with Lilies.”
Severus blinked, flashing back to that moment, the rumble of shock in Jamie’s eyes, like thunder.
Perhaps for a different reason than he’d always assumed.
“Is this how he asked you to marry him?” he asked Lily, trying desperately to defuse a tension that held him hostage.
Lily looked as intent as James, though, not willing to joke just now. Her green eyes were wide, lashes wet. “It did go something like this,” she said, looking to James.
Severus turned, saw James’s throat work.
Part of him must’ve still thought it was a joke, because the next thing he said came out teasingly. “If only your wife weren’t at your side when you proposed.”
Something broke in Jamie’s face, then, a complicated look that held pain, and laughter, and sorrow all tangled up together. The sound he made wrenched Severus, made him regret his light-heartedness for a second; Jamie had clearly been struggling with this for months and Severus hadn’t ever known—
And then James was reaching forward, his breath against Severus’s lips for a heartbeat; and then his lips were pressing, sweetly and inarguably, to Severus’s, and the chaos inside his head finally settled, like the passage of a lifelong hurricane.
Then James was drawing back, his own hazel eyes wide.
Severus remembered cataloguing his freckles, lying in bed across from him, and could’ve kicked himself. Part of him had to have known.
But then, he’d been so absorbed by his love for Lily, so consumed by it that he couldn’t see what was in front of him—
Lily!
But she was holding Jamie’s other hand, their fingers laced together, and he realized she’d never once let go. She had an expression on her face of love and pain, too, and Severus heard himself laugh, wetly. She leaned her head against his shoulder.
“Let me go put Harry down,” James said. “You need to talk, too,” and then the two of them were alone.
“All right?” Lily asked, and it so surprised him that Severus truly considered the answer.
He was very, very good. Almost high with it. “Only afraid that this is all some kind of hallucination,” Severus replied. “Maybe I’m on the floor of a Potions lab right now, and I’m going to be very embarrassed when— if — I wake up.”
“It’s awkward,” Lily agreed, nodding against the press of his shoulder.
Daringly, he raised his arm to wrap about her shoulders; she only snuggled closer in response.
“This is why,” she went on, “in those French films the menage a trois goes from smoky glances straight to the sex.”
“You haven’t seen French films—”
“I have so! Everyone knows those films.”
“Fine. But you haven’t seen them. I’d know if you’d crept into an X-rated movie.”
She looked up at him, from very close. “How would you know?”
“I know you,” Severus replied.
Lily’s features rippled with pain, and she ducked her head back into his shoulder. “You do. Better than anyone,” she replied. Quiet reigned but only for a moment. “I’m sorry I kept you at arm’s length.”
“Where else were you supposed to keep me?” Severus said. “I wouldn’t have imagined this in a million years.”
“A million years leaves a lot of time for the imagination.”
She was so fast, he thought, in helpless admiration, so clever. Daringly, he kissed the crown of her scarlet head. “So it does,” he said, quietly. Then, with a feeling of freefall: “you know I love you. I always will.”
There was a long pause, and then Lily’s arms tightened about his waist. “And I love you,” she said, and Severus’s heart seemed to swell in his chest. But then she pulled away. “But I don’t know that I love you just the way you love me. And I don’t want to hurt you by promising too much. Right now, I want to wrap my arms around you. Is that all right?”
Severus felt a smile stretch his cheeks, which were beginning to hurt. “Yes.”
“And you understand, I’m saying I might never want more.”
Severus laughed, delighted. “Lilies,” he murmured. “I’d follow you if you asked me to carry the train of your dress.”
“But that’s the last thing I want,” Lily whispered, clutching at his shoulders. “I want you to be happy, Severus.” And she must’ve wanted it a great deal, because her voice broke, and her eyes swam again.
James returned from laying the baby down. “All right?” he asked.
Lily looked up at him from her position at the couch, green eyes wide. “Severus wants to carry the hem of my dress,” she said, and in the wild way of married couples who spent nearly every waking moment in one another's company, Jamie caught on immediately.
“She’d be happier if it got muddy,” he said, “and you held her hand.”
Severus huffed a breath, halfway between an agreeable laugh and disbelief. “You two are a pair.”
James smiled at him, and there was so much warmth and humor in it that seeing it directed at him felt like a sip of warm cider going all the way down. “Well,” he said. “I guess we do have a lot in common.”
They didn’t stay awake for long after that. Severus felt giddy, but he knew the Potters had a day full of trials, and the sleeplessness of a couple with a small baby, besides. So he stood, not knowing if it were to go, or to go to bed, or—wildly, for a moment, he thought— to bed with them? And if they did want that, would they want to lie there companionably, or would they want more?
I wish you stayed here at night.
Perhaps that answered the first set of dilemmas. He planted his feet and looked at Lily helplessly; she reached for Severus’s hand.
He let himself be drawn in, closer, throat working. “I don’t know how any of this goes,” he sighed.
James looked at Lily, as if it were up to her.
“Could you—would you just—lie with us?” she said, cheeks igniting. “If that’s what you want, too.”
“Yes,” Severus said, reeling. Go to bed with them.
James smiled up at him as he turned the Christmas lights off for the night.
They all headed to the cottage’s one bath, to brush their teeth and splash their faces. There wasn’t enough room for three, so James and Lily went first, Severus leaning into the doorframe, skin prickling all over as he watched them elbow companionably at the sink.
He went in once James escaped, stood by Lily as she put on eye cream, dotting the remnants across her cheekbones. She grinned at him in the mirror, and it was almost, almost the dream he’d always pictured, almost exactly what he’d always wanted.
But, Severus thought, catching James’s eyes going dark in the mirror as he lingered in the doorway, watching, he was growing into someone different from that angry, selfish boy who grasped at bright things because he’d grown up in the dark. And tonight, for the first time he understood how his darkness could be soothing: that his solemn, take-charge nature was needful, sometimes.
So for the first time, he could maybe, sort-of believe it when Lily and Jamie said they wanted him around.
Severus snuck one, final look up at James in the mirror before casting a spell to clean his teeth. He once again stepped into their bedroom: Lily’s pearl earrings were gone on her side, replaced with a paperback mystery; James’s side held cufflinks, now, and an old glass of water which he flicked away to the kitchen. James once again handed Severus a spare pair of pyjamas and Severus slipped into them, aware of James doing the same but conscientiously not looking, still unsure of where the lines were.
When Lily slipped into the bedroom, she was brought up short by the sight of the two of them. “I feel like I missed a step on the stair,” she admitted, drawing her hair over her shoulder to weave it into a messy braid, her fingers going almost too fast for Severus to follow.
“We’re already here,” Jamie said, jaw firmed. “It’s just a matter of admitting it.”
Lily laughed, delighted. “You’re so wise, Jamie,” she teased, but her smile said she half meant it. “Come to bed, then.”
“Do I get a pillow, or—” just curl up at your feet, like a dog, Severus stopped himself from saying. He wasn’t sure he’d have been able to censor his bitterness even a few months ago, had he ever envisioned this coming to pass in the first place.
“I only sleep with one,” Lily explained. “The rest are for sitting up and reading; here…” She set a pillow down pointedly in between hers and James’s, tapping her wand to the bed to widen it a few inches to make room.
They tossed and traded pillows between the three of them like a three-part puzzle until each flopped back and proclaimed it good. Lily spelled out the lights.
Severus had half-expected James to make another move and couldn’t help but feel a bit on edge, like James was going to turn to him any moment expecting—more. When Severus turned to look, James was blinking at him in the dark. Severus smiled uncertainly with half his face and James reached out to slowly wrap one arm around Severus’s waist.
Jamie was still maintaining eye contact, so Severus gave a little nod, and the other man relaxed with a sigh, scooting forward a little to make the grip more natural. Lily had always treated Severus’s body like furniture growing up, and showed none of James’s delicacy, draping herself over Severus so dramatically that she whacked her husband with one arm. They both started giggling until Severus interrupted:
“Will you be quiet? Some of us are trying to sleep,” he murmured.
“I love you,” Lily said, and kissed his cheek before flopping back down. It was less than a minute before she started snoring.
Severus kept wondering when he’d wake up.
Severus woke slowly; he could feel no warm bodies using him as a pillow, so he assumed the Potters were already awake and dealing with Harry, or making breakfast, or a hundred other things that kept new parents busy. He rolled over and then fell out of the much-smaller-than-anticipated bed.
THUMP!
The whack shook the last of the past from his mind and he sat, dazed, on the flagstone floor of the dungeons. For a long while, he did nothing but sit, mind curiously blank.
Then, thoughts began to fly past, disorderly in a way that was shocking to Severus’s normally tidy mind.
James’s thoughtful gaze on his face in the dark, James’s arm sliding so carefully around his middle.
“wish you took up more space—”
That awful ornament—
Harry’s screams, Harry’s baby-head with its whorls of dark hair, Harry knawing the teething ring from Severus, Harry’s eyes were going to be Lily-green—
Lily saying, “I’d missed you so badly.” Lily’s lips pressed to his cheek. “I love you.”
The taste of sugar biscuits and spiced cider.
Jamie pressing his face into Severus’s shoulder and laughing with his arms around him and Lily both, and Severus was warm and safe and loved—
He realized he’d stood from the floor only because his vantage had changed and his legs were tingling. He shook out his hands, moving to one side of the bedroom and then the other, with no object.
Coffee. He needed coffee.
Things would be clearer, the world would snap together again, be in a recognizable shape again, once he had a little caffeine. He strode to the fire and almost barked out a request for coffee from the House Elves before considering his words more carefully. He didn’t want coffee, he wanted Lily’s coffee, which he would never taste again.
“Severus Snape’s rooms,” he said into the fire, keeping his voice even. “Coffee. A smoky, bitter blend with milk and sugar on the side.”
A tray poked through the flames, boasting a little silver coffeepot a-steaming, with a small service: two cups and saucers, a pitcher of milk, a sugarbowl and a pair of tiny silver coffee spoons. Severus doctored the coffee as close to Lily’s way as he could recall, and took a sip.
Of course it wasn’t the same, but it was—good, it was good, it was close. He suddenly recalled that Lily used brown sugar or vanilla-scented sugar when she could get it; he’d try that, next.
A tentative knock at the door; “come in,” Severus said, and it was Harry Potter.
“Hullo, sir,” he said, “I was just wondering—” and then stopped.
Severus cocked his head at the boy, suddenly knowing what it was like to hold a Harry who was so small he fit in the crook of Severus’s arm; he suddenly remembered the boy’s whorls of hair and could see how those patterns made up the hair on his head, now.
“…Harry?”
Harry shook himself, came in, closed the door behind him. “Sorry. Just… are you all right?”
Severus’s lips quirked. “Here, sit. Have you eaten?”
Harry shook his head.
“Have some breakfast.”
Harry came to their— their? —little kitchen table and sat, ordered breakfast through the Floo, and Severus rose, fussing about in the Potions lab; when Harry had eaten, and had cleaned his hands, Severus spelled the table free of crumbs and set the photo album in front of the boy with new pictures: baby Harry in Severus’s arms, in his crib, knawing at the toy Severus had bought, because it was what Severus had thought of, first.
Harry made a strange, strangled little noise and clapped one hand to his mouth at the sight of the new images. He looked up at Severus, hand still pressed to his lips; Severus nodded at him, then nodded at the album, and Harry flipped the page.
There was James, standing in the snow as he walked Severus to the Apparition point; Severus had thought the best shot was when he’d said, I don’t like you having to work so hard; the young man’s brow was furrowed and conflicted, a very Jamie expression, at least as Jamie’s face arrayed itself at Severus Snape. Lily, newly-shorn hair curling about her ears, holding little Harry and grinning at the arrival of Severus and James, though they were both out of frame. The decorations and the tree and the figurines on the mantel, looking distinctly eighties, though it would have taken Severus ages to point out which aspects of the décor rendered them so. Lily looking approvingly at them both, though again they were out of frame; and now Severus could see the desperate love that shone from her gaze, too. One shot of Lily telling the story of their terrible Christmas, Jamie in the foreground with his head tilted back to laugh; their faces were lit with the glow of the Christmas tree lights, almost like candlelight, warm and soft. Severus could just make out the edge of the platter he’d brought them.
Harry flipped back to the baby pictures, then looked up at Severus again, wordless.
“I remembered you,” Severus explained.
Harry tapped his fingers to the pictures reverently, features flickering through his father’s familiar stubbornness, his mother’s fire, and then landing on a kind of iron determination wholly his own. He looked at Severus.
“Who took this from you?” he said.
After that, it was all something of a blur.
Severus was still— he could tell there was something wrong with him, that he was still in something like shock, because he more-or-less allowed the brat to take charge.
“Here,” Harry said, handing Severus a stack of Muggle notecards. “The first thing to do is establish a timeline. Write down everything you remember that belongs to the same time, and we’ll put them in the right order. If they’re in the right order, maybe we can find clues as to what took your memories away, and why they’re… well, tucked away instead of just gone,” Harry explained.
Severus looked down at the notecards, then back up at Harry. “I should tell you something.”
But he wasn’t sure he should, actually?
At what age could a young witch or wizard hear about… a parent’s… affairs? Dalliances, oh hell. Was Potter old enough to know that Jamie and Lilies hadn’t been his Ron and Hermione at all? Or was this something he’d have to keep to himself, until, well, the end of his days?
Harry merely stared at him, eyebrows raised. “You don’t have to tell me everything, you know. Not if there are parts that are just— nothing to do with me.”
Was it nothing to do with Harry, that he’d been that close to Harry’s parents? Severus wasn’t sure.
“Just… stay here,” Harry urged, and then he was gone.
Severus wandered the living room back and forth, back and forth, mind by turns empty and careening, thoughts flying past him too fast for their import to make any impact. Eventually he moved back to the table and sat before the notecards again, staring at their white emptiness.
A knock.
“Yes?”
Now, Harry entered with Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley trailing in his bloody wake.
“Now, just one moment—” Severus said faintly, but Harry held up a hand.
“This is Ron,” he said, gesturing. “This is Hermione,” he added, with a second sweep of his hand.
Severus raised his brows. Both of the other teenagers were milk-faced, but they held.
Harry added, pointedly: “they’ve helped me solve weird mysteries since first year.”
Severus pillowed his head in his hands.
“Hermione’s got a mind like a steel trap and Ron’s a formidable tactician,” Harry said evenly.
Severus lifted his head up.
“Please let me help,” Harry said firmly.
Severus shook his head vehemently, so it was a surprise to even him when what he actually said was, “oh, very well.”
“No, you see,” Hermione Granger was saying in her most supercilious of voices. “He could not have possibly got arrested after he showed up at Godric’s Hollow covered in blood, because in that memory Moody told him about the Order for the first time.” With a flick of her want, she darted the index card holding information about the Potions arrest further back in the timeline.
“The Death of James Potter’s parents,” Weasley said. “Further back, it was winter.”
Snape shook his head to clear it as that index card wheeled backward.
“Right but that had to have been after the invite to the wedding,” Harry said, and the index card with the wedding and the picture they’d chosen to accompany it flew backward.
“When’s the Malfoy’s Christmas party?” said Weasley.
“All the Christmas ones are the same Christmas, I think,” Granger replied with a flick of her wand.
And then, there it was: a timeline, laid out in photography and his own words. The children read of his life story—from after Hogwarts on, anyway—acutely personal details removed for the sake of his sanity.
“You forgot all of this, Professor?” Granger said, turning to him. “Until just now?”
Severus took a breath and let it out slowly. Harry was looking at him with a sort of encouraging mien. “Yes,” he huffed. “I didn’t know any of it.”
“Crickey, the gifts Harry had to give to you, those were in the Christmas memory?” said Weasley, who’d never shown half so much acuity in Potions class.
“Yes,” Severus said again.
“Well, that’s done and dusted,” Weasley said, as if this last piece falling into place made it all obvious.
“Is it?” Granger queried, settling to sit at Weasley’s feet; they all dropped, one by one, even as the notecards and photographs hovered in midair. Severus, for his part, found himself grateful that he wasn’t the only one out of the loop.
“Well, sure,” Weasley said. He looked up at Severus nervously, then seemed to make the decision to describe his conclusions to his friends. “Shortly after that Christmas, something went wrong.”
Severus straightened.
“They sent,” Weasley went on, gaze flickering up so fast to Severus that he’d have missed it if he hadn’t been looking. “They sent him off to do something kind of deep cover, yeah? And they thought it was gonna be awhile.”
“How d’you figure?” Harry pressed.
Weasley shrugged. “Mr. and Mrs. Potter re-wrapped his Christmas gifts. An’ his memories were gone…”
Harry still looked confused, but Granger’s eyes were lighting up.
“Right! Of course,” she said. “He Who Must Not Be Named was always a brilliant Legilimens. If Professor Snape had been close to your parents, he would’ve seen it straightaway. So something was used to pack the memories away, somehow…”
“And everything Snape owned because of the Potters had to be squirreled away, so nothing could jog his memory,” Weasley finished.
“Hence the gifts, re-wrapped for,” Harry said, then needed to swallow before he could continue. “For next Christmas. To give back.”
“But of course, that never happened,” Granger said somberly. She looked up at Professor Snape, gaze warm and sympathetic, and instead of feeling offended, Severus found his face was doing something wry and thankful in response. “That must’ve been terrible,” she said, gazing on the index cards and photographs hanging in the air. “For them, and for you.”
Severus said nothing. He was fixed on the picture of Lily holding Harry, standing in the doorway to greet him and Jamie coming in from the cold.
God, what he would’ve done, he thought, for a picture of all of them, one with him in it. As it was, it already felt like he’d been excised from their lives; what he wouldn’t give for proof he’d been there by their sides, that those smiles on their faces were in part for him. That he’d made more than sorrow and hatred ripple out into the world, but some joy, too.
When he next was aware of his surroundings, Weasley and Granger were finishing tidying up the cards, placing them and the photographs side-by-side back into the album in chronological order. Moments later, they were finished and edging out the door, Potter talking to both of them in low voices; they both embraced him before departure, and Severus felt something like jealousy and something like joy that Harry had them.
“You’re right, Mister Potter,” Severus said. “They’re very good at that.”
Harry laughed, but looked a little worried, and his hands twitched like he wanted to embrace Severus, too, but didn’t dare. Instead, he told the older man he would see him tomorrow and slipped out the door to retreat back to Gryffindor Tower.