Chapter Text
Theo sits next to Harry at the Leaving Feast, and finds himself mourning the loss of Ron and Granger, who are banished to their own tables for official feasts. And when did he start appreciating Ron’s even and dutiful study guides and boisterous commentary on their various enemies, or Granger’s reading recommendations and manic gleam in her eyes when Flitwick mentioned something in Charms she hadn’t heard before?
(He’s always appreciated how they stand shoulder to shoulder to Harry, though, since that first breakfast when they were still a little intimidated by the Slytherin table but did their best to make conversation anyway, because Harry was there.)
Harry— he would say Harry is his friend, though such a thing will have to be held in the strictest sanctums of his being, as his father would not think he could be a Nott and friends with the Boy-Who-Lived. Even though the Boy-Who-Lived has been Harry since second week of term, when Theo stepped sharply between him and Draco’s taunting yet again and Harry mumbled why and the haughty child he was raised hearing about, the cunning enemy he was told to evaluate, the giddy defeater of the Dark Lord who would have sorted Gryffindor in a heartbeat would have never asked that. He knows he cannot be friends with Harry like Ron and Granger are friends with him, and occasionally he is jealous, but mostly he does not mind. Harry trusts him to know the right supplemental reading books and partner with him in Potions, and is always delighted when Theo comes to Quidditch matches. They share the tacit understanding of growing up in homes that were slightly wrong— Theo’s with his father’s slavish devotion to the Dark Lord and an infection of dark magics; Harry’s with something like neglect.
(Sitting next to Harry, Harry who Theo is pretty sure is spending the whole summer with Granger and Weasley, Theo thinks of Snape asking him directly if things were alright in his house. How he’d wondered, for a flash of a moment, what Snape would do in response to a direct challenge to prove his loyalties if Theo said no. How he’d wondered what it would be like to live somewhere that didn’t feel like a mausoleum, what it might be like to be seen and noticed and loved. If he hurts me, I’ll leave, he’d told himself ever since he’d found out what had happened to his mother, and now there is a dimension that plan that is not just running— he imagines the letter and the owl and he is not yet so old as to not imagine what it would be like to have someone take him away from that crypt of a mansion— but he’d already been hurt. His father had mangled the part of him that would have let him love Harry like Granger and Ron loved him.)
But. They are at the feast, and the banners are Slytherin green. Harry had told him and Millie in whispered tones about the stone and Quirrell and Voldemort and how he thought it might have been Dumbledore who laid the trap for him and his crew two nights ago, as they sat shrouded in privacy wards in an annex off the Common Room. Millie had been fighting mad, at Dumbledore and Voldemort both, but she was from a mainly neutral family and knew only that murder was nothing to aspire to, and Theo had grown up on tales from his father and the Dark Lord’s glory and inevitability and seeing the Mark, and his insides had twisted: how can you ask this of me, Harry, to choose you?
But Harry wasn’t asking, now was he? Harry had done the choosing, already: in the dorm room, sitting with Theo when they couldn’t sleep, letting the son of a Death Eater into his personal space with ease; in Potions, when Harry let Theo shield him from Draco’s subtle hexes and the Gryffindor’s taunts; in the Great Hall, when Harry dragged his friends to sit at the Slytherin table as if that was normal, acceptable, decent, and was delighted every time they and Theo and Millie interacted. Even now, Harry was doing the choosing, sitting next to him with his shoulder against Theo’s, talking to Daphne about the Wizarding library in Oxford and how maybe he could meet her sister over the summer, Blaise chiming in about asking his mother for an international portkey back to attend Harry’s birthday party and when Harry went I don’t have a party planned, Blaise said don’t worry, we can fix that, and Theo imagined Blaise writing to Molly Weasley and snorted.
“Well— if I’m having one, you should all come,” said Harry, looking around. “Millie, Theo?”
“Duh,” said Millie, rolling her eyes and giving him a friendly knock on the shoulder. “When you get the upcoming Nimbus 2001, you can let me borrow your 2000 more!”
“Based on how often you’re using it, it sure seems like it’s already yours,” mutters Daphne, and Millie shoves her, and Harry turns to Theo and says, “Theo?”
Theo hasn’t ever thought very highly of the Dark Lord since he learned he was defeated by an infant, and learning that infant was Harry Potter— Harry Potter who’s hair looked like a train-wreak and Harry Potter who would have failed Transfiguration without his and Granger’s interventions and Harry Potter who befriended the house elves and knew all the ones who took care of Slytherin by name— had furthered the damage. And who was he, Theodore Nott, to take a maniac’s brand on his arm and become someone else’s to control?
When he says, “Yes, I’ll be there,” he knows he will never say anything else to Harry Potter, and he finds he doesn’t mind. Is this what it is, to have a friend?
_______________
Susan sits next to Ron at the Leaving Feast, staring morosely into her pudding. “What do you mean, you can’t come to my house?”
“I didn’t say that,” says Ron, who as usual has put away enough food to feed and army and is now on helping three of pudding. “I said I’ll have to ask my mum, and it’ll probably be a couple of weeks.”
“But Harry’s going to be at your house,” she says.
“That’s different,” says Ron, not rude but in the way you state a known fact, and Susan knows that.
Susan knows that she’ll never be Ron’s best friend. He revolves around Harry and Hermione like they’re a three-star system, and if he were anyone else, she might be able to hate him for it.
But he’s Ron. He taught Justin how to play Wizarding chess because Justin asked and has spent the entire year trying to get Hannah to be cool with Harry (an end-of-term Quidditch scrimmage with the first years seems to have finally broken the ice, and also Draco Malfoy decided to play beater and nearly broke Harry’s nose, but that can be a problem for someone who isn’t Susan) and puts up with Ernie even when he’s being a pompous asshole and had taken her aside, early in the year after Harry had burst into tears over his parents’s pictures at their table, to ask if she had pictures.
“I live with my aunt, Ron,” she’d said, a little confused. “My mum’s sister? Of course I have pictures.” She pulled out her locket, which had once belonged to her mother, hinged it open, and demonstrated. Something strange had crossed Ron’s face and he’d said, “Yeah, well, so does Harry,” and Susan didn’t know what to do with the fact that Ron’s first reaction to realizing that not all families were kind was to check to make sure hers was alright.
He’s Ron, and so she can’t hate him for it, not when she knows if she asks him for anything, he’ll do his best to give it. It seems exhausting, really, to be Harry Potter and Hermione Granger’s best friend, to do the saving the world stuff and stop people from killing Harry or You-Know-Who from coming back (she shivers, and thinks of her parents murdered by Death Eaters and how she wouldn’t been able to look him in the eyes like Harry did). Ron told her about the stone in a low voice a couple of days ago, when they had been the last ones in the their little nook of the common room, and she understood why he’d said the Hat had considered Gryffindor. She might be loyal, and kind, and hard-working, but she would have run screaming before going down to confront Quirrell.
Susan thinks of Harry, and what it would have been like to grow up not knowing your parents died so you could live. Of the way he helped her with her DADA practical work and let her use his Nimbus, even though she was really Ron’s friend, not his, and went to potions open office hours with her because she was nervous about Snape. Susan thinks of Hermione, and how strange and terrifying it must have been to not know you belonged somewhere else, that your accidental magic was a sign of good things to come. Of how she’ll always help her with Charms work and how she introduced her to Anthony and Sue Li and did the research to find a repair charm strong enough to fix the snapped chain of her locket.
Of how both of them need Ron, in a way that she doesn’t need Ron. She likes Ron, appreciates Ron, loves Ron, even, but she doesn’t need him. She has Justin, and Hannah, and Ernie, and her aunt Amelia and her primary school friends from their neighborhood who know she’s a witch and still wrote her letters from their boarding schools and want her to play summer league rugby with them when she’s home. She could have anyone she wants, really— Millie and her are something approaching friends, and Sue Li is pretty wicked for a nerd, and Neville clearly needs more people in his corner, which is why Ron invited him to their Sunday study groups and she approves.
She’ll never be Ron’s best friend, and he’ll never be hers, but they are friends. There is something, after all, in staying not because you need to, but because you want to. In having everything and just deciding to have more. “Harry could come to,” she says. “If you want. My aunt says we can go do whatever we want in London.”
“Even that muggle wheel thing?” Ron asks, lighting up. “Hermione told me about it but it sounds fake.”
“It’s real!” says Susan. “You can see the whole city. And I can teach you to play rugby!”
Ron has been hearing bits and pieces about rugby and winces. “You’ll be fine,” says Susan, giving him a friendly elbow. “Just pretend everyone on the other team is Malfoy and tackling will get a lot easier.”
After hearing about what happened with Harry and You-Know-Who, Susan thinks she understands why his laugh has gotten a bit more sluggish as the year’s gone on. But it’s there, after a moment, and she slings her arm across his shoulders and he might not be her best friend, but he’s her friend, and it’s a good feeling.
_______________
Sue Li sits next to Hermione at the Leaving Feast, their heads close together with Anthony as they discuss what the three of them have heard about the various major Wizarding libraries in Britain. Occasionally, they’ll be one none of them have heard of and Sue or Hermione will pop their head up and ask Penelope, who is sitting with her friends but keeps glancing at them with an older-sister sort of fondness. Sue thinks of her older sister, who is a squib attending Eton who wants to be a mathematician— what do you mean, you’re not learning math! she’d practically screamed in a letter at the beginning of the semester, and Sue has an inkling that her summer will contain lots of quality time spent with her sister and an Algebra textbook. And, when she can get away, Birmingham with Hermione (an hour on the train, she asked her dad last week and he checked for her), going to the Library of Kells there. Maybe she could convince her Mom to take them up to Leeds for a weekend to go to the Charms library there.
(Sue thinks, as she does often, that the way Hermione is learning wards is different from her own fascinations with magical law and politics, or Transfiguration, or whatever weird History of Magic tidbits she’s working through that week. She does Transfiguration in long hand in the margins of her potions and charms textbooks, barges into McGonagall’s detentions to ask weird obscure questions, and sometimes never gets around to solving or fixing or being able to alter the snuffbox, but she’ll sleep soundly and dream of theoretical magic.)
(Hermione is learning wards and protective magics and advanced charms with a hunger, with a fixation, with a ragged-edged brutality. In March, she practiced protego for three weeks straight, until she’d stripped so much magic from herself that an old scar from a bike crash when she was nine reopened and Sue had Anthony distract her while she ran to find Ron and Harry, because she knew that they would be able to convince her to go to the hospital wing. Sue thinks of that, and of how Hermione had told her and Anthony about the chamber at the end of the maze and the stone and how she had cast protego— an imperfect, slightly splintered protego, but fucking protego, at twelve— between You-Know-Who and Harry.)
Hermione and Ron and Harry were working on a different level, Sue knew. She and Anthony were friends with Hermione, sitting with her in class and sharing note and bickering on the way to the library together about if Snape was alright (Sue) or good at being Head but not teaching (Hermione) or horseshit (Anthony), but the thing Hermione had with the two boys was like the thing Sue had with her sister. The thing the two Gryffindor twins had with each other, maybe, even. The kind of love that moves and shifts and refocuses; the kind of love that means you spend your summer teaching them math instead of hanging out with your Eton friends like a normal sixteen-year-old, that means you learn protego if your best friend is Harry Potter and You-Know-Who is just around. A huge, hideous, almost untenable sort of love.
Sue has found that she doesn’t mind. Hermione is her friend, not her sister, and she loves the parts of her she gets— the frenzied revisions and charms help and someone to listen to her rant about wizarding law. She likes the overlap, of having Ron and Harry around— how Ron will talk to her about League Quidditch in a way that Anthony and Hermione won’t, how he’ll always ask about her day; how Harry clearly doesn’t know what’s going on in Transfiguration most of the time but will always listen to her explanations and ask her questions about why she’s interested in it, how he’ll rise from the table to stand between her and anyone who dares to make fun of her for her dad being a muggle or her sister being a squib or her being too smart for her own good or any of it. The trio have taken, in this last term, to having breakfasts with the Slytherins (she suspects because Malfoy is a preener and never arrives until the last minute), lunch with the Hufflepuffs, and dinner with the Ravenclaws. That way, Sue and Anthony and Hermione can compare notes about their lessons and their days and plan how they’re going to divide and conquer homework for the evening.
Sundays, they go to the library to sit with Harry’s friends and Ron’s friends— Nott with sharp eyes and brilliance, who’s father Sue knows fought for You-Know-Who last war but is always so polite to her and Hermione; Millie who supports the Tornados but has a bone to pick with the History of Magic curriculum too; Blasie with this cool disregard and sly humor breaking the ice; Susan Bones who’s a force of nature, always showing up ten minutes late but with snacks stuffed in her pockets and a desire to accomplish; Ernie with his smoothed hair and carefully cultivated manor flagging once he gets comfortable; Justin not always understanding, but willing to ask good questions and listen; and now Neville too, shy and quiet, but wicked at Herbology and calmer once you get him talking and offer to help him with his potions essays.
Sue Li’s spent her entire life dreaming of Hogwarts, of the library and what she could learn, what she could do. And she can feel it, all around her, humming. Why did it have to look like this, then, the aftermath of a war— You-Know-Who wanting to kill her parents because her mother married a muggle; Harry Potter with his thin shoulders having to face him in the basement of the school instead of having time to listen to her explain Yörrel’s Basic Theorem of Transfiguration him; Ron dodging hexes because he's associated with people who aren't blood purists; Hermione reading books on warding because her love is so much that it takes precedent? At Eton, no one almost dies every term. No one in her sister’s study group has parents who actively tried to murder her parents.
But we have the summer, she thinks, as Hermione turns from her conversation with Jasper Kripps, one of the sixth-year Prefects, about if Cambridge’s magic library is worth a visit, to ask for Sue’s input. “What’s the Transfiguration section like?” she asks, thinking of her house in the Kent country side, with the heavy wards to keep You-Know-Who away and her sister and her father prepping for his human rights law cases on the couch and her mother singing while she directs her magic to cook dinner while at the same time reading cases from the 1300s. Maybe Hermione can come and stay. Maybe, eventually, she’ll know Harry and Ron well enough to have them all over.
For now, though, there is only the Cambridge Library, and the way Hermione takes wild notes on it all through the feast, and the fact that she has nerd friends now too (just like her sister!) and it’s such a solid thing, like the grid of the stacks in the library, like coming home.
_______________
Neville sits by Seamus and the Patil twins at the Leaving Feast, listening to them talk but not really adding things. He thinks about long arc of the semester— the nights of worry over being in Gryffindor at all (wouldn’t he have fit so much better in Hufflepuff?), the way his wand (his dad’s wand) won’t quite work right for him, like his father, really, how he’s not an orphan on paper but like Harry is but how can he be anything else; the quiet calm of the greenhouse when he’d go back there during Sprout’s office hours and just breathe in the smell of dirt and feel less— everything, really; how awful potions was, and he knew Dumbledore trusted Snape but his Grandmother had drilled into him everyone who worked with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, the whole history of that generation at Hogwarts and he knew Snape had been just a year above one of the men who’d hurt his parents, just a couple of years below two of the others, all in Slytherin, all wrong—
(And his Grandmother writing him about Harry being in Slytherin, like she was looking for intel. Like Harry wasn’t kind and decent and made sure he got his Rembrall and stood up for him in potions when he freaked out. By mid-term, Neville was crumbling the letters and had decided to draw his own conclusions.)
He won’t pretend he understand why it was him in Gryffindor, though, and not Harry. Harry stands up to the bullies, and was brave enough to go after the stone, and keeps playing Quidditch even though someone tried to kill him. And not Ron, who invited him to the meetings in the library and got in a fist-fight with Malfoy; and not Hermione, who’s wards are brutal things and went down to face He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (he’d heard that much, through the grapevine.) All of them seem braver, better than him.
Maybe it hasn’t been the best year, all in all.
Except: Sprout told him that next year, he could come in after dinner and help her with some of her repotting, if he was free. Susan slide in next to him a couple of weeks ago when he was studying alone at the Library, her friend Hannah tagging along, and asked if he could help them with some Herbology questions. Ron had made a point of inviting him to their end-of-semester Quidditch scrimmage, and when he’d said he didn’t really fly, Ron said, Don’t worry, you can sit with Hermione and Theo and Blaise and just hang out! But it would be a shame if you missed it! and it felt good to be wanted. He’s made a morose comment about his wand being his dad’s and not feeling right a couple of Sundays ago and Millie, without missing a beat, had said, just break it by accident, and then you’ll have to get a new one! and he couldn’t say he wasn’t thinking about it. Maybe over the summer, somehow.
He would spend the summer in the huge, empty house his Grandmother owned, working in the garden and reading about plants and trying to catch up on potions things he hadn’t had time to do during the school year, panicking about Snape (He’s not bad, said Harry, last week, and Neville had thought he’d been talking about how Neville’s fear had been irrational until he said, He made sure I didn’t have go back to my relatives this summer, and maybe, just maybe Snape wasn’t evil like the people who had hurt his parents.) When he got back from those exhausting visits to the closed ward, he’d go out to the woods and look for plants he’d never seen before, until he could get the smell of antiseptic out of his nose. Ron had said he would write. Blaise had said you’re coming to Harry’s birthday party right! and Susan had said when’s yours? and when he’d said, Blaise had gotten this look in his eyes and muttered something about planning a joint party.
And what a thing. What a thing that would be, if he was just bundled into to such a thing, blooming from the power of the way Ron and Hermione and Harry circle each other.
He thinks that if he perhaps contrives to disappear into the woods— missing dinner, maybe, worrying his Grandmother just a bit— she will be too relieved to have him back intact to be mad that his father’s wand is broken. He knows his magic reeks of chlorophyll and molten steel, and maybe with the right wand he can finally tap into the pool that he’s starting to understand is right there underneath his rib cage, waiting.
Well, his dad was a late bloomer too, from what he hears in the stories. He’s got time to come into his own, maybe even more so now that there might be such a thing as friends.
_______________
(Dumbledore sits in the center of the Head Table, Pomona to his left and Filius to his right, and counts score for the school year.)
(Harry is alive, Harry is here, Harry clearly has a power to him. He didn’t expect Slytherin, and Gryffindor certainly would have streamlined certain things, but Severus has done an admirable job treating the boy with an even hand— no affection, no hatred. Albus shouldn’t have doubted him. And— Albus doesn’t think Slytherins are uniformly evil, per-say, but it has been a relief to see Harry ally so strongly with a muggleborn and some Slytherin half-bloods and a Weasley. And to not tolerate any bullying. With hindsight, Dumbledore can admit that perhaps he should have taken a stronger line on some of those Gryffindors— pushing Severus to Voldemort was useful, in the end, but he never would have predicted him turning spy, and perhaps if Sirius Black, at least— but then Black, and Potter too, might have—)
(He shakes the thoughts of the past away, thinking of his and Harry’s conversation in the Hospital Wing. Severus hadn’t responded to his cues to leave them alone, so he’d delivered the whole thing to Harry— his mother’s love, destroying the stone, Voldemort gone but a wraith, so probably still returning— with Severus right there. Severus for his part had taken it all without comment or even reaction. Harry asked follow-up questions, but was subdued, not quite meeting his eyes. A worthy Boy-Who-Lived, even he was still a bit rough around the edges— at heart, brave; brave and self-motivated to go after the stone. It would be alright; he was eleven. There was time.)
(Voldemort, though— Severus is furious about the fact that his trap both summoned Voldemort and did not catch him. Potter could have died, he’d yelled, pacing around his office, robes streaming. You brought him here, when you knew Potter was here, and Albus, as much as he hates it, admits Severus is right. He had gotten ahead of himself— he assumed the Voldemort would send a thrall, like he thought Quirrell was, who would not be powerful enough against the sheer weight of Albus’s wards to murder a student outright. He’d thought to have his cake and eat it too— testing Harry’s mettle while also feeling out Voldemort’s current strength. Instead, they had been saved because Lily was a charms expert bar-none. Perhaps he owes Severus an apology— the man has seemed skittish and slighted around him of late. If he’d listened to him about the unicorn blood—)
(Plans within plans within plans. The young Mr. Malfoy and the other children of Death Eaters in Severus’s house. Another defense teacher— the pros of sabotaging the education of the dangerous seventh years versus impeding yet more progress for everyone else. The— well, riddle— of how Tom had survived. How exactly he had remained alive, what horrifically dark magics had he borrowed or invented? How, then, to unhitch them?)
(Albus sighs, looking out over the Great Hall, to where Harry is laughing with his Slytherin classmates. He thinks he has done the best he can for him this year, to make it normal. Quirrell was— well, Quirrell was concerning on paper, but Albus hadn’t anticipated him to try to kill Harry. Perhaps another pro of an inept defense teacher will be that they could not do that. And he allowed him the over-ride on the first year broomstick ban, and has let him and his friends keep their covert hideout on the fifth floor— perhaps he should spend some more time up there next year, seeing how they are when no one is around. Or he could send Severus to do it, he supposes. Always good for him to gain more appreciation into Harry’s character as more than James’s son. But other than Quirrell, he hopes Harry has gotten to be a student, this year. A student and a child. He sees the years ahead of them piling up like great storm banks, and hopes Harry will have some slivers of happiness before the war comes.)
_______________
Minerva sits next to Filius at the Leaving Feast, and does not mean to get drunk. But the end of the school year feels like as good at time as any.
He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, alive, or at least clinging to life; there had been whispers, but this was solid proof. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named face to face with Potter, the only thing saving him, according to Albus, some devilishly tricky piece of blood magic and charms intermingled that Lily had invented (and maybe metastasized with the Killing Curse?) so that when she’d been murdered, the murderer would be unable to touch her son. And what was this from Pomona about why she’d assigned Potter and his crew detentions in the Forbidden Forest? They’d been sent to help Hagrid, which given their obvious affinity for the man, she’d thought wouldn’t be too bad. She’d given the Marauders worse, but maybe she was just loosing her touch— James’s son couldn’t get a needle to twitch into a matchstick, some days. He was powerful, but he couldn’t seem to find time to grasp the theory, and who’s fault was that?
Another year with no casualties, but she wonders what they have lost, those children who had never held themselves like children. And that was the difference, wasn’t it, between Potter and his father: James has been carefree and unbothered, right until the end, even sitting in Order meetings, and Potter held his shoulders like he was bracing for a blow.
She remembers a time when she would have called a child like that into her office (Sirius Black, her mind supplies, and she shoves the thought of him away, what he took like a knife to the gut) and plied them with biscuits and support and understanding until they cracked and told her everything, and she could make inquiries and make moves, but somewhere in the last war things began to slip from her hands and she missed Severus, didn’t she, and now he’s doing the asking and the solving and the fixing with the brutal acumen he does everything.
She is still powerful enough to build a chess set from stone and imbue it with magic; still powerful enough that if Albus had told her He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named might descend on the castle and hurt Potter, she could have conjured up a show to fight him off. Still friendly enough to make allies with the Weasley Twins and still gentle enough that the first-years sobbing from homesickness come to her office. She could win a duel against most wizards alive (not Albus or Filius, of course, and perhaps not Severus) and the Killing Curse has always come easy to her, green light like a blade when she fought her last two wars, but—
She is tired. She is loosing her touch, or maybe she is letting it slip on purpose: twenty years ago, the first-years who came sobbing to her office would have come to depend on her for the rest of their academic careers and beyond, and now they trickle off to go to the Prefects, and the other professors, and she watches Potter laugh with Zabini and Nott and Bulstrode and knows that if she were better, she would have told him about his father, but she is not.
If nothing else, she will keep him alive, and she will back his play against He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. The idea of having to live through yet another war grates in her bones, but for James, she thinks, she will have to stay alive at least until Potter is of age.
_______________
Flitwick sits next to Albus at the Leaving Feast, thinking not of the several charms papers he hopes to write over the summer, but of the trio. The Golden Trio, he heard Mr. Malfoy sneer in class the other day when none of them were given any sort of detention for breaking through several layers of defenses and preventing the theft of the stone (according to Albus, at least; Flitwick does not know if this “Quirrellmort,” as Sprout had dubbed him at their emergency staff meeting could have broken into Klien-space and used the stone.) But perhaps.
It feels as though Albus should have been better safe than sorry, if the target of the trap was in fact You-Know-Who, which it seems to have been.
He thinks of the weeks after Easter Break, where Mr. Potter’s face was open in class and he summoned his magic more easily and his essays were better, more solid. In another life, he would have been raised by his mother and known charms as easily as falling asleep, and in another life, even with the first war, he could be here learning, and not trying to fight a second. For the third or fourth time that year, Flitwick weighs the protection Albus offers the school by being the only one Voldemort ever feared and him being himself, and comes up with nothing; for the umpteenth time this year, he wishes it had been enough for James and Lily to die and take the You-Know-Who with them, none of this lingering business.
He wonders if Albus intends to teach Mr. Potter to duel. If it will be easier for he himself to offer instead of Severus. If it will be worth further mangling Potter’s childhood in order for him to survive.
At his table, Miss Ganger and Miss Li and Mr. Goldstein are bent over the list he provided for them yesterday of all the magical libraries in Britain, when they burst into his office in a panic after learning they couldn’t take books from the Hogwarts Library home. He’s gleaned enough to know that Severus worked something out, and Mr. Potter will not be returning to the muggles he was raised by, and he wonders how much of the Holidays will be spent at Miss Grangers, seeing those libraries.
Over the summer, Flitwick will pretend there is no war to come. He will write up his most recent research and meet with some of his old students— in Paris, in Devon, in Shanghai— and he will go to the European Division of the Charms & Wards Conference in Stockholm, where he’ll present his paper on the interactions between Felix Felicis (graciously brewed by Severus) and various common protection and healing charms, as well as give a talk on teaching charms to NEWT- level students through self-study options. He will forget about the sixth-year in his house who is developing a fascination with the dark arts, and the two graduating seventh-years who are foaming at the mouth with talk of blood purity, so much so that they will barely look at him. He will find someone who knows more about protection and stasis wards to correspond with Miss Granger, and make inquiries about openings in Masteries for Severus’s Miss Finkley and—
The war is coming, he can feel it in his teeth. What does a man like him do, in a war? He spent the last one here, ignoring it resolutely, but if this one comes before Mr. Potter is of age, it will be fought here, and what then?
What then?
_______________
Pomona sits next to Snape at the Leaving Feast, and watches her children, and thinks of what she has accomplished this year. Dylan has just been given a Healing Apprenticeship at St. Mungo's; Ullrich has been recruited to play Chaser for the Wasps. Two couples which she thinks will last; good OWL results almost across the board she’ll stand to reckon (DADA tutoring she organized payed off) and Neville from Gryffindor to help her in the Greenhouse next year. She’s not entirely sure yet, but if he continues like he is, she thinks he’ll have a career in it.
Ron, being Ron. Severus, getting Harry out of that house. You-Know-Who not gaining power, by the width of a hair.
(She does still want to leave Albus alone with the plants in greenhouse nine for just a little too long, but that’s beside the point.)
Beside her, Severus looks exhausted; she knows he spent two nights in the infirmary with Harry, just sitting between him and the door. She wonders how many nights she’s going to have to do that, with one of hers, if this continues. If this school becomes the staging ground for the next war, which she doesn’t want to believe in but lives portent in the lines in Severus’s face. On the other side of the table, she can see McGonagall, who has already fought two wars and Sprout isn’t sure could survive another— not magically, of course, her power has only grown as she’s aged— but mentally. There are only so many people you can stand to bury. And then Flitwick— brilliant, the best teacher of all of them, but no fighter. Subversive, if the Dark Lord came here openly and started hurting people, but he would never join something so overt as the Order of the Phoenix.
So is this how it will be, then? The rising tide of the coming war, her and Severus trying their best to protect their students from the grip of the Dark Lord and Harry always in danger and the trio— and their swelling group of friends— with him? Albus with more schemes, the school an island— a not-so-safe island in the darkness?
Why is it, that their world is always at war?
But her table, Ron and Susan are laughing— not thief-thick, like the trio is, but with something else, an easy orbit that has no need to it, just joy; at Severus’s table, Harry staring at Blaise as he spins some elaborate tale or scheme, Millie on one side and Theo on the other, both in his space in a way that makes him melt into their shoulders; at Flitwick’s table, Hermione is chattering with Sue and Anthony, probably about books or charms or libraries. (She again beseeches magic for more Ravenclaws who love Herbology.) And at McGonagall’s table, there is Neville, who is lonely but Ron noticed and is doing his best to pull him in, and she will try too, working in the greenhouses next year. She’s already tapped her Prefect for next year, and one of hers will be the next Head Boy. Next year, there will be more tiny first-years— the last Weasley, the Lovegood child— and she wonders how many muggleborns there will be for her to introduce to the idea of magic. In the last few years, she’s taken over virtually all of them, knowing she both reads witch and is non-threatening (Severus is… not that). Should she start putting wards on their family’s houses, if there’s to be another war?
She shakes that thought away, for another night, when she and Severus will sit down with vermouth and make plans. Tonight is for toasting their survival. Tonight is for the present, for the ones she’s saved thus far, the ones she’s saving.
Ron is laughing, Harry is laughing, Hermione is laughing, and everywhere her children are laughing, and fuck this talk of war: it will do, for tonight, to have this.
_______________
Severus sits next to Pomona at the Leaving feast, and watches Potter, and wishes he trusted any of his colleagues enough to get drunk in front of them. Albus, really, is the problem. He shrouds his face and tries to think of the brewing he plans to get done this summer, between the parts of the summer where he’ll be looking for the Dark Lord in whatever hole he’s crept into and making sure no one thinks to check if Potter is at Private Drive (odds: low, considering Arabella had been mailing Albus fucking letters for ten bloody years) and ferrying the boy himself from location to location. And picking him up from Kings Cross tomorrow discreetly but professionally— he’d suggested it himself, to Albus, even before the nonsense with Quirrell, that it might be better if someone took the boy directly to said idiotic blood wards, and Albus had beamed at him and agreed.
He, of course, would be taking the boy to Birmingham and the Grangers, but if he played his cards correctly, Albus would never need to know that. Albus still thought the fit he’d thrown about Potter’s living situation was because he thought the boy was spoiled and pampered and he hated Petunia (a good lie had truth to it), not because he wanted to probe into Albus’s motivations and how much he knew.
Too much, Snape has decided. Albus is playing chess master, and Harry is—
Harry is Harry, now. Harry brings his friends from other houses to office hours for potions even though he clearly understand the material, to give them moral support. Harry apologized for ignoring his direct order not to go after the stone and asked, in a low voice in the dark of the hospital wing, if he’d have to go back to the Dursleys after all. Harry is the reason several older Slytherins came to his office hours to have long talks with him about the actual use of the Dark Lord— to quote one Marcus Flint a couple weeks ago: “He’s completely average at everything except being a Seeker, which isn’t exactly Dark or right powerful. Last week, he walked into the doorframe on the way back from the pitch. If he’s got some mystic dark power, I ain’t seen none of it. Stupid fucking choice for the Dark Lord to fixate on, all I’m saying.”
Severus sees the war before them, though he wishes he didn’t. He wishes he could go down to his lab and drink and have one night where he didn’t have to try to fix everything. How long will they have, before the Dark Lord manages to reconstitute himself? There is magic Severus has heard of but never seen, that can reanimate wraiths and rebuild bodies. Perhaps he needs to do some reading, on top of it. Could he convince Narcissa to get him into the long abandoned libraries of Grimmauld Place?
Harry will get older. He knows enough of the prophecy, of how the Dark Lord works, to know he will come back and go after Harry. How long? How much time does he have to try to teach the child what he needs to know to survive?
None of this has been about Lily or Potter Senior or the vow since— well, who is Severus Snape to pinpoint the inflection points of his own loyalties. This has been about how he wants Harry James Potter to live. To pass Transfiguration and win the Quidditch Cup for Slytherin and befriend the children of Death Eaters and take his little crew and go to their bolthole and take a breather, away from the world that wants him to be things. To live, because he is a child, and children should live.
(Snape thinks of their bolthole, on the fifth floor, with Granger’s wards that would have stumped a fourth-year. Granger’s wards, which would not hold if Quirrell, if the Dark Lord, if Albus came knocking. So what if he had incanted over them more powerful things, the kind of wards that would let him know if one of them were hurt, the kind of wards that would encourage Albus to forget the room was there or delegate spying on it to him, the kind of wards that would slowly seep into the castle walls and become forgotten, untraceable, but there all the same.)
At his table, Harry is wedged between Bulstrode and Nott, wearing the coat Severus bought him for Christmas, the coat he rarely takes off, and Snape has no care to interrogate the emotion such a thing raises in him.
Perhaps, tomorrow, there will be enough flexibility in their schedule to take Harry to Diagon Alley, before he drops him off at the Grangers. Polyjuice, if needed, even. Some gold, books for next year (Granger would love that, wouldn’t she), his robes were already a little too short and some of his shirts too, but it hadn’t been lost on him that he only ordered clothes when someone (Nott) nudged him to—
He shook himself from his thoughts. There would be a war. He would go back to the Dark Lord and kneel and make apologizes for Quirrell (though, that one was on the Dark Lord, really— why would Severus have thought someone as smart as him was using someone as inane as Quirrell, who couldn’t solve puzzles in a term that three children did over the winter Hols) and sniveling under Dumbledore and take the rounds of crucio. He would do what he needed to do to protect Harry. As much as he resented Dumbledore’s machinations around the boy, he could admit Dumbledore was an excellent general and spymaster; Snape would move where he was directed, learn what he needed to learn, kill who he was directed to kill. And Harry—
Albus seemed convinced Harry was necessary, somehow, to defeating the Dark Lord. He was usually right about such things, as much as Snape loathed it. He looks again at his table, full of children laughing, relieved to finally have the holidays upon them. Wonders how many of them he can save. Wonder how many he will meet at a Death Eater meeting, too late.
Wonders how many Harry will turn, with nothing more than his two best friends and the light in his eyes.
The war. The dead. The fact that eventually Harry will know, about the prophecy and who Snape has killed personally. The ones he killed in spirit.
But it is the Leaving Feast. They have survived first year. Harry is at the table, laughing at something ludicrous Zabini has said, his eyes occasional slipping to find the other parts of his crew, and he’s never going back to that infernal house. Snape thinks of Florian’s ice-cream shop in Diagon, and wonders if anyone has ever bought him ice-cream, and if— if it is such a wrong thing to want to be the first. To triage just a bite of the damage.
It does not make him good. It will fix nothing, save nothing, prevent nothing. But—
He would have hated Harry, for looking like his father, for looking like his father but with his mother's eyes, but now he's here, a child, sitting with his friends and occasionally looking up at the Head Table and finding Snape. Receiving a slight nod in return: I’m here, I will back your play.
And really, what more is there to do than to do that?
_______________
(Dumbledore dismisses them. The trio say goodbye to their friends, who know by now how such a thing works. Snape watches Harry; Sprout watches Ron; Flitwick watches Hermione; McGonagall busies herself with cleaning her spectacles; Dumbledore watches them all but doesn’t grasp it, not yet. They meet at the threshold to the Hall, orbiting like a three-bodied system, and slip off, small enough underfoot to escape notice, for the time being. Up to their bolthole, matching each other step for step through the ancient corridors, talking and not talking and does it matter? Snape’s wards are a heavy net over them, once they enter, and maybe they ache, with the idea of being apart, and maybe there will be a war, but they have this, and for one more night, it will have to do.)
(When they sleep, they only dream of the others, but alive.)