Chapter Text
Harry stood in front of Snape’s office, searching for the courage to knock. With a deep breath, Harry knocked and then quickly backed two steps away from the door, waiting for a response with bated breath.
There was no response.
Harry knocked again, louder and firmer. His heart beat in his throat, nervous and embarrassed. He wanted to get this over with. But again, there was only silence.
“He’s not in there, firstie. Might as well head back.”
Harry jumped, since he’d thought he’d been alone in the corridor. He looked around for someone else but didn’t realize where the voice had come from before an amused snort drew his eye to the portrait across from Snape’s office. A grass snake lay sunning itself and watched him from within its frame.
He stepped up to the portrait and gave an unsure smile.
“Do you know where Snape is? I wanted to see him before school lets out,” Harry said.
The snake in the portrait reared back as if startled. Harry didn’t know why, since it wasn’t an unreasonable request. Then again, this was Snape. No one wanted to see him. Not even Slytherins.
The serpent blinked twice before a sly expression crossed its face.
“And what business do you have with the Head of Slytherin?” the serpent asked. Harry looked down at his feet, emotions ricocheting around in his head.
“It – it’s about a detention.” A lie, but who knew what the snake would tell the Slytherins.
The snake remained silent a moment before it bobbed its head, buying what Harry had said.
“I know where he’ll be. Follow me.”
Harry followed the snake as it slithered through the portraits, leading him further into Slytherin territory than he’d ever wanted to venture. The snake kept up a running commentary on the passing scenery and bits of gossip about the other portraits they passed – sometimes to their faces, though none of the portraits did more than roll their eyes. Perhaps they’d grown used to the snake’s antics. The snake was surprisingly amusing, and Harry would have been snorting if he didn’t feel so sick about being down here and what he’d set out to do.
As they went, Harry kept an eye out for portraits large enough to hide the entrance to the Slytherin common room, not wanting to have a run in with Malfoy. His day would be bad enough.
Though if Harry and Malfoy met and got in a fight, it’d achieve the same end.
No gits in green materialized, and before long Harry’s guide stopped across from the portrait of a napping adder.
“Elspeth, is the Head in?” asked Harry's guide.
The adder hissed at the disturbance.
“Yes, so go away,” the adder, Elspeth, said.
The grass snake gave a hissy chuckle.
“But Elspeth, I brought a Speaker to talk to him.”
The adder raised her head and examined Harry as he looked between the two.
“Speaker?” Harry asked. It wasn’t a title he was familiar with.
The adder’s eyes widened and she raised herself up further, giving her full attention to the conversation since Harry and the grass snake had arrived.
“It’s not often we have someone to talk to,” the grass snake explained.
Harry got the inexplicable impression that the snake had shrugged, despite a lack of shoulders. Harry also wondered what kind of massive jerks Slytherins were that no one talked with the snakes.
“You’re wearing red? Are you a Gryffindor?” Elspeth asked, sounding slightly horrified. The adder turned to the grass snake. “Typhos, this Speaker’s a Gryffindor?”
Harry huffed and crossed his arms, cutting in before Typhos could speak up. “Yes. Does it matter?”
Elspeth turned back to Harry and Harry raised his chin. There was nothing wrong with Gryffindor. It was loads better than Slytherin.
“No, that doesn’t matter to me. It’s you humans that insist on that silly rivalry. But I’m afraid I can’t let you in without the password.” She tilted her head to the side. “Do you know it?”
Harry scowled. “No, I don’t. Can you just go and tell Snape that I’m here and want to talk?”
The professor wouldn’t be pleased to see Harry, but he’d at least come out for the pleasure of squeezing in one last dressing down before everyone went home for the summer.
The adder shook her head.
“There’s no portraits in his quarters. He took them all out when he moved in. And besides, he isn’t a Speaker,” she said.
“Oh,” Harry said, despite not being sure what the last part meant.
He kicked at the stone beneath his feet. He’d come to see Snape despite not looking forward to it. But Harry needed to see him before he had to leave Hogwarts. Perhaps it was enough that he’d tried? Harry couldn’t just break in.
Guilt squirmed in his gut. No, he couldn’t just leave.
Harry sighed.
“Could I knock? Would he hear that?” Harry asked.
The adder tilted her head the other way. “No one’s tried, so I don’t know if it would work, but I guess you could.”
Harry raised his fist.
“Just be sure to hit the frame, not my canvas,” Elspeth added quickly.
Harry nodded and knocked against the frame, being sure to avoid damaging the canvas in any way.
Nothing happened, so Harry knocked a little harder. Just as he stopped knocking, the portrait swung away from the wall. Harry stumbled back to avoid being hit, tripping and falling to the ground in an awkward sprawl. In the doorway, Snape glowered down at Harry.
“Potter,” Snape spat. “You’ve finished soaking up your adoring fans’ adulations in the hospital wing, stolen the House Cup from the rightful winners’ in a frankly astounding display of nepotism, and now decided to darken my doorstep? Has your ego not been sufficiently stroked in your pathetic pre-pubescent mind?”
Harry scowled at the floor, feeling the familiar rush of anger and humiliation that came from being around the Potions professor. For the thousandth time, Harry wondered what he’d ever done to make Snape hate him.
“That’s not why I’m here,” Harry said.
Snape gave a contemptuous snort.
“What, then? Come for a detention? I told the Headmaster that you and your little miscreant friends ought be in detention for all of next year after your little display of foolhardiness with the Stone,” Harry held his breath, perverse hope surging in him, “but clearly he didn’t take my advice into consideration, and now there’s nothing to be done about it.”
Harry’s stomach clenched. He didn’t want to hear that. He should have tried breaking in. Snape definitely would’ve given Harry a punishment then.
“Thank you.” It came out as a snarl, but the words had been said.
There was a glacial silence.
“Excuse me?”
Harry swallowed. Harry hadn’t meant to say that, and now he wasn’t sure how to salvage the situation. People didn’t usually get in trouble for apologizing.
“Thank you,” he said again. The words sounded meek now, and Harry hated them.
Harry was still staring at the floor, and Snape hadn’t spoken. Harry could only see Snape’s feet, black boots sticking out from beneath black robes. Harry couldn’t bring himself to glance up. His hands fisted against the ground, still propping him up from where he’d fallen to the floor.
“At the quidditch match, when my broom acted up. We’d thought you were the one hexing the broom, but Qu- Quirrell –” even speaking the name, Harry had to wash down a wave of nausea “– he said you’d been trying to save me. I didn’t know until a few days ago, and I’ve been in the hospital wing since, otherwise I’d have been here sooner. But you saved me, so... thank you.”
Here, Harry peeked up at Snape. His professor wore an expressionless mask, and he stared at Harry intently. Harry squirmed before picking himself up off the floor, not meeting Snape’s eyes. His mind raced, but Harry couldn’t think of a way to get himself in trouble now.
“Erm... sorry. About think you’d been trying to kill me. And thinking you were the one trying to get past Fluffy,” Harry said.
“Fluffy?”
“Err, Hagrid’s cerberus. He named it Fluffy,” Harry said.
Snape gave an aggravated, long-suffering sigh, which Harry kind of had to agree with. And that was without telling the Potions Master about Norbert.
Snape’s hand dropped and he looked down his long nose at Harry.
“You will not go galivanting off on any more adventures, understood? Simple instructions like that are able to penetrate your skull, no matter how remarkably thick it is, correct?” Snape asked.
A thought dropped into Harry’s head. He nodded.
“Yes, sir. I just wanted to thank you. I didn’t think you’d be the one to save me, what with you being an angry, prejudiced berk and all,” Harry said.
In an instant, Snape’s face had gone from sneering to thunderous, and he took a step closer to Harry so that he towered over the boy. Harry’s insides twisted into knots, preparing for a blow, even as he held his breath in anticipation.
“Get out of my sight,” Snape hissed.
Harry blinked. “What?”
“Get out,” Snape repeated in the same tones. “Get on the train and don’t bother me again. If it weren’t the summer, boy, you’d be scrubbing cauldrons until your hands fell off. But you’re too cowardly to time this when you can get punished. So much for the exalted Gryffindors. Now get out of my sight.”
Snape turned and stalked towards his portrait. He had a foot through the door’s entry when Harry’s control snapped.
“No!” Harry shouted, leaping to his feet. Snape turned around, fury on his face. “You were supposed to punish me!”
Snape froze, caught between anger and confusion.
“You were supposed to, to, give me detention, assign extra homework, something!” Harry yelled, tugging at the roots of his hair.
“And why would you be aiming for this?” Snape asked, snarling.
“I killed someone!” Harry yelled.
Tears ran down his cheek, leaving warm trails that burned into his skin – but not as much as Quirrell’s, never as much as Quirrell’s, Quirrell’s skin burning, turning gray-cracking-brittle-dying-dead. Harry started crying, angry sobs that he couldn’t keep down.
Crying, in front of Snape. Great. As if this couldn’t get any better.
“I killed Professor Quirrell, and I wasn’t even punished! Dumbledore gave me points, but someone’s dead, and it’s my fault. No one cares! Dumbledore’s proud of me! Why? Why is no one horrified, or angry?”
Harry had to stop ranting as he ran out of breath. He tried to breathe but couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. His vision blurred from the tears and he gasped for breath. Too much, it was all too much and the guilt clawed at Harry’s heart and sank its fangs in and it was dragging him down, too-much-no-breath-dying-murderer –
A weight settled on his back and a voice murmured in his ear “breathe, Potter, you need to breathe – if someone sees this, I’ll strangle you”. Harry realized that he was sitting in a chair but couldn’t remember quite how that had happened.
The voice came again. “Potter, you need to take slow breaths. Inhale on my count.”
Harry listened to the voice, and suddenly could breathe again, oxygen rushing back in. With it, he recognized that the voice belonged to Professor Snape, calmer than Harry’d ever heard him before. Harry also realized that he was trembling, and Snape had a hand on his shoulder to calm or comfort Harry.
At this point, given how Snape was behaving, Harry thought it likely he’d had a seizure and was hallucinating. A glance at Snape's face showed Snape had an annoyed expression. Maybe not a seizure, then. Which actually made the whole thing unbelievable.
“Wait here, and do keep from dying,” Snape murmured.
Harry kept his head down, not acknowledging what Snape said. He heard Snape walking away and a cabinet opening, followed by the tinkling of glass moving around. Snape’s returned and pressed a glass into Harry’s hand.
“Drink.”
Harry started raising the glass, but his hand trembled badly enough that Snape reached out and covered Harry’s hand with his own. Snape kept the glass steady as Harry swallowed a few mouthfuls of a potion that tasted of peppermint.
Snape tisked, muttering about the stupidity of blindly accepting unknown potions.
Harry’s breathing slowed further as a wave of calmness washed over him. He could still feel his earlier hysteria gently lapping at the corners of his mind, but now it was as though there was a moat the hysteria couldn’t cross, Harry’s emotions guarded like a castle. Harry’s eyes flitted up and met Snape’s as the professor studied him.
Snape must have been satisfied with what he saw, because he gave a sharp nod and straightened, summoning a chair. Harry looked around, taking in his surroundings in a calm haze. He didn’t recognize the place, but it appeared to be a sitting room.
“Why did you come here?” Snape’s voice broke through Harry’s inspection, and Harry turned his focus from the room to his professor.
Harry licked his lips, getting another small hint of peppermint on his tongue.
“I came here to thank you for –”
“No lies, Potter,” Snape said firmly, just a hint of the nastiness that Harry would have suspected. It would have startled Harry, if the calm haze hadn’t still been firmly in place.
“I killed Professor Quirrell, and no one cares. I should be in jail. But Dumbledore rewarded me, and Professor McGonagall probably is more upset about us breaking curfew than Professor Quirrell dying. I thought you’d be willing to punish me,” Harry said.
Snape stared at him a moment. “You came to me as your preferred method of self-punishment.”
Harry scrunched up his face, piecing the words together. “Yes?”
Snape raised his eyes to ceiling as though silently asking for strength, and Harry studied his own hands, flexing them, the hazy calm messing with his thoughts. He’d killed someone with those hands. There hadn’t been blood involved, nothing to stain the hands red, so would Harry’s hands be stained gray to match what had happened to Quirrell?
“Why doesn’t anyone care? I feel... dirty, and I don’t understand why no one else is upset. Isn’t this my fault? Shouldn’t I at least get a, a detention?”
Snape muttered something under his breath before kneeling in front of Harry.
“Potter.”
Harry was still studying his hands, but he stopped when Snape put a hand under his chin and raised Harry’s head until they were looking eye to eye.
“I disagree with many aspects of how Headmaster Dumbledore’s handled this, and yes, you should value human life and never attempt to harm another, whether in earnest or for a bit of fun,” here, a sneer edged into Snape’s voice that was there and gone again, “but like him, I do not hold you responsible for Quirrell’s death.”
Harry opened his mouth to protest, but Snape cut Harry off with his most withering glare. Harry closed his mouth in a rare moment of self-preservation.
“The reason behind that, and what the Headmaster should have explained but apparently didn’t, is that Quirrell was already dead.”
Harry’s eyes widened and Snape shook his head.
“Not literally. He wasn't an inferius. Quirrell didn’t realize, or else he’d never have agreed to hosting the Dark Lord, but by agreeing to take in the Dark Lord, Quirrell let in a parasite. The Dark Lord is currently a wraith, and as such feeds off the life force of others. He’d been feeding off Quirrell for the entire school year, and Quirrell had grown progressively weaker. It wouldn’t be something that any of you students would notice, but I and a few other professors did. Even if you and Quirrell hadn’t fought for the Philosopher’s Stone, Quirrell would have died the moment Voldemort left his body. He’d have died even if Voldemort stayed in his body, for that matter.”
Harry looked back down at his hands.
“But... but he crumbled when I touched him,” Harry whispered. “I couldn’t sleep last night. I keep seeing it over and over and over again. Dumbledore said it was because my mum loved me, but seeing that, it was awful. How could something like that happen because of love?”
“What precisely did the Headmaster tell you?”
“He said that the reason Professor Quirrell – did that – was because my mum died for me, and that her love... it got woven into me, as protection. And because Vol –” Snape made a sound in the back of his throat and Harry paused. “Err, because You-Know-Who was in Quirrell, my mum’s protection reacted to Professor Quirrell too.”
Another emotion Harry didn’t recognize darted along Snape’s face before passing away. Snape got off his knees and reclaimed his seat, no longer looking directly at Harry.
“Yes, that sounds right. Old magic, not practiced in... ages. A good, if simplistic, explanation of what happened.”
A heavy pause lingered between them.
“How can love look like that?” Harry asked quietly.
Snape didn’t answer right away. Harry felt bad for asking the question after a moment, though he didn’t know why, and he looked away from Snape. He studied his own hands, contemplating what Snape had said about what had caused Quirrell’s death. Eventually, however, Snape found words for Harry’s question.
“Death is a difficult thing, especially when in such a violent form. Lil – your mother’s death was a terrible occurrence, but she died to protect you. When her sacrifice protected you from the Dark Lord, the protection was as equally terrible to him as what he did to her – as terrible as what would have happened to you, had the protection not been in place. Life is not always pretty, but do not doubt that it was your mother’s love protecting you,” Snape said. “It was not something you should have seen down in that chamber, but what happened was not your fault, Harry.”
It was the first time that Snape had ever called Harry by his first name or spoken to Harry without vitriol. Without the calm haze, it would have sent Harry into another fit of hysteria.
“Do you understand, Potter?”
Harry nodded, numb.
“Well then, you’d best leave if you don’t want to miss the train home,” Snape said. Snape went and opened a door, revealing the corridor that Harry had been in when he’d confronted Snape.
Harry wanted nothing more than to miss the train, but knew he’d be pushing his luck with Snape, especially after what he’d said to the man when he was trying to be punished. Harry got up and went over to the doorway. He paused and looked up at Snape. The professor raised an eyebrow.
“Thank you, sir, for listening, and for saving my life at the quidditch match. I did mean it, about that.” Snape peered down at Harry, who gulped. “I should apologize, too, for what I said to you. And for thinking you were the one trying to kill me all year.”
A muscle twitched by Snape’s mouth. Harry didn’t know if it was the start of a smile or a frown. The professor nodded his head, and Harry took that as his signal to leave. He climbed out and the grass snake who had led him to Snape’s quarters greeted him.
“You’re not dead!” the grass snake said cheerfully.
“No, I’m not.” Despite himself, Harry could feel his mouth quirk up in a smile.
“Elspeth and I thought you were dying, or that the Head was going to murder you,” the grass snake said cheerfully. “We’re glad you’re not, though. It’s been a long time since we had a human to talk to. It’d be a shame to lose our entertainment so soon.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “Is that all I’m good for?”
“Potter.”
Harry jumped, startled. He turned towards Snape. The man looked from Harry to the portrait. His brow had furrowed, looking unsettled.
“How long have you known you’re a Parselmouth?” Snape asked.
“A what?” Harry asked.
An irritated expression crossed Snape’s face.
“You can speak with snakes,” Snape said.
“Oh, yeah,” Harry said. “I talked with a boa constrictor at the zoo and freed it with my magic last year, before I knew about magic. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon were furious.”
Snape blinked before his brow furrowed even deeper. “Does anyone else know about this?”
Harry shook his head.
“Then do not tell anyone. Being a Parselmouth is generally considered a Dark ability, and not a connotation you will wish to be associated with. The last known Parselmouth was the Dark Lord. People would likely fear you if they knew,” Snape said. “Understood?”
Harry nodded, wondering at his rotten luck.
Snape nodded sharply. “Good. Then you have a train to catch.”
“Yessir,” Harry said.
“I will see you next schoolyear,” Snape said, before the portrait swung shut.
Harry stood in the corridor, blinking in surprise. He and Snape had just managed a civil conversation. That was crazier than fighting Voldemort.
Harry stared at the portrait Snape had disappeared behind, replaying his conversation with Snape about Quirrell. Somehow, Snape had been more comforting than everyone else since Harry had woken up in the hospital wing.
With a word of goodbye to the snakes, Harry set off to find Ron and Hermione and catch the train back to London.