Chapter 8

 

  Severus was not a happy camper.

  He had spent the last eighteen years trying to keep himself sane, and then the Potter brat - yet again - had to go and mess it up again. It certainly didn't help that Potter had started looking like his Harry more and more each day, sinking Severus further into the grief he had never truly let go of.

  He could still remember that first day he had seen Potter. At eleven, his eyes had shone a brilliant green that had taken him back fifteen years ago to another Harry when they had first met.

  He was tired. Tired of teaching brats who didn't want to learn. Tired of dealing with idiots like Black and Potter and having Albus on his back.

  He was tired of life.

  The only thing that kept him going was the thought that he couldn't give up the search for the potion that would free *his* Harry. Severus had kept his body alive all of these years in the hopes that he would be able to bring him back from the land of the dead. As long as there was some kind of connection between it and his soul, there was still a chance that Harry would come back to him.

  He knew that the students thought him a greasy git who only took pleasure in taking points from any other house but his own. They wouldn't even care to know that his hair was greasy for the simple reason that he was looking for the ultimate potion. The research required hours spent over a boiling cauldron, searching for the right ingredients that more often than not blew up in his face. Taking points... they were just a way to relieve his frustration about the entire situation, especially when taken from Potter.

  Severus sipped at his glass of scotch, trying to clear his mind.

  Today, Potter had looked so much like his Harry during potions - at least the way his face had been set with determination when he'd been defending Granger and Weasley from Draco. Plus, it was almost Halloween, and after all these years, losing Harry still hurt. He was tempted to just go and look, but Severus knew that he'd just be there all night, and he couldn't afford that at the moment.

  All of this would throw Severus into a depressed state, bogging his mind down in memories of happier days - days when he would come home after some awful mission for Albus or Voldemort and Harry would be sitting at the table with a wonderful meal and a willing ear. Then they would sit on the sofa and either listen to the wireless or read to each other, taking comfort in just being next to each other. As the moon crept through the sky, they would then head to their bed and make love, only to fall asleep with their arms entwined around each other.

  Severus shook his head. No, he couldn't let himself think about those wonderful times right now. He had too much riding on what was happening in present time to think about the past. He needed to find something to help in the present and even the future.

  It was just too hard watching Harry. His body may be kept alive with various nutritional potions, but they couldn't get rid of the paper-thin skin and shrunken cheekbones. Every once in a while, a spark would dance across the exposed skin, stopping everyone except Severus from touching him for any long period of time. Even in the state he was in, Harry was still the Lightning Child that the Sorting Hat had proclaimed him to be.

  There had been odd points when the lightning would increase dramatically, but as there was no pattern to it, Severus wasn't sure what was causing it. The only noticeable time was Halloween, and the reaction had been growing each year.

  So, no matter what Severus said, Albus wanted him down here watching over Harry on Halloween. The headmaster didn't want to take the chance of Harry tripping the wards by accident when the lightning spread across the rooms. It was too dangerous for him to be left unattended with the atmosphere outside of Hogwarts.

  Fudge had refused to acknowledge Voldemort's return until his last day in office, and it had helped Voldemort's cause. Even though the Minister hadn't been a supporter, his inability to see what was happening in front of his eyes turned out to be his downfall.

  Severus had hated the Minister from the second he had risen to that office. It had been only two months after Voldemort's attack on Hogwarts that he'd come into office after Minister Parks had been ambushed by several Death Eaters on his way home from a late night meeting with the French Minister of Magic.

  The first thing that he had done was having Lucius Malfoy raised to a higher level within the Ministry by way of recommendation - to the Board of Governors of Hogwarts. What he hadn't known at the time was that the men who had suggested Malfoy for his new job had been among the first Death Eaters Voldemort had recruited almost twenty years before. The second thing he had done was to place restrictions on what teachers and students could do if Hogwarts was ever attacked.

  Luckily, he had never done a thorough tour of the school. If he had, Severus would have definitely been thrown into Azkaban for keeping Harry in his rooms in the attempts to bring him back to life. Only last year, when they had gone through all of the items that Barty Crouch, Jr. had collected during his stint as Alastair Moody, had they found the Marauder's Map. Severus had looked at it and had been torn in two by what he had seen. The dot that represented Harry was the faintest gray, and only named him as "H." No full name, but it showed he was still alive, if only the tiniest bit. He counted himself lucky, though, that the Weasley boys and Potter had never investigated what that dot had meant while they were in possession of the map. And if Crouch ever figured it out, he had never told anybody. He may have searched Severus' rooms under false pretences, but Severus had made sure that Harry had been safely away from them. He'd had the feeling the Moody would be going through every teacher's offices and rooms, and more specifically Severus', and had Harry moved up to the hospital wing to be looked over by Poppy for a couple of days. It had been just after Halloween and time for his yearly 'check-up,' so it hadn't looked strange to the nurse, so Severus had escaped detection on all sides.

  Severus went to take another sip and found his glass empty. Instead of going to pour himself another, he rose and went into his bedroom, wondering just if his bed would ever be warm again.

 

******

  James and Lily looked at Harry.

  "It's time, isn't it," James said.

  Harry nodded. "You both knew this was coming," he responded to the non-question. "I have to go back now. Otherwise, who knows what will happen if I don't."

  The elder Potters didn't look comfortable with losing their son again, but Harry had to get back to Severus. He wanted - no, needed - to be with the other man. This time, when it was all over, he was bonding with Sev so that everything that had happened wouldn't repeat.

  Sometimes is sucked, having half a soul.

  When that curse hit him all those years ago, his soul had split into two. It had taken him years to figure out why that had happened - why part of his soul had stayed on the mortal plane to be born as Harry James Potter exactly nine months from that Halloween, and the rest was in the other realm.

  One of the guides that were a part of the other realm, and who had never existed on the mortal plane, had tried to explain just why Harry's soul had split. Sometimes when a person meets their soul mate, if they are killed before they bond, they will be reborn immediately so that they will eventually meet with their intended for the bonding to finally take place. Even if that happened, there was still a little piece of his soul that had lived on in his 'original' body that kept Severus' soul whole. Harry had worried over its existence, until his mother had pointed out that Severus would have given up on life a long time ago if he hadn't kept searching for the miracle that would bring Harry back to him. So Harry had ruminated over the subject for a while before deciding he wouldn't worry about it.

  While it was technically the land of the dead, there were some souls like his that still had a living body on the mortal plane. Neville's parents were also here with that problem. As long as their bodies were still alive, a small part of their soul was locked in them. It was the reason why Neville went to see them in St. Mungo's every holiday from Hogwarts.

  Harry's case, though, was different. If his body died, the other half of his soul would return to the other-realm and time would stop. Or rather, if both bodies died, it would stop.

  Time was a tricky bitch, sometimes.

  Harry's soul had been looped through time, being born into the almost grown body of Harry Potter before being split into a newly conceived fetus and a shade in the other realm with the barest hint of contact to the mortal plane through his previous body. When the time came for Voldemort to cast the banishing curse that would send Harry Potter back twenty years, the pieces of his soul would reunite in the body of Harry this time.

  Harry had gotten the worse headache figuring that out. At that point, he had wished Hermione had been there to figure it out, since it was the time turner that she had gotten in third year that had triggered his search for the truth about why all of this was happening this way. Come to think of it, he still got headaches when he thought of it.

  The gist of it was that when his soul was finally back together in one piece, they would join in the body that Severus had kept alive in his chambers. It was his true body - the body he would have had if the whole thing had been normal.

  As if anything Harry touched could ever be considered normal, but that was beside the point.

  Harry Potter's remarkable resemblance to James Potter was because of his half-soul - the part that was most like his biological father - was the reason. Brave, curious, and willing to spend any amount of time on anything not schoolwork, it was the reason why the Sorting Hat had only offered Slytherin and Gryffindor.

  When his soul was as complete as it could get without being bonded to Severus' he would take his true physical form: a blend of both James and Lily Potter. That was why no one had known who he was when eleven year old Harry Potter stepped foot into Hogwarts, and why he wasn't connected to the other Harry whom he'd been named for. All because of when Lily had given birth to him, he'd already looked like James.

  Harry had always wondered just why his eyes had been green, when Muggle biology had taught him that brown eyes took precedence over green. His green eyes had been that little part of Lily - her understanding and ability to use what information she had to get around things that weren't important - that had been in both parts of his soul.

  A hand rested on his shoulder, and Harry reached up to rest his own on it. He looked up to see his mother watching him with a concerned look.

  "I know I can't stop you from doing what you think is right, Harry," she said in a low voice. "I just want you to know that no matter what you do, we will support you. Time has tempered our ideas of just who Snape really is, and although your father may never truly love him, he is willing to do whatever is necessary to help you."

  "What about you?" Harry had to ask.

  Lily smiled. "A mother has a special link with her child, no matter how far away they may be. When we first met you, I felt a link with you that I didn't understand at the time. Now, I know what it is, and there will always be that link between us. I love you, and I love Severus for the simple reason that you love him."

  Harry gave a wry grin. "Yes, I do love him. I just hope that he will love me for who I am after everything is over."

  James frowned, but came over to stand behind Lily. "Don't let anyone stand in your way, Harry. I know that you will have problems, especially with Sirius, but let them know what is going on. Besides, you can tell Sirius that you know his little secret. That will shut him up."

  Lily slapped James on the arm. "I hope you're not suggesting Harry blackmail his own godfather. Hmm?"

  James winked at Harry, who was grinning.

  Sometimes it felt so strange to have any kind of conversation with his parents. He had been waiting for something to happen for such a long time after he had gotten here, and then everything had seemed to explode around him. From the moment Harry Potter was born on the mortal plane, Harry had remembered everything that would happen to that other part of his soul. From that point, he had been both dreading and excitedly waiting for his parents to arrive. Harry had wished that there might be some way he would be able to manipulate the mortal plane from the other realm so that he - Harry Potter - would be able to grow up with his parents. Then had come the realization that if he had done anything to swerve time from that path, that Voldemort would have continued to wreck havoc over England and would have soon spread across Europe, and then over the Atlantic to the States and Canada.

  Instead, Harry had to watch, this time from a different perspective, as first James and then Lily Potter killed by Voldemort. When the Dark Lord had attempted to kill Harry Potter, the other realm Harry had felt a strong pull before tugging hard on whatever was on the other end. By doing so, he had snapped the power of the killing curse back to Voldemort. When he did so, however, it lost some of its power, and instead of killing Voldemort, reduced what was left of his soul and released it from a physical body. It still being in the mortal plane had just meant that someday he would be able to gain back a body.

  Harry had known all of this and had been powerless to stop it. In the other realm he had all the knowledge of using the power, but it was tied up with the physical body the other half of his soul possessed.

  And while he was here in the other realm, he had learned even more. Great teachers from different times, including several of his own ancestors, had taught Harry everything he needed to know to finally rid the mortal plane of Voldemort once and for all. And when Voldemort's soul - that tiny part of it that had clung to the Dark Arts that had destroyed the rest of it - reached the other realm, those great teachers would imprison it. Then, no one would be able to resurrect Voldemort in some scheme or another. It was what they did for other wizards who had tried to take over the world, including Salazar Slytherin and Grindewald. Only two had escaped such punishment - the witch Morgana, whose soul had been destroyed when Merlin attempted to do it himself, thus ending his own as well, and a wizard named Deanor, who had lived in the times of Atlantis and was responsible for its sinking. Deanor had been turned into stone to mark where Atlantis had once stood in the mortal plane, his soul trapped forever in it. They hadn't been able to do anything with Voldemort the first time Harry had destroyed his body – if they had, time may have warped too much for the entire cycle to continue, and Harry Potter may not have grown up to become the wizard he was meant to be.

  James and Lily, while not of the teachers who had taught him magic and spells, had taught him of his ancestry and family values. Lily had been most upset to learn that her son had been sent to live with Petunia, and had set out to correct the things that her sister had done to Harry. James, on the other hand, had been determined to teach Harry all about the Marauders and every single prank they had ever played - but had soon learned that showing glee about the ones that involved Severus was Not. To. Be. Done.

  Now, though, Harry was leaving all those he had learned to love here in the other realm behind. Most of them were making a bigger deal out of it than it really was, since he would end up here sooner or later, whether it be Voldemort killing him off for what he had done, or Sirius killing him and Severus for being soul mates. It was going to happen one way or the other.

  Smiling at his parents, Harry took a deep breath as a scene played out on the quidditch pitch at Hogwarts. It was Halloween, and almost the stroke of midnight, as Voldemort and his Death Eaters crossed the boundary between the school and the village of Hogsmeade. Just within the castle walls, the resurrected Order of the Phoenix stood ready for battle, and down in the dungeons, Severus was watching in amazed horror as Harry's body began to flicker in and out.

  In the middle of the pitch, Harry Potter stood, knowing that something big was about to happen. And he was ready for it.

 

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