Chapter Text
When Severus came in from the garden shed, where he’d been holed-up for hours working on a particularly difficult pet project – using the basic principles of muggle chemistry, he wanted to see if he could determine what about Monkshood, exactly, was the element that was toxic to Werewolves, in an effort to determine if a similar but less toxic substitute might be identified – he found Regulus sitting at the kitchen table with his head buried in his hands.
Regulus was their secret-keeper, and, consequently, the only other person they’d seen in months. It wasn’t the first time Severus had come inside or downstairs to find him, but it was the first time he’d seen Regulus look so worn. James wasn’t there either, but Lily, he saw through the open doorway, was curled on the sofa, breathing raggedly.
“Is Sirius…” There were few things that could have left Regulus and Lily in such a state. Even Remus, he didn’t think, would have made Regulus cry like that.
He shook his head slightly. James, coming back downstairs with Harry perched on his hip, wasn’t crying, although it looked as if he might have been. That meant that Sirius was certainly fine.
“It’s over,” he said, with the weight of worlds behind his words. Severus thought he’d gained grey hairs over the course of their time waiting. “Frank and Alice are dead.”
No wonder Lily was so distraught. Alice had become one of her best friends over the course of the war. But Regulus… it didn’t make sense.
The final piece only fell into place when Regulus lifted his head and said, “it was Barty. He was the other secret keeper. They didn’t think anyone would expect it to be him and I trusted him and-“
Severus pulled him into a fierce hug, letting Regulus cover him in tears and snot in lieu of actually saying anything comforting. Barty Crouch had been Regulus’s only remaining Slytherin friend. It had been Regulus who had recruited him for the order, brought him into the fold, nurtured the oddball friendship between him, and Frank, and Alice. The awfulness of this was worse than anything Severus himself had ever experienced.
“And Neville?” Lily’s godson, just the same age as Harry. They’d been meant to grow up together in a peaceful world. Someday, when this all ended and they were allowed to leave the little protective bubble around their house. That future now seemed further away than ever.
Harry said something to James. It was obvious that he could sense how upset they all were.
“That’s just it,” Lily said from the couch, voice raspy, “Neville’s alive. The Prophecy was right. He’s gone.”
There was no question which ‘he’ she meant. “How?”
Regulus, against his shoulder, said, “I don’t know, but I don’t trust it.”
After so long, Severus didn’t think he would trust it until he saw Voldemort dead by his own hands.
“What does Dumbledore say?”
He must have been the one to send Regulus, after all.
“He says you’re safe, for now.”
--
The worst thing by far about St. Mungo’s was the smell. It wasn’t like muggle hospitals, which he knew from visiting Lily’s parents near the end, reeked of disinfectant. It was subtle enough that someone who wasn’t a potioneer might not ever have been able to detect the way all the potions mingled together in the air. To Severus’s trained senses, it was rather overwhelming as his mind struggled to keep up with the meaning behind every scent.
“This is shit.” Lily pressed a paper coffee cup into his hand and sat beside him on the bench. She pulled her own cup – it smelled like hot chocolate, with a sickening amount of whipped cream – out of the carrying tray and vanished the tray with a petty vigor.
“I thought you were taking Harry and Neville home.”
The children weren’t anywhere in sight. “I was. But to be honest… I wasn’t in any state to look after them. So I floo-called Augusta and asked her if she could take them for the night.”
“You really shouldn’t be here anyways. You need a good night’s sleep, love.”
At seven-and-a-half months pregnant, the last thing Lily needed was to spend all night sitting on an uncomfortable bench in St. Mungo’s.
She leaned against him until Severus put his arm around her shoulder. “I wouldn’t have gotten a good night’s sleep at home either.”
The truth was, there wasn’t anything either of them could do. They weren’t healers. Not this kind of healer, anyways. Severus had spent the last several hours replaying his entire career, wondering if he could have found time to study emergency healing, more mental magics, more anything helpful. Regulus wasn’t as good at potions as he was, and Regulus could help. Severus’s mind contorted itself with guilt. Fat lot of good all of his work with Damocles would do for Remus now.
It was supposed to have been over. They were supposed to have been safe. Severus wished, more than anything, that he had killed Bellatrix Lestrange when he’d last run into her in a fight. He’d almost come close, but Voldemort had shown up and they’d run. Now, Severus wished he’d stayed to finish the job. Even then, he’d known she deserved it from the way she’d helped abuse Regulus and Sirius as children.
“Did you tell James and Regulus that you were staying?”
Regulus was inside, assisting the healers. They hadn’t wanted to let him, but he’d been Lupin’s primary healer since he graduated, so they didn’t have much choice in the matter.
“Mm. I brought James, Hope and Lyall coffee too. Hence the tray. I think the woman in the Muggle coffeeshop thought very badly of you all for having the pregnant woman get you coffee.”
James was doing disaster management with the Lupins. Somehow, in their moment of complete crisis, he’d gained a preternatural calm that unsettled Severus terribly. Even though he was far less close to Sirius and Remus than James was, he hadn’t been able to take the tension of the waiting room proper. The smell, even worse inside that out here that lead onto the muggle street, was only a part of it. Something about seeing Hope and Lyall so upset had made it all worse.
“Did you want to go back in and be with them?”
“Sometime.”
It was all so fucking pointless. The war was over. It was over, and there had been no reason at all for the Lestranges to try and take one last strike against the Order. If they hadn’t, they might even have gotten away with it like some of the other wealthy pureblood deatheaters were likely to. As it was, all of them were going away for a very long time.
They’d been caught red-handed, was the thing. In one of life’s great ironies, Sirius had been saved by his mother. She and Sirius had been planning to meet to negotiate a détente of the family feud. When he’d been late, she’d sent Kreacher to harass him, and Kreacher had fetched the aurors.
“This is fucking awful,” Severus said, mostly to himself.
Remus had probably been the best of them, at the defense stuff especially, and Sirius had been good enough in his own right to survive the war. In a fair fight, rather than a surprise attack, there was no way they wouldn’t have been able to win.
“We’re not going to give up on them,” replied Lily, to a thought he had never voiced. “Even if the healers say they aren’t going to recover, we’re going to fight it. You, and me, and Reg. We’re really fucking excellent wizards.”
When they were finally allowed in to see them, Remus propped up in bed, looking grim with a bottle of skele-gro on the bedside table and bandages wrapped all around his chest.
Sirius, in Animagus form, was curled at his feet. James, in hushed tones, had told them that he didn’t seem willing or able to change back. Apparently, he’d shifted when Bellatrix had started using ‘crucio’. Nobody knew what, exactly, that was going to do to him. Regulus, who had retreated into position near the window, was staring at his brother with open grief. Hope Lupin, on the other hand, looked at her son with naked, giddy relief. Lyall’s face was a curated mask.
“Here’s a puzzle for you, Scales,” Remus rasped, when he saw them, “does lycanthropy make you more resistant to the Cruciatus curse, or is my pain tolerance so completely fucking warped that I had no idea how severe it was.”
A good question, but right now, all of Severus’s intellectual curiosity had been wiped away in favour of naked relief.
--
Remus had been putting on a brave face for his parents, that first day. Most of the time, it wasn’t as good as that. For Sirius the struggle was more immediately visible, but Remus still spent most of his time in a state of fear and shock. Afterwards, all of them would wonder how they’d survived those first few months before and after Marlene Lily’s birth, when Sirius was Padfoot nine days out of ten, Regulus was halfway through his first year as a professor, Remus spent most of his time staring into space not saying anything, and James, Lily, and Severus had three babies to look after. Neville was a blessing, of course, but he had nightmares about things he couldn’t even remember, and that woke Harry and Marley, and then all of them were irritable for not having gotten enough sleep. Augusta helped when she could, but she had her seat on the Wizengamot, and her grief over losing Frank was debilitating. Hope and Lyall did the same, but Hope had become increasingly sick over the year. Yet another of these muggle illnesses that wizards had no idea what to do with.
She died in May of that year, and nobody could get a word out of Remus for three days. Regulus quit his job to move in and look after Sirius and Remus, forcing Dumbledore to rehire Slughorn as substitute for the rest of the year. Severus thought he was going to have to do the same to help James look after the children while Lily was in her university classes, but by the end of April, Damocles took one look at him and told him not to so much as look at a cauldron for a month.
It was keenly unfair, Severus thought, that the only living parents between the Marauders were Lyall – who, for all his love of Remus, had also been a traumatizing figure, with all his hangups about lycanthropy – Walpurga Black, and Severus’s father. The war had been hard for everyone, but it didn’t feel right that they’d lost so much so quickly. That they were so alone even when they were all together.
They’d had other friends, once. Regulus had Barty. Lily had Alice. Severus had Marlene. Sirius had the Prewetts. There was a time when they wouldn’t have hesitated to call any of them. All gone now. Merlin spit on the war.
But there was one member of their extended friend group who was still very much alive. And it was Kingsley who came, when they needed him most, hitching a ride with Lily back from one of their law school classes like Mary Poppins from that muggle movie that Lily and Neville loved.
“You cannot possibly want to stay in this madhouse,” James said, but he’d handed over Marley so he could concentrate on an American book about the psychic effects of Animagus transformation.
Kingsley was holding the baby with a confidence that indicated either younger siblings or cousins. It struck Severus that in more than a decade of knowing each other, he’d never asked.
“Can it really be worse than living with the four of you for seven years at Hogwarts?”
Severus opened his mouth to say it could, considered a portion of the things they’d done, and said, “No, probably not.”
--
In July, they had a breakthrough with Sirius. They’d found that he did better with other animagi, which was particularly inconvenient since Remus and Regulus were the only two people in the Marauders who weren’t. Regulus, never one to let his junior status in the friend group stop him, had mastered the Animagus transformation in record time, assuming the form of a black Maine Coon cat.
After seeing him, Sirius had laughed so hard he’d cried. It was the first time he’d cried, since, and Severus, who’d been half-supervising half-jotting-down ingredients for a potion he thought might help Remus – something to temporarily enhance the effects of lycanthropy, rather than mitigate them, to see if his theory about it providing protection was true – had been allowed to hug Sirius in human form for the first time since, and he counted that as a victory all on its own.
--
Harry and Neville turned two that summer, and on Halloween, they all raised their glasses to the memory of Frank and Alice Longbottom, except for Regulus who had returned to Hogwarts for a second attempt at his first year of teaching.
After the children had been put to bed, and James and Sirius had gone to smoke in the back, Lily, Kingsley, Severus and Remus sat around the kitchen table, nursing their third bottle of wine.
“Did you ever think this was what our lives were going to be like?” Asked Kingsley. He’d almost been killed by a trap in a raid on an old deatheater hideout last week. Severus, for one, was glad that Lily was pushing him towards a career on the legal practice, rather than the law enforcement, side of things.
Lily leaned back in her seat. “By the end of seventh year, I think I had some idea. I mean… Muggleborn, right? I knew that there were people who wanted me dead and I wasn’t going to fucking cower and hide. I was going to live my life. I just didn’t mean for anyone else to have to suffer with me.”
“Exactly,” said Remus, nodding. His eyes were focused on an empty spot on the table. “I knew my life was going to be a bit shit. But honestly… I always thought I’d do it alone. I still don’t know if it’s easier or harder this way.”
On the one hand, he had them to fall back on, always and unconditionally. On the other hand, he’d been forced to watch the person he loved most in the world suffer tremendously. That was a fate Severus wouldn’t wish on anyone.
“Severus?”
How to answer without sounding a little pathetic? Well, hell, she’d married him. It couldn’t be pathetic if you actually got the girl. “Summer before seventh year, Regulus and I decided that he was going to spend the war looking after Sirius and Remus so they didn’t get murdered while they were snogging, and I was going to do the same for Lily and James. The rest of it was a bit of a surprise.”
Remus laughed, while Lily tapped Severus’s leg with her foot under the table in a silent gesture of support and love.
Trying to keep the focus off his reddening face – seriously, how could he have said something so sappy – Severus asked, “and you, Kingsley?”
He looked surprisingly maudlin. “I mean… I had other friends, in school. But half of them are dead now and the other half either ignored the war or were on the wrong side of it. And now I’m stuck with the fact that all of them either didn’t know that my mother is a half-blood or knew and somehow thought I was better just because my father’s family is in the Sacred Twenty-Eight.”
Kingsley hadn’t really been their friend, in school. By seventh year, they’d sat together in some classes, but that was after lines had already been drawn in the sand between Death Eaters and cowards and mugglesborns and their allies. Before that, Severus remembered him being socially popular, friends with students with serious academic interests in basically every house. As a member of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, the Slytherins had been willing to respect him even if he was a Gryffindor and his father was one of the more blood-traitor-y members of the lot. They still weren’t nearly as uncouth as the Weasleys or the Potters. Or, these days, the Longbottoms and the Blacks. James, who hated the entire institution with a terrible passion, was very smug about the number of families who were now either blood-traitors or, as in the cases of the Lestranges and the Crouchs, well on their ways to being extinct.
“Those ones don’t sound like very good friends,” Lily said, after a moment where Kingsley’s words lingered in the air. “You were always a better friend than people deserved – us especially.”
He’d protected their secrets long before they’d been anything but a nuisance to him. They’d made his time as a prefect utterly chaotic, had destroyed half the dorm with pranks and general slovenliness on Sirius and James’s parts, and had generally caused mayhem. And he hadn’t ratted out Remus for being a werewolf, or the rest of them for being illegal animagi. They’d owed Kingsley blood debts long before he’d shown up with his great-aunt’s hideous bag and offered to help them.
Kingsley looked between them. Muggleborn, half-blood, werewolf. “In my experience, people very rarely get what we deserve. It’s better to be kinder than someone deserves than it is to be crueler.”
Severus would happily drink to that.
--
A year and a half after that, they had their third and final child. A daughter, though they didn’t know it at the time. Jennifer Sarah. They all agreed that four was a more than appropriate number to stop at. Neville and Jenny were always closest. Even when she was small, Neville was far more interested in the baby than anyone else was. Severus was quietly happy about it, even if he sometimes wondered if he should be ashamed to take such profound joy in having Alice and Neville’s son in their care. The cost of this happiness had, after all, been high.
Marley and Harry got on well too, if in a different way than Jenny and Neville. They both liked quidditch, and they played together a lot when it was just the four of them, but they both liked the Weasley siblings that were closest to them in age much better than they liked each other.
Severus was always on edge, in the back of his mind. Waiting for Voldemort to come back, or something else profoundly terrible to happen, but it never did. Dumbledore seemed to have some concerns, and insisted they send Neville to live with his grandmother for some obscure reason, but Lily refused point blank and that was the end of. Augusta didn’t want that any more than they did, and she was involved in Neville’s life as much as worked for all of them. She came to Sunday dinners, and Neville went to stay with her for three weeks every summer. The last summer before Neville and Harry went to Hogwarts, Jenny, all of seven years old and eight months after she’d told them that she was a girl, had insisted she was going too. Augusta, very generously, had agreed to put up with it for the last week of Neville’s visit, and they’d apparently had a very good time, even if Jenny had blown up a pudding on one of Neville’s relatives for being rude to him. Lily had given her a scolding for that when she’d come back, but James had been too amused and Severus too pleased with her taking a stand for the scolding to really have an effect. And that was how the last summer before the boys – Ron Weasley honorarily included in their number – went to Hogwarts.
--
Dear Mum, Dad, and Papa,
And Jenny-Jens and Marls!
Neville and Ron and I are all in Gryffindor! It’s awesome! There are five of us in the room. Seamus and Dean, who are both halfbloods, are the other two. We met some of the girls on the train too. One of them is called Hermione and she is the worst ever. Ron agrees. I think Neville likes her though so don’t tell him I said that.
Have to go now – Neville is taking these to the Owlery. Hopefully the map will keep him from getting lost!
Love!
Harry
--
With the boys gone it was… oddly quiet, especially when Marley and Jenny went over to play with Ginny or to the pre-Hogwarts school that Severus had found for them. He hadn’t wanted any of them spending all their time alone like he had as a child. With Lily off at the Ministry most of the time, and Severus in the professional lab he shared with Damocles, James found himself without anything to occupy his time for the first time since graduation.
In October, Severus and Lily both took a day off work, and the three of them took a portkey to Wales to go on a hike. It was one of just a handful of proper dates they’d managed to have in years.
James packed a picnic. Lily remembered the blanket. Severus brought the wine.
They talked, for a long time. About the kids, about their work, and Kingsley’s new girlfriend who was a muggle social worker. And, naturally, the conversation turned towards James’s plans.
He and Sirius and Kingsley had all been planning on becoming Aurors, once. Kingsley had changed his mind, reading about magical law after finding out the truth about Remus. He’d decided that, like Lily, he wanted to change laws and defend people rather than enforce them. Sirius, for his part, had been robbed of that chance by Bellatrix Lestrange, the way his hands still shook sometimes, and he spent the worst days as a dog. But James had given it up for love. To raise their children and help their friends. Lily and Severus, who had been raised as muggles in this regard, still sometimes found it odd that they’d acquired a house-husband.
James, conversely, didn’t seem to mind. “I think I would have been an excellent auror,” he said, when Lily had raised the topic, “maybe I still would be. But being there, for the kids… I wouldn’t trade a second of it.”
“And when Jenny goes to Hogwarts?”
James’s cheeks had coloured lightly. “I was going to tell you. I just hadn’t worked out how, yet.” They both waited, patiently, until he said, “Minnie has been helping me apply to complete my mastery in transfiguration. I don’t know what I’ll do when I have it, exactly, but it’ll be nice to have. That and the Wizengamot will be more than enough.”
James’s transfiguration was such an enormous gift. There had always been a trickle of guilt that Severus had been able to pursue his great gift of potioneering and James hadn’t had the same chance.
Lily, for both of them, said, “That is wonderful.”
--
Harry James Potter,
Risking your life, facing a troll! What were you thinking? The letter from Professor McGonagall nearly scared all of us half to death! Thank goodness Neville came home for Halloween.
I know you went after Neville’s friend Hermione, and that was very brave indeed. But next time, please go get a teacher. For the sake of your Uncle Remus’s heart.
All my Love,
Dad
--
Ron came to stay with them that Christmas, while his parents were away. It was a rowdy affair, with five children in the house, and all the marauders reunited. Even Regulus managed to get away for Christmas, after some time spent needling Dumbledore. As had been a great source of amusement for all of them, Harry had gone from hating the smartest Witch in Gryffindor to being her friend. That, and his fighting the troll, and the fight with young Mr. Malfoy that had won him his position as the youngest Seeker in living memory, seemed to have taken up all the air in the room.
On Christmas eve, Severus found Neville sitting outside, wrapped in his thickest muggle winter jacket.
“Your Uncle James is making Cocoa inside, if you want some.” With the offer made, Severus took the seat beside him and waited for Neville to say what was on his mind.
“Do you ever think Harry should have been the chosen one, instead of me?”
Severus put his arm around their godson. It seemed not so long ago that he’d been able to carry Neville in just one arm.
“No.”
They’d never told Neville about the prophecy, about the fact that it could have applied to both of them. It didn’t seem like knowledge that could have done anyone any good.
“But Harry’s just… better, at everything.”
“And how’s his herbology been, lately?”
Normally that would have gotten a laugh out of Neville, but he just sighed. “I’m terrible at potions, and transfiguration, charms, and flying, and everything.”
“You aren’t terrible at potions. I’ve seen you helping James with the cooking hundreds of times.”
“Ask Uncle Regulus. I’ve blown something up in basically every single one of his classes all year. Cooking is different. It isn’t magic. I’m terrible at magic.”
“Neville, look at me.” He seemed to Severus to be trying very hard not to cry. “You are magic. Every single thing you do is magic. I’ve seen you casting spells while you cook, just the same as James does.” He muttered something noncommittal. “How many times would Jenny have to blow something up in potions before you declared her a failure?”
Neville looked so singularly appalled at the idea that Severus had to laugh, a little. Rather petulantly, he crossed his arms and said, “it isn’t the same.”
It was always easier to be kind to the people you loved than to yourself. Severus knew that from experience. He stood, throwing off the snow that had settled on his cloak, and offered his hand to Neville. “Would you like to come into my workroom with me?”
Neville’s eyes had gone very wide. He knew very well that only Regulus and Lily were generally allowed in Severus’s home laboratory. He didn’t keep anything truly dangerous there – that was saved for work – but there were sensitive experiments that were easy to disturb. Not a single one of them was as important as this.
Neville was good at cooking magic. He was bad at potions class. The trick, really, was to close the gap between the two. Severus conjured up a blackboard, wrote out a set of instructions, and, instead of looming as a teacher, followed through them at Neville’s side, showing him every step of the way while chatting about some inconsequential thing, a Weird Sisters album and Neville’s friend Susan. When they were done, cauldrons bubbling, Neville was almost smiling.
“Congratulations,” Severus said, “you’ve just completed a third year potion. To a standard that I assure you, your Uncle Reg would be more than pleased with.”
“Then why am I so pants at potions class?”
Severus leaned back on his stool, looking at Neville with an appraising eye. “Have you considered the fact that you might be nervous in front of everyone else? The fact that they’re watching you, thinking of you as The Boy Who Lived, scares you?”
While they’d sent Jenny and Marley to magical primary schools, Harry and Neville had gone to muggle school for precisely this reason. It had been a minorly fraught process, but one much better for Neville’s wellbeing. The way grown witches and wizards treated him made Severus seethingly furious.
“But I have to be better when they’re all watching!” Neville nearly yelled it, which showed exactly how much this was bothering him.
“No, you don’t.” Neville obviously didn’t believe him, skepticism written all over his face. “I’m completely serious. They’re watching you. They’re probably going to be watching you all your life. Well, they can all piss off!” Neville made the shocked face of someone hearing an adult swear for the first time. “Their rudeness and nosiness doesn’t get to decide your life. Understand?” He got a slight nod, and managed to soften his tone. “You should talk to Sirius about this. It wasn’t the same, but in our first year, people were really rude and nosy to him because he was the only member of the Black family to be in Gryffindor.”
“Really?” Sirius was, across the board, the kids’ most idolized uncle. What child wouldn’t find turning into a dog painfully cool?
“Really. That was how Sirius and I became friends. He got a Howler his very first Christmas at Hogwarts and I burned it. The rest of the tower was just sitting there, listening. You can go ask him about it, if you want. Him and Remus should be here, by now.”
They went back in, after that, but not before Neville hugged him for a long time and had a bit of a cry. Severus didn’t think he’d ever really get used to being trusted like that.
--
Mr. Potter, Mr. Snape, Ms. Evans,
Please be informed that your child(ren) HARRY POTTER and NEVILLE LONGBOTTOM have been caught in the hallways after hours. A punishment of FIFTY POINTS DEDUCTED PER STUDENT AND ONE DETENTION (TBD) has been given.
Regards,
Minerva McGonagall,
Deputy Headmistress
Head of Gryffindor House
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
PS
I have to say, after what the three of you got up to in your time at Hogwarts, I don’t know why I expected anything less. Perhaps I was hoping Kingsley would be a good influence.
--
“You know, James, the one thing that gives me comfort in all this is that at the very least they weren’t using the Invisibility Cloak to get into trouble.”
--
Dear Uncle Remus,
I saw the most scary thing ever in the Forbidden Forest last night. It was Eating Unicorns. It had a black robe so I didn’t really get a good look at it, but it was pretty scary. Do you know what it could have been?
Love to you and Uncle Sirius,
Neville
--
Dear Neville,
No, I don’t. I am sorry that you had to see it. I can assure you that it wasn’t a werewolf (the robe, for one thing, and the phase of the moon, for another) but without more information I can’t know. But to kill a unicorn is a terrible thing, and whatever it was must have been a dark creature indeed. Go to Madam Pomfrey for some chocolate and, if you have any nightmares, feel free to write me about them. These things are always easier when shared.
Love,
R. Lupin
--
The hours between when they got Professor McGonagall’s letter telling them to floo over at once because Neville was in the hospital wing, and when Neville woke up, were some of the worst and most torturous of Severus’s life. Not quite like the war, not really, but going over with James – Lily was in court, they’d sent Sirius to fetch her – had been utterly torturous.
Harry had been awake and uninjured, and, as the three of them had sat in the hospital wing bothering Madam Pomfrey, James had gotten the whole story out of him.
From the beginning of the year, Neville had been nervous of the Defense professor, Quirrell. But no more nervous that Quirrell had been of him, it had seemed to everyone else. In January, there’d been a flying lesson – Harry never went to them, since his admission to the Quidditch team – and afterwards Neville had insisted that his broom was trying to kill him. But the only person they’d seen out of place was Hagrid.
“And we all knew Hagrid wouldn’t do that. Anyways, it turned out what was wrong with him was that he had a dragon, so we knew he wasn’t the one behind it.”
“Hagrid has a dragon?” James’s tone was deceptively mild. Harry didn’t pick up on the nervousness in his eyes.
“Not anymore. We gave it to Charlie Weasley. Anyways, since we knew it wasn’t Hagrid, we didn’t know who it could have been, so we thought maybe someone was coming into the castle through one of the secret passages you told us about, but since Neville and I lost the invisibility cloaking giving Norbert – that’s the dragon – to Charlie, we couldn’t look there, and we didn’t know why anyone would break into Hogwarts anyways, and then we figured out who Nicholas Flamel was – Uncle Reg wouldn’t tell us because he thought it was for someone else’s class – but it was on Dumbledore’s Chocolate Frog Card – so anyways we figured out that Fluffy – that’s Hagrid’s three headed dog. We met it when I was going to duel Malfoy because he said Neville’s parents were stupid to get killed and we got lost because Neville forgot the map and so anyways we figure out Fluffy was-”
Either, Severus thought, Harry was going to pass out from not breathing, or he was going to explode, judging by the shade of red his face was turning. James held up a hand, and conjured him a glass of water.
The rest of the story continued in a marginally less frenzied fashion. They’d gone to McGonagall, she’d thought they were telling tales, they’d heard Dumbledore was gone and decided that this was the night. Together, they’d gone back in. Fluffy had already been asleep, so they’d only had to face challenges from the rest of the staff. Devil’s Snare that Neville had dealt with in a hurry. A flying challenge with charmed keys that Harry had caught, a chess game that Ron had won, although he’d been left behind there, and finally, Regulus’s challenge.
“Hermione figured that one out. It looked like a puzzle but it wasn’t, really. There were dozens of potions, and the riddle made it seem like only two were good, but we figured out that really it was that all the potions could be good or bad. If you wanted one, someone else had to give it to you. But that meant they could only go backwards,”
That was a very Regulus sort of puzzle. “And what did you do there?”
“Well, there were three of us, so Hermione and Neville changed potions. She went back to help Ron, and he went forward. I stayed there, and… I don’t know. I just stayed there.”
James pulled him close. Harry seemed to look more like him every single day. “Never, ever, do anything like that again. Your Mum and Papa and I will always come if you and Neville ask. I promise.”
--
Regulus,
Something keeps swirling around in my mind. That story Harry told me, about the puzzle you left. Dumbledore said Quirrell was able to get through because he was already two people. But how did he know that would work? How did that work, by Merlin’s baggy ballsack? Fuck, which faculty member took James’s Invisibility Cloak when Harry and Neville lost it? Dumbledore’s seen it plenty of times. Was it meant to be a punishment? Were you trying to stop the kids from poking around without telling them off?
No, I’m just being paranoid now.
[Letter burnt]
--
The summer between Harry and Neville’s first and second years was, mercifully, uneventful. Marley, who still had one year left to wait before Hogwarts, was visibly nervous about Ginny leaving her behind, but, really, things could have been much worse.
The end of the summer, from their trip to Diagon Alley to the 1st, was significantly more eventful than the rest. Between Lucius Malfoy and Gilderoy Lockhart (apparently, the new defense professor, Merlin help us), Diagon was utterly occupied by idiots, a fact made worse by Harry almost getting into a fist fight with Malfoy’s son. And then Neville, in a seeming effort to one-up his brother, managed to fail to get onto the carriages with Ron Weasley and the two of them decided it was a brilliant plan to sneak in through the shrieking shack and almost got killed by the Whomping Willow. There wasn’t a howler sent by them after that, but it was a near thing.
--
Dear Aunty Lily and Uncle Severus and Uncle James,
I don’t think I want to come home for Halloween this year, if that’s okay. Nearly Headless Nick invited us to his deathday party, and I think it would be very rude not to come. Hannah says so too.
Love,
Neville
--
With Neville away at Halloween, they ended up going out in costume like muggles instead. Lily had always wanted to do this with the children, but Neville hadn’t ever wanted to, and they had always been careful to let him set the boundaries around the anniversary of his parents’ deaths. Both of the girls decided it would be funny to go as witches, so Marley went as the Wicked Witch the West, although she was very sad she could not use a real broomstick, and Jenny went as the White Witch, from Narnia, and was very put out every time someone thought she was Glinda. In spite of this, a good time was had by all. Most of all James, who had never seen a real Halloween before, and found every muggle interpretation of real magical creatures endlessly amusing.
Coming home to discover an urgent letter from Neville about finding a dead cat certainly put a damper on affairs.
--
When he was at Hogwarts, Severus didn’t think he’d fully understood how little communication with parents there really was. But now that his own children were attending, the letters seemed particularly torturous. It was obvious that Neville felt profoundly isolated by the fact that everyone who had wanted to be his friend had turned on him, a matter made worse by the fact that him and Harry seemed to be fighting with him about something obscure.
They were reluctant to pull the boys out of school, even as things went from bad to worse, with a student (and, apparently, a ghost), being petrified. But after Christmas, things seemed to have settled down, and with increased security, they’d almost gone back to normal. By Valentine’s day, if not for Remus’s concern when they’d spoken at Christmas, Severus almost would have believed it was only some student’s horrible, horrible idea of a joke.
--
Prongs, Nevermore, Scales,
I haven’t much time to send this, but the Board of Governors only just heard; two more students have been petrified. One of them is Harry and Neville’s friend, Hermione. Fudge is convinced Hagrid is responsible – apparently he was expelled for something like this? – Lucius is blaming Dumbledore. I’m only one man, and I can’t stop Dumbledore’s suspension given Lucius’s penchant for blackmail, but I did convince them to install a member of the board – namely, me – as supervision. So I’ll be there to help get to the bottom of it.
Love,
Padfoot
--
Dear Neville,
No, acromantulas cannot, to the best of my knowledge, cause petrification. If you have any other ideas, please, bring them to Sirius rather than investigating yourself next time.
Love,
R. Lupin
--
At a glance, it was hard to say which of the three of them – Harry, Neville, Sirius – looked worst. Harry sat in the corner, cracked glasses on the table beside him, but physically unhurt. Only hours ago, he had been almost fully possessed by Voldemort. Neville was covered in blood, but seemed surprisingly cheerful. Marley’s friend Ginny Weasley was sitting with him, perched on the corner of his bed and chatting away. She’d apparently saved the day by nicking the Marauder’s Map from Harry earlier in the year to conduct a series of pranks. As a result, when Neville, Ron, and Gilderoy Lockhart had vanished from the map in Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom, she’d broken away from the rest of the first year students and run to fetch Sirius.
As for Sirius himself he seemed… distraught, perhaps, was the best word. Unusually, he was sitting in human form, staring at his hands, which were not shaking at all. He was still wearing the wrap-around sunglasses he’d conjured when he realized it was a basilisk, which made him look particularly out of place in the Edwardian-looking Hospital wing.
Sharing silent eye contact, the three of them divided up. Lily went to Harry, sat quietly by his side and held his hand until he was ready to talk. James went to Sirius, and, gently, pulled Sirius against his chest in a silent gesture of gratitude. They’d known each other so well, for so long, that they didn’t really need words for times like this.
And so Severus went to Neville. Even if he seemed mostly alright, that didn’t mean he was. Ginny looked up at him. It was as if her face didn’t really know what expression to make. “Hi… Mr. Snape.”
He put his hand on her shoulder, trying his best not to be too dismissive, or weird in any other way. “Ginny… thank you, very much. But do you think I could get a minute alone with Neville?”
She glanced between them and nodded, vigorously. To Neville, she said, “just because you’re Marley’s dork brother doesn’t mean you’re not brave, yeah?” And then she was gone before he could say a word.
Severus took her place, and was pleasantly surprised when Neville leant up against him. “When did you go from being ‘The Boy Who Lived’ and her childhood idol to ‘Marley’s dork brother’?”
Neville shrugged. “I think I like this one better.”
Severus put his arm around Neville and, in a more serious tone, said, “do you want to talk about what happened?”
“Not really,” said Neville, so Severus let him curl into his side, watching Lily and Harry in much the same pose on the other side of the room. James and Sirius had pulled apart, Sirius’s glasses finally off and a small smile on his face.
Quietly, Neville said, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you something was wrong with Harry. I just thought he was angry at me about something, and he’s never been angry at me like that before. I didn’t think I should complain; he’s your real son.”
And about the rest of it? Severus wanted to ask, why didn’t you tell us about Malfoy’s house elf being the real reason you missed the carriages, or the cursed diary when you found it, or the voice you were hearing, or Hagrid’s warnings about the spiders? But he didn’t ask, because from Neville’s words the reason was achingly clear; he thought they wouldn’t want him if he told them that something was very, very wrong.
“Neville, look at me.” He did glance up, though he didn’t take his head completely off of Severus’s shoulder. “You must have noticed that Harry isn’t my biological son, haven’t you?”
It was an obvious fact, really. No child had ever looked so much like their father as Harry did like James. The other two were a bit in the air, really, but with Harry there was no question.
“Yeah, but that’s not really important. He’s still your son, Uncle Sev.” He said the title with some force,
They had always been very clear that Neville didn’t have to call them his parents. To try and leave respectful room for Frank and Alice in his life. Maybe they had been making a horrible mistake.
“You’re our son too. As much and as long as you want to be. If you want to keep calling us ‘Aunt’ and ‘Uncle’, or call us what your brother and sisters do, or call us something else entirely… we can work something out. Just because Frank and Alice were your dad and mum doesn’t mean you aren’t also our son, if you want to be.” And then, just to be a little mean, he added, “you wouldn’t rob Jenny of her favourite brother, would you?”
Neville pressed his face back into Severus’s side and didn’t say anything for a long time. Across from them, Sirius offered a thumbs-up and James mouthed ‘good job!’
--
That summer was perhaps one of the hardest since before Jenny was born. Harry needed their full attention and support. Neville did too, in ways that were perhaps less obvious. And Marley, of course, felt understandably frustrated that her last summer before going away wasn’t going to be special like her brothers’ had been. But she was a good sport about it, given her age, and they let her go visit the Weasleys before their trip to Egypt, which cheered her some. Jenny went away too, on holiday to Spain with Sirius and Remus. One of Severus’s most essential parenting insight was the every child wanted to feel loved in a unique way. For Marley, getting to be with her friends, and for Jenny, getting to go to Spain where she could see the sort of magical history sites she found fascinating, helped both of them to know that they were seen as special and loved in their own ways. They would have other time with their parents, when they needed them. But for now, Neville and Harry were in more dire straits.
--
Harry looked up, blearily, when Severus cast lumos in his room.
“Was I screaming again?”
He had been, but that was besides the point. “You weren’t asleep. I thought you might like to get up and have a reset before trying again, like Remus suggested.”
None of them were strangers to nightmares – not even Neville, who still sometimes dreamed of the night has parents died – but Remus was particularly good at giving advice.
Harry dragged himself out of bed with a groan, and went to sit at the kitchen table while Severus made them both a cup of chamomile tea.
They’d been sitting quietly, nursing their tea, for perhaps a minute or two before Harry asked, “how are you so calm, all the time?”
Severus didn’t laugh, but it was a near thing. “I’m not calm all the time.”
“You look like it.”
It was, in some ways, a reflection of how hard Severus had worked to never, ever, be like his father. And now, it seemed, it was coming back to bite him. “I’m not calm. I’m very, very angry. And, if I’m honest, I’m scared. I hate that I haven’t been able to protect you and Neville. I’m scared of losing you. I’m scared of being a bad parent. And as to being angry… there’s nothing wrong with being angry for the right reasons. Growing up, sometimes, just means learning how to use that anger. One of the things that makes me angriest, in the whole world, is the way people talk about werewolves like your uncle. When I was just a bit older than you are now, your mum and I pulled a lot of pranks on a teacher who said horrid things about werewolves. But now that we’re older, Lily writes petitions to the ministry and fights for werewolf rights in court and before the wizengamot, and I do my research because I know I can help people.”
Harry was looking at him with an appraising eye, which hadn’t ever boded well before. “You know mind magics, don’t you?”
It wasn’t one of the worst ideas Harry had ever had. That prize still went to the Philosopher’s Stone incident from his first year. “I’ll teach you occlumency, if you want to learn. Sorting your thoughts can be helpful. A bit like therapy, but with magic.”
“And without a therapist. So not really like therapy.”
“Good point.”
Harry, rather quietly, asked, “can we start tomorrow?”
And so they did.