Chapter Text
There is something bittersweet in stepping back into the shoes that you had once so easily filled, knowing full and well that this was definite. That it was little more than a show being put on for a less than captive audience while those backstage worked tirelessly at the mechanics of it.
Dumbledore, for all Harry and Severus alike could tell, did not care much for who it was that picked the young snake up from the Platform at the end of the year, so long as it was not someone of magical lineage. This was the only excuse that the professor and the two young Slytherins that he had somehow come to foster could come up with when no one had batted an eye at Harry not returning to the Dursleys the summer prior.
It was this explanation that they had hinged things on when the potions Professor had conspired with the lone remaining Potter for him to go and stay with the muggle friends that he had made until he could get all of the paperwork in order, the trio of snakes pulling strings from behind a curtain that no one else could see.
Harry didn’t mind the turn of events, not for the part that he played in it anyways, as he walked through the dirty streets of the city with the Plutos all around him, each composing themselves in a manner that made parents steer their children away from them on the street, and made those that looked almost as rough as them smirk as if weighing their chances in a fight. The ones that did come left the group high on adrenaline, with bloodied knuckles that itched for another fight.
It was three days of cigarette smoke in the teen’s lungs, cuts on skin put there by too quick fists and blades that were not his own, and the sting of alcohol as it burned its way down all of their throats.
It was three nights of sleeping next to the first person that had ever looked at him as if they could find a home in one another if they so wished, as touches came easy between the two. Always soft, never bruising, never meant to cause pain.
(As they fell asleep together and woke up in each others arms each morning well before the sun rise, the pair ignored the simple fact that there were other forms of pain that never cause any sort of hand to strike skin)
Harry couldn’t bring himself to give over his mind completely to the way that he was all but living in a memory of something that he knew he wouldn’t be able to return to after these few days, not when he had spent those early hours of dawn before Thomas, Alex, and Jude would seek him out, in the forest with spirits of those long dead at his sides. Neither of them explaining to him why he could see either of them, but instead Merlin having the second teach him through something else entirely.
And Harry let them dictate like this for now, because when he rose out of bed on the third day - a sad look on his face that marred Jude’s as well - the boy knew that the lesson would be one that he would need come nightfall.
He had plans to complete after all.
-
Number Four, Private Drive looks from the outside exactly like that of any other house on the street, something that it’s occupants have always prided themselves on, even if they knew that at a time it hadn’t exactly been the truth on the inside as well. Sure, their lawn and garden had lost a bit of the prestige that it had held up till a summer or so before, but it was a small price to pay for the peace that the loss of the freak had brought.
As Petunia opens her front door to find a man that she had hoped to never see again, the blond woman knows that this peace has just expired.
The heat of summer was beating down on the dark clad figure - Wizarding robes swaying ever so slightly in the small breeze that he had conjured into the air - but one would never know it from the almost impassive way that the man held himself. He had endured worse than heat after all at the hands of the Dark Lord himself countless times.
“You,” Petunia said, the word coming out as a curse rather than an everyday part of speech.
“Hello Tuney, is Harry here?”
Severus didn’t know which name caused the woman to flinch worse, the one that he had called her, or the given name of the boy that she was supposed to be caring for as if he was her own son. Something that she had been failing to do since the day that he’d been given to her.
“The boy isn’t here,” she all but spats, looking past the wizard before her at houses around her own, as if expecting for all of the neighbors to have the blinds open and watching the scene unfold, “now leave.”
“Not until Harry comes,” Severus says firmly, his voice almost a sneer, “now are you going to let me inside, or am I going to stand out here for all the neighborhood to see?”
It was at that thinly veiled threat that the blonde woman drew up to her full height and raised her hand, pointing a finger at the man that she had grown up alongside, as if she thought that she could be intimidating to him at all. All the front did was make the potions master rage a bit more inside, knowing that such a tactic would work on a small child well enough. He’d used it in his own classroom enough to know such a thing to be truth.
“You listen right here, Severus Snape-” but she never got a chance to finish as a new voice rang through the air, loud and commanding attention, uncaring of who heard:
“Professor!”
Both adults turned and watched with oddly similar gazes as two figures stalked towards them, the elders of one mind as they only recognized one of them. Severus had an idea as to who the second one was though, the theory supported by the casual arm that the stranger had thrown over the young Slytherin’s shoulder. It was the sort of familiar touch that would have gotten others gutted for even less.
Jude.
It was always Jude Finley in any story that he’d ever gotten the boy to tell.
Always.
Severus looked just past the two teens for a moment and saw a beat up looking car a few houses down, two older boys leaned against the outside of it, smoke billowing in the air from the cigarettes burning between their fingers, an identical tattoo peeking out from beneath their clothes.
The Plutos, Harry had called them - almost affectionately - when he’d gone (with permission) at the end of the year to call the eldest among them, a boy named Thomas. Severus guessed that the taller of the two was likely he, making the other Alex.
Looking at the small group, the Professor had to remind himself that it was for the best to take the boy from them. That this wasn’t the world that Harry belonged to (that was a lie, he belonged to each in equal measure, something that Harry himself knew down to his bones and the damaged soul that was nestled beneath them) that he was a wizard and would have to leave them all behind eventually.
(He had a landline at home, he knew then that it would be getting a fair deal of use)
The decision though to take the boy away became easier when he saw the bruise blooming on the teen’s cheek, one that hadn’t been there only a few days before. Severus was sure that if he were to look, that he’d see scabs just barely forming over bruised knuckles on both of the boys that had stopped before the two adults.
He was right.
Severus really thought that he should have known better than to hope for the boy not to get into any fight in the three days that they were out of each other’s sights, but here he was suppressing a sigh.
The potions master opened his mouth to greet the two teens, but it was his turn to be interrupted before he could even begin to speak.
“So you finally came back,” Petunia sneered in a manner that reminded Harry remarkably of the potions Professor that was standing before her, the tone was enough to make the teen want to shut down, just as he always had when she was in such a fowl mood, “you filthy, wretched boy. You dare to stalk my doorstep after all this time?”
Harry didn’t notice that his body was trembling in a manner so small that it could be easily explained by the summer breeze, but Jude did. The taller teen dug his fingers into a bruise that he knew was on the younger’s shoulder, and Harry let the pain wash over him and bring him back to himself once more.
“Well, we both know that I was the only one that kept it clean, so I have more of a right to stand on it than you do, Aunt Petunia.”
Harry thought that he would remember the way that she went red in the face for the rest of his likely short life.
Jude snickered, the sound low and quiet compared to the heavy, angered breathing of the woman that should have been Harry’s caretaker, but she heard it anyways, her too sharp gaze turning to the other teen but her words still for Harry alone.
“It was bad enough that one of your kind,” Petunia says, throwing a disdainful look towards the man that she had known since she was small, “is here, but now you bring this trash too?”
A soft hiss escaped from the Parselmouth’s lips, causing the serpent in his jacket pocket to stir slightly at the noise, but Nyx stayed where she was, having been warned not to come out when Jude was around. The dark colored serpent did not understand the Royal One’s instance of this rule, as it had never been a problem before then, but could feel the warning that the teen gave off when Harry had felt her move, and settled back down. For the speaker’s sake alone.
“Well, if we’re such a…. disagreeable group to have on your front porch, then you might want to let us in before the neighbors lose interest with those two idiots down there,” the young Slytherin said, pointing at the other two boys that bore the same mark that he and Jude did, still smoking around the car, “and their eyes stray down here. I mean, I’d love to hear of that scandal, but I’m sure you wouldn’t.”
Harry smiled as he spoke, it was a cruel sort of look, with teeth sharp enough to be seen as a threat all on their own even without the one that he’d just spoken. It was violent and vile, the very sort of look that had most shying away.
Jude loved it, he always had.
If Harry hadn’t known for sure that there wasn’t a single drop of magic within the woman’s blood, he would have thought that the flash of her eyes in the sun was that of the same magic that caused his own to flash a violent green.
“Fine,” she spat before she turned her cold gaze onto the teen that belonged here even less than Harry himself, “but he is not coming into this house,” Petunia said, pointing at Jude. “I may not be able to do anything but the two of you freaks, but he is not allowed.” And with that the woman turned, blonde hair sweeping over her shoulder as she did so. For a moment Harry was reminded of Lucius Malfoy. It was not a comparison that he particularly liked.
When Harry turned to look at the other teen, there was a soft look on his face, one much gentler than he’d ever seen before on the older boy. Something broke a little bit inside of the snake at seeing it, seeing this version of the other teen that was so often reserved for nights when a scream was beginning to tear at Harry’s throat as he woke from nightmares in the other’s bed, Jude’s hands gentle on his skin.
It looked as if Jude was mourning someone not yet gone.
(Harry wondered if he was)
“I’ll call you,” he says quickly, possibly too quick, but there was a sense of urgency in the air with his aunt waiting and potions master right there.
“I’m sure you’ll try,” Jude said, that damned smile still there, as if he thought that Harry would forget the other. Harry didn’t think that he ever would even if the mark of their group wasn’t forever on his skin. “But if you do call, I’ll be there.”
There was a double meaning to the other boy’s words that the Slytherin had no trouble picking up on.
“My own personal Batman, now that’d be a sight to see.”
“Whatever you say, Superman,” the other responded, a smirk on their lips.
Harry only had a moment to wonder why the other Pluto had chosen that particular hero out of all the choices, when the other was suddenly moving closer, the pace slow and given plenty of time for intervention. Lips brushed his cheek, burning like fire on his skin for the moment that they lingered there before Jude pulled away, that same sort of sad look in his eyes that they’d both been sporting all morning.
“Goodbye,” the older teen said in a manner much too soft for the two of them, who spent so much of their time together with cigarette smoke in their lunges and cuts on their lips.
Jude had already turned and walked too far away before Harry got the chance to say it back.
The young wizard took in a deep breath that he thought that Remus should be proud of him for, as he turned and walked into the house that had done everything but raised him.
“Why are you here?” Aunt Petunia asks harshly the moment that the door closes, her too tall form much too close to Harry’s own for him to have any sort of comfort.
“Just to permanently take myself off of your hands,” Harry said back, with much more bravado than he thought he could ever hold within this house, his voice much louder than he’d ever been allowed to have it, “isn't that lovely?”
“You disappeared all on your own before,” the woman protested.
“I know,” the teen says, false joy in his voice as he looked upon the woman that had not quite raised him with such dead eyes that she flinched knowing that she’d had a hand in creating that, “it must have seemed like fucking Christmas for you lot here.”
“Who’s at the door, Petunia?” a loud voice bellowed from the direction of the sitting room and Severus noticed instantly the subtle flinch that tore through the teen at his side.
It was at that, that the man stalked past the woman that he had never imagined would grow to be as cruel as himself, and into the room holding the source of the noise, wand held comfortably at his side, twirling it.
(Harry watched him and wondered if the older man knew that Harry did exactly the same thing when he held a blade.)
There was a walrus of a man sitting in a chair that creaked something awful as he stood suddenly at seeing a stranger walk into his sitting room, especially one dressed the way that he was.
“Who the bloody hell are you?” the man thundered, but it didn’t phase Severus when he had stood at the feet of those so much stronger than the muggle before him could ever hope to be.
“Severus Tobias Snape,” the Slytherin Head of House said formally, “your nephew’s potions professor.”
Severus watched as the pathetic excuse of a man before him blubbered at his proclamation, paling in the face.
“I have no nephew,” Vernon said, seething as he lied through his teeth, anger taking over his fear as it so often had.
“Then I suppose I imagined living here.”
Vernon’s head snapped to the side at the new noise, a voice that he’d not heard in a long time now. He saw a ghost standing in his hall, a thin boy standing next to the cupboard under the stairs with cold eyes that looked as if they would strike him dead at any given moment, as scarred hands ran down the wood of the cupboard door.
Harry James Potter, the bastard of a child. The child of the shame of the family. The freak that they had been forced to take in.
“You,” Vernon snarled, storming forwards, all fear forgotten as rage barrelled into him. “You ungrateful, little piece of shit!”
For someone so large, Vernon Dursley was already at the boy before Severus could move to intercept him, though he only stayed there for a moment as before beginning to back up, Harry following closely with a blade pointed at the older man’s neck, blood trickling onto the muggle’s shirt.
“I’d watch out, Uncle,” the teen said as Severus watched the boy’s head tilt to the side with a cruel glint in his eyes, like a serpent waiting to strike, “one wrong slip,” the blade dug in deeper, “and you wouldn’t even be the first man that I’ve killed.”
“You wouldn’t, boy,” the muggle continued to blubber, but Severus supposed that he saw something in the teen’s eyes, because it looked as if for the first time in nearly thirteen years he conceded. “Alright, freak.”
“Why are you here?” Petunia asked, the cowardly woman finally catching her voice after standing silently by as her husband was threatened by the teen that they had tried their hardest to kill with their questionable care.
“As I said,” Harry started, holding the blade close to his body even as he pulled away, “I’m here to take myself permanently out of your care.”
“How, boy?” Vernon asked, paling as green eyes that seemed to flicker with unnatural light turned on him once more.
“Severus?” the teen asked without looking away from the muggle man.
“Well, I had wanted to do this in the sitting room, but here is as good a place as any,” the potions master said, stepping back into the fray of the conversation after staying back and letting Harry handle this himself.
The man pulled out a piece of parchment to Vernon and did not lower his hand till he took it, forcing the man to accept this from a ‘freak’ like him.
Harry watched with careful eyes as his uncle read over the parchment, looking for any signs that the boar of a man might tear it as he had done so many of the letters that Harry had been meant to receive when he was eleven.
He didn’t tear it though, reading it instead.
“An apprenticeship?” Vernon asked, mockingly. “Is the whelp even smart enough to get such a thing?”
“He’s one of the top in his class,” Severus answered and Harry heard the pride there.
Petunia did too.
For the first time she truly looked at the boy, the only thing that she had left of a sister that had left her behind long before the war had taken Lily from her, and let the guilt wrap itself around her heart.
“We’ll do it,” the woman said, stepping forwards and taking the parchment from her husband’s hands, “anything to wash our hands of the freak.”
Harry was well versed in lies and half truths, he knew that this reasoning - for her at the least - was something between the two. He didn’t particularly care though, didn’t think that he could if he were to try.
Harry watched as they signed the papers quickly, wanting to get the both of the wizards out of their home as fast as they could, and knew that this wasn’t true freedom, but only a brief sort of reprieve. After all, the only thing that Severus was offering him was an apprenticeship and a place to stay. It wasn’t adoption and a home. He would take whatever scraps of affection that he could get though, and should they be revoked, then he always had his own personal Gotham Knight waiting for him.
Harry didn’t want to have to call upon Jude to be his savior though.
—
Severus had bought a cottage during the school year.
The man had never thought that he would be doing such a thing, but yet right around the beginning of the previous school year - when it had come to his attention that somehow Theodore Nott would find his way into his care as well - he had. He’d even taken great care with picking its location.
The fields around the cottage were wide and vast with the tall grass that Harry had seemed to favor during their Patronus training over the past school year, though in the distance one could easily see three other homes peeking up from the grass, the Weasley home - the Burrow as they called it - much too close for his own feelings of safety as the twins had taken a liking to his ward, the Diggory home off to another side, standing much shorter than the Lovegood home that could also be seen. He knew that in moving here, in building a cottage here, he was signing himself up to a house filled with teenagers, but it was a price that he was willing to pay to see the boy’s eyes hold a bit of light within them.
Severus watched as Harry took in the cottage from the outside, looking at the house with the speculative eyes of someone much too used to things attacking him when he dared to get too comfortable. This wasn’t going to be that, Severus would make sure of it.
Harry studied the cottage as he walked closer to it, taking in the deep green exterior and the large windows covered in plants, taking stock of each exit point on each of the two floors. It was beautiful, if simple in its design. He studied Severus as well, watching the way that the man took it in as well. Harry knew then that the other hadn't had this property the summer before, that he’d bought it for him.
For a moment he dared to hope.
“Let’s get you inside,” the potions master said softly, “we can go and retrieve Mr. Nott tomorrow.”
Harry knew that they would not be doing that, but followed all the same.
—
It was late into the summer night when a boy suddenly appeared on the lawn of an old manor, the air shining around him as the teen’s wrist burned with the price of such magic. The wards of the manor stood at his back, protesting his existence, but unable to do a thing to stop the death touched boy as he walked closer and closer to the doors of the manor. The wards had been made of modern magic after all, something that Harry did not bend to the whims of anymore. Not that he ever truly had done so before.
When he knocks on the door, Harry knows that it echoes like thunder throughout the too empty house.
The door opened a few moments later and there was a wand in the boy’s face held by a shaking hand, and a laugh floating through the air that only the teen could hear.
Harry looked at the man before him, someone that was much older than he had thought that any parent of someone his age should be, and saw Theo in his too stern features. The color of his hair was the same shade of brown, the sort that shined gold in most soft lights, and his eyes held the same lifelessness to them, though his seemed to be more from the way that his skin sagged with age than anything. He knew without a doubt that this was the man that had helped to create his brother, the one that had sought to break him into an image of himself.
The boy didn’t have to reach for the magic within him, not as it was already lashing out, stealing the wand from Nott Senior’s hand, the wood creaking as Harry fought the urge to snap it right then and there.
Nott Senior stared with wide eyes at the boy that now had a wand - his wand - floating at his side as if magic were supposed to work in such a manner.
“Who are you?” he asked with a levelness that only being brought up in the proper society of wizarding culture could instill in him.
“Harry Potter,” the teen answered truthfully, looking upon the elderly man with a gaze that didn’t only seem to glow, but truly did as green light shined around the boy, “are you going to let me in?”
Harry watched and for a moment thought that the answer might be a no, something that he had fully prepared for even though it would be a much bloodier venture should the man wish to take it. But he stepped aside after a moment and Harry smiled with teeth much too sharp, sharp enough to tear out a man’s throat.
The younger Slytherin followed the elder almost obediently to the parlor, looking at the dark wood of the manor around him that felt oppressive rather than inviting as the cottage had earlier that morning. Everything about the place felt like the Dursleys even as the two houses looked nothing alike.
“Tea?” the old man asked as he sat down in a chair with a casualness that the teen did not believe and the older wizard knew that he could not make him do so. There was only one other man that had ever instilled so much fear within him with only a small showing of their power, and standing before him was the boy that had killed him when he was nothing more than a baby.
Though, Nott Senior thought as his arm burned in tune with his mind , he likely wouldn’t be dead for long.
“I’ll light the fire,” Harry said and watched as flames a dazzling emerald green leaped forwards from his palm, running about the room as the older wizard flinched at the sight of them.
Dragons and thestrals made of flames soared and swooped around the teen, the flames licking at his clothes and skin but never burning him as serpents made of flames coiled around his flesh. Nott Senior had never seen fiendfyre act in such a way, never seen it bow so easily to anyone. He knew that he never would again.
“Why are you here?” the man whispered as he watched as a skeletal horse swooped just a bit too closely to his person, close enough that he could feel its heat.
“Theo,” the teen answered simply as he touched a small dragon as if it were made of scales and meat instead of flame, “he is to come with me for the summer.”
“Why?” Nott Senior asked, not out of bravery, but the pure curiosity that ran through the Nott line, almost sorting many of them into the house of blue and bronze.
“I don’t see how any of that is your business when you have no power to stop me,” the teen answered coldly, a stark contrast to the heat that should have accompanied the flames.
Everything about the teen was as cold as the waters of the Black lake, Nott Senior no longer wondered how it was that the boy savior had found his way into the snake den, not when he had been all but born for it as it seems. The elder wizard watched as even the flames became chilled, turning black before his eyes, like shadows. He knew without even touching them that they would do much more damage than any normal fiendfyre could, or ever should.
“He’s in his room,” the Nott patriarch said, pointing as he did so.
“Pathetic,” the boy hissed, long and low as he stalked as he did so.
Nott senior knew that the teen was right in his assessment, but he’d take it if the other could turn his son into anything even close to himself.
For the first time the man wondered if the Dark Lord was truly the one that he should follow.
—
When Harry found the room, following the feeling of the other’s magic through the long halls, Theo was already waiting for him with his trunk at the foot of the bed and a busted lip to show for his time. He knew right then that consequences be damned, he’d made the right choice in coming early.
“Let’s go home,” Harry said softly, though his voice sounded like a gunshot in the quiet room as Theo smiled at the words despite the action bringing blood to his lips.
A flick of a stolen wand and a raised brow was all it took to have the trunk shrunken down and in Harry’s pocket, Theo at his side as they walked through the halls, and a wand now abandoned on the ground to be found by its owner some other time when the two teens weren’t there to see it.
The boys walked out of the manor, trekking into the yard as the stars shined down upon them, magic thick in the air in the manner that it so often was when Harry was around.
“How are we leaving?” Theo asked as he looked at the other boy, taking in the darkness under his eyes. It had only been a few days since they’d seen one another and yet it felt like there was a whole world that had stood between them. “I don’t see any brooms.”
“We don’t need brooms,” Harry said surely.
“I wasn’t aware that you knew how to apparate.”
“I don’t,” the snake said, confusing the Nott heir even more, “but I know the old magic that it was taken from.
Harry looked past the boy, at the woman that only he could see, her robes fluttering in winds that he could almost feel on his own skin, and watched as she nodded.
“Hold out your hands,” the death favored child instructed, holding out his own, “cross your wrists, and face one palm up and the other down.”
Theo did as asked, trusting the other teen more than he did himself, and wasn’t surprised when Harry took his hands into his own, though he was surprised when the boy started to speak in a language that Theo didn’t know, but knew that it wasn’t the language of snakes. Wasn’t even close.
Harry repeated the words that Morgan le Fay spoke into the wind, the old Celtic sort of language rolling off of his tongue as if he’d always been meant to speak it. Winds rose up around the three of them, tearing through the air and taking the trio with them and the boys’ wrist began to burn, one’s greater than the other.
Theo had closed his eyes as the wind had picked up, unable to keep them open, and when he opened them once more he was somewhere else entirely, in the front yard of a cottage that he’d never seen before. The teen hissed as his wrist quietly throbbed and looked down upon it only to see a marking that hadn’t been there before, raised on his skin in an angry red.
“It's the runes Raidho and Algiz laid over each other,” Harry explained, showing his own wrist, where the marking stood out in an even darker red on his slightly tanned skin. “Together they make a rune for travel.”
“Sure,” Theo said, as he fell in line with Harry and the two began to walk to the cottage, a spirit trailing behind them and joining the one waiting at the door for the boys, though only one knew that. Theo had stopped questioning the enigma that is Harry Potter many years ago. “How long will it stay there?” he asked, pulling his sleeve down to hide it.
“For you, an hour since you’ve only used it once,” the other boy explained, “it’ll be on me for about a day, maybe a little more since I bore most of the weight of the magic just then.”
“Alright,” Theo accepted easily.
That night, the two teens slept next to one another in a bed meant for just one of them, as the others had not yet been made, but it was fine because this way they each had proof that their brother was alright.
The lecture and the slight grounding that followed them in the morning when Snape found them together, was a price that they were fine paying.