Harry Potter
Fem!Harry/Severus
SFW for this chapter, NSFW the whole story
Cow- T, w4, m3 - Un’altra volta (Once more) - con un omaggio alle tabelle di Fabian! - Chap 1 here
Chap 3 to come
TW: pregnacy, brief discussion on abortion
At first, she doesn’t notice - she was never regular with her period, and starving herself in the forest might have made it completely go away, so it’s not a surprise when month after month she doesn’t need pads. She also puts up some weight, despite the risible amount of food that she manages to consume, and as of lately, she can’t even keep half of it down. She must have caught a bug, she tells herself as she throws up and Hermione doesn’t suspect a thing, not at first.
Weeks pass, and Harry doesn’t get better, no, she keeps throwing up and feeling weird, and maybe she was cursed, that could have happened, couldn’t it?
Hermione waits for Ron to take the first watch outside the tend to corner her. Harriet should have put two and two together sooner, but it’s fitting that it should be Hermione to bring out the topic.
“I think you need your hair cut,” she approaches her, “they’ve grown a little.”
It’s true, the mass of hair on her head has grown into unruly locks, that won’t stay in place despite the length. She thought making them grow to her shoulder would make them heavier, easier to tame, but that never happened so she lets Hermione wet her hair and take the scissors.
She cuts in silence for a while, trying to find the best way to approach the topic.
“I wanted to ask you...” Hermione tries to sound nonchalant, but Harriet knows immediately there’s something else, “Did something happen when we weren’t there?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you... meet someone?”
Harriet feels the blood drain from her face - how does she know, what gave them away? - and then licks her dry lips. “No,” she lies, “Why are you asking?”
Hermione puts the scissors down.
“You can tell me the truth, whatever happened, I can help you...”
Harriet looks at her as a deer in the headlight - more like a doe, actually. She can’t tell her - she can’t - but Hermione is a bloodhound and when she has smelled something she never lets go.
“I don’t know what happened to you when we were gone. We should have never left you. I should have never left you, Ron be damned,” she looks pained as she speaks, tears welling in her eyes, “What I’m saying is, I know we’re not the kind of girl friends who talk all the time about boys and the likes, but if you met someone...”
“No,” Harriet denies, closing her out. This is her secret to keep.
Hermione covers her eyes with a hand, massaging her temples in a tired gesture. She looks like she’s carrying the weight of the world on her shoulder. “Harry, did they do something to you?”
“They?” Harriet asks
“I don’t know. He, they. You can hold off against one, maybe even more... I know you must have had sex with someone but you’re denying it. If you’re feeling ashamed... There’s nothing you have to feel ashamed about. We left you, a girl, alone, in the woods. If someone found you if they forced you...”
“No!” Harriet interrupts her, realizing where she’s going, “No, Hermione, it was... it was consensual.”
“Oh,” Hermione breathes, “Oh, thank god, Harriet. I was so worried. I was thinking... and I could never forgive myself if anything...”
“It’s not... It’s ok, Hermione. It was just... he was here. It happened.” She’s about to ask her how she knew then when Hermione asks another question.
“Then, Harry, if I can ask... Who’s he? Who’s the father?”
Harriet feels struck. The father? And then it clicks, it downs on her that she’s pregnant. It’s not that she doesn’t know how babies are made, or that there are steps to prevent it and they didn’t think about taking them, or what the symptoms of pregnancy are and that she had been having all of them. She just never put all that together.
Because she never thought... she never thought it would happen to her. She was the least sexual being in the school, she never had a boyfriend before, never had a crush - not a real one, because Cedric Diggory didn’t qualify past ‘cute’ - and now she has had sex and yes this is something that can very much happen, and when had something that could happen not happened to her?
She should have seen this coming from a mile away.
“Harry?”
“I’m not - I prefer not saying.”
“You do know who is the father, right?”
Harriet almost chokes, “Merlin, Hermione! Yes, of course, I do!” She shakes her head, “I haven’t slept with a bunch of people! I know who he is!”
Hermione raises her hand in surrender. “There wouldn’t have been anything wrong if you didn’t.”
“But I do.”
“And you won’t tell me.”
“No,” she shakes her head, “It wouldn’t change anything.” But it’s a lie. It would change everything.
-
They have to tell Ron, they resolve. He might not realize what is happening, but he has noticed something is happening.
“You had time to have sex when we were gone?” Ron asks, tactless as always.
Harriet doesn’t fight him, only because she needs to throw up. She doesn’t know if it’s because of the pregnancy or because he’s making her nauseous. She was alone, she was scared, she had the weight of the world put on her shoulders - please, forgive her for looking for a little comfort in the only person who could actually understand what she was going through.
“Maybe if you all hadn’t been gone for weeks,” she bites back, after wiping her mouth, and Ron flushes.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean...”
Hermione stares at him, “It doesn’t matter how you meant it, only how it sounded.” If looks could kill, Ron would already be a pile of ashes on the floor.
“No, it’s just that... Well, a forest isn’t exactly full of places to hang out and meet people!”
“It happened, okay?!” Harry snaps before Hermione can retort, “It happened. I didn’t exactly sign up for a child.”
Ron doesn’t comment further. Hermione wrings her hands.
“Harry...” she bites her lips, “Do you... do you want to keep it?”
Harriet looks at her, really looks at her, a question she hadn’t dared to ask herself. “I don’t know.”
It’s not as if she can waltz in a clinic right now, and maybe there’s a potion, some herbs that Hermione can pull out of her purse, but the thing is... Harriet doesn’t know.
It’s Snape’s child. Snape’s for fuck sake.
She doesn’t have a clue where to begin untangling this mess - should she tell him, see what he wants to do? Should she keep it, get rid of it? Should she hope the matter will resolve itself?
The only thing she knows it’s that she can’t let Voldemort win, she can’t stall and postpone for a child she’s not even sure she wants to keep. For a child she will likely leave orphaned anyway.
Maybe she doesn’t have a maternal instinct, maybe she would be a horrible mother, maybe Lily, who sacrificed her life for her daughter, is turning in her grave at the thought of Harriet going on with the war.
But she’s not even sure there’s something she could do to bow out of this, even temporarily, even for six months. This is her life, now, and it would be easier, without a child growing inside her. She already has too much to think about even without another being depending on her.
She still can’t bring herself to tell Hermione to get her the herbs.
-
Harriet tries to look for him.
You need to come to me when you’ve completed your mission, he had told her and she hasn’t, but she’s here and maybe they won’t have another chance, so she tries, she asks subtly, but her friends are confined in the Requirement Room and they don’t know anything about him - they don’t even want to know - and she doesn’t want to tip off Hermione.
The lump of her stomach is still small at her fourth month, hidden under her robes. Nobody notices but Hermione’s not stupid.
Besides, she’s not here for him. She lets Luna guide her to Ravenclaw’s tower, leaving the others behind. She hopes she will stumble upon him, but they meet the Carrows and then they meet Professor McGonagall and Harriet doesn’t ask about him, hoping he’ll come to her now that the Carrows have told Voldemort they have her. Harriet focuses on the diadem, on getting the rest of the students safely out of the school now that a battle is going to happen.
If she had warned McGonagall if she had told her she needed to talk to Snape...
But Harriet doesn’t, and then Snape is there, “Have you seen Harriet Potter, Minerva? Because if you have. I must insist---” and Harriet feels her chest warm, her heart beating faster. She wants to throw away her invisibility Cloak and run into his arms and kiss him and tell him, be damned who might hear.
But then McGonagall protects her, Flitwick and Sprout come to her help, and they curse Severus, they fight him because they don’t know he’s on their side and Harriet can’t do anything to stop them, too busy protecting herself and Luna from flying spells, and then Severus is gone, flying the Castle without even knowing Harriet was there, so close.
When she sees him again he’s bleeding on the floor of the Shrieking Shack and she runs to him. There are tears falling from her eyes because he’s dying and there must be something she can do, there must be...
But there isn’t.
Severus dies looking into her eyes and later, when she has seen his memories, she knows he was looking at her, not at her mother.
It doesn’t matter that he died not knowing they were going to have a child. None of them is going to be alive by the end of the day for it to matter and Harriet goes to face Voldemort, knowing she’ll have to die. They both will.
But she wins, and she has the child.
It’s a boy, wailing and healthy, even if a little bit too small for his age, but that had to be expected considering she had been malnourished for the first part of her pregnancy. She calls him Albus Severus Potter and she brings him to his father's grave.
Eyebrows are raised and words muttered - but only when Harriet can’t hear them, because she’ll go feral if only someone dares imply that Severus had been something different from the hero she knows he was. Nobody ever questions her, nobody even has doubts about the paternity, not when she has given the boy that second name, not when he grows up and they all can see it in the curve of his chin, in the shape of his nose. In the beating of his heart.
* * *
Albus Severus Potter travels through time for the first time when he’s thirteen. He knows he’s the same age his mother was when Hermione Granger put a Time turner around her neck and went back hours to save her godfather. Albus knows because Harriet told him, her adventures whispered as if they were fairy tales at Albus’ bedside, to put him to sleep.
So Albus grows, with a thirst for adventures and a longing for a family. He listens to his mother telling him about his father - the bravest man she’s ever known - and he dreams of getting in trouble sneaking through Hogwarts’ secret passages.
Honestly, Harriet should have seen it coming.
So when he’s thirteen - thirteen and sneaking into the section of the Black Library his mother locked, thirteen and already knowing what he’s doing with his charms - Albus finds the book.
It’s old and ancient, leather cover and discolored pages, sepia ink on yellowed parchment - but the instructions are clear, and the rituals are explained in detail. There are margin notes, explaining what went wrong and how to right the mistake of the wizards that previously used them.
Albus hides the book under his shirt and runs to his room before his mother could find him out.
He reads through the night, a solitary candle in Grimmauld Place. And then he frets and prepares and double checks and never tells his mother any of his plans because if he has learned something is that for how reckless Harriet Potter had been in her youth, she’ll never let him do something so dangerous.
But Albus - a little reckless himself, a lot arrogant - is good.
He’s a brilliant student - brilliant enough to study from his father’s books, to get the mechanics behind spells and potions and runes enough that at twelve he had already started doing his own experimentations, botched as they were.
And Albus is also smart - he doesn’t rush into the ritual without thinking it twice. No, he lulls and cradles his book for months, studying it in every minute of his free time.
When he returns to Hogwarts after the Christmas holidays, he takes the book - spells it to look like something completely innocuous, and reads it in the Great Hall.
Teddy laughs at him, “They should have put you in Ravenclaw,” he tells him when he sees him at lunch, hunched over the tome. Teddy, bright laugh, brown hairs, the only Hufflepuff that ever dared sit at the Slytherin table.
Albus raises his eyes from the book just for him. “I’m trying to do something.”
His conspiratorial tone puts a glint in Teddy’s eyes, that shift from green to a deep golden yellow, almost lit. “What?”
“It’s a little too soon,” Albus shakes his head, “But I’ll let you know.”
“Should I help with some research?”
“What do you know about time travel?”
“Not much,” Teddy tells him with a grin, “Not yet.”
-
Albus Severus Potter travels through time for the first time when he’s thirteen. He’s not alone.
-
The ritual should bring them to the past and then back to the future in a matter of two hours. Albus is confident enough that if he tampers with the runes a little he might be able to change the time frame, bypassing it completely.
Teddy is not convinced. “We don’t know enough. What if we get stuck in the past and can’t reverse the spell? What if the time frame misfires and we end up fourteen centuries in the past instead of fourteen years.”
“Where is your sense of adventure?”
“We’re not Gryffindors,” Teddy shakes his head.
“That’s why we’re experimenting,” Albus tuts, hiding the fact that he’s just as scared as Teddy is. “First we try the ritual, see if it works. We go back a couple of hours, that way if we get stuck it won’t be that bad. Then we start modifying the parameters.”
Teddy knows it’s risky, he knows they could end up dead, or stranded somewhere, or who knows what other awful scenario his mind has not yet had time to conjure. But Albus is offering the chance to save their parents, to get to know them, to get to have a family.
Harriet Potter is the best godmother he could have hoped for, his grandma is amazing, and Teddy loves them both. But they’re not his parents and all the stories and the anecdotes cannot make up for not knowing them, having never been hugged or kissed on the forehead.
So Teddy nods and Albus takes out a chart, dates, and hours meticulously written on a piece of parchment with Al’s fine calligraphy.
“What’s this?”
“You know I’m organized,” Albus grins, a little embarrassed. He had taken to write down schedules since, during his first year at Hogwarts, Aunt Hermione had shown him how she did her study plans when she was his age. It was love at first sight.
“I should have known,” Teddy laughs at his friend, “So how long will it take us with all your experiments?”
“If everything goes right and we have no setbacks...” Albus checks his planner as if he needs to, ”two years.”
-
It takes them three years - accounting for the fifth-year debacle when they stopped talking to each other for two months, much to Harriet’s chagrin. The Accident That Should Never Be Mention Again involved a flying broom, a particularly well-written Transfiguration Essay, and a toad. And just as abruptly as it had started, it ended. With Teddy's scorched eyebrows and Albus raiding the kitchen for an impromptu picnic.
(It is telling that neither of them felt confident to go on with experimentation alone - neither of them wanted to make progress without the other even while swearing to themselves they would never talk to the other again.)
Three years later, a collection of runes embed in their arms - one for every travel they made
(“What happens when we run out of space?” Teddy had asked, unsettled.
“I’m not sure I want to find out,” Albus had tried to swallow with a dry mouth. “We’ll get there when we have to. Should we try expanding the time limit to three hours now?”
Teddy Had bitten his lower lip. “Might as well.”)
- a good plan well written and prepared for all contingency they could think of, they are ready to perform the ritual for the last time.
* * *
2nd May 1998
(Once more, with feeling)
“Have you seen Harriet Potter, Minerva? Because if you have. I must insist---”
Professor McGonagall moves fast, her wand raising, a spell already in her mouth - but not fast enough.
“Expelliarmus!”
The wand in her hand flies, interrupting her spell, and disappears mid-air.
Another spell, coming from nowhere, blocks the hallway before the other Heads of Houses can come and make this whole situation worse.
Snape, his wand half-drawn, hastily pulls it out of his robes and looks around to the invisible spot where the spell started.
“Harriet?” He asks, his voice a whisper.
“No,” a male voice answers, and then in front of him, getting out from under the Invisibility Cloak, there’s a boy. He looks like one of his students, he cannot be older than sixteen, tall and lanky with unruly curly black hair and grey eyes, and a pronounced nose that takes most of his face. Snape has never seen him in his life. “Not Harriet, but I’m here for you.”
Wary, Snape doesn’t lower his wand. “For me?” Snape asks, not impressed.
“Yes, you see...” The boy stuffs his cloak away, putting his and McGonagall’s wands back in his pocket. McGonagall observes him with a stern expression. “I’d very much like it if you didn’t die tonight.”
The understatement of the year - of the decade?
Snape scoffs at that, disguising his surprise “I appreciate the sentiment, but I fail to see why you would care. I don’t even know you.”
“Not yet,” the boy smiles at him in an uncanny way, something that weirdly resembles him of Dumbledore if such a thing was possible, “I’m not sure how many details I should tell you,” the boy shrugs, “but I have something for you.”
He slowly reaches down inside his pocket and then gets a few vials out. He offers them to him, and Snape takes them, getting closer to him without lowering his guard.
Whoever this boy is, it might be a trap.
“What is this?” Snape shifts his gaze to the potions. He vaguely recognizes them, standard practice for a seventh year, but the boy can’t be that old and besides, he considers as he uncorks the caps and sniffs them, they were changed. He can smell the variations, see them in the colors. Whoever made them knew what he was doing.
“Blood replenisher, anti-venom... A little modified from the original recipe, but I read it in a book,” the boy tells him as if that should make any sense. Something clicks in his mind, but that’s not possible. His old books are all in his possession now, he made sure to get them all back since Harriet lost him his sixth year’s Advanced Potions the previous year. “I inherited it from my father,” the boy goes on, but Severus doesn’t deem that important. Not his books then.
“These are really specific,” Snape closes the vials without drinking.
“Yes, especially the anti-venom one, it was awful to brew. But well, I have privileged information about your... death.”
“And it will happen tonight?” It’s not that Severus doesn’t know he’s risking his life, every minute that he spends deceiving the Dark Lord is another torture that would be added to his painful death if he were to be found out. It’s just that this boy it’s so convinced it will happen tonight of all times, that Snape has to ask more questions - he has, after all, had proof that Divination works on occasion. It doesn’t mean he has to look as if he believes him. “With poison?”
“The guy, Voldemort, he has a snake, hasn’t he?”
“The... guy?” Snape asks incredulously.
McGonagall frowns, trying to put together the pieces because this boy isn’t scared of their enemy, he calls him by his name as Dumbledore and Potter did, and yet he is here to save Snape.
The boy shrugs, uncaring, almost as if he weren’t that much of a problem.
“You’re insane,” Snape shakes his head.
“Probably,” Albus smiles, “I mean, I’m here, am I not?” He shakes his head - he hopes Teddy is doing better than him - and then goes on before Snape, too lost for words, can say something else, “Listen, this should only be a backup plan. Ideally, I wouldn’t want you to go to the Shrieking Shack when Voldemort calls you there, because... well, because then you die.”
At that, Snape chuckles, bitter, “I can’t exactly disappoint my master’s order, boy.”
The boy waves his hand, “Yes, yes, such a loyal follower,” he rolls his eyes and Snape feels a chill growing straight in his spine. This boy knows his true allegiance, this boy knows it and he’s talking about it in front of McGonagall as if this weren’t that much of a secret, as if his life and the result of the war didn’t depend on it. “Just. Don’t go,” he reiterates, “I know you think you can convince him to let you go looking for my... for Harriet, but...” Snape registers he wasn’t about to say her name but he has corrected himself and then wonders how exactly the boy knows all these things. The certainty with which he speaks it’s too much for him relaying on mere divination, even if he were a Seer.
And yet all of it is true because it’s true, he knows Harriet is at Hogwarts, he knows the Dark Lord is coming and he has to talk to her, he has to tell her what needs to be done. He hates that, but he has to, and if the boy is right, if he dies tonight, then he’s running out of time.
Snape’s head starts to hurt.
“But maybe I can help you with that,” the boy goes on, oblivious, “Well, this is a little more public than I had hoped for,” he adds, looking at McGonagall.
She scoffs, “If you think I’m leaving...” There’s nothing she can do if Snape bids her go, not without her wand, but that doesn’t mean she won’t protest.
“Whatever,” the boy says to her, then turns to Snape again, “Well, I know what you have to tell her.”
“You do?” Snape sneers, trying to not show the waves of panic rolling down his spine.
“Yes, I do,” the boy replies, forcefully, “And you might as well tell her now since she’s here.”
Snape freezes on the spot, and McGonagall clenches her fists, regretting the loss of her wand. She knew he was not on their side - he was trying to save Snape’s life - but this feels like a betrayal.
“Is it true?” Snape asks.
“Unless I’ve blocked her on the other side of the hallway she should be here,” the boy looks around, shifting over the spot where Harriet and Luna are crouching, hidden by the Invisibility Cloak.
Harriet looks at him, tightening the grip on her wand. There’s something familiar in those eyes, something that in the end, makes her decide to get in the open. She has to talk with Severus, after all.
“Do I know you?” She asks as she steps out, leaving Luna hidden, not willing to put her in danger.
She hears Snape’s short intake of breath, McGonagall’s whine, but she doesn’t take her eyes off the stranger.
The boy’s face lightens up, as he turns to her, “Ah, yes! Yes, you know me. Well, you will.”
She looks at him attentively. He doesn’t make sense, and yet he feels so familiar. The way he moves, his features, it’s almost as if he was right but not quite, as if she's expecting to see something in him, something that isn’t there.
“How will I know you? When?” She asks, mesmerized, and the boy bites his lips and then looks at her, pointedly, moving his eyes from her face to her stomach, accompanying the gesture with a raising of his eyebrows to highlight the importance of his stare.
Her hand runs to cover the bulge in her belly, shock running through her because nobody knows, and he’s implying...
“In five months, give or take,” he smiles at her.
“But that’s -” Impossible.
“Magic?” the boy smiles, “I heard you can do a lot of things with that.”
Harriet covers her mouth with a hand, tears welling in her eyes. “The Time Turners have all been destroyed, the limit is eight hours...” she tries to be rational, to put up counterarguments, but deep down she knows.
Her son.
He’s her son - she’ll have a boy - and he’s here, alive and well, and here. In the past. Because -
“You’re here to save his life.” She doesn’t need to ask, he told them as much. His father, who dies in the war.
Harriet looks up at Severus, trying to contain her tears, then she throws herself at her boy, her beautiful and amazing son that traveled through time to change their future. To have a family.
She knows what it feels like, what she would have given to have her parents back, the lengths she would go to. “I’m sorry,” she tells him, as she presses him against her body, “I’m so sorry.”
“There’s nothing...” He tries, because it’s not his mother's fault how he grow up, there’s nothing wrong with his life, there’s nothing she could have done differently that could have turned out better.
“I know,” she tells him, “I’m sorry anyway.”
She looks at Severus over her child’s shoulder, and he doesn’t meet her gaze. He’s looking away, his jaw set.
“Give me just a moment, Albus,” she whispers against his hair as she places a kiss against his temple, and he smiles at his name, because of course she already had chosen a name, even if she weren’t sure to keep him.
It’s actually difficult for her to part from him - from the living proof of what’s going to become the child that she carries. It doesn’t matter that at the moment he’s maybe a couple of years younger than her, that she isn’t yet the mother he knows - that she will never be if he has his way and changes the timeline.
Severus refuses to meet her eyes. “He’s someone we can trust, I assume,” he says, his wand still in his hand.
“Yes, we can,” she smiles at him, placing a hand on his forearm to get his attention, “Severus, there’s something we should talk about.”
“This seems hardly the moment,” Severus tells her, trying to take a step back. She follows him, without letting him go.
“I don’t think there will ever be a better one.”
He shakes his head, “Harriet, whatever you need to tell me... I don’t really think it’s something that concerns me.” He looks at her then, scolding his face into blankness, and Harriet wants to scoff and roll her eyes, wanting to kiss him stupidly. The idiot.
“Oh, trust me, it does,” she levels her gaze at him, squeezing his arm, “You should shut up and listen, before you say, again, something you will regret.”
Snape winces at her reminder of just last time his judgment had been clouded by his emotions and he had hurt her. He doesn’t lower her gaze, daring her to continue, to say something he isn’t expecting her to say.
She does.
“Your son has just traveled fifteen years in the past to save your life,” Harry tells him, carefully choosing every word and delivering with a meaningful force.
It doesn’t register, not at first. Of course, it doesn’t, Harriet and Albus have just had a half-verbal conversation based on the assumption that both of them knew what was going on. Snape, on the other hand, is oblivious, doesn’t know she’s pregnant, couldn’t gather it from a half-gesture and some soft-spoken words.
“My...?” His voice cracks, as he tries to speak. He doesn’t have a son, it’s the first thing his brain supplies. Not yet, is the second. But that would mean...
“Are you...?” He can’t even finish the sentence. He searches her eyes for a confirmation, half expecting her to burst out laughing and tell him it’s a prank - a sick joke like the ones her father used to pull on him, a cruel mocking.
But Harriet is deadly serious when she nods.
Her hand, the one that’s not gripping tight Severus’ arm, raises to her belly, fully completing the gesture and Severus looks at her and swallows. There are so many ways this could go, and Severus was right, this wasn’t exactly the best moment, not with Voldemort on his way and a war to fight, but this is the only time they have and Harriet needs to know if he would want him, their son. Albus. She’s not as naive as to think that one night could make them a family, but there had been something between them, and maybe they could start from there.
“What’s the meaning of all this?” Professor McGonagall growls because she too didn’t have all the pieces to put together what Harriet and the boy were talking about, but she’s not stupid, and the picture they’re panting is that Severus Snape, teacher of her school, - traitor - has slept with one of his students. And it simply can’t be. It can’t be, because then she’ll be forced to wonder if it has happened other times - she knows what the school has become, she tries to help the children but she’s seen the punishments, the tortures, and if she has to wonder about this too, about what could have happened every time there was detention... That way lies madness. “Severus,” she asks of him, menacing, “I need an explanation.”
Severus straightens his spine, ready to fight back because this - that night, this child - he’s not going to regret it. Of all the morally wrong things that he has done, he won’t allow her to have this, to sullen and spoil something precious to him. He feels Harriet tightening the grip on his arm, steeling herself - she’s no longer a student and she’s very much capable of making her own decisions without needing to defend them.
“Oh, they’re going to have a baby, Professor!”
Truth be told they all had forgotten Luna was there - Snape hadn’t known it in the first place, and Albus vaguely remembers her mother telling him once or twice that Luna was there with her at the time, the main focus of the story being her regret for not speaking with Severus when she had the chance. But Harriet... oh, Harriet completely forgot about her.
Professor McGonagall, just as startled, turns. “What?”
“That’s true, isn’t it?” Luna asks, tilting her head with a curious glance, “That’s what you are talking about. You’re having a baby and that’s him. Or it will be him” she pointed to the boy, still, in the middle of the tableau. “What’s your name?”
The boy fidgets, then deciding he can’t do worst for the timeline than jumping into it to screw it and completely change it, he answers. “Albus.”
Professor McGonagall chokes down a noise, something that could be a sob or a cough.
“The complete name is Albus Severus Potter, even though, me being here, I was hoping to change it.”
“That’s a really pretty name,” Luna beams at him and Harriet is smiling, bright and proud, and Severus... Severus looks stunned.
“You give him my name,” he whispers, so low Harriet barely ears him. She knows she would, if Severus were to die tonight, she would.
“I won’t,” she tells him, “You won’t die and I won’t give him your name.”
He looks at her. It was just one night - they were desperate, they were searching for comfort in each other. He couldn’t hope - couldn’t want something more. Could he?
He looks at her - she’s young, she’s innocent. He was her first and he wouldn’t trap her, wouldn’t force her into a relationship, to something so close to what his mother had. He’s too old, too broken.
He looks at her, at her resolution. She’s fierce and determined and she told him - she’s not a child. She can make her own decisions.
“Are you sure?” He asks of her, because he needs to know she’s not doing this because she thinks that’s what she should, but because that’s what she wants.
She falters then, her eyes turning to doubt, “If you don’t -”
“That’s not what I said,” he interrupts her. “I asked you if you were sure.”
“Then yes,” Harriet nods, convinced, “I am sure.”
They share a look then. There’s longing and desire, something that neither of them would have thought possible, but he knows the smell of the curve of her neck and she knows the pressure of his fingers on the skin of her back and somehow what should have never happened - what was so absurd and impossible - that is what they want again.
“This is... insane!” Professor McGonagall shrieks. She feels as if she’s going mad. Maybe she already has. Severus Snape has killed Dumbledore; he’s a Death Eater - confirmed, not repented - loyal to Voldemort. She does the math, when would they have even met when Harriet was in hiding? Why wouldn’t he have captured he? Why would Harriet even entertain the idea of... her mind refuses to even bring up the idea... with Snape.
And yet, she can see it, now that it has been pointed out to her, that the boy in front of her does have a resemblance with Harriet, and yes, with Severus too. And the way they look at each other... She might need to sit. As it is, the wall behind her has to be enough of a support, but she curses Albus - Dumbledore, not the child, and she feels like laughing for of course Harriet has named him so, and here he is, meddling as his namesake, even before his birth. But no, Minerva curses Albus Dumbledore because he could see it happen - if he were alive, Minerva would own him five galleons of lemon sherbets.
“This is insane,” she says again, to herself this time, and she shakes her head, but she sounds resigned. What has her life been in the past year, if not insane?
“Professor McGonagall, this isn’t really the moment to have a breakdown,” Albus tries, “Can I give you back your wand, without you hexing someone?”
She passes a hand over her eyes, tired, “Yes, Mr. Potter,” she answers him, and when he hesitates, she goes on, “I promise I won’t use it against anyone of the present.”
Albus gives her wand back, then, pressing it in the palm of her extended hand. “He was always on your side,” he tells her. It sounds like a justification.
Professor McGonagall spares a glance in their direction. They’re being entirely appropriate, but there’s something in the way Severus looks at her, something in the way Harriet clutches his forearm, something that gives them away.
“They look happy, don’t they?” Luna asks, quietly.
‘Happy’ isn’t exactly the adjective anyone else would use. There’s a war raging on, and they are central pieces in it, both with a death sentence looming over their heads. No, ‘happy’ is not the right adjective. But it could be if they had the chance.
Minerva allows the corner of her mouth to twitch upward, in a tiny grimace that might resemble a smile. “Yes, they do.” She doesn’t sound happy about it, but she’s not enraged anymore and Albus deflates.
“Thank you, Professor.”
She doesn’t know why this boy should care - but maybe he’ll know her, even if she doesn’t know him already. Maybe she’ll be his Professor, his head of House even.
It’s not important, not right now. Harriet cries, her hand shooting to her forehead, as pain takes her, and Severus tries to steady her, but his Mark is burning through his forearm.
“What’s happening?” Minerva asks, trying to assess the situation. Albus pales, his heart fluttering in his chest. It’s something to know that his mother could feel Voldemort’s emotions and that it wasn’t pleasant. It’s another whole thing witnessing how painful that connection was - watching and knowing there’s nothing he could do to alleviate her pain.
“He’s angry,” Severus manages, through clenched teeth.
“Yes,” Harriet pants, righting herself, “He already found out about the locket, now he knows about the cup, too. He’s on a rampage, I have to hurry up.”
“You have to go,” Severus interrupts her, “Now. Before he comes here.” There’s something wrong with him, he’s frantic, a lilt of desperation in his voice.
“What?! No!” Harriet shakes her head. “Severus, you know what I have to do, what I came here for. I still have to find-”
“Harriet, there’s no time for that. He’s coming here, he’s coming for you,” he takes her hands.
“I know!” She tries to tell him, but he shakes his head.
“You’re not listening. You need to go. You need to... hide. I can help you, throw them off. I’ll send him looking for you in another direction. There must be a place where you can lay low.”
She thinks she gets it, he wants her safe in her pregnancy - it’s what they did with her mother after all, hiding the whole family, letting the Potter have the child in relative peace, protected by a Fidelius. It’s not what Harriet wants for herself - she’s the only one who can stop this war, she can’t be secluded away.
“I can’t lay low for five months!” she protests, “The war is going on!” Besides, she knows he won’t go with her.
“Not just for five months,” he shakes his head, and that’s where she loses him.
“Severus, you’re not making any sense.”
“Oh, yes, he is,” Albus says, his voice distant as if he hadn’t thought at the fact that having a family, that knowing about his future son would make it so that Snape wouldn’t send Harriet to her death. It makes sense, in the stories his mother told him, that Severus would damn the rest of the world for the people he cared about. “But you’re also wrong. She has to do it.”
“No,” Snape shakes his head, in denial, “No, I won’t let her...”
Albus interrupts him, “In my timeline, you never knew. You died not knowing. And she did what she was supposed to do and we both ended up fine.”
“How?” He asks, completely focused on his son.
“What is it that I have to do?” Harriet asks, but she goes ignored. Albus knows that the less he alters the timeline, the easier it would be for his alternate future self to go back in time to keep the changes he’s making now and avoid a paradox. It’s better if it’s Severus the one that tells her, just as it was in the original timeline.
“I don’t know the specifics, you... well, my mum didn’t exactly tell me the details, but it works fine, we both survive.”
“What is it that I have to do,” Harriet asks again, demanding to know.
Severus exchanges a glance with Albus, “Are you sure?”
“I’m here,” Albus nods, “Which means I’m alive.”
Then Severus turns to Harriet. “I-”
“Tell me!”
“You have to die.”
He tells her, and it quiets the room.
“This makes no sense,” Professor McGonagall whispers. She doesn’t want to believe it. It’s not fair. It’s not how it’s supposed to go.
“You have to let Voldemort kill you,” Severus goes on. His jaw is clenched, his eyes unreadable. He looks like a man ready to be stricken down.
“What?” Harriet ignores her, and asks Snape, trying to make sense of what he’s saying, “Why?”
“The things you’re trying to destroy...” Severus looks away, collecting his thoughts, choosing his words, before looking back at her, “there’s one in your head. It got there when the killing curse rebounded on him.”
Her hand raises to her forehead, to the scar that connects her to Voldemort, to the physical evidence of the piece of his soul in her mind. It makes sense.
“And if Voldemort kills me, if I let him do it...”
“He kills that connection. I don’t know how you could survive it. I thought you would have to...” Severus has tears welling in his eyes. He looks up at the ceiling, willing them away. He’s a spy, for fuck’s sake, he has control. She places a hand over his forearm as if he was the one needing comfort. He scoffs at his weakness and squeezes her hand, “I can’t let you die, now,” he tells her, “I don’t know how you could even survive.”
Harriet nods, dread still coiling in the pitch of her stomach.
“How?” She turns to the only one with answers, “How does all this happen?”
“I don’t know,” he shakes his head. “You just told me you died, and that you went to a place that looked like King’s Cross, and I was there and so was Voldemort’s fragment. You were offered a choice to move forward or to go back to the living, and you took me back with yourself. I don’t know why you have been offered that choice. You always told me it was the first time you saw me, the first time I felt real and you couldn’t leave me behind.”
Harriet smiles at him. She knows the feeling - this might not be a post-mortem hallucination, she might not be seeing his blooming soul in a mental train station, but she understands it.
“Okay,” she says. She’s scared. Oh, of course, she is.
“Wouldn’t you die?” Snape had asked her, “If it meant stopping the Dark Lord, keeping the people you care about alive, wouldn’t you sacrifice yourself?”
She knows now why he had asked, why it had felt so significant when he had done it.
“Yes”, she had replied, “Yes I would.”
It hasn’t changed. She would do it, she would willingly sacrifice herself, walking the path of the lamb, if it meant stopping Voldemort, if it meant giving other people the chance to live, to defeat him. That her son is here to tell her that she survives this, that she comes back and she brings him with her, should only make her feel better.
“Okay, I’ll - I’ll do it.”
It’s definitive as any death sentence is, and just as sobering.
Minerva closes her eyes, a pained expression on her face. Luna throws herself at her and hugs her. Severus looks like he’d prefer to kill himself instead.
It doesn’t matter if she’ll come back, death is still death and nothing besides it is ever certain - Albus might be the living proof she’ll be back, but there’s still the chance that by changing the past as he’s doing he’ll change the future too.
“In your timeline, what happened?” Severus asks.
Because it hadn’t gotten past him that in the boy’s timeline, they had won.
“What?” Albus shifts his attention to his father - his father, he allows himself to think, his father who is alive and breathing and who’ll continue to do so if Albus’s doing this right.
“What originally happened in the timeline where you weren’t here, where I die.”
Albus opens his mouth, hesitates. Then he tells him everything he knows, every little detail he remembers.
Albus tells him what would have happened, tells him about him fleeing, about the school barricading, and Voldemort asking for Harriet. He tells him about the Shrieking Shack, about his mother holding him as he was dying and taking his memories. He falters as he talks, he can’t quite reconcile the man from his mother’s tales to the man standing in front of him, flesh and blood. The brave spy against the man with a sneer and an awful attitude. The smart boy from his school books, the teenager that would invent spells and modify potions in the margins, and the stern man looking at him with a calculating glint in his eyes.
“Very well,” Severus nods, “Then I need to go. Keep this as close as possible to the timeline.”
“What?!”
“No!”
Harriet and Albus speak at the same time.
“If I run, Minerva can still barricade the school.”
“You can barricade the school!” Harriet protests, “You’re the headmaster!”
Severus shakes his head. “No. If I turn coat now, he’ll raze the walls down. I can be of more help if things go as planned. I can buy you time to destroy the diadem. I could even kill the snake. ”
“The snake gets killed anyway, and he won’t have
“Yes, it does. Professor Longbottom killed it with Gryffindor’s sword!”
“Professor -?” Snape grimaces, “You know what? This, I don’t want to know. But, Harriet, the less you change, the more of what you know will happen as you know it. I’m not risking you to save my life.”
“You’re not dying tonight.”
“Neither are you. Not permanently. And I have his Potions, I’m safe.”
“You can’t be sure,” she shakes her head. “No offense, honey.”
“We could,” Albus intervenes. “Take them now. If I disappear, it worked.”
“You disappear?” Harriet looks at him bewildered, almost scared.
“It’s the paradox,” Albus says. “If I save you, then I have a father and future me won’t have a reason to go back in the past to save him. Which reminds me,” he searches for something in his pocket and takes out a scroll of parchment, “It’s best if you give my future self this. Instructions. You see, this way he can go back in time and know what to do even if for him it never happened, ensuring that for him it never happens. Also, so that we don’t destroy the timeline and possibly the universe.”
Severus Severus looks stricken, Harriet twists her hands.
“But you’ll disappear? You’ll... die?”
Albus lets out a breathy sad laughter, “Well, that’s pretty philosophical, isn’t it? I’ll never have existed. Not this version of me, because my father never knew about my existence and now he does, because my mother never talked with him before his death and now here you two are because nobody knew of his true allegiance, and now other two people know,” he gestured toward McGonagall and Luna. “No, I won’t exist and so I will disappear. But an Albus already exists in this timeline and I am him.”
Harriet looks about to cry
“You’d do that for me?” Severus asks, amazed.
Albus shakes his head, “I’m doing this for myself,” he chuckles, “This is entirely selfish from my part,” from our part, because he hasn’t told them about Teddy, about doubling the possibilities that something might go wrong. He has written about Teddy in his letter because if one of them fails, they wanted the other to know and bring the other along to try again.
“I choose this,” Albus goes on, “I choose this for myself. And it won’t be easy for the Albus to come either. I’m placing on his shoulders the weight of the timeline. But it’s worth it,” he tells them. “Now take the potions, dad.”
Severus does something then, that nobody has ever seen him doing since he was a kid. He takes a step forward and hugs him.
Albus is shocked still, the warm arms closed around his shoulders, the weight of the body solid against him. His father is hugging him. Albus feels the tears in his eyes, and he lets them go, raising his arm to hug him back, gripping the cloth of the back of his tunic with desperation. This is the first and last hug he’ll ever receive from his father. He hopes the Albus that will take his place won’t ever have to know what it means.
“Thank you,” Severus whispers against his hair, his voice looks mere seconds from breaking. He won’t disrespect him by telling him he shouldn’t have done all this. It’s already done, and he won’t look ungrateful. “Know that if I had been alive in your time, I would have loved you just as much as I do now.”
Albus sobs then, tears rolling down his cheeks and shoulders shaking. “I love you too, dad.”
“I know,” Severus tells him, “you’re here.”
They hug for what seems an eternity and still not enough. But they don’t have much time, so Albus clears his throat and disentangles himself, wiping away his tears. His eyes are red and puffy, and his smile is trembling, but he’s smiling nonetheless.
“You should take the potions, now,” he tells him, and Severus finds he doesn’t have enough voice to reply. His eyes are glassy and red too.
He looks at Harriet and she takes it as her clue to throw herself at her son, clutching him against her chest. She doesn’t have words either.
That’s when Severus uncorks the first vial and takes it. Harriet grips Albus tighter, as the second potion follows and then a third.
For a few seconds nothing happens, and then the consequences of his actions ripple through the timeline changing it, the future blurs and shifts.
Albus shivers and then he starts to fade.
His father will live.
He did it.
He just hopes Teddy did too.
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