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English
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Part 9 of Blood and Bonded Universe
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Published:
2025-05-17
Words:
2,154
Chapters:
1/1
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34
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149
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Pensieves and Inevitability

Summary:

Harry Potter has known he was going to die young for as long as he’s understood the concept of death. Somehow, hearing that other people have known that too is different

OR

A reimagining of what would have happened if Snape was a little less obedient, found out Dumbledore’s plans sooner, and wasn’t exactly a better person, but stepped away from having a hand in it a touch sooner.

Notes:

My test went great 💃 I failed (as I expected, validating my years of worsening symptoms). It’s not an official diagnosis, but it’s an official symptom diagnosis, which is an enormous first step. Tragically, I was rejected from the best immunology department in the state because my initial immunoglobulin results were normal, despite the immunodeficiency we suspect me of having is an specific antigen deficiency which wouldn’t show up in that panel. Hopefully, the backup referral group will accept me bc I have strep, despite the fact that I mask every time I leave the house and have had no contact with anyone who is sick.

Anyway, I probably won’t be finishing the chapter as quickly as I’d expected to, but 1/3 POVs is done and 2/3 is about halfway! In the meantime, I hope this will tide you over

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

“Detention, Potter,” Snape snaps. Harry bites back a wince, hastily righting his ladel so he doesn’t dump his and Ron’s cure for boils all over the desk.

 

Beside him, Ron squawks in indignation, hands flapping around and nearly upending the cauldron as his knees bang against the underside of the table with the newly-gangly limbs that followed his latest growth spurt. “For what? He didn’t do anything!”

 

Well, Harry would be inclined to agree, but that’s never stopped Snape before. Harry grips the ladle a little harder, taking a slow breath as he tries to steady his hands. The sharp edge of pain down the meat of his palm cuts through the red haze of hate that spreads through Harry’s body as quick as if it was in the air he’s breathing.

 

“For breathing obnoxiously.”

 

Right. As expected, then. Bloody git.

 

Thankfully, there are only a few more minutes of class, so there’s not too much time to stew on how infuriating it is that Snape is still around to make his life miserable when Malfoy finally fucked off to who knows where over Christmas break. While his and Ron’s potion is more of a sickly yellow than it should be, it’s at least yellow which is better than some of the others can say. He takes vicious smugness in Crabbe and Goyle somehow managing to explode their cauldron now that they’ve been partnered together instead of being carried through the course by Malfoy and one of the other Slytherins.

 

Snape, of course, sweeps out and down to the dungeons the moment class ends in a whirl of black hair and the definitely-starched long bits at the back of his robes that snap out when he walks, leaving Harry to trail down after him with far more reluctance. Ron shoots him an apologetic glance before shuffling off to find Hermione, who’s already off on another library quest. Best not to leave her alone though, especially these days, when the thoughts of everyone around them are loud enough to just about deafen her. There’s nothing much Ron could do to stop Snape if he decided to mete out another measure of abuse of authority, even if he stayed, anyway.

 

As Harry shuffles into Snape’s office, he takes in the man standing derisively over the penseive he’d chucked Harry out over last year, two phials in hand. No way, is he really still mad about that? It’s been over a year!

 

“I will be leaving Hogwarts.” Snape’s voice snaps Harry out of his thoughts. “But before I do so, I must impart these memories onto you. You should review all but this one-” he shakes the second phial of silvery-white liquid pointedly, “before you depart for the summer. Do not watch this one until you return to Hogwarts, once everything has…resolved. And, if you care at all for the people around you, do not share these with anyone.”

 

So, naturally, he immediately takes them to Ron and Hermione, who convince him that no, they can’t just rush back to the office when Snape could still be there — Hermione notably not correcting them to call him professor.

 

“Be normal,” Hermione hisses at them when Harry pushes away his food one too many times and earns himself a meal supplement hard candy tossed into his open mouth by Fred and a worried look from George.

 

Harry rolls his eyes, the candy clacking against his teeth. “I’m the Boy Who Lived, Hermione, I think that ship’s sailed,” he grumbles, which earns him an exasperated look and a light kick to the shin. Still, point taken, so Harry and Ron do their very best as they shuffle robotically back to the common room and slip into their beds, drawing their curtains tight until the others bang around the dorm through their evening routines.

 

Finally, finally, when Harry thinks the phials of memories might burn a hole in his pocket, Hermione pokes her head through the curtains, bushy hair wound in tight braids for the night.

 

They shuffle under the cloak that once fit them over them with extra fabric pooling around their feet badly enough that they had to bunch it in their eleven-year-old hands so they didn’t trip on the hem, but now falls no lower than Ron’s calves if he doesn’t wear the hood, while Harry and Hermione’s portions cut off somewhere around their ankles. Thankfully, the magic doesn’t mind spanning the extra gap, and they shuffle along in well-practiced synchronicity to Snape’s now-vacant office.

 

Somehow, Harry hadn’t expected how empty the space would look, though he does have to admit it’s quite a bit roomier and brighter without the dramatic phials of dark liquid sealed with equally dramatic dark wax on every flat surface. Spitefully, Harry hopes it was awful, packing up his life and the future he thought he could have had here to flee to wherever allegedly-loyal-to-the-anti-bigoted-side double spies flee to when their old master starts planning his more dramatic moves. Good riddance, Harry will say if anyone bothers to ask him. Not that he thinks they will, since that’s the common sentiment.

 

“Guess he wasn’t joking about leaving,” Harry says as he dumps the large phial of memories in, setting the other, smaller one off to the side. “Shall we?”

 

They dump the large phial of silvery strands into the pensive, Ron cradling the final one carefully out of reach. He and Hermione will watch that one on their own after all three of them watch these so they know what they’re getting into.

 

Hermione grabs Harry and Ron’s hand as she takes a deep breath, nodding once and plunging her face into the bowl. Harry and Ron share a glance, and it’s like they’re eleven and twelve and every year they’ve known each other all at once, wordlessly falling back into sync, altogether sure that like always, they’re in this as a trio.

 

The memories themselves are disjointed and uncomfortable. It paints a dismal picture of a child raised by a magical mother who loved him, but not enough to leave her magic-hating alcoholic husband. Of that child, raised with the knowledge of magic but none of its cultural and political implications, entering magical society ignorant of the war brewing and the discrimination against muggleborns and halfbloods both, proudly proclaiming that he wants to be Slytherin, the house that the rising Dark Lord recruits from most heavily. It’s inevitable that he would be ostracized for such a claim by other children raised to believe that discrimination is wrong, even if they’re all playing war games without removing their training wheels.

 

Harry watches as his mother, brilliant and vibrant and unapologetic in a way that reminds him of the friends who stand beside him now, is sneered at and insulted and grows stronger not because of the treatment but in spite of it even as it twists a young Snape, reinforcing his disdain for Muggles and magic users who choose to be with Muggles instead of their own kind. He watches as his mother yells at Snape, who defends his friends and housemates — the only ones who look at him and see not the halfblood with poor hygiene and the blood supremacy ideologies of a pureblood, but someone with a gift in spell craft and potions — as they proclaim their loyalty to a genocidal maniac and hospitalize her friends. He watches as Snape, his age now, voice still cracking and temper still flaring hot and high, finally says the one word that will destroy their relationship irreparably.

 

Harry thinks it was a long time coming, when Snape saw Lily as someone who was clever and bright and beautiful and thought that he could keep her, like a flower potted on his desk instead of a being with agency.  A near-inevitability, even. He watches as Snape prowls outside of the Gryffindor common room, refusing to leave even when Lily sent all of her friends — including Mary MacDonald with a still-pink scar twisting and pulling her lips into a lopsided grin where it slashes up her right cheek and disappears into her hairline — to tell him she doesn’t want to speak to him, keeping her trapped like a cornered animal by blocking the only exit day after day. He watches as his mother, clever and bright and beautiful wilts a little as she starts traveling in larger and larger groups until it seems like almost their whole Gryffindor class is traveling together, Harry’s father a guard dog at her heels even as he never sees them speak.

 

He watches as they leave for the year and Snape watches miserably as Harry’s mum goes home and he trails along behind Lucius Malfoy. He squeezes Ron and Hermione’s hands as the world disappears from under their feet and reappears the rickety, uneven wood planks of the Hog’s Head. Dumbledore is there, seated across from Professor Trelawney while Snape crouches under the window outside the pub, face hidden under the overlarge hood of his cloak. Then, they watch as the prophecy that ruined Harry’s life, that stole the lives of his parents, is delivered, Snape being thrown out when Dumbledore catches on to someone being outside.

 

Ron and Hermione hold silent vigil as they watch Snape kneel and grovel and beg for Lily Evans’ life, careless of the lives of her unborn child and husband, only to rush to Dumbledore and beg for the same, finally realizing that the lord he served would never truly value a Muggleborn.

 

“I can’t,” Harry chokes out, twisting away from the scene of Snape sobbing over his mother’s body, his own tears going ignored as he sits in his crib, forehead crusted with drying blood.

 

“Let us.” Harry nods, tucking his forehead against Ron’s shoulder in thanks, listening as Snape turns spy at Dumbledore’s behest, as he only doomed the woman he claimed to love by accident, but that it doesn’t particularly matter, does it?

 

Harry looks and he sees a boy who was so much like him and instead of the absolution he expected to find, Harry feels himself harden. At the end of the day, Severus Snape never once apologized. Not in the memories, and certainly not to his face.

 

Pulling out of the pensieve, Harry is sick with revulsion, an ice cold wedge of rage buried under his ribs.

 

“After everything he went through, how could he have the gall to treat me the way he did? Or Hermione? Or, Merlin, Neville?” Harry stumbles back, landing heavily against the desk as he presses a shaking hand to his mouth as nausea curls the back of his tongue. “And he never cared. Probably never even realized that he was the worst thing in so many students’ lives. How many people didn’t take NEWT Potions to get away with him?”

 

Hermione wrings her hands, nerves and fury warring in equal measure before she explodes, ricocheting off of Harry’s anger like it’s her own. “He told me he saw no difference when Malfoy hexed my teeth to grow back in second year. And your poor mum! Trapped in the common room outside of classes, or the poor girl who tried to send him off! And now he has the- what? The audacity to act like he’s doing you a favor giving you these memories like he didn’t set things in motion personally?”

 

It’s Ron who’s silent, for once, whose jaw is set and the skin around his eyes is tight, the way it gets when he’s playing a particularly difficult game of chess against someone who poses more of a challenge than Harry can. It’s the sort of look that says he’s wormed his way into the other player’s psyche and he’s running through their possible moves. His spearingly blue gaze shifts to Harry, and there’s something like heartbreak there, like he already knows what’s going to come of the next memory and it’s devastating.

 

Harry swallows hard. I’m not going to make it, am I? Harry doesn’t ask. Ron can’t tell him anyway, not with the connection still tying his mind to Voldemort’s, with no way to say when or what he can access.

 

“You should make sure,” Harry says instead. Ron nods, just once, a jerky thing. Hermione looks up, dark eyes narrowed as she looks between him and Ron like she knows she missed something. “Don’t worry,” Harry tries to reassure her. “It’ll all work out.”

 

There will be time to grieve, later. Time to tell the people in his life that he loves them and piece together the rest of the hints that Dumbledore left behind as they come, since the man didn’t trust him with anything useful — didn’t trust anyone with anything useful, it seems — trying to keep everyone chasing whatever leads he gave them.

 

For now, Harry tucks himself between his friends’ knees as they bend over the pensieve one last time and tries to breathe.

Notes:

Huzzahhhhhh

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