By the time Harry got up, it was late in the afternoon. The Castle was quiet. After staying up the whole night before- fighting, celebrating, mourning- it seemed that everyone was asleep. Harry stood up and changed into a fresh set of robes, careful not to wake his sleeping roommates. He considered his invisibility cloak, but he didn’t need it now.
He found Snape in his office, where he used to try to teach Harry Occlumency, poring over an old book. When Snape looked up and saw him he looked at him, his eyes like long black tunnels without a hint of light, in that way he would that seemed to be reading Harry’s mind. But Harry, knew, now, that his defenses were up. That Snape could not truly see inside his mind, as Harry had recently seen inside his.
“May I come in?”
“It would seem you already have.”
Harry walked over and sat across from him. Snape was still pale, paler than usual, from the blood loss and the poison. There was a long, painfully awkward silence.
“You were barely at the celebrations,” Snape said finally.
“I was tired.”
He considered him for another long moment.
“Did you lose people?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I never thought I’d hear you say that.”
Snape continued to bore his gaze into Harry’s, to not look away, but Harry was startled that he was able to recognize the fact that he was embarrassed from the way he ground out his next words. “Did you watch my memories?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll have heard me say it before.”
“I meant I never expected to hear you say it to me.”
There was another long pause.
“I think this is the longest we’ve ever gone without you ranting that I’m as arrogant as my father.”
“You are arrogant,” Snape said. “I saw the way you spent forever explaining to the Dark Lord how you were the master of the Elder Wand and could defeat him now. He could have killed you in that time.”
“No he couldn’t have.” Harry wasn’t quite sure why Voldemort hadn’t been able to kill him. Dumbledore had explained it, but it hadn’t really made sense. He was grateful nonetheless.
“He could have killed your friends.”
“No he couldn’t have.”
“Ah yes,” Snape said, with a hint of disgust. “The power of love.”
Harry said nothing.
“You aren’t like your father,” said Snape. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“I’m not like my mother, either-”
“Certainly not,” Snape said at once.
Harry blushed. He had been thinking that he was his own person, neither the father or mother he had never known, but now he was thinking about how no one could ever match the simplified image of both his parents that he suspected Snape had in his mind.
“I won’t justify what my father did to you,” Harry said. “I know what it’s like to be treated like that. But part of the reason I do is because of you.”
“I never laid hands on you.”
“You were my professor,” Harry said. “You used that to humiliate me, to single me out, to punish me for petty reasons. I was not the only one you did that too. Perhaps now I can understand why you did it, but it was still wrong.”
“And now that you’ve defeated the Dark Lord, you’ve come to litigate the unfair treatment of your old potions professor?” Snape asked with a sneer.
“I’ve come to figure out how I feel about you,” Harry said. “How you treated me when you had power over me is very relevant to that.”
“And why does it matter?” Snape asked scornfully. “I have no desire to, as you put it, “figure out how I feel about you.””
“Well,” Harry said. “There’s the matter of what happens next. I’ve told Professor McGonagall enough to prevent you from being arrested for now, but that’s a short term solution. Right now, I’m the only person alive who knows your full story. Obviously, it would be unjust for you to be convicted for your actions as a double agent, and it is not illegal to be a cruel teacher. However, a lot of what I know is personal information that you clearly don’t want shared. In addition, if it’s widely known that you betrayed the Death Eaters, it could make you a target for Voldemort’s other former supporters. I don’t know what the right thing to do is, and if I don’t understand my feelings, it could cloud my judgment.”
Snape was looking at him like he’d looked at him all those years ago when he didn’t know the answer to that question about an infusion of wormwood in his first year. “Well, if you wish to punish me, you could have me continue to act as potions professor,” he said. “But as you outlined, that would be rather punishing for everyone else as well.”
“What do you want to do?”
“That is my concern,” Snape said irritably. “I would appreciate if you testified that I killed Professor Dumbledore at his request, and I will worry about the rest. I assure you, I do not need a seventeen year old boy to protect me. But if we are speaking of justice, I don’t think you know the full extent of my actions as a Death Eater before I joined forces with Professor Dumbledore.”
“I know enough,” Harry said. “I know that you shared information that you knew would likely result in the death of a baby and both his parents, and only regretted it when you learned who one of those parents were.”
Snape’s face became very, very still.
“Yes,” he said. “I thought you would wish to discuss that before delving into my unjust teaching methods.”
“People can change-”
“But not be forgiven.”
“-but you were a cruel bully as recently as last year, and I have no evidence that you’ve changed since then. I’m not sure if you’ve changed since you first went to Voldemort to join his ranks.”
“Really. You think that should another Dark Lord come along, I will rush to join his side?”
“That’s not what I meant. You only joined Dumbledore because Voldemort was threatening my mother. Dumbledore would say that-”
“That there’s no greater power than the power of love, yes, I’ve heard it all too.”
“And that may be true,” said Harry. “But power isn’t morally good or bad. It’s neutral. In your case, your love for my mother caused you to do good things- but that’s still selfish. You were fine with hurting and killing people as long as they were people you didn’t know.”
“Then it would seem you have your answer.”
“Maybe,” Harry said. “But, when you thought I was going to die, you still stayed on Dumbledore’s side. You accidentally blew of George’s ear because you were trying to protect Remus, your childhood adversary. You’ve spent the past year as headmaster trying to protect the students. That had nothing to do with me, or my mother. Why do all that?”
There was a long pause.
“Perhaps,” Snape said. “I was never a very well-written character, and the writer- the fanfiction writer, not the original one- was simply enamored with me because it was the first time she’d read books with characters with any degree of complexity.”
Harry blinked.
“That fourth wall break came out of nowhere,” he lampshaded.
“I didn’t know where else to take the conversation.” He looked at Harry, and his black gaze had power again now. “Tell me, boy who lived, is there any good in you? I don’t mean all the noble heroism you’ve done, you’re the hero. That’s your job.”
“And what are you?”
“The red herring,” Snape said. “It’s not that complicated or deep.”
Harry sighed. “I suppose at this point we’re going to discuss how I will become a wizard cop and uphold the corrupt Ministry of Magic-”
“Oh, yes, how original. No one has ever pointed that out before.”
“-Or how I awkwardly avoided ordering a sandwich from my slave before I came down here-”
“I don’t know how anyone ever thought that was acceptable.”
“-but I alluded to all this earlier,” Harry said. “When I talked about the power of love. If love is this pure, good thing, then that means you’re a good guy. That’s why you’re the only Death Eater who can cast a patronus. And Voldemort, he isn’t capable of love, so he’s this force of pure evil. But it doesn’t work like that in real life. Evil people still feel love, it’s part of being human. And bigoted people- when we think they aren’t human, we think we can never be like them. That’s what happened to our original author.”
“Yes, yes,” Snape said. “I watched the Contrapoints video about JK Rowling-”
“That’s an image I’ll never be able to get out of my head.”
“Say something original.”
Harry’s features shifted and changed, as though he’d taken polyjuice potion, so that instead of Harry Potter, it was RainbowWeddings who sat in the cold office, before Professor Snape.
“But that issue is at that heart of your character,” she said. “And you’re at the heart of it all- for me, I mean. You were my favorite character. When I first read the book, I obsessed over trying to figure out whose side you were on. I used to vehemently defend you when I was at that stage where I thought that enjoying a character meant I always have to side with them, even when I’d cringe whenever someone wrote you OOC as too nice, and railed against Snermione fanfiction as a puriteen-”
“And now your first fanfiction on AO3 was a sad Theon/Robb fic. I think you just like tortured borderline villains who are sad about accidentally causing the death of the redhead they’re secretly in love with.”
“So I haven’t changed at all.”
“Of course you’ve changed. You’ve never defended Theon the way you’ve defended me.”
“I still get this instinct to defend you. And I still get this instinct to defend Harry Potter.”
Snape’s features changed, as Harry’s had before, and now another RainbowWeddings was sitting across from the first one.
“I think you’re more like Snape than Harry,” she said. “I think you liked Harry Potter because you liked stuffing your head with useless trivia no one else knew, liked feeling superior to those who only watched the movies like those insufferable Fire and Blood Purists. Loved Snape because you could go back and feel superior for knowing something that Harry didn’t.”
“No,” said the RainbowWeddings that had been Harry. “I didn’t reread those books a million times because I wanted to feel superior, and Snape didn’t innovate new methods of discovering potions because he did. There was love there.”
“And now that love is gone,” said the other RainbowWeddings. “It’s been years since you picked up a Harry Potter book. You can’t recite the confrontation at the Shrieking Shack from memory anymore. You obsess over a Song of Ice and Fire now, you can’t even write a Harry Potter fanfiction without whining about JK Rowling. And still you narcissistically attach yourself to Harry Potter because you feel like it was yours. Was there ever any good, there? Anything worth defending?”
There was a pause.
“So how do we end this?” asked the RainbowWeddings that used to be Harry.
“I don’t know, how were you going to end this originally?”
“I was going to give you the old potions textbook from the Half Blood Prince, but then I remembered that it was almost certainly destroyed in the fire in the Room of Requirement.”
The second RainbowWeddings began to turn back into Snape, and his office reformed around him. “Well, it hardly seems worthwhile to maintain continuity now.”
The first RainbowWeddings nodded, as her features shifted back into Harry’s. She reached into his bag, and took out an old potions textbook. The property of the Half Blood Prince.
“I was wrong to copy from this,” Harry said. “You’re good at potions, though. You could have been a good teacher.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes. That’s all.”
“What does that resolve?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
Harry stood, took his bag, and started to go. At the doorway he stopped, turning back into RainbowWeddings again.
“After Harry watches your memories, when he realizes he’s going to have to sacrifice himself, there’s this paragraph- I don’t remember exactly how it goes, but he talks about his heart beating like it wanted to get a whole lifetime worth of heartbeats out of the way before he dies. He talks about how he always was so focused on surviving that he never thought about dying and- that part moves me to think about even now. I’ve always been afraid of death- I don’t have a special reason to, I just have been. And JK Rowling is christian, and I’m an atheist, so I thought we’d have completely different perspectives. But it spoke to me.”
“And you couldn’t have gotten that from anything else?”
“Maybe I could have. But I got it from Harry Potter.”
“This is all very touching.” Snape transformed again, so he was also RainbowWeddings. “But people are getting hurt. Not people like Snape or Harry. Real people.”
“I know,” the first RainbowWeddings said. And around them, Hogwarts faded away to black.