WHO: Harry Potter and Severus Snape WHEN: Sometime in March, around the time Snape showed up. WHERE: The cafe on the boat. WHAT: Maybe I should change it to 'Harry, Snape, and the elephant in the room.' WARNINGS: Talk about death and maybe a smidge of abusive behavior? STATUS: gdoc, complete!
______________
If he were honest, Severus Snape was not ready to be face-to-face with a grown Harry Potter. But there were a number of things in his life that he had not been ready for, and that had rarely stopped him from doing them. In fact, it never had. He'd done multiple things he hadn't been ready for because they needed to be done, and in this case he suspected this needed to be done - if not for the same reason that some of the other things had needed to be done - and so it was better to get it over with.
That and he had less to do currently than he'd ever had in his entire life. Going from juggling a thousand things, including dozens of secrets which could make or break the survival of himself, Harry Potter, and the Order of the Phoenix, to being on a cruise ship where many of his secrets were known and everything was done for you, had been more of a shock than he wished to admit to. And so speaking with Potter became something that could be done - something he could put on a list of things he ought to do.
And also, there was some curiosity, about what had happened to him since. Harry had chosen to name his son after Severus and while Severus would have never asked for that, nor did he think it was a particularly wise thing to burden a child with, there was still some curiosity.
And so he'd suggested they meet, and he sat now at a table, a cup of tea on the table in front of him - as yet untouched - while he waited for Potter's arrival.
Harry was nervous about meeting with Snape. The last time he saw the man, he was bleeding out. No, that’s not completely correct. He saw his memories last, Severus cradling his mother’s body. Severus asking Dumbledore if Harry had to die. Severus saying always. The doe patronus made him realize just who gave him the sword of Gryffindor when Ron came back to them in the woods. It all came together. He apparently revered the man enough to name his son after him. Right now, he wasn’t feeling that. Maybe with time, it would come.
It wasn’t that he hated Snape, it was just … awkward. As most things were for him. He was having a hard time with personal relationships, still after four years had passed since he fought Voldemort. Since he died.
Harry came to the cafe-- he was late. They spoke briefly about talking and meeting at three. It was now three twelve and Harry jogged to get to the table. “Sorry, sir.”
Severus wasn't certain if an apology meant that the meeting was off to a decent start or a terrible one. It didn't seem as if it were intended as a slight and so he simply gestured to the seat across from him and considered the young man. He'd grown since Severus had seen him last, but of course he had. The last time Severus had seen him had been as he'd been moved to the Burrow for the last time. He'd been only a teenager then, not yet full grown, and now he was at least a young man. How odd it must be to have children older than he was.
"I ordered some tea. I didn't know if you would want that or something else," he spoke without preamble, or really even acknowledgement of the apology. It was sentiment that felt unnecessary at the moment. But then, Severus had never been particularly fond of social niceties. He could pull them off well enough when he had to, but here he didn't have to, and he didn't care to, exactly.
"I read the books," he offered, pulling his own tea saucer towards him. He decided to leave off the multiple moments where he'd been quite tempted to toss them across the room at Harry's point of view presented as it was. But he had not gotten to be who he was and where he was without a strength of self-control, and he'd been uncertain what would happen to the device of Albus', and so he'd maintained a enough calm to keep things in tact.
It meant though, that he knew what happened at the end. He raised his gaze to Potter. "I certainly thought that you would die in the end. I am," he hesitated, but the words were true enough. He'd wanted to protect Lily's son. It had been his life's work and maybe he hadn't done so as well or as much as he should have liked to have done, but it meant that he hadn't failed. "I am relieved to know that was not the case."
Harry didn’t want this meeting to go badly. Part of him thought it might. Right now, he still had that anger in him. The anger that fueled his way through defeating Voldemort. That gave him the strength to live with the Dursleys. That fight that kept him alive.
His problem was, essentially, that if Snape truly cared about him, he wouldn’t have had to torture him so much at school. Harry thought he should be truthful, Snape deserved that.
But then he noticed the other man pull his tea closer. Harry crabbed the packs of sugar and began to drown his tea in the sweetness. He started to speak while going about this task, “Did you notice who the villain was, so often?” Okay, that was a little smart-assey, but he couldn’t help it.
Severus raised an eyebrow at Potter. It was typical, but also, Snape would have thought Harry could have grown beyond that by now. Apparently not. He added milk to the tea, stirred, and stared at Harry. He could legilimens him, but he found he really didn't want to know what was going on in the boy's head. And he didn't need to, thankfully. Really, none of this had to happen, it was simply something that he'd felt should happen. For better or for worse they were not as tied together as they were in the time Severus had just come from.
"If you expect me to be surprised that you would paint me as the villian - inaccurately at times - then you really must not think much of my intellect," he said dryly. "Which seems particularly odd given that you named your son after me."
Harry looked down at his teacup and at his balled up fists at the sides of it. One hand had a faint scare of I must not tell lies. “You were terrible to me all those years. Maybe when I get older, I’m over it. When I’m old enough to have kids, at least.” Because right now? He wasn’t over it.
“It’s been four years since it all happened, and I’m still not quite past everything that’s happened. I’m still processing.” It was why his relationship with Ginny was shite, it was why he pretended everything was fine around Ron and Hermione.
Severus lifted tea to his lips and took a sip of it. "You had people to coddle you and hold your hand across the street, Potter. That wasn't my job. I knew what you were going to go up against, and I did the best I could to prepare you for it, and to keep it from happening until such time as it was unavoidable. That was my job."
He sat the tea down, and stared across at the young man in front of him. It would be a lie to say that he had really liked him. There had been times he had argued with himself that he should. Harry was what was left of Lily, after all, and perhaps if he had taken more after his mother and less like his father, Severus would have been able to compartmentalize a bit better. Although he suspected Harry would have always been a reminder of Severus's own failure to protect Lily.
He pursed his lips together, the emotional response to that thought welling up, and that wasn't where he wanted to go right now. He had no emotional reservoir or knowledge base to help a boy that should have died twice over, and lived twice over, make sense of that fact. The only tool he'd been given to deal with emotions was to bury them, which worked until they exploded out finally in anger.
"How long have you been here?" He asked instead, not certain if the boy would answer or not, but uncertain how to move forward on the previous topic.
That was easy enough to answer. He ignored the taunting or whatever it was that Snape was doing to think what was the date when he arrived. “I’ve been here four months.”
He moved the teacup by the handle around in a little circle. “So you think you were doing me a favor by treating me cruel?” Harry’s green eyes bore into Snape’s, expression slack. “You can tell me the truth, you can tell me you hated me, or that you hated your task. It’s better than lying about it.”
Four months was not so much longer than Severus, although it was long enough to possibly have come somewhat to terms with the fact that his life was so readily available for public consumption, something Severus still was uncomfortable to think about. That it was told through the eyes of someone else made it at once easier, and worse. He had no control over the narrative told, which was frustrating, particularly in the parts where it felt wrong.
He reached for the teacup, taking a sip as Harry stared at him. Of course he would get nothing from Severus, even if he were trying to use legilimency on him. Had the boy ever learned to mast it well, Severus wondered idly.
"There are many things I hated, Harry Potter, but it was not, despite your attempt to make it out as such, about you." Secrecy and privacy, lies long told, and truths long buried, knotted against a partial desire to have the boy understand what he seemed clearly incapable of comprehending. Severus held the teacup in his hand, staring at a crossroads of which way he might go. The boy had been through his memories, after all, how could he have missed it? And yet if he had, did he really deserve to have it spelled out for him? It was such a Gryffindor trait to miss the subtleties when they were right there in front of your nose. For all the times Albus had told Severus he ought to have sorted Gryffindor, Severus rather thought Albus ought to have sorted Slytherin, for he could see those subtleties - the nuance.
He sat the teacup down and leaned forward. "You assume that they are lies, but it is not that simple, Potter. Things can be true, without being the whole truth. It was largely never my intention to be cruel to you specifically, but for many reasons I had no intention of befriending you. I hated teaching, but it was the cover we all needed me to have. And if you need me to tell you that I hated my task much of the time…" he raised a hand in dismissal and reached for the teacup again.
Harry wasn’t trying legilimency on him. He would never do that again, especially not against Snape. The other man was far too good at it, and Harry far too inexperienced. He stared at Snape so that he’d have to address his face, his eyes.
“Right. No. I know you hated the task. But if things were different, would you have been my friend?” It was such a small thing to ask, but it was so large to Harry.
“If it was Neville instead of me-- you probably wouldn’t have even been at Hogwarts, would you have been?”
The teacup paused halfway to Severus's lips, and he closed his eyes, put it back down, and this time he regarded Harry.
"No, I would not have been, which would have been its own mistake in the end." Severus liked to think he might have found his own way through some of the problems, and his own way out of them, but he suspected that was mostly wishful thinking on his part. He would have been in so far, with nothing he considered worth risking his life over to pull him out.
"Define different, Harry," he raised an eyebrow. "If you had been sorted into Slytherin perhaps? Or if you had looked less like your father?" He wasn't certain what the boy wanted from him. Perhaps a better question might be whether or not he could befriend him now. At the moment, it seemed less likely than not. "Perhaps - How am I to say. Perhaps a better judge of it might be if we could manage it now that you are not my student and I am not your teacher."
“I don’t know,” he said dumbly, looking down at his tea. He slouched in the chair, and fiddled with the buttons on the cuff of his shirt. “I just wish we had a better time together. I don’t want to know that i named my kid after you out of pity. I want another chance, I guess. I want to know if there was ever a time when we could have been friends. My aunt Petunia is here and she’s different.”
Harry sat up and leaned towards Snape, “I hated you the most and you’re the one who helped keep me alive. How does that make you feel?”
One could not really call Severus emotionally intelligent. At least - he hadn't been at all - even if he'd gotten better at it through sheer will and legilimency. He was at least somewhat self-aware enough to realize he'd rarely thought rationally about the boy, man really, in front of him. He didn't know if he could do that anymore so here, where Lily was alive, as was apparently James. And then there was all this history.
He wanted to put his hand to his forehead to massage it, but years of giving nothing away kept it from going there.
"I wasn't looking to be liked," he said neutrally. "My job was to keep you alive, which I did. Am I sorry that you hated me?" He waved a hand. "Perhaps, but it was no different from your father's opinion of me. I was hardly expecting you to like me. Nor will I pretend to be different than I am to be liked. I am satisfied, I suppose, that I did the job I needed to do."
He paused. "I am, however, willing to attempt something different here."
Harry sighed and slouched back in his chair. Because of his father, he was never going to live anything down. It wasn’t fair that his father’s impression on Snape changed things. He felt like what Albus must have felt when he decided to change his name.
But then Snape said that last part. He tilted his head like a confused dog and put his elbow up on the table. He casually pointed, his arm straight up and down, his wrist bent. “So you’re saying you’re willing to start over? Is that what you’re saying? Or are we moving on? There’s a difference.”
"I think it's unfair to call it a start over, for either of us," Severus pointed out pragmatically. "You've detailed your frustrations with me, and I've several with you. I don't expect you to simply drop those frustrations now that we are no longer here."
He leaned forward, trying to decide if this was even worth doing. But they weren't fighting a war here, and while Severus hadn't asked for it, he had to admit that the fact that Harry had named his child after him at all had made him think twice. It was foolish and sentimental. And it was a sentiment that Severus couldn't entirely understand, but it did stir a sort of obligation to try.
"This is a different sort of place. If it is possible to move on, I am willing to put aside past frustrations and operate from now insofar as this is possible. Whatever differences we had, and however you feel I treated you poorly, I never wanted to see you come to any harm."
Harry was becoming frustrated. He didn’t know what to do, and he usually looked to adults to help guide him. But in this case, he was an adult now and the adult across from him wasn’t giving him much to work with.
“So we won’t forget what happened, but we’ll put it aside? Is that what you’re saying?” He really didn’t want to start over with Snape. He’d probably still have the same first impression.
“You have some way of showing it.”
"Unless you have another idea," Severus turned the question back at him. Perhaps he was doing this all wrong, but it wasn't as if anyone gave you a guidebook for 'how to treat the child of the woman you'd loved who married the man you hated and then had a child who looked so much like that man but you had vowed to protect anyway'.
He sighed. "I've protected your life dozens of times over, Potter. And even when I was harsh, it was because I wanted you to learn, to take things seriously, because they were deadly serious - something that it was not always clear to me that you understood. I certainly didn't when I was a child."
“I’m glad you never became a father, then,” he said bitterly. Once he said it, it was as if he tried to chase it back into his mouth, “I mean--” He dropped his shoulders and chin, looking down.
“I didn’t understand then, I don’t quite understand now, but one day I will. Maybe while we’re here, we can work on understanding each other. I want … I want to try and be your friend.”
The statement should not have stung at all, which didn't explain the way it felt like he'd been smacked. "I would have been a terrible father," he stated, flatly. His jaw pressed together and he shook his head.
He had no idea if Potter would understand. Truthfully he wasn't entirely certain he could understand Harry. Thus far it felt as if much of the conversation had run around in circles, but in theory the idea of friendship - or at least a sort of working tolerance - seemed the best possible outcome to this conversation. The boy had named his son after him. Severus might not have asked for it - but that meant something, surely.
He lifted the tea again, pausing before putting it to his lips for a question: "Perhaps something that has nothing to do with any of this then -- Tell me about what you did after Hogwarts then."
“I didn’t finish, for one.” He smirked. “After all the horcruxes, I think I learned enough.”
Harry then went into detail about everything he’d done since then. He avoided subjects like Ginny and their strained relationship. He talked about being an Auror and about Ron leaving to join his brother’s business.
After that, it seemed to be quite all right, as conversations go.