They both started as Rosmerta bustled over to them with their drinks and a bowl of crisps. She put the lager down in front of Harry and a golden double down in front of Snape. "Here we go. Let me know if you need anything else."
With that, she was off to deal with the crowd in the other room.
Once they were alone again, Harry quietly explained, "I did it because I knew you were innocent."
"How? Minerva has known me for thirty-seven years, and even she had doubts." For all that he had the most refined and cultured voice Harry had ever heard, Snape sounded almost like a hurt child as he repeated the sentiment he'd voiced when they were alone in the headmistress' office. The tone reminded him too much of the one Snape had used on that horrible day in third year when Sirius had nearly suffered the dementor's kiss because of this man's malice.
Clearly, McGonagall's lack of faith had really thrown him. Fortunately for them all, Snape didn't seem to be reacting to this incident on quite the same level of betrayal as he had Dumbledore's refusal to properly punish Sirius for the Shrieking Shack 'prank', but that might be because Snape hadn't had thirty years or more to brood on the unfairness of the incident.
Looking at Snape now, Harry realized for the first time how entirely horrible that Shrieking Shack situation must have been for Snape in fifth year. The attack on his life had barely been deemed worthy of a reprimand by the authorities, and the victim himself had been sworn to secrecy so that he couldn't even vent his feelings with his friends. How much had Dumbledore's gag order hurt this man? Harry wondered if Snape had been able to confide in anyone about the event in the forty years that had passed since then. The only person who had ever had any patience for Snape was Dumbledore, and he'd been dead for years now, and even when he'd been alive, it was Dumbledore who'd refused to properly discipline the wrongdoers. The gross injustice Snape had suffered had obviously been eating at his heart for his entire adult life. Was it any wonder his reactions were nearly unhinged when it came to dealing with that incident?
Well, that wasn't going to happen with today's events, Harry determined. The man was going to know that someone had been on his side from the start, and that the others were as concerned about him as they could have been, given the situation.
"Minerva wanted to believe," Harry insisted. "Her first priority had to be her student. Remember, Westfield gave a Veritaserum testimony that you were the person who assaulted him. That's pretty stiff evidence to overlook. Would you have been any more trusting than Minerva, if you were headmaster and this case were brought to your attention? She had to take the child's side; the same way any of us would have had to in her shoes."
"Yet, you still believed me innocent," Snape said.
"Maybe I just know you a little better than they do," Harry tried to lighten the mood.
"Know me better? We haven't agreed on a single issue since you came to Hogwarts fifteen years ago," Snape pointed out.
"Maybe we don't like each other much, but I think we know each other well enough to understand that there are certain things that the other just wouldn't do. I've had firsthand experience of your integrity that the others haven't. I knew you would never molest a student, or anyone, for that matter."
Snape's entire body seemed to freeze in his chair. For the longest time, he subjected Harry to one of those piercing stares that came a breath away from brushing over into his thoughts. Finally, Snape muttered, "Firsthand experience of my integrity?"
Snape sounded as though it were beyond his ken that anyone could voice those words together, let alone defend him.
Most days, this conversation could never have occurred, Harry recognized. Snape was usually so guarded that he allowed nothing to get close enough to him to hurt him, but the trials of the day had obviously left Snape as battered as the final battle with Voldemort had, perhaps more so, because this had been a personal attack.
Realizing how much it was taking for the other man to be this open with him, Harry quickly answered, "Yes, firsthand experience of your integrity. You don't broadcast it, but you've got it."
"False flattery, Potter? I'd have thought better of you," Snape's sneer dripped venom as those barriers snapped back up in his eyes.
Losing patience with this cantankerous misanthrope, Harry snapped, "Oh, for . . . would you give it a rest, just once? Of course you've got integrity. The entire fate of the Wizarding World depended almost solely upon your personal integrity when you were spying on Voldemort."
"That was self-preservation," Snape dismissed, as if everything he'd risked and sacrificed was irrelevant for that reason. "Don't confuse the two. And you did say 'firsthand experience'. Although your faults are legion, you don't usually lie without a very good reason. You and I both know that from our initial interaction in your first year, I went out of my way to humiliate you. What you said simply cannot be true, so spare me your pity. "
"Pity?" Harry stammered, flummoxed by the very suggestion.
"What else could it be?" Snape asked, sounding simply weary instead of outraged.
"Try the truth," Harry countered. "Look, I'd be the first to agree that you're a right miserable bastard, but . . . when you had the chance to really get back at me, to make me pay for every stupid, petty disagreement we ever had, you didn't take it. That restraint took integrity."
"What the devil are you talking about?"
"My Occlumency lessons in fifth year."
Snape burst out laughing. It wasn't a pleasant sound because the Potions master was clearly laughing at him, but the idea of Snape laughing at all was so strange that Harry couldn't help but enjoy the experience.
"What's so funny?" Harry interrupted when it seemed the mocking laughter would never stop.
"You, Potter. We could barely be in the same room after those lessons for years; they were such an unmitigated disaster. Even Albus was finally forced to see the absurdity of my trying to teach you those skills. And yet you offer that dismal failure as proof of my probity?"
"It wasn't a total failure. You taught me," Harry protested.
"I came a heartbeat away from murdering you," Snape reminded, still chuckling.
Though it was a mean and grating bark of a laugh, the man's face had changed completely. For the briefest instant, Snape didn't look as though he were carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. He seemed more human, nearly approachable.
"Maybe so, but you still taught me," Harry insisted. "What's more, you showed me what real integrity and honour were during those lessons."
The laughter stopped as if cut off by a switch. Snape subjected him to another of those evaluating stares before saying, "You're serious."
"Entirely."
"I haven't a clue what you're referring to. Our behaviour towards each other that entire year was characteristically reprehensible," Snape said.
Nervous under that dark stare, Harry picked up a crisp and ate it. When he'd followed the salty distraction down with a gulp of lager, he softly said, "I admit that at the time I hated your guts so much that I couldn't appreciate what you were doing for me. It wasn't until that final battle with Voldemort when he entered my mind and was searching for weaknesses that I began to understand what you could have done to me, if you'd wanted to be truly vicious. You could have hunted down every lie I ever told you, every secret I ever kept, and then hidden what you'd done with a memory charm like Lockhart used to use, but you didn't."
"Potter, the entire Wizarding World was expecting you to defeat Voldemort for them. Had I indulged myself, and done something 'truly vicious', as you call it, Albus would have nailed my hide to Hogwarts' main door. It was sheer self-interest, and there was nothing integrious in it," Snape denied.
"It wasn't fear of the Headmaster that kept you from misusing me. It was your personal honour," Harry insisted.
"It was common sense, that's all. Only a Gryffindor could attribute such high blown motivation to simple necessity," Snape said.
"Look, I know you're no saint. I know you weren't doing it for me, but I'm also old enough now to recognize that you could have done anything you wanted in my head back then. It could have all been cruel and horrible, and it wasn't. It was merely unpleasant because we disliked each other and neither of us wanted to be doing anything that intimate together."
Although Harry sensed that his words were making Snape intensely uncomfortable, that dark gaze was fixed almost unblinkingly upon him.
"I was doing what Albus commanded me to do – no more, no less, solely because he commanded it," Snape informed him. "There was nothing personal or honourable in it."
"Wasn't there?" Harry asked.
"What do you mean?"
"You didn't want to teach me, and he forced you to. Those lessons put you in a position where you could have taken any revenge you wanted to, but you didn't. You never did anything in my head to hurt or belittle me. You saw a lot of embarrassing stuff, and you never used it against me. Not once. You never even mentioned anything you'd seen in those lessons," Harry reminded him.
Snape broke eye contact and reached for his glass. Harry couldn't help but notice the faint quiver that shook the golden liquor as Snape lifted his drink to his thin lips. He remembered how unsteady that hand had been earlier in Minerva's office and wondered if the man had stopped shaking at all today. Nerves of steel only went so far when faced with the reality of Azkaban.
"Perhaps it didn't occur to you at the time, but I was in a far more vulnerable position," Snape said at last.
"How so?"
"You were a fifteen year old boy, Potter. Nothing I saw in your mind would in any way damage your position were I foolish enough to circulate what I'd seen. What was the worst I could have said? That those degenerates with whom Albus insisted upon leaving you treated you abominably? The only people that would have reflected badly upon were those Muggles, the headmaster – and myself, of course. There wasn't anything there to use against you."
"Malfoy would have had a field day with any of it," Harry softly pointed out.
Snape sighed. "And what would your Gryffindor friends have done, or even Mr. Malfoy, I wonder, had you spoken to your classmates about any of the incidents you'd picked up in my mind or what you saw in the pensieve? It would have been more than embarrassing. If you had revealed any of what you'd learned, it could have seriously impacted my ability to teach."
"What do you mean?" Harry asked, his brow furrowing as he tried to understand this point that Snape seemed to think was self-evident.
"You could have made me a laughing stock, had you wanted. In fact, I spent days after our final lesson preparing for just that event," Snape said. "To this day, I don't understand why you didn't."
All those fears he'd sensed in Snape's brain this afternoon were suddenly there between them. Although there was no clear memory attached to anything, Harry knew how this man expected betrayal as a given. He could only imagine how confused Snape was on the rare occasions it didn't happen. Mercy and courtesy were obviously alien concepts to him.
Knowing that Snape was seeing him for perhaps the first time in their acquaintanceship without viewing him through the filter of being James Potter's son, Harry said something he'd been wanting to say to this unpleasant man for the past eleven years, but had simply never had the courage to approach him about. "I didn't do it because it would have been cruel and wrong . . . and I'd already made such a poor showing of myself."
"In what respect?" Snape asked, although he had to know to what Harry was referring.
"In all respects. You mightn't have been teaching me for my sake, but you were going out of your way to help me. And I . . . I repaid you for your trouble by violating your trust on the most basic level. I truly didn't understand what I was doing when I looked in that pensieve in fifth year. All I knew was that I didn't trust you. That's no excuse. I know how wrong what I did was, and . . . well, I am sorry I did it. You didn't deserve that kind of treatment. You were only trying to help me."
The silence at the table was absolute.
Snape reached out, picked up his drink, and downed half of it. "What is it you want, Potter?"
"What?" Harry asked, thrown by Snape's weary tone.
"What is all this sudden . . . bonhomie in aid of?"
Hating that suspicion, Harry sighed. "I don't want anything from you. I just want to apologize – for my sake, as much as yours. What I did in fifth year has been bothering me for a long time."
Harry braced himself for the inevitable 'and you think an apology makes up for it' snipe that was Snape's typical response to social convention. But no attack came.
After a long pause, Snape gave a grudging answer of, "The fault was hardly yours."
"What? Did I just hear you absolve me of responsibility?" Harry actually laughed at the thought.
Snape didn't laugh again, but something like humour sparked in his glittering dark eyes. "Incredible as that might seem, yes."
"How can you say that? I . . . ."
"You were only fifteen. I told Albus how dangerous it was to teach those particular skills to anyone that young."
"Are you saying that your objections weren't personal?" Harry demanded.
"Of course they were personal. But beyond our mutual dislike, there were moral considerations involved that Albus was once again only too eager to forego on your behalf," Snape answered.
"What type of moral considerations?" Harry challenged, feeling as suspicious as Snape.
"You've been a teacher for years now. Is there a single fifth year student you know to whom you would feel comfortable teaching the arts of Legilimency and Occlumency, no matter how gifted or mature the student seems?" Snape asked. "Would you want a fifteen year old to have the power to look into another person's mind and influence their decisions?"
