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An Urn For Her Ashes	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Snape Views: 8569 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Title: An Urn For Her Ashes
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Eventual Snarry, Lily/James and past unrequited Severus/Lily
Warnings: Major AU, violence
Rating: R
Summary: AU. When Voldemort inflicted the Horcrux on baby Harry, his mother’s love manifested by wrapping around it to protect him—giving Harry some personality traits and memories of Lily’s. Dumbledore takes personal charge of Harry, helping him cope with the memories and train to defeat Voldemort. Severus meets him for the first time when Harry is seventeen years old.
Author’s Notes: So, as should be obvious from the summary, this is a major AU. There will probably be six or seven chapters, updated every seventeen days.
An Urn For Her Ashes
            Chapter One—Displacement
            Severus settled comfortably back against the chair at the head of the table. Albus had asked him to arrive before the rest of the Order. Severus didn’t know why. Albus “wanted him to meet someone.”
            Severus knew the useful people in the Order, among the current students of Hogwarts, among the Aurors, and among the Death Eaters. Those, for example, who would work harder on the basis of a warning, or might be persuaded to give Severus some intelligence if Severus made the case compelling enough. He needed to know no one else.
            Albus arrived a moment later, and stood looking around as though the contents of the chamber—round wooden table, enormous phoenix mosaic of red and gold set into the middle of the floor, thick stone walls bearing portraits of three Founders—had changed in his absence. Severus watched him, motionless. Albus was an incomparable showman, and not a bad general. It was that which had fended off the Dark Lord for the past six years, after he had reappeared suddenly with the use of the Philosopher’s Stone.
            Severus was not going to forgive him for storing the Stone in the school and ignoring Severus’s warnings about Quirrell, of course. But some things did not need forgiveness for them to work in harmony.
            “Yes,” said Albus, with a sigh, and then turned around. “You can come in, Harry.”
            Severus sat up. Someone whom Albus was on first-name terms with, he should have met long ago. The useful Ministry officials and the like still demanded a show of deference. If Albus felt comfortable enough to use a first name—
            It was no familiar face who followed Albus into the room, though. It wasn’t even a man. He looked like a tall, gangling teenager, with hair so red that Severus assumed he was some Weasley relative. Severus shot Albus a skeptical look, only to have Albus give him a steady, loving glance that was extraordinarily uncomfortable to endure.
            “Severus Snape,” Albus said, and Severus understood with a slow stirring of outrage that he was here to be introduced, as if this stranger occupied a higher social status than he did. “This is Harry Potter.”
            “Impossible,” Severus said, and the sheer emotion behind his word called up magic that made the glittering glass on one of the phoenix’s outspread wings crack.
            The eyes that turned towards him, wide and wondering, were Lily’s, though. That extraordinary green could belong to no one else. And Potter (if it was him, although of course it couldn’t be, Harry Potter was dead with his parents, with Lily, years and years ago) had her cheekbones and the almond shape to her eyebrows and the sudden flush under scrutiny that Lily used to have until she gained some confidence.
            Severus shook his head to clear it. “How did this happen?” he whispered. “And it had better be convincing, Albus.”
            Albus only opened his hand towards the brat. Potter turned back to Severus, his hair shining around him like a flame, and said, as if reciting, “Voldemort split his soul the night he came after me, when he murdered my mum. He didn’t mean to. But part of it clung to me, and made me a Horcrux.”
            Severus reeled back, and the chair went over with a crash. That he didn’t was a testament to his long years of dueling, and nothing else. He had to cling to the table to keep upright.
            “That was why I didn’t die.” Potter lifted a hand and then dropped it as if he had been about to touch some invisible Horcrux manifestation until he remembered that Severus wouldn’t be able to see it. “She wrapped her love and sacrifice around me, and I didn’t go evil or die. She’s been keeping the Horcrux at bay for a long time.” He paused and licked his lips. “And I can feel her, sometimes. Her spirit. She’s told me a lot about you.” His eyes locked on Severus.
            Severus rose with his head and hands shaking. To know that part of Lily had survived, and he had never known.
            He looked at Albus. He need say nothing. The demand would make itself plain on his face.
            “I thought it best to make sure that Harry was safe before I told anyone about him,” said Albus, and sighed like escaping steam. “I had intended to let him ride the train to Hogwarts in what should have been his second year. He was still having some trouble keeping Lily’s imprint and personality apart from his own spirit when he was eleven. But then Voldemort recovered the Stone, and…” He let his voice trail off.
            Severus had stopped shaking. He had commanded himself to stop it, and that meant he could. He was the one who was master here, not his vulnerable body. He managed to nod and look in Potter’s direction.
            Potter watched him with bright, hopeful eyes. Eyes that looked so much like Lily’s Severus wanted to spit.
            But he refrained, and said only, when the hesitant smile appeared on the boy’s face, “You are Potter’s son. You were never her.”
            And he stalked out of the room, and managed to slam the door behind him. A triumph, as Albus had designed them so they could not ordinarily be slammed. One of the more infuriating things he had ever done, Severus had thought.
            Until tonight. Until tonight.
*
            The noise of Potter’s return, or survival, or existence, whatever one wanted to call it, exploded across the countryside from the moment he gave his first interview to the papers.
            Severus would call it nothing. He maintained his distance, and watched.
            There were so many irrelevant questions that people wanted to know the answer to. What was Potter’s favorite food? Did he wish that he had been Sorted into Gryffindor, the House of his parents, and allowed to attend Hogwarts like anyone else? Did he agree with pure-blood politics or with Dumbledore’s “radicals”? What would he do after the war?
            In order, Severus didn’t care, knew that of course Potter wished for that, knew Potter agreed with Dumbledore because the other side wanted to kill him, and knew Potter probably wouldn’t need to make a decision because dead people didn’t.
            Potter was calm and polite to the reporters, which surprised Severus until he remembered that the brat had grown up under Albus’s tutelage. Obviously some nurture would replace some nature, and not even James Potter’s son could stand up to having his ego deflated regularly by the most powerful wizard in Britain.
            Or the second most powerful, Severus thought sometimes, when he glanced down and saw the dark brand burning on his arm.
            Minerva, to his surprise, was one of the people overcome by the romance of it all. Of course, she had never got over James Potter’s death, or the revelation that three of her students had been unregistered Animagi.
            “I wish the boy had been in Gryffindor,” she said three times a day. Then six times a day. Then nine times a day. If it got to eighteen, Severus was giving himself permission to hit her over the head with the butter dish. “I wish I’d had the teaching of him. And I could have, if Albus had allowed me to know about him.”
            Then the old cat would blow her nose and glare wrathfully at Albus up the table. It was from one chair farther than before, since they had all been shifted one seat down the table to accommodate the Potter brat sitting at Albus’s side. When Severus followed Minerva’s gaze, he would see that red hair swaying, the brightness of it outshining the torches on the walls.
            Potter wore it long. If Severus had allowed himself to pretend, he could have thought it was Lily sitting there.
            But he looked away instead, and took a savage swallow of pumpkin juice, which he drank not because he liked the taste—he loathed it—but because it was the easiest beverage to taste potions in.
            He had spent long years not hoping. Nothing was allowed to change now.
*
            Of course he attended the first Order meeting that Albus held after the boy’s reintroduction to the wider world. Albus would have commanded him to be there in any case. And just because Severus did not hope did not mean he could not indulge his curiosity. Besides his morbid desire to see the exact manner in which the Dark Lord conquered Britain, curiosity was the one vice left to him now.
            This time, Albus sat at the head of the table, with Potter standing beside him, hands clasped. He was taller than Severus remembered—
            No, Severus, sitting near the foot of the table where he could see their expressions of beaming foolishness clearly, corrected himself. He remembered Lily. He hadn’t noticed Potter’s height when he first met him.
            Potter was not Lily. What would once have been a simple truth now needed a great deal of reinforcement. Severus sat in silence and provided it to himself.
            “So, you mean, we might have a chance?” It was Molly Weasley who asked the question. Her face was so pale that all the freckles seemed to have disappeared. Severus considered her and decided not to remark on her slowness in absorbing Dumbledore’s claims. It was perhaps the best moment of good sense she had shown, doubting them.
            Perhaps her doubt came more from grief over the death of her twin sons, killed in a battle with Death Eaters two months ago. But that was not a matter with which Severus concerned himself, note it though he did. He was unlikely to ever end up at the mercy of Molly Weasley.
            “Yes, that is what I am saying.” Albus beamed at them all again, and then looked at the young man at his side. “You know of the Horcruxes. Well, Harry can sense them. His mother’s spirit has given him visions of them, and their new hiding places.” Severus grimaced; it was Albus’s carelessness in leading the search that had forced the Dark Lord to move his Horcruxes from their original caches. “We can find them and destroy them quickly.”
            “It will be have to be very quickly,” Severus murmured. “You know he placed alarms on them that connect the shard of soul left in his body to them now. He will sense when they are destroyed.”
            “But thanks to Harry here,” and Albus rested his hand on Potter’s shoulder, “we should be able to prevent him from sensing their movement. Thus we can gather them and destroy them all at once, when we are ready, and coordinate an assault on Voldemort that should kill his mortal body at the same time.”
            Severus raised an eyebrow, reluctantly interested. It was the best plan he had heard in the past six years.
            Of course, considering most of the Order’s usual plan was “Charge!”, that was not holding the new one to a high standard.
            “What kind of magic is that?” Hermione Granger had been admitted to the Order when she was sixteen, against Severus’s recommendation. Albus—and Molly and Arthur, whose daughter she was friends with—had argued they needed her brains, but Severus did not think her brilliant or perceptive, only dogged. She squinted now at Potter. “I never heard of something like that.”
            Potter spoke for the first time since Albus had introduced him. Severus found himself listening for echoes of Lily’s voice in the young madman’s, and caught himself back with a grip that made reverberations like dropped iron ring in his head. “It’s because of the way my mum’s spirit absorbed the Horcrux and spread it around my body.” He reached up and touched a piece of the glowing hair. “We leave a lock of my hair, or fingernail clippings, or something like that, in place of the Horcrux, and it feels to Voldemort as if he still had a piece of his spirit there.”
            “Why do you say his name?” Severus asked, deciding to indulge his curiosity again.
            Potter blinked eyes that had no right to be that green. “Because Professor Dumbledore raised me not to be afraid of it.”
            Severus tried to imagine how Albus had raised the boy, a secret, all these years. He couldn’t imagine it. Nor could he imagine how Albus would have told the boy he was a Horcrux and—
            “What will happen to the Horcrux in Potter when we’ve gathered the others?” Severus asked abruptly, forestalling Minerva, who was trying to say something. She hissed at him a little. Severus ignored that. She could bloody well wait.
            Potter looked him in the eye, although Severus had in truth directed his question to Albus, and someone who had only recently emerged from the shadows into the light of reality ought to be able to tell that. “It’ll be destroyed along with the rest.”
            Severus stared at him, and said nothing. It was Molly who burst out, probably because Potter’s resemblance to a ginger had unbalanced her, “Oh, no!”
            “There is no other choice, Molly,” said Albus, in a voice of steel gentleness Severus had never heard from him before. “Harry’s survival in the first place was a miracle. We must undo that miracle in order to destroy Voldemort.”
            “Professor Dumbledore told me all about it,” Potter added, in a voice as urgent as a hunting horn. His eyes and hair shone as he leaned forwards to look at Molly. “He gave me sixteen years of life I wouldn’t have had otherwise. And he showed me some visions of other paths I could have gone down. They would have been a lot worse. Please, let me do this much. It’s the only way I can pay you back for suffering through the war when I didn’t have to.”
            He sounded impossibly noble. But Severus had no doubt he meant every word.
            Black fire filled his belly.
            He is this way because Albus raised him to be. Not because he would have chosen the path of such extreme nobility of his own free will, but because Albus wanted him to. He’s talking about sacrificing things he doesn’t even know about. How could he know anything about a normal life when Albus kept him hidden for sixteen years?
            But open opposition against the leader of the Order, in front of the Order, would be suicide. Severus knew enough to wait, and listen, as Harry Potter explained with grand gestures, borrowed from Albus, about his plan to destroy the Dark Lord.
            “We’ll come to the—prepared battlefield.” A quick glance at Albus showed Severus that Potter had been instructed not to reveal where that battlefield, exactly, was. “I’ll cast a spell that destroys the piece of hair or nail we left behind to replace the Horcruxes, so that Voldemort knows they’re gone. He’ll either Apparate to where we are, then, or I’ll draw them there.”
            “You,” Severus said. “A seventeen-year-old.”
            Potter turned and looked him in the eye with that disconcerting stare again. “That’s the age of majority in the wizarding world, isn’t it? Old enough to make my own decisions.”
            “Not old enough,” Severus said, leaning forwards slightly to emphasize his point, “to bring the Dark Lord where he does not want to be brought.”
            Potter gave a twisted smile that surprised Severus, it seemed so self-aware. “He doesn’t know about the Horcrux in me, and that gives me an advantage. When I’ve gathered all the Horcruxes in one place, and then I invoke the power of the one behind my scar, I can essentially summon him like a demon. He only has one piece of soul left in his body, and it’s pretty small and tattered. It’s not enough to resist the drawing power of seven other pieces.”
            Severus considered. He had never heard of such magic, but he had to admit that it sounded plausible.
            Of course, if Severus had trusted his survival to the way things sounded, he would have died during the first war.
            “If the spell does not work as you expect, and does not bring you the Dark Lord’s own body?” he asked.
            Potter gave a complicated heave of his shoulders, as though he was settling a large weight. “Then I seek him out. I don’t think it’ll be too hard. He’ll be pretty eager to find me, after sensing a Horcrux he didn’t know about.”
            Severus silently agreed.
            “Someone else still needs to come with me, though, so they can kill him after I die.” Potter looked straight at him again. “Would you be willing to volunteer, Professor Snape? Professor Dumbledore thought you would, since you knew my mother and you have the score of her death to settle with Voldemort.”
            Severus pinched his lips shut over the refusal he wanted to give, and pondered it carefully. He knew that Albus was up to his old tricks, trying to manipulate Severus, even if the boy was utterly unaware that he was the conduit for the manipulation.
            But this time, Severus thought he could see several possibilities for finding his way forwards. Changing things the way they should be changed. He nodded sharply, and Potter smiled as if Severus was doing him a personal favor.
            “Good!” Albus clasped his hands and beamed around at the other members of the Order. “Then we only need to acquaint you with your part in the plans, and the way that we’ll need to act if Voldemort attacks before they’re complete.”
*
            “Professor Snape, sir?”
            Severus turned around slowly. It was still incredible that a Potter should be that respectful to him. Yes, perhaps Potter hadn’t been raised by his father and didn’t look much like him, but he was still a Gryffindor in all the ways that mattered.
            His willingness to throw his life away, nobly, stupidly, showed that.
            “Yes, Potter?” Severus asked, his voice meant to be repressive. He had been walking towards his quarters in the dungeons when Potter had overtaken him. He continued striding on his way now, annoyed that he had stopped or even slowed.
            “Professor Dumbledore thought I should tell you how many of my mother’s memories I have,” Potter said. “So you wouldn’t be upset if you found out later.”
            Severus did not stop because of the silent resolve that nothing else would make him do so, but he did feel as though someone had jabbed him in the stomach with a spear. “How many do you, then?” he asked, in the sort of voice he would have used to an apothecary who had told him the shop was out of beetle eyes.
            “A lot,” said Potter. His voice was low, and when Severus glanced sideways at him, because he had to, Potter was walking with his eyes fixed ahead of him on the far wall of the corridor. “When she was a child and met you. When she was in school and doing Potions, and you helped her sometimes. When she…”
            He turned around and stopped. Severus decided it would be ridiculous to keep going, silent vow or no, and stopped, too. But he had no intention of looking Potter directly in the eyes, not this time. He was not Lily.
            No matter how much he looks like her. No matter if some of her lives on in him.
            “When she decided to stop being friends with you,” Potter whispered. “Professor Dumbledore was upset because that was when I learned the word Mudblood.”
            Severus’s muscles felt like stone, his stomach like oil. He kept staring. He could see what Potter had thought was so fascinating about the far wall of the corridor. It had a certain mesmerizing beauty if viewed from the sort of eyes that had nothing else to look at.
            “Sir?”
            Severus turned around. Potter looked back at him, and this time, Severus could not read his expression. Not Lily, not the noble boy getting ready to sacrifice himself, not the stranger he had been at first. This was a different man.
            “You must be lying,” said Severus. “Dumbledore gave you those memories.”
            He said that even though he knew Albus had been nowhere near when he lost Lily. He spoke the words because the other possibility, the sudden surge of need to do something besides wait for the end of the war, would destroy him. Destroy his path and his near-neutrality, his despair and his hatred, and send him spinning in a new direction.
            “No,” said Potter. “No, sir, I’m really not. Here.” He stepped in front of Severus and lifted his chin again. Severus didn’t know what he was doing until Potter whispered, “Dumbledore told you could do it, too. Read people’s minds. Can you do that and see that I’m not lying?”
            Severus stuck before Potter could take the invitation back, riding into his mind and expecting a childish whirl of memories. Instead, he felt coolness as practiced Occlumency shields, strong as stone, peeled smoothly back and let him in, leading him to a different kind of memory.
            And the truth.
            There were Lily’s memories, shimmering along the edge with green and golden light, and grey that reminded Severus of fleeting images glimpsed on a Muggle telly. There he was, that day after exams, turning upside-down by the wand of James Potter. And there Lily was, squinting at books, and cradling an upside-down bundle Severus could only assume was the boy in front of him now, and turning as the Dark Lord came in through the doorway.
            Severus wrenched himself sharply free. Potter made a wounded little sound and crumpled to his knees, bowing his head for a second. Then he straightened and stood up once more, eyes seeking Severus’s.
            “What do you think of your father?” Severus whispered harshly. “The bully?”
            “Are you asking what I do, or what my mum does?” Potter’s smile was sudden, sharp, painful. “Because sometimes it’s hard to be sure.”
            Severus turned away and walked down the corridor with a long, racing stride. Potter didn’t call after him, although Severus was sure he stood still and watched him go.
            Severus was not running away. But he needed to think, and he couldn’t do that near Potter.
            Or the remnant of Lily that it seemed was still alive in him.
            Lily.
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An Urn For Her Ashes