Title: Like This

Rating: PG

Warnings: Angst, episodic style, present tense, dual timeline, no happy ending

Word count: 5700

Summary: Beltane is as much an end as a beginning.

Disclaimer: Characters are the property of JK Rowling, et al. This was created for fun, not for profit.

Author's Notes: Written in the 2011 hds_beltane fest as a pinch-hit for vane_nt, to a prompt of magical rituals: Your chosen characters take part in a magic ritual involving a bonfire. What is the ritual for? Why do they want (or must) participate? Optional: what if the ritual goes wrong? What if your main characters make a serious mistake and/or sabotage the ritual? Why would they do it? What would the consequences be? It also includes her prompts of Severitus and Snape surviving DH. This story was a challenge (in the good way) to write. My betas Linda and Kelly helped enormously.

Like This

The Beltane fire burns on a headland this year, high above the dark waters that surge beneath it. The flames leap high enough to eat the sky, and certainly to eat the logs that are heaped on top of it.

The wizards who have gathered to celebrate stay a distance from the bonfire, dancing across the grass, laughing and whispering to each other. Some of them have already divided into couples, smiling into each other's eyes with merry, malicious intent. Lips wander, hands travel, bodies retire into the shadows.

Only one man stands near the bonfire. His hands are folded into his sleeves. His hood covers his face. Even after the war, even after the trial that acquitted him, he still does not care to expose his features to the scrutiny of the curious. This may or may not have something to do with the long scars that stripe the side of his throat.

His hand travels down to one pocket, and his fingers close around the smooth surface of the green glass vial there. When he turns it back and forth, he can hear the gentle slosh of blood. Nothing else sounds quite like it. He has been a Potions master for more than twenty years, and he has cut the throats of numerous animals as well as handled endless bottles of blood acquired from apothecaries. He knows.

The one he waits for is late, as usual.

He hears the footsteps behind him at last, and turned around. This man also wears a cloak with a hood, more suitable for the mist and spray coming off the sea, the chill of this last night of April, than the slippers and diaphanous robes that that conceited crowd of butterflies wears.

His reasons for wearing a hood are different from the other man's, but there is no reason to spend much time dwelling on them. The Potions master nods and lifts the vial of blood from his pocket. "You have what I asked you to bring?" he demands.

The other man hesitates, and for a moment the one who has waited thinks that his famous courage has failed him, that he did not manage to bleed himself enough to fill a vial. But he nods and holds it up a moment later. "Got it," he says, voice high and flat.

They both turn towards the bonfire.

Harry stares at the letter in his hand, and then flings it down and turns away from it, staring out the window of the small cottage he's been living in since the end of the war.

The cottage looks out on the road that runs through the center of Hogsmeade, and the garden in front of it is bright. Sunflowers, roses, larkspur, irises, columbines, flourish there even now, in the depths of winter. Harry planted them like that deliberately. He has had enough of darkness, and if the rest of the world insists on going grey and brown for a while, it will happen outside his garden.

His hands twitch with the impulse to burn the letter, but he won't. It comes from his mother. Well, part of it does, anyway. The writing at the top explains that it remained in the Potter vault for longer than it should, and that the defenses Harry has lived under for most of his life—first the blood wards that protected him when he was with his relatives, and then the wards of Hogwarts—prevented the letter from traveling to him the way it was meant to. That writing is from the goblins of Gringotts.

The rest of the letter is from his mother, and it explains how Lily Potter slept with Severus Snape because she thought she wanted to, because she thought it was a romantic gesture of defiance against James Potter, the man she was no longer sure she wanted to be with, and because it happened at a time when her defenses against the stress of the war were weak.

No grand tale. No glowing dreams. In fact, the destruction of a romantic tale and glowing dreams, because now Harry can no longer imagine that his mother was the saint that memory and legend have painted her as, that she never cheated on his father, that their love was of a kind to outlast time and space.

He glances back at the letter and swallows. He does not have to believe it. Even Lily admits in the letter that she is not entirely sure that Severus Snape is his father. She thinks so, but she returned to James after that fling and never left him again, and a Paternity Charm needs at least a month between bouts of sex to distinguish between two men as fathers. This time, there must not have been.

Harry sighs and resists the temptation put his head in his hands. He suspects that a potion would tell him the truth, but he is not sure that he wants to know it, because of everything else that would inevitably follow after that.

In the end, though, he picks up the letter and goes to a discreet apothecary he knows, the kind who will forget anything for money. Because he needs to settle this—the way he has ruthlessly settled so much else from the war, such as banishing the darkness from his life and hunting down the remaining Death Eaters—before his life can continue.

"Circle the fire. Slowly."

He nods and begins to move, keeping a constant eye on the position of the Potions master as he does so. He does not believe, truly, that the other would betray him at this late juncture. Then again, he has never thought that the Potions master would agree to a ritual like this in the first place.

That he has now is more than a little suspicious.

They circle together, their hoods rising and falling in the updrafts from the fire. Both of them shuffle at various times, but recover their balance before they can fall. The fire sparks and pops at them, but does not visibly alter. By the time they have completed one circle, it has burned down a bit.

"Now," they say at the same time, and then throw their vials into the fire. As if they have rehearsed it, although they have not.

Neither of them could have stood to be in the same room with one another long enough to do so.

The fire writhes back and forth with the addition of the blood, and then growls and turns a low, dull red. There is a chance that someone else will look over from the dancing crowd and see it happen, of course, but he has cast a spell that should distract their attention elsewhere for the five minutes the ritual needs. He uses it often in Auror work.

"Now the wand woods," the other says.

He nods, and pulls a small twig of holly from his robe pocket, followed by a twig of elder. He has no way of knowing which wand the ritual would think he wields, in truth, so he brought both.

The one across the fire holds up a twig of ebony, and for a moment their eyes catch through the flames.

He has had the letter for years, because Lily was apparently incapable of remaining faithful to her husband or keeping silent once she left him behind.

My dearest Severus,

Please don't hate me. Please. I understand that you have the right to do so, but I never meant to hurt you. I never wanted to. I thought that you might be what I wanted, instead, but I see now that you were my means of revenge against James. No one deserves to be just that. Please try to forget me, and move on with someone else.

So the letter babbled on, and of course she said nothing as sensible as she said in the first paragraph. Instead, she imposed her feelings on him with one hand while yanking them back with the other. She said that she was sorry, and that she loved him and desired him—all the while knowing, she must have known, what those words would do to him, who has had so little to care for in his life—while obtruding her love and desire for Potter into the conversation, holding them before her like a Shield Charm.

She said nothing then of a son; it was written before the second Potter's birth. So, although Severus has kept the letter because he would rather throw away a prized cauldron then dispose of it, it has remained folded and locked in a cabinet for the nineteen years since she wrote it, removed and read ritually only when he has begun to feel that he was weakening and could not continue with either his spy career or his protection of Potter the Second.

A glance at those words, and he reminds himself both what he destroyed and mourns, and what he remembers and despises.

The letter that comes from Potter on the second morning of January has nothing like Lily's grace. He inherited the hand of neither of his parents, neither Lily's small and neat handwriting nor James's careless, confident scrawl—

No. He has to learn to think differently, now, because Potter encloses Lily's letter to him along with his missive to Severus, to prove that it is genuine.

Severus leans back and considers the last line of Potter's letter—the only one there is, beyond the signature and the paragraph that explains where Lily's letter appeared from, why he had no idea about its existence until now, and how a potion has shown he has no blood connection to Potter artifacts.

What do we do about this?

Still, Severus thinks, after turning the fact over for a few minutes in his head. His handwriting looks nothing like mine, either.

He tosses in the ebony twig. There is a flare of light on the other side as the hero does the same thing with the holly and the elder.

The fire changes color from red to gold. He takes a step back, his eyebrows climbing, because that is as sudden and unexpected as a change in a potion he is brewing, by this stage of his career. The fire should have remained red for the full five minutes of the ritual.

He tries to recall if one of the books he read in preparation for this day includes mention of such a change—

"The next part."

And he pulls them forwards, and he does not have the chance to consider before he draws out the torn photograph of Lily that he took from Black's house and lets it flutter into the flames. He has others. He can let this one go.

Still, it tugs on complex roots in his heart as it burns, roots of love and hatred and jealousy and desire.

Across the way, he watches him toss in the letter in his mother sent him, and wonders for a moment why he is content to burn it. It is literally the only thing he has from his mother, bar anything Lily's sister may have passed on.

But then the fire roars, and turns blue.

The color of ice, the color of chains.

That is not supposed to happen.

"Why did you agree to meet me here?"

Harry feels the hatred boiling up in him as he speaks. He has to set his jaw so that no more of it gets out. Snape's eyes are already hooded as though he anticipates pouring a potion in Harry's tea.

"Because of your letter," Snape says, and nothing else, his eyes flicking around the room. They're at the back of the Three Broomsticks, but of course, that means nothing if too many people see them there or someone overhears what they're talking about. Harry knows that. He just can't help himself. "Sit down."

Harry does it, while all his muscles lock in protest at doing something Snape told him to. He has to look aside from the man while Madam Rosmerta, whom they've warned, brings over a butterbeer for him and a glass of water for Snape. Harry doesn't think it would be a good idea to have anything stronger in Snape's presence. Is Snape thinking the same thing? Do both of them have a hard time holding their liquor?

No. You promised yourself you weren't going to do that.

Harry nods and turns back to Snape. He promised himself that he wouldn't look for supposed resemblances, and so now, instead of trying to calculate whether anything about the shape of Snape's scowl is familiar, he says, "We can't just go on as if nothing has happened. There are—things we have to consider. Whether we're going to tell anyone. What happens when I have children."

Snape smiles, and it cuts right through any stupid little dreams Harry might have had about finding a father. "Why, Potter? Do you think that I'll show up in them like a disease? That one of them might be good at Potions, and I might die of shock when I hear about it?"

Harry's teeth dig into his tongue. He knew this would be difficult. He hasn't realized how very difficult until he got here.

He shakes his head. "As far as I'm concerned, you can go hang," he says bluntly. "We could spend the rest of our lives not acknowledging each other, and the only problem is that I'm not sure it's long enough."

"Then why meet me here?" Snape's eyes are blazing, digging at him. He does the "gaze full of claws" better than anyone Harry's ever met.

"Because of any children I might have," Harry says. "They might like to know their grandfather. You might like some of them better than you've ever liked me." He grimaces. He would have said that Snape wouldn't take out his grudge at Harry on Harry's children, but he knows better than that. Snape took out his grudge at James on Harry, even after loving his mother. Why should Harry think the next generation would be any different?

"And because of what your friends might say to you if they find out that you were keeping such a secret, I would imagine."

Harry swears under his breath and takes a sip of the butterbeer, mostly so that his mouth won't betray anything else for him. But Snape's right. Harry loves his friends, but part of their friendship comes from the investigations of mysteries that they conducted together in Hogwarts. They're naturally nosy. They know everything about him, everything that matters. To find that he had been keeping something this gigantic from them…they would understand, but it could cause damage if it emerged accidentally rather than because he told them.

If it has to come out, then Harry would prefer to control the way the secret spreads. And he doesn't want to keep family, or family skeletons, from his children.

"Yes, fine," he says. "So. What are we going to do about this?"

"You could burn the letter and forget that anything ever happened."

Harry rolls his eyes. So there's a difference between us. I'm smarter. "I would betray something in the way I spoke. You always said at school that I had no discretion. Assume that I haven't learned any although school's been behind me for a year."

Snape's face flushes slowly. Harry grins at him savagely. "What? You dislike having one of your prejudices used against another?"

Snape glances away and takes a few sips of his own drink. Harry finds himself watching the way Snape's fingers grip the glass. Something familiar in the way they curve, in the distance between the third finger and the fourth finger and how they rest…

No. He promised himself that he wouldn't do that. He looks away angrily, and fights the temptation to drain the rest of the butterbeer. That will hurry Madam Rosmerta back to their table to ask if he wants another, and they can do without that.

"There is a ritual," Snape says. He sounds as if he's choking on something large and furry stuffed down his throat. Perhaps mice. "One that is meant to—reconcile differences. Subdue emotions for those who are estranged but must work together. It was used often in the past for couples who must raise a child together because the Wizengamot would not permit divorce, for master-and-apprentice pairs where the apprentice had a rare talent but they hated each other, for wizards who hated werewolves or vampires but had to live among them."

Harry nods slowly. "And what is required?"

"Wood that symbolizes our wands," Snape said. He seems more relaxed now that he's talking about something magical and distant from both of them. Harry can understand the easing of that; some of the tension has flowed out of his own body. "A sincere desire to reconcile. Replicas of our wand cores. Mementoes from the one who made the bond possible. In this case—" He swallows wildly. "Your mother."

Harry is afraid that he doesn't quite veil his contempt when he stares at Snape, but on the other hand, he doesn't see why he should have to. He is the one who actually lost Lily Potter. Harry is the one she loved, the one she died to protect. And he didn't even know her for longer than a year and a half. If anyone has a right to mourn her, he does. But does he tear his life apart over it? No. He acknowledges that he misses his parents, and he gets on with things.

Meanwhile, Snape is the one who caused her death, and he's the one who drove her away, and he lost her friendship twenty years ago. Shouldn't he have the ability to surmount his feelings where she's concerned more easily than this?

"All right," Harry says finally.

"And our blood."

Harry has learned enough about blood magic in the past few months of Auror training to grimace, but he nods acceptance. If this will work, if it will buy him tolerance of Snape or at least make sure that he can stand to be around him without reviling him—the least heroic hero that ever crawled the earth, the man who didn't care if his father died just as long as he got to have Lily—then he'll do it.

"And it doesn't require torture," he says, testing.

Snape sneers at him.

"Or the death of animals. The blood comes from us?"

"That is what the word our generally means." Snape pushes his drink away and stands. "I await your owl, Potter."

His eyes flicker as he speaks the name, and Harry smiles grimly up at him. He must admit that that's the one part of this debacle that makes the meeting worth it: to see how Snape realizes that he can't call Harry by that name anymore, in good conscience.

On the other hand, when has Snape ever had a good conscience? But the name is a mistake, which will irritate him more.

Snape leaves. Harry lowers his head and closes his eyes. Of course he will not admit it, because Snape will never understand, but this ritual is as much for him as his unborn children or his friends. Harry has been unsettled ever since the letter arrived, turning over the icon of his mother in his mind and trying to understand the tarnish on it.

He doesn't have to like Snape. But if he can act more cordially around him because some of his stronger emotions are subdued, then he can finally put this mess into perspective, make a place for it in his life the way that he's learned to do with the image of his father—James—as a bully.

He backs away from the blue fire, but a hiss from the Potions master on the other side reminds him of what is at stake here. The ritual is simple to perform, but it exacts its own costs. Finish it, and it will do as it is supposed to do; refuse to finish it, and the ritual will gather them both in and—

He did not finish when he spoke the words. He didn't need to. Being gathered in by fire is not something that most people can survive.

He reaches for the last component of the ritual, the one that cost him the second most, the phoenix feather that shines in his hand. On the other side of the fire, he will be holding a dragon heartstring. They cast them in at the same time.

This time, a deep red flash cuts through the heart of the fire, and he feels a momentary shudder of gratitude. So the colors are not as they were described, either by the books or by him, but they're getting back on track now, the fire is changing to the shade it's supposed to be, they—

The fire flares once, and then settles down into a small, hardened ball of emerald light. It does not glow. It does not flicker. It simply shines.

He takes a step towards it in spite of himself. He wonders if the other thinks it the color of his mother's eyes.

But it is not. It is the color of the Killing Curse, the color of memories, the color of poison.

The color of death.

Many times during the preparation for the ritual, Severus realizes that he is not sure why he has agreed to do this.

He cares nothing for any children that Potter may have. He finds that he can barely bring himself to care for Potter. All that he knows about his own resentment for the boy makes that strange. If he resented Potter for being a visible symbol of Lily's betrayal, for being James's son with her eyes, then his feelings should have shattered or at least altered when the revelation came.

But they have not. During the few other times that they need to meet before the ritual—discussing its timing, the steps they will need to take, and the materials purchased when it turns out that Potter has trouble acquiring a phoenix feather—Severus has the chance to look deep into the boy's eyes.

And he sees nothing there. Nothing familiar, nothing recognizable. He asked the boy to look at him when he was dying because he was dying. He knew that he would vanish soon into the darkness where nothing returns, and that made him think that he might have a chance of separating the color from the person it belongs to and seeing Lily there, as he has never been able to.

He could not then, or at least he lost the memory when he found out that he had survived. He cannot now. Potter's lateness bothers him, and the boy's irritating habit of pushing up his glasses and smearing his fingers with ink, and his handwriting in their infrequent owls, and the way he sometimes stares at Severus as if also seeking out similarities.

Severus finds the answer to his question, the question about why he is doing this, during the last meeting they have before Beltane. Potter insisted they meet so that they could be "absolutely sure" about the steps of the ritual. Severus is contemptuous of the flaws in Potter's memory, but agreed with little objection. It is less trouble than the series of reproachful owls he would receive if he did not.

"And that's it? That's really it?" Potter shoves his glasses up his nose and leaves ink smeared on his cheek. Severus closes his eyes. Potter has the ability to sicken him, but he will never show such weakness in front of someone who remains nothing more than a reluctant comrade, never admitted to the confederacy of blood that Severus has only ever truly known with his mother. "I can't believe it's not more complicated."

"The fire carries the burden of the magic," Severus explains, as he has more than one time now. He wonders what it will take for Potter to grasp it. He turns his head and looks out the window at his garden. It is small, tame, neat, quiet. A small house was all he was able to afford after the war, but he wants nothing else. Potter perhaps expects him to demand a share of the Potter money and buy a luxurious mansion, he thinks cynically. But a mansion cannot afford him the anonymity that is the treasure he covets. "It will burn the objects we give it, and that annihilates the weights that we carry with us and creates a new bond."

"Huh." Potter's inarticulate noise makes Severus shudder. He turns back in time to see the boy lift his head and stare at him.

And then the answer comes.

Severus is not doing this because he really expects a peace treaty with Potter to result, or because he wants the boy to stop bothering him. He is doing it because it means that he will end any and all connection to the boy. He will pay any debts he could have owed him. He will pay for killing his parents, for making Lily's disappointed eyes float in his dreams every night for years.

After this ritual, there are those who would say, if they knew, that Potter owes him. And Severus can imagine nothing sweeter than that, even if he never gets to hear the words.

"There is something else that will power the ritual, make it important," he continues.

"What?" Potter leans forwards as if he expects to hear the secrets of the universe. Severus's irritation clenches in a spasm like a troubled heart. The boy did the same thing the first day of Potions classes, he remembers. It annoyed him even then. It did not reflect sincere desire to learn, the way that, with the distance of time, he can acknowledge that Granger's enthusiasm did. It reflects nothing more than the desire to get in good with the teacher—or the sire, as it may be—to have that person think well of him.

Severus is aware, thanks to the Occlumency lessons of fifth year, that the boy did not have an ideal childhood. But it makes him impatient to think on. The boy survived far worse things at Hogwarts than he endured growing up. That he would still let a pitiful, pathetic desire for attention overcome him makes him a victim.

And that is something Severus swore he would never be. The position of atoner is better than the position of corpse, or walking wounded.

"The sincerity of our desire," he says. "We both must desire to accomplish this."

"Of course," Potter says, and sits back as if he thinks that that is all, that he can do this and Severus will finally approve of him, and the air around him is so saccharine with longing that Severus has to excuse himself to visit the loo.

The fire is green, and that is wrong.

But as he stands still, his heat beating in time with the shine of the flames, Severus knows that it is also right.

He lifts his head and meets Potter's gaze as he stumbles to a halt across from him, on the other side of the fire. For the first time since he can remember, those emerald eyes, those green eyes, those eyes he once loved, do not cut him.

"What happened?" Potter whispers.

Potter, Severus thinks, and then remembers that that is no longer strictly his name. And then he remembers that Potter will have that name forever, because of what the fire means, because of what else here is green, and his heart stirs with subdued flame of its own.

"I told you that we had to have a sincerity of desire to be—reconciled, to have our emotions subdued enough to work together, before the ritual would work," he said. He grimaces. There is no good phrasing for how the ritual should work, not when Potter did not grow up in the wizarding world. That is another separation, another rift that they cannot cross. Severus, for all his Muggle heritage and upbringing, knew about magic from his mother and came prepared into the world of Hogwarts.

Potter—or Harry; he can speak the name once, when he is on the brink of freedom—never had that. He lacks instinctive understanding of much that Severus takes for granted.

And he also lacks enough compassion for the ritual to work. Severus closes his eyes and feels his pulse beating in the scars he received from Nagini. For once, it does not hurt. For once, it reminds him that he is alive.

"I did want to get along with you," Potter says. His voice is too loud against the background of stopped music and stopped dancers. Severus knows that they are watching him and the boy, the careless product of a moment's dalliance, and for once, he does not care. "Not for your sake, not for mine, but because I wanted my children to—" He breaks off, as if remembering that there might be some people here they do not want to reveal the secret of their bond to.

"You didn't want it enough." Severus nods to the fire, and the Avada Kedavra pulse at its heart. "Just as I did not want it, but went along with it for your mother's sake. You still hate me, don't you, hero that I am?" And he meets the green eyes again.

Slowly, Potter's hands form into fists. But Severus is a skilled reader of people, and he knows what he sees in that lifted chin, that stubbornly clenched jaw, those flexing fingers. Relief.

The only similarity he has ever seen between them.

"Don't I have more reason to hate you than you have to hate me?" Potter hisses at him. "Now that you know I'm not a perfect carbon copy of my father, now that you know my mother gave you something that she never gave him—what reason do you have to hate me? But you still do."

"Always asking," Severus murmurs. "Always clutching. That is what I hate in you, that you think you have a reason to demand more and more of the world because you were born with a grand destiny. Not as much as you could have demanded, yes, I know," he adds, catching Potter in mid-rant when he opens his mouth. "But when one has given as much as I have to the war effort, demands for more grow intolerable, in time."

Potter shakes his head again, but this time, not in denial. "And I hate you because you can't let it go," he whispers. "Because you'll always be bitter. Because you still hate a child enough to torment him."

Severus smiles back at him, glad and vicious, and inclines his head. "Then it seems that there is no reason to concentrate on the bond between us after all. You said during one of our meetings that we could not ignore this. But we can. We have proven it."

Perhaps it is his obvious happiness, perhaps it is because he says "we" for once instead of blaming Potter solely, but Potter's eyes cool. He glances away. Severus chuckles. He knows that Potter has more trouble coming to terms with this than Severus does. He likes to think of himself as the hero, yes, the one too noble to cling to old hatreds.

But he is not noble. He is sordid and petty in the deepest parts of himself. He knows what hatred is like. He knows how to hold a grudge.

For once, Severus is willing to admit that this stubborn, hot-tempered young man is his son.

"Yeah, right," Potter mutters, and moves away. "I burned the only letter I had from my mother because of you."

"But you are less unhappy about that than you think you should be," Severus says, and watches Potter pace a few steps further before he whirls on the spot and Apparates. The sea-spray on his lips tastes like happiness.

Harry opens his mouth to retort to Snape, but closes it. For one thing, the bastard is gone.

For another…

Well, yeah.

It feels like burning a chain, not an heirloom. Yes, that letter had his mother's handwriting on it; when he first got it, he had felt nothing but wonder that she was reaching out to contact him after so long. But in the end, the revelations she gave him are nothing he wants. If he had grown up with them, if the letter had found him when he was a child the way it was supposed to…perhaps that would be enough. But he did not, and they did not, and he grew up in his own way, and made his own defeat of Voldemort.

Knowing Snape only as a comrade in the war at best, an enemy most of the time, not a father.

Perhaps they could have forged something, some kind of bond, if they had known earlier and tried.

But they did not, and they are not, and he is free.

Harry laughs aloud, startling himself and attracting sidelong glances from the dancers below. He grins and, because he can, flips them off. Then he jogs down the hill, feeling the Beltane breeze in his hair.

The letter is gone. Snape isn't going to tell anyone about it, and Harry isn't. Their one attempt to come together, made with what Harry thought was good faith on both sides, has faltered. There is no bond, no connection between them now, except the war, and the war is fading into the past where it belongs.

Harry takes a deep breath, filling his lungs with the air of the first day of summer in the old calendar, and sees the future opening ahead of him, unconstrained, undefined by who his parents were, or are.

He Apparates, light all around him.

Behind them, fading in green, the fire dies.

The End.