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When Harry Potter dies in the Forbidden Forest, he doesn’t know what to expect.
What he doesn’t expect is to wake up again, completely starkers, in what would become a strange afterlife version of King’s Cross Station, but without the people and trains.
He also does not expect to find the shriveled remains of Voldemort’s Horcrux–the one that had lived within Harry for longer than he really wants to think about.
He definitely does not expect to find Professor Severus Snape.
The man is sitting on a bench directly above the whimpering bundle of what had once lived inside Harry–he gags and shudders again and his eyes snatch back to Snape quickly.
His former Professor sits like a statue, his hands clenched into tight fists in his lap. He wears his usual outfit, in contrast to Harry who had to wish himself some robes, though the longer he stares at the Potions Master he realizes that the man is missing his cloak, leaving him with just a white dress shirt and simple black trousers.
Harry is stunned how strange Snape looks without his usual heavy, black teaching robes. He is thinner than Harry would have expected and almost looks–vulnerable flickers through his mind but that isn’t a word Harry would ever associate with the man in front of him.
There are so many emotions dwelling inside of Harry that he blinks rapidly, trying to figure out which of them to give way to first.
He wants to scream at the man for all the hate and abuse he had thrown at Harry, for the wrongdoings of others. But then, he also wants to hug him real tight, for the friendship he’d given his mother and the mistakes no one had ever forgiven him for.
He wants to apologize. Say thank you.
A tiny part of him, he thinks, really wants to smack the git for it all.
Ron would be very proud. Hermione would still not approve, though Harry could nearly imagine her to be the one to throw the first punch. But at the same time Harry realizes that this would never happen–neither of his friends would ever really know. Never again.
Snape was dead–had died right in front of him. So, of course, Harry was dead too.
The despair clutches his heart in an iron fist and eats the little hope he’d had.
“Why are you even here?” Harry asks accusingly and throws a threatening finger at him. His voice echoes mockingly in the nothingness. “I did what you told me to, and it still isn’t enough, is it?”
Snape says nothing, does nothing.
It fuels his anger that the man, after everything, wouldn’t even acknowledge his existence. Even in the afterlife Snape seemed to still hate him.
Harry charges forward and grabs at the Professor’s arm but to no avail. It’s like scratching ice. Cold and unmoving.
His gaze flickers up to Snape’s face, but it's tight with tension and pale, but not a single hint that he is even aware of Harry.
Dread floods his body when in the corner of his eyes he sees a red substance slowly dripping from Snape’s cheek, along his throat and onto his crispy white shirt.
He knows it is blood, almost immediately, but it chills his bones nevertheless.
Harry frantically pats at the man’s neck, trying to find the wound he knows is there. He had seen it before after all.
But he finds nothing. There is no wound the blood could come from, but Snape was still furiously bleeding. Whatever he tries, it doesn’t stop.
Harry finally falls back on his bum in resignation. He cannot help Snape and of course, seeing as the man had already died. But Harry isn’t that kind of a person and Snape really didn't deserve this.
“Why won’t you let me help you?” he asks in a whisper.
“You cannot help.”
Harry spins his head to the voice of Albus Dumbledore in beautiful deep blue robes, with a wide smile and not a care on his face. Harry is confused, his eyes going back to Snape who was still sitting there, bleeding, and dead.
But Dumbledore doesn’t seem to notice or care, just walks by them and further away. Harry is stunned by the man’s ignorance but follows quickly after him. If there is another person besides Harry on this planet who owes Snape to help, then it is Albus Dumbledore.
But the former headmaster has too many answers to too many questions and quickly Harry’s mind shifts from the bleeding man to all the things he’d never known to understand. It’s the first time Dumbledore tries–piece after piece comes together in a puzzle that was Harry’s life and by extension also Dumbledore’s.
Harry had thought he hated the old man for leaving him behind clueless and frankly he doesn’t think he would have known to find any Horcrux without his friends. For once Ron had been the one to understand Harry’s conflicting feelings during their year hunting.
But the more Dumbledore explains, the more Harry realizes that the man before him had changed. This version of Albus Dumbledore was able to acknowledge his flaws and even if his apology is weakened by the loss of too many people and the hardest year of their lives, Harry doesn’t think it had ever been more genuine before.
But the taste of betrayal is heavy in his mouth.
For all his shortcomings and faults, after everything, Snape had been the first adult to ever tell him the hard and unforgiving truth. Not just a part of it and not when all had been said and done already. No riddles or smart words. Just simple honesty as a means of enablement for Harry to do what had needed to be done.
Harry doesn’t know what he would have done, if he had been in any of their shoes. He is quite certain he would not have survived half as long as Snape did as a spy–or had come to any of the clever conclusions as Dumbledore had.
No, Harry would have gone headfirst into the fight with no idea what he was doing, trusting his instincts and more so his friends. Ron and Hermione, Neville, Luna – all of them always at his side. Harry wasn’t alone.
He turns around, looking back at Snape, still sitting on the bench by himself like a frozen monument.
“What about Professor Snape?” Harry asks slowly.
Dumbledore blinks at Harry, curiosity blooming on his face. Irritated and somewhat impatiently Harry steps aside and waves his hand back to where Snape is sitting.
“Oh,” the headmaster exclaims with a breath. “I did not–”
“You told me I cannot help him,” Harry says again, watching as Dumbledore begins to stroke his beard thoughtfully. Had he not seen him? “But there must be a way–If I can go back, why not him too?”
Dumbledore does not answer for such a long time that Harry momentarily is worried that he is frozen now too. The anxious feeling doesn’t really leave when the headmaster finally speaks.
“I was not referring to Severus, Harry. I had no idea he was here.”
“But–But how–”
“As I said, this is your party–your choice, my dear boy. Though I am rather surprised to find Severus a part of it.”
Harry wants to tell him how he had definitely not planned on Snape being part of his afterlife experience, but the words die in his mouth.
“You say, that, technically, I am not dead, err, yet,” he slowly recalls. “If Snape is here, then he isn’t dead either?”
Dumbledore’s eyes turn sad in a way that Harry doesn’t think suits him, with how he’d been part of Snape’s death sentence in a way. For Dumbledore, he knows now, Snape had been an acceptable loss for the sake of ending Voldemort. Like many more.
Just like Harry.
“Severus is a conflicted man, Harry. I don’t think he ever thought to live through the war. Does he want to? That is not an answer I can give you.”
It’s deeply disturbing to Harry that someone wouldn’t choose to live if given the chance as much as how easily Dumbledore was to accept Snape’s demise, but he still knows that those are shoes unfitting to him.
“Harry.” Dumbledore is next to him again, putting a warm and comforting hand on his shoulder. “Severus' will to live has always been buried in another’s death.”
“My mum,” Harry whispers.
“And so many others.”
Snape had died sure of Harry’s death too. He had kept himself alive just long enough to the very moment he’d been able to fulfill his final task.
Just like Harry.
Harry walks forward, feeling Dumbledore’s hand slipping away from him. He knows he cannot stop the bleeding, but maybe that wasn’t what he was to do.
He sits down on the cold bench, next to the Professor, ignoring the still whimpering child-like monster beneath them. Harry doesn’t know how to talk to Snape, a man he usually only encounters through sneers and mutual loathing. He wasn’t ever prepared to not hate or even try and save him.
“I don’t know if I can help you,” Harry began slowly. He reaches for one of the tightly wrapped fists, and shutters at how icy they are. “But I don’t think you deserve to be alone either way.”
In the corner of his eye, Dumbledore is approaching, and Harry looks up at the old face of a man he had always trusted without a doubt. A man who wasn’t without flaw, but at the same time one of the very few Harry would have easily followed blind.
“Tell me one last thing, please,” Harry said. “Is this real or just happening in my head?”
Dumbledore’s face lit up; a twinkle Harry hadn’t seen in so long appearing on the worn face.
“Of course, it’s happening inside your head but why on earth should that mean it’s not real?”
He cannot help the smile that escapes his lips, thinking that maybe this was the Dumbledore he had always known.
Hope blooms in his chest again, as small and tight as it feels, and a newfound strength ripples through his body.
“Can I save him too?”
“My dear boy, I wouldn’t know you not to try.”
The last thing Harry feels is Snape’s hand, wrapping around his fingers.
In the end it is Hermione’s quick thinking and McGonagall's surprisingly well stocked potions supply that save Snape.
Harry’s heart is still racing and his body on the verge of collapsing when Madame Pomfrey is working tirelessly on the man. Slughorn looks ready to keel over but pulls vial after vial from a dark trunk that McGonagall clicks her tongue at. Apparently, she had spent a great deal of time covering up ever disappearing potions ingredients in the wake of the death eaters in control of the school.
Slughorn looks properly uncomfortable–Harry doesn’t think he’d ever seen that–but McGonagall doesn’t seem too upset either.
When Harry had woken up from his near death on the ground of the forest, he had realized that dying did indeed hurt, if you survived it. He was exhausted and in pain and could feel his drained magic pulsating with every beat of his heart.
Harry feels frozen in place while he stares at the pale man on the makeshift hospital bed. McGonagall is right next to Harry, most likely oblivious to the fact that her hand was very tightly wrapped around his upper arm. He doesn’t tell her either, enduring the pain for the sake of keeping her comfort and himself standing.
Harry doesn’t quite understand how they all had come to his help without a single question.
He doesn’t really remember what exactly he had spat into Voldemort’s face either, but, for the sake of Snape, obviously just the right words.
When Pomfrey finally looks up with a firm nod, relief floods his body. Ron is looking at him funny before Harry’s legs give in.
He learns then that McGonagall’s death grip on him had always been to keep him upright instead of her own anxiety for Snape or fatigue catching up to her. If anything, she looks amazingly at ease, though a bit exhausted.
She helps him to a chair next to Snape’s bed and Pomfrey is immediately on him. Harry hears himself apologizing–and a loud snort from Ron he thinks–but neither of the women in front of him have any of it.
Harry is forever thankful for Hermione's comforting hand on his head while Pomfrey examines and heals the most pressing of his wounds. He doesn’t think it’s that bad, remembering a Basilisk’s fang jabbed through his arm or being tortured by Voldemort in a graveyard, but shuts up when McGonagall looks proper sick and ready to strangle someone.
Harry smiles at her warmly and makes sure to hug her tightly before Pomfrey shushes him to a bed.
Hours later he wakes from a fitful sleep, raising his head just so he can glimpse at the sleeping man two beds over. He wouldn’t wake for a while, Pomfrey had said, but would make a good recovery.
Slowly Harry slips from his bed and walks over, his naked feet trudging along the cold stone floor. He sits in the chair that McGonagall had nearly fallen asleep in and continues her silent watch.
Very carefully he lays a hand on Snape’s slightly twitching one.
The man will give Harry hell for dragging him back. Probably rightly so, he thinks, still wondering if it had been the right decision to force Snape back to the land of the living.
Though, Harry muses, maybe it wasn’t just his choice, but rather Snape’s own.
It is only after his second child is born, named after the man himself, that Snape would tell him about the two hours between dying and living.
They would sit together in Harry and Ginny’s new living room, the house in Godric’s Hollow just about to be finished. Snape would be deeply irritated by a sleeping toddler in his lap and Harry, exhausted from endless nights with no proper sleep would barely be able to keep his eyes open.
And Snape would tell him–
About the strange limbo that had looked a lot like King’s Cross.
About a boy who just wouldn’t let him go and how it had turned out to be, after all this time, his train ride home.