Chapter Text
Albus Dumbledore was tired. There was no time, or space, for his exhaustion, but it was there anyway. Filling him up and emptying him out. Fireworks exploded in the distance, owls soaring and screeching overhead in one of the largest breeches of the Statute of Secrecy in his lifetime.
And too many of his people were dead.
Alice’s hand stretched out towards the crib, trying to get closer to the infant boy in her last moments. Frank, downstairs, hadn’t even held his wand.
Little Neville stared up at him with watery eyes, a vicious scar across his forehead.
And Tom Riddle was gone.
Albus ran a hand down his face, alone in the frozen house. No one but him would be able to enter until he tore down the rest of the wards. He’d been there for almost a day and a half, scouring through the traces of magic left around the property. Delving deep into the chaotic mind of their infant savior.
He’d tried to pull the soul shard from Neville’s head. And he’d been unsuccessful.
Slowly, Albus scooped the child into his arms. He’d been spelling nutrient potions into the baby’s stomach and cleaning him every couple of hours, but already he felt lighter, less solid, than he had when Albus had last held him.
He tucked the blanket closer around Neville’s limbs, and rocked him on his shoulder.
Alice’s cold, empty eyes stared accusingly up at him.
He would need to find Augusta.
He looked up sharply as the misty silver spell flew in beside him and solidified into Moody’s honey badger.
“Lestranges and the Crouch boy arrested at Potter house. En route to St Mungos.”
Albus’s heart sank, and his eyes closed even as his grip tightened on Neville.
James and Lily. The other potential couple from the prophecy.
He shifted Neville so he could wave his wand, sending his phoenix back to Moody.
“The baby?”
He waited, patting Neville’s back as his stomach twisted. The honey badger materialized more slowly this time, like Moody was reluctant to send the message.
“Alive. Come to Mungos.”
Albus paced twice around the little nursery.
Harry wasn’t the child the prophecy spoke of. He wouldn’t be needed to end the war Albus was certain would start again, if his understanding of the part of Tom Riddle’s soul embedded in Neville’s forehead was correct.
Carefully, he walked down the stairs, stepping over Alice and then over Frank, his head bloody from hitting it on the stairs as he was felled, and out of the front door. Almost instantly, the house disappeared behind him.
Neville whimpered, squirming closer, and Albus cradled him gently on his shoulder before turning on his heel and apparating away.
Augusta Longbottom was as close to hysterical as Albus had ever seen her. She sobbed and screamed and sent curses flying at him, all of which he deflected with a simple shield. She wasn’t trying to hurt him or her grandson.
“Look,” he whispered, pulling the blanket down from around Neville’s head. “He has Frank’s hair, Augusta. Alice’s chin. Frank’s nose. He needs you.”
It hardly took an hour to get the wards set up and the baby to sleep, despite Augusta’s wailing.
She would care for her grandson.
Only when Neville was snuffling quietly, and Augusta was sipping at a spiked mug of hot tea, did Albus make his way to the hospital.
Too many of his people were dead.
He didn’t want to be told that Lily and James had died too.
It was almost worse.
The vibrant young couple were surrounded by healers. James was sobbing like a toddler. Lily stared vacantly at the ceiling, a small string of drool connecting her lips across her open mouth.
Albus peered into her dull eyes, brushing his mind against hers, expecting to feel the fiery barrier he’d taught her to erect. But there was nothing. No barrier, and no thoughts behind it.
Just a desolate wasteland with the occasional blip of Harry’s little face.
He turned to James, his favorite student for years, and shushed him gently, running fingers though his messy hair as tears and snot poured down his face.
There was no mossy forest blocking his mind. No portrait hole he’d always scolded James for, as it looked far too similar to the Gryffindor common room. There was just ash. Twisted and tormented ash, blown in the wind of a shaking, shivering agony.
Cruciatus.
They’d been tortured until their minds had broken and their personalities had shuttered over, deep enough that Albus couldn’t find a trace of thought or word in either of them.
He almost cried, then.
Frank and Alice, dead. James and Lily, worse than.
He was supposed to protect them.
“Where is Harry?” He turned to Moody, unwilling to allow Doge to pacify him, and ignoring the team of healers. They wouldn’t be able to do anything for his students.
“Sirius tried to take him,” Moody said gruffly. “But Hagrid took him to Hogwarts. Followed the plan.”
Albus nodded. Harry would be safe in his office, with Hagrid, until he could get there.
Albus rubbed at his eyes.
“You will need to find Sirius,” he said eventually, coming to a decision. “He was the Potter’s secret keeper.”
Moody’s eyes widened, then narrowed.
“Black betrayed them?”
Albus felt his heart shrink at how simple it was to turn Sirius into Black with barely a sentence.
But it needed to be done.
Harry could not grow up with Sirius as a parent. He would be chaos personified by eleven.
He hadn’t seen Sirius as the Aurors took him away. Apparently he’d laughed. Sirius had always laughed when he was in trouble. Some remnant of hysterical fear.
He’d tried to rear Sirius as a spy. Had tried to take the miracle of a Gryffindor Black and send him into the darkness. But Sirius had been too headstrong, too attached to James from the first day of Hogwarts. He would have never been able to convince Voldemort he was loyal.
Albus held Harry gently, rocking him in his arms, sitting at his desk. They were surrounded by the ticking and clinking of Albus’s delicate instruments. The glass on the bookshelf hummed with dark red energy, telling him of the strength of the wards around the castle. The clock on the mantle fizzed quietly, keeping track of the magical signatures of the Order members. It was lower in tone, now, than it had been the week before.
Fawkes had given a tear or two for the bruises on little Harry’s face and arms, where he’d been picked up and dropped by Bellatrix Lestrange.
The baby was sleeping comfortably in Albus’s arms. He probably wouldn’t remember any of this. Not his parents, or the magic he’d been surrounded by since birth.
Albus had a plan. A reluctant, painful plan.
As the rest of the country celebrated the fall of Voldemort, Albus anticipated his return. The fragment of soul in Neville would call Tom Riddle back from the dead, Albus knew it. There would be no death for Riddle until all the horcruxes were destroyed.
Neville would need training. Specialized training from all of Albus’s trusted circle. He’d be trained in defense, and raised to be the brave hero they would need when Riddle returned.
But Harry. Albus had made his choice, when he’d accused Sirius of betraying the Potters.
Harry would do what Sirius had been unable and unwilling to do.
Harry would be his spy.
Severus, while trustworthy enough for the desperate times they found themselves in, was not a creature of the light. He had chosen wrong. But Albus had control over Harry’s influences. He would be able to craft the child into a spy so perfect Harry might not even know he was filling a role.
So Albus planned.
Albus cast old, old magic on the tiny child.
And Albus allowed a single tear to spill down his wrinkled cheek, thinking of what must be sacrificed for the greater good.
The Dursleys were perfect. Exactly the correct personalities to be easily moldable.
He started with Petunia, exploring through her mind to find all the memories of Lily and twisting them, just slightly. He hated the idea of it. But there was some deep part of him which relished in the challenge.
He made the Lily of Petunia’s memories just a little smarter. A little prettier. A little more conceited. He pushed memories of sibling squabbles into fights, where Lily always won. He rolled memories of Lily’s early magic into nightmares, making them dark and frightening. He planted seeds of jealousy and fear and hatred, and helped them grow.
Vernon was simpler. Dumbledore simply removed moments of kindness and love, especially around children. He twisted revulsion at maltreatment into vague discontent. He wouldn’t want Vernon to hurt Harry too much.
But Harry would have to be hurt.
Harry would have to suffer, to grow the kind of personality Albus needed. To sow the seeds of desperation and pain Riddle so loved to prey upon.
He left memories of their own son in tact. He didn’t need that boy to suffer. There was nothing to be gained from the chubby little boy hurting at all. Albus shored up their love for their son against the negative feelings he was fostering for their nephew.
He turned away from Vernon’s glassy eyes and spun a slow circle of magic around the house, putting some of his own magical energy to feed the healing abilities innate to every wizarding child. It wouldn’t do to irreparably injure the boy.
He obliviated himself from the Dursley’s memories, and left a sleeping Harry on their doorstep, a note asking them to take him in tucked into his blanket.
He explained, in the note, that Lily and James were dead. It wouldn’t do for Harry to look for them. He promised that there would be no intervention from the wizarding world until Harry reached Hogwarts age. He didn’t ask for them to take care of him, or to love him. He only asked that they keep him alive.
He hardened himself against the guilt and the sorrow, and tucked a wild strand of dark hair across Harry’s forehead.
He had so much more to plan.
8 Years Later
Severus Snape hated teaching. The last eight years had been a blur of snotty, irritating little children getting in the way of the only interesting thing left for him in the world.
Dumbledore had kept him out of Azkaban, though. Had saved him from the fate all his living friends had faced. Not that many of his friends had survived. Regulus had died before the Dark Lord fell. Evan Rosier had died. Damien Wilkes had died. Barty was in Azkaban. Only Avery and Malfoy were free and alive, and he’d hardly been friends with either of them, even though he’d trailed around after their gang in their later years of school.
So he was alone, and imprisoned in a much more pleasant environment than the alternative, swarmed with dementors as it was. Even if the dunderheaded children destroyed his ingredients and made messes in his classroom and seemed to be doing their best to kill themselves and their classmates in every lesson.
So it was with an irritated flair of his robes that he went up to Dumbledore’s office for their weekly chat.
Severus was indebted to Albus, without question. But he’d never quite forgiven the man for his failure to protect Lily. Protecting Lily had been the entire point of switching sides, and yet there they were, Severus scrubbing acidic sludge out of children’s cauldrons, and Lily staring at the ceiling of St Mungos for the rest of their miserable lives.
He knocked on Albus’s door and entered when he heard the headmaster’s greeting. Albus smiled up at him over his half moon spectacles, and Severus clamped down on a sneer.
The old man had settled back into the grandfatherly persona he had cultivated throughout Severus’s years at school, away from the hardened war general Severus had come to know when he’d switched sides a year before the end of the war.
“Welcome, my boy,” Albus gestured to Severus’s customary chair on the other side of his desk. “How have your classes been this term?”
They were closing in on the final week of school. Exams were over, and the children were devolving into excitement and insipid drooling for their summer breaks.
“Fine,” Severus said curtly, reaching out to drag their chessboard towards him. They’d been half way through a game last week, and he was eager to have something to do with his hands and mind to get through the first few minutes of small talk the headmaster insisted on.
“Good, good,” Albus nodded absently, flicking his finger to move his knight across the board and putting down his quill.
“The OWL students should all achieve at least Acceptables,” Severus moved his rook with his fingers, a habit the chess pieces had been trying to break him of, unsuccessfully, for six years. “And I expect at least six Outstandings. I have hopes that all four of the NEWT students this year will gain at least an Exceeds Expectations.”
“Excellent,” Albus’s eyes twinkled as he took Severus’s bishop. Severus scowled and took another pawn. “And how are you faring?”
“Fine,” Severus tried to smother the fiercer scowl that wanted to twist his face. He hated this inane questioning. He would much prefer to talk about anything other than the damned students or his own thrice damned wellbeing.
Albus chuckled, clearly knowing exactly what was going through his head, even though Severus hadn’t felt even a hint of an attempt at brushing his mind.
“Well, dear boy,” Albus’s tone got a little more serious, and Severus moved his bishop into check. “I have a task for you, once the students leave the castle at the end of the week.”
Severus raised an eyebrow in question, and Albus placed his hands on the desk, obstinately not taking his move.
“I need you to retrieve Harry Potter from his relatives.”
Severus’s heart skipped a beat.
He wasn’t supposed to have to interact with the boy until he turned eleven, and, unless he had missed several years in the fog of monotony that was teaching, the boy was turning ten during the summer.
“Why?” He spat, “is Prince Potter complaining?”
Albus shook his head fondly, and Severus narrowed his eyes at the almost imperceptible flinch.
“I felt a severe depletion of the magic I left around the house,” Albus explained, “which indicates that Mr Potter had to heal a significant injury last night.”
Severus scowled at him, waiting in silence for him to elaborate. He’d found that Albus rarely answered questions if asked, but was more willing to talk into silence.
“When I left him with his relatives, I made sure to leave behind a reservoir of magic his accidental magic could call on to heal any major illnesses or injuries, just in case. I believe that he was quite severely injured last night, and too much of that reservoir has been depleted. It would be advantageous to remove him, once your current responsibilities have wrapped up for the year.”
Severus blinked.
“What major injuries?” He snapped, not wanting to get overly concerned over the accidents and roughhousing Potter Junior no doubt engaged in.
“I cannot discern that from here,” Albus sighed, “but based on his previous pulls from my magic, I expect several broken bones, and possibly significant bleeding.”
Severus froze.
What kind of childhood antics would result in that significant of an injury?
“You believe he was in some form of car crash?” He asked, the only explanation he was able to discern.
Albus sighed.
“I expect not,” he finally moved his rook. “Check, Severus.”
Severus jabbed his king a single space to the right, and scowled at his headmaster. But he knew that no explanation would be forthcoming. Albus never deigned to explain anything.
“I could go and explore the property tonight,” he said reluctantly, “I’m hardly needed here for the last few days.”
“No, no,” Albus closed off his next exit with a well placed knight, and hummed his check again. “You should be there for the end of term feast, my boy. Slytherin should be coming second, and you will want to congratulate your students on their excellent performance.”
Severus’s lip curled involuntarily. They would be in first place, if the other professors ever awarded his students points for good behavior and homework.
“You don’t believe the boy is in danger, then,” he said slowly. “Despite bleeding and broken bones?”
“As I said, he was able to pull from my reservoir to heal any major damage. Harry will simply be uncomfortable until you arrive.”
“The muggle hospitals have ways of fixing these things,” he said coolly, “even for wizarding children.”
“Ah, I doubt he will be taken to a hospital. Harry will be fine until you arrive, dear boy.”
Severus frowned harder. He hated when he didn’t understand.
“You don’t believe he will be treated for his injuries?” He said slowly, “will his magic fix them so easily?”
“As I have said,” Albus glanced at him over his spectacles again, the firm headmaster voice overriding his grandfatherly one for a moment, “Harry will be fine until you go to retrieve him on Saturday.”
Severus nodded, knowing when to back down.
“And where am I supposed to take the boy?”
“Oh, I believe Spinners End will be quite adequate,” Albus smirked. “You can take a sabbatical. After all, you do have much to teach him.”
Severus felt the horror choke him for a moment.
“You can’t be serious,” he spluttered, “I thought you had discarded your plan years ago!”
“No, dear boy,” Albus shook his head sadly, “you will take Harry and apprentice him for your position as spy.”
Severus felt his heart beat wildly in his chest.
“Lily Evans’ son will not join the Dark Lord!” He hissed, “it was ridiculous when you suggested it, and it’s ridiculous now! You would be better training him alongside the Longbottom boy. I’m sure he would love to be trained to kill those who ripped apart his parents’ minds.”
“Lily Potter,” Albus emphasized her name, as he always did when Severus slipped up, “is no longer able to have an opinion on what her son does with his life. But I know that she would be proud of him, when he is able to pass information and bring down Voldemort’s inner circle from within.”
Severus scowled again. The headmaster had clearly never truly understood or known Lily, not as Severus had.
“She wouldn’t want her son used in this way.”
“I am sure Harry will not see it as being used. In fact, I believe he will be grateful to join the magical world at last and have the opportunity to get his revenge on those of us who separated him from his heritage.”
“You still intend for him to join of his own volition, then?” Severus sneered, “you hope that the brat will betray everything his parents stood for, in order to seek power at the Dark Lord’s right hand?”
“I am sure of it,” Albus nodded. “We will make it so, Severus. I have no concerns that we will be able to do deliberately what we have done accidentally so many times.”
Severus looked away from the pity in Albus’s eyes.
“Potter’s brat is nothing like me,” he said, his voice cold and dark with hatred.
“I hope that’s true, dear boy. You made the right choices, in the end.”
“Hatred isn’t simple, Albus,” Severus spat, “you cannot manufacture it in a spoiled, pampered child.”
Albus stared down his crooked nose at him for a long, long moment.
“Make sure you tell him how special his magic is,” he said quietly, “how it makes him better than his family. Better than all the muggles. Tell him he’s gifted, and powerful. Tell him he can make others hurt without touching them. How he can bend their wills. Teach him to harness his magic for the sake of anger and pain. Teach him this, and I have no doubt he will turn to Voldemort when you explain how your Lord will enhance his powers.”
Severus gaped at him, hearing the echos of the Dark Lord in his protector’s voice.
“He won’t turn to the dark,” Severus said slowly, “not Lily’s boy.”
“Teach him how,” Albus almost whispered, “teach him how to hate, and Harry will do what needs to be done. And we will receive great gifts from Lily’s son.”
Severus trudged up the mediocre street with a look of abject disgust in his eyes. It was somehow worse than the dump he had grown up in. At least his dirty, grimy street had had character, with the old men outside playing board games, and children playing in the closed off road, and women gossiping over strings of laundry tied between their houses.
This street was beige. The row of identical semi-detached houses all had a car in the driveway, in black or dark blue, and each neatly manicured lawn was the same, lifeless, perfect green, despite the early summer heat.
Number four was just as identical as all the others, except for a weak thrum of Dumbledore’s almost extinguished magical reserve.
He knocked sharply on the door, and waited for his best friend’s sister to answer.
Instead, a large boy threw it open and lumbered straight past him.
“Mum!” He yelled, “I’m going to the park with Piers! There’s a man at the door!”
The boy waddled off down the street, ignoring Severus entirely, and Petunia appeared in the doorway.
“You!” She hissed, “what are you doing here? They said we wouldn’t be bothered!”
“Tuney,” Severus sneered, slipping into the house and closing the door behind him as she backed away. “Wonderful to see you again.”
Petunia blanched, her horsey face scrunched in dislike.
“Don’t call me that,” she hissed again, backing a few steps further away until she was inline with a small doorway under the stairs. “The note said none of your kind would come here until the boy went to school! That’s the only reason I took him at all!”
Severus paused, taking that in. She was the child’s aunt. The teenage girl of his memories, though she had always been annoying to him and Lily, would never have turned away her son.
“Professor Dumbledore requested that I fetch the boy early,” he said carefully.
She went even paler than she had been.
“You can come back in a few weeks,” she squeaked, “he’s staying with a friend.”
Severus flicked his wand, and Petunia squealed in fright, flinching away from him. He stared at her. She’d been disquieted, when Lily and he had done accidental magic in her living room, before Hogwarts, but Severus had never known her to be afraid.
Something was wrong here.
“There are three people in this house, and one of them is a wizard,” he said calmly. “I assume the third is your husband?”
“He’s upstairs,” she wheezed, clutching at her chest and keeping her eyes fixed on his wand.
“And where is Potter?”
For just a moment, her eyes flicked from his wand to the little door next to her, and Severus’s brain slowed down. Why would the boy be playing in the cupboard?
He stepped towards her, and Petunia backed away, matching each of his carefully measured steps with a mad scramble.
“Pet?” A loud voice came from upstairs, “who was that at the door?”
“Vernon!” She cried, “Vernon, come quick!”
Severus cursed, but he reached the cupboard before the heavy footsteps reached the top of the stairs.
There was a lock, on the outside of the door.
It wasn’t a simple sliding bolt to keep a recalcitrant door closed. It was a large, heavy monstrosity meant for security, locked with a metal padlock.
There was no sound beyond the door.
Severus flicked his wand again, and the lock sprang open as Vernon reached the bottom of the staircase.
The little room smelled. Stank. Of urine and sweat and vomit and blood. Of utter, absolute fear.
“What is this?” Severus turned to Petunia as Vernon roared from behind him. He sent a stunner over his shoulder, and the man fell hard to the floor. Severus glanced behind him, and took in the massive man, and the cricket bat in his fat fist.
“The boy is a freak!” Petunia shrieked, her voice high and reedy and desperate, laced with bitter rage. “Just like you and Lily! Always breaking things and hurting my poor Dudders! He shouldn’t be allowed around normal people!”
Severus couldn’t quite take in a breath, the foul smell itching at his nose. But he turned to look inside the cupboard.
For some reason, his eyes landed first on a torn sheet of paper stuck up on the low wall. Harry’s Room, written in the shaky block letters of a small child. Harry was written in a different color to Room, on top of another word Severus couldn’t decipher in the dim light.
A broken toy soldier stood proudly on a shelf, right between two bottles of bleach.
A bucket was propped on a lower shelf, and Severus could trace most of the stench to that point.
Slowly, hardly daring to look, he let his eyes wander to the ground.
A thin, stained crib mattress took up most of the floor space not taken by a vacuum cleaner and a stack of mops and brooms.
On the mattress lay a boy much smaller than Severus had expected.
Neither Lily nor James had been short. Lily had been slender, but never thin. Not like this boy. James had been somewhat scrawny at eleven, but his long limbs had matured quickly into height and light musculature.
The boy was thin. Too thin. He wore a pair of filthy underpants multiple sizes too large for him, tied in a knot at his hip and reaching almost to his knees. Other than that, the boy was naked.
His ribs jutted out, his collarbones sharp under his pale skin. He was visibly bruised, a spattering of purple and black and yellow marks across his chest and what Severus could see of his back.
His hair had been recently shorn, with bald spots all over his head, marked with nicks and cuts from the scissors.
Even his hands and feet bore marks. Small, shiny burn scars ran up and down his arms, mostly in short, straight lines and little circles. His feet were speckled with tiny cuts, clearly from shattered glass.
His eyes were open, staring almost as listlessly as his mother’s in St Mungos, barely acknowledging Severus’s presence except to curl a little tighter around his almost certainly fractured ribs.
It was unspeakable. This was not what he had been told to expect. This was not how he had imagined the Potter boy would be.
He had imagined mischief and arrogance and a child drowning in gifts and attention. He had not imagined a skeleton in a dark closet.
The smell of vomit, combined with the horror of this little prison, made Severus retch.
And, he reminded himself, horror trying to flood through his occlumency shields, this was after the child had used Albus’s magic to heal himself. After enhanced magical healing and almost a week of recovery.
“What happened here?” He turned to Petunia, who was babbling over her lump of a husband.
She ignored him entirely.
Severus took a deep breath of the fresher air of the corridor before going to his knees and shuffling inside the cupboard. It wasn’t tall enough for him to stand.
He pushed his way gently past the cleaning equipment until he had a clear path to the boy.
“Hello,” he said, as low and careful as he could. “My name’s Severus. I’m here to take you away.”
The little boy’s eyes fluttered for a moment, then came to rest on his forehead.
“Do you understand?” Severus whispered, “I’m going to take you away, and you never have to see them again. They’ll never touch you again.”
Harry blinked slowly.
“Dream?” He whispered, his tiny voice raspy and thin.
“Not a dream,” Severus whispered back.
“Promise?”
Severus felt something inside him shatter at the hope and fear in the child’s voice.
“I promise,” he croaked. “Will you come with me?”
Harry nodded, and winced as the movement jostled his neck.
More carefully than he’d ever completed a task in his life, Severus scooped the child up into his arms and cradled him against his chest.
He weighed about as much as Draco had at six, and was hardly taller. So it was horribly easy to pull him out of the cupboard. Severus looked around for a pair of glasses, or any other clothes or toys. He’d been using a large, ratty t-shirt balled up into a pillow, so Severus pulled that out too. But there was nothing else. Just cleaning materials, a bucket of waste, and a filthy mattress.
He didn’t even glance at Petunia or her husband as he left the house. He wouldn’t have been able to look at them and maintain his gentle hold on the small child in his arms.
If Albus’s intention was to traumatize the child into hating him, he may be more successful than Severus had hoped.
Severus didn’t take Harry back to Hogwarts, as much as he wanted Poppy’s assistance with the child.
Instead, he cradled the boy’s head and apparated through the sticky wards of his own home, landing directly in the hallway with a little moan from Harry.
He laid him down on the couch, and began.
The bruises were easy to fix, and he rubbed salves into tense muscles, occluding his disgust whenever Harry flinched. Some welts across his back were easier to smooth away than others. His hands shook slightly at the familiar pattern of a looped belt, brought down over and over until the marks crisscrossed into patterns. Deep, raised scars across his lower back and buttocks were clearly the result of a cane splitting skin, and Severus couldn’t put that particular weapon into the context of his own memories. Nothing done to him had ever had the methodical spacing of those lines.
The chips and fractures of his bones would need to be fixed with skelegrow, as they were almost completely healed, but imperfectly.
There was little to be done about the burns. His magic had healed them too quickly, and Severus couldn’t undo the accidental healing enough to fix the skin cleanly.
He was able to tame the slight swelling in the boy’s brain, and fix the single bone still acutely broken, the lowest bone in his right index finger. The bruises across it made it look like it had been trapped in a door.
There was very little he could do for Harry’s malnutrition. That would have to be combated over weeks, possibly months, with food and potions administered on a precise schedule to avoid stressing his system.
Severus thought about what he was supposed to say.
Albus had given him some guidelines. Things to tell the child. Don’t worry, Harry, wizards will protect you from muggles. Muggles are nasty. Lesser. You didn’t deserve to be hurt. You deserve to do the hurting.
The training Minerva had given him in his first term of teaching gave a different script. Don’t worry, Harry. We’ll protect you. We’ll keep you safe, you don’t have to be afraid anymore. You can trust me. Have a biscuit, Harry.
But the glassy eyes looking steadily at his hands tracking every movement carefully, were Lily’s eyes.
Lily would not have accepted hatred for her son. She would not have allowed him to grow up like Severus had grown up.
But Lily had been such an actress. She’d been so disappointed when Hogwarts didn’t even have a drama club.
She would have loved Harry the Spy.
So Severus Snape decided, looking into Lily’s eyes in an emaciated James’s face, that Harry wouldn’t be a spy for Dumbledore. Harry wouldn’t be a Death Eater. Harry would be a child. A child with all the information Severus could stuff into his brain. A child with the ability to make this choice himself.
A child on his own side.