Seek

Harry Potter was wishing for his glasses, cursing the dust that made his contacts torture. Every step through the dingy house in Spinner's End raised another great cloud of the stuff, and it had the distinct acrid scent of a potions workroom, not to mention the same ability to shorten his temper every moment he was exposed to it.

But Harry Potter paid his debts.

---

"Don't call me coward." Severus Snape's whispering breath was drifting past Harry's right ear, and he was surprised that it smelled only vaguely sweet. He knew his own was rank with the days of secret, frenzied travel that left no time for the niceties of oral hygiene.

Snape was supporting most of Harry's weight with an arm about the waist, half carrying the young man whose head still spun with the potion he had drunk outside the walls of the crumbling manor only minutes before. It had pushed him deep within himself, submerged the greater parts of his conciousness, rather like the nights he had spent coiled around empty bottles by the fleeting warmth of Ron's poorly lit witchfires.

Snape navigated the two of them past the last of the wards, Harry felt it's tingle slip over his skin, and propped the Gryffindor at the base of a decaying holly tree whose bark pricked at Harry's back through his dragon hide gambeson and the invisibility cloak that covered them both.

"When it's done, Potter, I'll be gone. If Dumbledor sussed that out, he never told me. When the Dark Lord is gone, many of us will fade. The mark will kill us. The old faithful will go quickly, initiates more slowly." Harry blinked at Snape, desperate for the antidote that would let him make sense of the older man's urgent murmurings. "Don't forget me. Speak for me. Remember what I've done." The ex-professor was struggling to speak past the growing knot in his throat. "If there is grace left with you, Potter, go to Spinner's End, find the secrets I've laid to rest. Addo pacis."

The tiny vial was warm when Snape shoved it half into Harry's mouth and Harry realized abstractedly that it must have been the heat of Snape's body that made it so. He made no move to spit it out, even so, waiting while the sweet taste of the antidote within dripped down his throat like wine pressed from the fruit of hope.

When Harry remembered himself moments later Snape had already vanished into the gloom.

Harry would never see him alive again.

---

Snape had lived a sterile, spartan life. It was reflected in every blank wall, every bare surface of the man's home. The passage behind the bookcase had been easy to spot for it's lever was a false and much worn volume of poetry shelved in the midst of twelve alphabetized treatises on the use of dog's blood in potions.

Puzzling out the incantation to enter Snape's bedroom had been more difficult, Harry had needed to light a fire in the disused grate downstairs and call on Hermione to help decipher the runes carved across the sill.

His final goal was astonishingly simple to spot.

Harry crossed the room he guessed Snape had not seen more than once in the year after he killed Dumbledore and before he admitted Harry to Voldemort's sanctuary, and picked up the slender gray book from the nightstand. The diary of Severus Snape.

The place he laid his secrets to rest.