HP&THBP 1.6180339887...Ch.4

Title: HP&THBP 1.6180339887...

Genre: Fan Fiction, Spiritual/Drama

Current Chapter: 4 - Heirlooms

Chapter Word Count: 2,698

Total Story Word Count: 10,809

Summary: Two years after the Final Battle, Harry Potter receives an unexpected and rather unwanted letter amidst his already tumultuous life. He embarks upon a new quest, this time a more deeply interpersonal one as he blazes a trail down what's left of Severus Snape's memory lane. Is he truly ready for his parents', or more accurately, Severus Snape's history?

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IV

Heirlooms

SHOCK was what Harry felt when he read that sentence in Snape’s new letter to him.

Harry Potter, I also have memories from both your parents.

But, how?! Harry wondered, his mouth hanging open.

The letter didn’t say and there wasn’t too much to the letter after the shocking bit, just detailed instructions on how to mix the catalyst to view the memories, which sounded suspiciously like complicated Potions brewing to Harry.  

After staring at the letter with the glow of his wand for some indeterminate amount of time, he had finally lit one of the two candle-filled lamps in the sitting room and had continued to sit staring off for another indefinite length of time.  

This is mental!  This has to be some cruel joke!  A very elaborate cruel joke, mind you.

Harry’s mind kept coming back to how.  How had Snape set this up?  How had Snape gotten a hold of memories from Harry’s parents, who were dead long before Snape died?  How, how, how?

It just couldn’t be possible...

...but Harry had enough experience with Dark Magic to know that with enough sheer determined willpower, nearly anything could be done.  So, in his heart, he both mistrusted yet explicitly trusted this magic, this...offering.  

Eventually Harry got up and busied himself with conjuring some lit candles, charming the kitchen moderately clean and making himself a sandwich from his provisions, a deep frown creasing his forehead.  He wondered all the while if this is what he meant when he had wished to know more of his parents.  A whisper in his head, Be careful what you wish for.

Tuning out any more cautionary disembodied voices, he finished his sandwich.

Harry decided to attempt to tackle the will first and foremost, but opening up the scroll onto the table to find even more tiny, cramped writing just filled Harry with a sense of overwhelming tediousness that he felt his nerves were really not in the mood for.  Restless, Harry decided to do what he did best - explore.

The kitchen was the kitchen - little tiny counter space and stove with an old refrigerator that Harry was leary to open up.  There seemed to be a water closet, a small pantry, and a door that led to the back and side alley of the house.  Not much to see in the kitchen.  

Harry charmed clean a bit of the sitting room before going on to explore it.  Upon further examination of the bookshelves, which were stuffed with old, leather-bound copies of both Muggle and Magical tomes, he found that there were two hidden doors.  One that was to the right of the tiny brick fireplace and across from the front door seemed to lead down into what Harry presumed was the basement.  The other door, which was located again behind a bookcase (really it was the door modified to look like/be a part of the bookcase) and to the right of the front door, perpendicular to the basement door, led upstairs to the second story.

Two different staircases to take - above first or below?

Harry really didn’t care what was in the basement at this point in time; the newest letter had said that the memories were stored in the crawl-space, which had to be upstairs, due to the very nature of crawl-spaces.  

As the electricity did not work, he lit his wand again and ascended the dark stairwell, each step eliciting a creak! as he trod on it.  The air was thick, musty with dust and cobwebs, which he brushed aside as he came to stand upon the landing.  Harry held his wand aloft - he was in a short, narrow hallway and there seemed to be three doors to his right and a single window to his left, which was shuttered and had thick curtains drawn over it, like the rest of the windows downstairs.  It felt like it was the middle of the night, what with it being so dark inside, but Harry was sure it was just nearing evening.  He chanced a peek outside, struggling with the stuck shutters briefly, and, sure enough, the sun was beginning to set.  He closed up the shutters and curtains and turned around to face the three doors.  Harry pointed his wand at the middle door.  “Alohomora!”

All three doors unlocked themselves.  Another incantation was spoken and the doors flung themselves open.  Harry waited for the disturbed dust to settle, and for more spiders to scurry into a safe nook or cranny, before peering inside the middle doorway.

That one was just another water closet, however.  Harry walked down the hallway to the last door and stepped inside.  This room seemed to be just a spare room for storing things - Harry’s wand light illuminated an old school trunk, a bookshelf with more stacks of old textbooks and notebooks, a glass case full of odd, most likely dark magic objects, and other rather mundane things like spare cauldrons and vials on one side of the room.  Most notable, however, was the wall covered with what looked like Muggle LPs - and quite a number of them, too!  There were almost as many records as there were books downstairs!  Harry reckoned that this room used to be Snape’s old room when he was young.  He looked at the ceiling, around the perimeter of the room, managing to levitate the massive collection of records for the briefest of moments, and inside the tiny closet for a crawl-space entrance but to no avail.

Back in the hallway, he shined his light at the ceiling in case he had missed any obvious signs of there being an attic, but the ceiling, rather like the walls, was bare.  

There was only the room right next to the stairwell to check now.  

This room was the largest of the three, obviously being the master bedroom.  It was quite sparse in its furnishings, having only a queen-sized bed and night-table next to it to his right, a simple dresser next to the closet on his left, and a tarnished silver, freestanding full-length mirror.  Harry got to work scouring for the crawl-space.  There was nothing on the ceiling nor behind the dresser or bed; that just left the closet.

Harry opened up the little door adjacent to the door that led out to the hallway and was surprised how large the thin closet was; it ran the whole length of the left wall.  He could see the end of the closet only because there wasn’t much in it, just a few black robes of varying thread-bareness, a couple of boots, a sparse collection of simple Muggle button-downs and slacks.  Harry entered the walk-in closet and made his way to the very back of it where he could see a tiny little door that reminded him of Kreacher’s hole-in-the wall cupboard door back at Grimmauld Place.  

Two little brass hook-latches kept the door in place and when Harry placed his hands on it, a little jolt shot up his arm that felt like the ghost of the shock you’d get from sticking your fingers in a wall socket and an image of a circle with strange inscriptions flashed briefly in his mind; this was remnants of powerful Dark Magic.  There was no denying it as he did this sort of thing for a living now (though the electric feeling was typical, the image that flashed in his mind was not).  Nonplussed, he opened it up and a dankly warm and musty smell wafted into his nose.  The air was humid and it was pitch dark, though the light from the tip of his wand illuminated a narrow stretch of raftered and insulated gnome-sized hall.  Harry could see a lump at the end of the stretch.  He made his way towards it.

He tread lightly, as the floorboards were creaky and felt thin and he was sure he was above the sitting room down below.  The cotton-candy pink insulation was decrepit and, like the rest of the house, full of dust.  Harry was glad he never suffered from allergies.  He reached the lump at the end of the crawl-space and, sure enough, it was a rickety old chest with a big iron padlock on it.  

Alohomora didn’t work.

Harry attempted a couple of other unlocking charms and spells of varying complexity, but nothing worked.

What did I miss?!  I read all his bloody instructions!  Harry racked his brain.  

He suddenly jumped up and hit his head on the low ceiling.  After a moment in which the stars he was seeing dissipated, he scrambled back through the narrow space, back into the bedroom and into the hallway, and back downstairs into the kitchen.

There was something in the envelope that the first letter came in - something more weighted than a sheet of parchment, something he hadn’t bothered to look at yet.

Sure enough, it was another old skeleton key, and it was made of heavy iron. 

Even though it made him quite dizzy, Harry Apparated into the crawl space to shave time.  

The key fit into the lock smoothly and snugly but there was the faintest electric-like tickle through his hand and up his arm that Harry again associated with disabled, but a fragmented leftover of Dark Magic -  he proceeded with a bit more caution.  The locked clicked open and very gingerly, Harry removed it and carefully opened the lid of the ancient school trunk.

E. Prince was embossed on the inside of the lid in faded and flaky goldleaf.  Harry felt very small - like when he used to read about pirates at his school library when he lived with the Dursleys and he would imagine himself digging up and opening forgotten chests of loot.  He shown his wand-light over the open trunk.  Inside, there were no gold or jewels, but what appeared to be treasures of sorts to the late Severus Snape: an old wizarding photograph album, various knick-knacks of tarnished metals, a wand, some books in a language Harry could not identify, two stacks of what appeared to be letters held together with twine, a dark purple velvet satchel with something that clinked and rattled inside it, as well as another photograph album which seemed to hold Muggle pictures.  At the very bottom of the trunk were two boxes - one had an elaborate crest on it in faded silver filigree and inside were old pieces of jewelry.  The last, which he had saved, knowing what it must contain, was in fact addressed to him with a tiny bit of parchment attached with Spello-tape.  

Harry’s heart began to beat hard against his ribcage.  Setting his box gently aside, he packed up the contents of the trunk and closed and locked the lid (not minding the little electric jolt it gave him as he did so).  He then de-lit his wand and Apparated back into the sitting room with the box full of memories.

His breathing was fast, and not just because of the instantaneous movement from crawl-space to the downstairs.  He sat himself down on the threadbare sofa and set the box on his lap.  He opened it up and gasped.

There were more vials than he had anticipated!  He counted twelve in total and they were labeled, with miniscule spidery writing, as such: Severus, Lily, James, Lily, Severus, James, S/L, James, Lily, Severus, J/L, Severus.  Harry’s fingers brushed lightly over the one labeled J/L and a couple of the others with his parents’ names on them and felt light-headed.  He repeated the names under his breath so many times that they began to lose their meaning - just seeing his father’s first name in the writing he associated with both The Prince and Snape gave him an odd, tight feeling in his chest.  

Why go to such lengths...?  Why do all this for...for me?  Harry couldn’t fathom any reason for Snape to do such a thing.  

For some reason, Snape’s ward-unlocking spell came unbidden into his mind, “Amor et melle et felle est fecundissimus.”  Harry again wondered what it meant.  He wished he had an owl so that he could send Hermione a letter and ask her for the phrase’s meaning.  Instead he tucked the bit of information away in his brain for later.  

He really wanted to get right to work brewing this “catalyst”, but he knew himself well enough that if he tried to brew a very complicated (and most likely Dark) potion as his nerves were wobbly and as night was approaching, that he would not get very far because he’d botch it somehow.  Harry decided to take a look down in the basement - he had a feeling that most of the equipment and ingredients he would need would be down there, if he was lucky; he could set up for brewing tonight and get right to work first thing in the morning.  

Taking the box of vials with him, Harry strode over to the door to his left, whispered, “Lumos,” and descended into the basement.

The crooked, wooden stairs wobbled their way towards a wall and deposited him facing a rather large collection of bottles lying on their sides with their tops pointed out to him.  He pulled a few out at random and found that it was a wine collection.  

“All these bloody heirloom collections.  As if I didn’t just get through with Grimmauld Place’s heirlooms.  At least these ones came with directions.”  He recalled Sirius’ will - curt with not much but a “And Harry gets everything.” with the word “everything” underlined twice) - and couldn’t help contrast it with Snape’s essay up above on the kitchen table.  Another memory surfaced within him in quick succession, this one not his own, but he hazily glimpsed the Great Hall at Hogwarts with students taking their Defense Against the Dark Arts O.W.L.s, one spidery dark-haired boy with a densely written lengthy essay, the other dark-haired fair-looking boy leaning haphazardly back in his chair; old habits died hard Harry supposed. 

He turned his attention to the wall to his right and sure enough it had a thin, but tall wooden door mounted in it’s middle.  He pointed his wand at it and spoke.  Two things happened at once - he heard two locks open themselves, one in the door handle and what sounded like a chain unhooking, and there was again a flash of some strange complicated sigil in his mind that looked similar to the one he had “seen” at the entrance to the crawl-space.  He stood for a moment getting his bearings as this after-effect rattled him more than he would have liked, then he pushed the door open.  

Harry immediately saw the back wall first; the soft blue glow of the light from his wand glinted off of rows and rows of vials and jars on shelves that took up the whole back wall.  Creepy was one word to describe it, though it wasn’t wholly unfamiliar as it quite resembled Snape’s old classroom.  He looked in front of him and was pleased to find a candelabra.  He lit it, set the box of memories next to it, and set to work looking for a cauldron, scales, and other various items for brewing potions.

Trust Snape to keep a whole, ready-to-go Potions Lab in his basement, Harry thought - all the hardware he could possibly need was in the room and in no time at all he had quite the set-up on the long, sturdy wooden table in the middle of the room.  Satisfied with his work, he blew out the candles and was about ready to close the door behind him when he paused for a moment.  He turned back around and brought the box of memories with him back into the sitting room.

Harry dragged the box around with him as he constructed and consumed another sandwich, made up a small bed on the couch, and stared at the box with his name still Spello-taped to it, that he had placed directly in front his head on the little low coffee-table, until he fell asleep.