4

CHAPTER FOUR:

Harry awoke slowly, feeling better than he had in... longer than he cared to remember. Looking around blearily, he found himself in an unfamiliar room - which wasn't unusual, if he was honest - that had only the bed he lay in, a wooden chair, and a desk strewed with parchment and potion vials. Harry frowned slightly: The last of their potions had run out over three months before, so where had the potions come from? He vaguely remembered drinking them, actually...

Then it all came back to him with a crash, and he lunged upright in bed. He was in the past. He was in the Room of Requirement. Everyone was still alive.

And Harry broke down.

Even when he had first seen Hogwarts, whole and unblemished, he had managed to keep a shred of control and not let his grief overcome him, holding on to his control by a fine thread. Now, alone in the depths of Hogwarts, he felt no need to hide his heartbreak, and he cried his heart out, huge sobs wracking his body as he had never permitted before. There had never been time before, never been time to mourn the Weasleys, who had always treated him like a son, no time to mourn Snape when he had been so cruelly ripped from them, no time to mourn Susan or Daphne or Dean or Ginny or Teddy or... the list just went on and on, Harry finally crying for all the people he had lost.

Then a hysterical laugh bubbled from his lips. "What would you think if you saw me now, Severus?" he asked of the ceiling, tears blurring his vision. "You, who were always so strong, who never let anyone see your feelings, what would you think of me breaking down and crying like a baby?" A sob wracked his slight frame. "I never got to mourn you, you know. You were always there for me, and when I found you in Malfoy Manor there wasn't even time to bury the body," he choked out. "You were gone, and I had to assume control of the Order on my own. I had never realized how much I had relied on you before then, how crucial you were to our effort, how much you were respected by the members." A hiccough interrupted his sobs as he closed his eyes. "I didn't mean to fail you all. I didn't mean for you to be tortured to death, or for you to be decapitated on the battlefield, for you to bleed to death next to the severed head of your lover, or for you, my love, to be the first victim of that terrible curse," he said, his heartbreak audible in his voice as he thought of the people closest to him, the ones he had failed the most. Tears ran down his cheeks, and it was a heartrending sight: That of a young man sitting between crumpled sheets, face tipped up to the ceiling, wearing an expression that no one of that age should have to bear. As he cried he brokenly listed gruesome deaths, apologizing to each person in turn for being unable to prevent it but never mentioning their names. The recital was terrible enough without them, and Harry held each person in his mind as he listed their death, picturing them both as they were when they were vibrant with life and when they had been rendered to corpses, their eyes empty and without life. Harry laughed at the thought, an edge of hysteria clearly noticeable. "Except for you, Colin," he sobbed, "You had no lifeless eyes to stare at me with - they gouged them out and left them on the floor beside you."

With that he fell silent, staring at the ceiling as he saw before his eyes events that had happened in his past, but that hadn't happened yet in this time. "It won't happen this time," he spoke, and his voice was full of conviction even through the tears. "I'll kill them all, and they can toss me into Azkaban afterwards for being a mass murderer." Harry laughed shakily. "Like I'm not one already anyway." He paused. "I'll have to kill Greyback all over again," he said in a tone of mild irritation, only occasional light sobs puncturing his sentences now. A feral grin split his face, and combined with the tears he looked truly insane in that moment. "I already got Malfoy for you, Susan," he said, and his voice was heavy with terrible justice. The grin lasted only a moment before Harry took a shaky breath in, getting himself under control once more.

"Alright, Harry," he told himself, scrubbing at his face. "That's quite enough. You'll be no help to anyone if you let yourself become unstable." With that he pushed aside the sheets and stood, a determined look on his face. Facing the middle of the room, he spoke clearly, "Hogwarts, I would ask you for a bath and a change of clothes," not blinking when a full bathtub materialized in the center of the small room, soap and other essentials lined up on the rim and a set of folded clothes resting on the floor along with a large towel. "I thank you, fair Lady," Harry acknowledged, bowing once to the room. They had discovered during some hard times that the Room of Requirement was capable of conjuring anything needed, pulling it from other places as necessary. Food, which had been the most important to them at the time, had come directly from the Hogwarts kitchens, and they had assumed that beds and other necessities came from some of the many unused rooms in Hogwarts.

Harry stripped and sank into the bathtub, groaning at the feeling of hot water hitting his various cuts and injuries. The potions had done him a world of good, but the open cuts stung terribly.

"How long has it been since I last washed?" Harry wondered quietly. It had been a hard time, towards the end, when Voldemort had somehow managed to cut off all their water and killed most of the house elves. They had still been capable of using Aguamenti to wash, of course, but trying to fill a bathtub with that spell took more out of a wizard than was safe in those times.

Sighing, Harry relaxed into the bath, shutting his eyes and trying to put himself in the mindset of the time he found himself in. It was towards the beginning of his fifth year; there had been Quirrell, the basilisk, Sirius' escape from Azkaban, and last year the Triwizard Tournament. Harry grimaced - Cedric had died. Cedric had been the first person for whose death Harry had felt responsible. He felt less so now that he realized that without Dumbledore's influence he most likely wouldn't have offered to share the trophy and Cedric wouldn't have died.

Shaking his head, he turned his mind to the present once more. By February 1996 Harry had been having visions of Voldemort's doings, and... Harry grimaced. Those terrible Occlumency lessons with Snape. Years later Severus had apologized to him for those - well, as much of an apology as any Slytherin would give - and now Harry knew that most of the trouble had been Dumbledore's spells on Snape and not the Potions Master himself. But the current Harry didn't know that.

Harry grimaced again. He wanted to go right up and remove all the spells from his younger counterpart, but he had to get in Dumbledore's good graces first, and he was afraid that if the old man tried to cast those spells on him once more he would murder him then and there.

I'll cross that bridge when I reach it, he decided. For now, I need to meet Severus and discuss the future with him...