Chapter One

A man and a boy, shouting at each other, while another, much older man watches:

"You're not calming yourself enough, Potter!" the man shouts, his shoulder-length black hair clasping his hollow cheeks like wings.

"Then try not screaming at me!" the boy replies hotly, his own black hair mussed and untidy.

"The whole point of this is for you to learn how to guard your mind in adverse conditions, Potter!"

The old man in the corner cleared his throat. He was present precisely because he was afraid this sort of thing would be happening, as it had in the previous lessons that had occurred without his presence. "And it would be helpful for you, Severus Snape, if you could put aside your hatred and calm yourself for just a few minutes."

"'Calm myself'?" A muscle twitches in the black-haired man's left cheek.

"Yes, Severus," replied the old man, gently but firmly. "You're about forty seconds away from having a major stroke."

If it had been anyone else – even the black-haired man's own mother – he would have probably uttered some cutting remark. But one did not make cutting remarks to Albus Dumbledore.

So, instead, the black-haired man nodded, closed his eyes, and took several long, deep breaths. Perhaps by the time he opened them again...

He didn't realize that Harry Potter, having had dozens of embarrassing snippets of his life replayed before their eyes, would be smarting for revenge.

"Legilimens!" came the cry, from a teenaged throat raw and hoarse from an hour of shouting and spell-casting. And Potter's vengeful, focused mind forced its way into Snape's unguarded one.

Whatever calmness Severus Snape may have achieved was swept away in that instant. He felt rage, and a shame at having been caught unawares – how dare that brat do this to him!

Meanwhile, Harry reveled in the sensation of access to Snape's twisty old mind. At last, at last he'd managed to score a point off the greasy bastard! He knew he would pay for it later, but he would press on while he could – harder – harder –

Images flashed through Harry's mind at lightning speed. A black-haired, black-eyed toddler watching happily as his mother pulled down a set of Gobstones from a battered bookshelf. The Dark Lord praising a teenaged Snape as the boy stared down dully at the newly-made mark on his arm. Lily Evans helping Snape with a Charms essay. Sirius Black stomping on a present Snape's mother had sent him...

The pressing suddenly got more difficult. Snape had recovered from his surprise and was now fighting Harry's intrusion with every ounce of power he had. But Harry didn't give up; he was in now, he knew he could do it, he could press hard and –

There was the sensation of something snapping. Or maybe it was like a boulder that had gone from sudden heat to sudden coldness and then back again, cracking under the strain. Whatever it was, it had the feel of a physical change, rather than a mental one.

And then a new set of images started appearing, bursting from Snape's brain with such force that Harry knew that Dumbledore could see them too:

The friendly, weather-worn face of a man, framed by a sky that was bluer than blue, looking down with concern at the young, black-haired boy lying on his back in the middle of a farm field. That same boy in a hayloft, stripped to a pair of jeans, getting his very first kiss from a pretty girl. The weatherbeaten man showing him how to drive a Muggle tractor. A motherly woman putting him to bed with a kiss on his forehead.

And then, blackness.

Harry Potter broke the connection just in time to see Dumbledore moving to Levitate Severus Snape's unconscious body before it hit the stone floor.

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Two persons watching a third person as he was lowered, slowly and carefully, on top of a nondescript bed-quilt covering a four-poster bed.

"What happened, Professor?" asked Harry, once Dumbledore had finished setting down the still-unconscious Snape.

"That, I do not know for certain. But I am willing to hazard a guess or two." He turned towards Harry, his blue eyes piercing behind the gold-rimmed spectacles. "But first, you must tell me: Why did you attack him, Harry?"

"I didn't mean –" Harry had started to say. But, as he looked into the headmaster's sharp, unwavering gaze, he knew better than to finish that particular sentence.

"I was being stupid," he said instead, hanging his head. "I was so angry at him for – for always setting me up to fail in this, and in everything else over the past five years." He looked back up into Dumbledore's eyes. "I wanted, just once, to prove to him that I could do it, that I could learn to read his mind, and get a bit of my own back, despite his trying to sabotage me all the time."

"I see." Dumbledore let out a sigh.

Harry hung his head again. He couldn't bear to look Dumbledore in the face any more, to see the gentle reproach that was far less than what Harry knew he deserved at this point. He took a small wooden chair and pulled it next to Snape's bed, then sat down on it, all the while keeping his eyes on Snape's twitching, yet unaware, body.

"I will summon Madam Pomfrey," Dumbledore said quietly.

The headmaster turned on his heel and left the room. Harry found himself turning his head to stare at the place where Dumbledore had been standing.

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Madam Pomfrey put away her wand. There was a faint glow, the sort of glow resulting from spells used to diagnose illness, surrounding Professor Snape's body, but it was already fading. "I've heard about this sort of thing, Professor, but I've never seen it until now."

"The Hackett case?"

"Yes."

"I thought as much." Dumbledore took off his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his long, blade-like nose. He turned towards the man in the bed, and the boy sitting at beside, and his eyes blinked as their gaze lingered on the man's still form occupying a bed in the hospital wing. He sighed, and slowly replaced his spectacles.

"So," Dumbledore continued, "sometime in his early youth – after he came to Hogwarts, but before he took the Dark Mark – something occurred that caused someone else to want to wipe it from his memory." He paused, and took a deep breath. "Except that as is the case with most Memory Charms, they didn't actually wipe it, they merely suppressed it."

"Exactly, sir."

Harry looked up at Poppy and Dumbledore, his eyes wide with surprise. "He was hit with a Memory Charm, Professor?"

"He was indeed, Harry. And the caster was in all likelihood employed by the Ministry of Magic."

It seemed to Harry that the room had suddenly got rather chilly. "How do you know?" he whispered.

Dumbledore's mouth tightened in the way that it did only when he was extremely angry. "Because of the technique," he said, his voice suddenly hard and bitter, "and the determination to extirpate a whole swath of Severus' life. Only a trained Ministry Obliviator would be that thoroughgoing without actually causing much in the way of organic damage – much, that is, by Ministry standards."

He drew a large breath and held it for some time, then exhaled it slowly, sending the wisps of his white beard flying in a way that, at any other time and in any other place, would have been extremely funny. "I see the signs all too clearly, now. At the start of his fourth year, Severus seemed to be out of sorts, his schoolwork not up to his usual high standard. I put it down to aftereffects from the loss of his parents in the year just past, and his having to adjust to life with his aunt. I should have known better."

Harry turned to look at Snape, then back at Dumbledore and Poppy. "So... those last images we saw..."

"Those had been suppressed by the Memory Charm, yes."

Harry called up in his head his memories of what he had seen of those suppressed memories of Snape's. "But sir," he said, frowning, "why would anyone want to suppress those memories? You saw them, you know that they weren't bad memories..."

Dumbledore held up his hand in a gesture of negation. "Sadly enough, Harry, I suspect that it's precisely because they weren't bad memories."

Harry's frown deepened. "But why?"

Dumbledore let out yet another loud sigh before he answered.

"In all likelihood -- because his aunt had requested it."

"Requested it!" Harry whispered.

"Yes, Harry. She had a hatred of all things Muggle and she would not have abided the notion that her nephew, her ward, would have had happy memories pertaining to Muggles and their existence." He looked over at Snape, who had started murmuring things as he slowly writhed and twitched in the bed. "And thus she would have wanted them removed, regardless of the cost to her nephew. She no doubt even rationalized it as doing him a favor."

"That's – that's horrible," Harry said.

"Yes, it is horrible," agreed Madam Pomfrey sadly. "But now – now he has them back. The problem is, he got them back all at once."

"Why is that a problem?"

"It was a shock to his system. It's overloaded his brain, Harry. It will take some time for him to get himself sorted again – if he can."

Harry felt as if he'd been kicked in the stomach. Snape was damaged, maybe dying – and it was all his fault. He felt the strong urge to vomit, but dug his fingernails into his palms so the pain would distract his gut from carrying out that urge right then and there.

"Is there anything we can do to help him?" Harry asked in a small voice, when at last he felt able to open his mouth without puking.

"We can watch over him, and feed him light broth and other liquids on occasion," replied Madam Pomfrey. "There will be periods when his coma will lighten, and he will verge on being fully awake. But those won't last long. However, he can take nourishment during those times. If all goes well, he'll come out of it in a few days."

"If all goes well," repeated Harry dully.

"If all goes well," agreed Dumbledore, but in a somewhat more cheerful tone than Harry. "In the meantime," he said, "it might help us if we were to take those memories of his that we witnessed and examine them in the Pensieve. I am most curious as to how he got them in the first place."

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Madam Pomfrey eased her ample form into a chair at the table where Dumbledore and Harry were sitting. "Did you find anything?" she said, stifling a slight yawn as she glanced over at Snape lying motionless, for now, in his bed.

"We did indeed," replied Dumbledore, lightly brushing his beard with his fingers, as his stint in the Pensieve had disarrayed it somewhat. "It seems we are dealing with the two-month period between the end of his third year, and the beginning of his fourth."

"Ah. And what happened in that time?"

Dumbledore paused before answering. Then, he turned his thin, hollow-cheeked face towards Madam Pomfrey. "One moment, he was on the platform of King's Cross, going to meet his aunt. The next moment, he found himself in the middle of what appears to be a soybean field four thousand miles away from King's Cross."

Madam Pomfrey blinked in surprise. "What! He was Transported!"

"Yes, Transported," affirmed Dumbledore.

"How in the name of Merlin – did someone do this to him deliberately?"

Dumbledore leaned forward, and his face looked ashen in the dim torchlight of Snape's bedroom. He looked very old, and frail, and looking at him, Harry suddenly was reminded that even the greatest wizard of modern times was, after all, mortal and human.

"I don't know if the Transporting was deliberate, but the gang of wizards that threw the hexes at him certainly intended to cause him harm – and behind his back, too."

"Oh, my stars and garters! How despicable!"

"Indeed it was, Madam Pomfrey. I would have moved to punish the malefactors, had I known about this at the time."

"You think that his aunt found him before the start of the next school year, sir?" Harry said, working to suppress his own yawn; they had both been up the better part of the night poring over Snape's rescued memories.

"She must have done so, as he was present for the start-of-term feast in the Great Hall. We won't know the exact date until we've examined all of the memories. But that will take a great deal of time, and the memories exploded into his conscious – and ours – in no particular order. It's rather like putting together a jigsaw puzzle." He looked over at the figure of the Potions master, finally still and quiet in what looked to be authentic sleep, and then yawned himself. "And we are all in need of our beds. There's not much more we can do for him at the moment. The best we can do for him right now is to get our rest, so we can better help him when he finally does awaken."

"I suppose so."

Harry got up from his chair, yawning and stretching until his back and neck cracked. Then he let Dumbledore guide him out of Snape's chambers, back to Gryffindor tower.

"What do you suppose he's thinking about now?" Harry said as they walked up the stairs leading out of the dungeon.

Dumbledore thought a moment, his eyes seeming to go slightly vacant even as his legs kept propelling him up the stone staircase with surprising agility for a wizard of his age. "I'd say that he's doing much the same thing we are, Harry: Trying to figure out where it all began..."