Ride the lighting

Part 15

Snape floated Harry all the way to the large stone Gargoyle and once he had whispered the password, up the stairs and into the headmaster's office.

He locked and warded the door then turned to Harry, "Right Potter, I am going to release you now and if you so much as try to escape this room before I am finished with you I will hand you over to the dark lord myself."

He whispered "Finite Incantatem" and Harry fell to the floor.

"I thought you had just revealed you were on our side, what the hell did you drag me away from that fight for? What is so damned important?!"

"Potter shut up!" Snape turned to his desk and Harry noted for the first time since entering the room that Professor Dumbledore's Pensieve was sitting on it.

"It's time you knew the truth Potter, whether you like it or not."

"What truth, what are you talking about you greasy bat, let me out of this room now!" Harry yelled.

"SHUT UP" Snape shouted, before putting his wand to his temple and pulling a silver string of memory and placing it in the pensieve, then another and another.

"Watch, now!"

Harry rolled his eyes, gripped his wand ready encase this was a trap as he had thought and put his head into the pensieve.

He fell straight into the exact room he had just left, only instead of Professor Snape standing at the headmaster's desk, it was Dumbledore.

"You promised me. You promised me she would be safe! I should never have trusted you!"

Harry's head turned in time to see Severus Snape on his knees, with tears spilling down his cheeks.

"Lily and James trusted the wrong person. They were betrayed. No one had any idea that the dark lord would get to them like that. Severus I'm sorry," Dumbledore soothed, coming around his desk and putting his hand on Snape's shoulder.

Harry had just enough time to see Snape shrugging Dumbledore away and tearing from the room before he fell from that memory and into the next one.

He landed and looked around, seeing a thatched cottage with half the roof and a third of the house blown away.

He saw a caped and hooded figure walking apprehensively towards the gate and enter the small front garden, and into the house as the door was hanging off its hinges.

Harry followed the figure up the stairs and gasped as he watched the figure remove his hood to reveal Snape. His face was crumpled in pain. He dropped to his knees and picked up the lifeless body of Harry's mother Lily as a baby Harry looked on crying from his crib.

He fell from that memory straight into another, in the halls of Hogwarts. A young Severus Snape walking with a girl with green eyes and red hair. She was smiling and listening to something Severus was saying.

He fell and fell and fell. Each memory showing Harry that the man he had hated for so long had loved his mother, loved her to the point that he risked his own life to try and save her, even though she had loved and married another.

Then the scene completely changed, back in the headmaster's office with Dumbledore. Snape was kneeling next to Dumbledore's chair with his wand raised over Dumbledore's dead looking hand.

"Why did you try and wear it? What could you possibly have hoped to gain?" Severus was quietly reprimanding the old headmaster.

"It was a simple mistake Severus. How long?" Dumbledore asked, his voice showed tiredness and pain that Harry had only seen one other time, in the cave with the locket.