And the terrible tension flooded back into the room like water pressurized at the bottom of the ocean.
Harry couldn't breathe.
"I didn't know," Harry whispered. "I'm s-"
"No," said Severus. Just that one word.
Harry stood there in silence, his mind frantically searching for options. Severus stood between him and the window, which was a real pity, because a fall from that height wouldn't kill a wizard.
"Your books betrayed you, Potter," said Severus, still in that voice stretched tight by a million tons of pull. "They did not tell you the one thing you needed to know. You cannot learn from stories what it is like to lose the one you love. That is something you could never understand without feeling it yourself."
"My father," Harry whispered. It was his best guess, the one thing that might save him. "My father tried to protect you from the bullies."
A ghastly smile stretched across Severus's face, and the man moved toward Harry.
And past him.
"Goodbye, Potter," said Severus, not looking back on his way out. "We shall have little to say to each other from today on."
And at the corner, the man stopped, and without turning, spoke one final time.
"Your father was the bully," said Severus Snape, "and what your mother saw in him was something I never did understand until this day."
He left.
Harry turned and walked toward the window. His shaking hands went onto the ledge.
Harry stared out at the clouds and the light drizzle for a while. The window looked out on the east grounds, and it was afternoon, so if the sun was visible through the clouds at all, Harry couldn't see it.
His hands had stopped shaking, but there was a tight feeling in Harry's chest, like it was being compressed by metal bands.
So his father had been a bully.
And his mother had been shallow.
Maybe they'd grown up later. Good people like Professor McGonagall did seem to think the world of them, and it might not be
Of course, that was scant consolation when you were eleven and about to turn into a teenager, and wondering what sort of teenager you might become.
So very terrible.
So very sad.
Such an awful life Harry led.
Learning that his genetic parents hadn't been perfect, why, he ought to spend awhile moping about that, feeling sorry for himself.
Maybe he could complain to Lesath Lestrange.
Harry had read about Dementors. Cold and darkness surrounded them, and fear, they sucked away all your happy thoughts and in that absence all your worst memories rose to the surface.
He could imagine himself in Lesath's shoes, knowing that his parents were in Azkaban for life, that place from which no one had ever escaped.
And Lesath would be imagining himself in his mother's place, in the cold and the darkness and the fear, alone with all of her worst memories, even in her dreams, every second of every day.
For an instant Harry imagined his own Mum and Dad in Azkaban with the Dementors sucking out their life, draining away the happy memories of their love for him. Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shutdown and told him never to imagine that again.
Was it right to do that to anyone, even the second most evil person in the world?
And unless the wizarding justice system was as perfect as their prisons - and that sounded rather improbable, all things considered - somewhere in Azkaban was a person who was entirely innocent, and probably more than one.
There was a burning sensation in Harry's throat, and moisture gathering in his eyes, and he wanted to teleport all of Azkaban's prisoners to safety and call down fire from the sky and blast that terrible place down to bedrock. But he couldn't, because he wasn't God.
And Harry remembered what Professor Quirrell had said beneath the starlight:
Right now this flawed world seemed unusually hateful.
