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WHO: James Potter and Severus Snape.
WHERE: Casa de Snape, I guess?
WHEN: Sometime Wednesday afternoon.
WARNINGS: ...James and Snape.
SUMMARY: The guys discuss Harry. They may manage to be non-violent. Watch and find out!
FORMAT: MORE WORDS.

It was a very odd thing, to be a 21 year old with an 11 year old son in the City. It was even odder to have one's wife sent home just after the son arrived. Whenever James had pictured 11 year old Harry and himself, it had been absolutely nothing like this. Then again, he would have had the experience of eleven years of fatherhood by that point, of course. Here, he is at a loss. There are people that know Harry, of course, but they know him as older -- and Remus and Sirius have both gone home, too. So as much as he dislikes it, he must ask the one person who is old enough (and, perhaps, truthful enough when it suits him) to deal with Harry as an adult should.

So here he is, at Severus Snape's door one day after work. He never thought he would be here willingly -- aside from Order work, such as it was. But desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures.

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The wards chime when he arrives. Snape is bewildered-- he has only been back to himself for a day or so, with this strange porting in, porting our business. A day to recover from what had been a brief and unpleasant return to the moment of his death, only to come back and find his cat was irritated that the box was full, his meat-eating plant was ravenous, and apparently, there'd been a small war in his absence.

Maybe he should be glad he'd missed the last couple of weeks, all things considered.

But he comes downstairs to find that the strangest thing of all is on his doorstep. All he can say, once he opens it is very simple, and very Snape:

"Potter. Get in before someone sees you." And with that, he steps past to let the man in and shuts the door securely behind him. "You had the good sense to hide your trail, I assume?"

"Of course I did," James replies, a tad offended that Snape would even bother to ask. Every auror had the good sense to do so, of course. Even if he wasn't technically an auror anymore. --But now was not the time for annoyance, even if he was talking to the man near the top of James' own personal Most Disliked list. There were more important things at stake. Harry, for instance.

"This is ...odd," he says after half a pause. "But it needs to be done, I think, and though I hate to admit it, you probably know Harry a bit better than I do."

"I can't imagine why, as dead men make poor fathers," Snape replied, leading James up the stairs.

It was a difficult thing. Each step he thought he should turn around and tell him no, that he should deny him, tell him to figure out shite on his own, refuse. It would feel good, to watch him squirm and suffer.

But it would do the boy no good. Like it or not, there was-- enough that had happened in the last year of his life that made Snape realize... that he did not, should not, cannot add to the boy's weight any further. Shouldering Albus' burden, even for that scant time, had taught him that lesson.

So he brought the man who had taken everything when he at the end, Snape himself had gotten nothing, into his his home. It was not comfortable. It was not pleasant.

"I've been told Ron Weasley was-- replaced. I told the boy," he can't say Harry, not to James. He can barely manage Potter in James' presence, "that he could trust him. A pity."

"So do ones who are used to their son being one instead of eleven," James said ruefully, though his heart wasn't exactly in it.

It was not exactly pleasant for James either -- talking with this man, the man he had loathed for all his years at Hogwarts and still rather loathed now, though he was willing to put it aside for more important things.

"Bit more than that, I think," he replied. "Ron and Harry were -- will be mates at school, right? Hopefully he won't be -- too put off by all this."

Upstairs in the flat itself, Snape gestured to chairs and couch by the windows that overlooked the street; not that James could see the street, as the drapes were drawn closed, but it was still a place to sit.

Rockselena, the tabby queen that Draco'd given him, immediately took up the largest chair and sat primly in it, giving James a fixed look. Snape pays her no mind and does not sit at all. He is-- tense, to say the least, with James Potter in his home.

"I don't know what to tell you. We had a relationship. It was complicated by the war and my duties." Not to mention loads of personal feelings. "As for-- Mr. Weasley. Yes, they're -- they will be. Will be family when Mr. Potter marries Mr. Weasley's sister. But right now he's a ten year old boy who has been denied his true nature all his life, and is only just coming out of living in a blood cupboard."

...says man who was once the boy that got locked in the cellar.

James gave the cat a dismissive look right back and chose a chair for himself, settling into it a bit awkwardly. Cats had never been his sort of animal, but he supposed they suited Snape well enough.

"Of course it was, but -- it's true enough, you're the only one here any more who I can talk to about him." He rather hates having to admit that, but even he knows it's a fact. There's a scowl, just for the mention of the Dursleys, but then another uneasy shrug. "Yes. We're both -- getting used to everything."

Really, the cat suited Malfoy, but she'd been handed off on the man's birthday, and Snape found he didn't mind her company.

"The only adult -- who wasn't a child during his youth," Snape corrects. There was a pack of Weasleys who knew Harry very well, but they'd grown up with him. Their perspectives would be different. "He came at a dangerous time, most inopportune. Riddle, LeStrange-- and no one his age. Before his knowledge of his own self, and what it means to be Harry Potter in the wizarding world."

He abruptly wished for Albus; the elder wizard would certainly know what to do.

"Well -- yes, that's what I meant." He sighs a little. "I mean, I suppose it's alright that the Dursleys didn't ...tell him, he was probably safer that way. But I'd still rather like to give them all few good hexes."

Snape's lip curled; his disdain for Petunia and her husband was-- rooted in the same, fertile ground that had bred his urges for power. She'd disdained him and her sister both, hated them for being other than her, for being better--

But no; those at the thoughts of a man who was a Death Eater, and they have no place here. Sometimes, though, sometimes-- he remembers how easy it was to believe Tom Riddle's lies.

"I don't know what you want or expect," Snape replies, sharp as ever. "You know the basics. You knew him -- as a young man, though he was-- matured by hardship by that time." Even Snape can recognize that the Harry Potter here had been a young man and not a callow boy. "He's young. Uncertain. Had no friends. Has been bullied by his cousin. There was no -- affection in his home, beyond what--"

--what Lily had left for him.

"I knew him for about two months, it's not exactly the same as being a father to an eleven year old when you remember him as a one-year-old." James bristles a bit. It's force of habit, what can we say.

"I know, alright?" There's a flash of guilt on his face. Yes, he knew very well he couldn't do anything about what had happened to Harry, but even so. "There's a reason I would've sent him to Sirius."

"So your pattern of terrible choices would remain solid," Snape replied, sneer curling his lip. "You may not be willing to admit it, but we both know Black and personal accountability are strangers. He would have been the worst guardian for your son, even if he had the best of intentions. Lupin has all the spine of a flobberworm. Had he been entrusted to either of them, he'd've been dead or deranged before he ever got on the Hogwart's Express!"

He stalked away, pacing; this was a terrible situation and he hated it. He couldn't even enjoy the knowledge that he had power-- influence-- over James Potter, that he could have the other man over a barrel and make him suffer. No, he could do little more than beat the proverbial death horse of their youthful rivalry and find no satisfaction in it.

"The simply fact is you are a father to an eleven year old -- who knows nothing of you, nothing of his destiny, and likely should be kept ignorant of the latter at all costs. The trouble with your son began when he found out what he was. There was no way to keep him ignorant, and he's as headstrong and foolhearty as any Gryffindor. He is very much your son and all that entails; he's not exceptionally intelligent but manages to be clever, surrounds himself with people and generally likes most of them. He has a sense of right and wrong that he will abandon when convenient. He's a child, Potter; he's moldable to a point, not as tractable as any parent would like and will begin to immediately gray your hair."

He stops then, and turns, peers at James for a moment; beady black eyes were Legilimens fierce, but he did not reach out with magic. Oh no; no, the realization was terrible enough that he hardly needed magic to verify it.

"You're afraid I know more about your own son than you do," he says, voice very quiet. "You're afraid I know him -- better than you ever will. That's what this is about, isn't it? You don't expect me to guide you or assist you-- you want to ascertain what threat I might be to your state as a father to a boy you never lived to see."

He straightens, standing tall, black eyes unreadable. But there was no malicious joy there; that seed had not yet sprouted, but the ground for it was fertile still.

"Severus Snape, more a father to Harry Potter than his own flesh and blood. Is that-- what you're afraid of..." his lips quirked, "James?"

He could deal with the insults to Remus and Sirius. Those, at least, were the usual thing when it came to discussions with Snape. What James was not in the mood to hear was how to deal with his son, especially not from a man he had loathed since he was eleven.

"You don't," James says quietly right back. "It's obvious enough that you thought of him as a younger version of me, you just said as much. You were his teacher, and from all I've heard, he loathed you just as much as I do." He shifts, just a little, poised to go for his wand if it's necessary.

"You could never be a father to Harry." He is, at least, entirely confident in that.

"Which is why Black was wroth when he found out the boy had been the first to see me here," he replied. "And passed on his potion supplies."

He'll just let that sink in. Oh, it's cruel -- but finally he feels like he has the upper hand. Forgetting everything beyond their rivalry, for the moment.

"You had everything in the world, didn't you? Except this. The one who was with your son to the bitter end, James Potter, was me. It was not your cohorts, it was not the founding members of your Order. I did. Never forget that."

But he backs away, satisfied with getting his licks in -- for now -- and sweeps toward the window, checking beyond it for the moment. Still not trusting the man to not be followed or watched.

"It matters not regardless. You made your choices as to who to trust and they were equally as poor as mine," he says. "And in the mean time, while I would dearly love to watch you suffer and writhe at the idea that I know more about your boy than you ever will-- we need to deal with Tom Riddle and keep Harry Potter safe."

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