"All right, all right!" Harry shouted, wrapping his arms around himself. "That was misdirection, all right? Or lying, whatever you want to call it! I didn't want to know all that, those things you told me! I just wanted to know if I could trust you!"
"You would have made a dreadful Slytherin," Snape sneered, still pouring memories into the pensieve. Harry sort of shuddered. "Trust! It matters so much to you that you feel you have every right to trample my clear request to not discuss last night's festivities, does it? Then so be it, as I said. You will watch the meeting, Mr Potter. You will know not to question me again!"
"Look," Harry tried. "You're angry. I'd be angry too, if I were you. I'm sorry I asked, and I'm sorry I doubted you. I just . . . Look, it's hard for me, all right? I . . . like you, now. Well, most of the time, anyway. And I couldn't just split my feelings up into neat little slices where one part of me ignores what the other parts know, and I didn't want things to change and go back to how they were--
"Stop babbling and look in the pensieve!"
"No!"
Snape took a step towards him, his teeth clicked together as he snarled in clear intent, "Look in the pensieve, Mr Potter, or I will shove you in!"
When Harry didn't move, Snape snaked out a hand, wrapped his fingers around the back of his neck, and began to thrust him towards the edge of the kitchen table.
Harry struggled, but since he didn't have much chance against a grown man, he did the only thing he could think to do, in the circumstances. "Remus!" he screamed, his lungs close to bursting with the force of the yell. "Remus! REMUS!!! REEEEEMUS!!!!!"
Snape gave a harsh laugh and tightened his fingers. "Your beloved werewolf is not here. He went to get you ice cream. He thinks you are a little child who needs protecting. But you're not, are you? You're old enough to challenge me. You're old enough to know everything."
As Snape began to remorselessly shove him towards the pensieve again, Harry screamed, desperate, "I don't want to violate you, not again!"
At that, the Potions Master let him go, releasing him so suddenly and unexpectedly that Harry half-stumbled across the floor, knocking into the table. The liquid in the pensieve sloshed towards the rim, but didn't spill.
Unable to really believe Snape had relented, Harry froze in place and cast a wary glance over at his teacher.
Snape still looked furious, but now, he also looked controlled. Yanking out a chair, he seated himself on the far side of the pensieve, and glared at Harry. The glare quickly became a scowl. "You can wait for Remus and your ice cream sundae," he sneered, "or you can prove yourself an adult and finish what you started."
Harry pulled out a chair, too, and flopped into it, feeling sick with relief. "How does it make me an adult to look in that again? I told you, I don't want to violate you!"
"You violated me already, upstairs," Snape returned in a voice coated with ice. "You demanded my version of events, though you knew I preferred not to speak of such things. Not to mention, you made it clear you didn't trust what I'd said."
"I thought you didn't care about trust!"
"I don't," Snape snapped, curling his fingers and looking away. "Unfortunately for me, your trust is necessary to fight the Dark Lord effectively. We failed last year, Mr Potter. You doubted my intentions, my very allegiances, and Sirius Black died! Now the Order has one fewer member to carry on the fight. I will not allow that to happen again!"
"I do trust you, all right?" Harry was starting to feel even more desperate than he had when Snape was threatening to plunge him into the memories by force.
"You don't," Snape returned in that cold, hard voice he hated, his gaze seeking Harry's again. "You can't. It was evident upstairs. You need to see for yourself."
All true, though Harry was ashamed by then that he hadn't had more faith in Snape.
"Are you a man or a child?" Snape taunted.
Without another word, Harry yanked the pensieve towards him, leaned his face down into it, and felt himself sucked into a scene of carnage and horror far worse than anything he'd ever imagined could exist.
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Snape's hand was on his neck again, though this time he had his grip on the collar of Harry's shirt, and was pulling him backwards. Disoriented, still caught up in the cyclic terror whirling in the pensieve, Harry fought, but Snape was stronger, and jerked him free.
"Drink," he ordered, shoving the pensieve out of the way and slamming down a glass of something clear yet viscous.
Harry quaffed the liquid, which tasted vaguely of rotting melon. It quelled his churning stomach, though not completely, not after all he'd seen. Upstairs, he realised now, Snape had told him just the barest outline of what last night's victims had suffered. The truth was worse, so much so that he felt tainted. Dirty. Reeking with it.
"I'm sorry," Harry whispered, his voice rasping painfully against a lump of regret in his throat.
"I'm certain you are," Snape returned, his voice still glacial, though without that dreadful fury that had filled it, before.
"I . . ." Harry gulped, not knowing really what to say, after all that. "I think I need more potion."
Snape narrowed his black eyes. "You are going to be sick?"
"Um, probably not, but my stomach still feels . . . awful," Harry understated, pressing his hands into his midsection. Then another thought came to him. "You gave me potion! I thought I wasn't supposed to have magical cures until my own magic came back!"
"It is back, as I have painstakingly laboured to explain to you. You simply do not have clear access to it, except through certain restricted avenues."
"Oh, right," Harry murmured, rolling his shoulders a little. It felt like he couldn't get his bearings. The images in the pensieve still haunted him, and as a particularly gruesome sequence replayed in his head, he felt the sickness in his stomach surge up into his lower throat. He swallowed it back down, gasping, "Can I have more potion? Please?"
His teacher shook his head, then tilted it to the side as he considered the request at greater length. "The amount you drank should have worked completely. Apparently you can tolerate magical cures at present, though they are not as efficacious as they should be. Interesting."
It wasn't terribly interesting to Harry at that moment, though he was relieved that the Potions question appeared to have calmed Snape down. Unable to bear the taste of acid in his mouth, he pushed up weakly, filled the glass with water, and sat back down, drinking it with a sigh.
"So, you just happen to carry Stomach Calming Draught around with you?" Harry asked, thinking to keep the conversation on safe ground. He wasn't too comfortable chatting with Snape, not after a few words put wrong upstairs had led to so much fury. He wondered how long it would be until Remus returned.
"I conjured it," Snape shortly replied.
"Oh." Harry actually hadn't thought of that. "Um, how come we don't just learn to conjure them, then, instead of make them? It'd be quicker. Less mess." Fewer explosions.
Snape stared at him as if not even a blithering idiot would ask a question as daft as that one. "I conjured it from my personal stores, not from the thin air," he drawled.
"Oh," Harry said again, thinking that that would be the end of his Potions questions for a good, long while.
"Go ahead, ask your questions," Snape uttered in a long-suffering tone.
Harry's gaze snapped up. "What, about Potions?"
"Merlin preserve me," Snape intoned, jerking a thumb towards the pensieve. "Of course not, Mr Potter. About that. What you saw."
"I don't have any questions," Harry denied.