Not to Alter

There comes a time in every man's life when regrets bring him to a crossroads. That time came for Severus Snape on 3 October, 1998 while watching Remus Lupin meticulously cut off his third piece of roast beef, and ended when Remus Lupin, once again, licked the fork clean. Snape had come to both look forward to and dread seeing roast beef on the table.

As politely as he could manage, he excused himself from the Headmaster's ever-benevolently vacuous conversation and wandered from the hall with considerably less dramatic flair than usual.

Why, he wondered, did Lupin have to grow up, clean up, and fill out so damned nicely and why did the one man to spark Snape's libido in years have to be the one man who frightened him into impotence with a single flash of always-too-pointy teeth?

Rationally, Snape wasn't frightened in the least. In fact, rationally, he'd come to respect Lupin as one of his more civilised colleagues. The instinct of a terrified 15 year-old boy, however, neither knew nor cared what was rational.

By the time Snape got to his chambers, he'd admitted to himself that he would do anything, give anything, in that moment to have changed one night almost twenty years ago.

And by the time Snape reached his bedroom, he was on his knees digging around under his bed and ready to do so as in his palm lay a Time-Turner that burned with a cold mercurial sheen.

Not hours.

Years.

In theory. He wasn't certain if anyone'd been brave enough to test it, but it may have explained Narcissa's perpetual youth and vapidity for a time.

He'd confiscated it casually from the Malfoy estate for "safe keeping" one night when Draco was--Snape paused for a quick mental calculation--ten, and an excellent distraction when necessary.

Slipping its chain over his head and dusting off his robes, Snape strode to the Slytherin dorms, snapped the password at the painting, and made his way into the fifth year boys' room, sitting on a bed that had once been familiar with all his young sins, and began to count as he turned the time-turner with precision. After all, there wasn't anything in his current life he'd particularly miss.

When he stopped, he heard his own voice break on an undignified yelp as the bed shifted sharply beneath him, and cast a quick silencing charm around the bed before speaking. "Oh for Merlin's sake, take your hands off yourself and cease wanking for fifteen minutes," he snapped. "This is important and it isn't as if you haven't tossed off Circe knows how many times today." It was surprisingly easy, all things considered, to look on his younger self as a particularly vile little student. After all, with most of his pupils, he could only suspect them of transgressions. With himself, he knew them all in colourful detail.

"Who the fuck are you?" He snarled back, looking far too young, and far, far too beaky with the covers pulled up beneath his nose that way.

"I'm you, and even I find that pose unattractive. Do sit up," he said, feeling inexplicably too tired to argue, and added. "It's nothing I haven't seen before. More times than you have, in fact."

He squinted up at himself, and the covers lowered--just a little. "This doesn't have anything to do with the enhancement draught I tried last night does it?"

Snape resisted a wince at the memory that question provoked. "No," he said with some reluctance. "No. That will only make you itch tomorrow. Don't look so nervous, it fades away after a week." It was disturbingly difficult to ignore the look of supreme discomfort coming over his own young face.

It's no wonder, he thought sourly, that it took joining the Death Eaters to get laid.

"So you're me," young him said slowly, calculatingly if Snape was any judge of himself, and he fancied that he was. "In the future."

"Far in the future," Snape amended.

The young him squinted. "I age pretty well."

"Yes, well, free time in the Potions laboratory helps us."

"It didn't help with the hair."

Snape found himself scowling down at himself. "Was I always this irritating?"

"I don't know. Perhaps you tell me."

Fighting the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose and seek out a headache potion, Snape straightened his robes, then his spine, and began to speak. "You are not to repeat anything I've said to anyone, is that clear?"

"Why not?"

"Why--" Snape stared. He didn't remember being this dense at fifteen. "Because I'm you from the future, idiot. What is the very first rule of travel back in time?"

To his supreme irritation, the younger him only shrugged. Snape ground his teeth. Audibly.

"I really do become a sour old bastard, don't I? What are you, a teacher?" Slow horror dawned. "Oh Merlin. Don't tell me I'll be trapped here for the rest of my life," he moaned.

With infinite effort of will, Snape ignored that. All of it. "The first rule," he said with low menace, "is that we are not to alter the past."

"What do you call this? A wet dream?" Apparently, Snape noted, sarcasm was a natural part of him and seemed to have come fully developed on its own. If not with refinement.

"A judicious bending of the rules," Snape said at last. "Now listen. Remus Lupin--the Gryffindor--is a werewolf. You are not to spread this information around the school. Secondly, the rumours about werewolves during the other 29 days of the month are greatly exaggerated, and he is considerably more civilized company than the misbred cretins he considers friends. Thirdly, Sirius Black will attempt to lure you away from school on the next full moon. Unless you wish to encounter a full grown werewolf and find yourself indebted to James Potter, I suggest that you ignore him and find something more productive to do." He stood, dusted off his robes, and looked down at his younger self. "And do stop gaping at me like that. It's most unattractive." He wondered if he should worry that his younger self was beginning to look intrigued.

As he began the turns back to his proper time, he could have almost sworn he heard his own youthful voice muttering a smirking "greasy git" behind him, and then he was back.

Somewhat shaky, he noted with an absent sort of scientific curiosity, wondering when the memories of his changed history would begin to filter in over his previous life, and what he might have lost in it, and found in one buoyant moment that he really didn't care what he'd lost. His life would have been different, and for the moment, that was all that mattered.

He was almost cheerful as he made his way back to his laboratory and returned to the ever-thankless task of the last stages of brewing Lupin's wolfsbane potion.

"Am I late?"

He very nearly jumped. Since when had Lupin taken to letting himself into his chambers without knocking?

Allowing his mind turn over that particular question, he wondered if Lupin had done so before and he simply hadn't noticed. Withdrawing goblets from the cabinet above his workbench, he filled two of them unthinkingly, passed one to Lupin, and had the other to his own lips before he realized what he was doing.

"Well drink up, Severus," Lupin said with that soft, gently wry humour. "It's not going to taste better for waiting--you know it tastes like cold kitchen grease if you wait." He turned his face to the high dungeon windows and began to disrobe, shedding his clothes carelessly and letting them lay where they fell. To his dazed mind, they seemed to be of a nicer cut than those he'd last seen Lupin wearing. Locking the workroom door and coming back to cover Snape's hands with his own, Lupin guided the goblet to his lips until Snape drank down every last foul drop.

When Lupin--Remus--kissed him, the goblet fell from nerveless fingers and shattered moments before the bone-rending change overtook them both and he remembered with sudden vivid clarity that as a youth, he'd never been particularly fond of taking orders from his elders.