Better Be Slytherin!

He could not feel anything. Except for a great, aching mess where his heart would be if he had one. It hurt, ahhh, Merlin, he'd not felt such pain in years. Not like this, not because of another, not since she had refused his apologies and spurned him forever. Merlin, how he had hurt then . . . .

This time, it was her son.

In the hospital wing, in a bed which dwarfed him, the boy lay on sheets the same hue as his skin. His arms and neck were swathed in bandages due to the burns he had received from Quirrell's immolation. His black frame glasses rested on a corner of the bedside table, leaving the boy's face waif-thin and too pale. What skin Severus could see had an odd, ghostly sheen, though not as eerie as it had been in the crypt three nights past. Then, Harry's skin had glowed, and Severus had known in an instant that he had been possessed by the Bloody Baron again, the idiot. He had not known (not until last night, when the Baron finally reappeared) that the possession had been the boy's idea.

For all his Slytherin resourcefulness, Harry was too much a Gryffindor. The Bloody Baron was far too amenable to an 11-year-old's 'suggestions.' And Severus was far too old to deal with the kind of heart-stopping terror as he had faced the other night when he caught up to Harry at last. In the room with the Mirror of Erised, he had found the no-longer-stuttering Quirrell (together, somehow, with the Dark Lord) dueling with the young boy Severus had sworn to protect.

His hair was graying prematurely, he just knew it.

When he was creeping behind the Dark Lord's visage to get a better angle for attack, recalling everything that had happened between them, Severus had thought, for an instant, that the boy would give him away. But when Harry spotted him -- and he knew he had been spotted, even before the Bloody Baron had confirmed it for him last night -- he had not betrayed Severus to the enemy, had not insinuated that Severus was trying for the Stone while he was kept busy, had not, in fact, given any indication at all that he had seen Severus. Instead, the boy had waited till his professor was in a good position for cross-spell work -- not directly across from him, but somewhat off to the side, to avoid hitting each other. And he had continued his own spell casting, to the point of enraging the Dark Lord and making him attack Harry physically.

A foolish idea on the Dark Lord's part, as it turned out.

Severus had no idea why Quirrell's skin and blood and hair had burst into flame wherever it made contact with Harry, though Dumbledore had made a few oblique hints about it. In any event, it did not matter why. It only mattered that Quirrell, and thus the Dark Lord, had been vanquished. In fact, if the clash of the two invading spirits -- Voldemort and the Bloody Baron -- had not resulted in the Baron's forcible ejection from Harry, leaving him with the ghost's chest wound as had happened before, the boy might have emerged from the duel entirely unscathed.

Not without some scarring, of course. No one could burn another being to death with their bare hands and not be scarred by the experience. Not unless they were a Dark Lord themselves.

And Harry, Severus vowed, would never even stray down that path. He would see to it himself.

For three full days, with few exceptions, Severus sat a silent vigil in the hospital wing, waiting for Harry to wake. The two of them had much to discuss. Of course, even with the latest vanquishing of the Dark Lord by the Boy Who Lived Despite Himself, Severus could not afford to be found here. He could not afford to be seen so overcome by the state of this child, no matter how much he was, in fact, undone by the results of the child's run in with Voldemort. So he sat under the boy's Invisibility Cloak, hidden. He had found the Cloak in the doorway to the Mirror's room, in the midst of the conjured black fire. It must have slid off the boy when he went through the flames.

In three days, the only time Severus had roused from his chair was for Slytherin's last Quidditch match, and then only because he had to be seen at the event. Unless he thought hard about it, he could not recall who had won.

--HPHPHPHPHPHPHP--

A fourth day passed before Harry stirred at all. Even then, he did not waken. His eyes moved rapidly behind closed lids, and his arms twitched in little jerky movements reminiscent of his nightmares. Severus wanted to wake him; he had no desire whatsoever to see this child suffer for another second. But what if seeing Severus frightened him more? He hesitated only a moment, however, before trying to wake the boy, putting a hand on an unburned portion of his arm and jostling him slightly. The boy did not appear to wake, but he did stop thrashing about in his dreams and settled into a more easy sleep.

Severus was willing to count it as a victory.

Into the silence that followed, Severus started one conversation they needed to have, even though he knew that speaking while the child could not hear him nor respond was not the bravest thing he had done lately. Pitching his voice to as low a level as he could, he murmured, 'I am so terribly sorry, Harry, for what occurred in my classroom these last few months. Much of what I did was . . . it was not done especially for spite, but to make you an even better Potions student than you already were. I daresay you can whip up any First Year potion in half the time it takes your peers. I pushed . . . I pushed you because I knew you could rise to the challenge . . . But I know that is not how it seemed, and I admit my motives were not so clear or clean when it came to most of my treatment of you or the vitriol I unleashed in my classroom. I can only apologize. I did not realize, until recently, why you spurned my offer of summer placement after I had gone to great lengths to secure it for you, and I was . . .' He trailed off, staring at his bloodless hands. Come now, Severus, he chided himself, he's not even conscious. You can say anything you want. Anything you need to.

'I was hurt, Harry,' he admitted at last, and something tight eased in his chest, made it possible for him to go on. 'It had happened to me before, you know, with your mother. Many years ago, in a fit of pique, I called her a vile name, and she refused to ever accept my apology. It was the end of our friendship. And then, when you looked at me with such . . . such distaste, with such loathing, and with her eyes, I . . . I snapped. And yes, I continued to snap well after that, too.'

He continued to stare at his hands, unable to bear to even look to see if Harry was listening. Hidden as he was, no one else could see them clasped so tightly. No one else could see his pain. No one could see the tightness in his heart, the cold, dark fear that nothing was left but shards and fragments of the trust the boy had once shown him. The darkness and fear waited, ready to welcome him if he spilled over the edge.

'When you fell in that room, with the Dark Lord and Quirrell and all those flames, with your blood soaking your clothes, I thought you might die before I had a chance to apologize, before knowing I was sorry for hurting you, and it was the worst feeling I have ever had. Worse than the original hurt, I swear it.'

Hope was a tiny, fledgling flame buried under the weight of his guilt and shame. Hope was all he had left, hope that he could set things right with young Harry Potter. For so many months, he had not had a chance to speak with Harry. The boy had shut him out, and Severus had nailed closed the door between them. It was not