Severus Snape didn't know why he'd come. He and Potter had never been cordial, never mind friends. Yet, here he was, at St. Mungo's visiting the boy-who-mine-as-well-be-dead.
The papers proclaimed victory and flashed old photographs of the Chosen One. What contest in Hell had he won? The Order lied through their teeth, The Prophet was full of statements of their invention. Potter was in training, Potter was studying for Newts, but none said the truth: Potter had given his mind and his health to a world that had given him nothing but misery, Potter was a vegetable.
Potter had a private ward and the weary-eyed healers eyed his identification dubiously, but let him in after a few terse questions. He'd expected a bed, alibit a nice one, what he saw was a child. Not in years, but in mind. Harry Potter, the not quite eighteen year old Harry Potter, was humming happily as he built a castle out of blocks.
He almost left. He had expected, a staring body in a bed. What he saw was a simpleminded child in what had once been a very intelligent, if lazy, young man.
But then Potter saw him. "I'm Harry." He said shyly.
"We've met before." Snape's voice was curt enough for Potter to shrink back.
"I don't remember," He confessed, looking a little ashamed. "The Healers say I might, if I try. But when I try I have bad dreams."
Was it possible that the order was right? Potter was a psych case, not the victim to a curse, this changed everything. "There our potions for that."
"What's a potion?" Harry toppled the castle (a Hogwarts look alike) down with his elbow and his lip pouted sadly as he stared at the rainbow of scattered blocks on the carpet.
"What sort of doctors are you seeing?" He changed the subject.
"Lots." Harry said proudly, as if it were the equivilant to winning a quidditch match. "I drew a picture if you want to see." His hands pointed to the wall containing the door, covered in crayon drawing of any and everything.
"They're very nice." The order was depicted accurately on dozens of drawing paper. Even the deceased were there, crying, but present.
"I like to draw, Dr. Kevin likes me to draw, too." Harry's eyes were his mother's and innocent of war horrors and, when Snape left a half hour later, he thought Potter would be better to stay that way.
Better to stay forever young, like Peter Pan, than to become a tortured man. Better to be the harry that stood before him than the man that he was.