Thanks again for all the reviews! Chapter 24 ended the first arc of the story, and this opens the second. The battles between Harry and Snape are still present, but the circumstances are altered, and they have a different focus now than just hiding Harry's secret or getting one-up on Potter.

Chapter 25—Potter As Scratching Post

Severus grimaced down at the boy in the bed he'd set up in his extra room. Sometimes, he wondered whether he hadn't put in too much effort, whether it wouldn't have been simpler to let Potter die on the top of the Astronomy Tower.

On the other hand, by now he had poured so much effort into the boy that letting him die would be wasting his work.

The first two days had been touch-and-go; Severus had been forced to remove the stabilizing spells while he fed the healing potions to Potter, but the moment the spells vanished, the decay of his internal organs began again. Severus's wand had to move fast, now preserving his liver from disintegration until the specific potion he'd just used could swamp it in restorative fluid, now guessing the progress of a viscous liquid down Potter's esophagus and matching its speed against the slow destruction of Potter's kidneys. And that said nothing about all the difficulties of feeding someone whose organs were as decayed as Potter's, and the delicate, difficult stratagems he had to use so that the food didn't mingle with the potions and cause an undesirable result.

Compared to that, the burns were easy. Burn potions were relatively common, and one ingredient could be substituted for another, so that if he couldn't use his first choice because of a reaction it would have with a healing potion, he could find another. And Potter's burns were second-degree only—serious, but not irrecoverable. At the end of those first two days, the flesh on Potter's face and body, which had looked like cooked meat, was a mass of fresh pink scar tissue, and that too would fade in time. Another spell kept a layer of cool air in between the new skin and the blankets, so that Potter did not wake screaming from the pain.

And there were compensations even for the brutal damage the Medea's Draught had wrought on his internal organs. For one thing, it had not touched his stomach. If it had pierced the lining and let the digestive acid inside out on the other organs, everything would have been over. And the boy was utterly under his control, and would be for a long time to come. He would have to take some healing potions for weeks still; others he would need to be weaned off, as they contained addictive ingredients. If Severus chose to make Potter repay his investment, he had the instruments at hand to ensure that happened.

He had done harder things than this before, like brewing potions in battle conditions. He kept his mind focused on one task this time, at least, without needing to speed between cauldron and curses.

And slowly Potter mended, though he never woke save to briefly scream in those first two days before Severus put him under again.

When he saw signs of stirring on the third day, the twenty-seventh of December, he refrained from casting the sleeping spell. Potter's pain would still be great, but not unendurable—nowhere near the level of the Medea's Draught. And it would probably make him understand his dependent position better than words ever could.

Besides, he had questions he wanted to ask the boy. He settled close beside the bed, a vial of Veritaserum in his hand.

Harry clawed hard, and struggled back to consciousness with a rush of light and triumph and the feeling that he should have done this much earlier, only someone had stopped him. He opened his eyes, but saw only a single thick blur. He blinked harder, struggling.

A hand pried his jaw open, and he felt three drops of some potion touch the end of his tongue. He wasn't alarmed until a floating feeling invaded his mind, and he realized what the potion probably was.

No!

He made the struggle internal this time, but though he could summon all his will to the task, he couldn't stop hearing, and his tongue seemed to have been removed from his control. As his sight cleared and he recognized Snape, the man's voice, relentless as his fingers had been, asked, "What is your full name?"

"Harry James Potter." The answer came out of him in a mechanical fashion, the way Harry remembered himself obeying Hermione's orders under the suggestion potion, and that increased rather than reduced the burning rage in the back of his mind. "You bastard! I hate you!"

"Yes, of course you do." Now Harry could see Snape leaning back in his chair, his fingers steepled in front of him. When his eyes met Harry's, he didn't even try to hide the sadistic amusement that sparkled in them. "Now. I know the general aspects of your plan, but I wish to hear particulars. How were you planning to kill the Dark Lord?"

And Harry opened his mouth and told Snape his plan. He supposed the secrecy itself was irrelevant, now that Snape had seen his plan fail—

Made it fail.

Harry ran the memories swiftly over in his mind as his disobedient tongue spoke on and on, and, though he was confused with pain and irritation, he was sure he remembered Snape attacking the mirrored maze in his mind, smashing it to fragments. It had worked until then. It had held Voldemort until then.

The hatred settled deeper into his gut. He could divine that Snape didn't want him to die, or he wouldn't have bothered with the bezoar, but wasn't it just like the git to decide that Harry shouldn't defeat his enemy in any way but the one Snape approved of?

He would kill him. It would have to wait until just before he killed Voldemort, but he wanted him dead. He swore, in silence, an oath to Sirius it would be so, and then leaned back on his pillow, letting the pain rule him for a bit, though he never removed his gaze from Snape's face.

Severus listened in silence. The boy's determination no longer surprised him; nor did his ability to learn Occlumency when he decided to do so. He was still reeling from the discovery that Potter had managed to brew Medea's Draught, but he could come to accept even that, in time.

No, what staggered him the most in Potter's involuntary confession was the reason he had sought to die instead of searching for some Occlumency technique that would let him kill the Dark Lord but keep his own life. Disgust grew in him as he listened. Potter was going to sacrifice his life for some misguided idea of repaying the mutt?

And that was the delusion he'd unwittingly countenanced when he blamed Potter for his godfather's death in detention. He did not think it was possible to turn Potter's course by mere words, but he had helped make the boy more dedicated than ever to the idea of finishing himself off.

What caused this?

He could not entirely tell, so when the confession finished and Potter was mumbling various incoherent promises of vengeance under his breath, he asked, "Was there anything special about your summer, Potter? Besides your making such a foolish choice, I mean."

Potter's face was carved like a fine bronze mask with his loathing. Severus rather enjoyed the effect.

"It was almost like last summer," Potter answered. "Just a few letters from my friends, a few from Dumbledore." Severus found himself automatically opening his mouth to correct Potter on the disrespect and add the Headmaster's title, and stopped himself, amused. The habits of a lifetime are indeed hard to break. "Oh, and my relatives didn't speak to me."

Severus sat up, feeling as though he had hold of the end of an invisible rope. "What do you mean by that?"

"They didn't talk to me," Potter said plainly. "I'd hear them talking, and they brought me breakfast and the rest, and sometimes they'd look at me with scowls or fear in their eyes, but they never spoke to me."

"And none of the Order came to your house and spoke to you?" Severus demanded. He knew what the cause of Potter's madness might be now, but he could hardly believe it had happened. It was a coincidence that no one had spoken to the boy and broken his isolation.

"No."

Severus leaned back in his chair, musing, and shook his head. He knew what happened to wizards who lived so far apart from the world that they never saw one person from one year to the next, and who avoided speech with their kind. Their identities began to break down. People depended on other people to define them, their speech and their thoughts and their reactions, and without that—

Without that, there was obsession, psychosis, a reduction of what had once been a human being to a few basic desires and drives. Potter didn't have to worry about finding his own food and shelter, so his mind had seized on his godfather's death and brooded there until he came up with a way, as he saw it, to escape both his grief and his feeling of extreme isolation.

It was remarkable that Potter's resolve should have survived his return to the school, but there, the advanced insanity and the sheer strength of his will had probably helped. He might have been tempted to forsake his promise, but he'd clung to it, and no one had noticed, because everyone else had no notion of the reasons that Harry Potter might want to commit suicide.

"I am going to kill you."

Severus looked up. Potter had only whispered the words, but he wondered if they were as fervent as the vow he had made to kill himself, and sneered. He leaned forward, eyes fastened on Potter's.

It was time the boy understood a few home truths.

Harry could feel the detached floating feeling in his mind from the Veritaserum wearing off, at last. He was gasping from the pain in his gut, but the pain of knowing he'd told everything to Snape was almost worse. He wanted to hurt, to tear, to rend, and he couldn't, he had to lie here helpless in bed—

"Potter."

Harry looked up, his nerves on fire. If he could convey the least part of his loathing to Snape, then—

"You are a baffling combination of the most twisted intelligence and the most sublime stupidity," Snape told him in a monotone, so that it took Harry a long moment to catch up with the words and realize what had been said.

"I did what I had to do," he said stiffly. "And if you hadn't ripped my mind apart just as Voldemort was—"

"Is that what you think happened?" Snape raised his eyebrows. "No. The Dark Lord was too much for you. He was already breaking free from your trap. That was another reason I interfered, Potter. At the last moment, I did think you might win, but you would not have. And I will not have the Dark Lord possessing you and using your body and magic to benefit himself. I will kill you myself first."

Harry glared at him. The problem was that his memory of the moment was so scattered, thanks to the pain, that he couldn't say Snape was wrong. Maybe he had started losing control of Voldemort, but the potion might have killed him before Voldemort could possess him.

Maybe.

"And as to your reason for seeking your death instead of his death—"

"I did mean to kill him—"

"Listen to me, Potter!"

Harry fell silent with a blink. Snape's voice had risen, not to a shout, but to a hard push that he couldn't yell over right now. He was leaning forward, his black eyes glittering as he stared at Harry.

"It was fantastically stupid," he said, every word banging into Harry's head like a nail into a coffin, "to believe that you owed Black your life. You did not kill him, Potter, and if you had spoken to someone else once in the critical period, that delusion would have fallen apart. Alas, you did not, and it is left to me to pick up the pieces." He shook his head.

"I didn't ask you to save me!" Harry struggled up so that he was leaning against the pillows, his hatred clogging his throat. He wanted so badly to inflict pain on Snape, and, thanks to his weakness, he couldn't. "You could have let me die! I—"

"And you would have died with the Dark Lord still undefeated," Snape cut in mercilessly. "Is that what you wished?"

"I tried to kill him!"

"And you did not try hard enough." Snape leaned still closer, and Harry thought he had never realized how ugly the man's face was before now. "You did not practice until you were certain that you could hold a Legilimens that powerful in a Beholding maze. You did not look about for alternate tactics you might have used to strengthen your assault. A suicidal attack is one thing, Potter, but it should be at least a suicidal attack that accomplishes its objective!"

"I was going to—"

"But then," Snape went on, his voice dropping and deepening, his eyes never moving from Harry's, "you would have accomplished your purpose, wouldn't you? You didn't really want to defeat the Dark Lord. Even repaying your godfather was only an excuse. You wanted to kill yourself, and this way, you could convince yourself it was not a selfish act." Snape's lip curled slightly. "Or a cowardly one, which must have been the harder lie, given how brave you Gryffindors are."

Harry was panting. Red-black explosions opened in front of his eyes. His hands clenched so hard that he could feel the tension biting into his shoulders. "Shut up!"

"Feeling bad to hear your justification torn to shreds?" Snape taunted him softly. "Don't want to hear that you're a little boy instead of the grand war-hero you thought you were? Don't want to know that you used talents that could have won the war for completely selfish and stupid ends?" He nodded in mock sympathy, clucking his tongue. "Of course, it must be hard to come face-to-face with yourself after a lifetime of believing you were in the right."

Harry caught the instinctive response he wanted to make to that, and leaned back on the pillows, panting. He forced himself to think, to wonder why Snape had bothered saving him if he thought this of him. And then he remembered the fact that Snape was to leave Hogwarts at the end of the Christmas holidays, and snorted, his shoulders relaxing. Snape wanted Voldemort dead so he would be safe. That was his selfish reason. He didn't really believe what he was saying. It was just a convenient means to keep Harry alive.

He laughed quietly.

Snape cocked his head, but he didn't seem angry, only intent, the way a predatory bird was when considering its prey. "And what is so funny, Mister Potter?"

"The fact that you've still lost," Harry said, and wished the calm words hadn't been marred by a pant of pain at the end. He shrugged himself past that, though. He could already see a new course stretching before him. "You'll heal me, if that's what you've done, and give me back to other people. They'll put me in St. Mungo's, I think. And then I'll look very sorry for what I did and seem to heal, and, when they think I'm back to normal, I'll reach out for Voldemort and kill myself again at the same time. You could be suspicious enough to distrust me for months, maybe, but they won't." He laughed in Snape's face. "You've just won a small battle."

A smile flicked across Snape's face. "Do you realize," he asked, "that you are not in Hogwarts? You are in a small house of my own—one that none but the two of us realize exist. I took you away from Hogwarts after I stopped you from killing yourself. And this shall be your home for the next few months, or however long it takes to train you for your true task, killing the Dark Lord, instead of slaying yourself."

Harry clenched his hands. "I don't believe you," he said.

"Believe or not, as you like." Snape eyed him contemplatively. "What matters is that I understand the reasons you wished to kill yourself now. Extreme isolation formed and nurtured that delusion. Contact with life will cure it."

Harry laughed despite himself. "And you think you're life, Snape?"

"I am willing, as others would not be if I turned you over to them, to use extreme methods to break down your isolation," Snape said, and rose to his feet, still smiling. "In the meantime, understand that you were excessively stupid, even for you, to decide on this method of dying. You attracted the Dark Lord's attention and maimed yourself for no good purpose."

"I tried to fulfill—"

"Not well enough," Snape cut him off pitilessly. "And since you cannot be trusted to take your destiny seriously, I will take over the management of that for you, too. You will train here, under my eye, for as long as necessary." He cocked his head. "You may wish to kill yourself still and seek alternate methods, but I will see and stop them, as those in St. Mungo's could not."

Harry lay back on his pillow and closed his eyes. His one great ambition at that moment was not to kill himself, but to find some way of hurting Snape. Perhaps murdering him would suffice, if he could choose a sufficiently painful death.

He had lost the calm determination that had sustained him since the beginning of summer, but the red-edged black fury clawing up its way up his throat could substitute.

Severus concealed a smile as he went to fetch Potter's next dose of potion. He had seen the loathing in the boy's eyes. He knew what it meant, none better, since he'd felt it himself for James Potter and Sirius Black.

Potter had already made the first step towards losing his obsession with destroying himself: caring more about another goal. In this case, having that will focused on his destruction was dangerous, Snape knew.

But the danger only made him the more inclined to laugh and welcome it. If Potter were an easy enemy to overcome or convince in the first few minutes of conversation, Severus would have been bored. Even the prospect of controlling and torturing an old enemy's son would not have sustained his interest through the weeks and months necessary to improve the boy's skills.

But Potter was a challenge, and one that Severus must be very careful not to underestimate.

When the boy turned fully away from his suicidal thoughts and embraced life, in the guise of killing Severus, that care would increase to a level he'd previously had to exercise only around Death Eaters and Dumbledore, he knew. He still didn't comprehend everything Potter might do.

But, this time, Severus worked directly for his own freedom and power and place in the struggle, not for vaguely-defined goals of immortality or triumph for Dumbledore's side. And Potter was not yet his equal, though close enough to it to be a brisk challenge.

For the first time in years, he felt alive.