A/N: Back to your regularly scheduled program. IE, no more flashback.
Harry feels remarkably well as he finishes his day's last class. It is as if his heart had never stopped, as if his jaw had never been torn away from him in a moment of darkness. He feels so well that he breaks tradition, goes to the staff bathroom, and paints himself beautiful again with his dulling pocket knife, a present from Sirius which he has kept all these years. Harry feels so well that he does not let the eyes watching him stop him. At first, when he looks up, he thinks that it is only a mirror, teasing him again, but it's Professor Snape, face clouded in some emotion. Harry chooses to read it as annoyance.
"Feeling better, I see," Snape sneers.
"Much, thank you," Harry answers, returning his knife to the folds of his robes. "Did the shipment reach your store room?" Harry had ordered enough wormwood from the Hogsmeade apothecary to replenish what he had taken the night before.
"Yes, it did," Snape answers. "I see there is no call for concern," he continues, gesturing at Harry's cuts. "They don't even deserve to be called 'superficial'."
"I'm glad we're in agreement on this," Harry laughs, not nervously, but not happily either. "I wouldn't want to cause any concern."
"It does look quite nice," Snape continues, moving closer to Harry, as if to touch, or smell. "You are so very pale, for someone who wastes his time on the pitch every weekend."
"Maybe that's the wormwood too," Harry answers, unnerved by the length of this conversation, if not the subject and tone. Snape and he are no longer enemies, if they ever had been, but they are by no means friends. Not even bitter ones.
"About that, would you consider giving me the formula for the potion you are taking? I'd like to work on it."
"I'll bring it to your office after dinner, if you'd like. Don't trust Gustave?"
"Come to my rooms instead," Snape suggests. "I'll need to refer to some texts, I'm sure. And Augie Gustave is a talented Potions Master, but everyone has his or her strengths and weaknesses. He may have missed something."
Harry finds Snape in his rooms an hour later, as planned. He's been here before, for various reasons, but never long enough to warrant comfort. The sitting room is warmer than Harry's, both in climate and color, surprisingly enough. Where Harry's rooms are decorated in cool blues and greens, black and white, Snape's has an Oriental tone, warm autumnal colors matching the spines of well-loved books that line the walls. The fireplace is crackling away, no doubt struggling to chisel at Snape's ever-cool exterior. The Potions Master is pulling books from the shelves, stacking them on a large oak desk against the wall, separating references to wormwood from texts on diseases of the muscles, and diseases of the heart. There is a fourth pile there, smaller than the others, and Harry can only assume, with no small amount of amusement, that these books have something to do with psychological disorders. Harry briefly wonders where Snape stores his heart of guilt, before he goes farther into the room and hands Snape both the instructions for brewing the potion and a sample dose for chemical analysis.
"I'm impressed," Snape says, after reading the scroll Harry has given him. "This looks…challenging."
"I suppose I have compelling motivation not to fail," Harry answers. "No matter what you might think," he adds, looking pointedly to one of the books on the desk, the one about self-abuse and suicide.
"Yes, a perfectly healthy man often cuts himself for pleasure," Snape answers, but without cruelty, this one time.
"So where are your scars?" Harry asks. Sometimes he convinces himself that it is within his rights to be childish.
Snape answers by rolling up his sleeve, but all that is there is the Dark Mark, pale on pale.
"Was that a cosmetic decision?" Harry asked, clinging to levity. There is something about Severus Snape that always draws Harry to truth, no matter how painful.
"No."
"Then what makes you think you can help me?" Harry snarls. "This isn't suicidal. This isn't masochistic. This isn't exhibitionist. It's not even painful, so it's not a problem."
"No pain equals no problem, does it?" Snape laughs. There's the cruelty.
"It does in this situation," Harry answers. "I'll accept your help on my medical condition, but keep your fucking hands OFF MY SOUL!"
"I'm not about to patch you up only for you to break yourself," Snape answers, whispers really, deadly deadly. Harry almost swears he's speaking parseltongue.
"Go to hell," Harry sighs, leaving Snape's rooms before he says anything more damning.