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Chapter Two: Demonstrations In a Hollow Room

Harry wished he had a lynx form outside of dreams. He thought it would be a useful skill if he could flatten his ears. And, at the moment, he wanted to do something that would show his extreme irritation and displeasure and worry and reluctance.

You could turn around and leave this room alone. No one would have to know. Only Vera knew you might seek this room out, and you didn't say you would do it today. It's your choice.

And Harry might even have believed that, if not for the stubbornness that had grown in him over the last week and a half. He no longer believed that there was any value in some parts of his training—especially the parts that disobliged him in simple things on a daily basis—and that had led him to look critically at other decisions he'd made. Were they the best choices? Or had he merely made them because of a lack of time and a pressing need to do something else, and then let the bad choices solidify into habit?

He had seen how people became slaves of habit, slaves of prejudice. He never wanted to be one.

And that had led him to spend the last few days, as he recovered from the slashes down his left arm and told Vera, Draco, and Snape everything he could remember about the bird, analyzing two of his choices. One he had eventually decided wasn't the best choice, but it also wasn't something he could change right away. He would need McGonagall's help, and Snape's, and the help of the Black libraries and the Hogwarts library. That had to wait until he left the Sanctuary.

The other didn't—not when Vera had already told him about one of the rooms that could help him.

Harry stood now outside that room, and stared at the door, and gnawed his lip. His hand traced the ending of his wrist, the severed stump, over and over and over again.

Chattering voices of different opinions clamored in his head.

You did decide that your choice was hasty and badly made.

It's silly, and unimportant, and you should be learning as much as you can about useful weapons in the war while you're still here and have access to knowledge that doesn't exist outside the Sanctuary.

Most of what you think is silly and unimportant has turned out not to be so. And nothing can get in the way of your healing. You didn't let Loki make you stay in the wizarding world. Are you going to let your own preconceptions hold you back from doing something that you know you should do?

Those were two good arguments for going forward, against only one for staying where he was. Harry took a deep breath and tugged open the door to the room.

Vera had described the Sanctuary as a shrine to the present. The rooms set aside to hold and contain the presence of magic corresponded to types of magic that actually existed in the world, somewhere. The moment a kind of magic ceased to exist, because its last practitioner died or because the knowledge or ingredients that were necessary for it were lost, then the room would vanish. The Sanctuary looked to the future, not the past.

Harry stepped into a large room, perhaps round, perhaps square. From the outside, it was rectangular, but Harry already knew that the insides of these rooms perhaps didn't correspond to their outsides. In any case, it was difficult to make out the shape because of the mirrors that crowded the walls. Some mirrors had round frames, some sharply pointed edges, some star-shaped protrusions that overlapped with the other mirrors and made it difficult to be sure of what was real. Harry waved, and a thousand thousand Harry-shaped images waved back. Some had slightly different faces, some slightly different eyes, some slightly different bodies. The images reflected more than once—when mirrors were set opposite from one another so that a long series of possible Harrys stretched away—looked very different.

Harry stood there in silence for a long moment. So far, the mirrors worked as Vera had told him they did. They showed images of what could be, all the possible ways that Harry could be different, marching corridors of side-realities. They could not be used as doors to those realities; if that magic had ever existed, Vera had told him, it was lost, and the Sanctuary wouldn't demonstrate it. But they could show transitions between the real Harry and a possible one, the various shades, for example, through which his eyes might pass on the way from green to blue.

And that meant—

That meant—

Harry took a deep breath and lifted his left wrist.

A ripple ran through the mirrors, a shudder so intense that for a moment Harry feared they would break. Vera had warned him about this, though. So long as he kept his left wrist low and at his side, out of range of the glass, it might be anything; the possibility was undefined. When he forced the mirrors to reflect it, then each image had to become what it would be in that other reality.

And it worked. Harry saw himself, in the nearest, oval mirror, with a left wrist that ended in scar tissue. When he turned his head, he saw left hands, left hooks, images of himself with an intact left hand and a missing right one, and, more than once, a wing or a flipper on that limb. He blinked, then forced himself to look away from those strange, beguiling images and to one of the ones with a left hand.

And on a diagonal to the oval mirror that reflects me as I really am. Vera had told him about that, too. "True" images, ones that would actually lead him from what he was to what he wanted to become, were more often found on the slant.

It took him several minutes to sort out a pattern. Then he looked at the series of transitional images that separated him from the final product, and shivered, and looked away again. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of madly swinging heads, so he shut his eyes to avoid them.

There were ten images between himself and the Harry with a left hand who still looked almost exactly like him.

Only ten.

Harry made himself look again. Each of the first three images had a smaller shimmer of Dark magic above his left wrist. The fourth one had a star of Dark magic there—probably, Harry thought, the last curse to burst, or the deepest one, which would take more effort to break than the others. The fifth one simply had an ordinary, scarred wrist. The sixth and the seventh one had shadowy images of left hands, and the eighth and ninth possessed hands that they held gingerly. The tenth image looked completely comfortable with both his hands, and caught Harry's eye with a solemn expression that, Harry imagined, did not look completely terrified.

It might be the same expression on his face right now.

He controlled the impulse to just walk out of the room. Instead, he studied the really important images, the ones that detailed the curses, so that he knew what he could expect them to look like at each stage of the breaking. Argutus could help, of course, by reflecting the hidden spells in his scales. Harry would just as soon not set out to break one and then have it warp in a different direction, though. And knowing Bellatrix and her insanity, he couldn't say that wouldn't happen.

Then he turned and paced quickly to the door, lowering his eyes so that the dizzying army moving with him partially faded from his sight.

Only ten steps, and I can have my hand again.

He shut the door of the room and leaned against it. A light, misty rain fell in the Sanctuary this morning. Harry could hear birds calling that he hadn't heard before, energetic cries that seemed to praise the rain and the coolness and even the gray of the skies as part of a good life.

He had examined his reasons for not trying to regrow his hand, and decided they weren't good ones. He would look weak? There were many other ways that he might look weak to his allies, including the kind of emotional breakdown he'd experienced over the dead children during the siege, and he was working to heal those wounds. He didn't have time? He had time if he made it. He didn't want to make it seem as if that was something he cared about, when many, many other things mattered more?

Well, that last was still true. But Harry hadn't been able to say why he felt that way. Why should regrowing his hand be less important to him than making sure that Ignifer, for example, won free of the infertility curse her father had placed on her?

He didn't have a good answer for that. His gaping terror of being selfish wasn't a good answer. And he had to be more selfish, to stop himself before he broke down as he nearly had before he came to the Sanctuary, or they would lose the war.

So here he was. He would try to break the curses and regrow his hand.

He shook his head and moved quickly, sharply away from the room. He wanted to go watch Draco eliminate some of the taint on his soul with Nina's encouragement, or help Snape brew a potion. He wanted to listen to Argutus ramble on about his own beauty, which he was more concerned with suddenly, or listen to the soft hisses of the Many snake as she conversed in half-understood fragments. He wanted to do anything that didn't focus on himself.


Draco smiled when Harry slipped into his room behind Nina, but didn't take his eyes from her face. Likewise, Nina nodded a welcome to Harry, but the words she spoke next, soft and soothing, were to Draco.

"I can see your soul as a jeweled construct, with emerald and opalescent wheels."

"Of course it's jeweled," said Draco, and had the delight of seeing Nina smile back at him. Harry raised his eyebrows in confusion. Of course he would. He tended to respond too seriously to Draco's arrogance, while Nina treated it for what it was, one more game to play or waltz to dance. Draco had often done the same thing with Narcissa when he first began his lessons in pureblood etiquette, and had always enjoyed them more than his father's more formal efforts to drill him in the same things.

"It would be," Nina murmured. "Nothing less than the best for a Malfoy." She squinted thoughtfully off to the side, as if she were looking at his left shoulder. Draco hated it when she did that. It reminded him even more forcefully that she could see things he couldn't. That was annoying enough when it happened with Harry, and Harry was at least stronger, magically, than he was. Draco wondered, not for the first time, what he would see if he possessed Nina.

"Coils are wound among the wheels," Nina continued. "Springs. Clockwork. All of them are dark, the same shade of gray. I can tell you what I think they are, and you can tell me which one doesn't belong."

Draco nodded. They had done this before. He had to admit, it was interesting to learn all sorts of things about himself that he would never have suspected before. He saw Harry lean forward, and took the opportunity to set his shoulders back and lift his chin, determined to make both Harry and Nina proud of him.

Nina narrowed her eyes now as if squinting against the sun, and said, "One is the impulse to prove yourself regardless of what you might have to do in the process." She smiled again, her expression growing brighter. "I think I should know that that one is your own."

Draco inclined his head, his own eyes and cheeks blazing with his amusement. Harry shifted again, briefly catching his attention. Draco caught a glimpse of a very intriguing emotion in his eyes, but he couldn't take the time to study it, because Nina was droning on.

"One is the impulse to grow without restraint, to have so much magical power that nothing can stop or check it." Nina lost her smile first, and then the playful tone to her voice. "Could that one be a legacy of your encounter with Voldemort?"

"I—possibly." Draco could remember times when he had felt the impulse for himself, though. At one time, little had mattered to him but matching Harry in magical strength. He had called on an ancestor to give him that power, with what seemed, in hindsight, perilously little research and horrendous impatience. But, on the other hand, he thought he had subdued that idea. Voldemort would not have.

Nina nodded, and went on. "Then there is the impulse to cause pain to others." She didn't say anything else this time.

Draco squirmed in place, his cheeks flushing. "What kind of pain?" he asked. "Can you tell?"

"There are many different roots to it." The Seer folded her hands almost primly in front of her, as if to say, whatever she had seen in her own soul when she looked at it, this had not been there. "It might be pure sadism at some points along the coil. It might be the simple desire to irritate someone with a hex who's irritated you with a hex. It might be a wish that someone would go away and stop bothering you or your Harry."

Draco nodded. Well, he should have expected that. He would have been more horrified and ashamed if he had a simple soul, one where he could pick the right answer every time Nina had a question. "I don't think the sadism is mine," he said. "I do want revenge, and I do think my Harry should take it more often than he does—" another shift in his peripheral vision "—but I don't take that much pleasure in watching someone else suffer. I take much more satisfaction in knowing that they'll never hurt me again."

"Very well, then," said Nina, and eased backward on the rug she'd spread to sit on. "So, you are ready?"

"I am," said Draco.

He braced himself as Nina brought forth a small mirror she'd pulled from one of the Sanctuary's rooms; Merlin knew which one, since Draco so far hadn't had much time to go exploring. The mirror had two halves, one that bulged outward and one that rippled backward into the frame. Nina tilted it so that both halves reflected his face and pulled her wand from a pocket of her robe.

"Vitrum reapse," she whispered, and gestured.

Draco's face rippled as if someone had thrown a stone in a pool of water. Draco reached forward with his own magic, his own mind, at the same moment, grasping at his thoughts, pulling them and tugging, using the image in the mirror as a stabilizing point. This was reality, this was truth, and he would make himself into the Draco Malfoy whose image he saw in the mirror.

It would have been impossible if he hadn't had the possession gift. But part of learning to possess others had been learning an exquisite consciousness of himself—where his thoughts ended and another's began, primarily. He always needed to be able to tell what was him in another person's mind, so that he didn't accidentally sabotage his own plans. The only reason he couldn't heal himself of Voldemort's taint was that the slime had gone so deep into his soul. He had to look intently at one point of his own mind before he could see the incongruities.

Nina had pointed him to the right one this time, he thought. He found a twisting, alien bit of presence in the part of his thoughts devoted to pain and revenge, and he carved it out of himself with relish. As always, he directed it down the path of his thoughts towards his mouth. He had to expel Voldemort from his body somehow, and though, strictly speaking, he could have imagined the dark taint as a mist that would float away and leave him alone, it was easier this way, to think of it as mingled bile and poison he spat out.

He opened his eyes as his mouth moved, and saw a splatter of saliva blossom on the mirror. A moment later, it turned black, and he saw the quivering, caught worm of Voldemort's presence. He nodded and sat back, beaming at Nina, who beamed in turn and cleansed the mirror with another wave of her wand. Draco imagined he could hear the worm screaming as it burned.

That delight in pain is all my own, he thought.

"I think it's time that we stopped for today," said Nina softly, rising to her feet. Draco wondered if she was stopping solely for his sake, or for Harry's, or perhaps for her own. "You've yanked out three tendrils, and it's harder and harder for me even to see a place where others might be hiding. I think you're almost healed, Draco."

Draco inclined his head, accepting the glad news—the more glad because he knew the Seers wouldn't chase him out of the Sanctuary just because he had healed. He could still stay here until the end of the summer, and he could focus more on Harry once his own mind was cleansed.

"Just don't forget what my soul looks like," he told Nina as she made her way to the door. "You won't ever see something that beautiful again, and it should remain to brighten your life when I'm gone."

Nina rolled her eyes and shut the door. That confirmed Draco's belief that she'd stopped the soul-seeing for her sake. Unless she was deeply tired, she always came up with a witty retort of some kind.

Draco went at once to the couch Harry had taken a seat on, capturing him with a kiss and an arm around his shoulders before he could stand. Harry blinked, dazed, and then his face broke into a bright grin. "Draco!" he exclaimed. "You're moving faster than you were yesterday?"

"Yes, bloody finally," Draco groused as he sat down. "I still don't think bed-rest was the cure for me once my headaches ended." He caught Harry's chin and tilted his face towards him. Harry bore it, looking patient. Draco frowned. That unfamiliar emotion he'd thought Harry had expressed earlier was gone, and only entirely familiar affection and exasperation looked back at him.

Well, perhaps talking about Nina will bring it back. "The way she helps me is wonderful, isn't it?" he asked casually.

Ah, there it is. The emotion traveled through Harry's eyes like a comet across the night sky, and then he was nodding and agreeing, but Draco sat close enough to him to see what it had been.

"Harry," he said, and he tried to keep the delighted purr out of his voice, but he couldn't, he really couldn't. "Are you jealous?"

Harry blinked, then said, "Honestly, Draco, of course not. I don't believe that you'd ever sleep with her. Besides," he added, standing and slipping out of Draco's arms, "for all I know, you don't even like girls that way."

"Oh, I don't mind them," said Draco, leaning back on the couch and watching Harry's tense shoulders. He shouldn't hide from this. We're supposed to be letting down our barriers and showing our emotions anyway. "You're the one I like, Harry. But you wouldn't get jealous over bed-sharing, anyway, when we haven't even shared one. You're jealous because she can See part of me that you can't, aren't you?"

"I am not jealous."

Draco laughed at him. "Liar."

Harry glared at him over his shoulder. "I am not," he said. "You need her help to heal, Draco. It would be unworthy, not to mention stupid, for me to get jealous over that." He frowned and trailed his hand over the edge of Draco's bed.

"Well, jealousy often doesn't have a rational basis," said Draco comfortably. He patted the couch next to him again. "Why are you on the other side of the room? Come sit next to me."

"I don't want to."

And now he's pouting! This is wonderful. Draco would have thought it worth coming to the Sanctuary, and coaxing a reluctant Harry to come with him and away from a war-torn wizarding world, for the sake of this alone. "Yes, you do," he said. "Or you did a moment ago. But now you think that you shouldn't be jealous, and you're—what? Punishing yourself by denying your urge to seek out my company?"

He saw Harry stop moving. Then he turned around and glared at Draco again. "If I didn't know that Seeing can't be taught," Harry said, "I would say that you'd been taking lessons from Nina. Or Vera, perhaps, since she's my Seer."

"You still don't like someone seeing you that well," said Draco, and shook his head. He couldn't name the emotion that welled up in him. He decided to call it protectiveness, because that made a good name. "Get used to it, Harry. I intend to know all of you before I'm done."

"I'll change," said Harry, his voice soft. Draco wondered if he even realized what he was saying as he examined Draco intently. "I'll change, and then you won't know me anymore. And the same thing will happen to you, and to Snape—" Harry checked himself. "Well, I think it'll happen to Snape. Maybe not. I've never seen someone so determined not to change."

"I'll read you anew, then," said Draco, and stood. He walked slowly across the room to Harry, who stood watching him come. Draco clasped his wrist and rubbed gently at his forehead, over the scar that marked Harry as the real recipient of Voldemort's Killing Curse. "What is it, Harry? Do you really think that I'll wake up someday and just decide to give up on you?"

"No," said Harry.

"Then what?"

Harry sighed. "I still understand why someone would want to see you and love you better than I understand why someone would want to see and love me." He tugged at Draco's grasp on his hand, then forced himself to stand still even before Draco could ask for it, and shook his head. "And that's the truth," he said, sounding half-unnerved. "No matter how stupid it sounds, there it is."

Draco curved one arm around Harry's shoulders and tugged him forward until his head rested on his shoulder. "Is that the reason you haven't wanted me attending your sessions with Vera where you work on removing your mother's training against pleasure?" he murmured into his ear.

"Partially," Harry said, his voice going dry. "The other part is that the training often involves hot baths, and I don't think you could control your impulse to stare at me sitting naked in the water. And that would be rather distracting."

Draco's mouth went dry, and then he realized that Harry had made a joke, and what kind of joke it was. He laughed, and it felt like the most genuine laughter he'd ever given. He hugged Harry hard enough that Harry both lost his balance and his breath, and did it until Harry pounded feebly at him with one arm to let him go.

Then he said into Harry's ear, "Most of the world would give everything to be standing where I am now, Harry, if they only knew you. And I'll say that until you believe it. If you change, I'll say it again."

Harry tensed for a moment, as if thinking of a further objection, and then relaxed. "Thank you," he whispered.

Draco held him, and smiled, and decided that it could do no harm to not tell Harry what idea this conversation had just spawned in his mind. Harry needed some surprises and excitement in his life, after all, since they were currently in the middle of a peaceful haven where he received none.


"Can I help you, sir?"

Harry saw Snape's back tense from across the room. He'd been standing in front of a cauldron bubbling with a thick purple liquid, and stirring as if it were the only thing that existed. Now he shifted as if to conceal its presence from Harry, even before he smoothly turned on his heel.

"Of course, Harry," he said. "I'll need the mandrake roots boiled first, before they're cut. If you will?" He nodded to a table on the other side of the room that contained a cauldron full of water, a glass bowl to shield the fire, and a pile of dried mandrakes.

Harry nodded back and crossed over to the roots, gathering them, squeezing them to remove most of the juice—as one should always do before boiling mandrakes—and using his magic to create a fire in the glass bowl. He kept sneaking glances at Snape's back as he dropped the crushed roots into the cauldron, though. He couldn't help it. Snape showed an uneasy awareness divided between him and the potion. It took a lot to disturb him like that.

"Are you all right, sir?" he ventured at last.

Snape's hand tightened on his wand, and then he slid it into his pocket and turned around. "Dreams," he said.

Harry blinked. "What?" He crushed the latest mandrake root so hard that stinking juice ran out over his fist. He winced.

"I am healing through dreams," said Snape, voice flat. "I refused to allow the Seers to help me. The Sanctuary sends dreams in that case, images that dig up the buried emotions and memories and make me reflect on them from a different perspective." He laughed. It sounded like something breaking. "Or that is what is supposed to happen. In the last nightmare, I lost myself so completely to memory and bitterness that I never knew it was a dream until I awoke." His hand rose and began to caress the sleeve that hid the Dark Mark, almost absently. "And that is less than helpful when healing," he said.

His voice was clinical and dry on the last words. Almost, Harry thought. It shook on the last one.

That alone made Harry more concerned for Snape than he had ever been.

"Please, sir," he said quietly. He put the mandrake root he was handling down completely and faced Snape, but didn't try to move closer to him. From the way he was staring off into the distance, and the soft, constant buzz in the air around him, Harry knew Snape's wandless magic would try to open his belly or his throat if he got close now. And Snape had enough emotion to carry, that was plain, without adding guilt to the mix. "I think you should talk to the Seers. If Joseph is—too much like Sirius—" he didn't think the man was, personally, and it was just Snape's blind hatred and bias talking, but Snape had fastened on an insistence that yes, he was "—I'm sure there are other Seers who would talk to you."

Snape abruptly blinked, and the buzz in the air died down. Harry hardly had time to draw a breath of relief before Snape was shaking his head.

"What, sir?" Harry asked.

"I should not have told you," said Snape, voice and face empty. "You are healing. You should think of your own soul and thoughts, not mine." He turned, and the way he swept towards the cauldron moved the air so much Harry caught a faint whiff of the purple liquid inside. He wrinkled his nose. It smelled awful, and completely unfamiliar, which meant Snape was probably inventing something new. "I will bear the dreams alone. Thank you for your advice to talk to the Seers. It makes sense. Should the dreams overwhelm me, I will seek their assistance."

Harry narrowed his eyes. "No."

Snape glanced at him over his shoulder, face still blank. "No, what?"

"No, I think what you're doing is unreasonable." Harry folded his arms and scowled at Snape. "This is the exact kind of thing you're always warning me against doing—concealing my wounds until I have no choice but to get help because I'm drowning in my own blood. You scolded me out of it when we had to coordinate the battle at Hogwarts. I would scold you out of it now, but I think you could find an answer for every one of my taunts. So I'm just telling you that I think it's reckless, stupid, and hypocritical of you do to this." He paused, just long enough to let the impudence have the most impact, and added, "Sir."

Snape's eyes burned with something wild and dangerous. Harry had not seen this before, but he had felt it. When Snape came to rescue him from the storm his own magic had raised at the end of his second year, when his mind had been broken in shards and Snape had had to use Legilimency to help him rebuild it, his own magic had unfolded around him in response to the Dark power Harry was calling. This was the Death Eater's edge, the man Harry thought had prepared himself to kill, and, before his crisis of conscience, had enjoyed every second of it.

"I will handle my healing on my own," Snape snarled. "I am an adult, Harry, and fully aware of my own beliefs and choices—"

Harry snorted. "Of course you are, sir," he said. "That would be why you carried a childish grudge forward twenty years. You still don't see my brother for who he really is, thanks to living in the past. You still hate Sirius and compare people to him who are nothing like him. You still carry a fear of werewolves that you've transmuted into hatred, rather than overcome. And I think that you only struggled to overcome your hatred of my father because you knew that, otherwise, I would see what you did for me as revenge on James instead of justice for me. All of those are absolutely lovely examples of adult behavior."

As he watched Snape's face flush with rage, Harry had to reconsider his idea of whether he possessed enough sarcasm to taunt his guardian out of his childish obsessions.

"Get out," Snape said, and one of the knives he'd placed beside his own cauldron whizzed across the room and buried itself to the hilt in the wood beside Harry's head.

Harry glared at him. "Do you really think that impresses me?" he asked. "One nice thing about being a Lord-level wizard is that magical temper tantrums pale next to what I can do in battle."

Another knife flew. Harry doubted that Snape was seeing him at the moment. He was panting, his face livid, his eyes staring into another time and place. Harry conjured a shield that bounced the knife, and cocked his head.

"Talk to Joseph, sir," he said softly. "I don't blame you for this, not any of this. But I've finally decided that healing is important, you see. That means everybody's healing. I'm going to be just as stubborn about this as I am about the issue of forgiveness and reconciliation, or rights for magical creatures. Do you really want to be on the opposite side of an issue from me that I'm that determined about?"

"Get out." The words were low and ugly, and this time Snape's cauldron rose from its base, slowly revolving.

Harry rolled his eyes and did. The determination remained in his head as he walked down the steps towards his own room.

Idiot. He taught me those lessons. And now he claims that he'll hide and rage and scream but refuse to seek help? Idiot. No, he won't.


Snape knew he should apologize to Harry.

But it took him hours to work up the barriers with which to do it—to make sure that the rage lay down, tamed and still; to wrap his emotions with rocks and sink them to the bottom of the Occlumency pools; to forget the urge to snarl when he thought about Harry's words and what they had done.

He made himself cool and composed, as he had been when he was a spy among the Dark Lord's ranks, and went to Harry's room.

He found Harry reading, alone, unless one counted the tiny gold-and-green cobra coiled around his throat and the silvery Omen snake dozing at his feet. Snape did not, knowing neither of them could understand English. The Many snake did lift her head when he came in and give him an unfriendly hiss. Harry hissed back, and the cobra at once wound into place again, as motionless as a metal ornament.

Harry stared at him expectantly.

Snape stared back, narrow-eyed. This wasn't the boy he had been expecting to find. He knew Harry had not understood his outburst and what drove him to speak as he did earlier, and so he knew Harry's words to him could not have been planned. He had expected contrition, startlement, perhaps a demand for an explanation.

Harry just waited.

Snape snarled, at both himself and Harry, and said stiffly, "I apologize. I should not have thrown objects at you, no matter how angry I was. It is inexcusable treatment when dealing with an abused child." He inclined his head, feeling as if his neck were physically objecting to the movement.

"You shouldn't have," said Harry. "But you have a reason for it. The air of the Sanctuary is wearing away at you. What are you feeling? What events are you reliving in the dreams?" He leaned forward, and though his searching green eyes did not carry a Legilimens's probing touch, they were intense enough otherwise that Snape felt unnerved.

"I do not need to tell you," Snape said. Despite his best efforts, his voice was descending into a growl again. "Nor should I. You have your own healing to concentrate on, and receive assistance with."

Harry uttered a dry laugh. "And because of that, you think we should simply play the roles we always have? I heal, or try to, while you herd me along and retain your own implacable, frozen stillness." He shook his head. "It isn't working, sir. Can't you see that? If you had quieted the ghosts that haunt you, you would never have lost control this easily. I know how thick your walls are. I don't think they're simply weakening in this place, whatever the Seers may believe. I think the emotions that are rising are so powerful they can't be dealt with any other way."

Snape folded his arms. So he thinks he knows me? He ignored the uncomfortable twinge that said Harry probably did know him, as well as anyone living could claim to. Dumbledore had known more, but he had scoured Snape's mind for evidence of his motives when Snape came to the Light. And his mother—

Do not think of her.

He let out a steady breath, never taking his eyes from Harry's. He claims he knows me, and yet he has never reached the same conclusions about me that Eileen did. That means he is ignoring evidence of my true tendencies yet.

"I will decide how best to attend to my own healing, Harry," he said, making his voice deep and calm. "I have already chosen to suffer the dreams rather than use Dreamless Sleep. I—"

"That's a step," said Harry. "Progress. But not enough. Even these memories are weakening you severely, or you would never have attacked me. I think they'd still be there even if you started using the Dreamless Sleep now, sir. And when we go back into the world, I know that you won't be able to afford the weakness, any more than you want it. And I don't want you to be faltering. So it would be best if you would heal the breach now."

Snape cast a wandless, nonverbal spell to remove glamours. He thought for a moment that he might have surprised Vera sitting in Harry's place, disguised by some of the innate magic of the Sanctuary. But the spell worked, and Harry was still Harry, rolling his eyes as he felt the tingle along his skin.

"Is it really so hard?" Harry questioned, a tinge of impatience in his voice. "It's the same logic you gave me when I wanted to dig in my heels and remain as I was. Better to be whole and strong that way, no matter how much it hurts, than ignore your own weak points."

"I am whole!" Snape snarled, and then stopped as he saw spittle flying from his lips. He could feel rage coiling in his chest as it had not done since Harry's second year at Hogwarts. He had once thought that only Black could affect him that way. Even in James Potter's trial, he had been more in control. He had kept his motives in mind, and what would happen if his magic slipped its leash and slew Potter. And now…

Now, he did not know which way to turn, and all directions were confused.

"I want to help you," Harry told him, his eyes shining earnestly. "I want to see you talk to someone if you can't bear to take help from me. I want—"

"And it is not fair that you should be playing an adult role, shouldering adult burdens," Snape said, in what was not quite a shout.

Harry actually snorted at him. "What the fuck does fair have to do with any of it?" he asked. "We live in the world as it is. No, perhaps I should have been coddled and cuddled and spared any responsibility, but as it is, that didn't happen." He shrugged, never taking his eyes from Snape. "So I'll do what I have to do, and that includes both healing and helping you."

"What makes you think that you have to do it?" Snape could feel the world around him tumbling faster and faster, as if he were on the blade of a sword a master swordsman were spinning in his hands.

Harry blinked. "Because I love you. Obviously."

In Snape's state, the words were not ones he could hear and not react.

His magic made the walls of the room shake. The Omen snake raised his head and hissed, his long body flexing. The Many snake actually slipped down Harry's shoulder before he spoke to her in Parseltongue and she stopped.

"If you really want to do it that way," Harry said.

And his magic answered Snape, with a jolt that welled up out of the stone under Snape's feet and shook him back and forth, touching nothing else in the room. It felt like a springtime river in flood, bold with an impatient power that Snape had never encountered even in the Dark Lord.

"I'm stronger than you are," Harry reminded him. "You can't convince me to back off that way." His tone was sharp, but it was affection that made it so.

And the world was a mass of dizzying light and emotion.

Snape turned and ran.


Harry nearly rose to go after him, but then checked himself as he heard the hissing, like a hive of hornets, that accompanied Snape. His magic would lash out wildly now, and once again, he would only blame himself once he returned to sanity. Harry did write a swift note to Vera, advising her to keep guests and Seers out of Snape's way for the evening—though he thought they would probably know if they were at all magically sensitive, and Snape would probably return to his room and conjure things to destroy soon—and waved it in the air. A white dove appeared in moments, holding out its foot, to which a message tube was already attached. Harry smiled at it as he slid the note into the tube. The doves were the Sanctuary's owls, condensed out of the pure magic that filled the air and given many similar duties.

"Take this to Vera, if you would," he said.

The dove flapped its wings and gave a bob of its head and a quick coo, and soared away. Harry watched it go, then sank back down in his seat, shaking his head.

"Why is he being stupid?" Argutus demanded, flowing up and "sitting" beside Harry, which meant several silver coils overlapped the couch with another two to spare, holding Argutus's head at the height of Harry's face.

"Because he's afraid," said Harry.

"Ah." Argutus turned and looked along his scales. "Well, I am not often afraid, but you are. So it must make sense to you."

It did, Harry thought. But he no longer felt like letting fear control his life.

He stood so suddenly that the Many snake had to clench around his throat. Argutus regarded him with surprise as he strode towards the door.

"I'm going to visit Draco," Harry told him, and left the Omen snake to follow or not, as he liked.

Yes, he thought as he took the steps a few at a time, he was tired of letting fear control him. He would find Draco, and if he was free at the moment from a session with Nina, he would speak to him immediately, and if he wasn't, then Harry would wait. Either way, he wanted to talk to him.

He wanted to tell Draco he was going to regrow his hand.