Bothari had spent hours doing everything he could to keep Severus anchored to the world where his body was: combing his long fur, talking to him, dripping tiny quantities of milk and water into his mouth so that he didn't get too dehydrated, even rubbing him with a flannel dipped in warm water to feel like a mother cat's tongue. The kitten was still breathing and still had a pulse, but he still didn't open his eyes or respond to sounds.

Cheiron was asleep on his hooves, and Spark was in energy-saving mode while she recharged. Bothari knew he mustn't sleep. Most nights he couldn't sleep much even when he wanted to, but he mustn't now. This was as important as staying awake on guard duty. More important. Don't keep stroking his fur. Nice soft fur. Long black hair. After all those years, she was still beautiful…

Four sharp little sets of claws were jabbing into his thigh, startling him awake. For a moment his instincts shouted 'Enemy! Attack!' until he properly came back to the present moment. Severus, just as startled, jumped down from his lap and faced him, hissing furiously, fur standing on end and tail fluffed out like a brush.

Bothari knelt on the floor beside him, trying not to be intimidating. 'Easy,' he murmured. 'Friends, remember?' Severus backed away, keeping out of reach and snarling.

'Welcome back, Severus,' said Cheiron, also waking. 'I'm glad you made it.'

'You need to eat,' Bothari reminded the kitten. He poured milk into one saucer and placed a small amount of liver in another. Severus wasn't supposed to have too much of either, but, at least in cat form, he usually seemed to like them. Now, though, he turned away to wash himself as though he was scrubbing the smell of Bothari's hands off his fur.

'Is he going to go away like that again?' Bothari asked.

'He might,' said Cheiron. 'It depends whether he feels that this afterlife is worth living.'

Skywalker sat up straighter in his float-chair and opened his eyes. 'I sense anger and despair in Severus,' he announced, 'and great loneliness. Why can he not sense that we wish him well?'

'For one thing,' said Cheiron, 'Severus is a wizard, not a Force-sensitive. He's both intelligent and an exceptionally powerful and widely gifted wizard, but magic doesn't give him an intuitive awareness of people's emotions, the way you've experienced people ever since you were a child. If he was in command of his magic, he could use telepathy, or if he was in human form, he could brew a truth drug and question you under its influence. But if he didn't believe you, he might still decide that you were resisting the spell.

'In fact, I suspect that Severus probably has less awareness of other people's emotions than plenty of Muggles do. It's probably one of the things that have given him a reputation for being unsympathetic, because, for example, if he makes a joking comment about someone's appearance, he doesn't know if he's hurting their feelings. It probably caused him difficulties as a teacher, because if some of his students were frightened of him because their families were violent to them and, as far as they knew, any adult who accused them of being useless or incompetent might decide to murder them, and other students just refused to listen to him because they were used to their families punishing them for things that weren't their fault and so they were just in the habit of ignoring all adults, from Severus's point of view it just meant that his students were just messing around and needed telling off.'

Bothari wasn't sure whether kitten-Severus could follow this line of argument. He was so tired that he could only just follow it himself, though he'd spent enough time around Betans in the past two decades to be used to this psychology talk. But to Severus, if he could understand it at all, it probably just sounded like saying, 'You ugly psychopathic idiot!'

'I like him,' he said, trying to mend matters, just in case the kitten was listening.

'Yes, he's been a good friend to you,' said Cheiron. 'And that took a conscious effort on his part: not mind-reading, but remembering to see you as you, and not identify you with people who had hurt him in the past. I know it hasn't been easy for either of you, because the way your brain is wired means that your face and voice don't show how you feel, and you aren't always even aware of your own emotions, and the way Severus's brain is wired means that he isn't good at reading other people's emotions anyway. So to get past the double barrier in communication, he had to make the effort to understand you, and you needed to make the effort to explain things to him. But what that hasn't helped any of us to do is understand Severus and give him the attention he needs.

'In some ways, you're almost the opposite of Severus. You've always been good at seeing what other people expected you to be, but what can be harder for you sometimes is keeping a distinction between what other people think you are, and who you know you are. Unlike you, Severus knows how to be an honourable and responsible person even when he knows that the people he is working to protect hate him, and even when the nature of his job means he has to pretend to be a traitor. But he's so used to having to live that way that maybe he can't believe that anyone likes him.'

Severus, who had finished washing, batted an imaginary ball between his paws, pretending not to listen. There are all kinds of ways to look as if you're not listening. It's easiest if people assume you're just a stupid great oaf who can barely understand language, and treat you like furniture – or when they assume that anyone who is crippled must also be brain-damaged. Being an animal works, too. But Severus was trying too hard, and Bothari had seen enough of suicidally depressed people to know the signs. He knew all too well how even a child with loving parents and close friends could decide that life wasn't worth living if someone rejected him. How much worse must it be for Severus?

'How can we show him that we care about him?' Skywalker asked.

Severus padded over to the door, and out through the cat-flap. Bothari wished he had never sawn that hole in the door. All sorts of creatures came to the Rock, and plenty of them might eat cats. Not to mention what might happen if Severus ate something he wasn't meant to in the garden. He might have all the hurt and sadness of a full-grown wizard in him, but it was still in the brain of a kitten who didn't have a mother cat to teach him what was poisonous.

'Leave him,' said Vader. 'He needs to choose his own path.'

'He's probably as physically safe outside as he is in here,' said Cheiron. 'Emotionally, I don't know how to keep him safe, but I don't expect he'll appreciate feeling trapped. Maybe right now he needs to seek some consolation from friends who aren't us, if we've hurt his feelings. Or maybe he needs to drown his sorrows in catnip. As long as he knows that he can come back, I expect he will when he wants to.'

Bothari moved the food bowls closer to the door, where Severus could smell them. As he approached, he saw the cat-flap swing closed, then ease itself open again by just a crack as he left. He let himself e let himslef relax slightly.

'Do you know the phrase "love languages"?' Cheiron asked. Bothari didn't, and by the look of him, neither did Skywalker.

'Are they like Romance languages?' asked Spark, her lights slowly turning brighter again. 'Like Spanish and French and Romanian?'

'Not exactly,' said Cheiron, smiling. 'There was a human who wrote a book called The Five Love Languages, about the different ways in which different people experience love and show their love to others,' Cheiron explained. 'Unfortunately, the title confused a lot of people into thinking that there were only five – and that people experience love in the same "language" in which they express love. Now, in practice, people don't always fit into neat categories. So, Konstantine, how do you know when people love you or like you?'

Bothari wondered how he did know. He thought of the scene they had watched in the memories, of Lord Vorkosigan explaining why he could trust Bothari at his back in battle. He remembered asking Lady Vorkosigan if he could be her baby's bodyguard, and how she had looked unsure for a moment and then said, 'That would be – an honour.'

'When they trust me,' he said at last.

'Good. And you, Anakin?'

'When they persist in believing that there is still good in me, and refuse to give up,' said Skywalker. After a pause, he added, 'And when you listen to me.'

'Yes. Those are both important,' said Cheiron. 'Spark? What about you?'

'I'm a robot,' retorted Spark, rolling the light-beams from her eyes around the room.

'That doesn't mean you don't have feelings,' said Cheiron. 'But if you don't want to talk about yourself, what about your observations of other people?'

'Erik says he knew Christine cared about him because she kissed him on his forehead. He says his mother had never kissed him even when he was a child, and she wouldn't even be in the same room as him if he didn't have his mask on. That's why he likes it when Hephaestus and Charis hug him, and when you pick him up in your arms like a baby.'

'Yes, physical affection is important for a lot of people. Now, how about showing love? Konstantine, what do you do when you love someone?'

'Protect them,' said Bothari. Skywalker nodded in agreement.

'Erik's love language is crime,' said Spark, flashing her eyes with the robot equivalent of a giggle. 'Stalking, kidnapping, and blackmailing the girl he loves. Oh, and art – before kidnapping her and giving her a choice of marrying him or he'd blow up the building and kill her, himself and everyone else in the building, he wrote a wedding march and a requiem mass for her, so as to cover all the outcomes. You two don't get to be the weirdest people around, not when there's Erik.

'And then,' she added thoughtfully, 'when he decided to let her go, he decided to die of a broken heart, so the requiem mass could be for him. So maybe death is his love language.'

'Those are things he did in response to being in love, yes,' said Cheiron. 'But how did he show the full extent of his love for Christine?'

Spark considered. 'He let her go. He accepted that she loved Raoul.'

'Yes,' said Cheiron. 'Seeing Christine as a person, enough to accept her choices, was the greatest thing Erik could do to show love – and coming from him, that's exceptional. But a decent person, like Severus, while he'd be sad if someone he loved didn't love him, wouldn't have to struggle to decide to let them go free, because he wouldn't kidnap them in the first place, or blackmail them by threatening someone they cared about.

'And similarly, for Severus, protecting people from danger isn't something exceptional that he would do only for people he personally loves,' Cheiron went on. 'He was always someone who would do everything he could to protect his allies or the children at the school where he taught, whether he liked them or not, and who wouldn't mistreat even a prisoner who he believed was a dangerous criminal, or an old enemy who had been assigned to him as a subordinate for him to do as he wished with. There was one student in particular, who absolutely did not get on with Severus and whose life Severus had saved at least once a year for the time he was at Hogwarts, and the boy had no idea why. Various people had offered him assorted rationalisations over the years – that it was to repay an old life debt, or whatever – because he would never have understood the idea of a teacher protecting him simply because he was a child. He was an orphan, and no-one at home had protected him since his parents died when he was a baby, so the idea simply didn't exist in his head.'

'I know! I know!' exclaimed Spark, lights flashing with excitement at having worked something out. 'It's the same with Severus, isn't it? His brain hasn't been programmed with "How to feel safe and loved and accepted" because he didn't have any experience of it when he was younger. Is it true that as humans grow up, their brains delete all the unused storage space for learning new concepts and ideas, if they haven't learnt them by a certain age? So that there isn't a mechanism for Severus to learn "How to feel loved" now, because he didn't when he was younger?'

'It isn't quite like that,' said Cheiron. 'Adults – or older children anywhere past infancy, really – already have a view of the world, so they learn new ideas by understanding them in terms of things they already know, rather than starting from scratch. But you're right about Severus not having experience of feeling loved and accepted. Konstantine, when you first arrived here after you died, and Severus, someone you didn't know at all, was looking after you – did it worry you?'

'No.' The memory of those early days wasn't much more than a blur of feeling tired and in pain and guilty and miserable, but also, somehow knowing that he was somewhere safe, and that no-one was nagging him or calling him useless vermin or accusing him of skiving, or cursing him for the terrible things he had done.

'Why did you feel able to relax?'

'Professor Snape is your friend. And – he's like a good officer.' Like the way Vor ought to be and mostly weren't. He was like the Vorkosigans.

'Anakin? What about you? How did you feel about waking up here, and about Konstantine and Severus looking after you?'

'And being a limbless, helpless, forty-six-year-old baby?' rasped Vader, sounding amused. 'You chose good foster-parents for me.'

'Thank you,' said Cheiron. 'You see? Anakin, I know life has been hard for you, but you had a good mother, didn't you?' Skywalker nodded mournfully. 'And Konstantine, you had a truly harsh start in life, but later on you met people you could trust. But I don't know if Severus has any memories of being loved and cared for, so maybe, as Spark says, he doesn't know how to recognise it even if you do care about him. I don't know what his love language is – I'd guess that spending time together, being noticed and listened to, is important to him, but there might be other things that are more important. But I do know that we need to find out, if he isn't to disappear for good.'