Harry woke late, feeling stupid and lethargic, realizing that he really hadn’t gotten that much sleep. Although Draco’s words, and, more importantly the meaning behind them, made him sick to his stomach, he couldn’t help that they seemed to be replaying in his mind. By the time he dragged himself out of bed, he’d missed breakfast entirely and was already five minutes late for Potions.Snape’s rule for his sixth-years was simple: for every minute late to class, ten minutes of detention and ten points from their House; if a student was so foolish as to be more than ten minutes late for class, the Professor simply locked the door.

Harry was the first to be late that year. Not exactly a mark of distinction, he decided, sitting on his own and pretending he hadn’t noticed Draco’s frantic motions or Hermione rolling her eyes.

“Mister Potter,” Snape greeted. “How kind of you to join us. As we are slightly ahead of ourselves in our lessons, I was giving a pop quiz. What excellent luck that you have not – quite – missed it.”

Harry didn’t think it was excellent luck. He thought Snape was getting a head start on revenging himself for the slight of not showing up on time by making him look stupid.

“What are the uses of wormwood in the three following potions: Wolfsbane, Calming Draught, and Web of Darkness?”

Harry flushed. This was a seventh-year question, and Snape knew it. The reasoning behind the ingredient’s inclusion into each of those potions was utterly beyond him –

Wait, he thought, wait, I do know this...

“Today, Mister Potter. Unless you do not know? Draco–”

“No, I do know,” Harry said aloud. “In the Calming Draught, anyway, it’s a bitter principle, so it’s going to interact with the skullcap and end up settling the stomach. In the Web of Darkness, it is one of the blinding agents, and it stings the eye as well. In the Wolfsbane...” He paused, searching his memory. “It’d still be working on the stomach... so... it helps to curb the bloodlust that werewolves feel during the full moon?” he tacked on, completely guessing by this point.

Snape was staring at him as if he’d never seen him before.

Harry himself felt a little odd. He didn’t recall reading about any potion called the Web of Darkness. Frowning, he began wondering if Occlumency was somehow giving him the ability to read his teacher’s mind, but he didn’t feel the tell-tale touch of another’s thoughts on his.

Harry re-traced his mental steps. How had he known? Something Hermione said...? Something written as a footnote in their text?

‘The Web of Darkness...’ Harry saw the words written in lacy handwriting in his mind’s eye. ‘...is a blinding powder, made up of powdered wormwood leaf, sand, and–’

“Good one, Harry!” Hermione said, elbowing him as Snape turned to write on the board. “I’d read all about the Wolfsbane, you know, but I wasn’t sure about the others.” She beamed at him happily.

Harry heard Ron’s voice: Hermione reckons you’re just growing up...

No, Harry thought, she feels she’s finally found a kindred intellectual. He couldn’t find it in himself to feel any derision. It must be lonely for Hermione, he suddenly realized, to be the only one really interested in this stuff... He smiled at her tentatively, feeling as though he were meeting her for the first time.

Hermione seemed to sense his hesitancy and touched him gently on the arm before turning back to face the board, an unromantic but unmistakably intimate gesture, serving to remind Harry that Hermione was who she’d always been; he was only seeing her differently, lately.

After class, Draco stormed up to his desk and glared. “Just what do you think you were doing?! You were supposed to be at breakfast; you were supposed to set up my books for me! You’re supposed to be doing as I say!”

Harry looked up at Draco in surprise. After yesterday, it seemed incredible that Draco could be such a spoiled-brat child. Hermione and Yolande stopped chatting to eye the both of them – sympathetically, Harry thought – before exiting the classroom, leaving it empty but for he, Draco, and Snape.

“I can’t obey you in matters I can’t help,” Harry replied calmly. “I overslept, plain and simple. It happens to the best of us.”

Draco glowered and crossed his arms over his chest. He looked away briefly, then shrugged.

“What would you like me to do, sir?” Harry inquired mildly. “I can set my alarm earlier, if you’d like.” Harry thought he saw Snape’s lips curl faintly at the ‘sir’.

“No. No, that’s useless. Goodness, Potter, I thought you’d be able to follow simple orders like ‘set out my books’. Maybe you consider these things beneath you, not worth your time?”

Harry looked up in alarm, his disinterest falling away. “No, sir,” he said, his voice ringing with quiet urgency.

“Perhaps that is the case. Professor Snape calls you ‘our little celebrity’. Maybe he’s right. Maybe you’ve been in the spotlight so long that the little things have long since faded to insignificance, hmm?”

Harry could’ve told him that it was only the little things that mattered anymore when you were in the spotlight, but somehow he didn’t think Draco would understand, or even listen.

“Well. We’re going to start in on some of the big things, today, Potter.” Draco glanced up at the front of the room, where Snape was innocently marking papers. He lowered his voice and crouched so low that his breath stirred the hairs on the back of Harry’s neck.

“Your invisibility cloak,” he said. “I want it.”

Harry paled and looked up into Draco’s features, scanning them for signs of... of what, he wasn’t certain. Mercy? He wasn’t the least bit interested in how Draco’d found out, although he realized he should be. He was more concerned with... “Why?”

“Why isn’t any of your business, is it?”

Harry worried his lower lip. “It is,” he protested. “I said I wouldn’t help you put me in more danger than I already am...”

“You said it yourself: you could’ve told me to murder my own mother under Imperio and I would’ve complied. And now you won’t give me an item, a stupid piece of clothing, albeit a useful one? So much for Gryffindor honor,” Draco spat.

“Heavy-handed with the manipulation, Mister Malfoy,” Snape said, still managing to look unconcerned as he scribbled something vehement in bright green ink on some poor first-year’s paper. “He would’ve given it to you without the mention of his House.”

Draco sniffed haughtily, but raised one pale eyebrow at Harry.

“Yeah,” Harry said with a sigh. “Reckon I would’ve.”

Snape made a vague get-on-with-it motion with one hand, still not looking up.

“Will you give it back?” Harry inquired.

“I’m going to hazard that all depends on you, and how well you perform during the rest of the week,” Draco said, his tone measured and firm. “If you please me, I’ll return it to you.”

Harry gazed at him dubiously. “That’s a lie, isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” Draco replied easily. He grinned. “Only one way to find out, isn’t there? Besides all this, I shouldn’t have to haggle with my slave. Hand it over.”

Harry sighed again, feeling cornered. “When?”

“Whenever, so long as it’s before lights out tonight,” Draco replied. “Perhaps during Defense?”

“Okay,” Harry said through clenched teeth. There was nothing else to do.

Charms passed by in a haze for Harry. He noted Ron looked worried, and felt amused that Hermione could manage to listen to Professor Flitwick, do her own work, watch Neville, and read some sort of esoteric text behind the pages of her Charms book in the space of a moment. Neville commiserated with him briefly about Malfoy before Hermione gently redirected him towards his work.When class ended, Harry ran miserably back to Gryffindor Tower and withdrew the invisibility cloak from the bottom of his trunk. He held it lovingly to his face, breathing in the scent – that of himself, Hermione, and Ron, of course, but also an older scent, unrecognizable to Harry but nonetheless bringing him a feeling of home, security, peace. It was his father’s smell.

Oh, Merlin, no. He hadn’t known what this would mean to him until he was holding the cloak. He could not give it to Malfoy. He watched the fabric ripple, watched it drape over his hands until it appeared there was nothing beneath.

“Potter.” Malfoy was framed in the doorway.

Harry whirled around. “What are you doing here?!”

“Don’t act as though your universe’s been breached,” the blond boy drawled, leaning indolently against the doorframe. “I followed you; I heard the password. Nothing to it.” He grinned at the cloak. “Is that it?”

Harry didn’t trust himself to speak, so he nodded.

“Give it to me, Harry.”

Harry looked down at the cloak, then up at Malfoy. Slowly, his hands lifted into the air, without conscious thought. When Malfoy took the fabric from his arms, the gesture was almost reverent. “They don’t have one of these at Malfoy Manor, even,” he breathed. “They’re so rare. Do you know why?”

Harry shook his head mutely, still unable to speak past the despair lodged in his throat.

“They take fifty years to weave,” Draco replied, perching on the edge of Harry’s bed as though he belonged in the Gryffindor’s room. “The thread can only be made of a flax which grows on the north face of mountains where snow nymphs live... and the spells, they have to then be placed on, layer by layer, thread by thread...” He stroked the cloth with a motion that Harry, in his abstraction, noted was uncharacteristically gentle. Those long, tapered, pale fingers were touching something that was so personal, though, so very much his, that the gesture almost seemed obscene.

“Come, Harry,” Draco ordered, standing. “I still need to drop this off before Defense. And you’re coming with me.”

When Harry rose slowly, Draco took him by the sleeve and nearly dragged him from the room.

It was two or three minutes before Harry became clear as to their location. They were descending to the dungeons, or thereabouts: to the Slytherin dormitories. When they reached a large gargoyle, Draco whispered the password: Imperio. He seemed to think this funny, but Harry didn’t. Snape indubitably thought the entire business hilarious still, and was attempting to carry the joke for all it was worth.

“Oh. Wait a moment. I think I hear someone coming.” Draco beckoned to Harry, and tossed the invisibility cloak over the both of them, then pressed against the wall.

“...don’t know why you’re–”

“For the last time, it’s my own business!” Yolande Zabini was in a fury. Her golden hair was in a static-ridden halo around her head; her cheeks were crimson and her eyes flashed. She whirled on her companion and stood, hands on hips. “Let me tell you one thing, Blaise Zabini,” she intoned, advancing on her prey. “You breathe one word of this to anyone, and I’ll tell mother all about that party at the end of last summer.”

Blaise raised his hands in the air. “Steady on, dear girl. Never you mind that party, I was drunk.”

“Ha!” she barked. “Please. I saw you looking at Iya long before that, didn’t I?”

Blaise went suddenly quiet, running a hand through his short-cropped, dark hair anxiously.

“There, Blaise, darling, you know I wouldn’t tell – under normal circumstances,” Yolande said, and the sharpness had faded from her voice, somewhat. “But, you know how it goes: tit for tat. Keep your pretty mouth shut, and so will I.”

“How it goes in Slytherin, you mean.” Blaise said. “What about that new badge you’re carting around, is it just for show?”

“I’m still a Slytherin first and foremost, but I believe in inter-House cooperation,” she said, her chin hitching up slightly.

“I’ll bet you do,” Blaise hissed. “You and your pretty new girlfriend.”

Yolande went bright red. “She’s not my girlfriend!”

“But you wish, don’t you, darling,” Blaise echoed. “Goodness, you’re transparent. One wonders how you made it into Slytherin at all!”

The pair moved out of view and their voices muted to nothing. When Harry moved to tear the cloak away, though, Draco gripped his wrist, shaking his head silently. Together, they began to move forward, in the same direction as the two Zabinis, presumably towards the dorms. Draco had to rattle off three more passwords before they actually reached his bedroom, where the cloak came off.

Harry took a deep breath of Draco-free air. Draco’s scent, a faintly nervous smell behind too much expensive aftershave, had been getting to him – especially, mingling as it was with the scents of the people he loved the best. He sank into a seated position on the floor, suppressing the urge to cough and double over. It was the aftershave; that had to be it.

Draco carefully folded up the cloak and tucked it under one arm. “Well? Close your eyes, Potter. I won’t show you where I’ll be keeping it.”

Harry obeyed – instinct, by now, he no longer even paused to question, he realized – and it was just as well. He couldn’t stand crying in front of Draco Malfoy, and if he had to watch his father’s invisibility cloak secreted amoung the other boy’s things, he might have done just that. At the feel of Draco’s hand atop his head, his eyes fluttered open and he gazed almost straight up.

“You gave me a treasured possession today,” Draco said formally, twining his fingers almost painfully in Harry’s hair, “and you did it willingly. I saw how much it hurt you.”

Harry willed his eyes not to fill with tears, clamped down on the words it was my father’s, stomped on the desire to beat Malfoy to a bloody pulp.

“Good,” Draco said, and his grip altered suddenly to a pat. “You’re getting better, aren’t you, Harry? Come along, now, or we’ll be late.”

Defense passed by in a blur; Harry couldn’t have said, even, what the lesson was about. All he knew was that Professor Lupin wanted to meet with him to discuss future lesson plans. Harry had agreed; it seemed like it would take more energy to disagree. Lupin had called him ‘Mister Potter’ the entire time, and they’d set up a meeting for some time during the next week. They still had three weeks to plan, but part of Harry knew that Lupin was also interested in making sure that Harry was... well, that Harry hadn’t...Become his own Dark Lord, maybe?

Something like that. Maybe it was as Ron said – Lupin figured he’d snapped, or was snapping, under the pressures around him.

Maybe, Harry thought, indenturing me to Malfoy wasn’t the best of plans, then. It certainly doesn’t seem to be improving my state of mind.

Ron was acting just the same as ever, except that, instead of ‘good night’, he always said, “feel like talking?” When Harry said no, Ron nodded and extinguished his light. Harry had seen this quiet determination on his friend’s part before, and realized that Ron would probably be asking him this question for some time to come.

Hermione, for her part, was more cheerful than ever. Although it was hard to tell whether she were ignoring his distress or simply unaware of it, Harry had to believe the latter, given what he knew of Hermione’s nosy nature. The bushy-haired girl was doing swimmingly in her classes, and seemed quite pleased with the progress she was making on a personal Charms project of which she would say very little. Every now and then, she would pat Harry bracingly on the arm and tell him that the business with Draco would let up very soon.

It did seem to be letting up, with or without his servitude ending. After the Cloak, Draco did not seem to want anything particularly taxing for awhile. Harry made it to the weekend before even realizing that he had an Occlumency session with Snape that was fortunately disguised as a detention due to his lateness to Potions.

Knowing Snape, though, it would be every bit as difficult as a detention.

When Harry arrived Saturday evening, the Professor was in the Potions lab. He beckoned Harry forward without looking up, then gestured for him to close the door – again, without bothering to look up or otherwise acknowledge Harry’s existence. After Harry had stood awkwardly in the doorway for a full three minutes, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, he moved to a desk and settled himself down.“Potter.” Snape’s voice drifted in from the adjoining room, muffled by space and potion smoke. “Write the following fifty times, using no magic: No matter how I am tortured by Draco Malfoy, I shall not be late for Potions class.”

Harry jerked slightly in his chair. “Professor...? But... Occlumency...?”

Snape stuck his head out of the door and peered at Harry, sneering. “You honestly thought you would be missing this detention because both it and your Occlumency lesson happened to be on the same evening?” Snape’s eyebrow twitched, as though he saw some black humor in the very thought.

Harry glared at him half-heartedly, withdrawing a quill, an inkpot, and a small roll of parchment. He wrote: No matter how I am tortured by Draco Malfoy, I shall not be late for Potions class.

By the time he’d written it the tenth time, he was beginning to be truly angry with Snape.

By the time he’d written it the twentieth time, the words were beginning to lose meaning.

By the time he’d written it the fiftieth time, the words had taken on new meaning. He laughed aloud, setting the quill down.

Snape emerged from the Potions lab, wiping a glittery blue substance off of his hands with a dark cloth. “You find something amusing, Mister Potter?”

“Myself,” Harry said with a shrug, handing Snape the parchment. “Are you through in there? Do you need help straightening up?”

“Your detention is over, Potter, and your lesson has begun,” Snape said by way of an answer. He set himself behind the teacher’s desk. “Tell me,” he said, “what you recall of our Occlumency sessions last year.”

Harry glared. “Sessions, you call them,” he said. “Mostly, I remember things like try harder, and you are handing me weapons! and the Dark Lord will not go so easy...” He couldn’t help but slightly imitate the Professor’s trademark sneer with these words. “Oh, but the first time you told me I’d done well, actually,” he suddenly recalled.

“Not what I said, you fool, technique, ideas...”

“Not much. Er... clear my mind. Empty it of all emotion. Before sleeping, but sometimes during waking hours, too. Control, precision... things like that.”

“Things like that,” Snape said, rubbing his own forehead with every sign of intense exasperation. “So you do not recall anything concerning the Obscura technique?”

“No,” Harry replied. “You just kept throwing Legilimens until I collapsed.”

“And you, Mister Potter, did not clear your mind before sleeping so much as one measly time!” Snape’s expression slowly began to shift under Harry’s relentless accusatory glare. After a moment, the Professor broke the staring contest and massaged his temples.

It also looked, to Harry’s disbelieving eye, that the Professor was counting to ten under his breath.

“I’ll do better this time,” Harry said stiffly.

Snape shook his head absently, lowering his hands. “I know you will.” The words emerged with surprising conviction.

“Good,” Harry said, wondering how the Professor was so certain. “So... shall I clear my mind?”

“If you can, with all that buzzing,” Snape said, raising his hands to his temple again.

“Buzzing, sir?”

Snape looked up at him sharply. “You don’t hear any buzzing.” When Harry shook his head, the man shrugged his shoulders. “Well – one of the added benefits of being a Potions Master–” His gaze slipped significantly back to the lab, where copious amounts of smoke were still emerging. “Interesting side-effects. You should have seen; the other day, I was mixing three separate cauldrons in the same room, and I–” He paused, suddenly. “I’m rambling.”

Harry nodded. “What were you brewing in there?” he inquired.

“Calming Draught, Draught of the Living Death, and...”

“Veritaserum?” Harry completed. “Sir...”

Snape laughed suddenly, a sound so startling that Harry jumped. “Well,” he said, when Harry continued to stare, “don’t you find this funny?”

“I find it interesting... sir,” Harry replied cautiously. “My guess is that you inhaled some combination of the Calming Draught and Veritaserum.”

“You may be excellent at saving the world,” Snape interrupted, “but you’re terrible at Potions. That shouldn’t cause symptoms of lightheadedness...”

“No, no,” Harry said, “see, if they’re in combination, inhaling them might have this effect... because of the...” He frowned, suddenly losing the thread of what he was saying.

Snape was eyeing him with sudden suspicion. “Continue.”

“I, uh... I don’t remember what I was going to say.”

The Professor blinked, then snorted, rolling his eyes. “Close the damned door, you idiot,” he said. The odd thing was that he appeared to be talking to himself, because before Harry could rise, Snape had suited word to action and slammed the door to the Potions lab. Snape withdrew his wand and pointed it at the door. “Impervio,” he said, and smoke ceased curling from the crack in the door and the keyhole. “Much better. You were saying?”

Harry struggled to regain the thread of the conversation. “Erm... oh, yeah. The Calming Draught has that anemone tincture, and if you added it before it was cool, it would leave some of the good stuff behind, but all the volatiles would have evaporated, and if that combined with some of the volatiles from the Veritaserum, that would go straight to your hindbrain, sir, if you know what I mean, some of that stuff is pretty potent, and... and now I’m rambling.”

“Accurate.”

“Yeah, sorry.”

“No, you’re rambling, but you’re also quite accurate,” Snape said. “What happened to you over the summer?”

Harry stared at him. “I think you got the worse of those Potions, Professor.”

“Highly likely. Now answer the question.”

“Not much, really,” Harry replied. “Dudley was okay, this summer. Mostly, I did yard work and homework and that was really all.”

“But you’re...” Snape gestured vaguely with one hand.

“What am I?” Harry demanded.

“Quite different,” the Professor said with a shrug. “Quiet. Detached. Rather brilliant at Potions all of a sudden. Better hold on your temper. Nearly deranged respect for me. If I didn’t know you were you, I’d swear you weren’t.”

Harry thought about this for a moment, then grinned. “Right back at you, sir. Although you’ve probably always been brilliant at Potions.”

“Don’t change the subject,” Snape said, his eyes narrowing.

As sloshed as he was, the effect was rather more humorous than he intended. Harry broke into a fit of giggles.

Snape rubbed at his temples again. “Ugh, the buzzing’s back...”

“Oughtn’t we look for an antidote?”

“While the potions are still smoking, Harry? I know you have a brain; kindly use it.”

That sounded a bit more like the Snape Harry knew. “Certainly, sir. How and where would you like me to use it?”

“Figure out how to get in there and douse the flames under the cauldrons,” Snape replied promptly.

“Well... you could Apparate in there and douse them, then Apparate out,” Harry suggested.

“Apparate? No, I’d be too alarmed at the thought of leaving an eyeball or an arm behind me, in this state...”

“Oh, I have a thought,” Harry said suddenly. “Oooh, I have a good thought.” He frowned. “Let’s see...” He stuck his wand under the gap between the door and the flagstones. “Accio oxygen!” he said.

Harry immediately felt far more dizzy in the rush of air coming under the door, but he stood to peer inside the room anyway. “Hey, it worked! No more fire!”

Snape’s hand gripped him by the shoulder and practically tossed him back, slamming the door and whirling on him.

“What?!”

“Do you hear yourself, Potter? ‘No more fire’! What’s the matter with you, do you always feel the need to place yourself in harm’s way, is it some sort of obsession with you?!”

“You told me to get in there and douse the flames!” Harry protested.

“I told you to figure out HOW to get in there and douse the flames!” Snape corrected, roaring now. “It’s not your responsibility to fix everything, do you hear me?”

“I’m sorry.”

Snape held himself rigid for another moment; then, he seemed to deflate. “So am I. First, you stood directly in the path of those fumes. Then, you called every oxygen molecule in the room over to you. Do you know how flammable oxygen is – and you, standing next to the torches? Strike that, I imagine you do, or you wouldn’t have called it away from the fire. Did you know an excess of oxygen also makes you lightheaded?”

“I... I do now,” Harry replied. “You, er... seem to be feeling better.”

The Professor sighed. “Yes. And you?”

Harry tilted his head to one side, running a systems diagnostic. “Okay, I guess. I still feel a bit odd.”

Snape ran a hand through his lank hair, a nervous, aberrant gesture that told Harry the Professor was still not quite himself. He sank suddenly into the chair behind his desk, his pitch-black eyes sliding up to Harry, then back again. “Well, sit, Harry, for Merlin’s sake.”

Harry moved cautiously to one of the chairs most directly across from the desk and slid into it, keeping an eye on his Professor the entire time. “Have – have I really changed so much?” he managed.

Professor Snape glared, and Harry couldn’t help but entertain the disturbing notion that the greasy-haired man was gazing through him instead of at him. “Perhaps you are merely growing up,” he finally said. “Or perhaps you were simply never the boy I thought you were.”

Harry frowned, not certain he liked that. “Detachment and the hold on my temper... do you think it’s Obscura?”

“Perhaps,” the Professor conceded, steepling his fingers. “General side-effects of the technique have never been studied, owing to its extremely limited number of master practitioners.”

“You said everyone who masters it goes insane.”

“Ah, yes.” Snape leaned slightly forward in his chair. “Allow me to rephrase then: that is one of the only things generally known about Obscura.” He frowned, and worried his lower lip, again a gesture so expressive that a pinprick of worry formed at the back of Harry’s mind. “A practitioner of Obscura – the sort of man who buries his emotions – is not likely to discuss side-effects with anyone else; nor is he the sort of man in whom anyone would note an alteration. The entire idea of the thing, Harry, is to hide oneself, to display a surface so consistent that there is never any impression created other than that of control.” He cleared his throat. “Often, the fact that the wizard in question was practicing Obscura goes completely unnoticed until the final month or so of limited sanity before...” He shrugged.

Harry swallowed with difficulty. “Oh. Er... well, you and Ron have been noticing, anyway.” He frowned. “And Draco, I think.”

“Your best friend and your worst enemy,” Snape mused. “They, more than anyone else, are in a position to appreciate an alteration in your behaviour. Besides, your initial behaviour–”

“I have an all-or-nothing personality, I know,” Harry filled in. “I wish you’d stop saying that. It sounds like I don’t have a brain.”

Snape laughed, but at least it was a low, scornful laugh and not the laugh full of feeling he’d heard earlier. “If I could trust you with such an advanced technique, I might teach you to control Obscura rather than abolishing it,” Snape mused. “You could certainly use a better hold on your temper. What worries me is that you appear to be doing this unconsciously, avoiding a meltdown at all costs.”

“Well of course I am,” Harry said, eyeing Snape. “You aren’t still hammered, are you, sir?”

“Maybe a little, but that isn’t the point, Mister Potter.”

They were back to ‘Mister Potter’. Harry sighed in relief. “What is the point?”

“That there are times in life when we must break down. When the walls around us hem us in rather than keep our demons at bay. If we do not allow our pain expression once in a great while, we risk allowing it to overcome us in all things.”

Harry shut his open mouth with difficulty. “Y-yes sir,” he managed, hoping that Snape would only remember the gist of what he’d said in the morning. Almost against his will, he added, “what about you?”

“What about me?”

“You use this Obscura thing too, don’t you?”

Snape glared. “In my services for the Dark Lord, yes.”

“But do you let it out gradually?”

“Yes, Potter, why is it you think I have such a temper?!” Snape shot back, proving his point with the shout and glower. “I’m letting it out in a trickle most of the time; I have to!”

Harry fell silent after a small sigh. Then, “couldn’t you let it out all at once?”

“That would be... inadvisable.”

“But maybe in larger chunks? So not... all the time?”

“Potter, it’s late, I’m exhausted,” Snape said suddenly, passing a hand over his eyes.

Harry stood. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize...” He checked the watch at his wrist. “We’ve been here hours already, sir.”

“We didn’t even progress to anything practical,” Snape murmured, rubbing at his forehead. When Harry started forward, the Potions Master made a dismissive gesture. “Just an ordinary headache,” he said.

“We talked about it, and that is practical. It’d be great if we could start off every lesson with some talk,” Harry managed. “Like, what we’re going to do, before we do it? Uhm, that would help me. A lot.”

“Very well, now go,” Snape dismissed.

Harry stood gathering his things. He was almost to the door before a worry suddenly gripped him. “Professor? Do you need help getting downstairs?”

“My private rooms are not far,” Snape replied. “I’ll be fine, Mister Potter. Thank you for your concern.”

Harry nodded somewhat formally and moved into the corridor with the startled realization that he felt oddly cheerful – more cheerful, in fact, than when he’d come.