Aug. 13

I hate journals and I’m not going to write in them anymore. And he can look over at me all he wants and raise his eyebrow and not even teach me how to do it, and I don’t care.

I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. . . .

“Harry.”

Harry didn’t look up but kept writing the same three words over and over again, scribbling madly.

“Harry, look at me, please.”

It was the please that did it. Snape never said “please” to him. His quill stopped moving and he looked up at the professor, who was standing back a pace or two, not looming like he sometimes did.

“What are you doing?”

Harry tried the one-eyebrow thing, but only managed to get both of them to vanish under his fringe. “Writing in my journal,” he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Which it should be.

“You’ve been doing so for almost three hours. And after you tore up yesterday’s writing, I wanted to make sure . . .”

“That I’m okay? I’m fine.” Harry sneered. “Go ahead, take points.”

“Shall I make tea?”

“No.” He turned back to his journal. Now, where was he? Oh, yeah . . . I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t—

“Harry, I would like you to put your quill down.”

Harry gripped it tighter. “You wanted me to write, so I’m writing!”

“I suggested you write as a way to express yourself without shouting or wanting to hit things. But I don’t know if it’s doing you any good right at this moment.”

“It’s doing me a lot of good,” Harry growled, quill still scratching madly in the book, “and if you don’t let me be, I’ll tear out the rest of it and burn it, too!”

He felt the professor move before he heard him, and before he could do more than yelp, Snape snatched his journal and Accio’d the quill away. Harry reached for the ink pot, but it wouldn’t come off the desk, no matter how much he pried at it. “Oh, that’s not fair!”

“My apologies for not wishing to see your primitive artwork adorning my walls.” Snape’s voice had taken on that snippy, annoyed tone that Harry had grown to hate, especially over the last three days.

“You’re not sorry!”

“No, I’m not.”

Harry glared at him. “What do you care what I write, anyway?”

Snape’s face remained impassive, and Harry wanted to hit it. Hit him. Hard. He barely had a check on his temper, and had spent a good portion of the last couple days in his room, banished there for “acting like a three-year-old.” Ha! Fat lot Snape knew. If he’d threatened violence or had a “temper tantrum” when he was really three, he’d have been knocked flat. Sent to his room was nothing.

Besides, now he had his summer homework done, and had even read ahead in several classes. He’d passed all his OWLs except for Divination and History of Magic, and had received Os in Defense, Transfigurations, and, surprisingly, Potions, with Es in everything else. Snape had been . . . kind enough to loan him texts for the coming year, since he hadn’t been able to stomach the idea of going to Diagon Alley to buy anything yet.

“Since you have not been able to put your journal to use for the last three days—”

“I did so! I wrote yesterday—”

“And promptly removed all traces of that writing, yes?”

So what, if he’d torn it out, and torn it up, and then burned it to ashes in the fireplace. “So?”

“So, you will now be required to tell me what was on those pages.”

“What? No! You said I didn’t have to share that with you.” Harry was on his feet now, and if he could break things in half simply by glaring at them, Snape would be in pieces. “I can’t believe you’re going back on your word!”

Snape crossed his arms over his chest and his eyes narrowed, but he didn’t yell, which was . . . amazing actually. “I told you I would not read your journal. And I will not. However . . . Harry, we have barely more than two weeks before classes are due to begin again, and you’ve not even been able to step into the Great Hall yet, with just the other professors.”

Harry mirrored Snape’s stance, though his shoulders hitched up a fraction. He didn’t what that had to do with anything, but he still bristled. “You said I didn’t have to, till I was ready.”

“I did,” Snape agreed.

“And . . . and I’m not ready.”

“I know you feel you aren’t, but if you’re going to go back to classes on time, you will need to get used to being around other people besides me, and in a less controlled environment. And the first step in doing that is to trust me with what has been bothering you the last couple days.”

Harry was trembling by the time Snape finished, and his hands were sweaty. He balled them into fists. “No, I don’t care!”

“Don’t care about what?”

“Going back to class. I don’t need stupid Charms and Magical Creatures and all that rot. I can . . . I can just go to the library and read on my own. How about that?”

Snape shook his head, and Harry’s fists were clenched so tight he wasn’t sure he could uncurl them again. “I’m sorry, Harry. You’ll need to be enrolled in regular classes, or at the very least, have a tutor who can take you through the curriculum, in order to do your NEWTs.”

“What if I don’t care about NEWTs?”

Snape considered him for a moment, expression barely changing beyond a slight cant to his head. “What do you care about?”

There it was, the moment to tell him, and admit that he’d become a monster. It almost felt good to be able to get it off his chest. “Killing them. Making them suffer like they did to me.” He paused. “But mostly, killing them.”

Snape nodded, once, as if he’d expected no more and no less from the stupid, arrogant Gryffindor who’d annoyed him for five years already. But Harry wasn’t going to take back the words, no matter how it made him look. They were the truth, and he was sick of lies.

He held the potion master’s gaze for a long time, and was surprised that Snape didn’t try Legilimency on him. But he didn’t, and they stared at each other and nobody shouted.

Finally Snape said, “Sit down. I’ll make the tea.”

Harry could have screamed. But he didn’t.

---

Several hours later, they were still at the dining table. Snape had made four pots of tea, in total, and Harry felt like he was floating in it. He’d used the loo a couple times already, and each time, while washing up he stuck his head under the tap and ran cold water over it.

He felt hot and a little sick, with shame and embarrassment, and it was the only way he could stay cool enough to continue their “conversation.” Though their talk wasn’t really a conversation, he thought. Snape asked questions, like he always did, and Harry had to answer them.

He hated it.

But he’d still told Snape about the nightmares he’d been having, the ones with Lucius Malfoy in them, and the laughter than made his skin crawl, and how now Draco was in them, and Avery, and in the worst ones, the dream added in Ron and the twins, and even Sirius, and all of them knew, and were mocking him and hurting him, and he was running, but he couldn’t get away, and he always woke screaming.

And he told Snape about the nights when his scar erupted in agony like he was under the Cruciatus again, and Snape nodded and said they were going to work on Occlumency again in the morning, now that he had most of the worst memories in the pensieve and had finished reading that book.

Then Harry asked how many times they’d hit him with Crucio that last night at the manor.

Snape looked at him, surprised, and equivocated for a while, but Harry just stared back at him and said, “Madam Pomfrey must’ve told you.”

Taking a sip of his tea before answering, Snape studied him over the rim of the cup, and Harry did his best not to fidget. “One wonders why you ask.”

Biting his tongue (literally) to keep from saying, ‘It’s none of one’s business,’ Harry held the man’s gaze, knowing he was being measured. “I want to know exactly how much I owe them for.”

Snape sighed and put down his cup. “Vengeance is a dark road, Harry.”

“I know that.”

“Do you? You realize it was for vengeance’s sake that Tom Riddle became the Dark Lord, yes? Revenge on the Muggles who disowned him, such as his father, on those who hurt him or neglected him in the orphanage where he grew up, and revenge on the ones who currently stand in the way of his thirst for power.”

“I . . .” Harry hadn’t really known, but it made sense. At the moment, though, he didn’t care. That wasn’t going to be him. “I just want to know. Will you tell me?”

Snape pressed his lips together in a thin line and stared at him some more. Then he sighed again. His voice was curiously flat as he said, “According to Madam Pomfrey, in the twenty-four hours preceding our rescue, you were hit forty-three times by Cruciatus, twelve by Diffindo, four by Engorgio, fourteen times by Ennervate, eleven times by Episky, seven by Flagrate, once by Furnunculus—”

“All right, all right! Stop! Please.” Harry was feeling sick. He didn’t even remember most of that. When had they covered him with boils? And how come Snape remembered down to the specific number of each?

“There is more, if you want a true reckoning.”

“Maybe . . .” Harry squeezed his eyes shut, and pushed the sudden image of the Engorgio Curse, particularly, away. He gritted his teeth to keep from vomiting. He’d done too much of that this week. “Maybe later.”

“If you’re sure . . .”

“Yes!”

“Very well.” Snape paused, long enough for Harry to get his breath back; probably timed it perfectly, the git. “Tell me, then, how you came by that interesting scar on the back of your right hand.”

Harry groaned and laid his head on his arms, on the table top. “I don’t want to talk anymore about the ways Harry Potter’s been stupid.”

“Oh, see, now you have piqued my curiosity. Do go on.”

Harry glared at him through half-lidded eyes. “I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut.”

“Fascinating.” He squinted at Harry’s hand. “It does read, ‘I must not tell lies,’ doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, um, sorry. I mean, yes, sir.” Harry rubbed the thumb of his left hand over the words and remembered how angry he’d been last year, and bitter, when everyone was avoiding him, including Dumbledore, who set up horrible, nasty Occlumency lessons with the person who he’d least wanted in his mind, ever.

With a sigh, he admitted, “It was Umbridge. Detentions. I kept getting them because I was damned well not going to sit there and listen to her tell everyone that Vold—er, sorry, that What’s-His-Name wasn’t back, and that I was making the whole thing up because I was a nasty little liar. Not after Cedric. I couldn’t let her do that to him.”

“But you could let her carve words in your hand?” Snape actually looked surprised, and a bit appalled, and Harry was taken aback.

He shrugged. “It was a quill that did it. I wrote, and it used my blood as ink, from cuts it made in my hand. Then it would heal up, and I’d have to write the line again.”

“Over and over?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you never told anyone? You do realize that Blood Quills are considered Dark Arts.”

“I figured that. And I tried to tell Professor McGonagall, but she just told me to keep my mouth shut and my head down.” He rocked his head on his arms so his face was hidden. “Well, we both know how bloody well that worked.”

“You . . . you told McGonagall? And she didn’t stop it?”

No question now, the Potions Master was spooked. Weird, after all Harry had told him, that this would set him off. “No.” He shrugged, peeking at the man through the fringe of his messy hair. “Why would she? It was my own dumb fault that I kept getting the detentions.”

“Because such items are highly illegal, that’s why! And because you’re one of her precious Gryffindors, not to mention the bloody Chosen One! She should have protected you.”

Harry laughed mirthlessly. “Okay. Sure.”

Snape’s eyes narrowed down to mere slits. “Explain.”

Sitting up straighter, Harry picked at the skin on his thumb along the jagged nail he’d taken to biting and avoided Snape’s eyes. “It’s just that a lot of ‘shoulds’ get tossed right out the window when it’s anything to do with all that Boy Who Lived rubbish.”

“Such as . . .”

Harry huffed a breath. “Such as, Dumbledore should have told me earlier about the prophecy. Or, rather than ignoring me last year, he should have said that Old Snake Face,” he ignored Snape’s tea snortage, “was like to be messing about in my mind and I should be doubly wary of any visions. And both him and McGonagall should have listened when I asked them over and over if I could stay here, summers, because I really, really didn’t like it with the Dursleys. And I shouldn’t have had to face the full Wizengamot for defending myself against Dementors while on summer hols. And I shouldn’t have been forced to play in the TriWizard Tournament, especially when at least Dumbledore knew the Goblet had been tampered with somehow, for my name to get into it in the first place. McGonagall should’ve listened when I told her the Sorcerer’s Stone was in trouble, and that Dumbledore shouldn’t leave the school unattended, so I wouldn’t have had to get past Fluffy and all the rest of it. . . .” He paused and played with his teacup for a minute. “You know, for example.”

Snape was silent, and for a long time, the only sound was the crackling of the fire in the hearth. Harry had gotten used to the sound, and the warmth of the fire, and was glad that Snape let them keep it going, even though they didn’t really need it here in the summer. It wasn’t hot in the dungeons, by any means, but it wasn’t actually chilly enough for a fire, either.

A sudden pop came from the logs as several of them settled, and sparks rose to float in the air. Harry’s gaze was drawn to them, and he startled slightly when Snape finally spoke.

“I owe you an apology again, it seems.”

Harry frowned. “How do you figure?”

Snape’s dark eyes watched him thoughtfully, and it made Harry nervous. “I was so concerned with making sure you survived your various encounters from year to year, I had no idea that you were being undermined so continuously and thoroughly by my colleagues. If I had, I assure you, I would have stepped in far sooner.”

“What do you mean, far sooner? Far sooner than what?”

“Than now. Harry, I’m going to petition the Ministry to give me custody of you, until you come of age.”