“And is that better, or worse?”

It took a moment for the translation spell to work, but it wasn’t as though Severus really needed to hear it. He’d been answering the same question for the last hour and a half, and the mediwizard seemed quite content to go on in the same vein for the foreseeable future. Assuming, of course, that I don’t kill him first. “Better.”

Flick of his wand to change the screen Severus was looking at. “And now?”

“Worse.”

Flick. “And now?”

“Worse.” The man frowned, waving his wand in a complicated pattern, and Severus heard something shift in the vicinity of his right eye socket.

“And is that better, or worse?”

He was strongly tempted to answer ‘purple’ just to see what the response was but managed to restrain himself on the grounds that he’d like to get back to Hogwarts before the school year ended. “Better.”

“And now?”

“Better.”

A third flick, and Severus didn’t wait for the question.

“Better.”

“Excellent, the ability to focus is now under your control. Now we’re going to move on to mobility. I am releasing the positional lock.”

Severus wasn’t entirely certain what that meant, until the man flicked his wand again and he found himself in a whirlwind of color. He drew his wand and struggled to get his feet, suspecting some sort of trap, only to realize that the room wasn’t actually spinning wildly. Just his eye was. He eased his wand back into its holster and tried to relax back against the seat even as his stomach began to revolt. “I believe that something is wrong. Fix it.” Before I start vomiting. He’d never considered himself particularly motion-sensitive before, he doubted that anyone who’d ever flown on a broomstick never mind played Quidditch could, but this was ridiculous.

“— have to concentrate,” he heard the mediwizard—or at least the mediwizard’s translation spell—saying amidst the whirl of color. “You must control the eye.”

Easy for you to say! He gritted his teeth. “And just how would I go about doing that?” He could honestly say that looking down his own throat was not an experience he ever cared to repeat, especially with what seemed intent upon coming up it.

“Concentrate on facing forward to start. You should have control of the major quadrants now; I will be making fine adjustments as we continue.”

Severus decided that he was more than willing to put up with another string of ‘is that better or worse’ questions if this bloody rotating would just stop. And to think that Alastor did this on purpose on occasion. It’s no wonder that the man is more than half mad. He clenched his teeth. Forward!

The spinning actually came to a relative halt, although the eye was still making slight sideways lurches that made him rather glad that he hadn’t eaten since last night. No wonder he had been instructed to forego breakfast.

“I will be lighting each of the images on the wall in turn. Without moving your head, I want you to focus on each as it lights up, and I will make fine adjustments to the positional controls as necessary. We’ll start with the image to your left.”

Severus saw something flicker and fought down the automatic twitch of his head. He hadn’t realized how accustomed he’d actually become to having just a single eye—even with the eyepatch currently covering it, his instinctive reaction was to move the light into his remaining eye’s field of vision. But he was here to restore vision in his other eye, and he gritted his teeth as the replacement began to spin again, Left! Left, I said! Despite the attention that he gave the task, it still took him at least a minute to get it to still facing in the general direction of the little green ball of light.

“Now is this better, or worse?” The mediwizard flicked his wand and the ball moved a bit to the right. Well, that or Severus’ eye shifted a bit opposite. It was hard to say when the vast majority of his attention was on keeping it facing in the same general direction.

“Better.” Marginally.

Flick. “And now?”

“Better.”

Flick. “And now?”

The eye began to twitch up and down. “Worse.”

“And now the image to your right.” It lit up blue.

Another session of spinning before his eye cooperated, and Severus decided that maybe he wouldn’t try eating until he got back to Hogwarts.

As before, the image—or the eye—shifted slightly. “Is that better, or worse?”

“Better.”

“And now?”

“Better.”

“What about now?”

Purple.

* * * * *

Severus managed a polite farewell, keeping his new eye focused forward the entire time despite its rather annoying tendency to flip backwards. He’d been assured that that was a normal side effect of the way its weight was distributed, and that with more time and practice he would be able to keep it focused in the direction that he desired without conscious effort, but he wasn’t yet at that level. He felt it start to twitch and clenched his teeth and forced it to cooperate. He wasn’t yet anywhere near that level.

He wasn’t due at the Milan Floo Station for another two hours, and as he’d kept his things with him he had no need to return to the rather barren dormitory room that he’d been assigned to for the duration of his stay, so he took the time to visit Milan’s version of Diagon Alley, La Strada di Magia, or something similar, and browse the bookstores. It wasn’t the most relaxing stroll he’d ever taken—two steps, make sure his eye was still cooperating, two steps, make sure his eye was still cooperating—but it passed the time. He didn’t find anything particularly spectacular, certainly not on the level of the books that he’d lost, but he picked up two for himself for light reading on the trip back and then on impulse grabbed a third on Quidditch seeking techniques. If the brat was going to be spending extra time in his quarters chattering, it was only sensible to have something on hand to distract him. Merlin knows I’ll never get a moment’s peace, otherwise. But at least he could look forward to re-opening his lab when he returned.

The trip back to London and then Hogwarts was so remarkably unremarkable that it was almost disappointing. There were no Deatheaters lurking about at the London Floo station, no carefully-laid—or even haphazard—ambush to contend with…it was actually a little insulting, all things considered. The worst that happened was that, although he was hardly idiotic enough to let his defenses drop in a public place even when reading, he wasn’t accustomed to controlling a wayward eye as well. At least three times a chapter he was forced to put the book down and turn the majority of his concentration toward making his bloody eye face forward, which made his book even less relaxing than his walk around Milan had been. Well, actually making a small child cry when it saw his eye flip backwards, had been rather amusing—and it wasn’t as though it didn’t serve the brat right for staring—but in general he would be glad when he had real control over the thing.

“Severus, welcome back,” Poppy greeted with a wide smile, setting down a piece of parchment and getting to her feet as he stepped through the Floo in Albus’ office. He wasn’t sure how she’d known when he was going to return—he’d given them an approximate date, but even he hadn’t known the exact time when he’d left for Milan—but he wouldn’t have put it past her to have had some kind of communication of her own with the mediwizard. As it was, if he hadn’t moved backwards at her approach, he was mortally certain that she’d have hugged him.

That woman has lost her mind, he decided, not for the first time, and did his best to keep Albus’ desk between the two of them. “Poppy, you’re looking well.”

“That looks excellent!” She ignored his attempts at evasion and came to stand immediately in front of him, peering alternately into each of his eyes. “I can hardly tell the difference. How is the control? How precisely can you focus? Have you had any difficulty in overlapping images between the two? What about tracking speed?”

“I’ve had it for two days, Poppy,” he interrupted, before she could continue her barrage of questions. The eye took that moment to flip backwards, and he gritted his teeth and focused forward again. “I’m still learning its capabilities, and I as I understand it, I will be doing exercises and such to do to improve my control for some time to come.” That should make her happy; she liked long recoveries. Merlin help us all.

“Will you be needing any assistance?”

She looked entirely too eager for his tastes, and he shook his head firmly. “That won’t be necessary, thank you.”

The door swung open before she could press, and Albus and Alastor came in. Whatever they’d been discussing, they broke it off when they found the study occupied.

“You!” Alastor snapped, focusing on Severus. “You’re back.”

“Why, yes, so I am. Thank you for averting that potential existential crisis.”

He ignored Severus’ words, stamping close enough to jab him in the chest with one blunt finger. “You set that witch on me.”

Severus gave the response of any sensible man confronted by a madman and took a rather large step backwards. Between Poppy and Alastor, he was going to end up backing his way right out of the castle. “I’m sure that I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Alastor glared.

Severus thought for a moment, before the obvious occurred to him. Oh. Sybil. Bloody hell. He probably shouldn’t have expected her to keep her mouth shut about who had mentioned Alastor’s name. Still, best to bluff it out. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared right back. “Well? Dare I hope that you know what you’re talking about, or is that too much to ask?”

Albus cleared his throat. “Welcome back, Severus. I trust things went well?”

Severus didn’t shift his attention. “The trip was fine, though I’m afraid that I find your welcoming committee rather lacking. Were the Dementors busy elsewhere?”

“Never mind the Dementors,” Alastor growled, jabbing at him again. “I want that woman kept away from me.”

“Who doesn’t?” A statement that wasn’t precisely calculated to reinforce his position that he had no idea what Alastor was talking about, but then it wasn’t as though Alastor had believed him anyway. He was sorely tempted to hex the lunatic, but he didn’t want his new eye destroyed within ten minutes of his arrival at the castle. And Alastor would target it, of that he had no doubt.

“Actually I think Minerva and several other members of the faculty wanted to have a bit of a get-together this evening to welcome you back,” Albus continued, blithely ignoring the confrontation in progress between Severus and Alastor. “She’s invited most of the faculty, although I suspect that I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”

Severus was quite certain that Albus hadn’t been supposed to reveal that little detail, given that now that he knew about the gathering he could avoid it, but he had more pressing concerns at the moment as Alastor had nearly backed him into a corner. He set his feet and lifted his chin. The fact that the ex-Auror was both taller—by at least a small amount—and heavier—by a considerably greater amount—was irritating, but it was hardly the first time that he’d faced the man down. “Alastor, unless you’d like to lose that finger, get it out of my face. Honestly, is one little witch who spends most of her time lost in her own bizarre world that intimidating?” Alastor opened his mouth, and he hurried to finish before the other wizard could get a word in. “Well, I suppose to someone who’s afraid to leave his quarters without half-a-dozen Dark detectors secreted about his person she probably is, but still I—”

“I’ll show you intimidating, you—”

“Gentlemen,” Albus interrupted, suddenly beside them, a hand on Alastor’s wand arm keeping it at his side. “Severus, your new eye looks excellent, but I’m sure you’re tired from you’re trip. Why don’t you take your things down to your quarters and get some rest before tonight?”

Despite the phrasing, it obviously wasn’t a request, and Severus dipped his head slightly. “Of course. It would hardly do to disappoint Minerva.” Which had never yet stopped him, but that wasn’t the point. He nodded to the two of them. “Gentlemen—using that term loosely, of course, in regards to some.” He turned slightly, fairly certain that Albus’ presence would preclude any sort of immediate retaliation from Alastor beyond a rude comment, and nodded again. “Poppy.”

She fell into step beside him as he made his way out of the Headmaster’s study, and he deliberately lengthened his stride in an attempt to leave her behind. A futile attempt, but then that wasn’t any real surprise.

“Honestly, sometimes I have the urge to make the two of you stand in opposite corners until you see sense,” she scolded, nearly trotting to keep pace beside him.

“Provided we’re casting hexes from those corners, I’ll be happy to support the notion.”

“You know full well what I mean. Two of Hogwarts’ professors acting like overgrown schoolboys. And here I’d thought the two of you were getting along better.”

“‘Better’ is a relative term.” Given that there had been a time in the past when he’d have had no compunction about delivering Alastor to the Dark Lord in as many pieces as he could manage, and he knew full well that there had been a longer period of time when Alastor would have cheerfully delivered him to Azkaban in the same state, they certainly were getting along better. It was hardly his fault that that wasn’t saying a good deal.

A cluster of students, first and second years by the look of it, came around the corner, and he was forced to slow his pace lest it look as though Hogwarts’ fearsome Potions master was trying to run away from the school mediwitch. Even if that had been his intention.

She moderated her tone slightly as well, lowering her voice so as not to be overheard by the passing students, but her frown didn’t lessen. “When I agreed that Alastor would be an acceptable substitute for the mindhealers, it was with the understanding that you would actually speak to him.”

Severus wondered just who she thought she’d come to that understanding with, given that he certainly hadn’t agreed to anything of the sort—and from Alastor’s comments before he’d left, he doubted that the ex-Auror had been consulted either—but for the moment he refrained from interrupting.

“Instead, the two of you seem to derive an almost absurd amount of pleasure in going about trading insults, baiting each other beyond the bounds of all courtesy.”

Well, at least she isn’t missing the completely obvious. “Poppy, apparently you are unaware of a very pertinent fact—Alastor and I don’t like each other.”

She moved to stand in front of him, blocking his path and crossing her arms over her chest. “Oh? As I recall, you agreed to duel him not so long ago.”

“Well, yes, when people dislike each other, they generally take what opportunities they can get to hex and curse each other. You’re telling me that in all your years as school mediwitch, you hadn’t noticed that?”

She huffed and then threw up her hands. “Hopeless. I will see you in three hours in the Hospital Wing so I can get a good look at that eye, and I expect a full accounting of any possible side effects or issues that might lengthen your recovery. Is that understood?”

“Yes,” he responded, and then cursed himself mentally for his automatic response. He was a full grown wizard, not some eleven year old student for her to order about! Well, at least he’d managed to refrain from ‘Yes, ma’am’…that would have been rather more humiliating than he could tolerate at the moment. With all of his attention focused on her, his eye took that opportunity to spin backwards, and he clenched his hands into fists as he forced it to return to the appropriate position.

“Are you all right?” she asked as soon as it had stilled, annoyance replaced with concern. “That didn’t appear to be a voluntary movement. Perhaps you should come with me now.”

“I’m fine,” he said flatly. “That is simply one of the things that I need to work on.” He shook his head and did his best to regain some of his habitual sneer. “Now, if you will excuse me I need to be elsewhere.”

She shook her head and muttered something under her breath as she stepped aside, before turning to go back in the opposite direction.

He took the stairs down to the dungeons quickly, making no real attempt to determine what she had said. It was highly unlikely that it had been anything complimentary.

“Professor!” a surprised voice called as he turned down the corridor towards his quarters, and he debated how good his odds of escape were if he turned immediately and ran—or at least walked quickly—in the other direction.

He came to the conclusion that they ranged between extremely low and absolutely nonexistent as Harry came to stand in front of him. “Harry. Dare I ask what you’re doing down in my dungeons? I’d expect you to be out freezing your extremities off on the Quidditch pitch.” Between the Quidditch ban and detentions, he knew Harry hadn’t been doing much flying of late, and he’d expected the boy to spend a good portion of his holiday making up for that lack.

“Me and Ron and Ginny and a couple others were out there this morning, but Professor McGonagall made us all come in when the snow picked up again. Something about low visibility.” He shrugged. “I was just coming down to leave a note for you; I didn’t know you were coming back today.”

“Yes, well….” Perhaps he should have spent a bit more time enjoying the sights in Milan.

Harry looked up at him, mimicking Poppy’s earlier actions as he peered into one eye and then the other. “That looks really good.”

“Thank you for that informed medical opinion; I’ll be certain to tell Mediwizard Giordano that he has the approval of a completely untrained fifteen year old. May I ask what sort of note that was that you were planning to leave?”

“I sort of had an idea.”

Words to send a chill down anyone’s spine, Severus decided. “No.”

“What?”

He stepped past Harry and continued towards his door. “Whatever your idea is, the answer is no.”

“You haven’t even heard it yet!” Harry objected, trailing Severus into his quarters.

“Given how well thought-out your ideas normally are, ‘no’ seems an appropriately all-purpose response.” He shrugged out of his traveling cloak, hanging it on the chair. He would unshrink what few belongings he’d taken with him on his trip later.

“Please, Professor, will you at least listen?”

Severus sighed. I suppose I’ll have to humor him if I want any peace this afternoon. “If I listen, will you leave me be afterward?”

“Okay,” Harry agreed after a moment, taking a seat on the couch.

“Please, make yourself at home.”

Harry ignored the sarcasm. Severus took that as a bad sign.

“I was thinking about that room we found in the Chamber of Secrets. You know, the one with the papers no one has been able to read in it?”

“A faulty memory has never been a particular failing of mine.”

“Well, what if there are other rooms down there? I mean, I thought about it a little before when Madame Pince wanted me to help with a translation, that maybe there was some sort of code-breaking sheet or something like that down there that we could use, but we’ve been so busy with revising and reading about Horcruxes and doing detentions that it keeps getting pushed to the back.”

An excellent reason to keep you in detention. “Your point?”

“I think we should go down again. Well, I’m sure I should, since I can open whatever doors that might be down there, but after what happened with Ron…well, maybe you and Professor Moody or someone else should come too. Who knows what we might find?”

“A conspicuous amount of dust, I suspect,” Severus observed, debating whether or not to reveal that he had already returned to the Chamber. And that there should have been an Order group down there as well only a day or two before, although he would need to check with Minerva to confirm that they’d carried out that particular plan. On one hand, if the boy knew that there was something being done, he was far less likely to do something rash on his own, but on the other hand, he would no doubt want to involve himself, and given the load that he was already bearing with the Horcrux knowledge….

Severus tapped his fingers on the table lightly. At least the brat had come to him with this scheme rather than simply doing it, and it seemed reasonable to encourage that sort of behavior. Not that he liked the idea of the boy going back down into the Chamber—and he certainly wasn’t going to be leading any sort of expeditionary force back into those tunnels—but there had been the Horcrux, or at least suspected Horcrux, that he and Minerva had found. With the information that Harry and the other two members of the trio had gleaned in their reading, there was the possibility that they might prove…useful…in its disposal. Which would hopefully serve the dual purpose of involving Harry while keeping him too busy to come up with any particularly absurd stunts.

His tapping became more purposeful. Perhaps that was the tact to take, even if it was likely going to mean that he wasn’t going to get to put off his little talk with Albus and Minerva much longer. If nothing else, it should encourage Harry to continue confiding in him rather than going off on his own as was his typical behavior.

And since when do I want the brat confiding in me? he couldn’t help but wonder as soon as the thought occurred to him. He had enough problems of his own! But as it was his duty to keep all of the students safe….

“Professor? Is something wrong?” Harry asked.

Severus checked automatically to make sure that his door was shut and the wards were intact. “Despite what you may believe, you are not the only thinking being in this castle.”

Harry rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything, and Severus wondered just when his sarcasm had started becoming so ineffective. Surely it had to have happened recently, or he would have noticed. Perhaps…perhaps his eye was doing something amusing? But no, it was actually behaving reasonably well at the moment. He shook his head and made a mental note to do something to terrorize Harry—and the rest of the fifth years, just to be safe—at the next available opportunity.

“As it happens, Minerva—Professor McGonagall—and I made a trip down to the Chamber ourselves, some time ago.”

“What? When? How did you get down there? Did you find anything?”

“Professor McGonagall is a Transfiguration Master, as I believe you’re aware. She is quite capable of doing human transfiguration.”

“She made you a snake?”

“Hardly relevant to this conversation, but yes. And, as to what we found…I did tell you that the Dark Lord had created several intentional Horcruxes, correct?”

Harry’s eyes widened further. “You found one? What is it?”

“We found a diadem—rather like a tiara—in a second chamber, similar to the one that you found.”

“So you think it’s a Horcrux?” He paused a moment, and then grinned, not waiting for a response, “Or you’re just telling me that Volde—uh, You-Know-Who—wears tiaras?”

It was a rather amusing mental image, but Severus managed a glare. “Did I say that? No, both Minerva and I believe that it is a Horcrux. I believe the current puzzle is how to dispose of the thing.” Or at least that had still been a question when he’d left…perhaps he should have consulted Minerva or Albus before starting this conversation with Harry. Still, it was rather late for that now. “Perhaps the next time you and your shadows come down here, you could turn your attention to ways to dispose of inanimate Horcruxes and see if you can shed any light on the matter.”

“Oh, we can do that now,” Harry said immediately.

“What?”

“There isn’t much on Horcruxes in those books, and what there is is mostly theory, but we started making a list a long time ago of every possible way to destroy the things. Hermione tried to mark which ones were more than just theory….”

Of course she did. Severus watched as Harry hopped down off the couch, hurrying over to where the Horcrux books were kept and pulled a sheaf of papers out of the back of the largest. “You realize that if you’ve broken the binding on that, Madame Pince will have all our hides, correct?”

“We didn’t. Ah, here it is.”

Severus took the piece of parchment he was handled cautiously. The majority of it was written in Miss Granger’s neat script, but there were a few lines in Mr. Weasley’s untidy scrawl as well as some in Harry’s slightly larger and more ink-blotted handwriting.

“The ones with the checks are supposed to be more than theory, and anything marked with an ‘X’ killed whoever tried it.”

“Good to know.” Perhaps I can convince Alastor to try one of them. He scanned the page. “May I borrow this?”

“Of course.”

“I will need to speak with the headmaster before involving you further,” Severus said after a moment. “But I expect that you, and very probably your shadows, will be getting a summons this evening, or possibly sometime tomorrow.” He suspected that the timing would depend mostly on how many strips Albus—and more worryingly Minerva—decided to tear out of his hide, but Albus would certainly want to talk to Harry once he knew that the boy knew. Harry didn’t look entirely pleased at that response, and Severus frowned and summoned his shrunken books from the inner pocket of his traveling robes. He unshrunk the third quickly. “Here. Spend your afternoon reading about something non-life-threatening.”

Harry took it with a frown that changed into a grin as he read the title. “Brilliant, I don’t think I’ve seen this one before.”

“I expect not. I don’t believe the primary text is in English, but there is a translation spell inside the front cover that you should be able to use to change the language.”

Harry nodded. “Thanks, Professor.”

“If anyone asks, you found it in the library or ordered it by owl post or something of that nature, understood?” He still had to teach, after all, and he did not need his reputation ruined.

“Of course.”

Severus put away the things he’d taken to Italy with him and then debated whom to approach first. Albus, as both the leader of the light side and his immediate superior, seemed the logical choice, but as he strongly suspected that Minerva was going to be a great deal more incensed…. “Minerva first,” he decided after a moment. If nothing else, perhaps he could nip this ‘welcome back’ party idea in the bud at the same time.

* * * * *

“You did what?!”

Severus didn’t bother to respond. He’d found her alone in the staff room having a chat with a few house elves about after-dinner snacks—she’d looked appropriately guilty when he’d caught her at it—but when the house elves had been dismissed and he’d mentioned what he’d come to speak to her about, the guilt had shifted fairly quickly to outrage.

“Are you bloody mad! He is a child!” Her fingers were curled as she stalked back and forth, and Severus had a strong suspicion that if she’d been in her Animagus form, he’d be rather well clawed right now.

“As I recall, you’ve said that before, and it hasn’t changed a thing.”

She spun to glare at him. “Does Albus know about this?”

“Not yet.” It was somewhat disturbing that the idea of visiting Poppy this afternoon was actually sounding more and more pleasant.

“Well, that’s something, I suppose. I’m certain that he wouldn’t have supported this course of action.”

The only reason he wouldn’t have is because he’d have wanted to save the information for some appropriately dramatic moment. There were days when Severus wondered whether everyone but himself had some bizarre sort of blinders on where Albus Dumbledore’s actions were concerned. “He was willing to use the boy as bait in the Tri-Wizard Tournament, as I’m sure you recall.”

Her lips thinned. “A thoroughly bad decision, and I’m sure that he regretted it.”

I’m not, given the number of other times he’s allowed the little idiot to run headlong into some sort of perfectly preventable danger.

“And regardless of Albus’ preferences, it certainly wasn’t your place to make that decision.”

He couldn’t precisely dispute that assessment so he kept his mouth shut.

“Frankly, a few months ago, I thought the ceasing…hostility…between you and Harry could bring nothing but good, but if this is your idea of ‘helping’ I’m starting to think that we were better off when you were trying to get him expelled every chance you got.”

“I don’t think—”

“Under normal circumstances, you’re the last person that I would accuse of that particular offense, but in this case I’m certainly starting to think that that might be true!”

He felt his face start to redden, and his new eye began to twitch. Focusing on that kept him occupied for a good five minutes of her continuing diatribe. Which didn’t save him from the shouting that followed, but….

* * * * *

“Lad, you do seem to have a death wish.”

“Alastor, shut up.”

Of course, the lunatic paid about as much attention to that as he’d been paying to Albus all night. Albus and Alastor had been together in Albus’ study talking about the Order visit to the Chamber of Secrets when Severus had gone to see Albus—he’d decided to rest and deal with Poppy first, since after his and Minerva’s little chat his welcome-home part was most definitely off—and he’d decided to simply kill two birds with one stone and tell them both at once. After all, it wasn’t as though the rest of the Order wouldn’t find out at some point, and even together they couldn’t possibly exceed Minerva’s volume.

Except that while Albus had obviously been displeased, Alastor had, for some unknown reason, found the entire situation hilarious. Which had aggravated Albus as much as Severus’ actions had—or almost at much, anyway—and drawn the session out far longer than necessary.

“What is so amusing?”