Severus honestly wasn’t sure how he felt about Potter. A Hufflepuff Potter wasn’t the offence a Gryffindor Potter would have been. A Hufflepuff Potter who should have been in Slytherin was intriguing. Severus’s curiosity had always gotten him into trouble, but knowing that never stopped him from letting it lead him into further trouble. This Potter, apparently unlike his arrogant, bullying father, was unexpected. And despite himself Severus was very very curious.

He still could have hated the boy, not for his father (which, let’s be fair, was hardly something the boy could control – Severus’s own father had been worthless), but for the fact that Potter was the Boy Who Lived. For most people this made him a hero. For Death Eaters it made him the man who destroyed their Lord. For Severus, it made him the boy who’d gotten rid of his brother. But Voldemort had attacked Potter, not the other way around. Potter had been a baby. Besides, Voldemort wasn’t really dead. Severus had known that all along for he’d only had to look at his arm and the darkness of the tattoo there to tell that.

The Death Eaters had called it the Dark Mark and showed it off proudly in their circle. Severus couldn’t think of it as a Dark Mark and he’d never shown it to anyone, not even Albus, because his had been the first and his was different to the others. The magic was very different and even the look of it was different. Like Voldemort’s own Mark and unlike any others, Severus’s skull wore a crown. It was the brother of the Mark on Voldemort’s arm; it was the sign of the brothers. Blood brothers.

It was old magic, pre-Founders, even pre-Rome. Magic from a darker, more bloodthirsty time, where symbols and signs hadn’t meant the same as they did now. The skull symbolised a union even death couldn’t break, a bond that ran deeper than flesh. The snake was the emblem of eternity. Brothers forever.

It was only after he and Severus became blood brothers that Voldemort came up with the idea of the Dark Mark for communicating with his followers and the Dark Mark was a modified, greatly watered-down version of the blood brother bond, lesser in every way.

None of which, of course, told Severus how he felt about the Potter boy.

He still hadn’t figured it out by his first class with the first year Hufflepuffs. The Potter Three, as observed at meals and in the corridors, was already obviously a group. Unsurprisingly they took up positions at a single table, pulling out their books and looking around with interest. As he went about his lesson and then watched over the children’s first attempts at brewing (and why could these brats not follow simple instructions?), Severus kept an eye on the so-called hero. Potter, and Severus had definitely observed him closely over the last few days, was normally surprisingly graceful for a boy but now in class, despite his attempts to hide it, he was suddenly awkward. Mostly, Severus’s sharp eyes noticed, when he was reaching across the table to pick up a quill or drop something in his cauldron. Severus’s hands curled into fists and he turned, snarling, on a Ravenclaw girl who despite repeated warnings managed to completely disobey every instruction and make her cauldron overflow dangerously. And all the while he was trying not to think about Potter. He knew certain signs. He knew them too well.

“Potter!” he barked as the children began hastily throwing their things into their bags. “Stay behind!” And then, when all three of them waited, he glowered at Longbottom and Granger. “Not you, just Potter.”

“Go on, guys,” Potter said.

“A-are you sure?” Longbottom asked, made nervous by Severus’s scowling presence but still standing his ground; maybe he was a born Gryffindor after all, Severus acknowledged with a grudging respect.

Potter laughed; Severus was impressed by how natural the sound was. “Professor Snape’s not going to eat me.” He darted a slightly challenging look at Severus. “Are you, Professor?” Granger hissed his name worriedly.

“No,” Severus said blandly. “You’re far too skinny, Potter, and I like some meat on my meals. Mr Longbottom, Miss Granger, go! before I start issuing detentions.”

Granger smiled a farewell at Potter before pushing Longbottom out the door. Apparently the boy was too stunned by Severus making a joke to remember how to control his legs.

As the door closed behind them Potter looked at Severus, his face now perfectly serious. “I saw you watching me.”

“And? Are you going to let me see or am I going to take you to the hospital wing?”

The boy winced. “I don’t s’pose you’d believe me if I said I didn’t know what you’re talking about?”

“No.”

“Because really I don’t need—”

“Me or the hospital wing, Mister Potter. Your decision.”

“Why should I trust you?” he asked sharply.

Severus opened his mouth to order respect, then shut his mouth again, forcing himself to admit that it wasn’t an attempt to be obnoxious. He’d been that boy, he’d been unsure who to trust, how to trust. “If you require it I will swear on my magic that I mean you no harm.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that if I harm you I would lose my magic. Forever.”

“And you would do that?” Potter checked.

“I would.”

Behind the glasses a child’s eyes studied him with cold calculation, assessing his sincerity. “That won’t be necessary.”

“Then you will let me examine you?”

Cold calculation fled, replaced by fear. “Will you... Do you need to tell anyone?”

Severus hesitated. But he never lied to his students. “If this was a Muggle school I would be legally obliged to report any signs of abuse I see on my students. Unfortunately, the wizarding world is backwards in many ways.”

Potter relaxed. “If I cooperate, will you promise not to tell?”

“Why should I? Why should either of us protect anyone willing to attack a child?”

“It’s not that I want to protect... them, exactly.” Potter looked at him earnestly. “But I’m not stupid, Professor. I’ve read the books about me, I’ve seen the way people around here look at me. They think I’m a hero and they think I’m going to be a hero again, and if this got out... Do you think they wouldn’t find out? Do you think I wouldn’t have everyone pointing and whispering twice as much as they already do? Wanting to know everything about me and not caring about me.”

“Hufflepuff,” Severus said in sudden understanding. Potter was hiding. Why hadn’t he thought of that?

The boy chuckled, sounding genuinely delighted. “You’re the first one to figure that out. We wanted somewhere where people wouldn’t have expectations of us. Where we could be ourselves.” Despite everything there was a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “And no one suspects the Hufflepuff.”

“You are definitely a Slytherin,” Severus told him. “Now cease in these efforts at distracting me, they won’t work.” Fear flashed a moment in the boy’s eyes. “I agree to your terms.” And that was relief. “No one will learn of this from me without your permission. But you will cooperate fully.”

Potter’s fists clenched at his sides for a moment, then he forced himself to relax. “I don’t—” He lost his ability to look Severus in the eye.

“It is nothing to be ashamed of Potter. The shame belongs to the one who did it, not the one it was done to. No shame, no stigma, no disgrace, is attached to you.”

With a great effort, his hands shaking, Potter pulled his robes over his head. He wore Muggle clothes underneath, shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. His hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t undo the buttons on his shirt.

“Let me,” Severus said softly, brushing the small hands away so he could gently undo the buttons.

Potter swallowed hastily several times, blinking fiercely. Was this the real Potter, hidden down below that boy who had laughed so very recently? Or were they both the real Potter and this boy had managed to compartmentalise his life the way Severus had learned to do as a spy? “I don’t—I can’t—”

“I just want to see exactly what’s wrong,” he said, trying to make his voice brisk and matter of fact when he was reliving a similar, oh-so-similar scene. Voldemort had done this same thing with him, Voldemort had found out—

“Sir...” Potter pleaded.

“I won’t harm you, Potter,” he said, his voice rough. “I promise.” Steeling himself, he slipped the shirt off the small shoulders, trying to ignore the flinch, and turned the boy around.

It looked like he’d been whipped, long thin strips of welted skin running across the boy’s back at varying angles. Severus didn’t ask for details: Potter didn’t want to tell him – and Severus didn’t want to know. Though they weren’t fresh, the wounds had started weeping during the morning and had clung to the shirt when Severus pulled it away, which explained the flinch more clearly than he would have liked. He didn’t ask why the wounds hadn’t been dressed. Potter didn’t want anyone knowing about this and it was hard to dress wounds on one’s own back. Severus had tried.

“You showed no signs of this earlier in the week,” he said, his voice remarkably level despite the little boy inside raging angrily in remembered, empathetic pain.

Potter didn’t look at him, just stood there, staring at the floor and shivering. Severus absentmindedly cast a warming spell on him. “At Diagon Alley I asked Professor McGonagall if I could try some magic painkillers. I told her I get really bad headaches sometimes and wanted to compare magical stuff with Muggle stuff and she showed me what to buy. It was really good, it stopped my back hurting at all, but I’ve run out now.” Running out of words as well, he wound down like a clockwork toy.

Severus tried to remember how to talk. “Who did this?” No reply. “Potter, the deal was full cooperation. Who did this?”

Two small hands clenched into desperate fists. “My uncle,” he whispered. “When you told them I had magic they were scared. They’d decided I didn’t have any so that made me acceptable but when they learned I did... Uncle Vernon said he was going to beat the magic out of me. I’d always been caned, of course, when I was bad, but that’s just a few strokes on the hand, this was—” Much unsaid in that pause was understood.

“How many times did he do this?” Severus asked quietly. When Potter was silent, he prodded, “Please, Mr Potter. How many times?”

“F-four. The last time – he made me bleed and Aunt Petunia came along. She didn’t know he was... She made him stop. She said if I’d had magic it would have acted by then to protect me. She was mad with him for doing it because if I had had magic it would have hurt him. I don’t know if I ever had magic but if I did Uncle Vernon got rid of it.”

“Of course he didn’t, Potter. You can’t get rid of magic no matter how hard you hit.” Severus managed to regain sarcasm with relief; he knew how to be sarcastic, he wasn’t sure he could cope with being sympathetic. This cut a little to close to the bone.

“Could you—Could you please give me some more painkiller?” Potter looked back at him cautiously. “I can pay for it.”

“I could,” Severus acknowledged, not even bothering to argue with the idiotic ‘pay for it’ business, “but if I did I couldn’t heal it. The painkiller would interfere with the healing salve. I think you would be better off if I healed this.” If he didn’t look too closely at the wounds, if he just called them ‘this’, he might just get through this.

The boy half turned to him. “You would do that? For me?” The surprise in his voice told Severus more than he’d wanted to know.

“I will do it. Immediately, in fact. Wait here.” He marched out the door and into his private storeroom, glad this had been the last class of the day, and not only gathered healing salves but summoned his camera. Returning to the classroom where Potter was waiting hopefully for him but not quite believing he’d do what he’d said, Severus put the things he’d gathered down on the nearest desk. “Hold still a moment, I want to take some readings and some photos.”

Potter reached hastily for his shirt, betrayal writ in his eyes. “Why?”

“Because, you ungrateful brat,” Severus said without heat, “one day you might change your mind about making this public and giving your uncle the justice he so richly deserves. And on that day you will want proof.”

Eyeing him warily, Potter nevertheless let Severus take the shirt from him and stood still while Severus took medical readings and recorded them on parchment, followed by photographs. “I will keep these safe for you, Potter,” he said. “And should you choose to take the alternative route all you have to do is ask me for them.”

“Couldn’t I—?”

“Keep them yourself? I doubt you have the security in place to keep your nosey housemates from discovering them. Besides, Mr Potter, I’m not stupid either. If I give them to you you’ll destroy them. Now hold still. This won’t hurt as much as when you got these wounds but it isn’t going to be fun.”

Although he flinched and tears came to his eyes, Potter made no sound as Severus carefully and as gently as possible smeared the salves onto the boy’s wounds. The relieved sobbing breath the boy took when he announced he was done did nothing to make Severus feel better about it.

“Unfortunately, Potter, that was only round one.” The boy rubbed at the tears in his eyes and looked up at him questioningly. “Another application is necessary if you want to avoid scarring, but that needs to wait for fifteen minutes. In the meantime, I have some questions.”

“Of course you do,” Potter said tiredly. “Okay, sir. I guess I owe you.”

“No,” Severus said sharply. The boy flinched and stared at him in wide-eyed surprise. “This... You don’t ‘owe’ me for this, Potter. This is the least any adult can do for a child in your position. This isn’t a favour I’m conferring on you, it is something you deserve, something you should be able to take for granted. And that you don’t believe that tells me more about your home life than you want me to know.”

“Uncle Vernon never did this before my Hogwarts letter!”

“There are more kinds of abuse than beatings,” Severus told him. “There is emotional abuse.” ‘Freak’, he remembered suddenly. That was the word Mrs Dursley had used for magic. Dear Merlin. “There is neglect. And caning, despite your casual reference to it, is no longer considered acceptable by the majority even in the magical world.”

“It’s not like that,” Potter said desperately. “Really!”

“That is what they all say.” Severus frowned at him. He’d been intrigued by Slytherin-Hufflepuff Potter but he hadn’t expected this.

“It’s true!” The boy threw his head up defiantly. “They never liked me,” he said, and no eleven-year-old should be able to say that so simply, so without pain, “and they certainly never loved me. But they never hated me until you came!”

It took a moment for Severus to find his voice. “Are you saying this is my fault?”

“No!” Potter said, startled, and in that moment of being startled lost his momentum. “I didn’t mean—I just—” He wilted, the way Severus remembered him wilting in that pristine sitting room in Privet Drive as he cast what Severus now realised were probably scared looks at his aunt while Severus calmly forced them to accept that he was what his relatives feared.

“I’m surprised you don’t hate me.” The words came out of him unbidden.

“I did.” At Severus’s start of surprise Potter actually smiled faintly. “But I had a lot of time to think. Lying on my tummy, because my back hurt. And I thought at first it was all your fault because none of it had ever happened before you came, so I hated you. But then I started thinking that I didn’t know Uncle Vernon would react like that. And if I didn’t know, why should you? So it wasn’t your fault, you never told him to do it, it was Uncle Vernon’s fault. So I don’t hate you.”

“Just like that?” Severus asked weakly.

He laughed just like an ordinary boy who’d been told a joke. “No way. It took a lot of thinking to get there.”

Severus shivered. “You were hurt because of me.” He went over his visit in his mind. Surely he should have seen the signs. Could he have done something to prevent it? Was it his negligence that had caused this?

“Yes,” Potter said, “but it’s okay.”

“How is it okay?”

“Because you didn’t mean to.”

“I still should have—”

“And because I forgive you. That makes everything okay,” the boy assured him with a sort of fractured innocence that made Severus wince.

“Potter—”

“You need to forgive yourself, I think.”

He’d been there. He should have seen—

“You weren’t looking for it,” Potter said in uncanny echo of his thoughts. “Why would you see anything?” He shivered, but not from cold, and wrapped his arms around himself. “There wasn’t anything to see then anyway.”

Silence stretched out, long and hurting.

“I want to help you,” Severus broke it.

The boy’s eyes lifted to his in startled wariness. “You can’t,” he said sharply. “No one—” He shut his mouth with a snap.

“Not even your friends?”

The sudden warm affection that breathed over the child’s face was like spring’s return after a long, hard winter. “I’ll protect them. Even from me.”

“And if they don’t want protecting?”

Potter’s eyes narrowed. “You won’t tell them! You won’t!”

“Not without your permission,” Severus agreed silkily.

“I won’t give it. Ever.”

Severus offered a silence of appropriate scorn.

“Hermione was the first person to ever care about me,” he disclosed in a rush, as if it was too wondrous, too marvellous a secret to keep to himself. Somebody cares about me!

Severus wondered if the girl had any idea just how much loyalty she’d earned herself by a simple act that most people took for granted. “Then I am glad she found you.” Before the boy could regret his impulsive confidence, Severus said blandly, “Now please turn around so I can finish with your back.”

The wounds were already healing and Severus made a noise of satisfaction in the back of his throat. “Your back will be fully healed by morning, Mr Potter, and you will have no scars. I do suggest that you not shower until morning, however.” Putting on the second application was a much more pleasant experience than the first, for this time he was causing no pain.

Then he helped Potter back into his clothes and sent him away. The boy paused at the door and looked back. “Thank you,” he said, and surprised lurked in his voice, hand in hand with awe. Why would anyone help me? that surprise asked. Why not demand payment? Severus nodded curtly, unable to trust his voice. “And... and I’m sorry for what it is about me that hurts you.”

And he was gone. Which was lucky because Severus had no idea how he wanted to react to that.

The door closed, gently.

Severus sat down, suddenly shaking.

That had come too close to memories he didn’t want to recall, dredged up feelings he didn’t want to have.

Grateful that had been his last class for the day, he stood and gathered himself together for one last burst of control that got him to his quarters unnoticed. The big bad potions professor falling apart in the hallways would not be a good idea. He managed to hold it together until he was in private and there was no one to see how his hands trembled so much he poured as much firewhiskey on the table as in the glass.

Gulping it down, Severus stared blankly at the wall and finally let himself feel. Let himself remember the thin back lined with red marks. The glass shattered.

Four times.

How dare he! How dare that man raise his hand to a child! Severus had had too many beatings to keep track of, but because of that he would not suffer any child to be struck with intent to injure.

And worse, the blows to the boy’s mind! Potter’s surprised ‘thank you’, his expectation that he should have to pay for even a small bit of aid... Hermione was the first person to ever care about me. Severus Reparoed the glass so he could hurl it against the wall. They never liked me... but at least they never hated me.

Severus’s father had hated him but at least he’d acknowledged him. His mother’s indifference had hurt more. Sometimes he hadn’t even been sure she’d known he existed. That had left deeper scars than his father’s beatings, the knowledge that he wasn’t even worth hating.

That Potter was as normal as he was was a miracle.

Even if Potter had given him permission Severus would never have gone to Albus with this story. He knew already there was no point. Not Albus, full of second chances and completely lacking any understanding of the dark underbelly of life. Albus had never gone hungry for food or affection, Albus had never had to deal with anything but obvious evils. Albus might be the leader of the Light and the greatest wizard of his time... but he was a fool when it came to real life.

Dealing with this was up to Severus.

He summoned another glass and poured himself fresh shot of firewhiskey.