One, two, three—

             “I must say, Severus, you are taking excellent care of me,” Albus said in a pleased voice.

             Severus had expected the interruption, and it made no difference in his counting. He reached eleven without incident and applied the potion again. The cut made a spitting noise like a burning torch plunged into water, and Severus stepped back to get out of the way of the cloud of foul-smelling smoke that resulted, without releasing the hold that kept Albus’s arm flat on the top and the wound turned upwards. Albus had said he would not pull away. Severus watched his muscles twitch and flex and permitted himself a small, bitter smile. Vows like that were as useless as vows not to flinch under the Cruciatus. The control that the mind could exercise over the body’s automatic reflexes was so limited.

             “Will it be well now?” Albus asked as he watched the smoke clear away. “Or will you need to apply more of the dragon’s blood?”

             Severus took a moment to study the wound. Albus waited instead of demanding a reply. In that respect, he was superior to many patients Severus had had. “Do you see the lines surrounding the edges of the cut?” Severus asked at last, tracing one finger along the crescent of scaly grey skin that pointed towards the elbow. “They should be smaller than they are. I’m afraid I will have to apply more of the solution of the stinging nettle.”

             Albus sighed and shook his head, reaching for a lemon drop with his free hand. He had insisted that Severus attempt to save his arm and his life in his office rather than the infirmary. Severus was beginning to suspect he had mostly done that so he could keep his favorite sweet near. “Well, what must be borne must be borne.”

             Severus raised an eyebrow. It was a better reaction than he had a right to expect when the solution of the stinging nettle hurt twice more than walking through the flowers did. But he turned and picked up the appropriate vial, which sat on a table cleared of Albus’s silver instruments a short distance away. The paste inside was thick and an off-white that he had never liked looking at, though the smell was crisp and pleasant. Severus rolled the paste carefully between his fingers, then pressed it down onto both the grey lines of skin at once.

             An indrawn breath was Albus’s only reaction. A moment later, the crunching sound of his teeth on the lemon drop replaced that. Severus kept his gaze away from the other man’s face, because watching someone suffer who meant to him what Albus did was not conducive to his own concentration.

             “What were you trying to do?” he murmured, adding another glob of the stinging nettle solution when he realized that the battle between poison and healing magic had almost boiled the paste away already. “I swear, Albus, if this was the result of yet another stupid attempt to prove to the world that there is a thirteenth use for dragon’s blood after all—”

             Albus laughed softly. “No, my boy,” he said. “Unfortunately, Tom has powerful Dark artifacts at his disposal. I tried to destroy one of the most powerful of them without taking proper precautions.” He would have moved his arm and undone some of Severus’s careful work, but Severus luckily saw the twitch in time and kept the arm pinned. “The artifact concealed a trap. It lightly scratched my arm, and, well, this is the result.” He peered at the wound curiously, as if he were interested in seeing exactly what had happened.

             Severus bit his tongue and waited until he felt the unmistakable taste of blood before he spoke on. “You should have waited until you had the artifact at school and within the protection of the wards, Headmaster.” Hogwarts could, if necessary, lend extra magical strength to her Headmasters which had served, in the past, for everything from setting up secure potions labs to defeating rampaging dragons.

             “I had my reasons to fear what would happen if I brought this artifact back to Hogwarts,” Albus said simply, and then fell silent, watching as Severus continued to smear the solution of stinging nettle.

             It took two more hours, but at last Severus was satisfied that the poison would not spread up Albus’s arm any more than it had. He would always bear a nasty scar, but that was no less than Severus had expected when he first saw the wound. He leaned back in his chair and drank the last vial standing ready, one of his own Refreshment Draughts, which combined the awakening qualities of a Pepperup Potion with the clarity of mind introduced by a Concentration Elixir. Energy surged and tingled down his limbs, and he felt ready to open his eyes and examine the Headmaster.

             Albus had a look in his eyes that told Severus they had not finished speaking about the wound. It was the look Albus always wore when he intended to turn a weakness into an advantage.

             “I might easily have died from this, my boy,” he said. “I would have if you were not here.”

            Severus inclined his head and said nothing. That was the obvious. He saw no need to respond until Albus’s plan had grown beyond the obvious.

             “I think,” Albus murmured, turning his wrist back and forth as if he were admiring the gaping, abscess-like scar he now carried, “that we will put it about that I am.”

             Severus stilled. “Excuse me, Headmaster?” he said, when he thought that he could speak instead of croak.

             Albus gave him a faint smile. Severus knew that smile, too, though he didn’t know how many other people did. It was stripped-down and shining, in the way that a bared sword-blade would be. This was Albus the master of war, the man who would make whatever sacrifices were needed to keep the wizarding world safe. Not even in front of the Order of the Phoenix did he wear that persona.

             “Tom has been too cautious so far for my liking,” Albus said casually. “I know that he intends to move this year, my boy, but I intend to control that movement. We will put the tale about that I am dying, in the form of rumors. I have no faith that Tom will believe the story right at first, but we will ensure that he does, through continually staged ‘weakening’ and allowing some Slytherin students to see my spells misfiring.”

             Severus said nothing on the matter, because there was nothing on the matter to say, but he privately resented the fact that it was Slytherin students who would be expected to play the role of gossip-mongers, indicating that Albus thought their parents in service to the Dark Lord.

             Severus particularly resented that because he knew it was true.

             “I fail to see how the gain to our side would outweigh the loss,” he said instead. “We would panic the Order and our allies if we did that. Some of them, the fence-sitters, might even desert us and join him.”

             Albus gave him the weariest smile that Severus had ever seen out of him. He was cradling his wounded hand against his chest now, his fingers smoothing lightly up and down the skin next to the injury.

             “This is not a war that will be ended with a single final battle, my boy,” he said, “or even a spectacular duel like the one that ended the contest between me and Grindelwald. It will require something—rather different. Putting about the story will give me the time I need to hunt out the Dark magical artifacts that Tom relies on. And it will give you an excuse to remain more often in the school. Tom will need someone to try and estimate the true extent of my weakness, and why not you, who are already so close?”

             “What is to be the real reason for my remaining here?” Severus clasped his hands in front of him and regarded Albus evenly. He would do what he was told to do, of course. That had been the price of his service since he first fled from the Dark Lord. But he was not always adept at guessing what Albus’s orders would be. In some ways, it was much easier to read the Dark Lord. Take a certain knowledge of his goals, mix insanity with it, set it to simmer over a fire of passion for revenge, and one could not go far wrong.

             “You will become the Defense teacher for this year,” said Albus, and gave him a smile that was probably meant to be comforting.

             Severus did not smile back. “And you will hire Horace for Potions, I suppose,” he said, making sure that his words had no emotion.

             “I will,” Albus said. “But more to the point, my boy, you can train the students who will need the skills you can impart to them before the end of this year.” He paused, but Severus kept his face blank, because he saw no reason why he should make this easy for Albus. In the end, the Headmaster had to finish without the satisfaction of tricking Severus into speech. “Including Harry.”

             “It is not enough to be Potter’s nursemaid, then,” Severus said, his voice desperately bored. What would showing his rage accomplish? Little enough. It never did. “I must also be his mentor?”

             “I will be working closely with Harry in that capacity,” said Albus, with a sharp touch to his voice that Severus told himself he would think of and enjoy later. It was a human weakness that did not endanger their success in the war the way that Albus’s other follies did, and therefore a rare treat. “No, instead I wish you to enhance his talent for Defense. Our professors in the past have given him an…irregular education at best.”

             “Have you forgotten my efforts at teaching Occlumency to him?” Severus asked. “I do not understand your fondness for repeating and preparing disasters to happen, Albus. One might think that enough happen on their own to satisfy you.”

             “The way you teach Defense must be different from the way you teach Occlumency.” Albus rose to his feet, which was enough of a signal that the meeting was over for Severus to stand as well. “See that you change your methods in the future.”

             Severus bowed slightly and let himself out through the door that led to the moving staircase. His mind was already busy with the lies that he would need to construct so that he might convince the Dark Lord Albus was truly on the brink of perishing, and not reveal the destruction of the powerful Dark artifact, whatever it was.

             After that would come the lies necessary for establishing a teaching relationship with Potter.

             He would not allow his dislike for the imbecile or the fact that Potter was miserable in Potions to overpower him. After all, more than one member of the staff in the past had praised Potter’s skill in Defense. Severus would bide his time and give Potter every chance to show that skill forth.

             When it did not appear, then he would have more than enough evidence to destroy one more piece of precious Potter’s undeserved reputation.

 *

             “If your mother was more loyal to me, Draco, this might not have happened.”

             Draco shivered and kept his eyes on the floor. The Dark Lord had many different tones to his voice, but Draco had already discovered that the one he hated most was the gentle, solicitous one, as though the Dark Lord was really grieved that he’d had to punish Draco’s mother.

             “Luckily,” the Dark Lord said, and his shadow swayed and his voice dripped with satisfaction like venom, “your aunt is loyal.”

             Draco knew it would be wiser to go on staring at the floor, but he couldn’t help himself. He glanced out of the corner of his eye at Aunt Bellatrix, who stood alongside the wall with her wand in her hand. Her eyes were wide and bright and fixed on the Dark Lord’s face.

             She could look at him without horror. Draco didn’t understand her.

             “So,” the Dark Lord said, drawing the word out and making Draco pay attention to him again, “I have punished your mother and decided to give you a task. It was to be a hard task. Your father failed me.” His voice turned to a strained screech, and Draco swallowed in relief. It was better when he wasn’t trying to sound gentle. “You must do something to prove to me that your family can be trusted, especially after Narcissa’s…indiscretion. Do you understand?”

             “Yes, my lord,” Draco whispered. He shivered as he felt the Dark Lord’s immense magical power wrap around him like a strangling hand around his throat. He stood as still as he could, because he doubted that the Dark Lord would like it if he struggled.

             “But news has come to me today that changes my perceptions of the usefulness of that first task,” the Dark Lord went on, and rose to his feet, pacing back and forth. Nagini followed him like an adoring shadow. Draco continued to stand very still. He’d already seen that snake eat five people. “So you are to have a different, minor problem to solve. I want you to find a way to let my Death Eaters into the school, at any time they require. Do you understand that?”

             Laughter followed the words. Draco knew there were a bunch of Death Eaters who thought he was stupid.

             “Yes, sir,” he whispered, and wished he could sound adoring like Aunt Bellatrix and Nagini. He put some eagerness into his voice, anyway. “What was my task to be, my lord?”

             “It does not matter,” the Dark Lord said, and Draco breathed again, as he had stopped doing a moment after he spoke the former words. The Dark Lord could have responded angrily, and then, his father’s fate, surrounded by Dementors in Azkaban, might have looked kind. “What matters now is that you accomplish this little chore no sooner than the end of the school year.”

             “Yes, my lord,” Draco said, and then he was allowed to bow himself out of the room that had once been the main drawing room of the Manor and into the entrance hall. He didn’t stand there to admire himself in the wide mirrors on the walls, but immediately took the large staircase leading up.

             His mother’s room was on the second floor. Draco stood in the doorway for some time and watched her as she lay on the bed. The Dark Lord had not used the Cruciatus on her, but an experimental pain curse that made her nerves send flares of pain through her even though nothing, outwardly, was hurt. She didn’t have any wounds now, but she still shook, hours after it.

             Draco closed his eyes. The lingering shadow behind the Dark Lord’s words lay across his mind.

             Do this, or your parents will die.

             The Dark Lord hadn’t said that. He didn’t need to.

             Draco clenched his hand into a fist and told himself that he was up to this task. There was no one else who would help his parents, and no one from Potter’s side had come to help him. He didn’t particularly want most of the students at Hogwarts to die, but he didn’t want his family to die even more. He would bear with this because he had to.

             And hope like fuck that he succeeded.

 *

             No, Harry thought, turning his head critically back and forth in front of the bathroom mirror. It wasn’t an optical illusion or a trick of his eyes. His face had started looking more and more different in the past year, and now it was really different.

             He gnawed his lip and studied himself again. Then he glanced back to the photograph in his left hand. Colin had taken it for him at the start of this last year, his fifth one, when Harry could still remember feeling something other than anger and pain and weariness.

             When Sirius had still been alive.

             Harry had thought and thought about that, though, and it seemed that no matter how much he did, he never had any new thoughts. He blamed himself and he resented Snape and he wished that Sirius was still alive and he’d learned Occlumency. The Dursleys preferred to ignore him this year rather than give him chores, so Harry had nothing to distract him from those thoughts, either.

             He was bored of his own grief, and so he might as well look at his face and figure out what he could do about it.

             The him in the photograph, who looked the way he was supposed to look, had a shorter nose than he did now, and less sharp facial features. Harry wrinkled his nose when he realized what that meant. He was getting pointy. He’d be looking like Draco bloody Malfoy next if he didn’t watch out.

             But studying the photos and the mirror carefully in the past few months had made him realize something else, too. He’d never looked as much like his dad as everyone had said he did. Harry had thought and thought about why people would say he did, and decided that it was mostly nostalgia. Everyone had thought it would a great thing if he looked like his father come back to life, and he did have messy hair and needed glasses, so they could start with some basics and go from there, imposing his dad’s face on his. Harry had finally seen some pictures of his grandparents, his mum’s mother and father, in the past year, and his grandmother’s hair was one big tangle and his grandfather had glasses. So those could have come from his mum’s side of the family, too.

             But now he was growing up and didn’t look the same any longer. Harry didn’t think someone was suddenly going to spin around in the corridor at Hogwarts, point at him, and declare him Snape-spawn, but pretty soon he was going to have people who peered at him and said that he looked different.

             That was enough. He didn’t want to look different.

             He looked carefully at the photograph, staring until he was sure that he could see his old face floating behind his eyes when he closed them. Then he pointed his hand at his face—that was the best thing about this summer, practicing wandless magic to the point where he could use a little of it and he didn’t think the Ministry would come after him since they tracked his wand—and whispered the illusion charm he’d made a point of looking up in the Hogwarts library.

             “Flecto orem meum.”

             Lines of what looked like colored spiderwebs flowed across his face, and Harry wondered for a second if this would work. But he kept repeating the spell carefully, making sure his pronunciation was the same each time. Finally, the colors wavered and disappeared, and he was looking at a copy of his old face.

             Harry sighed and reached up, exploring with his fingers while he watched in the mirror. There were probably a few differences between the way his cheeks bent and the way they seemed to bend with the charm, but not much. Someone would have to be standing really close to him and practically poking him in the eye to notice.

             Good. Harry had kept his promises to himself not to think about his stupid parentage as much as possible, and he was glad that he could put this out of his mind now. He would have to renew the charm every week or so, but that didn’t matter. It was a small price to pay to go on being himself, instead of some ugly stranger he didn’t know.

             He marched out of the bedroom and back to his room. He’d practically memorized his Defense Against the Dark Arts book by now, but it was the only book he’d been able to sneak out of the trunk before Uncle Vernon locked it up, and he wanted to study anyway. He wanted to do the very best he could this next year.

             Everything was going to be different, because everything had to be different. The Ministry had finally admitted that Voldemort was back. Harry was growing up enough to take some part in the war, and the Order had to see that. Harry was sure that he wouldn’t get high enough marks to be in NEWT Potions, so he wasn’t going to have Snape to bother him anymore.

             Sirius was dead.

             Harry took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He still felt as though someone had punched him in the gut when he thought about that, but he’d finally determined that sitting around and feeling guilty about it all the time did nothing. It would be better if he could make up for it somehow. And the only way to do that was to win the war, because when the war was over, Voldemort and Bellatrix would be dead. Or in Azkaban, maybe, for Bellatrix.

             Harry gave a small smile. Somehow, he couldn’t see Voldemort going to Azkaban.

             He picked up his book and flipped the pages open to reach the complicated shield charms. This time, though, he could only read a few sentences before his mind wandered away from the words it had already memorized and back to what he’d been thinking about a little while ago.

             His face was changing so that it resembled Snape’s. What if other things changed, too? His mum had said in the letter that he deserved to know in case he got some strange disease. What if he had a disease because he was a Snape, a disease that Potters didn’t get? Or what if his magic changed? There was still so much he didn’t know, and it made Harry worried that he might miss something that would reveal him and not defend against it.

             Harry shook his head, then, and bit his lip so hard that it made him wince and hiss in pain. He’d already come up with plans to deal with this. He just had to be careful, that was all. He had to practice his lies. He knew he wasn’t a good liar, but if he could tell them often enough, then he would sound natural if someone tried to confront him.

             One of the lies was that he would just shrug and say that lots of people changed as they grew up. That was true enough.

             He could also say that he didn’t know a lot about his parents and look sad. Most people—unless they were Malfoy or Snape—would feel sorry for him that way and not ask any more questions.

             If he got a disease, then he would go to a Healer at St. Mungo’s. Madam Pomfrey had probably treated Snape when he was a student and knew more about his diseases. Harry couldn’t take the chance that she would recognize his sickness and make some connection.

             And if worst came to worst and someone did discover the truth, Harry thought he could fight to stay free. After all, he only had a year and a month until he was seventeen. Once he was an adult, no one could force him to stay under the care of a man he despised, or with the Dursleys, either. And he would leave Hogwarts only not long after that. Any time being tormented by Snape would be horrid, but nothing compared to ten years with the Dursleys. If he could survive one, then he could survive the other.

             Of course, the best thing would be if no one else ever found out. Harry didn’t intend to let them.

             And your mind’s wandering again, the way it did when you tried to learn Occlumency.

             Harry shook his head and focused back on the book again. Yes, things were going to be different this year. For Sirius. He’d promised that.

             He’d kept one set of difficult promises for a whole year. He could do it with another one.