The walk back up the stairs wasn’t as bad as the walk down had been; mostly because no one walked behind him.  Probably having Snape there helped too, he also admitted to himself.

The only thing that worried him about being at the back was that he wouldn’t know if anyone said anything, unless they stopped to look at him.  Deciding there was nothing he could do about it, Harry set his mind to worrying about other more pertinent things—like what precisely he’d be able to get away with during the medical exam.  

Of all the things he feared, doctors and medical personnel were some of the worst.  After enduring months of no visitors, except nurses whose only concern was to rid him of dead skin by scraping it off, Harry had developed a bit of an anxiety concerning the medical profession.  Doctors represented loneliness, uncertainty, crippling pain, and the undeniable proof that no one wanted him.

His classmates were already inside the infirmary before he realized that he was still in the hallway, staring resolutely at the double doors that led inside.  The smell—he couldn’t move, his mind was locked down in a horrible recall of all the thus far worst moments of his life.  

“Potter?”  He barely twitched as the imposing figure of his head of house came out into the hallway with him and crouched before him.  “Harry, look at me,” the man said, putting a hand on his face and drawing his attention gently to him.  

That did it.  He flinched at the sight of those dark eyes staring so closely at him, but the hand didn’t hurt and the man didn’t start yelling.  He blinked and shook his head.  

“Are you all right?”  

He liked the way that Snape talked.  His words were crisply enunciated, leaving no room for guessing.  He guessed that his professor had practiced his speech in order to make it so precise.  

“I don’t like doctors,” he finally said, in what he hoped was a quiet voice.  

Removing the hand from Harry’s face, Snape’s eyes traversed his body, eyeing his leg and face shrewdly, “I would guess not, Mr. Potter.  Can you tell me what happened to result in all of this?”

This time, Harry took a step backwards, putting some much needed space between him and the professor.  

“It was an accident, sir,” he said, feeling the tension in his chest skyrocketing.  

“Yours or somebody else’s?”  His professor asked, not yet standing.  

Harry smiled his half smile, showing his teeth and then briefly turned away as his left eye tried to fill with tears.  “Somebody else’s, sir,” he spat back when he finally could look the man in the eye again.  

“Your relatives?”  

“If you want to call them that,” Harry said walking up to the door and taking a deep breath.  If he went in, he could put an end to this uncomfortable conversation.  

Once inside the infirmary, he blinked hard at the sudden light and forced himself to relax.  He felt the vibration of footsteps from behind him and guessed that Snape had followed him in.  His suspicion was confirmed as the dark robes passed him and went to break up a brief argument that had broken out between Zabini and Malfoy.  

Harry looked around and noticed that with the exception of those two, the rest of his classmates were mostly spread out on the various beds, talking to one another as they awaited their turn.  He passed two girls whispering and giggling to each other, with barely a look to them as he passed.  A big girl was laid out face up a few beds down, pretending to sleep.  Harry supposed that if he were the subject of the other two girls’ gossip, he’d probably try to sleep too.  

A few beds more, but on the other side, he found Nott.  

“Hey, sorry if I got you in trouble,” the smaller boy said, catching his arm and pulling him in closer to where he was perched on the edge of a bed.  Harry let him, even though he could have broken his hold easily.  

“Pardon?”  Harry responded, cocking his head to the side in fake confusion.  Likely Nott was the reason Snape had gone after him, but he found that all in all he didn’t really mind.  

Nott shrugged, acutely embarrassed.  “I noticed you weren’t here and I told Snape that you might still be outside.  I didn’t remember you comin’ in at all.”  

Harry shrugged too.  “I don’t like doc—healers much,” he said, correcting himself as he remembered what they were called in the magical world.  

“Me neither,” Nott retorted, looking away nervously.  “If I wanted to be seen, I’d just walk around naked, you know?”

Harry relaxed and the corner of his mouth came up in something near a real smile.  “Yeah.  I get that.”  

Eventually, Harry wound up sitting on the bed next to Nott—or Teddy, as the boy had finally said to call him.  In turn, he had decided to let Teddy call him Harry.  It was like having a friend—almost.  He didn’t believe in friends, after all.  

They watched as one by one, the various students were cleared by the healer.  Snape took them back in groups of two or three—god forbid any of mummy or daddy’s little darlings get LOST, Harry thought in annoyance.  

“I think I might kill those two girls,” Nott said with a subtle nod to the still talking Parkinson and Greengrass.  

“I think Bulstrode may help you,” Harry responded with his head down to help muffle his statement.  
They had been going over the names of the other kids in the room, Nott helping him the most since he had apparently grown up around most of them.  

Finally it seemed as though just the two of them were left, and Harry wondered if that was on purpose, judging from the twitchy state of the boy next to him.  He had seen some kind of unidentifiable look pass between his head of house and the Pomfrey woman, and he guessed that it had something to do with them.  

“Mr. Potter, if you would follow me back please,” Pomfrey said, appearing once more.  

“Yes ma’am,” he said slowly, glancing at Nott—er, Teddy before leaving the room.  

“I haven’t seen you since you were just a baby,” Pomfrey told him, indicating that he should take a seat on the edge of a bed.  It was different only in that it was behind a curtain, and he was alone with the matron.  

“Is that so,” he answered casually.  He didn’t like being alone with this woman, magical healer or otherwise.  It didn’t matter.  He didn’t like people who had to have a physical degree in helping; people who seemed to shout to the world with their profession that they were a helper!  

Bloody bullshit is what that is.

“You were a beautiful child,” she nattered on as he watched her just in his peripheral.  “Your mother was so happy to have you.”

Just like my aunt, I bet, he thought morosely.  

“Now, I just need you remain still while I do some scans,” she said, pulling out her wand and pointing it at him.

He tried not to flinch, really he did, but he couldn’t help but lean backwards from the threat of something striking his head.  He already had one bad eye—he didn’t need another!

She frowned at his reaction but didn’t actually say anything.  

He noticed her lips thinning as the parchment beside her began filling up with writing, but decided not to comment on it.  He wondered how accurate her tests were, and whether or not he would have to actually tell his story, but mostly he wondered whether it would actually mean anything if he did.  

“Harry,” the matron finally said, looking decidedly more serious than she had before.  

Agitatedly he dragged a hand through his hair, not caring if it stood up even more than it already was.  

“Can you hear anything I’m saying?” She asked very carefully, her lips moving slower than before.  

“I understand what you’re saying,” he answered instead.  

“That’s not what I asked,” she said, pity blossoming in her eyes and face.  

He hated pity above all else.   The corner of his mouth curled up bitterly and he clenched his teeth briefly.  

“It’s not a big deal,” he answered casually, shifting on his seat.  

“Which part precisely, is not a ‘big deal?’” The woman snipped back, her posture becoming even more rigid.  “Your hearing loss?  Your leg?  Your eye?  Mr. Potter, really; these are all very important parts of you!”

“Were,” he clarified.  “Were,” he repeated, jumping off the bed and stalking to the edge of the curtained off area.  

He felt the woman behind him talking and he turned angrily to see the last part of her statement, “ . . . you going?”

“Because we’re not done yet?  Listen, we’re done!  It doesn’t matter,” he said, enunciating his words the best he could.  

“Young man, I decide whether we are done or not, and believe me you, we are not,” she said, pink blossoming in her cheeks as he continued to stare back unflinchingly.  

“And I told you!  It doesn’t BLOODY MATTER!” He could feel himself turning pink; feel his scars standing out on his face.  It didn’t matter, because if it did, then it meant that he mattered, and he could only matter if he mattered to someone.  And no one cared, no one had cared and so it didn’t matter in the least, because no one gave a damn how he was, or where he was, or even who he was, because he wasn’t wanted and he wasn’t anyone’s.  

Abruptly, the bed that he had been sitting on burst into blue flame, and he took advantage of the distraction to leave, to hightail it out of there as fast as he could move.  

“Harry?”  He thought he saw Teddy call out as he raced past him, the doors slamming themselves open as he went through.  

He didn’t know what he had been thinking, trying this world out in replacement for the other one.  Things were the same as ever.  They didn’t matter, because Dumbledore had made sure that nothing mattered regarding him.  Nothing mattered.  It had long been his mantra when the pain was too much to take, and it was his mantra now.  

Then all of a sudden he collided with something big and dark, and for a moment he flashed back to his Uncle Vernon, and before he knew it, he was scuttling backwards as fast as possible, hands up in front of his face to protect himself.  He had pushed himself into a corner before he realized that someone was talking to him, hands on his shoulders, a dark headed man crouching in front of him, looking so very familiar.  

A hand went to his face and just like before, he found himself being grounded by that simple touch, and suddenly the world came back into focus around him.  

“Professor?”  He choked out, his insides still curling tightly into themselves as they sought a way to escape from the inescapable present.  

“Harry, I need you to breathe now, can you do that for me?”  

He wanted to respond that of course he could that, he’d been doing it all his life, but at the same time, he realized that the hallway was beginning to spin a bit around him, and in fact, he couldn’t actually find his breath so readily after all.  

He gasped out a breath and got an encouraging nod, so he sucked another in and then repeated the process.  

When finally he found he could breathe without thinking so much about it, he asked, “Do you usually find yourself sitting in the hallways with your wayward students?  Or are you just making an exception for me?”  

Humour glinted back at him from the man’s eyes, and he consciously made himself uncurl a little.  

“Can you tell me what happened, Harry?”  

Snape’s hand moved from his face to his hand—his right hand—and he flinched backwards, driving his elbow hard into the wall.  

“Don’t—don’t touch that hand, please,” he responded, shoving his right fist into his armpit.  

He could feel the edge of his crutch scraping over the hard stone floor and without thinking he retracted it with a quick jerk of his arm.  

“As you wish,” his professor said simply, laying long fingers on his other hand.  “Is this acceptable?”  

Dark eyes searched his face and he allowed his neck to creak up and down in the affirmative.  

The man was still staring at him, waiting patiently for his answer, and without warning words suddenly began spilling from his lips, “I’m not going back in there; you can’t make me go back in there.  You can yell at me, and you can take points and give me a thousand detentions, but I’m NOT going back in there.”

He was breathing hard by the end of his speech, but his eye was dry as he stared resolutely back at his professor.

The Infirmary door abruptly opened, spilling bright light into the corridor where they were sitting.  Harry blinked hard at the sudden change in light, and then realized that it was Teddy he saw standing there in the doorway.  

“I’m not stayin’ either,” the other boy said, a spot under his right eye twitching.  “Sir,” he added hastily as Snape continued to stare back up at him unblinkingly.  

Harry felt, more than saw, the heavy breath expelled by the man in front of him.  

“Well then, perhaps we should take a walk,” Snape finally said after much uncomfortable silence had passed.

. . .

Severus made Nott stay with Potter while he went into the Infirmary to tell Poppy that he had both boys with him and that they were not going to be returning immediately.  He could smell smoke in the air, but nothing was burnt, and he wondered what had transpired between them.

The healer’s eyes were shadowed as she answered him, and although he was loathe to leave the boys unsupervised in the corridor for longer than necessary, he found himself needing to know what had happened to make her so morose.  

“Poppy?”  He asked gently, laying a hand on her shoulder.  

“Severus,” the older woman responded softly, shaking her head as though she had nothing she could offer the current situation.

“What happened?”  

“He—I confronted him about his physical state,” she whispered. “And he became very defensive, insisting repeatedly that none of it mattered, that nothing mattered about any of it.”

“Is there anything I should know about what you found on your scans?”  Severus asked very carefully.

“Prosthetic eye, prosthetic leg, malnutrition, previously broken bones, broken teeth, he is deaf in his right ear and has severe to profound hearing loss in his left, two missing fingers from his right hand . . .” she trailed off, not even making note of Severus’ horrified expression. “And that’s only the most obvious of it.  His scans show a long history of abuse, leading back to sometime just after age one and a half, shortly after his parents were killed.  Severus,” Poppy finally turned back to him, “Something very bad has happened to this child, and I’m afraid that if we can’t get him to talk about it, many worse things will occur as a result.”  

Her warning rang in his ears as he left the infirmary and instructed the two boys to follow him.  Clearly, Potter was adept at reading lips, or he wouldn’t have been able to pass as a hearing person for so long.

He strode down the hallways, his mind lost in the horrors that his little snake had already been through in such a short time.  He was barely aware that he was leading them to his own private quarters, barely aware that they were there already; the walk down there seemingly having taken no time at all.  

He closed the door behind them, indicated they should take a seat on his sofa and then went to the kitchen to make tea.  However, once he was alone, he suddenly stopped and leaned over a countertop, putting his head in his hands as he sought to make sense out of the madness that had just descended upon his mind.  

Who would do this to a little boy???  Lily’s little boy!  Who had done this!?  He couldn’t work it out, but the moment of solitude at least allowed him to get his head back on straight, and after another moment, he began making the tea.  The familiar motions soothed him somewhat, so that by the time he went back out into the main room of his quarters, he had found that he could handle the situation calmly once more.