“Please?” Harry whined, handing the empty potion vial back to Snape. “I’m fine you know?”

 “You are not ‘fine’, Mr Potter. You took a significant blow to the head and you are still recovering from severe concussion,” the professor told him.

 “It wasn’t severe,” Harry grumbled. “And I feel fine now. I’m bored.”

Exhaling, Severus Snape sat down on the edge of the bed beside him.

 “If you promise to rest for the remainder of the afternoon, I shall permit you to eat dinner at the table. You may also spend the evening in the lounge. But only if you stay in bed whilst I finish the remainder of my lessons for the day,” he said.

Harry beamed. “I will, I promise!”

Snape inclined his head. “Very well.”

Settling back against the pillows, Harry curled up onto his side as he felt the potions master tuck the covers around his shoulders.

 “Can you give that to Ron and ‘Mione?” he mumbled, gesturing to the piece of parchment folded neatly on the table beside his bed. “I’ve not seen them in ages.”

 “It has been a mere three days, Mr Potter–”

 “ –Harry,” the boy corrected.

  “Please refrain from interrupting me when I am talking. As I was saying, it has been only three days since you last saw your friends. However, I shall deliver your letter, as I’m sure the Weasley boy thinks I have put you into a potion by now,” Snape said, standing up and tucking the piece of parchment into the pocket of his robes.

Harry smiled sleepily as his eyelids began to feel heavy. “Thanks.”

 “You are welcome. I have two further lessons to attend to, followed by a detention. I will be back around six thirty,” the professor told him. “Can I trust you will behave until then?”

Harry nodded, half asleep. As he slipped into a comfortable slumber, he felt two gentle hands reach out and remove his glasses from his face, placing them on the bedside table with a soft tap.

 “Sleep well, Harry.”

With vague, hazy consciousness, the young Gryffindor allowed himself one final smile before he drifted off.

OOOOOOO

True to his word, satisfied that the boy had spent the rest of the afternoon tucked up in bed, Severus Snape allowed Harry to join him at the dinner table that evening.

Following their meal, he even agreed to a game of Wizard’s Chess – purely to keep the boy from whinging of course.

 “Thank you for taking my letter to Ron and Hermione,” Harry said eventually, moving one of his pieces, which promptly smashed his opponent’s into smithereens.

 “Your chess skills have come a long way,” Snape told him approvingly. “And, you are welcome.”

 “I’ve been practicing with Ron a lot,” Harry told him. “And… I thought maybe tomorrow, I could go and see them? My friends.”

 “I think that it is far too soon for you to be galivanting around this castle again,” the potions master told him.

Harry’s shoulders drooped in defeat.

 “However, if your friends can stomach it, they might perhaps visit you here. For an hour,” Snape added.

Harry smiled, grateful.

There was a pause then, before the professor spoke again.

 “Speaking of gallivanting around the castle, there is something I’d like to talk to you about.”

 “What?” Harry asked nervously, before catching Snape’s disapproving look. “I mean, what is it, sir?”

 “I would like to know what you were doing in the dungeons. The day you heard my… conversation with the headmaster,” Snape told him, a little awkwardly.

The potions master had half expected the boy to clam up and recoil into himself in a desperate attempt to hide his misdemeanours. Instead, Harry’s face suddenly bore a troubled expression.

 “Oh… Well…” he began.

Snape rose a brow, awaiting a more constructive response.

 “I… wanted to talk to you about something,” Harry frowned, busying himself with examining the chess board.

 “I see. With regards to what?”

 “It doesn’t matter now,” the child told him, softly. “Professor Dumbledore explained it. And besides, it’s gone now so…”

 “What is gone?” the potions master asked.  

Harry shrugged his shoulders, head bent over the table and eyes averted downwards.

 “Please look at me when I am talking to you, Harry. What is gone?” Snape repeated.  

Harry lifted his head obediently and emerald met obsidian before he spoke again.

 “The mirror.”

OOOOOOO

When Severus Snape entered Dumbledore’s office the following morning, he found it empty.

For a moment, he contemplated leaving again.  

And he almost did – until he saw it, in the far corner of the room.

Silently, he moved across the room to stand in front of the mirror that Harry had told him so much about the night before. He had heard the stories before of course, but had never truly believed that it was in the headmaster’s possession.

And what Harry had seen when he looked into it?

Stopping several steps away from the mirror, Severus hesitated.

And then he closed the gap, removing the dusty blanket that covered the glass and looking at his own reflection.

He frowned.

 “Good Morning, Severus.”

Startled, the potions master whipped around on his heel to find Albus Dumbledore standing behind him.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

 “Forgive me, I would have prepared some tea had I known you were coming,” the headmaster said eventually, moving to sit at his desk.

 “It is true, then,” was all Severus said.

 “That I haven’t prepared any tea? Alas, yes,” Dumbledore told him, pleasantly.

 “Do not try to distract me with mindless chit chat, Albus,” he snapped. “When Harry told me he had come across The Mirror of Erised in an abandoned classroom, I thought he must surely be mistaken.”

 “As you can see, he was not.”

 “This is a dark piece of magic, headmaster. Surely you know that?” Severus asked, examining the lettering of the mirror’s frame more closely.

 “Perhaps it is. Perhaps not,” was all the headmaster said.

 “To a little boy with no real memory of his family, this is an extremely dangerous thing to be stumbling across,” he said, unable to hide his irritation. “This mirror–”

 “–Will be moved to a more secure place, where it can be found by neither student nor staff, for that very reason,” Dumbledore told him calmly.

Severus nodded his head. “Let us ensure that it is.”

 “What did you see?” the older wizard asked him.

 “I beg your pardon?”

 “You looked into the mirror just now, did you not? An entirely personal question, I know, but one can be forgiven for being curious,” Dumbledore said.

Without a word, Snape turned and replaced the dusty blanket back over the mirror’s glass, before turning to leave the office.

He did not answer the headmaster’s question.

OOOOOOO