Dumbledore greets him in the Dursley's front garden with an inquiring look, but Snape says nothing as they make their way back to Arabella Figg's house, and the Headmaster, thankfully, does not press him. Dumbledore is first through the floo, giving the direction as "the hospital wing, Hogwarts," and after a moment's indecision, Snape follows him to the same location.

He hears Potter's voice the moment he steps out upon the hearth, shaking the soot from his Muggle clothing. He takes a moment to end the Transfiguration and restore his robes to their former state, listening to the conversation behind him as he does so.

"I'm fine, Headmaster, really," the boy is saying. "I don't need to stay the night."

Snape spins on his heel to find Potter struggling to sit up in bed, Madam Pomfrey to one side of him, trying to push him back down again. The Headmaster stands at the foot of the bed looking slightly amused.

"Potter," Snape drawls, catching the attention of all three. "Two hours ago you were insisting you didn't need treatment at all. You can hardly expect anyone to take you seriously regarding your state of health after that."

Potter flushes—then, incredibly, grins. "It's all right, sir, I don't expect you ever take me seriously." Then he turns back to Madam Pomfrey, missing, Snape hopes, the startled look he cannot quite prevent passing over his features. "I mean it, though. I feel fine."

Snape rolls his eyes. Madam Pomfrey opens her mouth to speak, but before she manages to do so he has taken three long strides and arrived at Potter's bedside. Potter, Pomfrey, and Dumbledore all look up at him expectantly.

Snape leans over the bed and jabs the boy lightly in his injured ribs with two fingers. Potter emits a high-pitched gasp and turns white, his hands bunching in the bedclothes.

"An overnight stay, I believe you said?" Snape addresses the question to Madam Pomfrey, even as he smirks down at the top of the boy's head.

"At least," she nods, her mouth twisted in a strange combined expression of disapproval and amusement. "I don't allow anyone to leave the hospital wing with Skele-Grow in their system, it's not safe."

"There you have it, Harry," says Dumbledore, speaking for the first time. "I am afraid that you have been over-ruled. Do not be cast down, it happens to the best of us. Now, I am afraid that I have business to attend to elsewhere in the castle. Professor Snape, however, can answer any questions you may have as regards our—" his eyes flicker briefly from Potter to Madam Pomfrey, who arches an eyebrow, "business of this afternoon."

Snape takes an automatic step back. "Headmaster, I have my own work—"

"Nothing you could see to before dinner begins, Severus. You might as well spend the next few minutes here as anywhere." He arches a quelling eyebrows in Snape's direction, then turns away, effectively cutting off any further protest. "Harry, I am glad to see you so well mended. I trust you will abide by Madam Pomfrey's instructions until you are fully recovered. You are welcome to come see me later, if you still have questions after your interview with Professor Snape. I will be in touch with you shortly in any case."

With a nod to Harry, a bow to Madam Pomfrey, and a hand clasped to Snape's shoulder in passing, he sweeps from the hospital wing. The doors open for him automatically, and shut behind him with a resounding thud.

"Drink this in half an hour," Madam Pomfrey is saying to Potter when Snape turns his attention back to the sickbed, "and call me, or send Severus, if you begin to feel lightheaded. I wouldn't leave you, but I'm overrun with a case of dragonpox in the Hufflepuff girl's dormitory." She tucks Potter's blankets in around him, as though hoping to secure him to the bed by doing so, and brushes past Snape with a low murmur of, "do watch him, won't you?" that Snape has no opportunity to reply to.

Potter speaks when they are alone. "Sorry, Professor," he mutters, looking down at his hands.

Snape arches an eyebrow, though he knows it will not be seen. "For which of the afternoon's manifold inconveniences are you apologizing?"

"Getting stuck with me here. I wouldn't want to hang around either." Potter darts a glance toward the doors, as they swing shut in Madam Pomfrey's wake.

"It is you who are stuck, Potter. I do not plan to linger, I assure you." Belying his own words, Snape summons a chair from the side of an empty bed across the room. It lands with a faint clatter to the right of him, and he seats himself stiffly. "Ask your questions, and be quick about it."

Potter pushes himself upright in the bed with a wince. Nearly all the bruising is gone from his face and neck, and the cut over his eye has healed to a clean pink line. "Right. Um. So...Professor Dumbledore went to see my aunt and uncle?"

"The Headmaster and I visited your relatives' home in Surrey, yes," Snape corrects him dryly.

Potter blinks at him several times. "You—you went too? But why?"

"The Headmaster requested I accompany him," says Snape, carefully skirting the edge of the truth, "and I went for that reason, none other."

"Oh." Is it Snape's imagination, or does Potter seem embarrassed? "So what did my aunt and uncle say when you got there?"

"Honestly, Potter," Snape huffs. "Do you really require an answer to that question? You know your relatives, how do you think your uncle reacted when two wizards appeared on his doorstep?"

"Oh. Right. Good point." Potter looks still more abashed. He turns his head, avoiding Snape's eye. "I'm sorry if he was horrible to you."

"The fact that you are currently drugged to your eyeballs still does not excuse the utter inanity of apologizing for the man who—did this to you." He waves a hand to encompass Potter's many injuries; the boy flushes slightly. "At any rate, we spoke only with your uncle. Your aunt and cousin were not at home."

"What did you say, then?"

"I said very little," says Snape, unprepared to recount the brief conversation he'd had with Dursley outside the cupboard. "The Headmaster, however, confronted your uncle with incontrovertible proof of his crimes against you, and promised him a gruesome death by dismemberment if he touched you again."

Potter's eyebrows make a slow ascent into his hairline. "Dismemberment? Professor Dumbledore?"

Snape waves his hand again, negligently. "Well, perhaps the dismemberment was merely implied. The other, however, was not. It was pointed out to Vernon Dursley that he and his family have benefitted no less than you from the wards that protect you while you live there. And while it has always been Dumbledore's intention to offer his family assistance and protection when you turn seventeen, it hardly needs saying that if they abandon you before time, no such assistance will be forthcoming."

"So that's—that's all? You went all the way to Surrey just to tell him he had to take me back next summer?" At Snape's look, Potter shrugs. "You might have saved yourself the trip, that's all—he never said he wouldn't."

"Surely you aren't sulking?" Snape says, arching an eyebrow ."You were the one who insisted you not be removed from your uncle's care in the first place."

"Of course I'm not!" Potter says, nearly shouting, and for the first time since that afternoon he begins to look angry rather than merely abashed. "I never wanted anyone talking to him in the first place, if you remember, sir. I don't whine about things I know can't be helped."

Snape takes a long moment to regard the boy in the bed across from him. He prefers Potter like this, defiant and bristling, rather than vulnerable and cowed. Still, there is an underlying fragility to the boy's air that disturbs him; he wants to expose it, long enough at least to see whether it can be mended or patched. This is for his own sake, as much as for the boy or anyone else. He is tired of walking on eggshells around Potter, tired of pulling all his punches. The sooner the boy is on his feet again, the sooner Snape can return to his favorite hobby of cutting him down to size.

When he speaks again it is in measured and carefully neutral tones.

"It is very important to you," he says, "that no one should be under the impression that you think you deserve—anything."

"What? That's—I never said that." Potter's confusion is stronger than his impatience this time.

"But you did," says Snape smoothly. "Perhaps without meaning to, but then you are so woefully transparent even at the best of times...I wonder what you think it will gain you? This ruthless emotional parsimony of yours."

"I wonder why in the world you would be interested, Professor," says Potter through gritted teeth.

"It is my privilege to analyze my students without reference to their comfort," Snape informs him loftily. "And in your case, working out your motivations may be key to apprehending you before you can put your next suicidal stunt into practice."

He meets Potter's gaze and does not look away, though for a few moments he is tempted; there is a hardness in the boy's eyes that does not belong in the gaze of any teenager.

"Can I ask you a question, sir?" says Potter, then goes on without waiting for an answer. "If you'd never heard the prophecy, would you have let me go when I first asked you to, without bringing Dumbledore and all the rest into it?"

"If not for the prophecy, and the role that you play in it," Snape informs him in his driest tones, "the Headmaster would never have assumed responsibility for your fate when you were an infant, and you would undoubtedly have grown up a proper little princeling in a proper wizarding household—in which dearly-to-be-wished-for case, the events leading up to this entire scenario would have vanished in the resultant vortex of shifting chances and causalities. In other words, Potter—no. But it is a useless question. You might as well ask what I would have done if the earth were flat or the sun rose in the west."

Throughout this speech he keeps his eyes trained on the ceiling over their heads, an intentional gesture on his part, at once meant to suggest that to look at the source of such stupidity would be beyond even his strength, and to save Snape the necessity of watching Potter's features either dissolve into a rictus of agony, or go blank with incomprehension, or harden even further. He doesn't want to see any of that. He doesn't want to become any more attuned to the nuances of the boy's emotional drama than he has already done. It is an uncomfortable place to be, and he doesn't wish to reside there any longer, Dumbledore's orders or wishes be damned.

But the intolerable fact of the matter is that he is attuned to the boy, could hardly be otherwise, closely as he has watched him for the last six years. And for this reason, he knows that there is another question behind the one Potter seems to be asking; furthermore, he knows that the hidden question is the real one, the important one. It is the same question Snape would have asked Dumbledore himself during a different era in his life, if he had dared to do so. But he never had dared, and it seems Potter will not either. Another shared legacy of shared childhood griefs, no doubt.

"I was surprised to discover myself famous in your relatives' home," Snape adds, purposefully switching the topic to one that will throw Potter off-balance. "Vernon Dursley recognized me, apparently from your description."

Potter does not deny this. "Thought it might put him in a good mood," he says, the corner of his mouth curving in an expression that might be either a small smile or a faint sneer. "I thought he'd like knowing there were wizards who hated me as much as he did." His smile slips away, his eyes growing distant. "Was wrong about that, as it turned out. That was definitely the worst summer of my entire life."

"Which summer was that?" Snape asks, before he can get the better of his curiosity.

"Before second year. My first summer back from school. They weren't going to let me go back to Hogwarts, you know." Potter blinks, still looking at nothing. "Locked me in my room and fit bars over the windows. Nearly stopped feeding me altogether. I reckon I'd still be there if they'd had their way."

Snape quells the immediate outrage this information provokes and thinks back to the summer in question. "That was the year you and Weasley arrived at Hogwarts in a flying Ford Anglia."

"Yeah," Potter mutters, seeming to slip a little further beneath the blankets. "That was a really stupid idea, but when I couldn't get onto the platform at King's Cross, I panicked, you know? I'd spent the whole summer wondering if—if Hogwarts, and me being a wizard and all of that was just a dream. That summer really was a bit like a bad dream—you know the kind, where you really want to get somewhere, but stuff keeps happening to keep you away..."

"I do know," Snape mutters, almost to himself, willing himself not to think of the number of times he has visited Godric's Hollow in his dreams just in time to warn Lily she had been betrayed.

"Bet it gave Uncle Vernon a turn, you showing up on his doorstep," says Potter, a gleam appearing in his eyes.

"I rather think it did, but why would you say so?"

"Well, if he remembered what I said about you, he'd know you were—er. Not someone to mess with, that's all." Potter manages to look faintly abashed.

"Oh?" Snape arches an eyebrow.

"Well, I was eleven, and you were about the scariest person I'd ever met." Another bitter smile. "These days I have a little more perspective."

No doubt. Snape eyes the boy critically. "Do you still think that of me?"

"What, sir?"

"That I am a man like your uncle."

He expects a blush, a nervous sort of backpedaling. Potter is frequently insolent, but he is not often blatantly insulting. He does not expect the furious glare of outrage he sees in place of a blush.

"How can you even ask me that?" Potter demands. "I just told you, Professor, I was a kid at the time. I'm not eleven anymore, I know better than to think you're a bad person just because you hate me. You've got loads better reasons than Uncle Vernon for not liking me, but you've never hurt me, or let anyone else hurt me if you could help it. I would never compare you to him."

It is a strangely warming sort of benediction, considering the source. Potter has averted his gaze again, and though neither he nor Snape can seem to think of anything to say in reply to it, the silence between them is not precisely uncomfortable.

He is oddly conscious of the boy's unspoken question of a few moments before, and whether it is the fault of the enforced intimacy of the events of the afternoon or something inside him unbending in response to Potter's olive branch, he does not know; but it seems important to him suddenly to make some answer to it. He cannot know, after all, what sort of difference it would have made to him if Dumbledore had ever done the same for him at his age. Maybe none.

Maybe all the difference in the world.

"How long have you known about the prophecy, Potter?" he asks, when the silence has winded along for another minute.

Potter looks up at him in surprise. "Dumbledore—Professor Dumbledore told me about it after—after the fight at the Ministry."

Snape looks at him consideringly. "Time enough for the full import of the thing to sink in, would you say?"

Potter shrugs.

"Then I confess that I find your lack of rebellion rather remarkable for a young man under a death sentence."

Potter lifts his chin, a stubborn, determined, and strangely adult look coming over his face that Snape cannot help but note with some admiration.

"It's not a death sentence," he says. "Dumbledore doesn't think it is, anyway, and I reckon he'd know better than anyone. I always knew Voldemort was going to keep after at me until he'd finished me off, that's been obvious since that night in the graveyard. The only difference the prophecy makes is that now I know I might have a chance to finish him off instead." A grim note enters his voice. "Or take him with me, anyway."

"And you're quite resigned to that, are you?" Snape says in some disbelief.

"Like I said, sir, I don't whine over things that can't be helped. I know that I've got a shot now, and that's more than I had before."

If it were anyone but Potter speaking, Snape would find all this noble resignation rather suspect; but if the years of their acquaintance have proven anything it is that Harry Potter is nothing if not pathetically sincere. And after all, knowing what he does now about the boy's upbringing, is it so remarkable he should value his life so cheaply? Who has ever taught him the value of it?

"I wonder, if your sense of duty is really so keen, how you justify exposing yourself to the continued risk of your uncle's violence." Snape is careful to speak neutrally, without accusation. "Surely you must have realized that if he had killed you, all our best hopes of victory would have died with you?"

"He wouldn't have killed me—"

"He ran you down with his car, Potter! For a joke, that's all your life is to him! Is it no more than that to you?"

He looks away, but Snape cannot let it rest there, not until he can see in the boy's eyes that his meaning has penetrated. Snape stands and walks over to the side of the bed; Potter looks up at him, a little wary, and Snape bends down until his nose is mere inches from the boy's face. He speaks in a low, intense voice, filled with an urgency that he himself hardly recognizes.

"I don't suppose you happened to glance into a mirror before applying that glamor, did you Potter?" They are so close together that the fringe over the boy's forehead stirs with Snape's breath. "Do you have any idea what you looked like? Two of your ribs were broken; you were already beginning to run a fever. Had I not apprehended you in your pretense, you would have died of blood poisoning; one more week, and you would have been beyond all aid. That is how close he came to killing you, that is how ably you assisted him in the attempt."

He straightens again, his eyes never leaving Potter's face. Snape nearly regrets the harshness of his words; the boy is pale, dangerously so. Snape glances from the clock over the door to the fireplace behind him; when had Pomfrey said she meant to return?

Snape sits in his chair again, on the edge this time, elbows propped on his knees, fingers steepled together. "Let me put this to you another way. Suppose it were one of your classmates. Suppose it were Miss Granger. What would you say to her if she were in this situation? If she behaved as you have done?"

"That's different," says Potter immediately, two furious spots of color high on his cheekbones. "I'm different. I always have been."

"That is mere arrogance," Snape tells him easily. "You are born to a remarkable fate, I grant you, but you are no less deserving of the privileges of safety and consideration that most people enjoy. Indeed, you may have a better right, because you know enough not to take them for granted."

Potter's color is a little better now, and there is look of sardonic amusement in his eyes that Snape cannot help but feel bodes him no good. "Let me get this straight, Professor," he says. "You—you—are telling me that I deserve to—to be safe and happy. You're telling me this?"

Snape replies by glowering at him. "I have already confessed myself to have been...laboring under a misapprehension once this afternoon. Is it your desire that I abase myself entirely?"

The ironic look on Potter's face gives way to honest confusion. Snape huffs impatiently and looks away. He sits, drumming his fingers against his knees, then gets to his feet and paces the length of the room twice. He comes to a stop beside his empty chair, and stands with his back to Potter, facing the doorway.

He recognizes the necessity of what he is about to say, but he wants to be able to make a quick exit afterwards.

"Very well," he says, gripping the back of the chair, then turning on his heel to face Potter again. The boy has grown pale once more, and his eyes are wide and apprehensive.

Snape take a step closer to the bed and gazes down at him.

"Listen to me carefully, Potter: I will say this only once, and if you repeat it to anyone I will call you a liar. There is nothing wrong with you. The fact that you have a valuable role to play in this war does not mean you have no value of your own. You asked me what I would have done today if there were no prophecy. I say that I would have not have done anything differently. If the Dark Lord were dead, and all his followers fled to the farthest corners of the earth, your safety would still be a matter of import to me. For as long as you continue to be noble, insufferable, and reckless, I will protect you to the best of my ability. I have my reasons for this, and they are none of your business. That is all I have to say on the matter, so it had better be enough for your delicate Gryffindor sensibilities."

Snape resists the temptation to turn and leave without waiting for Potter's reply, but a dim sense of courtesy—and curiosity, too—keeps him where he is. Potter is sitting straight up in the bed, white as the sheets he is clutching in his hands.

Potter's eyes are wide and bright. "Professor. I..."

And then anything more he may have intended to say is lost, as his eyes roll back in his head and he slumps, unconscious, back onto the pillows.

Snape stands for an instant, frozen in shock. Then he leaps forward and seizes the boy's hand where it has fallen limp at his side.

"Potter!" he shouts into the boy's ear. "Potter, wake up, damn you!" He presses his fingers to the inside of Potter's wrist; there is a pulse there, but it is thin and thready.

Swearing under his breath, Snape dashes to the fireplace, seizing a handful of Floo powder and flinging it into the flames.

"Hufflepuff common room," he shouts, and disappears.