Snape’s eyes snapped open at 9:30 that morning. He shook his head to clear it and wondered why he felt as though something had happened. Then he remembered. It had. The Iliad was beside him on the bedside table, and he picked it up and paged through it a bit. He had skipped most of the catalogue poetry and simply read the more exciting bits.

He remembered reading it for the first time when he was about eight or nine. His father had swung the door to his room open as Snape pretended to sleep under the dirty comforter. “Boy? Are you awake, boy? Put your head up, ya great lump, I’m talking to ya!”

Severus had poked his head out. “Yes, Da?”

“ ‘Yes, Da!’” Soundin’ like a yer Mam, no good slut she is! Brought you somethin’. Sit up.” When his Da was drunk his accent would come back—the accent he had worked so hard to loose at University.

Severus was scared. When his father brought him something, it could be anything. A hug, a toffee, a whipping with the heavy brown leather strap that his father kept in a drawer. He had no choice but to obey. He forced himself into a sitting position.

His father stumbled as he walked the few steps between the door and the little bed, which was too short to be comfortable now. He reached under his coat and pulled out a book.

“This was mine when I was your age. Thought you might like it.” He shoved it clumsily into Severus’ still small hands. It was too dark for him to read the title. He hugged it to his chest.

“Read it, won’t ya, an we’ll talk about it?”

Severus nodded. “Yes sir, I will.”

His father leaned over and Severus could smell the heavy gin fumes on the man’s breath. “ There’s a good boy, Sev. Back to sleep now.”

He lay down and watched from slitted eyes as his father made his ponderous way to the corridor, stumping painfully on his crude wooden leg. They’d offered him a better one but he’d always refused. Severus knew what he’d hear next; his father would yell at his Mam, his Mam would cry, and then the hitting would start…

Snape came back. His slapped the book down on the table and threw his legs over the side, shoving his feet into his slippers.

Twenty minutes later, showered, dressed and shaved, he felt alive. He started the breakfast and, carefully spelling the pot not to over spill, he walked upstairs. He opened the door, fully expecting to find the boy lounging. Instead Potter was sitting crossed legged, clearly waiting to get up. Snape undid the age line and the boy leapt up.

“Glad to see me, Potter?”

Potter flushed. “ No sir, I mean yes, I ah--”

Snape waved a hand to stop his idiotic stammering. “I get the gist. Breakfast is in fifteen minutes and I expect you looking as though you didn’t roll in the mud yesterday. Understand?” The boy streaked to the bathroom in his traditional ‘herd of starving animals’ run. Snape wondered how the Weasleys did it. They didn’t look like they’d been tippling…

Harry yanked a t-shirt over his head and raced down the stairs. He was half scared Snape would throw out his breakfast, though he’d never done such a thing before. He’d been really angry when Harry went to bed, when Harry thought he ought to have been at least a little more understanding ( bad things can happen to everyone, after all). Then, when Harry woke him up crying like a stupid little kid, Snape had been…well, maybe not nice, but not as totally evil as he usually was. Harry wondered what had happened—was Snape some kind of were-git who transformed into a decent bloke once the sun was down?

Porridge was on the table and they ate in silence. Snape seemed less than inclined to talk and Harry hoped that if he were quiet, Snape would forget he was suppose to punish Harry and go back to mucking about with the gristly bits of disgusting animals. He hunched down a little and ate the last few bites of his meal. Now if only he could …

“Potter, what do you think you’re doing? You look even shiftier than usual. Sit up and get that sinister look off your face.”

“I don’t look sinister.” Harry felt his stomach sink when he realized that Snape had not forgotten. He had an awful idea he knew what his punishment was….

The waiting would kill him. “Professor, about last night--”

Snape didn’t look up from his paper. “Are you so eager to resolve the situation? I would have thought you’d prefer to put it off as long as possible.”

“It’s the waiting.”

Snape nodded sagely. “Waiting builds character. Besides, the ministry had leveled a six percent tariff on foreign harvested unicorn hair. Who wouldn’t want to read about that, perhaps five or six times in a row? I’m a very slow reader, Potter.”

Snape let the little nuisance squirm for another thirty seconds before he put the paper down and fixed him with a stony glare that would have frozen water solid.

“You have thirty seconds to explain why you don’t deserve to be punished severely for this, Potter. Start now.”

“ I didn’t mean for it to happen. I just lost track of how far I’d gone, that’s all. I never meant to fall, and I never meant to wake you up.”

Snape sighed. Merlin this was hard. “First off, you aren’t in trouble for waking me because you had a nightmare. You will never be in trouble for that, even if you wake me every night until you’re thirty seven. When I took you, I understood a certain amount of sleepless nights were inevitable. Do you understand, Harry?”

Potter nodded, looking at him as though he thought it was a trick. Snape had an urge to go and strangle the muggles for teaching him to be afraid of being human.

“Tell me, Potter, would your relatives have been upset had this happened when you were younger?”

Harry nodded vigorously. “ I had a nightmare like that once when I was ten and my uncle locked under the stairs for a week because he had a meeting the next day.”

“As your guardian, Mr. Potter, I may not encourage you to do things which are against the law or will hurt someone. I can, however, tell you that once you’re of age, I will gladly give you an alibi if you wish to transfigure them into flobberworms. I will even teach you the correct spells. Not that I encourage that sort of vigilantism, of course.”

It was Harry’s turn to nod sagely. “Of course. You could use them as potions ingredients.”

“Potter! Don’t be absurd, boy. Your aunt would clabber any potion she was diced into.” Harry started. Had Snape just made a joke? He wasn’t smiling but Harry almost thought…

“Now, back onto the subject at hand. You knew not to go that far, did you not?”

Potter nodded. “Yes sir.”

“And you knew you were farther than shouting distance?”

“Yes sir.”

“And you knew that should get me if you were hurt?”

Potter swallowed. “No sir. You said not to interrupt you.”

“I thought you understood it was different if you were injured.”

“I didn’t know I was. Not until you pointed out how bad it was later.”

Snape took a deep breath. Yelling wouldn’t help. “You saw the cuts on your arms and legs.”

“Yeah but I didn’t think they were a big deal.”

The cut on the boy’s calf was deep. It must have bled and bled.

“Potter, that cut on your leg must have hurt. It must have bled everywhere. Didn’t it occur to you that you might have lost a good deal of blood?”

“It bled a lot. But I was all right to walk back, and then I put a damp paper towel on it and it was fine.”

Snape took three deep breaths. Yelling wouldn’t help, yelling wouldn’t help yelling wouldn’t help. “ But did it hurt?”

Harry thought. “ A little. Not as much my arm did that time with Lockhart.”

“Do you remember that smacking I gave you in the library the first day you were here?”

Harry’s face flushed. “Yes sir.”

“How much would you say that hurt? On a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst?”

Harry thought. “Maybe a three or four.”

Snape nodded. It wasn’t as though he had been trying to crack the boy’s bones, but neither had those swats been love pats. The child’s abnormally high pain tolerance was becoming a problem.

“ In sum, you knew you were disobeying but not until it had already happened. Is that correct?” Snape gave Harry credit; the boy nodded and then stood still, not trying to beg off or plead his case. His face had a distinctly white tinge to it, like milk.

“ You’ve put me in a rather bad place, Mr. Potter. I believe you when you say you weren’t maliciously naughty; I don’t think you mean to do these lunatic things as often as you do, which isn’t to say I don’t think you never mean to do them.

On the other hand, you endangered yourself. The Dark Lord has many followers waiting for his return. Any one of them would gladly kill you, and that’s if you were lucky. Do you know Swinburne, Mr. Potter?”

Potter shook his head. “ Swinburne said: ‘ At the door of life, by the Gate of Breath, there’s worse things wait for a man than Death.’ Do you understand what that means?”

Harry nodded. “ That death is better than…” he couldn’t finish. He swallowed convulsively. His nightmare from the night before popped unbidden into his head.

Snape’s hand, heavy and hard but carefully gentle at the right times, settled itself on Harry’s shoulder. “Calm down, Potter. Deep breaths, that’s a good boy.”

Harry made himself calm down. Snape felt a sharp stab of –well, not guilt but something. The child had been naughty and needed to be punished but he should have known better than to scare him with ‘a fate worse than death’ so soon after Black’s inglorious end as Dementor food.

“All right, Harry. My point is, you must think about these things. Calculated risk is one thing; risk for its own sake is another. Yesterday was the second thing. Further, from now on, regard seeing your own blood as both bad and unusal. If it bleeds more than a minute, you’re to come and get me, is that clear?”

Harry nodded. “Yes sir.”

“Let me ask you: If you had a ward and he behaved this way, in these circumstances, knowing the rules and the penalties for breaking them, how would you handle it?”