“Potter!”

Tonight, the nightmare wasn’t so willing to let him go. Harry wavered between wake and sleep, Snape’s voice on one end and Voldemort’s high-pitched laughter on the other.

“Potter, wake up. It’s just a dream.”

Harry wanted to scream. He knew it was just a dream, but that didn’t make it any less horrible.

A slight stinging impact on his face abruptly ended the agony. He sat bolt upright, nearly colliding heads with Snape, and realized that the man had slapped him awake. He felt his cheek, vaguely noting that it didn’t hurt as much as he would have expected it to. It must have been a light slap.

Harry looked at Snape sideways. The man was sitting back on his heels, looking slightly frustrated. Harry wouldn’t have been surprised if Snape really wanted to hit him, after being forced to trek across the highlands for days on end and not even being able to get peace at night, all because of Harry. He looked away, face burning, not with pain, but shame. It’d been almost two months, but the nightmares weren’t getting any better. This was the third nightmare in a row that Snape had interrupted.

“Diggory?” Snape asked, voice tight.

“Voldemort,” Harry said, not seeing the man’s wince as he clambered to his feet. He looked out over the scenic view, breathing in the morning air. He wanted to run, run away from his nightmares, from Snape’s judgment, from the ache in his chest that had settled there after that night in the graveyard and hadn’t gone away since.

This dream had been different, though. He’d been Voldemort, had seen through his eyes. It was creepy, and he resisted a shudder. He noted, with consternation, that his scar seemed to be prickling. A quick glance around, however, proved that they were completely alone on the highlands.

They ate breakfast on the move that day. Harry became aware of an urgency in Snape’s movements. He probably wanted to get Harry off of his hands as quickly as possible. 

Harry scowled to himself. So what if he did? It wasn’t like Harry wanted to be near him, or cared about the man’s approval. His nightmare had put him in a melancholy mood.

He did his best to shake it off, but it became apparent that he was preoccupied when Snape threw out an arm to halt him as he walked.

Harry glanced at him questioningly, but Snape wasn’t looking at him. He was staring forward into a spot in the distance. “What is it?”

“People,” Snape said shortly.

Harry’s heart skipped a beat. “Death Eaters?”

Snape watched them for a moment more, then slowly shook his head. “No.” His lip curled. “It’s a tourist group.”

Harry tried to look where Snape was staring, but the sun reflecting off of his glasses made it difficult to see. He lifted a hand to his forehead to block the sun.

Snape inhaled sharply, and Harry jumped a little when a hand clamped around his arm. Harry watched in confusion as Snape pulled his arm closer, eyes narrowing.

“What happened to your wrists?”

Oh, that. Harry flushed, shuffling his feet. “I, uh, had trouble cutting the ropes binding my wrists after the trial.”

Snape’s lips thinned as he grabbed Harry’s other arm, several inches above the wrist, and lifted it to inspect as well.

Harry didn’t really understand why the man would care. It was a minor inconvenience. He’d had much worse over the summers and before coming to Hogwarts. If it had happened at school, he wouldn’t even have bothered going to see Madame Pomfrey.

“It’s infected,” Snape said, scowling darkly. “Why didn’t you mention it immediately?”

“It’s not a big deal,” Harry said, pulling away and growing annoyed when Snape wouldn’t release his arms. “I can handle it.”

Snape gave him that look again. What did he want from Harry? He’d walked after him, uncomplaining, for three days, slept in the open, done his best not to overly irritate him. What was the man expecting? For Harry to collapse into histrionics because he couldn’t handle his own life?

The thought only reminded him of the nightmares, and he tried tugging free again.

“Hold still,” Snape said, frowning at Harry as he released one of his arms to bring out the impossible pouch. Harry immediately dropped his arm to his side, resisting the urge to argue when Snape pushed his arm back up. “If you would suck up your pride for five minutes, Potter, I can treat you!”

Of course Snape had a healing potion in his bag. When he uncorked it and moved as if to pour it on Harry’s wrists, Harry said, “Shouldn’t you save it? For something important, I mean?”

Snape impatiently waved his words away. “Potter, the wounds are infected. Unless you want to risk losing both hands, you’ll stop resisting!”

Gritting his teeth, Harry stopped talking and watched as Snape treated the wounds with potion. Harry relaxed despite himself as the pain he’d been trying to ignore all day faded. From the way Snape raised an eyebrow, he knew the man had noticed.

“Why,” he said dryly, “do you find your injury to be unimportant?”

Harry wanted to tell him to mind his own bloody business, but the man was looking at him with genuine curiosity.“Because it is,” he said flatly, looking back out at the landscape. To distract him, he said, “Are they getting closer?”

Snape huffed, as if he knew Harry was trying to change the subject, but looked anyway. “Perhaps.” He glanced around and pointed at a jumble of boulders not unlike the one Harry had taken refuge in when he’d first arrived on the highlands. “Come. We must not be seen.”

So it was that Harry found himself sitting on the ground, surrounded by scores of boulders, trying his best to avoid eye contact with Snape, who was watching him as though he were a particularly strange insect he planned on dicing up for some potion.

The Nightmarous Potter Fly. The Red-wristed Waterdiver. The Bug Who Lived. The Gra—

“Potter.”

Harry was getting sick of his own surname. He finally looked Snape full in the face, impatiently wondering what awkward or insulting conversation was about to follow.

“Have you ever heard of Occlumency?”