Even Quig couldn’t ruin a Continental breakfast. Or so Harry thought, until he bit into the warm croissant: it didn’t taste too bad, but it was the consistency of raw chicken and smelled suspiciously of burned feathers. However, there didn’t appear to be anything else, so Harry held his nose and kept his chewing to a minimum. He wasn’t a fussy eater. It was only afterwards that the worrying ideas laid siege: what if Quig had transfigured the croissant from a dead bird? What if he put mushrooms in his marmalade?

Harry decided that having a supply of Emergency Emetic Antidote would, after all, be a wise precaution.

The walled herb garden of Snape Cottage was a botanists’ dream. Plants from all corners of the globe were growing there, separated into four main sections - culinary, medicinal, decorative/aromatic, and poisonous - with subdivisions within each bed for genus and species and specialist micro-climates, all clearly labelled and with not a weed in sight.

Harry strolled round the borders, gathering the fresh medicinal leaves he needed for the recipes he was planning to make. Professor Sprout could take a few lessons from this, he thought, mentally comparing this model of horticultural efficiency with the chaotic, jungle profusion of the Hogwarts’ greenhouse.

Treading softly, Harry sneaked down to Snape’s basement laboratory. He wished he had Sirius’s knife with him - if only its blade hadn’t disintegrated like melting cheese when he was trying to unlock that damned door in the Department of Mysteries. Sirius. Everything Harry did seemed to bring him back to Sirius. He had hardly known the man, really, and yet he still felt that they were inextricably, eternally linked. From that first day in the Shrieking Shack, Harry had known that he could ‘connect’ with Sirius. Whatever a soul-mate was - and Harry wasn’t sure; it had always seemed rather a girly concept - he thought Sirius must be the nearest he would ever get to one. Somehow he had always been able to talk to Sirius, tell him things, without worrying about being corrected or belittled. With Snape it was so different: Harry always felt he had to be careful about what he was saying - the content, the phraseology, the grammar even. Snape was so quick to criticise, so ready to take offence or assume malicious intent, so sensitive and defensive. A conversation with him, on anything but the most innocuous of subjects, was fraught with pitfalls; the emotional stakes were too high. Whereas Sirius had been a friend, more like one of the lads than a mentor. Had been… Harry brought himself up short, acknowledging the past tense. This reverie was getting him nowhere, certainly not through the locked door to the laboratory.

He looked around hopefully for a key, not expecting to find anything so pedestrian. No, Snape would not make the same mistake twice in one lifetime. Again Harry bemoaned the lack of his wand… One simple ‘Alohomora’ would have done it. It was so easy, he reflected, to get carried away with the excitement of high-powered, NEWT level magic when, really, some of the basic spells they had learned in the first year were the most useful. But, wait a minute, Snape had had his hands full of biting weasels when he had come down to the basement; he couldn’t have used a wand either. Harry racked his brains, trying to remember the verbal opening spell he had heard him utter.

“Open! Open up! Open the door! Aperio! Aperioportum!” The door didn’t budge.

“Alohomora!” He tried the spell anyway, without a wand, but nothing happened. Then, on a hunch, he changed languages:

“Ouvrez! Ouvrez la porte!”

The door scraped ajar. Harry closed it quietly behind him. He was deliberately breaking one of Snape’s primary house rules - it felt rebellious and risqué, but Harry wanted to establish a few ground rules of his own, one of them being that he was old enough and responsible enough to find his way around a Potions lab without killing himself in the process.

He worked conscientiously all morning, carefully following the recipes in ‘Herbal Heroes’ and ‘A Passion for Potions’, checking and re-checking the ingredients, quantities and precise methods until he was confident that everything was perfect. By the end of the morning he had prepared three phials of freshly brewed Potions, and he felt justly proud of himself. The Emetic Antidote was a little cloudy, but he hoped it would settle out.

The second potion had required long and regular stirring. Once Harry got into the rhythm he had found it pleasantly relaxing, therapeutic even - he had almost stirred himself into a trance. It gave him a chance to think, to try to work out where, exactly, the previous evening had gone so disastrously wrong. One minute Snape had been offering to betray his principles and take a Potion, go against the habits of a lifetime, for Harry’s sake, to reassure him - or so it had seemed to Harry - and the next moment he had switched to ‘self-destruct’ and was hitting the Firewhisky.

Remonstrating with him had only made things worse. Finally Harry had given up in exasperation, retreating upstairs miserably, shocked to find himself a trespasser in Snape’s private hell.

Harry had slept fitfully, waking at the slightest noise. He heard Snape’s tread on the stairs, heard his movements through the wall as he prepared for bed, his racking bouts of coughing, then silence… Harry woke again, some time later, as a sharp squall of rain smacked the window panes. He lay listening to the weather scrapping outside, the bossy wind buffeting the mist into sullen swirls, the rain a repetitive grumble, interrupted by driving flurries of temper.

Next door Snape moaned in his sleep, muttering something incoherent. Harry tried to block out the sound - he didn’t want to intrude on the man’s dreams too. The restless muttering became louder and more insistent, coalescing into protests of alarm and a final, agonising cry:

“No! No more…! I will never… That’s enough! No! No!”

Harry leaped up in bed shaking as though it were he having the nightmare and not Snape.

“Oh no, not you too,” Harry sympathised. He knew only too well that sense of relentless, inescapable menace, that suffocating dread, the overwhelming intensity of fear; pain, acute, unimaginable pain, the screaming inevitability of death, the horror, the panic…

He knew the terror of waking alone, pulse racing, fighting for breath, clawing a jagged way up out of the black chasm towards rationality. And then lying there, trembling in the darkness, the sweat chilling on his skin, wringing the shock from every pore, every cell, yet still tense, poised for flight, terrified to close his eyes…

Yes, Harry had been there, done that. His nightmares were grotesque collages of green light, his parents’ screams, a graveyard, a cellar, whispering archways at the end of long, dark corridors; his own voice shouting “Crucio!”; red eyes glaring through the folds of a slowly unwinding turban… Those were Harry’s nightmares. After today he had a fair idea what Snape’s nightmares were too.

How many times had Harry lain awake, willing the horror to subside and wishing that there was someone - anyone - to take it all away. Someone calm and strong who could take control, take everything out of his hands; someone to say, ‘It’s alright, Harry. You’re alright.’; someone who would put an arm round him and hold him safely, and share the aching emptiness.

Harry slid out of bed and made his way to the door of Snape’s bedroom. He wanted, at least, to tell him that he understood; that he, Snape, was not alone… For a long time Harry hesitated outside the room, his hand reaching for the door-handle then withdrawing, unsure of his welcome. He listened, too timid to enter, moved by real compassion yet unable to act upon it. He had waited and then, wretched and ashamed, he had crept back to his own cold bed.

Harry had brewed the Potions, tidied the lab and even had time to have another wander round the herb garden before there was any sign of Snape. The rain in the night had scuttled the mist and it was one of those chilly, fresh, dazzling October mornings, the sky piercingly blue, the cool, Autumn sun shining for effect only. At the far corner of the garden, beneath a spreading Mulberry tree, Harry saw the granite shape of Braque, or it may just have been a rock, he didn’t go to investigate. It had suddenly seemed a good time to return to the house.

Snape eventually made an appearance. He was walking rather carefully, cushioning his movements, obviously nursing a dragon of a hangover, but determined not to admit it. He sat with his elbows on the kitchen table, leaning his head on his hands.

“Oh, Merlin!” he groaned.

Harry suppressed a tic of schadenfreude. He passed the Professor a mug of strong coffee and a tall glass of water.

“Oh, so that’s how it’s going to be from now on…” Snape commented hoarsely, with a scowl, “…you monitoring my every move and disapproving, like that tutting Pomfrey woman.”

“She likes you, Sir,” Harry told him.

“Indeed?” Snape didn’t care.

“Yes. She said you were rude and patronising,” Harry quoted, hopelessly misjudging the tact to honesty ratio.

“Clearly an admirer!” said Snape, sardonically. Then he looked sharply at Harry,

“You have been discussing me with that medical harridan?”

“No, Sir, not really. Not at all.” Harry was desperate to change the subject, before they mired themselves in their first argument of the day. Striding to the window he announced, “I think I can see Braque.”

But the border at the base of the Mulberry tree was empty. There was, however, a small slag-heap, progressing purposefully towards the cottage.

Snape was shielding his eyes, wincing in the sunlight. He picked up the coffee mug,

“Look, I’m going to take this into the other room. It is excessively bright in here.”

Harry followed, smiling and shaking his head.

“I hardly expected you still to be here this morning,” Snape said quietly, addressing the coffee rather than meet Harry’s eye. “I am not obliged to justify myself to you, but…” He then proceeded to do so anyway. “… but I must emphasise that last night was atypical. Yesterday was…”

“It’s alright, Sir. You don’t need to explain.”

Snape now gave Harry a searching look, his dark eyes narrowed and pensive,

“No. I don’t suppose I do.”

He lapsed into silence. Harry wondered how much truth there was in Snape’s explanation, or whether he did actually drink more than he should. Who could blame him? It could be one reason why he was often so tetchy in class. Harry had assumed that Snape’s worst moods coincided with Death Eater meetings; or maybe the two were linked. Double-bluffing Voldemort would drive anyone to drink.

At that moment he caught sight of the empty Firewhisky bottle on the floor. With Snape in his current fragile condition it was difficult not to be judgemental. Correctly interpreting Harry’s sniff of reproof, Snape went on the defensive,

“Oh, don’t you start. I have already received one lecture from Quig this morning.”

There was a note of petulance in his voice that Harry had not heard before. He could not imagine how the shambling, bald, deaf elf could possibly reprimand the severe Potions master.

“Quig can be somewhat Puritanical in his views,” Snape complained. “He expresses them most… ..energetically. He is absurdly over-protective - takes family loyalty to unnecessary extremes.”

Harry suddenly experienced another of those flashes of insight that he sometimes felt when he was talking to Snape. It had happened only yesterday out on the hill, when he had intuitively guessed about the Veela. For years he had had the creepy notion that Snape could read his mind - and not only when using Legilimens - and he was beginning to wonder if it were a two-way thing.

“It was your mother, wasn’t it, who made Quig deaf?”

Snape put his mug down next to the empty bottle, his dark eyes fixed on Harry appraisingly.

“If I didn’t know better - if I didn’t know she was a talent-less, hysterical charlatan - I would think you had been receiving special tuition from Professor Trelawney,” he remarked, intrigued rather than outraged. “Your powers of deduction and lateral thinking are most perceptive. It is a pity you do not approach your written work with similar perspicacity.

“Or have you been conversing with Quig? No, that is hardly likely. He does not discuss his deafness.”

“I’m sorry, Sir. It’s none of my business.”

“Potter, Professor Dumbledore extracted a promise from me that I would answer your questions, and so far I have endeavoured to do so, however painful the truth. You have a right to ask; I reserve the right to refuse to answer.” Then, in a harsher, suspicious tone, he queried,

“Is that the real reason you stayed? To complete your fact-finding mission?”

Harry couldn’t deny it.

“Well, there are still some things I want to know…”

“I see.” The barriers of reserve went up again.

Oh, don’t be so bloody touchy, thought Harry. It’s like trying to talk to an angry porcupine. What am I supposed to say - that I want to stay here and get to know you? That I want to make sure you’re OK? Can’t you see that? That I want to work out if there is any point in contemplating a future in which we do something more constructive than snipe at each other? Give me a break!

“You were going to tell me about Quig, Sir?”

“Indeed. Quig has been the Snape family house elf for many years. He was especially devoted to my mother. In the early days of her… ..illness, before I discovered the Potion that stabilised her condition, she still had the use of her magical powers. On one occasion she turned them on herself. Quig intervened and his deafness is the resultant injury. In employing him I am merely honouring the ‘blood bond’. That is all.”

If Harry had been hoping for more detailed family history, he wasn’t going to get it. Snape was still smarting from Harry’s completely unintentional rebuff; beneath the tough skin of anger and impatience he bruised easily. Harry was only just beginning to understand that. He studied Snape, thinking how much it had cost him to admit that his mother had been suicidal; how any reply, however curt, was really quite a breakthrough, a gesture of confidence. Though, compared to the revelations of the day before, this was small beer.

The three phials of Potion were still in Harry’s pocket. For the nth time, he contemplated telling Snape that he had been in the laboratory that morning, and once again he decided to put it off until a little later. Snape could wait. No point in getting bogged down in a debate about the infringement of house rules. Before he aggravated Snape again there was one last, important question that Harry needed to ask.