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Severus hissed and clutched his left arm as Harry came around the corner. Harry gave him a look that was more than startled, and then his hand rose and closed about something round that hung on a thin silver chain around his neck.

“Sir? Are you all right?”

They were in the corridor with other Slytherins appearing behind Harry, and the distant rumble of Gryffindors arriving for Potions. Severus dared do no more than jerk his head down in a short nod and fling open the classroom door with a blast of wandless magic.

“Inside, the lot of you.”

They went, but Harry was giving him a desperately curious look, with more emotion than he ever showed in front of others. Severus shot him a tight smile and then turned and walked to the front of the room.

He did not touch his left arm. There were those who would have seen him do it and made assumptions.

He should not have touched it in the first place, but he had been startled.

That is what you cannot afford to be, with the Dark Lord returning, Severus thought, and turned to face the class, locking all of his reactions behind perfectly mirror-smooth Occlumency walls of ice. He knew his voice was without tone when he said, “We will begin the Maximal Strengthening Solution today.”

*

“Sir?”

Harry had lingered behind after class, doing it blatantly, without even the excuse of a spoiled potion. Of course, he had spoiled none since his first year. The other students were too afraid now to throw objects in his cauldron, even if they disliked him.

Severus sighed as he studied his ward. “Where did you get that necklace?”

“Professor Moody gave it to me.”

Why would he—

But Severus had the answer after less than a moment of thinking. Of course. Moody believed that Harry was in danger from “Dark” elements in Slytherin, and with the events at the Quidditch World Cup, it was unsurprising he had given him the kind of object that could detect Dark magic.

Or its remnants, in the case of the Mark.

“I was startled, in this case,” Severus said. “I should not be affected again.” The stinging in his left arm was continual, as a matter of fact, but it had only joined the general pain that had come with the Mark’s darkening. Severus would spend more time with his Occlumency distancing himself from the pain.

“But why would it hurt you?”

“It is doubtless a Dark detector,” Severus said, keeping his voice as remote as he could. If Moody had decided to be a mentor of sorts to Harry as well, he would not appreciate Severus interfering in that. Severus would not criticize the man in Harry’s hearing. “Moody has a variety of such devices. There are things I carry about my person that would trigger such a device.” He motioned to his left arm with his eyes.

Harry’s mouth and eyes both rounded. Then he said, “I’m sorry, sir! I’ll take it back to Professor Moody right away.”

“No, don’t do that.”

“Why not?”

Because Moody is so erratic that he might take offense to your returning it, and then I would have to deal with the man’s grudge on two fronts.

“Because it is not often that Alastor Moody deigns to make such gifts. You should take advantage of his battle prowess.”

Harry stared at him, calm and motionless. Severus was unsure why, the same way he didn’t know what to make of Harry’s extreme surprise a few moments ago. There was a hint of an emotion to Harry’s stillness now that he didn’t understand.

Relief? Wonder?

Harry finally said, “I would place you above him, sir. I hope you know that. It wouldn’t matter how rare his gifts might be if they made you uncomfortable.”

Disappointment.

It was Severus’s turn to stare at Harry and feel his eyes widening beyond their accustomed width. He coughed and averted his gaze. Then he said, “I am sure I shall—grow used to it.”

“No. I’ll leave it behind and only wear it outside your classroom. Thank you for telling me the nature of it, sir.”

“It could still be valuable—”

“Who has hostile intentions towards me in Potions?” Harry’s smile this time was more familiar, self-satisfied and cold. “No, I don’t think I need to wear it here. I’ll just tell Professor Moody that. I’m sure he’ll understand.”

Before Severus could make another argument against this, Harry leaned in and slid a hand along Severus’s left arm, the first time Severus could remember that the boy had initiated a touch between them. “You mean too much to me, Severus, for me to want to cause you pain,” he added quietly.

Severus was silent. Harry gave him a smile with an edge of sadness and slipped out of the classroom. Severus stared after him, and wondered if the sadness came from Harry expecting him to know already how much he valued Severus.

(Later he learned: yes. And no).

*

“Young Harry has been spending rather a lot of time with Alastor, Severus, from what I understand.”

Severus blinked and looked up from the Christmas meal he had been contemplating, while wondering why he had not skipped it this year. “Yes, he has,” he said briefly. “The man has taken a shine to the boy.” He shrugged, wondering what reaction Albus expected from him. “I am glad. Perhaps Mr. Potter can gain an edge in Defense that he will preserve after Alastor’s inevitable departure at the end of the year.”

“You think he will inevitably depart, then?”

“In the sense of the curse on the Defense position, yes.”

“You know that Alastor only took up the post as a personal favor to me…”

Severus nodded absently in response to Albus’s rambling, his eyes straying to where Moody leaned an elbow on the table next to Harry’s chair and talked to the boy in a low, intense voice, interrupted by louder cackles and occasional pounding of the table. Harry listened with a faint smile.

Hm. Is he humoring the man for the sake of what he can learn from him?

Severus shrugged and took another bite of chicken. There was no way that a trusted friend of Albus’s would harm the boy, any more than Albus himself would. If anything, perhaps it would make Harry more conscious of his own safety, which he could use.

Not because he was unconscious, but because there was no way to keep him too safe, in Severus’s opinion.

*

“Happy Christmas, Severus.”

Severus blinked at Harry. He had known it was his ward when the knock had come on the door of his quarters, but he hadn’t anticipated this. Harry was holding up a large silver-wrapped box to him with a solemn expression.

“Happy Christmas, Harry,” Severus said after a blank moment. He waved his hand. “You may come inside.”

The box was large and heavy. Severus felt all the more awkward that he had only got Harry a set of crystal flasks for a gift. They would be useful, but Harry wasn’t passionate about Potions the way Severus had been.

This gift, Severus was certain, would be well-chosen and expensive. He shifted uncomfortably.

“This is—bare.”

Severus looked up. Harry was standing next to the open door into his bedroom, staring around. Although he had never tolerated even Albus looking into his most private interior space, Severus didn’t mind Harry doing it. He shrugged. “A bed, a table, bookshelves. What else would I need?”

“A comfortable chair? A large fireplace?” Harry turned those deep, wide eyes on him. “I would have assumed at least a fireplace in the bedroom, instead of only in the parlor.”

“That is the setup of every professor’s quarters at Hogwarts,” Severus murmured, ignoring the fact that he could have moved his bed into the front room and used the bedroom for a study. “I do not need more than that.”

“I don’t think you treat yourself well.”

Harry’s eyes now were sharp and assessing. Perhaps Moody was already teaching him to look beneath the surface. Severus ducked his head and shrugged rather than answer, then sat down in the rocking chair beside the fireplace and whipped his wand. Flames sprang up from the coals. He nodded to Harry. “You can sit down.”

Harry did, although on the very edge of the plain wooden chair that Severus preferred. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

“Of course,” Severus murmured, and slit the paper on the box. It was the first time in years that he hadn’t checked a gift with spells, but then, he didn’t tend to receive anything but prank gifts from Albus in any case.

He lifted the lid and gaped at the book that lay inside. It was huge and bound in covers of something softer than leather. Severus’s hands shook as he picked it up. He knew exactly what that softness was, and—

Of course Harry wouldn’t have been involved in gathering the ingredients for this book. For one thing, hunting unicorns wasn’t the sort of thing he would do. For another, this had been bound long before he was born.

“Do you like it?” Harry asked. He was leaning so far forwards on the edge of the chair that Severus had to resist the temptation to cast a Sticking Charm to keep him from falling off.

Severus cleared his throat and nodded. “Yes,” he whispered. “This is one of the rarest Potions books in the British Isles.” And illegal to create any more copies of, not that Harry needed to know that. Severus gently turned it over, brushing his fingers over the wavering title embossed in green ink that, supposedly, crushed emeralds had been placed into.

A History of Salazar Slytherin’s Potions.

“Good.” Harry beamed at him. “B—Professor Moody said you would like it.”

Severus stared at Harry. “Alastor suggested that you give this to me?” he asked, and then remembered his personal policy not to use other his colleagues’ first names around students. He cleared his throat and shook his head. “I mean—Professor Moody. Why in the world would he…”

“To make up for what his Dark detector did to the Mark on your arm.” Harry ducked his head, but not before Severus saw the corners of his lips twitching up into a smile, which seemed an odd reaction. “He didn’t mean to do that.”

“Alastor Moody does not apologize to people for anything.”

Harry shrugged and looked up. His face was sober again, the way it had looked when Severus was opening the gift. “He’s changed a little since he started talking to me. I don’t think he believed I was—like you described me at first. It took a while to convince him. But I talked to him about reevaluating some of his ideas, and he agrees that you’re different than he thought you were, too. That you deserve this gift.”

Severus closed his eyes. He could feel a churning in his gut, an uneasiness. Moody had always seemed to Severus too old to change his behavior. And the way that he acted towards Igor Karkaroff had not changed.

But then again, Harry wouldn’t have any reason to speak up for Igor. It had only been Severus, then. And perhaps Moody was flexible enough to bend for one person important to his talented protégé.

Important.

Severus cleared his throat and placed the book gently back in the silver paper it had come in. “Thank you. I shall treasure it. Did—Professor Moody say where he had acquired it?”

Harry was beaming all over his face. “He said he tends to collect old Dark artifacts from people he arrests, and sometimes he tries to destroy them—”

Severus hissed despite himself at the thought of losing so much priceless knowledge.

“Right?” Harry’s smile widened. There was a sharp edge to it, an edge that could cut. “So I’m glad that he never figured out a way to destroy this one. At the same time, he never wanted to sell it or give it away, you know, because what if people misused it? This is the first time he’s found someone he can really trust with such a Dark artifact.”

It was unworthy of Severus to immediately think of other ways he might be able to persuade Alastor to part with other objects like this.

But Harry read the thought on his face, and laughed a little. “Do you want me to ask him about other books? Other artifacts?”

“I—would not be opposed.”

“That means you think it’s a good idea and you like it.” Harry abruptly bounced to his feet and crossed the distance between them to fling his arms around Severus’s waist. “Thank you,” he said, muffled, into Severus’s robes. Severus sat there and stared straight ahead. “You’ve helped me so much. I wouldn’t have survived without you.”

Severus closed his eyes and stiffly wrapped his arms around Harry. This sounded like a farewell if he had ever heard one.

He supposed that Harry did not need him now that he had Moody. Perhaps he would even go to live with Moody during the summer, because the man probably had a more fascinating house than Spinner’s End.

“Severus? Are you all right?”

“Yes. Only overwhelmed.”

It was the truth, so Harry accepted it with a quick smile and slipped out, probably to go back to Moody.

Severus sighed. At least Moody seemed to be good for Harry. And Albus should be pleased with his old friend mentoring the boy.