Belated Regrets
When Severus flooes back to Grimmauld Place, it is to an openly sobbing Harry Potter. Severus sighs deeply, then steels himself. Potter seems to have curled in on himself as much as possible. He is sitting up, which Severus very much knows is against all advice.
If the boy has noticed he’s entered, he doesn’t appear to care. Severus puts down the potions and creams he’d brought out on the table before he sits down gingerly on the arm of the couch by Harry’s feet. Harry is watching his hands as they move, fiddling with his glasses as he does so. He looks weary, and Severus really can’t blame him.
With plain, deliberate motions, he picks a bottle from the collection on the table and holds it out to Potter.
“What is it?” Potter asks at once. His voice is painfully thick.
“It’s a calming draft.”
Potter grimaces but takes the uncorked bottle and downs it without further coaxing.
“Better?”
Potter nods, but it seems more like an attempt to convince himself rather than expressing any resemblance to an actual truth. Next comes a bottle for his ribs. Potter doesn’t fight him anymore. He must be truly tired or in pain. Possibly both.
“We should really get you lying down. I need to apply a salve to your bruises.”
With a bit of help, Potter eases into the cushions. Severus uncorks the little jar of bruise balm and starts at a spot over Potter’s upper arm, marked with a bruise that looks so dark that it could not have been from the ordeal last evening.
Still, Potter flinches, if only marginally. “I’m not going to hurt you”, Severus says in what he hopes would be a mild, placating voice. It had been his rationale for starting with the arm rather than something so invasive as a neck or rib.
Potter pins him with a dirty look. “ ‘S just cold.”
“Ah, yes”, Severus says with an even voice, lightly heating the salve a few degrees with his wand before doing the same to Potter, refocusing it with a muttering of “Focillo.”
Potter sighs, sinking back a little. Maybe this won’t end up being so unpleasant after all. Potter certainly doesn’t react when Severus moves to coat the salve at his neck. Severus remembers something. “Molly!” He gives a low, short shout and waits. No answer and no frantic pitter-patter of feet sounds to signal that anyone has heard him.
“Where’s she gone now?” He mutters.
“Oh”, Harry speaks up and fits Severus with a faint look of shame. “I kinda- I sorta shouted at her to leave.”
Severus sighs. Of course he had. “Still, that’s no reason to leave you unattended. You’re bound to be mad, but it’s no reason for them to vanish.” Something about Potter’s facial expression tells Severus this was not the response he expected from him, but at least he isn’t screaming at Severus to leave, too
Severus shifts to the side, aiming his wand to transfigure a little bowl on the table, then fills it with water with another spell. He beckons a few clean rags over from the kitchen, and as he does so, he notices Potter sinking deeper into the couch. He seems to be dozing slightly.
Severus continues to work, now moving on to Potter’s face. He wets the rag and washes off the dried blood that has resulted from the cut in his head and what he presumes to be a hit to the face. He has a cracked lip, but Severus finds a small comfort when he sees his nose isn’t broken.
“What’s the time?” Potter asks suddenly, eyes blearily glancing to the furthest wall as if expecting a clock to hang there.
“Seven-forty in the morning.”
“Oh.” Harry looks off to the side, towards the closed door into the kitchen, seemingly deep in thought.
Some more time passes. Severus has begun working on the bruises on Potters’ midsection when he speaks up again.
“I really wish I hadn’t screamed at Sirius and Mrs. Weasley.”
Severus sighs. He really doesn’t care for this. “They’ll live.” He absolutely does not care.
A short while passes with Potter staring listlessly at the wall.
“Do you want me to go get them?”
“No. I’m still angry.”
Of course he is. “I can get Lupin if you’d prefer it.”
Harry seems to think about it. “I guess Professor Lupin is okay.” Oh, good heavens. Severus sighs audibly, making sure that the boy hears his exasperation.
“You have to tell me what you want, Harry.”
His eyes snap back to Severus, a dark, bitter kind of green he’s become familiar with from the years of potion lessons they’ve both endured since Potter’s enrollment. “Yeah. Sure. Bring Professor Lupin, please.”
With Lupin in the room, Potter looks marginally more cheerful. At least he doesn’t seem very angry at Lupin, and although he looks a worried sight, Lupin does not appear even near the hysterics Molly displayed earlier. He has settled for a remarkably neutral and calm demeanour, and Severus is grateful for it.
The brief moment of calm is shattered the instant they attempt to treat the wounds on Potter’s back, many of which Severus knows must be starting to fester from a time of neglect.
“Absolutely not! I’m not letting you treat me when I can’t fucking see!” His voice is sharp, but it carries a particular uncertainty and is at a slighter higher pitch than it ought to.
“Language”, Severus mutters. Lupin resigns himself to petting Potter’s hair.
“Harry-” Lupin begins.
“No! No way in hell! I’d rather die.”
Severus shares a look with Lupin. Lupin raises his eyebrows at him in what can only be a challenge to Severus’ dwindling patience.
“I can do it for you if you want, Harry.” Lupin looks at Potter as he says it, searching for his consent. After a moment of deliberation, the boy gives the slightest of nods, still not looking all that convinced. In fact, he seems to be on the verge of mortification. Severus scoffs at the notion.
They turn him around on his back, and Severus vanishes the threadbare thing over it with a flick of his wand. Beneath, it reveals more of his abuse. There is a large, wine-coloured bruise stretching across his lower back, and you could count every knob of his spine from across the room, should you want to. As the boy shifts, his blotchy skin stretches across his every rib. It looks paper thin - like his bones could pierce it at any second. Indeed, there are three sharp cuts to his side, raised with inflammation beneath a bright red layer of skin, which only barely are kept together by thick, oozing scabs.
“This fucking sucks”, Potter insists, and Severus can’t help but to feel a bit sorry for the boy. He doesn’t even like him, but he feels a strong urge to get over to the Dursleys and give them an unpleasantly slow, painful death.
“It’ll be over in no time”, Lupin says with a put-on serenity as he takes the jar from Severus.
“I hate this. I fucking hate this.”
“Language.”
Lupin ignores Severus and keeps his eyes focused solely on the boy. “I know.”
Something is churning in Severus’ stomach , mounting ever since he first found the boy under the tree back in Surrey, something that's only intensified since. He can’t help but think about all the times he’s called him an arrogant, spoiled little brat. The feeling becomes stronger now than ever, probably because he has nothing to do to occupy his time besides monitoring the people before him.
He can’t help but feel he’s misjudged the situation terribly, despite his pride doing its all in fighting to push the thought as far away from reality as possible. The boy is a brat and arrogant - unquestionably - but all else he’s labelled him as has been, perhaps, to the Potter’s boy miscredit. The proof is visible before him, and now that he thinks of it, it has been since the first instance he’d seen him getting sorted in the great hall. Severus finds himself feeling faintly ill. The boy had been so small, even for an eleven-year-old. He’d been so flighty, quick to temper. He’d always worn everyday clothes several sizes too big, threadbare and obviously not his, and from very early on, he’d viewed Severus with a dark, distrusting look so familiar he should have caught it then.
Once Lupin finishes with Harry’s back, they turn him over again, so that he can rest his neck on the propped-up cushion on the armrest. Severus makes his way over to the foot of the couch, as it were, and carefully rolls up the leg of Potter’s trousers. His ankle has swelled something terrible, but as nothing is broken, he puts a mixture of salves on it and tightly covers it in a bandage. When he’s made Harry sit up, he does the same around his torso for his ribs.
“There we go.” Severus breathes out. That had gone remarkably well. (Which, now that he thinks about it, is worrying in its own right. Harry Potter always fought, and on any normal occasion, Severus’ patience would’ve been non—existent within a minute of conversation with the boy. Severus and the Potter-boy didn’t get along; Those were the rules, it had been the rules he himself had established.)
Potter breathes out, too. “What now?”
“Lupin, would you heat some soup up for him?” The man obliges him at once.
“This salve”, Severus rests it at the table’s edge, near Potter. “Is to be applied every morning and night for three days. If you have any bruises on your legs, you may tend to those later. Now, you’re going to eat and then take this. It’s a nutrition potion. Take it after every meal for the foreseeable future.”
Potter nods, then yawns so that Severus can hear an audible click in his jaw, which seems to hurt him.
“Then, you’re going to bed. You can rendezvous with your friends come dinner.”
Potter looks to the side and nibbles at his lip. Again, Severus feels something tug at him.
He puts his hand on his shoulder, and he needs to steel himself before managing to force out the sentence in a low, strained tone. “It’ll be alright, Harry. You’ll see.”
“But-,” Harry starts, eyes suddenly very big and uncertain. He looks young, much younger than the fifteen-year-old boy he’s supposed to be. “I’m expelled. Will I need to go back to Surrey? Will I-”
Severus shuts him up with a little squeeze around the shoulder he’d rested his hand on. He can feel every bone under his palm, sharp and rigid like a piece of wood, and swallows down his rising anger at the situation. “No, you’re not expelled. Not yet.” He sighs, and his own shoulders sink marginally. “Arthur and Dumbledore have been working it through with the Ministry, and I’m sure they’ll figure something out for you. Besides,” he says, and he feels it’s essential that Harry looks at him. Severus spots those eyes of his, so like his mother’s, yet not alike at all. They’re too cool, too distant. Some of Lily’s best qualities had been her permanence, her ability to see a small delight in every small moment, and her grounded, assertive presence that always seemed to fill any given room she presided over. Her son has none of that. “You’re not going back to that place, no matter what. Do you understand? I won’t permit it.”
Potter nods fleetingly, but then his eyes darken. So unlike Lily. “What do you care? You hate me.” Of course, Lily had been known for her fierce temper, which she seemed to have passed to her son, but the dull ache that seemed so near-permanent in Harry was one of his own, and now Severus realises that it’s always been there. He’s frankly never made a point to note it. And Severus grimaces, for the boy did have a point in what he was saying; Severus had never made a case for himself, never made it a point of showing even the tiniest of care regarding the issue of Potter’s welfare, or lack thereof. In fact, he’d always been openly hostile.
“I don’t hate you, Harry. I am often occupied and overcome by my own prejudices, and I’m afraid this unfairness has spilt onto you. In any case, nobody deserves a home life like this,” Severus gestures vaguely into the air, and he doesn’t quite know what he’s saying, just that he needs to say something.
“Not anyone. Not you.” He says it with as much conviction as he is able to muster. With a finality so clear, he knows the boy can not argue the point.
The boy stares at him anew, looking awfully like a fish on try land. Lost. The eyes are softer now, though they’ve narrowed suspiciously, as though Severus is a very arduous piece of homework Potter can’t quite figure out.
Severus feels an awkward feeling rise within him, and he fills it by turning away from the boy and diverting his focus to writing down Potter’s future potion intake on a piece of parchment he’s procured from a pocket inside his cloak. The moment, which has become filled with a strained silence, thick enough to cut through with a butter knife, is thankfully broken by Lupin. He arrives with a big, steaming pot of goulash with a side of toasted bread, which Potter eyes greedily. As the man opens and closes the door on his way in, Severus can distinguish the faint sound of people moving about outside. The morning must be getting late.
“Here you are”, Lupin says and deposits the tray gingerly on the little rickety table, barely fitting around the various jars and bottles strewn about by Severus.
At least there seems to be little wrong with Potter’s appetite; the only thing stopping him from wolfing it all down in one prolonged drink is presumably the food’s heat. After an initial, small sip, Potter recoils with a twinge and then takes big gulps from the glass placed beyond the tray. Severus refills it silently with a spell as Potter eats.
“I’ve instructions written for Harry’s treatment plan here. It is not complicated.” He hands the short list to Lupin and proceeds to occupy himself with cleaning around Potter’s tray, wasting a notable amount of time surveying every label before he tucks each flask away. “Well,” he pauses uncertainly, swallowing harshly against the lump forming in his throat, “it seems I’ve done what I can here.”
Just as he steps into the hearth, he hears Potter’s voice, wavering so terribly Severus has no choice but to look back. “Sn- Professor Snape,” he falters, then seems to grasp onto a new courage. “Thank you.”
And it’s now, when Severus studies him in this dusty, unloved room, that he sees the boy for what he is- a boy, plain and simple. For the first time, Harry is not Potter’s son or the last remnants of Lily - he just is, just as he’s always been; an uncertain, frightened boy. And that thought scares Severus. He’s been continuously on the wrong path all this time, and in a way, he wonders if he hasn’t always known it. He’s paraded decidedly down a road which could never reach a satisfying end-point, and he should have always been able to recognise it, but he chose not to. He’s been foolishly, unforgivably wrong.
Severus nods limply. It’s the first piece of thanks he’s ever heard from the boy, but the gratitude clings to his whole body like an unpleasant sickness. It’s guilt, he remarks absently, and he quickly throws the thought and feeling as far away as he can; he distances himself from his own thoughts and imagines throwing them out of the window. “Think nothing of it,” he forces out before he mutters his address, a strange feeling washing over him at the words.
He feels he should have said something else, something more. Before he can consider it further, he’s looking at the dimly lit sitting room in his own quarters, with its equally peeling wallpapers and furniture coated with his years of neglect.
Running away towards familiarity is never as satisfying as it appears, he supposes as he studies a tome by the sunken armchair, with its peeling spine so clearly detailing the decades of abuse.
He chucks the book into the fireplace behind him, puts it alight with a flick of his wand, and refuses to ponder further on it.
It’s done, and there’s no changing it now.