By LastCrazyHorn

Word Count:

Rating: PG-13 for brief language, violence, and depictions of abuse

Summary: A disabled Harry comes to Hogwarts story. Everyone expects him to be like his dad, but how can he be with such a different past? A Slytherin Harry takes on Hogwarts in an unusual way.

Harry could tell that Pomfrey had told Snape about what she had found.  He could tell, but in a way, he was too tired to care.  Teddy’s surprising request had thrown him off-balance, and now his mind was whirring quickly as he sought to figure out the best course of action.  On top of that, his head was pounding, and he belatedly found himself remembering the shop owner’s warning to him regarding the eye he had purchased there.

She had been very clear on his need to let his eye rest at least six hours a day.

“That means you either take it out or you put on your patch.  It’s not your real eye, even if it looks like it and if you don’t pay attention to your body’s need for rest, you’re going to feel the consequences,” she had said.

He waited until Snape came back in the room before pulling out his patch, and then without further ado, he slipped it on over his right eye, just under his glasses; a movement made easier by years of practice.  It brought him back to his more familiar mono vision, and although that annoyed him, it also gave him a measure of comfort.

“You should have done that an hour ago,” was all Snape said.

“You talked to Pomfrey,” Harry accused.  Teddy kept silent, but looked back and forth between them, a confused expression plastered on his face.

“I did,” Snape answered, sitting down gracefully and indicating that they should serve themselves.

“Whatever you think you know, you don’t . . . sir,” Harry added with a sneer.

“Then enlighten us,” Snape answered coolly, a challenge evident in his eyes.

Abruptly, Harry snorted and the left side of his face curled up in a smile.

“Why should I?”  He said, crossing his arms and forcefully throwing himself backwards into the sofa cushion.

Snape did something unexpected and turned to Teddy, “Mr. Nott?  Care to enlighten Mr. Potter?”

Warily, Harry turned towards Teddy, a questioning look in his eye.

Teddy blinked back at them, his brown eyes wide as they stared at him in silence.  “Uh well,” he began hesitantly, “I dunno what’s going on precisely,” he scratched the side of his neck thoughtfully.  “But I figure that whatever it is, maybe we could help you with it?”

Harry’s eyebrows went down thoughtfully and his visible eye narrowed.  “What do you mean, ‘help?’”

“Let Mr. Nott be your ears for you, Mr. P—Harry,” Snape answered for him.

“I don’t need help,” was his stubborn response.  “I get on fine on my own.”

“And likely you have for some time, am I correct?”  Snape said, getting to his feet and towering over them both.

Harry pursed his lips and didn’t answer.

“I suggest an experiment.  Harry, you close your eye—no, do not look at me like that.  You close your eye and when Mr. Nott touches your shoulder, you open it again.  In the meantime, while your eye is closed, I am going to wander around the room speaking to you at various intervals.  You are to point at me wherever I am.  Agreed?”

“You’re the professor,” Harry shrugged.  

“Indeed.  Now close it, Mr. Potter and no peeking.”

Harry did and everything went dark.  He hated playing this “game” of Snape’s, but it would be much worse to admit that he couldn’t do it at all.  With his eye closed, he was down to his sense of touch and smell, and a bare minimum of aural awareness.

He suspected that Snape had a very low voice, and for that he was thankful, considering that his hearing was only severe in the lower tones of the register. It still wasn’t much, but he’d take it, if it kept him from getting babied like some poor helpless waif.

He could tell from the vibrations against his feet that Snape was moving, and then the air shifted across his skin and he caught a whiff of whatever ingredients the man worked with.  He felt the tension change in his jaw and he instinctively pointed with his left hand out to almost the exact spot his professor was standing in.

. . .

“Tell me Mr. Potter, what would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?  No answer?”

Snape raised an eyebrow as the boy got his first location guess largely correct.  Nott stared at Potter in surprise, and in response, Severus raised a thin index finger to his lips.  Nott nodded and he moved again, stopping almost directly in front of the boy, but back a few feet.

“I wonder Mr. Potter, what is the difference between monkswood and wolfsbane?”  He paused and once again the boy pointed with almost dead on accuracy directly at his head.  “You don’t know?  Pity,” he added, smirking a bit at the grimace on Nott’s face.  He moved again, heading back to the original spot, but back in the far corner.

“Where will you find a bezoar?” He called out in a perfectly audible voice.

It took the boy a moment longer to make up his mind, but when he did, it was almost right.  The child’s finger was only off a foot or so, which was still better than any of his hearing students would be able to manage, should their precious eyes be closed.

“Touch Mr. Potter’s shoulder now, Mr. Nott,” he instructed and headed back to his seat, only to find his half-drunk cup of tea cold.  With a frown, he waved his hand over it and heated it back up with a silent, wandless incantation.  Then, on a whim he did the same to the boys’ cups as well, sending thin wisps of steam into the air with each.

“Well Mr. Potter, very impressive,” he paused, letting the boy relax before levelling the next set of inquiries on him.  “So tell me, what were the answers?”

“The answers?  Sir?”  Potter responded quickly, licking his lips and turning subtly in his seat to Nott.

“To my questions, of course.  Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten the questions?”  Snape answered, showing his teeth with a touch of cruelty.  He did not enjoy tormenting the boy.  He merely wanted him to understand why he needed their help.

“You didn’t say anything about . . . about my answering your questions, sir,” Potter quickly corrected himself.

“An oversight on my part, I assure you,” Snape responded easily.  “Have your injuries also addled your brain?  Perhaps you will need extra tutoring to help augment your meagre cognitive skills?”  He knew he had struck gold with that statement when the boy’s cheeks began flaming.  Potter no doubt had heard such useless drivel pointed at him before.

“My cognitive skills, as you put them sir,” Potter quite nearly snarled at him, “Are perfectly fine.”

Snape had no doubt of that.

“Would you like Mr. Nott to enlighten you on what it was I said?”

“Do the professors here often require their students to learn with their eyes closed?”  Potter elegantly sidestepped the issue at hand.

“No,” he paused, allowing the boy another moment of triumph, regardless of how hollow it might ultimately be.  “But they do teach with their backs to their students.  It occurs while they are writing at the board, or perhaps they might be behind you while you are working on something at your desk.”

Potter looked ready to retort, but Snape responded first.  “And before you say something moronic like always having gotten by in the past,” he hissed.  “Let me propose a scenario for you.  Perhaps you are working on a potion in my class, with say, Mr. Nott as your esteemed partner.  I happen to notice from the other side of the room that you are about to add an extra snake’s fang to a potion that only requires one.  I know, as your professor, that adding that particular extra ingredient will cause a violent explosion and probably take out half of your classmates.  Therefore, I shout from my side of the room, behind your back, for you to freeze and put it down.  You don’t hear me and include it anyway.”  Severus leaned back in his seat, an ugly expression on his face.  “Should you survive, Mr. Potter, you’ll likely see ten to fifteen years in Azkaban for inadvertently murdering those around you.  Azkaban, if you are unfamiliar, is—.”

“—The wizarding prison,” Potter interjected, a tense and unreadable wave of emotion flickering across his face.  “I heard.  Sir.”

Severus wanted to ask for his source on such a topic, knowing all too well the kind of inane rumours that his upper years often told the younger students, but he kept his mouth shut.  Now was not the time.

“Having someone help me in that situation wouldn’t do much good, sir,” Potter continued, his shoulders hunched in defensively.

“But perhaps if you had been able to hear my instructions initially, you would have taken note and already known the consequences for such a foolish mistake.”

They stared at one another in uncomfortable silence, until Potter finally spoke again.

“Perhaps,” the boy said, clenching his teeth briefly before reluctantly continuing on. “Perhaps you have a point.  Sir.”  A green eye stared balefully up at him, and Severus knew how much it must have cost him to admit to such a thing.

“I’m not an idiot, sir.” Potter added a moment later.  “I don’t want you treating me like a baby, or, or—,” the boy’s lips pursed white.  “Or some kind of freak,” he finally managed, his lower lip trembling for the briefest of seconds.

“I have no doubt that you are probably just as intelligent as your mother was,” was Snape’s only response, as he stood up and removed the remainders of their tea from the room with a well placed flick of his wand.  He waited until he heard the cups land gently in his sink and then he continued. “If you have no objection, I will transfigure the sofa into one large bed and you two can sleep here for the night.  Or you can take the floor.  I don’t really care.”

The sofa was easily taken care of and soon he had a full sized bed in the centre of his quarters. He had made its covers and pillows dark green with silver trimmings, and it was easily big enough for two full grown adults.  His two little snakes would be swamped in it, but hopefully it would be comfortable enough for them to sleep without being annoyed by the other.  He was on his way out of the room, after having explained where the toilet was and that he always kept its light on—a lie, but only a small one—when Potter’s voice called out to him.

“Sir,” the boy stood there looking ridiculously tiny in the pyjamas Severus had transfigured for him from his robes.

“Yes Harry?”  It was late.  He could afford to be a bit informal at such an hour.

“My mum—she was pretty smart?”  Was Harry’s hesitantly spoken question.

“She was one of the most intelligent witches I’ve ever known,” Severus quickly responded.

The boy nodded and Severus turned and left the room, turning out the lights as he went—except for the aforementioned toilet.

. . .

Harry and Nott lay side by side in the middle of the bed talking as they tried to relax enough to go to sleep.  Harry’s magical eye had a form of night vision that allowed him to focus on the faces of those around him, and for that reason he had pulled off the patch.

“What questions did he ask?” He whispered to Teddy first.

“You really couldn’t hear him?”  Teddy asked.

“Nuh uh,” Harry shook his head in the negative.  “Can’t hear much anymore, really,” he admitted a touch sourly.

“Well,” Teddy paused, thinking.  “First, he asked about what he’d get if he added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood.”

“Draught of Living Death, isn’t it?  I read that in the book, I think,” Harry said quietly.

“Yeah, that was it.  My da’s talked about that before.  Scary stuff,” Teddy answered, shivering a bit.

“What else did he ask?”  Harry prompted when it seemed like Teddy would never go on.

“The difference between monkswood and wolfsbane—which is stupid, ‘cause—.”

“’Cause they’re the same thing!” They both said together, breaking into giggles as only eleven year old boys can do.

“And then?”

“Um, he asked where to find a bezoar.”

“Hm,” Harry responded quietly.  “I dunno.  I don’t think I got that far.  You?”

“I remember reading about it,” Teddy answered, throwing his head down on the pillow as if he hoped to jar the memory out of his brain forcefully.

“That’s a weird word.  I would have remembered it if I’d read it.”

They chattered on like that for a few more minutes before finally Teddy was startled when he heard Snape’s deep voice yell out, “It is found in the stomach of a goat!  Tell Potter and then go to sleep!”

“What’d he say?”  Harry asked as his new ally jumped and then froze as though listening to something from the other room.

“Said to tell you it’s found in the stomach of a goat and that we’re to go to sleep!”  Teddy stammered back, his eyes wide in Harry’s eye.

Silence, then Harry whispered, “Night Teddy.”

“Night Harry.”

They whispered together for another second and then both yelled out, “NIGHT PROFESSOR SNAPE!”

They were quiet after that.

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