Severus squeezed his eyes tightly closed as Al's last words hit him with a joy so sharp it was a physical pang. For a moment, his voice - precisely-honed weapon that it was - deserted him completely.
"No-one else has ever..." he swallowed. There were a thousand ways he could finish that sentence, and all of them were true, and all of them fell short of the truth. At last, he settled for "...found me easy to understand."