SEVERUS SNAPE

Snowflakes caressed the windows in the Hospital Wing and melted only to freeze again as they made trails down the glass. It hadn’t stopped snowing for days, ever since the accident.

I stood at the foot of Harry Potter’s bed and watched the bandaged boy sleep. He looked fine. Like he only slept, and not lay in a coma. For days he never moved an eyelash. For days he never whispered a word. All movement from the Boy-Who-Lived ceased. Poppy told me at some point he had actually died. His heart had stopped. But it beat now. Steadily, like the fall of snowflakes, never stopping their fall down through the atmosphere until the ground meets them.

I crossed my arms and watched the even fall and rise of the boy’s chest.

The question was: when would he wake?

 When would the steady stream of dreams cease their fall through the boy’s mind and reach the ground? Reach consciousness.

Every day since the Accident, I came here and stood for a few minutes at the boy’s bed side. I saw his transition from a mottled broken human creature to the dark haired boy who now slept. Magic could do wonders for the human body, but the mind was another matter entirely. Something no man, magic or Muggle, could conquer.

And so he slept. Surely avoiding the question that I so urgently needed to ask. Why?

My mind answered the question a hundred times by now.

He looked for more glory. Another commendation to add to his shining record.

He thought that I was someone else.

He was trying to get out of the way and just happened to get in front of me.

He tripped.  

None explained it. The very intentional move to pull me away. The shield spell, cast wandlessly no less.

The boy obviously knew what was going to happen. I could very clearly remember his voice yelling to Longbottom seconds before the wasp wings fell. Neville don’t!

I didn’t want to thank him. I didn’t even want him to know that I was even a tad grateful. I just wanted to know why? Why me? Why stand in front of someone who had done nothing more than to make your life miserable. Why? What compelled the boy to do something so stupid?

I remember asking why when he fell to the ground. His body moved like it was far too light for the world and sank slowly to the cold dungeon floor.

The potion was thankfully inert after the catastrophic explosion, so many wasp wings in the concoction had literally blown out all its acidity. But not soon enough to be ineffective against skin hit at point blank. Potter had held his hands out in front of him like his was pushing a great force away, but instead was casting a shield spell of such strength that it could only have been fueled by wild magic. The magic of raw emotion and the very lifeforce of the world. Such magic was not easy to use.

So, why? What compelled the boy to be able to use such magic instinctively?

I tightened my hands around my arms where they crossed to prevent myself from speaking out in frustration. I didn’t like things that I could not understand. I didn’t like not understanding at all. Things that I didn’t understand I sought even harder to understand but this, this did not click.

The image of him, of the boy who was the son of a man who caused me no end of trouble was one I was more than willing to grasp onto. It was easy to see James Potter in Harry Potter. The hair, the glasses, body language, it all spoke of a man long dead in body but not in spirit. This boy was a reincarnation of a time that I had long wanted to forget, of a torturous school life that wouldn’t go away, of a series of bad decisions that defined my life into a twisted portrait of hell.

This boy… shattered everything with a single act. Now, the stable image that I had long accepted as truth was made false. The eyes of Lily, the eyes that stared up at me as the life faded from them while the boy who owned them died in front of me, telling a tale that I could not decipher.

No, I didn’t want to thank him. I wanted an answer to the mystery in front of me. Without his glasses as he was now, I could see more of Lily in him than ever. It wasn’t just the eyes; Harry Potter had her nose, her cheeks, her stubborn chin. The glasses, dark frames and echoes of a distant past hid them all. The boy was changing before my eyes from the son of James Potter to the son of Lily Evans.

“Severus, are you here again?” Poppy tapped my shoulder and I suddenly realized that I was cutting off the circulation in my arms.

“What of it?”

Poppy pursed her lips, “If you must be over here then sit with the boy, and not stand at the foot of his bed like a vision of Death. If he wakes you’ll scare him to an early grave!”

“If only.” I muttered but not low enough for Poppy to not over hear.

“Well I never… Severus Snape behave yourself while you are in my Hospital Wing. If you must come here then SIT.” Poppy pulled a chair out from behind one of the privacy screens and plopped it in front of me. She turned on a sickle and puttered away.

I took the chair and moved it not right next to Potter’s bed but around the middle, across the small walkway between hospital beds. I didn’t need to hold the boy’s hand. That was intolerable.

I don’t know how long I sat. For a time I watched the snowflakes fall, their short, uniquely designed lives ending with a single breath on the warm windows of the Hospital Wing. The headmaster had cancelled the Hogsmeade visit for the students because the snow had reached a height of five feet and looked nowhere close to stopping.

“The snow is magicked.” The headmaster had said. “It’s a natural reaction to so much magic being pulled from the world. It’s trying to repair some tear in the fabric of magic.” That’s why no one had attempted to use a spell to move it out of the way. Mixing wild magic with controlled magic of witches and wizards never turned out well.

“Fine predicament you’ve gotten us in, Potter.” I said to the comatose boy.  He didn’t stir.

I fell silent and waited for something to happen. But nothing did.

I left as evening approached, but returned the next day, and the day after; waiting for him to open his eyes so that I could resolve this mystery. The boy, as always, continued to infuriate me, even in a comatose state.

More and more days passed. Soon I was bringing potions journals with me and reading while the boy never moved. Then I found myself having conversations with him, even though he slept. I asked my questions of him, even though he did not answer. I speculated and I postulated. The only day that I didn’t come was Christmas. His friends surrounded him that day and I dared not step out of the shadows. I poured over my research in my labs the whole day and did not return to the hospital wing for a full twenty-four hours.  

When I got there, I started talking and I didn’t stop. I talked about my research, I talked about the stupidity of the students, I talked about inane things like the weather. It wasn’t until the first day of January that I realized what I had been doing. I found myself starting to talk about my troubles with Dumbledore and the Dark Lord. I found myself feeling something like nostalgia. I used to talk to Lily like this all the time.

I didn’t return to the Hospital Wing for a whole month.

And the boy continued to sleep.

The Triwizard Tournament went on without him. Moody was found out to be an imposter when he snuck into the Hospital Wing with an illegal portkey some time after the second task. Poppy had clobbered him over the head multiple times with a pillow before one of her nurses had half-a-mind to cast a Stupefy.

The school year ended with Cedric Diggory as the Triwizard Champion winner.

And the boy continued to sleep.

Summer, with its broiling heat hit the school hard. The cool stones of the castle were the only thing that saved the teachers and house elves from death by heat stroke. Oddly, I felt too cold in the dungeons. I took to wandering the castle at odd hours of the day, pondering over my research and other subjects of concern.

So one day, I found myself walking past the Hospital Wing and couldn’t help but go in and see the boy. He had long been moved from the open beds in the center of the Wing and was now in a private room off the edge of Poppy’s office. She was in there mulling over some text or another. I passed her office and pushed the wooden door of the private room open. He was just as I had left him many months ago. Asleep. Comatose.

A chair near his elbow beckoned my walk weary legs and I sat for awhile. Ii didn’t speak, for fear of falling into the same trap of thinking that I was talking to Lily again.

And yet, still I wondered. What had I misjudged? Where had I gone wrong in my image of this boy?

I reached out and touched his forehead. The bristly looking hair was uncharacteristically soft. He was only a child after all.

I used my abilities in Legillimency to reach out and seek the boy’s mind.  It was locked up tighter than Gringotts most expensive vault.

“Fascinating.” I murmured. I wondered if anyone had taught the boy Occlumency. His mind was heavily fortified. That would explain some of the frustrations that Dumbledore had voiced a couple months ago. No one could reach the boy’s mind to even see if he was still alive inside.

I pulled away and felt for the first time a lament for the boy. His childhood was being eaten away.