"Oh, no. Oh, no. He's come back. Please, I don't want him to come back."

The sound of a child whimpering roused Severus from his ruminations, sitting as he was in his mental projection of his dungeon chambers at Hogwarts.

Tim was having one of his nightmares. And no wonder, after the long stressful conversation with the mind healer.

Taking a fortifying breath, Severus opened his illusionary front door onto Tim's dreamscape. It was a bit like walking into a memory held in a Pensieve.

The door led to the sitting room of a nondescript little flat. The carpet might have been beige once and curtains of the same indistinct color were hung from the windows.

A poster of a woman in a medieval gown, drifting across a black lake in a punt, dominated the living room. The still picture marked it as a Muggle dwelling rather than a Wizarding home. Bits of rubbish were piled up here and there. Off the living room was a galley-style kitchenette that was about four square feet. Its sink overflowed with dishes and there were pizza and take away boxes strewn across the floor, some of them looking as though they'd almost made it into the bin. Empty bottles of beer or fizzy drink overflowed with cigarette butts and ashes on the table.

In the center of the room, next to the settee, was a cot with a golden-haired, blue-eyed toddler of perhaps eighteen months, fretfully picking at his blanket while he held a small stuffed toy close to his chest. An empty bottle lay beside him and from the odor Severus could detect, it seemed that the child needed tending to.

There was talking and then raised voices was coming from behind a closed door. The child stared at the door and after a moment began to squall for his mummy.

"No! Shut it! Oh please, be quiet," whispered a voice. Severus spotted eleven-year-old Tim kneeling next to the cot, his back to him, trying to get the baby's attention. "Shh. He'll hear you… Please, be quiet." Tim stood, reached down, and with great effort pulled the toddler into his arms. Clumsily he sat down with the child in his lap. "You have to be quiet, Baby," he whispered.

The child's wails quieted to hiccupping sobs and then soft coos. Apparently the baby was happy enough in Tim's arms.

"I'm sorry." Tim was still whispering to the baby. " I don't know what to do."

Hesitantly, Severus went forward and put his hand on the child's shoulder.

Tim jerked at the contact. He looked up into Severus' face, relaxing at the sight of the imposing man. "You have to help us," he whispered. "Father's here. He's going to… to…"

Whatever it was, the boy couldn't articulate it. His voice was choked off as he shut his mouth against it. The baby burrowed into the older child's shoulder, shaking with fear and making whimpering noises.

"Shut up, you little bastard!" a man's voice called from the other room.

Without a doubt, something terrible would happen if that man came out of the bedroom.

"You're dreaming, child." Severus knelt down in front of Tim to look him in the eyes. "It's not real." This had worked before when Severus had been caught in one of the child's nightmares.

Tim shook his head vigorously. "No!" He put one hand out and grabbed Severus by the collar of his robe. "You don't understand. Please. He's going to hurt the baby. Please, don't let him hurt the baby." Clearly he was trapped in the reality of the dream.

"I won't." Severus soothed the boy, knowing nothing he was going to say was going to make a difference if Tim wouldn't recognize the dream for what it was.

"That Bastard's got a wand. He can cast spells. Real spells." Tim sounded as though he thought he'd have to convince Severus.

Severus smiled darkly. "So can I." He showed the child his own wand as evidence.

The door behind Severus slammed open, the door bouncing off the wall.

The man who came out of the doorway was handsome, with dark hair and eyes the same color as Tim's. He looked furious about something. He was dressed in a Muggle tee shirt and boxer shorts, but he brandished a wand.

Severus stepped between the other man and the children, only to find that this dream monster didn't acknowledge him in the slightest.

The baby began to howl in fear and the man stepped through Severus to advance on the children.

Tim was hyperventilating, but he left the baby on the floor and stood up to the man, his wand out and at the ready. Without hesitation, the child pointed his wand and cried in a strangled sob, "Avada Kedavra."

Severus felt the magic tingle across his skin, a hot burning wind. The jet of light was bright enough that, in the waking world, he would have expected it to have worked.

The green light flashed straight through the man's heart but, though he glowed with the energy of it, it didn't prevent him from walking through Tim and grabbing the baby. The man shook the infant, who screamed even more loudly. The man growled and shook harder, making the infant's head rock on his shoulders.

The woman came up behind the man with a wail, trying to get around him to get to her child. She was dressed in a pink silk dressing gown. Apparently the child's cries had interrupted a moment of passion. She snatched the child away and hurriedly put him in his cot.

The man smacked her with the back of his hand. She was knocked off balance, but kept her feet. She spoke to the man in a whining, placating tone. Severus didn't understand what she said but whatever it was, it made the man turn to her with a leer and move closer to paw at her.

The child was no longer hyperventilating, nor indeed was he showing the slightest scrap of fear. Tim's eyes had turned alarmingly cold as he watched the man and the woman. The hairs on the back of Severus' neck raised—the child's eyes held no more expression than the Dark Lord's pet snake's.

The baby had ceased to wail and merely lay whimpering. Severus wondered how badly the baby had been injured to fall so suddenly silent. The woman made no more move to try to get to the toddler, instead her tone had turned coy and would-be seductive. She brushed the back of her hand against the man's cheek, smiling through her tears. She pulled him towards the bedroom

The man and the woman moved out of the room again.

The child stared at the baby. "He's going to die," Tim said woodenly. The baby started to shake, going into some kind of seizure.

This might only be Tim's dream, but Severus had a dreadful feeling that if the baby died in this dream, something of Tim would be lost.

"No, he's not. I won't allow it." Severus moved quickly to pick up the baby. He passed his wand over it, as though it were a real flesh and blood infant and not a dream phantasm.

Fortunately, in the dream, the baby was a wizard. His native magic was struggling to repair the damage, but there were tears in the fine network of blood vessels and his brain had started to swell. If Severus had access to a potions lab, he could at least cure some of that. Because this was a dream, he supposed he could cure all of it, if he so willed.

Severus looked again at Tim. Something was happening that the potions master didn't understand at all, but he decided that he would just go with the reality as it appeared.

He hefted the infant into one hand. "Come here." He held out the hand that still held his wand. "Take hold of my arm. We'll need to Apparate."

If this had really been Hogwarts, Severus could never have Apparated directly into the hospital wing. However, if he was to convince Tim's sleeping mind that this treatment would work, his own mind needed to be at ease with it.

The hospital wing Severus created looked more like the one in 1998, with very little hint of Christmas cheer. The boy gasped and staggered as they landed.

"I'm afraid Madam Pomfrey isn't available at the moment," Severus said. He put the injured child on a bed and cast a spell to help the child breathe. "Can you look after the baby while I get what I need?"

Tim sat down next to the baby and nodded, wide-eyed.

Severus willed there to be a nerve tonic, a bleeding control and a bruise potion in the potions cupboard. For good measure, he decided there would be a calming draught as well.

These potions were all formulas that merely encouraged natural magical processes. The baby's magic could do all of this alone, but these would make it happen faster, as though being enhanced with another wizard's magic. Severus feared to tell Tim's mind and magic in this dream state that it needed to do something it wouldn't do by itself. Who knows what that might do to the child?

"Sir?" called Tim. "The baby!"

Severus raced back to find the child seizing again. The potions master wasted no time in spelling the different potions into the infant.

The baby's face took on an alarming dusky hue. The small boy beside Severus sighed, turned away. "That's too bad," he said tonelessly.

Severus growled deep in his throat and then, taking a deep breath, trying not to think of the risk he was taking with the child's body and mind, he willed the leaking arteries to close over and he willed the damaged nerve tissue to heal.

This would never have worked in the real world, but in his own dreamscape, he had discovered how to change his own dreams. The principle was the same here.

The small body relaxed, his breathing eased, his face went from dusky blue and purple to pink. After another few minutes, he started restlessly moving about until his eyes opened. Eyes that were exactly like Tim's.

The infant version of Tim began to squall. The eleven-year-old looked alarmed.

Severus smiled, feeling better than he had in a long time. "Crying is a good sign in babies." He thought any emotion was a good sign in the child. It was curious to be standing here with two versions of the same child—even in a dream. Severus picked the baby up and rested him against his shoulder. "Come along."

Tim took Severus' arm. They Apparated into Tim's bedroom at Grimmauld place. Severus couldn't think of a place that would make Tim feel safer than that.

Severus sat in the rocking chair with the crying baby. He checked to see if the baby's nappy was in need of a change, which it was not. If anything confirmed for him this little scene's unreality, it was that.

Severus began to sing a monotonous little lullaby to calm the child. It was one he'd heard Narcissa sing to Draco on many an occasion.

The boy sat on his bed, staring at Severus and the baby with that chilling expression. Eventually the squalling infant calmed.

"He's fine," whispered Severus to the child.

Tim nodded.

The next instant, the baby vanished.

"You are dreaming," asserted Severus.

The child shook his head. "Maybe I am, but the baby wasn't. The baby nearly died. I don't remember the first time you came to help me." He wrapped his arms around his knees in a defensive posture. "Maybe that was it."

Severus stared at the child. The hairs on the back of his neck were going back up. "What we just witnessed? Did that really happen?"

Tim nodded. "Yes. I don't remember it, but the baby does."

"Child… Tim… you realize that the baby is you—don't you?"

The boy shook his head. "No, that's not me. I'm a wizard."

"But all Wizarding[H2] children start out as babies, just the same way others do," Severus told the boy softly.

"No." The child shook his head sharply.

Severus abandoned the chair to kneel in front of the child. Those eyes were still chips of blue ice and the soft curve of the child's jaw was clenched and hard.

"It does no good to pretend that these things are not part of you, Tim." Severus searched the child's face for some hint that he was getting through.

"Fuck off," the child hissed. "You can all stop pretending like you care."

This angry Tim was new to Severus. Ominously, everything in the room started to shake.

"Go away," growled the child.

"Why are you so angry?" Severus asked, grasping at straws to defuse the boy before the magic erupted into violence.

Rather than answering, the boy howled.

The room exploded into darkness, but the howling wail continued.

"Tim?" That was Potter's voice. "Sh-sh-sh, you're safe, love. You're home. It's all right."

Tim's body was picked up and set on Potter's lap. The child was fighting the man, but this appeared to be something the man was prepared for. He wrapped the blankets from the bed tightly around the boy, so that those flailing limbs were trapped like a swaddled baby's.

"Shhhh." Potter started singing the same soft lullaby that Severus had just sung to the infant.

Sometime after the boy quieted, he muttered, "Dad? Mmgonnabesick."

A plastic pail was produced and the child emptied the contents of his stomach into it.

"Better?" Potter asked softly. "Do you want to talk about it?" He helped the sweaty child disentangle himself from the bedc . A quick wave of his wand dried the cold sweat from the boy's nightclothes.

Tim shook his head sharply. He was shaking as though with intense cold, his teeth chattering. Potter waved his wand again and all but one blanket sailed back to the bed. The one left was warmed and wrapped around the child.

"Does your head hurt?" asked Potter.

"N-no." Tim could not stop his teeth clacking together.

Potter backed off from the child enough to look him in the face. "What's wrong?" He stared intently into the boy's eyes and Severus felt the gentle brush of the man's Legilimancy.

Images from the child's dream came tumbling out, although Severus himself was only remembered as an unidentifiable black figure. What was unambiguous was the infant being shaken, abandoned and seizing.

Potter paled and held the child more securely. "Kreacher?" he called. "Will you bring us a calming draught, please?"

"I'm glad That Bastard's dead," Tim said in that flat, emotionless voice.

"I am too," Potter replied softly.