The Beast by Hopeless Wanderer
Summary: They're stranded in the middle of nowhere, on the run, in the biting cold of a ceaseless winter. Severus has to make sure Potter survives.

No matter the cost.

** my response to this year's Winter Fest 2021**
Categories: Fic Fests > Winter fest 2021, Teacher Snape > Professor Snape, Parental Snape > Guardian Snape, Snape Equal Status to Harry > Comrades Snape and Harry Main Characters: .Snape and Harry (required), Voldemort
Snape Flavour: Snape is Angry, Canon Snape, Snape Comforts, Snape is Depressed, Snape is Desperate, Out of Character Snape, Overly-protective Snape, Snape is Secretive, Snape is Stern
Genres: Action/Adventure, Angst, Tragedy
Media Type: None
Tags: Alternate Universe, Incognito!Harry, Incognito!Snape, Runaway
Takes Place: 6th summer, 6th Year
Warnings: Character Death, Out of Character, Panic attack, Torture, Violence
Challenges: None
Series: None
Chapters: 1 Completed: Yes Word count: 2414 Read: 1829 Published: 21 Nov 2021 Updated: 21 Nov 2021
Story Notes:
I'm just getting an early start; it is freezing cold here, so imagine me dramatically shivering behind my laptop as I am typing.

1. The Beast by Hopeless Wanderer

The Beast by Hopeless Wanderer
Author's Notes:
The prompts used for this work are as follows:

- Christmas on the run, can be an alternate universe of Harry and/or Snape being on the run from Voldemort and having...

- Winter camping.

- Hypothermia. Harry and Severus must share body warmth to survive. (briefly mentioned)

- Snape makes Harry tea.

- Panic attacks, anxiety. (mentioned)
“You need to drink something,”

The boy doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even budge in his place, won’t blink, won’t show any indication that he has heard Severus to begin with.
It’s quite cold in their tent. The furniture feel ice cold to touch and a chilling breeze howls, lapping up to the outer walls and seeping in. if Severus had the luxury of using his wand to cast a warming charm around them, the cold wouldn’t have been that noticeable. But he can’t. so the cold dominates over them with an iron fist.

Potter looks like he doesn’t care at all.

He’s been like that since Severus woke up this morning; unresponsive, sitting with his knees clutched to his chest, and his chest heaving with shallow rises and falls that sound slanted.

“Look at me, Potter,”

He’s tried this command before. Potter is impervious to it. No matter how disapproving or annoyed Severus makes himself sound, he won’t move an inch. Severus hates admitting this to himself, but he is growing somewhat worried that the boy must have been broken.

Though, it’s not as if he was in his sound mind before, when they packed up and left and fled to the wild. He was quiet, fidgeting, constantly on the verge of passing out from panic. Severus wasn’t too hard on him; he was a child.

If Potter’s comatose state and the cold kept up, they would freeze to death for sure. Severus knows that they are in a very precarious position, and it’s only partly his fault. They’re in the middle of nowhere, Severus had intended it that way to elongate their stay. What he hadn’t been foreseeing was the weather turning so poorly so quickly.

He can’t use magic to apparate them somewhere else. They are in no condition to walk on foot in this weather.

He sighs and shrugs off the blanket on his own shoulders down to wrap around the boy’s stilled frame. It’s the third time he’s doing that; since Potter shows no inclination to respond and maintain his thermoregulation, Severus has to take care of it. Like he always does.

There is a hint of disdain in his movements that Severus doesn’t bother stifling. Potter doesn’t care.

“Was it a scary dream? A nightmare?” he prods at the boy’s forehead, laying his hand flat to feel for any fever. Cold as a dead fish, his skin.

Severus pinches the bridge of his nose and stands, rubbing his hands together for any hints of warmth, but it’s difficult to maintain the illusion for long. He has to keep moving around, that would be pivotal to his survival.

He aimlessly walks around their tent, from one section to another, he’s turned their solitary stove up all the way, and after fluttering around the stove to warm his hands and shifting on his feet for quite a while, Severus comes to accept that they need hot water. That means he has to go outside, in the freezing ice land outside and gather snow.

Severus, while knowing how childish it is to do so, procrastinates on the unpleasant task by sitting with Potter for a bit longer, muttering his name and fixing the blanket sagging on the boy’s shoulders.

“Nightmares aren’t real,” he tells the boy, “They’re weapons of the mind against itself. They’re not real,”

What Severus fails to mention, is that any nightmare the boy might have, is nowhere near as terrifying as the world they live in now. He can still taste the bitter aftertaste of that night in his mouth. he remembers it vividly; how he crammed anything his hands could reach into the case, clothes, potions, books. Anything. He remembers calculating, knowing that he needed to get to Potter before the wards fell, before the Dark Lord found out about Dumbledore’s death via Bella.

It was done so quickly. He ran in the darkened hallways, took two steps at a time and charmed the portrait open. He’d passed his students’ sleeping bodies in the common room, knowing that he is damning them to a fate worse than death.

“I have nightmares too, Potter. That doesn’t mean you can lock yourself away from reality,”

His fingers had felt the sturdy stone tiles as he’d raced up the stairs that led to the boy’s dormitory, and he had faltered, unfamiliar with the layout, and having no time to investigate.

He’d gathered the boy’s trunk first, shrank it and then leaned over the boy. He didn’t think it was quite possible, but Severus didn’t even need to charm his weightless, the sixteen-year-old weighed almost nothing in his arms when Severus scooped him up, blanket and all. He could hear distant screams.

They were already in the castle.

Severus ran out of the dorm, Potter in his arms, miraculously still sleeping. The Death Eaters poured in from one direction, and Severus took Harry out from the other.

“Whatever it was, I will protect you,” he tells the boy now, his hand hesitantly settling on the child’s shoulder, “It will be fine,”

It will not be fine. It’s a bold-faced lie, if he’s ever heard one. But Potter can’t know that.

Potter only blinks every now and then and after sitting with him for a while, Severus can’t take it anymore. He stands, settles his own blanket—the last one they have—from his own bed and settles it around Potter.

In silence, he turns and regards the entrance of their tent. He picks up the pot from the cupboard and squares his shoulders, hand outstretched before he hears Potter’s voice.

“Please,”

Severus doesn’t turn, but drops his hand, “I will be right outside, just gathering some snow to boil,”

“No,”

He sighs and then turns, pot in hand, he walks over to Potter, who is regarding him with wide-blown eyes, his face, flushed red from the cold is chalky and he looks absolutely terrified, huddled beneath the pile Severus has dumped on him.

“So now you can talk?” Severus can’t help himself but Potter crumbles.

“I’m sorry,” he sounds on the verge of tears, and Severus absolutely can’t handle crying children. He’s had enough of it when they had initially been on the run, with Potter kicking and screaming and crying and cursing him. But this is different.

“What did you see?” he settles beside the boy again, stomping his boots to shake off the cold seeping into his socks.

Potter drops his face into his knees and shakes his head. He’s shaking even beneath all those blankets. Severus stifles another sigh and closes his eyes. He hates children. He never intended to have any children. Being a teacher was out of necessity. Dealing with Potter is out of necessity, but that doesn’t make it any less difficult.

“Potter, you can’t afford to be afraid of a nightmare when—”

“It wasn’t a nightmare,” Potter mutters back, now a bit defiantly.

Severus stills, peers a bit more closely at the boy and then steels himself, “What did you see?”

Potter’s answer is not immediate, it is rough and stilted, and the boy’s voice croaks, “My scar was hurting and I…there was blood,”

“From your scar?” Severus didn’t see any hints of blood on the boy’s face this morning.

“No. on the floor. And…and bodies,” a shiver runs through his frame and Severus feels the same urge to shiver. It was a vision. The boy had a vision, and that was dangerous. If he could peer into the Dark Lord’s mind, the Dark Lord could look back.

“Did you empty your mind? Cleared your thoughts?” he asks, and tries his best not to sound as frantic as he is feeling right now. If the Dark Lord saw him and Potter together, he would…well Severus doesn’t know what he would do. The subject of his disloyalty to the Dark Lord wouldn’t exactly be news to the man…but the knowledge that he had Potter with him could be disastrous.

And who is he kidding? Potter is lousy at Occlumency.

“He didn’t know,” Potter rasps, “He was too happy and…” he trails off, seemingly out of breath, but no matter how many times he heaves, he doesn’t seem to get enough air to finish the sentence.

“What was happening?”

Potter bursts into tears and Severus controls himself. It was a traumatic experience. Potter was a child. Severus needed to be delicate.

“Get up, Potter,” he startles the teen into looking up, which is exactly what he intended to do.

“What?”

“It’s freezing here,” Severus stands and walks over to Potter’s trunk and his poor excuse of a wardrobe. The clothes that Potter had already had in his trunk, would be most suitable for dusting a very filthy house, but Severus made the decision not to make a very big deal about it.

He drags the trunk to Potter’s bed, “Get out of the pile, and put on as many layers as you can,”

Frozen tears still stream down the boy’s face as he hesitantly shrugs off the many layers already draped over him. Severus mutely hands him one layer after another, and Potter puts them on with shaking hands, sniffing every once in a while.

Severus oversees Potter putting on five overlarge shirts, and two garishly large trousers on top of what he’s already wearing, before he burrows under the layers again. Severus rubs his hands together again, and closes the latch of Potter’s trunk.

“I’m sorry,”

Severus regards the boy, “It’s a torture technique,”

“What?”

“Riddling you with unsettling images and scenes, the same thing he did when he tried to lure you in last year,”

Potter goes limp, staring into space again, though this time, Severus can literally see the thoughts racing in his head. Thoughts of Black, lurching back into the veil, thoughts of death and torture and pain that he went through personally. It’s such a damning weakness, to have your emotions and inner thoughts so obviously flashing over his face, bleeding into every expression.

“But it felt real,”

Severus won’t deny it; it probably is real, whatever Potter saw. The Dark Lord is known for his infamous bloodbaths. Now that he had Hogwarts under his reigns, he also had a playing ground with more than plenty enough people to kill.

“He wanted you to feel unsettled,” Severus says, running his thumb over the smooth surface of the pot. They would need the tea, at some point. The cold was still biting, but Severus notices that the chilling breeze has decreased in intensity.

“What are we going to do?” Potter quietly asks him after a while, and Severus shrugs.

“Survive,”

He stands, looks at the boy over his shoulder, “I will be right here, just gathering snow to make us tea,”

“I don’t want to die,”

Severus turns again, this time letting annoyance creep onto his face, “I will hardly take a minute, Potter,”

Potter just looks at him, and they both know that is not what he meant. Severus drops the pot on his bed and walks back to Potter’s, dropping down near the boy. He grabs him by the shoulders, to sound more convincing maybe, “You will not die,”

“But what if—” Potter’s voice cracks.

“No. You will not die, do not even think of the…”

“Sir-”

“Don’t interrupt me,” he cuts in with a glare, “Dying is not an option. You’ll die when I tell you to die, and I do not intend to do that any time soon. Do you understand?”

Potter’s eyes drop, “That’s not how it works,”

He shakes the boy to capture his glance again, because he needs Potter to understand, because if Potter gives in then this whole thing would be for nothing, “That is how I will force it to work,” he snaps.

Potter looks away, his eyes hidden behind a curtain of tears that don’t terrify Severus anymore, “Look at me,” he orders the boy, and thinks about how this is the most intimate moment they have shared since running away.

Potter looks at him, biting his lip, probably with the intent to abate the urge to cry.

“If you want to panic, you will panic. If you need to cry, you will cry, and if you need to scream, you will scream. In the moment, then it’s over. It’s off your chest. If you are afraid, you are afraid in the moment, and then the moment will pass,”

Silent tears escape Potter’s dam and Severus nods at him, encouragingly, “You do not need to worry about him in the moment. We are untouchable. What you need to worry about right now? A beast of another kind.”

“It’s really cold,” Potter whispers and Severus nods again.

“It’s very cold, and we have to survive it, okay?”

Potter squirms under his gaze and wipes at his face with his sleeve, “Yes sir,”

“Get under the blankets. Here’s what will happen now,” he sighs, “I will go outside, I will get us snow to make tea, then regrettably, I have to join you under the blankets, because it is really fucking cold. And you will sleep again. Is that clear to you?”

Potter nods but Severus shakes his head, “Verbal confirmation,”

A tiny smile tugs at the boy’s mouth, “Yes sir.”

Severus lets go of his shoulders and stands again, “We might as well use this time to review your lessons, so try remembering the ingredients used in a Pepper-up potion while I make the tea,”

He ignores Potter’s groan of protest. It’s what he needs, predictability. He needs the stability of a task to carry out, no matter how simple, to distract him from the vision, and also the cold. Severus gives him one last look and turns again, bending to pick up the fallen pot.

A task to carry out. A beast to defeat. Severus is not ready in the slightest for either.

But he has no choice.
The End.


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