Severus rubbed his forehead and then checked the time. Yet another night he’d worked through, and not a great deal to show for it. Oh, he’d managed to salvage most of the venom antidotes he’d been working on, but none of them were giving particularly satisfying results. One would do nothing for the poison, another would destroy the poison easily enough, and Weasley’s major internal organs with it…. What in Merlin’s name did that bastard do to that venom?

There was a knock at the door—of his lab, not his quarters—and he turned with a snarl. “What?”

“Uh, Professor?” Harry stuck his head in cautiously.

“What are you doing here? I’m surprised that Poppy released you.” Or, for that matter, that Molly Weasley had.

“Apparently I’m healed.”

“And wandering about yet again.” Less than a day after he goes traipsing off and gets himself lost in a maze of tunnels and he’s back to his old tricks. “Merlin forbid you actually acquire some sense after one of these little excursions of yours.”

Harry shuffled in place. “I’m not wandering about, Professor. I’m not allowed to be anywhere except the Gryffindor rooms—and the Hall for meals—unless I’m with a professor for the rest of the holidays. Ron too, once he’s out of the infirmary. And we’ve got detentions after that.”

“Good.” Personally he’d have reinstated the Quidditch ban for the rest of the year, but Minerva probably didn’t want to destroy her team’s only chance at the cup. Though keeping the Weasley boy off the pitch might actually improve the overall play. “In light of that sentence, I don’t suppose you’d care to explain your presence here?”

“Professor McGonagall walked me down. She said if you’ve got anything to add to our punishment she and the headmaster will support it.”

“Hm. I would hope so.” Hot pokers, or the rack? Or boiling in oil, perhaps; my oversized cauldrons should be large enough. Well, if I boil them one at a time, at least. So many difficult choices.

“Um…Professor?”

Severus drummed his fingers on the counter lightly. His concentration had been on his work; he hadn’t actually planned out anything to do to the brat. Of course, he hadn’t expected to see him for at least another few days either. “I believe the liver of a teenage boy can be used in a variety of potions.”

“Professor!”

He snorted and nodded sharply to a worktable in the back. “Bubotubers. You can start there. There should be a large jar of them in the left-hand cupboard. And I believe some flobberworms came in as well that probably need to be sorted.” Slughorn had ordered supplies before the holidays with an eye to the lessons that would be taught in the upcoming term, but of course he had left the actual work in preparing all of them to Severus. “I believe you know what to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

The groan in his voice made Severus feel slightly better—although it didn’t change the fact that he still had a bruise on his arse and a scratchy feeling at the back of his throat that was not helping to improve his mood—and he turned back to his experiments. Something had to work. There was no such thing as a totally incurable poison. There just…wasn’t. He considered the cauldrons in front of him and then gave up temporarily on experimentation in favor of retracing the research that had been done on the basilisk poison. Two of the volumes he’d ordered upon receiving Harry’s present had come in several weeks ago, and while he had read through them with an eye as to what he might like to try, he hadn’t spent a great deal of time on the drier details.

Halfway thought the second chapter an annoying repetitive noise finally forced him to look up. “Mr. Potter, are you humming?” Children did not hum when they were gathering bubotuber pus—they whined, moaned, groaned, complained, and more than occasionally cursed when they were under the impression that the supervising professor was out of earshot, but under no circumstances did any of them hum. It was preposterous.

“Well, I have to do something to break up the boredom.”

No, you don’t. You’re supposed to be being punished. Now be silent.”

At least then he grumbled…a much more soothing noise when it came to working.

“Professor? Professor Snape!”

Severus blinked hard, wondering why his neck felt so stiff. “Yes, what?!”

“It’s time for dinner. We already missed lunch.”

“What?” Harry had only arrived perhaps two hours ago.

“You fell asleep.”

I fell…damn it all. Granted he’d needed the rest, but that didn’t mean that he appreciated losing the entire day for it. A short nap would have sufficed. “Why didn’t you wake me earlier?”

“You looked tired.”

Bloody…Gryffindor. “Fine.” He moved the books on his lap to the floor and stood with a suppressed groan. This was why one didn’t sleep in a chair—not only was his neck stiff, so was his entire back, and the popping sounds from his spine as he stood didn’t make him feel any better. “Well, go on then. What are you waiting for?” Not any kind of healing potion, he didn’t think; from the look of it the brat had had the sense to use the dragonhide gloves that had been left in the cupboard. Assuming that he actually did anything after I fell asleep, of course.

Harry shifted. “You have to come with me…I’m not supposed to be roaming the halls without supervision, remember?”

Severus glared for a moment. This was probably all part of Minerva’s plot, annoying, meddling tabby that she is. And Poppy had probably been the one to put her up to it—fussing at him for missing meals like she had been recently. “Fine. Do you have all your things?”

“Yes, sir.”

And, much to Severus’ annoyance, a glance at the counter revealed that a fair amount of bubotuber pus seemed to have been gathered. “Come along.”

Harry left his side as soon as they reached the hall, joining the Weasleys where they sat. Well, the twins and the girl, anyway; there was still no sign of the youngest boy. He took a seat beside Filius and waited for the food to arrive.

“Severus,” Poppy greeted as she and an older man came into the Hall. “I wasn’t sure that you’d make it to dinner.”

“Yes, well, since Mr. Potter required an escort….”

She took a seat beside him, the older man on her other side. Fortunately the two of them seemed to be in the middle of a conversation and he wasn’t going to be expected to contribute. He suspected that the man was some sort of relative…it wasn’t uncommon for the staff who didn’t leave the castle to invite someone to visit for the holiday. In fact Minerva’s niece appeared to have arrived sometime today as well; fortunately—for her sake—she seemed to have moved past that ridiculous crush she’d had on him in her younger years.

“Severus, do you have a moment?” Poppy asked, turning towards him as the meal came to an end.

“Of course.” Finding a cure for a severely injured man can be indefinitely postponed, as proven by yesterday’s events.

“This is Healer Corwith,” she introduced as she, Severus, and the older man stepped into the corridor.

Severus bit off his immediate response and firmly reminded himself that murdering the school’s mediwitch would not put him in anyone’s good graces. Why couldn’t he be her boyfriend? Brother? Third cousin twice removed? No wonder she hadn’t introduced the man before the meal; if she had he’d have found an excuse to leave early.

“After Grindlewald, he began to specialize in mindhealing for some of the survivors who’d suffered severe losses both physical and emotional,” she continued, ignoring his expression. “Healer Corwith, Severus Snape.”

“Pleased to meet you,” the man said, offering a hand.

“Likewise.” Though from Poppy’s expression his tone conveyed something else entirely. Which is perfectly fine since it’s supposed to. He’d known at the staff party that Poppy had been serious about him talking to someone about what had happened at the Dark Lord’s hands, but he hadn’t expected her to act so quickly on the idea. Nor quite so directly.

“If you’d like, I’d be happy to sp—” the man began.

“Regardless of what you may have heard from my…well-meaning…colleagues, outside of the obvious physical impairments I have recovered from my ordeal quite well. Now, if you’ll both excuse me, I do have other things I need to be doing this evening.”

“I know that a loss such as that you’ve suffered is difficult to adjust to,” Corwith said, taking up a position in Severus’ path. “I’ve spoken to many different people and I can assure you that all of them have felt much better after they’ve found a way to express themselves.”

Severus raised an eyebrow. “As anyone in this castle would be happy to assure you, one thing I have never had any great amount of trouble with is expressing myself.” On occasion at great length and in high volume after doing much damage to any glass objects in the immediate vicinity. He was sorely tempted to demonstrate his abilities in that arena to his current audience, but Poppy could be disturbingly devious when it came to taking revenge. She was already looking quite annoyed at his dismissal of the mindhealer.

“I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but there can be severe aftereffects of that kind of injury—nightmares tend to be the primary, but there’s also the possibility of flashbacks, uncontrolled irritability, inability to sleep, loss of appetite….” He shook his head. “The list goes on and on, and not all of them are things that you would automatically link to any sort of trauma. Obviously Madame Pomfrey hasn’t given me any of the details of your particular situation since you are not yet my patient, but—”

“I assure you that I am fine,” Severus interrupted. “I appreciate your offer—”well, actually I don’t, but this is hardly the place to get into it—“but it isn’t necessary.”

“I realize that my arrival here was something of a shock; perhaps you’d like some time to think about—”

“I’m fine,” Severus repeated. “Now, if you will excuse me?”

Poppy was opening her mouth to object, but he pushed past the two of them and headed for his dungeons. There, at least, he could bar the door. And it’s not as though I don’t have work to do. Finish reading that second book on the basilisk poison, for one, since he hadn’t gotten more than a few chapters into it, and then go back through and see how much he could match up with the notes he’d taken so far on Nagini’s poison. He didn’t need to talk about his ‘experiences’ to a complete stranger who’d probably lived his entire adult life safe behind St. Mungo’s walls. He didn’t need to talk about them to anyone. He stalked into his workroom and selected the book on the top of the stack he’d been looking through earlier, taking it back into his sitting room and dropping down on the couch. None of this will tell me what the Dark Lord did to Nagini’s poison, granted, but at least it’s a start.

Of course he didn’t get more than three pages in when a heavy banging on the door interrupted him. He didn’t think it was Poppy—for one it was too soon for her to have politely seen off the mediwizard, and for another even when she was mad she wasn’t one for that sort of rudeness—which meant it was yet another of his colleagues. “And once again I have the strong urge to relocate to Brazil. Bloody—come in!”

“Enough with your muttering.” Alastor shoved a handful of papers at him. “From St. Mungo’s. And send yours with messengers, not owls. I believe I mentioned this before.”

“It sounds somewhat familiar.” Not that Severus had any intention of following his order this time either.

Alastor snorted and actually left without any more harassment. That worried Severus more than he cared to admit, and he checked the notes twice for possible hexes and jinxes and then did a quick curse sweep as well. Nothing. Well, maybe he found someone else to bother for awhile. He considered the packet of parchment for a moment. That or he knows a spell I don’t. Severus winced. Alastor knew several spells that he didn’t from what he’d seen so far, and while none of those were the sort of thing one left as a booby trap that didn’t necessarily…. After another moment of thought he shook his head and tapped the top with his wand. Poppy would be down to shout at him soon enough; if he needed healing she could bloody well do it then. The string holding the parchments together fell away easily. And nothing else happened. Severus ground his teeth for a moment. Merlin-be-dammed lunatic—if he isn’t annoying me with what he’s doing, he’s annoying me with what he’s not. With a shake he returned his attention to the notes.

Potions masters one and two were still accomplishing nothing—he was amazed that the first was still able to write after some of the ridiculous things he’d attempted—and three’s notes looked similar to what he’d read before. Either she was backtracking or making more variations for experimentation. Thanks to his unintended nap he didn’t have much of anything of worth to write up for the day…still, summarizing his notes on the basilisk poison after he’d finished reading about it would help him organize his thoughts as well as anything else.

It was well after midnight when he finally finished the second book, and he summoned Minerva’s quick-quill and began to dictate before his thoughts escaped him. He shouldn’t be feeling tired, not with as much sleep as he’d had earlier, but his body didn’t seem aware of that fact, and that annoying scratchy feeling in his throat had returned by the time he finished speaking. With a snap he summoned a house elf and ordered it to take the notes to the owlry and send them off, and then he gave in and retired to his bedroom. He shouldn’t be tired, but since his body obviously wasn’t aware of that fact….

///////////

“Mr. Potter, will youcease with that infernal noise!” They day hadn’t started well. Somehow they never seemed to, of late. First Poppy had arrived just after breakfast—which he’d missed—to harangue him about his rude behavior toward the mindhealer yesterday evening and repeat her insistence that he talk to a professional about what had happened. Then the idea his sleep-fogged mind had thought brilliant at half-past one in the morning had taken all of forty-five minutes to prove was the exact opposite—he’d ruined that cauldron almost beyond all hope of salvation. On top of that, his throat was still sore, and, although the brat-who-wouldn’t-have-the-courtesy-to-die-and-leave-him-in-peace had seen fit to let him be until lunchtime, he was now back in Severus’ workroom humming along to some vapid muggle tune as he worked. And humming off key on top of everything else.

“Sorry, Professor.”

He wasn’t, that much was obvious from his tone and the expression on his face when he turned to look over his shoulder, and Severus reminded himself firmly that flinging hexes around potions was never a good idea. “Why, pray tell, have you seen fit to grace me with your presence today? Granted that Gryffindors aren’t known for their great leaps of logic, but I would think that, given a choice between confinement to your tower and sorting flobberworms in my dungeon, even you would select the tower as the more preferable.” He certainly hadn’t suggested that the brat return.

Harry shrugged. “There’s nothing there to do though, and….” Another shrug. “Ron is still in the infirmary, and Ginny and the twins are just sitting around worried about him and their dad. I mean, I am to, but…I beat Ginny at chess yesterday, and I never beat anybody. At least here I’m doing something, even if it is pretty nasty.” He was quiet for a few minutes, and then, “Am I really bothering you that much?”

Severus gritted his teeth. As much as he might like to reply in the affirmative, he found that he couldn’t quite do it. “I would prefer not to be regaled with your absolute lack of any musical talent whatsoever.”

“Yes, sir.”

That was genuine enough, which, of course, meant that the bloody silence was the next thing to grate on Severus nerves. Silence punctuated by the occasional plop as Harry selected which pile the flobberworm he was currently examining was going to go in, and the rustle of pages as Severus tried to determine where he’d gone wrong, but silence all the same. He pushed aside his annoyance and tried to concentrate. Obviously the lack of a reasonable quantity of pure venom to study was an issue in concocting an antidote, but it shouldn’t be slowing him down this much. Nor the other sensible potion master working on this mess. Oh, it was reasonable that they hadn’t found a cure yet—it hadn’t been that many days since Weasley was bitten—but they should both have firmer tracks of research to work from by now. He gave the vial holding the poison he’d managed to pull out of Weasley’s blood a tap. I don’t even have conclusive proof that this is what is affecting his blood. He still hadn’t come up with a better way to test it than pouring some on a wound, and he was beginning to think that he’d need firsthand experience as to the progress of the poison before he could make any more progress himself. “Harry, put those away.”

“Professor?”

“You can finish sorting flobberworms later. Right now I need you to go fetch me a rabbit.”

“I…what?”

“A rabbit. A small mammal with large ears and—”

“I know what a rabbit is. Why do you want one?”

“Because I need to see this poison in action, and since the headmaster would be annoyed if I used you as a test subject, I will have to make do.” He preferred not to test on animals—aside from the fuss the rest of the wizarding community tended to make, magic didn’t necessarily affect the nonmagical ones the way that it did a witch or wizard and trying to test on a magical creature was generally more than one’s life was worth—but in this case he didn’t see any other option. Well, not besides selecting ingredients at random, and unlike the first St. Mungo’s potions master he would prefer not to die like that.

“You’re going to kill a rabbit?”

The brat looked distressed, and Severus rolled his eyes. As if you didn’t spend half your transfiguration classes turning this and that into animals or animals into random inanimate objects and then stabbing them with pins and such. “If it is a choice between a rabbit and the elder Mr. Weasley, I assume you would prefer Weasley to survive?”

“Well, yeah, but that just seems…mean.”

“I suppose it is, but I’m at a loss as to where else to start. Frankly I’d prefer a mouse or rat, but with the Hogwarts house elves’ fanatical devotion to cleanliness I don’t expect to find any of those in the castle proper.” There were always a few student pets of course, but that wouldn’t go over any better with the headmaster than sacrificing said students would.

“There are some in the Chamber of Secrets.”

Severus glared. “I am going to pretend that I didn’t hear you say that, and you are not even going to think about going back down there to fetch one, am I understood? Of all the ridiculous notions….”

“Yes, sir. But where am I supposed to find a rabbit? It’s the middle of winter.”

“Go ask Hagrid. He feeds those…pets…of his somehow. If he hasn’t a rabbit, I suppose any small mammal will do. Mind you a mammal—don’t bring me back an owl or a toad.”

“I wouldn’t.”

He seemed to find the idea of using an owl quite offensive, but then Severus recalled belatedly that he had a pet owl. “Well, go on.”

“Um, I’m not supposed to be out of the tower alone, remember?”

Well, I don’t want to go trudging about through snowbanks; if I did I wouldn’t be sending you. Severus scrawled a message on a piece of parchment and shoved it at him. “I expect that will satisfy Professor McGonagall should you have the misfortune of encountering her in the halls. Now go.” At least with a small mammal—and Harry would share his definition of small even if Hagrid didn’t—he wouldn’t need to use much of his poison supply.

Harry returned on much shorter order than he’d expected…chilled to the bone but carrying a fluffy white bundle. “Here’s your rabbit.”

Severus took the creature and set it on the counter and then cast a quick warming spell on the boy. “When I told you to go and ask Hagrid, I was under the impression that ‘go and fetch your outer robe from your rooms before going outside’ was understood.”

Harry waved a hand. “It was quicker to just run. I didn’t get that cold.”

Teenagers. Severus reached for a small knife and the vial of poison.

“What are you going to do?”

“I have to get the poison into it somehow. If it bothers you so, go back to your room.” Not that he actually planned to kill the creature—the longer it lived the longer he’d have longer to examine the non-clotting effects—but without knowing how strong Nagini’s poison actually was there were no guarantees.

Harry’s chin lifted. “I’ll be all right.”

“Then go put some scrap paper into one of the oversize cauldrons.” He’d have to have somewhere to put the thing…leaving it hopping up and down his countertop was obviously not an option, nor was hunting it all over his quarters if he wanted to check it again later after the initial observations. Besides which, it meant that Harry’s back was turned when he dipped the very tip of the knife into the poison and jabbed the rabbit’s haunch lightly. It hopped away indignantly, but red was already starting to stain its fur, and Severus grabbed a notebook and began to take notes.

Blood was flowing out more quickly than it should…not only was the poison anti-coagulating as they’d all known, apparently it acted as a blood thinner as well. Which stood to reason; the faster a prey animal bled out, the sooner the snake could eat. Some disorientation from the erratic nature of its movements…Arthur had shown signs of that when he’d first woken up as well, although it was possible that that could be attributed to rapid blood loss. He gave himself a mental shake and put down the quill long enough to locate a vial and collect the spilled blood. If there was any sort of self-replicating substance in the venom—which he suspected that there would be since even after losing as much blood as Arthur had there had still been venom traces in what had been collected—Severus would take as much as he could get.

He observed the rabbit’s behavior for a bit longer, but nothing new was happening and Harry had finished with his task and was shifting around uncomfortably beside him. With a sigh he summoned a sticking bandage from the first aid kit he kept on hand, and, after a flick of his wand to clear away the surrounding fur, he applied it to the wound.

“That’s all?”

“I’ll take it off again in a few hours and see if the effects of the poison have changed. Here.”

Harry took the rabbit and put it in the cauldron. “Can I get him some food or something?”

“I suppose. Go into the outer room if you’re going to summon a house elf; I don’t want them coming into my workroom and they know it.”

Armed with enough food to feed a small colony of rabbits, Harry returned a minute later. “So did you learn anything?”

“I don’t know. The effects were approximately what I expected…I’m going to purify the poison out of its blood and see if that tells me anything new.” If he was able to extract more poison than he put in, the self-replicating hypothesis would be confirmed, at least. “I believe you have flobberworms to finish sorting?”

Harry muttered something under his breath, but Severus had other things to worry about. At least he’d already found a working process for separating poison from blood…by the time Harry returned to his side to announce that it was time for dinner he’d almost finished.

After dinner, and after insisting that Harry return to his tower with his little friends, Severus completed the process and then brought out the rabbit for a second examination. It was still quite alive and not particularly thrilled to be picked up—Severus hadn’t realized that rabbits bitbefore—but after petrifying it he was able to peel off the bandage. And found the wound scabbed over. Obviously the blood loss had continued for awhile, judging from the amount of blood on the inside of the bandage, but the damn would had healed. “Bloody….” What is it? The size of the wound? A lesser venom concentration? There has to be something different about the damn rabbit. Of course it wasn’t magical which could be the difference right there, but he couldn’t believe that even a small cut had sealed so quickly when Weasley’s wound had had days to start healing and clotting hadn’t even begun. He snarled and then dropped the rabbit back into the cauldron—he might have some use for it later and with the amount of food Harry had left it should be quite content for the near future—and scrawled a note for the St. Mungo’s potions masters. Maybe they could find a volunteer of some sort to test the poison. Because if we haven’t got a sample of what’s really keeping that wound open…. Well, Severus wasn’t entirely certain what they could do at that point. Leave the man with sealed bandages wrapped around his torso for the rest of his life?