"So can you do it, or can't you?" Harry demanded from the grate. "Listen, I don't exactly have all day, so if you've suddenly gotten particular, or maybe you don't think you can do it—"
Severus Snape was looking over a desk piled high with the scrolls he was grading. His personal desk in his personal quarters. Where he was never disturbed. He got to his feet and drawled to his visitor, "Anything that can be done with potions I can do, and almost anything can be done with potions, therefore, Potter—"
"You're enjoying this, aren't you?" Harry said wonderingly of the Severus Snape that towered over him, still fully dressed in the middle of the night. His pain-wearied brain wondered if the old sod slept that way. Probably upright in one of these affected pieces of furniture, with his wand at the ready—
"By 'enjoy' you must have been referring to yet another wounded former student who wouldn't acknowledge me in the street showing up unannounced demanding my help for a cause that I have no opinion about. Or perhaps you mean that I am specifically delighted to find the Savior of Wizarding-Kind begging at my feet," the professor was droning on in his lessons-voice.
Harry cut Snape off. "I am at your feet because I am specifically paralyzed, you bastard. And I think I broke one of my elbows dragging myself to a working floo."
There was a silence. "What happened? How long has it been?" Snape asked with what might be apology in his voice while taking in the torn Ministry-issue pajamas. Usually people dragged themselves in to avoid the slipshod medical care available to members of the Ministry army, or because they weren't members and rebels got even less attention.
Harry was describing the freak accident almost a week ago that had a stray curse shearing off a piece of a building onto his back, along with his determination not to be kept in the Ministry as an object of pity. Then he looked up at his questioner.
A strange expression that might be shame flitted across Snape's face. Then his wand was out and floating Harry to a couch that he mostly couldn't feel but its oily green velvet looked uncomfortable.
"Better?" Snape asked while directing a wet cloth and basin towards his guest. He left Harry with the cloth to cleanse the caked grime off his face. When the professor returned, a huge wardrobe was following him docilely like a pet.
"You can't have a pet dog or cat like a normal person?" Harry asked, wondering if he was delirious.
The potions master gestured and the doors opened, revealing shelves upon shelves of pots, bottles and phials. The containers rearranged themselves as he contemplated them with his wand. "My potions cupboard is concerned about you, and you'll find it more useful than a lapdog in your state." He turned around with an armful of items and set them on the already cluttered coffee table.
"But you can fix it?" Harry asked, contemplating the feet he used to know but that seemed to belong to someone else and felt very far away from his head.
"Drink this," Snape prompted brusquely, and the warrior was already strangely comforted. The old slithery bastard always knew what to do, and a spine that had been half-crushed by falling masonry should be no different than the lessons from the classes that seemed so long ago, though Harry and the majority of his peers had only dropped out a something over a year ago. The patented Snape sarcasm was a mere tickle compared to the horrors of war, he told himself.
But still, after all this time commanding troops, Harry was finding that the older man's appraising glance was making him feel less sure of himself, as it always did.
"We'll talk about it tomorrow," his host said, turning on his heel.
"What? I don't want to wait to regrow my nerves or whatever I have to do!" Harry protested.
Snape turned back. "You're in shock from overexertion in this delicate state. It's a testimony to the Ministry hospital that you were motivated to drag yourself here at all. Even I wouldn't ask you to make a decision while you're more addled than usual, Potter."
Before Harry could protest further, he was thrust into a state of suspended animation. He realized he hadn't been able to relax, truly relax, all these months he'd been in the service, not even when he was in bed at the Ministry hospital and being stared at by all those doctors and officials. But now he was being allowed to collapse at what was for him the end of the line, in the care of a conscience-less git in the filthy potion-master's dungeon. No one would believe it. Which was precisely the point.
"Nobody's going to turn me into a martyr for their cause," was the thought that had motivated Harry out of his monitored hospital cot. He'd dragged twisted body to hide in a cupboard until he could floo himself to freedom. "I made it. I made it." He let the spell take charge of his breathing, his heartbeat, the commerce of his blood, nerve impulses and thoughts. He slept.
"Have you seen Fawkes' friend?" Dumbledore asked Severus at breakfast. Hogwarts had nearly emptied during second term of last year, during which time the school huddled together at one table. Enrollment was now climbing as parents realized the school was determined to stay out of the conflict and thus safer than other alternatives for their children. The headmaster had yet to withdraw the adults to their own table, hence the code reference to Harry.
"Stumbled in, demanded to be patched up, was sent on his way without anyone being the wiser," Severus said around a strategic mouthful of toast. "Some story about a new faction developing. He didn't succeed in enlisting my collusion any more than the myriad other sides have."
"Medical treatment is not considered collusion, Severus," the headmaster remarked mildly.
Severus snorted. "They all think my collaboration is to be bought, as if my no-scruples can be had at any price."
The other professors barely looked up at the reference to his checkered past. Snape was hardly anyone's worst concern anymore.
"They'll sort it out. Young people always do," Dumbledore declared. "It must have been relatively mild or you would have dispatched him to our infirmary."
Fearing that he looked miserable in an unusual way, Severus passed a hand over his face. "A waste of perfectly good Derma-Knit elixir," he grumbled. "I'll have to go out and collect more Threadworms, and it's not even the right phase of the moon for the fungi that work best."
"I'll warn Filch that you'll be in and out," Albus replied. "I hope you gave him my best."
Severus did indeed go out that afternoon to gather the ingredients he lacked, feeling strangely on edge, though no one had bothered about him for a long while. For the hundredth time he thought how odd it was to be irrelevant after a lifetime of arousing hatred for small and large reasons, all of them good ones.
He wiped his sweaty brow on his arm before carrying his basket back to the castle. Some part of his brain still reminded him about the Mark, which was now more a paler patch where the black patch used to be, before it disappeared with the Dark Lord it bound him to.
Suddenly, Severus began to hurry towards the castle. Thank goodness for his alarm system!
"Password?" Filch demanded from the door. He was a born fascist and loved the boost the heightened security measures gave his profile.
"Out of my way, you nitwit, I forgot I left a potion on the boil!" Severus said.
After what seemed like an age, he was back in his rooms. "Stop struggling. Stop it I say!" Severus said to the form wrapped in a floating cocoon.
The first thing the spell released was the breathing, and that allowed the mouth to say, "I've been awake and under artificial respiration for almost an hour!" his patient spat. "If I'd gotten my wand over here, you would've come back to a different picture."
Severus looked at the wand on the floor a few feet between the tangle of clothing and the floating pallet, and considered the tremendous effort it must have taken to summon it that far while struggling against the Respiro spell. "I have no doubt of your capabilities for revenge, Potter," he said tiredly. "I was out gathering the necessaries for your treatment."
He examined the young man from the waist up, concentrating on the elbow that had just begun to mend itself. "Tsk, tsk, if you had cursed me with that arm, you would have undone the healing you accomplished overnight."
"Healing? Can I?" Harry asked excitedly, looking at his feet.
"No. Your pelvis and lower spine are still smashed to a powder and the nerve conduction tests I performed showed no activity."
Harry blinked, taken aback, though whether from the unaccustomed lack of sarcasm, or the grim prognosis, Severus couldn't tell.
"But that's for something that will help me," the boy gestured with his chin towards the basket on the ground.
"Yes." For whatever reason, his old professor looked ill, sicker than Harry felt, and he was the one that felt like he'd been cut in half by that piece of stone.
"Well then?" Harry had people relying on him; he didn't have time to sit there in midair, chatting in his ex-professor's quarters.
Snape summoned a class of water and used his wand to help his patient sit up. "Are you familiar with stem cell therapy?"
Harry gaped at him. This was the last thing he expected to come out of a wizard's mouth. "You're going to send me to some muggle lab? I thought those kind of treatments were experimental still."
"They are, but like many things, the wizarding world has mastered the concept somewhat earlier than our muggle cousins. There is a treatment that is known to help cases like yours, people who need to wipe the slate clean on a particular organ or limb and start over, as it were."
"If it works, let's have at it," Harry prompted.
He's used to commanding a regiment, Snape thought with sympathy. He knows to be brass tacks about everything, no matter how uncomfortable….
Realizing the man floating in his parlor was looking at him expectantly, Severus forced himself to say, "It will take a very long time, for one thing, and if we stop treatment for whatever reason, you risk losing your progress." He forced himself to meet the young man's eyes. "It's a chronic treatment, at least for a time, not an immediate cure."
"All right, so I have to choke down something revolting from that," he nodded at the potions cabinet that had been edging forward solicitously. "For the foreseeable future. I'm not afraid of swallowing something disgusting any old day."
The potions teacher appeared to be at a loss for words for a moment. "Since I am breaking Hogwarts' official noninvolvement policy with this little war of yours, I do require something in return."
"I'll give you my Gringott code, whatever, you can buy all the potions ingredients you've ever dreamed of," Harry interrupted, his good humor revealing the desperation underneath it.
"I require your commitment to this venture, which means total trust in whatever I tell you to do, and complete discretion while I hide you in my rooms," Severus snapped, disliking being on the bargaining end of Harry Potter's calculations even more than usual.
"Dumbledore doesn't know I'm here?" Harry tried to sit up and slipped back down. His pelvis wasn't knit back together enough to allow him to sit. "I thought he knew everything that happened here."
"A particular spell I've perfected makes it seem like you left." Harry's schoolboy delight in this infraction amused Severus for some reason. "We can tell him you're here any time you wish, but—"
"The faster we get started the faster I'll be able to walk out of Hogwarts and back to my life, so the fewer complications the better. Fine, Snape, I swear it."
"He called me Snape. His military directness is rather hilarious," Severus thought to himself while he fitted the boy's wand in his hand and said, "Swear this way or not at all."
They performed the Unbreakable Vow, requiring a proximity that was a continuation of the clinical procedures Severus undertaken while his visitor was asleep last night. Telling himself once again that the shattered state of Harry's lower body required drastic measures, Severus barked out a few potion names and they leapt out from the cabinet.
"Drink these in the order in which they offer themselves to you. I'll be back."
Severus took his recently gathered flowers, fungi and herbs to his laboratory. He spent some time calibrating the exact proportions of the first elixir in the regimen he'd read about in an abstruse potions journal. It was, in truth, Harry's only hope of ever walking normally again. (Though magical prosthetic limbs were always an option, though certainly not suitable for anything as athletic as broom-riding, much less full duties as a Ministry officer. What rank was this boy-soldier? Severus only trusted what he could read in between the lines of the papers, and this detail escaped him.)
When at last the liquid was cooled, Severus banished all trace of what he had been making and left in its place the residue from a harmless skin treatment. No one was interested in his experiments down here, but years of subterfuge were hard to forget.
"I'm hungry," Harry said in greeting, somewhat embarrassed, from his perch at eye level with the teacher.
Severus opened the cupboard and unveiled the broth he'd made while in the laboratory. "Use your left hand," he ordered, and Harry ate the soup clumsily but with appetite.
"This is best on a full stomach," Severus said, substituting the bowl for the large phial he'd just made. "Drink it all. It doesn't taste unpleasant," he said to Harry's cautious gaze.
"Oh, actually, it wasn't so bad. Kind of raspberry-flavored," he said, and Severus felt glad he decided at the last minute to include the raspberry leaf. "Where are you going?"
"There are some things I need to do, such as prepare for my week's classes," Severus stated. "I can't spend too much more time in my quarters without arousing suspicion. I'm leaving you this journal to make note of any sensations you may begin to experience."
Harry was quickly bored. He couldn't comfortably cast a spell with any energy using his right hand, or his elbow felt like it was going to fall to pieces. So he drew clumsily with his left hand in the notebook Snape left him, mostly defensive formations he wanted to try, and wondered how long it would be before he could get back in the fray.
To think that he and the oily potions instructor had been sworn enemies at one time. Now that everything had been revealed, people his age thought Severus was kind of an antihero badass. When everything came out in the wash in the months after Voldemort's death, almost everyone had either done something they shouldn't have, or not done something they should have. But to people of Harry's generation, Snape had stood out among the resistance as someone who had waded into—and nearly drowned in—the moral ambiguity of that era. The poncey potions adept was still not someone you would claim to admire aloud, but Snape had managed to save Dumbledore where many members of the order would have failed, and tripped up the Death Eaters far more often than the good guys.
Only someone people truly believed capable of killing Dumbledore could have faked the death of the beloved wizard. And only someone exceptionally gifted at potions could produce a near-death state to fool several doctors and then bring him back to perfect health and have him transported, under Polyjuice, to Tahiti. There he had a pleasant beach vacation, until such a time when people were rising up against Voldemort's brief but disastrous ascendancy, and then Dumbledore came riding back to save the day.
It was Dumbledore's plan all along, but Severus was the only one placed to put it into action. He endured another brief stint in Azkaban for it and spoke not a word in his own defense.
As he didn't protest when Death Eaters came to break him out.
Voldemort schmoldemort, Harry snorted at his childhood fears. All of that had been like the contests over succession between medieval sovereigns. Anyone who was smart saw that nobody was going to benefit from Voldemort winning but Voldemort, and whoever his sociopathic favor fell on any given day. The Ministry benefited from this identifiable enemy keeping everyone more or less united against a common foe, at the price of the entire wizarding world pushed itself to the brink of extinction every generation or so with its recurrent pure-blood mania.
But then there are the rare kind of wars that do matter. These are like the Spanish against the Aztecs, where one entire side is wiped out, never to rise up again. These wars between civilizations can destroy one or both sides because they are about a way of life. This was the much more pertinent conflict that had divided wizarding society of late.
All that racialist nonsense had vanished with Voldemort's death. After the smoke cleared, the true fault lines separating wizard from wizard and witch from witch began to emerge.
The Conservatives wanted to keep the wizarding world hidden, secret and more or less to the boundaries established through history. Most wanted to more or less cut off their world from the other in the name of preserving the old ways.
The Traditionalists, meanwhile, saw the muggle world as the true prize, right there within reach. Why not direct their murderous impulses at the muggles who controlled resources and territories that could easily be snatched by the more powerful magical folk, led by these young ones who were not afraid to engage with modern problems and use technology and science?
The two sides fought bitterly over points where there were doorways between the two worlds. Diagon Alley was a big one, but any place that people could enter or exit from was the site of rivalry. It became harder for magical people with no politics to get through these portals.
Families were divided over the maneuvers carried out by the more extreme factions of each side as they tried to either lock themselves further away from the world, or bite off pieces of it for themselves.
Harry had joined the Ministry forces because he thought both sides were barmy, and because he sensed that throwing himself in with the rebels would mean giving it the stamp of the Boy Who Lived—not something he wanted to give away so easily.
If Severus came back and left again, it was while Harry slept. The potions cabinet took care of the doses of his medicines and with dispensing the strong-tasting broths Severus prepared. Harry wished with all his heart that he could have contact with a house elf for some more palatable food, but then, they couldn't be trusted to keep his whereabouts a secret. The Prophet would be in there in no time, everyone would volley for the rights to use him as a martyr, and Harry knew without vanity that they would have no qualms about drawing the neutral Hogwarts into the fight.
It went on like this for four days. He knew from the marks he was making in the book, and the red-colored potion that came round every evening. And because on the fifth day, the thing arrived.
The medicines made Harry tired, though he'd rather sleep than be bored and awake. But if he'd been conscious when the thing appeared, Harry would have banished it with the left-handed hex he was working on, rather than having to stare at it with a clear head.
It had a green cushion at first, but that changed to red overnight. Harry gave a bitter smile at his jailer's concession to his old house affiliation. There was also a network of straps, no doubt because Harry couldn't sit up easily without at least a spell holding him in place. He was sure now that the cabinet was watching him and then communicating what it saw whenever Snape was in. He'd spent hours trying to figure out how the thing connected with the laboratory where his medications and meals were prepared.
The smarmy Snape took long enough to return that evening that Harry had built up on his tongue everything he wanted to say.
"Get it out," he said in the tone that had made his troops tremble. His wand hadn't done anything to banish the object, but evidently it was still good for making the other man take a step back.
"Rowing yourself around in midair on a charm doesn't give you as much exercise as the chair," Severus said reasonably. Harry hated him.
"I do not need a—"
"Wheelchair," Snape completed helpfully.
"Because you are going to fix me, aren't you, sadistic wanker?"
"Tell me, have you noticed any—interesting—sensations?" Harry clenched his fists at Snape's clinical detachment and then hissed at the pain it caused in his right arm.
"The tip of my nose tingles in the morning. How soon can I walk over there and wipe that expression off your face?"
Snape was actually taking notes, which was even more infuriating. "This 'tingle,' has it appeared anywhere else?"
"No," he ground out between his teeth. "What exactly should I be looking for?"
The professor snapped his notebook shut. "If I told you, then we couldn't be sure it wasn't the power of suggestion," he said. "You came to me for science, I assume, having had enough of the alternative offered in the Ministry hospital. If you learn to use the chair, you'll keep your upper-body strength, something you might find useful in your line of work."