Severus Snape rapped against the door of 12 Grimmauld Place, leaving a bloody smear near the eyehole. He put a hand to his nose. The blood was flowing rather rapidly now, he noted with academic interest. Molly Weasley cautiously opened the door.

"Severus, the password…Oh my!" She took his elbow as he lurched in the door. She didn't appear too alarmed by the trail of blood down the front of his robe, Snape noticed. Whether this was a lack of interest in his well-being, or the result of having six sons who had inured her to gaping wounds of all sorts, Snape couldn't say.

"Let's see," she said. "Stanchium…episkey!" His nose remained unchanged. Snape was beginning to feel light-headed, to his annoyance.

"Not broken…maybe cursed," he said, leaning against the door frame.

"Oh dear. Arthur, Abby!" Arthur Weasley appeared in the doorway. Down a flight of stairs into the foyer, came Abkhazia Wilson, dressed casually, her dark hair draped about her shoulders. Snape hadn't known much about her until recently, and perhaps he knew little more now. She had been several years behind him at Hogwarts, best in her year in Potions. Dumbledore had recently recruited her as sort of a field medic. ("A low budget version of you, Severus," she had said) She had a dry sense of humor, that Snape found amusing, although he had never said so. She was rather good with children, as Snape had observed her once making ladybugs fly around the head of a small child whose knee she was repairing. She was also, he believed, his best statistical chance of surviving whatever he had been hit with.

Abkhazia looked at him with puzzlement, placing a hand on his shoulder, and pulled out her wand.

"Stanchium…Reparius…Reversium. Well, that last one seems to have slowed it a bit anyway. Severus, can you tell me what happened?"

"Probably a curse, won't stop." Snape began to sway. He suddenly vomited all over Abkhazia's shoes. This would have mortified him, but he felt his ability to care about such things fading along with his consciousness.

"Damn. I think I know what this is, and untreated it's quite serious, but I have some antidote upstairs. Arthur, let's get him up to my room." Half relying on levitation, Arthur and Abkhazia hauled him up two flights of stairs and down a hallway to a small brightly colored room. They sat him on a bed with cream colored linen. He immediately vomited again.

"Thanks, Arthur, I can take it from here. Whatever you hear, don't come in unless I specifically ask you." Arthur looked rather relieved at these instructions and fled. She shut the door.

Snape wasn't sure how he was still sitting upright. Abkhazia was rummaging through a trunk."Is it under E or R? Ah." She pulled out a small vial and went over to him. She put a hand on his back. "I'm afraid I can't give it to you until you've vomited again. I have to be sure it stays down long enough to work." Snape eventually obliged.

"Tergeo," she waved her wand, cleaning off his face. "Severus, you'll need to drink this, and then the next five minutes are going to be very unpleasant, but it's just five minutes, alright." She fed him the liquid, and sat down next to him, keeping her hand on his back. Suddenly he felt an immense pain in his chest.

"Ahh!' he cried, toppling over. He landed on something soft. The pain was unbearable. He curled himself into a fetal position. He tried to scream, but couldn't get any air into his lungs. He felt someone put an arm around him and take his hand.

"Just hold on for five minutes, Severus," he heard Abby saying. Everything went white.

When he began to regain consciousness, he felt an arm draped over his chest. Someone was also stroking his hair. At least he thought so. He couldn't recall whether he'd ever felt these sensations before. He slowly opened his eyes. He noticed that his head was in someone's lap, and that his robes were no longer covered in blood and vomit, nor was the floor next to the bed. He could hear a fire crackling in the grate.

"Severus?" He didn't want to sit up, partly because he still felt a dull ache in his chest and in his extremities. He found, also, that having his hair stroked was quite pleasant, more than he would have expected. Now that she could tell he was awake, he had to sit up, though. "Easy, don't sit up too fast. The blood will rush away from your head, and there isn't quite enough of it sloshing around in you just at the moment." She helped him sit up, steadying him. He turned to look at her.

"It was an Expulsio Curse?"

Abkhazia looked at him. She had always admired his breadth and depth of knowledge, but she was even more impressed by the sort of strength that allowed someone to diagnose his own near death experience.

"Yes, quite crude. The antidote is quite crude too. Since the curse tries to make your body expel its fluids, the antidote simply interrupts the curse by petrifying your organs and blood flow for three minutes. That's why you feel as if a giant sat on your chest."

"My arms and legs…"

"Are just feeling the effects of restored circulation, rather like recovering from frostbite." He nodded. "How long before you got back here did the symptoms manifest?" He looked as if he were trying to clear his clouded brain.

"About forty minutes." She looked at him incredulously, her hand still on his back, as if she were afraid he would topple over at any second.

"Forty minutes of sustained blood loss, and you're talking to me as if we're having Sunday tea? That's quite a constitution you have there." She stopped herself and focused. "I don't want to bore you with details you already know, but I want to make sure you have all of the information at my disposal. You know that whoever cursed you had to get you to eat cursed food?" He nodded. "The curse can be set to manifest between two and eight hours, and you arrived at 9:45, so any food you took between 1 and 7 p.m. could have done it. Does that narrow things down for you?"

"Almost," he said cryptically.

"I don't want you to tell me any more than you are comfortable with. I could envision any number of scenarios – someone thinks you're disloyal to the Dark Lord, but doesn't have enough evidence to convince him, or you're on a mission for the Dark Lord to investigate another Death Eater, and the object of your investigation thinks you might be onto their shady behavior. It might even be an Order of the Phoenix sympathizer who suspects you of double dealing." She was troubled by the thought that she had had any number of times before, that they were asking too much of him. One man couldn't keep this up for long, this double life. She changed the subject. "But that's for you and Dumbledore to figure out. Interesting," she mused, "such a dated curse. Lucrezia Borgia, one of us of course, used it in the 16th century. She could easily blame the symptoms of her victims on one sort of plague or another."

"Fascinating," Snape said, with a familiar hint of sarcasm. She realized she had been rambling.

"Sorry, sorry," she said with an embarrassed laugh. "You should sleep. You've lost a lot of blood. Can you stand?" She put a hand under his arm and helped him up. He steadied himself against the coatrack. She started to unfasten his robes.

"I will – "

"No, you won't. I have a high estimation of your abilities, Severus, but you aren't exactly in top form are you?" She helped him out of his robes and his next two shirts. As she was unbuttoning them, she felt a pang. She had seen this with patients before during her fellowship at St. Mungo's, men who wore several shirts, even when the weather was fine. It was always a habit of men from families of limited means, who lived in houses which were never really warm, where double glazing was a luxury not to be thought of. She was glad she had started a fire for him.

She finally had him down to a black undershirt. She turned to pick up her wand and she saw him looking at her with, what, shock, surprise? At her effrontery? At her taking time with him? Severus Snape wasn't a man with whom most people troubled themselves if they could help it. Whether this was because he preferred it that way, she couldn't know. She tapped his waistband with her wand, changing his trousers into the lower half of a pair of cotton drawstring pajamas.

"Handy charm," he murmured.

"Well, you know women, never quite satisfied with our outfits. Not a familiar sensation to you is it?" she chuckled, drawing back the covers. He looked a bit offended. She decided to ignore his look, and she gently pushed him down on the bed. He sat rather heavily, and she pushed his shoulder down onto the pillows.

Snape felt very woozy leaning against the coatrack. Whether it was because he had been clinically dead for three minutes or because a woman had just undressed him was perhaps an academic question. When she made a joke about the way he dressed, he had been on the verge of an angry retort. Yet, she was pushing him down on the bed very gently. She didn't seem the kind of person who would make fun of a patient. Perhaps she was joking with him the way one joked with a friend, the way Arthur Weasley joked with Molly, or the way Black joked with Lupin. Perhaps this was the way she had been taught to deal with the sickly, of which he was one just at the moment. Perhaps this was the way Lily had joked with James. Snape pushed that thought from his mind as he felt the blankets being pulled over him. They smelled of lavender, which he knew to have a calming effect. If he had been asked earlier that day, he would have thought its use in this context to be a frivolous gesture, but he now found it soothing. Abkhazia was on the verge of saying something when there was a knock at the door. She went to answer it.

Snape looked up. The door at first obscured the identity of the visitor.

"Professor Dumbledore!" she said

"Albus, my dear, Albus," he said, stepping into the room to stand next to the bed.

"Old habits die hard, Professor."

"And how is the patient?"

"Better than he was a bit earlier."

"Thanks to you, my dear, I'm sure."

"Lucky, perhaps, that I had the right antidote on hand. It wasn't due to me, though, that he managed to stay alive and upright for the forty minutes before he got here."

"You know how we men are about doctors, my dear. Always putting off check-ups. What was it?"

"Expulsio Curse."

"My word," said Dumbledore, "I hadn't thought anyone had used one of those since the 16th century." Snape rolled his eyes, and he caught Abkhazia grinning at him.

"I expect you two will need to speak alone. I'll just go down and give Molly a hand. I will be back in twenty minutes. He needs at least 24 hours of rest to replace some of the blood he's lost," she said firmly.

"Point taken," said Dumbledore, smiling.

Snape hadn't realized he was following her with his eyes as she left the room, until he caught Dumbledore watching him. He quickly shifted his gaze to his hands holding the sheets.

"Quite a remarkable young woman, Miss Wilson," said Dumbledore, smiling.

"She has a – clear head in a crisis."

"Fortunately for you. Do you know who cursed you, Severus?"

"Abkhazia – Miss Wilson indicated that I could have ingested the cursed food between 1 and 7 p.m. During that time I took two meals with Death Eaters in their homes."

"And?"

Snape remembered the way Abkhazia had laid out his alternatives, exactly the way he would have done it.

"The first was with Rasmussen. The Dark Lord does not entirely trust him. Perhaps Rasmussen thinks I know a good reason why the Dark Lord should not."

"And do you?"

"He is venal, and generally profits from any missions he receives. These profits are of course unreported to Voldemort. I have enough information about such profits that I could report them."

"And the other meal?"

"With the Malfoys."

"An early dinner?"

Snape's lips curled into a sneer.

"The Malfoys haven't sunk to such depths that they would yet consider inviting someone of my socioeconomic status to dine. They did consent to offer me afternoon tea. With biscuits."

"Their motive?"

"Less clear. Lucius is jealous of my closeness to the Dark Lord, but I do not think that he is so foolish as to think that my untimely death would restore him to favor."

They discussed a plan of action for dealing Rasmussen. Dumbledore leaned over him and put a hand on his shoulder.

"I know you think, Severus, that it is only on occasions like these that I am reminded of the magnitude of what we ask of you. Please know that I am always aware, and I am grateful." Dumbledore walked toward the door. Severus Snape considered himself no one's fool, an abject pragmatist. Yet Dumbledore had the power to disarm him every time, to steal his cynicism at every turn. Perhaps that was why Snape had come back to him, time and again, like the Prodigal Son.

"Severus," Dumbledore had stopped just before opening the door. "Do you know, I think that having someone else tuck you up in bed every once in a while is very underrated."

Abkhazia climbed the stairs. She met Dumbledore just outside the door to her room.

"Thank you, my dear. Recruiting you was quite a brainstorm on my part. You know, Severus isn't comfortable in very many places. Thank you for trying to make him so." He smiled at her and walked downstairs. She was grateful he hadn't stayed to see her blushing.

She entered the room. Snape was on his side, looking at her as she entered. He was even paler than usual. She went over and sat on the other side of the bed. She put a hand on his shoulder.

"Do you need something to help you sleep, or can you take care of that yourself?" Every Occlumens she knew could put himself out like a light.

"I do not require any narcotics." He paused. "Thank you." She put her hand on his back and began rubbing it gently. He stiffened at her touch. He hadn't before, but he was more aware now that the aftereffects of the curse were fading. She kept rubbing, and he relaxed.

"Severus, I want you to know that I, well, I think everyone, admires what you are doing. Walking into a room with those people, with HIM – most of us couldn't do it once, and you do it almost every day. I don't know how."

"It is possible to become accustomed to almost anything. It is not clear that it is always wise to do so." Was he thinking of the stupidity of his youth, for which he would forever have to atone? Or was he having regrets about his role? Abkhazia didn't know. She stopped rubbing his back and looked over at him.

"Please, keep…" he murmured. She could tell he was falling asleep. He probably wouldn't remember what he had just asked her, and that was probably for the best. She kept it up for another minute. He was asleep.

She realized that she really hadn't thought ahead to where she was going to sleep. She could take a couch, or one of the other rooms. She could bunk in with the kids for that matter, although she suspected those Weasley twins snored. She was content for the moment to stretch out next to him, and watch him sleep. She told herself it was the professionally responsible thing to do. He looked more relaxed in sleep than she had ever seen him before. He wasn't, for once, on his guard. She didn't really notice herself becoming more tired. Finally she drifted off.