How he managed to remain calm and composed enough to put the boy in his place during such occasions, Severus could never understand. It was only after he emerged from these encounters that he realized, over and over again, that he had in some way been holding his breath: blood had pounded distantly in his ears like the weight of an endless ocean while his sense of space had dissolved into an abysmal blur of green. Time too had seemed to stop as it does in the head of a drowning man: something – perhaps the past, was petrified in these depths; arrested from rushing in but always there, always before him.
And then that cruel glint of sunlight after he escaped to the surface, illuminating the hellish desert for his stinging eyes. That cold, sparse air, conducting the crashes of the waves for his bleeding ears. All his senses awakened once more, telling him that time moves again with all its biting salt and scarring sediment. And he breaths, thinks, remembers, hates, breaths…
It exhausted him. And yet he relished it. It channeled through his veins the substance of some sort of truth: that he was alive? He was not sure this was it. Life, to Severus, was an end that held no subtlety. Too repetitively had he watched it come, expire, and leave. It was the means to life that confounded Severus although he was too sensible a person to dwell on this for any length of time.