In the beginning...
There was an old book, a very old one, with an old spell that offered him the world for the right payment. It took him all of a second to decide.
And once he expelled his breath, steeled himself and paid the price, he was surprised at how mild everything was. It wasn't painful. A mere sting really, no worse than a bogbug's bite. What surprised him was where he ended up waking. Wherever he thought he'd wake up in, never once did the hospital wing at Hogwarts crossed his mind.
But the hospital wing it was. The place was still too bright and sickeningly cheerful in his estimation. As bright and as sickeningly cheerful as the pair of blue eyes peering down at him.
"Hello, my boy," the eyes seemed to say. It took him a while to register that there was a mouth attached to the eyes, somewhere.
Severus spluttered and muttered, searching his bemuddled mind for correct strings of alphabets. His efforts dissipated together with dust dancing in sunlight when a set of five gnarly fingers descended upon his brow. Severus blinked and blinked, and blinked some more, fighting sleep's hold upon him. His eyes burned, insistently sleepy, annoyed at the prickly streams of light demanding him to wake.
"Take your time," another voice piped up from the other side of him, and he tried to twist to look at the source of that voice. "And the Headmaster should leave you to your rest, I think," the voice was warm but edged with steel, removing gnarly fingers from his brow almost instantaneously.
"I..." He wanted to ask a million things. Why, what, who, how, and a host of other questions. But little speckles of black danced across his eyelids, bright white spots ran up and down and sideways across his retina, and he had no choice but to retreat back into sleep.
It was also very bright when he woke up next. There were voices, floating around him, floating above the buzz of silence. One voice sounded a bit like reprimand, though it didn't seem as though it was directed at him. Another voice sounded a bit like amusement. There were shuffles, and little tinkles and he thought he could hear the sound of birds and trees and the subtle shift of castle stones and the breeze outside.
"Hello again," someone greeted him. This time he remembered, his mind supplying the correct information attached to the voice he had never forgotten.
Severus cleared his throat once, twice, and a third time for luck before greeting the Headmaster and then Madam Pomfrey who hovered just right there. His vision had not returned, but their shadows were bright enough for him to remember. It's not like he's forgotten seven years of his life here.
"What happened?" the Headmaster asked, and Severus saw a flash of admonishment, a short hiss coming from the school nurse aimed at... well, thankfully not him. Severus fidgeted as the Headmaster fidgeted under Madam Pomfrey's gaze. "You can tell us later," the Headmaster amended.
"No," Severus said, fashioning words around rusty syllables of a rarely-used voice box. He needed to talk, lest he lost the ability, or the will, to talk. Muteness, Severus had found, was oddly soothing. "Now."
The Headmaster's acquiescence and the School Nurse's indignance clashed and danced in the air, and Severus found it amusing. He closed his eyes but kept his ears open. He felt an odd tug of a smile, and felt his face crackle, crumble, reinventing itself. It couldn't look very good, he thought, and found his thought amusing. "Nothing happened," he said, testing words on his tongue, testing words that weren't 'yes, My Lord', 'very well', or 'I obey'. Other words that might or might not exist in a Dark Acolyte's vocabulary. "Nothing happened," he repeated. "I merely paid what was due."
He tried to smile again, and was mildly surprised that it hurt less than last time, his face didn't try to reform itself. It must've looked odd, though, judging from the sounds around him. He closed his eyes, composing a story in his mind.