11
Severus huddled in a corner of his cell, arms crossed over his aching chest and his face buried against his knees. The Dementor who had brought him his food - cold, moldy bread that he retched back up more often than not - still lingered, savoring his misery, feeding on the resistance that Severus could only barely cling to even when the Dementors were nowhere in sight, but which now slipped away as easily as his strength and health before it.
He had learned, after the first terrifying night, to never show his face when the Dementors came. The sight of his face - his eyes - his mouth - seemed to be an irresistible temptation for them, and they had descended, one after the other, to stroke his jaw with their cold, decaying fingers, leaning their gaping mouths so close to his that he had been certain they were going to Kiss him before his eyes rolled back and he passed out.
He had awoken alone, with the moldy bread, the cold settled so deeply within his chest that he had actually wondered, for a few horrific minutes, if they had taken his soul.
But no. He was still himself. He could remember Lily, with effort. No trace of her could have remained if they had taken his soul, surely.
The cold didn't leave him, though. He didn't know how many days or months or years he had spent here; his efforts to keep track had been obliterated by the inescapable despair the Dementors brought. Sometimes, when he felt the weakness in his limbs, he thought he must have been there for decades. Sometimes, and this was somehow worse, he thought it had only been days.
In his most rational moments, he could conclude, from the way his broken ribs were beginning to heal in the wrong positions, that it may have been weeks or even a month or two, but surely no more, and no less.
He felt it when the Dementor left, more than he consciously registered the scrape of the door as it closed. The darkness of the room deepened, no longer broken by the sickening gray shreds of hunger that had sucked at it before. Severus didn't move from his corner. The rough stone wall was the only stability he could find in this place.
Savage had told him the cells with windows were the worst, because it was too easy to contemplate suicide. She had been a fool. Severus had found three separate edges on these cold stone walls where he could have scraped his wrists open, deep enough to kill. He did not find it maddening, though. It was a comfort, the one small bit of power he had left. The Dementors might think he was helpless against them, but they were wrong. It was his choice to stay here. It was his choice to live. He could escape them in an instant, but he was strong enough, despite them, to wait.
He barely remembered, now, what he was waiting for. Even if he left this place, was the rest of the world any better? He had a vague memory of realizing that there was nothing that made his life worth living, and he could think of nothing to contradict that, not even Lily.
Still - this was power, and he was not going to throw it away by using it.
He ignored the moldy bread, though he was starving. He could feel the ache in his body for nourishment, its desperate craving for the nutrients that would strengthen it. Others might have spent their time remembering all the food they had ever eaten. Severus recited to himself, with terrible longing, the ingredients of a Nourishing Draught.
What he wouldn't give for the lining of a cow's second stomach, the root of a Voracious Vine, the tongue of a mother duck...
He gritted his teeth against the memory of the potion's smell, rich and earthy, with a taste of barley, the thick foamy texture of Butterbeer -
He reached out in the darkness for the bread they had left him, then recoiled as something squirmed beneath his fingers. Ah, yes. Maggots. That had happened once or twice. Last time, he had picked them off and eaten the bread anyway, but now he was finding it difficult not to wonder what maggots tasted like. Surely they contained more nutrition than the bread they had hatched from?
With a snarl of desperation and disgust, he flung the bread as far from him as he could. He heard it burst apart against the bars, heard its crumbs - and probably a few maggots - scatter across the floor outside his cell.
He would not let them reduce him to this.
He pressed back into his corner, clutching at his chest as he so often did now, cold and miserable and hungry, and keenly aware that the Dementors were far enough away that he could actually analyze these things now.
Analyze the irregular beat of his heart beneath his broken ribs.
Analyze the feverish sweat on his freezing brow.
Analyze the itch, the endless itch, of the cuts and burns from his duel with Lucius, wounds which had tried and failed and tried and failed to heal as he sat here rotting in this cell.
He could analyze, too, the smell of his unwashed body, the greasy, tangled mess of his hair, the stale taste of his teeth, the broken length of his fingernails, the uneven scraggle on his unshaven jaw. But these things were unimportant. Minor discomforts. It was the infection that worried him, the infection that was so easy to forget when the Dementors swept over him with their numbing, icy cold, but which returned to fester in his thoughts as soon as they were gone.
How long could his weakened body fight the bacteria multiplying like maggots in his skin?
Would he die here, not of cold or starvation, but of a filthy, easily curable infection? He could name the ingredients for half a dozen different disinfectants, based in tea tree oil or honey or even ground up maggots -
Severus tried to clear his mind of the panicked thoughts, but the itch and the cold, the hunger and the darkness, all preyed on him one after the other.
He supposed it should not have surprised him that he began to hallucinate.
The hallucinations were only auditory, at first. What else could they be, in this incessant black? The first sound startled him so much that he froze in place, utterly paralyzed, as if some demon had crept out of his nightmares.
"... think we just keep going up."
It was Potter's voice, unmistakably. Of all the people his fevered mind could hallucinate, was he really condemned to suffer Potter?
"Reckon we can risk a light?" a second voice asked. It was unfamiliar, certainly not one of Potter's usual friends.
"Better not," Potter said.
Severus heard the soft scuff of footsteps from the stairs spiraling down from outside his cell. They were coming up, coming closer.
Then, a second set of footsteps, much faster, and the unfamiliar man's voice exclaimed, "Hermione! Blimey, you startl-OW!"
A loud thump had interrupted the voice, and now a third voice, a woman's, hissed, "Be quiet, Ronald Weasley!"
"Hermione," Potter said, "you shouldn't -"
"I shouldn't?" the woman whisper-screeched. "I shouldn't! You -"
Evidently words failed this female hallucination, for there was another thump and Potter yelped.
"Quiet!" the woman hissed.
"I would be, if you wouldn't hit me!" Potter muttered resentfully. "And you shouldn't have followed us!"
Several more thumps followed this pronouncement, and both men dissolved into stifled grunts of pain.
"Do you have any idea how dangerous this is?" the woman whisper-shrieked, punctuating her words with more thumps. "You have no idea what you're walking into! You have no right to be here! You could change everything!"
"Who cares?" Potter hissed back. "It's not like it's time travel - I'm not messing with the internal consistency of our universe -"
There was a long pause where everyone, Severus included, tried to digest this.
"You actually read my research?" the woman said, evidently too surprised (and, Severus noted in disgust, flattered) to keep her voice lowered.
"The first few pages, at least," Potter muttered.
The woman thumped him again.
"My point is," Potter continued hastily, "that I can't mess anything up, can I? I mean - I would just be changing the present, and that should be fine!"
The woman made a scoffing sound. "Oh, yes, completely fine!" She sounded slightly hysterical. "You'll just waltz into an alternate universe, change a few things around -"
Severus pushed his greasy hair behind his ears. What had she just said?
"Hermione, I could see my parents! For all I know they're in danger here! I could save them!"
"Harry -" the woman said, and Severus, unable to help himself, leaned closer to the bars. Harry? Why was she calling him Harry?
This was a very strange hallucination.
"Why can't I?" Potter - whichever Potter it was - demanded. "It won't mess anything up! The future isn't set in stone! Or are you telling me you believe it is, in all that Divination tosh -"
"Don't be silly, of course I don't!" The woman sounded outraged. "But - Harry, you have no idea what could be out there! Haven't you considered what must have changed for your parents to still be alive?"
"Yeah, I have!" Potter said hotly. "Maybe Voldemort never heard the prophecy -"
Severus flinched at the name.
"- or maybe Snape never gave it to him -"
What?
"- or maybe that slimy little rat Wormtail never betrayed them -"
Wormtail - that sounded oddly familiar. Where had he heard -
"- or maybe I was never born to begin with! Who CARES, Hermione? I want to see them!"
"Er, mate," the unfamiliar male voice interjected. "You might want to lower your voice a bit."
"There's no one around, we must be miles beneath -"
"Haven't you noticed how cold it is?" the male voice - hadn't the woman called him Weasley? - prompted.
There was a sudden silence, then Potter hissed. "Dementors -"
"Harry -" the woman said fearfully. "Harry - I know you want to see your parents, and I understand, I really do -"
"No, you don't -"
"But Harry, we have to go back! If the Dementors are still here - and your parents are still alive - don't you understand what that must mean?"
"You don't think Vol-"
"Say You-Know-Who!" both of the others hissed.
"I already said it once, didn't I? And Snatchers didn't show up."
"Yes, but still, Harry, we have to be careful! What if - oh, it's so awful, but what if he won?"
There was a long, dreadful silence. Severus was practically pressed against the bars of his cell now, both bewildered and fascinated by their conversation.
Severus was cursed with many unfortunate things, but a slow mind wasn't one of them. Though he certainly hadn't discounted the overwhelming likelihood that this was a hallucination burgeoning from his fever, he was at least willing to contemplate the possibility that these people were, impossible though it seemed, from another world.
After all, Ekrizdis had suggested such things.
Possibilities recoil from each other, too entwined to drift apart, but forever separated by the gates of reality…
Was this another possibility? That Potter had been named "Harry" instead of "James," that the Dark Lord had been defeated in his world, that Severus himself had some parallel in another universe?
It was madness.
It was riveting.
"But don't you see?" Potter said. "This is my point. My parents could be in danger! I have to find them, to help them!"
"Harry -"
"Lay off, Hermione!" Weasley snapped. "You don't know - you didn't lose anyone -"
The woman gave a stifled gasp.
"Well, it's true," Weasley muttered. "You didn't. Your family are all Muggles, and they were safe -"
"Because I sent them to Australia!" she exclaimed, only remembering to whisper halfway through.
"But they were still safe!" Weasley continued. "You don't know what it was like for us - what it's still like - we lost people - and now we could save them -"
"By strolling into another world? Without a plan? Without preparation? Without me?"
"We knew you'd follow us," Weasley said smugly.
This was obviously a mistake. There was another thump, and he hissed in pain.
"Boys!" she snarled, in a rather more intimidating tone than Narcissa had used when expressing a similar sentiment.
"We have to go back," she snapped, "we have to plan, we have to prepare, and then maybe, maybe, we can come back."
"All right," Potter said, "all right, Hermione. But let's at least have a look around first -"
"Harry Potter!"
"- otherwise how will we know how to prepare?"
There were several seconds of angry huffing from the woman, then she snapped out, "Fine. But if we see one Dementor -"
"We won't," Potter said hastily, which Severus thought was a rather idiotic (and typical) promise for him to make. "And I can always cast my Patronus -"
"You'd better be ready," Weasley muttered. "Blimey, it's cold."
"Maybe," the woman growled, "if you had bothered to ask, I could have warned you that there might be Dementors here! Honestly, didn't you even consider it?"
Neither man answered.
She huffed.
"All right, Hermione, you're smarter than us, we get it," Weasley said. "Let's just - I dunno - find some prisoner to interrogate. I've got a few Pumpkin Pasties here, I bet they'd tell us just about anything for that -"
Severus's mouth, to his deep shame, began to water.
He heard the shuffle of their footsteps coming closer. They didn't sound like a hallucination, but in the impenetrable blackness it was impossible to really tell. It could be a trick, a dream - it could be anything -
"Here," he tried to call out. It came out as only a hoarse whisper. "Here."
"Did you hear something?" Weasley whispered, sounding, to Severus's satisfaction, unnerved.
"It's probably one of the prisoners," the woman said, trying to sound nonchalant but with a distinct quiver in her voice.
"Here," Severus rasped out again.
"Lumos!"
The light was blinding. Severus flinched like he'd been struck with a lance, just barely stifling a cry of pain. Involuntarily, he stumbled back to the corner of his cell, covering his eyes.
"I thought I saw something move in that one -" the Weasley voice muttered.
He heard their shuffling feet approach, but couldn't look at them. His eyes burned. And he was seized, quite against his will, by an unshakable terror.
Had he really gone mad?
"I don't know about this," Potter muttered.
"He could be dangerous," the woman whispered.
"Hey!" Weasley called gruffly. "Hey, you! In the corner!"
Severus pressed his palms harder against his eyes, but managed to turn toward them. There was something so uncouth about the Weasley voice, something almost laughable. The idea of being seen in such a state by such a rude person made Severus seethe. With an effort, he squinted his eyes against his palms and slowly, slowly began to lower his hands.
"It's the light," the woman said suddenly. "It's too bright -"
Immediately, the Lumos spell dimmed, though it was still brighter by far than anything he had seen since Savage's Patronus had glided away.
"Er, can you hear us?" Potter asked.
Severus forced his voice to remain steady, though it was still a mere whisper. "One moment, please."
His politeness seemed to reassure them. He could hear at least one of them sigh in relief. For several long moments, Severus squinted into the pool of shadow cupped in his hands. After what may well have been a few minutes, he lowered his hands to his chest.
All three of the strangers gasped.
"Snape!" Potter exclaimed. "But -"
"It can't be -" Weasley muttered.
"Oh, my -" the woman squeaked.
Severus tried to glare at them, but the light was still too bright to look at them directly. He felt exposed, and couldn't stop himself from shrinking back into the corner, arms firmly wrapped around his chest.
Potter, he thought, why did it have to be Potter?
"Snape," Potter said slowly. "You are Snape, aren't you? Severus Snape?"
Severus wished he could meet the man's hateful eyes, but the wand was in the way. "Yes."
Both men rounded on the woman, then, and the beam of light suddenly illuminated her pale, shocked face. Mounds of bushy hair surrounded her head, and a thick Gryffindor scarf was trailing almost to the floor over one of her shoulders. Her brown eyes were wide and frightened.
"You said this wasn't time travel!" Potter exclaimed.
"It isn't!" she said shrilly, but she sounded unsure.
"Hermione," Potter said, "look at him. Does that look like our Snape to you?"
Severus felt her gaze flutter over him, warm and worried. "No - no, I know it's not, but -"
"Hang on," Weasley said. Severus could just make out his red hair - definitely a Weasley. "Maybe…"
"Maybe what?" Potter demanded.
The young man's voice was suddenly grim. "Maybe we did time travel -"
"I told you that's not -" the woman started.
"Just listen! Maybe we did time travel - because - well - maybe this is the only possible way to be in a world where your parents are alive, Harry."
Silence followed this statement. Potter, who was holding the wand, visibly shivered - the light shook all across the walls.
"So you're saying," he forced out, "that - that my parents are - are doomed to die? In every world?"
"It's possible, isn't it?"
Potter made an inarticulate sound of rage and grief that truly startled Severus. He had always been under the impression that Potter's emotions ran skin deep.
"Shh!" the woman hissed.
"I don't believe it!" Potter snarled. "No - I don't accept it. We can change it. We will change it."
"But Harry - how?"
"We defeated Vol-"
"You-Know-"
"We defeated RIDDLE once," Potter snapped, "and we can do it again!" He wheeled on Severus suddenly. "What year is it?"
Severus flinched back from the light. To his complete shock, Potter said, "Sorry," and lowered his flickering wand.
Perhaps it was the shock that made him answer so honestly. "I don't know," he said quietly. "I don't know how long it's been -"
"But Harry," Weasley interrupted, "if Snape's in Azkaban - doesn't that mean the war's already over?"
"It can't be," the woman said. "Harry asked for a world where his parents were alive."
"Oh. Right."
"Why are you in prison, anyway?" Potter asked, frowning at Severus. "Ron's right - that wasn't supposed to happen until after the war."
Severus could do nothing but blink. How the hell was he supposed to know why his reality was different from the (probably hallucinatory) reality this Potter - who was still, no matter his given name, Potter - had come from?
"I think you're scaring him, mate," Weasley said.
"I'm not scared," Severus said as scathingly as he could, which wasn't very: he was still rasping hoarsely.
"Of course you are!" the woman said, before turning to her friends and adding, "Just look at him! We have to help him!"
"Hermione," Weasley said sharply, "weren't you saying we weren't supposed to change -"
"She's right," Potter said. "He could tell us everything."
"You don't know that!" Weasley exclaimed. "He could be evil - he was evil, remember? He got your parents killed!"
Severus felt a cold wave of shock. Whatever his feelings for Potter - and he didn't deny that they were usually murderous - he would certainly never have struck out at him through his parents. He had never even met his parents.
"He didn't mean to," Potter said. The complete lack of hatred in his words stunned Severus even more. Severus had loathed his father, but he would have torn Potter to pieces if he'd so much as cast a Jelly-Legs Jinx at him. It was the principle of the thing.
"Anyway," Potter added, "he was never evil, just a slimy bastard."
That sounded more like the Potter he knew. It was an intense relief to hear it.
"But once we explain everything, he'll help us -"
"You're forgetting that we can't help him," Weasley said, with the air of someone grasping at straws. "He's locked in a cell, remember?"
"Oh, honestly," the woman said, reaching into a pocket and drawing out a key. "Move, Ronald."
She slid the key into the lock of Severus's door. It swung open. All three of the men gaped at her.
"Where did you get that?" Weasley asked, awed.
"Kingsley gave it to me," she said, shrugging as she pocketed it. "For my research." Turning to Severus, who was staring at her in equal awe and no small measure of fear (hallucinations couldn't unlock doors), she said, "Why don't you come out - er - Severus?"
"Severus?" Weasley hissed, evidently recovered from his brief moment of awe.
"Well, he's not Snape, is he?" she said. "Not our Snape."
"Not your Snape," Weasley mocked.
She ignored him, stepping into the cell and approaching Severus slowly, like he was a wild and frightened animal. Which, he supposed, he technically was.
"Hermione!" Weasley hissed. "Not so close! He could be dangerous!"
The woman continued to ignore him. In fact, she was so focused on Severus that he felt a flush creeping up his cheeks.
"Malnourished," she muttered, "feverish. Those cuts are infected. And, oh, I'm sure you need chocolate. If only I had thought - but I don't bother anymore, you know, since the Dementors were banished."
Severus stared at her.
"Yes, well," she said, still gazing at him with those wide brown eyes. "I think you'd better come with us. It'll be a bit of a shock, of course, but we'll get you -"
She cut off suddenly, and Severus knew why. A gust of cold so intense their teeth chattered blasted through the corridor, and on its wings -
"Expecto Patronum!" Potter ground out. "Expecto - Expecto -"
The woman lunged forward, grabbed hold of Severus's arm, and wrenched him out of his corner. He gasped, more in fear than surprise - if the Dementors caught him trying to escape - they could Kiss him, they would Kiss him -
The woman shoved him out of the cell. "Harry - think of your parents -"
"Expecto Patronum!" Potter finally managed, and a silver stag burst out of his wand, charging at the Dementors.
The four of them ran, Severus stumbling on weakened legs, dragged along by the woman as they half-tumbled down flights of stairs. The other two were ahead of them, racing ahead on strong legs that neither Severus nor the small woman could match.
Involuntarily, Severus glanced behind them. Up the walls of the spiral stone staircase, he could see the lingering sheen of silver cast by the Patronus. It was still covering their retreat.
"It must have been the key!" Hermione gasped. "They must have known the door was open - oh, how could I have been so stupid -"
Severus hardly thought obtaining a key to the cells of Azkaban was the mark of a stupid person, but now did not seem the time to discuss it. They were descending deeper and deeper beneath the fortress, and he knew, with a thrill in his heart, that they were not escaping to the merciless North Sea, they were escaping somewhere else - somewhere impossibly far and yet so very, very close -
A wall of magic suddenly slammed against them, stopping them short. Severus involuntarily, irrationally started to turn back.
"No, ignore it, ignore it, it's just a trick," the woman babbled. "Just keep going - we're almost there -"
Severus, familiar enough with wards to recognize that he was being affected by one, took the woman at her word and resisted the strange impulse with all his might. Her hand clutched his, yanking him determinedly forward. He remembered Savage's pitying touch as she abandoned him to this place, and thought that the touch of this strange Hermione woman's hand was much, much better.
It was all madness, of course, but he was certain, absolutely certain, that it was real. He could not have imagined the silvery safety of Potter's Patronus or the warmth of the woman's skin, and he certainly could not have imagined this crevice before them, so narrow she could barely fit through it after him, not bundled up in winter clothes as she was.
Behind them, over her bushy head, Severus could see the Patronus getting closer, its silver fading dramatically though it butted its antlers at the nearest Dementors with desperate force. Its magic was flickering alarmingly, perhaps unable to withstand the sheer mass of Dementors bearing down on it. It held the crevice, but Severus could feel tendrils of cold reaching after them, and the girl sobbed with fear just behind him.
"Hermione!" Potter called.
"Here!" she sobbed, much too quietly to be heard by anyone but Severus. He doubted he could shout any louder, so he gripped her hand tightly and pulled her along, following the increasingly frantic cries of her friends.
Then, in icy silence, the light behind them flickered out. Blackness swept into the corridor. And Severus felt something - and he knew exactly what - begin to drag the girl away from him in the opposite direction.
"No!" she begged. "No! Expect - Expecto -"
Severus pulled at her hand, but the cold was swallowing him, too, until he stood frozen in place, waiting for rotting fingers to clench his jaw -
Something warm and solid slammed into him from the other side. "Snape!" Potter hissed. "Where's -"
"H-H-Harry!" the girl gasped.
"Expecto Patronum! Expecto Patronum! Damn it! I don't understand why it's not working!"
Severus shivered. He could feel what, evidently, Potter could not. There were old magics here, the devastating hunger of the Dementors, the deep, curious crackle of something else. He could feel, intensely, that the Dementors were not welcome here, that the impulse which had seized him to turn back was now directed entirely at them.
And yet, they resisted it. With the same ravenous mocking defiance they had unleashed on Severus as he approached the island, they fought against the ancient wards, determined to reclaim their stolen prisoner, determined to punish whoever would dare defy them.
Potter's magic stood little chance of surviving the conflict.
"Harry!" the girl whispered again, before she was wrenched away from Severus entirely, her warmth disappearing into the shadowy onslaught of cold that now turned its grip on him.
"Hermione!" Potter gasped, "Hermione!" But there was no answer, only the grasping of the Dementors, and Potter grabbed hold of Severus's robes and dragged him backward, into the folds of the crackling ancient ward.
"Hermione!" Weasley exclaimed when they fell at last through the crevice into an echoing cavern. "Where's -"
"I couldn't -" Potter gasped. "I couldn't - my magic -"
There was no need for him to continue. The seeping ice and shadow of the Dementors was darkening the crevice, sliding out in tendrils and webs as the magic of the chamber shuddered beneath it.
"The wards have been breached," said a voice behind them.
Severus turned, startled, to see an insubstantial figure flickering before him, not a ghost, but not anything else he had ever seen, either. It shifted from form to form, its face changing from one to another to another. It stood beside a large archway like some kind of guard.
"Hermione!" Potter gasped, taking a step back toward the crevice before reeling backward as the first Dementor unfolded from the narrow gap.
"Hermione," Weasley moaned, but turned to the figure and said, "We need to go back in time, to stop ourselves! Is that possible?"
"This is not the Gate of Time," the figure replied.
The Dementor was gliding toward Severus. Potter gripped him by the robes and pulled him backward, even as one, two, a dozen others followed, filling the cavern, chilling them to the soul.
"We need to go back to our world," Potter whispered, every word anguished. "We need to go home - is that possible?"
"Yes," the figure said.
A crackling whoosh filled the air. The space within the arch was suddenly alight with dancing magic.
And Potter, gripping Severus by one arm and Weasley by the other, plunged into it.