11
Neville could hear his mother's screams from two floors below the Spell Damage Ward. By the time he made it to the fourth floor, he was gasping for breath, sweating, and nearly sobbing with worry.
"Mum!" he cried out.
"Careful, Mr. Longbottom!" the Healer cried. "Something - something has happened -"
Neville gave her a terrified look. "The Lestranges!"
She looked shocked. "No, no, not the Lestranges! It's that man who keeps visiting, Frank's friend. He's - I don't know what he's done -"
Neville pushed past her to get to his parents' beds. Frank was on Alice's bed, supporting her as she rocked back and forth screaming. Snape was sitting rigid and unmoving in his chair, his face expressionless, his eyes eerily empty. Fiend sat perched on his shoulder, her meows drowned out by the screams.
"There were wards around the beds!" the Healer exclaimed, sounding scandalized. "But - but your father -" She gave Neville an important look. "He stuck his head out and called for help! Isn't that wonderful?"
She was shouting over Alice's screams. Neville ignored her. Moving to stand in front of Snape, he said, "Sir? Sir? Can you hear me?"
Snape didn't respond. It didn't take a genius to figure out what had happened. Even Neville could see that Snape had tried to Legilimize his mother, and that it had gone wrong. But why couldn't Snape answer him?
"What is going on here?"
Neville cringed. Gran was striding toward the beds, vulture hat askew.
"I received an urgent owl about my son and daughter-in-law," she said accusingly, glaring at the Healer. "A shamefully vague letter, I might add -"
"Yes, Madam Longbottom, I sent you the owl!" the Healer gushed excitedly. "Your son - you'll be so happy to hear this -"
"I'll be the judge of that!"
"He talked! Alice was screaming, and he called for help!" The Healer's expression, though still ecstatic, darkened slightly. "This man seems to have done something. He had wards all around the beds!"
Gran's gaze fell on Snape's motionless figure, then on Neville, who was still leaning over him.
"Er -" Neville said, reddening.
"I would like a moment alone with my grandson," she said, glaring at the Healer again. The Healer, intimately familiar with Augusta Longbottom's temper, fled.
"Now," Gran shouted, still over Alice's screaming. "What exactly is happening here? This is Severus Snape, is it not?"
"Yes," Neville and Frank answered at the same time.
Gran opened her mouth, clearly shocked, then managed to pull herself together. "Frank?" she asked, almost suspiciously.
"Hi, Mum."
Gran looked so stunned she really was speechless now.
"Severus is helping me," Frank continued. As he spoke, Alice's screams shrank to whimpering sobs. "Using Legilimency. Finding memories."
"Severus Snape?" Gran whispered, incredulously.
"Bringing me back," Frank asserted. He looked at Alice. "Today, he tried to help Alice."
"I take it," Gran said, recovering herself a little, "that didn't go well."
"He's not answering," Neville said, giving Snape's shoulder a little push. Fiend sank her claws in to keep her balance, but even that didn't rouse him.
"Stuck," Frank said. "I think."
"Stuck in Alice's mind?" Gran asked sharply.
"Yes." Frank's expression was grim. "He was afraid. Afraid she wasn't there."
They all looked at Alice. Her body was heaving with sobs, her eyes tightly shut. She was clutching her head.
"I think she's there," Neville said quietly.
Gran frowned deeply. "But where is there?"
There were no spiderwebs here. No gossamer wisps, no unraveling threads. There was no delicate architecture to Alice's mind, no strands to be rewoven.
Severus's immediate, inescapable impression was savage pain. In the first instant, he knew it for what it was: the Cruciatus Curse, the seizing agony of its aftermath. How many times had he curled in on himself on the cool stone floor of his dungeons, twitching as lingering splinters of the curse's thrashing worked their way out of his flesh?
He had an instant to recognize this, and no more. Before he could retreat, or steel himself, or grapple for some semblance of control, the curse was on him, tearing through his flesh like a thousand thirsty mouths.
Desperate, he tried to pull away from it, to shut himself in the safety of his mind, untouchable, unreachable, whole. If he could just find it - but where was it -
It was with desolate horror that he realized he was already in his mind. In her mind. There was nowhere left to hide.
He tried to cry out, but the screams he heard were not his own. He tried to find her, but his pain was tangled, tangled into hers like vines, like ropes, like whips. The harder he tried to pull himself apart from her, the tighter the bonds became.
With an icy effort of will, he stopped struggling.
Excruciating eons passed. His mind shuddered and twitched, ensnared in the Dark spell, so hideous and so elegant.
The screams, his and yet not his, ended. Sobs shook him, or her. He tried to gasp for air, but had no mouth or lungs. It was hard not to panic.
He needed to retreat, to return to his own mind, his own body. He needed to sever their connection.
He couldn't move.
Somewhere near him, a voice sobbed, "Get out! Get out, get out…"
"I'm trying," he whispered.
The sobs stopped. He felt someone approach. Her. "You're not… him."
Severus struggled to focus. Alice. Her name was Alice. And him… "No, I'm not him."
"Who are you?" She was suspicious, afraid.
Severus was afraid, too, and couldn't hide it. His voice, or thought, was shaky. "I came to find you."
"For them!"
"No. For Frank."
He felt her confusion and frustration, and a softness, a tenderness, that she did not understand. "Frank?"
Severus wasn't sure how much to tell her. She was not like Frank, desperately clinging to the last remnants of his sanity. She was volatile, fierce, frightened.
"You knew him once," he said, cautiously.
"Before," she said.
"Yes."
He felt her considering him, razor-sharp, as ready to cut him away from her mind as accept him. He wondered if she could. What would happen to him, if she locked him away out of reach?
"Get up," she said, suddenly. "We can't stay here."
We. That was probably an improvement, but her tone worried him. "Why?"
"They'll come back."
Severus supposed there was little point in telling her that they had probably barely given her a moment's thought in years. It had been easy to be honest with Frank; he had retained a connection with reality. But Severus could feel, in the difference between this knife-like presence and the vague, gentle woman who peeled wrappers off of crayons, that the Alice in St. Mungo's and the Alice he was dealing with now were two very different people.
"Get up," Alice snarled.
Strangely, Severus was able to stand up. He looked down at himself, and found that he was in a body. An illusion, of course; there could be no doubt they were still inside her mind. But her mind, unlike Frank's, was not a shapeless ruin.
In fact, glancing around, Severus found that it was fully shaped. They stood in a forest, a dark, misty, twisted place, all gnarled trunks and knotted roots. Thorns cut through the wet, white air, black and jagged as they wound in and out of shadow. Rotten stumps, some charred as if split by lightning, some mossy and oozing, filled the air with a moldy stench. The ground beneath him was muddy, bubbling here and there with foul-looking puddles.
"Charming," he said.
"Isn't it just?" she muttered. Her hair was messy, ragged, her arms bare and dotted with goosebumps, her feet muddy yet visibly calloused. Her face was not like he had ever seen it in life: not the haughty, slightly conceited girl of his school years, nor the passionate, easily panicked Auror who had almost blown his (thankfully hooded) head off during a skirmish, and certainly not the frail, sweet-faced creature who blew bluebell-tinted bubbles at the ceiling to watch them float. Her face was hard, tired, stained with scars and bruises that had never existed in waking life.
Strange, that.
"Hurry up," she snapped, though in a low voice. Turning away from him, she started picking her way over roots and under thorns, stopping every now and then to disentangle her filthy robes from the briars.
Perplexed, Severus followed her, scowling as the imaginary thorns caught and tore at his robes, too.
"What is this place?" he asked.
"The Forest," she answered.
"Where are we going?"
"The River. He can't cross it."
"Then why didn't you stay there?"
She shot him a glare. "You showed up."
Not deterred, Severus asked, "And is there anything else, besides the Forest and the River?"
"The Hill," she answered. "But I don't go there."
"Why not?"
"My sister lives there."
Severus racked his brain, trying to remember anything about Alice Longbottom's sister. She certainly had not attended Hogwarts. "What is your sister's name?"
"Alice."
Ah. An imaginary sister, then. "And your name?"
She looked surprised, confused, then shrugged. "I don't have one."
Severus ceased his questioning for a few moments, considering. He had never entered a mind like this. Minds were composed of memory, emotion, experience. Dreams, intangible as they were, rarely appeared during Legilimentic sessions, though particularly memorable or emotional dreams could appear (as Potter's shared dreams with the Dark Lord sometimes had). He supposed that someone like Luna Lovegood might have a few daydreams (or delusions) vivid enough to be perceived by a Legilimens.
Yet he suspected that this place - the Forest - was not a memory, or a dream, or a daydream. Alice - both Alices, or however many there were - had retreated into a fantasy world. Had her mind always been like this? Or had she constructed it in a desperate attempt to withstand her torture? It was obvious that she had split apart in some fundamental way. Yet, for all that, her mind was altogether more habitable than Frank's had been. The intensity of her fantasy - its colors, its scents, its cool, wet mist - was impressive.
Severus's own fantasies were vague, intangible, just out of reach. Abstract concepts came easily to him, facts or mathematics or words. Yet he could barely call Lily's face to mind, except in those unfortunate moments when he saw her eyes in the Potter brat's face. Imagining her, particularly in daydreams about events that had never occurred, words she had never spoken, was almost impossible for him.
Not that that had ever stopped him from trying.
Perhaps, he reflected, as one of Alice's thorns gouged through his sleeve and into his arm, resulting in a very realistic gash (though, interestingly, no pain), it was no surprise that he rather envied this woman's imagination. What he wouldn't have given to retreat into a fantasy after Lily had died…
Still, Alice's fantasy left a great deal to be desired. "Why is this Forest so unpleasant?" he asked.
She gave him a you-worthless-dunderhead look that would have put his own to shame. "Because of them."
Interesting. Then she did not have total control. The fantasy was involuntary, perhaps; she was trapped within it.
And so, by extension, was he.
"How far is the River?"
"Do you always talk so much?"
"No," he replied, rather offended. "I am trying to understand this place so that I can help you leave it."
She snorted. "You can't leave."
Severus quashed the nervous twinge her words caused. "Have you ever tried?"
The you-dunderhead look returned. "What do you think?"
Half in honesty, half in a bid to provoke her into revealing more, he said, "I think you do not understand this place as well as you think you do."
"Don't I?" she snarled, spinning to face him. "Haven't I spent years here, fighting for my life, fighting just for a few seconds of rest - rest that I've never had! Every day, ever hour - fighting them - in this fucking Forest - fighting forever, without any help or anyone! Where were you - or Frank, whoever he is? I was here."
"Where is here?" he asked.
"You tell me! You just got here!"
Severus hesitated. Telling her the truth would be a colossal risk. What if he initiated some kind of psychological breakdown? Then again, she had spent half her life suffering through such a breakdown. Perhaps it was time she realized that.
"Very well," he said. "We are inside your mind."
She stared at him, mouth open, too stunned by either the absurdity or the revelation of his words to respond.
Yet the Forest responded. Severus jumped as a loud crack sounded behind them, then another, then another. Wheeling, he saw lightning flashing eerily through the mist.
"Run!" Alice screamed. "They're coming!"
Her terror struck him like a bolt of the approaching storm. Together, ignoring the thorns that tore at them, they ran.
