The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 37: (Happy) Accidents
I want to go on a cycling tour to Nice," Harry says, flinging down the day-old Times, which was all he could find today.
"Oh, I thought we could go bathing." It's good that Harry agreed to a site on the French seaside, because it seems the only way I can keep myself balanced is being by the sea. The constant reminder of something large and liquid helps me bear the immense weight of my stolen magic. We've taken brief bus excursions and walked and lain by the shore, but Harry never wants to stay in the water as long as I do. And he can't swim nearly as well as I, but I don't feel comfortable assuming my normal form that close to shore. Swimming transfigured makes my real skin itch underneath the other skin, demanding contact with the pure water.
"Then let's do our own thing today and meet up at the evening," he suggests.
"Let me cast the trident first, but you've been testing just fine," I say, guilty at feeling relieved to have a day to myself. "When does that cycling tour meet?"
"They meet at ten, so we only have half an hour," he replies, tossing aside the paper. Our eyes scarcely meet as we rush to get him ready. I give him the cellular phone we've bought to field calls about university interviews and other details about setting up our lives here. He puts it in the bag with his camera and sketchpad and then, with a kiss to my cheek and a look of gratitude, he is gone.
Within five minutes I'm in my trunks and wading into the water. With strong strokes I propel myself at an angle from where I started so the bathers are increasingly less likely to recognize me. I submerge myself in the deep, catch a tiny bit of the unknown songs of the fish, and resurface as Severus Snape. My true skin drinks in the seawater, my magic unfurls itself from the tiny corner I've had it bunched up in to be around people, and I swear it touches as far as the coast of North Africa.
Ahhh.
It's so much easier to think in the water, so I spend almost an hour alternately swimming and floating, considering last night.
I've not thought that much about Lilly in years, and now I wonder if it's not just the similarities in her and Harry's enthusiasm for causes. With Lilly, it might very well have been that her madness, the undoing caused by me, happened slowly over many months. If I had been paying more attention, if I'd been less blinded by my need for her, perhaps it could have been recognized in time and taken steps to stop it.
Yet here I am, losing myself happily in the waves, and just as easily relaxing in the trough of what must be the natural up-and-down of a couple's life together. Today we are apart, tomorrow we may stay in bed all day. But Harry and I can't afford that luxury ordinary couples take for granted—trusting that things will work out. I have to be able to track his magical levels and the effects of all the remedies we're trying to keep him in an optimal state.
When Harry comes back he is tired, slightly sunburned but full of enthusiasm about the French countryside.
"What did you do today, Severus?" he asks while we set up the projector so he can show me the photos from his excursion.
"Worked on notes for my research project I need to sell to the universities," I say with a twinge.
He smiles the way he always does when I refer to our future together, which is not very far in the future at all.
I smile back and gaze at these shimmering images that possess an artistic magic I could never replicate. In a way these notes I've begun to take about our time together are part and parcel of the research I wish to do at whatever muggle university is gullible enough to swallow my trumped up credentials:
My study is how to keep Harry and me together without killing him or driving him insane.
The next day we divide between sketching and writing, respectively, on the beach, and getting reacquainted after our day apart. Does everyone change so much day to day as this man does? The hard look that Harry's face sometimes acquires is gone. In its place is this stranger who has shipwrecked on the remote island that is my life. Afterward we lie in our hotel bed silently, taking each other in with our eyes and the tips of our fingers and our toes.
"The Boy Who Lived," I whisper, and for once the title that he never wanted isn't an insult or a joke or a curse. I'm just so very glad he did live through everything he has survived.
"So are you," Harry says in the same tone. "You're much more The Boy Who Lived than me after everything you've been through."
The moment is pure enough that I can't think of shattering it with a comment about my age or most of my sorrows having been brought on myself. "The two Boys Who Lived, then, they must take care of each other."
Harry puts his right hand in my left hand. "Agreed." It's as though a tremendous weight that this young man has always had to shoulder alone is now at least half off his shoulders.
He sleeps, and I summon my notebook and pen from across the room so I can write my observations and questions about his latest trident reading, which is much the same as the previous one. Perhaps his regimen of potions and my visualization exercises in bed are working. I'm dying to cast the trident but I don't want to disturb my lover by extricating my hand.
An hour later he wakes up and then we're distracted by showering together—always a bad idea if there's something else to do—and then choosing a new restaurant.
It's a beautiful night, with a clarity in the air from the slight chill that makes everything seem like it's exactly the way it's supposed to be. Harry and I are having dinner, which is mostly longing looks exchanged over an excellent poached fish, when suddenly he can't lift his fork.
"Sev?" he asks anxiously, "Why won't my arms move?"
Elegantly, I stand up, leave some money on the table, and move his body under my power in some approximation of his normal walk out of the restaurant. Then I hail a taxi and we are carried to the hospital while I kick myself for not testing whether it is safe to apparate him when his magical level is very low, because it is infinitely better than kicking myself for making him this sick and then not bothering to notice. His nose bleeds all over my shirt, so that at first they think I'm the injured one. Until I try to set Harry in a chair in the waiting room and he's too weak to keep himself from sliding out of it.
My calm is irreproachable in the hospital. I translate for Harry, who can scarcely move his lips. I do my best to implant ideas into the doctor's mind so that he will do the tests I think are appropriate. I consider a way to sneak in some of the potions I'd left at the hotel. And most of all I am negotiating with the Severus Snape of the future, who is going to use potions or hexes to quiet his accursed sex drive and take an Unbreakable Oath to never touch his lover again, if only Harry gets better.
When a nurse comes in and asks me my relationship to Harry, I remember that in this form, I'm much closer to Harry's age, so I say I'm his partner and leave it up to her to make an issue of it. She nods and eventually Harry is wheeled away for tests and I'm left in a chintzy cubicle imagining an enraged mob of magical people roaring at me for what I have done, for what they knew I would do, to the Boy Who Lived.
"The Boy Who Lived—Died Satisfying the Alkahest's Appetites!" "The Alkahest Destroys Everything, Even What He Who Must Not Be Named Could Not!" is resounding in my head when the doctor approaches.
"I'm Dr. Clairoux. The nurse tells me you are very inquisitive. Are you in the field?" he asks me while offering me his hand in that muggle custom I'll never get used to.
"In a fashion. I'm Julian Moreau, a scientist." The hand I extend feels strange to me, the name feels strange, but what is completely familiar is the dread. This incident might get back to the all-knowing Dumbledore and cause him to activate his contingency clause that will take Harry away…. Then I curse myself for being so selfish to think about that while Harry is ill.
The doctor is noticing that there is something underneath my carefully controlled exterior, so I smooth over my shield. "I don't know what's wrong with your friend—partner," he corrects himself, "but I would like to keep him overnight. We may have to intubate him at any moment. People don't just suddenly become too weak to move, as I'm sure you'll agree."
"Of course, thank you doctor," I agree. We're entirely in this muggle's hands. There is no asking Albus. He cannot know. I'm completely on my own and wish I felt safe taking Harry to a wizard hospital, but they'd no doubt connect Harry Potter and the signs of being drained by what would have to be me. Our plan is not going to work. Our plans…
The doctor comes back and without preamble asks whether Harry and I are up to date with our HIV tests. We are, actually. I dragged Harry to get tested the second morning we spent together, just as a way to show we weren't starting with any secrets. (We'd both been the reluctant center of the mental health world's attention for so long we had all of our tests and shots anyway, so I wasn't concerned). Clairoux nods when I answer we'd both just been tested and says something about risk groups and I hate him for a moment.
Then he starts asking, again without preamble, about Harry's genetic heritage and if anyone in his family had any number of horrifying degenerative neuromuscular diseases. Of course I don't know, but if I did, the cause of his illness is clearly me. It's the effect I'm worried about—his kidneys not working, his blood levels getting subtly but fatally out of whack. A heart attack from an electrical imbalance. A stroke from a blockage. These are my fears. But the Future Severus is selfishly raging at the nice doctor because this is the me who will be the one to lose sleep over which he'd rather Harry suffer from—multiple sclerosis or being eaten by his lover's magic.
The doctor's eyes have been roving around the room and then he looks right at me. "What is wrong with your friend's brain?"
He proceeds to show me printouts and rattle off test results along with a staccato summary of what makes them different than normal. Where is Lessmore when I need her? Actually, I follow him mostly very well—perhaps because my mind is desperate to understand.
I suddenly wish I'd read more about the scientific investigations into the magical brain. There have been a few in our world, or occasionally a wizard or witch will volunteer for a muggle medical study. It's impossible to say what baseline is for Harry, but the doctor gives me some interesting places to start my study, should I ever get to school.
All I understand from his explanation is that Harry's brainwaves seriously deviate from the norm. If that is so, I'm sure mine would really fall off the charts designed for muggles.
Trying to assure the doctor that Harry is not completely off his rocker, I remark "He does suffer from depression. Perhaps that factors into these results?"
Then the doctor starts going off on psychosomatic problems and conversion disorders and I want to scream at the muggle slant on psychiatry that seems to think that one can't have both mental and physical maladies at the same time, so I use my shield to start moving him away. We aren't going to get any answers tonight, and at least I know all Harry's organs are still working.
As if reading my mind the doctor says, "Other than gallstones, he's basically in good shape."
"Gallstones?" I repeat.
"It's the English diet, you know," he says and we exchange a superior look as Frenchmen. "Your partner will be coming back from testing soon. He had to be sedated a little because he was very nervous." The doctor gives a small bow to my thanks and leaves.
Rose-croix! I didn't think of how frightened Harry would be having strangers' hands all over him.
Quickly I apparate back to our hotel, grab my potions and trident and return to the room.
Harry is wheeled in a few minutes later and he looks too small, too young on the hospital bed. He feels the wrong magical color, and it must be the tranquilizer. His upper lip has traces of a stanched nosebleed. They are giving him fluids and I thank all that is good in the world that he can still breathe on his own.
He could be dead right now from paralysis of the lungs. I add another fear to my list.
When he realizes I am there his face lights up like a sluggish sunrise.
"Ssh, don't try to talk." And it's all I can do not to scream when he reaches two fingers a few centimeters towards my hand and my hand wants to comfort him and yet I know it will take some small fraction of his magic away.
Just like with my mother, his magic needs to go somewhere, to be directed to some purpose in him, and when it's not there he's fundamentally unbalanced, undone. I don't want him to go mad. I don't want him to die.
He lies there and basks in the strength and love that I manufacture for his sake. I'm saying endearments in French and then translating them because we are moving to France, of course. But all I can think of is the paint in my childhood home swirling around in the air because I'm digesting it off the walls. How my mother lost the power of speech early on.
In the clarity of this night, with Harry's two fingertips ghosting over my skin to reassure himself of my presence, I advance the science of Spagyrics farther than I have in twenty years. Harry's screaming diatribe at my cottage was correct—I've not been trying hard enough.
The nurses stop coming round so often and I try to contact Harry's mind directly. It's not something I've tried to do since we've been back together because I don't want to bring back bad memories, but he's either too sedated or we can't do it without Voldemort as an intermediary (curse the name!) He's looking at me with heavy lids, following my movements to cast a strong shield to give us some privacy. I cast the trident and his magic is almost gone except for the tiny trickle going towards me.
"Harry, mon amant," I am saying, and I start mixing all the different languages I know just so he will hear my voice and know he is not alone.
I'm trying to tell if any one of several new salts I've bought have a reaction in the trident when he says clearly "Nng!"
"What is it, love?" I wheel around.
"Nng!" he says, looking fixedly at a salt that is orange in exterior color, though blue in magical color.
"You want to try this one?" Glad to be doing something, I float a small pinch of the powder above him. It swirls over his gallbladder and a few other places.
"Nng! Nng!" He's saying urgently, but I hush him and try the other salts. They do nothing spectacular, so I kick myself for not bringing an alembic or anything else to decoct, and decide to rub in a little to his wand-hand wrist.
He grabs me with his right hand, startling the life out of me. He's sweating with the effort to try and form words, so I conjure an alphabet and run my finger over it until he blinks twice. Slowly, painfully he spells out the following:
Orange salt need more now luv u sev not blue.
I have to check and see which salt is physically blue because in my mind it's yellow. I consider the properties of the blue/orange powder, which is precipitate of moonstone, and the yellow/blue powder, which is extracted from Petal-pore rock. My mind is whirring while I take a mostly neutral salve I brought and mix in the salt that Harry asked for. I make a brief charm over it to distribute it evenly and then anoint his temples. His face clears immediately. Now alert, he watches me anoint points along the right side of his body.
When I put just a little over his gallbladder, he actually says something that sounds like "fuck!"
When I begin on his left side, he winces, however.
"What is it, Harry?"
Prickly. Not good prickly.
This throws me off entirely. My science, and any magical science, allows for differences between the right and left sides of the body, but the whole left side shouldn't be showing an aversion that registers as a slight coldness, now that I know to look for it.
My eyes are scanning around the room while I consider, and then I smack myself in the forehead.
Hermès!
Harry makes a questioning sound.
"I forgot to make a neutral magical space before I cast the trident, that's all. Who knows what sort of variables are throwing things off. Just a minute, Harry."
Sure enough, on the left side of his body is where the vent with that hospital-smelling air is coming out of. Who knows what sort of things live in that. My hands pick up something very faint–a blue? A green?–that is a definite active cool, but it's so heavily layered over by the artificial Neutralizing chemicals muggles favor I can't get any closer than that.
Whatever it is, it's interfering with the very positive reaction Harry was having to the blue/orange moonstone extract, and I won't have that. Yet banishing all influences, as any practitioner who wasn't beside himself with anxiety would have done, might get rid of some other invisible element that is contributing to the benefit Harry was deriving from the moonstone.
After some experimentation I arrive at a compromise: the shield on the left side has an extra layer to it, which I adjust at random until Harry says the prickly feeling goes away.
"Lll!"
"This feels good?"
Harry spells out: Like that! Leave it like that! More orange!
So with a trembling hand I distribute more "orange" compound to Harry's left side.
He takes a deep breath. "I feel like…the two sides of my body were traveling in different directions, and now they're not."
His head falls back, exhausted from the effort of speech, but he breathes deeply and appreciatively.
Hiding a fraction less of alarm, I smile encouragingly and kiss him and have just enough time to make my belongings disappear and sit down looking tranquil before the nurse comes back. The woman looks suspicious and checks a monitor attached to Harry. She gives me a sour look and I realize his pulse was speeding up.
While she busies herself with his monitors, my own heart is racing much faster.
The standard text on individualized medicine, Aberthwack and Twick's Cyclopaedia of Magical Correspondences, has been used for almost a hundred years, and yet it's little more than a suggestion of what might happen between a person's magic and various common treatments. And no one has done much to improve it since. If my life had gone as planned, perhaps I could have been the person to systematize this vague science, because I can actually sense the things these pioneering magical scientists could only observe in patients. Why these different reactions occur are just as far beyond me as they were to them.
Acknowledging that there are these hidden variables that cause great—sometimes fatal—differences in reactions to treatment is still a huge advance. Even without my gift, given enough data and the proper sort of equations, a close observer could come up with patterns that can help predict—for one person—what foods to eat/avoid, what remedies to use, what spells will be easy or taxing, and the psychological problems one tends to have. This much Lessmore and I had theorized, and it's not a unique idea.
What we proposed to do was determine some of the patterns and then extrapolate to a much more complete vision of a person, magically, physically and emotionally, down to potion prescriptions they can take on a preventative basis and the potential for telepathy between different people's matrices. It was a huge undertaking that would have required an enormous research team, which was why we were so anxious to get me placed at a university with good resources. The decisive asset was me, and my ability to determine what qualities a potion or a person was bringing to the table. It was the interaction we were unsure of.
It is an irony that I, myself, am the worst possible guinea pig, because nothing reacts with me the way it does for other people. Worse yet, I can't seem to pick out what compounds are particularly salutary for me. What Harry did, preferring one salt over another, I could sit there all day and not be able to decide what's right for me, though I can say what reacts in a positive manner with another substance or a person.
Since I'd not had any live subjects in years, I never thought to ask someone what felt right. All this time I was trying to come up with the overarching theory before testing it.
Tonight I had new information—what felt right to harry and what didn't, as well as his gallbladder problem which just might be the Archimedian one place to stand by which to move the world.
And this happy accident of not banishing the space before I treated him—if I'd done what Lessmore taught me before anything else, I wouldn't have found that the environment adds a new level of complexity that can apparently be very helpful indeed.
When the nurse left I cast the trident again. Harry has regained just a bit more magic. He sees and his tongue flops around in his mouth excitedly. Yes my love, let's celebrate that I haven't completely digested you yet, I think, smiling warmly down at him. We make some experiments and find something to use for his left hand, and after a bit of yellow (to me pink) salve, he says very clearly, "Merlin, Sev, where have you been hiding this stuff?" and he lifts up his left hand and extends it to me until I grasp it and feel it steady in my own.
With equations racing through my mind, I make everything invisible and sit down for the doctor who walks in a moment later. "What are you doing to our patient?" Clairoux asks jovially in heavily accented English. He makes a note of something on the monitor and then uses his stethoscope to listen to Harry's heart. "His heart is beating faster, but that is a good thing compared to the sluggish beat from before," he says to me in French. He looks at his fingers. "Acupressure points," I say, pointing at several points where Harry's skin has a slight sheen from the salve. "I study the intersection of western and alternative medicines."
He is too genteel to sniff at the knowledge outside his tradition, but he is not open to the idea. "Well whatever he does, tell him to let you sleep a little," he says to Harry, and leaves.
"We have much to do together, love," I say, nodding at the awareness that he's helped with a big discovery, "but please do sleep. I won't leave you." I smooth his hair, over and over, until he finally falls asleep.
While Harry sleeps I revise a lifetime's worth of work, mourning Lessmore's absence with every step.
I'd heard of the Philosopher's Stone, of course. Every magical child is brought up knowing that there's something somewhere that is the essence of magic, and that it might not be a bad thing that no one has discovered the ultimate charm that could help or harm the world as we know it beyond repair. Everyone has a barmy uncle or aunt or other distant relation who claims to be farther advanced than anyone has ever been on the road to discovering this Stone, which has been described variously as a liquid, an equation, an incantation, or, to the eugenicists out there like my grandmother, as a genetically perfect magical person.
It all seemed too far off to be of much interest to a practical being such as myself, but I supposed you could phrase some of the theories Lessmore and I were working on in terms of the Philosopher's Stone. For me, it would have to have a chromatic element, because for my specialized system color is the best shorthand. Then again, my childish forays into posture- and sound-magic showed that these dimensions can be very powerful indeed.
Now I'm beginning to see that the Stone could be the compass I've been missing in my attempts to predict magical individuals' reactions to treatment. If we knew this missing variable, be it a number that unlocks predictive phenomena, or somethings that places someone where they are on an axis mapping all potential reactions…. We'd be able to solve many stubborn health problems.
Further, once we know that number, it could probably be used to maximize any person's potential to the point that their weaknesses were almost eliminated and their strengths greatly enhanced. One of the papers we never managed to publish—perhaps because there is little interest in placing wizards and muggles within the same system, albeit very far apart— was that magically inclined people had managed to pick out their "number" in certain circumstances. This facility was what allowed our kind to discover charms and potions and other magical arts that seemed to break natural laws. It was like a key magically inclined individuals had found and only sometimes could they find the right lock.
When Harry wakes up he is much better and we thank the doctor and nurses, all of whom seemed suspicious of something but I saturated them with enough peaceful energy they may not know for a month what it is. I pay in cash, explaining that we are in the midst of relocating, so that we can avoid leaving a trace with the credit cards in the name of Julian Moreau I have been flinging about right and left on this identity-establishing trip. Seeing him wheeled out to the front where the taxis are nearly kills me. All I can think was of Dumbledore watching and being very angry with me for being so selfish.
I carry Harry from the taxi and lay him on the hotel bed. He dozes while I remove his clothes and take a wet cloth and wash off the bad hospital smell I can't bear being associated with him. I place him under the covers and apparate back and forth between my house and the room, the room and an esoteric bookstore in Paris, Paris to a market for an assortment of foods to see what he feels is right to eat. When I return he is just stirring a little. "Severus," he says happily, "I can move my toes."
The future Severus is flogging himself with a cat o'nine tails.
"That's good Harry," I say, and hold him in my arms. He tries to fumble with my shirt and I say, "you can barely move, why are you doing this to yourself?" but he just wants to be skin to monstrous skin, and he falls asleep again.