Let's do it Right This Time, Chapter 24

Severus glanced down at the result of the diagnostic that he had just cast. No injury, no illness, just total magical exhaustion. Severus stopped and stared at it, and then at the boy. How could a child have exhausted this much energy? How could anyone? But the boy whimpered, and Severus realized that he had to start by giving him replenishing potions. There would be time enough for questions later. And there would be questions.

The Potions Master rose from his seat beside the boy, going to his personal storage cabinet and lifting out a box he had not touched since the end of the last war. Taking out a jar full of thin silvery teal liquid, he forced the boy to swallow it, wiping the excess that trickled down Gaunt's chin. And he waited. There was nothing else that he could do, at least until the boy regained consciousness, and the best thing at the moment would simply be to let him sleep.

So Severus summoned a Potions Quarterly and some quizzes that he had to grade, sat in his favorite armchair, and settled down to wait, making sure the floo was warded and that he had a few pepper-up potions waiting; he knew this would likely take a long time, and he also didn't want Dumbledore or some other well-meaning colleague nosing in his business, although he knew that it would be futile if the headmaster really wanted to talk to him, seeing as he held the wards. But he had to try, and so he sat there, hour after hour, buoyed up by pepper-ups and the last lingering effects of the two cups of coffee he always drank in the mornings, and he graded papers and watched Gaunt breathe.

Gaunt did not wake up when he had expected. Though the pure exhaustion seemed not to last any longer than the four hours that he had expected, rather than wake up Gaunt only slipped into a lighter sleep, misty violet eyes rolling beneath his eyelids.

It soon became evident that Aurelius Gaunt did not sleep well, or at least he wasn't at the moment. At times he whimpered in his sleep, twitching like a puppy dreaming of its mother, or murmered broken, mournful, incoherent words. Severus knew what it was like to suffer from nightmares, and once or twice he made an abortive attempt to sooth his student, but drew back before his slender fingers so much as touched his hair; Severus Snape did not do comfort. And yet he wanted to ease the boy's suffering- any student, or man, for that matter, did not cry like that without some cause, and he felt a strange compulsion to run his fingers through the messy, mad blonde curls. He might even have done it, too, except that as he was about to, the boy gave a sharp little cry.

"Teddy! Teddy!" he wailed, thrashing in his sleep as though trying to escape hands that were clutching at him, tears streaming silently down his cheeks. A pause, and his eyes flickered open momentarily. He simply lay there for several minutes, twitching and muttering and crying in his sleep. And tthen he spoke again. And the words sent chills down Severus's spine. "You disgust me. Killing a child, James? Remus's child? Get out of my house. Now. Or do you think I am too noble to cast unforgivables?"

Severus felt numb. James? Remus? How- what-

Aurelius Gaunt muttered something that sounded horribly like "crucio", tears streaming down his cheeks. Severus summoned a shot glass and a bottle of firewhiskey and gulped down a shot, coughing as the liquid burned its way down his throat, then put it back- he should not be drinking on school hours.

But all he could think about were those quiet words.

"'Mione, why?" the boy gasped, struggling. "What...trusted you!"

Severus closed his eyes, trying desperately to think. He wanted to shake the boy awake and interrogate him, but he had to sleep as long as his body would let him if he was going to recover from whatever trauma had depleted his core- probably classes on top of the parselmagic he had done in the morning, now that he thought about it. He sat vigil as the boy drifted in and out of dreams, watching late into the night until at last Gaunt's lavender eyes flickered open and he stared around him, fumbling for his wand.

"Easy, Gaunt," he found himself saying.

Those strange lavender eyes fastened themselves on his face, and all of a sudden the boy relaxed, tension visibly draining from his body.

"Professor," he replied quietly, a faint smile finding its way across his face. "What happened?"

"I found you in a part of the castle you had no business being in with your magical stores totally depleted. Care to explain?" Severus said as he summoned the potions that the Slytherin would have to drink.

Gaunt winced. "It's a long story."

"We have time enough."

"Ok, so I might have asked the Bloody Baron where the wardroom was to update the parselmouth anti-rape laws that some chucklehead thought would be funny to take down- I think it was Lionel Gaunt? And I might have accidentally taken on the full ward structure."

Severus realized absently that his mouth was open, and hastily shut it. "Who the hell are you?" he hissed when he could finally speak.

"Aurelius Gaunt," was the soft reply as the boy drank the potions he had been given, throat bobbing. "I- I'm not sure how much more I should say."

Severus knew that he shouldn't try to get answers from him now. He also knew that he'd likely end up dead o if he could not figure out who this boy really was, and this was no boy. And he knew that the potions he had given the boy for magical exhaustion would have a bad interaction with veritaserum, so the only way to get truthful results was "legilimens!"

And then memories that were not his own washed over him in violent waves. Sirius Black, struck by a stunner, falling backwards through a ragged, translucent curtain and vanishing beyond it, as a boy's voice screamed "Sirius!" A little boy, obviously a metamorphmagus, being held down by two aurors as a killing curse struck him, his acid green hair turning white in death. A woman in the most appalling shade of pink he had ever seen, handing a Black Quill to a boy and forcing him to write lines. Professor Quirrell, eyes glittering coldly. "Where is it?!" A bolt of green light from his wand, striking Albus Dumbledore in the chest. Remus Lupin, twisting into a werewolf. A basilisk with its eyes blinded, chasing a boy who stabbed desperately at it with...was that a sword? A room filled with timeturners and jars containing little models of the life cycle, Rabastan Lestrange crashing through it and getting one of those strange enchanted jars on his head. A warped figure of a boy in Slytherin robes, screaming and fading away. A cauldron full of polyjuice bubbling away in a boarded-up bathroom. A monstrous, snake-like demon, rising from a steaming cauldron. A young woman in tears. "But y-you never loved me! It was all amor-amor-amortentia!"

Severus tried to back out, but couldn't.

A voice crying "sectumsembra!" and Draco Malfoy collapsing, bleeding. Himself, bleeding out- he almost managed to extricate himself from the flow of memories at that, but it sucked him back in as he tried to do so.

A giant snake devouring Charity Burbage. Lily's voice, screaming. Himself, sitting next to an ill-looking Dumbledore: "And my soul? What of mine?" A house elf with a knife in it's chest. A voice screaming "Kill the spare!" and Cedric Diggory collapsing, dead. Himself, older, black eyes narrowed. "Get up and try again. Or do you think the Dark Lord will give you a chance to catch your breath?" James Potter and a young man extraordinarily like him screaming at one another: "You ought to be grateful. At least you're not Snivellus's son!" "I wish I was, you son of a bitch! The man may have been a bastard but he did more for the Wizarding World in one year than you did in your entire miserable life, and died for it, too, all while you sat back on your arse eating bonbons with your new pureblood wife!"

And at this, Severus Snape, youngest potions master in history and spy for the light side collapsed in a dead faint.