Here I come with a larger (hopefully) and new chapter in what I WILL make into an adventure. It isn't healthy to wallow in angst even for people like Snape. I need to give him something to do.
As for my reviewers:
Barbara: You are making sense, and I know what you are talking about. That is part of what I am trying to portray here. Besides, this version of Snape is a considerably evolved one.
t.a.g.: Hm. A few, I should think. But whether they'd stay united after a final end to their sect/movement/voldie-worship, I doubt they'd go against Hogwarts. Not yet anyway.
JaimynsFire: The scar is reacting to intense dark magic/evil... I doubt it will ever stop doing so... ofcourse, Potter could just have cut himself in his sleep with a razor. heh.
Now on with the story.
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"Is it Voldemort? Potter?" I am trying to get through to the boy thrashing in my hands and trying to avoid any kind of contact. It is getting harder and harder to dodge kicks and punches as I carry the boy to my bed.
His scar is bleeding more and more, until it appears as if an artery is gushing from his forehead and drenching the pillow, the sheets, everything. The first thing I feel the impulse to do is call Poppy. Then call Albus. Then I remember that they are both dead and instead I call for Minerva. At least, I yell at whatever house-elf is lurking nearby to get Minerva here or else.
It is the first time I hate that there are no students in the dorms. I am not sure anyone actually heard me. And once more I have to deal with a Potter Emergency all by myself. The brat doesn't seem prepared to stop bleeding on his own.
However did you manage it this time, you miserable little twerp?
I point my wand to his forehead and run a quick scan of his brain. I was afraid he would be in a stupor, but it seems that not only is he not unconscious, he is actually in an alternate state of consciousness. I cannot tell what it is he is seeing. At least he has not been thrashing at me.
I do not want him to have an aneurysm, however, or a stroke, so I mutter a calming charm. He gasps and shrieks, his eyes flashing open, unseeing, with an inner light I definitely don't like to see in his pupils. I know dark magic when I see it. Even when I would give anything never to recognise it again in my life. I mutter Finite Incantatem before he suffocates himself with all the gasping.
Pushing any questions to the back of my mind in order to answer them later, when Potter is healthy and properly chastised, I contemplate how to help the boy. I can't stop the bleeding or coax his mind out of the stupor with any charm that the Light condones. This calls for a surge of power far stronger and harsher, a command for the keys to the boy's consciousness to be relinquished to me. I sigh and point my fresh, new wand at Potter.
"Imperio Cognitas," I mutter, and instantly, Potter goes slack. His mind is linked to my own, only I hold the command. I have to order Potter's mind to do what it needs to, and if it takes a variation of Imperio to do it, then so be it.
[You need either commas after both 'stabbings' and 'screams' in the third sentence, or commas after neither.] Unfortunately, this version of Imperio links you to your target's mind completely. And I feel the pain. I feel the stabbings, and the screams and the despair. Then I see. I see the dark power pulsing, rabid around me, even though I know it is not me, trying to rob me of my energy, trying to possess me and my power, although I know it is not my power that it is after.
Why Potter, of all people?
The boy's consciousness is overwhelmed, and the only thing he feels is the pain of resisting the dark influence. I grab his arms, and then I hold him close to me.
"Stun it, Potter," I snap at him, and he whimpers at me rubbish about Diggory and Granger and his deserved demise.
"Fine," I tell him and I order him to wake up. I push him away from the darkness that doesn't seem to affect me as much as it does Potter's psyche, and put mine between them. Potter's image disappears from the plain. The dark creature is enraged, and it suddenly directs its attention to me. But there is no time left for it to attack me. The Imperio Cognitas helps me anchor to reality, and finally my quarters' surroundings materialise again, and I find myself looking in Harry's eyes in a lock of stares that he cannot break.
"Finite Incantatem" I sigh, and immediately I feel relief not to be linked to anyone, even if I have the upper hand.
"Whatever is going on, Severus? What is Harry doing down here?"
In any other occasion in the past, only Albus' reassurance that I had not the faintest intention of molesting the Potter boy would she not curse me within an inch of my life. But after everything that has transpired, she is only looking at me like an extremely ruffled, worried mother hen.
"He is drenching my bedsheets, as you can well see. At least he's deigned to stop," I describe the obvious to her, then proceed to wake Harry up. He moans and is reluctant, but in the end I charm him awake.
He blinks at me, bewildered.
"Do you have any recollection of the past hour, Potter?" I ask him quickly. He just stares at me. I try again.
"Are you deaf or is the question too complicated for your intellect?"
He shakes his head as if trying to shake images away, and Minerva glares at me as she sits at the edge of my bed and rubs Potter's back. He leans against her and starts to cry. I watch for a while until I start feeling decidedly ridiculous. But then something makes me suspicious. Through his tears, Harry is falling asleep again.
Potter might be a twerp and a horrible sample of a student, but he is not the type that falls asleep on his feet anywhere except in History classes where it is normal.
"Wake up, Potter!" I snap at him and he shoots upwards so fast he nearly head butts into Minerva's chin. That would be interesting to watch. But I am starting to see a pattern here. A pattern that I have to break until we can figure out what to do with the new foul entity to plague Potter.
I get a potion from my personal stash and mix it with a quasi-elixir to reverse its effects. I make the boy drink it.
"This will keep you awake even if you should be sleeping," I tell him, and both he and Minerva are looking at me oddly. But Minerva thankfully doesn't need ALL the t's crossed.
"Why must he remain awake, Severus?"
"Because if he falls asleep, he will die," I state calmly. After all, there is nothing better than the truth, is there?
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