Nothing Found is Lost Anymore
by Asphodelle
Rating: M
Summary: It is June of 2001, four years after Voldemort was defeated. Severus Snape lies, nearly dead, in the baking desert sun. They took his memory. They blinded him. They cut his hair and erased every trace of who he once was. But Deborah Kirkwood, a reclusive, bitter author, finds him.
Chapter One
For Deborah, thoughts of death came often. She thought of death in the paranoid sense; being a clinically anxious person, she imagined, in any given situation, absolutely every way she could possibly die. It's not that Deborah feared death. She often thought of death as a release. An exhileration. On a day like this, in the middle of June, when the sun was obscured by a wall of orange dust, when the sky all around her was an apocolyptic red like blood, she thought of death. She thought about standing in the middle of her seemingly endless desert property and waiting for the sandstorm to hit her. It would whip her long brown hair violently across her face, sting her cheeks with tiny peices of glass, fill her eyes and mouth with dirt. And she would throw her arms open and throw her head back and throw her voice away and up, outward, screaming into the onslaught. Her laughing screams muffled by the roar of the wind, nobody would hear as the duststorm overtook her, slicing her into shreds, and carrying the peices away into the atmosphere to settle later on the newly washed SUVs of the wholesome, regular people of the world.
Deborah was not afraid of death. She was afraid of losing control. The thing that scared her about dying was doing it in a way she had not forseen. She was afraid of the universe making her look like a fool. As long as she saw it coming, death would be quite alright, and that is why suicide was always so appealing to her.
Of course she never did it. In her down moods she was never despondent enough to go through with it, and in her lowest moods she was always too depressed to do it. She was wise in that she knew death could never provide the answers she was seeking so desperately. And maybe that was another thing about dying that scared her; she would die as confused and lost as she was today.
And lost was something Deborah never was. She could always feel where her home was, and so used that as a sort of North star to guide her way back if she became a little displaced. Likewise, she knew every square inch of her thousand acre property, which is why she noticed it right away.
It was the evening and a storm was headed in. The air was the strange, deathly still that always perturbed the animals before inclement weather. She was sitting atop a relatively green filly, three years old and jet black, who was walking along the trail surprisingly calmly. The air smelled like dirt and Palo Verde trees, the way the Sonoran always does during monsoon season. The air was warm, but random slithering, soft breezes were strangely cool as they pulled strands loose form her hastily gathered ponytail. They were just about to head back. Deborah didn't want the filly getting any dust in her large, sensitive eyes. Deborah had just reined to the right when she caught sight of something peculiar half a mile off. She squinted into the rosey dusk as a stronger wind began to blow sand around her mount's feet.
Was was it? Maybe some sort of hurt animal. It wasn't horse sized; maybe it was a cow that somehow wandered over from a neighboring ranch or something. Deborah looked at the horizon, up at the mountain that loomed in the close distance so reassuringly. It was almost completely obscured by thick, grey-brown dust. She thought of turning around again, but something didn't feel right. Instead of the usual pull she felt toward home, she felt toward this strange object lying at the southeast edge of her property.
She made up her mind and cued her filly. Her filly reacted willingly, picking up her head and breaking into a fast canter. This had to be quick; dust was already starting to sting at her eyes. Overhead, behind the storm she could see thunderheads fast approaching, and powerful streamers of lightning backlit the mountain. She urged her filly into a gallop, in the meantime worrying greatly about picking up a rock, stepping into a hole, or being attacked by a pack of coyotes. Her worry, however, wasn't as great as usual, as she could somehow sense the peril in this was not all her own. The object up ahead, she knew, was somehow in danger, and when others were in danger, Deborah had no time to play paranoid games with herself. They were getting close now. The object was pale and pink, and Deborah was beginning to fear it was a person.
Yards away, she knew it was a person. A man, to be exact. He had no clothes on and his skin, which looked as if it was usually deathly pale, was a violent red. He was spreadeagle on his back, his eyes shut loosely and his mouth gaping unattractively.
Deborah didn't wait for her horse to halt before she jumped. Like a goat-tyer she hit the ground running and fell to her knees beside the man. The storm was almost fully upon them now and Deborah tried to squint her eyes against the pain of the dust. Behind her, the filly stood obediently with her butt turned to the storm. All around Deborah the horizons were disappearing.
Kneeling over him, she knew he was dead. His lips, chapped and bleeding were dark grey, his crusted eyes partly open and not moving. She couldn't see him breathe. The only movement about him was his short, black hair waving wildly in the gusting wind. His skin was so burnt she didn't want to touch him, but she had to find a pulse. She reached around his neck and felt for the arterie. It was hard to feel any veins, as he was surely dehydrated, but she finally felt something. A flutter. That was good enough.
As much as she didn't want to touch a sunburned, naked man she took his thin, long arms and pulled them around her neck. Painfully scraping the backs of her hands, she reached under him and pulled him into a rag-doll embrace. His body was limp and dangerously cold and dry, but he luckily weighed about what a bale of hay did. With a burning strength she didn't know she possessed, she pulled him over her shoulder. Her muscles screamed as she struggled to stand, nearly toppling over, but she used the force of the now roaring dust storm to help balance her as she leaned. Once she was standing, it was easier to move and she walked as quickly as she could back to the filly. The quickest way to get back home was riding, but how would she do it with this extra baggage?
The filly stood mercifully still as Deborah used one hand to unbuckle the beat up roping saddle and push it off the horse's back. It landed with a thud and a clang beside the horse's feet, and yet the horse just shifted.
Deborah flung the man over the back of the horse, stomach down. She pulled herself, with some effort, onto the back of the 16 hand tall horse and took an awkward possition behind the man's body. Luckily enough, he was slightly built, and she herself was small. She grasped hard with her knees and wrapped one hand in the filly's long, black mane, the placed on the man's back to keep him in place. She dug her heels urgently into the filly's sides and the horse took off obediently. Deborah prayed the horse would have the sense to head back to the barn, which was just beside the house she lived in. Either way, they were headed north and away from the storm.