Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!

This is not the only posting for today; a regular chapter will be along, but later. This Intermission does address something mentioned in the first chapter, however, and which will be a regular, running theme of the story. Once again, Half-Blood Prince spoilers abound.

Intermission: Fever Dream

The world around him was dark, and close, and hot. The world outside breathed light rain, the coolness of early summer in this part of Yorkshire. But inside, with the fire blazing, and the windows shut, and the deep, sweet scent of sickness in the air, it could have been summer in a jungle.

Summer in a fever.

Severus waved his wand, and the fire flared higher. He gagged. From the bed came a rattling cough. Severus turned and looked towards it, thinking for a moment that his mother would fall asleep again.

A twinge hit his left arm. He rubbed it. There was a black symbol flickering there, smoke and fire, and then it faded. A snake and skull? Severus thought so.

And why not? he thought, as he moved to sit on the small collection of pillows not far from his mother's bed. I have thought of that often enough, in the last few days, and the atmosphere in here will affect me. But—there may be no need for that, even now.

Lucius had promised him that Severus could be a part of the Dark Lord's inner circle if he desired to be so. But Lucius promised many things, and if there was anything Severus had learned while he was at Hogwarts, it was wariness of promises made with a bright voice, or shining eyes—or, for that matter, half-lidded eyes in which wormwood cunning lingered. Lucius's promises could wait.

His mother was dying. It was important that Severus be here, that he see what happened when she did. He folded his arms on top of his legs and breathed in the sickness and the smoke. His head felt heavy. His thoughts drifted.

"Severus."

Severus turned. For a moment, the woman struggling to sit up in the bed—he knew better than to go to her and assist her—made him want to shake with shock. You're dead, you're dead, he wanted to say, but he knew she wasn't. She was dying. And why did thinking of himself by his first name seem strange?

The half-formed thoughts swirled and vanished like the smoke as he watched his mother lean against her pillows. Eileen Prince had never been beautiful, and what little liveliness remained in her face had drained away and vanished soon after she married Tobias Snape. Or so Severus imagined; he only knew what his mother used to look like at all from the three old photographs she had shown him. She had long since gone sour-faced by the time he was born.

"Do you remember what we spoke of yesterday?" she asked him, and then paused to let out a rattling cough. Blue stars of light flared and flashed and vanished around her crabbed hands and her liver-spotted throat. Severus forced himself to watch those without emotion. His mother had Pandora's sickness, which opened the box of her own magic and turned it on her, depriving her of any skill with a wand and accelerating the aging. Her weakness had been exacerbated, doubtless, by the smoke and pollution of the Muggle town she lived in. But it really did not matter what she was dying of. She was, and they could not have sought help from St. Mungo's even if his mother in her pride would have consented to it. They had no money for the Healers.

"The way of the world," Severus said, which was an answer to both his own thoughts and his mother's question. He saw his mother's eyes flash with anger, and he bowed his head. He knew what came next. He mouthed the words along with her.

"Forget that accent, Severus. Shed it. I understand that being among the relics of your childhood brings it back, but you must learn to shed it, or you will never gain any respect." His mother spoke slowly, carefully, precisely. She spoke like the proper pureblood witch she'd been raised to be. Severus's voice, when he didn't watch it, imitated the Yorkshire accent of his Muggle father. He had struggled, with his mother's help, to overcome that defect, but he still slipped into it when he was—

Well. Here. The house at Spinner's End, the home of his childhood, the small and slovenly hovel where magic had taken root, in his mother and himself, and grown strange and twisted, into a plant like belladonna if it was a plant at all.

His mother was trying to help him. Severus understood that. And mingled beneath his gratitude, twined with it, were helpless resentment of the world, that trying to sound different was necessary at all, and helpless resentment of her, that she had never tried to spare him from the harsh truths of the world as other mothers did. She had let him know what he looked like, what his chances were, with his mixed blood, in the wider wizarding world, and how his peers would regard him. He had gone to Hogwarts already knowing what he would find there, though nothing could have prepared him for the sheer malice of Sirius Black and James Potter. And so he had his mother to thank that he had not gotten—no, got—hurt more yet, but he also had her to hate for never having any illusions of a comfortable, safe, tame world to lose.

She had taught him to see with clear eyes. Hatred was more common than love. Behind all the grand illusions were common, petty secrets that others would kill to keep because of their pettiness. Honey and flattery were the sweetest poisons, and should never be swallowed.

"I understand," he whispered.

"Good." Eileen stopped and had to close her eyes for a moment. Severus lifted his head to study her. Her breath wheezed in and out of her lungs. A white star danced on her lips, then burst apart in a shower of sparks, and her coughing eased. By that, he knew it would not be long. Pandora's sickness, like the woman for which it was named, let hope free from the box last of all.

"I want you to understand one thing more," Eileen continued. "You have no claim to being pureblood, Severus."

Severus did not know how long it was before he whispered, "What?" His heart seemed to hang motionless in his chest, like a slug plunged into a jar of Salting Solution. His memories danced through his head—memories of his mother telling him that his father could not understand him because he was magic, and because he came from a much nobler, older, purer line than anything a Muggle could dream of; teaching him to write his name as Prince, and not Snape; telling him legends of dark purebloods and implying that he had a place among them. She had taught him to consider himself as pureblood in spirit. They would always scorn him, but he could honor them, and that meant the tie between them was never truly lost.

"You have no claim to being pureblood," Eileen repeated, slowly, in that manner that said she knew he was stupid sometimes, but there was no excuse for that. It was the voice she had used until Severus finally managed to go cold. "You're halfblood, and half-Muggle at that. That's as good as being a Mudblood to most of the wizards who matter." She let out another loud wheeze, and fell back against her pillows.

Severus blinked into the close, hot darkness. "I—you said that I—"

His mother cut him off with an impatient sigh. "And what did you think that was, Severus? The last gift a mother could give her child, of course. If I had taught you what you really were from the beginning, you would never grown a backbone and some pride in yourself, and your magic would not have manifested." She gave one of her older smiles. "And your father would never have realized how pointless it was to try and control you." She focused on him again. "I thought that once you reached Hogwarts, were Sorted into Slytherin, and listened to some of your Housemates, you would lose the illusions on your own. But you did not. I saw what you wrote in my old Potions book, Severus."

Severus bowed his head. The Half-Blood Prince. He'd called himself that. It was an appeal to the one thing about himself that he could be proud of, other than his skills in Dark Arts and Potions. All those things came from his mother.

And now—

"And I—"

"It is time for you to lose the last of your illusions," his mother cut in mercilessly. But is it merciless to pull out the weeds, so that the herbs survive? Severus thought, his eyes wide and focused on the fire. "You are not a child any longer. You should have stopped being a child long since. You are not pureblood, Severus, not a Prince. Neither are you a filthy Mudblood wallowing away in the sty, not even aware of what more there is to aspire to. I taught you to look upward at least, thank Merlin. You are an ugly, wizened, tough survivor. No one will ever care for you for yourself. If they pretend to do so, it is only another illusion, because who can love someone who only possesses useful skills, and not beauty or blood-right? But they might pretend to love you and lure you into a trap because of it, out of hatred. You have seen that. You must fight for a place, and never stop fighting. You must never yield. You must never think of yourself as a Prince, because then you would go easy on yourself, and begin to believe that you deserve things you cannot have." She leaned forward. "You will have nothing but what you fight for, Severus, and you deserve nothing if you cannot hold on to it. Do you understand me?"

The whole house seemed to be swaying from side to side. Severus felt that he had never noticed before how small it was, how dark, how close. And he had never felt more the sallowness of his own skin, the lankness of his own hair, the fact that he did not have a face like any pureblood wizard's he had ever seen, self-confident and beautiful and assured of its own place.

"I said, do you understand me, Severus?"

"I understand," said Severus. And he did. He looked up at her, and felt the twined gratitude and resentment and hatred and love and clarity stand up in him like a quintaped. "I understand, Eileen."

Eileen watched him for a long moment. Severus stared back at her. He felt as if he were seeing her for the first time. Cross and sullen she might be, but she was pureblood. The blood flowed in her veins and made her shine. She had a place.

It was no wonder it had taken her so long to get through to him. He was a halfblood, and inherently deficient of understanding. But he would have to hide that and gain understanding, wield his intelligence like the double-edged sword it was, in order to make sure that no one pureblood ever found out his weakness and used it against him.

And everyone would. Now, he grasped that. Now, he understood.

"Good," Eileen said then, and leaned back on her pillows, closing her eyes. "Bury me, Severus."

Severus lowered his head and stared at his hands. The sound of his first name already rang wrong in his ears. It denied what he was. It was an ancient, noble name, and he did not deserve that.

Nor did he deserve his mother's name.

He wondered if he could reconcile himself to his father's name, and all that came with it. And then he knew that he would have to. It was the only way to remind himself, at all times, of what he was, and yet give himself the strength and the goad to struggle for a place in the only society worth being a part of, that of pureblood wizards.

He closed his eyes and breathed in sickness and smoke, and thought of himself as Snape. He let the wounds on his soul bleed, knowing they would scar eventually, and he would be stronger for the scars.

Eileen had dipped him in the River Styx, just as Achilles' mother had in the old stories, but, like Thetis, she had only done it so that he would survive. And Snape planned to have no heel to make him vulnerable to his enemies.

Not my fear of werewolves. Not my fondness for anyone else. Not my blood.

Not ever again.