Severus wishes that he had a broom.
He had never been fond of flying via brooms in the past but he'd rather be traveling on that dreaded flying contraption than walking for miles on end up this rocky and mountainous landscape with his own two feet.
Wizards just weren't meant for this kind of travel.
"What's the name of this accursed mountain again?" he grumpily questions the raven on his shoulder with a tired huff.
Kazu cocks his head at him and comments, "It's a hill, not a mountain."
The bird rolls its eyes at the weak-ass wizard and wonders if the human might start passing out any moment now from exhaustion.
"Are you sure it's a hill? We've been walking uphill for hours and I don't think we're anywhere near the top," Severus bites out through gritted teeth. If it wasn't for the cooling spell he'd casted on himself a few miles back, he's sure he would have been sweating through his travelling cloak by now. The shady hat on his head, which he'd transfigured from a leaf, provided barely any relief from the glaring summer sun above.
"You're almost there," the raven encourages him, "it's just round this bend and then we should be able to see signs of the village." Kazu had taken flight a few hours back to ascertain exactly where they were from the sky and had confirmed that there was a small village atop the hill they were climbing.
When they had landed in the middle of the wilderness of Tea Country, Severus had grumbled under his breath at the cruelty of one white raven for dumping him and Kazu miles away from any indication of human civilization.
'She couldn't have left us conveniently next to a town somewhere?' he had pondered irritably before deciding that the two of them should start discussing what to do next. It was better than simply standing there and gawking at the green and hilly landscape at any rate.
"Why don't you just use that 'divination' magic you've been trying to work out," Kazu had cleverly suggested.
Which brings them back to the current 'mountain-tracking' situation the two of them now find themselves in.
The wizard, with his still-experimental practice of divination, had divined that they were meant to climb up in the direction of the village so as to come upon a fortuitous encounter.
"So, a 'fortuitous encounter' huh?" the raven quizzes him almost teasingly. "Do you think we should have maybe apparated straight to the village instead of climbing the hill on foot?"
Severus pauses a moment to catch his breath and wipe some sweat away from his brow.
"No, we're meant to walk up towards the village," he insists with a frown.
"Couldn't you have divined exactly how and where we would have this 'encounter'?" Kazu cocks his head questioningly.
Severus covers his face with a palm and points out exasperatedly, "I did tell you that my practice of divination is still a work in progress."
Kazu squawks out in amusement at that.
Severus soon hears the gurgling of running water. He turns from the path he was climbing and slowly trudges towards the source of the sound. He certainly wouldn't mind stopping by a stream or river for a bit to soak his aching feet in the cool water.
The pair duck under a few overhanging tree branches and after walking for a few minutes, were treated to the sight of a small but clear stream.
Kazu suddenly lifts off from his shoulder and dives into the clear stream. He surfaces a moment later with a struggling fish in his beak. Severus watches in fascination as the raven swallows the fish in one gulp and wonders if maybe the raven had a bird of prey in its family tree somewhere.
"You want one?" the bird inquires politely but Severus merely shakes his head to decline.
He instead walks up to a small boulder by the stream and starts removing his shoes. He leaves his footwear on the boulder and wades into the shallow running stream. The cool water feels heavenly and he's almost tempted to remain here for the rest of the day.
"Your trousers are getting wet," Kazu comments pointedly but the wizard ignores him. It was nothing a bit of drying spell couldn't solve. He'd like to just stay here and soak himself in the water like a particularly dehydrated plant for as long as he could, thank you very much.
A slight rustling in the overgrowth breaks the tranquility of the moment but before Severus could even turn to look at the source of the sound, Kazu launches himself towards a patch of tall grass and disappears into the dense growth.
Severus immediately takes a stance and has a stunning spell at ready.
A few tense seconds later, the raven bursts back out from the tall grass and lands smoothly on his shoulder.
"I think I found our fortuitous encounter," the bird informs him warily.
"What is it?" he inquires, trying to guess at what might be hiding in the overgrowth.
"Didn't you say that a clue to your divination would be the colour green?" the raven reminds him.
Severus nods. He had presumed that the colour green indicated the trees in the forest where they would come upon the 'encounter'. It was the sole reason why he had chosen to go up to the village through the forest trail rather than the well-used road.
"There's an injured boy lying in there with green hair," Kazu reveals. "Guess you were right about taking the forest trail."
"Does the boy need immediate medical attention?" Severus questions as he wades his way back to his footwear.
"Judging by how corpse-like he looks, I would say that he needs a miracle," the bird tells him morosely.
Severus quickly puts on his walking shoes and uses a quick drying and cleaning spell. He hurries towards the patch of overgrown grass and pushes the tall green stalks away.
The green haired boy is curled up in a fetal position on the forest floor. His skin is almost too pale and his clothes look like they had been through a shredder. There were multiple bruises and cuts on his scarred skin from what Severus could see through the holes of his shirt. The boy looked like he had been through a few rounds with a Hungarian Horntail and got spit right back out.
He casts a diagnostic spell on the boy and is soon bombarded with so much appalling information that he's tempted to just put the boy out of his misery.
"What's wrong with him?" Kazu asks anxiously. The kid was just a child after all, he shouldn't have been left for dead in the middle of nowhere in such a condition.
"What's not wrong with him?" The wizard angrily grimaces and starts going over all the potions he'll need to start treating the boy.
"He's been poisoned to his gills with so many different types of substances, he should have been dead years ago," the wizard bites out. "We'll need to find a place to treat him."
"Put him on my back, we can fly him to the village," Kazu urges him.
But before the raven could transform to his larger form, Severus stops him.
"Wait."
The wizard contemplates for a bit and then says,"The diagnostic spell detected long years of physical abuse both to his internal and external organs. We don't know who has been abusing him and I'm not sure if the village is a good place to take the boy."
"You think the villagers did this?" The raven cocks his head to eye the child.
Severus shrugs and casts a simple healing charm on the boy to keep him from dying on them. "Let's heal him and then we can ask the boy himself."
That's how they find themselves flying on Kazu's back whilst heading towards a direction North.
"Are you sure it's this way?" the bird questions as they cross overhead above acres of terraced fields planted with tea and rice.
"It's supposed to be a valley hidden between a few hills that look like the shape of an almost perfect triangle," the wizard responds as he holds onto the boy whilst they're riding atop the large avian.
"Is that all your divination could tell you?" the raven asks with a sigh.
"I was divining for the closest place to build a safehouse and that was the only hint I got," the wizard grouches out. They might cause too much of a spectacle if they barged into a town or village with an almost-dead boy and a giant bird, he imagines.
They fly a few more miles, this time going North-East before they spot what they were looking for.
Kazu lands gently in the middle of a clearing and slowly they lower the boy down onto a transfigured bed made from a dead branch lying on the ground.
"What now?" the raven questions, looking around and seeing only wilderness. The tall hills surround them on all sides and a patch of triangular blue sky could be seen above their heads. Besides that, a lush forest surrounds the clearing they've landed in. They certainly weren't going to find any handy hospitals or healing rooms here.
"Now, I get to work," Severus glances around to study the environment. He most definitely had a lot of transfiguration spells to cast.
He pulls out a few colorful bottles from his magical sack. "Feed him these few potions first," he instructs the bird and then proceeds to walk away muttering about make-shift camps and security wards.
Kazu looks at the few potions by his feet and then to his avian-claws before looking at the unconscious boy. It was definitely going to be a long day.
The first time he wakes up, he knows he's being moved from the forest ground where he assumed he'd breathe his last.
He had been resigned to his death and thought that it might finally be a welcome change. There would be no one to whip him when they were bored or use him as a test subject. He'd finally be free, just like the birds he's seen flying outside his cell. He wonders if that was what death was like, the freedom to go anywhere he wanted.
It was only a pity that he couldn't take them all with him when he finally kicked the bucket. He would have savoured their dying screams. He imagined using the poisons he had been given throughout the years on them, it would have been such a satisfying sight. Their pain would have been so beautiful.
He'd long since become numb to pain but he remembers what it was like. After years of being injected with poisons though, his body had learned to shut it out as a 'defense mechanism'. He understands what that means and all their other medical jargon and theories which they had discussed among themselves while they observed the effects the substances had on him.
They were usually disappointed when he kept surviving poison after poison. His 'grandfather' had even decided many times to try to speed up his demise by sporadically whipping him with a horse whip when he was in one of his drunken spells.
He should have at least stayed long enough to stab the man to death with a blunt knife before his escape into the forest.
He knew however that his body was failing, death was soon to be at his door and he wanted to at least be outside his cell and free for that.
He's soon jostled from his position and his mind gathers itself to pay attention to what's happening to his body. He's being carried, almost gently, in someone's arms. He hears two people talking about healing him and wonders who they are and why they're thinking of saving him.
He knows his own body and he recognizes that no medicine or healer in the world could possibly heal him at this stage of his condition. He knows it's too late.
His mind soon falls back into consciousness but before it does, he thinks that he's glad that at least someone had, for once in his life, tried to help him.
The second time he wakes up, his mind is still foggy but he is a little more conscious of what's happening around him. He takes in the feeling of the soft bedding he's lying on; he doesn't think he's ever laid down on such soft material.
He opens up his senses with whatever remaining chakura he has and detects that there's no one in the room with him, which makes him lower his guard for the moment. He then looks inward with his chakra and is instantly surprised at the state of his body.
The poisons that were once slowly killing him little by little were no longer doing so and if he isn't wrong with his own self-diagnosis, they have even begun to coexist in his very cells. He's still carrying the poisons but they were no longer a danger to his own health. In fact, the very organs that were slowly breaking down due to years of the abuse have even been healed to peak condition.
He wonders if he's dreaming. No one could possibly have healed him to this extent.
He throws his senses out with chakura to beyond the four walls of the room that he's in. He tries to decipher if he's now being held prisoner once again and if this is just another more comfortable cell.
He discovers that he's in a large house with many rooms and beyond that, there's a large forest filled with tall trees surrounding the place. He tries to look for any signs of life besides his own only to realise too late that he's overused his chakura.
He falls unconscious once again.
The next time he wakes up, he hears the sound of rain falling on the eaves of the roof and tapping on the glass window panes.
He detects that there is someone in the room with him and he tries not to tense up in alarm, pretending to still be unconscious. He doesn't even try to throw out his chakura in fear that the other would be able to detect it.
He strains his ears instead to listen to what the person might be up to.
The sound of fingers flipping through paper clues him in to the idea that the person might be reading something.
'Reading? What's this person doing reading in here with me? Is he looking at my medical chart in order to think of what to experiment on with my body?' the thoughts float through his panicked mind.
His fears prove unfounded as the person proceeds to spend the next two hours just sitting there flipping through pages of a book, he decides, and occasionally sipping on a cup of tea; he smells the comforting scent of green tea from where he was lying on the bed.
Lowering his sense of vigilance, he decides he'd like to know more about the other. So far the stranger didn't seem to have any ill-intentions towards him and he might even be the healer who had healed him.
He spends the rest of the next two months pretending to be unconscious while he observes the man called, 'Severus'. The man who had rescued him.
He listens in to all the conversations between the man and his raven.
He learns bits and pieces about who they are and why they've saved him. He doesn't quite know what they mean by a 'fortuitous encounter' and how he could be of any help to them. Everyone else in the village had deemed him as being a disgrace and a shame to the community, so to be looked at as something 'fortuitous' seems somewhat absurd.
He learns that the man is someone called a 'wizard' and that he has powers beyond imagining. He had even used those powers to save him, someone who had already been knocking on death's door before he had been rescued.
He hears about the world of the summons and that many of them regard this man as their friend and kin.
They appear sometimes, the different animal summons. They poof out in clouds of smoke to visit the man on a frequent basis from their own pocket dimensions. They come in all shapes and sizes, young or old, furry or scaly, eight legged or none, but the one thing they have in common is that they all treat the man as their own. They show him affection the same way they do one of their own and the man responds in kind, offering solutions to their problems with his power and his miraculous potions.
Many weeks in, he wakes up one morning and detects that the man is in the kitchen with the raven, Kazu, and a small koi-summon that swims lazily around in a glass bowl by the kitchen shelves.
"How long are you going to wait for him to wake up?" the fish summon asks, blowing colorful chakura bubbles up teasingly at the man.
"I never give up on a patient," the man says simply to the koi and proceeds to sip his morning green tea.
The boy suddenly thinks to himself, 'I want to be there. I want to meet him,' and he opens his eyes for the first time since he's run away from the village.
Severus is in the kitchen one morning, having breakfast and conversing with one of the visiting koi summon when he hears the sound of pattering feet running swiftly towards the kitchen.
He looks up and sees his green haired patient standing at the threshold of the kitchen, dressed only in his simple white healing robe.
The boy smiles tentatively at him and shyly asks, "Can I have some green tea?"
And that is how Severus Snape meets his adopted brother, Shiki.
*Snape's Family-Recipe Green Tea* by Snape Shiki
Fresh roasted green tea (15 g)
Ever-Spring water (50 ml)
Lots of love