Author's note: A couple of quite angsty chapters ahead.

Please, Severus … we're friends.

Aveda Kevadra! and a flash of sickly green …

It was a dream, Snape knew it was a dream even as the scene played out. A dream he couldn't wake himself from, a dream that any moment now would —

Please, Severus, Charity begged.

Ah, there it is. Back to the beginning, and through we go again.

It was a dream. A dream he had almost nightly for years. Surely at least the edge of the fear and shame and self-loathing of it should have worn off by now? But no. Charity Burbage pleaded with him again, and again he turned a blank face of indifference to her. Aveda Kevadra!

Over and over. Please, Severus … we're friends. Charity died again, and again, and again without even a comforting word, a kind smile, writhing in agony at the mercy of the people she feared most in all the world.

Aveda —

Snape jerked himself awake at last and flung himself out of bed as his stomach turned over and cold sweat prickled his skin. He made it to the sink before the first painful spasms and leaned there, retching until his stomach was empty.

Please, Severus … we're friends.

Voldemort was watching me. She was there as a test for me. If he'd given away any hint of his real feelings Charity would have been just as dead, he would have soon followed, and all Dumbledore's plans and plots would have fallen apart in that instant. There had been no choice.

Liar.

There were always choices. They were all choices.

Charity had not done a single atom of harm in all her life and a great deal of good. While he, on the other hand, had done a great deal of harm and only one really good thing in his life and in what should have been his last moments he'd had the indescribable comfort of seeing her eyes set in the face of her son, the son who — after everything, despite everything — had tried futilely to save him.

Who, after everything, had been kind.

And Charity had not woken up in the half-ruined Hospital Wing with Poppy Pomfrey crying over him, sobbing out dear boy, my poor dear boy over and over.

Please, Severus …

He had chosen. He had chosen to stay alive, to maintain his cover, to continue his work. It was the right choice. He had known it at the time; he knew it now. Charity Burbage, if she was here, would say the same.

If she was here … ah, there's the rub.

He ran the tap, scooped a palmful of water to rinse his mouth, and straightened. Five years of Poppy and Tilney conspiring to cosset him had had its effect, and the man staring back at him from the mirror looked thin, but not wasted. You wouldn't know, from a glance.

Until …

Deliberately, he raised his left arm, palm towards the mirror. At any time over the past five years, the gesture would have shown him a faded scar, all that was left of the Dark Mark.

Now …

Snape forced himself to look at the grey flesh. His efforts at containment were working: it had still spread no further than the diameter of the Mark. He could feel the curse seething in its confinement, longing to be released to spread its evil through the rest of his flesh, to sink into his blood and bones and run rampant through his body. It was designed to cause an agonising death, and for all his skill and knowledge, all Snape could do was delay the inevitable.

When the time came, though, he'd cheat the curse of his pain, at least. No need for me to force a friend to strike the killing blow. There were ingredients in the storeroom at this very moment that could be combined to end his life quickly and painlessly.

Not yet. He had, perhaps, a year before he reached that point, and it was a year he intended to put to good use. By the time he lifted that final vial to his lips, Hermione Granger would be the best teacher of Potions he could make her, and he would know that his subject and his students were left in good hands.

Snape lowered his arm and gave his reflection a bitter smile. Ironies upon ironies.

That he had surrendered any hope of surviving, at the end, only to find himself alive despite himself.

That he had abandoned all hope of doing any of the things he had sometimes allowed himself to dream of doing if he was ever free of his two terrible masters, to keep himself safe from Death Eater revenge, and that revenge had found him anyway.

That it had been the insufferable know-it-all Granger who had turned herself into once of the most competent Potions researchers in the country, and the logical choice for the Potions Professor of Hogwarts in the years and decades ahead.

Who would have thought, five years ago, that I would find myself here: once more teaching Granger, once more in the classroom …

Once more dying.

Note: The words in Snape's nightmare are taken from the film version.