With a jolt, Severus found himself back in the operating theatre, sitting on the floor with Potter, the harsh, gasping sobs tearing out of the boy's chest rasping across the surface of his newfound consciousness. With an ease born of long practice, he banished the searing memory – It's true, he's dead – now that I'm finally free, what the deuce do I do now – and grounded himself. This was no time for self-indulgent contemplation. There were lives to save.
He looked up at his two newest critically injured patients, suspended face-down in mid-air in two levitation 'beds'. Mediwitchards were already there, keeping the charred bodies clinging to life, ministering to the burns. But no sooner had a burn been healed than it erupted again, deeper than before. Severus found himself shaking, but quelled it sternly. He pulled his hand from where it had been resting on Potter's knee, shoved the weeping boy aside and rose, only to find Pomfrey rising with him, her hand on his shoulder.
So that explained her voice in his mind. "You were there too," he said roughly. It was not a question.
"Yes," the mediwitch rapped out, wasting no further words. From the panicked look in her eyes, he knew she had seen the curse, and he knew that she would have nothing in her arsenal to counter it. "Do you know the countercurse? Any countercurse?" she said urgently.
Severus closed his eyes. The curse was so very old – it was ancient magick, since before Hogwarts – from the time before magic was written down in books, from a time when wands were unnecessary, when a wizard could use the force of his will alone to curse you into an enchanted sleep for a thousand years. He delved deeper into his memory, trying to find a cure, trying to remember. His eyes opened and he looked desperately at Poppy. "It's too old," he rasped desperately.
She held his gaze, refusing to give up hope. "Never say die, right?" she said gamely, though her voice cracked.
"Never say die," Severus repeated and raised his wand as she aimed hers.
"Finite Incantatem!" Nothing. "Episkey!" Nothing. "Accio burn ointment!" He knew the ointment would crash through the door to his office, and didn't care. It arrived, scattering splinters in its wake, and, flinching, he spread it over the twisted limbs. The skin soaked it up and glowed slightly for a moment, then shrank back into dry, carbonized hardness.
Pomfrey was there now with undiluted Derma-Gro. She sloshed it onto the blackened flesh. Nothing. She laid her hands on Weasley, murmuring an incantation. Nothing. "Anaferno!" Nothing. "Finite!"
"I already tried that." Severus growled with frustration. Trying to make a dent in the elemental curse with their modern spells was like pelting Quaffles at a wall of granite.
"Benedictio! Balsamis! Panaceum!" Pomfrey's wand crackled with magic as her voice grew increasingly frantic.
"Accio!" A vial of Cooling Solution snapped into Snape's outstretched hand. Poured onto Granger's back, it had no effect.
"Santus! Benessere!" Pomfrey gave up on verbal spells and began trying non-verbals accompanied with fiendishly complicated wand movements, mostly consisting of drawing runes in the air.
"Accio!" His notes on Arabian healing spells flew into his hands. "Bardan wa Salaman! A'uzubillah min ash-Shaytan al-Rajeem!" He might as well have been reciting a language lesson. Severus' stomach roiled as his wand indicated that Weasley's breathing was becoming irregular.
"We're going to lose them, Madam! We need help!" a panicked young wizard turned to Pomfrey just long enough to blurt before he turned back to the two children.
"Specialis Revelio!"
The spell came from the stupid boy. As though the secrets of a spell since the beginning of time could reveal themselves! Nevertheless, he found himself stepping back to see if anything would be revealed.
The Morsmordre merely rose off the burns, flickering green for a second before dissolving into thin air.
"I'm sorry, Harry," Pomfrey began.
"NO!" the idiot boy yelled, suddenly grabbing at Pomfrey's robes, gasping and pleading. "Think of something! You've got to!" He was in a state, shaking like a leaf, the pain in his eyes palpable.
But Severus had no sympathy with idiots who distracted him when he was trying to work.
"Got to, have we?" he sneered. "I don't recall taking orders from you, Potter." He was trying to think. Harsher than he'd intended, he snapped: "Contrary to your experience, Potter, the world isn't just sunshine and roses. There can't always be a happy ending."
Potter spun, screaming. Severus actually flinched at the madness in his eyes. "Don't you think I don't know that? I've always known it! But I didn't want them to die for me! I'd have died rather than live without them!"
"Much as I would love to pander to your self-indulgent emotions, Potter…"
"SHUT UP!" Potter launched himself at Severus. But his volatile state rendered him weak; Severus merely deflected him with a shove, sending him reeling into Granger's 'bed'. As if it wasn't enough that he'd put them in harm's way, now the fool was endangering his friends' treatment! The mediwizard stabilizing her reeled backwards, momentarily losing his focus as Potter grabbed gruesomely onto the flesh charred dry, his tears splashing over the burns.
"Harry, we can't have this here, now. I'll have to ask you to leave," Pomfrey said gently, and Severus could hear in her voice what the diagnostic spells had already told him: They were dying. He had never cared particularly much for Weasley or the know-it-all, but he felt an unaccustomed pang nonetheless.
"Isn't there anything I can do?" the boy sobbed. "Please let me…" He bent over Granger, shoulders shaking. "Hermione…" he choked. "Ron… please…"
He wondered how much time the teenagers had left, and cast another diagnostic, bracing himself for the answer.
"Harry, dear, we've tried everything we know…"
He blinked as the answer floated up from his wand. Granger's vital signs had improved from "Sorry, Ready to Croak" to "If You Don't Really Hurry, She'll Be Dead." What could have…
He looked up at Granger and found himself staring at where Potter's tears had landed. "Look!"
Like islands in an ocean, spots of clear, unblemished skin shone amid the charred blackness. They actually rose cliff-like above the burned areas, leading him to believe that the flesh had been completely rebuilt. Poppy and Harry whirled, following Severus' mesmerized gaze, mouths dropping open.
Ancient magic, Severus thought, his mind in a whirl. No substance more powerfully magical, more ancient, than the tears of your one true beloved. Like Lily's sacrifice, it was a magic that predated curses, predated writing even, a magic that came from the fount of creation itself. Potter must love the Granger girl, then, he thought; but the notion was barely formed when Pomfrey grabbed Potter's shoulders, whirling him round to face Weasley, infused with an urgency he'd rarely seen in her. "Do that again."
The stupid boy's tears were already drying at the thought of hope for his friends, but he obediently removed his damp glasses and dashed the remaining moisture from them onto Weasley's back. And damned if the same thing didn't happen! Wherever the tears landed, the flesh miraculously healed and stayed whole. A quick diagnostic confirmed it: The tears were pulling him back from the edge of death, too. Severus frowned for a moment and thought: He loves the boy, then?
But Pomfrey was excitedly moving their 'beds' together, joining Potter's hands to their blackened, twisted claws. He barely had time to register a sort of grudging admiration at the lack of disgust with which Potter held his friends' charred stumps, before he saw it.
It formed around the three of them, glowing brightly: the aura that showed him why Potter's tears had worked. Severus gulped: this was old magic indeed, and none more true. He stared at Pomfrey and saw the dawning light of triumph in his eyes reflected in her own.
But then he looked at the idiot boy and his heart sank; it would have been comical if it wasn't so serious. The blasted fool was shining with hope now, all his tears dried!
"Potter," he hissed, "you must keep crying!"
"Don't be so hard on the boy, Severus!" Poppy admonished, but he had no patience with this. He rounded on the boy, taking him by the shoulders, wrenching his hands out of his friends' grip. His stomach twisted as he saw blackened pieces of finger fall to the floor, but he ignored the feeling. If he didn't get this done soon, no-one would be in a position to care, anyway.
"Potter," he hissed, "for once in your miserable, worthless life you have the opportunity to actually do something useful – by sheer good luck, as everything in your life has been – and I will NOT allow these lives to be thrown away because you cannot shed a tear!"
Potter just aimed that vacuous stare at him again, dry-eyed. "But – but I can't!"
"Yes, you can! I can give you a potion that will increase your lachrymal production, but you will have to do it on your own. If I thought it would work, I would willingly use the Cruciatus on you to get the tears out…"
"Go ahead."
Idiot Gryffindor. Fools rush in, indeed. He grabbed Potter's shoulders and shook him. "I KNOW the NATURE of this magic, you IMBECILE! Your tears MUST be for these two idiots! I can siphon the tears off with a charm, I can engorge them up to a point, but YOU-WILL-HAVE-TO-BLOODY-WELL-CRY, Potter."
That blasted deer-in-the-headlights stare again. Snape rapped out a string of expletives, a single one of which would have brought the wrath of Eileen Snape, née Prince, down upon his head if she had heard it, grabbed Potter's wrist and hauled him off towards his lab. "Come on."