Chapter 52: In Which Snape Awakes

Severus woke with his heart pounding, covered in sweat, and sticky with semen, as well. For a moment he was extremely glad that Hermione preferred to sleep curled against his back. Then more memories of the dream came to him, and feelings of anger, guilt, shame, and lust all hit him at once.

Goddamn, bloody, fucking dream! 'It'll tell you about your personality element. What the hell kind of element involves… that! Fuck! Severus got up gently so as not to wake Hermione. He most certainly did not want to explain his current state of sticky disarray. The clock read 5:05. Must get a shower and see if I can find Willow.

His bad mood worsened as he got into the shower. The water on his body just brought back more images from his dream. He stayed under the spray just long enough to wash off and then was out.

He was stalking down the hall toward Willow's office when it occurred to him that she didn't live in her office. In fact, he didn't know where any of the older members of the group, besides Xander, lived. His level of frustration and anger began to coalesce around him, forming an almost visible blackness. A barely audible litany of angry and embarrassed curse words followed him as he changed directions and headed toward the kitchens. If he couldn't find Willow, at least he could find a cuppa.

He didn't find his cuppa. He did find Willow. Or rather, she found him. She appeared in the hallway in front of him less than a minute after he left her office.

"I could feel you from home." She took one look at him and said, "I see your dream wasn't what you were expecting."

"Bloody right it wasn't what I was expecting! I was expecting air. I was expecting flying."

"And you got?"

His scowl deepened. "Not air."

"Let's go into my office and talk."

He followed her, and she silently wondered what on earth could have him in such a bad mood. She opened her door and settled on one of the pillows her students used. She offered him a seat, but he paced around her office.

"So, tell me about the dream."

"I don't want to."

"Of course you do, you came looking for me at five in the morning."

"I want to yell at you for opening me to such a thing!" He snarled at her, forcing his anger towards her in an almost physical burst of magic.

She sat calmly on the floor as he towered over her. Willow let herself try to feel what was bothering him so much. As she relaxed, she noticed that the main cause of his disquiet was embarrassment. So what would cause Severus to be so embarrassed?

"You don't have to tell me, but it'll be hard to move on in your training if I don't know."

He turned quickly from his pacing, glared at her, and continued walking. She continued trying to get a feel for what he had been dreaming about. Fortunately for her he wasn't even trying to block his emotions. Finally she got a momentary glimpse of the dream. Oh, Snape, Spike, Buffy and Hermione. No wonder he's upset.

"You think you're the first wizard to have sex dream that bothered you?"

Snape stopped dead in his tracks, glaring at her, while she continued speaking blithely, "Look, sex is usually an indicator of fire energies. It's just the way your brain chose to get the point across."

"We were in the pool."

"You were in the pool?"

"Yes woman! Are you deaf? The pool. Water all over the place, no fire to be seen!"

"Huh? Interesting. Any other fluids?"

"Sex in a pool: what other kinds of fluids do you think there would have been?"

"Okay. We've got sex, water, and semen. Was there a death symbol?"

Snape's eyelids lowered. For a second he was about to say something blisteringly sarcastic, and then it hit him. Spike was a death symbol. Spike was a huge fucking death symbol with a deliberately rough accent and bleach blonde hair.

"Yes."

Willow was starting to see some relief coming over Severus's features. "How about blood?" she asked.

Even if there hadn't been literal blood, the fact that a vampire had been in the dream would have filled the bill. "Yes, there was blood in the dream."

"Both sexes present?"

"Yes."

"Did you do something that indicated accepting the death symbol?"

"Yes." Bloody dream! How on earth am I going to look at either of them again? He still felt mortified, but much of the anger was starting to fade away.

"Sounds like you hit gold. Remember I said that magic fits roughly into one of four categories. Well, here's where roughly comes in. Above and beyond elemental magic is life and death magic. Some people use the term necromancy, which covers healing to killing to the undead, but most people forget about its context as life magic as well as death magic because of the name. If I'm interpreting your pissed off and embarrassed manner as well as the bits you've told me correctly, it sounds like there was something of a live/dead male/female orgy in the pool last night in your dreams."

He nodded stiffly. She made a somewhat complicated gesture and the stone that had so interested him whizzed off its shelf and stopped in front of his hand.

"Go ahead, take it."

He held the stone.

"It's been calling to you since the first time you saw it. This is the stone I used as a focus when I tried to bring Oz back from the dead. It didn't work. But what you felt about it, what you noticed as different, was the life magic. It's beyond the elements. Most of us can feel it, but using it is very tricky. I couldn't really use it when I cast that spell. I can now, but by now I know not to try again.

"All of the elements are required for something to be alive, but all the elements cannot make life." Willow sat and thought. Severus finally stopped pacing and sat next to her, holding the stone, and trying to understand what he felt while it rested in his hand.

"All the potions you make are used to do something with someone. They're all about changing life in some way."

"Yes, but isn't most magic?"

"Not really. Most magic is about changing matter: making things do stuff. Making that rock fly to you. Or making a lock open. Conjuring things. Making things burn or freeze or change. With the exception of Care of Magical Creatures, you probably taught the most life involved course at Hogwarts. I bet water really isn't your element. It's life. You've got potions skills. Can you heal? Are you good with dead things?"

Severus began to warm up to the topic, especially as new ideas began to fade some of the dream images from his mind. "I'm better at potions than anything else. With a potion I can cure almost anything that can be cured. I haven't had too much experience with non-potion healing, but what I have done worked well. Spike is the only 'dead thing' I have any experience with. That's not quite true, but I've never bothered to do anything with the castle ghosts, besides sit History of Magic."

"How about magic designed to hurt someone?"

"I'm good at that, too. I invented a spell that severs flesh. It usually cannot be healed. I can fix the damage that spell creates, but I think I'm the only one."

"And you survived an attack that should have killed you?"

"Yes, but that wasn't my own magic. That was a protection placed upon me long ago." His eyes went unfocused for a moment. His thoughts were a long way off. "That was also life magic, very, very old life magic."

"You have no children?"

"No. Not a lot of opportunity, and I make a very, very good contraceptive potion."

"You would. Anything that heals or kills you'll make well. Have you killed anyone other than Dumbledore?"

"Yes."

"It was easy wasn't it?"

He answered with a tight voice. "I didn't find the spell difficult, if that's what you mean."

"That's what I mean. I don't mean that you enjoy killing, just that you'd have a talent for it if you ever decided to turn your hand to it. There are times where that skill will prove to be a blessing. Life and death is all the same thing, just different stops along the same road. You can't have a talent for the one without skills with the other."

"So, what does this mean for learning wandless magic?"

"It means that you'll find anything involving a person, animal, or plant, easier to do than say light a fire, or levitate, or make the wind obey you. Not to say you won't be able to do that as well, but..." Willow stood, grabbed a knife, and cut her hand. "Pay attention to what I do."

Snape focused on her, and felt her bind the wound, heal the skin, reconnect the blood vessels. She tossed him the knife, which he caught deftly.

"Do you think you can do it after seeing me do it once?"

"I can try, and if I can't, you can fix me up."

He chose his arm as his target, rather than risk damage to his hand. He made the cut shallowly, not wanting to see anything too reminiscent of the blood play in last night's dream. He dropped the knife, and placed his hand over, but not on, the cut. For a moment he focused on the pain, and on the way his body felt, the way the magic of his body felt, and then he began to will the cut to close. And it did. He held up his arm, wiped the blood away, and showed Willow the smooth, unscarred skin.

She smiled brightly at him. "Yes, you have great talent for this. Now, as wonderful as your newfound skill is, it's six in the morning, and I'd like to try to get another hour and a half of sleep before I have to be back at breakfast. You could probably use some sleep as well."

And, just as with his experiments in the pool yesterday, he was once again feeling very tired. "I'll walk you to your room, and then I want you to get at least another three hours of sleep."

When she got to his door, she said in a low voice, "Don't worry about being embarrassed, just about everyone here has had a dream or two about Spike. For all I know, he causes them on purpose. And, if you do spend a few days shying away from him and not looking him in the eye, he'll know what was on your mind last night. Same with Buffy. Xander couldn't look at him for a week, and then Spike spent the next year teasing him about it."

"How did you know?"

"They might as well be a human ankh. You don't get a better life and death symbol than the two of them."