Thanks again for your reviews last chapter! Especially mycanvasisblank, her review managed to bring a tear to my eye. :)

I hope Harry's personality is a little clearer in this one. I wanted him to be a bit all over the place at first... I imagine those first few weeks after the battle would have been difficult to cope with. Before the emotional wounds had time to heal.

O

Chapter Four: Surreality and Sadness

…..oOo...

Severus was confused, to say the least, when he found himself being dragged across the hospital wing against his will. He hadn't done anything, he hadn't thought of anything in particular but the effect of Potter's touch – reveling in the lingering warmth that coursed through his being – before he suddenly could see again and the arched ceiling above seemed to be moving of its own accord, but that couldn't happen...

He'd turned his head without thinking, realizing after the fact that he could move again, and saw his own body, laying serenely on white sheets, drifting away from him. But it was the other way around, wasn't it? He was the one that was moving – sliding along in mid-air – away from his body.

It was surreal.

His movement stopped abruptly, remaining floating two feet above the floor on his back and almost directly in front of the hospital wing doors. Well, that had been strange... what had caused it? Nothing he'd done for himself before would free him from his body, and it now seemed that Potter had done it for him with a touch, by accident, for goodness sake... why was it that every time something happened in his life, or his death, Potter was involved somehow?

Severus' feelings were ridiculously mixed about it; on one hand he was having a small hallelujah moment in thanks for Saint (oh, how ironic that statement was now!) Potter's help. On the other, he was fuming; he wanted have freed himself in his own time! Bloody, meddling Potter! And still his underlying confusion and annoyance was still present of why any of it had to be happening at all.

He allowed himself several moments of his mixed internal ranting before his gaze lit upon his own body once more.

Looking at himself on the outside six feet away sobered him.

Regardless of how he felt about any of it, his predicament was blatantly obviously happening and there seemed to be very little he could do about it. So, dissolving into a blithering mess and screaming complaints to the heavens would do him little good. He couldn't very well be resurrected, and he certainly couldn't die twice, unless he stuck himself in the path of a basilisk as Nick had done five years previous.

As he'd said to Potter earlier: Suck it up and get on with it.

Well then, now what?

Perhaps the first thing would be to get himself upright and standing.

Testing his limbs proved easy enough now that he was free to use them, and it felt much the same way as it had when he was alive, just less pronounced, like what he felt was only a vivid memory of what it felt like before. He reached his hand towards the ceiling and felt the muscles in his arm contract and tense, but not quite. The feeling was muted, distant, though the movement itself was by no means the same and was just as responsive as it had been when he was alive.

The same initial thoughts triggered the movements also, so the conscious thought to stand must be the same as it had been, and it would feel more or less the same as well, he decided.

With that, he made the move to sit upright, like sitting up in bed...

… and turned himself in a half somersault, ending up with his head pointed to the floor.

Thank god no one was around to witness that.

Okay... how was he supposed to go about this?

Water, Severus decided, was the key. He was used to working with gravity, a surface always under foot. He was now working without any of that, no gravity, no surfaces, no up or down, much as it would be if he were underwater. And though water still held some of those traits, they were muted, and being underwater was more or less like moving in three-dimensional space, like what he had done just now, just without the movement of the water itself, cause by tides and what-not...

In thinking that though, he was certainly not going to go about his UN-merry way using a butterfly stroke.

But, it was something to keep in mind.

He stretched himself out, ramrod straight, so he hung upside-down in mid-air, and willed himself to, in a way, 'fall' sideways. He did one full three hundred and sixty degree spin before he caught himself and halted right-way-up.

Now, that hadn't been too difficult.

Again, thank god there was no one there to witness that.

Although he did have an audience, they were hardly in a condition to critique him. If the other beds in the hospital wing were anything to go by, they were the same as he was- or had been. Shrouded, still figures occupied almost every bed. He didn't want to count them... even one was too many.

Suddenly feeling quite out of sorts, he walked towards the door – the movement of doing so, thankfully, working the same way as it had when he was living – reaching out for the handle out of habit... his hand passed through the door.

His snatched his hand away, inhumanly fast, as if he'd been stung; a momentary pang of panic flaring up inside him before he gave himself a little mental shake and was reminded, yet again in the space of so many moments, that things were not as they had been.

Incorporeal... right.

Severus steeled himself and stepped through the door.

It wasn't so bad, a faint feeling of coolness in place of where the door passed through him

The floating thing was a bit unnerving though, and he was very aware of the fact that his feet did not touch the ground. Instead, his steps connected with the air an inch or two above the floor. But he did that, as long as he paid attention, it was really quite easy to move about. At least when he restricted his movements to those used when he was living.

In the hall outside the hospital wing, a lone figure caught his eye.

Potter.

The boy sat on the floor in the hallway, his back pressed against the wall and knees drawn up to his chest, he'd wrapped his arms around his legs and forehead pressed into his knees.

His shoulders were shaking.

He looked... broken.

Then, jaded green eyes lifted up to look straight toward Severus.

oOo

Harry couldn't stand it.

He couldn't bring himself to leave Snape there in the hospital wing in that condition, so he'd cleaned him up to the best of his magical abilities (and cleaning spells were not his strong-suit), but the moment he'd moved the man's hands and placed them over his chest, and felt the cold, clamminess of his skin, something in him had snapped and he just could not stand being in the room any longer, amongst all the people that had been lost, and he fled.

He had only managed to travel a few meters down the hallway before his own breath had nearly choked him as it left him in a rush and he'd just caught onto the wall before he sunk down like a stone in the lake and stayed there.

All those people, they were all dead, and it was all his fault!

A small voice of rationality in the back of his mind reason that it could not possibly be all his fault, but Harry wasn't listening to it. Too overcome by grief to care if his actions made sense or not, and nothing much he had done that day had made much sense to him, his only moments of clarity being his thoughts on Snape's heroism as he walked down to the boathouse earlier that morning.

Then he'd slowly started falling apart...

Talking to Snape; what happened in the boathouse had been mad, thinking the man spoke in turn was even more mad, but that little bit of speaking on Harry's part had given him just a tiny bit of a relief for the feelings that sprang up inside him when he saw Snape once more, lying in exactly the same position he had been left in.

Hermione; she was wonderful, brilliant, she knew exactly what to say when it needed to be said, but her words had brought his feelings of grief and guilt to the surface once more when he was trying so hard to keep them locked away. Keep them from Hermione, from Ron, and Ginny – all of them, because they all had their own grief to deal with.

The Hospital Wing; walking into that room, filled with so many people that Harry had known, all of which had lost their lives because Harry had returned to Hogwarts that night. None of them should have had to die. Not one.

And then, Snape's hands; that had been the final blow. The feeling of his cold hands had driven a knife into the shell that had been just barely keeping Harry's emotions in-check since he woke that morning – a shield that had been in place for years now, probably ever since Cedric's death, and had been ever so slowly eroded as time went on.

Because, –even though none of them should have died– out of everyone, Snape could not be dead. It simply did not make sense because, surely, the cold and callous professor that Harry had know for so long, and the jaded man that inhabited the memories in the pensive, could not be the same man that now lay prone on a bed in makeshift morgue.

To think that someone who had been that strong could die...

His parents had been strong, but he hadn't known them. Sirius, Dumbledore, Lupin and Tonks had been strong too, but he'd never had the chance to really get to know them... not well enough.

Harry had hated Snape for years – truly loathed him, and he'd thought he knew exactly what the man was like, but now Harry had had such a vast amount of absolute truth given to and laid out before him, showing every bit of selflessness the man possessed.

Even if Snape still remained quite an enigma to him, it was entirely impossible to for Harry to hate him any longer.

He was a true hero.

That was what made it so much harder to accept his death.

Harry felt his battered emotional shield shatter and he broke down right then and there in the hallway, sobs wrenched from somewhere deep inside him as he tucked into himself and pressed his forehead into his knees.

He sat there for a while.

When he finally managed to master himself once more, he wasn't sure how long he had been there. It couldn't have been too long, as the angle of the sunlight outside had barely changed, and no one had stumbled across him yet, for which he was thankful.

It was then that he became aware of someone watching him; that strange little sensation that bored into the space between his shoulder blades. Had someone come looking for him?

Slowly he lifted his head and looked up and down the hallway, gaze lingering in the direction of the Hospital Wing doors. For a moment he though he saw someone by the doors...

… but no one was there.

…..oOo...

O

Kinda short-ish this time, but it felt like this was the logical end of this chapter and I couldn't make myself tack-on more at then end. But, it means the next chapter will be up sooner than usual. :)

Oh, and just a quick note I feel I should share; as of next Tuesday (July 26th) I'll be in hospital for anywhere up to a week, so, sadly, there won't be any new chapters over that time period. Hope you can all wait that long. :P

That being said, I hope to have two more chapters up before then.