The world was going black. The ceiling in the Shrieking Shack refused to stay in focus. He'd done all he had to. It was okay; it was time.
He'd lived with regrets for far too long, already.
His nerves screamed in pain, more intense than a crucio, and never ending.
Shouldn't the pain be fading by now?
Severus struggled to think, to focus. Something seemed wrong.
He was dying. Of course, something seemed wrong. He was being torn from this life and into the unknown.
Only… he wasn't.
The pain wasn't going away. He could feel the puncture wounds in his neck pulsing as his blood trickled free. He could feel the venom eating away at his veins as it slithered beneath his skin. It was eating him alive.
Consuming him.
Why was he still alive?
He blinked, and tried to focus on the rough, wooden-planked ceiling.
It seemed closer than it had been a moment ago. He didn't remember it sloping quite so sharply.
That was odd.
He shivered, and instinctively wrapped his tattered old blanked closer around him.
Blanket?
He didn't have a blanket in the shack.
He certainly didn't have this blanket.
A new wave of agony and nausea washed over him, causing bile to rise in his throat.
Lurching to his feet, Severus stumbled over to the steep ladder-like stairs that led to his attic bedroom, and clambered down them.
He burst through his home's back door, and emptied his stomach onto the hard dirt of the neglected flower beds. He thought he had cemented over these beds, years ago?
His limbs trembled, and Severus could feel a sheen of sweat bloom across his body as he vomited once again.
A whimper escaped him, high and childlike in its misery.
Merlin, he felt like death.
His sleeping t-shirt clung to his thin frame with sweat, making him shiver convulsively.
He needed to make it back to bed.
Back… to his childhood bed at Spinner's End.
Looking up sharply, Severus groaned and grabbed his head, as the world spun violently around him.
His hand was a child's hand.
Stumbling back in shock, Severus leaned heavily against the doorframe of his house at Spinner's End.
He blinked hard and looked around. The vision of his left eye was blurry and swimming in dark shadows. It pulsed with the same pain that radiated from his neck.
Was Nagini's venom eating his eye? Was he going blind?
That didn't make sense. Nagini had bitten him when he was an adult. Her attack shouldn't be affecting him here. Not now.
Was he hallucinating? Was he in a coma? Was he dead?
Was this the 'next great adventure' that Albus was always going on about?
Before he'd died. Before Severus had killed him.
He looked down at his left forearm. The tendons in his wrist twitched in pain, but the skin was blessedly clear.
No Mark.
Surely, if there was an afterlife, Severus would remain saddled with the scars of his mistakes. Marked.
He rubbed at the unblemished skin with the thumb of his right hand, so small and frail. So innocent.
Only Severus wasn't innocent, was he?
This had to be a dream.
Nagini was slowly killing him, and Severus' mind had been overloaded at the trauma. It was cutting up his memories and piecing them back together in a way that didn't make sense.
It was the only explanation.
"Severus?" the voice of his mother called from inside the house. "Why's the back door open?"
Severus swallowed hard. He hadn't spoken with his mother in years.
Could he face her? Did he want to?
"I'm out here, mother," he said, his young voice a shock to his ears. "I'm not feeling well."
"Well get inside before you make yourself worse, you foolish child," she snapped, exhausted and exasperated. "I'll get you some medicine."
Severus winced in sympathy. He remembered hating it when his mother sounded that way, knowing that her passive aggressive barbs would soon dig in deeply to his psyche. Now, though, she just sounded like him. He'd never appreciated her bitter regret, and volatile lashes against the circumstances that kept her trapped, as a child.
Merlin. He had thought he'd done well, to avoid becoming an abusive drunk like his father, but he'd become his mother instead, hadn't he? That was almost worse.
With a heavy sigh, Severus closed the back door behind himself, and headed to the kitchen, where his mother kept an assortment of muggle medicines and potions disguised in muggle bottles.
He still could not see clearly out of his left eye. He was still in pain. Reaching up, he felt at his neck and shoulder. The skin was unbroken. There was no wound there, but the pain from the venom remained.
It was because he was trapped in a coma. He was still dying. This illusion changed none of that.
"Are you sick to your tummy? Do you have another headache?" Eileen asked as she scurried into the room, her hands full of laundry.
Well, at least she wasn't depressed and hiding in her room, today.
"I'm feeling intense phantom pain in my neck and shoulder," Severus said dryly, counting off his symptoms on his clumsy child's fingers to this manifestation of his own subconscious. "I just threw up. I'm experiencing nausea and vertigo. The vision in my left eye has gone wonky. I have a headache. Oh, and I don't think I belong in this body."
"I'll have none of your sass, young man," Eileen griped as she rifled through the cupboards. "Let me have a look, then."
Severus sat patiently, waiting for her to look up. It wouldn't do her any good. As far as Severus knew, he had no physical damage, not in this body. Still, he indulged her. Indulged himself.
She looked up, and looked him in the eye, letting out a startled gasp. She dropped whatever bottle of medicine she'd been holding, and it shattered on the floor.
"You're eye! Merlin, what did you do to your eye?"
Severus stared back, startled. "What's wrong with it?"
"We need to see a doctor. No, Merlin help me, we need to see a healer. Severus, go grab your coat."
"I'm still in my pajamas."
"Then change, and go grab your coat. We don't have time for your backtalk. What did you do?"
"I woke up this way," Severus said defensively, before scurrying back up the attic stairs to throw on some clothes. "What's wrong with my eye?"
"It looks infected or something," Eileen called out from the bottom of the stairs. "It's all bloodshot and swollen, and the color's all wrong."
What?
Well, that was certainly a creative twist for this hallucination to throw his way.
Was his mother really willing to risk taking him to a Wizarding healer over this?
Merlin.