The air was heavy with panting. Both he and Snape were heaving breaths through their mouths, or so it sounded like. It was impossible to see, and, oddest of all, Mötley Crüe was still playing on the cassette player.
The utterly irrelevant thought Harry had to that end was that the damn thing must have been near enough indestructible.
"S-sev'rus...?" His voice emerged in a pitiful whimper.
It was hard to say whether Snape had lost it around the same time he'd lost control of his car. He was leaned forward over the wheel, his wrists crossed as he gripped the top-most portion of the steering column with hooked fingers, and he was pitched over at the waist, his breaths coming in ragged gasps.
"You're... you're alright back there, Harry?"
Harry could have wilted with relief alone to hear the man's voice. He'd been left with a bone shaking terror that he'd find that Snape had lost consciousness behind the wheel, or that he'd sustained some injury too terrible to recover from.
In point of fact, Harry's own state of being he'd not paid a lick of attention to up until the moment where Snape had finally spoken and assuaged his fears over the man's wellbeing.
Harry's hand came up to his right temple, where he habitually sat with his forehead resting against the window. It came away bloody, and an increasing awareness of a terrible throbbing pain began to descend down over him with the certainty that he'd conked his head violently against the glass.
By some miracle, the pane was unbroken.
"I think I hit my head," he admitted, his voice weak with incredulity.
The wizard up front turned, his pale face dimly illuminated by the light of the waning, quarter moon above. Snape seemed to nearly fall over sideways at the waist as he manoeuvered himself to reach between the two front seats, twisting until he was facing backwards in the car which was now stopped in a low field.
Long fingers brushed against Harry's head, probing along the front and side of his cranium and he found himself closing his eyes. It was better when his eyes were closed. If he couldn't see that they were stuck in a field, brush all over the bonnet and a very concerned Snape staring at him with terrified black eyes, then it might still be possible to wish it all away.
The pads of Snape's fingers brushed along the swelling portion of Harry's forehead, above his right eyebrow, pushing away his fringe in a quest to assess the damage.
"You're bleeding."
"I'm okay," Harry said, swaying a bit where he sat against the leather. What he really meant was that Snape was okay.
Because so long as Snape was alright, it would all shake out; Severus always knew what had to be done, and he always did it too.
"Damn it, Harry, open your eyes!"
Harry did, but his gaze felt slow to focus on Snape's pinched features. He saw the man withdraw a bit where he sat to reach around in the front for something before a twisty stick of wood was thrust into his vision. Snape's wand.
"Lumos."
Rearing back now, away from the light, Harry cried out in a mixture of surprise and pain as he bounced against the leather bench seat and the impact sent jolts of electric pain down his back and shoulder.
"Your eyes! Open them," Snape demanded again. "Try not to blink."
His eyes watering, Harry forced them open and tried to look past the source of the light to Snape's face, now a silhouette in the encroaching darkness.
"How many wands do you see?"
Harry shook his head with a grimace. "You only have one wand, Severus."
"How many do you see, not how many do you know I have."
"Just the one, Severus." Harry soothed, interrupting Snape before the fragile edge of panic he heard in the wizard's voice took over completely.
"Are your ears ringing?"
"Er..." Harry thought hard for a moment and brought up one of his pinkies to try and wiggle in his ear canal. "It's hard to say."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, I'm not sure what's from the car crash, and what's from the song..."
"Nox," Snape chanted at once, extinguishing the light. Its absence was just as disruptive to Harry's sight as its appearance had been. "What on earth are you talking about?"
"Well, are they really chanting 'Girls' three times, or is that ringing?"
"Bloody—" Snape snarled an oath under his breath and dove to retrieve the cassette player from where it had been thrown to the floor before the passenger seat. After what sounded like a struggle, the music cut off, bringing to mind sudden death.
No light. No sound. A transitory state of consciousness...
It should have been no wonder that Harry's breath started coming shorter and shorter in his lungs. He panted to keep up.
"How about now? Any ringing?"
"Er... I don't... I'm not sure. I don't think so."
Snape was silent in his seat, and Harry got the idea that the man was scowling at him.
"I'm... I think I'll be fine," Harry insisted leaning over to unbuckle himself from the bench. It was then that he noticed how Snape's buckle, as ever, hung limp from the wall of the car. "Are you okay, Severus? You weren't wearing your safety belt."
He heard from Snape's tone, rather than saw the way he was likely rolling his eyes. "This is low on the list of injuries I've survived."
"That doesn't mean you're not hurt," Harry argued, familiar by now with Snape's tendency to dissemble by responding to his queries with indirect answers. "In crashes like these you're lucky you didn't fly through the front glass or impale yourself on the shifter—"
"Faugh! No one's ever impaled himself on the shifter!"
"Or bounced off the steering column, or had a leg come off—" Harry continued, naming the long list of injuries he'd heard of while listening in to the nightly news that his relatives watched religiously.
Harry's words were interrupted by Snape beginning to chortle, the sound of it teeter-tottering on the edge of hysteria. "Had a leg come off!?"
"If the car split and the metal were jammed up far enough it'd take off your arm or leg," Harry explained, not liking that Snape didn't seem to be taking his concern seriously.
"Pray tell how my wearing a seatbelt could prevent such an injury, Harry," Snape's amused voice mocked, between rumbling laughter.
Harry was grateful for the dark if only for the fact that it obscured his humiliation.
"We'll have no need to rush to A&E on my account. Rest easy."
Harry did, slumping back against the seat. The brief respite wasn't to last, however, as Snape roused him moments later and began the difficult process of extracting them from the car. The frame had bent so that magic was required to open the door.
In the moonlight, Harry nearly fell to his knees in the field. The car looked unrecognizable. The dull, blue-white light reflected off the lunar surface had washed the tan brown of the paint into a ghostly hue, devoid of saturation. It looked for all the world like the car had been eaten alive by the boughs of the hedges they'd careened through, and then that the frame itself had been twisted into their naturalistic image. Any illusion of clean, neat lines designed by the hands of man was ruined.
His legs wobbled as a second surge of adrenaline surged in the boy's veins.
They might have died.
That they'd walked from the car on their own without needing rescue may have been a true miracle, or at least Harry couldn't think of another word for the unlikely circumstances of their survival.
Beside him, Snape was cursing and kicking clods of dirt about. He'd walked back to the side of the Marina from their distance of several paces away and was ghosting hands over gnarled parts of the frame above the door. In a fit of pique, one booted foot lashed out to strike at the front, driver-side tyre.
Something about watching Snape's loss of composure broke Harry's own. Under normal circumstances, if Snape wasn't worried, Harry usually figured he oughtn't be either.
But if Snape was beyond reason? Well. It seemed that panic must have been appropriate.
Finally giving into the urge to drop to his hands on the ground, Harry at last allowed his shoulders and back to shake, the havoc wrought by his brush with certain death moving up his body: it started at his feet and moved along his spine until he began heaving, the food he'd eaten at Gammy's table making a reappearance scant inches from his hands.
When he dropped to his side, wracked with sobs, he narrowly avoided flopping into the puddle of his own sick, and his eyes focused far off on the horizon while he listened to the oddly comforting sounds of Snape's nearby tantrum as it progressed from beating the car to shouted epithets the more damage the man found.
It was likely only moments later that Snape approached his side, although to Harry's mind, it felt like an eternity. He was first alerted to the fact that Snape had approached him when the tips of his boots appeared swimming in Harry's vision from where he had his cheek pressed into the dirt.
One thin hand grasped him underneath his armpit and Harry watched as the older wizard dropped to one knee before him, using the position to leverage Harry up into a sitting position.
"You've not blacked out on me, have you?" Snape asked, his voice emerging a bit gruff after his own temporary descent into madness. He'd likely strained it, yelling as he'd done.
Pulling in a rasping breath, Harry screwed his eyes shut for a moment and shook his head 'no' violently.
"Harry—"
"It's ok. I'm ok..." Harry winced when his words came out as a pitiable whimper. That wouldn't do. He cleared his throat and tried again.
"I'm fine—just I saw the car and..."
Snape stood, pulling Harry with him, and turned the boy by his shoulders to face the car.
It was gone.
"What—where's the Marina?" His mouth dropped open with his shock, and he was left staring at the deep ridges that had been left where the tyres cut through the loam, and then had seemingly disappeared into thin air.
"I've gone and parked it." Snape quipped. He looked to be swaying on his feet a bit, and from what Harry could make out in the darkness, it seemed as though Snape was having a hard time keeping his own eyes open.
"Parked it?"
Snape nodded, adopting a goofy—and utterly inappropriate—grin, considering the circumstances. "In my pocket."
"It's parked in your pocket?" Harry forced out, feeling his own patience dwindling. This must have been one of Snape's odd forays into madness where the older wizard enjoyed himself a bit too much poking fun at Harry's expense.
But then, to back up his outrageous claim, Severus shoved his hand up to the forearm into the pocket of his trousers and withdrew a dirt-encrusted, miniature Morris Marina. He flipped it over in his palm and brandished it in Harry's line of sight, turning it this way and that.
"That's not the same—that's not our car!"
Snape seemed to swoon again, his balance moving from right to left until he stabilised on his feet, seemingly by force of will alone. "I can assure you that this is our car, Harry. And I have the worst case of magically-induced fatigue I think I've ever incurred for my troubles, so I'll thank you not to insult me further by doubting my abilities."
"It's not doubting your abilities!" Harry argued. "That's... that's impossible! How is it so small? Why—?"
Snape shoved the tiny Marina back into his pocket and pushed his hand through his hair until it liberated itself from his ponytail. He grimaced more than once as knots pulled through and caught against his finger webbing. "I'm not likely to let the police have it, am I? No. Granted, shrinking it like this will likely have unintended consequences on the engine, but there's really no better choice. We haven't enough to have someone come tow it out, and we can't afford to have people around asking too many questions.
"Come, now." He began stumbling off in the vague direction of the road they'd flown from and Harry was left to follow behind, wincing as a dull pain began to tug at him whenever he looked around or moved his head on his shoulders. He made an especial effort to march straight-backed. Any twisting caused some unnamable part of his back to protest with painful, lightning-like zaps.
They'd flown quite far from the road before Snape had managed to stop the car, and it was a bit of a steep climb to make it back up to the hedgerow they'd busted through. There was a Marina-sized hole in the underbrush.
"Sev'rus," Harry began as he struggled to breathe. The cold air hitting his lungs hurt after the exertion, and he was huffing and puffing a bit as they finally found the crumbling pavement of the country lane. "How are we gonna fix the Marina? The frame looked wrecked. You couldn't hardly get the door to open."
Snape stopped him at the side of the road, and they glanced left and right for oncoming cars before Snape beckoned him onward. Harry noticed that the man seemed to be stumbling more often after they'd made it up the hill.
"Don't concern yourself with that—"
"How will you get to work?"
"I'll walk."
"Can't we apparate home?"
When it seemed like Snape was going to turn to chastise him, they rounded a curve in the road that was hidden behind an impenetrably dense cluster of trees, and they were both brought up short by the sight that had been obscured even seconds before.
Against an abandoned, stone out-building was smashed the cab and front-end of the lorry which had flown at them on the road. Smoke was spilling from the front and the right windscreen looked as though it had been smashed through from the inside-out. Its trailer had toppled sideways and was lying on the ground, obscuring both lanes of the road, and a loud hissing pierced the air—so noisy that Harry couldn't quite believe that they'd not heard it earlier.
"Merlin," Snape hissed. He stood stock still, his eyes darting left and right as he tried to absorb all of the information presented by the scene. "Oh, dear Christ above—"
"What—?"
"Stay here." Snape turned and pressed on both of Harry's shoulders at once to underscore his command, causing the boy to wince with pain. Yet Snape didn't seem to have noticed. He was off like a shot before Harry had even reacted and was sprinting up to the steaming carcass of the enormous vehicle.
There was a foothold perhaps a foot or two off the ground on the passenger side, and grabbing hold of the handle on the door, Snape leveraged himself up until he could peer into the window, pressing his face close to the glass until he saw inside.
Not a moment later, he dropped down and stumbled a bit as his feet met the ground. He still appeared, at least to Harry's eyes, out of sorts. By no means would Severus ever have been mistaken for an athlete, but he was never so clumsy, nor so kinesthetically impaired. If Harry didn't know better, he'd have thought the man drunk.
His worries about Severus' sobriety tapered off, however, when Snape went around the front of the smashed lorry and disappeared from Harry's sight.
For several moments, no word came, and when Severus still didn't make an appearance after at least a full two minutes, Harry decided to follow him. It took time to make it all the way there, given the unnatural way in which he was obliged to walk.
When he arrived, Harry found that he wished for all the world that he'd waited where Snape had bade him.
Off in a ditch, not five meters away from the right-side of the lorry, Snape had knelt down in the scrubby grass beside a dark, prostrate object.
Whatever it was was long, and parts of it seemed to twitch and spasm at irregular intervals.
Legs. Legs that were kicking. An arm. An arm whose hand was shaking.
Snape was murmuring words too softly for Harry to hear. Brief flashes of light in a startling array of colours seemed to illuminate the suffering form of the driver in short-lived flares before evaporating into the night's chilly air.
Creeping forward until he hovered over Snape's shoulder, Harry could barely contain his retching when he saw that the lorry driver's arm was off—nearly at the shoulder—and that it was nowhere to be seen. (Perhaps, at that, the fact that Harry couldn't readily locate it was some lesser mercy, if there could be such a thing in such circumstances).
He appeared to be a middle-aged fellow. Working stock from the grizzled, grey face, and the cap pulled down over his head—though how the cap had made it through the crash when his arm hadn't seemed an irony too cruel to contemplate. The poor man's mouth was working around a mute tongue, his gaze far away with agony, and sightless in his suffering.
By now, Harry could make out the fact that Severus was fluidly cursing between bouts of that strange tongue he'd come to know as Latin.
A tortured groan erupted from the throat of the man lying before them, followed shortly after by an eruption of blood and sputum from his lips.
Harry's sharp gasp of terror must have alerted Snape to his presence, as the other wizard whipped around and faced him, his chalk-white countenance and empty black eyes betraying his shock and horror.
"I told you to stay back there," Snape rasped.
Harry ignored him and shifted from foot to foot, his hands spearing through his hair as he looked down on the broken human that lay before them. "Severus, is he... is he gonna die?"
"Go back to the road."
"Severus, look!" Harry pointed, ignoring his command once again. How could he do such a thing when the lorry driver was now shaking like a leaf, blood spraying between his teeth with every laboured exhalation. Where Severus was as white as freshly driven snow, the man before them was somehow—impossibly—a full shade paler.
Snape chanted something more, his right hand brandishing his wand over the man's prone form while his left wove through his hair, pulling and tugging the strands in his state of agitation.
The dull blue flash at the tip of his wand had him rising with surprising speed and coordination—two things which had been absent from his recent movements—and stalking around in a state of furious excitement.
His litany of swearing was painful: both in its repetition, and in the hopeless way in which he drew so long on the 'f' syllable.
"Harry," He swirled on his heel, stalking forward until he bent down nose-to-nose with the boy. Harry was distantly aware of being grateful that Snape was blocking his view of the poor fellow lying on the ground. "Please, go back to the road."
Harry's eyes widened. It was entirely possible that in all of his months of knowing Severus that the older wizard had never spoken to him thus.
His words were soft. His eyes were urgent. His plea was as sincere as any words Snape had ever uttered.
And God help him, Harry didn't want to stay a moment longer anyway. He didn't want to look on the man choking on his own blood. He didn't want to find out where the arm had flown. He couldn't bear a second more... so he turned and loped back towards the other side of the lorry, distantly noting that it was a Volvo as he passed, until he was standing once more beside the road, a few meters off from the toppled trailer.
While he made his way with painful sluggishness toward the exact spot that he and Snape had stopped earlier, his shadow was cast before him in a brilliant, and fleeting, blaze of sickly green light.
A/N at time of posting: When I wrote this I actually didn't know the circumstances under which Def Leppard's drummer lost his arm, but apparently it was in a scenario very much similar to this one, and only a few years before this story takes place (December 31, 1984). I don't think I ever directly allude to that in this story later on after I'd learned about how he lost his arm—which, in hindsight, seems like a missed opportunity—but given the themes of the story I thought it was worth a mention for trivia's sake. If you're curious, you can look up Rick Allen (drummer) on Wikipedia.