Last time: Only he didn't feel himself slam into the wall as he anticipated. Naturally, he'd flinched when Severus had grabbed him and thrust him in the direction of the masonry, but when he opened his eyes, it was to see that the two had emerged into a brightly lit antechamber.
Harry couldn't help but to blink, feeling taken aback, but unable to do or say much given that this was merely one more in a long list of oddities he'd seen that very evening.
As it happened, the magical hospital was recognisable as a hospital even to one who had only ever had experience with the muggle variety. Upon entering, the clean, white interior was so sterile and devoid of personality that it was enough to send Harry's head reeling given the incongruence with the exterior of the building.
Not for the first time, he felt grateful that Snape led a life that wasn't so obviously magical. He wasn't entirely sure that he would ever get used to the deceptive and subversive nature of witchcraft.
That wasn't to say that he understood it as such, but he definitely registered the sudden about-face as uncanny. Eerie.
The room was mostly empty given that it was so late on a weeknight. There were a few huddled up witches and wizards who apparently waited to be seen, but otherwise, there didn't seem to be much of a rush for the emergency facilities.
Snape propelled him forward, and Harry's neck hurt too much to manage to crane around in order to see who it was that might have been ahead of them for the wait; but he was quite certain that the wizard to his back-right was hiding an amphibian-looking arm in the folds of his cloak, and that the sounds he was emitting could only rightly be called croaks and ribbits.
Snape kept pressing Harry forward until they stood before an anemic, whitewashed counter.
Behind the reception desk sat a young, bored looking witch who wore bubblegum pink robes. Pinned to her lapel was a flickering pin that alternated between the flashing messages: "Welcome witch," "Can I help you?," and "Margorie Starnes." Her focus was trained on a shiny periodical which bore the image of a witch in flamboyant, sapphire blue robes, posturing herself in an outrageous fashion on the cover.
WITCH WEEKLY
Watch Out Celestina Warbeck: Three up-and-coming vocalists vying for the top spot of the wireless charts
Lunar Dressing: Why your sun-sign need not be the most influential celestial body in your choice of wardrobe
Underground Couture: The subterranean goblin ateliers threatening to put Alley robemakers on the back hob
Snape said nothing as they stood waiting for the young woman to acknowledge them, though after her inattention lasted longer than five seconds, he did bring his long fingers to the desktop and began beating out an impatient tattoo against the surface, the sound of it loud in the oppressive silence.
Finally, Margorie glanced up under eyelashes visibly caked with black mascara. She blinked slowly, her blue eyes glancing from Snape to Harry in a single, lazy pass.
Finally, they came to rest on Snape once more and she gave a small, contemptuous smirk.
"Well, well, I should have known," she set the magazine to the side and picked up a few colourful cards that appeared to have been laid aside beside her cheap, chintz teacup.
There were at least five cards facing up to the ceiling and another three laid face-down. They were unlike any deck of playing cards Harry had ever seen.
"When The Hanged Man showed up in my lunch drawing, I took it to mean that I should be taking more time to myself on holiday," her small, mauve-painted lips quirked up in a sardonic motion. "Looks like it meant something a bit more literal—"
Harry heard a strangled, feral growl escaping the man who hovered over his shoulder, sounding as though Snape was attempting to smother whatever this reaction was with all of his considerable force of will.
"And if you're here," she continued, acting like she'd not heard the warning noise Snape had let escape past his mashed together lips, "then this must be Jamie's boy," she cooed, batting her congealed eyelashes at Harry. "Fate sure does have a sense of humour."
"I always thought her a poor comedienne at best," Snape spat, his voice boiling with repressed rage and asperity. "Are you going to do your job, Starnes, or must I call on someone else to attend to us? We didn't come here at two in the morning on a Wednesday for our own amusement."
"Touch-eeee, Snape!" She held up both hands in mock surrender. "Then, you always were. Where can I direct you gentlemen?"
"We've been in a car crash. The boy's been injured somehow."
Margorie clucked her tongue in an expression of long-suffering impatience. "We don't have any regular trauma wards here! Where exactly would you fit in between the Creature Ward and the Spell Damage Ward? Take him to a muggle A&E, Sniv—"
Severus' fist came down on the surface of the desk, sending a crack of noise through the room, rolling like thunder and cutting off what she might have gone on to say.
Harry couldn't look, but he expected that all eyes in the antechamber must have been on them by this point.
"I'm not going to risk my custodianship to the whims of some Ministry bureaucrat who decided I didn't do enough when Harry bloody Potter found himself injured after a damn car crash! I've brought him here to be cleared by one of our professionals, and we won't be leaving until he's been checked out by a proper healer!"
Margorie's nose wrinkled like she was smelling something foul wafting from under her chin, but she did take down Harry's name onto a scrolling piece of parchment with a fussy little quill she'd pulled from an inkpot by her elbow.
"You'll be called back shortly. I've recommended one of our spill-over examination rooms," she informed them, her voice icy. "The Tower, indeed..."
She continued to mutter even as she pointedly grabbed her issue of Witch Weekly back up off the desk and hid behind it.
"Go find a seat, Harry." Snape told him, looking back at the desk with a determined expression on his haggard face.
"What about you?"
"I'll join you in a moment."
Harry toddled back to one of the chairs that lined the wall, choosing a section of seats that was far away from the frog-armed man, and on the opposite wall from a witch who was coughing up blue flames. He managed to sit at the edge of the chair, his back feeling terribly stiff, and he watched as Snape harassed Margorie Starnes for a second time, bothering the unfriendly witch for something that was impossible to discern from this distance. She looked to be answering him, even as she glowered up at the wizard opposite from her, tossing her head of brackish-blonde frizzy hair as she did so.
Snape stalked back over to him moments later, looking as though he was persisting by spite alone at that point.
They didn't have long to wait before a harried looking middle-aged wizard in lime-green robes dashed out from behind a door that sat to the rear of the reception desk.
"Harry Po—"
Snape stood sharply from his seat and shot a glare at the man, silencing him immediately. He helped to stand Harry up from his seated position with a hand under the boy's armpit, and led him with surprising gentleness towards the green-robed wizard.
"A little discretion would be appreciated," Snape hissed to the man, once they were within ear-shot.
"I... I apologise, Professor Snape."
"I'm no longer a professor," Snape informed the man, looking weary.
"No matter. I see now that it likely wasn't wise to announce to the whole hospital just... er... who it is that you've brought in this evening. If you'll follow me?" The man raised a hand, palm up, to invite Harry and Snape along into the corridor that led away from the reception area.
The trio's shoes made different sounds on the tile floors. The doctor's—was it a doctor, what he was, or something else entirely?—made soft scudding noises. Snape's boots produced a sort of smacking, clip-clopping sound. Harry's trainers sort of... plodded.
"I'm afraid you've never told us who it is that we have the pleasure of working with this morning, Healer." Snape intoned, his voice going a bit nasally as it did whenever he thought he was being droll.
"Oh, did I forget? I did, didn't I?" The wizard in lime-green robes fretted, slicking a hand over the shiny spot on his bald head. "You'll have to pardon the bit of rudeness; it's not every day we expect to be looking after Harry Pott—"
He was interrupted by another growl from Snape, whose non-verbal noise warned the man away from uttering Harry's name aloud in the hall.
"F-forgive me, er... Healer Lundy. I normally specialise in the Spell Damage Unit, but... well... we weren't about to leave you sitting in the reception room, were we?" He shook his head, giving off a nervous, breathy laugh. "No, no. Not suitable in the least."
At the end of the hall there were a line of single rooms with empty placards outside, none of the signs reading a thing. When Healer Lundy approached one, he tapped it with his wand and in a scrolling script, the words 'Occupied. Patient P' appeared.
"After you," he indicated that Snape and Harry ought to proceed him into the examination room. "Have a seat on the table for me, Harry, if you don't mind."
Harry glanced around the sparsely furnished space, spying the cushion-topped table that Healer Lundy had indicated. He would have hopped up had he not felt so stiff that he could barely twist his torso or neck. Instead, he backed up to it so that the edge was against his bottom and managed to work his way into a seated position by a combination of standing on his tiptoes and shimmying back and forth with his legs. He was short enough that his legs were hanging half a foot from the floor by the time he was seated securely.
"Now, what's brought you in to St. Mungo's this morning?" Healer Lundy had busied himself at a cabinet across the room, and Snape was leaning up against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest. He'd pointedly ignored the single chair that was flush against the wall beside him, preferring to stand.
"We... er... we were in a car crash, and at first I felt alright, I think, but now I can't move my neck or twist 'round."
"He flinches with pain when he receives a sudden jolt." Snape added. At Lundy's perplexed look, he clarified: "We took the Knight Bus and meant to go home on it. All of the jumping around is what alerted me that he might have needed a healer instead."
Healer Lundy hummed and stepped closer to Harry. He shook his wand a bit and lit it at the tip with a word that was too soft for Harry to hear. "Follow the light, if you would." He began to draw the wand left and right, close to the centre line at first and then further and further to the sides until Harry couldn't manage to track it with his eyes alone and would have had to turn his body. He couldn't quite manage.
"Are you feeling pain elsewhere?"
"Er... my arms a bit sore. And my jaw." Harry admitted. "And my fingers tingle."
"Tingle how?" The healer pointed at Harry's right arm and when the boy nodded that that was the one, he picked it up and began pinching each of Harry's fingers in turn.
"Like... I can still feel them, but also sort of not? You know when your leg falls asleep—?"
"Ah, yes, yes," Healer Lundy was murmuring, frowning down at Harry's hand.
"You wear glasses," Lundy observed, apparently still focused on his task. "Is your vision any noticeably worse than usual?"
"I don't think so." Harry blinked, his eyes darting around the room quickly in order to see if everything looked normal. "There's a bit of a glow around stuff..."
"A glow?"
"Well, it's not as if it's fuzzy, but it's like the outlines of things are blurred..."
Healer Lundy's hands came up to either side of Harry's jaw, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Snape make a weird, jerky movement in response, but the Healer only tested the flexibility of Harry's neck with very gentle pressure, apologising when Harry yelped in protest.
"I'll have to use the ossuprobe on him to get a better look, but I'm thinking it's some manner of spinal injury," Lundy told Snape. "It looks as though it could have been a lot more serious, given the circumstances. He's probably in luck, I've seen far worse from Quidditch players who've taken a bad fall off of their brooms."
"What's the treatment?" Snape asked, his voice terse. Harry couldn't tell if his guardian was annoyed, or whether it was something else.
"Likely just rest, unless the probe reveals something worse. Muggles get this all the time from car crashes, as I'm made to understand. Call it 'Whiplash.'"
"Whiplash," Snape repeated. Harry might have snorted had he not been in pain. Severus, for the first time, sounded a bit dull-witted.
Healer Lundy had turned back to the cabinet attached to the wall and was rifling through a drawer, emerging with a long stick in his hand that looked a bit like a cricket bat. "Of course, we have methods of fixing him up a bit faster than simply watching and waiting for it to get better.
"I'll pass this over you, it'll take a few seconds, and I need you to remain as still as you can until I tell you otherwise. Alright, Harry?" Lundy instructed as he moved to stand in front of Harry once more. He held the bat-like thing out a foot from Harry's shins and began to move it, an inch at a time, upwards through the air.
Faint lights and swirling mists of magic were emitting from the back end of the paddle, facing away from Harry, and they hung in the air for Healer Lundy to interpret, not dissipating as they ought to have.
"What does that one mean?" Harry asked in an undertone, when the bat threw up a wavering red symbol, out of step with the gentle colours of the previous smoke signs.
"Shh." Snape stepped forward and hissed for Harry to be quiet as he frowned from behind Lundy's back. It appeared that he was trying to make sense of the readings as much as Healer Lundy himself, but from the crease between the young man's raven black brows, it seemed as though he wasn't meeting with much success.
Another red symbol freed itself from the wooden paddle when it reached the level of Harry's mid-chest, and thereafter several came in quick succession, puffing out into the air level with where the ossuprobe had made its pass.
At Harry's head, the readings returned to pale, pastel shades and it looked to Harry like Healer Lundy's sigh was one of relief.
"Well, there's nothing wrong with his head," the healer concluded, straightening up and returning the device to the cabinet he'd pulled it from. "I'm reading hairline fractures in some of the cervical spine, and some mild spraining. It could have been a lot worse—if you were a muggle you'd probably be in one of those neck-thingies—"
"A neck brace." Snape corrected, impatience colouring his words. "What's the treatment for a young wizard, Healer Lundy?"
"Ah, er... nothing as disruptive as all of that. A dose of Skeletal Restorative right now, and I'll send you home with a dose for the morning. Should be hunky-dory in time for breakfast."
Harry blinked, feeling a bit surprised. "That's it?"
"Well," Lundy chuckled a bit as he dashed off a note on his clipboard, "what exactly were you expecting?"
"I..." Harry wasn't exactly sure how to answer. He felt as though he'd had a brush with death. In truth, he had. The other driver had died!
He could feel himself paling as he considered the lorry driver's fate and had his neck not been so stiff, he might have shaken his head to dispel the terrible vision of the man's last gasping breaths.
"I just... this was a bad crash. Two potions... that's pretty easy—" Harry mumbled.
What he really wished was to say that they'd gotten off easy. It could have been the two of them who had pitched through the windscreen into the side of the road. It could have been that their car had collided with something too hard for them to soar through, as they had the hedgerow.
A glance up at Snape showed that he seemed to have divined the direction of Harry's thoughts. He was glaring down at him repressively, clearly warning his charge against saying more.
The boy swallowed around the thick lump that had risen to stick in his craw.
"I'll just go fetch the restorative, shall I?" Lundy bowed out of the room with a simpering grin. One which, for some reason, he'd directed at Snape's cross visage. The shorter wizard backed out of the room, nodding in turn to Snape and then to Harry, whom he seemed to be appraising with residual curiosity, even after he'd had time to study him as a patient.
The door clicked shut behind him and as soon as it had, Snape began pacing.
He took exactly five strides to cross from one side of the room to the other, and Harry knew this because the staccato clipping of his boots against the floors echoed loudly between them.
"I'm sorry," Harry murmured, hoping against hope that if he offered the worthless words, that it might go even an inch towards redirecting the thundercloud that seemed to be forming around Severus' angular shoulders.
Snape whipped around then, his hair flying in an arc that followed the movement, so forceful that the hanks slapped him about the shoulders where they landed. "What're you sorry for?" He demanded, advancing on Harry until he stood before the boy's knobby knees.
It wasn't often that Harry felt frightened of Severus, but he thought that in this moment, he might have felt a frisson of fear pass through him at the expression of unmitigated wrath that the older wizard wore.
Despite the heat of Severus' gaze, when his words emerged, they were glacial.
"Were you the one that killed a man this evening, Potter?"
Harry mashed his lips together to keep any words back that might have escaped. He tried to shake his head 'no,' but it was more like his whole shoulders and torso moved all together as one. He was too scared to pay heed to the pain that the motion caused.
"You do realise what I did, don't you? Do you understand?" Snape asked, the menace in his words only eclipsed by the tortured agony that shone forth from his beetle-black eyes. "Can you possibly understand?"
Harry gasped in a breath, intending to tell Snape that yes; yes, he understood. He understood mercy...
But Snape interrupted him before he got a chance to answer.
"Of course you can't." Snape jerked back away from Harry before the boy could raise a hand to him. Had his arm not felt numb, his reflexes might have been faster, but all Harry knew was that he wished he could dig his fingers into the meat of Snape's shoulder, if only to give him something.
It shouldn't have been worth so very much whenever Severus lost sight of himself enough to cuff Harry on the back as he so rarely did... but it meant the world. Harry just knew that, even as hard as the man would have tried to deny it, a tiny bit of affection was what he actually needed in that moment.
The self-hatred Snape must have been feeling fairly dripped off of him like an insidious, black ooze, the impression only heightened by the disorderly state of the man's tangled, black head of hair. Snape may as well have been dipped by the feet into a vat of tar—nothing else could have so succinctly summed up the aura he projected in that moment.
A soft rapping came at the door and Snape drew in a shuddering breath of air as his head came up. He looked hunted. In spite of that, he called for the interloper to enter.
It wasn't Healer Lundy's bald pate that poked in through the crack at the door's seam, however. The newcomer was revealed to be a tall wizard—taller than Snape by at least three or four inches, anyway—in a tasteless ensemble of orchid-pink and blazing-yellow robes. The newcomer stepped through with a spritely little hop which had him lifting the hem of his robes and revealing red leather boots with a stacked heel.
Harry had seen them before.
While Harry's eyes were transfixed on the headmaster, he heard from his left side that Snape had heaved a heavy sigh, laden with all of the emotion and dread of a truly terrible evening.
It might have sounded as though the younger man was put upon by seeing his former employer show up at St. Mungos, but to Harry, who knew Severus better than most, it sounded like relief.
"Headmaster—"
"I heard tell of a bit of a..." Dumbledore seemed to pause, a small, grim smile lighting his features for a moment before he settled on a suitable understatement, "fracas."
Snape stared at Dumbledore for a moment, his expression having shifted into something terrifyingly blank.
"Are you having a lark?"
Dumbledore swept into the room in a ripple of rose and lemon. He took the seat which Snape had eschewed and crossed one knee over the other, bouncing his booted foot so that the shiny buckle caught the magical light. "Am I? I didn't think so, no, but do you find this all very funny, Severus?"
Apparently, Snape's vacant expression was a temporary one, for this inquiry saw him colouring up to the ears in an ugly flush.
"Funny? Do I bloody well find it funny? Would you!? Would you find it funny to have to take a man's—"
The headmaster held up a repressive hand to still Snape's tirade, so effectively dousing his former employee's ire that Snape might as well have been a cat, thrown into a body of water. He was even sputtering.
"I'd not say that aloud, were I in your shoes, Severus. A time and place for everything, yes?"
"A time and place," Snape repeated in a stultified mutter, looking mutinous. "Can there ever be a time and a place for such a thing?"
"You tell me," Dumbledore answered, looking unflustered. He went fishing in his robes for a small, oblong tin and slid the top half-way off, selecting from within a piece of hard candy.
Turning to Harry, he spoke to the boy as though Severus weren't even in the room with them. "You'll understand, normally I'd offer you one as well—terribly rude not to—but given that it's well past the time you ought to be away in bed, and at that, perhaps you've already brushed your teeth, I suppose I really ought to ask Severus, here, first—"
This was apparently a bridge too far for Severus Snape. He was off like a shot across the short space to where Dumbledore was seated.
"DAMN YOUR SWEETS, AND DAMN YOU, YOU CRACKED UP FART! You only mean to mock me!"
"On the contrary. I thought it appropriate to first ask your permission—"
"Which you didn't do! You told Harry that you'd normally give him a sherbet lemon! That the only thing preventing you in this instance was that you felt you ought to ask me first! With the presumption that I'd be forced into the position of opposing such a treat!" Snape was hissing and spitting now, much like the cat Harry had earlier observed he resembled. His eyes were wild, but not only with anger. Underneath was a thinly obscured wellspring of panic that he must have been covering for.
Otherwise, Harry would have thought this a terribly odd argument over a rather small trifle. Particularly given what had precipitated it; namely, the death of the lorry driver and Dumbledore's insistence that Snape not mention it.
It ought to have been obvious that Harry'd not had an opportunity to brush his teeth that evening, if nothing else. It seemed, however, that both adults were pointedly ignoring that particular fact.
"It's ok, I don't really want one, anyway..."
"The boy doesn't even want one!" Snape crowed, sounding triumphant as he straightened up as would a strutting gamecock.
Harry was once again reminded of the strange phenomenon where Snape seemed to become little more than an adolescent whenever and wherever adults older than himself were concerned. In nearly all other circumstances, he might have been mistaken for older than his actual age. Harry would have felt embarrassed for Snape, had he not felt such pity for the strain his kuya was under.
Harry's mouth twisted with worry, and he shot a look at Dumbledore that seemed to plead with the old sorcerer to be gentle with Snape. As far as Harry could figure, the appearance of the elderly wizard had damn near scattered the last of Severus' marbles to the winds.
Dumbledore's penetrating gaze locked onto Harry's for a moment, the deep pull of his powder-blue eyes evoking that same feeling Harry got whenever Snape would perform one of his impressive—and improbable—mind-reading tricks.
Slowly, Dumbledore nodded, looking contemplative, and he turned a sober eye on Snape, who appeared to be fraying faster than a partially snipped length of hemp twine.
"Take a seat, Severus, please." Dumbledore's words now were calm, kind. Not a hint of the mockery from earlier was present as he held an ancient hand aloft in invitation, showing that he expected Snape to perch his boney backside on the padded table next to Harry.
After taking several deep, calming breaths, Snape seemed to see the wisdom in this and he did so, which Harry counted as a victory, even if Severus still looked ready to climb out of his own skin.
"Were we somewhere more comfortable, I'd be happy to offer you a cup of chocolate, but given the present circumstances, I'm afraid this shall have to suffice," Dumbledore spoke in a low, soothing tone to Snape, who looked ready to protest. "Don't even think of shoving this back in my face, Severus, I really must insist."
From some hidden pocket of his voluminous robes, the wizened wizard withdrew a slim bar of some sort. It looked to have been wrapped in a shimmering, iridescent foil, and then around the middle in a red and purple swath of paper.
"This is Honeydukes' special reserve," Dumbledore announced, sounding proud and conspiratorial all at once. "I wouldn't care to share this with just anyone, so don't insult me by declining."
To Harry's surprise, Snape's eyes had widened as Dumbledore continued speaking, and his face took on an almost greedy look. No sooner had Dumbledore finished speaking than Snape's hand shot out to snatch the bar from him, tearing at the paper and peeling back the foil from a slab of chocolate that looked nearly marbled. He wasted no time at all in breaking off a corner and shoving it between his yellow teeth.
It must have been some chocolate for it to have produced the rapturous expression Snape now wore. His shoulders had slackened from the tightly coiled posture he'd maintained during the tense exchange, and he looked close to sedated, his eyes going hazy and half-lidded.
When he caught Harry peering at him with a bemused expression, rather than taking the boy to task over it as he normally might have, he glanced down at the bar and lazily broke off the other upper corner, holding it out for Harry in his open palm.
Harry wasn't fool enough to refuse the good-faith overture, though he did take more time in eating the confection than his guardian had. He nibbled it a bit with his teeth, tasting the chocolate shavings sloughing off of his incisors as they fluttered down like snow onto his tastebuds. It was exceptional and couldn't have been anything less than magical. Each flake felt as though it sent tendrils of heartening warmth through his body, and much of the dread and horror he'd felt in the wake of the evening's events seemed to be lifting from his mind like mist evaporating into the aether.
Through the strange misty feeling that seemed to have been produced by the otherworldly chocolate, something struck Harry as odd about the entire affair. He had to fight to turn the strange niggling into a comprehensible thought, and then he had to strain for words equal to the task of expressing that thought in plain language.
"Hey, uh—how did you know? Mr... er... Mr. Dumbledore?"
He heard the old man chortle. "My, it's been many a year since anyone's called me that, Harry."
"He's Headmaster," Snape nearly slurred. "Headmaster Dumbledore—"
"Now, Severus, I don't half mind it. Do go on, child. How is it that I knew what?"
"To... er... to come here? That we'd be here? How did you know that Severus had to... to..."
Dumbledore shushed him with a gentle, but firm, noise, reminding the boy that he'd earlier cautioned them against speaking aloud of Snape's actions. "Severus himself sent word to me when you arrived at St. Mungo's, Harry. I received notice from reception via floo a mere quarter of an hour ago. As for the other? Well. We all have our ways of being kept abreast of such things."
Harry giggled. Abreast. It was funny enough that he didn't bother asking what a 'vi-a-flew' was.
'A breast.' He giggled once more. 'Like bosom...'
Which reminded him, in quite unwelcome fashion, that there was no possible way that he'd be ready with his Richard III vocabulary list for Mr. Fowler in the morning, and that class was only a scant five to six hours away. He nearly groaned aloud.
A/N: I took some liberties with St. Mungo's and the Knight Bus, but we get scant information on each, so I went ahead with my own alterations/interpretation.