pekeleke (pekeleke) wrote in snape_potter, @ 2012-09-20 14:34:00 |
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Entry tags: | pekeleke |
Chaptered fic. Complete. 43/43. The voice under all silences.
Author: pekeleke
Pairing: Severus Snape/Harry Potter
Rating: N-17
Summary: Four years after the final battle Severus Snape wakes up. He believes this must be Hell, but... what if it isn't?
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Warning(s): Strong language.
A/N: English is not my mother tongue so mistakes are to be expected.
Beta: None
Disclaimer: The characters used in this fiction are not mine. No money is being made from it.
The voice under all silences. Chapter 1.
Eyes colored with the same unutterable darkness of a starless midnight focused with ruthless determination on the harmless, orange-tinged cheerfulness of the fire.
The room was warm, unusually so, and the heat that was unstoppably conquering the room felt unfriendly, cloying. It threatened his frayed senses with the instinctive perception of unseen and imminent danger.
His lids closed, shutting off the flickering flames. But the unnervingly loud popping of the burning wood couldn't be so easily vanished from his consciousness, as it exploded at random intervals into the heavy silence. His throat throbbed with the never-ending agony spreading from the seeping wound that covered what, once, had been the right side of his neck. There was a bandage, frayed gray and much too tight, protecting the area. Hiding the suppurating, green-tinged craters left behind by the snake-bite that should have killed him and yet, to his dismayed disappointment, had failed to do so.
His muscles clamped painfully as he attempted to swallow yet again. He was trying hard to ignore the increasingly angry sense of desperation that was threatening to overwhelm his already exhausted mind with every passing second. His nerves were shot to Hell. He felt drained by the unrelenting strength of the venom that still coursed through his veins, keeping him ill and vulnerable. Making his every word a triumph of both: bull-headed doggedness and sheer, unbending pride.
He might wish with every fiber of his now weakened being to have died, once and for all, on that Merlin-forsaken shack, but... he'd be dammed before he allowed any one of them, bastards, to know exactly how... shattered... he'd become.
His head throbbed with tension and he felt nauseous. His heartbeat pounded unpleasantly through his every vein with so much force that he could feel it hammering him from the inside out. It pulsed maddeningly at the side of his jaw. Against his too-thin wrists. On the mangled skin left on his throat...
The heat made him feel drowsy and claustrophobic. It irritated his dark eyes, drying them to the point of pain. It made him long for a tall glass of cooling water, but he refused to shift from his position. Rejected the very idea of allowing them, whomever they might be, to see him reach for the temptingly close jug, filled to the brim with tinkling ice, and only Circe knew what else, mixed in with the crystalline beauty of the water that they had provided.
He had been removed from the hospital bed he'd been inhabiting in Azkaban prison and brought here: to this mocking, overly-warm replica of his own destroyed chambers at Hogwarts for some obscure purpose that he had no desire to discover.
They had dragged him in, set the fireplace ablaze and very deferentially advised him to “make yourself at home, Sir”, as if he could!. As if he were some long awaited and reverently admired member of their long lost family...
There were papers on the side table. Quite artfully folded in order to show their incredibly ridiculous headlines to best advantage:
“The Greatest Hero of the Wizarding World to be finally released!”
“Loyal Dumbledore's spy to receive the Order of Merlin, First Class, in exclusive ceremony this coming Friday!”
“Rodolphus Curlieu, Minister of Magic, to offer public apology to The Greatest Hero on behalf of the magical community! “
His choleric black gaze shot derisive daggers at the nastily deceitful print before flickering, once more, towards the water and his thin lips tightened with hatred.
How dare they mock him so?. How dare they play their cruel games on him once more?. How dare they rub the face of the nasty, murdering scum-bag universally known as the Potion Master of Hogwarts, with the soul-destroying vision of all he'd, so misguidedly, searched for in his wretched life but had never, ever, found: Recognition. Appreciation. Respect...
His breathing evened and he forced his long fingers into fists. Curling them protectively into the pristine edges of the familiar teaching robes that he'd always favored. The weight of the now utterly unfamiliar cloth felt like the embrace of a long-lost friend, a caress of comfort. A whisper of forgiveness.
They had forced him out of his embarrassingly inappropriate mid-tight, Azkaban-issued hospital gown and into these clothes with one single, apparently deferential, wave of some unknown auror's wand and he resented them the kindness. He suspected their motives at the apparently missed opportunity to humiliate him even further by forcing him to disrobe before their eyes, while they all cackled at his inadequacies and called him names, as the aurors used to do... so long ago.
The fake deference had gotten under his skin with more devastating impact than the outright cruelty had done. He'd become immune to many things over the years, after all. Things that he had to endure with gritted teeth in order to survive. Things that he'd believed had made him virtually impervious to torture of any kind.
-Well... Now I know better.- He thought to himself savagely. Furiously aware of the fact that the unexpected twist they had included in their eagerness to make him suffer had, to his horrified shock, worked like magic. He'd been hurt indeed. He'd felt wretched, harmed to the very depths of what was left of his soul. He'd been lethally wounded.
The sudden thundering of unequivocally rushing feet had him tensing in the perfectly replicated version of his own favorite armchair and he squared his shoulders. Determinedly ignoring the agony that the action sparked from his damaged neck.
The door behind him opened with a bang.
A brusque, anxiously distressed wave of magic washed over him as the heavy wood was pried off it's locked position. He refused to turn around, refused to acknowledge the presence of whomever they'd seen fit to send in to torture him further. Rejected the very idea of allowing his unwelcome tormentor to establish superiority in this mockingly hurtful replica of his former safe haven. They had intended to intimidate him by mimicking his own chambers at Hogwarts in shatteringly painful detail.
-Well... I shall play them at their game and behave as if I am, indeed, at home. As if I am the master of all that I see. As if I have not waited, like the tired puppet that I've become, for the bastards to yank on my strings once more...-
The door banged twice, against the incredibly realistic centuries-old granite, before closing and the incipient headache that had been threatening the periphery of his consciousnesses finally exploded into glorious, inauspicious life.
His lips compressed further and his eyes narrowed to slits, so dramatically reducing the already meager amount of color left in his pale visage, that he'd fancied himself turned into one of those odd figures carved in wax that he'd seen in the strange muggle museum he'd once visited. He shivered with the unwelcome recollection of their awful, inanimate faces. They had all looked so lifeless and unreal, so fake. They looked dead. Unreachable. Untouchable...
"Oh, thank Godric you are here, Sir!. Snape. Err... Professor Snape. Gosh!, I can't believe how badly Myers messed this up!. He wasn't supposed to bring you here...”
Severus' incredulity held him utterly still. He couldn't have moved to save his miserable life, had he truly wanted to do so. Not for all the magic of the founders!. Not under his own steam at least.
He'd recognized the voice at once, of course, although not the slightly panicky tone making it brim with... worry?. His mind could not cope with the surreal quality of their move.
Such bizarre, unexpected weapon, this one. Such unpredictable tactic. Such... confusing, inexplicable deception and... for what? What could anyone possibly do to him that hadn't been done already sort of granting him THE KISS? What were they planning to do that could possibly rival the warm care he'd been receiving at the hands of Azkaban's resident healer?.
Heavy boots thumped against the stone floor as his unlikely visitor approached, still babbling that increasingly disconcerting diatribe at top speed.
"Why haven't you tried to hex me yet, at the very least ?. Where the Hell is your wand?. No. Don't tell me... That bloody incompetent forgot to give it to you, didn't he?. I swear I'm gonna skin Myers alive, Sir!"
-Myers?. Who the Hell was Myers?-
The steps came to an abrupt halt right behind his chair and a short but blissful second of blessed silence descended upon the room. The suffocating heat that was coming off the fire became the least thing on his mind as his thoughts whirled fast. Faster.
A Dizzying array of possibilities, every one more unlikely than the last, were analyzed before being ruthlessly discarded during that silent reprieve. Then there was a rustle of cloth, a clearly perceived shift in the air around his chair and the shape of a man who should have looked familiar but, surprisingly, didn't materialized on his left.
"It's roasting in here!. Are you sure you're all right, Sir?"A wide, lightly tanned hand rose towards him in a lurching, anxious motion and he startled enough to bark in defensive, blistering rage:
"Do. Not. Dare!"
The hand froze.
The moment became charged, with the kind of unwelcome tension that brought a renewed cramping to his rigid neck and shoulders. Unutterable pain shot all the way down his arm from his thrice-dammed wound and he curled his long fingers into a reflexive fist that his visitor noticed and interpreted incorrectly. As usual.
"Calm down, for Goodness sake, Professor!. I only wanted to check you for fever..."
He could feel his old mask, that viciously sarcastic shell that had protected him for so many years, fall across his features like an old, battered helmet. One that might no longer fit him as tightly as it used to, but that could still be useful in the face of danger, nevertheless.
He forced himself to ignore the shaky weakness of his legs and rise, in order to stare down his nose at the spawn of his worst enemy. He couldn't believe that he was being forced to confront thus the beloved child of the only woman who had ever bothered to love him: -Oh, Lily!... -
"I happen to be perfectly calm, Mr. Potter. Unlike you, I might add, if that infuriatingly anxious rambling that only you'd have the courage to inflict upon me is as reliable a hint towards the state of your emotions as your former temper tantrums used to be."
Surprisingly the brat smiled.
"Ah!. You are all right, then. I'm sorry if I scared you with the touchy-feely-thing, you know?. We were all so worried when you didn't turn up where you were expected to that I... well, I might have err..."
The words tapered off into some kind of horrifyingly bashful little silence and Severus frowned.
His eyes narrowed suspiciously, trying to bore holes into the slightly lowered green ones that reminded him so much of Lily's that he couldn't bring himself to stare at them for long, lest his own guilty regret manage to finally crush him like the pathetic insect that he should had been all along. Lily, his precious Lily, would have been still alive if he'd turned out to be some sort of creepy-crawly instead of the man who had, ultimately, betrayed her. She would have lived to raise her boy if it hadn't been for his unforgivable treachery...
Lost as he was, in anguished contemplation of that truth, he missed a new installment of incoherent babble that ended puzzlingly on:
“... Then Hermione said that it could be true. That, in your state, it was possible that you might have felt faint from the portkey journey and I started to see it all over again: your body, so still, on the floor. Your head covered in blood. So much blood... and I didn't even bother to stay back and scream at Myers. I just... apparated straight to Hogsmeade and started running."
His headache reached its peak at that very second as a wave of rage so powerful that he could barely control it rose across his chest, like the deathliest kind of tidal wave.
"Are you so dim-witted, so obtuse, so carelessly confident in your appallingly pathetic attempt to harm me that you really believe it possible to convince me that I am at Hogwarts? How stupid do you think I am, Potter?"
Startled green eyes focused on his own and an inexplicable edge of barely repressed violence punctuated the sharp-toned, two-word question that the boy managed to bark:
"Harm you?"
If the little bastard expected him to back off he could very well just fuck the Hell off!. Or send him right back to Azkaban, were he belonged. Painful mind games were not really his thing any longer. Never had been, to be perfectly honest. That had always been more Albus' style than his own. The thought ambushed him, spearing mercilessly through what meager amount of heart he could still lay claim to before he could repress it.
- Albus!... -
His eyes closed and he felt himself grow cold from head to toes. He was clammy with shock. He would not, could not, bring himself to deal with the consequences of the monstrous task he had performed in order to save a boy whom had been saved in the end by the very same thing that saved this one: the love of a mother Hell-bent on protecting her young...
"Professor?"
His legs folded under him so unexpectedly that he was denied the dignity of regaining his seat unaided and he crumbled like a statue made out of shifting sand when his long-unused muscles failed to support him.
"Severus!..."
Panic. Not his own, but the boy's, forced his eyes open and he blinked through a haze of mortifying weakness right into the face of a strangely pale Potter. Then he realized that there were arms around him, keeping his useless body safely cocooned against the heaving chest of the green-eyed menace and he flailed with angry embarrassment.
“Unhand me!" He hissed, recklessly ignoring the tearing pain that his own tone wrenched from his badly damaged throat.
"I can't. You'll fall!"
The surreal situation rose his hackles. He hated this... this... blasphemy of reality. This totally horrifying charade that the boy was playing. He felt savaged and on edge. Ready to attack whoever dared come close in order to protect what pitifully little was left of himself from further harm at the hands of those whom had only ever loathed him.
"So? Since when have you cared if I broke, Potter?"
The arms supporting his weight turned rigid around him and that very young face, so familiar and yet so utterly alien to him now, froze with the kind of wretched pain that had to be false.
"Since I grew up!" The brat growled, tightening his hold on him with an easy strength that frightened Severus into the realization that he was here, somewhere as of yet undetermined, wandless and apparently alone with a man who could overwhelm his pitiful defenses in the blink of an eye...
His foot fought for purchase against the unyielding granite floor and he ignored the screaming pain that was shooting up and down his legs as he forced himself to straighten up within that confusingly protective hold.
"Unhand me!" He repeated once again. Pushing firmly against the heaving chest that was plastered almost completely against his own in a determined demand to be set free.
Potter looked at him through narrowed eyes. A vein throbbed in the corner of that fiercely clenched jaw and that face, so unfamiliarly matured by whatever harrowing trials the boy had endured lately, locked into an expression of doggedly determined mulishness.
"If my touch offends you so, I'll gladly set you back on the chair, Professor. But I won't allow you to come to harm on my watch. Not again. Not even to soothe your injured pride!"
The words sent him reeling with their ludicrous bizarreness and he all but jabbed his index finger into the chest of the Wizarding World's Heroic Boy Wonder.
"Release me, Potter. At once!"
Surprisingly the boy's face became even more closed off. Emerald colored determination flashed across the gaze trying to drill holes into his own so intently that he felt, for a crazily exhausted second, tempted to lower his eyes, like a chastised young child. Silence fell, spreading between them like a frigidly cold blanket seeking to freeze them in place. Turn them to stone. Hold them utterly captive...
The moment stretched as they both stared into one another's eyes with equal amounts of obstinate tenaciousness to have their opposing wishes fulfilled. Severus' paper-thin eyelids fluttered minutely as he locked his jaw in order to suppress the pain-filled groan that formed in the back of his throbbing throat when a new and devastatingly strong cramp turned the useless muscles of his right leg to rock.
Although not a single sound escaped his tightly compressed lips the boy seemed able to read him like a book. Sudden awareness shot across those green eyes and a look of frustrated concern softened the young features.
"Why must you make everything so difficult?" Potter growled that question from such close range that he felt every word ghost across his right cheek and sink beneath his skin. He didn't have enough time to respond before the situation entered the realms of the most appallingly realistic nightmare. So ridiculously fantastic in its development, so risible indeed -if one had within one's spirit the kind of strength left to admire the finest of all ironies- that he found himself contemplating for the very first time the relieving idea that he could, perhaps, be asleep. Trapped inside a dream of his own making. Dragged into this... this... aberration of the true reality by his own guilty conscience and some kind of twisted need for... atonement.
His eyes bulged almost completely out of their sockets when the blasted figment of his imagination lurched slightly sideways in order to, horror of horrors!, lift him up into a pair of overly muscled arms that he was by now mostly certain he must have conjured out of some... depraved... recess of his mind. Surely, certainly, the real Potter wouldn't have turned into some kind of rugged Greek God since the last time he saw his skinny little hide... That idea alone reassured him so much, offered his exhausted psyche such relief, that he allowed himself to ignore for the moment the disturbing actions of the... the... being who was so insistently trying to manhandle him straight into total humiliation.
"Gosh... You are so thin that you are practically weightless!" The figment... thing... Potter... growled disapprovingly against his ear while carefully hefting him off the ground. He was being held so protectively against that huge, too-warm chest that he felt threatened by the horrible surrealism of the whole God-awful mess...
He wondered why, of all the possibilities available to his darkly twisted mind, he'd settled for this particularly cruel form of torture. One so reminiscent of the pain-filled pranks played on him during his early teens that he supposed there could be some sort of sick explanation as to what on Earth could Potter be doing in a dream of his. The boy had always been like an emoting replica of his happily defunct father, after all...
"This is the worst nightmare I've ever had to endure..." He muttered absently to himself in startled self-awareness.
The bulging arms tightened uncomfortably around him when his unwelcome carrier came to an abrupt halt not five paces into wherever it was that he intended to deliver him, and Severus' brow furrowed in baffled incomprehension. His dark eyes rose towards the face that was so inappropriately close to his own by now that he could actually feel the sharp edge of the... the... Potter's... unshaven bristles digging into the side of his temple.
His gaze collided with the kind of glare that no self-respecting Gryffindor should have been able to produce and he felt the vibration caused by the boy's cross bark run all the way along the left side of his body, which was being most rudely plastered against the muscled chest from Hell.
"Gee!, Thanks a lot, professor. And to think that I almost broke my neck running down a million bloody stairs just to get to you!"
Now this nightmare was turning seriously aggravating. He could not fathom why his unconscious need for self-flagellation had decided that he needed to endure the company of a sulking and sympathetic Potter.
"I don't see what your problem is, you, annoying child!" He finally confronted the thing harshly, feeling more than uncomfortable with the extremely irregular situation, with the illogical nature of this delusion. He was more than ready to wake up in the freezing coldness of Azkaban's medical ward. He was even eager to discover what new misery Peterssen, the vicious healer that ruled the place with an unchallenged violent hand had decided to subject him to this morning.
"Considering that I happen to know exactly what kind of nightmares you've had to endure, I imagine that it wouldn't take a genius to figure out what my problem is, Snape!" Green eyes that had darkened with enough bitterness to match the raw undertones of those sharply pronounced words bore into his own as the boy resumed walking.
"You know... at the risk of sounding totally conceited I should tell you that most people would sell their souls for the chance of being exactly where you are, Professor. It just figures that you would be among the very few who consider the honor of being cradled in my arms to be nothing short of torture!"
Severus didn't like the strange vibe that he was getting here. He despised the uncomfortable sense of wrongness that scraped along his nerve-endings like the touch of rough sanding paper and was suspicious of the inexplicable swirl of emotions that fleeted across the expressive face so close to his own. He liked even less the fact that he'd finally realized exactly where it was that Potter was heading.
His heart banged against his ribs as his mind struggled to force itself awake. His mouth tightened with raging distaste. With impotent self-scorn for having allowed this atrocity to progress this far and, in his instinctive need to lash out, he ended up responding as viciously as he knew how to the little jerk's astonishingly pretentious claim:
"Then by all means, boy, Go!. Don't imagine even for a second that I'll languish in simpering reminiscence of this one hellish moment. I have neither the intention, nor the desire, of spending any more time than I have to trapped inside the abominable clutches of this disgusting nightmare, and I shall be eternally grateful if you could happen to just... conveniently vanish from it!. Preferably before you actually reach the bedroom door, if you please."
The contrary little cretin halted once again and Severus could have cried in sheer relief as he realized that his wish had been almost completely granted, for once. Potter had actually halted...
He had not exactly vanished, no. That would have been so unexpectedly generous of the Founders that he might have died from the incredulity of imagining himself to have been heard by those almighty beings. But the boy had stopped in the middle of the narrow corridor and was completely ignoring the ominously close proximity of the bedroom door that Severus had no intention whatsoever of ever crossing in this particular manner. Least of all, in the company of a man whom he'd been delightedly tormenting for many years. A man who detested him in return with a passion only surpassed by a very understandable hatred towards the Dark Lord himself.
The amber-tinged light coming off the scones that hung along the passage was turning the brat's ghastly spectacles into reflective little pools of light that made it virtually impossible to read the eyes that must be showing... what exactly? Surprise to have been unmasked as a wisp of Severus' own fevered mind?. Remorse for having been caught taking part in this mockery of care in order to humiliate an already defeated enemy through derisive scorn? Shock that said enemy had not, as they all had probably expected, dissolved into a grateful puddle of abnegation at the very sight of the Saviour of the Wizarding World?
His head throbbed with sheer tension as a second slowly stretched into another and the boy... the thing, Potter, simply stood there: crushing him tightly against his chest as if he were some kind of life-sized teddy bear while gazing down at him from behind the privacy of those reflective lenses without uttering a word. Not. One. Word...
He'd just opened his mouth and was readying himself to demand being set down when the witless wonder returned abruptly to babbling life:
"You... err... you are not exactly making sense, Snape. Sir. Err... professor. I don't think you are...mmm... “with it”, so to speak. Are you sure you are not...huh, you know, sick?"
-What the Hell..?- He blinked in confused reaction to that strange diatribe, attempting to figure out exactly what was it that the ridiculous moron thought he could be carrying ”With him”.
"I am not sick. I am not stupid, either, and I won't play these ridiculous games with the likes of you. Now unhand me, at once, and return me to my flea-infested bed in Azkaban, if you don't mind. I am certain that the sooner I lay there in this dream the sooner I'll wake up!"
There was that choked, extremely realistic, gasp of surprise again and the messy dark head shifted around enough for the lenses to unveil their secrets, as they were being no longer painted with the unfathomable reflections of the flames. Severus' hackles rose as he finally looked into those familiar eyes and discovered that they were shadowed with concern and open disbelief. With a frantic, helpless, worry.
"You think that you are dreaming?. That you are still in Azkaban?. That I...?. That we are playing a trick on you, like my father used to do? Like Sirius?..."
With every word he spoke the boy's voice rose higher and higher, brutally exacerbating his throbbing headache without any consideration, the bastard!. Those overly-muscled arms crushed him as well, closing menacingly around him as if, now that he found himself discovered, the godforsaken whelp could think of nothing better to do than attempting to restrain him physically as opposed to continuing using his initial tactic of old-fashioned buttering up.
The scorching, minty-tinged puffs of air that kept thumping his shocked features after every single sharp-toned syllable was growled straight into his face caused him to frown thunderously. He was truly pissed off with all this nonsense!.
"Potter, Shut the bloody Hell up already!" He screamed over the top of all the ire so unjustly being directed towards his puzzled self, and regretted the impulse when he felt the sharp tug of brutal agony that his action had to sparked. The blasted snake-bite began to thrum unpleasantly and he was forced to lower his unraveling voice in order to hide the increasing weakness of his strained vocal chords from the boy:
"I don't really expect you to either care nor understand this but, for what it's worth, let me be frank: I am tired, Potter. Truly tired. I am sick and I am bewildered, and I do not want to deal with you!.
I don't care if you are truly a nightmare, or a ghost, or some kind of avenging angel come to take me to task for my many transgressions. I am already paying for them all in full!. I've been doing so every single second that I've spent alive in Albus' absence. In Lily's. In the shadow of all the souls whose deaths I've caused...
Leave me alone, for goodness sake!. Leave me alone to suffer, and atone, and pay for it in blood. In tears. In whatever the Hell coin you think its appropriate. I'm certain that every Azkaban gaoler will be happy to accommodate the suggestions fallen from the lips of their great Saviour.
Now for Merlin's sake, PUT ME THE FUCK DOWN AND SEND ME BACK!" He roared at the top of his voice, heedless of the fierce throbbing that was spreading cursed fire down his neck and into his arm, like a river of molten lava intent on consuming him without mercy. He felt so... liberated... So at peace with all the world for that one brilliant tic on the clock of his life, that he could have very happily surrendered his last breath to the stunned face of his bitter enemy's child. Then his neck surrendered to the most savage kind of agony and he chocked in the sudden silence.
His eyes widened with the shattering awareness that his windpipe was closing down in shocked response to the unbearable pain that he'd just caused himself. The boy's green gaze, which was still hovering just above his own, seemed to be alert and frenzied. Centered solely on him with a distressed sort of inexplicable fear.
He closed his own eyes determinedly, then. Not really willing to witness this once more. He didn't want to see that pale face while he died, again, in the blasted boy's arms...
This was just... another sickeningly pathetic little chestnut of all encompassing bloody cosmic irony at his expense. Must he only, ever, die in the arms of a Potter?. Like father, like son. The bastards!.
Couldn't the greedy, little jerks leave him alone to enjoy his imminent demise just this once?
His throat convulsed uselessly and he attempted to breathe, he really did. But the effort was as useless as he'd suspected. He started to flay against the arms that still held him and his hacking, dry-sounding intakes echoed around the corridor like deathly curses...
"Professor!... Professor... Severus!..." There was something puzzlingly frenetic in the urgent voice that called him, but he couldn't pay any attention to it at the moment. He was quite busy dying, thank you very much.
For a second he thought that the sudden, dazzlingly white blast of almost furious magic that he'd experienced must have been the welcoming embrace of Lady Death. But then he sensed the almost unendurable constriction on one's body that's so characteristic of apparition and felt ridiculously cheated by having been proved right: he hadn't been at Hogwarts after all... It had all been a lie, a terrible trick played upon him by perverse little children. He would not die at home. He would die in...
"Severus!...”
His mind swam in and out of focus with the slowness of one already barely here, but he recognized that voice without any trouble. He could put a face to that familiar sound that had been his faithful companion during so many years of misery, during a million and one moments just like this one. So many close calls... So many...
Poppy... Poppy Pomfrey was here. Right here!. Struggling to keep his eyes open he followed the sound of her voice, surrendering himself to his own desperate need to to see her one last time. She looked old, frightened and terribly fragile... She was running at top speed towards him with a tearful, strained face and he wanted to smile at her, console her. With the last of his strength he fought the hold keeping him trapped and an arm that was strangely ghostlike, as it was covered in too big black clothing, rose shakily towards her.
-Don't worry about me, Poppy, I'm finally going somewhere safe. I'm going home to Albus...
I'm here, Potter is also here and the muggles say that third time's the charm and all that rot...-
Although he couldn't have possibly said any of that out loud he must have been broadcasting his thoughts because the next thing he heard was the blasted brat's enraged roar:
"No... No!. You won't do this to me, you grumpy old bastard!. Poppy... Poppy, do something!. He is fading as we speak. He is... SEVERUS!...”
He heard a scream. No. Several screams. And crying... Dear Merlin!... Someone, somewhere, was shedding a misty old tear in his behalf. How... curious...
His lungs held no more air. His mind managed no further thought. His ears buzzed unpleasantly one last time before embracing the deafening silence of absolute nothingness and his eyes, his ebony-black eyes, froze into lifelessness while they were still stubbornly opened, directing a heartbreakingly accusing glare towards the world that he had not a single reason to regret leaving behind...
TBC...