Recuperation

Disclaimer: JKR owns all. I am a squatter.

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Severus's sitting room was 20 feet 7 inches long, measured from the door of his laboratory on the south side to the door of his bedroom on the north side. It was 17 feet 8 inches wide when measured from the entrance door to the hearth directly opposite.

It was approximately the size of the sitting rooms of the other Heads of House at Hogwarts, but it was...perhaps...more cluttered.

This was because the other Heads had their desks and many of their books in the third rooms of their suites...they used these as studies. His was his private laboratory. So his desk and most of his books were crammed into his sitting room (though he'd had shelves built in his bedroom too, where books also towered in tidy stacks on his bedside tables), along with the sofas and chairs he required as Head of House.

It was, in short, a room ill suited to pacing.

And today, nine days after his near-fatal rendezvous with Voldemort and three days into his sequestration in his own rooms, he was inclined to pace.

Really, he was inclined to get the hell out of his rooms and breathe some air he'd not already inhaled uncountable times.

If only he could walk more than three steps without needing to stop and support himself using a chair back, doorframe, or stretch of wall...whatever came to hand.

Yesterday was the first day he had been able to get out of bed, wash, shave, and dress. It had taken him two hours to do all those things, but he had done them. Then he had immediately lain back on his bed...booted, buttoned, and frock-coated...and slept like the dead until mid-afternoon. He'd spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening reading and drowsing in front of the fire.

Today was a nearly normal day, except that every little thing exhausted him...and he was still a virtual prisoner.

Three nights ago Filius and Minerva had Levitated him from the hospital wing down to his rooms. They had made the move in the dead of night to avoid students (and it was sheer luck they'd not encountered Peeves).

Since then, house-elves had Apparated in with food and drink. Mostly he just wanted water, but he made himself drain the bowls of broth and chew and swallow the toast they brought him.

Poppy Flooed in twice daily to supervise his potions dosage and make assessments of his progress. He found it infantilising to have a great pinafored mother hen swooping and clucking about his rooms. And none of his growled abuse seemed to find its mark with her...she tartly deflected it and went ahead with her pillow-fluffing, pulse-taking, brow-wiping officiousness.

He was also fed to the teeth with the intrusions of his colleagues. Horace had appeared twice with batches of Iecur Fortis potion, which Severus needed quite a bit of. On the second occasion, Severus had cut off Horace's nattering bonhomie with a weakly cast but quite sincere Furnunculus hex. Horace had begun sending the potions via Poppy.

Minerva made a point of Flooing in around teatime each day. He was irritated with her on principle, but at least she didn't make sympathetic sickroom noises at him. She simply talked of the day's DADA lessons and of her plans for the next day.

Perhaps the classes she had taken on would not be sinkholes of anarchy when he returned. He shuddered to think of the wilderness his Slughorn-tended classes would have become by the time Horace handed them back to him.

He was not pleased to discover that, in order to cover his fifth- and sixth-year DADA lessons, Minerva had given the reins of her first- and second-year Transfiguration lessons to her teaching assistant, Plato Cowell, a seventh-year Ravenclaw.

'Oh, Cowell's perfectly capable of handling a couple of weeks' worth of lower level teaching,' she said, waving her hand dismissively at Severus, who was silently radiating disapproval.

'In fact, I'm grateful for the chance to give him something a little more challenging. He has been marking papers for me since the beginning of last year, and I think the poor boy is on the verge of deciding he doesn't want to be a teacher after all. I am hoping a little time in the classroom will reinvigorate his ambition. He'd be a good one.'

Severus snorted, bringing on a coughing fit that in turn reduced him to panting, stomach-clutching pain for nearly five minutes. Minerva tsked and handed him a glass of water but generally stayed out of his way while he recovered from this little attack.

Breathing hard, he gazed up at the window in his ceiling, which was twenty feet below the surface of the lake. The dying daylight illuminated a long rope of weed undulating gently across the outside of the glass.

At least the woman has some vestiges of tact and self-restraint, he thought as he watched her refill their teacups.

He revised this assessment almost immediately.

'You should consider keeping Miss Granger on as your assistant even after you've returned to the classroom.' Minerva pulled a flask out of her sleeve and tipped a little amber liquid into her tea. 'I cannot tell you what a relief it is to have a reliable second to whom I can hand over some of my more routine work.' She settled more comfortably in her chair.

'What are you talking about, Minerva?' he demanded coldly.

'Severus, you did know, surely, that she has been marking papers for your first through fifth years?' She looked at him quizzically. 'Horace and I quite depend upon her already. If we had to mark all those papers as well as take your lessons we'd be buried. Albus had the foresight to recruit her for the task the very night you were hurt. I am surprised he didn't choose to tell you she was part of the plan, as I can tell from your expression he did not.'

'Where are they?' he rasped.

'Of whom do you speak, Severus?' She cocked an eyebrow at him.

Damnable woman. 'Not whom, what. The papers, Minerva. The scribbled-on, amateurishly marked, know-it-all-tainted PAPERS. Hand them over.'

'Well, of course most of them have gone back to the students already,' she said blandly. 'I do have a batch in my satchel; we traded marked for unmarked right before I came here.' She began to rummage in her bag, pulling out handfuls of rolled parchments. 'Miss Granger sends her good wishes, by the way. She's been quite concerned about you, you know.'

Severus's face was flushed a dull yellowish red. He was boiling with rage and frustration at being handled and disrupted and having his lesson plans and papers touched and his classroom overrun by bloody well anyone bloody Albus chose.

'Wingardium Leviosa Totus,' he hissed with a curt wave of his wand. The parchments Minerva had heaped on his coffee table floated up and moved over to his desk, where he released them into neat piles.

'Miss Granger's good wishes and expressions of concern are none of my concern,' he sneered. 'I shall have my work cut out for me cleaning up her efforts there...' he pointed at the parchments '...and discovering how badly she has queered my students' marks in the last nine days.

'I'll thank you to retrieve the papers you deposited with her today and bring them here to me so that I may mark them properly.'

'I'll do no such thing,' said Minerva with asperity. 'You are behaving like a spoilt child, Severus. You may look at those parchments tonight to assure yourself that Miss Granger is doing a more than acceptable job with them. I promise you she is.

'No!' she snapped when he drew breath to speak. 'Not a peep from you until I finish. I will remind you that I have been teaching at this school for longer than you have been alive, and that my standards have not slipped a jot since you scraped your Divination NEWT.

'Hermione Granger will continue to mark Defence Against the Dark Arts papers as instructed by the Headmaster until he deems you fit to resume your duties. And if you have a shred of sense that is not prisoner to your tender self-regard, you'll let her continue to mark them as long as you can manage to keep her.

'I'll be by to pick those parchments up after breakfast tomorrow. The third-years will be needing them back before the holiday. Do not waste your strength redoing work that has been done and done well, Severus. It's absurd.'

Minerva stepped to the fireplace and Flooed to her own rooms without another word.

Checking his first impulse to throw his teacup into the fireplace after his colleague, Severus hauled himself to his feet and hobbled over to his desk. Reaching for a quill with one hand, he yanked the first parchment towards himself with the other.

Karin Morgenstern had written 15 inches on the benefits and risks of using personal concealment charms in defensive situations...apparently Horace was at least keeping to the assignments laid out in Severus's own lesson plans for the month.

Hermione Granger's neat handwriting filled the right-hand margin of the essay. Her comments were surprisingly terse and to the point, if a little overhelpful. Severus, for example, would not have appended a list of references for further reading. He doubted the Hufflepuff girl...a very mediocre student...would care to go deeper into the subject than she had to. But the mark was fair enough.

He unrolled the next parchment. Dennis Creevey, a Gryffindor, had done a slapdash job. As usual. Granger's notes were sharp but not harsh, and again the (very low) mark was fair.

Slytherin Vestal Pryce was a lamentably bad writer. Granger had heavily marked up the first paragraph of her essay, then left a note at the bottom requesting that Vestal come and see her so they could go over the paper's many grammatical and spelling problems. 'You must improve your writing skills if you are to succeed in this or any other class at Hogwarts,' she warned, and Severus smirked. He could picture the know-it-all saying these words aloud to Pryce, and the mutinous, mulish look she would receive in reply. Pryce would not take kindly to being lectured to by a Gryffindor student.

The lake water pressing against the windows of his rooms was black by the time he had finished reviewing all the parchments.

Granger had done an acceptable job. Severus could quibble but he couldn't find fault.

He sipped from the bowl of broth the house-elf had just delivered. Dumbledore had managed everything so that Severus did not have to lift a finger during his recovery.

But if he had no work... Well, he needed to do something or he'd fairly quickly run mad.

Perhaps he could review his notes for the project he had been working on two years ago, before the Dark Lord had returned and recalled his Death Eaters and Severus's time had entirely stopped being his own. He pulled out his wand.

'Accio journal. Accio Fortescue, Pelham, Hemon, Garcia, and Tomikawa.' The books flew to his desk and stacked themselves neatly.

He reached into his pocket for the silvery ear cuffs, tapped them with his wand, and slipped them on. The rich sounds of a Bach suite for cello flowed into him as he opened his old journal and began to read.

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Albus stepped out onto the hearthrug. A low fire gave the room a dim golden glow. The desk lamp was on, flooding the book-choked desktop with light. Severus sat absorbed, scratching away with his quill in a leather-bound journal set amid the piles. He didn't seem to have heard Albus come in.

'Good evening, Severus,' said the Headmaster, and Snape jerked his head up, simultaneously pulling something off his right ear.

'Albus. Minerva told me you were away from Hogwarts.'

It wasn't the most gracious greeting, but he'd been taken by surprise.

'I've just returned, and I wanted to see how you were faring. Better than the last time I saw you, it seems.' Albus smiled and glanced down at a stack of parchments covered with complex formulas written in Severus's narrow, spiky hand.

He looked up in surprise. 'The old Sublimation project? I didn't know you'd taken it up again. How marvellous; it was such an audacious hypothesis, such a well designed series of experiments. When did you start working on it?'

'I'm not working on it,' said Severus truculently, closing the journal and pulling the other cuff off his left ear. 'I had time on my hands and a modicum of energy so I just... took a look.' He turned off the desk lamp and removed an envelope from a drawer before making his way slowly to the nearest armchair, into which he lowered himself stiffly.

'Albus, since I am immured here, would you send an owl for me?'

'Of course, Severus.' Albus reached out for the envelope and read the inscription. 'Narcissa Malfoy?' He looked over the tops of his glasses at his pale, spent young colleague. 'Are you sure you want to send this by owl?'

'I don't see an alternative. Merlin knows why the Dark Lord hasn't summoned me these last few days, but the dispensation cannot last. Narcissa will know what to do when she receives this.'

'I will send it straightaway if you wish, Severus, but I should tell you I called on Narcissa Malfoy the day after you were hurt. I think you'll find Voldemort has taken steps to make shift without you.'

Knowing how incapable Riddle was of thinking of anyone's needs but his own, Albus had contrived to remind him that the spell he'd cast on Severus would have the Potions master in hospital for weeks.

Albus recalled the mood of his visit to Narcissa Malfoy...how their conversation was a careful dance of half-truths, double meanings, and subtext. He did not ask her to carry a message to Voldemort that Snape was badly broken and couldn't work at present, and she did not promise to do so. And yet he did ask, and she did promise.

'In fact,' Albus mused, as though it had just occurred to him, 'I recollect that Narcissa is rather a dab hand with potions. I wouldn't be surprised if she has stepped in to supply the lack herself.'

'Regardless, why don't you take the opportunity to rest, Severus? While you stay in your rooms you can have a little span of peace, and some relief from all your usual duties at Hogwarts and... elsewhere. Mmm?' Dumbledore held up the envelope.

Leaning forward, Severus plucked it out of his hand and winged it into the embers, where it flamed up and burnt down to ashes.

'Good, good,' sighed Albus, suddenly looking as tired as Severus felt. 'I shall be at Hogwarts until the holiday begins, dear boy. I'll look in tomorrow.'

He stepped into the fire and was gone.

Severus sat quite still in the warm, dim room, letting his exhaustion fill his whole body.

A few days of autonomy, even if he had to take them cooped up in his rooms were... well, a few days of autonomy. Unheard of, unlooked for, but his. He looked over at his desk, with its piles of books and parchment.

He knew he had to try one more time to reach Draco before the boy went home for the holiday. But he would leave it for just a bit...

It was very late when Ka the house-elf found Professor Snape fast asleep on his sitting room sofa. She Levitated him gently to his bed, pulled off his boots, undid the buttons at his neck and wrists, and set a fresh pitcher of cool water on his bedside table.

He barely stirred when she Apparated away, and if any dreams came to him that night, he'd forgotten them by morning.

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A/N: Furnunculus hex: a spell that causes boils to break out all over the victim.

Thanks to greenstuff for the beta and lifeasanamazon for the Brit-pick, as always!