Chapter Forty-One—Indenture

AN: It's been so long, I know. I hope I haven't lost you.

Numb.

At least, that's what she had thought at first. It was not unknown for her whole body to go totally numb during times that the pain became so intense, so voracious that she wished for such all-encompassing sensory deadness. Occasionally, her wish was granted but not often enough.

Her pain receptors had become so accustomed to firing that sometimes she wondered if she had just learned to block the bulk of it out and that they never stopped sending those burning signals of desperation into her brain. It was always a matter of degree. If there was no pain, she was in overload.

She took a deep breath and sighed the air out slowly. Something wasn't quite right...she could feel her ribs creak tiredly as they moved. She inhaled again, thinking that she was mistaken. No, she could feel the tightness in her throat, the stiffness in her spine from being left in one position for too long and slight warmth on her face.

She could feel.

Parr prised her eyelids open carefully and looked blindly into the pale winter light. Her focus was shot to hell. Even squinting failed to sharpen any of the details. She rolled her eyes in their sockets, wincing as the granular sensation of grit scraped across the inside of her lids. A raspy groan slipped from her mouth as she pushed herself upright and wobbled on the uncertain support of her right arm. The tight bandage around her neck made it difficult for her to drop her head forward and out of the cruel blast of sunlight. Drawing her legs up towards her body, she slumped over her knees, one hand pressed to her forehead.

She felt like she'd been sat on by an elephant, which, whilst unusual, was not unwelcome in comparison to how she'd been feeling over the past few days. It was still worse than one of those monumental hangovers that were always Remus' fault.

She smacked her lips and nearly reeled backwards at the smell of her own breath. Dear God, had someone stuffed a dead bird in her mouth while she was passed out?

"Remus," she ground out raggedly. The evil bastard had probably avenged himself by doing to her what she had done to him some months ago. He'd shown an amazing lack of humour at the event, which had just served to heighten Parr's amusement. Some rather colourful language had erupted from the man's mouth along with the sparrow's feathers that could have had something to do with an avowal of revenge. She'd been too busy laughing to notice at the time.

A rustle of starched cloth approached.

"What on Earth are you doing?" The outraged tone could only come from one person.

"Trying to get away from the stench of my own breath, Poppy," Parr replied hoarsely, swinging her legs over the side of the cot and out of the covers. "I don't suppose you have a toothbrush, do you? Mine's... ah... sort of... ruined."

"Paré's pants, your toothbrush is the least of my concerns right now!" Pomfrey told her crossly.

Parr's head wobbled upright and she tried to fix her gaze on the matron-shaped blob in front of her.

"Poppy, my breath comes straight from Satan's arse," she pointed out, her hand cupped over her mouth. "How can you not be vomiting?"

"I have a strong stomach in addition to having been rather desensitised to dreadful smells over the past two days, Chara. I also have an extremely short temper right now, so it would really be better for all if you got back into bed."

Parr's gauze-wrapped hand dropped from her mouth, and she sighed. "Trust me when I say that I would feel a lot better if I could take a shower and scrape the dung out of my mouth. Then I promise I'll get back into bed." She squinted up at Pomfrey's blurry silhouette. "Please?"

"How do you feel?"

"Old, squashed and smelly," Parr replied. "Therefore a lot better than before."

Pomfrey's hand tipped her head up to allow her to fuss at the bandage around Parr's neck.

"You've been out for two days. I was starting to worry."

"You? Worry?" Parr snorted. "I find that hard to believe." The lines across her forehead deepened. "Two days? I guess it must've been worse than I thought."

"How much do you remember?"

Parr blinked a few times as her mind lurched about, trying to find some scraps of recollection. The stark whiteness of the ceiling played havoc with her eyes' already poor focussing abilities, making her feel disorientated and unbalanced. She tried her hardest not to sway lest Pomfrey notice and determine that strapping her back into bed was the best course of action.

"Not much," she admitted after a few moments. "I remember... people talking. I remember... red." She frowned. "Remus. Remus was here." She moved to stand. "Did he..."

Pomfrey stopped her from rising off the cot with a hand on her shoulder. "No, Chara. He's not found her yet. Please, sit still for me."

"Oh God!" Panic shot through Parr's voice. "I dropped it! I dropped it, Poppy!" She clutched at the woman's arms, her eyes wide with the razor-sharp shock of what she had forgotten.

"Chara, don't! You'll..."

"She relies on me!" Parr cried, her grip tightening painfully on Pomfrey's forearms. "She relies on me to take it and I dropped it!" Her face drained of colour until it was nearly as white as her hair.

"You would know if she is dead!" Pomfrey told her loudly, trying to cut through Parr's abrupt hysteria. "Is she?"

Parr froze, blinking uncertainly up at the mediwitch. She gulped in a breath.

"No." A sob escaped her. "But I dropped it, Poppy! I swore I never would. I swore to her," she repeated in a harsh whisper, her eyes searching desperately for something in Pomfrey's eyes. Whether it was forgiveness or condemnation, Pomfrey couldn't tell. The woman's wretched situation was not in her ability to cure or even palliate.

"If you dropped it, then where is it?"

Parr's fingernails dug into Pomfrey's skin. "I don't know!" She shook the older woman slightly. "I can't find it!"

"Perhaps because it isn't there, Chara."

The younger woman's forehead wrinkled. "I don't... understand..."

"The drugs you've been given deaden the pain receptors in your body," Pomfrey explained. "It's a dangerous thing to do, but we had no choice. You wouldn't stop screaming." She prised Parr's hands off her arms gently but firmly. "Remus nearly gave himself a stroke when he heard you. I had to ask his permission to give the drugs to you. There wasn't anyone else I could..." She trailed off, plainly unwilling to finish the sentence.

"Then the pain..."

"Is essentially still there, but you can't feel it."

"Does it rebound? To Caroli?" The desperate expression returned, the fine network of lines around her eyes deepening in her pale skin like spider webs in an evening's dying light.

"You would know better than I. Is she in pain?"

Parr's eyes defocused as she looked inward, her pupils dilating to almost twice their size. She sobbed again, this time in relief. "No!" She hung her head to hide her face, but Pomfrey saw the thick drop of water fall onto the woman's bare leg.

"Then there is something to be glad of," the mediwitch told her softly.

Parr gave a snotty sniff and scrubbed her hand over her eyes. "You said you were going to St Mungo's. Is that where you got the drugs from?"

It was the question that Pomfrey had hoped Parr wouldn't ask. She smoothed her apron absently and knotted her fingers together tightly.

"No."

Parr looked up, her eyes reddened and abnormally bright from the tears that sat in them.

"Then where..."

"They wouldn't help," said Pomfrey angrily and turned away abruptly lest Parr see the nasty flush of red in her face. She busied herself with rearranging various objects on the small table beside Parr's cot: a comb, a glass of water, some bandages and a book that its owner had been reading only a few hours before. A safety-pin was pushed around to various spots by Pomfrey's agitated fingers.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

"Why not?" Parr's tone was flat, and Pomfrey couldn't tell if she was angry, curious or disappointed, facing away from her as she was in order to hide her own emotion.

"They said it was too dangerous for you to be brought there again. Refused!" Pomfrey banged the glass of water sharply on the wood of the side table to vent her frustration. Some of the contents slopped over the rim, eliciting a hiss of annoyance. "I couldn't believe it. I tried everything I could." She pressed her lips together tightly before turning to face Parr. "They wouldn't even send anyone!" Her voice shook with rage, the colour high in her cheeks.

Parr blinked slowly. "Hardly surprising, considering what happened last time," she replied carefully and rather woodenly.

"That is no excuse!" Pomfrey almost shrieked. "They are not to make judgements like that! A sick person deserves treatment. That is the way it always has been. Or so I thought!"

"Then where did you get the drugs from?"

Pomfrey's face went stony, and she looked to one side, the blood in her cheeks signalling her discomfort.

"Surely you didn't steal them?" Parr asked with a small laugh.

The mediwitch's face snapped into outrage. "Certainly not! I would never..."

"It was a joke, Poppy. I know you would never do that," Parr assured her, wiping the dampness from her own cheeks.

Pomfrey's huff of indignation relayed what she thought of Parr's sense of humour.

With a creak of old bedsprings and even older-feeling bones, Parr stood slowly from the bed, testing her legs carefully. She waved Pomfrey away as the woman surged towards her. A smile of satisfaction seemed appropriate as she managed to stay upright.

"And so," she continued, her arms held out in a mini-flourish at her success. "Who do I have to thank for being my drug dealer, then?"

Regret.

At least, that was what he had felt at first. It was like reopening an old wound, the kind that had never healed cleanly. Brittle and thin, a weak spot that would forever be condemned to the risk of failure. It had been years since he had thought of its cause. Perhaps he should have left it alone.

He had become so accustomed to ignoring the memory that as time went by he started to wonder if it had really happened. Perhaps he had fabricated the whole thing, so divorced from the experience of it that it could have been someone else's story, something that had insinuated itself into his recollections like a cunning parasite.

It hurt more than he thought it would, probably because he'd pushed it aside for so long, refusing to acknowledge just how greatly it had impacted his life. Cut it dead before it destroyed him...that was how he had chosen to react to it. But the anger was still there, still strong even after fifteen years, interwoven tightly with a bitter emptiness.

He'd stared disbelievingly when the Chief Healer had told him he'd been refused advancement in his chosen career. Langerhans must have seen the undisguised shock on his face.

"I know you were expecting to get the apprenticeship position, but the board decided in favour of Tyro Harris for a number of reasons."

Snape failed to evince any reaction to Langerhans' comment, frozen in the chair, his brain locked around the denial like a stone in the gears of a machine. The Chief Healer sighed, realising that this was going to go even worse than he had anticipated.

"It's nothing to do with your abilities or your knowledge, Severus." The first-time use of his given name sounded alien to the both of them, a shallow attempt to inject some form of friendliness and understanding into the exchange. "But there are so many other factors involved in Harris being a more suitable candidate than you."

"It's because I told Healer Pander she was wrong about that poisoned girl in the Borgia Ward, isn't it?"

Langerhans closed his eyes briefly and sighed at Snape's flat tone. "It certainly didn't help," he replied honestly. "However..."

"But I was right."

"However..."

"If I hadn't said something, the patient could have died."

"However," the older man overrode him, giving him a warning look over his pince-nez glasses. "There are a number of other points of concern that several board members brought up during the review of your application."

Snape clamped his mouth shut against the retort that threatened the Chief Healer's already limited patience and jiggled his leg in furious exasperation.

"Of serious note was your frequent tendency to correct Healers in front of patients as well as your lack of empathy with those undergoing treatment here at the hospital."

The younger man ducked his head, trying to hide behind the one lock of hair that always refused to be tied back. He hated having his hair pulled away from his face, but the hospital's rules were very specific and inflexible. The other trainees were always making jokes at his expense that Snape didn't find in the least bit amusing. Harris was the worst, always sweetly reassuring him that he'd grow into his nose one day with the kind of doe-eyed innocence that made him want to slap her. Now he had even more reason to hate her.

"You seem to regard medical cases as nothing more than the illness," Langerhans continued with a stern frown. "It seems inconsequential to you that the illness comes with a person attached, a person who has feelings...worries...about their condition."

Snape sniffed and looked at his feet partially hidden under the hem of his pale green trainee robes.

"Healer Broca has spoken to you on a number of occasions about this very issue, and so have I, but you persist in a complete refusal of dealing with a person's emotional dis-ease."

"I don't feel comfortable coddling people," the dark-haired trainee mentioned sullenly. "It sounds... fake."

Langerhans sighed, shaking his head at the young man's unfailing stubbornness. "I'd hoped that the more you interacted with patients, the more accustomed to considering the intangible side of healing you'd become." He rested his elbow on his desk and rubbed his forehead wearily. "But it seems to be a barrier you do not wish to overcome, and I cannot allow that kind of attitude in any apprentice Healer, no matter how gifted they may be."

"But not all Healers deal with patients," Snape pointed out, squinting shrewdly at the grey-haired man opposite him. "Healer Bethune spends all his time in his office writing research papers and no-one lectures him about not holding a patient's hand."

"Healer Bethune spent decades working on the wards with patients before you were even born, Tyro Snape," Langerhans informed him rather loudly. "He has earned the right to spend his days researching in whatever area he deems important." He paused in an effort to dispel the flash of temper that Snape's comment had dredged up from him. "Just because a Healer spends their time in research, it does not mean they do not consider the eventual impact of their research on a living, breathing person. It is a consideration that all Healers must have, whether they work on a full ward or in a dusty and remote office. The person is what we treat, not just the condition. They are inextricably linked."

"Guérir quelquefois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours," Snape muttered with a sour twist to his mouth.

"Exactly," Langerhans replied emphatically, leaning forward in his chair. "I'm glad that you have at least absorbed something of what Healer La Vigne has taught you during your time here. They have to become more than just words to you or you will never reach your potential."

Snape glowered darkly at him, mouth pressed in a thin line.

"Your distance and curtness are not the only problems," Langerhans continued after another pause. He fiddled about with some parchments on the desk in front of him, trying to find the best way to phrase his next sentence.

Black eyes glittered at him, unblinking, accusatory. The Chief Healer's muddy blue eyes met them head-on.

"A number of people have expressed... a concern about your affiliations outside of the hospital."

Snape said nothing, but he felt his face darken involuntarily. The silence stretched out between them like a thorny chasm that became greater than the spacious office the conversation was taking place in, threatening to swallow them both into a ragged descent into vicious argument.

"What does my life outside of the hospital have to do with anything?" Snape finally demanded to know, his shoulders tight and rounded forward defensively.

"It has everything to do with your position here," Langerhans told him unflinchingly. "A patient has to trust a Healer. Trust is hard to procure from a patient at the best of times and it is frighteningly easy to lose. Your reputation is key to securing and keeping that trust. If there is any doubt as to the credence of your duty as a Healer, a patient will not trust you. And if a patient does not trust you, you cannot treat them adequately. And if you cannot treat the patient adequately, then there is no point to you being a Healer."

"Unlike some, Healer Langerhans, I am able to separate my personal life from my professional life," Snape responded with a bitter sneer.

"I cannot consider them separately, Tyro Snape," Langerhans shot back coldly. "Once a Healer, what you do off-duty is as relevant as what you do when on-duty."

"I disagree."

"You are at liberty to do so, but not in my hospital."

Snape stood, pulled loose the thin strap of leather that held his hair back and tossed it on Langerhans' desk.

"It will not be your hospital forever," he noted icily and left the Chief Healer's office, and the hospital, for the last time.

Maybe not forever, but certainly for a long time. Fifteen years on and Langerhans was still in charge, with no retirement in sight. Not that it mattered. The time of his apprenticeship had come and gone; an opportunity that would never present itself again.

Snape sighed and scribbled some notes in the margin of the parchment he was writing on. Whilst the incumbent Chief Healer had not changed in the intervening years, other things had. Now that he was older, Snape realised that Langerhans and the board had been right to refuse him the apprenticeship. The blots against his application were of his own devising...he couldn't deny that. It didn't mean that he liked what had happened, just that maturity had opened him to accepting the reasons why it had happened. Those reasons still existed: he was still curt, irascible and unsympathetic, and to many he was still a Death Eater, no matter what the determination of the Wizengamot had been. Who would want to be treated by such a person?

The line between his brows deepened. Someone who was desperate. Someone that all others had given up on, whether justified or not. Someone who had been near death.

It was true that Snape was only ever interested in the medical condition. The person attached to it was inconsequential to him, almost an embarrassment in the way they'd muddy up the diagnosis with tedious whining and pathetic self-absorption. As a trainee at the hospital, he'd lost track of the number of times he'd told a patient to shut up and let him get on with the task at hand, and that was always after an interminable period of time during which he'd suffer their repetitive bleating in silence.

He'd come to the conclusion early on that patients lied. Or, if he were to be honest, perhaps it was more that their ignorance was a serious hindrance. They focussed on some elements of their condition and forgot about others. There was never a factual recounting of the symptoms. There'd be the inevitable side stories about family strife, troubles at work, feeling out of control, stress about money...

"Just fill this in," Snape would tell them, thrusting a questionnaire parchment at them and leaving the room before he snapped. Sometimes he even said "please" if it had been fairly early on in the day, before he got ground down into frustration. Healer Broca would shake her head and lecture him endlessly about his lack of empathy, totally disregarding the almost unfailing accuracy of his final diagnosis.

It still pissed him off.

But that was a long time ago, and there was little point in dwelling on what could have been and resenting what he couldn't change. He'd made his decision and that was that: his chosen career ended before it had even begun.

Or so he had thought.

While at St Mungo's, he'd been mystified at the way the other trainees fumbled and flopped their way through a differential, spending more time arguing with each other than examining the possible causes of the patient's symptoms. They seemed to approach the whole thing backwards, lurching from one suggestion to another without examining the anatomical cause behind the symptoms. If there were five of the six symptoms evident for a particular illness, they'd tout it as a possibility. Four out of six if they were desperate.

He'd just wait until they'd finished cluttering the session up with extraneous material and then declare three of the most likely diagnoses. The other trainees would sigh and roll their eyes at his certain tone, Healer Broca would proceed to pick apart his suggestions as best she could while Healer La Vigne wore her enigmatic smile, having swiftly become accustomed to the accuracy of her trainee's diagnostic abilities and was rather proud of it. None of the other Healers had been so fortunate in their trainees' abilities.

"They are jealous," La Vigne explained in her wry, heavily-accented voice accompanied with a slight shrug when he asked why everyone picked his suggestions as the ones to rip apart. "Pay it no mind. They don't like you because you have no manners."

He'd blinked at that bald comment.

"But then, neither do I," his teacher pointed out with an elegant wave of her hand, closing her heavily-lashed eyes. "Healer Broca still hates me, and it's been forty years since I suffered her as my trainer." She'd fixed him with an appraising look from her deep blue, almost violet eyes and pinched his cheek lightly...one of the few people he'd ever let touch him without flinching or shying away. "They also don't like you because you are right. And a right answer is what matters, non?"

Snape lifted the quill from the parchment in a momentary pause. He'd disappointed Healer La Vigne. He knew that with a certainty as steely as the woman's exacting standards. He'd never explained to her why he'd left, and he wondered now if she'd have known the reasons why. She'd written to him after he'd left, but he'd never read her letter. The likelihood that her disappointment was contained within the elaborate swirls of her handwriting caused him to immolate the letter before he could bring himself to open it. Burned, along with the opportunity to become a Healer, the chance to unpick the knots of mystery that snarled up a person's body; ashes. Fitting.

He put the quill down, maudlin thoughts throwing cold water on his examination of the components of the anodyne of his own devising in order to achieve something more refined, more tailored to the requirement of it. He'd made it himself many years ago in a desperate attempt to quench a rapacious agony borne of a near fatal injury bestowed upon him by a master who took failure very poorly. He'd suffered through many sleepless nights where standard treatment had left him begging for death. The drug was deadly. One drop too much could mortally poison. Dose with it for too long and the heart would stop. Seek it out too often and it became bitterly addictive.

Snape stared, unseeing, between the sharp angles of his written words, the silence of the classroom sitting heavy around him, like weighted cloth that only slightly softened the claustrophobic mass of frigid stone in the dungeons.

He should have left it alone. It wasn't his business. He'd been told that on a number of occasions, either verbally or with a look. It depended on the witness to his interest as to how they would transmit their dissatisfaction about his curiosity, but he'd never been able to leave a mystery alone. It would nag at him until he found ways to unravel the snarled mass of intrigue and occlusion, for to know was better than to be in ignorance. Ignorance left you in the dark. Ignorance left you exposed. Ignorance could get you killed. It had been a brutally harsh lesson for him to learn and he wasn't about to forget what it had taught him. He'd made too many mistakes through ignorance.

If the others had been in the infirmary, he didn't know what he would have done. Turn around and left? Could he have possibly done that? Part of him would have said it was the wisest course of action. His presence, let alone his assistance, would not be welcomed there. It was fortunate, not only for him, that he hadn't had to come up against that decision. Only Pomfrey had been there, slumped forward in a wooden chair, her head resting in her hand so that her fingers covered her eyes, elbow on her knee. A small, empty bottle in her free hand, clutched so tight that her knuckles were pale. Waiting the way Healers did when their patients had nothing left to do but die. Waiting while they furiously turned over in their mind what they could have done to change this outcome. Waiting for the moment when the breath wouldn't come again...the silence that screamed in accusation and despair.

"Poppy?"

Her head lifted. He could see the faint sheen of wetness on her face lit from the lamp on the table next to the cot, a light that threw the wretched figure in the bed into silhouette.

"Severus?"

She stood, hesitant, waiting for him to walk through the doorway.

"What is it?" She took a step towards him, the hand that had supported her head clutching at her white apron.

He held the bottle up in his hand.

Pomfrey paused a moment before making her way towards him, a brief glance at her patient to check that her chest still rose and fell in its erratic rhythm, fearful that should she step too far away, the lack of her immediate presence would take the last support away from whatever it was that held Parr up from that bottomless pit that yawned beneath her.

"What is it?" the mediwitch asked once more into the shadows where he stood.

"A last chance."

She took the bottle from his hand. The liquid inside was as clear as water, giving no hint as to its components. She looked back up at him across the threshold to the infirmary, her eyes rimmed with a redness that he could see even in the dim light, and held out the bottle to him.

"You know best how to use it," she told him. "I shouldn't..."

"No."

Pomfrey's lips thinned as she pressed them together briefly. "Why not?"

"You know the reason why. This is not my place."

She sighed. "I'm old, Severus, but my memory is not failing me. I do recall you being here on a number of prior occasions."

"As a teacher, yes. As a patient..." He shrugged slightly. "From time to time. But no more than that." He saw the lines in her face that spelled out her keen awareness of her failure. He'd seen it before, years ago; that same pattern of dreadful realisation that some things were beyond a person's ability to ameliorate. He had to admit that, for once, he felt sympathy for her.

He told her the dosage, turned and left, having not set one foot in the infirmary during the entire exchange. It was not his place to do so.

In many ways what he had done to Pomfrey was cruel. In giving her a potential hope at such a moment it called into question her own efficacy in her role. Snape knew that in her youth, she had been more than capable as a Healer, "a person of significant potential" he had heard said of her. How and why she had ended up as a mediwitch at a school treating a sorry gallimaufry of typical childhood magical diseases and ludicrous maladies resulting from immature pranks, he had no idea. He'd never asked and no one had ever told him. He found it hard to believe that it would have been a willing decision on her part.

He had also put her in the quagmire of uncertainty as to whether or not she should use what he gave her. He was not entitled to treat people in such a fashion, even though others had required it of him in the past. Treating himself was one thing. He had only himself to be responsible for. Even providing Lupin's lycanthropy medication made him uncomfortable.

Snape rested his elbow on his desk and lowered his forehead into the palm of his hand, his fatigue finally catching up with him. Rest had been patchy of late.

Would Pomfrey take the risk? There really wasn't much choice left for her. Either let her patient die, or try a possible salvation, however dangerous. Which option was in the best interests of her patient?

Parr had been a wreck, her body so wasted and wracked in pain that to let her live in such a way was an obscenity against compassion. It was never clear when the Healer had to let the patient go. There was never a definitive line that you could see being crossed, when the best interests of the patient were overshadowed by the Healer's stubborn refusal to give up, thinking that perhaps there was some way, hoping that some miracle would happen when all else had failed.

Would Pomfrey take the risk? He'd forced that decision on her, abrogating his own responsibility by walking away and leaving the bottle in her hand. Just one more cruelty in his character, to do such a thing. Langerhans had been right.

He'd owned many decisions: ones that had shaped his life into the jagged edges that he stood on precariously as if balanced on the shards of shattered glass in bare feet, ones that occasionally made the darkness a little less consuming only to return him to that hopeless reality of his situation, ones that condemned him to pay and pay and pay until it seemed he had nothing left to give. But he'd refused to own the decision to let Parr live or die, and he had no idea why.

Would Pomfrey take the risk? Snape couldn't say how he knew the answer to that. He had not been to the infirmary since, and he had shunned company entirely since that night, seeping around the castle like black ink in the shadows, ill-at-ease, unseen by anyone except Folter.

Until now.

He sighed and raised his head and looked straight at Parr.

Her cheeks were still hollowed, the shadowing around her eyes making her look even thinner, but she was not even close to the level of emaciation he had last seen her in. She must have eaten half the contents of the school's kitchen stores to recover weight so quickly. She shouldn't even be out of the infirmary, but wilful as she was, Parr would decide what she wanted to do, when and for how long.

She stared at him blankly from the other side of his desk, steeped neck to toes in black that blended at its edges into the shadows of the classroom, pupils swollen in the grey irises like a bloom of soot on granite.

Neither of them spoke. Snape had no idea what he should say, if anything, and Parr was being uncharacteristically mute. He saw her nostrils flare a fraction of a second before she moved and moved so fast that his eyes struggled to catch up.

The point of the knife bit into the wooden surface of the desk faster than the strike of a serpent; the deed done before his body even had a chance to flinch.

Parr's hand tightened on the hilt, her gaze locked on the blade with an almost vicious intensity that never touched the rest of her face, frozen as the line of crimson ran down the edge. And then she was gone, a streak of silver and black, the white panel down the back of her overcoat slashed with rusted orange, her knife still jammed into his desk with her blood leaking into the pierced wood, its hilt bound in the same shades as those running down her back...a late sunset twisted with long white cloud.

He studied the embedded blade for some time, trying to riddle out its meaning, but it was a language he had no knowledge of, a symbol of some unknown declaration on her part, a sign that could as easily be an announcement of war as a proclamation of gratitude. Snape had no idea what it was saying to him.

But he did know someone who might.

AN: "Guérir quelquefois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours" means "Cure occasionally, relieve often, console always". It is a quote attributed to the French surgeon, Ambroise Paré (1510-1590).