Chapter Forty-Three—Patient

Snape stood by the cot, tapping his foot impatiently. Diagonally across from him, Pomfrey was stripping another cot of its linen now that its former occupant was gone. There had been a brief burst of gastric 'flu amongst the students after the Yule Ball, and some of those hardest hit had been kept in the infirmary under Pomfrey's hawk-like eye. Snape suspected that some of those cases were more likely hangovers. Teenagers could never forgo an opportunity to get utterly inebriated. He glared at the mediwitch's back as she fussed with the precise angles of the hospital corners the sheets were being pressed into, displacing his irritation to her in the absence of its rightful focus.

He'd come here straight from the grounds, trailing water from the melted snow from his overcoat across the floor and making Pomfrey bristle at his effrontery.

"This is your idea, not mine!" he replied rather petulantly, making her roll her eyes at his snippiness. She cast a drying charm to dispel the puddles and proceeded to ignore him.

Minutes ticked by. Snape folded his arms and ground his teeth, becoming increasingly ratty at being kept waiting and his overcoat dripping a growing pool of water around his boots.

Folter would have told him if Parr was heading back to her quarters instead of here, but he hadn't thought the Striker would take this long to return inside. Perhaps whatever mysterious ritual attached to the return of her knife dictated she stay outside for some indeterminate further period of time. Snape's eyes flicked to the windows at the end of the room. It was now fully dark, the snow still falling outside in the swirls of a light wind. If Parr caught hypothermia, he'd flay a strip off her. That thought actually brightened his mood and he watched the flurry of snowfall through the frost-edged panes of glass for a while with a faint smile on his face.

When he turned his head back toward the entrance to the infirmary, he found Parr standing less than an arm's length away, her misted eye squinted as she looked up at him. He failed to suppress the jump that her sudden appearance elicited. She quirked her eyebrow faintly.

"Where have you been?" he snapped.

"Outside," she replied mildly.

"Doing what?" He feigned not to notice Pomfrey's icy expression at his nasty tone.

"Picking my nose."

His eyebrows drew down into an ill omen. "Don't be fatuous."

Parr shrugged slightly. "I was telling the truth. It itches inside."

"And I'm sure shoving your germ-ridden finger up your nostril is going to alleviate that," Snape responded sarcastically. "Take your clothes off and stand here." He pointed to a spot in front of him.

This time both Parr's eyebrows climbed some distance up her forehead. "Why? Are we going on a date?"

"What Professor Snape is trying to say," Pomfrey interjected, sweeping over in a rustle of impeccably starched linens, "is that he needs to examine you." She fixed Snape with her finest disapproving glare. "Though he could have put the suggestion to you in a slightly more appropriate way."

Parr's mouth formed a moue. "You're a doctor?" she asked Snape with a taint of suspicion in her voice, head tilted to one side like a curious sparrow.

"Not exactly," he ground out through gritted teeth, a vein in his temple starting to throb.

"The Professor spent some time in training at St Mungo's but never continued to apprenticeship," Pomfrey informed her.

"Ah." Parr nodded her head slowly. "Let me guess. Temperament issues?"

"Certainly not!" he snapped, hating Pomfrey rather keenly for subjecting him to this.

"No, I suppose not," Parr admitted calmly, studying him as if he were a particularly alien object. "Rudeness, sarcasm and irascibility are prized traits in a doctor, after all."

Snape bared his teeth at her.

"I had hoped to speak to you prior," Pomfrey continued as if the blooming acrimony were not occurring right in front of her face, "but I think it best if the Professor has some say in treating your condition. We think that he may be able to significantly increase your recovery. I'll be here at all times, so there's nothing to be concerned over."

Snape narrowed his eyes at Pomfrey. She was giving the impression that this had been a decision reached mutually between him and the mediwitch. The truth was that Pomfrey had browbeaten him into agreeing. He'd tried to twist out of it, but the woman had made up her mind and that was that.

"I cannot help her," she'd told him rather shrilly, two spots of colour high in her faintly-lined cheeks. "I've tried everything I know and it hasn't worked. You must do it." She'd somehow managed to loom over him despite being half a foot shorter.

"I'm not a Healer, Poppy. It isn't ethical."

She'd snorted at that. "I'm not giving you free rein, Severus. You will still be subordinate to me in Chara's treatment."

That certainly hadn't made the idea any more appealing. The notion of being subordinate always put his back up.

"I'm not interested," he'd told her bluntly and had turned to leave the infirmary.

"Your level of interest is beside the point," Pomfrey had replied, dodging around and in front of him once more to prevent his exit. "I will not see a patient of mine suffer through my inadequacies. If that means you have to treat her, then that's what you'll do, even if I have to hold you by the scruff of the neck to do it!"

He'd seen the iron-clad determination in her eyes and concluded that she would do exactly that if she felt it necessary.

"There is nothing I can do you can't, Poppy," he'd persisted, trying to slip out of the tightening grip of her resolve. "Medical matters are your purview because you are better qualified and more adept than I."

"Spare me the ego-stroking, Severus. I won't fall for it," Pomfrey had vowed. "There is no room in medicine for ego. The patient always comes first."

"It is not my place," he'd maintained doggedly and swept around her.

"I'll go to Albus if I have to."

That had stopped him dead. "You wouldn't." He didn't need to turn back to see the implacability in her face. It saturated her words like a water-laden sponge, leaving him in no doubt that she would do anything she felt she had to in order to get him to assent.

"Albus wants her alive, whatever the cost. Don't make me make him force you to do this."

"I never thought that blackmail was in your character, Poppy." His back had been rigid in suppressed anger at her inexorable will to force him to bend. She would drag him back into the embrace of the only profession he'd ever willingly sought to serve in. The pain it would reignite in him at his exclusion from it all those years ago did not matter to her. He still could have refused, but he'd known that eventually he would have been compelled to do as she had asked. Eventually.

The second he could convince Pomfrey that she was capable of handling Parr's rehabilitation herself once more, he'd drop the burden she'd dumped on him as if it were a burning branch. Perhaps if he were sufficiently rude and curt, she'd realise her mistake and chase him out from the infirmary before that, and since Parr's attitude had a hide as thick as an elephant's, he'd need to be especially discourteous.

Snape stared down at the Striker. "We can do this the easy way or the hard way, Miss Parr," he informed her. "Your smart mouth doesn't impress me one bit. I'm here to treat your injuries, not put up with your insolence and lack of co-operation."

"Severus!"

"Poppy, if you want me to do this, then I do it my way," he told the mediwitch curtly. "Miss Parr is difficult enough as a student but as a patient she has the potential to be intolerable." He fixed Parr with a black look. "I suffer you as a student only because I must; I do this under Madam Pomfrey's request only, and if you decide that it will amuse you to frustrate me I will hang you from the top of the Astronomy tower by your underwear, snowstorm or not. Doing what I tell you isn't optional or pursuant to the dictates of your mood and if I catch a whiff of recalcitrance to follow my instructions I'll hold you down and insert the foulest-tasting potion I can find into you. Have I made myself perfectly clear or do you want to test my rapidly dwindling patience and force a demonstration?"

"My God, you're sexy when you're angry," Parr told him, her eyes wide at his tirade. "Is that why you never became a doctor? All those female patients throwing themselves at you because of the way you flirt?"

"Get undressed!" he barked at her, an unfamiliar rush of blood to his face making him even angrier as he stalked off to find the bitterest purgative that Pomfrey had in her stores.

"Stop fidgeting."

"It's cold."

"Deal with it."

Parr ignored him and bounced lightly up and down on the balls of her feet as he scribbled away in his notebook. It made the floorboards bow slightly and shift his feet so that the notebook jogged rhythmically. Snape swivelled his eyes up.

"Stop... doing... that."

"Sorry, doc," she replied, still bouncing up and down. He tried not to notice the way it make her chest move, but considering there was little between her current state of undress and complete nudity, it was a fairly blatant indicator of her gender.

"Don't call me that." He went back to his notes, the ends of his hair almost brushing the pages. The notebook continued to shift in time with Parr's movements. She didn't seem even the slightest bit perturbed to be standing in front of him in her underwear. In fact, he had a suspicion she was deliberately trying to make him feel uncomfortable about it. When her feet started to leave the floor and return with a thump, he realised that she knew how empty his earlier threat had been. He'd be flat on his face before he could get within two feet of jamming a purgative into her. He closed his notebook with a snap, shoved it and the half-sized quill into his pocket and unfolded himself from the wooden chair. Looming over her didn't prevent her from bouncing up and down on the spot, so he stared at her until she stopped which, admittedly, took close to a minute and occurred only after Pomfrey had cleared her throat.

He spent some time looking closely at the scars on her body. Most of them had the trademark dots of muggle stitching running along the length of them and showed the results of a very diligent and careful hand.

"Why do you have so many scars?" he asked her bluntly, squinting at the ragged and keloid wound line running down the outer side of her left leg. It started a few inches below the bottom of her cotton shorts and ended midway down her calf.

"Comes with the job," Parr told him.

"Why is this one so bad?" he asked Pomfrey, the tip of his index finger less than an inch from Parr's skin.

"Chara's femur and tibia were shattered during her incarceration. By the time she got to St Mungo's there was a bad infection and they were unable to heal it cleanly. The Healers found out too late that Chara was immune to magic so she had to be taken to a muggle hospital in order to have the bones pinned together. The doctors there didn't do a good job of stitching her back up."

Snape snorted. "Butchers."

"Nah, it's just like a go-faster stripe," said Parr lightly.

Snape bent down further. "What happened to your feet?" Her left foot had a small dressing between the bones of her first two toes, and both feet had pale white scars between each metatarsal.

"I had trouble staying still."

He peered up at Parr. "An elaboration would be appreciated."

"I had knives rammed into my feet in order to pin me to the floor," she provided calmly, as if it were of no moment. She held out her hands, palms toward her and her fingers spread. "They did the same to my hands, but they've not healed so well." The bandages around her hands reinforced her statement.

Snape wished he hadn't asked. His eyes slid away from hers towards Pomfrey. "Is there an infection?"

"None that I can find," the mediwitch replied. "Some of her wounds just fail to heal. I've tried all sorts of treatments." She held out a sheaf of parchments to him. Snape straightened from his crouched stance and took them from her. He could feel Parr's eyes on him as he read through her medical records. It was strange. Why would some of her injuries fail to heal, whilst others had? Most medical treatments employed by both St Mungo's and Pomfrey had no magical components in them, only substances that muggles had no access to. He flicked back and forth through the pages. There was no mention of Parr's symbiotic relationship with her Handler, yet that would surely have some effect on her abilities to heal. Was it possible that neither the hospital nor Pomfrey were aware of this relationship? Could it be deemed that much of a secret that its revelation would be denied a medical practitioner? Snape judiciously decided not to ask the question until he could find out from either Parr or, more likely, Lupin as to whether or not this was the case.

"I need to see the injury around her neck," he said instead, handing the parchments back to Pomfrey.

The puncture wounds were still inflamed, still that angry, puffy redness around them he'd seen three days ago.

"They look infected, but they aren't," said Pomfrey, folding the unwrapped bandages in her hands, a crease of confusion between her brows. "I've checked every day but nothing pathogenic shows up. No virus, bacteria or fungi, yet her immune system is reacting as if there were something there."

"Any allergies?" Snape asked faintly. He hooked his finger around one of Parr's side tresses to move it aside so he could get a better look at the punctures along the left side of her neck. She didn't move but the change in her attitude was like a slap across his face and he realised he'd overstepped some invisible line. He pulled his hand back as if it had been burned. Her face was deathly pale, lips pressed tightly together and nostrils flared wide. She pointedly didn't look at him, but the unmistakable rumble from deep in her chest told him how on edge his touch had made her.

"I'm... sorry," Snape said hesitantly. "I didn't mean..."

"The fault is mine," she interrupted him harshly. "I forget that you don't know." She kept her eyes fixed on the wall opposite and a faint blush of colour suffused the pale milkiness of her cheeks.

Snape looked at Pomfrey silently for help. She shrugged slightly at him and shook her head, her brows wrinkled in uncertainty. It seemed she had no idea what Parr was talking about either.

"Chara..."

"It is..." Parr paused, a ripple of consternation on her forehead. "... considered rude for... someone to touch a Striker's hair unless it is their Handler." Her shoulders rounded forward defensively, though whether that was due to the unintentional insult or the need for her to explain the reasoning surrounding it, Snape couldn't tell. It left him almost afraid to move lest he upset her further and end up with a black eye or worse.

"Chara, if you're upset, we can stop," Pomfrey told her gently.

Parr took a deep breath in through her nose. "No. It is my problem to deal with," she said flatly and raised her hands to scoop her hair up and out of the way, tipping her head to one side so that Snape could see her injuries more clearly without having to touch her.

He tried to make his examination of those deep, almost bite-like marks around Parr's neck as brief as possible, desperately uncomfortable at the waves of agitation that rolled off her, her words clashing with what he had seen prior.

Lupin had touched her hair. He'd witnessed that very clearly. It had been an almost intimate gesture, and one that she had shown no anxiety at. Pomfrey would surely have touched Parr's hair at some point, but the mediwitch had seemed just as surprised as he had felt at Parr's reaction.

He edged back cautiously.

"Poppy, I need to see a swabbed sample from each unhealed wound. Don't apply anything on them that will try to seal them. They need to be left open until I can figure out the best way to treat them."

"I need to get sample dishes from stores," Pomfrey replied, looking from him to Parr worriedly, patently unwilling to leave the two of them alone so soon after Parr's burst of upset.

Snape backed away several paces until he was right up against the cot behind him, opening an even wider distance between them. "I will wait here." He looked keenly at Parr. "That is, if you are all right with that."

Her nostrils flared and she let her hair fall loose from her hands. A small nod signalled her agreeance.

Pomfrey still hesitated. "I don't know..."

"I won't move from this spot," Snape assured her emphatically.

"I'll be as quick as I can, Chara," Pomfrey promised her and hustled off.

The ensuing silence screamed awkwardness. Snape watched Parr carefully, alert for any change in her profile that would signal any potential retributive act for his ignorance of seevy etiquette, but she remained still in distrait stoniness, her eyes trained resolutely on the wall opposite her, the deep red shade of her underwear and the rich pink scar down her leg seemingly the only colour in her.

There had been no mention of it in the records that Pomfrey had handed him, but Snape had a nasty suspicion that the true extent of Parr's abuse remained unreported, at least on parchment. Greyback wouldn't have been able to resist brutalising her, and the wounds on her feet and hands were enough to confirm that. Sycorax only knew what he would have put her through.

The situation was so far from ideal that Snape knew he shouldn't ask the question, but he had to do it while Pomfrey was out of the room.

"Who did it?"

Parr's head turned slowly towards him, her face blank. Silent.

He tried again. "Who put the collar on you?"

Once more, she didn't move, but he knew the boiling rage and shame that lay hidden behind that neutral expression he'd seen too often on her. He could almost taste it, bitter and acrid.

Her eyes glittered at him. "I don't know what you're talking about."

They stared at each other, frozen at a desperately perilous impasse as the seconds ticked by. Of course she wouldn't trust him, but he had to know.

He lifted his hands to his neck, undoing the buttons of both coat and shirt and pulling the material aside so she could see the healed scars around his throat.

A hissing growl rose up in her, her teeth bared to the molars like a dog mere seconds from biting. It took every last shred of self-control in him not to flinch and skitter even further away from her. He saw her left hand come up from her side, the first two fingers straight and pointed to the ceiling, a shadow of a knife held in threat.

"Who did it?" she demanded hoarsely of him, a stain of outrage shaping the lines of her face as she took two steps towards him, her hair bristling. "Who did it?!" She shook her hand, shaped as it was in a seevy symbol he couldn't translate. Snape forced himself to look right in her eyes, directly into that savage grey blaze of near terrifying intensity, and hoped that he hadn't made a fatal error in asking her the same question.

"Don't make me say his name," he told her quietly.

Her guttural growl intensified as she drew in a breath through her teeth, the vibrations of it running down through her body and into the floor, sinking into the wood until he thought he could feel them under his feet.

She shook her hand again. "Why?"

Snape blinked at her and heard the greater meaning behind that solitary word. "Because I disobeyed him."

Parr's face contorted in convulsive reaction and she screwed her eyes shut. "My list grows longer," she whispered and clenched her raised hand into a tight fist.

Pomfrey's approaching footsteps brought her eyes open and returned her to that former statue-like stance, aggressiveness hidden under the blanket of blank neutrality that Snape couldn't help but admire now that he knew the depth and intensity of fury it could obscure. Hurriedly, he refastened his shirt and coat just as Pomfrey entered the infirmary with a cluster of glassware in her hands.

"Who did it?" he whispered to Parr persistently. He had to know.

She closed her eyes slowly and her mouth formed the name silently.

Brachoveitch.