Chapter Fifty-One—Reset

She had warned him. He couldn't claim ignorance. Perhaps stupidity. Foolishness. Maybe even arrogance. Regardless, she had warned him, and still he'd gone ahead and done it.

So now, instead of those burnished, red eyes sweeping back and forth in an attempt to find him, they were locked unerringly on him, unwavering, piercing, accusing.

There was little point in backing away from them, from hiding. Where would he go in this room with no doors?

Death stood blocking the light from the boarded-up window, a crisp halo outlining her form. A form he did not recognise. She had appeared in several guises, in shapes and faces that frightened him, that punished him, that reminded him. He had no idea whose face she wore this time.

"Could it not be possible that I'd wear my own?"

She often knew what he was thinking. Maybe she'd always known. Death was a mysterious creature, a subtle manipulator and brutal goad.

"I do what I must, Severus. My role does not allow me much in the way of personal indulgences." The red eyes shuttered briefly. "It is of personal indulgences I wish to speak. I find myself forced to remind you that we had an agreement. An agreement you seem to have set to one side. Why?"

Specks of dust caught in the halo around her turned and spun in eddies, motes of fire and condemnation.

"I still hold true to what was bargained."

Death threw back her head and laughed, the sound reverberating off the walls and the insides of his skull.

"Is that so? Tell me, Severus...do you recall the words you spoke, what you offered in return for your life?"

The coldness of her anger rolled over him, a frigid wave that tightened his throat.

"Yes."

"I bent rules for you. Did you know that? Do you know what I risked in doing that? How quickly you forget! Perhaps you think to outsmart me, yes?"

She wasn't just angry; she was furious. It was controlled, coiled, constrained, but there, like a viper waiting to strike.

"I get them all in the end. How could you possibly think it otherwise?" Her eyes narrowed to slits. "I bent rules for you. I realise now I shouldn't have."

It was astonishing how such a sweet voice could carry so much venom, so much threat. It was all the more terrifying for the contrast.

Something inside him turned bitter, resentful, hateful. Circe, how he was sick of answering to other people! Was there nothing that he was permitted for himself? Nothing that he could claim in the name of selfishness the way others did again and again as if it were their right? Nothing that wasn't thrown to him like a scrap from the table? Covetous people with their clutching hands around his throat, using him, forcing him, making a mockery of his dignity and his regret in order to achieve their aims. It was a detestable hypocrisy that made his hands clench and his hackles rise.

"I've done nothing that contravenes our agreement! If anything it has strengthened my ability to do what I'm bound to. This sounds more like petty jealousy than a judicious reminder on your part!" he spat.

The red eyes snapped wide open and the shadow before him swelled in outrage.

"You dare to accuse me of jealousy?!"

The soprano rasped into a barbaric shriek.

"You spend too much time in the company of a conceited bitch who mocks me like the egotistical fool that she is! Stop playing with your Striker. This is not a game that you can step out of when you choose! I've waited long enough for you to remember your duty to me."

Death reared up like a thunderhead, the silver lining around her solidifying to a painful brightness, but he refused to be cowed by this bully, this machinator that threw a tantrum when she didn't get her own way.

"And what will you do if I refuse?" he shot back. "Who will be your dog to run around doing your dirty work?"

He stared right back into those eyes that held an eternity of pain and torment, his fear curdling into defiance.

"If I'd known the bargain permitted you to shred my will and kick me like a cur whenever you felt like it, I'd never have begged for it!"

A rippling behind Death caught his eye, flexing the air and refracting the light from the window like sunlight on water. Was this the omen of the obliterating fury he was pushing her toward in his rancour, the premature consumption of everything that he was because he could no longer stand the self-righteous attitude that was constantly shoved down his throat?

"You insolent wretch!" Death howled at him, a harpy's voice that made ears weep blood and spines shatter into brittle shards. "I broke rules for you! I own you!"

She lunged forward, a rabid beast that would snatch him up in her jaws and shake him until he was nothing but a bloody, ragged mess; the destruction that would go on and on and on.

Time slowed to a trickle.

Death bared her teeth.

The shadow behind the shadow drew its blade.

He saw the light skitter along the metal, pooling in the engraved words, as leaden as a glacier, as breakneck as lightning, before the two figures in front of him dissolved into a shredding, snarling mêlée of brute strength and indomitable will.

He backed away, desperate to avoid being sucked into this tornado of opposing forces, and ran straight into his own shadow...a shadow of pale skin, slate-grey eyes and hair that stole the colour from the setting sun. In the fraction of a second that he had, he realised that of all the people who had stared right into his soul, this one was the one that terrified him the most: the searchlight that left him no refuge, a honed ray that both split and melted, the anvil against which titanic pressure smashed substance into conformation.

Validus quam nex.

She smiled at him sadly, as if he had lost.

It hurt. So much.

Snape had experienced bad headaches. More than a couple. Occasionally, he'd suffered through migraines, but they had been blessedly few.

This felt like his skull had been smashed open with a hammer and the pieces crushed into a screaming, formless mush. A membranous layer of agony sat between the bones and his skin, burning, splintering, blistering.

It seemed as if he had no body; none that he could feel. All there was of him was the wrenching, grinding fire that melted his nerves.

Could nothing stop it? He would have done anything to stop it. Even breathing was a torture he didn't think he could withstand.

He opened his eyes to darkness, to an utter disorientation where it felt he was falling upwards, sliding backwards, twisting endlessly without moving. His fingers clawed at the softness beneath him in the hope it would stop him slipping down the incline to hell, but the world was falling with him.

Snape groaned in submission to this pulverisation of who he was. The sound fractured him into so many pieces that he could never have possibly counted them.

He raised his head...it took aeons, moving this bloated, rotten, canker that let his brain weep through the lesions.

The silhouette in front of him was witness to this merciless putrefaction. Death had followed him here, to the inescapable reality of his descent into physical decay, a cruel spectator that fed off the brume of his agony. Not surprising, considering how much he had angered her. She'd want to see him twist and writhe and beg for a mercy she did not hold inside her.

But where were the crimson eyes of exultation, of vicious satisfaction? He squinted to try and sharpen his focus. Why would Death sit with her back to him, silent, still? It made no sense. Did she turn from him in disgust, in cold dismissal, his importance now so ruined that to acknowledge him would lend a legitimacy to his life that he had no right to?

He thought of begging her, as he once had, to finish him off. What pride could he possibly have left now, lying here, slowly dissolving into insensibility?

He opened his mouth to capitulate when the gentle shimmer of silver told him that it was not Death that sat at his feet, but the one who had fought the mistress of Gehenna for his life.

It was a thrum of voices, a sound that sat below consciousness, a vibration that his ears could perceive but not understand.

He crouched with his hands pressed to that cruelly small point of connection, forehead resting against the invisible wall to allow him to breathe in whatever he could from the nexus under his fingers.

They were arguing. He didn't need to hear the words to know it. The thorny environment he had grown up in taught him fast that to be unaware of emotional undercurrents saw you treated to the brunt of another's frustration and anger. Yes, he had learned that very quickly.

His thoughts were baldly selfish. He would have been the first to admit it. Was it something that he had done? Something that he had not done? Did it threaten him in some way? Did it jeopardise his plan? Had he made a mistake?

He drew in a sucking breath, trying to taste the acrimony in the hope he could determine what constituents blended together to form it, to see if he could separate the disappointment, the fury, the indignation and the hurt as the vapour whispered up his nose, telling him that he should not be listening, that this was not his place, that he pushed his luck like a single-minded child. The disapproval did nothing to dissuade him; if anything, it made his hunger even stronger. He nearly whined aloud, gasping, and ran his tongue over that tiny contact point like a starving animal, as if he could lick the connection into him where he could never lose it. A part of him cringed in shame at such wanton behaviour at the same time it convulsed in lascivious pleasure at the stunned surprise that spread across and into the softness of his mouth.

He had no idea that desperation could be steeped in such delectation as this. It was even more delicious for the brevity of it.

Once, early in his traineeship, Snape had made the inevitable error that all aspiring medics had since the dawn of the healing arts: he'd rubbed his eyes after handling Fireflax. The resulting blisters and pain had taken nearly a full week to die down. He'd suspected that it could, in fact, have been far more abbreviated. Healer La Vigne had been almost casual in her acceptance of his carelessness, as if she had expected it. Tyro Harris had snickered about it until she had done the same thing a month later. Snape had hung on to the schadenfreude that had caused for as long as he possibly could.

He later learned that few ever avoided such an experience with Fireflax. It caused no permanent damage, and the Healers at St Mungo's used it as an effective example of how lax attention could cause serious problems.

What he'd felt during those days of agony...of the unremitting pain of inflamed flesh, the sting that tears did nothing to alleviate and the weeping sores that Murtlap barely affected...was not too dissimilar to what he was currently experiencing. It felt like someone had set his eyeballs on fire and then rammed them back into his skull.

He groaned and immediately regretted it as his head started to pound.

Having his eyes open or closed seemed to make little difference to the pain or to discovering where he was. The surrounds were blurred by the salty tears leaking out of his eyes, and he still felt like a troll had shaken him until his teeth had fallen out.

Skidmarks of Sycorax, he felt sick! In his current state, if he threw up on himself there was little he could do to clean himself up. He'd just have to lie there, steaming in his own vomit and feeling utterly wretched. It couldn't possibly get any worse, he thought to himself as his head rolled to one side. He was wrong: it could.

She was sitting close enough that he could make out some detail, despite his blurry vision. Her legs were drawn up to her chest, left arm resting across her knees atop which her chin was propped. Her right hand was partially hidden under the hair that fell over her ear, watching him as she sat scrunched up in the chair next to his bed.

"I don't feel very well," he said rather stupidly, increasing his mortification even further.

"I'm not surprised, considering how much mud you ate," Parr replied, failing to keep the twist of amusement from her voice. She probably didn't even try to subsume it. "Are you going to spew again?"

Snape groaned. "Don't say 'spew'." His stomach knotted itself and threatened to turn inside out.

"I've had to change my clothes three times already. Maybe I should just wear a sou'wester until the geyser subsides."

He screwed his eyes shut as the heat radiating from his eye sockets slipped down to his cheeks.

"I've already ... vomited?"

That question just made his stomach roil even more powerfully.

Parr snorted. "You're as theatrical in illness as you are in good health. I've never seen such a performance. I did consider stripping you naked and dumping you in the shower just to save on laundry, but Folter didn't think it was such a good idea. And since she's the one who's been cleaning up after you, I guess she has the right to decide. God knows how quickly she had to clean up the yellow sick road you trailed through the castle before Filch found it!"

"Don't say 'sick'!" Snape grated out through clenched teeth. "I don't remember coming back inside."

"I should think not," said the Parr-shaped blur in the chair. "You were very conveniently unconscious at the time. Unfortunately, it didn't stop you from hurling down my back. I'll never get the smell out of my hair!"

Snape made gurgling noises like a drain backing up.

"For a scrawny guy, you're incredibly heavy."

He stared like a drunken fish at her.

"You carried me?"

"You weren't showing much sign of walking in by yourself, Dual," Parr pointed out a little huffily.

"Someone could have seen!" he snapped, trying to hide in tetchiness the indignity he felt at having been toted like a sack of potatoes.

"Oh, please! I'm not a Strikelet. No-one saw anything!"

"Well, I don't share your certitude, Miss Parr," he responded snottily, trying his hardest not to wince at his own raised voice.

"Shut up and go to sleep," she told him.

He did.

The pendant hung from the silver chain wrapped around her fingers, gently turning in the air, the light that reflected off it flickering a touch from the beat of her heart as it shuddered down the chain's fine links.

He couldn't read the expression on her face as she stared at the jewellery he could have sworn had been around his neck.

Snape made to protest at having it removed from him without his permission but found he couldn't move anything more than his eyes. Fear at this immobility bloomed and leaked into the testiness and blush of embarrassment that welled up in him that he had been found wearing this self-imposed shackle of guilt. Not that she would know what it meant. Would she?

Her grey eyes flicked up to meet his.

He blacked out.

It seemed appropriate that he herald his return to consciousness with a long, drawn-out groan.

Parr remained focussed on the book in her hands, but he thought she turned the page unnecessarily loudly. Trust her to be able to make a scathing remark without even speaking!

Snape clutched at his chest clumsily and felt the sharp pointed metal of the pendant dig into his palm. Perhaps it had been a dream. He hoped it had been a dream. The thought that she would have seen this rather secret concession to personal adornment filled him with a rather puzzling abashment. Martyr-like, he was sure she would denounce it as. At least, she would if she knew what the pendant really meant to him.

He sighed in exasperation at the tangle of his emotions. At least his headache had receded somewhat, and the sting in his eyes only a dull burn now.

"Do you really sleep in that horrible rag?" Parr asked, not looking up from the page she was studying.

"Your judgement of my sleepwear is a matter of supreme indifference to me, Miss Parr," he tried to say as acidly as possible. "This is not a fashion parade."

She snorted in that dismissive manner she always did. "I just thought that for someone who eschewed underpants, a nightshirt seemed oddly prudish."

"Am I to retain no dignity whatsoever?!" Snape hissed, clutching the sheets to his chest tightly.

Parr rolled her eyes and turned a page.

"Shut up and go to sleep."

"What time is it?"

Parr lifted her head from the strip of cloth she was sewing.

"Just before lunch."

Snape managed to turn away just in time before vomiting noisily onto the floor. Luckily, there was so little in his stomach that it didn't make that much of a mess beyond a few drops of bile.

"Let me guess: don't mention food?"

Snape made a sound like a dying cat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"I hate you."

"No doubt," she replied calmly.

Snape rolled onto his back and stared angrily at the ceiling above his bed for a few minutes, seething at yet another blow to his comportment.

"Why are you here?"

Parr tutted at his crankiness. "Doctors do make shit patients," she muttered and didn't answer his question.

Snape squinted sideways at her. "I'm not a doctor. What are you doing?"

"I'm fixing my binder." She was carefully stitching a seam at the end of the orange strip of cloth. He watched her cut the thread with her work knife that had been resting in her lap and test the reinserted weight. It passed her scrutiny, if her nod was anything to go by.

"What do you use it for?" He'd thought it had been just some piece of meaningless cloth she'd used in one of their lessons. Lessons. That made him scowl. There had been little she'd taught him except for how much she delighted in making him subservient to her, reliant on her.

Parr jabbed the needle she'd been using in the arm of the chair she sat in, cross-legged and swathed in her usual grey Striker clothes. "It's like a bolas." She held out her arm and the orange cloth snapped around her wrist tightly as she whipped it, the weight at the end of the material giving it a sharp and secure grip.

She was gathering the long cloth in some strange series of folds when Snape asked the question he wasn't sure he wanted the answer to.

"Was it meant to hurt this much?"

Her hands paused. It was clearly a question she didn't want to answer either. Her lips pressed together tightly before she replied.

"I don't know."

His silence made her look up.

"I'm just a Striker. Untwisting is not my... area of expertise." Her eyes darted to one side, as if she were embarrassed. That surprised him. "I couldn't take the pain from you. You had to ride it out alone."

"Is that what Strikers do?"

Parr huffed and frowned, still not meeting his gaze. She was plainly uncomfortable, which gave him a surge of satisfaction that was altogether immature and incredibly gratifying.

"We do not speak of it."

Snape narrowed his eyes. "Is that what you say when you don't want to talk about something?"

That brought her head back around. "Git!"

That made him smile which just seemed to irritate her even further.

"Shut the hell up and go to sleep!" she barked at him, her cheeks flushed pink.

He didn't even get the chance to smirk at her before he passed out.

He wished she wouldn't keep doing that.

Lying here was playing havoc with his sense of time. It felt like mere seconds sat between the periods of wakefulness. It also felt like years. The contradiction was aggravating and highly unsettling. It made him want to get up and stagger over to the window, pull the drapes back and determine, at the very least, what hour of the day it was.

But the thought of movement just made him feel incredibly exhausted, so he just lay on his side and continued to stare at her.

Scrunched up in the chair once again, her head was turned away from him, tilted slightly as it rested in her hand. She looked gaunter than he remembered seeing her last. He surmised that the apoth hadn't managed to medicate the Handler yet.

Parr looked tired. Strung out. Stubborn. She had managed to avoid answering his question as to why she was here. Maybe she felt guilty about the state he was in. Perhaps she was making sure that he didn't forget who controlled his life right at this very moment. Or that he didn't die on her...an acerbic gargoyle on the death-watch. He had to suppress a snort at that. It was an unfair comparison, even for him.

Snape didn't understand her reticence to discussing the way Strikers took pain and illness from their Handlers. It was clearly a taboo subject, but just for her or for seevy in general? Could it be possible that the restriction was coming from the Handler?

His experience with Parr's twin was limited, with too many holes that could easily be filled with suppositions. However, if she were a person who could keep control of a Striker like Parr, she must have a will like iron. The Striker wasn't a person that followed others simply because they told her to. If anything, she was far more likely to tell those same people where to stuff it. She and only she would decide what she would and wouldn't do. The two exceptions that sprang to mind were the Handler and the Screen. The relationship with the latter was still unclarified. It must have been close for her to kill him in such a complete and brutal fashion. There must have been enormous trust placed in the man whose role Snape guessed was to stand between seevy and non-seevy; a barrier of sorts. Just the person to use as an assassin. It would have been devastating for Parr to have had such a confidante turn on her, and then to make such a request of her.

Her bond with her Handler was very strong and wasn't one that she openly strained against, but Snape knew there were instances where Parr did things that the Handler clearly disapproved of. The Striker could easily explain them as actions that in the long run would benefit the Handler, but he was starting to wonder if she was using that as an excuse. She couldn't claim that she would have been unaware of what her Handler's reactions would be.

"She's angry with you."

She made no movement that would have betrayed that she hadn't known he was awake, but he thought the colour in her cheeks darkened slightly. Another taboo topic? He decided to push his luck and see how far her obligation to him went.

"Why?"

Outward appearance gave the impression she was ignoring him, but he got the feeling she was thinking carefully whether or not to answer. It could have been the way her eye narrowed slightly or the line bracketing the corner of her mouth deepened, but such changes couldn't possibly be that eloquent.

"A difference of opinion."

An answer that said little.

"Did she not know what you were going to do?"

Parr's eye narrowed further.

"Why didn't you tell her?"

Considering.

"She would have said 'no'."

"And yet you did it anyway."

"It is my right. She knows this."

A confusing response. Who in this partnership was in charge? Just when he thought the Handler led the way, Parr would indicate that she was the one who dictated the direction.

Parr tutted and shook her head slightly.

Was he that transparent?

"I told you you'd be open after I untied the knot. You may as well be screaming in my ear. And thanks for the gargoyle comparison."

She didn't look or sound amused at that, but Snape knew she was. Perhaps he wasn't the only one left open.

"What day is it?"

"Sunday. Just."

He blinked. A day since she'd untied the knot. It felt like an age.

"I can't lie here any more."

Parr's eyebrows climbed, but she still kept her face in profile. Studiously avoiding looking directly at him. Interesting.

"And why is that?"

There was an edge to her voice that spoke of what she thought of his statement.

"I have obligations, and they do not wait for convalescence."

Parr found that very funny and she stifled the evidence poorly. It took Snape a moment to recognise the hypocrisy in his statement, which made him cranky.

"If this whole undertaking is meant to be kept occluded, I don't see how my being restricted to my bed while I recover is going to go unnoticed. The fact that you're here, which is totally inappropriate, does nothing to aid that secrecy!"

"The Headmaster is not on the grounds and hasn't been since late Friday evening, so stop wetting the underpants you don't wear, Dual. And much as it would amuse me, you are not tied down and incapable of independent movement, so if you choose to get out of bed, who am I to stop you?"

That put him on his guard. If Parr wasn't going to prevent him from getting up, then there must be some other agent that she was certain would keep him there. He could almost smell the expectancy of his attempt misting off her. She wanted him to try it, which told him he shouldn't.

Snape didn't feel enfeebled. Tired, certainly, with the ghost of a headache still scraping at the insides of his skull and an acidic sting to his eyes. What little movement he'd made didn't seem affected, but then, he'd not stood up, and if what he remembered of his sense of direction being turned on its head was anything to go by, his proprioception was in some degree of malfunction. Falling flat on his face in front of Parr, again, would be yet another humiliation, but considering how he'd already disgraced himself, Snape wasn't sure whether it would make the situation any worse than it already was.

"It seems you currently have your own Imperius, Miss Parr. Who knows what you'll make me do or not do?" he pointed out softly, anticipating a reactionary outburst from her at the accusation. He wanted, needed to unbalance her from her position of control over him. Subservience was not a collar he was willing to wear, and aggravating her gave him a thrill he hadn't felt in some time...the almost sensual flush to push, to mercilessly seduce someone to his way of thinking through opposition, to manipulate an adversary into justified compliance. It made him shiver and quicken his breathing.

Parr's head turned slowly, her eyes enlarged from the shadowing hollows that her gauntness threw across her face, the grey no longer that of cold stone but of auguring cloud, the impenetrable wall of her mind no longer steel but of smoked glass.

His muscles tightened in a wave in response to the look she gave him, its meaning sliding down his spine and slipping deeper into him...so far from what he had expected that it was almost alien.

"Shut up and go to sleep," she told him even as the first silken fluctuation swallowed him.

He was consumed in a semi-conscious delirium; a luxuriant fever that trammelled his need into a devastating dimension...a non-corporeal ecstasy that was both a gift and a theft, to be denied a physical form that would allow him to experience the pleasure through flesh and senses. To not have a mediation, a moderation from tactile input was an overwhelm that made him cower and exult, the dichotomy driving him slowly insane in the sweetest and most cruel way.

To not have hands to brace, to cradle, to stroke with.

To not have fingers to clasp, to torment, to delve with.

To have no tongue to taste, to pleasure, to tantalise with.

To have no voice to coax, to adulate, to dominate with.

No arms to bind, to support, to manoeuvre with.

No mouth to seize, to envelop, to suckle with.

No hips to plunge.

No spine to sway.

No thew.

No breath.

A potent ophidian that wrapped itself around him and slithered into him in a way that was both a frightening violation and an exhilarant ingress.

This had gone on forever, expanding into infinity.

It had barely begun...a promise of a delight yet to be fully revealed.

Who he was, what he was, flexed and twisted, impaled and embedded, yielded and embraced.

Consumption.

Gratification.

Satiation.

It was all he could conceive of. All he allowed himself. All he wanted.

He couldn't tell if he was the giver or the receiver. He didn't care to know.

The undulation that embraced him, that permeated him, impelled him to the edge.

Sensation drew into him and bled out of him. No beginning. No end.

The overload heaved him into full consciousness, the grip on himself so urgent, so tight, it bordered on painful. Shame skittered across the surface of the swell, a terror that came from the certainty that he couldn't prevent what was going to happen. Didn't want to.

He paused, the hesitation nothing but sublimation of the inevitable, and realised the chair was empty.

His physical presence returned to him in a blinding rush, nectarous, full, enslaved. Body convulsing, gasping, dissolving. A surge that drained him utterly as he arched in fulfilment. Again. And again. And again.

As he lay there, panting and shuddering in the darkness, he wondered if he had really been alone.