The Snake and the Eagle

Chapter 13 - Between Life and Death

Three days had passed since Professor Snape had left Hogwarts, and still there was no sign of him. In the meantime, Madam Pomfrey was taking his place at Potions as all students were studying healing potions of different levels of complexity. Although Professor Falconbridge was still deeply upset with Snape, she could not help but miss him. No matter how hard she was trying to deny it, nobody could completely change one's feeling for a person in a twinkling of an eye. She once heard Dumbledore tell Professor McGonagall that Snape's prolonged absence was very strange, because he was not used to leave without giving the news of him for so long. Those meeting usually lasted a couple of hours or so, and Dumbledore was beginning to worry that something terrible could have happened to him. Those news were starting to make her really anxious as well.

The moon was shining brightly that night. It was dark outside, when the castle inhabitants began to head to the Great Hall for dinner. Professor Falconbridge was still in her room, changing clothes before going down to join her colleagues at the High Table. She was about to leave when, passing by her window, her attention was attracted by the worst scene she had ever clapped eyes upon. At the margin of the Forbidden Forest, two hooded, black figures with their faces hidden behind a mask were carrying a third man, dressed in black too. They stopped at the limit of the thick vegetation, and left the senseless body of the third man on the ground before dissapearing into the pitch darkness of the forest, without even checking if he was alive or not.

The man lay there still as a stone, he looked dead. When a passing cloud finally moved away from the pale surface of the moon, its rays fell on the man's face revealing his identity. It was Snape, and from what she could see, he was mortally wounded. She felt her heart explode in her chest. She would have wanted to scream, but she could not make a sound. There was no time to waste, she had to warn Dumbledore. She ran out of her room and headed straight to the Great Hall, her heart beating so fast it hurt. She was hopping against hope that he was still alive. The doors at the end of the room were closed, and the whole school was about to begin eating, when they suddenly bursted open and Professor Falconbridge came in, running like a mad.

"Albus ... Albus ... Death Eaters ... in the forest ... Severus ... dead!" she managed to shout, panting heavily. She stopped breathless in front of the Headmaster, leaning against the table for support. Dumbledore shot up from his chair.

"Nobody leaves the castle. Prefects, I rely on you to keep the situation under control. Teachers, follow me outside," he instructed the stunned crowd. Professor Falconbridge was not able to move a step farther. Her body was shaking, and her legs seemed to refuse to support her anymore.

"Alexandra, you better stay here. Minerva, please, stay with her. We'll be back as soon as possible," he gently addressed to the two women.

When Dumbledore and the other teachers reached the limit of the forest, there was no trace of the Death Eaters' presence, they were gone. Snape lay there senseless, but still alive. His clothes were torn, and there were mud and blood stains all over his body and clothes. Some fresh blood was streaming down from his forehead, across his deadly pale face. Dumbledore dearly feared he was going to die, if they did not take him immediately to the hospital wing. He conjured a stretcher out of thin air, and levitated him on it. Four staff members carefully carried the stretcher walking as fast as they could. In a minute they reached the castle.

In the Great Hall, the prefects were having big troubles in restoring calm. They had formed a line in front of the large doors at the end of the hall, trying to prevent other students leaving the room. Professors McGonagall and Falconbridge stood in the doorway, holding onto each other for support, waiting for Dumbledore to come back. A gasp of horror escaped their mouths as soon as they saw the stretcher carrying Snape, and Alexandra nearly fainted.

"Professor Snape!" Pansy Parkinson shouted crying, struggling desperately to free herself from the prefects' hold to run to him. Madam Pomfrey clapped a hand to her mouth as soon as she saw his senseless body. She quickly regained control over herself, and readily led the porters up to the Hospital wing, followed by Professors Dumbledore, McGonagall and Falconbridge. The other teachers returned to the Great Hall with the rest of the school, the big doors were closed, and everybody went back to their seats at their house tables. The room was full of murmurs about that night accident. Some people were crying or sobbing with shock. Snape was the most detested teacher at Hogwarts, but surely nobody wanted him dead. The most shaken of all were the Slytherins, obviously. Pansy Parkinson was simply inconsolable, while Draco Malfoy was bubbling some nonsense about poorbloods being untouchable.

***

Up in the hospital wing, the porters carefully lay Snape on a bed and left the room. Madam Pomfrey moved to the bed to start examining him. His clothes were so sticky with blood and mud that they had to be torn into pieces to be removed fully removed from his body.

"Alexandra, do you know where his rooms are?" Pomfrey kindly asked her.

"Yes,"' she replied in a strangled whisper, her throat held by a tight not of anguish.

'Then, could you please be so kind to go there, and bring him some clean clothes? His night-shirt and some underwear too, please," She nodded and reluctantly left.

Professor McGonagall anxiously waited outside the curtain drawn around Snape's bed, while Madame Pomfrey undressed him with Dumbledore's help. They had just finished taking his upper clothes, when he suddenly woke up. His eyes darted around the room, trying to identify the place where he was. His eyes opened wide, when he saw Dumbledore's gentle face bent over him.

"Albus! ... Albus ... he knows!" he stammered in panic.

"Severus, please calm down! It's all right, you're safe now," Dumbledore tried to reassure him.

"Albus, I ..." Snape tried to go on, but his words were cut in mid-sentence by a violent cough, which made him spit blood. Once it subsided, he stared at Dumbledore with imploring eyes.

"Then allow me to read your mind," Dumbledore gravely said. Snape weakly nodded, took a deep breath, and bored his eyes into those of the old wizard, giving him free access to the deaphts of his mind.

Like in an old black and white Muggle movie, Dumbledore saw the memories of Snape's past three days among the Death Eaters. First of all, he saw the meeting of the inner circle with Voldemort himself. It was nearly impossible to identify who those people were. The rest of the night and the whole day after, Snape had been brewing an highly complicated potion for Voldemort. He had been working hard, barely eating or sleeping. Most of its ingredients looked very mysterious and probably were mostly forbidden as well. In another scene, Dumbledore saw Snape hastily write some names on a piece of paper, to later hid it in an inside pocket of his coat. Then he saw the beginning of Snape's end among the Death Eaters. A door bursted open, and an unmasked Lucius Malfoy came in, followed by his minions.

"Traitor!" he called Snape, while the other Death Eaters grabbed him and brought him in front of the Dark Lord. Malfoy said that Snape had been acting strangely, and suspected him to be a spy of the enemy. Voldemort tried his Legilimency against him, but he crushed against Snape's powerful Occlumency.

"Let's see if you'll be more willing to confess under torture," Voldemort's cold voice hissed.

Snape was dragged in a dark, moist dungeon, and they put his wrists in a pair of handcuffs hanging by a chain from the ceiling. Down there, he was stricken by the most painful curses, and someone did not disdain the use of pure, bare-handed brutality. Worst of all, they had used the Cruciatus Curse over and over, almost to death. All the while, Snape had kept his mouth shout, never saying a single word, not a single cry coming out of his lips. But under the exhausting effects of Cruciatus, he finally had no strength left to resist Voldemort's final Legilimency. The Dark Lord had found out about Snape's double role as spy, but he could not find anything else about Dumbledore, the Order of the Phoenix or its members. There was no way he would know those secrets from him, because Snape had wisely left them all in the Pensieve. When Voldemort freed him from his spell, Snape fainted.

"Someone leaves this filthy worm right under Dumbledore's nose. Let him know that his silly game is over," the Dark Lord hissed venomously.

"The bastard is completely useless now, and he won't live long anyway," he added, and bursted in a sonorous mirthless laugh, a laugh to chill the bone-marrow, a laugh of breath-taking, ice-cold venom. Two hooded man, Mr Crabbe and Goyle senior, came forward and took Snape's senseless body away. Dumbledore had the time to see the end of that last memory, before Snape rolled his eyes to the ceiling and lost consciousness again, his head dropping to one side. The effort to let Dumbledore read his mind had been too much for him. It had consumed his last drops of strength. For a second, Dumbledore was scared out of his wit, he feared Severus might be dead.

"Severus! Severus please answer me, my son!" he pleaded, but he did not wake up.

"Calm down, Albus," Pomfrey said as she examined him carefully. "He's still alive, but only just. I'm afraid it was too much to bear in his conditions. He's got into a coma now," she said brushing away a sudden tear. She had been knowing him since he was a student, and had too many times healed the marks left by his father's abuses. At these words Dumbledore covered his face with his hands.

"Poor boy, I could have killed you," he sobbed.

"Albus, please. Don't blame yourself. You only did what you had to. We needed to know. It was not you, but those bloody bastard who nearly killed him," Professor McGonagall tried to comfort him, but her eyes were full of silent tears too.

"I'll contact St Mungos Hospital straight away, they will know the best thing to do. Certainly we cannot move him from here," Madam Pomfrey readily said. "Albus, you should come with me and describe them what they have done to him," Dumbledore nodded and followed her to her office.

McGonagall sat on a chair by Severus's bed, holding his hand in hers, while she motherly caressed his head and face with the other. The image of St Mungos's Head Mediwizard appeared in the middle of the green flames of Pomfrey's office fireplace. The face turned very gloomy, when it heard the details of Dumbledore's account. Things were more complicated than they had thought. Snape's body had been hit too many spells and curses, and now it had accumulated too much magical power inside of him. Another single drop of magic could be enough to kill him. The only thing to do was to wait for all that magic to flow out of his body, and then he could be mostly healed without magic.

***

Meanwhile, Alexandra was in Snape's private quarters in the dungeons. His rooms looked gloomier than usual ... so empty, so silent. She opened his bedroom door, and felt her heart heavy with so many contrasting emotions. She was trying hard to deny her true feelings, in hope that her resentment for him could prevail, but it was impossible. After seeing him that night, her world seemed to have turned upside-down. No point denying it. It really did not mattered if he was a Death Eater or not, she still cared for him, she still ... loved him.

"A Death Eater and a werewolf ... I heard Dumbledore was an odd man, but I couldn't imagine how peculiar he could be in choosing his allies," she thought astonished. She looked for the things Pomfrey had asked her. She had easily found a pair of smooth night dresses in an upper drawer. In a certain way, she felt like she was intruding in something forbidden, as she rummaged in his drawers among his neatly folded underwear. She felt a little ashamed as well when she picked up a pair of his silken boxers, and curiously stretched them to see their size. She then moved to his bed, to see if there was something on his night-table he could need. There was only his mother's picture standing on it. She took it in her hand, and stared longly at the beautiful woman in it. She reminded her of Severus in many things, not only the obvious hair and eyes colour. It was more something about the nobility of her standing, the shadow of melancholy and sorrow she could read in both their eyes.

"I think he would like to have it with him," she concluded with an half smile, and took it away with her. She went back to the Hospital wing on the third floor, where it had recently moved. She came in at the same time Pomfrey and Dumbledore came out of her office, and they strode together back to the private ward where Snape lay.

"What did they say?" McGonagall asked shooting up from his chair.

"The situation is very serious. We can't use magic to cure him, because his body has too much of it stored inside. We first have to force the surplus to flow out of him" explained Pomfrey.

"And how are you going to do it?" Alexandra inquired.

"I'll use some special stones which will suck the excess of magic out of him. But it needs to be very careful not to leave them there for too long, or he may eventually be deprived of his own magical power," the school nurse said with concern.

"And what are you going to do for his other injuries?" McGonagall asked.

"I'll have to fix them the Muggle-way, and leave them heal on their own. But the mediwizard said I can administer him a diluted solution of fresh phoenix tears through vein. That will speed up the whole healing process, without farther damage," she encouragingly said, but then the tone of her voice changed, "all the same ..." she went on, "if the stones and the phoenix tears won't be quick enough ... there's the risk he may not pass the night," she stated in a strangled voice. McGonagall clutched her chest, and Alexandra clapped a hand over her mouth while a silent river of tears crossed her face. Dumbledore's face was unreadable.

"I'll go fetch Fawkes," he curtly said and stormed out of the room.

Later that night, the Headmaster gathered the whole school in the Great Hall to make a speech. "Tonight, as you have seen, Professor Snape has been victim of a Death Eaters' attack. His life is now in great danger, and there is even the risk he may not pass the night. I only have one thing to ask you ... those of you who have faith, any faith, please just pray for him. All we can do is wait and hope," He finished his speech and left the room, followed by a weeping McGonagall. The room fell immediately in a sea of whispers. Everybody was shocked to see the Headmaster in such a deep state of distress.

"I thought Death Eaters attacked only Muggles?" somebody said.

"What on earth has Snape to do with those bastards?" someone else said.

"How is it possible? He's one of the inner circle?" ran a very low whisper along the Slytherin table. Professor Falconbridge was still in the Hospital Wing, sitting by Snape's bed. Madam Pomfrey never allowed anyone to watch over one of her patients, but she had made an exception for her. She did not had the heart to send her away, when she had begged her with imploring eyes, and let her spend the night there.