For Forever

AN: I do not write enough things in Snape POV. I just don't. And I need to. So this.

Okay, so I wrote this in a day and a half and it was horrible. Not just bad, but one of the worst things that has come out of my fingers. But. I spent a couple of days just editing the damn thing, and now I have this puppy. You had better like the thing.

Severus is quite OOC in this, and it doesn't go a lot into his motives, but it is pretty cute in my opinion. In the canon, at the end Harry would be bleeding to death on the floor while Severus huffed and stormed from the Great Hall. But what's life without a little romance, no?

This was actually inspired by all the secret admirer fics everywhere, so thank you people.

None of the characters, settings, or shared plot are mine as they all belong to JK Rowling.

Enjoy!

~Kiro

PS- This is dedicated to my mother, who taught me that words can have weight greater than anything else.

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It started during the hostile takeover of the Ministry, the year that Severus had to balance his regular teaching, Occlumancy lessons with that Potter brat, Death Eater meetings, and that damned Umbridge woman all at once.

Severus had just gotten back from another meeting with the Dark Lord and was too out of his mind with the lingering pain from the Crucios to remember the existence of his pain potions. It was all he could to to walk in a straight line to his chambers in the dungeons and shed his robes and mask before stuffing them in their hiding place.

Severus almost collapsed onto the bed, but managed to notice a vial and a note on his sheets before he did so. The deep blue green of one of his own pain potions greeted his eyes. Severus opened the vial and sniffed it, searching for any hidden or dangerous ingredient. Finding none, he downed it in one. Finally to a reasonable level of mental faculty, he plucked the note from his black sheets

For the pain was all it said.

~

Severus had almost forgotten the incident with the pain potion when it next happened. He had just strode into his office, desperately sleep deprived but with a pile of sixth and third year tests that had to be graded before the end of the week. It was Thursday. Severus walked, comatose, to his desk, body moving mechanically and his mind dreading the coming work. However, just as Severus reached his desk he noticed that red marks were already scattered over the exams in his handwriting.

Confused and suspicious, Severus picked up the first perfectly graded exam, causing a small note to fall to the floor. Ignoring it for the moment, he checked over the test. It was perfectly graded according to his answer key, though lacking in the acerbic comment area. It was absolutely indistinguishable from a test that Severus himself might have graded when he was too tired to function properly. Severus raised an impressed eyebrow.

Bending down, Severus retrieved the note from the floor. The scrap simply read For your well being in a uniform script. The parchment was standard, cheap academic grade, and it appeared to have the same tidy writing as most commercial Quick-Quotes Quills. Severus flipped back through the entire stack of tests to find that each was graded in the same manner as the first. His answer key had been used perfectly and each test was reliably graded, no altered grades from what Severus could tell. The note leaver had just saved him about three hours tedious work. Severus left to catch up on some well-needed sleep.

~

The mysterious helper appeared at many points over the next year, always when Severus needed something the most, and it never did or said the same thing twice. The mystery benefactor always left a note in that Quick Quotes writing on cheap parchment, and always the note read For the... Each note accompanied a task or gift that made Severus's life bearable.