Blood Stones (Snarry)

Stay a While

He stared with open amazement, his breath leaving him as though through a dementor's kiss, but in a far pleasanter way. Someone he knew. Some like him, with no obtuse expectations of grandeur from him... Then his stomach flipped uncomfortably, his eyes widening in a comically late reaction.

"Fucking hell-" he breathed eloquently.

There was Severus Snape, his childish foe turned hero, almost alive looking, in ways that the ghosts of the castle nor the nightmare of Tom Riddle never could be... but he wasn't alive. He was dead. Protecting Harry and 'the cause' just like nearly hundreds of others.

"I'm not sure I understand professor, although I am glad to see you. I've simply gotten older is all."

"Don't lie to me, Potter. You look like you haven't slept well in years, your eyes are sunken in because you hardly eat, you've lost weight, you're drinking year old apple fire whiskey and you're still holding your knee. You've done that messing up a skele-grow potion no doubt, the only thing that could leave scar tissue such as that." He approached the man further inspecting his injury, his smirk made him twitch.

He still had that smirk that made him look as though he was trying to say he was better than you in some way.

"What brought you here." Severus sat in a nearby armchair.

A part of Harry almost warned the professor against sitting on the rotting chairs, another part of him angered at the smirk, petulantly wanting him to fall as he had but then he remembered the one key factor there. Severus was dead; he was not.

"First off you pompous arse-" he began, a small part deep within swelling in some way at getting to say what he'd always wanted as a student.

"It wasn't my potion that did this. The nurse was new. Not her fault, it was busy." he said, a part of him feeling obligated to defend the mistake of the nurse, even if as a professional she should have known by the color alone something was off.

"We raided a trafficker den, they thought they could have a bit of fun with the 'chosen one'. They thought it better I grew the bone in its entirety than try to mend a split kneecap." he said offhandedly, much as he'd always done about his injuries.

To him, it was no big deal. He wasn't dead... Andrews, Mallick and the others were.

"Second off, it's not too uncommon for ex-students to come visiting memory lane. I just was contemplating a... a career change and needed to clear my head of the ramble." That was at least a half- no, quarter truth.

He was tired, he'd had a particularly harsh dream about Sirius and Lupin and since he was on medical leave he couldn't go to work to forget about it. He also remembered Severus protecting them from a turned Lupin and the flash of Nagini's fang before his childhood professor fell. It ended with simply his feet taking him there. Besides, as he'd been reminded many times, Hogwarts grounds were open to the trio as much as they wished, as well as McGonagall trying to coax the idea of teaching into his head.

"Nurses are required to pass their exams nearly perfectly to attain a job of any kind. A mistake as dire as this should have cost her, her job Potter." He stood up and knelt next to him on the floor and put his arm through his injured kneecap.

He watched as his eyes widened and he relaxed, almost into asleep. "This will numb your knee. I'm not sure how long this will last but it will help you sleep. Being dead comes with its perks, one of them being numbness that I'm apparently able to transfer through touch." He looked up to see him with his eyes closed, he felt his emotions change, he was relaxed, happy, grateful, almost in a state of pleasure. He was sure Potter hadn't felt relief since the incident however long ago it was.