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UnBroken	By : OddDoll Category: Harry Potter AU/AR > Het - Male/Female Views: 6172 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 8
- 9
- 10
Unbroken
By Odd Doll
Chapter 8
From the hospital room, Severus had made his way to the downstairs lobby. Each step jarred his torn, broken body, but starvation turned out to be his undoing. His atrophied muscles could carry him only so far. He collapsed, light-headed and panting, on a bench in the lobby and remained there for half an hour.
A very fat woman in a pink and purple muumuu chose his spot on the bench, forcing him to poke her in the rear to keep from being squashed. She squeaked, turned around to stare at the 'empty' seat. Before she could sit down again, he stood up to work his way to the doors. He chose to use the back exit, because Phoebe would soon be parked behind the hospital, and he wanted to see her safely on her way out of his life.
He made it to the small park that surrounded the hospital grounds, and no further, sinking exhaustedly to the damp ground with his back to a tree. After a time, he unzipped the jacket to examine his bandages, but looked no further when he saw the patch of red that had soaked through to his outer clothing. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. This is where I die, he thought gratefully as he lay down on his side beside the tree. He had expected his death to be violent or ignoble, but not on the grounds of a Muggle hospital.
How had he imagined it, in his darkest nights, when the burdens Fate had laid on him became more than he could bear? Laying out flat with the grimace of horror that the Avadra Kevadra left? Or cursed from behind by some former friend or colleague? Always there was another there to witness his end. It gave him a spark of humor that the anti-social, misanthropic terror of the potions classroom had never imagined dying alone.
Severus didn't want to die so much as he no longer had anything to live for. The Order of the Phoenix was in a shambles over a year ago, long before his capture. His family was dead. The place he had called home for most of his life was occupied by the enemy. And anything he could possibly do about it seemed impossibly remote, a far off mountain that he was too exhausted to even think about climbing. He wanted it to be over, finally.
It never occurred to him that he suffered from a normal depression brought on by the cumulative effects of malnutrition, pain, dehydration, and blood loss. Anger and frustration had been his lifelong companions, but never despair. So muddled were his thoughts that he didn't remember that he knew a spell to stop bleeding.
He watched Phoebe Baher park in a dark corner of the lot. She was so close he could almost call out to her from where he lay, if he had a little more strength. He dozed and then awoke to find her gone. One last sacrifice accomplished, and at least his death had a little bit of meaning.
Using up his last bit of strength, he crawled under some rhododendron bushes, set a few spells to make himself more comfortable, and closed his eyes. He had spared Phoebe and cheated the Death Eaters of their revenge. It was enough.
Unbroken
By Odd Doll
Chapter 9
After a short internal debate, Phoebe dismissed the cab in the hospital parking lot but wrote down the phone number to call another. In the shadow of the same tree she had parked beneath earlier in the evening, she removed the two wands from her purse. Narcissa Malfoy's wand was slender, black, and very stiff. When she tried to levitate a few fallen leaves, the wand twitched in her hand, fighting her. Veritus Villanova's wand almost melted into her hand, although as Snape had experienced, the magic flowed sluggishly through the wood.
Phoebe struggled to remember the hearing charms, but they escaped her. She paced in a circle under the tree, saying different combinations.
"Auris Cattus. No, that wasn't it."
Without realizing it, she had been bouncing the wand in her hand as she paced. She felt an itchy tingle in the tips of her ears. She touched one with a fingertip and felt a soft layer of fur covering the outer portion and a long and pointy bit of flesh protruding from the top.
"Finite Incantatum," she said with a growl.
"Cat ears," she whispered. A growing sense of urgency sent tremors to her knees and hands. She paced faster, on the jittery edge of a panic attack. She would fail. A man would die.
"Cat ears." She struggled to concentrate and stopped pacing. It wasn't cat ears, she realized. That was just the name of the charm. The charm was 'cat hear.'
"Audio Cattus," she said with a flick of the wand.
In an instant Phoebe's awareness of the world around her expanded tenfold. The light drip of condensed fog grew to rival the hammering of a construction crew. Automobiles roared by on the distant highway, and voices belted out shrill peals of laughter from within the hospital.
Above the cacophony of night sounds, she heard two hearts beating. One, off to her left, was rapid and accompanied by ragged breathing. The other, steady and strong, came from directly behind her.
Phoebe whirled toward the sound and pointed her wand. A man stood about twenty feet away amidst a clump of trees. He raised both hands and said, "Don't shoot."
"Who are you?" Phoebe demanded.
"My name is Sylvester Waterman, ma'am. I tried to reach you earlier. You're Phoebe Baher, aren't you?"
"What are you doing here? Who are you working for?" He smiled and dropped his hands.
"Let me see your hands." He raised them again, and she closed the space between them to ten feet. From that distance she could see he was quite elderly and dressed like a Muggle.
"I don't work for anybody. I've been retired for going on ten years now. I'm just a Muggle trying to help out a wizard that I heard is in a bad situation."
Phoebe stared, dumbfounded. When she had gathered her wits she said, "If you're a Muggle, how do you know you're a Muggle?"
"Two of my children turned out to be a witch and a wizard. They taught me a few things, here and there. Are you going to put that thing down?" He gestured toward the wand in her hand.
Phoebe was nowhere near ready to let go of the upper hand. "Why are you here? And how did you find out about us?" She kept the wand pointed at a spot in the center of Waterman's forehead.
"I have a friend or two in the magical world. Sometimes I do little services for them. They told me there was a wizard here who was important to the fight against Lord Voldemort and that I should get him out of here if I could."
"That's more than a little service. That's a little service that could get you killed."
The man shrugged. "Yes, well, the risk is worthwhile to me."
Phoebe felt time slipping away while she sparred with this troublesome Muggle. What to do? So much was at stake. She eyed the Muggle, taking in his slight stature, the gray of his hair. With years of experience pushing around submissives, and her larger frame, Phoebe thought she could overpower him if she needed to. And the wand helped.
"Were you telling the truth about doing services for those fighting the Dark Lord?"
"Well, this is first time they've actually had anything for me to do that was really dangerous," he admitted.
Phoebe groaned. She didn't need any more complications, but her options were few and she knew that soon Narcissa Malfoy and Veritus Villanova would come looking for her. If they weren't already.
"This way." She lowered the wand. "He's right over here."
"How do you know?"
“I can hear him. I put on a hearing charm. That's how I knew you were behind me. You really shouldn't hang about in the dark like that. Someone might think you're a mugger."
"I'd be more worried for your own safety if I were you."
She followed the sound of ragged breathing until she came to a stand of rhododendron, their soft pink blossoms glowing in the low light.
"He's right here." She knelt and felt the ground under the bushes. She inched her way forward, patting the damp, leaf-strewn soil until she felt fabric under her hands.
"Mr. Snape. Mr. Snape." She terminated the invisibility spell and his limp form appeared. "Mr. Waterman, would you please keep watch? I'm going to make some light." She held the wand over Snape's body. "Lumos." She saw him looking up at her.
"Hey," she said softly. "It's déjà vu all over again." She saw him shiver, but his hair was soaked with sweat. Phoebe placed a hand on his forehead. "You have a fever."
"Ms. Baher, no. Leave me. I wanted to keep you out of this."
"I think, Mr. Snape, considering what we've been through, you can call me Phoebe." She lifted open his jacket. A large patch of blood soaked his clothing. "And it's too late to save me. I'm in this up to my eyeballs now, so I thought I might as well do something useful. Where is my wand?"
He drew it out from beneath his body, grunting in pain as he moved. "What do you mean?"
"Mr. Waterman," she said over her shoulder. "Do you have a car? We need to get him out of here."
"Yes. I'll bring it around." His retreating footsteps made a sharp click in her ears, thanks to the hearing charm.
"Mr. Snape, do you know if a blood clotting spell will work through bandages?"
"Cut them. What happened? Who is he?"
"I had a little run-in with a Death Eater. And Mr. Waterman is a friend. I think." I hope. "I'll explain everything later." She did as instructed and he cried out. "Oh, my God, I'm sorry." His mouth stretched in to a grimace, his teeth bared. "I'm so sorry." Her hands shook, but she ignored it, forging ahead. Fear of the attack itself had the greatest likelihood of bringing one on, and she had too many other things to think about right then.
"I shouldn't even be trying to do this." She had to force the wand under the tight bandages. He winced as the wand tugged at them, but then sighed in relief when she cut the bandages and they fell away from his wound.
"It looks like you have an infection started." She stopped the bleeding. "And I don't know how well this spell is going to work. I think the bleeding is on the inside."
He looked off into the darkness over her shoulder. "I guess this means I'm not going to die tonight."
"Not on my watch, babe." She winced as the roar of a large engine assaulted her ears. She pointed the wand at her ear. "Finite Incantatum. I'll be back in a sec'."
She crawled out of the rhododendron bushes and walked over to Sylvester's Mustang. "Do you think your contact could find a reliable healer?" she asked in a soft voice as he climbed out of the vehicle. "He's in a bad way."
"I'll see." He took a cell phone from his jacket pocket and held it at arm's length, peering at the buttons. Phoebe looked around the parking lot, feeling very exposed.
"What do you say we get him in the car and get ourselves out of here? You can call from the road."
"Good idea."
They could not drag him out from under the bushes without bringing on greater pain, and in the end he crawled out on his own and walked to the Mustang, leaning heavily on Phoebe and Sylvester. The car proved problematic. The old Mustang's rear seat was too cramped for Snape's long body, and the front seat did not recline. They ended up settling him in the back, on his side with his legs crumpled like an accordion, and Sylvester roared into the night.
Sylvester Waterman drove fast, but he seemed competent enough. Phoebe fought the urge to ask how old he was. But when he tried to dial the cell phone with one hand on the wheel and one eye on the road, she decided to intervene.
"Here." She took the phone from his hand. "I'll dial and then you can talk. Turn on the overhead light for me, please." The phone beeped when she turned it on. "It says you have a message. I suppose it's from me."
"I keep forgetting to turn the damn thing on," he admitted sheepishly. "I have her on speed dial. Just press two and the call button and give me the phone.
"If they find someone, tell them to let them know we are on our way."
His call was short and, to Phoebe's ears, a bit cryptic, but the outcome was clear.
"No one."
Phoebe sighed. "There has to be somewhere we could go." She glanced back at Snape. "How are you doing, Mr. Snape?"
"Fine," was all he said, not sounding like it. But then, in a stronger voice, he added, "Considering what we've been through, I think you can call me Severus."
"Well, your sense of humor hasn't died yet. Where are we going?" Phoebe asked Sylvester.
"I have no idea. I'm just driving."
Phoebe licked her lips and thought frantically. "Let's find a motel. This jostling around can't be good for him."
"I don't know this area that well."
"We'll need an all-night drug store. Are there ones in England? I'd like to get him some painkillers and something for his fever. He'll need fluids, too."
At that moment her cell phone rang. With an impatient growl, she took the phone from her purse. The number displayed on the phone's tiny screen was one she recognized as belonging to her office in California. It would be early evening there, the resort's nightlife just ramping up.
"Hell," she muttered under her breath. "Hello," she said into the phone.
"Phoebe, oh I am so glad I caught you," her secretary said in a rush.
"Jenny, I don't have time right now. I'm doing something important. Call me back."
"But, Phoebe, it's an emergency."
"What?" Please tell me my day hasn't gotten any worse. She had visions of Death Eaters raiding the resort compound in a retaliatory attack for her actions of the previous evening. Would they have acted this quickly?
"Old Bill Foster, do you remember him?"
Phoebe gritted her teeth. Not an emergency by her new, post-Malfoy standards. "Yes?"
"Well, he had a heart attack and died."
"Jenny, couldn't this wait?"
"But he was in a session with Albert and Luis when it happened."
Oh, Christ. Phoebe's eyes fluttered closed, a pain springing to life behind her eyes. Foster was a seventy-two-year-old closet homosexual, with tentacles reaching into nearly every major corporation in California. "Jenny, he was a very old man. You had no business letting him into a session."
"I'm not sure how it happened. I had already told him no. What should we do?"
It was too much. She could almost feel the reins on her temper snap as blood roared in her ears. "Jenny, I'm really busy right now with something that is actually more important than this. I didn't hire you just because you look good in leather. I'm sure you can figure something out." She snapped the phone shut, terminating the call.
Phoebe settled back into the seat with a groan. Out of the corner of her eye she caught Sylvester's curious look in her direction, but she couldn't dredge up the energy to make an excuse. "Please find us a motel or something, Sylvester. I think we all need a rest."
"Will do."
Phoebe closed her eyes for a while, letting the rumble of the engine sooth her. But when she thought about Narcissa Malfoy and her kind, a nauseating bubble of fear filled her stomach. I am in charge. The lives of three people depend upon me and my thinking skills. She went back in time, to the lessons her father had taught her, trying to find one that would keep them a step ahead of Voldemort's ruthless army.
- 8
- 9
- 10
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UnBroken