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A/N I have now got two betas so my gorgeous gals are checking my grammar and punctuation! Which needed some work, more than 120,000 words in less than eight weeks, means a lot of mistakes! They are getting the rest of the story beta-ed too! *squees* So thanks muchly to Kim and thequeenanne. I love you ladies!

Severus awoke a long time later. He felt like he had been run over by a herd of centaurs. His head was pounding. He prised open his eyes, wincing at the bright light and snapping them shut as fast as he could. He was not in the dungeons anymore; that was for certain. The light down there was never this bright. Tentatively, he opened his eyes again, more slowly this time, to see that he was in one of the starched white beds in the infirmary. He peered around, still squinting somewhat, and nearly fell out of bed with shock. Sitting right beside him, in one of those dreadfully uncomfortable hospital chairs, was Sirius Black.

“Well, now I know for certain that Poppy hates me!” Severus muttered. “I wake up, wondering where in the blue blazes I am, only to be confronted by your odious face. This day just gets better and better! Why am I here? What just happened? Where is Farid? And last, but not least, what the fuck do you want?”

Severus had sat bolt upright, and having shouted the last bit, he began to believe that maybe the centaurs in his head had started wearing clogs?

He groaned, and the next thing he knew, Sirius Black was beside him laying a cool cloth on his head and giving him sips of cold water through a straw. Severus just stared at him, although he did take the proffered water. “I am in an alternate universe, aren’t I? Either that, or The Dark Lord has tortured me into insanity!”

Black sat back down again. He looked chagrined, embarrassed.

“I am here to eat humble pie, Severus. May I call you Severus?”

“No, you most certainly may not! Where is Farid, and what is going on?” Then raising his voice, which caused the centaurs to stop their pounding and get out extra large sledgehammers to go with the clogs. “ALBUS!”

“He can’t hear you right now. He is downstairs with Fudge, trying to keep him away from you and Har… Farid. Farid is just a couple of beds from you. He is unconscious Sev… er Snape.”

Severus tried to sit up, but he hurt too damned much. What had happened? Where was his boy?

“Just tell me what occurred!” He ground out from between clenched teeth. “Now!”

“Snape, it was terrible, horrific! You were screaming, such screaming as I have never heard! Merlin, never, ever anything like that. Not even in Azkaban. Harry... no, Farid, he was like a wild thing, desperately trying to get to you. We tried to hold him back because we didn’t know what was happening, whether there was danger or not, but his magic, it just exploded. I have never seen anything like it in my whole life. The raw power that boy possesses! He is not big, but, Hairy Hippogriffs, the strength in him! At one point Remus was actually sitting on him, whilst Albus tried to examine you, but Farid was not having any of that. We ended up on the ceiling, not Ron or Hermione, but Remus and Albus and I. He didn’t hurt us. He just wanted us out of the way. He was screaming too.

“’You can’t have him. He is mine, my Master.’ In that mad accent he has! Then he grabbed your arm and started shouting again, only this time in parseltongue. He is a Parselmouth, Snape.

"After a moment or two he collapsed, and we just drifted down and landed gently. He was slumped across your chest, barely breathing, and you didn’t seem much better. After all that screaming, because I think we were all doing it at one point, the room seemed so quiet. It was eerie, unearthly. We could feel your pain, his pain. It was almost like he was taking your agony on himself and broadcasting it to us. Then that weird stillness. For a moment, we thought you were dead.

"But Ron was already kneeling beside you, and Hermione was checking your, what did she call it ‘plus’? To see if you were alive she said. And then Ron shouted out, and we all crept closer and that… that is when we saw it… Severus. The Dark Mark is gone.”

Severus tried to get up, then thought better of it, it just hurt too much to move right now. So instead, he lifted his left arm to have a look. He would not believe it until he had seen it for himself. His breath caught in his throat, and he made a strange croaking noise. His forearm was completely unadorned. For the first time since he was seventeen years old, the hideous blemish was missing.

He felt like he had been frozen in time, petrified. He just held his arm in front of his face and stared.

“Um… Snape, are you okay?”

“The bond is still there,” Severus muttered.

“What?”

“The bond with Farid hasn’t changed, I can feel it. It feels the same. Just the same.”

“Nnno. Dumbledore thinks it hasn’t. He had Fawkes look at it yesterday, but we won’t really know until Farid wakes up.”

“Is he alright, Black? I mean, I think he is. It feels like he is. But he is not hurt, is he?”

“He seems fine, Se…er Snape. He’s just unconscious, from the amount of magic he produced, the power he expended. You have both been unconscious for two days now.”
Then he said, “I need to ask you something.”

He peered up at Severus from under his brows, and Severus said nothing, merely waited for whatever it was Black wanted to say.

“I…erm…When Poppy undressed Harry to examine him, she found some scars, um they looked to be old. Did the vampires do them, Severus? Did he get them before? How did he get to be a slave? Do you know? Because erm….I don’t understand. He’s had such a bad time, and I don’t know him at all. Is…is he very damaged?”

Severus looked at him coldly.

“Just what are you trying to say, Black?” he asked.

Sirius Black looked crestfallen. Diminished. Like he was in deep waters and did not know how to swim. When he looked up at Severus his eyes were shining with tears.
“He’s James’ son,” he said, quite unnecessarily in Severus’ opinion. “I promised to look after him. But I really did not do a good job, did I?

“Don’t answer that, it was a rhetorical question. He was such a happy baby. Lily said he never even cried when he was teething. He always smiled and laughed when he saw me. I thought he was safe with Lily’s sister. But when I got out of Azkaban, and I heard he was missing, I had to find him. It was like an obsession. But you found him instead, and he is so different from what I was expecting.”

Severus sneered at him. “Don’t you like the fact that your godson was, what did you call him again? Oh yes! A whore. A fuck toy .”

Black choked back a sob.

“Please, Snape. I am so sorry for what I said. I hurt him. I hurt you too, and I am so very sorry. I was bang out of order, and Weasley was right to lay one on me.”

He looked up again, this time he had a rueful grin on his face. “The Gryffindor hour glass has an extra sixty beads. No one will admit to awarding them, but I think it was Albus and Remus! You would never award extra counters to Gryffindor, would you?

“And I fucking deserved that smack. I know I did. I see now. I understand. He really loves you. He was absolutely frantic when Voldemort was torturing you. Nothing and nobody else seemed to matter. And I do want to do what’s best, so I’ll help. Both of you. In any way I can.”

Severus stared at him for a long moment. Then he began to speak.

“The scars come from his uncle. He used to beat him and burn him. He has skin around his scrotum that is scarred too. That’s where his aunt scrubbed him with bleach. The word carved into his hip, his uncle did that. He tied him down to the kitchen table one day, and did it with a knife. Farid said he’d had too much to drink. He thought that Freak was his name till he went to school.

“Yusuf, the Master Vampire, told me that he found Farid on a doorstep in February. He’d been beaten and was wearing nothing other than an oversized shirt. They fed him, and were nice to him sometimes he said, when he did what they wanted. They didn’t hate him either, and that was better than his uncle, too. He didn’t used to see very well, Farid told me, so they corrected his eyesight and then glamoured his eyes, because they didn’t like the colour.

“They looked after him better than his family did in many ways. They used him, and beat him, but the scars that they left can’t be seen. And he could have stopped it at any time, just by telling them about his magic, but he didn’t want to be evil. The turning would have destroyed the bond, because it would have killed him. He would have been undead.

“So he kept his magic secret, for years, because he was frightened about what they might manage to do with his power at their disposal.”

Severus throat hurt. It was still tender from the screaming, and now it was raw from emotion too. When he looked up, Black had his head buried in his hands, and his shoulders were shaking. He was sobbing.

Then Severus did something he would never have thought possible; he reached over to Black, put his hand on the man’s shoulder and squeezed.

It did the trick. Black stopped crying and looked at him with unbridled astonishment. They sat for a moment eye to eye, unmoving, until finally Black spoke.

“If you plan on paying a little visit to that uncle of his, I’ll come with you,” he said.

Severus smiled. It was not a nice smile; it was cold, cruel, calculating. But when he extended his hand, Black took it and they shook on the deal.

“By the way, Black,” Severus said, still smirking, “Those glass beads? Just so you know, I was responsible for awarding twenty of them!”




When Farid awoke, the hospital wing was quiet. Not that he knew where he was. He panicked a little bit when he first awoke, but it was okay, because Master was close. He felt exhausted, even worse than with the vampires, than when he ran from the hall and Master came to get him.

He had been so very scared when he had seen Master in pain. He closed his eyes again and tried to calm his breathing. He put his hand against his cheek in that comfort gesture that was all he had had for so long, and his teeth began to nibble at his lower lip.

He seemed to be wearing a strange backwards shirt that did not do up properly behind. He sat up and winced at the soreness in his head, but he wanted Master, and he had to find him.

Albus Grey Beard was sitting beside his bed in a peculiar flowery chair. He was snoring gently, making his moustache rise with the funny little growly breaths that he was taking, but Farid was not worried about getting past him. He was very good at being unnoticed when he needed to be.

It hurt a lot when he stood up, his head throbbed and so did just about everywhere else, come to that. But Farid had been in far worse pain than this, and he had dealt with it. This need was greater than his discomfort. He needed his Master.

The room, wherever it was, was dark. It had big windows that showed the night sky, and in the glimmers of moonlight, Farid saw his master in a bed close by. He padded over on bare feet to see how Master was, but he was sleeping. It was not a natural sleep; Farid could feel through the bond that Master had been given something. A potion perhaps? But Farid needed to feel him close. He could not untie the shirt on his own, so he simply vanished it, so that his skin could touch Master. He climbed under the sheets and Master, unconscious though he was, wrapped his arms around Farid.

And Farid’s heart filled with love.

It had been awful earlier when Voldemort had attacked. He had been able to feel his Master’s agony. He had put his hands on that awful brand that Master had worn, the one that he had always avoided touching; so much corruption had it contained. At once, he had been instantly connected to the mind of the evil wizard that had created it.

“Ahh,” the evil one had said. “Now I see you, Harry Potter.

“You can’t hide much longer, you know? But first, before I come for you, I am going to execute a spy!”

He had tried to kill Master, and Farid was not having that. When Voldemort pushed his perverted magic down the bond, Farid had sent it back. Tenfold. He had hurt him. Hurt him quite a lot. He had felt the other wizard’s suffering in his mind, his agonised screams replacing Master’s.

Then, just to be sure, he had removed the Mark. He had screamed at it to be gone, to leave Master forever. He had pushed with his mind, imagined it gone, and the snake had vanished in an instant, and then the skull had dissolved, and Master had been freed. But, all the while, his heart had been pounding in his ears, and it had felt like someone was squeezing it tight in his chest. The pain had grown and grown, until finally everything had gone dark, and he had known no more, until now.

He snuggled down under the covers, warm and cosy now. Knowing that Voldemort would take a while to recover from the magical backlash that Farid had created. So just for a while, for tonight at least, Farid knew that he was safe, and he drifted off to sleep held tight and protected in his Master’s arms.


A/N Thanks for all the lovely reviews I do love reading them. *Group Hug* Luciexxxx