FOR SERVICES RENDERED

Chapter Forty-Three

Farid had successfully evaded a bone crushing curse when he saw Nott senior raise his wand to Severus; he sent off a stunning curse which threw the man back against the nearby wall. Simultaneously, Farid also stunned all of the other Death Eaters - he could not risk any injuries to his friends or indeed any of the children or teachers at Hogwarts.

But he had to return his attention to Voldemort almost immediately, as his opponent would give no quarter, he knew. The Dark Lord was ruthless; he now knew that he was mortal and could be killed: he was fighting Farid for his life.

But Farid was not frightened; he felt strangely elated, full of confidence. This is what he had trained for with Master and with Remus; Master knew Voldemort’s fighting style, and the dark wizard was reacting exactly how Master had predicted he would. So it was easy for Farid to counter his every move. Then, all at once, Farid felt a sharp pain around his heart and was momentarily incapacitated. From the corner of his eye, he saw Voldemort raise his wand and fire off a curse, so he did the same in retaliation.

All at once, a surge of power ran through him and he was flung back against the wall of the bubble. He did not have time to think about what had happened to him; he did not have time to do more than react to the powerful magic that was assailing him. The wands had connected; what seemed like a ribbon fired with lightning joined the two wands and they started to shake violently. It was all Farid could do to hold on whilst he was whirled round and round the inside of the bubble, still connected to his enemy via the wands.

Voldemort was shouting at him in parseltongue; he was shouting about how the world owed him: for his dreadful childhood, the rejection he had suffered, the pain. He was spewing hatred at Farid, threatening death, agony, torture. And at the same time he was trying to probe Farid’s mind. Farid smiled to himself; if Voldemort wanted to see torture, experience pain and suffering, then Farid would let him.

He grasped firmly at the tendrils that he could feel brushing his mind and pulled them inside his memories. He showed Voldemort everything: all the darkness, all the pain; he showed him his dreadful childhood and he would not let him go, not until he had seen it all, every last thing.

When they finally broke contact, Voldemort was screaming.

He had broken the connection between them and he was clutching his head in his hands. When he looked at Farid again, his eyes were flashing they were a deep dark red.

“What are you, boy?” he hissed; he was still speaking in parseltongue. “You ssshould kill them all for what they did, for they let happen to you. Join me and together we will rule the world, you can be dark, I can sssee it inside you!”

“Oh I don’t think sssso,” Farid told him. “You sssee, I only hold one wizard ressssponssssible for what happened to me, and that wizard issss you. I ssshall take the greatessst pleasssure in killing you, however!”

Voldemort roared his defiance he pulled back his wand - a wand that looked a bit battered, a bit charred. He curled his lip.

“Let us end this, boy! Avada Kadavra”

Farid laughed. He held out a hand and caught the curse; it was easy, he could see the light, shining green, sinister, reflecting in the almost transparent skin of the bubble.

He rolled the light into a ball and bounced it in his hand as if it were a child’s toy; the other wizard just stood and stared. Farid almost laughed he felt, strong, invincible.

“Look at my pretty ball, Woldemort,” he said. “Here, vhy don’t dyou catch?”

And he threw the curse back at the man who had cast it. It met its target and hit the Dark Lord right in the middle of his chest; for just a second Farid caught a glimpse of the other wizard’s face - the shock, the horror that froze his features - and then Voldemort exploded into a thousand tiny shards of light.

Farid was thrown backwards by the force of the blast, but he managed to recover himself quite quickly.

But then he looked down. In a corner of the hall, lying in a pool of blood was his master. Poppy was beside him; she seemed desperately trying to save him but he was not moving, and Farid knew that Master was gone - he could not feel him any longer, there was nothing, the bond was gone too. Farid was alone. Then he was falling, he was slipping into unconsciousness, everything was blackness, and he knew no more.


When Severus awoke, he felt weak and battered. It hurt to breathe but, more than anything, he was astonished that he was still breathing. This time it was Remus beside his bed.

He lay there and just looked at the werewolf for a moment until the other man noticed his scrutiny. Remus smiled at him wearily.

“Hello, Severus. How are you feeling?”

Severus coughed, “Like I’ve been sliced open by a cutting curse,” he croaked. His chest felt tight, like it had been constricted; a sheet lay across his midriff, and could see a large white bandage swathing his torso.

“You nearly died, Severus,” Remus said. “Just a few seconds more and you would have been dead. Thaddeus Nott managed to sever several major veins and arteries; if it had not been for Hermione, we would not have been able to save you. Apparently she has taken a Muggle course called First Aid; without her actions you would undoubtedly have died. She did something called applying pressure. It kept you alive until Poppy could get to you; not that I think Hermione was planning on letting you die any time soon, she is a most determined young lady, I think!”

Severus was only half listening, he needed to know how Farid was; nothing else mattered, really. From force of habit he felt for the bond, and realised with a pang that it was there no longer.

“Farid?” he asked urgently. “How is Farid?” Remus looked infinitely sad.

“He won Severus; he defeated the Dark Lord, but there was some sort of explosion at the end, and he fell so hard to the ground. He has been in what Poppy calls a catatonic state ever since.

“We can’t wake him; he has lain in that bed over there for more than 48 hours now.

“He saved us all, but we can’t wake him. I thought that maybe, just maybe, you could try using the bond.”

“No,” Severus whispered, “Oh no! Oh Merlin, I can’t Remus, there is no bond; I dissolved it. He is free; I thought I was dying so I released him. Farid is no longer a slave, he is a free man.” Remus said nothing to that, he looked shocked though, completely stunned. “Hermione found out how,” Severus said. “She told me that day, she just told me before the battle, so when I thought I was dying, I set him free.

“Can I see him, please can I see him?”

“You mustn’t move, Sev,” Remus answered. His voice sounded hoarse with emotion. “Your wounds have sealed, but the skin is still very delicate, it could still break open, it could still tear.”

He stilled, he seemed to be thinking for a moment. “If you promise to lie quietly, I will wheel you closer; but you must promise me, Severus, that you will not move.” Severus looked into his friend’s eyes, he nodded, just once.

So Remus moved him. He wheeled the bed, on which Severus lay prone, closer; so that he could see Farid, so that without stretching he could reach across and hold the ice-cold hand of the boy that he loved beyond reason.

It was so different this time; before when Farid had been unconscious, his breathing had been even, his eyes closed, but this time there was something very different happening. Farid lay still, deathly still, and he was so very pale. His breathing was shallow, his chest barely moving at all, and his eyes, that was the worst of all; his beautiful green eyes were open, but it was almost as if they were shaded - there was no vestige of life, no sparkle in them at all.

When Poppy came to examine Severus and to scold him for letting Lupin move his bed, she told him that Farid had fractured his skull.

He had had other injuries too, but they had been healed soon enough; it was the head injury that was causing concern.

“When he fell it was awful; he plummeted to the ground, and hit his head so hard, we all heard it, it reverberated, echoed around the hall. He hasn’t moved since.”

“He is in a deep coma, one from which he may never wake. His brain swelled for quite some time and I had to widen the split in his skull for a little while, to relieve the pressure. Since, his brain returned to normal size though there has been no response. I think that he has gone Severus, I can find no brain activity, whatever we do, there is no reaction; I think he is brain dead.”

“No!” Severus said firmly, catching the eye of the mediwitch. “Don’t you write him off, don’t you dare! He is very strong my Farid, he has survived so much. He has won, he has so much to live for, he will not die; I will not let him.”

But, as the days wore on, nothing changed.

Visitors streamed in and out of their room all the time. As the spring sunshine gave way to early summer, visitor after visitor came by and told Severus what had happened in the battle and what was now occurring in the outside world. Each day Severus grew stronger: he was able to sit up, the bandages came off, he was able to get out of bed for longer periods each day; and, all the time, Farid lay there, small and fragile, eyes focussed on nothing, and slowly but surely, everyone gave into despair. Everyone that is, except Severus, who would not give in, who instead washed his boy and combed his hair lovingly and talked to him about what he had heard, what others had told him of the outside world and sat for hour upon hour, just holding Farid’s slender hand.

The world had changed so much since the battle, it seemed. Farid and Voldemort had fought for more than forty minutes; curses had flown back and forth and with the two of them in cased in their bubble the entire school had had a grandstand view. No one really knew why Farid had cast the field around himself and Voldemort, had taken the battle up in the air, but the general consensus was that it kept everyone else safe and out of harm’s way. And wasn’t that just like Farid?

Voldemort had been firing curse after curse at the boy, and he had been freezing them, sending them right back. The final curse had been green and glowing and, when Farid had stopped that and returned it, Voldemort had exploded into a thousand pieces, shattered, destroyed. That’s when the bubble had burst and Farid had apparently just floated in mid-air for a moment before collapsing to the floor far below him, like a puppet who had had its strings cut.

Everyone had seen him fall, but no one had been fast enough to catch him; Severus berated himself for the fact that he had not been there, because surely if he had been, then he would have done something.

Visitor after visitor expressed their regret that they had not been able to help Farid, that nobody had been able to stop his fall. They talked about what had happened during the battle, how the Death Eaters had all fallen unconscious at once, thereby saving many lives. Not a single child or a member of staff had died that day - several Death Eaters had, though.

And the rest of them, why the rest of them….

When Farid had fallen, all eyes had locked on him. Sirius Black had reached the crumpled form before anyone else, but they had not moved him until the mediwitch arrived, and she had been busy for quite some time saving Severus’ life. Instead, someone had fetched a blanket to cover him, and then everyone had just waited.

So Sirius had sat by the boy, and held a small white hand in his own huge paw-like fist, not stirring for nearly an hour whilst they waited for someone from St Mungo’s to come; all around him the children and other teachers had stood, spontaneously holding a silent vigil for the boy who had saved them all. Then, when the magi-medics had finally arrived, they had finally noticed the babies.

Every single one of the Death Eaters who had not died had vanished, and in the place of each of them was a small child, none of them older than about two years of age. Some of them were crying, others held tight the robes that no longer fitted them, but that had pooled around them on the floor and yet more just sat and stared at the students. Not a one wore a Dark Mark; each of them had been taken back to a time of innocence.

Remus told Severus that the spell that Farid had cast (for who other than Farid could have done such a thing?) must have held them all in stasis until Farid himself was moved. As soon as the medics had lifted him to a magical stretcher, the spell that held the children frozen in place had been removed and they had come to life, to consciousness.

It was the existence of these children that had finally deposed Fudge.

The Minister for Magic had become increasingly unpopular since his recent encounter with Farid. In the days that followed the battle, he had had some tough questions to answer about why the school had been so vulnerable, how Voldemort had managed to attack, why it was not protected so that the Death Eaters had had to be fought by a handful of teachers and older students, and how come an eighteen-year-old boy had defeated Voldemort all by himself, with no back up and no support from so called ‘well-trained battle hardened Aurors.’

It had been Fudge himself who had prevented the magi-medics from getting to the school, insisting that the area must be made safe before they were allowed to enter it, a dictate that did not go down well with the parents of children who had suffered injuries.

But Fudge truly did not know what to do with the toddlers; he was completely flummoxed when it came to them. He at first tried to have them sent to Azkaban, but that idea has soon been quashed by a number of very important individuals. Indeed, some of the Death Eaters who had been incarcerated were released, as they too had been returned to childhood. Draco Malfoy had had to go haring off to rescue a toddler Lucius and take him to the cottage in which he and his mother now lived.

Farid, it seemed, had judged the Death Eaters; what the criteria was nobody knew, but he had obviously decided that a number of them deserved a second chance. So he had returned them to childhood, early childhood, to give them that chance. It was not lost on Severus that, once the children had been examined by Poppy, they were pronounced to be fifteen months old - the exact age that Harry Potter had been when his parents were killed.

It was Adrian Barnard, Farid’s American journalist friend, who had finally confronted the Minister on behalf of a hostile and angry press corp. as Fudge led a team of Aurors who were gamefully trying to arrest thirty-seven small children and escort them to prison. Adrian had suggested that the Minister was a fool and a coward who was only capable of bullying tactics. Furthermore, the fact that he had delayed the magi-medics because he was scared of a handful of babies meant that he could well be responsible for Farid’s current condition, since their late arrival may or may not have contributed to the hero’s current condition.

After Barnard’s passionate condemnation, Cornelius Fudge was gone by morning and Amelia Bones was appointed interim minister in his stead.

She took over responsibility for a team of Aurors - whose morale was at an all time low - thirty-seven children (plus six more later retrieved from prison), and an Azkaban that no longer had guards. She took charge of a magical world that was, for the first time in more than twenty years, completely free of terror, and she took charge of protecting a hero who slumbered all-unknowing about what was taking place, whilst the political landscape was changing and history was being made.

She visited Farid several times, telling Severus all about the Order of Merlin that they wanted to present to the boy, the glowing future he could have as an Auror, if he decided that that was what he wanted to do. But she had no more success than anyone else at waking him up and, oblivious to the changes that were going on around him, Farid merely slept on.