A Thousand Words

-Chapter 5-

Magical Genetic Regeneration

Harry swore loudly as he brought his cut finger up to his mouth. He sucked on the bloody thing and rolled his eyes mournfully. He couldn’t even die like a normal person, he thought bitterly. Leave it to him to find himself stuck in some freak show of an undead-sort-of-alive-but-not-really-alive-genetically-regenerated-freaky-albus-inspired-magical-frame-thing. Though Snape had referred to their situation as something called “Magical Genetic Regeneration”, Harry still thought “Magical Freak Show” fit the bill much better. Harry pulled his finger out of his mouth and looked at it critically. He noted the cut wasn’t bad and probably wouldn’t require anything more than a small plaster so, with a shake of his head, he continued to cut up the vegetables he planned to add to the stew. Even in semi-death, Harry noted that he was still being saddled with the cooking duties. With a bitter shake of his head, he wondered if he should have his forehead checked. Perhaps he had more than a scar hidden under his black fringe. Perhaps there was also a secret sign lurking there that read, “Make me do the cooking”. He sighed again.

“Still pouting?” Snape’s voice broke across Harry’s dark thoughts. The younger man looked up and raised his eyebrows questioningly.

Snape entered the kitchen and took a seat at the small dining table. “You appear to be lost in your own self-indulgent thoughts again,” he said and folded his arms.

Harry opened his mouth to retort but realized abruptly that Snape was right. He pressed his lips together and looked down at the half completed meal. Ever since he had found himself in this most unusual of circumstances, Harry had been lost in self-pity and darkness. Only Snape’s presence had prevented him from disappearing into it entirely. He shook his head but did not respond.

Snape watched his former pupil for a moment before rising to join him at the counter. Without a word, he removed the knife from Harry’s hand and began to expertly chop the vegetables himself. “Put the tea on,” he said simply.

Harry looked up at Snape. The man had spent the last two weeks uncannily knowing when the pressure of his new circumstances was getting to be too much for Harry and simply appearing nearby, quiet and calm. A reassuring word here, a blanket against the ceaseless cold there. Always just enough presence to help him through the rough bits and enough space to deal with the thoughts surrounding his horrible new reality. As he watched the taller man, Harry found a smile he had hadn’t been able to locate all day; a small one mind, but a smile none-the-less. “Earl Grey?” he asked softly.

“Whatever you wish.”

As Harry moved to put the kettle on, he reminded himself that Snape had assured him that the dark thoughts were normal for the first while and that keeping himself busy was the best way to combat it. Hence the cooking and the cleaning and the reorganizing of shelves (and various other tasks Snape had set him to completing) that had filled the last two weeks of this new ‘life’.

The information Snape had promised to give Harry about what had befallen him after his life had abruptly expired at Malfoy’s hands had been offered in small bits at first, Snape apparently anxious not to overload him. Consumed by grief, confusion and a ceaseless cold that seemed to grip his very bones, Harry had listened to Snape explain how it had come to pass that they now both occupied this strange netherworld. Unable to comprehend everything being said, however, Snape had repeated several pieces of information to Harry, demonstrated others by drawing diagrams on parchment and had finally taken Harry around his new environment to show him the reality of his new life.

Harry shook his head as he opened the cupboard above the stove to fetch a few teabags. Strange how comforting small rituals could be, he observed as he placed them in the teapot. In a life where nothing was the same yet everything was exactly the same, tea seemed the only thing that made sense anymore.

“You should talk about something,” Snape said next to him. “You have been stewing in silence for too long. It is not healthy.”

Harry watched Snape cutting up carrots for a moment, the precise chop chop chop of the kitchen knife not unlike the method he had seen the man use a hundred times on his potions ingredients. “I can’t stop thinking,” Harry finally said, aware that they may have been the first meaningful words he’d spoken for many hours.

Snape glanced at him briefly before returning his attention to dinner. “That can be unhelpful,” he said simply and then added after a second’s hesitation, “Especially when nothing can be done to change what has happened.”

Harry looked down at his hands and furrowed his brow. He had no desire to argue the point with Snape again, but he wasn’t exactly convinced of that. Based on what Snape had told him about how and why they were there, it seemed to Harry that a change of circumstance must be possible. “But, we’re still alive,” he said softly.

The chopping of vegetables abruptly stopped but Harry didn’t look up. They’d already had this conversation numerous times over the past week and he knew Snape was growing impatient with him. “We are not alive, Potter,” he said, his voice even though obviously strained. “I have never said as much.”

Harry finally looked up and took a step toward Snape. “But we are!” he protested. “Look! I’m bleeding, Severus.” Snape did not turn his head. “Look!” Harry insisted and raised his cut finger for inspection.

Snape turned abruptly and Harry took an instinctive step back. Before he could withdraw his hand, however, Snape had it securely in his grasp. He examined the cut closely and finally looked at Harry. “It’s not bad,” he declared.

“I know.” Harry sighed and made to pull his hand away, but Snape held tight. Harry stopped pulling and looked at his former teacher for a moment. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Snape’s eyes slowly lowered to their hands, the smaller held tightly by the larger, and he sighed. “It’s been so long since I’ve felt …” he said softly and abruptly released Harry’s hand.

Harry blinked several times and looked down as Snape returned to the dinner preparations. He was overcome by an emotion that had been haunting him since his arrival in this strange place; pity. For every hellish moment that Harry had experienced since awaking to his fate, he had had Snape there to explain, to comfort, to guide, to offer, to just be there… When Snape had arrived in his new home nineteen years before, there had been no one. He had endured the terror, the pain and the loneliness without a single bit of comfort.

Sighing, Harry turned back to the teapot. “I just meant that if I can bleed, then it must mean that I’m…”

“Don’t torture yourself, Potter,” Snape said.

“But you said that we…”

Snape turned to Harry abruptly, slamming the knife down on the counter this time, “I said that we are genetic reconstructions of the beings we once were. We have been created, Potter, from the genetic information found in our blood. As I have said. We are not alive, because we cannot exist outside of this magical environment created to sustain us. Have you heard me this time? Must I repeat myself again and again to you?” He picked up the knife and returned to chopping, this time with vigour. “This begins to remind me of repeated and ultimately pointless attempts to teach you potions!”

Harry pressed his lips together and watched Snape for a moment. The man’s shoulders were stiff and his neck rigidly bent as he set to his task with an angry determination. Harry thought that by the time Snape was finished, they would likely have enough carrots for a week’s worth of stews, perhaps more considering that the food they used seemed to simply replace itself as needed. He could not fault his former professor for his pessimism, however. Harry knew despair lingered just beneath the other man’s composed exterior. Hope of release from this place had long since passed away for him and Harry suspected his own naïve ramblings of a life beyond these walls served only to reopen nearly two decades of hopelessness. “I’m sorry,” he said softly.

Snape sighed. “You needn’t apologize, Potter,” he said. “It is not my intention to dash your optimism, merely to bring you to the point of acceptance sooner rather than later.” He shook his head. “It is ultimately better for you to do so. Trust me on this point.”

Harry’s small smile found its way back for a brief second and, with a swift movement, he found himself next to Snape again. Snape stopped chopping. Other than a shift of his eyes towards Harry, he did not move. “What?” he said, suspiciously.

Slowly, Harry reached over and took the knife from Snape’s hand. “I’ll finish up.” He smiled up at the taller man. “You get the tea.”

+++

As dinner settled in his stomach (as suspected, there remained enough left-over stew for the next day and the day following), Harry rolled his wine glass lazily between his hands, his gaze fixed on the fire.

“Are you cold?” Snape asked from across the room and Harry looked over. He smiled and shook his head. “No,” he said. “The cold seems to be passing.”

Snape nodded and returned to his book. Harry watched the other man’s severe features for a moment before looking back at the fire. He hadn’t quite reached a place where he could concentrate enough to read. His attempts so far had resulted in him rereading every paragraph at least three times and still not having a clue what he’d read by the time he’d reached the end of the page. He sighed and closed his eyes, once again trying to make sense of this new reality.

As far as he was able to piece together from what Snape had told him and what he had observed with his own eyes, what had brought him to this strange netherworld was this: he had been inadvertently caught up in a piece of Dark Magic created by the one and only Albus Dumbledore. Not surprising really, Harry noted with a shake of his head. Before he’d known the truth about Dumbledore’s past, the Dark Arts part might have come as a bit of a shock, but certainly not now. It seemed the man was positively obsessed with blood; dragon’s blood, human’s blood, even cave troll’s blood (though, admittedly, he had been able to produce very little with the troll’s blood other than a particularly nasty odour). If it was blood, it was apparently worthy of experimentation.

Snape had explained to him, several times as Harry recalled, that Albus had once been as obsessed with immortality as the late Tom Riddle had been. Not a surprising revelation really, considering the Philosopher’s Stone. It was his experimentation with dragon’s blood that may have surprised some, however. It had been Dumbledore’s intention, apparently, to use the blood to prolong human life. How he intended to do so, Snape wasn’t certain, but what the former Headmaster had ultimately discovered had been a serendipitous combination of hard work and complete accident.

As a student at Hogwarts, Dumbledore had been somewhat prone to mischief. Though certainly brilliant and eager to impress, he had also tended toward an enjoyment of experimentation, particularly with the magic of the castle itself. On one such occasion, Dumbledore had cut his finger while peeling a pear and had decided to see what would happen if he smeared the oozing red liquid across the painting he was sitting next to. Naturally, Maynard the Mad, who occupied the painting, had not been overly pleased with the notion of having blood smattered across his frame and had attempted to behead Dumbledore with his meat cleaver. Fortunately for all concerned, the cleaver simply pinged against the glass and rebounded to bash Maynard in the nose.

All of this knife wielding and consequential nose bashing went by unnoticed by Dumbledore, however, for something else amazing had captured his attention. The moment his blood had touched the glass, it had absorbed as though blotted by a thick handkerchief. Not a second later, a faint, ghostly image of his finger had appeared, for only the briefest moment, inside the frame before disappearing. Dumbledore had been thunderstruck and had conducted the experiment several more times (driving Maynard to cut off his own foot in an enraged attempt to reach him and met out some medieval justice). Being a rather brilliant young fellow, Albus had theorized that the magic used to create the paintings (which was known to be of the most ancient kind) used some small part of the subject in order to render them whole in the painting (their magical ‘signature’ was theorized the be the most likely candidate). It would make sense then, Dumbledore had reasoned, that the frames themselves would be able to produce a small magical effect when introduced to some other significant part of a magical creature; something that contained their entire genetic structure, for example. With this knowledge in hand, the stage had been set for what would probably be Dumbledore’s greatest magical achievement; Magical Genetic Regeneration (alas, an achievement only a handful of people would ever know about).

It had been many years later that Dumbledore had discovered the many uses of dragon’s blood, perhaps the most significant being its ability to stabilize other magical elements. Remembering the ghostly finger in the painting, Dumbledore had decided to see what would happen if he smeared a magical painting with dragon’s blood before adding his own. As suspected, the dragon’s blood had absorbed immediately and the scene beyond had darkened dramatically. Through the shadows, Albus had been able to make out rooms and corridors; indeed, a duplicate of the rooms he occupied! His disappointment had been beyond reckoning, however, when he had smeared his own blood on the frame and nothing more had happened than a brief ghostly image of himself had appeared in the room, before disappearing completely. It had taken him many years and many more failed attempts to piece together that his image would not appear in full form until his magical signature ceased to exist in the real world. One’s essence, after all, cannot be in two places at once.

It had finally been a dying cat (of the magical variety, of course) that had proven Dumbledore’s theory. Pouncer the cat was on his last legs when Albus had smeared some of its blood on the frame. The cat appeared for a moment and then was gone; a predicable outcome. The true surprise had come when the cat had finally died, however. Pouncer had appeared within the frame, completely solid. Dumbledore had watched as the cat slowly woke and went through several stages of pain, disorientation, confusion and terrible shivering as its new body adjusted to being suddenly ‘alive’. Try as he might, however, Dumbledore could not find a way to get the cat out of the frame again. The journey seemed to be one-way. Fed up with waiting, the cat had finally left the frame and taken up roaming through the other frames at will. Once a part of the system of magical frames, the newly regenerated subjects seemed free to move about within that world, Albus noted with interest.

Several things occurred to Dumbledore at that point. One, if one used dragon’s blood on an existing magical frame, it was possible to regenerate a dying person even if they did not have a magical frame designated for them. Two, it was apparently not possible to get them out again. Three, they must parish in this life before they can move into the frame. Four… Dumbledore, being completely ignorant of the power he had uncovered, had already spread his own blood on a magical frame…

Distressed by the implications of how his discovery could be used by the dark side, Dumbledore had told only a handful of close friends about the discovery. Until the day of his death, Dumbledore had continued to work on a way to reverse the effects of the smeared blood or, at least, find a way to be released after regeneration. He had apparently sealed his own fate with his constant experimentation, but he wouldn’t endanger anyone else by asking for their help.

That is, until a young man by the name of Severus Snape had come into his life… Dumbledore had been foolish enough to ask for the brilliant young man’s help in his plight and Snape had been foolish enough to be tempted by life eternal. Armed with Dumbledore’s notes, Snape had waited until he was alone one night to choose an empty frame (the occupant apparently preferred to stay in a friend’s frame near the hospital wing) which he smothered with dragon’s blood. To his credit, Snape had hesitated before cutting his own hand and smearing his blood across the glass, but, alas, not long enough. The fear of death and darkness had been too great for him in the end and he had succumbed to temptation. He had moved the frame into his own quarters and secured it to the wall with a sticking spell greater than any the wizarding world had likely seen in a long while. And there it waited… until the foolish young man had grown older and finally died on a wooden floor, a young man with green eyes looking down upon him as his essence fled to a dark frame far away.

Harry sighed and closed his eyes, thoughts of magical experimentation and life-alerting decisions tiring him to the bone.

“What are you thinking about?”

Harry opened his eyes and looked over at Snape. “Dumbledore.”

“Ah.” Snape closed his book and set it aside. “I may need more brandy.”

Harry smiled and put his head back against the soft leather of the chair. “Sounds about right,” he said. “Bring the bottle.”

Snape made no attempt to move, apparently aware that Harry had not been serious. He watched Harry for a moment before speaking. “It was never his intention that you should be caught up in this madness.”

Harry closed his eyes briefly. “I know,” he said softly and finally raised his head to look at Snape. “You knew I would end up here, though, Severus. When you told me to touch the frame. You knew my blood would bring me in here.”

There had been no accusation in Harry’s voice, but still Snape bristled. “I couldn’t just let you die like that,” he said and rose swiftly from his chair. He stalked to the mantle near where Harry sat and leaned against it, his face cast down. “Not like that. I know what it’s like to lie on the floor and…” He shook his head and pressed his lips together.

Harry watched him for a moment. “I would have done the same,” he said.

Snape snorted. “Would you?”

A small laugh escaped Harry and he shook his head. “Are you kidding me? A chance to rescue someone from death? How could I have resisted that?”

Snape looked sideways at him and Harry was certain he saw a small smile crease one side of his lips. “Naturally. Perhaps Albus was thinking of Gryffindors when he conjured it.”

The two men were silent for a moment before Snape spoke again. “I…” he said softly, “I am sorry…”

Harry immediately leaned forward in his chair and reached out to grasp the other man’s hand. “No, Severus, don’t. Please don’t apologize. I was serious. If our positions had been reversed, I would have done the same thing. I couldn’t have just stood there and watched you die without…” Harry blinked and hesitated. That was exactly what he’d done, though, wasn’t it? All those years ago? He released Snape’s hand and looked down at the floor. “That is to say, if it had happened now, I would have… I’d have…”

Snape was beside him in an instant, kneeling beside his chair. “No more torturing ourselves,” he said simply. “What we have each done, is done. Now we must live with it.”

Harry swallowed and looked up at his former professor. He nodded and tried to smile, but somehow couldn’t manage it. “Are we living?” he asked softly.

Snape sighed and looked down for a moment before returning Harry’s gaze. “If it isn’t life now, then we will make it so, Harry,” he said firmly. “We must take what we have here and make something of it lest we waste away in despair.”

Harry smiled faintly and nodded. He dared not tell Snape that he had not yet resigned himself to an eternity inside a frame. If what Snape had said was true and they were really exact duplicates of their former selves, then there must be a way for them to move into the real world again. The way simply had to be found. It just needed a bit of courage and good old-fashioned Gryffindor bull-headedness. “We won’t waste away, Severus,” Harry promised.

A/N: I’m very sorry this chapter took so long! It was content heavy (as is life at the moment), so always a bit of a drag to get down on paper. Oh, and don’t worry if it seems like there are a few holes in the ‘how did I end up here and what does it all mean?’ story… Snape hasn’t told Harry everything yet. Thanks again for the reviews… love them muchly… Take care and see you soon!