Prologue - All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood

Gasping for breath, a thousand hours to a second and he can feel the water, as cold as those moments of living death when being apparated by someone else all around him, up his nose seeping under his eyelids to touch the delicate tissues of his eyes with fingers like Dementors' talons. The unwise gasp leads water to slide down his throat, almost friendly, caressing, touching and pressing the remaining air out of his lungs in a trail of beautiful phosphorescent bubbles. His robe floats upwards like Ophelia's hair, tangled with the encroaching water weed as the water changes from deep green to black, like his own eyes in the dark.

Then something wraps around him, like a tentacle, but he knows that the giant squid is far from this dark cauldron of water, in the lake not within the Forbidden Forest, where light creatures, even giant, bad-tempered ones rarely venture. And it begins to pull him upwards – towards the light. He wants to protest but no words form – the darkness at the corners of his eyes has reached out and is swallowing him, and he's glad. Heartbeat loud in his ears like the Japanese festival drums Hermione had on her portable cd player – drowning out the need to breathe, even in the newly approaching air.

He surrenders to the darkness and lets it eat his soul.

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Serverus Snape, potions professor of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, was jaded enough to think that he'd seen, if not it all, then most of it in his lifetime; however, he'd never expected to be lifting the Boy Who Lived from the pool of shadowed reflections near the heart of the Forbidden Forest.

The pool was nothing but a flat expanse of greenish black volcanic glass, unless one offered it something. Then it could become whatever was reflected in your darkest desires. He had seen it glow like the finest gold, become a sunrise, a pool of healing. He'd never seen this black forbidding darkness like a portal to the Underworld with Hades himself awaiting the unfortunate at the bottom.

But then, for the life of him, he'd never expected to lift the 'saviour of the wizarding world' from the water, hair grown longer over another summer slicked to his skull and merging with the darkness of school robes; arms hanging limp, knuckles almost merging with the grass; cerise water gently mingling with the early morning dew…

Pink water…

A curse left his lips – curling with them a sneer that was normally given for Potter's poor performance in his class – and let go of the variant of Wingardium Leviosa which was keeping the boy aloft, before moving swiftly across the spongy carpet of moss and grass that kept the forest looking a permanent, verdant dark green, and kneeling beside Harry and looking down. The wounds on his wrists were long and jagged, not knife wounds, and were interspersed with other, older scars, slim and ragged both – writings of the soul.

Snape gently ran his fingers over the open wounds, murmuring under his breath as they healed. Complicated healing magic didn't require a wand, but it did require personal sacrifice. He wasn't the most talented of healers, but the wounds would heal and Potter wouldn't die of them. He sighed before turning the boy onto his back and kneeling at the top of his rump; gently massaging, watching water spill from between ice-pale lips before turning him so that he could perform artificial respiration.

Then breath fluttered, once, twice, a choked sound that caught on the edge of tears before green eyes opened, held like jewels between the night-dark thatch of lashes and the purple shadows of pain beneath. And the green that he'd often looked at as spring grass was dulled and shadowed like the toad pickled in brine in his office.

Almost against his will one arm slipped beneath the boy's head, drawing the soaked body closer to his own for warmth, not for comfort. No, he wasn't the sort to offer that to boys of seventeen who were thorns in the collective side of the Dark Order and his classroom organisation structure.

And those tormented – almost, broken? – eyes looked up into his through the broken shadows of those long lashes and a voice made shattered and harsh by water and choking screams in a whisper asked, "Why?"