My love, my love, take shelter in these trees...
The grove of Dreaming Trees is unusually clear of mist today, and strangely warm, too. The broken Arch glows with a ghostly sheen, and the trees themselves gleam bone white under the light of the near-full moon
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All of her protests have been futile, and it isn't fair, to write Harry off. One mistake doesn't mean he's bad. Look at everything he's done, all of the times he's put his life on the line to help. And Harry has saved Molly multiple times over, taking her back from Arctis Tor, vouching for her with the Council, looking after her through all the events since. The younger wizard growls in frustration and prepares to gather up her power to fling at Morgan, magic to make him less hardened, more forgiving, more fair. He is wrong, wrong about Harry and wrong in the way he thinks ( ... )
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He did not know this woman. Worse, he could not bring himself to lift his head to see her.
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His brain is firing in strange ways-- uncertain, bewildered ways, for -- that shock of strangely colored hair would indicate Nymphadora Tonks but the voice is wrong. Did the poison start to destroy his ears? Will he go deaf and blind before paralysis claims him?
"B--bez--" he tries to tell her that ther's a bloody bezoar in his pocket, but there's-- not much he can get out right now. Every breath is a fight.
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Oh, crap. Molly would've paid a lot more attention to the books and movies if she'd known that she'd meet one of the characters. She tried desperately to think of anything that started with 'bez,' knowing that if she were Tonks, she'd be able to get it. "I'm really sorry. I couldn't quite catch that last part. You were trying to tell me something that could help?"
If it were something that could help, he had to be talking either a counter curse or something on his person. Molly couldn't do anything about the former, but the latter? "I'm gonna go through your pockets," she announced her decision so that it at least seemed she was consulting Snape before acting.
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It must be strange, to consider all the layers this man in in. He wears a cloak, which is now in disarray around him and soaked with his own blood, a many-buttoned affair that was sealed from neck (soaked) to navel. Trouers with pockets, a wand in a leather holster on his hip, and under clothes beneath all that.
Still she had the right idea, and so he didn't struggle. If she found the bezoar, he'd be saved. Tonks didn't do well in potions, as he remembers -- well enough to pass for Auror training, but only just. Still, she knows what a bezoar is and wil know to cram it down his throat and save his life. Even SHE would know THAT.
Here's hoping Molly does as well.
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She pulled a small object out of one pocket and stared at it for a second with her eyes narrowed. "Oh, bezoar!" she exclaimed, memory of the word triggered by connecting the symptoms of presumably poison with the item in her hand. They'd put one of these in Ron's mouth, right? Molly refused to think about exactly where the bezoar had originally come from, reaching out to put it in Snape's mouth.
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Those are the eyes of a man who has just discovered he'll live.
He swallows the stone roughly -- and then shudders once, hard, and goes still. His breathing is nonexistant for one terrible heartbeat, and then begins again. Less struggle, but still rasping. It's stopped the poison in it's tracks, but it will take time to reverse the effects.
"Tonks," he says again. He's still quite convinced that's who she is for the moment.
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"Still not Tonks," she insisted. "As you can probably tell from the accent, I'm an American witch." Molly would usually refer to herself as a wizard, but for the time being she didn't object to adopting terms she knew to be in common use for Snape. "My name's Molly Carpenter."
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"Water?" He's rasped his throat dry, and Merlin's gray beard, he's parched now. He tests movement and finds he still lacks most of it. His fingers can open and close now, and that's a start.
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"I didn't exactly come here by choice," she grimaced apologetically as she spoke, "And my wand was left at home." It wasn't even a lie. Molly's wands might not function like Snape's, but she had two ivory wands back in Chicago, where they did her a lot of good now. She would have been equally useless in the matter of obtaining water even with them, but having them would have been a comfort.
As a thought occurred to her, she hurried to add, "Actually, there's one thing I can try." Molly sent her magic down into the ground. "Aquilevitas!" she murmured fervently, narrowing her eyes as she focused her will. If there were no ground water close to the surface, she would have lacked the power to call it upward, and while she understood the principle, it wasn't a ( ... )
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He's pre-occupied with the thought that something might have gone wrong, and Harry might be out there, getting himself killed in entirely the wrong way, leaving them all very well buggered, indeed. Not just that-- not just WON'T he stop Voldemort, but he will also not find his way back from death, and then Snape will have failed Lily and the last living piece of her.
So he doesn't think about the waeakness he displays as he greedily slurps what water he can down his throat, and coughs only once. It's enough.
"American? Strange place for you to be. Not allys of the Order? Albus would have told me, explained contingency or backup!" he says, voice still rough. "Still, glad to have you. They'll -- probably call this something stupid, Battle of Hogwarts or Potter's Field for irony's sake.... But it will be a Potter's ( ... )
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Apparition would, of course, negate the concern over geological distance, but since Molly didn't think they were actually on earth, it wouldn't help Snape much. "You could try apparating, I suppose, but I'm betting there's some kind of Anti-Apparition spell on the area." There, that sounded like an explanation that would fit into his world.
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He's trying to place the forest; he's been in a lot of dark, dank forests in his time, but this one is not familiar. It's not the right greenery at all. "Where are we?" he asks sharply, accustomed to being answered promptly and truthfully. And if not, there's always his eyes, seeking hers; he's in no real condition to be getting deep in someone's brain, but he's certainly willing to skim surface thoughts to ascertain their truthfulness.
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Molly shrugged. "Don't know. I just have an inkling of where we're not." He would not find it so easy to meet Molly's eyes, nor would he like what happened if he did.
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