A Push in the Right Direction – Chapter 6 – emersli1!

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Severus surfaced slowly, to the sound of a steady beep and the terrifying feeling of something in his throat.  The beeping sped up and took on a frantic tone as he tried to lift his arms to clear his airway.

“Easy, easy now, lad.”  The soft lilt reminded him of his Master, easing his panic enough to let him listen.  “Ye’ve got a tube down yer throat helpin’ ye to breathe.  We canna take it oot just yet.  Yer facial bones have no’ quite finished settin’.”

Opening swollen eyes, Severus looked at the person above him.  A woman, middle-aged, with a round face under her nurse’s cap.  Focusing hard on her face brought things slowly into focus around her a bit more.

“There ye are.  Good Morning, Mr. Quinn.  It’s good to see ye back with us.”  Severus was startled for a moment, hearing her call him by the name he’d never used anywhere but Andorra.  Then he realized that his muggle ID card would have been in his wallet, so of course they had registered him under his muggle identity.

Severus wondered how long he’d been out, and the extent of his injuries, but a deep weariness seemed set in his bones.  The rhythmic beep of what must be a heart monitor and the gentle lilt of the nurse’s voice were easing him back to sleep.

Severus quietly slipped back into the dark.  Not too deep this time, just the sleep his body needed to heal.  Hopefully next time he woke he would be able to stay awake long enough to get answers to some of his questions.

That was his last conscious thought as his dreams spun him away to the mountains.

It was a week before Severus could stay awake long enough to speak with his doctor.  

That week was full of reassurances from his day nurse that he really was healing.  He was usually awake just long enough to get impatient and frustrated with his inability to communicate.  They had tried spelling, but he couldn’t stay awake long enough to finish the questions he wanted to ask.

So now he waited eagerly for the doctor to come in and tell him what was going on with him.

“Well Mr. Quinn, it’s very good to see you awake, alert, and not panicking.  Excellent.  I’m going to fill you in on your condition and prognosis today, so you have some idea what’s going on, and what our next steps are.”

Severus nodded as best he could.

“Wonderful.  I’m Dr. Thorne, by the way.  Now, on the whole I want you to remember … you’re a very lucky man.  You’re not going to feel very lucky for the next several weeks, but really .. it could be much, much worse.  After all, you were dead for almost three and a half minutes.”

Huh.  Somehow it had felt longer than that to Severus, that time on the hilltop.  But maybe perception was different here.  Or maybe time just ran differently there.

“You were admitted with multiple fractures and contusions.  Several ribs, your left hip and knee, both arms.  Your spleen was bruised and we worried about it, but you managed to recover and keep it.  Pneumothorax.  We had to re-inflate your lung.”  The man looked at Severus intently, making sure he was still awake and following.

“The most critical damage was to your face and skull.  Lower mandible broken in two places, upper mandible detached on both sides.  Left cheekbone shattered into gravel, both eye sockets shattered.  We thought for a while you might lose your right eye, but it’s healing well now.  Two depressed skull fractures.  We elevated both of those, removed the bone shards we could reach without insult to healthy brain tissue, and hoped for the best.”  The list of injuries would have shocked Severus speechless, if he’d currently been capable of speech.

The doctor looked him over seriously.  “Mr. Quinn, I want you to really take on board what I’m going to say here.  We had to rebuild virtually everything above the neck.  You’re not going to scare children in the street.  We tried where we could to keep the scars inside your mouth or under the hairline.  And having to remove sections of scalp for the brain surgery and then reposition them afterwards might result in a difference in your hair.  You won’t look the way you used to … but you’re alive.”

Severus had never been a handsome man.  He’d come to terms with that almost a decade ago.  Granted some ugly ducklings grew up to be swans, but he could see the disparate features he’d inherited from his parents and had no expectation of improvement as he grew.  Frankly, he didn’t really care what he looked like, so long as Harry didn’t run terrified when he saw him.

The doctor continued, “When we remove the bandages and all the swelling has gone, we’ll see what we’re left with.  If we really need to adjust things, we can always re-operate in a year or so.  Now, I’m going to start backing down the ventilator.  It will be set to kick in if your respiratory system isn’t ready to function at acceptable levels yet.  And when you can go twenty-four hours without it needing to breathe for you, we’ll remove it.”

The man smiled.  “At that point, we’ll have the conversation about rehab and physical therapy.  Once it can be an actual conversation, and not just me info-dumping while you glare at me.”

Oops.  Severus didn’t realize he’d been glaring.  He tried to soften his gaze.  No need to offend the people taking care of him.

The doctor laughed at that.  “Don’t worry, Mr. Quinn.   We healthcare workers develop thick skins.  I’ve had far worse than a glare over the years.  Now, you rest.  You’ve gotten a lot of information today.  Let it settle a bit.  We’ll talk again in two days’ time.”

With that the man made a few adjustments to the machine whose job it apparently was to breathe for Severus right now.  Then with one last smile and nod, the man left the room, continuing on his rounds through the ward.

Four weeks after the surgeries, they were ready to remove the bandages and leave them off.

The chest tube was long gone, as was the respirator.  Both arms were still casted and his right arm was strapped to his chest.  His hip and knee were still immobilized, with a couple of weeks left to go until physical therapy could start.

But today, the yards and yards of gauze bandages around his head were going to be removed and Severus would get his first look at his face.  The swelling wouldn’t finish subsiding for another few weeks, but the bones seemed to have set well enough to safely remove the headgear and allow his incisions to breathe.

Nurse Gwyn assisted as Dr. Thorne unwrapped the bracing and removed the bandages.  As the various pieces of gear were removed and either thrown away or set aside for cleaning, Severus couldn’t help but wonder how bad it was going to be.

The last pieces removed were the protective coverings over the incisions inside his mouth.  Severus could breathe and speak freely for the first time in a month.  Oh, he’d been able to grunt and fumble and make himself understood, but for a man who had prided himself not on his appearance but on his presence … well, it had been a sore trial indeed.

“Yes, yes… everything’s looking very good here.  We’re seeing some regrowth in the hair, and much of the swelling has receded around the mouth.  Open, please.”  Dr. Thorne felt gently along the incisions in Severus’s mouth, humming as he went.  “Very good.  Excellent.  Well, I would say we’re ready to think about rehab options.  The incisions are almost healed and in two weeks your casts and immobilizers will come off.  So have you had any ideas about where you want to spend the next eight to ten weeks?”

To be honest, Severus didn’t expect to need eight to ten weeks to heal.  Hogwarts would start up again in September, so by the middle of August he fully expected Dumbledore to track him down, vanish most of his bones, dose him well with Skele-grow, and leave him in Poppy’s tender care for a few days.  But he’d take the holiday.

On the upside, he no longer had worries about where he’d live for the summer.

One of the rehab facilities available to him was located in Surrey, and he knew that’s where Pet lived with her awful husband.  That would at least put him close to Harry.  He still didn’t know how he was going to pull off raising the boy without Dumbledore noticing, but in his defense, he had spent most of the past month either asleep or so deeply drugged he could say hello to his ancestors.

“Park Grove, please.”  Ah… that was his voice.  A little wobbly and muddled still with the lingering swelling in his mouth, but at least his tone.  He would never again have the smooth, fluid voice he’d once had.  The intubation had seen to that.  But Severus wasn’t terribly displeased with the roughened timbre and slightly deeper pitch.

Doctor Thorne nodded.  “Park Grove it is.  I’ll go ahead and forward the paperwork, so when you’re ready to go, you’ll be at the head of the list.  Now… are you ready to look?  You don’t look bad, but I know it’s hard to see yourself looking different.  Especially under these circumstances.”

“I’d like to see myself, please.”  Severus thought he might as well get it over with.

Nurse Gwyn smiled encouragingly and picked up a large mirror, angling it so that Severus could see the face they said was his.

The face in the mirror still looked as though he’d been mugged, with swelling and bruising still evident in several places.  But overall … Severus was shocked.  His nose looked as though it was in proportion to the rest of his face, a combination of it having to be reattached and his cheekbones being broader.  His eye sockets were not as deep set, and the heavy upper lids had been trimmed back to provide skin for the rebuilt bottom lids.  They were also a different shape, being ever so slightly tilted now.  His lips looked fuller, though that could just be the swelling.

His hair was growing back, but it was curling over his scalp.  Doctor Thorne had warned him that might happen.  The blood supply to his scalp had been significantly disrupted when they peeled it back to perform the skull elevations, and as a result the hair produced by the follicles was now coarser and thicker.  Opening his mouth, Severus was briefly shocked to see a toothless mouth, but then remembered the implants he would be getting before he left the hospital.

“We talked about the hair, and the teeth, and I’m really cautiously pleased about the rest.  We’ll know more in a couple of weeks as the swelling continues to subside.”  Doctor Thorne’s tone was encouraging, as though he were afraid Severus was going to break down in tears or horror at the sight of his new face.  

In actual fact, Severus felt he had never looked so good.  Indeed, he felt the face staring back at him was actually a different person.  A man called Corvus Quinn.

Oh, there were a few new scars.  A couple of them were even fairly noticeable, one snaking down the right side of his face and bisecting his eyebrow and the other curling from his nose to the corner of his mouth, quirking his lips on the left side.  But on the whole, he was really quite relieved.  It looked as though the worst of the scars would be hidden eventually by his hair.

Looking closer, Severus could still see all the disparate features he had always had.  They had just been rearranged slightly into a more pleasing whole, with the end result being a quite different appearance.

Especially since his oily skin had apparently decided to grow up (finally) and leave puberty behind.

Corvus Quinn smiled at his doctor and nurse, waiting anxiously for his reaction.  Even if this was only to be a brief holiday from enduring as Severus Snape … he would take it.

“Well, that’s not too bad then.  Thank you for your hard work.  I think I’ll be fine, once I get used to it.”  Corvus was content, for now.  

“Wonderful.  If things seem more problematic once you’re fully healed, we can re-visit the matter.  I think we could probably release the scar pulling on your lip if it becomes a problem.  But on the whole, I think you’ve come away better than we had any right to expect.  I’ll be sure to tell Doctor Green you’re pleased with his work.  He did most of the face while I concentrated on the skull fractures.”  Doctor Thorne patted his shoulder gently.

“Get some rest now.  In two weeks, we’ll remove the casts and get you up and moving again.  It’ll be a long road, but you’re going to do fine.  I’m sure of it, now.”

With that, his doctor exited the room, no doubt to check in on one of his other patients.  Nurse Gwyn resettled his covers and rolled the over-bed tray table to where he could reach it with his casted left hand.

“There now, ye just rest for a wee bit.  And here’s the button, if ye need me for anything.  I know it’s a lot to take in, but yer doin’ fine, lad.”  The soft, rolling lilt eased Corvus towards sleep, reminding him so much of home and safety.

Gently, Corvus Quinn sank into sleep … dreaming of the day he might be more than a temporary respite.