An: Here is another story from the House That Time Forgot series. Thanks to Fawkes Song, my faithful and fast beta.

For those of you who are confused, I changed my name on here, but I'm still the same old writer, chugging through grad school.

Thanks for reading!

HP&HP&HP&HP&HP&HP&HP

A knock sounded on the door.

Frowning, Snape put his book down. Harry had gone to the Weasleys for three days, and he was expected back this evening. That meant the house had been quiet for seventy-two hours, even though Harry wasn't as noisy at sixteen as he had been at twelve.

However, had Harry been in the house, he would have answered the door as he loved having visitors, even the occasional lost hiker. Harry would sometimes accompany the knockers down the lane, always chatting with them. Snape was furious each time, thinking it could be a trap, but Harry never stopped to consider the possible evilness of whoever showed up at the door. True, Harry was under wards and a secret keeper's protection, but still. The boy had no sense of self-protection.

Snape opened the door cautiously.

On the other side was the local policeman from the village . . . and Harry.

"Does this belong to you?" the policeman motioned to Harry.

Harry's shoulders were slouched, and his cheeks were flushed red, and he was shaking. "I'm fine," Harry managed between bluish lips. "I was making my way here but Jeff here was kind enough to help me the last bit. It was a short walk."

The policeman shook his head, and behind him, the small police car was still running. "I found him stumbling down the road, carrying a broomstick," Jeff said, holding up the broomstick. "Odd looking contraption. I thought he was drunk, but I think he's sick."

"I'm not sick," Harry wrapped his hands around himself tightly. "I'm special and I don't get sick ever. Getting sick is for other people who aren't me."

"Thank you, sir," Snape put a hand on Harry's shoulder and guided him inside, taking the broomstick with the other hand. "I'll put him to bed right away. I'm sorry he caused you so much trouble."

"No problem. You have a nice day," the policeman went back to his car.

"I'm not going to bed," Harry stumbled inside. "I want to go flying. I want water."

"What happened to you? You were supposed to be at the Weasleys."

"I was," Harry leaned against the wall, his cheeks hectic red against the cream of the walls. "Ron and I went into the woods and we found this box. It was wooden and all carved and interesting. We couldn't open it and we thought about taking it home when Ron said we should use wands –"

"You're underage!"

"I know," Harry nodded ruefully. "We should have taken it to the Burrow, but then Mr. Weasley would have confiscated it. So I used my wand because you always insist I take it with me –"

"In case you get attacked, not to open magically-sealed boxes!" Snape's voice rang through the hall.

Harry winced at his loud tone. "I know. But I thought no one would know because we were at the Weasleys. I did the opening spell, and it – um . . . hit us."

Snape said nothing, and Harry dropped his gaze.

"We – uh – made it back to the house, but the family was out on errands so Ron went to lie down and I used floo-powder. But I said the wrong house because I was coughing, and it blew me out at the grocer's in the village. I had no idea he was a wizard. He heard me, but I ran out the back before he could see me. I was walking back, but the policeman wouldn't leave me alone. He said I was acting funny and he made me get in the car. Oh, everything hurts."

Harry leaned back against the wall. His whole body was throbbing and tingling painfully.

"You wretched brat," Snape said between ground teeth. "Will you never gain any sense at all?"

Harry looked at him, aggrieved. "If you're going to be like that, I'm leaving."

Harry didn't move.

"I'm going. I'm leaving forever. Look at me, walking out the door."

Harry didn't budge from the wall.

"Am – am I moving yet?"

Snape shook his head.

Harry's eyes got big behind his glasses. "Snape – Snape, I can't move. I'm trying, but I can't move myself. I'm paralyzed."

Quick as a flash, Snape stepped forward and heaved the boy over his shoulder.

Panicking, Harry stared down at the floor while he was carried upstairs. "I can't move at all. What's happening to me? Oh, no, no, I can't move!"

"Yet your mouth keeps going," Snape muttered. "We're getting to the bottom of this, I promise you, and a little paralysis will be the worst of your problems. You think about that."

Harry tried to keep breathing calmly, but it was an awful sensation, not being able to move his own body.

Once they were upstairs, Snape laid him on the bed and rolled him on his back. Vampyr was beside the bed, barking worriedly.

Snape put a hand on Harry's forehead and then took his glasses off.

"I can't see either!" Harry panicked.

"You can't ever see without your glasses," Snape reminded him. "Be quiet a second and let me figure out what's wrong with you." He put his thumb and forefinger at the bottom and top of Harry's right eye, widening it slightly. "Your pupils are dilated. You're burning with fever. Think, Harry, when the box exploded, what kind of explosion came out of it? Bright light? Smoke? Fire? A sharp pop?"

"It was light that snapped really loud and then disappeared. I felt a weird tingle go over me. But then it disappeared."

Snape frowned and put Harry's glasses back on his face, and the world came into focus again.

A noise sounded downstairs. "Severus Snape!" Mrs. Weasley's voice crackled. "Where are you?"

"Don't move," Snape said out of habit as he left the room.

"I can't," Harry looked up at the ceiling in despair. Why did everything awful happen to him?

Snape was downstairs for a few minutes and then he came back with a black bag of potions, his face under tight control.

"What's wrong?" Harry asked. "What did Mrs. Weasley say?"

"She fire-called me," Snape set the bag on the bureau and started rutting through it. "Ronald's in a coma. They took him to St. Mungo's."

"What?" Harry felt the blood drain from his face. "I have to go help Ron."

He turned his head to the side and strained to move, but nothing happened.

"Don't worry," Snape kept pulling bottles and vials out of the bag. "The doctors there are qualified to help him. I'm not taking you there because it would expose you, and those doctors and healers would want to run tests on you to see what makes the Chosen One so special."

Harry's eyes widened again. He had never thought the wizard community would want to do medical experiments on him, but he thought about how eager Madame Pomfrey seemed to be to help him whenever he went to the hospital ward. He had always thought she was a fussy nurse, but had she been interested in him because of what he was, what he had endured, what was marked on his forehead?

"This will help," Snape turned from the bureau, a long syringe in his hand, the glass vial filled with blood-red potion.

Harry stared at the shot, the long stretch of thick needle. "You're not sticking that into me. I'll swallow a potion, but you are not sticking needles into me."

"I made this concoction the autumn after you came here," with his free hand, Snape rolled Harry on his side and began tugging up his shirt. "It's a potion that freezes any ailment you have, stopping the sickness long enough for me to figure out what's wrong with you in order to heal you. I thought it would come in handy, considering all the scrapes you find yourself in," Snape pulled his trousers down a few inches.

"No, don't," Harry pleaded.

Snape made no reply. Steadying Harry with one hand, he used the other to press the needle into Harry's pale skin and emptied the contents of the syringe slowly.

"Ow, ow, it hurts," Harry complained. It was unnerving to feel pain in his hip and be unable to move at all. "Take it out. I don't like shots. It hurts!"

"It will hurt a lot more before we're done," Snape warned. "There we go, all done."

He rolled Harry back over, and Harry glared at him. "You're a potions master. You're supposed to give me disgusting potions to drink – you're not supposed to stick needles into me. I'm telling Dumbledore."

"I'm trembling with fear," Snape retorted. "You're the biggest baby when you get sick."

"I'm not sick. I'm cursed. Everything bad happens to me. Anyone else would have opened the box and found candy inside or gold or something nice. What if Ron never comes out of a coma? What if something happens to him and it's all my fault?"

"That is entirely possible," Snape was heartless. "Next time you'll think before you start using illegal magic. This part is going to hurt too."

Snape held up a vial of what looked like a black slug. He took Harry's limp right arm, rolled up his sleeve, and tipped the black, slimy thing onto his skin. "It's a magical leech."

Harry stared at the thing, horrified as it lay on his skin, just above the crook of his elbow. And then it bit him. It stung and he couldn't shake it off, and he couldn't move as that nasty thing started to suck on his blood. "What's it doing?"

"It is charmed to suck on infected blood if you have any," Snape explained. "Just relax and let it do its job. I'm going to be running other tests on you, and I want you to breathe slowly, in and out."

Harry wanted to argue, if only for the sake of distracting himself from what was happening to his arm, but he looked up at the ceiling and tried to focus on breathing.

Had he not been paralyzed, the diagnosis part might have been interesting because Snape did things that Harry had never seen before. The potions master flung a handful of blue powder over Harry, but instead of falling, the powder hovered in the air over him, arranged in patterns of long lines. When Snape held up the empty vial, the powder swarmed back inside, leaving a trail of blue mist that quickly disappeared.

Snape had a clock thing with knobs and screws that he put at the base of Harry's throat. It felt cold and then it started whirling. Snape studied the dial intently, watching the measurements that Harry could not see.

Next, Snape pulled out a metal device. It reminded Harry of the brass knuckles he had seen in Muggle movies, and Snape put it on his right hand, fitting the device up on his fingers, over his knuckles. But instead of metal ridges on the end, there were four sharp points on the end, thicker than most needles, but sharpened to glinting points at the end.

"No, absolutely not," Harry watched the thing fearfully. "You don't need to use that. You have the leech and you need to give it time to do its job. Don't use that on me."

"The hero of the wizarding world can't take a simple diagnostic test," Snape rolled his eyes. He reached for Harry's other arm.

Harry tried to move, but nothing happened. He squeezed his eyes shut for a second, but something cool touched his arm. He opened his eyes to see Snape swiping his arm with a tiny cloth.

"Rubbing alcohol to clean it properly," Snape explained. "Stay very still for this."

Snape was evil, no doubt about it. Harry watched in fear as Snape turned his right hand knuckle-down, and the four points came closer to Harry's bare arm. Harry had never reflected on how vulnerable the skin just above the underside of his wrist was. It was nice, smooth skin that never wanted needles near it – nice skin that had never done anything to deserve what was about to happen.

Snape popped his wrist down, and Harry felt a sharp stab of pain, and then Snape stepped back, taking off the metal device. The four needles were shiny red with blood, and Snape unscrewed each needle from the knuckles and dropped them into four separate vials.

Four red spots of blood had risen up on Harry's arm, but Snape dampened another cloth and rubbed it over his arm. The blood disappeared, and Harry felt relief sweep over him.

"Please let that be all," he closed his eyes in exhaustion.

"You really are pathetic," Snape said as he went back to the bag. "A few needles, and our hero turns into a whiny baby. You fought the Dark Lord and sustained countless injuries."

"That was different. I could move then. Had I been paralyzed, I would have been screaming. Remind me to never fight Voldemort when I can't move."

A strange look came over Snape's face. "If you ever touch another object without knowing what it is, I will give you every potion in shot-form," he threatened. "Every night for the rest of your life on top of whatever other punishment I give you."

"It was just a wooden box in a field," Harry looked away. "Ron wanted to set fire to it. Go call Mrs. Weasley and see how he's doing. We should be there with him."

"St. Mungo's can handle him. She said she would call me if there was any change. We have you to worry about now. I think the leech is full."

Snape pulled it off, but the thing pinched as Snape removed it, and blood trickled down Harry's arm.

"You could have used that blood and not the knuckles thing," Harry said as Snape cleaned up his arm.

"The leech contaminates any blood it touches," Snape put the leech in a vial full of clear liquid. The vial turned black.

"Oh, no," Snape shook his head. He put the vial down and placed his hands on the bureau, slumping his head down between his shoulder blades for a moment.

"What's wrong?" Harry asked nervously. "What is it?"

Snape straightened and looked at him. "Once I get you better, you're getting the licking of your life. You're not going to be able to sit for a month."

"So I will live," Harry felt a little more relieved. "Ron, too, I hope. What do we have?"

"The box was booby-trapped with a strain of wizard pox."

"I don't know what that is," Harry admitted. "Is it anything like smallpox? Chicken pox?"

"It's a disease that regresses your muscles back to their early stages. After the paralysis wears off, you have to relearn to use your muscles. You learn to sit up, roll over, crawl, walk, and eventually run."

"Like a toddler!" Harry's mouth fell open. "It turns you into a baby!"

"Not completely. It just regresses your body for a time."

"For how long!" Harry shrieked. "How long does it take?"

"Anywhere from two weeks to two months."

"What!" Harry was so loud that Vampyr got up from the floor where he had been watching the proceedings with anxious eyes. "The whole summer?"

"Maybe less. It depends on the person. You're young and somewhat healthy. Mr. Weasley will wake up soon, paralyzed like you and go through the same thing. But you performed the spell on the box so the majority of the curse hit you. He'll be better before you are. He's in a coma because you were the one conducting the magic."

"Not fair," Harry leaned back.

"You want Mr. Weasley to be just as sick as you? Very Gryffindor of you."

"Don't you twist my words," Harry glared at him. "I want us both to be well. Can't we make this thing go faster?"

"Well, now that I know what it is – that it won't kill you – I'll give you something to counteract the shot I gave you. Otherwise the disease will keep you paralyzed longer."

Snape reached into the bag and took out another long syringe. He stuck the needle tip into a vial of blue serum and began filling up the glass tube. "I'll give it to you in your other hip."

"Why didn't you do the leech first? Now I have to take two shots."

"Yes, you do. I didn't know what the disease was or how fast it was working. This is what happens when you play around with strange boxes."

"You've got to be kidding me," Harry closed his eyes. "What did I do to deserve this? This isn't fair."

"I agree entirely," Snape rolled him to the side and pulled up his shirt. "And in the next few weeks, you're going to think 'unfair' more than once. You do realize that this means I have to carry you around and feed you."

Harry groaned in despair and braced himself for the shot.