Harry Potter awoke with a start.

He drew in a shaky breath and held it, looking around in the darkness and trying to get his bearings. His disorientation was growing into a sense of desperate panic; every muscle in his body was taught and he was wound like a spring. His ears were pricked, listening acutely for something though all he could hear was silence. His eyes were straining to see, though there was only opaque blackness.

Frantically searching for a clue as to where he was, his eyes darted but the darkness was so absolute that he could make out no shapes: nothing but a thick blackness. His breath was coming faster, staccato hiccups that brought little relief; he was trying desperately not to panic, to stay calm, to just think things through.

Slowly, he tried to sit up, but the movement was painful and the space confined. Since he wasn't able to move without twinges of agony he searched his surroundings, groping in the dark to try to make out anything familiar, anything that would tell him where he was.

The only thing he knew was that he was in a small rectangular encasement with barely any room to move about. He settled back again and realized with a start that whether the enclosed space was ridiculously small or not, he was lying on silk and there were silk pillows propping him up. Flashes of thought whipped through his mind and Harry did not like what they implied.

Calming himself, he ran through his last memory.

He had been at the Dursleys' for the summer. It had been night and he had been in his cupboard, which he'd been returned to following Sirius' death, though whether the change had anything to do with that, Harry couldn't be sure. As far as he could tell, there was no reason why his relatives should know about Sirius, but then again Dumbledore liked to write letters to Harry's aunt in an attempt to wrangle himbetter treatment and it was just as possible that the headmaster had divulged the information in the hopes that it might garner Harry some sympathy. If that was the case, it certainly had not worked.

Beyond the vague recollection of the sound of boots and of banging doors, Harry could not remember anything except a blinding light; but then again, any light would be blinding after being locked in the darkness for so long.

He closed his eyes tight and tried to hold in his frantic gasps. Panicking would not do any good. But where was he? He begged and pleaded that he wasn't where he thought he was. A dark swell of fear and desperation flooded him and he let his breath out in a whoosh, pounding against the silk walls of the small space and screaming and begging.

He knew where he was.

The notion terrified him, but he thought that he knew exactly where he was.

"Please! Please! Someone get me out!" he called, sobbing even as he knew that he should be concentrating on conserving oxygen. But did it matter?

"Wake up, wake up wake up!" he ordered, clenching his fists and bringing them up to hide his face. "Wake up, wake up, wake up!" he pleaded. It was a dream. A nightmare. It wasn't real. It couldn't be real!

He could hear thumps; the noise was loud and frightening, multiplied a hundred times over and the thumps and bumps and shuffling seemed to be everywhere. There was nowhere that he could curl up and hide. He had no wand. He had no defense. His breath came in short gasps and he began to rock back and forth as he curled in on himself.

"Please, please, wake up, wake up!" he was begging.

A loud thud, and he was shivering and blacking out and hyperventilating and it couldn't be real, it just couldn't.

Then he was certain that he had passed out, or died, but the world suddenly became very, very cold, so cold, and he gasped for breath, and there were hands on him, pulling him up, clutching him against something soft but hard and warm, so warm. And it was lovely to breathe oxygen. It was lovely to be free of the heat and the silk and the confined space.

He had always been sort of claustrophobic.

"Potter? …Harry, focus!" a voice was ordering him and he knew that voice; he did, he did. He knew the soft warming baritone of it, but he didn't know the tone. The tone was new.

"Harry?" The voice was sharp and he jolted back to himself, blinking in shock and looking into the narrowed, dark eyes of Severus Snape. And that was odd, wasn't it? What was Snape doing in his dream?

"Harry?" Severus asked again. And that was concern in his voice. And when had Harry reached the twilight zone? Because Severus never called him by his first name.

And when had he begun to think of the man as 'Severus'?

Harry pushed the thoughts away. They were too confusing. Too much. He couldn't breathe. There was too much air. Did that make sense? Did anything make sense? Where was he?

"Where?" he managed to ask, in a feeble croaked voice that shocked him. He was still shivering and, he noted in amusement, he was clutching onto his professor's arms, and Severus had his hands on Harry's shoulders and was holding him close. Harry thought vaguely that he should probably sit back because it was awfully intimate. "What?" he asked instead, turning his head to look about him.

It was dark, so dark, but he could see quite well, which didn't make sense because Dudley had sat on his glasses a week ago, just before Harry had been returned to his cupboard after his brief 'airing out' and been forgotten there.

And this was a graveyard, wasn't it?

It was. There were crypts and tombstones and weeping angels everywhere. He shifted in Severus's grasp and noticed that the potions master's legs were dangling down into a hole.

A hole that had a long black box in it.

A coffin.

What was he doing here? What was going on?

Dazedly, Harry managed to pry his eyes away from the open coffin - away from the claw marks and tears in the silk that desperate fingers had made on the lid.

A tombstone. A simple, small onyx tablet.

R.I.P.

Harry Potter

1980-1997

Harry blinked and re-read the tombstone.

It was abrupt and unsentimental.

And it still said his name.

Harry blinked again and turned, stunned, to look at Severus, who was now looking very concerned. Harry opened his mouth to speak, to ask what had happened, how he ended up in his own grave when he wasn't dead, and why Severus was there, but though his throat worked to produce a sound it came out as simply a stunned whimper, and then he promptly passed-out.