Lost and Found
This is a collaborative piece, mainly written by myself (whitehound) and Dyce. It was inspired, in the first instance, by a story called Missing in Action by the writer Sheriff of Nottingham. This intense and tragic tale got into my brain and obsessed me (whitehound) for weeks; partly because whenever I read a story in which something awful happens to somebody, especially Snape, I have a powerful urge to make things right for him, and partly because, although the crippling injuries which Snape sustained in Missing in Action might well be beyond the powers of the wizarding world to correct (because they were of a type which wizards don't normally encounter), I knew that in a good Muggle Intensive Care Unit he would have at least some chance of survival.
Eventually, in an effort to work off the obsession, I began doodling a sort of sequel to Missing in Action, and then other people started to get interested, and this guy called Adrian (loosely inspired by Howard from the Halifax) came and knocked on my brain demanding to be written about, and suddenly we had this novel-length medical drama, hurt/comfort fic and romance on our hands. Writing a story which is inspired by but slightly AU from another fan-writer's story may be unusual - but it's only doing the same as we're all doing to JK Rowling's story.
The story starts off immensely grim - it could hardly do otherwise - but will eventually become quite hopeful and light-hearted. It is, overall, about kindness rather than cruelty, and recovery rather than injury. It also answers a question which is raised in my story-sequence Mood Music and Sons of Prophecy, in which an OC is trying to provide support to a Snape who has escaped from Voldemort's clutches traumatized but still functional, and who asks her what she would have done with him if he had been completely broken, rather than just very badly shaken. She says she'd do much the same as she is doing, except that it would take longer. But it occurred to me, writing Lost and Found, that in some ways it might even be easier to rebuild him from the ground up, since at least then he might shut up and stop arguing for a few weeks - rather like the difference between doing a clean reinstall on an operating system, and trying to repair it whilst it's still running.
See the Prologue, below, for an explanation of how and by whom the story was written, and where it departs from canon and/or from Missing in Action.
Because this is going to be a long story which may not be updated very regularly, the The Story So Far page is intended for people who have already been reading the story but have forgotten where they had got to. It will be updated with each chapter. If you haven't already read the story so far then it's all spoilers!
Begin, therefore, by reading Missing in Action (link in Prologue), then mentally knock off the last two paragraphs, and Read On.
N.B. Dyce and I have had some queries about why we have portrayed Snape in the way that we have, so I have posted an essay called Reserved!Snape - Canon or Fanon? to explain our reasoning.
Deathly Hallows Revisions Table
This story has been re-edited up to Chapter #18 to take account of the new canon backstory revealed in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (although the events of this story are of course AU from the Ministry of Magic battle at the end of OotP onwards). All the signficant changes are listed in the Revisions Table, so you can see what's been altered without having to go back and re-read the entire story (unless you want to, of course). Most of the edits are fairly minor.
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