A/N: This was written in response to a challenge from 30-minutes fic on Live Journal. In other words, I wrote, proofed and posted the thing in 30-minutes.

When he woke up there was nothing. Strange faces appeared before him, they opened an orifice and strange gibberish came out of their mouths. They touched him and he shrank from their touch. Weird things happened around him. People went flying backwards, glasses shattered and things would fly around the air. Not that he noticed. More often than not, he was unconscious when these things happened.

Gradually he noticed that he was staying awake for longer periods of time. He couldn't stop the tremors that wracked him at random intervals. Strange noises would come from his throat and sometimes he wet the bed. Soon someone came by everyday and sat beside him. They opened a thing and noises came out of her mouth that created a cadence that calmed him.

One day a noise made some sort of sense. Potions. That was a word. Soon other words made sense and he realized that the noises coming out of these strange people's mouths were words. He knew what people were. But when he opened his mouth, harsh noise came out. So the person sitting beside him brought something to him one day. It showed him a picture of a man. When he touched the thing, his hand stopped, and he could see his hand in the thing. He saw a face. When his hand went to the face, he saw it reflected in the mirror. That was him, he was the face.

He had no idea who that was.

The person beside him made him repeat sounds. Soon those sounds formed words. The words soon formed sentences. He asked the person "who am I?" She answered "Severus Snape." It took him a long time before he could say that. It took him longer to say the person's name, Minerva.

She brought him pictures that moved like the people around him. She named them. He practiced long and hard and soon he could say their names when they walked into the room. He kept the pictures in the table by his bedside and every night he practiced remembering. Minerva brought books to him and told him that the markings in the books were words that were the same as the noises coming out of his mouth. One day that made sense. The words strung together and the sentences became paragraphs and pages and pages of knowledge.

But it didn't mean anything.

An older man came to him, not as often as Minerva, but enough. His name was Dumbledore and he brought sweets and smiled, but his eyes were sad. He watched as leaves fell off trees, and white stuff they called snow came down and then the leaves came back and they were green and it was pretty outside. He could move about better so he went outside and walked around. There were people that flew and strange things that grew out of the ground, so he kept walking towards the trees that looked so pretty from outside his window.

He walked for a long time, until he couldn't see the buildings anymore and he wished he were home. Everything blinked out. When he opened his eyes again, there weren't any trees around him. He was in a circle of people, only they all looked the same and in the middle was something that didn't look like a man, even if he stood like a man and spoke like a man.

He said, "Welcome home."

So Severus guessed he was.

---End.