I haven't written anything this long in years, so here goes the grand experiment. What started as a horrifically incongruous mental picture has blown up into a crazylong plot machine. That's right, time to pass the blame--Marilyn Manson, U2 and Neil Gaiman made me do it.

My goal is to finish two chapters per month.

Rated R for coarse language and graphic violence. Begins in the summer preceding the fifth year. Standard disclaimer. Something witty. The end.



damnatio memoriae : one


Saturday, August twenty-ninth: the first light was weak with a promise of heat. Morning rose around the castle on the rock, glass flashing in the sun as windows exhaled the night, pushing their shadows a little deeper into the center of the thing. Severus Snape had been awake now for nearly ninety hours.

His hands were shaking and the knife tapped out a nervous cadence over wood and boarsheart. It drew blood on his index finger; he cursed and stuck it in his mouth, tasting copper as he made the final, even slice. His good hand fluttered over the table, gathering work and waste alike, all tucked into a pocket at his hip. Snape crossed the room and counted--one-two-three-four-five--pieces into a cauldron on the fire.

Each splashed and vanished. He stared for a long moment at the contents of the kettle, as clear as still water. A log shifted and the fire sighed sparks, yet the cauldron remained complacent. It would not boil.

But he was seeing past it, or perhaps not really seeing much at all, as something like fear blunted by four days' waking ebbed inside him. Snape turned as if to move, his eyes fixed to a singular point somewhere in the stones behind the fire.

Then he moved abruptly to the podium facing the empty classroom, and pulled a small television from one of its shelves.

This was placed on one of the long tables, between the weathered blue stains of a fourth year's final gone awry and a small capital A nicked into the wood; Professor Snape assumed a position opposite the screen with a look of intense concentration. The room was quiet save for the settling of the fire, so when he pulled the two silver antennae into a slightly crooked V, the sound was clearly audible: a frantic gulping, like a man short on air. The television rocked to the sound, absurdly round for a moment as it ballooned around the edges. Static crackled across the glass.

"--on the West Bank, where Palestinian forces continue to violate Tuesday's cease-fire accord."

The picture was dim. She was standing knee deep in sand and rubble, but her hair was perfectly styled. There was a red logo in the corner lined in white: CNN.

"Too far," he muttered, his hands guiding the antennae into a tighter form; to the left. A drop of blood rolled down the metal line, mercury bright in the morning sunlight.

"--in Jacksonville yesterday, where as many as twelve are wounded and three are dead after a man drove his SUV into the window of a local supermarket--"

She stood knee deep in oranges and rubble, but her hair was perfectly styled. The reception was clearing. It was blonde.

"Wrong side of the pond, my dear," he said laconically, slapping the flank of the set. The image made a startled jump, bouncing offscreen. Skittish. Snape bit his lip, deftly bowing one antenna at an obtuse angle.

"--as the tourism industry encounters more gloomy numbers in London. But up next is the weather, and at ten to the hour: new information evidence linking an escaped madman to the Chapel Street incident, and why law enforcement officials are saying he has taken his first victims in decades."

She stood in front of Westminster Abbey in the rain. A plastic bag covered her hair. Water was collecting around her ankles as she paused; there was a silence of rain and fire in which he felt acutely aware of the cold. Chapel Street. The water eddied around her stockings, but her words were sinking in. She had touched a breach, a place he had broken in the Muggle code, and the associations that spilled out were immediate. Fourteen years ago, Chapel Street had meant a man's ruin. His stomach made a fitful noise. Cut--commercials.

Absently, he found a chair, wooden legs skipping over rough flagstones as he pushed himself to a comfortable distance. His own legs were thrown over the table, ankles crossed, bare toes thoughtlessly twisting the severed cables trailing from the television's bowels. But his eyes had that queer unfocused look again.

Maybe he was overestimating his own capabilities. Maybe he was trying to talk himself out of it. Maybe--he needed a nap. Ninety hours was a long time to live in any single task.

The weather. Snape's attention waned, drifting to the cauldron; barring that he failed to keep the fire red and healthy, his business here was essentially done. There would be time to sleep and eat and scheme, time to live, perhaps, in the end, but first he had to see this thing through properly.

He thought blithely: there would be time to muster a honest fear of death, too.

"Authorities and the public alike have long suspected Chapel Street incident may have been deliberate, rather than accidental." She was sitting behind a desk, looking Snape in the eye. Her hair was dry. "Fourteen years ago, thirteen lives were claimed and four were injured when a gas line allegedly ruptured on a busy weekday morning."

The footage was tagged file. In afterthought, he wasn't sure what he had expected; certainly not the view from some anonymous alley where yellow tape crossed the passage onto the street, casting slick glares in the afternoon sun. Red and white lights ran tight circles over blown out windows, hands and backs of men in uniform. Cornelius Fudge stood recognizable and unmoving. The minister's acid green bowler had faded.

This was the frightening sort of objectivity about Muggle film: his imagination had failed to account for the street sign, bent at the bolt and singed black.

"--have long questioned the validity of the official ruling that the incident was accidental. Now, startling new evidence has emerged that places an escaped murderer at Chapel Street minutes before the explosion."

A still photograph, hours earlier rendered in crisp black and white. The half-turned face haloed in red should have come as little surprise--he needed no indication. Chapel Street read straight on its steel pole.

"Black," he breathed through a mirthless sort of smile.

"According to the Associated Press, the photo came from an undisclosed source. The man has been identified as Sirius Black, who escaped from private institutionalization two years ago. Black is now wanted for questioning concerning his involvement with the incident." She turned to face a different camera, shuffling a stack of papers importantly. They all appeared to be blank. "However, police were given a more urgent reason to intensify their manhunt last Thursday, when the bodies of a young mother and her seven year-old twins were discovered in the suburbs outside of London."

Guilt chose a rather odd moment to make itself manifest. A summer could be spent following the Muggle misinterpretation of a dark lord's growing boldness, a fortnight might be spent in the active preparation to kill a man--yet he felt cornered in the simple act of eavesdropping. Fingers clenched, testing the burden of information. The thought was most atypical of him: Not Black. Not now.

He regretted it immediately.

"Although authorities believe releasing too much information may jeopardize their investigation, top law enforcement officials are now saying this murder may be related to several dozen unsolved cases from the past three decades. Police have set up a hotline, and are offering a ten thousand pound reward for tips leading to Black's arrest--"

"What unsolved cases?" he wondered aloud, but the question surely a fluke. His mouth had gone dry. Several dozen was not a round number. And yet the underlying doubt was even further removed--why Black? Why now?

She had stopped speaking, looking at him levelly again.

"This murder may be related to several dozen unsolved cases," she repeated carefully. Closed captioning sprang up from the base of the screen, reiterating her sentence in yellow type. Her smile was wooden and perfectly aligned. It said, look how legitimate our concern is for you...then there was the hint of sex behind it.

"Woman, I am not slow, nor am I deaf, so kindly stop leering like a bitch in heat and tell me in plain English how Black is responsible for your unsolved cases." Ninety hours had seen the better of him; Snape was losing his patience, and rapidly so.

"Sirius Black is wanted for questioning concerning his involvement in the Chapel Street Incident. Sirius Black escaped from private institutionalization two years ago." The image flickered to a grainy photo of Black at twenty, laughing. "Would you like an infographic for the murder rate in the United Kingdom?" she offered brightly, eyes lifted high, because Snape was standing, because Snape's heel was on the corner of the set and he was thinking darkly that some men probably found her pretty from that vantage point.

Then he gave a gracious kick.

The television hit his own desk before bouncing end over end across mortar and stone, guttering plumes of circuitry and cracked plastic. Glass burst from a nest of tangled wire, lit like a sparkler and crackling from point to point. It was a crash site that circled his feet, and the mute reflection swimming over the resting pieces was a slim figure standing among palm trees knee-deep in mud.

He was breathing. He was very conscious of this fact. But it was outside the pitch and tumble of his breath that he had heard it. He blinked, turning slowly.

"Severus." Remus Lupin stood framed by the door. Inclined his head slightly, his fingers curling around the oak frame. He wore a tee-shirt that bade visit the extraterrestrial highway--with exclamation points--and that shit-eating smirk they all found so charming.

"Remus." Snape belatedly withdrew his leg from kicking position. He swallowed forcefully, feeling his throat seize on air and slide down. "Defense Against the Dark Arts, I presume?"

Lupin just nodded again. The blue-dark smudges under his eyes did not preclude him from looking healthier overall, and Snape found himself facing the inevitable quandary: he simply couldn't dislike Remus Lupin as a person. Fortunately, he had no qualms with basing his acrimony on principle.

Then there was the resentment. And a whole lot of that.

"Who are you planning on killing?" Lupin was casually blunt. Either an educated guess or a snarky bit of intuition had led him there; at least he had the good sense not to gape at the spilled interior of the television.

"Yes, well, congratulations--your name is now being looked upon with favor by the committee," he said, drawing his cloak closer, fists balled in the trim and pulling the black wool tight over his arms and shoulders. Snape's grin was less shit-eating than it was outright predatory.

"Good to see you too, Severus," he replied good-naturedly. "So you're really not going to tell me what you're up to?"

Neutrality prevented Lupin from entering the classroom, neutrality circumvented annoying questions, and Snape assumed neutrality was what kept that bemused smile on his face. That was the thing about Lupin's expression--one might sense the character of his mind but not the specifics.

"Of course not." He brokered there would be no argument.

Lupin studied him for a long moment. Brown eyes tracked left to right, quite literal in their reading.

"Very well, then. I'll be around," he said finally. With two fingers forming a half-assed salute, he made as if to leave, but suddenly he stopped short, gazing steadily at the other man.

"Oh, and Severus? Get some sleep. You look like shit."

And then he was gone, echoes receding down the corridor. Earnest, irritating Lupin, wrapping unwarranted concern in offense. Realization stirred and moved after him--it occurred to him too late that Lupin, in all probability, had no concept of the trouble stalking Black.

But minutes later, Snape passed out. He hit the ground cold; a shard of glass sank into the sole of his foot, broadcasting in silence as blood welled around the edges and, over time, the floating pictures faded.


dm:one:end.