Chapter 2: The Man With Nothing to Lose
He couldn't sleep again. But this was not a new phenomenon. His dark figure wandered the empty, dark hallways of Hogwarts like a wraith, though his heart still beat and his chest still rose and fell at an even pace.
For all intents and purposes, this place was his prison, his punishment. He was to do his penance here, unpaid, until his duty was at an end or he drew his last breath. The Vow had been made and there was nothing he could do about it. Pessimistically, he began to wonder if it wouldn't simply be preferable to brew a potion that would finish things more quickly than ten long years of putting up with insufferable students just to save a child who, with his luck, probably looked and acted just like his horrible bully of a father.
The thought made him more miserable than ever, which made him all the more certain that his premonition would be completely true.
Still, he knew that he couldn't end his own life. Severus Snape was many things, but a quitter was not one of them. He'd relentlessly held onto his miserable excuse of a life through more extreme hardship than this. Though his heart still ached horribly when he thought of how Lily must have died, how her death was his fault, how...if he had just listened to her when she'd told him he was spending time with terrible people who did terrible things…he shuddered in the dark, silently allowing the tears to travel down his cheeks where no one would see them. There were too many things he'd done wrong. There was no hope to truly make up for them. The only thing for it was to minimize the damage and hope for the best.
The worst thought of all was the one that kept telling him, in a voice that sound suspiciously like the Dark Lord himself, that it was far too late for a wretch like himself to ever be redeemed.
He could no longer produce a Patronus, corporeal or otherwise. And even though his Dark Mark had faded to a nearly unintelligible smear on his arm, the inability to summon the silvery doe had nearly shaken him to the core.
His feet brought him up sleeping staircases until he'd nearly reached the empty Gryffindor Tower, where he'd pleaded and begged for Lily to forgive him. He did not finish climbing the stairs. He didn't need any more ghosts haunting him on this somber night.
When he finally reached the fifth floor landing, the darkness had begun to feel oppressive, and he pulled his wand from his robes, silently calling up tiny blue lanterns that floated around his head silently.
It was then that he noticed the door.
Large, black and somewhat out of place on the blank stretch of wall, Severus frowned as he stared at it. A quick diagnostic spell proved that the door itself was real, but not what lay beyond it. And when he touched the knob, he hissed loudly as the cold bit his fingers.
He was ready to go and rouse Albus, regardless of whether or not it was the middle of the night, when he heard a terrified female voice from inside.
"Please!" the voice called out, "Anybody! If you're there, please help!"
The voice didn't sound like Lily, or at least, not like the Lily he'd heard laugh gaily in his Potions class until he'd graduated, back when he had done his best to be invisible and stay away from her just as she'd demanded of him. But he was seized by a righteous energy to help whoever was trapped inside, no matter what it meant.
And if I end up being ended at last by whatever creature awaits me inside, it will at least not be at my own hand and at the service of someone in distress.
The thought was far more comforting than he had expected it to be. With a determined grimace, Severus grabbed the knob and ignored the biting cold metal as he wrenched the door open and continued on into the darkness within.