Chapter 2: Never Could Follow Orders
Author's Note: I am in the process of rewriting this story. This chapter has not yet been reworked. While the plot will not be changed, please bear in mind that the writing is not up to my standards. If you have any suggestions as to how I could improve my work, please feel free to review or email me directly. Thanks!
Disclaimer: see Chapter 1
"I hate going to court," Severus mumbled. Entering Voldemort's presence required even more debasement than it had in the secretive days just after his "rebirth". These days, kissing the hem of the Dark Lord's robe was only the beginning of the rituals he required.
"Rise, my vassal."
Severus stood, his knees protesting. He schooled his features to humble neutrality—though reasonable, his annoyance was unlikely to help his already miserable situation.
"Lucius, bring in the bride." Voldemort grinned; he was always quite cheerful when he was getting his way.
As Malfoy brushed past, he sent a condescending smirk Snape's way. Wait till it's Draco, Lucky. Just you wait. He threw open the doors with his usual flair, returning presently with a small, veil-covered figure. Severus's morbid imagination flickered through a host of sickening possibilities as the pair approached.
"Time to thank me, Sev," Lucius drawled, and with a flourish he removed the veil. It was Hermione Granger.
---
Harry had never been good at following orders, no matter how smart or well-meant they were. Over the years he had come to the conclusion that if you were going to disobey Hermione, it was best to get Ron in on it. So it was that he ducked into his best friend's cubicle less than an hour after the phone call.
Ron had looped one leg over the arm of his office chair and was twisting back and forth in it, grimacing at a screen full of gibberish. He was mumbling something about local variables when Harry tapped his shoulder.
"Hey, mate. What's up?" Ron's chair squealed as he twirled around to face him.
"Got a minute? The old boys came to play."
"Did they now?" He stood and looked over into the next cubicle. "Jerry, I'll be back in five." A grunt came from the distracted Jerry, and Ron showed him into a conference room down the hall.
The minute the door clicked shut, Ron's lazy demeanor dropped abruptly. "What happened?"
Harry went through the conversation word by word as Ron paced.
"She's wrong, you know. They were looking for her, not you."
"What?"
"Why else would they call her lab and give her a good reason to come home?"
"Oh."
Ron pulled a tattered little address book from his back pocket, rifled through it for Hermione's number, and picked up the conference room's phone.
"Nope," he said a moment later. "She's gone."
---
"She's been drugged!" Severus knew his anger was palpable, but he was too shocked to care.
Malfoy began to laugh. "Sympathy for a traitor, Sev? Should we have served her tea? Returned her wand, perhaps?"
The unfortunate Miss Granger stared more or less through him with glassy eyes—it was clear she was aware of none of this—and Voldemort's smile grew even brighter.
Was this his punishment for a lifetime of calling Dumbledore's twinkle evil? To be faced with that same sparkle in the Dark Lord's serpent eyes?
"First things first. Severus, take Miss Granger's hand. I'm giving you control of her mark so you can keep her in line once the potion wears off. Severo copulam transfero!"
Severus felt a small corner of his mind open and a pulsating warmth begin to emanate from it. Then the world went black.
---
He awoke in a rose garden. The sky had the deep turquoise cast of early evening, and the air seemed to hold its breath in anticipation of nightfall. The eerie timelessness was quite literal, he thought with trepidation when he spotted a fountain nearby. A stream of water hung in mid-air, and the answering ripples could have been made of glass.
He felt a sharp tug on his wrist.
He looked down.
Shit
.In a sickening parody of the Japanese love-ribbon, a band of black and silver circled his wrist and trailed off past the garden's wrought iron gates into the heavy mist outside. Gathering the first few feet, he followed it out of the garden.
For what seemed like hours, he trekked though the dense fog, noting the peculiarities of his guide-line. The nature of the Frenum Copulaque, though it was derived from the caster, found form in the subject's mind, and the representation Hermione's subconscious had chosen was not giving him hope. The wristband was a soft embroidered reflection of the chain that formed the bond: links shaped like small silver snakes, joined in mouth-to-tail circles, woven through with a black velvet ribbon that glistened the darkest of reds when the evening light caught it. The chain was to be expected—Voldemort had declared he was giving Severus control—and he rather liked the little snakes. The ribbon was the problem. The black-red represented a twisted form of love, a need, imposed by the spell, for the forceful dominance he was expected to mete out. Severus felt ill.
At length, the fog lifted, revealing a mausoleum of white stone set into a barren hillside. A new tension in the chain told him she was near.
---
After so many years of protecting Harry, Hermione found herself ill-prepared to defend her own life. She had only intended to peek inside the window, to assure herself that Albus was safe, but the sight of twenty Death Eaters milling about her living room had been a bit too much for her. Her left foot slipped, she skidded a few branches down, and the vibrating twigs tapped politely against the window.
"Well, Miss Granger. I must admit, I thought Muggles entered their homes by means of the door." The silky baritone of Lucius Malfoy cut through the double-paned window as easily as if it were paper. An idle part of her brain wondered what charm he had used, and she squelched the thought with a reminder to her brain to get busy. She felt like a deer caught in the headlights—a very stupid and clumsy deer. Still, she bristled at Malfoy's mockery. An instinctive grab at her sleeve cost her precious time before she remembered she no longer had a wand. It was just enough for the two closest figures to haul her bodily through the window. So much for underestimating Muggles, she thought. It's not a weakness if it's true. She settled instead for glaring up at him. What could he possibly want from them? If they were here to kill the traitors, or torture them, they would have started by now. What the hell, she thought, and put the question to Malfoy.
Of course, he just laughed. "You have two choices," he told her, drawing two vials from his robes. "You can drink this one, and save us all from having to listen to your tiresome Gryffindor bluster, or this one"—he waggled the left one—"goes in the radiator. I don't think Minerva McGonagall's prize student needs to be told what that would do." He raised an eyebrow then, lifting one vial, then the other, as if he were actually giving her a choice.
"Fine, drug me," she said, refusing to play along.
They did.
When she awoke something seemed terribly wrong, but she couldn't put a finger on it. The twilight sky might have been pretty, but the air was still and cold. She looked down. Well, that explained the cold. She curled her arms around her legs a she sank to the floor, and a tug at her neck made her freeze. She was collared. Her panic rising, she checked the lead. Silver chain. Black-red... oh god. "This is not happening. Not again. Not again."
The shivering, naked figure rocked back and forth on the bare white floor, repeating her mantra: "This is not happening—This is not happening—"
---
The Frenum Copulaque was created in the mess following the Roman invasion of the Hellenistic world. Long after the Muggles had settled into a workable occupation, the Greek and Roman wizards were still at each other's throats. Dark spells had been created on both sides, and the wizarding world stood in serious danger of anarchy. The Roman equivalent of the Minister of Magic at the time was Gaius Cato Pisces, and he appealed to the governing bodies to engage the denizens of the magical realm in a contest. The winning strategy would be used to make peace in the eastern empire, and the magus responsible would be remembered as the savior of wizard-kind. The winner, of course, had been Merlin, but one other strategy had worked—with chilling efficiency. The inventor was a small Egyptian named Osiri, with long fingers and a voice like wind through dry reeds. Contemporary writers suggest he had suffered some horror at the hands of his Greek masters early in his life (he was nearly two hundred years old when he presented his solution), but they seem desperate to account for his cruelty.
Among other things, he proposed an early recipe for Veritaserum and laid the theoretical foundation for the creation of Dementors, but his punishment for traitors garnered the most outrage. Osari had developed a complex fusion of snaring and domination spells, a sort of choke-chain on the subject's magical ability. While the holder of the leash could not control the subject's gift directly, he could govern how much magical ability he could touch. Ensuring correct behavior took little more, Osari wrote. His "experiments" showed that wizards long seperated from their gift slipped into deep depression, and any hope of the gift returning generated a desperate desire to obey. Voldemort had been deeply impressed.
It was one bit of research Severus had been glad to be excluded from. He didn't want to think about the victims (er, subjects) among the lower ranks of the Death Eaters, or about Bellatrix Lestrange's combination of already dubious sanity with control of five broken minds she'd been unable to get rid of. Bella's breakdown had been the only thing to convince the Dark Lord not to leash his Inner Circle, and even then Malfoy had had to talk fast to save his own neck from the collar. In the end, though, the research had been abandoned, and Severus had prayed he'd never hear of it again.
He certainly never thought he'd be the one to recommend it.