CHAPTER 11

LET'S UNSTRING THAT MIND OF YOURS

The Dark Lord was speaking, but Severus grasped he was no longer listening. His body was numb in fear, his mind sedated.

He found himself regarding as though from a distance — the room, the Dark Lord, himself on his knees. A shivering mess he was.

The events and ramifications he had foreknown were, one after another, tumbling into disaster. That they hadn't hit rock-bottom yet laid out the sobering verdict: it could be worse.

"Severus." The Dark Lord raised his tone to reach Severus in his imagined distance. "Severus, do pay attention! You would not want to appear impolite. Would you?"

Severus' head jerked in the direction of the voice, although only after a while.

"Good," said the Dark Lord. "I want you to turn around and look at Lucius and answer his accusations. No need to stand; on your knees is just fine. Be on all fours, if you like. I doubt Lucius minds seeing you that way. Do you, Lucius?"

"My Lord," Lucius' words were quiet, and they were followed by a silence long enough for Severus to even forget where it had begun.

"Be so kind as to answer my question, Lucius."

"My Lord…" another pause, another silence, and when Lucius finally spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. "I do not."

"You see, Severus, he does not. So do turn around and answer to Lucius. You can be on your knees, if that's all you're capable of. I want you to look him in the eyes."

Severus didn't. Not to defy, but because he could not. His mind, standing distant from all this, was sober and paralysed all the while. It could will no actions into his body, couldn't begin to fathom what actions should even be willed.

Quite a wreck he was.

At least he wasn't crying for his mother, or not just yet. He'd seen men, better than him, do it; he wouldn't be surprised. Though the notion left him thinking, maybe he should have visited for Christmas, that one time, eight years ago.

"You cannot do it," the Dark Lord surmised; his voice held no reproach. If anything, he sounded consoling of a sort. "It is understandable. You believed you could trust Lucius, and he deceived you. It must hurt deeply."

He was ambling, dark robes brushing lazily on the cobblestone floor. "Very well, I wish not be cruel. If you cannot face him, then answer to me." Still ambling, still lazily. "What do you make of the eye-opening accusation Lucius has brought you?"

It was all bullshit, Severus' distanced sobriety told him. No one's eyes had been opened. The Dark Lord was doing it all on a whim to spite him.

"Severus, I expect an answer."

Severus had no answers, could piece together none. He shook his head, or maybe he was nodding; he couldn't be sure. The movement was so faint and prolonged it seemed almost a tremor, and he was wondering, privately, what the fuck sort of an answer that even was.

"Pity," the Dark Lord said, sounding, in honesty, a bit disappointed. Maybe he had gotten bored, and this would end. He stopped his ambling, the shifting of dark robes swishing to a halt, and concluded unsurprisingly, "I shall find then the answers myself — in your mind."

Severus had expected nothing less.

He would have braced himself for it, if he could make sense of what there was left to even brace.

When the Dark Lord entered Severus' mind, it was a frozen current seeping inside his skull. It grasped and grabbed and paralysed his thinking, and Severus barely registered as his thoughts and memories stirred up, reeling in his head . The dark trail in Longmoon Forest, the hallway in the housing, curses flying through the room before it burst in a flurry of butterflies.

The whirlwind swept through the room, and Severus knelt, clutching his wand to keep it from being pulled out of his hand. Had he held on tight enough?

The frosted presence in his mind rushed relentlessly, hungry for more, and Severus let it rush — Go rush! Skip the details, jump forward — forward to himself kneeling on the floor without his wand. He'd lost it at some point. Curses grazed the air; Bellatrix worded the Killing Curse, and Severus—

Severus, with whatever grasp on lucidity he had, searched for the ending to that memory. The ending — not the in-between! — only the ending. The faceless entity dug deeper, like shards of glass embedding in his brain. He felt his head about to burst open as the memory unwound before him, to find himself watching horrified and wandless as the Killing Curse slammed into the wooden furniture.

The presence withdrew abruptly, and he was left heaving for air on the floor, a splintering pain in his skull. His mind no longer watched anything from a distance but had curled up with him in the maddening ache. The world reeled deliriously around him, and he only wished it would stop, for only a moment so he could rest his head and not feel a thing.

For only a moment.

"You're boring me." The Dark Lord said flatly, like a child that's had too much of an old toy. "Your mind is too ordered. Every pathway straight, every memory shelved. You're boring me."

Unsteady with pain, Severus pushed himself to his knees.

"What do you say we stir some havoc in that tidy mind of yours... shall we?"

Severus shuddered.

His blood must have drained out of his limbs and what was left of it had turned to ice, because he suddenly felt maniacally cold. He understood the Dark Lord's words, with jarring clarity — he would search his mind under the Torture Curse and would find treason. The night had worn him down, and he could not resist intrusion under the added bounce of pain. He had his limits, he knew. He wasn't stupid.

The Dark Lord was pacing before him; he holstered his wand, speaking casually. His words echoed off the stone walls, but the inhuman sound was wasting in the frightening mess of Severus' thoughts.

The mind could resist Legilimency only when it detached from emotions, which was a wry joke. There was no detaching anything! Severus' mind was very much attached to his body, chained to the pain, frightened stupid by the prospect of more of it to come.

It was strange how, in all the times he had imagined this moment coming, he had never pictured himself so mindlessly terrified. His breaths were rapid, shallow gasps, his chest nearly bursting with the frantic fluttering of his heart.

The Dark Lord closed in on him, with even steps. One. Two. Three. And crouched before him.

Severus flinched.

"Why don't you loosen up, Severus?" The Dark Lord said, and Severus, with his head bowed and his gaze held low, could hear the smirk in the words. He didn't look at the Dark Lord's face; no one would dare such defiance. "Worry not. I'll guide your way."

The Dark Lord stood up and walked away, three paces back. "You should not have disappointed me."

Severus knelt shivering, no shred of strength left in him. No bit of hope. Turns out he would end up a sobbing mess, after all. Only a madman would believe he could deceive the Dark Lord in his condition. And Severus wasn't mad. He was the opposite in every aspect. He calculated his risks, weighed every possible outcome — had weighed even this one.

Though, come to think of it, walking into hell, knowingly, was probably insanity at its peak. Maybe he wasn't in his right mind, after all.

Or maybe this was his right mind — a tad insane.

He saw the Dark Lord pull the wand out of his robes, purposefully slow. Severus must have been insane — by all means, he was — to have walked all this time into this game, stepped up for every round, again and again, knowing each time he might end up — right here. He'd played it well until now. What else was there to say?

He regarded the Dark Lord's wand gripped in the disgusting hand. He still had no idea. Had he? Sure enough, Severus had played him well.

It was curiously enticing how, in this last moment, Severus had come to perceive himself in such a way. No. Not perceive — but remember and know everything he'd done, everything he was.

He wasn't some half-wit caught stealing information for petty scraps of glory. He had worked his way up to stand as the Dark Lord's first lieutenant, all the while thwarting his every step.

No one before him had attempted it, and surely after him, no one would dare.

As he knelt on the floor, waiting for the last act to begin, the fear was still there, every bit of it, fiercer than ever before. His stomach was squelched in terror and his heart a block of ice. But his mind — was shockingly clear.

"Shall we begin, Severus?" The Dark Lord asked silkily, disgusting fingers trailing along the wand, slow and lazy, to toy with Severus in a twisted game of anticipation. "Or you would like time… to prepare?"

Severus nearly laughed — mirthless as the Dark Lord and a tad unstrung. He still had no idea who was toying with whom. The world's greatest wizard, Severus had played him like a fool for years.

His breaths had evened out as he watched the ugly hand fidget on the wand hungry for more. His heart was beating like a war drum, and the blood in his temples thumped rabidly unhinged.

What was one more time?

It would sting a bit, sure. He'd never expected it to be gentle. It would be a bloody mess, no trace of dignity left long before the end. But until then, he would play him one more time.

Because he could. Like no one else.

He lifted his head. "I have nothing to hide, My Lord." And looked him in the eyes.

Saw the surge of rage on Voldemort's disfigured face — red eyes blazed savagely. No one! No one dared look him in the eyes! Before the second had elapsed, though, the anger had morphed to malicious satisfaction, reasoning the brazen gesture was not defiance but an invitation to enter Severus' mind.

He smiled, lipless and cruel.

Severus let the confusion be, and dwelt in it. For now, for this one time, he would have his act of defiance. He really needed to.

"Well, Severus, let's unstring that mind of yours."

Severus straightened his back the bit that he could, and lifted his chin just barely higher. If he would descend to hell, he might as well play the devil. He nodded in the slightest, that read as consent. He was ready, as ready as he'd ever be.

He smiled inwardly — just a little madly. Go fuck yourself.

And then all hell broke loose and crashed down on him.

The first to hit was the pain.

It hurt like hell and more. It exploded in his lower back and crawled up so ferociously he, irrationally, felt his spine being spliced open, sending scorching currents through every muscle-tendon-bone in his body.

He curled in on himself, horrified by his own screams, crippled by the splintering throes.

The frozen current seeped into his head, no longer stirring up his memories but clawing at them, pulling them out, tearing apart all that stood in its way like they were shreds of paper.

He saw the house in the forest, where Black was hiding, his heart pounded wildly, his resolve did not waver, he would go through with it to the end, no matter the cost—

His body convulsed; his mind was not his anymore, slipping and reeling to the beat of the torturing jolts.

He clung to the only thing that was unfabricated, his resent for Black. It bulked up inside him as he waited to storm the hideout, Severus' only regret — that he couldn't kill Black with his own hand.

The memory was torn out of him, and it exploded to dust, the burst inside his head threatening to crack his skull like an eggshell.

His own screams, as the presence in his mind continued to pull and rip relentlessly, were nauseating.

He found himself kneeling on the floor, again, as the curses grazed the air around him. He had no wand. Bellatrix worded the unforgivable, and he — he froze. The pain surged, like a hot iron rod hammering into his skull. And the world went black and still.

He woke with a start, choking, and turned to his side and heaved convulsively. He spat out water, struggling for breath.

He'd been doused in water to wake from unconsciousness. When had it come to this?

There was a voice speaking, but the words were getting drowned in the sore jagging of his own coughs. When he finally drew air into his lungs, he gulped it down so greedily, he choked again.

The Torture Curse hit again, and the ice bit into his brain. He wondered how, through this amount of pain, he could still register the cold and mind it. Another memory was clawed out of him, and he tasted blood in his mouth, though he didn't remember bleeding.

He stood before Dumbledore's desk. Angry with the old man, furious with Black. He held on to that anger, with all that he had, to keep his memories from sliding forward or backwards. Stay in place! 'I'm certain Black's Animagus did even better in Azkaban,' he told Dumbledore.

The memory exploded, and Severus clutched his head, not to appease the agony but to keep his skull from bursting open. His actions, reduced to a spastic mess of visceral impulses, were no longer making sense. Not even to him.

Another bout of blackness brought all to a halt.

"You're getting lazy, Severus," a cold voice brought him back to his senses. "Do you know how many times I had to Enervate you?"

He was lying on the ground on his side, not really remembering how he had gotten there or why he had to spit out blood and dirt to breathe. Somehow, all that made sense in his foggy mind was that he hated Black, and he'd made it his mission to hate him to his last breath.

He was cold beyond reason.

He saw a man grinning in his face, arrogant and hateful — and hated. Black, this was Black, he remembered vaguely. They held one another at wand's end, in someone's kitchen, one heartbeat away from firing the final curse. The thought burst to splinters, and the world swapped into darkness, and Severus knew no more.

He was once more jerked back into awareness, whatever was left of it, though he couldn't fully tell where awareness began and whatever else ended.

The lines blurred hazily between the painful convulsions and the images that flooded all — faces he didn't truly remember, places he no longer knew — and the standstills of blackness.

Again, he choked on water and dirt and saw a face hovering over him — ugly and deformed — half human, half whatever that was.

He shivered, convulsively, when someone placed a hand on his forehead, cold as steel, and screamed when something sharp pierced his skull. It made no sense that the liquid in his mouth kept tasting like blood.

The disgusting face morphed to be old and wrinkly, with long silvery hair and beard and a smile to it, mildly concerned — so cynically misplaced in the hallucinatory mess of his own suffering.

His body was being pulled apart by those wretched throes. At some point, he found the old, wrinkly face again. It was no longer smiling but set in stone and terrible, like everything around it, bleak night and stormy iced winds.

He wasn't sure what brought him here, on top of a hill, kneeling before this figure of absolute power, but whatever it was, it made him desperate. It wasn't this man, or even the unrelenting pain and the cold. It was something more he couldn't grasp. Something terrible was about to happen. It scared him to the marrow of his bones, made him so affright he would have clawed at the ground beneath him to tear it to crumbles and make it disappear only to hold off from happening what was bound to happen. What was bound to happen?

It spoke, the old face, but the words made no sense — sounds on a string, suspended in mid-air — getting lost in a mingle of screams and wheezes and inert numbness.

The edges bled into one another, a maddening haze of yet more scenes reeling around him. It was hypnotic to watch the fragments of his life, which he no longer recognised, torn out of him and pulverised, one by one, by one. The faces around him were getting younger and younger, and he had the strangest impression that he was forgetting something important.

Two boys were laughing in his face, wands out, saying something he couldn't comprehend. He, too, had his wand trained on one of them — tall and handsome and hateful, with dark hair falling into his eyes. The smell of grass filled his senses; they were on school grounds, by a lake.

What was he missing? Why was he here?

Behind them, he saw a girl, her hair a glimpse of orange — coppery orange, so vibrant and warm, the most beautiful colour he'd ever seen. Her presence felt so mesmerising she must have come from another world. 'Leave him alone!' she said, and her words, he understood.

The first words that made sense in his mindless agony. It wasn't so much her words as the sound of her voice and simply... her. And with a jolt of discernment, he remembered. He let her go, quickly, sent her away, to dissolve into forgetness, trained his wand and his attention and, truly, all he had on that dark-haired boy and his hateful demeanour.

The pain muted, as they faced one another — he and that awful arrogant boy — and around them, the world was standing still.

There was an undercurrent in the air, an infinitesimal tremor inside his head, barely perceptible at first, then it amplified with dizzying speed, surging to a mind-robbing pressure that hurt like hell. It was expanding to shatter any resistance and break out of his skull.

He kicked with his legs, clawed with his fingers, as if that could keep the soaring tension from heightening further.

It couldn't.

He felt the fragments of his skull tremor under the pressure — like the shell of a grenade in the last moment before blowup. It was unbearable. It was beyond sense. It was — with a last glimpse of clarity, he understood: This was it. Finally, he had arrived. This was the Hell.

Then all blasted to nothing, and he knew no more.