Chapter Twenty
Sitting in his squashy armchair, the fire stoked beside him, Peter bit into a butter oozing crumpet and turned the page of the paper. What he saw caused him to frown.
Man of the Hour!
It said at the top, and then right underneath:
Severus Snape - Our Secret Hero
And there was a picture of old Snivellus sneering out at him, his cold, black eyes blinking slowly. Peter chewed thoughtfully, the frown growing deeper, his brow furrowing and his little eyes darting to and fro across the page as he read.
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Little is known of Severus Snape, the hero who single handedly caught Death Eater Black and his pet werewolf, rescued baby Harry Potter and returned the child to the loving arms of his muggleborn mother's family. And yet a little boy sleeps safely and two more cells of Azkaban will be full tonight because of the efforts of this one mysterious and yet determined, young wizard.
It is known that he was an excellent student at Hogwarts - as one might expect from a man as young as himself who managed to take down two of You Know Who's most ruthless and vicious disciples without any assistance. And Hogwarts felt like home, so much so that - after leaving - he returned there just a few years later to take up the position of potions master (as Professor Slughorn - those many of us remember from our own school days - is now nearing retirement and has been, perhaps, past his best for years.)
While students at the school today may be thrilling at having the opportunity to learn from so bold and fearless a wizard as their potions master - Snape himself remains modest and humble. Although he did his duty and testified in court, he declined to comment when questioned by our fearless reporter (journalist extraordinaire - Rita Skeeter- who's ruthless quill cuts to the heart of every story) wishing to keep his name from the paper and his extraordinary accomplishments out of the limelight.
Discretion being the better part of valour, he even refused to commit to whether or not he had in fact discovered the two Death Eaters committing carnal acts of sinful desire upon each other's flesh (though it must be noted that - while he did not confirm the rumour, he did not deny it either. The mind boggles at the thought of what a man and a wolf may get up to in the heat of passion - and delicacy forbids us from speculating any further.)
When questioned on the matter, Snape's young face blushes - perhaps as he remembers the indiscreet manner in which the two Dark wizards were found. Naked. Their arms clasped around each other… Blissfully oblivious to the rage and fury bearing down on them, the jaws of justice reaching out to swallow them whole...
And now - for the wizarding world, for Lily, James and little Harry Potter - that justice has been served. Two more cells are full in Azkaban tonight, two more dark wizards caught - never to spread their hurt and evil across this land again. A dark wizard in chains, a werewolf about to be destroyed … and all thanks to this one, enigmatic, young hero.
The debt of gratitude we all owe this young, unassuming potions master can never be fully repaid. There can be no finer or more worthy young wizard in our nation - more deserving of our rapturous applause. And so, let us take today to celebrate Severus Snape - the man of the hour!
...
By the time he had finished reading, Peter's face wore a dark scowl. Snivellus? The hero? The man of the hour? The one the whole wizarding world was looking to and celebrating?
Why - it would be Snivellus who got the cakes and mittens in the owl post today, the admiring cards and letters.
Peter was forgotten about… He combed carefully through all the articles which were linked in any way to the war, the trial or his old friends… His name did not appear in the paper once. Not once! That hadn't happened since the whole thing began.
What? Snape testifies and suddenly Peter was nobody? He was the best friend of the Potters - the only uncle little Harry had left, unless you included the muggle fool he had been sent to live with. And suddenly he was yesterday's news because Snivellus was the one to hunt down Moony and Padfoot?
No … he was not going to let this lie.
He pulled a piece of parchment and his quill towards him, dipped the nib in ink and began to scribble furiously - dashing off a letter to Rita Skeeter.
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Dear Rita,
Great result last night - I'm sure we're all very relieved. None more so than I
...
And no one would ever know the half of how true that was.
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I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to speak with you yesterday, however I would be delighted to meet up with you and give you an exclusive interview on my feelings about the trial at your earliest convenience. I'm sure I have so many more interesting things to tell our readers about Black and the wolf.
Do get in touch by return owl.
Peter.
...
There … he took another bite of crumpet - that ought to do it. Knock old Snivellus off the top spot. Keep his own name out there in big letters. Yes… he chewed thoughtfully, it all came down to knowing how to appeal to the public. And that was something he was getting quite good at.
Snape was in a towering temper. He had been all day - ever since the Daily Prophet had arrived.
Oh - today should be a good day, the loathsome Black and his monstrous lover were finally behind bars where they well and truly belonged; where they thoroughly deserved to be - and had deserved to be since they were sixteen. And it was him who had put them there. Him! Today should be good - the vengeance so sweet in flavour that it rotted the teeth right out of his head.
And yet the paper had arrived … he had read the front page, and then turned over to read the next one ... and he had been wearing a sour grimace ever since - unless his face had been twisted and contorted in fury and humiliation … Which had also happened a fair few times throughout the morning.
...
That article … that article … he couldn't look his fellow members of staff in the face. He couldn't look his students in the face. He certainly couldn't look into a mirror and look himself in the face. He didn't know he would ever be able to look anyone full in the face ever again.
Just the thought of it … man of the hour … enigmatic, young hero … deserving of rapturous applause … made him shudder with horror and flame with burning, agonising embarrassment.
He wanted to write a strongly worded letter to the editor. He wanted to hex Rita Skeeter into next Tuesday. He wanted to use unforgivable curses on anyone who had so much as seen the article - never mind paid attention to it.
...
And they had all seen it. He could see it in their smirks. Well … he'd make them smirk on a different side of their face if they dared bring it up.
He'd given a third year detention just for innocently turning to that page of the newspaper in front of him. And if any - any - student dared to quote it at him, he would personally - personally - make sure they got expelled.
...
When morning classes were over, he locked himself in his office and stewed , biting his lip until it bled, in his fury.
And then there was a tap on the window … an owl.
It was late for an owl - they usually came in at breakfast.
He let it in, took its package from it and allowed it to fly out the window again. Once he'd taken the brown wrapping paper off and seen what the parcel contained, he wished he'd kept the bird back.
...
One Gladys Gudgeon had sent him a letter telling him she was an avid admirer of his and so grateful for his hard work capturing that dreadful Death Eater and his even more dreadful werewolf friend. She'd also sent a tin of treacle toffees - all oozy and gooey and sticking together in their container.
He took one look at them, yelled in anger - and hurled the tin and the note on the fire. If only he'd held the bird back a while - he would have found an envelope and stuck a curse in it, and sent it back to Gladys Gudgeon by return owl.
Although their guards were silent, Azkaban was not. Screams and shrieks and desperate howls echoed around the fortress, reverberating on the walls: the other prisoners, trapped in prisons made not of stone and bars but of their own, aching, ceaseless misery. These cries came from those who were now Sirius' and Remus' fellows, their equals. Criminals cast out, thrown away and left to rot. And soon the two men would be no different from the rest … locked in their cells trying to scream out their pain.
...
They were led into a dark room - though all of the prison was dark; hallways; stairways; cells - and made to take their clothes off.
How different this was from the last time they had stripped in front of each other; when the fire had burned and their hands had trembled and their lips had met in eager kisses; flushed with warmth and half unbelieving that something so longed for was finally realised. How different it was - even - from the time before that, the night of the full moon - when Remus had modestly turned his back as he had removed his robes ready for the change and Sirius had transformed into a dog and pretended not to watch.
Now they were trapped in a freezing fog; in their minds, in their hearts, and even in the room itself. The dementors seemed to suck out all the warmth along with all the hope and happiness and leave nothing but chill air in its place. Although they did not turn from each other modestly, this time, there were no lingering glances either - no flushes or blushes or heady, intoxicating kisses. And if fingers trembled, as buttons were undone, it was only with the cold and not with desire.
They did not turn from each other modestly not because they were in love and had nothing to hide - but because they were so alone, so separate in their freezing fog, that the other one simply may as well have not been there.
...
Once bare, a jet of icy water was turned on them, the spray stinging their flesh and nearly knocking them off their feet. They were hosed down, until their skin stung and their hair dripped and they gasped in the cold, fighting to get their breath back. And then the water was turned off and they just stood there, water droplets tracing down their skin, forming little rivulets and following the force of gravity downwards until little puddles were formed at their feet.
They stood in this freezing room, the freezing water clinging to their flesh, to every hair … and they drip dried … slowly. Skin turned blue, small hairs stood on end to try and trap more heat … though there was none to be trapped, teeth began to chatter and then - just when it felt like their extremities had turned into blocks of ice - they were handed, thin, grey prison robes. And though they were not yet fully dry, they pulled them gratefully over their heads.
But the material stuck to their wet skin - clinging to them damply - and did little to offer warmth. And any flicker of colour in the grey of their minds that the gratitude had kindled was snuffed out even more quickly than it formed.
On numb feet, they followed their silent guards from the room and out into the hallway.
...
It was a long corridor. The windows had no glass in them and so the whole place felt open to the elements. There were bars across the windows - of course - and the grey light from the grey sky flung stripped grey shadows onto the floor. The hallway was narrow; the stones of the floor rough underfoot, and the walls seemed to press in on them … as if the prison was shrinking around them; the screaming, black pit of despair collapsing in on their own agony.
They were high up - they could see the sea, many feet below - and like everything else it was iron grey. It crashed violently against the jagged rocks of the island, as cold and as forbidding as the prison itself.
...
Beyond themselves, and the screaming of the prisoners, there were no other signs of life here. There were no gulls wheeling in the sky, no plants or flowers or even weeds clinging and creeping between the boulders. This was a barren rock, a place of death and decay … and nothing living would make its home here out of choice.
...
They reached the end of the hallway - there was a crumbling, spiral staircase leading up into a tower ahead of them. One dementor took Sirius by the arm and started to drag him up the stairs. The other took Remus by the arm and held him back … finally separating the two for good.
Sirius did turn to look at Remus before he disappeared from sight. He knew that once upon a time, a very long time ago - this one last sight of Remus would have meant something to him. An aeon ago, in another world, they would have struggled at being parted. They would have yelled out to each other - words of love, words of comfort - they would have gazed at each other, lingering and longingly; drinking each other in; remembering every heartbeat - every freckle and eyelash and storing it up to hold close inside of themselves, to pore over later - savour the good times to help them through the bad.
Not in this world, though - in this world there was nothing but numbness … aching emptiness and a sense of crushing futility. Nothing mattered. Not even parting. Sirius still looked - out of respect for the olden days, for the man he had been in that previous life; that simpler, better life. But it meant nothing.
He met Moony's eyes - and felt nothing. Or at least, nothing that wasn't already there: hopelessness, despair, pain and suffering.
And then the door at the bottom of the stairs had been opened, Remus flung inside, and the door slammed shut … and Sirius was still being dragged up the stairs, higher into the tower.
...
They eventually reached the top and stood on the narrow landing. There was an iron door and the dementor opened that up, pushed Sirius inside and then slammed it close with a loud clang.
The screams around the prison grew louder as the echo of the door slamming bounced through the hallways, and sliced into the fractured minds of the inmates.
Left alone - Sirius looked around. There was not much to see. His cell was small and dark with a low roof. Slime dripped down the walls. There was a mattress and a thin blanket against one wall and an iron toilet bowl against the external wall. Peering down it, Sirius saw that it just dropped straight into the sea.
His window was small, and barred - high up but not so high that he couldn't see out. The sea was miles beneath him - and the jags of the rocks looked like distant pinpricks.
...
Suddenly coming over all shaky, he dropped down onto his mattress - his bed - and brought his knees up to his chest. He wrapped his arm around his legs and then lowered his head so his brow rested on his kneecaps. He took a deep breath and tried to fight off the all encompassing misery … the draining hollowness of being here that utterly overwhelmed him and left him in danger of starting to shriek out in anguish like all the others were doing.
He took a deep steadying breath … tried to push the freezing fog from out of his mind …
...
But then he heard a rasping death rattle of a sound from just outside his door, a hideous wheezing - like air being sucked through lungs that were already dead. And the dim cell seemed to grow dimmer, and the fog seemed to grow denser, and the air grew more chill and Sirius realised …out in the prison, a dementor had sensed his growing resolve… and had arrived to suck it out of him.
At the base of the tower, Remus likewise sat huddled on his mattress. He had half expected, when he sat down, to find it chewed - the stuffing spilling out from the insides where the rats had gnawed on it. But it was all in one piece. And after a moment, Remus realised that it had not been eaten by rats because there were no rats on the island. Even rats would not choose to live on Azkaban.
Like Sirius had done, he wrapped his arms around his knees and stared out of his barred window. Although the sun had not shone all day, the sky always being the same leaden colour as the sea below it, it did still get darker - and colder. Murky grey turned to navy blue, turned to inky black.
Remus could see no stars in the sky - and he wondered if, like the rats, stars just stayed away from Azkaban. Perhaps there was just too much misery here for even the stars to shine down on them.
...
But he could see the moon. It was still large and round - just two nights past full. Anyone else - anyone who wasn't him - might mistake it for the real thing. But he knew it wasn't. It was waning gibbous - fat for now, but getting smaller - night by night. Eventually it would disappear altogether and then be reborn as new. Waxing towards full. Next time the moon looked like this, it would be almost a month later ...his time would be almost up.
The moon stared down at him, a baleful eye counting down the days left of his existence. How it had always watched him, how he had always been able to feel it's malign presence and how he had always hated it. But now … it had never felt so malevolent, so harmful as it did right now - alone in the sky, shining in on his dank little cell. And, with his fear and his pain mounting moment by moment, it was taking every last drop of his human resolve to stop himself from throwing back his head and howling at it like the wolf.
When Peter got back from work, it was to find that Rita Skeeter had sent him a note. He picked it up eagerly and began to read … though, as with the paper that morning, what he read caused him to frown.
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Dear Mr. Pettigrew,
Thank you for your kind offer - however with the two traitors in prison and everyone wanting to forget, I hardly think it will be necessary for me to take you up on it. Earlier today Barty Crouch Jnr was found in the company of some known Death Eaters and has been arrested. In the face of such a scandal and with a new trial on the horizon, the readership simply will not be interested in endless reminisces about the school days of two men already convicted. They are yesterday's news, Mr. Pettigrew - and so are you.
Rita Skeeter
...
He scrunched the letter up and threw it on the fire. Yesterday's news was he? No interest from the readership was it? Well … well, they would have to see about that. He had grown accustomed, in the past few weeks, to being someone important. To mattering. He was not going to give all that up without a fight.
He would have to think of something. He would have to find a way to make himself front page news once again.