The Austere Stonewall

by Mudblood88

When the Ministry revives an old marriage law as a smokescreen to hide the reconstruction after the war, Hermione Granger is one of the first wave of people caught in the law. Not willing to marry Ron and doom them both to a life of misery, Hermione has no immediate prospects. With few viable options, Hermione proposes to someone else caught up by the law to help him avoid Azkaban.

39. Book 4 Prologue

The Austere Stonewall, Book 4: Severus

Prologue

Throughout his life, there were a few memories that haunted his dreams at night.

The night he'd found his mother beaten unconscious while his father stumbled drunkenly out of the house to visit the pub. While his father was out spending all their money, drinking and screwing whores without a care that he may have just killed his wife.

The day he took the dark mark. The smell of his own burning flesh pungent in the air as he writhed on the floor in front of the Dark Lord and tried not to vomit or piss himself.

The night that he arrived to find Lily, cold and lifeless in the wreckage of the home she'd made with Potter. The screams of a terrified toddler in the air as he numbly held her body, not able to understand or process what had happened.

The day after the Dark Lord returned to power and the torture he'd endured for not having looked for him in the past 12 years.

The night he was nearly killed by Nagini on the Dark Lord's orders. His body in severe pain as he gasped and tried to stay conscious long enough to complete his final mission for Dumbledore.

The night he'd finally arrived in a cabin in the woods to find his wife on the floor, half naked, with blood smeared all over her thighs and all over the floor around her as Dolohov held her down. The fuckers cock was erect and exposed even as aurors surrounded him in the middle of his heinous act.

Crimson red tinted everything in his dream as he saw the blood all over the floor and coloring his wife's beaten body while a psychopath who'd already nearly killed her several times over.

Even as he sat in a stiff chair beside her hospital bed, Severus knew that the nightmare of the way he'd found her in that cabin would haunt him for the rest of his life. It would be his newest and worst nightmare that would haunt his sleep until the day he died.