Chapter 4

The Things That Were Done

(Flashback Chapter)


In the days leading up the the obliteration of Voldemort World...

First years gave him a wide berth as he stalked angrily out of the Dark Arts classroom; actually, a number of students gave him a wide berth despite his unimpressive height, they all knew what it meant if you were kept after in that class, and his last dueling club contest win had been "particularly inspired." That meant his opponent was still in the Hospital Wing, and he was apparently worthy of fear. He paid no notice, but if he had, he would have thought it was fine, though inaccurate. It was a safe image anyway. They all though his father was rather terrifying too.

Discipline was at an all-time high, proving that something bad had happened, which likely accounted for the Dark Arts Professor's short mood with him. Even at his age, Sev knew everything rolled downhill. If any of their professors got it, they got it, and for some students it trickled down to first-years, Mudbloods, and Muggles. Why wouldn't others think he'd do that as well? As he took the stairs down, the last thing from his mind was inflicting his misfortune on some unsuspecting dilettante, as Umbridge might put it, who got in his way.

By this time, the charade of it, including the copious beatings and violence, were merely all part of a routine for the young Slytherin. He had been prepared for it beforehand, far before he was even of Hogwarts age; because it was not if their lives depended upon it, their lives did depend upon it. He had been ready for all of it, not just a little pain or moral ambiguity. He was sporting both at the moment.

You do what you have to do. No matter how tired you are, hurt you are, afraid you are, sad you are, no excuses, ever. And then when there are times you can temper it with what you can do, you do what's right.

Otherwise, doing what was right, was entirely relevant to the scenario. Those words, those ideas were so drilled into him by this point that he barely veered from them. He didn't like it all the time, but he did what he had to do; it was either that or increase the odds of their deaths exponentially.

After letting the sixth years trudge passed, whispering about the massive essay his father had just set them and eyeing him as if he bore part responsibility, he walked in the open door to the Potions classroom and shut it with a wave of his hand. It banged louder than he had meant it to.

Without looking up, Professor Snape said in a smooth voice from behind the desk, "I know it does not escape your notice that you should at least announce yourself, Severus, before you commandeer my classroom with your magic."

"And shutting the door does not announce me, sir? Who else would presume?" he asked.

"Mind your cheek that you don't presume too much." The professor gave the boy a meaningful look.

Appearances. He was still a teenager, after all, but he did know that look very well. "Yes, Father," he replied, sighing while dropping his bag and jumper, hoping to avoid turning one sentence into a lecture.

Up went an eyebrow to the sighing response, but nothing was said about it. "You're bleeding," the Potions master noted instead.

"A bit." He wiped at a cut above his eyebrow. "Dark Arts was rough. I hit my head." It was a lie by omission. He more than hit his head, but he hated getting his father upset.

"It's always rough for you, Sev." There was a hint of exasperation.

"That's because Carrow is stupid." He walked over in front of the desk and eyed the plethora of Potions samples littering the top. He gave a sniff of disdain. If that was Living Death, they'd all far more likely be dying rather than living, that was for sure. Absentmindedly, he started arranging them into groups, seemingly by color, which was far from clear as it should be.

His father snorted at the assessment of Carrow. "Obviously. That does not make it wise of you to give a reason to lash out at you, as I've told you before. That's your own stupidity."

He looked up from what he was doing, which seemed to be separating them by how he thought his father would grade them. It must have been an apt approximation, because the Potions master did not stop his fiddling.

"I know more and can do more than that entire class and he wants me to practice these stupid curses. I don't need to practice them. I've been doing them for years with you, and everyone knows it. What sense does it make to hurt my friends for practice I don't need? Why is it so hard to get that I can't summon the necessary necessity to make the magic work if I don't feel it's necessary?!" He threw up his arms and then winced, putting his arms hastily back down and clearing his throat somewhat suspiciously.

There was some element of petulant theatrics to the response, but the unfortunate problem was that the boy was probably far too smart for the more blunt instrument type like Carrow.

In his best Professor Snape voice, he replied, "And his mentality is simply that you do what you're told, thinking optional. Your hope that somehow there should be a 'getting' it, therefore, is rather futile. You'll be wrong every time, right or not, as I'm sure you realize full well."

"Yes, sir, I know." He shrugged. He made his decision, and he'd live with it, already had lived it with for the short span of the walk down to the dungeons.

"Well I am not sure what I was expecting between my intelligence and your mother's penchant for being such an insufferable know-it-all. I suppose I got precisely what I deserve in my delightful progeny." The elder Severus gave the boy a small, indulgent smile. "And pray tell what did your inheritance of snark and brains earn you beyond a knock on your thick head?" After his son had tossed his arms up and winced, he had a good idea already.

The boy made a dumpy face at his father, knowing he was beyond discovered.

"Come on, then. I suppose this means you'll have to lay down for this."

"Yes, sir."

His father put a hand to the his shoulder and guided the youth out of the classroom and toward his quarters. Once inside the Professor twirled his finger in the air, telling the boy to turn around and face away from him. Off came the cloak and the boy's shirt was pink with blood all down his back.

The professor turned his son around by the shoulders and started taking off his tie and shirt. "I should let it be and not heal it. Perhaps that might start to teach you to respect your elders even when they're stupider than you." He looked down his nose at the boy to make sure he was listening. "Unfortunately for you, that's a large percentage of your world, son; you'll save yourself a lot of trouble if you learn that lesson now. I did also teach you some humility and respect, I believe. One day it will be far more and worse than this."

He was torn between letting out a whining 'Dadddd' or a 'yes, sir.' He chewed his lip for a second as he watched his father's long fingers make quick work of his buttons. A clarification was safer...

Instead he said, "Do you really feel that way, Dad? Do you think that's disrespectful? Foolish, sir?" He looked up through his eyelashes at his father's face. Foolish was one of the worst things to his father. Worse than disrespectful.

The father raised an eyebrow at the son, pushing the boy's hair away from the cut on his forehead. "I feel both ways, actually. You are my son in more ways than you understand. It is just difficult as a father to know what you live with, what happens to you, but I can't begrudge you what few choices you are free to make, either. I suppose you shall just have to learn to handle the results, as will I." He healed the cut on the boy's face first, thumbing it for a second as those charcoal grey eyes stared up at him, before turning his son back around.

"I'd rather stomach a little pain than bow to their stupidity," he said, quietly, as he shrugged off his shirt tenderly with his father's help. It peeled, stuck to a littering of webbed cuts. His lip curled some in discomfort.

The elder smiled slightly behind his son's back, although his words were more tempered. He did not precisely want to encourage it, but he was proud of his son's strength nonetheless; it was required, though somewhat sobering. "Sometimes it is the most intelligent to feign otherwise and do as you're told, just make sure you choose well and do not push too far."

"Yes, sir."

An intake of breath and a sigh indicated the Professor's reaction to the state of his 4th year's back compliments of his fellow staff. "Was this it?"

"No, sir, you know it wasn't…" He flopped down on the bed on his stomach. It was a familiar routine.

This revelation seemed to give a moment's pause before a silent healing spell started closing up the cuts and clearing the blood.

If anything tripped Severus Snape's temper, it was that dolt using the Cruciatus on his son for being too bloody smart for his own good. Not wishing to let his anger out around his son, he tried to focus the conversation something else, a technique he oft used to keep control of himself.

"I need you to brew Veritaserum with me tonight and through the schedule for the lunar cycle."

"D-." A hasty glance shut him off before he could even protest with a 'Dad.' Instead he replied, "Yes, Father." He could tell when not to push, even if his father's temper was stoked by no fault of his own. He had not really wanted to say anything about the Cruciatus; his father would know when he invariably shook or was nauseated, and then he would be in trouble for lying.

"Right after dinner. What I can do that others cannot gains me much leeway; that you can provide a caliber of help where others cannot does the same for you. Do not ever think that is an expendable situation that you can neglect or you will answer to me."

"I know, sir," he said, quietly, clearly sorry he'd nearly pulled the 'Dad' card to begin with.

"Unless you want there to be no more reason why you can't have shaky hands, so Carrow can take full advantage of whatever he might want to do to you," the professor added.

"Dad." His voice was soft, understanding. He looked up with those large eyes, like Hermione's but charcoal like his father's. "Dad, I know...don't worry. I wouldn't make that mistake, sir."

The man sighed and magicked the boy's wavy hair into a braid to keep it out of the way, before he gave his son's head soft pat and headed toward the bathroom, trying not to let show how much he wanted to pop that skinny twit Carrow's head off.

After a moment the deep voice filtered back through to the bedroom, "And you are going to have to make your own dittany salve if you keep this rate up, Severus."

He lifted his head and groaned. Just like his father to make him make his own necessities, which were more duties than chores; there never had been anything remotely resembling a normal home-life, wizard or otherwise.

He could protest that he wouldn't mind a few scars, but he was quite certain if his mother saw them, she would mind. He knew from experience the parental row that would result from that; it was the constant row for the last three years of his life, though they tried to keep it from him.

The gel-like substance was cold. A soft sigh escaped him as his father sat down on the bed next to him and began rubbing it in. The smell did nothing for the nausea that started to rise up after the Cruciatus though.

"Mm, I feel a bit sick." He tried to hide the twitch and then the shake that went through him. "Will you, will you sit with me, Dad?"


The Professor put the jar aside and propped his back against the pillows. Dittany was far too frequent an accompaniment to his time with his son. It was no surprise to either that the older his son got, the worse this all became.

A very poor semblance of quiet time, sitting with his son while he healed.

He preferred the days of more active espionage, no matter how harrowing; this slow decay was somewhat more torturous than death for him. There was not much to be done to change matters. The only thing that kept either he or the shadow of Hermione Granger going was their son, of that he was perfectly sure. It was easy to bear a life of 95% burning hellfire if meant the relative welfare of your child.

Especially when that child deposited his head on your chest and put an arm around you.

He put a hand on top of his son's head, idly fingering his hair, and the other on the upper arm laid across him. Watching this all slowly play out for his son was becoming ever more painful even for his stalwart resolve. What came after Hogwarts would be no better, he knew. There was only so much staring into the abyss before its stare came back at you, and he knew that was hitting the younger Severus already. It was why he did not want to curse his friends with Dark magic for practice that he did not need, practice for magic the boy did not even want to use to begin with, good at it or not. Unfortunately, there would be many things he would have to do over and over again like that, in this life. There was no choice involved for his son, not even a glimmer of one.

He had signed his child up for that by the folly of ever conceiving him. He simply hated the life he sentenced the boy to, blaming himself for much of what happened everyday.

What sort of existence was it where you woke up every morning for class wondering if this would be your last day?

Your mother's last day?

Your father's last day?

In the worst possible way you could imagine, and not in paranoid exaggeration? The boy already had the visual, unfortunately.

He knew his son thought that every morning; Sev told him so before he was even a teenager, as sick as it was. It was real, and it was true, and he could hardly deny the truth or lay any comfort in the matter. Reality necessitated that he prepare the boy for that end, even. Prepare him for it. Prepare him to die. Why he had proven a beacon for such gut-wrenching tasks, he had little idea.

What life necessitated discussing how that particular finality could, would, or should come about with his then not even thirteen year old son? That memory constantly echoed in his head, where he had to reassure his son that, yes, if it came to that, he could take solace in knowing his own father would kill him painlessly before anything worse than that could happen.

That conversation had been precipitated by his son witnessing and having to pretend to partake in worse than death, and watching his father do the same.

It was a promise he was loathed to keep, because he knew one day he would have to keep it. This could not go on infinitely. They both knew it. All of them knew it. The moment he looked at that face and kept his word would surely be his worst moment alive, and thankfully his last as well.

Hermione had once shouted at him that perhaps he was in Purgatory, which being half-blood, he entirely understood conceptually. She had apologized for it later, but it was apt, and it was apt that she cut at him. It had been long over by then anyway. They were then separated by a chasm of reality; he aware of it and she firmly in denial, in a hole of futility with Weasley, but it did not make her less right in the circumstances. He was reliving his own horrid payment for every sin he had ever committed, partaken of, observed, or even dreamed. She was absolutely right.

"Dad?"

He pulled out of his fatalistic thoughts. "Yes?"

"Stop worrying."

"How do you figure that's what I'm doing?" There were definite drawbacks to having a smart child. That and strong magical bonds seemed to foster that sort of intuition.

"You're playing with my hair, sir. Easy enough to deduce when you always do that after I take a beating..."

"I was merely worrying about whether or not you realize it's been unacceptable to throw up on me since just after you five years old," he replied, silkily.

His son's half-muffled chuckle vibrated against his chest before an ironic spasm of his son's diaphragm sent another shake through him, followed by an uncomfortable groan. With a resilient spirit, the boy replied, "That's why I stopped eating before Dark Arts class, so you can stop worrying about that too."


AN - I hope you all like the flashback chapter! If you do let me know, I'll plan to do a few more of them. Otherwise there might just be one more where you'll see some of the things he's had to do.

Read? Review Please!