Author's Note: I'm back! Wow, I really like writing fanfiction. Whoo-hoo!
Like it or hate it, here we go...
***
Instinctively Snape raised his head at the sight of the reptilian monster, but Malfoy stooped down instantly and clapped his hand to the prostrate man's black-enshrouded forehead. The back of Snape's skull was slammed down into the dirt of the grave beneath him.
Into his limited range of vision drifted the somber snake-face of the only man he'd ever seen who could pull off the title of "Dark Lord" without appearing ridiculously self-obsessed. His visage made Snape want to squirm away, but the strength of the robed men holding him made even twitching nearly impossible.
The thing's mouth opened, much wider than it should have, and it spoke in a low, grinding voice that rumbled the lowest octaves in the range of human hearing. "So, we've a Snape tonight," it said. Its eyes were cold now, but a slight aura of humanness touched them with a look of keen intelligence that made Snape imagine him to be capable of emotion equal to any ordinary man, anger most of all.
"The only Snape I knew was an idiot. They tell me his son was even more a fool. But you have come highly recommended by your Death Maker." He paused, and there was silence. "A Malfoy has never yet told me tales." A scaly, long-fingered hand rose and gestured towards the top of Severus' head, where Malfoy crouched. "Now let him find out why he was brought here. Begin, Malfoy."
Snape would have been confused by what he heard if he had listened to it on a summer's day in his own silent dwelling. In this moment, in which everything seemed strange and his life appeared to be in immediate danger, he could hardly even focus on the... Dark Lord's meaning.
It calmed his thumping heart but little when Malfoy let go of his head and began to speak, as though he were reading from a script inside his head.
"I declare myself Death Maker to this Snape," he intoned, standing up to tower above the mentioned man's eye level. Down the long track of his nose, Severus felt a droplet of cold sweat trickle, and realized that he feared for his life. From this seed of emotion came a sudden flare of malice toward Malfoy; Malfoy the Death Maker. The man who was now repeating a question which he had just asked and of which Snape had not been aware.
"How will pledge yourself; to faithful service or a coward's death?" Malfoy demanded, looking at him emotionlessly. It was like looking into the eyes of a cat; one got the feeling that if someone stumbled into the room with a sword in his chest, he would have snidely remarked upon the mess and gone about his business.
Snape allowed himself a look of disdain and answered with his head tilted back so that he would have looked very snooty if he had been standing. "I will serve any wizard who can best me. I do hope you were not referring to yourself, Lucius," he shot viciously at Malfoy; a small revenge for having invited him here.
"I shall repeat the question, and I expect that you will be able to answer such a simple query on the third attempt. Now-"
"Silence, Malfoy. Let him up; let go, all of you." The voice of the Dark Lord broiled in Snape's ears, making him regret his rash speech. Still, it was quite a relief to feel the weights lift from his limbs and to be able to push himself into a sitting position. He pointedly did not seek out the eyes of the Dark Lord until he had drawn out his wand and regained his feet. The look on that face was terrible: it smiled and stared at him unblinkingly.
"Not like your grandsire. And I had expected a sniveling boy." He kept on smiling and his eyes seemed to grow even wider, as Snape found that he could not turn away his gaze. "Yes, that's right, isn't it? They called you Snivellus. How clever."
A fire burned down Snape's spine, and his pale face paled slightly more at a memory that should have been tucked safely inside his own mind. Suddenly he was reliving vividly raw memories of vile days in the halls of Hogwarts' School. There was Potter's face, upside down to Snape's eyes and laughing pitilessly. In a trice he had gone, and the face became instead the snake-like abomination.
"Everything is so very close to the surface in your mind. Everything that wounds you." The creature closed its eyes at last while Snape stood ramrod straight and gaped with horrified rage. Into the moments he had most regretted and feared, the Dark Lord had thrust him without warning. At that moment, he hated himself as he had in school; nearly as much as he had hated Potter and his gang. Wide-eyed with the strength of those moments and the freshness of his self-loathing, he turned his eyes away from the Dark Lord, who smiled and spoke again.
"So then, you are as pitiful as I imagined," he said, his smile fading to a look of disgust. "Not so much in that you let me into your head," he continued, moving closer, "and not even for allowing such trivialities to bring you to your knees. Figuratively, of course. You're still standing, and that's a plus. But, you see, you've dropped your wand..."
Snapping out of his miserable thoughts like a swimmer breaking away from a deadly riptide, Snape realized with horror that the snake-thing was right. His limp fingers had unconsciously lost their grip on the barrel of the wand, and it lay uselessly on the ground at his left side. Immediately he stooped to pick it up, not noticing as the Dark Lord's hand raised his own wand into the air.
"Crucio!" cried the Dark Lords in an inhuman voice, pointing his wand at Snape and fixing his horrible eyes on his victim's face. In a most undignified manner, Snape plunged forward, face first, with the force of the searing, horrible pain that hit him like a blast of lightning. He felt as though he could not breath; that his limbs were being torn from his torso, that his skin was being flayed, that his muscles were being ripped away from his bones. His eyes seemed to be shredding their sockets, and he felt such a horrible, sharp feeling in his innards that a dagger thrust into his stomach could have no more increased his pain than ended it. Though he could not tell, there issued from his mouth a loud, un- controllable, moaning cry which faded into a burbling sound as his lungs ran out of breath to sustain it.
He had missed the wand altogether; it might have been in another world, the pain was so all-consuming. Until suddenly it ceased, and he found himself with his face in the damp grass of an older grave, suddenly able to feel the wand pressing into his body. He realized he had fallen upon it as his senses began to straighten themselves. All at once his ears became attuned to the sound of the Dark Lord's approach. Lifting his head, he felt the sudden urge to vomit. He felt it coming up his throat, but managed to control himself before he wretched all over the headstone beside the place where he had fallen.
"Hmm. Many a better man than you have made a mess of themselves after such an ordeal. I will give you that." By now, Snape was blinking his exhausted, bloodshot eyes and regaining some sense of where he was and what was going on. He felt his fingers brush the wood of his wand as he reached towards it blearily from his new kneeling position. For once, he was not angry, but instead terrified into a sort of blazing calm that reached his eyes in a cold, lively glint, as though they had crystallized into sharpened diamond points.
With a sudden, awkward movement he threw himself forward and gripped the wand tightly. Whirling around in the general direction of his torturer (his head was still spinning a bit) he flicked his wand and shouted at the top of his voice, "Avada kedavra!"
It was a spell from an old book of arcane magic that he had uncovered years ago left on a table in Hogwarts' grand library. It had obviously belonged in the restricted section, and had not seemed like something that any student at Hogwarts should have been allowed to see. He wondered afterward if someone or something might have placed it there where it knew he would see it. Perhaps Salazar Slytherin had left more of himself at the school than the legend of a Chamber of Secrets.
Now he pointed his wand with a steady hand, grateful for his chance acquisition of the book, as he felt a bolt of power shoot out of its tip. He heard the thump of a body fall, but when he found the awful eyes of the Dark Lord peering down at him, filled with his peculiar sort of life, he realized that he had missed. His scrambled to his feet with his stomach churning uncomfortably. At once he saw that one of his black-clad captors had fallen, and that his companions were shaking their heads, obviously aware that he would already be dead. Snape's head snapped around to find the Dark Lord's eyes again, at the same time stepping back defensively and raising his wand.
"Well, you do have a knowledge of the Art!" said the snake-man with a slight, unnerving smile. He was evidently pleased. "I wish you hadn't felled Kerchel... But better him than me, I say."
Now his frightening grin stretched literally from ear to ear, showing off his tiny pointed teeth. "On the other hand, I have lost one of my most loyal Death Eaters. Crucio!"
The pain was as bad as before, and he crumpled to his knees. He managed, this time, to hold on to his wand, simply because his muscles had clenched around it in their agony. When the pain let up- in less time than before- he could not hold back the gag reflex, and he vomited bile down the front of his black robes.
"Put him back in place, and hold him there," instructed the creature. "Though I do not think he will struggle very much."
The Death Eaters complied, assenting with a nod of the head and a somber "yes, Lord." Too disoriented to protest or even think clearly, Snape felt hands take hold of him by the shoulders and lift him onto his feet to drag him onto the Barron's grave. He had almost come to terms with still being alive when someone pushed him down and turned him onto his back, at the same time ripping his wand from his loosely clasped fingers and remembering to remove it from his reach. He could not see whence it was taken, which was not to say that he didn't strain his neck to its fullest extent in trying to look around the flowing black folds of the Death Eaters' apparel.
One of the men, the heaviest of the remaining four, sat so roughly upon his legs that he felt certain that if he lived, he might have to have his blood- starved legs amputated. The others held his arms, and Malfoy- he supposed it must be he, although he could not see his face- stood at his side.
"Now then: tell us how you will pledge yourself; to faithful service or a coward's death?" Malfoy repeated.
Snape squinted at him. "Service," he said defiantly.
"Then you will carry this dark mark as a sign: a sign that you are a disciple of the great Lord Voldemort, till the end of life and ever beyond."
With his head free, Snape was able to turn and watch as Malfoy took out a triangle-bladed silver dagger from inside his robes and pushed up his sleeve. Snape could not make out what it was, but he could tell that on Malfoy's upper arm there was some sort of mark, apparently tattooed onto the skin.
Quickly Malfoy raised the dagger to his arm and, wincing, opened a slit in the flesh at the site of the mark by making a slash across its center. With the blood running down his arm, he knelt down beside Snape and put the red- soaked knife to the flesh of his upper arm.
Severus Snape did not protest as Malfoy cut the lines into his flabby limb, but he turned his head and shut his eyes tightly. It didn't seem so bad after enduring Crucio, but the sting of the cold slicing hurt nonetheless.
The Death Eater took his time at his task and did not finish for some time. Just when he felt his resolve might not hold, that he might scream to the stars who witnessed the ceremony, the dagger-point came away from his arm, leaving the fresh wound bloody and buzzing with pain. Malfoy then put a hand to his own arm, reopened his clotting gash with his fingers, and scooped some of the blood into his hand. This he wiped into Snape's incised arm, and smeared it into the slits. A cooling, soothing feeling instantly spread over the mangled area, and Snape gave a short, involuntary sigh of relief. "The Dark Mark spawns in your flesh," Malfoy said, using that same deadpan voice. "The master will awaken you to your purpose."
Upon hearing those words, fear once more welled up inside of Snape. He could guess just from hearing the words that his ordeal was not yet over. Could it possibly get worse? he wondered, and realized cynically that he was certain it could. His conviction solidified when he saw the snake-man- he realized that he must be the "great Lord Voldemort"- gliding towards him. His wand was put away somewhere, and Snape thought to himself that at least he was probably safe from the cruciatus curse.
"This Snape has bound himself to me. I accept," said Voldemort tonelessly. He bent down towards the ground and his thin hand came towards Snape's arm, hovering a moment above the fresh red design before covering it entirely with his palm. It was worse, all right. Worse than the effects of "crucio." But Severus did not feel much of it, for after a few seconds he was driven into unconsciousness. The pain would not leave even a shadow on his memory when he awakened some time later, lying on a stone slab somewhere in the gently breathing dark.
***
What did you think? Any suggestions or comments on how I can improve? Thank you for making it to the end (or at least scrolling down to look at it!)
***
Instinctively Snape raised his head at the sight of the reptilian monster, but Malfoy stooped down instantly and clapped his hand to the prostrate man's black-enshrouded forehead. The back of Snape's skull was slammed down into the dirt of the grave beneath him.
Into his limited range of vision drifted the somber snake-face of the only man he'd ever seen who could pull off the title of "Dark Lord" without appearing ridiculously self-obsessed. His visage made Snape want to squirm away, but the strength of the robed men holding him made even twitching nearly impossible.
The thing's mouth opened, much wider than it should have, and it spoke in a low, grinding voice that rumbled the lowest octaves in the range of human hearing. "So, we've a Snape tonight," it said. Its eyes were cold now, but a slight aura of humanness touched them with a look of keen intelligence that made Snape imagine him to be capable of emotion equal to any ordinary man, anger most of all.
"The only Snape I knew was an idiot. They tell me his son was even more a fool. But you have come highly recommended by your Death Maker." He paused, and there was silence. "A Malfoy has never yet told me tales." A scaly, long-fingered hand rose and gestured towards the top of Severus' head, where Malfoy crouched. "Now let him find out why he was brought here. Begin, Malfoy."
Snape would have been confused by what he heard if he had listened to it on a summer's day in his own silent dwelling. In this moment, in which everything seemed strange and his life appeared to be in immediate danger, he could hardly even focus on the... Dark Lord's meaning.
It calmed his thumping heart but little when Malfoy let go of his head and began to speak, as though he were reading from a script inside his head.
"I declare myself Death Maker to this Snape," he intoned, standing up to tower above the mentioned man's eye level. Down the long track of his nose, Severus felt a droplet of cold sweat trickle, and realized that he feared for his life. From this seed of emotion came a sudden flare of malice toward Malfoy; Malfoy the Death Maker. The man who was now repeating a question which he had just asked and of which Snape had not been aware.
"How will pledge yourself; to faithful service or a coward's death?" Malfoy demanded, looking at him emotionlessly. It was like looking into the eyes of a cat; one got the feeling that if someone stumbled into the room with a sword in his chest, he would have snidely remarked upon the mess and gone about his business.
Snape allowed himself a look of disdain and answered with his head tilted back so that he would have looked very snooty if he had been standing. "I will serve any wizard who can best me. I do hope you were not referring to yourself, Lucius," he shot viciously at Malfoy; a small revenge for having invited him here.
"I shall repeat the question, and I expect that you will be able to answer such a simple query on the third attempt. Now-"
"Silence, Malfoy. Let him up; let go, all of you." The voice of the Dark Lord broiled in Snape's ears, making him regret his rash speech. Still, it was quite a relief to feel the weights lift from his limbs and to be able to push himself into a sitting position. He pointedly did not seek out the eyes of the Dark Lord until he had drawn out his wand and regained his feet. The look on that face was terrible: it smiled and stared at him unblinkingly.
"Not like your grandsire. And I had expected a sniveling boy." He kept on smiling and his eyes seemed to grow even wider, as Snape found that he could not turn away his gaze. "Yes, that's right, isn't it? They called you Snivellus. How clever."
A fire burned down Snape's spine, and his pale face paled slightly more at a memory that should have been tucked safely inside his own mind. Suddenly he was reliving vividly raw memories of vile days in the halls of Hogwarts' School. There was Potter's face, upside down to Snape's eyes and laughing pitilessly. In a trice he had gone, and the face became instead the snake-like abomination.
"Everything is so very close to the surface in your mind. Everything that wounds you." The creature closed its eyes at last while Snape stood ramrod straight and gaped with horrified rage. Into the moments he had most regretted and feared, the Dark Lord had thrust him without warning. At that moment, he hated himself as he had in school; nearly as much as he had hated Potter and his gang. Wide-eyed with the strength of those moments and the freshness of his self-loathing, he turned his eyes away from the Dark Lord, who smiled and spoke again.
"So then, you are as pitiful as I imagined," he said, his smile fading to a look of disgust. "Not so much in that you let me into your head," he continued, moving closer, "and not even for allowing such trivialities to bring you to your knees. Figuratively, of course. You're still standing, and that's a plus. But, you see, you've dropped your wand..."
Snapping out of his miserable thoughts like a swimmer breaking away from a deadly riptide, Snape realized with horror that the snake-thing was right. His limp fingers had unconsciously lost their grip on the barrel of the wand, and it lay uselessly on the ground at his left side. Immediately he stooped to pick it up, not noticing as the Dark Lord's hand raised his own wand into the air.
"Crucio!" cried the Dark Lords in an inhuman voice, pointing his wand at Snape and fixing his horrible eyes on his victim's face. In a most undignified manner, Snape plunged forward, face first, with the force of the searing, horrible pain that hit him like a blast of lightning. He felt as though he could not breath; that his limbs were being torn from his torso, that his skin was being flayed, that his muscles were being ripped away from his bones. His eyes seemed to be shredding their sockets, and he felt such a horrible, sharp feeling in his innards that a dagger thrust into his stomach could have no more increased his pain than ended it. Though he could not tell, there issued from his mouth a loud, un- controllable, moaning cry which faded into a burbling sound as his lungs ran out of breath to sustain it.
He had missed the wand altogether; it might have been in another world, the pain was so all-consuming. Until suddenly it ceased, and he found himself with his face in the damp grass of an older grave, suddenly able to feel the wand pressing into his body. He realized he had fallen upon it as his senses began to straighten themselves. All at once his ears became attuned to the sound of the Dark Lord's approach. Lifting his head, he felt the sudden urge to vomit. He felt it coming up his throat, but managed to control himself before he wretched all over the headstone beside the place where he had fallen.
"Hmm. Many a better man than you have made a mess of themselves after such an ordeal. I will give you that." By now, Snape was blinking his exhausted, bloodshot eyes and regaining some sense of where he was and what was going on. He felt his fingers brush the wood of his wand as he reached towards it blearily from his new kneeling position. For once, he was not angry, but instead terrified into a sort of blazing calm that reached his eyes in a cold, lively glint, as though they had crystallized into sharpened diamond points.
With a sudden, awkward movement he threw himself forward and gripped the wand tightly. Whirling around in the general direction of his torturer (his head was still spinning a bit) he flicked his wand and shouted at the top of his voice, "Avada kedavra!"
It was a spell from an old book of arcane magic that he had uncovered years ago left on a table in Hogwarts' grand library. It had obviously belonged in the restricted section, and had not seemed like something that any student at Hogwarts should have been allowed to see. He wondered afterward if someone or something might have placed it there where it knew he would see it. Perhaps Salazar Slytherin had left more of himself at the school than the legend of a Chamber of Secrets.
Now he pointed his wand with a steady hand, grateful for his chance acquisition of the book, as he felt a bolt of power shoot out of its tip. He heard the thump of a body fall, but when he found the awful eyes of the Dark Lord peering down at him, filled with his peculiar sort of life, he realized that he had missed. His scrambled to his feet with his stomach churning uncomfortably. At once he saw that one of his black-clad captors had fallen, and that his companions were shaking their heads, obviously aware that he would already be dead. Snape's head snapped around to find the Dark Lord's eyes again, at the same time stepping back defensively and raising his wand.
"Well, you do have a knowledge of the Art!" said the snake-man with a slight, unnerving smile. He was evidently pleased. "I wish you hadn't felled Kerchel... But better him than me, I say."
Now his frightening grin stretched literally from ear to ear, showing off his tiny pointed teeth. "On the other hand, I have lost one of my most loyal Death Eaters. Crucio!"
The pain was as bad as before, and he crumpled to his knees. He managed, this time, to hold on to his wand, simply because his muscles had clenched around it in their agony. When the pain let up- in less time than before- he could not hold back the gag reflex, and he vomited bile down the front of his black robes.
"Put him back in place, and hold him there," instructed the creature. "Though I do not think he will struggle very much."
The Death Eaters complied, assenting with a nod of the head and a somber "yes, Lord." Too disoriented to protest or even think clearly, Snape felt hands take hold of him by the shoulders and lift him onto his feet to drag him onto the Barron's grave. He had almost come to terms with still being alive when someone pushed him down and turned him onto his back, at the same time ripping his wand from his loosely clasped fingers and remembering to remove it from his reach. He could not see whence it was taken, which was not to say that he didn't strain his neck to its fullest extent in trying to look around the flowing black folds of the Death Eaters' apparel.
One of the men, the heaviest of the remaining four, sat so roughly upon his legs that he felt certain that if he lived, he might have to have his blood- starved legs amputated. The others held his arms, and Malfoy- he supposed it must be he, although he could not see his face- stood at his side.
"Now then: tell us how you will pledge yourself; to faithful service or a coward's death?" Malfoy repeated.
Snape squinted at him. "Service," he said defiantly.
"Then you will carry this dark mark as a sign: a sign that you are a disciple of the great Lord Voldemort, till the end of life and ever beyond."
With his head free, Snape was able to turn and watch as Malfoy took out a triangle-bladed silver dagger from inside his robes and pushed up his sleeve. Snape could not make out what it was, but he could tell that on Malfoy's upper arm there was some sort of mark, apparently tattooed onto the skin.
Quickly Malfoy raised the dagger to his arm and, wincing, opened a slit in the flesh at the site of the mark by making a slash across its center. With the blood running down his arm, he knelt down beside Snape and put the red- soaked knife to the flesh of his upper arm.
Severus Snape did not protest as Malfoy cut the lines into his flabby limb, but he turned his head and shut his eyes tightly. It didn't seem so bad after enduring Crucio, but the sting of the cold slicing hurt nonetheless.
The Death Eater took his time at his task and did not finish for some time. Just when he felt his resolve might not hold, that he might scream to the stars who witnessed the ceremony, the dagger-point came away from his arm, leaving the fresh wound bloody and buzzing with pain. Malfoy then put a hand to his own arm, reopened his clotting gash with his fingers, and scooped some of the blood into his hand. This he wiped into Snape's incised arm, and smeared it into the slits. A cooling, soothing feeling instantly spread over the mangled area, and Snape gave a short, involuntary sigh of relief. "The Dark Mark spawns in your flesh," Malfoy said, using that same deadpan voice. "The master will awaken you to your purpose."
Upon hearing those words, fear once more welled up inside of Snape. He could guess just from hearing the words that his ordeal was not yet over. Could it possibly get worse? he wondered, and realized cynically that he was certain it could. His conviction solidified when he saw the snake-man- he realized that he must be the "great Lord Voldemort"- gliding towards him. His wand was put away somewhere, and Snape thought to himself that at least he was probably safe from the cruciatus curse.
"This Snape has bound himself to me. I accept," said Voldemort tonelessly. He bent down towards the ground and his thin hand came towards Snape's arm, hovering a moment above the fresh red design before covering it entirely with his palm. It was worse, all right. Worse than the effects of "crucio." But Severus did not feel much of it, for after a few seconds he was driven into unconsciousness. The pain would not leave even a shadow on his memory when he awakened some time later, lying on a stone slab somewhere in the gently breathing dark.
***
What did you think? Any suggestions or comments on how I can improve? Thank you for making it to the end (or at least scrolling down to look at it!)
