Disclaimer & Author's Notes: It's been quite a while, but I'm back – and the muse is calling strongly. No longer a one-shot: Musings is turning into a full-length post-war fic. HBP-compliant; there be spoilers here. These spoilers, as well as all the characters, are the brainchildren and property of the great J. K. Rowling. I'm using them to gain no money...but please review! It puts life into my day!
It is hard to make goodness – and good people – sound interesting. Yet the good are worthy of note, of course, because they battle and that battle is a great story, whereas the evil are evil because of moral laziness, or weakness, and that is ultimately a dull and uninteresting affair. -Alexander McCall Smith
Chapter 1: Preludium
From somewhere very far back in his mind, a tenuous thought arose.
Haven't I done enough?
He didn't even bother to dismiss the thought.
It was never enough.
For ten years he'd had that burned into his mind; he bent his knees, his head, his will to it all. For twenty more years he'd lived by it. It was far too late to stop.
He tended not to think about the time before he'd left. The last year he ran with the Death Eaters as one of them had ceased to trouble his thoughts. He'd taken the memories, rammed the shame down his own throat, forced himself to swallow the revulsion and the pain and the overwhelming, searing guilt. He'd used every tactic the Dark Lord had taught him.
One corner of his mouth lifted slightly. The Dark Lord was good; his training flawless.
"Oh, Severus is smart," his own parents had said of him. "Too smart for his own good." True, certainly. The Dark Lord had seen that; he'd seen everything. One look and he'd seen every day Severus had ever lived: every taunt he couldn't endure, every failed retaliation; every time he'd hid from his furious parents, put his fist through a window, hexed a squirrel. He'd seen and he'd made good use of it. The best.
He modified his training for each individual. Bella was coaxed gently along, given opportunities for sadistic pleasure at a level that she'd never imagined. Lucius had been cowed by fear, then intoxicated by the lure of power.
But Severus was taught to appreciate his intellect: how to use it, how to strengthen it, how to hide in it when the world was too much. He was taught how to react, how to plan ahead, how to make decisions quickly. He was trained to separate his mind from his body; an abusive parent always jump-started that process, and the Dark Lord finished it well.
The Dark Lord had also – somewhat inadvertently – made them all masters of tact. Only the smart, the careful, and the lucky survive a rough interview.
And then he, the Dark Lord's servant, had taken himself away. Every technique of disguise, every breath of secrecy and stealth was used against his master. And, as so often happens, the apprentice had won. The perfect fighter, the intellect unmoved by emotion, the wand that never trembled had pointed at the Dark Lord himself. From behind his back, of course; the only way to survive. And he had survived, and the Dark Lord had not.
No, it wasn't the memories of those years that still brought him shame; it was the day he'd decided to leave.
When had the moment of decision occurred? It passed by without him noticing. He was used to making split-second choices, used to trusting himself without wasting time in analyzing his own thoughts. He'd Apparated to Hogsmeade almost without realizing it and followed his memories onto the Hogwarts grounds. He had nearly faltered then – the memories of all his failures on those lawns had nearly overwhelmed him – but he forced his memories to push him onward instead of back. Once inside the castle, he'd headed straight to Dumbledore. Of course.
This was the part that brought the heat to his face and drove his teeth to chew his lower lip. He'd walked in, absolutely, shiningly certain that once he'd forced those few words out, he'd be free. Forever.
How could he have thought that; how could his intellect have deserted him for those crucial moments; in the wail of a student, how could he have been so stupid?
The first thing Dumbledore had taught him – his new teacher, now, but one who disdained any notion of mastership; and, to be sure, Snape was in no mood for another master – was that things hadn't changed. The fighting among friends, the backstabbing, the distrust were perhaps even more evident when one was on the side of Good.
There would be no trust, no acceptance from a soul in the Order – except, of course, Dumbledore. And that distrust, of course, was not only predictable but right. How Dumbledore could have believed him, how he had known Dumbledore would believe him: these were best left unconsidered. A drowning man will grasp the right straw sometimes. Especially if he's smart.
But it was out of the frying pan and into the fire for Snape, and the conversation in Dumbledore's office gained momentum as that became clear. Finally Dumbledore had looked at him with those eyes that carefully refrained from seeing anything they shouldn't, and ended the conversation and all of Snape's hopes.
"You do realize that in order to position yourself to the best advantage, to become our most valued man, and – I will not hide this from you – to prove your loyalty to the rest of the Order of the Phoenix, you will have to go back to Voldemort."
Severus stood up from the sterile infirmary chair and paced over to the window, stood looking out, unseeing. His body was poised, listening for any change in the rough breathing of the boy in the bed.
"Throughout our whole lives, we shall be kept fully employed with our own selves, taming our body, killing its passions, controlling its members till they obey, not the passions, but the spirit."
He had been muttering that one day; it was one of the Dark Lord's favourites. He was seated on the floor, crammed into a corner. With every clause he pounded his fist against the stone beneath him; blood was seeping and drying around his knuckles. The door opened, Dumbledore's feet walked calmly into his field of view, and he killed the impulse to jump up and apologize.
"Interesting choice of words," the headmaster said. Snape gritted his teeth. He couldn't stop saying them, words that bound him to the Dark Lord surer than any spell.
"I meant that," went on the voice from above, sounding slightly amused, and Severus now had to squash the impulse to stab the irritating feet which were now tapping happily around him. "Martin Luther. Preface to the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans."
The feet had strolled across the room and were almost at the door again. Severus's head came up. "What?" he asked. Stupidly. Like a fool.
Dumbledore turned, his hand on the doorknob. "Martin Luther. German theologian, 1522. Muggles call him the father of the Reformation? Those were his words." He opened the door and was gone. Theatrically.
Severus was still, eyebrows knit together, breathing lightly. The seconds ticked by. And for the first time in twenty years, the Potions master leaned back against the wall and laughed till the tears came.
And the tears fell, and stopped. He wiped his face on the knees of his robe and pulled himself to his feet.
From that one slender thread of hope, that what the Dark Lord had corrupted might not always be evil, he clawed his way back into life. By the Dark Lord's methods, no less. Voluntarily working through every exercise he had been forced to perform as a teenager, he would sit at night for hours in silence, pulling the memories before his eyes. A house afire. The look on a child's face as she opened her eyes for the last time. The detached hand of an old woman, slightly squashy under his foot.
He pushed his mind farther and farther, ignoring the tears and the sobs that gasped from his throat. The first torture session he'd observed. The first time he'd been assigned to punish a recalcitrant apprentice. The longed-for look of parental pleasure on his mother's face as her son received the Dark Mark, and the unbelieving pride...control, control, take it...looking at the tattoo – his vindication, his reason for living...push farther, don't stop... The joy – the ecstasy – of his first major battle, the fierce hot passion as his trained muscles pushed him on and his clean mind cut through the confusion and his sharpened spells sang through the darkness to bury themselves in flesh –
He'd pushed himself to his limits once more, and found (once more) that he could exceed them. And a week after that scene, he presented himself in Dumbledore's office: cleaned, calmed, controlled, and ready to walk back into the lion's den.
And so it began again. Eighteen more years among the lions. And at the end of those eighteen years, he had...he had paid the price for his liberty.
And then there'd been another year.
And it would never be enough.
The boy on the bed sighed in his sleep and Severus Snape returned to his seat, rested his head on his hand, and resumed his watching.