Chapter 3: I Will Make You Proud

Severus could not believe his eyes. He was clearly living in a waking nightmare, dropped into a hell of someone else's sadistic making without warning or mercy. What trickery, what villainy was this? He'd already tried pinching himself and had seriously considered performing a countercurse for magically conjured illusions, just to see if there was some alternate explanation for what was at this moment being presented to him as reality.

But he hadn't woken up. An act of malignant sorcery, this sight before him was not.

No. Just the despicable act of violence and all that it had wrought – that was the act of malignant sorcery, all too real and all too cruel. These were just the effects.

For here she lay, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and ever known, lying curled in a prone position in the hospital cot here in St. Mungo's Ward for Psychologically Disturbed Individuals. Just the title of the wing elicited a bizarre kind of mirth from him that now attempted to inappropriately grapple with the misery his eyes and ears were forced to confront, as Severus recalled the words to a song in some musical play the lady now languishing here had dragged him to, when they were children. A bunch of street urchins, yahoos, laughing at themselves and declaring that their own psychological states of mind were disturbed, were disturbed, were the most disturbed. As if the plea of insanity was nothing more than a joke.

Except what Severus now beheld in the bed was far from a joke, and it certainly wasn't funny. Though, as he had already been tragically informed, it did have all the markings of true insanity.

Lillian Potter (neé Evans) had been quite literally tortured into delirium, the assessments of Healers and the initial investigation into the attack on her and her husband were now finding. A quick Trace on her unconscious body had revealed the cause: the Cruciatus Curse, one of the three Unforgivables, so egregious and unspeakable that all well-adjusted, humane wizards had long ago declared such acts of wizardry to be illegal. Exactly how many times Lily had been subjected to the forbidden spell, the curse, was proving more difficult to determine: a magical Trace, whether performed on the wand of the accused caster or on the subject of its conjuring, was more effective at determining exactly what spell had been cast; a procedure like this tended to reveal nothing about how many repetitions of the same spell may or may not have been performed. For such a more in-depth analysis, more advanced magic would be called for, and it still might not tell investigators everything they needed to know anyway. Right now, the Trace on Lily's sprawled, unconscious form acted as little more than a magical cousin to the study of, say, gunshot residue. As a weapon of war, wands, like rifles, were still bound by the aftershocks of what their power left behind.

But Severus wasn't much concerned about any of that, at least not at present. The real question was: who? Who could have done this? On that point, the Trace was also proving elusive, although more hopefully, the identity of the caster could be narrowed down to a much more workable pool of suspects from what the evidence alone had gleaned. Still, that kind of probing work would too take time. Severus nonetheless had a feeling he knew: right now, his gut feeling was working just as hard as the interdisciplinary experts working to bring this monstrous perpetrator to justice.

Right now, the facts as they had been presented were these: Aurors had received a tip and call-in to the tiny wizarding village of Godric's Hollow, only to find the home of a married couple of prominent Order of the Phoenix members nearly razed to ash. The team of magical officers had treaded lightly, bracing themselves to find only bodies…. so it had come as a shock to them when they found the occupants of the Potter household, not only alive, but in various degrees of condition, ranging from critical (that would have been Mr. Potter and his young wife) to, most perplexingly…. perfectly well, in the case of the couple's baby boy. The infant was now being attended to by the highest echelons of the Hogwarts staff, which just so happened to also double as the power behind the throne of the resistance to Lord Voldemort's pureblood supremacist insurgency. Severus had received assurances from higher authorities there that Lily's baby, called Harry, would be placed somewhere safely, the arrangements of which were probably being ironed out as he just stood here stupidly, still in shock.

Immediately, it had been adjudicated that the condition of the father was far more egregious; Severus had watched as Healers frantically dashed into the sickbed partition the next cot over, the curtains respectfully drawn, desperate to save the man. But some time ago, he had observed nurses leaving the emergency magical triage weeping bitterly, some of them wailing.

It was tragic, he convinced himself, how James Potter – his schoolyard rival, bully and the bane of his existence since they were 11 – had met such an unjust end, even for the likes of him. Severus wouldn't wish that fate on his worst enemy, even as James had been in top contention to be one of those.

Although…. he now was sorely tempted to draw up a hit list of other great enemies of his to wish this kind of revenge upon. Enemies that he had once courted, counted as allies, even friends. For it was they who were responsible for no one less than the love of his life being reduced to a blithering madwoman, uncertain as to where she was or who she was. And with equally great uncertainty as to whether she would ever be the breathtakingly beautiful woman, mother and wife she had been ever again.

Though Lily's prognosis was considered better than that of her husband (how much of that comparison was relative was anyone's guess, least of all Severus's), the outlook for any sort of treatment was bleak. The Healers at St. Mungo's had experience in treating Cruciatus victims before, the frequency of which had been growing at an alarming rate, almost exponential, in recent years. James may have succumbed to his injuries, but the doom loop limbo to which Lily had been condemned seemed to all those observing to be a fate worse than death. The Healers were not confident she would regain her memories, that she would be forced to drift standing still through life in some kind of masochist twist on the Groundhog Day tale, reliving the same day over and over again, each night the slate wiped clean of any memories made. She would very probably no longer remember names or faces of those who might visit her, nor would she be able to recall defining life moments or happier times: the day she received her Hogwarts letter. Her first kiss. Her wedding day. The summer night she had given birth to a son. It had taken an act of the most despicable kind to essentially revert her to a state of childlike innocence, unable to be molded or shaped by the experiences of the immediate world around her. Little more than a blob. Even if Lily ever did manage to open her eyes and rejoin the world of the living, the Healers seemed fairly grim in their conventional wisdom that this would be her fate, for the rest of her life.

That would hardly do, Severus already knew. When he had accosted a passing nurse as to whether there was any hope Lily or any victim of Cruciatus could return to full cognitive or psychological strength, the Healer had hedged. "It is a delicate question," she had put to him with the commensurate gentleness and neutrality such an obfuscating, clinical statement demanded. "The chances that such a thing might be possible… are unclear."

Severus had taken her uncertainty to mean that there was still a chance, however unprecedented or slim, that his Lily might return to him. Perhaps recognizing the hope in his eyes, the kindly Healer had attempted to caution him pityingly not to yearn for too much. Better to temper his expectations with a dash of disappointment. Most Cruciatus Curse victims who had managed to survive an initial onslaught of this magnitude were studied intensely, and found to be not too dissimilar to those afflicted with the Muggle developmental disorder known as Autism. Though such a diagnosis emerged almost exclusively in the first years of childhood, Cruciatus Curse victims were known to struggle with many of the same neurological problems: the push and pull dichotomy between expressive and receptive language, for instance. Should she wake, it would be as though there was a firewall in Lily's brain, entombing her and dooming her to be more or less a prisoner of her own enfeebled mind. Unlike Autism, however, only the permanence of this mental firewall remained in mysterious question.

Severus refused to believe that she was enfeebled or that her brilliance had in any way been reduced. The damn spell had merely discombobulated her into a jumbled mess. It may have done this, but his Lily and all her sparkling intelligence was locked away in there somewhere, he was sure of it, and all he had to do was get it out.

And he would get it out, he vowed. But first, it was time for a few bills to come due. Here lying in this bed was proof that a Death Eater could never be taken at his worthless word, not even if that word came down from the Dark Lord himself. Severus had interceded on this good woman's behalf. He had dared to show enough arrogance to presume that he could beg the Dark Lord for any sort of boon. He had pleaded for the man to spare this lady's life. And, to his shock and relief, Voldemort had promised mercy.

Voldemort had lied. Severus might still not yet be sure that the man himself had been the one to transform his poor Lillian into a shell of her former self, or if one of His deputies had done the deed on His orders, but regardless, damn him if he, Severus, wasn't going to find out. He would have the truth, and follow the facts wherever they may lead. He would and could tread lightly, having mastered the ability to live in the gray for some time now. He would uncover who had done this to her, the woman he loved, the woman who he had one day hoped to marry, perhaps could have, if she would have had him and things - so many things! - were different. In the meantime, as it pertained to matters of her health, Severus knew Lillian would be safe here, and he would visit her dutifully as often as he could, when he found the time.

But first: he had a new mission, a new purpose to fulfill, as he reached out to take Lily's clammy hand in his own. She did not stir at his touch, though the health monitor to which she was connected did jump and beep, her nervous system registering the touch of human connection, of intimacy.

"Don't worry, Lily. I will get to the bottom of this…." His voice broke: "I promise."

And one more vow he now gave her, even as he wondered if she could even hear him:

"I will make you proud. Get the answers and set you free! Don't you worry, whatever it might take, I'm finding a way…. And I swear right now, that no matter what comes of me, anybody who stands or has stood in my path, they are going to PAY!"

He felt his free hand clench into a determined fist, and when he lifted his head, his eyes, black as coal, flashed with outraged steel.

"They….. will….. pay!"

A/N: Song Credit: Alan Menken, Tangled the Series.