WARNING: Graphic gore.
Intermission: Disaster, Thy Name Is Regulus
"Severus."
Snape stiffened at the sound of his first name, and glanced over his shoulder. Regulus Black stood behind him in the early summer darkness, his head cocked and his eyes gleaming with intensity. Snape didn't remember that intensity from school. Granted, Regulus had been a year younger than he was, even if they were in the same House, but Snape had made it his business to know him, since he was Sirius Black's brother. He should have noticed something like this.
"What are you doing here?" Snape asked. "Here" was the remains of a wizarding community just past the Scottish border. It was the closest the Death Eaters had yet attacked to Hogwarts, but Snape knew that would change. Besides, angering Dumbledore and panicking his followers hadn't been the main reason they staged this attack where they did. It was a sufficiently isolated place to test the Black Plague spores that Adalrico Bulstrode had finally managed to create. The Dark Lord was not entirely pleased with the results, however, so it would be some time before the spores saw use in formal battle. Snape nudged the remains of a swollen body with his foot, and wrinkled his nose. His Lord had ordered him to search for tatters of bubo-marked skin which he could brew into a potion to neutralize the plague. It would be important to have that for the Death Eaters once the spores worked properly, Snape knew, but he found the task distasteful. The bodies stank.
"I'm out of Hogwarts now." Regulus leaped lightly over a body and joined Snape, giving a peculiar shudder as he landed. The smell did take getting used to, Snape thought. Regulus rolled up his sleeve and thrust his left arm under Snape's nose, forcing him to confront the Dark Mark. "And I chose to follow our Lord."
Snape glanced quickly at Regulus, then away. "Of course you did," he said. He wondered why the news should have surprised him. Everyone knew that Sirius Black had run away from home at the end of Christmas holidays in their sixth year, and that his parents had disowned him and settled on Regulus as their heir. Of course the Dark Lord would court the only heir of such a prominent, Dark, pureblood family, since the oldest son was beyond his reach and firmly wrapped up in the webs of the Order of the Phoenix.
"Yes." Regulus kicked at a body, then shook his head. "How do you stand the smell?"
"Not easily." Snape saw a woman with a still-intact black bubble on her chest, and knelt, using a Cutting Curse to remove the patch of infected skin. Blood spread where it had been in a sluggish, disinterested stain. He rose and wrapped the skin in a bit of cloth, tucking it into his robe pocket. "Did the Dark Lord send you to find me?"
Regulus jumped a bit. "Oh! Yes, he did. He said that he wanted you to return to him as soon as possible. Something even more urgent than creating a potion to resist the plague has arisen." His voice fell into a stentorian imitation of Voldemort's tones. Probably unconscious, Snape decided. At least, he hoped it was unconscious. He would not live long if their Lord decided that Regulus was mocking him.
"Then we must go to him at once," said Snape, and turned to stride over the ground paved with sprawled limbs and burst organs.
"Of course," said Regulus again.
It took Snape a full three minutes to realize he had reached the edge of the village and Regulus wasn't with him. He turned around, an impatient comment on his lips.
He saw Regulus kneeling over a woman whose head had leaped off her neck when the spores landed, carefully aligning the broken pieces of skin once more and closing the head's eyes. Snape wondered, incredulous, if he would say a mending spell, but Regulus seemed to realize how inappropriate that would be. He just stood, nodded a moment at his handiwork, and then hurried after Snape. He even took the lead a moment later, in fact; Snape had to stand still and stare after him, wondering what in the world had prompted him to make that unnecessary gesture.
"He's dead."
Snape came very close to breaking his glass stirring rod on the side of his cauldron. He tended to enter brewing so deeply that he was not aware of what was happening around him. A weakness, he knew, and one that he must take steps to correct. He laid the stirring rod gently aside, without letting his hand tremble, and turned to face Lucius.
"Do you think I keep track of your comings and goings, Lucius?" he drawled, and had the satisfaction of seeing Lucius's triumph-flushed face turn red for a different reason. "Who is dead?"
"Gideon Prewett," said Lucius, with savage satisfaction. "And his brother Fabian. It took us five of them, but we brought them down."
Snape nodded curtly, to keep from saying something unfortunate, namely how pathetic it was that it had taken five Death Eaters to kill two Light wizards. Yes, the Prewett twins were famous, respected wizards, but the Dark Lord's followers were supposed to be more powerful—those who had the desire and the will to conquer death.
"Enjoy your prize, Lucius," he said, as he turned back to his potion. Voldemort had wished for a potion that would allow anyone to mimic the effect of the Dementor's Kiss. So far, Snape was having no luck. There was simply not enough information available about Dementors, even in the vast libraries he had access to as Voldemort's trusted servant; few wizards had ever been interested in them.
"I will," said Lucius, his voice gone languid and content. "This is the last of the major attacks for a month's time, and Narcissa is waiting."
Snape heard the pop of Apparition from behind him, and returned to his cauldron. Or, he tried to return to his cauldron. In a few moments, he had to put the stirring rod down and pace in a circle. He made sure it looked as if he were trying to stretch muscles tense from the bowed position the brewing had put him in. He was largely alone in this wing of the Riddle house, but one never knew who might be watching. And, of course, his Occlumency barriers were up, as they always were.
He could not show that the tension in his muscles came from wild contempt, of the kind he had felt a year ago for the Mudblood children killed in his initiation.
He had known when he came into the Death Eaters that few were like him, either in level of magic or level of dedication. They were there because they feared death or wanted to follow the Dark Lord on his quest to create a pureblood world free of taint. Snape had accepted that he would have to work beside people he did not understand and did not like. That had always been true, because there was no one in the world like him.
He had not known that he would despise them so much.
They bragged when their own blood pride should have told them to keep silent. They resorted to ugly and obvious spells where simple, elegant ones would have done—in fact, where their Lord had commanded them to be careful, because he did not want a certain attack to be revealed as a Death Eater one yet. Then they seemed surprised when the Dark Lord kept his word and tortured them for their failures. They made the same mistakes again and again. They denigrated the care Snape took over his potions and did not understand why their Lord valued him, even when he explained. They smashed interesting magical treasures recovered in their raids as easily as they smashed the skulls of Mudbloods.
Snape had never known there would be so little grace in what he had become.
"Severus?"
That would be Regulus, the only one who persistently called him by his first name other than the Dark Lord—and since the first time he had met Voldemort, Snape had never failed to sense his magic and be kneeling when Voldemort entered a room. He cut off his circling at once and faced Regulus, his robes snapping to behind him. "What?" he snarled.
Regulus blinked, then held up his hand. "I thought you might want to see this," he said. "I just came back from a visit to my parents, and they agreed that I could take it to show you."
Snape drew breath to bark a retort, and then the silver globe lying in Regulus's palm came to life. It opened its sides as wings made of light, and Snape saw the gleam of stars on deep, velvety blackness. In the center of them was a golden dot of sunshine, and the planets of their solar system dancing around it.
He came closer, and stared. He had never seen any magical device so intricate on so small a scale. Whoever had made this had replicated the colors of Saturn perfectly on a globe the size of Snape's thumbnail, and the others were smaller. Yet, when Snape murmured a spell that sharpened his eyesight, he could make out the gleam of green continents on the Earth globe. It was perfect down to the last and the smallest.
This was what Snape had once believed all magic should be: calm grandeur, going about its beauties, not even noticing the efforts made to hinder it.
He gazed, and gazed, and when he looked up, Regulus was watching him. His face had relaxed, though, and he said nothing, only nodded with a small smile before he gathered up the globe and took it away with him. He could get away with the smile, Snape thought. Regulus was known to smile and joke like that—it was put down to him being both young and the spoiled heir of a prominent family—and appreciation of art was not disapproved of among the Death Eaters, though many of them didn't see the use of it, and lacked the wits to do it themselves.
Strange, Snape reflected as he began brewing again, that the only Death Eater who seemed to show him something of grace and beauty was Sirius Black's brother.
"Amputo!"
Snape roared the word, and the Order of the Phoenix witch facing him fell screaming, trying to lift her wand and unable to do so. Of course, it didn't help that the spell had wrenched her left arm away from the rest of her body and left it lying on the ground, and that her left hand clutched her wand. All that remained sticking out of her left shoulder was a bag of bone and flesh about the size of Snape's wrist.
He could have left it there. The blood loss and the shock would have finished her, and he was needed elsewhere in the battle; he could hear spells exploding around him as the Death Eaters fought to turn the Order's ambush into a victory for their side.
But he could not leave yet, because it was not enough.
He focused on the witch again, and whispered, "Coquo."
The spell curled around her legs first, and the woman began howling, a noise of pure misery that didn't sound human, but reminded Snape irresistibly of a werewolf's cry. He shuddered, but he didn't look away from his victim. It wasn't the full moon, and in any case Fenrir Greyback had been assigned to a different part of the battle, as he always was at Snape's request. He had the leisure to stand still and watch as digestive acids consumed the woman's feet, then her thighs, then her groin. The howl as she was eaten below the waist made something like peace come back into Snape's heart.
She was a torso with a right arm and a head now, and still alive. Snape wasn't done with her yet. "Torridus."
The Dehydration Curse wrinkled her skin, and the woman tried to cry out again in misery, but she had no saliva left in her mouth, and therefore could make no sound. Her eyeballs rolled crisply in her head. Her hair crackled as she waggled her neck. Her skin gleamed with a dull patina in the firelight behind her; Snape had taken her sweat away.
Snape smiled. He saw, from the corner of his eye, someone who had been approaching him back away. He didn't blame that person.
He finished it. "Extorqueo."
Giant, invisible hands grabbed what remained of the witch and began twisting her head in the opposite direction from her body. Snape saw her mouth moving as her head traveled in a circle, and then the clean, crisp snap of her neck rang a good distance across the battlefield. A moment later, the invisible hands pulled her body and her head apart in a spray of blood. Snape blinked as blood flew across him, pattering his face, soaking his robes, and shards of bone rang past him like shrapnel. One sliced his cheek open.
He smiled.
"Severus?"
And then he turned and then he saw Regulus—Regulus, whom he had thought dead at the witch's wand—and then he fell to one knee, overwhelmed, and Regulus was there, one hand tentatively resting on his shoulder.
"I—you didn't need to do that," Regulus whispered. "I was all right. And even if I hadn't been—" Snape looked up to see him shaking his head, and he said no more, but Snape knew what he meant, as clearly as if he'd finished the sentence. Even if I hadn't been, you shouldn't have used those spells. You know more of grace than that. Clean kill, and move on.
Yes, Snape thought, he should have done that. He should have. Pleasure in torture was a refined amusement in the proper place.
A battle was not the proper place.
He felt a shifting as of continents inside him, and that was the first time in nearly two years that his scorn turned on himself, pouring over him like the flood of digestive acids from the Coquo spell. He should have known better. He knew how to take revenge. One took it in the best and safest way, and in the coolest frame of mind. One did not succumb to rage like a—
Like a Gryffindor.
That was the first time that Severus Snape looked at himself with clear eyes, and saw what he had become, and despised it. There was nothing of the grace or beauty or grandeur there should have been in the Death Eaters, and none in the Dark Lord, and none in him. The notion that he could walk through ugliness and remain untouched by it was gone. The notion that he could turn ugly and not care about it was gone.
And it was Regulus's fault, for retaining a note of grace that he probably didn't even realize he possessed, for calling Snape by his first name and trying to share beauty with him and advocating a cleaner revenge. He was the reason it all tumbled apart in Snape's mind, two years after his first meeting with Voldemort, and refused to put itself back together again.
