He had seen something like this before. Lord Voldemort paced around the room still heated by the fire on the hearth. He was always slightly chilled now. His body temperature needing greater warmth even as his disciples used all sorts of magic to prevent themselves from sweating, to keep themselves composed under the literal heat. That didn't matter so much now. Some of these people could not feel the cold or the heat anymore and would not feel it, or anything else, ever again. He had been angry that time and he somehow contained his anger but what he felt now passed out of time and collected into a deadly rage. I cannot tell you how angry or what the color of it was but the general shape looked like many bodies on the floor. Very many. He had let them fall and fall and fall.
***
He had had to see this for himself. He had paced around the hall as he did this room surveying the wreckage. This one folded under him or herself, this one's bone sticking out of there. Someone would clean it up and it wouldn't be him. He had scrubbed enough floors in his time and coupled with this smell? He hated this smell. That was the worst of all. He could barely think when he first walked in with Bellatrix, Severus and Rozier. It took seeing what happened to refocus his thoughts. This one on the floor with his brains blown out of the back of his head jammy and stinking. There was tile piled on one side of the room. Dorcas had made the floor move under them. Lord Voldemort smiled to himself. They might have slipped, become disoriented but someone had killed this one on the floor on purpose. Who was he? He sustained a low murmur that the four of them ignored. He wasn't dead then? People like this man were making him look bad! What business did this nameless nobody have in this fight in the first place? It could have been anyone responsible for the dozen or so people later pulled out of this hall with its tall ceilings out of the rubble. The muggles' families would have to be alerted. A release for the muggle news. Dorcas had created an environment in which to do all of this. That's what they thought at least. Lord Voldemort knew better. She was hardly the reason all of these people had died and yet for all of this chaos, he recognized that she threatened his plans. That incident earlier had probably made her sick and to the best of his knowledge she had never done anything like it before and had not since. He had ordered that she be brought in then. Yet not one of all the people he had sent on his direct orders had come back with her. He had heard her name several times before that moment but, until then, had no occasion to remember it until one day, for whatever reason, he did.
"That name sounds familiar." He thought, mining his memories and accurately placing its previous uses. He kept hearing her name over again. He heard her first described as "Moody's girl", then "the mudblood" which Severus made a grand show of not doing. Ha! So dramatic. And, very occasionally and briefly, she was referred to by her last name and then finally "the auror". When she died, they had believed the threat had passed. They had even brought out a bottle of a sweet, magical wine from the Malfoy's collection (really, it had most likely come from the Black family as a wedding gift or dowry). Lord Voldemort opened it himself. They believed that he would be happy? What did they think, those who still could, those who were still alive? What did they think would happen?
Severus knew from the very first toast that something would happen and he couldn't wait to witness some people getting their due even as he mapped out a plan of protection in his head. His Lordship insisted on opening the ancient bottle of Satiativa. An ancient vintage. Ancient. This should have tipped them all off but alas. His Lordship had to handle it with a serviette wrapped around the neck of the bottle just so as was tradition, preserving the dust. An empty bottle would cost a small vaults worth of equally ancient currency and he would enjoy the drink immensely. Sip on what only a few wizards could only dream of tasting if they even knew it still existed. It would be a good one. The finest, thinnest stemmed cordial glass appeared in front of each of them at the table. When the cork popped it released not only the pressure in the bottle but the remaining tension in the room. They were safe, they thought, as Lord Voldemort poured into the slightly larger cut glassware in front of himself. The glasses around the table filled simultaneously. He set the bottle down gently. The auror is dead. Dorcas Meadowes is dead. Finally. Severus could feel everything and everyone around him, the relief. He learned long ago that this was a sham of a feeling. He learned a long time ago that an exhalation is done in private, that someone is only safe if they are asleep and sometimes not even then. How do you really know if someone is asleep? How do you know if they aren't just playing dead? Lord Voldemort lifted his glass and all in attendance lifted their glasses in unison. Some people were smiling. Some had tears in their eyes. Joy? Severus looked up at Lord Voldemort from his seat on His right. Regulus across from Severus. Bellatrix diagonal from her nephew, same proximity as Severus but on Lord Voldemort's left hand side.
"A toast!"
There it was. There it was! Severus felt what was a largely imperceptible shift in tone, in inflection. He knew that set-up. He personally had done nothing wrong and he knew his Lordship would not do anything to him but there were reflective surfaces in the room. A spell could bounce off of so many polished things here. Some spells could go through another person and his Lordship was nothing if not precise and elegant but Severus heard it, he felt it. He saw it in his Lordship, he heard it in those two words. Severus could drop under the table and start incantations if he needed to and would explain it away later. But now, he would wait. He would know the time to move. He always knew the time to move, he was still here after all. Still alive.
"A toast to…"
He was angry and here these sops were smiling, grinning away, elated. Maybe Snape wouldn't hide under the table. He might die happy knowing that these half-wits were stripped of their histories. He might enjoy to watch it.
"Regulus!"
Regulus Black inclined his head slightly and slowly as Lord Voldemort enumerated on the toast. He learned fast, Severus had to credit him for that. It never crossed his mind that he was an excellent teacher. That the gesture was copied as Regulus had seen Severus do it. That the gesture, the body language was all Severus.
"To Regulus!" They all affirmed.
They lifted their glasses to sip. And it was perfect. They didn't, they couldn't make anything like this anymore. Severus went through the list of ingredients in his head as he savored the light, green, sparkling sweetness; the slightly, piney astringency. He would be satisfied with the memory of having tasted something, anything with belbarberries. He went over the process for extracting and stilling the juices as described in an old text. The fermentation taking years and the vintage, theorized to be stable forever if made correctly. If not, it could kill a cast of hippogriff dead with a few drops. Those drops were said, per another primary observational text written during the experiments conducted before the ministry existed, even before the " olde vvitch coda", to be so divine, so transcendent that for centuries there was a time when wizards and witches brewed it incorrectly just to taste, just to try it and it was through this that the plant was harvested to extinction and made the correctly prepared wine (really a potion) so rare and expensive. This also wiped out an estimated tenth of England's wizarding population, a point of history still taught, with gusto, in France.
Severus sipped again leaving a remainder and felt the bubbles break up his thoughts and piece them back together in a lighter hue. When he set down his glass again, the goblet portion of the glass filled slowly as did everyone else's at the table according to how much they drank. All of them well-bred, or well-read, enough to know to leave a little left over, that their glass would be refilled from the large bottle at the table if they left a little in their own glasses and when that was gone there would be no more.
Severus knew he would not have to scramble under the table like a fool. Regulus now knew that too. He too could now sense the shift in Lord Voldemort's voice as He raised His glass to toast the next person. And from Severus he knew that he would be safe and spared whatever was approaching in the invisible, blood-filled storm cloud conjured by Lord Voldemort's voice if only he just sat quietly and very still.
