"If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals."
- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Sirius Black)
---
Severus woke to find sunlight spilling through the high windows onto his bed. He was on his back, which was surprising in that it didn't hurt at all. He stretched, sensing a lingering stiffness in some of the formerly torn muscles, but for the most part, his body felt relaxed and healthy.
He heard a chime go off somewhere, and Madam Pomfrey bustled out of her office.
"Good morning, Mr. Snape, how are you feeling?" she asked, fussing with his pillow.
"I'm fine," he replied. Then, noticing the angle of the sun through the high windows, he frowned and asked, "What time is it?"
"Eleven O'Clock, about. I'll have lunch brought up for you a little early, though." She ran her wand over him, nodding at the results. "Is there anything in particular you would like?"
Eleven—had he slept through the whole night and morning? Potter would be furious. "Madam Pomfrey, I need to leave. My master will be upset if I do not—"
"Fall down the stairs the moment you step out this door?" Pomfrey cut in, sharply. "I'll let you go after dinner—if the potions have worn off by then, mind you—but not before. Mr. Potter has lived this long without you, I'm sure he'll manage for awhile longer."
"But he's my master. I'll be expected to attend him," he argued, trying to make her understand. He couldn't handle anymore punishments so soon. He began pushing himself up, surprised at the sudden dizziness in his head. "I need to go..."
"No, you need to lie back and let your body finish processing the apothecary Healer Wyatt and I just finished administering to you. James will wait."
"He won't. He'll be angry." Snape felt his throat tighten.
"Severus..." She trailed off clearly wanting to say something she couldn't find the proper words for. "I'll speak to James. You'll need to remain here for treatment, anyhow. The scars are still healing, and we're still trying to reduce the damage as much as possible."
Reduce the... Snape felt as if he'd been thrown into the lake in February. Damage, of course, there would be damage after what Lucius had done. He shivered. "How bad will it be, then?" he asked, not really wanting to know.
She sighed, rearranging a series of glass vials. "You'll have scars, there will be no getting around that." She stopped, and turned to face him. "But most likely they will be very faint. If the healing goes as expected, you will have to look closely to see them at all. I don't think they should decrease your... value, by much."
Snape nodded, turning away. There was no point in telling her that she was wrong. A scarred slave was a scarred slave; at the moment, he was worth almost nothing. If he graduated from Hogwarts and became a Master of Potions, then he would have real value, but at the moment, nothing Potter could do to him would make him worth less. His only form of protection was gone.
He would have curled up, but he was afraid it would aggravate the scars. He stayed there, brooding too much to enjoy the rare feeling of a bed and a blanket in a relatively safe place. He ate a little lunch and, later, dinner, just to keep Madam Pomfrey from glaring at him. Otherwise, he pretended to sleep.
Once he had finished his dinner, Madam Pomfrey made him get up and take off his hospital robes. She ran her wand, then her hand down his back.
"See," she said, conjuring a mirror. "They're hardly visible at all, anymore."
The scars were long and winding, slightly pink. Madam Pomfrey assured him that would fade to an untannable white that would go almost unnoticed on his sallow skin. But he was still scarred.
Potter was going to kill him. Or make him wish he had.
Madam Pomfrey laid out some older Hogwarts robes—Gryffindor, now—and he put them on. He was about to head out the door into the hallway when he felt a brief touch to his shoulder. He looked up at Madam Pomfrey.
"Severus...James isn't like your former master." Snape raised a skeptical eyebrow. Madam Pomfrey sighed and ran her thumb across his forehead. "Please, try not to worry so much, you've only ever seen him at his worst." Snape said nothing. He liked and needed Madam Pomfrey too much to speak the bitter rejoinders in his mind. He didn't doubt that he brought out the worst in Potter; nor did he doubt that, granted absolute power, Potter's worst would become entirely unbearable.
But Madam Pomfrey had released him, and he had nowhere to go but Gryffindor Tower.
---
He didn't have the password, but he was only outside for a few minutes before he heard footsteps behind him.
"Hello, Severus." The voice was soft, uncertain, but unmistakable.
He spun around, hand reaching into his wand pocket, to face the sharp faced, brown haired boy. "Lupin," he hissed, instinctively bracing for a fight, even though it had rarely been Lupin who attacked him. He felt a moment of panic when he couldn't find his wand before he realized that he didn't have it anymore and that he was a slave to this boy's friend. The panic blossomed into controlled terror, which he kept out of his face with the practice of his short lifetime. He dropped his hands to his sides and said to the ground, "Hello, sir."
"Sir? I'm not a professor. Or your master, for that matter." He couldn't see Lupin's expression, but his worn boots shuffled under his robes. "Are you looking for James?"
He glanced up, surprised and a little disarmed by the tone. Then he realized Potter and Black were nowhere to be seen; Lupin was usually safe as long as he wasn't with his friends. He relaxed a little. "Yes, I am. Madam Pomfrey just let me go."
"Well, he's down in the library with Sirius. I can show you around the tower now, if you want."
Ah, so that was what this was about. Lupin wanted to sample his friend's new acquisition, perhaps without Potter knowing. Potter would want the first taste, wouldn't he? Except, Snape wasn't anything like a virgin, and it might be that Gryffindor boys were more communal than the Slytherins. He just didn't know.
"Is that—will that be acceptable to my master?" It was harder to say those words, acknowledge his inferior position, while looking into the eyes of his once-enemy. He would have to get used to it; he would soon be saying them regularly to Potter.
Lupin bit his lip, then shrugged. "I don't think it will matter to him. He's busy with Sirius. They're researching...something."
Snape gave a short nod and followed the other boy through the portrait. The common room was warm and red, with Gryffindors lounging in great worn armchairs or playing chess or talking by the fire. It reminded him of scenes he had witnessed like this in the Slytherin common room. As if to remind him that such scenes weren't for him, the friendly din froze into silence. He felt the cold stares on him and wanted nothing more than to get up to the dorm and let Lupin get on with it, hopefully in private.
Lupin looked around the room, then at him. Disgustingly placid air aside, he seemed to sense the mutual hostility. "Why don't we do introductions later, after you've, ah, settled in?" Without looking for Snape's acknowledgment, he led the way up a long, curved staircase. Behind the door he stopped at was a round room, with a semi-circle of beds. He counted five, each with a window to the left of the head. Interesting. In Slytherin, students slept three to a room, and each room led to a smaller, year-specific common room. When Lucius was still in school, Snape had normally slept in the seventh year common room. He'd preferred that, as it afforded him some measure of privacy when the other boys were sleeping, and it allowed him to keep a light going for his studies when he needed it. He wondered how he would handle not having even that respite from Potter and his gang.
His attention returned to Lupin when the boy gestured at the bed at the end of the semi-circle, closest to the door. "I would guess that's yours. It wasn't here when we left this morning. The elves must have brought it up. "He looked expectantly at Snape, who suppressed a sigh and went over and sat on the bed. In Slytherin, he would already be naked, spread out on his belly, waiting, but this was not Slytherin and he hated the idea of pillow-biting for these Gryffindors.
He stared at the wall behind Lupin, not wanting to meet the other boy's eyes but wanting to see how much he could get away with. Nothing happened. Lupin was muggle-born, sort of, so perhaps that made sense. He could feel the weight of the eyes on him, could feel Lupin working up the nerve to do something, most likely to break in his friend's new toy.
His nerve must have failed him, because he merely shrugged and turned toward the door. "I'll just let you get settled in, then...James should be back soon." He paused awkwardly by the door before walking out and shutting it behind him.
Snape bristled a little at the implied threat in the last words, but was too confused by the sudden reprieve for it to weigh on his mind. Anyway, what did Lupin mean, "Settle in"? It wasn't as if he had any belongings, and the simple round room wasn't difficult to figure out. He got up and paced across the floor a bit, enjoying the warm, soft carpet spread out across the center of the room. This wouldn't be bad to sleep on, certainly better than the cold stone of the Slytherin common room. He stared longingly back at the bed, but doubted he was allowed on it except when ordered. The extra bed did make sense—no use leaving wet spots on the other boys' sheets. The thought came entirely without irony, a simple practical observation, until he realized what he had been thinking, and squeezed his jaw shut as if it was his mouth that was responsible for the poisonous direction his thoughts were taking.
Finally, tired of pacing, he slid down to the carpet, drawing his knees up to his chest and resting his pointed jaw between them. He closed his eyes and lost himself in thought.
---
"I cannot believe you, Prongs." Sirius was leaning against a stack in that elegant way that drove Elena Bramshuckle wild, his eyebrow arched elegantly and incredulously.
James said nothing, but threw a crumpled up parchment at his friend's head, enjoying the satisfying thwack it made against Sirius' exceptionally hard skull. Sirius had been sniping at him since he had told him of his plan to take Snape away from the Malfoy's at the beginning of school, but since Snape had arrived it had taken on a sullen, resigned tone.
"Slave or not, he's still Snivellus, and now you've got him sleeping in our dorms without so much as a by-your-leave." He dropped another heavy bound volume on the library table. James winced, grateful for the silencing charm and the slight but complex glamour they had mastered a few months ago. James had received enough detention as a result of Sirius' abusive habits towards the library books that he now simply cast the glamour on whatever table they were working on. James briefly wondered whether or not he could order Snape to serve his detentions for him now, then shook that thought off.
"What else am I supposed to do with him? I can't just have him go sleep in the snow."
Sirius flipped silently through the pages of the book before drawing an elegant finger down the corner of the pages. "I say, stuff him in the Shrieking Shack and save the lot of us the trouble."
"He's not that stupid. He'd figure it out, you know."
"You don't think he's going to figure it out sleeping in the dormitories with us?"
James stopped breathing for a moment. "Merlin, I didn't even think of that. Sirius—"
"—come pull my ignorant arse out of the hole I've dug it into?" Sirius smirked, then shrugged. "There should be a geas that will prevent him from giving out information he knows to be secret. Here, have a look." He slid another heavy tome over to James' side of the desk.
James glanced down at the page, which confirmed what Sirius had said. The geas also kept him from harming his master or himself, and would drop him into a coma similar to that caused by the Draught of Living Death if he was out of his master's presence for more than a month, but those were the only restrictions it placed on a slave. It was up to the master to enforce obedience, and James winced as he looked over the methods suggested by the books, which included everything from a gagging to castration. The book must have been written before Imperius. James hoped.
"Some pretty sick stuff, huh?" Sirius had come to read over his shoulder. "Snape was probably lucky; Malfoy wouldn't have the stomach for most of this. Now, if he was with my family..."
But James was still staring at the page, fingers crushing the edge of the book. Slowly, he turned to the front cover of the book. Books from the restricted section had no check-out list on their cover, as students weren't allowed to even look at them without permission. But this book did, and the calligraphic script that graced the cover read Lucius Malfoy, 25 September, 1970.
Sirius shoved the book away with one hand, as if it were covered in something slimy and disgusting.
The image of Snape's flayed back came back with sudden clarity: every straight, clean, blood-black line of skin that simply wasn't there, the way they were so even that the skin seemed as if it must have been peeled away along the edge of a ruler. James closed his throat to the burning that crawled up from his stomach.
"Well, if anyone deserves it, it's Snape." Sirius voice was toneless. James looked up, to find his friend's face wearing an almost dismissive expression, though Sirius' eyes would not settle on those aweful pictures. James understood. He wanted to believe that Snape had deserved whatever had happened to him, but he also didn't want to believe that anyone could deserve the marks Snape had worn yesterday.
"Sirius..." He opened his mouth to tell his friend what he had seen the night before, but found the language of adolescent males insufficient to describe a wholly adult horror. So he finished with, "Leave off him for awhile, will you."
Sirius huffed. "Why? He can't hide behind Malfoy anymore, so why should we? It's not like he won't deserve it." His expression had finally come back to the well-worn Snivellus sneer, but this time, James couldn't look at it without feeling a little sick. Was that how Malfoy had looked at Snape before he'd cut into him?
"He never hid behind Malfoy." James stared at the book, careful not to look at the illustrations. "And now he's mine, so just leave off."
Sirius was silent for a moment, but James just kept watching his finger trace the edge of the book. Finally, he could hear Sirius shrug. "Fine, if it's that important to you." He gestured to the small stack of books, all dealing with slavery and slave bonds, the debate over for now. "You want me to help you smuggle these out?"
James shook his head. He didn't want anything of Lucius Malfoy's in his dorm, and he also didn't want Snape to realize that he was ignorant of nearly everything concerning slavery, other than its existence. "Help me put them away?" He and Sirius made short work of precisely replacing the books, so that Madam Pince would never know the difference. During their years of Animangus study, sneaking in and out of the restricted section, as well as nicking its books, had become less of a risky thrill and more of a casually dangerous habit, like riding the Knight Bus.
When they were done, they realized it was already after dinner. Sirius offered to go down to the kitchens and get food, valiantly leaving his friend to face the common room on his own. James muttered a sarcastic thanks and moved off to go face his house.