Remembrance and Renewal by Nigel Tatsuya and Avatar Arkmage
Chapter Six: Broken Boy, Broken Man

It is a commonly held belief that disembodied spirits could potentially cause the ambient temperature of a room to drop; that they themselves were the very quintessence of cold. Throughout the world, both muggle and magical, cold spots in the corridors of dimly lit mansions, icy breezes in deserted cemeteries, and unexplained frost developing on mirrors and windows in otherwise warm places of residences, were often attributed to unseen entities, whether benign or malevolent.

Severus, who was still kneeling at the smelter's block, shuddered fiercely; a result of both the pain, and the sudden cold that came over him as Harry floated nearer.

The smell of charred flesh made Harry feel sick. He wondered how that was possible, being that spirits did not have bodies with which to feel sick. "Prof-" Harry stopped himself. "Snape!"

The teenaged Severus looked in Harry's direction, his face a mixture of agony and curiosity. He thought for a moment that he saw the apparition of a concerned being with eyes not too like Lily Evans's, and wondered if it was the preborn spirit his mother had told him of.

"We're not quite finished yet, Black Snake." Voldemort said, drawing his wand and reciting a spell over the seared flesh of Severus's arm. The mark glowed green momentarily, then burst fully into green flames.

Snape cried out again, and writhed against his bindings. The coarse chains cut into Snape's pale flesh, causing great gouts of scarlet blood to run down the slab.

Voldemort tutted. "Oh no, that simply will not do," and with that, he retrieved an iron poker from the fire and held it against a few of Severus's deepest cuts, effectively cauterising them.

Unable to tolerate another moment, Harry wished he were away.

"Harry?" Lily whispered to her shivering son a heartbeat's time later. He had reappeared amid the tranquil whiteness of the spiritual plane.

After several attempts at speaking, but only achieving incomprehensible babbling, Harry threw his arms around his mother's neck and held her. A stream of comforting, though not physical, warmth permeated his form; as though he were being defrosted from the very images which had chilled his soul.

"Are you cold, HARRY?" Sirius asked, noting Harry's quivering.

"You look as though you've been encased in a glacier frozen since before mammals gained sentience, son!" James remarked, genuinely worried.

Harry merely recalled what he had seen happen to Snape in his thoughts, and James and Sirius winced.

"That is only to be expected," James shrugged, "he put himself in that situation, after all!"

"Snarky, git." Sirius scoffed. "Smart enough to sit twelve N.E.W.T.s, but too stupid to keep himself out of trouble when it really matters."

"No, you don't understand..." Harry finished with only his recollections of what had transpired before that horrid scene at the smelter's block, and James and Sirius fell silent.

The question that burned in Harry's mind earlier, flared past the firebreak of his consciousness, and into Lily's mind. He had to know if James Potter was truly his father. One part of him shouted that there could be no question as to his paternity, for James looked like Harry would in a mirror capable of marginal distortions. Virtually anyone who had known James, commented on either Harry's physical resemblance to James or the similarities in their characters.

Then again, according to what Harry had witnessed in Snape's Pensieve, Lily cared nothing for James nor his antics, at least not in that time. Could love truly develop from a foundation of such vehement discord? Furthermore, Harry felt a connection growing inside him for his once despised potions master, and the woman he felt with every fibre of his existence was his grandmother.

Harry felt a hand on his back, and then another on his shoulders. He turned slowly, and was comforted once again by the forms of Sirius Black and James Potter.

"Harry," James began, pulling Harry into a firm hug, "one of the first things I want you to know, is there is far more to being a parent than blood. I did not realize it in life to the extent that I do now. But freed from the flesh, you are as much my son, as you are the gi-Severus Snape's son ."

Harry squeezed his eyes closed. It was true then. His biological father was Severus Snape.

"In life, although I knew Severus had fathered you, I came to love you." James released Harry from the hug, but kept a hand reassuringly on his shoulder. "I could not help but love you. You were so adorable, beautiful to look at, and your eyes held none of the anger..." his voice grew more subdued. "...or emptiness I had seen in Snape's eyes."

Sirius clenched his teeth together, as though his very words grated at him. "Oh...We both couldn't see in life what we can understand now. When we first met Severus, we saw him as a disgrace to pureblooded wizards. Even though he was just as pureblooded as us, he looked like some cross between a muggle trying to look like a wizard on Halloween, and a lovesick vagrant. Snivellus wore the most cast-offish looking robes, which fit him about as well as Hagrid's clothing would you. And he probably used a trowel to apply pomade to his hair."

"He did not!" shouted Lily, pushing Sirius firmly, causing him to lose his balance and fall flat on the whiteness beneath them.

"Okay okay, so he didn't use a trowel," Sirius said, resuming his position without using his hands for purchase. "But there was enough grease in his hair to lubricate all the belt sanders in the U.K. and..."

"Padfoot!" James scolded, barely stifling his own laughter. "Anyway, what we're trying to say is that Severus Snape was not an easy person to like, but in retrospect, I wish we had done things differently. From that first day when we met him on the Hogwarts express, we just couldn't stand him with that ragged appearance, and that infernal way he carried on. Sure, we were all going to miss our folks, but we didn't bawl ourselves blind like he was doing. He cried like a little girl. It was disgraceful! All the time, just sniffle, sniffle, and sniffle. If we so much as spilt a bottle of ink on his parchments..."

Lily smacked her husband between the shoulder blades. "James, you did not just spill ink on his parchments!"

"Right," James continued sheepishly, "we kicked him around a bit before pouring ink on his essays. He fought back with his thrice-cursed dark arts hexes though, but he was too busy snivelling to take us all. We called him Snivellus within an hour of meeting him though, because he was crying like a little girl all the way to Hogwarts."

From what Harry had seen of Snape's childhood, he suspected that the boy was crying because he feared for his mother. Leaving one's mother alone with an abusive lout, was not too different from sentencing her to death. Over the years, Severus had probably learned to direct at least some of his father's violence onto himself to save his mother being from being killed. Was it possible that Severus was so distraught because he was thinking just that, or might he have been in pain from a beating he received shortly before boarding the Hogwarts express?

"It was well known that Snape's folks weren't poor people, so when we saw him with only a corned beef sandwich for lunch that day, we teased him about it," admitted James.

"And kicked him in the backside..." Sirius continued.

Harry felt a pang deep within the region of his sternum. James and Sirius could very well be describing Ronald Weasley. On their first trip to Hogwarts, Ron had only a corned beef sandwich for lunch, and was clad in secondhand robes.

What if it had been James and Sirius who had shared the car with Ron Weasley? Would Ron have become more like Snape had Harry shunned him, and befriended a wealthier wizard like Draco Malfoy? True, Ron did not have to spend his days afraid of his own father, and watching his mother taking the brunt of the man's wrath, but would he torment Ron, along with Draco and his goons, the way James and the Marauders had tormented Severus?

Perhaps not like James, he cautioned himself, he knew he could never initiate the cruelty he saw James enact in the Pensieve. He would never seek to humiliate anyone that way, even in thought. Harry understood exactly how it felt to be humiliated and injured, courtesy of his cousin Dudley.

A shiver ran through his backbone, as he wondered if he would have taken the role more like the one he had seen Remus Lupin assume. Would he have stood idly by, and watched Draco, Crabbe and Goyle humiliate Ron in a similar fashion? Surely the condition of Ron Weasley's third or fourth-hand underclothes would have been similar, or even worse than Snape's, as he too, had to make due with far less than the more wealthier wizards did.

"No!" he spoke inwardly. "I am not like that. I would have helped Ron, even if he were not my best friend. Even if we were enemies. No one deserves that kind of treatment. No one!"

"I'm not proud of what we did that day." James said, lowering his head. "I had hoped you would not have found out about that. The fact that Snivelly..uh..Severus placed that memory in the Pensieve at all..."

Harry did not hear the rest, and had not realized that he had asked the question, but he soon found himself standing once again on Hogwart's grounds on that fateful early summer's day. Lily Evans was headed towards Harry so rapidly, that he had no time to react as she walked right through him. He turned at the sound of loud whooping and cheers, and saw that James Potter had indeed removed the inverted Severus Snape's greying undergarments. Sirius gleefully relieved him of it, and levitated it to one of the castle's spires, where it hung like a pennant one might see at a convention for particularly zealous underwear manufacturers.

Although most carried on as though it were a colossal satire, some of the crowd had stopped cheering and were now gawking. Harry noticed the thin pink, and silvery signatures of scars all along Snape's back, exposed backside and thighs. It was obvious that he had attempted to cover them with a series of charms, but his current emotional state caused his tenuous hold to waver, and more scars appeared steadily like elongated stars against a pale sky.

"I guess it's not true what they say about blokes with large noses." Sirius commented, not wanting to lose face, although Harry could tell that even he was astonished to see the extent of Severus's scars.

"False advertisement indeed!" James said with humourless cadence. Harry knew that any boy in the vicinity, the Marauders included, understood that it wasn't that Snape was small, but merely that he had started puberty later than most of his peers. The sparse growth of hair, or near lack thereof, probably indicated that fact to the watching girls as well. From first-hand experience, Harry knew that malnourishment and prolonged abuse in the home, could cause a failure to thrive, and delays in their development.

Peter Pettigrew joined in the teasing, but Harry heard nothing, and prayed that Snape would be released from this degrading ordeal soon. Lupin acted as though there were nothing more interesting than a game of exploding snap occurring, and continued reading his book.

Lily stomped back into Harry's field of vision, and blasted James, Sirius and Peter with a spell Harry had never experienced before. Whatever it was, it sent the three boys sailing like quaffles across the grounds. Lily angrily ended the spell, allowing James, Sirius and Peter to fall into the lake. "Perhaps it's you who should shag the giant squid!" Lily yelled.

The crowd, not wanting to be the next target of Lily Evans's wrath, dispersed rapidly.

The girl with the gleaming red hair turned Severus upright, and ended the spell on him. Lily gently lowered him to the ground, and knelt beside him as he collapsed onto the grass, leaning on her for support. Harry could not remember ever seeing his future potions master with such rounded shoulders, and his head bowed so low that his curtain of lank, black hair obscured his face completely. Lily Evans put a comforting hand on his shoulder, and though Severus did not pull away, he did not meet her gaze either. Harry understood exactly why, when a soft whimper escaped the young Severus. Lily placed a hand on his back, attempting to comfort him, but he stood rapidly and ran toward the Forbidden forest.

Lily cast a last, corrosive look at the three boys crawling out of the lake, before pursuing Severus into the trees. Even she was not entirely against breaking the school's rules.


The scene faded to white once more, and Harry found himself amid his parents and godfather. For a long time, no one could speak, merely exchanging feelings of embarrassment, contrition, sorrow, shock, regret, anger, and grief. Harry found it strange how easily those feelings were to express when one was not encumbered by the boundaries of the flesh, and he could feel the emotions spilling into him from the three adults.

Harry began to wonder again about his parentage, and why Professor Snape seemed to not know that he was Harry's father. As though in reply, his parents and godfather faded, and Harry once again found himself at another point in the world's timeline.

From the stately looking buildings, uniformed witches and wizards milling about the darkened grounds, professors demonstrating spells in the courtyard, and trees planted with almost surgical precision, Harry deduced that he was on the campus of a Magical University. On one of the paved walkways, outside what appeared to be a giant science building, was Lily Evans. The girl, who would someday give birth to Harry, was wearing a horribly faded coat so oversized, that Harry would have thought she had received one of the Dudley's hand-me-downs if this hadn't been an earlier time. Lily paced to and fro, her boots making soft clunks on the pavement. She appeared to be waiting for someone.

"I usually spent time with Severus after he finished his work in the laboratory each night." The spirit Lily, who had followed Harry into this time, stated as though reading his thoughts. "We'd usually make it to the cafeteria moments before they closed for the night. The nice elves would let us take home leftovers though."

Harry watched in wonder, as Lily's coat slipped off her shoulders repeatedly. Each time, she would make a futile attempt at adjusting it, only to have it slip off of her shoulders again. "Petunia sent that to me for Christmas one year." The spirit Lily offered.. "I knew she got it at a secondhand store, and I was going to discretely throw it away, but Severus knew what I was planning to do. He pulled my right arm into one of the sleeves and pulled the other sleeve over his own arm and zipped us both up in the coat.

Harry giggled at the thought of Snape being in the same article of clothing with his mother, when the spirit Lily touched Harry's forehead and showed him the image of Severus and Lily walking together in the coat. He thought that two people in a coat would appear like a bizarre two-headed monster, but he saw it was not the case. Although Severus was much taller than Lily, he crouched within the coat so that Lily would not have to stand on her toes. Their hair, which was roughly the same length, intermingled, forming a lovely cascade of red and black down their backs.

The scene changed once more. This time, Harry saw Lily and Severus seated on a sofa, still wearing the oversized coat. They were apparently watching the telly, they must have been at Lily's house. While engrossed in the program, Lily managed to feed them both potato crisps, and a chocolate bar with her right hand; Severus in return, gave both of them sips of tea and crumpets with his left. Nothing was spilled.

Harry could not help but wonder what had gone wrong. They looked so perfect together, that Harry thought he must have dropped into an alternate universe or something. He wondered if his father... Father? When did Harry start thinking of Snape that way...?

Harry saw flashes of images, as though he were running through time instead of neatly jumping onto points of it. He next saw Severus, with a huge bandage on his left forearm, hurriedly making potions in a darkened laboratory. On the other side of the large room, also fabricating potions, was a pale haired man wearing a white frock coat. Lucien Snape. Voldemort must have wasted no time in putting father and son to work after Severus had accepted the mark.

There couldn't have been two people, who reminded Harry of the difference between night and day, more than Severus Snape, and his father Lucien Snape. They especially looked it from Harry's vantage point near the ceiling of the room.

When Harry saw that the clock on the wall read 4:00am, he assumed that Severus had not met with his mother that day. Severus and Lucien Snape continued working until well into the afternoon of the next day, and it was only then that Harry heard bits and pieces of their conversation.

"You just had to show off in potions didn't you?" Lucien hissed. Without warning, he walked over to his son, and shoved him into a nearby shelf, knocking its reagent bottles all over the floor.

"Jealous, father?" Snape asked, still standing.

"No you, imbecile!" The Elder Snape shouted, taking hold of Severus's shoulders and shaking him fiercely. "I wanted you to be as invisible to the Dark Lord as possible! I know you didn't want to join! I didn't want you to join! I wanted to keep you and your mother as far away from the Dark Lord you could be! You're too stupid to know what's right for you!"

"Then why have you brought mother here? And why did you assist in my capture?"

"I was under the imperious curse tonight, you dunderhead!" Were the situation not so grave, Harry would have found Snape being referred to as 'dunderhead' incredibly funny; it was the very endearment Professor Snape would later use on his first year potion students. "Now you'll live a cursed life until you die!"

"As though my life weren't a cursed one before." Severus rounded.

Lucien made to strike his son again, but exhaled deeply and returned to his work .

Several hours later, after they finished decanting the potions, Lucien Snape literally kicked Severus out of the lab. The dark haired youth staggered into the hallway, and collided with the wall, where the Dark Lord brushed him off and excused him from the mansion.

"You have a most talented son, Snape." Voldemort said, entering the lab and perusing the fully restocked shelves.

Lucien merely nodded, and began spelling the area clean.

The Dark Lord moved closer to Lucien, and whispered his next orders. "I want you to ready an eight hour supply of the Animalia Potion for about ten death eaters."

Lucien started shivering, and looked stunned at the request.

"Your son defied me yesterday, and must be dealt with firmly." The Dark Lord sauntered toward a rack holding dozens of vials filled with a substance the colour and consistency of clotting blood. "I am also in need of entertainment."

"NO!" Lucien turned on the Dark Lord "You can't! You'll not use this potion against Sevvi-Severus!"

"What was that?" Voldemort queried, drawing his wand threateningly. "You dare tell me what I may or may not do with what rightfully belongs to me, White Snake?"

"Master, I'll not otherwise disobey you. I have not, in many a year. But do not ask this of me!" Lucien hissed, his cheeks twitching involuntarily, and his ice-coloured eyes unfocussed.

"Ready the potion, Lucien!" Voldemort ordered. "I will depart in five minutes."

"You used that potion against me all those years ago!" shouted Lucien Snape, the fear etched deeply in his features. "I nearly died! I've been mentally unstable ever since! And now you ask me to condone its use against my own son?"

"Your son will still be able to perform his duties to me. After all, your gifts in potions were unaffected..."

Lucien fell to the floor and began twitching violently, his facial muscles completely out of his control. At first, Harry believed Voldemort had cast a spell on the Elder Snape, but The Dark Lord appeared equally surprised by Lucien's unexpected convulsive motions.

As quickly as it had began, the seizure ended, and Lucien shakily stood once more. "But everything else in my life was affected!"

"The Animalia. NOW!" Voldermort pointed his wand at Lucien's nose.

Lucien Snape ducked quickly behind the safety of one of the shelves, grabbed the first rack of the red vials and threw them against the floor; sending shards of glass, and the red liquid in all directions. "I couldn't tell Mervidith what was done to me..."

CRASH! Another rack of vials were destroyed.

"Killing me would have been kinder! To everyone! But you're a coward, nothing but an opportunistic coward! You kept me alive because you needed a potions master...no you needed a SLAVE who could brew any potion you wanted! You could certainly not kill me then!"

The very human Voldemort lunged at the pale man, but Lucien evaded him, smashing another rack of phials in the process. "After you and the other Knights of Walpurgis had your fun with me, I ended up brain damaged, with a temper that scarred Sevvie for life! He was never afraid of me before that!"

The Dark Lord sent a curse towards Lucien, but the white haired man dodged it, and sent another rack of the Animalia potion shattering against the floor.

"What is it? Is Severus still a virgin?" Voldemort hissed with cruel delight. "Is that what troubles you? Are you worried that his first experience will leave him as irreparably damaged and unable to please another as you are now?"

"He'll be killed!" Lucien screamed, dashing toward the shelves holding the last racks of phials. Lucien collapsed just short the targeted phials, and convulsed helplessly on the floor.

"CRUCIO!" Voldemort yelled.

Lucien's body writhed so fiercely against the floor, that his screams were disjointed. Although Harry had no love for Snape's father, his grandfather, he could not contain his rage for the Dark Lord's cruelty, and forgetting where he was, lunged at the Dark Lord with his fists flying.

The Dark Lord simply walked right through Harry's fists, and over to the shelf where he retrieved the remaining rack of the bloody red potion.

"Only two hours worth!" the Dark Lord hissed in disgust. "You'll pay dearly for this, White Snake!"

Voldemort lifted the curse, not as an act of mercy, but to assure that Lucien would stop screaming long enough to hear what he had to say. "In times past, those who violated the orders of their lords were dealt with most harshly. To assure that they paid the price in full, some were forced to expire under torture."

Lucien whimpered in terror, and Harry began to feel the beginnings of pity for his cruel grandfather.

"Oh no, the Cruciatus Curse alone would be quicker and more efficient than you deserve." Voldemort knelt beside Lucien Snape, who was now sobbing for mercy for his son. "I have minions who are well trained in more traditional forms of torture. You'll die, of course, but not until I allow it."

Lucien tried to spit in Lord Voldemort's eye, but his body was once again overcome by spasms.

"After I've disciplined your wayward son, we shall return to deal with you." Voldemort cast the Cruciatus Curse again, but only to Lucien's hands, tongue and feet. "Don't go anywhere until I return." He then touched his wand to his arm to summon the Death Eaters.

Time seemed to speed up again. Harry watched in terror as Lucien Snape screamed and writhed on the floor of the laboratory. Soon his voice grew hoarse, faded, and finally he could no longer scream, but the agony remained evident on Lucien's face.


Harry had to warn Severus, but he wasn't sure he would be seen. Apparently, it was not voluntary. All the other times these people from Harry's past had seen him, it had seemed like such a random occurrence. He sincerely hoped he could warn Severus this time.

He blushed when he found himself standing behind a very naked Severus Snape. The man was working copious amounts of shampoo into his hair, as he stood in what looked very much like the showers adjoining the dressing rooms near the quidditch pitch at Hogwarts. But judging from the insignia on the fluffy towels hanging nearby, and Severus's uniform, which lay in a heap on a bench just outside the main shower area, this was not Hogwarts, but the University Severus attended. There were other boys standing under the showers on either side of Snape, and they were all engaged in conversations about the things important to University boys in the late 1970s. For a moment, Harry felt that he was in the middle of some 8-Track Flashback movie.

Harry expected Severus to be one to rush in and out of showers as quickly as he could, but he took his time, stopping frequently to turn the faucet to cold and run the soothing water over his forearm. Harry moved closer to look at the Dark Mark, and noticed that Severus's arm was so badly burnt that he couldn't work out the mark at all.

The water sluiced over Severus's body, but sprayed right through Harry. Harry found it odd that he could feel, or at least sense, the water's temperature, but could not feel the water itself. He stayed under the showers for a long time with Severus, trying desperately to warn him about the danger that was coming. Once, Harry had managed to pull the bar of soap out of Severus's hand, and had kicked over the shampoo bottle, but Severus seemed unaware of Harry's presence.

To Harry's horror, the other boys finished their showers, donned their clothes, and departed, leaving Severus in large shower area alone.

If Harry possessed skin at the moment, he would have jumped out of it when he became aware of a group of people skulking behind them. "Oh no!" Harry thought to himself. "The Death Eaters!"


Harry whirled around, and came face to face with his own living reflection, a split second before a rolled towel whisked right through him and smacked the younger Severus Snape in the backside.

"POTTER!" Snape snarled, turning toward James Potter, Sirius Black and Petter Pettigrew, who were clad in only towels, standing behind him.

Severus summoned the towel off of Peter's waist, turned him around, and smacked him in the bum as well. Sirius was laughing so hard, that he did not seem to notice, until Snape spelled his towel off and smacked him in the backside as well.

"Confound it, SNAPE!" Sirius yelled, swinging a towel at Snape, missing his mark, and hitting the slender boy in his hip.

"What are you reprobates doing in this institute of higher learning?" Snape scowled, looking absolutely ridiculous standing there naked, and holding a towel like a weapon.

"Our college is playing against your University, Snape." James Potter replied, removing his own towel and taking aim.

"Then what is he doing here?" Snape asked, motioning to Peter. "Surely no college in the entire UK would let him play for their quidditch team. Tell me, Pettigrew, are you still following Potter, Black and Lupin around like the grotesque tail you are?"

Peter roared and swung the towel at Snape's face. A full fledged towel fight ensued, and Harry noted when all school uniforms and house colours were cast aside, all that was left were youths being youths. James and Peter finally tackled Snape, each snapping their towel no less than three times each on Severus's defenceless backside.

"I must say," Snape remarked, looking surprisingly unruffled, considering how red his posterior appeared, "That three against one is not fair. FOR YOU!" with that Snape waved both of his arms, and in the best display of wandless magic Harry had ever seen, sent James, Peter and Sirius backpedalling right out the open doors of the washroom.

"OY!" came Remus Lupin's raspy voice. He had been seated on a bench in the hallway, studying from his Advanced Dark Arts tome. "What are you fellows doing?"

Before Sirius, James or Peter could respond, Severus Snape stepped out of the washroom and addressed the gathering crowd outside. "They are proving that Peter is the only natural blond amongst them. James and Sirius obviously are not."

"SHUT UP, SNAPE!" said all three of them at once.

The nineteen year-old Remus Lupin respectfully averted his eyes from his three friends. "You had better put your clothes on, before you become sick."

"I have great pity for you, Moony."

"Why is that, Prongs?"

"You attend the same school as Snivellus!"


Fondness, in tandem with sorrowfulness, competed for Harry's consciousness. He watched the living Marauders re-robe, and leave the washroom with a heavy heart. While it was pleasing for him to see his father...strike that, fathers, godfather, a young Remus Lupin, and even a not yet corrupted Peter Pettigrew as they once were, the knowledge of what became of each of them seemed to play like a melancholy dirge in the background. Both James Potter and Sirius Black would die before they reached middle age; Peter would betray not only the Marauders, but most of the law abiding magical world as well; Remus Lupin would live a very hard life of near poverty; and Severus Snape had arguably the worst fate of all.

As if in synchronicity with Harry's musings, the images before him broke into intermittent flashes, as though he were speeding forward on the timeline, and stopping for only fractions of seconds, before resuming his course. The scenes before him grew ever more painful to watch, yet by the time Harry would attempt to close his eyes, the scene would move on to the next image. There was Snape, holding his arm under the cool water of the shower again. It must have been burning terribly, as the red colour spread like an ugly dye down to his palm, and up to his shoulder. Harry panicked, and began shouting for Snape to run when he saw the human Voldemort, and a group of ten Death Eaters enter the washroom. There was something very wrong with them. The masked figures no longer walked, or even looked like humans. The ten only growled and made animal-like vocalizations rather than talked. Harry heard bits and pieces of the Dark Lord's conversation with Snape, and about how the Animalia potion exploited common genetic material humans had with certain animals, thereby enhancing their strength, and lowering their higher reasoning capabilities.

Severus sprinted toward the exit, but his path was blocked by the phalanx of robed figures. The Dark Lord touched his ring to Severus, and they vanished. The Death Eaters apparated out immediately afterwards.

The walls of the darkened mansion Harry had watched Snape take the dark mark in, materialized around him again. Harry turned away as Voldemort cast a modified impedimenta curse on Snape.

Severus struggled feebly in the invisible bindings. "I've already brewed the potions you required! What more do you want of me?"

Voldemort levitated Severus to his oaken desk, and dropped him onto it. "You are never to show any disrespect toward me again. I hold your very life in my hands, if I desired, I could simply close my hands and crush you!"

Laying face-down on the oaken table, Severus began gagging, and Harry knew that Voldemort was employing wandless, dark magic to constrict Severus's throat. Harry turned away, as the animal-like Death Eaters descended on the nineteen year-old Severus Snape like a pack of dogs on their quarry. Although he could not see anything, the horrid sounds of Severus being assaulted in the most unspeakable ways pierced Harry's soul. Within the two-hour eternity, serious, irreparable damage was done to the 19 year-old boy. Harry could not escape the sounds of his father's pleas and agonized screams, and soon Harry was screaming as well, for he could somehow feel everything that was done.

At last, the onslaught ceased, and Harry uncovered his eyes to find that he and Severus Snape were once again in the washroom at the University. The human Voldemort slapped Severus across the face once more.

"It is partly in your hands, Black Snake. If you please me, and do exactly as you're ordered, you can brew any potion you desire, for you will have access to any ingredient on the planet. You can have riches beyond that of the wealthiest potion master in the UK, for I can arrange lucrative contracts with apothecaries throughout the world's richest markets. And your old school rivals will bow to your greatness." Voldemort tightened his 'grip,' causing Severus to wince and sob in pain, he was injured virtually everywhere on his body. "But if you disappoint me, or betray me in any way, I could make you suffer in this manner every day. Every day, until the day I see fit to end your life, I'll give you the same as you've received now. I could even give you worse. Your sire is well aware of that fact."

"No..." Severus implored, the simple action of talking was torture. "Please...no more."

"You are not your own, Snape." Voldemort said, turning to leave. "Just remember tonight, and strive never to disobey me again."

Severus rasped something incomprehensible.

"Say again?"

"Y-yes, master." Severus repeated, tears coursing from his swollen black eyes.

As Snape lay on the tiled floor, in the middle of a slowly expanding puddle of his own blood, Harry thought that Snape did not look like the victim of a violent assault by humans. The broken young man looked as though he had been mauled by wild animals.

His dark eyes were open, but there was an emptiness to them, as though whatever substance his eyes once contained had been washed out by the high volume of tears he had shed over the duration of the attack. The tears flowed thinly now, and as they did, Snape's eyes appeared to grow even more hollow, nearly taking on the feel of dark tunnels.

If two hours worth of the Animalia potion could inflict this much damage, what would the full dosage Voldemort had originally requested have done? How had Lucien Snape survived the full dosage? With brain damage, yes, but how did he survive at all?

How could anyone be so cruel to another human being?

Severus's black hair, which he had just washed back to its nearly iridescent state, was quickly becoming fouled by the blood flowing heavily from cuts on his scalp and face. Harry knelt beside his future father, wanting to help, but was unable to do more than put a comforting hand on a small area of his chest which was not gashed open, or heavily bruised.

Severus turned to Harry, and it seemed as though the wounded man could see the 'preborn angel' for a fleeting moment. He moved his mouth to say something, but Harry could make no sense of it, as Severus's lips were too bruised and swollen. Severus then squeezed his eyes tightly closed and began sobbing uncontrollably.

Harry did not think it possible for a person alone to bear such pain. Severus had lost everything. He had lost the only people in the world who had ever loved him; both his parents, and Lily. He had even lost his freedom, and would live the cursed life that used to be his sire's. He had also lost the chance to be a father. Harry's father.

Evidently, Severus could not contain all the pain alone, for Harry burst into tears as well, crying for the man who was dying at a deeper level right before his eyes; crying for the man who would have been his father; crying for the man who really was his father and had never known.

Inspiration struck Harry as suddenly as a brush fire fed by an accelerant. Harry quickly dashed the tears from his eyes, leaned close to Severus's face, and whispered softly: "Voldemort may think he's won, but you're still alive. And you won't have to fight alone for the rest of your life. Seventeen years from now, in my present time, I'll join you. Maybe neither one of us can defeat Voldemort alone, but together...well...I don't know even then, but I'm willing to try!"

Severus began to cry more fervently, and Harry could not be certain whether it was because humans had a finite threshold for what they could endure, and Severus had simply had too much; or because Severus had indeed heard him.

"I'm still alive as well. My body is weak, but it exists, and it can heal. You'll heal in time too..." Harry paused, knowing that the forthcoming months would be difficult, but at least neither of them would have to face them alone, "...Father!"

The End Part Six