A/N: So a funny thing happened last September. I'd just finished the main body of the 'Lioness' and was toying with the epilogue, and then I sat down to write the next chapters of this story. And found that I couldn't. Not because of writer's block or anything, but because this part of the story seriously freaked me out, and I knew what I wanted to go for, and I wasn't sure how to write it (and believe me, I tried). Mostly because good (and I mean good in a literary sense) torture isn't written during lunch break.
So I tried and tried again, and nothing came of it. When April rolled around and I still hadn't given you the promised update, I decided to shift part of my insane work load and take a whole week just to write this. It freaked me out, and got me depressed, but it's done.
Which means for you: The key scenes of the coming chapters are now written, and I'm pretty happy with them (though they are awful and terrible and reaaallly depressing). Which means updates at least once a week for hopefully the rest of the fic. There are about ten more chapters to go, and I'll try to finish and post them as soon as possible, since I wouldn't force too long a waiting period on anyone in this arc of the story.
That's my plan. I hope you agree! Now go and read the depressing story…
The Blood-Dimmed Tide
Curselights and shouted spells greeted Snape as he stepped from the mists, and he had to suppress the instinct to draw his wand and join the battle.
Instead, his eyes darted to Potter-the-man to check his condition and then went in search of the memory-Potter that had to be hidden in this mad chaos of bodies and magic somewhere.
"What is going on?" He shouted against the battle noise, trying to take stock of the situation and analyze it at the same time.
He could recognize several Order members – none of which had lived to see the Dark Lord's demise, he realized with a sinking heart – engaged in a fight with several dozen Death Eaters. The Death Eaters were winning in a quite spectacular fashion, and more than one of the corpses that littered the ground was familiar to Snape. He was quite sure that he knew an equal numbers of fighters on each side, but luckily the Death Eaters' faces were obscured with masks and spared him the memory of old friends he had betrayed.
"The middle of my seventh year," Potter answered shortly. "I'm about to be captured."
Although their talk the day before seemed to have lightened his conscience, Potter seemed changed. During breakfast he'd been monosyllabic and without his usual exuberant emotional reactions. By the time they had entered the pensieve for the first memory of the day, he appeared downright cold.
Snape wasn't sure if it were the remnants of the last memory that caused this behaviour or the knowledge of what was yet to come.
He chanced another look at Potter and saw that he had chosen the base of a tree as his perch. Knees drawn up to his chest, head leaned back against the trunk, Potter had closed his eyes and seemed half asleep, ignoring his surroundings completely.
As if he hadn't noticed that battle that was raging around him, or as if he simply couldn't be bothered by it.
Surreptitiously, Snape aimed a diagnosis charm at his patient. Potter was alright, but his energy levels were all the way down despite the Pepper-Up Snape had administered only a few minutes ago. And the fact that Potter didn't even seem to notice the spell washing over him was a whole diagnosis all by itself.
It's just nine in the morning, Snape thought, wondering how on earth they could manage the four memories scheduled for today. Merlin, I wish someone had bothered with developing a finer diagnosis process for the Fading. Only twenty-six memories done and his body could give in any day now.
And still, he couldn't leave Potter behind with the – albeit small – comforts a hospital bed could offer him, for the symptoms would only be visible on memory-Potter if his Potter was close to him. And despite all the good advice various people who should have known better had given over the past week, simply jumping to the last bad memory and hoping that would be the one causing the Fading wouldn't work.
Snape had studied this illness for half a year during his time as Death Eater, and if there was one thing he knew about it, it was that the cause was completely unpredictable. Within the parameters of physical and mental stress he had set for the memories' selection, the trigger could be anything, from the most terrible event in a person's life to something appearing rather banale to the uninvolved observer.
There was no way of predicting which event would be surmountable to a person and which would be life-shattering. That much was true even for persons without the kind of mad chaos Potter preferred to call life.
If anything, the process of this treatment had confirmed Snape's view of the diagnostic process. There had been memories fitting the parameters that he hadn't expected in a lifetime (Black's death had been ugly, but it didn't really compare to Voldemort's resurrection in Snape's opinion), and others that he'd been utterly sure would cause a Fading in anyone (the attack by more than a hundred Dementors sprang to mind).
And yet he'd been wrong on all counts, and Potter himself didn't seem too sure, although he'd never really answered this question to Snape's full satisfaction.
As things stood, they could either have hopped wildly through Potter's memories and shot Snape's methodology to hell, or they could have done the sensible – if less intuitive – thing and stuck to the plan. As Snape had done. And he would do it again, even though Potter was now huddled at the foot of a tree, looking like a shadow of the confident, powerful man he'd met a week ago.
He would do it again, because if he ever gave up his scientific process, he could just as well start handing out lemon drops for all the difference he would make.
Though in hindsight, he should have trusted Potter's assurances concerning his life before Hogwarts and started a bit later. But he'd never tell him that.
Snape groaned and turned away from his patient. He was ruined to the world! There was a battle going on around him, friends and foes facing each other in lethal combat. He should be floating on adrenaline right now, not thinking about Harry Potter!
How was the younger one, anyway?
Doing his best to avoid the fighters left and right – memory-persons were insubstantial if one came in contact with them, but he'd never liked the feeling -, Snape searched the melee for Potter and found him, unsurprisingly, in the thick of it.
What did surprise him, however, was Potter's prowess at duelling. He'd certainly shown promise during his training (in sixth year – that short pitiable excuse for a duelling club in Potter's second year had shown him disastrously lacking in ability), but nothing that had hinted even remotely at this.
Potter spun and blocked, he hexed and cursed and ducked in a tempo that Snape, who was famous for his duelling skills even among Hogwarts professors, found astonishing. The boy wasn't even eighteen, and already he could have fought and defeated most of the aurors Snape had known.
At seventeen, Potter already had much of the agility and reflexes the twenty five-year-old had exhibited before his body weakened, but his technique was an entirely different matter.
Conventional and unimaginative where his fighting style was now exotic and perfectly targeted to the situation, Potter made up for his lack of finesse with sheer willpower. Where his Potter was all elegance and efficiency, this Potter was aggression in its purest form. He barely seemed to notice when a spell grazed his body, and he used his arsenal of spells indiscriminately, not caring if his opponent was stunned or slashed in half
He looked a bit like Bellatrix, but without the playfulness, and there was no joy in his eyes. Only fury.
But despite all that, he was only a seventeen year old boy in a battle between grown-ups, and it was only a question of when he'd blunder.
There! A spell shot across the edge of his shield and engulfed his thigh in flames, only for a heartbeat, but a heartbeat was enough. Potter went slack and would have collapsed if not for the grip of a black cloaked Death Eater who suddenly appeared from behind.
The man pointed his wand to the skies, and suddenly the green light of the Dark Mark illuminated the devastated faces of aurors and Order members, their enemies gone, and with them their prize.
Potter was – once again – a prisoner of the Dark Lord, but this time there would be no rescues, no last-minute-escape.
It would have seemed rather anticlimactic to Snape, had he not known that this was now considered the key event to the second war against Voldemort in every book he'd bothered to read (and thrown against the wall in subsequent disgust).
And all because of these stupid, incompetent Order members that couldn't manage to keep a seventeen-year-old out of battle, that followed orders no matter how imbecilic they were.
Not for the first time, Snape thought in disgust that Potter had truly survived despite the help they had provided.
He shuddered, aimed another diagnostic spell at his Potter, and waited for the mists of the pensieve to engulf them.
0o0
The chamber that re-formed around them was familiar to Snape.
He blinked twice, spun around, and met Potter's eyes with an expression of utter shock.
"Here?" He asked. "The primary stronghold? You've been here all the time?"
Potter was leaning against the rough stonewall of the unadorned room that served as apparition point, watching as his past self struggled wildly against the hold of his kidnappers and received a punch in the stomach for his efforts.
"You didn't know?" He asked with faint surprise. "I thought… I always assumed that the Order knew and simply couldn't get me out… or wouldn't, since Dumbledore…"
"Dumbledore what?" Snape asked sharply, but Potter just shook his head and closed his eyes in obvious exhaustion.
He is your patient, Snape reminded himself. Healers do not snap at patients. This is difficult enough without your baggage on top of it.
But he remembered it so clearly now – the other side of the coin. The panicked message about an emergency Order meeting, the arrivals of hooded and cloaked strangers in Hogwarts (so indiscrete it would have made a blind person suspicious), the presence of Ronald Weasley and the Granger girl, despite Molly's protests.
They had looked incredibly young as they sat huddled between Moody and Minerva, a sharp and painful reminder of Potter's age.
And the way their eyes had filled with tears, the way Molly's face had crumbled, the way the collective Order seemed to sag in shock when Dumbledore had joined them, had laced his fingers together and had said, without a hint of his usual optimism:
"It is my sad duty to inform you all that Harry has been taken prisoner by Voldemort."
Yes, Snape's memories of that day were all too clear. The Order had been mad with worry and anger at Potter's capture, and most of that anger had been piled on him, their spy, always good for a scapegoat.
Why hadn't he known, or had he? Was he the one who'd informed Voldemort of Potter's whereabouts (which was a real laugh, considering that he'd known nothing about any of this, the secret missions, the additional training, Potter's duelling skills)?
He'd never liked Potter, after all. And hadn't he complained often enough that they were stuck with such a pitiful excuse for a saviour? Perhaps he'd preferred the chances the other side offered, after all?
Snape hissed, wishing that he could punch someone. But the only other substantial person in reach was Potter, and with him punching was for medicinal reasons only.
"No," he said instead. "I didn't know. Voldemort never summoned me here while you were his prisoner. In fact, he didn't summon me at all."
The whole time he'd been sitting there, waiting for a hint, a trace of a clue of what had happened, going through every source he could use without appearing too desperate, risking things that could blow his cover wide open, three months of waiting, and the hateful voices of the Order in his ears all that time, whispering that he didn't care, didn't even try…
"I'd have been surprised if he had," Potter whispered, eyes still closed and face chalk white. "Even if he trusted you completely, he couldn't be sure that Dumbledore wouldn't find a way to use you against him."
His lids cracking open, he flashed Snape a hint of green eyes and a memory of a smile. "The old man's devious that way."
Snape wasn't sure if he meant Dumbledore or Voldemort, but found that he didn't care.
Silently, he watched the Death Eaters half-carry the struggling Potter down the corridor, but he waited until his Potter sighed, and clenched his jaws, and thrust his shoulders back, and said "Shall we?", before he followed them towards the snake's den.
The Dark Lord was lounging on his throne, his head turned towards the wall to his right, his spidery fingers caressing the marble.
He did not react to the Death Eaters' entrance, nor to the struggling Potter, who gathered his last strength and lunged towards Voldemort, his hands like claws, only to be stopped by rough grips and a punch that sent him sprawling to the ground.
When he stumbled to his feet, slowly and disoriented, his lip was split and coated in blood. It made him look strangely alive.
Only now did Voldemort lower himself to notice them.
„Harry Potter," he whispered, his face still half averted as if in disinterest, but anyone who cared to look could see the excitement in it.
"You've barely grown since we last met, I see," now he turned fully, a smile twisting his lips. "And you still believe you can avoid the unavoidable."
One finger twirled elegantly, and one of the cloaked Death Eaters kicked Potter's legs from under him. With a hiss, Potter fell to his knees, but his eyes remained fixed on the ground, refusing to meet Voldemort's red gaze. His body was thrumming with silent tension.
"Death Eater got your tongue, Potter?" Voldemort chuckled at his own joke. "Speak to me, boy. Or do you want to be tortured?"
And Potter, blood dripping slowly form his split lip, raised his very green eyes to Voldemort. They shone with hate, bright as only an Avada Kedavra could.
"I will kill you, you half-blood," he said. The darkness in their eyes made them equals.
Voldemort laughed and cocked his head in surprised delight.
"And still so much fire," he mused. "So much youth and confidence… let's see what we can do about that, shall we?"
Snape swallowed, his throat dry and itchy. This was not the recently resurrected Voldemort Potter had met at the end of his fourth year, nor the fighter on enemy terrain that had engaged – and nearly defeated – Dumbledore in Potter's fifth. This Voldemort was in control, his madness sharpened with purpose.
This Voldemort twitched his fingers, and Death Eaters danced to his rhythm like puppets.
Without a word being spoken, Potter's robes were removed and his body chained to an iron pole that stood lonely in the middle of the throne room. Snape hoped that Potter wouldn't notice the red splatters on the flagstones surrounding it.
The last consolation for a victim was usual the belief in the uniqueness of his situation. Potter didn't have to know that he was only the latest in a long line of entertainments. Even if, perhaps, the most anticipated.
Someone ripped Potter's shirt open, exposing white, goose bumped skin, and another Death Eater kicked his legs away so that he fell awkwardly to his knees. Potter didn't even try to get up again. One lesson learned, it seemed.
"His wand," Voldemort demanded.
One of the Death Eaters stepped forward, his head bowed respectfully, his hand offering the brother to Voldemort's wand.
Instinctually, Potter-the-boy reached out for it, his body straining to bridge the distance between him and his one weapon, only to be yanked back by his chains.
Voldemort chuckled. "A true wizard's impulse, Potter," he whispered appreciatively. "Always reaching for one's wand, for it is the only thing separating us from animals. Do you remember the first time it sang its magic for you, Potter? The sweet power running through your veins?"
He closed his eyes and hummed in satisfaction.
"I remember it as if it were yesterday," he whispered silkily. "And now I have yours to keep my own power company."
He touched the brother-wand slowly, reverently, his fingers sliding along it with relish.
Then, his eyes fell on his two followers, standing to Potter's side.
"You really should unmask, Lucius, Janus," he suggested lazily. "This is such an intimate moment for Potter. We should recognize it."
He smiled. "And after all, he won't have a chance to disclose your identities."
The Death Eaters hesitated for a moment, their eyes turning from Voldemort to Potter. Then long, carefully manicured fingers removed a mask to reveal Lucius Malfoy's steel grey eyes and smirking lips. After a second, Janus McDall followed his companion's actions.
Again, Voldemort smiled. "You see, Potter? We are all friends here. Lord Voldemort has nothing to hide."
He waited for a reaction, and Snape waited along with him, his heart in his throat. Too well did he remember Potter's defiance in their last encounters.
Potter-the-boy did not disappoint.
He glared, opened his mouth to respond, then quite obviously changed his mind and spat on the stones in front of him instead. Mild in comparison to what Snape had seen and done in this chamber, but it communicated Potter's opinion clearly.
"It seems he is not quite ready for talking yet," Voldemort commented. He gestured to Lucius and Janus. "Warm him up for me, will you?"
Potter didn't scream through the first bout of Cruciatus, nor through the second. By the third, his whole body trembled and writhed, but his jaws remained locked together.
It didn't surprise Snape, not after what he had seen over the past week, but he could feel his respect for Potter's resilience climb another notch or two.
He used the time to aim another diagnostic spell at his Potter and force one of the special Pepper-Ups on him when his energy levels were too low.
But while he fussed around Potter and muttered disparaging comments about the world in general under his breath, his ears were straining for a scream, a whimper, any sound but the pained grunting that escaped Potter's lips whenever another curse hit home.
He heard nothing but the spells, he chains and the steady dripping of blood on stone.
And finally, Voldemort commanded his men to stop.
"How are you feeling, Potter?" He asked in something that would have sounded like real concern from any other person.
Potter grunted again, and spat a mouthful of blood onto the rough stones around him. Another sacrifice for the pole.
"You can try as hard as you like, Voldemort," he pressed out of lips that were bitten and bloody. "But you'll never break me!"
Voldemort just shook his head. He seemed amused.
"Potter, dearest Potter," he chuckled. "I think you still don't realize your situation here. You are in my stronghold. This mansion is unplottable, no portkeys can be made or transported here, and no one knows where you are. This time you won't escape or be rescued after a few rounds of the Cruciatus. This time, we have months before us – years even, if I want it so -, and soon you will beg for your death. You think you've stood up against me and were a courageous little Gryffindor, but the fact of the matter is that we haven't even started yet."
He smiled, still amused, searched Potter's face for fear and found it.
He turned away, walked slowly over to his throne of black marble, and sat with the air of someone who had all day and nothing but fun ahead of him. Snape felt dread and fear coil together in his stomach. He knew what would happen now. He knew it from a hundred meetings and a thousand broken bodies at his feet.
"Break his fingers, Lucius dear," Voldemort said lightly. "One by one. And do it slowly. I want to hear them snap."
The title of this chapter is taken from the poem "The Second Coming" by Yeats, just as the titles of 35 and 39 are.
Next chapter will be up in about a week. Now pay the evil Dark Lord by reviewing!