Up in the Sunshine
After all that had happened here, everything he'd witnessed, the sight of Voldemort's throne room could not faze Snape anymore. He just grunted, resigned in the face of its well-known horror, and carefully lowered Potter to the ground so that he could lean against a marble column not too far from the iron pole to which his memory counterpart was chained.
He whipped out several blankets from the large bag he was carrying, doing his best to envelop Potter in a cocoon of warmth that might keep his temperature somewhat steady. This was followed by a row of potions bottles he carefully placed next to Potter, instructing the man - as always - to take one if he felt even the slightest change in his condition.
And here the easy routine of many days changed. Potter did not smile at him, did not thank him. Did not, in fact, even bother to meet his gaze or give any sign of reassurance. His eyes remained fixed on Voldemort, and his face was hard now, the brittle harshness of thin ice.
You will not apologize, Snape told himself firmly. Nothing at all is helped by an apology. You forced him into this, and you will bear that responsibility, not try and make excuses he'll have to accept.
"Comfortable?" he asked instead, holding onto his clinical detachment with everything he had.
Potter sent him a short look of disbelief, but before it could turn into reproach he looked away again, once more fixing his eyes on the Dark Lord.
Who was looking satisfied, for the first time in a month of memories. Snape's heart sank.
"Potter," Voldemort spat, and the word was a curse and a longing at the same time. "Since I have not been satisfied with the progress you made these past weeks, we will try something new today. Aren't you looking forward to that?"
The memory-Potter remained quiet, not in the way he had before, when he was too exhausted, too broken to speak, had perhaps even forgotten what words were for. This silence was one of resigned superiority, and his blood shot eyes rested on Voldemort with nothing but tired reproach.
"Not going to answer me, Potter? Has your muddy little well of wit finally run dry?"
Voldemort was sprawled out in his black throne, one bony-white hand splayed on the armrest, the very picture of a king. But his left eye was twitching, and the sibilants in his voice were sharp today, like snakes hissing from a hidden darkness, wanting out. He was on the edge of control.
Potter sighed, then grimaced as the rips in his bitten lips broke open and began to bleed again.
"You know this won't work, Tom," he said quietly. "It never does."
Voldemort's hand clenched into a fist, but his lips stretched wide, exposing sharp teeth, and Snape could feel the older Potter tense by his side, shifting his weight in sudden anxiety.
Snape would not have needed that tell. He knew this smile. He'd feared it for years.
"Oh, but are you really that sure of yourself, Potter?" Voldemort whispered. "You have shown remarkable resilience, I'll grant you that, and your stubbornness may be well matched to my own will. But we have only just begun. What will happen if we add something to this equation, hmm? Something more to wager with than just your life? Something you hold dearer than your continued existence?"
The younger Potter's face was the shadow of a living thing.
"It's a bit late for that, Tom. Now that you've taken everything already."
"Oh no, my dear boy," Voldemort's smile stretched wider, slipping into savagery and out again on the other side. "Not everything."
Three things happened simultaneously, then. The younger Potter stiffened, as wary as his weakened state allowed him to be. The older Potter jerked, his hands grabbing the column he had settled against, as if trying to haul himself up and flee this place, but the gesture was aborted, its uselessness realized before it could be completed.
And, on the other side of the throne room, black doors where thrown open wide, their clanging a dark echo in the cavernous room, and in marched two Death Eaters with Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger held firm their grip.
Snape sighed, but he wasn't surprised. In all their time together, the only thing that had ever gotten a genuine reaction out of Potter was the mentioning of his friends. The only thing that still seemed to possess the strength to wound him was their deaths. So when Potter had refused to continue the treatment for the first time since they had begun, Snape had known what would be waiting for them in the mists of the past.
But sometimes it didn't help to know one had been right. Sometimes that just served to make things more miserable.
The younger Potter looked slack-jawed, an expression Snape hadn't seen on his face for many a memory now. His whispered denial was drowned by Weasley, who espied his friend, reared up against his captors with a shout and was rewarded with a harsh punch to his face that left him sagging in the Death Eaters' floating spell.
"Harry!" Granger cried out, high and shrill and painfully untainted in this of all places.
Snape's Potter moaned, his fingers grappling on the stone floor, searching for escape, an anchor, anything.
Memory-Potter's eyes widened in horror.
"No," he whispered. "No."
But he did not answer his friend, did not outwardly react to their presence. Instead, he turned his head to the Dark Lord, to the only power that mattered in this room.
"Don't do this, Tom," he said. "Don't. This is between us."
Voldemort smiled, his lips razor sharp.
"You had your chance to ask for favours, Potter," he said. "It's too late now. Now that I have found you lacking, I will test the mettle of your friends instead."
Granger cried out again when she and Weasley were chained roughly to conjured poles similar to Potter's – close enough to their friend that they could almost reach one another. Almost.
"Harry," she whispered, in her face the horror of finding her friend so different after only a few weeks. Through her eyes, Snape could see the changes in Potter-the-boy anew, changes he had almost become used to, parallel as they were to his diminished condition in the now.
His clothes only a few tattered rags, and he not shy about showing his body, perhaps not even noticing anymore. His skin a mottled chaos of blue, greens and reds, like a painter's discarded palette, crusted with dirt. His arms stick-thin and chained above his head. His legs crooked, his hands useless, his mouth parched like a desiccated field.
His eyes weighed down with a knowledge that would forever set him apart.
Granger was crying over the shell of a boy that had once been her friend. And Voldemort was following the trail of her tears with his greedy eyes, gaze flickering between her and Potter, back and forth, drinking in a pain that Potter had unlearned to express.
"Harry. What happened to you?"
That was, perhaps, the stupidest question Snape had ever heard her ask. But she had no idea how easily a human being could be broken, could have no idea, and in a better world, she would have never found out.
"Yes, Harry," Voldemort cut in, his sibilant voice sickly sweet. "What did happen? Do you want to tell your little friends all about your journey of discovery? Where should we start? With your pleas for mercy? With your prostration before my throne? Or perhaps with the way you clawed my dear Bella to death in your aberration?"
Memory-Potter sighed. After that first unguarded reaction, his eyes had not strayed from Voldemort. Even now, with Granger whispering his name and Weasley moaning with returning consciousness, even now his eyes were fixed on Voldemort, and Snape understood that he was trying to protect his friends by ignoring them, by downplaying their importance and giving Voldemort what the Dark Lord longed for – his undivided attention.
But Snape also knew that it was a useless effort. Nothing would change the outcome of this, no distraction and no plea. Weasley and Granger were already burnt flesh. And Potter, his eyes fixed on Voldemort's dark delight, seemed to realize the same thing.
His face twisted. His head sank, and his body hunched in on itself as far as it could, given the chains that bound it.
"This won't work anymore, Tom," he said quietly, as if it was a regrettable fact of nature. "I won't play this game with you. You've broken my legs too often and in too many ways."
He looked up, his eyes flickering towards his friends with a shadow of regret, then back to the Dark Lord. Who hissed at him, never more like the giant snake that he resembled than in this moment.
"So sure, Potter," the words barely understandable, balancing on the very edge between Parseltongue and human. "So assertive. But there is another kind of destruction we have not explored yet, the sweet, blazing agony of another's pain, and I will fill you to the brink with it. I am not interested in breaking your legs anymore."
Potter opened his mouth to argue, to engage Voldemort in discussion and thus delay the fate of his friends, but Voldemort flicked his wand at him in a lazy Silencio, as if to show that he had no interest in the other's words, no interest at all.
But his eyes were not on Weasley and Granger when he gestured for his minions to begin, and he did not condescend to cast the spells on them himself.
Instead, he watched Potter. Watched him flinch at every spell, every scream, every droplet of blood. Watched him grind his teeth in helpless anger, watched his silent yelling as he pleaded with Voldemort. Watched him rip at his chains in vain, rebelling against his fate for the first time in a month, but not to get away this time, not to flee, but to help his friends. In vain.
Granger and Weasley were certainly less resilient than Potter, Snape noted clinically. Their pain left him almost untouched, small and inconsequent as it was in comparison to what Potter had suffered under the same hands, nothing he hadn't seen a hundred times as a Death Eater, and nothing in their dealing with it unusual enough to warrant attention.
Granger's reaction to pain was disbelief at first, paired with something approaching hysterical fear, while Weasley vented his anger in useless threats and trite oaths of defiance. Nothing unexpected. But to memory-Potter, every second of it was agony, and his newfound serenity wasn't helping here, was a drop of water in the waste, for good as Potter was at accepting his own sacrifice, he was helpless in the face of someone else's suffering, and every spell that hit another's skin cut into him, bled him out, carved away at his soul.
"I've been trying to forget this," present-Potter's voice was barely a whisper. He looked hollowed out, thin and grey and insubstantial, less than a shadow but for his terrible pain. "For so long. I tried to forget that they suffered, how they looked when he made them bleed, how they screamed with the pain. I tried…"
Granger was sobbing as a Death Eater sliced off the skin of her arm, a high, panicked wail of pain and fear and denial, a 'No, no, please, no, don't, please no, don't!" that went on and on and on without mercy or end, and memory-Potter was echoing her words, still silent, still struggling with his chains.
"I tried to remember them differently. There were so many other things, so many years of good memories! I tried to build a wall of them, I tried to forget this, and sometimes I almost managed, sometimes I could think of them without… sometimes I could see them as they were before, Hermione's face tilted up towards the sunshine on the first day of spring, Ron and I in the flying car, their delight when we won the House Cup for the first time, family dinner at the Burrows…"
Weasley's voice rose in a scream of pain, and present-day-Potter's voice rose, too, still babbling, still conjuring memories of better days, as if he could patch them over his eyes and ears, use them as a shield against this moment, a blanket of good, warm things he could huddle under, protected by their power.
"…lessons with Hagrid and conspiracy meetings in the Common Room, all those chocolate frogs we shared and all those letters, the first time I showed them the Room of Requirement and our brilliant seats at the Quidditch World Cup, Hermione's dress for the Yule Ball and Ron's terrible robes, and their smiles, their happiness, their cleverness, their bravery…"
"Are these truly Gryffindors, Potter?" Voldemort shouted gleefully. "Look how they beg, look how they plead. Where is their courage now? Even you did better, and we both know what a snivelling coward you are!"
"And how we laughed," Potter shouted, his voice almost gone, his eyes shining feverishly. "Walking the hills of Hogwarts in the summer, drinking hot chocolate in the kitchens, standing together through everything - there was so much laughter, so much trust, so much happiness! Friendship, true friendship…"
But it was all ash against the horrors of this moment, and his words trailed away, trickled into the empty wasteland of his memories.
His face did not change as he began to cry. His mouth did not twitch. His eyes still shone with the fire of his effort, but the flames were dying now, almost gone.
"How can this be all that is left?" He whispered. "After so many years…"
A/N:
"Oft denk' ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen,
Bald werden sie wieder nach Haus gelangen,
Der Tag ist schön, o sei nicht bang,
Sie machen nur einen weitern Gang.
Ja wohl, sie sind nur ausgegangen,
Und werden jetzt nach Haus gelangen,
O sei nicht bang, der Tag ist schön,
Sie machen den Gang zu jenen Höhn
Sie sind uns nur voraus gegangen,
Und werden nicht hier nach Haus verlangen;
Wir holen sie ein auf jenen Höhn
Im Sonnenschein, der Tag ist schön."
"I often think that they have just gone out.
Soon they'll be coming home again.
The day is bright! Don't be afraid
They are just walking up there to those heights.
Yes, they have only gone before us
Soon they'll be coming home again.
Don't be afraid, the day is bright!
They are just walking up there to those heights.
They have only gone before us
And will never wish for home again.
We'll find them on those heights! Up in the sunshine!
The day is bright up on those heights."
Friedrich Rückert, Kindertotenlieder
x
Weasley and Granger were already burnt flesh – A variation on a quote from the movie "The Name of The Rose": "She is already burnt flesh, Adso."