"Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."
- from "Leviathan", Thomas Hobbes
For his crimes against the Wizarding World, including the murder of Albus Dumbledore and countless innocent Muggles and wizards, Severus Snape was sentenced to twenty years' hard labour - the Wizengamot's euphemism for lifetime slavery. "Lifetime" because most criminals who received that sentence never survived their first year, let alone the next nineteen.
Severus Snape made it through five.
The prisoners were kept in a large corral with ramshackle little huts for dubious shelter from the elements. They were sold or hired out for menial labour and came and went as needed. There was no bedding; they slept on the ground - in the mud if it rained. The shacks were shared by the pair and turnover was high.
Two wizards performed routine administrative and other tasks in a much nicer building located near the entrance of the corral. Other than that there was no need for guards; numerous harsh and intricate spells on the convicts took care of all security requirements, and no slave had a wand - it was the first thing to be taken from a prisoner upon his arrival.
They had broken Snape's wand and thrown it into the fire right in front of him, the first day he was brought into the encampment. He had forced himself to remain moveless, to show nothing on his face or in his eyes, to refrain even from clenching his fists. It had been the hardest feat of self-control he had ever had to accomplish. Nothing before or since had been as difficult, not even the killing of Dumbledore.
After that he had been assigned a hut and a room-mate, and that afternoon he had been sent out on his first job.
The work was backbreaking, the food minimal and scarce - as was the clothing supplied. A few legitimate parties would hire the slaves from time to time; usually companies with an eye for the bottom line and not much concern for quality work. Most of it was of the fetch-and-carry variety, on construction lots or in quarries and mines. Often, however, the hirers were people with a grudge who simply wanted revenge. Needless to say, convicted Death Eaters were in much greater demand than ordinary thieves and murderers.
The guard wizards did not care if prisoners returned somewhat the worse for wear. They received a cut of the pay (the rest went to the Ministry's coffers, ostensibly to a fund for victims of the War, but in reality it mostly went to tea and biscuits in the Wizengamot's Reading Room) and thus had a certain minimal interest in keeping the workers alive, but there was also always plenty of fresh meat coming in every month, so they saw no need to unduly coddle existing slaves.
Simple cuts and bruises were ignored. More severe injuries such as broken bones would be healed perfunctorily and the prisoner sent back out the next day, unless the injuries were sustained by someone who had already seen his best years, in which case the slave would more than likely be left to suffer until he either healed on his own or died. Either way, he would be forced to continue working until he dropped - there was no such thing as a sick day in the slave camp.
Severus was fairly lucky in that he was strong and known to be a hard worker, not to mention a consistently profitable hire, so the guards usually healed him of his worst injuries whenever necessary. He was unlucky in that he was the most famous Death Eater to survive the end of the War. Even at the premium price that he commanded, every other day still brought some fool or other who was either out for vengeance or merely wanted to be able to boast that he had kicked the tar out of Severus Snape, the man who had murdered the Great White Wizard in cold blood.
The spells did not allow the slaves to defend themselves, so in the first months after the end of the War, many Death Eaters died while out on assignment. Deliberate murder of a prisoner was forbidden, of course, but the Ministry generally turned a blind eye to almost anything short of that. Snape survived by dint of sheer stubbornness - or willpower, as he preferred to think of it. He did not know why he kept on going week after week while his former colleagues dropped like flies around him, and he certainly did not expect to live through twenty years of almost-daily beatings, but he persevered regardless, one excruciating day at a time. He would not give in without a fight, could not. It was simply not in his nature.
The last Death Eater in the encampment (other than Snape himself) died six months and three weeks into Snape's sentence. Amycus Carrow had been failing for some time - he had said that he had no wish to live on after his sister died in Azkaban while they were awaiting sentencing - and the guards had ceased to bother healing his injuries. He did not return from his last assignment, and Snape did not know what had happened to him. Presumably his hirer had abused him to the point where he had collapsed and failed to regain consciousness.
Snape did not care. One less slave was one less person to fight for food.
The days after that were a blur of grueling work, meagre subsistence and dogged endurance. Once in a while a fresh new intern would arrive and be stupid enough to want to fight Snape to prove his place in the pecking order. They always lost, but by increasingly slimmer margins as the months and years passed. Severus knew that one day, eventually, he would be the one left dead or gasping in the mud, but he did not think about it in the same way that he did not think about the passing of time or the events of the past.
Five years and two days into his sentence, he was hired out to work on the construction site of a new building in Hogsmeade. He had acquired some useful skills in that field by then, and was able to perform simple tasks that could be done with regular tools, or which did not require the use of a wand. It was one of the things that had kept him alive - when word of his competence and reliability on site got out among the few companies that used the convicts for such work, they had begun to request his services more often and this had provided some respite from the other, more lethal types of hirers.
Working in Hogsmeade, especially along a public thoroughfare such as the one where this particular building was to be erected, was always a test of willpower and self-control. It was not easy to hold his tongue when passersby recognised him and said stupid things, but he had had a long time to train himself to it. One also had to be alert to sly tricks - some people liked to stick their feet out and trip the slaves as they went back and forth with their heavy loads; others liked to play tricks with their wands, hexing equipment or otherwise harrassing the labourers.
Every now and then, some people would just stop and watch. These were sometimes the worst, to Snape's mind, because they did nothing. They neither taunted nor cursed, they simply looked. It made his skin crawl.
This day there was one such person. He stopped just behind and to the right of Snape, a respectable distance away, but it still felt like he was breathing down Snape's neck. The former Death Eater kept his head down and focused on the heavy stones he was lifting. Some people who would otherwise remain silent became belligerent if they thought they were being challenged and felt they had something to prove in front of an audience. It was always best to avoid inciting a confrontation if at all possible; the company and its regular employees could not be counted on to protect the slaves it hired, even one as valuable and well-known as Snape.
The observer stayed in position for some time, and Snape had the uncomfortable feeling of being scrutinised from head to foot. He kept his face tilted away, his lank hair falling down to shield it from view. It was quite long now, and he usually kept it tied back with a piece of string he had picked up from one of the sites he had worked on, but he had been bending over a lot all day and several locks had come loose. He had been annoyed about it earlier, but now he was glad of the coverage. With his luck it would be yet another idiot who had recognised him and was even now planning to hire him as soon as his current contract expired.
Eventually his watcher went away and Snape let out a sigh. By the end of the day, he had forgotten all about it in the tussle for dinner scraps.
The next morning, he was called to the guard house. Keeping his face blank, he stood at attention and waited.
"Well Snape, it looks like you're sprung."
"What?" He tried but failed to contain his shock.
"Aye. Someone's bought your contract - permanently. Which is to say for the remainder of your sentence. Paid off your current contract with the construction blokes, too."
"Who-?"
"Let's see now..." The warden, fortunately one of the friendlier ones, leafed through his sheaf of paperwork and pulled out a flimsy piece of parchment. "A Mister H. J. Potter, it says."
Mouth open, Snape stared. Then he sank down on the floor, heedless of the guard's bewilderment, and laughed.
He laughed for a full minute, until the guard's expression turned into puzzlement and began edging towards worry.
"Are you quite alright?"
"Yes," Snape said, standing up again, ignoring the thin salt trickle of blood from his cracked lip - the perils of laughing when dehydrated, he thought nonsensically to himself. Suppressing the hint of incipient hysteria sternly, he said, "What is the procedure?"
"It's been paid in full so you may leave as soon as you are ready. The buyer left an address - make your way to it before sunset today. You'll be told what to do once you get there."
Taking the proffered scrap of parchment, Snape nodded curtly, turned on his heel, and left.
He made straight for the corral exit. There was nothing to pack. The slaves had nothing, other than the clothes on their backs. Unlike some of the others, Snape had never attempted to steal anything for himself, excluding the dirty piece of string which he had picked up off the ground one day to tie his hair with (and he sincerely doubted that anyone would ever complain about that particular "theft"). All of his energy had been put into the task of surviving, pure and simple. If a thing had had nothing to do with food or shelter or the healing of a wound, he had paid no attention to it.
Looking down at the note, he saw that it was an address on the outskirts of Hogsmeade. It would take him some hours to walk there, especially if he took the more deserted roads to avoid running into people who might try to waylay him. He folded the piece of parchment carefully and pushed it into the pocket of his threadbare trousers, then headed for the road north.
It was a long walk, and Snape allowed himself the luxury of speculation as he strode on. Whatever Potter wanted of him, it could not be worse than the last five years had been. He would withhold judgment - or gratitude - until he had heard what the boy had to say. In the meantime, he was freer than he had been in a very long time - at least for the duration of this journey, he was, in a sense, his own master.
Tilting his head back, he looked up at the sky. He had not looked at it since the day of his sentencing. It was pale blue and cloudless, the sun a white haze glinting off grass and green leaves. Birds were hopping about and flying between the trees. He lay down in the field by the side of the country lane for a moment and laughed again.
It was the second time he had laughed in almost a decade.
