Needfire

Disclaimer: See Chapter 1.


god\'s terrible face, brighter than a spoon,
collects the image of one fatal word
so that my life(which liked the sun and the moon)
resembles something that has not occurred:
i am a birdcage without any bird,
a collar looking for a dog,a kiss
without lips;a prayer lacking any knees
but something beats within my shirt to prove
he is undead who,living,noone is.


-- e.e.cummings


Chapter 10 - Damages Done


Snape took the long walk back to Hogwarts at a pace close to a run. He was glad of the darkness. It meant that no one would see the flaring colour in his cheeks, colour not born of his exertion or the single glass of Stolichnaya, long gone from his system. Colour born of his internal torment. His black robes billowed behind him, thrashed in the wind of his velocity.

Back in the dungeons at last, he slammed into his quarters and stood staring wildly about him. Everything in his tidy quarters was in place, yet it seemed as if every least item had been moved, a bare half inch out of proper alignment: twisted, tipped, rotated, disturbed. He went to his bedroom, intending to throw himself on the bed and perhaps sleep, hopeful that after sex and the long, hard walk, his body would finally be ready for rest and would overrule his spinning brain.

But the distortion continued in his room, made worse by the bed, the bed that stood hulking in front of him like a ship driven atilt onto rocks. His BED, in which he would most likely only think of Hermione as he lay there. Marina was already forgotten despite the lovely and pleasurable fucking he\'d needed so much, but the other three women in his interior sexual life, Angharad, Lily, and, now, Hermione Granger, were ravaging the forefront of his thoughts.

The noise that ripped from his throat was that of anguish. He couldn\'t stay here.

There were, really, only two possible sanctuaries. The Stones, and his dungeon classroom. It was too bloody cold out, and too far, to consider the Stones. The classroom it would be. As he left his quarters, he snatched a bottle of Jameson\'s out of a cupboard in his sitting room and stuffed it inside his robes.

Snape warded the doors more strongly than ever, changing the passwords from \"Cogito ergo sum\" to \"I think, therefore I should not be.\" He could always put them back later, but just now he wanted no interruptions. A Friday night in dark October; what better time to get drunk. He had the entire weekend ahead of him. He and the Jameson\'s sank down between the lab tables, hidden from all view, comforted by the cold stone of the floor, and sheltered by the tall tables. He uncapped the bottle, realized he had forgotten a glass, and drank straight from the neck. It scorched all the way down, welcome and cleansing heat and fumes.

It was Lucius Malfoy who had introduced him to Jameson\'s all those years ago. Beautiful Lucius, the Slytherin jewel who showed Snape exactly the shape of Snape\'s soul at the time he least wanted to see it: foul, twisted, but brilliant. The Jameson\'s was a means to an end, the breaking of barriers, the key to Snape\'s locked-away pain. Lucius already belonged to Voldemort, and in Snape he found the perfect pawn, a new soldier in Voldemort\'s growing army. Young, isolated, ugly, and hurting, Snape was ripe for the picking. Lucius had enjoyed Snape\'s blossoming under Voldemort\'s rough tutelage. And at last Snape had a new friend, one who shared his interests and his intellect. Lucius.

\"Snivellus!\" James, and Sirius, standing near Peter and Remus. Pointing, laughing. Severus\' hand went for his wand, but James was faster, disarming him instantly. More laughter, followed by taunting, and then Scourgify, so strongly cast it amounted to a hex as Severus stammered his anger. The O.W.L.s had been bad enough, difficult and draining, but this was much worse. Lily\'s Gryffindor crowd...he didn\'t dare to blast them to oblivion, she wouldn\'t approve in the slightest. Why did she run with them?

Why does she run with you, Severus?

She loves me.

She\'s kind, that\'s all. She feels pity. Poor bewildered Severus, alone, unloved, abused by a cuffing father, unprotected by a cringing mother. Pity. Remember you told her the whole miserable story, one of those long conversations.

She loves me.

She\'s never told you so. She likes the sex. She likes the control she has over you. Her own pet Slytherin slave. Bit of a forbidden thrill for a Gryffindor edging into the cusp of Ravenclaw, reckless, bright and sharp.

Lies. Lies!

But that niggling suspicion remained. He almost choked on the pinkish foam of Scourgify covering his lips, spitting desperately to clear his mouth. He reached his wand.

Another swallow of Jameson\'s. How many times had he relived this particular memory? It seemed to surface anytime he was distracted or upset. It went to the bone, like Voldemort\'s Dark Mark on his left arm.

Movement, a bit away from the group. Swing of dark red hair. Lily!

\"When are you going to bathe, Snivellus...wash that greasy hair of yours?\"

Vile green light shot from Severus\' wand. He couldn\'t speak around the foam, but his intention was brutal.

A cut opened in James\' cheek. There was blood, and immediately James\' wand was raised again and Severus was upside down, dangling in mid-air. Severus\' wand was knocked from his hand again. This late in the school year, his heavy winter robes -- the only ones he had -- were too hot for other clothes underneath, and so when the robes flipped over his head, obstructing his vision, he knew his pale, thin shanks were visible, along with what he wore under the robes: not much. Old underwear, much washed, and beginning to be ragged.

It wasn\'t that there was no money. There was. There should have been enough to pay for decent clothing. It was more that there was no love, no thought, no provision. Severus looked too much like his father, and his father hated himself. Had it not been for the Hogwarts invitation, Severus would have remained at home, watching the awful dance that was his father\'s control over his mother, and her fortune.

\"Look at that!\" James again, laughing uproariously. From the sounds of it, quite a crowd was gathering to watch the spectacle. Much laughter. Severus tried vainly to summon his wand, but with the robes over his head and hands, could not find it though he could feel it nudging at the shrouding cloth. \"Wonder what\'s UNDER that old grey underwear! Let\'s find out!\"

\"Stop it, James.\" Lily\'s voice. Cool, strident. \"Put him down, it isn\'t funny anymore.\"

Merlin. The humiliation, the fury. I will see you dead for this, James.

James let him fall. \"Lucky for you Evans took your side, Snivellus.\"

The rage flared out of control, and he was driven to scorch Lily with it. The girl he wanted, the girl he could talk with, the girl who had given him her virginity, and taken his. \"I don\'t need the help of a Mudblood.\" Like father, like son.

It would take more than two swallows of Jameson\'s to drive James and Lily back into the dark where they belonged. Snape drank again. The dungeon floor didn\'t seem so cold any longer.

Severus, running after Lily later that week. \"I didn\'t mean it.\"

\"You did. Why say it, else?\"

\"I was angry.\"

\"So I saw. James was bleeding.\"

\"I\'m sorry.\"

\"I\'m not. It makes a few things abundantly clear, Severus.\"

He halted. So did she. \"What do you mean?\"

\"You\'re a pureblood. I\'m not. This will never work out.\"

\"I can look past that.\"

Bitter laughter from Lily. \"That\'s just it, Severus. Listen to yourself talk. YOU have to look past it, when it shouldn\'t even occur to you as an obstacle.\"

Silence. She had driven a spike through his heart. His father\'s ugly heart, beating in Severus\' own pale chest. What else of Father was in him?

At last, wrenched from him: \"Let me try.\"

She put out a trembling hand. \"You have to let me in, Severus.\"

Again: \"Let me try.\"

\"I can\'t do this if you\'re going to be so...so...cold.\"

\"Lily.\" Despair, until she let him touch her again.

While the floor had ceased to seem cold, it was still hard. Snape used the lab table nearest him to pull himself upright and stumble along to his office, where the chair was more comfortable and he could drink himself into a stupor. The purity and sanctuary of his dungeon no longer seemed important, but getting drunk did.

By early in their sixth year, though, he found his father\'s heart to be too strong. Lily was simply too warm, too bold, and with each of her forward steps (except for sex -- the sex was still the best thing about their relationship, the sex and the way the world had narrowed down to just the two of them -- no more Gryffindor crowd, just Severus and Lily, Severus and Lily, Severus and Lily) he retreated. Cold, colder, and finally coldest, when she asked him if he loved her.

\"You suit me,\" was the closest he could come.

Hard, glittering emerald eyes stared him down. \"You don\'t love me at all. You control me. That\'s what you love.\"

\"I want you!\"

\"You want a doll to play with, to dress and pose and...and...fuck.\" The word was ugly, coming from her, born of her distress. \"You don\'t want me. We\'re done here.\"

There, his chair. He fell into it. The black leather was cool, but it warmed rapidly. The level in the Jameson\'s was rather alarmingly low; should he fetch another bottle from his quarters, enough for the weekend? Not yet, not yet. Another sip, to chase that Lily-ghost.

\"You don\'t look well, Severus. Is something wrong? Did something happen with your Gryffindor girl?\"

Severus looked up slowly at Lucius, Head Boy of Hogwarts. Beautiful, beautiful Lucius. Gold and grey, heat and ice. \"Mine no longer.\" Bitter, bitter words.

Lucius cocked a hip and leaned against Severus\' library table. \"Pity. She looks like quite the luscious f...\" Trailing off, seeing the glare.

Silence.

\"It must hurt, though. Why don\'t you come with me, Severus? I was planning on a little self-indulgence this evening...you look like you could use some.\"

\"What do you mean?\" Quill brushing his lips and jaw. Still two essays to write.

Lucius\' tapered fingers reached to close Severus\' book. \"Getting drunk,\" he said. \"That\'s what I mean.\"

\"I don\'t drink.\"

\"You\'re missing a lot. Muggle whiskey, incredible. Beats firewhiskey, no contest. A much better buzz.\"

And in the end, Snape had gone with Lucius to his Head Boy\'s room, and they had shared the Jameson\'s. Snape was drunk enough to tell Lucius everything the blond wanted to know, and not remember much about it afterwards, except to recall how comforted he\'d felt, how sympathetic Hogwarts\' Head Boy had been about the whole Gryffindor affair, the public humiliation, and the cut on James\' face.

And he\'d returned, each Friday night for three weeks after that, to repeat the process. Drinking, chatting, finally drunk, confessing, passing out, forgetting. When Lucius pulled back the velvet of his sleeve, to show Severus the Dark Mark, taken just that spring, Severus was fetched. He liked the things his new friend had shown him so far.

\"Voldemort, you say?\"

\"Yes. You wouldn\'t believe the power this Mark gives me, Severus. I think you\'d like that power. Even the merest taste...heady wine, better than whiskey.\"

Derisive laugh. \"Not much is better than this Jameson\'s.\"

\"This is. Come with me next time.\"

\"When?\"

\"I never quite know; he calls me when he will. But...Severus...there will be time for me to find you, bring you with me. The Dark Lord has been looking for someone like you. Someone with your intelligence will be most valued.\"

And at midsummer, Snape had taken the Dark Mark. The perception of a new power was incredible; addicting; intoxicating. Perhaps power was not the right word, but certainly there was a shackling of his conscience; a new set of rules for Snape to play by. A certain willingness to do things his conscience would otherwise have forbidden, Slytherin though he was. Now, when he cast hexes, there was a pride in their strength; a pride in the ease with which he could intend to injure. He no longer felt a compulsion to hold back in any way. These things the Dark Mark freed in him. As Lucius had promised, it was better than the whiskey; better, even, than sex with Lily. There were other women in the world, as he discovered.

With this sort of strength at his fingertips, there was no need to return home, to watch his brutal father and bone-weary mother spiral towards each other, ever closer to a final ending point. He took a job in London, in a shop off Knockturn Alley, brewing potions and creating new ones for Voldemort. He lived with Lucius in the other man\'s flat and acquired a taste for the softer things in life; the better things; the expensive things. And through the last years at Hogwarts, he had enough money to do as he pleased; buy his own Jameson\'s, buy his own robes, and never wear ragged underwear again. His colours were the Slytherin colours, used to relieve the starkness of the black he loved best.

To another man those points might have seemed foolish; but to Snape, they were the beginning of a new life. A new confidence. A new Snape, colder, brutal, almost the Slytherin jewel he had always longed to be. Almost. Lily and her Gryffindor crowd gave him a wide, wide berth. More than one of them had felt the freezing sting of the new anger in his wand; anger liberated by the change the Dark Mark had wrought in him. He had friends among the Death Eaters. He had no need of friends at Hogwarts any longer.

Seventh year came. Lily had been dating James for most of their sixth year.

James, bragging in the corridors between classes. \"She\'ll marry me. Once we leave school, she\'ll marry me. Lily, Lily Potter. What about that, Sirius? How\'s that sound?\"

Severus, out of sight around the corner, froze in his tracks. He sank back against the corridor wall, clenching his long fingers into fists, feeling his nails cut into his palms. Shock filled his brain to the exclusion of all else, for many moments. He heard Sirius slapping James on the back, congratulating him. Lily Potter. It might have been Lily Snape, once, but for his inability to say he loved her, wanted her, needed her. And after the shock of hearing she would forever belong to his worst enemy eased, the only thought Snape could muster in response was an ugly and petty one. She may marry you, yes...but I had her first. I had your Lily. I plucked that bloom.

His NEWTs scores were nearly off the charts; the highest mark given, ever, in Potions. All due to the experience he gained working for Voldemort. And so on to university, and his Potions Mastery, gained quickly, far ahead of schedule. During that time Lucius and Narcissa were married and Lucius took his bride back to the Malfoy\'s ancestral home, leaving Snape alone in London, and high on Voldemort\'s short list of favorites.

Now Snape put his feet up on his desk, heedless of the stack of parchments that spilled to the floor. The Jameson\'s he set carefully in the bottom drawer, capped, after another hit from the bottle; it would not do for it to spill, no, not his whiskey. His precious oblivion.

What had finally ended the Death Eater romance? Was it the endless rounds of futile plotting, the posturing, the bragging, of Voldemort with no real progress made -- boring, beyond boring, excruciating -- or was it that last, most twisted potion that broke the camel\'s back?

\"I want a new potion, Severus.\"

How many potions had he created for Voldemort? Countless, countless. Mostly indifferent or wicked in their intent, the mindlessness of them beginning to wear on him, nearly as boring as the meetings. \"Of what sort?\"

\"It will contain the vitality of the young. I will drink it myself.\"

\"And what ingredient will supply that vitality, my Lord?\"

Voldemort\'s gleeful, horrid rubbing of hands. \"The secret longings of a teenage boy. Legilimens should do; I understand you\'ve been training with Lucius. You will find me those cherry-dark dreams and put them in that potion. And...one last thing...I find I have a taste for something even younger...fetch me a potion with the sweetness of a baby\'s crying. In its final moments, when life is most precious and most precarious. And I wouldn\'t say no to a bit of its mother\'s grief and misery for added spice, my talented one.\" Licking of lips, rhythmic squeezes of fingers. Voldemort knew his skilled Potions Master could do it.

Finally, a line Severus couldn\'t cross. The killing of a babe, a life that was more than innocent. Utter revulsion. An excuse, finally, to back out of the meetings, to quietly vanish from the roster. By the end of that year, Severus had exited the Death Eater circle unless there was a specific summons. Fortunately Voldemort\'s ambition was such that a potion for entertainment purposes was soon forgotten.

He was sleeping now -- more accurately, passed out -- mouth agape, sprawled bonelessly in his chair. Conscience Minerva prowled at the edges of his dreams, prying at his memories, unharnessing the better memories, striving to heal.

Memories of Angharad, she who stopped his slow drift.

Weeks in Oxfordshire, rambling aimlessly, no job, no real place to live, sleeping in Muggle pubs. Wandering, wearing out shoes, mending them with Transfigurations but doing little other magics. Touring prehistoric monuments, seeking the so-called power latent therein, finding nothing. Walking along leys, vectors of force connecting three or more sacred points in a straight line. He had never quite believed in them, the legends of dragons traveling along them, yet he felt compelled to explore them. While he didn\'t believe in dragons of power, he did believe in power itself. Yet, he found nothing.

Until.

The night of the full moon, just at sunset, at the Rollright Stones, a smallish Stone Circle with oddly short dolmens, small and ugly like rotted teeth. A woman there, inside the circle, chanting, burning incense. And power rising from her like steam, like smoke, like perfume. He stepped inside her circle, breaking her concentration, but she only beckoned him forward, to take her hands.

He had seen her cloak fly, though at the time he had not recognized the ring of force that rose as he touched her, completing some mystic circuit.

\"Teach me this,\" he had begged, the first thing in his life he\'d wanted, since Lily.

\"Prove to me you are worthy,\" she had countered. \"Great evil is within you, and great wounds.\"

A year of her tutelage, six months of proving himself before she let him celebrate a rite with her again. A year of peace, no summons from Voldemort; somewhere during that year James and Lily were killed, and Voldemort vanquished by their baby son (a moment in which Snape\'s Dark Mark nearly combusted -- Angharad held him for hours, rocking him in her arms, drawing out the bitterness and the pain and horror, hearing it all). A year in which his mother died (How, father, did THAT happen, I wonder? A finally too-careless blow? ) and his father became a drunken recluse. Snape did not go home for her funeral. A year in which Angharad taught him what she knew, and sent him to an old, old friend of hers, Albus Dumbledore, for the rest of his penance.

And so began his life as a spy for the Light, turned from the Dark by the cry of a babe and the mythos and silent awe of the Druid rituals. Severus Snape, priest. Holy at last, if not whole.

~*~

When he awakened some time mid-afternoon that Saturday, his head was splitting, his mouth was dry and tasted as foul as one of the potions he\'d brewed for Voldemort those untold years ago, but Lily and James were quiet. Conscience Minerva was still prowling, only now she showed him Hermione. The Jameson\'s looked at him innocently from the opened bottom desk drawer. He reached to close the drawer. Enough, Snape. He stumbled to a sink in the classroom and shoved his head under the cold stream of water from the faucet, cooling his heated face. Then he turned his mouth up and drank deeply.

The flow of clean water reminded him of Hermione Granger, and her red, red hands. Her unclean hands, whatever that nonsense was about. He would have to get to the bottom of that, somehow. Granger, apparently his new apprentice, since she\'d agreed to most of his ground rules -- and set down a few of her own. She\'d met his gaze more or less calmly when he asked if she was clear about what the rites entailed.

Snape himself was not calm at all about what those rites entailed. So much of him wished he had never agreed, the night of the new moon ritual, to teach her these things. But he\'d been so elated, so overwhelmed, so... thrilled...that his Stones had awoken, he would have agreed to much more had she asked. And another, larger part of him wanted Hermione, wanted her more than he had wanted anything in his miserable life. Or, almost anything. His druid training with Angharad...that came first, and remained first, in his very short list of \"things Snape did right.\"

Sex with a student, even for reasons of religious celebrations, would not be tolerated, though it was well within his own personal parameters of what was acceptable.

He was begging to be sacked. And Hermione would be expelled, or at best, transferred, if they were found out. Conscience Minerva was clear on this point, compellingly clear. But the equally clear voice of Angharad stated that this Druid training was what Hermione needed and wanted; a lodestar, a new magnetic North to moderate the extreme swing of the peculiar pendulum of her life.

His personal pantheon was changing. His triple goddess was reborn, recast, renewed; Lily and her ghostly memory had been supplanted at last. Had he been in his Circle this day, wanding names in the red, red leaves, he would have written:

ANGHARAD.

MINERVA.

HERMIONE.

He slicked the water from his hair with his hands, blinking, and returned to his quarters, this time to sleep off his hangover in his own bed, no longer atilt. He took no potions to quiet the throbbing in his head; he did not deserve to feel better any sooner than he should.

~*~

Tuesday morning Snape\'s fragile control was shattered when Hermione Granger and Weasley sauntered into the Great Hall, together, and languorously late, looking well-shagged and sated. His hand clenched abruptly, and this time it was he who broke a teacup.

Minerva and Flitwick stared, but he offered no explanation. After glaring in the direction of Granger and her bookend brothers for the remainder of the meal, Snape billowed angrily off to his classroom. There he laid waste about himself, unfairly assigning yards of punishment essays and detentions with Filch for the slightest imagined infraction.

~~@~~@~~
A/N:

You can visit these sites for pictures of the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire and the adjacent King Stone and Whispering Knights, where Angharad celebrates her rites and trains Snape:
http://www.megalithia.com/sites/sp296309.html
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/65#images