Low Man Is Due

Hmm, I guess the bunny came back. Two chapters updated!



Chapter three: Can you heal the broken worlds within?



The voices seem to be getting louder. At least, they do until the clouds return. I like it here. There is nothing. Simply, nothing. Just those clouds, and, now and then, sun breaking through. Sometimes it is so bright it hurts with its intensity. Other times it is just one bright shaft which lights my face – not that I have a face – and warms me.



The words still do not make sense, and still hurt me when they do. Sometimes the words don’t hurt, but generally they make my body shiver and tremble and shake. I say my body, but I don’t have one, not really. It feels like my body is quivering, so I’ll have to express it as that.



I wonder how I know all of these words? I wonder who it is I’m talking to? Who am I communicating with? And what do I want from this communication? To be left alone? To be understood? To be helped, perhaps? But I don’t need help. I like it here.



If only the voices would leave me alone, then I could rift away. I know, without knowing how I know, that if I drift away I’ll be at peace forever. There will never again be the voices, no hurtful words, no pain or worry or upset.



If the voices would just stop.



***



Life for Severus settled into a rhythm. He would have been the first to say it wasn’t a ‘life’. Certainly, how anything resembling his existence could be seen as living was beyond him.



He awoke, at roughly 7.30 every morning and showered, cock hard and heavy in his hand. Harry’s name upon his lips as he climaxed.



Once dressed, in the same plain black garments he had always worn, he was allowed to summon a houself. The rules of his confinement were quite clear. A houself could be summoned three times a day, only. If Snape fell ill, he had to use the emergency floo powder which stood on his mantelpiece, and which was connected to a grated fire, so that he could talk to the person at the other end (in the Auror’s office) but could not flee through that exit.



Once breakfast had been ordered and delivered, he would take the tray and sit at the small table he had which rested by a wall. Severus, for once missing the lack of windows, had hung a tapestry there to make it appear that a window was hidden behind it. Psychologically, it was meant to make him feel less enclosed. Sadly, it didn’t work.



Breakfast took as long as he could make it last. And then, with the tray returned to the spot where it had been placed by the elves and then removed by them, Snape would move into his laboratory area. The potions he could make were restricted to merely the most basic. The ingredients he had to work with were only those which were available to a first or second year at the school. Nothing more advanced than what a 13 year old could attempt could be made my Severus Snape, Potions Master.



The Aurors had claimed that if Snape had access to all manner of ingredients, he could quite easily create something dangerous. Severus knew that that was only partly the reason. The Aurors enjoyed the irritation on his face, the boredom he suffered, attempting potions which were no challenge.



He fumed as he read advanced potion making books, and was unable to experiment with the liquids, as he simply lacked the raw materials to start. So, very often, he would resort to experimenting with the basic potions, despite knowing that almost nothing could be done to improve them. And even then, he could see the resentment in the Aurors’ eyes: why should he be allowed to do anything he loved, whilst Harry potter lay in a bed, unmoving, unreacting?



At roughly 1 o’clock, he would select his lunch and walk three times around his rooms, anything to stave off the feeling of lassitude that swept over him in the afternoons. Anything to stave off the erection that tented his trousers as he considered Harry whenever his mind wasn’t forced to focus along narrow roads.



The afternoon would be spent in making potions, or, when even that became tedious, in reading, or in lying on his bed and wanking, aching for Harry and hating himself for that weakness.



The evening meal arrived at about 6.30, and usually, after it, he would again walk around his rooms, fighting the urge to scream with boredom, and somehow occupy himself with books or by gazing restlessly into the fire until 11pm, when he would finally be allowed to leave his quarters, surrounded by four Aurors, and could walk the path they had decided upon for him, for precisely one hour. Each night a different walk was selected, so that, if somehow he managed to get a message outside, his accomplice wouldn’t know where to wait. Of course, the idea of a helper was errant nonsense, and the Aurors knew it was such, but still they enjoyed taking him on the most twisted and complicated routes, where his long robes tangled on branches, and his feet caught in roots.



At midnight he would be returned to his room, and the magical seal would once again be in place. Severus would then go to bed and attempt to sleep, although a body doing as little as he was needed very little in the way of sleep. And the annoyance was that if he was struggling, he could not request an elf bring him a hot drink. His only option was cold water from the bathroom tap, or the one in the lab. He generally used the one in the lab, purely because he couldn’t bear to look at his own pallid complexion or see the face of the man who lusted so unhealthily for the son of his enemy.



It wasn’t a life. It was an existence. And Severus Snape knew it was more than he deserved.



***



There’s a storm coming.