Dark Gods In The Blood
Chapter Four
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A/N: It’s very
interesting to read folks’ conjectures as to where the story’s going, but I’m
afraid (and oddly glad as well) that no one’s hit the nail on the head
yet. I like hearing the different
theories, though. Just shows that there’s
a bunch of different ways this could go.
Anyway ... here’s our dearest Severus ... enjoy and, as
always, thanks for reading.
Summary: A wandering
student comes home, a broken man pays his penance, and a gruesome murder is
both more and less than it seems. Some
paths to self-discovery have more twists and turns than others.
Rating: R, for
intermittent dark themes, violence, and language
Disclaimer: Nothing
you read here (save the plot and bits of the text itself) belongs to me.
property of JK Rowling and Warner Bros. (and someone else, probably, but not
me). All chapter headings are properly
credited to their sources.
Dark Gods in the Blood
by: Hayseed (
Chapter Four
I
couldn’t let it rest, though; but when an opportunity
grass growing
ribs was tall enough to hide his bones.
Hermione found it was best if she did not think on her current actions
much. Dwelling would only cause second
thoughts and then she’d back out and curse herself for the coward she usually
was.
Dumbledore’s words echoed unpleasantly in her brain.
Professor Snape had gone mad?
She remembered him vividly from her school years.
her day-to-day life than the mystical, mythical Dumbledore.
And she remembered many things about him. Irritable, irate, and thoroughly unpleasant.
respect and a man she knew it would take her a lifetime to be able to stand.
And one of the sanest men she’d ever met.
Most wizards seemed to have idiosyncrasies. Dumbledore had his ‘barmy old coot’ impression, Arthur Weasley
had his mad plug collection, Alastor Moody had his killer dustbins.
up having a soft spot for his murderous son that ended up being his
undoing. But Severus Snape?
The closest thing she could recollect to a quirk (or even a weakness)
that he had was a fondness for being particularly cruel to the Gryffindors in
her year. Harry Potter, mostly.
Certainly the Professor Snape she remembered was less of a candidate
for a mental institution than she was herself.
All of these thoughts, plus a thousand more that didn’t bear further
reflection, whirled through her mind as she laid a finger on the grubby sock
the toothless old witch held out to her.
“Ten o’clock to Yorkshire, dearie?” the hag asked.
As she was jerked forward by her navel, she questioned her
motives. As she stood atop a hill and
looked down into the actual town of York, she continued to question them.
Even as she stepped firmly through the doorway of Perkins Hospital for the
Mentally Challenged, she asked herself what in the nine hells did she think she
was about? In her obviously mended
robes and with her flyaway hair, what was she doing
“Yes?” a rather matronly looking woman asked kindly.
“I’m here to visit a patient,” Hermione heard herself saying as if from
a distance. “Severus Snape?”
“All right,” the woman replied pleasantly. “And your relationship to the patient? Just for records, of course.”
“I’m a ...” She hesitated.
dying of curiosity,’ didn’t sound like the most correct thing she could say.
Severus Snape’s friend.
Who would have thought?
If the receptionist was surprised, she did not show it.
said, holding up a sheet of official looking parchment.
continued as Hermione scribbled her name.
“And any sharp objects you might have on your person.
pockets. Oh ... and your shoes.
Hermione raised an eyebrow. “Is
he dangerous?”
The woman smiled sadly. “Only
to himself, my dear.”
-- -- --n
sn
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> -- --
He was already seated at a table in the room when she walked in,
feeling oddly vulnerable in her stocking-feet and nawithwithout her wand.
quirked an eyebrow.
For her own part, Hermione was silently stunned, feet slipping forward
of their own accord, carrying her to the empty chair across from his.
They’d cut his hair
There were four things that defined Snape in her mind.
around his ankles and flapping in his wake like so many adoring
sycophants. Then, of course, was that
hooked, aristocratic nose, suggesting a sort of ruined nobility oddly fitting
to his position as a master of Slytherin.
But third and fourth went hand-in-hand -- those intensely dark eyes,
burning with an inner furor as he descended on some hapless student, and that
hair, hanging down in his face, worn incongruously long for someone who was
otherwise rather practical in his habits.
The robes she hadn’t expected to see, but the replacement white Muggle
hospital scrubs were still a bit of a shock to her system.
hair ...
The hair was the most startling thing.
Cropped closely to his head, only the bangs sitting limply on his
forehead held a suggestion of the person he used to be.
This man, this shaven wolf, was not Professor Snape.
on the head.
Severus is ... not
himself.
And whoever this was, whoever this gray spirit inhabiting the
professor’s body happened to be, Hermione knew that the Snape she remembered
would have held him in the highest contempt.
n stn style='mso-tab-count:1'>
She kept her silence, however, and waited for this creature to speak.
The man regarded her sullenly, quietly, with the air of someone who
feels greatly put upon but would not deign to mention the injustice he was
enduring for her sake.
Wondering at herself, Hermione held her own tongue in kind, deciding
that she had already made the first move by stepping through the doorway.
certainly his.
His eyes held hers even as his head tipped slightly toward the
tabletop. Inwardly, she cried out as
the expected hair did not fall into his face.
Perhaps he registered the slight shift in her emotions as the eyes
narrowed minutely.
Still, neither of them spoke, choosing to regard each other in mute
fascination.
He was even more pale than she remembered, his skin nearly matching the
starkness of his scrubs.
to look under the table, she knew she would see his bare feet.
presence, he certainly would not be allowed them either.
Maybe he wore socks.
An unexpected giggle bubbled up in her throat.
cold as mine are on this infernal floor?
He sat back in the chair, arms folded over his chest in a clear
dismissal.
But she was not to be ordered about by this ... this shade.
staring resolutely back at him. If he
was fazed by this, it did not register on his features as his eyes met hers
forthrightly.
Seconds ticked by achingly -- Hermione longed for her watch, sitting in
a box under the receptionist’s feet along with her wand, her hotel key, and her
Oxfords. Her hands itched to do
knee. Hermione willed them still.
Even the mere shell of Severus Snape made her fidgety, apparently.
Time stretched out and curved back into itself as she and Snape stared
at each other in this steriox, ox, seated on dry clinical chairs, the table a
sanitary landscape between them. She
had never felt further away from any human being in her entire life.
His cold, impersonal lack of regard disconcerted her more than the
overt dislike he’d displayed throughout her childhood.
Yell
berate me! Anything to convince me that
you’re alive!
He showed no signs of understanding her inward pleas, continuing in
what was beginning to be unbearable silence.
Hermione, continuing to stare into those placid eyes with horrified
fascination, still could not convince herself of his insanity.
he was no madman either.
Why, then, was he trapped here?
A line from a play floated into her memory abruptly -- Stark,
raving sane.
Too sane, maybe. His flat eyes
and blank expression could make her believe that. Maybe Snape had stopped dreaming.
As his gaze bored into her skull, Hermione felt his sanity closing in
around her, stifling her. She did not
know how much time had passed as they sat in their stuffy little room, but she
did know that she could not bear another moment of it.
Hastily, starting a bit at the loud scraping of the chair echoing off
the walls, Hermione stood, beating a quick retreat from the room.
If she had been looking at Snape’s face, she might have seen the spark
of indefinable emotion in his otherwise bleak stare. As it was, she only thought she heard a dry voice whisper in her
wake.
normal'>“Run away, little girl.”
-- -- --
--
“You have the most uncanny habit of showing up where I least expect
you, Hermione,” Ron said through a mouthful of sandwich.
She shrugged. “Good intuition.”
He grinned, picking up his water glass and saluting her with it.
“Shut up,” she retorted amiably, sitting down in the empty chair across
from his.
normal'>
Motioning down at his half-full plate, Ron looked at her
expectantly. “D’you want
something? I’ve got a fair amount to
work my way through and they’re very quick with orders.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head.
“Although I confess I would never have thought in a million years that
I’d find you at a Muggle café in the middle of London, eating lunch as if you’d
done it all your life.”
“They make a killer Monte Carlo here,” he said, draining his
glass. “Not to mention their
croissants. I make it a point to eat
here whenever I have enough of a lunch break to leave the Ministry.”
“The Ministry,” she repeated thoughtfully, stealing a chip off his
plate. “What exactly do you do
“Auror,” he said thickly, licking his fingers.
well, you know.”
“After I left,” she supplied kindly, pushing down the little voice in
her head that hissed, ran away, you mean.
Professor Snape to unsettle her completely.
“An Auror, eh?” she said in an effort to ignore her mental discomfort.
dreams, then?”
He regarded a chip with a frown.
“Boring, for the most part.
There’s paperwork like you wouldn’t believe, and I work mostly at a desk
now. We used to think that being an
Auror was fighting evil and making a difference in the world.
wishing you could make a
difference. We’ve rounded up most of
VoldemorDeatDeath Eaters, though.”
Blinking at the subtlety of the shift in subject, Hermione realized
that for all of Ron’s usual diffidence and characteristic cheerfulness, he’d
changed far more than she’d given him credit for. “You have?” she asked, wondering what he was working up to.
“Yeah.” Twirling the last chip
in his fingers idly and oddly elegantly.
“Actually, Snape was a big help in that -- six months or so after I finished
my training, Snape came out on our side publicly and started hunting down Death
Eaters as if his life depended on it. I
dunno -- maybe it did.”
She remained silent, pondering the insinuation.
“In fact,” Ron continued with a bleak chuckle.
of the last big ones. Rosier.
“What happened?” she asked, curious.
With a little shrug, he swallowed the last chip and wiped his fingers
on his robe sleeve, ignoring his napkin neatly folded at his elbow in a gesture
completely familiar to Hermione. “We
were ambushed,” he said. “We had a team
of twelve. Snape was at point -- he
tended to be, you see, since he knew the hideouts better than anyone else.
low. What we didn’t know was that
Rosier had wired his whole damn place to blow.
I’d no idea he knew enough about Muggle explosives to do such a thing.
as he triggered the device. Looked
Snape straight in the eye and just hit the button, giggling like a goddamned
schoolgirl.”
The mental picture was difficult and terrifying.
“Snape was the only one unhurt at the end of it all,” he said with a
shrug. “Ironic, when you think about
it, rea
sky-high. We found just enough pieces
to know he was dead. But I never will
forget that -- the stink of blood and burning flesh and Snape in the middle of
it all, dragging men out as the building fell apart around our ears.
-- that he wasn’t Dumbledore’s pet Death Eater on a tight leash.
smoke and clutching onto what later turned out to be Rosier’s left arm, he just
clapped a hand over my eye and pulled me out.
Never said anything about it.”
Captivated, Hermione leaned across the table, unable to reconcile this
horrible tale with the easygoing Ron Weasley and caustic Professor Snape from
her childhood. Mouth open, she found
herself speechless.
“Some shrapnel caught my eye,” Ron admitted. “And there are some things magic can’t fix -- I lost twenty-four
degrees of peripheral vision on my left side.
Just annoying in the day-to-day, but it finished up my career as a field
Auror. Can’t be effective when all a
baddie has to do is sneak up on the correct side to completely blindside
you. But the Ministry found me a desk
and a place at the Academy to teach when the mood strikes me.”
He laughed and there was only a little bitterness in it.
an Order meeting that Snape was out of commission. Dad dragged it out of him, where Snape actually was.
cracked. I know I would have,” he
admitted freely. “I still wake up with
a scream caught in my throat dreaming about that night.
Still stunned, Hermione stared at Ron, not knowing how to react.
blend in his eyes, she knew. She knew
that her happy-go-lucky friend was no more himself than Severus Snape had
been. In his place was a hardened young
ght ght who’d discovered that the dragons he’d ridden off to fight had deadly
claws and deadlier fire. He was simply
better at pretending -- that was all.
“I think maybe Harry was happy,” Ron said reflectively, another subtle
subject shift that Hermione barely caught.
“I know Mum was.
f
reminiscent of the child that he’d been many years ago.
ready to take on the world. When he
dropped out of training, he expected me to as well, and we fought when I
didn’t. He and Françoise visited in the
hospital -- Nicholas was just a little bit, then. And that look in Harry’s
eyes -- that almost satisfied sort of ‘See what you’ve gotten yourself into’
look ...”
He trailed off, apparently trapped in that painful memory.
into the silence. “I went to see him.”
Head jerking up, Ron’s face was pale.
“What?” he breathed.
“Snape,” she clarified, not liking the hope in Ron’s eyes.
His face lost its haunted look.
“What on Earth for?” he asked curiously. “I mean, I almost did -- back after I’d been taken off commission
at work, but why would you go see him?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“I just lik like I needed to.
It was awful.”
“I’ll bet,” he said with a faint smile. “He’s awful.”
“No,” she said slowly, shaking her head. “It wasn’t that. It was
just ... it was awful.”
“Did he say something to you, then?”
“Nothing.” Hermione laughed
shortly, humorlessly. “We didn’t say a
word. We sat there for nearly an hour,
just staring at each other. And then I
got up and left.”
“Hrm,” Ron mused, pulling his wallet out of a robe pocket and
extracting a few Muggle bills.
“Strange. Oh well ... that’s
Snape for you, I suppose. It wouldn’t
be fair to us Gryffindors if he was easy to figure out, now would it?”
She laughed genuinely, then, more relieved than she cared to consider
as the good humor returned to Ron’s face.
“Oh ... before I forget,” he continued, laying the money on the table
and standing with a quick stretch.
“Françoise wanted me to ask you if you’d like to come ‘round on Thursday
afternoon, maybe stay for supper. If
you’ll still be in town, that is?”
“I’d like that,” she said, hesitating only briefly.
“Yeah,” he confirmed with a broad smile. “Say, when are you leaving
again, anyway?”
Hermione shrugged, almost unwillingly.
“My itinerary is not fixed,” she admitted. “And I hadn’t really considered how long I would stay here.”
He gave her a calculating look.
“Someday, Hermione, you’ll have to tell me what sort of job you’ve got
that lets you take an open-ended vacation like that.”
“Someday,” she said, evading his gaze.
-- --
-- --