The Masque
Chapter 4
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Title: The Masque 4 of 6 (~~3500 words) (total length
~16,000 words and counting)
Pairing: Snape/Bill
BETA'D
Part target="_blank">1
target="_blank">2
target="_blank">3a
target="_blank">3b
A/N: Posted for scribbulus_ink's Classic Cannon challenge. I chose The Ballade
of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde - a 4000 word poem.
A/N2: There is no way that I can possibly thank my beta src="Masque4_files/image001.gif" alt="[info]" v:shapes="_x0000_i1025">
enough for this. She tweaked my rambling prose into something exquisite, and
I'm in awe of her help. Thank you so very very much.
IV
There is no chapel on the day
On which they hang a man:
The Chaplain's heart is far too sick,
Or his face is far too wan,
Or there is that written in his eyes
Which none should look upon.
Severus emerged from solitary confinement a changed man. Not so much externally
– he could still hold up conversations, make his way from his cell, to work, to
exercise, to his cell on the treadmill of routine. But inside, something had
snapped. In loosing Bill, Severus had lost the last bit of his sanity, the only
frail threads holding the entire edifice of his composure together.
He would act and react, and no one realized that inside his head he was
reliving the past, cataloguing all the deaths and trials and tribulations. No
one noticed that his crystalline mind had shattered into a thousand shards,
each reflecting pieces of a broken memory.
Severus was alone in his dream world, his fantasy world.
Now his prison was both inside and out.
So they kept us close till nigh on noon,
And then they rang the bell,
And the Warders with their jingling keys
Opened each listening cell,
And down the iron stair we tramped,
Each from his separate Hell.
People’s feet beat a worried metronome in his mind. Silent and steady, he could
pace his day by it as they ate each meal, cutlery clanging in counterpoint to
the stoop and shuffle of the prisoners. Mad rushes of motion affected his
thought, derailed his carefully timed progress though the world. The cacophony
of sound, too, broke the pattern, and he was left clinging to the flotsam and
jetsam of a tired mind, one where everything had melded: past, present, future.
What could have might have, would have been, should have been.
There was no up anymore, and no down, no direction to his thoughts, and his
hands, once so delicate, were broken. There was no surcease to be found in
them; nor any on the roof of his cell, nor between the empty bars of the one
opposite him. The cell where he could sometimes see the ghost of Bill peering
out, beckoning.
Out into God's sweet air we went,
But not in wonted way,
For this man's face was white with fear,
And that man's face was grey,
And I never saw sad men who looked
So wistfully at the day.
The most awful part was that Severus knew that he was loosing his mind. At his
most lucid moments he would rend his face with his fingertips, breaking the
skin, trying to get through and grasp, in shaking fingers, the mind which was
betraying him. And it was at times like those, when he really knew what
was going on, that he was free to face the horrors his head had in store for
him – that he was locked up and sedated.
At least in the sedation he found peace.
Bill was always there. Young and beautiful, opening the doors to his cell,
telling him that he had retracted his statement; that Longbottom was going to
prison and that Severus would finally be free. That he loved him, that they had
a chance together now.
They learnt to maintain the sedation. Once, when it wore off, he tried to pull
out his eyes with his fingers.
I never saw sad men who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
We prisoners called the sky,
And at every careless cloud that passed
In happy freedom by.
And the faces. Severus didn’t know where all the faces had come from, appearing
in the brick and mortar, grinning at him from inside the rocks he was about to
crush. A huge gaping scream in the sky had him, in the space of a moment,
gibbering on the floor. It was Lucius who took him inside and brought him the
sweet opiate oblivion that he craved.
And even then, inside the drugged haze, there were faces, always looking out at
him from under tables, always peering and leering and jeering at his
misfortunes. They were the faces of those he had killed, those he had wronged,
even those he had saved, and they told him, over and over, that he had made the
wrong decision, that Severus Snape was a failure, that he deserved to be
without Bill.
Severus spent a week in the infirmary that time.
But there were those amongst us all
Who walked with downcast head,
And knew that, had each got his due,
They should have died instead:
He had but killed a thing that lived,
Whilst they had killed the dead.
Lucius had tried to help, at first, and tried valiantly to console his friend.
Breakdown notwithstanding, Lucius was a good man. An evil man, but a good man
to those he could trust. And he trusted Severus.
Up until the day that Severus said that he wished that he had fucked Draco.
Lucius reduced his face, his arm, his collarbone and his ribs to bloody,
bone-splintered pulps, screaming “Mine” and rending his companion to
shreds – all to the wavery, hysterical tune of Severus’s laughter.
Pain brought lucidity. The price was cheap enough.
But the opiates dulled even that in the end. Severus was forced into the
infirmary again, and his precious handle on reality was lost.
For he who sins a second time
Wakes a dead soul to pain,
And draws it from its spotted shroud,
And makes it bleed again,
And makes it bleed great gouts of blood,
And makes it bleed in vain!
That particular time it was his return to the Death Eaters as a spy. The Crucio
and Veritaserum and cold probing steel hand of Pettigrew scrabbling in his
anus. His own reflection in Voldemort’s black boots as he knelt to clean the
soles with his tongue. The sharp raps of Lucius’s cane, and the steel glint in
Bella’s eyes when she was allowed to torture him for the weekend. McNair and
his axe, the sounds of dark revels occasionally punctured by the torture of
animals. Muggles.
Dumbledore had refused all knowledge, the spineless coward. Left to fend for
himself in a nest of serpent which he had once betrayed, and into which he had
manage to re-integrate himself, Severus was at a loss to know how to act, when
to act, where to act.
He was alone again. No matter what he did, he was always alone.
Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb
With crooked arrows starred,
Silently we went round and round
The slippery asphalte yard;
Silently we went round and round,
And no man spoke a word.
And the days rushed into one another in silent pounding, flesh and fetid
fumblings of the prison block. Severus no longer knew when to turn, and he was
moved around in a steady flowing over a path unmarked and unknown. Bill
appeared at random intervals, sometimes talking to him, sometimes not.
Sometimes there would be a flash of Longbottom, rotting and buried, in the
corner of the yard where the suicides lay. Yes, Severus could just see that
traitor feasting on desecrated flesh, ingesting his own filth, his own kind.
Traitors and murderers and the people in the prison were not like him, not like
them, not like the facets which were splintered in his mind. The people in the
prison were whole, and Severus had to try and get a grip, try to connect to the
stupidly leering faces pointing at him to the blank visages of the prisoners.
Sanity was a slowly slipping silken rope.
Silently we went round and round,
And through each hollow mind
The Memory of dreadful things
Rushed like a dreadful wind,
And Horror stalked before each man,
And Terror crept behind.
Some days there was blood. Blood, incarnadine, seeping through the walls as he
woke up, pooling up through the cracks in the table, always welling upwards,
towards him, rushing around his feet in rivulets as if he were a saint, not the
sinner, and not the thief on the cross who was denied heaven. He was shrouded
in a congealed cloak of plasma, dipped top to toe in sin and sex and sweat.
He wanted to lick the blood and to also shy away from it. He wanted to bathe
and revel in it, and yet he wanted to be cleansed and purified and to never
have touched it. He wanted to be able to say “Look at the fruits of my Labor,”
and fall to his knees with a “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” He
wanted to beg for forgiveness, and stand up on the towers screaming “Look at
the Vengeance which my hands have wrought.”
His mind was slowly splitting in two.
The Warders strutted up and down,
And kept their herd of brutes,
Their uniforms were spick and span,
And they wore their Sunday suits,
But we knew the work they had been at,
By the quicklime on their boots.
Some days, it was the graveyard, and the quicklime eating away at the bodies,
maggots and worms where a lazy convict had not bothered to properly line the
graves. He could see all the Weasleys here, their putrid bloated faces in the
bottoms of the graves, floating just beneath the arid soil. He could see
Arthur, some days, and those days he always dug a bit faster, wishing to reach
his turgid corpse first and to smash the shovel down on his face, to see Arthur
break as he had broken the last pure, true thing in Severus’s life. Severus was
alone thanks to that bastard of a Weasley, thanks to that self-sacrificing
Gryffindor bastard of a scion, thanks to that gluttonous heap of flesh, so
needy and possessive and completely without remorse.
For where a grave had opened wide,
There was no grave at all:
Only a stretch of mud and sand
By the hideous prison-wall,
And a little heap of burning lime,
That the man should have his pall.
On his more lucid days, Severus could pick out exactly which one was Bill’s
grave. He always tried to keep away from it, knowing full well that burrowing
under the sand with his hands, pulling out a corpse and kissing its limeburnt
face, trying to claim back the fleeting moment of consummation which they had
had, would land him back in the world of opium-dreams.
Maybe he should have been a taxidermist instead of a Potions master.
That way he could have, and would have, kept Bill. Kept at very least his body
alive, and kept hope alive in those glassed-over eyes. Been able to pull him
out, push him out, touch and fondle every inch and muscle of that divine body.
Been able to dissect every tendon, and put that beautiful Weasley back together
again, make him whole. Bill Weasley, a taxidermist’s wet dream.
For he has a pall, this wretched man,
Such as few men can claim:
Deep down below a prison-yard,
Naked for greater shame,
He lies, with fetters on each foot,
Wrapt in a sheet of flame!
Some days, the cherubim and seraphim would come down and sing to him. Severus
would ask if Bill had sent these visions of wondrous beauty to him. He liked to
think so, liked to think that Bill was up there, with his brothers and his
sister, with the twins playing tricks on Merlin, and Charlie breeding dragons
in the sky with which to make clouds.
But the odds were that Bill was in hell. He doubted that eternal bookkeeping
was any better than mortal. Probably the Ministry of Magic had damned the
beautiful red-head to the fiery pits of hell.
Probably.
But Severus could always hope.
And all the while the burning lime
Eats flesh and bone away,
It eats the brittle bone by night,
And the soft flesh by day,
It eats the flesh and bone by turns,
But it eats the heart alway.
Moonlight corpses came to visit him. Mother, father, sister, brother, murderers
and victims, all waxy, ghostly pale. And then the midnight visitor, the one
that Severus fumbled beneath blankets for, fumbled for his cock and grasped it
as the ghost of Bill Weasley tells him exactly how much he’d like to fuck him,
to bend him over, open him up and drive him into the mattress. How he would
sink his teeth into Severus’s shallow flesh, mark as his own what he could
never have in life.
Severus wished that he could have had Bill’s come puddle within him. Just once.
For three long years they will not sow
Or root or seedling there:
For three long years the unblessed spot
Will sterile be and bare,
And look upon the wondering sky
With unreproachful stare.
But there was no chance of that. The mute grave stood as a reminder, the open
and empty cell a cenotaph to that man. Every object in every day, the breakfast
table, his knife and fork, the rustling sounds of papers being read – they all
brought to his mind thoughts of Bill’s demise. So Severus retreated further and
further into the realms of insanity. With little to hang onto, he slipped and
faded away more and more into a dislocated land of dreams.
Having been a Death Eater, few of these dreams were pleasant.
They think a murderer's heart would taint
Each simple seed they sow.
It is not true! God's kindly earth
Is kindlier than men know,
And the red rose would but blow more red,
The white rose whiter blow.
At times he was lucky, though, able to clearly see and mark what might have
been. If Bill had told his parents the truth, stood up for him and for himself.
If Longbottom had been a man and slit his own throat, and not that of a
helpless girl. If Severus had refused to go on that final mission, refused to
mislead his paramour, refused to be Dumbledore’s patsy. If Severus had ever
been able to make a concrete decision…his life might have been so very
different. But no, he had been swept away by choice, by neglect, and now his mind
was sweeping him away and he was powerless to stop it. Irony, thy name is fate.
Out of his mouth a red, red rose!
Out of his heart a white!
For who can say by what strange way,
Christ brings His will to light,
Since the barren staff the pilgrim bore
Bloomed in the great Pope's sight?
Sex would have been nice, however: not the twisted sex of his tortured
imaginings, but rather the sly touches, and the warm presence, brushing up
against him. Bill’s hand on his shoulder, his chest. Bill spooned up against
him at the end of a day, or sitting in front of him each morning, simple
mundane things that are the foundations of all good relationships. Even fights,
but not over death and anguish, but about life, things moving forward, toward
freedom. Severus sat each night waiting for a peace which would never come,
longing for a hand or the gentle touch of fingers, for a chaste press of lips
on lips as he drifted off to sleep.
But neither milk-white rose nor red
May bloom in prison-air;
The shard, the pebble, and the flint,
Are what they give us there:
For flowers have been known to heal
A common man's despair.
And then sleep took him. Nightmares, inviolate and obstinate, pursued him
through the corridors of his mind, always the same few frames from which he
could not escape: Bill’s head falling off halfway through a blowjob, dangling
there fly-eaten and vile; Severus reaching the heights of pleasure only to find
the writhing mass of a carcass beneath him, riddled with pupae and larvae.
Somewhere, in the meantime, Bill had gone from being a body of flesh and bone
to a scaly sludge of insects and dirt.
Each night and every night these dreams occurred, almost monotonous in their
regularity. Severus could not wake, could not break away from the prison that
they firmly held him in.
So never will wine-red rose or white,
Petal by petal, fall
On that stretch of mud and sand that lies
By the hideous prison-wall,
To tell the men who tramp the yard
That God's Son died for all.
So passed each day, moving Severus further along the path of no return. He fell
deeper and deeper into the realms of the insane, seeing more faces, hearing
voices, feeling touches, ghostly, up and down his arm. At times it was more
real than Lucius, blonde and dissolute, at others it was more real than
Pettigrew (though how anything could be more real than that obnoxious lump of
lard, he did not know).
He found himself consciously seeking the moments of respite from the drudgery
around him, trying to keep himself removed from the monotony of everyday life.
If his control was to slip, so be it, but at least he could try to live out his
remaining days in some form of comfort.
Yet though the hideous prison-wall
Still hems him round and round,
And a spirit may not walk by night
That is with fetters bound,
And a spirit may but weep that lies
In such unholy ground,
Even Lucius avoided him, their distance growing as a result of the fight about
Draco. Severus was losing control over his actions, and much as that fact
brought a certain devilish glee to Lucius’s heart, there was little that he
could rely upon in a minion as unpredictable. Severus could no longer be his
performing bear, his guard-dog and protector. There was too little rationality,
too little substance behind the façade, held together by steel ribbons and
rubber bands. It was unsafe to be around Severus, unsafe to be seen as his
companion.
Lucius would not gain parole by associating with a madman.
He is at peace - this wretched man -
At peace, or will be soon:
There is no thing to make him mad,
Nor does Terror walk at noon,
For the lampless Earth in which he lies
Has neither Sun nor Moon.
Pettigrew could not understand what all the fuss was about. A little slow on
the uptake, it had taken him a while to note that Severus was not his usual,
taciturn self. But on the day Severus had told him that James and Lily sent
their regards, and had asked him if he had seen them recently, Pettigrew
finally realized that something was quite fundamentally wrong with his former
comrade.
As opposed to disassociating himself from Severus, as Lucius did, he took great
pains to make his life as much of a misery as possible. He would stand in
alcoves and whisper about maggots and corpses, brush feathers across Severus’s
neck to simulate ghosts, the downtrodden rat joying in the simplicity of
finally finding one weaker than himself to torture.
The reactions were amusing until he was caught.
The guards could not, or chose not, to stop Severus from killing him.
They hanged him as a beast is hanged:
They did not even toll
A requiem that might have brought
Rest to his startled soul,
But hurriedly they took him out,
And hid him in a hole.
Lucius wondered why no one had intervened – though that thought was put to rest
with the Ministerial missive that called the murder an “unfortunate accident”.
Apparently, legion as Pettigrew’s crimes had been, there was a certain grudge
borne against the man who had betrayed the Potters. The Ministry not being able
to eke its revenge by due process, it simply left Pettigrew in the hands of
criminals. When the inevitable happened, they congratulated themselves on their
foresight.
They did not have to see Severus walking around the prison all day, talking to
his hands, telling them to stop it, to take it back.
Severus had another ghost in his pantheon now.
They stripped him of his canvas clothes,
And gave him to the flies:
They mocked the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes:
And with laughter loud they heaped the shroud
In which their convict lies.
He was put into solitary confinement again. The powers that be might caw at
their intellect, but the reality of what Severus could do to a truly important
prisoner gave them pause. What if he was to lose the last shred of his sanity
at meal time, or in the exercise yard? Would the guards wish to intervene? –
after all, they had seen him wrench Pettigrew’s arm from its socket as if it
were no more than a stray bit of clay from an iron mould. Arthur thought not.
The warders had spoken to him of the unlikely amity between Bill and Severus.
Now, after the fact, he wished to know why. There were many questions he wished
to have answered. It was a pity that he had waited until his son was dead to
achieve this sense of perspective.
The Chaplain would not kneel to pray
By his dishonoured grave:
Nor mark it with that blessed Cross
That Christ for sinners gave,
Because the man was one of those
Whom Christ came down to save.
A hypocrite, his wife had called him. He moped around the house for Ginny,
praying that his little girl would come home safe, that it was all a mistake
and that Bill somehow hadn’t killed her. There was nothing for him to cling
onto.
Then, his wife asked him: “Why? Did you ever ask Bill why he did it?”
Arthur’s walls came crumbling down.
Yet all is well; he has but passed
To Life's appointed bourne:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn
He made his way to the prison with a heavy heart, to see a madman, and ask for
the truth about his son.