The Witch\'s Hair Shirt

All conversation ceased immediately as Snape appeared in the front room of the small house, now an abattoir. Their silence hung like a heavy accusation, weaving its wicked denouncemnet in and out amongst the gathered Death Eaters. Snape let his eyes become hooded as his face closeda gua guarded expression of self-assurance. He warded his mind against any thoughts which could be read and construed as traitorous, but his heart leapt up as he quickly realized that Voldemort was not yet there.

A hooded figure stepped forward, Snape swallowed back the rising bile as the other threw back her hood revealing the perfectly coiffed black mane and exquisite sneering face, “You’ve returned.” She paused and stared at the young man in front of her, “And where, if you please, is it that you’re returning from?” Her hostile, searching eyes taking in Snape’s unrobed appearance, the bizarre half-transfigured shirt, willing the younger man to strip himself of the careful veneer he was wearing.

“I will not answer to you, Bellatrix.” Snape spit this out with enough controlled volume for all present to hear him.

Lestrange’s eyes widened and just as quickly narrowed dangerously. With a sudden movement of cruel grace she slapped him, rocking his head back and watched with satisfaction as his thin upper lip wept a dark drop of blood and began to swell.

Refusing to touch his bruising face in front of her, Snape hissed “You dare to strike me?” flicking his wand down out of his sleeve.

Faster than lightening Lestrange had the blunt tip of her own wand pressed into Snape’s belly, “I dare to strike you, I would just as soon kill you. But you are yet too valuable, I’m being told.\" Her eyes glinting like two daggers. \"Do not think for a moment that you can best me. It will be a most fatal error. And one that I lie awake at night dreaming of.” With her wandless hand she grabbed for Snape’s testicles and brutally closed her fingers around them. “You are half a man, Severus. No fire, a dead thing. You disgust me. Book-learning and skulking through your laboratories.” She shoved him hard and Snape went sprawling backwards, twisting in his fall, landing hard on one knee. “You have yet to prove yourself to me, and I daresay you will soon enough become a tiresome indulgence to our Master as well.”

Snape stood, his chest heaving, his mind swallowing these revelations, the world narrowed to him and Lestrange. He had known that she did not like nor trust him, but he hadn’t known to what depths. How many of the others shared her venomous hatred of him?

“What is the meaning of this?” the drawn-out sneering tone of Voldemort’s voice froze everyone in the room. He stood in the doorway, towering over all present, his face a closed aspect of fury. A short figure shook beside him, his hood thrown back revealing the mottled pudgy face of Peter Pettigrew.

Snape bowed his head at the Dark Lord, taking the proffered hand and as he bent low to kiss the long, thin fingers, the hand was pulled out of his grasp. “You are bleeding, Severus Snape.” Voldemort’s tone was accusing and poisonous.

Snape rubbed at his lip. “My apologies, Master.”

But he had already been dismissed, Voldemort turned on Lestrange releasing a hiss of displeasure. “Crucio.” She fell to the ground at hist ant and crumpled into her robe, her face hidden from them all. Voldemort crooked a finger at another figure who walked forward and hauled Lestrange back to a standing position, her hair untidily hanging in her eyes now, spittle flowing from her mouth. The Dark Lord reached out and grasped the woman’s face, pinching it between his impossibly long thumb and forefinger. “Do not ever touch him.” He shook her face in his hand, “Ever.” With an inhuman strength he threw Lestrange away from him, she fell heavily against the wall, unconscious.

Snape watched this peripherally, his mind was whirring trying to deduce a reason for Pettigrew’s presence there. He despised the mewling coward. A Marauder. His crooked, jowly face brought too many unpleasant recollections to Snape’s mind, memories of a time and place he had actively worked to forget.

Voldemort strode purposely out of the room, leaving Pettigrew to blanch, his tiny eyes darting like moths against a flame. Snape watched the little man’s eyes squeeze shut and his mouth parch open as a scream rent the air of the house and climbed and climbed and climbed the scales of human voice until it seemed to become a sound that only nature could make, and yet Snape knew it was the witch.

A form in the hallway motioned to him and Snape followed it back to the room where the witch now hung from the arms of a hooded Death Eater, standing behind her, his hands vised under her upper arms, her body dangling, thighs splayed. Her eyes rolled in their sockets, more blood on the floor than could be believed possible to have been let from a single human form. Voldemort stood to one side, observing the pregnant body with the steady eye of a hunter mesmerizing its prey.

“Severus, we are so close. So close, my loyal alchemist,” the Dark Lord whispered. “Is the potion ready for its final ingredient?” His hand reached out and caressed the jerking roundness of the witch’s abdomen. Another scream climbed to the Heavens.

Snape trusted himself only to nod and was surprised to hear his voice, “Yes, Master, it is ready.”

“You will be rewarded. You will be remembered.” Voldemort’s voice caressed him. He turned to the others in the room. “We shall wait until midnight to cut him out of her body. Not one minute before not one minute after. Do not disappoint me.”

Snape closed his eyes, shaking his head as the path beckoned, the journey was begun. There was a presence in the small, cramped room and it was reaching out to him, entering him. It was the dying witch. He thought of the Icelandic cliff, the Norn Grandmother. The presence began to fill him and he saw this younger woman full of life immersed in a different reality on that frozen plain. He had never known a pregnant woman but he could see this one counting down her days to be delivered, aching with a mother’s love, willing to endure nature’s opening of her body, stepping into the stream of evolution, washing herself in the waters of all womankind, ablutions to the Goddess.

And now she would not survive her chs mus murderous birth, would not see the dawning of the new day, and he had been playing a vital role in the horror. Yet, that seemed somehow pushed aside, emptied from his body and he felt the presence of the woman inside of him. A threaded point of light pierced through the membrane of his heart and anchored itself there.

“Tom Riddle.”

A woman’s steady voice.

Snape\'s brain seized at the sound of this unmentionable name. His eyes snapped open. The room seemed to shimmer, magic swirling around the hanging figure, eddies of it flowing from her body. She had one swollen eye prised open, fixed upon Voldemort, her other eyelid twitched under a thickening of dried blood, her lips were parted revealing teeth broken at the gumline, but from this mouth she had uttered the Dark Lord’s halfblood name.

Snape felt his life force spin out of him in a fine line of tension, spinning, spinning away from him. His focus followed the skein of energy as it flowed into the witch’s orb. Something within him pull the thread taut and it vibrated between them, strumming the chambers of his heart.

Voldemort stood stiff, his mouth gaping. But before he could move, before a breath was drawn by any of them, the mother brought her broken hands up to hold her belly and with a whisper of love she spoke the killing curse.

“Avada Kedavra.”

“NO!” Voldemort’s scream ripped through the air, severing the tie between Snape and the witch. Snape fell backwards and watched as Voldemort leapt at the witch and threw her hands off her swollen form. With a crushing blow, he brought a hand across the front of her face, still screaming, “No! No! No!” He pummeled her again. And again.

The Dark Lord vaulted over her falling body and onto the Death Eater who had been holding her upright, with vicious blows and screeched curses he brutalized the man. The other two Death Eaters scrambled away from his insane fury, tripping over their dying comrade, slipping in the blood, tangling in robes, and then they were out the door. The Dark Lord spun like a spider with one too many flies in its web, his long arms reaching out and disappeared into the hallway.

Snape heard him screaming in the front room, the noise of the house a deafening din of rage. Then words broke through, DarkDark Lord’s voice clear, “I want her rent, limb from limb, send her hands to Bagnold! Send her head to Crouch! Wrap her heart in her veil and deliver it to Dumbledore!”

Faster than he had ever known he could move, Snape was on his feet. He scooped her up, her broken body heavy; he was out the door of the room, casting a quick concealment charm upon them both. Then he was at the same warded door he had stepped through just hours before.

And holding the dying witch in his arms, the life-force of her child gone from her, he returned to Hornbjarg.