Chasing Darkness Away

Chapter One - Tribulation

He woke up stifling a scream, shaking and sweating. Years of rigid self control and the absolute necessity of hiding his true feelings enabled him to hold back from grasping her sleeping form and pulling her to him, even though she knew his weakness, knew everything about him and embraced it all. Well, not quite everything. There were things he kept from her still, he knew, but only because he tried still to keep them from himself. He suspected that she guessed at them, anyway.

Wrapping his arms around himself, he lay on his side, willing the nausea to subside and gazing at her as she slumbered. Moonlight slanting through the high arched windows of their room outlined the curve of her hip as she lay with her back to him, her chestnut hair spread across the pillow. He shifted position slightly, edging a little closer to her warmth so that he could bury his nose in her soft curls and breathe in the scent of her shampoo, a strange but not unpleasant concoction of oranges and coconut, and the scent of her. His wife. Ah, how he loved her.

As if she could sense his need for her, she turned over in her sleep and grunted softly as her arms reached out for him, embracing him, one snaking around his back. She snuggled against him with a contented sigh and he enfolded her then, as she did him, and the frown line between his brows deepened as he fought not to crush her to him in his need for her comfort. He buried his nose in her hair once more and let her softness drive his demons away. 

The next time he opened his eyes the silvery moonlight had been replaced by bright early morning sunshine, and he was alone. He experienced a surge of blind, heart-stopping panic, followed by a wave of relief as he heard her through the opened bedroom door, singing softly.

“Ella?” he called, sitting up, prepared and yet still amazed at the sight of her as she re-entered the room, smiling and warm, his infant daughter in her arms. His wife. His daughter.

“Oh, you’re awake at last!” she said, leaning over to lay the baby in his outstretched arms before climbing back into bed beside him. Taking his face in her hands she nuzzled his sizeable nose with hers before kissing him tenderly and continuing, “I thought you were going to sleep all day! Do you know, I had to wrench myself out of your arms to go to Persephone, and even then you didn’t stir!”

He looked down at the small, grizzling child in his arms, her wild black hair sticking out from her head at all angles, her tiny fists bunching and waving around as her legs drew themselves up to her tummy, and back down again. Swallowing an unexpectedly large lump in his throat, he stroked her cheek tenderly with a long, delicate finger, and she turned her head reflexively towards it, rooting impatiently.

“She wants you, love,” he murmured. “She’s always hungry!”

“Mmm,” agreed Ella cheerfully, sitting cross-legged beside him as she waved her wand over their many pillows, plumping them up behind her before settling back into a comfortable position. “She’s very demanding. I can’t imagine where she gets it from!”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he replied airily, kissing Persephone on her forehead and reluctantly relinquishing her to his wife’s capable hands.

He stayed where he was for a while, watching, but the vision of his wife and child, wrapped up in one another, was too much and he could not bear to be anything less than a full participant in their bliss. Reclining beside her, Severus slipped his arm around his wife’s shoulders and kissed her before resting his chin on her shoulder with his cheek against hers, to watch his baby as she fed.

“You had another dream last night, didn’t you?” Ella said quietly, her cheek rubbing gently against his early morning stubble as she spoke. He froze for a moment, his hand poised over her chest, motionless as Persephone’s tiny fist enclosed his finger.

“I didn’t know I’d woken you. I’m sorry.”

“That’s the whole point, you didn’t wake me, and I’m the one who should be sorry, for sleeping through it!”

“Then how do you know?”

“I saw the fear in your eyes just now when I brought Persephone in. I know that look, and it hasn’t been there for a long time. Not since – not since the dreams stopped, months ago.”

He sighed heavily, but did not speak. He could not deny that she had seen into his soul, yet again, and yet he did not want to confirm it to her either, even as he knew he did not need to. She knew him too well.

“When did they come back, love?”

So, he thought, she knew this was not the first recurrence of his nightmares.

“The first one was – a week after our wedding – “

“Oh, Severus!”

“ – I’ve had several more, since then.”

“How many?”

“Enough. More than enough.”

They fell silent then, and watched Persephone. At last, Ella laid her on the bed, between her knees, and they absorbed themselves, for a while, in watching her gurgle and kick. At length, Severus sighed heavily once more and said,

“If I could tell you…tell you everything…could you bear to hear it?”

His only answer was a fierce hug as Ella threw her arms around his neck and clasped his head to her shoulder.

Darkness. The rank stench of putrefaction. The steady drip of water from damp, glistening permeable rock echoing into the avid silence.

It always began like that. The Dark Lord preferred his Death Eaters to emerge from the blackness of the tunnels slipping and stumbling and clumsy of foot, their flesh crawling as they retched and gagged. It made it all the more amusing when they prostrated themselves before him. His chamber, his sanctuary for ten long years now, was harshly illuminated with black light, casting no shadow but throwing everything therein into flat, dead, unreal relief. Snape knew this, for this was what he saw, a mocking reminder of a childhood fear, long dead but resurrected on the whim of a madman. He strongly suspected that each one of Voldemort’s Death Eaters was given their own personal, and private, vision of hell to endure. He did not know, for he never asked, but once his own memories had been subdued in the need for strength in the present, he would glance around him casually, noticing the beads of sweat on nervous brows, the sudden starts as some new horror was manifested, for its recipient’s eyes only. Once Bellatrix Lestrange had been careless enough to mutter to Snape,

“Do you see it? Do you?” as her eyes stared into an empty corner, widening in recognition of some unnamed terror only she could see. Her loquacity was punished, swiftly, and her trembling lips never mentioned the matter again.

Snape often wondered what the true appearance of the lair would be, were the glamours to fall. Would he see a stark, white compound, cold and clinical, with no corners and no end? Perhaps Voldemort fancied himself an emperor, on a velvet-covered throne on a huge dais in a room of the finest marble, colonnaded as far as the eye could see. Or would they simply be in a rank, damp dungeon, hewn from the same stone as the walls outside. Fruitless to speculate, he knew, but it passed the time and helped to drive the visions of garishly painted moving figures and the grinding of hidden machinery from his mind, and for that he would be grateful. Voldemort had plucked the memory of his childhood terror from his mind long years ago, when he had been but an untrained apprentice and too arrogant and thirsty for knowledge to waste his time learning to school his thoughts and rein in his emotions. He knew better now. It was odd, though, he mused on a regular basis, how one single defining childhood event retained the power to drive him to his knees thirty five years later. Even when he knew he would be faced with it over and over, still it never lost its power to shock him.

Nevertheless, Snape had been able to conceal his sickening disorientation well ever since the first time he was summoned to that particular place. He wondered many times thereafter whether that had proved a good thing, in the end, or whether the intensive training Dumbledore had insisted he undergo that had given him his almost preternatural self control had done him a disservice in the long run.

Sixteen long years after first becoming a Death Eater, Voldemort’s power was waxing once more and Snape’s longstanding role within the Order of the Phoenix as a spy on behalf of Albus Dumbledore and, indirectly, the slow-to-be-convinced Ministry of Magic, was becoming ever more dangerous. He supposed he ought to feel grateful that he was one of Voldemort’s favourites, he would think bitterly, lounging against a wall, arms folded, struggling to keep the bile from rising in his throat as he forced himself to remain impassive while watching yet another Muggle gang raped by Malfoy’s coterie. Voldemort never forced him to participate, hadn’t in fact for over ten years. Not since the last time that – no. Not since then. Malfoy called him a cold fish, and an impotent one, moreover. Snape cultivated that image. It was in every way preferable to the alternative. He feared that his enforced participation could reawaken Voldemort’s interest in him and, even worse, result in a renewal of systematic, obscene abuse, the memory of which he had tried to suppress for most of his adult life.

He owed the Potter boy a huge debt of gratitude, he knew that, and it stuck in his craw to admit it, even if only to himself. To be beholden to a baby – James Potter’s baby, no less! -  for putting an end to two years of horrific abuse was humiliating in the extreme.

The physical scars were long gone, and only Poppy Pomfrey had known the full extent of his injuries, since she had been the one to tend him in those first weeks following his arrival at Hogwarts the night Lily and James died. The psychological scars remained, spreading and calcifying over the years to form a protective shell around him that no-one could crack. The ‘cold fish’ image he cultivated was not entirely fabricated, either. He had been impotent for at least five years after Voldemort’s fall, and when he had returned to his side as a spy it was easy to subdue himself and his needs under a thick veneer of boredom and detachment, because his instinct for self-preservation positively screamed at him that this was the safest course of action to take.

So, he would watch, seemingly bored, as Crabbe and Goyle, Avery and Nott, were egged on by Lucius Malfoy to outdo one another in performing the cruellest and most debauched acts, and he was for the most part ignored. Now and then Malfoy would try to provoke him, but his iron self control meant that he did not rise to the bait.

The only flaw in his approach was the opportunity it afforded Voldemort to test him. When he tired of watching his loyal Death Eaters’ sport, Voldemort would turn to Snape and casually inflict Cruciatus, over and over, to see how well he would withstand it. No longer interested in sexually abusing his erstwhile young protégé, he sliced through Snape’s reserve with a flick of yellow taloned fingers instead, leaving him writhing in agony on the floor at his feet, forced to lick Voldemort’s boots even as he nearly passed out, his consciousness trying to flee from the pain. Voldemort preferred inflicting Cruciatus to sex, that much was apparent. Snape preferred it, too.

Snape’s self –made fortress protected him from the Dark Lord, it was true, even without the rigorous Occlumency training given him by Dumbledore, but he had always had a predisposition for solitude, and years of rigid self discipline had left him inherently aloof, with no real desire for other people or their company. He knew that people tolerated him, liked him, even, in some instances – Dumbledore for one, and the werewolf too, inexplicably – but he shied away from them. He neither deserved nor allowed their good intentions, and he rebuffed any physical contact they tried to make. Each time Remus Lupin tried to shake his hand he ran the risk of Snape hexing him, and even a friendly pat on the shoulder from Albus made him flinch. He was impervious to warmth. He could not afford to be any other way.

Legilimency was a related skill that Snape sometimes wished he did not possess. When he looked into Lupin’s eyes he could read a wary regard, a hesitant desire for friendship and a feral anger, at times, at what he saw as Snape’s obtuseness. Snape was disinclined to correct him. Dumbledore was a master Occlumens himself, but there were certain emotions that he never tried to conceal from Snape, including a regard so strong and esteem so high that it was incomprehensible and painful in its unwelcomeness. He did not try to read Albus very often, for that reason. And as for the idiot Black…the hatred had dulled over the years to a mild dislike tempered with guilt and regret at the follies of youth. Snape’s enmity of Black, however, remained undimmed, blazing in his gut on the all too frequent occasions their paths crossed.

He was called frequently to Voldemort’s side. He had become accustomed to the tightening of the skin on his forearm that foreshadowed the searing hot agony of the summons, and when he felt it this time, sitting in Albus’ study with a snifter of fine cognac, he had winced and rolled up his sleeve. He stared at his arm, waiting for the sudden blaze of crimson that shot white hot needles of pain into his every fibre.

“Oh, my dear boy. Not again, not so soon,” the Headmaster had murmured, rising swiftly and crossing to Snape, placing his hand on his shoulder, forgetting himself in his concern for the younger man. Trying not to recoil from the physical contact, Snape’s face had tightened, and the old man had frowned in sadness, aware of the degree to which his young friend suffered.

“I don’t – I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, this time. I tell him I have little difficulty keeping you in ignorance, and it pleases him to think he can keep me away from Hogwarts in term time. Something’s afoot, I know that much.”

“Much as it grieves me to say it, old friend, I fear that you will be of far more use to us there even than you are here at Hogwarts.”

Snape glared at Dumbledore out of habit, but then shook his head resignedly, knowing that the Headmaster spoke the truth and wishing he could contradict him.

“Give the dog its bone for a while, then, if you must,” he said wearily. “Let’s see how it manages all the nubile sixth and seventh year girls. It’ll think all its Christmases have come at once!”

“Now, Severus, I am sure Sirius will step into your shoes – or try to,” Dumbledore amended hurriedly as Snape shot him a sharp scowl, “with the utmost professionalism! I would not employ him were I to suspect otherwise.”

“Hmph,” snorted the younger man, pinching the top of his large nose between his fingers and rubbing the flattened diamond on its bridge absently. “What possessed you to I’ll never understand.”

“Ah, Severus, if I did not make a habit of welcoming lost causes, his is not the only life that would be quite different now,” Dumbledore said meaningfully, piercing Snape with a glance over the top of his half-moon spectacles.

“Yes, well, yet again, you have the last word,” Snape complained grudgingly. The Headmaster gave a hollow laugh, becoming serious once more as Snape suddenly gasped in pain and turned away, clutching his forearm.

“Please be careful, Severus!” he said quietly as Snape strode from the room.

Weeks passed. Snape was not fully aware of how much time sped by while he was incarcerated in Voldemort’s own private hell. Voldemort had a way of stretching and flexing time to his will. In his bleaker moments, usually when he was lounging against a wall, seemingly bored out of his mind watching Goyle or MacNair perform some debauchery on the limp form of an unfortunate Muggle, Snape would wonder whether, when he returned home, he would find the school in ruins, all his colleagues long dead and the name Hogwarts long forgotten. Such was Voldemort’s power, and to do so would suit his twisted, petulant sense of fun. Fortunately, however, Voldemort’s vanity and his ability to bear a grudge outweighed those finer qualities, and to rob himself of too much time would mean forfeiting his supposedly vital revenge on Albus Dumbledore and anybody else who had ever crossed him. Snape therefore knew that once Voldemort released him, each time there would at least be a home for him to return to, to lick his wounds and regroup before the next assault.

He knew better than to speak to the Dark Lord unless spoken to. He had made such a mistake, once. Only once. Sometimes Voldemort went into trances that lasted for hours, maybe even days. Snape would take advantage of these reveries to indulge himself by wallowing in bitter memories, and wonder why on earth he had changed sides in the first place. Dumbledore was just as persuasive as Voldemort, in his own way. Dumbledore had betrayed him when he had kept Sirius Black at the school after the Whomping Willow incident in their youth, and now Snape was expected to smile sweetly and allow the idiot loose in his classroom, and his own private storeroom too. Dumbledore had refused to listen to Snape, then and now. But on the other hand, Dumbledore had taken him in when common sense would have dictated that he send him to Azkaban to receive the Dementor’s Kiss. And Dumbledore had never, and would have never, assaulted him so violently both physically and magically that when he had first returned to Hogwarts Madam Pomfrey had fainted clean away at the appalling injuries she was supposed to heal. In recent years, of course, she was faced with the results of Voldemort’s zealous use of Cruciatus with such monotonous regularity that she became almost as inured to it as did he.

He tried as delicately as he could to discover Voldemort’s plans, but got the distinct impression that the Dark Lord was deliberately less forthcoming than in the past. He performed the expected humiliating obeisance, prostrating himself on the floor at Voldemort’s feet, licking his boots, ignoring the dull ache in his kidneys caused by hour after hour of standing in attendance at his right hand, but received none of the usual scraps of information, usually gleefully imparted, which were his reward for such dedication to his master. Voldemort’s pet, the object of Lucius Malfoy’s suspicious jealousy.

If Voldemort had come to any strategical decisions, then Snape had not been made party to them this time, and he wondered whether Lucius Malfoy’s supercilious smile had anything to do with that.

His position was becoming more and more precarious, and the line he trod ever more fine. On the one hand he told Voldemort that he was reporting back faithfully every detail of inaccurate propaganda supplied by the Dark Lord, while at the same time striving secretly to separate fact from fiction. Something he had been singularly unable to do, this time. And on the other hand, he fed Voldemort a constant diet of misinformation, helpfully supplied by the Ministry, via Dumbledore of course, since the fastidious officials there would not want to get their hands dirty by dealing with an ex Death Eater themselves.

Furthermore, he suspected that someone at the Ministry was not doing their job as assiduously as before, since the half-truths from the Ministry had been less well though out latterly, almost as if his role was assigned less and less importance. It had been far better when he took his instructions from his fellow members of the Order, rather than some faceless Percy Weasley-type quill-pusher sitting behind a desk with no conception of the risks he had to face.

Eventually he was dismissed and allowed to go home, but not before being made to suffer several hours of Cruciatus, as punishment for the failure of his last piece of intelligence to yield any fruit. Crawling a few feet from his erstwhile master, his pride forced him to his feet despite the agonising after-effects of the curses, which left cramps shooting along his limbs and a liquefying tension in his guts which demanded expulsion by one means or another from his weakly protesting frame. He managed to get over two thirds of the way down the pitch dark corridor leading from Voldemort’s realm before he gave in to the demands of his shattered body, and was violently sick.

He apparated at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, fell to his knees and gulped in the heavy, damp, mossy air in harsh heaving breaths. He knew the Forest well, but a quick glance at the sky told him that it would soon be dusk, and he did not wish to linger there any longer than was absolutely necessary. Although proud of his own abilities to the point of arrogance, nevertheless he had sufficient self-awareness to accept his own limitations when in extremity. He would be no match for the Forest’s less amenable denizens while still suffering from the cumulative effects of repeated subjection to one of the Unforgivable curses.

It took longer than usual for him to stagger back to the school, and by the time he reached the side entrance which gave on to the kitchens, the sky was purpling to black. Holding on to the walls as he walked to steady himself, he was almost on his knees by the time he flung open the kitchen doors. Grabbing the nearest house elf by the baggy neck of its greying vest, he rasped,

“Get Pomfrey!” before collapsing onto a bench set at one of the four long tables. He did not even feel the pain in his head as it hit the oak table with a hard thunk.

He ought to have spent the following day in the Infirmary, but he woke with the dawn, writhing in pain in the narrow metal-framed cot and roaring out for Madam Pomfrey, and insisted she let him return to his own rooms with a large supply of the healing potion he himself had brewed. She went through the usual pretences, he noticed. Never one to neglect her duty, she would not discharge him from her care without their habitual arguments, and if he were honest with himself, their verbal sparring and her longsuffering disapproval were balm to his soul, signalling a return to normality, a mundane reminder that he had survived once again, and that the routine of his life at Hogwarts would soon reassert itself. Until the next time he was summoned, at least.

Back in the sanctuary of his rooms he sat shakily in the armchair beside the fire and called Albus Dumbledore. The debriefing was mercifully short, since there was little to report, despite his absence of more than three weeks. As soon as it was over, he went to bed, with a supply of healing potion on his bedside cabinet, and a draught of Dreamless Sleep potion, just in case.

One and a half days later, the nausea was gone and the tremors no longer wracked his body, although his hands still shook uncontrollably every time he began to dwell on what he had been forced to witness in Voldemort’s lair. The Headmaster had suggested he try to be present at breakfast that morning, and although he had no desire for company, he acquiesced. Regular attendance at mealtimes in the Great Hall was expected of him. It was his duty, and he took pride in fulfilling his obligations where Dumbledore was concerned. Snorting bitterly as he shrugged on his black frock coat and began to fasten its long line of buttons, he rued the contradictory nature of his self-made moral code, and wondered not for the first time whether the end truly did justify the means. He still had no answer, and doubted he ever would, so in the mean time, all that he could do was carry on, try to atone for the sins of his youth, and try to redress the balance.

Even though each enforced visit to the Dark Lord’s lair caused him more and more stress, he could still do his duty. He had no weak spots. And then he saw Ella for the first time, and suddenly his life became so much more difficult. Now, he had an Achilles heel.

On to Chapter Two