Post by SEVERUS TOBIAS SNAPE on Dec 31, 2012 1:13:31 GMT -5
| [atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=width,500,true] [style=text-align: center]  The destiny you will meet [style=font-size: 10px; line-height: 10px; padding: 25px; margin-top: -10px; color: 999999;]He hadn’t meant to scream. [/style]The thought had plagued him since the moment it had happened, from the split second his lips had parted and let loose that awful, agonized sound when Lucas had grabbed him and thrown him up against the wall. His back couldn’t bear it. The oozing lashes and lacerations that decorated his flesh, hidden beneath his clothes, could have perhaps borne the brunt of the attack, but the boils around them, results of the scorching, had not. He’d felt some of them crack open against the flagstones as Lucas had thrust him back, and the response had been instinctual and automatic. He hadn’t meant to scream. The moment the sound had torn its way from him, something had slipped inside of Severus, something critical that he had not been in the right mind to assess. Lucas had stepped back so quickly, the expression in those hazel eyes reflecting a torment Severus knew far too well. He recognized the shift in Lucas as anger locked itself in place and the other had spun on his heel, prepared to run from what he had wrought. It was in that moment that Severus destroyed them both, unable to bear losing all that was left. Eric is dead. Three words was all it took to stop Lucas cold – all it took to make the echo of Severus’ scream fade away in the face of a stark new reality. He’d turned, his expression knowing, and Severus did not lie to spare him. He did not – could not – curb his tongue and Lucas had let the truth bleed out. Severus’ physical agony was forgotten as anger, guilt, bitterness and hatred built in the Potion Master’s private chambers, a triad of silencing spells likely the only thing that kept their uncurbed, raw emotions from being interrupted. It had built up quietly, snarls and snapping words lashing out between them with the hiss and crack of whips, two men rendered vicious with grief, attacking one another to defend themselves. It escalated, almost without their noticing, to growls and cries as words struck nerves already frayed and damaged and they were left with desperate accusations and frustrated guilt that could not be appeased no matter how much they attacked one another. It lead to screaming, and perhaps that was the result of the punching, the clawing, the purely animalistic fury that had gripped them both in the end. Lucas forgot about the state Severus was in and attacked without restraint, and Severus embraced the pain even as he dealt back as much as he was given to the best of his ability. Neither one of them used their wands, taking their pound of flesh from one another with their fists alone. Two men of keen – nigh superior intellect – rendered into the soullessness of wild beasts desperate for nothing but blood in their teeth. There was no end to the anguish, no matter how hard they struck one another, how hard they pushed, how much they bled. It hurt and they knew it, hurt in ways they didn’t know how to articulate, so they fought until Severus’ body caved, unable to bear the violence in such a state. His mind was muddled, lost in a wailing despair courtesy of what he had witnessed, but more than anything a direct result of the potion he had imbibed for the Dark Lord’s benefit, to appease the demon’s thirst for loyalty. He didn’t know what caused it – but he blamed the initial scream for everything. He blamed that scream for telling Lucas, for bringing them to this point of no return, for the first of the tears that fell. He’d never seen Lucas cry. Not in frustration – not in grief. Until that moment Severus had believed the man to truly, honestly, be incapable of it. He had envied the man for it. It had only been one – perhaps two tears – but it was the end of both of them. The cutting remarks were traded in for silent understanding, the furious, desperate abuse exchanged for the closest thing to tenderness either one had ever shown one another. Severus’ head had come to rest on Lucas’ knee, his hair curtaining around his face to shield the shame and the liquid testament to yet another failure. Lucas had laid a hand on Severus’ hair, the first to touch it in well over twenty years, uncaring about its unclean state as he too, bowed his head. There was no hair to shield his face, but Severus wasn’t looking, and his hair was thick enough to hide the evidence of grief as it fell, drop by drop, into the inky mass. There were no words spoken, no more accusations or attempts to defend. Neither one of them acknowledged when it was over, but both seemed to understand when the moment was at its end. Severus shifted back, his face already drying, and Lucas’ head had lifted, a fire in his eyes that spoke of retribution, of rage, but above all – most terrifying of all – an acceptance. Of what, Severus hadn’t known, but he’d seen it and been afraid, deeply afraid, of what it might have meant. They stood, almost at the same moment, and Lucas left. His every motion, his every step, showing that the violence inside him was just beneath the surface, that his moment of grief had been a weakness not soon to be repeated. That someone, somewhere, would soon die. Severus had let him go, had known, in that moment, that he could no more lose Lucas than he could himself. They were both condemned to the same eternal pit. It was merely a question of who would get there first. The door had closed behind Lucas, and Severus had meant to go to his stores. He’d meant to at least make a passing attempt at healing himself, he was sure. Yet when Albus walked through the Floo for his report, calmly ignoring the shattered bottle of bourbon and the blood on the floor, Severus realized it simply didn’t matter. There was a logical part of Severus that existed still, a sharply observant and deeply aware part of him that noticed the way Albus’ gaze had flickered to the broken glass , the way the old man’s lips had thinned at the sight of the blood. Had noted and known that Albus was concerned, but choosing not to address it because when Severus broke things, his temper was simply too fierce to contend with. A part of Severus understood he had brought this seeming lack of care upon himself and recognized that Albus was doing the best he could, keeping Severus focused on the task at hand. That part of him was all too easy to ignore, with the echo of his own screams still being so loud in his ears. The report was granted with the detail and integrity Albus was used to expecting from Severus. The details, as they were given in a monotonous soldier’s roll call, flayed Severus from the inside. Eric’s late arrival, the Dark Lord’s discovery, his own punishment was all described without emotion, the only details spared being the ones regarding the potions he had imbibed. Albus left under the impression that Severus was healthy, that a bezoar had been all that was required to heal him, and he had left satisfied. Just as the Dark Lord had been satisfied with voluntary torment, so Albus was appeased with lies of what the loyalty of his spy truly entailed. Drained mentally, exhausted emotionally and thrashed physically, Severus had collapsed in his chair before the fire, only for his alarm to wake him five minutes later, for all the unexpected, unwanted sleep his body had forced upon him. It was a testament to how destroyed he truly was when Severus dragged himself to his stores, took one of his strongest pain relieving potions and gave himself a double dose before simply taking up the Defense papers he needed to return and making his way to the classroom, vaguely aware of the way his shirt clung to his body in a festering way. The flesh on his back was still oozing blood and pus in a sluggish manner, the dried fluids causing the crisp once-white fabric to fuse itself with the mess. His black overcoat hid it all beautifully of course. Severus had learned young the benefits of black clothing; they didn’t stain from blood, because blood simply did not show upon them once dried. With his billowing cloak overtop, there was no reason for anyone to notice – though in truth, Severus was simply moving on autopilot. With the pain reliever coursing through him, he felt only mild discomfort at the way his legs chaffed against the soft fabric of his pants, or the way his back cracked from time to time as a result of his moving, to seep more of his blood into his shirt, across the broken sores and blisters, almost soothing when it formed a rivulet across them. It didn’t occur to him that he entered the classroom slowly, that his robe didn’t billow or that the blood loss had caused his normally sallow skin to appear almost waxen in shade, or his lips almost grey. He didn’t know that his eyes were surrounded by such dark circles – from blood loss, minimal sleep, and a fractured nose courtesy of his fight with Lucas – that they appeared almost sunken into his skull. If he had known…he still would not have cared, simply because he would not have thought anyone would take note. As Severus handed the papers to Granger and told her to pass them out, he did not notice how his voice did not carry the weight it generally did. A night of screaming, of cursing and releasing raw emotion that had never before pulled itself forward, had run it ragged and almost hoarse. He did not take a seat at the front of the class, though logic told him he needed to be off his feet, that he needed more than pain reliever – he needed blood replenishing potion, nerve restoratives, pure lavender, a cure for boils, bruise balm, bacterial counter-measures and a plethora of other medicines. Instead he stood where he always did, lectured in a voice frayed and hoarse, but still stern – unyielding – quintessentially Snape in every aspect – that its frailties were easily ignored. He took points from Gryffindor simply because Finnegan’s whisper, at one point, was a bit too loud, and this bolstered the belief that he was unchanged. He set them to their tasks, and wandered among the class as he always did. Though there was a tiredness to his clipped tones as he corrected wand grips and spell pronunciations, Severus was his usual snarky, unforgiving self. The only real change from routine was the fact that he left the class ten minutes early – and he thoughtlessly placed Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy in charge in his absence. He made it to the dungeons and fully intended to begin at least some of his healing process when the bile rose and he found himself in the restroom, vomiting like a child who’d never seen death before and didn’t know how to face it. The weakness sickened him, irritated him so much that he lost sense of the logical reason, the real reason for his illness. He needed certain restoratives, had gone too long on a limited blood supply, and his body was doing its best to reject the poisons on its own. An innate sense of time had Severus in the Potions Class he was meant to substitute on time, and he could not allow himself to sit, for he was dealing with fourth years and combustible substances. He did notice the way his hands shook as he wrote the directions on the board, so he quickly cast a spell and had the chalk write for him instead, clasping his guilty hands behind himself as he wandered through the class. Prudence and pain finally brought Severus back to his chambers, where he took some blood replenishing potion to stave off the headache that was threatening to bring his brain out through his ears, and forced himself to imbibe the lavender his stomach needed to coat the poison and cope with it. He didn’t have time to deal with his back or his legs – double potions were next, and Severus knew exactly where his duties were expected to be. Double potions with the Gryffindor and Slytherin sixth years after this mornings performance in Defense left Severus feeling distinctly frustrated with his current reality, though his sense of compelling duty to Albus combined with the fact he’d entirely forgotten the cure to the Befuddlement Draft that he absolutely and unequivocally should have imbibed first thing upon his return the night before left him utterly incapable of fully comprehending just why, precisely, this day was proving to be more hellish than any other, when in truth the children were shockingly well behaved. It didn’t occur to him, for even a second, that perhaps the fact he looked more like a vampire than ever before had them slightly on edge. All he knew was the back of his mind would not shut up about the amount of healing he needed to do, and despite the fact this was a N.E.W.T. level class, one of the students made a very dangerous and very stupid error that he had needed to respond to quickly. Something on his back tore open when he darted forward to stop the cauldron from exploding, vanish the disaster and send the poor, idiot child from his sight and to the library to write a fifteen foot essay on how this potion was made and precisely what could have happened if that third drop had fallen – what would have happened due to the second drop, had her professor not put a stop to it. He’d been so busy cutting the girl to size, his voice regaining strength in his anger, that Severus honestly didn’t realize he’d let a small sound slip out before he started in on her, or that he’d been gripping the table far too hard for anger alone to warrant. The class ended without further disaster, and though it seemed that there were two students that wished to speak with him, Severus had stormed from the class and back to his private stores long enough for another bit of blood replenishing potion, and another bit of pain reliever, as he would have no time to tend to his back or legs until the day was done. Double defense with the seventh years had been next and last on the agenda, and his curriculum had dictated that today they would be working on tertiary knockback jinxes, which was a heavily hands on course. By the end, Severus was sweating and his hands were shaking, his lips bloodless to the point of being a greyish blue that looked deathly on his waxen pallor, and as the last of the seventh years left the classroom, there had been nothing left in him but the strength to bring himself to the ground with some semblance of grace. He recognized, dimly, that he had worn himself to a point he very well might have to reveal to Albus that he had lied, as he may have pushed himself to the point of needing Pomfrey to assist in fixing him, but in that moment Severus honestly could not bring himself to care. He could not bring himself to care about Albus’ sensibilities, or Poppy’s insufferably stuffy ways, or the fact that he was, quite frankly, letting himself die slowly. He felt…remarkably empty. There was something…blissful…about being this cold, this completely hollowed out, that Severus couldn’t help but hold onto. He knew the monsters that awaited him if he got back up. He knew the fate that was destined to him if he continued to fight. And in that moment, Severus just wanted to lay down and let it all go. His oaths…his broken promises...his desperate, foolish attempt at a redemption he had no right to and could never earn or deserve. Eric’s eyes stared at him from inside his own mind, and Severus laid his head in his hands, unaware that his solitude had been intruded upon, that this private moment of breaking and dying was about to be rudely interrupted, and allowed an anguished cry to fall from his lips, the only apology he had to offer, and one that was as worthless, as meaningless, as every apology he’d been offering all his life. tagged; Hermione Granger words; 2770. notes; Future thread, hiding it here. I broke writing this omg. ORIGINAL TEMPLATE BY LITTLE BITTY PRETTY ONE @ CAUTION 2.0 |
