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A Regrettable Situation by Lady of Shallot [Reviews - 21]


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A/N: Written for the "Obliviate" challenge on the livejournal community darkones. Dark Snape, not very heavy on the 'ship, not much happy to be found here. Consider yourself warned.

Part I.

He knew that greed came in many different forms.

The greed for cold, dead things; objects that never held life. Glinting gold coins and echoing manor houses that always belonged to someone else’s family, never his. Greed for people too—girls in particular, which was to be expected. One whom he couldn’t forget, who had had long red hair and a laugh that traveled up and down his spine, but who only looked at him with pity in her eyes. Anger later, and disgust, but he told himself those were better than pity.

He had coveted so many things that could not, should not, would not be his. Money and a good name. New robes, not hand-me-downs every other year from some distant cousin who went to Durmstrang. Prestige, importance, being Somebody. Not being laughed at, not wearing ratty gray underpants and being called Snivellus whenever teachers were out of earshot. He craved the day when he would be able to make those people, everyone who had ever laughed at him and called him names, all of them, pay. Power; it all came down to power in the end, he had learned well from all those years in Slytherin. In between all the lessons in how he wasn’t good enough and how this could never change, he learned how to fight back in his own way. He learned how to store up revenge for years, waiting, knowing all the while that it would make it sweeter.

Some day they would be sorry for how they treated him, but by then that wouldn’t be what he wanted, not at all. No, such a response would only make him hate them more; it would make his task easier.

They could try to explain it—him—away. Perhaps it came from being poor: an economically deprived childhood, emotionally neglectful parents, (father with addictive personality and poor anger management skills, mother with insufficient mechanisms of coping with situation). A regrettable situation. He had seen all this in his file once, after too much had happened for the sudden interest in his personal life to make a difference.

Later that same file would be found in a desk drawer in an office that had been closed off for some years. Too long to assign blame to any one person for not being involved, too long to remember what worker in the Ministry had been assigned his case. Even if they had found Severus Snape and asked him, he couldn’t have told you the name. A woman, he remembered, with grey hair and robes and a tired grey face. She wouldn’t have remembered his name either, if she had still been alive. Sullen teenage boys who manifest violent and antisocial tendencies aren’t so uncommon in the Wizarding World, no matter what you hear.

It was the system’s shortcomings and what could do you now? It was a regrettable situation; one more sad case who had slipped through the cracks of the system and fallen prey to the banality of evil.

Except evil wasn’t always so banal; it was exciting once, Snape would tell you. A long time ago, when he was a lonely teenage boy who sat alone in his room, cradling his wand in his hands and whispering all the spells he had learned. When he was that boy who had snuck into the Restricted Section at school and read every spell he thought might be useful some day, and a few that might never be but were such a pleasure to think about. Yes, such fun to imagine James Potter waking up one morning with a slight itch, not enough to go to the nurse, but enough to irritate him all day. Over the next few days he would begin to blister and break out in boils; then he would worry, but by then it would be too late—by the time they got him to the infirmary, it would be only a matter of time before his skin burned and boiled from an invisible fire, before it peeled off his body and James Potter died a very, very unpleasant death. That made the boy Snape smile, alone in his attic.

One day, his mother came upstairs—something he counted on her never doing. She started to say his name, maybe something to the effect of, “Severus, darling…” but he never let her complete here sentence. Before she could finish, he hissed, “Obliviate!” and the words died on her lips. She stood there in the doorway for a little while, her gaze soft and unfocused, until he steered her down the stairs and suggested that she take a nap.

His first test on a person, and the results were quite adequate. A little practice and he would be perfectly ready next time.

Part II

Students. He hated their plump, self-satisfied little faces as they came into class on the first day of each term. They were the faces of children who had been spoiled and coddled their whole lives, to whom everything came easily, children who wouldn’t have understood the truth of the world if it was spelled out at the level of a five year-old child.

He particularly hated a boy with messy black hair and too familiar green eyes—green eyes that didn’t look at him with pity this time, but with undisguised fear, hatred, contempt.

He barely noticed the girl who sat next to Potter in class, constantly raising her hand and looking at him, sometimes nervously, sometimes eagerly. If he ever noticed in her eyes just how much she longed for his approval, he forgot. By the time he was ready to notice, such emotions were long since gone.

Part III

He wanted the boy hero dead, and that was what he got. Not by his own hands, but by the hands of the Dark Lord. It would have been satisfying, but in the end that wasn’t really what mattered—it was wisest to let those who were more powerful get what they want.

Hermione had been sent out on an errand before the attack, just as he had planned it. The other Death Eaters had not been informed of this change from the original plan; this was a favor the Dark Lord had not granted in public and it remained privileged information.

He didn’t hear her come in the door and so he was as surprised to see her as she him. Most unfortunate that she had to see such an unpleasant mess, but that could be dealt with. Almost immediately she had reached for her wand, but he was quicker than she was. A simple disarming, and before she could run, he had her up against the wall, hands pinned above her head.

She knew, he had half-expected it, though he wondered what exactly gave him away.

“You. You betrayed us.”

What did she expect from him now? An obviously false protestation of innocence? A dry, sarcastic response in that silky voice of his that he had practiced so carefully for years: Very perceptive, Miss Granger… ? If she were thinking logically, she should expect death. Two words, Avada Kedavra, were all that were necessary, and she would join the bodies on the floor.

He said none of those things. He simply stared at her and said, “Yes.”

She had been struggling up until then, if not very effectively, but now she went more or less limp in his arms. “How could you?” she whispered. “They were your—”

“Friends? No.”

“That’s right, you wouldn’t know what friends are, you unspeakable bastard, you…”

“Yes?”

This infuriated her, as he had anticipated. With a sudden burst of energy, she tried to break away, but he was too strong for her. Holding her back against the wall, Snape felt very tired suddenly. There wasn’t any real pleasure in holding her down and hearing her voice break with rage and held-back tears. Maybe once he might have enjoyed it, but not any longer; now it was just more effort spent.

“They were my friends! I HATE YOU!”

“I know.”

“Then get on with it and kill me, you bastard.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer her question, just let go of her and reached for his wand. She was still trapped between his body and the wall, and for a moment she looked at him with utter confusion in her eyes.

“I don’t understand you. Every time I think I do, I, just…” Her voice trailed off.

“Obliviate.” A word he almost caressed.

After the battle clean-up was over, he apparated with Hermione. He took her to his temporary living place, an old manor house, and led her to his rooms. Snape noticed the glances and heard the comments along the way, but he said nothing as he steered the unnaturally docile Hermione Granger up the stairs.

He knew all those lines about only wanting a woman who came of her own free will. But what did such principled villains do when no woman showed up on their door, asking to be ravished freely and willingly? There was always paid company, but it seemed tawdry and pathetic where one should be forceful, never vulnerable.

All the while Hermione just stared blankly at the wall, biting her lip, and let him lead her by the hand.

Potter’s friend—the sweetest revenge. Regrettable that such a great mind had to be wasted, though it made no great difference in the scheme of things.


Part IV

Day after day, Hermione rocked back and forth, humming softly to herself. When she was like that, he could go to her, touch her, and she did nothing. He didn’t take any liberties, the way the other Death Eaters alluded to with laughs and jibes, he simply sat and stroked her long brown curls, wrapping them into corkscrews around his fingers. Her small hands rested limply in his and usually she let him pat her on the cheek or caress her face. When he tried to get her to lay down and relax, she went stiff and could not be moved, so he let her stay as she was.

In the early days, he often knelt down to her level and cupped her face in his hands so that he could look into her eyes. What would he find there—some kind of absence that told him that the real Hermione was gone? He had never looked at her closely before, so he didn’t have any true basis of comparison, but even still he was certain something had changed. It was like looking into a pair of doll eyes, brown and glassy, but these looked back at him sometimes and were thus twice as unnerving.

Over time, Hermione seemed to become accustomed to his presence. Once, in a moment that would later cause him something like shame, he kissed her. She was compliant enough, opening her lips slightly and tilting her head up, as if this were something she remembered vaguely. Her lips were damp and soft and suddenly he felt like he was kissing a child. Without really meaning to, he shoved her from him and rose to his feet, stumbling as he left the room.

After this, he stayed away from her for a few days. When he returned, she only gazed at him with confused, pleading eyes, and he could tell she had been crying. When he tentatively sat down next to her, she crawled into his lap and nuzzled against him, her lips turning up into a small smile against his neck. Snape sat there with her, rocking her against him slightly, until she closed her eyes and began to make a crooning noise.

Eventually, he deduced that she did this whenever she was content or happy. Things that made her happy included having her scalp rubbed, rather like a cat or dog, sitting on the floor and drawing with crayons (though when black and red-haired boys began to turn up in these drawings, Snape took them away from her), and sitting on the floor and drinking tea with him. She began to speak again, just little words and phrases, but when she smiled innocently up at him he felt a sharp and unfamiliar tugging in his chest.

His time with her was a routine that he came to depend upon. When he wasn’t with her, he let her entertain herself by playing with a piece of yarn or playing simple games with the house elves, who were quite fond of her. They brought her her meals, bathed and dressed her, untangled her hair when it became ratted at night. She often had nightmares where she thrashed about in her sleep, crying out unintelligible fragments. He discovered that it soothed her to sleep in his bed, spooned against him, her small bare feet pressed against his legs.

He tried not to think about how this all must come to an end soon.

One day, he found Lucius in the room talking to Hermione, patting her cheek and nodding encouragingly as she said something in reply to him.

“Get out,” Snape said, his voice cold with sudden rage.

“No need to be so touchy,” Lucius said coolly. “I didn’t know your pets were off-limit to the rest of us.”

“She’s—she’s not—out!”

“Believe what you want, Severus.”

Lucius left silently, but Snape slammed the door behind him, almost forgetting that Hermione was there.

“Why are you so angry?” she asked softly

“I’m not.”

“Oh.” She sat there for a few minutes, weaving her fingers over and under each other, her face intent on something. “Severus? Is that your name?” There was a crease in her forehead now, as if she were trying to remember. “Except I didn’t call you Severus, I called you something different…”

There was a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as he reached for his wand. “Obliviate,” he said wearily, with regret this time.


A Regrettable Situation by Lady of Shallot [Reviews - 21]


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