bait_backup | All I need is a heart attack, c'mon, humble my bones with a cardiac

*In the past twenty-four hours Snape has gotten incredibly good at swimming. It’s a skill he never mastered when he was younger. Jaundiced limbs, much too long to be properly coordinated, had floundered pathetically in water like an overturned beetle trying to right itself. It seems strange than that it’s all he can do right now not to swim. Or rather, his vision is swimming. There doesn’t appear to be any water. There’s only a chair and the room and the bricks. He already hates the bricks; they’re everywhere, below him, above him, on every side - uncomfortably close. And yet, the room vaults and slopes up to improbable heights, meeting at no clearly set point and reaching back down behind him until everything looks rounded in a room made of nothing but sharp angles and lines.

It’s no longer clear to Snape where anything ends or divides, minutes and hours and days blending together, taking on spherical shape like the bricks, little mounds of formless and unknowable time. His body too has sunken into his chair, become inextricable from its mass, the magical chainwork pressing every limb into the wood, cutting off his circulation until his fingers are swollen and purple and tingle with the strange slumber of muscles.

It’s all exactly what he expected.

The bowels of the Ministry are unexpectedly stuffy. There’s no air, no circulation, only the lingering moist staleness warmed by his own body. It’s become that moment - that moment when the underside of a duvet grows insufferable, that moment stretched out for hours with no promise of relief, with no mattress edge to search for.

He supposes there is some water now. It stings his eyes, dots his lips and makes his hair, already greased in sweat, stick to the back of his neck like tack. He makes no note of the third man’s departure or the closing of the solid iron door, he only sucks at his lips and takes a moment, yet another moment in a series of similar moments that have marked his entire life, to really appreciate how typical this is. To bask in the implications, to let his mind wander forward and cast out his future like divinatory bones, reading only death and doom and betrayal. He’s had more than enough time to come up with a who and a why, but the only conclusion he can reach is that there’s simply too many whos and too many whys - that perhaps it’s a mystery best left to the ages - that perhaps it doesn’t even matter. He’s done too many things and looked down the closed, mysterious funnels of too many paths, and then in that metaphorical fork in the road he’d stopped to have a picnic, tossing bread down each tunnel to feed whatever was inside. He’s done everything and nothing, ambitionless success and significant failure. A mass murderer, a Death Eater, a virgin, a penniless intern. It’s perfectly fitting, perfectly meaningless, to be sitting in a chair in Level Ten, counting bricks with a glass of water emptied over his head.*

Threaded | Flat

*When the door opens again, an unexpected face enters into Snape's stubbornly peripheral vision. With a large stack of sickly yellow folders following just behind him like a threatening but subservient pet, the Minister's sunken features are more exaggerated than a mind might, kindly, expect. Most people outside of the Ministry are accustomed only to seeing him on the front of a press release or staring out at them from a watchful poster, and it becomes easy to assume he cannot look quite as distinct in the flesh. It is an awkward and mockable face, but only when it's owner is far, far out of sight and earshot, a distance which he does not plan to allow Snape.

He crosses toward the ancient chair and stops in front of the puddle of spilt water very nearly touching the toe of his shoe. Snape's swollen fingers do not seem to phase him, nor does his reluctance to answer his questioners, but the mess does. A prisoner is nothing more than a living, breathing object, but his property is another story. The history of these rooms, from Crouch Sr.'s perspective, goes back only so far into the past as he does. Their true significance in the world and the government only ever came into effect when they become a tool he was allowed to use. In the days when he was nothing more than a trainee, the fact that buried beneath the Ministry lay perfectly preserved torture chambers from a more persuasive time in society, meant next to nothing to him and probably didn't accomplish much at the time anyway. Now however they are his, and they have not been put to waste, nor are they meant to be spilled upon.

With nose wrinkled, he asks his first question on the evening without bothering to look up at who he addresses, for all intents and purposes appearing to be addressing the problem of the puddle.*

Can you tell me, Mr. Snape, what this is?

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