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

[dontbegoofy.livejournal.com]

*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.*

Comments

[dontbegoofy.livejournal.com]

*The reply comes swiftly now, automatically. Toneless and emotionally devoid.*

Yes.

[notquitefacist.livejournal.com]

*He would never submit to admitting it, but it had only after Snape's shoddy work at St. Mungo's that Crouch Sr. had even begun to realise that the man responsible for the medical contamination and the one who had stumped him with the Headmaster's death were one in the same. At first after the fallout, the obvious responsible party had been held responsible in the court of Crouch Sr.'s mind, and his son's involvement will never be forgotten or forgiven. But it was Snape who was the only employee with access to the bottling supplies, a speciality in brewing antidotes which even the dimmest Auror involved in the investigation knew required an intimate knowledge of the poisons one needs to cure, failed to supply an adequate alibi to the authorities when hospital staff were interviewed, and who was known to be seen in the company of some unsavoury people whose names have been on a list in the Ministry's top drawer for quite some time. Crouch Sr. is getting a perfect confession, but his tone descends into deliberate displeasure as though Snape had dared to talk back.*

I don't need your answer. All the evidence leads back to you, and you alone. No other bodies have been found in the past seven years so perfectly unharmed with such innocuous traces in their system as Dumbledore's and the victims at St. Mungo's. To be perfectly frank, repeating the same exact potion in yet another highly publicised case is one of the most extreme display of negligence I have seen, even among the most idiotic of criminals.

You caused all those deaths, Mr. Snape, and none of them appear to phase you. But I don't think you realise what you've done here. Only one of your murders really matters.

[dontbegoofy.livejournal.com]

*Snape stares and then blinks, his groggy brain struggling to calculate who could possibly matter. The superstructure of Crouch, Sr.'s words seem to finally be arching back towards him, but he still can't make out the details.*

You mean Dumbledore.

[notquitefacist.livejournal.com]

I don't care about some dead hippie!

*The twang of strained reason and control is audible as Crouch Sr. barks so scornfully, accompanied by such a frightful twist of expression that it far surpasses his usual impatience. Like a nightmarish vision out of the corner of the eye, it's over before it fully registers, and he continues on as though nothing had happened, every bit as composed and level as he had been before.*

The crime against the Headmaster was only completed thanks to your own dumb luck. Mistakes have turned out well for you - being sent on another man's orders and returning with a dead man's final secret in your pocket as reward. It is my belief - and I am never mistaken - that it was your own idiotic self interest then, too, that lead to the contamination of half a year's supply of vital medicinal potions and infusions. Mixtures that kept innocent people alive, and one in particular.

That wasn't your master's work, was it. It was you, Snape, who murdered my wife.

You have known it all along, you knew it when you committed the act. Bernadette trusted the public against all reason and it is people, you, who took her. But now that I have found you here, I don't think I will be informing anyone else of your little triumph. None of them, in fact, even your solitary success with Dumbledore. I won't be seen as outwitted by you.

[dontbegoofy.livejournal.com]

*Deja vu makes stripes and swirls through his brain like ink spilled in water, forming momentary ghost shapes in his mental peripheral. Bulging eyes and frenzied words coming to life and melding with the eerily similar eyes and words in front of him. He's had this conversation before, but not with this particular Barty.

It's then that the sudden hope of leverage presents itself.*

It doesn't take much to outwit you. Just look at your son.

[notquitefacist.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, my son. Twelve O.W.L.s and still the boy never has been smart enough to know he can't keep secrets from me. Rest assured, Mr. Snape. He is next.

But you destroyed any hope for my wife - and, allowed yourself to be taken in by your own tricks. I would be far more worried about myself right now, if I had made your mistakes. There's a lot you understand, isn't there. But at least you're... honest.

[dontbegoofy.livejournal.com]

*Nessus' Bane isn't the only perfect potion. Tasteless, odourless, undetectable - there's only been one other quite like it. Suddenly the perhapses of before become certainties, and the plot solidifies around him. The torture before had worn him down, the water over his head had caught him off guard and Occlumency never can work when the threat has already gestated inside you.

The sting of such an amateur mistake hits Snape before the implications.*

[notquitefacist.livejournal.com]

*A sleek watch, perhaps even muggle craftsmanship by the look of it, appears from beneath Crouch Sr.'s sleeve. It's a commonplace movement, with no excessive brandishing or emphasis, but the insult rings in the air.

When he looks back up his face begins to change again. This time Snape is not met with rage, but with a smile, and not a normal one at that, one that has only lately found it's way into Crouch Sr.'s expressive repertoire and has never been photographed by the press. Something is familiar in it's breadth and half savage glee. It is a smile most often found on particularly infamous six year olds, and not on grown men in business suits.*

Disappointing. I thought the effects of Veritaserum would be obvious to a Potioneer much sooner than that, particularly one as dishonest yourself. But no matter, it certainly succeeded in getting you to open up, and I only needed a short chat to put my mind at ease.

[dontbegoofy.livejournal.com]

*It's hardly the penultimate realization he was expecting, but it's the one that arrives. He's wet - he's wet and it's overwhelming. Overwhelming the way his skin feels oiled and strange, the way it shifts over angled bones as he fidgets. Overwhelming the way that jaundiced, sallow canvas is spread too tight on his left thigh, swollen and split - no doubt from some earlier, hitwizard-acquired wound. Overwhelming the way his robes are heavy and suffocating, slathered on his chest like drying plaster, flattening his lungs. It's overwhelming the way he stinks - he smells it now, his nose suddenly, strangely alive. Sweat and grease and chemicals and piss. Looking down he notices, for the first time, that his lap is soaked with torture-extracted urine. The indignity of it feels familiar, base, oddly comforting.*

[notquitefacist.livejournal.com]

Now, Mr. Snape, I'm quite certain you'll satisfy one last curiosity of mine. As it was important enough to swear by your life, you no doubt remember even now what Dumbledore's little secret was.

What did you vow never to repeat? I'd be interested in seeing the results.

[dontbegoofy.livejournal.com]

*His body is humming. Organs, of various sizes and shapes, seem to have clambered up to his ears, sticky and slippery and beating against his ear canal with regular, fast thuds. He can hear the liquid churning of his veins, the bubble of acid in his stomach, the scratch of over-long toenails agaisnt the interior of his boots.

Contrary to the rather sorry state of his refrigerator, expiry dates are something Snape has always been mindful of. The difference between an antidote and liver failure could be one particularly mushy mistletoe berry. In this same way, Snape is all too aware that life and death is often measured not by stamina but by usefulness, and his usefulness has gotten awfully mushy, awfully fast. There's no choice but to speak, no choice but to recite it. The potion doesn't leave room for his memory to stumble.*

It was the woman's - Dumbledore seemed to believe it was a legitimate prophecy. She said - the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches, born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survive-

[notquitefacist.livejournal.com]

*The result, it turns out, is immediate, brief, and unsatisfying; words Crouch Sr. would not hesitate to assign to describe Snape's life, too, as well as his death. It's silent, apart from just a few last, snuffling breaths sucked in desperately through his nose, which protrudes out from behind his hair like the beak of a crow. His jaw snaps closed on his parroted final words, and in one jerking motion his half-grown body stiffens and strains upward against it's chains. Crouch Sr. has seen better performances, and where that wide, carved smile had once taken up a large portion of his face there is nothing but a thin line now that everything is over. His interest is lost after the first convulsion, but he forces himself to stay until the muscles release and the body goes limp inside it's restraints. The patch of dark cloth between Snape's legs widens further, and Crouch Sr. turns away. His files follow him out the door.

He has accomplished everything he wanted tonight. He has planned the perfect death sentence, finally begun to avenge Bernadette after too long of waiting for results on his son, and secured a piece of societies trash to serve a purpose. After a single interrogation, he can call the new trace effective, regardless of the technicalities, and two unsolved cases are already being emptied from his mind before he makes it out to the main hallway, a slight relief from all the information he must go over at least once every night before sleep. The moment of victory, however, has passed, and Crouch Sr. emerges from the government-standard torture chamber just as important, put together and pitiless as he had been going in.

There has never been a moment during Snape's final night, that Crouch Sr. had cared what had been Dumbledore's secret. It had made for the perfect final card to play, but had been nothing more than a slow and painful check mate, and that is no different now that he has heard it. Prophecies, despite their potential uses as stepping stones toward legitimate progress, are largely hokum, and he considers this mystery woman's to be just as legitimate as his horoscope. He knows one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord exists, and Crouch Sr. celebrates his birthday in January, not July.

Outside, in the torch-lit hallway, several officers straighten up, wands drawn to begin administering further enticement or move the prisoner for the night. Crouch Sr. looks sternly around at each of their faces, and cautions them before making his way back upstairs and home.*

Whoever administered the serum? Should know I did not give my authorization for spilling. The floor will need to be wiped.