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.*

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[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.