I pulled off your wings and I laughed

[dontbegoofy.livejournal.com]

*Seventy-eight continuous hours and counting. That’s how long Severus Snape has been conscious. The boundless realm of mixing and brewing and stirring has facilitated and been the cause for this prodigious feat of human foolhardiness - and isn’t that always the case. Like some clichéd and dated conception of a mother, potions have always cared for him, nurtured him, reared him up lovingly since his significantly less involved flesh-and-blood mother had given him her old books to keep him occupied. There’s a potion for practically everything. And when there’s simply no time to sleep or eat there’s potions for that too, keeping the body running against all logic and sanity. Yes, to Snape, potions have done more for him than any one parent - any one person ever has.

His relationship to his work, however, is a deeply symbiotic one. So it seems only fitting that today his small flat is absolutely dominated by a spread of ingredients, cauldrons and a thick, chemical steam. His plan had been flawless, effective and practical. However, like everything, it’s had its unfortunate consequences. The side-effect of his victory is grueling, twenty-four hour work. The hospital, growing ever more desperate, has enlisted nearly ever able and willing potioneer. It isn’t the human need that stirs Snape, it isn’t some misguided loyalty to his employers or even latent guilt - but a dedication to his craft, a genuine love for making potions that is more than enough to convince him to stave off the day-to-day and the minimally social.

It is precisely this preoccupation that ensures he hasn’t read the Daily Prophet, and even if he had, the death of Bernadette Crouch would seem even more distant and unconnected than the deaths of the many people he’d had a more active hand in dispatching. He has no idea, no sudden precognition, of what is presently bearing down on his location whatsoever - or why.*

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[mad-actually.livejournal.com]

*There's something superheated, inhuman, almost feral to his movements. A wiry life that drives his limbs with all the frenzy of a fleeing gazelle. Of course, he isn't fleeing - he's arriving. He has no disguise this time, no one's skin to wear, no act to play. He doesn't even have his own skin, his own act. His mind now chiseled down to bare bones essentials. A cobbling of instincts and primal displays of implacable grief and misplaced rage. A reddened face and reddened eyes and a need to see red, to have it squirt and drain from his sacrificial scapegoat until the cruel cosmos is appeased.

For the second time, Barty knocks on Severus Snape's door*