Dark Gods in the Blood

Chapter Eight

There were rumors that a very important station was in

jeopardy, and its chief, Mr. Kurtz, was ill. Hoped it was not

true. Mr. Kurtz was ... I felt weary and irritable. Hang

Kurtz, I thought.

-- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

His eyes opened automatically and Severus knew that it was six-thirty in the morning, despite the lack of any indicators in his little room. No clock, no windows, nothing. Just the sound of his breath, steady, even, and damnably persistent.

In and out, in and out. He counted his breaths. One, two, ...

By breath number sixty-seven, the door unlocked and opened as if on its own, a single hand snaking in to flick the light switch.

Due to the nature of its occupants, Perkins Mental Institution operated on regular Muggle electricity, and the fluorescent glare of the lights hurt Severus' eyes.

"Good morning, Severus," a female voice said pleasantly from the other side of the door -- he'd made it abundantly clear years ago that he did not want assistance in the mornings. "Up and at 'em."

He did not respond. It would not be worth the breath to insult her -- it would just wash off and she'd never consider it again.

Before -- or even in the beginning -- he would have taken the time. Insulted, berated, and delighted in her potential tears. Oh, the time he had wasted railing at everyone. Albus, Cuthrell, the nurses, the patients ...

But now Severus knew. He knew that such behavior was carefully recorded, and each lovely gem was carried carefully home to be related to loved ones, who would make the appropriate noises. "Surely he didn't say that!" he knew the nurses would exclaim as they swapped stories over their lunch sacks.

He had no intention of being anyone's anecdote any longer.

Slowly, patiently, Severus pulled himself to a seated position on his cot. After a few more moments of quiet, he finally stood, throwing his blanket sullenly to the floor. He shucked off what everyone else called 'pajamas' -- blue scrubs as opposed to the dingy white that passed for day wear.

They were not permitted underthings.

Somehow, that was the final indignity in Severus' mind.

He knew it was rather foolish of him. Certainly he ought to have resented the days spent in a Full-Body Bind. The countless number of times he'd been stabbed with a Muggle IV needle because he simply did not feel like eating. Or the fact that he was as helpless as an infant any more where magic was concerned.

But no. Severus chose to resent the more mundane considerations.

Morning tea instead of coffee. No newspaper. The relatively inoffensive existences of his fellow lunatics.

No knickers.

He scratched his head lazily as he felt his shirt settle on his shoulders. Some days, he missed his hair. The short stubble that he lathered up in the shower offended him sometimes and he recalled his first defiant haircut -- performed only after Severus had been Stupefied -- with something like fondness.

Now, he permitted it with the same listlessness that he permitted everything that happened to him in life.

Another sharp knock on the door. Seven, Severus thought to himself, contemplating his lengthening toenails. This must be the week for nail cutting.

He met no one on his way to breakfast. Possibly, the staff rather avoided him. Severus did not blame them. If he had some mechanism for it, he would avoid himself.

The cafeteria was crowded -- the usual jumble of shouting patients and frowning nurses greeted him and he collected a breakfast tray with a small sigh.

These were the hopeless cases. The throwaways.

People like the Longbottom Auror and his wife, they were kept at St. Mungo's. Places where they could actively attempt to treat them. Places you couldn't look into the nurses' eyes and tell that they'd given up.

Hell ... even Gilderoy Lockhart rated St. Mungo's.

The porridge was served in bowls. No cutlery here. And everything was charmed to disintegrate if ever removed from the cafeteria. Severus had once tried to take a tray out, in the beginning, but found his chicken laying on the floor after his tray turned to dust on his fingertips.

He frowned at the weak morning tea. Watery and tasteless. Everything was tasteless any more. He was certain that his own blood had turned to mere salt water in his veins.

There were only a handful of empty chairs and Severus surveyed them with dismay. In the end, he settled beside a fellow known only as Old Jack. Old Jack was nearly as notorious as Severus himself -- silent and petulant, he had a habit of biting people who got close enough. No one knew exactly why Old Jack was here, but no one really seemed to want to know and that appeared to suit Old Jack just fine.

Keeping his chair a good distance away from Old Jack's, Severus picked up his porridge bowl and took a lethargic sip. If he didn't eat, it would get back around to Cuthrell and Severus would find himself bound to his bed, a needle attached firmly to his arm. And a nurse would be assigned to him, twenty-four hours a day, to make sure that needle stayed in his arm.

They hadn't been careful enough, in the beginning. The nurse left him once he'd fallen asleep. Severus had been faking, of course, and had the IV out of his arm and into his throat before anyone knew what was happening. He'd managed to puncture his windpipe but got no further than that as the nurse walked back in suddenly, having forgotten a chart.

And he never felt alone again.

It had initially bothered him, having that feeling of perpetually being watched. Took him right back to his days working as an undercover agent for the Order of the Phoenix -- right back into Voldemort's clutches. He'd had nightmares. They tied him down and forced Dreamless Sleep down his throat.

The nightmares eventually dissipated and Severus felt oddly drained. As if with them, the nightmares had taken the last vestiges of his feelings. The suicide attempts ceased as Severus genuinely ceased to care.

Perhaps that was part of Cuthrell's plan. Cow him into submission -- if he did not feel anything, he might not want to die either.

Severus didn't know any more. That absolute certainty -- that desire to end it all -- was no longer firm. His resolve was gone.

It was actually worse than the void that had settled on him as he watched that stupid little boy drag Voldemort's body through the Hogwarts Great Hall all those years ago. A void that widened with each additional Death Eater he managed to bring down.

He didn't want that life, he'd realized. He'd been reduced to nothing more than a puppet, following Albus' orders so blindly he couldn't find where Albus' will stopped and his own began.

A bell sounded, startling Severus out of his musings as he stirred his tea with a pinky finger. Eight o'clock, then.

Patients began shuffling out of the cafeteria, to their various common rooms and activities. Some of them to therapy appointments, doubtless. And maybe a few of them were going to visitation rooms. He did not know and he did not care.

There were a few activities that patients were encouraged to indulge in. A Muggle contraption that showed moving pictures was set up in a monitored room. Another held various 'safe' games. Muggle crayons and sheets of paper, a couple of carefully warded chess sets, things like that.

Severus himself shuffled to the common room closest to his room. Devoid of any sort of interesting stimuli, it was not a place that many other people visited. That was part of the reason Severus preferred it.

The rest of the reason was obvious as he painstakingly dragged a chair over to one of the large windows and sat down, staring out through the glass. So many of the rooms in the hospital lacked windows.

It was raining today, Severus saw. The rain made little tapping sounds as it hit the glass, following watery paths down the pane to puddle on the ledge. He put a hand to the glass and felt the warmth under his fingers.

Going to be a hot day, then.

He tried not to pay attention to the passage of time. Not knowing what the day was, what the month was, made it simpler to ignore the slow creeping of time, stretching the boring days into equally dull years.

But the staff disrupted his little mental game. He knew he'd passed five Christmases at Perkins -- the therapists thought it would be beneficial to play at celebrating the holiday. Last year, Cuthrell had been the one to dress up as Father Christmas, handing out trinkets and sweets in his stupid white beard and ludicrous stuffed belly. Five years.

Reaching out a single finger, Severus traced the descent of one raindrop as it slid down the glass. His second day out of the first bind they'd put him under, he'd tried to throw himself out of this very window, realizing with dismay that not only had it been warded Unbreakable, but a Cushioning Charm had been placed as well.

There wasn't a real pane of glass, a sharp corner, even a hard surface anywhere in this damned place. He knew -- he'd spent the better part of his first year looking.

Severus allowed himself to lose track of his surroundings as he watched the rain fall. If he thought hard enough, he could almost remember what it felt like to stand out in the rain. Water trickling under his collar, wet hair slapping his forehead and cheeks, bare toes squishing mud and grass together. The coolness of his skin in the muggy air. Even the electric feel of the hair on the back of his neck rising as lightning crackled in distant summers of many years ago.

But he couldn't recall the smell.

Rationally, he told himself that rain smelt like a blend of earth and green things. And he could remember that. A childhood memory -- laying in the grass in early spring, nose to the ground.

There was something else, though. Some indefinable thing that said rain -- this was what he could no longer grasp. The tenuous memory of rain was slowly but surely escaping him. Perhaps in ten more years, he would forget the feel.

He felt the nurse enter the room. A woman -- her heels clacked against the floor. Severus blinked but did not turn around.

"Severus," she said warmly, chirpily. He hated the sound of his name on these people's lips. Fully, cheerfully enunciated, Se-ver-us -- it made his hackles rise every time he heard it. "Severus, you have a visitor."

He did turn at this. Turned and silently stood, wishing he could disconcert her somehow with his behavior.

Walking quickly, Severus took the lead out of the room, not wanting to be led around like a child. "You've been popular lately," the nurse said, nonplussed as she matched his stride, walking by his side.

He said nothing.

"My, you've had, what? Five visits this month?" she continued in that voice dripping with false cheer. "I heard from Marcy that a very pretty young lady has been in to see you, Severus."

Keeping his eyes focused straight ahead, he stayed silent. But he could feel the grin on her face as she pointed to the visitation room door.

"Right in there, Severus," she said as he put his hand on the doorknob. "Enjoy your visit."

-- -- -- -- --

He didn't know whether or not Miss Granger had changed through the years. It would have been nice to be able to snarl at her, "You're the same ignorant little child from all those years ago," but he wasn't entirely sure. And if nothing else, Severus preferred to be honest.

What's more, he didn't know exactly what Miss Granger used to be, either. He had a dim recollection of buck teeth, frizzy hair, and an irritating tendency to regurgitate textbooks, but nothing further.

Her cronies, Potter and Weasley, stood firm in his memory. Potter, a sneer permanently attached to his face as he sat beside Albus at Order meetings. Passing around pictures of his brat as everyone else obediently cooed, those damnable knowing eyes watching Severus, always. Distrustful. And Weasley -- red hair an incongruous beacon as he led Aurors to their deaths at the hands of Voldemort's followers, time and time again. His weight on Severus' shoulders as he pulled him out of Rosier's hideout, the confusion on his face the moment unconsciousness took him.

But Granger ... no, she eluded him.

She'd gone away, he remembered with a start as he took the seat opposite hers in the dingy little room. Potter and Weasley went to Albus that day, trying to see if she'd told anyone where she went.

He suppressed a mental snort. As if she would have been in a position to speak so familiarly with Albus. Weasley worked with the Order in adulthood, Potter had an honorary seat due to his circumstance, but Granger was nothing more than a glorified childhood friend of theirs.

But she was the one sitting here with him now.

Severus permitted himself a moment to study her. Hair still rather unruly, decidedly shabby looking robes, and a look in her eyes that he could not immediately place. Her eyes narrowed suddenly at his scrutiny and he had it.

Innocence.

Miss Granger was looking at him innocently. There was no dissembling, no calculation in her gaze. No knowing.

Well, why would there be? he asked himself. She had not been there. She had not seen what everyone else had.

But her gaze disconcerted him. More than Potter's glares, more than Albus' patient understanding, Granger's innocent curiosity simultaneously frustrated and puzzled him.

He wanted her to go away.

"Well, Miss Granger," he said quietly, watching her blink. "Have you returned with some purpose in mind?"

"I --" she started.

He wasn't about to let her finish. "Convince me that my life really, truly is worth living, perhaps? That there are people who care whether or not I'm still exchanging oxygen with the environment? No, Miss Granger ... you can tell me nothing that I have not already heard before."

Was she actually glaring at him? "No, sir," she retorted in a rather chilly sort of tone. "My intention, actually, was to ask how you were." This was said in a warmer voice, but her eyes were still narrowed.

Stifling a laugh at her ludicrous statement, Severus decided to actually reply. "I am still, Miss Granger, quite mad. Pray, how are you?"

She accepted the rebuke silently -- apparently, she was aware of the foolishness of her remark as well. One of her eyelids trembled slightly.

"If you have nothing to say to me, Miss Granger, apart from enquiring after my health, I will bid you good day, then," he said, unwilling to allow this to continue. They had already had two silent exchanges -- he was not in the mood for another.

With a little frown, Granger actually opened her mouth to speak. "Does --" She stuttered briefly, clearly discomfited, and Severus permitted himself a small smile at her distress. "Does your Dr. Cuthrell not know you were a professor at Hogwarts?" she finally managed to get out.

Taken aback, Severus actually considered his reply rather carefully. "Not a question I was expecting," he said. "But I believe that Cuthrell is marginally aware of my former profession. Especially given that he was one of my students, many years ago. A Ravenclaw, if memory serves."

"Oh," she replied. "He just ... seemed rather surprised when I referred to you as 'Professor' when we spoke the other day."

His eyebrows rose as he considered what she'd just said.

"We spoke at length, I'm afraid," she admitted after a short pause. "He wanted me to ... erm ... well, bring information to him, I guess. I understand why you don't trust him."

"And you would be telling me this because ...?" he asked dryly.

Granger shrugged. "I have no reason not to tell you," she said. "And I suppose I felt as if you ought to be aware of the treatment you are receiving. Besides, I wonder why he jumped on the fact that I called you 'Professor.' Especially since he was at Hogwarts as well."

"Probably because I am not in the habit of receiving visitors who address me in such a fashion," Severus replied. "Former students of mine, in general, would not seek me out under most circumstances. You are, Miss Granger, possibly somewhat of a novelty to him." He smirked as her eyes widened -- she obviously grasped the subtle insult in his response.

"I find that hard to believe," she said, clearly not willing to rise to the bait. "After all, you spent at least twenty years at Hogwarts -- Britain must be practically overrun with your former students."

"Twenty-five," he corrected rather snappishly. "And given the subject at hand, I find myself returning to an old question. Why, indeed, are you here, Miss Granger, novelty among lunatics?"

Again, her face shuttered. "I told you before," she said sharply. "I just felt like I needed to come."

"Need," he repeated thoughtfully. "What a curious word, need. We use it far too often, really. We need to breathe, we need to eat. Many children need things such as broomsticks, toys, candy. People need trinkets from loved ones, symbolizing, quantifying affection. No, Miss Granger, I don't think that you needed to come."

"Why do you insist that I put it into words?" she asked, frustration showing.

Severus let out a long sigh, steepling his fingers under his chin -- a gesture that he knew meant nothing to Granger. "Because, Miss Granger, words are all that's left to me."

She did not seem to know what to do with her hands. They went from her lap to the tabletop and then to her hair, twisting a stray curl as she appeared to think. "I'm not ... that is to say ..."

"Exactly, Miss Granger," he said, interrupting her stammering with something akin to mercy. "You have no reason to be here. And, with that in mind, I suggest that you leave."

Her gaze was suddenly hard, piercing. "If words are so important to you, Snape, then tell me why you chose to speak with me, of all people. According to your Cuthrell, you haven't spoken to anyone lately."

He glared. Glared at Granger's face, glared at the table, glared at his own fingernails, peeking over the edges of his fingertips. "I do not have to justify my actions to you."

"Well, then." Her face was set.

"I see we have reached an impasse," he said, idly scratching the back of his head.

Granger winced -- he had no idea as to why. "In what way?" she asked, recovering rather well.

With a shrug, he met her gaze forthrightly. "We have nothing left to talk about."

She actually smiled at that. "Have you, by any chance, read Plato, Professor Snape?"

To his credit, he masked his surprise and managed to keep his jaw in place. "Are you suggesting, Miss Granger, that we discuss the Greeks?"

"What, you have other pressing social engagements?" she asked innocently. He did not know how she maintained a straight face.

He ignored her. "Some of his Dialogues are better than others."

"And the Republic?"

"A sufficient analogy for ethical means, but not an entirely convincing political treatise. If I recall correctly, however, Plato did not intend it as such. I also remember reading it wondering when the old fool would get to the blasted point," he said thoughtfully. "I am sure, Miss Granger, that you have nothing but wonderful things to say about it, however."

She shrugged minutely. "I was always rather uncomfortable with the initial set-up of his ideal city, to tell the truth. The myth of metals struck me as so much brainwashing. Imagine, telling a child that he was bronze, just because he didn't happen to be as smart as the one next door.** But you are correct, I suppose. Plato was simply extending a metaphor ..."

To Severus' amazement, they actually managed to fill a decent period of time talking about Plato's Republic. Granger's view of human nature turned out to be far less sugar-coated than he'd originally anticipated. She actually quoted The Prince at one point, excusing herself with a rather wry twist of the wrist. "It is ironic, of course, that Machiavelli himself was not Machiavellian. A true Republican, really. His histories are far less pretentious than Bruni's.** I'm fairly certain he wound up in exile somewhere."

"Thus completing the irony," he commented dryly. "Are you quite finished with the history lesson?"

She blushed.

"I think, Miss Granger, that you somehow believe that you are humoring me," he continued. "But I am certain that I am humoring you."

Granger nodded abruptly, apparently not willing to belabor the point, and stood, chair scraping loudly in the silence. "I will say goodbye, then, Professor Snape."

"I am no professor, Miss Granger," he reminded her, nodding in kind.

And she was gone, leaving Severus to contemplate the closed door quietly, wondering what she was about. For that matter, he wondered what he was about.

-- -- -- -- --