Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Chapter Thirty-Three

While his colleagues were busy forming plans for his absence and burying their worry beneath the warmth of barrel-aged brandy, Snape sat alone in his chambers at looked at everything without seeing any of it. His hands bunched in his lap, cold ivory, and he watched them tremble with suppressed rage. He longed for a nip of Ogden's Old Firewhiskey, but he was frozen on the austere sofa, bolted there by his fury.

The Headmaster had stripped him, Albus had stripped him of the title he had earned every minute of his teaching life, plucked it from his collar just as neatly as you please. Wouldn't Minerva be pleased? Wouldn't they all be pleased? The miserable, nasty git, the tyrannical bastard with impossible standards, the persecutor of innocent, bleating first-years and Gryffindors, had been laid low at last, toppled by the malice he had so relished wielding against them.

No doubt the overjoyed pupils were cavorting in the corridors and Common Rooms, stuffing themselves with Canary Creams and chocolate frogs, speculating about their future in Potions, and dreaming of some weak-kneed fop who would allow them to do whatever they pleased. Neville Longbottom, he supposed, was probably having the first erotic experience of his useless life fantasizing about newfound freedom beyond the reach of his lash.

Damn the lot of them, the Headmaster included. Especially the Headmaster. His lip curled in a reflexive snarl as he remembered the soft brush of fingertips against the pressed and starched collar of his robes, and his own jittering fingers unfurled and came up to touch the place where the unassailable mark of his authority had rested for the last seventeen years. His jaw creaked when searching fingertips found only two tiny pinpricks where the pin's dainty fastener had pierced fabric as though it were penitent flesh.

Trust in me, Severus. Words that once held salvation now mocked him.

He had been a fool to believe, to even dare hope that the Headmaster, unlike so many others, would keep his word. He should have known better, but he had been so desperate for an ally that he had ignored the warning cry inside his head. Anything, he had told himself with the rabid conviction of the drowning, would be better than where he was, where he had been. So he had traded one master for another.

Trust in me, Severus. Have faith in the Light.

That was what the Headmaster had told him all those years ago as he had stood before him in blood-sodden robes and reeking of death. Such a balm those words had been to him then, but he found no comfort in them now. In fact, they reminded him of what Voldemort had told him the night he was initiated. He closed his eyes and kneaded his forehead with fisted hands, and the soft, seductive voice of Voldemort grazed his ears with cold fingers.

Trust in me, young Severus, and all that you wish shall be yours. No doubt, no hesitation, just simple, erotic surety.

And Merlin help him, Lord Voldemort had been right at first. All that had been denied the dour, greasy boy whom everyone despised in equal measure was suddenly within his reach. What he wanted, he took, and if anyone had the temerity to protest, they were silenced. The haughty, jeering girls that had spurned his awkward advances paid for their cheek. What they would not give him willingly, he had taken with bloody, brutal force, and when he was done, when he could not stand to look at their red, tear-stained, swollen faces, when the sight of the bruises rising on their cheeks, throat, and thighs from his merciless hands sickened him and the sound of their terrified wails infuriated him beyond reason, he had killed them with two simple words. All his problems cleansed in a flash of emerald green.

His stomach churned at the grotesque recollections, and his mouth twisted upwards in a grim rictus that bore little resemblance to a smile. Funny that he was so revolted by his actions seventeen years too late. At the time, hands smeared with blood and buried to the hips between the legs of a screaming girl, he had given them no thought whatsoever. He had simply reacted, surrendered to the fathomless rage that infected his mind with an unquenchable need for vengeance and the desire to punish them and make them as weak as he had once been. Their piteous pleas for mercy were throttled by the memory of their leering, laughing rejection, and when their lifeless, ravaged bodies had lain sprawled at his feet, he had been able to feel only a smug, dizzy satisfaction.

If he were in the mood for rationalization, he could have reassured himself that such bilious hatred had been a result of Voldemort's indoctrination, but he knew it was not so. The anger had always been there, lurking beneath his skin and in his heart. Voldemort had merely given him the excuse to grant it free rein. For so long, he had bottled it up, pushed it down, ashamed, and terrified at its potency. He had often wondered if he was losing his mind. Then Voldemort and the Death Eaters, and at long last, he had been in the right. He had been the righteous crusader. Everything he had ever thought had been true. They did deserve to suffer, and so he had punished them.

The man he had become recognized the grotesquerie in such thinking, the utter perversity of it, but the days of his youth had not allowed for honest reflection, and the down-trodden, furious child that had responded so eagerly to the Dark Lord's lure had seen only the opportunity to avenge himself with impunity. What wronged child would not have seized it?

There is no excuse for what you have done.

He snorted. He had no illusions about that. There would be no salvation for him, no reprieve from the fires he had stoked with every pernicious, sadistic wave of his wand. There was only one end for him, and he deserved it. Part of him longed for it. He wanted to face his judgment and have done with it.

Perhaps the wait is part of your penance. Perhaps this is your hell, and the Fates will not permit you to taste the sweet freedom of death until you have rendered every ounce of flesh and every drop of blood that your atrocities demand.

If that were so, he would never die. He would roam the earth forever, and when his body collapsed and crumbled to bones and tainted dust, his spirit would remain tethered here, wandering the paths he had so often trod in life in the futile search for absolution. Should the Dementor win his soul, his body would wither in the dank, rotten bowels of Azkaban, but it would never die. His twisted heart would beat on and on, beat even as his blood curdled in his veins, and as the years turned to decades and then into centuries, Mediwizards would come to marvel at him, the Body That Would Not Die.

If you are so eager to die, then why do you cling so tightly to the tattered threads of your life? Why no go without a struggle?

Because it is my life. Mine. Slytherins do not easily cede that which is theirs, and no man lays down his life without fighting for it. Even the most repulsive martyr will not give his life without a greater cause to give it meaning. That feckless twit Fudge has no right to it, and I cannot let him take it until my contrition is done.

That still doesn't explain why you are so angry with Dumbledore.

His lip curled. That was simple. Dumbledore had given him hope. When those long, deft fingers had pinned the Slytherin serpent onto the collar of his robes and smiled, his heart, long still inside his cold chest, had begun to beat again. He had been lifted from the dirt and the mire into a position of power, of respectability. For the first time in his life, someone had entrusted him with true power. The idea that there might one day be peace for him had taken root in the stony, pragmatic soil of his heart, and for seventeen years, he had nurtured it with his blood, sweat, and tortured screams.

Now that fragile bloom was crushed, wrested from him by the very hands that had planted it. That the Headmaster's eyes had been filled with anguish as he had done so made little difference. All that mattered was the knowledge that the Headmaster had taken from him the only thing he had ever earned by his own merit. His chance for atonement was gone. The protection he had been promised on the night the scales had fallen from his bulging eyes was nowhere to be found.

You should have seen that coming.

He should have, at that. He had seen the Headmaster's "fairness" at work before. Fifteen and standing in the Headmaster's office with furious tears drying on his cheeks, he had watched the man he would come to love dismiss the travesty his beloved Gryffindor Golden Children had wrought on him for no other reason than they could. What would have cost him a month's detention and a letter to his parents had cost Potter and his minions a night's detention with McGonagall. Lupin had even been allowed to retain his Prefect's badge. He, Severus, had received neither consolation nor justice for his humiliation.

He had known then that the Headmaster's justice was the justice of expediency, of that which served him best, but he had forgotten that along the way, and when the poisonous thought had reared its head from time to time as he shivered in the infirmary, he pushed it aside. After all, the Headmaster was always there when he regained his senses, solemn blue eyes peering solicitously over the rims of his half-moon spectacles. He had taken it as a sign of his faith and professed affection. Now he wasn't sure.

Likely praying I'll not die before he can prise the latest bits of information from my bloody, cracked lips, he thought bitterly.

He knew he was being irrational and unjust, but, trapped like a beast in the very rooms that had been his haven, he could not care. He suspected that were he and Potter's positions reversed, the good Headmaster would have risked treason to secure Harry the right to roam the castle as he wished. He would be flanked be a cadre of not-so-inconspicuous Aurors, but his movements would still be his own, and he would be allowed to bear witness to his defamation and fatal ruin, not shut up in his rooms like the oblivious fatted calf.

Hatred for the boy welled inside his chest, and he growled behind clenched teeth. Stupid, wretched anathema, he was. The moment the little prat had set foot upon the ancient stone floors, his life had ceased to be his own. Every waking moment was spent fretting over what new catastrophe the boy's ineradicable brashness and holy, prophesied name would bring down upon their heads. Had he not had the galling indecency to keel over and throw Hogwarts into chaos, the Headmaster had ordered him to begin tutoring the ungrateful wretch in Occlumency.

If Potter recovered and managed to survive the coming war against Voldemort, he, Snape, would gladly wring his victorious neck. It wasn't as if he would be vital to the cause-there would no longer be one. The sanctified brat had destroyed everything, and he would never forgive him for it. James Potter had been dead and moldering in his tomb for fourteen years, and not a day passed when he did not curse his name. It would be no different with the son.

His thoughts turned to the Slytherins. He had never been deeply involved with the day-to-day affairs of the House or its secret, petty politics, though he was well aware of their unspoken hierarchy. Draco Malfoy was their student leader; it was a position held by the Malfoys since the House's founding, and Draco's appalling lack of common sense would not change that one whit. It would fall to him to decide what action the House would take.

Which meant, in all likelihood, that there would be no action from that quarter aside from petulant missives to his father. Draco would never dirty his hands if it could be helped, and truthfully, he had little to gain and much to lose by raising a row on his behalf. His name had never been of much value, even in Death Eater circles, and with the world soon to link it to the attempted murder to its beloved princeling hero, it would be lower than the worthless soil beneath an indigent's feet. Even Draco would see the wisdom in staying out of the fray.

What about Lucius?

He rose from the couch with a sardonic snort and stalked into the kitchen. If Draco's help was doubtful, then Lucius' discreet absence was a certainty. His welcome with the Death Eaters was waning, and as Voldemort's premier toady and second-in-command, Lucius would be the first to distance himself. In fact, when the time came, he would probably be the one to assassinate him. If he recalled correctly, Malfoy's favored weapon was poison.

In spite of the circumstances, he smirked. That would never work, he was afraid. His long, crooked Potions Master's nose would alert him to any toxins in his food or drink, and in any case, he would never be so foolhardy as to accept either from his former compatriot. Thus, the means of his death, if not the frozen, avaricious lips of a Dementor was a silver dagger embossed with the Malfoy crest on blade and hilt. It was a sleek, coldly beautiful weapon he had seen used times beyond reckoning, and he had often marveled at its craftsmanship as its owner slid it into the breastbone of a screaming wizard.

For all his fastidious care in the public eye-the perfectly coiffed hair, the magnificent robes, the cultured, clipped, mellifluous voice-Lucius was a sadistic killer. He reveled in the sundering of spirit from the flesh that housed it. A classically beautiful man as he strolled imperiously through the streets, he was the seraphim that bore his name when in the orgasmic throes of a kill. The shimmering corona of platinum-blond hair threw sparks when the markless death flew from his upraised wand, and he shuddered in wordless ecstasy when a Pureblood traitor's life ebbed over his hands. Should he fall by Lucius' unwavering hand, he would die with the knowledge that, for the first time in his life, he had given someone genuine pleasure.

No Lucius, no Draco, and no Headmaster. Who remained to stand for him? He opened the cupboard and pulled out a teacup.

There's Stanhope.

He groaned. If a prying cripple with the singular ability to drive him to frothing distraction was his only hope, he was doomed. She possessed neither the physical stamina nor the vicious cunning to take on a legion of Ministry officials. She might have an inkling that a miscarriage of justice was afoot, but she had no powerful father to force the hands of the powers that be, and no deep pockets with which to sway them. She was an outsider, a misshapen, perpetually bedraggled interloper with no established credibility and an unsettling countenance reminiscent of Dark seers and ill-bred hags. She could proclaim his innocence from the rooftops in the clarion voice of inevitable truth, and no one would pay her any mind.

Even if she did manage to convince someone that she wasn't a raving loon who saw conspiracies beneath every bed and around every corner, she had no concrete evidence with which to prove her assertions. Hallucinatory visions and waking fugues were lent scant credence even when experienced by affirmed and universally acclaimed seers, and Miss Stanhope was neither. They would laugh in her face.

To be perfectly blunt, unless the true culprit presented himself to Fudge and sang, "Avada Kedavra Alleluia," he would not see thirty-eight. He filled a kettle with water, set it on the burner, and prodded it with the tip of his wand to ignite a flame. He could have turned on the burner by hand, he supposed, but he suspected that his days of being permitted to use magic were drawing to a close, and he wanted to exercise the dying right before it was snatched from him, feel the heady, crisp surge of it in his veins.

They would be coming tonight. The Aurors and Fudge would barge in and trample everything beneath their thoughtless, vindictive feet and leave his well-ordered world in ruins. They would ransack his drawers and confiscate his papers, and they would expect him to thank them for it. A simmering ball of rage and dim dread settled in the pit of his stomach. He prized his privacy and long-standing anonymity, and the thought of their entitled, bureaucratic hands pawing through the sparse treasury of his earthly possessions made bile rise in his throat.

It would be ridiculous of him to rail that they had no right to do such a thing. He knew very well that they did, and even if they hadn't, they would have invented the right on the spot. That was the nature of the governmental beast-to find the means to acquire that which did not belong to it under the guise of absolute moral rectitude. If the means did not exist, then they spun it from the soil and the air and told the disbelieving public that it had been there all the while, unseen until brought to light by their wise and humble hands.

He snorted. No wonder Gryffindors make such successful politicians. Not much of a leap.

The kettle intruded upon his morose musings with a petulant wail, and he extinguished the flame beneath it with an absent flick of the wrist and poured its steaming contents into the waiting teacup. He was just reaching for the teaspoon when the door to his chambers crashed open, and Fudge strode into the parlor, flanked by a dozen scrupulously blank Aurors.

"Severus Snape, by order of the Ministry of Magic, your premises will now be searched. Refusal to cooperate will result in immediate removal to Azkaban. Do you understand?" Fudge trumpeted, and before he could reply, the Aurors swung into action.

"Expelliarmus!" snarled Dawlish, and Snape's wand flew from his hand with traitorous ease.

"Wouldn't want you to get ideas, now, would we?" purred Fudge, and though he wore an expression of bland composure, his eyes danced with malevolent glee.

You bastard, Snape thought savagely, but he remained silent, numberless curses imprisoned behind his clenched teeth.

It grew harder to remain mute as he watched the Aurors systematically destroy all that he owned. They tore his book collection to pieces, ripped the yellowing pages from their leather bindings and let them flutter to the floor, felled albatrosses. They overturned the furniture and pulled the linens from his bed. They wrenched the rugs from the floor and gouged ruthless holes in the stone beneath searching for hollowed alcoves in the floor.

The blood pulsed in his temples, and his hands fisted behind his back, quivering. They were so calm about it all, so nonchalant. One Auror was laughing as he wrenched the drawers from his desk and spilled their secrets onto the floor. Another was sniggering to a comrade about the state of his utilitarian underclothes and holding up a particularly tatty pair for the rest of them to see. Fudge laughed heartily and shot him a gloating, toothy leer.

Cold hatred settled over his bones like rheumatic fever, and he blinked to clear his eyes of a sudden red haze. He despised them all. He longed to see them writhing at his feet, bathed in the warm red glow of Cruciatus, longed to feel the jolt of absolute power in his temples and in his groin. He wanted them to scream and weep and gibber as he had done so often in the name of protecting useless Potter and making sure that their disorganized, tottering kingdom did not collapse. He wanted to hear them howl that their bones were being turned to wax inside their skin, to smell the sickly-sweet stench of their feces in his nostrils like aphrodisiacal incense.

Steady, steady. Lose your head, and the Headmaster's sacrifice of a life debt will be for nothing.

For once, the thought of the Headmaster did nothing to quell his anger. In fact, it increased it. If it weren't for him, there would be no reason to restrain himself. But the dotty, unrepentant Gryffindor had bound him by something stronger than honor, stronger than oath. Loath as he was to admit it, he still loved him, and he would not betray that love for the satisfaction throttling an Auror might bring.

Things might not have turned out as they did had not a particularly zealous Auror gone into his kitchen, opened his cupboards, and begun tossing his china to the floor, where it shattered with a hellish, merry tinkle. He was humming as he did so.

Sound vanished from his world, and the scope of his vision narrowed to the jagged shards of tea rose china strewn across the floor like delicate shrapnel. It had been his mother's china, a gift from her mother on her wedding day, and it was the only thing for which she had ever had the temerity to fight his father. In one of his drunken stupors, his father had decided it would be great sport to break it, and his mother, defying her own terror, had tried to stop him.

She had paid for her audacity with curses and sharp, cracking blows to the face, and later, during the worst of it, with heavy, meaty fists to the stomach. Well could he remember that night. He still dreamed of it, thrashed in the clutches of its lingering ghost when night fell and the nightmares claimed him. Eight years old and huddled in the corner with tears and snot streaming down his face, flinching with every curse and blow, every sobbing plea from his weeping mother. She had never stopped begging for that china, even after a solid boot from his enraged father had sent her sprawling across the dining room floor. And when his father had tired of the game and staggered from the room in search of more Firewhiskey, she had huddled over the broken pieces as though they were her shattered children.

He had saved the rest. For her. Long after he was sure his parents were soundly asleep, he had crept down the carpeted staircase to the dining room and retrieved what remained of the china from its place in the cabinet. When the last of it was cradled precariously in his trembling arms, he had slipped noiselessly into the immaculate tea garden and buried it, clawing up the dirt until his hands were scraped and raw and filthy, soil caked beneath the crescents of his fingers like ill-concealed sin.

One by one, he had pressed the teacups and the saucers and the teapot into the damp hole, muttering imprecations against his father, a holy liturgy against the devil. They gleamed like polished bone in the moonlight, and he had wept as he worked, the memory of his mother hunched and weeping more potent than the knotted lash. When he had finished, he had returned to his room and scrubbed his wounded, chapped hands until they bled.

When his mother noticed the absence of her prized heirloom, she had wept silently, but she had never mentioned them again, and though he had longed to tell her what had become of them, he hadn't dared, for fear that his father would unearth them and break them for spite. She had gone to her early grave believing that his father had destroyed them as punishment for some imagined slight, and they had remained in their subterranean bower until his father died. His sire's cooling corpse had not yet settled in its eternal cocoon when he had gone to the tea garden and unearthed them as he had buried them, with his bare hands. He had brought them back to Hogwarts nestled in his arms and protected by a Cushioning Charm, and they had stayed in his kitchen cupboards, undisturbed by any hands save his own. Until now.

He did not know why he moved. There was nothing he could have done. His wand was clutched in Cornelius Fudge's pudgy hand, and even if had been in possession of it, the Aurors would have cut him down before he could raise it, but he had wanted to make him stop, to protect what he could of his mother's china. He hadn't torn his eight-year old hands to ribbons just to see it reduced to powder by a snot-nosed Auror whom he had probably taught not long ago.

In any case, it gave Fudge the excuse he had, no doubt, been looking for. With a sweeping flourish, the Minister turned his own wand against him.

"Petrificus Totalus!" he crowed.

Snape felt his body stiffen in mid-step, his joints and muscles suddenly lifeless as stone. He toppled backward with a jarring thump and found himself gazing unblinkingly at his shadowy ceiling. A moment later, Fudge's smug visage obscured his vision like a malignant eclipse. He would have snarled were he able, but the living rigor mortis of the Body Bind did not allow it. Nor could he close his eyes to shut out the repugnant sight.

"My, my," clucked Fudge, shaking his head dolefully, "looks as though I was right to remove your wand. You have quite a temper. But then, I know all about that, don't I?" He gave a humorless chuckle. "Oh, indeed. But Dumbledore tidied that up. What are a few unspeakable atrocities when he would make such a useful spy.?" He reached down and gave him a condescending pat on the cheek. Then he looked to his subordinates. "Get him up."

Twin blue blurs floated on the hazy periphery of his vision, and then he was seized beneath the armpits and dragged to his feet. Fudge surveyed him with a contemptuous sneer. "Not so lordly now, are you?" he said quietly.

Vocal cords seized by the iron grip of the spell, he could give no reply. He could not even quiver with outrage. The only outlet left to him was his gaze, and into it he poured his rage and hatred and contempt, willing it to convey what his paralyzed tongue could not. His eyeballs burned with the effort, and he wished with all his heart that looks could kill, that the blistering heat from his furious stare would reduce the porcine, preening man before him to so much smoldering ash.

Fudge smirked as if he sensed the thought. "Something the matter?" he asked, disingenuous concern smeared across his face like cheap greasepaint. "Oh, how silly of me. You can't answer." He raised his own wand this time. "Finite incantatem."

Snape's knees buckled, and he sagged gracelessly between his captors before he recovered himself. Someone behind him sniggered, and he vowed that when the opportunity presented itself, he would discover their identity and settle the matter. The thought gave him vicious satisfaction. He blinked to moisten his tortured eyes and watched Fudge circle him, a bloated buzzard surveying a particularly succulent acquisition.

"Something the matter?" Fudge repeated.

"He dropped my mother's china," he hissed.

Fudge froze, thunderstruck. "Your mother's china?" he sputtered.

"Yes," Snape answered through gritted teeth. His head ached from the surge of blood in his temples, and his jaw gave an ominous creak.

Fudge threw back his head and laughed, a harsh, ragged bark in the otherwise perfect stillness. Then he drew closer, until his hot, stale breath brushed Snape's cheek, an invisible and maddening miasma. Snape's burning skin recoiled from the contact.

"You seem to be under the unfortunate illusion that you have rights," Fudge purred, "or that I would even bother to recognize them if you did. Dumbledore has coddled you for far too long. I'm afraid you need to be put in your place." He looked to the Auror who had dropped the teacup. "Destroy them all."

Snape uttered an inarticulate oath and lunged forward, but the Aurors at his side held fast, and Fudge pressed his wand tip against his throat.

"Now, Severus, I thought we had learned our lesson, but it seems you are most intractable. No matter. I'll gladly teach you another...harsher one." Fudge tapped his wand into the meaty palm of his hand.

Despite his dire circumstances, Snape rolled his eyes, unimpressed by the Minister's menacing theatrics. "I believe I am already familiar with the lessons you have in mind," he snarled.

Fudge tapped his chin, as though pondering this. "Indeed, indeed. And if I am not mistaken, the aftereffects of those lessons are most unpleasant. I'm sure you wouldn't want these young Aurors to see you covered in your own filth. Affront to your cosseted, ludicrous honor and all that."

Snape growled. He would sacrifice his honor for those teacups, his last tenuous link to a mother he had lost too soon and disappointed too often, but the realist in him knew it would be a fruitless endeavor. There were too many of them, and not one of them gave a whit for the dubious rights of a Death Eater turncoat. Fudge would make good on his threat; the Aurors would turn a blind eye. He would writhe and scream beneath the Ministerial wand, and the china would still implode upon the unforgiving floor.

In the end, he watched the grinning Auror sweep his mother's china to the floor piece by priceless piece. He sang while he did it. As each one exploded in a fullisade of scattershot porcelain, he remembered his mother's sad, pale form hunched protectively over the only bit of finery that had ever been all her own, watery mucus and blood commingled and dribbling down her face, and in his heart, the fragile, lofty tenets of hope and ultimate justice fostered so fervently by the Headmaster withered, throttled by an impotent, all-consuming despair and cancerous hatred.

Have faith in the Light, Severus, came the voice of the Headmaster, but it was distant, and tired, and he could find no conviction in it.

"Well now," Fudge said as he went to inspect the carnage in the kitchen, "have we learned our lesson?" He crouched over the glittering white shards and sifted through them with his forefinger. He pinched some of the dust between his thumb and forefinger and looked up. "Well done. Thorough job." He stood up with a muffled groan.

"Thank you, Minister Fudge," said the Auror, and he snapped his heels together in a smart salute.

Fudge inclined his head in gracious acknowledgment, grinding the soles of his gleaming boots into the pulverized remnants of his mother's china. Then he strode to Snape once more, beady eyes brimming with sadistic triumph.

"Well?" he prodded. "Have you?"

Snape considered him for a very long time, the sound of his own heartbeat thunderous in his ears. "At least," he said at last, the words sweet and seductive on his tongue, "Voldemort is honest about being a soulless bastard."

The reaction was immediate. Several Aurors grunted as though something had knocked the wind out of them. Still others, including the pair clutching his forearms, flinched and swayed on their feet. The Auror that had so glibly desecrated his mother's meager legacy turned a satisfying shade of green and closed his eyes, as if to ward off a sudden attack of vertigo.

Fudge, choleric with rage, turned a heretofore unobserved shade of plum, and before anyone realized what was happening, he slapped Snape across the face with a trembling hand.

"I am nothing like...like him," he hissed, his eyes narrowed to agonized, reptilian slits. "Dumbledore has protected you for too long, but not anymore. Sooner or later, he'll make a mistake, and when he does, I'll have his job, and I promise you, you'll be in Azkaban with the rest of the filth. And before I give you over to the Dementors, I'll make certain you suffer. I'll do it myself." He grimaced in a mad parody of a smile.

Then, as though he realized how he must look, he sighed and smoothed his robes with long, exaggerated strokes. "Now," he said calmly, "strip him."

They handled his robes with the same disdain they had shown his other belongings. They were jerked from his body with cold efficiency, and he distinctly heard a seam give way with a mournful purr. His linen shirt was next, and then rude hands pawed at his trousers in a perverse facsimile of a lover's caress.

Not that you'd know anything about that. All your experience has either been taken by force or paid for by the hour.

He stiffened. Now was not the time to ponder the abysmal state of his conjugal affairs. The chill dungeon air stung his skin, made it ripple in knots of hard gooseflesh, and his exposed genitals contracted in an attempt to conserve precious heat, a fact not lost upon a gloating Fudge.

"So much for the great Slytherin myth," he jeered, and several of his subordinates sniggered.

"Minister. I would have thought seeing Lucius Malfoy without his trousers would have answered that question for you years ago," he muttered blandly, but he was nearly blind with humiliation and anger.

In truth, he had never seen Lucius in a state of undress, and he doubted Fudge had, either. In fact, if Narcissa's drunken, disjointed ramblings were to be believed, Lucius was rather blessed, but that was neither here nor there. All that mattered was striking out at the infuriatingly imperious Fudge, and if the renewed caul of apoplexy spreading over his face was any indication, he had achieved his end.

"Enjoy your insipid cheek while you can," Fudge snarled, his voice hoarse with rage. "Brandt," he said, speaking to someone Snape could not see, "full cavity search."

"Yes, sir." There was the rustle of shifting fabric, and Snape knew the man was searching for his wand.

"No," Fudge snapped. "No wand. Do it manually."

There was an uneasy silence at this proclamation, and then, "But, sir, the wand is quicker and more accurate, and besides, I have no gloves." Timid, appalled.

Not so enthralling when it's your hands that get sullied, is it? he thought savagely. Besides, your esteemed Minister doesn't give a damn about expediency or accuracy. He never did.

"I don't give a damn," Fudge roared. "Just do as you're bloody well told. I don't pay you to think."

"Yes, sir," whispered the Auror, though he sounded revolted.

Snape uttered not a sound throughout the whole ordeal. He stood rigid as a tent pole and bit the inside of his cheek until the bitter, coppery taste of his own blood filled his mouth, but he did not flinch. He would not give them the satisfaction. He would go to his death without a word before he would let them see his weakness. And with every beat of his heart, his hatred blossomed into a dark and deadly flower.

When the Auror was finished, he withdrew and pronounced, in a weak and sickened mutter, that there was nothing to be found. Then Snape heard him reach for his wand and whisper, "Scourgify!" as though it were a prayer for the dying. Under other circumstances, he would have found the man's desperation amusing, but now he was too tired and lost to feel anything at all. He just wanted them to go and leave him to pick up the shattered remains of his violated dignity.

"Well," said Fudge briskly, vague disappointment stamped on his florid face, "I think we'll withdraw for now, but we reserve the right to enter the premises at any time and seize whatever we see fit. Refusal to cooperate, will, of course, result in immediate transfer to Azkaban." He straightened his robes again and continued. "In the meantime, your wand is confiscated, and any magic will constitute a violation of your provisional liberty here at Hogwarts."

Provisional liberty. The phrase made his stomach churn.

Fudge strutted out, flanked by his gaggle of sycophantic Aurors, some of whom clutched sheaves pf parchment to peruse in search of subversive rhetoric against the Fudge regime or a full confession to the attempted murder of Potter. What they would find was execrable, meandering essays on the proper preparation of Pepper-Up Potion and lists of ingredients he needed to order from the apothecary in Hogsmeade. More power to them.

When the last of them had filed out, he stood and stared at what was left of his home. Everything was in ruins. His book collection had been ravaged, his furniture broken and overturned, his floor gouged and cratered, and without his wand, he could repair none of it. A debilitating sense of ennui flooded over him, and he longed to sink to the floor, wrap his frozen arms around his strengthless knees and drift into a numb stupor, but he forced himself to shamble to his torn robes and pick them up. His shaking fingers slipped through a gaping rend in the fabric.

He put them on without thinking, his bony shoulder protruding from the hole, and shuffled to the mound of broken china. All grace had left him, leeched from his suddenly brittle bones by the memory of Fudge's smirking face, and when he squatted over the jagged pieces, he flopped like a marionette whose strings had been severed.

He picked them up and cradled them in his hands, numb, unwieldy fingers trying in vain to put them together again. He growled in frustration. Why couldn't he fix it? Why couldn't he make it right?

"Damn you, Potter," he spat in a voice he did not recognize, a voice clogged with denied grief. "Damn you!"

"Professor," said a deep, gentle voice from behind him. Kingsley.

"Get out!" he snarled. Get out! I don't want your Gryffindor pity." His hands snapped closed around the shards, and blood trickled from his palms.

He knew Kingsley was still there. He could feel the insistent press of his presence against his back. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the throbbing sting of his lacerated hands.

"I was in Ravenclaw, Professor." A sigh, and then the soft snick of the door being closed.

He was alone again. When he was sure his legs would support him, he stood and went to sit on the sofa, where he clutched his mother's china and looked at nothing. He stayed that way for a very long time.