Innocence

Though your sin be red as scarlet...

The cold, rank smell of a stone basement dungeon filled Severus Snape’s nose, and he surveyed the dark, damp scene before him. A young Muggle girl was bound to a chair in the middle of the room, encircled by billowing black-cloaked figures, skulking in the shadows. Flickering torches tossed ever-changing light upon the girl’s frightened face from above. Her face was dirty, her clothes were wrinkled and torn. There was no blood on her, but Voldemort had always preferred wizarding forms of torture to anything that would cut or draw blood.

Slowly, the Deatheaters circled the girl, moving ever closer. She quivered in fear, but was otherwise quiet. Her silence did not last for long. A familiar, nasal voice echoed harshly in the room. “Crucio.”

The quivering became shaking, and the room was filled with the girl’s screams. Snape cut the ropes that bound her to the chair, and she fell out of it, her ceaseless shrieking filling his ears as she rolled on the ground in agony, slowly going mad...

.

Snape woke up in his bed in the hotel in the mountains, sweat on his forehead. He breathed out slowly, and sat up. There were some things, he knew, that could not be forgiven. Ever. He closed his eyes in agony, feeling slightly sick. That day when he had helped to torture and eventually kill the Muggle girl... why had he remembered that day? It was not unique. It was not special. There had been many days like it before then, and many more before the war was over.

The things he had been forced to do to give information to the Order were beyond unspeakable. His sins were uncountable, and that day, surely, was not the worst of them by far.

But that day had come to him, not any other. He got down off his bed and sat on the floor, concentrating. Dreams, even nightmares, flashes from his past, had kernels of reality in them. What had brought this one on?

Slowly, painfully, he went over every detail of the dream. The faces of the Deatheaters and their black robes. The feel and look of the stone that covered the walls of the room. The sound of the Dark Lord’s voice. The chair and rope that had confined their Muggle victim. And, finally, he turned his thoughts over to the girl herself.

She had not been an unusual Muggle. She was wearing a plaid skirt and collared shirt, all of it wrinkled, and the hem torn. Her grey eyes had been filled with the fear that was expected of anyone brought into the presence of the Dark Lord. Her red-brown hair had trembled as the billowing black silhouettes had drawn closer, her freckled face filled with shock, fear, and worry.

Perhaps it was the clarity which the dream had cast Snape’s victim that set her apart. After so many days exactly like the last, being a Deatheater had become routine, the killings and victims all melting into the next, indistinguishable from each other. Severus remembered the girl in the dream. She had died during the rise of the war, like so many others, but why was she called up to his mind tonight? And why not some other helpless person dead at his hand instead?

Something was missing. The plaid skirt, the freckles, the auburn hair...

“Merlin,” gasped Snape quietly as all the pieces clicked into place. Quietly, as if noise would alert the world to his discovery, he crept to his bag, still unpacked by the side of his bed, and drew out a bottle of the dreamless sleep draft he had brought with him. Severus stared at it a moment, then uncorked it and downed the entire thing. There would be no more nightmares tonight.