Where Loyalties Lie

The voice was cold, raspy but clear in the darkness. Not another sound was heard: no night birds, no crickets, no rustling of cloaks or the breathing of the other fifteen figures circling one lone figure. Their masks gleamed silvery-white in the half moonlight, giving all of them an impression of black cloaked skeletons.

The lone powerful figure was standing directly in front of one tall member of the circle. Pride and confidence was evident in this singled out individual's stance but it was forsaken when the individual dropped to his knees, lifted the hem of the leader's black robes and kissed it reverently. "You asked and it shall be done," murmured the kneeling figure obediently.

"Are you certain?" The leader seemed amused at the sight before him.

The prostrate man looked up, black eyes glittering in eye holes of the silvery white mask. "Of course, my lord."

"You hesitated with strangers, will you balk at this? I question your loyalty to me." The leader of the grisly group moved away but was stayed by an iron grip on the hems of his robes.

"You will never have cause to question my loyalty again, my dark lord." Molten red eyes met obsidian black in a war of wills and Lord Voldemort nodded once before conceding the battle. If this Death Eater was true to his word, he could concede this battle of will. He'd already won the war.

"Very well. I invite you gladly this once to prove me wrong. Do not fail me again, Severus Snape." Voldemort pulled his robes from Snape's grasp and moved back to the center of the circle. When he turned back around, Snape had already disappeared to do his bidding. He smiled. "If there is one thing I cannot abide, it's competition for the loyalty of my flock."

One light flickered in the entire house, illuminating a tiny bedchamber on the third floor. Elena was up with Trajan. Severus stepped up on the porch and opened the front door. He moved soundlessly from room to room until he reached the backstairs, the old servants staircase from when the home had belong to some very distant Muggle relations several hundred years ago. It would not do to let her know he was here.

He knew every creak and groan in this old house. He should, as it had been his only home other than school for as long as he could remember. Both his parents had died here, as well as his older brother. His parents' deaths had been natural, his brother's had not, but no one had been the wiser. Vespasian had been a fool, a trusting fool, unable to see the power and scope of Voldemort's ideals. Sibling rivalry aside, Severus had been glad to see the end of Vespasian.

The stairs blurred by as he set his mind to his task. Trajan required very little evening pampering. Something must be amiss, but it should make his job all the more easier. Do the deed required of him and return to the Dark Lord's side, triumphant in his success. It angered Severus that his loyalty would be suspect merely for one tiny hesitation. He knew who had reported that hesitation as well and Avery would pay for his tattling the first opportunity that Severus could find. After all, his life had never had purpose until Lord Voldemort called to him and brought him into his circle of Death Eaters.

Rage swept through him, feeding his blindness as it had never before. The hallway he stepped into was pitch black, save for a sliver of pale light coming from a slightly ajar door at the end of the hall by the main staircase. A woman's voice could be heard singing. Severus winced. Elena couldn't sing a note on key if she was charmed to do so. Trajan also seemed to be tone deaf so perhaps it was a blessing in disguise.

Severus removed the mask, setting it on an antique, three-legged hall table. He pushed the door open more and stepped inside.

"Severus! You're back!" Elena turned to him, smiling tiredly. "He started crying the moment you left. He always does, you know, but usually he quietens down after a few moments." She noticed the impassive look on Severus' face. "I take it the meeting did not go well?" There was no answer, only cold silence. "The Dark Lord knows you are loyal, Severus, so whatever has happened will be fixed, you'll see." She sounded confident at first but when his expression remained unchanged she sounded less confident. "Severus?"

"He cries when I leave?"

Elena's eyes widened at the frost in his voice. "Y-yes, just a little. I know you don't like it, but he's only a baby. We'll teach him better manners as time progresses and he can understand better."

"We can do so now." He stepped to the crib, staring down at the small being gazing up at him, black eyes, so like his father's, drying up tears as fast as they had previously been making them. Sensing the strong presence of his sire, the baby gurgled and blew bubbles of happiness, flapping his arms and legs with a squeal of joy.

Severus gripped his wand tight. "It's all right," he crooned softly, almost more to himself than to the baby. "It will all be over soon."

"Severus?"

"AVADA KEDAVRA!" A flash of green light sped at the baby and the last sound in the room for a few very long seconds was the echo of a rush of air and a baby's final happy squeal.

"SEVERUS!" Elena Snape couldn't move for a moment, her brain unable to process that the husband who had so joyfully tossed his son up in the air only a few hours before, cuddling and cooing at him, had now killed his son in cold-blooded murder. Her horror was compounded by the fact that this same husband who held her tightly in his arms and swore that being a Death Eater would make their lives all the easier when Voldemort came to full power turned to her with the same blank expression. "No," she whimpered and threw herself at his feet.

It was as if he wasn't there, as if he wasn't in control. It wasn't the Imperious Curse, not at all, he was doing this willingly, but it was as if he wasn't all there. A part of him was floating away from the body that was pointing the wand at his wife. 'After all,' a treacherous voice whispered deep in the recesses of his mind, 'she's not all that beautiful. Pretty, yes, but not beautiful. When the Dark Lord takes control, you can have your pick of women, your pick of anything your heart desires.' As Elena hugged his legs, tears streaming from her dark blue eyes, her brown hair wispy about her face, begging him to tell her what was going on, what she and Trajan had done to die so, he kicked out. She tumbled away and into some old toys of his and Vespasian. She lie there, sobbing uncontrollably, curling up into fetal position, staring at him as his mouth formed the words.

"AVADA KEDAVRA!"

At that very moment he heard the words from her lips. "I love you, Severus." It was as if he'd suddenly been jerked back into his body. He tried to move the wand to where the curse would miss but it was too late. The rush of green death hit her and she went limp, eyes staring sightlessly at him. He expected accusation and hate in that dead gaze, but there was only confusion.

Severus Snape stared at what he'd done, his brain literally misfiring, his eyes going blind like a strobe light in a Muggle dance club. Everything he saw was taken in through still images, not one fluid picture. His hearing seemed to suffer the same calamity, not that there was anything to hear but he thought he heard disjointed sobbing from somewhere. To his horror, when he pressed a hand to his face to block his eyes, he discovered the sobs were coming from himself.

He stepped back, and back, and back, trying to escape what he'd done, but he couldn't. Not even when he'd left the room and slammed the door. He stared at the closed door, the very faint light from beneath it blinding him as no light could. Cold darkness seeped into him and he shook as if in an earthquake.

'I killed them for him. This is what he wanted! Absolute loyalty, unquestioned!' Severus' mind spoke the words and he fell to his knees, eyes unseeing before him now. Everything was dark, everything was quiet. Right before his brain shut down entirely, his last thought was, 'He had it until this moment.'

She thought it was James, though why he'd be coming in the front door was beyond her. She stumbled out of bed and turned on a light, grabbing and shrugging into her terry cloth robe. She'd just gotten Harry to sleep from his three o'clock feeding so the last thing she wanted was him woken up again.

Lily Potter stepped into the upstairs hall and crossed to the large banister rail to lean over and hush her husband's noisy passage through the house, but froze when the figure in the darkness below obviously wasn't James. Terror swept through her at the sight of swirling black robes and she rushed back to the bedroom, careful to make as little noise herself as possible. She took her wand from the bedside table, gripping it tightly and turned off her light. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness and went back out to face the intruder.

She was halfway down the steps when a vaguely familiar rasping voice stopped her in her tracks. "Lily?"

She knew the voice but not the tone. Pain had never been evident in Severus Snape's voice the entire time she'd known him at school. "Snape?" she called hesitantly. "Get out of my house!" She pointed the wand in the direction of the dark shape outlined by the filtering moonlight of the parlor room windows. He was standing in the parlor doorway and she could just barely make him out.

"Help me?" It the voice of a lost little boy and she was startled when he fell forward into a heap on her floor.

Terrified it was a trick or a trap, Lily didn't move and instead kept her wand trained on him. "Get up, Snape. I don't trust you. What are you doing in my house? Get up, I tell you, or I'll hex you right now!" But the form didn't move, didn't even seem to breath and her curiousity and instinct to help drove her forward to kneel beside him. She nudged him cautiously but he did not stir. Bolder now, she pushed him onto his back and found his eyes closed. His face was paler than she could ever remember it being and the haggardness made him look like the living skeleton he'd always been teased to be.

She felt for a pulse. It was faint and very weak. Certain now that this was no trick she levitated him from his fallen position and took him up the stairs. Making certain that he was unable to move should he suddenly, treacherously spring to life, she rushed back into her bedroom, took some powder from a small jar on the bedroom fireplace mantle. She tossed the powder into the fireplace and said, "Albus Dumbledore."

Seconds later, the long white beard, watery blue eyes and thin face of the modern magical world's most powerful wizard was peering at her in a startled manner from within her fireplace. "Lily? Whatever is the matter?"

"Get James and come here right away. Snape's here and there's something wrong with him. He's unconscious, hurt, I think, but I don't why he's here. He broke in somehow and I don't feel safe with just me and Harry." Lily spoke rapidly, eyes darting to the hovering figure of Snape in the hall, his long black Death Eater robes dusting the wooden floor.

"We will be there immediately." Dumbledore's expression turned dangerous and Lily was glad that Dumbledore was on the side of good. His disembodied face disappeared and Lily was again left with only a sleeping infant and an unconscious Death Eater in her home. She went back into the hall and levitated Snape into the furthest guest bedroom from Harry's nursery as she could get. She set him down on the bed, noting for some reason that his weight hardly shifted the mattress at all. Didn't the man's wife ever feed him?

"LILY? LILY!" James' voice shouted through the house following the crash of the back door. Lily ran to the stairs again.

"Ssssh!" she shushed. "Harry's still asleep and I'd like to keep it that way!" James and Dumbledore both paused their mad dash up the stairs.

"What's Snape done to you?" hissed James, his blue eyes blazing up at her.

"Other than scaring me to death by sneaking around my house and fainting, nothing," Lily assured him.

"You're certain?" he asked, crushing him to her in a tight hug.

"I'm certain."

Dumbledore stepped around the couple. "Where is he?" Lily pointed to the room she'd put Snape in. "Tell us everything."

"Not much to tell," she confessed as she followed the two men. "I'd just put Harry to sleep again, when I heard walking around by the front door. I thought James was home and came down to tell him to be quiet. I looked over the banister rail and saw this dark figure in a black cloak wandering from room to room, so I got my wand. I was going to hex him right there, but Snape said my name."

"You should have hexed him anyway," James told her grimly as Dumbledore turned on the lamp at Snape's bedside.

"It was the way he said my name," Lily told them. "He sounded lost, hurt, wounded. I told him to get out but right before he fainted at my feet he said help me. Something's terribly wrong with him."

Dumbledore was muttering under his breath and moving his wand over Snape's body but eventually shrugged. "He's not been charmed or hexed in any way that I can tell. Let's remove his robes and see if there are any physical wounds. James, help me."

Reluctantly, James Potter did as he was bid, lifting Snape's surprisingly feather-light frame so that Dumbledore could remove the heavy outer cloak that branded him a Death Eater. No blood or injury was visible. They both paused to stare in horror at the skull and snake design branded into Snape's lower left arm. "So that's how he communicates with them. I wondered..." They continued their check.

"What the devil is going on?" growled James in a low tone when they had finished and come up with no physical ailments.

Dumbledore shook his head, perplexed as well. "I'm not certain. His mind has completely shut down. I dare not risk using magic to, shall we say, start it back up again. He's helpless, James, and no threat to you at the moment. However, I shall stay the night and magically seal the room just in case. We will see if there's any change in the morning." Dumbledore smiled tiredly at them. "Do have a small trundle bed or cot I could use or shall I conjure one?"

"I'll get it, Albus," Lily said hurriedly and disappeared out the door.

"You're going to stay here with him?" James exclaimed incredulously. "What if this is a trap and we've fallen into it?"

"Then it deserves to work because this is the cleverest one I've yet to see," Dumbledore informed him around a yawn. "I can handle Severus Snape easily enough, don't you worry. For now, however, I suggest we seal the entire house, just in case more Death Eaters do show up. Then you and your lovely wife will go to sleep. We'll deal more with this perplexing new twist of events when we are better equipped to handle it."

James helped Dumbledore charm the house as secure as possible while Lily prepared the trundle bed, making sure there were plenty of blankets and pillows for Dumbledore's comfort. Lily even tucked Snape beneath the covers of his bed, staring at him for a long moment before turning away. Dumbledore could hear the whispered comments of the Potters long after all the lights were extinguished. He knew they were worried, scared and confused. He understood their reaction for he was feeling the same thing, tempered by something else.

He had a feeling that with Severus Snape, the Dark Lord had made a terrible miscalculation and it was going to work in the side of light's favor.

-The End-