The Witch's Hair Shirt

"There is one more thing," Dumbledore drew a parchment from the pile of rolled missives on the table in front of him. Snape inwardly groaned, yes this was the staff meeting from Hell. Surely Dante must have included staff meetings in one of his inner circles of damnation; he made a mental note to check his battered copy of 'The Inferno' later for a reference. "Severus, please indulge an old man for another few moments." Snape felt the Headmaster's criticism underlying the teasing tone of his words. He sat up straighter and feigned an interest. Dumbledore nodded and looked down at the parchment.

"Our recent vacancy in the position of History of Magic has not gone unnoticed. We are being offered a temporary instructor, for the remainder of this school year." Smiling down into his beard he said, "That should allow Professor Binns time to return from this rather surprising sabbatical." He looked up at his staff, mouth set in a serious line. "This morning I received word from HildegaardVon Franz" he paused to let Snape's audible intake of breath resonate throughout the room "of the NornCoven informing me that if we are so inclined, she would very much like to have us consider one of her own witches for the position." Now he had them all gasping.

Minerva spoke first, "A Norn Witch is interested in teaching at Hogwarts???"

"It would appear to be the case," Dumbledore affirmed.

The staff room came alive with a buzzing undercurrent of surprised whispers.

Snape's voice was not amongst those. He was reeling under the shock of the message, searching for the intent. The highest order of witches in the entire magical world had contacted Dumbeldore, to offer one of their own to spend nearly three quarters of a school year with this student body. It was unfathomable.

It had been nine years since he had been in Hildegaard Von Franz's presence, he was thirty years old now and his life at twenty-one seemed to have been lived by someone else. He shuddered as the sickening and all too familiar stab of shame and regret cut to the bone. He fell into the nearly decade old memory from that fateful day; the ice-cold spray of the ocean air, the contrasting heat of the witches gathered around him, warmth denied to him because he held one of their own, dying, in his arms. Von Franz had spoken in riddles...her voice came back to him...her words, "Nine fold nine."

He rubbed absently at his chest and felt the...

"Professor!" hissed the librarian to his right. "Headmaster!" hissed the librarian to his left. He was flanked by both women.

He shook himself out of his reverie and looked up. "Apologies, Headmaster, sir," he bowed his head, "My thoughts were elsewhere."

"Apparently." Dumbledore stared at him intently. "I was asking for any reservations that the staff may have regarding this placement. I assume you have none."

"Of course I have none. I am just," he hesitated, "extraordinarily," hesitation still, "surprised, honored...a bit stunned..."

"'More things in heaven and earth, Horatio, '" chuckled Flitwick.

Snape turned on the little professor venomously, "Not in my heaven and earth, sir!" He saw too late that the man meant no harm and had been merely attempting to lighten Snape'sobviously tense mood. He pursed his lips and slightly inclined his head, but Flitwick turned away, silently.

Dumbledore broke through the awkward hush, "Yes, then. I thought not. Katla Freyan will arrive tomorrow."

October 30th, Snape realized. Of course, nine years to the day.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The meeting was over, the groan of chair springs keeping time with the creaking of aging bones as staff members rose and stretched and murmured to one another.

Snape sat frozen. He was immersed in a fog of pain. He vividly remembered the Icelandic cliffs...had the chill from that morning ever left his core...

He struggled to pull his thoughts back to a semblance of clarity.

On a peripheral level, he knew that the librarians were lingering, casting furtive glances at him. Since their arrival at Hogwarts last Spring, they always seemed to be on the edges of his presence. Was he imagining this or was there a truth to it, he wondered idly, still trying to draw his thoughts down to that sharper point. He had given them no more consideration than he did any of the other staff who played less than minor roles in his day-to-day existence at the school, yet, by the very virtue of this new feeling of familiarity, perhaps he should be paying a bit more attention.

He looked up and indeed two pairs of eyes were studying him. The staff room was now empty but for the three of them. He scowled and stood, refusing to indulge his body with any form of stretching or deep breath. He held himself taut on the balls of his feet as he adjusted his robes.

Crossing his arms, he looked at the young women in front of him. "Tell me," he purred, and was rewarded with two flashes of teeth and smiles. "You are always together, never apart?"

The one giggled and the other smiled nervously. He raised an eyebrow in question.

"What do you mean, exactly, professor?" smiled the one in a flirtatious manner. His eyebrow dropped menacingly.

"I mean exactly that." Why was he playing with them like this, he asked himself. He needed to be alone. Immediately. But an inner demon preferred to shake him out of his current state of unease. He heard himself speak again, "Perhaps you embody a sort of mental Siamese twinship?"

Both stood quietly. "Well, we are identical," spoke one softly.

"We've been together since conception," echoed the other.

"But you make it sound," said the first.

"As if that were a bad thing," finished the second.

"Unless," the first one again, with a wicked smile, "you have some," he watched in utter disbelief as she slowly licked the length of her top lip, "curiosity that needs to be satisfied?"

"Curiosity doesn't always kill the cat, you know?" whispered the other sister.

Snape's inner demon was howling in glee, he surmised. His thoughts were very intently focused now. He should have seen this, he berated himself silently. He was very nearly in over his head; but he did welcome the comfort of having his senses sharpened to the glittering knife's edge that was his usual self. Yes, that felt good.

He looked from the lip licker to her mirrored sister, and the corner of his own, thin, upper lip lifted slightly in a sneer he knew from experience was deadly to amorous feelings.

"Evangeline and Madeline," he drew their names out slowly, "such a quick and generous offer to satiate my," he raised an eyebrow and dropped the curling lip, "curiosity, was it?" He imagined his tongue dripping with poisoned honey, "Perhaps it would be best to remember, the only boast that the mice can make is that they beat the cat to the grave."

He swept past them.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The fact that he had charmed his wards to allow him the satisfaction of slamming the door to his private quarters didn't bring his usual smirk. His long strides took him to the cabinet of wizard spirits and muggle liquor; he flung open the tall doors and stared at the vast collection of liquids, each whispering a promise of respite and forgetting.

While deciding whether he wanted to temporarily empty his mind of these current thoughts or just dull the cutting edges, he brutally tore at the silvered clasp that closed his robes and they thudded to the floor, a dark pool around his feet. He leaned into the cabinet and brought out a heavy, crystal glass and his oldest bottle of talisker. As he levitated the glass and poured the whiskey, he could feel his shoulders itching to be rid of the weight of his woolen frock coat. He sneered at himself, grabbed at the half full glass of amber liquid and downed it in one gulp. A grimace of satisfied pain rode across the sharp plains of his face, the butterscotch fire roaring down his throat. He waited for the smoky aftertaste, then refilled the glass and returned the bottle to a dark corner inside the cabinet.

He would just grind off the surgical precision of the memories, then.

Dumbledore's announcement certainly was a sign of something much bigger than a substitute instructor. It boded of things which would need to be examined and considered with some semblance of consciousness. The situation with the twin librarians was another thing altogether and required no more thought. He was to blame for not having noticed their interest before, in the same way that he was to blame for now having drawn perhaps more of their attentions. What was the saying, "Keep your friends close, your enemies closer?" Well, he had just added two to the crowd he held within his embrace...he couldn't help but snicker at the dichotomy of it. He hadn't held anyone in his arms since forever and now he was holding legion closer than any lover. The dragoon mating dance, he thought bitterly.

He kicked his robes against the wall, walked to the fireplace, set the glass down on the hearth and clawed at the buttons that kept the fitted coat closed around him. He shrugged out of the garment and threw the jacket into one of the armchairs. Spitting out the word "Incendio," the resultant warmth from the blazing hearth fire confirmed that the cold on his skin was a chill seeping up out of his pores. Slowly he unbuttoned his stiffly starched dress shirt and in one fluid motion shook it from his body, balled it up and threw it with all his might into the fire. He watched it catch and marveled as a flower of regret bloomed inside his brain; the waste of fine cloth, craftsmanship and a month's wages.

He stood, staring into the flames, observing the shirt burn and collapse into a fine grey ash. He felt better for being rid of the heavier outer garments; his tightly cut black trousers, his leather boots and the shimmering pale gold of the finely woven undershirt gave him a feeling of personal freedom he never felt in his coat and robes, although he did wish that his best shirt had not been sacrificed.

Retrieving his glass, he dropped himself into an armchair. He took a deep breath and then another and then another and wondered if perhaps he might be on the verge of tears.

Great Hecate, he thought to himself, I'm having some sort of nervous breakdown.

'Katla Freyan' The sound of her name played inside his head. He remembered the other one's name and let it fall from his lips like a reverent prayer, "Gerda Solveig."

Yes, it was going to be tears, he realized, and with the same dread and revulsion usually reserved for vomiting, Snape squared his shoulders and willed his body not to betray him in that way. He would rather retch his emotions out than succumb to tears. He leaned forward and placed the heavy tumbler on the floor, with both hands locked behind his neck, he pulled his head down to his knees. He counted to ten in Latin, then on to twenty in French, to thirty in German, forty in Gaelic and finally, finally began to feel his eyes harden and his throat relax.

Leaning back again in the chair, he grasped two handfuls of the golden shirt that had come to define the hidden parts of him over the past nine years. He rolled the material between his thumbs and forefingers, marveling at it. His mind opened to the remembrance of her floor-length braid, the witch who sawed at its great thickness with glinting shears, the one who washed it clean of vomit and blood, the other witch who wove it while singing a wordless song of numbing loss.

He remembered the first weeks of his harrowing need to scratch it off his body and then the slow resignation to it, to its unique discomfort; the shirt that had been made from Gerda Solveig'spale blonde hair.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The night wore on, the talisker finally doing his bidding, warming his guts and bringing the sharp drumming in his mind to a slow beating he could bear. The room was buried in shadows and the flames from the fire danced in time to his breathing.

After what seemed like hours spent slumped in the chair, rolling the empty tumbler between his palms, Snape arrived at the place inside his thoughts where he knew that the next step would take him into the memories from that long-ago day. That place was no stranger to him, he recognized its landscape clearly from his other visits, but for the first time he found himself wishing he could return to the memories of Gerda Solveig'smurder with fresh eyes, from an outsider's point of view. He wanted the pensieve of the Gods to be set before him, a mystic third party observant, which would clearly reveal the terrible course of events that led to his turning from the Dark Lord and seeking out what had become his reformation.

He had spent years of his life reconstituting the now dry memories from those days. His body had become the waterbath for the brew which he insisted on mixing from the vast stores of his recollections. Each memory, each smell, each touch had become an ingredient as he willed the brew to coalesce into something tangible he could hold in his mind. He wanted to boil away all the material and be left with something hard, something worthwhile, the elusive philosopher's stone that would transform him at its touch. But, he was missing something, something in the stirring of the cauldron...and the brew would not turn.

Even now, to return to it, with the knowledge that he would be in the presence of a Norn sister within less than twenty-four hours, he could only collect the same memories, brew the same impotent tincture, always lead, always lead.

And yet...

He closed his eyes and stepped back into the house where the witch was held captive, her death less than day long hours from her, her body still fresh, before the torture shattered it, her mind still intact, before the agonizing pain would melt it.

There had been a rumbling in the magical world the moment that the Dark Lord succeeded in capturing the Norn. It had felt like tremors in the Earth, a fault in the physical world opening and shifting. He had felt it and when he was summoned to the place where she was being held, he found himself staggering from the realization that it had been her abduction which had moved the ground under all their feet.

Voldemortknew that he couldn't hold the force of her in the magical world, so Snape had found himself in a Muggle place, a non-descript house in a neighborhood of other such houses. Each one alike,each filled with lives that were nothing like his life or the lives lived in his world. At one point, he had inquired about it and been told that they were in a place called Los Angeles. He could feel the despair of all the souls trapped there and he wondered at the depravity of humans who would choose to live out their lives in such a manner. Later he would wonder if it was an unseen power of that place - the pain of souls tortured by their own hand - that had turned Voldemort's plans inside out. The City of Angels, indeed.

The family whose house they were occupying lay in the front room, swimming in congealed pools of their own blood, shredded by Death Eater foot soldiers. The Death Eaters were a concentric entity, building from an outside circle to the center where Voldemort stood. The first circle was a vicious collection of wizards and witches who were little more than murdering puppets, finding their purpose in the more mundane exploits of killing. As each circle tightened closer to the center a depravity of skills grew exponentially around the bull's-eye of throned horror. Snape knew he stood very near that throne. He was one of the younger Death Eaters, at twenty-one years of age, and the only alchemist among them.

As he strode through the house, his nerves stretched painfully under his skin; he would soon be called upon to play his part. This killing field was fresh, far more so than he was accustomed. He was usually summoned by the Dark Lord much later in an encounter, his skills being honed for precise extraction, harvesting for the darker brewing, not the brutal felling that occurred in the beginning of an encounter. The sickening smells of fear and blood and slow death were undeniable in this place, he was unused to it and found that he couldn't stand it. He sought a neutral place.

Over the course of that first day, the small house began to fill with the more powerful players and he realized that this was intended to be one of Voldemort'striumphs. The capture of this witch was a coup and it had all the markings of dark destiny upon it. Voldemort would not appear until the bitter end, with his hands clean, grasping what he insisted be taken.

Snape had found a corner for himself and silently occupied it, ignoring the comings and goings of the crowd. An introvert to the core, he preferred to wrap himself in isolation. He had contained his thoughts by mulling over an idea borne from a dream; he was failing to brew a particular potion because of the way the ingredients were being harvested. Voldemort had encouraged him to explore the darkest aspects of potions-making and he had indeed created brews he would never have been able to discover without the Dark Lord's permission, this latest struggle, however seemed to be hinged upon the concept that the ingredients could not be murdered for and instead needed to be given.

The hours of contemplation had cocooned around him but when he heard the woman begin to scream, something drove him towards the back room where she was being kept.

He came up to the door, stopping at its threshold. The curdling smell of urine washed over him and he restrained the urge to cover his nose and mouth. Two figures moved aside so that he could see the inner workings of the room. She was there, being held upright by some spell of restraint, her arms pinioned over her head and her hands reaching for the heavens in supplication. The process had begun. The crude physical beating would be first, then the lengthy sexual attack before the curses and finally....he suppressed a shuddered.

She was clothed in the robes of her Coven and still veiled. Snape knew that he wasn't the only one present who had never been this close to a veiled witch. It felt surreal, these women were the highest order of witches in the magical world and before this moment he had never come close to contemplating one being trussed up for slaughter. His stomach gripped. A figure moved towards her and began to rip at her clothing; each move in protest bringing a brutal blow to her face. Then she hung naked, her head lolling on her shoulders, the telltale floor length braid of her Coven swinging freely down her back. Blood dripped steadily from her nose and mouth and one ear.

And she was heavily pregnant.

Snape felt his stomach turn over again, he had known that this was what the Dark Lord had wanted, but to be within the presence of it was not what he had expected for himself. From some deep curve in his intestines, his guts convulsed and cramped and a dry pain surged up into his lungs and around his heart. He had never felt anything like it and as it squeezed his organs, he gasped. His brain recognized this mutiny. He was feeling shame. A heart-twisting shame brought on by his involvement with the torture of this human being and her unborn child.

Suddenly, her head lifted and she looked directly at him. His eyes widened and something passed between them and he was knocked backwards by an invisible blow. His body hit the wall of the hallway and he fell forward onto all fours. He heard her scream out as a Death Eater stepped forward and delivered a terrible blow to her torso. He felt as though he had been the one to receive the pain. He threw up and his vomit covered his hands. Again she was hit and again he retched. Someone reached down for him and he violently repelled them with his voice and wandless magic. "Irae!"

He had to get out of that space, away from her and the screams which seemed to be tearing out of his own lungs. He pulled himself up the wall and shouldered his way through the small group of observers. He stumbled towards a door that led outside and quickly altered the wards so that he could step out into a magic place, he fell heavily against it, twisted the knob and found himself on the edge of a cliff, the ocean raging below him and the freezing cold of the place shocking his skin. Again, he was on all fours and he dropped his head and looked behind him, the door now gone. He fell to his chest on the rocky tundra and welcomed the loss of consciousness.