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Severus had the distinct hunch that Dumbledore was to blame for their misery. Who in their right mind would send a group of sixth-years to a prison for career day? Based on McGonagall’s and Slughorn’s grim faces, those two certainly hadn’t volunteered to oversee this train wreck of a trip either.

“Once we arrive, you stay close to us at all times. Do not, and I repeat myself,” McGonagall hissed while she paraded like a drill sergeant in front of the assembled students in the Hogwarts courtyard, “do not wander off! You will listen to the guards and be on your best behaviour. Otherwise, we will leave you there with the other thugs to learn a much-needed lesson about discipline!”

With that last threat, she made sure to stare at the Slytherin section of the mixed-house group. Severus returned it unenthused. He could hear Goyle and Crabbe snicker behind his back, and Avery seemed excited of all things. He had been babbling about meeting his uncle non-stop the night before – so much that Macnair had thrown his cushion at the boy to finally shut him up.
Apparently, Avery’s uncle was buried somewhere in that shithole for murdering a Muggle family that had dared to settle on their ancestral property. Not that their ownership had been recorded with the Muggles. To those poor souls, it must have been nothing more than unclaimed land. Their murders had gotten Avery’s uncle a life-long subscription to free meal and board with the ministry.

“We should send that old codger some rotting flowers,” Mulciber mumbled. “Best chance ever to get into the Dark Lord’s good graces. Imagine we manage to break someone out! Or we can give him intel on the layout. Rumour says he’ll be at Lucius’ engagement party over the summer. Maybe he’ll mark us as a thank-you!”

Severus hummed half-heartedly. He was not looking forward to this field trip. Like. At all.
It didn’t help that the six Gryffindors on the other side of the half-circle were glaring at them in a way that promised murder. Well, everybody but Lily. Those green eyes did not make eye contact with Severus. Hadn’t since the end of fifth year.
Mulciber and Macnair and Avery were right. Screw her. Screw that … Mudblood.
The poisonous word still burnt on the inside of his head like acid.
He was such a fake.
A pot calling the kettle black.
But one had to choose. And Severus would rather stand where he stood now, amongst his peers than … be alone.
It scared him. The prospect of having nobody.
He swallowed down the uncomfortable feeling in his throat.

“Right. I guess the visit’s not a complete waste of time then,” Severus commented much too late. Mulciber had already turned around for a quick chat with Crabbe and Goyle.

“Everybody, get into position,” Slughorn called out to them. The six Slytherin sixth-graders formed a circle around their Head of House, just as the Gryffindors assembled around McGonagall. Severus was a bit jealous of the Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs. It sounded boring to interview a bunch of officials about their day-to-day activities, but the ministry would be a hell of a lot cheerier than where they were going.
To everyone what they deserved, he supposed. Dumbledore really was a bigot.

“Hurry up, boys. We only have one minute left until activation.”
Slughorn held out a silver key with a shiny green emerald fitted into its handle. Going by the sheer size of it, it would fit the doors to the Great Hall! A key as a portkey. Wow. The Auror department sure were showing off their intellect.
Severus put his hand over Macnair’s, Mulciber’s and Avery’s, just as Goyle’s and Crabbe’s plump fingers closed around his. It was an uncomfortable position as their hands were resting on top of each other like a sports team cheering themselves on before a match. He dared to take a glimpse towards the Gryffindors.
Potter, Black, Pettigrew, Lupin, Macdonald, Lily. He could hear them chatter about Aurors and how it was just that criminals were separated from society and That will be a warning to these snakes. Black’s words sounded like a curse, the way he spat out the syllables. Lily actually was opening and closing her mouth in a rapid succession, apparently reprimanding the other boy.
Or encouraging him.
Who knew. She could be so fickle with her feelings.

“Keep your eyes to yourself,” Macnair grunted into his ear. “You’re embarrassing us with your stalking. Just stop, Snape. Stop. You’re such a wimp!”

He bit down on the tip of his tongue to keep the rude remark to himself. Severus didn’t have the standing amongst his peers to survive challenging Macnair. Unlike that brute that was built like a tank, Severus was the runt of their pack. Not in height, but …

One day, he would upturn their hierarchy. Would put the others in their place! He would show them. Once he joined, once he could prove himself useful to their cause, he would rise to the top.
That he would.
One day.
But today … wasn’t this day.

He lowered his head until the thick strands of his hair covered his eyes. “Sorry.” At the same moment, the portkey wisped them all away.

Severus didn’t know how the ministry’s architects had achieved this, but Azkaban was actually less inviting a place than Spinner’s End.
The portkey had deposited them on a beach that was about two metres wide and already halfway underwater again as the tide was rising. Muddy puddles and putridly smelly algae covered the ground.

“My hair!” Macdonald’s cry was followed by her effort to put up the hood of her uniform. Strong winds chased over their heads, and the waves of the North Sea splattered against the rocky cliffs where land and water met, spreading tiny salty droplets across the air and their faces. Like the never-ending tears of those locked up in that blasted tower above them. Lighting chased across the horizon. The tower’s upper floors all disappeared into the stormy clouds that hung low in the sky.

McGonagall was also struggling to keep her eyes open as she pointed towards the prison tower and said something against the wind. The breeze was cutting into her skin and swallowed her words.

“WHAT?” Slughorn shouted just as he put the portkey chain over his head and let the silver key disappear underneath his neck collar. “MINERVA! WHAT DID YOU SAY?”
The man held his hands against his ears to ease the wind pressure. Severus and the other students grabbed their hoods like Macdonald had, and pulled them down. Only Black remained rooted to the rock he had climbed, with his hands firmly in his trouser pockets as he stared up ahead of the path. He seemed lost in his thoughts, not even minding the wind or rumble as thunder struck in the distance.

McGonagall pointed towards the tower, and it was clear what she wanted them to do. Seek refuge in the prison.

“I don’t think anything can live out here,” Lily shouted towards Potter who had grabbed her hand to help her across the wet rocks that had already caused Pettigrew to fall onto his face and cut his cheek on a razor-sharp stone. “There’s nothing to eat or drink! How does the ministry keep all those prisoners alive out here?”

Potter’s answer was lost to the winds as Severus had to turn away from the couple to not follow Pettigrew’s example. Quietly, he made sure to step right where Lupin’s feet had been, as the other boy walked right in front of him. He was pale as the full moon that was about to rise the very same night.
Since that incident in fifth year, Severus was always aware of the moon cycle. He knew that no matter how much Lupin starved himself as he appeared to be keen on doing for the past months, he’d still be too much wolf to handle for Severus on his own.

Ten hours until moonrise.

***

Azkaban was a triangular-shaped tower of black rock that stood tall and proud in the middle of this deserted island. There were hundreds of tiny windows but Severus saw no light, no movement behind them. At least ten floors. Ten windows per side. Thirty cells each floor. Times ten.
And yet, the entire place looked dead. Like something that was good at extinguishing all life within.

Something in his stomach began to painfully twist and turn at the thought of all those lives stacked on top of each other. Stuck in those prison cells. All those forgotten people.

He didn’t want to draw any closer. Not a foot.
His mind was screaming danger. Because … people that set a foot in there did not come out. That’s what his mother had told him in her gory bedtime stories. What he had read in their school books. He knew what it meant when people were sent here. All those faces on the front page of the Daily Prophet. Having your face portrayed there … it meant you would not be seen again. Ever.
The tower was cloaked in the emotions of so many that he could not filter them as his mind automatically took in that remnant of lives lived. Lives lost.
Severus didn’t want to do this. Didn’t want to see Azkaban from the inside.
He didn’t.

The group, though, moved quickly ahead to escape the storm, following the trodden path through the rocky, wet underground where the tides carried the water right up to the tower stairs at their highest point.
There was lightning and thunder and rain, and wind. And all Severus could think despite the unwelcoming weather was …
No.
He’d rather stay out here than go up there.
As if the tower itself was screaming in a thousand voices.

“Snape! Move!” Mulciber, the informal head of their ragtag Slytherin group, had noticed that Severus wasn’t coming along. He was two metres ahead – at the end of the Hogwarts students group. Impatience was etched into his face.
Didn’t he see what Severus was seeing? Didn’t he …

“Snape!” Mulciber demanded again, the prefect pin shone in the all-too-bright lightning that struck the sky, as he twisted his upper body backwards towards Severus. The boy’s uniform was drenched and hung off him like a dementor’s cloak. “MOVE!”

No. Severus didn’t want to go in there. Didn’t want to get any closer to that … thing.
Something just told him …that if he crossed the threshold to this tower … he wouldn’t come out the same person he was.
He couldn’t shut those voices out. No matter how much he focused on his Occlumency.

“SNAPE!”

That aggressive growl made him jump forward. Like a whipped dog, he hurried after Macnair with hunched-up shoulders, his heart pounding, his legs shaking with each step towards the black tower in front of them.

“I don’t like this place,” he whispered as soon as he had caught up to Avery, the second-lowest in their ranks. The boy’s stupidity was only outclassed by Severus’ low-quality blood.

“I can’t believe Uncle Alvernon has been stuck here for five years! Man! No wonder he never writes back. I don’t think they got any owls around here. Only seagulls.”

That, Severus suspected, was the least of your problems when you were housed in this shithole.

If he tried hard enough, he could pretend it was merely the wind that was talking to him. Telling him to leave.

***

There were two Aurors waiting for them at the entrance stairs to the tower. Both wore their uniform and had their wand in a sheath that was in a protective case around their right thigh. One of them seemed like an apprentice; he carried the lantern that had guided the students towards the tower. The other Auror relied on a walking stick. An ugly scar criss-crossed his face, it broadened his mouth as the corner had been sliced open at one point in his career, and the wound had only poorly scabbed over.

“Professors,” the experienced Auror greeted, raising his right hand. It was covered in a black glove. The fingers were rigid despite the overall movement; as if … there were no fingers underneath it at all.

McGonagall and Slughorn shook the two men’s hands just as the students huddled closer together to find cover from the rain. For once, both Slytherins and Gryffindors refrained from goading each other. They felt too miserable to come up with a good insult anyway. Macdonald’s teeth were chattering despite Lupin having lent her his cloak. The wolf stood there in nothing but his trousers and shirt, both stuck to his skin from the rain. What a freak of nature. He wasn’t even shaking from the cold Severus held the boy’s too-bright, yellow-brown eyes for a moment.

“It has been some time, Derek. And Rufus, my boy! So glad to see that you have made something out of yourself!”

Both Aurors greeted Slughorn like an old friend, although Severus could hardly tell whether the older one was smiling or grimacing. That scar tissue around his mouth was barely moving alongside his other muscles.

“Them’s all?” the older Auror grunted.

McGonagall let her eyes wander over them, counting each head. Apparently, she had so little trust in them that she figured one person could have already managed to fall into the North Sea. “Yes, six for each house,” she confirmed. “A lot of families prefer homeschooling or boarding schools outside Britain with the ongoing war and everything. It has been some bad years for Hogwarts. Numbers are dropping.”

“Could stand to be even lower if you ask me”, Mulciber muttered. “If we got rid of the Mudbloods, the number would be perfect.”

There was some hissing from the Gryffindor side. Especially Black and Potter looked at them with a murderous glare.

“We can do without blood purists like your lot”, Potter growled. “That would make Hogwarts truly perfect!”

Both sides exchanged a couple more insults. Severus didn’t say anything. He preferred to be forgotten. A bit like Pettigrew who was hiding behind Lupin.

“Alright, ladies and gents,” the older Auror finally said after finishing his smalltalk with the teachers. He knocked with his weird, gloved hand against the entrance door to the tower. “First, we’re going to go over some health and safety regulations in the canteen. Then we’re going to put you into groups to do some exploring.” He huffed. “Whatever you do, don’t approach the dementors. They will eat you.”

Potter’s face dropped at the thought of having his soul sucked out of him. Crabbe and Goyle were too thick to understand the Auror’s joke, but Mulciber shuddered all over.

“What did he mean?” Avery squeaked next to Severus. “What did he mean by that?”

Severus reluctantly followed the group inside. He was the last one, and he could feel the gruff Auror’s dead-fish eyes on him. The man had been scanning each student as they had come in as if to assess their threat level. Severus nervously held the man’s gaze, then … the entrance door snapped shut behind him.

It was as if the walls of the tower were closing in on him. The screams in his head became even more unclear as they overlapped.

***

The Aurors had sat them down in the wardens’ canteen, a dingy room with four tables and a small kitchen area. There wasn’t a stove, just a sink, an open cabinet with some glasses and plates, and the tiny, chimney-like food elevator that connected the canteen to the elven-run kitchen in the basement.
On their way to the canteen, they had passed the first set of cells of the ground floor –an underwhelmingly row of metal doors. No special locks or anything. Like in the animal shelter his elementary school class had once visited, each cell had a name plate with a registration number, the day of intake and, in this case, a release date. It had been confusing how low the numbers had been, but the grim Auror (Derek Brode), had explained that the ground-level section was reserved for idiots who hadn’t paid their fines in time and first-time offenders of non-violent crimes. Theft, scam, drug dealing, homosexual acts.
Macdonald and Lily, both of which were the only Mudbloods other than Severus himself, had dared to question the Auror on that. Hypocrites. It wasn’t like the Muggle world was any better. Homosexuality had only been decriminalised about ten years ago. Their upset cries had found deaf ears with Brode. The Auror had merely stared them down into silence. “Law’s the law,” he had growled. “I don’t make ‘em. I enforce them.”

The canteen had a tiny window, and Severus tried to get close to it because the ceiling lights in Azkaban were shoddy, but the table next to it and its four chairs were taken by Macnair, Mulciber, Crabbe and Goyle. Avery, the traitor, had actually sat down next to Slughorn, the young Auror and Macdonald, who seemed to make gooey eyes at the young Auror.
With a sigh, Severus walked towards the only table that still held free seats; because McGonagall and Pettigrew sat there – apparently, Potter, Black and Lupin had preferred to sit with Lily rather than their friend. Go figure.
The mousy Gryffindor boy was busy studying the floor tiles.
How had that idiot managed to qualify for advanced Defence classes? Never mind. Avery was hardly any better. He could hear the other boy chat about his prison uncle with Slughorn at the other table. The teacher was rather tight-lipped; not that Avery noticed. Dear old Sluggy probably didn’t want to admit to knowing a convicted murderer in front of his former student.
Meanwhile, Brode began lecturing them on when to use their magic (essentially: never), and gave them some waivers that absolved the ministry of any responsibility should any student come to harm during their visit. Pettigrew’s hand was shaking so much as he signed the paper that he ripped a hole in it.

“I am not good with stressful situations,” Pettigrew explained at McGonagall’s frown.

“Is there anything you're good at?” Severus mumbled that got him an evil eye from his transfigurations teacher.
Worth it. Pettigrew’s eyes were wet with unshed tears.

“I have rarely seen such an undisciplined group of good-for-nothings!” Brode growled, finally fed up with the chit-chatter that filled the canteen. Instantly, the tables grew silent. “You lot may think yourselves tough, because you can transform a mouse into a pin cushion, but if you approached even one of our guests on your own, you’d leave this island in pieces. All that’s between you and those psychopaths is ten centimetres of magically-enhanced steel, an army of dementors, and us Aurors. So don’t annoy me, got it?”

“Yes, sir,” the students mumbled in chorus.

“Oi, you there,” Brode snarled at Mulciber who had dared to roll his eyes. “Anything you’d like to share with the group?”

“Not particularly. Sir.”

Brode zoomed in on the Slytherin bench. “Your name?”

“Marcus Mulciber.” The boy made sure to smile as angelic as he could.

“Quite a familiar name. I imagine you must be looking forward to meeting some of your relatives today.”

The Gryffindor boys began snickering, drawing a hiss from the Slytherins.

“Derek,” Slughorn intervened, just as the mood turned sour, “maybe Rufus could show my students around? As a former Slytherin, he can probably relate better to them.”

The younger Auror sat beside Macdonald gave a benign nod. His brown, wavy hair and thick eyebrows gave him the look of a lion. “It would be my honour, Sir.”

“As you wish.” Brode sounded cold.

***

For once, Severus felt like thanking Slughorn with all his heart. Scrimgeour was wonderful in comparison to that grump Brode. The young Auror actually took his time to explain to them about the different jobs, the daily schedule, how newcomers were processed, how parole worked, he even showed them the different security check-points on a map of the tower.

“If you get lost,” the Auror had told them, pointing with his finger on one of the evacuation plans behind glass that were hanging next to the stairs on each floor, “never go anywhere with this red marker. That’s an area with stationed dementors. Blue and green are your friends.”

“What does black stand for?” Mulciber nodded towards the black lines scattered throughout the tower. Unlike with blue, green and red, it wasn’t a solid block of cells but a haphazard, unconnected number of corridors. Except for the ninth floor - that one was black throughout.

“Those are magic-dampening areas,” Scrimgeour explained. “For mind readers and other freaks that are dangerous even without a wand.”

Freaks.
Severus stared at the black pathway near the top of the tower.
If the ministry ever got a hold of him, that’s where he’d end up.
It was a weird thought.
He enforced his occlumency shields to suppress those shouty voices in his head. Better not show any signs that something was wrong with him. Lest Scrimgeour would put him into one of the black corridors pre-emptively.
Was he going insane?
Maybe.
Or maybe he had always been a little insane.
Run, the tower seemed to demand.
Or I will keep you.
Severus’ eyes remained fixated on those colour-coded pathways as he burnt the tower map into his mind. Just in case.

“Hey, Mr Auror,” Avery piped up, apparently already having forgotten Scrimgeour’s name. “My uncle’s Alvernon Avery. Is there a chance we could visit him? My family hasn’t heard from him in ages.”

Scrimgeour’s face didn’t fall. Instead, it remained unnaturally unmoving. Then his eyes shifted away from Avery. “I am afraid that’s not part of the booked tour.”

“What about –“ Macnair started, but Scrimgeour didn’t allow any further requests for family reunions. “Let’s move on to the holding cell. We actually have a release scheduled for tomorrow, and the inmate has graciously agreed to let you interview him.”

***

“Why are there so few wardens?” Severus dared to ask as they made their way through one of the corridors with green-tinted ceiling lights. There was some cursing, some screaming behind the cell doors, but by now, the group had become accustomed to those sounds. It was weird how easily one disassociated themself from the suffering behind those walls.

“Well, it’s Saturday,” Scrimgeour explained. “Over the weekend, we always have one Auror team stationed on the island, and one team on passive duty. People would go berserk if we kept them from their families on the weekend. Besides, you don’t need a lot of people to run this place. It sort of runs itself. The dementors are good at keeping the prisoners compliant. We mostly need staff when there are newcomers, executions or leavers.”

It was eery how few personnel actually worked in the prison. So far, it had only been the two Aurors and one guard for each section. Not that the wardens were patrolling their respective thirty or so cells. They were busy listening to the radio or filling out the Daily Prophet’s crossword puzzle.

“Has anybody ever escaped Azkaban?” Mulciber asked with a glint in his eye. Severus could imagine what he was plotting.

“None.” Scrimgeour didn’t even have to think. “Azkaban’s the safest prison in the northern hemisphere. The prisoners never leave their cells, so there are no fights between them. And since we rarely enter a cell, there have been no major incidents between guards and prisoners either.”

“They don’t go to the canteen? How do they eat then?” Crabbe asked with a horrified look on his chubby face.

“The prison elves take the food directly to the cells and remove leftovers,” Scrimgeour explained. “No physical contact needed. In fact, we are forbidden from entering any cell without getting back-up first. Sometimes the newcomers pretend to choke on some food, but this prison policy keeps us safe at all times.”

Severus let his hand trail over the cell walls as they moved down the green corridor. Those muffled sounds sounded so much lonelier in his ears than before.

“If the elves deliver food, they also deliver presents and letters to the prisoners, right?” Avery bit his lip.

Scrimgeour refused to answer. The young Auror pushed forward towards the next set of stairs.

***

The prisoner in the ground floor’s holding cell (apparently a fake seer who had conned people out of their money according to Scrimgeour) was barely more than a shallowly breathing skeleton. Severus could not avert his gaze from that ghastly sight, as the man was rocking back and forth on the wooden bed. Someone had put clothes on the floor, but they had remained untouched. Instead, the prisoner wore a bedsheet-thin grey uniform with gashes all over – from all the clawing that the man did. His arms were littered in scars, too, and so were his neck and face.

“Don’t wanna talk,” the man mumbled with crazed out eyes that showed more white than anything else. “Too late to talk. Don’t wanna talk. Too late to talk.”

“We had a deal, Arminius,” Scrimgeour said sharply. While he had been rather relaxed with the students, his voice turned almost aggressive as he spoke to the prisoner and pointed his wand into the man’s face. “You get to go home one week earlier if you speak with the students!”

The man stared at the six Slytherins that were standing in the holding cell in a half-circle. No words left his mouth.

“Arminius! You were so eager to demand we release you a week earlier! You have been annoying us for months with that! TALK!”

The man’s eyes wandered over the group of Slytherins before those white orbs settled on Severus. Arminius rose his hand like a person looking for salvation before it fell down on his bed once more. His mouth opened in a silent scream.
Severus tried to take a step back from that man who had been driven to insanity by Azkaban, but Crabbe and Goyle were like immovable statues behind his back.

“ARMINIUS! We will put you back into your cell! You know Derek’s got no patience for your bullshit!”

“It’s okay,” Slughorn said. He sounded uncomfortable. “I am sure the students have an excellent idea now about what it means to go to prison.”

Scrimgeour sent a stinging hex towards the inmate who didn’t even yelp. He only shuddered as if an electric shock had passed through his mangled body.
Severus pushed against Crabbe once more to leave this horrible place. He couldn’t stand the smell of the toilet hole in the ground anymore. Even the constant rush of running water (to take away the waste put in that hole?) made him feel sick.

“Are you sure, Arminius,” Scrimgeour asked, “that you would prefer to go back to the black block for one more week?”

The man stared ahead. Any resemblance that he knew where he was or why was gone.
His eyes met Severus’ once more. And his mouth opened for a single syllable that never left his mouth based on the lack of reaction by the other students. Yet Severus heard the word loud and clearly echo through his head.
Run.
Severus’ eyes widened, and he regretted not controlling his body. Because Arminius began to smile. His mouth grew wide, revealing a set of black teeth.

“Run,” Arminius whispered hoarsely, causing each of the students to flinch.

***

Once they were back outside (and every Slytherin had become quiet. Even Mulciber), Scrimgeour let the cell door shut close. He tapped against the plate with his wand in a specific pattern to look the door before turning back towards them. Severus caught Mulciber stare at the movement greedily.
Scrimgeour turned around with a fake smile: “Well, you now saw what the cells are like. Of course, the beds in the other cells are made of indestructible steel instead, so nobody can create a weapon. The holding cell is more like a transition point and doesn’t need that level of security.”

“Is the Auror training this rubbish that you’d lose against a person swinging a wooden splinter at you?” Mulciber’s comment made the other Slytherins break out into laughter. Only Severus remained dead silent.

Scrimgeour blinked. “It’s more about what the prisoners could do to themselves, actually. Desperate people are the most dangerous sort of people. They don’t act rationally.”

***

They had passed the Gryffindor group just a moment ago. Scrimgeour had stopped Brode for a quick chat with a lot of hand gestures, probably to tell him about the unhelpful prisoner that refused to speak about his experiences in the holding cell. It was one of the corridors in the green block, but the stairs they were heading for had a red arrow above them. And here Severus had hoped not to meet a dementor today. Not when he already felt overwhelmed by so much desperation that had seeped into these walls even after their owners had passed long ago.

The Gryffindor boys that were usually quick to throw insults into their direction remained quiet behind their Auror. They seemed oddly withdrawn. McGonagall, too, was ashen. Macdonald’s face was even covered in tear-stains as she still clutched Lupin’s cloak. The dementors had gotten to her. What a cry-baby. Had she seen a low NEWT score or what?

As the two Aurors held their chat, Severus spotted some movement from the corner of his eye. Avery had traipsed off around the corner into one of the black corridors their Auror guide had been avoiding at all costs until now.
Severus let his gaze swivel between the student group and Avery. Brode would explode in the boy’s face if he noticed!
Go, the voices still demanded.
Hurry.

“What are you doing?” Severus whispered harshly after catching up to Avery. He grabbed the other boy by the sleeves of his Hogwarts uniform to drag him back into the green corridor, but Avery resisted the pull.

“I think he has to be around here!” Avery stated. “He hasn’t been anywhere we’ve been to so far!”

“Your uncle’s a bloody murderer!” Severus hissed. “He’ll be in the red section!”

“No way he’d be with those monsters! It was only Muggles, and he was defending his property!”

“So what?”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Brode’s voice boomed across the floor, drawing not only a startled shout by the Hogwarts student group (and wasn’t Potter squealing like a little girl, that ugly asshole who was clutching Lily’s hand like a lifeline), but also a noise complaint from the cell doors. Fists hit the doors, thumped against the walls in protest.
Severus could feel the ground shaking, as the voices in his head grew louder with the rise of emotions in the cells.
Not long.
Today.
It’s coming.

Severus stumbled backwards until he tripped over his feet, landing with his upper body in the green corridor. His eyes rested on the path ahead, though. The ceiling lights were dimmed and held no tint like the green or blue areas. The lights were buzzing like an angry fly.
Only then did he notice that the prisoners in those cells had stopped their shouts and knocking the very same second.

“I was only looking for my uncle!” Avery rushed back towards Slughorn who grabbed his arm and held out the other as Brode had his wand drawn and directed at Avery. Severus did not dare move a muscle as he lay on the cold ground of the corridor. Even the Gryffindors did not laugh at his position. They were just as tense. And stared at Brode’s wand tip.

“Derek,” Slughorn tried to placate the older Auror. “It was a stupid boy’s –“

“Hey, brat. You can join your uncle in his cell for all I care!” Brode growled. “Consider this your final warning. Nobody steps out of line under my watch!” His eyes now narrowed in on Severus beneath his feet. “Do you need an extra invitation? Are you hard of hearing? Get over here, NOW.”

Then the Auror put away his wand. Slughorn and Avery both sighed collectively in relief.

Up. the voices in his head demanded. Up.

Under the jeering eyes of the Gryffindors, Severus also stood up and moved back towards the Slytherin group. “Sorry.” He cast down his eyes to show his submission to Brode. That usually worked with the Slytherins, and Brode seemed to accept it, too. He pushed past Severus to lead his Gryffindor group towards the holding cell.

“Can we see the worst criminal that you got?” he heard Potter ask Brode. “Like You-Know-Who’s right-hand henchman or something.”

Lupin turned his head back and zoomed in on Severus’ face. The damn wolf had caught him snooping. Quickly, Severus turned around to follow Scrimgeour and the other Slytherins towards the red section above.

***

“Don’t touch anything,” Scrimgeour warned, this time he was much more serious than before. Severus could understand why. There were dementors everywhere. Those black-cloaked ghosts patrolled the cell block and took no notice of them. Crabbe and Goyle began to shiver next to Severus who was clutching to his occlumency shields. Like spider webs, the dementor’s magic seeped into one’s mind, one’s heart, until they had enough hold of somebody to break them.
He mustn’t give them even one inch.

Avery pressed himself against Severus as if to seek shelter.

“Rufus,” Slughorn called out from behind Severus. “May I summon a Patronus? I must confess this dour mood is getting to me.”

“Sorry,” Scrimgeour answered with a grimace. “No Patroni allowed in the red section. The dementors take it for an attack. It’s reserved for bad situations.”

Slughorn sighed. Severus could see the man shaking as well. The dementors had made the temperatures drop at least five degrees from the already not-so-hot prison.

“How do you deal with their effects when you work here every day?” Macnair, who always liked to know more about beasts, asked quietly. “Is there a way to get used to them or –“

“Sadly not.” Scrimgeour moved a tad quicker through the corridor, expertly stepping around the dementors that floated around aimlessly across the room. Never interacting with them but those not-faces, those…. hoods … they always moved with their movements. Like attack dogs focused on their prey. Waiting for the command to strike.

Strike, it echoed through his head.

Severus put one of his hands against his temple and surreptitiously clawed at his hair, at his skin – to rip that voice out of his mind.

“Eh. You just learn to appreciate the green and blue block. It’s not like we have to patrol the red section that often anyway. Nothing ever happens up here. The dementors make sure of that.” Scrimgeour furrowed his eyebrows. “Though Derek, I mean Mr Brode, he is quite skilled at ignoring the dementors' effects. Some wizards are like thar. In the black section, for example, there are some prisoners who –“

Suddenly, there was a mechanic click as the announcement system flared to life. The sound was bad, there was no other word for it. White noise filled the air as Scrimgeour looked up at the ceiling where the sound came from with an alarmed look.
It wasn’t a voice. Just somebody breathing loudly into the microphone. It sounded laboured as if the person had been running. Then, with a click, the announcement system fell silent again.

“What was that, Rufus?” Slughorn asked. “One of the wardens?”

“I … “Scrimgeour bit his lip. “I don’t know.”
He looked towards the warden at the glass-walled station who was no longer reading the newspaper. The man had also put it down to look up towards the ceiling. He seemed just as puzzled.
Scrimgeour’s throat jumped as he swallowed before asking: “Would you be fine with the students for a moment if I took you back down to the green section, Sir? I’d like to check on the announcement room on the ground level. We sometimes have technical issues. The magic fails, especially since the public budget has been cut in half to support the ministry’s war effort.”

“Of course.” Slughorn rubbed his arms. “I am looking forward to it, in fact. As fascinating as this was, I could do without the dementors. It still leaves a bad taste in my mouth to consider Crouch’s proposal. I hope he doesn’t get it through the Wizengamot. Executing people without a trial …”

“That’s politics for you, Sir. Not a lot you and me can do about it.” Scrimgeour was about to turn around to lead them back to the stairs with the green arrow, when he stilled abruptly –
“Excuse me, kid! What are you doin–“

There was a roar. An inhuman battle cry, and all Severus could see were black shadows throwing themselves at them. As Avery took his hand away from one of the cell doors.

“I just wanted to read the name plate –“

“DOWN!” Scrimgeour yelled, and Slughorn threw himself on his students, bringing some of them to the ground in a big messy heap of flailing limbs. The teacher had his arms wide apart to increase his volume as he shielded them with his body.
Severus could not react – everything was going too fast. Mulciber’s body rested on his legs, keeping him pinned underneath to look up into the ceiling lights where the dementors gathered around them like predatory birds.

All he heard were the two shouts of Expecto Patronum and then a white marlin and a lion broke out of the adults’ wands as their first and last line of defence.

And there was laughter in his head.
Shrill and high and … triumphant.

Severus saw those cloaked claws reaching for them, only for one of the patroni to bash them away. Over and over.

It has begun, the voice whispered almost fondly like a lover into his ear.
Welcome, my little mice. As the tower is now … mine.

The walls and ceiling began to shake as thunder struck the tower, and the lights began trembling above them. On. Off. On. Off. As the dementors battled Slughorn’s and Scrimgeour’s Patronus.

“Get downstairs!” Scrimgeour shouted from where he stood between them and the attacking dementors in the middle of the corridor, waving his wand as darkness and light took turns each second. “Get back to the green section! NOW!”

And the students scattered apart like a herd of prey animals.

Chapter Text

The six Slytherin boys were hurrying down the stairs at full speed to leave the dementor-filled red corridor; their limbs knocked into each other as they pushed forward in utter panic. Everywhere, there were people, and Severus couldn’t get a grip on the railing. Avery was the first to actually tumble to the ground with a high-pitched shriek when his foot slipped off one of the steps. All Severus could do was not tread on him as Crabbe tried to push past out of fear of having his soul sucked out of him.
Behind them, Slughorn’s and Scrimgeour’s voices shouted out spells to distract the dementors

“WAIT, GUYS! PLEASE!”

“Avery’s down!” Goyle huffed.

“Don’t! Fucking! Care!” Macnair’s grunt reflected what they surely were all thinking. If that idiot hadn’t touched one of the high-security cells …

“He got what he deserved!” Severus spat. Bloody Avery and his stupidity!

“But --- shouldn’t --- we – like, you know --- help ---“ Goyle was barely getting enough air as he carried his overweight body down the stairs.

Mulciber cut him off sharply: “We should do shit! Let Sluggy take care of Ave! We have to worry about ourselves first! There could be dementors coming after us any second!”

Nobody dared to contradict him.

The ceiling lights turned green as they collectively jumped down the last three steps to hit the third floor. Like upstairs, the lamps were flickering in the aftermath of the lightning that had struck Azkaban a mere minute ago.

“STOP RIGHT THERE! Why are you causing such a havok? I can barely concentrate on my reading with all your shouting!” The warden was still seated behind his desk with his legs propped on the table. He was holding the Daily Prophet. The warden didn’t register their mood; he was busy rant-mumbling to himself: “Bad enough this place’s falling apart! How am I supposed to read anything with the light switching off and on every bloody second? Brode better fix this quickly. Can’t wait for Crouch to get that law through. If we got those criminals kissed from the get-go, we wouldn’t need this shithole of a place to store them until they drop dead of their own!”

“Dementors!” Crabbe, with his massive body, pushed past Severus. He was waving his arms wildly through the air as if he was trying to demonstrate the size of their problem to the man. As usual, he was lacking the vocabulary to articulate his thoughts. “Dementors!”

That one word broke through the warden’s tirade. His face turned ashen, his eyes wandered towards the stairs they had come from, then back over them, taking in their dishevelled state.
Instantly, the man jumped up from his chair in a swift motion that Severus hadn’t thought the warden capable of. The Daily Prophet floated to the ground as his hand went for his wand instead.
“Get to the ground floor and use the tables to barricade yourselves in the canteen! Wait there until somebody comes to get you!”, the warden ordered. “Shut the windows, so that the dementors can’t come in in case they get out of the tower! And once you’re there, be quiet! NOW!”
Without looking back for even a second, the warden rushed upstairs towards the noisy battlefield with his wand ready for an attack.

“HEY! You can’t just leave us out here alone!” Mulciber shouted, but was ignored.

Before Severus could thank the warden for being no help at all, Macnair snapped: ““Fuck it all! Fuck Dumbledore and fuck Avery!”
Always such beautiful words out of that brute’s mouth.

“Nothing has changed, guys! We just have to take care of ourselves like always. Let’s get to the canteen!” Mulciber demanded, nervous sweat running across his face. “Hurry!”

As if to punish the warden for abandoning them, Mulciber kicked away the man’s edition of the Daily Prophet so that it landed on Severus’ shoes. Its front page was filled with a man’s face. The guy had to be in his early twenties; he was rather short next to the four Aurors that were leading him out of the court room – his arms and legs were chained. Bloodshot eyes and a knobbly nose that gave him the appearance of a half-troll, ginger hair that was cut like a soldier’s. A face that was born for a mugshot if there ever was one. The man looked shady. And despite his bent-over walk, his eyes glinted victoriously. As if he had won. In whatever way a life-sentence in Azkaban could ever be such a thing.
Attack on the minister, the bold letters stated, leaves one Auror dead.

There was laughter in Severus’ head. Cold and high-pitched.

***

Severus’ lungs were burning as he followed the others down the stairs to the second floor. The ceiling lights were still flickering. In those seconds of darkness, his feet were sometimes losing traction as he misjudged the distance between the steps. The five Slytherin boys were stumbling downstairs, their minds filled by the desire to get out of this accursed place.
Then Severus suddenly hit Goyle face-to-back as the giant had come to a halt at the bottom of their current stairs.

“Move!” Severus replied viciously twisting his head back to make sure no dementor was following them. He was the last one. Like a sacrificial lamb. “Move already!”

“For once, I am with Snape!” Mulciber, who stood next to him, said. “Get the fuck going! Go! We still have one more floor!”

“But there’s no one here? That’s strange, right?” Goyle shrugged helplessly with his shoulders, making room for the others to squeeze themselves past him. The green corridor in front of them was deserted. A row of closed doors and an eerily empty security desk. No sign of the warden.

“Where did he go?” Crabbe asked.

“Toilet?” Macnair sounded uncertain.

Severus looked back nervously. Avery still hadn’t caught up to them. Did he hurt himself when he had fallen on the stairs? What were Slughorn, Scrimgeour and that warden even doing up there? Were they taking a nap? They were supposed to tell them that everything was under control!

“Let’s go before the dementors catch up to us,” Severus tried to hurry the group but nobody was paying any attention to him. How utterly unexpected. Hah.

“Can’t be on the toilet,” Mulciber contradicted Macnair. “Didn’t you listen to the Auror? The wardens never leave their station without their replacement. If he had gone to the toilet, he’d have called for back-up first. And we would be talking to said back-up right now.”

“Maybe he didn’t come to work today at all,” Goyle suggested. “Because of the bad weather?”

“Must be!” Crabbe sounded relieved. “I would call in sick, too, if it was raining like that.”

Severus doubted that. There was a steaming tea cup on that desk. Someone had been sitting there mere minutes ago. But where had he gone? Not upstairs. They would have met him there.
With a weird feeling in his stomach, Severus stared at that abandoned security desk. Almost forgetting about the danger that lurked above them.

“Who cares about a stupid warden,” Mulciber said, taking one step towards the stairs that would lead them to the first floor. “Sluggy can barely keep a classroom of children under control. I don’t trust him with managing those dementors at all!”

“That will probably be the first and best kiss of his life,” Macnair snickered to himself.

Goyle and Crabbe both looked a tad green. They rose their hands towards their mouths as if to protect their souls.
The faint noises of the fight two floors above them could still be heard.

Mulciber apparently noticed them as well, the way he hurried down the stairs when –

“It’s barricaded!”

Severus also turned the corner. The heavy security door had been shut. A big slap of steel blocked their way to the first floor.

“Just open it!” Crabbe demanded.

“HOW?” Mulciber growled. “There’s no door handle, you dolt!”

Macnair and Crabbe both were pressing their hands against the steel as if to look for a secret mechanism. The lights were still flickering, but between the flashes of darkness, Severus could spot that there was nothing they could work with. The closed door was like a wall.

It made sense. In a prison, that is. That the doors could only be opened from the corridor underneath. To keep people from getting out.

“FUCK!” Macnair yelled. And for once, Severus agreed with the brute.

“I don't understand! Who closed the door?” Goyle asked.

“The warden!” Mulciber exclaimed. “That coward! He ran off and shut the door behind him when he heard the fighting noises!”

Crabbe was banging his fists against the steel, but the material was too thick. The sound barely travelled – and nothing could be heard from the other side. “Open up!” he demanded. “OPEN UP!”

“Just stop,” Mulciber snarled, grabbing Crabbe’s hand that was turning red from the force applied. “Don't you understand? That’s good news for us! It means we can close the door to the third floor, too, and it can't be opened from the other side!”

Silence befell their group; even Crabbe and Goyle who were mentally challenged seemed to understand what Mulciber had just proposed.
It wasn’t just the dementors they’d shut out.

“It’s a bit harsh,” Goyle mumbled. “Avery ---”

“Nothing’s going to happen to him,” Mulciber cut him off. “Avery has three trained adults with him. He’s going to be fine.”

If things were fine, why were they all on the run in the first place?
Severus didn’t voice his comment. Didn’t want to be noticed. Lest those four left him on the other side as well.

***

“That’s bloody heavy,” Crabbe grunted. “Help me!”

Macnair and Mulciber were the first to react, with Goyle and Severus following their command half-heartedly. Together, they pulled the steel door to the floor above them shut. The fighting could no longer be heard, and a collective exhale travelled through the boys’ mouths.
Severus closed his eyes as he leaned his head against the door.
No reason to feel awful for Avery. No reason at all.
Because … if their positions had been switched, Avery would have closed off the door as well. To save himself.

“What now?” Macnair asked. He was rumaging through the drawers of the warden’s desk. Apparently, there were a dozen or so photos of the same cat.

“Let’s look for an alternative path. I’d rather be behind more than one door when there are soul-sucking beasts floating around.” Mulciber headed towards the wall map. Now that their adrenaline levels had lowered somewhat, they had remembered that they were wizards. All of the five Slytherins had their wands out and had cast Lumos to aid them. The electricity in the building had been fried. The ceiling lights wouldn’t stop flickering.

Severus followed Mulciber while Macnair was busy throwing folders onto the floor and sipping the missing warden’s tea. Goyle and Crabbe had a whispered argument. Apparently still about Avery as Goyle was pointing towards the shut door.

The map of Azkaban was difficult to navigate; Mulciber and he took a minute to find their position as the three sides of the triangular prison were build almost symmetrically.

“We’re in Wing A,” Mulciber concluded, pointing at the wing with the canteen. “The second floor.”

Severus hummed. His eyes skimmed the map. He couldn’t keep himself from looking for the stairs between the fourth and third floor where they had lost Avery.

Mulciber’s finger touched the map. “If we move to the second floor of Wing B, we can take the stairs there and then switch back to Wing A.”

“No!” Severus blurted out, putting his heels down instinctively. “NO!”

His refusal had raised the other boys’ attention. They came closer until they all stood in a half-circle around the wall map.

“What’s the matter, Snape?” Mulciber glowered. “I know you’re a fan of dark and dirty places like this crappy place, but we got to move!”

“That’s a black corridor!”

“Who bloody cares if the corridor between wing A and B is black, or green, or pink like the Mudblood fairy you are!” Mulciber snarled defensively. “I SAID we are taking that corridor!”
He was pointing towards the other end of the floor. Like obedient dogs, Goyle, Crabbe and Macnair followed suit, only Severus remained rooted to the spot next to the map wall.

“Are you coming or not?” Mulciber challenged, his feet quite apart as he stood there like an alpha wolf. His arms were crossed in front of his chest.

No, Severus wanted to scream into his smarmy face. NO, NO, NO, NO!
He still remembered his last encounter with a black corridor.

Yes, that voice in his head whispered mockingly. Come to me.

“We are wizards,” Severus replied, his voice shaking as he stood up to Mulciber. Even without the other Slytherin boys witnessing his moment of rebellion, he almost hyperventilated. There would be consequences to challenging the hierarchy. “We could explode away the steel wall to the first floor –“

“And bring this place down?” Mulciber furrowed his eye brows. “Let’s make one thing clear, Snape. I won’t extend an extra invitation to you. You are not worth it. So either come with us or stay behind to get your soul sucked out of you like Sluggy and Avery, for all I care.”

With that Mulciber turned on his heel and hurried after Macnair, Goyle and Crabbe who were already disappearing around the corner of the corridor.
Don’t go there he wanted to scream but it wouldn’t make a difference. They were mindlessly following the other boy’s order. Mulciber had always been their brains.
Severus could feel the walls draw closer as he registered that the others had truly left him behind. With nowhere to go as the stairs up and down were both closed off.
Not that it came as a surprise that they would leave him to fend for himself.

Come the voice in his head repeated. Or … am I the one coming to you? Let’s find out.
That high-pitched laughter.
It sounded closer.

Severus turned to the stairs that would have led to the first floor. Frustratedly, he banged against the steel wall, but like with Crabbe, nothing gave way, no noise from the other side, no person to reason with, nobody to open the door for him. He was …

A mouse, the voice said patiently like an exasperated teacher, trapped in a hole.

“FUCK!” Severus grunted, borrowing Macnair’s foul language. “FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!”

***

Mulciber was already at the end of the white-walled corridor with the green-tinted ceiling lights when Severus caught up to him. However, as soon as his foot hit the black-painted corridor with the dim white lights, his previously lit wand turned dead.

“WHA–“

“Magic suppression,” Severus explained, his breath heavy as he came to a halt next to Mulciber.

“I know.” Mulciber sounded annoyed. “Let’s just leave already before Sluggy and that Auror let one of the dementors come after us!”

No word lost about his previous rebellion. The boy really had to be nervous about their current situation. Usually, it took a lot more to soothe Mulciber’s ruffled feathers. Severus had fully expected to do a lot of grovelling before being accepted into the group once more.

It was happening again. He could feel them. The other mind-users. Their emotions were a black mass that was drawing him in. A cacophony of voices, one uglier and more crazed than the other.

Weren’t they supposed to be rendered Squibs in their cells? Severus’ heart was beating fast as he trailed Mulciber through the dark corridor of closed doors.
Ten.
He had counted every single one of them.

“Are you afraid of the dark?” Mulciber rolled his eyes. Severus didn’t need to see that. He could hear it in the boy’s voice.

“Just a little.” Severus forced himself to breathe in through the nose. And out with his mouth. Like his mother had always done when his father had come home drunk and shouted abuse at them.

Then the black walls turned white again, the ceiling light held a green tint. A big sign above an open steel door told them that they were now in Wing B. Someone had closed off the stairs to the floor above.

“Another coward of a warden,” Mulciber growled as they passed the empty security desk. “Where are the others? They could have waited for us at least! Damn them!”
He threw Severus an unenthused, annoyed glance. “Don’t know if I’d rather be paired with you or them in the future. I hope the Dark Lord has some people that are a bit more competent than you guys. Afraid of the dark, really? What are you, five?”

“Let’s go down,” Severus replied quietly, burying the hot white anger about the insult in his heart. The voices were eerily quiet now. As if they were anticipating … something. He didn’t like it.
“Maybe we can find Brode,” he suggested, still thinking about Avery and Slughorn and that courageous warden. “I’d trust him to fight off the dementors a lot more than Scrimgeour.”

“True. Though I’d rather he got kissed in the process,” Mulciber muttered. “Damn Auror pest.”

They both lit their wands again as they hurried down the stairs to the first floor. There were two males arguing on the floor underneath. The voices sounded deep.

“Seriously, you three could have waited for –“ Mulciber started to complain as they turned around the corner of the stairs, only to come face to face with two fully-grown, adult men in prison uniforms. One of them sported a wild mess of a beard that hadn’t gotten a proper trim in weeks, the other … Severus had seen mere minutes ago on the front page of the Daily Prophet.
The prisoners stood next to the abandoned security desk, one behind it, one in front of it. Two pairs of eyes zoomed in on them.

“STU-“

“Tarq?” Mulciber exclaimed, cutting Severus off who had raised his wand in defense. Mulciber pushed himself forward, rushing towards the more deranged looking one of the two prisoners. “Tarquin, is that you?”

“By Merlin!” The man who stood behind the desk had raised his fist as if to come at them the Muggle-way. “What are you doing here, Marcus?”

“Field trip. I don’t have to ask what you are doing here, do I?”

“You know the brats?” The other man sounded hoarse but equally as young. Somewhere in his early twenties. His accent was thick and in the style of London’s back-alleys. He had rolled up the sleeves of his prison uniform to reveal some tattoos on his arms that looked distinctly Muggle. Unlike his friend. Tarquin. Whom Mulciber was acquainted with.
On his arm, there was a vicious-looking skull with a snake crawling all over.
Severus hadn’t seen it before. He recognised it nonetheless.
Instinctively, he took a step back and raised his wand a bit higher.

Please, he thought, don’t tell them what I am.
Because Mulciber knew. Made sure to voice it whenever he wanted to put Severus in his place.
Mudblood.

“Sure do, Mundungus.” Tarquin suddenly let his arm come down, making Severus flinch – only for him to pat Mulciber on the shoulder. “That’s my cousin! Marcus, that’s my old school friend Mundungus Fletcher. We go way back. He knows all my stories about you. So be nice to him, otherwise he is going to blackmail you!”

And Mulciber honest-to-God smiled as he shook hands with the other criminal.

Severus still kept his wand up, its tip switching aim between both adults. “I don’t want to disrupt this moving family reunion,” he said slowly, “but shouldn’t you two be behind bars?”
He didn’t know about that Tarquin guy, but this Mundungus character had burnt down the minister’s home. And killed one of the minister’s guards in the process.
Definitely not someone Severus wanted to turn his back to.

Mulciber’s cousin scowled at him in that haughty, Pureblood way: “Why, you want to put us back into our cells, brat?”

“He’s right, Tarq,” Mulciber cut in, but his tone of voice was much more jovial. “What’s going on? Why are you out of your cell? Is it only you or is the Dark Lord breaking everyone free? Was it you who made that weird announcement?”

“The breathy one?” His cousin snorted. “Nah, that was weird. We almost thought Brode had found out about our escape plan.”

“But how did you get out?” Severus repeated his question. Something about these two prisoners felt off. And it wasn’t just the way Mulciber’s cousin refused to come closer. He stood firmly behind the security desk. He let his eyes wander around the room. Was there another accomplice? “Azkaban’s the safest –“

Mundungus grinned broadly. “There ain’t no lock I can’t not pick, brat. ‘Specially for the right price.”

Both men shared a conspirative grin before turning their attention back on them. “By Merlin, Marcus, I can’t believe we get to see each other again like this. When I heard about the Hogwarts group, I didn’t want to get my hopes up … you see, everybody was talking about it, but -”

“Everybody.” Severus furrowed his brows. “I thought you didn’t get to meet other prisoners. Scrimgeour said –“

“There are ways in here to be in the know about things.” Tarquin cut him off impatiently. “But enough of that. You do your thing, we do ours. If someone’s asking, you didn’t see us, alright?” He bent over conspiratively: “We’re going to see each other during the summer meeting at Lucius’ place, right?”

Mulciber nodded vigorously: “Sure. Until then, you serve the Lord well, Tarq, okay?”

“Always.”

“And be careful! There are some angry dementors on the fourth floor of Wing A,” Mulciber warned. “That’s why we lost our group. There should be some wardens and Aurors running around, too.”

“Don’t worry,” Tarquin said with a wink, “Mundungus and I know how to take care of problems.”

For some reason, the comment made Fletcher’s mouth twist downward as if his friend’s words had disgusted him. Severus narrowed his eyes. The man noticed his stare; but it wasn’t Severus’ eyes that Fletcher was focussing on. His hungry stare rested on the tip of Severus’ wand. Fletcher was looking at it. Following every sway.

“We could use one of your wands to get out,” Fletcher said, “Right, Tarquin?”

The other man hummed.

Severus put his wand hand closer to his chest. Mulciber, though, seemed to have no doubts about those two men. He handed over his own wand to his cousin.
Making it one wand versus one wand.
Severus hated the odds. His eyes now fully rested on the wand tip that was casually directed at the ground.

“Oh, one more thing.” Mulciber piped up. “Did our friends pass through? “They’re about this tall,” he used his hand, “one is named –“

“No one came through.” Tarquin grunted. “Just you two.”

“And we’ve been on this floor the whole time!” Fletcher said.
The hairs on Severus’ arm stood up. That Daily Prophet article … Fletcher had killed an Auror. He would have been put on a red corridor. Not a green one like this.

“But that’s weird.” Mulciber furrowed his brow. Severus wanted to kick him in the shin. This was not the time to doubt those two. They should leave. Right. Now. “Goyle and Crabbe and Macnair went first. You should have seen them.”

“You were the first to come down these stairs.” Mundungus shook his head. “Maybe they went a different way.”

“That makes no sense. We were heading downstairs!”

“Well, sometimes things just make you change your plans,” Mundungus suggested. “Like when you walk forward and get stabbed in the back and fall down.”

That literally made no sense. Severus didn’t dare to say that out loud, though, as Tarquin was bobbing his head in agreement. He wanted to get away from those nutters as soon as possible. So Severus remained quiet. And focused on the wand in Tarquin’s hand.

“Let’s not see each other again,” Fletcher said, making a gesture for them to walk past towards the corridor that would lead to the first floor of Wing A. “No offense.”

“None taken.” Mulciber laughed and high-fived his cousin before moving towards the other corridor that held a blue-ish tint. Severus had hesitated a second too long; both criminals were now glancing towards him. Speculatively.
With a gulp, he walked past the security desk.

Look behind the visible, the voice that would not shut up whispered. It was much softer than before. Amused.
By now, Severus knew it to be a trap. That voice fed on his misery.
Look.

He didn’t have the strength to withstand that command.
As he walked past Mundungus Fletcher who smelled of tobacco and alcohol, he nodded towards Tarquin and … leaned his head to the side to look behind the security desk.
A hand.

“Bye, Marcus’ friend.” Tarquin had a broad, knowing smile on his face. “See you never.”

Severus looked up in the man’s crazed glint. Then he quietly nodded before walking past the desk and the warden’s corpse behind it.
He walked. Step for step. His eyes fixated on Mulciber’s back who had no idea. No idea at all what monster he had just created.

Maybe it was a thank you. No spell hit Severus in the back.
After all, they had handed Mundungus Fletcher and his Death Eater pal a wand.

The ceiling lights turned blue as Severus and Mulciber re-entered the first floor of Wing A.

The voice in his head was snickering.

Mice. In a hole. Come. Or am I coming to you? How many am I, and how many are you?

Chapter Text

The blue corridor was just as abandoned as the second floor above them.

“I don’t get it,” Mulciber mumbled. “Where is everyone?”

“Let’s look for Brode downstairs,” Severus suggested. His heart was still beating too fast as he couldn’t keep himself from watching the connecting corridor to Wing B. Where Fletcher and Mulciber’s cousin were probably off murdering the warden on the ground floor.

“Can’t believe Goyle and Crabbe and Macnair ran off. Are they idiots? Why would they have gone upstairs? Don’t get me wrong, they may not know the difference between left and right, but up and down? That’s so strange.”

Severus leaned against the corridor wall of closed cell doors. The blue ceiling light had a calming effect on him. As Scrimgeour had said: Blue was their friend. Nothing but illegal potions dealers and spouse-beaters and thieves behind these steel doors. Downright relaxing.
“I think …. “ Severus hesitated but the damage was done. Mulciber had stopped and looked at him with suspicion. No going back now. “I think ... Goyle convinced Crabbe to go rescue Avery. They were debating something rather heatedly while we had a look at the map.”

“You’re joking.” Mulciber didn’t sound amused. At all. “Even so, there is no way Macnair would follow –! Oh, there is. He wanted to stop them. Those fucking morons!”
Mulciber swirled around and hit his fist against the wall. “Those idiots manage to trip over their own damn feet! What do they expect to do against those dementors? Huh!?”
Then he turned towards Severus again and grabbed him by the collar, dragging him back a step until Severus hit the wall with his back. “And why didn’t you say anything before?” He let Severus go as if he was dirt. “What am I even complaining about? Nobody around here is even remotely capable!” Mulciber threw his hands into the air before storming off towards the stairs. “Let’s get Brode, for Merlin’s sake!”

Apparently, Severus had hesitated too much, as Mulciber threw him a nasty glare. “Hurry up!”

Severus stumbled after the other Slytherin boy. As he passed the security desk, he glanced behind it but … just a stain on the floor. Red. Like blood. Or tea, he reminded himself fiercely. Just tea.
His stomach made a somersault.
They must have disrupted Fletcher and Mulciber’s cousin while they had been disposing of the body. The others seemed to be stuffed away somewhere.
His eyes drifted towards the row of closed cell doors. Then up to the ceiling tiles.
Somewhere.

“Your cousin,” Severus asked quietly as they reached the stairs, “what’s he doing time for?”

“Oh, this and that.” Mulciber made an off-hand gesture. “Actually, you should know the answer. It was splashed all over the Daily Prophet a couple of months ago. It wasn’t even that bad, but the ministry will take what it gets. They knew he was a follower. Well, it’s literally written on his arm. But his punishment definitely didn’t fit his crime. They couldn’t get him for following the Dark Lord, so they gave him 15 years for a joke!”

Severus had the vague notion that it might not have been a joke for whoever had ended up on the other side of the man’s wand.

“Never heard of a Tarquin Mulciber,” he admitted.

“Tarquin McTavish!”

Yeah, Severus still drew a blank. He did follow the news, but if it had happened during the holidays … Spinner’s End was a magical black hole.

“He trapped a Muggle in a teakettle.” Mulciber snickered.

Severus didn’t get the joke. Yet he forced a small nervous laugh.
What was he even doing with his life?

***

Severus could honest to God say he had never felt as relieved to see these green eyes as he did now.

“Lily!” he couldn’t keep himself from saying a touch too loud, skipping the last step of the stairs. A long sigh escaped his lips.

Both girls still had their wands trained on them but Severus could tell that their shoulders fell down instantly. Not considering them the threat they had been on the look-out for.

“What are you two doing here?” Lily challenged, just as Mulciber came to a halt next to Severus.

“Where’s Brode, Mudblood?”

“Take that back!” Macdonald demanded. Her voice always reminded Severus of a little mouse. Her blond curls and thick bangs almost hid her eyes from them.

“No take-backsies, Macdonald. Grow up already. Oh, sorry, I forgot that’s not in your genes.”

Mulciber pushed past Macdonald whose small body didn’t offer enough resistance.

“You take that back right now,” Lily demanded icily. Her wand was trained on Mulciber.

“Where is the rest of your ragtag group?” Mulciber ignored her. Severus understood why. The ground floor held a lot less Gryffindors than he had expected. It wasn’t as chaotic or scary as the above floors. The cell doors remained closed, the ceiling light actually worked (how had Brode managed that? Well, magic, duh, but how), and the security desk did have a living and breathing warden sitting in front of it. Albeit the man looked rather stressed, the way he was merely throwing them a dirty glance and leafing through a thick book. It looked like a manual.

“You’re supposed to be in the canteen until Mr Brode returns from the announcement room to remove whatever of you jokers snuck in there to scare everybody,” the warden told them. “As I was just telling these young ladies that I found down in Wing C! Why is everybody doing whatever they want today? Bloody Aurors,” he muttered under his breath. “We only ever get the leftovers since that damn war began. No wonder they can’t even manage a horde of teenagers, let alone criminals.”

“There’s dementors loose on the fourth floor,” Mulciber informed the warden. Severus was almost impressed by how conversational it sounded by now. As if he was getting used to telling people that piece of 10 minute old news.

“What?”
The warden blanched. His moment of inattentiveness made the tag fall out of his thick book as it snapped shut. Guideline for Guides, a riveting read, Severus was sure. Hopefully the man actually knew some security procedures by heart.

“Dementors,” Severus repeated helpfully. The girls’ eyes grew wide. “On the fourth floor. Scrimgeour might need some help to calm them.”

The warden stared at him like a doe caught in the headlights of a car.

“What do you mean there are dementors on the loose?” Lily asked. The shock had made her forget that she wasn’t interacting with Severus anymore. Right now, she was openly staring him in the eyes.

“It means there are dementors. Roaming on the fourth floor,” Mulciber replied. “And we lost three of our friends on the way. Now, I’d like to get into that canteen, please.”

The warden was clutching his manual against his chest as his head wandered to the ceiling. “Yes … I see … I should inform Mr Brode … “

“No way!” Lily exclaimed, and her yell made the warden twitch. “You have to go up there and help! That’s your job!”

The warden looked at her helplessly as only a thirty year old man could that wasted away his best years in a prison when he hadn’t even been sentenced himself. “Now, Miss, not in that tone –“

“She’s right!” Macdonald agreed, her hands in fists as she found the courage to speak up. Not her biggest strength. How that girl had ended up in Gryffindor … Severus had no idea. “You need to help right now! We can get Mr Brode as back-up ourselves!”

“But the manual doesn’t say –“ The warden’s voice faltered, then he bit his lip. White as a sheet, he nodded and took out his own wand, still clutching the manual against his chest. “I suppose … but you have to promise to hurry … Mr Brode is the best at dealing with those creatures … gosh …”

And the warden stumbled up the stairs. Leaving the four of them in their weird stand-off.
Severus’ eyes found the main entrance door. It was shut, but his fingers itched to ditch the rest of them and just run off.
He didn’t like to feel trapped.

But … Severus noticed Lily’s stare. She had caught him looking at the door. And disapproved.
Coward, those eyes seemed to say.

“We’ll get Brode,” Severus suggested, “you two go to the others in the canteen to warn them about the dementors.”

“No.” Lily’s contradiction came fast. “Who knows, maybe you two set the dementors loose yourself and you’re out to kill Brode or something.”

“You’re not serious!” Severus hissed. “You cannot be serious, Lily!”

“Don’t call me by my name!”

“Why not, I don’t see you calling me Mr Snape, do I?”

They were both giving each other the evil eye, only for their stand-off to be broken by Macdonald’s mousy squeaking. Annoying. “Where’s your wand, Mulciber?”

That made both boys stand up straight, mouths shut tight. The girls noticed the tense mood. Lily narrowed her eyes on them.

“What’s it to you, Mudblood?”

“That was a simple question,” Lily interjected.

“Just as simple as mine was, yet you ignored me too. Or what were you Mudbloods doing in Wing C?”

Now it was the girls’ turn to become all tight-lipped. They shared a nervous glance. As if Mary and Lily were conversing silently. “Toilet,” Lily claimed. “You know how us girls always go together.”

A nasty remark burnt on Severus’ tongue, but he bit it down. Oh, should Macdonald and Lily engage in foreplay in a prison corridor for all he cared!

“You and Snape go to the announcement room,” Macdonald suggested. “I don’t know the Patronus charm, and Mulciber doesn’t have a wand.”

“But Mary –“
“Don't underestimate me, Macdonald! I am dangerous even without a wand, believe me!”

“It’s only logical,” Macdonald squeaked nervously, lowering her head so that the bangs hid her face down to her nose. “Please, Lily. It’ll be fine.”

“You hate Mulciber,” Lily openly said, drawing a Hey from said Slytherin. Severus heard her real argument, though.
And I hate Snape.

“I don’t know the Patronus charm either,” Severus said cooly. “So you two can be on your merry way to warn Brode.”

Lily’s eyes turned to steel. “Why don’t you want to be in a different group than Mulciber?” she asked suspiciously. “Do you plan to cause trouble behind our backs?”

Severus rolled his eyes. “Yes, I intend to free all prisoners and become chief of Azkaban with my personal army of murderers and rapists. You foiled my plans. Oh no. Maybe your boyfriend can Avada Kedavra me to save the world from my reign. Then he can stay right here in the cell he deserves.”

Lily’s hand hit his cheek hard enough to twist his head around with the sheer force.
It burnt.
Severus didn’t turn his cheek back. He simply stared at the wall.

Silence had fallen over their group of four. Then Lily said quietly but determinedly: “Come then. Snape.” His last name was an insult on her lips. “Let’s get to the announcement room.”

He made eye contact. “Do go first,” he whispered harshly. “Because I don’t trust you to have my back. Evans.”

***

His cheek hurt. And for once, he relished in the pain.
Severus was used to this. Had been smacked around by his father, by stupid Muggle children in their elementary class, by older kids on the playground, had even once been hit by his mother when he had threatened his father with his own magic. He still didn't understand her. All the time, she allowed that man to trample over them. Eileen Snape had never used her magic to defend herself. Or her son. And when Severus had finally taken a stance … had the courage to speak up when she didn’t … she had slapped him across the face.
Just like Lily.
Well. Now he knew where he stood.
Love and hate, he supposed. They were close neighbours. Why else could you swing between the two of them so easily like a pendulum that was given a push?

Severus could take all the swear words. Could take the humiliation, could take the insults and reprimands. But he would not let himself be hit anymore. Especially not by a ... Mudblood.

No word had passed their lips on the way to the announcement room. Once they got Brode, this nightmare of a trip would end. Brode would take care of the dementors and hopefully snag Fletcher and McTavish before they caused more suffering. Maybe Severus could give the Auror a hint. Something that Mulciber couldn’t trace back to him.

The door to the announcement room stood open.

“Mr Brode,” Lily spoke up as the two of them got close to the door at the end of the row of cells. “There’s been an emergency. We need you to –“

The room was completely dark. The lights had been switched off despite the lit corridor.

Lily felt for the light switch, pressed it. And the ceiling light flickered on, revealing a small room that held a single desk with a microphone.
Brode’s hand was still clutching it. He looked almost asleep, the way his head rested on the desk and he sat bent forward. His other hand dangled on his side to where his wand had fallen onto the ground. As a thick, black dagger had pierced him from the back, gone through his heart and come out on the other side. The hilt kept the wound closed. Barely a dribble of blood down his shirt.

“What … “ Lily stumbled backwards, hitting Severus who hadn’t expected her weight and lost his footing as well until they both crashed against the corridor wall. “… oh my god …”
Her breathing quickened. Severus smacked his hands over her mouth, lest she scream. Lily, however, bit his hand, extracting herself from his grip to take two steps to the other corridor wall, only for her to collapse on herself. From her seated position, she was staring at Brode’s corpse. “ … oh my god …”

Well. He had an advantage on Lily. This wasn't his first body this day.

Severus forced himself to stretch out his hand, touching Brode’s wrist. It was still warm.
Then he grabbed the wand off the floor, slid a metre back, so that he could throw the door to the announcement room shut.

“Colloportus,” he whispered, using his own wand as Brode’s felt … dirty. Then turned to Lily. “... we need to get the others from the canteen and take them to the beach.”

Those green eyes rested on the red x that now sealed the announcement room. “What the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know,” he replied brutally honest. “But I’d rather be everywhere else than this place.”

Brode was gone.
Had been lured to the announcement room. Then killed from behind.

The laughter in his head gave him a migraine.
How many are you?, that familiar voice repeated. Or should I ask: How many of you are left?

Chapter Text

His fingers were bathing in sweat, yet Severus did not dare change the grip on his wand as the two of them hurried through the corridor of closed cell doors towards the canteen.
He couldn’t shake his paranoia, so Severus found himself twisting and turning his head to check each and every darkened corner that they were passing. The shadows, he felt, possessed eyes. Were staring back.

Somewhere in this building, there was a murderer.

Well. There were probably dozens of those on the floors above, but at least one of them was on the loose.
Or make it three. He had almost forgotten about Fletcher and McTavish who were running rampant in Wing B. If only he could convince himself that this was their doing.
But … that voice in his head …
It had hinted at Brode’s fate long before Severus and Lily had actually found the corpse.

There were small sobs coming from Lily’s direction. Severus didn’t comfort her. Didn’t know what to say. She held her wand up high, though. Ready to defend herself. Each and all antagonism between the two of them had ceased immediately in the face of Brode’s untimely death.
Truce.
For now.

“Do you think he suffered a lot?” Lily suddenly asked. Her nose sounded stuffed.

“… it was a straight-forward kill.”
Like a gamekeeper who culled its prey.

“Don’t make it sound so …. “

“Factual?” He listened into the foreboding silence around them, but there was no noise from above as they passed the stairs. Their steps were like fired bullets on the tiled floor, echoing off the walls back to them. “Somebody wanted rid of Brode, and they did the deed. Efficiently as fuck.”

His language made Lily flinch.

How kind of you to appreciate the effort that has gone into it.

Severus refrained from answering. Communicating with the voice felt dangerous … as if he would invite it further in should he acknowledge it. No matter how much he concentrated on shutting the voice out, it just kept on talking. His Occlumency shields didn’t even muffle it at all.

Of course, they don’t. Your technique is sub-par. Were you taught in a gutter?

He clenched his teeth and continued walking at their rushed pace towards the canteen. The voice was trying to get a rise from him. Severus refused to play into that. If he lost control of his emotions, that would make it even easier to invade his mind.
Somebody else’s amusement bled through, making him shudder all over from the unwanted touch on his mind.

Whatever lunatic he was talking to … it had to be an incredibly gifted wizard. As Scrimgeour had said earlier: Mind-readers were freaks of nature. Dangerous. To be locked away in magic-dampening areas.
His mother had been so incredibly scared for him when he had been a child. Had dragged him away from the playground with force whenever Severus would answer another child’s thoughts without a care in the world. He had caused her so much grief – had kept forgetting and fighting her rules as he hadn’t understood the risks. Severus still remembered the slap to his face, the scrubbing of all of their floors after his nine-year-old self had out-played a scammer downtown that had taken all of Lily’s pocket-money – unlike her, he would always find the marble hidden underneath one of the shuffled paper cups. Severus had brought home his earnings. It hadn’t placated his mother at all.
She had finally sat him down. Had told him about what the magical world did to deviants like him. In all the gory details. Since then, Severus had been very careful with his accursed gift. He had finally shared her fear. Because knowledge was a currency that could get you killed just as quickly as it made you rich.
Like most mind-readers, Severus hid his ability thereafter. Nobody at Hogwarts was in the know. Apart from Lily. And he prayed to God that she had kept his secret.

The thought of encountering a like-minded person, someone with the same gift … it filled Severus with dread, if anything.
There had always been rumours that Dumbledore and the Dark Lord had taught themselves the obscure art of mind-reading. Severus couldn’t say whose intrusion on his thoughts he personally feared more, but it had driven him to study Occlumency. Especially after he considered joining. Since fifth year, he would go to bed early to spend 15 minutes doing nothing but imagine walls of thorns and concrete and brick, and he would layer them one behind another to make himself a fortress.

Had the library book taught him rubbish, though? The voice certainly wasn’t affected by his efforts at all.
And then there was the matter of eye contact. Severus had never managed to intrude on somebody’s thoughts without being in the same room. Gazing into their eyes. This voice … it seemed like it was inside of him.
What kind of legilimency was this? Severus had never experienced something like it. So … overwhelming. As if he was facing an opponent far outside his league.

Foreign laughter was echoing through his head.

***

Kudos to McGonagall. Severus was actually impressed at the barrier of tables and chairs that the elderly woman had magically erected to barricade the door to the canteen to keep the dementors out. Once they had called out their names to identify themselves from the outside, Lily and he were let in, only for McGonagall to rearrange the furniture behind them again.
The professor’s hair was ruffled, with some of her pins gone as she had to have torn at her bun. Long strands of grey hair had fallen down and were hanging over her shoulder. It made her seem frail, almost. Especially the way Potter was badgering her and talking heatedly at her. For once, that stupid oaf didn’t even pay Lily any attention.

“Please, Professor,” he argued, using his full height to tower over her, “You have to let me –“

“Mr Potter!” she cried out with a scowl. “One more word out of your mouth and by Merlin, I will –“ McGonagall cut herself of. She lowered her wand as the furniture wall had completed itself, and turned her head towards Lily and Severus who stood near the sealed entrance awkwardly. “Mr Mulciber and Miss Macdonald informed us about the trouble upstairs. Did you two find Mr Brode?”

The eyes of all students came to rest on them nervously. Lupin, Macdonald and Pettigrew sat huddled together on the ground underneath the window at the corner opposite of the door. Mulciber had decided to keep some distance – he was leaning against the wall to the side. Unlike them, he seemed almost bored, the way he had his arms crossed and stared outside the barred window. It was still raining, and thunder was chasing across the sky. Outside, it was almost … black.

“Professor, Mr Brode is –“ Lily began, when Severus cut her off, directing a sharp question at McGonagall: “Where’s Black?”

That drove a grimace across Potter’s face. “Professor McGonagall, I think –“

“What did I tell you, Mr Potter? I do not require you to speak! You have made your point entirely clear the past ten minutes!”

He scowled at their teacher.

“Was Black eaten by a dementor?” Severus half-way joked, fed up by being ignored as those two continued snapping at each other.

“Sadly not,” Mulciber replied.

“I’ll give you sadly, you piece of –“

“Mr Potter!”

“Sirius ran off,” Lupin finally answered. His face was deathly pale and he was almost hugging Macdonald who still wore his jacket. Severus couldn’t tell who was holding onto whom as they seemed to offer each other comfort. Urgh. If bestiality was Macdonald’s thing, so be it. Lupin had a thing for wet blankets, apparently. On his other side, Pettigrew was shaking in his boots. The mousy lump was rocking back and forth, mumbling something about consequences. His eyes were unfocused, as if he had retreated far into himself and wasn’t aware of his surroundings anymore.

“You let Black run off?” Severus asked incredulously. Typical! That pompous ass probably wanted to show off his fighting skills to the Aurors or something like that!

“Oh, shut up! We didn’t let him do anything! He just ran and –“

“Mr Potter!” McGonagall pointed with her finger towards the empty corner of the room. “Kindly do calm your temper over there! I have had enough of you now!”

The boy opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, closed it. Like a child who was unaccustomed to being told off. Hah. Then Potter stormed off to the corner. He was tapping his foot impatiently against the floor, though, and kept looking at the clock on the wall. As if to count the seconds that he had been separated from his one true love. Severus would cry a tear or two for him. They really had more important things to do than mollycoddle that giant baby.

“Now. Miss Evans, did you two find Brode?” McGonagall repeated her question tiredly.

Oh yes the voice in his head stated amused, you definitely did.

“Professor, he –“ Lily began once more, and regret coloured her voice. She was looking for the words to admit that there was a murderer on the loose. “Mr Brode, he –“ She inhaled deeply. “He was gone –“

Watch.

Severus jump-startled as if the voice had given him an electric shock. There was no plan to his action. Just … instinct. He grabbed Lily’s wrist in a way that would leave a violent bruise and drew a pained gasp. “What Lily meant to say is: Brode must have already gone upstairs to help.”

And he watched. All of them. As the students’ eyes rested on Lily and him, Severus stared back. Looking from one person to another. Not enough time to read each of them individually, but their emotions and faces were an open book to him.

Lily tried to shake his grip off, but Severus insisted. Bore his fingers even more into her skin.

“What are you –“ she spoke up angrily, breaking Severus’ concentration as he tried to dive deeper into the minds before him. She mustn’t –! Severus cast a silent Langlock with the wand he held behind his back. Lily’s eyes threw curses at him as she tried to tear herself away from his grip, to open her mouth, but –

“Thank Merlin!” McGonagall breathed out. She was rubbing her eyes. “I will skin Albus alive for this heart-attack,” she continued to mutter. “I told him this was a bad idea, but does this man ever listen!?”

Lily finally twisted her arm free and was about to raise her wand (to attack him? To free herself from the curse?) when Severus bent over, forcing their gazes to meet for a second.
Someone killed Brode. What if it was one of them?

Lily’s head went back in revulsion as the idea alone disgusted her. Severus took a step back, releasing her from the silencing spell. She had other plans, though. Lily grabbed the collar of his uniform shirt to pull him intimately close so that she could speak into his ear. “Are you nuts? None of us would have a motive –“

He whispered back: “You should hope it was one of us … or would you rather there was somebody else running around this prison?”

Lily’s green eyes were wide and unsettled as she studied him intensely. Realisation dawned on her face.

“Get away from her already, Snivellus!”
Potter had stormed over and pushed Severus to the side until his back collided with the canteen wall. His hair was utterly dishevelled from running his hands through it, and he glared at Severus icily before taking Lily’s hand and dragging her to their group of friends.
Lily held his gaze from across the room.

“This is good news,” McGonagall addressed them all. “Once the Aurors manage to secure control over the tower, they will let us know. Until then, we will stay right here. I’ll transform some chess boards for you, if you want to –”

“We should get out of the tower, Professor. Right now!” Lily held onto her boyfriend’s hand as if she found strength in Potter’s proximity. “There’s weird things happening and I don’t feel safe! Can’t we go to the beach and take the portkey back to Hogwarts?”

“Yeah,” Pettigrew readily agreed, jumping to his feet. “Please, Professor! Before we get killed!”

Lupin and Macdonald also got on their feet, leaning on each other for comfort. “It’s getting late and I’d rather not be here until night time.” Lupin’s eyes seemed to implore McGonagall as the wall clock struck 3 pm. “Who knows how long the Aurors will need to get the dementors under control!”

“Mr Lupin. I hardly think –“

“I can’t see any dementors outside. Seems definitely safer than in here where I did see dementors,” Mulciber said from his window position. “If the portkey still works, we should activate it. Maybe Slughorn has taken the others back to Hogwarts already and we are the stupid ones for remaining behind.”

No matter what kind of coward Slughorn was, Severus doubted he would have bolted down to the ground floor and just left them all behind to rush to the beach.

“…all right.” McGonagall nodded, her eyes swiftly jumping between the barricaded door, the progressing fingers of the wall clock and her unsettled students. “I suppose we could –“

“No!” It was Potter who suddenly spoke up and let his girlfriend’s hand fall down. He stomped over to McGonagall, rightening himself up once more as if to impose his will on her. “I told you, we have to go after Sirius before something bad happens! If you are all cowards, then I can do that –“

“And I told you I’ll not have you cause any more trouble! It’s bad enough one of you disregarded my authority like that!” McGonagall pressed her lips together. “Safety in numbers. I will not have you go missing as well, Mr Potter!”

“But I need to –“

“I said: NO!”

Frustrated, Potter hit his fist against the wall of the canteen and walked up and down like a caged tiger. “But –“

“Cease this childish behaviour at once! This is not the time nor the place –”

“I have to find Sirius, please! Or else –”

“Mr Potter, one more word out of you, and I will –“

“I don’t care if you dismiss me from school!” he shouted. “I’ll go after Sirius with or without your permission!”

McGonagall and Potter glared at one another in a way Severus would have never thought possible. Usually, the professor seemed star-struck by that dumb idiot and his Quidditch talent.

“Please, James.” Lily’s hand found the sleeve of his uniform. She softly pulled at it to get his attention. “Let’s get everyone to safety first. Then we can alert the ministry or something.”

Mulciber shuffled over to Severus’ side and rolled with his eyes at the Gryffindors’ antics.

***

Severus walked next to Mulciber as their small group trekked back to the entrance door of Wing A. In his mind, he was mulling about the other students’ reactions to his lie about Brode’s condition.
Mulciber, the asshole that he was, did not give a damn about Brode. Go figure. But the Slytherin boy had also been with Severus at all times. First on their tour with Scrimgeour, then later on as well. He may have the inclination to kill Brode for attacking his pride earlier, but not the opportunity.
Lily’s reaction to the corpse could have been fake. But even in his inherent grudge against her, he couldn’t imagine her as a cold-blooded killer.
Macdonald was still covered in her own snot and tears from when she had heard about the dementors. She and Pettigrew were the biggest scaredy-cats he knew.
Then there was Lupin. Lupin was a monster in human skin. Maybe he had left the group to go to the toilet and offed Brode for the fun of it. Not likely, but the alternative culprits didn’t sound any more promising.
Well. There was Potter. He definitely was capable of murder.
Just like Black.
Or maybe McTavish and Fletcher had freed more prisoners and they’d –

So many accusations, the voice commented. You are missing the most important question.

No, Severus wasn’t. He simply didn’t care why as long as he could identify the who.

***

They definitely weren’t going to get out through the main entrance. Severus stared at the wall of blue flames that was blazing ceiling-high in a perfectly drawn half-circle in front of the door.
McGonagall had her arms stretched out as if to hold all of them back. They weren’t idiots. None of them was about to touch the flames that had not even flinched at their attempts of aguamenti. Neither water nor lack of air nor magic-dissolving spells had any effect on the fire. It didn’t spread. It stayed in that perfect line like a drawn boundary.

“What is that?” Macdonald asked Lupin. Her voice was coloured by alarm.

“I … don’t know.”

“Fiendfyre.” Mulciber whistled quietly. “That’s dark!”

“Do try to sound less impressed,” McGonagall said through clenched teeth. “And this is not fiendfyre! Have you not paid any attention in Defense Against the Dark Arts? That colour –! It has to be Mr Brode’s attempt to prevent escapes while the stations aren’t manned!”

Well. Severus didn’t agree on the authorship of that spell, but McGonagall was right. Unlike fiendfyre, these flames did not continue to consume their environment. They stayed – blocking anyone from leaving and everyone from coming into the tower.
A deathtrap.
That’s what it was.

“Are there more exits?” Lupin asked.

“No.” Severus had studied the map quite well. “This is the only one.”

McTavish and Fletcher would be furious to have their escape route gone. Severus just hoped this didn’t kindle their murder lust.

“We can go through Wing C,” Lily suddenly piped up. “It’s not an official exit, but Mary and I saw a large windowfront there – we could explode the glass and –! It leads to the back of the tower, and there are only a handful of rocks to climb around, but we could use magic to make it safer and –“

“And when, pray tell, were you two in Wing C?” McGonagall had her eyes narrowed, still futilely casting different spells on the fire that kept them caged in Azkaban.

“We got a bit lost while we were looking for the toilet.” Macdonald bit her bottom lip.

“That’s bullshit!” Potter was still pacing in front of the flames, his eyes burnt with anger. “Some maybe window at the other end of the prison! We should be looking for the others upstairs! You said it yourself, Professor: Safety in numbers!”

“This fire -! No. Miss Evans. Lead the way to Wing C, please. We should return to Hogwarts asap!” McGonagall didn’t even acknowledge Potter’s outburst. Nor the boy’s shout of anger. Instead, she made to move after Lily who at first walked cautiously, then hurried.

Lupin and Potter were the last ones; Severus could hear them argue in a whispering tone behind his back as he and Mulciber followed Pettigrew, Macdonald, McGonagall and Lily. Potter was dragging his feet, the distance becoming ever greater.

There was a big portal that connected Wing A und Wing C; the first of their group had already reached it without any more weird shenanigans.

“You don’t understand!” Potter was still shouting abuse at Lupin. “Sirius is going to do something really stupid. We need to –“

“McGonagall is going to have you in detention until the end of the school year if you contradict her one more time!”

“Remus, I –! Argh! You just don’t understand!”

“No, James! It’s you who doesn’t understand. This is not about you or Sirius! Azkaban is dangerous!”

“Oi! Can you two stop that?” Mulciber had turned around with a scowl. “Your voices are so annoying! Nobody cares for your lover’s spat!”

Lupin and Potter looked flabbergasted and disgusted by the implication. Severus and Mulciber were about to pass the portal, when –

I wonder … would you pass a trial by fire?

Fire.
… Fire …?

Severus turned around, and at the end of the corner of Wing A, there was a cloaked person. The face was under a hood – like a dementor. A wand was directed at Severus. No.
At the portal.

“WATCH OUT!” Severus cried out as he jumped to the side, away from Mulciber and the portal.
The other boy had his eyes wide in confusion, his gaze a single question.
Before he was swallowed by a wall of blue fire.
Mulciber’s screams chased through every cell in Severus’ body, bore into his head through his ringing ears.
A cacophony of shouting.
Lily, Macdonald, even McGonagall. His ears were ringing.
He, too. His own voice.
As he stared the blazing flames that had swallowed Mulciber whole. Where was his outline?
Severus couldn’t see anymore.

Two foreign hands grabbed his arms, dragged him further back. Only now did he notice the punishingly hot air that burnt on his cheek.
With combined forces, Potter and Lupin had evacuated him from the zone where the fire was blazing wildly. They could not see anything inside it. Nor behind it.

He certainly did not pass the test, the voice merely stated. I am losing my patience. No more running, boy. Meet me upstairs.

Severus’ head swished back but the figure was already gone. The end of the corridor lay empty.

“Oh, Merlin,” Lupin was breathing harshly into Severus’ ear as he knelt on the floor shaking all over. “Merlin! He’s dead. He’s dead, isn’t he? Oh, Merlin …”
Then there was retching, and Severus felt warm droplets hit his shoulder as Lupin had thrown up on the ground.
The dancing flames cast a blue light on Potter’s face. His eyes rested on the burning portal.

“… are you alright?” McGonagall’s shrill voice sounded out from behind the fire wall. “Potter, Snape, Lupin!?”

More retching next to him. Severus could understand why. The air smelt like burnt meat.

“ … yes … we’re …. fine ….” Potter’s voice sounded faint despite him sitting next to them on the ground. He was shielding his face with his hand from the heatwave. Maybe there was a tear. Severus couldn’t tell.

“What happened?” Pettigrew’s terrified squeak. And sobbing in the distance.

“Yes, what happened?” Lupin repeated, still bent over and spitting out the leftovers in his mouth. It was a brown soup colouring the tiles next to Severus’ hands. Acid and meat and – Severus pressed his hands in front of his own mouth, as tears sprang into his own eyes.

“… self-activation,” he forced out. Buried his face in his elbow. “It self-activated.”
He couldn’t have the others break out in panic.
Couldn’t share his knowledge.

Together, they sat on the ground, all strength drained from their limbs, It was McGonagall’s shout, the adult voice of reason that finally freed them from their emotional paralysis.
The realisation that it could have been them instead.

“Upstairs! We will meet up on the first floor!”

There was sobbing and panicked words criss-crossing each other, but Severus had understood McGonagall’s order loud and clear. So had Potter and Lupin by the lack of antagonism. Together, they dashed towards the stairs. Severus didn’t want to, tried not to. But he found himself looking back into the flames. Yet no person came through.

***

Mulciber hadn’t been his friend.
Severus had hated that power-hungry, selfish boy from the moment they had been put in the same dorm room.
Each year, it was Mulciber who had decided the sleeping arrangements. Who got which bed. Which closet. Bathroom times.
Mulciber had made him write his potions essays. And defence essays. And do the Arithmancy exercises.
He would always talk about the Dark Lord and his family connections, and he would buy incredibly expensive Christmas presents with no personal knowledge of what Severus might even enjoy.
Mulciber, who had trusted the Dark Lord’s mark enough to simply hand over his wand to his deranged cousin.
He had kept their ragtag group of Slytherins together.
Mulciber had ridiculed him for his Muggle father and Muggle ways … yet he had included him.

Where did that leave Severus?

It couldn’t be. Just this morning, Mulciber had made some tasteless Mudblood jokes at breakfast in the dining hall. He had talked back to Brode and led their Slytherin group after they had been abandoned by the adults.

It couldn’t be. Mulciber just couldn’t be dead. Not gone like that. In a blink of an eye.

There was another wall of blue flames on the first floor. And on the second floor. Always blocking their paths towards Wing C.

“What’s going on?” Potter was out of breath from all the stairs. He stood bent over to hold his knees. From the other side, they could hear McGonagall have a hated debate with her group of students.

“… there’s something seriously wrong with this place.” Lupin sounded hoarse. He was scrubbing his mouth with the back of his hand. That might erase the stains, but not the sour stench of bile that cloaked him.

Severus also stared into the sea of blue flames. That man in black … he was driving them upstairs. Severus was certain of it.

What are you waiting for? Do you need another invitation? I. Am. Waiting.

Chapter Text

“Professor! What are we supposed to do?” Lupin shouted over the sea of blue flames that parted their two groups by making it impossible for them to cross the threshold into the other prison wing. Stuck. That’s what they were. “Professor! Please!” Desperation coloured the wolf’s voice.

Severus stood with his back pressed against the corridor wall, staring straight into the flames, right at where he could see the four wobbly shadows huddling together. Quiet sobs filled the air.
Stop being such crybabies, he wanted to snarl at Macdonald and Lily. You hated him. Stop pretending that you care!
It had been Mulciber who had made Macdonald dance like a puppet in front of everyone. Who had forced her to strip in the courtyard as the fifth-years had met, one group walking to, one walking away from Sprout’s class.

That was definitely Lily’s voice trying to soothe her friend. Unbelievable. Macdonald was shedding tears for Mulciber.
Gryffindors truly were idiots.
Severus’ eyes stung alike.
… idiots. All of them.

On the other side of the blue fire, a Scottish brogue broke out in a long stream of curses. A language truly more suited to a sailor than their elderly professor. McGonagall rarely displayed her heritage, but it seemed like today was the day. “You three stay exactly where you are! We will come get you from the other side!”

Severus froze. The image of McTavish and Fletcher swam to the forefront of his mind. Those two were running rampant in Wing B. Granted, he had last seen them on the first rather than the second floor, but …
Should he warn them?
That would definitely raise uncomfortable questions about what Mulciber and he had been up to, and why he hadn’t said anything before, and –
Maybe it was a good idea to let McGonagall walk into that mess. Better her than Severus himself. She would know how to deal with two adult wizards out for murder.
Probably.

“But Professor!” Pettigrew squeaked from somewhere on the other side. “What if we run into the dementors!? Can’t you take Lily, Mary and me to the beach first, and then go back inside to get Remus and James –”

“I will not lose anymore of you! I can’t –!“ Her voice broke away like a rock starting an emotional landslide. “We will leave together or not at all!”

Lily’s voice was shrill: “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to leave without James and Remus either, but I think Peter’s right. We should –!”

“What did I tell you back at Hogwarts before we left? You lot do as I say!”

That shut up the three Gryffindors on the other side. Severus could see their heads hanging in defeat, and the shadows were moving away from the connecting path already, and –

“NO! Professor!” Lupin banged his fist against the wall next to the blue fire. “That will take forever! You can’t leave us here all alone –! We could try the next floor, maybe there’s no fire separating our wings there –“
Lupin’s protest was drowned out by the sound of rushed footsteps as McGonagall’s group turned around. Almost instantly, their shadows were gone from behind the fire that kept burning and licking at the air, yet staying perfectly in place, blocking their path forward.

You are free to join me upstairs whenever you feel like it, the voice reminded Severus in a bored tone. The man’s soul seemed empty. Entirely unaffected by the life he had just taken. As if they all were mere flies … mere rats from the gutter to him.

Severus refused to answer. Refused to acknowledge that he even heard the voice.
Refused to accept that the voice was inside of him.
All he could do was suppress his one true thought.
Because there was no way in hell he would willingly go meet that murderous lunatic upstairs.

If he concentrated on the origin of that voice … if he looked for it within himself … he could almost see from that dark-hooded shadow’s eyes. As if he himself was in a spacious, almost luxurious cell, with his elbows on the table, the fingers interlocked in anticipation.
Like a chess player waiting out the other’s turn.
The connection went both ways, and that made it infinitely scarier than Severus would like to admit.

He retreated. Blinked. Looked from Potter to Lupin who were still busy doing nothing in that damn corridor as they waited for McGonagall to be their knight in shining armour.

“Maybe we should meet the others halfway,” Potter suddenly suggested. He had been walking in circles impatiently since McGonagall had left to fetch them. “Make it a bit easier on them …”

Severus hadn’t even had a chance to ponder whether he thought this a good idea or a fantastically bad one. Potter already put his foot in the air to walk back towards the other end of the corridor, when –
“McGonagall said not to move.” No surprise there. Lupin really was a teacher’s pet.

Potter’s foot came down again – as if he had marched on point. The boy seemed frustrated, as if it took quite some discipline to stay. To listen to his friend. There was something on Potter’s mind, and it drove him forward.
For once, Severus could relate. This dead-end made sitting ducks out of them. Getting back to the stairs would at least give them options where to run. Just in case.
McTavish’s nasty grin dominated his thoughts. The way he had smiled at Severus while standing next to the dead guard oh so casually.

“Potter’s suggestion seems sensible if you ask me. We really should go back to the –”

“Shut up. Nobody asked for your slimy opinion.” Potter walked a large circle in the middle of the corridor, then turned the other direction. He seemed to patrol but his mind was miles away going by that distant look. “Come on, Remus. Don’t be a scaredy-cat like McGonagall. There’s no logical reason why we should be in less danger waiting here than if we moved down the corridor.”

“It just feels wrong,” Lupin said. “She told us to stay, and I don’t want to do the wrong thing. Not when … when a single step can mean we live or die, James.”

Uncomfortable silence. Even without glancing at their thoughts, Severus could tell that they, too, were haunted by the after-image of Mulciber being burnt alive. That almost inhuman cry of pain. In the same voice that had ridiculed him for being a Halfblood before, that had laughed at his misery after he was pranked by the four Gryffindors, and the same voice that had snarled at him to hurry up with copying his own homework at the breakfast table for the others.
Lupin was right. Mulciber had taken a wrong step and suffered the consequences. But how was Severus supposed to take the right steps in his place? Mulciber had always had the answers. Had always gotten them out of trouble with his silver tongue, had had the blood to smooth-talk people, had had the confidence to do stuff. There was no way Severus could … he couldn’t … he needed –

“Geez, Remus. Ease up on the dramatics.” Potter turned his head towards the dark corridor nervously.

Not enough air.
Severus let himself slide down the steel wall of the corridor until he sat on the floor. The floor tiles were cold as ice. Like a dementor’s presence.
Why was there no place to hide?
Nobody to hide behind?

“Oh, shit. Are you alright?” Lupin had bent down to be on eye level with Severus. There was still a speck of bile on his shirt from when he had thrown up at the smell of burnt human meat. Severus swathed the hand away that was trying to grab his shoulder.

“… he was my friend.”
The words tasted hollow on Severus’ tongue.
He had hated the guy, had wished Dragon’s Pox on Mulciber for each and every belittling comment he had to endure.
Mudblood
Despite all of that … Severus wanted things to return to normal. To be told off by that arrogant wanna-be Death Eater. Things were so much easier when you could follow. When somebody else took the lead.
“… stop talking about him already!”

“We weren’t even saying anything nasty!“ Potter protested. “Only that we should be more careful than Mulciber –“

“Stop talking about him!”

Is this your resolve then? Do you refuse to take a step forward for fear of falling? My. I expected more of you, Mr Snape. Especially after all that I have seen. You … are trying my patience.

Severus’ exhaled shakily. No use in fighting. No use in anything. “How long have we been waiting for McGonagall already?” His voice sounded scratchy. Damn it.

“Not so tough when you’re all alone, are you, Sniv? It hasn’t even five minutes.”
It felt so much longer. But for all of all of the asshole’s faults, Potter was quite good at telling time. Came with Quidditch, Severus supposed.

“I just dislike being a sitting duck,” he shot back, but his voice trembled. Damn it!

“No need to worry. It’s the pretty ones that get eaten first. You’ll be safe for some time.”

Potter looked towards Lupin, apparently expecting the other boy to break out in laughter, but the wolf was caught in his own panic. His breathing had gone weird.
“Remus? You okay?”

The wolf hit his fist against the wall. Over and over again. “Oh, Merlin,” he whispered. “what are we even doing here … “

“Don’t go crazy on me, Moony.” Potter stepped past Severus, his face turning from ugly jeer to concern. He grabbed his friend by the arm, preventing Lupin from hurting his fist again. “Hey. Remember that Auror presentation last month? Don’t lose your head when things get stressful. Be vigilant instead. Why don’t you take out your wand? You’ll feel safer, just in case.”
Potter’s eyes skirted around the empty corridor of closed cell doors around them.

“In case of what?” Lupin suddenly snapped back. He put his fingers under the collar of his uniform as if he had a hard time breathing. “In case we meet a monster that will eat us?”

Deathly silence.

Then ….

“Alright. I’m sorry. That wasn’t funny.” Potter put his hands up in surrender before swirling his wand from one hand to the other. His eyes kept checking the fire behind them, then the stairs, then the corridor towards Wing B that led into semi-darkness as the ceiling lights had been killed by the thunderstrike earlier. The blue flames mixed in quite an ugly way with the green emergency lights of the cell block.

“There are dementors roaming around,” Potter said. “And cursed fire activating itself. Come on, Remus. I need you to concentrate. Even if I was a stupid ass.”

Lupin and he traded a long stare before the wolf took out his wand, too. He didn’t seem ready for a fight, though, the way he weighed it between his hands.

“Remus, I … I was lying before,” Potter quietly admitted. “It has been more like fifteen minutes rather than five.”

“… I know.”

Severus’ looked down into the darkness that led down the floor all the way to wing B.
Had McTavish and Fletcher come back upstairs? They had been heading towards the entrance on the ground floor that was sealed by blue blames now. Severus just hoped they would not blame him. Would not think he had snitched to the Aurors about their escape attempt.
This time, there was no Mulciber to talk down his crazed cousin.

Lupin raised his wand, muttering a spell, and a clock appeared in the air for a second before vanishing again. 3 pm.
Three hours and 43 minutes until sunset.

“Maybe we really should move towards the other end of the corridor.” Lupin sounded nervous. Then he betrayed Severus in the worst way - by including him in the decision-making: “What do you think?”

It was a gamble. There was no way of knowing where they would safe.

Severus hated the two pairs of eyes on him. He had preferred it when Potter and Lupin had treated him like air. His voice sounded like a child’s to his very own ears: “… it’s better than doing nothing, I guess.”

***

There was anxious silence between Potter, Lupin, and himself as they moved through the abandoned second floor of the prison wing.
Severus could barely concentrate on the path ahead. He felt jittery because all the shadows seemed to have faces whenever he swung the wand around to check that nobody was creeping up to them. In the front, Potter and Lupin had their wants lit as well.

Finally, they arrived at the junction with the warden station and the two stairs. If they went straight past them, they’d arrive at the gate to Wing B. The exit on the ground floor was sealed, and upstairs, well … Severus had an idea who could be waiting there.

“Why is there no guard anyway?” Potter suddenly asked on high alert. “I didn’t notice before because, well, things had been a bit … hectic.” He threw Severus a glance as if he expected him to have a meltdown at the mere mention of Mulciber’s death. “But shouldn’t there be someone here?”
He pointed towards the abandoned station.

Severus refused to look.

“It’s a green floor.” Lupin’s eyes shifted down the corridor of closed cells. “Maybe they don’t need guards everywhere. I mean … it’s the weekend.”

Severus didn’t say a word. Lest he told them too much.

“Wait. Let me check something.” Potter went over to the glass case with the prison map that hung next to the stairs. He was tracing some floors with his finger and his lips were moving. As if he tried to memorize the layout. Then he suddenly stormed to the warden station and pulled out all the drawers.

“Hey! What are you doing, James?”

“I’m trying to find a prisoner register or keys or … just something!” He emptied out the drawers on the desk. Coins and a spare set of glasses and quills rolled across the desk. “Damn it!” Potter kicked the desk before going back to the map of the prison tower. His voice could barely be heard as he was talking to himself: “Where the hell are you?”

Oh, hell, no!
“No way!” Severus blurted out as he finally understood. Both boys were looking at him with surprise, probably having forgotten about his existence once again. “No! We’re not going to look for your boyfriend across Azkaban!”

“Of course, we’re not,” Lupin said. “We have to meet Professor McGonagall down the corridor –“

“It’s a small detour, and nobody asked you to come along anyway, Snape!”

Lupin looked taken aback; apparently, he hadn’t been in the know. “What do you mean we’re taking a small detour? James! McGonagall is going to skin us alive if she gets here and we’re gone! Besides, I don’t want to look for Sirius! He can take care of himself! He ran off like he always does! Let’s –“

“Remus, I need you to trust me! We need to find Sirius!” Potter grabbed Lupin’s shoulders as he looked his friend in the eye. “He –“

“No!” Lupin threw off Potter’s hands. “I don’t get what you two have been fighting about since yesterday, but we need to get back to McGonagall first! I want out of here, and I want it now! Before –, before … ”

Anger flashed in Potter’s eyes. “You just don’t understand.” His tone was cold. He took a step back, glanced at the glass case on the wall and .. “Bombarda!

The glass exploded, and Severus and Lupin gasped in shock as shards rained down on them. Just in time, Severus managed to twist his face away, but he could feel the cuts into his uniform and unprotected arms.

“Are you mental?” Lupin exploded, pushing James to the ground and holding his wand at the other boy’s throat. One shard had caught Lupun’s nose, giving him a solid cut across. “What are you doing!?”

“Oh, give me a break!” Potter hollered and threw Lupin off, only to grab the map of the prison that now lay in the broken glass case. He scrunched it to a parchment ball, in the other hand he held his wand tightly. “Final chance. You with me or not, Remus?”

Lupin seemed shell-shocked. “I don’t know what’s going on with you and Sirius but –“

“I see. We don’t need a false friend like you.” There was a storm of emotions raging in Potter’s face as the boy –
Took the stairs to the third floor of wing A.

No!
“No!”
The voice in his head and Lupin shouted at the same time, making Severus press his hands over his ringing ears.

Follow him, the voice demanded. Stop him!

Yeah, Severus wasn’t falling for that trick. He hadn’t been born this stupid. Else, he wouldn’t have survived the shady back-alleys of Spinner’s End to even see Hogwarts at age eleven.

Rather than following Potter upstairs, Severus took a step back. Under his foot, there were shards of glass being crunched into tiny glitter.

You need to follow him right now, you ignorant little toad, the voice insisted. All air of apathy had disappeared. There was a burning edge in those words. Leave! Even I heard that explosion and I am much further away from you than they are.

They.
Severus’ eyes wandered towards the stairs that led to the first floor. Lupin took a step forward, also glancing in the same direction as him.
A male voice in the distance. “What was that noise?”
Steps on the stairs.

Severus instinctively grabbed Lupin’s arm and dragged him up the stairs just behind the metal security door, about halfway between the floors and –

“What –“

“Pray they don’t see us!” he whispered harshly as they crouched behind the wings of the security door; Lupin was on the left, he on the right.
There was no time to close the security door behind them as McTavish and Fletcher had already reached the second floor. Severus didn’t dare sneak a peak from behind the shadow of the door. He listened to the sound of the footsteps. The crunch of the glass as those two goons inspected the exploded case.
Lupin’s legs were shaking from the effort of staying in such an uncomfortable position. The boy had his legs bent in an awkward angle to fit behind the door. Those yellow eyes rested on Severus’ face – as if the boy was asking him hundreds of questions, was demanding answers, was accusing him of an unspoken crime.
All they could do was cower in the shadow of the stairs and wait for McTavish and Fletcher to pass.

“Ya think it’s your cousin and his friend?” Fletcher asked. Severus recognised the street-rat dialect. McTavish, just as much of a brute, was too pure-bred to slur his syllables like that.

“They went downstairs. That has to be one of their friends. They said there were more rats about.”

McTavish must have walked to the guard’s desk as his voice sounded more distant now. “Was that you, Dung? This mess. I don’t remember.”

“Nah. I got what I needed from the guard on my floor. You callin' me greedy?”

McTavish laughed. “Do I?”

“I ain’t stealing from the dead. Even a thief has got his honor.”

Steps drawing closer. “The door upstairs is still open,” McTaivsh said. “Didn’t you close all the connections? That’s bloody dangerous! What if Brode or that idiot Scrimgeour find us! We’d be toast!”

Severus closed his eyes as cold sweat ran down his face and then his throat.
Metal scratched over the floor.
Severus held his breath.
Then the door was pulled shut, trapping them on the third floor.

No sound travelled through the door. Severus could hear neither Fletcher nor McTavish.
Finally, he let go of the breath he had been holding and opened his eyes.

Lupin was looking at him as if he had never seen him before. “What was that?”, the boy whispered despite the sound-proof door.

Severus grabbed his legs and pressed them against his chest. Hugged himself. “They’re followers of the Dark Lord. They freed themselves.”

“The guards –“

“Dead. All of them. At least those on the first and second floor.” Severus buried his face in his trousers. “I saw one of the corpses. They must have hid the others in one of the cells.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Lupin whispered harshly.

“Oh, I am sorry.” Severus fought the panic rising in his chest. “It sort of didn’t fit into our conversations so far that there are two murderers on the loose!”

Lupin’s face was ashen. “The others are in danger, aren’t they?”

Which others, Severus wanted to scream.

“We need to find James!” Lupin jumped up on his feet, his head nervously wandering from left to right. “Then you can explain to him how you hid such a big thing from all of us. From McGonagall even! Damn it!”
Lupin stormed off, and Severus froze for a second. Not that it was a choice, really. So he hurried after the boy, sure to have a tight grip on his wand. As soon as Severus’ feet hit the floor tiles of the corridor, his heart sank. The emergency lights on the ceiling were red.

Chapter Text

A chilling aura hung heavily over the third floor of Wing B, and Severus’ breath felt almost solid, as if there were ice crystals hidden between the oxygen molecules in the air. Bone-deep coldness was clutching at his arms, trying to get inside of him. Lupin, too, shivered from head to toe. Severus could feel the other boy trembling where their backs touched. Instinctively, they had pressed against each other, pointing their wands in different directions. Down the opposite corridor ends that led to wing A and C respectively.
There was a rasping sound coming from everywhere and nowhere.
No dementor in sight. Yet it felt so bitterly cold.

“Is it down there?” Severus asked. He did not dare turn his head. Did not dare blink. Just an empty, badly-lit corridor to his left. A row of closed cell doors. Nothing special.

“I … I am not sure ...” Lupin sounded as if he had run a marathon.

“Do you see a dementor, yes or no, that’s not really a difficult question, is it?” Severus snarled, still concentrating on the darkness in front of him that was barely illuminated by the red warning lights. He was hyper-focused on the doors that remained closed. No movement. Yet.

“It’s just … I think one of the cell doors at the end of the corridor is slightly open. Just an inch or so. But maybe I am wrong. It could be the angle. An optical illusion, you know.”

An open cell on a red floor in wing B. That had to be where Fletcher had escaped from.
Negligible.
All Severus could think about was Lily anyway. Her storming off after he said the bad word, how she hadn’t accepted his apology in front of the Gryffindor dormitory. The casual digs at his nose and second-hand clothes and hair wherever he went at Hogwarts, and –
He felt the grip on his wand weaken under the onslaught of bad memories.

Up, the voice in his head demanded tersely. Up!

The red warning lights above were blinking sluggishly. But their rhythm was off. The intervals uneven.

Severus’ head wandered up – and all he saw above Lupin and himself was a dark wavy mass, a cloaked something pressing itself against the ceiling with its skeletal claws.

He couldn’t react. Was too caught in the mouth-like hole that was facing him from the cloaked mass. The rasping noise in his ear like the whistling wind as a hawk went after its prey in free fall.
The dementor leapt down with a cry of war.

Lupin and Severus scrambled away from another, away from the dementor that landed where they had been. No way to get past it towards the stairs to the fourth floor where they could close the metal door behind them.

“The open cell!” Lupin grabbed at the steel wall and pushed forward blindly, crashing down the corridor on the right. Severus ran. The dementor’s harsh breaths were getting closer.
They wouldn’t make it. No way. They wouldn’t outrun it.
Severus could see the slightly open cell door at the far end of the corridor.
A skeletal finger touched his shoulder.
Severus lost his balance, hit the floor with a shout and instinctively rolled himself together and thrashed against the dementor’s hand that was pinning him down by the leg. The black mass moved over him like a predator securing its prey.
The dementor had no weight, had no body Severus could fight off; just that iron grip on his leg.

“Expecto Patronum!” Lupin’s voice rang out from ahead, but there was no shiny-white saviour bursting from his wand. Like an idiot, the wolf stood in the middle of the corridor, holding his wand with both hands to point the tip at the dementor. He was trembling all over as he stood his ground. “Expecto – expecto … “
Scared to death. That’s how he looked.

Severus gave up trying to punch away the dementor, tried to crawl away instead, but the grip on his leg was pure iron. The beast snarled in his face, and it stunk of rotting flesh.
It was halfway bent over him, his lower body now completely immobilized.

“Expecto Patronum!” The white wisp from Lupin’s wand did jackshit.

Severus struggled to free his arm from underneath his chest. He had no idea how that spell worked but – he needed it to! “Expecto Patronum!” he cried out in panic, and felt no movement of magic from his body to his wand. As if he was holding a dead piece of wood instead of a magical object.
The dementor’s other hand bore down on his shoulder, pressing him even more to the filthy, tiled corridor floor. Almost like a lover, it bent over him, rasping, and Severus felt his will to fight melt away.
This was it.
He twisted his head to the side, but the hand that had been on his leg found his chin now. Forced it back up as the dementor moved forward –

“Expecto Patronum!”
A silver stag barrelled into the dementor, its shriek echoing off the corridor walls. The cloaked beast rose from where it had landed, leapt towards Severus once more, but the stag pushed against it, again and again, like the forces of good and evil caught in a battle for dominance.

“Don’t just lie there, you fucking prat!” Potter snarled, his head barely showing from inside the open cell. “Move!”

Lupin yelped before throwing his body into the cell head-first like how a swimmer would dive into a deep pool. Meanwhile, Potter’s patronus was losing ground; the silvery magic particles were splitting apart, no longer able to hold the form, as the black wisps of the dementor swallowed the stag.

“Fuck!” Severus got onto his knees, propelled himself forward and jumped into the open cell as well, only for Potter to throw the door shut behind him.

There was a cry from outside, then … eery silence.

***

Their breaths were trembling in the darkness of the cell. Nobody dared to say anything, not even to light their wand. There was no window to let in natural light; and the emergency generator of the prison was apparently not connected to the cells. Did all of the prisoners sit in darkness, blind to what was going on outside? What an uncomfortable thought.
The darkness made Severus hyper-focus on his other sense. Cobblestone on the ground. The sound of running water from the toilet hole. It still smelled like a sewer. Or the London Underground. And there was a mattress next to Severus, at least he hoped that’s what the soft, squishy thing his hand rested on was.

“… do you think it’s gone?” Lupin whispered from to the side.

“It’ll keep lurking outside for us to come out again. It stopped going after me too, when I hid in here.” Potter’s voice was close. Almost in his ear.

Severus buried his head in his hands. “You both do realise we just locked the cell door behind us, right?”

Deathly silence.
It was Lupin who broke the moment of shock; the wolf pushed himself towards the door and threw his body against the metal but – of course – the door withstood his attempt to ram it down.

“Let us out!” he shouted. “Help! HELP!”

Potter and Severus for once were of the same mind. Together, they threw themselves on Lupin to shut him up. They were forcing their hands over the boy’s mouth who was thrashing under them in panic.

“Stop it!” Potter hissed. “Don’t enrage it!”

“You don’t understand!” Lupin had obediently stopped but he was trembling in their grip. “You can’t be locked in here with me! James! You know you can’t! Not tonight!”

Severus let go of Lupin as if he had been bitten and recoiled until his back hit the cell wall. No way to get further away from Lupin.
There had to be a way out –! There had to be –

“Lumos!” Potter’s wand lit up the tiny cell.
The mattress Severus was half-kneeling on had been slashed, revealing the inside feathers. The bigger concern, though, was the man sitting at the far end of said mattress.
He wore a guard uniform and his eyes were completely lifeless, despite his chest moving up and down. The man had his mouth slightly open. Like caught in surprise.

Lupin and Potter yelled in unison. Then they startled backwards so that Potter’s wand fell to the ground, still lit, and landed in the middle of the cell. It illuminated the cramped room like a candle, throwing shadows across their faces.

Severus’ face was only 10 inches away from the guard as he had also been sitting on the mattress. Timidly, he reached out with his index finger to touch the motionless arm that rested against the man’s side. No sign of awareness. As if the guard was … gone. He only stared ahead, as he had done when the cell had still been dark.

“Was he … kissed?” James asked, disgust and fascination colouring his voice alike.

“Oh Merlin. Oh … Merlin …” Lupin began hyperventilating once more.

In the flickering light, Potter looked pale as a ghost. “It’s fine,” Potter said way too casually. “It’s all fine, Remus. Sit down. You need to breathe.”

“Nothing’s bloody fine!” Severus didn’t hold his hysterics back anymore. He pointed at Lupin. “We are either going to end up living corpses like the guard or he’s going to maul us to death!”

“No, he isn’t!” Potter insisted. “He’s … he’s …”

Lupin looked like a wax figure, a puppet with its strings cut, the way he sat propped up against the cell door. “He’s right, James. I will.”

They fell silent.

No. No! No!
He wouldn’t die like that, he wouldn’t –!
Severus didn’t know where the thought had come from, but it spread through his mind like hellfire. He knew the curse. Hadn’t ever used it before but … he knew the words. If it came down to saving his own skin or his soul … he’d kill Lupin. He’d do it.
Severus tightened the grip on his wand. Kept it in his lap as to not attract Potter’s attention. The idiot would take it from him should he realise Severus’ plan.
Macnair had always bragged about the stray cats he had killed over the holidays. It couldn’t be that difficult.
It couldn’t.
Severus felt cold sweat run down his throat. He didn’t want to behave suspiciously, yet he couldn’t but stare at Lupin. Focus on the wolf in human clothing.

“It can’t be long,” Potter started to placate them, “I mean, Scrimgeour and Slughorn and Brode should be able to get the dementors under control any minute. Then they’ll look for us. Azkaban is big but not that big. They’ll find us. We got plenty of time left.”

Three hours, Severus wanted to spat at the boy, wasn’t plenty of time. That wasn’t even enough time to brew a painkiller!

Surprisingly, Potter didn’t join Lupin at the door. Instead, he let himself fall onto the damaged mattress next to Severus and the soulless guard. The space was so cramped that their knees touched. For once, the boy didn’t comment on being too close to him, being able to smell his greasy hair or whatever.
Severus eyed the lifeless guard. He didn’t expect the man to move closer to him, yet he didn’t trust him. Not fully. The man seemed more animal than human. You couldn’t be sure his actions would make sense.

No sounds from outside. The dementor had quietened down instantly.

Potter sighed, then played with the sleeves of his shirt. “The air’s pretty bad in here.”

Severus knew what he meant. It felt as if he was competing with the other three for oxygen. That couldn’t be the case, though. The cells had to provide a magical airstream, right?
The stale air felt like torture.

Lupin banged his head against the cell door. Rhythmically. With a stoic face. He seemed to count the seconds with this method.

“We could explode away this door,” Potter suggested. “The red floor doesn’t suppress magic, right?”

“Then what?” Severus rubbed his tired, burning eyes. “We’d just be facing the dementor again.”

Their gazes wandered towards the guard that still stared off into the thin air. Did he have family? What was the man’s name anyway? Severus felt an odd connection to the guy. Maybe because he was staring down a similar fate. Oh Merlin.

“If it comes down to it,” Lupin whispered, “I want you to fight me. Whatever it takes. Okay, James?”

“Remus, I could kill you!” That sounded good to Severus, but apparently, the thought upset Potter a lot going by his stormy face. “You don’t know what you’re asking for!”

“I do!” Lupin banged his fist against the door once again, more so in anger than an attempt to break it. “Of course, I do!”

“You’re asking me to –! No, Remus! We’re not there yet!”

“There has to be a way out,” Severus said, more to himself than the others. “There just has to be …”

“Nobody escapes Azkaban,” Potter lectured him angrily. He conjured the magical clock again. 3 hours, 9 minutes left.

Well, Fletcher had. The guy had not only escaped his cell, but then gotten the guard kissed and had placed the poor soul in the empty cell to hide his disappearance.
How?
How had he done it?
Severus doubted the man had gotten a wand past the Aurors. Brode had been paranoid enough to distrust his own mother. Anyway, Fletcher hadn’t had a wand when Mulciber and he had stumbled across those two goons.
Then how?
Severus slid forward on the mattress; closer to the guard. He pressed his eyelids shut as he forced his hand onto the man’s chest. Warm. But no reaction. He began feeling for pockets, for objects. Like keys. Or a wand. Anything.

“What’re you doing?” Potter demanded to know. He sounded suspicious.

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re mental,” Potter commented, sounding utterly annoyed. “Not sure if that’s the answer to my question.”

The guard’s pockets were empty. Had been emptied before, maybe. Apart from ... the broken ends of a wand.
Had Fletcher struggled with the guard? Then the wand had broken. Maybe that’s when the dementor had gotten the guard. Why hadn’t the dementor attacked Fletcher, though? And why had it given Fletcher the time to dump the guard in this cell?
Severus’ brain hurt from thinking. “There has to be a way to get out. There just has to be!” Why couldn’t he see it? Why!?

“There isn’t a way out. We’re at the most secure prison of the world,” Potter said slowly as if Severus was an imbecile.

“… no, Snape’s right.” Lupin was hugging himself. “There are criminals on the loose. There must be a way to get out of the cell without alerting the dementor.”

“Criminals on the –!” Potter looked from Remus to Severus, the back to Remus. “What happened in this bloody tower!? Is that why the dementors are running rampant? Is there a gigantic prison break happening or what?”

“Oh, the alarm was entirely Avery’s fault,” Severus said. “He triggered the dementors on the fourth floor. This is just … bad luck.”

But is it? Is it really unrelated?
Severus ignored the question.

“Bad luck,” Potter echoed. “Right.”

Bad luck indeed. Avery had touched one of the cell doors and that had triggered the dementor attack.

Touched. The door.
Oh … oh!

“Tell me!” Severus turned around and grabbed Potter by the shirt. “What happened when you entered the third floor? Tell me right now!”

“Nothing happened!” Potter exclaimed. “What are you on about? And take your dirty hands off! You’re really a weirdo!”

“Don’t lie to me!” Severus spat. “You opened this cell door, didn’t you? And only then did the dementor attack you!”

The uncomfortable shade of red in Potter’s face told him all. Severus couldn’t rein it in anymore. He threw himself at Potter, clawed at the boy’s collar, but Potter, the damn Quidditch star, was too muscular for him. He was swatted away like a fly, only to be pushed into the soulless guard. Severus rolled away, disgusted by the squishy contact.
Lupin, meanwhile, had put himself squarely in the middle. And Severus respected that. Not him as a person, mind you. He held no respect for Lupin. He’d simply rather not start a fight with the bloody wolf.
Lupin had his arms out widely to offer Potter protection. Or him, really, because Potter had gotten up to show Severus his insignificance.

“Stop it, you two! There’s no use in fighting between us!”

“Don’t you get it?” Severus growled. “We locked ourselves in here for nothing! If Potter had gotten out of the cell instead of hiding in it, and if he had closed the damn door from the outside, the dementor wouldn’t have attacked us at all! That thing is dumb as toast! It only wants the cell doors not to be compromised. It doesn’t even care who’s in it!”

Finally, Potter made the connection that had made Severus want to claw his eyes out. The Gryffindor paled in guilt.
Well, too late. Severus definitely wasn’t in the mood to give him a pep talk about how it didn’t matter and happened to the best of them and that rot.

“Oh.” Lupin needed a second as well before getting back into his goon role. “Well, it doesn’t matter! How was James supposed to know?”

“Did your mother not teach you not to touch everything you see?” Severus verbally hit back from behind Lupin. “Oh, I forgot! You must have been raised by savages. It sure does explain your usual behaviour!”

“Well, you must have been raised in a gutter then!” Potter tried to move past Lupin who now grabbed his friend’s shoulders, pulling him backwards. “Your mother’s a whore, you –!”

“Take that back!” Severus pointed his wand at Potter whose wand was still lying on the ground, lighting the cell. “Take! That! Back!”

“ENOUGH!” Lupin hollered. He was panting like the dog he was. “So, what you’re saying …” he tried to get them down to a normal talking volume. “If we manage to get out of the cell and close the door behind us, we have nothing to fear from the dementor?”

Yes.
Probably.
Well, maybe.
Severus didn’t answer. He merely stared at Lupin and Potter. It would look like a lover’s embrace if Potter didn’t have such a red head from all the shouting.

“I don’t buy it,” Potter spat. “You said the Aurors were fighting the dementors upstairs and that Avery touched one of the cells. Well, shouldn’t the dementors have stopped attacking once Avery pulled back his hand?”

True.
Severus bit his lip. It had all made sense in his head until it didn’t.

Bad luck.

Damn! That voice … it really liked handing him the solutions in the most cryptic of ways. Severus felt like a marionette whose strings were pulled from behind the screen. Because this answer was not his own. It had been planted on him.

With clenched teeth, he muttered: “… because the break-out wasn’t a coincidence. It wasn’t mere… bad luck.”

He could feel satisfaction roll through him as the voice’s owner smiled. If only he choked on his own arrogance!

Severus exhaled. “When Avery touched the cell, it jump-started the tower’s alarm system. And that gave Fletcher the signal to escape. And the dementors kept rioting even after Avery pulled back because down here, the cell door was open. So they attacked, and Scrimgeour and Slughorn’s Patronus kept them from coming down here to stop Fletcher.”

And Fletcher, after opening his cell door, fought the guard, the stationed dementor got involved, the poor guard was offered as a sacrificial snack, and Fletcher managed to chuck the guard into his empty cell. Throwing the door shut. Which then calmed down the dementor.
Damn!

The question was … was Avery in on the escape plan? Had he touched the cell upstairs deliberately to mask Fletcher’s escape attempt? Severus couldn’t imagine the boy to be foolhardy enough for something like that. Not when he knew he’d be facing a pack of enraged dementors. So … did somebody make him touch the cell? Or had it been extraordinarily bad luck that Fletcher had been waiting for a signal the same day Avery created a diversion by accident? Had Avery simply been faster than Fletcher’s co-conspirator?

So many questions and no answers in sight. But that meant … upstairs was safe! There were no dementors on the run!

I told you to come upstairs, didn’t I? the voice commented sourly. It was your own decisions that got you into trouble.

“Who the hell are you?” Severus shouted, finally at his last straw. “STOP TALKING TO ME!”

Triumphant laughter.
Damn! Severus leaned his head against the cold stone wall.

“Seriously, what’s your problem, Snape?” Potter asked. He had his hands pressed against his hips.

“You are my problem!” he snarled. Severus was done with this shit. He just wanted to leave and never look back. “You and your friends and that crappy school and those idiot Purebloods who never think!” He exhaled shakily, rubbing his eyes but the world did not stop existing even when he tried to shut himself off from it. “I … I hate magic!”

You really are a whiny little thing, aren’t you?

“Can you two stop squabbling for five minutes?” Lupin asked exasperatedly. “Don’t you get it? That’s good news!”

Potter and Severus looked at the boy unenthused.

“No, really!” Lupin insisted. “We have wands and this is not a black floor. We can just … Alohomora this door. And get off the floor without having our souls sucked out of us.”

And then? Severus wanted to ask. What then?
It was hardly safer outside the cell than inside with the wolf. Somebody had killed Brode and somebody was trying to get Fletcher and McTavish to escape prison, and those two were dangerous enough on their own, and –!
He almost hoped the voice was the evil mastermind behind all of this mess. Otherwise there was another dangerous party lurking in the shadows.

“Alright!” Potter exclaimed and picked up his wand off the floor. He turned towards the cell door, about to force it open by magic.

You’re still too haughty to ask the right question, boy.

Urgh. Severus was so done with being manipulated. Why always him? Why!?
It seemed he was destined to disappoint people. Even the voice did nothing but criticize him.

“Stop,” he demanded, and both Lupin’s and Potter’s head turned his way. Startled.
His stomach burnt with unease as he dared to voice the question. Not that he cared for the answer. He had a hunch that he would rather not know.
“Tell me first why you chose this cell,” Severus asked quietly. “Why, Potter?”

“Huh?” Potter blinked at him sluggishly.

Severus shifted his eyes away. Was too nervous to hold contact. “Why did you choose this door out of all the cells on this floor? It’s at the far end. Why … this one?”
The one that Fletcher had been in. That housed the kissed guard.

Alarm and guilt alike washed across Potter’s face until he blanked his expression deliberately. Badly noticeable. “No reason. Just coincidence.”

Make the connection.

“You were looking for Black,” Severus combined. “That’s why you ran off. Then you choose this cell.” His stomach hurt. “You expected Black to be here.”

Potter gave him nothing. But panic rose in those brown eyes. They became shifty. “I have no idea what you’re on about.”

Yes, he does.

“What does Black want from Fletcher?” Severus asked.

Chapter Text

Severus didn’t understand it. No matter how much he mulled over it, no matter how he turned around his thinking, it just didn’t make any sense whatsoever. What did Black expect to achieve by killing Fletcher?

His heart was beating fast as he waited for Potter’s signal. They all had their role. Lupin would cast the Alohomora, Potter would jump outside first to fend off the dementor with his weakling Patronus, and meanwhile, Severus and Lupin would shut the bloody cell door behind them.
Which, in theory, should calm the dementor and allow them to escape this ruddy floor.

Severus’ eyes were fixated on Potter’s fingers. Three.
He needed to focus.
But he couldn’t clear his mind of Black’s idiocy.

Potter had spilled the beans. Had rambled on about how an Auror had died when Fletcher had tried to burn down the minister’s house. How his best pal had received an owl the very same day informing him of his uncle’s demise. Alphard Black had left everything to his nephew, apparently to spite his family. The two had never met. And instead of feeling incredibly lucky, Black had started to become obsessed with the idea of revenge. Because prison was not enough for people like Fletcher.

And Potter had been unable to keep his friend under control. Once chaos had set in, Black had rushed off to find and kill Fletcher.

“You should have warned Dumbledore,” Lupin had exclaimed, obviously upset by his friends.

“He would have punished Sirius for something he hadn’t even done yet!”

“If Sirius kills Fletcher, that’s on you! How can you live with that guilt!?”

“I am more concerned with Fletcher possibly killing Sirius, Remus! He’s a murderer and apparently now on the loose, too! I need Sirius to be safe!”

“THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD DUMBLEDORE!”

Their fight had continued for about five more minutes, going nowhere as they had circled back to the same issues over and over. Severus had just sat on the floor of the cell and listened.
To him, Fletcher and Black offing each other had sounded like a nice compromise. But Lupin was right in one regard. They needed adults to handle this shit.

Potter reduced his fingers to two, finally shaking Severus out of his thoughts and memories. The countdown had begun.

One.

Alohomora!”

As the door sprang open, Potter rushed out, and – “Expecto Patronum!” The dementor’s shriek made Severus startle, but then he and Lupin both hurried outside as well, only for them to push the cell door closed, but –

The dementor did not stop fighting the patronus.

Alarmed, the boys exchanged a look, then Severus remembered Scrimgeour's warning.

“Call it back! The Patronus angers it!”

“If I do that, we’re on our own!” Potter trembled, and so did his wispy stag that had locked its antlers with the dementor’s cloaked body.

Lupin suddenly took a step forward so that he was almost touching Severus’ shoulders with his. “He said: CALL IT BACK!”
Anger and frustration coloured the other boy’s voice. It seemed even Lupin had a breaking point after which he was done with his friends’ shit.

“You are seriously asking me to trust Snivellus with my life!?”
Harshly, Potter slashed his wand through the air, dissolving the silvery strands and –
The dementor gave one more wail, then it remained almost without any movement in the middle of the corridor. Like a statue frozen in time.
The air was still chilly, and Severus’ mind was still bombarded with images of his drunk father and the taunting voices of his house mates and –
But the attack was over.
He let himself fall against the wall and took a deep breath.

Potter wiped some sweat off his forehead. “Child’s play. Alright. Now we need to find Fletcher downstairs before Sirius does and –“

“No.” Lupin walked past Severus and Potter until he stood in front of the dementor. Then he turned around. The boy was biting his lip as if he was struggling to find enough courage to stand up for himself. “We’re going to look for Scrimgeour and Slughorn in Wing A. Then we’re going to tell them about Sirius’ plan and the escaped prisoners! Things you two should have told the adults a long time ago! We wouldn’t be in this mess if you two had acted responsibly!” He scowled at them both. “And then we pray to Merlin that Scrimgeour and Slughorn can get Azkaban under control again. And find McGonagall and the others.”

“Remus: You don’t understand. Sirius will be thrown out of school –“

“He brought it onto himself! It’s not our job to clean up after him!” Lupin’s voice trembled with fury. “If you were his friend, you’d have protected his life rather than his secret!”

“What do you know about friendship?” Potter spat. “You've long abandoned us anyway! You just keep hanging out with us because everybody else would run for the hills if they found out what you really are!”

“That –“ Lupin gulped down some air. “That was uncalled for, James!"

“Oh, stop berating me!” Potter waved his wand angrily at his friend. “If you have no loyalty to give, then let’s split up for all I care! I am not even surprised – you weren’t with me before, so why should you now?”

“So be it!” Lupin’s eyes were red-rimmed with unshed tears and exhaustion. “Go after Sirius like you always do! But I am going to get help! Something you should have done hours if not days ago! That’s what real friendship is!”

And with that, Lupin stormed past the dementor that was paying them no attention whatsoever.

“Real friendship is having each other’s back!” Potter shouted after Lupin, kicking the wall in fury. “Not being a backstabber like you!”

Lupin’s steps hesitated for a second, then he continued towards the connection to Wing A.

“Fine! Go! I don’t need you anyway!” Potter shouted after Lupin. Then he turned towards Severus: “You coming with me, then?”

Severus startled as he hadn’t expected them to acknowledge his presence. By accident, he looked straight into the other boy’s brown eyes. There was worry hidden in that mind, and panic, and utter disappointment. Severus could see the silhouette of a memory that was so close to the surface that he drowned in it before he could look away.
A small boy in second-hand clothes stumbling into a carriage and being seized up by the three purebloods in there.
A studious, quiet boy reading in front of the fireplace as Potter and Black played Exploding Snap.
Potter helping said boy onto his uncooperative broom during their first flying class. A small smile exchanged between Potter and Lupin.
Cleaning the bathroom by hand after another prank. Potter’s frustration as he scrubbed the brush across the brown stains underneath the toilet stall. Then a hand gently took the brush out of his grip. Lupin did not say a thing. He just put a finger to his lips, rolled his eyes and began scrubbing alongside Potter.
Potter sitting in front of the barricaded door of the Shrieking Shack. There were howls and sounds of objects being smashed. And Potter was reading a book from the library to the wolf.
“I’m sorry,” memory-Potter said as he followed Lupin through the corridors of Hogwarts. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know Sirius would –! I didn’t know.” But Lupin did not look at him. He walked towards the next class.

Severus shook his head, overwhelmed by it all. He hated looking into people’s eyes. Instinctively, he put his fingers into his hair, letting the overlong bangs fall over his face.

“Snape? So? You coming or not? I could use your help. You met Fletcher, you could maybe talk –“

“… I think you mistook me for one of your goons.” He pushed past Potter and tripped as he passed the dementor. Lupin was almost out of sight.

“Of course, the coward’s going to follow the coward! I hope you die in a fire like your friend Mulciber did!”
There was a flurry of footsteps behind him as Potter rushed off after Black.

***

Lupin, that bloody doormat of a Gryffindor, had actually waited at the end of the corridor once he had realised that Severus was coming with him.

“Is there a reason you insist on walking one step behind me?” Lupin asked. He was rubbing his wand hand nervously.

“Is there a reason you want to hold hands?”

They exchanged a combative stare before they went on as if nothing had happened. Severus definitely wouldn’t let his guard down around Lupin. Even if the other hadn't been a werewolf, Lupin was hardly someone who would have your back in a fight.
No.
Alone is what he had. And Severus had managed to stay alive up until now. He could do this. He could.

Almost there.

Once they crossed from Wing B back to Wing A, they should be able to reunite with Slughorn and Scrimgeour. Unless some more blue flames sprung up between the corridors. But something told Severus that the voice would not interfere. Wanted him right here.
The red floor on the fourth floor … that’s where this nightmare of a day had started for Severus. Knowing that the dementors should be calmed by now … having closed Fletcher’s door themselves … it still did not settle the turmoil in his stomach. As if his gut had twisted into a knot and tried to pull itself free.

“They’re such idiots,” Lupin muttered under his voice. “It’s not like Fletcher’s death will bring back his uncle. What is Sirius even thinking?”

Not a lot, but Severus assumed Lupin would not appreciate the comment. There was too much frustration in the other boy’s voice for him to actually mean his words.

“I just hope Slughorn and that Auror can stop this mess. You said they should be here, right?”

“That’s where Avery triggered the dementor attack. We had been about to finish the tour of the prison. Then everything … went wrong. There should also be a guard up here. He rushed upstairs – before we closed the doors to the floors downstairs.”

Lupin sighed from the bottom of his heart. Every other second, he would look behind them to check for danger. Severus almost took it personally that the werewolf didn’t trust him to have his back.

“I can’t believe James decided to go after Sirius himself! He’s such a stubborn prick sometimes! Does he really think he could fend off two adult Death Eaters by himself?”

Severus definitely could imagine this.

“What do you think?” Lupin stopped mid-way. “Should we make up some cover story? I don’t want Sirius and James to be punished even if they deserve it. Maybe we could tell Slughorn that they were trying to save –“

“You do realise I’ll gladly tell Slughorn the truth, especially when Black and Potter will be expelled for it, right?”

That shut up Lupin. Good. They weren’t friends. Severus hated how the other was using him as a sounding board.

***

The fourth floor of Wing A was worse than what Severus had been expecting – and it wasn’t the dementors’ fault.

“What happened here?”, Lupin asked, instinctively clutching Severus’ sleeve.

The dementors were circling the room in a black tornado-like storm while the red warning lights on the ceiling tried their best to illuminate the room between the moving masses of black. And underneath, the ten cell doors all stood wide open.

There was a long red-black smear on the ground that had to be blood. As if a body had been dragged across the floor in some grotesque painting technique.

“Is he … dead?” Lupin was shaking.

The guard they had sent upstairs before lay motionless in the opposite corner amidst a puddle of blood. There was a gap, though, between the blood trace and his body. As if somebody had thrown him.

Severus pulled up his own wand. The dementors did not pay them any attention despite the open doors. But why –

“Be ready,” he commanded Lupin before taking a deep breath and stepping onto the first floor tile.
No reaction from the dementors that were still circling like fish in a tank.
Step by step, Severus made his way to the first open cell door and looked inside.

An elderly man with no hair on his head but a long, unkempt white beard lay on his mattress with a slashed throat. His eyes were wide open, staring into the darkness of the cell ceiling.

Severus threw the door shut. Breathed. Then … “Colloportus.”
The red X of his sealing spell glimmed eerily in the artificial light from above.

He moved to the other side, hoping that Lupin actually was making sure he would not be attacked while he was looking inside the cells.

A woman in her forties. Her arm was outstretched towards the cell door as if she had pleaded for mercy.
It was just as ugly as it had been on McTavish’s arm. The Dark Mark was still moving as if the snake was trying to call the woman yet it was no longer able to reach her. Another slashed throat.

Severus pushed the door closed with his back, letting everything sink in. All the other eight doors of the floor and the dementors that were satisfied with the state of their corridor … then he cast “Colloportus” once more.

“Snape?” Lupin’s voice was trembling despite not having seen those empty white eyes. “Is everything alright?”

“What about our situation here seems alright to you?” he snarled back, still resting with his back against the ice-cold steel door. One of the dementors swished past him much too close for comfort.

“Are they …?”

“They got what they deserved, right?” Severus kicked the next door closed, not even bothering to check. “That’s what your kind is thinking anyway.”

“Your kind,” Lupin repeated. “Right.”

Severus looked inside the third cell. He didn’t recognise the face, but it was so young. Barely out of Hogwarts. His sleeve had been rolled up to reveal the Dark Mark. There were magical ropes around his hands; unlike the others, he had been tied up before somebody had cut his throat.
All Severus could see was himself and Avery and Macnair and fucking Mulciber.

“Maybe this was Black,” he snarled. “Maybe he couldn’t find Fletcher and just took whoever he considered unworthy!”

“Sirius would never kill somebody!” Lupin caught up to him, throwing caution to the wind. For whatever reason, the dementors kept circling above without minding them at all. As if they were occupied with something else. As Lupin grabbed Severus to shake sense into him, the wolf got an eyeful of cell four. And instantly fell over his own feet when he flinched back.

Severus gave the door a shove, then sealed it.

“… this wasn’t Sirius.” Lupin still half-lay on the floor. “This was not Sirius!”

“Then who was it?” Severus demanded. “Because this sure as hell wasn’t McTavish and Fletcher. They would have freed those guys, not exterminated them like vermin! And I don’t see Scrimgeour and Slughorn doing this either! Not to fellow Slytherins!”

“Maybe it was them!”, Lupin argued. “We don’t know this Auror guy, and Slughorn has always played both sides in this war. Maybe he’s done playing!”

“Oh, come on!” Severus growled. “Slughorn could barely waddle through these cell doors with how much candied pineapples he eats in a day! Stop making excuses for your murderer of a friend!”

“Sirius wouldn’t –!”

“We BOTH know what he’s capable of!”

That shut Lupin up. Much more quietly, much more timidly he stood up again. “It’s not fair to keep using the Shrieking Shack against us like this,” he whispered. “That’s over. You know what Dumbledore said. No more talk about it –“

“There are ten dead Death Eaters on this floor!” Severus exploded in Lupin’s face. “Tell me how it’s not relevant that Black has a history of murder attempts!”

Lupin grabbed Severus’ arms to calm him, to make sure his wand was no longer moving around so wildly as it had already started to throw out sparks.

“You don’t know him like I do. This wasn’t him. I promise you. It wasn’t him!”

Severus ripped his arms free. “Then who was it?”

Lupin remained helplessly silent.

Unlike the voice in the next corridor that, in this very moment, let out a high-pitched scream. Instantaneously, the dementors stopped circling and looked into the direction of Wing C.

Chapter Text

The corridor of Wing C was eerily black; even darker than their own that was barely lit by the red emergency lights.

“… do you think that’s someone of our group?” Lupin pointed his wand towards the half-open doors at the end of the red section, yet his eyes kept drifting upwards to the dementors that seemed hyper-focused on the very same direction. Their mad dance had stopped entirely. They now floated in the air, their hooded faces staring straight ahead, then –
They began wailing in a cry of war.

Severus and Lupin both jumped backwards in anticipation of an attack, but instead of turning towards them, the dementors plunged forward, clawing and fighting their way through the gate towards the helpless screams from Wing C. Like piranhas smelling blood, they squeezed through the doors into the next corridor.

The human scream did not repeat. The inhuman shrieks, though … they were like a choir in the distance.

Severus still felt chilled to the bone. He took another step back. The air was no longer freezing, but the dementors were too close to release his heart and mind from their cold grip.

“It could be Slughorn’s or McGonagall’s group.” Lupin’s voice was trembling with anxiety.

Did he envision Macdonald or Pettigrew with the same empty eyes as the guard had had? The one they had left behind in that blasted cell?
It didn’t matter.
It didn’t.
Because whoever was down there with the dementors … they were on their own. Severus would rather go up as instructed than down there.

“I don’t care,” he urged. “We need to leave before they come back for a snack.”

“That could be Lily.”
Lupin was staring at him intensely as if he expected the reminder to change Severus’ mind.

He shook his head. Once. Twice. Thrice.
He saw Lily as he remembered her. All red hair and smile and freckles and green dots of warmth that promised spring.
The green dulled in his imagination. The smile turned into an expressionless line.

Severus took another step backwards, almost falling as his shoes hit the dead guard’s body. Instinctively, he looked down.
Those eyes were lifeless too, and he could see the half-open mouth, the shaving nicks around the man’s mouth. Barely 30 and lying broken on a metal prison floor with his throat slashed. One hand was closed around a wand, the other still rested against the neck wound as if he had attempted to quell the flow of blood. It had run down his uniform, staining his front and forming a puddle underneath his body.

He reminded Severus of his mom.

Dementor wails in the background. Another human scream from Wing C. And Lupin was calling out his name again and again.

Severus’ knees touched the floor next to the body as he clutched his own throat to get air. Then he rested his palms on the cold metal floor.

“Snape? Are you okay? Snape! This is not the time for –“

“Just shut up for once in your goddamn life!”

He clawed into his own arm to ground himself. Pain did that.
Then he reached out his shaky hand and put it onto the guard’s face that rested mere centimetres from his. The cheeks were lukewarm. He closed the man’s eyes.

The dementor’s wailing still rung in his ears, and he could hear his own heartbeat in his ears. The rush of blood.
This was a panic attack, he realised in that out-of-body experience that had overcome him once before.

Just like last time.

It had been Severus who had taken down his mom from the kitchen ceiling the summer between fourth and fifth year. You found her, his father had slurred from the couch where he had buried his face in his lap. For once, it hadn’t been beer but tears that had messed up Tobias’ pronunciation. You found her, so you take care of it.

“SNAPE!” Lupin’s voice broke him out of this trainwreck of memories.

“WHAT!?”

“We can’t not help them!” Lupin cried out. He sounded uncertain and desperate and like somebody out of their mind.

“It’s none of our business.” Severus grabbed his wand that had fallen next to the guard’s corpse. It offered a spark of warmth, sensing that he needed it. At least one friend in this fucked-up place. “We need to …. we need to leave”

They needed to go… up.

Severus’ eyes shifted to the end of the corridor from where they had come from. The stairs to the fifth floor of Wing B. He’d rather be anywhere else than between all of these corpses and dementors. The red floors … they were no good.

He waited for triumphant laughter, for any reaction, but the voice in his head remained stubbornly silent.
Did it not approve anymore?
Should he fear to be burnt alive as punishment for disobeying an unspoken rule?
Or was silence the best he would get? A reward for good behaviour?

Whatever.

The dementors were still wailing in an ugly chorus and the human screams had turned into a final one.
There was nothing they could do. The voice was right. They were nothing but vermin. Mice running around in this maze.
If the dementors preyed on Lily or Macdonald or McGonagall or Slughorn or whatever … it didn’t matter. There was nothing Severus could do to stop that.
All they could do was stay alive.
And run.

“Up,” he said harshly, stumbling to his feet and turning back to Wing B. “Let’s go up!”

“No.”

Severus halted. Turned around in utter irritation to Lupin who had his feet firmly on the ground, his arms crossed.

“You cannot seriously want to go down there?”

Lupin’s face was ashen and he looked more dead than alive. Especially next to the guard’s corpse and the still open cell doors – there were outstretched limbs at weird angles.
Severus refused to look closer.

“If this is the others, we need to help.” Lupin gulped. “Because we need them just as much as they need us!”

“You’re crazy!” Severus spat. “What about our last encounter with one dementor convinced you that we can take on a dozen of them? Your silvery thing definitely did jackshit! Even Potter’s stag only stalled it and that was more impressive than your failure!”

The scream in the back stopped. It was followed by more dementor wails.

“It’s advanced magic!” Lupin defended himself. He had his lips pursed. “And you were no help at all!”

“Well, I don’t pretend to be a dementor slayer!” Severus’ breath was raspy. “We need to leave!”

At least he needed to.

Internally, he could feel the clock ticking. Spending time around Lupin was dangerous enough on its own. He itched to conjure the magical clock – to check how long he had left.
If things came to it … he’d still find the words to put Lupin down.
Especially now that Potter was gone. That Potter couldn’t interfere.
He’d find those two words inside of him. Even if his tongue felt locked tight now.

Lupin walked two steps back, grimacing as he lifted his feet a bit higher to step over the dead guard that was blocking the path. “I don’t know about you but … I couldn’t live with myself if I turned my back on the others. If I lived and they died.”

“Good for you,” Severus spat. “I prefer to live to regret my survival. Feel free to offer yourself as a snack to the dementors. I won’t stop you.”

“Of course, you won’t.”
Lupin’s mouth twisted downward. Was it disgust? Displeasure? Disapproval? Disappointment?
Whatever.

Severu watched as Lupin forced himself towards Wing C, step by step, suddenly accelerating into a jog. Only to disappear into the darkness behind the gate.

The next thing that rang out was Lupin’s panicky shout –
“Expecto … Expecto Patronum!”

Severus could not see any silvery light breaking through the darkness.

“EXPECTO PATRONUM! EXPECTO … EXPECTO PATRONUM!”

No. He’d not risk his life for a werewolf.
Severus remained rooted to the spot between the six open and four sealed cells in the red section.
For once, he desired to hear that voice. To know that there was someone looking out for him, even if that someone might be a deranged lunatic.
It felt as if he had been abandoned.
Not worth it anymore.

He should go up.
Should …

Two voices cut through the wails of the dementors. One was Lupin’s. “SNAPE!”

And the other –

There you are.

Severus stared at the man who had emerged from the dark corridor. One hand casually rested on the door as he stepped over the threshold into the red section of Wing B. A Caucasian man in his sixties, maybe. With wizards, it was hard to tell. His bleach-blond hair was a tad too long, too unkempt. Receding. There were age lines on his face, marring what once had to have held beauty. Two differently-coloured eyes had caught his. One was as dark as Severus’ own set of eyes; the other was completely grey and unfocused. It seemed to stare into the afterlife.
The man had taken down his hood, but the black cloak was still flowing around him like it had done downstairs when he had set Mulciber on fire.

Severus couldn’t get the scream out that was caught in his throat. Couldn’t move a muscle. He felt his eyes caught in the man’s gaze.

The wizard was drawing closer, crossing the red section. Stepping over the guard’s body, his boots hitting the man’s hand. Squishing it underneath.

Unlike most wizards Severus knew, the guy wore a soft moustache, not the full-blown beard traditional British wizards liked to sport. Every button of his cloak was tightly closed. A golden chain hung around his neck and at the end; a silvery pendent with cracks all across. Hundreds of shards sticking together by nothing but magic.

The stranger came to a halt next to Severus, facing the direction of Wing B.

“You are shorter than I thought.”

With that, the man moved past Severus.

Severus did not dare turn. Did not dare breathe. Those unmatching eyes were still at the front of his mind. Haunting him.

“Who are you?”, he whispered, his voice like a twig that would break at first contact.

“Come find me on the roof when you have grown into your shoes, boy.”

Steps leading away from him. And just as Severus had figured he was safe –

“Ignis Maximus.”

Instantaneously, the air in the red section exploded with heat as the fiendfyre sprang to life, eating the guard’s corpse on the ground and spreading through the corridor, its flames bound by the metal floor and walls that acted as an oven chamber.
Severus threw himself forward with a yelp, barely escaping the racing flames until he heaved himself over the threshold of the black corridor. Through the green flames, he could see the man standing on the opposite side of the room. Their eyes locked but no thought greeted him as the dark corridor weighed on him – suppressing each and all forms of magic. The fiendfyre licked at the air but it too could not penetrate the black section that was the fourth floor of Wing C.

As Severus looked up again, the wizard … had gone.

“SNAPE!”
Lupin’s yell broke through his hypnosis-like state.

The corridor was in utter darkness, apart from the flashing white lights on the ceiling. There were only four doors, and all of them were closed; on the ground, there was Lupin, pressed to the ground by three dementors, as he flailed in a struggle for his soul. Just a metre away from him, there was Avery. He was lying propped against the wall, his eyes blinking and staring at Severus but no longer seeing him.

The dementors now noticed Severus too, as if they had smelled his soul.

Lupin’s hand reached out for him. “Call a Patronus!”

He didn’t know how.
He didn’t think he could.
Even if the corridor would not suppress his magic.

The stairs to his right.
They would lead to the fifth floor, to a corridor that may be red or blue or green.
That might allow for magic.
Would give him the chance to fight.
Lupin’s hand was twitching, the three dementors fighting each other for the honour to feed on him. The others had turned towards Severus, wailing in that god-awful way they did before … pouncing.

Not enough.
He was never enough.

Vermin.
A child.

Even the wizard had ridiculed him. Had considered him unfit.
It wasn’t fair.
Why had the dementors not sucked out his soul?
Severus had felt power oozing off him like a heavy perfume. He had almost suffocated in his own insignificance. Powerlessness.
Why?
Why was he never good enough?
Not good enough to fight back. To take control of the situation.

No.
Nobody could control dementors. They were monsters just like Lupin.
It was only right for him to be eaten by them.
Only right.

As the dementors approached, Severus became overwhelmed by memories. By the werewolf in his mind. How those yellow eyes had stared him down. How those paws had pressed him to the ground of the Shrieking Shack– the hot breath, it stank of meat and saliva and –

For a second, he glimpsed past the memories. Lupin’s eyes were brownish-green. So blown-up in fear. Then a dementor pulled between them, and all Severus could see was darkness. Hands on his face and shoulder and –
He fell.
His head hit the first step of the stairs, and everything was shaky and ringing in his ears –

He didn’t want to feel this anymore. Didn’t want his heart to race, his breath to tremble, to think –
He shut it out. Pulled his own hands over his eyes. If only he could ignore the wailing, the unwanted touch that stained him.
He was lying on the cold floor, the back of his head pulsating.
It didn’t hurt. It wouldn’t hurt.
He blended it all out.
Even the wet sounds that the dementors made as they got into his face.

“Snape! Snape!”

Even that.
He blended out even Lupin’s calls.

Then the skeletal fingers retreated. Severus waited for them to come down on his throat, but – nothing.

He blinked his eyes open. He was still focusing on nothing like he would do before going to sleep in his dormitory bed at Hogwarts. Sometimes it was so much easier to wish he did not exist. That there was nothing inside of him and he was leaving into nothingness.

The dementors that had decided to prey on him … –
They had rejoined their friends and were once again fighting over Lupin’s soul. Like dogs deciding on a hierarchy for a feed.
They were ignoring him … as if he was … not there.

“Lupin!” Severus shouted out, clawing at the step next to him to sit up, to get up the stairs to the fifth floor to safety. “You need to control your emotions!”

But the other boy did not stop screaming.

“CONTROL YOUR EMOTIONS!”

Lupin didn’t listen.
Because no one ever listened to him.

One of the dementors had managed to get on top of the Gryffindor boy, ignoring the snapping of the others and how they would smash themselves against it to throw it off. It was bowing its head towards Lupin’s face.

The Gryffindor was still twitching. Still fighting so unlike Avery that sat leaned against the wall like a marionette with cut strings.

He had gotten rid of the dementors. So, he could … could call them, too.
Oh Merlin.

Potter’s memories had been nothing but bullshit.
They had –
Severus concentrated on his side of the story.
On everything that he felt. That he had never said to Lupin.
And if he did not stop those dementors … he would lose the chance to do so. Forever.

Severus let those memories wash over him, let them claw their way into his heart.
Let them out.

He remembered being so ashamed of his second-hand clothes with which he had to board the train to Hogwarts. The books he had inherited from his mother with food stains and torn pages. The way Lily’s parents had hidden their grimace when he had gotten into their car because his jeans still were dirty from his last tumble in the grass the week before.
How Potter and Black had seized him up after they had entered Lily’s and his carriage. How they had focused on his unkempt hair, his threadbare shirt – and given each other a knowing smirk.
He remembered those whispered Mudbloods in the Slytherin common room as he slaved through parchments of homework, filling out Avery’s and Mulciber’s and Macnair’s, too.
The yellow eyes of the werewolf in the shack.
Dumbledore’s ENOUGH as he had started to tell what Lupin and Potter and Black had been up to – then the bitter realisation that it was him that would spend every Friday evening polishing the trophies in the trophy room by hand until the end of the year. For leaving his bed during the night
Dumbledore’s warning not to stray from the path again – lest he would be expelled.
Lupin’s eyes following him everywhere. The yellow eyes in his mind and those green ones all across Hogwarts. He had never stopped when the boy had called out to him. Hadn’t wanted to hear him gloat. Hadn’t wanted to hear that, really, it was your own fault.
Just as Lily began to avert her eyes whenever they were in the same room, Lupin never stopped looking.
Like a bloody stalker.
Or a wolf fixated on its prey.

In truth, he had hated Lupin way before the Shrieking Shack.
Because Lupin had always been enough. While Severus hadn’t.

Severus spread his arms as he stood on the stairs to the fifth floor. “COME HERE!” he shouted. “You fucking monsters, come here!”

He let all his memories and feelings bleed through his shield, smashing it into pieces.
It felt … as if it was beyond repair.

Finally, the dementors looked into his direction. Smelled the air. Took him in with all his pain and jealousy and … they came for him.

He could see Lupin’s panicky eyes look towards him. The boy’s empty hand reaching out to him in a warning. A plea. Whatever. Severus broke the connection. He turned around and ran for his life as darkness was following him. Grasping for him.

He could feel their hands and the wisps of blackness that surrounded the dementors, their merciless cold – and with a final jump, he took the last three steps in one go to land on his stomach on the fifth floor.
Blue-flashing ceiling lights.
He rolled around, pointing his wand at the wave of dementors –

“Expecto Patronum!”

But it wasn’t his wand that the silver stream broke from, nor was it his voice that boomed through the corridor and echoed off the empty walls.

Four boots stepped over him, just as he held his hands protectively over his head. And Severus looked up to the two backs that had put themselves squarely between Severus and the onslaught of dementors he had brought with him.

Scrimgeour’s lion and Slughorn’s formless stream of silver were locked in a mad battle with the dementors that were now crying in agony and anger.

The two men looked worse for the wear.
Slughorn’s coat had been slashed open, and his eyes seemed sunken in as if he had seen too much in the past hour. And Scrimgeour – the young Auror sported a deep, ugly cut across the left side of his face as if something had failed to cut his head open. There was blood on his white shirt and his left eye was completely closed. But he stood upright.

“Don’t let the one on the left break through, Rufus!” Slughorn ordered, his voice rough from exhaustion.

“I know!” Scrimgeour corrected his wand hold. “We need to drive them back and close the door!”

“NO! Lupin’s still down there!” Severus screamed. “Don’t send them back to him!”

For a second, the two adults looked at him in alarm, then at each other –
Until the dementors almost broke through and they needed to concentrate on their Patroni again.
Without exchanging words, just from that one glance, the men began to simultaneously move apart, creating a cage of silver around the dementors.

“Move!”, Scrimgeour gave Severus a shove with his foot as he was right where they were driving the dementors. And Severus did. He crawled to the side, pressing his back firmly against the wall of the corridor. Then Scrimgeour and Slughorn managed to come back together, now their backs facing the dark corridor as they drove the dementors towards Wing B on the fifth floor.

“LEAVE YOU FUCKING NUTJOBS!”, Scrimgeour cursed, holding his wand more tightly. “WE’RE WITH THE MINISTRY!”

“They don’t care, Rufus!”

“Oh, really, Sir?” Scrimgeour slashed his wand in fury, causing one dementor to wail out as it was hit by the whip of silvery magic.

The dementors kept fighting, kept throwing themselves against the silver wall.

“We could retreat to the sixth floor and barricade the door –“ Slughorn suggested under coughs as his throat gave out. His jet of silver began to waver.

“Expecto Patronum!”
Lupin had crashed onto his knees as he reached the top of the stairs, joining them on the blue floor. He was clasping onto the door as his legs would not hold him. Despite that, he managed to add a silvery wisp to Slughorn’s and Scrimgeour’s defensive wall.

Still useless as always.

The words shook Severus to the core. He whirled around but –
No trace of the man in the darkness of the hole behind him. Just empty stairs. Yet all hairs on Severus’ arm stood tall.

“Snape!” Slughorn growled his name, holding his own wand with two hands and desperately pumping his magic into the silvery mass. “Don’t just stand there like an idiot!”

What was he supposed to do, really? Severus raised his wand, clumsily calling out the incantation but –
Again. Not even a wisp of silver like Lupin’s.

“Fucking hell!” Scrimgeour pushed him to the side, repositioning himself to take more responsibility for the silvery wall as Lupin and Slughorn were not pulling their weight. “LEAVE US ALONE!” His anger pulsed through the shield, and the dementors wailed even louder, and then – they suddenly dispersed, rushing off towards the other two wings under angry wails.

All that could be heard in the empty corridor were their four laboured breaths.

Then Slughorn turned to Severus and –
Hugged him.

The man’s meaty hands closed around his form, leaving Severus paralysed. After an eternity, Slughorn let go of him just as quickly as he had grabbed him. Only for him to reach out to Lupin, touching the boy’s shoulder and arms as if to make sure he was okay.

“I don’t know what miracle you worked to get through to us, but thank Merlin nothing happened to you two! Did Minerva send you?”

Lupin and he remained silent. It just … Severus didn’t know how to explain what had happened downstairs. There were no words for it. For those bodies and Brode and the blue flames and Mulciber and Fletcher and MacTavish.

“Is everybody okay?” Slughorn asked, his relief instantly replaced by worry. “Mr. Snape. Mr. Lupin. I asked you a question. Is everybody okay?”

His hands that had been on Lupin’s arms to check his health now found the Gryffindor’s shoulders again. This time, he was holding the boy with enough force to draw a sharp gasp from Lupin. “Is everybody okay?”

Chapter Text

No. Nothing was okay.

Severus stood still while Lupin shakily recounted what had happened to them. The words tumbled out of the boy’s mouth.
“We were with Mr. Brode when the lights went out and the alarm rang; and he rushed off to see what was going on, and Professor McGonagall took us to the canteen. Then Snape and Mulciber arrived, and they said the dementors had attacked them upstairs! So we tried to leave, but there is magical fire in front of the door, and we decided to find another way out, but then we were separated by a fire wall, and Mulciber … those flames burn you alive! They are blue! I’ve never seen … I’ve never seen anything like that!”
Lupin paused to take a deep breath. He was running low on oxygen from how he was speeding through their story.
“And then Snape and I went upstairs, and we found … “ his eyes flickered to Severus as if to gauge how much he should reveal. “There are two prisoners outside their cells! They’re downstairs and they killed the guards!”

Scrimgeour and Slughorn exchanged a look. “We already encountered one of them,” their teacher informed them. “We had been looking for a way to get downstairs because you guys closed the security doors when you ran from the dementors. Mr. Avery had found us alongside Mulligan. The guard you sent upstairs to help us. When we got to the red floor, we came across this cloaked man who was killing the other prisoners one by one. He drove us into the black corridor where the dementors awaited us.”

“Avery’s still there,” Severus stated quietly. “The dementors … they got to him.”

Neither Slughorn nor Scrimgeour seemed surprised.

“I have no idea who this prisoner was,” Scrimgeour said. “He didn't talk, he just ... cursed us. I couldn’t …. I couldn’t do anything against him. His magic was so destructive, so fierce! Poor Mulligan. He was gutted like a pig.” Scrimgeour closed his eyes in pain. “Whoever that is, he must have gone insane. Why else would he attack the other inmates? They were no threat to him!”

“That’s not who we were talking about,” Severus interjected. “McTavish and Fletcher have escaped their cells. They’re running rampant downstairs.”

One of the names (or both?) made Slughorn give a surprised yelp. Right. He had to have known those two when they were children.

Scrimgeour snarled. “Death Eaters, the lot of them! How have they gotten out? What’s going on today!”

“They have a wand,” Severus added. “They … must have taken it from one of the dead guards. The first three floors are all abandoned.”

This seemed to be one punch into the stomach too much. Scrimgeour bent over as if he would throw up. His breathing was harsh.
How old was he anyway?
His thick beard made him look thirty, but the way he would look to Slughorn for guidance …

“You need to stop Fletcher and McTavish!” Lupin insisted, probably thinking of his two friends that were hunting Fletcher. “Please!”

“No! This goes beyond what I can do! Too many people have died under my watch already. We need to call for back-up, especially since I haven’t heard anything from Brode in a while,” Scrimgeour said. “If we get to the top floor, there’s a floo connection in the warden room. It’s sealed for travel, but we can still contact the Auror office – “

“Couldn’t we send a Patronus?” Slughorn asked. “That would be faster and less dangerous. We could hide in an empty cell and just wait it out.”

Scrimgeour grimaced. “There’s a charm to make the island unplottable. No patronus from the outside can find anyone inside the barrier, but unfortunately, this also means that any Patronus from the inside can never find a person outside the barrier. The floo is all we have.”

“Very well.” Slughorn still held onto Severus’ and Lupin’s shoulders as if to keep them close, lest he lose them like the others. “We have the children in the middle, you up front, me at the end. And once we have made the floo call, we can wait it out in the warden room, at least?”

“Yes, Sir.” Scrimgeour nodded. He was already raising his wand when –

“No! You need to go after McTavish and Fletcher first! Please!” Lupin had shaken off Slughorn’s hand to approach the young Auror.

“Those two aren’t a priority right now,” Scrimgeour said. “They can’t escape the island. There is an anti-apparition barrier around Azkaban. Let them leave the tower for all I care. They can drown themselves in the North Sea. We need to get that murderous bastard taken care of – “

“Fletcher and McTavish were working their way upstairs,” Severus said. “Not down.” He frowned.

“Doesn’t matter!” Scrimgeour locked eyes with Slughorn. “Sir, I am sorry for the danger you have been placed in with your wards. I will make sure that we are as safe as we can be. I owe you this.”

“It’s fine. This is not your fault, Rufus.” Slughorn exhaled. “I am getting too old for these shenanigans. Believe me, the first thing I do when we get back to the castle is write my resignation letter.”
He was kneading the silver key with the emerald stone that he had been wearing around his neck since their arrival.

“But –“ Lupin’s protest was cut short.

“The ministry will sort out everything, Mr. Lupin. They will take care of the escapees.”

It still made no sense why McTavish and Fletcher were going up the tower.
Nothing in here made sense.

You see but you do not observe. What a rotten spy you’d be.

“Please, professor!” Lupin was still arguing with all his heart, visibly distressed about the fact that the Auror would not rush off to get Fletcher before Potter and Black were torn into pieces by the two Death Eaters. “Can’t we first get Fletcher under control –!”

Fletcher and MacTavish. Who were closing the connecting doors to prevent people from … going down. As if they were looking for something. Or … someone.

“Wait!” Severus paled. “Could they be …” His gaze was drawn to the silver key around Slughorn’s neck.

And there it is. Not so stupid after all, are you?

The others followed his gaze. It was Slughorn who first balked, his eyes widening in panic as he looked down the stairs to the black corridor where Avery’s soulless corpse lay, his thoughts miles away. “We need to look for Minerva’s group, Rufus! If something happens to her – … I couldn’t …”

“Where did you see them last?” Scrimgeour had grabbed Lupin’s shoulders.

“Down … down on the third floor.”

“FUCK!” Scrimgeour’s growl reminded Severus of a lion. “If they have a portkey, it will work once they leave the building!”

Lupin had also paled, exchanging a horrified glance with Severus. Who felt numb to it all.
McGonagall and Pettigrew and Lily and Macdonald. They had gone missing in between corridors.
It was already too late.

“Let’s hurry!” Lupin cried out. He did not wait for the adults to make up their mind; he jumped back down the stairs to the black corridor to retreat their steps, and Slughorn and Scrimgeour followed him, wands raised high.

It was one of these out of body experiences. Severus could see himself standing on the threshold of the fifth floor, with one clear path down.
There was quite a mess waiting for him.
McTavish and Fletcher, who were hunting down McGonagall’s portkey, and Black out to kill Fletcher, and Potter trying to prevent Black from becoming a murderer.
It was a mess that could be clearly defined in good and bad, and in the in-between where everybody could only lose.
There would be spells flying around, and people being hit in the chest accidentally, and –

There was more to this.
How had Fletcher even known about the portkey?
And there was one more puzzle piece that still did not fit.
A piece he had not shared with anyone.

Brode was dead.
Had been killed even before Fletcher had escaped his cell.

There was but one player who had been moving them around like chess pieces on a board from the minute they had gotten to the island.

Severus concentrated on the thought, projecting it through every fibre of his body. Who are you? And what do you want from me?

But for once, there was nothing but silence in his head.

He had managed to reverse the connection once. Only for a second he had stared out from the man’s eyes. All he remembered was that luxurious cell.
Or had it been.
Had it truly been a cell.
Or rather …
The warden room with the floo connection on the top floor.

Meet me on the roof, the man had said before almost burning Severus alive.

Just staring at the stairs that led to the sixth floor gave Severus the chills.

Whatever was happening downstairs … that wasn’t his problem.
This though.
This was his problem.

He was dead anyway.
So what did it matter.

Severus exhaled until his head was so bereft of oxygen that he felt dizzy.
Held that moment.
Then he breathed. Once. Twice.
And this he repeated for every step he took to the sixth floor.

Chapter Text

Severus could already tell that the sixth floor would have red emergency lights on the ceilings – a wave of ice-cold air hit him as he was climbing the stairs. His wand was trembling as he repeated Lupin’s spell in his head.
Over and over.

Expecto Patronum. Or was it Expectum Patronum? Expectum. Expecto. Expecto Patronum. Expectum Patronum. Expecto –

They had never been taught that spell in class. No Defence teacher had stuck around long enough to get to that part of the curriculum. He was a bit jealous of Potter and Lupin for knowing the spell. Nothing had happened when Severus had tried to cast it before.

It would be okay. The dementors were trained not to attack unless someone interfered with the cells on their corridor. And Severus just wanted to … he wanted to …

Severus gripped his wand tighter as the chill of the dementors crept underneath his clothes and skin, gripping his heart. Images flooded his head.

He had been four or five, and he had made a paper airplane fly through the living room like a complete idiot who didn’t think of the consequences. His parents were arguing, pushing each other around physically while fighting over who would leave the house.

The m-word on both sides.

Magic.
Mudblood.

He had slapped her, and she had split his lip, and they had exchanged accusations until –

Until his father threw a half-empty bottle of vodka against the wall. The shards had rained down on his mother’s shoulder, her shoes. Silence. Something had broken apart that night; had shattered alongside that bottle into thousands of pieces. Beyond repair.

Years later, his mother’s body had lain on the floor of the same shabby, rat-infested living room.

He had knelt next to her, that damn letter in his fist that threatened him with expulsion because he had cast a cutting spell to take her down. The ministry owl was still sitting on top of a wobbly stack of newspapers, screeching in expectation of a reward. He had wanted to set the bird on fire so badly. Just like he had wanted the world to burn. Maybe it was a good thing he had never been taught that blue flame spell. He would have cast it to erase those Gryffindors, to destroy his father, to make himself disappear with all that hurt inside of him.

A tilted world of green and black, as he was hung upside-down by Potter near the lake shore, his own cloak now over his head and exposing his underwear to –

Severus’ eyes were burning as he forced himself up the stairs to the sixth floor. Step by step.
He wouldn’t give the dementors the satisfaction of having beaten him down.
He never bowed to no one.

Never.

***

There were three dementors on the sixth floor, and he found himself staring right up into one of them as he exited the stairs. It blocked the stairs to the seventh floor. Severus could feel those empty sockets trace each and every of his movements. As his heartbeat quickened, the dementor lowered its cloaked head, seemingly fascinated with Severus’ chest.

He could feel its hunger, but –
It had a job.
Like a trained attack dog, it waited for permission to strike.

The other two dementors were patrolling the row of cells, hovering up and down through the air like ghosts. They, too, had their non-faces turned to Severus, ready for him to step out of line.
They were almost … hopeful.

Severus’ breath hitched; there was more air streaming in with each of his breaths than going out. It made him dizzy. He kept his wand trained on the dementor guarding the stairs to the seventh floor, while he walked towards it. But the damn monster did not move aside.
Severus twisted around, his heart hammering as he expected a trap, but the other two dementors remained at a respectful distance.

“Move,” he ordered, his voice brittle as he recalled Scrimgeour’s words earlier. “I am …. I am with the ministry.”

No reaction.

This was going to get ugly very fast. Scrimgeour had warned that they would take any and all magic in their face as an attack.
Severus took a step back before breathing in deeply. Then – “Expecto Patronum!”

Nothing.
Not a wisp of silver. He hadn’t even any magic rush from himself to the wand. As if he had said gibberish.
The dementors seemed just as unimpressed.

“Expectum Patronum!” he tried again. “Expecto! Patronum!”

You really are useless the voice stated with utter disdain. What are you even trying to accomplish here?

“You told me to get to the roof,” Severus hissed. “I am doing the best I can!”

You will not get past them like this, the voice claimed. People like you and me; we know solitude. We don’t rely on a protector. We protect ourselves.

Severus refused to be grouped together with that murderer. Whatever connection there may be between them, he didn’t want it. So he stubbornly raised his wand again. “Expecto Patronum!” His angry swish produced another round of … nothing.

Why was it not working? Why was he never enough?
Potter and Lupin had produced that silver mist, and Slughorn had done it, and Scrimgeour –

Oh, for Merlin’s sake. What does Albus teach you up there in that castle? How to weave flower wreaths? You need a happy memory that you can infuse with your magic as a carrier. That’s why you are failing.

Severus hesitated in his latest attempt to cast the spell.
A happy memory.
It sounded ridiculous and unmagical, and like something Dumbledore would spout in one of his lectures on love and forgiveness and kumbaya. Not like something a dark wizard would share with you.
Was the guy making fun of him?

I have better things to do, believe me. Since the beginning, you have been a gigantic waste of time already. Try it. Then you’ll see that I am right. This spell is not for you.

Severus didn’t like to be told that he couldn’t do certain things. It made him want to succeed at that spell even more.
Besides, this was easy. There weren’t a lot of memories to choose from that would qualify as happy.

He tried to think of sitting on his mother’s lap. They had read a book about fairytales from the church library, and she had told him the magical version that the Muggle brothers hadn’t captured when they had recorded the stories. Like how the wolf had actually been a werewolf, and that’s why Little Red Riding Hood had given him the information on her grandmother and not recognised what he was in time.
The world had seemed so magical back then. So full of wonders.

“Expecto Patronum!”

His mother vanished from the memory, leaving behind nothing but an empty chair at the table.

He needed a stronger memory.
Something that was … untainted.

That vibrant red-haired girl on the swing that flew off and landed on the ground safely. No care in the world on Lily’s bright face. No bruises on her.
Severus could still taste traces of that jealousy on his lips.
Her magic had seemed as soft as a spring breeze.

They were lying on the grass near the river together and stared into the blue sky. Lily and he had been talking about magic and their future adventures at Hogwarts, and she had laughed at his pranks when he had used his magic to play tricks on Muggle children that were passing by. Tying their shoelaces together, or making their toy cars disappear, or deflating their football mid-game.

Lily had joined him in the shadows from where he had observed the other children. All his life, he had hidden behind a tree or the corner of a corridor.

“Expecto Patronum!” He aimed at the dementor guarding the seventh floor. “Expectum Patronum!”

Nothing.
Because … Lily had stepped out of the shadows. Had turned the corner and … talked to people. Had left him standing there.

He felt like snapping his wand in two.

See? The voice sounded bored. We can only rely on ourselves. People do nothing but disappoint you. That’s why this spell is a waste of time. We both have better means of dealing with dementors.

“But –“ Severus bit his lip. That dementor in front of him was insurmountable. His gaze swivelled around. Maybe if he switched wing. Maybe there would be free access to the seventh floor there.

You could run, the voice agreed, or you just walk past it and all those fears that keep you down.

Walk past it.
Ludicrous.
The dementors had a body, he had felt their claws on him before in the dark corridor. Had felt their weight on his chest as he had almost lost his soul to them.

Tell me, boy. Why can the manifestation of a happy memory hit a dementor when your bare spell cannot?

He didn’t know.
He just didn’t know.
Severus’ head was pounding.

Come on. You did it before. Do it again.

Before.
When he had manipulated their movements by controlling his own emotions. When he had hidden his every thought and feeling behind his Occlumency and then thrown them at the dementors like a weapon.

It was true. There was nothing that could hurt him … if only he did not exist.
It didn’t come easy for him, though. This level of total control.
He just needed to care less.
It was difficult.
Because … he wanted to be seen.

Not by them, though.

No. Not by them.

Severus’ collected his thoughts and feelings behind his own occlumency walls – like a glass jar that was put over him. Even the voice became muted as his mind, again, belonged to nobody but himself.
It drained him. This was not something he could keep up for long.

The dementor’s socket-less eyes wandered past him, no longer able to perceive his presence. So Severus stepped through the black mass. It was weird. Like passing through a ghost.
There was even this sensation of having a bucket of ice-cold water run down his back, but without being drenched by even a droplet.
Then he was past the dementor that seemed unperturbed. As if he had not even felt Severus walk through him.

He lowered his shields and hated himself for it, as he looked for that voice. For guidance as he stumbled upstairs to the seventh floor.

Well done.

It shouldn’t feel good. Not when it came from Mulciber’s murderer. From the person that had almost set him on fire. That had killed all these Death Eaters and ridiculed him every step along the way.
Severus hated how his chest warmed for a second.
He wasn’t used to praise.
And he could feel the voice smirk knowingly.

This was dangerous.
This game that they were playing – it was fucking dangerous.

***

The seventh floor was unremarkable; another blue corridor that held a row of cells. However, this guard station was abandoned, too, although Fletcher and McTavish couldn’t be responsible for that. They had never made it this far up.
Severus hesitated in-between stairs.

Don’t dawdle, the voice demanded.

There was a low-pitched pounding. As if somebody was knocking against one of the cell doors.

Two more floors. I am waiting.

Severus’ head wandered from the stairs to the empty guard station, then to the closed cell doors.
The knocking continued. Somebody swore like a sailor, though only every second syllable made it past the thick steel.

It was the third cell. Severus had come to a standstill before the door. According to the tag, it should be an empty cell, however –
There was a fist banging against the door from the inside. Arrhythmically. The person on the other side was running out of stamina.

Severus raised his own fist and – knocked back.

There was deafening silence on the other side, until –

“Rufus? Is that you? It’s me, Alex! Please! Get me out of here!”

Severus kept silent.

“Rufus? Rufus? Oh, for fuck’s sake! HELP!” A man’s voice. “Get me out of here! HELP!”

And suddenly, all the other prisoners also began shouting and banging against their doors. Calls for food, and manic laughter, and cries of despair, they all blended together. The corridor ground was quivering from the stomping and pounding behind those doors.

“The keys are in my desk drawer”, the voice shouted. “PLEASE! Get me out of here! Before that guy returns! GET ME OUT OF HERE!”

Severus took a step back. The other prisoners had been rattled by the warden’s screams, and it was loud enough in the corridor to make his ears ring. People were pounding against metal, and roaring.

“GET US OUT TOO!”

“It’s been dark for hours! What’s going on!”

“GET! US! OUT!”

Severus’ eyes fell on the desk that stood untouched near the stairs to the eighth floor.

“PLEASE!” the warden begged; his voice was barely audible over the noise. “Whoever you are, we need to inform Brode and Scrimgeour about the intruder. Azkaban is not safe! We need to get back-up!”

If you free him, the voice informed Severus, I will have to squash him for good, this time.

Severus took his hand from the desk as if he had been burnt. “I am sorry,” he called out to the warden in the cell. “I am so sorry!”

“WAIT!”

More pounding, but Severus hurried up the stairs to the eighth floor.

There, he found himself with another emptied guard station, and blood smears on the ground, but it looked more defensive in nature, not … like the slaughter the dark wizard had left behind when he had killed that warden alongside the Death Eaters. The blood droplets led to the first cell, and here, the block was completely quiet. No calls to be rescued. The guard was either too injured or too dead to protest.

The bigger problem awaited Severus as he turned his gaze to the stairs leading up to the ninth floor.
A wall of blue flames.

***

Instinctively, he took a step back, twisting his ankle as he lost balance. His butt made contact with the concrete floor of the prison. The sound had apparently been loud enough to get through the thick cell doors, as now the prisoners here too were rebelling. They were hitting their doors with something that sounded like drums. Spoons, maybe.
We want food!” he heard somebody shout. “And light!”
“Food first!”
“Tell the elves to hurry up!”
“Yes, tell them to hurry up!”
“DINNER! DINNER! DINNER!”

Severus blended out their protests as they mistook him for a guard. He was busy staring straight at the blue flames. The very same magic that had eaten Mulciber alive.

He turned his head, but the other end of the corridor also had a wall of blue flames.
Severus was a rat trapped in a dead end.
He focussed on the stairs that would lead him down to the seventh floor again. He almost expected a wall of blue flame to arise, but –
Nothing.

“If you want me to meet you on the roof,” Severus argued with the air, his throat sore, “then you should let me pass instead of making me jump through hoops like a circus animal!”

Tick, tock. I am waiting. Get a move on.

“How!?” Severus pointed at the flames.

Walk through them.

Yeah, this was a definite no for him.
Nope, nada, never, no!
Severus still had the smell of burning human flesh in his nose when he thought of Mulciber. He’d rather face the werewolf downstairs and the two murderers on the loose, and –

You are welcome to do so.
The voice was losing patience.
Based on experience – that was not a good sign.

“I’ll burn to death!” Severus hissed, once again drawing noise from the cell block behind him. They didn’t know in what an awesome position they were! They could hide away in their cells! Severus felt like shouting at them to be a bit more grateful.

Trust me.

“Well, I don’t, for obvious reasons!” Severus breathed harshly as he focussed on the wall of blue flames.

It’s called Devil’s Protection. The fire will not harm you … unless you intend to fight me.

Yeah, Severus certainly didn’t plan on doing that. He knew his place. Fighting that monster of a wizard – that was suicidal. He had seen what the man was capable of.

“Mulciber didn’t fight you, and he still died in these flames!” Severus growled.

He had pledged himself to that Dark Lord of yours, the voice said. He opposed me by that alone.

I intend to join as well, Severus wanted to scream. So these flames will burn me just like they burnt him!
He didn’t say a word. Maybe the voice did not know of his intentions yet. Maybe that was the only reason why he hadn’t received the death penalty like all the other Death Eaters.

Oh, I know exactly who you are. In all your shades of grey.

That made the wall of blue flames in front of him all the scarier.

Severus gripped his yet unblemished arm tightly, until his fingernails dug through the cloak into his skin.

Walk into the fire. Show me your loyalty.

He had been wrong. This tower wasn’t a trap. It was all circles of hell combined.
Just like with the dementors, Severus felt as if he had been unclothed and forced to bare himself for somebody else to judge him.

He didn’t want to die as someone who had spent all his life in the shadows.
He wanted to be more than that.
He didn’t want to die.
Not like that.
He didn’t.

It hurt. The way his fingernails scratched at his arm.

He wanted to be more than a rat.

His feet moved forward, while his brain screamed at him to stop.

The fire was burning high, almost touching the ceiling, yet it did not spread. The heat was scorching, making his eyes shut defensively.

The voice knew of his plans. Knew of his inclination towards the Dark Lord, so why did he –
Why –

I don’t want to fight. I am too scared to fight him. I won’t fight him, Severus repeated in his mind, over and over again, focussing entirely on what he figured the voice would want to hear, hiding everything else underneath his occlumency walls.

His mind was his own.
He could rely on nobody but himself.
He may not know the Patronus spell, he may lose all verbal fights with the Gryffindors, but … this was his weapon.
The reason why he would walk out of this unscathed.
Because he protected himself.

The tip of his shoe disappeared into the flames, and with it his right leg. Severus did not stop, or else he would not find the courage to move forward again. He reached out with his hand and –
stepped through.

For a split second, blue flames danced across his closed eyelids, before he reached the other side of the stairs. The wall of demon fire burnt brightly behind him, unwaveringly.

Severus crashed onto his knees, not caring about the crunch in his bones as he hit the stone steps of the stairs. Blood was trickling down his leg. He could feel it inside his trousers. Then he grabbed the railing and pulled himself up.

Not dead yet.
He could already see the blinking emergency lights from the ninth floor.
He swiped the back of his hand over his forehead; and felt the blood transfer from his hand to his brow.

Welcome, the voice whispered. You’re almost there.

The man was wrong. Severus was already exactly where he had wanted to be. Because … the next floor was pitch-black.
Severus took a gigantic leap like a long jumper at the Olympics – crashing onto the floor once more.
There was finally nothing but silence in his head and he exhaled from the depth of his heart. What his shoddy Occlumency walls had not achieved, the magic-suppressant corridor did in a split-second – cutting off his unwanted connection to the man.

He had studied the black corridors before all of this had ever happened. Had stood in front of the map as Scrimgeour had led their group around the prison. Those corridors had scared him the most – so he had them memorized.

“I am not going to fight you”, he whispered in-between harsh breaths, “but the Aurors will!”

He pushed himself up and raced down the black corridor and away from the last set of stairs that would lead to the rooftop.
He’d known it was on him to activate the floo from the moment Scrimgeour had told them about the wardens’ room on the ninth floor. He was the only one that would be allowed to approach. And he’d be the only one to thrive in the shadows of these dark corridors.

How long until his betrayal would be noticed?
It felt already as if the darkness behind him was grasping at him. So he ran even faster.

You of all people should have known, Severus thought spitefully, although his words would not reach his tormentor, that you can only rely on yourself in this world.

Chapter Text

The warden room was a corner office with two desks, a set of lockers and – most importantly – a fireplace. Severus rushed inside, throwing the door behind him shut. For a second, he let himself take a deep breath. The break was necessary anyways – his eyes needed the second to adjust to the natural light.

The storm in front of the barred windows was still raging strong, with lightning and thunder chasing each other across the dark grey sky. Wherever the sun may be hiding behind that fortress of clouds, it was losing the battle. Severus’ eyes were drawn to the big clock on the wall.

One hour until moonrise.

Everything in the room seemed unkempt as if somebody had to evacuate abruptly. Some guard uniforms had been thrown over the coat rack, and there were files gathering dust on these desks. Another newspaper showing Mundungus Fletcher’s face as he was led away from the Wizengamot to serve his prison sentence in Azkaban.
One of the trays on the desk said “newbies”, the other read “leavers”. There were a couple files on the left one. The other only held a single file. The seer. Severus recognised him, although he still had a bit more body weight to him in that mugshot.
The calendar on the wall had the day marked as “Hogwarts trip”. Someone had smeared a sad smiley next to it, another person had made a drawing of McGonagall. She was half-human, half-cat in this one. In another pen colour, there was a small remark underneath: Cat got her tongue.
Slughorn’s drawing had been halfway erased. Severus could still see the faint writing, though. Did you know snakes don’t have spines.

Maybe the guards had realised they were wrong. Snakes possessed spines; even if they were often so twisted it required a mercy-culling.
Or maybe Scrimgeour hadn’t been able to stomach the joke. He was probably the only Slytherin on this side of the cell doors.

You think you’re clever, don’t you?

The man’s voice was full of contempt. Severus didn’t answer. He rummaged through the drawers of the desks and cabinets to find the floo powder. Hearing the voice was actually comforting. It meant the man wasn't yet in the black corridor. There was time. The man wouldn't catch up to him in the warden room. Not yet.

In which scenario in that head of yours do you come out of this alive, boy? Who do you think you are?

Found it.
Severus hastily got rid of the lid. It hit the floor as he threw the content of the small box into the fireplace. “Incendio!”

The flames burst to life, they were as green as Lily’s eyes.

“The minis–“

His command was unnecessary, as the wall behind the fireplace suddenly shimmered, revealing … another office. It was as if those two were connected, despite the hundreds of miles of distance between them. Severus reached out his hand, but the fireplace was truly sealed off. He could not touch the flames. They were burning the floo powder, and Severus realized he was wasting precious seconds.

“HELP!” he yelled from the top of his lungs, kneeling onto the cold stone floor. The ministry office on the other side seemed deserted.
Saturday. It was bloody Saturday night.
“WE NEED HELP!”

Suddenly, there was a bang, and a wizard rushed into the frame. He was still fixing his belt, apparently having come from a toilet. The man seemed rough. He had blood-shot eyes and the skin around his neck was already saggy. Dark splotches covered his face, as if he had seen too much sun for a lifetime. Definitely closer to retirement than the frontline.
The man froze as he spotted Severus behind the fireplace, before throwing himself on the ground as well. “Merlin’s balls! How did you get into the warden room? Close the connection right now, kid, this is only for emergen–“

“Brode is dead and we have two prisoners on the loose!”

The Auror paled, as far as his age-tanned face allowed it.

“What?”

“There’s an intruder! He killed lots of prisoners! And there are some Death Eaters running around the prison! We need back-up! Call back-up!”

“Who are you?” The guard sounded almost wondrous. Did he not get the situation?

“I am from Hogwarts! We were visiting when the power cut out! You need to get back-up!” he repeated the demand. “Hurry! He’s going to be here soon!”

You bet I will.

“Brode is dead?” the guard confirmed.

“GET BACK-UP!”

There was a bang behind Severus as the door burst into pieces under the weight of a body. He instinctively jumped underneath one of the desks, as a spell made contact with the fireplace, shattering the stone and debris rained on the office. Stone fragments caught Severus’ unprotected back.
And he looked up into a set of empty white eyes and a wide grin of jet-black teeth.

Arminius’ body was still covered in that tattered linen that now held even more tears. His shoulder was oozing a black liquid instead of blood – from a gash that he must have gotten from breaking open the door to the warden room.

Severus fell backward, desperately holding onto his wand as he dived under the desk in an attempt to get out of the warden room but –

“Bombarda.”

The filing cabinet next to Severus exploded, papers and metal pieces cutting through the heated air. Instinctively he had put his arms around his head, cowering together in a ball to protect his body.
Bare feet next to his.
There was no emotion on the seer’s face, as if his muscles were frozen in place by … whatever. His mouth opened and closed in a grotesque way. Like a puppet whose strings were pulled. Unnatural. That’s what it was.
“You really like to get into places you’re not supposed to be.”

The voice did not belong to the seer. Severus still remembered the frail man’s strength in the holding cell as he had gripped Severus’ arm and told him to run. That manic laughter as their eyes had locked and those black teeth.

“Flipendo!”

But it was blocked with a wave of the other man’s wand.

“Expelliarmus!”

Another block.

Whatever spell Severus threw, the seer countered it in perfect synchronisation. As if he … knew. Knew what spells Severus would use.

He dragged himself further away from the seer, who followed him at the same pace.

“SECTUMSEMPRA!”

But his cutting spell was denied just the same.

In desperation as he was running out of space (the wall was approaching), he grabbed the next-best thing he could get off the floor – a shoe – and threw it –

It was repelled.

“Pathetic”, the man commented through the seer, “you have to try harder.”

Severus didn’t know how.

“I am sorry!” he pleaded, “I am sorry, I won’t do it again, I am sorry!” but the seer took another step forward, his wand coming up and –

Severus grabbed his own wand with both hands, screaming: “AVADA KEDAVRA!”

Apparently, Mulciber was right. If you really wanted to kill, the spell came to you as natural as breathing.
It was an ugly feeling; a pulse that left his hands and made the wand vibrate and –
The green light shot into the seer’s face, reflecting off in those white eyes and –
Gone.
The body had absorbed it.

“My turn, I suppose.” The seer stepped onto Severus’ cloak, sticking him into place. “Oh come on. Don’t look at me like that. Did you really think it would work on a corpse?”

The seer’s wand rested underneath Severus’ chin, caressing his throat.

“Who are you?” Severus whispered. He didn’t want his throat to bob. Any sort of movement seemed unwise.

“You behaved incredibly stupid,” the seer scolded him. “Now the ministry is going to send Aurors to the island. It may take them until sunrise to get here by boat, but you have put an unnecessary time constraint on all of us.”

All Severus could take away from this was –

“Sunrise?” He blanched. “No! They’re going to arrive any minute now! Stop lying!”

The seer sneered. “How? Azkaban is protected against apparition, brooms, owls. I could go on. The only thing that penetrates these walls,” he showed his black teeth as he reached for the necklace that was hidden inside his shirt, “are portkeys forged of objects that belong to the island itself.”

The key shone darkly as it was dangled over Severus’ body. His eyes followed each and every movement.

“… what did you do to McGonagall?” he croaked.

No expression on the corpse’s face.

Red hair and green eyes and angry words exchanged in anger and –
His mind was running away from him.

The portkey once again disappeared into Arminius’ tattered shirt.

“The Aurors will be here by sunrise,” the voice produced with those lifeless chords was hollow, “believe me. There are things that cannot be changed like their means of arrival. And I can see fixed points in time very clearly.”

Severus felt his own fear bubble out of him, as he channelled his insecurity into anger. “Well, you fucking didn’t see that I would not bow to your will, did you? Was your crystal ball dirty or what?”

The stinging hex made him shudder. Each nerve end of his body was on fire; waiting for more punishment.

“What has been happening in this tower is fluid. Only the outcome … that is set in stone. After all, you never mess with time. Or you lose.”

“You killed Brode and all those people and Mulciber!” Severus’ voice broke; too high-pitched.

“They were superfluous. Time can spare one or two pawns. Their roles can be filled by others easily.” The wand underneath Severus’ throat suddenly stopped stroking his skin. “You, though. Don’t tempt me. Believe me, I’d love nothing more than to cut your throat right here, right now.”

“Then do it.” His eyes were watery. Severus wished he could stop it. Could stop his mouth from running. From ruining his life.

The wand retracted from his throat. “You are still needed.”

For what, Severus wanted to scream and rave, but the logical part of his brain told him to not protest the mercy he had been given.

The seer retreated, even stepping off Severus’ cloak. Yet his wand remained trained on him at all time. Those white eyes were staring through him.
They were the same colour as …
One had been white. The other black.

The man was controlling Arminius’ corpse through his eyes. That’s how he had blocked each and every spell. He was in there …

“How long?” Severus whispered. “How long have you controlled his body?”

A blank stare.
But Severus didn’t need the answer.

“You did something to me,” he accused the man. “When Scrimgeour showed us Arminius’ cell, you did something to me! That’s why you’re in my head, that's when it started, that's why I can’t –“

“I am in your head because you are weak.” The seer sounded bored. “You crave connection. Why else would you hold onto me instead of throwing me out? You’re a silly teenage boy, so utterly alone, and … lonely.”

Severus’ cheeks burnt as blood flushed through them. “I am not –! I –“

“If you will excuse me now. This necromantic spell does not have a long shelf life and I cannot renew it on a black corridor. I will have to hurry if I want this body to bring me the Portkey.” The seer turned towards the door, no further glance left for Severus. “You will remain here until the Aurors arrive. Strengthen your Occlumency walls or read the newspaper or go have a nap on the sofa for all I care. You will not set another step out of this room since you cannot be trusted. Am I understood?”

Severus didn’t know what the guy wanted with the portkey, but –
There were only two. And they were the only way to get off this island.
And downstairs, there was about to be a werewolf on the loose.
Severus felt his breath hitch.

He couldn’t let that guy take the portkey. He couldn’t. Not when the Aurors wouldn’t arrive until sunrise. He raised his wand but –

The Cruciatus curse made him topple over as he convulsed on the floor, his fist clutching his own wand until his muscles stopped contracting.

It wasn’t his first experience with the curse. In Slytherin house, you could earn money letting people study spells on you. There were worse things, really. If only … if only his brain didn’t feel so shattered.
Severus spat out the blood as he had bitten the insides of his mouth. All he could see was the dirty floor and those splatters, and he could hear the echo of footsteps as the seer drew close once again. He stood above him. His foot came down on Severus’ hand; rested on it as a threat.

“From the moment you twisted away from my planned future, I made sure to watch each and every alteration of this fight that I could see. You can throw all your spells at me. It will not make a difference. I will block and block again. I’ve seen what you will do.”

Seen.
Huh.
Severus hated those white eyes, hated them, hated –

“That just means I have to create a future that you didn’t see coming, right?”
He stared up and met the sneer with defiance before gripping his wand as tight as he could underneath the seer’s foot. “Lumos Maxima!”

The light exploded, and even behind his closed eyelids, Severus felt the pain of adjusting nerves. Immediately, he pulled his hand free from underneath the seer’s corpse, slashing his wand through the air, and silently (do not let him hear, do not give him something he could use to foresee the attack), he cast Sectumsempra.

A fluid smacked him in the face, gooey as tar oil and –
He opened his eyes.
Just as black.
The seer’s throat had been cut , splattering this dark … something … all across the warden’s room.
His mouth was like a tear itself, a manic grin and –
The body disintegrated into its human shell and the black tar-like fluid. It fell onto Severus, pressing him to the ground.
Cold skin and dead weight, and empty white eyes.

He grabbed the chain with the portkey, ripped it off Arminius’ neck and pushed the body off him.
With a thump, it fell onto the ground, and there were black smears all over. Hand prints. He raised his own and – it was on his fingers.
Everywhere.

The Dark Arts, he recalled Slughorn’s speech in the common room in front of the assembled Slytherins after a particular nasty incident that left a few second-years bed-ridden, were messy by nature.
Severus finally understood.
That black goo stuck to him. To his skin.
To his soul.

Murderer.

He could not tell, for once, if the thought belonged to him or to the man.

The warden room wasn’t a magic-free zone, though.
If he didn’t –
The man would revive –
Severus raised his trembling wand, directed it at the seer’s broken body, and –
“... incendio.”

The flames burnt black as they devoured the seer.

Chapter Text

He needed to buy them time.

Severus sprang to his feet, the smoke of the burning corpse up his nose as he rushed to the door that Arminius had broken down. He didn’t know any fancy magic to seal the entrance, he didn’t know how to conjure those weird flames that kept enemies out.
All he had was ….

He pointed his wand at the shelf, and –
“Locomotor shelf!”

The metal scratched across the floor, making Severus wince as his ears protested the screeching sound that reminded him of nails dragging across a board; under his wand’s guidance, the shelf moved towards the door, toppling over and blocking it.
So far, so good.
Even if that man sent further corpses after him … or came himself … they wouldn’t get to him so easily.
He was in control for now.

And furiously suppressing his thoughts just like he had done with the dementors.

The portkey in his fist weighed heavily on him, but it also felt warm to the touch. Severus put the chain over his head, letting the key disappear under his shirt. It was a ticket out of this mess. Sure, he could get the others out, too, if he herded them together and they got either to the rooftop or the beach, but that was unlikely. It was an option for later, maybe. For now, the portkey was his, and he was one stair away from the rooftop –
Even if that man was waiting for him up there.
He’d only need a second of inattention.

Alternatively, he could chase after Slughorn. But what was the point? That would leave both portkeys vulnerable, not just one.

In all truth, he did not know what scenario was worse – letting the portkey find its way into Fletcher’s and McTavish’s hands or handing it over to that murderer.
With Fletcher and McTavish, it was clear what they wanted. They wanted out, and the portkey was their ticket to serve the Dark Lord. In theory, Severus really could care less whether they succeeded or not. It was their tendency to harm whoever crossed their path that worried him. He wasn’t sure they’d spare him, even if he handed over the portkey voluntarily.
That freak waiting on the rooftop … Severus had no clue what was going on behind those two differently-coloured eyes. He had claimed that he didn’t want Severus dead. But there was no proof. No realistic explanation why Severus should matter to him when he had killed so many already.

You are still needed.

Had he seen Severus do something in the future?
There was no telling how far into the future that prophecy reached. What if he had outlived his usefulness already?

Finally, Severus let himself take a deep breath. He could see himself in the mirror above the sink. In his panic, he had spread the black tar on his wand handle, his face, his clothes.
The wardens’ room was in complete disarray from the spells Arminius had blocked and redirected. There were pieces of metal and wood from the exploded filing cabinet wedged into the couch, into the wall, through the other cabinets. All papers had been ripped off the desk, now strewn across the floor.

One thing was clear.
The guy didn’t mind hurting Severus.

What did he know about the guy anyway?

He hated Death Eaters.
And he had killed Brode for whatever reason.

Brode.
Severus’ eyes fell onto the lockers in the corner.

***

The lock had given in to a simple Alohomora, but Brode’s locker didn’t prove to be useful at all.
There was an image of a woman and a kid taped against the back, and Severus pulled it down because he didn’t want to see their faces. It reminded him of –
He went through Brode’s spare uniform and clothes, checking all pockets, but there were only some coins.

“Why were you killed?” Severus threw the clothes out of the locker to see whether they were covering something else. “Come on. Tell me.”

A box of letters at the bottom of the locker. Right, when he had thought that there was time, he hadn’t meant that he was looking for reading material to kill some time until the Aurors arrived at sunrise. Annoyed, he leafed through the papers, taking in the odd word or two,
Correspondences with other wardens, many not even in English. Severus recognised the address of one of the letters. MACUSA. The Magical Congress of the United States. But why did Brode keep correspondences with –
Right.
He had been an Auror.
Not just a warden.

An experienced Auror parked at Azkaban … a career dead-end.
Because of his amputated fingers?
No.
Scrimgeour, that made sense. He was a Slytherin, so he was mistrusted considering the Dark Lord’s rise to power. That’s why he had been given a permanent placement at Azkaban.
But Brode. He was trusted. All the wardens had looked up to him, and he had seemed capable from what Severus had gleaned. Slughorn had also nothing negative to say about him.
So why had he been placed in Azkaban?
Furiously, Severus went through the letters and old mission reports. Some had words underlined, but it didn’t make sense. Most of the correspondences were in German (or at least Severus thought so, he only knew a couple of words). One page, in particular, had a lot of markings. It was in English; it had been signed by somebody named R. Graves. An ex-director of … something. His writing was barely legible as his hands had shaken a lot. Either the man had been roaring drunk or super old.
Or both.
Our mutual friend, it said over and over as if Graves had not dared to put the name to writing.
He warned Brode of their friend’s ability to shapeshift. To take other people’s faces. The letter talked of necromancy. Of mind games. Of a silver tongue that would affect guards if given too much time with him. That no man could hold such darkness if it wanted out.

It sounded familiar.

Brode had been investigating.
For months.
For years.
He had been obsessed.

The German messages were usually short, and Severus looked at them again, and then one more time, but he was lacking understanding. There was a translation spell, but for the life of him, it was on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t remember –
One name caught his attention in that mess of letters that formed illegible words and sentences.

Arminius Nagel.

It was a longer missive, and the author had hurried through his lines. Severus couldn’t understand the content.
The date, though –
Two years ago.
What had happened two years ago?
Severus turned around, almost twisting his ankle, as he stumbled to the desk. The trays of “leavers” and “newcomers” had been upturned as well, with the prisoners’ files strewn across the floor. He threw himself on his knees, picking up each file, checking the name, discarding it, grabbing the next.

He had just thrown Fletcher’s file aside, when –

Severus picked up Arminius’ file. There was no resemblance anymore between the mugshot and the smouldering mass of flesh behind him. It stank as the dark magic was continuously burnt out of him. The smoke was slowly filling the room, and Severus knew that he had to hurry –

Arminius’ file was paper-thin and written in another language. Only the newest entries were in English. It annotated a moving date about two years ago, and his early release schedule. Severus could not say what the man’s crimes had been. There was a 50, which could be his age or the length of his sentence, or the body count he had left behind. There was only one word he recognised on the summary page.
Grindelwald.

Severus let Arminius’ file drop to the floor.

***

On the rooftop, the night breeze made Severus’ hair fly into all directions as the final sunrays were settling on the horizon of the North Sea. Orange cuts scarred the storm-grey, battling sky.
The full moon had not risen yet.
But it would.
Soon.

Severus couldn’t stop himself from flinching as the door to the staircase fell shut behind him. He was occluding with all his might, as if the man in front of him was a dementor.
In all honesty, there was hardly a difference. He fed on other people’s souls, too.

Grindelwald was leaning against the walls that prevented people from falling to their death. There was a small bench nearby, presumably for the wardens during their breaks. Other than that, the rooftop was a cement desert.
Lightning chased across the sky, illuminating Grindelwald’s ugly set of eyes.

He had to know.
That grey eye that stared into the future … he had to know what Severus was thinking and planning. No matter how much Severus focused on occluding.
Yet he kept his emotions bottled up.
He was in control.
He had a portkey.
A means of escape should the man make a move towards him.

Severus instinctively grabbed the chain around his neck as he approached the man until they were only five yards apart. Enough to talk to each other across the heavy wind, not enough room to –

“You are late.” Now that he really listened … yes. There was a hidden accent in the man’s voice. “You mess with my sight a lot, boy. More than I am willing to tolerate.”

“I brought the portkey.”

It wasn’t a lie per se. But he’d rather use it himself than let that man escape. It had to work. Why else had the man insisted on meeting up here all the time?

“I knew you’d do that. I’ve seen you do it over and over again. We always meet here. I did not foresee the circumstances in which you came to receive the portkey, though. Or how annoying it would be to get you to come upstairs.”

“Tell me why I should hand it over to you,” Severus dared the man. “I’ve seen how you treat your enemies.” He could still see Brode’s slumped-over body in front of his eyes. “And I’ve seen how you treat your friends.”

That mass of flesh with black magic oozing all over the floor. That had been Grindelwald’s supporter. What a disgusting fate.
But that’s what happened when you trusted the wrong person. A snake was a snake, and it would bite the hand that was feeding it.
Because it was a snake, and it bit on reflex.

“Don’t be melodramatic. Arminius consented.”

“Nobody in their right mind would consent to that!”
That body had been twisted into something non-human by necromancy. Abused and controlled like a puppet.

“He knew his death today was a fixed point in time. He only gave it meaning by accepting his fate.” Grindelwald sneered. “As a seer, he knows that there are things that are bigger than us. We abide by the rules of time. There are fluid points, and there are fixed points. People like him and me, we know to bow to fate. That is why he gave himself to my magic.”

“You came for him,” Severus spat. “You got into his detention cell as soon as he was transferred out of the black corridor, and you killed him and you took his place. That was you down there when Scrimgeour showed us the cell. You pretended to be Arminius, and you grabbed my arm and –! But then it was Brode’s turn. He was supposed to interview Arminius with his group, and you knew he would figure it out. He knew about your shape-shifting abilities. So you got Arminius’ necromanced body to slaughter him. And in the general chaos, you made his corpse free you from the cell.” Severus exhaled shakily.

“Well done.”

“Why?” Severus’ knuckles were turning white from the force with which he was grabbing the portkey. “For the life of it, I can’t figure out why you come here after you managed to slip out of Nurmengard. And the portkey … you came here with your shapeshifting, didn’t you? You took one of the guard’s faces … you wouldn’t need a portkey to leave. You’d just have to take another person’s face at the next change of the guards. I … I don’t understand why you’re here.”

Grindelwald looked bored. There was a rumble in the distance, as lightning and thunder almost coincided. The heart of the storm was moving closer, the grey storm clouds above their heads now dropping rain on them. The water weighed down Severus’ hair, so that strands were sticking to his face, restricting his vision from the left eye.
He did not dare move them. Did not dare change his wand position nor let his other hand stray from the portkey.

Grindelwald was looking into the rain clouds, closing his eyes for a second as water streaked down his neck.

“Would you believe me if I told you that I came here … to meet you?”
Grindelwald’s eyes were once again trained on Severus.

“Me?”

“I told you before. You still have use.”

Severus sneered at the man. “For someone who doesn’t want me dead, your corpse puppet sure seemed to have the intention to kill me right then and there!”

Grindelwald began walking around, even breaching their five yards of distance, as he walked in circles before letting himself fall onto the wardens’ bench. The man crossed his legs, but his eyes told Severus that he was still being preyed upon.
“Well. I know you could off Arminius. You are a murderer after all.” A cold, knowing smile passed Grindelwald’s lips. “I was curious what it would look like once you snapped.”

“I … I only defended myself … I … “

Grindelwald sprang to his feet like a predator, and Severus could not react as caught as he was in the moment.
There was a hard hand on his chin, forcing his head up.
Forcing eye contact from close distance.
Activate the Portkey. He needed to activate the portkey. He needed to –

Grindelwald’s dark eye rooted him to the ground. No magic needed.
The hand around his chin twitched as if –
As if Grindelwald was considering breaking his vow of keeping fate intact.
Of letting him live.
“From all the people in this building,” Grindelwald’s whisper was almost as sensual as destructive, “I have always hated you the most since the first time I saw you in my mind.”

“… I … I haven’t done anything.”

“No.” The fingers pressed down harder on his chin. “Not yet.”

Then Grindelwald released him, and Severus stumbled backwards, rubbing his chin by instinct and –

His hand flew back to the portkey. Grindelwald seemed amused by his panic, though.

“Don’t worry. I don’t need to take that by force. You will let me have it anyway.”

“Why should I?” Severus began to move as Grindelwald returned to his circling motion. He tried to keep distance between them, moving almost symmetrically to the man. “If I manage to keep you in Azkaban until sunrise, the Aurors will take care of you. They’ll take you back to Nurmengard.”

The man rolled his eyes at him. “So what? I will just leave again. It’s what I do.”

“What? But … there must be guards! Dementors! Magic to keep you there!”

“Nurmengard is my prison,” Grindelwald said, raising his eyebrow cockily. “I fought my war as long as Albus was still wavering. But when he came to Nurmengard, I saw it in his eyes, and yes, pun intended, that this time, he was ready to fight me for real. And so I knew that there was no longer any wiggle room. I would end up defeated. So I told him. Albus respects the power of the sight as much I do. He knew I’d stay a prisoner of my own mind as this … this was my fate. And seers like me … we never challenge fate.”

“Bullshit!” Sparks flew out of his wand, powered by his anxiety and anger at Grindelwald’s attempt to manipulate him so openly. “You’re here! You escaped! How is that complying with your fate!”

“Oh, rest assured.” Grindelwald looked to the side, as if he was focussing on a far-off point in the future that only he could see. “I will be back at Nurmengard when my time comes. I know my place. And until then … I like to travel. Though I must never leave my imprint. I must not change things.”

Again with those lies.
“You killed all those Death Eaters and Mulciber and … and Arminius! How is that not interfering with fate!?”

“Ah. I did not kill Arminius. I told you, he offered himself to me –“

“YOU'RE A LIAR!” Severus had taken a step towards Grindelwald, breaking their dance around each other. Angrily, he waved his wand at the man. “You murdered them because you could and because you wanted to!”

“Ah.” Grindelwald shrugged Severus’ accusation off. “I suppose you can call it my revenge. I know all the fixed points. Along the way … there is some flexibility. Some people are just … interchangeable.”

Severus gulped. “But not me.”

“No,” Grindelwald confirmed, again with that weird knowing look. “Not you.” Grindelwald began playing with his own wand lost in thoughts. “Believe me. If you were, we wouldn’t be talking.”

Another lightning chased across the sky. Severus was wet to the bones, and breathing the cold air began to hurt, and he just wanted to sit down.

“You’ve been talking circles around me, but … you didn’t answer me before,” he said quietly. “What do you want the portkey for?”

For the first time, Grindelwald seemed almost taken aback.
Or rather … uncomfortable.

“Killing Brode was a slight miscalculation,” he admitted. “It created a vacuum. Those two Death Eaters were always going to stage a prison escape tonight, but originally, the two Aurors would have advanced on them in a pincer attack. Scrimgeour from above, Brode from the ground floor. Brode would have died anyway, so I figured I could get away with killing him a couple of hours earlier to protect the secret of my presence in the prison. As long as I kept the Death Eaters from leaving the tower.”

The blue flames that had blocked the exit of the prison. “You didn’t set the cursed flames to keep us in,” Severus realised. “It was to prevent their escape now that Brode wasn’t on the ground floor to chase them towards Scrimgeour.”

There was a ghost of a condescending smile on Grindelwald’s face.

“And that’s why you’re after the portkeys, too.” Severus closed his eyes and groaned, finally letting his hand slip of the chain around his neck. “You need the portkeys out of their reach. Because their capture is a fixed point in time. And that’s why you made Arminius' body attack McGonagall’s group. Their portkey was at the highest risk of being taken. And –“

“At the same time, I was about to steal the other portkey. I had chased your teacher and Scrimgeour towards the dementors, but then you and that wolf boy decided to join my party. Ruining my plans. As you did a lot tonight.”

“Because of you, Avery was kissed!”

Grindelwald did not even bat an eyelash. “Good riddance. Along all those other … followers.”

No.
For a second, Severus had forgotten how dangerous, how utterly deranged the man in front of him was. For a moment … he had felt almost … safe.
He stepped back, again gripping the portkey around his neck.

“What makes you think,” his voice trembled, “that I won’t join too?” His throat was hoarse.

“You will. But your biggest crime will be much worse than a tattoo on your arm.” Again, he drew close, so that they were almost toe to toe. Severus had to look up, his neck hurting. He hadn’t felt like a child for some years. Not like this. Underneath this striking gaze, he shrunk back. “But it is as it is. A fixed point in time. Good for you, boy.”

Before Severus could react, Grindelwald had grabbed the chain around his neck, pulling with enough force to rip the portkey out of his hand and over his head.

“HEY!”

Grindelwald turned around, striding towards the wall. He held the portkey in his hand as he stared into the darkness of the North Sea. Severus followed him, trying to snatch the portkey from his hand, but the man did not give an inch. Instead, he –

“Look.”

And with his hand still reached out to get the portkey, wavering in the air, Severus did.
The grey clouds seemed oddly bright, as if –
The silhouette of the full moon peaked out of the sky.

And there was a howl.
A sound so primal that it made all hairs on Severus’ arm stand straight like soldiers in a line-up.
No.
No.
No.
It couldn’t be.
It mustn’t be.

His eyes swerved to the door that was unlocked – the connection to the floors downstairs. He had already raised his wand to seal it when Grindelwald’s hand pressed down on his hand so that he lowered the wand.

“What if it comes up here? We need to –!”

“It won’t.” Grindelwald looked almost bored.

“How can you know this!?”

“Because,” he again let his arms rest on the wall as he glanced down the tower into the sea, “this was always going to happen. If it’s any consolation … he was trying to get back to that empty cell to hide himself away in time.”

“How does this end?” Severus demanded to know. “You have seen everything apparently! How does everything end?”

Grindelwald sighed, apparently annoyed at being questioned. As if he was humouring Severus. “In the original timeline, Fletcher surrenders to Albus after McTavish kills a student he had taken hostage. Fletcher is a pick-pocket, an opportunist, somebody who would do anything for money. Not a follower. Murder doesn’t sit well with him. Well. As long as it’s not a state official. He hates them with a passion. Albus will get him out of this pickle. He’ll reduce the sentence, keep him from being kissed … and Fletcher’s loyalty will prove very useful to Albus in the future.”

This … it sounded like … a fixed point in time.

“Who?” Severus’ heart was beating fast. “Who died in the original timeline?”
Not Lily.
He wouldn’t even beg for it to be Potter or Black.
Please.
Just ... not Lily.

Grindelwald made a humming noise. “The blond girl.”

Oh.
Severus could see Macdonald’s timid face in his mind. The way she had trembled in the cold wind, and Lupin had placed his jacket around her, and –
She’d always been there in the background during his Hogwarts years. A nobody.
He should feel more.
But all he could muster was … guilt that he didn’t.

Macdonald.
That was … alright.

“Yes.” He had missed that Grindelwald had turned towards him once again. “It’s these ugly thoughts that will keep you alive throughout the years.”

So he wasn’t destined to die here.
Good to know.

Another howl from downstairs. Severus leaned over the wall as well to take a deep breath. The wind tasted salty, and it kept his bile inside.
Lupin was running wild downstairs.
There was a bloody werewolf –
Again –

“What do we do now?” His voice shook.

“We?” Grindelwald looked down at him almost in amusement. “We don’t do anything. I was never supposed to be here. Whatever happens henceforth does not include me.” He raised his hand with the portkey. “Thanks, boy.”

“NO!”

Severus tried to grab the portkey again, but Grindelwald was faster.

“Petrificus Totalus.”

His body clammed up, and he could see the ground come towards him, but his hands wouldn’t catch the fall –
He was lying on the floor, the rain drizzling on him. Severus couldn’t move. Couldn’t channel his magic into his wand that still rested in his hand. Even his mouth would not close.
He felt frozen in time.

A set of shoes entered his limited sight.

“I wanted to find out whether I could learn to forgive you.” Grindewald’s wand stroked across Severus’ hair. “When I realised that you were a fixed point, I lost trust in fate. I thought … if only I could understand why it had to be you, why I had to allow you to … never mind. I don’t see it. I never will.”
The wand tip retreated.
“Your soul will rot in hell alongside mine, no matter what Albus says. Murder is murder. No pretty words will change that.”

Severus didn’t understand. He didn’t even want to. He just –
If he could move –
If he could channel enough magic to free himself –

“Remember, boy. Mundungus Fletcher mustn’t die.” Those boots gave him a kick against the shoulder. “As I said … Brode was interchangeable. You will take his place. Comb the place from bottom to top. There are a lot of rats in this tower. Even in the sewers. Or have you not wondered how those Death Eaters managed to escape their cells?”

The boots disappeared from Severus’ sight, and his scream remained stuck in this throat as –
The Portkey was activated, leaving him alone and unbound in the heavy rain. Yet all Severus could muster strength for was to put his arm across his face as he teared up in utter exhaustion.

There was a bang in the distance; somewhere underneath him, however many floors down … there was a fight that made the walls of Azkaban tremble with each spell explosion.

Why did it always have to be him?

Chapter Text

There were a lot of adjectives his peers and teachers had used to describe Severus over the years – brave wasn’t one of them.

Trembling, he made an effort to push himself back up on his feet after the immobilizing spell had finally faded. Grindelwald was gone. And most important of all: Severus had survived the encounter.

From all the people in this building, I have always hated you the most since the first time I saw you in my mind.

The portkey had taken Grindelwald away for better or worse. So why did Severus still feel so exposed?
An involuntary shudder ran through him.
From the first meeting in Arminius’ holding cell to their final parting on the rooftop, Grindelwald had toyed with him. If the man had wanted to, he could have squashed Severus underneath his shoes any time.

Would it be like this, too, once the Dark Lord called upon him?

Severus gripped his unblemished arm and looked up into the night sky. The full moon was half-hidden behind a cloud. Since the werewolf’s howl of emergence, the distant noise of fighting echoed through the tower. Maybe Slughorn and Scrimgeour were trying to fend it off.
Back-up wouldn’t arrive until dawn. They were stuck inside the tower with a vicious monster.

He could defy Grindelwald.
Severus had done so before.
No need to risk his life for any of his classmates. They hated him and Severus hated them and … and … why did it have to fall on him to stop those two Death Eaters? He could just barricade himself on the roof and –

Severus lost the fight with his shaking legs. He crashed back on the ground, his back hitting the outer wall surrounding the rooftop. As he hugged his knees to his chest, he took a deep breath.
Once.
Twice.
Again.

You’ll survive this.

The voice inside him wasn’t Grindelwald this time.
The only person in his mind was himself.

Severus didn’t believe in fate or fixed futures and all that claptrap. There was a reason he had chosen Arithmancy over Divination. Numbers didn’t lie. They spoke cold, hard truths.
And yet … if Grindelwald was right …
Then somebody needed to stop McTavish, now that Brode had been killed before his time.
But … did it really have to be him?

Severus had eaten neither lunch nor dinner, so there wasn’t anything in his rebelling stomach except acid. He was still clutching his knees, crouching on the ground while he tried to ignore the sounds downstairs.
Knowledge was power.
Knowledge was a curse.

Severus was still hugging his knees as tightly as he could, waiting for the trembling in his arms and feet to ebb away. This meltdown wasn’t remotely as bad as the one he had experienced after witnessing Mulciber’s death. It wasn’t a full-blown panic attack. This was manageable. He just needed to breathe and wait and –
To hell with it all.

Severus forced himself towards the door that would take him down the tower again. His grip on his wand was so weak that he let it slip through his fingers twice and had to get on his knees to pick it up. He missed the comforting weight of the portkey around his neck. Facing Grindelwald hadn’t been this nerve-wrecking – he had had an out. Now though? There was no miraculous escape should things turn dangerous.

Clear your mind, he commanded himself. Or everything will get to you.

Severus let the emptiness wash over himself that he had learned to cultivate over the span of this horrible day. Apathy. That was the only thing that could save your heart when your chest was exploding with fear.
He was stuck in Azkaban with a werewolf, and yet he wasn’t.

In his mind, he kept strategizing as he strode through the black corridor of the ninth floor. There were so many people in this tower whose position he could merely guess. Crabbe, Goyle and Macnair had vanished into thin air on the second floor. Then there was McGonagall’s group. Gone without a trace in the lower floors of Wing C. Potter and Black had run off to find Fletcher. They were likely stuck in the middle of the tower since Fletcher and McTavish had closed the gates to the upper floors. Slughorn, Scrimgeour and Lupin had been on the fifth floor when he had parted ways with them. Had they gone down as planned to help McGonagall’s group? Or had they decided to look for him after they noticed that he had slipped upstairs?
Certainly not, right?
He didn’t matter any more than Avery, whose living corpse had been left behind by them on the fourth floor like trash.

Grindelwald’s blue flames burnt brightly as Severus stepped through them and went down to the eighth floor. All of these barriers and closed gates had turned Azkaban into a giant maze where you did not know whether your path would be a dead-end littered with corpses or not. Wing C had been completely clear when he had gone up; well, apart from Grindelwald’s trials of fire, but by now, he knew that they wouldn’t burn him like they had done with Mulciber. Should he rush downstairs as fast as he could? But if he took that route, he was likely to run into the werewolf. That’s where he had last seen Slughorn’s group.

Severus braced himself against the cold wall of the staircase to the eighth floor.
Breathe.

If only he could pinpoint which corridors would be safe.
Severus went through Grindelwald’s spiteful monologue, trying to remember every single syllable. What had the man said about Lupin?

Think.
That was what Severus was good at.
He needed to concentrate.

Then it came to him. Grindelwald’s annoying voice broke through his thoughts. … he was trying to get back to that empty cell to hide himself away in time …

An empty cell.
It couldn’t be Fletcher’s. After all, that ruthless son of a whore had placed the now soulless guard in his own cell to trick the dementors.
No.
Right now, there were only two empty cells in all of Azkaban: Arminius’ holding cell and McTavish’s. Both were on low-security corridors. So if he stuck to black and red … it should be safe.

Well.
As safe as you could be when you were hunting two murderers.

Severus found himself racing through the red and black corridors, changing floors whenever he noticed a blue or green ceiling light ahead of him. There was no plan in his head for what he would do once he found Fletcher and McTavish. Everything else – Lupin’s hideous face rose to the forefront of his mind – was secondary to that.

The only thing that could stop him … was the closed gate in corridor 6C.

Severus’ breath was racing just as much as his heart. Exhausted, he heaved in front of the metal barrier. Somebody had closed the gate from the floor underneath. His eyes swiveled towards the left, then towards the right. Both corridors that led to Wings B and A were green.

Unlucky.

But not as unlucky as Mary Macdonald had been.

Severus knelt beside the broken, bloody body that he had discovered in Wing B of the sixth floor. Fangs had torn her throat open, revealing a mass of tissue. Her eyes were wide in fear. There was no trace of the monster in the corridor. It must have moved on. Not a reassuring thought since Severus had discovered that the connecting stairs to the fifth floor had been shut close just like in Wing C. And, he suspected, this would be true for Wing A, too.
Macdonald had found herself stuck on a floor with a raging werewolf, then.

Those doors hadn’t been shut back when he had slipped upstairs to meet Grindelwald.

Had it been Lupin who had wanted to keep everybody in the lower floors safe from himself? He must have felt his transformation coming, after all.

Macdonald was still wearing Lupin’s coat from when he had lent it to her upon their arrival on the island in the harsh storm. It was a size too big, and definitely second-hand bought. Severus didn’t know what he was feeling as he pushed the girl’s head to the side, checking for a pulse that he knew would not be there.
His occlumency barrier was sky-high. Yet, he reinforced them.
Macdonald hadn’t died unaware like Brode. She had faced a monster and she had known the inescapable truth as those fangs had buried themselves in her flesh. She had tried to defend herself. There were angry scratches all over her hands and the coat sleeves had been torn open by Lupin’s claws.

He stared into her empty pupils. There was no after-image of what she had seen last, yet Severus found himself drawn to her eyes.

“I know what you saw,” he whispered. “I saw it once, too.”

The incident in the Shrieking Shack had been a close call. This was him. Her body was his. Just not in this timeline.

Macdonald didn’t answer him. Even if there had been a heartbeat left in her, no sound could have ever passed that shredded throat again.

His hands, Severus noticed belatedly, were now painted in her blood. Occlumency was great. It was like being drunk. You were there and at the same time, you weren’t.
Lily would have closed Macdonald’s eyes. He was sure of that. Muggles did that to make the dead look more peaceful. He remembered the gesture from when his paternal grandmother had passed away in his bedroom. It had been his mother who had paid her respects - despite the degrading comments that she had had to suffer in his grandmother’s last weeks at their home.
Originally, Macdonald had been taken hostage and subsequently killed by MacTavish. Had that gruff auror, Brode, closed her eyes and given her peace? Would he then have erased the traces of such a disgusting death to make it more palatable for the girl’s family? Or had he given them the truth?
So many questions. And the only person who could have answered them was gone.

There was a trail of blood specks towards one of the cells at the end of the corridor. Its door was leaning slightly open. No growling. No nothing.
Was it scared?
Or simply sated and content?

Severus’ grip around his own wand tightened.

Was it still murder if you used the killing curse on a beast? Or mercy?

What if he didn’t use his own hands? He could lead the werewolf towards the dementors in Wing C and be done with Lupin forever. It wouldn’t take much. A couple of steps forward. Some noise to attract its attention. It would look like an accident.

This wasn’t the first time Lupin had transformed outside a controlled environment. It wouldn’t be the last. There was a reason werewolves were supposed to register with the ministry. If they were ever spotted anywhere else than in a containment room during the full moon, they were to be put down.

With the dead girl in his arm, Severus drew the cell door shut, capturing the werewolf that was cowering in the darkness.

Macdonald was quite light.
Her blonde hair was pooling around his arms like a waterfall, and Severus ignored the tiny drops of blood that dripped on the floor as he carried her through the abandoned corridor of 6B.

Come dawn, Macdonald’s body would be discovered by the back-up Aurors. It would be evident that she hadn’t died at the hands of the rampaging Death Eaters. Lupin would hence be disposed of.
It was fate.
And as Severus had been told today over and over: None of them could escape a fixed point in time.

In his mind, today’s events swirled around aimlessly. He remembered how Lupin had dragged him back from the blue flames on the ground floor that had just eaten Mulciber alive.
Are you alright? Lupin had asked him, bending over Severus who had been about to fall into a panic attack. Lupin had probably not cared how he felt, but he had taken the second to ask anyway. Later, they had escaped the dementor attack together after Potter had run off to find Black.
This was a stress bonding. Nothing more.
Like how a duck imprinted on whatever it saw upon hatching.

I don’t know about you but … I couldn’t live with myself if I lived and they died.
Lupin’s annoying voice echoed through his head.

Severus didn’t know much about fixed points and fate, and he definitely couldn’t see the future the way Grindelwald had. However, he could imagine a path which would lead to only one life lost. Not two.
There had been enough grief already.

Macdonald needed to disappear into the same flames that were eating away at Arminius’ corpse in the warden’s room.

Maybe it was cruel of him.
Maybe it was kind.

Not that anybody would get to judge him on it. This was one secret he’d take to his grave.

Chapter Text

Muggle spy movies were wrong. There was nothing cool about sliding down a dumbwaiter.

Severus could feel the steel ropes cut into his palms. The skin was already chafed open, but he mustn’t let go.
How many floors had it been already? How many more were there to come?

The shaft barely fit a human. It was designed to send food to the warden’s room, and nothing more. The steel rope acted like a conveyer belt for a tray platform. Severus didn’t know if it was mechanical or magical, but the elves down in the kitchen were likely in control of the contraption. The only thing that he did care about was the implication of it. He had to hold onto the steel ropes with exactly the same amount of strength, otherwise one side would go up and the other down.
Even though he had spelled his shoes to stick to the walls to make it easier on him, gravity was constantly pulling on him and he would slip down a couple of inches from time to time. It was a tough balancing act to lower himself down the shaft without simply falling into nothingness.

Since he couldn’t hold his wand, he had put it between his teeth. The small Lumos at the tip was the only source of light in the dumbwaiter. It made coordinating his feet a bit easier.

The air was stale and he could hear his own breathing echo back to his ears. If there ever had been reason in his life for swearing like a sailor, this was the moment.

Fuck Grindelwald and fuck McTavish and fuck his life.

As he had feared, the upper floors had been completely sealed off to contain the werewolf. None of his magic had broken through the enchanted steel. Of course, it hadn’t. These barriers were constructed stop violent prisoner revolts. It had taken Severus another hour of pacing and kicking walls and shouting at the air until he had made up his mind about how to proceed.

Jumping off the roof was even too suicidal for his own standards. There were spells to soften your landing, but … he had gone back up to the rooftop and looked down onto the jagged cliffs surrounding the tower. Severus had instinctively drawn back.
No.
Just … no.

Sure, he could have transformed something into a rope, but he would have needed an object of equal length. So … about the height of Azkaban. As McGonagall always preached in class: Magic liked similarity. Material, size, color, properties. You needed at least two checks, otherwise you better be Albus Dumbledore, or your transfigured object would turn to dust before you could even blink twice. If he had had a rope already, he could have spelled it longer – but prisons were traditionally enemies of everything inmates could hang themselves with. The only available object remotely similar to a rope had been his shoelaces. There were limits to how much you could stretch material, though.

It had left Severus with only one way down.
Not that he had come up with that idea on his own. The fire in the warden room had burnt away the wood panel and left the entrance gaping wide open. Only then had he remembered seeing the same contraption in the canteen.

Lowering himself down the dumbwaiter had been an insane idea, but it was too late for regrets now. He had to be halfway down already.
Severus wasn’t prone to claustrophobic bouts. His own bedroom was tiny, and whenever he displeased his father, he was sent into the windowless basement. Yet the shaft made his heart race. Did it get narrower with each floor? Or was this Severus’ imagination?
It felt as if his angled legs had less and less room, the way his knees dug into his shoulders.

What if he got stuck?

He rested for a second, panting from exhaustion as his back protested in pain. He had been pressing himself tightly against the wall of the dumbwaiter for at least a quarter hour already.

Had Grindelwald foreseen this, too?
The bastard probably had rejoiced at Severus’ suffering.

Again, Severus stopped his downward movements to bring his struggling lungs under control.
The air had turned incredibly stale. Almost unbreathable.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” he whispered, stopping after a couple of steps again. Then he hollered into the dark shaft, “WHY DOES IT ALWAYS HAVE TO BE ME!”

But there was nobody listening to his whining.
There never was.
Not when he had been locked in the basement in Spinner’s End or hiding in a cupboard from Potter and his goons, and certainly not in the dark tunnel leading to the Shrieking Shack and …

The steel ropes slipped from his grip, making him slide down the dumbwaiter multiple feet until he got his position secured again.

There was no room to look down. His body was blocking his head from taking a peek.

How much further –

It didn’t matter.

Could he do it again?
Controlled falling. That’s what he had just done. It had been more efficient than when he had glid down step by step.
Severus collected his haggard breaths, then he eased his grip on the ropes deliberately, allowing gravity to pull him down for a second before he grabbed the ropes again.

He was the rat from Grindelwald’s meandering. The rats crawling in the sewers.
And rats always survived.

***

Finally, Severus could hear thistle-high voices and dishes that were stacked and the sounds of sizzling pans.
Dinner. The elves were preparing dinner.
Severus felt a hysteric laugh bubble up in his stomach towards his throat.
It was such a random observation. As if time had stopped down here. Had the elves really not noticed the hostile takeover? Or were they simply bound to previous commands and going through the same procedure as every day?

Then he felt it. The steel ropes in his hands had begun vibrating. Then they moved in opposite directions so abruptly that Severus didn’t react in time.
He should have let go of the one moving down.
He should have grabbed the one going up with both hands.
Instead, he felt himself be torn into two directs, and –
It forced him out of the horizontal balance that he had been keeping.
His foot slipped upwards, with Severus’ back now losing contact with the back-wall, too.
And …
He was free-falling.

Instinctively, Severus tried to grab the moving steel rope to break his fall, but everything was happening too fast and violently.
He would land on his back.
There was no way he’d live this.
He needed to stop the fall.
He needed to –

Severus stopped trying to hold onto the steel rope, instead he grabbed his wand and swung it.

There was no incantation coming to his mind.

This foolishness had to end. He couldn’t just let himself fall.

How? How do I survive this?

Because he would.
He had to.
That’s what Grindelwald’s hateful speech had been about.
If he were to survive this then he needed to stop himself from falling right about now.

Oh.
Maybe it wasn’t about not falling. Maybe it was … about flying. Just like Lily had done all those years ago on the playground.
He had never used his spell like this, but –

“Levicorpus!” he shouted, tersely focused on pulling his magic inward instead of projecting it out.

Just in time.

Severus was staring into a pair of wide, dumb elven eyes as he levitated inches above the ground and at the exact height of the dumbwaiter’s open door.

Above him, he could still hear the rumbling of the food platform that the elf had recalled towards the kitchen to fill.

Severus relinquished the hold on himself, so he hit the ground with a groan, before he flung himself right at the elf and out of the shaft lest he be squashed by the tray platform.

***

The kitchen tiles beneath his face were cool to the touch. He refused to move even a single limb.
It finally made sense why Grindelwald had emphasized twice that Mundungus Fletcher needed to be spared.

“I’ll kill them all,” he muttered. “Three times over. And I’ll spit on their corpses.”
Grindelwald included, of course.

“Expel–“

His body, which had been in perpetual alarm mode, reacted before his head did. He shot up, directing his wand at the source of the voice. “Sectumsempra!”

He found himself wand to wand with none other than Lily, who flinched as his spell grazed her cheek, slicing it open.

Both of them stared at each other in utter surprise.

“Oh God.” Severus scrambled to his feet. “I am sorry! I didn’t think, I just reacted … you shouldn’t have attacked me! God! I can heal it, let me –“
He had already raised his wand to her cheek when a voice from the side cut across the kitchen aisles.

“Stay where you are or I am going to explode you into thousands of pieces!”

Severus swiveled around. A woman with unkempt and unwashed black hair was pointing her palm at him. She wore glasses that were thick as a finger. Severus had never met somebody who fit the description of a mole this perfectly. The woman had to be almost blind to need such a prescription. It was weird how his perception of what meant danger had shifted. He barely registered her prisoner’s uniform.

“Who is that?” he asked Lily, ignoring the stranger. The woman held no wand. For all he knew, she was mentally ill.

“That’s not him! He’s one of my classmates!” Lily had pushed herself between Severus and the strange woman. “Don’t attack him!”

The stranger slowly lowered her hand. “He doesn’t look harmless.”

Severus flinched. He wasn’t quite sure if she meant his face or his blood-soaked clothes.

“It’s not mine,” he said, only then registering that this would probably not help his situation.

His suspicions were confirmed when Lily now gave him a glance-over, too, before taking a step to the side until she hit one of the kitchen workstations. There were about a dozen of elves cowering in the background. His surprise entrance had frightened them off. . Their ears were hanging down in fear, and the younger ones were hiding under a table, while the older ones kept an eye on him but tried to salvage the food on the stove.

“What happened to you?” Lily exclaimed. “Did that man with the white eyes and black teeth attack you, too?”
Arminius. Or rather … the seer’s animated corpse.

Severus slapped her hand away that had tried to inspect his blood-covered sleeves. “I am fine.”

Both the strange woman and Lily gave him a look that said You certainly don’t look fine. Couldn’t they give him a break?

“Your name.” Severus demanded, now addressing the stranger directly. “I’ve had a terrible day. Please skip the song and dance. Just convince me that I don’t need to kill you.”

“Severus!” Lily’s voice was shrill with indignation. “How can you say something like this after Mulciber was killed in such a horrible –“

“I am Carlotta Pinkstone.” The woman eyed Severus speculatively. “Your manners are atrocious, young man.”

“And I still don’t know who you are.”
He held her gaze to rectify that. Pinkstone’s memories were easy to break into as she was quite self-centered. She was still busy pitying herself even after months in Azkaban. One would think she would get over that injustice. Well. Severus saw her protesting in front of the Ministry with a banner that said ‘Stop Spell Suppression’. Different days and seasons, always the same good old Pinkstone with her protest signs. “Are you … a politician?”

“She’s an activist,” Lily explained. “I needed help with Professor McGonagall.”
She pointed towards the unconscious figure at the other end of the kitchen. Somebody had laid the old woman down on a bed of kitchen towels, and there was a bag of potatoes that supported her head.

“You couldn’t move McGonagall, so you freed a random prisoner?” Severus furrowed his brows. Had everybody gone mad since they had arrived on this damned island or was it just him, and thus his own perception was flawed?

“She’s hardly dangerous,” Lily argued. “Mrs. Pinkstone simply thinks that wizards shouldn’t hide themselves away. It leads to a parallel society and discrimination against Muggleborns.”

Severus blinked at Lily. “What?”

“Don’t pretend to be stupid. You understood me perfectly well.” Lily pressed her lips together in dismay. “Last year, Mrs. Pinkstone was arrested for civil disobedience. I showed you the paperclip! We even had a fight about it because you disagreed with her position on magic and Muggles. Well. I agree with her! And that’s why Mary and I wanted to interview her. We think her story needs to be told in the Daily Prophet. It’s horrible that the Ministry would try to silence her like this. As if she was a criminal.”

Somehow, the insane drivel that Lily was feeding him began to form a picture in his head. He had wondered why both girls had been in Wing C on their own.
Incredible. Just … utterly unbelievable.
Did everybody on this bloody trip have a second agenda for coming to Azkaban apart from him? First Avery and his damn uncle, then Potter and Black who were out for Fletcher’s blood, and now this?

There simply wasn’t enough time in the day to deal with this.
Not his problem.
He shook his head and raised his hands in defeat. “Whatever.”
Frankly, he had bigger problems.

Severus moved past Pinkstone and towards McGonagall’s unconscious form. Grindelwald had definitely dealt a decisive blow against their Transfigurations teacher. Her body was convulsing, but there was no exterior wound to explain her unconscious state.

“She’s trapped in a nightmare,” Pinkstone said. “We tried to wake her up, but nothing worked. I am a proficient wandless magic user, but even I couldn’t do anything.”

Lily let herself fall to her knees next to McGonagall and Severus. Then she grabbed her Head of House’s hand. “The white-eyed wizard didn’t speak, so I don’t know the incantation he used. I just hope Madame Pomfrey can save her once we are evacuated.”

To Severus, it looked like McGonagall might have earned herself a trip to St. Mungo’s. “Have you tried Enervate?”

“Do you think I am stupid just because I am a Mudblood?”

For God’s sake. How long would she hold this grudge? All of this because of one slip of the tongue. Women!

“Now, your turn. What happened to you?” Lily’s gaze flickered to the dumbwaiter. “Did you jump in there to escape McTavish and Fletcher?” Then her face blanched significantly. “Or was it the white-eyed man?”

“No,” Severus replied. “He’s gone.”
He still remembered how Arminius’ corpse had oozed black matter after the body had been corrupted by Grindelwald’s possession magic. Not that he’d ever share this information with anyone. There was no proof that Grindelwald had ever been present in Azkaban. All those dead Death Eaters in their cells? The Ministry would put the blame on Arminius.
The perfect scapegoat.
And Severus himself had burnt all evidence when he had destroyed the seer’s corpse to prevent it from rising again.

“You met him, though?” Again, Lily had clutched his arm as if she feared he would vanish into thin air. Arminius’ corpse had rattled her, this much was clear. Severus could feel her trembling. Lily prattled on with things he already knew.
“I think the white-haired wizard killed Brode. He is ruthless! When he stopped us in the corridor, I could feel it. He’s a mass murderer. He went for McGonagall and nothing she did had any effect on him as if he could read her mind, and Professor McGonagall then told Mary and me to run, and I did, but then she screamed, and when I looked back over my shoulder, Professor McGonagall had fallen down, and I couldn’t just let her die, so …” Lily’s voice had turned weak because she hadn’t paused to take a breath. A tear began to form in her eyes. “I lost Mary. I don’t know where she is!”

Damn.
She was looking him in the eyes. How was he supposed to lie to her now?

“He didn’t go after Macdonald,” Severus said, occluding over layers of occlusion. “He went straight to the rooftop and used the Portkey. He’s gone.”

Lily’s body shuddered in relief. “Good.” Then her brain caught up to what Severus had just revealed. “Wait. Did you fight him?”

Severus avoided her gaze. Rather, he walked up and down the small kitchen, with each elf squeaking and scuddling away when he came too close.

“Why are you avoiding my question?” Lily demanded in a shrill voice. “Your robes are covered in blood and you act all weird! Do this McTavish guy and his friend know where you went? Do we need to run now?”

“I don’t have time for this,” Severus declared, directing his wand at the dumbwaiter he had come from. “Colloportus!” With fierce distaste, he swung his arm to form an X, then the entrance was sealed. He repeated the process with the remaining two dumbwaiters for Wing A and C.

Comb the place from bottom to top. That had been his instructions.
Grindelwald was such an asshole.
He had known Severus would end up in the basement and he hadn’t warned him about the fall.

“What are you doing?”

Lily’s questions were infuriating. He didn’t know how many of them he could answer without changing the timeline.

“You.” Severus pointed his wand at the oldest elf he could spot at first glance.

“Yes, Sir?”

“Are there any other pathways that lead upstairs other than the dumbwaiters?”

The elf seemed to contemplate his question. Then he raised his knubbly hand towards the door. “Only the stairs, Sir.”

Which Severus would seal off immediately once he had left the basement.

“Thank you,” he said, which earned him a cautious nod from the old elf.

“You are leaving.” Pinkstone sounded almost accusatory.

“Of course, he isn’t,” Lily said. “That would be madness. We should stick together and seal the door.”

Severus raised one eyebrow. “Are you sure you want to be in such close quarters with somebody like me?”

“I still wouldn’t throw you to the wolves! Who do you think I am?” Lily cried out.
She was too caught up in her own righteousness to notice how her choice in words made him flinch.
Too soon.
He still had Macdonald’s blood on his sleeves.

Severus ignored her as Lily prattled on about how he was acting like an idiot out of spite. He approached the sink. After turning on the faucet, he began to wash his hands, scrubbing at them quite furiously. Then he cleaned his sleeves, which turned the water rust-red.

Suddenly, the flow of water stopped. Lily had turned off the faucet.

“Stop ignoring me!” She had crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Something’s wrong with you!” Her voice turned into a hush. “It scares me.”

He didn’t answer. It was the safest choice. Lily had always been very perceptive when it came to his lying.

“Like always. You do whatever you want to do. It doesn’t matter to you one bit how I … how others feel.” She bit her lip. “I have a really bad feeling. Promise me to be careful.”

This was dangerous.
It almost sounded … like she cared.

Severus bore down in her eyes, dragging memories of her and Potter to the forefront of her mind. A party in the Gryffindor common room. Potter was wearing his Quidditch uniform. They were holding hands.
She was excited.

He drew back.

Better.
He had needed a reminder of where Lily and he stood.

“Don’t leave the kitchen,” Severus commanded, noticing immediately how his tone soured Lily’s mood. “The Ministry’s backup arrives at dawn. Stay here until then. No matter what sounds you hear from upstairs.”

Pinkstone and Lily exchanged an alarmed look, but Severus ignored them. He turned around and grabbed himself an apple from the fruit basket before heading to the door. It tasted like ash on his tongue. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast at Hogwarts. Maybe he’d feel less sick to the stomach now.

Chapter Text

“I can hear footsteps! Hurry, Vincent! Someone’s coming!“
“What do you think I’m doing? Hurry up yourself! We need more tables over there!”

Severus hadn’t consciously ordered his feet to pick up the pace, but he found himself drawn to two voices in the canteen. The walls and door had muffled their words, but it was unmistakably Crabbe and Goyle. He’d recognize their voices anywhere. There wasn’t a lot of privacy in the dormitory, and over the past six years, Severus had gotten used to their croaky singing in the shower and their moans whenever they read dirty magazines under their bedcovers at night.
It was them.
He was sure of it.
But … were they alone?

He gripped his wand tightly. At the first glimpse of either McTavish or Fletcher, he’d attack. He was at an advantage, after all. He knew who his enemies were. They on the other hand? They didn’t know that they had turned from predator to prey.
It wasn’t a question of whether he could do it or not. Grindelwald had foreseen him succeed, so he would.
He would do it.
In his head, Severus chanted the killing curse over and over.
Just in case.

Just in case McTavish would be in there with Crabbe and Goyle.

Grindelwald’s blue flames continued to burn strongly in front of the exit, which helped to secure the prison. There hadn’t been many unlocked rooms on the ground floor, and those that Severus had found, he had sealed shut one by one. He wouldn’t leave any hiding space for Fletcher and McTavish. He’d get them, even if he had to comb the whole tower from bottom to top.

It would be too convenient to encounter them on the ground floor already. But he was ready.
He could do it.
He would do it. Macdonald’s blood and Arminius’ black goo already stained his hands, so what did some more of this matter?

Severus could shout his name, of course, to ease Crabbe’s and Goyle’s fear and to let himself be invited in. Then he would turn on McTavish if he was in there. Which he probably wasn’t, but it was good to have a plan.
Yet Severus approached without identifying himself. A part of him liked this picture in his head of Crabbe and Goyle cowering behind a mess of tables. Nobody had ever feared him.

He relished the echoes of his footsteps as he approached the canteen.
Even if it was only for one night in which his survival was secure, he felt in control.
As Grindelwald had said. He was untouchable.
Invincible.

It was … addictive.

Crabbe and Goyle had turned silent – probably to fool him into believing the canteen was deserted. Severus pressed his back against the wall before reaching for the door handle. No need to risk a spell to the face.

The handle gave way, but the door wouldn’t budge.

“Shit!” Goyle’s yell initiated a flurry of panicky shouts from inside, and table legs squeaked as both boys threw their full weight against their haphazardly erected barrier. “They found us!”

“Go away!” Crabbe’s voice was shrill as a banshee. “I’m warning you, we know the Unforgivables!”

“Maybe it’s not them! Maybe it’s the ministry!” Goyle sounded close to tears. “Are you from the ministry?”

Severus sighed inwardly. Mulciber had truly been the brains of their operation. Did those two really expect some tables to stop a trained wizard from coming inside? One Bombarda and he’d be in.

“The back-up Aurors won’t arrive until morning,” Severus informed them, raising his voice to make sure it travelled through. “Let me in.”

“Oh, Merlin! It’s Snape!”

“Are you alone?” Severus asked, his grip tightening on his wand. “Or is there somebody with you –“

“Hold on! We’ll let you in!” Goyle promised, and from inside, Severus heard their groans and the table legs scratching over the floor of the canteen.

So stupid. Not even one blink of distrust in them.

As soon as he could push open the door, Severus squeezed himself inside, wand-first and ready to attack. Not that he needed to. There was no sign of any adults around. Only Goyle and Crabbe and … Avery.
Huh.
So they had found his living corpse.
Avery sat against the corner of the room, his legs outstretched like a doll whose strings had been cut. His head sagged against his shoulder as he stared lifelessly ahead. There was no movement in him apart from the occasional blinking eyelids and the steady rise of his chest.
He didn’t pose any danger.
Not anymore.

Severus pushed his wand back into his trouser pocket and put his hands on his hips to lay into Crabbe and Goyle. “Are you utter imbeciles? What if I had been taken hostage to lower your defenses? At least ask for something only I would know to make sure I’m who you think I am!”

“Snape! You’re alive!”

Suddenly, Severus found himself in an octopus-like hug by none other than Goyle, who threatened to squeeze him to death.

“Get off me!” He squirmed out of the other boy’s arms.

“We thought they had killed you!” Now it was Crabbe’s turn to throw himself at Severus. His face was wet and it buried itself way too intimately into his neck.

“What the hell is wrong with you two?” Severus pushed Crabbe off, then he rubbed his neck in an attempt to rid himself from the other boy’s snot and tears.
Crabbe and Goyle looked like death warmed over, their eyes red-rimmed and puffed, and their faces were ashen.

“We’ll tell you later!” Crabbe began to push the indistinct mass of chair legs and tables back against the door. “We need to seal the door first! They might kill us, but they will definitely kill you!”

They.
The pronoun left a sour taste in Severus’ mouth. He had a distinct idea who Crabbe and Goyle could have encountered during their suspicious absence.

“Why are you two down here anyway?” he questioned them. “Last we saw you, you were on the second floor. Then you abandoned us. Mulciber was pissed. And where’s Macnair, anyway?”

Mentioning Mulciber barely made a sting on his heart. It was inconceivable, really. How had he allowed his feelings to run so rampant as to break down in front of Lupin and Potter like an idiot? No. That was past him. Severus didn’t have a lot of experience with keeping his mind behind the Occlumency barrier for so long, but he felt no urgency to drop the shield anytime soon.
It allowed him to see more clearly.
To think more rationally.
To do things.

It felt good not having to feel bad for Mulciber.
Severus stared at Crabbe’s and Goyle’s puffy eyes, and he felt no urge at all to cry with them.

“Who are you hiding from?” Severus repeated his question, his voice turning sharp and impatient.

“We met …” Goyle faltered. He looked at Crabbe as if to ask for permission.

“There are two Death Eaters on the run, Snape.” Crabbe instinctively hugged his own belly as if to seek comfort from himself. “Their names are McTavish and Fletcher. You are damn lucky that you missed them. They’d kill you for being a Half-blood. Do you get it? We need to block the door now!”

“Sure.” Severus drew out the word in no hurry at all. “But why are you two acting all scared?” He raised one eyebrow. “Shouldn’t this be your best day ever?”

“Are you nuts?” Crabbe balked. “They are murderers! And they wanted us to help them kill McGonagall! We pretended to go along with their plan, and as soon as we got the chance, we ran for it! They’re crazy!”

“And dangerous!” Goyle added.

Then both their faces turned forlorn and they glanced towards the living corpse in the back of the room. “We found Ave,” Crabbe whispered. “He’s all weird.”

Goyle’s lips trembled. “We don’t know what’s wrong with him. But you’re smart, right? And you pay attention in class. Do you know a spell to help him?”

Severus brushed past the two boys, barely glancing over Avery’s pitiful existence. Those three had been friends before Hogwarts. No wonder they had dragged his body down here despite fearing that Fletcher and MacTavish would notice their desertion.

“Don’t bother. He’s beyond help.”

Though not without use.
With that, Severus bent down to steal Avery’s rumpled, but stain-free cloak. It was annoying to maneuver it off the lifeless boy, but he succeeded.

“Hey! What are you doin–“ Crabbe had advanced on him, but Severus simply stepped past him.

“I’ll seal the room from the outside, but it’s still a good idea for you two to re-erect the barrier. Don’t let anybody in until sunrise. Have I made myself clear?”

“What are you talking about!” Goyle clenched his fists as if to hit him. “How can you say something so heartless about our friend and what’s going on with you! You are all … all …”

It finally seemed to dawn on them that Severus wasn’t looking for a hiding spot. Crabbe was first to take a step back.
Yes.
Severus liked that new look on their faces.
Nobody had ever respected him like that.

“Whose blood is that?” Crabbe asked, pointing towards Severus’ sullied uniform.

“None of your business.” Severus turned away from his three housemates, still grasping Avery’s rumpled cloak. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“You can’t go! No! You don’t understand! MacTavish and Fletcher will kill you!” Goyle insisted.

“Not if I kill them first.”

With that, Severus threw the canteen door shut behind him, sealing it with a swish of his wand as he already strode down the corridor towards the stairs to the next floor. Mid-stride, he shed his cloak that was still soaked with Mary Macdonald’s blood. Then he threw it into the blue flames near the entrance, before sliding into Avery’s stain-free cloak.

Now she was gone for good.

There was something behind his Occlumency shield. A pressing itch that spelled trouble. He squashed it.

Somewhere above him, Fletcher and MacTavish were hunting down Slughorn, now that McGonagall had been taken out of the game. Macnair was helping them. That was good intel. Going to the canteen hadn’t been a complete waste of time.

He’d get them all eventually.
After all, there was only one way out of this cursed tower – and none past him.