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Dark Gods In The Blood	By : Hayseed Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 3951 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 8
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A/N: So, what does Severus
think about all of this? Thanks for
reading.

Summary: A wandering
student comes home, a broken man pays his penance, and a gruesome murder is
both more and less than it seems. Some
paths to self-discovery have more twists and turns than others.

Rating: R, for intermittent
dark themes, violence, and language

Disclaimer: Nothing
you read here (save the plot and bits of the text itself) belongs to me. Harry Potter and his cronies are the
property of JK Rowling and Warner Bros. (and someone else, probably, but not
me). All chapter headings are properly
credited to their sources.

Dark Gods in the Blood

by: Hayseed (hayseed_42@hotmail.com)

Chapter Eight

There
were rumors that a very important station was in

jeopardy, and its chief, Mr. Kurtz, was
ill. Hoped it was not

true. Mr. Kurtz was ... I felt weary and
irritable. Hang

Kurtz, I
thought.

-- Joseph Conrad, Heart of
Darkness

His eyes opened automatically and Severus knew that it was six-thirty
in the morning, despite the lack of any indicators in his little room. No clock, no windows, nothing. Just the sound of his breath, steady, even,
and damnably persistent.

In and out, in and out. He
counted his breaths. One, two, ...

By breath number sixty-seven, the door unlocked and opened as if on its
own, a single hand snaking in to flick the light switch.

Due to the nature of its occupants, Perkins Mental Institution operated
on regular Muggle electricity, and the fluorescent glare of the lights hurt
Severus� eyes.

�Good morning, Severus,� a female voice said pleasantly from the other
side of the door -- he�d made it abundantly clear years ago that he did not
want assistance in the mornings. �Up
and at �em.�

He did not respond. It would
not be worth the breath to insult her -- it would just wash off and she�d never
consider it again.

Before -- or even in the beginning -- he would have taken the
time. Insulted, berated, and delighted
in her potential tears. Oh, the time he
had wasted railing at everyone. Albus,
Cuthrell, the nurses, the patients ...

But now Severus knew. He knew
that such behavior was carefully recorded, and each lovely gem was carried
carefully home to be related to loved ones, who would make the appropriate
noises. �Surely he didn�t say that!� he
knew the nurses would exclaim as they swapped stories over their lunch sacks.

He had no intention of being anyone�s anecdote any longer.

Slowly, patiently, Severus pulled himself to a seated position on his
cot. After a few more moments of quiet,
he finally stood, throwing his blanket sullenly to tloorloor. He shucked off what everyone else called
�pajamas� -- blue scrubs as opposed to the dingy white that passed for day
wear.

p>

They were not permitted underthings.

al'>Somehow, that was the final indignity in Severus� mind.

He knew it was rather foolish of him.
Certainly he ought to have resented the days spent in a Full-Body
Bind. The tlestless number of times he�d
been stabbed with a Muggle IV needle because he simply did not feel like
eating. Or the fact that he was as
helpless as an infant any more where magic was concerned.

But no. Severus chose to resent
the more mundane considerations.

Morning tea instead of coffee.
No newspaper. The relatively
inoffensive existences of his fellow lunatics.

No knickers.

He scratched his head lazily as he felt his shirt settle on his
shoulders. Some days, he missed his
hair. The short stubble that he
lathered up in the shower offended him sometimes and he recalled his first
defiant haircut -- performed only after
Severus had been Stupefied -- with something like fondness.

Now, he permitted it with the same listlessness that he permitted
ethinthing that happened to him in life.

Another sharp knock on the door.
Seven, Severus thought to
himself, contemplating his lengthening toenails. This must be the week for nail cutting.an>

He met no one on his way to breakfast.
Possibly, the staff rather avoided him.
Severus did not blame them.

The cafeteria was crowded -- the usual jumble of shouting patients and
frowning nurses greeted him and he collected a breakfast tray with a small
sigh.

These were the hopeless cases.
The throwaways.

People like the Longbottom Auror and his wife, they were kept at St. Mungo�s. Places where they could actively attempt to treat them. Places you couldn�t look into the nurses�
eyes and tell that they�d given up.

Hell ... even Gilderoy Lockhart rated St. Mungo�s.

The porridge was served in bowls.
No cutlery here. And everything
was charmed to disintegrate if ever removed from the cafeteria. Severus had once tried to take a tray out,
in the beginning, but found his chicken laying on the floor after his tray
turned to dust on his fingertips.

He frowned at the weak morning tea.
Watery and tasteless. Everything was tasteless any more. He was certain that his own blood had turned to mere salt water in his veins.

There were only a handful of empty chairs and Severus surveyed them
with dismay. In the end, he settled
beside a fellow known only as Old Jack.
Old Jack was nearly as notorious as Severus himself -- silent apetupetulant, he had a habit of biting people who got close enough. No one knew exactly why Old Jack was here,
but no one really seemed to want to know
and that appeared to suit Old Jack just fine.

It had initially bothered him, having that feeling of perpetually being
watched. Took him right back to his days
working as an undercover agent for the Order of the Phoenix -- right back into
Voldemort�s clutches. He�d had
nightmares. They tied him down and
forced Dreamless Sleep down his throat.

The nightmares eventually dissipated and Severus felt oddly drained. As if with them, the nightmares had taken
the last vestiges of his feelings. The
suicide attempts ceased as Severus genuinely ceased to care.

Perhaps that was part of Cuthrell�s plan. Cow him into submission -- if he did not feel anything, he might
not want to die either.

Severus didn�t know any more.
That absolute certainty -- that desire to end it all -- was no longer
firm. His resolve was gone.

It was actually worse than the void
that had settled on him as he watched that stupid little boy drag Voldemort�s
body through the Hogwarts Great Hall all those years ago. A void that widened with each additional
Death Eater he managed to bring down.

He didn�t want that life, he�d realized. He�d been reduced to nothing more than a puppet, following Albus�
orders so blindly he couldn�t find where Albus� will stopped and his own began.

A bell sounded, startling Severus out of his musings as he stirred his
tea with a pinky finger. Eight o�clock,
then.

Patients began shuffling out of the cafeteria, to their various common
rooms and activities. Some of them to
therapy appointments, doubtless. And
maybe a few of them were going to visitation rooms. He did not know and he did not care.

There were a few activities that patients were encouraged to indulge
in. A Muggle contraption that showed
moving pictures was set up in a monitored room. Another held various �safe� games. Muggle crayons and sheets of paper, a couple of carefully warded
chess sets, things like that.

Severus himself shuffled to the common room closest to his room. Devoid of any sort of interesting stimuli,
it was not a place that many other people visited. That was part of the reason Severus preferred it.

The rest of the reason was obvious as he painstakingly dragged a chair
over to one of the large windows and sat down, staring out through the
glass. So many of the rooms in the
hospital lacked windows.

It was raining today, Severus saw.
The rain made little tapping sounds as it hit the glass, following
watery paths down the pane to puddle on the ledge. He put a hand to the glass and felt the warmth under his fingers.

Going to be a hot day, then.

He tried not to pay attention to the passage of time. Not knowing what the day was, what the month
was, made it simpler to ignore the slow creeping of time, stretching the boring
days into equally dull years.

But the staff disrupted his little mental game. He knew he�d passed five Christmases at
Perkins -- the therapists thought it would be beneficial to play at celebrating
the holiday. Last year, Cuthrell had
been the one to dress up as Father Christmas, handing out trinkets and sweets
in his stupid white beard and ludicrous stuffed belly. Five years.

Reaching out a single finger, Severus traced the descent of one
raindrop as it slid down the glass. His
second day out of the first bind they�d put him under, he�d tried to throw
himself out of this very window, realizing with dismay that not only had it been
warded Unbreakable, but a Cushioning Charm had been placed as well.

There wasn�t a real pane of glass, a sharp corner, even a hard surface anywhere in this damned place. He knew -- he�d spent the better part of his first year looking.

Severus allowed himself to lose track of his surroundings as he watched
the rain fall. If he thought hard
enough, he could almost remember what it felt like to stand out in the
rain. Water trickling under his collar,
wet hair slapping his forehead and cheeks, bare toes squishing mud and grass
together. The coolness of his skin in
the muggy air. Even the electric feel
of the hair on the back of his neck rising as lightning crackled in distant
summers of many years ago.

And she was gone, leaving Severus to contemplate the closed door
quietly, wondering what she was about.
For that matter, he wondered what he
was about.

-- -- --
-- --

**Footnote -- Plato�s Republic
is indeed a treatise on ethics (the fundamental question Plato desires to
answer is �What is good in and of itself?�), however he develops this huge metaphor
of �the ideal city� within it. The
method Plato proposes to control the lower populations of said ideal city is to
instruct children in the belief that there are three sorts of people -- gold,
silver, and bronze -- and everyone works according to their composition. Just to let you know.

**Footnote -- Machiavelli, for all his reputation due to the
publication of The Prince in 1529, was
not Machiavellian. The Prince is a work that details the �proper� way to rule a
kingdom, which is, incidentally, rather despotic. However, Machiavelli himself was a staunch republican, calling
for the unification of Italy under a single, democratic leader. I rather thought that Snape and Hermione
both would appreciate the irony of such a thing and would thus be familiar with
the tale. Machiavelli was indeed exiled
to his country estate for the last few years of his life -- called San
Casciano, I believe. Thus endeth the
impromptu history lesson.

-- -- --
-- --
- 8
- 9
- 10
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Dark Gods In The Blood