(HP/Naruto) all of the serious sasu-centric XO thing so far
Title: Coils
Author: Asuka Kureru
Fandom: Naruto / Harry Potter crossover
Lead character(s): Uchiha Sasuke, Severus Snape
Pairing(s): ? I don't know if there will be any, but I like yaoi/slash and het BOTH, so be warned. I'll try to keep it subtle, in any case. No crossover pairings -- people will only hook up with people from their own world, unless chemistry happens on its own. I'm not planning on romance anyway.
Genre: angst, action.
Warnings: whee violence! Whee blood and gore!
Notes: ALTERNATE SIXTH YEAR. No spoilers for anything happening in Half-Blood Prince and after.
This fic was written because a) I don't like the easy way out of not explaining how exactly the ninja world and the HP world cohabit, nor the "Dumbledore just happened to know the Third" thing, and b) Voldie. Oro. Both like snakes, both have a serious problem with dying and staying dead, both seem to only live to kill and destroy, both have an unhealthy obsession with underage boys. There's a connection to explore. (OMIGAWD OROxVOLDIE OTP !!1!111!oneeleven ... kidding. X3)
Present for Iniq. ;D
He lifted his hand, and watched it tremble.
"My Lord, Bellatrix Lestrange reports..."
"Quiet," he hissed. Unless she reported Harry Potter's death and the subsequent dissolving of the curse the brat had thrown at him, he did not care to hear it.
Potter, alas, was still very much alive, though not in any state to be much of a bother for the time being. The brat was locked inside his own mind, unable to reach out.
It was really nothing compared to what was happening to him; to feeling soul thread after soul thread break away from his hard-won body, to seeing his precision and strength slowly diminishing. Soon enough he would be back into a state of utter dependence on his servants, and after that...
Ten, twelve years as a drifting ghost, as nothing more than a soul condemned to float around until an opportunity to slip back in the material world presented itself. He could do it again, but how he loathed the very idea. How he loathed the setback to his plans, the time given to the opposition to strengthen their positions, to train the Potter brat...
"Curse them all!" he hissed again, shifting into Parseltongue. He wanted to pace, and break things, and Crucio someone, but with his coordination getting worse, it was a stupid idea.
"Masster?" Nagini slithered up to him, winding around his chair. "Is your sskin sstill troubling you?"
"Yess," he replied shortly. He had told her he was losing touch with his flesh, which had translated into "my skin is detaching itself from me." He hadn't bothered to find another way to explain the problem to her -- some concepts just didn't translate to Parseltongue.
"Maybe it iss time to sshed it, then," she commented, and flicked her tongue thoughtfully.
For a minute, he didn't answer, thinking. "... Humans do not grow back losst sskin, Nagini."
"Then why not take it from ssomeone elsse, like you take the bear'ss fur and the sheep'ss wool for yoursself? Would that really be sso complicated?"
He pondered the suggestion, unmoving but for the faint, constant trembling in his hands. And then he smiled.
"... That, indeed, would be worth finding out, my beauty."
+
He lifted his hand, and watched it bleed.
"You're getting much better, Sasuke-kun."
On the ground, a tiny grass snake was curled up. Barely a hatchling. Better than the eggs he'd been summoning earlier, but still pitiful.
Sasuke dreamed of huge boas, snakes that he could afterwards pretend having lost control of, once they were done crushing Kabuto's mangled body. But the curse seal on his neck drained his chakra, and he couldn't get hold of enough energy to summon much of anything. And his master's right hand man kept smiling gently, falsely, kept encouraging him when they both knew that Sasuke was stuck.
The tiny snake slithered over to his foot, looked up at him. Sasuke thought of how disturbingly easy it would be to stomp down on it. There was no one else to kill, no one expendable enough that Orochimaru-sama would accept to sacrifice to Sasuke's dark mood. But killing the snake would break the summoning contract, and for that, there would be hell to pay.
He dispelled the jutsu, dismissing the snake, reopened the wound on his thumb, and mechanically started shaping the hand seals yet again.
Kabuto's hand on his wrist stopped him. He stared at the medic's hand, expressionless, then looked up his arm and into his still smiling face.
"Ah, Sasuke-kun. You worked hard, today. You should give your chakra some time to replenish itself. Rest a little. Maybe take a walk around the village."
He didn't think he'd worked hard enough, if the best he could get was stupid baby snakes not even two hands long. But he didn't care much about that anyway. The problem, after all, was in his chakra reserves, not his ability to perform the jutsu. Soon enough, it would cease to be a problem to him.
As would lots of other things.
He didn't want to think about that. He didn't want to think about anything -- especially not about how much he wanted to crush his fist into Kabuto's shining white teeth, to tear that silver hair out, scalp comprised, to break his spine and hear, for once, nothing but whimpers of pain -- no cheerful greetings, no gentle admonitions, no veiled mockery.
He turned away and left the courtyard and the compound, licking his bleeding thumb absently. He didn't especially like the taste of blood, but it was familiar. It was about the only thing there that was. The Hidden Village of the Sound was empty, most of its ninjas away or in training. There were no civilians there, no cheerfully chattering housewives, no children coming back from school. No one over the age of forty.
He started to wander. Where, he didn't know. It did not matter. It was all the same anyway. Empty streets and dust, wariness and a clear sense of being an intruder. He didn't much care. The streets were all the same.
On his neck, the curse seal had started to pulsate softly. He followed the pull.
The area beyond the walls was all the same too; damp, moss-covered forest, half-rotten trees, mist everywhere. The mist hid his marks, but he knew where he was going anyway.
The curse seal was guiding him.
He swept in the dungeon as dramatically as was his usual, black robes floating after him. The mask was stifling him. It had been spelled so that he could breathe through it perfectly normally, but it didn't matter; nothing made it any less oppressive.
They were numerous, tonight. Many black robes, many featureless white masks -- he counted dozens of fretting, nervous, excited new initiates, and pinpointed easily, despite the uniform, the poise and superiority members of the Inner Circle exuded. Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange were probably with the Dark Lord, along with Wormtail, which meant that with his arrival the Inner Circle was complete.
He would have been surprised if there were more than three people who hadn't come, actually. That was not normal, and quite worrying.
He stalked forward, the crowd parting before him, reached the edge of the wide empty space in the middle of the circle of stone pillars. The Dark Lord was standing there, his snake circling a wide, complicated array on the floor, forked tongue flicking out as if to taste the still-wet edges. Five small bodies were hanging from their feet from five pillars, unmarked but for the wide, red smile crossing their throats.
"Ah, Severus, at last. Take place."
He bowed deeply, and went to stand at Lucius' left, on the edge of the outside circle. His eyes flickered quickly -- this series of runes was used in summoning, but the series wasn't complete. That one was fragments of creation magic. He would need to brush up on his Ancient Runes skills; he didn't understand if that complicated pentacle was genius or madness. Fifteen years ago he would have said genius, but Tom Riddle's sanity wasn't getting any better.
The Dark Lord's hands were shaking, as they had been now since Potter's curse -- one thing the imbecilic brat had done well, if for a high cost -- but for once, he wasn't bothering to hide it. His eyes were alight with excitement. Snape took it as a very bad sign.
Nagini slithered behind him, smooth scales making almost no sound on the paved floor. His jostled memory told him that the rune for snake was carved in the middle of the pentacle; Snape wondered if they were trying to call up a demon serpent from the netherworld. The children -- two squibs, three muggleborns -- had been drained of magic as of life and blood. Snape searched for runes of control, but didn't find any. He didn't question the Dark Lord, though; trusting his abilities might get him killed, but questioning them would kill him for sure. Besides, if the worst happened, he could always throw Lucius at the summon as a living sacrifice; it would buy him a few seconds.
Not that Lucius wasn't thinking the exact same thing.
The chanting started. A basic charm; one that let their magic flow along the circle openly, for the master of the spell to wield.
Snape didn't even know what they were doing, nor, if he believed the varying degrees of success the lower-ranked initiates had at hiding their confusion, did anyone else. Of course, no way to tell if Lucius and Bellatrix did indeed know or if they were just that good at looking smug -- but even Dolohov and Macnair appeared faintly unsure. Snape was about level with them; if they hadn't been trusted either, his cover was probably still holding.
He had planned on memorizing the spell, but when Voldemort started incanting in Parseltongue, he resigned himself to memorizing the patterns on the floor instead. Maybe Dumbledore could figure out how the spell worked from that; he had pulled weirder rabbits from rattier hats.
For the longest time, nothing happened -- besides Nagini biting a grunt who had started fidgeting and leaned forward to whisper in his comrade's ear. The man's twitching on the floor barely echoed over the chanting; most of the other followers knew better than to interrupt.
Then the air started to shimmer -- except that instead of dry desert heat it exhaled damp and cold, and a shape started to appear, slowly darkening. The chanting grew in intensity, and Voldemort's hissings grew louder, tinged with something that Snape could recognize as triumph.
Suddenly, his magic was his own once again, and the chant stopped. The Dark Lord let a claw-like hand brush against Nagini's scales as she tasted the air, and Snape lost a second trying to figure out how he could think that a sodding snake could look smug.
There was a boy standing in the middle of the circle, facing Voldemort. His head was bowed, his face hidden behind midnight-black hair. He seemed to be about fifteen, and struck the perfect balance between graceful and muscled. He didn't move for the longest time, and then Voldemort stepped into the circle, and the boy crumpled like a puppet with cut strings.
"My enemies thought to vanquish me by banishing me out of my body, but I have thwarted them once again! They thought they could defeat me by forbidding me the use of this aging form, but I will come back young and strong again, to lead you all to victory! Admire my new vessel, my faithful servants!"
The boy, Snape noted, was not wearing much; the rags still holding to his waist didn't hide a lot besides the essential, and only the bandages on his arms and legs were still roughly intact, if somewhat dirty. He was also much too beautiful, but in a weird, exotic way that Snape couldn't name right away -- and then he remembered Cho Chang. How the Dark Lord had managed to conjure himself an Asian body, Snape didn't know, but it would probably be amusing to find out -- if amusing and utterly useless were synonymous, of course.
"Severus."
Snape stepped closer, despite his best judgment. Summonings, especially those believed to be under control, were best approached first by expendable grunts.
"There is a chamber ready to keep this body until I am ready to move into it. Take four men with you. Make sure that it is healthy, and keep it alive until the right time."
"Yes, my Lord," he replied, because he could say nothing else. It was an honour -- though it was also that he was probably the only one of the inner circle to have some skill with the healing spells.
It was indeed breathing regularly, though shallowly enough. But its skin was prickling with the cold of the stone underneath. Snape frowned as he assessed the amazing responsiveness of that conjured shell, and waved two of his helpers closer so that they could lift it.
A second later, one of the men was freezing on the spot, and Snape would have berated him if he hadn't been too busy staring at the red-gloved hand that had just bloomed in between the man's shoulder blades.
His reflexes were faster than rational thought, which was why he'd lived so old, and he was already a few steps back with his wand out when the other man's neck broke with a dull, wet crack, and he crumpled to the ground at the boy's feet. The brat's face was utterly expressionless, and he didn't seem to notice or care about the blood covering his hand or speckling the side of his chest.
'The Dark Lord had the good luck or forethought to find a vessel that already had red eyes,' he thought as the teenager took in the room. 'How convenient for him.'
The boy blurred from view, and the third helper was suddenly airborne. Snape dodged, hearing the man hit the last one. That hadn't been magic -- just the kind of inhuman strength one might expect from a troll.
At first too surprised to react, the Dark Lord quickly lifted his wand, firing a stunning spell at the boy. The boy threw himself face down on the ground, and slung a rock pried loose from the cobbled floor back at Voldemort, which bounced hard from the Dark Lord's shielding spell, splintering all over the place. Then all hell broke loose.
"DON'T DAMAGE IT!!" Voldemort ordered angrily as a Blasting curse grazed the boy's shoulder, throwing him in the middle of a throng of yelling Death Eaters.
There was a number of wet crunches and choking noises as he fought his way through the crowd à la Muggle. Snape scowled -- the idiots were so long in stepping back to give him a wide berth. There were already five -- six masked bodies on the ground.
"Stand back!" Malfoy called out, and fired a Petrificus Totalis with remarkable accuracy. The boy toppled over, frozen -- and then there was a little cloud of dust, and an anonymous woman landed on the hard floor. Snape was pretty sure she had been standing over ten feet to the right -- and there was the boy, slipping between Death Eaters still busy staring at where Malfoy had aimed.
He allowed himself a smirk as Malfoy cursed, and calmly locked the exits.
As he followed the wall toward the exit, Snape wondered if the boy could Apparate. It shouldn't have been possible seeing how many wards there were around the place. But upon reflection, it was more of a switch with something else than a full displacing of his being. At any rate, they had to stop giving him a crowd to work with; it was impossible to aim properly without hitting a neighbour, but the brat didn't have the same problem.
Voldemort had finally managed to quiet his followers, and was stomping his way toward the arch that led outside. Hearing him come maybe, the boy whirled around, his back to the heavy doors. Briefly, Snape toyed with the idea of letting his warding spell slip, but the boy had proved he was dangerous, and Snape wasn't sure if the Order would ever find him again if he managed to escape. At least Voldemort wasn't planning on using him right away, which left some time to assess the situation and make a decision. After a major summoning, there was no way the Dark Lord would have the necessary energy to do whatever it was he planned to do with the boy before at least a good week.
Voldemort and the boy stared each other down for a few seconds -- then the teenager started sneering in a way that would have made a Malfoy proud, and lifted his hands, fitting them together oddly in a series of rapid shifts.
No one knew what they were supposed to do, but there was a clear intent behind them. The Dark Lord wasn't stupid enough to let him finish.
+
It took four Petrificus Totalis before the boy would stop twitching. Bellatrix was all ready to throw in a fifth, but Voldemort stopped her. Severus was glad -- he didn't want to deal with the result of a heart attack, and definitely didn't feel like mouth to mouth resuscitation. It was already unexpected that the boy would still be breathing -- albeit shallowly -- on his own.
Snape took two men to carry him, and followed Wormtail to the chamber that had been prepared to hold the Dark Lord's vessel. He stood at the left of the boy's head, wand drawn -- they'd been surprised enough that evening as it was.
Somehow, he wasn't surprised to see his eyes still open, and burning with rage. The Dark Lord had found himself a fitting vessel indeed. He ignored the anger and the hate, though; the boy was too pale and looked too drawn to still threaten him effectively, even without counting the Petrificus.
The room was dark, with no windows, no chimney and a thick, reinforced oak door that locked from the outside. There were anti-Apparation wards up. Snape nodded in approval, and directed the men to put the boy down on the rather incongruous hospital bed in the middle of the dungeon.
"You can wait at the door," he informed them coolly, leaning over the boy. He knew better than to make them leave; the boy was too dangerous for them to leave anyone alone with him, and asking for that would only make Snape look either obtuse or suspicious.
"The Dark Lord--" Wormtail started, even as the grunts stepped back obediently, one of them walking out to stand guard in the corridor and the other one leaning against the wall to watch over the proceedings.
"You can watch from the door well enough," the Potions Master snapped, and added contemptuously, "I didn't think you would actually want to be in range if it threw even part of the spells off."
The rat Animagus scurried back, flinching. Sneering, Snape turned back toward his charge.
A good cleaning charm later and the boy was a little less dirty -- not a lot less, but at least the drying blood on his arm had disappeared, along with some of the dust and dirt. Snape still couldn't tell what his original skin color was, though. He looked the boy over quickly, ignoring his powerless resentment. He reached for the weird arm-warmers and unbuckled them, and arched an eyebrow at the weird tattoo wrapped around the teenager's left forearm, and the array of blades strapped to both wrists.
His fingers twitched as Snape took off the holsters.
"Don't strain too much," the man advised him in a soft, unconcerned voice. "You will only injure yourself." Inside though, he was mildly impressed. Four Petrificus piled up and the boy's body still wasn't totally frozen.
There were more weirdly shaped knives in the pouch strapped to his thigh, along with a handful of round things -- bombs of some sort if he judged by the wick. He also found a length of metallic wire around his waist; probably the only thing that had kept what was left of the boy's shorts up so long. The wire was difficult to remove -- it bit into the skin if he pulled too sharply. In the end he had to levitate the boy, whose powerless glare went up a notch, if that was even possible.
The long coil of wire went to pile with the other weapons. Snape continued his inspection.
The lone shoe -- open-toed, so strange -- was coated in mud, but if he trusted the rest of the boy's attire, it probably contained weapons too. Maybe something in the heel. It stank, though. He briefly toyed with the idea of asking the rat to check it out, but in the end dropped it on the floor.
The leg-warmers had to be banished off him. One of them was caked with dried mud, and the other, shredded into tiny bits, left fibers in a few half-healed scratches. Two days old maybe? He pondered briefly at the necessary strength of the compulsion that would have made the boy ignore something so basic as cleaning his wounds. With such a strength of will as Snape had glimpsed, the power necessary to subdue him so totally and for so long -- and from so far away, he guessed, though he had no idea where the teenager was from -- should have left him a gibbering mess.
"So? Have you learned anything of interest at all?" Wormtail whined from his corner, disrupting his train of thought.
"It seems to favor bladed weapons," Snape replied silkily, and picked one up to consider the weird triangular shape. "These, in particular, seem especially suited to skewering."
There was a moment of silence, and then Wormtail stammered out, "W-well, I could see the... the knives on my own, but --"
"Then," Snape replied slowly, "why ever did you ask?" Inwardly, he seethed. Wasn't it obvious that he couldn't assess the boy's physical state before he was clean, for one thing? And wasn't it even more obvious that making him as harmless as possible came before taking care of bruises and aches and eventual internal trauma? The boy wasn't going to croak in the ten minutes it took to defang him.
Wormtail mumbled something, but Snape wasn't listening anymore. Turning back to the boy, he met his eyes for a few seconds, and then with a faint touch of apology, banished the tattered shorts and underwear, leaving him nude. Modesty was a luxury he couldn't afford, and wasn't that a pity.
"S-Snape--"
"What," he demanded sharply, using a good Scourgify on the teenager. It probably hurt a bit -- the spell was powerful and might take off a layer of skin or two -- but he didn't want to bother giving him a sponge bath. To get that kind of dirt off, he would need to scrub for hours, and he didn't feel like touching the child any more than necessary. Once he was clean, Snape unfolded a blanket and draped it over the boy's legs, covering him from the waist down. There, modesty -- and his eyes -- preserved.
"Why did you--"
"Those rags it was wearing were a nest of vermin. Did you want me to present the Dark Lord his vessel in such a state?"
"... Oh."
Snape caught the odd tone in Wormtail's voice and concluded that the rat suspected him of pedophilia. His opinion of the man's intelligence dropped another notch.
The basic diagnosis spells he used next told him that the boy was physically exhausted, hadn't eaten anything in days and was mildly dehydrated. Frowning, he ordered the guard at the door to go get him water, and made a note to ask the Dark Lord permission to bring in someone trained as a nurse. Field healing, he could do -- sealing a freely bleeding wound for example -- but such ailments were outside of his expertise.
The scratches on his arms and legs only required cleaning and disinfectant; the bruises a little healing salve, which he was carrying in one of his inner pockets. The wrenched right knee was a bit trickier, but the Petrificus kept him unmoving anyway; that would take care of the worst of it.
There was a weird mark on the boy's neck, three swirling dots that elongated into little points. It was black, like a simple ink tattoo, but as the one on his left arm attested, Snape had a more than passing familiarity with magical brands. He pulled a bit parchment out of his pocket and copied it down meticulously to research later, and then copied the larger one on his forearm. He couldn't reveal the underlying enchantments right now without taking off the Petrificus, though; they would have interfered with his diagnosis.
Anything else looked normal -- if in outstanding good health -- and seemed to work properly, but he still clinically opened the boy's mouth to check his teeth, and then pulled up his eyelids.
... Hm.
"Lumos," he muttered, and hissed softly in surprise. The boy's eyes weren't only red, they were... there was a darker circle in the iris, at about equal distance from the pupil and the outer edge of the iris, and on that circle three black dots, slightly elongated at one end. They gave off the impression of spinning around the pupil, and spinning and spinning... He blinked, shaking off the faint hypnotized feeling.
"Uh. S-something wrong...?"
"Merely strange -- stay where you are," he snapped as the rat stepped forward.
He was starting to seriously question his assumption that the boy was human at all. There was no doubt that he was in possession of some intelligence, but the eyes, coupled with the strength and the weird swapping ability... Maybe some kind of demon, which the Dark Lord's spell had forced into a human-like body. Or maybe it had slipped in the empty body that the Dark Lord had made himself -- Snape didn't know enough about the way Voldemort had procured his vessel to guess which was the most likely one.
"S-strange how?" Wormtail asked. Was he actually standing on tiptoes to try peering over Snape's shoulder? The Potions Master sneered.
"It seems to have four pupils."
"... Four," Wormtail repeated weakly.
"In each eye."
"... r-right..."
Apparently it unsettled the coward. Snape slipped into his teacher voice without missing a beat. "The main pupil seems to constricts normally to the light. The three secondaries... hm. Curious. It does look like they're spinning from time to time, but that might just be the eyeball moving to accommodate a better angle of view..."
"... Oh."
The hate was still burning strong. He had a clear feeling that, should he be in the boy's -- or demon's, or whatever he was -- path if he got free... Well. This could be annoying, especially if he ended up freeing it on Albus' orders. He wasn't sure the boy would be anything approaching understanding, much less grateful.
He had to find out more about what the boy was before he had to go back at Hogwarts, though -- Dumbledore couldn't plan for anything if he didn't have that most basic information. Erecting mental shields, he prepared himself to finding a totally alien mindset, then leaned at a better angle, making sure that he couldn't be seen from the door and its guard, and whispered, "Legilimens."
The first thing he noticed was rage. Unhealthy lots of it. The feel was still human, though. Underneath...
His own face -- the white Death Eater mask, black eyes staring through, lanky black hair hanging out of the hood -- on a lacerated body. Images of blood and violence and torture, flashes of intentions trying to mask rage and powerlessness -- held by a capacity to hold grudges that matched his own...
... and underneath... A man with eyeliner around shocking gold eyes and long black hair, licking his neck; the first time his knife had bitten, not in wood, but in flesh; his first kill -- a girl whose feelings baffled him; a blond boy with an infectious grin that he couldn't let die, that he wanted to kill -- a little boy in a familiar, deserted street, bodies all around -- betrayal of the most awful kind -- and then a wave of hate and outrage, memories of a young man with his face shoving him against a wall and raping his mind -- raping his --
Snape was shoved out of the boy's head, with such formidable speed and strength that he only realized he was out when he crashed into Wormtail and they ended up in a heap at the bottom of the wall.
"What?! W-what happened?" the rat wheezed, trapped behind Snape and the wall. The Potions Master straightened up quickly, hiding his dizziness.
"What, pray tell, were you doing, standing behind me?" he asked silkily, his eyelid twitching.
Wormtail squeaked an answer; Snape didn't listen, channeling his surprise and unease at the boy's reaction, and his humiliation at being caught off-guard, into fury. "I am done with your interference. Get out of here now, you utter imbecile!"
"But--"
"GET OUT!"
He whirled away, robes flaring, and stalked around the boy's bed to the pile of discarded weapons. There was a terrified squeak, and Wormtail scrambled out of the door so quickly that he bumped into the guard. One unfriendly look, and the man was bowing out with a deference that soothed his bruised ego very little.
It wasn't until he was alone again, with the guards standing on the outside of the open door, that he allowed himself to reach up, slip a hand under his mask, and feel the wet trail slowly making his way to his lips.
His nose was bleeding. He wiped it slowly, staring down at the boy. The brat's face was still frozen in an expression of powerless rage, but underneath, there was some satisfaction now.
Snape cursed in advance all the members of the Order of the Phoenix. The boy was not on Voldemort's side, but he was still a cold-blooded killer, with an amazing propensity for hate and little to no ability for forgiveness. And there was no doubt in Snape's mind that the soft-hearted imbeciles to which he had tied his fate were going to want to rescue him.
As if such a little viper wasn't going to prove just as dangerous to anyone that stood in its path and pretended to control it, whatever the reason. It was a pity that forgetting to mention Voldemort's new prisoner wasn't really an option.
Author: Asuka Kureru
Fandom: Naruto / Harry Potter crossover
Lead character(s): Uchiha Sasuke, Severus Snape
Pairing(s): ? I don't know if there will be any, but I like yaoi/slash and het BOTH, so be warned. I'll try to keep it subtle, in any case. No crossover pairings -- people will only hook up with people from their own world, unless chemistry happens on its own. I'm not planning on romance anyway.
Genre: angst, action.
Warnings: whee violence! Whee blood and gore!
Notes: ALTERNATE SIXTH YEAR. No spoilers for anything happening in Half-Blood Prince and after.
This fic was written because a) I don't like the easy way out of not explaining how exactly the ninja world and the HP world cohabit, nor the "Dumbledore just happened to know the Third" thing, and b) Voldie. Oro. Both like snakes, both have a serious problem with dying and staying dead, both seem to only live to kill and destroy, both have an unhealthy obsession with underage boys. There's a connection to explore. (OMIGAWD OROxVOLDIE OTP !!1!111!oneeleven ... kidding. X3)
Present for Iniq. ;D
He lifted his hand, and watched it tremble.
"My Lord, Bellatrix Lestrange reports..."
"Quiet," he hissed. Unless she reported Harry Potter's death and the subsequent dissolving of the curse the brat had thrown at him, he did not care to hear it.
Potter, alas, was still very much alive, though not in any state to be much of a bother for the time being. The brat was locked inside his own mind, unable to reach out.
It was really nothing compared to what was happening to him; to feeling soul thread after soul thread break away from his hard-won body, to seeing his precision and strength slowly diminishing. Soon enough he would be back into a state of utter dependence on his servants, and after that...
Ten, twelve years as a drifting ghost, as nothing more than a soul condemned to float around until an opportunity to slip back in the material world presented itself. He could do it again, but how he loathed the very idea. How he loathed the setback to his plans, the time given to the opposition to strengthen their positions, to train the Potter brat...
"Curse them all!" he hissed again, shifting into Parseltongue. He wanted to pace, and break things, and Crucio someone, but with his coordination getting worse, it was a stupid idea.
"Masster?" Nagini slithered up to him, winding around his chair. "Is your sskin sstill troubling you?"
"Yess," he replied shortly. He had told her he was losing touch with his flesh, which had translated into "my skin is detaching itself from me." He hadn't bothered to find another way to explain the problem to her -- some concepts just didn't translate to Parseltongue.
"Maybe it iss time to sshed it, then," she commented, and flicked her tongue thoughtfully.
For a minute, he didn't answer, thinking. "... Humans do not grow back losst sskin, Nagini."
"Then why not take it from ssomeone elsse, like you take the bear'ss fur and the sheep'ss wool for yoursself? Would that really be sso complicated?"
He pondered the suggestion, unmoving but for the faint, constant trembling in his hands. And then he smiled.
"... That, indeed, would be worth finding out, my beauty."
+
He lifted his hand, and watched it bleed.
"You're getting much better, Sasuke-kun."
On the ground, a tiny grass snake was curled up. Barely a hatchling. Better than the eggs he'd been summoning earlier, but still pitiful.
Sasuke dreamed of huge boas, snakes that he could afterwards pretend having lost control of, once they were done crushing Kabuto's mangled body. But the curse seal on his neck drained his chakra, and he couldn't get hold of enough energy to summon much of anything. And his master's right hand man kept smiling gently, falsely, kept encouraging him when they both knew that Sasuke was stuck.
The tiny snake slithered over to his foot, looked up at him. Sasuke thought of how disturbingly easy it would be to stomp down on it. There was no one else to kill, no one expendable enough that Orochimaru-sama would accept to sacrifice to Sasuke's dark mood. But killing the snake would break the summoning contract, and for that, there would be hell to pay.
He dispelled the jutsu, dismissing the snake, reopened the wound on his thumb, and mechanically started shaping the hand seals yet again.
Kabuto's hand on his wrist stopped him. He stared at the medic's hand, expressionless, then looked up his arm and into his still smiling face.
"Ah, Sasuke-kun. You worked hard, today. You should give your chakra some time to replenish itself. Rest a little. Maybe take a walk around the village."
He didn't think he'd worked hard enough, if the best he could get was stupid baby snakes not even two hands long. But he didn't care much about that anyway. The problem, after all, was in his chakra reserves, not his ability to perform the jutsu. Soon enough, it would cease to be a problem to him.
As would lots of other things.
He didn't want to think about that. He didn't want to think about anything -- especially not about how much he wanted to crush his fist into Kabuto's shining white teeth, to tear that silver hair out, scalp comprised, to break his spine and hear, for once, nothing but whimpers of pain -- no cheerful greetings, no gentle admonitions, no veiled mockery.
He turned away and left the courtyard and the compound, licking his bleeding thumb absently. He didn't especially like the taste of blood, but it was familiar. It was about the only thing there that was. The Hidden Village of the Sound was empty, most of its ninjas away or in training. There were no civilians there, no cheerfully chattering housewives, no children coming back from school. No one over the age of forty.
He started to wander. Where, he didn't know. It did not matter. It was all the same anyway. Empty streets and dust, wariness and a clear sense of being an intruder. He didn't much care. The streets were all the same.
On his neck, the curse seal had started to pulsate softly. He followed the pull.
The area beyond the walls was all the same too; damp, moss-covered forest, half-rotten trees, mist everywhere. The mist hid his marks, but he knew where he was going anyway.
The curse seal was guiding him.
He swept in the dungeon as dramatically as was his usual, black robes floating after him. The mask was stifling him. It had been spelled so that he could breathe through it perfectly normally, but it didn't matter; nothing made it any less oppressive.
They were numerous, tonight. Many black robes, many featureless white masks -- he counted dozens of fretting, nervous, excited new initiates, and pinpointed easily, despite the uniform, the poise and superiority members of the Inner Circle exuded. Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange were probably with the Dark Lord, along with Wormtail, which meant that with his arrival the Inner Circle was complete.
He would have been surprised if there were more than three people who hadn't come, actually. That was not normal, and quite worrying.
He stalked forward, the crowd parting before him, reached the edge of the wide empty space in the middle of the circle of stone pillars. The Dark Lord was standing there, his snake circling a wide, complicated array on the floor, forked tongue flicking out as if to taste the still-wet edges. Five small bodies were hanging from their feet from five pillars, unmarked but for the wide, red smile crossing their throats.
"Ah, Severus, at last. Take place."
He bowed deeply, and went to stand at Lucius' left, on the edge of the outside circle. His eyes flickered quickly -- this series of runes was used in summoning, but the series wasn't complete. That one was fragments of creation magic. He would need to brush up on his Ancient Runes skills; he didn't understand if that complicated pentacle was genius or madness. Fifteen years ago he would have said genius, but Tom Riddle's sanity wasn't getting any better.
The Dark Lord's hands were shaking, as they had been now since Potter's curse -- one thing the imbecilic brat had done well, if for a high cost -- but for once, he wasn't bothering to hide it. His eyes were alight with excitement. Snape took it as a very bad sign.
Nagini slithered behind him, smooth scales making almost no sound on the paved floor. His jostled memory told him that the rune for snake was carved in the middle of the pentacle; Snape wondered if they were trying to call up a demon serpent from the netherworld. The children -- two squibs, three muggleborns -- had been drained of magic as of life and blood. Snape searched for runes of control, but didn't find any. He didn't question the Dark Lord, though; trusting his abilities might get him killed, but questioning them would kill him for sure. Besides, if the worst happened, he could always throw Lucius at the summon as a living sacrifice; it would buy him a few seconds.
Not that Lucius wasn't thinking the exact same thing.
The chanting started. A basic charm; one that let their magic flow along the circle openly, for the master of the spell to wield.
Snape didn't even know what they were doing, nor, if he believed the varying degrees of success the lower-ranked initiates had at hiding their confusion, did anyone else. Of course, no way to tell if Lucius and Bellatrix did indeed know or if they were just that good at looking smug -- but even Dolohov and Macnair appeared faintly unsure. Snape was about level with them; if they hadn't been trusted either, his cover was probably still holding.
He had planned on memorizing the spell, but when Voldemort started incanting in Parseltongue, he resigned himself to memorizing the patterns on the floor instead. Maybe Dumbledore could figure out how the spell worked from that; he had pulled weirder rabbits from rattier hats.
For the longest time, nothing happened -- besides Nagini biting a grunt who had started fidgeting and leaned forward to whisper in his comrade's ear. The man's twitching on the floor barely echoed over the chanting; most of the other followers knew better than to interrupt.
Then the air started to shimmer -- except that instead of dry desert heat it exhaled damp and cold, and a shape started to appear, slowly darkening. The chanting grew in intensity, and Voldemort's hissings grew louder, tinged with something that Snape could recognize as triumph.
Suddenly, his magic was his own once again, and the chant stopped. The Dark Lord let a claw-like hand brush against Nagini's scales as she tasted the air, and Snape lost a second trying to figure out how he could think that a sodding snake could look smug.
There was a boy standing in the middle of the circle, facing Voldemort. His head was bowed, his face hidden behind midnight-black hair. He seemed to be about fifteen, and struck the perfect balance between graceful and muscled. He didn't move for the longest time, and then Voldemort stepped into the circle, and the boy crumpled like a puppet with cut strings.
"My enemies thought to vanquish me by banishing me out of my body, but I have thwarted them once again! They thought they could defeat me by forbidding me the use of this aging form, but I will come back young and strong again, to lead you all to victory! Admire my new vessel, my faithful servants!"
The boy, Snape noted, was not wearing much; the rags still holding to his waist didn't hide a lot besides the essential, and only the bandages on his arms and legs were still roughly intact, if somewhat dirty. He was also much too beautiful, but in a weird, exotic way that Snape couldn't name right away -- and then he remembered Cho Chang. How the Dark Lord had managed to conjure himself an Asian body, Snape didn't know, but it would probably be amusing to find out -- if amusing and utterly useless were synonymous, of course.
"Severus."
Snape stepped closer, despite his best judgment. Summonings, especially those believed to be under control, were best approached first by expendable grunts.
"There is a chamber ready to keep this body until I am ready to move into it. Take four men with you. Make sure that it is healthy, and keep it alive until the right time."
"Yes, my Lord," he replied, because he could say nothing else. It was an honour -- though it was also that he was probably the only one of the inner circle to have some skill with the healing spells.
It was indeed breathing regularly, though shallowly enough. But its skin was prickling with the cold of the stone underneath. Snape frowned as he assessed the amazing responsiveness of that conjured shell, and waved two of his helpers closer so that they could lift it.
A second later, one of the men was freezing on the spot, and Snape would have berated him if he hadn't been too busy staring at the red-gloved hand that had just bloomed in between the man's shoulder blades.
His reflexes were faster than rational thought, which was why he'd lived so old, and he was already a few steps back with his wand out when the other man's neck broke with a dull, wet crack, and he crumpled to the ground at the boy's feet. The brat's face was utterly expressionless, and he didn't seem to notice or care about the blood covering his hand or speckling the side of his chest.
'The Dark Lord had the good luck or forethought to find a vessel that already had red eyes,' he thought as the teenager took in the room. 'How convenient for him.'
The boy blurred from view, and the third helper was suddenly airborne. Snape dodged, hearing the man hit the last one. That hadn't been magic -- just the kind of inhuman strength one might expect from a troll.
At first too surprised to react, the Dark Lord quickly lifted his wand, firing a stunning spell at the boy. The boy threw himself face down on the ground, and slung a rock pried loose from the cobbled floor back at Voldemort, which bounced hard from the Dark Lord's shielding spell, splintering all over the place. Then all hell broke loose.
"DON'T DAMAGE IT!!" Voldemort ordered angrily as a Blasting curse grazed the boy's shoulder, throwing him in the middle of a throng of yelling Death Eaters.
There was a number of wet crunches and choking noises as he fought his way through the crowd à la Muggle. Snape scowled -- the idiots were so long in stepping back to give him a wide berth. There were already five -- six masked bodies on the ground.
"Stand back!" Malfoy called out, and fired a Petrificus Totalis with remarkable accuracy. The boy toppled over, frozen -- and then there was a little cloud of dust, and an anonymous woman landed on the hard floor. Snape was pretty sure she had been standing over ten feet to the right -- and there was the boy, slipping between Death Eaters still busy staring at where Malfoy had aimed.
He allowed himself a smirk as Malfoy cursed, and calmly locked the exits.
As he followed the wall toward the exit, Snape wondered if the boy could Apparate. It shouldn't have been possible seeing how many wards there were around the place. But upon reflection, it was more of a switch with something else than a full displacing of his being. At any rate, they had to stop giving him a crowd to work with; it was impossible to aim properly without hitting a neighbour, but the brat didn't have the same problem.
Voldemort had finally managed to quiet his followers, and was stomping his way toward the arch that led outside. Hearing him come maybe, the boy whirled around, his back to the heavy doors. Briefly, Snape toyed with the idea of letting his warding spell slip, but the boy had proved he was dangerous, and Snape wasn't sure if the Order would ever find him again if he managed to escape. At least Voldemort wasn't planning on using him right away, which left some time to assess the situation and make a decision. After a major summoning, there was no way the Dark Lord would have the necessary energy to do whatever it was he planned to do with the boy before at least a good week.
Voldemort and the boy stared each other down for a few seconds -- then the teenager started sneering in a way that would have made a Malfoy proud, and lifted his hands, fitting them together oddly in a series of rapid shifts.
No one knew what they were supposed to do, but there was a clear intent behind them. The Dark Lord wasn't stupid enough to let him finish.
+
It took four Petrificus Totalis before the boy would stop twitching. Bellatrix was all ready to throw in a fifth, but Voldemort stopped her. Severus was glad -- he didn't want to deal with the result of a heart attack, and definitely didn't feel like mouth to mouth resuscitation. It was already unexpected that the boy would still be breathing -- albeit shallowly -- on his own.
Snape took two men to carry him, and followed Wormtail to the chamber that had been prepared to hold the Dark Lord's vessel. He stood at the left of the boy's head, wand drawn -- they'd been surprised enough that evening as it was.
Somehow, he wasn't surprised to see his eyes still open, and burning with rage. The Dark Lord had found himself a fitting vessel indeed. He ignored the anger and the hate, though; the boy was too pale and looked too drawn to still threaten him effectively, even without counting the Petrificus.
The room was dark, with no windows, no chimney and a thick, reinforced oak door that locked from the outside. There were anti-Apparation wards up. Snape nodded in approval, and directed the men to put the boy down on the rather incongruous hospital bed in the middle of the dungeon.
"You can wait at the door," he informed them coolly, leaning over the boy. He knew better than to make them leave; the boy was too dangerous for them to leave anyone alone with him, and asking for that would only make Snape look either obtuse or suspicious.
"The Dark Lord--" Wormtail started, even as the grunts stepped back obediently, one of them walking out to stand guard in the corridor and the other one leaning against the wall to watch over the proceedings.
"You can watch from the door well enough," the Potions Master snapped, and added contemptuously, "I didn't think you would actually want to be in range if it threw even part of the spells off."
The rat Animagus scurried back, flinching. Sneering, Snape turned back toward his charge.
A good cleaning charm later and the boy was a little less dirty -- not a lot less, but at least the drying blood on his arm had disappeared, along with some of the dust and dirt. Snape still couldn't tell what his original skin color was, though. He looked the boy over quickly, ignoring his powerless resentment. He reached for the weird arm-warmers and unbuckled them, and arched an eyebrow at the weird tattoo wrapped around the teenager's left forearm, and the array of blades strapped to both wrists.
His fingers twitched as Snape took off the holsters.
"Don't strain too much," the man advised him in a soft, unconcerned voice. "You will only injure yourself." Inside though, he was mildly impressed. Four Petrificus piled up and the boy's body still wasn't totally frozen.
There were more weirdly shaped knives in the pouch strapped to his thigh, along with a handful of round things -- bombs of some sort if he judged by the wick. He also found a length of metallic wire around his waist; probably the only thing that had kept what was left of the boy's shorts up so long. The wire was difficult to remove -- it bit into the skin if he pulled too sharply. In the end he had to levitate the boy, whose powerless glare went up a notch, if that was even possible.
The long coil of wire went to pile with the other weapons. Snape continued his inspection.
The lone shoe -- open-toed, so strange -- was coated in mud, but if he trusted the rest of the boy's attire, it probably contained weapons too. Maybe something in the heel. It stank, though. He briefly toyed with the idea of asking the rat to check it out, but in the end dropped it on the floor.
The leg-warmers had to be banished off him. One of them was caked with dried mud, and the other, shredded into tiny bits, left fibers in a few half-healed scratches. Two days old maybe? He pondered briefly at the necessary strength of the compulsion that would have made the boy ignore something so basic as cleaning his wounds. With such a strength of will as Snape had glimpsed, the power necessary to subdue him so totally and for so long -- and from so far away, he guessed, though he had no idea where the teenager was from -- should have left him a gibbering mess.
"So? Have you learned anything of interest at all?" Wormtail whined from his corner, disrupting his train of thought.
"It seems to favor bladed weapons," Snape replied silkily, and picked one up to consider the weird triangular shape. "These, in particular, seem especially suited to skewering."
There was a moment of silence, and then Wormtail stammered out, "W-well, I could see the... the knives on my own, but --"
"Then," Snape replied slowly, "why ever did you ask?" Inwardly, he seethed. Wasn't it obvious that he couldn't assess the boy's physical state before he was clean, for one thing? And wasn't it even more obvious that making him as harmless as possible came before taking care of bruises and aches and eventual internal trauma? The boy wasn't going to croak in the ten minutes it took to defang him.
Wormtail mumbled something, but Snape wasn't listening anymore. Turning back to the boy, he met his eyes for a few seconds, and then with a faint touch of apology, banished the tattered shorts and underwear, leaving him nude. Modesty was a luxury he couldn't afford, and wasn't that a pity.
"S-Snape--"
"What," he demanded sharply, using a good Scourgify on the teenager. It probably hurt a bit -- the spell was powerful and might take off a layer of skin or two -- but he didn't want to bother giving him a sponge bath. To get that kind of dirt off, he would need to scrub for hours, and he didn't feel like touching the child any more than necessary. Once he was clean, Snape unfolded a blanket and draped it over the boy's legs, covering him from the waist down. There, modesty -- and his eyes -- preserved.
"Why did you--"
"Those rags it was wearing were a nest of vermin. Did you want me to present the Dark Lord his vessel in such a state?"
"... Oh."
Snape caught the odd tone in Wormtail's voice and concluded that the rat suspected him of pedophilia. His opinion of the man's intelligence dropped another notch.
The basic diagnosis spells he used next told him that the boy was physically exhausted, hadn't eaten anything in days and was mildly dehydrated. Frowning, he ordered the guard at the door to go get him water, and made a note to ask the Dark Lord permission to bring in someone trained as a nurse. Field healing, he could do -- sealing a freely bleeding wound for example -- but such ailments were outside of his expertise.
The scratches on his arms and legs only required cleaning and disinfectant; the bruises a little healing salve, which he was carrying in one of his inner pockets. The wrenched right knee was a bit trickier, but the Petrificus kept him unmoving anyway; that would take care of the worst of it.
There was a weird mark on the boy's neck, three swirling dots that elongated into little points. It was black, like a simple ink tattoo, but as the one on his left arm attested, Snape had a more than passing familiarity with magical brands. He pulled a bit parchment out of his pocket and copied it down meticulously to research later, and then copied the larger one on his forearm. He couldn't reveal the underlying enchantments right now without taking off the Petrificus, though; they would have interfered with his diagnosis.
Anything else looked normal -- if in outstanding good health -- and seemed to work properly, but he still clinically opened the boy's mouth to check his teeth, and then pulled up his eyelids.
... Hm.
"Lumos," he muttered, and hissed softly in surprise. The boy's eyes weren't only red, they were... there was a darker circle in the iris, at about equal distance from the pupil and the outer edge of the iris, and on that circle three black dots, slightly elongated at one end. They gave off the impression of spinning around the pupil, and spinning and spinning... He blinked, shaking off the faint hypnotized feeling.
"Uh. S-something wrong...?"
"Merely strange -- stay where you are," he snapped as the rat stepped forward.
He was starting to seriously question his assumption that the boy was human at all. There was no doubt that he was in possession of some intelligence, but the eyes, coupled with the strength and the weird swapping ability... Maybe some kind of demon, which the Dark Lord's spell had forced into a human-like body. Or maybe it had slipped in the empty body that the Dark Lord had made himself -- Snape didn't know enough about the way Voldemort had procured his vessel to guess which was the most likely one.
"S-strange how?" Wormtail asked. Was he actually standing on tiptoes to try peering over Snape's shoulder? The Potions Master sneered.
"It seems to have four pupils."
"... Four," Wormtail repeated weakly.
"In each eye."
"... r-right..."
Apparently it unsettled the coward. Snape slipped into his teacher voice without missing a beat. "The main pupil seems to constricts normally to the light. The three secondaries... hm. Curious. It does look like they're spinning from time to time, but that might just be the eyeball moving to accommodate a better angle of view..."
"... Oh."
The hate was still burning strong. He had a clear feeling that, should he be in the boy's -- or demon's, or whatever he was -- path if he got free... Well. This could be annoying, especially if he ended up freeing it on Albus' orders. He wasn't sure the boy would be anything approaching understanding, much less grateful.
He had to find out more about what the boy was before he had to go back at Hogwarts, though -- Dumbledore couldn't plan for anything if he didn't have that most basic information. Erecting mental shields, he prepared himself to finding a totally alien mindset, then leaned at a better angle, making sure that he couldn't be seen from the door and its guard, and whispered, "Legilimens."
The first thing he noticed was rage. Unhealthy lots of it. The feel was still human, though. Underneath...
His own face -- the white Death Eater mask, black eyes staring through, lanky black hair hanging out of the hood -- on a lacerated body. Images of blood and violence and torture, flashes of intentions trying to mask rage and powerlessness -- held by a capacity to hold grudges that matched his own...
... and underneath... A man with eyeliner around shocking gold eyes and long black hair, licking his neck; the first time his knife had bitten, not in wood, but in flesh; his first kill -- a girl whose feelings baffled him; a blond boy with an infectious grin that he couldn't let die, that he wanted to kill -- a little boy in a familiar, deserted street, bodies all around -- betrayal of the most awful kind -- and then a wave of hate and outrage, memories of a young man with his face shoving him against a wall and raping his mind -- raping his --
Snape was shoved out of the boy's head, with such formidable speed and strength that he only realized he was out when he crashed into Wormtail and they ended up in a heap at the bottom of the wall.
"What?! W-what happened?" the rat wheezed, trapped behind Snape and the wall. The Potions Master straightened up quickly, hiding his dizziness.
"What, pray tell, were you doing, standing behind me?" he asked silkily, his eyelid twitching.
Wormtail squeaked an answer; Snape didn't listen, channeling his surprise and unease at the boy's reaction, and his humiliation at being caught off-guard, into fury. "I am done with your interference. Get out of here now, you utter imbecile!"
"But--"
"GET OUT!"
He whirled away, robes flaring, and stalked around the boy's bed to the pile of discarded weapons. There was a terrified squeak, and Wormtail scrambled out of the door so quickly that he bumped into the guard. One unfriendly look, and the man was bowing out with a deference that soothed his bruised ego very little.
It wasn't until he was alone again, with the guards standing on the outside of the open door, that he allowed himself to reach up, slip a hand under his mask, and feel the wet trail slowly making his way to his lips.
His nose was bleeding. He wiped it slowly, staring down at the boy. The brat's face was still frozen in an expression of powerless rage, but underneath, there was some satisfaction now.
Snape cursed in advance all the members of the Order of the Phoenix. The boy was not on Voldemort's side, but he was still a cold-blooded killer, with an amazing propensity for hate and little to no ability for forgiveness. And there was no doubt in Snape's mind that the soft-hearted imbeciles to which he had tied his fate were going to want to rescue him.
As if such a little viper wasn't going to prove just as dangerous to anyone that stood in its path and pretended to control it, whatever the reason. It was a pity that forgetting to mention Voldemort's new prisoner wasn't really an option.