Chapter Thirty-Nine—Broken

A/N: Some material has been lifted from GoF in order to tie this story in with canon. Naturally, I do not claim JKR's stuff as mine.

Stupid. The whole idea was stupid. A monumental waste of time. A gargantuan test of his patience. The only thing that ameliorated the situation was that it happened as infrequently as it did, though he would have much preferred it to not happen at all during his time at the school.

As each day passed and Christmas drew closer, Snape's mood soured. It seemed there was no place he could go without hearing some reference to the bloody Yule Ball. Students spent a majority of their time whispering about it, shouting about it, scribbling notes in class about it, crying about it, fighting about it and therefore not paying any attention to what they should be doing.

Even other members of the faculty seemed overly preoccupied with the wretched event. McGonagall harped on endlessly about everyone playing their part to ensure the ball went off without a hitch. Protracted arguments broke out between Flitwick and Filch about Christmas decorations. Hooch insisted in showing everyone her dancing skills at every ten-second opportunity that presented itself in the staff room whilst simultaneously plotting to spike the punch with Sprout's unabashed assistance, and Vector kept scrawling incomprehensible equations over any scrap of paper that didn't move and mumbling something about incompatible triples. At one point, Snape found her writing numbers all over the surface of the table in purple ink and banging her foot on the floor in frustration, making everyone's teacups jump about. He'd turned on his heel and walked straight back out of the staff room, vowing not to set foot in it again until the New Year unless McGonagall threatened him with student counselling duty.

Maxime and Karkaroff had their finest sneers and looks of disdain screwed on tight, with the Beauxbatons headmistress loudly denouncing English festivity whenever there was a pause in conversation at mealtimes. Karkaroff was uncharacteristically silent, but Snape had spotted him casting looks of speculation in his direction when the man thought he wasn't paying attention. He half-expected an ambuscade to erupt from the shadows, yet the Durmstrang leader kept his distance in all but his gaze. Snape had no idea what had caused the change in Karkaroff's behaviour, but if it kept him away, he didn't care to know the reasons why.

Even the normally uplifting incidence of being able to grade Potter at the bottom of the class for botching his poison antidote on the final day of term had failed to palliate the itching sense of dread in him. Hooch had the ill-considered gall to ask him which of the castle's stone gargoyles he was taking to the ball with him, to which he promptly and snidely informed her that she was currently leading the faculty pool for being the first one to be found in a drunken state of dishabille and cracking onto the seventh-year students.

"So, perhaps you should be practising abstinence instead of dancing about like an imbecile with a rabid Niffler jammed in her knickers, Rolanda," he finished, thus ending any further yuletide raillery from being aimed in his direction.

Christmas evening saw him standing in the Slytherin common room in front of his charges informing them that if he detected even a whiff of poor behaviour from any of them, they would forever remember the twenty-fifth of December as the anniversary of their worst day ever.

"And just for the temerarious or chronically obtuse amongst you, that includes intoxication of any kind, fighting, swearing, dancing on tables, petting, hexing, spitting, belching or singing disgusting songs. If you want to act like that, you can join Gryffindor and don't think for one second that this is an empty threat."

It remained to be seen if any of them tested the veracity of his statement.

"You could have made an effort to upgrade your attire, Severus!" McGonagall snapped at him outside the Great Hall, looking him up and down disapprovingly.

"I had no idea it was a fancy dress event, Minerva," he replied coolly, wincing at her red tartan outfit and leaning back from the thistles she had rather violently arranged around the brim of her hat. "Are you going as a Scottish thicket?"

"You could at least take your teaching robes off," she harped, her eyes flinty.

"As far as I am concerned, I am on duty this evening, therefore I am appropriately dressed," he retorted.

McGonagall tutted. "Co-operation isn't a dirty word, Severus."

"Save your breath, Minerva," Sprout advised as she strolled past the two of them looking like a Christmas bauble in her garishly-coloured dress robes. "He needs to work himself into a snit so he can terrify the students on his anti-amative searches in the bushes."

Snape had no idea how long he was forced to remain in the Great Hall, but it seemed like hours. He gritted his teeth and tried not to jiggle his leg in frustration under the dinner table as everyone else checked their common sense in at the door and threw themselves into the revelry with gusto. The meal passed without him even noticing. He certainly didn't eat any of it. Now he had to stand about waiting until he could leave without causing an interfaculty uproar at his rudeness.

He swept his eyes over the throng and shook his head. Did they honestly enjoy this nonsense? It was incomprehensible to him how this could be considered a desirable way to pass the time. The gleaming and rather vacant eyes on the girls unsettled him, and the pigeon-like strutting of the boys aggravated him. It was a dolled-up charade that only he seemed aware of as being a shallow attempt at entertainment. Was there no one else here who hated this kind of thing?

He scanned the crowd again and frowned, not knowing whether to be angry or surprised that her name had popped into his head. Parr was the last person he wanted to see right now, and she seemed to have granted his wish. Ordinarily, her presence in the last remaining days of term would have been barely noticeable to most, but Snape had become so sensitised to any glimpse of her that he could not help but pick her out of the shadows at the back of his classroom where she sought to avoid detection as much as she was able to whilst still being in the same room as him. He had been especially nasty to her in the last two Potions lessons, but the dead look in her eyes and the slate-coloured pallor in her face made him wonder if she even noticed the effort he was making to upset her.

He sighed heavily and glared at the back of Moody's head as the man took a swig from his ugly pewter hip flask without even bothering to hide the action from everyone round him. Sinistra, showing her total lack of taste, even asked the crabby lump of a man to dance! Were there copious amounts of alcohol being surreptitiously consumed that he wasn't aware of? It beggared belief.

Snape rolled his eyes and slipped out of the Great Hall.

It took him less than five minutes to find the first pair of transgressors groping each other, and less than fifteen for Karkaroff to track him down.

"Go away, Igor. I'm busy," he told the man curtly, squinting at a suspicious source of movement behind the topiary. He should have realised that just as the chill evening air was proving no dissuasion to hormone-riddled students, it would fail to touch the Durmstrang headmaster. An English winter would barely register to him.

"Severus, it's imperative that I speak with you," Karkaroff hissed at him. "I have to ask you something."

"My dance card's full," Snape replied sourly and used his wand to scorch a hole right through the dragon-shaped hedge. It was partially to uncover two students bonded at the lips but mostly to aggravate Sprout who had spent weeks making the grounds look as impressive as possible for this very night. He'd pay good money to see the look on her face in the morning when she saw the ragged remains of her painstaking work, but he knew that being within a five-mile radius at that point in time would bode ill for him.

"I really don't have time for your repetitive jabbering," he told the Durmstrang headmaster under his breath. "Wainwright, that's ten points from Ravenclaw, and whatever your name is... je parlerai à votre directrice au matinée!" he barked at the two red-faced students. "Get back in the Great Hall and keep your hands to yourselves!"

The two men watched the teenagers scurry off through the icy darkness towards the doors.

"Yes, I can see this is a very pressing duty that you're attending to, Severus," Karkaroff mentioned with a whining peevishness that wisped from his mouth like smoke. "Has your life become so dull that this activity assumes such monumental importance?"

Snape's head swivelled slowly towards Karkaroff. "Unlike some, I take my duties very seriously, regardless of how inane or trivial they may seem. You would do well to attend to the responsibilities of your own role, instead of pointing fingers at me."

Karkaroff twisted his goatee around his index finger nervously. "One must pay mind to the direction the winds are blowing. Had I not, I would never have found out what Macnair and Brachoveitch are up to," he mentioned in a rather self-satisfied tone.

Snape sighed heavily. "Why would the activity of those two be of any interest to me, Igor?" Not bothering to wait for a reply, he strode off to the opposite end of the topiary garden, leaving Karkaroff to jog after him.

"Your comment makes me wonder if you know what they're doing," came the sly statement. "If you did, I doubt you'd be so blasé."

Snape bent down to look under the arch of a hedge bridge. "I can see your feet. Come out or I'll drag you out!"

The hedge rustled and shook as three bodies extracted themselves from their hiding place. Three? Circe knew what they'd been doing. Snape didn't want to know.

"Parkhurst, I thought I made it clear what behaviour was within the realms of acceptable and what wasn't, so that's ten points from Slytherin, and I will ensure all your house mates know how your stupidity has penalised them as a whole. Fortescue and Willis, I am not surprised at finding you embarrassing Gryffindor, so that's ten points a-piece and two evening's detention with Filch."

The girls began to cry morosely which Snape thought had more to do with being caught in front of Karkaroff than anything else.

"Are all the Hogwarts students this inclined to break school rules, Severus?" Karkaroff inquired curiously. "I would never allow such behaviour from my students."

Snape spun his wand slowly between his fingers. "I think a more accurate statement would be that your investigative abilities are so wanting that you're unable to catch your students out. Or perhaps they just have a dullness of imagination," he mused, watching the slowly rotating length of wood in his hand. "I hear that happens when one discourages independence of thought."

Karkaroff's mouth tightened. "What you call dullness of imagination I call discipline and obedience."

"You have no subtlety, Igor," Snape sneered at him. "Drawing out the required elements from a stubborn source is an art you have absolutely no skill in. Your attempt at guidance and influence is like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick." The wand stopped abruptly in his fingers, and he aimed its tip right at Karkaroff's left eye. The man swayed back automatically, a nervous twitch making his cheek jump.

Snape smiled nastily at him before slipping his wand back into his pocket. "Too slow. Always too slow," he hissed, his lip curling in practised contempt.

"Not always, Severus," Karkaroff assured him, a bit of his customary bluster returning. "I'm fast enough to catch Brachoveitch out."

"Brachoveitch is a slug," Snape denounced, staring coldly down his nose at Karkaroff. "You are the last person to be aware of his activities."

"Then you condone what he's doing?"

Snape exhaled tiredly. "What Brachoveitch is doing is dangerous. He risks much in his idiocy but he is not the only one."

"I know Macnair is behind it, but to risk an association with werewolves?" Karkaroff snorted and twisted the strands of his goatee between his fingers. "He makes himself out to be so much better than the rest of us, and under cover of darkness he lies down with dogs."

"Then he'll get up with fleas," Snape replied, shrugging in disinterest. "And it'll be one less fool in the fold." He widened his eyes briefly at Karkaroff but the man was too dense and self-absorbed to notice.

"But what if they get loose?" Karkaroff whined. "What if he sets them on us? Have you not considered that?"

"I consider all options, Igor," Snape pointed out.

"But that building he's hiding them in..."

"Is one of three places he is using, only one of which is the true location," Snape told him in a bored tone, but his gaze was fixed resolutely and unerringly on Karkaroff's eyes.

Uncertainly flowed across the other man's face, and his mind threw up exactly the information that Snape had manipulated him towards, confusion making Karkaroff drop his guard just long enough as he mentally shuffled through the stored images in his memory. He may as well have blurted the location out.

"I'm... worried," came the reluctant admission.

"You should be," was the dry response.

Karkaroff's eyes slid left and right, searching out possible eavesdroppers. It was a perfect example of the man's carelessness that in the absence of direct evidence to the contrary, he considered them alone.

"He... is coming back."

Snape shrugged slightly, making Karkaroff scowl.

"Surely you are not so confident in yourself that you think this is of no consequence, Severus," he hissed, eyes wide enough to catch the light of the dying moon in glassy anxiety. "This is not like Macnair and Brachoveitch messing about in dangerous territory. This is the direst of situations!"

"Why?"

Karkaroff blinked a few times at Snape's surly inquiry.

"If you were stupid enough to fold under pressure and spill your guts, that's your problem to deal with. If you had thought there'd be no consequences arising from it, you're a greater fool than I had thought."

"I find it rather hypocritical that you accuse me of self-preservation when you have been sheltered under Dumbledore's hand since the Dark Lord fell," Karkaroff spat bitterly.

"How the years have caused your intelligence to atrophy, Igor," Snape replied silkily. "The Dark Lord was the one who sent me back here in the first place. But of course, being the fringe-dweller you always were, how could I expect you to know that?"

"But the Dark Mark," Karkaroff continued unabated. "It burns so much! What does that mean? Is the Dark Lord here? In England? Is he calling us back to him?"

Snape suppressed a frown at Karkaroff's words. "You assume that the Dark Lord speaks to us without discrimination?"

Confusion returned to the man's face with a vengeance.

"I don't see what there is to fuss about, Igor," Snape told him, maintaining an air of calm that he wasn't experiencing in truth.

"Severus, you cannot pretend that this isn't happening!" Karkaroff whispered, taking a step closer to him, pushing his face forward in his anxiety. He held out his left arm. "It's been getting clearer and clearer for months. I am becoming seriously concerned, I can't deny it..."

"Then flee," Snape told him, growing agitated with the man's whining and becoming even more impatient with the conversation. He began to walk away from Karkaroff and towards the rose garden beds. "Flee, and I will make your excuses. I, however, am remaining at Hogwarts."

How the man had ever managed to manoeuvre himself into a strong enough position to receive the Dark Mark was a mystery to Snape. He bowed at the first touch of pressure, scuttled away at the slightest challenge and covered his behind so religiously that Snape wondered if the man knew how to use his hands for anything else.

A flit of white caught Snape's eye, drawing him around the corner of the rose beds and his wand back out of his pocket. He made sure that he severed the rose bushes near their bases to make it that much harder for Sprout to repair them. It also had the effect of singing the clothing of those hiding amongst the thorny plants.

"Ten points from Hufflepuff, Fawcett!" he snapped as the girl scuttled past him, the hem of her dress smouldering. "And ten points from Ravenclaw, Stebbins!" he pointed out to the boy bolting after her. He'd already hauled that one out of a closet with another girl earlier in the evening.

Perhaps if he went back into the castle where there were other people in greater numbers, Karkaroff would leave him alone instead of dogging his steps and bending his ear with pathetic bleating. Of course, there would be the disadvantage of possibly having to interact with these other people, but most were sharp enough to take a hint if he was sufficiently nasty in the face of their bland small-talk and platitudes. It was worth the risk.

He turned towards the castle and stopped short.

"And what are you two doing?" he ground out between gritted teeth. Was there no end to the parade of imbeciles placing themselves in front of him?

"We're walking," Weasley replied sulkily from behind his fringe, his words shrouded in a puff of misted breath in the cold winter air. "Not against the law, is it?"

Snape narrowed his eyes at the boy's tone. Weasley wasn't normally brave enough to be openly aggravating. That was usually Potter's area of expertise. He shifted his gaze to the darker-haired boy, assessing what level of insolence he was about to encounter, but Potter just returned his look with a somewhat stony one of his own. Merlin's beard, surely those two weren't going off to grope each other in the shadows, were they? Snape just could wait to encounter that nightmare! That would just be the perfect culmination to his shit of a day. His momentary shudder had nothing to do with the cold.

"Keep walking, then!" he growled at them and swept past, keenly aware that Karkaroff was still tethered to him.

It took some swift manoeuvring between the clusters of students in the entrance hall to shake the man, but Snape managed to lose Karkaroff finally, leaving him free to prowl the corridors, flushing students out from classrooms and closets. Points dropped from houses in a steady stream.

The slumped form with the empty liquor bottle at the bottom of the stairs to the third floor ratcheted his filthy mood into the medically dangerous zone.

Parkhurst started to make hollow, gulping sounds while they were still some way from the infirmary.

"Don't even think about it, boy," Snape told him, tightening his grip on his collar and keeping his eyes fixed determinedly forward. "If you do, I'll triple your punishment and you'll be scrubbing the Owlery out on your hands and knees for the rest of the school year."

Parkhurst, despite his inebriated state, realised that clamping his hands over his mouth would be the wisest course of action, but the thought of bird rejectamenta was having a rather negative effect on his already roiling stomach. The choice between holding down what was making him feel so utterly wretched and condemning himself to constantly smelling owl crap for six months was undoubtedly the toughest he'd ever had to make.

They reached the shadowed silence of the infirmary just as Parkhurst started to gag. Snape flung him on the nearest cot and snatched up a steel kidney bowl to thrust under the boy's mouth. The receptacle was woefully inadequate to the task of holding what was about to erupt out, but Snape couldn't care less if Parkhurst drenched himself in a sea of stinking vomit, just as long as he was nowhere near the boy when it occurred.

He gritted his teeth together tightly as the guttural purging began in earnest behind him. Snape doubted that this would be the only incident of underage alcohol poisoning that Pomfrey would have to deal with tonight. He actually felt something akin to sympathy for her, condemned as she was to dealing with idiot drunken children on a night she would surely want to enjoy without being sprayed in acidic spew. If his own experiences as a student were anything to go by, Pomfrey would give them nothing to lessen the agony of their condition. The gut-wrenching nausea, vicious sweats, muscle cramps and monolithic headaches would be more of a punishment than any amount of outraged lecturing from her could ever impart.

Where on earth was she? The last thing Snape wanted was to hang about any longer listening to Parkhurst turn himself inside out, but the matron was not in her side office, nor anywhere to be seen in the main room.

The house-elf appeared with a crack barely a second after he spoke her name.

"Folter, where is Madam Pomfrey?"

She seemed to consider this question carefully before responding, peering up at him with her large brown eyes. "Folter will ask Kuppy." She dematerialised sharply.

Snape sighed, wishing he could just slink off to his rooms and forget the whole evening. This Christmas had proved to be just as unsatisfying and tedious as all the others had been, devoid of all the sorts of festive enjoyments that others seemed to experience as the norm. Parkhurst's retching continued unabated, making Snape clamp his mouth shut tightly to stem the rising wave of biliousness that was beginning in him. Much as he wanted to, he couldn't leave an incapacitated student alone, even if the illness was self-inflicted.

Folter reappeared. "Kuppy says Madam Pomfrey is not on school premises."

Snape frowned. "Then where is she?"

The house-elf shrugged, tucking her hair behind her ears. "Kuppy does not know."

Snape tutted. "It's important that you find out, Folter. A student requires her care."

Folter nodded once and flicked a glance down towards the end of the room where the tall windows allowed the moonlight to stripe the floor with bands of pale grey. "Folter will find Madam Pomfrey," she told him quietly and, peculiarly, padded out of the infirmary instead of vanishing in her normal manner.

He stared after her for a moment before looking back to where she had briefly set her gaze. While the moonlight threw some parts of the infirmary into colourless clarity, most of it huddled in silent shadows. Heavy, lurking masses watched him suspiciously, an intruder on their sterile territory.

An unfolded screen partially hid one of the cots that sat closest to the windows. For a moment, Snape thought that perhaps Pomfrey was behind it, but Folter would have told him had that been the case. Surely there was not a student left unattended? That would be so unlike Poppy as to be ludicrous. Strange enough that she was off-grounds when supposedly on-duty, but that? Never.

He drifted slowly down towards the end of the room and, blessedly, farther from the source of his increasing nausea. Unsure of what he would find behind the screen, he peered somewhat hesitantly around it and discovered the reason why Parr had been absent from the Great Hall that evening. On her side, with her face to the windows, she was not in the most wretched state that he had ever seen her in, but she was obviously in considerable physical difficulty.

Looking like she'd been doused with a bucket of water, her silver hair was plastered to her head, and where her sweat had not affixed it to her, it lay lank across the pillow like rivulets of mercury. Breathing rapidly and shallowly, her eyes closed in their heavily-shadowed sockets, she appeared either asleep or unconscious. A folded strip of gauze was draped across her neck, trailing across the cot to dangle its ends over the edge of the mattress, the one hand he could see open and suspended mid-air, the forearm resting on top of the coverlet. The bandage around her palm and wrist was darkened with the slow bloom of blood leaking from wounds he couldn't see.

Poppy had left her like this? Snape shook his head in disbelief. Something was very wrong here. He moved to stand in front of the windows, his shadow falling across Parr's recumbent form with a ripple. She looked even worse from this angle, the hollowness of her cheeks making it look as if something was sucking the life out of her.

She shouldn't be here. A person this ill, this cachectic needed to be in St Mungo's, not left lying in a school sickbed as if she had nothing more than a stomach ache.

"Are you going to give me detention?"

Snape blinked in mild surprise. Not unconscious, then.

One eye opened slightly to fix him with a slight glimmer.

"Detention on Christmas night would be terribly mean," she pointed out hoarsely, her cracked lips barely moving.

"And, after all, I am known for my unfailing generosity of character," he replied dryly, one eyebrow raised.

Her mouth twisted in a faint, yet pain-ridden, smile, her other eye opening a fraction.

"Have you run out of judgement-impaired students to terrify, Professor?"

"One can't run out of what there is an inexhaustible supply of, Miss Parr," he countered, tilting his head to the same side her own head was resting at.

A hiss of breath that could have passed for amusement at his statement slipped from her mouth. She took a few shallow breaths, the fingers of her hand curling gently.

"You look nice. Going dancing?"

He squinted at her. "This is what I always wear."

Again, that hissing approximation of a laugh. "I know." Her eyes closed, brows drawing in towards each other, setting a deep crease above the bridge of her nose.

"Where is Madam Pomfrey?"

Her eyes opened again, slightly wider this time. Her forehead wrinkled. "I... don't know. She was here before, but now..." Her breathing hitched with a rattle in her chest. "No, I don't know," she finished with a minute shrug.

"What happened?"

She seemed to struggle to understand his question, and it was some time before she answered that he thought that perhaps she had either not heard him or she'd lapsed into the unconsciousness that he had thought her in when he'd discovered her.

"I got sick," she said simply, the corners of her mouth quirking upwards.

"How?"

She closed her eyes once more and ignored the question, her hand flexing briefly.

"May I see?"

Her breathing paused as the faint glimmer studied him again. Her laughter this time was clearer, though still a pale imitation of what it usually was. She shrugged her uppermost shoulder.

"Sure. Why the hell not? I'm not exactly in a position to deny you."

Snape bent forward and carefully lifted the strip of gauze to uncover the ripped mess of her neck. The sight of the inch-long punctures set in cushions of angry, inflamed flesh froze his spine solid in recognition. Despite the brutal appearance of the wounds, there was no smell of decay or putrid flesh, and because of that, they didn't seem real...almost an illusion. He very tentatively touched the bloated site of one puncture with the tip of his index finger. The bloom of intense heat rolled against his skin before he'd even touched her. The deep red of the inflammation indicated these wounds were not new, that she'd been harbouring them for who knew how long under those ever-present bandages around her neck, the serum leaking from them like tears from eyes long-used to crying, so accustomed to the weeping caused from angry, bitter pain.

A soft puff of air tickled the side of his neck, once, twice.

He leant back and frowned at her.

"Your hair is getting in my mouth," she explained in a rasping voice that fought its way through a faint smile.

He blinked at her, seeing how bloodshot the sclera of her eyes were, how thin and translucent her skin had become, how the blood from the cracks in her lips had dried to thin black lines. The strength had been leached from her, leaving little more than a husk behind as a cruel reminder of what had been taken. He wondered how long it would be before this shell collapsed in on itself, the implosion inevitable to leave nothing more than dust.

He tucked his hair behind his ear to keep it away from her face and leant forward once more, as much to avoid having to look into her eyes that already told him that she knew she was losing the fight as to study the butchered flesh that formed a necklace of vicious agony, a noose to slowly choke her with.

"What are you doing?"

His head snapped to the right to find Lupin standing at the foot of the cot, a ceramic bowl cradled in his arm and a rolled bandage in his free hand.

Snape dropped the gauze back into place and straightened.

"Where's Poppy?"

Lupin's expression turned flinty, but he answered nonetheless. "St Mungo's. What are you doing here?"

Snape scowled at the man's tone. "Precisely what I was going to ask you."

"Poppy asked me to keep an eye on Chara," Lupin told him flatly, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.

"You're doing a poor job of it, then," Snape sneered at him. "While you're at it, you can inadequately care for the drunken vomitee in bed two. I know you have extensive experience with that particular condition," he noted haughtily and swept past the werewolf and out of the infirmary with his nose in the air.