Chapter Thirty-One - Pain

For those who have never experienced it, they inevitably ask: What's it like being under the Cruciatus Curse? It is a ridiculous question; after all, the name is self-explanatory: Cruciatus – excruciating.

Most people have experienced pain. It is, after all, a part of life. Some have the misfortune to be dealt severe pain, whether through injury or illness. Others deal with unrelenting acute pain, the kind that is endured through sleepless nights, red-tinged days, agonisingly slow weeks that swell into endless months that cluster into a merciless cloud of a year. Nerves shredded and raw. A pitiful lassitude of will to carry out even the most basic day-to-day functions. Each breath merely extending a pathetic and torturous existence. That is what the Cruciatus Curse is like, only ten times stronger. It is an agony set outside of time. Pervasive, debilitating, destructive. It macerates the very fabric of consciousness into a mince of primal sensory information. Even thoughts of escape cannot form. Nothing exists except for the pain. It surrounds and devours. There is nothing beyond it. When it stops there is the briefest moment of relief...the sensation of normality, that absence of pain, is incredible. Then the body comes out of shock and the feedback from every cell in the body overloads the brain in a wash of searing hurt. Sometimes this second wave is worse than the Cruciatus itself: the reintroduction of a state of being that is not solely enmeshed in pain, the jolt of visceral, muscular and nerve cramping and twisting, woven throughout with the terror that the curse will descend again. A certitude that it will return, and the conviction that withstanding it a second time is unthinkable, wholly implausible. Anticipated agony has a way of magnifying the actuality. This was something that the Dark Lord knew very, very well.

Slumped on his knees as he was, Snape could not tell if what he just experienced was the same or worse than the Cruciatus Curse. Objective, rational thought was always exceedingly difficult to maintain when in pain...that was what made it such an effective tool of control. Overload a person's senses sufficiently, and they will do anything, say anything, think anything that you want them to, as long as you stop the pain.

The magnitude of sensation had been so great that his sight had given out. This was not unusual in instances of excessive pain. What had been unexpected was the internal vision, the exposure to imagery through someone else's eyes. Again, this was not a new experience for Snape. Being a Legilimens, it was a point of view that was not unfamiliar to him, but what he had seen was not through Parr's eyes. It could not have been. She had been an observer, just as he was to her observation...looking through the eyes of someone who looked through the eyes of another. There was not the proximity of a normal incidence of Legilimency. There was always a mental closeness to the act. Some might have said that closeness was too mild a term. "Violation", they would normally label it. Legilimency was like a knife: it cut itself into another's mind no matter how you used it. It was just a matter of degree of laceration. Whether you used a fine needle or a blunt axe-blade, it was always an intrusion, an injury, a forcing into where you didn't belong. It was an insidious, dishonest, brutal tool, invariably a rape of the mind. The victim hardly ever welcomed it. It involved a taking of something that was not being offered. It always sickened him, no matter how many times he used it.

Snape had once asked Parr if she was a Legilimens, a question that she gave every indication of finding insulting. Occlumency and Legilimency often went hand in hand, though not always. A person could be adept at attack and woefully incapable of defence and vice-versa, but usually if a person had skills in one, there was some ability in the other. Parr could block a reasonably solid stab of Legilimency with little effort, even going so far as to clamp down on the incursion with a vice-like mental grip. Experience had taught Snape enough for him to realize that she could have been a hell of a lot rougher with him than she had been at the safe house.

To call what she had done to him in Dumbledore's study Legilimency would be akin to comparing drowning with a sponge bath. It had not been an insertion of one mind into another. It had been one consciousness consuming another, a complete submersion of his awareness into hers. He had not experienced anything like it before.

"Severus?"

His ears heard the word, but his brain couldn't attach a meaning to the sound. It was just random noise to him.

Just as speech had nuances, volumes and subtleties of meaning, so did minds. They had shape, texture, emotion, and sometimes what he thought of as flavour, although that word was insufficient in describing the attribute. It was hard to use the spoken word in such descriptions, and others who were Legilimens were rarely ones who discussed the language of their ability with others. It was seen as a negative trait, something inherently dishonest, like thievery, so more often than not Legilimens remained silent.

With Legilimency, one forced a portion of themselves into the awareness of another, like a hand pushing through a membranous barrier to the space beyond. There was never a subsuming of either mind. True, one was the violator and the other the violated, but the two were connected at only one point. An Occlumens blocked a Legilimens by finding that point and either severing the connection or deflecting the invasion before it had a chance to penetrate. But how does one prevent a drowning when there is no surface to rise to? How does one find the exit to a room with no door? How does one stay separate when held wholly in the consciousness of another? Snape had no answers to these questions.

"Severus?"

The sound was familiar to him now, but in what way, he couldn't tell.

Trint. He'd seen Trint very clearly from an upward angle, so whoever it was whose eyes he'd been looking through had been lying on the floor. Next to him had been Macnair. Snape had known that it had only been a matter of time before that bastard reappeared. Now he knew that the man was involved with Greyback, and from what he'd seen, whatever arrangement had initially been worked out was now sliding out of Macnair's direct control. Greyback's attitude towards him smacked of contempt, which was interesting. Macnair could easily overpower the werewolf with magic, but he'd made no move to use either wand or wandless magic. Why?

Snape had also seen that bloated fop, Todianus, lurking behind Macnair. Perhaps this was the explanation that had seen the apoth divert his higher quality merchandise away from Snape and, undoubtedly, other patrons of a less psychotic persuasion. Perhaps the fat man was too stupid to realize that he would most likely end up in the same place as his brother, Timeus? Perhaps he thought himself smart enough and nimble enough to balance along the knife-edge of an association with Greyback?

It had not been solely a visual experience. Legilimency rarely was. There was always emotion involved, usually at a very intense level: emotion surrounding memory, stemming from thought, arising from the reaction at the mental connection. The emotional input had been a highly disorientating one, with a peculiar echo to it. It may have had something to do with the fact that there had been more than two people involved. Legilimency never involved more than two since it required constant eye contact to maintain the connection. Snape had no idea how Parr had managed to combine three consciousnesses, especially considering that one had not been in immediate proximity. There had been a resonance between her mind and that of the unknown person, a harmonising reverberation that whispered words he couldn't discern from the unbroken ocean of overpowering sensory information. Whoever this unknown person was, Parr knew her, and knew her well. He'd been able to tell that much from under Parr's distress.

Pain...the kind of pain that was old, long-endured, suffered, forborne simply because there was no other alternative. This silhouette of an identity reeked with it, was drowning in it. Snape was both observer and vessel of it, the duality yet another layer of disorientation. She had been heavily drugged, not to sedate but to stimulate her out of unconsciousness. The bitter tang of ephedra in her mouth had been unmistakable along with the burning of her fingertips and toes that revealed that it had been a dangerously high dose...the serum that Pirino had given her was undoubtedly rich in it. Snape knew him only by reputation: an up-and-coming hot-shot mediwizard who worked his way around many of the discipline's long-held strictures in order to affect a cure while never actually breaking any of the rules. Snape had instantly disliked the man from a distance, not because of his flagrant disregard for caution, but for the shameless preening he did when in the medical spotlight. The size of Pirino's ego was disgustingly bloated. Snape hated show ponies, and Pirino had the gymkhana all to himself.

"Severus?"

This time he knew what it meant.

"Yes." He didn't bother to raise his head, preferring to allow his hair to shield his eyes from the light.

"What happened?"

Snape didn't answer immediately, still trying to get the edges of the fractured picture to align. Dumbledore waited. He had the kind of patience that ground rocks into dust when it suited him.

Parr wasn't in the room. Snape knew that, though the method by which the knowledge had come was a mystery. He had no idea when she had let him go, but the imprint of her mind on his was still there ever so faintly, like fingerprints pressed into soft clay...merely a reminder of her hold rather than any remaining connection.

"Do all seevy have resistance to magic?"

If Dumbledore was surprised by the question, he gave no indication of it in his reply. Even if he were looking at the man, Snape knew he'd still not be able to tell. Few were as opaque as Dumbledore. It was a mark of his skill at manipulation that few knew when information was being withheld from them.

"No. Only a certain number are. It is a closely guarded secret, even amongst themselves."

Snape shifted his weight off his knees slightly, trying to alleviate the press of stone into the top of his lower legs. He was going to have some spectacular bruising there from when Parr rammed his knees into the ground.

"Greyback knows it, and so does Macnair." He made an ungainly attempt to stand, shrinking back and away from Dumbledore's steadying hand. "Greyback is trying to learn if the resistance can be passed along to non-seevy." He peeled his eyes open slowly, exhaling his fatigue heavily. Both he and Dumbledore were alone, the others having gone who knew where. Lupin was probably with Parr, and wherever Lupin was, Tonks usually was.

"How do you know this?" Dumbledore asked.

Snape rolled his tongue in his mouth, part of him convinced that the Codonopsis he could taste was not solely as a result of the sensory information that had been injected into his brain.

"The woman Parr is looking for... Greyback wants to breed from her to see if the immunity can be introduced into the werewolf population." He pushed his long hair out of one eye with the side of his thumb. "He is also using her as a blood bank to give himself protection. She's heavily dosed with a Blood-Replenishing Potion to stop her from becoming anaemic."

For once, Dumbledore let his disgust show on his face. To hear that a woman was being used like a breeding animal and a living pharmacopoeia would have revolted most people. Greyback had little in the way of ethics and mores, which was what made him so dangerous. That he would drink the blood of another like a vampire showed that even the bone-deep, centuries-old animosity between werewolves and vampires couldn't prevent him from getting what he wanted, even if it meant mimicking his enemies. Male werewolves killed quickly and messily. They favoured numbers over constant supply. The joy for them was in killing; sustenance was secondary.

"Severus, don't mention any of this to Chara." Dumbledore turned away and walked slowly back to his desk.

Snape frowned at the Headmaster's back. "Why? She saw what I saw, heard what I did. She already knows." He paused a moment. "Who is this woman she's looking for?"

Dumbledore didn't turn, preferring to remain with his back to Snape. There was a marked hesitation before he answered.

"Her Handler. More than that I cannot say."

Handler? What sort of person needed a handler as if they were a trained animal? Obviously someone like Parr, but whilst she was outspoken and not a little rough around the edges, Snape didn't think that she needed a handler to control her. He straightened his coat. Well, thinking back on that time she'd tried to jam a dead spider into his mouth, perhaps she did.

"She has the Dark Mark on her arm."

That comment brought Dumbledore's head around to face him, this time with a genuine expression of surprise.

"You've seen it?" His blue eyes searched Snape's face keenly, his own features creased in anxiety.

Snape shook his head. "I know it's there."

"How?" Dumbledore asked before Snape had even finished his sentence. His gaze sharpened and hardened at this obviously unwelcome statement.

Snape huffed and glanced to one side, trying to work out how to give a shroud of reality to something as incorporeal as the ghost of his belief.

The way she fussed at her arm, the incident in the classroom when his Dark Mark had caused a sudden, cutting pain that had made both of them flinch, that she had known he was branded... He admitted to Dumbledore that these were not iron-clad explanations, but just as he had experienced the physical sensations from Parr's so-called handler, so he had shared Parr's: the suppurating welts around her neck, the dull ache in her left leg, the burn of acid in her stomach, the acute sense of smell that brought everyone's scent into crystal-clear focus... and the twisting sting on the inside of her forearm. A sting in the shape of the Dark Mark.

Dumbledore stared at Snape during his explanation, and for some time after. Then he gave a small shake of his head.

"No. I don't believe it's true. I've seen her arm. There is nothing there." The apparent certainty of his words was mismatched with the subtle line of concern that his brows had formed. It seemed that the Headmaster was trying to convince himself that it wasn't possible for Parr to be branded as a follower of the Dark Lord. "She has no prior connection to the Death Eaters. Surely you of all people would know if she had?"

"The Dark Lord never shows all his cards," Snape reminded him quietly, dropping his gaze to the floor and pushing down a wave of tiredness down deep to where it could wait to be attended to later. "Ownership of someone of Parr's abilities would have been agreeable to him." He glanced back up at Dumbledore. "But someone with a mind that strong would be a weapon that could just as easily cripple whoever aimed it."

Dumbledore's concern deepened. "She is a Legilimens?"

"No."

"An Occlumens?"

"No." Snape rubbed one eye with a knuckle, as if to press out the fatigue from it. "She is something better."

Something better. Quite an understatement. If one were to make an honest and accurate comparison between what Snape could do and what Parr could do, the allegory would be she speaking a language fluently and with a poetic complexity while he shouted obscene swear words like an incoherent drunk.

Snape stared blankly at the wall, the spoon in his hand going from bowl to mouth automatically. He didn't even notice the taste of the soup that Folter had given him, but he knew it was insufficient to quiet the gut-twisting hunger drilling a hole through to his spine.

Snape worked hard to excel in the things he had talent in. Having been born with few positive physical attributes, he'd done the best he could with his mind. Whilst he hated using Legilimency, there was a perverse pride in him that he could wield it very well. He even considered himself one of the most adept in it, and it may have been hubris to think himself more skilled than the Dark Lord himself, but a good part of him believed it so. The strength of the weapon was the same, but the Dark Lord used it with all the subtlety of a rusty, serrated knife ripped through the guts. Force won over delicacy, in the Dark Lord's mind at least. The range of its uses was curtailed for the Dark Lord; he destroyed with it, ravaged with it. He probably never even contemplated that someone could withstand and deflect such brute strength, so had never advanced beyond a competent level of Occlumency. Whom would he need to guard against that could be stronger than he? The Dark Lord had taken many things from Snape, but he had never taken his ability to hide beneath layers.

Snape had spent his whole life hiding beneath layers. Sometimes he wondered if there was anything left of him at the core. Perhaps what he had once been had long since rotted away? It was a melancholic thought he entertained himself with when he was feeling maudlin.

The empty spoon surprised him. He'd gotten through the soup in a ridiculously short amount of time. Snape put the bowl down on the small table next to his chair and jiggled his leg in frustration.

He'd gotten careless. Their narrow escape from the now poorly-named safe house had been of the luckiest kind. There were four possibilities: Trint had worked through the triple blind that Snape had set up between himself and the double-crossing information seller; someone had been tracking him without his knowledge and had therefore made the connection between one of his Polyjuice personae and himself; someone had been following one or more of the others who knew of the safe house; or one of the others had let key information slip. Snape didn't like the way that Trint was involved with Greyback and Macnair. It made the likelihood that Trint had tracked him, whether through the string of buffering messengers or from having Snape followed, very strong indeed.

He rested his elbows on the armrests of the chair and slid his fingertips back and forth lightly across each other, stirring the agglomeration of thoughts in his mind in the hope that something of use would rise to the surface. His eyes flicked over to a movement in the shadows: Folter.

She had his coat in her hands, checking it carefully for any kind of soiling. She was exceptionally particular about his clothing, almost to the point of sterilisation. Sometimes he doubted that some articles of his clothing had ever seen dirt or grime. She must have deemed his coat's state unacceptable as she began to empty the contents of his pockets onto the side table. He didn't ever carry much. The pieces of string and two glass vials earned barely a glance, the folded white handkerchief paused for a fraction of a second in her hand, but the looped lock of hair was treated to a very close scrutiny. The flickering blue of the charm set around it almost obscured the colour of the hair and made holding it difficult. The surface of Stasis Charms tended to be slippery, so Folter hooked one finger through the loop and then rested it carefully atop the handkerchief.

Snape thinned his lips. He'd forgotten he had put that in his pocket. Folter gave him one of her wide-eyed looks that he held for a few seconds before sliding his own eyes away, one finger tapping the armrest rhythmically and rapidly. Folter turned and headed back into the shadows, his coat still in her hands. He didn't want to speculate on what was going through her mind. He felt as uncomfortable as if he'd been caught in some embarrassing act, though surely she had no idea what he intended to do with the lock of hair. Sometimes he wondered, though.

Snape knew why Greyback was so insolent to Macnair. He must have succeeded in getting immunity to magic by drinking Parr's handler's blood. The werewolf could strut about to his heart's content, and Macnair could do nothing. It was a fine line for Greyback to be stomping along. If he pushed Macnair too hard, the Ministry's Executioner could make life very, very difficult for the werewolves. Life was already a meagre thing for them, so they could ill-afford any further drop in their living conditions. So if Macnair was keeping his mouth shut in the face of Greyback's taunting, it must mean that he wanted something from the werewolf rather badly...most likely the support of the werewolves. When the Dark Lord had been at his peak, the werewolves had been drawn to him as what they thought of as the stronger of two evils. To make themselves indispensable to him meant that they had some form of protection against the persecution they were facing from the wizarding world. So they became insanely violent, making themselves the Dark Lord's barely-trained hounds that dispensed a frenzied and mortal punishment on whomever the Dark Lord deemed unfit to continue breathing. He would also use them to terrify others into complying with his demands, gnashing teeth kept a hair's-breadth from shrieking throats, family members thrown to the werewolves mere hours before the full moon. That had been a favourite form of entertainment for the Death Eaters.

However, it wasn't long before the werewolves realised that the protection they had bought was grossly overpriced. More of them died under the Dark Lord's shielding hand than the Ministry's. They were brutally abused, drugged and tortured into entertaining some of the sicker and more twisted Death Eaters. It didn't matter to the Dark Lord what happened to them. They were tools to him, nothing more. The werewolves tried to back out of the arrangement, only to lose more of their numbers in the attempt. In the end, they were forced to endure the barbed yoke as best they could. One could never make a bargain with the Dark Lord without losing everything. It was only ever a matter of time.

The Dark Lord's defeat had granted the werewolves the escape they had so badly needed. Macnair was clearly after their support again and was having to work hard to get it. Numbers in the werewolf population were difficult to gauge. The infection rate was nearly one hundred percent, assuming the victim survived the attack. Little was known as to how lycanthropy was passed along genetically simply because werewolves rarely survived long enough in order to breed, and for the fact that no-one outside of themselves had any interest in learning about the generational effects on the disease. Most magicfolk were in favour of genocide, though few ever voiced it. It was a nasty, dark aspect of wizarding society that simmered like poison under the skin.

Folter, in that peculiarly intuitive way of hers, had known how hungry he still was and had brought him a plate of food. She padded towards the side table and replaced the empty bowl with the full plate. Then she stood in front of him and waited, the bowl clutched in her long fingers, her large brown eyes fixed on his. She knew that he wanted to ask her something. She almost always knew, no matter how hard he tried to hide it. So much for his prodigious Occlumency skills, he thought to himself with a wry smile. He sighed and wondered if he could ask of her what he needed her to do. It was dangerous, something that he would ordinarily have handled himself, but since Trint had managed to sniff him out, that option wasn't open to him.

Snape liked Folter. She was quick to pick up on a subtle suggestion, didn't jabber constantly like most house-elves, and had what he usually described as a terminal streak of mischief that he appreciated as long as it wasn't being directed at him. She was the perpetrator of some of his pettiest vengeances against the staff and, if truth be told, against the student body as well. He had no idea how she managed to get Flitwick's hands to remain sticky for that long. It must have taken the Charms Professor the larger part of a day to find a way to stop everything he touched from affixing to his hands...retribution for having charmed Snape's feet to the floor of the staffroom. Hooch and Sprout had been in stitches over it, mainly because there had been a pair of very lacy pink knickers dangling from Flitwick's left hand amongst all the other paraphernalia glued there: feathers, Flitwick's wand, half an apple, two coffee beans and a rabbit's foot. The tiny man had maintained stoically and red-facedly that the knickers did not belong to him, nor did he know whose they were or how they got there. That just made Hooch and Flitwick laugh even harder and McGonagall purse her lips until they went white. Snape just stuck his nose in a book and pretended to ignore the whole commotion. The knickers had obviously been Folter's idea. It was the only way he could explain why Flitwick had been unable to get rid of the items stuck to his with magic...house-elf magic was an entirely different thing to wizarding magic.

"Folter, I need you to do something for me."

She tipped her head slightly to one side and used one hand to tuck her hair behind her large ear. "Sir."

"It's very dangerous," he pointed out, scraping the nail of one index finger across the pad of its opposite in unconscious habit. "I wouldn't ask it of you normally, so you are free to refuse." She probably wouldn't though. Couldn't. His guilt increased. She never said no, so his statement was somewhat useless.

"I need you to go to an address in London and find out if someone I know is still alive."

She made no reply at that, waiting calmly for more information, the light from the fireplace glinting off the surface of her eyes.

"Her house may be watched by people capable of killing whomever they find, but they will be expecting a witch or wizard, not a house-elf. You may be able to slip past their traps." He thought he saw a faint smile on her face, which was very unusual for her.

"Folter is very good at avoiding notice and getting past barriers, Professor."

Snape couldn't stop the corners of his mouth curling up at her statement. "I have noticed that," he mentioned dryly. "Will you do it?"

The almost permanently surprised expression on her face deepened. "Yes," she replied as if the answer had been so blatantly obvious that to give it voice was ridiculous.

Snape laced his fingers together and hitched his shoulders. "Why?"

Folter's lids flashed over her eyes like a bird blinking.

"Because the Professor has asked Folter to do it."

He narrowed his eyes at her. "That's not the only reason, is it?"

Folter squinted and glanced thoughtfully at the ceiling.

"Folter has been told that she has an overdeveloped sense of adventure that will get her into trouble one day." She dropped her eyes to him again, with a dusting of colour on her high cheekbones. "Folter hasn't been caught yet."

Snape smiled at her and gave her the address, hoping that he wasn't wrong about Trint's two-dimensional thinking.

She was back an hour later. He found her in the main room of his private quarters after he left the bathroom, his hair still dripping water down his back. He saw straight away that the news wasn't good. The paleness of Folter's face and the lines of distress around her eyes were such a rare sight on her that she looked like a different house-elf altogether.

They stared at each other for a few moments before Folter shook her head slowly, her fine chestnut hair slipping from behind her ears to fall, strand by strand, to partially cover her face.

Snape's heart sank. "How?"

Folter tucked her hair back behind her ears carefully. "Folter thinks it was done slowly. With a knife." It pained her to say it aloud, almost as much as it pained Snape to hear it...another dead because of him. It seemed that was all he was good for in life.

Folter drew something out from the small pocket she had sewn in her flour sack clothing, walked towards him and held it out. The silver chain twisted around her thin fingers, the triangular opaline amulet swinging and catching the firelight in flickering flashes along its metal border.

He took one hand from the towel around his waist and took the jewellery from her. The metal felt cold, like a trophy stolen from the grave in the dead of a winter night. He closed his fingers around it, the points of the triangle digging into his palm.

It took a great deal of effort for Snape to ask the next question...his throat had closed up and a tightness in his chest made breathing awkward.

"The birds?"

"Folter has put those that still lived in the Owlery."

Kettering must have held out a long time. The death of any of her birds in such a situation would have destroyed her. He couldn't blame her for giving him up.

AN: ephedra is a stimulant chemical, and Codonopsis is a Chinese herbal tonifier that is used to fortify the blood.