Chapter Text
Happy Days in Hell
by Enahma
Category: Drama/Angst
Rated: T – Contains graphic depictions of torture in later chapters (clearly marked at the beginning of those chapters).
Pairing(s): none
Spoilers: written pre-OotP, so from the first four books only, AU as for the other books, though certain aspects of OotP were included into the later parts
Beta readers: Lliey Gemini and Ty Rose (previous versions); none for the current version.
Author's notes: this is a completely re-edited version of my story written way before OotP came out, so in a way it is extremely AU, on the other hand I tried keep all of my characters as IC as possible under the extreme circumstances.
Chapter 1 - The Bastards' Game
When Severus Apparated into the circle of Voldemort, he was genuinely surprised. Even having had to cross the Anti-Apparition wards of Hogwarts, he was among the first Death Eaters to arrive that afternoon.
Only Avery was there, along with a young Frenchman—Rome—one of the newer devotees of the “Dark Arts,” as he so affectedly called them. Severus sneered inwardly. There was nothing remotely artistic in what they did—massacre, terror, crude brutality dressed up in grand words. He had not always thought so… or perhaps he had simply never examined it closely. It had always been there. Dark Magic had been part of his life for as long as he could remember, as natural as breathing, as inescapable as blood—embraced by nearly every member of his family. Nearly. Quietus had—
No. Not here. Not now.
He forced the thought aside and turned instead to the more immediate question: why he had been summoned again. It would not be potions. He had received his instructions only the previous evening—an entire schedule for the coming weeks. If something urgent had arisen, the Dark Lord would have sent for him directly. This… was something else. Something darker, more unpleasant.
Movement at the edge of the forest caught his eye. More figures were Apparating in—Death Eaters arriving in twos and threes, gathering near the shadowed outline of Nightmare Manor, where the meeting had been called this time.
That was the way of it. One never knew where one would be taken. The summons came, and he Apparated—and found himself already within the circle, the location concealed until the last possible moment. It was an effective precaution. No spy among them could betray what he did not know in advance. Not to the Ministry, not to the Aurors, not even to Dumbledore.
Nightmare Manor. One of the darkest of the Dark Lord’s strongholds. Severus did not know its precise location, though he had been brought there more times than he cared to count. Somewhere in the north, perhaps Scotland. He and Dumbledore had spent years trying to locate it—without success. And it would have mattered greatly. This was where prisoners were brought—the ones the Dark Lord did not wish to kill immediately. Here, they were kept. Used. Broken.
He was certain that after the Dark Lord’s fall fourteen years ago, some had remained there—forgotten, abandoned, left to die slowly in the dark. No one had found the place. No one had come for them.
The place of fear. Of pain. Of things that should not be remembered.
He hated it. With a depth that surprised even him. More than the Ministry’s dungeons. More than—
Stop.
That was enough.
If the meeting had been called here, it was unlikely to be anything but a spectacle. A demonstration. A punishment. He hoped, with a quiet, tightly controlled urgency, that he would be able to withdraw before it began. He was not often required to take part. His position—as the Dark Lord’s Potions Master—generally afforded him a degree of distance. It was one of the few advantages the role possessed.
Not always.
There had been occasions when even that had not sufficed—when loyalty had to be demonstrated, or when the victim had been of sufficient importance to require every witness. His own loyalty had been tested before. He did not allow the memory to surface.
So. An important prisoner, then. Someone worth assembling the entire inner circle for. Someone Dumbledore would need to know about—quickly.
Within ten minutes, nearly twenty of them stood assembled. The full inner circle. Silent, waiting for the Dark Lord’s pleasure.
Had Voldemort taken Fudge? Or an important Auror—Moody?
A flicker of something sharp and unpleasant passed through him. Moody. That would be… fitting.
The trials. The interrogations. The Ministry’s so-called “light” torture sessions. Veritaserum forced down his throat. Tormenta—legal, sanctioned, forgivable—and no less vile for it. Sleep deprivation. Systematic breaking. And then Azkaban. Six months that had felt like a lifetime. Enough to strip a man down to nothing. Enough that afterwards he had felt… nothing at all.
Moody had overseen it. The paranoid old bastard.
If it were him—
He remembered, with a sudden, unwelcome clarity, the moment Moody had entered the Great Hall the previous September. The shock of it—so sharp it had nearly unmade him. He had never thought Dumbledore capable of such cruelty as to place them under the same roof.
But it had not been Moody. It had been Crouch.
Crouch—a sorry bastard now worse than dead.
Severus exhaled slowly.
And now they waited for another bastard to make his entrance. The greatest of them all. He stood among them, unmoving, expression closed, and let the thought settle with a kind of cold, bitter clarity.
Yes. He was one of them.
One more bastard in a circle of bastards—waiting for the game to begin.
At that moment, Voldemort emerged from the Manor.
“Come. Join me in the Main Hall,” he called, theatrical as ever. “Our guest is waiting for you all.”
Something in the air was cold—wrongly cold. Severus drew his cloak closer and suppressed a shudder. The great black gates of the Manor stood open like an enormous mouth, ready to swallow everything and everyone who passed through. He found himself wishing, with sudden intensity, that he were anywhere else.
Their expressionless masks caught the torchlight as they entered the Main Hall.
At the centre of the vast room stood a child.
A small child, with thin, untidy dark hair and round glasses.
Severus stopped in the doorway.
No.
He loathed the idea of torturing a child. In class—yes. With words, with sarcasm, with detentions, with the loss of house points—if necessary. But this—this was something else. Physical pain. Curses.
The thought turned his stomach, and he had to force the memories back before they surfaced fully.
He realised, a fraction too late, that the others had already formed a circle around the boy. He alone was missing, still standing in the open doorway. He exhaled once, slow and controlled, and moved forward.
As he took his place, the boy lifted his head.
Severus went still.
The boy was Harry Potter.
Damn it.
What the hell was the boy doing here? He should have been at home with his family, watching telly, wasting time on some idiotic game with his friends—anything but this.
He stared at the brat in stark disbelief, his thoughts racing.
Impossible. It had to be some trick of the mind—a dream, a hallucination. He would wake in his quarters any moment now, shaken but whole, and put it from his mind.
But the waking did not come.
For an instant, he thought the boy had recognised him—their eyes met—but then Potter turned away, towards Voldemort. Severus felt a flicker of surprise. There was no fear in those green eyes. No horror. Only pain. And resignation.
What could he do? How could he get the boy out of this? Nightmare Manor was warded, like Hogwarts itself. Anti-Apparition. He could not simply seize him and Disapparate. Impossible. And yet he had to find a way—some way—to save this foolish child who had, once again, managed to entangle himself in something far beyond him.
He exhaled slowly. Whatever he did, his role as a spy would be finished. The thought brought a sudden, unwelcome relief. For a moment, he felt free.
But it would make no difference. There was no getting the boy out of here.
He could leave the boy to his fate. Let them torture him. Kill him. If he intervened, they would both die, and for nothing. If he did nothing, he could retain his position, continue to serve the Light, continue to be of use to Dumbledore.
And yet—
Potter had to live. There was the Evans girl. There was his promise. Quietus’s name. All of it, converging into one unavoidable conclusion: he would have to help the boy.
Yes. Potter was a fool—an infuriating, reckless fool who had landed himself in this mess. It had been difficult enough to maintain the façade of a loyal Death Eater without inviting the attention of his own conscience, and now—
So he must try.
Severus’s gaze moved through the Hall—doors, windows, distances. He knew the building well enough. His so-called laboratory lay on the third floor, while the dungeons below served a different purpose entirely: the prison. Cells and torture chambers steeped in pain, where weeks were enough to unmake a person, life stretching into something indistinguishable from a prolonged Cruciatus. And if Voldemort chose to linger, he did. Breaking people amused him; time had never been a concern.
The boy’s legs were bound, leaving him no chance of escape this time, and he had no wand. Potter stood there like something led to slaughter—and worse, he seemed to accept it. Severus saw it clearly now in those eyes fixed on him once more: pain, and nothing else.
The recognition came cold and sudden. The stance, the stillness, the absence of fear—replaced by something quieter, deeper. Another boy, long ago, standing in the same place, at the centre of the circle, without fear. Only pain.
Those black eyes. He would never forget them.
Voldemort was already speaking.
“Three rounds,” he said softly, the thin smile barely touching his lips. “After that, he is mine. Do not kill him before I do.”
Three rounds. At least two hours, if he judged them correctly. Severus saw Voldemort withdraw, settling into the high-backed chair like a spectator.
“Let the show begin.”
And the show began.
Severus tried desperately to devise some way to save the boy, but as the minutes passed, he found nothing. The boy would die—and he would die as well. The temptation returned. He could leave the boy to be killed. He had no real choice: the boy would die alone—or they would die together. And the latter would achieve nothing. Albus—the Order—needed him.
And then again—they needed the boy too. And there was the Evans girl. And his oath to her.
What a mess… what a bloody situation. Worse than the nightmares that had plagued him almost every night for two decades. He would not have believed it possible. He was almost shaking as he watched the show. Shouts rang out in Latin—Seco! Frango! Contundo! Flagello! Diffringo! Uro!—each followed by precise additions, naming the part of the body to be harmed.
Potter screamed and writhed and jerked and howled, granted only brief pauses between assaults. His voice, raw with pain, seemed to fill the entire building.
Severus’s turn was approaching. His turn to torture the brat he had loathed for years—the brat he had humiliated, mocked, and shamed before his peers. The brat he had tried to have expelled by every means at his disposal.
The boy he had protected without thinking. The boy he had wanted to survive each year in that damned school because he had sworn to keep him alive. Not willingly, perhaps, but as best he could.
When his turn came, he realised at once that he was unprepared. He had not expected it to come to him so soon.
The boy lay on the floor, bleeding. In pain. But he did not cry for mercy. He did not beg. He was exhausted—but not broken. And suddenly, against all expectation, Severus felt something dangerously close to respect. He had been certain the boy would break. Fourteen—fifteen at most. Boys that age broke. They were meant to.
But Potter had not. Not yet.
And his gaze—
He needed time. He would have to act at once.
He turned his head aside and whispered, “Tormento,” his wand directed at the boy.
“An interesting choice,” Voldemort said softly. “One favoured by our more… virtuous counterparts. Let us see how long Mr Potter endures it.”
The boy’s screams filled the hall. Severus knew exactly what the boy was feeling.
When he lowered his wand, the screaming ceased. He met his eyes—and the brat gave a faint nod.
Severus’s stomach tightened. The boy had recognised him. The thought made him feel sick. He did not want Potter to die believing he had betrayed him.
He had hated the boy once—back at school. But now, somewhere between the screams and the silence, that hatred had burned out. Nothing remained.
The second round began—the physical torture. Whips, kicks, blows. After the first ten, the boy was scarcely recognisable—bruised, bloodied, broken. And yet those green eyes kept finding his, again and again, with a stubborn insistence that made no sense.
Why? There was no plea in it, no request for mercy. And still he kept looking for him—as though compelled by something Severus could not name.
Severus wanted it to end. He wanted to leave, to shut himself away and forget. For a moment, he considered it—walking away, preserving what remained of his position, leaving the boy to his fate. The thought did not hold.
What would he say to Dumbledore? Potter is dead. I helped kill him.
And after that? How would he go on—teach, face the others, meet their eyes? Granger’s, Weasley’s.
He had never escaped his past. Twenty years had not been enough. This would see to the rest.
It was his turn again.
The brat—the insufferable, stubborn, damned brat—was still searching for his eyes, though Severus doubted he could see anything at all by now.
He lowered his head and slipped a small vial from his pocket. Fortunately, he was not required to use his hands. A potion would suffice—something suitably dramatic for the Dark Lord’s amusement. For the Bastards’ Game.
For a moment, he considered drinking it himself. It was new. Exceptionally painful. He always carried such potions for occasions like this—but never for the boy.
But he needed time.
He stepped forward, knelt, forced the boy’s mouth open, and poured the contents down his throat. Then he stepped back into place.
For a moment—silence.
Then the boy’s eyes flew open, and the scream that followed tore through the hall so violently that several covered their ears.
The Bone Game Potion.
Snape loathed himself more than he thought possible—and that was saying something.
It shattered every bone into fragments, pain with every breath, every movement—then forced them back into place with the agony of accelerated regrowth. No lasting damage. Only pain. As bad as the Cruciatus. He knew. He had tested it on himself.
The boy would never forgive him.
But there would be no time for forgiveness. No time for anything. Potter would die. And he—Severus Nobilus Snape—would die with him. A fitting performance: villain and victim.
When the screaming finally died, the boy lay still, eyes closed. Only the rise and fall of his chest showed he still lived.
“Good, Severus” Voldemort said. “You improve. I had not expected it, after so long in Dumbledore’s service.”
The third round began. And still he had no answer. No plan. No way to save the broken child before him.
He would have to choose another curse. The Dark Lord did not tolerate repetition; boredom was punished, and a cleanly delivered Cruciatus would be the price.
He needed something that hurt—but did not last. The Knife Curse: sharp, immediate pain, brief.
It was his turn again.
“Culter,” he said, turning his gaze away.
The scream that followed was worse than before—higher, harsher. Shame burned through him. He wanted it to end. Every fraction of a second of that screaming felt like something tearing loose inside him.
“Severus,” Voldemort said. “You do better than I had expected.”
Severus gave a slight nod, his eyes fixed on the small, convulsing body before him.
Abruptly, the boy fell silent. He did not move.
Another Death Eater raised his wand.
“Stop!” Voldemort commanded sharply. “He is mine.”
Voldemort stepped forward, stood over the still form and, with a casual kick, turned the boy onto his back.
Severus saw it at once: every eye fixed on them, on the boy and the Dark Lord. No one was watching him.
He moved. “Avada—”
A jet of light slammed into his hand, tearing the wand from his grip. The spell died on his lips. He snapped his head round—and found himself looking straight at Lucius.
The next instant, he was on the ground, petrified.
“Severus,” Voldemort said softly, almost idly. “Predictable. I had expected no less. Is that not so, Lucius?”
Lucius inclined his head.
“I had my doubts,” Voldemort continued, almost conversationally. “A loyal servant—reformed, after a brief encounter with Auror methods and a few months in Azkaban. Curious.” He studied him. “You were always… resilient. And yet you break.” He paused, then gave a thin smile. “For a moment, I thought myself mistaken. Those curses. That potion.” He turned his gaze to the boy. “Did you enjoy them, Potter?”
Potter did not answer. His eyes had found Severus’s again. They simply looked at one another.
Voldemort was speaking—he could hear the sound—but the words no longer reached him.
He saw only the boy.
Potter would die. And he would die beside him—beside the boy he had hated for years.
Hated.
Why? Old grudges? Schoolyard ghosts? A father long dead?
And the Evans girl— Four years of bitterness, directed at her son. For what? For nothing. Less than nothing.
And still—there was no accusation in Potter’s eyes. No anger. Only quiet acceptance. As if he had already forgiven him.
“Sorry,” he said quietly. “So sorry… for everything.”
The boy’s eyes closed for a moment.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
With a flick of his wand, Voldemort sent him aside.
“Your part is over, Severus,” he said. “Now—it is your turn, Mr Potter. Erecto.”
Potter was forced upright—unsteady, swaying—but standing.
“Just kill me, then,” he spat, his voice rough but steady. “Isn’t that what you’ve been trying to do for fourteen years? No one’s going to stop you this time.”
Silence fell. The Dark Lord’s anger seemed to thicken the air itself, pressing in from all sides—but the boy did not flinch.
Then, just as suddenly, Voldemort stilled, a thin smile curving his lips. “Very brave, Mr Potter. Very… Gryffindor.” His voice softened, which made it worse. “No. Not yet. I have no wish to kill you quickly.” He studied him for a moment. “I have time. I can wait.” A faint pause. “Perhaps I shall even give you a choice.”
The boy did not hesitate.
“I’m not giving you anything,” he said. Still hoarse, still raw—but firm. “Not ever.”
Voldemort did not linger on the answer. “We shall see,” he said lightly, his gaze shifting to Severus. “And you, my dear professor? I seem to recall you are not quite so resilient.” He paused, deliberate. “A few weeks, perhaps. In the dungeons. Together.” His smile sharpened. “You may yet prove useful. You might persuade him… of the wisdom of surrender.” He lifted his gaze to the circle. “Do not kill them.” Then he turned and left.
The circle closed.
The boy collapsed the moment the spell released him, crumpling beside Severus. Severus could not catch him—the Petrifying Spell held him fast. They lay there side by side, helpless.
When the spell was finally lifted, Severus rolled onto his side and checked the boy.
Unconscious.
Then it would be his turn.
Longer. Slower. More thorough. He was a traitor, after all.
It took an hour and a half before he lost consciousness.
"Vernon, the boy hasn't come back yet!" Petunia said nervously.
They were sitting in front of the telly after dinner.
"Mm…" Vernon muttered, his eyes fixed on the screen.
"Vernon!" Petunia repeated.
"Well… what do you expect me to do? He'll turn up in the middle of the night, I'm sure. He's probably ashamed," Vernon replied, not taking his eyes off the television. "Or his freakish friends have taken him off again. Good riddance. Oh—look at that dog!" he added suddenly, pointing at the screen. "Just like Marge's!"
Petunia shuddered. She detested animals—especially Marge's old, ugly, vicious dog.
And she was worried.
"Vernon, every time they've taken him before, they've always let us know… somehow. But today… it's midnight, and—"
"And…?" Vernon snapped, irritation rising. He had no interest in the boy's absurd disappearances. "If he wanted to go, he's gone. Now I'd like to watch the programme."
"But we're his guardians, Vernon. If anything happens to him, they'll punish us!" she cried, her voice rising sharply on the last word.
Vernon flinched, then let out an annoyed sigh.
"All right, all right. But I'm not going traipsing all over the place looking for him. You can, if you like. I'm not!"
"I think we should call the police," Petunia said in a low voice.
"Oh! Good idea!" Vernon said with a grin. "Perhaps if they find him, they'll keep him for a few days, eh?"
"I don't know," she answered uncertainly.
"What's the matter?" Vernon asked, frowning as he noticed her tone.
"I don't know," she repeated. Then, after a moment: "I've got a very strange feeling. A very bad one. I felt it once before… a long time ago…"
Vernon stared at her.
Petunia was trembling. Her hands shook; her face had gone pale.
"What—are you all right?" Vernon asked, suddenly uneasy.
Petunia shook her head.
"No. Something's happened. Something like… like the day I first went to the cinema with you…"
Vernon's voice faltered.
"You—you don't think that…?"
Petunia nodded.
A long silence fell over the room.
They stared at each other.
At last, Vernon pushed himself to his feet.
"I'm calling the police. Now."