Severus clutches his stomach as he bleeds, and bleeds, and bleeds. He stains the floorboards with his blood, and there’s no doubt that his father will complain about it once he gets home, and beat him once again. He is curled up on the floor, breath constantly hitching, heart skipping beats, throat tightening. This was all he was, ultimately. Always inevitably reduced again to this weak, shaking body. Be it by his father or by James Potter, he would be knocked back down any time he had a high. Beaten, scarred, humiliated. Disgusting, helpless, and bloody.
He takes his wand in his shaking hand, painting its wood red, and searches the depths of himself for something that will help him now. His shirt is slowly changing color from green to brown. His body is broken and bleeding and he is worthless.
“Accio Murtlap Essence” He casts, and a small glass bottle floats towards him. The words escape his mouth timidly—Magic was not allowed in this house. But that didn’t matter. His father was at the pub.
He uncorks the bottle and applies the medicine to his wounds, and he is inhaling through his teeth and sobbing because it burns. Weak, his mind tells him.
He lets the potion soothe his cuts and bruises for the second time this week. The thing that made Severus Snape a coward was not that he had enemies and a shit for a father. What made him a coward was that he took their abuse and healed in the aftermath, as if there was a point in his bruises fading when they were only going to reappear in another few days. At Hogwarts it was James Potter, and during the summer it was Tobias Snape, and Severus always decided that he would suffer instead of fighting back. He had his school days taken away from him as well as his summers. But really, he did it to himself.
The summer was over, and it was September first. The Hogwarts Express is jampacked, and Severus tilts and maneuvers in order to steer clear of the crowd.
He searches for an empty compartment—no one on this train would want to be bothered by his presence. The only person who’d ever bothered with him in his life was Lily, and she hated him now, and so he keeps his head low and his face to himself. Prays that the Marauders do not spot him, lest he lash out and curse them eternally.
He shouldn’t be upset at Lily leaving him, really. He was the one to call her a mudblood. He was the one to push her gradually away, week after week, distancing from her in favor of blood supremacists and boys in his house who had a knack for the Dark Arts.
He was already a burden, anyway. He was just the boy she met in Spinner’s End years ago who’d been interesting because he had knowledge of magic, but not valuable for anything else. So now she calls him Snape instead of Sev, and it hurts even though it shouldn’t.
He sits in the empty compartment he was looking for and stares out the window for lack of anything else to do. The train passes infinite fields and it feels as if the ugliness of the landscape was for him, caused by him, because he is a nuisance and too broken and too stubborn to fix. This was who Severus was. So utterly nothing that even the flowers hated him. He spots a wilting lily being overtaken by an ugly weed and it is obvious that he shouldn’t exist.
Whether or not he would take the Dark Mark was never a difficult decision. Maybe it could have been, had he still been friends with Lily, but he wasn’t now, and that was that. The skin of his left arm burns and stings and bothers him now. It is stained with a tattoo of a snake slithering from the mouth of a skull, and there's a voice in his mind that tells him that Lily would hate to see him this way. He ignores that voice in favor of Bruce Mulciber’s.
Mulciber is broad, and his skin is a brown that looks golden, contrasting strongly with Severus’s ugly paleness. His eyes are made of honey, and Severus thinks it’s fucked up, to fall in love in a situation like this, but he does anyway.
They bond over Death Eater meetings and the murders of innocents, and Severus doesn’t care that it’s insane. They cry and puke and panic together the day after they see Voldemort slaughter a child for the first time, and it is Mulciber’s red nose and his teary eyes that ground him.
Lily would hate him. She would hit him and curse him and cut ties with him if she hadn’t already done that in fifth year. She would stop loving him because he was evil and he was with the Dark now. And Severus knows that she would be right for it. He is a murderer and a worshiper of a corrupt Lord—unfixable, destroyed.
But Bruce Mulciber is also unfixable, is also destroyed. He knows Severus, because he is him, because they are the same, and he understands that neither of them can be fixed. He understands that that’s not what either of them need. It’s too late for softness, it’s too late for mending. And Severus needs someone who is just as insane as him, because there is no turning back now—he is a dead man walking. And so is Bruce Mulciber, and so they walk together, already dead, and knowing it, too.
And Lily used to make Severus feel worthless, made him feel at fault, and he was, he knows this. But the mark on his arm gave him purpose, and the man with the honey-dripping eyes gave him purpose, too. He kills and he hurts because that is all he is good for. He makes curses and poisons because at least now he is good for something.
His father used to say that he was useless. Severus wonders, if his father could see him now, ruling the world, killing, overpowering, conquering, would he still think Severus weak?
Severus feels an evil course through his veins and shoot out through his wand, and he knows that he feels weak no longer.
He knows that he will feel weak never again.