Chapter 4
Chapter 4 -
Severus had lived through many horrible kinds of pain in his life, from Cruciatus curses to having every bone in his leg shattered and all the skin burned in a potions accident. Fortunately, being wixen meant that nearly every pain was incredibly short-lived. There was a charm or potion for nearly any sort of malady you could think of, and pain potions were of the most varied type of potion.
Given his vast experience Severus felt he was prepared for the deep scan on his health and magic he’d requested of the Horde. He was incorrect. After leaving Ironclaw’s office Severus sent off a Patronus to Cole, letting her know he’d be indisposed while being examined by the goblins, and to notify Ironclaw, the Snape and Prince account manager, if anything changed at the Dursley residence, or if she noticed any wixen monitoring the house. Ironclaw agreed to keep Cole in the loop, since she was the only trusted wixen the child knew, and promised Severus she’d be made aware if they needed assistance getting Harry out of the house at any point in their investigation.
After being guided to the medical hall of Gringotts, Severus was instructed to change into a provided linen robe and to recline on the alter set up for cleansings. He was to remove any magical items from his person and place them in the provided expanding bag, to be placed in his vault until his examination and cleansing were completed.
“If you had to put an amount of time on it, how long do you think this will take?” Severus’ tone was dry, belying his nervousness at being separated from his wand and wearing only a thin cream robe, making him look especially sallow under the bright lights of the medical hall.
Ironclaw simply smirked, gave a nod to the medi-goblins, and strode out of the hall with the expanded bag carrying all Severus’ things. With a sigh Severus looked around at the six goblins remaining near him, then he laid back on the alter, and was shortly surrounded by four of the medi-goblins, one at each cardinal point. The remaining two seemed to be the elder in charge and his assistant. In unison the goblins surrounding Severus raised their hands and began chanting gutturally.
The native goblin language of Gobbledegook, or just Gook, as the goblins call it, was a riotous medley of broken consonants, stretched vowels, grunts and growls, and throat singing. As the chanting increased in volume Severus found himself paralyzed, unable to even so much as twitch, and felt an increase of pressure both over him and seemingly in his bones. It felt like he was being torn asunder and mashed flat, with his magic pushing back against the onslaught of goblin magic, until a ear-popping pressure suddenly seemed to crack through his entire being at the crescendo of chanting, and he screamed in his mind, his voice just as trapped as his body. He wasn’t sure how long this went on for, it could have been seconds or hours, but the blazing pain through his magic and bones forced Severus’ mind to quiet, and between one second and the next he was unconscious. Not a moment later the goblins finished their chant, dropping their hands in concert and taking a step back, all of them breathing hard and sweating from the effort.
“Well, that’s the initial step done, Medi-Goblin Goresbane.” The goblin at the north-point of the square around Severus spoke. He was looking past the alter, to where a positively tiny elder goblin stood back, holding a parchment that was writing furiously onto itself a long report of initial findings. As the parchment grew to touch the floor, Goresbane sighed, and with a wave summoned over a tall chair with several steps and a narrow end table. Perching himself on the chair, he started reading through the notes as they formed. With another sigh, he finally spoke.
“Medi-Goblin Copperleaf, please notify Ironclaw that we’ll likely be doing a 3-fold cleansing on Potion Master Snape, and that, based on the preliminary results, Potion Master Snape is also going to be labeled as a victim of a breach of the First Law.” Gook swearing tore through the four assembled medi-goblins, with Copperleaf, Goresbane’s assistant, bobbing his head and hurrying from the hall. With a nod, Goresbane signaled the other four goblins to proceed with the exam and cleansing. Snape had wanted to know how long it would take; given the damage to his person found in the initial segment of the exam, the purely physical history of his person, they’d be here for at least 6 hours restoring him. Who knows what sort of magical damage the man has seen?
Snape woke physically and magically exhausted, but with a clear mind. The clearest it’d been in decades, despite the riot of unsorted memories tumbling about his usually pristinely organized mind. His Occlumency allowed him to create a mental domain, with outer defenses to keep Legilimens from gaining his secrets and memories, and an inner sanctum designed to be comfortable for him to retreat to and organized in a way he found useful. In the case of this Potions Master, his inner mind resembled a clean, bright potions lab, with shelves upon shelves of book, ingredients, and potioneering tools. All his memories were sorted and stored as these books or tools or ingredients, as a last line of defense in case anyone were to get so far into his mind, and as a way for him to easily search his own mind for specific information. A master Occlumens essentially gave themselves an eidetic memory, after vast mental training.
In Severus’ internal potions lab he found years of previously lost or hidden memories, the edges of the moments sutured into their correct places in his personal timeline. It looks like months, possibly years, of memories had been returned to him, and with a gasp, Severus opened his eyes and mentally backed away from analyzing those memories now.
Looking around, he found himself still in the Gringotts medical hall, but no longer on an alter. Instead he was in a small cubicle, separated from the rest of the hall with curtains, and lying on a plush bed that his feet went to the very end of. As he sad up and adjusted to lean against the headboard, the curtain swished open, admitting Ironclaw and the elder medi-goblin, Goresbane. The former carried Severus’ bag, the latter a ream of parchments and three small glass orbs, swirling with different colors.
“It’s good to see you awake, Snape. It’s been 18 hours in total since you were admitted, I know you were wondering.” Ironclaw set Severus’ bag on the bed as he spoke, then sat in one of the chairs to the side of the bed. “Goresbane has a lot to tell you, but I wanted to let you know that Ms. Cole contacted me to inform me that all seems fine today, young Mr. Potter was seen outdoors in the yard working on his garden, and she managed to slip him an entire bag of takeaway Thai food. It’s apparently a favorite of his, out of the meals she’s snuck him over the years.”
Snape chuckled at that, the sound rusty and surprising to himself. When was the last time I chuckled? he thought, but mentally shook himself before he could delve into his mind again, those swirling memories heavy with emotions that seemed to be seeping into his current mood. Locking down his mental shields again, Severus cleared his throat.
“Thank you for the update Ironclaw. It was the first thing on my mind, which isn’t something I’m exactly used to experiencing.” Shifting his attention to the other goblin, Severus bowed his head respectfully for a moment before addressing the elder goblin. “I appreciate your work over these hours. You have the results of my examination and treatment, Medi-Goblin Goresbane?”
“Indeed, Potion Master Snape, indeed. The exams took a total of 3 hours to complete, the rest was treatment time. We conducted a three-fold cleansing, it was necessary with the physical, magical, and mental damage you had received.” At this, Goresbane handed the ream of parchments to Severus, pointing at the very top of the first page. “You’ll see here, we were dealing with quite a bit more that expected, the damage also starting much earlier.”
With hands beginning to tremble, Severus read through the pages quickly. It took him probably 20 minutes to get through them the first time, and once he finished he started again from the beginning.
“If I’m reading this correctly… I’ve had my memory altered upwards of 300 times, with roughly 4 years of my life stolen and rewritten? And in that time I was married, fathered a child, was love and compulsion potioned, had my husband stolen and erased from my mind, was magically enslaved to a dark lord, then enslaved again by another dark lord, and had my family magics bound.” Severus took a deep breath, letting it out over a four-count, before doing it again. “Tell me about these orbs, the report says they’re trace magical signatures?”
“Correct. We have three stable samples from the majority of the spell trauma you received. With one-off curses, like you’d get in a duel, the trace fades. You get stable samples from long-term magical damage or enchantments. Two of the samples are specific to the majority of the damage, including all but two instances of memory charms, and the last sample was mostly pulled from the Dark Mark that was on your arm. When we-”
“I’m sorry, did you say was?” Snape nearly shouted, as he hurriedly pulled up his left sleeve. The skin of his forearm was unblemished, not even a hint of the horrendous black tattoo that marked him as a Death Eater for over a decade. He stared blankly at it for a full minute in silence, before clearing his throat again. “Apologies, Medi-Goblin Goresbane, that was a bit of a shock, please continue.”
“As I said, the three signatures are stable samples, and we can positively identify them based on samples obtained when each of the wixen established vaults with Gringotts.” At this, Ironclaw smiled viciously, as he knew most wixen never realized that when they opened an account with Gringotts and gave their permission to use their wand as an identifying means to open their vault, instead of just a key, they were allowing the goblin Horde to utilize that sample in Horde business. Including investigations. Severus looked over at Ironclaw, eyebrow raised.
“We are currently auditing these vaults to determine if they contain any stolen goods, full value summations, and debts linked. Once this First Law investigation is complete, we’ll be able to pull restitution for you, Mr. Potter, the Horde, and any other victims we discover in the course of our investigation.”
“May I ask who these signatures are for? I can guess one for certain, the Dark Lord. I don’t want to speculate on the other two, however.” Severus’ voice was getting strained, the exam and all the information starting to weigh on him, making him increasingly drowsy. Goresbane squinted, and with a wave and a low mutter in Gook, ran another short diagnostic.
“You will sleep, so your mind can sort through the years of missing and altered memories being realigned. Take one of the lighter sleeping potions you keep in your satchel, not Dreamless Sleep.” With that pronouncement, Goresbane shuffled out of the curtained cubicle, leaving Severus staring hard at Ironclaw. Ironclaw sighed, and with a quick tap on the curtain enabled a silencing rune.
“You’ll have to do what he says, he’s the senior Medi-Goblin in this branch of the Horde. But I’d pull my ears off if I had to wait for news of an enemy like this, so I’ll tell you quickly, just take the potion and lay down.”
With a nod, Severus did as instructed, locating his wand and summoning his potions case from inside the extendable bag. After he threw back the light blue potion, he once again raised a brow at the goblin beside him.
“The first sample was Dumbledore, he was the other to ensorcell you, and did a lot of the memory charms, and a fair bit of the physical damage to your person. But the other… the other that did the most memory charms, gave you the compulsion potions and the love potions, and stole so much from you… that was Lilian Evans.”
“Evans. She’s still Evans, not Potter?” Severus’ voice was raw and quiet, the words barely scraping through his constricted throat.
With the saddest look Severus had ever seen on the goblin, Ironclaw shook his head and continued.
“Severus, she was never a Potter. She stole much from you, your child, your memories… your name. You took James’ name when you married, when you bonded. You both hyphenated to Potter-Prince. She stole two legacies with that move and rewrote histories, claiming to have mothered the child ‘hero’ that you carried.”
For the first time in over a decade, Severus Snape, no, Severus Potter-Prince, cried.
It took a week for Severus to heal enough to leave Gringotts. He recovered and sorted his memories first, under silencing wards while he laughed and cried and railed as the emotions of reliving four years of altered memories crashed through him like he was living them anew. He couldn’t, wouldn’t occlude the emotions of these restored memories; suppressing the emotion in the memories would strain the mental sutures the goblins assisted in placing, and would potentially fracture these recovered memories into fragments. So he got to relive the romance and loss of his husband, the pregnancy and birth of his son, and the abuses he suffered at the hands of those that claimed to be friends and mentors.
Physically Severus had to recover roughly a decade of a corrupting glamour curse. Laid on him by Lilian Evans sometime in their 7th year at Hogwarts, the curse aged and corrupted Severus’ “beauty”. In fact, the most famous use of the curse was on two step-sisters, when their families merged and the spoiled youngest girl decided she wanted to be the prettiest of the three sisters. The muggles painted the youngest as the princess in the version they heard of the tale, but wixen history put Cinderella into Azkaban, for cursing her step-sisters, poisoning her step-mother, and stealing a betrothal, thereby committing line theft.
Severus hadn’t ever been a vain man, but watching in a mirror as his face shifted over the course of the week, from the gaunt crone-like man he was into the more youthful visage he remembered from his recovered memories was shocking. His hair was again soft, his teeth straight, his skin pale but not sallow. He wondered how he could have missed it, this descent into being a dark and ugly version of himself, but it had been a slow transition of years.
His biggest surprise was his physical recovery of muscle mass, and the re-widening of his hips. It wasn’t much, true, but enough to change his gait into more of a swaying prowl. He looked healthy again, and young.
Standing at the foot of the hospital bed he’d spent a week in, Severus tied back his hair, and adjusted his altered robes. He had a meeting with Ironclaw upstairs in half an hour, but was instead staring at the small box sitting next to the ream of parchments on the nearby table. Ironclaw had found it in the audit of the vaults, labeled it as "stolen goods”, misfiled the reacquisition documents so the vault owner wouldn’t be notified, and had it returned to Severus that morning. With a trembling hand, Severus reached out and picked up the ring box. A deep breath later and he’d carefully put the wedding band onto his left ring finger. The second band in the box he slipped onto his right hand’s ring finger, and snapped the box shut.