Judgment - R

Title: Judgment
Author: Mars (alliante)
Type: Fiction
Length: ~4k
Pairings: No official pairings beyond Snape/Lily, rest is up to reader's imagination.
Warnings: Mature sexual content? Not explicit. Language. Suggestions of incest.
Series: No
Rating: R
Summary: Severus wakes up in the underworld and is faced with the test of character to decide upon his afterlife. Response to prompt "Heaven, Hell, and all that lies between."
Author Notes: Thanks a lot to only_veetee for putting up with my flailing and reading this over. I haven't ficc'd properly in a long time, and I don't think this is up to par. Any MSITAKES are aaawbviously mine.
One scene was cut due to general effed-up-ness. Also, sorry the title is lame. :)



JUDGMENT


Something had just happened. He strove to remember what it was.
Was it important? Whether it was or not, it was still bothering him. He relied on his mind and memory; often it was all he had. And when it failed to live up to a cursory examination - can you remember what just happened? - he was altogether worried and, well, irritated.
The feeling of irritation was so familiar that he found himself confident enough to open his eyes. Or, rather, his eyes were already open, but now he was actually seeing with them, realizing that the mass of smoggy black above him was not the comforting dark of the inside of his own eyelids but really a ceiling. As his eyes adjusted he picked out details, jags of rock, glistening drops of moisture like beaded little eyes. Nothing familiar. Nothing comforting.
“You realize you’re dead, right?” A man’s voice asked.
Severus sat up. “Yes,” he said, softly, after a moment. That was right. He was dead. He’d just died. That was the very momentous thing that had happened which he could not remember. He’d completed his last task before it had happened, hadn’t he? His work must be finished, else he would have risen as a ghost… maybe… admittedly, he couldn’t be too sure.
As he stood up, his boots scuffing the floor somewhat, there was a click, a ring, and then tapping, echoing towards him from nearby. Severus put his hand out to touch the wall to his right. It wasn’t cold; rather, it was warm, and then, underneath his palm, it seemed to move, to breathe, as if it was a part of something live. He twitched his hand away, then carefully placed it back and stepped forward, following the wall. The were no lights and nothing else to guide him, save for the faintest of glows issuing from around the corner.
The man was the one that had spoke, Severus was sure. He certainly looked as if he had. He was sitting down behind something that looked like a receptionist desk, and he was working away on a typewriter. The glow came from a small orb hanging just behind his head, and which made his raven-black hair glimmer blue. He was very attractive. A little to the right of the man’s shoulder was a mirror, taller than Severus and just a bit wider.
Severus stood there, watching him. “Bled to death,” the man said, not cheerfully but with more pleasure than Severus liked, “after sustaining a wound to the neck, inflicted by a Nagini, that is, a bloody huge snake. Fan-fucking-tastic.”
“What are you, then?” Severus asked coldly.
“The janitor,” the man replied.
Severus stared at him. The man matter-of-factly skipped a line, the typewriter ringing out. He didn’t look like a janitor. He looked like a lord, a conqueror, with the posture and the eerie confidence and the shadowed eyes. “I assume,” Severus said, at length. “That you are being metaphorical.”
“Not entirely,” said the man. “I am the one that cleans up what is left behind. I am the master of this area in that I am its caretaker, its controller, and the one who knows all the answers. You, Severus Snape, are ignorant, and dead.”
Severus stiffened. The man did not look at him the entire time.
“You can take a seat if you like,” said the man.
Severus did want to take a seat, actually. And he wasn’t about to stand there at the corner, glowering. He found a chair at the opposite wall, afraid for a moment that it would live like the walls had, but it was still and lifeless, though it smelt faintly of a perfume he knew. Lily’s? Narcissa’s, perhaps?
He stared long and hard at the janitor, and then down at his feet, wearing the boots he had worn when he had died. He couldn’t remember much. He knew who he was, certainly; but thinking hard, he could not trace back his various morals and beliefs to their original source. He felt a deep love for… Lily. And he also felt the deep, empty space of a life wasted.
The typewriter was strangely comforting. It sounded so efficient. Severus liked efficiency. He was tireless, waiting in the room, and somehow calm. He had not put much faith in the afterlife, and assumed that if he did everything for the greater good, at least he would be satisfied, perhaps; and if that condemned or saved him, well, that wasn’t a problem he’d bother himself with…
“Not to interrupt,” Severus said, after awhile, he wasn’t sure how long. Time seemed to go slowly here. “But what is this place?”
“A waiting room,” said the man, pausing in his typing. “Someone like you will find it quite interesting, I’m sure. Some of the others that pass through here, they don’t care much. I must say I’m growing rather fond of you in that you are largely silent.”
“Is that a hint?” Severus inquired, dryly.
“Yes,” said the man. The conversation ended there.


Finally, the man spoke again. Severus wondered if anyone else had died during that time. “Right,” he said. “The paperwork is done. Severus Snape, you are now about to be judged.”
“Really,” Severus said, interest piqued.
“Really,” said the man, standing up. For a moment, Severus imagined he had wings, but then the vision was gone. They’d been beautiful, grey and speckled like a hawk’s. The orb of light followed him as he moved. “It’s all standard procedure. But it does get interesting, especially when I get your type.”
Severus got to his feet. The man was not as tall as him. “My type.”
“Vigilantes,” said the man. “Those who fight for the greater good. The mentally scrambled. The damned. Whatever you want to call them.”
“Ah,” Severus said.
The man tipped his head back slightly to look up at Severus, his face considering. “Come with me, please.”
And he began to head down a corridor Severus had not noticed before.
Severus hesitated. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to be judged, now. But the so-called janitor showed no signs of stopping, and he carried the light with him, and soon Severus would be left alone in the dark, in the afterlife. So Severus followed.
As he went, he glanced at himself in the mirror and pulled back, startled. In it he had a stronger jaw than he remembered, for one, but everything was subtly different, somehow straighter and delicate and almost attractive. But he was also scarred with bruised-looking skin beneath his eyes and flyaway hair. The two sides seemed to war with each other.
The janitor came back to stand next to him. His reflection was the exact duplicate of himself; no edits or changes. “That’s what your soul looks like,” he said. “They rarely look the exact same as your physical body. Wounds can inflict your flesh and leave your soul untouched, and it’s same the other way around. Now hurry up.”
The corridor became different as they went along. The stone appeared ragged and grainy before faded away completely; soon signs of water damage became apparent, with stained, peeling wallpaper. The carpet was ragged and thin underfoot.
“Interesting,” said the man.
They stopped at a door, and the man searched his jeans, coming up with a key. Just the look of it made Severus shudder; it was cold and black and evil-looking, and eerily threatening.
“Unlock and open the door,” said the man, and then handed the key over.
Severus took it and clutched it tight in his thin fingers. He was trembling, now; things became so much more daunting, all of a sudden. But he was not a man to shirk from a challenge, and so he steeled himself. He stepped forward, slotting the key into the lock; it went in smooth. He turned his hand; the lock clicked.
Severus didn’t need to be told what to do next. He opened the door, and went in.


It was his house. It was his house if someone had renovated it fifty years ago before changing their mind and having it ransacked, and then leaving it to its own devices. Furniture was broken, walls were torn down to reveal rooms beyond. Books lay open and face down, scattered here and there, and the cobwebs clung insistently wherever they could, not only in the corners of the ceiling but on the chairs and the upset coffee table with one of its legs gone. When Severus walked, dust stirred up beneath his feet. He was afraid to breathe in. He was dead, but that did not make him think that he was safe. Perhaps, he mused, it was possible for you to die more than once. Perhaps there is a stage beyond here.
Then the racket began. It came from upstairs.
Severus was not about to go up. He knew it from his childhood; the screaming and the shouting and, eventually, the crashing - yes, yes, there it was. Something was knocked over; someone was crying. It wasn’t his mother… his mother was dead and gone… this was just all in his head. Or something of that sort.
Severus ignored the stairway and went into the library. It was not much different from the living room, except there were more books. Some had the pages torn out and they littered the floor like sad, dirty leaves. Pictures of Lily were taped up everywhere.
Some of them were muggle photographs; but some moved. There she was, waving, smiling. Severus remembered her clearly now, the way she smelt, the way she laughed and moved and talked with her hands. “Miss me, Severus?” one photograph taunted. Severus reached out and ripped it from the wall, crumpling it up into a ball and dropping it to the ground.
“Regret, much?” Lily taunted at his back. Severus flinched.
“I see, now,” he said, under his breath.
“See what?” Lily demanded.
“He sees nothing,” another said. “Couldn’t see I didn’t love him much, did he?”
“Thought you were so fucking smart!”
“Bloody ridiculous.”
“I’ll tell you something, Severus,” Lily snarled. “You’re nothing but a racist, bigoted fascist. Mudblood, you called me! I don’t forget that. Girls like me never forget that.”
“You never wanted to spend time with me,” Lily whimpered. “It was always those others… those bad people.”
“No,” Severus said. “No, that’s not fair - it was always you I-”
“Liar!” Lily screeched at him. She did not look lovely. “You liar! You’ll never be good enough for me! I knew it! That’s why I chose James! That why I chose James-”
Severus ripped her from the wall. The rest of them were screaming; in a frenzy he pulled them all down, trampling them, mad with the desire to just make it stop.
“It’s easy to stop caring for someone,” the last one whispered as he tugged her from the wall. “I did it, see? It’s easy.”
“No,” Severus said, ripping her in two. “It’s not.”
He stopped to catch his breath. The photos were all silent. All those tears he’d cried for her. All the years he’d devoted to her memory. It was just so hard to stop caring for people, afraid that once he stopped there would be nobody left; Severus had chose to shoulder the pain instead. “I loved you so much,” he said aloud. He was aware of the silence. The racket upstairs had stopped.
Severus sank down into his favourite chair. It was worn, the once-plush fabric having been rubbed raw. Severus curled up, like he had when he was little, and fell asleep.


He dreamed of James.


And then he was on the ground, panting raggedly, his mouth tasting of dust. A dream perhaps, he told himself, some sort of death-dream, but as he got to his feet again he had to pull his trousers back up, and he angrily kicked over the lopsided chair and looked around.
Kitchen.
Someone began pounding on the front door. Hard, fast, angry hits. “Severus!” his father screamed. “Severus, opened the goddamn door!”
In his childhood, Severus closed his eyes and curled up tighter. But he was a child no longer. He stood there in the kitchen, staring around at the remains, at the broken dishes stacked neatly in the cupboards as if some madman had smashed them and then put them back. Maybe that madman was me, Severus mused. It seemed very likely.
He wished this was a hallucination, because then maybe he could wake up. But it wasn’t, really. He was dead. But maybe death was just an illusion, too. There were so many maybes it made his skin itch.
He leaned heavily against the counter. I don’t want to do this anymore, he thought.
There was a creak and the broom closet slowly opened, and there stood the man, the janitor. There was no orb of light hanging about behind his head. “You sure about that?” he asked.
Severus wondered if this was just more of the so-called judgment until the man stepped in and looked closely at Severus’ face.
“Well,” Severus said.
“You can take a break if you want,” said the man. “You can take a break for the rest of eternity. But this place will always be here waiting for you, you realise.”
“Yes,” Severus responded, wearily. “I realise.”
“Don’t fret,” said the man, and Severus wondered if anyone had ever said ‘fret’ to him before. “I can accompany you, if you like.”
Severus blinked at him in surprise.
“I didn’t offer earlier,” the man explained, “because you’re the sort to do these things on his own. Is this still the case?”
Severus cleared his throat. “No.”
“Alright,” was the reply. “I’ll walk with you, then. I must say, I’m actually rather interested.”
“Well,” Severus said, in a dead voice, “fantastic.”
The man grinned.
Despite it, his presence was supremely comforting. He doubted that the man could stop anything from happening, but the fact that Severus was now not alone in his own head made him feel a bit safer.
“Get raped yet?” asked the man.
“What?”
“Some people get raped,” the man said energetically. He shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. “I suppose it’s symbolic for something. Power struggles most likely. That means half the time they’re raped by their parents. Were you raped?”
This was an odd conversation. “No,” Severus stated.
“I‘m sure it’ll happen soon, so you don’t feel left out,” the man said helpfully. Though he was being of aid, he still managed to look dark and broody and unpleasant. His entire being seemed to be a contradiction.
“Let’s continue, shall we.”
“Try that room,” the man suggested, singling out the dining room entrance.
That seemed as good a place as any to start up again. So Severus went to check it out.
One of the walls was gone, replaced by glass. No - on closer inspection there more was than just glass, there was another room. The janitor grasped Severus’ sleeve and tugged him forward, skirting the table and stepping over the paintings that had fallen. “Who is that?” he asked Severus, pressing his nose to the glass.
Severus had to look very closely. Beyond them it was shadowed, and dirty, and rotting. Just looking at it made the bile rise in his throat. There was someone there, shoved resolutely into the corner, all that was visible in the uncertain light being a skinny bare foot, its sole caked with grime.
Then it twitched.
The shape began to uncurl, jerkily, started to squirm forward, reaching out, nails digging into the rotting floorboards. She - long, swinging hair - dragged herself forward, curling her legs up beneath her. It would have been a serpentine movement, but it reminded Severus too much of clockwork, too much of something old and rusted. And then her face was pushed up against the glass (the janitor had backed off, making a disgusted sound in his throat).
It was Bellatrix Lestrange. Her starved face stared out at him as she clawed the glass, nails causing spine-tingling, scratchy noises. He remembered how beautiful she used to be; now here she was, a clockwork monster.
“You know,” Severus said, as Bellatrix beseechingly stared out at him, lines of black running across her cheek, eye to chin from when her makeup ran. “She used to be quite intelligent. Strong-willed, but tolerable. Then they sent her to Azkaban, and they made her like this.”
Severus glanced aside at the other man, who was watching Bellatrix with a strangely closed look on his face. “Were you ever alive, once?”
“Sure I was,” the man whispered. Severus saw the wings again; but this time they were batlike and veined and pulsing before they were gone again.
“How did you die?”
“You don’t want to know,” the man said firmly.
Severus did, but he supposed it was impolite to ask again. “Is that all she’ll do, do you think?” Severus asked. The man didn’t answer, but he felt himself pushed forward, his thoughts clicking and whirring. He did not remember so much, only little images and glimpses and pictures. A rather unhappy childhood, save whenever he was with Lily. A complicated adult life, doing whatever Dumbledore said. Severus had done a lot of growing up during the first war.
And then there was the second. How many monsters crawled out of the shadows? How many of those had been made by the very officials that had sentenced them?
Bellatrix was just a victim among many. They all were. Lucius and Narcissa came to mind first, as they had hoped, when the Dark Lord had fallen the first time, he would stay down; that they could be left to raise their newborn son in peace. Severus remembered the pregnancy, how wrought with fear Narcissa had been. “How can I have a baby, Severus?” she’d whispered urgently. “How can I have him, when his father might never come home one night?”
Severus, though, had nothing and no one to lose, save Lily. And there was no one to miss him, if he might fall. “I did it all for the best,” he said, touching the glass. Bellatrix’s mouth moved.
The man stared impassively at them both.
I did too, Bellatrix mouthed, me me I I yes. She sank down to the ground, to her knees, bending forward, head bowed, her hair obscuring her face.
Back in the kitchen, the sink was filled with empty, dusty bottles, beer and wine and harder liquor. Ants and bigger, darker insects crawled among them, some scurrying free to the floor. Severus dared not look in the fridge; he could only imagine what his mind would put in there.
“Stay here,” Severus instructed, softly, to the caretaker. The upstairs needed to be inspected, and he would do it alone.
It was silent now, but Severus was not fooled. He made his way up to the second floor, the stairs beneath him creaking unsteadily, followed by the janitor, whatever he was, a dead soul paying penance maybe, or someone cursed for all eternity.
The first room on the right was the study. But there was nothing there now; the desk and bookcases and files and globe had all been cleared out. There was, however, the chair, upon which sat his mother, unclothed, her thighs pressed tightly together and her hands over her face. Her hair was up in the severe bun he’d always associated with her, but it was coming undone with long, thick pieces framing her face. In the dusty light she looked skinny and garish, much like himself, her prominent ribs straining against the thin skin, her stomach nearly concave.
She was sitting before an old-fashioned camera, big and bulky and draped in cloth. She did not move, at all.
This chilled him, moreso than everything else. Something about her, something so corpselike, was unnerving. She lacked anything sinister, but the image was just so cold and reminiscent and strange and unwanted that he had to do something, anything, to make her move.
“Mother?” he asked, cautiously, inwardly recoiling at how loud his voice sounded.
“Oh, Severus,” she said, uncovering her face, moving so soon, too soon, just like that. Her eyes were ragged and dark. “Oh, Severus, my Severus, oh, Severus,” and she kept saying it, repeating over and over in her hoarse voice, the litany being first weepy, then mechanic, and then sexual. She caressed her arms and shoulders and chest with her hands, staring at him. Severus stepped back. Her hands crept down her stomach and to her thighs, as if on their own accord.
“I did wrong,” she hissed suddenly, and leapt to her feet. Dust rose up around her ankles. A thin trickle of filmy fluid traced down the inside of her thighs, and pieces of hair stuck to the corners of his salivating mouth. “I have to go. I have to go, Severus. I’m sorry. I did wrong in marrying him. I shouldn’t have married him. You shouldn’t have been born.”
“Mother!” Severus shouted, but she was already barreling towards him, forcing him to scramble out of her way. She made her escape, tearing past him and down the steps.
He hurried to the foot of the staircase, but all that was there was the skinned, bloody corpse of some animal, limp and red at the foot of the stairs.
Severus felt the jerk in his throat and stomach, ripping his gaze from the corpse and covering his mouth with his hand, shoving one shoulder against the wall for balance as his body shuddered with the effort not to vomit.
He stood there for some time, composing himself. Severus had seen much worse than a skinned mammal in his life, but that didn’t matter. He went back into the study. That chair had fallen over. He crossed behind the camera to the window, grabbing handfuls of dusty velvet and forcing them out of the way.
There should have been the front lawn. His front. Instead there was bright green manicured grass, and a snake-embossed casket, and row and rows and rows and rows and rows of… people. Those who could not find a seat where standing. A lot of people were crying.
Severus felt a sour sinking feeling in his gut and pulled back. His hands found the curtains and he pulled them back into place, shutting his own funeral from view. So they all loved him when he was gone. Well, that didn’t help him much.
“I looked out a window,” Severus said, when he came back downstairs. He found the janitor in the library, who was picking up crumpled pictures of Lily, smoothing them out, and then carefully shredding her apart, ignoring her tiny cries.
He looked up, interested. “What did you see?”
“My funeral,” Severus said. He hesitated. “Was it real?”
“Oh, yes,” said the other. “The windows to the outside depict real scenes, whether or not they’ve happened yet. I always thought that was sort of a shit thing to happen. After all, you could look through a window and see your best friend fucking your wife.”
“Not married,” Severus said vaguely.
“Burning your books, whatever,” said the janitor. He turned his head to look at the waiting pile of crumpled Lilies, and there was something so familiar about that profile it made the hate boil up in Severus’ stomach. Even the cock of the chin was familiar. “Are we done here?”
“Are we?”
“This is your judgment, Severus,” the other man said, pushing his black hair from his eyes. “Yes? Your judgment. Not that hard to figure out, is it?”
“What are my choices?”
“Whatever you want. Whatever you can think of.”
“Well,” Severus said, slowly, “I’d like to get out of here, for one.”
The janitor stood up, pulling a key from his jeans. This one was a bright white gold. “After me, then.”
There was paperwork that Severus had to sign. Afterwards he was sitting in the chair he had occupied when he had first come to the place, arms crossed over his chest and inspecting the ground. The typing was in full-force again.
When Severus looked up he would just see the top of a dark, bowed head over the receptionist’s desk. The little floating orb was back, picking out the glints of blue in the other man’s hair, and subtly outlining a pair of curling, demonic, near-invisible horns. Severus could almost see them, but at the same time, he was quite certain they didn’t exist.
Where have I seen you before? Severus wondered, as he stared at the tip of the head hiding away behind the desk and the typewriter. I know I have seen you before. I might have even known you. But I’ve forgotten. I and everyone else, maybe, have forgotten.
The typewriter dinged, and so did something in Severus’ head.
“Regulus,” he said aloud.
The typing stopped for a second. But then it started up again, as cheerful and methodic as ever. Severus settled back against his chair, glad for having even solved that mystery. He was content with waiting. For once, he had all the time in the world.