"What?" he yelled.

"I said, 'do you want to go someplace quieter'?" She ran a garish fingernail down the front of his green silk shirt, nearly hooking it in the waist of his leather trousers. Lucius had dared him to wear them. Lucius was going to be very, very sorry.

Severus shook his head, eyebrows raised in disparagement. "No." He shoved his cup into her hand and stalked off.

There was no possible way Crouch's parents knew about this. Hell, there was no possible way a fourth year - or was that fifth now? - could have this many friends. Severus didn't even know most of them; they were only anonymous faces he'd seen in the corridors, now warped and wicked in the throbbing explosion of lights. He slipped between them, rubbing his temples. If he'd known this was how he would spend his first night of real freedom from Hogwarts, he would have barricaded himself in the bathroom as soon as he'd arrived.

A hand latched onto his shoulder. "Having fun?" Lucius grinned.

"No." Severus found another cup of that damned punch in his hand.

"Have some of this. You'll start a treat."

"I don't want to start a treat."

"What?"

Severus glared. He shouted, "I said, 'I don't want to start a treat'."

"'Course you do! We're out of school now, never have to go back! Celebrate a little!"

Severus roughly shook Lucius off and passed him the cup. "You're pissed."

"Uh-huh. You should be, too."

"Where's the W.C.?"

"Upstairs, I think."

Severus turned before Lucius could stop him. He trudged through a frenzy of people dancing, people drinking, people doing things best done in private. It seemed like a very long time before he found the staid double doors leading to some semblance of civility.

He stood in the foyer, head down, skin throbbing from the feral beat shaking the doors behind him. It felt like a thick-skinned balloon was inflating in his ears. For a moment he stayed there, eyes closed, hands to his temples, desperately savouring the diminished volume.

Suddenly, the door flew open and the noise swelled. He winced. Severus looked up in time to see Rita leading Peter Pettigrew by the hand. She flashed a "don't-you-wish-this-were-you?" look and took the lump of Gryffindor around a corner to god knows where. Severus watched them go with a look of disgust. A repugnant knot formed in his belly. He wasn't sure whether it was because that little slut had hit on him, or because he was suddenly in the same disreputable category as Peter Pettigrew.

He had to get away.

The world slowed ever so slightly in the light grasp of alcoholic fingers caressing his brain. Severus found the stairs and, gripping the banister until his hand went white, lifted one foot, then the other, then the first again until he was upstairs. The loose button-up shirt shifted from emerald to pine in the subdued orange torchlight. He felt wanton and exposed in the thin fabric. It kissed his skin with icy lips, its smoothness turning to sandpaper over the Mark still raw on his arm. It whispered wickedly, the leather of his trousers hugging his lower body like a burial shroud.

More noises met him at the top of the stairs. Myriad dark doors were closed to the white hallway, sheltering the weird, wet sounds of couples, triples, whatever twisted groupings the fruits of Hogwarts could devise. A moan that sounded disturbingly like James Potter came from the door nearest him; Severus' spine shivered. He hunched against the barrage of senseless lust and made his nihilistic way down the corridor.

At the far end was a second stairway. This one was plain, black-topped steps with stark white faces beckoning him from beyond the black doorframe. He left the thick, phantom stench of sex and the glut of noise behind.

The staircase turned on a landing halfway up. Severus paused to look out the window. The glass was waxy and lumpy, like it had melted in the light of day. Even the moon was lost in its distortion. Absently tracing one of the iron pane dividers that sectioned the warped outside world into neat rectangles, he glanced back for a moment. There was nothing of interest for him that way. There was nothing to save him from life. Eyes to the floor, he took the last steps with only a vague sense of dread.

There were only a few doors, widely spaced, this high in the house. He didn't see any more stairs. With a weary grunt, Severus quietly tried a knob to see if he could find peace within. It wouldn't budge. The next was the same. The black doors judged him mercilessly from the white walls. A tiny shudder went up Severus' back, and he tried the next cold cast iron knob.

It turned smoothly. He felt the slight hitch of a latch sliding back. Silence beckoned him, and stillness, and a burst of air that turned chilly on the fabric of his shirt. Books with perfect, pristine spines covered the dark walls, stoic and grave in the unstable light of a hearth. He smelled leather, and dust, and whiskey, and something that might have been the remains of bookworms left to feast on the lives of men.

"Is it still going on?"

Severus jumped. He looked around quickly. Next to the fire was a lone armchair. He caught a tarnished gold profile: a straight, sharp nose, a high forehead, a chin ever so slightly weak. Eyes turned yellow by the fire glittered. The man slumped in his chair, half a glass of chestnut liquid glinting in his hand.

Frowning, Severus stepped back. "Sorry?"

"The party."

"Oh. I suppose."

The man snorted. He turned his face towards Severus. Those glittering eyes were ringed, dilated with alcohol and hard with age. "My son informed me this afternoon that he had invited a few friends for a party. Naturally, my wife pressed me until I relented, and promptly took a sleeping draught. I've found better potions for that sort of thing." He indicated his drink and took a sip. "Come in. Close the door."

Severus silently obeyed. His hips didn't want to respond. There was something feral in the man's weighted posture. One foot moved, slowly, then the other, until Severus closed the door behind him. His palms remained flat against it.

"What's your name, son?"

"Severus, sir."

"That's all? Just 'Severus'?"

Severus blinked. "Yes, sir."

The man - Mister Crouch, presumably - smirked unevenly and drained his glass. "Care for a drink, Severus?" He picked up a large bottle. About four inches of warm brown liquid sat at the bottom. In a moment there were only two.

"No, thank you, sir."

"Are you sure? It was opened fresh this evening."

"Quite, sir."

The man took a sip. He let it rest on his tongue a moment before swallowing. "Suit yourself." He took another, this one longer. "You go to school with Barty?"

"Used to, sir. I've left."

"You've left, have you? Well. That's certainly an achievement in this day and age. You're alive." He snorted. "Plenty of people aren't."

"Yes, sir." Severus pressed tightly against the door. One pale palm slid to the knob.

"Plenty more won't be, soon enough, if the Dark Lord has his way." Another drink. A slim trickle of whiskey ran from the corner of his mouth and dripped onto his black robe. "I went to school with him, you know."

Severus' stomach curled into a ball. "Sir?"

"A long time ago, that was. More than thirty years." The sallow eyes twitched. For an instant they turned blue. "He was Head Boy my first year, and then he was gone, and we all thought Tom Riddle was dead. How sickeningly mistaken we were." The man gnashed his teeth a moment and drained his glass. "A Slytherin," he said with drunken disgust.

Severus was about to open his mouth when the man beat him to it. "Slytherins should be wiped from the face of the Earth. Evil sons of bitches, the lot of them. Not a one that's not in the service of the high and mighty 'Lord Voldemort'." The deep, sarcastic slur burned a swathe across Severus' brain. He gripped the doorknob more tightly.

"Sir?"

"Take my Barty. Ravenclaw. Good House. Decent House. They don't value evil in there. Oh, no." He dumped the last of the bottle into his glass. Holding up the empty bottle, he frowned. "Everything ends, you know."

"I know, sir." Severus inched closer to the edge of the door. His Mark pulsed; he shifted his left arm behind his back, sure everything was visible through the thin cloth. The man shifted. His eyes were hooded and heavy, like a lion's. Severus silently prayed to emptiness that they wouldn't see the serpent he'd invited in.

"And, me," the man raised his glass and gave a short, derisive laugh. "I was a Gryffindor! Nobility! Bravery! Courage! That's what made Gryffindor great! No life spent crawling through the muck on our bellies, oh, no. We were lions! Are lions. We're always lions. Always lions." He lowered his glass and stared at it silently.

The sound of spitting flames meshed with the faint rasp of Severus' beleaguered breathing. He felt the coils of a serpent tighten around his left arm, the fingers of his Dark Lord. His blood moved sluggishly, like tar, or like the blood of a snake before the sun warms it.

"Where are your friends, Severus?"

"Downstairs, sir."

"You aren't with them?"

"No, sir."

A watery, wry smirk caught him. The yellow-blue eyes dug into his soul. "Do your parents know you're here?"

"My parents are dead, sir."

"Shame." Another long sip. More dribbled down the man's chin. "Did you kill them?"

"Sir?"

"A joke. Not a very good one, but I'm drunk. Anything is funny. I drink because, with our world being... raped," he rolled the word on his tongue like expensive wine, "by a Slytherin excuse for a worm, there's no other way to laugh."

Severus was quiet. A shudder ran through his stiff shoulders, playing back and forth between them. If this was the Light, please, please, please let him remain in the oblivion of Darkness.

The man studied him for a moment. "You're very striking, you know."

"Sir?" Severus squinted. He must have had more to drink than he'd thought; he'd definitely heard the man incorrectly.

"You're very striking. I'm not sure if you're handsome or ugly as sin, but whichever you are, you're striking."

Severus didn't respond. He felt the leonine eyes trace him, the thin fabric of his shirt loose over slender torso, the leather that left neither ridge nor religion a secret. Wherever they inspected, Severus felt an invisible layer of snail's slime creep over his body. He shirked. He stared at the naked floor.

"My wife won't be awake for hours."

"Yes, sir." Severus huddled into himself as much as he dared.

"Wait for me. Next door. The water closet. I'll be along presently."

Severus shivered. He yanked open the door and hurried out. The serpent of his spine curved tightly; the serpents of his arms constricted around his chest. The deceitful serpents of his legs followed the stark black floor to the next door along, and he opened it. Severus denied that he understood why; in his heart, he knew it was only one more grope towards oblivion.

He closed the door and didn't layer it with locking charms. Shaking, he staggered to the far wall by the sink and, sliding against it, sank to the floor until his knees met his chest. Eyes wide in the dark, he didn't speak, didn't move. Only the rasp of his lungs broke the silence and he sat, wand tight in his hand, cowering like a serpent while the lion stalked its prey.