Thanks to all my reviewers.

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The headmaster stood in Severus’s cell, staring at his student with mingled concern and fury.

“What have they done to you?” he breathed.

Severus blinked in the sudden light. He had explored the room by touch but this was the first time he was seeing it. Walls of polished stone, floor the same, empty except for a pot in one corner and his uneaten porridge in a tin mug: sight added little to his knowledge of it.

“Their duty!” he spat. The headmaster’s words of three days ago rang between them. It’s everybody’s duty to do what they can to defeat Voldemort. Yours too. Screwing up his eyes he stared at the floor. Bright, too bright.

The old man could move swiftly when he chose. In one rustling movement he glided from the door to bend over the hunched bruised body in the corner. Gentle hands skimmed over the boy, parting his hair, patting him down, pausing at the left arm crusted with dried blood.

“There’s nothing here that’s beyond my power to fix,” Dumbledore murmured.

Severus jerked away, turning his face to the wall. His stiff limbs screamed in protest. It was hours since he’d moved.

“Leave it!” he snapped. “I’m a Death Eater, what did you think they’d do? If we caught one of them you’d be scraping bits off the moon.”

His stomach jumped up his throat and he pushed past the other to retch into the chamber pot. They’d had one captive at the first meeting that summer. There wasn’t much left of him by the time it was Severus’s turn. He’d wanted to prove himself and had experimented with a Glacis hex on the man’s lung. He didn’t like to remember what the long glass shards had done to the crumpled chest and he’d had to swallow his vomit and stand tall as men clapped him on the shoulder with rough good humour. Even the Dark Lord had smiled, his striking features smoothing into approval.

That’s what they’d do to him if – when – they found him out. It didn’t matter, he deserved it. Yet his fists clenched as his shrunken stomach turned itself inside out over the pot. It was months since he’d been able to keep down anything but toast.

It shouldn’t have taken long to empty his gut but he continued dry retching long after that was over. Long-fingered wrinkled hands held back his hair, rubbed comforting circles into his back and shoulders. Almost he leaned into the touch, but then he reminded himself this was the man that had put him here, without hesitation or apology. They were still on different sides. Even as their spy, he would never be truly a part of the Light.

Afterwards, the old man pulled him into his arms to rest against his shoulder. The silver beard made a scratchy but soft pillow. Too weak to resist, he closed his eyes and dozed, waking ten minutes later with the just-scrubbed feeling of being newly healed. He tried to pull away but the arms tightened around him and he couldn’t move without hurting the man.

“Rest a while longer, child,” the soft voice soothed.

He stiffened.

“I’m not a child. I’m seventeen. They’ll try me as an adult – if they try me at all.”

“There’ll be no need for a trial if you’re still resolved to spy for us.”

As if there was a choice. On one hand, a quiet cell in Azkaban, reliving those sickening scenes in his mind, waiting for the Dark Lord to pluck him out at leisure as a night’s entertainment and object lesson. On the other, repeating those scenes in real life, waiting for his Lord to pluck him out of the circle upon discovery, etc, etc. There was little difference he could see except –

“They won’t be able to arrest my friends if I’m spying.” Not his friends anymore, not his friends, he’d betrayed them. But what else could he call them? “That would break my cover and then I’d be useless.” Not to mention dead and broken into a thousand bleeding squishy pieces.

“Not at first. Not unless your companions put themselves in the way of discovery.”

Companions. Was that what they were now? Just people he met on the road and traveled with for a day?

He wrenched himself free and sat with his legs folded in front of him and his back to the wall. Despite himself, his thin lips twitched into a brief half-smirk. Only Dumbledore would sit on the floor of a prison cell in aqua silk robes patterned with pink and gold cherubs. How Rab's sister-in-law, Bella, would have cackled and Ev would have made a wisecrack about their revered head belonging on a naming-cake. Wilkesie would have rolled his eyes and Rab’s cheeks would have got redder and redder till he let out his firecracker laugh.

Not mere companions, he’d known them too long and too well. Had smeared home-brewed salve on raw hands after Herbology lessons, stayed up nights studying how to transfigure butterbeer to firewhiskey, flown tandem till he finally learnt to control his broom. He knew exactly what they’d have said and thought, what hexes they’d eventually use the night he lay, revealed and shivering, in front of them.

Crucio from Rab. Possibly on his kneecaps, if too many had been before him with the same spell, but more likely on his eyes. He wasn't very creative, but that was his sister-in-law's favourite. Bella had a particular fondness for Crucioing eyes and Dolph and Rab would copy her choice. They always did.

Wilkesie would slice his fingers off, one half-joint at a time, and Ev would stare at him for a long farewell moment then shrug up his thin shoulders and Diffindo his neck in one last act of friendship. Once his spinal cord was severed, he wouldn’t feel what they did to most of the rest of him. He hoped Ev would get first turn.

He blinked, once, twice and again. His eyes were burning and his throat ached. If he’d had his wand he’d have conjured a spring of clear water to drink from and to dip his head into. He had no wand.

“Who hit you?” the headmaster asked, a hint of steel in his pleasant voice.

Severus shrugged. His head was muzzy and talking in full sentences seemed too much work.

“Quiet one held me first. One with bits missing raped my mind. Guess he did most of the punching.” His eyes closed and he needed a gigantic yawn to force them open again. “Does it matter? Just doing their job, weren’t they?”

“It’s not their job to treat you so roughly.”

"It’s their job to find every scrap of information they can drag out of me however they can!” he snarled, anger lending him temporary strength. “Do you think I’m stupid? Would they weigh my bruises against saving lives? Would you?” You didn’t, did you? That’s why I’m here.

"They have to fight Death Eaters, not become them.”

“Not much difference is there? They’ll use the darkest hexes they’re allowed on us, same as we do on them. Only difference is what orders come down from the top.” He glowered through his greasy curtain of hair at the headmaster who was shaking his head in disagreement. “Don’t pretend you don’t know that. Threatened me with Imperio in your office, didn’t you? Told me they’d get an order letting them use it if I chewed off my tongue. Remember that?”

“I remember. But they don’t joy in using Unforgivables, even against Death Eaters. It’s a last resort.”

Severus just closed his eyes and shook his head. Dumbledore hadn’t seen the triumph in the old Auror’s eye as his fist crashed down. Given the chance the man would joy in a Crucio quite as much as Bella. He was sure of it.

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I see Dumbledore as someone who uses people, though with the best of intentions. If in canon he can knowingly place baby-Harry in a house where he'll be mistreated, then he certainly can hand Severus over to Auror buddies for a few days without being OOC. It's part of a learning process he finds essential and, unlike Draco in HBP, this Severus has already ripped his soul.

Although the Lestranges are out of school and married, Snape thinks of them familiarly here as Bella and Dolph, rather than as Mr and Mrs Lestrange, since (according to Sirius, GoF, ch 27, "Padfoot Returns") they had been part of the "gang of Slytherins" Snape was friends with at school.