"Go... You don't want to see what happens next."
The Jennings woman whimpered and struggled against his grasp, but she couldn't free herself. He had her too tightly clutched, his wand pressed to harshly into her neck. They stood in silence as he listened, with legilimency more than his hearing, for the boys to be rounded up and taken out of the house. It took Oliver longer than it ought to have done - and Snape was glad to find, searching elsewhere, that James Potter and Jasper Odair were already in the office of Harry Underhill at the Ministry's Training Center.
The children would not be unattended long.
The moment the kids were out of ear range, Severus Snape whispered in the Jenning woman's ear. "You like beating children, I hear."
"No," she gasped, "No, I don't. I never --"
"Don't lie... to me," he breathed. "I can see it in your mind... exactly what you did..."
"I didn't, I - I didn't do --"
"Do you need a reminder?"
And suddenly he was projecting into her mind the strike - but she felt it. She could feel it throb through her cheek bone, through her temple.
"What else have you done?" Snape whispered.
Suddenly, she was flooded by thoughts, memories, flashes, pictures of the stuff that she'd done to each of the children she'd ever mistreated. Their faces, their names floated through her mind... Snape imagined her brain like a cauldron, and he stirred it counter clockwise, all her thoughts and memories coming to the surface.
But she could feel it. She could feel the back handed cracks across the face, feel the pushes, feel the stairs and the landing from a terrible fall. She felt the punches, kicks, the beltings, the rod cracking mercilessly across her backside, across her knuckles, across her back... It was as though every memory were renacted on her in an instant, invisibly, without Snape ever letting her go.
She was sobbing.
"What's the matter?" Severus whispered, "Doesn't it feel good anymore?"
She shook her head, "Please... no more... please..."
"Yes, that is the point," he whispered. "There will be no more of this. No more of this because you will not be given the chance to do it again."
"I - I won't, I won't, I swear, I --"
"You needn't swear," he whispered. "After all, you can't hurt the living once you're dead yourself."
She fought, trying to get away.
Severus whispered, "What I wouldn't have given to do this to my own father." His voice rumbled in her ear as she quaked and sobbed in his arms. "If I had been able to..." His wand sparked just a bit and the sparks burned her skin and she let out little shrieks as they left hot red welts where they touched her.
"My mother gave all that she had to see him killed," he whispered. "Gave us both over to the service of the Dark Lord... sold our souls to the Dark Lord... because he was willing to do... what the Ministry wouldn't. He was willing to save the people who were broken and who needed help... and the Ministry... could not... too focused on... paperwork... and what's right... their skewed sense of justice.... and rights... Is he good? The Dark Lord? No. By no means. I have no choice but to serve him... and me now doubly so since she did not finish what she pledged... but there are times when being in his service over the service of any other is... most... beneficial..."
The Jennings woman struggled against him, but he held tighter.
"Like now."
He paused, and he turned her around, wanting to see her, to look her in the face... he reached for his mask and sliding the metal covering from his face so that she stared into his cold, black eyes.
"Please," she whispered.
He stared back into her eyes.
"I feel no mercy."
"Crucio," he hissed.
"Pleeease," she whimpered, her voice weak, body still convulsing with the pains her memory was inflicting on her, over and over and over again, a broken film reel that kept repeating itself, now electric.
"Secarexpulso!" he bellowed in her ear, the explosion shook the entire house, blasting a hole through the ceiling, through the attic, through the roof, the bright-white light bursting the windows and filling the world for a moment with electric magic that crackled as it moved, visible like veins cracking the walls, cutting through everything that it touched without stopping.
She screamed in fear.
"Avada Kedavra!"
The green light that flashed filled the entire room.
He looked up, up at the sky, and shouted, "MORSMODRE!"