Hello everyone! *clears throat* I have an announcement to make... *Snape snorts* I am starting a new story!

This has NO CONNECTION WHATSOEVER with my 'Narrator Snape' series (which I have been writing up to now). As you will see, Snape is not narrating here, for one. I wanna try out a little different Severus...

... that and he requested at wand-point that I make a story where Harry gets much more tortured than he does. *laughs* I had to say yes.

For those reading 'Full Circle', there is no need to worry-- I will continue both stories without letting either slide. But as I said before, they are irrelevant.

'Go with the Tide' starts in the summer after GoF, as so many 'torture Harry and see how Snape reacts' stories do.

Can you tell I am already having fun?

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It is the last time you burn my bacon, boy! I will give you a lesson that you shall never forget you worthless waste of life!...

DON'T YOU DARE GLARE AT ME!

.... .... ....

Severus Snape still was smirking to himself in disgust and indignacy. At times he couldn't understand Dumbledore's way of thinking, and why he had to be involved in every escapade that old coot came up with. Or his reasoning. Like what he had to do today. Rescue Harry bloody Potter. And why, one might have asked? Because Sybil predicted his imminent demise.

As if Sybil predicted anything else.

Snape had nearly started laughing when Dumbledore told him how he had decided to get the Golden Boy back to Hogwarts only a month into the holidays. But Dumbledore would not let him off the hook, and what's worse, he didn't let Snape even get some of the venom he felt churning in his chest out like usual, and virtually kicked the Potions Master out of the office pleading the utmost urgency.

Hah.

That had been precicely the reason Snape had taken a long, soaking bath that lasted forty minutes before carefully picking out his muggle clothes and going to Hogsmeade to disapparate to number 4 Privet Drive. He had even tried on his black jeans and shirt for style, like a meticulous boy before a date. Anything to waste as much time as possible.

But at last, Severus Snape was standing in front of the house. It was late afternoon, and people were starting to get back into their homes. Snape swore under his breath. He would have preferred it if it had been night, but he had not come up with anything to do to waste time for that long.

With his most disgusted scowl, he walked up to the muggle house and knocked on the door.

Nothing.

Muttering under his breath that they had better not have gone on some surprise trip to the seaside, he knocked harder.

Still nothing.

Snape turned around to leave, so angry he was bordering to livid. He had been sent for nothing to an empty house. Storming down the driveway, he kicked hard the first suitable letout for his frustration. It just happened to be the Dursley dustbin. The force was so much that even though the bin was full, it tipped over with a big crash, and garbage rolled out. Snape couldn't care less. That is, until one item caught his eye and checked his speed.

Potter's glasses. And closer to the dustbin, what seemed to be the burned remains of the boy's transfiguration textbook. Or was it potions? Snape lingered, for a moment perplexed. He picked up the glasses tentatively.

They were smashed.

Pocketing them unconsciously, Snape walked back to the front door and knocked the door as hard as he possibly could. When nobody answered, he pulled out his wand and let himself in with the unlocking charm. It seemed to be a deserted house. Snape had been in enough to be able to tell. He frowned to himself. Something was off. Something that he couldn't quite pinpoint at the moment but yet he perceived. Nobody was inside. Shutters were down, beds were made, and even the refrigerator was locked. But if it was deserted...

... why did the house smell as if they had just roasted meat? Snape didn't like how this was going at all. The slow creeping anticipation and the prickling of his skin were dead signs that whatever he found out, he was not going to like. And Snape hated things that displeased him.

"Potter. Out now." he commanded in an irritated voice.

Still no answer. But Snape was a spy. He somehow knew that although there was little life in the building, there still was some. He could feel, just below hearing threshold, a ragged breathing. But where? He checked and double checked every room in the house. Even the one that seemed like a storage room, with bars at the window, although it seemed preposterous that anyone could live there.

There was no sign of the young Gryffindor he was after. It was exactly that which alarmed him: It seemed as though Harry Potter did not live in this house. There was no article of clothing, no possession that he could recognise, no photograph to mark the boy's existence. He might as well have been in the wrong house.

Yet Snape was well aware that he was not in the wrong house. Standing in the middle of the living room, he contemplated, then as if taking a decision, he poised his wand.

"Point me."

The wand tilted and tugged towards a direction, and Snape followed, perplexed. Surely he can't have missed anything upstairs. He had even looked under the beds. He realised the wand stopped pulling on him, a sign that he had arrived to his destination. He blinked, arching an eyebrow. He was standing in front of a cupboard under the stairs.

He snorted and scowled. Perfect. The family had obviously gone on an excursion and Potter had locked his magical possessions here for safekeeping, which made the wand point him here.

Still, this was the only place Snape hadn't looked for the boy.

"Bah. Might as well, for the sake of argument." Snape muttered under his breath, and uttered the spell.

"Alohomora."

The door swung open, revealing a dark interior. The burned flesh smell hit him much stronger than before. Snape could feel the hairs at the base of his skull lift. What was going on? Alarms of all sort went off in his mind, and he forgot his dissatisfaction and contempt as he whispered Lumos to further look inside.

What he beheld made his eyes turn colder than pewter, his teeth clench in anger, his hand holding up the wand white at the knuckles. He had finally found Harry Potter. And he had been wrong.

Inside the cupboard lay hunched a boy he barely recognised as the cheeky adolescent he wanted to erase from the student lists of Hogwarts. He was laying on a tool box and some shoeboxes, in an odd arch, his head tilting completely backwards. Snape doubted the boy was even conscious. Potter's face was a bloody mess, as if someone had hit him many times over there, or used the boy's head to make a dent in a wall. Under the light of the wand there were little glittering pieces there as well. Merlin, could this be glass shards? Looking further down, he found out what the source of the smell had been: Potter's right hand and forearm was a mass of burnt flesh, sinewy and wet, like someone had made him hold a hot cattle prod for far too long...

Snape did not want to see anything more. Tentatively, he placed two long, elegant fingers at the boy's neck, and established with some relief that Harry was still alive. Thank Merlin for that Potter, or Dumbledore would have my hyde for real. He strengthened the light from his wand and put it in his pocket so that its tip would still cast some enough illumination so that he could see what he was doing. As he gathered up the limp form into his arms, he felt rage. For many things. First off, for being subjected to this sight that shattered so many of his convenient preconceptions for the bane of his existence. Now he would never be able to look upon the boy without remembering the cupboard under the stairs. Considerable less leverage for harrassment, and Snape -liked- harrassing Harry Potter.

Second off, he was sent to retrieve and rescue the boy when he was only just into the new circle Voldemort had created, and still under scrutiny for his loyalties. If any hostile eye saw him, the next gathering would be his last. What was Dumbledore -thinking-? Snape felt that at the moment he hated the old wizard.

And third off, who would that the gall, the perversion to do this to a child except a drunken Death Eater? And whatever for? Even at his worst moments, when Snape truly wished for Potter's death, he never had quite conceived torture such as this for the boy.

"Where are you going with that!? Get OUT of my HOUSE!"

Snape's terrible gaze was fixed on the wide frame of the man standing in the front door holding a beach umbrella, a tall thin woman peeking behind him. Snape smiled at Vernon. And when he smiled in mental states as these, Snape was extremely dangerous.

"Did you do this?" he asked with a silky, calm voice that could chill hell and shifted his hold on Harry.

"The boy is mine, freak! Give me what is mine!" the man turned purple and walked in, the beach umbrella like a battling rod, mistaking Snape's low tones for a sign of weakness.

"Nothing I would like better." Snape assented and pulled out his wand.

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end Chapter 1. Warning: full effect of Harry's injuries to be displayed yet. Opinions? Should I continue this or not?