Chapter Text
Severus Snape was born alone.
Under skies as dark as his watchful eyes, fat drops of rain pelted against the rickety windows, drowning out his mother’s cries. When she dragged him up from between her legs with clammy, uncertain hands, he barely uttered a sound. He merely watched, observed. She would forever recall feeling that they were the eyes of a man from centuries past.
When the front door slammed, the whole house shook. Shuddered, as though the building itself knew.
Tobias Snape burst through the door in a cloud of stale smoke and booze. His wife gifted him a tight grin that he did not return. Bleary eyes trailed across the messy room to the dampness where his wife’s waters had broken, to the bloody placenta, still attached to his newborn son. Fluid soaked through the already decaying mattress where his family lay.
“You couldn’t have put down a towel?” he asked gruffly, and Severus burst into tears.
He was barely a month old the first time he witnessed his father hit his mother. A petty spat over dirty dishes, resulting in crimson blood violently spattered over the unwashed plates. His mother crawled across the kitchen floor, whispering broken reassurances to her son. He was too young to remember, too new to understand. But moments like that stick, burrowing their way into a boy’s subconscious, slowly shredding away at his juvenile innocence until the only thing left was darkness.
Perhaps in another family, in another life, he could have been bright. But in that house, with those parents, he never stood a chance. So, Severus quickly lived up to his namesake: he grew cold. Stern. Discerning. Lonely.
When he turned four and still hadn’t uttered a word, his parents grew frustrated. His mother blamed herself, and his father blamed her too. Severus tried to tell her that it wasn’t her fault. He would watch her sleep—a very serious expression on his little face—trying to project the thought from his mind to her own.
That was also the year he taught himself to read. There was never an abundance of children’s books in the house, so he read his mother’s old school books instead. Carefully tracing a finger along with the shapes of the letters until they made sense, he read and re-read each edition of every textbook he could find. It was his only solace from the sounds his mother made as his father continued to beat her down.
By the time he was six, he could mentally recite the recipes to two dozen different potions.
They became his tether, the only thing stopping him from succumbing fully to the darkness. As he delicately picked bits of mould from his morning bread, he imagined he was picking lavender for a Sleeping Draught. As he handed his mother a damp cloth for her bloody nose, he imagined they were brewing Doxycide and she had accidentally rubbed some Bundimun Secretion onto her nose. As his father tightly grabbed him by the back of the neck, he imagined…
Well, he never did manage to turn his father into some fantasy story. He just stood motionless, forced not only to bear witness to his mother’s assaults but to hear Tobias’ absurd justifications.
She was always too loud, too quiet, too demanding, too apathetic, too affectionate, too cold. Too much. Not enough. Never enough, not for her husband.
Severus, however, thought that his mother was the most glorious person he had ever known. She was bright, shining, strong. As if fated by the name she was given, Eileen was pure magic in the eyes of her son. After his father had passed out for the night or had gone out in search of more drink or another bed to warm, Eileen would hold her son close and whisper to him until he fell asleep. She would tell him stories of magic, of a school with a funny name full of children just like him, children too special, too good for this cold world. His mother did what she could, but even at her brightest, she could not shield her son from his father’s darkness.
He often wondered if his father’s lack of magic was the reason behind his cruelty. For Severus would be envious too, he thought, if he were just a Muggle.
Magic—despite all its inconceivable beauty—was no cure for loneliness… and Severus was entirely, unbearably alone. There were days—weeks—where he never left that tiny, dilapidated house on Spinners End, passing time by leaning against his dusty bedroom window, watching the world go by.
He was three years old the first time he noticed Lily Evans. She was a tiny girl hidden beneath a wild mess of bright copper hair, like unruly flames burning down her slight frame. Her mouth was open in a perfect O, and she was wailing, defiantly stomping her feet in a display of such fierce, unbridled emotion that Severus couldn’t bear to look away.
So he didn’t.
He learnt Lily Evans the same way he learnt his potions. Her daily routine became the blueprint for his own. Each morning he watched her walk down his street in her blue tartan school dress, always three paces behind her sister. In the evenings, he would watch her return, now always three paces ahead of the older girl. On the weekends, he would slink out of his house and follow her-–always at a safe distance–-as she and her sister skipped to the local park. That was when he was most envious: the time he spent crouched behind a tree, watching the girls slide and swing and laugh without a care in the world. There were moments where he almost dared to step out from behind the great oak tree, yearning to be a part of their world, but in the end, he never seemed to find the courage to.
He merely observed, watched from behind a curtain, as he had always done. Until one day, the curtain was ripped back.
He was watching her at the park, as per his routine. His heart burned with an unquenchable desire to join the sisters, to be wild, carefree… normal. Lily’s sugar-sweet laugh reverberated off the trees, more beautiful than the most melodious birdsong, as she swung higher and higher on the creaking swing.
Then she jumped.
Severus gasped in time with her older sister’s shriek, but Lily’s amused expression didn’t slip. She hovered high in the air for a second before floating down with the weightlessness of a feather. Severus fell forward in shock, and two sets of eyes locked on his red face.
The older girl rounded on him, firing questions like bullets, disdain clear on her pinched face. Severus scrambled up, panic melting through his body. He opened and closed his mouth like a fish gasping for air. He was six and a half and had yet to speak a word out loud.
Lily approached him then, more curious than cruel, “what’s your name anyway?”
He dared a glance up, breath catching in his throat at the intensity in her emerald green eyes. There was fire behind them, a yearning that he would spend the remainder of his life trying to understand.
He swallowed thickly. “Severus,” he croaked out.
Lily grinned a gap-toothed smile, her eyes squinting in the sunlight. “That’s a funny name.”
Starting then, Severus had a friend.
He skipped through the front door with a smile on his face that day, a startling change in physiognomy. Eileen nearly dropped her coffee in shock when he verbally greeted her — casually, as though it were something he did every day.
From then on, Severus spoke — not loudly, and not often. His voice would forever hold a low drawl, a slow precision, as though every word that escaped from his lips was painstakingly intentional.
He spoke most with Lily. She was a splash of colour on the walls surrounding his grey life. Over the years, he became a part of her routine instead of a distant observer. He would run out onto the street and wave goodbye to her each morning, and each morning she would scrunch up her face with longing and displeasure at having to leave.
Lily hated school. She was too inquisitive, too stubborn, too loud, too different. She fancied herself a bit of a rebel, an activist, and believed no one could change the world from behind a desk.
Her eyes lit up with envy when Severus told her that he was homeschooled, although ‘homeschooled’ was a bit of a loose term. He mostly sat in his dingy room, reading, writing, and counting out sprigs of dittany, lavender, and whatever else he could find for his makeshift potions.
Lily was also a witch. And Severus told her, much to her chagrin. It took over a week for him to string the words together in a way she understood, in a way that didn’t sound cruel. That seemed to be an ongoing struggle for him, not sounding cruel. He thought it wasn’t his fault that some people were just so easy to be cruel to.
One afternoon when they were nine, Lily’s older sister—Petunia—was teasing them. Spitting vile insults and degrading their friendship. Severus narrowed his eyes, and a branch overhead cracked, falling hard on Petunia’s shoulder. Lily shrieked as her sister burst into tears, rounding on Severus, angry, accusatory.
When she ran after her sister, he was left irritated and embarrassed. Why did it matter? She had started it! If he had the opportunity, he would drop much more than a branch on his father’s head, and they were all the same—Muggles.
Lily disagreed vehemently, so Severus never brought it up again.
As their eleventh birthdays approached, Lily was riddled with anxiety. “What if my letter never comes? Petunia says it’s all just pretend.”
“It’s real for us, I promise,” Severus reassured.
“Can you tell me another story about Hogwarts?” she asked quietly.
It was the same routine almost every day, but Severus didn’t resent it. In fact, he relished it. It made him feel ten feet tall. He was Lily’s only window into the wizarding world, and when he told her the stories, she hung onto his every word, looking up at him with eyes full of wonder.
He would tell her stories all day, for the rest of his life, if only to be looked at like that forever.
On January 9th, 1971, Severus got his letter. Three weeks later, Lily got hers.
“We’ll be friends forever, right, Sev?” Lily asked, reading through her Hogwarts letter for the eighth time. “You won’t ditch me as soon as we get there, will you?”
“Why would I ditch you?” Severus asked, frowning at his friend.
“I dunno, you just know so much about this stuff. What if there are heaps of other kids there? Kids who are way more magical than me?” She started chewing on her lip anxiously.
“Nobody could be more magical than you,” he muttered, cheeks glowing red.
“Just promise we’ll always be friends?”
He looked at her properly then, trying to find the words to communicate just how much she meant to him.
“Of course, Lily. Always.”