He flicked small pieces of crumpled up paper across the room, defiant without the worrying presence of his father in the house to discover his misdemeanour. Balls of paper on the floor might not seem like such a heinous crime to most people, but his father would have seen him punished for it. Anything that showed weakness, boredom or lack of thought enraged the older Snape, pushing the dark man into a place that Severus hoped he would never himself visit.
Watery light seeped through the window and pooled half-heartedly about him. His face tilted awkwardly towards it and he blinked a little at the lack of gloom in the world beyond Darkacre. The sun was unkind to him, highlighting the lack of colour in his cheeks and reflecting dully off the gloss on his hair. Not that Severus cared much about his looks; no one else, apart from the servants and the occasional lout from the village, saw him, so there was no one to tell him he had the look of a cadaver about him. What Severus really cared about was his books and his garden. By his own, infallible, calculations his father had been gone twenty-seven days and four hours, with just a brief visit on Christmas Day, during which he had presented Severus with a Romanian Rue Fly – a nasty specimen that battered feverishly against the glass case that Kentigern had presented to Severus with no affection.
“Don’t let it out, boy,” he had boomed. “It will kill you as soon as sniff you.”
Severus had winced at his father’s lack of any thought and ungraceful speech. The blue-hued fly had flipped and turned for precisely thirty-six hours, five minutes and thirteen seconds before lack of any sustenance caused the violent wings to beat one last time before giving up the battle completely. The fly was still in his room, dead in its case sitting on the windowsill drinking in the light. He had a good idea how the creature must have felt in its cage; he often wandered through the house flapping his robes with the same frenetic desire to be free of the walls that confined him.
The paper balls had formed a neat arc around his rubbish bin, like a constellation orbiting some yawning star. He’d leave them there until someone came and tided them up. That someone was most likely to be one of the servants that his father kept, showing off as he was wont to do. The house-elves did all the below stairs drudge in order to keep the human servants looking clean and well-presented. For servants, they had the most callus-free hands and sported far fewer blemishes than Severus himself had.
He looked down at his own hands; bony fingers stretched and flexed, dry skin and blisters witness to the amount of work he put into his garden and his Potions experiments. If he twisted his head slightly he could just see the fringes of his hard work peeking beyond a line of Castlewellans. Was it normal, he mused, for a boy of his age to be interested in gardening. He had the vague notion from some of the fiction books he had found in his mother’s rooms that boys did not tend to plants and spend their time forcing begrudging flora to offer itself to the sun. There was an inkling in his head that he ought to have been out on his broomstick or doing something more manly like winking at girls or fighting bigger boys for the excitement of it. But the only girls Severus met were congenital idiots and fighting was an overrated pastime. He had engaged in the activity just twice, both times with boys from the village. Severus had suffered significant injury in both skirmishes and made a resolution not to revisit that particular arena of boyhood.
That had been before he learned to harness his magic, however. He knew that if he was to get into a fight now, he could pulverise the idiots with a few spoken words and a twitch of his newly-bought wand. He wouldn’t, though. The Ministry would be down on him like a blinkered elephant, which would provoke his father’s lion temper and before he knew it he would have a zoo full of angry people roaring at him.
He sighed.
The wind echoed him as it galloped past his window, rattling the Castlewellans and warning him off going outside. All that was necessary to complete the feeling of dejection was a huge black cloud crossing the sun in that dramatic way that nature has and his day would be a complete washout.
His mother had left a box on his desk that morning with a pretty little message of love. She had always tried to make a purchase of his love with such expensive trinkets that must be kept hidden from his father lest he be thought spoiled. The box had contained an astrolabe made of finest gold and beautifully engraved by what could only have been a mountain goblin from Switzerland. He had tinkered with it for an hour this morning, finding novelty in its beauty. It had quickly worn off when he moved the components around and arrived at the time.
Ten years and three hours since he had been shoved unceremoniously into the world by his mother into the waiting arms of his monstrous father. Ten years of abject misery broken only by his ability to be alone with himself. He got along with himself quite well; far better than he did with other people. Other people talked to him, but didn’t really want him to talk to them. Other people had plenty to say, but very little desire to listen. Other people were – in short – boring and pointless.
Still, this time next year he would be at school, if father had his way. That had to be an improvement on his current lot in life; all that learning; all those professors waiting to impart that learning to him. Best of all, his mother could stop trying so hard to love him. The failure he saw in her eyes often pained him. He was learning to not let it show, learning that the only way to reciprocate her lack of love was to feel nothing for her.
She had left a card with the astrolabe.
To my darling boy, with much love on your birthday, Mama.
“Meaningless guff,” he had muttered, tossing it into the fire where its lack of real affection was soon consumed by hungry flames. She hadn’t even brought herself to use his name in the card. My darling boy. What sort of thing was that to be calling your son?
He stood up and stretched stiffened limbs. At some point today he would be required to go downstairs and smile at an icing-covered confection that proudly proclaimed his ten years to anyone unfortunate to witness his birthday. Someone, usually Cook, would be propelled into the room to sing Happy Birthday to him, and he would be expected to stand there and look grateful for their time. His mother would smile and clap her dainty hands and try her utmost to look happy. Severus snorted at the thought of happy. Being happy was another thing that was grossly overvalued. Happiness was for dimwits. Happiness was for those who couldn’t stimulate their mind beyond their own comfort.
He raised flint eyes to the sky and watched as a heavy clot of black rolled in front of the sun. It was quickly followed by an explosion of thunder. He knew he shouldn’t have expected anything else. His birthday was always a dead loss. Sometimes Severus thought he got the birthdays he deserved. And with that thought bothering him, he steeled himself to get through the rest of the empty celebrations that would doubtless be thrust under his long, disdainful nose.
Birthday Blues by Magical Maeve
Chapter Notes: Castlewellans are large conifers.
Darkacre is the house that Snape grew up in according to the Daughter of Light series.