The Prince’s Unshared Tale: Uncut
“Did you make that happen?”
“No.” He looked both defiant and scared.
“You did!” She was backing away from him. “You did! You hurt her!”
“No ” No I didn’t!”
But the lie did not convince Lily: After one last burning look, she ran from the little thicket, off after her sister, and Snape looked miserable and confused....*
The scene dissolved again. When things settled, Harry thought for a moment he was back in his own memory, in his own cupboard. But Snape was the one in the lumpy camp bed, the one shivering slightly under too thin blankets.
He had not aged yet, but his eyes looked familiar to Harry: they were the same brooding eyes the adult Snape wore. They were gazing fixedly at the clock, whose hands were pointing at an obtuse angle. From outside the room, there was the faint sound of sobbing. Snape was sneering now. Harry followed him out of his room.
“You married him; you deserve to wallow in misery for being stupid.”
Harry jumped at the malevolence in the young Snape’s voice. The woman sobbing to a shawl on the rocking chair seemed used to it, however, for she made no reaction but a vehement hiss of, “Get out of my sight, you depraved boy!”
“Gladly,” answered Snape, taking the same overlarge coat from a hook beside the door. He shrugged it on with so much malice seams in the shoulder ripped. He paid no mind. Nor did the woman when, instead of going out, Snape ran back to his room, snatched something from a drawer and carefully pocketed it. Harry was unable to see what it was.
Snape opened the door of his house to a flurry of snowflakes. The woman snarled behind him and slammed the door closed with her wand. Snape trudged off, his head down, his hands in his pockets. Harry looked around. The street was deserted and dirty; the houses were shabby. Neither was as yet concealed by the snowfall. He understood the scorn in his aunt’s voice when she spoke of where Snape lived.
Presently, they came to a murky river made even more sluggish by the cold. Litter was scattered in the bank. Harry followed Snape along it until they came upon a break in the stile. They traversed the footbridge to the little thicket opposite. The trees were bare now; this seemed to annoy Snape, because he made little growling noises and hunkered deeper into his coat, as though wishing to burrow into it completely.
The road they crossed led to a small town, astir with Christmas bustle and bright with Christmas decorations. Snape didn’t look up once, not even when he bumped into people, who either shoved him aside, harrumphed, or patted him kindly on the shoulder. This last seemed to anger him. The last two times someone did that, he actually snarled a magical curse and glared.
He continued walking, Harry trudging along, patience wearing thin. How long was the walk to his mother’s place?
But he shouldn’t have grumbled or doubted. Snape turned a corner, and then, above the medley of carols flooding the street from the shops, rose Lily’s voice. “Severus?”
Snape looked up. Harry was looking avidly at his mother, who was wrapped in a teal scarf and a flaxen mink coat, but he still caught the wide grin that stretched over Snape’s face, and the way he tried to erase it hastily with a scowl.
Lily had already run over and was then dragging Severus to an alley between the greengrocer’s and the candy shop. The smell was half-delightful, half-dreadful. Lily didn’t seem to notice. She eagerly clasped Snape’s bare hands in her mittened own.
“Oh, Severus, how nice to see you at Christmas! How have you been? I’m so sorry we haven’t seen each other, we’ve been at school, you know, we only just got back two days ago, and we went straight to Auntie Enid’s house because she hasn’t seen us since I was six.”
“ ‘How nice’, really? You had to drag me beside trash bins first before you can talk to me.”
“Don’t be spiteful. I just don’t want Tuney to see. You know you don’t get along well, and though our parents don’t believe you’re nasty, I don’t want to antagonise Tuney at Christmas.”
“Oh, if they don’t believe I’m nasty, they might invite me for dinner. How will Tuney cope then?”
“Why don’t you invite me for dinner? You don’t have siblings who’d disagree.”
Snape gaped at her. “But I have a father who’d probably kick you right back across the river, after taking your fur.”
There was a second’s silence. And then Lily shook Snape’s hands again. “Come now, he can’t be that bad.”
“If he isn’t, do you think I’d be here, having a conversation with you in a reeking alleyway?”
Lily, who had been craning her neck looking out at the street, snapped her head back. She looked at Snape with eyes glittering a bit more than usual. Snape hungrily stared back for about a couple of seconds before looking away. That was when Lily made a small noise in her throat.
What occurred next was so fast Harry didn’t have time to make a sound. His mother leaned in, engulfed Snape in a golden, warm mink hug and kissed him on the cheek.
“I have to go, Severus. But I do wish I could take you with me!”
Snape was gaping at her again. Only when Petunia’s shrill voice calling her sister reached them again did he blush, then sneer. “I wouldn’t go anywhere near your sister. You’re the one who needs pity, having her.”
“Severus!”
“Don’t mind me. I just don’t like her, is all.”
Lily waved a mittened hand and changed the subject. “Are you going to spend your Christmas evening walking around in the cold?”
“Maybe. That has more appeal than going home. I can’t wait to go to Hogwarts, you know that? The perfect escape from my ‘family’””
“I can’t talk about Hogwarts right now; I can’t be mooning about it at Christmas dinner. If you won’t go home, take my scarf””
And before Snape could decline, she had already looped and knotted it around his neck. With a smile and another mittened squeeze to Snape’s hands, she turned away. Petunia was still calling, sounding hacked off now, “Lily! Where are you?”
Snape stood there fingering the scarf’s fringe. The hem of Lily’s coat had just disappeared around the corner when he seemed to shake himself. “Lily! Lily, wait!”
Lily miraculously came back. Snape looked relieved and stopped running at once. “Your sister hasn’t seen you yet, has she?”
“No. What is it? My parents would be worried, Sev.”
“Here.” Snape reached into his pocket and shoved something into Lily’s upturned, mittened hands.
Harry looked along with his mother.
It was a four-leaf clover. Larger than average and, though a little crumpled, fresh looking.
“I think I kept it from wilting by magic. I found it in Mrs Fulson’s yard. It has nothing but weeds but there was a patch of clover and I looked f ” I mean, I found this. I couldn’t buy you anything, and if I made you anything, my father will either steal it or destroy it before it’s even finished just to t ”” Snape gritted his teeth at his babbling. “Never mind. I found this while loitering around after you stopped coming to the playground.”
“Oh, Severus.” Lily was already rooting in a pocket. She came up with a piece of tissue and tenderly placed the cloverleaf within its fold. “Thank you! How wonderful! And I’m sorry I stopped coming to the playground. I hadn’t really been that mad with you for long, but you really hurt my sister, whether intentionally or not. And she’s my sister, so I coddled her for a bit. You understand.”
Snape response was to wave her affection for Petunia off, the same way she waved his dislike off earlier.
“You gave me a green scarf. I gave you a green leaf. You know what this means?”
“What?”
“Well, haven’t I told you about the four Hogwarts houses yet? We’re sorted into one as soon as we arrive. There’re Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and, the greatest of all, Slytherin. They each have house colours. Slytherin’s is green and silver.”
Lily seemed to have forgotten about Petunia and her parents. “What about the other houses?”
“Never mind, you’re going to Slytherin, aren’t you? I wish you’d take back your scarf. You look too Gryffindor in that.”
Lily laughed. “You mean Gryffindor’s house colour is gold?”
“Red and gold,” Snape spat.
Lily laughed again and patted her hair, which she had gathered around her chest for warmth in lieu of the scarf. Petunia’s voice reached them again. “Lily! I swear, I’m going to hide half your presents if you don’t get back here this minute!”
“Such a charming girl, your sister,” Snape said flippantly.
“She doesn’t mean it. Sometimes I do want to give her half of my presents. I always seem to get twice more than she does””
“I wonder why.”
“Stop it! Bye, Severus! Can we see each other again before we go back to school?”
“I’ll be ‘spying’ by.”
The flurry of snowflakes intensified, and Lily disappeared, or maybe it was just Snape’s memory moving on, Harry along with it.
* Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Chapter 33 p. 668, American Edition
© JK Rowling
Author’s Notes: Thank you to Andrea for coming up with such lovely prompts. And thank you to coffee. Your stimulating attributes never ceases to amaze me. I wrote this in one sleep-deprived sitting.
This is my first Severus Snape fic. I don’t read him, so I don’t write him. My idea is that he and Eileen were quite close, hence, the candidness. ^_^ Thank you for reading. Please tell me what you think.