Chapter 2: Predestination
Severus had never liked the last part of the school year after exams were over. The lack of routine and dearth of tasks to accomplish had always bothered him, although perhaps he might have enjoyed the freedom more if it hadn’t always been accompanied by his dread of his upcoming return to the ancestral abode. Every Slytherin seemed to have an ancestral abode, so of course Severus had one too; his just happened to be a run-down row-house in a declining mill town. The reason behind the smirk on his face when he used the vague term was his own business.
Summer itself had become something that he both anticipated and dreaded ever since starting at Hogwarts. On the one hand, he was forced to return to the home that he hated and the parents he had once feared but now mostly loathed. But summer was his time with Lily, almost three months of having her all to himself. There was no interference or competition: no gaggle of Gryffindor girls who looked askance at him, no James Potter, no Marauders, no blood-status-obsessed Slytherins needling him about his “Mudblood girlfriend.” The week Lily’s family went away to the shore each year was always a dark one for Severus, and he could hardly believe that this year, the entire summer would be like that.
He had moved past the raw sadness and fear that had gripped him in the first week or so after the fight, onto a kind of twilight state in which nothing really mattered. After about a week he had stopped trying to put on a front of nonchalance; it was too much work, and just making it through the day was work enough. Severus had never been sure whether he actually dreamed about Lily, as he only rarely remembered his dreams”but his prior life had been full of daydreams about her, and he couldn’t even get himself to indulge in those anymore, because they only made him feel worse. He lacked the energy and the interest; where Lily had been, there was now just a sense of loss. She became more and more abstract to him, even though he technically saw her multiple times each day without even trying, and he realized how much of their friendship in recent years had consisted of his imaginings about her and how much of his inner life she had filled. They really hadn’t spent that much time together in recent years, if he was honest with himself about it, but the Lily of his hopes for the future had rarely been out of his thoughts. Since she couldn’t read his mind, he reflected, she probably had no idea, or she might have understood how little he had meant what he’d said.
Packing his things, he looked around his room at Hogwarts, with the stripped beds, the now-empty dressers, the debris of four boys scattered around: discarded parchments, sweet wrappers, broken quills, unclaimed socks. The warm early-summer daylight filtered in through the window, with dust motes floating gently around in and out of a sunbeam as Severus stuffed his things into his trunk, disturbing the quiet air and sending the dust briefly into swirling eddies. Empty, abandoned rooms like this always made him feel elegiac and mournful, but this year was worse than ever. Everything made him feel mournful lately.
On the Hogwarts Express, he sat with a few of his classmates from Slytherin -- by default, not really with any kind of active volition -- barely caring that, with his temporary popularity from the Lily incident having diminished, he was now back to being the odd man out in their group. They made vague references to plans for seeing each other over the summer -- plans in which he was not included -- and unlike in past years when he would angle for invitations, trying to ferret out who would be seeing whom and why he hadn’t been asked, he simply didn’t care. He seemed to just be moving from one bad situation to another: Hogwarts with Lily’s coldness tormenting him, or the train with this lot, or Spinner’s End with his parents. Nothing ever got better.
The train pulled into Platform 9-3/4 and he said his goodbyes to his companions, knowing full well that he wouldn’t be invited to see them over the summer and wouldn’t particularly miss them. Lily’s parents were at the station to meet her, of course, and in recent years, he had gotten a ride home with them in their car after the train ride north with her family. He had always done relatively well with adults and was comfortable around them, so he had actually enjoyed these trips: something about being under the wing of Mrs. Evans was very reassuring, and with Lily’s parents chatting with him and asking questions, he felt as though he were her boyfriend being quizzed by her parents, a fantasy that he was happy to entertain. On this day, though, things would be different; he hadn’t even thought about it until he exited the train and saw them on the platform. Mrs. Evans beamed at him and Mr. Evans gave him a friendly wave -- in response, he cast them an anxious smile and muttered something about having to go catch his train.
As he walked away from the puzzled pair, he could see Lily walking up behind him briskly, a frown on her face, gesturing silently with a sharp wave of her arm for her parents to cease and desist. Petunia appeared to have begged out of the annual trip to pick up Lily this year, he thought, reflecting that Lily wouldn’t have her sorrows to seek either this year. She didn’t need him at Hogwarts, but they had always been each other’s refuge in the summer; maybe that was what it would take to bring her back. Perhaps Petunia would make him look like an attractive companion by comparison. But somehow he doubted it. He hoisted his rucksack into a more comfortable position on his shoulders, dragged his trunk over to an empty trolley, and went off to find the train schedule that would let him know what platform he needed to begin the long trip home by himself.
“You’re later than usual,” his father said, without bothering to look up from his television show.
“I walked from the station,” Severus answered, depositing his things on the floor near the foot of the stairs. “I couldn’t get here any sooner.”
Still looking at the television, the elder Snape asked, “What happened to your girlfriend? Doesn’t she always give you a ride?”
Severus had thought his mother would be the one to torment him about Lily, whom she had always believed to be putting on airs for a mere Muggle-born, since “pretty” equaled “conceited” in her estimation; he hadn’t been ready to answer questions about her from his father. In a quiet, bitter voice he answered, “I’ve told you before, she’s not my girlfriend. She’s not even my friend anymore. Just leave it alone.”
His father ignored the warning in the final sentence and went on badgering. He actually bothered to look up from the BBC at this point, and with a knowing shake of his head he continued, “Good-looking bird like that, Severus -- can’t say I’m surprised. What on earth would she see in you? I always told you: stick to your own level and you won’t be disappointed.”
“I said leave it alone!” Severus yelled, slamming the kitchen door behind him as he stalked up the stairs and flung himself face-down on his bed.
God, he was going to start summer vacation with a beating for talking back to his father, and nowhere to go after it. He waited for the creak of the chair, the heavy footsteps on the stairs, and as inevitably as night follows day, a minute later they came. Usually he braced himself, heart racing: cowering in the corner, pressed against the wall, anything to partially shield himself from the blows and occasional kicks. It had occurred to him at the winter break that he was finally almost as tall as his father and perhaps big enough to fight back even without magic, but this time he was too miserable to care.
The door opened, but more slowly than it usually did when his father was about to burst in on him in anger and tear into him until his rage had been exhausted. “You listen to me, you good-for-nothing git,” his father began in a low, savage tone, still standing in the doorway. “Look at me. Look at me! ” Severus, who had pressed his face into the covers, raised his head enough to make eye contact with his father, wondering vaguely and almost impersonally whether his look of weary hatred would only incite the older man to further violence.
Having wrested from Severus the courtesy that he rarely extended himself, his father continued, “You come back here every summer with those books full of freakish nonsense and that plummy accent and your pretty redhead from up the town. Well, you listen to me. You’re no better than the people you come from, Severus Snape -- thinkin’ you’re some bloody Roman emperor like that ridiculous name your mother gave you. You’re nothing. You’re a leech, is all, and you’ll be lucky if you manage to live half as well as the life we’ve provided for you. Bloody high-and-mighty freak,” he spat, waiting to see the effect of his words on his son.
Severus remained impassive, too depressed already for the speech to even wound him. How many times had he already heard the same rant from his father? At least it would apparently be just a speech this time. Satisfied, or fed up waiting -- Severus couldn’t tell which -- Tobias Snape turned around and thumped back down the narrow staircase to the waiting TV.
Plummy accent? At Hogwarts, Severus had managed to lose some of the local drone, but not enough to keep the London types from mocking him. He couldn’t seem to win no matter where he went. He waited for a few minutes to make sure that his father wasn’t coming back up the stairs to beat him -- the old man had a tendency to return for seconds-- and finally went downstairs to collect his things. Welcome home.
The summer, of course, turned out to be every bit as bad as Severus had expected. His dad, being out of a job again, spent the days downstairs in the back room reading the paper, particularly the want-ads, and watching whatever garbage was on the small, staticky television on the rolling cart. Clearly it wasn’t a good time to be a mill-worker; had there ever been a good time to be a mill-worker? The fact that he hated the job made his situation even more pathetic: the older man was actually intelligent, where his wife was merely shrewd, but poverty and circumstances had denied him the education and opportunities he could have made good use of. When younger, he had been perpetually angry and frequently brutal; now that he was older and a bit wary of his son’s stature and powers, Tobias Snape mostly seemed defeated.
He had been a good student, apparently, perhaps even an outstanding one. But his family had been poor, secondary school back then had cost money, and tuition was a luxury they could not have afforded. The first cohort of students who benefited from the new public funding for secondary education had been born a few years after him, at least in northern England, which had lagged behind the rest of the country. His younger brother had eventually gone to university; Tobias had gone to work at the mill.
The books in the small bookcase in the front room were mostly his: crumbling textbooks with outtakes from Wordsworth, Tennyson, Pilgrim's Progress, cheap editions of Dickens and Shakespeare, remnants of a stunted but thorough education. He never talked about his disappointment and seemed to take it for granted as the first of many, but Severus's late grandmother had mentioned it once before her grandson left for his mysterious boarding school: that one of her greatest regrets was that they had not been able to send Toby to school beyond age thirteen. Sometimes Severus could pick up hints of that traditional primary education in his father's everyday speech, turns of phrase of surpassing beauty or power that pulled Severus to attention. But mostly the years of studious attention and rote memorization had just given Tobias Snape something grand to declaim when drunk.
Severus knew his father had no interest in the company of his son, the freak, and this at least was a relief. He was able to spend his days as he saw fit, which mostly meant up in his own room, with the shades drawn, free to ponder his sorrows. Pondering his sorrows held little interest for him anymore, though; he just wanted to sleep and forget it all. He occasionally managed to get out of his pajamas by noon, but some days he didn’t, and some days he fell asleep in his clothes. Some days he didn’t actually get out of bed at all. With the exception of occasional bursts of righteous anger at her lazy son by his mother, who actually had a job and therefore the right to complain, no one seemed to notice his absence. The air in the house was close and uncomfortable in the seemingly never-ending heat-wave that had hit about a week into the summer; Severus’s father moved as little as possible, getting out of his faded armchair only to change the channel, adjust the antenna on the telly, or boil another pot of tea, which he drank incessantly, heat wave or not. Eileen Snape spent her days away at the factory doing mindless bookkeeping and spent her nights complaining.
“Get out of bed, you lazy lump, and get down here for your tea!” his mother called shrilly up the stairs, announcing her return from work in the usual fashion.
“I’m not hungry!” Severus yelled back, his voice scratchy from lack of use.
“Then help with the dishes!” came the reply. Stiff from lack of movement, he heaved himself out of the bed. He preferred not to go downstairs at all, but the house didn’t have the upstairs plumbing that many of the neighbors had apparently installed; despite his lack of sustenance, his kidneys still seemed to be magically functioning, and he did require a trip to the antiquated outdoor privy. Some sort of innate survival instinct had made him keep pouring glasses of tepid water and drinking it, even if he didn’t feel like eating. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to be able to let himself just shrivel up and die.
He was getting pretty close, though, he pondered. He looked at himself in the mirror and wished in some perverse way that Lily could see what had become of him in her absence. His hair, after nearly a fortnight’s neglect, was flat and stringy, separating into oily strands that fell in his face. His eyes looked hollow, with dark shadows under them from his nocturnal vigils and erratic sleep. His clothes had the rather animal smell of an adolescent male who hadn’t bathed in many days, which bothered him surprisingly little. And the inadvertent hunger strike had left him visibly thinner, which made his nose even more prominent. He looked almost sepulchral, he thought -- like he might die of loneliness and unrequited love like something from a book -- but he seemed unable to pull it off.
Even he couldn’t stay in the bell jar forever. Maybe he was just getting used to being away from Lily and being at home, or maybe it was the change in the weather, but in the second half of July, his mental fog started to lift, and one day he actually got up, bathed even though it was sooner than absolutely necessary, put on some Muggle clothing that no longer really fit, and headed out of the house for a walk. He had no idea where he was going. Lily’s area was out of the question, so he headed away from her direction down to the river, hoping that his clothes wouldn’t make him a target for one of the gangs of out-of-work toughs that seemed to congregate down there. Straight, slim jeans seemed to be something of the fashion among certain Muggles, but not ones so short that they hit above the ankles, and he had actually finally started to develop something resembling shoulders, which meant that he had outgrown all of his old T-shirts and had to borrow an enormous one of his father’s. It had been almost funny watching his father’s response to that question, torn between not wanting to lend something to his spoiled, ungrateful git of a son and yet not wanting the boy to go out in wizard gear that to him resembled a dressing gown. Snape Sr. had forgotten and had briefly made eye-contact during the conversation, and Severus had enjoyed rifling through the petty conflict at the surface of the man’s mind.
Now out on the front step wearing the shirt, he remembered quickly that as long as he was still in the vicinity of the house and undetectable by the Ministry, he could actually do something about its size and surreptitiously cast a shrinking spell over the garment. There -- now he was just walking around in trainers, jeans, and an old Muggle undershirt, not a baggy old Muggle undershirt. Since sartorial spells had never been necessary for him before, he had stood gazing into the wardrobe with no idea how to lengthen the legs of the jeans without simply expanding the whole thing until it was much too large for him -- Engorgio? not really -- so he gave up and headed out looking vaguely ridiculous and acutely aware of it. He wondered, again with amusement that somehow came more easily to him now, what Lucius Malfoy would think. Not that he particularly cared.
The days all seemed basically the same to him, but his mother was not at work and yet had worked the day before, so therefore it was Saturday. He walked around the streets of the city, paths he had walked with Lily so many times when they both needed to get away or just wanted to go out for the fun of it. One of their favourite sites to visit had been an old church that reminded them both of Hogwarts; entering its great wooden doors and standing under its heavy stone arches had assuaged some of the homesickness they felt for their school when they were away. Severus’s father dragged him to church occasionally when the spirit moved him, but one with Puritanical roots and an austere simplicity that was nothing like this. He didn’t belong in this place, but no one had ever seemed to mind him and Lily being there. On this particular day there was apparently a fair going on in the lot next to the church, which interested Severus not at all. He walked along behind a chatty, festive crowd obviously headed toward the fair, but turned into the church itself while they went on.
As always, he wished he knew something of the appropriate ritual for entering -- when in Rome, after all -- but after all those visits with Lily, it was comfortably familiar. Coming in from the brightness of midday outside, it took a while for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dimness -- the place was lit only by a few lamps, the high stained-glass windows, and the candles lit by worshippers. He walked around the walls for a while, soaking in the coolness and ancientness, the lingering smell of incense and candles, the Latin inscriptions, the atmosphere so like the only real home he had ever known.
After a while, out of some combination of need and respect, he knelt in one of the wooden pews to think, or pray, if that’s what became of thinking while in a church. Living in a world with magic as daily evidence of it, he had to believe in some power greater than his own, but he wasn’t sure if it was what people thought of as God. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to be watching over him, and if it was indeed watching him, he couldn’t see the signs.
He looked at the worshippers kneeling by the candles that they had lit for their intentions, murmuring prayers in any number of accents, most of them Irish, and he wished he could believe in something the way they did. He had believed in Lily, and she had abandoned him -- to what? The Dark Arts? Was that what he had left without her to turn him from it? He had always known that there were two sides to his nature, and without Lily, the Dark Arts fascinated him more than ever and drew him like a moth to a beautiful, dangerous flame. In a place like this, though, it seemed sacrilegious to even think of such a thing, so he closed his mind to it. All the same, the simple, unquestioning belief of the immigrant faithful left him feeling deeply alone, and he got up to leave.
Squinting in the bright sunlight, he walked slowly away from the great edifice and continued up the street past the fair, stopping on the sidewalk to see what was going on. His glance was immediately arrested by the sight of a familiar face: Petunia Evans, with her usual discontented look. She had cut her hair and done something different and probably trendy with it, he reflected, but she still looked like Petunia. He almost didn’t recognise Lily for a second; in the mid-day sunshine she was wearing a floppy, broad-brimmed straw hat and an earth-toned, rather Bohemian sundress that looked like something from the previous decade. There was nothing trendy about her; knowing Lily, she had probably borrowed it from things that no longer fit her mother. She was just herself, as always, and she was the most beautiful thing in the world.
Why did he have to be drawn to both the Dark Arts and a girl who seemed like the very antithesis of darkness? There she stood in the sunlight, with her Muggle sister, wearing her Muggle sundress and sandals. Petunia looked self-conscious and made-up as if she were going out to a disco instead of a fair, but Lily just looked happy and perfect. The man working the booth was obviously trying to flirt with her; who wouldn’t? She smiled back at him and chatted casually, a pretty girl aware of her powers. He wasn’t her type, Severus reflected, worried much less about a thirty-something Muggle than about James Potter, who even now could be a threat from miles away, sending Lily letters by owl, petitioning her to see him over the summer, taking his opportunity to fill the place that Severus had vacated. But there was nothing Severus could do about it, and it didn’t do to dwell.
Nobody was flirting with Petunia, and she obviously wasn’t particularly enjoying the event; she kept pulling on Lily’s arm and appeared eager to go, and rather than watching her sister’s attempts at the ring-toss booth, she looked around as if she were watching for someone. Severus knew that she wasn’t looking for him, but unfortunately, her eyes lit upon him, narrowed, and then turned away as she started poking Lily to alert her to Severus’s presence. It was time for him to move on. By the time Lily could look up, there would be nothing for her to see.
Safely away from the crowd with Lily and Petunia -- and slightly disappointed despite himself that Lily hadn’t tried to follow him -- he stopped outside a pub to figure out which way he wanted to go next. As he looked around, getting his bearings, a heavy-set middle-aged man on his way into the pub stopped and called to him: “Severus, right? Tobias’s boy?”
Severus recognized him immediately, a companion of his father’s from the mill, back in the days when his father had still been working. The name filtered up to his consciousness: Harold Perry. Severus had seen him occasionally when he still lived at home, but rarely since starting at Hogwarts, and not at all since his father had been unemployed. “Mr. Perry,” he answered, sufficiently polite. He had no desire to talk to anyone, but Harold Perry had never done anything against him and deserved common courtesy.
“How’s your old man, eh?” Perry continued. “Found work yet? I haven’t seen him since the mill shut down.”
“He’s still looking for a job,” Severus responded, honestly enough. “Yourself?”
Perry scratched his head and then shook it, looking down at his feet and then back up at Severus. “Eh, here and there. I’ve picked up a bit of work at the railroad yards, but nothing that’s stuck. Mostly on the dole, truth to tell. How’s your mum?” he asked, seeming a bit anxious and fairly obviously changing the subject.
“Same as always,” Severus answered, letting Perry take that whatever way he wanted to. Nothing ever changed with his parents. Perry nodded awkwardly, seeming eager to end the conversation and get his drink.
“You’re your da’s son, Severus,” Harold Perry said. “Every time I seen yeh, you’re more and more like him. Well,” he concluded, as Severus had failed to reply to this comment. What could he say: that he had spent his entire life wanting to be as little like his father as possible? That he hoped to God that the similarities ended with the dark hair and big nose? Perry probably had no idea what Severus’s father was like. Or perhaps he did.
“Good seeing you, Mr. Perry; I won’t keep you any longer,” Severus answered, putting out his hand for a handshake from this man who seemed even more uncomfortable with the social niceties than he himself was. Perry shook, his hand large and calloused, and Severus wasn’t sure whether to feel lucky or effete that his own hands were not those of a working man.
“Good luck with school, lad,” Perry said, with a last gesture at friendliness to a boy he barely knew. “Don’t come back here. There’s nothing left here.” Severus nodded, Perry pushed open the pub door, and the awkward encounter ended. It had unsettled him, and he didn’t know why. He walked around for a while longer, but eventually went home and up to his room.
The next few days were harder than the ones that had preceded them. He had gone over a month without seeing Lily-- without even trying to see Lily-- but after accidentally catching a glimpse of her, he couldn’t stop wanting to again. Logic would have dictated that seeing her should have assuaged his need to see her further, and yet it somehow only made the craving even worse. It made no sense. After their one-sided encounter, he found himself pacing like a caged animal when at home, driving his father into rages with the constant footsteps above him. The resultant shakings left fingerprint-shaped bruises on Severus’s upper arms, but were not enough to deter him; it was uncomfortably primal, but if he didn’t do something, he felt like he would go mad. He finally started getting out of the house regularly, going for long walks that always started with him walking in the opposite direction from where she lived but inevitably winding up in places that they had gone before together. Once or twice he even stood at the end of her street and waited, but had no success in catching a glimpse of her. Knowing by now how the new Lily would respond if she thought he was stalking her like that, he never ventured any closer.
Over half of summer had passed without Severus really knowing where it had gone. He almost sympathized with his mother over the uselessness of the males in the family; he had inherited many of his books for sixth year from the ones from her schooldays, so at least his own studying technically served a purpose, but despite being sixteen and old enough to have a summer job, he wasn’t doing anything to bring in money. His father was still out of work, and was so permanently glued to the chair in the back room that Severus had concluded that the old man’s legs were largely ornamental.
Sometimes his mother attempted to get Severus to “actually do something;” most of the time, she seemed to have given up. She did assign the task of cooking dinner to him, and cleaning up the dishes afterward, since she was understandably tired after work and didn’t see why the lazy so-and-so who called himself her son shouldn’t do something to earn his keep. Severus had no argument for that, and so he began cooking a nightly dinner. It could hardly have been called cooking -- tinned baked beans on toast, Birds Eye pudding from a packet, canned salmon with salad cream-- it was more like reheating, really, and it rarely involved creativity, herbs and spices, or anything green. Based on his efforts in Slughorn’s class, he was sure he could do much better if he gave a damn enough to crack open the Delia Smith cookery book that inexplicably had made its way to their kitchen, a tome which appeared to be to Muggle cooking what Libatius Borage was to Potions. But it kept his mother happy, and gave his father a nightly excuse to ask him what kind of a bloody fairy he was, making dinner, and would he like an apron or maybe a dress? Somehow this taunt didn’t bother Severus; he wanted desperately to talk to Lily and listen to her and plumb the depths of her soul, but he also knew perfectly well how his body yearned for her, how some days he longed so badly to wrap himself around her that he could hardly think of anything else. If there was one thing he was sure of, he was definitely interested in girls. Or one girl, anyway. The problem was that she had no interest in him.
In any case, another one of his boring, repetitive dinners had finished, he had endured the usual taunts about being a great ruddy pansy, and even in the long summer twilight, the day was finally growing dim. For dinner conversation, Severus’s parents had been arguing again about his father’s lack of employment, and his father had retreated to his chair to give the want-ads another go. While doing the dishes in the sink, Muggle-style --Tobias Snape never allowed his son to do chores with magic, or his wife either if he could help it -- Severus had been trying to decide between going for a solitary walk or just returning to his room to read; when his parents’ fight exploded, it made up his mind for him.
“You’d do better if you actually tried a bit harder,” Severus’s mother said, half helpfully, half spitefully, leaning over her husband and weighing in on his useless job search. “You could look in this section-“ -- the sharp tap of her thin finger made the newspaper rustle --“or in this one, or here.”
“I don’t need help from a bloody freak like you!” Tobias Snape erupted, standing up to his full height and towering over his wife. Severus was already in the front room by this point, half way to the door and glancing back at his parents. There was no point in doing anything. Either his mother had her wand, or she didn’t, and even if she didn’t and he helped her, there was a significant chance that his intervention would only cause his parents to form an impromptu, temporary alliance with his mother egging his father on out of relief that she wasn't the target. He could live with being beaten by his father for trying to protect his mother; he could no longer just submit to punishment that she actually encouraged for daring to intervene on her behalf. He was no coward, but he was also no fool. As he opened the door, his parents’ raised voices carried out into the street. He closed it, and all was silent.
Head down, hands in his pockets, he walked briskly down the cobbled street to the river, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible because now more than ever, he needed to be alone. He sat down on the deserted bank with his knees pulled up to his chest and laid his head on them, closing his eyes tightly, but the hot tears leaked out anyway. His father’s words echoed through his head -- I don’t need help from a bloody freak like you-- I don’t need help from filthy little Mudbloods like her -- he had the man’s voice, and as of a couple of months before, he even had the man’s words. He was becoming him. In thirty years, he thought, the only difference would be that Severus would be able to torture his own wife and children using magic: Crucio, you ungrateful brat. Crucio, you worthless excuse for a human being. Crucio, because I’m a bully and I’m angry and you’re small enough and helpless enough for me to take it out on. By this point, he realized, he was crying in earnest, his body shaking with silent sobs. Helpless to stop it, he felt grateful for the darkness.
Lily had gotten out while the getting was good. He loved her, of that he was certain, but his father had loved his mother once. It wasn’t enough. His parents were both unhappy people who thrived, in their own way, on the anger they created, and he was becoming like them. He was more like his father already than the old man would ever know; he didn’t bully and beat the young and small, but he had spent his time hanging around with a pathetic group of pure-blood bullies just to have friends and feel like he was better than someone else. And he too gave free reign to his temper as if he were some dumb beast with no control over it. He had even allowed his mother’s petty prejudices to mean something to him. Slipping into the rut that his parents had carved for him, he had lost the only person who had ever actually loved him.
Without even opening his eyes, he could picture the part of town that Lily lived in as if he had turned around to look up at it: the lights in the distance that he always imagined were hers. He wanted to walk -- no, run -- through the dimly lit streets of the old industrial quarter, up past the park and the playground, over through the neatly manicured lawns and tidy, comfortable houses of Lily’s neighborhood, and knock on her door and beg her to take him back, swearing once again that things would be different. But aside from the fact that he knew by now that she wouldn’t be that easily swayed, he knew too well that she would be right not to believe him. He didn’t even believe himself. His future was laid out for him; his future was unfolding in that kitchen in that dismal house at the end of a row of equally dismal houses. It pulled at him; it held him in some sort of orbit that he couldn’t seem to pick up enough speed to escape.
The suffocating nearness of his family home and his predetermined fate was getting to him, and he had collected himself enough by now to stand up, wipe his eyes roughly on the sleeve of his jacket, and walk away from the house, heading along the bank. The river was filthy, surrounded by shuttered factories and despairing homes, and the walkway that he paced was littered with garbage: sweets wrappers, drink bottles, decaying bits of newspaper. But at least by walking, he felt like he was doing something. He had to do something: he had to show himself that he could become something different than that which he was inexorably becoming. Somehow he was turning into nothing more than a more subtle version of his brutal, bullying father, a Tobias Snape with a wand. He didn’t know what the alternative was, but if he could ever get to that point, maybe he would finally be right in asking Lily to come back. And maybe she would be right in doing so.
He stayed out for a long time, eventually making his way to the playground and sitting there lost in thought, until he was fairly sure that his parents would be asleep. Catapulting over the back-yard wall, he let himself in through the back door that led to the kitchen and dining area where his father sat, asleep in his chair, with the end of the day test pattern running endlessly on the television in colorful vertical bars. Severus turned the knob on the television to switch it off -- his father shifted in his sleep -- and walked noiselessly through the kitchen and crept up the stairway to bed. Nothing had changed -- his parents obviously weren’t speaking, his dad still didn’t have a job, his room still looked bare and dismal -- but for the first time in ages, perhaps the first time in his life, he felt like he at least understood where he was going wrong.
August was drawing to a close, and he would soon be returning to Hogwarts. He was certainly doing better than he had been in June, Severus realized, as he packed up his trunk a few days early, even though technically nothing had really changed. He had survived a summer at home despite only catching sight of Lily once, and was eager for all the chance encounters that Hogwarts provided and the opportunity to bask in her presence, however distant.
On the other hand, her coldness would probably pick up exactly where it had left off, and with the recent development of hope, and plans, he dreaded the quelling effect that reality would have on those things. It would be so easy to just fall back into his old patterns, whatever they were. He was already slipping into them now with precious little in the way of provocation; he was a creature of habit, and remaking himself was not going to be easy. On the other hand, it might be easier than the future that lay in store for him if he didn’t.
At the root of the problem, now that he had crawled out of whatever pit of despair had engulfed him a few months before, was that the studies which he found so beguiling didn’t seem to lead him to anything that remotely resembled happiness. Perhaps there was some sort of law of nature that, after enough exposure to terror and anger and hatred, a fascination with the Dark Arts was inescapable; if so, then he of all people was doomed to be entrapped by it. The idea of being so weak, of lacking control over his own mind to such a degree, repelled him, and yet here he was, unable to stop himself from mentally exploring those pathways, the perplexing challenge of crafting spells, most of them tending toward what would be considered Dark magic. Sometimes he told himself that it was harmless and merely a creative outlet, an antidote for boredom. It was all theoretical: he had made no conscious practical use of any of his creations, and didn’t intend to. Sometimes, though, it felt more like an addiction.
In which case, what was Lily -- how was she any different? She invaded his thoughts, drove his manic energy, and left him craving her. But the comparison between his two obsessions was never an argument against her, he realized, but always one in favor of continuing to submit to his own fascination with the Dark Arts. Lately he and Lily had mostly seemed to argue and make each other miserable, but before, even just the previous summer, without the world of Hogwarts to intrude, she had been the only thing that had made him happy. He was always left wanting more, and yet he would come away from a day with her, with their shared jokes and her bright wittiness and spontaneous tenderness, more soaring than frustrated. She knew what his home was like -- she had known for years -- and yet she really couldn’t know the demons that she pulled him away from every time they were together. If he had told her, it might have been too much; it might have scared her off to know that she was his only happiness, his salvation, his everything. He had bottled it up for fear of losing her that way, and instead had lost her by calling her something hateful. Usually he enjoyed irony, but this one held no pleasure for him.
With the renewed interest in the world that the impending return to school spurred in him, he found himself actually thinking about Lily in terms of the future, rather than just the past. Once again she populated his daydreams: in class with Lily, defending Lily against some nameless evil or even the Dark Lord himself -- but mostly, of finally making her realize after all these years that they were made for each other, which thought led to musings on all the many permutations of happily ever after.
The problem was how to get from “not talking to each other” to “happily ever after,” which, despite his renewed and somewhat uncharacteristically optimistic sense of purpose, seemed like a rather broad divide to cross.
Snivellus and the Head Girl by SeverusSempra
Chapter Notes: Summer after fifth year, at Spinner's End
Chapter Endnotes: Reviews warmly welcomed. :) I promise more action in the next chapter with the return to Hogwarts, but I thought that, to be realistic, he was probably miserably depressed this particular summer and not exactly up to much.
Thank you to my wonderful and encouraging beta, Colores. Anything or anyone you recognize belongs to J.K. Rowling, particulary the quote from "Snape's Worst Memory" from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The 1970's British cuisine might even belong to her also. ; )