The house was quiet and dark. It was quiet because his mother was out shopping and his father was at the pub. It was dark because all the windows were boarded up. His parents claimed it was to save on heating bills, but he knew the truth. They burned in the light! They were vampires! No, that wasn’t it. Maybe they just didn’t want to have to see what a rat’s nest their house was, how filthy and unkempt and neglected, all the way down to their son in it.
Every year it got harder to fill the long hours, so much harder to reread what was long ago memorised. It was winter, nothing to do outside but freeze, but his mother had sealed him in anyway, leaving him one less option. Today he had woken up and then spent hours lying on his bed staring at the ceiling in the epitome of boredom, trying to pretend finding shapes in the cracks there was interesting but failing miserably.
Now he was hungry.
He tiptoed down the stairs, silence a hard habit to break, down the draughty hallway and to the right, to the kitchen. He stood on a chair to reach the highest cabinet, the only place a reliably clean glass might be found. He withdrew one and squinted at it in the dim brown light: lucky. Apparently he wouldn’t die of lead poisoning or whatever else was
stuck to the glasses on the lower shelves.
He turned the sink’s rusty faucet, ignoring its squeak of protest, and waited. After a moment a little unidentifiable slime oozed out, and then the tap was as dry as before. Somebody had neglected the water bills. Again.
So he would be thirsty. He could survive. His mother would be home by nightfall anyway, arms laden with greasy fried fish and chips and diet soda from the supermarket down the street.
He swallowed a few times, trying to convince himself it was cool, fresh water sating his thirst. His mind eventually believed it, but his throat was too stubborn to swallow a lie.
He waddled awkwardly—the large coat, his father’s old one, that he wore inside because no one paid the heating bills, either, wouldn’t fit for at least twenty years—down the hall again, to the pantry. No bread or beans or anything else he would call a meal there, though that was no surprise. The icebox was even more disappointing, housing only a piece of mostly-green cheese. He weighed the option in his mind: was it worth trying to salvage a little and scrape off the mouldy bits with a knife? No, he wasn’t that desperate, not yet.
If only he had a wand of his own! Aguamenti burned in his mind, the simplest word with a wand motion he knew so well, it seemed impossible he would not be able to perform it. But he was nine, and he must wait for his Hogwarts letter like any other good magical boy his age. It wasn’t fair at all. Nine years old and he couldn’t procure food or water for himself, magically or otherwise. Eleven years old and it wouldn’t matter; he was never going to leave Hogwarts, never going to come home again, go live with his uncle in the summers if he had to, just not back to Spinner’s End.
His stomach growled.
I know, I know, but what can I do about it? he silently supplicated. His stomach’s only answer was a hollow grumble saying it was empty, empty, empty.
Well. Maybe he’d look in the pantry again.
Its entire contents consisted of a rotten potato, two onions, a shriveled chili pepper and a jar of honey so ancient it probably belonged to the house’s first owners. Yet. He remembered reading in some book or another that honey was the only food that never went bad—jars of it had been discovered in Egyptian tombs. No expiration date…
Hmm. He slid it out, flinching as his fingers met a thick coating of dust. He rubbed them on his trousers and set it on the counter and got out a spoon. He unscrewed the lid with a sense of foreboding and then took a healthy dip. It was thick, richly coloured amber, beautiful somehow. He wondered what it would feel like to put his whole hand in the jar.
He stuck the spoon in his mouth experimentally and ran his tongue along his gums to get the stickiness off. He didn’t like it, not exactly, but it was certainly interesting, certainly unlike anything he’d ever tasted before, certainly better than a rotten potato or mouldy cheese chunk. It was clover honey, syrupy with a little tang at the end.
One spoonful did not satisfy. Nor two, nor three. The flavour was saturating his mouth, almost spicy somehow, but he was no fuller than before and the spoon kept dipping. And then, after the ninth, he paused. A terrible feeling rose up in his stomach.
He ran to the toilet and thoroughly vomited, utterly nauseated. He sat down on the floor, queasy, leaning against the wall for support, his head to the cool plaster. Now this is ironic, he thought as he reeled. Severus Snape, the self-proclaimed survivor, withstands nine years in this house, is beaten like a mangy dog by his dad and Imperiused like a marionette by his mum. And he can’t handle a bit of sweetness.
Somehow he didn’t feel like laughing.
He dragged himself upstairs and curled up on his bed, hungry and thirsty and the bile burning his throat all the while. That was how his mother found him when she arrived home.
‘You only did this to yourself,’ was all she said.