The Student Years
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.
I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
"That fellow's got to swing."
And never a human voice comes near
To speak a gentle word:
And the eye that watches through the door
Is pitiless and hard:
And by all forgot, we rot and rot,
With soul and body marred.
For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and gray,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol - Oscar Wilde
Before she knew him, she knew his mother.
Minerva taught Eileen Prince for five years; she did not pursue a NEWT in Transfiguration. She had been rather unfortunate looking, if Minerva was honest. The girl was from a pureblood family but that did not help her socially. Eileen always smelled faintly of gobstones spray.
Minerva did not take much notice of Severus Snape when he first arrived at Hogwarts. The boy was tall for his age, rakishly thin. His robes were already threadbare from use. Severus held as little regard for his appearance as his mother had, perhaps even less.
She was privately glad that the boy had not ended up in her own house. His odor had grown so bad that other teachers approached Slughorn about addressing hygiene with his student. Minerva felt a pang of pity for the boy, but more often thought of him with disgust. She was ashamed of these private feelings; he was only a child.
She reassured herself that she wasn’t alone in her perceptions. It didn’t make her a bad person.
Minerva reassured herself too, that she did not treat Snape any differently despite her feelings. Even when he showed an early and strong affinity for dark magic. The boy cast spells she’d never heard of, and without mercy.
It did not take long for several students in her house to form an antagonistic relationship with Snape. His classmates feared his sharp tongue and quick casting. The boy dueled as if he’d been born with a wand in his hand.
Snape did not form connections with his classmates and often exasperated his teachers. The only person who seemed able to tolerate the boy’s company for any length of time was Lily Evans.
Transfiguration had not been Snape’s best subject, to her relief, but he had excelled regardless. His essays were thorough and well written, his practicals less successful. Transfiguration required imagination as well as belief, if one could not hold an image in their mind, the spell could go horribly wrong. Severus Snape struggled to focus his mind, so often controlled by his own emotions.
The boy was overly emotional and sensitive and prone to tears when he lost his temper. She had never had a student who so easily devolved into screaming matches with other children. It was not uncommon for Severus to cry in frustration when he was angry or humiliated.
He spent a lot of time angry and humiliated. She heard students whisper and call him Snivellus in the halls. She did not stop them. Children could be cruel, but social pressure would only help him acclimate better with his peers.
Lily Evans often defended the boy and Minerva’s heart swelled with pride to see such goodness in one of her students. Evans was a popular girl, beautiful and talented. She did not have to spend her time with the school’s pariah, but she did.
Snape came to Hogwarts with no manners to speak of. He was rough spoken with a strong accent. His family came from near Yorkshire and it was sometimes impossible to understand him, especially when he was upset.
The boy was obsessed with reading but easily distracted from his schoolwork. She’d often catch him with a second book inside his textbook during class, pretending to read the material. Snape was a good writer, but his essays were sometimes only tangentially related to the assigned topic.
The boy was secretive. His classmates often complained that he was creepy and spied on them. He knew things he shouldn’t.
Once she had needed to cover a colleague’s Monday class after he’d over imbibed the night before. Minerva had given an excuse to the first-year class, claiming their teacher had come down with the flu.
Severus had stared at her without blinking, his dark eyes were striking and made her uncomfortable. “You’re lying.” He’d said in front of the entire class. “Professor Grouper is hungover.” She’d assigned him a week’s detention for calling her a liar and couldn’t help avoiding eye contact after that.
It was easier to not look at him at all, actually.
His hair was greasy, the boy’s long nails often had dirt under them, and the state of his teeth caused her to cringe internally. Fortunately, he did not smile often.
The years passed quickly and Severus Snape grew into himself. By his fourth year he had shed his heavy northern accent and foul language. He kept his nails short and fastidiously clean. His hygiene improved to an extent. Severus still had an explosive temper but had stopped crying. The nickname stuck anyway.
His enmity with the Gryffindor boys only grew. It felt like every few days she was called into the hospital wing to attempt to correct some spell he’d cast and refused to counteract. Objectively, his spell work was impressive. In reality, it irritated her endlessly.
Snape would stand behind Slughorn and smirk at her as she struggled to reverse his magic while maggots poured from Sirius’ mouth into a bucket. As soon as she learned the counter curse to one spell, he would use another — sealing a mouth shut, inducing black diarrhea, bursting pustules, switching the victim’s hands and feet, disrupting the nervous system and motor control. Severus Snape seemed obsessed with the human body and all the ways he could cause it to fail.
And if he ended up in the hospital wing nearly as often as her Gryffindors? Well that was a natural consequence. Of course, James Potter and his friends defended themselves against him. The fact that their duels were often four against one did not bother her for long, the odds seemed fair enough to her. Severus Snape needed to learn that he should not be so quick to fight a difficult opponent.
She did not often catch them in the act, but the first time she did, Minerva’s breath caught in her throat. He was an incredible duelist. Her usually hunched and awkward student was in his element. Shoulders straight, a defiant smile lit his face. He cast at least three times as quickly as the Gryffindors.
Pettigrew went down with a simple stunner. Snape blocked James’ spell with a shield charm and dove behind a group of watching students when Sirius sent his own curse. Black was hit with a fire spell that ignited his hair and Potter flew into a stone wall when Severus caught him with Depulso.
Before she could intervene, Snape had tackled Lupin to the ground and started pummeling the boy with his right fist. Lupin kicked Snape away with shocking strength, but Severus went after him again with a single-minded ferocity.
Minerva was able to intervene then.
When he was younger, Snape would always blame the Gryffindor boys and tattle over petty slights and unkindnesses and groundless accusations.
She wondered when he had decided to stop justifying himself to her.
Instead, he stood in the headmaster’s office once again, stone faced and insolent in his silence. Resentfulness burned in his dark eyes. It frightened her. He was a boy now, what kind of man would he become?
Minerva worried for Lily Evans and waited for the day Snape would turn on her like a vicious dog that bites the hand that feeds it. He never did. Severus spoke to her with a softness that he did not grant anyone else, helped her with her homework, mercilessly attacked anyone who teased her.
In some ways, it isolated Lily from the other students. They were so afraid to approach Snape or offend him that they avoided her as well. No one wanted their harmless joke at her expense to end with their fingers transfigured into snakes or fire ants conjured in their pants.
Several times Severus was threatened with expulsion for his actions. He would not attack without perceived provocation but his retaliation was always disproportionate. Slughorn wrote many letters to Eileen Prince about her son’s behavior, none of which received a response.
The incessant fighting between Snape and the Gryffindors came to a head at the end of their fifth year. When she happened to walk past the Black Lake and saw Snape floating upside down in the air, she stopped. Potter dunked Snape in the water, laughing riotously as bubbles floated to the surface. Other students pointed and laughed; that was when she saw Snape was totally exposed from the waist down, with his robes hanging in the water of the lake.
Minerva ran to end the spectacle, furious with her Gryffindors for such an odious prank. The boy was not worth damaging their future prospects over. James let Snape fall into the water once he saw her quick approach, still smirking.
“Just a bit of fun, Professor. Snape wanted swimming lessons.” Oh he was arrogant. She would never say so, but anyone with eyes could have told James Potter that he was not half the duelist that Snape boy was. James had taken his humiliation too far, and she was afraid what pound of flesh Snape might seek in retribution.
Snape crawled from the lake, his hair plastered to his face and soaking robes clinging to the water’s surface. His pale face was red with fury and he pulled a piece of cloth from his mouth. It was his underwear.
In that moment, Minerva truly thought she might have to duel Snape. He was fully prepared to kill. Thankfully he did not have his wand.
She had assigned a month’s detention to Potter and Black, and stripped Lupin of his prefect’s badge for his participation.
Minerva became increasingly alarmed as Snape spent more and more time outside of the Gryffindor common room portrait. She had to ban him from the area, fearing another fight would break out. It was later that she found out Severus had fallen out with Lily and was hounding her.
Minerva pulled the girl aside and asked if she felt safe, if Snape had ever threatened her. Lily had looked back at her, perplexed. “Severus would never hurt me, professor. He’s just a bastard.”
When Severus Snape arrived at the hospital wing with a broken jaw the first day of his sixth year, no one questioned him when he reported he’d been brawling with muggles. She should have wondered why Eileen had not taken him to St. Mungo’s.
He changed that year.
Severus did not soften, if anything, the loss of his only friend seemed to breed total apathy. He no longer retaliated against Sirius and James in the halls but blocked their spells again and again or else ducked out of the way. He was distracted and listless, constantly jotting indecipherable notes in his textbooks.
Severus’ mother died in a potion's accident before Christmas in his sixth year. He did not return home over the holiday.
His suicide attempt was a month later.
The Slytherin returned from the hospital wing with a newfound determination. He brought advanced medical texts to class and told Slughorn that he wanted to apply to St. Mungo’s after he graduated. The young man’s grades were good, but his disciplinary record was poor. Slughorn laughed with the other teachers in the staff room, sharing how he’d told Snape they would never accept his application to such a prestigious program with his history.
He had done it, somehow. Slughorn believed that Lucius Malfoy had likely pulled some strings for a fellow Slytherin. Still, even she could not deny that Severus had earned his own grades as a NEWT student. The boy was unarguably brilliant.
He left Hogwarts a changed man. His diction more closely matched Lucius’ than his own, he was never in trouble. He did not cry and rarely lost his temper. He was soft spoken and polite, as if desperate to avoid scrutiny. The poorly concealed rage behind his eyes cooled to ice.
The day that explosive cohort graduated was a relief to the entire staff.
Minerva prepared for the next school year, and pretended her children were not going to war.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!