Chapter Text

SEVERUS

A New World

The entrance to Hell is hidden at the base of a large willow tree, a human-sized hollow tangled in its roots, ready to swallow you whole.

Down, down, down into the earth.

You find a low tunnel, as stifling as it is starless, an endless, Stygian squeeze to the core of the earth.

Down, down.

It is hot here, like the blaze of black pavement, like the sear of skin under an angry sun. But through the sweat, you press on, as fast as you can, chasing an urgency you cannot name.

This treacherous earth clenches its fist around you, tighter and tighter, a noose around a neck — until you are forced to crawl on all fours. Tighter and tighter and tighter — you slither on your belly like a snake, squeezing against the tangle of tree roots that strangle your path, until at last, at last, at last you see it: A way out.

A way in?

You press your palms against the trapdoor. Drip of sweat. Decay of destiny. You push…

And the world is engulfed in flame.

“RUN!”

Severus Snape jolted awake with a gasp, body frozen in terror. His sweat-soaked bedsheets clung to his skin as he blinked away the blaze of the dream. It was unbearably hot in his bedroom. Outside, a street lamp flickered and then went out. Severus lay still, catching his breath, listening to the buzz of flies against the ceiling. They’d been awful this summer, the flies. Hot, smelly rubbish in the alley. Hot, smelly rubbish in the house.

In a burst of irritation, he reached for his wand and shot down one of the flies. It fell to his mattress, and Severus stared at it for a dispassionate moment before flicking it to the floor with his thumb and forefinger. Then, out of boredom as much as spite, he pointed his wand back at the ceiling and systematically zapped each fly down dead, until the floor was littered with the glittering carnage of his massacre.

He felt a brief stir of satisfaction at the thorough completion of his task, but this was quickly blotted out by disgust. He was of age now, a fully-grown and capable wizard, and the best magic he could do was shooting down flies in a fetid two-up-two-down in Spinner’s End? Pathetic.

He’d sworn he wouldn’t come back to Cokeworth. For years, he’d sworn that the moment he was of age, he would get out, leave this disgusting Muggle dump of a town behind. But his seventeenth birthday had come and gone, and nothing much had changed, and suddenly the end of the school year had hurtled to greet him, and Severus Snape had nowhere else to go.

So he went home.

The stifling heat of his bedroom had become intolerable. He decided he would go out. Not that it was any cooler out there. All of Cokeworth this summer was hot, hot, hot. But at least with the moon above him he’d feel less trapped by the horrible walls of his house. Less like he was being buried alive.

He clawed his way out from beneath the sweat-stained sheets and pulled on his trousers, his boots and, after a wary sniff, yesterday’s shirt. He crossed to the door, ignoring the crunch and shatter of dead flies beneath his boots.

He crept down the stairs.

It was late, but still his mother stood by the kitchen sink, scrubbing at the dishes by hand. No magic. Like she was nothing more than a useless Muggle. Well, these days she was. That’s what he made her.

Gurgle of pipes, clatter of dishes. The drone of the radio drifted in from the parlor, where his father undoubtedly sat passed out in a liquor-fused stupor. Severus slunk past his mother without comment, and though he felt the faintest touch of her attention — like the damp chill of a ghost passing through — she said nothing to him.

The hall was dark and the front door felt a long way off, like the distant end of a tunnel. He took a few tentative steps forward — so close, almost out of this horrible old house — when suddenly his father lurched from the parlor, looming over Severus like his own twisted shadow against the wall. The man snapped his thumb against the light switch, and with a faint whirr of electricity, the bare-bulb fixture above flickered unsettlingly to life.

Severus froze like an animal caught in headlights. His father blinked down at him through a bleary haze. Beads of sweat pooled on his brow and ringed the pits of his untucked shirt. Severus clocked at once the fogged look of liquor in his father’s eyes; he sniffed the sharp, almost rancid scent of several days’ of cigarettes seeped into unwashed clothes. A quick and silent calculation. Conclusion: Danger.

“Where the fuck d’you think you’re going?” his father slurred.

“Out,” said Severus shortly.

“Out,” repeated his father in sneering falsetto that made Severus’s blood boil. “What, does that poncy school of yours have no curfew? Get back to your room.”

There was a time not so long ago when Severus would’ve obeyed. He would’ve turned — raging on the inside, hating his father, hating himself — but he would’ve done as he was told and turned and climbed the stairs back to his room, letting the slam of his door be the only real act of rebellion against the tyranny of Tobias Snape.

Nothing good ever came from talking back to his father. In fact, nothing good ever came from talking much at all. Everything Severus did annoyed the old man, from the things he said to the way he said them. “Stop talking like some posh fuckin’ poof,” his dad had railed at him once during the summer after fourth year, when Severus had made the mistake of bringing a book to the kitchen table to read. “What, you think you’re clever, do you? You think you’re better than your dad? Because you read your fancy books about — what the fuck is this? Advanced Potion-Making?” Severus had tried to explain that it was schoolwork. “You don’t know the meaning of work, you lazy fuckin’ sod. Try working in the mill for a day. You’ve never worked a goddamn day in your life. Fuckin’ magic school.”

No, nothing good ever came from talking back to his father. But Severus Snape was seventeen years old, and he was sick of being bullied. And so he did something very stupid: He talked back.

“I can go out if I want to.”

The words hung in the stifled air between father and son like something bright and violent.

“Oh, you can, can you?”

“Yes, I can.”

“Not if I say you can’t, you miserable piece of shite. I don’t care if you go to fuckin’ magic school, you’re still my son and you’ll do as you’re told, so get back to your fuckin’ room.”

What happened next happened very, very quickly. Severus took a step towards the door — and his father lunged at him. A flash of fists — and Severus didn’t even think. He pulled his wand from his pocket and then — abruptly, loudly — his father was blasted down the hall by a burst of magic Severus didn’t even remember casting. The old man fell like a rag doll against the wall; a bright gush of blood coursed down his forehead, pooling in the corner of one swollen eye and dripping off the large, hooked nose the older Snape shared with his son.

Severus approached, gripping his wand tight in his fist. His father blinked his bloody eyes, looking confused and stupid and furious. He opened his mouth — but with the faintest twitch of his wand, Severus thought Langlock, and his father choked on his own tongue, satisfyingly silent. He watched the man squirm beneath him in much the same way he might consider a wriggling grub he was preparing to dice up for Potions. A thought occurred to him — a memory, rather — battling through the haze of rage that had swallowed him up, not unlike the fog of booze from which had first been wrenched: “Would you do it? Would you kill your father?”

Yes, thought Severus again, more clearly this time around. I believe I would.

He took another step forward, soothed by the sense of calm, of rightness — of righteousness, even — that had swept over him as he stared down at the man who dared to call himself his father. Tobias stared back up at his son, terrified. Of course he was. He should be. He was a weak, pathetic excuse for a man, and Severus was ashamed that a filthy Muggle like his father had ever held any power over him.

He could do it so easily. Sectumsempra. He could slit his throat and watch him bleed out on the dirty carpet. He could do it fast; he could do it slow. He could slice off his ears, his fingers, his nose. He could chop him up into a thousand tiny pieces and dump him in the bins of the back alley with the rest of the rubbish, and no one would ever know or care because he was nothing more than a filthy, stinking Muggle —

A clatter of dishes from the kitchen was followed by a shrill scream from his mother — and then she was there, kneeling on the floor next to his father, dabbing at his bleeding forehead with her sleeve, peering up at her son with more emotion than he’d seen on her face in as long as he could remember.

“Severus,” she hissed, and even her voice sounded wispy to him, gone like the smoke from one of the cigarettes that was always pinched between her long spindly fingers. Pale flesh, pink knuckles. Jagged nails and nicotine-stained skin. “Severus, stop!”

Severus stared down at the pair of them, rage and disgust roiling his gut. His mother gaped up at him, her dark eyes imploring, desperate…and all his rage turned to her. How absolutely, repulsively pathetic she was. He could end it right now, for both of them, and she was choosing him, her miserable, smelly, old Muggle husband? The man who used to corner her in the kitchen and scream at her until she cried? The man who hit her, who’d once left her face all black and blue? The man who hit her son? And she would choose him? Him?

His emotions felt unmoored, as though in this moment, he might do anything at all. And he could. He could do whatever he wanted. No one could stop him…

“Severus,” said his mother again. “You put that wand away.”

Oh, she’d like that. She’d put her own wand away years ago, locked it in a trunk beneath her bed with all the rest of her magic things, like she was ashamed to be pure-blood — and she a Prince! And now she lived like a meek little cockroach in this Muggle dunghole, scurrying away from her husband’s boot. It was disgusting. It was contemptible. Pathetic. Humiliating. Severus wouldn’t do it. He was done cow-tailing to Muggles like his father. He would never demean himself like his mother. She may lock her heritage away, but Severus was no Muggle. He was a half-blood Prince, and he, at least, had proper Wizarding pride.

He raised his wand. He saw his mother’s eyes widen; his father flinched away. He could do it. It would be over so fast — he just had to do it — but then the swell of rage crested and left in its wake little more than a lingering sea of nausea. He jabbed his wand instead at the bare bulb of the light fixture above, and in a spark of light it exploded, showering the hall with shards of glass, tinkling against the walls and windows, skittering across the carpet.

Severus stepped forward and pressed the tip of his wand to his father’s throat. “Don’t — ever — touch — me — again.”

His father whimpered.

Severus straightened up. “I’m going out,” he announced, and he stepped over his cowering parents, crossed to the end of the hall, and slammed the door behind him.

The vicar’s house on Bobbin Street sat empty and dark in the swelter of night. From his vantage point standing vigil in the alley, Severus peered closely at each of the windows, lest some tiny movement had been missed, some infinitesimal shred of evidence that would prove the secret conspiracy he longed to be true: that Mr. Evans had not died, that Lily was still here, that if only he threw a pebble at her window and used precisely the right words, he could make her see reason, make her understand, make her forgive.

But he couldn’t, and she wouldn’t, and no amount of pebbles pestering the window could change that incontrovertible fact, because Lily Evans was gone.

Gone.

Even as she was shutting her curtains on him, refusing to speak to him, even as she was ignoring him at school, crossing the corridor rather than risk walking too close to him — even then, she’d still been near enough. He’d always had her with him. But now…she was truly gone. She was gone, and he didn’t even know where she was. She hadn’t told him. She’d left Cokeworth, left him behind, and she hadn’t even told him.

It hadn’t exactly been a surprise to find her old house empty. He’d assumed that Lily would not return to Cokeworth for the summer, now that Mr. Evans was dead. After all, Petunia had left for London, and they had no other family in town, Severus knew that. And yet, standing here now before the dark windows of a dark house — this house that had once been everything to him that his own home had not — he felt the realization of his loss hit him like a bag of bricks, like a father’s fist.

Gone.

“I’m surprised you care,” Lily had said to him about her father all those weeks ago, on that fateful morning when he’d stopped by the Gryffindor table at breakfast. “He was a Muggle, after all.”

The ice in her voice seemed to pierce him again now, even through this thick summer heatwave, and he recalled how she wouldn’t even look at him. This admittedly had been convenient cover, given that he’d been trying to slip the Felix Felicis into her tea, but…fuck. She could be so cold. She was so fucking cold. How could she think he wouldn’t care? Severus had as good as grown up in this house. He liked Mr. Evans, far more than his own father. Far more than the rest of the Evans family, for that matter. Petunia had always kept her face pinched into a scowl whenever Severus was around, like she thought he smelled or something, and though Lily’s mother had always made an effort to hide her distaste, he’d still caught Mrs. Evans casting him crooked glances, as though she didn’t quite trust him hanging around her precious daughter. But Mr. Evans had always been kind. Sure, the man talked about God a bit more than Severus would’ve preferred, and he was always trying to convince Severus to bring his parents ‘round to service on Sundays (“Bunch of god-botherers,” sneered Severus’s father.), but he’d always been kind. Always welcoming Severus into the house and offering him a cup of tea and a bite to eat on those summer mornings when he’d knocked upon the Evans’ door far too early for Lily to have woken up — as had often happened, as Severus had been eager to escape his own home as soon as the sun rose, and Lily had never been a morning person.

Gone, gone, gone.

He wanted to howl; he wanted to fall to his knees and sob, to smack his fists upon the earth until his palms and knuckles were bloody, until all this intolerable grief had bled away.

“FUCK!” he shouted, surprising even himself, and then he kicked over one of the bins in the alley. It fell with a startling yet satisfying clatter. So Severus kicked it again, and again, and again — until a nearby house switched on a lamp and pulled back the curtains, and a spill of yellow light framed the alley like some haunted halo. Severus slunk back into the shadows, breathing heavily through his teeth.

It took him an uncertain amount of time to pull himself together, and then he forced himself to leave the alley of Bobbin Street behind. He walked aimlessly through the languid streets of Cokeworth — eerily quiet save the distant barking of dogs or occasional skitter of rats. And yet it seemed to Severus, in his slightly unhinged state of mind, that the place was teeming with life, haunted by specters of a lost past, whirling by in a dizzying film reel of memory.

“You can borrow Tuney’s bicycle,” sang the ghost-voice of Lily Evans, skipping down the alley. Ten years old. Pink-cheeked from the sun. Splatter of freckles across her nose. “Tuney won’t mind.”

Tuney did mind. She’d minded a lot, as it turned out, but then she’d always been a whinging old bitch.

He’d been so lost in his own memories that it had come as a bit of a surprise to find himself at the playground. But of course his feet had carried him here — here, to this once holy site where all his childhood dreaming had begun, that day when he’d first spotted Lily doing magic on her own. So young and so powerful…he’d watched her for weeks after that, until he’d finally found the courage to speak up…and then her bitch of a sister had nearly ruined it all…

He dropped himself onto one of the swings; it creaked ominously in the breezeless night. He glowered around the playground, and his eyes fell on the nearby roundabout. He could still see Lily, twelve years old, spinning on that horrible Muggle contraption, her head thrown back in laughter, her hair a reddish blur as she spun round and round. “Come on, Sev, it’s fun!” He hadn’t wanted to disappoint her, so he’d got on too. Afterwards, he’d puked in the bushes.

A wave of fury not unlike roundabout-induced nausea threatened his gut again — and he leaned down from the swing to scrape up a palmful of pebbles from the dirt and proceeded to hurl them methodically at the nearby roundabout. With each tinny ping as the stone hit metal, he hardened his heart to Lily Evans.

Ping.

He’d done everything for her. Everything he’d done, he’d done to protect her. He’d given up the last of his precious Felix Felicis for her! And what thanks had he received? She’d slapped him. In front of everyone. In front of his house-mates. The other boys had taken the piss out of him for that for the rest of term. (“Oi, did you see Snape get a stiffy when the Mudblood slapped him?”)

Ping.

And for what? For what? What was she so angry about? That he’d tried to protect her? What had she expected him to do? He hadn’t known what was going to happen in Hogsmeade that day, not really. And even if he had known, it wasn’t as though he would’ve been able to stop it. It’s not like he’d been out there, setting the town on fire. It wasn’t his fault people got hurt. And even if it was, he thought viciously as his train of thought jumped tracks to James Potter, he wasn’t even sorry. He wasn’t sorry at all.

Potter. That swine. For the course of three weeks, Severus had thought that something had finally gone right, that his old friend Felix had finally done its job, and maybe Potter was gone for good. Burned up in a burst of Fiendfyre. He deserved it. They all did. But then Potter had come back in a blaze of glory, ever the fuckin’ hero — and oh, how Lily had dashed to his side. He’d seen her on the train, all cozy with Black and Potter.

Ping.

She disgusted him. That’s right, he said it. He was disgusted with her. She would choose them over her best friend? Those pricks who had teased her for years? Those bastards who had tormented him for years, who had bullied him and berated him and dunked his head in the toilet — and she would choose them? Them?

He had his fist raised to hurl the last of his pebbles when a sharp crack echoed through the night and pulled his attention away from the roundabout. A few years ago, he might’ve thought that sound was a tree branch falling nearby — but he’d suffered through enough Apparition lessons to recognize it for what it was.

He whirled about on the swing somewhat erratically, looking for the source of the noise. For a frenzied, unsettled moment, he half-imagined it was Lily, coming home to apologize — he’d take her back, he’d forgive her — but then he saw a distant form staggering up the hill towards the playground, and he knew at once that it was not her.

“Severus,” said the smooth voice of Corin Mulciber through the dark. “I’ve been looking for you.”

It wasn’t until the older boy had stepped close enough to squint at that Severus realized quite how wrong he looked. Wild, almost. As unhinged as Severus currently felt. There was something off behind the eyes…he couldn’t explain it.

“What are you doing here?” asked Severus, thoroughly wrong-footed by the sight of Corin Mulciber in his rich pure-blood robes standing on a Muggle playground in dirty old Cokeworth. “How did you — how did you know I was here?”

Mulciber waived a hand as though brushing the question aside as boring, trivial, not the damn point. “I came to say thanks.”

Severus frowned. “For what…?”

“Your little tip about the Mudbloods’ protest, remember?”

“Oh. That.”

It had been weeks since the protest and the subsequent Death Eater attack. He couldn’t see any reason Mulciber would need to come talk to him about it here.

“You see, it got me the attention of some…ah…important people. I owe you for that.”

“Oh, er….that’s all right.”

Mulciber chuckled. “I have something I want to show you, Severus. Something brand spanking new. Get off your arse and come here.”

Baffled, Severus did as he was told.

Mulciber’s grin was stark and unsettling in the bleak moonlight as he extended his arm towards the other boy. “It’s a new world, Severus. And thanks to you, I’ve just taken my place at the top of it.”

And slowly, proudly, almost lovingly, he pulled back the sleeve of his robes.