Chapter 9
IT STARTED ON HALLOWEEN.
Despite their inherent differences in the eyes of Hogwarts, Lily and Severus managed to stay together over the last two months, if only in private. It being the beginning of the year, not many had the time to care about one of the few interhouse friendships still standing, and Tom’s earlier connections had both Brax and the Old Man from playing the Slytherins and Gryffindors against each other lest it become headline news (again).
The Duo kept each other updated on their interests, Severus about Potions and Lily about Flying Lessons; it reminded Tom of his friendship with Myrtle Warren, two people with nearly completely opposite intrigues kept together by circumstance. Thankfully, those circumstances were where they lived and not the absolute hell Hogwarts could bring itself to be.
Until now.
Tom had been writing a letter to Eileen when McGonagall knocked on his door. “Come in,” he said tiredly; it was verging on ten at night, and he’d been helping Hagrid move oversized pumpkins for a day and a half (he had to repay him for the boat ride somehow).
“Tom, there’s something you should see,” the Headmistress, wearing the tired but unnerved face she reserved for misbehaving students. “It’s about Severus.”
Tom’s blood went cold. “What happened?” he asked, slowly rising from his desk.
A few tense moments later, and they were in the Headmaster’s Office. Seated in front of the Old Man’s desk was Severus, with Madam Pomfrey standing by his side. Slughorn sat by the window, twiddling his thumbs as he watched a boy with black hair and a pair of glasses. James Potter, Tom realized; the Potter Heir. He remembered him from the Sorting.
Tom rushed towards the boy as Dumbledore protested. “There was no need to bring Professor Riddle into this matter, Minerva,” he said coldly. “Mrs Snape has already been informed.”
“That’s ’Prince’ to you,” Tom muttered, ignoring Slughorn’s pedantic point that it had never been legally changed as he kneeled at Severus’s side. “What happened, Sev?” he asked, as calm as he could.
At first, Severus just looked tired, but the more Tom looked at him, the more he looked like he was holding something back. “I already told them,” he said, a flash of apprehension in his eyes. “He pushed me!”
“It’ll be alright Severus,” Tom said carefully. “You just need to tell me what happened.”
The boy looked hesitant, but followed after a pause. “I was by the stairs,” he began. “I was going back to the Common Room from the Feast. And then - he came out of nowhere behind me! It was like he was invisible! And then - and then I fell.”
“I found him on the bottom landing. His leg was broken,” Pomfrey added from behind them, glancing towards Severus’s leg, and then disdainfully at Potter. Tom followed her gaze. There was a cast on it, hiding a patch of bruised and broken skin.
For the first time in what must’ve been years, Tom’s eyes shone bright red. To Potter, he must’ve looked like a devil from Hell.
“I-I … I was only trying to scare him!” he decided on, folding one foot behind the other nervously. “I didn’t mean to hurt him! We just thought it’d be a good prank, that’s all!”
“We?” McGonagall asked, moving towards her student while bearing the features of the gargoyle that guarded the room’s entrance.
Potter gulped at that. “My friends.”
“And who would they be?”
“Me, Remus, Sirius, and Peter. Don’t punish them, I was the one-”
“Enough!” the boy’s Head of House interrupted. “They helped you think this stunt up; they can share the blame.”
“Minerva, I know these boys,” Slughorn began, “and-”
“And so do I!” McGonagall snapped, causing Tom and Madam Pomfrey to carry Severus to avoid the inevitable argument. “They’re in my House, Professor Slughorn, and I will decide their punishment. Potter, here, can serve a month of detention for this idiotic stunt of his, and the other three a week for putting that idea in his head!”
“Now I don’t think that’s fair, Minerva,” Dumbledore said suddenly; he’d remained silent during Severus’s explanation, looking pensive. “Coming up with something like this is just as bad as acting on it. Each will serve a week, and I will supervise their detention. In the meantime, we’ve all lost enough sleep over this.”
Tom froze in the doorway to the revolving staircase: If there was something that Dumbledore could have someone else do for him, but did himself, it was something he had an interest in. A personal one.
“Can you get Severus to the Hospital Wing?” he asked Pomfrey, as McGonagall protested.
“Yes.”
Tom nodded. “I’m going to have a conversation with the Headmaster, Severus. I’ll see you in the morning.” Pomfrey shifted Severus by his shoulders onto the staircase, and the last Tom saw of him that day was his pained, but stubbornly unemotive face looking back at him as he descended towards the exit.
He turned back towards the office: McGonagall was still putting up a fight.
“Albus, the boy could’ve died! Don’t you see- oh, would you kindly escort Mr Potter to his Common Room?!” she said the moment Slughorn opened his mouth. The Potions Master quietly shuffled out of the Headmaster’s Office, leading Potter by the shoulder. Tom gave a long look at the black-haired boy, trying to figure out what interest the Old Man could have in him. Other than his eventual Potter Lordship and Slug Club membership, anyway.
“Minerva, the matter is settled,” Dumbledore insisted. “There is no need to muddy the waters further.” At that, he gave a passing glance towards Tom.
McGonagall followed his gaze, her face stiffening in consternation. “So that’s what this is about,” she mumbled disgruntled. She’d always held suspicions about Tom and Dumbledore’s past, but had never had cause to further them. “If anything else happens-” she began, before meeting Dumbledore’s eyes, and leaving in a huff, slamming the door behind her.
“Anything more to say, Tom?” the Old Man asked, his full concentration fixed on the younger man before him. “It’s getting late, and we both have children to deal with,” he added, a flash of recognition in his pale blue eyes.
Tom held his poker face as best he could, but the creeping thought that there was no way he could directly challenge the Old Man, even with the help of the Ministry, gave him a feeling of helplessness he hadn’t felt in thirteen years. Without a doubt, this would lead to something greater; something that Tom could only partially stop at that point in time.
“Yes,” he said after a pause. “Yes we do.”
***
The next day, Tom visited the hospital wing. Severus was there waiting for him, sitting in his bed.
Tom handed him a Honeyduke’s Bar he’d been saving for a rainy day. “Everything feel alright? Your mother’s coming over, you know,” he added. It would be the first time she’d seen Hogwarts in about 30 years. Tom was just a little worried for her, considering her past.
“She owled me,” Severus said, a small sigh escaping him as he dropped the wrapper to the floor in dissatisfaction.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Severus, I know you too well to believe that.”
The boy grumbled before speaking. “Lily came over earlier. She said that the Gryffindor Captain’s thinking about having her on the team next year,” he trailed off, glancing out the window towards the Quidditch Pitch, as if trying to take her place. “And she talked about those boys by the stairs. Apparently they’re sorry. And then- And then she went on about Potter. How he could be on the team with her.”
Tom’s heart sank, remembering how he’d viewed Severus’s friendship with Lily like his and Myrtle’s. It seemed that it was much more similar than he’d thought: Yet again, Hogwarts had accepted one, and trampled the other. And the other accepted their surroundings, abandoning the spare.
He would never forgive himself for that.
“I wish I was you,” Severus said suddenly.
“Why would you want to be me?” Tom asked, minding the guilt that came with the question.
Severus thought for a moment. “People like you. They think you’re .. beautiful,” he said after a moment.
Tom sighed. They had, a long time ago. And they’d seen Myrtle as an unwanted pest. Merlin, why hadn’t he done anything? “Most only like me because they have to, Severus,” he said. “They wouldn’t accept the most beautiful person in the world, if they were like me.”
Severus looked away, glumly, as if realizing that not even his mentor could fit in so naturally. “Why don’t they like you?” he pondered. “Why do they like Lily, but not us?”
Tom thought back to when he first met Dumbledore. How, when he asked Tom if he knew about magic, Tom said that he’d talked to snakes.
“Watch this Severus,” he said suddenly, standing up and facing the sole painting in the Hospital Wing: A depiction of Mercury bearing his caduceus. Tom focused on the twin snakes, honing a skill he hadn’t used since Nagini died all those years ago.
“Do you get cramps, being so still?” Tom decided upon, the hissing words coming naturally, as if he were speaking plain English.
“Speaker!” the snakes cried, abandoning their stiff posture in tandem, shocking Mercury as much as it did Severus.
“You’re a Parselmouth!” the boy exclaimed, and Tom exchanged a few more sentences with the snakes to prove the point. “What did they say?”
“Oh, how boring it is to stay stiff so long, how much more entertaining it is to talk to a human, and so on. The usual really.” Tom paused, letting Severus’s excitement grow. “That’s why people don’t like us, Severus,” he began.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re different,” he explained, kneeling down by the bed again. He felt his voice grow passionate, like he was saying something he should’ve a long time ago. “We don’t share their views, or their abilities, or their traditions, so clearly we’re Dark Wizards in the making, or Blood Traitors, or some other such rubbish. But could you imagine actually being like those Gryffindor boys? Or like the Purebloods? Endlessly yammering about Quidditch, or Marriage, or Bloodlines?”
“Well, I think I’d keel over!”
“And so would I!” Tom chuckled. “And that’s because we’re different. And you can’t stop being different no matter what you do, as much as I can’t stop being a parselmouth, or as much as you can’t unlearn everything your mother taught you about potions. It’s a part of you. Here,” he continued, producing a small, black book from his robes with the words Severus Snape spelled across the front cover; something he'd fetched from his office earlier. “This was going to be my diary, but- well, I got a little sidetracked.”
“But it’s yours now, and I don’t care what you do with it as long as you make it your own, make it different . Because you’re different, Severus,” he finished, resting his hand on the boy’s shoulder and offering him the book. “Take pride in that.”
Severus took and studied his new diary for a few moments, taking in everything he’d been told, before dropping it on the bed, springing forward, and hugging Tom around the shoulders.
“I love you too, son,” Tom said instinctively.
And the guilt disappeared, at least for a moment.