Chapter Text
Severus ached.
He was lying on his side on something damp, with hair in his face. It moved against his nose, unpleasantly damp with every breath.
He ached, and he was cold, and something was sticking his eyes closed.
He tried to lift his hands to wipe his eyes clean, but they didn’t move. The burst of fear that generated was enough to bring him back to full consciousness. He was caught in someone’s binding spell – hopefully it was Pettigrew’s rather than Black’s. Sad that he had been bound often enough to know which one degraded fastest. He rolled from his side and wriggled a bit, trying to find the least uncomfortable position, and managed to wipe off the wet leaves that had stuck to his cheek against the shoulder of his robes. He had a headache. There was a deeply sore spot on his left cheekbone and another near the hairline above his right eyebrow, and his skin itched all along that side; he must have had a scalp wound. Those bled like fountains.
With a little more effort he got his gummy eyes opened and stared up through branches at the night sky. From his Astronomy lessons he could tell it was around 3 AM. He was supposed to take his last O.W.L. today. History, at 8 AM. Based on when he had been assaulted (as if the attack by the lake hadn’t been enough) he had been unconscious almost 6 hours. If anyone had been told to search for him they had either given up or not tried very hard. The spot where he lay wasn’t all that far from the school grounds.
Severus sighed, knowing there wouldn’t have been a search. The Marauders certainly would not have told anyone that they’d followed him into the Forest. He’d gone to gather potions ingredients (more to soothe his temper, really, this close to end of term there wouldn’t be time to brew anything really interesting) and he’d spent enough nights in his unofficial potions lab in the disused dungeon classroom he’d commandeered that none of his dorm mates would think anything out of the ordinary about his absence from his own bed.
No, he’d made Potter and Black angry enough they probably had left him hoping he’d get eaten by something, or trampled by a centaur, or even just left him for dead. He closed his eyes, wincing at the memory of the bitter words he’d spewed out when they’d bound him and started the usual taunting about how ugly he was.
Exhausted, he bore with it, but in his head he went through a litany of questions that had grown like beads on a string since first year, and handled enough to be as polished as a set of rosary beads.
What did I ever do to you, to make you hate me this much?
What did Slytherin House ever do to make Griffindors hate us this much?
All I’ve ever wanted since the first week of first year was to get a potions mastery and make brilliant things. What is so bad about that?
Why do you save your cruelest tricks for me?
Why do you drive away anyone I try to befriend or ally with? Aside from Regulus or Lucius, no one who associates with me escapes your vitriol. And Lucius graduated after our first year.
Are you trying to break me?
Why do you care so much about seeing me bleed?
Do you actually care about courting Lily, or is your real motivation to hurt me by taking away my oldest and best friend?
Would you even care about her if it weren’t for me?
If I break it off with her will you drop her too?
If I let her go will that buy my safety?
And the newest and most burning set of questions, far too raw to say aloud: I wrote to every potion master and apothecary in the country looking for a place as an apprentice or shop clerk and every one turned me down. Only with the last did someone let me know that your father had blacklisted me. What did you tell him to make him do that? He doesn’t even know me. Did you intend to force me to take the Mark? It’s the only way I would ever work in potions in this country now, and I can’t afford to go overseas.
Dizzy and in pain, Severus looked Potter in the eyes and said out loud, apropos of nothing going on at that moment except the litany of questions in his head, “Congratulations, you are the best recruiter for the Dark Lord at this school.”
That had earned him some mockery and a kick in the ribs by Black, because apparently his words were interpreted as a confession that he’d already been Marked.
Severus groaned, considering his options. They were painfully thin. Potter really had closed off any paths aside from taking the Mark if he wanted to continue working toward his Mastery.
And that was only if Severus could bear to work with people who considered any half-blood beneath them and a poor one even more so.
He could probably find work in a shop or something if he wanted to starve with a clean arm, or he could accept the hints Malfoy kept dropping – he knew the older man wanted Severus to beg him to be a sponsor into the Dark Lord’s service.
Lucius appreciated his talents and had been talking him up to the right people. Severus already knew how to look meek and speak the right kind of flattery to match each of the purebloods in his House. Taking Lucius’s offer would just require him to do the same for even richer, more powerful wixen. But he had no illusions that the future his friend was steering him towards would be much better than indentured servitude. Once he took a Mark he’d never work for anyone else, or ever be able to strike out on his own.
He’d missed out on too much of his muggle education to get any kind of decent job in the muggle world. He’d starve there, too.
Severus rolled onto his back and stared at the stars for a while through the branches of the tree he’d been left under, pathetically grateful it was not raining and that the night was not much worse than chilly. Eventually near dawn the bonds crumbled away. He levered himself stiffly into a sitting position and scooted back to lean against the trunk of his tree while he slowly and painfully rubbed the circulation back into his hands and feet. He grimaced at the state of his school robes – they’d been in poor shape even before this fight and now they had several large tears and one shoulder was drenched in blood. The formerly black fabric had been washed so often it had turned to dark gray and no longer concealed bloodstains well. The kind of cleaning spells that would get those off would definitely be too harsh for the fabric, as old as it was; the elves did their best but years of the Marauders’ attention had been hard on his clothing and he knew what the elves could and could not do very well by now.
He pulled the torn fabric over his head in frustration and used it to wipe himself as clean as he could manage. He’d had to wear a muggle shirt and trousers underneath the robes today, as his last set of wizarding clothes had been the ones spoiled in the assault yesterday. It wasn’t his fault his pants had been washed until they turned grey. He’d had to change and throw his grass-stained, muddy clothes into the laundry. The Hogwarts elves hopefully had left his clean things folded on his trunk now, assuming no one had decided to make his life even more miserable by stealing or ruining them. Again.
When the light was good enough he started the search for his wand. He was fairly sure it had been dropped over...that way? After nearly a half-hour’s search Severus was just about ready to give up and assume the Marauders had decided to steal his wand, when he found it.
Snapped.
He sat down where he was, heedless of the additional layer of dirt and leaves he was smearing into his jeans, and stared at the poor broken wand that he’d pulled from the depths of a muddy boot-print. As far as he could tell it hadn’t even been broken intentionally.
The handle had split in half, barely held together by the core, and the tip was badly scorched. A bit crumbled away as he stroked it gently with a trembling finger, leaving a smear of charcoal on his skin. There was no point even saving the core to try and find a new piece of wand wood – too much of it was missing. He would have to buy an entirely new wand. With money he didn’t have. He owed too much to Mulciber to get any additional funds advanced, and asking Lucius would be the first step in a decision to take the Mark.
Severus flung his ruined robes and wand to the ground, then himself, and sobbed briefly. When he could bear it he gathered himself together.
He could not return to Hogwarts without a wand to protect him, not exhausted and hurt as he was. The professors had made it more than clear that anything that happened to him was his own fault and they would do nothing.
Abruptly he decided that he didn’t need this morning’s O.W.L. Plenty of people failed History and still got jobs, and he was confident he’d done at least an E in everything else. An O, of course, in Potions. He thought about hiding in the forest until the train left the next morning. Surely he could find a way on without being noticed? But even that seemed intolerable. He supposed he could try to hide in the loos for the length of the trip, but again, wandless and without even Lily’s protection this trip (he cringed at what he’d called her, and the look of betrayal on her face) he had no particular faith that he’d survive the journey.
Well, there was no help for it. He had to go home somehow, and hope that his mother would lend her wand to him for the remaining two years of his education. She certainly didn’t use it. It pained him to leave his trunk with all his things behind in the dorms, though. Maybe Slughorn would have it stored for the summer, maybe not, but Severus just couldn’t make himself go back into that building right now. He expected the Marauders were probably already preparing to gather in the dining hall waiting for him to drag himself in so they could laugh at him for being dirty, and hex him a few more times. Severus put his head in his hands again and just breathed for a while.
Eventually he hauled himself to his feet and, following the paths he had long since discovered in this forest that was his home away from Hogwarts, he made his way first to a stream to rinse the blood out of his hair, then more urgently to a patch where he gathered some late wild strawberries. He picked a few edible mushrooms along the way and stole a handful of nuts from an abandoned squirrel’s store he’d been picking from since he found it a fortnight ago. He looked longingly at a hollow tree with bees going in and out, but without his wand to protect himself he didn’t dare plunder the honey there.
By the end of the day he’d made it to the border of the muggle repellent barrier. On the other side was a wagon track that led to the nearest muggle village, which was on the same train track the Express used. Surely he could pick up a ride, or find an empty car on a muggle train.
As dirty as he was none of the few passers-by gave him a lift and he had to resort to the train. It took two miserable, hungry days before he managed to turn up at the house at Spinner’s End.
No one answered to his knock so he pulled the key out of its hiding spot which his mother had warded against muggles, as one of the last pieces of real magic she’d performed, to keep it from the eyes of thieves. Thankfully this also meant his father had never taken it away even when he locked Severus out of the house on the days he used that as a punishment.
Severus peeked into each room but no one was home. Everything was even dirtier than usual. Just about every dish and glass in the house had been stacked up in teetering piles on the table in front of the telly, and what wasn’t there was in the sink. A blanket and pillow lay messily draped over the couch. It looked as though his father had set up camp there. His parents’ bed was missing the mattress. Severus sighed. His mother must be sleeping in Severus’ bed if his father was on the couch, and who knows how long it would take them to find or trade for a new mattress. He wondered vaguely what had happened, then decided he didn’t care.
He quickly made his way to his room to get a change of clothing – he kept most of his muggle gear in there, knowing better than to take it to school. He sighed again, more bitterly, as he opened the drawers and saw his mother hadn’t gone out to get anything new for him for this summer. Everything in his drawers from last year would be too small. Still, it was clean. He didn’t see any of her things in his room, but he was too tired to think much about that.
Severus quickly scrubbed a bit in the cold shower without soap, because of course they’d run out again and of course the boiler was off since it wasn’t Sunday, then changed into the least ill-fitting of the too-small clothing. Food next.
The kitchen was almost empty, and he frowned. He’d been assuming his mother was having one of her difficult weeks when she wouldn’t cook or clean or do much of anything but lie in the bed with a pillow over her face. But why wasn’t she at home, then?
He found the curled-up heel of a loaf of bread, a half-full jar of marmite, and the sad remains of some fish and chips take-out that was mostly just the greasy chips at the bottom of the package with barely three bites of fish left that was mostly breading. He ate all of it anyway. He smeared marmite on the remaining chips to stretch the sad meal a bit more, eating slowly and methodically to keep it down. And then he went up to bed. If he was going to have to take turns sharing the bed with his mother he might as well rest while he could. He didn’t bother doing more than taking off his shoes and was asleep almost before his head hit the thin musty pillow.
Severus woke to the sound of angry boots tramping up the stairs. He scrambled out of bed, hampered by how he had twisted the blankets around himself in his sleep, and was barely on his feet before an extremely drunk Tobias Snape grabbed a handful of his shirt and screamed “Fucking boy, you ate my sodding dinner!” His voice was so thick with alcohol Severus felt himself get light headed just breathing the same air. His father flung him back down onto the bed and Severus scrambled to get up and around him, to no effect. Although Severus was nearly as tall as his father now, Tobias was much bulkier and had the muscles of a lifelong manual laborer. He easily grabbed Severus and pushed him back against the wall hard enough to make him grunt, ribs protesting. Tobias slapped him twice across the face, then flung him to the floor.
“That’s for eating my food. Get out of this house and don’t come back without my dinner,” he snarled. Severus grabbed his shoes and ran, disoriented and panicky, not stopping to put them on until he’d gotten around the corner. He had no idea what time it was, but by the number of dark houses around him it was either late or very early. Severus gloomily resigned himself to spending the rest of the night outside. Normally he’d have walked over to the Evanses, but he was pretty sure Lily wouldn’t be in a mood to let him in.
He spent the rest of the night napping fitfully in a shed down the street that he’d kipped in before when things like this had happened, and then lurked around the house until he saw his father leave. Severus let himself back in with the hidden key. His mother was still not home.
Well, unless she’d taken her wand, which she normally didn’t, it would be up in the attic in her boxes. They’d pretty much cleared out everything there that he could use in the previous five years, especially since he was taller than her now so even the last remaining school robe he remembered putting aside was useless to him. There wasn’t any point transfiguring clothes for school. There were too many “finite incantatum” spells cast in every classroom for any alterations or transfiguration to persist. Robes and other clothing had to be made of proper real cloth and actual stitches to survive a full school year.
He rummaged around anyway, finding her 6th and 7th year books mostly intact although of course all the other gear was either already in his trunk at school or used up long ago. His mother had gone to school very well supplied, but for a single student. It wasn’t enough for two, and that was assuming none of her other things had been ruined or thrown out by his father.
With that fear in mind, he took the suitcase with his mother’s initials which was the only other usable piece of luggage left in the attic and spent some time filling it with what little he could gather. He needed to know how much he would need to earn in case he never got back his abandoned trunk, and now that he saw how little he had to scavenge he regretted his cowardice bitterly. He could surely have found a way back to the dorms unnoticed.
It was a fairly pathetic haul once he finished searching and looked it all over: textbooks, a few scrolls with notes and essays that he’d determined could be scraped clean and re-used as blank parchment, an inkwell that still had some usable ink (although he’d long since used up all his mother’s leftover quills,) and Eileen’s jewelry box which was entirely empty. He assumed his mother must have long since pawned whatever it had held. Nevertheless, it was a nice box, heavy and substantial, and he could feel the magic on it recognize and acknowledge his touch when he opened it. He expected it had protection spells that were keyed to blood. Probably why she hadn’t sold this, too – it would only work for family. Well, he could use it for his writing gear, and maybe it would keep his things from being stolen or spoiled quite as often. He set it aside for later.
Severus peered downstairs, listening for the continued silence. He was beginning to feel surer now that something must be wrong. His mother never stayed away this long. He packed up the suitcase, impulsively adding the empty jewelry box, and moved it to under his bed.
He almost went out to beg some odd jobs from the people in the Evans’s neighborhood, people he’d worked for before on other summers, but on the way there he got some odd looks. A brief glance in the mirror of a parked car told him he had a new black eye spreading over the greening one the Marauders had given him, plus a big red mark over his cheekbone that had begun to puff up.
He changed course and walked away toward the center of town.
The last time he’d shown up at the Evans house with bruises they’d made such a fuss about them. Mr. Evans had walked him home to have a talk with his parents, and his father had beaten his mother senseless as soon as Mr. Evans left the house. He couldn’t afford for them to do that again. Or, if Lily was angry enough at him, to face their rejection under the assumption that he had been up to no good. He shook his head. Yes, that was more likely and nearly as unbearable.
By the time Severus had finished stewing over the injustice of it all, he had made his way to the main street, where the good citizens sneered at his clothes and a teenager he’d vaguely recognized as one of those who had gone to the same primary school as he had pushed him down. Severus skulked after him, hiding his skinned palm in the sleeve of his jumper, and managed to lift the other boy’s wallet. It had just enough cash inside to buy two baskets of fish and chips.
He ordered the two meals and ate his own immediately, relishing the hot taste of grease and revenge. He took the other one home and put the it in the fridge for his father. There was no telling when the man would be home, or in what state, so Severus decided it would be safer to stay away. He grabbed a battered paperback novel he’d read a dozen times already and went off to sit on a disused bench by the river. It stank there, but that pretty much ensured he’d be left alone, so he read on the bench until a light drizzle started and he reluctantly made his way back home.
Tobias was hunched in the chair in front of the television, the empty bag of take-out tossed to the side of his chair. Severus looked in the kitchen and upstairs, but his mother was still not home. He went back down and stood in the doorway to stare at his father.
“Where’s mum?”
Tobias shrugged without turning to look at him. “Dunno. Council took her.”
Severus stilled. “What? Why?”
Tobias shrugged again, eyes still glued to the screen where a racing program was talking about the prospects for some new jockey.
“Is she in the hospital? What happened?”
His father finally turned but only to snarl at him: “Shut up, boy, can’t you see I’m watching this?”
“I want to know what happened! What did you do?”
“I didn’t do nothing. She was dead when I found her.”
Severus gaped. Dead?
“When??” his voice cracked on the question.
Tobias shrugged again, eyes back on the television. “After Christmas. Council took her, ask them what they did with her.”
Severus felt his heart freeze. He’d gotten a plain muggle-style Christmas card wishing a happy holiday, with nothing written in it but his mother’s signature. He’d thrown both card and envelope in the common room fireplace, angry that she would go to all the effort of sending him something through the muggle post care of the Ministry, and then not include a letter. He hadn’t replied, and hadn’t gotten anything for his birthday, but that was ordinary. He hadn’t gotten anything for any of his birthdays at Hogwarts, not after the first year when he’d been sent a scarf and hat that had been mocked so mercilessly he’d written his mother not to do that again.
He stepped forward, heart twisting, vaguely aware that his magic was welling up inside him; tendrils of lacy frost started to appear on the window and his next breath showed white in the abruptly frigid air. His father rose to meet him, face already growing purple with rage.
“None of that freaky magic here, boy! We live like normal people in my house!”
Severus reached out to grab his father by the shirt front.
“What. Did. You. DO TO HER???” he screamed.
“Nothing, boy! Stop this immediately.” Tobias easily broke Severus’s grip on him and backhanded him into the door behind him. It cracked with the force of his body landing on it. Severus felt his knees buckle and he slid partway down the door before scrambling to his feet again. Tobias’s face was wild with rage and terror as the temperature dropped again under the force of Severus’s accidental magic.
“Wand to me. Now,” Tobias commanded.
“I haven’t got it, it broke,” Severus replied, still stunned. His mother was dead. No, he didn’t believe that. She’d left, or been put in hospital.
Tobias grabbed Severus by the shirt front and slapped him again, this time on both sides of the face. The cut on his cheek reopened and left a smear on Tobias’ hand.
“Stop this at once!” he bellowed, foul-smelling breath filling the narrow space between them with white mist in the freezing air. Severus struggled, trying to pry the man’s fingers loose, to no effect. The temperature plunged still further and their breath fogged the space between their faces. Tobias switched his grip to Severus’s throat and began to throttle him, snarling incoherently about unnatural bastard children who wouldn’t listen: a litany of familiar insults. Severus’s magic surged once more to thrust them apart; it sparked between them like a live thing, and Tobias in turn was tossed across the room. Tobias scrambled up from where he landed but did not approach again, though his fists were clenched. Possibly in fear, now, though, as his purple face had paled.
“What happened to her wand?” Severus croaked, not knowing why he even bothered. Hardly anything useful had come from this man’s mouth.
“Thrown out with the mattress, I think,” he muttered sullenly. “Found her dead in the bed after I came home from a few days off. Been dead long enough to start smelling.”
Severus knew that “a few days off” meant there had been a bender where his father spent his whole week’s check on gambling and booze; he never showed back up to hear Eileen fret about the bills and the groceries until he had the next check in hand.
Severus stared at the man he’d grown up with, who had hurt him and his mother so many times.
“I repudiate you,” he said, his magic still wild within him, and his voice as cold and hard as he could make it; he could feel his core starting to ache as he edged closer to exhaustion. How did it go, now? He had read a book just this year about how purebloods disinherited the children who disgraced the family. He felt the words tumble over his tongue, vicious satisfaction in the precision of them. The books said that like the Unforgiveables, this kind of spell only worked if you really meant it. He felt his index finger make the wand movement described in the text; he could see the line drawing of the wand movement in his mind’s eye as heartfelt words left his mouth.
“You are no kin of mine. Your blood is none of mine. Tobias Stewart Snape, I repudiate you. I share no name with you. I share no blood with you. I share no life with you. I repudiate you.”
With the third repudiation, his magic surged once more, filling the room with a sheet of ice, and both of them fell to the floor.