So y’all I really think this is the best thing I wrote that has Severus Snape as a main character, so I’m going to make it everyone’s problem. On god I’m putting this everywhere.
TW: psychological abuse, domestic violence.
25th August, 1975
There was silence at Spinner’s End, Number 9. Within those walls, silence was never a synonym for peace; more often than not, it meant tension. Which, all things considered, was still preferable to the alternative.
A table had been set up just beyond the island that separated the kitchen from the living room. The house had never been designed to accommodate a dining room. It was clearly intended for a single man who worked in one of the nearby factories and was too exhausted to concern himself with something as mundane as setting the table. It was a house built for the kind of man who would sit in an armchair with a whisky and call that supper.
As it happened, that was exactly the sort of man who lived there. The problem with the owner of Spinner’s End, Number 9—as with every previous owner—was that the men of the Snape family had bowed to the social expectation to marry and produce at least one heir, generation after generation.
An heir to what, none of them had ever really known. For decades, perhaps even centuries, anyone unfortunate enough to bear that surname had barely scraped by.
Every man in the Snape family had married a relatively quiet woman; ‘pliant’, as Tobias’ father, Ernest, had always described his wife, Patricia. Women who did not complain or aspire—or at least never admitted to aspiring—to be anything more than mothers and housewives. Each of them had fathered a single son and raised him in accordance with Snape tradition: one stroke of the belt is worth a thousand words.
Then Eileen came along.
Eileen was different; Tobias had always known that. At first, it had been exciting. She was a mysterious woman on the run from a family she would not even name, eager to defy convention and utterly uninterested in social expectations. It had been thrilling when Tobias was eighteen.
Now, however, Tobias was forty. The lively sparkle in thirty-eight-year-old Eileen’s eyes was no longer exciting; it was childish. Her mysterious origins were no longer intriguing; they were something to hide, something to be ashamed of and never to mention. Being different was no longer charming. It was something to be discouraged. Something to be punished.
But Eileen had never given in. She had desired a child more than Tobias had desired an heir, and she had yearned for a home more than Tobias had needed a house. So the table appeared in the only small patch of empty space the house offered. No matter how hard Tobias tried to turn every meal into an argument, Eileen never allowed that to stop her from sitting down and sharing mealtimes with him.
Like a family.
Severus had never understood why she kept trying. As far as he was concerned, they might as well have eaten separately—preferably in different rooms and without speaking to one another. Sitting in that chair while his father sat at the head of the table, stuffing himself without so much as a word of thanks, and his mother forced brittle smiles while her leg trembled beneath the table, made him feel sick.
“Not hungry, Sev?” she asked softly, glancing at the plate piled high with bangers and mash.
Severus looked at her. The mere thought of eating any of it made his stomach churn.
“Not very.”
“The boy’s never hungry, Leen,” his father muttered between mouthfuls of sausage. “It doesn’t take a genius to work that out. Just look at him.”
Severus was used to remarks like that. He received between five and fifteen of them every day, most of which were exactly like that one: half-muttered to his mother as though he were not even in the room. They did not stop at his being skinny. His father found fault with almost everything: the way he spoke, moved, walked and stood; when he was too quiet; when he did something; and when he did nothing at all.
By then, he had become completely numb to it. He reached for his glass of water and lifted it to his lips with deliberate indifference.
“The salad’s very good, though,” he added, pulling the bowl towards him.
Eileen had a habit of adding some of the magical herbs she grew in a pot beneath the sitting room windowsill to her salads. Growing herbs and brewing potions were the only magical things she could still manage; they were discreet enough to escape Tobias’ notice. Every now and then, she would slip Valerian leaves into Severus’ meals or stir one of her homemade elixirs into his porridge to provide him with what little nourishment he could get, despite their poverty and his constant nausea.
Severus knew. It was their secret. Comments about the food were the only way he could share a quiet moment of complicity with her when his father was present.
Eileen smiled and nodded as she took the salad bowl from him.
“It can’t be genetic, can it?” Tobias went on, shovelling another great spoonful of mashed potatoes into his mouth.
He was right—it wasn’t genetic.
His father stood at over six foot three and carried with pride more than sixteen stone of muscle, most of which he had earned through hard labour—a fact he never failed to complain about yet somehow insisted ennobled him. His mother was slender, though not unusually so for a woman. She was even taller than average.
Severus had no idea why he had turned out the way he had. He was fifteen, yet his body showed no sign of ceasing to resemble that of a thirteen-year-old. While his classmates changed, he remained exactly the same. Perhaps it was a curse—perhaps he was doomed to stay that way forever. He scarcely cared. In fact, if it irritated his father, he did not mind in the least.
“I reckon it’s ingratitude,” Tobias grumbled, spraying a mouthful of wine as he spoke. “Maybe the boy thinks food just appears on his plate by itself. That no one has to work to put it there.”
“Tob,” Eileen said quietly.
It wasn’t a genuine warning; there was no conviction behind it. It was the sort of timid plea that said, ‘Please. Just for one evening. Just this once, let us have dinner in peace.’
Severus had stopped caring about peace a long time before. The only reason he never rose to his father’s bait was because doing so would have been exactly what the man wanted.
Tobias ignored his wife entirely, fixing his son with a look of such utter contempt that Severus awarded it a solid eight out of ten. He sometimes scored his father’s expressions: zero for ‘surprisingly mild’, ten for ‘he’s about to kill me’.
Tobias held his gaze for a moment before turning away with theatrical disdain and resuming his meal as though nothing had happened.
Eileen glanced anxiously around the room, as she always did, searching for a topic of conversation that could fill the silence without provoking the man seated beside her. No easy task.
“So, Sev,” she said, forcing a crooked smile. “Are you excited about going back to school?”
School, thought Severus.
That was a relatively safe topic. His father disapproved of his attending a wizarding school, but he was happier at the prospect of his greatest disappointment leaving home again.
Nicely done, Mum. Nine out of ten.
“It’s all right,” he replied with a shrug. “I’m looking forward to getting back to studying.”
Tobias gave a derisive snort.
“Studying…” he muttered.
Both Severus and Eileen pretended not to hear him.
“Aren’t you looking forward to seeing your friends again?” she asked.
Severus lowered his gaze to his plate. He pushed his spoon into the mashed potatoes, took a small scoop, then dropped it back onto the plate.
“Of course,” he mumbled.
His mother studied him with quiet, measured concern. His father let out a bitter laugh.
“Oh, please…”
Severus’ eyes snapped up to meet the man’s hard stare. It happened sometimes. He would promise himself that he would not take the bait, but eventually he gave in. It had been happening more and more ever since he was given a wand. Knowing that he could cast a curse at him if necessary had given him a quiet sense of power that was slowly pulling him out of the bubble of terror in which his father had kept him imprisoned.
“What’s funny?”
Tobias’ nostrils flared.
“Don’t you dare use that tone with me!” he barked.
Severus held his gaze, but said nothing. Not because he had nothing to say. Because he knew he would not be the one to pay for his own defiance. He folded his arms and looked back down at his plate.
Satisfied, Tobias picked up his napkin, wiped his mouth and tossed it carelessly onto the table.
“You know perfectly well he hasn’t got any friends to go back to,” he spat, turning to his wife. “The only friend he has is the neighbour’s daughter he sneaks off to see at night, thinking we don’t notice.”
“Tob!” Eileen exclaimed.
Meanwhile, Severus had lowered his head until a lock of black hair slipped across his forehead. The familiar pallor of his face gave way to a faint flush on his cheeks.
“If he were sneaking off for a bit of snogging behind our backs, at least that would be normal for a fifteen-year-old,” Tobias sneered. “But of course not. He goes there to chat. Mark my words, one of these days they’ll be brushing each other’s hair.”
“Tob, that’s enough.”
“It’s all right, really,” he went on relentlessly. “That little redhead needs a girlfriend. I can’t imagine she’s having much of a life either.”
Severus was on his feet before he realised it.
The chair scraped violently across the floor—a noise that had earned him countless harsh rebukes over the years—and he stood facing his father, his head still bowed and his hair still hanging across his face.
Tobias rose cautiously, his expression verging on an amused grin. He took a couple of slow steps forward until he was standing directly in front of his son.
“Tobias, please!” Eileen cried, already on her feet and ready to step in.
“What are you going to do with that?” he hissed, nodding towards Severus’ pocket.
Without thinking—a reflex born of more than one ambush in the corridors of Hogwarts—Severus’ hand went straight to his wand, gripping it so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
“Are you going to show me one of your little magic tricks, boy? Or are you going to face me like a man for once?”
Severus considered it. The man standing before him was at least three times his size; he wasn’t foolish enough to imagine that he could beat him in a fair fight. But Merlin, how he wanted to show him one of his magic tricks…
Perhaps one he’d never had the chance to try before. The one that tied the victim’s tongue into knots? Or the one that stitched their lips together? Or maybe the one that left their bones as brittle as glass? Or even better, the one that covered their body with deep, bleeding bites as though a savage dog had torn into them.
He pictured them all. He saw his father dangling upside down before him, begging to be let down. He saw him clutching at his chest and fighting desperately for breath, his face slowly turning purple as he pleaded for mercy. He saw himself refusing.
He saw himself laughing.
“Tobias,” Eileen said steadily.
She had stepped between them, her arms outstretched. She met her husband’s intense gaze without flinching.
“Tobias,” she repeated. “No.”
Slowly, his eyes moved from his son to her. His expression did not change in the slightest, but the fist he had been clenching gradually relaxed. He said nothing. He clicked his tongue against his teeth and looked at Severus from beneath lowered brows, his expression a familiar mixture of pity, resentment, and disappointment. Severus had come to interpret that look as ‘you’re not even worth it’.
Then he turned away and walked towards the bedroom, his nose in the air, with the unhurried composure of a man utterly convinced of his own righteousness.
Eileen closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She turned back to Severus, offered him a trembling smile, and bent down until their faces were level. Cupping his cheek in one hand, she brushed her thumb gently across his skin.
“Go to your room, Sev,” she murmured. “Get some rest. These are your last few days of the holidays, after all.”
Severus did not even try to return her smile. He knew he couldn’t.
“Don’t go in there,” he whispered. “There’s no point. You’re trying to reason with an animal. It’ll only bite you.”
Eileen let her hand fall from his cheek and stood up straight. Much of the tenderness disappeared from her face.
“That’s your father you’re talking about,” she said firmly. “Your family.”
Severus wrinkled his nose.
“You are my family,” he mumbled through gritted teeth.
Her expression softened again, but only slightly. She tucked the stray lock of hair back behind his ear and nodded towards the other side of the living room.
“Go to your room,” she repeated.
Severus gave up. There was no point. Nothing he did or said ever made any difference. He did not look at her as he walked past her and crossed the room.
It wasn’t really his room; it was a cupboard that had been emptied, furnished and covered in pale blue wallpaper to hide the cracks in the walls. Severus hated that wallpaper. While not particularly ugly, it had been hung carelessly and the floral pattern slanted slightly to the left. Even worse, it wasn’t symmetrical. On the wall opposite his bed, there were exactly forty-three little white roses from the far right-hand side to the centre, but only forty-two on the other side. It was unbearably irritating.
Severus knew because whenever he needed to distract himself from his surroundings, he counted things. At Spinner’s End, the walls were not thick enough to allow for a private conversation, and the men were not calm enough for one to be conducted in whispers.
“Do you have any idea what sort of son you’re raising? Do you realise that nobody wants him around, not even at that school for lunatics you insisted on sending him to? Even among freaks, they think he’s a freak!”
“How can you call your own son a freak? Can you even hear what you’re saying?”
Thirty-three… Thirty-four… Thirty-five…
“I know perfectly well what I’m saying! You’re too soft—that’s your problem! You know what my father did if I refused the food he put on the table? He’d belt me twice, send me to bed and put the same plate in front of me at breakfast. If you’d just let me do my duty as his father—”
“I don’t care what your father did! You’re not allowed to—”
“DON’T YOU DARE TELL ME WHAT I’M ALLOWED TO DO!”
“LET GO OF ME! LEAVE ME NOW!”
Forty… forty-one… forty-two.
There were only forty-two. It was awful. Who in Merlin’s name would hang wallpaper with an uneven number of roses? A madman, that’s who.
From Wrath of The Lamb, chapter 1: “Sev”.
