Excerpt from a SSHG fic that mostly exists in my head
A while ago I wrote, and then abandoned, a SSHG fic called "Soulsavers". I still think about it a lot, and so today I wrote a scene that could fit in it. The premise of the fic is that Hermione travels in time to try to talk young!Snape out of becoming a Death Eater, and they gradually develop feelings for each other. In this scene, the Slytherins at the breakfast table debate an editorial on the Daily Prophet:
Hermione would have been almost perfect, if she had not been so fucking clueless, Severus thought. He shoved aside her inexplicable strokes of near-omniscience, along with the knowledge that, had she been at this school since the start, she'd probably want nothing to do with him, like all the other girls. “Oh, can you believe this utter bollocks,” she said, slamming the Daily Prophet on her half-eaten toast.
"Finally, she's getting some sense into that head of hers,” Black remarked. “It's absurd to think our society isn't under threat, even if most of them are just shaved monkeys.” But Severus suspected that Black was merely projecting. Hermione gave Black a cold look and mumbled something about “see how you talk in five months”. Regulus was too busy admiring his own voice to hear her, and Severus already knew he wouldn’t get a straight answer. Hermione turned to him, and asked, “Are people really dumb enough to believe atomic bombs are because Muggles steal magic?! And this is how they justify all this idiotic purity stuff?!”
Severus asked himself again, for the thousandth time, what were they teaching them in Australia, and stared into his tea. He knew Muggles, and as far as he could tell, wanton destruction is exactly what they would do with magic.
“Doesn’t it make sense, though? Suddenly, they can do this, and even they don’t fully understand how it works, innit?”
“You can’t expect me to explain how atomic bombs work! They’re the ones claiming Muggles stole magic, they can prove it! How were they even supposed to do it?!”
Severus shrugged. However the Muggles had come by atomic weapons, they still had, so wasn't it only right for them to be contained?
“And look at what this… this… Oh, the writer of this editorial is a Malfoy, of course! So how does suggest enforcing his ideas? You kill all the Muggle-borns, new ones will keep turning up!”
Severus glanced at Lily, who was giving Potter the cow eyes as he read out of the same editorial. “Dumbledore wants us to learn from them. He wants us to let their children mix with ours with nary a thought for preserving our identity,” James orated, exaggerating even his own pomposity.
Preserving our identity… Funny, that. There seemed to be nothing left of the Lily he loved so much, who could see her sister and his father for what they were: resentful, obsessed with their own weakness, believing it entitled them to treat their magical kin like the dirt on their shoes.
“Our secrets and our powers corrupted in their unworthy hands, whilst the Ministry wrestles with the minutiae of the Dark Artifacts Regulation Act,” the older Black continued, and still Lily looked at Potter with naked admiration. Such courage, such chivalry, mocking Dumbledore’s critics in Dumbledore’s own school.
“That's easy, Granger,” Regulus interjected. “You know it was Godric Gryffindor who insisted that the admissions book include every magical child. We could, you know, just have someone alert us when a new name turns up, if they're not born to a proper family. That's what the Trace was originally for, you know.”
“Not according to Hogwarts: A History,” Hermione rebutted. Another issue of hers, she could never help correcting people. Sadly, Black had deep roots in their society, and he reminded her in no uncertain terms that he had a headmaster's portrait in his living room and that she would do well not to correct her betters.
What an ass, he could hear her think, and quietly assented. Even an ass, though, was better than an inveterate criminal.
“Not everyone are as psychotic about it as the Blacks, mate,” Avery said. “Don’t scare our half-blood friend here, you know we want him to join. We don't need to kill their babies, we don't have to stoop to their level.
Severus could feel Hermione tense up, but he could not understand why. Nothing Avery’d just said was false. “We could just... have a separate school for them, to teach them respect for our ways. Then if they prove themselves, their children could study here.”
“Or we do nothing and let them blow themselves up,” a more practical minded younger Slytherin suggested. “Or take their babies and raise them like useful servants, without access to wands, of course,” Matilda chimed in.
The conversation turned to the many ways the Muggle-born question could be dealt with, and Hermione grew pale beside him.
“You can't possibly want to join them, Severus! Listen to them!”
Didn't he? He was wiser, now, than he was at 11. His desperate attempt to cling to Lily had failed long ago, not before costing him years of isolation from the other Slytherins. Of course he would have wanted for it all to be different, for the world to be simple. But it couldn't be. And Severus loved magic too much, and knew the muggles too well, to be that much of an idealist.
“It's rule or be ruled, Hermione,” he said with a shrug. “What makes you think the muggles or their children would rush to help you?”
Hermione had a peculiar (and aggravating) tendency to be very certain of herself, as regards what was right or wrong, and what Severus could or could not possibly want, and then crumble at the first sign of resistance. For all her fiery opposition, he expected her to have a better counter-argument than “But if you believe that, how is the world ever going to change?”
Who said he wanted to change the world? What if he had just–finally–understood it, and how he could thrive in it? And why did Hermione seem so convinced it was down to him how the world would turn out?
There was no use denying it, though. He liked that she made him feel important. He buttered his own toast and smiled at her, and she smiled wanly back. She was almost perfect, and it was far more than he had hoped for not so long ago.
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