in a little mining town, two children sit on the grass, under hanging branches and a dark sky. the boy gasps in pain, mottled with bruises and elbow bent unnaturally. the girl points a torch at an old medical textbook, studying the diagrams carefully. the boy bites down on one of the girl's spare jumpers and nods. the girl takes the boy's elbow in hand and pushes it back into place. the boy screams around his mouthful of green wool.
that elbow will never be the same, dislocating again and again far too easily, but it would have been worse if the girl hadn't helped. a decade later, the girl woman girl walks out of her school straight into a war, and spends the rest of her short life fighting and hiding but above all, healing.
the girl has her parents and (at least for now) her sister and later she will have mary and marlene and alice and the boy has nobody but her. perhaps, that's where the problems start: when the girl staggers under the weight of holding up the boy's soul alone and the boy puts the girl on a pedestal she can't possible stay on and the girl forgives and forgives when she shouldn't, when she should put her foot down and tell the boy you cannot see me as an exception to the rest of my kind; you cannot hurt those like me then turn around and say "but not you!"; you cannot truly love me if you hate my blood but she doesn't because they've been friends for years and he has no-one else and they have been lily and sev for so long she doesn't think she remembers how to be anything else and the boy does not understand that he is not her entire world when she is his.
maybe it's because she bandaged his cuts and smeared bruise ointment onto his skin after every time tobias snape came home drunk. maybe it's because he'd taught her all the wizarding ways— the manners, the clothing, the history, how to act, what to say— so when she finally went to hogwarts, she managed to fit in, said well met instead of hi, did not seem to be an outsider like the other muggleborns. maybe it's because she was so talented that nobody could say she was inherently worse at magic. maybe it's because she was the only good thing in his life for years and years and so he lifted her onto a pedestal so high he couldn't see the mud anymore. maybe it's because she was his first friend. maybe it's because he loved her.
but whatever the reason, severus snape saw lily evans as an exception. an exception to everyone he hissed mudblood at in the halls, an exception to the dirt the plagued the rest of her kind, an exception to his hatred. she was one of the good ones, she was not like other mudbloods, she was different.
and it was always going to end this way. it didn't have to end this way. they were doomed from the start. they could have prevented this. it was written in the stars. they could have rewritten the stars, shot up arrows and felled a hundred then flown burning kites until there were a hundred more in new places. it was fate. fate isn't real.
but a man has a doe patronus and a woman is a healer and a man has a bad elbow and a woman crushes her sopophorus beans every time and a boy and a girl walked into a scary new world side by side at eleven years old. what could touch that? what couldn't?
severus snape is not a good man. severus snape is a hero. severus snape is bitter and petty and cruel. severus snape slept in a dormitory for seven years with boys who would have killed him if he did not suffocate half of himself. severus snape is a bigot. severus snape is a little boy in a mining town for whom muggle meant beatings and hunger and helplessness and for whom magic meant warmth and food and safety. severus snape is a cruel teacher. severus snape never wanted to teach in the first place.
severus snape did good things, in the end. and maybe he did them because he wanted to make the world kinder, even if he could not come to care for the boy who lived. maybe he did it only for the memory of a woman he did not truly respect while she was alive.
do you think the orphans will care why you build the orphanage? a rabbi asked, long ago. after all this time? an old man asks, now.
how could it matter? how could it not?
a boy from a mining town answers. always.
anyway everyone go read a life of smoke and silvered glass right now because it's canon to me now idc idc idc
