The Snape Chronicles

He listened, heart full of disgust to his father's rehearsed excuses, recited so easily to the mediwizards as they took away his mother's battered corpse. As the lines flowed, mellifluously falling from the fiend's lips, they reverberated within the young boy's mind, "It was a spell gone wrong", "She was everything to me", "I loved her". With each false tear shed, Severus's anger grew, until he had to let it out, lest it explode his distraught heart. He shot out of his seat, " Lying, Filthy Mudblood!!" he shouted at his father's back, "Murdering Bastard!, you killed her, she loved you and you killed her!" The elder Snape whirled on him, murder in his eyes, his large face red with fury, but the word were now flowing passionately, and the boy would not be shut down. He spoke, recounting of years of abuse and fear, telling the listening mediwizards everything, bringing up hard memories long blocked by pain.

But the lies won, for, making use of a quick wit Severus would have never expected such a brute to possess, the teenager's honest rant was attributed to shock and "a need to blame someone ". He was once again drug back to the hellhole he knew as a home, the reason being he "needed rest".

But it wasn't a nap he received upon reaching seedy shack that passed as a house. No, it was instead a beating like he had never before endured. He had now, at the absence of his mother, taken on the role of his father's sole punching bag.

The next day he could barely stand, every part of him screamed in agony as he rose from his bed. He would have collapsed, back onto his ragged cot, had it not been for his father, roaring for his breakfast.

Later on, after another beating (the eggs weren't done right) he found himself alone in the house, painfully alone, for, normally he would have had his mother there, her bruised face smiling through the pain, telling him of better days. But now she was gone, her life stolen and her spirit stifled at the hands of a mudblood, a filthy, impure monster. Why did it have to be her? What had she done to deserve this life? Questions raced through his mind as I flipped open the paper. It was filled with more news of Voldemort, more accounts of his vendetta against the half-bloods, stories of brutal murders like that of his mother, only, against those like his father.

That night he was again soundly beaten, but this time he didn't even make it to bed before passing out. The next morning he again woke in pain, again made breakfast and again was pummeled. This became the pattern of his life, the norm.

And then one day, just after his 17^th birthday, his life changed, you might say, in a flash. The Dark Lord's power finally came down upon the worst of all mudbloods and, with a burst of green light, his tormentor was gone.