The Long Way Home

The Understudy

There are a number of places pure blood will get you: the royal enclosure at Ascot, the top spot at the Ministry of Magic, the position of right hand man to Voldemort. These are not, necessarily, places a wise man wants to go, and yet they have a certain allure. Severus Snape would kill (literally) for any of them. This doesn't make him a bad person, or even an unusual one; it does make him a sad one.

Snape had been lying about his parentage since the first time he caught the Hogwarts train at Kings' Cross. He told people that his father was dead; that he was a prisoner of war; that he left Snape's mum and moved to America to be an astronaut; that he played poker professionally; and that he was Grindelwald's personal Transfigurationist. The truth was more mundane and less pleasant.

This didn't excuse Snape. Nothing excuses Snape. But he could hardly have admitted the truth to his housemates and expected to achieve any one of his ambitions. And Tobias Snape, while pitiable, was not deserving of pity. He was a mean drunk when he married Snape's mother and got meaner with time. Snape might be a bully by nature, but he was a bully by nurture as well. His father's time was divided between Wormwood Scrubs and his local, and the few times Snape saw him usually resulted in blacked eyes and bloody noses for the younger Snape and a good hexing for the older.

Snape--Snape the Younger--was recruited to the Death Eaters by Lucius Malfoy. It would be fair to say that he would have followed the other boy to hell, if he'd thought there was an advantage in it. Malfoy was all the things Snape wanted to be when he grew up: pretty and popular and a success: as well as pureblooded and independently wealthy and possessed of an old Norman name. So it did not take much persuasion on Malfoy's part to have Snape take the Mark.

He was far from the embodiment of Voldemort's Ideal Death Eater. Voldemort liked his servants loyal, rather than ambitious; he preferred handsome, smiling faces and small minds in his minions, and was ever mindful of Caesar's fate. He took Snape because Malfoy asked him to, and Malfoy was the handsomest of his Death Eaters, and clever enough to hide his ambition. Snape was clever, too, dangerously so, and fundamentally unlikeable.

Voldemort took him on intending to dispose of him. He sent Snape on the most dangerous missions he could contrive. He set him impossible tasks--the creation of Potions not meant to exist, made from ingredients that could be gathered only beneath the light of a waning moon at the passing of the old year, the slaying of dragons--and hoped against hope he would fail. But like love, Snape never failed.

When it became clear that Voldemort's service was a risky one, with few prospects for advancement, Snape turned his coat. He was a born spy, made for the shadows; more than that he liked it, though he would not have admitted it. Voldemort had promised power, and withheld it. Dumbledore promised respectability and to an extent he granted it. Snape had wanted to be loved, but no one loved him. Fear he could and did command.

Snape split his loyalty between two masters, and proved his worth a thousand times over, but he was no one's favorite. And he did not have favorites, either; he served Dumbledore and Voldemort equally well. Himself he served best of all.

There are things to be gained in a nation at war with itself that cannot be gained elsewhere. Fortune, fame, sex with under-age women, knowledge most of all. Some of them were there for the taking and Snape took them. Some of them were more difficult to achieve, and some of them he never managed. There were things that no amount of ruthlessness, no guile, no desperate desire could gain him. He would never be the kind of man men liked; he would never be the kind they trusted.

He could be, and by the end of the war he was, the richest man in Hogsmeade, though he had nowhere to spend the money he was not supposed to have. And he knew things that not even Voldemort and Dumbledore knew, spells that healed or killed with a touch. There was not a student at Hogwarts, male or female, he could not have had his way with.

It was not enough and it never would be. He had been born who he was and he would never be anyone else.