A Line

Year One: Escape. The house seemed silent without his music blaring- nothing to block out the

tension.

Hogwarts was a new start. Anywhere but home was good, and Hogwarts fit those qualifications. At least there wasn’t any screaming when he was trying to fall asleep.

He felt awkward around his peers, wildly uncomfortable. He’d never hung out with other kids much. But at least his parents weren’t there. He didn’t have to focus on hating his father or trying not to hate his mother because it wasn’t her fault. A new feeling: jealousy. Everyone else can talk to each other. Everyone else loves everyone else.

Develops a dislike for two boys in his class. They tease him, he snaps back at them.

Year Two:

Drags through the summer, buries himself in school, music blaring again, potions

constantly boiling in his room, reading huge, thick books. His mother smiles. She’s proud. Her son must be smart.

He leaves for Hogwarts, has forgotten about the other boys over the summer. They won’t be that much of a problem. He’ll just ignore them this year.

His mother writes him hundreds of letters. He writes once or twice back. He doesn’t always open her letters. Decides not to come home for Christmas, and writes to ask for permission because the school requires it. His mother gives permission.

She cries at home over a cup of hot chocolate. His father is off somewhere.

The boys are Potter and Black. He decides to stop ignoring them, hexes them to shut them up sometimes. They start to hex him too. All get into detention too much, due to fights with each other.

Makes friend in his home room by being the only person who can offer help with potions homework, knows loads of dark spells from his father that the others haven’t ever heard of.

His mother hugs him when he steps off the train and he goes stiff, blushes.

Year three:

Free to forget about Black and Potter. Locked in his room most of the time, but he

makes potions for his mom when she has head aches. Talks about school to her sometimes. She’s just glad to stand in his door and watch him sleeping sometimes. Sometimes he’s only pretending because the door squeaks and it wakes him up.

Has some people to sit with on the train to Hogwarts this year. He has to go to them, but at least he knows all their names. Sometimes they call him by his, and that makes him feel more welcome because they remember who he is.

Sneaking around in the dungeons to steal potions ingredients, finds out that Potter and Black have an invisibility cloak when they drag him into Filch’s path but don’t get caught because he can’t see them running away. Blisters his hands washing cauldrons in searing hot water during detention for that.

Sometimes they search him out during lunch to taunt him. He tries to practice self control, but loses his temper a lot.

Sometimes he has nightmares about them. Sometimes he has good dreams, about hurting them.

He doesn’t tell anyone.

Year four:

He doesn’t want to talk to his mother about school. Once, only once, he has a

nightmare. He gets up to get a drink of water. Doesn’t tell his mother.

Finds his friends on the train again.

Doesn’t like to go places alone because Potter and Black always find him. They call themselves the marauders, with their two tag-alongs. He wants to show them he isn’t afraid, spits offensive things at them as long as he has other people around to defend him. Some of the kids call him white trash because his parents are poor. He can rise above it, though. He acts upper-class, so they don’t think of him as what he really is.

year five:

Stays distant from his mother. She feels alone, tries to tell him she loves him, can’t

understand why he doesn’t seem to return it anymore. His father’s always gone. Unless he comes home to beat her.

He has more regular dreams about the marauders, even though he isn’t at Hogwarts. He tries giving himself a sleeping potion to see if it keeps asleep too hard to have dreams, but it doesn’t work, so he stops before he gets addicted. He shoots flies off of the ceiling, pretends that they’re marauders.

He sits in a separate compartment to see if his friends come and find him, but they don’t, so he goes to find them half-way through the trip. Potter and Black fake screams as he walks by.

In the middle of finals, they dangle him upside-down and Potter makes his underwear disappear. He hides in his dorm and changes behind the curtains.

He finishes finals, but he feels like everyone is staring at him.

He’s never sleepy.

He’s never hungry.

He stops coming to most of the meals and sits in the storage compartment on the ride home to avoid people.

year six:

His mother is horrified at his ribs- they’re showing through his back and sides. She

forces him to eat even though he tells her he’s just not ever hungry anymore. He sits awake in bed most of the time, or wanders around the house.

Until one day, when he falls asleep on the floor of the living room, and she doesn’t want to wake him up. He sleeps for two days. When he wakes up he eats better than before. She comes in his room when she knows he’s just pretending to be asleep and sings to him until he’s really asleep.

He doesn’t want to go back to Hogwarts. He tells her he hates the school, but she forces him to go.

He is taking advanced post-OWL potions in his extra time. He realizes that he still hasn’t gotten used to the marauders and skips classes sometimes if he has to see them there. Only sometimes. He is flying by easily in potions, but he has to crawl through the other classes and studies until his head hurts sometimes.

He finds out that Remus Lupin is a werewolf when Black tries to kill him.

Potter saves him, but he doesn’t believe it. Dumbledore makes him swear never to tell anyone what he saw. None of the marauders are expelled. Suddenly, Potter starts trying to be nice to him, and he hates it because it seems so fake. It’s been too long, and he doesn’t believe that Potter could change so suddenly.

He cries in the Slytherin Common Room when everyone else is asleep.

No apetite. Never tired enough to sleep, never awake enough to pay attention.

This time, Potter tells Madame Pomfrey and she forces him to eat. She makes him come to the hospital wing every evening to check his health, tries to make him comfortable so he can sleep.

He sits up and stares out the windows.

Waits for when they’ll let him go home. Fails two classes, but they’re extra-curricular anyway. Aces potions in the extremely advanced level, the credits in that make up for his failed classes.

year seven:

Starts hanging around his mother more, like he wants to tell her about things but

never has the words. He even kisses her before he gets on the train to Hogwarts.

Everyone is becoming Death-eaters. He’s heard his parents. They agree on this one thing- they don’t support Voldemort.

But this is something new, and he wants to have a chance. Everyone else is doing it.

He goes on a mission and kills muggles for the first time. He imagines that they’re marauders and they die fast.

Something in him has become more focused, and he starts getting his grades back in subjects other than potions.

He tells his mother that he’s a Death-eater and she slaps him and cries. His parents fight about whose fault it is. He comes downstairs with his wand and threatens to kill them, he’s killed already, and he can do it again. Then he orders that they never tell, or he’ll go through with his threat. When his father tries to scare him out of the decision, he casts the crucatious curse on him and knows that neither of them will tell now.

Later, in a moment of weakness, he tells his mother he’s sorry and kisses her.

And in a few years he loses his apetite and stops sleeping again.

He becomes a spy for Dumbledore. He agrees to be put under veritaserum, which he makes himself so that the ministry doesn’t have to approve of it.

Dumbledore questions him.

He says yes, he has been false many times, but he does not intend to be false to Dumbledore.

Not ever again.

Dumbledore paces for a long time when he should be sleeping.

And he decides to trust Severus Snape.