Severus Snape was a gutter rat rescued from the London slums by Harry Potter's great-grandmother. Years later, he writes a letter to Harry explaining not only his past, but also of Harry's family history and heritage.
Chapter 03
Posted:
05/20/2002
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Author's Note:
Author's notes: I would like to say this follows the canon, but sometimes it meshes, so it would be safer for me to say this is an Alternative Universe of Severus Snape's past. Due to the obscurity of Snape's past, I took a great deal of artisical liberty, but I still like to think that Snape is canonly in-character. If not, I blame it entirely on his past. Or something. (To be read thinking that everything you ever learned in OotP does not exist.)
“Leave off!” I cried, throwing myself out of his way. I crashed into James’ brawny friend who had come up behind us. I kicked him in the shin as he dropped a hand down on my shoulder to steady his uneasy balance. As I sprinted away from him, I saw the third boy, the quiet one. Both hands hung limply at his side, but I saw his gold-rimmed eyes. They did not condemn as James had, but held pity. Remus was never the type to condemn, but he understood, more than either James or especially Sirius, what it was like to be judged on being different through uncontrollable circumstances.
Pity I could take. I know all about pity and how easy it inspires within anyone who hurts at seeing us slum people live the way we do. I know I inspired pity with my too-large rags draped over a runty, skeletal body. I did not hate or despise those who pitied me, for it meant they felt bad for my situation. If they perhaps had the strength, they would have done what they could to rectify the situation. They were the people who hosted and arranged pantry dinners from time to time for the gutter rats, street urchins, and beggars.
I did not look back as I scurried through the streets. My heart pounded in rage at your father. I could not imagine why anyone who had the sort of grandmother as his could so easily judge and dismiss me for how I appeared. How selfish!
I judged people then, and now, for their unguarded actions. It is through their motions do I see the thoughts and emotions that mirror them and I understand, far more easily than what many would suspect me for, what sort of personality and character are revealed. I had to learn to survive.
The woman had called me from my little corner and fed me and I, frightened at the questions she prodded me with, fled her. I decided she was a kind woman. I saw that singular movement of James’, his releasing me and wiping off the hand he had touched me with. That was what made me despise him. The look in his eyes I could easily ignore, but not that hand. Never that hand.
Perhaps I had been too hasty to judge, but on the streets one’s first impression was usually what saved one from certain disaster. My overall impression of mankind was already a fragile thing. I thought everyone to be as selfish as myself (especially those who were fortunate enough not to live on the streets), and yet had no ambition to aspire to being anything greater than a gang leader or a drug dealer. I thought everyone to be cruel and desperate, looking out for their selves only. Though I merely loathed James, I hated, and still hate, Sirius.
There was always a sharp distinction between the slums people and everyone. Always a direct line drawn between us (the slums people) and them (the upper classes). There were common myths for us and them, and one of the myths of us was we brought our fate upon ourselves and one of the myths of them was they were happy and did not hurt like us. One thing for certain though, is that our worlds were completely different. “Them” did not have the extremity of man’s worst as “us” did. One could not afford kindness nor could one afford trust, if at all, to anyone but one’s own clan. Even then treachery was a common thing. It was not a rare sight to see gang members killing each other, or a gutter rat selling out its clan to a drug dealer searching for child prostitutes.
So I fled the area, wanting to get as far away from those eyes as blue as the woman’s, and yet unable to see me as she had seen me. I ran in random directions, not caring if I found the doorway or not, but only desiring to escape the area where James was. Through sheer luck, I saw the same pair of women who had inadvertently shown me how to enter through the brick wall standing again before another section of the wall. The blonde woman had her hand upraised and, as she finished the sequence and the bricks parted, I scrambled after them.
They noticed the darting figure that barrelled between them out of Diagon Alley into the surroundings. I heard one of them call out in surprise, but I ignored the sound. I scrambled through the ally, taking twisting turn after another twisting turn, ducking through holes in the walls and climbing over piles of rubble, until I at last reach the trashed-out alley where Phillip and the others were sleeping amongst the garbage cans.
No one asked where I was, and no one asked why I remained quiet so long afterwards. I refused to go back to Diagon Alley or that area which lay closest to it. I told no one of what I saw for I had the uncomfortable feeling they would not believe what I would say. For the following few weeks, though the actual time is unknown to me, we lived within Outer Diagon Alley. I stuck close to Phillip, taking comfort in his steady and dependable presence.
When I was with him I learned he had several contacts among other gutter rats; those who kept him informed of the more important slums politics. Phillip knew where gangs did not feud so much, which drug dealers should be avoided more than others, and where the dark man who killed with green light was last seen or was rumoured to strike next. I learned all this with him. We found out the dark man did not just attack the slums, but the upper classes as well though rarely. However, it was strange the other classes would not acknowledge that the dark man killed with green light.
I later learned, among the Muggle societies, the idea was simply too ludicrous to be taken seriously. As Voldemort was too powerful and too evil to not be taken seriously, any mention of green light was played down. The Muggles believed the man to be a mad serial killer who held no pattern in his killings. We of the slums had no way of playing down the green light though. It is commonly said most of us are slightly crazy anyway. We did believe that, though the green light probably did not kill anyone, it undoubtedly had a lot to do with who the dark man was.
Some time after learning this, Phillip finally decided to move us again. We scurried through the streets away from Diagon Alley, deeper into inner London, into territories of violence and low classes where the police rarely patrolled and the scars of the War’s bombing existed still. Again, I drifted away from my clan of gutter rats in search of learning.
I discovered a beggar who readily taught me to read if I gave him alcohol. I did, and spent a great deal of my time with him. I would snatch books and magazines from garbage piles in the district of the upper classes and bring them along with beers, wines, and whiskeys to the man. He expanded my knowledge on letters and sounds. His voice was soft and cultured and I forced my gutter accent to give way to his own.
I knew if I were ever to escape the slums, I would have to speak as if I did not come from it. I stressed my accent, forcing myself to speak slowly and pronounce the words fully lest I drop sounds. I spoke softly to hide any accent I was unable to extinguish. I later learned there is a certain power in speaking slowly and softly. The idea behind a soft and slow-spoken person is a highly intelligent and educated being, not to mention very controlled. It is an image I have spent many years cultivating.
I admit I am proud of such behaviour. My bitterness and sarcasm may be the result from living in the slums during the most impressionable part of my life, but I used such an attitude to my advantage by plying it with my cultivated appearance.
I am whatI made myself.
I had no help in it any more than what I have allowed, shaping myself with what I was given and how I wanted to become. Pandora Potter, James Potter, Albus Dumbledore, and Minerva McGonagall did not influence me in any way you may see. They may have, in a slight degree, persuaded my thinking and my attitude, but most of what I am I created through my own efforts and ideas of what I wanted to become.
Oddball I was; oddball I am still. My accent, vastly more superior than my current peers of fellow gutter rats, led me into a lonely life for the remaining time I remained in the slums. My clan knew I would leave the first chance I could and so any dependability I possessed dissipated. They knew they could not depend on me for help or steadiness. I did not care. I did not want to be tied to them, owing them favours and having to be responsible. Learning suited me well.
It was also the only thing that saved me. The rumours of the dark man who killed with green light was going to appear in the streets again filtered everywhere and Phillip warned us to be careful and to hurry directly to the Area of Supernatural should something happen. I was supposed to stay with my partner, but I preferred to be with the beggar who was teaching me how to read and my partner rather liked being with the other gutter rats.
My last day in the slums began as usual, with me and my partner scrambling for food among garbage. After finding an unopened can of beans, we bashed it open with a broken brick, ate our fill, and my partner scampered off to share it with others. I had also found a bottle of whisky still half-full, and this I took straightway to my beggar.
As I scuttled to where my beggar camped out on a doorstop of a rundown building another clan of gutter rats lived in, I felt a prickling along my skin. I was instantly alert at it for it was a boding of some deadly danger. It was a sense of menace that choked me, filling me with confusion and panic. I could not withstand the feeling and I fled from the area, dropping the bottle of whiskey behind me.
I ran back to the area where Phillip and my clan stayed at nights and directly into a black-robed figure whose face was hooded. I tried to duck past and beyond the figure, but its hand grabbed my shoulder and jerked me back into its arms, which clamped tightly around my form. I tried to yell, and one hand covered my mouth to mute the sound. Green light flashed and I heard a horrid scream, filled with pain and terror.
Out of the green light emerged a man dressed in dark robes, and what a horrible man he was.
Harry, you have never seen Voldemort while he was at the height of his power. Any memory you might have had of him when he attacked and killed your family would have been him with the majority of his power stripped away by your great-grandmother Pandora’s attack.
Personally, I have always found the way Voldemort fought against your family and was always beaten one way or another bitterly amusing. It seems that, no matter what he did, there was Potter to thwart him. It was James Potter who constantly foiled Voldemort’s actions, though he had help with that. Then Pandora, whose attack drained him of his strength. And then you finally finished him off after Pandora disappeared. Still and all, it is ironic that the family who would outwit him every time would also be the family he destroys so absolutely. Your parents and grandparents were slaughtered, your great-grandfather was murdered, your great-grandmother was poisoned and forced to disappear to regain what strength she could in a safe peace, and you now constantly terrorized and threatened. But at any time you have seen him, Voldemort was never at the height of his power.
He was called the dark man not only because of the black robes he wore at all times, but also for his black hair, his swarthy and twisted facial features, and his eyes. Those eyes which were like pieces of the night; mysterious, wicked, and endless in their depths.
Pandora Potter’s eyes were unusual, and not because her gaze was piercing. It was more than just that. When she saw things, she did more than just see at the physical level of any object she peered at. She was the sort of person who saw the mental and spiritual aspects of the physical object as well. She saw me not only for what I was, but also what I desired to be, everything of my past, and the potential of I would become in my lifetime.
I have only known three other persons whose eyes were the same, looking beyond the normal levels of the physical attributes of any object. These three are Albus Dumbledore, Voldemort, and you (on rare occasion only, and never when in Potions when it certainly would have been most useful!).
Yes, I admit you look beyond just the physical level of anything. It may be attributed from your great-grandmother’s ability to, or the constant friction between you and Voldemort, or the influence of Dumbledore. I cannot truly say for I do not know. Perhaps it is all three of these. I do not say you look at something the way as Pandora Potter does merely to flatter you, as no Potter will ever amount to be anything like the woman who accepted the name through marriage. Were I standing directly before you, I would not be telling this to you at all.
I only write this with the intent of it to be given to you upon my death (as you surely would know by now as you read this), for it is your right to understand your heritage. That dimwit godfather of yours is incapable of telling you all that I know. It was I who followed the incidents of the Potter family for many years.
In that instant I gazed upon Voldemort, I knew this man was far more dangerous than anything I had ever seen before. He exuded confidence, strength, arrogance, and power beyond anything I have ever seen or perhaps ever will see again. Neither Albus nor Pandora could compare, but they had one thing Voldemort was never able to possess, and that was dignity. This man sold his soul to the Darker Powers That Be and, even to the untrained eye such as mine, I knew there was nothing natural about him.
He glanced at me with those penetrating, all-knowing eyes, and then looked away, uninterested in who and what I was. He sauntered gracefully about the alley, killing those slums people who desperately tried to hide from him. Had I been there earlier instead of going to my beggar, I would have undoubtedly been killed as the others were. Voldemort ignored me though, as if I were an insignificant little bug he meant to squash later. As he and other robed figures that surrounded him slowly began to walk down the alley rooting out those in hiding, I glanced down at the arms that circled around and held me close and still.
My eyes fell upon the black mark on the left arm of the person. It was a skull with a snake for a tongue, black and hideous and, to me, absolutely terrible. Gang members often scared themselves in a likely fashion, packing dye into carved lines and cuts for distinguishing colours and designs. I knew from my experiences on the street that this mark was a cultist object used to distinguish individuals to one another as possessing mutual memberships.
I also knew then that whatever I did in the future depended on my getting away. I was frozen in fear at the moment because of the killings I saw, the masked persons pointing their wands at scurrying gutter rats that screamed and stumbled in their fear, and voices saying ominously, “Avada Kedavra.”
I used to wonder why I was kept alive, caught in the confusion by a single Death Eater, instead of killed immediately as the other gutter rats were. They had no way of telling whether I would be a good wizard or not, or even if I was one. But after I joined the Death Eaters, I learned why.
If a single Death Eater spoke out for a likely target, everyone would then and there accept that target for a later time. A later time, that is, for play. By grabbing me and holding me close, the Death Eater had claimed me for a later playtime.
Harry, if you think the Death Eaters’ methods of killing are gruesome, then hope a group that wishes to play with you never takes you alive. They do not kill their playthings and by doing so that makes what they have inflicted upon their plaything so much worse. There are fates worse than death, and psychological torture has always done greater damage than physical torture. It is not the pain that is inflicted; it is the wait and the knowledge of what will be done, what is being done, and what has been done.
The Death Eater who held me lingered behind the others, so when Voldemort and his lackeys had gone so far into the alley, I took it as a chance to escape. I had no idea what was in store for me but my senses screamed to get as far away as I could.
Here’s a helpful little tidbit for you, Harry. The human jaw is the strongest joint in the entire body. The pressure you can apply with your molars may easily reach up to 136 kilograms while your incisors and canines have a pressure of about 77 kilograms. In a fight, one of the best ways to win or escape is to bite as hard and as fast as one can. This is something every slums person knows (not the mathematics, but the use biting has in a fight, since the exerted pressure is generally substantially more than you personally weigh).
I bit the hand covering my mouth and tasted blood as the skin broke. Just as I knew it would, the hand released me and I heard the Death Eater curse viciously. I slipped past the person and dashed as fast as I ever had before in my life as far away from the alley as I could. After a moment, I heard the person whom I had bitten take chase after me.
I was desperate and frightened; anyone in my position would have been, and many perhaps were frozen in their fear. We of the slums are not religious people. What sort of loving god would leave us to our harsh worlds in the slums, trapped by human wickedness? But as I ran, I found myself praying to whatever deity who was listening, be it evil or good. I would have sold my soul to get out of that terrifying situation had I known a way to do it.
Who would have thought someone was listening to my prayers? Truth be told, there was not a deity who was watching out for a nameless gutter rat who ran for his life from the dark man.
I was a mysterious agenda to your great-grandmother, and if there was one thing that Pandora could not stand, it was something she had no explanation for. I, a little wretch from off the streets, dressed in my rags and looking (rightly so) as if I had never had a proper meal in my life, had shown up out of nowhere. Obviously, I was not a wizard’s child as I did not recognize anything and because wizards knew simple charms to keep clothes clean and in fairly good shape. Diagon Alley was not a place that contained slums or where people lived in the back alleys, homeless and poor. So how did I enter the wizards’ market and where did I come from?
There could only have been one answer, and that was I was a wizard--Muggle-born perhaps, or a wizard’s get abandoned out of fear because of Voldemort’s rise in as a dark lord--drawn to Diagon Alley for its magic. Faced with that conclusion, Pandora very well could not leave a potential alley on the streets, either for my talent to be lost through an accidental death or Voldemort’s finding and seeing it within me.
In my haste to get away from Voldemort, I quite literally ran into Pandora without realizing it. To give me credit, she was using her husband’s invisibility cloak (the very same one that she later gave James, which was passed on to you). The Death Eater who had been running after me skidded to a halt as Pandora drew me into the cloak’s hidden folds and shushed me with a gentle hand over my mouth and quiet words of warning.
I remember thinking how sweet she smelled, so unlike the rotten filth of the gutters and back alleys where garbage and refuse heaped. I also remember wondering if I had gotten myself into a worse situation. However, when she next spoke, her husky voice rising from deep in her chest, I knew her to be the woman who gave me peaches and cream.
“Go back,” she said loudly, “go back to Riddle and tell him I have sought this child and will not easily give him up.” The words should have frightened me. Anyone who personally sought me out and would not hand me over was a ruthless person who wanted something.
But she smelled sweet, and she had shown me a moment’s kindness. For that, I would follow her long enough to learn what she wished to do with me. You should also know your great-grandmother spoke not of Voldemort, but of Riddle. The Death Eaters accepted it as a nickname, assuming, I imagine, that Pandora believed Voldemort to be a mystery. There is a reason behind this, but one that will be explained within due time. I stray enough from the current subject by trying to explain certain points that otherwise elude your base understanding.
Also beneath her invisible cloak was a broom. I shall not say anything about my first ride on it other than it being a rather humiliating memory of my being terrified of floating off the ground and how Pandora finally had to place a body bind spell on me in order to keep me still long enough to escape the slums.
A witch or a wizard who flies over a Muggle-populated region will be fined by the Ministry of Magic should he or she be caught. However, flying over the city at night while wearing the invisible cloak assured there were no witnesses to Pandora’s transgression. The city areas I had known and lived in looked only beautiful from a far off distance in the sky, when everything is too dark and too shapeless for one to see what actually lies in these areas.
And before I write anything else let me just warn you here, Harry: If you ever, and I do stress ever, fly in the city in full view of Muggles, even if it is night and even if you are wearing your invisibility cloak, I shall gut you with that Firebolt broomstick of yours and then feed your entrails to Hedwig. Understand?
As we flew over the city, the movement stirring our clothes and hair, Pandora spoke casually of how she sought for me in the slums, knowing my dress and manner being that of a gutter rat or a street urchin. At the time I felt insulted. I may have been the lowest of the low, but I had always prided myself in my avoiding the life of a cutpurse. Remember, no matter how bad life treats you, there is never the need to take what belongs to another person’s belongings to ease your own suffering as that person may not afford the loss.
But I felt safe in Pandora’s arms. It was as if I had found my mother at long last, and who was taking me away from the slums to a world of nice things. Indeed, that was exactly what happened. From the definite way she spoke, I knew Pandora Potter had absolutely no intention whatsoever of releasing me from her grasp. I was right where she wanted me to be and, even should I not have been a wizard, she still decided I was in need of a good home. She did not directly ask me any questions so I volunteered nothing of myself.
Please make sure to keep your mouth closed in your incoming surprise, as I do not enjoy the thought of your drooling upon my careful writing.
And thus did I become, in essence and through Pandora’s adoption, your uncle.