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 06
Posted:
06/16/2002
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417
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.)
Two days after my meeting the original Severus Snape for the first time, a man from the Welfare of Children arrived at Dinsmore to finish paperwork with Pandora. Both James and I entered the kitchen where papers were strewn about on the table and both adults sat at it, asking and answering questions.
James boldly marched over and wiggled into Pandora’s lap. He openly stared at the legal papers. I stood at Pandora’s side and looked up at the man. I never learned what the man’s name was, but I do not care. James and I silently listened to the conversation.
“The boy’s name here, here, and here,” the man said, pointing at separate lines on two different papers. As Pandora’s quill touched the paper, James leaned forward and peered at the writing.
“What’s all of Sev’s name?” he asked curiously.
“Severus Dominic Potter,” Pandora replied absently as she began to write.
I felt something yell within myself and I glanced swiftly from Pandora to James and then back to Pandora. I remembered the man I was named firstly after with his cheerful devil-be-damned-with-the-rest-of-the-world attitude and his belief in exceptions to every rule. I wanted to have the same name as him, not the same name as my troublesome brother. “No,” I said clearly. The other three jumped at the sound of my voice, and their eyes settled upon me. I felt slightly uncomfortable at having gained their attention as my gutter rat’s instincts raised to the surface. I felt a lump grow in my throat, but I could not stop; I would not stop. Something within me demanded to have that name. “I don’t want to be a Potter,” I said.
The man rolled his eyes in irritation and leaned forward. “Your legal papers have already been signed,” he said testily, “it’s too--” Pandora silenced him with a single wave of her hand and a quick glance. James solemnly watched Pandora and me. He settled back against her chest as her arms unconscientiously tightened protectively around him.
“Why do you wish not to be a Potter?” Pandora asked softly as she stroked James' hair. “I’m one.”
“You married a Potter. I want to be a Snape.” I held my breath as her eyebrows dropped sharply downward and she crinkled her brow in thought. There was more to this desire to being a Snape instead of a Potter than just having Severus Snape’s full name. I wanted to choose something in my name. I wanted to have some margin of control over my life. Yet there was still the unknown need to have the name; a need I could not understand. I felt giddy with excitement, and dread that I had gone too far. Pandora’s eyes shifted over to the man watching us in puzzlement.
“How long can this wait?” she asked with a sweeping hand to take in the papers scattered on the table.
“I-I don’t know . . . Why?”
“I need to see the citizenship people about changing Severus’ name.”
“But you can’t!” Pandora leaned back in her chair as the man burst out. His face flooded in anger and he glared at me instead of looking directly at Pandora. “The papers were made for him to bear your name as he had none, and the name should match your own to fit the adoption papers!”
Pandora pointed her wand, always kept tucked in her apron's front pocket, at the pile of papers and muttered something I could not distinguish. The papers snapped together into a neat pile. The man looked at her with wide eyes and she pointed her wand at the kitchen door. It swung open. “I shall see you again soon. Have a nice day,” she said as she stood up. She smiled at both James and me. “What do you want for lunch?” she asked us brightly, pointedly ignoring the man.
The man huffed and left in a dark mood.
It was difficult for Pandora to change my name as it had already been established, but she called on several favours from different people. She seemed to understand how I wanted to have a choice in something as important as being named. When asked why she wished to change her mind, she explained to the people she already had a child for the Potter heritage. It had occurred to her, she said, that if she was going to adopt a child, why not adopt it under the Snape surname? After all, she was the last of the lineage and it was a proud name to bestow upon a gutter rat.
Almost too proud, as it seemed to many people. Some families believed I should have remained Severus Potter rather than being given the illustrious name of Snape. After all, what would it look to those families who could trace their ancestors through the Snape line because of marriage and distant relationships if a gutter rat--a deplorable, vermin-laden, disease-carrying, filthy bastard get of a whore--was to continue the Snape bloodline without a single drop of Snape blood in his veins? After all, it was bad enough the last of the Snapes married a mudblood rather than someone from one of the other prominent wizard families.
About here I would like to mention how you are cousins--seven or eight times removed, I could never keep track--to Draco Malfoy. Now, mind you, the real Severus Snape did not mind my presumptuous askance for his name. Indeed, he was very proud about the entire idea and would brag to anyone who cared to listen, which was a sore few persons. He usually satisfied himself with telling Francis how proud he was of me as Francis, absent-minded and certainly not listening, tinkered away.
There is no love lost between either myself, as a Snape or Lucius and Draco as Malfoys. Indeed, were it not for Lucius, I would not have been forced into making the decision of being a Death Eater. Needless to say, I am bitter towards the man. He should be suspended by his toes from the branches of the Whomping Willow alongside Lockhart. I can stand Draco to a certain degree. He is an instrument of mine for revenge against Lucius. That I shall explain in due time.
In the end, Pandora did manage to change my name to Snape and, to her, I was as much a Snape by adoption as she was being born into the family. Pandora was never the sort to put up with depression, and when she did something, she did it completely. Henceforth she did not say “my” to mean her Snape family and all that they did, she would say, “our”.
“Our family is longstanding in pride, Severus, we should remember it is not because of our power nor our bloodlines that make it so, but because we so chose to determine that our family is the foundation of our strength.”
I love those words; not because she included me as if I had been born into the Snape family with the automatic rights to being everything they were and all they had, but because I have rarely heard anything more wisely said.
Harry, you come from a proud family possessing a great honour, wealth, and strength. Perhaps you may find that depressing, for not only do you now have to live up to your “Boy Who Lived” image for your absurd mass of drooling, mindless fans, but also because you have learned of the greatness of your family that you must now aspire to.
Do not think thus. Do not ever think thus. It is exactly as Pandora had stated, “We so chose to determine that our family is the foundation of our strength.” Pandora once told me never to live up to being like someone else, for I have the rights only to surpass myself. You cannot, nor should not, try to be as noble as any of your family. Use their past exploits, their won honours, and their own heroic deeds, as the foundation for your own.
This is difficult for me to explain. We are what we wish to be influenced as. We may manipulate the input of experience we receive to create the output of what we wish to become. We are what we make ourselves. I was a gutter rat, the very dredge of mankind. Yet I would aspire to be greater than that; I used my background as a gutter rat to propel myself forward to become what I am today. Because I knew what it was like to have nothing--no hope, no possessions, no honour, and no love or friendship--I used those memories to force myself to work hard to gain what I now have.
This is the foundation that gave me ambition. Like this, one can use the memories and tales of one’s family members to create a ladder in which to climb to success. In times past, when I was both a Death Eater and then when I had been sent to Azkaban, I lent upon the strength of the Snape family and past experiences. It was not the usual questions others may ask, such as, “What would they have done?” or “What would they think of me if I give up?” but rather what was inspired by Pandora’s words. “We so chose to determine that our family is the foundation of our strength.” I did not do what I had to do to become them, for I would make myself what I am. I did what I had to do for them, to honour their memory and their own sense of dignity as people who loved me.
You may be like Pandora, cunning and sly. You may be like Francis, brilliant and naïve. Or you may be like your father, strong and honourable.
Or you can be yourself, such that Pandora or Francis or James may look at you and say, “Yes, that is uniquely Harry Potter.”
The Snapes and Potters made their way in the world, full of energy and ambition, to take on what the world would throw at them and ready to bounce right back on to their feet if they were ever knocked down. You can and you do follow in their footsteps; not the footsteps of greatness, for true greatness may only be attained through your own deeds and not by leaching off of someone else’s exploits. Remember, you allow your family to define who you are, and your family was filled with a dignified self-integrity. Through that definition, your actions are reflected as such, so your family then becomes the foundation of your strength.
“It is a Potter thing to fight,” so many a person said of James’ decision to become an Auror. Indeed it was; but the habit in which he fought was that of the Snape family, and James borrowed that to build his foundation of strength. You yourself often lend to your father’s and mother’s memories for strength and dedication. By doing this, you do not make yourself live up to them, but use them for the examples they set.
Now, James, in and of himself, was not too bad of a person. As I said, I loved him in my own way. He was my brother and I never would have purposefully endangered him. However, we were not close. I could not tell you what his favourite colour was, or what his happiest memory was, or what sort of dessert he liked best. I could not tell you these things because we were not close enough for me to learn them. Nor, I think, did either of us really care.
Let it not be said though that we could not or did not depend on one another. Through blood and by the common bond we shared by having Pandora as a mother-figure, it was enough to warrant dedication to one another. If James was removed from the presence and influence of Sirius, he and I got along wonderfully.
Unfortunately, James and Sirius might as well have been Siamese twins, so attached they were to one another. Between the two of them, they managed to spend more than 95% of all waking hours together at either Dinsmore, Sirius’ family’s home, Remus’ family home, or wherever else they cared to cause trouble.
As I rarely could put up with the nonsense Sirius constantly displayed, it was not often we were together at all. However, Pandora believed in outings to the Muggle world, saying it was vital for us to know about the Muggles, as they were too dangerous not to be understood. She often took us to parks, museums, fairs, restaurants, and theatres in an attempt to “Muggle-culture” us. And by us, I mean both myself, James, and any neighbourhood child who were still clinging to the back of Pandora’s buggy as we rode off to a small Muggle village connected to the railroad and, ultimately, London.
With the Snape wealth, Pandora could well afford to take more than a dozen children to a zoo. All would listen to what she had to say and Muggles often commended her on her very well behaved grandchildren. Indeed, it was not unusual for Pandora to take all twenty-seven of the scattered neighbourhood children to London if they were all gathered at Dinsmore, looking for something to do.
Dinsmore itself was a rather large cottage, a manor perhaps, that sat upon a hill. Growing around the hill was a forest, and in separate areas of this forest, dotted here and there in patches of sparse growth where the trees had been cut back, were homes of other wizards and witches. Because of the terror Voldemort slowly created through Europe, it was decided in the wizarding world that it was safer for people to live in groups. And nowhere was it safer to live than in the shadow of someone with a Pandora-like influence over Voldemort, if any.
During the rise of Voldemort’s power, many wizarding families moved to this area. Indeed, the next time you go to the Barrow and see the Weasley family, walk eight kilometres northeast, and you shall find the blackened remains of the homey cottage your father and I grew up in.
The families that moved to the area more often than not had children and, as a result, neither James nor I ever had want for a playmate. If one walked out the backdoor of Dinsmore and hopped over the fence, there lived Frank Longbottom and his mother, a woman widowed by Voldemort. Out the front door led to the Lupins’ residence and three more homes, and if one snuck out James’ bedroom window and directly over the fence there, one would find one’s self just a few hundred meters from where Sirius lived with his family.
There were few neighbourhood children I got along with; Frank Longbottom was one of them, and Remus, when he was not with Sirius. All things considering, Remus and James together was not an awful pairing. Remus’ calm and cool nature often overrode James’ desire for mischief and the two of them would instead explore the surrounding countryside, such as the woods or the tunnels dug beneath Dinsmore by past generations of eccentric Snapes. I enjoyed being with these two at such times. This was very rare though, happening only when Sirius and his family travelled somewhere to visit family or to Diagon Alley.
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As Pandora was a high-ranking member of the wizarding community and as she was well experienced with Muggles, the Ministry of Magic often gave her the assignment of introducing the idea to Muggle parents that their precious child was a wizard or a witch.
That is something few people ever give thought to. Yes, when a child comes to Hogwarts and says, “I am Muggle-born but I’m attending this school to be a wizard/witch,” it is generally accepted. You yourself may have been surprised to learn you were to attend a school for wizards, and your family certainly did not take well to the idea. The Dursleys were already familiar with the idea of magic and wizards through Petunia being Lily's sister.
However, it is rarely a wise idea to drop a letter off at a house, delivered unseen by an owl, which states in essence, “Congratulations, your brat is a wizard/witch, please send him/her to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for proper training.” That would be taken as a prank or a joke, and the parents would throw the letter away without a backwards glance, regardless of how excited their child is at the idea of attending a school of witchcraft and wizardry.
Such matters had to be taken care of with extreme delicacy by someone the Ministry could trust not to bungle matters up. It is difficult for anyone to believe Pandora would play such a nonsensical prank, as her dignity and composure discouraged suspicion. Her rigid stance spoke volumes of sincerity and truth.
Through this extra little side duty Pandora accepted, James met your mother.
Now, Pandora was not the sort of person to blindly leap into a situation. That, I believe, is purely a Potter characteristic, for Snapes are rarely impetuous. It comes from being from a family with a very strong background of Ravenclaws and Slytherins. Pandora preferred to study the persons she would approach with information that would forever change the way they not only saw the world, but also what they may have planned for their child’s future. She often explained to James and me that it was easier to present the information in a manner the parents could be comfortable with. I believe this was also Pandora’s way of preparing herself for a long mental battle, as fighting against disbelief and prejudice in order to convince often is.
Her strategy to dissuade the Muggles started, as always, in the same way: Separate the child from his or her parents and get that child involved with James and myself in play. We would present the idea of magic to the child, and Pandora would measure the child’s reaction. As children often reflect their parents’ sentiments and beliefs, it was easy for Pandora to gauge how the parents would react. Depending on how fiercely the child reacted with the idea of magic, she would or would not then strike up a conversation with any one of the two parents about the joys of raising children. Pandora led each conversation with extreme caution.
I remember the day we met Lily. It had been raining in London for more than a week, and when the rain finally let up, parents dragged children filled with pent-up energy to playgrounds and parks for a moment’s respite. Despite the sun not being out and the wind being rather chilly, Mrs. Evans brought Lily and her older sister, your lovely aunt Petunia (please note my sarcasm), to the park.
Pandora had been watching the family for several weeks, living off and on within a near-by apartment. She took this as a chance to introduce the prospect of magic. She bundled James and me up in several sweaters with a cap on each head to protect us from the wind, and hustled us off to the park after the Evans family.
James was excited; at the age of ten years, he and Sirius had a lot of experience as being all-around tricksters and trouble-causers. Being stuck in a single apartment room with only myself for company and the many books of spells and charms Pandora had given us to study was not a healthy thing for an over-active boy with a sense of mischief that rivalled Voldemort’s ambition to rule the world.
The first thing James did upon reaching the playground was to pour an oily compound on the slide, something he had brewed up from one of Pandora’s potion recipes. Children misfortunate enough to play on it found the bottom of their trousers or skirts slicked up to the point where they slid off further than they ever dreamed of. Nor could they sit upon anything afterwards, as they would slide from their perch. Needless to say, the swings were free. Pandora’s only response to that little prank was to seat herself beside Mrs Evans, roll her eyes, and then complain loudly about problematic little boys.
Having only daughters, Mrs. Evens expressed her condolences. From there, they began a casual conversation about the pros and cons of both genders as children. As for myself, I wandered over to the sandpit where Lily was building a set of tunnels. I quietly began to work beside her as James continued to reap havoc upon the Muggle children. After some time, his energy diminished, and he joined me in the sandbox.
“Eh, that was all sorts of fun, wasn’t it Sev?” he asked as he plopped down beside me and ran his hands through the damp sand. I glared at him disapprovingly. James was not bothered in the least. “Don’t look like that, Sev,” he said knowingly, “or your face’ll stick.”
Lily giggled then. I looked at her. It was the first sound she had made since we both started playing in the sandbox. She had not even sighed when Petunia tromped through earlier and wrecked our sandy creations. At the time, she was a mousy little thing with tangled auburn hair and the most brilliant green eyes I have ever seen on anyone.
"Look like what?" I asked.
"Like this." James frowned in the same manner as I had. I rolled my eyes and Lily giggled again. James turned to her with a grin. "I guess I shouldn't do that," he said, "my face might stick like his and then there would be two of us!"
I rolled my eyes again. "The world would end as we know it."
James threw a friendly arm around my shoulders. "We love each other," he said to Lily, "can you tell?"
She continued to giggle. James, as brash as he was at times, could be quite charming if he willed. I think Lily was quite taken in by him from that moment onward, as James took her under his proverbial wing. They did become quite fond of one another throughout the years. Lily was like Remus, calm and even-headed. She tempered James' wildness while he brought her to life with his antics, adding a spark to her eyes and a spring to her steps.
In the ploy of introducing the idea of magic, James and I manipulated one another, come what may. We mooched off of each other for cues, ideas, and ploys. We would lay blame and cast excuses, using each other to what had to be done, willingly pooling together our resources to succeed.
This was a foreshadow of what we would do together in our years after graduating Hogwarts. He would become an Auror, and I a Death Eater. Ah, but we were a formable force! My cunning and his strength combined with our mutual drives and ambitions to succeed, as I worked in the background and James strove in the forefront.
As James spoke with Lily, he played up on my grumpiness. This was where we would introduce the concept of magic. The more James spoke, the more he gestured with his hands. When he suddenly stopped gesturing, that was Pandora's cue to watch closely as we mentioned the M word. Now, from this time on, our roles would interchange. If the child we spoke to was taken in with James, he would turn to the child and say quite solemnly, "And can you believe this boring git here doesn't believe in magic?"
From there we led the child in a roundabout way, trying to see if the child accepted the idea. If he or she did or did not, that was Pandora's signal to manipulating the parents into the avenue she wished them in. The way James' and my roles exchanged was if the child was repulsed in some way by James' behaviour. I would introduce the concept of magic by saying, "Would you believe this idiot here thinks magic exists?"
Now, it was generally a given if the child would accept the concept just by the overall reaction towards James' and my question. Lily's response to James' comment was to look at me with wide, disbelieving eyes. I shrugged, and Pandora launched into her own scheme.
I will not explain how Pandora presented Hogwarts to the parents as well as the child's invitation to attend. Needless to say, Mr and Mrs. Evans were not hard to convince that the school was not a hoax. Indeed, they were excited over the idea of their daughter being a witch. They thought it to be very elite and were proud of Lily's ability to do magic. However, Petunia was not.
Add that woman to the list of people who should be suspended by their toes from the Whomping Willow. Place her between Lucius and Lockhart, and let the three of them at each other; it would be most amusing and they deserve no less.