The Deconstruction of the Family Snape
Severus Snape was nineteen years old when everything went to hell.
Before that point, it had been hellish, but it was a manageable sort of hellish. Looking back, it almost seemed comforting. Reliable, like clockwork. But now, with the Mark bubbling under his skin like a malignant disease, he knew the difference.
The Dark Lord called and he answered. It was automatic by this point.
He'd been a fool; this he knew without reservation, but he had inherited his mother's stubbornness and knew that he would stay through any magnitude of abuse, for some part of him believed he had made his bed and knew he must lie in it.
The world did not give second chances. It most certainly would not give him a third.
'I deserve this,' he thought, through every torture dished out to him by the other, more senior Death Eaters. 'I was told many times what would become of me and still I chose this."
Sometimes, when it was particularly bad, he would find himself thinking kindly of his father, who had hit him often enough from a young age to teach him how to make his mind go far away from his body without any effort on his part.
"I'll give yer somethin' teh cry about!" He could still remember his father's slurred voice and the sound of his leather belt slipping against the cloth of his father's trousers as the man readied himself to strike his son.
Sometimes there was comfort in the familiarity of pain.
So, when Severus received a letter by owl one morning, he knew that it would be terrible news.
"Come home. He's dead," read the note.
Severus did not go home, though.
He waited one, two, three weeks. He brewed potions for the Dark Lord and pretended that this was the reason he was not returning to Spinner's End.
It was only when his mother knocked weakly on the door to his dingy apartment that he finally came along, his shoulders dropped with resignation.
"Don't slouch, Severus," his mother muttered. "You've already embarrassed me enough as it is."
He had to Side-Along Apparate with her because she'd forgotten how, and had spent all her money on a train ticket. His mother didn't speak much. She didn't ask him how he was doing or make small talk. It was as though she had been sent to retrieve him but lacked any sense of free will of her own. In fact, she only stared dully at the wall and did not reply when Severus discovered that she'd cast a Stasis spell on her husband's body, for she was too afraid to move it from his customary drinking chair in the front room.
"Were you bringing him food, Mum?" Severus asked, looking down at the plates of rancid food that lay around the corpse in piles.
"He asked for food but I keep forgetting," she replied numbly. "If I just remember to bring it fast enough this time, he will be pleased."
"He's fekkin' dead, Mum!" Severus almost flinched at the hysterical sound of his own voice.
He Vanished the plates with a violent jab of his wand. He still couldn't bring himself to look at his father
"He'll come back. He always comes back," his mum replied, hugging herself tightly and beginning to rock back and forth.
"Mum, please, you're not well. I'll take care of...Dad, but you must come with me." Severus wrapped his arms around her and felt her bony frame press against him from under her dress. He looked carefully at her face and beheld her sunken eyes and loose skin.
They Apparated together to St. Mungo's with Eileen Snape still in tears.
"She's not responding well to the potions we've tried," the Mediwitch said sadly, as Severus looked at his mother's small form on the white hospital bed, where she stared, nearly catatonic, at the wall. "After evaluating her, it's been determined that her memory is in decline, and though we've been able to fix some of her nutritional problems, her mind is-"
"It's fine," Severus interrupted. "If she forgets, she won't be sad about dad dying anymore."
He turned abruptly and left the mediwitch holding her clipboard with a frown on her face.
"Thank you, Lucius," Severus said, as he regarded the regal figure in the hallway on his way out, "She's the only family I have left."
The aristocratic man nodded slightly. "Family is, after all, the most important thing."
The house at Spinner's End had never been clean in the best of times, but now it was filthy. It hadn't helped that his parents had apparently taken up storing all manner of junk in the small space, probably in the hopes of selling it while his father was between jobs.
From all the empty liquor bottles, it was obvious just how that had turned out.
The floor was caked with grime and rat feces. Severus had to cast a Bubblehead Charm to save his nose from the stench of it all. Luckily, with a wand at his disposal, the place was soon empty of garbage and junk, though he had to rest after hoisting some of the larger pieces out to the street.
Later, he would burn every shred of his clothing in the tiny back garden.
Finally, he levitated his father's body into the shed in the dead of night so that nobody would see. Severus could not yet bring himself to do anything about it, though he knew that he must, eventually.