Chapter 1

o-O-o

When she was five she woke up in the backseat of a Ford Sierra, in a car park outside of a petrol station and a second-rate nightclub. Her fingers were numb and her breath puffed into frosted air. The rough spots on the car seat from old, spilled liquor grazed her skin like bristled fur, suddenly puffing into rime. She was used to waking up in strange places, by herself, and so she felt detached curiosity at the sudden fear that gripped her limbs. She hardly knew what to think when the detachment dissipated and the fear marbled like cooling liquid in her blood, hammering icy shards into her heart. She couldn't breathe, and then suddenly began inhaling in panicky gasps as her small chest fluttered like a caught rabbit.

Her eyes registered nothing, just her scared reflection in the mirror, a child enclosed in a plastic casket. But her body was telling her to run. There was something, something, in the car with her, an empty gaze casting tendrils of interest along her body.

The phrase that entered her mind was as foreign as the dread she was feeling.

Mummy. I need my mummy.

Liz popped the lock up and flew out the door, her footprints skirting the dusted snow on the asphalt. She ran a few steps then stopped, her hammering heart echoing the tantric beat from the building across the street. Looking back at the hunk of grey car, its open door like a gaping black yawn, she watched in horror as a thin line orbited wisps alongside her footprints. It threaded towards her, slowly but purposefully, caressing and splitting the snow with its unseen shadow.

She sprinted across the street and ducked through the door of the building, her little arms trying to slip through the crowd of smokers loitering in the entry, and yanked open another door that led to the club floor. Heat cloaked her in a sweltering blow; the crowd of sweat-slicked people writhing like lake-floor reeds did little to assuage her fear, but rather amplified the reaching danger she felt closing in on her. A man's hand reached down to clasp her shoulder, probably to question her presence, but she shrugged him off. In her limited experience she already understood that glassy-eyed drunkards did her more harm than good.

Mum.

Her mother did not look like a mother in most circumstances, but her parenthood status was utterly incongruous in the snow globe-like enchantment of the reeking warehouse. Barely a woman, and yet, utterly a woman, she danced in her most elemental form, her beautiful face dipping to the ground then rising again, gaspingly. It would be later that Liz would analyse the scene, and see what was wrong with the picture. How her mum commanded the room; how the dancers glazed over in both feet and eyes, spellbound. How she lazily twirled a stick between her fingers, the stick, the one that no one was allowed to touch. How there was no ceiling, but a starlit galaxy that swirled to the motions of her hands, casting ambient blues and purples onto her slack face.

Liz tugged at her mother's empty hand, trying to wake up her vacant, distant eyes. The galaxy sky flickered, dimming with her lapsing concentration, and her long lashes swept from her high cheekbones, which paled from smooth to gaunt as the light changed to a tri-coloured pallor from the cheap floor lights.

"Mummy," Liz pleaded, seeing her mother's faint awareness and pointing rather blindly in the direction of the door.

Her mother stopped stock-still, her eyes widening towards the ceiling. Liz followed her gaze, only seeing water-damaged tiles and loosely-hung foil lights; it all seemed rather jaundiced after the clear glow of the galaxy.

"Dementors", mum hissed, slipping the stick into her waistband and yanking Liz to her side. Mum never stooped when holding her, just jerked her child upwards by the arm while the girl ran on tiptoes. Liz felt such happy relief that mummy, at least, saw the danger.

They burst out the emergency exit and into the softly snowing night. Her mother was just as afraid as she was, that much was clear, as her hands shook at the ignition. The little engine cranked as they fled through the coiling streets of Gateshead, the rushing snow concaving around the windscreen like pinpricks of collapsing stars.

Mum swerved the car behind a large brick building, tunnelling down a pitch-black lane and parked behind a skip bin. White-knuckling the broken safety-belt, Liz recognized the building as Tony's place. Having regained her bearings, she jumped out the car and into the side entrance, mum hot on her heels. There were no sounds. No traffic. No rustling litter. No wind. Just the wheezy gasps of petrified girls. Having scrambled up the steps, mum fumbled at the lock of her boyfriend's flat, the tension mounting at the sound of footsteps knocking up the wooden stairs behind them. Before Liz slipped into the jerked-open door, her stomach leapt into her throat as she caught a glimpse of long brown robes swishing around the corner.

Her mum slammed the door and lifted her stick from her waistband, but right as she pointed it to the bolt the door swung open, knocking Liz on the nose as she pressed flat to the wall.

"No!" Mum's voice was strangled, desperate.

"Marie Milne." The voice was deep, and oddly dispassionate considering the level of terror curdling in the hallway.

Mum tried again to shut the door, but her body was immediately yanked out of the door. Her hands gripped the door jamb.

"It wasn't me. I swear it." And then, "I'm pissed out of my mind, I didn't mean to! I'm not in my right state… gerroff!"

Liz clutched the doorknob with sweaty palms and held it to her chest.

"Mrs. Milne."

"Do not call me that," she snarled. "I never took the bastards name."

Undeterred, the voice droned on. "This is your third confirmed breach of your probation in regards to magical protocol. As specified in the terms of your probation, your wand is traced to the Ministry. We are here to escort you to the Wizengamot for an immediate hearing."

"This is bollocks!" Mum shrieked. "You have no right!"

Liz spared a wide-eyed glance in the crack of the door, watching her mum's fingers slip from the jamb as she cursed and shouted, her voice hiccupping in unison to the tugging of her body, before a crack sounded out and her cries were cut short and left behind dead silence.

The instant hush tore any remaining breath from the girl's lungs. She stood frozen, in the dark, craning for any noise and any remnant of mum. Her heart clenched as she sensed a breath touch her between the door and the jamb, and her jaw dropped in silent petrification as she felt the floorboards bend with the weight of a man. Her hands clutched the knob in prayer stance.

She couldn't see the man, but she felt him moving around in the flat. Opening doors and looking into rooms. He walked back to the doorway, an inch from Liz, and stopped again. He breathed deeply, and the fabric of his clothes rustled. The girl saw black dread creep around her vision and grip her heart, before flooding her body with molten blood. She remembered to let go of the knob the very second the figure swung it shut. She stayed in the spot by the wall, gasping, for hours until Tony showed up from his night shift. There was little she could say to explain her appearance.

After waiting a week for his girlfriend to show up and collect her kid, he had his sister drive the girl down from Gateshead to London and into the care of her birth father, Doug Milne. The prodigal bastard husband.

As an adult, Liz would come to understand that this event was hardly serious. Retrospectively, not even that scary. She would come to fear much more grave dangers, in her later life. She would undergo worse traumas.

But this was the first. And the first is the one that haunts.

Her first broken bone, her first betrayal, the first time she was sexually penetrated, all these firsts would forever remain palpable to her. While the memories of the pains would be visceral and real, she had the cognitive capacity to gloss over the acuteness of the sharpness and the stabs.

The memory of fleeing through Gateshead, however, stuck like shrapnel. She would always feel the tangible texture of that night; the cold fabric of the Sierra, her mother's anguished pleas, the feel of every stuttered heartbeat galvanizing her chest. To be informed of such abject terror and abandonment at that age would impress not only all her future decisions and actions, but her personality as well. She was a person who knew what it was to be left alone. Not simply to be alone. But to be left alone.

o-O-o

Marie had lived.

She had not been carted off by Satanists or abducted by aliens or any of the gory scenarios her daughter had envisioned. She was merely drunk, stupid, and highly reactionary. The only risk to Liz had she been seen was to have her memory forcefully obliviated, which, all things considered, would likely have been for the best.

Liz would learn this later.

Doug had taken one bloodshot glance at his sullen child the day she landed at his doorstep, looked to the ceiling and proclaimed all manners of profanities at his god. But he was hardly one to turn his nose up at the support benefits her presence would bring. And so Liz learned what it was to be used. He immediately saw the light and applied with a family bid for council housing. He trotted her out to the park to woo single mothers into taking a second glance at an otherwise unacceptably unhealthy man. When she was a little older he'd get her to stand outside the liquor store and sweetly ask dodgy-looking customers for a favour. He left her in the company of his boss, after one too many shifts skivvying off. And then the landlord. And then the loans-man.

Her father was a brute, and an alcoholic, but in his quieter moments she caught glimpses of what drew the attentions and unwittingly ensnared the womb of a then-teenaged Marie. He had been but a boy, once. It was such a mystery as to how something so pure could be so corrupted. His hardships in life had so deprived him of personhood that he was left depraved; a concept she came to learn as being something as resolute and lasting as the stones in the street.

No one could say where exactly Liz learned her humanity. Nobody, herself included, was paying close attention to her life. She was not Doug. She was not Marie. She was not the result of them, and their choices. Amid all the awful people that circled the miserable vortex of her childhood, there also existed the good.

Sami the sweetheart clerk at Botterils. The elderly Chinese woman who'd sometimes mind her and subsequently feed her until her belly burst. The Berry's, a loving family of ten living in a two-bedroom council house down the road and who were protective to the point of fanaticism. A girlfriend of Doug's who had left her a second-hand mattress, uncomfortable that she got to sleep on a bed while the child had the settee.

Liz had friends. And they sustained her.

o-O-o

Memories of magic stayed in her mind in unimportant ways; washed away in recollections of bigger events, or affixed to a random sense as banal as the smell of cough-syrup. She had partly grown up with it, and while she knew it was something that existed, it was not a concept she was capable of looking at head on.

It wasn't until Marie came back that she really viewed magic as the oddity it was.

Liz was eight years old, walking home from primary, and slowed wonderingly at the sight of the beautiful young woman leaning against the brick fence. She identified the thrum in the air before she recognized her mum. Marie's magic had a steady strumming sensation, like a plucked guitar string with the sound long faded.

Three years she thought this woman dead. Her fingers anxiously twisted the straps of her rucksack and she began to cry.

Mum.

Marie offered a quirk of a smile, amused. The familiarity of the gesture struck Liz to her core, and her sobbing pitched into a keen as she howled mum… mum... mum. The only words she was capable of.

The woman winced, then sighed as she stubbed her fag. "Quit your squealing Liz. It's good to see you. You're big now, yeah? Where's your dad at?"

It would annoy Liz, later, that the memory of the day her mother returned was as patchy and muddled as most other prosaic childhood memories. She could vaguely recall how Doug's absence brought a genuine smile to Marie's face, and how she followed at Marie's heels as the woman scoped the layout of the council house. She could see herself rashly swiping the tears from her cheeks, holding in the wash of snot, trying to appear mature for her mother.

Can you stay?

I'm staying at a friend's house, love.

Can I come with you?

No.

Marie was terse, distracted.

Where have you been? Mam, where were you? What happened to you?

Prison.

At Holloway? The only prison Liz knew of – Doug had female friends incarcerated there.

It wasn't that kind of prison, Liz. Give me a hand 'ere.

Liz remembering tripping over herself in her haste to help her mother carry the telly to the door. Then they loaded the guitar, the portable radio, expensive speakers Doug had nicked the day before. She knew on some level what they were doing, what Marie was planning, and felt some anxiety as she knew Doug was going to go mental. But she would've robbed a bank if it meant Marie's regard.

Eventually there were men in the house, friends of Marie, and Liz felt her heart pounding as the afternoon began to close. While Marie rummaged through the drawers looking for spare change, she tentatively, so tenuously, gripped her mother's sides in a cautious hug. Marie tolerated it, patting her hands distractedly. But then, as the kitchen emptied, Marie stood up straight.

She looked at Liz shrewdly, glanced out the door and then pulled the stick, the stick, out from under her sweater.

Do you remember, Liz?

She had nodded, the memories of old lessons vaguely evoked.

Try it again. I want to see. Give it a flick. C'mon, give it a go.

Nothing.

Try this. Look at the mug, focus your mind on it. Wingardium Leviosa. Say it right, love. Wingardium Leviosa.

Liz could recall the surge of Marie's energy, thrumming with impotent want, wanting to touch that mug. She also recalled, in perfect detail, how her stomach wilted at the contempt and disdain in mother's eyes, as the signature of Liz' own strum never revealed itself.

It's what you get for shagging muggles, I suppose.

A squib, Marie had said.

A squib, Liz would remember all her life. Squib. The word meant nothing, yet everything, to her.

At the door, she begged her mother to take her along. Trying to convey wordlessly to her the kind of life she was living, in the manner that women understood in the very marrow of their sex. Save me. Please. Please.

Marie shrugged the weeping girl off, but mindful of her mates in the car, gave her an obligatory but cursory peck.

"Give us a kiss, then. I'll come again, yeah? We'll step out for a bite. I promise."

One of the men called out. "Christ Marie, she's yer spittin' image."

Her mum looked back at Liz, truly looked at her well and proper. Her beautiful, pained face scanned the girl's features, warily, as though realizing for the first time that this truly was her girl.

She looked sad. An uncanny sadness, not the usual kind. She met her child's eyes.

"I'd have loved you, you know." A shadow fell over her eyes. "Ta, darling."

And in the infuriating tendency of childhood memories, all Liz could still see was the back of a young woman striding across the narrow street, hands shoved into her pocket, and that was all that was left of Marie.

o-O-o

Authors note:

This won't be a long story, I promise. Or a particularly complex one. It was going to be otherwise, as indicated by the lengthy backstory of the OC character, but the other chapters are going to be much more to the point, as I simply don't have the time to invest in a byzantine original plot. I don't quite know why I wanted to write this, as the descriptions of Snape as written by JK Rowling doesn't particularly inspire heart palpitations, (for me at least), and really my OTP interest is Remus/Tonks. But I read one Snape fic, which was so bloody well written, that led me to another fic, and then to another, and after a solid month reading some of the best fanfics I've ever read, I realized I quite like Snape. Perhaps not for his looks or his vindictiveness, but for his actions. He's quite the tragic hero.

Long story short, I think Snape deserves some love.

Full disclaimer: It's been awhile since I've done fanfic – plot points are totally predictable, dare I say unoriginal, and as with many OC characters, we may accidentally fall into Mary Sue territory. Such is life. Well, my life, at any rate. Let's have fun anyway!