Alphabet of Secrets

Notes: My first fanfic, please read and review. Not beta'd, not Brit-picked. I don't own the copyright on these characters, I don't make profits from this, (J.K. Rowling and Scholastic books do, as well they should!). All the usual disclaimers apply.

The song about the ravens dates from at least 1611 and can be found in many versions wiki/The_Three_Ravens - I first heard countertenor Alfred Deller's version: watch?v=a7BptN19_5k There's a darker version known as the Twa Corbies (Two Crows) that I don't think even a Slytherin mom would sing to her four year old.

Alphabet of Secrets

January 9, 1963:

He's three today, his Mum tells him, a big boy. They go out and play in the back garden most days even though it's cold in early January, just past Three Wise Men's Day. He catches snowflakes on his tongue and it's his first memory—swirling snow around them, trying to catch the sparkling snowballs Mum throws to him before she bustles him inside, gives him a hot bath, a snack and cocoa before his naptime.

Mum says he's clever. Mum says don't bother your father when he comes home tired from work or the pub when he's had a few. At bedtime, she often sings him a song about a little green snake that slithers through the emerald green grass and even though he's a young hatchling, he's smart and waits for the unwary boys who caught and teased him once so he can bite their heels. She sings it so all the Ses in the song sound like hissing. Severus thinks it's brilliant that even small creatures can fight back.

There's an even sadder song she sometimes sings about three ravens and a dead knight who has a faithful hawk and a dog that lies down at his feet. Ravens are smart, Mum says. Just watch the crows that are their cousins, they always know what's going on in the neighborhood, and she imitates a crow's alerting caw so well it makes him jump and look around. Mum reassures him, showing him her hand and arm "See? No feathers."

After that, he starts paying attention to birds and plants and living things. In the summer Mum's garden gives him bugs to check out and butterflies to catch among the flowers and juicy tomatoes to taste off the vine and all sorts of smells—mint, lavender—that make his nose tingle. In autumn they talk about migrations and birds and why we get colder weather and warmer weather. He gets a blue pullover sweater and a grey flannel peacoat from Oxfam and a scarf with green and black stripes that Mum made to keep him warm as it gets chillier again.

Spring 1964-late 1965

One March day when he's four and pestering her after his nap as she tries to read another murder mystery, she sets down her copy of Dorothy Sayers' Strong Poison, sits with him at the kitchen table and starts teaching him his alphabet and which words start with which letters.

She prints a capital A for him on a piece of scrap paper. "This is the first letter of twenty-six in our alphabet. A is like a witch's hat. And A is for…?"

"Apple!" says Severus, who ate half a Pippin apple for lunch with a bit of cottage pie.

"Clever boy. And capital B looks like the two half circles stacked together, B is for…"

"Biscuit!" He likes Hob Nobs. "Bangers and mash!" "Big brave boy." He scarcely cried when he fell and scraped his knee yesterday on the garden path's rain slicked bricks.

"That's right. C is curled like a cat's tail, in French a cat is un chat. Tell me what else starts with C?"

"Cartwheels. (Something he can't do when the occasional lost lorry comes down their dead end street, Spinners Lane.)

"Another word?" she prompts.

"C is for Cokeworth, yes?" he asks. It's the sooty town where they live. There's usually a tinge of grey to the sky from coal fires in the winter and the factories by the murky river the rest of the year. Sometimes the dark smog makes everyone cough and people try to stay indoors on those days. Peasouper fogs, Da calls them, but he doesn't explain when Severus asks him what peas have to do with something grey and wet.

C is for cooking and Cadbury's hot chocolate. Except when Dad's home drunk or mad, Severus has Mum to himself and she teaches him things while she cooks casseroles or concocts tinctures and beauty products that the neighbourhood ladies buy. Sometime people pay her in coins which she hides carefully away for his future schoolbooks and for feeding her film addiction. More often, she's given foodstuffs like meat that they can rarely afford, or hand me down clothing for Severus, who is tall for his age. "It's a good thing, this trading," Eileen tells him, "this way your Da can't drink up the pair of long underwear that will keep you warm this winter." He giggles at the picture of gulping clothing and his Da choking on itchy wool.

"Now tell me Severus, what words begin with D?"

"Dangerous dog."

They met a scary one, loose in the park one day last week and it growled at him and looked like it wanted to eat him or Mum. But Mum had twisted her fingers in a strange gesture and threw a spark of light in the dog's direction. It yelped, jumping back like it had been smacked on the nose, and ran away.

"Cave canem, indeed," she murmured in satisfaction, as they resumed their walk and he took her hand. Sometimes small snakes needed bigger snakes to protect them. One way to be smart was to know when you needed someone else's help, Mum said.

"Mum, what's that mean?" Every day he spent a lot of time asking her the meaning of words she used that he didn't know. She never told him to stop pestering her with questions, and only sometimes told him she would tell him later when he was older. This week his favorite word was gormless. It was a northern expression, a different way of saying "stupid."

"Beware of the dog. It's in Latin, a language you'll probably end up needing to know. Dogs are also called canines—as are wolves. Werewolves are another story for another day."

She shows him where his canine teeth are and that he'll get his grown up teeth starting when he's six or seven. She tells him about snake fangs and beavers' teeth and vampires' fangs and basilisk fangs and all sorts of teeth and why they're different and the different things animals do with their teeth.

They spend the next month or three talking about teeth and different animal defenses and weapons and which creatures eat which foods. Almost anything can be a weapon, if you have knowledge about how to use it correctly, she tells him. She reads him books from the town's lending library about teeth and skeletons and sharks which don't have bones. It's very important to brush your teeth and keep them clean so your breath doesn't smell.

They play the alphabet game every day. Now he's got more D words—Dad, drunk, December, duck the bird and duck the verb, dodge, darts like at the pub and dart to run away; and another word for a stupid person that he happily rolls off his tongue over and over: dunnnn-derrrr-head.

E is for Mum's name, Eileen, and E starts the words egg and extract and England. She draws him a rough map, a way to find your way to places you've never been before, if the map is detailed enough. There is London, in the bottom right on squiggly Thames River. Here's Stonehenge and Avebury, and Manchester, Coventry, and Newcastle. This dot is York, and up top to the north here is Cokeworth, and way, way up, off the paper and into their dirty breakfast dishes is a special castle in Scotland called Hogwarts that she'll tell about when he's bigger and learned his capital letters.

She calls him her Young Prince or My Half-Blood Prince when he says something especially clever. "Silly Mummy, you're not a Queen!" She smiles and tells him she used to be a Prince before her marriage to Da; that was her family's name.

"But you weren't a real prince, not like the Queen's baby, you're a girl." He saw pictures of Queen Elizabeth (another E name!) with her new baby Edward (lots of E words), in the newsreels when, as a special treat, they went to the afternoon cinema together. Mary Poppins' bottomless carpetbag and Bert the Chimney sweep led to her mentioning expanding charms and Floo powder. He doesn't get it at all, but Mum says that's okay, he has years to learn about things.

His mum adores dark films where murders get planned and happen or birds attack people and films where smart spies like James Bond narrowly escape being caught by the Bad Guys. His father will sometimes watch war films and westerns, anything with guns and explosions (another E word to add to his list).

Eileen goes to see a matinee of Goldfinger as a treat to herself and a neighbour lady keeps an eye on Severus along with her own brood of five. Severus comes home with yet more questions.

"Mummy, Mr. and Mrs. Pridgedon didn't have any books in their house, isn't that funny? There are so many more people than books there, not like our house at all and why do they have so many children and here there's just me? And when can I go to the theatre with you? I want to see another film."

"She's a kind lady to watch you for me. The next time you go over, I'll send some of that salve I make for skin moisturizer with you. Some people just don't like books, Severus," she adds with a disdainful sniff. He looks at her like she's grown another head. Her answer distracts him from his other questions. "How can you not like books? They're neat, they teach you stuff!"

He decides people who don't like books are stupid. And since they don't read, they must stay stupid. Their own house is stuffed with books. Some are mum's books; some are school books of his dad before he went to work at sixteen. Still others, dozens of musty dark brown bound thick books with pictures of skeletons, veins and muscles belonged to his father's father who was a doctor until he did something stupid, lost money and died over in France around the First World War.

Severus has a shelf of his very own books in his room—a lot of Ladybird books for children, Beatrix Potter, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Alice in Wonderland and a reserve shelf of ones to read when he's older—the Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien and one of Mum's favorite detective's stories about Sherlock Holmes.

Da is stupid and mean. He only reads the sporting pages of the local paper and curses when his team loses. Then he drinks another beer. He tells Severus to shut it when Severus tries to tell him about the ants he found at the park or what Mum said about books. Severus is usually fast enough to duck Dad's backhand after his third beer. Tobias tells Eileen to stop reading all the goddamn time and making goopy medicines and starting acting like a normal wife and mother. "You spend too much time with Sev, he's such a mama's boy he'll end up bent, Eileen. And no son of mine's going to be a faggot. Send him out to play in the park, he'll meet some friends that way."

Faggot is an F word, like fuck and fucking- that grownups like Da sometimes use when they're furious or drunk. Severus is not to use such words or Mum will wash his mouth out with soap, the kind that stings and really gets rid of dirt by taking half your skin off. Privately he makes a list to himself of words Da says, but Severus is not allowed to repeat. "Bloody, god-damme, hell, fuck, shite, piss, whore, homosexual, faggot, queer…" Mum says there are better ways to insult people, and if you have to curse them, let it be a real curse, or with words they don't quite understand. She'll tell him what all those forbidden words mean when he's older. Like one hundred. He isn't sure if she's serious or not.

F is for four and five. Severus wonders if it would be fun to have a brother or sister when he sees The Sound of Music when he's five. He doesn't think he'd like all the fighting that siblings seem to do, like at the neighbours. And he wouldn't want to perform singing about a silly flower on stage, either. Mum tells him Edelweiss represents courage or daring in flower language. He still thinks the song is dumb and a younger sibling would probably be a pestilent brat (something his father has called him at times, so he figures pestilent is Not Good and adds it to his List of Cool Insults.)

Garden begins with G. In warm weather he helps Mum with her garden. She grows all sorts of herbs and vegetables and plants in their backyard between the kitchen door stoop and the shed which was an outhouse until indoor plumbing was put in a few years before he was born, after the Second World War. Now the shed holds spades, and shears, a rake and stakes to tie plants to and a calendar with his Mum's planting notes on it and dried flowers and herbs hanging from the rafters. Mum is a dab hand, with green thumbs and fingers, say their neighbours.

"I studied Herbology and Perfumery after school and before I met your father," she explains to Severus as they take a break and drink cool water in the shade of the apple tree. Their back garden is strange, Severus thinks. It looks to be a space not more than perhaps fifteen feet by twenty, but its inside is much larger than its outside. There is a greenhouse that shouldn't fit in the space, but it does.

"I'll tell you about it when you're older," Eileen says. Severus thinks that stinks, he's smart, he can understand most of what she says to him. She should tell him now. There are some other weird things he's noticed about Mum and their house and he has asked her about them, but Mum says only, "Silent as the grave," mimics turning a key over her lips and tells him he can help her with weeding if he has that much time to think about all that's strange in the world.

Mum says she loves him, and he needs to learn all he can. She talks French to him sometimes, which he starts to pick up a word here and there and she tells him he's smart enough to be a doctor or chemist or barrister. He won't be stuck in Cokeworth forever if he studies hard and keeps learning things. Mum promises by Merlin's beard he won't be trapped here, she will see to it. He wants to know everything. It's an amazing world, and a bigger one than just Spinners End and his father's anger. He's seen an exciting, different world in his mother's movies and books.

Eileen sets her son to help her prepare the soil for planting. He pulls the grasses she points out and the spiky leaves she calls weeds. He piles them on the brick walkway that bisects the kitchen garden by the back door and the rest of the land. These will go into the compost pile to make more good soil and to feed the earthworms. She talks about sage and mint, basil and anise, and their uses to heal people or flavor food. They tie bundles of plants up to dry and Severus learns the H word harvest as he helps his mother preserve jams and put away vegetables for winter stews.

H is for Halloween, haunts and Hobgoblins. Eileen and Severus carve turnips and put lit candles inside and put them in their windows to keep away the ghosts that come around this night, when the barrier between the worlds thins. Severus is reading easy children's books. He loves that he's growing up and he's really reading, not just looking at first letters and guessing at what something says from the pictures.

Not long after Samhain, there's one night Da's temper suddenly flares and he's trapped by his parents struggling in front of the door he could use to escape, like his mother told him to do when Da gets angry. "Run away, if you can. If not, hide little snake until Mama Snake can come get you." He crouches down, as small as he can make himself when Da lets loose with his fists on Mum. He cries soundlessly, so no one notices a small scared snake behind the sofa.

Tobias' voice is booming and he's calling her words that would get Severus a mouth washed out with soap. Repeatedly. Severus sticks his head out a bit to see if he can make a break for it. Da grabs Mum by the arm and pulls her hair and keeps yelling and shaking her. All Severus can think is, "Shut up! Shut it! Stop it!" at Da when he feels himself flushing with anger and choking, there's a crackle and heat and a sparkling ice-blue flame like alcohol on a Christmas pudding and suddenly the room's silent aside from Mum's heavy panting as she pulls free from a meaty hand's grip on her upper arm. His father's mouth opens, but no words come out. After some interesting faces of frustration and fear, he hits Mum, grabs his throat and dashes from the room. They hear the front door slam a minute after that.

Severus looks up to see his mum holding her bruised cheek and smiling at him through her tears. She says, "I'm sorry you saw that my Half-Blood Prince, but forget it. This is a wonderful day. You did accidental magic and froze your father's vocal cords, my love. That'll take a while to thaw. You're a wizard, Severus my Prince, not a squib." She gives him a fierce hug and spins him off his feet even though she's scarcely a foot taller. He's glad mum's happy with him, though he has no idea why or what exactly he did.

"He needed to shut his bloody mouth," he said sullenly, pulling free from her close embrace so he can look her in the eyes. "I hate him, we don't need him. We'll leave and go somewhere else like London and I can get a job and I'll protect you."

His mum pulls him into another hug. "I love you, darling but you can't stay to protect me forever and I can't leave him, I'm married to him, for better and for worse, much like a binding spell. You'll be off to Hogwarts in only six short years and there is so much I need to teach you before you get your letter."

Mum tells him about Hogwarts, where she went away to school at eleven, and its four houses. "Princes almost always end up in Slytherin. But Ravenclaw would maybe suit you too. The Sorting Hat talks to you in your head and then decides, your first night there at the Welcoming Feast, where you belong."

1966:

Since he is magic like Mum and can read, Eileen pulls out her childhood books for him to read. "Babbity Rabbity and her Cackling Stump" "Young Wizard tales" and "Young Witch stories" and they get even more library books every fortnight—stories of dragons, folk tales, ghost stories, the Wizard of Oz, Greek myths about fantastic beasts.

There are things he hasn't seen that she tells him about. It's a secret just between the two of them, don't tell, not even Da and when he goes to Muggle school he can't let people there know about their special world either. He starts to wonder about why Wizards have to hide from Muggles and why families are so different to each other and his mother starts to teach him about the Wizarding World. There is a whole world, an alphabet of secrets that he can't tell anyone.

A is for Amortentia and yes, apple. But some apples aren't like the Garden of Eden ones, there are magic ones found in the Western Isles, Tir Na Nog or Avalon, where the wizard Merlin, who was very real, visited a long time ago with another A, King Arthur. A is for Azkaban, the Wizard's prison on an island in the northern seas. Few prisoners get out alive or sane.

B is for Bezoar which cures most poisons and comes from the stomach of a goat. Belladonna—she shows him a picture of the plant—enlarges the dark part of your eyes and makes people sleepy. B is for the Black family—"distant pureblood cousins of mine," says Mum. When he asks why he hasn't met them she falters a moment, then says, "My family didn't like that I married your father, so they don't visit me anymore and they don't want us to visit them." B is black, and bats and the Black Death with its song about Ring a Round a Rosie.

C is for cauldron and cutting knives for herbs and, more prosaically, for cooking soup which hits the spot so well on those wet winter days when the icy rains sheet down in windy gusts and it's impossible to play outside without nearly drowning. C is for Charms and clockwise and counterclockwise ways of stirring soupsand unguents.

D is for the story of Death and the three brothers who tried to live forever and D is for Dark Lords who usually become other D words: despots or dictators. She tells him about Grindenwald during the Second World War and the wizard Dumbledore who defeated him. That sounds scary, so they talk instead about the dog she scared away last spring and smalls spells that even young witches and wizards can use to protect themselves or in emergencies when no one's around. She tells him about Dragons and Dementors, which he decides are way scarier than Dark Lords. That night she has to give him a draught of Dreamless Sleep when he wakes up screaming with a nightmare that his soul's being devoured.

E is for Excellence. Mum says he needs to do well in school so he can get a scholarship to study when he's an adult and 17. Seventeen sounds very grown up to Severus, it's years away and way longer than he's been alive. Mum teaches him maths as they measure and cook things. E is for Etiquette or manners. You never touch another person's wand without asking. You never offer your wand to another unless you are agreeing to serve them or in an emergency. There are different ways to address the son or heir of a noble family versus a merely wealthy one.

F is for family. Blood and bloodlines are important to understanding the wizarding world, like Burke's Peerage is to British muggles. She tells him about the Noble and Pureblood families and draws spidery line charts showing who's related to whom, who has alliances with whom, the last she knew. There are light wizards: families like Weasleys and Potters and Longbottoms. There are grey families like Sprouts, Pettigrews and Pomfreys, mostly from Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw Houses and there are families that tend to have an affinity for dark magic—Princes, Blacks, Malfoys… Most wizarding families have only one or two children. A family larger than three children is rare.

The garden and potions she makes in their linoleum floored kitchen (that stays clean with charms so she has time to read) are all part of the Wizarding secret world. Mum's a hedgewitch, like he's a future wizard. Magic can't solve everything, though. When he asks Mum why she doesn't turn Da into a toad, she grows solemn and says she won't do that, it would cause problems with the Authorities, both Muggle and Wizarding. Can she magic them a pile of gold to spend? No, it's one of the fundamental rules of magic that you can't create money or food or water out of nothing. You can summon things, but that's a different thing to accio a drink from your kitchen which has a faucet. So is creating a spring to bubble up if you have the knack for earthmagic and some accommodating ley lines in your vicinity.

Da may drink too much and sometimes smack them around, but he pays the bills. Mum has nowhere else to go since her family disowned her for marrying him, and she doesn't have any close friends in the neighbourhood. Severus hates that his father yells at him and Mum, especially after he's gone a few rounds at his local. The house is so much quieter and calmer when he's gone. Sometimes his mum gets a black eye and bruises that need healing salve. The doors she accidentally walks into greatly resemble his father's fists.

Severus will grow up to be a wizard even though his dad is a muggle, a non-magical person. That's why he's called a half-blood. Because of something called the Statute of Secrecy, Severus can't say anything to anyone about magic unless they also have magic. How he'll figure out they are a witch or wizard if no one is supposed to talk about it, he doesn't know.

In addition to all the books, Eileen tells him her family's stories. "You remind me of my brother sometimes, my Prince," she says, her hands a blur as she chops leeks and onions and carrots, peels potatoes and preps a cock-a-leekie soup for supper.

Severus raises his head from a book about mushrooms, edible ones and poisonous ones. After this, he's going to read a kid's book about plants for potions his mum used when she was a girl. He pushes his dark shaggy hair back behind his ears and peers over at her as she finishes prepping.

"I have an uncle? Do I have any cousins?"

"You had an uncle, he's been dead longer than you've been alive, mon brave." She settles herself at the kitchen table after putting a kettle on the hob for tea time.

"Janus was your uncle, my older brother. He died before he could marry or beget heirs. He lived for one thing—to bring our family back to prominence and he paid for it with his life." Severus keeps silent. Mum doesn't like interruptions when she's telling him about the Wizarding World, because her stories often hold hidden, but important lessons, sort of like Aesop's fables. The wise ant he read about last week sounds like a Slytherin who planned and plotted, while the carefree grasshopper sounds like a Gryffindor, living brashly, on the fly.

"Now, my mother was German, her family came over to England in the last century when the Muggle Prussian Chancellor Bismark was busy invading places all over Europe. She made my father, who was from a British wizarding clan, promise that Janus would be sent to be educated at Durmstrang, a Wizarding School, not far from the Carpathians. We lived in England, not too far from here, but it was decided that the Heir Prince should get a broader world view, so perhaps he might get a start in mother's family's medical supplies business. Not everyone can learn the charms and spells to locate and source, for example, good ancient Egyptian mummy bandages, it's not easy like going to the chemists to fetch aspirin for a headache.

So, Janus, who was more than ten years my senior, went to Durmstrang and fell under the spell of one of his teachers, Gellert Grindenwald, who was a devotee of the Dark Arts. He convinced Janus and many other students and youngsters that allying with him would bring Wizards greatness once more and that one of the ways wizards might gain land and power again was to eliminate most of the muggles. They don't give us Liebensraum, Janus was always complaining in his owl-carried letters home, so we need to take it by fair means or foul."

Severus risks shifting in his seat. "Liebensraum?"

The kettle whistles and Mum makes them each a mug of tea before settling across from him to resume her story.

"German. Living space. Janus said Gellert was crafty, he planted seeds in muggle brains and schemed with Wizarding and muggle politicians alike. After the Great War, the one your da's father died in, a huge influenza epidemic killed more people in two years than four years of all-out war had accomplished. Gellert kept aiding muggle rabble rousers—it didn't matter what they said they believed. His plan was to start an even bigger war and set an even more deadly stage for a massive epidemic if the war didn't kill enough people. Janus served Gellert by slipping funds and information to German groups, helping the Nazis consolidate power. In the wake of Gindenwald's defeat by Dumbledore, the wizarding world insisted on trials for war criminals. Janus was one of many kissed by Dementors. The Light only cared to punish those who had been on the losing side and used their Dark Arts knowledge. Janus died soon after in prison and left me the only Prince of our generation. My father was in so much grief he began searching for Dark Artifacts to bring Janus back from the dead. We think he ran afoul of a roc in Arabia, there weren't many pieces left to bury of him."

Severus sits and thinks. He can look up what an epidemic is in the dictionary in their house, so he asks another question instead. "Was Janus being with the Dark why you went to Hogwarts instead of Durmstrang?"

"Yes, my mother believed in hedging her bets, so she sent me to the school where the eventual victor Dumbledore taught and later became headmaster. She encouraged my budding interest in potions and perfumes. I was to "fly under the radar" as muggle pilots put it, and I was expected to make a brilliant marriage alliance, preferably with a Ravenclaw heir. I didn't have to be on the side of the light, I just had to appear to be at least grey and not interested in the dark arts like my brother."

"Why couldn't you show people you were smart and powerful too?" he asks after some consideration. Grey made sense, it gave you options. Grey was like a camouflage for wizards. Of course appearing dark would scare a lot of people and that might be even better…

"My mother was a traditionalist and I was just a girl. I wouldn't have gotten schooling beyond Hogwarts, except I convinced her that I would do more husband-hunting than potion ingredient hunting in France." She smiles a devious smile. "I didn't want a brilliant but loveless marriage like my parents. I wanted a man who could make me feel intensely alive. What did I know, I wasn't that old."

"But why a Muggle? Da doesn't even like to read."

She shrugs. "He swept me off my feet when I was home on vacation from my studies in Paris and it was the lure of the forbidden, a dark brooding muggle who was attentive, jealous and possessive when I even glanced at another man during a date. Well, I thought, I'm nearly forty—your dad thinks I'm in my thirties, not approaching fifty, by the way- I should have a child and get married. I thought my parents would eventually forgive me for following my passion. I didn't take my contraceptive potions and here you are. Not long after that I learned what a bad temper he had."

Severus thought having a baby was probably more complicated than forgetting a potion. He didn't quite get what all the steps were between wanting a child, being married and then waddling like a swollen-stomached penguin down high street like Mrs. Pridgedon seemed to do every other year before another baby showed up in its pram.

"I don't like babies, they scream and smell nasty," he says. You could hear anything in their house—it was small, and he could hear Da yelling at Mum in their bedroom most weekends and Mum crying, even when he hid under his bed with a pillow pulled over his head. He still really didn't get why Mum never used magic on Dad. She could hex him and then obliviate him, after all. Tobias wouldn't remember and Severus wouldn't tell anyone.

Autumn 1966:

He's six, he starts muggle primary school. His favorite jumper is acid green, he wears that on the weekends. The annoying thing is the other children. They're babies, they scarcely know their ABCs, much less how to read the books he's been devouring. He's one of the older and taller kids in his class, so while they think he's weird, they don't tease or bully him—yet. That starts a few years later when they catch up to him in height.

His teachers like that he cleans up his messes. They're amused when he says, very seriously in his high voice, "Messes can cause 'plosions, Mum said so." His teachers assume someone in his family worked in a munitions factory back during World War II.

The teaching staff think he is bright, but moody. He doesn't relate well to his peer group. "A loner, not a team player," comments one teacher on his report cards. His mother snorts at that one. "Teams are for dimmer Hufflepuffs who can't make it on their own brainpower." "Finishes work, but reads in class. Should get more outdoor exercise," writes the maths instructor. His mum mutters about Gryffindorish Muggles and testosterone and annoying heartiness. His marks are excellent, and he's polite to adults, but gets poor deportment marks because he insults his classmates and "should improve his attitude and make some friends."

1967:

Severus learns all he can about the muggle world at school, about TVs and Radios and what the Space Race is. His da gives him a transistor radio as a gift, so he can hear BBC radio news and popular music like the Beatles and the Merseyside sound. It gives them something to talk about over supper sometimes. His Da loves the Rolling Stones especially "(I can't get no) Satisfaction" and "Under my Thumb."

But living with his father is always a bit scary, his temper could blow at any time. You feel like you're doing a balancing act, like trying to coax a Hungarian Horntail dragon into giving up her eggs while avoiding becoming an appetizer. Tobias hasn't hit him that much since last year when Severus made him lose his voice, but his son isn't taking any chances and sits beyond arm's reach whenever possible. He knows better than to cheek his Da or ask him questions.

Tobias mutters under his breath about damn queers getting rights when they should be jailed. Mum tells Severus later that it matters less in the wizarding who you love, witch or wizard, but it's important to find someone who is as powerful or more powerful than you to form alliances with, including who fall in love with, if you can possibly help it. She didn't marry a wizard and you can see for yourself what a problem that is.

Severus is not invited to join in football matches at recess or playing in the riverside park after school with the other boys. The girls think he's weird and his clothes look odd and old fashioned. It doesn't help he snarls at them to leave him alone when someone tries to interrupt his reading as he sits under the shade of the willows in the park. He doesn't want just anyone for a friend, he wants a friend he can practice charms with and talk about muggles versus wizarding families.

At home, he reads books intended for fourth years at Hogwarts and, with a whippy willow stick, practices the motions he needs to accompany hexes and jinxes. Forewarned is forearmed. He practices running fast and staying inconspicuous at school so the muggle bullies won't notice him and can't catch him. He knows running won't work at Hogwarts if he's hit with a Jelly-legs jinx, so he reads Defense for Beginners and tries to learn how to stay alert in all sorts of situations and how to walk quietly. He needs to be smarter with faster reflexes than anyone, Muggle or Wizard, so he can control situations and avoid getting thrashed.

Spring 1968:

Lots of famous American men get assassinated the year he's eight, one is named King. He wonders if muggle Kings are related somehow to wizard Princes, but he bets not, otherwise a protective spell might have helped the man stay live. The Americans and Russians are both trying to be first to land on the moon. Sometimes his father's newspaper mentions spies in Berlin or the Red menace.

He knows each of the Hogwarts houses have their colors, in the same way the planets have their symbolic colours. Red is for Mars and fire signs in astrology like Aries, Leo and Sagittarius. Red means danger and stop in traffic signals. Expensive rubies are pigeon's blood red. Gold is used to colour glass red. He asks his mum about the Reds in the paper.

"Nothing to do with Gryffindors," his mother says. "Those sorts of Reds—it's a muggle type of government. And, by the by, the cowardly lion in those Oz books you are inhaling is satire. Gryffindors are brave for the most part, sometimes fool-hardily so when it comes to taking a stand. It's better to watch, wait, gather information and plan and thus stay alive. The saying should be "Spilled guts, no glory."

They go out to the park and pick violets for violet water. We need at least four cups' worth, says Eileen. I want to make some to sell, I'm going to need to pay for your robes and a real wand fairly soon. Severus helps her gather violets while watching two sisters, one about his age with flame-red hair, play tag and then hide and seek. He thinks they might be in his grade or the grade behind him. There's something different about the girl (her sister screams her name Lily in frustration, when she is found). The air seems to waver around Lily while her dark haired older sister doesn't have anything magic about her at all. Maybe this ginger haired girl could be his friend…