Respect


A look at Snape being sent to take Harry to Hogwarts. He knows this boy is not his rival but he hates him all the same


He hates the old man for making him do this, even though he knows Dumbledore didn't make him do anything. But that gentle nudging, the hints! Merlin, he'd have to be deaf and dumb and blind not to notice that it is really and truly imprtant to Albus that Severus be the one to find the eleven-year-old boy. Already the child is getting preferential treatment, and term hasn't even started yet.

Hagrid might have used different means, but Snape uses magic, a Point-Me spell and an Apparition, bringing him to face a hovel on a rock, damp and windy and more miserable than even his dirtiest dungeons. Potter lives here? He thinks incredulously, because it looks like seaweed would have trouble living on this small island, and they're in the middle of the sea. He enters the hovel with all expectations already shattered, and what he sees inside is basically a metaphorical boot grinding the shards down to dust and kicking them into the wind.

It is dirty and damp and smells like things have died and rotted and grown over with rot-eating mushrooms, which have also died and rotted, it a huge, smelly cycle. And laying on the dubiously sturdy floor is the spitting image of James Potter, shivering under a blanket that is more air than cotton.

Snape nearly turns and walks out right there, because this is the face of the man who bested him, and the boy who wears it is curled into a weak little ball. He is unknowingly mocking Severus with this, because he can stand to lose to a worthy opponent and James Potter was worthy, and his son--

His son is a weakling.

He knows this boy is not his rival but he hates him all the same, for the disgrace and for all of his pride is telling him this is wrong. He cannot stop the sudden flood of anger, that the son of Lily and James, the son of his rival and love, is treated like a dog by muggles and in Snape's mind that is Harry's fault.

He reigns in this anger, tells the Dursleys in his most dangerous voice exactly how this thing is going to happen, and with a final sneer at the boy he is gone.


Over the years Severus Snape watches Harry become like James, and suddenly an even better man than his father. And on that day Severus looks at him without hate or disgust, and maybe it's even approval in his eyes. On that day, Harry honestly earns the respect his father had to steal some fifteen years ago.


I've been seeing a lot of Snape goes to get Harry fics, and they usually end up with the man being a mentor. Well, I figured this suited his personality better. My view of his personality, at least.