Author's note: I bring you a small character sketch of Severus – not necessarily canon. It has been helping me to get back into his character a little more. I hope you enjoy it.
The Gardener of Spinners End
He keeps his fears buried in a chest in the back garden. Beneath the gardenias and the African violets are his sorrows and his regrets. Severus Snape walks the gravel path at the back of the house he has inherited at Spinners End, his footsteps crunch the stones with a distinctly satisfactory sound. The watering can in his right hand has rusted in places so that as he walks it wets the ground beside him, and little weeds spring up in the in-between places that separate the stones and the sand.
There is bark underneath his fingernails, soil stains the creases on his hands. He sets the watering can down and inspects a bed of daisies, their little white faces turned towards the sun. With steady hands he brushes dirt from their petals and tucks the dirt up around their stems.
He learnt gardening from his mother. He remembers her bent over the same daisies, spraying them with an insecticide that they brewed together in the laundry. She would spend balmy summer nights stirring the potion in the cramped space while he looked on. Her head beaded in sweat, her nightgown clinging to her lower back.
He planted rows and rows of daisies when she died.
Their twisted stems remind him of his childhood, and as he waters them he thinks of lost time, wasted moments, and regretted seconds.
Even now with the dark mark burned into his forearm he smiles at the flowers, picks up his watering can and continues to the back corner where the dilapidated wooden fence has cracked and splintered. Sunlight never reaches this section of garden. Yet a single lily survives in the garden at Spinners End. Flowering on one day of the year, the 31st October. And as Severus kneels down to it, its petals unfold in the darkness.