AN: Hello all! I'm Lady Caris, nice to meet you. This is my first story on this account, so I'm understandably a bit nervous. Um, no flames, please?
About this story– we've all see a lot of Severitus/Snape mentors Harry/Snape rescues Harry stories, but I've never found, to the extent of my knowledge, one of those stories with a Fem!Harry. Snape taking care of little Fem!Harry struck me, and well, here's the idea fleshed out a bit.
My main problems with most Severitus fics are as such: 1). Snape is usually WAY overly emotional and OOC. 2). Symptoms of child abuse and neglect are either dramatized to almost comedic proportions or not really researched at all. 3). Dumbledore is ALWAYS bashed. NO. NO MORE. I LIKE Dumbledore! I cried at his death in the books! Stop turning him into this wicked, cruel man intent on manipulating every single dang thing around him in malignant ways! 4.) Harry seems to recover with a snap of fingers.
Warnings: brief mentions of sexual assault (the act is not in this story nor described, but is loosely mentioned out of medical concern), child abuse, neglect, Snape suddenly having to take care of the little Harriet Potter. No bashing, no slash.
Disclaimer: Although I masquerade as J. K. Rowling in the daytime, by night I am known as the fearsome, lethal Lady Caris, who has no claim to this original story but her own unique twists.
She was small.
So much smaller than Snape had anticipated.
Even he himself wasn't entirely sure what he had been expecting. A little bratty female version of James, most likely. He'd heard, through snatches of conversation between Albus and the teachers, that the child had James' black, unruly hair, but Lily's eyes, though his caustic mind had taken to compressing his mental image of the child into a carbon copy of James.
His heart seemed to lodge itself in his throat. His brain, though admittedly quite sharp and clever, simply couldn't compute with the image presented before him. Though he was silently shocked, his grip on his wand remained tight and ready, an effect of years of paranoia and spying.
A small child, emaciated to the point of skeletal weight, with lank, hopelessly tangled black hair that obviously hadn't experienced a good soaping in a long time, her pathetically small body curled away from him on a miserable, filthy cot. Her narrow shoulders were hunched inwards, as though cowering from the entrance to the little room. A putrid smell permeated every crease and crevice of the cupboard under the stairs, sharp and pungent. Snape's coal-black eyes slid slowly to the left, wordlessly taking in the empty blue bucket shoved into the farthest corner. It was faded, scratched, and old, and judging by the stains, it had been used as a makeshift bathroom before, though empty now.
He stood very still and looked at the shoddy cot, the threadbare blanket and lack of pillow. He looked at the cobwebs hanging despondently from the ceiling, fat black spiders dangling from their ends and watching the intruding Potions Professor with bright, round black eyes. He looked at the child's sickly pale skin, the shallow rise and fall of her shoulders.
Flashbacks of his own miserable childhood flickered distantly through his mind.
He moved forward, his sweeping black robes whispering over the floorboards. A long-legged man, he could barely fit in one stride before he had to stoop beneath the deeply slanted ceiling lest he pick up a nest of awaiting spiders with the crown of his head.
He burrowed his arms underneath the body, turning it over gently. A horrid smell wafted upwards. Clearly, Harriet Potter had not been bathed in quite a while. Dank hair flopped lifelessly around the cot, like dying black snakes. Her abdomen was swollen, a red alert for severe malnutrition. He brushed the back of his knuckles against her face to check for any warmth in the skin, internally marveling at the child's tenacity for life. She looked seconds away from death. A distinct, puce-colored bruise mottled the upper left half of her face, swelling her eye shut. In the middle of the contusion was a thin cut. Judging by the shape of the handprint, the cut was the work of a ring, and according to the mark's size, it was clearly a remnant of her fat Uncle's rage.
Snape's mouth was drawn tight, his facial expression closed tightly as he occluded with all his strength.
This was Lily's child. The Savior of the Wizarding World. The girl-who-lived. The Golden Girl.
And here she lay, scarcely five years old, beaten and starved and neglected to within an inch of her life, shoved away in a dirty cupboard.
He shed his outer cloak and clinically wrapped the child's deadweight in the soft material, lifting the bundle easily, wryly promising himself to burn the material later. Her head flopped against his chest. At this angle, he could see crumbles of dirt at the messy part of her hair, and long black eyelashes, stark against the paleness of her skin.
He backed out of the cupboard, wand held tightly in his long, stained fingers. The miserable family of Muggles eyed him dreadfully from where they sat magically frozen on an ugly flowery-print couch. The television played an insipid cartoon loudly in the tense atmosphere. Snape flicked his wand, meaning to silence it, but his emotions were not properly controlled and he ended up exploding the contraption in a shower of bright sparks and acrid smoke.
The fat man with a bristly, offensive mustache and repugnant countenance, was very red in the face, a vein throbbing noticeably in his temple. He looked as if he couldn't decide between indignant outrage or primal terror. Petunia Dursley's thin, reedy face was drained of color, her considerable neck pressed as far back into the cushions as it could, as if to repel herself away from the intruder. Snape's black eyes traveled slowly to the last occupant of the room–the obese pig-boy, Harriet's age, frozen with his grubby jaw hanging open and his ugly, swinish eyes comically wide.
A contestable hatred rose up inside him. For a moment, Snape recalled his blackest moments, his cruel tendencies, his most inventive dark curses and hexes–
–but now was not the time. His eyes flitted back to the ailing child in his arms. Harriet Potter needed the expert attentions of Healer Pomfrey as soon as possible. Not to mention the countless lists of rules and regulations forbidding magical torture or interaction with Muggles. Snape would need time to work around them and find their loopholes. His long fingers flexed, the wand jerking in his hands.
There was always a later time, but for now, so that they would not flee in the meantime...
"Obliviate," he intoned darkly. Their eyes, already unintelligent, glazed and grew blank. Snape released them from their magical binds and was out the door and apparating before their vision had even settled.
Snape appeared outside the wrought gates of Hogwarts with a loud crack. Immediately, he shifted the unconscious child in his arms, looking down with slight alarm. He shouldn't have apparated with his passenger in such condition, and normally he wouldn't have, but time was crucial now.
He strode imperiously up the winding paths at a breakneck pace, the girl cradled in his arms. He looked down at her tilted face, looked up, looked down, and then swore softly.
'To hell with my reputation.'
He broke into a run.
"Motty," Snape snarled as he passed through the outer courtyards. A house elf, dressed in the standard Hogwarts House Elf uniform, appeared with a muted pop, already bowing. "Tell Madam Pomfrey that she is about to have a very sick child in her care–severe malnutrition, dehydration, neglect, and abuse. Alert Albus that I am taking Miss Potter to the hospital wing." The house elf immediately disappeared, the afterimage of wide, tennis-ball sized eyes lingering.
As Snape took all the accessible shortcuts he knew of to get to the hospital wing in the smallest amount of time possible, he felt the bundle in his arms stir, a pitiful, hoarse squeak coming from within the folds of the dark cloak. Snape quietly cursed again. The last thing he needed was a conscious, sick little girl waking up in the arms of a stranger in an unfamiliar place.
Her eyes struggled open, the pupil severely contracted to mere pinpricks in a sea of blurry, hazy green. Slow reaction time. Her pupils were sluggish in adjusting to the bright flames of the torches in the walls. Snape watched her out of the corner of his eye, preparing for a negative reaction. Her irises slowly wandered around, drifting without any real focus, sliding past Snape's face two times before managing to latch on to his sallow visage with any real success. She was silent. Her mind's natural barriers might as well have been nonexistent. One peek at her startling green eyes and Snape saw several fleeting memories of the horrid cupboard, a large spider crawling up a stick-like, limp arm, a man's towering face red with screaming–
She was shaking, Snape realized. Trembling like a leaf in a gale, though she was remarkably quiet for an abused child waking up tucked close to a stranger's chest. Grasping for something to do to somewhat ease her pain, he cast a nonverbal warming charm on the cloak. Instantly, her face relaxed and she curled further against his chest, small cheek nuzzling his robes as her eyes blanked once again and slipped shut. A funny twinge flicked in Snape's gut. He was unused to handling children, especially ones so young and so ill.
The figures in the paintings chattered and followed him through the halls. Depicted women gasped and cried and swooned and called medical advice to him, as the men ranted and raged about "what they oughta do to the kind o' sort who could go round hurtin' defenceless children". Snape paid them no visible heed, but listened attentively to their drivel. It helped delay the impending realization that he was holding Lily's child.
He burst into Poppy Pomfrey's hospital wing with uncharacteristic haste, like a great bat alighting upon a sighted prey.
"Poppy," he called sharply.
A homely figure, dressed in a nurse uniform, faced him. She had already prepped one of the beds and collected a rack of medicinal potions, and now she wiped her hands nervously on her apron and approached the Potions Master.
"Severus!" She exclaimed. "What could possibly have happened? At this hour?" She clucked her tongue. "Where is the child?" Severus glanced out of the glazed glass windows, noting the darkness and weak moonlight filtering through the gauzy drapes. He hadn't noticed how late it was; for such a remarkable spy, the thought unnerved him, and so he banished it quickly from his mind.
He shifted his arms so that Poppy could see the bundle. Her hands flew upwards, cupping her mouth.
"Favor for Albus," he explained loosely, hesitant to use the word "mission" for fear that it might trigger her suspicions. "I was supposed to check up on a student in a Muggle home. Her condition and state of living were deplorable. I brought her here for medical aid."
"The poor thing!" Poppy gasped, even as her wand flicked out of her sleeve and swirled, levitating the child from Snape's arms to the prepared infirmary bed, settling the limp body on top of the crisply folded and starched sheets.
"Severus, her clothes," Poppy instructed firmly as she began pouring doses of potion into a small wooden cup. Snape hesitated, then began to assist in clinically vanishing the pitiable, baggy shorts and wrinkly, foul-smelling shirt. Her underwear was soiled and worn. Snape vanished the filth and cast the strongest freshening charm that he knew, but the tired fabric could only muster up a weak grayish-white. Her body was all awkward bones and pale skin. Indents of her ribs could be clearly seen, and her collar bone jutted as much as her wristbones, ankles, knees, and elbows. Worse were the contusions spread randomly over the body. Bruises and scrapes in different states covered her limbs, centralizing on the shoulders, forearm, stomach, and sides.
"Any other types of abuse that you might be aware of?" Poppy asked as she hovered her wand over the la body, casting diagnostic charms and busily reading off the charts.
Snape's stomach churned nastily as the impact of her words dawned on him. Would those monsters stoop so low to child molestation?
"I didn't have time to check," he informed her faintly. He should have. He should have put little Harriet in a stasis charm and ripped those filthy Muggles' minds apart to find out the extent of the damage.
Poppy gave him an inscrutable look before gently turning the child over and beginning a cycle of magical tests designed to check for assault. Snape turned his head away respectfully. The silence was short but heavy.
"She hasn't been touched in that way," Poppy finally said, her voice trembling with relief. Snape let his own shoulders sag heavily for a split second. If such a despicable act had happened to Lily's child…
Poppy briskly rubbed bruise and cut creams generously over the child's body. As she attended to the bruise on the girl's face, she froze, eyes wide.
"Severus," she said faintly, moving away a lock of hair. The thin, zigzag scar nearly gleamed in the light of her Lumos. "Is this who I think she is?"
Snape wisely chose to remain silent. "If you would continue, Poppy," he finally said. "The details can be sorted out later." Poppy shook herself and went back to work. She magicked her into a loose hospital gown, tucking her in a very motherly fashion underneath the folded coverlet. Snape then moved to assist Poppy with spelling the potions directly into the child's stomach, and helping with physically delivering the volatile ones that reacted violently to magic and were unable to be transported into the child through charms. As they administered the last potion, one that Severus himself had brewed only a fortnight ago, designed to strengthen the immune system against invading sickness, the doors to the Hospital Wing flew open once again. Poppy jumped at the unexpected sound, the glass vial almost slipping from between her fingers.
"Albus!" She said, her voice tremulous with a myriad of desperate emotions. Snape turned stiffly, hovering beside the small child's bedspread. He felt the acute need to flee to his quarters, where a bottle of Firewhiskey and a warm fire awaited him.
Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore was generally a gentle and affable man.
But tonight, Severus looked at him and saw Dumbledore from the War, leader of the Order of the Phoenix, slayer of Grindelwald. His piercing blue eyes were tempestuous and angry in a fearsomely controlled type of way. His magic, its exerted pressure so strong that it almost filled the entire room, lashed like the waves of the sea.
"Where is she?" He asked shortly. The succinct inquiry, delivered in an icy voice, almost startled Snape, who long grown used to his mentor's affinity for waxing poetic. Snape and Poppy parted, letting Albus pass by and see the limp child. He fell into the chair beside her bed, shock carving deep lines into his aged face.
"Oh, my child…" he whispered, horror-stricken, and tears rose to the elderly wizard's eyes. His roiling magic deflated suddenly. The anger rolled off of him like rainwater, and he looked very very old. He reached for her hand, then decided the better of it and withdrew it, settling the appendage limply in his lap. He bowed his great, white head.
"I knew they would not welcome the addition," Snape heard him whisper, "but even I, fool that I am, did not foresee this treatment." His voice grew more impassioned. "Oh, my child, I am so sorry…"
He was silent for a moment. Snape saw a tear mark a glittering trail down the man's cheek, but Albus did not move to wipe it away.
When he raised his head, he was composed once more, his half-moon spectacles glittering in the washed light.
"Severus," he said, voice steely and soft. Snape flicked his chin to show he had heard. Dumbledore faced him fully, hands folding regally in his lap.
"I expect a full report in the morning. You have done excellent work. For the remaining night hours, Poppy and I will attend to Miss Potter. You may retire to your rooms–I expect you'll be wanting the rest..."
He didn't really need Albus' permission to leave, Snape knew, with a touch of sour irritability, but he supposed that Albus must know–he always knew everything, so how did he not know of the condition of the Lily's daughter?–how this whole situation was affecting Snape terribly beneath his stony facade.
He nodded stiffly, gave a few bits of quiet advice to Poppy about which of the potions were the freshest and therefore the strongest, and then left the long, silent Hospital Wing in a swirl of black robes, haunted all the while by a pair of distinctive green eyes.
AN: Gramps!Dumbledore is going to be epic, haha. xD Explanations and Snape fully meeting Harriet in the forseeable future.
(Is this the part where I say, "Review please?")