Innocent Blood

1.

They were shouting again. His ears perked without his consent, body tense while he strained to hear despite himself. Nothing good ever came of listening to his parents' row, but there was always the physical compulsion to listen, anyway. His body wanted him to be prepared and informed, even if his mind only wanted to be far, far away. He forced his eyes down, scanning the same page of his book without registering any of the words; he wasn't sure for how long. When they were fighting, time was different.

"Sev?" he started. He was so attuned to the muffle of voices coming up and around the staircase, that he hadn't heard his younger sister approach the doorway to his room. He craned his neck around at the sound of her voice, looking to the door without getting off his bed. She was still in her nightdress, even though it was nearly noon.

"All right, Cor?" He didn't exactly invite her to come into his room, but she tiptoed forward anyway, rounded the bed to stand by the head. He was lying on his belly, book spread over his pillow, elbows propping himself up. "You should get dressed," he said, without much enthusiasm.

"Why?"

Severus Snape sighed, placed his index finger in the crease of his book, and shifted his weight. "Because it's nearly the afternoon. It's called a nightdress because you're supposed to wear it at night."

"What are you reading?" Cordelia always shifted subjects as easily as a breath transitioned from inhale to exhale, but seldom as naturally.

"Hogwarts, A History," he replied, sitting up. He cradled the book protectively in his lap, finger still marking his page. "Did you know that the ceiling of the Great Hall is enchanted to show the sky outside?"

"Really?" A great rattling thud and a shout downstairs quieted both children; Cordelia padded to the doorway and leaned out into the hall, pale hands pressed to the wood of the doorframe, supporting her weight against it. Another thud, the sound of glass or pottery shattering, and then the thread of argument picked up again. Severus realized he had been holding his breath.

"What do you suppose that was?"

"I don't know," he rubbed his thumb over the embossed title on the cover of his book. "A vase, a glass. Mum's spirit."

"A window," Cordelia said.

"Nah, it wasn't a window. That would've been louder."

'No, at Hogwarts. In the Great Hall. Why didn't they just put a window in the ceiling?"

The shouting stopped; a door slammed. The house rattled in response, and, as if loosed by the same motion, a woman's sobs rose up the stairs.

They made eye contact. "Both of us?" Cordelia asked.

Severus nodded, slipped the book off of his lap and himself off of his bed in one motion. He gripped his sister's hand - cool and dry, it complemented his own sweaty, clammy hand. Ten pale, spindly digits twisted together, unifying the pale, spindly children they belonged to.

Two sets of bare feet gripped the worn floorboards. Two sets of toes curled around the edge of each stair before venturing into the unknown of the stair below. And at the bottom, two sets of skinny legs hesitated on the landing.

The crying stopped, as suddenly as it had started. They heard a loud sniffle, a shivery, hiccupy breath. Severus pushed the landing door open, pulled his sister into the empty sitting room. Drab furniture sat in stoic silence, a threadbare rug, curling up at the edges, lay crookedly over the floor.

"Mum?" Severus ventured, crossing the room to the kitchen, sister still in tow.

A woman was at the kitchen table, sallow face shiny and swollen from tears. Long, limp strands of black hair hung down, ends pooling on the scuffed surface of the table. Around her, the kitchen was in shambles. Overturned plates and cups littered the floor, along with a few pieces of dinnerware that were shattered beyond recognition.

Now that the woman had stopped crying, the kitchen's soundtrack was the drip drip of the leaky kitchen faucet, the resonant buzz of a fly around the rubbish-bin. Sunlight streamed in through the window above the sink, garishly highlighting all that was wrong, undomestic, about the ransacked room and the people within it.

"I thought you two were playing outside," she said listlessly.

Severus shook his head. Cordelia unwound her fingers from her brother's, slipped past their mother. She hooked a thick tangle of inky-black hair behind her ear, bent forward, and began gathering the chipped pieces of pottery from the floor.

"Is everything all right?" the young boy's face was a taut mask of concern divided by a beaky nose, dark eyes shadowed and wide. He was ten years of age, but in that instant he appeared at once much younger and positively ancient.

"Everything's fine," their mother said, and she found that she couldn't meet her son's earnest stare. "Your father's gone out for a bit."

"I wish he'd go out for good," Severus said, and he could feel, unexpectedly a dark bubbling rage. It began, strangely enough, in his toes and boiled itself all the way up to the tips of his ears.

"Watch your mouth," Eileen Snape rose to her feet, pointed a bony finger in her son's face. "An empty belly, no roof over your head. Is that what you want? Don't let him hear you say that."

Severus felt a burn in the whites of his eyes; he thought it was that rage, pouring itself out of him, but then his vision blurred with tears. He blinked them back, or most of them, anyway. A runaway slid down his face, dripped onto the front of his wrinkled, oversized shirt.

"Cor," he managed, sucking in a great breath, "Put some shoes on. You'll cut your feet open."

#

Summer was fickle to the Snape children; on the one hand, there was the freedom of the playground, the yard behind their house, the ability to languish in bed long after the sun came up, to wear pyjamas all day if one wanted to. On the other hand, there were the other children at the playground who teased them, the loneliness of the yard with nothing but clumps of straggly weeds between the cobbles to look at, the stifling, sticky heat in their tiny bedrooms after the sun came up, and the nagging despondence that came of wearing pyjamas all day.

Cordelia thought that her brother had gotten a better lot than she, but he was pretty good to her, most of the time, so it never bothered her much. He had his own proper room, with a wardrobe, and he was allowed to go to the playground by himself, and to the fish-and-chips shop at the corner, although neither of them ever had any money to buy anything there.

Her own room was in the partially-finished attic space - tiny, stuffy, and prone to extreme temperatures, although it was isolated from the rest of the house, which she didn't like most of the time, but was fiercely grateful for when their father was drunk and angry. Her room had to be accessed by pulling a rickety wooden staircase down from the ceiling of the first floor, and to get out of it, she had to be careful not to fall through the hole before she had gotten the stairs to unfold properly.

This summer though, Cordelia was starting to resent her brother's freedoms, mostly because he wasn't sharing them all with her anymore. The last few weeks, he had been to the playground nearly every day, and he'd only brought her along twice. She knew he had new friends too, because one day she'd gone out to the yard to see if she could find some dandelions growing between the cobbles, and he was walking away from the house, with a girl with long, pretty red hair.

In her hot, stuffy room, Cordelia lamented how unfair it was that Severus could go out alone and make new friends, and she could not. She was only - and she counted it out in her head - one year, seven months, and six days younger than he was. She would start at Hogwarts the year after him - and she knew she would, because once, she had accidentally fallen through the entrance hole of her room, and she had stopped a centimeter above the ground, and Severus had told her it was her magic. And just what was she meant to do at the weekends, when Severus was at Hogwarts and she was left at home? Surely by then, she would be allowed to go to the playground by herself?

She rolled over in her bed, eyeing the shelf of battered, dog-eared books on the far wall. Nearly all of them were hand-me-downs from Severus, and she must have read each one at least a hundred times. Even though she loved to read, the thought of reading the same book yet another time made her limbs tingle with irritation; she felt as restless as if she had been asked to live the same day of her life over and over again forever.

School would start again in a few weeks, and even though Cordelia didn't much like the other children in her class, there were always new books every year. She couldn't keep them after the school year was over, so she would read them hungrily over and over again until she had to turn them in in June. Sometimes the things in them were wrong, like her science book in infant school, which had said that magic wasn't real.

She remembered that very well, because she still had a scar on her forearm from that year. She had told her teacher that magic was too real, that her mother could do it, and her brother and herself could do it only sometimes, without really trying to. When the teacher told her she had a lovely imagination, she had tried to explain all about wizarding school and owl post; eventually, the teacher asked her to write all about it and hand it in. Cordelia had, and then she had mostly forgotten about it, until the teacher sent it home in the post to her parents, with a note suggesting they enroll in her in a children's creative writing course.

Tobias had been nearly as furious as she had ever seen him, and, as luck would have it, blind drunk to boot. That was when he had been laid off from his job at the mill, and so he had had most of the day while Cordelia was in school to build up both his anger and his intoxication level. He had raged at her an hour, burned the papers in the fireplace, and then, for good measure, shoved her bodily into into an end table. The lamp on the table had come down and smashed apart when it hit her arm, cutting it open.

She remembered also going to her mother for comfort, but her mother had only glumly told her that she ought to know better than to go around telling all sorts of Muggles about magic; and anyway, the table lamp had been an accident, and that was a story she better not write up for her teacher, unless she wanted them all to go hungry and homeless.

Tobias had only been out of work a few months before he got another job in the next town over as a factory worker, and by that time, Cordelia and Severus had both been knocked around a bit by him; not as bad as their mother, that was true, but everyone was relieved when he had work again.

In her attic room now, Cordelia jumped up from her bed suddenly, crossed the room and chose one of her tired old books at random. She'd rather read James and the Giant Peach for the hundred and first time than think about that time anymore. She hoped Severus would bring her to the playground with him tomorrow. Maybe that girl with the red hair could be her friend, too.

#

Severus dug the toe of his worn trainer into the dirt underneath his swing. Next to him, a pretty girl his own age pumped her legs, urging her own swing higher, higher. Rich, red hair streamed behind her, a banner against the summer sky. His eyes followed her back and forth.

"What about unicorns, Severus? Are those real, too?"

He nodded; realized her green eyes were focused on the horizon rather than on him. "Yes. They are. You probably won't see one though, they're rare. Dragons are real, too - but you wouldn't want to meet one of them."

"What about elves? And goblins?"

"Both real," Severus answered, "The wizard bank is all full of goblins, they work there."

Lily reached the height of her arc, and leapt off the swing. She floated gently to the grass, grinning broadly. "I'm so glad I met you, Sev," she said, circling back towards him, "I want to know all about magic and things before I go to Hogwarts."

"I'm really glad I met you too, Lily." He smiled, warmth spreading all throughout him. "We'll do everything together. We'll have the same classes, hopefully we'll be in the same house. I'll show you everything you need to know."

He became aware, halfway through his declaration, that Lily's eyes were focused somewhere behind him. He turned his head, saw a thin, blonde girl with a look as sour as Severus suddenly found his mood.

"Hi, Tuney," Lily said, uncertain.

"Mum wants you home for lunch, Lily. Leave the freak here."

Severus' lip curled. Tuney always ruined everything when she turned up. He couldn't wait until he and Lily were at Hogwarts together, and they could have fun without her always coming along. He was glad Tuney wasn't a witch; imagine if he had to put up with her at Hogwarts, too.

He watched Lily and Tuney walk away, toward the posher end of town. Part of him wanted to follow them, Tuney or no. When he could no longer make out the flash of red that was Lily's hair, he rose reluctantly from his swing, set his feet towards Spinner's End, let them carry him to the house at the end of the row.

#

Sometimes, his parents fought about him - how much his school things cost, how they were going to afford his Hogwarts things next year, how he was gone out too often, or stayed in the house too much, how he had managed, simply by virtue of trying to go unnoticed, to strike his father as lazy, disrespectful, disobedient.

They fought about money an awful lot; how they could argue so much about something they didn't have any of, Severus didn't understand. They fought about the house, too. Something was always broken, needing replacement, not where it was meant to be. His father thought his mother should keep the house neat all the time, should serve him dinner, see to their children, and not do much else. He wanted the children out of his sight most of the time, and both of them were happy to oblige.

The worst times were when they fought about his sister, though. There were the usual reasons, the same ones they brought up about Severus, but when his father really got going about Cordelia, it was always bad. The children were never meant to hear, but how could they not, when the house was so small, and the walls seemed to fill and fill with all the anger inside?

Sometimes, the worst times, Tobias said that Cordelia wasn't really his child. When he was very drunk especially, and when Cordelia was around during a row, he'd accuse Eileen of having been with another man, of having a baby with someone else and bringing it home for him, Tobias, to raise. It started with her eyes, always - that was how Severus knew it was going to be one of the bad nights. Eileen had very dark, nearly black eyes, which her son had inherited, and Tobias had muddy brown eyes. Cordelia's, though, were a very pale blue, like ice.

When Severus heard Tobias start in on Cordelia's eye colour, he always made certain that Cor was in her room, with the stairs all closed up. Those were the nights too, that Severus was afraid to check on his mother when the row was done. Nearly always, when they argued about Cordelia, EIleen would have dark blooms of purple and blue on her pale skin; her eyes would be frightening, far away, closed off. Severus hated finding her that way, hated the way that he couldn't quite keep contempt from sliding under his skin, sitting there like a cat curled up next to his veins.

His mother told him, told them both, told Tobias who wouldn't listen, that it wasn't true, that she hadn't been cheating on him, but when Severus saw his sister's face, which really didn't bear any resemblance to their father's, high cheekbones neither of their parents had, unexplained blue eyes, he couldn't help but remember coming home from school one day and catching his mother in a lie.

He'd come into the house; the front room was dim, dark shades drawn against the late afternoon sun. Eileen was staring at the floor; Severus followed her gaze. A sticky brown puddle over the rug, shards of glass littering the floor, his mother's jaw slack with fear, shock. Severus saw a rag in her hand, a blank expanse on the shelf next to her. She had been cleaning, and it had been an accident, but she'd knocked over the bottle of expensive whiskey Tobias had bought himself at Chistmastime; it was still nearly full the last time that Severus had noticed it - his father only drank it every now and again, usually loaded himself up with cheap stuff he bought on his way home from work every Friday.

Eileen had looked at Severus, looked at puddle of liquor on the ground. In a frenzy, she'd mopped up the mess, haphazardly picked up the bits of glass; one piece cut her finger and she never noticed, just kept piling the shards in her other palm. She brought them all outside, to the dustbins in the street. When she came back, she'd gone to the cupboard Tobias kept his cheap whiskeys in, picked a bottle that was nearly full.

She'd drawn her wand - a thing she rarely did, because Tobias didn't like her to use magic - waved it over the bottle, and the bottle morphed, slowly; the label changed, and soon, it looked just like the bottle that had fallen. She put it carefully on the shelf, where the old bottle had been, she'd looked back at Severus, dark eyes hooded.

"That's done," she'd said softly, hollowly. "It's better to hide something that might make him cross than to try to explain it was an accident."

Severus could see his mother's face, looking the way it had that day, every time they fought about Cordelia; every time she told his father that he was wrong, that Cordelia was his by blood as much as Severus was. The thing was, Tobias had never mentioned the whiskey; never guessed what had happened - but then, the whiskey had only been different inside; there was no label on the outside to tell him that he'd been cheated.