A/N: You know what, this is going to be just the weirdest damned fic. Which is fine, that's never stopped me before. I've been working on a project, and I need some FF relief. Suffice it to say this is an idea for an original story I got when I worked briefly in a domestic violence shelter. I rooted around in my mind and asked myself, "What acerbic teenage boy could I substitute in order to turn this original story I may never write into a fic I will almost certainly write?"
Only my favorite one! (Cue singing: Snape, Snape, Se-ver-us Snape . . .)
I'd like to ask anyone who reads this extremely AU exploration of a 17-year-old Sev to go easy on me. I'll be the first to tell you I'm an American and am writing about a situation I encountered in an American, Southern women's shelter. Does that make Sev an American here (and a redneck woman to boot?!)? No, of course not. I'm just warning you that, while Brit-picking will be highly warranted, I'm writing by the seat of my pants for the sake of escapism. FF means freedom to me. :)
WARNING: This fic will likely venture into some dark and potentially unpleasant territory. The M rating is for language and themes.
In a more affluent neighborhood—Godric's Hollow, perhaps—a concerned citizen would have roused himself to phone the police. Spinner's End was not Godric's Hollow, and it was not affluent. Whether it was a true neighborhood was questionable, since it totally lacked a sense of community. Colloquially speaking, it was a narrow, closely-stacked shit heap brimming with vice and apathy. None of its inhabitants were particularly keen on calling in the heat to clean up Tobias Snape's mess when their own was sitting conspicuously by, beckoning notice. So, when they perceived that the Snapes were once again in a towering racket, they shut their windows, had a few more drinks, and turned up their televisions. Live and let live was their charitable motto.
"Come on, then!" goaded Tobias Snape, king of his proverbial castle. On the first syllable, a fine spray of spittle flew from his mouth and landed on his wife's shirt sleeve. "Put up your dukes! Put up your fists and fight, you cunt!"
Eileen's lip quivered. She held up one loosely curled hand, not quite a fist, and shielded her face from her husband's wrath. She lay on her side, in the middle of a dingy, dirty room like a padded cell. Through a low opening behind her was a cramped kitchen. Off to one side was a set of doors, one of which led into a bedroom, the other a staircase.
"Look at you." The tip of Tobias' long, hooked nose curved further inward when he sneered. "You're pathetic. Do you know what that's like for me, to be chained to a pathetic, pleading worm? No wonder our son is such a spindly little weakling. Look what his mother is."
On the next collective breath, the spindly weakling entered the room.
Seventeen-year-old Severus Snape slammed out of his bedroom with the force of a small hurricane. The door resounded with a rough bang when the tarnished knob hit the exposed brick. The hinges needed oiling; the door lodged in its extremity.
Sev was not summoned by any slur on his own behalf, nor would he have bothered emerging to referee a simple shouting match. He was used to both these occurrences and, having grown up to their tune, was as desensitized as humanly possible. But he had heard the fleshy thump of his mother striking the floor. The sound never failed to frighten and enrage him. Eileen was a bony, angular woman. Sev could not attribute the heavy thud of her landing to gravity alone.
"That is it. I've had it with your bullying."
Sev slipped deftly between his parents and turned his angry, harsh features up into his father's bloated smirk. Maybe it was a foolhardy move. Sev was not actually spindly, per se—there was some ropey muscle clinging to the bones in his limbs—but he was of comparable size with his mother, and she was in a heap on the worn, patterned rug. His father definitely had more bulk. Not the bulk of strength; a lot of it was padding. But extra mass on a cruel man was mass to be feared.
Sev was beyond fear, momentarily. His typically pallid face was flushed an ugly rose. Tendrils of black hair stuck up wildly and clung to a fine perspiration on his brow. His large nostrils dilated to enormity.
"I don't know what's brought this on, whether you've drunk yourself into a fit," Sev speculated through bared teeth, "or you've just taken it into your mind to be a lunatic tonight, like you are most every damned night—"
"Sniveling, squalling brat," Tobias flung at him, and now Sev knew it wasn't booze. His breath lacked that familiar, fumed stench. "Never knew how to mind your own business, did you?"
"It is my business!" Sev screamed. Later, he would wonder, as he always wondered, what he hoped to accomplish by such an assertion. Did he expect his father to suddenly see reason, shake his hand, and apologize?
Tobias took a swing at him. Sev was quick and reeled backward at the last moment. He felt a swoosh of wind brush the tip of his nose. Eileen cried out behind him, but there was no time to heed her. He leaped on the opportunity of catching his father unbalanced. In fact, he leaped on his father.
"Stop it!" Eileen pleaded in a wavering, unconvincing tone of admonition. "Both of you, stop it this instant."
They did no such thing. The man and boy, each with a clear, brutal intent, grappled in the center of the sparsely furnished living room. Eileen crawled away from them. Her tone became keening, regretful.
"Sev—Sev, why? I didn't ask for your help."
He had long ceased to marvel at her apparent ingratitude. She meant well. If he would only stay out of it, he would come to no harm, and it would end all the faster. He recognized the logic, but he was transported by fury, as unable to shake it off as Tobias was unable to deal kindly with his family. In that way, father and son were perfectly alike, and maybe this was what frightened Eileen most of all.
Knowing all this, Sev ignored her. But Tobias saw an opening:
"You heard your mum," he panted. "Didn't you? You can hear me, yeah?"
He worked his arm around Sev's throat, clutched his ear, and twisted it. The pain was shocking, severe. Sev couldn't reign in his resulting yowl.
"Say again?" Tobias dragged him toward the kitchen.
"Let him go," Eileen begged. The demand she tried to work into her voice was belied by misery and rendered ineffective.
At this point, while Sev strained with pitiful fury at his father's arm, which was smashing his Adam's apple back into his throat, Eileen re-entered the fray. She flung herself on Tobias' shoulders.
"Let him go, I said!"
Her husband easily batted her away. Sev's ears began to stop up, though he barely noticed it past the ache in the one his father grasped.
On the burner, the copper tea kettle started to whistle piercingly. He heard that. Sev's heart played percussion over the shrilling utensil. His eyes watered. Not tears—he had not cried since seven years of age, when he huddled in a corner with his face in his knees. Now, through the haze of wetness, he caught sight of one thing, and it seemed to ram itself straight through his vision into his brain. He could not dislodge it from his mind:
A coarse, crumbling loaf of half-eaten bread sat atop a cloth on the rickety oak table. From it jutted a wonderfully menacing old kitchen knife.
His knees came up. With a burst of strength centered in the flat plane of his abdomen, Sev wrenched himself loose. He thought he nearly lost his ear in the bargain. A second later, he wrapped his hand around the knife's wooden handle and plucked it, bread and all, from the table. The loaf slipped and broke into crumbs on the floor as Sev spun to face Tobias and—
He never knew what. He never got a chance to find out what his coiled instincts meant for him to do with the knife. To threaten. To murder. He never knew.
While he had reached for the knife, Tobias had reached for the thin, hot copper handle twisted into the top of the tea kettle. Sev turned into an impact, a forceful, scalding strike against his left temple. His fingers loosened around the handle. The point of the blade met the floor a second ahead of his knees and lodged there.
Meanwhile, the kettle's handle was too hot to hold for long without a glove. Tobias released it with a hiss; it hit the floor and rolled. The water slopped out, the steam found its exit, and the homey device stopped its demoniac shriek. As Sev sank into the darkness, he heard his mother take over.
"Hell," intruded Tobias' voice, full of triumphant sarcasm and muddled like eerie music, over Eileen's wail, "at least he tried."
[] [] []
Sev woke to an achingly glacial frost on his face. His last memory was an excruciating heat. In his disorientation, he now confused the two. He bolted upright, flailing to fend off his . . .
Nurse.
"Oh, god," he groaned. His sudden movement resulted in a sickening swoop inside his skull. "Mum . . ."
His mother sat on the side of the bed in his small, square room. The walls were darkly painted and largely undecorated. A wardrobe stood in the corner, bare but for necessities. Even this miniscule haven had never felt like a home to him. But his mother . . . for all her faults, she felt like home. In her hand she held an improvised ice pack: an oversized, raggedy dishcloth stuffed with ice, knotted, and dripping. Sev wiped what felt like a river of cold water from the left half of his face.
"Ow."
"Shh, shh, careful," Eileen cautioned. She gingerly pulled his hand back and replaced the ice pack. Sev felt it leaking down into his hair. "You've got a burn."
Oh, that was right. The goddamned tea kettle.
"Bad?" he asked. And, to fend off any pretense of delicacy: "Am I uglier than normal, I mean?"
"Hush that nonsense." She smacked at his arm with her free hand. "Just a few red spots along your cheek. A lump above your ear. It's not as bad as it—"
Her unfinished sentence hung in the air: Not as bad as it might have been.
Sev knew he had ended the confrontation when he collapsed. Bowed out by blacking out, in a manner of speaking. If he had not, Tobias would have continued to beat him until he gave up or gave out. Or—
Sev tightened his fingers into a fist. He could almost still feel the knife in his grip.
"What about you?" he asked, hoarse with the knowledge of a marvelous, thwarted possibility. His black eyes raked over her scrawny, pale face, so like his own despite the inherent femininity.
"Wasn't so bad. Not once I stopped going for the phone, anyway. He wouldn't let me call for help," she explained. "But he's gone out now."
Sev noted that she still spoke in a whisper, as though it were an ingrained habit.
"How long has he been gone?" Sev asked. He lifted a hand to massage his bruised cheekbone and winced. Doubly stung, he let the smart of his burn die down as he held out his knuckles and examined the mottled, purplish bruise puffing them outward. This latter injury, at least, imbued him with satisfaction. His father had not walked off entirely unscathed.
"Long enough." Eileen pushed her lank hair back from her ear and cocked that organ toward the door. After a moment of silence, she found her son's eyes again and searched them. "Sev, can you stand up? Try for me. We need to hurry."
He stared at her.
"Now," she urged him, with a gentle tug at his sleeve. "We're leaving."
"Leaving?" he echoed, and he uttered an incredulous snort.
This was a first, to be sure. Ordinarily, Eileen pined after Tobias when he left and parried every one of Sev's vicious curses with a rational-sounding, if hollow, excuse. Tobias Snape was not a bad man—a disappointed man, yes, a tense man, always, and an impatient one, most certainly. Never a bad man, though. Eileen insisted there was some good there, though Sev sure as hell couldn't see it.
Eileen's heavy brow drooped. Sev saw he had hurt her.
"Leaving for where?" To back up the new seriousness in his tone, he lifted himself past a wave of dizziness and pain and set his long, pale feet upon the dusty floor. He felt pieces of indeterminate grit press into his soles.
Eileen began to bustle about the moment Sev stood, busying herself with raking items of apparel and personal hygiene from the dilapidated, peeling gray wardrobe. She piled them atop the bed. At his question, her hands faltered. A stick of deodorant clattered to the floor.
Sev watched his mother lean back against the wall. Her elbows emerged at angles; she held herself, forearms beneath her scanty breasts.
"I don't know," she admitted. Fear was thick in her throat. "If it were only me, I wouldn't even try. But after tonight, I . . . I've got to get you out of here, Sev. I could let him do this to me for the rest of my life, I suppose. I can't let him do it to you."
His male, adolescent sensibilities were embarrassed by the extent to which her words moved him. He fought valiantly against a wobble in his stubbled chin. Without proper forethought, he stooped to nonchalantly swipe the item from the floor. Wherever they were going, he would need that. Deodorant was a teen boy's best friend. But the moment his torso was at a 90 degree angle to his legs, the pain in his head surged and he thumped onto his knees, half swooning.
"Sev?" Alarmed, Eileen was at his side in an instant.
"I'm all right," he mumbled. He held onto her shoulder as he gained his bearings. When the room came back into focus, he let his old, familiar smile—grim at the best of times—stretch the thin line of his lips. "You think I'd let him do it to you?"
He grabbed the rickety bedstead and gained his footing. Once up, he tossed the deodorant onto the heap atop his blanket and spread his arms, offering his impressively wiry physique for her reassurance.
"I'm getting stronger every day," he joked, wishing it were true, "and I've always been smarter. No, admit it, Mum, it's him you're protecting. You know how it'll wind up one of these days. Me . . . setting my heel on his old, gray head and crushing it."
In morbid mimicry, he slid his foot along the floor and twisted it as if he were squashing a roach. Glancing down, amused with the mental imagery, he watched his mother's eyes widen in horror. He raised a bushy black brow.
"Sorry. Too graphic?"
"He's your father," Eileen reproached, "and we love him."
"You love him," Sev jibed while his mother got up, dusted off her skirt, and moved to help him finish packing.
"He simply isn't safe for us right now," she finished, ignoring him. "Maybe one day, when he gets himself together . . ."
She shook his pillow out of its case and began stuffing in various items. As she voiced this wistful hope, as it trailed off into nothing, her hands slowed. Sev stopped altogether.
"We're not leaving, are we?" he guessed.
Eileen came back to herself. She looked at her son sharply, with the dueling expression of a disrespected parent and a criminal caught in the act. Rapidly, she hitched the end of the pillowcase upward and knotted it with her capable hands.
"Don't be impertinent," she scolded him.