He can only recall clearly a collar and a glass.
He knows he is at most three, but he remembers - sometimes thinks he remembers being older at times much older.Staring down at what promise to be good, strong clever hands when he is grown he sees overlaid a multitude of scars and hardships.Sees the nails cracked from scrabbling against hardwood and stonework. Sees the fingers broken perforce one by blasted one as a woman - Bellatrix? - laughs. Sees them swollen and red from scrubbing 'stupid boy' from being doused in something foul 'Snivellus' from disobeying Father 'green eyes like stone'. He looks at his calendar to mark off another day until he is six.
Uncovering the mirror he studies it wondering why he is still so small. 'You were never very tall, not until you were fifteen did you begin to sprout.' Wagging his head the child bites his lip to ignore the unwanted information. Still he is a small, slender child with immensely pale skin and huge black eyes. His hair hangs down to his back since his father refuses to cut it. Looking around twice he sighs and pulls off the tight black shorts that are his only clothing. Briefly touching the sigil that means he belongs to Daddy he studies the finger shaped bruises on his hips a match to the lip shaped bruises on his chest and neck. Today he is four.
Watching the blond man writhe as Daddy curses him again he studies the younger counterpart who watches with wide tear-filled eyes. "Do you think Lucius has learned his lesson Sev?" Daddy smiles down at him green eyes twinkling 'like Albus' and he knows the answer his father wants - "No daddy. Lucius never learns his lessons." His father laughs as two sets of betrayed grey eyes turn to his impassive face. One looks away immediately, the other studies him intently as though searching for something or someone. They suddenly widen with pained shock as Daddy directs a hex at him. "You ought to know better Draco, this is my little boy." The rough hand he holds tightens possessively.
Today is his birthday. The collar and the glass say so.
His name is Severus Sonorus Snape. He is sixty-eight today although his birthday cake tonight will say six. He is not allowed to be more than six anymore. Once he reached the age of nine and ran. Bolted out the back door one day and hopped the fence. Three nights and a week of Sundays saw him banging on odd doors to see people who either didn't know him or looked scared to see him. There had been a commotion in Diagon Ally and he - well he couldn't remember much about that time. Though he doubts it's because he's 'forgotten.'
Sighing he curls up tighter on his bed chin on his knees glaring at the glass and the collar and the door stubbornly locked against him. "Today is my birthday." And soon he will be returned to the rip old age of three, mindless and eager to please. Playing 'Daddy's' sick little games - 'loving' father and son when Harry's sober, when he's normal and ever-obedient slave when he's having one of his fits. One finely crafted hand unconsciously traces the ornate lines of his current collar. Eyeing the new one he'll be given tonight he wonders how much they really weigh charmed weightless as they are. Weightless save for the bonds it winds about him - repressing his powers, his memories, and tracking him like a disobedient pet.
Tracing the lines of his collar he listens to Daddy's friends fighting him again, yelling at him for keeping Severus here. "It's not right; sure he's a fuckin' git or was… And he did a lot of awful things, but there were circumstances and he's paid his debts twice over with you. Let him go Harry!" Something breaks as a woman, Aunt Hermione, shrieks. Mommy holds him tighter her sightless eyes staring forward as she whispers to herself. Her grief-thinned fingers dig into his soft flesh as she moans.
"What do you care? Weren't you the one who said this was the best he could possibly hope for? Weren't you the one who wanted to know all his little 'tricks'?" Uncle Ron liked the things he could do with his mouth, said that at least it was good for something. Or he did once now he simply held him to his warm chest smelling of aftershave and auntie's soap. Aunt Hermione shrieks again before screaming curses at both her husband and Daddy. Mommy laughs atonally as her pretty red ringlets dance across his face. "Serves you right." One more shout, "Ginny don't let him near Sevvie!" before the house is empty except for Daddy's sobs. "Like I've ever had a chance Ron."
Daddy places a cup and a new collar in front of him. Face alarmingly grim. "Sev? You've got a choice courtesy of Uncle Ron and Auntie Moine. See these two things? They're both permanent." A door slams higher in the house. Something breaks and Daddy looks briefly demonic before turning his attention back to him. "Take the cup and you'll never got any older. Take the collar and it won't matter." Looking at the microwave clock he sighs looking far older then his forty-eight years, "See the numbers? You've got 'til one, two, zero, zero to tell me what you want." He suddenly springs away taking the broad white stairs at a jog. "Ginny? Ginny! You stupid bitch!"
The glass sweats as innocently as a glass of water but daddy says it'll stop him getting any older. A thud from the oddly quiet upstairs. Daddy spelled upstairs so that he couldn't hear anything; so that must have been a spectacular crash. Then again daddy doesn't cast as well when he's angry. The crucio he casts when he's mad only feels like a hand in the burner instead of being drenched with a hot cauldron's contents. The cauldron was going to overflow, was going to explode if he didn't stop it but he didn't have a wand. Blinks nausea suddenly spinning the world. 'My name is Severus Sonorus Snape. My father was Tobias Snape, my mother Eileen Snape nee' Prince. They are both dead; one by my own hand. I am sixty-eight or rather sixty-nine years old.
Gripping his head Sev shoves away the Doubt - the evil whisperings dad said a bad man named Albus cursed him with as a baby. His name is Sev Siri Potter and he is four years old. His daddy 'owner' is Harry Potter the Man-Who-Changed-The-World. His mother is the seer Geneva Potter nee' Wesley. He is loved 'toyed with' when he is good, and rightfully punished when he is bad 'lies'. The collar, his collar isn't working. Daddy says the collar is good because it means he can watch him and protect him from the Doubt and those who would taint him.
A window breaks and someone screams. Rushing to the window he stares as a body plummets to the hard, unyielding white sand daddy imported. Mommy's blood is redder then her bright new penny hair. 'Maybe he is your father, after all mommies always gets a shove from daddy.' The Doubt sounds scared too more then daddy looking lost in the hallway. "Sev come to daddy, we have to leave. When we come back it'll all be okay. Mommy will be better, more obedient and Ron won't be angry, I swear. Come on, get your coat."
Daddy runs shaking hands through his hair and Sev remembers this has happened before. Not a shove through a window, but a careless back flip over the low balcony bar. A slow cartwheel into the juniper like his sister's favorite doll - Jennifer. The blood from her lip like the blood from the hall as Daddy/Father buttons his trousers - the collar had faltered and he had been nine at the time old enough to run. Too young now, but Ron would hide him.
'Ron couldn't hide anyone' - and the Doubt is right because this had happened before and Ron had disappeared through the Great White Door as he held Daddy's trembling, sweat-slick hand. Ron shorn and trembling myopic eyes unable to focus and Hermione's eyes a blaze of caramelized loathing. 'Truly a Gryn-bitch that one just like Minerva.' Clenching his fingers Sev - Severus? Tries not to draw daddy's notice because daddy always looks him in the eye.
Once he had made it to twelve, had made it into the brand new School. A building like a muggle's lab all white and sterile fitted with dead-eyed children who moved in sync led by smirking Teachers who smelled of fear-sweat and narcotics. A blond man - 'Draco' - who shook him before they dragged him away to be beaten. A blond man who kissed the way daddy wanted to and wept, ' Don't you know me Severus? My dad, what's he done to you?' Pretty white-blond hair - slicked across his handsome face as he enters him again their keening like a violin's weeping - across his own pale hand, soft against his lips. "Draco? Beloved?"
"Sev?", Harry - Daddy's voice the soft confused one grandma disapproved of. Grandma died weeping - "Shut up you old bag! I can bring him back - I can bring them all back. For fuck's sake I didn't mean to. Oh, god I never meant to!" - the green light as pretty as his father's mother's eyes. Lily's patient eyes across a lifetime's forgetfulness. Does she weep? The real Lily not the manufactured cradle Harry sometimes lowers himself into at night. Sometimes she looks at him, but her lip lack the quirk that made him see her, see and love her.
"Sev?" And Lily green eyes focus on the drip, drops of red on the white tile floor. Red on a tile so white it shines blue. When he was younger Harry's eyes could shine blue. "I remember you, she loved you sticky, wet, warm bundle that you were." They stare at each other across five feet of stifled space a fly casts its shadow through walking across the sunlit glass. Tiny footprints freckle it - she used to have freckles. Mommy- Ginny but daddy made them away when he brought her back.
I'm only four. The floor rushes up at him his father's - tormentor's eyes a wide surreal grey like an olive's leaves. The warmth of his nosebleed. The scent of his frantic keeper's aftershave. The sound of bees and a car's tires through rain-slick streets. 'We've left the desert', rain drenched windows and a red London cab racing toward St. Mungos. Flashes of a grayer sky and a bluer river of cement - sidewalk beneath shadow - pale faces and a high like blood bubbling from a doll's face. Mommy - Ginny - Wesley rolling past the great white doors somewhere and him through the cool blue one. A body in a tube and a child's screaming down the hall.
He remembers things as the collar shudders through it's deaththrall and the white masked men shout incomprehensible things above his bursting head. Remembers his first trial self-righteous cowards sneering down at him. Remembers two animals baked into a corner, dogs? wolves? Creatures with the broken eyes of betrayed men. An old man's head erupting into a starburst of gore and blood blue eyes white with unleashed power. The first choice - a kiss at wand point or the lie of being loved. The new Reich and a glass beside a collar. Remembers forgetting, remembers remembering, and running - running and the collar changing becoming less a sign and more a brand - a prison.
This has happened before - not to him but the boy with a sad man's eyes body collapsing into a pottage of misaligned genes. The fire squad and a sound like howling, like a child's wailing misaligned and knowing a name. The first Lily too life-like, too real and her bloody scalp as she pulled tangled sheaves of red hair to stack in pyramids of copper blue eyes running further then anyone could ever hope to chase. Smiling black-haired boys who tried to fly - broken angel mongrels boys. He's breaking down neural system overtaxed by conflicting personas.
This has never happened to him before, he's been so much stronger then this. The very strongest that's why he's been Harry's special Gift. Why this place means nothing to him except as a field trip to Daddy's Job. A mask descends on him and he sleeps knowing this might well be the last he sees of anything though another with his mind and face still wakes, still walks. An imperfect clone, a snake in paradise. A flaw in the design; the fatal flaw.
Harry studies his child watching it force grown into his former lover, former teacher, former enemy and confidant. He watches his son, toy, and obsession grow into his adult form one he has not held in over twenty-six years. Carefully he places his hand against the slightly chilled, heavily reinforced glass remembering how such was broken the day Severus fort the Lie. For a moment he wonders at how far he has fallen, how far he has yet to go before it no longer matters. Dear mute 475 hands him a Notice her horsy face perfectly blank. Hun, the ever foolish Governors are testing their bonds again. With a final tap against the glass Harry leaves to handle affairs.
White lights stretch the room into infinity as he studies his hands against the white marble tabletop. Everything is white but his hair and his eyes. Oh the table is an agreement, one he can almost remember form before. Beside it is an overflowing folder of every misdemeanour and crime he has ever been charged with. Atop it is an even thicker packet containing his various confessions and recollections. A top it is a signed photograph of himself and a girl he helped kill. A girl he's suppose to love, whose son he was banging, was worshipping, was often banged by.
He scrawls fuck you over the signature line and knocks everything on the floor, except the glass and the collar. Deage into a perfect little trollop for Master Harry or or put on the collar and retreat into a haze of oblivion. Become the perfect, helpless pet as he retreats into a perfect, meaningless dream world. He knocks the collar onto the floor and studies the glass. A memory wiggles it's self into his brain voracious and painfully active. Long frantic nights of quiet, unshakable suspicions and one-sided dialogues spent pawing through musty pages and listening for quiet footsteps. Licking the back of crooked teeth as he smiles brightly in the face of his own green-eyed little demon. A potion and a lie and it looks just like water - the best ones do. He lifts the glass - 'salute'.
Carefully he draws the blood. Takes the hair sample and the semen ignoring the impatient shuffling behind him. "Alright then take the body. Burn it and be sure you watch it to ensure it burns."
The body twitches within the pyre and explodes into a flurry of black birds. With the sound of a great wind surge they take up. Cart wheeling only to be shot down like petals back into the flame by frantic soldiers. A moment of anticipation and then a sound long forgotten is heard as the pyre blazes blue. The phoenix call rises to a clarion call - and the survivors will only be able to recall flames.
The child toddles innocently across the floor. All he wants to do is smack it. It turns to him and smiles - snaggletooth and precious. He wants to strangle it. "You think you're so smart Severus but we both know you're original will fall, will fail and with him the renewed resistance. We know because you have before haven't you? Only I endure child. I created the City, created the Catalyst, the Lab, and the Order. I created you. What do you say to that?" The child giggles, "I love you daddy."