"This great evil. Where's it come from? How'd it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who's doing this? Who's killing us, robbing us of life and light? Mocking us with the sight of what we might have known?

Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow and the sun to shine?

Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?" - The Thin Red Line(1998)

"I'm not as strong as you think I am, Severus." She's sobbing, her eyes bulging from their sockets at the sheer force behind every wail ripped from her throat.

My mother pulls me against her side and leans on me for support.

"I'm not as strong as you deserve. I know. I know that and I'm sorry, honey, I'm so damn sorry." I've never heard my mother curse before. The worst she could manage when I was around was a darn or a sod it and that was only when she was very riled up.

Snot is pouring out of her nostrils, and she's babbling. Babbling like mad. She's trying to tell me everything she had ever wished to impart with me at once. Saliva spreads from the sides of her mouth to the red of her cheeks, mingling with her tears. In between words and sobs gulps of cold air she's swallowing hard enough to catch her tongue.

"When I was a girl, just a few years older than you, my mother caught me with a romance novel. They were the cheap, crass kind you find at the supermarket, and she did not approve. She said to me, 'Eileen, don't you dare go believing what's in these books. No man has ever, nor ever will be smart enough to woo a woman that well. If any hungry young boys come up to you spewing the kind of garbage you read in this book he's either a fruit looking for a woman to hide behind or a bare-faced liar. Any little miss you want neither in your life,'

"That's how she raised me, my mam: to never expect anything good from a man and to distrust everyone." My mother has calmed down just a little. She sniffs and wipes at her nose, "Now of course, I loved her, and there is some merit to what she said, but all she did was teach me to settle, and that's not what I want for you, Sev. You deserve so much more than what your father and I have. You deserve so much better from the both of us- from the world.

"I want you to be swept away. Don't you dare settle. You wait until you know, don't just ask the first woman that comes your way." My mother turns and wraps her other arm around me. She rests her chin on my head and squeezes me tight. "I used to read those books and think, how stupid are these women? To run off with these men they hardly knew for something that could never last. But that's who I am now. I'm the woman in the book. The one who tosses away everything good for a chance at something great." I can feel her shaking her head. She gives a sad little chortle. One more sniff, and she's calm again.

I can't remember the last time my mother has held me. Just, held me. I don't want to ruin it, I really don't. I want it to last, only I know it won't. It can't. She's just finished her sobbing, and, try as I might, I am about to begin my own.

I stretch my arms up as far as they could reach and grip her upper back just below the shoulders. I'm crushing myself to her and she's getting uncomfortable, I know it. Still, I can't help it. She is my mother and I love her so dearly I can hardly stand it. The moment for embracing has passed, and I must let her go, I know this. But when the words bubble to my throat like hot, bitter, hopeless bile I let them pass from my lips and fall at her feet without the slightest protest.

"Take me with you, please." It is quick, but incredibly painful to hear as I speak it. My mother clucks and sighs. I immediately feel ashamed for ever asking. I should know better, shouldn't I? The woman in the book doesn't run off to her new life with evidence of her old, does she?

"Oh, honey, no. No, no, no. I could never do that to your father. He'd be absolutely broken if he lost the both of us."

But he'd already was broken. In fact that's all he was, a broken man. Held together by the glue that was my mother as his drink tore him further apart. We all knew, but never said, there was only one other person in the world to him. It was the same for me. The only thing my father and I had in common was our love for my mother; a love she no longer had it in her to return. Even when I was younger, I knew: the sole reason I existed was to keep her around, and now even I wasn't enough.

That hurt. That hurt my very soul: that I wasn't enough to make her stay.

I'm hiccuping and gagging on the thickness of my tongue. Why aren't I good enough to be enough? Tears stream unchecked from my eyes, now shut against the current. The other children don't even try, yet their mothers would sooner die than give them up, let alone leave them. Shame is searing my cheeks. Why aren't I one of those children? It's the heat in my legs and the shaking of my shoulders. Those lucky bastards. How I despise them.

"Don't cry, Sev. Baby don't do that, don't do that, don't cry." She's cooing at me and patting my back half-heartedly. Her stance has changed and she's trying to put distance between us, only she can't because I'm still crushed to her bosom. I let go and stand bent, my face in my hands. I wish I weren't crying in front of her. I don't want her to remember me like this, weak and hopeless. I want to be her brave little warrior, her champion, not a snivelling child she chose to leave behind.

My mother, after taking a few steps back, puts a hand on my shoulder. The shaking quells for a short moment as she speaks: "I'm willing you to understand, Severus. You deserve to be happy, but I want to be happy, too. I will not find my happiness in this house, Sev. Not with the way things always are." Her hand goes from my shoulder to my hair. She tucks a strand behind my ear.

She's done. She's ready to go now. I force my hands away from my face. They're drenched in tears. I lift my head up, but refuse to meet her eyes. I settle for glaring at the wide trunk of the dead tree my father said he'd cut down last winter.

My mother is walking backwards towards the driveway. The twigs and leaves crack and crumble beneath her heels. There's no breeze, and she's far enough away that I shouldn't be able to, but I can smell her perfume. It burns my nostrils.

I'm sniffling and coughing and feel as if I may vomit. More crunching of leaves. Her heels hit concrete, and the clack echoes through the still air. The heavy creak of the car door opening.

"Take care, dear." She pauses, "And take care of your father, too."

I take a deep breath and hold it. I finally lift my eyes to her. She's standing, one leg in the driver's side cabin of the old pick-up.

I want to see her. I mean, really see her. As the woman she truly was, without the rosy glasses of being her son. In all the stories I'd been told, when someone breaks your heart over and over, you see them for what they really are. I wanted to see my mother as a monster; a villain; a crook. Something I could blame. Someone I could hate forever. But when I look at her I only see what I've always seen.

My mother. An angel. A blessing. A goddess. A thing of such beauty and fragility I can hardly stand to think of her as mortal. My mother, who caused me greater pain when she couldn't bare to look at me than the few times she struck me. My mother, who tucked me in at night, but never kissed me good-bye in the mornings. The woman who taught me I should only cry when I couldn't hold it, when it was hurting me not to; even then she would beg me to stop, to be stronger. For her.

My mother, whom I'd only ever wanted to love me like mother's are fabled to. To hold me and kiss me and not scorn me for being my father's child. At least to like me enough to pretend that it would always be okay in the end. But, no. She's all real, and she's about to be all gone.

But then, I suppose, she had not been with us, for a very long time.

She gives a little wave and gets in the car, closing the door as quietly as she can. My eyes burns almost as much as my lungs, but I manage to wave back. She starts the car, backs out of the driveway and disappears out of my life without so much as a glance backwards through the rearview mirror.

A clean cut.

I stand there for a while. A long while. With my breath still held and my lungs still burning and my heart thumping an unhappy staccato.

She's coming back.

No she's not.

...

I clench my jaw and ball my weak hands into fists. It cannot be. Why would she do this? Why would she leave me here, without a single person to care for me? To care about me? Why would she leave me with my drunk of a father, whose idea of teaching me to be a man was to strike me until he was too winded to continue? Why... Why...?

She's coming back. She has to. She just has to she must... she must come back she has to she can't leave she can't leave... She's coming back...

...

No, she's not.

Mum... My mother, she's... Oh, Gods, she's... gone and left... and left me behind oh gods, no... Mum...

"Good-bye." I croak, finally letting the now rancid air leave my lungs with a hitch.

I go inside the house and turn off the porch light.

I stand in the dark at the foot of the stairs. My room is on the second floor, but the staircase is made of old, warped wood, and it creaks if you so much as look at it too hard. I can hear my father snoring behind the closed door of his room. I cannot wake him, so I stand there. Quietly, numbly, consumed in shame. For what? I cannot say. Yet it comes in giant waves that crash down behind my eyelids, preventing me from keeping my eyes open for very long- so I close them tight.

Without realizing, I sink down to the floor and curl up into a ball. I feel as though I'm dropping through the earth. The shame swirls within me, mingled with such mourning and longing that I, Severus Snape at just eight years old, wish vehemently for the heavens to take me. To end the joke that is my life. It was the first time, but certainly not the last. Not by a long shot.

A life of abuse and abandonment, is more than fit to end in quiet tragedy on the floor, after the only good in your world is lost. It would be a mercy, death.

I suppose the gods do not know the meaning of mercy.

I'm exhausted beyond the point of sleep. I'm exhausted beyond the point of tears. I think, for a while, that I will never again find the peace to sleep.

And I am right.

I lay restlessly on the brink of sleep until dawn.

-sSs-

There's is a crash in the kitchen. I hear my father stomping about, cursing loudly as he throws a second object. I hear it shatter.

I manage to sit upright, but I am too fatigued to stand. If I can find the strength, perhaps I can make it up the stairs before my father turns his tantrum on me. I lift my leaden arm to the first step, and drag the rest of my body to rest atop it. It creaks loudly in protest and I halt. The noise echoes through the empty house, but I pray to the same gods as the night before that my father did not hear it.

Unfortunately, they did not answer.

As if on cue, my father storms to the staircase. "Boy." He seethes, towering over me. "Where is she? Hm?" He grabs my arm and jerks me from off the stair. My body does not protest. He is too strong to resist, especially now. I dangle by my arm before him, my legs still too numb to support me.

"Where is she!?" My father demands, yanking me to the left by my arm, which protests sharply at its shoulder socket. "I know she told you where she was going, boy! She took the truck! How will I ever find work now?! HOW WILL I PUT YOUR IN YOUR GREEDY MOUTH NOW, BOY? TELL ME THE ANSWER TO THAT!" He shouts, allowing me to drop back to the floor in a twisted heap of defenseless child.

I know the drill. I cover my face with my hands, and my chest with my arms. I can only hope he will run out of steam quickly. I am startled when, instead of kicking me, he thunders, "Get up, boy!"

He has never commanded this of me before. I had thought that the floor was where he liked me to be when he pummeled me.

"I said get up!" He is even angrier now, so I try. I try to will my legs steady as I rise up to my knees. I push off the floor with all my remaining strength, and immediately fall flat on my arse. "What's wrong with you?" He demands hoarsely.

"I- I can't stand up, papa. My legs won't let me stand up."

I dart a peek up at him through my curtain of hair. Even in the dim light, I can see, clearly, the redness of his eyes. Sallow and sunken in their sockets, the emptiness I saw in them frightened me. Pale and unshaven, he wreaks of vomit, piss and bourbon as he advances on me.

"Eh?" He reaches down and grabs a fistfull of my hair and begins to pull me up by it. "They don't work you say?" I shut my eyes tightly and bite my tongue. I dare not make a sound. My hands grip my father's wrist as he lifts me far above where my feet could touch the floor. "And why is that? What have you been doing boy? Trying to run away, just like your bitch of a mother!?"

"N-No! I'm just t-t-tired, sir, I swear. I didn't try to leave!" My eyes are still shut tight, and a headache begins to thud deep within my skull. A headache that has never really stopped since then.

"You're tired, eh?" He smacks me hard across the cheek, and I feel as if one more blow will split my head in two. "Well, boy, SO AM I."

I am thrown backwards and my spine strikes the very steps I had hoped to find solace beyond. I gasp and wince despite myself. I am in the same old comfortable pain I have always known, and part of me relishes in it. It distracts me from the reality of my mother's departure.

Home sweet home.

My father attacks the bannister with his heavy boots. "So. Am. I!" He repeats over and over as he kicks the weak wood until it snaps and collapses. He roars, mad with delusion and anger and his persistent drunkenness. "Get upstairs before I kill you, boy!" He howls, already turning to leave, to find more things to destroy. To make this house even less of a home to either of us.

He leaves me on the stairs, my back aching, legs still useless, cheek burning and head pounding. A little adrenaline has kicked in, finally, and I manage to crawl up the stairs to my room, all the while listening to the sounds of destruction my father was creating. He destroys photos and china, and at one point he even takes to tearing the door off the stove. And I was just grateful he was enacting none of his destruction upon my person.

Upstairs, I close the door to my bedroom and hide in my closet. The noises from below pervasive when all I want is some silence. Silence in which I can scream and not be heard. Silence in which the gods can hear me. Silence that engulfs you, holds you, molds you into its shape. Silence in which there is no Severus Snape.

No such silence was granted.

I cover my ears with my hands. and focus only on the soreness of my body, until the noises are so far away I can almost make believe they aren't there.

I know later he will go in search of her, and I hope for her sake he does not find her.

And, to my surprise, he never does.

A/N: It has been such a very long time since I have written any fiction for the viewing public. This is a SSHG fic, central to SS. I have no betas, and no brit-picker, so bear with me on this journey. There will be angst, romance, drama and humor in the chapters to come, as we time travel to various points in Severeus Snape's life. I will try to be vigilant in my updates.

To clarify for this fic: Sev lives in a magic-banned home. His mother has suppressed her magic to the point where she is no longer certain how to use it, and poor little Sev doesn't know what he's in for in a few years. Here's hoping his letter comes sooner than later.

Thanks xoxo

TSTU