A Reason to Celebrate

by sylphides

Change can be good, or it can be bad. Sometimes it doesn't happen. A look at the changes in Severus Snape's life through his birthdays. Part of the Last Spy world.

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter & co, more's the pity.

Note: This is a tribute to Severus Snape, who turns the big 5-0 this year. Happy birthday, Severus, and may you live long and happily in the many fanfics that have resurrected you and set you on a path that you deserve rather than one leading to a sorrow-filled life and death.

Warning: This is part of the world of Last Spy, my longer story which is currently a WIP. It can be read alone, but will make vaguely more sense if you have read The Last Spy.

There's no telling when your life is going to take a turn for the better. Sometimes, you just know that tomorrow will be the day and everyone will suddenly love you and see things the way you do. Then tomorrow comes and there's the same holes in your clothes, the same boys eyeing you like you're unworthy even to be their prey, the same teachers talking down to you as if you're small and stupid. Small you may be, but never stupid! And worst of all, the same smell of alcohol emanating from his breath, the same perpetual look of weary emptiness on her face. And, of course, only an extra pat on your head and a second glance behind as she leaves you tucked into bed for the night to tell you that she, at least, remembers that this is the day she gave birth to you. Probably regrets it too much to acknowledge it, the sarcastic side of you comments as you sit up cautiously in the dark, staring blindly at the door where the woman whom you call mother has just exited. But no matter how much your brain sneers and makes snide comments about it, you're only just a little boy and the greater part of you wishes that she, at least, had wished you a happy birthday.

You were eight, then.

Then, long after you had given up believing that anything was going to take a turn for the better, that your life was just going to be one long battle to keep from attracting Tobias Snape's attention—and his fists—your life changes, and its one you've been hoping for but the cynic in you has grown to overpower the young, hopeful boy. You know you have magic, have seen that magic do wonderful things like help you steal chocolate from the candy store when you hadn't had a decent meal in a week and make the worst of your tormentors at school develop an acute case of chicken pox and several others trip over nothing and bruise themselves all over. The same magic that brought you and Lily together, so it has to be real because otherwise you wouldn't have ever merited enough to be friends with Lily, golden-red Lily, beautiful laughing Lily who is fascinated with magic and is interested in what you have to say in the way no one else is interested.

But still you weren't sure if the same rules would apply to you because technically your mother had renounced magic—what if they thought that you had, too? Or what if they thought you weren't worth it? Or worst of all—what if you just didn't have enough magic?

All of those worries melt away in that one, pure, shining moment that factors one of the happiest memories in your mind, even better than the day you first saw Lily, playing in the playground, and saw her use her magic to fly high, high into the blue sky and float gently down. The one untouched moment on your eleventh birthday where you hear that unfamiliar rapping on the window just as you leave the bathroom, and you run to the living room window to see—and, as your mother comes clattering down the stairs, more life in her eyes than you've ever seen before, an owl shoves its way into the window you opened and drops a fine parchment envelop into your hands. And the ink on the smooth parchment is the same color as Lily's eyes and the name on the envelop is yours: To Severus Snape, it says. Yours.

That makes it the best birthday you can remember in eons, especially after Lily meets you at the playground and is ecstatic for you, shrieking and jumping all around and giving you a hug that makes you feel all giddy and light inside. Even when your father roars at your mother, and it's the first time he uses his fists on her in front of you instead of waiting until you've gone to bed.

There are worries after that, of course—will you be able to go at all? Will your father let you? Will you have the money to pay for it? Will you get in Slytherin, and bring a brief smile to mother's face? Will you make friends? Will you and Lily get into the same House?

But all that comes later. For now, this eleventh birthday is truly one to remember. A change, a reason to celebrate. (Later, much later when the boy is long gone and a haggard young man has to be dragged away from the gravesite of the Potters, out of the pouring rainstorm, even this memory becomes tainted with the faint and growing belief that it would have been better if you had never gotten his letter from Hogwarts at all. That way, Lily would still be alive.)

The next time a change comes, it is a long time in coming. You have weathered years of bullying and of being ping-ponged between the shining Lily and the dark, mysterious, powerful Housemates who seem to be so certain of themselves and their control over not only their own lives but the lives of others! This time the change is much, much darker. It is your very first birthday without Lily cheerfully greeting you with a hug for the year you've grown and giving you a little card or gift. Instead, they have just arrived back at Hogwarts for second term and she very carefully does not look at you at all, or even in your direction all day. And that's perhaps the turning point for your path down to pain, and fear the shape of a skull branded on your skin, because the only person that wishes you happy birthday is Lucius Malfoy, who has already graduated from Hogwarts and has come back to visit his old Housemates, and has remembered that it is that Severus boy's birthday today. And the careful promises Lucius makes of power and control over your own life—of respect and a place among your peers where you will be appreciated rather than snubbed and laughed at—is a heady birthday present, if one you will curse in the years and decades after for accepting.

Then there is the birthday after Lily's death. That, too, is a change, but not in the actual non-celebration of your birthday. In fact, Albus goes out of his way to tease you out of the dungeons and to a pub for dinner and a drink, but the old man can only hold back the memories for so long, and when you goes back to his quarters, the youngest professor Hogwarts has seen in years, you doesn't care about the accolades won fairly in the field of potions, but the fact that Lily will never, ever have another birthday again. She's deep in the earth, her body decomposing and her red hair dulling to the brown of the dirt. You drink yourself into a stupor that night, despite the image of your mother's reproachful face and the threat of becoming your father vivid in his mind. The alcohol isn't enough to drive away the knowledge that you do not deserve to be older than Lily, do not deserve to keep aging while Lily stays frozen forever in youth.

After that, there is no more reasons to celebrate. Oh, there is that one day a year where you accepts the inevitable and adjust your age. One year older, and the next, all of them undeserved and unmarked except for Albus' irritating propensity to send you ridiculous gifts, from the singing beer glass to the glass stirring rod for potions that flashes different colors of the rainbow (as if that would be remotely useful in brewing—think of all the potential hazards of being tricked by the light!) Oh, and as each year progresses, new colleagues become old colleagues, and if they do not throw you a birthday party or give you useless presents, they do wish you a happy birthday and go out of their way not to assign you to supervise a detention or have the late night shift checking for students out of bed after curfew, and Minerva even begins to join in Albus' campaign to get you out of the dungeons and solitude on your birthday, badgering you into far too many occasions of chess games and tolerable conversation in Albus' quarters. And the years slip away one by one, and you fall into a comfortable rhythm. No change is good. No change means that there will be nothing to disturb the little peace you've managed to eke out over the years when time has done the impossible and cooled grief into a manageable lump.

It is a kind of stalemate peace that disappears the minute you scan the gaggle of first years at the start of a new school year, and are confronted with Lily's green, vibrant eyes, as innocent and curious as they were back before the Sorting began the long, slow process of ripping the friendship to shreds. Your inner calm is jolted then, and it is destroyed completely in the next few months and years to follow as the boy proves to be as brash and as unheeding as his father, and yet, yet—as brave and good as his mother. That, even more than the fact of Lily's eyes in Potter's face is what brings home just how much a union of the two Harry Potter is. And that is why you cannot bring yourself to treat the boy as you would any other student like you swore you would do, not from the moment the scrawny little boy walked into the doors of his classroom for his first Potions lesson.

You can go over all the birthdays that didn't count, the birthdays that simply blurred into one experience, unremarkable, uncelebrated, unnoticed. In fact, you are more bothered by Potter's birthday each year since his arrival at Hogwarts than you are by your own. That has more to do with the big fuss Molly Weasley puts up at giving the boy a good birthday each year though. Every year, on January 9th, you toast to a day where you hope nothing at all will change.

And then it does, again.

This time, the change isn't apparent. Not at first. You go about your business, your birthday is forgotten except by the persistent Minerva and Albus as usual, and you toast once again to a day where nothing has changed, and hoping the next year of your life holds no unpleasant changes. The key here is that your life has already changed, and you don't even realize it because you're caught up in the change already, change that all starts with a brown-eyed, bossy girl-become-woman, and the training of her is taking up all the time you would normally spend hoping for things to remain stagnant.

And life is not going to comply with your half-hearted hope this time. Instead, its going to defy you—and with a vengeance. Between Albus and the Dark Lord and days so dark with death and pain that you wish once more you'd never been born, yet still flavored with a bit of light, that attractive mystery wrapped up in the studious, competent, alert woman who is both your responsibility and yet something more…someone wo could become a lot more important to you than you suspect, someone with whom you feel a kinship with despite the huge gap between your experiences. And your ages.

Life accelerates again and throws a curveball, and suddenly change doesn't matter so much as the fact that you have irrevocably severed your ties to your first and constant bay of safety and murdered the quirky and annoying old man who redeemed you when you didn't deserve it. There is no celebration in your heart, though the Dark Lord makes merry and you taste once more the sickening, empty respect of the Death Eaters that Lucius promised you long ago. And still, that woman is there—that bull-headed woman with eyes a common brown and yet gentle in their intellectual acuity the way Lily's emerald were altogether too preoccupied with morality and emotion and judgment. (And it feels like betrayal to realize that, after Hermione has declared that she is his friend through thick and thin and he had better get used to it, but a spy is used to accepting logic and truth over preconceptions and emotions, no matter whether or not the truth is unpleasant.)

It's funny. By now, you have long given up the expectation that life will change for the better just because you turn a year older, and as a man older than the boy that you used to be, you have no problem at all accepting that. But it catches up with you. Every single year that there was no change for the better, every single damned year—and this January 9th, there isn't anyone to wish you a happy birthday but you don't care because you have a lovely, willing woman who is too good to be true and just her existence, even though she doesn't know it's your birthday today, is a gift in itself—a reason to rejoice. That and the fact that soon, it will be over. One way or another. Soon. And you're not going to accept anything less than a victory, and the final death and obliteration of the Dark Lord, come Beltane, so this might be your last birthday but by Merlin it is the best one you've ever had, even better than your eleventh birthday!

This is especially true after Hermione realizes that she's missed your birthday.

You're only a man after all, and the 'gift' she has—well, you suspect that a stronger man than you would be thanking whatever gods he worshiped, if he had received such a gift. And just think—she loves you.

O Man, you have won the love of a brilliant, beautiful, bossy young woman who is as earthy and intelligent as all of your dreams put together but more, this unbelievable witch. Can there be anything more frightening and humbling an experience? Even as you strain to answer with what you know, something holds you back—the disappointment you felt on that long ago eighth birthday when you knew your life was going to be better tomorrow and it wasn't. What if this is the same thing? What if all you know—the love that this wonderful woman is offering freely to you—is a thing of deception and mist, of which you have so much experience with? A bitter life of deceit breeds suspicion and distrust. You cannot—say—it.

But it is there. One day, you know that it will be stronger than the fear that binds you now. Maybe it will be soon, or maybe not. But when that nameless it conquers that old childhood disappointment—well, life is going to change. And this time, it will be certain and it will be for the better. On that day, it won't matter that you can count so many birthdays ahead of her, or that most of those birthdays were days you ignored, rather than acknowledge that you hadn't been wanted on the day you arrived to this world. What will matter is that it is a day to celebrate, at long last, because without your birth, you wouldn't have found this woman and she wouldn't have fallen in love with you. And that's the truth, and spies accept the truth no matter how unpleasant—or pleasant—they might be.

A.N.: As I said in the beginning, this is a tribute for Severus Snape's birthday, January 9th. He may be dead in canon but he lives long and triumphantly in fanfic, and I for one am extremely glad! Happy birthday, my dear Potions Professor!