It was a muggy afternoon during his one summer of note, the one during which he took the Mark. He was seventeen-Merlin, he still went by Sev, then. Not often, mind, did one refer to the dour young man by that nickname. In fact, from that day onwards, he would be known only as Severus, Snape, eventually Professor-but that afternoon was Sev's last.
His flirtations with the Dark Arts demanded attention, payment, and he took another swig of what was essentially piss water. He recognized the beginning of his fall for what it was. Fortunately, the world at the end of his brown glass bottles didn't care that a deformation of the soul had finally been ushered forth by his curiosity. No, that dizzy world put all of its efforts into spinning.
Hence, he drank, feeling obliged.
Sev admitted to himself that he was a disappointment, even in his own mind. Full disclosure was the only promise he had left to make to himself, so dammit he'd be honest: he disgusted him. Wait, no. The man he would become, that man not unlike his father: that man disgusted him. He disappointed him, because he...because he was so wretched. Consumed with envy, humiliation and anger. In him, his father never died.
So why not imbibe? It was true to form, if anything. Par for the course, that he'd gone and sold his soul to the devil in him, the bastard: Death Eater.
How the fuck did one even eat death? The name didn't make any bloody sense-unless, of course, Death was a woman, redheaded maybe, in which case what a fine meal indeed. Ha, "Death Eater", if only. Had he eaten so well in all his life, he'd at least have been smiling as he sat there, shitfaced at the end of things. Or rather, shitfaced under the big oak in Cokeworth's Fetter Crown Park.
He snorted. It wasn't a park so much as a weedy lot, two ancient trees, a stone memorial bench or two, and history's Fetter Crown House, home to the founder of a miserable miller town north of nothing. He recalled, even in that dizzy brown world, that some committee or other petitioned for the house to be titled as a historical site-and so it was. Sev then noted, perhaps aloud, that the empty, sagging building had nothing to gaze upon with its dark windows besides himself and the scrawny Cokeworth crows.
Sev figured he'd spent enough hours then thinking about his life as he'd lived it. Or not life, really. Survival, perhaps, described it best. Or existential torment. Shit luck, or...
The birds cawed and interrupted his thought. Or maybe he'd abandoned it. In any case, he drank.
"To the absolutely very end of me!"
And his was such a predictable end, too: thoroughly lacking creativity or deviation from his plot for self-destruction. He didn't grab for power, and was ambitious only in scholarly pursuits; for some time, he was eager in the duty of his sworn oaths. Otherwise, he was a bitter shade. Moreover, he knew himself well enough to know that he would hardly allow himself any kind pleasure. Cruel. It'd all be cruel. Cruel jokes, cruel hobbies, cruel smiles, most likely. He'd dress entirely in black and learn to scowl like his mother used to, and lie to people's faces, and to himself even.
So cruel.
Merlin, the whole world span.
He swayed, tilted his head back and drained his bottle. Then he reached for another, banished the cap. The bottle had other plans, though, sliding from his slack grip and toppling to the ground. His glassy stare could hardly be arsed to turn downward. Once he spotted the bottle, glugging away on its own, he huffed in amusement. The damned thing pissed away the last of his stash.
He watched the dirt drink his beer and soon, found himself unable to stop laughing. He shook and giggled because gods, even the poor Fetter Crown was looking to sooth his old, dead hurts. After a few minutes, the laughing stopped, and he half-expected an onset of despair. He surprised himself by not crying, and the humor melted from his face and settled back into one of vague, idle musing.
Drinking in the park in Cokeworth was at least an honest affair. While typical in the way of ruined youth, it revealed personal truths that were relevant to Sev's last hurrah. Yet, he wanted more. Sev needed a testimony to himself, a memorial-rather, a grave marker. He'd make one, since no one else would: a grand sepulcher, to remember him by.
He glanced around himself, taking inventory of his available rocks, twigs, weeds, leaves; bird shite, and about a dozen empty beer bottles, including Crown's and his own.
Ah, yes.
He could build a pyramid out of beer bottles and dead grass, paint it with white shite and petition the parks committee to declare it a piece of the town's history. It wouldn't take too much convincing on his part, seeing as the story of the town rounded up to thereabouts, anyway. With enough time, he could prepare a speech for the ceremony of his monument, about how he and Fetter Crown shared drinks and decided that his life would be Cokeworth, and that the thought was enough to kill him, that thinking it was killing himself, that killing himself seemed to be his agenda all along because what else was he doing, really, drowning in swill with crows and dead founders and a past and a future like rolling testaments to the definition of unkindness.
Once upon a time, he thought, an unkind man wed an unkind women, and begot an unkind son in a town that was likewise. This unkind boy met one, sweet girl who hurt to think about; who didn't last because he was so unkind. Without her, quite a few peers beat him, or let him beat himself, because they, too, were unkind. Then there stood, looming above them all, a thing of the Dark, made of snakes and skulls and festering wounds, that plagued his nightmares and preyed on his sleepless rage, and all of them, including the man he would be, cawed like another great gathering of crows hungry for a feast of his entrails.
A few more crows alighted in the branches overhead, looking down.
He left Crown's upturned bottle to decant and opened a new one, for himself, to toast old Fetter Crown and poor Snape men. He gave a bloody brilliant euology, as well: "To the poor sods who never got a chance," or some variation of the same. He swallowed a mouthful of piss, then grimaced at the taste. Gah, the near feverish warmth of it hitting the rest in his stomach with a splash. Ugh.
For a few minutes, there was only the wet slap of meager breakfast on yellow grass; clear bile, sourness; heaving, panting. Swearing, eventually, and the stupid calling of crows. Or maybe they were laughing, at him.
He could use a good laugh, he mused. Something, anything, it didn't even need to be funny. He just needed to laugh at it.
Years later, he'd come to find amusement in the suffering of others, emulating the harsh unkindness of Cokeworth crows. His would be their beady glares and how they seemed to look on him with such amused content. As a grown man, while others would swear that he'd been exorcised of any semblance good humor, even then he'd value, above all else, a hearty laugh.
Certainly, his enjoyment of others pain and discomfort made him a contemptible bully, even twenty years past seventeen. However, his schadenfreude, such as it was-some would call it sadism-was transparent, honest in the style of Snapes and Cokeworth crows: pain was funny because it was all there was, in any direction, and everything hurt but he had to laugh some time.
That was it, then, Sev told himself. Laugh at the hurting of others. Try to hide your own hurt, to avoid being laughed at. That was life.
Finally, the young man noticed that the crows gathering in the tree he had been using for support, instead of squawking at each other, were doing so at him. Faster than the alcohol should have permitted, he aimed a curse at the closest one, nailing it in the wing.
With an awful noise, his avian audience fled the tree in a storm of black flapping and cawing. One wretched creature came crashing down from the tree to the stone bench a few meters away. It thrashed and flailed, flinging itself less than its own height from the bench to the ground. That practically negligent second height proved merciless, however, when the crow, with the full force of its panic, fell from it and broke its own wing.
He'd remember, for years afterwards, the sight of the injured bird thrashing on the ground in counterpoint to the disquiet of its fleeing conspiracy. He'd return to the memory, countless times, including on his near-death bed, finding in it a brutally clear view of himself. A great black bird, injured by him, crippled by himself, and in the end, abandoned by his unkindness.
"Stop that," said the man, Severus, the effigy of Sev, to the bird he'd just cursed. Still, the bird flailed until it knocked itself out against the stone. An idea conceived itself then, while the man lay still in a drunken stupor, in his own vomit in the shade of his favorite tree.
Better than a pyramid of beer bottles.
Over the years, he covered himself in that idea: in pieces, he carved his tombstone. When he had the time and money, and the privacy to heal, he expanded on it. In the evenings, when he undressed and the yards of black cloth slid off, he examined his memorial in silence. When he felt weak, he stood before the full length mirror in his quarters-one of the only non-magical items he still owned. His eyes, roving over his own thin body, bespoke a wordless sermon. Arduously, he hid his testimony to himself, as it grew, because to do besides would be "highly inappropriate" for places of work and indentured servitude. Murder was acceptable, and torture, a performance, but his black shrine was the most intimate truth he had to his name.
It wasn't even finished, and yet, when they peeled back his robes to tend to his wounds, they exposed said unfinished psyche.
The room stuttered. Even Madam Pomfrey, who'd seen the better part of it-once or twice since its meager beginning-started. Severus lay oblivious to the effect of his Unkindness. He did, however, manage choke out a few syllables: two, in fact.
"Stp tha," he said, half-strangled from trying to breathe, cough, and address a fatal flaw in his audience all at once. Somehow, even when mostly dead and wholly unconscious, the Potions Master could command a desired outcome. The illusion of control was astounding, even while his voice became a mucid rattle. He breathed one full breath, then another. Then, there were no more words from him.
The three Gryffindors shared more wide eyed glances between them.
Hermione furrowed her brow, an expression that threatened to stick. Ron shifted his weight about, looking through the gaps in Pomfrey's bustling to catch more glimpses of the black 'it'. Harry, from his position at Snape's bedside, held the best vantage point for peering down the length of the Death Eater's torso.
Dark ink with very few patches of bone yellow skin, bloodless except for the drying stains of the attack; the flow of lines suggested that there was even more yet to be seen. The portrait, from what was uncovered, was simply too striking.
Harry stepped back to avoid being underfoot. He didn't want to be shooed from the ward before he could understand what he was seeing. From a distance, he watched the dark thing ripple. It had eyes - furious, animal eyes. They glared up at them from the man's narrow chest, and when Harry stared back, the thing lunged at him.
Snape pulled in a massive breath, sending himself into a coughing fit so violent it had him arching off the bed. The monster on his body thrashed with him, creating the illusion of a desperate, tortured creature with eyes that bore into Harry with such accusation that the young hero could barely stand for all he was shaking.
"Harry. Harry."
His body jerked sideways; he was being handled. The eyes followed his movements. "Mr. Potter, honestly!"
Potter! He heard, hissed, in his head more than his ears. That thing on his chest knew his name.
"Mr. Potter, you will wait outside if you can't make yourself useful. I haven't the patience!" More hands shoved him away from the bedside, though he and the animal were of locked gazes. "Professor Snape will live, child, if you leave me to my work."
Over his shoulder came a sharp, "Miss Granger, if you would." He didn't hear his friend respond, so she probably nodded. In two shakes, he was being lead by the elbow from the ward.
Between his changing point of view and Snape's convulsions, the monster finally let him go.
Instead, it turned its damning eyes to Ron. He knew from his posture: the tall ginger stood at the foot of the bed, hunched over and frozen all over in shock. He was too far away to notice any trembling. Harry tried to catch his eye, to ask if somehow he felt it too.
Hermione reacted in his periphery, and he wanted to ask the same of her. Did you see that? Did you hear that? She kept shaking her head, as if to clear it, and her gaze jumped from the floor, to over her shoulder and the section curtain. Her hand held steady on his arm - she hadn't succumbed to the shakes at all like he had.
However, nerves haunted her eyes. The black of her pupils overwhelmed the brown, and she had the appearance of a trapped rabbit, seeing the cage.
Harry felt, between his best friends on the earth, the passing of a chilly knowledge: they had most assuredly overstepped their bounds. And for that, Snape had cursed them.
He had cursed them all from the very bottom of his heart.