It sucks that I have to have a disclaimer. Ok. I don't own Harry Potter. I'm not j.k. (just kidding) about the fact that I'm not J.K. Rowling. I am not affiliated with Warner Bros. nor do I make any claim to be. Fan writing FAN fiction. Enough said.

I never finished this fanfiction, and I never intend to. However, there were many chapters that I composed amid others that I did not, and I want to post them just as a reference tool for myself. I am not ever going to fill out any of the incomplete chapters.


Chapter 8

Later that evening, when left to his own resources, Snape got out his old pensieve from the locked closet. He wanted to slap himself hard for so foolishly forgetting his bottles of bad memories that anyone could so easily have nipped. Fortunately, he counted all of them, and each and every one he had left was untouched. The house elves, at least, were honest enough to not take or play with things.

Snape emptied several bad memories from his school days in a haphazard manner into the pensieve until it was full of the swirling murky substance that was neither liquid nor gas. Then slowly, very slowly, he let himself be absorbed in them.

When the clouds cleared, Snape was looking at himself in his fifteen-year-old form, lying inert on his bed. It was early morning, and the sun was just rising. Snape surmised that it must be summertime just before he began his fifth year at Hogwarts. He was at home, in the little loft room allotted to him. He heard pounding on the wall behind him. "Sev! Wake up! Come on!" came the muffled voice of his sister through the wall from her room. With a groan and a yawn, young Snape sat up in bed and leaned against the headboard.

"Sylvia! It's Saturday!" he shouted, protesting.

"No." she replied concisely. "I have to go to town today, and I want you to come with me. So get up, get dressed, and come down."

"Another hour. Please!"

"No. I have to get to the market before they run out of pork chops."

"What do you want with pork chops?"

"They're for dinner."

"Oho. So now you're head chef of the family, eh?"

"Oho yourself. You're talking an awful lot today; that's unusual. Did you wake up with fresh vocal chords? Anyhow, Mum said I could cook tonight. So get up--now."

Young 'Sev' sighed and got up, shivering slightly, with a glare at the wall behind which his sister was waiting. He was donned in blue and white pinstripe pyjama bottoms and plaid flannel short-sleeved shirt. That was all right in bed, but even in the warm weather, unless you lived in California, it was not a wise idea to walk around in so little. He seized a dressing gown left on the floor and shoved it on.

Dressing took two minutes, and soon older Snape was following his younger self down the stairs with his teeth bared. He had forgotten for a time how much his little sister had irritated him and teased him.

When he arrived down in the kitchen, Mrs. Snape, by far a younger and prettier Mrs. Snape, sat at the table, sipping coffee idly and reading a book.

"Morning, Mum." young Severus remarked icily.

Apparently she didn't hear him, for she made no reply. Taking no notice, Severus spent the next ten minutes occupied with making toast. When he sat down at the table with it, his mother finally noticed him. "Good morning Severus. Sleep well?"

"Fairly." he replied, nodding.

She looked puzzled, then leaned a little closer to him across the round table. "Sorry dear, what did you say?"

Severus spoke a little more loudly, "Fine, except Sylvia came and demanded I get up. Where is she anyway?"

Mother shook her head. "Severus, you know my ears aren't as good as they used to be. Really, you must learn to talk a little louder than a grumble. I simply can't hear you. Now what did you say?"

Severus said very loudly now, "I SAID I SLEPT JUST FINE."

Mother looked very odd now, but she still didn't seem to have gotten the message. "Severus, please just say it louder."

Young Severus got up, walked over to his mother, and spoke very succinctly into her ear, "I SLEPT VERY WELL, MOTHER, HOW ABOUT YOU?"

Mother stood up, leaving her toast. She seemed to be shaking slightly. "I'll…be right back." she muttered, and left the room. After a few minutes, she came back, with Sylvia in tow. Sylvia was shouting "Mum, I'm leaving with Sev right now. I'll be back in an hour." Mother had her hands on her ears and she looked very queer.

"Sylvia," she said suddenly taking her hands off her ears, "scream. Scream as loud and hard as you can. Just do it!" she added, before Sylvia could protest. Sylvia, questioningly, obeyed, and screamed bloody murder. If there had been any houses in the vicinity, someone would have called the police. However, Mother kept crying, "Louder. Louder! LOUDER! Scream as hard as when that hawk carried off your dog!" In reply, Sylvia shrieked loud enough to shatter glass. Exasperated, she looked expectantly at Mother. Tears were welling up in the other's eyes. "It's happened." she gasped, and fell to the floor upon her knees.

Young Severus was cool and collected on the outside, although older Snape knew he was trembling within. He picked up a stray quill and a grocery receipt from the counter. He wrote on the back of the latter, "You can hear nothing?" and showed it to his mother. Mrs. Snape shook her head.

"No, no nothing!" she cried, leaning against the wall.

Young Severus looked at her very anxiously for a moment, then spoke to his little sister. "Come, Sylvia, we'll take her to Doctor Meyers. He'll know what's to be done." Older Snape watched as they took her out of the house, down the road, and out of sight of the memory. But he didn't need to watch any further to know what happened next. Nothing was going to be able to be done for Mrs. Snape. This was the day she had lost her hearing entirely. Snape knew this had to be one of the worst days of his life. But they did not help him at all with his quest to find the Forbidden Feeling, or so he had named it inside his head.

The clouds were encircling him again. Soon he was watching yet another scene. This one was also the summer before his fifth term at Hogwarts, but it seemed to be after the disastrous day with his mother's lost hearing. A thunder shower raged outside, and the room was gloomy with the light of but one candle. Young Severus, Mrs. Snape, and Sylvia were eating in silence around the small table in the kitchen. Young Severus was helping himself to seconds of some pasta dish that consisted of their entire repast. No one except him seemed to have an appetite. Sylvia seemed to notice this. "Hungry tonight, eh Sev?" Severus shrugged, and then got up from the table quite suddenly, without touching a morsel on his plate.

"Your turn for the dishes, Sylvia."

"No it isn't; I do them on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and every other Sunday. You know that just as well as I do."

Severus shrugged again. "I did them for you last night because you went to talk to your friend Keesha via flu powder right after dinner."

"Oh, yeah, I forgot." replied Sylvia, plainly implying that she hadn't. And with that, she got up too. Severus turned on his heel and went up the stairs, unmistakably disturbed.

Young Severus took a shower after that, and got dressed for bed. He was still bearing clear signs of agitation. He got into bed and turned out the light, however, in five minutes, he got up and lit the light again. He stood in front of the body-length mirror in the corner, wearing just his long pyjama bottoms, poking his stomach repeatedly. His lips did not move, but he was thinking furiously. So his voice projected across the memory at some points. The memory was somewhat broken, so not all of it was there. "…what was Sylvia meaning? That I'm getting fat or something?" (Older Snape had to chuckle at this; the boy in the memory could easily have run for world's skinniest fifteen-year-old) Nevertheless, the voice continued, as young Severus kept on poking and prying himself.

"I guess she's right. But what can I do about it? Go out for Quidditch? No, Quidditch is awful. I'll never even make the team. Well, I could stop eating. That's it; by far the easiest way to go. But how would I go about not eating in a way that mum won't think I'm not eating?" With that, young Severus sat down on the bed to think. After a moment, he gave up. "I'll figure this out tomorrow." And he lay back on the bed. But he did not go to sleep; instead he debated with himself over whether he had the energy to get back up and walk to the basin to brush his teeth. In the end, though, he got up again and got out his toothbrush and fluoride toothpaste.

In the midst of the following events, young Severus jammed the toothbrush back too far, and he gagged. He eventually recovered himself, but the slight incident was all he needed for another burst of inspiration.

"If I don't digest my meals," he thought, "Then my body won't receive anything from the food. Thus making me thinner." He nodded sagely at himself in the mirror. "And, at the same time, I shall be appearing to eat, so mum won't worry. She's got too much on her hands, anyways. And I won't be hungry, either, gagging all the time. Yes, that's the best way out of this mess…" And with that, young Severus went out the door, across the hall, and into the bathroom. After a few minutes, older Severus heard the horrible retching of his forced vomiting. It was not a pretty sound and made his older self cringe involuntarily. A few minutes later, his younger self, looking much more pale and drained, came back in, took a swig of water from the jug on the side-table, and collapsed into the bed. In his mouth, Snape could almost taste the nasty aftertaste of vomiting, one of the worst parts of the plan. He remembered buying and sucking on so many mint candies during this period of bulimia that they were what he spent most of his pocket money on, and his teeth had rotted at a remarkable rate.

The memory swirled thickly. The former scene disappeared. There had been nothing to help him there. Snape didn't know if this was good for him to relive the worst days of his life, but he needed to find the meaning of that feeling. He had figured out that the collection of memories he had poured into here were mainly from his fifth year. They had arranged themselves in chronological order, so it was somewhat like watching a movie with some parts left out.

The memory dissolved away into nothingness, but it faded to the next. Now Snape had landed in the first scene at Hogwarts. It was in the Slytherin common room, and it was late evening. Snow was falling outside, and older Snape guessed the month to be about January or February. There were three boys besides young Severus in the room, two playing chess and one watching them, half-asleep. Young Snape was working feverishly on an essay. He looked horrible; emaciated almost to beyond all recognition. His anorexia had caused his cheeks to fall in, his yellow skin to pale to almost a light sage green, and large bruises covered most of his body from where he had bumped himself, either accidentally or from abuse by the Marauders. Because he was receiving almost no nutrition, they were not healing up very well or quickly. His breath came slowly and unevenly. His fingers were so tender that they were even bruised from writing. Nevertheless, young Snape wrote, not with such vigour as usual, but it was still writing. Older Snape wondered why he had gone bulimic; the results were definitely not very pretty.

Two girls walked in, each hiding something behind her back. Giggling, one approached one of the chess players and slipped a pink glittery paper heart into his hand. Then, still giggling, she dashed away and up the stairs. From this, older Snape was able to ascertain the actual date; February 14th—St. Valentine's day. He still remembered the desperation he had felt in these days when no one ever bothered to send him a valentine. Usually, this was one of the worst days of the year for him, and he always had treated it as any other day, just because it was for him. He did, however, storm around a bit more angrily on these days.

Anyhow, the other girl slowly approached him, hesitantly. When she was about arm's length from him as he sat primly as he could in his weakened condition on the stiff upholstered couch, she suddenly proffered to him, without a hint of emotion, an enormous box of candy. "This is from my friend," she explained dully in monotone. "She thinks you'll actually eat it all. Then, she thinks you'll round out a little more and be less of an eyesore to the rest of us. Or so is her theory." She stared at him uninterestedly. Young Snape had laid down, with a slight grimace, his quill, and now stared at her with sadness disguised as aloofness.

"And…?" he questioned haughtily.

The girl shrugged. "If you don't want it, I get to take it upstairs and we have a chocolate feast. But," she added hastily, "That's only if you don't want it."

"Do you want me to have it?" This was, probably, the first time any girl had talked directly to him in the last week. Young Snape responded to the situation by speaking as little as possible.

"No, but then, I didn't buy it" the girl said simply. Snape stared at the pretty box, shaped like a heart with lots of frilly bows and lace. It was just the sort of thing that a girl would choose as a present.

"If it was a sentimental gift," he said sombrely. "I might take it, but, as it is not, I could do better without it."

"Actually," the girl said, "The whole point of the scam was that you would do better with it, but, then, it might not even take any effect on you at all, and you still would be the same old revolting ugly Severus as before. So I assume you don't want it?"

"Precisely." Snape was used to the other students making fun of him to his face. He had grown to tolerate it, and even ignore it.

"Ok then, if you say so." With that, the girl turned around and slowly walked away, pulling off the ribbons from the box and opening it. Snape turned back to his work. The girl, as she approached the doorway to the stairs, turned around and, slowly drew a chocolate very deliberately from the box and placed it in her mouth, making loud undignified smacking noises as she enjoyed it. Getting no response from him, she shrugged, turned back to the stairs, and climbed up.

That, older Severus remembered, had been the only Valentine's gift ever offered to him, except as a matter of course from the other teachers in his adulthood, and it had not even been out of pure kindness. He sometimes wondered if, there had been a girl that he had been able to unburden himself to, if a girl ever had been as attracted to him as he was to her, that fact would have been different.

The memories swirled and swirled again. It was now sometime in April (a calendar clock on the wall showed the month,) and his younger self was sitting, alone, in a back corner desk, in Professor Binn's class. (Binns was a ghost at even this time.) He also noticed that his boy self was having trouble seeing the board due to the portly form of the student in front of him, and that he had to crane his neck with undue exertion in order to copy what was written for his homework. Suddenly, in the midst of Binn's lecture, he gave a little gasp and fell forward on the desk. No one noticed how he had fainted. Then the memory went dark, and began swirling again.

That short scene didn't help at all with Snape's aim. He figured, and figured correctly, that the next would be a hospital scene.

Madame Jacobs, the equivalent of Madame Pomfrey then, was trying to administer young Severus some soup. He forced it away so violently that most of the soup ended up on the sheets than inside him, however he did accidentally swallow some. He then tried to prove to Madame Jacobs that he was as strong as ever by getting out of bed, but he was about as successful at standing on his own as a newborn foal. He was hustled back into bed, but there was nothing anyone could do with him. He force-vomited almost automatically when Madame Jacobs went in the other room. She came back, the Marauders trailing behind her.

"Look Severus, you have some visitors!" she declared exasperatedly.

A hazy thought boomed through the memory, saying: "She's just dragged them in as they passed and probably bribed them to encourage me to eat."

Lupin, Peter, Sirius and James approached him. Older Snape realized that his younger self was indeed very shrewd and entirely correct in his assumption that they had been bribed to feed him, for James and Sirius brandished large chocolate bars, although Lupin had his sticking out of his pocket. Peter was already eating his. He also had been right, he knew, that the Marauders did not come of their own accord; Madame Jacobs insisted that they come in and help her as they were passing the hospital wing door on their way to do mischief somewhere. Perhaps she had thought that influence of his fellow students would make him eat or some such nonsense. So Severus pretended to be asleep. Lupin did try and keep his word to Madame Jacobs, and proffered more soup, but Sirius and James began a rowdy game of tag underneath and around the empty beds that they somehow dragged Peter into. The memory was extremely hazy, and Severus kept closing his eyes, so it was like a power outage with the lights flickering on and off. The memory, all in all, was not very good, and older Snape was glad when finally the memories began to swirl again.

Again, his search had been fruitless. But the next memory was already swirling around him in a dizzying manner. Snape counted how many he had to go; he had put in six, and this was the last one. He hoped this one would shed more light on the Forbidden Feeling than the previous five.

The memories stopped their swirling, and showed young Severus, still in his fifth year, sitting under a tree in the gardens one fine afternoon with a book. Apparently Severus had ironed out the kink in his brain that compelled him to be bulimic, because he was no longer so bruised or sallow, but he was still unnaturally thin. Older Severus remembered that Madame Jacobs and Dumbledore, then headmaster, had threatened to expel him if he didn't eat. That had put him in line well enough. Severus was not going to forfeit his education for his looks.

Anyhow, young Severus leaned against the tree, completely absorbed in his potions book. Yes indeed, this was the very book that Harry had discovered later and used, to his own success. Older Severus barred his teeth as he watched the pencil in his younger hand write at a rapid pace in the margins. If only he had not written all of that down in there, written it in some notepad or other source, Potter never would have found it, and would never have been able to achieve good grades or Slughorn's affection.

Other students were meandering out of the castle in groups of three or four. One such group wandered in the general direction of young Severus. It was composed of four girls. Older Snape strained to remember their names. One was Slytherin Tabitha Trickelback, who was a rather stout, pig-like girl, the one who had tried to give him the chocolates on St. Valentine's day. Another was Hufflepuff Miranda something-he-could-not-remember, rather pretty, but with a far-away glint in her eye that caused one to assume that she was eternally in La-La Land. Then there was Ravenclaw Tiffany Melstocking, a black-haired, intelligent-looking girl who was very observant. (She was the only person in the world who had a nose even remotely reminiscent of his.) Lastly, there was the gem of the group--Slytherin Celeste Montgomery.

Celeste Montgomery was probably the most beautiful creature in the school. She had waist-long, thick silky chestnut hair and big, beautiful blue eyes that shone like stars when she was happy. Her daintily manicured hands were long and slender, but, as Snape had observed in his classes, completely inept at everything. Young Severus, at her approach, stood abruptly and closed his book. As they walked on, he kept close on their tail.

After a time, the group stopped beneath a plum tree. Celeste and her friends jumped to try and reach one of the succulent fruits, but could not reach one. Gallantly, Severus climbed up the tree himself and brought some down some to them. Without a word of thanks or recognition (except the girl named Tiffany raising her eyebrows questioningly at him), the girls took the plums from his arms and left him standing there empty-handed. As they went out of earshot, Severus heard Tabitha murmur, "Why does Snivellus follow you around everywhere, Celeste? Do you think he likes you?"

"I most certainly hope not!" laughed Celeste in reply. "He's so rude and mean!"

"Not to you, he isn't!" And chattering, the girls continued on their way.

Young Severus sensed that perhaps the girls had purposefully said that within his hearing, to try and discourage him. He looked upon that as hopeful for him; perhaps Celeste secretly admired him but just wasn't wanting to make that known to him. Maybe she stressed his worse qualities in front of her friends because she wanted it to seem as though she didn't like him, when, in fact, she did. He hoped this was the case, at any rate.

Older Severus could remember that he had once felt, ever since his first year at Hogwarts, a fatal attraction for Celeste. Almost never was she completely out of either his sight or his mind. Even a glimpse of her brought a queer feeling in the depths of him. Indeed, he intended to ask her to marry him in later years, but that had been before his Death Eater days…all of a sudden, he remembered his quest. The way he had felt in the past for Celeste was identical to the way he now felt for Hermione Granger!

Severus slipped out of the pensieve in the middle of that memory, which hadn't quite ended yet, so shocked he was almost on the verge of swooning. How could this be? He love Hermione Granger?!! This was not right; no indeed, this was NOT RIGHT. It made no sense. But, on the other hand, it did all make sense, now. His wanting constantly to keep an eye on her in class, his stomach knotting up whenever she looked at him, his odd impulses to say kind things to her, and everything else made sense now. He was in love with the best friend of his archenemy. But why should he care so for her? She was years younger than him, not especially a beauty, and he never had felt anything other than malice towards her, because she was in Gryffindor, Potter's house.

Probably this was just a flying fancy. It was very likely that he just felt very proud of her achievements unconsciously, and this had turned into affection. It might be over with in a week, and a month, in a year at longest. He wasn't really sure if he was the kind to have these flying fancies, though; indeed, the only girl he had ever felt any sort of affection for before was Celeste. That had lasted from his first year at Hogwarts until her death at the hand of Lucius Malfoy, when Snape worked for Voldemort, when Lucius and fellow Death Eaters raided her estate. (Her family were very strong supporters and financiers of the Ministry at that time.) Actually, for a long time after that, Snape seemed to lose interest in the entire Death Eater regime, and only remained in it because he was bound with death as the punishment for abandonment. Probably the reason he lost inertest was because the girl he had loved for years had died at the hands of it. Also, it was probably the reason that he had never since wished or tried to pursue anything more than a steady bachelor lifestyle. He saw that now.

Snape glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was 7:40, forty minutes after he had begun going through his memories. It was not at all late; however, Snape undressed and flung himself into bed, almost forgetting to turn out the light before he crawled under the covers. In the morning, he would be better (for the entire feeling he considered to be some loose screw in his brain) and tomorrow he would worry about it if he wasn't over it yet. There would be plenty of time then. And with that, Snape drifted off into dreamland.


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