rainbowchameleon: I know you can tell your spouse about magic; McGonagall was afraid. She didn't want what happened to her mother to happen to her.

GlitteryAlchemist: I know a lot of people like Snape, but I personally never have. I also don't believe he was evil, however. He's rather in-between. This was, therefore, a challenge to write because I needed to be true to Snape's character; I've tried to get each character right. I've heard a lot of "Snape showed the bravery of a Gryffindor" and "Snape was a hero!" comments, and I tried to show how I believe Snape himself would view those comments in this. I hope it lives up to your expectations.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.

Severus Snape, January 9th, 1998

Severus Snape was not a man with delusions. He knew he was not a good man. He didn't care much about this fact; being good had never been a concern to him. He was no Gryffindor. He knew that one could be admirable without being good; one could be great without being good; one could be worthy without being good.

He was, for example, a very great wizard. His grasp of the Dark Arts was stunning; he was an excellent duelist, and above all, he was a Potions Master. That in itself was amazing. He had not known many others with talents of that scale to a particular subject. He had known a Charms Master, once. He had known a Transfiguration Master, too, but he had considerably less respect for the latter.

He had taught himself Occlumency—with the company of a very great wizard—but he had done it himself, and could deceive the Dark Lord himself. Even Albus Dumbledore was not as great an Occlumens as Severus was.

Albus Dumbledore. He viewed the name with a certain ambivalence. Severus had done horrible, terrible things as a Death Eater, but he had never once believed that he would ever cast the last Unforgivable. The Killing Cure. Avada Kedavra. And yet his desire for revenge had so overpowered that last inhibition, that last line over which he previously would never have compromised himself in crossing, that he had cast it at the only man that the Dark Lord had ever feared. Or so the world said.

The world was full of fools.

The Dark Lord feared death, and so he feared Harry Potter above all. A boy of seventeen. Another name Severus viewed with ambivalence.

He did not like Harry Potter. The boy had been forced to grow up fast; he was far older in emotion than many adults. And yet he still viewed the world in black and white. He had begun to discover shades of grey, Severus knew, but he did not yet know that grey was all that existed.

Harry Potter was grey. The Dark Lord himself was grey. There was no black or white.

Harry Potter was the sort of idealistic Gryffindor who would say, when he discovered Severus's role in the war, "That man showed bravery worthy of a Gryffindor. That man was a hero."

Severus was certainly not a Gryffindor. He was a Slytherin. And bravery had nothing to do with a man's worth. Cowards could be good. The brave could be bad.

And Severus was not a hero.

He heard the scream of a young girl echo from above and felt a sense of regret. He truly wished it was not necessary, for young children to be tortured. But that was the sacrifice that needed to be made if the Dark Lord was to fall.

He saw the way the professors—Minerva McGonagall in particular—looked at him for allowing such atrocities to happen in his school. They didn't understand, either. He didn't enjoy hearing children tortured. He merely realized the necessity of it. And it was people like him, people who realized the necessity of such things, who ended tyrannies and won wars.

For all her dirty looks, he wondered if Minerva had realized that he allowed the band of rebels to continue their protests. Potter's friends. And though there was not a Slytherin among Potter's friends, he wondered if anyone noticed the Slytherins who protected the younger students; those who risked their own necks, even acted as if they supported the torture, all to defend those they loved.

He had seen a third year Slytherin being asked to punish a first year Gryffindor just the other day. A fifth year Slytherin had stepped forward and suggested the name of an older Gryffindor, one she just gotten into an argument with—the brother of the first year, he later found out—instead and offered to do the torture herself. He was more of a threat, she had said, and what better way to discourage the younger from similar activities than to force him to watch his brother come to harm?

She had smiled a very nasty smile, one that Severus recognized from his own days in Slytherin. The smile was only for show. The girl was a brilliant actor. Se had suggested the older Gryffindor knowing he could withstand the torture; she had seen his spirit when they argued, and she was was offering him the chance to spare his brother the way she was sparing the third year Slytherin.

And yet the Gryffindor had looked at her with hatred in his eyes. It was rather the way Minerva looked at him when he walked by. With blind prejudice. Without the understanding that they, too, were making sacrifices in that war. They didn't see how much it took to compromise one's principles like that because they never had—in their minds. They always had a justification for their actions, those Gryffindors.

Severus had never liked Minerva McGonagall.

He privately thought this was only an extreme version of the way the school had been before. He had been tortured as a first year, too, if not with the Cruciatus. Slytherins had been victimized all the time, more so than Muggleborns had ever been. House prejudices had still torn the school apart.

The Slytherins and Hufflepuffs had occasionally found their common ground, and the Slytherins and Ravenclaws typically respected each other and had found allies in one another when Gryffindor and Hufflepuff viewed them with animosity.

But never once had a student tried to view things from another's point of view, and that was why Gryffindor and Slytherin remained bitter enemies.

He had experienced it himself. He was at fault for what had happened between himself and her. But she had been at fault, too, and she had never acknowledged that. She had never tried to see it from his point of view. She had tried all she could, she had said, and it was done now; she wouldn't even listen to his explanations. She didn't want his apologies.

The thought that she might be to blame as well, that she hadn't really tried, had never crossed her mind.

Severus loathed Gryffindors. Hypocritical, perhaps, because he wished for inter-House unity, but it was solely because they were all biased against Slytherin.

Not one Slytherin was in Dumbledore's Army, because it was full of Potter's friends. History would be written, claiming that the Slytherins had not done anything good as they weren't part of Dumbledore's Army. But they were never given the chance.

Potter thought all Slytherins were copies of Draco, and he did not like Draco Malfoy. From there stemmed the problem. Anything the Slytherins did went unnoticed because they hadn't done it alongside the famous Gryffindor heroes.

That was what Severus wished he could change. It was his school now, and he couldn't change the one thing that had made his life miserable in his own school days. He couldn't give his House the respect it deserved.

Part of the reason he didn't like Potter: he had the power to change it himself, and he had exacerbated it.

If the Boy-Who-Lived was a Slytherin, he would have found Slytherin friends to help him vanquish the Dark Lord. (Contrary to popular belief, not all Slytherins had Death Eaters in their family. Some were actually—Merlin forbid—Muggleborn. Even more shocking, those Slytherin Muggleborns were actually liked in their House!)

If the Chosen One was a Slytherin, the world would have seen the heroism present inside the House. Perhaps they would have viewed Gryffindors as arrogant and glory-seeking, however—but that was a problem easier dealt with, as Dumbledore was a Gryffindor, and therefore none of the Death Eaters Gryffindor produced would become representative of their House. (Although Severus often wondered why Slytherin wasn't afforded the same courtesy with Merlin, one of the greatest Muggle-advocates of all time and a Slytherin nonetheless. Shouldn't that prove that not all Slytherins wanted Muggleborns dead? That not even all Death Eaters wanted all Muggleborns dead and had originally joined the Dark Lord for other reasons before finding that they couldn't get out?)

It wasn't just Potter. Any one of those Gryffindor rebels could have done it. Neville Longbottom, perhaps.

Severus also didn't like Neville Longbottom. The boy was a constant reminder of what could have been; of what he had lost. If he had been the boy of the prophecy; if his parents had been the ones who died, then she would be alive. She would be alive, and he would not have been forced to give up everything he had the way he had.

But there he was.

Severus felt a flash of anger that he had the power to shape the school the way he wanted to but couldn't wield it. He had to remind himself that he had never taken the position of Headmaster to better Hogwarts, but to serve the war.

His school. He had never imagined that he would be standing before the Mirror of Erised on his thirty-eighth birthday as Headmaster of Hogwarts.

It was the mirror that offered him the final proof that he was not a hero, though he hardly needed it. The same people who might call him a hero after learning of his part in the war would expect him to see the fall of the Dark Lord in the mirror.

But he didn't. After all these years, the image was still the same. It would always be the same.

Lily.