I'm obliged by my sense of decency to point out that this chapter includes spoilers for book six. It is mentioned in passing, and the story itself does not base itself off of the events of that book—so the following chapters shouldn't also be considered to contain spoilers. I'll warn you if/when any other major HBP plot points pop up in the story (though I doubt they will, it really is AU after book five.) It really is possible to completely skip this chapter without being lost once the next is posted, so if you don't wish to read any HBP spoilers, head on to Chapter Thirty-seven.
Chapter Thirty-six: Angst
redacted lyrics from Mad World, Tears For Fears
Severus Snape was having a lot of difficulty sleeping. His usual outlet was to cover pages in his old Advanced Potion-Making book with various charms, curses, and hexes that he'd created or found useful. It was a way of organizing and overpowering his jumbled thoughts—but lately he'd begun to be plagued by nightmares that he knew stemmed from disordered memories and long-held grudges.
For someone who felt his most creative in the hours that directly followed the sun's departure from the soon-to-be night sky, this new restlessness was most inconvenient. Rather than being able to focus on his schoolwork—or, more often, a new incantation—Snape was spending his favorite hours of the day wondering what long-lost, long-repressed memories of his childhood would surface in the coming night's dream.
He blamed these new developments on his mother, not even bothering to wince at the Muggle cliché—though as someone who considered himself well-read, he'd perused some of their Dr. Freud's theories. Snape had more or less dismissed them; while he had seen his father as somewhat of a rival, and had wanted to protect his mother, he didn't want to be anything like the man. Tobias Snape had been a drunkard with a heavy hand and an even stronger temper.
And he had been a Muggle.
Severus sighed. It seemed as though he would be unable to immerse the disturbing thoughts, suppress the slow-burning anger he felt, not tonight. The fact that it was Friday meant he had no scheduled way of distracting himself the next day other than to watch Quidditch practices. The next 48 or so hours loomed ahead of him, promising little sleep and much frustration. He decided to take a walk, to find a way either distract himself—or a quiet place in which to wrestle with his inner demons, once and for all.
The outside air was right on the edge of being described as 'cold.' Snape hadn't donned his school robes, choosing instead to venture out wearing a simple grey shirt and black trousers, which the light wind coming from across the faraway lake treated as fairly nonexistent. He welcomed the stinging numbness, wishing he could apply it to his thoughts but knowing that the only way that he was going to find peace would be to set the awful memories loose instead of stuffing them away.
He thought about his mother, knowing that picturing her face would bring an immediate onslaught of painful memories, the most recent of which being only a few months before. Ever methodical, however, Severus pushed those memories back, seeking one of the most important recollections with relevance to the painful mental journey he planned on taking that night.
He was seven years old, and he HATED his father. Severus cowered on the doorstep to their house, knowing that he'd earn himself another beating if he ventured back inside, and sure that he'd receive one for retreating any further, as well. He could hear his mother's shrieks of pain, and wondered, precociously, how he had ever come into existence.
Children were—or so he'd read—supposed to be the physical expression of their parents' love. If that was true, however, what did that make him? An abomination, a perversion of the true meaning of love? A mistake, bound to make amends for daring to be born, his purpose on earth to be a reminder to his parents of all their mistakes?
He really wasn't sure which option he preferred.
He heard footsteps on the floor behind him, and knew that his brutish father was seeking him for another round. Severus stood, knowing that it was a foolish thing to do—a body could fly much farther from a standing position than a sitting one—but unable to suppress the defiant urge to appear unafraid. Tobias Snape would know it was a sham; by the time his father finished with him, he'd be once again on the ground, begging for leniency. There was just something in him, however, that could not be suppressed—a force that seemed to be driven to deny any desire to give up without a fight.
Weak-kneed, a sallow-skinned boy with slick black hair that seemed to absorb the afternoon sun stood with a straight back, facing the half-open door of his house, too frightened even to form a fist with his small hands.
His father had beaten him to near death that day. That event had been a catalyst for his mother.
She had renounced her magic when the man she'd fallen for had reacted so strongly against it, burying her wand in the dirt behind their house. When Severus had been born, they'd been happy—but the nature of her talent had shown true in her son. Strange things would happen, things that drove Tobias into fits of fury—but the tiny child could not forsake something he didn't even know he had. She couldn't even teach him how to control it, because she spent no time alone with the boy—and if her husband could get so angry over something that was an uncontrollable accident, how would he react to purposeful magic?
Time and time again she'd allowed her husband to commit atrocities against herself and their son, telling herself she'd turned her back on their only defense—but that all changed when she saw that her son had stopped breathing, the skin on every visible surface bruised and battered from the older man's vicious rage. His mother had burst into tears and fled to the back yard, leaving his father with the impression that she'd been cowed by his violence again—but then she'd returned.
With her wand.
Tobias Snape was ordered to leave and never return. His unreasoning fear of magic meant that Eileen Prince Snape didn't even have to make good on her threats—he left without another word.
The injuries he had sustained, and the trauma by which they'd been inflicted had mercifully removed all memories of the event for many years. He and his mother moved, she reconnecting with the wizarding community, and he learning to appreciate the joys of magic. Still, theirs was not a happy life—though he had lost many of his memories of his father and had basically repressed the rest, his mother never quite forgave him for being the wedge that had driven the man she'd truly loved away from her. She had been content to live without magic; she had made her choice—and he'd forced her into a different one.
School had been a blessing. Eileen Snape's self-hatred had by that time mostly displaced onto himself, and one consequence of this was that he hadn't been taught very much about magic at all. He'd learned a lot about self-restraint and patience in Slytherin—and had found to his surprise that he was extraordinarily gifted. The missing memories from his childhood and his mother's tight-lipped refusal to speak of his father had led him to the natural conclusion that he was a pureblood whose father had simply abandoned them in one of those hazy periods of his life that he couldn't recall with clarity. Severus frankly hadn't blamed his father in the slightest for leaving—he knew what his mother was like.
Everything he'd known about his life had changed that past summer, however.
Snape picked his way across the grass bordering the Forbidden Forest, studiously ignoring the field to his right and the slowly swaying Whomping Willow. That painful memory could remain locked where it was, tonight.
He had always dreaded going home, even as he dreaded returning in the fall; though this feeling originated mostly from the knowledge that once he graduated, he wouldn't be able to return, and thus his love of Hogwarts was forever tinged with the bittersweet understanding that it wouldn't last. When he had been home for barely a week, however, something completely unexpected happened.
Tobias Snape showed up at their door.
The moment he'd seen the man, the terrible things he had experienced at his father's hands had begun to come back to him. These weren't nearly as horrible as what was completely evident in every essence of the man who had given birth to him—he was a Muggle.
Severus was forced to question everything he knew about his own identity that day. As a half-blood, his status among his Slytherin friends would drop dramatically. Suddenly his talents for the creation of new hexes and curses seemed less of a birthright and more a freakish quirk. The scars on his body proved to be from abuse rather than a vigorous childhood.
The worst part of all was that he could see his mother had never stopped loving the man—and he was certain that she had never hidden away the memories of what that man done to both of them. Eileen Prince turned back into Eileen Snape in the matter of twenty-four hours, and this caused her resentment of him to be very much amplified. She could see in his eyes that he had begun to remember what had happened in the past, and instead of comforting him or apologizing for any of it, she became defensive and hostile. Severus could see that she wanted nothing more than for him to have never existed.
He'd come to her the third week of June and told her flatly that she wouldn't have to see him for more than a few hours a week if she would finance a small potions lab in their basement. The look of joy in her eyes cut him deeply; it left as large a scar on his heart as any his father had inflicted ten years before.
Severus had always been good at potions. They above all other magical disciplines were able to lift his thoughts out of the physical world and into an ordered, academic one. That summer, he methodically and precisely recreated every single potion in his Advanced Potion Making book. As he perfected each method of preparation, he'd note his findings in the book's margins, scratching out shoddy brewing instructions and supplying his own.
In the mornings, he went on long treks through the nearby countryside in search of rare plants, knowing and welcoming the chilling fact that if he met any danger on the way, his parents would do nothing short of rejoice. During the day, he slaved over his cauldron, uncaring of fumes or accidents, obsessively working on each new potion until it was flawless. In the evenings, he chronicled his discoveries, whether it was a new way of slicing a potion ingredient, or a curse that cut one's opponent with the force of a dozen knives—and at night, Severus contemplated his future, knowing he would no longer be welcome at 'home,' and despairing of his newly discovered blood status.
The day before he was to leave on the Hogwarts Express, Severus Snape carefully opened his worn potions text and placed an inscription on the inside cover, reveling darkly in the irony of the words he'd chosen.
Property of the Half-Blood Prince.
Severus reached the lake, shutting his eyes to allow his other senses to absorb the scene in front of him. The wind had picked up, lifting his heavy hair into disarray and pressing his clothes against his body in a cold caress. He could hear the gentle waves lapping against the rocky shore, the lower timbre mixing well with the higher pitched rustling of the foliage nearby. He wished it were morning, so that the symphony of sounds could be completed by melodic birdsong—but this impulsive desire for natural beauty was quickly overcast by the morbid and depressing trend of his earlier thoughts.
He opened his eyes, momentarily regaining his appreciation of the natural environment as he saw the reflection of the nearly full moon on the waters of the lake. He began to hear a new set of noises, inconsistent and without the rhythm that would mark them as environmental. Severus turned, expecting to see a deer—but it was Hermia James, her arms clasped tightly around herself and her head tilted back to face the moon. She looked as though she was screaming, but he couldn't hear anything more than her footsteps and the disturbance of the earth beneath her feet.
He wasn't sure whether or not to be frustrated at his sudden lack of privacy or oddly comforted that he wasn't the only one to appear to be in some sort of agony tonight. The girl hadn't seen him yet, and he realized with a pang of unexpected sympathy what her frequent stops, head movements, and meandering path across the grass meant.
She was screaming.
oOoOoOoOo
Hermione had gotten steadily more miserable as the night wore on. She knew she should have been expecting it—she always managed to punish herself mentally for her own bad choices, and her depth of caring for Remus meant that, to her conscience, reminding him of his transformation (especially when she wasn't even supposed to know about it) was unforgivable. What had made it so much worse—and the main reason she hadn't gone back to the common room as the sun had set and day turned into night—was that with the apex of the full moon coming in a scant few days, he probably could sense her discomfort. He would want to know why she was so upset, and she didn't know what to tell him.
Her had mind raced through all of the descriptions of lycanthropy she'd read through during her Third Year and afterwards, shrinking away as she had at the time from the thought of someone like Remus being required to go through such awful pain on a clockwork schedule. The thoughts of it now, here were all the more horrible, because at the time she'd read those things, the Wolfsbane Potion had already existed.
She'd needed to pace, as she always did when she was upset, but rather than wear a path into the stone walkway in the school courtyard, she set off along the cliff face, heading toward the lake. The sun had set during the time she'd spent huddled in a corner in the courtyard, and the treacherous moon had risen, reminding her that, inexorably, it would hang heavy and full at the beginning of the coming week.
It no longer appeared beautiful to her, and her strength of guilt and intensity of regard for her friend made her feel ashamed that she ever found it so. As she'd wound her way haphazardly across the field, Hermione's emotions started to envelop her. The stress of making promises to herself that she hadn't kept (Sirius); the acute pain of making friends with the one woman who truly understood her (Lily); the double-edged torment of seeing a likeness of Harry every day (James), and knowing that it should have been Harry being given the chance to get to know his father—and then, the conflicting emotions that surrounded the boy that she didn't even want to admit to consider a friend, even as she had started to understand him a little (Peter).
Just as she had finished her reflection on her relationship with each of her new friends, she'd looked up to see the Whomping Willow in front of her, illuminated by the nearly full moon rising just above the tips of the branches. This sight, appearing as it had just as she'd gotten to the final member of her new coterie of friends—it sent her into a rage so full-bodied and violent that she was nearly incapacitated by it.
She wanted to take James and Lily and hide them away, with herself as their Secret Keeper. She wanted to march up to Gryffindor tower and shake Peter Pettigrew awake, and tell him that he had better not ever contemplate betrayal or he would have HER wrath to deal with. She wanted to sneak into the Ministry of Magic and find a way to alter one of their Time Turners so she could go back and prevent Remus from being bitten.
Her anguish called forth a low groan from her throat, and suddenly she had known what would help her get through this fit of intense emotion. She pulled her wand from her robe and cast Silencio! on herself. That done, she had looked up at the moon with a look of pure hatred and, clutching herself tightly as though she were afraid that she could be ripped apart by the strength of her opinions, Hermione Granger told the uncaring moon exactly what she thought of it.