Disclaimer: I don't own this, nope nothing.
Dark Nights
The room was dark and the moldy wet smell filled my nostrils making me feel sick. I could hear the rain crashing against the roof of my room that had once been an attic. There was nothing in my small room except for a bed, a bed side table with one candle, and an old and battered trunk that held my supplies for Hogwarts my school.
As I was in the highest room in the whole house, the pouring rain beat against my roof painfully loud keeping me awake. Yet over the sound of the vociferous rain, I could hear the screams of my father who most of the time seemed indifferent to my existence.
Rolling over onto my shoulder, I concentrated on the sounds that came from below me, rather than the ones from above. Judging from the noise, my father had come home drunk once again and was yelling at my mother for some lame reason he invented simply to be able to yell. There was a distinct sound of china breaking followed by the painful sounds of female wailing and I was sure that my mother had been hit by the china.
The screaming went on for what I assumed was just under an hour when it suddenly stopped. I knew that this meant my father had passed out and wouldn't awake until sometime late the next day. The stairs began creaking as my mother began to walk up the stairs to her bed room. I could not hear it but I was sure she was still crying.
I felt really sorry for my mother at times, for she really was quite young and pretty; having rather pale skin, but black hair and eyes that were almost the same shade. She was a petite woman and I was certain that she could have found a wizard that would treat her nice. But so clouded was her mind from memories of the days before my father became a drunk slob, that she could not bring herself to leave him.
If it had been up to my mother, I was almost sure that I would have had a room in the real part of the house, not up here where I practically did not exist. I was my mother's only son and I could tell that she did love me greatly, but it was my birth that had almost killed my mother.
Once a long time ago, my parents had been in love. They went to the same school I do now, and they meet their first year when they had both, like myself, been sorted into Slytherin. Child hood sweet hearts, that's what they were. They got married one month after graduation, and nine months later waited in the delivery room at St. Mungo's for me. But the labor was hard on my mother and most doctors believed that she wouldn't live.
However, by some miracle, my mother managed to hold on to her life, yet she never fully regained her strength. The strength being taken from her, she could not care for me properly as it does take a lot to care for a baby. My father hired a nanny for me until I was able to walk and talk, and be at least somewhat self reliant. Yet as I remained my mother's only son, I would awake in the middle of the night to find my mother's sad eyes watching over me.
I suppose that you could say that the birth had left me somewhat deprived of strength as well. I was a sickly baby, and as a small child I was not able to romp about as most other children could. The proud feeling that fills a man when he became father to a son, soon left my father when he found out that I was sickly. I had disgraced him and I would never make him proud. How could I, being as he called me, "a mere shell of a boy"?
It was soon after this, when I was about six, that he fired my nanny, and removed me to this room here in the attic and forbid my mother to visit me. This I knew broke her heart even more; she became depressed and did nothing but sit around and stare out the window wondering what happened to the happy days of her life.
This turn did not sit well with my father, and it made him angry. He now had a son who would never amount to anything and a wife that could do naught but sit and mope about her son. Yet he refused to believe that he had a hand in the situation that we were in; my father needed someone to blame for everything, and he blamed us. It was then that he began drinking, and the drink turned his anger into violence. From the little bit I did see of my mother, she was never without bruises. On nights when he was really angry, he remembered he had a son and would climb up to the attic to punish me.
I remember nights where I would lay awake in my bed waiting for my father to come home, anticipating who would receive the worst of it that night. It was fear that kept me from sleep and fear that reigned my meek existence.
There was one good thing about my father's addiction however; when y father passed out, it was safe for my mother to come and visit me in my hole up in the attic. It was only then that I began to know my child-like mother. But she made excuses for my father, seemed to think that she really was to blame. I listened to it until I was old enough to know better, to know what my father did was wrong and that it was no one's fault but his.
In these visits, I grew to love and pity my mother, yet sometimes I wondered why she would stay and let us suffer like we did. But these thoughts I quickly removed from my thoughts, and held on to the one person I had in the world: my mother.
Again I heard the sounds of my mother's light foot steps on the stairs and I knew she was coming to see me. For a moment I played with the idea of feigning sleep, but decided against this in the end. My door opened slowly and my mom stepped into my room.
She looked at me. "You still awake?"
I nodded as I sat up, but I could not speak, for my mother was covered in fresh bruises and had cuts all over her arms and one even on the side of her head where her hair started. Finally, I found my voice. "Mother?" I said truly horrified, and she began to cry.
"Oh, Severus!" she said through her tears as she crossed the room to my bed. Quickly I wrapped my arms around my mother and let her cry on my shoulder. I held her as she cried herself to sleep on my shoulder. Then I enchanted her body so that I could bring it down to her own bed; even at sixteen, I had not the strength to carry the small body of my mother, but what I lacked in physical strength, I more than made up in my magical abilities.
When I returned to my room and sat once again upon my bed, I began to feel guilty for what would happen next week. Once again I would be leaving to go to school, and my mother would be alone. Not that it really helped having me home what with me being so small an all, but it made me sick to feel like I did not know what was happening.
I didn't really like going to school in any case. I had no real friends there and there were people like James and Sirius who liked to show off by cursing me simply because I was small. When the other kids looked at me they saw just a scrawny little boy with greasy hair and a large nose. No girl ever looked at me the way they looked at Sirius and James, and they probably never would.
But that was all just fine by me, for I didn't need anybody. I had gone through the greater part of childhood alone, and I could be alone as long as I lived. I didn't care; people weren't my specialty. I liked my books and magic, the only things that were truly reliable in this world.
I must have drifted off some time that night without realizing it because I was woken late the next after noon by my bed room door being shoved open so hard that I was surprised that it didn't fall off it's hinges.
Looking up I saw my father standing at the entrance of my meager room. A cold fear swept over me at the recognition of my father's menacing presence. But he did a most unusual thing that added confusion to my fear. He looked me straight in the eye and said gruffly, "Get dressed! Be down stairs in five minutes! We have somewhere to go."
Then he turned and slammed my door so hard that it made the walls shake. I began to get dressed imagining in my mind all the horrible places he could be planning on taking me to, and the unspeakable things that he planned to do. But I was never prepared for what was to come.
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And this is my first fic with Snape and my first fic in first person! So let me know how I'm doing! I am not quite sure how this held up, so tell me, I have a terrible fear of first person and I want to know if it totally sucked.
This chapter was short but I promise the next is going to get longer! I just wanted to finish this and post it before school starts (tomorrow yick!) but its my last year of high school woot!
I decided to write this because I didn't like Snape at all up until the fifth book and then I was like well he really is a sympathetic character, so I decided to write about him now. I am planning on making it angsty and I actually thing that I am going to throw in come romance. My brain has now formulated a real plot! Excellent! Okay, well how was it?
Please review!
~Atiannala