The Half-Blood Prince: Year One
Summary: The life of Severus Snape.
Author's Note: Erm... I know, the prologue sucks... It gets better, in my opinion...
Prologue
Eileen Prince knew what would happen when she married the man of her dreams. She would be disowned by her family, and no tradition-following pure-blood would ever talk to her again.
But she didn't care. Not at the time, anyway. She was madly in love with Tobias Snape—a Muggle. After a few months of dating, Eileen had told him that she was a witch. He had been a bit shocked (after realizing that it was not a joke at all) but soon accepted it with open arms.
That is how it came to be that Eileen Prince became Eileen Snape. She shared just over a year with her husband before finding out that she was pregnant. She gave birth to a baby boy nine months later.
They named him Severus, and he spent five years living happily with his parents in the British countryside. But then, Eileen discovered that her seemingly devoted husband was having an affair. She wanted to leave him, and tried, too. But Tobias stopped her.
"Think of Severus," he had said. "Our son needs a mother and father in his life." It was the word "our" that got Eileen to stay, in the end.
Their marriage was rocky for the next few years, but they managed to stay together. Then, on Severus's seventh birthday, his father hit his mother for the first time.
He had been watching when it happened. They had been arguing again, which was not unusual. Eileen insisted that he go somewhere called "Hogwarts", but his father didn't seem to want him to go. But if his mother had gone, then why shouldn't he?
Then, suddenly, Tobias had hit her. She stared up at him, and then with a glare, she stormed out of the house.
Eileen was gone for seven months. During that time, Severus kept to his room. He used the owl that his mother had bought him on his sixth birthday to buy books from various wizarding stores. His father never knew, since he was using wizard money.
In those seven months, Severus began to change. His seventh birthday was when he realized that the world was not a happy place. Since he stayed in his room, only coming out to eat and when his father asked him the occasional question ("Have you heard from your wretched mother yet?"), he grew extremely pale. He let his black hair grow out, barely paying attention to it. He was too absorbed in his books.
He didn't have a wand to use, so the subject he studied most was Potions. Severus bought all of the necessary ingredients, and started with simple potions. Within three weeks he could tell you all about sleeping draughts, different poisons, what potions could save someone on the brink of death. Nearly anything you wanted to know, he could tell you.
Since he could not actually perform the spells himself yet (as he was not yet eleven, so he didn't have a wand), he studied spells in a different way. Instead of studying the theory, he studied their creation. Soon he was writing out spells of his own, longing for a wand so that he could test them himself.
Then, one morning, Severus woke up to find his mother back and his father perfectly happy. He was rather confused, since they never explained to him where she had been or what had made her come back. He never asked.
Once again he lived in a happy home, and his parents tried very hard to make their relationship work.
But when he was ten, and just over two years had passed since Eileen had returned to her family, he came home from a walk (he frequently went to find his own potion ingredients in a nearby forest) to find his father in shock in the living room, and his mother dead in the bedroom.
There were wizards there—the first people from the magical world that Severus had met in person, besides his mother—who said they were from the Ministry of Magic, which was the government of the wizarding world. They told them that they'd come because they had registered the use of an Unforgivable curse.
No marks showed on his mother's body, and Severus knew that she had been killed using magic, since she had her wand still clutched in her hand.
The Ministry concluded that Eileen Snape had killed herself using the killing curse, offered their condolences to Severus and Tobias, and left.
Severus decided to study the Unforgivable curses, wanting to completely understand what his mother had done. He now bought Dark Arts books by owl from someplace called Knockturn Alley.
That was when Severus became obsessed with the Dark Arts. In his search to find out as much as he could about the Unforgivable curses, he acquired information about other kinds of Dark Magic as well. For the next year he brewed dangerous poisons, truth serums and other dangerous potions. He also spent his time not only researching dark spells, but creating them.
For the next year he barely said a word to his father. They barely acknowledged each other's presence—the occasional nod of greeting was all they showed.
Then, on July 31, Severus got his dearest wish.
Severus was sitting at the kitchen table, a Potions book propped open against a bowl, when his father came in, muttering about owls. Suddenly he threw something down on the table.
"Congratulations," he said gruffly, and then left.
The dark-haired boy wondered what it was. The writing on the front had not only his name and address, but his bedroom on it. He turned it over, and his eyes widened.
It was a Hogwarts letter.