A/N: This is my very first story and I greatly appreciate it that you have taken your time to come read it! Please let me know what you think of it. I'm not a native speaker so if I make any language errors please feel free to correct me (it helps in learning the language!). Thank you for reading this, and I hope you enjoy the chapter.
Eileen Prince had always been a well-respected woman in the Wizarding World. Though her looks were unfortunate, her family was old, Pureblood, and rich. Three important things to have in the Wizarding World. During her years at Hogwarts — she had been in Slytherin House like her parents before her, and before them, their parents, and grandparents — she excelled in most of her classes, and became captain of the Gobstones Club in her free time. She had achieved as many as seven N.E.W.T.s at Outstanding level. She was highly academical.
After school, she had married a boy her parents had picked out for her. He was a Pureblood, rich, and quite nice to look at. He was kind to Eileen, but not home very often, for he had an important job at the ministry which meant that sometimes he was away from home for weeks or months at the time. At first, this didn't matter so much, but later on it started to weigh on Eileen that she was alone so much. It made her lonely.
The manor they lived in was big, but empty, and although the couple longed for children, they didn't come. They tried, and tried, and tried again but all their attempts were futile as years later there were still no children. She was well over thirty and the chances of success were slim.
So, with her husband out at the ministry all the time for work, Eileen was left to find other means of occupying herself. She had taken a liking to taking long walks around the neighbourhood, chatting to the people who were in town or lived nearby. She made long visits over at her old friends' houses, and at her parents' house.
Her walks quickly got longer and farther from home as she grew bored of the scenery. Being a witch was useful, she simply Apparated to another part of the country to find a different route, a different place to explore.
On one of these walks, she met someone. Toby. Toby was unlike anyone she had ever met before. He was a Muggle, that much she had figured out soon enough, but what a man!
She was fascinated with him and spent a lot of time with him. Every moment her husband wasn't home, she would Apparate to the town Tobias lived in. They would spend hours just talking about anything they wanted. She found he was unlike any stereotypes she had heard about Muggles, and thought he was great company.
Great company was all the lonely Eileen needed.
Toby Snape was two years younger than she was, and their friendship soon became more. They got romantically involved, and their relationship was more passionate than her and her husband's had ever been.
She never told him she was a witch, though. He couldn't know that, it was against the law. And yet their relationship was built on trust.
It took seven months for her husband to realise she was spending time with someone else. When he discovered that someone else was a Muggle, and there was more going on than just friendship, he was furious.
He kicked her out of the house the very same day, and filed for a divorce. Her parents disowned her as soon as they heard, and her friends refused to lay eyes on her ever again.
That was what happened, when you get involved with Muggles.
With nowhere else to go, she fled to Tobias Snape, all her stuff packed in one trunk. The house he — they — lived in was small, the part of town always covered in a thick layer of smoke coming from the Mill which towered over the houses.
The air was always chilly, and the most over the black, dirty river never seemed to disappear. The cobblestoned roads between the houses were uncomfortable to walk over, and it was dark enough, even during the day, that she could easily get lost.
The river led to a Muggle school, and then farther into the other part of town. The nicer part of town. The part of town she had never been to before.
It was nowhere near as big, healthy or beautiful as where she had lived up until now, but she was certain this would be a happier place.
Oh, how wrong she had been. At first all was good and well. They married (something which was published in many wizarding newspapers, and made her a bigger disgrace to the entire Pureblood community) and they lived happily for a while as Mr and Mrs Tobias Snape.
But then she discovered she was pregnant.
Toby didn't like children, and never wanted any. Eileen had given up on having any, and figured she was infertile after her decades of trying without result. But there she was, 38 and pregnant.
Pregnancy was hard on her, and she was forced to stay at home the entire time. Her old belongings, wand, school stuff, other magical items, were stashed away in the tiny attic and it took everything she had not to get them out and make things better with the wave of her wand.
But she couldn't, and she knew that. It was her own decision to become involved with this Muggle, and now she had to live with that decision. Now she had to live as a Muggle.
It wasn't a life she liked very much. Just being at home, trying to take care of everything and waiting for Tobias to come home. It was as if nothing had changed at all, only this time around, she had no friends or family left to go to. Her child would grow up without them.
Tobias got drunk a lot. After work he would hit the pub, and then hit her. He called her lazy for sitting around all day, and life became increasingly difficult as Toby got more and more controlling and more and more aggressive. Things weren't going well at his job, and she was the target of his frustration.
It worried Eileen, who knew she wasn't just deciding for her own fate anymore but also that of her baby, but she stayed. She had nowhere else to go, nobody would want her. The Blood Traitor and her Halfblood child... they wouldn't survive in the harsh Wizarding World.
The Muggle world would be best for them, at least until her child could get away. Until it was old enough to go to Hogwarts and escape this place.
After eight months of pregnancy she gave birth. Tobias was even mad at her for that — the agreement was nine months of pregnancy, not eight — but she made it and was delighted to see her baby boy seemed to be healthy.
He was born on the 9th of January, 1960, at 12 o'clock in the afternoon.
She wrapped it in a towel and looked at it as it lay on her chest. A little bundle of skin. It was crying, and crying, and crying. Eileen couldn't shut it up. She was extremely tempted to get her wand to cast a Silencing Charm on it.
To be honest, it was kind of ugly. Of course, it was only a new-born and that would change soon, well, hopefully really soon. Just look at that awful nose! She thought upon seeing it. She'd hoped the baby wouldn't inherit Tobias' nose, but unfortunately, it had.
She swore to herself, if that baby kept that weird-looking hook-like nose, she'd straighten it out herself. It somehow made him look like a cranky old man, and she couldn't imagine it not becoming something other children would bully him for.
That's how she came up with the name: Severus. The nose made him look severely disabled, and stricter than McGonagall. And that was to say something, because McGonagall was, by far, the strictest person Eileen could think of.
Tobias came home that night and didn't even look at the baby. They didn't have a crib, nothing, for the boy to lay in except for the guest room's bed. But that was an adult bed — a baby couldn't sleep there, could it?
So she broke her promise and located her wand. She cast some protective spells over the baby and the guest room's bed in the hope that the boy wouldn't fall out this way. But Tobias had seen it. He saw her use her wand, and there was no way out of it.
She had to tell him the truth.
She explained to him what she was, and once Tobias had stopped declaring she was insane and had started believing her, he was furious. She had never seen him this angry.
He yelled at her for hours about trust and honesty, and she found herself agreeing on several points. She had been lying to him, yes, but for a very good reason.
But Tobias wouldn't have any of it. He was angry and refused to listen to her thoughts.
By the time he was done with her, she was black and blue from the forming bruises.
A new era in her life had begun with this argument. An era in which she wished more than ever that she'd never left her previous life, which had been full of blood prejudice and whatnot, but it had been so much better than this hell she'd stumbled into. Anything was better than this.
But this isn't her story.
This story is her son's.
This is Severus' story.