Chapter 3: Mother and Father
DEDICATION: My ink pens that were awesome before but is now leaking ink all over my pencil case.
If he could have another chance, I want him to live for himself.
It was almost a week after Severus woke up and he was hungry.
The only thing he had over the past two days was two pieces of moldy bread he found in the back of the half-broken fridge and a dirty bottle he filled with tap water. The bottle was currently in the middle of the living room floor board after his father stepped on it and crushed it to the floorboard after he saw Severus in the middle of the living room.
He decided to stay in his room as much as possible to avoid him.
He had almost forgotten how truly unpleasant his father could be.
It was not hard to avoid all living habitants in hs house. His father was always out, either unconscious on the floor or on the couch in the middle of the living room, or out of the house in a never ending quest of getting more booze or trying to hold down a job. His mother was holed up in the master bedroom like he was, but he was trying to salvage his leaking magic, she was crying into a pillow and reading old romance novels in a bid of salvage her marriage.
He has really forgotten how unpleasant his family is.
How cowardly they could be.
His mother was an emotional train wreck just waiting to be blown up. His father was just great at losing his sanity and temper at every provocation. They all seemed to have forgotten that there's a six-year-old living in their house! Any other child would've died.
If he is an actual six-year-old he would be throwing a temper tantrum, he would be yelling and crying and ripping apart bedsheets and smashing mirrors because he's hungry.
Being hungry is the least of his problems.
Magic.
Contrary to popular belief, only a small portion of a wizard's magic comes from their bloodline, though strong blood does add advantages to casting, but that's not how wizards have magic and muggle do not.
Magic comes from souls.
The stronger a wizard's soul is, the more powerful he can be.
Which is why the Dark Lord was a complete idiot because only the dunderheads he had to teach for over twenty years could even think of splitting their souls for magic or immortality.
Don't even get him started on the hilarity of immortality.
He has the soul of the a thirty-eight-year-old man in a body of a mere six-year-old. Which means that he has the magic of a powerful dark wizard in the spindly body of a child that has yet to learn the alphabet. Not to mention that this six-year-old is also a wizard.
So he is either going to explode into a beautiful shower of blood and gore because the two different forces of magic inside him are constantly fighting for dominance, or explode into a beautiful shower of blood and gore because even if his magic managed to fuse together and calm down it's going to be too much for a six-year-old body to handle, or he gets turned into a squib.
Or die of starvation and malnutrition before his magic can get to him, but that's a lot less likely since he is currently lying on his bed convulsing because his body fills like every artery and vein is being burst open.
Whoever said that rebirth is a pain in the behind knows exactly what's he's talking about.
And he honestly thought things would be different.
When his magic was acting up and trying to tear him from inside out, he would bury his head in his pillow and his too long hair and try to imagine a world where everything was different, where everyone was happy.
Where he was happy.
Where he was not the scrappy boy from the worse part of town, where he had parents that loved him, that shouldered their responsibilities rather than dumping them on the ground. A world where he had friends that would care about him, that didn't exploit him. A world where he could have a happy ending of his own rather than try to make up for someone else's.
A world where he didn't have unstable magic. A world where he could wake up and find food in the fridge!
He doesn't blame Eileen for what happened, as she is a pureblood heiress that had everything handed to her by either her parents or a pair of house elves. No, what broke him to Eileen, broken him even more with what she had done Before, was that there was no son in her eyes. He was merely an object, there to cement the truth of her love.
Her broken love that she held onto like a lifeline.
His mother Before would go out and find jobs, would work her hands raw and bleeding just so she could save up and few pounds that could buy her son a little biscuit on his birthday. A mother that would sew and resew her clothes so her son would have something decent to wear. A mother that never stood up to her husband's raging antics but tried to protect her son nonetheless.
A mother that ignited the spark inside young Severus, that spark for potions and spells and magic, that lead to his passion and future.
The Eileen Prince of this Severus Snape was nothing more than a coward.
A coward that believed love was the solution to all of her problems. A coward that shunned responsibility and sacrifice. A coward that put her needs before everyone else.
Maybe this time Eileen was fairly young when she met Tobias, maybe Tobias was nicer or her parents' stricter.
Maybe this time, he tumbled over to an alternative universe where his mother is a woman with serious delusions, where his father even more of a slaveholder than he was. Where Lily could never move to Spinner's End, where James Potter is actually pretty nice and the Dark Lord is not trying to enslave the entire world.
Note the sarcasm.
He knew everything was different when he was screaming names into his pillow and his mother barged into his bedroom and told him to shut up. She was wearing lipstick and there was a novel in her hands.
He heard the front door being opened and slammed shut, shaking the house like an earthquake. He could hear bottles being smashed and furniture being kicked. His father let loose a torrent of curses when he no doubt found the refrigerator to be off since they couldn't afford electricity anymore. There was more noise of things breaking, and Severus buried his head deeper into his cocoon. He couldn't lift his arms because of the magic fighting inside him, couldn't lift a hand to protect himself if his father came upstairs.
His father yelled something up, his voice slurred by whiskey no doubt, something like "women" and "bitch" and "get the fuck down."
There was a sickening sweet reply from the master bedroom-"Just a moment dear"-and Severus tried to disappear, muttering his list of things he'll change over and over again for comfort or reassurance. Who knows what Tobias would do if given a "moment" and she can't be serious about wanting him to go upstairs cause even more destruction!
She is a stranger to him, a cold stranger that did not give him an ounce of kindness. Just as Tobias is. Just as Lily would be.
Slytherins protects their own.
He is not dying for a family like this.
A/N:
To explain: Severus did not get reborn in a universe where he originally lived. He got transported into an alternative universe where everyone and everything was just slightly different than what he experienced. So essentially, everyone is a stranger to him. Slytherins do not care for everyone, the rest of the world can burn as long as their person is alright. So he is under no obligation to throw himself over her mother to protect her, especially when that mother is absolutely horrible.
So this creates a slight problem, he judges the people here based on his memories elsewhere, and sometimes his judgements are way off mark. So it is a trial ad error kind of thing, going through life with a cheating mechanism already installed but still kind of useless.
I am a procrastinator and I updated so soon is because my beta is screaming at me over Skype in all capital letters.
Please review.
Updates will be irregular/