Two Brothers, and the Boy Who Slept in Light...
They placed him by a window, where morning light would greet him first thing every morning, and stayed with him for as long as wood and stone allowed. There, by the window he slept the sleep of the dead, the sleep of the heedless. The sun, journeying across the sky as it would each day, was never harsh; as if it was really the all-knowing Phoebus caring after his son who had fallen.
And how this dark boy had fallen, The Headmaster mused, one terribly fine day, as he watched the still figure sleeping within a shaft of light. More light in these scant days than he'd ever seen in his short, miserable life, the old wizard thought. He watched as darkness was bleached out, like ink disappearing from parchment too long exposed to the sun. He watched as inky oppressive darkness leeched out of the boy, even when he couldn't say whether it was the magic of the sun, or something else he couldn't say.
But he had no time to waste on trifle philosophy. The boy would rouse, and everything would be explained away in those dry cutting tones, wit and thorough decisiveness he had only found out
(an explanation that would most probably start with an argument that the Headmaster should stop calling him "boy", for really, even the Headmaster knew that Severus Snape had never really been a boy, in so many sense of the word. But maybe, despite all of it, he still was. The boy-the Headmaster would insist-just couldn't see it for what it was).
He couldn't remember why he sought out the boy's apprentice papers and school-boy treatises after all these times, maybe to assuage his unnamable guilt (of what? he couldn't be sure), maybe a little bit of whim, a spur of the moment, maybe something else. He hadn't time to unravel this little bit of self-inflicted mystery as he came upon a door and let himself in.
And so the Dumbledore of the Tower,
descended down from the castle proper,
went he did across the moats,
to the Dumbledore who tilled the earth and fed the goats.
Though no boy in the darkness of a midnight clear,
sat under the door to hear,
Twas no shortage of unworthy ears,
thus float news to the One everybody fears.
And through it all, Severus slept.