Written for QLFC, Semifinals
Seeker, Wigtown Wanderers
Prompt: Les Miserables: A character leaves their past behind and seeks to be a better person
Word Count: 2885
Author's Note: Y'all, I love spooky season as much as the next person, but I'm getting really excited for Christmas, too! In that vein, I hope you're familiar with A Christmas Carol, because Snape is about to get Scrooged. Well, kind of. Because other holidays don't really share a lot with the whole "Christmas spirit" thing, you know? But I loved the concept. I took a little liberty with Snape's history, the concept of the Fates, and Hogwarts' class schedules, but you know — artistic license! Anyway, I'm going to shut up now. Enjoy, and Happy Halloween!
Halloween, 1991
Severus Snape sank into his favorite chair by the fire and swirled the brandy in his glass. The clock on the mantel read half-past eleven, but it felt much later to him. He hated Halloween, and this night had been a dreadfully long one. The troll had been a surprise, and Quirinus would demand more careful observation from now on, that much was certain. But that wasn't what was keeping Severus awake despite the fatigue thudding through his body.
He should have known that Potter brat would manage to worm himself into the middle of everything. The boy always needed to be in the spotlight, always wanted the attention and glory. Spoiled and arrogant, just like his father!
"I'll show him," Severus slurred under his breath before taking another large sip. "Him and the rest of these children. Think they're so high and mighty, they don't know anything. Great bunch of…"
The glass slipped from his grip and clattered to the floor, the remaining alcohol seeping into the stone as Severus Snape fell into a deep sleep.
"Severus. Severus."
He knew that voice.
He opened his eyes and blinked several times, sure that he couldn't really be here.
Eileen Snape stood at the foot of his childhood bed and looked down at where he lay. "Glad to see you're finally awake, you great lay-about."
She looked the same as his last memory of her, standing in the door in Spinner's End as he left for his seventh year. Her dark hair was streaked with silver, and worry lines creased her forehead as well as the corners of her eyes. It all seemed so impossible.
"What am I doing here?" he muttered to no one in particular.
"It seems you've been a wretched boy, my dear," Eileen answered. "The Fates have seen the things you've done, the things you're doing, and that which you have yet to do, and they've decided that you need a bit of an… let's call it an attitude adjustment, shall we?"
Severus sat straight up and said indignantly, "Ridiculous! I'm a grown man, and I'm entitled to my own free will. I don't need to change my attitude about anything when it's these cretins around me that are intolerable. Besides, there is no such being as the Fates. Yet another useless, stupid concept that sham of a subjuect, Divination."
"I wouldn't disparage the Fates like that," Eileen said darkly. "And it's nothing too unreasonable, just a visit from some old friends and a few trips down memory lane. When you wake up, no one else will be the wiser."
"I simply won't do it!" he replied in a haughty tone.
Eileen's lip curled back in a smirk. "I suppose we'll see about that, won't we son?"
Severus jerked back to wakefulness and nearly fell out of his chair in doing so. After a few seconds, he processed the scene before him—spilled drink, dying fire, crick in his neck.
"Idiotic, falling asleep in a chair like a first year," he grumbled as he cleaned the mess and stoked the fire with a few flicks of his wand. "Explains the strange dream, I suppose."
He blearily stumbled his way back to his room and climbed straight into bed, hoping to put the miserable day and that nonsensical vision of his mother behind him.
Severus knew he was dreaming. Well, more like nightmaring. Today had marked ten years since he'd been back to Godric's Hollow, but somehow he now stood in the front garden of the Potters' still-smoking cottage, feeling as though he was waiting for… something. The smell of motorcycle exhaust lingered in the air. Black and Hagrid must have just left, so if the real timeline of that night held—
Severus flinched at the sudden noise of his younger self Apparating onto the front walk. The younger man dashed toward the cottage and burst through the door without a backward glance. Severus followed quickly behind, catching up in time to see his younger self step over James' broken body, just as he remembered. And then the figure unexpectedly froze at the bottom of the stairs.
"I honestly can't believe you just walked over another person like that, even if it was James."
Severus whipped around to find the source of the voice. "Lily."
His heart thudded in his chest, even though he knew she wasn't real. Her long red hair streamed behind her in the chill breeze coming through the door—how had he forgotten how cold that night had been? Her green eyes, staring out of a now eternally unlined face, still pierced through to his very soul. She was just as beautiful as he remembered, yet something was… off. It took a moment for him to realize that he could actually see through her pale skin.
"Lily, wh—what's going on? Why do you look so—so—ghostly?
She pinned him with a hard look. "Because that's what I am, at least for tonight."
"But that's not pos—"
"As your mother explained, the Fates have deemed it necessary and made it possible. I'm the Ghost of your Halloweens Past, of the selfishness of your youth. Your decision to embrace Voldemort's bigoted teachings and join his circle is the reason I'm dead, the reason my husband is dead."
"I was angry with you. That's the only reason I joined the Dark Lord! None of it was real, I swear to you, Lily."
"You still followed that mad man. You still did everything he asked of you and in the process made life worse for people like me. And in the end, your spite is the reason I, like so many others, am dead."
Severus ran a hand through his long dark hair. "I tried to keep you safe. The Dark Lord promised he would spare you."
"At the cost of my child! Did you really think I'd do it, Sev?"
"I hoped," he whispered, his eyes downcast.
"Then I suppose you never knew me at all. You certainly never loved me."
He whipped back toward her. "How can you say that? I changed! I turned my back on the Dark Lord to spy for Albus because I was absolutely sick over your death! My patronus—"
She looked him square in the eye and shook her head. "I know about all of it, and I don't care. Let's get some things straight, Sev. You didn't start spying for the Order because you changed your mind about Voldemort. You did it because he and his Death Eaters finally did something to upset you. It has nothing to do with the fact that someone died at his hands for his evil purposes—it's only because that person was me. Had it just been James and Harry, you'd be back in the fold of Voldemort without a second thought."
"But I—"
"There's no defending yourself on this, Sev! It wasn't some kind of moral choice. You didn't choose the light. You're just trying to get back at the one who screwed you over. Your patronus doesn't mean a bloody thing to me."
Severus staggered back, dumbfounded. "I—I—I just did what I thought was right."
"You did what was right for you. It's a fatal flaw of yours," Lily said with a sad smile. "You joined Voldemort when you didn't get what you wanted, what you thought you deserved. I died because of that. You've turned your back on him, but still for selfish reasons. Take a good, hard look at your life, Sev, before anyone else gets hurt because of it."
He felt Lily's words cut deep into his heart, but there was a truth to her words that he couldn't deny, no matter how badly he wanted to.
Before he could reach out and grab her hand, hug her one more time, promise that he would really, truly change for her, the scene faded to an eerie charcoal mist.
The mist cleared, and Severus found himself at the front of his classroom, the Gryffindor and Slytherin first years trembling before another version of himself.
"Merlin, not this again," he mumbled. He cringed as he watched the idiot Longbottom mouth the directions written on the board, furrow his brow, and proceed to blow up his cauldron by stirring incorrectly. His talent was wasted teaching dunces like this.
A voice to his left said, "It's shameful to see your students so afraid that they'd rather make a mistake and die than ask for your help."
Severus did a double take at the transparent yet still stern-looking woman. "Minerva? But you're not even dead! You look exactly as you did at the last staff meeting."
She arched a steel gray eyebrow at him. "And yet here I am, the Ghost of your Halloweens Present, of the anger that hardens your heart. Rather than be grateful for Albus' forgiveness and the opportunity for a second chance, you've spent the past decade furious at consequences you brought upon yourself. The resentment you feel toward your job and your own life has caused the suffering of hundreds of students that have passed through this classroom."
"Of course I'm resentful!" Severus howled. "I'm a brilliant, highly inventive Potions Master, and I'm stuck teaching a bunch of children—I hate kids! Did you know that? I can't take a job with any of my former 'associates' because I need to maintain a clean image, and no one else but Albus would hire me because of my 'previous associations.' My career has been stagnating for the past decade, and I spend every day surrounded by people I don't like. What about that shouldn't make me angry?"
"And you think you're the only person in this castle who's been living under less than ideal circumstances?"
"Perhaps not, but I sincerely doubt many of these brats—"
Minerva cut him off. "Just take a look around the room and tell me what you see."
Severus rolled his eyes and looked out at his students. Clouds of mists began appearing throughout the room. Though the sizes varied, every person in the room had a swirling bubble above them, including himself. In them a myriad of scenes began to play out, none of them pleasant. Threads of shame, abuse, fear, and a thousand other pains wove through everyone's stories.
He felt his eyes guided by some unseen force to the largest cloud by far, which floated over the bowed head of Harry Potter.
"Of course the Potter brat has suffered," Severus sneered, trying to look away. "I don't care how many times you force me to watch it, I won't feel sorry for him."
"Harry doesn't even remember his parents' murder," Minerva said softly. "What you see is the result of living with his aunt and uncle."
Severus shuddered as he thought of the dreadful girl he'd met through Lily. "How bad could it really—"
Without warning, he was sucked into the thrall of the bubble. It was terrible.
When he managed to extricate his mind, Severus looked up at Minerva in shock.
"I know, it's horrid," she murmured, "to think of Lily's child, living in that environment. But somehow he's managed to grow up into a mostly normal eleven-year-old boy."
He scoffed. "He's just as arrogant as his father."
"And yet no more so than any First Year," she rebutted. "When you look at him, you don't see a student, which would be bad enough, given your track record. Instead, you see a mini-James. What would happen if you started seeing him as a child who is half Lily?"
He shot her a questioning look.
"Lily is still a bit of an idealist. She wants you to change and do it for all the right reasons. I'm just after the results," Minerva said with a shrug.
"Fine. I'll treat the Potter kid better. But I maintain I've done the best job I can of teaching these imbeciles. I've yet to see any level of talent come through this classroom that I'd consider sufficient enough to bother investing in, yet day in and day out I'm required to try turning a sow's ear into a silk purse! I can't perform the miracles expected of me."
"No one's asking you to turn every student into a master," Minerva snapped. "You don't even bother teaching your students. You just write instructions on the chalkboard and assign readings and essays. We're producing fewer candidates for Aurors, Healers, Unspeakables, and other important positions because you refuse to teach Potions properly."
Severus studied her for a moment. He'd always respected Minerva because she neither praised nor criticized unnecessarily. He knew she wouldn't lie to him about something like this, even if she was a bit of a ghost at the moment. He rolled his eyes and sighed. "I suppose I can see your point. Perhaps I can make a bit more of an effort on the teaching front."
"I think that would be acceptable."
"Fine."
"Fine."
He furrowed his eyebrows at her pleased tone.
"I've already told you, I'm all about results," she said with a smirk.
Before he could retort, everything around him disappeared into the same deep gray mist.
The mysterious mist lifted, and Severus realized he'd been transported out onto the Hogwarts grounds. He thought it looked like roughly the same time of year as the one he'd left, and his suspicions were confirmed by the cold highland wind that suddenly began slicing through his robes. The front gates behind him creaked, and through them walked a slightly older, translucent version of himself.
"Merlin, this is getting ridiculous," Severus muttered under his breath.
Ghostly Severus simply shot him a cold look and motioned for him to follow. He followed the apparition a bit farther down the path, and the front doors of the castle came into view. Or, at least where the front doors used to be. Now that he was closer, Severus could see parts of the castle lay in ruins, and rubble was scattered across the scarred earth around him. There were no lights on inside, no signs of life anywhere he could see.
"How is this possible?" he whispered. "What happened here?"
Rather than answer, Ghostly Severus stepped off the path and led him down toward the Black Lake. Beneath a crooked yew tree stood two marble tombs, one white and fairly well-kept, the other black and grown over. The white one had a large crack running through the top, which read, "Albus Dumbledore, 1881-1997."
Severus' stomach fell to his shoes. Albus was old, but he wasn't that old. It seemed impossible that anything, even time, could vanquish such a vital, powerful wizard a few short years into the future.
Ghostly Severus continued past Albus' tomb and stopped at the head of the black one. The words Severus could make out under the layer of filth made his blood run cold: "Severus Snape, 1960-1998."
"I don't think I require an introduction," Ghostly Severus rasped, "but we must observe the formalities. I am the Ghost of your Halloweens Yet to Pass, of the seeds you have sown and shall soon reap. I and my fellow spirits have come to warn you, Severus Snape. The jealousy, selfishness, anger, and resentment within you have caused those around you much pain. It is not, however, the greatest legacy you will leave. If you continue on this path, your attitude—the same attitude you have helped foster among your students, of arrogance and hatred—will lead to your own death and the demise of countless others."
Ghostly Severus began to turn away, and Severus called out after him. "Wait! Don't leave me here alone. Aren't you going to tell me more? Aren't you going to try to convince me or something? What about more proof? Wait!"
The figure turned back and gestured toward the scene around him. "Is this not evidence enough for you?" he asked in a hard voice. "Change your heart, Severus Snape, or see the end of the world as you know it."
The scene was again lost to the mist, and the gray miasma began to tumble and whirl, swallowing Severus whole as he screamed into the abyss.
November 1, 1991
Severus bolted upright in his bed, his heart pounding. It had all been a dream. Thank Merlin, it was just a dream.
He quietly went about his morning routine, lost in thought as he ate breakfast in silence and sat alone in his office trying to prepare for another day of lessons. The previous night's dreams, or visions, or whatever they were weighed heavily on his mind and made it difficult to concentrate on anything else.
When it was finally time for his first class to begin, he walked to the front of the room and looked out over a class of First Years clad in red and green trimmed robes.
"Good morning, class," he said somewhat stiffly. He rolled his shoulders and, with great mental effort, put a smile he was sure looked more like a grimace on his face. "Let's start with a quick review of the assigned reading, shall we?"
The students shared a long moment of confused glances. He coughed harshly, and they all turned back toward him, fear written plainly on their faces.
Severus started to smirk and then thought better of it. "Baby steps," he whispered to himself. "Baby steps."