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Mary McDonald walked along the corridor of the Hogwarts Express, peeking into each compartment she passed. Every single one in the previous carriage had been full, and this one looked to be the same – until she came upon one with only two people inside: she saw a head of bright red hair and another of deep black. She took a deep breath and stood still for a few seconds to ease her nervousness, then she knocked on the door and slid it open.
The girl with bright red hair turned to look at her. Opposite of her sat a skinny, dark-featured child, who looked very pale and was holding themselves strangely hunched and stiff as they stared out the window at the rural landscape rapidly flying by.
The contrast between the two was almost comical: the girl was looking at Mary with a look of curiosity in her green eyes, and her red hair was lively and full, flowing down her shoulders in gentle waves like rays of sunlight. She was wearing a mint green sundress and a white cardigan and her hair was pinned behind her left ear with a barrette that had a plastic flower on it. She was sitting upright, her chin confidently up, and her face was lively and radiant too.
The other child was not lively or radiant. They were pale in a dull and yellow and sickly way, and their eyes, more interested in the hills and trees outside than Mary, were dark and bottomless and had deep, tired shadows under them. Their hair was choppy and greasy and drooped down in front of their face, as if they were trying to hide themselves behind it. Like Mary, they were already dressed in the Hogwarts robes – but unlike Mary’s, theirs were ill-fitting and overly large, hanging off the child’s skinny frame. The sleeves were so long the kid’s hands were hidden entirely inside them.
“Hello,” Mary said, “may I sit here? I don’t know anyone yet, and well… everywhere seems full.”
“Of course,” the redheaded girl replied, smiling politely. Mary nodded gratefully, stepped into the compartment and closed the door. The other child's gaze flitted towards Mary momentarily as she sat next to the girl, but they didn’t say anything, just swallowed rather heavily, hunched up their shoulders even more and resumed staring out the window, holding their body stiff.
“I’m Mary.”
“I’m Lily, nice to meet you,” said the red-haired girl. “This is Severus,” she added, nodding towards the other child. “Don’t mind him, he doesn’t like trains very much.”
The boy swallowed again, and Mary put two and two together: motion sickness.
“You should switch places with me if you’re feeling ill,” Mary suggested to Severus. “Sitting backwards can make it worse, you should be facing the direction you're going. My mum taught me so, I used to have motion sickness too when I was little – on cars and buses and trains...”
Lily perked up at this.
“Cars? Are your parents muggles too?”
“Yep! My mum and dad couldn’t believe it when I got my letter, they thought someone was playing a joke on us or something. Well, I could hardly believe it myself until professor Flitwick showed me a real spell…”
“Professor Flitwick?”
“He teaches Charms at Hogwarts,” Mary said, nodding confidently, “And he’s a very small man, I wonder if he’s half-elf or something like that?”
“No,” Severus said rather abruptly and rudely, “elves are servants to wizards, they do not interbreed with humans. At least they shouldn’t, it would be really inappropriate because of the regulations on house-elf welfare.”
There was a short silence.
“Okay,” Mary said uncomfortably, feeling as if Severus was looking at her badly. She got up from her seat. “Did you want to switch seats? You’ll feel better, trust me.”
Severus stalled for a few seconds, but begrudgingly (and a little bit shakily) got up to switch. It made him feel strangely annoyed that Mary knew something about Hogwarts he didn’t, and that she was giving him unsolicited advice. He felt like she was intruding on his and Lily's space, and she made him look stupid.
Between the boys from earlier and this… They hadn’t even arrived at Hogwarts yet, and it felt like everything was already going not as great as he had imagined.
Hours passed and blended together as Lily talked with Mary, while Severus was listening on and off, occasionally lost in thought, joining the conversation only when he was asked something directly, or when he saw a chance to share his knowledge about Hogwarts and the wizarding world. The girls bought wizard sweets from the kind witch with the cart and excitedly snacked on them for the rest of the journey. Severus forced himself to taste some even through the fear of it coming back up, and found that he didn’t enjoy sweets very much – he wasn’t sure if it was his nausea, or if his body was simply not used to such massive amounts of sugar.
After the sun had already set and it was dark outside, the train came to a stop at Hogsmeade Station and students started getting up, stretching their legs and gathering their belongings.
While the trip had not gone without problems, Severus had made it without throwing up and he had to count that as a small win.
After the first-year students had piled into several boats and started crossing the lake led by a peculiarly large and wild-bearded man, the flame of hope Severus had felt dwindling during the journey grew again to an intensity he had never felt before, as he finally saw the castle in front of his own eyes – the colossal, dark shape with its numerous towers, looming over them against the starry sky, sprinkled with hundreds of warm specks of light that reflected on the calm water of the lake. He was shaking, felt like he could explode from the overwhelming excitement of it all – it was happening, it was real, they were going to Hogwarts!
This was the moment he had dreamed of, the moment he had anxiously counted the days down to, the moment his life would really start. He and Lily were going to be at Hogwarts for the next seven years, and they would be the best years of their life.
He was sure of it.
The Slytherin dorms were filled with the sounds of students talking after the feast had ended and the first years had been shown to their common rooms, stomachs full of delicious food and hearts full of bubbling excitement for the next day.
Severus had a familiar cold feeling in his insides, similar to how he’d felt many times in Cokeworth watching the muggle children from afar without knowing how to talk to anyone. All Severus’ classmates had been talking about since getting there was their families – their pureblood fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts and prominent ancestors and all the connections they had to all these famous and accomplished wizards.
Severus was the only one who didn’t know anyone. He was the odd one out.
One of the boys – Evan Rosier – turned to him suddenly.
“I forgot – what was your surname, again?”
“Snape.”
“I’ve never heard of a Snape family before,” Rosier said, looking at him down his nose critically. “Your family is pureblood, isn’t it?”
“Yes, m–my dad is from Bulgaria, he changed his name when he moved to England,” Snape recounted the story he had rehearsed during the last few weeks back home. “He’s pureblood, we just don’t have any family here. But my mum’s a Prince, they live in England.”
“Prince?” Rosier repeated, raising his eyebrow. “I don’t think I know any Princes either.”
“My mum and dad keep to themselves a lot – they don’t have friends, so I haven't met other purebloods much,” Severus said, not really lying this time.
“Well, there’s an entire house full of us here – you'll be in great company,” another student named Avery boasted, patting Severus on the back rather hard. Severus nodded, trying to force a confident smile on his face.
He was feeling rather sleepy already, as he hadn’t been able to get a wink of sleep the last night, anxious and nervous and excited about the next day. He let another wave of conversation he couldn't quite follow flow in one ear and out the other, until Avery asked him:
“So, what about you, Snape? What’s your team?“
“Huh?”
“Quidditch?” Avery said, looking at him as if he was an imbecile.
Severus was stumped, he couldn’t think of a reply. He just stared back, trying to not let his panic show in his eyes.
“Don’t say you don’t know Quidditch!” Rosier cried. “You’re missing out, mate. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
Severus laughed awkwardly.
He did not say another word for the rest of the night.
Something had happened in Potions class, and Lily was feeling troubled over it.
That day, Professor Slughorn had told them to work in groups of four. Severus and her had been grouped with two of Lily’s Gryffindor housemates – Sirius Black and Remus Lupin. Black had been one of the boys annoying them on the train, so it wasn’t like they had a good start to begin with. But things had started going really wrong when Severus, who was usually the very best at potions, had apparently not quite understood one line of the instructions.
Severus had been tasked with preparing a sand lizard for the potion. But as everyone had started to work, he had been the only one not doing anything – just staring at his lizard with a confused and increasingly pained expression on his face. He had kept craning his neck, trying to peek at what the other groups were doing.
“Is everything okay, Sev?” Lily had asked. Sev had just nodded, before tentatively starting to work on his ingredient. Black had stopped him moments later.
“What are you doing?” he had said, looking at Severus’ lizard on the chopping board. “It didn’t say to slice it. Blimey, can’t you read simple instructions?”
“I–” Severus said, embarrassed, “the instructions just tell you to ‘prepare’ it – it doesn’t say how.”
“Are you stupid, Snape? We prepared a common lizard last week, didn’t we? You cut it open and remove the entrails, then you remove the eyes and cut off the limbs only. What makes you think this is prepared any differently?”
Severus had gone completely red at that point.
Lily had told him it wasn’t a big deal, he could just ask Professor Slughorn to give him another lizard and start over. But Severus had been flustered, near tears: he had flicked the pieces of ruined lizard off the table and they had landed on the floor with a small thud.
“What is your problem?” Black had snapped, totally irritated and confused with Severus’ childish behavior. Other students had started staring at them with curiosity.
“Just get another one, Snivellus, and do it right this time.”
And Sev, unable to control himself, had taken his copy of Magical Drafts and Potions and whacked Black over the head with it. Black was not seriously hurt of course – Sev had not even managed to leave a mark on him – but Sev’s outburst had cost Slytherin twenty points and he had received detention, and as conscientious and perfectionist as Sev was, it had upset him to the point he had buried his head into the desk and started quietly crying right there and then, to the great amusement of the other students who had been following the scene.
Lily was, of course, feeling upset about her best friend being humiliated in the middle of his favorite class, but she didn’t understand what had possessed Sev to behave like that. She did agree on some level that Black deserved what he got because of how condescending he had been, but why had Severus seemed to lose his mind so completely over what really had been just a small, easily fixable mistake in the first place?
Lily couldn’t help noticing that Severus got annoyed and upset about the weirdest things sometimes, and she often couldn’t wrap her mind around why he would suddenly become intensely moody when, as far as she could see, nothing warranted it. But Severus was her best friend, and she tried to be understanding. Severus didn’t always understand it either when she was upset by yet another awful thing Petunia had said to her – he didn’t have a sibling, how could he understand why it mattered to Lily how Petunia felt – but she had recently noticed that he no longer argued about it as he had done in the beginning. He simply let it go, tried to change the subject, tried to cheer her up.
Lily on the other hand often found that trying to figure out what was bothering Sev was like trying to squeeze blood from a stone, which made it hard to let it go. Her best friend was like an enigma to her, and it unsettled her that she couldn’t figure him out – it meant she couldn’t easily find ways to comfort him.
So in the end, she too would change the subject to something else, hoping he would forget about it, and the incident would be yet another thing added to the pile of unsolved worries nagging her internally.
This was not the only thing that gave her trouble. The more time Lily spent with the other first-year girls in Gryffindor, the more apparent it became to her that Severus was not easy to be friends with.
Lily didn’t understand why Sev didn’t seem to understand certain things like she and others did. Why she sometimes had to explain things to him that shouldn’t have needed to be explained, that everyone else seemed to just inherently know or at least learned when they were very little – and at the end of the day, whatever it was that she was trying to explain to Sev, she still couldn’t be sure if he was grasping it, if he even believed she was telling the truth. Sev was so hard to read sometimes, and if he gave her nothing but a grunt or a muffled “yeah”, how was she supposed to know what he really thought?
Then there was that in company of more than the two of them, Severus became a bit of a problem.
It seemed like the only way of communicating Severus was comfortable with was lecturing others. He’d pick up a small flaw or uncertainty in what someone else had said, and would immediately launch into an intense tirade on the subject in a condescending tone, as if he fancied himself as a walking encyclopedia, waiting to pounce on questions nobody asked.
This was social suicide.
So, Lily was resorting more and more to just keeping her other friends separated from Sev. It saddened her that she couldn’t spend time with all of her friends at once, but it was best for everyone else, really. For some reason, Sev was unable or unwilling to act like the same person he was when he was alone with her in front of the others, and her other friends couldn’t understand what she saw in Sev. They didn’t like him. And how could they, when it seemed like he was making himself unlikable?
“What is wrong with you? She was just trying to be kind,” Lily exploded, unable to hold herself back.
Severus and her were walking back to their dorms from the library, where they had been studying together when Mary McDonald had suddenly invited herself to join them. Everything had been going somewhat fine, until Lily had reached over the table to grab a book from the other side of it and accidentally knocked over Severus’ ink bottle, spilling the contents all over the table and his book.
Before either of them could do anything, Mary had already cast a cleaning spell, which erased all the ink that had spilled on the table and most of the horrid black stain that had been slowly spreading over Severus’ tattered book. And what had Severus done?
He hadn’t thanked her. He had snapped at Mary, snatching his book and hugging it to his chest, he had told her to mind her own business and let him handle his.
“It was my fault anyway,” Lily added a bit sadly, “you should be mad at me. She was only helping you.”
“She –” Severus was flustered and wringing his hands and seemed to have trouble getting his words out – it was so typical of him, he got tongue-tied every time he was overcome with emotion. “She was – I don’t – I don’t like being made fun of!”
“You think she was making fun of you?” Lily was baffled at Sev’s interpretation of the events. “Oh, God, Sev! You always act like everything is some great big conspiracy against you, and it’s not like that! Do you think you’re the center of the universe?”
And Severus had gone strangely silent after that, not insisting on his point and not arguing. Maybe he had understood?
Severus didn’t understand why Lily was so strongly under the delusion that he should, or that he even could get along with her friends.
She may not have noticed, but he did. He had seen Mary and Marlene when Potter had flung a big ball of Flobberworm mucus at the back of his head in Potions class – he could vividly remember their laughter as the disgusting lump of slime had slid down his neck into his robes. He couldn’t pretend he hadn’t heard Mary mutter “Snivellus” under her breath when she thought he was out of earshot, or that he hadn’t heard the girls making gagging sounds one day when he walked past them in the corridor, when Lily hadn’t been around, and as soon as he had turned to look at them, they were staring back at him as if he had grown another head. When he had turned around again, he could hear them giggling as if it they had just witnessed the funniest thing imaginable.
Unlike he sometimes suspected Lily (and everyone else, for that matter) mistook him as, he wasn’t stupid. He noticed.
The more time Lily spent apart from Sev, the less he was on her mind. She no longer missed him as much in the classes they didn’t share, or when her other friends wanted to study together in the library or just hang out and explore the castle and the grounds.
But still, during mealtimes in the Great Hall when everyone sat with their own houses, she would often disconnect from the discussion between her friends for a moment and let her gaze move along the Slytherin table until she found Sev: she would notice how he would hang off slightly to the side, silently, not really participating. And each time, she would make a point of approaching him after the meal, a smile on her face, and ask him how his day was.
Severus was lying in his bed in the Slytherin dungeons, infinitely softer and warmer and more comfortable than his bed at home. But Severus could not enjoy its comfort that night, as his mind was racing with thoughts that had been bothering him and feelings he couldn’t quite name.
His throat stung – there was a feeling of a big lump in it, choking him, making his eyes water.
He had thought Hogwarts was going to be different. Well, he hadn’t thought of the details so much, but he had certainly imagined it would have been easier than this. He thought he would make lots of friends, fit right in just as soon as he met other wizards, and impress the teachers with how much he knew already. He thought as soon as he got to Hogwarts, he would magically become who he wanted to be, who he had dreamed of being – and yet… it was like nothing had changed. He was still the weird, funny-looking Snape boy from Spinner’s End. The Snape boy with the dirty hair and unfitting clothes and a jarring lack of social tactfulness that unsettled almost everyone who crossed paths with him. The boy who didn’t understand others and wasn’t understood by others.
Even though he was at Hogwarts, where everything was supposed to change, he was still the same old him.
He did know he wasn’t like the muggle children back home in Cokeworth, but that he could easily accept – he was a wizard, fundamentally different, destined to be whisked away to a world of his own kind while they would be forever stuck in their own, dull and unmagical one.
But now, Severus was coming to the realization that he wasn’t like other wizards either, and that stung. It hurt.
All wizards were strange, freaks, he’d been told over and over again by his father, by Petunia too. Freaks. So what did that make Severus – a freak in the world of freaks?
“Expelliarmus!”
Severus’ wand shot up from his hand and clattered onto the floor of the corridor. Before he could react, James had swooped down and picked it up.
“Why do you hold it like that?” James mocked. He put on a stupid wide-eyed expression, imitated Severus’ awkward, hunched posture, and started stomping around in an exaggerated manner, swinging the wand around in uncoordinated, jerking movements. Sirius and Peter roared in laughter. Remus did not laugh, but the corner of his mouth twitched up.
“Ooh… Look, I’m Snivellus,” James said in a whiny, high-pitched voice, earning more laughter from the others.
“Snivellus should learn how to move a wand properly. He won’t be able to aim a single spell right flailing around like a spaz,” Sirius said.
Lily felt hot rage boiling inside her. Severus did not sound like that, and there was nothing wrong with the way he held his wand, was there? Those stupid boys must have thought they were so much better because they grew up in wizard families and were raised into their ways from the cradle, they couldn’t understand what it was like for Severus and her.
“Stop it!” she snarled. James looked at her, eyebrows raised.
“Why? Right – it's because Snivellus is your boyfriend, Evans, isn't he?” Potter taunted. "That's why you let him follow you around and stick to you like a leech."
“Can you imagine that, a Gryffindor snogging a slimy Slytherin, slobbering – augh!” Sirius butted in, but his fantasy was cut short by a stinging hex hitting his shoulder.
Severus looked up and saw Lily quickly turn her wand from Sirius to James, who dropped Severus’ wand in surprise. Severus ducked to reclaim it as James’ attention was now on Lily.
“Watch it, Potter,” Lily said. “Don’t think I won’t hex you, all of you. Come on, Sev.”
Severus followed after her as she stomped away, filled with both admiration for Lily and burning embarrassment at the fact that – once again – someone had needed to come to his rescue.
Weak. Pathetic.
"What – is Evans using dark magic, now?" Sirius grumbled at James, rubbing his sore shoulder. "D'you think all that time buddying up with Snivellus has corrupted her? The greaseball has been rubbing off some of his nastiness on her, too."
Lily was trudging after Sev near the edge of the Forbidden Forest. It was rather late in the fall, but the sun had still decided to grace them for one more time before the winter. It was Saturday, and Sev had wanted to show her something outside after breakfast, something “interesting” he had found.
“How far is it?” she asked, starting to wonder if he was going to lead her into the forest for them both to get eaten by some kind of dark creature in it. Something like that would probably fit into Sev’s idea of “interesting.”
“We're almost there – it’s right around those trees.”
They came to a spot where dozens of small white flowers sprouted from the ground. Lily's face immediately brightened as she realized what they were, and she crouched down to look closer to confirm it. Hellebore.
“You said you wanted to collect these, right?” Sev said. Lily nodded in excitement. She had mentioned wanting to test a recipe for a temporary hair colour changing potion the other day, but she didn't have any hellebore.
"Yes! This is the exact flower I need!" she exclaimed. The fact that Sev had remembered such an offhand comment made her feel warm inside. She started collecting the flowers, but then she noticed a slight movement a the edge of her vision. She looked up and gasped.
“Look Sev – bunnies,” she whispered, pointing into the forest. There were three small hares, sitting comfortably on the ground, greedily eating plants from the forest floor.
Sev pretended to look surprised (he had hoped the bunnies would be there today, too).
Lily pressed her fists against her mouth, stifling her squeal over the cuteness to not scare away the skittish animals.
They spent some minutes there in silence, admiring the bunnies, until they hopped away in search for more food and disappeared into the depths of the forest. Lily gathered some more flowers, conjured a piece of ribbon around the stems to make a neat bunch, and gently put the flowers into her satchel. Not wanting to go back to the castle yet, Lily and Sev walked around the grounds for a while and sat down under one particular tree to soak up the last remains of the sunlight – the same spot where they had been hanging out a couple of times earlier in the semester when the weather had still been warmer. Lily let out a deep sigh as she looked up at the sky, adjusting her red and gold house scarf around her neck to shield her chin from the cool air.
“It’s been a bit weird, not being in the same house with you,” Sev said suddenly, unprompted, and Lily could swear there was a hint of melancholy in his voice. This was unusual: Severus was not one to offer up his feelings this freely, even to her. Lily turned around to look at Sev, but he wasn’t looking at her in return.
“I wish you could’ve been in Slytherin, too. We would’ve had all of our classes together and we could sit together at meals.”
Lily’s heart stung. In her mind, she saw Sev with the Slytherins as he usually was: silent and slightly separate, head buried in a book or a parchment... She hesitated for a moment over whether she should ask, but decided to go for it.
“Hey Sev... do you ever get lonely or anything like that?”
“I’m fine,” he said without meaning it.
“I know,” Lily said, “I know I have other friends in my house now, and we can’t spend as much time together anymore, just you and me. But you’re still my best friend, right? I’ve got other friends too, but when we go home for the summer, you’re going to be the one who’s still there.”
Severus let out a small, indecipherable noise. He was running his thin fingers along the dry grass as if to soothe himself, plucking out some individual blades from the ground. A lump rose up Lily’s throat, and she swallowed, blinking her eyes.
“Sev, look at me.”
He turned his face towards her: his expression was sad, and his eyes were red and blinking rapidly too.
Lily couldn’t handle it anymore: she scooted over to Sev to wrap her arms around him, cold and bony and angular to the touch. A tear rolled down her cheek as she felt Sev flinch and slightly shudder against her – she knew he didn’t like being touched – but she didn’t let go.
“Don’t be sad,” she said, her own voice trembling now. “Best friends, Sev?”
She hadn’t meant for it to come out as a question. Sev was quiet, save for occasional sniffling – he must have been in tears too by now – and Lily held him even tighter, pressing her face against his neck, sharing her warmth with him.
“Best friends,” he choked out finally.