Chapter Text
The Weight of Small Hands
Severus wakes screaming.
The sound tears from a throat too young to contain it, raw and animal, the kind of noise that belongs to battlefields and deathbeds, not to a child's bedroom in a terraced house on Spinner's End. His lungs burn with it, small and inefficient, struggling to draw breath around the panic.
Everything is wrong.
His body is a prison of soft limbs and clumsy fingers. When he tries to reach for his wand, muscle memory older than this flesh, his hand closes on nothing but air and cotton sheets. The motion itself is graceless, uncoordinated. He feels drunk. He feels invaded.
The darkness of the room presses close, and for one terrible moment he thinks he's still there, still bleeding out on the Shrieking Shack floor while Potter's eyes, his eyes, Lily's eyes, watch him die.
Then: light.
A door opens. Footsteps, quick but not harsh.
"Sev?"
The voice freezes him more thoroughly than any Petrificus Totalus ever could.
His mother's voice. But not as he remembers it; not the thin, defeated whisper of a woman who'd learned to make herself small. This voice carries something he'd almost forgotten she possessed. Concern. Real concern, not the performance of it, not the desperate placating of a woman trying to forestall violence.
Gentle.
Eileen Prince moves into the room with a grace Severus had only seen in his earliest, haziest memories; the ones he'd taught himself not to trust. She's younger than she should be. Her hair isn't yet shot through with premature grey. Her shoulders aren't yet permanently hunched.
She kneels beside his bed, a real bed, not the thin mattress he remembers from later years and her hand hovers over his forehead. Uncertain. Seeking permission.
"You're burning up," she murmurs. "Was it a nightmare?"
Severus can't speak. His tongue is too thick, his thoughts too large for this small skull. He's drowning in the impossibility of it all.
A chair scrapes against floorboards in the other room.
"He all right?" Tobias Snape's voice carries through the wall, and Severus flinches despite himself, a trained response to a stimulus that hasn't happened yet, won't happen for years.
But his father's footsteps aren't the heavy, aggressive stomp of a man three drinks past caring. They're quick. Concerned.
Tobias appears in the doorway, and Severus has to look away.
This man is a stranger wearing his father's face. The eyes aren't yet permanently bloodshot. The jaw isn't yet set in that familiar, perpetual scowl. Sober.
"Just a nightmare," Eileen says, but her hand has found Severus's forehead now, cool against his feverish skin. "He's shaking."
"I'll get him some water."
Tobias leaves. Not storms out. Not grumbles about being woken. Just... leaves to help.
Severus closes his eyes and tries to remember how to breathe.
This is before.
Before the drinking became constant. Before the shouting matches that shook the walls. Before worthless and freak and should never have been born became his father's favorite phrases, spat like curses over dinner.
This is before his mother learned to flinch. Before she learned to make herself invisible, to speak only in whispers, to pretend her magic away until she was just another defeated woman in a dying town.
This is before everything broke.
The house is warm.
Not metaphorically, though there is that too, a sense of care and attention that Severus had forgotten could exist within these walls. But genuinely, physically warm. There's a fire going downstairs; he can hear it crackling, can smell the coal burning. His blankets are thick and clean. The window isn't drafty.
They have heat.
"Drink this, son."
Tobias is back, crouching beside the bed with a chipped mug in his hands. The water inside is clear, not rust-tinged from pipes that should have been replaced a decade ago.
Severus stares at the mug. At his father's hands, steady and sure. At his mother's face, watching him with something that might be love if he could remember what that looked like.
His own hands; small, soft, useless, shake as he reaches for the water.
"Easy," Eileen murmurs, helping him. "Take your time."
The water is cold. Clean. It soothes the burning in his throat but does nothing for the burning behind his eyes.
He is three years old.
He has died.
He remembers everything.
Every mistake. Every cruelty. Every moment of cowardice dressed up as cunning. He remembers Lily's eyes; green and horrified and disappointed in a hundred different contexts. He remembers the taste of Dark Magic on his tongue, the weight of the Mark on his arm. He remembers twenty years of teaching children he despised, protecting a boy he couldn't bear to look at, serving a cause that ground him down to nothing.
He remembers dying on dirty floorboards, choking on his own blood, using his last breath to give Potter his memories because it was the only thing left he could do.
And Death said: You are wasted.
"Better?" Tobias asks.
Severus nods, because he has no idea how to explain that nothing will ever be better again, that he is fundamentally incapable of being a three-year-old child, that he has seen and done things that should have earned him oblivion, not this grotesque second chance.
His father smiles, actually smiles, tired but genuine and ruffles Severus's hair with a gentleness that makes something crack inside his chest.
"Back to sleep then, eh? Got to be up early tomorrow, thought we might go to the park if the weather holds."
The park.
Severus has a visceral memory of the park: rusted swings, broken glass in the grass, Lily's laughter bright against the grey sky.
Lily.
The thought hits him like Crucio.
She's alive. She's three years old too. She lives two blocks over with her parents and her shrill, magic-hating sister, Petunia, (five years old) and she has no idea what's coming.
None of them do.
"Sleep, love," Eileen whispers, drawing the blankets up around his shoulders. "You're safe."
But Severus knows better.
He has never been safe. Will never be safe.
Death has seen to that.
His parents leave the door cracked open, light spilling in from the hallway. He can hear them murmuring to each other in the other room; his mother's soft concern, his father's reassurance. Normal sounds. Healthy sounds.
Severus lies in the dark, in this body that doesn't fit, in this house that hasn't yet learned to hate him, and wonders what Death expects him to do with truth.
The investments, Death had called them. Souls like his.
He'd given everything when he had nothing left to lose.
Now he has everything to lose, and he has no idea how to protect it.
Outside, past the cracked window, Spinner's End sleeps. The factories are quiet. The chimneys have stopped smoking for the night. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barks.
And somewhere, a red-haired girl is dreaming, unaware that the boy who will love her and betray her and die for her is lying awake in the dark, trying to figure out how to save them all.
Severus closes his eyes.
Sleep doesn't come.