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ulltraviolences · 1 month ago

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Best friend! Marauders Era! Severus Snape Headcanons:

You met Severus through Lily.

The auburn haired girl with freckled skin, missing a front tooth, invited you to sit with them on the Hogwarts Express on the very first day of school. While Lily was lively, kind, and sweet, the boy who followed her around like a shadow contrasted like the moon to the sun.

In the entirety your 11 year old wisdom, you thought he looked like an old soul trapped into a young child's body, as if one of the castle's ghosts you read about in "Hogwarts: A history" took possession of him.

The train car was filled with chatter of you and Lily. The girl, still over the moon about her recent discovery of wizardry, explained all there was about being a muggle, her home, her sister that she will miss so much, her lovely parent and Cokesworth, where she met Severus — the name of the raven haired boy, who kept fidgeting with a loose button of his robes up until now. At the mention of his name, he grunted and nodded in response.

The entirety of the first year was spent like this: you and Lily having fun, and Severus existing at the same place, nodding or mumbling when his name was called. Without Lily carrying the conversation, Severus wouldn't even dare to look up from his frayed shoe laces.

With time, you get more syllables out of Snape. By the second year, the boy is far more confident in his skills, acing (almost) every test. When all the dusty, gigantic books in the library won't do their job of explaining Professor Flitwick latest class, your first instinct was to look for him.

Alone by the black lake, reading his own book with more notes by the margins that were text by the actual author on the page, Severus was unbothered by the crunch of the leaves around him until his name was heard. He was startled, but didn't show — it wasn't James voice that called to him, so it was always a relief.

With a quivering pout from the frustration of not figuring out your spells in time for the test that starts in half an hour, you ask, as politely as you can, if Severus can help you. He is the smartest guy she knows, and no book guide or different flicks of the wand seemed to help. Godric, at this point, you're even wondering if you belong in Hogwarts anymore! No matter what you did, nothing would change. Did your magic just vanish?

Severus tried not to take your compliments seriously. Everybody on Hogwarts seemed to agree that he was a slimy git, as Sirius so eloquently puts it. Y/N probably was just saying that, trying to get his favor. Nothing more.

But he still sighed and patted the grass by his side.

He corrected her pronunciation. Explained the proper technique. Positioned her hands in place. And by twenty minutes, what once was a chipped teacup, turned into a lazy mouse that slept inside her pocket.

Severus was just helping his friend's friend. Just that. He doesn't exactly care.

Or he tries to convince himself.

The smile and the happy squeal you let out when gold sparkles came out from the end of your wand the minute the spell was cast tugged some strings in his heart.

Since then, study sessions have become a thing. And little by little, they turned longer. More frequent. Just the two of you, in the less frequented corners of the library.

With time, the books were forgotten as Severus complained about his housemates, and you shared some gossip you heard back in your dorm. He would pretend not to care about such frivolity. But of course, over dinner, he would whisper about what he saw on his own.

"I saw Jessica from Hufflepuff with Charlie alone on the 3rd floor... Which is a bit weird, considering she is seeing Louis from Ravenclaw... I didn't snooped. They were just in the way of where I was going."

With the years going by, you felt like you blinked, and the boy who wouldn't dare look at your general direction suddenly was snoring in your bed in frequent sleepovers, when the marauders pulled a prank on the Slytherin dorms — what turned out to be an almost weekly thing.

Being close with someone so quiet, the habit of reading together was a must to keep the friendship. Not necessarily the same book, but it was oddly comforting to hear him scribbling furiously on his potion book while you leafed through a muggle magazine.

He would interrupt your reading to complain about something wrong in the orientations. He doesn't mean to be a bother — but his mumbling isn't exactly silent, with all the heavy sighs.

Quiet is a defining word for your friendship.

Quit commentary on other students dumb behavior through shared glances on a crowded classroom. A wide gaze, met with a sharp eyeroll, returned by a sly smirk. There was no real need for occlumency when your thoughts were already so obvious to Severus.

Quiet appreciation. When you wake up late for breakfast, there is always a plate with what you usually eat waiting for you — not that he notices, of course. You just get so annoying when you're hungry, he just might prevent that! The fact that there is the most indulgent, gooey, and hot piece of brownies on your plate is a mere coincidence.

Also, quiet jealousy.

Making Snape open up to more than one friend was an already hard enough process. So, of course he would get irrationally jealous every time you spend too much time with somebody else. You spent three hours with him, but three hours and one minute with some other person? Expect pouting, cutting answers, and cold glares.

You ask what's wrong, and he denies any alteration on his usual mood. Typical.

Thankfully, his sweet tooth makes Severus very easy to win over pesky problems.

Severus usually disappears after the Marauders's pranks, usually by the forbidden forest, collecting herbs for his potions and cursing to himself.

Once, you followed Severus there to check on him. To the slytherin, seing you seeing him in such a disheveled state was more embarrassing to him han whatever the marauders did. His pants were stained by the dirt, his hair full of knots from nervously messing with his hands every few seconds and a tear stained puffy face. For a second, he was scared that you would too make fun of him.

Hearing the worried cadence of your voice, feeling the comforting squeeze on his shoulders by your soft hands... Surprisingly, it all sent Severus to a fearful state: what if you think he is pathetic, and you're acting out of pity?

Severus Snape doesn't need your pity. He is lanky, poor, and too introverted for his own good. But he is the smartest boy in his year — and hell, the whole school! —, he doesn't need anyone's sympathy! And with his fists closed and an angry scowl, he is very energetic to tell you so.

Of course you don't leave. You're already used to his stubborn ways, to his wounded ego. You simply sit by his side on the damp grass, sigh, and lay your head on his shoulder.

He freezes, for a whole minute. His breath stops in utter panic, but soon relaxes, little by little, when he realizes the soft pressure on his body and the smell of your shampoo is surprisingly... soothing.

Severus wouldn't admit it, obviously. He still muttered under his breath about how annoying and clingy you are, but didn't dare to move a muscle in fear of sending you away.

After this first occasion, Severus unconsciously grew softer. Gentler. The tone he carried in his voice was brighter when talking to you, the discreet smirk he called a smile more prominent in your time together.

It was obvious to anyone that met Severus that his friendship with Lily, Mulciber, Lucius, or anyone wasn't like yours.

No one would point it out in fear of getting hexed by the raven haired boy, obviously.

#sooo cute #jealous petty sev towards ppl he cares about .. soo endearing to me

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ulltraviolences · 2 months ago

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Eileen Prince

I'm relentlessly curious about how a witch from Slytherin, a house that values cunning and ambition on paper, and bloodlines/nobility in its culture, ended up living in a muggle slum.

Unfortunately for me, she's a barely mentioned character written by an author who consistently fails to portray female characters with depth or dimension. The women in Harry Potter are portrayed as either maternal or villains, or, in Ginny Weasley's case, as redeemed by their masculine traits (because Rowling's Thatcher era feminism dictates that equality for women = emulating patriarchal ideas of manhood). About as much as you can expect from an author who's as unable to acknowledge the personhood of trans women as she is to write women as actual people. This leaves a lot of room for interpreting or delving into what Eileen Prince's life may have looked like, and how that would have affected her son's development.

There are three direct mentions of Eileen in the text :

“The picture showed a skinny girl of around fifteen. She was not pretty; she looked simultaneously cross and sullen, with heavy brows and a long, pallid face. Underneath the photograph was the caption: Eileen Prince, Captain of the Hogwarts Gobstones Team.”

HBP Ch. 25

“I was going through the rest of the old Prophets and there was a tiny announcement about Eileen Prince marrying a man called Tobias Snape, and then later an announcement saying that she’d given birth to a" “ — murderer,” spat Harry.

HBP ch. 30

“Harry looked around: he was on platform nine and three-quarters, and Snape stood beside him, slightly hunched, next to a thin, sallow-faced, sour-looking woman who greatly resembled him.”

DH Ch. 33

(Shoutout to Harry James Potter, who didn't recognize Eileen's fifth year photo despite her resemblance to Snape, the teacher whose classroom he got his used Potions book from. Shoutout also to Harry James Potter who didn't connect the dots between the Prince's handwriting and Snape's, a teacher who regularly wrote instructions on the board. "I needed to make the plot work, ok?" - JK Rowling, probably.)

Other relevant excerpts:

“Snape staggered - his wand flew upwards, away from Harry - and suddenly Harry’s mind was teeming with memories that were not his: a hook-nosed man was shouting at a cowering woman, while a small dark-haired boy cried in a corner ”

OoTP Ch. 26

“Harry delved into his trunk and pulled out his copy of Advanced Potion-Making before getting into bed. There he turned its pages, searching, until he finally found, at the front of the book, the date that it had been published. It was nearly fifty years old.”

HBP Ch. 16

Supplemental material re: Gobstones from JK Rowling:

"...it remains a minority sport within the wizarding world, and does not enjoy a very ‘cool’ reputation, something its devotees tend to resent. Gobstones is most popular among very young wizards and witches, but they generally ‘grow out’ of the game, becoming more interested in Quidditch as they grow older. ... Gobstones enjoys limited popularity at Hogwarts, ranking low among recreational activities, way behind Quidditch and even Wizarding Chess." [There's an additional sentence on the Harry Potter wiki's Gobstones page: "...it is also known as 'the thinking wizard's Quidditch.'"]

A few conclusions can be drawn from what little information we're given about Eileen:

She's described as "cross and sullen" around the age of 15, and as "sallow-faced, sour-looking" when she's older.

She's captain of the Gobstones club around her fifth year, so she likely marched to the beat of her own drum - given that Gobstones isn't particularly popular - and owns it proudly enough to take, or even seek out, a leadership role.

The sport is described as "the thinking wizard's Quidditch" which would imply Eileen was more interested in intellectual challenges and was clever (and can be paralleled with a young Severus' comment about "if you'd rather be brawny than brainy" to James Potter when they first meet on the Hogwarts Express).

Her marriage and the birth of her son are both announced in the paper, which might mean the family she came from was of some importance or note, or perhaps something else... but we'll get to that.

If we assume that Severus' secondhand copy of Advanced Potion Making was originally Eileen's (reasonable, though there is no textual evidence) then its publication date is likely around the time she was a sixth year, given that this particular text was specific to students beginning to prep for N.E.W.T. exams. Harry begins his sixth year in 1996 when the book is "nearly fifty years old," so we can assume Eileen was 16 years old sometime not long after 1946. Severus was born in 1960, which would mean Eileen was in her mid-late 20s at the time.

Her marriage was dysfunctional at best, abusive at worst. As per a Pottermore post that is still up on WizardingWorld.com: "...the desperately lonely and unhappy childhood [Severus] had with a harsh father who didn’t hold back when it came to the whip." Based on this, we can assume Tobias was abusive, and given Eileen's cowering as he shouted at her, she presumably feared him.

From these bits of information emerges the image of a woman who either had a surly personality, or at the very least was guarded, though perhaps just formal. There isn't really any difference in how her face is set when she's in an everyday setting like King's Cross, or when she's having her picture taken for the Gobstones Club. It's possible she was a stern, unsmiling person, but it's also possible - given that her wedding and child were announced in the paper - that she came from a family of some standing and was raised to conduct herself with hallmarks of British class, such as dignity and unaffectedness. After all, there are several wizarding families - such as the Potters - who are wealthy purebloods with social standing but are not part of the Sacred 28. Additionally, the Gobstones Club portrait would have been taken around the mid-1940s, when portraits were formal and their subjects did not often smile, and given that we see only a snippet of Eileen, we don't have enough information that she was unhappy or sour. It's also important to remember that we see her portrait and Snape's memory of her through Harry's perspective and, like his perception of Snape himself, this may convey Harry's biases.

We also know from the text that Snape had a house in a deserted part of Cokeworth, a fictional Midlands town that presumably had a collapsed milling industry, at the end of a street called Spinner's End. There's a great thread that goes into details about the kind of 2 up 2 down house it would have been, and we can assume that this is Snape's family home given that we know he and Lily grew up in Cokeworth. For all intents and purposes, the conclusion we can draw from this being the Snape family's home in the 60s is that they were working class and cripplingly poor. Most estates like this had been cleared by the 60s, and no longer exist today.

This begs the question: how did a witch from a possibly well-off family end up in an abusive marriage in an irrelevant slum?

Buckle up kids, we're leaving the world of textual references and veering into deep meta territory now. I won't label any of this as head canon because I'm not set on these interpretations, and am just drawing conclusions from the text, but some of it may be a bit loose even for meta.

If Eileen was 16 years old not long after 1946, then she would have finished school in the late 40s, possibly even 1950. While some people (including past me) posit the theory that Tobias may have been injured in WWII and his injuries debilitated him, forcing him to go on the dole and affecting his mental health, I'm increasingly skeptical of this theory. It would make more sense if Eileen had known him before he was drafted/enlisted and had committed to a relationship with him, which would then have changed when he came back from the war and was altered. If we assume Eileen's age based on the idea that it was her own copy of Advanced Potion Making Severus used, then she would still have been at school during WWII (which makes an interesting parallel with Severus' own experience of spending the bulk of the first wizarding war against Voldemort as a student at school).

I do think, however, that there's merit in the theory that Tobias suffered some kind of altering injury and that he wasn't necessarily abusive before Eileen committed herself to him. It makes little sense for a Slytherin graduate who was confident and self-posessed enough to be the face of an unpopular club to be drawn to a partner so abusive his shouts caused her to cower and who whipped his child freely. If, however, he was a charming, happy man when they met who suffered a life-altering injury, the trauma of which left him a shell of his former self, then someone like Eileen might stick around for the sake of the parts of his old self she can still see in him.

It's interesting that she didn't seem to use her magic to protect herself or her son, or even to dress her son in clothing that fit, but we know from the text that depression can cause a wizard's powers to wane:

“...it is also possible that her unrequited love and the attendant despair sapped her of her powers; that can happen”

HBP Ch. 13 (Dumbledore talking about Merope Gaunt)

The fact that the Snapes retained the house in Spinner's End seems to indicate that they continued to live there even when the local industry dried up and the slum was cleared as workers were moved to other parts of the country where they were needed (presumably what happened given *gestures at British history*). The most likely explanation for this would be that Tobias wasn't able to work, and perhaps did suffer an injury, only it was at work, and not during the war. This would mean the family lived on the dole (ie. welfare) and also that he would have spent a lot more time at home. It would also explain his anger and frustration that led to abusive behavior (which isn't to say that disabled people are abusive by any means, but it would have been emasculating for a man who considered himself the breadwinner in the 60s, and chronic pain coupled with limited abilities would give anyone a short fuse).

Moreover, this living situation seems to indicate that there is no additional support coming from anywhere. Where is Eileen's family? Why were they not helping? There's no indication in the text that there is any connection with them at all. We can infer from Snape's memories that, as a child, he learned what he knew about the magical world from his mother. This implies that she talked to him about it a fair amount, and his conviction that he and Lily were going to Hogwarts well before they got their letters also implies that Eileen expected him to go there and was set on her son having a magical education, despite how little she seemed to use her own powers.

Severus knows a lot about the wizarding world as a child, including that prisoners are sent to Azkaban and that it's guarded by Dementors, Hogwarts' house structure and what to expect when he and Lily get there, and about the Statute of Secrecy and the laws around it. When Lily asks him if it makes a difference being Muggleborn, Severus hesitates before replying no, presumably because he's aware of pureblood bias being a part of wizarding culture.

Perhaps that's the reason Eileen's family doesn't seem to be in the picture. My own theory is that Eileen hadn't planned to commit herself to Tobias long-term, and Severus was an accidental outcome of an innocent tryst in which a young Eileen, an educated witch from a well to do pureblood family, was having fun slumming it with a working class muggle and ended up pregnant. While we don't know the wizarding world's attitude around pregnancy and abortion, we do know it's a conservative and classist society that parallels muggle British culture fairly closely, and that the late 50s/early 60s were a time when an out of wedlock baby would have been considered a disgrace.

Add to that the anti-muggle bias of a pureblood family and it sounds like Eileen was disowned her for her mistake (and don't @ me, but even though I know that not all Slytherins are purebloods, it does seem to be a persistent cultural value of the house reaching back to Salazar Slytherin himself, so Eileen's being sorted into it can reasonably be taken as an indication of her blood status). Perhaps the marriage and birth announcements in the Daily Prophet were put in by Eileen herself, if she was a woman from a family where this was customary. It may have been her way of letting her family know of the events, or even of asserting herself and even deliberately defying them, announcing to the whole wizarding world that a Prince married and had a child with a muggle. It makes sense that the girl who wasn't just in the Gobstones club, but became captain, would also say to herself, why shouldn't I have my marriage announced in the paper like everyone else in the family?

It's worth noting that mid-late 20s is pretty young to have a baby in the wizarding world, where the life expectancy and child bearing years are much longer than they are for a muggle. According to the Harry Potter wiki:

"Wizard life expectancy in Britain reached an average 137¾ years in the mid-1990s, according to the Ministry of Divine Health ... Wizards in general have a much longer life expectancy than Muggles, usually living two or three times as long as their non magical counterparts, some living even longer than that depending on circumstances. In addition, seeing as James Potter's parents had him "late in life,” witches likely have significantly longer childbearing years than Muggle women."

Although we see several characters in Severus' generation getting married and having kids not long after leaving school, there's a mention in the text that a lot of people were doing this during Voldemort's reign, as the fear he inspired made people more eager to get a move on with life since they thought they might die any day (I think Mrs. Weasley says this but I can't find the quote, @ me if you do). It's clear this wasn't the norm in the wizarding world. Eileen was a Slytherin, a house that values cunning, ambition, and strong wizarding heritage. Something must have gone very wrong in Eileen's life for her to end up having a child so young and living in a muggle slum.

And so it's possible Eileen Prince found herself pregnant and alone, having been disowned by her family to save face in light of her disgrace, and dependent on the only person she was still close to, the father of her child. It's the kind of storyline that Rowling would write, and it would parallel fairly closely the story of Voldemort's mother, thus adding another to the long list of similarities between Voldemort and Snape.

Lorrie Kim makes an interesting point when she talks about how Snape has a strong reaction to other people having a love life or romantic experiences (the context being Rowling's intention of his love for Lily being romantic and unrequited), but doesn't react particularly strongly to mothers sacrificing themselves for their children, whereas Voldemort does. Her insight, and I think it's a reasonable one, is that Severus accepts the idea of mothers making sacrifices for their children, whether it's Lily giving her life for Harry or Narcissa risking all she did to ask for his help in protecting Draco, because his own mother protected him from his father as much as she could.

There's a lot of room for interpretation on what Eileen's relationship with her son looked like, and what it says about her own state. She may have prioritized not angering Tobias to protect Severus, who as a child might have perceived her actions as a form of rejection. At the same time, she seems to have prepared him thoroughly for life in the magical world, perhaps in the hope that he would find his place in it and escape home. Perhaps she missed it and told him so much about it so she could live through her own memories.

The only time we see her argue with Tobias, in Severus' memory, she's cowering as he shouts. We know from JK Rowling that Tobias used corporal punishment liberally, which implies Eileen didn't stop him despite her magical abilities. We also see in the text, however, that while at school Severus stood up for himself against bullies and fought back, and that he was an exceptionally clever and powerful wizard. As an adult he was brave enough to face Dumbledore when he betrayed Voldemort, and later fought against Voldemort right under his nose (or lack thereof). So it stands to reason that at some point Severus began to stand up against Tobias too.

How much of that was Eileen's influence, or the result of Severus seeing her acceptance of her fate and rejecting it for himself, is hard to say. As for what happened to Tobias and Eileen that their house was Severus' by the mid-90s and they were nowhere in sight, I don't think there's enough information in the text to infer.

#snape family .. you are all so tragically dear to me ..

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