Spinner’s End, Summer 1972.

The rain hadn’t stopped for days. It slid down the cracked windowpane of the Snape house like veins on pale skin, dripping onto the rotting sill where a small boy, no longer quite a first-year, but still slight and shadowed, sat in silence. Severus didn’t mind the cold anymore; it was quieter than the shouting downstairs. The smell of damp and smoke clung to everything: the threadbare sofa, the peeling wallpaper, even his mother’s hair as she passed by without a word.

From the kitchen came the crash of a bottle, the slurred curse of his father, and the dull sound of something fragile breaking. His mother’s voice rose once, soft and tired, then vanished into the hum of the factory beyond the river. Severus stared at the floorboards, counting each creak, each noise that wasn’t her scream.

He was still small for his age, all bones and shadows, though slightly taller than the boy who had arrived at Hogwarts months before. Hair fell into his eyes, sleeves still too long for his arms. On his lap lay a well-worn first-year textbook, pages dog-eared and water-stained, but precious. Inside it, the words reminded him of the world he had glimpsed at Hogwarts, wands, spells, and people unafraid of what he had always feared.

When the shouting grew too loud, Severus whispered the incantations he’d learned over the year, as if they could shield him from the house’s rot, from the man downstairs, from the ache of being unwanted.

Outside, the factory siren wailed. Inside, the boy whispered back, softly, fiercely, like a promise, to himself, to the magic he had begun to know, and to the life he hoped might one day be his own.