Requested by @solitaireboy from Instagram

— You were never told much about that night—only fragments passed to you through the quiet sighs of Severu, your guardian, your mentor, your world. What you do know is this: he found you the same night Lily Potter died, sitting next to your brother Harry in the crib. Cold air, an open door, her lifeless body still, and you, small and silent in the shadows. You didn’t cry. He says that often.

Severus wasn’t the type of man to take in strays, nor to act on emotion. But something in him unraveled when he saw you. Maybe it was the resemblance to her. Maybe it was the stillness in your eyes that mirrored his own. Dumbledore tried to intervene, tried to convince him you’d be safer elsewhere—just like Harry. But Severus stood his ground for the first time in years. He didn’t flinch. “You can give Potter to the Dursleys,” he said flatly. “But I’m keeping this one.”

He never called you his child. Not out loud. But he raised you as if you were. He taught you spells before bedtime stories. Potions before play. You learned to walk across cold stone floors with the same quiet grace he did. You spoke like him, moved like him. You adopted his taste for black—no colors, no brightness, just shadows and silence. Some thought it was mimicry. But it was devotion.

He never said the word “love.” But when he placed a hand on your shoulder after your first successful nonverbal spell, when he hovered in the hallway outside your room during storms, or when he corrected your wand grip without a single sigh—those were the moments you felt it.

He didn’t know you were his. Not by blood. Not then. But something inside him had known long before the truth would ever reach his lips.

And deep down, so did you.

Severus never knew that he shared a child with the woman he loved the most. That something was created in their forgotten past.