Hope For The Hopeless (Severus Snape x Reader)

The Pain In The Pensieve

Warning! Domestic abuse, rape and child abuse (non sexual) in this chapter.

If you were a spectator to your life, you'd be telling the woman, the one that had watched her lover sleep soundly then slipped out of her living quarters, to stop. Go back. Make whatever decision she had to make when she was calm and of a sounder mind.

However, you were not a spectator, or an onlooker, or even a passerby. No, you were living every day in a mind and body that you had stopped connecting with. You were scared. Exhausted. Confused. And increasingly haunted by the frightened little girl you once were.

The sadistic laughter of your father echoed in a faraway chamber of your mind. It was no laughter of pleasure though, no, he had laughed to stop the boiling anger that overtook him when he was no longer in control. The features that so tied you to him were gone. He had lost another hold. Your Mother hated that you were marred by their unholy union, and now it was gone. If you could change the blood that ran through your veins, you would do that too. He was deserving of no legacy.

Footsteps halted at the Gargoyle that guarded Dumbledore's office. That guarded the parts of you that were taken. Hogwarts was meant to help you focus on yourself. It was a cruel irony that coming back had led you into the arms of someone who could help piece those last parts of you back together, but the very place shattered you in wholly fresh ways. Maybe the pieces were too small to fit back together now; you hoped to whatever deity you were wrong.

Either way, you no longer felt like you could allow your memories to float idly in glass vials because your trauma was still there, you could feel it but could not grasp it; your body simply trying its best to deal with the aftershocks. And it was failing. The veil was slipping. Albus himself had said that trauma seeps into the deeper places in our minds; that was his subtle admission that he could not rid you of it all.

Before uttering the password, it opened. Suspicious.

The confident feet that lead you to that point seemed to disappear as you took the last set of stairs and finally the last door into Albus's office. It was empty. Quiet. The cosiness that the room usually radiated, now ghostly as the Pensieve cabinet opened to you, also.

Albus knew I would come.

Resting your hands on the sides of the bowl, looking into the silver water that filled it, you felt nauseous. The dreams had felt so real. The pulling and the drowning. The liquid filling your lungs and the trapping of your body.

It can't hurt you, y/n.

Looking to your left, Fawkes eyed you warily.

"If something happens to me, Fawkes. Get Albus. Please." You plead to the wise-looking bird and whilst he could not acknowledge your request, you knew he understood.

Albus had confined your memories into their little glass prisons, your name burning in cursive on each bottle with a little number on the bottom. There was no ignoring the tremors that ran through your body and fizzled at your fingertips but you took the vial marked '1' and without a second thought poured the contents into the Pensieve.

Sorry, Grandma.

Taking a deep breath and holding it, you pushed your face into the silvery pool of water below you and were immediately taken into your bedroom at your Mother's flat. Flowery green wallpaper wrapped the walls, it was aging and there were little rips in it.

Scanning over to your bed, you saw yourself, the little girl, balled under her lavender coloured duvet as she tried her hardest to concentrate on the ABC picture book before her but the sounds of an argument and something being smashed distracted you both.