Professor Severus Snape

"If I Die Young..."

Song is When It's All Over by Raign.
This takes place a few years after the fall of Voldemort (the first time) and Professor Snape is in his mid-twenties.
"Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it."- Sherlock Holmes. BBC series. Episode, The Lying Detective.
I really like that quote from Sherlock, so I decided to include it here. This is the first of the two Severus Snape imagines related to suicide. Please note that I am not romanticizing suicide in any. As someone who often feels like they have very little worth, writing about it often helps. The quote I mentioned is something I keep in mind a lot, along with some other things he says about suicide in that episode. And they say he doesn't have a heart...
Anyways, I hope that any readers of this book enjoy this imagine!

Hailey Walker's POV

I could't take it anymore. The arguing. The hitting. The screaming. The drinking. The fear. I could go on and on about the things that go on in that seemingly unassuming house. From the outside view, everything seems perfect. But no one could possibly imagine what truly goes on inside those whitewashed walls. But I must begin at the beginning.
My name is Hailey, and I am seventeen years old. I will be turning eighteen soon, but that will soon not matter. I am an only child, and I live with my father and stepmother, both of whom abuse me. My mother died in a car accident when I was a small child.
My father abuses me because he blames me for my mother's death, and my stepmother because...well, she's never really explained why.

After my mother's death, my father turned to the bottle. At first, he would go to the bar on the weekends and leave me with the neighbor, but, before long, my six-year-old self would be home alone while he wasted himself at a bar at all hours during all days of the week.

I still remember the first time he hit me. He had come home early from his job, and I ran to meet him, still the innocent child that believed that her father loved her. I now know that he had come home early because he lost his job due to the drinking.
When he came home and saw me greeting him happily, he snapped and hit me. Hard. I was so shocked I couldn't even scream.

After that incident, things only got worse. He would hit me more and more often. I was also beaten and blamed when we had to move. No job meant no money, and we were soon renting a tiny apartment in the outskirts of London. However, through all of that, it was still bearable. Until she came.
My stepmother happened to frequent one of the bars my father went to. I never even knew about her until he brought her home and said that she was going to be my new mother. I, of course, was angry. This woman could never be my mother. I was ten years old at the time.

Once he married her, they both kept up their habits of drinking and using me as a punching bag. Even then, things would have been okay, but there was one problem. I was not allowed to leave the house. Not for school, not for food, not for anything. I was stuck with no escape.
My father managed to conceal his drinking habits long enough to get a small job. It was enough to keep us in the apartment. That meant that I was left alone with my stepmother, if she can even be called that. She used less physical abuse, and more mental, emotional, and psychological abuse.

It didn't take long for me to develop a keen feeling of self-loathing. That's when the cutting began. Every night, after they finally went to sleep, I would slip into the bathroom and use my razor to cut my body. It's not like they would even notice or care, especially with my other injuries.
Now, here I am at seventeen, almost eighteen. Eighteen is the legal age at which a child can leave their parent(s), but I now knew that my father would never let that happen. He had never intended to let me leave in the first place.

I had discovered his plans for me simply by accident. As it happened, they had not gone to bed as I had thought, but they were in their room, talking. Talking about their plans for me to be exact. I found out that my father had the idea to sell me to a sex trafficker he had discovered while at work.
One thing of note is that whenever either of them mentioned me to anyone else, they always said the worst things about me. So, if I suddenly disappeared a few days before my eighteenth birthday, everyone would assume that I had run away. The police would not look for me, especially as kids ran away all of the time, and I was nearing my majority.
It would be perfect for them. My stepmother heartily agreed. One would think that they were planning on selling an animal rather than a seventeen-year-old girl.