The Things our Heart likes, without our Brain's Consent - A Severus Snape Story

Chapter One - Five years later.

Clouds lined the cerulean sky, placed as though an artist had swept white paint in smooth, loose strokes, framing the great, bright globe of the summer sun. It spilled light down upon the ground, lighting up the green in the leaves and the blooming colour in flowers, for it was summer and sweltering hot.

It even reached the last house on Spinner's End, reaching out its long, gentle fingers to brush past the dark curtains and settle onto the floor, casting a wonderful glow that set many happy and thinking of pleasant days...

Severus Snape jammed the curtains shut, scowling at the light with the intensity of a vampire. From his expression, one could have thought that it burned him like one too, but after prowling away a few paces Severus stopped. His shoulders hunched, he gave a very short, angry sigh, then turned back to the window.

He twitched the corner of the curtains aside, letting in a speck of brilliance through the sliver. He glimpsed the soft, blue sky, the clouds and the strange peace that always came with summer. Peace and something else. A sad sort of nostalgia, one which he couldn't swallow no matter how hard he tried. It made him think of better days, a comparison so bitter to the starkness to his life now that he jammed the curtains shut again, cutting off the light, and marched away to his bedroom.

Severus wasn't one for talking to himself aloud, but he kept a steady dialogue running in his mind which was usually reserved for mocking everything he set his eyes upon. It was, in all honesty, one of the few things which still kept him sane enough to not be put away into one of the wards at St. Mungo's. He was aware of this and so kept the dialogue up steadily, which was currently a steady stream of curses directed at the sun.

Summer was horrible. For starters, it was sweltering hot, it meant he had to put up with the heat in his long, black clock which he refused to take off even on the hottest of days. Number two, people laughed more during summer, a noise which pierced his eardrums and set his temper flaring. Not to mention that students - oh, the students - had about tenfold more energy when the summer sun was out and, ho-ho, was he going to make sure their chirpy little voices were quelled into nothingness.

Severus paused in his bedroom, at the foot of his bed on which a suitcase lay open, peering into it with vehement scrutiny although he was the very one who had packed it in the first place.

From a third-person perspective which he adopted for a short while, it was a very dismal-looking thing. All his clothes were black, for instance, and there weren't a lot of them at all.

Hm, he considered, his eyebrows an S shape. Variety?

He approached his wardrobe, creaked it open, then closed it almost immediately for there was about as much variety in it as there was colour in the dark. But he cared not, he thought to himself - colour and embellishments were for the ones who were raised with money to spare.

And the ones with enough personality to flare them, he thought in disgust.

He made sure all his proper books were in his suitcase, along with his cup - the only bright thing in the assortment - then took out his wand, closed the suitcase with a flick and made it fit into his pocket after shrinking it. All these movements were very well practised. It was as though he had rehearsed them in his spare time but the truth was, when you don't have a lot of people around you for a very long time you become rather mechanical and precise in everything that you do.

And so we enter the maw of hell for another year, he thought, as a green fire leaped up in his fireplace, though perhaps this time...

Severus had a very small hope that he shared with none, though which everyone knew of anyway and it came in the form of the defence against the dark arts position. Because Severus was very good at the dark arts. It was a fact which he also did not share with anybody but which everybody knew about anyway.