Always - Severus Snape (COMPLETE)

In the Beginning

Severus Tobias Snape came into the world on the 9th of January, 1960. His father was not impressed. Tobias Snape had been a boxer in his teens and early-twenties and had expected a boy of similar build. However, he got the opposite. Not only did the boy look more like his feeble mother Eileen, he had been born prematurely by almost three weeks and weighed barely anything. Also, he did not want any son of his, whether a disappointment of not, to be called Severus.

"I will not have my boy named after some freak!" Tobias yelled at Eileen immediately after she woke from her full day of labour.

"My father wasn't a freak," Eileen insisted, but softly, for she had had a trying day and night, and refused to argue with her husband of few years.

However the name had stuck. Little baby Severus, deathly still in his cot, opened one beady black eye and muttered something under his breath. Tobias had never believed her, but Eileen believed. The baby's words had been decipherable, and remarkable.

"Se-wer-wus."

*

Severus, or baby Toby as Tobias' mates at the pub liked to call him, learned quickly. His dark eyes had soon discerned different emotions. He knew when Eileen was surprised, by him. He understood her fear when Tobias came home late stinking of beer. He could interpret when he ought to be quiet and allow his mother to take the blame for something she didn't do. He knew not to cry, ever, for fear of being punished. He learnt these things at his mother's knee at the tender age of three months.

*

He began talking, properly communicating, at six months. Eileen was overjoyed. Tobias was incensed.

"Can he stop talkin' like a bleeding solicitor?" He directed this question at Eileen. Eileen was pleased because children her son's age simply did not talk: they babbled. She couldn't understand why Tobias didn't feel the same way; he should want a talented boy, not a useless one like he always moaned about. She felt that her husband didn't want another being in competition with him, and especially a baby smarter than him.

"Mama, please can I have my milk?" Severus asked quietly, his eyes flickering over to Tobias in fear.

"Yes, dear." Eileen's gaze never left Tobias either. "Of course you can."

*

Severus began showing signs of remarkable magic at eight months. He would levitate cups, books, chairs with his fingertips and he even hovered himself in fear whenever his father returned home drunk and violent.

"Get down here!" Tobias had slurred, the first time it happened. "You goddamn freak! Come down here! I'll beat that weirdness out you!"

"No, Tobias!" Eileen screaming, incurring Tobias' rage once again. Suddenly, Severus acted. He had progressed past the stage of accidental magic. He pointed one chubby baby finger at Tobias and red light streamed from its tip. The light blasted into Tobias' back and the drunken Muggle was forced into the far wall before sliding down it to the floor, unconscious. Eileen rushed immediately to her baby, sobbing in relief.

"Thank you, thank you," she repeated over and over again, shocked into a gibbering mess as she cradled him. "I couldn't have asked for a better son. Never. Thank you so much."