Severus sprawled lazily in the grass. It was slightly damp, and the soil was cold. It was the first day of September—and although sunny—the temperature was only around sixteen degrees Celsius. Muggle primary school would start in early September. Severus was dreading it. He hated the thought of hours trapped in a classroom with dull, idiotic children. He had already suffered through it once and knew everything that would be taught to him there. It would be deathly boring and a complete waste of his time.
He also wasn't prepared to face Lily Evans.
He had seen her at the park, playing on the swings with her Muggle sister, Petunia. Severus had avoided speaking or interacting with them. This time around, he never witnessed her perform an act of magic or told her she was a witch.
Severus' friendship with Lily Evans certainly hadn't benefitted him, while Lily had fit in well at Hogwarts on her own despite being a Muggle-born. James Potter fancied her, while the red-headed witch continuously ignored him. In fact, Severus was certain that if he and Lily hadn't been friends, Potter wouldn't have encouraged Sirius Black's cruelty as much as he did. Sirius Black, though he might claim otherwise, was not untouched by the infamous Black insanity. He almost always went too far, and someone usually got hurt. Usually, it was Potter who reigned him in before his actions crossed a line. Peter Pettigrew was too cowardly and pathetic to ever stand up to anyone. Remus Lupin never spoke against his friends' bullying, even when he possessed the authority as a Gryffindor Prefect. Whatever respect Severus might have initially held for Lupin didn't last long.
Black might've fooled a lot of people. Nonetheless, Severus hadn't been, and never would be, deceived by him. This time around, he wouldn't purposefully make himself an enemy of Potter or Black. Severus would try his hardest to never catch their attention and remain off their radar for the entirety of his years at Hogwarts.
When outside, the boy secluded himself by the bank of the river, far from the other children at the playground. He picked herbs and organized his mind with Occlumency, evaluating his repertoire of spells. Occlumency would preserve his memories, allowing them to be recalled perfectly and viewed at any time. Another vital use of Occlumency was that it protected the Occlumens' mind from outside forces.
In Severus' mind, he built a tower. Its cylindrical form of polished stone pierced through the fake clouds of an imaginary sky. Above the clouds, the sun was always setting, brilliant colours painting the horizon. Below the clouds, it was always night. Stars, planets, and galaxies that went unseen by the human eye in the real world were all visible, floating in the dark blue-black waters of the night sky. Inside the tower, a staircase spiraled endlessly upward and bookcases lined the walls all the way to the top. However, the books weren't really books, but knowledge and memories from both this version of the timeline and the last.
While rebuilding the fortress of his mind, Severus came across a locked up memory. He opened the book and was sucked into its shredded pages.
His father was mad about the broken plate. The drunken man shouted at his mother, towering over her. In the corner by the couch hid Severus, curled in on himself to appear as small a target as possible. Tears fell from reddened eyes. Blood dripped from a split lip and a bruise formed on the pale skin around it.
The shards of the plate were spread on the ground a metre away. The greasy-haired boy wished with all his might that the plate would stop being broken, that his parents would stop fighting. As a slap echoed through the room, Severus' magic unconsciously followed his will. The plate pieced itself back together, leaving not even a crack behind. The boy stared with wide eyes before hesitantly picking it up.
"Daddy." The yelling came to a halt. "The plate's not broken," Severus said in a choked voice.
He tensed, waiting for another blow to land on his aching body. Instead, the intoxicated man just grunted and sat back down on the couch. He lifted a glass bottle of beer, but found it empty. "Eileen! Get me another beer."
Severus watched as his mother hurried to the kitchen, trying to appease his father. When she went to the kitchen a second time, he trailed after her. "I fixed the plate, Mommy. I did magic," he whispered to her.
She froze, her eyes taking on a glazed look that provoked fear in the child. "No. No, you couldn't have. Your father doesn't like magic."
Her fingers harshly grasped his shoulder, nails digging into his skin. "Mommy?" The boy cried, holding in sobs as he was led up the stairs and dragged into his parents' bedroom.
His mother went into the closet, reappearing with a smooth stick of wood: her wand. She pointed it at him, ignoring his frantic pleas. "This is for your own good, Severus. Your father won't have magic in his house. This is to protect both of us."
As she began to chant strange words, a pain started above his navel. His mind hazy with agony, his eyes shuttering closed.
His mother spoke once more, "Obliviate."
Severus jolted out of the memory. He sightlessly stared at the library of his mindscape, in a state of shock at what he had uncovered. At a snail's pace, his brain processed it. His mother had bound his magic. She had stolen it away from him against his will, a part of his very self. Severus didn't understand. In his previous life, when he mastered Occlumency, he never came across this memory.
Moreover, if his magic was currently bound, how had he used it at all? Possibly, Eileen had only bound a portion of it so Severus wouldn't be able to do accidental magic. Or perhaps her own magic had weakened considerably without use, which caused the bindings to start wearing off prematurely. His mother's action, the ultimate betrayal, lingered at the edges of his mind. How could the woman have done this to him, her own son?
Anger and crushing helplessness afflicted the time-traveller. Each second aware of this knowledge added to his distress. Using Occlumency, Severus forcibly emptied his mind, then focused his attention inward. Immersed in his core, he saw the chains wrapped loosely around it, allowing small portions of magic to slip through. The glowing web of interlocked strands surrounding his core absolutely reeked of Eileen Snape's magical signature. Her magic felt so wrong: alien and nauseating. His magic was trapped by the shackles she placed on him against his will. With all the force he could muster, Severus threw himself into relentlessly attacking the foreign Dark magic attached to his core. The battle went unseen, though was no less severe. The bindings were overpowered with suspicious ease, as fragile as gossamer. His magic burst outward, surging through his veins.
His heart physically ached at the fearful thought of losing it again. Now that he had absolute control over what was rightfully his, Severus would rather die than surrender it to another.
Eileen's bindings on his magic now broken, Severus mentally addressed the second major issue of the day. While Severus had many awful memories of his childhood that he would rather forget, he knew with great certainty that the memory he'd found with Occlumency hadn't simply slipped his mind. In his future, the events that had taken place in the memory—breaking the plate, Tobias' and Eileen's fight, his use of accidental magic and Eileen's sudden mania in response—and the bindings on his magical core simply did not exist. So, how could these things exist now?
It didn't seem possible for the events to be caused by his accidental time travel, as the memory had taken place before adult Severus had woken up in his child body.
Severus wondered if this timeline might not be the same one he'd left in the future. If this was true, much of his future knowledge could be completely useless. His upper incisors worried at his bottom lip as stressed panic overtook his train of thought. What events would be different? Which people would be different? Would he go to Hogwarts to find Tom Marvolo Riddle as the headmaster and Albus Dumbledore as a Dark Lord?
Feeling himself jumping to conclusions, Severus took a deep breath and tried to view the situation impartially. After all, there were countless factors that could have impacted the timeline. While he himself was a considerably large variable, Severus was not actually the first person to have travelled back in time. Most importantly, he wouldn't be the last.
While time and temporal magic largely remained a mystery, it had been studied and experimented with for centuries. Meddling with time was extremely dangerous and could result in unwanted consequences—such as one killing their past or future self by accident—it had been attempted and achieved successfully through the use of Time-Turners. However, time-related magic was well-known to be unstable, and research had shown that a time-traveller could not safely go back in time for a period longer than five hours. Thus, Time-Turners were stringently restricted by hundreds of laws.
Severus' potion accident, which sent his adult mind into the body of his past child self, was the only incident of its type in his knowledge. In other incidents, the individual had always travelled to a past point in time in their present bodies. The worst well-known incident of this type that Severus was aware of was the case of Eloise Mintumble, who in 1899 was sent centuries into the past to the year 1402 for five days. By the time she was retrieved to her proper point in time, the timeline had been irreparably disturbed. The incident caused fluctuations to the hourly time of the following days and over twenty people's existence had been erased, unborn. Based on this information, Severus came to another conclusion and discarded his fears of having been sent to a completely alternate timeline.
The topography of time had yet to be properly studied. Yet, in the case of Eloise Mintumble, time could be viewed as linear. Additionally, as the Department of Mysteries was able to retrieve Mintumble after she became stuck in 1402, the future did not cease to exist, only suffered changes. From this Severus could theorize that not only was time linear, but it was a continuous linear line with no end point. Whether that line branched off in varied timelines due to changes caused by time-travel, Severus did not know. The facts he had on hand showed that, regardless, a change in the past affected the future but not any points in time before it, and that the future, despite being constantly affected by a chain reaction of changes happening in the past, never ceased to exist. Thus, his own time travel could not have affected the timeline before the arrival of his adult sentience, and his previous timeline continued despite the absence of his presence. Unlike Mintumble, his case of time-travel had been accidental, not a planned experiment by the Department of Mysteries. Whether or not his adult body remained in the future in his potions lab or had disappeared altogether, no one would think that he'd been sent back in time, and no one would be attempting to retrieve him.
Eileen's binding of his magic, as an event that occurred in this timeline but not in the timeline he had lived through, must have been a change caused by a prior temporal disturbance. Because Severus had been unaffected by the change at the point of time in which the potion accident took place, the origin of the temporal disturbance must have come from a point in time further into the future. After Severus had been sent back in time , someone else had managed to travel back in time to a point before the events of the memory took place, thus indirectly affecting Severus' childhood life. The term "indirectly" was key to Severus' line of thought and permitted him great relief. The lack of direct changes to his original childhood meant that whoever else had travelled in time either did not know of or did not care about Severus' own time-travel.
Accordingly, this meant that the unknown individual meddling with time was not Severus' problem.
Severus was not Potter, a foolish boy with a hero complex—just like his father. Severus was not Dumbledore, a manipulative man with fingers in a lot of pies. No, Severus Snape was a bitter old dungeon bat who, in his many unhappy years as a schoolteacher, had become skilled at ignoring and refusing any involvement in the lives and problems of those around him. If this other time-traveller had nothing to do with him, then Severus would do his best for it to remain that way.
Properly focusing on his magic, Severus intentionally slowed his breathing. As an experienced wizard capable of wandless magic, he was cognizant of how his magic moved: dancing along his skin, singing in his brittle bones, naturally filling every cell in his body. However, it was invisible to the naked eye. A third eye, a sixth sense that previously wasn't there, could witness it. There existed no words to describe its ethereal beauty. Considerable time passed as the young wizard stared at it in breathless wonder. A luminescent ball of power hovered inside him like a radiant star. His physical eyes would have been blinded.
Severus felt complete; whole again after finding something he never knew was dearly missing.
Tapping into that power was like sticking a metal fork in an electric socket. His consciousness was pulled back to the tangible world as his magic exploded outward from his body. Power hovered at his fingertips. Severus felt unstoppable, able to defeat Lord Voldemort and his corrupt army of Death Eaters all at once.
Regrettably, the undernourished child's sickly, delicate body was an inadequate vessel for a power that had grown untouched for many years.
Severus gasped for air, coughing instead of exhaling. There was a tightness in his throat and an aching discomfort in his chest. His ribs and lungs heaved breathlessly. The boy stood up from the flattened grass but was overtaken by sudden dizziness. Coughs wracked his weakened form. His hands clutched at his fraying shirt as dark spots flashed across his sight. His throat constricted. A mouthful of blood came up with the next cough. Discovering he was once more able to breathe, his starving lungs took in frantic gulps of air.
Severus wiped his mouth with his sleeve. The fabric was pulled away mottled by crimson. His head spun and his vision blurred. Next thing he knew, he was falling. Like a light bulb burning out, everything went black.
Blurry, charcoal-black irises gazed out from under drooping eyelids. The room was dark, the only light a shining fragment that came through the space between the curtains. Severus tried to sit up and groaned; every part of his body ached. His eyes itched and watered, and his throat was experiencing what he assumed would be the result of swallowing a handful of rocks. He had slept fitfully, disturbed by his restless magic that was still adjusting but did so by imitating electrocution. The circles beneath his eyes displayed his fatigue.
The creaking of the hinges of his bedroom door awoke him. The tall figure of his father stood in the open doorway, the glow of the hallway light making it hard for Severus to make out his face. He sat up, his right hand rubbing his eyes.
"Father?" His voice broke off in a yawn.
Tobias sat at the foot of the bed. Severus shifted nervously, hands clutching the blankets. What could the Muggle want at this hour of the morning? At least he couldn't smell the stench of alcohol, so his father wasn't drunk.
"I know it's early. I have to leave for work soon, but I wanted to... check how you were feeling."
Severus blinked, not expecting those words to come from the Muggle's mouth. "I'm fine, Father. It's probably just a cold. I'll be better by tomorrow."
The black-haired boy hoped he was right and his magic would settle by then. He wasn't sure how much more of this he could take. Thankfully, Tobias accepted his answer. Testing Severus' temperature by placing the back of his hand on the child's forehead, the man then nodded and left the room.
Severus slept almost an entire day. When awake, he shuffled around like an Inferius. Thankfully, his magical core completely adjusted to being unbound by the following morning. That morning happened to be the start of his first day of primary school.
The entrance of the Muggle school was littered with children and their parents. Since accidentally going back in time, he hadn't interacted with anyone other than Eileen and Tobias, so it was odd to observe people wearing outdated fashions. For him, it was like an image out of a history textbook. In the Wizarding world, it wouldn't be so obvious, as the change in styles was slower and subtler than in the Muggle world.
Severus masked the sneer that would usually form on his face in the presence of children. He could not suppress a wince as he walked past a particularly bratty child who wouldn't stop screeching to his mother that he "didn't want to go."
Considerably prepared, Severus quickly ascended the front steps of the school and slipped through the propped open doors. Entering his old classroom, he was hit with a rush of déjà vu. The classroom was exactly the same as the one in his memories. The walls were made of greying red bricks and the floor of dull tiles largely hidden by a stained carpet. Old, rickety school tables and chairs filled the centre of the room. They faced an aged blackboard, while along the other wall were streaky windows.
Less than half the class was already present. The students gave no notice when he came through the doorway. He gazed around the room at his classmates. They were already subconsciously separating themselves into certain groups. The girls from more well-off families showed off their brand new school supplies to each other. Their folders and notebooks were customarily brightly colored and glitter-covered. Among them, bragging about a heart-shaped pencil case, sat Lily Evans. The athletic boys, obsessed with sports, talked about whatever over-glorified game of fetch was in season. A second, smaller group of boys sat by the windows. Comic books were spread out on the carpet in front of them.
Severus cared neither for sports nor comics. However, if he didn't wish to be ostracised for the entirety of the school year, he would need to join a group as soon as possible. Preferring the calmer tones of the second group of boys over the chaos of the first group, he moved in their direction apprehensively.
He never got close to the windows. A small hand with badly painted fingernails grabbed his arm, and Severus was rudely dragged toward another group that was gathered in one of the corners by the chalkboard. The poorer girls were colouring with broken crayons and pencils provided by the school. The girl who pulled him over to the corner had her hair tied up in pigtails that made her look juvenile. She practically shoved him into one of the chairs, then introduced herself as Mary.
"What's your name?" She asked, collecting the orange crayons from several boxes.
"Severus."
Mary stopped what she was doing and looked at him. "That's a weird name."
"You're impolite," he stated.
Childishly, she stuck out her tongue and threw a peach-colored crayon at him. It hit his eye, an unexpectedly painful and effective weapon. To Severus' utter embarrassment, he could feel his eyes watering and his bottom lip quivering. The teacher, an uncaring woman in a sloppy, ill-fitting dress, saw what happened. She hurried over and scolded Mary.
"You should not throw things at others. Such bad behaviour is not allowed in this classroom." Severus understood that the woman didn't genuinely care; she was merely trying to make a good first impression.
The teacher then turned to Severus, who was on the verge of crying. He sniffled pitifully, wiping his eyes with the long sleeves of his sweater, which he wore to hide the starved brittleness of his wrists. She ushered him across the room to where the wealthier girls were now whispering in hushed voices.
"Would you like to sit over here?" She asked.
Severus quickly shook his head, too focused on not looking at Evans to have any tact. A majority of his adult life had been wasted attempting to make up for causing Lily's death. Severus had already come to realize that the significant childhood friendship Severus had created in his head didn't actually exist. He had sacrificed so much for Lily Evans, but this was his second chance, and Severus' life would not revolve around her in this one.
A bit exasperated, the teacher belatedly permitted him to make his own choice. Yet, when he proceeded to sit amidst the boys reading comic books, her lips thinned and her mouth puckered in displeasure. She said nothing, however, so he ignored her. The boys didn't pay him any mind, so he read one of the comics over a brown-haired boy's shoulder. He found it mind-numbingly uninteresting and made a mental note to bring one of his own books with him the next day.