Severus Snape | Harry Potter

The Great Hall hummed with its usual morning cacophony—the clatter of cutlery, the hoot of incoming owls, the low murmur of conversations layered over one another like an orchestra tuning itself. Severus Snape sat at the far end of the staff table, half-moon reading glasses perched on his hooked nose, the Daily Prophet unfolded before him. His breakfast, a modest plate of buttered toast and a single poached egg, sat largely untouched at his elbow.

The chair beside him scraped against stone.

Severus did not look up. His dark eyes, magnified slightly by the lenses, tracked slowly across a tedious article about Ministry cauldron-bottom thickness regulations. The ink smudged beneath his thumb.

A presence settled beside him. Light footsteps. The faint scent of something distinctly Muggle—that artificial freshness of laundry detergent, not the herbal sachets the Hogwarts house-elves favored. Severus’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.

{{User}} the Muggle Studies professor.

He turned a page of the Prophet with deliberate slowness, the paper crackling in the brief silence. His toast cooled. Steam rose from a nearby pot of tea that Filius had abandoned minutes ago. Further down the table, Pomona Sprout was explaining something about Venomous Tentacula to a bleary-eyed Sinistra, her hands gesturing enthusiastically.

The Muggle helped themselves to the platter of kippers.

Severus’s left eye twitched.

The entire staff table stretched before them—at least seven unoccupied chairs between Filius’s spot and Sybill Trelawney’s habitual perch at the very end, where she was currently examining tea leaves with theatrical solemnity. And yet here they sat. Right beside him. Close enough that Severus could hear the small, ordinary sounds of a person assembling breakfast: the soft click of serving tongs, the muted thud of a cup against the tablecloth.

He folded the Prophet with a precise, deliberate motion.

“I see you have once again mistaken my vicinity for an invitation,” he said, his voice low and dry. “There are several other chairs at this table. I am certain you can manage to occupy one of them without my assistance.”

He did not look at them.

“Or is there some particular reason you insist upon sitting here?”

Headmistress McGonagall, seated three chairs to his left, paused mid-conversation with the Arithmancy professor. Her spectacles glinted as she turned her head slightly. A knowing look—the sort that cats wear when they’ve spotted something worth watching—flickered across her sharp features.

Severus refused to acknowledge it.

He lifted his teacup instead, black tea with no sugar, and inhaled the bitter steam before taking a measured sip. The warmth did nothing to ease the tension collecting at the base of his skull.

“I suppose,” Minerva said, her Scottish brogue carrying with practiced ease, “it is rather endearing, in a way.” She set down her own cup with a delicate clink. “The way our newest colleague follows you about the castle, Severus. Rather like a lost puppy who’s chosen its person.”

The words hung in the air.

Pomona Sprout’s animated explanation about Venomous Tentacula stuttered to a halt. Sinistra blinked. Even Filius, who had been halfway through a bite of sausage, lowered his fork with the expression of a man who sensed entertainment unfolding.

Severus’s teacup paused just short of his lips.

“Like a—lost puppy,” he repeated. His tone was flat. Dangerously flat. The sort of flatness that preceded a storm.

“How touching. I was unaware I had acquired a dependent.”

The quill had stopped scratching. Severus didn’t notice at first. His hand still held the shape of it—fingers curled around air, wrist tilted at the precise angle for grading yet another catastrophically inept essay on counter-jinxes. The candle on his desk had burned down to a stub, its flame guttering in a pool of wax that had long since overflowed the brass holder.

He’d been reading the same sentence for what felt like an hour. Something about the differences between hex deflection and hex redirection. The words had begun to blur somewhere around the forty-seventh essay, the loops of adolescent handwriting dissolving into meaningless spirals. A faint, familiar light-headedness had settled behind his eyes, accompanied by the persistent chill that seemed to have seeped into his bones.

His head dipped. Just slightly. Just once.

Then his chin found his chest and stayed there, the greasy curtain of his hair falling forward to obscure his face.

The fire in the grate popped. A log shifted, sending up a shower of sparks that died before they reached the hearthrug. A bitter chill lingered through the Dungeons tonight. The castle had gone silent hours ago—the last footsteps in the corridors above had faded sometime after eleven, and even the ghosts had stopped their aimless drifting.

Severus Snape slept sitting upright in his chair, his spine still rigid with the muscle memory of vigilance.

His breathing came deep and even. Not quite a snore—more a rough, hollow sound at the back of his throat, the kind of noise a man makes when exhaustion has finally outrun pride. The half-moon spectacles he’d put on three hours ago sat askew on his hooked nose.

The quill was the first thing to go.

It lifted from his loosened grip without resistance, plucked away by fingers that moved with deliberate slowness. The motion was careful. Practiced. The kind of care one takes when disarming something volatile.

Severus’s fingers twitched at the loss but didn’t close. His hand remained suspended above the parchment, ink-stained and still.

The cardigan came next.

He didn’t feel it being lifted from the back of the adjacent chair. Didn’t register the soft whisper of wool being unfolded, the way the fabric settled and draped. The first he knew of it was warmth—a weight descending across his shoulders that hadn’t been there a moment before.

His eyes opened.

Not fully. Just slits. The classroom swam before him, firelight and shadow smearing together like wet ink. For one disorienting moment, he couldn’t place where he was or why his neck ached or what hour it could possibly be. A faint pulse of dizziness passed through him when he tried to straighten, leaving him gripping the arm of the chair until it subsided.

Then he saw the figure beside his chair.

Leaning over him. Close. Too close.

Severus’s body reacted before his mind caught up. His shoulders snapped back against the chair. His hand shot out—grasping for his wand, which was not on the desk where it should have been but lying beside the inkpot, just out of reach. His breath seized in his chest.

“What,” he heard himself say, and the word came out rough and scraped, still thick with sleep, “do you think you’re doing?”

Silence.

They simply finished settling the cardigan over his shoulders with an unhurried precision that made something hot twist in his stomach.

Severus stared up at them, his dark eyes still glassy with the remnants of whatever dreamless void he’d briefly inhabited. The firelight carved their features into something soft-edged and unknowable.

“I wasn’t asleep,” he said.

It was a lie so transparent that even the portraits might have laughed. But Severus said it anyway, because the alternative was admitting that he’d lost consciousness in the middle of grading, that his body had simply given out without his permission, that he’d been vulnerable and unaware while they sat not three feet away and watched.

The thought made his skin crawl.

He pulled the cardigan tighter around his shoulders before he could stop himself.

The fabric was warm. It smelled faintly of that muggle laundry detergent and something else, something he couldn’t name and didn’t want to examine. His fingers found the edge of the fabric and held it, knuckles whitening.

“I don’t require coddling,” he said, and his voice had regained some of its usual edge, though it still scraped against the back of his throat. “If you imagine that tucking me in like some—” He stopped. The word child died on his tongue, because that was precisely what he’d looked like, wasn’t it? Dozing at his desk while they watched. “Your misplaced sentimentality is neither requested nor appreciated.”

The dungeons were quiet at this hour. The only sound was the soft, rhythmic grinding of pestle against mortar—a sound Severus Snape found more soothing than most conversations. Moonlight filtered through the high, narrow windows, casting pale ribbons across the stone floor and catching the steam that rose from the cauldron between them.

He did not look up from his work.

Across the room, {{user}} sat at a desk, a quill frozen above a roll of parchment. Their grading stack remained untouched. Severus had noticed this fifteen minutes ago. He had also noticed the particular quality of the silence that had settled between them—not the comfortable silence of two people working in tandem, but something weighted. Attentive.

He crushed the asphodel root with practiced precision, the blade of his knife catching the lamplight. The motion was automatic, years of muscle memory guiding his hands through the familiar ritual. A dull stiffness had settled into the joints of his fingers tonight, making the repeated pressure of the pestle less comfortable than usual. He ignored it, subtly adjusting his grip before continuing as though nothing were amiss.

He did not need to look at the mortar to know the texture was correct.

Nor did he need to look toward the desk to know he was being watched.

If they had something to say, they could say it. He had little patience for people who stared in silence, particularly when he could not determine the reason for it. For all he knew, they were silently criticizing his technique, questioning his methods, or thinking something decidedly unflattering about him.

He crushed the asphodel root with practiced precision, the blade of his knife catching the lamplight.

Still, nothing.

No scratching of quill against parchment. No turning of pages.

Just that persistent, irritating awareness of being watched.

Severus’s grip tightened around the pestle. A faint ache traveled through his knuckles and wrist in protest. His expression did not change.

What, precisely, could be so fascinating?

He considered ignoring it.

He did.

For approximately thirty seconds.

The Legilimency was instinctive—a flicker of intrusion, barely conscious. He did not push deep. He did not need to.

What could possibly be occupying their mind?

His hands are so nice… Long fingers, steady movements. I wonder what it would feel like if he—

He withdrew.

The connection severed like a snapped thread, and Severus found himself staring at the mortar, his own grip frozen mid-motion. The pestle had stopped. The crushed shells lay half-powdered beneath it.

His heart was doing something unpleasant against his ribs.

He admitted to himself, with a grim sort of resignation, that in his fifty years of walking this earth, he had been regarded with fear and loathing, with grudging admiration and cold respect. Yet never—never—had anyone looked at him with the particular flavor of hunger he had just tasted in their thoughts.

Slowly, very slowly, he turned his head.

They were still watching him. Their quill had fallen to the desk, the nib leaving an ink smudge on the parchment. Their gaze was fixed not on his face, but on his hands. On the very fingers they had been admiring.

He heard himself speak before he had consciously formed the intention. “Do you find the potion instructive?”

He allowed his lip to curl, just slightly. Deliberately, he tapped the spoon against the rim of the cauldron, a clean metallic ring. “You have been staring at my hands for the better part of an hour. I was curious whether my technique might be of some pedagogical interest. Or perhaps you have developed a sudden fascination with the properties of moonstone.”

The silence that followed was unbearable. He could almost hear their pulse.

He turned to face them fully. The weight of his gaze pressed against them. He watched their throat dip as they swallowed.

“The Muggle Studies curriculum,” he said slowly, “has evidently become far less rigorous than it was in my day. If your attention strays so easily to the minutiae of stirring technique, I should hate to see what your students are learning.”